Chapter X: Part 10

A door opened behind us and closed again with a heavy jar, and quickly we were aware of a new presence. The waiting hush took an electric quality, a tension. Some one was standing there, across; and I peered nervously, for this could only be the chief of the band, the "head devil," on whose will or whim we must suppose ourselves to hang. I scarcely know what I expected; what image I had formed of that mysterious Number One, who had put such strange events in motion. Something very alarming and formidable, at least, and certainly very far detached from the sort of greeting that reached us now. Its words came rippling like notes of music:

"I am sure there must be some meestake. It could not be these who rafuse a kindness to a stranger! Pedro--these are zaintlemen! Pedro--Pedro--you shall answer to me! Oh, stupid-head--always to bungle some more!"

I despair of conveying that trick of speech, subtly exotic--like the tang in some rare wine. But the voice! Each has heard such a voice for himself, once or twice perhaps, and felt his blood leap to answer, singing. It was a woman's voice, mellow-throated as a bird's.

Robert Matcham raised his head at the first sound of it; but still we could see nothing to distinguish the speaker--only a vague apparition, nebulous, tall and slim. She moved before us, and presently sank half-reclining on some divan or deep settle midway of the room.

A hurried, anxious mumble seemed to show that the unfortunate Pedro made his excuse; but she waved them away.

"_Messieurs_," she said--"_Senhores_--I must truly apologize to r'ceive you so. My friend' have exceed' their instruction. I would not that they should treat you with such rudeness. I would not have you sink us _criminel_. Believe me--no!"

But, though she protested warmly, I could not observe any offer to release us.

"And English too!" Her soft drawl was a caress. "See how _bete_ is that Pedro--to sink he could make you tell anysing to a r-robber in the street! Of course you would not tell! But me--I shall ex-plain so clear and so simple; and then you shall understand. Attend me, please:

"There is a great treasure on the shore of these island. A gr-reat treasure wrecked with a ship long taime bifore. Always, always it is known--only where? Thad nobody can know! By Machico, they say--yes. But z' waters by Machico are deep and cruel, and thad ship has went all to li'l' piece' hundreds years ago; and only the gold--the heavy, heavy doubloon gold--r'main down there; and to find it is not possible. So at last thad story is nearly forgot! You see?...

"But listen now: Only three mon's ago a poor fisher boy finds a one coin on the rocks. Somewhere--somewhere he finds it, and quick the news shoots to Portugal, to Spain. My friends and me, we heard thad news. We are very much excite'; for w'ere thad coin is--you comprehend--there z'rest must also be! So we make a company among us; and me, bicause--oh, bicause I am not quite unknown in several co'ntries and I have some little hinfluence, it may be--I am bicome the Madame Presidente--ze Number One. Yes.

"We hurry to Madeira. And what do you sink? Thad boy--thad poor fisher boy--he don't know w'ere he find that coin! True, I tell you! We take him here; we take him there--no good! He never can rimember w'ere he found it. He is so stupid--a li'l' fool in the head, that poor Joao, who now makes drinks in the Casino. _Pobrecito! Pauvre gars!_ And so our treasure is lost again....

"Until you come along--you big zaintleman there. You are a stranger, a foreign'--knowing nothing of all this. You take yourself for a walk by the beach and, very first thing--what? You pick up another one coin of this treasure! Ah, thad is so remarkable! Thad is a wonderful, truly! But what can we do? We must know w'ere you pick it up--that is es-sential to us. And nobody knows but you. So now you understand why my friends should make you all this trouble."

The red dot of a cigarette glowed to life between her lips, and by that tormented spark we glimpsed a face that seemed to advance out of the darkness and to retreat again as swiftly--the merest vision of an exquisite and roseate loveliness.

She waited for an answer; but Robert Matcham made none.

"Perhaps," she said, with the gentlest concern, "perhaps I do not make myself yet quite clear. You will r'mark thad we are going to know! Somehow or another we are going to know. Thees is a too ancient claim of ours--writ' on ancient parchmen'--and nobody can kip us from it now, when we are so close. _Voila!_"

The stillness weighed again and I saw Robert Matcham's great chest heave and fall.

"I, too, have a claim," he said, his full, deep tone rolling under the roof like an organ pipe.

She drew herself up to stare toward him.

