Part 23

They caught some of his energy--some of his superior biting viciousness as well. Especially the loafers were roused by a call to higher things. The benzoin merchant, betraying a habit acquired in a ruder society, groped vaguely at his hip. The engineer sought a billiard cue that balanced better to his fancy. Only the little clerk retained official scruples and timidly doubted if there was any order against juggling, as such.

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

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

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

"We might give him a chance."

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

He turned on the bewildered Merry.

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

* * * * *

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

He understood. With some reserve of tortured clear vision he did understand--the subtle finish to Silva's jape: playing his poor claims against his frantic need--the last refinement of humiliation; to make him exhibit his pitiful arts as a faker and a trickster of brown natives before men of his own kind. They hitched closer about him. They were highly entertained, languid, avid, and vindictive; and they watched him with fish eyes from faces like wet leather bags, flabby and pithless. He saw them through the blue smoke and the heat and the lamplight, and he saw that in fact they were his own kind. He had fallen rather lower, that was all and they had dallied with the local devil rather more cautiously--they could still pay for their drinks. But if he meant to share with them he would have to grovel. There was no help, and no escape. None. For just then, with diabolic inspiration, Silva poured a glass of sticky yellow liquor and put it out of his reach where the drifting scent of it was a torment of Tantalus....

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

They knew how he was hunted all about that rabbit warren, in and out, by passages and traps and holes in the wall, upstairs and down. They knew how he sought refuge through filth and dust and blows with the blind cunning of a harried and flank-torn cur. How he got away at some turn. How he dragged himself to some innermost recess of the place before he collapsed. How he was found there at last, and how he found himself, in a sense--though exactly why or by what dispensation these matters came to pass, naturally the said witness never had any very clear idea.

They had few ideas about anything, beyond their daily plaint against God, man, the cook, and the weather--which was undeniably an ample source at that, you may say. They kept the story only as long as it was new, like a scrap of ribbon, or a painted bangle or any other trifle which circulates in common currency, soon to become faded, lost and forgotten. But while it lasted their tale was precise enough, and it certainly established beyond doubt that the girl with the pink wristbands was the first thing Merry saw when he opened his eyes again, when he filtered back toward consciousness with his head on her knee and her quick, cool hands nursing him....

"More!" was Mr. Merry's greeting.

She set down the empty cup.

"We got no more," she said.

To him she must have seemed, she could have seemed at first, only a figment of dreams. She crouched by the pallet to which she had dragged him. The room was darkened; a candle struggled fitfully somewhere with the rays of moonshine that came by the wide window. The light just sufficed to show her small, pinched face, of a deathly pallidity under its coil of heavy, dead hair, and her thin arms and figure loosely covered by her loose-sleeved wrapper. It sufficed for him to recognize her, as men, without start or surprise, absolutely and infallibly do recognize and collogue with the creatures of their delirium.

"I have been looking for you," he said simply.

"You've been a long time about it," she answered, with the same simplicity....

* * * * *

In truth, life and all issues had been pretty well simplified and fused down for both these people: for Merry, who was as nearly as possible incandescent, and for the woman, who was merely burned out.

"I looked everywhere," he affirmed, in childlike earnestness. "I looked at Samarang. I looked at Batavia. I looked at Palembang. That's a mean sort of place, don't you think?... Did you go to Palembang?"

"No," said the girl with the pink wristbands.

"I don't see how I missed you."

"You missed me, all right. You missed me at the start--at Singapore. That was the time to find me."

He drew his breath as if in his sleep she had prodded some old wound, and the dent between his brows deepened.

"I did look for you at Singapore."

"You looked too late," said the girl with the pink wristbands.

"I went to the Jalan Sultan," he pleaded. "You lived in a house in the Jalan Sultan, at Singapore. It was there I met you.... But when I went back to fetch you--you were gone!"

"Yes," she said dully. "I was gone.... They heard you promise to take me away. The captain--he said you wouldn't come back. He said you wouldn't dare--too likely to get your throat cut if you tried it. He said his people had scared you good. And you didn't come back that night."

"No." His stare was fixed and waking. "No. I didn't come back that night."

"The captain said you were scared. I didn't know. But I sat up waiting like we had planned--you and me. I was waiting and waiting. And you didn't come. Why?--?" Her flat voice slipped a note. "Why--why--why didn't you come that night? _Were_ you scared?"

