Chapter 14

It was a hundred and fifty miles up the line that he next emerged to notice, at Mendigos, that outpost set in the edge of the jungle, where the weary telegraphists sweat through the sunny monotony of the days and are shaken at night by the bitter agues that infest the land.

The mate dropped from the train here, still clad as at Beira in thick, stifling sea-cloth and his hard hat, though his collar was now but a limp frill. He came lurching, on uncertain feet, into the establishment of Hop Sing, the only seller of strong drink at Mendigos. The few languid, half-clad men who lounged within looked up at him in astonishment. He pointed shakily towards a bottle on the primitive bar. "Gimme some of that," he croaked, from a parched throat.

The smiling Chinaman, silk-clad and supple, poured a drink for him, watched him consume it, and forthwith poured another. With the replenished tumbler in his hand, the mate returned his look.

"What you starin' at, you Chow?" he demanded.

The subtle-eyed Chinaman ceased neither to smile nor to stare.

"My t'ink you velly sick man. Two shillin' to pay, please."

"Sick!" repeated the mate. "Sick! You you know, do ye?"

The idle men who lounged behind were spectators to the drama, absorbed but uncomprehending. They saw the fierce, absurdly-clad sailor, swaying on his feet with the effects of long-endured heat and thirst, confronting the suave composure of the Chinaman as though the charge of being unwell were outrageous and shameful.

"Say," he demanded hoarsely, "it, it don't show on me."

The Chinaman made soothing gestures. "My see," he answered. "But dem feller belong here, him not see nothing. All-a-light foh him. Two shillin' to pay, please."

The mate dragged a coin from his pocket and dropped it on the bar. He turned at last to the others, as though he now first noticed them.

"What's back of here?" he asked abruptly, motioning as he spoke to the still palms which poised over the galvanized iron roofs.

"How d'you mean?" A tall, willowy man in pajamas answered him surprisedly. "There's nothing beyond here. It's just wild country."

"No white men?" asked the mate.

"Lord, no!" said the other. "White men die out there. It's just trees and niggers and wild beasts and fevers." He looked at the mate with a touch of amusement breaking through his curiosity. "You weren't thinking of goin' there in that kit were you?"

The mate finished his drink and set his glass down.

"I am goin' there," he answered.

"But look here!" The telegraphists broke into a clamor. "You've been too long in the sun; that's what's the matter with you. You can't go up there, man; you'd be dead before morning."

The tall man, to whom the mate had spoken first, had a shrewd word to add. "If it's any little thing like murder, dontcher know, why the border's just a few hours up the line."

"Murder!" exclaimed the mate, and uttered a bark of laughter.

They were possibly a little afraid of him. He had the physique of a fighter and the presence of a man accustomed to exercise a crude authority. Their protests and warnings died down; and, after all, a man's life and death are very much his own concern in those regions.

"D'you think he's mad?" one of them was whispering when the mate turned to Hop Sing again.

"Set up the drinks for them," he commanded. "I'll not wait meself, but here's the money."

"You not dlink?" asked the Chinaman, as the mate laid the coins on the counter.

"No," was the reply. "No need to spoil another glass."

He gave a half nod to the other men, but no word, pulled his hard hat forward on his brow, and walked out to the aching sunlight, and towards a path that led between two iron huts to the fringe of the riotous bush. The telegraphists crowded to look after him, but he did not turn his head. He paused beneath the great palms, where the ground was clear; then the thigh-deep grass, which is the lip of the bush, was about him, grey, dry as straw, rustling as he thrust through it with the noise of paper being crumpled in the hands. A green parrot, balancing clown-like on a twig, screamed raucously; he glanced up at its dazzle of feathers. Then the wall of the bush itself yielded to his thrusting, let him through, and closed behind his blue-clad back. Africa had received him to her silence and her mystery.

"Well, I'm blowed!" The tall telegraphist stared at the place where he had vanished. "I say, you chaps, we ought to go after him."