"How?" she breathed.

And it was given Robert Matcham then to have his say out.

"Either that or nothing!" he declared quite simply. "Either I have a claim or there's no sense to life. Lady--look at me! Do you see a fool, a weakling or an imbecile? None of these, I think....

"When a man has been knocked blind and silly by his luck; when he's been hammered out of all hope and pride in himself--what can he do, lady? Well, there's one of two things for him: he can lie down and curl up like a worm, and confess he's only a lump of flesh, with no more control over his destiny than a bit of flotsam on the sea. He can do that--or else he can sink teeth and claw on the first hold and make it have a meaning; stick to it, and die sticking!

"I've had enough. I call enough! I'm half a world out of my place. I've lost everything I ever wanted; stood every mock and failure--a plaything for events. And now there's got to be a meaning: I'm going to put a meaning to it. If there's a treasure, as you say, it's mine; it must be mine; it's got to be mine--and it's going to be mine or nobody's!... And all hell can't make me speak!"

The fellow seemed to swell beside me; I heard the ropes creak about his limbs; and heard, too, the sharp-drawn gasp of the woman in the shadow.

"No! And how do you think you can privent?"

"Well," said Robert Matcham--and his voice rang with high exultation at last--"I can begin this way!"

His bonds snapped from him like thread; his fist went to his breast and came away armed with glitter--Joao's revolver, which he had hidden there. It spat saffron, twice and thrice, toward the door. He followed on and met a rush of opposing figures. I saw the fat croupier fall. I myself was bowled over, deafened by the bursting clamor, trampled, kicked in the head. Half-stunned, I writhed round to watch the struggle, adding my feeble pipe to the din.

"Go on, Robert Matcham!" I yelled. "Go on! Smash through! Oh, smash 'em."

They swarmed upon him, reaching for their deadly holds. Three had him about the waist; another clung to his feet; still others barred his path. So I saw him for the click of a shutter; and then, roaring with battle, he broke away, stripped them off like rats, waded on--plucked up the last one bodily and used him like a flail.

He was free! Free long enough to tear the door open and step back for a dash--and there she met him....

A bright bar of light cut in from the outer court and shone full upon her--a splendor of beauty to stop a man's heart in his breast. She was dark, like some tinted pearls--dark as he was fair--and ripe as her own lips. Her eyes, heavy-lidded, were slightly lifted to him with an amorous languidness. She did not flinch, save for a tiny quiver of nostril, thin and clear like a roseleaf, and the rise of her bosom, and when her little hand crept up to her throat.

So she stayed, and so he stayed, while the uproar died and fell away into the void--long and long; while time lost all count; while these two exchanged such a message as five centuries could not change, but no man can guess or words declare. And then--

"Robert," she said, "this is your treasure!"

"Anna!" said Robert Matcham. "Anna!"

I heard them--I, myself; I heard them....

It was the spade-bearded banker who brought me to.

"So," he nodded, with an amazing grin, "you are not a daid? Tha's nize! Now there are not any daids at all, and everybody being much pleased."

I blinked up at him from the divan on which I lay, and then round the room, gray and bare in the dawn, which had stolen in by opened door and casement. The banker sat down at a little table near by and beamed at me. I noticed that he carried one arm in a sling, but otherwise he was still the model rogue, jimp and smiling. There was no one else in sight.

"They are all down 'elping to fish up that box of gol'pieces," he explained. "You didn' know that, eh?"

"Where?"

"Below the beach. Your frien' showed the place; and, sure enough, there we dived and foun' it. But him--Oh, _la la_!" He chuckled. "Him and her, what do they care? They 'ave gone off together by their lones to see the sunrise--those dears!"

"Who was she?" I cried, starting up dizzily.

"What? You not know that divine _ballerina_, that dancer so sublime, that singer so sweet?" He kissed his finger tips. "Anna Darfetho, of Lisbon, and Paris, and Madrid! Only now--good-by! It is finish'! She are going with him to Australia. Imagine! And what for, do you think? To spend their share--'Oly Virgin!--in raising little woolly sheeps together!"

"Share?"

"Oh, we all share--that is agree'. Only me--you understand, I am--'ow you say?--the tiger for eat the mos'. Yes, I get the mos', because truly it should belong all mine.... Be'old--for this our fazers used to cut the throat!"

