monotonously, and no other sound. Standing inside the door, in that
hush of the house, he was oppressed by a sense of shameful trespass;
he glanced with trepidation towards the kitchen, dreading to see
someone come forth and shriek at the sight of him. Supposing Miss
Pilgrim were out! Then from the landing came a smart insistent knock
upon the door, and within the flat a bell woke and shrilled
vociferously. He turned; the room that was always to be ready was at
his side, and he fled on tiptoe into its darkness.
He got himself clear of the door, moving with extended hands across
its creaking parquet till he touched the cold smoothness of the tiled
stove, and freezing to immobility as he heard the kitchen door open.
Quick footsteps advanced along the passage; to him, checking, his
breath in the dark, listening with every nerve taut, it was as though
he saw her, the serene poise of her body as she walked, the pathetic
confidence of her high-held head, so distinctive and personal was
even the noise of her tread on the boards. Presently, when she had
sent the policeman away, he would see her and make her the gift of
his request and watch her face as she received it from him.
The latch clicked back under her hand, and she was standing in the
entry, confronting the policeman and his backing of citizens.
"Yes?" he heard her say, with a note of surprise at the sight of
them. "Yes? What is it?"
The policeman's voice, with the official rasp in it, answered,
spitting facts as brief as curses. "Man evading arrest aggravated
assault believed to be a certain American apparently escaped this
direction." It was like a telegram talking. Then, from his escort, a
corroborating gabble.
He could imagine her look of rather puzzled eagerness. "An American?"
she exclaimed. Then, as she realized it and its possibilities
possibly also the fact that already when an American was sought for
it was to her door that they came "oh!"
"Require you to produce him," injected the policeman, "if here! He is
here yes?"
"No," she answered; "nobody has come here yet."
There seemed to be a check at that; the effect of her, standing in
the doorway, made insistence difficult. The loud clock ticked on,
and, at the background of the whole affair, the citizens on the
landing maintained a subdued and unremarked murmur among themselves.
"He came this way," observed the policeman tenaciously. "He was seen
to pass the next house." And a voice chimed in, melancholy,
plaintive, evidently the voice of the dvornik who had been discovered
absent from his post: "Yes, I saw him."
"Well," Miss Pilgrim seemed a little at a loss. "He's not here." She
paused. "I have two rooms here," she added; "this" she must be
pointing to the dark open door beside her "and my bedroom. You can
look in this room, if that is what you want."
Waters heard the answering yap of the policeman and the shuffle of
feet. He turned in panic; there was no time to reason with events. A
step, and his groping hands were against that inner door, which
yielded to their touch. Even in the chaos of his wits, he was aware
of that subtle odor he had perceived before, that elusive fragrance
which seemed a very emanation of chaste girlhood and virgin delicacy.
He was inside, leaving the door an inch ajar, as the switch clicked
in the outer room and a narrow jet of light stabbed through the
opening.
"You see, there is nobody," Miss Pilgrim was saying.
The citizens, faithful to the trial, had crowded in. The policeman
grunted doubtfully.
Waters, easing his breath noiselessly, let his eyes wander. The
streak of light lay across the floor and up over the counterpane of a
narrow wooden bed, then climbed the wall across the face of a picture
to the ceiling. Beyond its illumination, there were dim shapes of a
dressing-table and a wash-hand-stand, and there were dresses hanging
on the wall beside him behind a sheet draped from a shelf. A window,
high and double-paned, gave on the courtyard. Through it he could see
the lights shining in curtained windows opposite.
"That?" It was Miss Pilgrim answering some question. "That is my
bedroom. No; you must not go in there!"
There was a hush and a citizen said "Ah!" loudly and knowingly.
Waters, listening intently, frowned.
"I must look," said the policeman curtly.
"But" her voice came from near the door, as though she were standing
before it, barring the way to them, "you certainly shall not look. It
is my bedroom, and even if your man had come here" she broke off
abruptly. "You see he is not here," she added.
"I must look," repeated the policeman in exactly the same tone as
before. "It is necessary."
"No," she said. "You must take my word. If you do not, I shall
complain tomorrow morning to the consul and to the Chief of Police
and you shall be punished."
"H'm!" The policeman was in doubt; she had spoken with a plain effect
of meaning what she said, and a policeman's head upon a charger is a
small sacrifice for a courteous Chief to offer to a lady friend. He
tried to be reasonable with her.
