THE affair of the brig _Bonito_ was bound to cause a sensation in
Makassar, the prettiest, and perhaps the cleanest-looking of all the
towns in the Islands; which however knows few occasions for excitement.
The “front,” with its special population, was soon aware that something
had happened. A steamer towing a sailing vessel had been observed far
out to sea for some time, and when the steamer came in alone, leaving the
other outside, attention was aroused. Why was that? Her masts only
could be seen—with furled sails—remaining in the same place to the
southward. And soon the rumour ran all along the crowded seashore street
that there was a ship on Tamissa reef. That crowd interpreted the
appearance correctly. Its cause was beyond their penetration, for who
could associate a girl nine hundred miles away with the stranding of a
ship on Tamissa reef, or look for the remote filiation of that event in
the psychology of at least three people, even if one of them, Lieutenant
Heemskirk, was at that very moment passing amongst them on his way to
make his verbal report?
No; the minds on the “front” were not competent for that sort of
investigation, but many hands there—brown hands, yellow hands, white
hands—were raised to shade the eyes gazing out to sea. The rumour spread
quickly. Chinese shopkeepers came to their doors, more than one white
merchant, even, rose from his desk to go to the window. After all, a
ship on Tamissa was not an everyday occurrence. And presently the rumour
took a more definite shape. An English trader—detained on suspicion at
sea by the _Neptun_—Heemskirk was towing him in to test a case, and by
some strange accident—
Later on the name came out. “The _Bonito_—what! Impossible! Yes—yes,
the _Bonito_. Look! You can see from here; only two masts. It’s a
brig. Didn’t think that man would ever let himself be caught.
Heemskirk’s pretty smart, too. They say she’s fitted out in her cabin
like a gentleman’s yacht. That Allen is a sort of gentleman too. An
extravagant beggar.”
A young man entered smartly Messrs. Mesman Brothers’ office on the
“front,” bubbling with some further information.
“Oh, yes; that’s the _Bonito_ for certain! But you don’t know the story
I’ve heard just now. The fellow must have been feeding that river with
firearms for the last year or two. Well, it seems he has grown so
reckless from long impunity that he has actually dared to sell the very
ship’s rifles this time. It’s a fact. The rifles are not on board.
What impudence! Only, he didn’t know that there was one of our warships
on the coast. But those Englishmen are so impudent that perhaps he
thought that nothing would be done to him for it. Our courts do let off
these fellows too often, on some miserable excuse or other. But, at any
rate, there’s an end of the famous _Bonito_. I have just heard in the
harbour-office that she must have gone on at the very top of high-water;
and she is in ballast, too. No human power, they think, can move her
from where she is. I only hope it is so. It would be fine to have the
notorious _Bonito_ stuck up there as a warning to others.”
Mr. J. Mesman, a colonial-born Dutchman, a kind, paternal old fellow,
with a clean-shaven, quiet, handsome face, and a head of fine iron-grey
hair curling a little on his collar, did not say a word in defence of
Jasper and the _Bonito_. He rose from his arm-chair suddenly. His face
was visibly troubled. It had so happened that once, from a business talk
of ways and means, island trade, money matters, and so on, Jasper had
been led to open himself to him on the subject of Freya; and the
excellent man, who had known old Nelson years before and even remembered
something of Freya, was much astonished and amused by the unfolding of
the tale.
“Well, well, well! Nelson! Yes; of course. A very honest sort of man.
And a little child with very fair hair. Oh, yes! I have a distinct
recollection. And so she has grown into such a fine girl, so very
determined, so very—” And he laughed almost boisterously. “Mind, when
you have happily eloped with your future wife, Captain Allen, you must
come along this way, and we shall welcome her here. A little fair-headed
child! I remember. I remember.”
It was that knowledge which had brought trouble to his face at the first
news of the wreck. He took up his hat.
“Where are you going, Mr. Mesman?”
“I am going to look for Allen. I think he must be ashore. Does anybody
know?”
No one of those present knew. And Mr. Mesman went out on the “front” to
make inquiries.