"I was drunk," he said. "God forgive me!"

Such tones a man may use when his naked soul is hauled out of him and stood up for judgment.

"It doesn't matter." She sank back again. "I wanted to get away then.... Afterward I didn't care."

The drink was taking hold of him, bracing him each instant nearer to an actual comprehension.

"Why didn't you care?" he demanded.

She pulled back the pink silk bands from her wrist and held them before him.

"That's one reason."

The man drew himself convulsively to his knees.

"Who did it? Who did that?"

"Silva. The captain--don't you know?"

"Silva?"

"They call him Captain Silva. He isn't really. He's a half-caste himself, only he pretends--and he scares everybody so. It was him brought me here. He's going to sell me to Zimballo."

"Zimballo!"

She nodded. "I suppose he'll sell me. I'm not worth much as a niña de salon, but I'm pretty tough. I've lasted--you see.... And--he says it's all I'm fit for."

Mr. Merry made never a sound.

For finally, with his wandering ended and with all questions of human chemistry and racial difference aside--finally this white man had reached the stage which had been so fully defined for him one steamy hot day by a Dutch navigator at Palembang. He had gambled away his last cent. He had been reduced to a wreck. His woman, in the laconic phrase--"his woman had gone bad on him." He had no more use for anything he could lay to mind. He was decidedly sorry with the world. And he was utterly ready to die with a big smash....

So Mr. Merry went amok, in the exact meaning of that word.

* * * * *

They were aware of him the moment he entered the main shed. They saw him, and they started at him with a yell.

He was the same man they chased and worried--that helpless and harmless outcast--just before. But so it is with all such outcasts: always helpless and harmless--just before. Heaven had fashioned Mr. Merry in one image, but the climatic devil had finished him in quite another. Most of his few rags had been torn from him, he was swathed about the middle with a Malay sarong, and his lean body was scored and pulped with blows. But his face was mottled and bluish now, with a fleck of foam in his beard. And when he came in among them he neither paused nor turned aside.

He made one jump to Zimballo's zinc bar. He made one leap to the highboy, Zimballo's high altar. He swept into his arms half a dozen of multicolored bottles, and, looming there above them from the top of the bar--up among the lights and the swaying punkahs--he began to launch those juggling missiles right and left, with the utmost speed and precision....

The first one caught Zimballo full in the chest and knocked him back against the wall with the shock of a battering ram. Another crashed just over his head as he sank to the floor. The engineer was sprawling at the billiard table when a third exploded like a shell fairly in front and deluged him in a flood of sticky liquor. The loafers and the clerk turned to run. But Merry dealt with them--and with retribution.

He was doing the thing he best knew how to do, by virtue of the odd knack of his fingers--and this time he made no mistakes.

He emptied a shelf, and the next, and the bottles still flew from him, streaking through space, smashing among the enemy.

Most of them made a miserable escape one way or another and fled, carrying a voice of panic that cleared out the establishment from end to end front and rear. But not Silva. Not the yellow-faced captain, who came back from the back of the room and charged with uplifted cue, snarling--who was met halfway: stopped, overwhelmed and crushed in his tracks as by a hail of thunderbolts....

* * * * *

When Mr. Merry led the girl out they had to cling for a time to each other and to the handrail that led down toward the landing.

All about them were the walls of the night, the dark, blank walls of land and sky and their prison. But outward lay a great silvered streak. To seaward they could gaze down a dim vista of rocky and deserted islets where the moon showed like an open silver gateway, like a wide, bright door to the uncharted spaces beyond--far beyond, as Merry's gesture showed her.

Of that consummation a whisper was caught, it seems, through the masking vines overhead: a last glimpse of them as they reeled there together on the brink.

"And you wasn't--you wasn't scared this time!" she gasped. "You ain't--you ain't scared now?"

"No," he said. "That is where we are going--out yonder.... I've a little prau canoe down here at the steps--if we can reach it.... It's where we belong, and our one chance. Over the curve of the earth--among the islands of the shallow sea. Where no one ever does go and nobody can follow."

"There's nothing much to eat. Nor drink, neither," she added quite practically. "We will die."

"What does that matter?... But a native might pull through, in the native way. And if it might happen to a native, it might happen to us.... Come!"

They went.

* * * * *

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Transcriber's note:

There are inconsistencies in hyphenation, accentation, and dialect. All are as in the book.