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Title: Hope Against Hope and Other Stories
Author: Benson, Stella (1892-1933)
Date of first publication: 1931
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Macmillan, 1931 (first edition)
Date first posted: 17 February 2009
Date last updated: 18 February 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #264

This ebook was produced by:
Jon Ingram, Hlne de Mink
& the Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe
at http://dp.rastko.net




HOPE AGAINST HOPE

AND OTHER STORIES

BY

STELLA BENSON

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1931



     CONTENTS

     Hope against Hope        Page 1
     Submarine                    27
     Hairy Carey's Son            39
     An Out-Islander comes in     75
     On the Contrary              89
     The Desert Islander         117

NOTE

These stories have appeared in _Harper's Monthly Magazine_, the
_Bystander_, the _Nation and Athenaeum_, the _Fortnightly Review_ and
_Time and Tide_, and I am indebted to the editors of these periodicals
for raising no objection to this reprinting of my work.

S.B.




HOPE AGAINST HOPE

Ward Clark thought, "Really, women shouldn't be allowed to live beyond
the age of about thirty--unmarried women, at any rate." He watched
Miss Hope coming across the terrace, carrying a little tray towards
him. Miss Hope-against-hope he called her because there was something
so senselessly hopeful about the large and rather fine slate-coloured
eyes behind her glasses. Directly she saw that he was looking at her,
she made a little arch backward movement with the back of her neck,
tucking her chin in, like a lizard when it sees a fly.

Her hair was of an uncertain dust colour. One could imagine the kind
of clothes, thought Clark, that she would choose to suit that
hair--unobtrusive ladylike clothes, navy blue probably, black
stockings, a neat black bow at the throat, a neat black bow at the
instep. But now, of course, she was dressed in the garb of her
profession--"trim" it was always called--quiet blue linen with stiff
white collar and cuffs, a white winged headkerchief round her head
allowing only one loop of her dull hair to be seen over one temple.

"You naughty man," said Hope-against-hope. "You didn't take your
medicine I poured out for you after breakfast. And now I've brought
you your eggnog, and it won't mix! Well ... you ought to be well
smacked...."

Ward Clark did not answer. He did not even stretch his lips to the
smile that politeness demanded as a reaction to such roguishness. He
had ceased to mind hurting his nurse's feelings. Besides, as far as he
could see, she hadn't any.

"I climbed down the steps on to the beach ... such pretty little ...
very like our Cornish thyme ... and running up and down on the wet ...
oh, you would have laughed ... little birds ... oh, I stood and
laughed ... running so fast, like toys ... an old fisherman said they
were called Ri-ti-ti ... ri-ti-ti--isn't it _killing_...." She stood
leaning towards him with both her hands flat on the table, turned in
like ungainly toes, her eyes burning intensely at his face, imploring
him to laugh. Clark gave a slight snort and withdrew his eyes from
hers. He heard her sigh. Fun evidently would not do. She looked about
the bright sun-dappled terrace, as he was looking. The mountain rose
so tall and velvet-grey behind the hotel that it seemed like a
lowering thunder sky until one's eye caught the peak, brittle and
gold-trimmed, against a pearl blue cloudlessness, far above the
chimneys. "Oh, what weather!" said Miss Hope, clenching her fists and
jaws. "Doesn't it make you _thrill_ to be alive?" He felt his flesh
creep as she looked at him wistfully. He was conspicuously refraining
from thrilling to be alive.

"D'you see that man over there sitting near the windows?" she said
(and Clark could almost hear her thoughts--"Well, we'll see if a
little gossip will rouse him,")--"Well, his name is Jawge Dawkins and
he comes from China. _China_--just think how.... Oh, how _thrilling_
it must be to travel...."

Ward Clark carefully looked away from Mr. Dawkins, out over the merry
speckled sea. To his astonishment he heard the indomitable Miss Hope
draw a chair across the gravel to his side and sit down. "Mustn't it
be wonderful," she said, "to live in _China_ ... it makes you _thrill_
to think.... Last night I was sitting reading my ... and he was at the
next table talking to the.... Oh my, Mr. Clark, you should have heard
the ... well, all about brigands and temples and rickshaws and ... you
know ... all matter of fact--as if they were just everyday things ...
well, of course, they _are_, to him...." Clark's eyes were drawn by a
morbid fascination from the sea to his tormentor. Her chin, he
thought, looked too soft, as if it had been boned like a chicken; all
its flesh trembled as she talked. He gnawed his nails moodily as he
lay staring at her. He felt justified in despising her, since he
thought of himself as a reasonable-looking and still young man, in
spite of the fact that he was older than she was, that his nose was a
little crooked, and that baldness ran up like a boulevard to the crown
of his head between two thinned thickets of fair curly hair. Still, he
felt himself a man--what a man ought to be--and knew her to be
absurdly faded and virgin--exactly what a woman ought not to be. Of
course, he was an assiduous reader of Mr. Aldous Huxley.

In spite of his efforts not to flatter her by attention to what she
was saying, Ward Clark could not help letting his eyes rest on Mr.
George Dawkins for a moment. He saw a thin-nosed wide-eyed man, some
fifty years old, with a very noticeable trick of sniffing. When he
sniffed, he twitched up his upper lip to disclose large teeth, making
the apologetic snarling grimace a dog makes when a friend touches a
wounded part of its body. His sniff was a sort of punctuation and made
every action seem like a significant parenthesis. He sniffed when he
turned a page of his newspaper, or spoke to the waiter, or looked out
admiringly over the polished sea. He sniffed twice as he was joined by
a pretty young girl who came out of one of the French windows of the
hotel.

"That's his daughter," said Miss Hope, pleased to see that the angle
of her patient's head now expressed a slight awakening of interest.
"Pretty little thing, isn't she?... but rather a _meaningless_ face
... if you know what I mean.... I always think an _interesting_ face
is so much more attractive than a _pretty empty_ face ... don't you
know what I mean? I remember when I used to live with my dear
stepmother and she found me crying one day over ... and she said,
'Now, Agnes ... you've got a face full of _character_ ...' she said,
'that'll be a hundred times more useful to you than _curls_ and
_cream_....' That's what she said ... _curls_ and _cream_--I've never
forgotten that...."

"I've left my pocket-handkerchief upstairs, nurse," blurted Clark.
"Would you mind...?" The fact that this jellyfaced faded creature
should have her vanity made him feel almost sick. With a glowering eye
he followed her retreat across the terrace towards the vine-shaded
windows. At the table of George Dawkins the fantastically confident
woman actually paused and made a Social Advance. Ward Clark could hear
in the clear air, "Lovely day, isn't it? Doesn't this weather make you
positively _thrill_ to be alive?"

Mr. Dawkins, between one sniff and another, made some obviously
affable reply--even rubbing his hands together in a complaisant
gesture of _thrill_. "How _can_ he?" thought Ward Clark. "It's so
_bad_ for her." It would have been difficult to explain why. When Miss
Hope had gone indoors, the Dawkins daughter looked after her with a
hoarse giggle in which Mr. Dawkins did not join. Miss Dawkins's eye,
rendered homeless, as it were, by her father's unresponsiveness, met
Clark's curious look across the terrace. She rose at once and made a
coy devious way towards Clark. She approached sidelong the terrace
balustrade and leaned her hip against it, looking self-consciously
from the invalid to the sea and back again. "Lovely weather, isn't
it?" she said with her husky short giggle. "Shame you can't be up and
about to enjoy it."

Ward Clark's face lit up. "It is rather a shame, isn't it?" he said
happily. "Especially as I'm a bit of a golf maniac. But it's my own
fault I'm laid up. I can't blame anyone at all--I would if I could."
He went on eagerly to tell her of his own rather picturesque rashness
in riding a steeplechase on an untried horse, of his accident--three
broken ribs and double pneumonia....

"Oo Lor," said Miss Dawkins, now sitting on the end of his
chaise-longue. "How you men _dare_ to do such things--I'd be simply
_tarrified_.... I knew a boy in Shanghai who used to...."

Ward Clark watched with real delight her short well-cut painted upper
lip moving as she spoke. He never would have thought an upper lip
could be lovely that was so short that it twitched the tip of the nose
slightly every time the mouth closed. Yet there it was--positively
delightful. And her eyes too, the way they looked at him as though
pleading merrily for his permission to be rather silly every time she
told him something about herself. For their talk rapidly resolved
itself into the amiable battle of egoisms that is characteristic of
all talk between men under forty and women under twenty. Neither was
impressed by anything the other said, yet each was delighted with the
general effect and felt that something interesting was being made
known. "My dad said, 'Bess, you've driven that boy fairly crazy--I
can't move a step in the house without falling over him.' ... A fellow
called Bernard on the Stock Exchange--and they know a thing or two,
those fellers--and he said, 'Damn it all, Clark, how _do_ you _do_
it--I'd have had to pay at least fifteen shillings a bottle for it.'
... 'Not a bit of it, old man,' I said, 'If you'll let me give you a
word of advice....' I suppose I'm silly and fastidious but I simply
can't _pretend_ about that kind of thing--I just blurt out.... I know,
I'm like that too, I used to get into no end of trouble with--"

"Here's ya hankie, mister," said Miss Hope's bright voice behind him.
"_Do_ you know what happened? I got up into that room and I simply
_couldn't_ remember what I'd come for--_too_ killing--I simply stood
gaping--I got hold of your clothes brush and gaped at it as if I was
... I'm sure the fam-de-chombe must have thought I was _raving mad_
... she happened to ... now what _did_ I come for? I said--and then
all at once.... Oh, I see you've got a nice companion now--a little
lady from China to talk to.... Well, I'll leave you to have a nice ...
and don't forget ya eggnog again, you naughty man ... and I'll just
hop up and do a little...."

She entered the house at the same French window as before and the back
of her neck made the same lizard-like moue as before towards the
Dawkins table. But Mr. George Dawkins was no longer there.

Bessie Dawkins gave her curious croaking giggle. "What a _priceless_
person...."

"Oh God," said Ward Clark. "She ought to have been drowned at birth."
But of course if he had given a little thought to the matter he would
have modified his pronouncement. Actually twenty-nine is the age at
which practically all women should be drowned, if I understand the
average young man correctly. Miss Dawkins was quite safe for some time
yet. She was only nineteen.

"I won't hear a _word_ against a woman," she said. "I don't know where
you men get the idea us women are always cats to each other. I do
admire women who go out and earn their living most _frightfully_--I
mean I really _do_.... I wish Dad would let me do it myself, but since
Mum died--d'you know what he says? He says--(it's too killing of
him)--he says, 'No, no, Bess, you're far too pretty.' ... I _do_ think
it's _too_ tiresome of the men to run after a girl that only wants to
be let alone.... Though as I often say, I love to have plenty of men
friends only somehow just when I get to know a boy really well he
always gets silly and falls passionately in love with me ..." etc....
etc....

Ward Clark hung on her lips. The only drawback to what she was saying
was that it prevented him--(but only temporarily, of course)--from
telling her something that he was convinced would interest her very
much--a story about his buying a horse against the advice of his
horsey brother-in-law--a horse which most marvellously justified his
prescience by winning ... etc.... etc.... And so the amiable contest
went on.

"Oo look," presently said Bessie, interrupting a rather good story. By
sitting up rather carefully in his chair, Clark could just see over
the terrace balustrade, down through the pine trees on the slope to
the spot on the beach at which Miss Dawkins's finger was pointed.
There, striding up and down near the waving silver margin of the sea,
were Miss Agnes Hope and Mr. George Dawkins, looking eagerly into each
other's faces as they strode. His hand was gesticulating
emphatically--one could imagine that he was sniffing like a dog on a
trail, but of course one couldn't hear this. The enchanted
exclamations uttered by Miss Hope could, however, be heard, rising
rather sweetly and remotely above the faint brittle noise of little
waves breaking.

It almost seemed as if the eyes of the two watchers on the terrace had
touched some spring in the attention of the ardent talkers on the
shore. They swerved, still talking, still twisting their shoulders to
face each other, towards the steps among the pines, and disappeared.

"Your unlucky parent ..." groaned Ward Clark. "He little knows...."

"Oh, Dad loves every one," giggled Mr. Dawkins's daughter.

And, suitably enough, Mr. Dawkins was talking of love as he came
within earshot at the other end of the terrace. "I love my boys," he
was saying. "There's no denying charm to the Chinese--they certainly
have charm. Young or old--it's all the same.... I wouldn't exchange an
evening spent among educated Chinese men and lads for one in any
company.... I love my lads ... both as pupils and as friends...."

Ward Clark gave a slight concealed snort. He disliked schoolmasters
almost as much as he disliked plain women.

Miss Hope looked with a dreamy and almost loving look towards her
unresponsive patient. "I've had such a _thrilling_ stroll," she said
in a surprisingly subdued voice. "Oh, my _dear_ Mr. Clark--the
_things_ I've heard.... Just like a story book.... Now I must
introduce you two...."

Mr. Dawkins drew up his chair and, catching the waiter's eye across
the terrace, called "Boy," and asked Clark to Name His. "Not at any
rate a missionary," sighed Ward Clark, secretly feeling like a lamb to
which the wind has only been rather ineffectually tempered.

"He hasn't finished his eggnog yet," said Miss Hope absently. Clark
listened, his exasperated ears stretched for the inevitable roguish,
"Naughty man." It did not come. Miss Hope's dark patient eyes glowed
through her glasses at Mr. Dawkins's face. "Do go on with what you
were saying," she said.

Mr. Dawkins went on, in a competent tenor voice interrupted only by an
energetic sniff from time to time. It was obvious, even to the
reluctant Clark, that everything that he spoke of was very vivid to
his own remembering senses. He drew very few morals, in spite of being
a schoolmaster. Nearly everything that he said was told from the point
of view of his own eyes and ears. A Chinese dinner party ... the
splashed tablecloth ... chopsticks nuzzling and biting in the common
bowl like storks' beaks ... the bright friendly lidless eyes ... the
harsh sing-song talk, never ironic, never careless ... the clamour of
servants uncouthly pushing dishes between guests' shoulders ... the
far howl of the cook announcing the readiness of a new course....

"I can see now," said Miss Hope presently in a pause, "that what
thrills one about _abroad_ is imagining oneself _at home_ in it ...
not strange ... not surprised...."

Ward Clark gaped at her. Her voice was quite quiet, her words
thoughtful. He suddenly drank the rest of his eggnog, as a sort of
reward to her for speaking so sensibly.... Mr. Dawkins said, "It is
not often that a garrulous traveller finds such a sympathetic and
imaginative audience for his yarns...." He leaned over Clark and
tapped him lightly on the diaphragm, sniffing impressively before he
said, "Let me tell you, sir, you're a lucky man to be nursed through a
wearisome convalescence by a woman of imagination ... it's a very rare
thing--imagination--among professional women--and men too, for the
matter of that...."

"Oh, get along," said Miss Hope, crimson with pleasure. "You'll never
get my patient to believe all that. Why, his very _eye_ scares all the
fancy out of me...."

       *       *       *       *       *

Ward Clark, who was a healthy man, was well enough in ten days to walk
quietly about by the side of his unloved attendant. He might not as
yet risk the steep steps down through the pine slopes to the beach,
but from the terrace he could walk a little way along the top of the
cliff--along the rather cultured little path that broadened every few
yards to accommodate an "artistic" bench wherever the view was
considered to be finest. To Clark, upright at last after how many
weeks of illness, the ground seemed very near and the sea very
tremendous and trancelike. Miss Hope, too, seemed to him in his
weakness different, more stalwart, a staff of strength--if only, like
a staff, she would permit herself to be laid aside, mercifully dumb,
when not needed to support his steps.

"You sit on the bench, mister, and have a little rest. I shall sit on
the dear moss--oh, the _feel_ of it beneath my fingers...." And by the
way she threw herself down in a careless sitting position on the
ground and straightened her knees and moved her toes in their neat
professional low shoes, Clark could see, with the keen understanding
of dislike, that she still saw herself as a sprawling girl and had not
learned to dissociate herself, as she should, from a calf-like
impulsiveness of gesture. She even threw off her hat gaily, as if she
had charming roughened curls beneath it, instead a tortured mat of
frizzed strands and hairpins. "One of the signs of a patient's
convalescence," she said, as she spun the hat round on a finger before
flinging it on the moss. "Now you're up and about, I can come into
your august presence like a human being instead of with that starchy
napkin flapping about. D'you know why I _love_ wearing nothing on my
head?... You'll never guess--how should you--a mere ... why, I'll tell
you.... I hate wearing hats and ... because I hate to hide my best
features.... _There_ now, aren't I a silly girl!... But it's not just
fancy.... I once won a prize for them--first prize at a Features
Contest at a bazaar at ... and besides that, I've been complimented on
... and--"

"On _what_--for God's sake?" Ward Clark could not restrain himself
from saying in a furious voice, though he had been trying to pretend
to read _Punch_.

"Well, look," said Miss Hope in an excited voice, and she pushed up a
dangling frizzle of hair and showed her ear--a good ear enough, small
and neat, but, to Clark, a great deal less than interesting. "I'm not
vain," she said, "but I can't help knowing ... it's seldom you see an
ear anywhere near the Greek.... I remember the judge at the bazaar
showed me a plaster cast of...."

"Sorry I'm no judge," said Clark, so much revolted by all she said
that he was almost amused. He looked forward to telling Bessie Dawkins
about Hope-against-hope's One Claim to Beauty. He heard in
imagination Bessie's low giggle and his own ironic voice. "Poor little
Bessie," he thought, and a sort of glamour came over the face of earth
and sky and sea as he thought of her. He could no longer see her
merely as an amusing flapper with a pretty mouth--for she had crowned
herself with a secret halo by falling in love with him. It was obvious
though unspoken; her concealments were pathetically frail. Clark had
outgrown most of the cruder forms of young conceit, and had never
aspired to the role of lady-killer; his good sense regretted that the
child should harrow her romantic affections to no purpose--yet, there
it was--she wore now, in his eyes, a special fragile charm, in spite
of the fact that it never once occurred to him to fall in love with
her. He had not the slightest intention of marrying, and, in any case,
he was never in the least attracted by virgins. He simply felt a sort
of deep, still, apologetic gentleness towards the afflicted Bessie,
and everything that she said or did was heard or seen by him in a haze
of glamorous--almost holy--tolerance. She could, indeed, do no wrong,
since even her pettishnesses, her small violences of manner, her
craving to exhibit her little soul, like her pretty little knees, to
him, her efforts to rivet his interest on the oddities she so
wistfully valued in herself--all these were but harmless weeds in
that same garden of charm that flowered in the sun of her young
passion for him. "Dear little Bessie," he thought whenever he
remembered her--which was fairly often. He had an uneasy conviction
that she expected him to propose marriage to her, and was determined
to be very very careful to avoid hurting her little feelings more than
was necessary. Good God, there was Hope-against-hope again--nagging at
his attention as usual. She caught his ear, of course, by naming the
radiant name Dawkins.