The other part of the town, the part near the church and the fort, got
its information in another way. The first thing disclosed to it was
Jasper himself, walking rapidly, as though he were pursued. And, as a
matter of fact, a Chinaman, obviously a sampan man, was following him at
the same headlong pace. Suddenly, while passing Orange House, Jasper
swerved and went in, or, rather, rushed in, startling Gomez, the hotel
clerk, very much. But a Chinaman beginning to make an unseemly noise at
the door claimed the immediate attention of Gomez. His grievance was
that the white man whom he had brought on shore from the gunboat had not
paid him his boat-fare. He had pursued him so far, asking for it all the
way. But the white man had taken no notice whatever of his just claim.
Gomez satisfied the coolie with a few coppers, and then went to look for
Jasper, whom he knew very well. He found him standing stiffly by a
little round table. At the other end of the verandah a few men sitting
there had stopped talking, and were looking at him in silence. Two
billiard-players, with cues in their hands, had come to the door of the
billiard-room and stared, too.
On Gomez coming up to him, Jasper raised one hand to point at his own
throat. Gomez noted the somewhat soiled state of his white clothes, then
took one look at his face, and fled away to order the drink for which
Jasper seemed to be asking.
Where he wanted to go—or what purpose—where he, perhaps, only imagined
himself to be going, when a sudden impulse or the sight of a familiar
place had made him turn into Orange House—it is impossible to say. He
was steadying himself lightly with the tips of his fingers on the little
table. There were on that verandah two men whom he knew well personally,
but his gaze roaming incessantly as though he were looking for a way of
escape, passed and repassed over them without a sign of recognition.
They, on their side, looking at him, doubted the evidence of their own
eyes. It was not that his face was distorted. On the contrary, it was
still, it was set. But its expression, somehow, was unrecognisable. Can
that be him? they wondered with awe.
In his head there was a wild chaos of clear thoughts. Perfectly clear.
It was this clearness which was so terrible in conjunction with the utter
inability to lay hold of any single one of them all. He was saying to
himself, or to them: “Steady, steady.” A China boy appeared before him
with a glass on a tray. He poured the drink down his throat, and rushed
out. His disappearance removed the spell of wonder from the beholders.
One of the men jumped up and moved quickly to that side of the verandah
from which almost the whole of the roadstead could be seen. At the very
moment when Jasper, issuing from the door of the Orange House, was
passing under him in the street below, he cried to the others excitedly:
“That was Allen right enough! But where is his brig?”
Jasper heard these words with extraordinary loudness. The heavens rang
with them, as if calling him to account; for those were the very words
Freya would have to use. It was an annihilating question; it struck his
consciousness like a thunderbolt and brought a sudden night upon the
chaos of his thoughts even as he walked. He did not check his pace. He
went on in the darkness for another three strides, and then fell.
The good Mesman had to push on as far as the hospital before he found
him. The doctor there talked of a slight heatstroke. Nothing very much.
Out in three days. . . . It must be admitted that the doctor was right.
In three days, Jasper Allen came out of the hospital and became visible
to the town—very visible indeed—and remained so for quite a long time;
long enough to become almost one of the sights of the place; long enough
to become disregarded at last; long enough for the tale of his haunting
visibility to be remembered in the islands to this day.
The talk on the “front” and Jasper’s appearance in the Orange House stand
at the beginning of the famous _Bonito_ case, and give a view of its two
aspects—the practical and the psychological. The case for the courts and
the case for compassion; that last terribly evident and yet obscure.
It has, you must understand, remained obscure even for that friend of
mine who wrote me the letter mentioned in the very first lines of this
narrative. He was one of those in Mr. Mesman’s office, and accompanied
that gentleman in his search for Jasper. His letter described to me the
two aspects and some of the episodes of the case. Heemskirk’s attitude
was that of deep thankfulness for not having lost his own ship, and that
was all. Haze over the land was his explanation of having got so close
to Tamissa reef. He saved his ship, and for the rest he did not care.
As to the fat gunner, he deposed simply that he thought at the time that
he was acting for the best by letting go the tow-rope, but admitted that
he was greatly confused by the suddenness of the emergency.
As a matter of fact, he had acted on very precise instructions from
Heemskirk, to whom through several years’ service together in the East he
had become a sort of devoted henchman. What was most amazing in the
detention of the _Bonito_ was his story how, proceeding to take
possession of the firearms as ordered, he discovered that there were no
firearms on board. All he found in the fore-cabin was an empty rack for
the proper number of eighteen rifles, but of the rifles themselves never
a single one anywhere in the ship. The mate of the brig, who looked
rather ill and behaved excitedly, as though he were perhaps a lunatic,
wanted him to believe that Captain Allen knew nothing of this; that it
was he, the mate, who had recently sold these rifles in the dead of night
to a certain person up the river. In proof of this story he produced a
bag of silver dollars and pressed it on his, the gunner’s, acceptance.