"It was because he was seen to come this way," he argued. "He passed
the next house and the dvornik this man here! saw him. He had
committed an assault, an aggravated assault, on an istvostchik and
evaded arrest. And he came this way."
"He is not here, though," replied Miss Pilgrim steadily. "Nobody at
all has been here this evening. I give you my word."
The Russian phrase she used was "chestnoe slovo," "upon my honorable
word." Waters caught his breath and listened anxiously.
"I give you my honorable word that he is not here," she affirmed
deliberately.
"Now what do you know about that?" exclaimed Waters helplessly.
From the rear of the room somebody piped up acutely: "Then why may
the policeman not look, since nobody is there?" Murmurs of agreement
supported the questioner.
Miss Pilgrim did not answer. It was to Waters as though she and the
policeman stood, estimating each other, measuring strength and
capacity. The policeman grunted.
"Well," he said, "since you say, upon your honorable word but I must
report the matter, you understand." He paused and there followed the
rustle of paper as he produced and opened his notebook.
"Your names?" he demanded.
"Certainly," agreed Miss Pilgrim, in a voice of extreme formality.
But she moved to the bedroom door and drew it conclusively shut
before she replied.
Waters drew deep breaths and shifted his weight from one foot to the
other. From the farther room he could hear now no more than confused
and inarticulate murmurings; but he was not curious about the rest.
He knew just what was going on the fatuous interrogatory as to name,
surname, age, birthplace, nationality, father, mother, trade, married
or single, civil status, and all the rest of the rigmarole involved
in every contact with the Russian police. He had seen it many times
and endured it himself often enough. Just now he had another matter
to think of.
"Honorable word!" he repeated. "It's a wonder she couldn't find
something different to say. Now I got to fool her. I got to, I."
The window showed him the pit of the courtyard; its frame was not yet
caulked with cotton-wool and sealed with brown paper for the winter.
He got it open and leaned out, feeling to either side for a spout, a
pipe, anything that would give him handhold to climb down by. There
was nothing of the kind; but directly below him he could make out the
mass of the great square stack of furnace-wood built against the
wall. From the sill to the top of the stack was a drop of full twenty
feet.
He measured it with his eyes as best he could in the darkness. It was
a chance, a not impossible one, but ugly enough. At any rate, it was
the only one, if he were to get out and leave that "honorable word"
untarnished. It never occurred to him that she might take it less
seriously than he.
Waters, who dreamed, who stood by and gazed when life became
turbulent and vivid, did not hesitate now. There was time for nothing
but action, if he was to substitute a worthy sacrifice for his
spoiled gift.
Seated upon the sill, he managed to draw the inner window shut and to
latch it through the ventilating pane; the outer one he had to leave
swinging and trust that she might find or not demand an explanation
for it. This done, he was left, with his back to the house, seated
upon the sill, a ledge perhaps a foot wide, with his legs swinging
above the twenty-foot drop. In order to make it with a chance for
safety, he had so to change his posture that he could hang by his
hands from the sill, thus reducing the sheer fall by some six feet.
The dull windows of the courtyard watched him like stagnant eyes as,
leaning aside, he labored to turn and lower himself. His experience
at sea and upon the gantries in the yards should have helped him; but
the past days, with their chill and insufficient food, had done their
work on nerve and muscle, and he was still straining to turn and get
his weight on to his hands when he slipped.
In the outer room, the catechism was running, or crawling, its ritual
course.
"Father's nationality?" the policeman was inquiring, with his
notebook upheld to the light and! a stub of flat pencil poised for
the answer. A noise from the courtyard reached him. "What's that?" he
inquired.
"Sounds like wood slipping off the stack," volunteered a citizen, and
the dvornik, whose business it had been to pile it, and who had
trouble enough on his hands already, sighed and drooped.
"American, of course," replied Miss Pilgrim patiently.
Below in the courtyard, Waters sat up and raised a hand to where
something wet and warm was running down his cheek from under his
hair, and found that it hurt his wrist when he did so. He rose
stiffly, cursing to himself at the pain it caused him. Above him, the
windows of the room that was always to be ready and waiting were
broad and bright and heads were visible against them. He felt himself
carefully and discovered that he could walk.
"Huh! Me for the roads goin' south outta this," he soliloquized, as
he hobbled towards the gate; "an' startin' right now!"
He paused at the entry to the arch and looked back at the windows
again.
"Honorable word!" he repeated bitterly, nursing his injured wrist.
"Wouldn't that jar you?"
He moved out through the gale slowly and painfully.
