an elbow; the quay goes round in a curve under high houses; a tree or
two overhangs the water, and there is a momentary space of quiet,
almost a privacy at the skirts of bristling Paris. Here, commonly,
men of leisure sit through the warm hours, torpidly fishing the
smooth green depth of water below; but now there was none. The girl
followed the elbow round and stopped at the angle of it. She leaned
her arms on the coping and gazed down at the quiet still water below.
She was looking at it with such a preoccupation that Raleigh was able
to come close to her before he spoke. He, too, put an arm on the
parapet at her side.
"Looks peaceful, doesn't it?" he said quietly.
The girl's head rose with a jerk, and she stared at him, startled.
The words had been deftly chosen to match her own thoughts; and for
the while she failed to recognize in this tall young man the
sprawling figure of the slumberer in the Tuileries Gardens.
"I, I who are you?" she stammered. "What do you want?"
He was able to see now that her pale composure was maintained only by
an effort, that the strain of it was making her tremble. He answered
in tones of careful conventionality.
"I'm afraid I startled you," he said. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have
ventured to speak to you at all if you hadn't--" He paused. "You don't
happen to remember me at all?" he asked.
"No," said Annette. "If I hadn't, what?"
He slipped a hand into his pocket and drew forth the five-franc
piece. The broad palm it lay on was still grimy from the workshop.
"I happened to fall asleep in the Tuileries this afternoon," he said.
"Idiotic thing to do, but--."
"Oh!" The color leapt to her face. "Was that you?"
Raleigh nodded. "You had hardly moved away when a man who had been
watching you tried to pick my pocket and woke me in doing so. He told
me what he'd seen and pointed you out."
Annette gazed at him in tired perplexity. When he was on his feet,
the condition of his clothes and hands and the absurd black patch on
his chin were noticeable only as incongruities; there was nothing now
to suggest the pauper or the outcast in this big youth with the
pleasant voice and the strongly tanned face.
"I, I made a mistake," she said. "I saw you sleeping on the bench and
I thought a little help, coming from nowhere like that you'd be so
surprised and glad when you found it." She sighed. "However, I was
wrong. I'm sorry."
"I'm not!" Raleigh put the money back in his pocket swiftly. "I think
it was a wonderful idea of yours; it's the most splendid thing that
ever happened to me. There was I, grumbling and making mistakes all
day, playing the fool and pitying myself, and all the time you were
moving somewhere within a mile or two, out of sight, but watching and
saying: 'Yes, you're no good to anybody; but if the worst comes to
the worst you shan't starve. I'll save you from that!' I'll never
part with that money."
Annette shook her head; weariness inhabited her like a dull pain. "I
didn't say that" she answered; "you weren't starving, and you don't
understand. It doesn't matter, anyhow."
"Please," said Raleigh. He saw that she wanted to get rid of him, and
he had no intention of letting her do so. "It matters to me, at any
rate. But there is one thing I didn't understand."
She did not answer, gazing over her clasped hands at the water,
across whose level the spires and chimneys of the city bristled like
the skyline of a forest.
"It was while I was following you here, wondering whether I might
speak to you," he continued. "I was watching you as you went, and it
seemed to me that you were well, unhappy; in trouble or something.
And then, back there on the quay, I saw you open your purse and throw
it into the river."
He paused. "There was a hole in it," said Annette shortly, without
turning her head.
"But" he spoke very quietly "you are in trouble? Yes, I know I'm
intruding upon you" she had moved her shoulders impatiently "but
haven't you given me just the shadow of a right? Your gift it might
have saved my life if I'd been what you thought; I might have fetched
up in the Morgue before morning. Men do, you know, every day women,
too!" Her fingers upon the parapet loosened and clasped again at
that. "You can't tie me hand and foot with such an obligation as that
and leave me plante la."
"Oh!" Annette sighed. "It's nothing at all," she said. "But, as you
want so much to know I'm a typist; I'm out of work; I've been looking
for it all day, and I'm disappointed and very tired."
"And that's really all?" demanded Raleigh.
"All!" She turned to look at him at last, meeting his steady and
penetrating eyes quietly. She had an impulse to tell him what was
comprehended in that "all"; to speak deliberately plain words that
should crumple him into an understanding of her tragedy. But even
while she hesitated there came to her a sense that he knew more than
he told; that the grey eyes in the red-brown face had read more of
her than she was willing to show. She subsided.