He took up from the table one of several blackish, common-looking lumps, like slag, and weighed it; and smiled his smile of the gentlemanly brigand who gloats upon the fortune won. And as I stared at that superior knave the whole stupendous marvel closed up with a final click.

Pilot? Pilot? I remembered the quaint phrase of the chronicle: "Great fighting pilot of Spain"--pilot? Pirate, rather. Pirate, of course!...

"Then you must be Pedro Morales?" I gasped.

"Ah, you know my name?" he twinkled pleasantly. "What a coincident!"

But I had had enough--enough of coincidence, of romance and adventure and authentic thrill to last me for some time, and rather more than I had bargained for with my ten pounds. I groped my way out into the open and the brisk morning breeze; and there, looking down to seaward through an alley in the cane, I saw the new sun come up, as round and broad and ruddy as--as a Portuguese doubloon.

THE PRACTICING OF CHRISTOPHER

Sutton was startling enough, and brisk, and eager--too eager. For five minutes after he broke in upon us he held us paralyzed with the story of his adventure through the back slums of Colootullah and the amazing discovery he had made there. And yet the gross fact glanced from us altogether, perhaps through his very vehemence, perhaps because of a certain obscure unsteadiness in the fellow....

"That's where the chief went to hide himself!" he cried, and we heard the words, but rather we were listening to the tone and watching Sutton; he convinced us of nothing.

He stood before us alight with animation; still breathed with hurry. Though the gummy heat of the monsoon made the little cabin a sweat box, he had not stopped to strip his rubber coat. It shone wet and streaky under the lamp as he gestured, and the rain-drops glistening in his stub mustache were no brighter than his eyes. And this was a notable thing of itself--to see him so restored, the jaunty, confident young mate we had used to know, drawn from the sulky reserve that had held him these many weeks. But most singular of all, as it seemed to us then, was the way he wound up his outburst:

"... So I came straight away on the jump to get you both," he declared, in a rush. "We can straighten out this mess to-night--the three of us--just as easy. I've a great notion.... Listen, now.

"There was a chap in a book I read, d'y'see? The other Johnnies put a game on him. Didn't they put up a game on him, to be sure! They made him think he was a duke or something, d'y'see? When he woke up! And, by gum, he believed 'em! They made him. Now there's the very tip we need to bring Chris Wickwire around all serene."

Captain Raff, sitting rigid on the couch, recovered sufficiently to unclamp his jaw from the fag-end of a dead cheroot. He had the air of one who goes about to pluck a single straw of sense from a whirl of fantasy.

"A book," he repeated. "A chap in a book? What in Hull t' Halifax is the boy talkin' about?"

Literature aboard the _Moung Poh_ was represented between the chronometer and the bottle rack by a scant half dozen of Admiralty publications. But Sutton laid no strain on our library. From his own pocket, like a conjurer that draws a rabbit from a hat, and quite as astonishingly, he produced a shabby, black-bound octavo. "Here it is, sir. Shakespeare wrote it. And the chap's name was Christopher too--a tinker by his trade. Queer thing!"

It was; you must figure here just how queer it was, and how far removed we were in our lawful occasions from books and people in books and all such recondite subjects--captain, mate, and acting engineer of a 1,500-ton tub of a country wallah trading between Calcutta, Burma, the Straits, and the China side.

* * * * *

By common gossip up and down among the brass-buttoned tribe such billets mostly go to men with a spot in them somewhere. We kept our spots pretty well hidden if it was so. There was nothing publicly wrong with any of us. Captain Raff commanded for our Parsee owners, because he always had commanded for them and never expected to do anything else, soberly and carefully--a man of simple vision, incapable of vain hopes and imaginings. Myself, I was following up a long run of ill health, glad enough of the sure berth and good food. And the only obvious fault with Sutton--though the same can be serious too--was youth....

Here we were, then, on the old _Moung Poh_. From the chart-room port we could see the low-lying haze of lights beyond Principe Ghat and hear the lash of rain down the Hooghly and smell the sickly mixture of twenty-four different smells that make the breath of that city built on a sink. We had been coaling and hard at it all day in a grime that turned to paste upon us. What with heat and weariness, our minds were pasted as well, you might say. The captain and I were grubbing among indents over a matter of annas and pice, when along comes Sutton, back from shore leave, to spring a wondrous tale--ending in Shakespeare! If I remind you further that there is more truth than poetry about the mercantile marine, perhaps you may glimpse the net effect.

