Part 22

We stared at him, a tattered ruin but an upstanding youngster, and we could sense no flaw in him now. He had come to grips with raw truth for once without failing--not without a falter, you understand, for he had to put aside a boy's pride and a last illusion in himself--but clear-eyed, the straight way, as every man likes to think he might have done in his own youth.

"Well," said Raff at last. "What's your notion?" Sutton drew a deep breath.

"You know, sir, the chief never took any note of time. One day or another--one month or another, it was all alike to him. Well, here it is: Why can't we strike out these seven weeks and three days from his memory--as if they never had been? We're fixed just as we were when we lost him. He's in his own bed, the ship's in the same berth, just coaled: same weather, same crew, same folk about him--same everything. He wakes up--wouldn't he think the whole mess had been a dream?... Wouldn't he? Couldn't we make him, just as they did with the Johnny here?" He hammered the book for emphasis. "_'Would not the beggar then forget himself?'_"

We winked as it burst upon us. Here was one beggar who had forgotten himself, anyway: his vanity, his posing, his weakness, in the fervor of a real idea.

"Perhaps there's something in make-believe after all--some merit. Perhaps it's got some truth in it too. It mightn't work, but I feel it must and will. I got the tip from the very book I gammoned him with, from the very passage he must have marked himself at random--d'y'see? And if he should come right--"

"Whist!" breathed the captain. "He's stirrin' now!"

The lank form on the bunk had moved. The bandaged head turned, and Chris Wickwire looked up from his pillow. His gaze traveled slowly over the bare, familiar details of the cabin, the racks and lockers, the deck beams above, the panels on the bulkhead, his own spare garments on their hooks--passed over our huddled group by the door and rested at the open port, its brass rim shining with the new daylight. He lay so for a time, tossed a little restlessly, and seemed to seek something. And then--

"Whaur's that pipe?" he muttered.

Our hearts stood still....

"Whaur's that blisterin' pipe?" he demanded, and raised himself with an effort, groped along the shelf beside him, found what he wanted by the tobacco jar, and proceeded leisurely to ram and to charge--his old clay cutty!

Raff had dragged Sutton and his tatters into the thwart-ship passage, out of sight, but I was clinging in the doorway when the dour old eye nailed me.

"Feeling better, chief?" I managed somehow to gulp. "You got quite a bump last night. Your head'll be sore for a bit--and--and the captain will want to know right away if the bandage is comfortable."

He considered me a space.

"Whaur's the mate?" he asked, and added quickly: "Did he go ashore?"

"No, sir. He stayed to tend you. He says he's lost his taste for shore leave, anyhow." I gasped, for Sutton's hand had caught mine in the passage, and it nearly crushed my fingers. "He says--he says he'll wait till you can go with him if you like."

Wickwire paused as he was lighting his pipe.

"Does he say that?" he queried, in a tone you would never have thought possible on those grim lips. "Fetch him here to me, will ye now?"

I stumbled away blindly. When I returned some minutes later he was propped quite comfortably at the end of the bunk.

"Beg pardon, chief--" I began.

"Hey?"

"Mr. Sutton can't come just now. I--I didn't care to disturb him--"

"How's that?"

"Well, it seems--the fact is--I--I left him in his cabin on his knees, and it looked--anyway it seemed to me as if he might, perhaps, be--praying!"

For the first time in my knowledge of him, his normal self, the chief smiled, and it was like the struggling ray of early sun that pierces the gray dawn. I should have left him then with that last glint of a picture to close the affair, and with Sutton's last word of it in my mind. "He's forgotten!" he had cried to me, in a clear bell note. "We did make him forget!"

I say I should have gone away with that image and that word. But just at the instant I saw a curious thing--and heard another. From the spot where Sutton had dropped it, Chris Wickwire had retrieved the book. He opened the volume on his knee and turned it around and over with a gesture entirely casual.

"Aye," he said, as he settled himself contentedly on his pillow. "Aye--well, I'll just sit here with this for a while. It's a grand book, beyond the pen o' men an' angels; I often wunner how I got along without one. Ye've no notion what comfort I've found just to sit an' haud in my twa hands such a staff o' immortal truth!"...

