full-grown thunderstorm. All my informants laid stress on his voice;
he exploded in their midst with an uproar that overthrew their
senses, and whacked right and left with fist and foot and assegai. He
was a white man; it took them some seconds to see that through the
dirt on him; he was clad in rags of cloth, and his head was bare, and
he raged like a sackful of tiger-cats. He really must have been
something extraordinary in the way of a fighter, for he scattered a
clear dozen of them, and sent them flying for their lives. One man
said that when he was safe he looked back. The white man, with the
assegai on his shoulder, was stumping ahead into the infected
village, and the girl she was lying down at the edge of the water
drinking avidly. She hadn't even looked up at the fight."
Father Bates nodded. "Poor creatures," he said. "Yes?"
"Well, the cordon being broken, those of the villagers who weren't
too far gone to walk on their feet promptly scattered, naturally, and
no one tried to stop them. When at last the people from the
neighboring kraals plucked up courage to go and look at the place,
they found there only the bodies of the dead. The white man had gone,
too. They never saw him again, but from time to time there came
rumors from the north and east tales of a wanderer who injected
himself suddenly into men's affairs, withdrew again and went away,
and they remembered the white man who roared. He was already passing
into a myth.
"I couldn't make head nor tail of the thing; but one point was clear.
Since this white man had neither Kaffirs nor gear he couldn't hurt my
river, and that was what chiefly mattered to me just then. I might
have forgotten him altogether, but that I came on his tracks again,
and then, to finish with, I saw the man himself."
"Eh?" Father Bates looked up.
"I'm telling you the whole thing, Padre. You keep quiet and you'll
hear."
The sad evening light was falling, and the faint breeze from the sea
had a touch of chill in it.
"Keep your blankets up, Dan," said the Father.
"You bet," replied Dan. "Well, about this fellow I'm telling you of!
He must have been getting a reputation for uncanniness from every
village he touched at. By the time I came up with the scene of his
next really notable doings he was umtagati in full form supernatural,
you know, a thing to be dreaded and conciliated. And I don't wonder,
really. Here was a man without weapons, bareheaded in the sun,
speaking no word of any native language, alone and nearly naked,
plunging ahead through that wild unknown country and no harm coming
to him. You can't play tricks of that sort with Africa; the old girl
holds too many trumps; but this chap was doing it. It was against
Nature.
"He'd made his way up to a place where I always expect trouble. There
is, or rather, there was then a brute of a chief there, a fellow
named N'Komo, who paid tribute to M'Kombi, and was sort of protected
and supported by him. He was always slopping over his borders with a
handful of fighting men and burning and slaughtering and raping among
the peaceful kraals. A devil he was, a real black devil for cruelty
and lust. He had just started on a campaign when this lonely white
man arrived in the neighborhood, passing through a bit of district
with N'Komo's mark on it in the form of burned huts and bodies of
people. A man N'Komo had killed was a sight to make Beelzebub sick.
Torture, you know; mutilation beastliness! The white man must have
seen a good many such bodies.
"N'Komo and his swashbucklers had slept the night in a captured
kraal, and were still there in the morning when the white man
arrived. I know exactly the kind of scene it was. The carcasses of
the cattle slaughtered for meat would be lying all over the place
between the round huts, and bodies of men and women and children with
them. The place would be swarming with the tall, black spearmen, each
with a skin over his shoulder and about his loins; there would be a
fearful jabber, a clatter of voices and laughter and probably
screams, horrible screams, from some poor nigger whose death they'd
be dragging out, hour after hour, for their fun. Near the main gate
N'Komo was holding an indaba with his chief bucks. I've seen him many
times a great coal-black brute, six feet four in height, with the
flat, foolish, good-natured-looking face that fooled people into
thinking him a decent sort. I wish I'd shot him the first time I saw
him.
"Well, the indaba, the council, you know was in full swing when up
comes this white man, running as if for his life, and wailing,
wailing! The Kaffir who told me had seen it from where he was lying,
tied hand and foot, waiting his turn for the firebrands and the
knives. He said: 'He wailed like one who mourns for the dead!' There
was a burnt kraal not a mile away, so one can guess what he had been
seeing and was wailing about. 'His face,' the nigger told me, 'was
like the face of one who has lived through the torment of N'Komo and
is thirsty for death; a face to hide one's eyes before. And it was
white and shining like ivory!' He came thus, pelting blindly at a
run, into the midst of N'Komo's war indaba.
