Chapter 17

An empty droschky, going the same way as himself, came bumping along the gutter behind him, the driver singing hoarse and broken snatches of song. He moved from the edge of the pavement to be clear of mud-splashes as it passed him, and heard, without further concern, the vehicle draw up level with him and the whistle and slap of the whip as the istvostchik light-heartedly tortured his feeble horse.

"Her eyes are cornflowers," proclaimed the istvostchik melodiously; "her lips are-" He was abreast of Waters as he broke off. Five feet of uneven and slimy sidewalk separated them. Waters looked up; a house-lamp was above, dull and steady as a foggy star; and it showed him, upon the box of the droschky, his enemy, the mainspring of all his troubles. He halted short.

The istvostchik had recognized him likewise. He was something short of drunk, but his liquor was lively in him, and he wrenched his poor specter of a horse to a standstill. Upon his seat, padded hugely in his gown, he had a sort of throned look, a travesty of majesty; his whip was held like a scepter.

They stared at one another for a space of three or four breaths. Waters was frankly aghast; this, upon the top of his other troubles, was overwhelming. The istvostchik ruptured the moment with a brassy yell.

"Wow!" he howled. "My Amerikanetz, the Foreigner, the jail-bird! Look at him, brothers!" He waved his whip as though the darkness were thronged with auditors. "Look at the jail-bird!"

From the gate below the dull lamp a dvornik poked his head forth. Waters had a sense that every door and window in the street was similarly fertile in heads.

"Stop that!" he called to the istvostchik. "That's enough, now."

The man upon the little cab rolled on his seat in a strident ecstasy of eloquence, brandishing arm and whip abroad above the back of the drooping horse.

"He tried to fight me, and first I beat him terribly oh, terribly! and then I made a protocol and sent him to prison. See him?" he bellowed. "See the jail-bird? See the dog?"

Waters swore helplessly. A month before, upon a quarter of such provocation, he would have flashed into fight; but cold, hunger and friendlessness had damped the tinder in him. He made to go on and get away from it all; he started quickly.

"Come back, jail-bird!" howled the istvostchik.

"I haven't done with you, my golubchik, my little prison-rat. Come back here to me when I bid you. What, you won't? Get on, you!"

The last was to the horse, accompanied by a rending slash with the whip. The wretched animal jerked forward, and Waters backed to the wall as his enemy clattered down upon him again.

"That'll do you," he warned as the cabman dragged his horse to a standstill once more. "I'm not lookin' for trouble. You be on your way!"

The immense ragged-edged voice of the istvostchik descended upon him, drowning his protest.

"He runs away from me, this Amerikanetz! He runs away, because when I find him I beat him I beat him whenever I find him. See now, brothers, I am beating him!"

And out of the tangle of his gesticulations, the whip-lash swooped across the sidewalk and cut Waters heavily across the neck.

In the mere surprise of it and the instance of the pain, Waters made a noise like a yelp, a little spurt of involuntary sound. And then the tinder lighted.

"Beating him!" intoned the istvostchik, mighty in his moment. "Beat."

It was the last coherent syllable which he uttered in the affair. With a rush Waters cleared the sidewalk and was upon him, had him by the pulp of clothes which enveloped him and tore him across the wheel to the ground. They went down together across the curb, legs in the gutter among the wheels, a convulsive bundle of battle that tore apart and whirled together again as the American, with all the long-compressed springs of his being suddenly released and vibrant, poured his resentment and soul-soreness into his fists and found balm for them in the mere spite of hitting somebody.

It was a short fight. The istvostchik, even under his padding, was a biggish man and vicious with liquor; he grappled at his antagonist earnestly enough, to drag him down and bite and worry and kick in the manner of his kind. But the breast of the worn linen blouse ripped in his clutch and a pair of man-stopping punches on the mouth and the eye drove him backwards towards the wall. It was then he began to squeal.

