the river, was a full half-mile away. Before he had gone three hundred
yards of it, he saw that the sand just ahead of him was darker and
shinier than the sand under his feet. A memory of another dangerous
sand, far away on an English sea-coast, shot into his mind on the
instant, but the footing failed before he could stop. The sand gave
beneath the one foot and let in the other: ooze of water shot up to the
surface: he flung himself backwards violently, and got out, but fell,
and saw, or thought that he saw, the surface of the sand shaking as
though it were laughing at him. He rolled himself clear, then rose and
looked at it. “That’s a pretty bad quicksand,” he said. “I might get
through, but from the pull on that foot, I think that it would pull me
down. Probably I can get round the shoreward end of it.”
He tried, but failed: the shoreward end of the quicksand was tropical
bog.
“Very well,” he said, “I’ll swim round the seaward end. It is only a
hundred yards. I need not go far out. It will be something to have the
swamp washed off me again.” He went knee-deep into the sea, with some
misgivings, for the shallows of all that coast are haunted with sand
sharks, which come right in to have the warmth of the sand. He splashed
as he went, to scare them. He had gone about thigh deep into the water
and was just settling down to swim, when there came suddenly an
agonising pain in his left foot.
His first thought was, “I’m on a thorn,” then, “I’m on a snake”; then,
as the pain ran in a long, hot, stabbing streamer up his leg, he knew
the truth, that he had trodden on a sting-ray. He hopped out of the
water to the shore, feeling all the blood in his foot turn to vitriol
and come surging along, as vitriol, to his heart. Most excruciating
agony made him fling himself down. He tried to hold out his leg, but
that was unendurable torment. He tried to kneel upon it, while he put a
ligature above the knee, but the pain made him so sick that he could not
bear it. He tried to lie down, but that was unbearable. He rolled over
and over, moaning: then staggered up, and hopped and hopped, gasping
with pain, until he fell. He had never known any pain in his life,
except the bangs and knocks of his profession, but now he tasted a full
measure.
Although he fell, the pain did not stop, it hit him when he was down, it
grew worse. The cold, deadly, flat thing in the sand had emptied his
horn into him. He buried his face in the sand: he dug his hands into the
sand. Then the poison seemed to swing him round and double him up. It
seemed to burn every vein and shrivel every muscle and make every nerve
a message of agony.
He managed to cast loose the wrapping from the foot. The foot no longer
looked like a foot, but like something that would burst. In his deadly
sickness he thought that his foot was a pollard willow tree growing to
the left of the road. He wondered why he was not on his bicycle. He said
that his foot was dead, that it had died of the gout, and would drop
from his body and never grow again.
All the venom came in pain on to his abdominal muscles; then he felt it
come swimming along like little fiery rats round the carcase of his
heart. He saw his heart for a moment or two like a black pig caught in a
bog; the rats came all round it together, from every side, they closed
in on it and bit it, bit it, bit it.
When he came to himself a little, he said something about the stars
being too many, altogether too many, for the job in hand. He said that
he could not pick up the guiding lights. Then he felt that every star
was a steamer’s masthead light, and that all those myriads of steamers
were bearing down upon him without sidelights. “Their look-out-men are
all asleep,” he said, “I can’t see how they are bearing, and I have no
lights at all. I must find a flare and burn them off.” He groped for a
flare, but found only his wet clothes pressing on his body. “The flares
are all damp,” he said, “the flares won’t burn. It is my fault; I stored
them in the pickle-house. They ought to have been in the chart-room with
the flags.” He wandered off in his thoughts far away from the lights of
the stars. He lost all knowledge that he was lying on the sand three or
four thousand miles from home. His main thought was that he was
wandering along corridors in search of doors. He knew that it was very
important to find doors, but whenever he found any, they closed in his
face and became parts of the walls.
After a long time he roused himself up, feeling weak and sick. He knew
at once, from the feel of things, that it was midnight. A sense of his
position came to him. The _Pathfinder_ must have sailed: he had lost his
passage: he was miles from anywhere: he had lost Richard’s bicycle. All
these things had happened because of his dream, because of Los Xicales.
He sat up, but saw no light in the direction of the house. Over the spit
with the pine trees there came a sort of flashing glimmer twice a minute
as the light swung round in the tower of Manola point. He was bitterly
cold, for besides being wet through, a mizzling rain was falling on him.