"He picked out N'Komo as the chief man there in a moment; that was
easy enough, and he broke into a torrent of words, gesticulating and
pointing back in the direction from which he had come. Telling him of
what he had seen, of course poor beggar! Can't you imagine him, with
those tall surprised black soldiers all round him and the great
dangerous bulk of negro king before him, trying to make them
understand, trembling with horror and fury, raging in homely useless
English against the everyday iniquity of Africa? Can't you imagine
it, Padre?"
"Ssh! You'll get a temperature," warned Father Bates. "Yes; I can
imagine it. It makes me humble."
"You see, I know what had maddened him. The first work of N'Komo's I
ever saw was a young mother and a baby dead and and finished with,
and it nearly sent me off my head. If I'd been half the man this poor
beggar was I'd have had N'Komo's skin salted and sun-dried before I
slept. He he didn't wait to mourn about things; he went straight
ahead to find the man who had done them and deal with him.
"Probably they took him for a lunatic; at any rate, they soon began
to laugh at him, shaking and talking in their midst. He was a new
thing to have sport with, and N'Komo presently leaned forward,
grinning, touched him on the arm, and pointed. The white man's eyes
followed the black finger to where a poor devil lay on the ground,
impaled by a stake through his stomach. It was N'Komo's way of
telling him what to expect, and he understood. He stopped talking.
"The nigger who saw it all and told me about it said that when he had
looked round on all the horrors he turned again towards N'Komo, and
at the sight of his eyes N'Komo ceased to grin. His big brute face
went all to bits, as a Kaffir's does when he is frightened. But the
white man made a little backward jerk with his hand that's what it
seemed like to the nigger who told me and suddenly, from nowhere in
particular, a big pistol materialized in his grip. He must have been
pretty clever at the draw. His hand came up, there was a smart little
crack, a spit of smoke, and N'Komo, the great war chief, was rolling
on the ground, making horrible noises like like bad plumbing, with
half his throat shot away, and the man who had done it was backing
towards the main gate with the big revolver swinging to right and
left across the group of warriors.
"And he got away, too. That, really, is the most wonderful part of
the whole thing. I expect that as soon as N'Komo was settled, the
usual row and the usual murders began by various would-be successors.
By night they had all started north again, on a hot-foot race to
occupy and hold the head kraal, and the country was clear of them,
and the white man's credit as a magic worker stood higher than ever.
He could have had anything he liked in any of the kraals for the
asking; he could have been law-giver, king, and god. But he was off
in the bush again, alone and restless and mysterious, with his
ivory-white face and his eyes full of pain and anger."
"Aye," said Father Bates. "Pain and anger that's what it was! And at
last you saw him yourself, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Dan. "I saw him. I was at my river then, combing the gold
out of it, when a Kaffir trekking down told me of him. He was at a
kraal fifty miles away two days' journey, lying, up with a hurt foot.
The gold was coming out of that river by the bottleful; it wasn't a
thing to take one's eyes off for a moment; but a white man, the white
man who had killed N'Komo well, I couldn't keep away. I spun a yarn
to my men about lion spoor that I wanted to follow, and off I went by
myself and did that fifty miles of bush and six-foot grass and rocks
in thirty hours, which was pretty good, considerin'. It was afternoon
when I came through a patch of palms and saw the kraal lying just
beyond.
"I hadn't much of an idea what kind of man I expected to see. I
rather fancy I expected to be disappointed to find him nothing out of
the way after all, and to learn that nine-tenths of the yarns about
him were just nigger lies. I was thinking all that as I stopped in
the palms' shade to mop the sweat out of my hat, and then I saw him!
"He was passing between me and the huts, a strange lame figure,
leaning on a stick, with a few rags of clothing bound about him. His
head, with its matted thick hair, was bare to the thresh of the sun;
he was thick-set, shortish, slow-moving, a sorrowful and laborious
figure. I saw the shine of his bare skin, and even the droop and
sorrow of his heavy face. I stood and watched him for perhaps a
minute in the shadow under those great masts of palms; I saw him as
clearly as I see you; and suddenly a light came to me and I knew I
understood it all. His loneliness, his pain and anger, his wanderings
in that savage wilderness, the wild misery of his eyes and the
ivory-white of his stricken face I understood completely. He had run
away from the sight of men of his own color he would have no use for
me. So then and there I turned and went back through the palms and
started on the trek for my own camp. It was all I could do for him."
