darkness seemed to descend about them. They fought as it might have been
through a gap in time and space: I watched them reeling in a dim
immensity. At some point I was aware of a thundering and a hammering
from the outer limits.... At another I had some idiotic impulse to
plunge into the fray myself, to aid my friend. But one glimpse of his
face, caught as a blink through the whirl of things, was quite enough to
throw me back out of that.
Himself, he had no fury. I mean none of the heedlessness of a man merely
berserk. While they revolved in their course together like a many-limbed
polyp, the Pole ravened with ceaseless and bestial ululation. Bibi-Ri
never uttered a sound. Little aid he needed! I swear to you he was still
smiling. He kept on smiling with a set and implacable and dreadful
pleasantry.
And good reason he had to smile, since that was his humor. For just then
by a masterly wrench of wrist over neck he had sent Bombiste's knife
spinning from his grip like a red-winged dragonfly.... Soon afterward I
heard a bone snap.... I had forgotten, you see, that while he might be
the Red Mark he was not called Bibi-Ri for nothing. I had forgotten that
while he might establish his claim to the belated title of a gentleman,
for some twenty-odd years of his life he had been acquiring the
recondite arts of the Parisian apache!
To say the less of it: by those lights he accomplished the job. In the
manner of the voyou and the garroter. In a merciful obscurity. Between
his hands. Between his fingers. With precision and dispatch. He broke
that creature Bombiste the way you would break a bread-straw. Until
their last smashing fall when the Pole was somehow horribly twisted
downward underneath, when his clamor shut off suddenly like a stream at
the tap, when he rolled on the floor an inert bundle.
And we were back in the smoky kitchen....
Voices were crying: figures shifting. The barred door seemed ready to
crack under assault. One fat and snuffy priest had come chattering like
a parrot. One gaunt and iron priest had gone sweeping forward to kneel
by the dead and his duty. Two sad-robed sisters looked on with the
placidity of canvas saints. Mother Carron was roaring. Carron himself
flitted about with a lantern like a will o' the wisp whose tremulous
flare shot the firelight with pallid citrine. It served at least to show
the singular tableau at the foot of the stairs where Bibi-Ri had picked
himself up.
A gladiator in the arena might have turned to Caesar as he turned to the
girl on her pedestal. He was stripped to the waist, his jacket in
shreds, his compact torso white and gleaming. And there we could
see--any one might have seen who knew and was minded--the curious
scarlet line of the birthmark about his neck which had shaped his
destiny for him to this very moment: the Red Mark.
"Do you believe me now?" asked Bibi-Ri.
Wide-eyed, she stood at gaze.
"Will you believe me now?" asked Bibi-Ri.
As the child in the fairy tale when the ice fell away from about her
heart: so with Zelie. The steeled, unnatural restraint dropped from her.
The generous, quivering pulse sprang in her veins. She groped: she
swayed toward him.
"Bibi--what have you done? Your chance!... Fly while you can!"
"Too late," he said, in his turn.
"But the heritage--your great future! Your riches! Your happiness!
Nothing counts but that!... Name of God, you've lost it!"
"I find this better: to have you think kindly of it once--and of me."
"What else should I think of?" And oh, the impassioned miracle of her
voice! "... It is your right. You should have it--you must have it,
yourself, in freedom, without hindrance! For that I would have given
anything--everything. For that I tried to drive you away!"
"Zelie!" he cried, in wonder. "Is this true? Did you feel so?... It was
for my sake!"
"What else?... Though it tore me: though I died for it! I was not fit
for you, but you should have your desire and I could help--a little,
however little--to set you on the road. I could free you from danger of
Maman--her blackmailing. For always. It was my own hope. But now--!...
Oh Bibi!... Bibi!..."
She must have fallen if he had not caught her. And that was the way of
it at long end. She loved him. They loved. The convict and the daughter
of convicts: lovers of New Caledonia. With what somber consummation!
"But you must escape!" she gasped. The knocking at the door was like to
splinter the panels. "There may yet be time.... The militaires are
coming! Be quick!"
He shook his head.
"It will not do, little one," he answered. "Useless. I should only be
run down by black trackers. No. For me, it is finished.... But I am
quite content."
"If you are taken it means death! ... And mine!"
"No. Not that either. You owe me, perhaps, one promise."
"Anything you want of me!"
"I bind you to it!"