He was sick and wretched. The closeness in the air was gone; a breeze
was blowing the rain straight along the beach. The trees inshore were
whistling and rustling: the seas broke as though they were cross, with a
sharp smash instead of the relenting wash of twilight. All sorts of
little life was scuttering about the sand: white owls, or sea-birds,
cruised overhead as silently as sails.
Sard sat up and tried his left leg. It was numb and much swollen. He
could not feel anything in it from his mid-thigh to his toe. It had
become as dead as a leg of clay or mutton. When he dinted the flesh by
pressing on it, the dint remained.
With a little difficulty he stood up on one leg. He then felt for the
first time that he had only one leg, that the other would not act. He
could move it, but not bend it; when he put it on the sand, leaned on
it, or tried to walk with it, the thing ceased to be his, it neither
obeyed nor rebelled, it failed. He was so cold that he felt that he
would die. He sat for twenty minutes working to restore his leg. He no
longer felt pain in it, the pain was gone, but it was as though the
poison had burnt out the life. In some ways he would rather have had
pain than this deadness.
“Now I am in a bad way,” he said, “for not many come to this beach, and
none in this State will wander about looking for me. If I could only
reach Los Xicales . . . However, I can’t reach Los Xicales this way: the
quicksand bars the land and I’m not going to risk another sting in the
sea. I can’t get back to Enobbio’s inn by that swamp. But I might crawl
along the beach to that man who has the horses, Miguel, with the good
heart, near the salt-pans. He might not be very far: two kilometres. He
might take me in to the port, or at least to Los Xicales, where I should
be in time, if those fellows were trying anything.”
He was suffering much: the leech-bites in his right leg itched like
mosquito-bites, but were also hot and stinging; his mouth had fur in it,
which tasted like brown paper; he felt that he was dying of cold. His
hands, neck and face were swollen from the bites of the midges. His
blood seemed to have changed within him to something grey and slow.
Worse than his bodily state was the thought that he had broken his word
to Captain Cary and missed his passage; “mizzled his dick,” as Pompey
Hopkins called it.
“She’ll be sailed by this time,” he thought. “Whatever grace Captain
Cary gave me, she’ll have gone by this.”
He stood up to look about him: he now realised, for the first time, the
change in the weather.
The northern section of the heaven was covered with intense darkness.
Over the blackness a sort of copper-coloured wisp, like smoke, was
driving at a great speed. The blackness was lit up continually by
lightning, which burned sometimes in steady glows, sometimes in sharp
stabs of light. The wind had risen; directly Sard crossed the sandy
spit, it struck him with fury, driving sand and fragments of shell
against his face and down his neck. The sea was not yet breaking with
any violence upon the beach. It was white as far as the eye could see,
as though the heads of every wave had been whipped off and flogged into
foam which shone as though with moonlight from the phosphorescence.
Washes of breaker burst and rushed up the sand to Sard’s feet, like
washes of fire in which all the marvellous shells of which the beach was
composed, were lit up like jewels. Far away to the right, out at sea on
the edge of the sky, there was, as it were, a shaking wall of white from
the sea already running upon the Rip-Raps. He could see it waver, but it
never seemed to change. There was a roller there before the last had
gone.
“This is the norther,” Sard thought. “I hope the old man did not wait
too long for me, but got clear of the Rip-Raps before it came on.”
He re-bandaged his foot, picked some stakes from among the driftwood, to
serve as walking sticks, and with the help of these set out towards the
salt-pans to borrow a horse. He hobbled forward, dead into the teeth of
the gale. The worst thing about the gale was the cold. Far south as it
was, the wind came down directly from the northern icefields. To Sard,
who was thinly clad and wet through, it was piercing. He stumbled along
against it, keeping his direction by the pale flame of the breakers
which roared at his side and flung their fire at his feet.
When he had gone about a mile, he saw the stretch of the salt-pans like
a patch of white heather away ahead, distant he knew not how far. It
might be a mile, or it might be two miles; no man could judge distance
on a sand so flat. At anchor, under the head beyond the sand, was a ship
which had not lain there when he came to the beach. She seemed to be a
small tramp or large coaster, sheltering from the norther. She carried
no lights. Sard judged that she had come there to load copper from the
mines of Tloatlucan. He knew that there was a pier there, at the mouth
of a river, and that the ore came by a light railway direct to the pier
from the mine.
He hobbled on towards the whiteness of the salt-pans: a flat road is a
long road at best; against a gale it is a bad road.