Sutton doubled the volume hastily between his hands and ruffled its worn pages. He seemed quite familiar with it. How it had ever reached the _Moung Poh_ we could not guess, nor did he give us time to inquire. "I'll show you, sir," he continued in the same nervous key. "These Johnnies, you should know, they found this old bargee dead drunk. And so they made out to gammon him for his own good, to practice on him, as they put it. 'Sirs,' says one of 'em--'sirs, I will practice on this drunken man.' Here's the place ready marked, d'y'see?"

_Sirs, I will practice on this drunken man,
What think you, if he were convey'd to bed,
Wrapp'd in sweet clothes, rings put upon his fingers,
A most delicious banquet by his bed,
And brave attendants near him when he wakes:
Would not the beggar then forget himself?_

"That was their little game--to make the beggar forget himself. And they did--by jing, they played him proper! He _did_ forget himself, all his low habits and such." He hammered the book for emphasis. "Soon as I saw Wickwire it come to me like that. There's the thing we'd ought to do for him!"

"'Rings on his fingers--?'" The captain turned a dumb appeal toward me.

"Mr. Sutton says he's found the chief, sir," I suggested, for I had begun to understand, a little. "He's found Chris Wickwire."

"Wickwire?" With a jerk he caught up the real marvel at last, and the crop hair seemed to stiffen all over his bullet head. "The chief!" he roared.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you, sir."

"Alive?"

"Very much alive."

"Well, where is he? Why ain't he here?"

We saw the glow fade from Sutton's cheek. "I thought I explained, sir. He--he's not quite himself." Already the index of his temperament was beginning to swing from fair to foul again and his handsome face to blur with doubt. The thing that had looked so easy at the first feverish flush of relief was taking another proportion. "No, that's the devil of it," he said, gnawing the corner of his mustache. "Not by any means himself. He didn't even seem to know me."

"He might anyhow ha' wrote to tell us what happened to him that night."

The mate's dark lashes lifted a little in a superior way they had as he stuffed the book out of sight.

"He might have, only Wickwire couldn't read--you remember, sir. He'd hardly be apt to write either."

But Raff held to the point.

"Are you sure it was him? What'd he have to say?"

"He wouldn't come along--wouldn't listen to me. He--he said, if you want to know--he told me to go troubling the wicked if I liked, but to leave the weary at rest, and swore a little by this and that and so turned to another pipe."

The captain smote his thigh a clap like a pistol shot, and indeed it needed no more to convince any one, the quaint phrase brought quick before us the figure of that sour, dour Scotch engineer whose loss had cast such a gloom upon our little company, had left such a lading of mystery aboard the _Moung Poh_.

"Six--seven weeks since. And he ain't dead after all--!"

"Seven weeks and three days."...

There was that in Sutton's tone which served to check the captain's jubilant bellow. He knew, we both knew, what would be coming next. "Twentieth June was the date, sir--before our last trip to Moulmein. We were lying here in this very berth, No. 6 Principe Ghat, on just such another night as this, at the beginning of the rains. We'd been coaling too; some empty barges lay alongside. As it might be now, without the gap of time--"

Sutton spoke downward-looking, twisting his cap in his hands, and he told the thing like one doing penance and square enough, as he had from the first alarm. A clean-cut, upstanding youngster, a satisfactory figure of a youngster, the sort every man likes to frame to himself for an image of his own youth. And yet--and yet, hearkening, I caught the same unsteady note that had made me curious of him often and often before. Something in him rang false. Not so much like a bell that has cracked, if you understand me, but rather like metal whereof the alloy was never rightly fined.

"I was off watch that evening," he went on. "Chris Wickwire wanted to go ashore--for the first time in a year maybe. You know you generally couldn't lift him out of the ship with a winch, and so I waited till he should come up and step by the gangway to fix a bit of a joke on him. It was wrong of me, and very silly, you know, and dearly I've paid for it. But I only meant a jape, sir--to hear him rip and fuss and perhaps jolt a proper oath out of him and make him break that everlasting clay cutty he always wore in his face.... I fixed to loose the hand rope on the outboard side--

"I did loose it, _you_ know I did; and then I leaned there on the rail to laugh. He went down the steps in the dark. I figgered he'd be slid quite neat into the shore boat waiting below, d'y'see? I heard him stumble and call for me before I thought what I'd done. I heard him, and I didn't go to help, but I never thought how it would be, sir, not till too late. You believe that--!"