"Would you believe it--he noticed my ears.... The day I walked to the
east point with him and we climbed out on the.... I had left my hat on
the beach ... and he said, 'That's right, now I can see a very pretty
sight, like a shell in floating seaweed.' ... D'you know, at first I
was almost offended--I made a little face at him because ... well,
seaweed, you know ... not a very pretty ... but he showed me some
brown seaweed in a pool among the ... it really _was_ like a fairy
tress of.... I was quite pleased then ... he _does_ talk so well,
doesn't he?... I remember he said that on the ship coming home through
a very rough ... the waves _boiling in blue curls_ against his
porthole ... _boiling in_ ... can't you see them?... with stormy
sunlight showing through.... Oh _my_--I should like to travel....
D'you know ... one so seldom meets _nobility_--it seems almost silly
to say ... you know what I mean ... _noble_ ... yet it does seem to me
that one could use the word of ... don't you know what I mean--he
could never be unkind or small ... or cynical ... or do anything he
thought wasn't.... He is a _noble_ person.... I _do_ feel so proud to
have made such a friend--because you know--I really do think he looks
on me as a ... you know what I mean--what schoolboys call a _pal_....
I'm so silly with you, Mr. Clark, because I'm frightened of you ...
you're criticizing all the ... but with _him_.... D'you know, I dreamt
about him last night ... wasn't it _killing_?... in my dream he called
me _Little Woman_ ... he kept on saying it, _Little Woman, Little
Woman_.... Oh, I--What's the matter, mister--shivering?--Are you cold?

"Yes," said Ward Clark. "Cold and a little sick. I think I'll start
walking home."

He was moved to grind his teeth in a paroxysm of revulsion, as hatred
showed him that the dream had been enchanting to her, and that the
golden memory of it had filled her silly eyes with tears.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Dawkinses were gone.

Ward Clark, his elbows on the window-sill of his bedroom, watched the
morning shadow of the mountain dwindle upon the sea, and thought of
his parting with Bessie. He felt, glowingly, that the chapter was a
pretty one in his life; he had been, he knew, kind and understanding,
as befitted a man twenty years older than she was, dear little thing.
Many men, he knew, would have taken advantage of the child's nave
vulnerability; some men would now be flattering themselves crudely on
a small triumph. Short of proposing to the girl, Ward Clark felt that
he could not have been more comforting and tactful to her than he had
been. Poor little Bessie, her tender courage--so flattering to
him--had stirred him. "You men do so well without women ... but if
ever...." Her large brown eyes had dazzled with tears. "You will write
to me sometimes, Ward, won't you ... you don't know what it would mean
to me...." "Your post-bag's full already with letters from all your
boy friends, my dear," Ward had smiled, reminding her gently to be
vain--to look past her humiliation. "What about Guy and Tim and Wally
and all the rest you told me about? Why, you won't even have time to
open letters from an old crock like me." The memory of her look gave
him an exquisite feeling--almost like a feeling of something
accomplished. "I've plenty of boy friends," she said with a strangled
giggle, and a modest manner of accepting his offer of dignity. "I'll
probably marry Guy--goodness knows he's keen enough--so are several of
my boy friends ... but I'll always remember my _man_ friend.... Oh,
Ward--good-bye--what a fool I am...."

It was a good thing the father--and even the lamentable
Hope-against-hope--had had the sense to keep out of the way, Clark
thought. The little scene, so restrained, so perfect, so creditable to
both participants, could so easily have been spoiled by interruption
or facetiousness. He had, indeed, not seen Hope-against-hope since the
early departure of the hotel bus in which the Dawkinses had gone to
catch the train for Rome. Ward Clark had given them letters of
introduction to friends in Rome--a city he knew well. He had drawn for
Bessie a little map, showing her how to find a wonderful little
restaurant where people in the know asked for a bottle of Number
Twenty-two with the chill just off. Half apologetically he caught
himself enjoying the thought of how immediate would be his memory in
her mind as she triumphed over the intricacies of the streets with the
help of his map, and found the door he had described to her. It was
long past the time for his eggnog. Though he was now scarcely an
invalid, he still took no exercise before noon, and had only dressed
this morning in order to see the Dawkinses off. He ought to have been
lying on his chaise-longue on the terrace, but Miss Hope had not come
in to "lay him out" (daily joke). He still felt enough of an invalid
to be a little aggrieved against his nurse for her neglect. The shadow
of the mountain had climbed inshore from the sea, was almost swallowed
up by the noon sun. The heads of the pine trees glistened a little in
the heat; they were gathering their distorted shadows more closely
round them as the sun climbed higher. Clark heard the sound of a horse
and cart--a rare enough sound in the motor-haunted driveway of this
sophisticated hotel. He crossed to the side window of his room.

He saw an amazing sight. Two local fishermen were driving in one of
the heavy farm carts of the country, behind a stout furry horse. And
on the back seat of the cart sat a distraught disordered
figure--Hope-against-hope--hatless--wet hair dripping round a neck to
which still clung the limp remains of her neat collar--shoeless feet
set, with toes turned in, in a pool of water on the cart's
floor--knees grotesquely protruding from (oh God) a torn pink
artificial silk petticoat, for she had no skirt on. Standing stiffly
out round all this was a fisherman's coat, stiff as a basket, open
like an anatomical sectional illustration to show every detail of its
miserable human contents.

Ward Clark, aching with surprise and annoyance, hurried to the
verandah to meet her. There was a twitter of astonishment from a
waiter and two chambermaids as Miss Hope, her stony eyes fixed on
nothing, stumbled from the cart between the two sheepish-looking
fishermen.

"My _dear_ Miss Hope ..." began Clark in a voice of repressed
exasperation. She clutched at his shoulder without seeming to see it.
He had to put his arm about her to steady her. She could not speak.
She seemed abysmally unaware that she was his nurse and he her
patient. Clark could not wait to hear the fishermen's explanation; he
had to support the staggering dripping woman along the passage to her
room. There he left her with the chambermaid while he hurried back to
the verandah. He felt quite choked with excitement; his temperature,
he was sure, had gone up. Oh, damn the woman--splashing her beastly
personality all over the place--was she not paid to be a background?

The head waiter--all the waiters now assembled on the verandah--had
now mastered all the facts. The fishermen spoke a dialect that Clark
had great difficulty in understanding. He turned to the waiters. It
seemed that the fishermen had been mending their nets on the shore
when they had seen a woman run along the rocks of the east point and
leap into the sea. They had launched their boat and reached her in a
few minutes. They had found her clinging to the seaweed of the
furthermost rock, trying to thrust herself under the sea--even trying,
rather feebly, to beat her head against the rock. She had struggled to
refuse help. "Na--na--na--" said the younger fisherman, throwing his
head back, shutting his eyes and shrieking through bared teeth as he
imitated the woman's behaviour. The men feared that they had bruised
her obstinate fingers in disengaging them from the weedy rocks. "She
_held herself_ to die," said a waiter in English.

"Good Lord, Good Lord ..." groaned Clark, dazed with disgust. "What
d'you think I ought to give these fellers?" he asked the head waiter.

"She harries me--she harries me ..." he thought. "Or do I mean
_harrows_...?"

She was up next day, the fingers of her left hand neatly bandaged, the
rest of her form neatly clad once more in professional linen. Ward
Clark found her with her pen poised stiffly over a blank sheet of
notepaper. She had made no mark except some poor scribblings
representing people coming out of the hotel depicted on the
notepaper--little inky spiders straddling on the terrace.

"I'm going--I'm going ..." she said in a desperately mollifying voice.

Clark's precarious patience was almost overset at once. No thought for
him or for her professional duties.... "Well, I should think you _had_
better go home--it's obvious, isn't it? that you're not fit,
nervously, for what you've undertaken.... Luckily I'm almost
well--I'll telegraph to my sister to come out ... so you needn't worry
about me.... But for God's sake, my dear woman--what happened? What on
earth possessed you? Haven't you any dignity--any self-control?"

"Oh--" said Miss Hope, and her pale mouth was pulled into a stiff
grin. "Oh--how far away--how far away--men and women are from each
other...."




SUBMARINE


There was a loud squealing in her ears and it was like the translation
into sound of the hurried green twilight about her. Her head felt as
if it was padded with vacuum like a thermos, but--also like a thermos
filled with iced lemonade--cool, acid, and lucid inside. She watched
Amos in front of her, cannonball-headed, waddling grotesquely,
sticking out a large creased behind, like an offended rhinoceros,
planting his immense feet on gardens and moving creatures and swaying
flowers, flapping a portentous hand like a drunkard. "That's the man I
love," she thought, gaping at him through streaked unflattering space,
and as she thought this, his foot moved carelessly and he sprang,
sprawling askew, to a point outside her range of vision. She could
only see a blinkered view through the window in her helmet.

She was not wearing the full diving-suit but only a headpiece with a
rubber "bertha" and her own bathing dress. She felt like a top-heavy
pawn on a drunken chess-board. The airpipe was under her arm. The
helmet was like a diving-bell with only a certain allowance of
bubbling squealing air trapped inside it. When she bowed forward to
look at a little crab, the air receded up to her mouth; in fright she
bent backward and the crisp line of the water slipped down at once to
her adam's apple. Now she felt braver; she could bend her nervous
weightless body a little--not too much--to allow her window to command
a view of white coral branches, white craters, anemones like pianists'
fingers, green-black patches of matted weed, crabs and smiling open
mussels, little glassy splinters offish that moved off round her
ankles like sun-touched midges round the pillars of a cathedral.
Looking at her ankles, slim and pearl-green under a body that felt so
top-heavy and undisciplined, she tried to dance a step or two.
Instantly she soared by mistake--sideways--backwards--outspread like a
spider--outspread like a little boy lifted by the seat of the
trousers.... She landed on one heel, unable for a moment to retrieve
her aspiring right leg, in a white coral crater.

"Who _was_ that man like?" came suddenly into her mind as she waved
and slanted in the urgent water, unable to stand, unable to fall. She
was thinking of the man in charge of the raft above her. "Who _was_ he
like?" Her eyes remembered the man, standing in his shirtsleeves in
the sun on the raft, scowling at the negroes who worked the pump,
turning with an apologetic smile to her and Amos. Her ears remembered
him.... "It's not often we get a lady on this raft, wanting to dive
for the fun of the thing, too. But you couldn't wear the outfit, lady,
well look, you couldn't move it--try one of the shoes ... well look,
there, you see--why, you couldn't carry the weight over the
side--three hundred and twenty-five pounds--of course it feels like a
feather once you're under water, but it'd be the getting there. Still
... well look, I'd like you to go down and see the _Will o' the
Wisp_--she lies so pretty, just twenty-eight feet under that buoy
there; we shall get the whisky out of her hold by to-morrow night, I
guess, if there really are only a hundred cases. No--she's not worth
salving, herself--she was only a dot-and-carry-one old schooner and
she crumpled her bows right in, running into that rock there--the sea
was pretty high and the old man must have lost his head.... It's only
the whisky the owners want out of her; well look, right here, within a
hundred miles of the Yankee buyers, whisky's worth something, I can
tell you. Well look, lady, I'd like you to see her--well, why don't
you go down in this gadget here, what the niggers use when they don't
want to bother with the whole caboodle--nothing but the helmet and
the tube, you see--works just as well for a short trip."

_Well look_, he said so often--who _was_ that like--with that mumbled
_well_, like _wll_, and the open throaty _look_--"_wll lok_." It was
like _Nana_--he might be Nana's son--that was why the connection--or
disconnection--in her memory had made her so uncomfortable. Everything
connected with Nana was wounding. The thought of Nana brought in a
rush into her mind a young lifetime of croonings and hummings and
comfortings and scoldings and rockings and forgivings ... and
then--_crash_--a day when Amos discovered that Nana, turned from nurse
to housekeeper, had during these twenty years stolen eight hundred and
thirty pounds out of the money given her for her charge's upkeep. The
widow profiting by the orphan's trust. Nana turned out of the house.
Amos shouting, "You're lucky we don't care to prosecute...." Nana's
sailor son--who happened to be in Harwich--sent for in a great uproar.
"Call yesself a gentleman--this is how you reward my old mother's
lifetime of service.... Wait till I get you alone--I'll get a chance
to get even with you some day...." She had only seen Nana's son on
that occasion--she had looked over the banisters and seen him shaking
his fist. The man on the raft _was_ like him. Amos would not notice
it--he was so short-sighted. Besides, it was ten years ago. But "_wll
lok_"--it was Nana's exact intonation. Surely the coincidence could be
_too_ extraordinary. She and Amos were only here by chance, yachting
in the West Indies--had come here idly to this lonely lagoon, having
heard of the wreck of the little smuggler. "Why, there's diving--oh,
what fun, Vi, let's dive...." So here they were, by chance, at the
bottom of the sea, at the mercy of a man on a raft--who was like
Nana's son. By chance. "I'll get a chance to get even...." _Was_ it
Nana's son? Now, suddenly, she remembered that he had said to Amos,
"Some people like diving, and some do it once and never do it again."
Amos had said, "We shall never get a chance to do it again, whether we
like it or not." And Nana's son had replied, "Probably not." (It _was_
Nana's son.) Then, to the negroes, "You goggling idiots, can't you--aw
hell--well then, get to hell out of here. I'll do it myself." He would
work the pump himself.

The young woman, alone in a squealing bubbling silence in the crater,
looked about her in a panic, moving jointlessly like a cheap puppet.
She thought thirstily of the safe dry air--of the light sky--of
birds--of England--Oh to be in England now that April's here; there's
the wise elm he grows each twig twice over.... She tentatively pulled
her air tube--the signal for help from the raft. There was no
answering pull. She could probably swim upward unaided--indeed she had
some difficulty in remaining down. But Amos in his leaden armour....
Where was Amos? Where was the wreck of the _Will o' the Wisp_--?--he
would be there. She began to climb prancingly up the side of the
crater, a mild slope of perhaps six feet but as difficult as a
mountain to her unwieldy feet. At the edge of the crater at last, she
could see the wreck quite near, looking very different from her
expectation. It looked like a little leaning house with a swinging
door; the mast, with flags of blackish seaweed, was like a dying tree
over the little house, and the ominous green light added to its
menaced look. A waltzing inverted Spanish onion bowing to the crushed
bows of the ship was identifiable as Amos. As his wife approached, the
unsuspicious Amos, in one flying stride like a slow motion cinema
study, aimed himself at the sloping deck of the schooner, reached it,
slipped and fell, and lay in the scuppers. He did all this with absurd
suspended ponderousness; his helmet, of course, could not change its
expression to a smile, and this immobility gave him the earnest look
of a puppy trying unsuccessfully for the first time to climb steps.
His wife, however, did not smile at his antics inside her own soberly
grinning mask. Somehow she reached the lower side of the ship,
bruising her shoulder against a stanchion. She could reach her Amos'
foot as he cautiously tried to get up. She pulled his foot; he sat
down again as abruptly as the supporting water would allow him to, and
bounced once. (What a field there is for a submarine low comedian!)
Amos made a flapping gesture of irritation, like the "Don't bovver me"
of a baby.

"Amos--come quickly--that's Nana's son, we're in danger," yelled his
wife. Her ears cracked. The squealing in her headpiece changed its
note and crackled; she felt almost suffocated; she reeled. Amos could
not hear a sound. He flapped foolishly again. "Amos--Amos--" She
pulled his ankle in panic--it was all she could reach of him. He tried
to draw it away. There was asperity in his flapping. She pointed
upward like a Salvation Army preacher. He turned his mask towards her;
she half saw his mouth moving behind the glass. He pointed at her and
pointed upward as he lay along the rail at an impossible angle. He was
evidently saying, "Go up yourself then, but leave me alone." This
squealing instead of silence was a more frightful answer than silence.
There he was, wrapped away in his own squealing sound-proof world. A
fish swam between him and her. "Amos--Amos," she screamed, and once
more was checked by semi-suffocation. Was the air being cut off from
above? Amos withdrew his leaden foot from her reach. He regained a
kind of perpendicularity and signed to her once more, peremptorily,
that she should soar away from him. He took one step away from her. As
a step, it failed. As a flight, it was unexpectedly successful; the
steep deck seemed to launch him backwards into space; he flew towards
his wife and, for a second, sat lightly on her iron face. She clasped
him round the middle; he doubled up like a jointed foot-rule. She was
saving him. She bounded about frantically. Amos managed to twist
himself out of her grasp but she caught his arm. "It's Nana's son up
there--an enemy." She clung with both hands to his rubber wrist,
dragging him. Amos, she could see, was now quite alarmed--not
suspicious of foul play but dumbfounded by the frenzied behaviour of
his wife. He pulled his safety cord. They were instantly caught up to
heaven together, floating sideways, intertwined, through the blowing
current, like G.F. Watts' _Paolo and_ _Francesca_. Their two round
steel heads collided at the surface, at the foot of the raft's ladder.
Some one lifted our young woman's false head off; she was herself
again--she was herself in her bathing suit, unarmoured, safe, as
though coming aboard after a common swim. A face bent over her. Nana's
son? What _had_ she been thinking of? This man was not in the least
like Nana's son; he was short and broad--Nana's son had been tall and
knock-kneed; this man on the raft was obviously Australian--he greeted
her with an unmistakable accent, and his first words were not _wll
lok_, but _lok here, lidy_.... What madness of memory had caught her,
down there in that new senseless shadowed world?

Amos was being helped up the ladder. Some one opened his little window
and his voice leapt out like a bird out of a cage. "Good Lord, Vi,
what in the world...?" as the raftman helpfully wrenched his iron
head off.