XI
THE CONNOISSEUR
The office of the machine-tool agency, where Mr. Baruch sat bowed and
intent over his desk, was still as a chapel upon that afternoon of
early autumn; the pale South Russian sun, shining full upon its
windows, did no more than touch with color the sober shadows of the
place. From the single room of the American Vice-Consulate, across
the narrow staircase-landing without, there came to Mr. Baruch the
hum of indistinguishable voices that touched his consciousness
without troubling it. Then, suddenly, with a swell-organ effect, as
though a door had been flung open between him and the speakers, he
heard a single voice that babbled and faltered in noisy shrill anger.
"Out o' this! Out o' this!" It was the unmistakable voice of Selby,
the vice-consul, whose routine day was incomplete without a quarrel.
"Call yourself an American you? Coming in here."
The voice ceased abruptly. Mr. Baruch, at his desk, moved slightly
like one who disposes of a trivial interruption, and bent again to
the matter before him. Between his large, white hands, each decorated
with a single ring, he held a small oblong box, the size of a
cigar-case, of that blue lacquer of which Russian craftsmen once
alone possessed the secret. Battered now by base uses, tarnished and
abraded here and there, it preserved yet, for such eyes as those of
Mr. Baruch, clues to its ancient delicacy of surface and the glory of
its sky-rivaling blue. He had found it an hour before upon a
tobacconist's counter, containing matches, and had bought it for a
few kopeks; and now, alone in his office, amid his catalogues of
lathes and punches, he was poring over it, reading it as another man
might read poetry, inhaling from it all that the artist, its maker,
had breathed into it.
There was a telephone at work in the Vice-Consulate now a voice
speaking in staccato bursts, pausing between each for the answer. Mr.
Baruch sighed gently, lifting the box for the light to slide upon its
surface. He was a large man, nearing his fiftieth year, and a quiet
self-security a quality of being at home in the world was the chief
of his effects. Upon the wide spaces of his face, the little and neat
features were grouped concisely, a nose boldly curved but small and
well modeled, a mouth at once sensuous and fastidious, and eyes
steadfast and benign. A dozen races between the Caspian and the
Vistula had fused to produce this machine-tool agent, and over the
union of them there was spread, like a preservative varnish, the
smoothness of an imperturbable placidity.
Footsteps crossed the landing, and there was a loud knock on his
door. Before Mr. Baruch, deliberate always, could reply, it was
pushed open and Selby, the vice-consul, his hair awry, his glasses
askew on the high, thin bridge of his nose, and with all his general
air of a maddened bird, stood upon the threshold.
"Ah, Selby, it is you, my friend!" remarked Mr. Baruch pleasantly.
"And you wish to see me yes?"
Selby advanced into the room, saving his eyeglasses by a sudden
clutch.
"Say, Baruch," he shrilled, "here's the devil of a thing! This place
gets worse every day. Feller comes into my office, kind of a peddler,
selling rugs and carpets and shows a sort of passport; Armenian, I
guess, or a Persian, or something; and when I tell him to clear out,
if he doesn't go and throw a kind of a fit right on my floor!"
"Ah!" said Mr. Baruch sympathetically. "A fit yes? You have
telephoned for the gorodski pomosh the town ambulance?"
"Yes," said Selby; "at least, I had Miss Pilgrim do that, my clerk,
you know."
"Yes," said Mr. Baruch; "I know Miss Pilgrim. Well, I will come and
see your peddler man." He rose. "But first see what I have been
buying for myself, Selby." He held out the little battered box upon
his large, firm palm. "You like it? I gave forty kopeks for it to a
man who would have taken twenty. It is nice yes?"
Selby gazed vaguely. "Very nice," he said perfunctorily. "I used to
buy 'em, too, when I came here first."
Mr. Baruch smiled that quiet, friendly smile of his, and put the box
carefully into a drawer of his desk.
The American Vice-Consulate at Nikolaief was housed in a single great
room lighted by a large window at one end overlooking the port and
the wharves, so that, entering from the gloom of the little landing,
one looked along the length of it as towards the mouth of a cave.
Desks, tables, a copying-press and a typewriter were all its gear; it
was a place as avidly specialized for its purpose as an iron foundry,
but now, for the moment, it was redeemed from its everyday barrenness
by the two figures upon the floor near the entrance.