Nearly all the way a great white bird (whether an owl or some sea-bird,
he could not tell) flew above and ahead of him. It seemed to him that
this bird shone. Perhaps the poison had upset his eyes, or perhaps his
eyes never lost the shine of the sea breaking beside him. In his shaken
state, this bird seemed like a luminous swan, guiding him to quiet.
Near the southern end of the pans he saw a shack or stable, facing him.
The seaward end of this shack was a small adobe house, with a palm roof.
The stable was empty: there was neither ass nor dog there.
Sard listened for half a minute, standing still, at ten paces from the
house, while he took stock. The house was closed to the night, yet it
had the look or feel of having someone there. Perhaps an animal instinct
survives in us from the time when it was important to know if a lair
were blank or not.
Sard went no nearer; he hailed the house in Spanish, calling on Don
Miguel by name. The place was silent, except for the flogging of the
palmetto on the roof, the scutter of crabs and gophers on the bents and
the wail of the wind across the salt-pans. Then presently something
tinkled within the house. It might have been a revolver cartridge, or a
knife coming out of a sheath, or a bottle upon glass. Sard hailed again,
saying that he came alone, in peace, from Don Enobbio, with desire to
hire a horse.
This time, Sard saw the shutter which covered the window (a space a foot
square near the door) move about three inches to one side. He heard no
noise, but he was watching the shutter and saw its greyness change to
blackness as the wood moved. “I am a friend,” he called. “I come from
Don Enobbio to Don Miguel to hire a horse. I, a sick man, wish to ride
to Las Palomas if Don Miguel will give aid, thus emulating the Good
Samaritan.”
He heard the heavy iron-wood bar of the door go back in its runners; the
door opened about eighteen inches; a young woman appeared, yawning.
“Enrique,” she said, “Enrique, back already?”
“I am not Enrique, lady,” Sard said, “but a traveller in need of a
horse.”
“Dios mio,” she said, “and I not combed! I thought you were Enrique.
Wait, then.”
He did not have to wait more than a minute; a light appeared at the
shutter; a tin basin or pan was kicked into a corner; then the door was
opened, the young woman called:
“Will the caballero enter, then?”
“Enter,” Sard thought, “and have my throat cut, perhaps; but I will
enter.”
He went in, with a watchful eye lest Miguel, who “erred in mind,” should
be lying in wait with a sand-bag just behind the door. However, Miguel
was not there, the young woman was alone in the one-roomed house.
She had lighted a little tin lamp, which had a smoke-blackened glass,
broken at the top. By the light of this Sard saw the room to be bare and
untidy. The bed was an array of small pine boughs, with their needles,
covered with sacks, ponchos and old serapes. The young woman had just
risen from her nest there; she was “not combed,” as she had said, nor
dressed, but hung about, as it were, with a long undergarment torn at
the shoulder. She was a plump young woman, just beginning to grow fat:
she was very dirty: her long, black hair shone from an unguent; she
flung it rakishly back from her brow with the gesture of a great
actress. Her eyes were like mules’ eyes, black and shining, with yellow
whites. Her mouth was exceedingly good-natured. She stood near the door,
clutching her sacking to her shoulder with one hand, while with the
other she motioned Sard to enter. She grinned at Sard as a comely woman
will grin at one whose praise of her comeliness would be esteemed.
The room, which was next door to the stable, had been lived and slept in
for some months with closed door and shutter. It smelt of oil,
tortillas, frijoles, horses, rats, mice, espinillo, hair-grease,
poverty, garlic, tobacco, joss-stick and musk. A sort of mental image of
a life made of all these things, all flavoursome and with a tang to
them, reached Sard at once through his nostrils, with the further
thought that it was not such a bad life, since it left the person both
dignified and kind.
He explained that he needed a horse.
“Ay de mi,” she exclaimed, “but Miguel is with the horses at the siding
beside the jetty, a half league hence. Assuredly he will lend a horse,
but it is further on, at the quay, that you will find him now.”
“I will go on, then,” Sard said.
“But you are wet and have known misfortune. Enter, I pray you, and rest
from your misfortune. Ay de mi, your foot has trodden unhappily.”
“Not since it has led me to your presence,” Sard said. “But thank you, I
must not enter. I will go on to Miguel, to the horse.”
Something in his tone or bearing or look, something in himself, seemed
to impress the woman.
“Assuredly,” she said, “the good Jesu comes thus, but must not go thus.
Sit you, Sir caballero.” She brought forward a three-legged stool, the
only seat in the room, and made him sit. “Sit you down till I see your
foot,” she said. She would have none of his protests, but had his
bandage off.