Had he forgotten? Had he anything or any need to forget? I could not tell: but this I know and this I saw while he twinkled at me through a puff of smoke before I fled from the doorway, that the book on his knee as he turned it and rippled its worn pages--the book, I say, was _right side up_!

AMOK

Merry saw how the thing was done one steamy hot day at Palembang, and he saw quite stark and plain. He had a first balcony seat to the performance, as you might say, for he was leaning from a raised and shaded veranda on the river street when it happened just below him. Also, by some chance or other, he was almost completely sober at the time. And this is the thing the sobered Merry saw:

From a doorway just across sprang suddenly out and down to the muddy level a little stout-shouldered half-naked Malay with a face mottled and bluish, with foam on his lip a creese in his hand. Forthright he drove into the crowd like a reaper into standing grain. His blade rose and fell in a crimson flicker, and he strode over the bodies of two victims before the people were aware of him and fled streaming through alleys and bolt holes. Then the terrible hoarse cry of the man hunt began to muster, and furious swart figures to start back out of the mass and to line the course with bright points of steel. The murderer neither paused nor turned aside, but held straight on, hewing steadily and silently, until the weapons bristled thick about him and he went down at last like a malignant slug under a tumble of stinging wasps.

Merry resumed breathing with a conscious effort and loosed his clutch of the balcony rail....

"What--was that?" he wanted to know.

A stolid and rather shabby client of the Dutch marine persuasion drew stolidly on a cheroot and craned over to count the huddled bundles that marked the madman's path.

"Oh, it iss nothing," observed this judicious person, who might have been mate, or such, of a country ship. "He got four only. Sometimes they kill eight--twelve--even more, till they get themselves killed. That fellow was just a common fellow."

"But why--what was he after?"

"Oh, it iss just going amok, you know. That iss a habit wit' the Malay folk. I have seen them often."

Still Mr. Merry desired light.

"How can I say?" returned the other. "A native iss always a native, except when he iss only a man an' a dam' fool. Perhaps his woman has gone bad on him or he has played his last copper doit at gambling. Maybe he has crazied himself wit' opium or bhang. Maybe he iss just come to a finish, you know?"

"A finish?" stammered Merry.

"Where he has no more use: where he gets sorry wit' the world an' wants to die quick. So he takes his knife an' runs amok to stab so many people as he can, an' he don't care a dam' if only he makes a big smash. It is like a sport, truly."

"Yes," said Merry. "Very like a sport."

Thereupon he gave pious thanks that he owned no share in the fantastic human chemistry that could produce such results. It was the sharpest reminder of essential racial differences. It made him feel sick and shaky, and since he knew only the simple cure for ills of body as of mind, he applied himself so earnestly that within half an hour he felt nothing at all, and the proprietor of the verandaed house on the river street had him thrown into a barge, where he slept with the flies crawling over his beard.

Afterward he recovered sufficiently to get himself out of Palembang, and after that out of Muntok and Batavia and Banjermassin and other places where he had no ostensible business to be. On his road he continued to encounter divers strange sights and incidents peculiar to the latitude and the social layers through which he moved; but the affair was a warning to him. He had been shocked. He had been very deeply shocked, and he was always careful never to let himself get quite so sober again--a development of the simple system whereby he avoided too vivid a view of local color while he wandered on--aimlessly, as well as anyone might judge--farther and farther downhill over the curve of the earth.

Now, it has been observed that a chap who starts downhill through the Archipelago commonly comes to an end of his journeying soon, and sometimes even sooner. The climate affords what you may call a ready accelerator, and so do the fever and the sun and the quality of the drink and other amusements prevailing in those parts. And often, if his steps stray a bit off the beaten track, he is likely to meet some kindly guide, black or brown or even white, perhaps, who bobs up in a quiet corner to point out a short cut. But though Merry took no heed of his steps in the least, and though he went quartering very far wide on that great thoroughfare which reaches from Singapore to Torres Strait along the midrib of the world, yet he kept on going for quite a while: and the reasons therefor were curious and well worthy of note.

