Where the Pavement Ends Part 20

But something had come upon Bibi-Ri. For once he gave me back no jest.

"The monster has marked me down! You heard him? It is a warning!" At that he started up, all streaky with soap and blood as he was, and must rush away on some errand. And then remembering it would be impossible to run the police limits of Noumea before dark, collapsed again. "I am lost!"

Figure my amazement.

"But how?" I demanded. "Does your blessed executioner have power to pick his own victims?... Does he go about cropping heads, for example, like a man in a flower garden? What can he make to you? ... Unless perhaps he has come between you and that fair fortune I saw you pursuing so ardently a moment ago."

The way his jaw dropped! As if I had touched the very spring of his destiny.

Now you can guess that I knew perhaps a little--no matter how little--of lawlessness and violence and secret intrigue persisting within this model criminal laboratory of ours. Do you change vice to virtue by transporting it half a world away and bottling it up? A disturbing question. At least if you expect your convicts to work, to aspire, even to marry and to multiply like free men, you must expect them also to covet, to scheme, to quarrel and to sin--again like free men. These facts I had noted without exploring too deeply, you comprehend. But Bibi-Ri was the last I should have credited with a share in their darker meaning.

Only picture this client as I had found him. A nimble rogue: a kind of licensed pest, with a droll face resembling those rubber toys that wink and grimace between your fingers. True, he had been shipped with the worst of us. But what of that? One knows these gentlemen the Parisian police: how they cry a wolf and then go out and nab some stray puppy in the street. Bibi-Ri! One wondered how he had ever earned his sentence.

And yet--and yet there was certainly something about the fellow. In his eyes were depths. Something fateful and despairing. Something, in view of his accustomed mad humor, to make me pitiful and uneasy.

"Look here, my zig," I said. "I have seen too much and not enough. What have you done? I spy a gay mystery that makes a comedian like you play such a part."

"Perhaps it is the other part I have to play," he returned, with a gleam of his proper spirit. "Perhaps I am playing it at the last gasp of fright--my poor knees clapping like castanets......

"Dumail," he said, "put it this way: Suppose you were within three counted weeks of your final release from this h.e.l.l of an island. Your little red ticket in hand and the actual ship in harbor that presently should bear you home. Within sight of heaven--you understand. Able to taste it. Able to count the days still left you like so many bars on a red-hot gridiron still to be crossed. Three little weeks, Dumail!...

And then your sacred luck offered to trip you up and cheat you again....

Rigolo--what?"

"Very rigolo," I agreed, luring him. "But it seems to me you are borrowing your effects from the martyrdom of the holy St. Laurent."

"Oh, I have a stranger impersonation than that in my repertoire," he flashed. "Conceive, if you can, that I am also supposed to fill the role of a seigneur--and a very n.o.ble gentlemen, too--in disguise!"

Perched there on the chair with a dirty towel about his neck, his hair in a wisp, smeared like a clown and preaching his gentility, he made a figure completely comic--should I say?--or tragic. Anyway I gave a gesture of derision that stung him past endurance.

"Dumail--" he broke out. "You laugh? Dumail, will you believe this?

There is awaiting me back home at the present moment a heritage of millions. Of millions, I swear to you! Not the treasure of an opium dream, Dumail, but a place ready established among the great and the fortunate. For me: Number Matricule 2232! Life in a gondola, do you see?

Luxury, leisure, rank. Beauty. Women. Happiness! Everything a poor lost devil could crave!"

Well, you know, it was a bit too much for me.

"Comedian!" I applauded. "Ah-ah--comedian!"

A sort of fury took him. All else forgotten, he jerked loose the collar of his jacket: made to spread it wide--checked himself and instead drew out from his breast an object for my inspection.

I had view of a miniature: one of those cherubic heads on ivory that relate to the model, perhaps, as a promise relates to a fact in this naughty world. Nevertheless I could trace a sort of semblance to that roguish front as it might have seemed in childhood--all ringlets and innocence, cerulean eye and carmine cheek--the whole encircled by a double row of pearls: Bibi-Ri himself.

"My t.i.tle deed."

I was impressed. Impossible to deny a richness in this miniature. And while the likeness was thin the pearls were indubitable. Still--

"Blagueur!" I murmured. "Where did you snaffle it?"