Then, suddenly flinging it down on the deck, he beat his own head with
both his fists and started heaping shocking curses upon his own soul for
an ungrateful wretch not fit to live.
All this the gunner reported at once to his commanding officer.
What Heemskirk intended by taking upon himself to detain the _Bonito_ it
is difficult to say, except that he meant to bring some trouble into the
life of the man favoured by Freya. He had been looking at Jasper with a
desire to strike that man of kisses and embraces to the earth. The
question was: How could he do it without giving himself away? But the
report of the gunner created a serious case enough. Yet Allen had
friends—and who could tell whether he wouldn’t somehow succeed in
wriggling out of it? The idea of simply towing the brig so much
compromised on to the reef came to him while he was listening to the fat
gunner in his cabin. There was but little risk of being disapproved now.
And it should be made to appear an accident.
Going out on deck he had gloated upon his unconscious victim with such a
sinister roll of his eyes, such a queerly pursed mouth, that Jasper could
not help smiling. And the lieutenant had gone on the bridge, saying to
himself:
“You wait! I shall spoil the taste of those sweet kisses for you. When
you hear of Lieutenant Heemskirk in the future that name won’t bring a
smile on your lips, I swear. You are delivered into my hands.”
And this possibility had come about without any planning, one could
almost say naturally, as if events had mysteriously shaped themselves to
fit the purposes of a dark passion. The most astute scheming could not
have served Heemskirk better. It was given to him to taste a
transcendental, an incredible perfection of vengeance; to strike a deadly
blow into that hated person’s heart, and to watch him afterwards walking
about with the dagger in his breast.
For that is what the state of Jasper amounted to. He moved, acted,
weary-eyed, keen-faced, lank and restless, with brusque movements and
fierce gestures; he talked incessantly in a frenzied and fatigued voice,
but within himself he knew that nothing would ever give him back the
brig, just as nothing can heal a pierced heart. His soul, kept quiet in
the stress of love by the unflinching Freya’s influence, was like a still
but overwound string. The shock had started it vibrating, and the string
had snapped. He had waited for two years in a perfectly intoxicated
confidence for a day that now would never come to a man disarmed for life
by the loss of the brig, and, it seemed to him, made unfit for love to
which he had no foothold to offer.
Day after day he would traverse the length of the town, follow the coast,
and, reaching the point of land opposite that part of the reef on which
his brig lay stranded, look steadily across the water at her beloved
form, once the home of an exulting hope, and now, in her inclined,
desolated immobility, towering above the lonely sea-horizon, a symbol of
despair.
The crew had left her in due course in her own boats which directly they
reached the town were sequestrated by the harbour authorities. The
vessel, too, was sequestrated pending proceedings; but these same
authorities did not take the trouble to set a guard on board. For,
indeed, what could move her from there? Nothing, unless a miracle;
nothing, unless Jasper’s eyes, fastened on her tensely for hours
together, as though he hoped by the mere power of vision to draw her to
his breast.
All this story, read in my friend’s very chatty letter, dismayed me not a
little. But it was really appalling to read his relation of how Schultz,
the mate, went about everywhere affirming with desperate pertinacity that
it was he alone who had sold the rifles. “I stole them,” he protested.
Of course, no one would believe him. My friend himself did not believe
him, though he, of course, admired this self-sacrifice. But a good many
people thought it was going too far to make oneself out a thief for the
sake of a friend. Only, it was such an obvious lie, too, that it did not
matter, perhaps.
I, who, in view of Schultz’s psychology, knew how true that must be,
admit that I was appalled. So this was how a perfidious destiny took
advantage of a generous impulse! And I felt as though I were an
accomplice in this perfidy, since I did to a certain extent encourage
Jasper. Yet I had warned him as well.
“The man seemed to have gone crazy on this point,” wrote my friend. “He
went to Mesman with his story. He says that some rascally white man
living amongst the natives up that river made him drunk with some gin one
evening, and then jeered at him for never having any money. Then he,
protesting to us that he was an honest man and must be believed,
described himself as being a thief whenever he took a drop too much, and
told us that he went on board and passed the rifles one by one without
the slightest compunction to a canoe which came alongside that night,
receiving ten dollars apiece for them.
