heart is both cold and empty. There is no one under my roof to husk the
paddy, or to cook, or to sing, or to drive away evil spirits with
laughter. There will never be any fat babies rolling about the mats or
swinging in the basket at my home while the mother tells the _Sehn-nee_,
the cradle song. Once I had a treasure in my house, Shway. Where is that
treasure now?"
"Meaning thy daughter, Moung Poh Sin?" asked Cloots directly to show
himself quite cool and firm. "Meaning Mah Soung, thy daughter?"
"Mah Soung is dead," said the headman.
"Mah Soung is dead," repeated Cloots, and an echo ran back and forth
between the walls with his word. He glanced swiftly toward the kneeling
maiden by the altar in the dim taper light, and for all his control he
could not repress the strangest flicker of fancy. She looked very like
Mah Soung. Very like. Some tilt of the head, some odd, soft line of the
shining tress over the ear started a poignant dart of memory, caught his
breath sharp. It was in just such a place as this, he recalled, in
pursuit of just such an idle, colorful adventure, that he first had
found Mah Soung....
But then--he told himself hastily--he had seen Mah Soung die. Who but he
had seen her die? She had died with her adoring eyes and her slender
yellow fingers uplifted to him as this girl's eyes and fingers were
lifted to the sacred image.
A curious qualm took him, one of those turns of sick uncertainty that
now and then seek out and wring the nerve of any white man who ventures
a bit too far off white man's ground.
He was still staring as the worshiper rose from the mat, placed her
water lily reverently on the altar and with obeisance and the murmured
invocation that begins "Awgatha, by this offering I free me from the
Three Calamities," faced about and glided in silence between Cloots and
Moung Poh Sin and so on and out of the chapel and out of their ken
forever.
She did not notice either man. She was quite unconscious of them. They
had spoken in a hill dialect, all incomprehensible to her.... She was
not Mah Soung, of course--though Cloots wiped a brow gone damp and
chill.
"I have learned," continued the headman of Apyodaw--"I have learned how
my child died--"
Cloots regained his speech in a curt laugh.
"What is that to me, old man? Yesterday's rice is neither eaten nor paid
for twice."
"There remains, however, Shway, every man's account with the _nats_ and
such guarding spirits as may be; and their just pay is taken always in
due course."
"Do they ask more than thee for a daughter? Thy payment was the highest
market rate, at least--But again I say, stand aside. I weary of thee,
Moung Poh Sin."
But Moung Poh Sin did not move.
"There is not much longer to wait," he said, neither grim nor humorous,
simply unvarying. "The sun already has dipped. Soon the big bell speaks
when all will be paid."
And in fact it became clear to Cloots that this affair would have to be
solved on the spot. He was not minded to stand any more of it nor to
leave Moung Poh Sin in train to repeat such performances. He had lost
that perfectly ripping new love toy of a girl. A very jolly evening had
been ruined for him, and his confident balance most inexplicably and
painfully shaken. And here this insignificant relic of a discarded past
was undertaking to block his steps. This flute-toned, slab-faced little
heathen was presuming to threaten him, to name the moment when a
superior white, with his strength and his vision, with his civilized
capacity for perceptions and enjoyments, should suddenly cease to be....
He shifted both fists easily to his belt and took a watchful survey of
the figure by the doorway--and he did some rapid calculating.
Outside on the platform between west and east, between flame and dark,
Shway Dagohn showed now like one cutting from a jasper opal. Each flake
and streak of coloring had mellowed. And, with that, all sounds seemed
mellower too, as if they came more resonantly on the burdened air.
Everywhere, all about, the pagoda bells were ringing: bells of bronze
and silver and gold, bells hammered by devout and lusty celebrants,
bells insistently jangled by begging priests, bells that tinkled and
sighed to any stray breeze. And the whole tide of color and of sound was
drawing to an end, a definite climax: presently the tropic night would
fall like a curtain, and presently the huge central bell, Mahah Ganda,
"the great sweet voice" which is the voice of a continent, would bestir
itself ever so slightly for an instant at the touch of its monstrous
battering-ram and wake brazen thunder far and wide.
