Where the Pavement Ends Part 51

Other guests had begun to gather at the promise of diversion: a bat-eared clerk from the Consulate office, a broken engineer, a benzoin trader looking professionally neat and antiseptic, and two or three loafers looking considerably less so--but all entire gentlemen, unpatched, and all expectant of Silva's lead and grateful for it.

"Well, well. A new specimen, then." The captain was pleased to a.s.sume a scientific interest as he propped himself on his cue and waved aside a wreath of cigarette smoke. "And a blasted poor specimen at that, I'd say.... Now which tribe would you take him to be, just as he stands?"

Captain Silva had a reputation of the kind invaluable to a humorist; it a.s.sured him an audience. Also, he had that rare immunity in tropic heats which makes any man formidable, and even sinister. An Anglo-Portuguese strain was supposed to account for him--for his color, for his superior air, and for various ventures of his not easy to define since piracy went out of date. Perhaps it did. But the gleam in his eye, a certain evil quickening with which he studied the unfortunate Merry, might have argued a darker origin.

"By G.o.d! A specimen for true!" he breathed, incredulous. "Zimballo," he added in his drawl, slow and acid, "you're getting infernally d.a.m.ned careless. Since when has this front room been free to any greasy lascar that comes along?"

The fat man went a rich shade of magenta.

"I can' help if he shoves in on me! 'Ow _can_ I help?"

"He wouldn't shove in by chance--on his nerve."

"Tha's it! Tha's jus' what he done, sir. Nerve! He come after drink, and you know what he brings along with him--to buy off me? Eh--what?"

Zimballo blew out his wrath. "Twenty-five Batavia cents!... Besides a lid'l fool parrot to do juggle-trick work!"

"Drink? Ah-ha. Likely enough too.... But how does he manage to call for 'em? Can he talk anything human, at least?"

And here, having confirmed his perception of the victim, Silva drove home the attack.

"Hey, you fella yonder. Bugis, Sula man, sea gypsy--whichever's your misbegotten stripe--suppose you speak'um. What pidgin belong you? Where you hail from, anyway?"

Mr. Merry stood there before them, dazed and helpless. In one hand he held his rejected coin; in the other the lorikeet's cage and a few trifles wrapped with a kerchief. He knew what these people meant. He was not so far gone as to miss what mockery was being put upon him in savage contempt, and how it measured the distance he had traveled and the depth to which he had sunk. But his head was humming like a pressure gauge, and his body was banked with unslaked clinkers, and he made his effort as best he could.

"Friends," he said, swaying on his feet. "I don't--I don't mind if somebody kindly will set me up to a bracer. I'm pa.s.sing through to Amboyna; dropped off a prau up the coast this morning.... It's true I do a bit with sleight o' hand to pay my way, but I had no luck this trip and I am asking.... Brandy. Arrack or sagueir, if you say so. It's--it's quite a while since I had any. I--I want it pretty bad."

In the silence Silva softly held up a finger.

"You," he noted softly, "are a dirty renegade!"

Above, the line of swinging punkahs fanned the thick air with regular beat. It threw a constant flicker of shadow over the guests. Otherwise they showed no change of expression. They leaned against the tables and mopped their faces and drank and looked on. The way many men, not ingrained with cruelty to begin, have learned to look on at many curious things in regions where that particular devil does business.

"Pity," suggested the engineer after a time, emptying his gla.s.s deliberately--"a pity he can't pick a flask or two out that bloomin'

hat he's wearin'. 'S big enough."

One of the loafers snickered.

"There's the river waiting for him. Full of drinks. And he could wash in it too."

"Turn him into those pigpens at the rear," advised the bat-eared clerk.

"Let him try his games on the mixed lot inside, in the back rooms."

"No, sir, you won'!" Zimballo entered a gusty veto. "That sweep? He ain'

fit for my back rooms neither!"

"You're right," said Silva. This yellow man did no mopping; his skin had the gloss of a salamander's, and his eyes were like dusky jewels. A humorist in his own fashion he surely was--and his speech was tipped with malice as with acrid poison. "The blighter's not good enough for half-castes, even."

"What's the lowest vermin on earth?... Why, the white who's forgot his own race. It's hard enough at best--isn't it?--to keep yourself topside with your right authority among a few million saddle-colored monkeys.

But along comes a rascal like that and lives on the folk: acts like 'em; looks like 'em; _drinks_ like 'em--by G.o.d! Then where's your sanguinary prestige gone?"