“Next day he was ill with shame and grief, but had not the courage to
confess his lapse to his benefactor. When the gunboat stopped the brig
he felt ready to die with the apprehension of the consequences, and would
have died happily, if he could have been able to bring the rifles back by
the sacrifice of his life. He said nothing to Jasper, hoping that the
brig would be released presently. When it turned out otherwise and his
captain was detained on board the gunboat, he was ready to commit suicide
from despair; only he thought it his duty to live in order to let the
truth be known. ‘I am an honest man! I am an honest man!’ he repeated,
in a voice that brought tears to our eyes. ‘You must believe me when I
tell you that I am a thief—a vile, low, cunning, sneaking thief as soon
as I’ve had a glass or two. Take me somewhere where I may tell the truth
on oath.’
“When we had at last convinced him that his story could be of no use to
Jasper—for what Dutch court, having once got hold of an English trader,
would accept such an explanation; and, indeed, how, when, where could one
hope to find proofs of such a tale?—he made as if to tear his hair in
handfuls, but, calming down, said: ‘Good-bye, then, gentlemen,’ and went
out of the room so crushed that he seemed hardly able to put one foot
before the other. That very night he committed suicide by cutting his
throat in the house of a half-caste with whom he had been lodging since
he came ashore from the wreck.”
That throat, I thought with a shudder, which could produce the tender,
persuasive, manly, but fascinating voice which had aroused Jasper’s ready
compassion and had secured Freya’s sympathy! Who could ever have
supposed such an end in store for the impossible, gentle Schultz, with
his idiosyncrasy of naïve pilfering, so absurdly straightforward that,
even in the people who had suffered from it, it aroused nothing more than
a sort of amused exasperation? He was really impossible. His lot
evidently should have been a half-starved, mysterious, but by no means
tragic existence as a mild-eyed, inoffensive beachcomber on the fringe of
native life. There are occasions when the irony of fate, which some
people profess to discover in the working out of our lives, wears the
aspect of crude and savage jesting.
I shook my head over the manes of Schultz, and went on with my friend’s
letter. It told me how the brig on the reef, looted by the natives from
the coast villages, acquired gradually the lamentable aspect, the grey
ghastliness of a wreck; while Jasper, fading daily into a mere shadow of
a man, strode brusquely all along the “front” with horribly lively eyes
and a faint, fixed smile on his lips, to spend the day on a lonely spit
of sand looking eagerly at her, as though he had expected some shape on
board to rise up and make some sort of sign to him over the decaying
bulwarks. The Mesmans were taking care of him as far as it was possible.
The _Bonito_ case had been referred to Batavia, where no doubt it would
fade away in a fog of official papers. . . . It was heartrending to read
all this. That active and zealous officer, Lieutenant Heemskirk, his air
of sullen, darkly-pained self-importance not lightened by the approval of
his action conveyed to him unofficially, had gone on to take up his
station in the Moluccas. . . .
Then, at the end of the bulky, kindly-meant epistle, dealing with the
island news of half a year at least, my friend wrote: “A couple of months
ago old Nelson turned up here, arriving by the mail-boat from Java. Came
to see Mesman, it seems. A rather mysterious visit, and extraordinarily
short, after coming all that way. He stayed just four days at the Orange
House, with apparently nothing in particular to do, and then caught the
south-going steamer for the Straits. I remember people saying at one
time that Allen was rather sweet on old Nelson’s daughter, the girl that
was brought up by Mrs. Harley and then went to live with him at the Seven
Isles group. Surely you remember old Nelson—”
Remember old Nelson! Rather!
The letter went on to inform me further that old Nelson, at least,
remembered me, since some time after his flying visit to Makassar he had
written to the Mesmans asking for my address in London.
That old Nelson (or Nielsen), the note of whose personality was a
profound, echoless irresponsiveness to everything around him, should wish
to write, or find anything to write about to anybody, was in itself a
cause for no small wonder. And to me, of all people! I waited with
uneasy impatience for whatever disclosure could come from that naturally
benighted intelligence, but my impatience had time to wear out before my
eyes beheld old Nelson’s trembling, painfully-formed handwriting, senile
and childish at the same time, on an envelope bearing a penny stamp and
the postal mark of the Notting Hill office. I delayed opening it in
order to pay the tribute of astonishment due to the event by flinging my
hands above my head. So he had come home to England, to be definitely
Nelson; or else was on his way home to Denmark, where he would revert for
ever to his original Nielsen! But old Nelson (or Nielsen) out of the
tropics seemed unthinkable. And yet he was there, asking me to call.
