Part 14

My first intimation of trouble came from Stires. I had nothing to do with this particular Yankee in the way of business, but I lingered occasionally by his door in the cool of the afternoon, just to feed my eyes on his brawn and my ears on his homely and pleasant nasality. Stires's eyes were that disconcerting gray-blue which seems to prevail among men who have lived much in the desert or on the open sea. You find it in Arizona; and in the navies of all the northern countries. It added to his cowboy look. I knew nothing about Stires--remember that on Naapu we never asked a man questions about himself--but I liked him. He sat about on heaps of indescribable junk--things that go into the bowels of ships--and talked freely. And because Follet and I were both in what Naapu would have called its best circles, I never talked about Follet, though I liked him no better than Stires did. I say it began with Stires; but it began really with Schneider, introduced by Stires into our leisurely conversation. This is Schneider's only importance: namely, that, mixing himself up in French Eva's context, he made other men speak of her.

The less said about Schneider, the better; which means always that there is a great deal to say. In this case, there was perhaps less to say than to surmise. He did not give himself away--to us. Schneider had turned up on a trading schooner from Melbourne, was stopping at the hotel in one of the best rooms, and had a general interest in the potentialities of Naapu. I say potentialities advisedly, for he was not directly concerned, so far as I know, with any existing business there. He frequented everybody, and asked questions in the meticulous German way. He wandered all over the island--islands, I should say, for once or twice I saw him banging off in a creaky motor-boat to the other jewels of the necklace. Guesses as to his real business were free and frequent. He was a pearl-smuggler; the agent of a Queensland planter; a fugitive from justice; a mad scientist; a servant of the Imperial German Government. No one presumed to certitude--which was in itself a tribute to German efficiency. Schneider was blond and brush-haired and thick-lipped; he was unpleasant from the crown of his ill-shaped head to the soles of his ill-shaped shoes; but, though lacking in every charm, he was not sinister. He had seen curious places and amusing things, and could cap most adventures with something relevant; but his type and temperament prevented him from being a "good mixer," and he was not popular.

Stires, however, had his own grievance, and his judgment of Schneider went deep. He did not mind the shape of Schneider's skull, or the hint of goose-step in Schneider's gait; but he minded, very much, the kind of interest that Schneider took in French Eva. He told me that, straight, emphasizing his statements with a rusty spanner, which he wielded in a curious, classical way, like a trident. According to him, Schneider was bothering the life out of the girl. "Always asking her to dress up and come over to chow with him at the hotel." And the spanner went down as if Neptune were rebuking the seas.

"Does she go?"

"No."

"Well, then--can't you leave the lady to discourage him in her own way?"

"She won't go to the ho-tel, because she hates Ching Po. But she walks out with him Sunday afternoons. He gives her gimcracks."

"Then she likes him?"

"There's no telling. She's a real lady." And the discouraged Stires beat, with his spanner, a refrain to his involuntary epigram.

"She can take care of herself, can't she?" I had watched her deal with a drunken Solomon Islander, and did not see how Schneider could be a match for her.

"I don't know." Stires's lazy drawl challenged the sunset.

"Anything I can do?" I asked as I rose.

"Unless you go in and cut him out," he meditated with a grin.

"But I'm not in love with her," I protested.

"You might take her to church."

But I refused. Philandering was not my forte, and church, in any case, was the last thing I should venture to propose.

"Why don't you go in yourself?"

Stires scratched his head. The trident trailed upon the ground. "It's serious or nothing with me, I guess. And she's got something against me. I don't know what. Thinks I don't blarney the Kanakas enough, perhaps. Then there's Follet."

"Oh, is he in it?" I forgot to go.

"He's more in it than I am, and I'm darned if I know what she's up to with the three of us. I'm playing 'possum, till I find out."

"If you can stand Follet butting in, why can't you stand Schneider? Safety in numbers, you know."

"Well, Mr. Follet belongs here. I can have it out with him any time. He'll have to play the game. But if I know Schneider, there's no wedding bells in his. And Mam'selle Eva hasn't, as you might say, got a chaperon."