There were spectators by now, dvorniks who came running and passers-by upon the other side who appeared from nowhere as though suddenly materialized. There was a sparse circle of them about the fight when it ceased, with the istvostchik down and flattened in the angle of the wall and the pavement, making small timid noises like a complaining kitten. Waters, with the mist of battle clearing, from his eyes, saw them all about him, dark, well-wrapped figures, watching him silently or whispering together. He sensed their profound disapproval of him and his proceedings.

"That'll keep you quiet for a while," he spoke down to the wreck of the istvostchik.

Only moans answered him; he grunted and turned to go. From the nearest group of spectators a single figure detached itself and moved towards him, blocking his path. It revealed itself at close quarters as a stout, middle-aged man, prosperously fur-coated, with a spike of dark beard the inevitable public-spirited citizen of the provinces.

"You must explain this disturbance," he said to Waters importantly. "You must wait here and explain yes, and show your papers. You cannot walk away like this!"

His companions pressed nearer interestedly. Waters could not know the figure he cut, with his torn blouse which even in the gloom showed stains of the mud and blood of the combat.

"Get out of my way!" was all his answer.

"Your papers," persisted the stout man. "I," he puffed his chest, "I am in the Administration; I require to see your papers. Produce them!"

The pale oblong of his fat face wagged at Waters peremptorily; he quite obviously felt himself a spokesman for order and decency and the divinely ordained institution of "papers."

"I said get out o' my way," said Waters clearly. He put the flat of his hand against the stout man's fur-coated chest, shoved, and sent him staggering back on his heels among his supporters. Without looking towards him again, he passed through them and continued his way. He heard the chorus of their indignation break out behind him.

It followed him, a cackle of outraged respectability, with here and there an epithet distinguishable like a plum in a pudding. "Ruffian," they called him, "assassin," "robber," and so forth, the innocuous amateur abuse of men who have learned their bad language from their newspapers. It was not till he had gone a hundred yards, and the noise of their lamentation had a little died down, that there emerged out of the blur of it a voice that was quite clear.

"Hi, you there!" It rang with the note of practiced authority. "Halt, d'you hear? Halt!"

The tones were enough, without the fashion of the words, to tell him that a policeman had arrived on the scene. He looked back and saw that the group of citizens was flowing along the sidewalk towards him, a black moving blot. He could not distinguish the policeman, but he knew that the others must be escorting him, coming with him to see the finish.

There was a corner some thirty or forty yards farther on. Waters jammed his cap tighter on his head, picked up his heels and sprinted for it.

"Halt, there!" shouted the policeman. "Halt-I'll shoot!"

Waters was at the corner when the shot sounded, detonating, like a cannon in the channel of the street. Where the bullet went he did not guess; he was round the corner, running in the middle of the street for the next turning, with eyes alert for any entrance in which he might find a refuge. But the firing had had its intended effect of bringing every dvornik to his gate, and there was nothing for it but to run on. He heard the chase round the corner behind him and the policeman's 'repeated shout; the skin of his back crawled in momentary expectation of another shot that might not go wild; and then, with the next corner yet twenty yards away, came the idea.

The mere felicity of it tickled him like a jest in the midst of all his stress; he spent hoarded breath in a gasp of laughter.

Around the corner that lay just ahead of him, for which he was racing, was the street in which Miss Pilgrim lived, with her outer room that was always ready and waiting. Without design or purpose he had run towards it; an inscrutable fate, whimsical as his own humor, had herded him thither. Well, he would go there! The matter was slight, after all; she would explain the whole matter to her Chief of Police, how the istvostchik had been the assailant and so forth; he would be released, and her self-appointed function of "vice-vice" would shine forth justified and vindicated. It all fell out as dexterously as a conjuring trick.

"Halt!" yelled the policeman. "I know you, halt!"