"Yes, that's all," she said.
He nodded, a quick and business-like little jerk of the head. "I see.
I've been worrying you, I'm afraid; but I'm glad I made you tell,
because I can put that all right for you at once, as it happens."
The girl, leaning on the wall, drew in a harsh breath and turned to
him. Young Raleigh, who had written a monograph on engineering
stresses, had still much to learn about the stresses that contort and
warp the souls of men and women. He learned some of it then, when he
saw the girl's face deaden to a blanker white and the flame of a
hungry hope leap into her eyes. He looked away quickly.
"You mean you can?"
He hushed her with his brisk and matter-of-fact little nod.
"I mean I can find you a situation in a business office as a typist,"
he said explicitly. "Wasn't that what you wanted?"
"Yes, yes." She was trembling; he put one large, grimy hand upon her
sleeve to steady her. "Oh, please, where is the office? I'll go there
at once, before."
"Hush!" he said. "It's all right. We'll get a taxi and I'll take you
there. It's the Machine-Tool and Gear-Cutting Company; I don't know
what they pay, but--."
"Anything," moaned Annette. "I'll take anything."
"Well, it's more than that," he smiled. "A typist with Raleigh and
Son at her back isn't to be had every day of the week."
A taxicab drifted out of a turning on to the quay a hundred yards
away; Raleigh waved a long arm and it came towards them.
"And after we've fixed this little matter," suggested Raleigh, "don't
you think we might go somewhere and feed? I can get a sketchy kind of
wash at the office while you're talking to the manager; and I'm
beginning to notice that I didn't have my lunch to-day."
"I didn't either," said Annette, as the taxi slid to a standstill
beside them. "But, oh! you don't know you don't know all you're doing
for me. I'll never be able to thank you properly."
Raleigh opened the door of the cab for her. "You can try," he said.
"I'm in Paris for three days every fortnight."
The taxicabs of Paris include in their number the best and the worst
in the world. This was one of the latter; a moving musical-box of
grinding and creaking noises. But Annette sank back upon its worn and
knobly cushions luxuriously, gazing across the sun-gilt river to the
white, window-dotted cliffs of Paris with the green of trees foaming
about their base.
"Oh, don't you love Paris?" she cried softly.
"I do," agreed Raleigh, warmly, watching the soft glow that had come
to her face. "I can't keep away from it."
IX
THE DARKENED PATH
The captain reached a hand forth and touched the mate's arm.
"Sit down, James," he said quietly.
The mate made a curious quick grimace and sat forthwith. "Shove off,"
ordered the captain.
Johnny Cos, the yellow, woolly-haired boatman, plying his oars, sat
perforce in face of his passengers and close to them. He would have
preferred it otherwise; there had been something in the mate's face
which daunted him. He glanced at it again furtively as he pulled away
from the square-sterned American schooner which had ridden over the
bar in the twilight of dawn and anchored, spectral and strange, in
Beira Harbor. The mate's face was strong and sunburnt, the face of a
man of lively passions and crude emotions; but as he sat gazing forth
at the little hectic town across the smooth harbor, it had a cast of
profound and desperate unhappiness. Johnny Cos had not words to tell
himself what he saw; he only knew, with awe and a certain amount of
fear, that he moved in the presence of something tragic.
"James," began the captain again.
The mate withdrew his miserable eyes from the scene. "What?"
"There ain't any reason why" began the captain, and paused and Hooked
doubtfully upon the faithful Johnny Cos. "D'you speak English?"
"Yes, sar," replied Johnny, ingratiatingly. "You want good 'otel,
Cap'n? Good, cheap 'otel? I geeve you da card; 'Otel Lisbon, sar. All
cap'n go there."
"No," said the captain shortly. "We can talk better when we get
ashore, James," he added to the mate.
"Ver' good 'otel, Cap'n; ver' cheap" coaxed Johnny Cos. "You want
fruit, Cap'n: mango, banan', coconut, orange, grenadeel, yes? I geeve
you da card, Cap'n ver' cheap!"
"That'll do," said the captain. "I don't want anything. Get a move on
this boat o' yours, will you?"
Johnny Cos sighed and resigned himself to row in silence, only
murmuring at intervals: "'Otel Lisbon; good, ver' good, an' cheap!"
When that murmur, taking courage to grow audible, drew the mate's eye
upon him, he stopped short in the middle of it and murmured no more.