The spectacle of "Mam'selle Eva," as I had last seen her, perspiring, loosely girdled, buying a catch of fish at a fair price from three mercenary natives adorned with shark's-tooth necklaces, rose before me.

"Man alive, you don't have to chaperon _her_," I cried. "She's on to everything."

The sun-and-wind-whipt eyes flashed at me. The spanner trembled a little.

"Don't misunderstand me," I insisted. "But it stands to reason that, here on Naapu, she's learned a good many things they don't teach in little red schoolhouses. I have a great respect for her, and, between you and me, I shouldn't wonder if she had sized Schneider up already."

The eyes were appeased. "Maybe, maybe," he grunted. "But lies come easy to him, I guess. Miss Eva wouldn't be the first he'd fooled."

"Do you know anything about him?"

"Not a thing, except what sticks out all over him. For a man's eyes, that is. You never can tell what a woman will see."

I left him poking in the dust with his spanner.

I dined that night at Lockerbie's. There was no Mrs. Lockerbie, and it was a man's party. Follet was there, of course, and Schneider, too, his teeth and his clothes whiter than the rest of ours. I was surprised to see Schneider, for Lockerbie had suspected the Teuton of designs on his very privately and not too authentically owned lagoon. Lockerbie did a fair business in pearls; no great beauties or values among them, but a good marketable cheap product. But no one held out very long against any one on Naapu.

Schneider was drunk before he ever got to Lockerbie's that night. It was part of the Naapu ritual not to drink just before you reached your host's house, and that ritual, it soon became evident, Schneider had not observed. I saw Lockerbie scowl, and Follet wince, and some of the others stare. I could not help being amused, for I knew that no one would object to his being in that condition an hour later. The only point was that he should not have arrived like that. If Schneider had had anything resembling a skin, he would have felt about as comfortable as Mother Eve at a woman's club. Lockerbie's scowl was no joke; and Follet had a way of wriggling his backbone gracefully.--It was up to me to save Schneider, and I did. The honor of Naapu was nothing to me; and by dint of almost embracing him, I made myself a kind of absorbent for his worst breaks. It was not a pleasant hour for me before the rest began to loosen up.

In my eagerness to prevent Lockerbie from insulting his guest, I drank nothing, myself, after the first cocktail. So it came to pass that by the time I could safely leave Schneider to the others, I found myself unwontedly incarnating the spirit of criticism.

They were a motley crowd, coalesced for the moment into a vinous solidarity. Follet spat his words out very sweetly; his poisonous grace grew on him in his cups. Lockerbie, warmed by wine, was as simple--and charming--as a wart-hog. Old Maskell, who had seen wind-jammer days and ways and come very close, I suspected, to piracy, always prayed at least once. Pasquier, the successful merchant who imported finery for the ladies of Naapu, rolled out socialistic platitudes--he was always flanked, at the end of the feast, by two empty chairs. Little Morlot began the endless tale of his conquests in more civilized lands: all patchouli and hair-oil. Anything served as a cue for all of them to dive into the welter of their own preoccupations. Just because they knew each other and Naapu so well, they seemed free to wander at will in the secret recesses of their predilections and their memories. I felt like Circe--or perhaps Ulysses; save that I had none of that wise man's wisdom.

The reward of my abstinence, I found, was to be the seeing home of Schneider. It would have come more naturally to Follet, who also lived at Dubois's, but Follet was fairly snarling at Schneider. French Eva's name had been mentioned. On my word, as I saw Follet curving his spinal column, and Schneider lighting up his face with his perfect teeth, I thought with an immense admiration of the unpolished and loose-hung Stires amid the eternal smell of tar and dust. It was a mere discussion of her hair, incoherent and pointless enough. No scandal, even from Schneider. There had been some sense, of a dirty sort, in his talk to me; but more wine had scattered his wits.

I took Schneider home, protesting to myself that I would never be so caught again. He lurched rather stiffly along, needing my help only when we crossed the unpaved roads in the darkness. Follet went ahead, and I gave him a good start. When we reached the hotel, Ching Po surged up out of the black veranda and crooked his arm for Schneider to lean upon. They passed into the building, silently, like old friends.