The peddler lay at full length, a bundle of strange travel-wrecked
clothes, suggesting a lay figure in his limp inertness and the loose
sprawl of his limbs. Beside him on the boards, trim in white blouse
and tweed skirt, kneeled the vice-consul's clerk, Miss Pilgrim. She
had one arm under the man's head, and with the other was drawing
towards her his fallen bundle of rugs to serve as a pillow. As she
bent, her gentle face, luminously fair, was over the swart, clenched
countenance of the unconscious man, whose stagnant eyes seemed set on
her in an unwinking stare.
Mr. Baruch bent to help her place the bundle in position. She lifted
her face to him in recognition. Selby, fretting to and fro, snorted.
"Blamed if I'd have touched him," he said. "Most likely he never saw
soap in his life. A hobo that's what he is just a hobo."
Miss Pilgrim gave a little deprecating smile and stood up. She was a
slight girl, serious and gentle, and half her waking life was spent
in counteracting the effects of Selby 's indigestion and ill-temper.
Mr. Baruch was still stooping to the bundle of rugs.
"Oh, that'll be all right, Mr. Baruch," she assured him. "He's quite
comfortable now."
Mr. Baruch, still stooping, looked up at her.
"I am seeing the kind of rugs he has," he answered. "I am interested
in rugs. You do not know rugs no?"
"No," replied Miss Pilgrim.
"Ah! This, now, is out of Persia, I think," said Mr. Baruch, edging
one loose from the disordered bundle. "Think!" he said. "This poor
fellow, lying here he is Armenian. How many years has he walked,
carrying his carpets and rugs, all the way down into Persia, selling
and changing his goods in bazaars and caravanserais, and then back
over the Caucasus and through the middle of the Don Cossacks all
across the Black Lands carrying the rugs till he comes to throw his
fit on Mr. Selby's floor! It is a strange way to live, Miss Pilgrim,
yes?"
"Ye-es," breathed Miss Pilgrim. "Ye-es."
He smiled at her. He had a corner of the rug unfolded now and draped
over his bent knee. His hand stroked it delicately; the blank light
from the window let its coloring show in its just values. Mr. Baruch,
with the dregs of his smile yet curving his lips, scanned it without
too much appearance of interest. He was known for a "collector," a
man who gathered things that others disregarded, and both Miss
Pilgrim and Selby watched him with the respect of the laity for the
initiate. But they could not discern or share the mounting ecstasy of
the connoisseur, of the spirit which is to the artist what the wife
is to the husband, as he realized the truth and power of the
coloring, its stained-glass glow, the justice and strength of the
patterning and the authentic silk-and-steel of the texture.
"Is it any good?" asked Selby suddenly. "I've heard of 'em being
worth a lot sometimes thousands of dollars!"
"Sometimes," agreed Mr. Baruch. "Those you can see in museums. This
one, now I would offer him twenty rubles for it, and I would give
perhaps thirty if he bargained too hard. That is because I have a
place for it in my house."
"And he'd probably make a hundred per cent, on it at that," said
Selby. "These fellows."
The loud feet of the ambulance men on the stairs interrupted him. Mr.
Baruch, dragging the partly unfolded rugs with him, moved away as the
white clad doctor and his retinue of stretcher-bearers came in at the
door, with exactly the manner of the mere spectator who makes room
for people more directly concerned. He saw the doctor kneel beside
the prostrate man and Miss Pilgrim hand him one of the office
tea-glasses; then, while all crowded round to watch the process of
luring back the strayed soul of the peddler, he had leisure to assure
himself again of the quality of his find. The tea-glass clinked
against clenched teeth. "A spoon, somebody!" snapped the doctor. The
cramped throat gurgled painfully; but Mr. Baruch, slave to the
delight of the eye, was unheeding. A joy akin to love, pervading and
rejoicing his every faculty, had possession of him. The carpet was
all he had deemed it and more, the perfect expression in its medium
of a fine and pure will to beauty.
The peddler on the floor behind him groaned painfully and tatters of
speech formed on his lips.
"That's better," said the doctor encouragingly.
Mr. Baruch dropped the rug and moved quietly towards the group.
The man was conscious again; a stretcher-bearer, kneeling behind him,
was holding him in a half sitting posture, and Mr. Baruch watched
with interest how the tide of returning intelligence mounted in the
thin mask of his face. He was an Armenian by every evidence, an
effect of weather-beaten pallor appearing through dense masses of
coal-black beard and hair one of those timid and servile
off-scourings of civilization whose wandering lives are daily epics
of horrid peril and adventure. His pale eyes roved here and there as
he lay against the stretcher-bearer's knee.