"But," said Father Bates, "you've not said what it was that you saw."
"Padre," said Dan; "that poor, poor fellow, who loomed to the Kaffirs
like a great and merciful god, he was a leper as white as snow!"
"Holy saints defend us!" The Father made a startled motion of
crossing himself, staring at Dan's lean, somber face in a blankness
of consternation. "So that's what it was, then! A leper!"
"That's what it was," said Dan. "I've seen it before in the East."
"He said," continued the Father "he said he had no use for my blasted
cant. And he hadn't, he hadn't! He knew more than I."
X
MISS PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
The double windows of the big office overlooked the quays of
Nikolaieff and the desk was beside them; so that the vice-consul had
only to turn his head to see from his chair the wide river and its
traffic, with the great grain-steamers, like foster-children
thronging at the breast of Russia, waiting their turn for the
elevators, and the gantries of the shipyards standing like an iron
filigree against the pallor of the sky. The room was a large one,
low-ceilinged, and lighted only upon the side of the street; so that
a visitor, entering from the staircase, looked as from the bottom of
a well of shadow across the tables where the month-old American
newspapers were set forth to the silhouette of the vice-consul at his
roll-top desk against his background of white daylight.
Mr. Tim Waters, American citizen in difficulties, leaned upon the top
of the desk and pored absorbedly across the head of his country's
representative at the scene beyond the window. A tow-boat with a
flotilla of lighters was at work in midstream; there was a flash of
white foam at her forefoot, and her red-and-black funnel trailed a
level scarf of smoke across the distance. It was a sketch done
vigorously in strong color, and he broke off the halting narrative of
his troubles to watch if with profound unconscious interest.
Selby, the vice-consul, shifted impatiently in his chair. He was a
small, dyspeptic, short-sighted man, and he was endeavoring under
difficulties to give the impression that he had no time to spare.
"Well," he snapped; "go on. You were walking peaceably along the
street, you said. What comes next?"
Tim Waters turned mild eyes upon him, withdrawing them from the
tow-boat with patient reluctance.
"There was one o' them dvorniks" (doorkeepers), he resumed in a voice
of silky softness. "He was settin' outside his gate on one o' them
stools they have. And he was talkin' to one o' them istvostchiks."
(cabmen).
His thin, sun-browned face, furrowed with whimsical lines, with its
faint-blue eyes that wandered from his hearer to the allurement of
the window and back again, overhung the desk as he spoke, drawling in
those curiously soft tones of his an unconvincing narrative of sore
provocation and the subsequent fight. He was a man in the later
twenties, lean and slack-limbed; the workman's blouse of coarse
linen, belted about him, and the long Russian boots which he wore,
gave him, by contrast with the humor and sophistication of his face
and the controlled ease of his attitude as he lounged, something of
the effect of a man in fancy dress. Actually he belonged to the class
familiar to missionaries and consuls of world-tramps, those songless
troubadours for whom no continent is large enough and no ocean too
wide. With his slightly parted lips of wonder and interest, a pair of
useful fists and a passport granted by the American Minister in
Spain, he had worked his way up the Mediterranean to the Levant,
drifted thence by way of the Black Sea to Nikolaieff, and remained
there ever since. Riveter in the shipyards, winch driver on the
wharves, odd-man generally along the waterside, he and his troubles
had come to Selby's notice before.
The vice-consul sniffed and stared unsympathetically as the recital
wandered unhurried to its end. For him, the picaroon who leaned upon
his desk was scarcely more than a tramp; Selby had respectability for
a religion; and his beaky, irritable face, behind the glasses that
straddled across his nose, answered Tim Waters's mild conciliatory
gaze with stiff hostility. The dvornik and the istvostchik, it
seemed, had laughed loudly and significantly as Waters went by, and
he had turned to inquire into the joke.
"Because, y'see, Mr. Selby, them Russians just don't laugh in a
general way, except they're wantin' to start something. An' I heard
'em say 'Amerikanetz' just as plain as I can see you settin' there.