A stupid indisposition housed me for a little after Lockerbie's feast. I resented the discomfort of temporary illness, but rather liked being alone, and told Joe to refuse me to callers--even the Maürs, who were more like friends and neighbors than any one else in the place. My own affairs should not obtrude on this tale at all; and I will not go into them more than to say that I came to the end of my dosing and emerged upon the world after three days. The foolish thought came to me that I would have a look at French Eva's hair, of which little Morlot had spoken in such gallant hiccoughs.

The lady was not upon her veranda, nor yet in her poultry-yard, as I paced past her dwelling. I had got nearly by, when I heard myself addressed from the unglazed window.

"Monsieur!"

I strolled back, wondering if at last I should be invited to hear the gramophone--her chiefest treasure. The mass of hair spread out of the crude opening in the bamboo wall, for all the world like Rapunzel's. I faced a great curtain of black. Then hands appeared and made a rift in it, and a face showed in the loose black frame.

"Monsieur, what is the German for 'cochon'?"

My German is scanty, and I reflected. "'Schweinhund' will do, I think," I answered after consideration.

"A thousand thanks." The face disappeared, and the hair was pulled after it.

I waited. I could hear nothing distinctly, but in a moment Schneider came running quickly and stiffly down the creaky ladder from the door. He saw me--of that I am sure--but I did not blame him for not greeting one who had doubtless been giving aid and comfort to the enemy. I squatted on the low railing of French Eva's compound, but she herself was not forthcoming. After ten minutes I heard a commotion in the poultry yard, and found her at the back among her chickens. Her hair was piled up into an amazing structure: it looked as if some one had placed the great pyramid on top of the sphinx.

"Do you need my further services?"

She smiled. "Not in the least. But I like to speak to animals, when possible, in their own language. It saves time." By way of illustration, she clucked to a group of hens. She turned her back to me, and I was dismissed from her barefoot presence.

Stires was my logical goal after that, and I found him busy with the second mate of a tramp just in from Papua and bound for the Carolines. After the man had gone, I informed Stires of the episode. For a man who had damned Schneider up and down for making presents to a lady, Stires reacted disappointingly.

"He got his, eh?" was all he said.

"Evidently. You don't seem to be much affected."

"So long as she's shipped him, that's all right," he drawled.

"I can't make out what your interest in the matter is," I suggested.

"Sure you can't," Stires began to whistle creakily, and took up some nameless object to repair.

"How long is Schneider staying round these parts?"

"Not long, I guess. I heard he was leaving on the Sydney packet next week."

"So you're only up against Follet?" I pressed him.

"I ain't up against anybody. Miss Eva'll settle her own affairs."

"Excuse me." And I made the gesture of withdrawing.

"Don't get het up under the collar," he protested. "Only I never did like this discussing ladies. She don't cotton to me for some reason. I'm free to say I admire her very much. I guess that's all."

"Nothing I can do for you, then?"

Stires lighted a pipe. "If you're so set on helping me, you might watch over Ching Po a little."

"What is he up to?"

"Don't know. But it ain't like him to be sitting round idle when there's harm to be done. He's got something up his sleeve--and a Chink's sleeve's big enough to hold a good-sized crime," he finished, with a grim essay of humor.

"Are these mere suspicions on your part, or do you know that something's up?"

"Most things happen on Naapu before there's been any time for suspicion," he rejoined, squinting at his pipe, which had stopped drawing. "These folks lie low and sing little songs, and just as you're dropping off there's a knife somewhere.--Have you heard anything about the doings up yonder?" He indicated the mountain that rose, sharply cut and chasmed, back of the town.

"Trouble with the natives? No."

"This is the time o' year when the heathen begin to feel their oats. Miss Eva, she's interested in their superstitions. They don't usually come to anything--just a little more work for the police if they get drunk and run amuck. The constabulary is mostly off on the spree. They have gods of wood and stone up in the caves yonder, you know. But it's always a kind of uneasy feel to things till they settle down again."

I leaned against a coil of rope and pursued the subject. "But none of the people you and I are interested in are concerned with native orgies. We are all what you might call agnostics."