He knew how to stir these listless exiles.

"I tell you, when a blasted tramp goes native altogether he needs to be taught what white men think of him, and where he belongs. He's a pest and a danger.... I'd like to see him and every other like him wiped out of the islands. It's a common duty to suppress the whole filthy crew of 'em!"

They caught some of his energy--some of his superior biting viciousness as well. Especially the loafers were roused by a call to higher things.

The benzoin merchant, betraying a habit acquired in a ruder society, groped vaguely at his hip. The engineer sought a billiard cue that balanced better to his fancy. Only the little clerk retained official scruples and timidly doubted if there was any order against juggling, as such.

"There's an order against vagrants," countered Silva.

"But, after all, if he has a trade of his own--"

"Trade be d.a.m.ned. He comes begging--doesn't he? And if you want to bet he's not a fraud besides--."

"We might give him a chance."

"It's what I mean!" cried Silva. "We'll give him a chance, for true.... Look here--"

He turned on the bewildered Merry.

"Look here--you! You say you've had no luck? Well: pray for it now. You say sleight o' hand is your line? Well: turn out a sample--if you can: something to prove you're not just a thieving beggar.... Observe! Here is a dollar. I lay it down to your silver bit, and I lay you the odds you've no trick worth a rotten straw--not one but I'll catch you out and show you up. If you win, you get your drinks. If you lose--!... I'm telling you! Be careful!"

Mr. Merry's first care, however, was to be seated. That is to say, he put himself into a chair at an iron-topped table because it happened to be nearer than the floor.

He understood. With some reserve of tortured clear vision he did understand--the subtle finish to Silva's j.a.pe: playing his poor claims against his frantic need--the last refinement of humiliation; to make him exhibit his pitiful arts as a faker and a trickster of brown natives before men of his own kind. They hitched closer about him. They were highly entertained, languid, avid, and vindictive; and they watched him with fish eyes from faces like wet leather bags, flabby and pithless.

He saw them through the blue smoke and the heat and the lamplight, and he saw that in fact they were his own kind. He had fallen rather lower, that was all and they had dallied with the local devil rather more cautiously--they could still pay for their drinks. But if he meant to share with them he would have to grovel. There was no help, and no escape. None. For just then, with diabolic inspiration, Silva poured a gla.s.s of sticky yellow liquor and put it out of his reach where the drifting scent of it was a torment of Tantalus....

So he did what he had to do: untied his kerchief and the lorikeet's little cage and spread out his few cheap odds and ends of juggler's stuff--to try, as you might say, with the quickness of his hand to deceive the eye of his fate.

In his usual program he counted one bit of conjuring which had earned him many a step and many a tot of country spirits along his journey, and which reasonably he could trust. He used on occasion to take up three small beans, red and blue and black, and to take the lorikeet on the same thumb; and with magic by-play he made to feed the bird three beans and three and three again and so on, while the fluffy green mite still plucked them from his finger tips and chattered in a manner absurdly impudent and human.... It was an easy illusion. It had worked scores of times. It began to work this time, startling the watchers with its quick and graceful turn--even these. It ran on. It was winning. It might have won him through: but the room and the lights were spinning about the luckless magician like parts in a gigantic Catherine wheel--he sagged forward on the table, his nimble fingers faltered--slipped; and quick as a striking snake, Silva gripped him.

"Ah-ha! What did I say? Even at his own game--this liar--this dirty tramp!"

The nature of the man loosed itself in a sudden, an insensate spurt of fury, the complement of its accustomed dark restraint. He swept the poor rubbish from the table. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the lorikeet and flung it down and as the tiny thing flapped and screamed, broken-winged, stamped it underfoot. He whirled Merry around by the elbows, so that all should have an equal shot at him with fist or toe or billiard cue.

"This outcast!" he cried joyously. "What are we going to do with him?"

"Throw him out!" came the chorus. "Throw him out!"...

Of the next succeeding interval in Mr. Merry's pilgrimage, and his particular progress that night, some slight record afterward survived for a while. Not officially, of course. The witnesses were certain nameless and unnameable residents of Zimballo's whose presence in the colonial court would hardly have looked well, and throughout the subsequent perfunctory inquiry they were very justly held to be incompetent, irrelevant, and improper persons, and they were never questioned--in fact, their existence was even denied. But they knew something of Merry.