His address was at a boarding-house in one of those Bayswater squares,
once of leisure, which nowadays are reduced to earning their living.
Somebody had recommended him there. I started to call on him on one of
those January days in London, one of those wintry days composed of the
four devilish elements, cold, wet, mud, and grime, combined with a
particular stickiness of atmosphere that clings like an unclean garment
to one’s very soul. Yet on approaching his abode I saw, like a flicker
far behind the soiled veil of the four elements, the wearisome and
splendid glitter of a blue sea with the Seven Islets like minute specks
swimming in my eye, the high red roof of the bungalow crowning the very
smallest of them all. This visual reminiscence was profoundly
disturbing. I knocked at the door with a faltering hand.
Old Nelson (or Nielsen) got up from the table at which he was sitting
with a shabby pocket-book full of papers before him. He took off his
spectacles before shaking hands. For a moment neither of us said a word;
then, noticing me looking round somewhat expectantly, he murmured some
words, of which I caught only “daughter” and “Hong Kong,” cast his eyes
down, and sighed.
His moustache, sticking all ways out, as of yore, was quite white now.
His old cheeks were softly rounded, with some colour in them; strangely
enough, that something childlike always noticeable in the general contour
of his physiognomy had become much more marked. Like his handwriting, he
looked childish and senile. He showed his age most in his
unintelligently furrowed, anxious forehead and in his round, innocent
eyes, which appeared to me weak and blinking and watery; or was it that
they were full of tears? . . .
To discover old Nelson fully informed upon any matter whatever was a new
experience. And after the first awkwardness had worn off he talked
freely, with, now and then, a question to start him going whenever he
lapsed into silence, which he would do suddenly, clasping his hands on
his waistcoat in an attitude which would recall to me the east verandah,
where he used to sit talking quietly and puffing out his cheeks in what
seemed now old, very old days. He talked in a reasonable somewhat
anxious tone.
“No, no. We did not know anything for weeks. Out of the way like that,
we couldn’t, of course. No mail service to the Seven Isles. But one day
I ran over to Banka in my big sailing-boat to see whether there were any
letters, and saw a Dutch paper. But it looked only like a bit of marine
news: English brig _Bonito_ gone ashore outside Makassar roads. That was
all. I took the paper home with me and showed it to her. ‘I will never
forgive him!’ she cries with her old spirit. ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you are
a sensible girl. The best man may lose a ship. But what about your
health?’ I was beginning to be frightened at her looks. She would not
let me talk even of going to Singapore before. But, really, such a
sensible girl couldn’t keep on objecting for ever. ‘Do what you like,
papa,’ she says. Rather a job, that. Had to catch a steamer at sea, but
I got her over all right. There, doctors, of course. Fever. Anæmia.
Put her to bed. Two or three women very kind to her. Naturally in our
papers the whole story came out before long. She reads it to the end,
lying on the couch; then hands the newspaper back to me, whispers
‘Heemskirk,’ and goes off into a faint.”
He blinked at me for quite a long time, his eyes running full of tears
again.
“Next day,” he began, without any emotion in his voice, “she felt
stronger, and we had a long talk. She told me everything.”
Here old Nelson, with his eyes cast down, gave me the whole story of the
Heemskirk episode in Freya’s words; then went on in his rather jerky
utterance, and looking up innocently:
“‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you have behaved in the main like a sensible girl.’
‘I have been horrid,’ she cries, ‘and he is breaking his heart over
there.’ Well, she was too sensible not to see she wasn’t in a state to
travel. But I went. She told me to go. She was being looked after very
well. Anæmia. Getting better, they said.”
He paused.
“You did see him?” I murmured.
“Oh, yes; I did see him,” he started again, talking in that reasonable
voice as though he were arguing a point. “I did see him. I came upon
him. Eyes sunk an inch into his head; nothing but skin on the bones of
his face, a skeleton in dirty white clothes. That’s what he looked like.