* * * * *
Cloots reckoned that he had perhaps five minutes before the stated
limit. It was to be a sort of test, as he saw and accepted. He would
have to decide how well, after all, he did understand the ancient half
of the earth to which he and others like him went swaggering as
conquerors and masters. He would have to demonstrate which of the
various ways and ways and just how seriously he was going to take this
ancient people and their self-sufficing and queerly keyed formulas, so
strange and vivid and charming. And whether he was going to be laid
under some kind of psychic blackmail every time he chose to snatch a
delicious interpretation.
If he meant to be quite sure of that essential white superiority of
this, the time had come to make it good.
He smiled again as he swung the right lapel of his twill jacket a little
farther to the right....
"Moung Poh Sin," he began, almost amiably, "with the rest of these
matters which seem so well and so fully known to thee, is it also known
where I have been since I went away?"
"No, Shway."
"Now, as it chanced, I went to the Salween country; even up into Yunnan,
the Cloudy South. And there, in those wild parts, I hunted the painted
leopard and the fishing cat and the tiger cat and other such, as I have
done before.... Thou hast seen me shoot?"
"Yes, Shway."
"Rememberest thou, perhaps, how once at Apyodaw in a merry mood, to show
my skill and for a jest, I shot away one by one the six strings from a
minstrel's harp?"
"Yes, Shway."
"And again, how with the short gun I slew a pigeon on a housetop and
tore the head from its body?"
"Yes, Shway."
"Then, for the third and the last time, I warn thee to get clear of that
door and of me--and to keep clear, Moung Poh Sin. I have been patient
and tolerant, marveling too much at thy insolence to be rightly angered.
But I have had enough. By every law of the land and by common privilege
of my kind, thy life is forfeit to me for daring to breathe these
threats. And it was a pity of thy cunning, and a flaw in thy
information, not to have learned whence I came--and whether I would be
likely to come from a place like Yunnan unarmed, Moung Poh Sin!"
But Moung Poh Sin did not stir.
"That can make no change, Shway. My own life is of no moment, and thine
is surely forfeit, as I told thee--here by the Slanted Beam when the sun
sets. What will be will be. It is written."
Whereupon Cloots very quickly and expertly fired once from the hip. The
shot burst with a racketing smash against the eardrums. To any on the
platform it might have just sounded as a clap of hands, no louder. But
within these solid blank walls it multiplied like a volley, then
dwindled and passed. A weft of smoke went drifting across the taper, and
that too passed. The chapel fell quiet. There had been no visible
result.
At one side stood the white man, half crouching in the act, tense and
expectant; and by the doorway stood the headman of Apyodaw, planted in
the same position he had held throughout, with the rectangle of fading
daylight behind him--a little brown figure in neutral tinted silks....
"They do not strike the big bell until the last ray of the sun,"
explained Moung Poh Sin, without the least quiver of emotion, without
the least break of intonation. "We have yet some moments to wait."
* * * * *
Cloots glared at him, astonished, unable and unwilling to believe,
picturing the collapse, waiting from one tick of time to the next to see
the fellow crumple on the stones. But nothing happened, nothing came of
it, and he brought up his arm and the glittering, compact fistful of
steel, and this time he took deliberate aim.
Again the shot and smashing echo. Again the still pause.
"They will be making ready now," said Moung Poh Sin evenly. "They will
be swinging out the striker of the big bell."
All shadows about the pagoda had run long and black like spurts of jet
and its western edge was no more than lined with copper; only the
topmost peak caught a last radiance and spread and shed a faint ruddy
glow and a patch of that lay on the threshold of the chapel....
Cloots had fallen back to the wall with sagging jaw, with eyes fixed
and starting in their sockets. He was stricken; he was beaten. For he
had come to the end of things known and conceivable. He had reached the
end of the white man's resource and had made the ultimate appeal of the
white man's civilization--and had failed. Beyond lay the incredible and
the impossible. It was rather a galvanic impulse than any reasoned
operation by which he brought up his weapon in both shaking hands,
steadied an elbow against his side and fired a third and last despairing
shot.
From somewhere, from under their feet as it seemed, there issued a vast
booming vibration; the air fluttered to a single gigantic, metallic
stroke. And it was then and not until then that Moung Poh Sin moved at
last and drew from the silken folds at his waist a broad, short-shafted
knife and all with perfect precision and deliberation advanced to do
what he was there to do.
"The time has come," said Moung Poh Sin....
Outside it had gone quite dark.