HAIRY CAREY'S SON


"My father," said Doctor Bligh, "lived on this island about a hundred
years ago.... Seems a long time ago doesn't it, but ... well, let me
see ... where are we now ... nineteen hundred--yes--I'm over sixty and
my father was over sixty when I was born. He lived here as a boy; he
was born in Cardiff in 1785...."

All the way south from New York Doctor Bligh had been carefully _not_
saying this. Ridiculously melodramatic though the conclusions were
that might be drawn from the information that a harmless elderly
passenger's father had lived on Lily Island a hundred years ago--drawn
they might be, and especially by a facetious joker like Captain Fink.

"A hundred years ago on Lily Island," mused the captain in arch
meditation. "Why--then he must have been a pirate!"

"There--you see!" said Doctor Bligh to himself. "You see what havoc
three brandies and sodas after midnight can do with one's privacy!"
However, the confidential impetus was irresistible now. Besides it
was such a good retort to the captain's waggishness. "He _was_ a
pirate," said Doctor Bligh, leaning dramatically forward and then
throwing himself back in his chair as if to watch the resulting
excitement.

There was no excitement. The captain of the _Rising Day_, who suffered
from a strong quivering spasm of the breath when amused, gave but a
faint exhibition of it now, and rubbed his nose. What a silly old man
this was, he thought. The old ass had been talking of the criminal
frivolity of hospital nurses all the way from New York and now he says
his father was a pirate. "We get quite a lot of pirate yarns told us,
one way or another," sighed the captain. "But I don't remember hearing
of any famous pirate on Lily Island called Bligh."

"He changed his name. When Queen Victoria came to the throne. That was
when he ceased to be really proud of his past. His real name was
Carey."

"Good Lord! Not Hairy Carey?" cried the captain, checking his tumbler
three inches from his lips.

Doctor Bligh looked at him in some alarm. "I didn't know it was such a
well-known name on Lily Island. If I had known it was a by-word I
wouldn't have told you the name."


"It's so long ago," said the captain. "I don't think I should trouble
to be shy about it, if I were you. Anyway Hairy Carey didn't leave a
scoundrelly reputation, you know--not like the man they called the Old
Duke. Carey didn't have time--he was just a kid, I believe, when
piracy was stamped out. The only thing they say about him, as far as I
know, is that he grew a beard when he was twelve, and that he fell
through a hole in an inland cave once and bobbed up like a cork fifty
yards out at sea. There's a song that the niggers sing about
it--that's the only reason why Lily Island remembers Hairy
Carey--because it rhymes with scarey and wary and fairy...."

"What are you laughing at?" asked Doctor Bligh rather crossly.

"I'm not laughing," laughed the captain. "I was looking at Young
Rummie here, collecting information about Hairy Carey--and collecting
it through his mouth, apparently...."

Doctor Bligh turned irascibly to follow the direction of the captain's
look. Young Rummie, the ship's boy, with his back to the two men, was
fiddling with some glasses on a tray. His innocent young neck was
claret-coloured with embarrassment.

"Have you come to Lily Island to hunt for your father's buried
treasure?" persisted the wheezing captain. "Got a chart drawn in blood
and everything just so?" Doctor Bligh saw his roguish distorted eye
through the bottom of his tumbler, and wished he could throw something
at it and distort it for good and all.

"No," he said shortly. "My father had a good position in the tobacco
trade in England. He never made a penny out of the adventures of his
boyhood." How undignified it was, thought Doctor Bligh, for a
respectable general practitioner to be mixed up with the kind of story
that excites cabin-boys and causes negroes to burst into song. Why on
earth had he brought the subject up? It had been perfectly safe in his
own mind. Really, of course, it had never been safe at all since he
had found that paper. It had seethed so much in his mind that it was
bound sooner or later to bubble over the brim before he could stop it.
"My father had a sentimental fondness for this island," added Doctor
Bligh. "As a very old man, especially, he often fancied himself on
Lily Island. But it was a purely sentimental feeling, and it is on
purely sentimental grounds that I have long wished to visit an island
that my father held in such happy memory."

"There isn't much sentiment on Lily Island," said the captain. "Or
much of anything else either, for that matter."

"Well, good-night," said Doctor Bligh, finding to his surprise as he
stood up that his feet were a little unsteady, even though the _Rising
Day_ was at anchor and perfectly motionless. "I have to get up early
to-morrow, if I want to get my walk over before the sun gets too hot."

On the deck, on the way to his cabin, the doctor paused and looked at
Lily Island across a stretch of striped glass water polished by
moonlight. The low uneven land was blurred black against the sky.
Stars floated out of the land to follow the flying moon.

Doctor Bligh was saying this phrase to himself: "Fifty thousand pounds
under a Cow's Lick." Whenever he thought of that phrase he felt a
certainty and then a sort of squirm. What an absurd position to be
in--if one wore woollen underclothes and weighed two hundred
pounds--to be the reluctant slave of a romantic quest. It was as
though he had been mysteriously impelled to find joy in the possession
of a popgun and the taste of bulls-eyes.

"Pleessa," said a voice near him. He turned to see the tiresome
freckled face of Young Rummie. "Pleessa--I couldn't help hearing what
you was talking about in there-sa. Pleessa _please_ may I come with
you-sa, to look for your father's treasure-sa. I bin to the island
often before-sa, and I'm strong and useful-sa...."

"Good God, boy," snapped the doctor. "What _are_ you talking about? My
father's treasure, indeed! Do I look like a man with a father who had
any treasure? My father lived for fifty years after he left this
island. If he had any treasure or knew of any treasure why should he
have left it here or anywhere else without coming to get it? You go to
hell, and stay there."

"I thought you told the cap'n your father was Hairy Carey-sa."

"Go to hell," repeated Doctor Bligh, but a little more doubtfully now.
Was it possible that the boy had heard of or found something on the
island? "What do you know about Carey?"

"On'y that he was about my age-sa--and that song about him...." And
the irritating child began to sing in the creaking voice peculiar to
the middle teens.

     Where-a you been, Hairy Carey?
     Down-do-down, I bin drowned.
     You go an' ask the green growin' fishes
     Down-do-down
     Down-do-down
     Down-do-down what I found.

What were boys coming to! exclaimed Doctor Bligh to himself. Butting
into the treasure hunts of their elders and betters and insisting on
singing to them, uninvited, in the middle of the night. "Captain Fink
was mistaken, if you _must_ know. My father was no pirate. He was very
much interested in tobacco culture and came here some years ago to
make experiments."

"Yessa," said the boy with docility.

"There were no pirates in his day."

"No-sa."

"Anything else you want to ask me?" asked Doctor Bligh in a withering
voice.

"No-sa. On'y--please, _pleessa_ let me come with you on your treasure
hunt-sa...."

Doctor Bligh walked furiously away across the deck to his cabin.
"Fifty thousand pounds under a Cow's Lick," he thought. He carried
always in his inner pocket the scrap of unexplained paper found
between the pages of an old notebook labelled _Heavens Sugar Farm_.
The writing--on the torn-out fly-leaf of a book called _Beauty's
Dower_, published in London by Mr. Atkinson, MDCCXC--was not his
father's writing. It was a mincing deliberate hand, and seemed almost
as if idle fingers had gone over it again and again, crossing and
super-crossing t's, dotting i's with galaxies of stars, adding frills
to the capital letters. There was nothing to explain what it meant,
or who scribbled it so, or how it got there among the papers of a
reformed pirate. "Fifty thousand pounds under a Cow's Lick...." Doctor
Bligh had first seen this scrap of paper on going through his father's
possessions forty years ago when the old man died. At the time it had
made no impression on him at all, for he had been a sober
single-hearted young doctor filled with the determination to Do Good
and Make Good. Now that the paper had become almost an obsession with
him, he found it difficult to understand how he could have seen it so
indifferently in his hot youth. But really his youth had never been
hot--only in his mysteriously rchauff middle age had Doctor Bligh
suddenly become tired of tepid duty. Anything would have done as a hot
sauce for duty--golf--stamp collecting--the Primrose League--Angora
rabbits--only it happened to be buried treasure. An idle rediscovery
of the scrap of paper, and some idle speculation upon its meaning had
lighted a discreet fuse which led to an explosion of fantastic
convictions about an actual buried treasure on Lily Island. And with
the thought of buried treasure, all kinds of romantic and grisly
half-recollections had found their way into Doctor Bligh's
consciousness. His mind's ear added ambiguously, fragment by
fragment, to his memory of what old Bligh--late Hairy Carey--had said
from time to time, fifty years ago. "It wasn't so much that the Old
Duke was a murderer--he didn't murder people who crossed him,
exactly.... There were none of the traditional pirate scenes in his
ship--she was just dirty and dull and as much like your modern tramp
steamers as a schooner can be--with just that wicked freak of speed
thrown in. But there was a sort of crooked indirect curse on
everything the Old Duke touched--he didn't murder a man who offended
him--but he made a murderer of that man--and in such a way that it
wasn't generally the dead man that was most to be pitied. So his
property was always safe; he protected it with the _irrelevance_ of
his cruelty. It was to every one's interest, somehow, not to offend
the Old Duke." Had the old pirate said something like that, or had his
son imagined it all, in the light of this new inexplicable romantic
brooding? "Am I really on the track of accursed treasure?" Doctor
Bligh thought. "Am I to have adventures at last, before I die?"

Doctor Bligh slept and dreamed that he looked from the deck of the
_Rising Day_ and saw, on the island, a broad road apparently leading
up easily to a terrace between the hoofs of a colossal golden cow
upon the skyline. And yet, in his dream, he could not start on his
walk along the road because there was no boat in which he could be
rowed ashore, nor any one to row him--only, in the distance, so
elusive that the frantic dreamer sought him in vain, a singer singing
in a faint wild treble voice.

Captain Fink had early breakfast with his passenger in the morning.
"Young Rummie can row you ashore," he said. "And you'd better arrange
with him where he shall meet you and at what time. Unless you'd like
to take him and walk along to the Cove, three or four miles south, and
meet us there. We have to drop down there for a few dozen crates of
fruit when we've finished the little bunch now alongside. We'll be
there about sunset. We go out at high water to-morrow."

"I'll do that alone," said Doctor Bligh. "I don't fancy that Young
Rummie much. He follows me about like a dog."

"He doesn't want to lose sight of the son of Hairy Carey, eh?" said
the captain with an attack of his merry asthma. "Oh, come on,
Doctor--even you must have been young once...."

Young Rummie rowed the little boat energetically over the gorgeous
green water. Doctor Bligh, looking down, could see half-defined
shapes in the water--peacock-coloured shadows that melted before they
could be realized. The little beaked garfish skidded, splintering
light and spray, from the tip of one wave to another. A great
heart-shaped sting-ray slid across a patch of pearl-green sand thirty
feet below, with a rolling ripple of its frills. In the distance sober
somersaulting fins marked the progress of three or four grampuses,
wheeling in slow suspended acrobatics across the roof of their green
world.

"Please _pleessa_, let me come with you to-day. Pleessa, I'm sorry to
go on botherin' you, but I can't bear it--I can't bear not to
go-sa.... It may be the last chance I get, goin' after treasure-sa.
I'm _born_ to go after treasure-sa--pleessa _please_ give me a
try-sa.... I'm such a resourceful feller-sa--it might just make the
difference to finding the--"

"How many times am I to tell you, you young fool--" shouted Doctor
Bligh, "that there's no question of treasure. Didn't you hear me tell
you--my father was here planting pineapples and--"

"Tobacco-sa."

"I said _pineapples_. As I told you, I am thinking of investing ... I
mean investigating...." He broke off. "What's the matter with me?" he
thought irritably. "Going on lying ... as if it was worth while
explaining anything to this pink rat of a boy. What he really needs is
a good whipping." Yet, looking along the little boat at Young Rummie's
ugly shining face, bobbing backwards and forwards as he rowed, Doctor
Bligh, with that inconsequence he was now coming to recognize as one
of the perils of middle age, felt unexpectedly tolerant. A tooth was
missing in the front of Young Rummie's broad mouth, and somehow this
chink in the otherwise tough rubber armour of his youth made Doctor
Bligh conscious of the anxious, desperately expectant heart beating
beneath that dirty and childishly narrow singlet. As if, with the
disclosure of the lost tooth, a tiny window had been opened.

"I don' cair-sa," said Young Rummie, after clearing his throat
nervously. "I must--I _must_ foller you-sa, whatever you say-sa.... I
hope you'll forgive me-sa--when I've proved me worth...."

"If you want to inform yourself about pineapples under cultivation,"
said Doctor Bligh, grinding his teeth with anger, "follow me and be
damned to you. I can't stop you. Lily Island's not my property."

The little village of Corkscrew Bay squatted under its crooked palms
and casuarinas on a bend in the narrow harbour. On the striped sand
and seaweed beach, as the little boat ran ashore, white and mauve
branches of coral lay among petalled shells that were like pink roses.
The ragged black village children, fluttering with faded cottons,
gathered on the beach to watch strangers arrive. The men of the
village were standing in a group round the mate of the _Rising Day_,
listening to his curses. That agitated man, his coat off, sweat
running into his eyes and dripping from his chin, stood, like a
defender, beside a complicated frail fortress built of pineapple
crates. He was hoarsely and hopelessly exhorting the crowd of negroes
to get to work. The men watched him rather plaintively and passively,
as though more of the sense of what he was saying reached them through
their wide wet eyes, their broad clumsy polished noses, their thick
open mouths--than through the ears that leaned out from their dark
skulls.

"Well, all I can say is ..." said the mate in an exhausted voice when
he saw Doctor Bligh. "Give me baboons--give me the blind pups of a
cross-eyed bitch--give me half-baked clams--give me--"

"You find the islanders unintelligent?" said Doctor Bligh. "Look here,
Mr. Wilkins, why don't you keep Young Rummie to help you get these
crates aboard ... he was sent here as a sort of guide for me, but as a
matter of fact I can well spare him."

"Please--pleessa--" Young Rummie's thin voice was full of a real
panic.

"There's only an hour's work here," said the mate. "I'd send the boy
after you."

"Oh, I shan't need him."

"Pleessa--pleessa--_pleessa_--"

"Damn you, boy--Well.... I'll come back for you in an hour's time....
There's nothing--there's _nothing_ to look for.... You're making a
silly mistake.... Oh, all right then, I'll come back--I won't forget."

"Hey, you Rummie," shouted the mate with alacrity.

Free of his follower at last, Doctor Bligh strode away along a narrow
path that led through the high guinea grass. For the first time he
wondered what actual steps he could take to decode the mysterious
message and apply it to the country in front of him. "Fifty thousand
pounds under a Cow's Lick." The whole affair from beginning to end had
been so far contrary to the ordered plans of his life that, for the
first time in his life, plans had seemed wholly irrelevant. Here he
was, on Lily Island, under a spell, the magic wording of which
was--"Fifty thousand pounds under a Cow's Lick." Of course it was all
nonsense. Surely an elderly retired doctor is free to travel when his
work is done. Why should not Lily Island be as good a destination as
any other for a slightly asthmatically inclined professional gentleman
in search of sea air and sunlight? Doctor Bligh looked uneasily round
the horizon, regretting the translucent and candid horizon of last
night's dream. Behind him was the village, scrawled with the shadows
of palms and crazy huts; behind the village was a small valley pitted
with pineapple holes. Round Doctor Bligh, shoulder-high, was the
guinea grass, varied here and there with dangling angular jumba beans
and with prickly pears and organ pipe cactuses. The low hills all
round were furred over with frizzed brush, as evenly as negroes' heads
are capped with wool. A rather higher strip of land in front of the
traveller was spiked along the skyline with century palms--some closed
like giant asparagus shoots, others opened out into jejune forks and
fans. Far beyond this ridge of land was a higher ridge, only one bluff
of which could be seen through a cleft in the near ridge. And that far
bluff--was it Doctor Bligh's imagination?--was it perhaps an effect
due to the abrupt framing in the near gorge?--the resemblance was very
vague--yet _was_ it so vague?... Doctor Bligh turned away for a
moment to give his eyes a chance of blotting out their prejudice in
favour of romance. The bluff, he now saw quite clearly, looked like a
cow's head and shoulders--there was a quite bovine hump behind the
shoulders.... It was a hornless cow, to be sure, unless one
counted--but that would be foolishly fanciful--those two tall century
palms as horns. The throat of the cow--that narrow receding flapping
pendulous throat--was very clearly suggested, thought Doctor Bligh,
trying to keep quite cool and unbiased. All the same, he wished he
could look at that cow's head for a second with fresh eyes. If Young
Rummie were here, one could say, "What does that bluff remind you of?"
Doctor Bligh was afraid of his own judgment now. He remembered how he
had deceived his imagination with his pirate-father's stories--now,
though he knew he had deceived himself, he could not say what was
false and what was real in that stammering tale.

He drew in his breath as a negro woman, carrying a tall bundle on her
head--a bundle crowned with boots and a trussed chicken, padded
towards him round a bend in the narrow path.

"Good morning," said Doctor Bligh.

"Ma-anin' za."

"Can you tell me the name of that hill?"

"Aye za."

"What _is_ its name?"

"Aye za."

"Hasn't got a name, eh?"

"Ya-azza."

"I was just thinking how like a cow's head it was. Did that ever
strike you or your friends?"

The woman turned her head with smoothness and caution under her
balancing bundle to look in the direction his finger indicated.
"Ya-azza," she said, her opaque brown eyes searching the horizon for
whatever might be the object of this unintelligible buckra's gaze.

"Like a cow--do you not think so?"

"Ca-aw za?"

"Yes, a cow's head. Can you see it?"

"Ya-azza."

"You can! Can you not tell me the name of the ridge?"

"Ca-aw's zed za."

"Cow's Head? Do you really mean that the ridge is called Cow's Head?"

"Ya-azza."

He searched her thick simple face with his eyes. Were his ears as well
as his eyes biased to the point of self-deception? "Thank you so much.
Good morning." He pushed along the path, combing the coarse yellow
grass with his shins.

As he reached the slope up to the near ridge, the grass gave place to
thick brush. A little breeze made all the short unkempt palms amid the
brush seem to turn their backs. The path, which could barely push
between the pale-stemmed bristles of the shrubs, gave a wide berth to
the clumps of sisal and the century palm, with their defensive sheaves
of spears, but sometimes the detour was not wide enough, and Doctor
Bligh's thin neat tussore trousers were soon torn and the plump neat
legs beneath them severely scratched.