"Speak for yourself, sir. I'm a Methodist. 'Tain't that they mix themselves up in the doings. But--well, you haven't lived through the merry month of May on Naapu. I tell you, this blessed island ain't big enough to hold all that froth without everybody feeling it. Just because folks don't know what's going on up yonder it kind of relaxes 'em. I don't say the Kanakas do anything they shouldn't, except get drunk, and joy-ride down waterfalls, and keep up an infernal tom-toming. But it sort of gets on your nerves. And I wouldn't call Naapu straitlaced, either. Everybody seems to feel called on to liquor up, this time o' year. If it isn't one pretext it's another. Things folks have been kind of hesitating over, in the name of morals, they start out and perform, regardless. The authorities, they get worried because a Kanaka's spree lands him, like as not, in a blackbirder. Mighty queer craft hang round at this season. There ain't supposed to be anything doing in these blessed islands that ain't aboveboard, but 'tisn't as though the place was run by Americans."

"And I am to watch Ching Po? Where does he come in?"

"I wish't I knew. He makes money out of it somehow. Dope, I suppose. Old man Dubois ain't his only customer, by a long shot."

"Ching Po isn't likely to go near French Eva, is he? They don't speak, I've noticed."

"No, they don't. But that Chink's little ways are apt to be indirect. She's afraid of him--afraid of the dust under her feet, as you might say."

Stires puffed meditatively at his pipe. Then a piratical-looking customer intervened, and I left.

Leisurely, all this, and not significant to the unpeeled eye. And then, within twenty-four hours of the time when I had left Stires, things began to happen. It was as if a tableau had suddenly decided to become a "movie." All those fixed types began to dash about and register the most inconvenient emotions. Let me set down a few facts diary fashion.

To begin with, when I got up the next morning, Joe had disappeared. No sign of breakfast, no smell of coffee. It was late for breakfast at Dubois's, and I started out to get my own. There were no eggs, and I sauntered over to French Eva's to purchase a few. The town looked queer to me as I walked its grassy streets. Only when I turned into the lane that led to French Eva's did I realize why. It was swept clean of natives. There weren't any. Not a stevedore, not a fisherman, not a brown fruit-vender did I see.

French Eva greeted me impatiently. She was not doing business, evidently, for she wore her silk dress and white canvas shoes. Also, a hat. Her face was whiter than ever, and, just offhand, I should have said that something had shaken her. She would not let me in, but made me wait while she fetched the eggs. I took them away in a little basket of plaited palm-fronds, and walked through the compound as nonchalantly as I could, pretending that I had not seen what I knew I had seen--Ching Po's face within, a foot or two behind the window opening. It startled me so much that I resolved to keep away from Stires: I wished to digest the phenomenon quite alone.

At ten o'clock, my breakfast over, I opened my door to a knock, and Follet's bloodshot eyes raked me eagerly. He came in with a rush, as if my hit-or-miss bungalow were sanctuary. I fancied he wanted a drink, but I did not offer him one. He sat down heavily--for all his lightness--like a man out of breath. I saw a pistol-butt sticking out of his pocket and narrowed my eyes upon him. Follet seldom looked me up in my own house, though we met frequently enough in all sorts of other places. It was full five minutes before he came to the point. Meanwhile I remarked on Joe's defection.

"Yes," he said, "the exodus has begun."

"Is there really anything in that?"

"What?" he asked sharply.

"Well--the exodus."

"Oh, yes. They do have some sort of shindy--not interesting to any one but a folk-lorist. Chiefly an excuse, I fancy, for drinking too much. Schneider says he's going to investigate. I rather wish they'd do him in."

"What have you got against him--except that he's an unpleasant person?"

By this roundabout way Follet had reached his point. "He's been trying to flirt with my lady-love."

"French Eva?"

"The same." His jauntiness was oppressive, dominated as it was by those perturbed and hungry eyes.

"Oh--" I meditated. But presently I decided. "Then why do you let Ching Po intrude upon her in her own house?"

"Ching Po?" He quivered all over as if about to spring up from his chair, but he did not actually rise. It was just a supple, snake-like play of his body--most unpleasant.

"I saw him there an hour ago--when I fetched my eggs. My cook's off, you see."

