The Ragged Edge Part 2

Drink for him had a queer phase. It did not cheer or fortify him with false courage and recklessness; it simply enveloped him in a mist of unreality. A shudder rippled across his shoulders. He hated the taste of it. The first peg was torture. But for all that, it offered relief; his brain, stupefied by the fumes, grew dull, and conscience lost its edge to bite.

He wiped the sweat from his chin and forehead. His hand shook so violently that he dropped the handkerchief; and he let it lie on the floor because he dared not stoop.

Ah c.u.m, sensing the difficulty, approached, recovered the damp handkerchief and returned it.

"Thanks."

"Very interesting," said the Chinaman, with a wave of his tapering hand toward the roofs. "It reminds you of a red sea suddenly petrified."

"Or the flat stones in the meadows, teeming with life underneath.

Ants."

"You are from America?"

"Yes." But Spurlock put up his guard.

"I am a Yale man," said Ah c.u.m.

"Yale? Why, so am I." There was no danger in admitting this fact.

Spurlock offered his hand, which Ah c.u.m accepted gravely. A broken laugh followed the action. "Yale!" Spurlock's gaze shifted to the dead hills beyond the window; when it returned to the Chinaman there was astonishment instead of interest: as if Ah c.u.m had been a phantom a moment since and was now actually a human being. "Yale!"

A Chinaman who had gone to Yale!

"Yes. Civil engineering. Mentally but not physically competent. Had to give up the work and take to this. I'm not n.o.ble; so my honourable ancestors will not turn over in their graves."

"Graves." Spurlock pointed in the sloping fields outside the walls.

"I've counted ten coffins so far."

"Ah, yes. The land about these walls is a common graveyard. Every day in the year you will witness such scenes. There are no funerals among the poor, only burials. And many of these deaths could be avoided if it were not for superst.i.tion. Superst.i.tion is the Chinese Reaper. Rituals instead of medicines. Sometimes I try to talk. I might as well try to build a ladder to heaven. We must take the children--of any race--if we would teach knowledge. Age is set, impervious to innovations."

The Chinaman paused. He saw that his words were falling upon dull ears. He turned to observe what this object was that had so unexpectedly diverted the young man's attention. It was the girl.

She was standing before a window, against the background of the rain-burdened April sky. There was enough contra-light to render her ethereal.

Spurlock was basically a poet, quick to recognize beauty, animate or inanimate, and to transcribe it in unuttered words. He was always word-building, a metaphorist, lavish with singing adjectives; but often he built in confusion because it was difficult to describe something beautiful in a new yet simple way.

He had not noticed the girl particularly when she offered the sandwiches; but in this moment he found her beautiful. Her face reminded him of a delicate unglazed porcelain cup, filled with blond wine. But there was something else; and in his befogged mental state the comparison eluded him.

Ruth broke the exquisite pose by summoning Ah c.u.m, who was lured into a lecture upon the water-clock. This left Spurlock alone.

He began munching his water-chestnuts--a small brown radish-shaped vegetable, with the flavour of coconut--that grow along the river brims. Below the window he saw two coolies carrying a coffin, which presently they callously dumped into a yawning pit. This made the eleventh. There were no mourners. But what did the occupant of the box care? The laugh was always with the dead: they were out of the muddle.

From the unlovely hillside his glance strayed to the several five-story towers of the p.a.w.nshops. Celestial Uncles! Spurlock chuckled, and a bit of chestnut, going down the wrong way, set him to coughing violently. When the paroxysm pa.s.sed, he was forced to lean against the window-jamb for support.

"That young man had better watch his cough," said Spinster Prudence. "He acts queerly, too."

"They always act like that after drink," said Ruth, casually.

She intercepted the glance the spinsters exchanged, and immediately sensed that she had said too much. There was no way of recalling the words; so she waited.

"Miss Enschede--such an odd name!--are you French?"

"Oh, no. Pennsylvania Dutch. But I have never seen America. I was born on an island in the South Seas. I am on my way to an aunt who lives in Hartford, Connecticut."

The spinsters nodded approvingly. Hartford had a very respectable sound.

Ruth did not consider it necessary, however, to add that she had not notified this aunt of her coming, that she did not know whether the aunt still resided in Hartford or was underground. These two elderly ladies would call her stark mad. Perhaps she was.

"And you have seen ... drunken men?" Prudence's tones were full of suppressed horror.

"Often. A very small settlement, mostly natives. There was a trader--a man who bought copra and pearls. Not a bad man as men go, but he would sell whisky and gin. Over here men drink because they are lonely; and when they drink too hard and too long, they wind up on the beach."

The spinsters stared at her blankly.

Ruth went on to explain. "When a man reaches the lowest scale through drink, we call him a beachcomber. I suppose the phrase--the word--originally meant a man who searched for food on the beach.

The poor things! Oh, it was quite dreadful. It is queer, but men of education and good birth fall swiftest and lowest."

She sent a covert glance toward the young man. She alone of them all knew that he was on the first leg of the terrible journey to the beach. Somebody ought to talk to him, warn him. He was all alone, like herself.

"What are those odd-looking things on the roofs?" she asked of Ah c.u.m.

"Pigs and fish, to fend off the visitations of the devil." Ah c.u.m smiled. "After all, I believe we Chinese have the right idea. The devil is on top, not below. We aren't between him and heaven; he is between us and heaven."

The spinsters had no counter-philosophy to offer; so they turned to Ruth, who had singularly and unconsciously invested herself with glamour, the glamour of adventure, which the old maids did not recognize as such because they were only tourists. This child at once alarmed and thrilled them. She had come across the wicked South Seas which were still infested with cannibals; she had seen drunkenness and called men beachcombers; who was this moment as innocent as a babe, and in the next uttered some bitter wisdom it had taken a thousand years of philosophy to evolve. And there was that dress of hers! She must be warned that she had been imposed upon.

"You'll pardon an old woman, Miss Enschede," said Sister Prudence; "but where in this world did you get that dress?"

Ruth picked up both sides of the skirt and spread it, looking down.

"Is there anything wrong with it?"

"Wrong? Why, you have been imposed upon somewhere. That dress is thirty years old, if a day."

"Oh!" Ruth laughed softly. "That is easily explained. I haven't much money; I don't know how much it is going to cost me to reach Hartford; so I fixed over a couple of my mother's dresses. It doesn't look bad, does it?"

"Mercy, no! That wasn't the thought. It was that somebody had cheated you."

The spinster did not ask if the mother lived; the question was inconsequent. No mother would have sent her daughter into the world with such a wardrobe. Straitened circ.u.mstances would not have mattered; a mother would have managed somehow. In the '80s such a dress would have indicated considerable financial means; under the sun-helmet it was an anachronism; and yet it served only to add a quainter charm to the girl's beauty.

"Do you know what you make me think of?"

"What?"

"As if you had stepped out of some old family alb.u.m."

The feminine vanities in Ruth were quiescent; nothing had ever occurred in her life to tingle them into action. She was dressed as a white woman should be; and that for the present satisfied her instincts. But she threw a verbal bombsh.e.l.l into the spinsters'

camp.

"What is a family alb.u.m?"

"You poor child, do you mean to tell me you've never seen a family alb.u.m? Why, it's a book filled with the photographs of your grandmothers and grandfathers, your aunts and uncles and cousins, your mother and father when they were little."