How Freya . . . But she never did—not really. He was sitting there, the
only live thing for miles along that coast, on a drift-log washed up on
the shore. They had clipped his hair in the hospital, and it had not
grown again. He stared, holding his chin in his hand, and with nothing
on the sea between him and the sky but that wreck. When I came up to him
he just moved his head a bit. ‘Is that you, old man?’ says he—like that.
“If you had seen him you would have understood at once how impossible it
was for Freya to have ever loved that man. Well, well. I don’t say.
She might have—something. She was lonely, you know. But really to go
away with him! Never! Madness. She was too sensible . . . I began to
reproach him gently. And by and by he turns on me. ‘Write to you! What
about? Come to her! What with? If I had been a man I would have
carried her off, but she made a child, a happy child, of me. Tell her
that the day the only thing I had belonging to me in the world perished
on this reef I discovered that I had no power over her. . . Has she come
here with you?’ he shouts, blazing at me suddenly with his hollow eyes.
I shook my head. Come with me, indeed! Anæmia! ‘Aha! You see? Go
away, then, old man, and leave me alone here with that ghost,’ he says,
jerking his head at the wreck of his brig.
“Mad! It was getting dusk. I did not care to stop any longer all by
myself with that man in that lonely place. I was not going to tell him
of Freya’s illness. Anæmia! What was the good? Mad! And what sort of
husband would he have made, anyhow, for a sensible girl like Freya? Why,
even my little property I could not have left them. The Dutch
authorities would never have allowed an Englishman to settle there. It
was not sold then. My man Mahmat, you know, was looking after it for me.
Later on I let it go for a tenth of its value to a Dutch half-caste. But
never mind. It was nothing to me then. Yes; I went away from him. I
caught the return mail-boat. I told everything to Freya. ‘He’s mad,’ I
said; ‘and, my dear, the only thing he loved was his brig.’
“‘Perhaps,’ she says to herself, looking straight away—her eyes were
nearly as hollow as his—‘perhaps it is true. Yes! I would never allow
him any power over me.’”
Old Nelson paused. I sat fascinated, and feeling a little cold in that
room with a blazing fire.
“So you see,” he continued, “she never really cared for him. Much too
sensible. I took her away to Hong Kong. Change of climate, they said.
Oh, these doctors! My God! Winter time! There came ten days of cold
mists and wind and rain. Pneumonia. But look here! We talked a lot
together. Days and evenings. Who else had she? . . . She talked a lot
to me, my own girl. Sometimes she would laugh a little. Look at me and
laugh a little—”
I shuddered. He looked up vaguely, with a childish, puzzled moodiness.
“She would say: ‘I did not really mean to be a bad daughter to you,
papa.’ And I would say: ‘Of course, my dear. You could not have meant
it.’ She would lie quiet and then say: ‘I wonder?’ And sometimes, ‘I’ve
been really a coward,’ she would tell me. You know, sick people they say
things. And so she would say too: ‘I’ve been conceited, headstrong,
capricious. I sought my own gratification. I was selfish or afraid.’
. . . But sick people, you know, they say anything. And once, after lying
silent almost all day, she said: ‘Yes; perhaps, when the day came I would
not have gone. Perhaps! I don’t know,’ she cried. ‘Draw the curtain,
papa. Shut the sea out. It reproaches me with my folly.’” He gasped
and paused.
“So you see,” he went on in a murmur. “Very ill, very ill indeed.
Pneumonia. Very sudden.” He pointed his finger at the carpet, while the
thought of the poor girl, vanquished in her struggle with three men’s
absurdities, and coming at last to doubt her own self, held me in a very
anguish of pity.
“You see yourself,” he began again in a downcast manner. “She could not
have really . . . She mentioned you several times. Good friend.
Sensible man. So I wanted to tell you myself—let you know the truth. A
fellow like that! How could it be? She was lonely. And perhaps for a
while . . . Mere nothing. There could never have been a question of love
for my Freya—such a sensible girl—”
“Man!” I cried, rising upon him wrathfully, “don’t you see that she died
of it?”
He got up too. “No! no!” he stammered, as if angry. “The doctors!
Pneumonia. Low state. The inflammation of the . . . They told me.
Pneu—”
He did not finish the word. It ended in a sob. He flung his arms out in
a gesture of despair, giving up his ghastly pretence with a low,
heartrending cry:
“And I thought that she was so sensible!”