When, gasping, he reached the top of the near ridge, one thing was
certain--he would not go back for Young Rummie. He had never meant
very seriously to do so. He noticed that the Cow's Head had
receded--had, apparently, side-slipped to quite a different point of
the compass, and to a site at least twice as far away as he had
expected. Without its frame, too, it was less arrestingly like--but
no; it _was_ like a cow's head. Between him and it lay a large
lake--probably invisibly connected with the sea. Several of the ridges
around this lake seemed to be paltry imitations of a cow's head too,
but Doctor Bligh guiltily averted his mind from this suspicion. _His_
cow, he told himself firmly, looked more like a cow than ever; it must
have been a famous landmark for the pirates, as it evidently now was
to the negroes. After a minute's thought, Doctor Bligh decided to walk
down to the lake and then follow its western shore. As far as he could
see, a broadish rocky ledge formed a more or less continuous rim to
the lake; the bands of green thicket that interrupted this rocky strip
seemed to him negligible from a distance. He almost ran down the slope
to the water. The path he was following led straight into the lake,
made no effort to veer to right or left. At its terminus lay the
submerged skeleton of an old boat, with small striped fishes whisking
between her ribs. Doctor Bligh began to walk along the terrace of rock
beside the water. The high sun was giving a more and more breathless
quality to the heat. The wind that had disturbed the palms on the
ridge was still now. All the air quivered, and from the long spindling
rafts of glare upon the lake, splintering spears of light were aimed
to pierce the sight. Doctor Bligh found it very much more difficult
than he expected, to walk along the waterside. The rock, a coral
formation, was pitted with sharp-edged craters. And at every few dozen
yards the rock surrendered the shore to mangroves.

Each strip of encroaching mangroves meant an obstacle of almost
desperate difficulty. The mangroves sprawled in a sort of angular
horizontal scaffolding over the water. Roots sloped tautly into the
water, like the legs of spiders. Footholds among these roots were
always slanting and slippery, and were treacherously concealed by the
bright juicy disks of the leaves. The branches were breast-high.
Doctor Bligh, bruised about the shins and wet to the knees, negotiated
three mangrove entanglements, and then he felt that he would rather
press on in the hope of finding an end to them than return by such an
arduous and revolting route. Inviting stretches of firm pale rock in
front tempted him with promises of better going presently. But these
promises always proved to be illusory; the mangrove strips stretched
wider and wider, and finally Doctor Bligh, achieving a strip of rock
after an hour's frenzied battle with fifty yards of malevolent swamp
roots, gave up. He sank down almost fainting, his set sweating face
buried in his hands. The heat of the sun seemed to throb about his
body. He could not keep his face covered, in spite of the glare; his
hands suffocated him. He decided to drink half the brandy and water he
had in his flask, and to eat one of the biscuits the steward had given
him. He looked about wildly as he ate. Where the rock again
surrendered to the swamp, a graceful grey bird like a small crane,
too young to fly, threaded itself like a silver hook among the angular
lacey intricacies of the mangroves. Its parents, less innocent about
the dangers of human proximity, flew in the air above it, planing with
outstretched neck and legs in a tilted obtuse angle.

"I must strike inland," thought Doctor Bligh, noticing that a
promontory of dry scrub pierced the swamp to a point quite near him.
Now he realized that by following the lake shore he had lost his Cow's
Head. The ridge was still there, with its two pin shapes of century
palm, but perspective had completely robbed it of any suggestion of a
cow. "I must strike west again across country." Certainly the matted
brush could not be more heartbreaking to walk through than the
mangroves were. He crossed the intervening yard or two of swamp-growth
and struggled in the clawing stubborn brush, like a fly in a spider's
web. At least, as he at first thought, he was spared the glare on the
water. Then he realized that he was robbed also of the slight coolness
of stirring air that belonged to the lake. He made slowly towards a
twisted casuarina tree which, in that low thicket, seemed to stand
like a memorial and spread a sanctuary of shade. Not only were the
close-growing shrubs difficult to push through, but deep mazy pits
continually waylaid the lost man's steps--pits sometimes ten feet
deep--traces of rolling seas long dried--holes made often perfectly
circular by the bowling of imprisoned uneasy stones--galleries pierced
by long departed tides between one curvy cell and another. Bananas
were planted in the rich black earth that lined such pits. The banana
fronds, down in the pit where no wind disturbed them, were virgin and
whole, like the pages of unread books, but the topmost plumes, which
Doctor Bligh came to appreciate as warnings of the deep traps laid in
the wilderness, were tattered and torn by exposure to the creeping hot
wind. Doctor Bligh hoped that these bananas, which must have been
planted by men, meant that he would presently come upon a path or a
cabin. But he reached the casuarina after hours of effort without
finding any further trace of men.

The tree stood on the edge of a low knoll, and its roots, mostly
exposed, clung to the dusty bank like knuckles. Between the roots was
a blackness--the crooked mouth of a cave. Doctor Bligh Walked straight
across the band of shade he had so ardently longed for, and, in a
stride and two stumbles, he was down in the cave. He found himself in
a kind of antechamber in a half light striped by gaunt and crumbling
columns. Behind these columns a black passage led downward. Doctor
Bligh felt in his pockets. He had a few matches--eighteen, to be
exact. He was so deeply exhausted that he had but little sense, and he
started down the black gallery, lighting his first match as soon as he
came to the end of level ground. The passage led downward over
unsteady red boulders. Some of the stones were set rolling by his
tread, but he went carefully and did not fall. By the time the ground
became level again, he had used five matches. He tried now to be
cautious, not only in actual economy of matches, but also in economy
in the glances he threw here and there into each brief dazzle. He
tried not to waste glances on the fluted white ceiling, the bats, the
sinuous water-carvings on the walls, the fantastic half-articulate
friezes of pattern, the pendulous needles of runed coral, the
pinnacled pillars aspiring from the floor. He tried to look first and
last at the floor before him. It was the fourteenth match that showed
a black patch on the floor immediately in front of him. He had noticed
these patches before, but since they had not lain actually in his path
he had passed them by without investigation. The concentration of
light on this last patch seemed to be too much for the poor spirit of
the match. He lit another more carefully, as he crouched on the
ground. Before him he now saw an abrupt pit, showing bottomless to the
scope of matchlight. Doctor Bligh, an already overstrained man, began
to quake. "I must get out of this," he thought. "Why did I come down
here?" and as he turned to retreat, he heard the sipping rustle of
water scores of feet below in the pit. He lit another match. Behind
him a ridge of rock not more than two feet across divided the fluted
rims of two more pits, between which he must have walked in the fitful
light without suspicion. He had one match left now.

Doctor Bligh was, after all, an old man. His whole dilemma, from the
beginning of the expedition till now, had been the result of an old
man's rebound into youthful irresponsibility from a life spent in
arduous and precise duty. The same tired old brain that had re-read so
hopefully the scribble on the fly-leaf of _Beauty's Dower_, had now
failed to allocate reasonably resources of light and time in the
search. Now the thin staff of romantic excitement gave way. He sank
down and lay, half-huddled against the wall, for a long time in the
dark.

He could hardly have slept, but he must have been sunk in a sort of
trance, for when he noticed at last that a distant light shone ahead
of him--how far away he could not guess--he realized that his eyes
had long been fixed senselessly upon it. He shouted; his heart nearly
strangled him as the raucous echoes crashed about him; a rustle began,
which he diagnosed after a moment as the bats waking in the hollows of
the ceiling. The distant light did not move. He lit his last match, as
an answer and an appeal to the light. No sign of recognition. Groping
very cautiously on hands and knees, he felt the rim of the pit in
front of him. His hand did not dare to leave the solid stone--he felt
that if he should suddenly find clear space beneath his hand he would
tip forward and fall headlong into terrible depths. But his hand made
sure at last that the rim curved away from him, leaving a shelf
several feet wide between the pit and the wall. He crawled along this,
inch by inch, never trusting a first scouting hand, but verifying its
discoveries with agonized and repeated pressure. He gathered no
courage from his successful circumvention of this pit. His imagination
bored more frightful shafts of space in every direction in which he
moved his tremulous hand. But after some hours of this painful
progress, the corner of a curtain of rock seemed suddenly lifted, and
a powdering of stars spangled the space thus revealed. The further he
crawled, the more widely did this blessed pricked doorway into freedom
seem opened. The roaring of the clear sea now drowned the deadly
subterranean sucking and moaning of secret channels. He identified the
light he had first seen as the reflection of a star in a water cup
formed in the peak of a frustrated stalagmite by a too impetuous
dripping from the hanging point above it. The little crater full of
water, when he reached it, seemed to accumulate more than its share of
light; it almost glowed. He thought it looked as brittle and fey as a
moon crater. He drank the cool water most gratefully. He tried not to
quicken his painful crawl as he found himself facing an apparently
unobstructed passage to the stars. There might still be traps. But at
last, there he was, on the lip of a cave halfway down an overhanging
cliff. The sea knocked at the under surface of a deep shelf below him.
Only the stars, the moon and a giddy silvered screen of vertical stone
towered above him. He ate his last biscuit, finished what he had in
his flask, and slept.

When he awoke, after a confused and painful sleep, it was daylight,
and the first thing that he realized was the next headland. It was
quite close, and it was unmistakably the neck of yesterday's Cow's
Head. There was that overhanging fluted flap of stone that had, from a
distance, seemed to lead so appropriately from the cow's lower jaw to
its chest. The romancer had seen it from a vantage point that had not
been high enough to show him that nothing but the deep sea lay at the
foot of the jut. Under the Cow's Lick--under the sea, his imagination
had placed the fifty thousand pounds of his vision. Only the slow
green waves shone at the foot of that bovine fantasy in stone. Doctor
Bligh looked for a time at the hopeless face of the stone, feeling
disillusionment pervade his heart. He saw then, pricking out of the
profile of the cliff, a pimple, a hair, a brown wart, the bows of a
boat, finally the whole of a little brown fishing boat tacking along
the coast.

When the boat was within hailing distance, Doctor Bligh gave a loud
cry. His voice sounded to him like the new voice of a dumb man. The
boat turned towards the cliff. An old brown man was sitting in her,
picking over some small fish that lay in the wash in her bottom.

"No way da-an from thar, za," shouted the old man thinly. "You'll
ha-ave to make a dive of it. Best go ba-ack through the ca-aive."

Doctor Bligh, who during the first few words had been looking down
appalled at the deep swinging water, when he heard the last
suggestion, threw himself instantly, all askew, from the lip of the
cave into the sea. After several choking centuries, he was able to
breathe air instead of water. In a moment he was grasping the old
man's hand and, after a breast-bruising, shin-bruising struggle, he
was in the boat, treading on a squirming fish.

"You'd best a gone ba-ack troo the ca-aive, za," piped the old man.

"I'll give you anything you like to get me to the Cove before high
water."

"Z'aba-at four hours sa-ail, za," said the old man. "Yer on the
wra-ang shore of Lily A-aland."

Doctor Bligh sat in the bows, getting gradually dry, looking with
incredulous distaste at his scarred and blood-caked legs--one entirely
denuded of trouser from the knee down, the other clad only in tatters.
He found it impossible to reconcile this sight with the fact that one
month ago he had been a medical man in good standing at Monmouth. For
a dreaming second it seemed to him that though the blood came, in
appearance, from superficial scratches on his legs, really it flowed
from a wound in his spirit that was mortal. He dozed a little,
presently, and when he woke he began to believe again in a probability
he had lost sight of--the hope that he had a future of fastidious old
age at Monmouth in front of him--that all this nightmare of
melodramatic misfortune was a thing that would pass. Never again
would blood flow from this trespassing young spirit in his breast.

As the little boat made the final tack that would bring it round the
ultimate headland, Doctor Bligh saw for the last time the corroded
overhang that had seemed to him to join his Cow's Head to boundless
treasure below.

"Did you ever hear of a place-name like Cow's Lick connected with any
spot on this island?" he asked the old fisherman.

"Nuzz'n excep' the Ca-aw's Lick they fa-and the fifty tha-asand pa-and
under," said the old man.

Doctor Bligh stared at him, paralysed for a moment with astonishment.
"_Did_ they find Fifty Thousand Pounds under a Cow's Lick?"

"Na-za--not just like that, they didn'.... It's an a-alanders' sayin',
that--why, ye must have heard people on the a-aland sayin' Fifty
Tha-asand Pa-and under a Ca-aw's Lick. It's a saying fer a piece of
luck.... My fa-ather he tol' me the true ta-aile aba-at that
sayin'--how a man called Havens ha-ad a ca-aw, an' ca-aw went astray
da-an to beach, an' Havens went a-lookin' fer the ca-aw an' fa-and 'er
lickin' at a lomp salt that got thar some way, and all aroun' the
ca-aw thar floated that grease stuff--hunreds a-ya-ards of that thar
grease stuff--what you call that thar grease stuff that's worth sa
moch money--?"

"Ambergris?"

"Yeah--A guess so--ambergris.... An' Havens made a fortune outa what
he fa-and, an' he built a ha-ase and mek a sugar farm--just a ruin
now, it is--near the Cove an' he had his da-ater eddicated--pretty
girl, my fa-ather useter say, but spiled wiz bookla-arnin'--though
Havens was just ornery tra-ash himself--an' she married a ja-adge in
United Sta-aites. But Havens lost all his money when the sla-aives was
freed by Queen Victa-aria. And that's how the sayin' comes, my
fa-ather useter say--Fifty Thaa-asand Paa-and Under a Caa-aw's Lick."

"Beauty's Dower," thought Doctor Bligh; "It belonged to the pretty
daughter of Heavens Sugar Farm. And my susceptible young papa...." And
he now saw it all as a romance after all--the last shred of the callow
young Hairy Carey's romance. He said nothing more. The little boat
slid on towards the Cove. He had looked for his destination so long,
yet he reached it unexpectedly. Tacking round a headland they came
abruptly in sight of the _Rising Day_.

"Why--woz goin' on? exclaimed the old man, looking not at the ship but
at the shore. A group of men stood on the green grassy seam that
joined the white sand to the scrub. The old man sailed close inshore
and after a moment Doctor Bligh said, "Why--there's the
skipper--there's Mr. Wilkins--there's Tom and Veery Joe."

"Thar's a ca-affin," said the old fisherman. "It's a buryin'."

"Can you land me on this beach?" asked Doctor Bligh. The boat drew
alongside a rough natural pier in the pockmarked rock at the curve of
the bay. As Doctor Bligh, conscious of his tattered trousers and
peeling face, drew near to the rigid, Sunday-best-looking group,
Captain Fink came to meet him.

"Well, I'm damned," said Captain Fink, looking unlike himself and
certainly more damned than blessed. "Where in hell did you get to,
Doctor?"

"Whose grave is that?" asked Doctor Bligh.

"It's Young Rummie's.... Good Lord, poor little brute, and he's got a
mother in Cardiff and all that.... The kid lent a hand loading pines
yesterday and Wilkins says he nearly broke his heart over it ...
seemed to think you were coming back to take him on a trip or
something.... Good Lord, I wish you _had_ happened to take him along,
Doc.... It would have saved his life.... Wilkins wasn't too hard on
the little chap about the work--he was kind of sorry for him--the kid
fretted so--God knows why--and anyway, there wasn't more than an
hour's work. He consoled himself eating spoilt pineapples--the niggers
say he put away over a dozen--and by midnight he was off his
head--raving and screaming with pain.... Gosh, I tried every bleeding
thing I could think of--but of course I hadn't an idea really.... I
thought you'd turn up any minute. I had a couple of men out all night
looking for you ... and one with a boat, up and down the coast.... I'm
sure a doctor could have saved him.... There are three black parsons
in this bloody hole and not one doctor--black or white. The kid died
at sunrise."

"So this was the crooked curse," thought Doctor Bligh, forgetting that
his futile search had endangered no pirate's secret. He said nothing.
He walked up the beach and stood by Young Rummie's grave, dug just
where the sand marched with the limit of the red rockstrewn earth. And
as he stood, spent and strained, beside the grave, time seemed to spin
about him--yesterday seemed almost within his grasp, and youth a thing
returning, like a thunderstorm, against the wind. Yesterday--that
freak day astray at the wrong end of his life--he saw it glamorously
now--it was terribly desirable to him--and only an hour ago he had
dismissed it with relief. But--oh, now--come back, deferred bright
day--come back, lost gleam--lost youth....




AN OUT-ISLANDER COMES IN


"You'll soon get used to it all, girlie," said Willie. "Everything
takes a bit of getting used to--that's what I always say." His large
perspiring cheeks quivered as the Buick in which he sat quivered
splashily through the storm along the main street of Coffee Town. Rose
looked at the street full of strangenesses--at the rich shoes, the
rich jumpers, the rich white plus fours, the rich silken calves, of
the tourists seeking shelter from the storm in the doors of shops full
of Hyper-Best dresses.

"One can't get used to people who are all the same person," said Rose.
"All these people are the same one, dressed up in different funny
ways. One can't get used to a _one_...."

"Folks all look like a buncha freaks when you're new to 'em," said
Willie, who always confidently mistranslated, in a tone ten times
magnified, like a faulty loud speaker, everything that his bride said.

Still, the honour of having married an American had to be paid for
somehow. Rose, a sensible though untutored girl, had realized this
from the first. It was most rare for any inhabitant of Liver Island to
marry any one except another inhabitant of Liver Island. Sometimes a
young man crossed over from one of the Kidney Islands and chose a
Liver Island bride. Apart from this, the only other island inhabited
by white people within a day's sailing of Liver Island was Tripe Key,
on which only seven people lived, of whom Rose's cousin had married
the only man under fifty. But Rose had fallen right off her planet;
she had married an American. Willie, from New York, had been looking
for a site for a turtle-shell depot, and had found Rose. Rose had
never worn silk stockings or tasted ice-cream, or used face powder or
a lipstick. Her Sunday hat was six years old; it was made of wired
imitation lace and lay like a plate on the peak of her mountain of
bronze hair. "Better wear nothing on ya head than that fool-thing,"
said Willie. "Foller the crowd, that's what I always say--it's only
crazy folks that try to be different. I'll buy you a hat in Coffee
Town like my sister wears, with a fake diamond swaller in the front."
So Rose had given her dear romantic Sunday hat to a younger sister,
and hidden her hair in a tortured tam-o'-shanter bought at the
incredible city of Coffee Town. "One-horse burg, this; give me
N'York, that's what I always say to these foreigners," said
Willie--which showed what America must be, since Coffee Town, on Bacon
Island, was the great renowned capital of the Marmalado Islands.