So, a' course, I knowed it was me they was pickin' on." The fight had
followed; Tim Waters, while he told of it, raised the hand in which
he held his cap and looked thoughtfully at a row of swollen and
abraded knuckles; and lastly, the police had intervened.
"It was that big sergeant with the medals," said the victim. "Come at
me with his sword, he did. Seems like it ain't safe to be an American
citizen in this town, Mr. Selby."
"Does it?" Selby sat back sharply in his chair, his ragged moustache
bristling, his glasses malevolently askew on his nose. "You're a
mighty fine example of an American citizen, aren't you? Say, Waters,
you don't think you can put that over again, do you?"
"Eh?" Tim Waters opened his pale blue eyes in the mildest surprise.
"Why, Mr. Selby?" he began, fumbling in his pocket. The vice-consul
interrupted him with a snarl.
"Now you don't want to pull that everlasting passport of yours on me
again," he cried. "Every crook and hobo that's chased off a steamer
into this town has got papers as good as yours, red seal an' all. You
seem to think that bein' an American citizen's a kind of license to
play hell and then come here to be squared. Well, I'm going to prove
to you that it's not."
Waters was watching him as he spoke with something of that still
interest which he had given to the scene beyond the window. Now he
smiled faintly.
"But say, Mr. Selby," he protested gently. "It it ain't the sergeant
I'm worried about. I'll get him all right. But there's what they call
a protocol fer breakin' up that istvostchik, an' you bein' our consul
here."
Selby rose, jerking his chair back on its castors. "Cut that out," he
shrilled. "Your consul, eh? Your kind hasn't got any consul, not if
you had forty passports see? You get out o' this office right now;
and if they hand you six months with that protocol."
He was a ridiculous little man when he was angry; the shape of him as
he stood, pointing peremptorily across the room to the door, rose
grotesque and pitiable against the window. The wanderer, still
leaning on the desk, looked over at him with lips parted as though he
found a profit of interest even in his anger.
"And you can tell your friends, if you got any," fulminated the
vice-consul, "that this place isn't."
He broke off short in mid-word; the rigid and imperative arm with
which he still pointed to the door lost its stiffening; he made a
snatch at his sliding glasses, saved them, and stood scaring. Waters
turned his head to look likewise.
"This is the American Consulate?" inquired a voice from the doorway.
For the moment neither answered, and the newcomer came down between
the tables towards the light of the window.
Of the two men, it was assuredly Waters, who had followed the lust of
the eye across the continents, who was best able to flavor and relish
that entry and approach. For him, stilly intent and watchful, it was
as though a voice, the voice which had spoken from the shadowy
doorway, had incarnated itself and become visible, putting on a form
to match its own quality, at once definite and delicate. The newcomer
moved down the room with a subdued rustling of skirts, resolving at
last into a neat and appealing feminine presence that smiled
confidently and yet conciliatorily and offered a hand towards Selby.
"It is the American Consulate, isn't it?" she asked again.
Selby, ruffled like an agitated hen, woke to spasmodic movement, and
took the hand.
"Why, yes," he answered, pushing towards her the chair he had not
offered to Waters and erupting forthwith into uneasy volubility.
"This is it. Sit down, madam; sit right down and tell me what I can
do for you."
The girl, still smiling, took the seat he gave her; across the
desk-top, Waters, unmoving, his battered hand grasping his peaked
Russian cap, gazed upon her absorbedly.
"Just got in, have you?" inquired Selby fussily.
"Yes," she answered. "I got in this morning by the boat from Odessa.
You see, I've come up from Bucharest, and as I don't know very much
about Russia, I thought."
Selby, seated again in his chair of office, his fingers judicially
joined, nodded approvingly. "You just naturally came along to your
consul," he finished for her. "Quite right, Miss, er."
"Pilgrim," supplied the girl.
"Miss Pilgrim?" he hesitated. She nodded. "Well, Miss Pilgrim, if
there's any information I can give you, or assistance, or, or advice,
I'll be very happy to do what I can. You're, er, traveling alone?"
"Yes," she replied, with her little confirming nod.
He had forgotten for the while the mere existence of Waters, brooding
wordlessly over them, and Waters after his manner, had forgotten
everything in the world. The girl between them, sitting unconscious
and tranquil under their converging gaze, had snared their faculties.