"Anything you want me to say!"
"Then you will not die: and you will save yourself from worse than death
the only way still open.... These good sisters are waiting here for you.
Do you understand?"
"I understand!" she sobbed, through her weeping. "I am yours.... I
promise!... Only kiss me once!"
It was Mother Carron who recovered some sort of sanity first among us. It
was Mother Carron who gathered the fainting girl and passed her over to
the charge of the nuns; Mother Carron who had forethought to snatch
one of Carron's jackets from a hook; Mother Carron, finally, who slipped
that jacket onto Bibi-Ri and buttoned it carefully to the chin before
she would order the door unbarred.
"Well, well--so we land her in the church after all," observed that
remarkable woman briskly, at the last. "Chouette, alors! It is honest,
at least.... And now, stupid, open up and admit the happy bridegroom and
let him see what he can see!"
He saw, right enough. He saw as much as was needful. When the door
thrust inward, when his two rogue friends of military surveillants
rushed through, when that tall devil in long black redingote and high
hat, with his flaming yellow eyes and raging front--when M. de Nou
himself, I say, confronted us--there we were properly ranged as the
actors in a perfectly obvious police case of brawl and murder: prisoner,
witnesses, corpus delicti and the succoring clergy: complete.
"What does this mean?" he demanded.
Bibi-Ri faced him--a strange meeting, in truth!
"Me," he said, with his old trick of whimsy. "Only me. Convict 2232.
I've been developing my capabilities a little.... That's all!"
* * * * *
So they guillotined Bibi-Ri. In due course, by due process, he passed
before the Marine Tribunal, before the Commandant and the Procurator
General and the Director and the rest of our salaried philanthropists.
They dealt with him faithfully and of a gray early morning they led him
from the little door of the condemned cell. They marched him out with
his legs hobbled and his hands tied behind his back; with the chaplain
tottering at his side and the bayonets of the guard shining martially
file and file: with some of the chiefest of these judges to receive him
and some hundreds of us convicts drawn up below to do him honor.
Such was the method of his elevation, you will perceive: such the means
by which he attained his ambitions, his uplifted position in the
world--when he climbed the scaffold in the courtyard of the central
prison on Ile de Nou and took his final look on life.
I was there. For my complicity at Mother Carron's that night and my
refusal to testify at the trial they had shipped me back to the
Collective. I stood in the front row. I was among those felons whose
special privilege is their compulsory attendance at executions. I could
miss nothing. Not a word nor a movement. Not the hurried mumbling of the
death sentence. Not the ruffling of the drums that covered the fatal
preparations.... Not even the icy chill to the marrow when we sank there
in our ranks on the damp flagstones.
"Convicts: on your knees! Hats off!"
Just as well for me I was allowed to kneel, perhaps.... Never mind....
It does not bear talking of. Except one thing. One thing I recall to
comfort me, as I saw it through a mist of tears, wrung with pity and
with awe. And that was Bibi-Ri's last salute to my address before they
lashed him on the bascule, under the knife.... He smiled at me, the
little fellow. Even gayly. Bidding me note as plain as words how he held
fast his good courage, how he had kept his counsel and his great secret
in prison and would keep them to the end. How he apprehended and viewed
clear-eyed the inconceivable grim jest of the family party there on the
scaffold: himself and the executioner!
Then he looked away across the harbor, toward the anchorage, and he did
not shift his gaze again from that goal of Noumea. Taking his farewell,
Monsieur. Taking his farewell in spirit and quite content, as he had
said, I do believe. For this was the day, this the very morning, when
the steamer left Noumea bearing his beloved Zelie for home....
And one other thing I can tell you, crisp and clear. Do you remember
when I began I said I had evened the score against M. de Nou? Evened it
for always until that fiend shall be dragged to the nethermost level of
hell and earn his reward? Evened it the only way it could be evened on
this side of the grave?... And so I did. Never was such an evening!
Listen:
Ask me not how it was done, by aid of what obscure pressure, through
what underground channels. But the miniature--the miniature of Bibi-Ri!
You recollect? Somehow. Monsieur--somehow, I say--it found its way into
the panier with the head of Bibi-Ri. Somehow the new assistant,
Bombiste's successor, discovered it when he "robbed the basket"--when he
stooped to gather the little perquisites of office for his master. And
somehow and finally it was laid straightway in the palm of M. de Nou....