But he did not shoot again; those southern policemen lack the fiber that will loose bullet after bullet along a dark street; and Waters had yet a good lead as he rounded the next corner and came into cover. The house he sought was near by; as he cleared the angle, he dropped into a swift walk that the new row of dvorniks might not mark him at once for a fugitive, and strode along sharply under the wall where it was darkest. He passed Number Seventeen without a sign from its dvornik, and in the gate of Number Fifteen two dvorniks were gossiping and did not turn their heads as he passed. The arch of Number Thirteen, the house he sought, was close at hand when the pursuit came stamping round the corner behind him; he heard their cries as he slipped in through the half-open gate of the arch. The chance that had brought him hither was true to him yet, for there was no dvornik on watch; the man had chosen that moment of all others to step over to gossip with his neighbor of Number Fifteen.

He paused in the blackness of the courtyard to listen whether the pursuit would pass by, and heard it arrive outside the gate, jangling with voices. It had gathered up the dvornik on its way. Waters, with a hand upon the door that opened to the staircase, heard the brisk voice of the policeman questioning him in curt spurts of speech, and the dvornik's answers. "Of course, he might have gone in. There is an Amerikanka here, from the Consulate, and he might have gone to her." Then the policeman, cutting the knot: "We'll soon see about that!" He waited no longer, but entered and darted up the stair; he must at all costs not be caught before he got to Miss Pilgrim.

It was the thought of her and the expectation of her welcome to the barren room that made him smile as he climbed. Muddy, penniless and hunted, he knew himself for one that brought gifts; he was going to make her rich with the sense of power and benevolence. He was half-way up the second flight, at the head of which she lived, when he heard the policeman and his following of citizens enter below him and the stamp of their firm ascending feet on the lower steps. He took the remaining stairs three at a time. Upon the landing, the door of the flat stood ajar.

Gently, with precautions not to be heard below, he pushed it open, uncovering the remembered view of the furniture-cluttered passage, with the doors of rooms opening from it and the kitchen door at the end. The kitchen door was closed now; there was no sound anywhere within the place. Nearest to him, on the left of the passage, the door of the room in which he had drunk tea was open and dark.

He tapped nervously with his nails upon the door, hearing from below the approaching footsteps of the hunters.

"Miss Pilgrim," he called in a loud whisper along the passage. "Miss Pilgrim!"

The bell-push was a button somewhere in the woodwork and he could not find it. He tapped and whispered again. The others were at the foot of the second flight now; in a couple of seconds the turn of the staircase would let them see him, and he would be captured and dragged away from her very threshold. He had a last agony of hesitation, an impulse swiftly tasted and rejected, to try a rush down the stairs and a fight to get through and away; and then he stepped into the flat and eased the door to behind him. Its patent lock latched itself with a small click unheard by the party whose feet clattered on the stone steps.

There was a clock somewhere in the dwelling that ticked pompously and monotonously, and no other sound. Standing inside the door, in that hush of the house, he was oppressed by a sense of shameful trespass; he glanced with trepidation towards the kitchen, dreading to see someone come forth and shriek at the sight of him. Supposing Miss Pilgrim were out! Then from the landing came a smart insistent knock upon the door, and within the flat a bell woke and shrilled vociferously. He turned; the room that was always to be ready was at his side, and he fled on tiptoe into its darkness.

He got himself clear of the door, moving with extended hands across its creaking parquet till he touched the cold smoothness of the tiled stove, and freezing to immobility as he heard the kitchen door open. Quick footsteps advanced along the passage; to him, checking, his breath in the dark, listening with every nerve taut, it was as though he saw her, the serene poise of her body as she walked, the pathetic confidence of her high-held head, so distinctive and personal was even the noise of her tread on the boards. Presently, when she had sent the policeman away, he would see her and make her the gift of his request and watch her face as she received it from him.

The latch clicked back under her hand, and she was standing in the entry, confronting the policeman and his backing of citizens.

"Yes?" he heard her say, with a note of surprise at the sight of them. "Yes? What is it?"

The policeman's voice, with the official rasp in it, answered, spitting facts as brief as curses. "Man evading arrest aggravated assault believed to be a certain American apparently escaped this direction." It was like a telegram talking. Then, from his escort, a corroborating gabble.