No one moved. "I shouldn't care to come to my hands with him," said another. "Did you did you see his face?"

They had all seen it; the speaker was voicing the common feeling.

"It's like drinkin' at a wake," observed the tall man, his glass in his hand. "Well, here's to his memory!"

"His memory," they chorused, and drank.

But the end of the tale came later. It was told in the veranda of Father Bates's house at Beira, by Dan Terry, as he lay on his cot and drank in the air from the sea in life-restoring draughts. He had been up in the region of lost and nameless rivers for three years of fever and ague and toil, and now he was back, a made man ready to be done with Africa, with square gin bottles full of coarse gold to sell to the bank, and a curious story to tell of a thing he had seen in the back country.

It was evening when he told it, propped up on his pillows, with the blankets drawn up under his chin, and his lean, leathery face, a little softened by his fever, fronting the long, benevolent visage of Father Bates. The Father had a deckchair, and sprawled in it at length, listening over his deep Boer pipe. A faint, bitter ghost of an odor tainted the still air from the mangroves beyond the town, and there was heard, like an undertone in the talk, the distant slumberous murmur of the tide on the beach.

"But how did you first get to hear of him?" the Father was asking, carrying on the talk.

"Oh, that was queer!" said Dan. "You see, I was making a cut clean across country to that river of mine, and, as far as I could tell, I was in a stretch of land where there hasn't been one other white man in twenty years. Bad traveling it was swamp, cane, and swamp again for days; the mud stinking all day, the mist poisoning you all night, the cane cutting and scratching and slashing you. It was as bad as anything I've seen yet. And it was while we were splashing and struggling through this that I saw, lying at the foot of an aloe of all created things an old hat. I thought for a moment that the sun had got to my brain. An old, hard, black bowler hat it was, caved in a bit, and soaked, and all that, but a hat all the same. I couldn't have been more surprised if it had been an iceberg. You see, except my own hat, I hadn't seen a hat for over two years."

Father Bates nodded and stoked the big bowl of his pipe with a practiced thumb.

"It might ha' meant anything," Dan went on; "a chap making for my river, for instance. So the next Kaffir village I came to I went into the matter. I sat down in the doorway of the biggest hut and had the population up before me to answer questions."

"They were willing?" asked the Father.

"I had a gun across my knees," explained Dan; "but they were willing enough without that. And a queer yarn they had to tell, too; I couldn't quite make it out at first. It began with an account of a village hit by smallpox close by. Their way of dealing with smallpox is simple: they quarantine the infected village by posting armed men round it until all the villagers are starved to death or killed by the smallpox. Then they burn the village. It costs nothing, and it keeps the disease under. This village, it seems, was particularly easy to deal with, since it stood three hundred yards from the nearest water, and the water was placed out of bounds.

"It must have been about the third day after the quarantine was declared that the, the incident occurred. A man and a girl, carrying empty waterpots, had come out of the village towards the stream. The armed outposts, with their big stabbing assegais ready in their hands, ordered them back, but the poor creatures were crazed with thirst and desperate. They were pleading and crying and still creeping forward, the man first, the girl a few steps behind, mad for just water. What happened first was in the regular order of things in those parts. The fellows on guard simply waited, and when the man was up to them one stepped forward and drove the thirty-inch blade of a stabbing assegai clean through him. Then they stood ready to do the same to the girl as soon as she arrived.

"She had tumbled to her knees at the sight of the killing, and was still crying and begging piteously for water. They said she held out her arms to them, and bowed her head between. After a while, when they did not answer, she got to her feet and stood looking at the dead body stretched in the sun, the long blades of the spears, and the shining of the water beyond. It was as though she was making up her mind about them, for at last she picked up her waterpot and came forward towards her sure and swift death. The assegai-men were so intent on her that none of them seem to have heard a man who came out of the bush close behind them. One of them, as I was told, had actually flung back his arm for the thrust and the girl, she hadn't even flinched! The thing was within an inch of being done; the stabbing assegai goes like lightning, you know; she must have been tasting the very bitterness of death. The man from the bush was not a second too soon. The first they knew of him was a roar, and he had the shaft of the assegai in his hand and had plucked it from its owner.