"Well," said the doctor, rising and dusting his hands one against the
other, "we won't need the stretcher. Two of you take him under his
arms and help him up."
The burly Russian ambulance men hoisted him easily enough and stood
supporting him while he hung between them weakly. Still his eyes
wandered, seeking dumbly in the big room. The doctor turned to speak
to the vice-consul, and Miss Pilgrim moved forward to the sick man.
"Yes?" she questioned, in her uncertain Russian. "Yes? What is it?"
He made feeble sounds, but Mr. Baruch heard no shaped word. Miss
Pilgrim, however, seemed to understand.
"Oh, your rugs!" she answered. "They're all here, quite safe." She
pointed to the bundle, lying where it had been thrust aside. "Quite
safe, you see."
Mr. Baruch said no word. The silken carpet that he had removed was
out of sight upon the farther side of the big central table of the
office. The peddler groaned again and murmured; Miss Pilgrim bent
forward to give ear. Mr. Baruch, quietly and deliberately as always,
moved to join the conference of the doctor and Selby. He was making a
third to their conversation when Miss Pilgrim turned.
"One more?" she was saying. "Is there one more? Mr. Baruch, did you--
Oh, there it is!"
She moved across to fetch it. The peddler's eyes followed her
slavishly. Mr. Baruch smiled.
"Yes?" he said. "Oh, that carpet! He wants to sell it yes?"
"He isn't fit to do any bargaining yet," replied Miss Pilgrim, and
Mr. Baruch nodded agreeably.
The doctor and Selby finished their talk, and the former came back
into the group.
"Well, take him down to the ambulance," he bade the men.
They moved to obey, but the sick man, mouthing strange sounds, seemed
to try to hang back, making gestures with his head towards the
disregarded bundle that was the whole of his earthly wealth.
"What's the matter with him?" cried the doctor impatiently. "Those
rugs? Oh, we can't take a hotbed of microbes like that to the
hospital! Move him along there!"
"And I'm not going to have 'em here," barked Selby. The peddler, limp
between the big stretcher bearers, moaned and seemed to shiver in a
vain effort to free himself.
"Wait, please!" Miss Pilgrim came forward. She had been folding the
silken rug of Mr. Baruch's choice, and was now carrying it before
her. It was as though she wore an apron of dawn gold and sunset red.
The pitiful man rolled meek imploring eyes upon her. She cast down
the rug she carried upon the others in their bundle and stood over
them.
"I'll take care of them," she said. "They will be safe with me. Do
you understand? Me!" She touched herself upon her white-clad bosom
with one hand, pointing with the other to the rugs.
The man gazed at her mournfully, resignedly. Martyrdom was the daily
bread of his race; oppression had been his apprenticeship to life. It
was in the order of things as he knew it that those who had power
over him should plunder him; but, facing the earnest girl, with her
frank and kindly eyes, some glimmer of hope lighted in his
abjectness. He sighed and let his head fall forward in a feeble
motion of acquiescence, and the big men who held him took him out and
down the stairs to the waiting ambulance.
"Well!" said Selby, as the door closed behind the doctor. "Who
wouldn't sell a farm and be a consul. We'd ought to have the place
disinfected. What do you reckon to do with that junk, Miss Pilgrim?"
Miss Pilgrim was readjusting the thong that had bound the rugs
together.
"Oh, I'll take them home in a droschky, Mr. Selby," she said. "I've
got a cupboard in my rooms where they can stay till the poor man gets
out of hospital."
"All right," snarled Selby. "It's your troubles." He turned away, but
stopped upon a sudden thought. "What about letting Baruch take that
rug now?" he asked. "He's offered a price and he can pay it to you."
"Certainly," agreed Mr. Baruch. "I can pay the cash to Miss Pilgrim
and she can pay it to the poor man. He will perhaps be glad to have
some cash at once when he comes out."
Miss Pilgrim, kneeling beside the pack of rugs, looked doubtfully
from one to the other. Mr. Baruch returned her gaze benignly. Selby,
as always, had the affronted air of one who is prepared to be refused
the most just and moderate demand.
"Why," she began hesitatingly, "I suppose-" Then Selby had to strike
in.
"Aren't worrying because you said you'd look after the stuff
yourself, are you?" he jeered.
Mr. Baruch's expression did not alter by so much as a twitch; there
was no outward index of his impulse to smite the blundering man
across the mouth.
The hesitancy upon Miss Pilgrim's face dissolved in an instant and
she positively brightened.