To begin with, he had brought along a fair constitution and a stomach that was not so much a stomach as a chemical retort--an advantage to be envied by kings. He carried a loose, limp, and rubbery frame well suited to the uses of a long-distance drunkard. He was by nature as mild and harmless a creature as ever tangled himself in a fool's quest. And finally he owned a gift, a certain special personal gift of the kind that tends universally to maintain a fixed percentage for the man alive over what he is worth when dead.

Such a provision is not so easily come by. Very able citizens have lacked it. Many an eminent explorer, many a devoted pioneer, has found his eminence and his devotion outbalanced in the primitive scale by the value of his trouser buttons. It is singular to reflect what potential marvels, what captains and leaders among men, have been knifed for the beers; or elsewhere even broiled and eaten and complained of at dessert--some being tough and some lacking flavor.

Merry was none of these sorts, but he had an odd juggling knack of his fingers.

It was a sketchy enough knack at best. Heaven knew where he had acquired it, just as Heaven was left the responsibility of knowing most facts about Merry, anyhow. And certainly that was never discovered--no more nearly than his proper name, nor the meaning of the upright wrinkle between his brows like the dent of an ax, nor what conceivable things he had done or been or wanted that had landed him among the islands.

Only there you were. Give the fellow a wisp of silk and some brass bracelets or mango seeds, or such, and he would squat by the wayside or in the shade of a hut or the cabin flares of a native prau and proceed to work miracles.

He could make an egg to vanish and pluck it again from your left ear, and he could mold a kerchief between his big, soft hands until it produced a live lizard, which presently turned to a tame lorikeet, which sat up and dratted your eyes in good set Malay. He drew chinking coins out of space. He stood a plate on his nose and caught it on his calf, kept six rings accurately flying, grew flowers from a paper spill and butterflies from a kanari nut, and on occasion--if he was not absolutely petrified and could still see the mark--would even undertake to sink half a dozen daggers within the space of a hand print on the opposite wall: and would do it, too, with the utmost speed and precision.

Accomplishments of this kind were his passport, good any day for a lift, a lodging, or a load from the most unlikely people, for they set him apart in cult of conjurers and jesters that has been privileged always and everywhere.

And so, past all the usual land-falls and long past the tables of mortality for persons of his class and condition, he did keep going on. He kept on after his clothes had fallen to ruin and his face had turned the tint of seaweed; after he had lost most of the pretensions of a white man, his shoes and his shirt. And in due course he arrived at Zimballo's, where he lost the little property left to him and the shreds of his pride, which every man has whether aware of it or not and which he loses last of all....

Here again was an eastern city--not Palembang, though between two winks you scarce could tell it from that or a dozen other ports: the same hive of mats and slats, of fishing poles and cigar boxes, like a metropolis devised by ingenious small children; with the same smells which remain the only solid memorials; with the same swarm of pullulating humanity and the same crowding junks and praus, and now and then the far-venturing ships of recognized flags, sometimes as many as two or three at once; with the same yellows and browns and clays against shifting greens and eternal distant blues--all hazed with the same molten light.

But in its own ways the city is different and remarkable. It is a falling-off place. It is the eddy in a stream. At its roadstead the trickle of traffic turns back and sheers aside from a shallow sea of uncharted and unprofitable dangers: one of the big, blank spaces.

It has some scores of Europeans, who linger as official or accidental units in the population. It has some hundreds of Eurasians, who occur as improper fractions of varying hue. It has a season of the east monsoon when there is no longer any steaminess in the heat, nor any muddiness underfoot, nor any escape from pestilential wind and pervading dust: dust of the roads and dust of the seared rice fields, and crumbled refuse heaps and dust of a scorching hinterland; until a man's soul is changed in him, as you might say, to a portion of immortal thirst.

And also by necessary logic it has Zimballo's.

