Where the Pavement Ends Part 26

It was Mother Carron who recovered some sort of sanity first among us. It was Mother Carron who gathered the fainting girl and pa.s.sed her over to the charge of the nuns; Mother Carron who had forethought to s.n.a.t.c.h one of Carron's jackets from a hook; Mother Carron, finally, who slipped that jacket onto Bibi-Ri and b.u.t.toned it carefully to the chin before she would order the door unbarred.

"Well, well--so we land her in the church after all," observed that remarkable woman briskly, at the last. "Chouette, alors! It is honest, at least.... And now, stupid, open up and admit the happy bridegroom and let him see what he can see!"

He saw, right enough. He saw as much as was needful. When the door thrust inward, when his two rogue friends of military surveillants rushed through, when that tall devil in long black redingote and high hat, with his flaming yellow eyes and raging front--when M. de Nou himself, I say, confronted us--there we were properly ranged as the actors in a perfectly obvious police case of brawl and murder: prisoner, witnesses, corpus delicti and the succoring clergy: complete.

"What does this mean?" he demanded.

Bibi-Ri faced him--a strange meeting, in truth!

"Me," he said, with his old trick of whimsy. "Only me. Convict 2232.

I've been developing my capabilities a little.... That's all!"

So they guillotined Bibi-Ri. In due course, by due process, he pa.s.sed before the Marine Tribunal, before the Commandant and the Procurator General and the Director and the rest of our salaried philanthropists.

They dealt with him faithfully and of a gray early morning they led him from the little door of the condemned cell. They marched him out with his legs hobbled and his hands tied behind his back; with the chaplain tottering at his side and the bayonets of the guard shining martially file and file: with some of the chiefest of these judges to receive him and some hundreds of us convicts drawn up below to do him honor.

Such was the method of his elevation, you will perceive: such the means by which he attained his ambitions, his uplifted position in the world--when he climbed the scaffold in the courtyard of the central prison on Ile de Nou and took his final look on life.

I was there. For my complicity at Mother Carron's that night and my refusal to testify at the trial they had shipped me back to the Collective. I stood in the front row. I was among those felons whose special privilege is their compulsory attendance at executions. I could miss nothing. Not a word nor a movement. Not the hurried mumbling of the death sentence. Not the ruffling of the drums that covered the fatal preparations.... Not even the icy chill to the marrow when we sank there in our ranks on the damp flagstones.

"Convicts: on your knees! Hats off!"

Just as well for me I was allowed to kneel, perhaps.... Never mind....

It does not bear talking of. Except one thing. One thing I recall to comfort me, as I saw it through a mist of tears, wrung with pity and with awe. And that was Bibi-Ri's last salute to my address before they lashed him on the bascule, under the knife.... He smiled at me, the little fellow. Even gayly. Bidding me note as plain as words how he held fast his good courage, how he had kept his counsel and his great secret in prison and would keep them to the end. How he apprehended and viewed clear-eyed the inconceivable grim jest of the family party there on the scaffold: himself and the executioner!

Then he looked away across the harbor, toward the anchorage, and he did not shift his gaze again from that goal of Noumea. Taking his farewell, Monsieur. Taking his farewell in spirit and quite content, as he had said, I do believe. For this was the day, this the very morning, when the steamer left Noumea bearing his beloved Zelie for home....

And one other thing I can tell you, crisp and clear. Do you remember when I began I said I had evened the score against M. de Nou? Evened it for always until that fiend shall be dragged to the nethermost level of h.e.l.l and earn his reward? Evened it the only way it could be evened on this side of the grave?... And so I did. Never was such an evening!

Listen:

Ask me not how it was done, by aid of what obscure pressure, through what underground channels. But the miniature--the miniature of Bibi-Ri!

You recollect? Somehow. Monsieur--somehow, I say--it found its way into the panier with the head of Bibi-Ri. Somehow the new a.s.sistant, Bombiste's successor, discovered it when he "robbed the basket"--when he stooped to gather the little perquisites of office for his master. And somehow and finally it was laid straightway in the palm of M. de Nou....