Rose looked about Coffee Town through the stripes of the rain. In the
hotel lobby, while Willie was in the bar, seeing a man he knew, Rose
sat and looked about, feeling as though she were in a trance. On Liver
Island, although almost all the white people had the same
surname--Leggatt--the other differences between one person and another
were marked and known by every one. One knew that Abraham Leggatt's
John hated cats, was colour-blind, and dreamt often of his late
mother; one knew that Mary Leggatt's, Mary's Mollie always lost her
temper when she was hungry, and had a mole on her left shoulder-blade.
And if a stranger should come and say, "How like Miss Mary Leggatt is
to--er--Miss Mary Leggatt--I mean the other one, _not_ the one who
lives on Bay Street ..." any inhabitant of Liver Island would have
looked at him in astonishment as though at an imbecile. Nobody on
Liver Island _could_ be like any one else, except in name. Nobody, for
instance, shared common catchwords. Liver Islanders didn't talk
enough for that. They said _Ah_ with an upward inflexion when they
meant _yes_, and a downward _Ah_ when they meant _no_. Between _Ah_
and _Ah_ they only stated facts about birth, death, marriage,
religion, food, turtles, and sponges. But here in Coffee Town, every
one seemed to have a different name and yet to be the same person. The
tourists stood about the lobby uttering elaborate forms of words in
imitation of one another, and yet expressing no facts. "I said, see
here, son, I'm a man who.... What I always say is.... That's what I
always say.... It's a long time between drinks, as the Governor of
North Carolina.... You ladies are all alike ... it's the _principle_
of the thing I care about.... I always say...."

Here was Willie coming towards her, his large opaque brown eyes
rolling through horn'rimmed glasses, his beaked nose sniffing this way
and that. Rose waved her umbrella at him with rather an out-island
expansiveness. Willie looked politely but stonily at her and turned
his little fat eagle's nose towards another woman. Good gracious--it
was not Willie, after all--he wore Willie's clothes and Willie's nose
but he was not Willie. _Here_ was Willie, coming now--oh no, that one
was wearing white plus fours and a flame-coloured pullover; Willie
couldn't have changed his clothes in the bar. Ah--here was the real
authentic Willie--how absurd not to have been sure of one's own
husband--though only a two days' husband to be sure. Willie had seemed
to be the most _different_ person in the world on Liver Island, but
here in Coffee Town, every one seemed to be different in the same way.

"Well, girlie, bin kinda lonesome? I couldn't come sooner; there was a
guy there who had a very stimulating line of high-grade information
about a new material for toilet goods called rubberine something or
other; never pass up a chance to get education, that's what I always
say. I didn't take but two highballs, but I've got plenty of the best
on my hip. Be prepared for a rainy day, that's what I always say."

"Well, you couldn't have a rainier day than this," said Rose happily,
seizing his arm affectionately and leading him to the window.

"Smart baby," laughed Willie. "Knows what she wants and wants it right
now. But we haven't got time now, not even for a quick one, cutie, we
gotta beat it. The ship can't come into harbour--it's too rough; we
gotta get to the tender at South Bay by four."

The wind whined through the flapping chinks of the car's hood as they
drove between agitated shockheaded palm groves. From under the wheels
came the sharp sound of cloven pools of water.

"Too bad--this gale," said Willie. "I guess we gotta bum trip ahead of
us, girlie. But what can't be cured must be endured--that's what I
always say."

A perfect suburb of cars had sprung up beside the short pier at South
Bay. Scores of stoutish men in grey overcoats and grey hats and
expensive sporting shoes--as though all dressed by one divine
impulse--stood on the pier watching the sailors' efforts to control
the violent movements of several lifeboats. Scores of slim women in
biscuit-coloured coats, and brown hats nailed to the skull with
diamond ornaments, and thick legs encased in silk, and wine-coloured
lips below chalk noses, crouched in the pier shelter. Luggage, in
dwindling mountains on the pier, was being tumbled precariously into
the leaping boats. "The tender can't come right up to the pier in this
sea," said Willie. "Aw hell, this is going to be one bum party." He
then mingled with a crowd of other perfect imitations of himself on
the pier, and said with them, "You c'n take it from me ... it's the
_principle_ of the thing ... these fellers oughta ... don't know their
own business, that's what I always say...."

Three hours passed, while restive boats full of luggage and
passengers bounded with difficulty back and forth. A good many of the
waiting male passengers got drunk. The women and children did not,
because they had to keep sober enough to be protected from the dangers
of the embarkation by their reeling husbands and fathers. A great deal
of sobriety was needed for this, as Rose found when it was her turn to
leap into the pitching boat from the pier-head. "Weddle I say _jum_"
said Willie--was it Willie?--holding her awkwardly and painfully by
the upper arm. "Don' _jum_ till I say_ jum_, f'godsek...." Another
Willie, on the bucking edge of the boat below, held out his arms. The
boat rose violently to meet her, all askew. "Jum ... jump ... jum...."
Rose jumped; she was torn from one Willie, was in the arms of another,
was passed to a third. She was sitting in the boat. Great slaty waves
shut out the shore; the sky reeled; a distant lighthouse whisked a
feather of light across the dingy distance till a near wave leapt up
and obliterated it.

Rose, an out-islander, was well accustomed to small boats, and to
getting wet at the whim of waves. It was the tender that alarmed her,
and the distant liner frightened her still more. She had never been in
a steamer before--or indeed in anything inexplicably propelled, until
yesterday when the Buick carried her across Coffee Town. She watched
for the tender intermittently from view-points on the tottering peaks
of waves. It was nearly dark. The tender looked like a gold-toothed
snarl, the far liner like a sneer of lights. She sat feeling sick with
fright, wedged tightly in a row of elaborately undaunted women; the
bones she sat on seemed to be shifted by some insane pull of gravity
inside her wedged flesh, as the boat pitched this way and that.
Opposite to her was Willie, and there, two women down on her left, was
another unmistakable Willie. In the whirl and the dusk she could,
uneasily, see other Willies grouped in the stern. As the boat twitched
itself skilfully parallel with the ribs of the tender, Rose realized
that the larger vessel was lined with Willies. She felt altogether
alone in the midst of this superfluity, and began to cry
unobtrusively. Several Willies helped her from the lifeboat. She had
quite given up trying to distinguish the right one. They were all
kind. Two of them sat down beside her on a bench on the tender.
"Feeling kinda lonesome, girlie?" said one, and the other said, "I
gotta toothful of the best on my hip. Always hope for the best and be
prepared for the worst--that's what I always say."

"Why did he say _I_--not _we_?" wondered Rose vaguely.

The tender rose and fell with energy but with more dignity than the
little boat. The wind whined between canvas screens. There was a stir
among the passengers. "Where is she? there.... Gee ... she's gone ...
no--_there_...." Every one but Rose and one of her immediate Willies
moved to the tender's side. The other Willie came back and said,
"Lifeboat's engine stalled--she's being blown out to sea. Fourteen
passengers on board of her--but don't get rattled, little
lady--they'll be all right." Rose, chilled and exhausted, was not at
all rattled about the endangered boat; among so many Willies it seemed
that some could be spared.

Hurrying clouds tore themselves to shreds on the horn of a crescent
moon. The sea tossed and jostled Rose and a tender-full of Willies.
Rose was now, as far as appearances went, the only woman on board. The
other women had all shrunk into cracks and crannies of the vessel.
Around Rose lay, sat, stood, waved and reeled Willies in all
attitudes, at all stages of synthetic sobriety. A line of them leaned
against the rail, watching the search for the stray lifeboat,
commenting one to another, "Why don't they ... if I was them ... know
their own business.... I said to the captain, say, listen, cap, why
don't you ... he had to admit afterwards, say, listen, he said, that
sure was some good advice you handed ... that's what I always say ...
I just said, say, listen...."

The thick clumsy blade of the tender's search-light lashed out through
the dark, pricking a rock, a flare of spray, a distant palm tree, a
searching lifeboat, with light like a quick short dream.

"Found--found--found," said all the Willies suddenly. "Gee--found 'em
at last.... I knoo they would ... if they done that right at the
start.... I said, say, listen, cap ... isn't that fine.... I guess the
other boat's picked 'em up.... I guess Ed's glad he had a droppa the
best on the hip.... Be prepared for the worst, that's what I always
say...."

Rose, though cramped and cold, was half asleep on her bench. No less
than six faithful Willies now guarded her rest, each with a wad of gum
inside his large soft cheek, each watching Rose kindly through
horn-rimmed glasses. When the tender, drunkenly approaching her
mothership, ran impetuously into her on an irresistible wave, breaking
off large portions of her superstructure, quite a dozen Willies
snatched Rose from under a shower of splintered wood. The force of the
gangway, craning wildly from the pitching liner to the rolling tender,
was broken by the intervening figures of thirty Willies, who threw
themselves between it and Rose.

In the liner at last, the passages echoed with the voices of a chorus
of Willies asking where was the state-room of Mrs. Willie Gold. Rose
felt swallowed up, irrevocably digested, by this monster full of
Willies. She rushed into a cabin and sat weeping on the bed. The
cabin, arranged by a cabin steward who was himself a flawless Willie,
looked, though she was too ignorant to know it, like a cabin steward's
ideal cabin--unsleepable-in apple-pie beds--undrinkable-out of
upside-down water glasses--unwashable-in disappearing
basin--unsittable-on folded campstool--unhangable-in pegless
wardrobe--all bleakly neat, and designed to make the passenger feel
nothing but an uncouth intrusion. But Rose disarranged the bed by
crying into the pillow. The Willies squeezed in embarrassment and
suspended chivalry at the door.

"She's kinda lonesome, I guess ... tired ... no wonder ... you ladies
aren't used to.... Wait, sister, I guess I still gotta toothful of the
best...."

Rose looked at them wildly, pressing in, pressing out, peering
shortsightedly over one another's shoulders, all anxious, kind,
stoutish, smooth, all spectacled, all with grey overcoats on. And one
of them said, "Why, say, listen, girlie, I bin looking everywhere for
you...."

"Aw hell, Rosie, what's eating you?" added Willie, unclasping his
bride's arms from the neck of the wrong Willie. "She's an out-island
girl ... she don't know much about the ways of civilized folks yet ...
everything takes a bit of getting used to, that's what I always
say...."




ON THE CONTRARY


Leonard Lumley had some very good ideas for keeping cool in the Red
Sea. "Wear _wool_ next the skin," he said, "and drink nothing but very
hot tea...." He had many such ideas, but no one could be absolutely
certain that he practised what he preached. Hot tea was not served,
for instance, in the bar, where Leonard spent a good deal of his time,
and it seemed that he had lost his only collar stud, so that his
shirt-collar flapped open in defiance of his dictum that Closed
Collars were Coolest. However, the very contrariness of his views was
impressive, and Leonard himself was a very impressive, though rather
stout, young man. Several people trusted him so much that they went
about for a day or two in thick Jaegers, looking like kettles boiling
over. Miss Dancey admired him so much that she must have lost several
pints in weight, between Suez and Perim.

Leonard, instinctively aware that all that he could say was safe in
Miss Dancey's ear, sat very often at the foot of her deck
chair--indeed partly _on_ her feet, since he was of spreading
figure--but spiritually, as he knew, their positions were reversed;
_his_ were the feet that were sat at. He believed that every man
should have a profession, he would tell her--but not before he is
forty. A man should afford himself leisure while he is young and work
when he is old.

"Oh--_oh_, what an eggstrawdinarily interesting idea," said Miss
Dancey.

Leisure is only useful to the young, according to Leonard Lumley;
after forty a man should begin to work, having nothing better to do,
and should work harder and harder until the age of ninety or so, when
death, the supremely full-time job, should interrupt him at his desk
or in the pulpit or on his charger riding into battle or at his
stethoscope or what not. For, though Mr. Lumley was just over
thirty-five and would soon come to the end of his period of leisure,
he had not yet decided on the occupation that would most fruitfully
employ his declining years.

"Oh--_oh_--a _doctor_," suggested Miss Dancey. "Doctors are
_magnificent_, I think--perfect _saints_...."

"On the contrary," said Leonard, to whose lips this phrase rose almost
automatically. "The doctor's profession is the least noble of any. A
stockbroker is more saintly than a doctor."

"Oh--_oh_--not _really_--do, _do_ tell me why--"

"Well, it's to a doctor's interest, you must remember, to live in a
sickly world, and also--er--well, if you knew as much about doctors
and stockbrokers as I do...."

"Oh--_oh_--" breathed Miss Dancey. "Then _why_ not be a _stockbroker_?
Then you'd be both _rich_ and _saintly_...."

"On the contrary," replied Leonard. "Stockbrokers never make money.
Not a penny. They always die in the workhouse."

"Oh--_oh_--how eggstrawdinary that is.... Can you _explain_ it to me?"

"Well, you can take it from me," said Leonard. And she did.
Stockbrokers and doctors being thus thrust beyond the pale, she tried
soldiers, clergymen, barristers ... imagining herself the wife of each
in turn. But all, it seemed, were not only unsuitable but impossible;
soldiers were slaves, clergymen's inhibitions invariably landed them
in lunatic asylums, barristers, being always corrupt, finished up in
gaol.

"_Sailors_, then," whispered Miss Dancey, a trifle discouraged. "Such
_breezy, healthy darlings,_ sailors...."

"On the contrary," said Leonard. "I can always see in a sailor's eye
that introspective, scarcely sane look that tells of a life spent
within unnaturally narrow limits. Show me a sailor and I'll show you a
potential homicidal hysteric."

"Oh Lord," said a voice near them.

Leonard looked round, annoyed, to see who this might be that so
impertinently appealed from his authority to a Higher Power. He saw
Mr. Hospice, _S.S. Meritoria's_ third officer, pausing in a walk round
the deck with some unknown fellow-homicidal-hysteric of minor rank.

"Oh--_oh_--Mr. Hospice," said Miss Dancey. "I'm learning _such_ a
_lot_ of new things." (There had been a difference of opinion among
the passengers as to whether Miss Dancey ever intended sarcasm.
Fortunately for her popularity, however, it was finally proved that
she never did.)

"Thplendid," said Mr. Hospice. "Thorry I interrupted. I couldn't help
overhearing Mithter Lumley'th latht remark, and it thurpriithed me
rather. Thorry." And he and his friend strode away down the deck.

Mr. Lumley, who whole-heartedly despised the thin undersized third
officer, was beginning to tell Miss Dancey how perfect an example was
this Hospice of all the Lumley theories--when--something happened.

Really, for the first two or three minutes, the passengers could
hardly tell what had happened. It was like an earthquake reversed--a
sort of lurch from regular movement into stillness. It had the same
deeply disturbing effect on the nerves as has an earthquake--gave feet
that had learned to trust their foothold, a sense of betrayal. The
ship, after a futile churning of propellers, was motionless, but
listed very slightly. Passengers streamed out of the smoking-room, to
ask Leonard what had happened.

The moonlight, which had long been exhibiting a silver panorama of sea
to no audience, now attracted general attention. Everybody crowded to
the rail, trying, with anxious gimlet eyes, to bore through the
curiously substantial silvered air. Every one expected to see--what? A
rock? A whale? Some unthinkable menace? Something, at any rate, to
write to one's horrified family about from Colombo. Perhaps, even,
something that would get into the papers and enable them all to be
called Survivors. But there was nothing to be seen except calm sea
and, a mile or so away--by the very keen-sighted--very low unobtrusive
land.

"_Don't_ look over the rail," rang Leonard's commanding voice. "In
danger, the best thing is _not_ to know the worst. Now I propose we
all sit down on the deck and play some silly game like Old Maid or
something. Better than singing Nearer My God to Thee, what?"

"Oh--_oh_," quavered Miss Dancey. "Then there really _is_ danger?"

"Who's got playing-cards on the spot?" asked Leonard. "Hi, don't go
mooning over the rail there, I tell you. Turn your eyes inboard,
everybody, and remember you're English."

"Oh--_oh_--is there anything very _terrible_ to be seen over the
rail?" asked Miss Dancey hoarsely.

"Cards--cards--cards," called Leonard gaily.

"Yipp-i-yaddy," echoed Mr. Hospice, appearing from the direction of
the bridge. "We're aground."

"Don't make such a fuss, man," said Leonard sharply. "You--an
officer--ought to know better than to frighten the ladies like that.
But we're not going to be frightened, are we," he added, looking
lovingly at his flock--of which Miss Dancey was the bell-wether--,
"Not a bit frightened. We're going to play Old Maid sitting on the
deck. What a lark!"

"Oh, for the Lord'th thake, don't be tho dam _brave_," said Mr.
Hospice in a low voice. He added more loudly. "We're aground--on
thand--till high tide to-morrow morning. No danger whatever."

Only a dread of being ridiculous restrained Leonard from strangling
Mr. Hospice on the spot. For, unfortunately for the landsman, words
spoken from above the brassy buttons of a uniform had a completely
soothing effect on the listeners. Nobody even dreamed of playing Old
Maid. Everybody went back to interrupted bridge and poker. Everybody
in due course went to bed and to sleep--though every one kept, as it
were, one ear awake for the sound of a change in the ship's condition.

There was no change. Promenaders before breakfast saw still the same
sluggish sea, the same sullen low land. Even the jellyfish looked as
if they had been there for generations. Leonard was, by the mercy of
his gods, enabled to say at breakfast, "I told you so.... Off at high
tide indeed.... Didn't I _say_ that little shrimp of a third officer
didn't know his job?"

Meeting Mr. Hospice on deck after breakfast, he said acidly, "In spite
of your hopeful promise, Mr. Hospice, we're still aground."

"Why, by jove--_tho_ we are!" exclaimed Mr. Hospice blithely.