Those two busy officials of colonial administration whose duty it was to
gather up and to sort out the threads of local crime in that far Eastern
port wasted no time and few words about their work. They had been on
many cases together. Moreover, this particular case offered a bare
simplicity in its few apparent details. Also, since it concerned the
death of a white, it called for urgent action, and they went at it with
precision and dispatch while the police guard held the entrance against
a wondering throng.
"How long has he been dead?" asked the assistant inspector.
"Some ten minutes, I should say," returned the medical examiner. "He's
still warm."
"Instantaneous?"
"As nearly as possible. His heart's been split in half, you might say,
with this _dah_." The doctor indicated a short iron dagger buried to
its iron handle in the victim's left breast. "One jab, and no bungling
about it."
"Done by a native," remarked the inspector, bending over.
"Evidently. But what kind of a Buddhist was he, giving himself to the
frozen Buddhist hell by taking a life?"
"Not much of a Buddhist. That's a hill weapon. They're hardly what you'd
call orthodox in the hills."
"Quite true," agreed the doctor. "Buddhism is a modern novelty to the
hills. What's a matter of three thousand years? They've got a system
rather older."
"And we've got a story here, if we could only read it, that's older than
any system."
"But still--to kill a man in a shrine, eh?"
"Yes. He must have had a pretty good reason."
Something in the other's tone made the doctor look up.
"You knew this chap?"
"Slightly," said the inspector. "Name of Cloots. He's been cruising
about after jade and ruby mines one time and another, living among the
people. Kind of a prospecting tramp and adventurer--you know the type.
Rather an obnoxious beast, if he's the one I've heard about."
* * * * *
The doctor sought no further comments on Cloots--that was quite
sufficient and might serve for an epitaph. He preferred to jot down
certain necessary official entries in his little book, and as the light
was bad he moved away toward the altar. Meanwhile the inspector remained
by the body, outsprawled there in a crimson pool, until an exclamation
brought him spinning around to find his colleague standing under the
glimmer of the lone taper and looking singularly pale, he thought.
But the doctor's question was quietly put.
"Have you any notion what became of the murderer?"
"It's a queer business," admitted the inspector, frowning. "I wish I
could begin to learn something of the capabilities of these people.
There must have been three hundred about the platform and the stairs.
And we can't dig up a clue to save ourselves."
"No theory yet?"
"What theory can there be? You see the material as well as I. A corpse,
a knife, and an empty shrine. It's a clear get-away, without a witness."
"Quite so. But aren't you forgetting this witness?"
* * * * *
The doctor laid a finger on the image of the Buddha. There it sat behind
the taper and the offerings and the veiling vapor of the incense. There
it sat cross-legged in its niche, with the left hand lying palm upward
in the lap and the right hanging over the knee--with the calm and
passionless and inscrutable regard of the tradition--a life-size image,
whose painted garments in gilt and old rose, whose set and peaceful
features had been dimmed to a uniform human tint. A very ordinary
image....
At least so it seemed to the bewildered inspector. Until he saw it sag a
trifle. Until he saw it give flaccidly under the doctor's touch. And
then he saw that the actual image had been displaced and jammed back
into the niche for a support and that this--this was a substitute.
"Dead!" he breathed.
The doctor dropped the wrist he had been thumbing.
"Dead," he affirmed rather shakily. "And not only dead, but cold!...
Inspector, I'm not a fanciful man, would you say? I'm not one to believe
much in deviations from the normal--in aberrations from the positive,
eh?--even under the Temple of the Slanted Beam. But I'd swear in any
court--west of Suez, I mean--I'd take my solemn oath the fellow was dead
when he climbed to that altar!... It's the plain evidence. It's as
certain as anything I know, if I know anything.... Dead?... He was dead
the first of the two! He was obliterated, wiped out, blasted out of
existence, _a full five minutes before he ever killed that white chap
there on the floor_!"
"Capabilities," stammered the inspector. "Would you call that suspended
animation, now--or what?"
"I'd call it suspended extinction, if there were such a thing in medical
science. As it is, I'll call it suspended judgment and let it go at
that."
They stayed staring at Moung Poh Sin for a while.
"'There are more things 'twixt'--" began the doctor.
"Twixt East and West," suggested the inspector.
"Quite so. And if you doubt my word for it--look!"...
He lifted aside the narrow-edged coat to show the naked, rugged breast
beneath; and there, a little to the left, within a space that might have
been covered with a lotus leaf were three smooth, round bullet holes
where the late headman of Apyodaw had been drilled through the
heart--three times.
