Where the Pavement Ends Part 47

n.o.body knew what wide courses had brought him eastward; his history began at the dock head where he appeared with the famous clay pipe in his mouth and the rest of his luggage in a plaid. There was a loose rumor he had once been top tinker in the big liners, until he took to raiding the saloon for revivals and frightening the lady pa.s.sengers into fits. It was said again that he had come out from his native boiler shops of Clyde as a missionary, making vast trouble for the official brethren and seeking converts with a club. But if his doctrine was somewhat crude, he had a lifetime's knowledge of machinery, and the man that can nurse engines will need to show fewer diplomas in outlandish parts than the one that can save souls. By the same token Chris Wickwire undertook to do both.

You can figure how this bleak moralist would fasten on a type like Sutton. Soft airs and sweet skies had no appeal for the Cameronian; to him the balmy East was all one net of the devil baited with strange seductions, and unnameable allurements. The rest of us were hardly worth a serious warning. But our youthful mate, with the milk scarce dry on his lips, as you might say, and his fresh appet.i.te for life and confident humor--here was a brand to be s.n.a.t.c.hed from the burning: here was a stray lamb for an anxious shepherd!

And Sutton--at the first he took to it like a treat. It made a new game for him, you see, amusing and rather flattering as well, the kind of a j.a.pe he was all too apt at.

"Where ha' ye been the day--ash.o.r.e again? Buyin' gauds an' silk pajamies, I notice. Laddie, do ye never tak thocht for your immortal speerit, which canna hide under lasceevious trickeries nor yet cover its waeful' nakedness? No' to speak of yon blazin' Oriental bazzaars, fu' o'

d.a.m.nable pitfalls for the unwary! Aye, laugh now!... Laddie, ye're light-minded. Heaven send down its truth upon ye before ye wuther like the lilies o' the field!"

This sort of thing was good fun for Sutton--at the start, as I say. He must have had many a rare chuckle from superior ground. Being d.a.m.ned with such a.s.surance, he naturally inquired into means of grace, and so developed the jest.

With the streak of slyness that marked him, he kept it pretty much between himself and the censor, but I chanced to overhear an odd pa.s.sage. He called one day for a Bible, offering to prove the other wrong on some argued matter.

"Na, fegs," said Christopher. "I hae nane."

"What--no Book!"

"I need nane. What for?"

"Why, for me, of course. It's a remedy for all ills, they say.... I'm surprised at your not trying it on."

They made a picture there by the rail in a strong glint of sunlight--the chief, squatted on a bollard like a grim and battered Moses giving the law; Sutton, dapper in fresh ducks, his hands in his pockets, swaying easily to the ship's motion.

Wickwire seemed to reflect. "Aye, it's a grand book, nae doot, but wad ye listen? I been watchin' ye, laddie--I ken ye better than maybe ye think."

"Much obliged, I'm sure," said Sutton pertly.

"Aye, there it is, ye see. Ye never tak' the straight way wi' life. But what I dinna just ken is this: are ye a'thegither past the reach o' good words for remedy? Puttin' aside the false glitter, could ever ye cast the beam from yer eye an' listen how h.e.l.l gapes for ye?"

"I might," said Sutton. "You haven't a notion how I enjoy hearing about it. You might read to me."

I was startled then to see the depth of yearning in Wickwire's regard, to see his hands knotting and twisting one in the other. However it might be with the mate, it was no play with him; he was wrung with pity as toward an erring son, or toward some younger memory of himself, perhaps--for Sutton had this appeal.

"Suppose I should tell ye now I canna read the heid o' one printed word frae the hurdies o' it?"

The idea took slow hold of Sutton while he stared and brightened.

"Can't read?" he echoed. "You can't read? Why, in that case--I could read to you," he cried--"couldn't I? By gum, there's a notion! I'll do a bit of instructing myself, d'y'see?... Truth--oodles of truth! I'll show you old boy--"

And he did. At our very next port he went prowling among the shops where the Government students get their second-hand textbooks, and when he came back he brought the book with him, a book with a gilt cross on the cover. You would have fancied the chief must have gained a great point for salvation; on the other hand, Sutton apparently skimmed the cream of the joke, for he certainly read. Thereafter one heard them in a quiet hour, a harsh voice like the rasp of an ash hoist rising now and then to protest and a lighter response, droning a line or perhaps breaking over into merriment....

"Where's the chief?"

"Prayer meetin' on the after 'atch."

"Saved anybody yet?"

"Give 'im 'is chawnce," said the third. "Give 'im 'is bleedin' chawnce.

He'll fetch that myte to glory if 'e 'as to spatchc.o.c.k 'im!"