Leonard had no shyness of asking captains questions. The bluff and
buttony spotlessness of captains imposed no humility on him. He felt
himself the _moral_ captain of every ship he travelled in. Actual
captains were sometimes a little irritated by his assumption of a
constant right to claim _tte--tte_ with them, but Leonard never
observed this irritation. The captain of the _Meritoria_ admitted, a
little fretfully, on being buttonholed by Leonard, that the ship of
which they shared the command had taken a firmer seat on the sand than
had at first been supposed. "It'll be a matter of shifting cargo,"
said the captain, as he abruptly took flight.

"It'll be a matter of shifting cargo," retailed Leonard to his flock
on deck. "We shall be here--oh ... er ... well ... quite a time...."

"Oh--_oh_--quite a _time_?" echoed Miss Dancey. "What would happen if
the sea got rough? The ship would break up. Like in _Robinson
Crusoe_."

"On the contrary," said Leonard. "The waves would help to jerk us
off--but that's a technical question and I won't go into it now.
The--er--south-west typhoon isn't due at this time of year...." Even
his hopeful ear detected a flaw in his omniscience here, so he changed
the subject. "What do you all say to my suggesting to the captain that
we passengers go ashore for the day? Just to get out of the way while
they're shifting cargo."

"It would be dam hot," said Bertie Briggs, a slightly mutinous male
lamb of his flock, looking at the scarred, heat-dazzled line of land.

"On the contrary," said Leonard. "It would be far cooler than in the
ship. I've spent years of my life in the tropics and you can take it
from me that the way to keep cool in a hot climate is to _keep out_ of
whatever breeze there is. Directly I take over a house in India, I
immediately scrap all punkahs and electric fans. Immediately. 'Take
the beastly things away,' I say to the servants. 'I'm not going to sit
and catch pneumonia under those fancy gadgets like a callow
tourist....'"

A callow tourist! Every tourist within earshot shuddered, shocked at
such an idea. For a tourist to behave like a tourist--how degrading!
About twenty tourist passengers felt obliged to disprove their
shameful touristhood by consenting to an expedition to the windless
shore, if it could be arranged.

Leonard and Miss Dancey had some difficulty in finding the captain.
"These sailors simply don't know their job," he said to her as they
followed rumours of the captain all over the ship. "Look at this
so-called captain--gets his ship into a hole like this, and then
disappears--can't be found, it seems, by any of his subordinates. Why,
anything might happen--and yet nobody knows where to lay their hands
on the man supposed to be responsible."

"Oh--_oh_--_might_ anything happen?"

They finally ran the captain to earth in the chart room. "I'm afraid,
Miss Dancey, I can't invite passengers to come and see me here--" he
began, but Leonard managed, by talking in a very loud voice, to
explain the object of their visit. The captain's attention was caught.
"Well," he said, on a note of hope, "I can't think why you should want
to go to a burnt-up hole like that, but if you _do_ want to--far be it
from me.... We shall probably spend the day shifting cargo and get off
at high tide early to-morrow. You going too, little Miss Dancey? Well,
ladies do certainly have some odd fancies. I'll send my third officer,
Mr. Hospice, to undertake the expedition."

"Oh, I'll undertake the expedition all right, captain," said Leonard.

"God help it, I know you will," replied the captain with unexpected
vigour. "Let's say, then, that Mr. Hospice will _over_take the
_under_-taker.... Ha-ha. He'll have the boat ready in half an hour's
time. I'm afraid I'm busy now. Good-bye. Enjoy yourselves."

"All ships' captains suffer from a superiority complex," said Leonard,
looking a little ruffled as he helped Miss Dancey down the companion
way. "They seem to think their authority is supreme."

"Oh--_oh_--_so_ they do.... But _isn't_ it--on board their own ship?"

"On the contrary. In these days of trades unions, the captain is the
slave of the humblest stoker on board."

"Oh--_oh_--_really_? Then oughtn't we to have gone and asked the
humblest stoker on board if we might...."

Really Miss Dancey was almost silly sometimes, thought Leonard.

However, as the boat, bristling with twenty passengers, was rowed to
shore, he felt the joy of creation and domination--even though Mr.
Hospice was ostensibly in charge--for certainly no other than Leonard
Lumley had led out these bleating Israelites from their Egypt--had set
the strong machinery of these rowing Lascars' arms in motion.

The most beautiful moment of the expedition was the moment of landing.
As the wrinkled sea-bottom, sloping lightly upwards under blue space,
stopped being sea-bottom and became Arabia--as the keel of the boat
gently grooved the ochre sand, it seemed to all the adventurers that
they were about to do something wholly new for the first time. In
marking that dazzling virgin beach with their feet, they would print
some mystic and undreamt-of word on the only really blank page their
eyes had ever rested on. One by one they jumped out of their boat,
murmuring or shrilling their astonishment. The shore--the whole land
as far as eye could see--seemed to be newly created by some brusque
movement of the earth, like a great nut newly cracked in haphazard
fragments. Jagged rocks lay lightly on the sand; nothing was embedded
or rooted. The very vegetation was only laid on the sand's surface in
the form of large round rolling transparencies of dried tangled
shrub--like ogres' thistledowns--blown from their far roots by some
dusty long-dead wind. The uncouth newly-broken rocks were sparsely
scattered about the shore, were grouped into a crazy Stonehenge just
above high-water mark, and, a little further inland still, were built
into a long ridge which had acted as a kind of dam for the low-blown
shifting sifting sand from the desert. The horizon, therefore, was
very close. The Magnificent Infinities which Leonard had promised his
flock were shut away by this wave of rock and sand.

"Oh--_oh_--" cried Miss Dancey. "How eggstrawdinarily eggciting it all
is. So _dangerous_-looking, kind of. I believe I saw a man's head
behind that rock. I suppose this country is _crammed_ with _sheikhs_."

"On the contrary," said Leonard. "You may take it from me that there
isn't a living soul within three hundred miles."

As he spoke, a young dark boy, almost naked, stepped out from behind a
rock where he had been hiding to watch the landing of the strangers.

"--Except, of course," added Leonard with some presence of mind, "a
few fisher-families scattered along the coast."

"I suppose they're practically savages," said elderly Mrs. Wilkins,
looking dubiously at the morose child.

"On the contrary. Like all simple peoples, they are extremely
friendly. They haven't learned to distrust strangers." He held out his
hand with a coin in it. The simple boy seized a rock and threw it at
the group--fortunately unskilfully--before he ran away shouting
something that, one feared, was an Arabian curse.

"Well, well," said Leonard, "boys will be boys all the world over. Now
everybody--let's _enjoy_ ourselves.... Isn't it _good_ to feel the
solid earth under our feet again?"

"Yes _and_ no," said Mr. Briggs rather impudently. "The solid earth is
almost burning the soles off my shoes. If you'd told me what we were
in for, I'd have brought a pair of stilts along. What's the next
move?"

"_My_ next move is into the shade of that pile of rocks," said Mrs.
Wilkins, who was rather stout. "It must be cooler there."

"On the contrary...." But Leonard's flock, showing a disquieting
independence, moved away from him as one lamb, towards the strip of
red quivering shadow.

"We'd better have our cool drinkth now or never," said Mr. Hospice,
who had been superintending two cross-looking stewards in the removal
of several hampers into the shade. "The ithed lemonade'll be hot toddy
thoon."

"I strongly disapprove of iced drinks in hot weather," began Leonard.
"I have often--"

"Oh, thplendid," said Mr. Hospice. "Tho much the more for the retht of
uth."

There was nothing for Leonard to do but to follow the party to the
strip of shade. It was a narrow strip, growing narrower, and they were
obliged to sit in a long row to enjoy it. The sand here certainly felt
cool in contrast to the baked shore. Mrs. Wilkins said, "Really, this
is quite pleasant," in a tone of surprise.

"Yes _and_ no," grumbled Mr. Briggs, for at that moment the flies
discovered the party.

"I wonder how long we can thtick thith out," said Mr. Hospice
cheerfully.

Nobody answered, but every one--even Leonard--silently wished that it
would not seem ridiculous to leave Arabia after a visit of only nine
minutes.

"Oh--_oh_--it's an _adventure_, anyway," said Miss Dancey.

"On the contrary. It is a popular fallacy that adventure is found in
wild remote places like this. You can take it from me that there is
more chance of adventure in the Strand, London, than in the whole of
the Arabian desert."

His luck seemed to be out to-day, for as he finished speaking a
startling adventure began happening to them, that certainly would have
been unlikely in the Strand. A torrent of dirty and wild-looking men
began streaming round from behind the ridge of rocks against which
they sat. All were shouting--not apparently to anyone in
particular--and each carried a naked dagger or a kind of a billhook.
They came and stood in front of the long line of seated
picnickers--and continued coming--more and more of them--until the
travellers' view of the sea was completely shut out. The heat and
smell, within this human stockade, became almost unbearable.

"My hat," said Mr. Hospice, standing up. "Thethe beggarth don't look
any too friendly."

"On the contrary," said Leonard, "they are no doubt friendly
fisherfolk, inviting us to visit their village. I see evidences of
native industries. Look at the coloured plaited leather round the
hilts of their weapons."

"Look at their toes," said Bertie Briggs. "All eaten away."

Their feet were the easiest part of them to look at, since all the
lookers were seated. To stand up against the overhanging boulders, one
would have to stand almost nose to nose with the visitors.

"I don't want to look at anything," said Mrs. Wilkins. "I shall be
sick in a minute."

Since Mr. Hospice was standing, the Arabs made the mistake of
supposing that he was the travellers' mouthpiece, especially as he
spoke a little Arabic. So Leonard sat back trying to smile subtly,
like a general leaving the drudgery to his aide-de-camp.

"Well, well," said Mr. Hospice, after a long bellowing talk with the
head man, who wore red and sandy striped draperies." It theemth
thethe beggarth want thome of our good money off uth. No leth than
twenty poundth, in fact.

"Whatever for?" asked Mrs. Wilkins, letting go of her nose for the
purpose.

"Well, thtrangely enough, for the privilege of going back on board."

"Oh--_oh_--are they brigands?" asked Miss Dancey.

"Thomething like it, I'm afraid. But we're perfectly thafe, really.
Only I thuppothe there'th nothing for it but to pay up."

"On the contrary," began Leonard, but Mr. Briggs interrupted him,
"Can't we knock some of 'em down and run for it? They've got no
firearms."

"Oh--_oh_--_don't_ talk like that.... I'm going to faint," cried Miss
Dancey, and she certainly began to cant alarmingly towards Leonard's
shoulder.

"I've got eight and sixpence," said a desiccated Major. Apart from
this sum, no one had more than a shilling or so.

"Well, talk--talk, my dear fellow," said Leonard to Mr. Hospice.
"Talk, to gain time while I think out a plan of action. _Bargain_ with
the brutes. Bargaining is the essence of Oriental business."

"Very pothibly it ith," agreed Mr. Hospice. "I've been bargaining like
hell. They athked forty firtht--they now conthent to take twenty. No
amount of bargaining'll bring 'em down from twenty poundth to
theventeen and thixpenthe--which ith all we've got."

"Let _me_ talk to them," said Leonard, heaving himself to his feet
among the crowding draperies of the Arabs. They began laughing
coarsely, for some obscure reason expecting entertainment. "Now then,
you scoundrels," he shouted authoritatively. But he stopped because a
lean black hand darted forward and removed his pince-nez from his
nose, snapping the little chain that tethered them to his bosom.
"Here--I say--drop it--this is too much--this is robbery."

But the pince-nez were by now straddling a broad black nose at least
twenty noses away from their owner's.

"Better rethign ourthelveth, I'm afraid," said Mr. Hospice. "They want
me to go back to the ship and get the money, and I think I'd better,
on the whole. You'll be quite thafe, ath long ath you don't annoy
them. You're _money_ to them."

"So damned ignominious," said Mr. Briggs.

But Leonard did not feel ignominious, though his eyes, without their
glasses, had rather a pink wincing look. "Yes, go back," he said
haughtily, "and ask the captain from me to send a party of armed
men--all the arms he has, and----"

But Mr. Hospice was hurrying down the beach to where the Lascars--all
agog--were waiting in the boat.

"I'd like to see the captain's face when he gets my message," said
Leonard, looking down his line of wilting followers. "He'll agree with
me, of course, that an armed demonstration would be a better course
than tamely paying up."

"Oh--_oh_--" wailed Miss Dancey. "But if these brigands see men with
guns coming, they'll cut our throats--I'm sure of it. They've got us
so squeezed up against this cliff."

"On the contrary," said Leonard. "We have a strategic position. An
Englishman with his back to the wall is the toughest man to beat on
God's earth, you can take it from me."

"Oh--_oh_--you're so _brave_.... I wish I was _brave_...."

"I wish I had a severe cold in the head," said Mrs. Wilkins.

Now that Mr. Hospice was gone, the robbers seemed to recognize
Leonard's leadership, though in no very flattering way. They made him
the butt of their simple wit, as he stood among them, trying to trip
him up with their sinuous black feet, pushing his hat over his nose,
tweaking his coat, putting their hands in his pockets and even trying
to pinch his ear. From above, a shaggy head looking over a split
boulder--like holly on the top of a partly eaten plum pudding--was
engaged in spitting assiduously down on to the captives. Leonard
haughtily moved out of the range of this marksman.

"Better stand in the shade, Lumley," said the Major. "You're the only
one of us without a topi or a sunshade."

"On the contrary," said Leonard grimly. "The topi is the cause of more
cases of sunstroke than ... you can take it from me.... Oh, _when_ is
this blasted little sailor coming back? The inefficiency of sailors is
simply--" He covered his burst of petulance with--"I'm longing to have
a dozen armed, men behind me and put these damned niggers in their
places.... Excuse my language, ladies."

"Oh--_oh_--you are so _brave_...."

"I can see a boat--no, _two_ boats, leaving the ship now," said Mr.
Briggs.

"Two boats--that means forty men," said Leonard. "I knew the captain
would agree with me. Pay up, indeed--what nonsense!" There was a
pause and then Mr. Briggs said, "The boats are empty, except for
Hospice and the men rowing."

"On the contrary," said Leonard, "the armed men are all crouching out
of sight. Even Hospice would have too much sense to show his hand too
soon."

"The two boats are separating now," continued Mr. Briggs. "One's going
to land right away down the beach. Very mysterious."

"Not in the least," said Leonard. "They understood my suggestions
perfectly. Lord, I wish I could get my glasses back so that I could
see the fun."

But there was no fun to see. The two boats ran ashore about a hundred
yards apart, and Mr. Hospice alone jumped out of the nearest one. Even
the robbers listened as he began shouting. His voice reached his
friends across the hot air with a brittle, almost microphonic sound.
"I'm going to walk thlowly up the beach while you walk thlowly down to
that further boat. I'll thet the pathe. You mutht all be thafe in the
boat by the time I reach the niggerth."

"Must! Must!" exclaimed Leonard furiously. "What does he mean--_must_?
Are we to trot about the beach at his orders like a flock of sheep? I
shan't move a step."

"Well, I shall," said the Major. "And I advise the ladies...."

But the ladies needed no advice; they were already gingerly filing
between the bars of their living prison. A few robbers walked with
them, shuffling along packed closely against their victims, treading
on their heels, nudging their ribs, thrusting their chins into their
back hair--meaning no harm but impelled to this almost lover-like
contiguity by their nave curiosity.

"Not too fatht," shrilled Mr. Hospice. "Keep all together, and watch
me." He shouted in pidgin Arabic to the robbers. A group of them left
the picnickers and started to meet him, but he at once retreated
towards the boat. The Arabs, understanding the position, stood still,
watching their victims receding, their reward approaching. Leonard
stood sullenly against the rock, wondering what gesture of valour and
authority remained to him to make.

"Oh--_oh_--Mr. Lumley," Miss Dancey called back. "_Don't_ stay there
by yourself.... You'll be _killed_."

"I must stand by Hospice," said Leonard. This idea occurred to him one
second before he put it into words.

The retreat and approach, regulated to synchronize, were slow, but at
last the picnickers were safe in the boat and Mr. Hospice reached the
robber group.

"Good Lord, Mithter Lumley--you thtill here? Why didn't you go with
the otherth?"

"Because I'm a man and not a sheep."

Mr. Hospice said nothing; he was counting out money into the chief
robber's hand. All the Arabs wanted to look at the money; they craned
and tiptoed behind each other like excited children. Leonard stood
outside the group, trying to keep his looks in keeping with his latest
gesture--"Standing By a Fellow Man." The robbers, finding themselves
all bowed by curiosity and avarice to one centre, suddenly awoke to
the fact that in the messenger they had another hostage. Why not send
Leonard back to the ship for another twenty pounds ransom? And then
seize Leonard and send the sailor. What a delightfully easy way of
making money, thought the simple fellows. Holding Mr. Hospice by every
outlying fold in his clothes, they expounded their idea to him,
pointing vigorously to Leonard. But just as Leonard was wondering what
this (probably flattering) attention meant, Mr. Hospice, lithe as a
fish, burst himself out of his clawed-at coat and kicked the robber
chief in the stomach.

"Run for it, Lumley," he shrieked--and ran.

Mr. Leonard Lumley's legs ran after him, bearing his reluctant body
which still throbbed with the thought--"An Englishman never turns his
back on danger." Luckily, his legs knew better. They had never run so
fast since they had had the honour of carrying Leonard.

A few of the Arabs, rather half-heartedly, pursued the fugitives, but
most of them at once relinquished their too-complex plan of seizing
alternate hostages and earning ransom after ransom to infinity. They
had had a remunerative morning's work, after all. Some of them came,
shouting uncertainly, to the sea's edge, but Mr. Hospice and Leonard
were being rowed swiftly away. The picnickers were already safe on
board the _Meritoria_.

"I thought there'd be trouble," panted Leonard. "As it turned out, I
was quite right to stay and back you up."

"Very noble of you, I'm thure."

"I can't imagine why you didn't bring back a few guns and men as I
told you to."

"My dear thir, thothe bruteth would have cut all your throatth at the
firtht shot. They had you penned up like pigth in a thtye. Twenty
poundth for the lot of you wath only a pound a piethe, after all.
Worth that, to get free without bloodshed. Tho the Thkipper thought,
at leatht."

"Pigs in a stye." Leonard was struck dumb by the
outrageous description. What a detestable young man this was. He
little knew that the kind Mr. Hospice was suppressing the captain's
actual message--"Can't you arrange to pay up nineteen pounds nineteen
shillings and eleven-pence--and let 'em keep that dam-fool Lumley?"