"You c'n wait to take me aboard again," said the captain, when the
wharf was reached; and the two men went slowly together into the
town, along the streets of ankle-deep sand, towards the office of the
consul.
It was an hour later that the loafers on the veranda of the Savoy
Hotel observed their slow approach. They had done whatever business
they had with the consul. They were deep in talk; the captain's
grizzled head was bent toward his shorter companion, and something of
the mate's trouble reflected itself in his hard, strongly-graven
face. In the merciless deluge of sunlight, and upon the openness of
the street, they made a singular grouping; they seemed to be, by
virtue of some matter that engrossed and governed them, aloof and
remote, a target set up by Destiny.
By the steps of the hotel the captain paused, wiping the shining
sweat from his face. The eavesdroppers in the long chairs cocked
their ears.
"James," they heard him say; "it's bad, it's just as bad as it can
be. But it ain't no reason to go short of a drink with a saloon close
handy."
He motioned with his head towards the shade of the long veranda, with
the bar opening from it and its bottles in view. The mate, frowning
heavily, nodded, and the pair of them entered and passed between the
wicker chairs with the manner of being unconscious of their
occupants.
From within the bar their voices droned indistinctly forth to the
listeners.
"Leavin' you here," they heard the captain say; "James, I'm sorry
right through; but you said yourself."
"Sure;" the mate's voice answered hoarsely. "Here or Hell or
anywhere, what's the difference to me now?"
After that they moved to the window, and what they said further was
indistinguishable. The loafers on the veranda exchanged puzzled
looks; they lacked a key to the talk they had heard. When at last the
two seamen departed they summoned forth the barman for further
information. But that white-jacketed diplomat, who looked on from the
sober side of the bar at so much that was salient to the life of
Beira was not able to help them.
"I couldn't make out what was troublin' them," he said, playing with
the diamond ring on his middle finger. "They was talking round and
round it, but they never named it right out. But it seems the younger
one has been paid off. He looks bad, he does."
"Well," said a man of experience from his chair; "he'll be drunk
tonight, and then we'll hear."
"H'm!" The barman paused on his way back to his post. "When I see
that feller drunk, I'm goin' to climb a tree. I got no use for
trouble."
But the mate's conduct continued to be as unusual as his words
overheard on the hotel veranda. He did not accompany the captain back
to the ship, and in the afternoon he was seen sitting on the parapet
of the sea-wall, his face propped in his hands, staring out across
the shining water of the harbor. The vehement sun beat down upon his
blue-coated back and the hard felt hat that covered his head; he
should have been in an agony of discomfort and no little danger, clad
as he was; but he sat without moving, facing the water and the craft
that lay at their anchors upon it. It was Father Bates, the tall
Scottish priest, who saw him and crossed the road to him.
"My friend," the priest accosted him, with a light tap on the
shoulder. "You'll die the sooner if you take your hat off. But you'll
die anyhow if you go on sitting here."
At his touch the mate looked round sharply. The tall white-clad
Father, under his green-lined sun umbrella, rested a steady look on
his face.
"You're in trouble, I'm afraid," said the priest. "Is there anything
a man can do for you?"
"No!" The word came hoarsely but curt from the mate's throat. "Leave
me alone!"
The tall priest nodded. "Nothing a man can do, eh?" he said. "Well,
then you know who can help you, don't you?"
The miserable rebellious eyes of the young man hardened.
"Leave me alone," he growled. "Say, you're a kind of a missionary,
ain't you? Well, I don't want none of your blasted cant, see?"
The Father smiled. "I know how you feel. My name is Father Bates, and
anyone will show you where I live. Bates don't forget! And I really
wouldn't sit much longer in that sun, if I were you."
A sound like a snarl was his answer as he passed on. Looking back
before he turned the corner, he saw that the mate had returned to his
old posture, brooding in his strange and secret sorrow over the
irresponsive sea.
He was still there at sunset when the schooner went out, holding
himself apart from the little group of Beira people who halted to
watch her departure. Upon her poop a couple of figures were plain to
sight, and one of these waved a hand towards the shore as though to
bid farewell to the man they left behind. The mate, however, made no
response. He watched unmoving while she approached the heads and
glided from view, her slender topmasts lingering in sight over the
dull green of the mangroves, with the sunset flush lighting them
delicately. Then she was gone, like a silent visitor who withdraws a
presence that has scarcely been felt.