He glanced at it. I saw him start. I saw him stare. I saw him stand and
stand and still stare. I saw him lose bit by bit that shell of damnable
pride, that prop of untouched and unrelenting hatred and contempt which
was and which had been through all his years, his evil support.... He
gave a movement, of horror, of growing terror. He stepped over. And he
looked into the basket at his handiwork still lying there. He looked and
he looked. But he could not know. He cannot know. He can never, never
know, Monsieur.... For the red mark about that severed neck was all one
red mark--do you see?--and the Red Mark remains a mystery forever!
EAST OF EASTWARD
Few persons ever attain any precise knowledge of the immemorial East,
its ways or its meanings; its wickedness or its mystery. But Tunstal was
a young man with a cherubic smile and a plethoric letter of credit, and
he had traveled far and wide to Honolulu, to Yokohama, to Macao, and
even to Singapore, which is very far indeed, besides being extremely
wicked. By the time he had taken passage on the _Lombock_ for a tour of
the archipelago his education seemed complete. He had just learned to
play fan-tan with much the same skill he was wont to display at poker in
more familiar climes.
Tunstal had fallen in with other traveled men on board the _Lombock_,
which covers a beat among the lesser ports of Netherlands India. These
were simple planters, merchants and traders for the most part, largely
Dutch in flavor as well as speed. He thought them pretty dull, but they
proved to be good listeners. So he had been instructing them all around,
charming their ears with tales of Sago Lane and the Jalan Sultan, of Gay
Street and Number Nine and the dances at Kapiolani, the while he banked
a bowl of chinking cash as long as any would sit up with him.
That was how he came to find himself alone in the smoking room one
breathless hot morning some days out from Singapore, amid the dead
cheroots and the empty glasses, with a pile of ill-gotten profits before
him, a very dry throat, and a great call for swifter action and yet
newer worlds. It was all too easy. This globe-trotting thing threatened
to become monotonous....
"And not even a drink on tap," he complained, for the virtuous
steward--also Dutch--had retired long ago beyond the troubling of a bell
push. "A fellow might just as well be back home with the lid down."
He stumbled out on deck in the dawn that came pouring up from behind the
earth like a cloud of luminous, pearly smoke. The _Lombock_ had made
harbor some time during the night and now lay anchored in a river mouth
off the fringe of a toy town--one of those island cities apparently
built of matches and cigar boxes that have a thousand years of history
behind them and no sense of dignity and not so much as a brick block to
support the same.
The water front was a tangle of crazy jetties, of string-tied fishing
boats and bird-cage houses, some on stilts and some on floating
shingles, to rise and fall with the tide. There stood the inevitable
ancient fort, clad in creepers, and there were the usual rows of
godowns, lime-washed and naked. A little mosque sprouted from a nest of
palms, like a moldy turnip trying to grow the wrong way. Up along the
wooded rise nestled a few solid dwellings, with garden walls and tended
terraces. But Tunstal discovered no wonders--nothing to claim a star in
any guidebook--and he looked indifferently at that age-old land with its
great green, jungled slopes shouldering back and back until they faded
in dim blue.
The early stir of little brown men, the raffle of small craft propelled
by pictorial pirates in kilted sarongs, the amphibious urchin who
paddled a log and besought a chance to dive for coppers; the mounting
heat, the lifting river mists, the first saffron tinting of the sun, and
even the complex and curious odor that wafted overstream, of jasmine and
mud flats and ripe fish, of swamps and hearths and the indescribable
exhalation of the human forcing house--he had observed these things
before in places quite similar.
Wherefore he yawned in the face of the immemorial East and moved toward
the lowered gangway to meet the first mate, a lean and leathery mariner,
whom he hailed with boisterous outcry.
"Hello chief--you're the very chap I need."
The mate paused to turn his patient, almost mournful regard that seemed
never to focus short of the horizon.
"I'm going ashore," announced Mr. Tunstal, "for a taste of local
ginger."
"Ginger?" inquired Nivin.
"Some kind of tropic spice."
"Spice?"
"I didn't come all this way," explained Tunstal, "to waste my
opportunities with a lot of fat koopmans who talk of nothing but
calicoes and the rate of exchange. I'm a humble seeker after truth,
right enough, but I want it fresh and snappy. I've got the price and,
believe me, chief, I've got the appetite.... What port is this?"