He glanced at it. I saw him start. I saw him stare. I saw him stand and stand and still stare. I saw him lose bit by bit that sh.e.l.l of d.a.m.nable pride, that prop of untouched and unrelenting hatred and contempt which was and which had been through all his years, his evil support.... He gave a movement, of horror, of growing terror. He stepped over. And he looked into the basket at his handiwork still lying there. He looked and he looked. But he could not know. He cannot know. He can never, never know, Monsieur.... For the red mark about that severed neck was all one red mark--do you see?--and the Red Mark remains a mystery forever!

EAST OF EASTWARD

Few persons ever attain any precise knowledge of the immemorial East, its ways or its meanings; its wickedness or its mystery. But Tunstal was a young man with a cherubic smile and a plethoric letter of credit, and he had traveled far and wide to Honolulu, to Yokohama, to Macao, and even to Singapore, which is very far indeed, besides being extremely wicked. By the time he had taken pa.s.sage on the _Lombock_ for a tour of the archipelago his education seemed complete. He had just learned to play fan-tan with much the same skill he was wont to display at poker in more familiar climes.

Tunstal had fallen in with other traveled men on board the _Lombock_, which covers a beat among the lesser ports of Netherlands India. These were simple planters, merchants and traders for the most part, largely Dutch in flavor as well as speed. He thought them pretty dull, but they proved to be good listeners. So he had been instructing them all around, charming their ears with tales of Sago Lane and the Jalan Sultan, of Gay Street and Number Nine and the dances at Kapiolani, the while he banked a bowl of c.h.i.n.king cash as long as any would sit up with him.

That was how he came to find himself alone in the smoking room one breathless hot morning some days out from Singapore, amid the dead cheroots and the empty gla.s.ses, with a pile of ill-gotten profits before him, a very dry throat, and a great call for swifter action and yet newer worlds. It was all too easy. This globe-trotting thing threatened to become monotonous....

"And not even a drink on tap," he complained, for the virtuous steward--also Dutch--had retired long ago beyond the troubling of a bell push. "A fellow might just as well be back home with the lid down."

He stumbled out on deck in the dawn that came pouring up from behind the earth like a cloud of luminous, pearly smoke. The _Lombock_ had made harbor some time during the night and now lay anch.o.r.ed in a river mouth off the fringe of a toy town--one of those island cities apparently built of matches and cigar boxes that have a thousand years of history behind them and no sense of dignity and not so much as a brick block to support the same.

The water front was a tangle of crazy jetties, of string-tied fishing boats and bird-cage houses, some on stilts and some on floating shingles, to rise and fall with the tide. There stood the inevitable ancient fort, clad in creepers, and there were the usual rows of G.o.downs, lime-washed and naked. A little mosque sprouted from a nest of palms, like a moldy turnip trying to grow the wrong way. Up along the wooded rise nestled a few solid dwellings, with garden walls and tended terraces. But Tunstal discovered no wonders--nothing to claim a star in any guidebook--and he looked indifferently at that age-old land with its great green, jungled slopes shouldering back and back until they faded in dim blue.

The early stir of little brown men, the raffle of small craft propelled by pictorial pirates in kilted sarongs, the amphibious urchin who paddled a log and besought a chance to dive for coppers; the mounting heat, the lifting river mists, the first saffron tinting of the sun, and even the complex and curious odor that wafted overstream, of jasmine and mud flats and ripe fish, of swamps and hearths and the indescribable exhalation of the human forcing house--he had observed these things before in places quite similar.

Wherefore he yawned in the face of the immemorial East and moved toward the lowered gangway to meet the first mate, a lean and leathery mariner, whom he hailed with boisterous outcry.

"h.e.l.lo chief--you're the very chap I need."

The mate paused to turn his patient, almost mournful regard that seemed never to focus short of the horizon.

"I'm going ash.o.r.e," announced Mr. Tunstal, "for a taste of local ginger."

"Ginger?" inquired Nivin.

"Some kind of tropic spice."