"He must have moved like a young earthquake, and bellowed like a full-grown thunderstorm. All my informants laid stress on his voice; he exploded in their midst with an uproar that overthrew their senses, and whacked right and left with fist and foot and assegai. He was a white man; it took them some seconds to see that through the dirt on him; he was clad in rags of cloth, and his head was bare, and he raged like a sackful of tiger-cats. He really must have been something extraordinary in the way of a fighter, for he scattered a clear dozen of them, and sent them flying for their lives. One man said that when he was safe he looked back. The white man, with the assegai on his shoulder, was stumping ahead into the infected village, and the girl she was lying down at the edge of the water drinking avidly. She hadn't even looked up at the fight."

Father Bates nodded. "Poor creatures," he said. "Yes?"

"Well, the cordon being broken, those of the villagers who weren't too far gone to walk on their feet promptly scattered, naturally, and no one tried to stop them. When at last the people from the neighboring kraals plucked up courage to go and look at the place, they found there only the bodies of the dead. The white man had gone, too. They never saw him again, but from time to time there came rumors from the north and east tales of a wanderer who injected himself suddenly into men's affairs, withdrew again and went away, and they remembered the white man who roared. He was already passing into a myth.

"I couldn't make head nor tail of the thing; but one point was clear. Since this white man had neither Kaffirs nor gear he couldn't hurt my river, and that was what chiefly mattered to me just then. I might have forgotten him altogether, but that I came on his tracks again, and then, to finish with, I saw the man himself."

"Eh?" Father Bates looked up.

"I'm telling you the whole thing, Padre. You keep quiet and you'll hear."

The sad evening light was falling, and the faint breeze from the sea had a touch of chill in it.

"Keep your blankets up, Dan," said the Father.

"You bet," replied Dan. "Well, about this fellow I'm telling you of! He must have been getting a reputation for uncanniness from every village he touched at. By the time I came up with the scene of his next really notable doings he was umtagati in full form supernatural, you know, a thing to be dreaded and conciliated. And I don't wonder, really. Here was a man without weapons, bareheaded in the sun, speaking no word of any native language, alone and nearly naked, plunging ahead through that wild unknown country and no harm coming to him. You can't play tricks of that sort with Africa; the old girl holds too many trumps; but this chap was doing it. It was against Nature.

"He'd made his way up to a place where I always expect trouble. There is, or rather, there was then a brute of a chief there, a fellow named N'Komo, who paid tribute to M'Kombi, and was sort of protected and supported by him. He was always slopping over his borders with a handful of fighting men and burning and slaughtering and raping among the peaceful kraals. A devil he was, a real black devil for cruelty and lust. He had just started on a campaign when this lonely white man arrived in the neighborhood, passing through a bit of district with N'Komo's mark on it in the form of burned huts and bodies of people. A man N'Komo had killed was a sight to make Beelzebub sick. Torture, you know; mutilation beastliness! The white man must have seen a good many such bodies.

"N'Komo and his swashbucklers had slept the night in a captured kraal, and were still there in the morning when the white man arrived. I know exactly the kind of scene it was. The carcasses of the cattle slaughtered for meat would be lying all over the place between the round huts, and bodies of men and women and children with them. The place would be swarming with the tall, black spearmen, each with a skin over his shoulder and about his loins; there would be a fearful jabber, a clatter of voices and laughter and probably screams, horrible screams, from some poor nigger whose death they'd be dragging out, hour after hour, for their fun. Near the main gate N'Komo was holding an indaba with his chief bucks. I've seen him many times a great coal-black brute, six feet four in height, with the flat, foolish, good-natured-looking face that fooled people into thinking him a decent sort. I wish I'd shot him the first time I saw him.