Gloomily he regarded me. "You are like the others. Always while I was kicking about the gutters or the jail it was that way. No one would listen. Another of Bibi-Ri's jokes! And I lacked any clew to this trinket: my single poor inheritance.... But now--look! These queer signs on the reverse. They have been deciphered. Oh, an unbelievable stroke of chance! Of course I have much to learn. The name of the family. My own true name itself. But at least I am in the way of proof and this time I was going to win!... A famished man--a man famished since his birth, Dumail--is set before a boundless feast. Does he joke about that?"

"Perhaps not," I admitted. "Go on."

"But I am showing you what Life means to me!"

"And M. de Nou--?" I reminded him.

He shuddered: his head dropped upon his breast.

"M. de Nou--is Death!"

Well, you know, this was all very thrilling for emotion, but as a statement it left something to be desired.

"Answer me," I commanded. "Have you killed any one?"

"No!"

"Is there another sentence hanging over you? Have you some stain on your prison record?"

"None."

"Whom have you wronged?"

"n.o.body."

"Then sacred pig! It is only a folly of nerves after all! Just because you expect to cash your millions and swim in champagne at last?... Bear up under it, my boy. Stiffen your lip! Faith, you might be a missing dauphin or even the Red Mark himself--as people say--and still you could meet your luck with a little courage!"

Like a jack on wires Bibi-Ri sprang to his feet.

"True!" he laughed, shrill. "You are right, Dumail. You are the friend in need!... Where is that blessed mop, to dry my face at least. So! I'm off!... But to-night--what? I owe you something, Dumail: you and your curiosity! To-night you shall come behind the scenes. If you dare.

Understood?" He wheeled at the step: his eyes held their old twinkling deviltry. "I was a thief before I was ever a gentleman," he said, with his weird grin, "and I can still play that farce to its end--get through and done with it and pull out once for all!... You shall see for yourself!"

Thereupon he left me to the haze of bewilderment in which I lived for the rest of the day.

Now you can imagine without much telling that we have ways--we convicts a.s.signed here and there on service--to conduct our own underground affairs in despite authority. Unnecessary to explain these little evasions. Enough to say my client was as good as his word that evening.

Enough to say that under misty stars, while the military of the watch were safely watching, Bibi-Ri crept out of town by forbidden paths: and that I crept along with him.

Inland from Noumea for a wide district is all one checkerboard of gardens and small estates where liberes and convict proprietors--the aristocrats of our settlement--enjoy their snug retreat. Not being a reformed bandit myself, skilled in agriculture and piety, I was strange to this countryside. But Bibi-Ri had the key. I could only tag at his heels through blind plantations and admire his silence and his speed.

Truly, as he said, he was taking me behind the scenes: until at last, in a grove of flamboyants that wrapped the night with darker webbing, he set hand to a door.

For all I knew it could have opened on the Pit itself: but a shaft of light guided me stumbling into a stone-flagged kitchen, low and dim and smoky in fact as some lesser inferno.

By the hearth a woman turned from tending the kettle to overlook us steadily. She was alone, but my faith! she had no need to fear. Figure to yourself this ma.s.sive sibyl with a face planned on a mason's square, deep-chiselled and brooding in the flush of firelight. She was like that. Yes, a sibyl in her cave, to whom Bibi-Ri entered gingerly as a cat.

"I am here, Mother Carron," he said.

Then for sure and for the first time I saw where we stood. Mother Carron! In Noumea--through all the obscure complex of convict life--no name bore more significance: or less, in the official sense. For she had no number. Consider what that means to a community of jailbirds. The finger of the law had never touched her. Consider how singular in a country of keepers and felons!

She was a free colonist. Her husband, a distinguished housebreaker, had been transported some years before. Whereupon she had had the hardihood--sufficient if you like!--to immigrate, to claim a concession and to have that same husband a.s.signed her as a convict laborer.

Since then she had wielded a curious power. Her size, her tongue, her knowledge of crime and criminals and her contempt of them all--these made her formidable. But also it was whispered that queer things went on at her plantation under the flamboyant trees: a famous rendezvous where no prying agent ever found a shred of evidence--against her or any one else. Successful escapes had been decided there, they said. And disputes of convict factions that troubled no other court, and even politics of the underworld at home, referred to certain great ones among us. Our inner conclave of transportes--so dread and secret that to be identified a member brings solitary confinement in the black cells--had a.s.sembled there to seek her counsel. Had demurred to it and been routed with her broom whisking about their ears, if rumor spoke true. For she was a lady of weighty ways.