THE SAFFRON MAN
As warmth in a dying man, so life in the village of Kilmarnock had
retreated from the extremities. Gray cabins stood for the most part
with sunken roof and yawning window; here and there, where a wall had
fallen out, they exposed, as for the stage purposes of some unacted
melodrama, the intimacy of all their little rooms at once,--the ragged
wallpaper, the zigzag mounting scar of stairs long vanished, the
hearthstones choked, in winter with snow, as now with autumn chickweed.
Beyond these dead environs, a brook, with cool and hearty noises,
tumbled out of its brown alder-shadow to halt, slacken, and wriggle in
a delta of deep-channeled rivulets through seaweed and long mud-flats.
And here, where fairy falls descended to that vile foreshore, the heart
of the village beat feebly in a half-dozen houses, weather-silvered.
In the post-office,--a littered, gloomy shed which was also carpenter’s
shop, wheel-wright’s factory, and woolen mill,--a few sad old men sat
always, talking slowly and vaguely; while underneath, the roaring
brook made the floor-boards vibrate, and flashed through chinks and
knot-holes the whiteness of cascade foam.
“Mornin’, Miles,” wheezed Mr. Quinn, the postmaster. An elephantine
man,--old Mr. Bissant called him Quinbus Flestrin, after the
man-mountain Gulliver,--he rummaged with slow, fat hands in Her
Majesty’s salt-box. “Here’s that letter you folks be’n waitin’
for,” he puffed. “Didn’t know you had relations over there, neither.
Poor hand they write, I must say. Oh, _now_ I ketch it! ‘A. Florio,
_Es_-quair.’ That’s him that’s stayin’ up to your place, ain’t it?”
Miles nodded, all impatience.
“‘Care of Richard Bissant, _Es_-quair,’” read Quinbus gravely, holding
the letter at different lengths of focus. “Say, they tell me he _ain’t_
a boarder, after all! Now, I thought he might be a rusticator, like the
city feller to Lovat’s that’s got the narvous prostrates. They say his
fingers fidges dretful, that feller.”
Miles listened politically, and was at last rewarded with Tony’s letter.
“Hear ye got noo neighbors down your way,” began Quinbus, but his
auditor escaped.
His news, moreover, went unheeded; for in three steps down the
grass-ribbed street Miles overtook a surprise. A little man trundling a
keg of nails in a barrow set down the handles with a sigh, and turned.
His hair was grayer, his cheek engraved with deeper lines, his aspect
less cheerful and thriving; but the swart face and shifting black eyes
were those of Abram the Magician.
It was like a piece of boyhood restored. Halting, Miles ventured the
question,--
“Isn’t your name Tucker, sir?”
“What if ’tis?” growled the man, defiant and suspicious.
“Oh, nothing,” rejoined Miles, taken aback. “Only I rode your mare
Jubilee once--”
“Dessay,” snapped Abram. He spat on his hands, stooped to the shafts of
his barrow, and growled, “Lots o’ lummockses did. Damn ’er hide! Dunno
that’s reason to hender a man’s work.”
“Or to be uncivil,” Miles retorted stiffly, taking a leaf from his
grandfather’s book of pride. But it was with a chuckle that he passed
on, and swung into the path along the shore.
It was a bright Saturday morning of late September. Across the border a
thin haze of forest fires, from “back lots” far behind the river hills,
veiled the high, resolute contours of the American shore; but in all
other quarters the air shone clear and buoyant, mellow but cordial,
like the sweetness of a frosty apple. Goldenrod along his path had
ripened to a higher, drier yellow; seaweed on the rocks below--that
turned the broad flats into a “rookery” of shaggy forms, petrified
in the act of basking--seemed to have lost the greenish tinge from
its leathern brown; ahead, down the sparkling vista of the river, the
bay, by a sleight of mirage, raised islands a hair’s-breadth above
the horizon, till beneath them sea and sky joined with that pale,
stretched continuity seen in downward-parting drops. A world unclouded
and untroubled: yet the sky held the growing whiteness that foreruns
autumnal wind, and a loon, winging high with bedlam laughter, steered
his flight by the flight of an unrisen gale.
Miles loitered, yet was busy rather with thought than sight. What could
bring Abram to Kilmarnock? The fat postmaster would have not only
mentioned a “show,” but discussed it tediously; where, then, were Terry
and Jubilee, and Madge the Seeress, and the little barefoot girl? His
sudden sharp curiosity, above all on this last head, astonished him.
Why should he care?--yet he continued to speculate.