But it ended as, of course, it was bound to. The one grew weary or the other too insistent; their sittings were suspended.

For a time they were not even on speaking terms, and the very day we were coaling at Calcutta--seven weeks before, you remember--they broke suddenly on an open quarrel. What it was about none could say, but all that afternoon the mate went strutting with a very pink face, while Christopher kept bobbing up the scuttle to glower after him with a long-drawn lip over his pipe.

"Did he say he's gaun ash.o.r.e the nicht?" he asked me once, in a whisper.

"Aye, there it is, ye see," he added to himself. "Wae's me for the fool in his heart! He's young--he's ower young. What he needs is to come to gripples with raw, immortal truth for one moment. What he needs is a rod an' a staff to comfort him--an' by this an' that," he breathed through the pipestem, "I'd like to have the layin' on o' it!" The same night we lost Wickwire....

Perhaps you can see now how hard it came for us to believe, as we hastened on his rescue toward Colootullah, that this kind of a man, that this particular man, had fallen the victim to a loathsome vice.

By what we could piece out from Sutton's report, at the time of the accident, Wickwire had never dropped into the river at all. He must have landed in one of the empty coal barges alongside--there had been one missing next morning which later was picked up near the Howrah Bridge--and so reached sh.o.r.e.

"He got hisself shook in his wits," said the captain, breaking a silence. "Is that how you make it?"

"Something of the kind," I agreed, and recalled a lad from Milford Haven I once was shipmates with who took a clip over the head from a falling block and for a month thereafter was dumb, though otherwise hale enough.

"It'd be an almighty clip over the head would strike the chief dumb,"

said Raff simply-- "or anything like it."

Sutton said nothing.

Meanwhile we went plunging on through rain-swept darkness. I never knew the course nor the place where we left our gharri and took to narrower ways afoot, but here the nightmare closed in upon us. We breathed an air heavy with mortality, on pavements made slimy by countless naked feet, in a shaft, in a pit, between dank walls. Shapes drifted by like sheeted corpses, peering, floating up, melting away; from pools and eddies of lamplight sinister faces started out and fingers pointed after us. For we had come to strange waters, the teeming backwaters of the city.

Port Said has its tide rips if you like, is wickeder perhaps in its hectic way; you need to keep to soundings in Singapore, and parts of Macao and Shanghai you do well to navigate with an extra lookout and pressing business somewhere else. But Calcutta at night is the Sarga.s.so Sea. There you wander among the other derelicts, helpless, hopeless, moving always deeper down lost channels, uncharted, fetid, clogged with infinite suggestions of dim horrors--

To top our bewilderment, the captain and I found ourselves being piloted swiftly through this welter, without pause or fault, by alleys and reeking courts, doubling and twisting. We dived into a lurid, crowded cavern that echoed with some dismal merrymaking of string and drum. We jostled the loungers in a low-caste drinking shop and pushed on to a dark stair that rose like the ladder of a dovecote. The place was alive with twitterings and shufflings. Steps fled before us and half-naked bodies caromed against us from the void until a last rush landed us on the floor above the street.

There was a dusky room hung with blue stuffs where dragons black and gold crawled and ramped. It ran along the front of the house as a gallery, but it had no windows--only a row of shallow cells, so to say, divided by the hangings. Down at the far end low lights burned hot and small under wreaths of greasy incense, and a big, green joss grinned from a niche. He was fat and cra.s.s and ugly, that joss, a fit deity for such a den, and he seemed to nod and to listen!

Perhaps because we were listening!...

"Whaur's that pipe? Whaur's that pipe? Boy, you smoke wallah, whaur's that pipe?" A voice to send the chill into your marrow, slab and dreary and overlaid, but with a rasp that we knew and would have known anywhere on earth, or under. "_Not_ the silver one, ye blistered limb--"

n.o.body came; nothing stirred among the curtains. Sutton had closed the door, to lean there. It was very still. Except for the leering joss and the monstrous embroidered things on the walls the rooms showed empty.

And the plaint began again, monotonous, m.u.f.fled:

"Whaur's that pipe o' mine?"...

Raff was first to break the spell that held us. With a brusque gesture he set us in motion, and we followed on from curtain to curtain down the gallery, and at the end near the joss we found him we sought. He lay propped on a charpoy in a nest of squab blue cushions. On a stand beside him glowed a tiny lamp, and a yellow Eurasian lad was tending him as perhaps the imps tend the d.a.m.ned. Evidently the pipe had been found; he held the length of polished bamboo ready for the fuming pellet, and he raised himself on an elbow as we three drew silently near and stood by.

"Chief!" said the captain, and stopped dead.

He looked up at us then, and it was Chris Wickwire, his very self. He looked and looked and made no sign.