Leonard and Mr. Hospice, on the deck of the _Meritoria_, found
themselves the centre of a frenzied group of ex-picnickers and their
friends. "Oh--_oh_--OH--_what_ an adventure."

"On the contrary--" began Leonard--but his world suddenly played him
false. It wavered, whirled, slipped upward, crashed, as he fell flat
on the deck in the midst of his flock. Before he became quite
unconscious, he heard two voices--good and evil--like the voices
described by poets as A Voice and Another Voice.

"Oh--_oh_--poor _darling_ Mr. Lumley--he's been so _wonderful_...."

"Sunstroke. That's what comes of being such a----fool as not to wear
a topi...."

"On the contrary," gargled Leonard--but he was obliged to reserve his
retort for several days. And by that time it was not necessary, for
Leonard's convalescence was brightened by the discovery that it was
the intention of his flock to present him with a solid silver
cigarette-case, in recognition of his splendid behaviour and competent
leadership in the hour of danger. Even Mr. Hospice was to be given a
pair of enamel cuff-links.




THE DESERT ISLANDER


Constantine hopefully followed the Chinese servant through the unknown
house. He felt hopeful of success in his plan of begging this
Englishman for help, for he knew that an Englishman, alone among
people of a different colour (as this Englishman was alone in this
south China town), treated the helping of stray white men almost as
part of the White Man's Burden. But even without this claim of one
lonely white man upon another, Constantine would have felt hopeful. He
knew himself to be a man of compelling manner in spite of his ugly,
too long face, and his ugly, too short legs.

As Constantine stumped in on his hobnailed soles, Mr. White--who was
evidently not a very tactful man--said, "Oh, are you _another_
deserter from the Foreign Legion?"

"I am Constantine Andreievitch Soloviev," said Constantine, surprised.
He spoke and understood English almost perfectly (his mother had been
English) yet he could not remember ever having heard the word
_another_ applied to himself. In fact it did not--could not
possibly--so apply. There was only one of him, he knew.

Of course, in a way there was some sense in what this stupid
Englishman said. Constantine had certainly been a _lgionnaire_ in
Tonkin up till last Thursday--his narrow pipe-clayed helmet, stiff
khaki greatcoat, shabby drill uniform, puttees, brass buttons, and
inflexible boots were all the property of the French government. But
the core--the pearl inside this vulgar, horny shell--was Constantine
Andreievitch Soloviev. That made all the difference.

Constantine saw that he must take this Didymus of an Englishman in
hand at once and tell him a few exciting stories about his dangerous
adventures between the Tonkin border and this Chinese city. Snakes,
tigers, love-crazed Chinese princesses and brigands passed rapidly
through his mind, and he chose the last, because he had previously
planned several impressive things to do if he should be attacked by
brigands. So now, though he had not actually met a brigand, those
plans would come in useful. Constantine intended to write his
autobiography some day when he should have married a rich wife and
settled down. Not only did his actual life seem to him a very rare
one but, also, lives were so interesting to make up.

Constantine was a desert islander--a spiritual Robinson Crusoe. He
made up everything himself and he wasted nothing. _Robinson Crusoe_
was his favourite book--in fact, almost the only book he had ever
read--and he was proud to be, like his hero, a desert islander. He
actually preferred clothing his spirit in the skins of wild thoughts
that had been the prey of his wits and sheltering it from the world's
weather in a leaky hut of his brain's own contriving to enjoying the
good tailoring and housing that dwellers on the mainland call
experience and education. He enjoyed being barbarous, he enjoyed
living alone on his island, accepting nothing, imitating nothing,
believing nothing, adapting himself to nothing--implacably home-made.
Even his tangible possessions were those of a marooned man rather than
of a civilized citizen of this well-furnished world. At this moment
his only luggage was a balalaika that he had made himself out of cigar
boxes, and to this he sang songs of his own composition--very
imperfect songs. He would not have claimed that either his songs or
his instrument were better than the songs and instruments made by
song-makers and balalaika-makers they were, however, much more
rapturously _hi_ than any acquired music could have been and, indeed,
in this as in almost all things, it simply never occurred to him to
_take_ rather than _make_. There was no mainland on the horizon of his
desert island.

"I am not a beggar," said Constantine. "Until yesterday I had sixty
piastres which I had saved by many sacrifices during my service in the
Legion. But yesterday, passing through a dark forest of pines in the
twilight, about twenty versts from here, I met--"

"You met a band of brigands," said Mr. White. "Yes, I know ... you all
say that."

Constantine stared at him. He had not lived, a desert islander, in a
crowded and over-civilized world without meeting many rebuffs, so this
one did not surprise him--did not even offend him. On the contrary,
for a minute he almost loved the uncompromising Mr. White, as a
sportsman almost loves the chamois on a peculiarly inaccessible crag.
This was a friend worth a good deal of trouble to secure, Constantine
saw. He realized at once that the desert islander's line here was to
discard the brigands and to discard noble independence.

"Very well then," said Constantine. "I did _not_ meet brigands. I _am_
a beggar. I started without a penny and I still have no penny. I hope
you will give me something. That is why I have come." He paused,
drawing long pleased breaths through his large nose. This, he felt,
was a distinctly self-made line of talk; it set him apart from all
previous deserting _lgionnaires_.

Mr. White evidently thought so too. He gave a short grunting laugh.
"That's better," he said.

"These English," thought Constantine lovingly. "They are the next best
thing to _being_ originals, for they _admire_ originals." "I like you,
he added extravagantly, aloud. "I like the English. I am so glad I
found an Englishman to beg of instead of an American--though an
American would have been much richer than you are, I expect. Still, to
a beggar a little is enough. I dislike Americans; I dislike their
women's wet finger-nails."

"Wet finger-nails?" exclaimed Mr. White. "Oh, you mean their manicure
polishes. Yes ... they _do_ always have wet finger-nails ... ha, ha
... so they do. I should never have thought of that myself."

"Of course not," said Constantine, genuinely surprised. "_I_ thought
of it. Why should _you_ have thought of it?" After a moment he added,
"I am not a gramophone."

Mr. White thought that he had said, "Have you got a gramophone?" and
replied at once with some pleasure, "Yes, I have--it is a very
precious companion. Are you musical? But of course you are, being
Russian. I should be very lonely without my daily ration of Chopin.
Would you like some music while the servants are getting you something
to eat?

"I should like some music," said Constantine, "but I should not like
to hear a gramophone. I will play you some music--some unique and only
music on a unique and only instrument."

"Thank you very much," said Mr. White, peering doubtfully through his
glasses at the cigar-box balalaika. "What good English you speak," he
added, trying to divert his guest's attention from his musical
purpose. "But all Russians, of course, are wonderful linguists."

"I will play you my music," said Constantine. "But first I must tell
you that I do not like you to say to me, 'Being Russian you are
musical' or 'All Russians speak good English.' To me it seems so
stupid to see me as one of many."

"Each one of us is one of many," sighed Mr. White patiently.

"_You_, perhaps--but _I_, not," said Constantine. "When you notice my
English words instead of my thoughts it seems to me that you are
listening wrongly--you are listening to sounds only, in the same way
as you listen to your senseless gramophone--"

"But you haven't heard my gramophone," interrupted Mr. White, stung on
his darling's behalf.

"What does it matter what sounds a man makes--what words he uses?
Words are common to all men; thoughts belong to one man only."

Mr. White considered telling his guest to go to hell, but he said
instead, "You're quite a philosopher, aren't you?"

"I am not _quite an_ anything," said Constantine abruptly. "I am me.
All people who like Chopin also say, 'You're quite a philosopher.'"

"Now you're generalizing, yourself," said Mr. White, clinging to his
good temper. "Exactly what you've just complained of my doing."

"Some people _are_ general," said Constantine. "Now I will play you my
music, and you will admit that it is not one of many musics."

He sang a song with Russian words which Mr. White did not understand.
As a matter of fact, such was Constantine's horror of imitating, that
the words of his song were just a list of the names of the diseases of
horses, learned while Constantine was a veterinary surgeon in the
Ukraine. His voice was certainly peculiar to himself; it was
hoarse--so hoarse that one felt as if a light cough or a discreet
blowing of that long nose would clear the hoarseness away; it was
veiled, as though heard from behind an intervening stillness; yet with
all its hoarseness and insonorousness, it was flexible, alive, and
exciting. His instrument had the same quality of quiet ugliness and
oddity; it was almost enchanting. It was as if an animal--say, a
goat--had found a way to control its voice into a crude goblin
concord.

"That's my music," said Constantine. "Do you like it?"

"Frankly," said Mr. White, "I prefer Chopin."

"On the gramophone?"

"On the gramophone."

"Yet one is a thing you never heard before and will never hear
again--and the other is a machine that makes the same sound for
millions.

"I don't care."

Constantine chewed his upper lip for a minute, thinking this over.
Then he shook himself. "Nevertheless, I like you," he said insolently.
"You are almost a person. Would you like me to tell you about my life,
or would you rather I explained to you my idea about Zigzags?"

"I would rather see you eat a good meal," said Mr. White, roused to a
certain cordiality--as almost all Anglo-Saxons are--by the opportunity
of dispensing food and drink.

"I can tell you my Zigzag idea while I eat," said Constantine, leading
the way towards the table at the other end of the room. "Are you not
eating too?"

"I'm not in the habit of eating a meat meal at ten o'clock at night."

"Is 'not being in the habit' a reason for not doing it now?"

"To me it is."

"Oh--oh--_oh_--I wish I were like you," said Constantine vehemently.
"It is so tiring being me--having no guide. I _do_ like you."

"Help yourself to spinach," said Mr. White crossly.

"Now shall I tell you my Zigzag idea?"

"If you can eat as well as talk."

Constantine was exceedingly hungry; he bent low over his plate, though
he sat sideways to the table, facing Mr. White, ready to launch a
frontal attack of talk. His mouth was too full for a moment to allow
him to begin to speak, but quick, agonized glances out of his black
eyes implored his host to be silent till his lips should be ready.
"You know," he said, swallowing hurriedly, "I always think of a zigzag
as going _downwards_. I draw it in the air, _so_ ... a straight honest
line, then--see--a diagonal subtle line cuts the air away from under
it--_so_.... Do you see what I mean? I will call the _zig_ a _to_, and
the _zag_ a _from_. Now----"

"Why is one of your legs fatter than the other?" asked Mr. White.

"It is bandaged. Now, I think of this zigzag as a diagram of human
minds. Always human minds are _zigs_ or _zags_--a _to_ or a
_from_--the brave _zig_ is straight, _so_ ... the cleverer, crueller
_zag_ cuts away below. So are men's----"

"But why is it bandaged?"

"It was kicked by a horse. Well, so are men's understandings. Here I
draw the simple, faithful understanding--and here--_zag_--the easy,
clever understanding that sees through the simple faith. Now below
that--see--_zig_ once more--the wise, the serene, and now a _zag_
contradicts once more; this is the cynic who knows all answers to
serenity. Then below, once more----"

"May I see your leg?" asked Mr. White. "I was in an ambulance unit
during the war."

"Oh, what is this talk of legs?" cried Constantine. "Legs are all the
same; they belong to millions. All legs are made of blood and bone
and muscle--all vulgar things. Your ambulance cuts off legs, mends
legs, fits bones together, corks up blood. It treats men like bundles
of bones and blood. This is so dull. Bodies are so dull. Minds are the
only onliness in men."

"Yes," said Mr. White. "But minds have to have legs to walk about on.
Let me see your leg."

"Very well, then, let us talk of legs. We have at least legs in
common, you and I."

"Hadn't you got more sense than to put such a dirty rag round an open
wound?"

"It is not dirty; it is simply of a grey colour. I washed it in a rice
field." Constantine spoke in a muffled voice from somewhere near his
knee-cap, for he was now bent double, whole-heartedly interested in
his leg. "I washed the wound too, and three boils which are behind my
knee. This blackness is not dirt; it is a blackness belonging to the
injury."

Mr. White said nothing, but he rose to his feet as though he had heard
a call. Constantine, leaving his puttee in limp coils about his foot
like a dead snake, went on eating. He began to talk again about the
zigzag while he stuffed food into his mouth, but he stopped talking
soon, for Mr. White was walking up and down the long room and not
pretending to listen. Constantine, watching his host restively pacing
the far end of the room, imagined that he himself perhaps smelled
disagreeable, for this was a constant fear of his--that his body
should play his rare personality this horrid trick. "What is the
matter?" he asked anxiously, with a shamed look. "Why are you so far?"

Mr. White's lazy, mild manner was quite changed. His voice seemed to
burst out of seething irritation. "It's a dam nuisance, just now. It
couldn't happen at a worse time. I've a great deal of work to do--and
this fighting all over the province makes a journey so dam----"

"What is so dam?" asked Constantine, his bewilderment affecting his
English.

"I'll tell you what," said Mr. White, standing in front of Constantine
with his feet wide apart and speaking in an angry voice. "You're going
to bed now in my attic, and to-morrow at daylight you're going to be
waked up and driven down in my car, by me (damn it!) to Lao-chow, to
the hospital--a two days' drive--three hundred miles--over the worst
roads you ever saw."

Constantine's heart gave a sickening lurch. "Why to hospital? You
think my leg is dangerous?

"If I know anything of legs," said Mr. White rather brutally, "the
doctor won't let you keep that one an hour longer than he has to."

Constantine's mouth began instantly to tremble so much that he could
scarcely speak. He thought, "I shall die--I shall die like this--of a
stupid black leg--this valuable lonely me will die." He glared at Mr.
White, hungry for consolation. "He isn't valuable--he's one of many
... of course he could easily be brave."

Mr. White, once more indolent and indifferent, led the little Russian
to the attic and left him there. As soon as Constantine saw the white
sheets neatly folded back, the pleasant blue rugs squarely set upon
the floor, the open wardrobe fringed with hangers, he doubted whether,
after all, he did value himself so very much. For in this neat room he
felt betrayed by this body of his--this unwashed, unshaven, tired
body, encased in coarse dirty clothes, propped on an offensive,
festering leg. He decided to take all his clothes off, even though he
had no other garment with him to put on; he would feel more
appropriate to the shiny linen in his own shiny skin, he thought. He
would have washed, but his attention was diverted as he pulled his
clothes off by the wound on his leg. Though it was not very painful,
it made him nearly sick with disgust now. Every nerve in his body
seemed on tiptoe, alert to feel agony, as he studied the wound. He
saw that a new sore place was beginning, well above the knee. With
only his shirt on, he rushed downstairs, and in at the only lighted
doorway. "Look--look," he cried. "A new sore place.... Does this mean
the danger is greater even than we thought?"

Mr. White, in neat blue-and-white pyjamas, was carefully pressing a
tie in a tie-press. Constantine had never felt so far away from a
human being in his life as he felt on seeing that tie-press, those
pyjamas, those monogrammed silver brushes, that elastic apparatus for
reducing exercises that hung upon the door.

"Oh, go to bed," said Mr. White irascibly. "For God's sake, show a
little sense."

Constantine was back in his attic before he thought, "I ought to have
said, 'For God's sake, show a little _non_sense yourself.' Sense is so
vulgar."

Sense, however, was to drive him three hundred miles to safety, next
day.

All night the exhausted Constantine, sleeping only for a few minutes
at a time, dreamed trivial, broken dreams about establishing his own
superiority, finding, for instance, that he had after all managed to
bring with him a suitcase full of clean, fashionable clothes, or
noticing that his host was wearing a filthy bandage round his neck
instead of a tie.

Constantine was asleep when Mr. White, fully dressed, woke him next
morning. A clear, steely light was slanting in at the window.
Constantine was always fully conscious at the second of waking, and he
was immediately horrified to see Mr. White looking expressionlessly at
the disorderly heap of dirty clothes that he had thrown in disgust on
the floor the night before. Trying to divert his host's attention,
Constantine put on a merry and courageous manner. "Well, how is the
weather for our motor-car jaunt?"

"It could hardly be worse," said Mr. White placidly. "Sheets of rain.
God knows what the roads will be like."

"Well, we are lucky to have roads at all, in this benighted China."

"I don't know about that. If there weren't any roads we shouldn't be
setting off on this beastly trip."

"I shall be ready in two jiffies," said Constantine, springing naked
out of bed and shuffling his dreadful clothes out of Mr. White's
sight. "But just tell me," he added as his host went through the door,
"why do you drive three hundred miles on a horrible wet day just to
take a perfect stranger--a beggar too--to hospital?" (He thought,
"Now he _must_ say something showing that he recognizes my value.")

"Because I can't cut off your leg myself," said Mr. White gloomily.
Constantine did not press his question because this new reference to
the cutting off of legs set his nerves jangling again; his hands
trembled so that he could scarcely button his clothes. Service in the
Foreign Legion, though it was certainly no suitable adventure for a
rare and sensitive man, had never obliged him to face anything more
frightening than non-appreciation, coarse food, and stupid treatment.
None of these things could humiliate him--on the contrary, all
confirmed him in his persuasion of his own value. Only the thought of
being at the mercy of his body could humiliate the excited and glowing
spirit of Constantine. Death was the final, most loathsome triumph of
the body; death meant dumbness and decay--yet even death he could have
faced courageously could he have been flattered to its very brink.

The car, a ramshackle Ford, stood in the rain on the bald gravel of
the compound, as Constantine, white with excitement, limped out
through the front door. His limp, though not consciously assumed, had
developed only since last night. His whole leg now felt dangerous,
its skin shrinking and tingling. Constantine looked into the car. In
the back seat sat Mr. White's coolie, clasping a conspicuously neat
little white canvas kit-bag with leather straps. The kit-bag held
Constantine's eye and attacked his self-respect as the tie-press had
attacked and haunted him the night before. Every one of his host's
possessions was like a perfectly well-balanced, indisputable statement
in a world of fevered conjecture. "And a camp-bed--so nicely rolled,"
said Constantine, leaning into the car, fascinated and humiliated.
"But only one...."

"I have only one," said Mr. White.

"And you are bringing it--for me?" said Constantine, looking at him
ardently, overjoyed at this tribute.