The mate crossed the road and addressed the man who stood nearest.
"Where's the deepo?" he demanded, abruptly. "The railway station."
The other gave directions which the mate heard, frowning. Then,
without thanking his guide, he turned to walk heavily through the
foot-clogging sand in the direction indicated.
It was a hundred and fifty miles up the line that he next emerged to
notice, at Mendigos, that outpost set in the edge of the jungle,
where the weary telegraphists sweat through the sunny monotony of the
days and are shaken at night by the bitter agues that infest the
land.
The mate dropped from the train here, still clad as at Beira in
thick, stifling sea-cloth and his hard hat, though his collar was now
but a limp frill. He came lurching, on uncertain feet, into the
establishment of Hop Sing, the only seller of strong drink at
Mendigos. The few languid, half-clad men who lounged within looked up
at him in astonishment. He pointed shakily towards a bottle on the
primitive bar. "Gimme some of that," he croaked, from a parched
throat.
The smiling Chinaman, silk-clad and supple, poured a drink for him,
watched him consume it, and forthwith poured another. With the
replenished tumbler in his hand, the mate returned his look.
"What you starin' at, you Chow?" he demanded.
The subtle-eyed Chinaman ceased neither to smile nor to stare.
"My t'ink you velly sick man. Two shillin' to pay, please."
"Sick!" repeated the mate. "Sick! You you know, do ye?"
The idle men who lounged behind were spectators to the drama,
absorbed but uncomprehending. They saw the fierce, absurdly-clad
sailor, swaying on his feet with the effects of long-endured heat and
thirst, confronting the suave composure of the Chinaman as though the
charge of being unwell were outrageous and shameful.
"Say," he demanded hoarsely, "it, it don't show on me."
The Chinaman made soothing gestures. "My see," he answered. "But dem
feller belong here, him not see nothing. All-a-light foh him. Two
shillin' to pay, please."
The mate dragged a coin from his pocket and dropped it on the bar. He
turned at last to the others, as though he now first noticed them.
"What's back of here?" he asked abruptly, motioning as he spoke to
the still palms which poised over the galvanized iron roofs.
"How d'you mean?" A tall, willowy man in pajamas answered him
surprisedly. "There's nothing beyond here. It's just wild country."
"No white men?" asked the mate.
"Lord, no!" said the other. "White men die out there. It's just trees
and niggers and wild beasts and fevers." He looked at the mate with a
touch of amusement breaking through his curiosity. "You weren't
thinking of goin' there in that kit were you?"
The mate finished his drink and set his glass down.
"I am goin' there," he answered.
"But look here!" The telegraphists broke into a clamor. "You've been
too long in the sun; that's what's the matter with you. You can't go
up there, man; you'd be dead before morning."
The tall man, to whom the mate had spoken first, had a shrewd word to
add. "If it's any little thing like murder, dontcher know, why the
border's just a few hours up the line."
"Murder!" exclaimed the mate, and uttered a bark of laughter.
They were possibly a little afraid of him. He had the physique of a
fighter and the presence of a man accustomed to exercise a crude
authority. Their protests and warnings died down; and, after all, a
man's life and death are very much his own concern in those regions.
"D'you think he's mad?" one of them was whispering when the mate
turned to Hop Sing again.
"Set up the drinks for them," he commanded. "I'll not wait meself,
but here's the money."
"You not dlink?" asked the Chinaman, as the mate laid the coins on
the counter.
"No," was the reply. "No need to spoil another glass."
He gave a half nod to the other men, but no word, pulled his hard hat
forward on his brow, and walked out to the aching sunlight, and
towards a path that led between two iron huts to the fringe of the
riotous bush. The telegraphists crowded to look after him, but he did
not turn his head. He paused beneath the great palms, where the
ground was clear; then the thigh-deep grass, which is the lip of the
bush, was about him, grey, dry as straw, rustling as he thrust
through it with the noise of paper being crumpled in the hands. A
green parrot, balancing clown-like on a twig, screamed raucously; he
glanced up at its dazzle of feathers. Then the wall of the bush
itself yielded to his thrusting, let him through, and closed behind
his blue-clad back. Africa had received him to her silence and her
mystery.
"Well, I'm blowed!" The tall telegraphist stared at the place where
he had vanished. "I say, you chaps, we ought to go after him."