Still that play of muscles underneath the skin, for a moment or two. Then he relaxed, and his eyes grew dull. Follet was not, I fancy, what the insurance men call a good risk.

"She can take care of herself, I expect," he said. They all seemed surer of that than gentlemen in love are wont to be.

"She and Ching Po don't hit it off very well, I've noticed."

"No, they don't." He admitted it easily, as if he knew all about it.

"I wonder why." I had meant to keep my hands off the whole thing, but I could not escape the tension in the Naapu air. Those gods of wood and stone were not without power--of infection, at the least.

"Better not ask." He bit off the words and reached for a cigarette.

"Does any one know?"

"An old inhabitant can guess. But why she should be afraid of him--even the old inhabitant doesn't know. There's Dubois; but you might as well shriek at a corpse as ask Dubois anything."

"You don't think that I'd better go over and make sure that Ching Po isn't annoying her?"

Follet's lips drew back over his teeth in his peculiar smile. "If I had thought he could annoy her, I'd have been over there myself a short time ago. If he really annoyed French Eva any day, he'd be nothing but a neat pattern of perforations, and he knows it."

"Then what has the oldest inhabitant guessed as to the cause of the quarrel?" I persisted. Since I was in it--well, I hate talk that runs in circles.

"She hasn't honored me with her confidence. But, for a guess, I should say that in the happy time now past he had perhaps asked her to marry him. And--Naapu isn't Europe, but, you know, even here a lady might resent that."

"But why does she let him into her house?"

"That I can't tell you. But I can almost imagine being afraid of Ching Po myself."

"Why don't you settle it up, one way or the other?" I _was_ a newcomer, you see.

Follet laughed and took another cigarette. "We do very well as we are, I think. And I expect to go to Auckland next year." His voice trailed off fatuously in a cloud of smoke, and I knew then just why I disliked him. The fibre was rotten. You couldn't even hang yourself with it.

I was destined to keep open house that day. Before Follet's last smoke-puff had quite slid through the open window, Madame Maür, who was perpetually in mourning, literally darkened my doorway. Seeing Follet she became nervous--he did affect women, as I have said. What with her squint and her smile, she made a spectacle of herself before she panted out her staccato statement. Doctor Maür was away with a patient on the other side of the island; and French Eva had been wringing her hands unintelligibly on the Maürs' porch. She--Madame Maür--couldn't make out what the girl wanted.

Now, this was nothing to break in on me for; and Madame Maür, in spite of her squint and her smile, was both sensible and good--broke, moreover, to the ridiculous coincidences and unfathomable dramas of Naapu. Why hadn't she treated the girl for hysterics? But I gathered presently that there was one element in it that she couldn't bear. That element, it appeared, was Ching Po, perfectly motionless in the public road--no trespasser, therefore--watching. She had got Eva into the house to have her hysterics out in a darkened room. But Ching Po never stirred. Madame Maür thought he never would stir. She couldn't order him off the public thoroughfare, and there was no traffic for him to block. He was irreproachable and intolerable. After half an hour of it, she had run out across her back garden to ask my help. He must go away or she, too, would have hysterics. And Madame Maür covered the squint with a black-edged handkerchief. If he would walk about, or whistle, or mop his yellow face, she wouldn't mind. But she was sure he hadn't so much as blinked, all that time. If a man could die standing up, she should think he was dead. She wished he were. If he stayed there all day--as he had a perfect right to do--she, Madame Maür, would have to be sent home to a _maison de santé_.--And she began to make guttural noises. As Félicité Maür had seen, in her time, things that no self-respecting _maison de santé_ would stand for, I began to believe that I should have to do something. I rose reluctantly. I was about fed up with Ching Po, myself.

I helped Madame Maür out of her chair, and fetched my hat. Then I looked for Follet, to apologize for leaving him. I had neither seen nor heard him move, but he was waiting for us on the porch. He could be as noiseless on occasion as Ching Po.

"You'd better not come into this," I suggested; for there was no staying power, I felt, in Follet.

He seemed to shiver all over with irritation. "Oh, damn his yellow soul, I'll marry her!" He spat it out--with no sweetness, this time.