He could imagine her look of rather puzzled eagerness. "An American?" she exclaimed. Then, as she realized it and its possibilities possibly also the fact that already when an American was sought for it was to her door that they came "oh!"

"Require you to produce him," injected the policeman, "if here! He is here yes?"

"No," she answered; "nobody has come here yet."

There seemed to be a check at that; the effect of her, standing in the doorway, made insistence difficult. The loud clock ticked on, and, at the background of the whole affair, the citizens on the landing maintained a subdued and unremarked murmur among themselves.

"He came this way," observed the policeman tenaciously. "He was seen to pass the next house." And a voice chimed in, melancholy, plaintive, evidently the voice of the dvornik who had been discovered absent from his post: "Yes, I saw him."

"Well," Miss Pilgrim seemed a little at a loss. "He's not here." She paused. "I have two rooms here," she added; "this" she must be pointing to the dark open door beside her "and my bedroom. You can look in this room, if that is what you want."

Waters heard the answering yap of the policeman and the shuffle of feet. He turned in panic; there was no time to reason with events. A step, and his groping hands were against that inner door, which yielded to their touch. Even in the chaos of his wits, he was aware of that subtle odor he had perceived before, that elusive fragrance which seemed a very emanation of chaste girlhood and virgin delicacy. He was inside, leaving the door an inch ajar, as the switch clicked in the outer room and a narrow jet of light stabbed through the opening.

"You see, there is nobody," Miss Pilgrim was saying.

The citizens, faithful to the trial, had crowded in. The policeman grunted doubtfully.

Waters, easing his breath noiselessly, let his eyes wander. The streak of light lay across the floor and up over the counterpane of a narrow wooden bed, then climbed the wall across the face of a picture to the ceiling. Beyond its illumination, there were dim shapes of a dressing-table and a wash-hand-stand, and there were dresses hanging on the wall beside him behind a sheet draped from a shelf. A window, high and double-paned, gave on the courtyard. Through it he could see the lights shining in curtained windows opposite.

"That?" It was Miss Pilgrim answering some question. "That is my bedroom. No; you must not go in there!"

There was a hush and a citizen said "Ah!" loudly and knowingly. Waters, listening intently, frowned.

"I must look," said the policeman curtly.

"But" her voice came from near the door, as though she were standing before it, barring the way to them, "you certainly shall not look. It is my bedroom, and even if your man had come here" she broke off abruptly. "You see he is not here," she added.

"I must look," repeated the policeman in exactly the same tone as before. "It is necessary."

"No," she said. "You must take my word. If you do not, I shall complain tomorrow morning to the consul and to the Chief of Police and you shall be punished."

"H'm!" The policeman was in doubt; she had spoken with a plain effect of meaning what she said, and a policeman's head upon a charger is a small sacrifice for a courteous Chief to offer to a lady friend. He tried to be reasonable with her.

"It was because he was seen to come this way," he argued. "He passed the next house and the dvornik this man here! saw him. He had committed an assault, an aggravated assault, on an istvostchik and evaded arrest. And he came this way."

"He is not here, though," replied Miss Pilgrim steadily. "Nobody at all has been here this evening. I give you my word."

The Russian phrase she used was "chestnoe slovo," "upon my honorable word." Waters caught his breath and listened anxiously.

"I give you my honorable word that he is not here," she affirmed deliberately.

"Now what do you know about that?" exclaimed Waters helplessly.

From the rear of the room somebody piped up acutely: "Then why may the policeman not look, since nobody is there?" Murmurs of agreement supported the questioner.

Miss Pilgrim did not answer. It was to Waters as though she and the policeman stood, estimating each other, measuring strength and capacity. The policeman grunted.

"Well," he said, "since you say, upon your honorable word but I must report the matter, you understand." He paused and there followed the rustle of paper as he produced and opened his notebook.

"Your names?" he demanded.

"Certainly," agreed Miss Pilgrim, in a voice of extreme formality. But she moved to the bedroom door and drew it conclusively shut before she replied.