"Well, the indaba, the council, you know was in full swing when up comes this white man, running as if for his life, and wailing, wailing! The Kaffir who told me had seen it from where he was lying, tied hand and foot, waiting his turn for the firebrands and the knives. He said: 'He wailed like one who mourns for the dead!' There was a burnt kraal not a mile away, so one can guess what he had been seeing and was wailing about. 'His face,' the nigger told me, 'was like the face of one who has lived through the torment of N'Komo and is thirsty for death; a face to hide one's eyes before. And it was white and shining like ivory!' He came thus, pelting blindly at a run, into the midst of N'Komo's war indaba.

"He picked out N'Komo as the chief man there in a moment; that was easy enough, and he broke into a torrent of words, gesticulating and pointing back in the direction from which he had come. Telling him of what he had seen, of course poor beggar! Can't you imagine him, with those tall surprised black soldiers all round him and the great dangerous bulk of negro king before him, trying to make them understand, trembling with horror and fury, raging in homely useless English against the everyday iniquity of Africa? Can't you imagine it, Padre?"

"Ssh! You'll get a temperature," warned Father Bates. "Yes; I can imagine it. It makes me humble."

"You see, I know what had maddened him. The first work of N'Komo's I ever saw was a young mother and a baby dead and and finished with, and it nearly sent me off my head. If I'd been half the man this poor beggar was I'd have had N'Komo's skin salted and sun-dried before I slept. He he didn't wait to mourn about things; he went straight ahead to find the man who had done them and deal with him.

"Probably they took him for a lunatic; at any rate, they soon began to laugh at him, shaking and talking in their midst. He was a new thing to have sport with, and N'Komo presently leaned forward, grinning, touched him on the arm, and pointed. The white man's eyes followed the black finger to where a poor devil lay on the ground, impaled by a stake through his stomach. It was N'Komo's way of telling him what to expect, and he understood. He stopped talking.

"The nigger who saw it all and told me about it said that when he had looked round on all the horrors he turned again towards N'Komo, and at the sight of his eyes N'Komo ceased to grin. His big brute face went all to bits, as a Kaffir's does when he is frightened. But the white man made a little backward jerk with his hand that's what it seemed like to the nigger who told me and suddenly, from nowhere in particular, a big pistol materialized in his grip. He must have been pretty clever at the draw. His hand came up, there was a smart little crack, a spit of smoke, and N'Komo, the great war chief, was rolling on the ground, making horrible noises like like bad plumbing, with half his throat shot away, and the man who had done it was backing towards the main gate with the big revolver swinging to right and left across the group of warriors.

"And he got away, too. That, really, is the most wonderful part of the whole thing. I expect that as soon as N'Komo was settled, the usual row and the usual murders began by various would-be successors. By night they had all started north again, on a hot-foot race to occupy and hold the head kraal, and the country was clear of them, and the white man's credit as a magic worker stood higher than ever. He could have had anything he liked in any of the kraals for the asking; he could have been law-giver, king, and god. But he was off in the bush again, alone and restless and mysterious, with his ivory-white face and his eyes full of pain and anger."

"Aye," said Father Bates. "Pain and anger that's what it was! And at last you saw him yourself, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Dan. "I saw him. I was at my river then, combing the gold out of it, when a Kaffir trekking down told me of him. He was at a kraal fifty miles away two days' journey, lying, up with a hurt foot. The gold was coming out of that river by the bottleful; it wasn't a thing to take one's eyes off for a moment; but a white man, the white man who had killed N'Komo well, I couldn't keep away. I spun a yarn to my men about lion spoor that I wanted to follow, and off I went by myself and did that fifty miles of bush and six-foot grass and rocks in thirty hours, which was pretty good, considerin'. It was afternoon when I came through a patch of palms and saw the kraal lying just beyond.

"I hadn't much of an idea what kind of man I expected to see. I rather fancy I expected to be disappointed to find him nothing out of the way after all, and to learn that nine-tenths of the yarns about him were just nigger lies. I was thinking all that as I stopped in the palms' shade to mop the sweat out of my hat, and then I saw him!