“You have met a snake,” she said.
“No; a sting-ray.”
“Then you have been in the sea and are of the ship, no doubt; ay de mi,
all wet, all wet, what misery.” She felt his arm and shoulder and cold
hand. “And a sting-ray; often have I seen them, with their horns. There
is a negro who can cure such with a white powder; but I have nothing.
Nothing but love which is a part of the love of God.”
She was kneeling at his side with his foot in her hands, kneading the
swollen flesh.
“No,” she said, “this is no time for the cure. The poison has killed,
but is now dead: the flesh is dead. It takes a day, two days, who knows,
after a sting-ray. Then, when the life begins to return, one can help.
See now, I can, by God’s mercy, do something. I have here a stirrup shoe
made long ago, but still of use. I have but the one, for the other was
cast out in error, as I always maintain; while others, on the contrary,
think that Martin took it, Martin the pedlar, the old soldier, who comes
round with saints and handkerchiefs. See now, a shoe for a count or
duke.”
She produced what had been the stirrup-shoe of a count or duke in the
days when such things were. It was a sort of wooden-soled slipper, with
a sole of wood, and heel and toecaps of cuir-bouilli. The great silver
bosses and brackets had long since been wrenched from it. The last user
had fixed it to his leathers with wire. The design on the cuir-bouilli
was of a coat-of-arms, but eaten away by ants and green with mould.
“See now,” she said, fitting it to his foot, “a shoe for a count or
duke. You shall walk the better for it. It is a shoe such as might have
been made for you.”
Her hand rested for an instant on Sard’s pocket, from which a draggled
silk handkerchief hung.
“Dios mio,” she said, “you are count or duke. It is so soft. This is
silk of the countess.”
She fingered it with a child’s delight in the texture. “Is it all like
this?” she said. “Truly, if you are not count or duke, you are servant
to one.”
“That’s more like it,” Sard said, rising, so as to tread upon the shoe.
“I’m a servant, to a limited company. Your shoe, señora, is as water to
one dying in the desert. You have been a friend to me in time of need.
You know the wise saying, ‘a friend to the beggars will never lack
guests.’ I say, ‘May a host to a beggar never lack friends.’”
“The good Jesu comes in all shapes,” she answered. “And you are not a
beggar, but very much a caballero; oh, very, very much a duke or count.
You are English. They say that the English are as ice, and therefore
come hither to be thawed.”
“That is partly true, señora. I have been melted by your kindness.”
“It is also said (though this I do not believe) that no Englishman will
kiss a woman to whom he has not been married by the priest.”
“That is assuredly true, señora.”
“Never, never, never; even if all things conspired: the moonlight,
perfumes, music, and beauty such as hers of Sheba?”
“Never, never, never,” he said.
“Ay de mi,” she said. “But it is said that the English are as Turks, and
are married to very many.”
“We are as God made us, not as people say, señora; but we remember
kindly acts forever and I shall remember you.”
“Forever?”
“I think so.”
“That is very caballero. But what is memory? A thought. You have not
even asked me my name.”
“I was going to ask it.”
“You were going to ask it?”
“Assuredly.”
“Assuredly,” she said. “It is true, then, as they say, that the English
are as ice. ‘Assuredly.’ You said it with a peck, as from a beak.
‘Assuredly.’ If I were to take a dagger and thrust it into my heart so
that I fell dead, you would say ‘Assuredly she has driven the point too
far. Assuredly she is no longer alive.’”
“Not so,” Sard said; “I should not say it. I might think it.”
“Would you be sorry?”
“I am sorry for any suicide.”
“Your cold ice would not thaw one tear. But, vaya, if I were countess,
and lay dead, you would stand like marble and say poetry. Listen: my
name, the name I call myself, is Rose of the South: will you remember
that?”
“Yes.”
“Assuredly?”
“No; faith of caballero.”
“Will you remember me, who am that name?”
“Yes.”
“It is me, myself, that name. When I was little, I had a sister: we used
to play grand ladies out in the sage brush. She was Lily of the West; I
was Rose of the South. She is dead, pobrecita, the Lily: she was of this
world, which needs a man, not a woman: pobrecita mia.”
“What is your real name?” Sard asked.
“Clara,” she said, “Clara of the Salt-Pans, the woman of Miguel, called
Miguel sin Nada.”
“He is Miguel con Mucha, with yourself, señora,” Sard said. “And now
adios, and always my thanks, siempre, siempre, siempre. I will return
your shoe by Miguel.”