Waters drew deep breaths and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. From the farther room he could hear now no more than confused and inarticulate murmurings; but he was not curious about the rest. He knew just what was going on the fatuous interrogatory as to name, surname, age, birthplace, nationality, father, mother, trade, married or single, civil status, and all the rest of the rigmarole involved in every contact with the Russian police. He had seen it many times and endured it himself often enough. Just now he had another matter to think of.

"Honorable word!" he repeated. "It's a wonder she couldn't find something different to say. Now I got to fool her. I got to, I."

The window showed him the pit of the courtyard; its frame was not yet caulked with cotton-wool and sealed with brown paper for the winter. He got it open and leaned out, feeling to either side for a spout, a pipe, anything that would give him handhold to climb down by. There was nothing of the kind; but directly below him he could make out the mass of the great square stack of furnace-wood built against the wall. From the sill to the top of the stack was a drop of full twenty feet.

He measured it with his eyes as best he could in the darkness. It was a chance, a not impossible one, but ugly enough. At any rate, it was the only one, if he were to get out and leave that "honorable word" untarnished. It never occurred to him that she might take it less seriously than he.

Waters, who dreamed, who stood by and gazed when life became turbulent and vivid, did not hesitate now. There was time for nothing but action, if he was to substitute a worthy sacrifice for his spoiled gift.

Seated upon the sill, he managed to draw the inner window shut and to latch it through the ventilating pane; the outer one he had to leave swinging and trust that she might find or not demand an explanation for it. This done, he was left, with his back to the house, seated upon the sill, a ledge perhaps a foot wide, with his legs swinging above the twenty-foot drop. In order to make it with a chance for safety, he had so to change his posture that he could hang by his hands from the sill, thus reducing the sheer fall by some six feet.

The dull windows of the courtyard watched him like stagnant eyes as, leaning aside, he labored to turn and lower himself. His experience at sea and upon the gantries in the yards should have helped him; but the past days, with their chill and insufficient food, had done their work on nerve and muscle, and he was still straining to turn and get his weight on to his hands when he slipped.

In the outer room, the catechism was running, or crawling, its ritual course.

"Father's nationality?" the policeman was inquiring, with his notebook upheld to the light and! a stub of flat pencil poised for the answer. A noise from the courtyard reached him. "What's that?" he inquired.

"Sounds like wood slipping off the stack," volunteered a citizen, and the dvornik, whose business it had been to pile it, and who had trouble enough on his hands already, sighed and drooped.

"American, of course," replied Miss Pilgrim patiently.

Below in the courtyard, Waters sat up and raised a hand to where something wet and warm was running down his cheek from under his hair, and found that it hurt his wrist when he did so. He rose stiffly, cursing to himself at the pain it caused him. Above him, the windows of the room that was always to be ready and waiting were broad and bright and heads were visible against them. He felt himself carefully and discovered that he could walk.

"Huh! Me for the roads goin' south outta this," he soliloquized, as he hobbled towards the gate; "an' startin' right now!"

He paused at the entry to the arch and looked back at the windows again.

"Honorable word!" he repeated bitterly, nursing his injured wrist. "Wouldn't that jar you?"

He moved out through the gale slowly and painfully.

XI

THE CONNOISSEUR

The office of the machine-tool agency, where Mr. Baruch sat bowed and intent over his desk, was still as a chapel upon that afternoon of early autumn; the pale South Russian sun, shining full upon its windows, did no more than touch with color the sober shadows of the place. From the single room of the American Vice-Consulate, across the narrow staircase-landing without, there came to Mr. Baruch the hum of indistinguishable voices that touched his consciousness without troubling it. Then, suddenly, with a swell-organ effect, as though a door had been flung open between him and the speakers, he heard a single voice that babbled and faltered in noisy shrill anger.

"Out o' this! Out o' this!" It was the unmistakable voice of Selby, the vice-consul, whose routine day was incomplete without a quarrel. "Call yourself an American you? Coming in here."