She was perhaps twenty-four, and both Selby and Waters, when
afterwards they used to speak of her, always insisted on this, not
pretty. She was fair in a commonplace way, middle-sized and
inconspicuous, the fashion of young woman who goes to compose the
background of life. She raised to the light of the window a face of
creamy pallor, with large serious grey eyes, and lips of a gentle and
serene composure; but it was not these that redeemed her from being
merely negligible and made her the focus of the two men's eyes. It
was rather a quality implicit in the whole of her as she sat,
feminine and fragile by contrast with even the meager masculinity of
Selby, with a suggestion about her, an emanation, of steadfastness
and courage as piteous and endearing as the bravery of a lost child.
In Selby, staled and callous long since to all those infirmities of
the wits or the purse which are carried to a consul as to a
physician, there awoke at sight of her all that was genial and
protective in his sore and shriveled soul; in Waters, who shall say
what visions and interpretations?
She looked from one to the other of them with her trustful eyes. On
Waters they seemed to dwell for a moment as though in question.
"Yes," she repeated; "I came alone; there wasn't anybody to come with
me." Her voice, mild and pleasant, corresponded to the rest of her.
"I've been working down in Rumania for nearly a year, in the Balkan
Bank, and before that I was in Constantinople. But I've always wanted
to see Russia; I'd heard and read so much about it; so" with a little
explanatory shrug of her shoulders "I came."
Waters's still eyes widened momentarily; he, at any rate, understood.
He knew, contentedly and well, that need to see, the unease of the
spirit that moves one on, that makes of the road a home and of every
destination a bivouac. His chin settled upon his crossed arms as he
continued to take stock of this compatriot of the highways.
"Oh!" Selby was enlightened and a little disconcerted. This was not
turning out as he had expected. He had diagnosed a tourist, and now
discovered that he had been entertaining a job-seeker unawares. But
the girl's charm and appeal held good; she was looking at him
trustfully and expectantly, and he surrendered. He set his glasses
straight with a fumbling hand and resumed his countenance of friendly
and helpful interest.
"Then, you propose to, er, seek employment here in Nikolaieff," he
inquired.
"Yes," she answered serenely. "Typist and stenographer, or secretary
or translator in French and German and Rumanian" she was numbering
off the occupations on her fingers as she listed them "or even
governess, if there isn't anything else. But it seems to me, with the
English steamers coming here all the time and the shipbuilding works,
there ought to be some office I could get into."
Selby pursed his lips doubtfully.
"You don't know of anything?", she asked. "That's what I came in to
see you about if you happened to know of anything? Because our
consuls hear of pretty nearly everything that's going on, don't
they?"
It wasn't flattery; her good faith was manifest in her face and
voice; and Selby suppled under it like a stroked cat.
"I wouldn't say that, Miss Pilgrim," he demurred coyly. He paused.
Her mention of shipping offices disturbed him. He had much business
with shipping offices; and he was picturing to himself, involuntarily
and with distaste, that gentle courage bruising itself upon the rough
husks of managers and their like, peddling itself from one noisy
Russian office to another, wearing thin its panoply of innocence upon
evil speech and vile intention. There were the dregs of manhood in
him, for all his narrowness and feebleness, and the prospect offended
him like an indecency.
"No, there's only one job I know of in Nikolaieff that you could
take," he said abruptly. "And that's right here in this office."
He had said it upon a rare impulse of generosity; all men are subject
to such impulses; and he halted upon the word for his reward. She
rendered it handsomely.
"Oh!" she cried, her grey eyes shining and all her pale and gentle
face alive with sudden enthusiasm. "Here in the Consulate?" She spoke
the word as a devotee might speak of a temple. "That, oh, that's
glorious!"
It was utterly satisfactory; Selby swelled and bridled.
"Er, secretary and stenographer," he said largely. "I had a young man
here a while since, but I let him go. He couldn't seem to be
respectful. And, er, as to terms, Miss Pilgrim."
"Yes?" murmured Miss Pilgrim, as respectfully as he could wish.
But the vice-consul did not continue. In his moment of splendor, it
may be that he became aware that only a part of his audience was
applauding, and his eyes had fallen on Waters. Till that moment he
had actually forgotten him; he seized now on an occasion to be still
more impressive.
"Hey, you Waters!" he cried commandingly. "What you waitin' there
for? Didn't you hear me tell you to clear out of this? Go on, now;
an' don't let me see you in this office again!"