“For the love of all the saints in bliss, caballero,” she said, “in no
way let Miguel suspect that you have talked with me. Ay de mi, we women;
we suffer for our hearts. Miguel is of a jealousy that would make proud,
being such evidence of love, if it were not such inconvenience. A
thought, a turn of the head, a look, and he at once ranks me with those
infamous of life, with her of Sheba, and Ysabel, Queen of England.”
“I will not let him suspect,” Sard said. “And now farewell, and my
thanks and again my thanks.”
“Stay yet,” she said. “Stay yet for one instant. I shall be here sixty
years, perhaps, like Caterina La Fea, below, at the poblacion, old, old,
and wrinkled like the devil, red-eyed, blind, from sitting in the smoke,
sucking bits of meat at last, with her gums. And little children
flinging dead rats at her and calling her Witch-Witch. I have had one
instant with you; let me have one other; only one; since it has to last
for sixty years, you would not grudge me one instant? Then when I am as
Caterina, I shall think, ah, but truly I lived, once, at that midnight,
when one like St. Gabriel came to my door, and was as a count or duke to
me, who am Clara the woman of Miguel.”
“Señora,” Sard said, “I, too, shall think of you, at times, for whatever
years may remain to me; but now I must go, and so I say again, thank you
and farewell.”
He turned away as fast as he could hobble.
“Stay yet,” she implored. “I do not importune, but I do not know your
name. Tell me your name. I would think of your name and pray for you in
the chapel and before the image here.”
“My name is Harker.”
“Harker. What does that mean?”
“I do not know: perhaps ‘one who listens.’”
“Listens for what?”
“What do people listen for?”
“The sea wind in the heat,” she said thoughtfully; “and the crowing of
the cock in the night of pain; and, in life, the footstep of the beloved
who never comes; or when he does come, goes on the instant.”
“Good-bye.”
“What do you listen for?” she cried.
“A change of wind, perhaps. Adios.”
He turned from her rapidly, but as he turned she knelt suddenly at his
side, snatched his hand and kissed it. “Thank you,” he said, “but men
are not worthy of that, señora.” He withdrew his hand and hobbled a few
steps away. At this little distance, he called: “I thank you, señora;
good night.”
He knew that she would not follow him into the darkness: she did not,
but he heard her break into a wild crying of tears and lamentation. The
last that he saw of her was the grey of her sacking and the pallor of
her face, standing looking after him while she lifted up her voice and
wept.
Perhaps three-quarters of an hour after leaving Rose of the South, when
it was (as he judged) a little after two in the morning, Sard saw in
front of him the sheds of “the siding beside the jetty.” Sard could see
no horses, but there was an engine on the line with steam up; a glow was
on the smoke coming from its funnel; a glare from its fire made the
stoker and driver ruddy with light. The engine was headed inland with a
load of trucks coupled to it. Men were moving about between the quay and
the trucks, either loading or unloading something heavy.
At any other time he might have wondered why men were shipping
copper-ore at midnight during a norther, though indeed the jetty was
screened from the wind by the high land beyond it. He had no suspicion
of these men. He was perhaps stupid from poison and fatigue; he thought
that he had reached his rest.
One of the workers came away from the trucks to get a drink at a
scuttle-butt. Sard heard the chain of the dipper clink, and the water
splash. Then the man spat and went slowly back to work, singing in a
little low clear voice the song about the rattlesnake.
“There was a nice young man,
He lived upon a hill;
A very nice young man,
I knew him we-e-ell.
To-me-rattle-to-me-roo-rah-ree.”
Sard drew nearer, to look for Miguel and the horses. He came down on to
a loop-line, crossed it, and passed between sheds and shacks, some piles
of pit props, fuel blocks and drums of wire rope, on to the pier-head. A
naphtha-flare was burning there to give light to a gang of men who were
handing cases from a launch, which lay below the level of the jetty, to
the trucks coupled up to the engine. Even then, Sard did not see at once
what company he had come among. One of the men, who had been watching
his advance, whistled. A man, who seemed to be in authority, moved up
swiftly and rather threateningly on the right: two other men came up
from the left: the work of the gang stopped. The men put down the cases
which they were carrying and faced Sard in a pointed manner. Most of
them had been humming or singing to themselves as they worked, but their
singing stopped on the instant. More than this, a voice in the launch
asked:
“What’s the rally?”
One of the men in front of Sard replied, without turning his head:
“Strangers in the house.”