THE RED MARK
Even now nobody can tell his name, though doubtless it was a grand and a
proud one. Perhaps you could find it in the files of the Bordeaux press
twenty years ago, when they sentenced him to transportation for life for
five proved murders. Since then it has been officially forgotten. But
the man himself has lived on. He lives and he continues to develop his
capabilities--as we are all expected to do here in New Caledonia.
M. de Nou, we call him. He is our only convict official. Ordinarily, you
comprehend, our jailers do not admit convicts to the administration. We
are citizens, if you like, in this criminal commonwealth. We are the
populace of this outlaw colony at the far navel of the earth. We are
artisans, workmen, domestics: we are masons, cooks, farmers: we are even
landholders and concessionaires--enjoying the high privilege of forced
labor, the lofty civic title of cattle in a bull-pen. It is all very
philanthropic: but we have not yet risen to fill posts under the
government. Except one of us. He has been raised because they could find
no other, convict or free, to perform the peculiar duties of the
position. That is M. de Nou. We hate him. There is not a creature of us
from Balade to Noumea, from the nickel mines of Thio to the forests of
Baie du Sud, that does not hate and fear him as some other people hate
and fear sin. The very Canaques flee at the whisper of his coming and
invoke their own dark gods against this white demon in the flesh. Eight
thousand felons bear the thought of him in daily bitterness. We have
been thieves, assassins, poisoners: we have been set aside in a sort of
infected rubbish-box, the sweepings of the prisons: but the last of us,
perishing from thirst, would turn back a cup that had been polluted by
the touch of M. de Nou. When M. de Nou comes to die the devil will have
to dig a deeper pit. Hell is too good for M. de Nou.
He is the executioner. He operates the guillotine. Not for any pay or
profit nor for the rank it gives him: but from choice. It is his
capability! It is the thing he likes to do.
Me, I am even with him. I am even with him against all time. Should it
be my fate to pass through his hands some day, should he stand to
perform his last dreadful offices for me, still am I even with him. I
would grin from under the slide itself and I would say to him--"M. de
Nou, I am even with you!" But I would not tell him how. I would turn
silent from those haunted yellow eyes, half-understanding and ravening
at me, and I would die content to leave him to his damnation. No, I
would not tell!... Only I am telling you, truly, so that perhaps this
tale may reach some of our friends who have escaped from New Caledonia
into the world again. They will remember, and they will rejoice to hear
how I evened the score on M. de Nou. Listen:
It was soon after my release from the Collective--when I was considered
to be properly chastened by residence in the cells--that I had the
ill-luck to meet this individual.
You can see for yourself I was never built for rude labor. But I have a
certain deftness of my fingers and perhaps also--well, a certain
polish--what?... Monsieur agrees? Too kind! Your servant, Monsieur....
Anyway, it was quite natural I should find employment with Maitre
Sergeo, he who keeps the barber shop in the Rue des Fleurs.
Maitre Sergeo is a worthy man, a libere, which means he was formerly a
life convict himself, you understand, though since restored to certain
rights within the colony limits. Requiring an assistant at his lathery
trade he applied to the penitentiary on Ile de Nou.
"Here is a brisk fellow," said the sub-commandant, leading me out like a
horse at a fair. "Number 7897. Docile and clever. Condemned for eight
years. Having served his Collective with a clear record. If you are ever
dull about your place he will sing you the latest operas. He has all the
polite accomplishments."
"A duke in trouble," suggested Maitre Sergeo, regarding me with his
sober twinkle. "What romance!... Perhaps he is the Red Mark himself!"
Strange he should have said that. Strange, too, that I should have heard
the term then and there for the first time in my life. Afterwards I
found it common enough, a kind of by-word among people who affect to
share the inner mysteries of police and crime. And later still I had
good reason to remember it.
Meanwhile the sub-commandant was encouraging no unofficial illusions on
my account.
"I said nothing about a duke," he returned. "But this is a superior
type. He has been a student in his day and even has taken prizes."
"I hope he has not the habit of taking them from the till," said Maitre
Sergeo, like a prudent patron. "What was his little affair?"
The sub-commandant consulted my ticket.
"An argument with a knife, it appears. A favorable case. Only his enemy
was so ill-conditioned as to die."
"I shall employ him," decided Maitre Sergeo. "A man who is handy with a
knife should also qualify with a razor."