"He was passing between me and the huts, a strange lame figure, leaning on a stick, with a few rags of clothing bound about him. His head, with its matted thick hair, was bare to the thresh of the sun; he was thick-set, shortish, slow-moving, a sorrowful and laborious figure. I saw the shine of his bare skin, and even the droop and sorrow of his heavy face. I stood and watched him for perhaps a minute in the shadow under those great masts of palms; I saw him as clearly as I see you; and suddenly a light came to me and I knew I understood it all. His loneliness, his pain and anger, his wanderings in that savage wilderness, the wild misery of his eyes and the ivory-white of his stricken face I understood completely. He had run away from the sight of men of his own color he would have no use for me. So then and there I turned and went back through the palms and started on the trek for my own camp. It was all I could do for him."

"But," said Father Bates, "you've not said what it was that you saw."

"Padre," said Dan; "that poor, poor fellow, who loomed to the Kaffirs like a great and merciful god, he was a leper as white as snow!"

"Holy saints defend us!" The Father made a startled motion of crossing himself, staring at Dan's lean, somber face in a blankness of consternation. "So that's what it was, then! A leper!"

"That's what it was," said Dan. "I've seen it before in the East."

"He said," continued the Father "he said he had no use for my blasted cant. And he hadn't, he hadn't! He knew more than I."

X

MISS PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

The double windows of the big office overlooked the quays of Nikolaieff and the desk was beside them; so that the vice-consul had only to turn his head to see from his chair the wide river and its traffic, with the great grain-steamers, like foster-children thronging at the breast of Russia, waiting their turn for the elevators, and the gantries of the shipyards standing like an iron filigree against the pallor of the sky. The room was a large one, low-ceilinged, and lighted only upon the side of the street; so that a visitor, entering from the staircase, looked as from the bottom of a well of shadow across the tables where the month-old American newspapers were set forth to the silhouette of the vice-consul at his roll-top desk against his background of white daylight.

Mr. Tim Waters, American citizen in difficulties, leaned upon the top of the desk and pored absorbedly across the head of his country's representative at the scene beyond the window. A tow-boat with a flotilla of lighters was at work in midstream; there was a flash of white foam at her forefoot, and her red-and-black funnel trailed a level scarf of smoke across the distance. It was a sketch done vigorously in strong color, and he broke off the halting narrative of his troubles to watch if with profound unconscious interest.

Selby, the vice-consul, shifted impatiently in his chair. He was a small, dyspeptic, short-sighted man, and he was endeavoring under difficulties to give the impression that he had no time to spare.

"Well," he snapped; "go on. You were walking peaceably along the street, you said. What comes next?"

Tim Waters turned mild eyes upon him, withdrawing them from the tow-boat with patient reluctance.

"There was one o' them dvorniks" (doorkeepers), he resumed in a voice of silky softness. "He was settin' outside his gate on one o' them stools they have. And he was talkin' to one o' them istvostchiks." (cabmen).

His thin, sun-browned face, furrowed with whimsical lines, with its faint-blue eyes that wandered from his hearer to the allurement of the window and back again, overhung the desk as he spoke, drawling in those curiously soft tones of his an unconvincing narrative of sore provocation and the subsequent fight. He was a man in the later twenties, lean and slack-limbed; the workman's blouse of coarse linen, belted about him, and the long Russian boots which he wore, gave him, by contrast with the humor and sophistication of his face and the controlled ease of his attitude as he lounged, something of the effect of a man in fancy dress. Actually he belonged to the class familiar to missionaries and consuls of world-tramps, those songless troubadours for whom no continent is large enough and no ocean too wide. With his slightly parted lips of wonder and interest, a pair of useful fists and a passport granted by the American Minister in Spain, he had worked his way up the Mediterranean to the Levant, drifted thence by way of the Black Sea to Nikolaieff, and remained there ever since. Riveter in the shipyards, winch driver on the wharves, odd-man generally along the waterside, he and his troubles had come to Selby's notice before.