Nivin told him. The name does not matter. It might have been one or
another about that coast. It meant little to Tunstal beyond the fact
that they would lie there till midnight.
"And plenty long enough, by the looks. I'll just collect three thrills
and a shock and be back for tiffin. All I want from you, chief, is the
wise tip. Tell me, chief, tell me. Is there anything--you know--anything
specially worth seeing hereabouts?"
Thus spake and thus queried Alfred Poynter Tunstal, and Nivin examined
the figure he made there under the dawn. Quite a pleasing figure. His
suit of cream-colored silk fitted sleekly upon his well-fed person and
his tie was a dainty scrap. He carried a dove-gray sun helmet with not
more than three yards of bright peacock puggree. His buckskin shoes were
fleckless. Also he wore a smile, which requires to be noted. It began in
dimples and circled chubbily. A captious eye might have marked it as
somewhat lacking--somewhat too round and ready, like the ripple on a pan
of water. But it was brisk, forward, and perfectly assured.
"Anything worth seeing?" repeated Nivin, considering that smile.
The mate had sailed with globe-trotters before, though possibly with
none quite duplicating Mr. Tunstal. This man Nivin was one of a type not
so rare in outlying lanes and obscure corners as might be thought, into
which something of the sun and the air of warm seas has penetrated. A
bit of a dreamer, perhaps, mellowed by service under softer skies, among
softer races. To such an officer any passenger is apt to become an
object of real concern, aside from the strictly professional value
thereof. He had overheard Mr. Tunstal's hectic memoirs in the smoking
room and simply, laboriously, he went about to convey a certain
warning....
"I should hardly think so--for a gentleman of your experience. The fact
is, sir, you're off the traveled track here, so to speak. A town like
this has no use for tourists and provides no class to fatten off the
likes. Music, dances--all the giddy frolic made up for a show--they
don't lower theirselves to that cut o' business."
"Why, they're only natives, aren't they?" asked Tunstal, and the whole
philosophy of his kind was rolled in the phrase.
"Only natives, as you say, sir," returned Nivin slowly--"which is Malay
and poor to jest with, besides frequently carrying a creese. They're a
sober-minded breed, sir. Quite superior and fit for respect in their
way."
* * * * *
But Tunstal had been leaning to watch the river traffic, and here he
prodded the other to look. Just passing them at the moment came a
clumsy proa that had worked upchannel on the last of the tide under
sweeps--a singular blot of color. Alow and aloft, from her tub cutwater
and forward-sloping rail to her languid wings of matting, she was grimed
an earthy, angry red. Her sailors were smeared with the same stain,
their head rags and kilts and their bare arms and knotted fingers at the
oars, so that she and they seemed to swim in a sullen, an infernal
conflagration, and the sunrise slanting across the river reaches picked
spar and rope and savage-dyed group with dabs of ruby and vermilion and
dull citrine.
"It's a cinnabar boat," said Nivin as they stared down at that silent
crew of ensanguined devils.
"From the mines. I know," nodded Tunstal. "Up the river--what? I heard
about those mines. Van Goor, that pop-eyed little chap--an agent for
some mining company, I believe--he was telling us last night around
fourth-drink time. It appears these mercury miners are imported Kwangsi
coolies. About as low a race as crawls, with peculiar customs of their
own. They trade with the country people for supplies, and they drive
some queer trades. Did you ever happen to hear yourself, chief?"
"There's no lack of tales."
"Maybe, but this is the only real one I got a smell of--pity Van Goor
wasn't a bit thirstier. He said a famine has been raging in some coast
district or other and the villagers are keen to sell. At the same time
the commodity naturally loses weight, through starvation, and the coolie
gangs buy by the pound. So a canny village will pool its food to fatten
up a few--Ah!"
The ore boat had drawn level with them, so near they might have tossed a
biscuit to the rude decks. And there under the break of the poop they
saw three women, scarcely more than girls, crouched against the
bulkhead. One raised her face for an instant, a face struck out like a
pallid, sharp-carven cameo from its ruddy setting--struck out with the
poignant, mute intimacy that sometimes springs between craft and craft
across a widening gulf. A vivid and unforgettable face!
* * * * *
The head boatman snarled, and the ragged creatures huddled from sight
like nestlings under shadow of a hawk, while the proa swept in toward an
upper jetty.