"Spice?"

"I didn't come all this way," explained Tunstal, "to waste my opportunities with a lot of fat koopmans who talk of nothing but calicoes and the rate of exchange. I'm a humble seeker after truth, right enough, but I want it fresh and snappy. I've got the price and, believe me, chief, I've got the appet.i.te.... What port is this?"

Nivin told him. The name does not matter. It might have been one or another about that coast. It meant little to Tunstal beyond the fact that they would lie there till midnight.

"And plenty long enough, by the looks. I'll just collect three thrills and a shock and be back for tiffin. All I want from you, chief, is the wise tip. Tell me, chief, tell me. Is there anything--you know--anything specially worth seeing hereabouts?"

Thus spake and thus queried Alfred Poynter Tunstal, and Nivin examined the figure he made there under the dawn. Quite a pleasing figure. His suit of cream-colored silk fitted sleekly upon his well-fed person and his tie was a dainty sc.r.a.p. He carried a dove-gray sun helmet with not more than three yards of bright peac.o.c.k puggree. His buckskin shoes were fleckless. Also he wore a smile, which requires to be noted. It began in dimples and circled chubbily. A captious eye might have marked it as somewhat lacking--somewhat too round and ready, like the ripple on a pan of water. But it was brisk, forward, and perfectly a.s.sured.

"Anything worth seeing?" repeated Nivin, considering that smile.

The mate had sailed with globe-trotters before, though possibly with none quite duplicating Mr. Tunstal. This man Nivin was one of a type not so rare in outlying lanes and obscure corners as might be thought, into which something of the sun and the air of warm seas has penetrated. A bit of a dreamer, perhaps, mellowed by service under softer skies, among softer races. To such an officer any pa.s.senger is apt to become an object of real concern, aside from the strictly professional value thereof. He had overheard Mr. Tunstal's hectic memoirs in the smoking room and simply, laboriously, he went about to convey a certain warning....

"I should hardly think so--for a gentleman of your experience. The fact is, sir, you're off the traveled track here, so to speak. A town like this has no use for tourists and provides no cla.s.s to fatten off the likes. Music, dances--all the giddy frolic made up for a show--they don't lower theirselves to that cut o' business."

"Why, they're only natives, aren't they?" asked Tunstal, and the whole philosophy of his kind was rolled in the phrase.

"Only natives, as you say, sir," returned Nivin slowly--"which is Malay and poor to jest with, besides frequently carrying a creese. They're a sober-minded breed, sir. Quite superior and fit for respect in their way."

But Tunstal had been leaning to watch the river traffic, and here he prodded the other to look. Just pa.s.sing them at the moment came a clumsy proa that had worked upchannel on the last of the tide under sweeps--a singular blot of color. Alow and aloft, from her tub cut.w.a.ter and forward-sloping rail to her languid wings of matting, she was grimed an earthy, angry red. Her sailors were smeared with the same stain, their head rags and kilts and their bare arms and knotted fingers at the oars, so that she and they seemed to swim in a sullen, an infernal conflagration, and the sunrise slanting across the river reaches picked spar and rope and savage-dyed group with dabs of ruby and vermilion and dull citrine.

"It's a cinnabar boat," said Nivin as they stared down at that silent crew of ensanguined devils.

"From the mines. I know," nodded Tunstal. "Up the river--what? I heard about those mines. Van Goor, that pop-eyed little chap--an agent for some mining company, I believe--he was telling us last night around fourth-drink time. It appears these mercury miners are imported Kw.a.n.gsi coolies. About as low a race as crawls, with peculiar customs of their own. They trade with the country people for supplies, and they drive some queer trades. Did you ever happen to hear yourself, chief?"

"There's no lack of tales."

"Maybe, but this is the only real one I got a smell of--pity Van Goor wasn't a bit thirstier. He said a famine has been raging in some coast district or other and the villagers are keen to sell. At the same time the commodity naturally loses weight, through starvation, and the coolie gangs buy by the pound. So a canny village will pool its food to fatten up a few--Ah!"