His path skirted among sweet-fern, mullein, and pink granite. The
little fir promontory, roughly double-serrate like the edge of an elm
leaf, suddenly hid the upper lighthouse, for shore and path bent sharp
into Alward’s Cove. Here a deserted house stood at the grassy mouth of
an ancient watercourse; and behind it, a grove of slender white birches
had already begun to shed yellow leaves, which so carpeted the dark,
strait hollow that a sunlight seemed to glow faintly upward.
Suddenly Miles saw that new shingles patched the cabin, and that from
the chimney curled blue wisps of smoke. A battered “punt” lay hauled
above the thin rubbish line of high water. But what most deeply
surprised him, the beginnings of a weir straggled down the beach. He
laughed aloud. The stakes were freshly driven, but the cedar poles
green-coated with many tides; on old material the builder had exerted
an inexperience glaring even in these first few yards; and more than
all, Alward’s Cove, a narrow cleft half a mile above low water, was for
a weir the worst possible situation.
Glancing up at the patched house, he cut his laughter short. Behind the
panes a girl’s face vanished into the gloom. The features he could not
have sworn to, but the hair shone indubitably bright. Ashamed to be
caught mocking her weir, he set out again briskly; and he had rounded
the little promontory before confusion cleared into the surprising
knowledge that he was glad of something. These were the neighbors of
whom Quinbus would have told; the keg of nails was for that absurd,
futile weir; and her hair _was_ of the color of winter oak leaves. Why,
again, should he care?--but care he did, even to excitement, with an
obscure feeling that his acts, even his thoughts, now had as it were
a witness, and that now any day could promise pleasant and unexpected
turns. He could not account for this glowing satisfaction,--that some
one had become mysteriously involved and identified, in his mind, with
the bright, volatile strangeness of autumn.
On the doorsteps at home, Tony smoked his pipe.
“Ah, the beggar’s written at last,” he grumbled; then unfolding a
single sheet, read it calmly, without comment. Miles, who had always
vaguely connected this coming letter with “enemies made at sea,” was
disappointed to see no more change in Florio’s dark face than in his
later behavior.
Weeks passed without incident. Miles went daily to the village for mail
which was never there, and of which the sailor declared no expectation.
He returned down river always by the shore path--“to see how the weir
gets along,” he told himself stubbornly. It got along slowly, from
bad to worse. Sometimes he saw the magician, far out, ankle-deep in
mud, hammering stakes, or weaving brush wattles into his foredoomed
structure. Once the blue of a calico dress moved among the white birch
pillars. Speech of his new neighbors, however, or nearer view, he did
not get. No face lurked behind the window-pane. And at home the fir
headland sundered them as effectually as the rim of a hemisphere.
One night, at his nine-o’clock visit to the upper light, he paused for
a time in the lamp-room, his back to the glare, looking out into the
dark. Something--perhaps the silence of the evening, the calm, so great
that the other tower’s light pierced the water deeply, like an inverted
point of exclamation--induced lonely and melancholy thoughts. As he
stood thus, a sound rose through the open trap-door. Something stirred,
thinly and dryly, on the stairs below.
At first like faintly tearing silk, or scuffing sand-paper, it mounted.
Footsteps, thought Miles; yet such footsteps as he had never heard,
uncertain, soft, and of a person neither shod nor barefoot.
They stopped. A harsh yet guarded call followed. If speech, it was no
human tongue. Miles waited, in a profound silence. A voice called in
strange sing-song; then nearer, chanting what sounded like a fragment
of barbarous melody.
Portuguese and Italian sailors Miles had seen, on rare visits aboard
some lumber schooner bound for Sicily or the Canary Islands. At
Admiral’s Light, however, nothing could bring them ashore, still less
up into the tower. And this sing-song gabble, as instinct told him,
came from no Latin throat.
The dry, scuffing steps began once more. Suddenly, out of the darkness,
claw-like fingers clutched the sides of the trap-door,--fingers of an
impossible, horny yellow, ending in blue talons.
For one spasmodic instant, Miles, had he stood on open ground, might
have bolted. Then as up from a pit, a reassuring black felt hat
bobbed through the opening, and tilted back to disclose a human face.
Eyes hard and bright as black glass peered from under lids curiously
in-folded, of double thickness; the saffron cheeks were smooth as a
babe’s; and indeed, in that strange face, as in a changeling’s, baby
innocence conflicted with reptilian age and wisdom. Without alteration,
without sound, it rested there for a moment, at the level of the floor,
as though decapitated; then sank from sight.
Miles had stared in fascination. Waking to anger, part at his own fear,
part at its cause, he shouted:--
“Stop! Who--what are you after?”