"Couldn't ever be proved," muttered Nivin at last.
"Of course not," agreed Tunstal genially. "Who wants to prove it? And
anyway the commodity is still in transit--coming in from those coast
villages, very likely."
"What would they be doing here?"
"Oh, they probably have a local clearing house for the trade," said
Tunstal, learned in wickedness.
"Why should you think so?"
"Well, observe the commodity again. It hasn't been delivered, has it?
You'll notice it shows no stain of cinnabar--_yet_!"...
The mate's face was stony as he stood gripping the rail, but Tunstal
only smiled with the proper cynical detachment of the globe-trotter.
From a silver case he drew a fat and sophisticated cigar to adorn that
smile.
"And so much for your superior Malay. Chief, I'm surprised at you,
trying to string me. Fancy a native how you like, but don't put it on
grounds of respect--because I know 'em. I've seen 'em pretty much, and
I've no more respect for any coffee-shaded tribe using two legs instead
of four than I have for so many monkeys. Monkeys--that's what they are.
Apes!
"Play with 'em? Sure. It's all they're fit for--cute little rascals
sometimes too. But they simply have no moral sense. I take 'em as I find
'em; always ready for any of their cunning little games, you
understand. Now here's this burg. I don't expect a complete Arabian
Night's Dream, but I'm dead sure of finding a joint of some kind, and I
mean to look it over--the place where the monkeys perform for you."
"I can't help you," said Nivin, tight-lipped. "You may be right--and yet
I'd swear these people have never been spoiled. There's so few whites
come here. You see, sir, you're pretty far East--"
"Too far for a 'sailor's rest'?" laughed Tunstal. "Pshaw! Come now; are
you going to turn me loose on my own or will you steer me up to the
local tropic drink, at least?"
Nivin might have been seen to wince a trifle, as one sorely tried, and
his melancholy gaze sought the shore. Was there or was there not the
beginning of a twinkle in the gray depths? He would have denied it--he
afterward did deny it.
"A drink?" he murmured. "A drink? Oh, aye, I could name a drink if that
would fill your need. Look over yonder on the slope beyond the
Government House, that purple blaze. It's a big bachang tree in bloom,
and if you should take the path that climbs beside it you might find
such entertainment as perhaps you're seeking. Local I believe it is and
quite tropic. Keep always to the left till you reach a pair o' green
gates--three turns, or it may be four--and mind your footing as you go,
sir--"
So this was the way Mr. Tunstal won his wish in the early morning when
he came to the garden of Lol Raman, up from terrace to terrace above
that far, that very far Eastern town.
He met his first thrill where Ezekiel met his in the vision, within the
threshold of the gate. The high wall he had been following gave suddenly
under an arch. There were the double green doors, standing open, and he
entered a sort of open-air conservatory. At least he had no better word
for the place so crammed with color and scent, and no word at all for
the strange flowers and improbable trees that clustered along the walks.
Down by the farther end of the inclosure stood a low house almost lost
in shrubbery. An arbor with some chairs and tables seemed to invite the
passer-by. And just before him, in Buddhistic meditation under a palm,
squatted the reception committee of one--a monstrous orang-utan, the
true red-haired jungle man, with a face like a hideous black caricature
of Death.
Things happened. At sight of a visitor the huge beast reared himself,
and sprang abruptly into vehement life, bouncing on bent knuckles. He
started out to the limit of his chain until the bright steel links
snicked ominously behind him and the leather harness drew taut about his
shoulders, pumping and roaring in the great cavern of his chest to top a
gale of his own forests. He scurried around the trunk and snatched at
something--a packet of leaves. He ran around the other way and retrieved
a little lacquer box. Crouching over these treasures with every
appearance of the most frantic rage, he began, swiftly and
incredibly--to roll cigarettes!
And meanwhile, impassive as a wax manikin, a white-jacketed,
white-saronged servitor glided from space somewhere to prepare a table
and to offer a chair in the arbor, to set out a square-faced bottle, to
pour a glass of golden yellow liquor, and to collect the tiny, fresh
cylinders of tobacco which the earnest ape was shedding about him in a
shower--all with the gesture of conjuring.
Tunstal sat down hard. He succeeded in lighting one of the cigarettes.
Exquisite. He gulped the glass of liquor. Delicious....
"I seem," said Tunstal, mopping his brow--"I seem to have landed as per
invoice."