No one moved. "I shouldn't care to come to my hands with him," said
another. "Did you did you see his face?"
They had all seen it; the speaker was voicing the common feeling.
"It's like drinkin' at a wake," observed the tall man, his glass in
his hand. "Well, here's to his memory!"
"His memory," they chorused, and drank.
But the end of the tale came later. It was told in the veranda of
Father Bates's house at Beira, by Dan Terry, as he lay on his cot and
drank in the air from the sea in life-restoring draughts. He had been
up in the region of lost and nameless rivers for three years of fever
and ague and toil, and now he was back, a made man ready to be done
with Africa, with square gin bottles full of coarse gold to sell to
the bank, and a curious story to tell of a thing he had seen in the
back country.
It was evening when he told it, propped up on his pillows, with the
blankets drawn up under his chin, and his lean, leathery face, a
little softened by his fever, fronting the long, benevolent visage of
Father Bates. The Father had a deckchair, and sprawled in it at
length, listening over his deep Boer pipe. A faint, bitter ghost of
an odor tainted the still air from the mangroves beyond the town, and
there was heard, like an undertone in the talk, the distant
slumberous murmur of the tide on the beach.
"But how did you first get to hear of him?" the Father was asking,
carrying on the talk.
"Oh, that was queer!" said Dan. "You see, I was making a cut clean
across country to that river of mine, and, as far as I could tell, I
was in a stretch of land where there hasn't been one other white man
in twenty years. Bad traveling it was swamp, cane, and swamp again
for days; the mud stinking all day, the mist poisoning you all night,
the cane cutting and scratching and slashing you. It was as bad as
anything I've seen yet. And it was while we were splashing and
struggling through this that I saw, lying at the foot of an aloe of
all created things an old hat. I thought for a moment that the sun
had got to my brain. An old, hard, black bowler hat it was, caved in
a bit, and soaked, and all that, but a hat all the same. I couldn't
have been more surprised if it had been an iceberg. You see, except
my own hat, I hadn't seen a hat for over two years."
Father Bates nodded and stoked the big bowl of his pipe with a
practiced thumb.
"It might ha' meant anything," Dan went on; "a chap making for my
river, for instance. So the next Kaffir village I came to I went into
the matter. I sat down in the doorway of the biggest hut and had the
population up before me to answer questions."
"They were willing?" asked the Father.
"I had a gun across my knees," explained Dan; "but they were willing
enough without that. And a queer yarn they had to tell, too; I
couldn't quite make it out at first. It began with an account of a
village hit by smallpox close by. Their way of dealing with smallpox
is simple: they quarantine the infected village by posting armed men
round it until all the villagers are starved to death or killed by
the smallpox. Then they burn the village. It costs nothing, and it
keeps the disease under. This village, it seems, was particularly
easy to deal with, since it stood three hundred yards from the
nearest water, and the water was placed out of bounds.
"It must have been about the third day after the quarantine was
declared that the, the incident occurred. A man and a girl, carrying
empty waterpots, had come out of the village towards the stream. The
armed outposts, with their big stabbing assegais ready in their
hands, ordered them back, but the poor creatures were crazed with
thirst and desperate. They were pleading and crying and still
creeping forward, the man first, the girl a few steps behind, mad for
just water. What happened first was in the regular order of things in
those parts. The fellows on guard simply waited, and when the man was
up to them one stepped forward and drove the thirty-inch blade of a
stabbing assegai clean through him. Then they stood ready to do the
same to the girl as soon as she arrived.
"She had tumbled to her knees at the sight of the killing, and was
still crying and begging piteously for water. They said she held out
her arms to them, and bowed her head between. After a while, when
they did not answer, she got to her feet and stood looking at the
dead body stretched in the sun, the long blades of the spears, and
the shining of the water beyond. It was as though she was making up
her mind about them, for at last she picked up her waterpot and came
forward towards her sure and swift death. The assegai-men were so
intent on her that none of them seem to have heard a man who came out
of the bush close behind them. One of them, as I was told, had
actually flung back his arm for the thrust and the girl, she hadn't
even flinched! The thing was within an inch of being done; the
stabbing assegai goes like lightning, you know; she must have been
tasting the very bitterness of death. The man from the bush was not a
second too soon. The first they knew of him was a roar, and he had
the shaft of the assegai in his hand and had plucked it from its
owner.