The light scuffing descended rapidly. Miles leapt for the black square,
plunged through it, and down the twisting stair. The thin scantling
shook and buckled under their double weight. He jumped the lower steps,
just as the tower door slammed open to let a black figure bound out
into the lantern light. A scurrying pair of thick white soles, as he
caught up the lantern by the bail, guided his pursuit; he gained on
them, and running his hardest to the gully bridge, gripped in his right
hand the fluttering fullness of a silken jacket.
“Stop!” he cried. “You--”
The fugitive tugged, wriggled, surrendered, and turned a grinning face.
“No can do,” he panted, nodding and ducking amiably. The felt hat was
gone, and his bobbing crown showed a high, shaven forehead, bound with
neat black coils of braided hair. “But in pictures they hang down,”
thought Miles. “A queue!” He had never before seen a Chinaman.
“What do you want?” he asked severely.
His captive, smiling and nodding, the calmer of the two, repeated,--
“No can do, no can do.”
Plainly, the man’s English went no further. Miles released his grip,
and, feeling rather foolish, stepped back to consider. Like a spring
released, and with instant, mechanical precision, the Chinaman vaulted
the bridge-rail, landed on the steep bank below, and darted upward,
crashing into the alders. His escape, like his first appearance, had
the facility of acts in a dream.
Flushed and bewildered, Miles was halfway home before he regained the
use of reason. At a clap the thought overtook him, What if this were
Tony’s “foreign-looking” enemy? “I’d better make sure first,” he told
himself; and sitting by the library fire, he kept as thoughtful a
silence as his grandfather and the sailor, perched, with intent faces,
over their chessmen.
At bedtime, he stepped across into Florio’s little room.
“News for you,” he began quietly, and continued in an undertone.
Florio’s hard gray eyes watched him sharply across the candle flame,
with a look which meant, if anything, impatient anger.
An explosive whisper was the only comment: “Damn the coolie!” Pocketing
his big fists with one energetic shove, the sailor stared down at the
floor.
“Thanks all the same, of course,” he said moodily. “Quite right.
That’s the chap I was afraid might turn up. Thanks. Don’t speak of him
to anybody else, till I say so, will you? Not a word? That’s right.”
He sat down on his bed, and unwound his leggings, neatly, methodically,
as though the affair were dropped.
In some surprise, Miles continued it.
“Then I’ll do my turns to-night, and afterward--the lamps.”
“Eh?” The sailor looked up, half startled, half chagrined. “What’s
that?--Oh,” he smiled indulgently, “not much! Get to bed, boy. What,
I’m not afraid of _that_ swine! Alone, isn’t he? Let me lay aboard him
once, that’s all! Can catch! No, I won’t hear a word of it. Your watch
below. To bed!”
By no persuasion would he forego his self-set labor, or accept company,
even for the single night. “Dear chap, I have _some_ pride,” he
reiterated; and as he offered no confidences, Miles left him with
disappointment. Yet his cool, stubborn attitude seemed, in a way,
admirable; and--to judge from deep, contented breathing, across the
corridor--he slept like a child.
Somewhere after midnight, Miles woke uneasily. Long security had broken
the habit; but now he sat up once more, to watch the distant light
of Tony’s lantern jerking in fitful eclipse among the firs. Near the
second tower it disappeared, as usual; and as usual, after a short
pause shining out again, returned down river, skipping and winking.
Suddenly it went out, and shone no more.
Miles crept from bed to window, and watched. He counted off three,
four, five minutes, and saw not another gleam. Dismayed, blaming
himself for suffering Tony to have his way, he wrestled into clothes,
stole downstairs, and raced through the sharp night air. Thin fog,
shoulder-high, had just begun to billow along the ground, concealing
and magnifying, even by starlight. Each tussock, each baby fir, loomed
like a waiting figure or stretched like a dead body. Silent over the
wet grass, Miles ran downhill toward the spot where the light had
ceased.
Nearing the shore, he brushed through the chill aspersion of bristling
thickets, when suddenly the light gleamed again, fixed, through the
lowest boughs. He stopped, listened, then slipped forward cautiously,
toward a murmur of voices. Subdued but unmistakable, it was the broken
sing-song of that speech from the other side of the world. He threaded
without a sound the interstitial windings of the underbrush, and
crouched at the edge of the clearing.
On the old quarter-deck, the lantern burned dimly. As in a luminous
smoke, two men sat talking, with now and then a gesture that set
enormous hands, outspread fingers, wavering on the magic-lantern screen
of the fog. Their alien tones rose and fell, in a quiet, scolding
incantation.
The more vehement speaker was Tony. Facing him, oddly squatting upon
heels, the yellow man of the tower nodded continually, amicably,
sagely, like a toy mandarin.
[Illustration]