"I am bringing it for myself," said Mr. White with his unamused and
short-sighted smile. "I am assuming that a _lgionnaire_ is used to
sleeping rough. I'm not. I'm rather fixed in my habits and I have a
horror of the arrangements in Chinese inns."

"He is morally brave," thought Constantine, though, for the first
time, it occurred to him how satisfactory it would be to slap his
host's face. "A man less brave would have changed his plans about the
camp-bed at once and said, 'For you, my dear man, of course--why
not?'" Constantine chattered nervously as he took his seat in the car
next to his host, the driver. "I feel such admiration for a man who
can drive a motor-car. I adore the machine when it does not--like the
gramophone--trespass on matters outside its sphere. This machine's
sphere is space, you see--it controls space--and that is so adorable,
for no non-machine except human thought can do that. And you control
_it_. It is truly admirable--even when the machine is so very
unimpressive as this one. Mr. White, your motor-car is _very_
unimpressive indeed. Are you sure it will run three hundred miles?"

"It always seems to," said Mr. White. "I never do anything to it
except pour petrol, oil, and water into the proper openings. I am
completely unmechanical."

"You cannot be if you work a gramophone."

"You seem to have my gramophone on your mind. To me it doesn't answer
the purpose of a machine--it simply _is_ Chopin, to me."

Constantine stamped his foot in almost delighted irritation, for this
made him feel a god beside this groundling. After a few minutes of
self-satisfaction, however, a terrible thought invaded him. He became
obsessed with an idea that he had left fleas in his bed in Mr. White's
attic. That smug, immaculate Chinese servant would see them when he
made the bed, and on Mr. White's return would say, "That foreign
soldier left fleas in our attic bed." How bitterly did Constantine
wish that he had examined the bed carefully before leaving the room,
or alternatively, that he could invent some elaborate lie that would
prevent Mr. White from believing this revolting accusation.
Constantine's mind, already racked with the fear of pain and death and
with the agony of his impotence to impress his companion, became
overcast with the hopelessness and remorselessness of everything.
Everything despairing seemed a fact beyond dispute; everything
hopeful, a mere dream. His growing certainty about the fleas, the
persistence of the rain, combined with the leakiness of the car's
side-curtains, the skiddiness of the road, the festering of his leg,
the thought of the surgeon's saw, the perfection of that complacent
kit-bag in the back seat, with the poor cigar-box balalaika tinkling
beside it, the over-stability and over-rightness of his friend in
need--there was not one sweet or flattering thought to which his poor
trapped mind could turn.

The absurdly inadequate bullock-trail only just served the purpose of
a road for the Ford. The wheels slid about, wrenching themselves from
groove to groove. Constantine's comment on the difficulties of the
road was silenced by a polite request on the part of Mr. White. "I
can't talk while I'm driving, if you don't mind. I'm not a good
driver, and I need all my attention, especially on such a bad road."

"I will talk and you need not answer. That is my ideal plan of
conversation. I will tell you why I joined the Foreign Legion. You
must have been wondering about this. It will be a relief for me from
my misfortunes, to talk."

"I'd rather not, if you don't mind," said his host serenely.

"Mean old horse," thought Constantine passionately, his heart
contracting with offence. "It is so English to give away nothing but
the bare, bald, stony fact of help--no decorations of graciousnesses
and smilings. A Russian would be a much poorer helper, but a how much
better friend."

The car ground on. Constantine turned over again and again in his mind
the matter of the fleas. The wet ochre-and-green country of south
China streamed unevenly past, the neat, complex shapes of rice fields
altering, disintegrating and re-forming, like groups in a country
dance. Abrupt horns of rock began piercing through the flat
rain-Striped valley, and these, it seemed, were the heralds of a
mountain range that barred the path of the travellers, for soon
cliffs towered above the road. A village which clung to a slope at the
mouth of a gorge was occupied by soldiers. "This is where our troubles
begin," said Mr. White peacefully. The soldiers were indolent, shabby,
ineffectual-looking creatures, scarcely distinguishable from coolies,
but their machine-guns, straddling mosquito-like about the forlorn
village street, looked disagreeably wideawake and keen. Constantine
felt as if his precious heart were the cynosure of all the
machine-guns' waspish glances, as the car splashed between them.

"Is this safe?" he asked. "Motoring through a Chinese war?"

"Not particularly," smiled Mr. White. "But it's safer than neglecting
that leg of yours."

Constantine uttered a small, shrill, nervous exclamation--half a
curse. "Is a man nothing more than a leg to you?"

As he spoke, from one side of the gorge along which they were now
driving, a rifle shot cracked, like the breaking of a taut wire. Its
echoes were overtaken by the sputtering of more shots from a higher
crag. Constantine had been tensely held for just such an attack on his
courage as this--and yet he was not ready for it. His body moved
instantly by itself, without consulting his self-respect; it flung its
arms round Mr. White. The car, thus immobilized at its source of
energy, swerved, skidded, and stood still askew upon the trail.
Constantine, sweating violently, recalled his pride and reassembled
his sprawling arms. Mr. White said nothing, but he looked with a cold
benevolence into Constantine's face and shook his head slightly. Then
he started the car again and drove on in silence. There was no more
firing.

"Oh, _oh_, I do _wish_ you had been a little bit frightened too," said
Constantine, clenching his fists. He was too much of a desert islander
to deny his own fright, as a citizen of the tradition-ruled mainland
might have denied it. Brave or afraid, Constantine was his own
creation; he had made himself, he would stand or fall by this self
that he had made. It was indeed, in a way, more interesting to have
been afraid than to have been brave. Only, unfortunately, this
exasperating benefactor of his did not think so.

The noon-light was scarcely brighter than the light of early morning.
The unremitting rain slanted across the grey air. Trees, skies,
valleys, mountains, seen through the rain-spotted windshield, were
like a distorted, stippled landscape painted by a beginner who has not
yet learned to wring living colour from his palette. However, sun or
no sun, noontime it was at last, and Mr. White, drawing his car
conscientiously to the side of the bullock trail, as if a procession
of Rolls Royces might be expected to pass, unpacked a neat jigsaw
puzzle of a sandwich box.

"I brought a few caviare sandwiches for you," he said gently. "I know
Russians like caviare."

"Are your sandwiches then made of Old England's Rosbif?" asked
Constantine crossly, for it seemed to him that this man used nothing
but collective nouns.

"No; of bloater paste."

They said nothing more but munched in a rather sullen silence.
Constantine had lost his desire to tell Mr. White why he had joined
the Foreign Legion--or to tell him anything else, for that matter.
There was something about Mr. White that destroyed the excitement of
telling ingenious lies--or even the common truth; and this _something_
Constantine resented more and more, though he was uncertain how to
define it. Mr. White leaned over the steering-wheel and covered his
eyes with his hands, for driving tired him. The caviare, and his
host's evident weariness, irritated Constantine more and more; these
things seemed like a crude insistence on his increasing obligation. "I
suppose you are tired of the very sight of me," he felt impelled to
say bitterly.

"No, no," said Mr. White politely but indifferently. "Don't worry
about me. It'll all be the same a hundred years hence."

"Whether my leg is off or on--whether I die in agony or live--it will
all be the same a hundred years hence, I suppose you would say," said
Constantine, morbidly goading his companion into repeating this insult
to the priceless mystery of personality.

"My good man, I can't do more than I _am_ doing about your leg, can
I?" said Mr. White irritably, as he restarted the car.

"A million times more--a million times more," thought Constantine
hysterically, but with an effort he said nothing.

As the wet evening light smouldered to an ashen twilight, they drove
into Mo-ming, which was to be their night's stopping-place. Outside
the city wall they were stopped by soldiers; for Mourning was being
defended against the enemy's advance. After twenty minutes' talk in
the clanking Cantonese tongue, the two white men were allowed to go
through the city gate on foot, leaving the Ford in a shed outside, in
the care of Mr. White's coolie. Mr. White carried his beautiful little
kit-bag and expected Constantine to carry the camp-bed.

"What--and leave my balalaika in the car?" protested Constantine
childishly.

"I think it would be safe," said Mr. White, only faintly ironic.
"Hurry up. I must go at once and call on the general in charge here. I
don't want to have my car commandeered."

Constantine limped along behind him, the camp-bed on one shoulder, the
balalaika faintly tinkling under his arm. They found the inn in the
centre of a tangle of looped, frayed, untidy streets--a box-like gaunt
house, one corner of which was partly ruined, for the city had been
bombarded that day. The inn, which could never have been a comfortable
place, was wholly disorganized by its recent misfortune; most of the
servants had fled, and the innkeeper was entirely engrossed in
counting and piling up on the verandah his rescued possessions from
the wrecked rooms. An impudent little boy, naked down to the
waist--the only remaining servant--showed Mr. White and Constantine to
the only room the inn could offer.

"One room between us?" cried Constantine, thinking of his shameful,
possibly verminous, clothes and his unwashed body. He felt unable to
bear the idea of unbuttoning even the greasy collar of his tunic
within sight of that virgin-new kit-bag. Its luminous whiteness would
seem in the night like triumphant civilization's eye fixed upon the
barbarian--like the smug beam of a lighthouse glowing from the
mainland upon that uncouth obstruction, a desert island. "I'm not
consistent," thought Constantine. "That's my trouble. I ought to be
proud of being dirty. At least that is a home-made condition."

"Yes--one room between us," said Mr. White tartly. "We must do the
best we can. You look after things here, will you, while I go and see
the general and make the car safe."

Left alone, Constantine decided not to take off any clothes at
all--even his coarse greatcoat--but to say that he had fever and
needed all the warmth he could get. No sooner had he come to this
decision than he felt convinced that he actually was feverish; his
head and his injured leg ached and throbbed as though all the hot
blood in his body had concentrated in those two regions, while ice
seemed to settle round his heart and loins. The room was dreary and
very sparsely furnished with an ugly, too high table and rigid chairs
to match. The beds were simply recesses in the wall, draped with dirty
mud-brown mosquito-veils. Constantine, however, stepped more bravely
into this hard, matted coffin than he had into Mr. White's clean attic
bed. As he lay down, his leg burned and throbbed more fiercely than
ever, and he began to imagine the amputation--the blood, the yawning
of the flesh, the scraping of the saw upon the bone. His imagination
did not supply an ansthetic. Fever came upon him now in good earnest;
he shook so much that his body seemed to jump like a fish upon the
unyielding matting, he seemed to breathe in heat, without being able
to melt the ice in his bones. Yet he remained artistically conscious
all the time of his plight, and even exaggerated the shivering spasms
of his limbs. He was quite pleased to think that Mr. White would
presently return and find him in this condition, and so be obliged to
be interested and compassionate. Yet as he heard Mr. White's heavy
step on the stair, poor Constantine's eye fell on the fastidious white
kit-bag, and he suddenly remembered all his fancies and fears about
vermin and smells. By the time Mr. White was actually standing over
him, Constantine was convinced that the deepest loathing was clearly
shown on that superior, towering face.

"I can't help it--I can't help it," cried Constantine, between his
chattering teeth.

Mr. White seemed to ignore the Russian's agitation. "I think the
car'll be all right now," he said. "I left the coolie sleeping in it,
to make sure. The general was quite civil and gave me a permit to get
home; but it seems it's utterly impossible for us to drive on to
Lao-chow. Fighting on the road is particularly hot, and the bridges
are all destroyed. The enemy have reached the opposite side of the
river, and they've been bombarding the city all day. I told the
general about your case; he suggests you go by river in a sampan down
to Lao-chow to-morrow. You may be fired on just as you leave the city,
but nothing to matter, I dare say. After that, you'd be all right--the
river makes a stiff bend south here, and gets right away from the
country they're fighting over. It would take you only about eighteen
hours to Lao-chow, going down stream. I've already got a sampan for
you.... Oh Lord, isn't this disgusting," he added, looking round the
dreadful room and wrinkling his nose. "How I loathe this kind of
thing."

"I can't help it. I can't help it." Constantine began first to moan
and then to cry. He was by now in great pain, and he did not try to
control his distress. It passed through his mind that crying was the
last thing a stupid Englishman would expect of a _lgionnaire_; so far
so good, therefore--he was a desert islander even in his degradation.
Yet he loathed himself; all his morbid fears of being offensive were
upon him, and the unaccustomed exercise of crying, combined with the
fever, nauseated him. Mr. White, still wearing his expression of
repugnance, came to his help, loosened that greasy collar, lent a
handkerchief, ordered some refreshing hot Chinese tea.

"You should have known me in Odessa," gasped Constantine in an
interval between his paroxysms. "Three of the prettiest women in the
town were madly in love with me. You know me only at my worst."

Mr. White, soaking a folded silk handkerchief in cold water, before
laying it on Constantine's burning forehead, did not answer. He
unrolled the pillow from his camp-bed and put it under Constantine's
head. As he did so, he recoiled a little, but after a second's
hesitation, he pushed the immaculate little pillow into place with a
heroic firmness.

"I wore only silk next the skin then," snuffled Constantine. The fever
rose in a wave in his brain, and he shouted curses upon his cruelly
perfect friend.

Mr. White lay only intermittently on his camp-bed that night. He was
kept busy making use of his past experience as a member of an
ambulance unit. Only at daylight he slept for an hour or so.

Constantine, awakened from a short sleep by the sound of firing
outside, lay on his side and watched Mr. White's relaxed, sleeping
face. The fever had left Constantine, and he was now sunk in cold,
limp depression and fear. Luckily, he thought, there was no need to
stir, for certainly he could not be expected--a sick man--to set forth
in a sampan through such dangers as the persistent firing suggested.
At least in this inn he knew the worst, he thought wearily, and his
companion knew the worst too. "I will not leave him," Constantine
vowed, "until I have somehow cured him of these frightful memories of
me--somehow amputated his memory of me...." He lay watching his
companion's face--hating it--obscurely wishing that those eyes, which
had seen the worst during this loathsome night, might remain for ever
shut.

Mr. White woke up quite suddenly. "Good Lord!" he said, peering at his
watch. "Nearly seven. I told the sampan man to be at the foot of the
steps at daylight."

"Are you mad?" asked Constantine shrilly. "Listen to the firing--quite
near. Besides--I'm a very sick man, as you should know by now. I
couldn't even walk--much less dodge through a crowd of Chinese
assassins."

Mr. White, faintly whistling Chopin, laboriously keeping his temper,
left the room, and could presently be heard hee-hawing in the Chinese
language on the verandah to the hee-hawing innkeeper.

When he came back, he said, "The sampaneer's there, waiting--only too
anxious to get away from the bombing they're expecting to-day. He's
tied up only about a hundred yards away. You'll be beyond reach of the
firing as soon as you're round the bend. Hurry up, man; the sooner you
get down to hospital, and I get off on the road home, the better for
us both."

Constantine, genuinely exhausted after his miserable night, did not
speak, but lay with his eyes shut and his face obstinately turned to
the wall. He certainly felt too ill to be brave or to face the
crackling dangers of the battle-ridden streets, but he was conscious
of no plan except a determination to be as obstructive as he could--to
assert at least this ignoble power over his tyrant.

"Get up, you dam fool," shouted Mr. White, suddenly plucking the
pillow from under the sick man's head, "or I'll drag you down to the
river by the scruff of your dirty neck."

Dirty neck! Instantly Constantine sat up--hopeless now of curing this
man's contempt, full of an almost unendurable craving to be far away
from him--to wipe him from his horizon--to be allowed to imagine him
dead. Invigorated by this violent impulse, he rolled out of bed and
sullenly watched Mr. White settle up with the innkeeper and take a few
packages out of that revoltingly refined kit-bag.

"A small tin of water-biscuits," said Mr. White, almost
apologetically, "and the remains of the bloater paste. It's all I have
with me, but it ought to keep you alive till you get to Lao-chow
to-morrow morning.... I'll see you down to the river first and then
pick up these things." He spoke as if he were trying to make little
neat plans still against this disorderly and unwonted background. He
brushed his splashed coat with a silver clothes-brush, wearing the
eagerly safe expression Constantine had seen on his face as he bent
over the tie-press the night before last. The orderly man was trying
to maintain his quiet impersonal self-respect amid surroundings that
humiliated him. Even Constantine understood vaguely that his attacker
was himself being attacked. "Well, I've done my best," added Mr.
White, straightening his back after buckling the last strap of the
kit-bag, and looking at Constantine with an ambiguous, almost
appealing look.

They left the inn. The steep street that led down to the river between
mean, barricaded shops was deserted. The air of it was outraged by
the whipping sound of rifle fire--echoes clanked sharply from wall to
wall.

"It is not safe--it is not safe," muttered Constantine, suddenly
standing rooted, feeling that his next step must bring him into the
path of a bullet.

"It's safer than a gangrenous leg." With his great hand, Mr. White
seized the little Russian's arm and dragged him almost gaily down the
steps. Constantine was by now so hopelessly mired in humiliation that
he did not even try to disguise his terror. He hung back like a
rebellious child, but he was tweaked and twitched along, stumbling
behind his rescuer. He was pressed into the little boat. "Here, take
the biscuits--good-bye--good luck," shouted Mr. White, and a smile of
real gaiety broke out at last upon his face. The strip of rainy air
and water widened between the two friends.

"Strike him dead, God," said Constantine.

The smile did not fade at once from the Englishman's face, as his legs
curiously crumpled into a kneeling position. He seemed trying to kneel
on air; he clutched at his breast with one hand while the other hand
still waved good-bye; he turned his alert, smiling face towards
Constantine as though he were going to say again--"Good-bye--good
luck." Then he fell, head downward, on the steps, the bald crown of
his head just dipping into the water. Mud was splashed over the coat
he had brushed only five minutes before.

There was a loud outcry from the sampan man and his wife. They seemed
to be calling Constantine's already riveted attention to the fallen
man--still only twenty yards away; they seemed uncertain whether he
would now let them row yet more quickly away, as they desired, or
insist on returning to the help of his friend.

"Row on--row on," cried Constantine in Russian and, to show them what
he meant, he snatched up a spare pole and tried to increase the speed
of the boat as it swerved into the current. Spaces of water were
broadening all about the desert islander--home on his desert island
again at last. As Constantine swayed over the pole, he looked back
over his shoulder and flaunted his head, afraid no more of the firing
now that one blessed bullet had carried away unpardonable memory out
of the brain of his friend.


The End




[End of _Hope Against Hope and Other Stories_ by Stella Benson]