To this institution, one evening in the dry weather, came Mr. Merry, making what speed he could and clinging to the handrail all the way up from the landing while he caught his breath and stared painfully about.

Below the point he saw the harbor like a sheet of crinkled copper. Overhead arched a coppery dome. To seaward he could gaze down a vista of rocky and deserted islets resembling slag heaps, where the sinking sun showed like a red-hot spot in the huge, coppered oven in which he found himself. He had been traveling since dawn; he had been without liquor for something like twelve hours; and as he resumed his struggle toward the clutter of tinroofed sheds and arbors which marked his goal he achieved in his mind a dim but quite definite conviction--that hell could hold few surprises for him now, and earth none at all....

But therein he erred.

"Where is the price?" demanded Zimballo, and when Merry laid down a single piece of silver the international ruffian shook his crop head. "No go," he stated.

"It's all I have," said Merry.

"It ain' enough," decided Zimballo, eying him.

In fact, Mr. Merry made an odd figure of a customer. He wore a coolie's grass hat with a pointed crown. About his body hung an old duck jacket, so rotted with rust and mildew as to lend scant anchorage for one brass safety pin. His feet were graced with a pair of aboriginal sandals. It was true he still retained the essential garment, as the frayed ends above his ankles were there to prove. But for political reasons he had swathed himself mid-about with a striped Malay sarong, which is half a skirt and half a sash: whereat Zimballo took purpled offense.

This rogue, himself a mongrel grown fat in the slums of three continents, held starchy notions on the subject of pants.

"A drink," he said with intention, "will be half a dollar. If you don' got it, get out. And if you _do_ got it, pay quick and get out any'ow!"

"I--I haven't it; no. But for any sakes, man," gasped Merry between blackened lips, "you wouldn't turn a chap off! I'm done and double-done. I been knocked out, with the sun and all.... See here now. Give me the worth o' that."

"I give you nothing. I don' like your looks. Why, even in my back room," puffed Zimballo, "the half-castes and orang sirani, they come here as _zaintlemen_ only!"

He loomed indignant under the glow of his fine oil lamps, just lighted against the dusk, in his fine main shed which it was the sentimental care of his life to run as close as might be on the model of a Levantine waterside dive.

There is a breed, or a type, whose destiny is to go about the world purveying garlic, cheap food, infamous wines, and more or less flea-infested hospitality in all manner of queer corners, by ice-bound bay or coral strand. So they did in the time of the Ph[oe]nicians, and so they still do, and that part is right enough. No one could have found fault with Zimballo's zinc bar, nor his highboy stacked to the ceiling with multicolored bottles, nor his tattered billiard table, nor his battered metal furniture. The flaring, red cotton covers, the gilt mirrors, and the crude prints of obscure royalties; the blue-glass siphons and the pinky lace curtains: these he had found some heroic means of transplanting, like the fixtures of a faith.

Meanwhile the East is the East and a good deal of a fixture itself, and behind his drawn jalousies and his masking vines Zimballo served the local devil quite successfully.

Not the red and lusty wickedness of other climes, but a languid sort, thriving in a reek of musk and raw Chinese apple blossom, of stale cooking and incense and stifled rooms and poisonous sweet champagne, as dreary as the click of fan-tan cash and the drag of silks and the voices of a cheeping bird cage that circulated through the secret mazes of the establishment day and night. An unsmiling devil--in the flesh and on the spot very well represented you would have said, by one of the billiard players, a tall, yellow, corpsy individual who had remarked the stir of Merry's arrival and who now lounged about the table.

"What's the row, Zimballo?" he drawled. "Let's have a share if there's any fun going. My word--is that a friend of yours?"

"No friend--Cap'n Silva, sir!" protested the hotel keeper, rubbing his hands in a fluster. It annoyed him vehemently that he had not banished this disreputable stranger at sight. "Ope to die, sir--I never see 'im before!"

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 assume 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 assured 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 God! A specimen for true!" he breathed, incredulous. "Zimballo," he added in his drawl, slow and acid, "you're getting infernally damned 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 passing 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 glass 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 God! 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!"

* * * * *