That is how I came, as Bibi-Ri always said, to be scraping throats
instead of cutting them. Myself, I considered the jest rather poor
taste and Bibi-Ri a good deal of a chattering monkey. But what would
you? Nobody could be angry with that mad fellow. He was privileged.
Also, as it happened, Bibi-Ri himself was my single client on this
particular afternoon of which I speak. I recall it with an authentic
clearness: one of those days made in paradise for a reproach upon us
poor wretches in purgatory: the air sweet and mellow, spiced with tropic
blossoms: the sky a blue ravishment: the sunlight tawny in the street
outside as if seen through a glass of rich wine.
It was very quiet and peaceful. From the Place des Cocotiers not far
away one heard the band discoursing. Those convict musicians were
playing _Perle d'Italie_, as I bring to mind: a faded but graceful
melody. One could be almost happy at moments like this, forgetting the
shameful canvas uniform and the mockery of one's freedom on a leash. I
even hummed the tune as I listened and kept the measure with stropping
my blade.
I waited for Bibi-Ri. By an amiable conceit he never failed each day to
get his chin new razored--though in truth it resembled nothing so much
as a small onion: as I often told him.
"That is no reason why you should peel it, sacred farceur!" he would
sputter. "Please to notice I have only the one skin to my face!"
But this day he was late. I missed the merry rascal. His hour went by
and still he did not come. And then, of a sudden, I spied him.
He was passing among the market stalls on the opposite pave:
unmistakable, his quick, spare figure in the jacket tight-buttoned to
the chin as he always wore it and the convict's straw hat pulled low on
his brow. Bibi-Ri in fact. But he never even glanced to my side. At the
pace of a rent collector he hurried by and disappeared.... This is
singular, I thought. What game has he started now?
Presently he came hurrying back again, and this trip I discovered he was
following a girl. But yes! A market girl. Only a slip of a thing--I
could not see her well--a dainty piece she seemed, supple as a kitten,
who threaded her way with a basket on her arm. I caught a flash of bare
ankle white as milk, the sheen of her hair, smooth like a raven's wing:
and she was gone, with Bibi-Ri at her skirts.
Three times I saw them so, through the drifting chaffering throng.
"The rogue!" I murmured. "He has found a better amusement than getting
himself flayed by me. Evidently!"
At the very word came a swift clatter of sandals and who should burst
into the shop upon me but that same Bibi-Ri. I had a finger lifted to
accuse him, but I stopped at sight of his face.
"Dumail!" he cried. "Hide me!"
My faith, he took one's breath away.
"Hide me and say nothing!" he implored.
Well, then I thought he was simply up to some of his jokes again. You
understand there is no actual hiding in a penal settlement, where we all
live in the eye of the police. Nevertheless I obeyed, planted him in my
chair, flung a cloth about his neck and slapped on a great mask of
lather.
I had him well settled under the razor when a shadow edged across the
doorway. Glancing over his shoulder, Bibi-Ri made a jump to rise.
"Animal!" I protested. "Will you take care!"
But I saw him staring with a strange fear.
Just outside by the threshold stood a man, an amazingly tall man,
looking in at us. The sunlight descended on him there like the flood of
a proscenium and he himself might have seemed a player in some stage
burlesque. Yes, one might have smiled at first glimpse of him: a
travesty of fashion in his long black redingote and varnished high hat
of ancient form which added the touch of caricature to his height. One
might have smiled, I say ... but the smile would have frozen next
instant as a ripple freezes on a street puddle.
His face was a moist and shining white, the white of a corpse under the
icy spray of the Morgue. He was old, of reverend years, though still
straight and strong as a poplar. And with that mouth of painted passion
and a great nose curved like a saber and the glittering tiger eyes in
the skull of him--I leave you to imagine any one more appalling.
Close behind him came another: a bandy-legged, squat fellow like a
little black spider, in attendance.
Even then, before knowing, I shrank from them both. They resembled the
bizarre and evil figures of the Guignol that used to haunt my dreams in
childhood. Truly. And the tall one was Polichinelle, the image of a
gratuitous and uncomprehended wickedness.
"Well done, hireling," he observed, in the voice of a crow. "Well done
indeed! You are something of a craftsman too. A good beginning. And a
good subject, who is ripe to have the head shaved from his shoulders, I
should think.... Pray continue," he said. "Cut again and cut deeper!"