The cry wrenched from him as he searched our faces. It was very necessary to him that we should believe; he had all a boy's eagerness to keep the illusion--some illusion. And this was natural too, though even the kid prank as he told it came to the same stark and gratuitous horror. For Chris Wickwire had dropped out of life from that gangway!

Captain Raff chewed his cheroot for a space in silence. You would hardly expect him to have the subtlety of a donkey engine, so to speak, but he might surprise you at times, and he had learned to be very patient with the mate. Perhaps in his own time he had passed some crisis when the stuff in him was molding and setting, though it must have been quite a different occasion with so rugged a soul.

"Well," he said carefully, "we know all that, and I never heard nobody jaw you as hard about it as what you done yourself. But it's all right now, ain't it? You've found him. Didn't you just say you found him again?" And then he added what turned out to be a singular comment: "If the chief was smokin' his ol' pipe as usual, I judge nothin' much could ha' happened to him. He must be pretty much his own self after all."

So Sutton was driven back on the mere fact, which must always have been tough for him. He had blinked it thus far, as I suppose was his weakness to blink and to spin all manner of sanguine threads about the naked nubs of things. But if he meant to tell, he had here to tell outright, though I saw him wince....

"I found him in an awful hole down there," he faltered, "a kind of a chandoo shop. And the stuff he's smoking now is--opium!"

* * * * *

I cannot say that either Raff or myself had arrived at any clearness when we headed away into the maze of Colootullah that night. It was all a bad dream, and it began badly, in a dog kennel of a ticca gharri that racked us in tune to our own jarring thoughts.

We huddled together on the one bench, we two, though, dear knows, the captain would have been a fare by himself. Sutton sat opposite quite stiffly with his knees drawn aside, and the journey long said never a word. And this was the next aspect we had of him, you will note: a strained and silent presence and a pallid face glimpsed now and then by the brief flicker of some street lamp. For he had seen what we had not--Chris Wickwire alive, but Chris Wickwire transmogrified out of all belief, the inmate of a hideous den in the city's vilest slum--and somehow it set him sharp apart from us....

You must know there had been something very special in the bearing of all hands toward the chief engineer of the _Moung Poh_. Every ship has her social code. We had been a good deal of a family craft, as they say, and in the curious way of such traditions this had come to center on Chris Wickwire. If Raff was the sturdy patriarch, the chief had been the prim and formidable maiden aunt of our little household on the high seas.

I suppose to any outsider he must have seemed no more than a long-boned, long-lipped stick of a Dumbartonshire Cameronian, as dry as the texts he was always mishandling. But he had a value to us like a prized domestic relic; we admired, derided, and swore equally by and after him. His vast, lean height and face of a hanging judge, his denatured profanity, and the intimate atmosphere of disaster, hell-fire, and general damnation in which he moved--these were points of pride and almost of affection.

"See that eye?" said a Newcastle collier cove newly translated third engineer--we sampled some odd specimens for third up and down the ports--"Ol' Chris, 'twas 'im done it. 'You red, raw, an' blistered son of perdition,' he says, 'I'll learn you to 'ide liquor in your bunk. Wine is a knocker,' he says, and stretches me. And with that goes back to his cabin to _prye_ for me! I 'eard 'im groanin' as I come by the dead-light. Oh, he's a 'oly wonder and no mistyke--once he goes to set a bloke right there's nothin' he won't do for 'im!"

Nobody knew what wide courses had brought him eastward; his history began at the dock head where he appeared with the famous clay pipe in his mouth and the rest of his luggage in a plaid. There was a loose rumor he had once been top tinker in the big liners, until he took to raiding the saloon for revivals and frightening the lady passengers into fits. It was said again that he had come out from his native boiler shops of Clyde as a missionary, making vast trouble for the official brethren and seeking converts with a club. But if his doctrine was somewhat crude, he had a lifetime's knowledge of machinery, and the man that can nurse engines will need to show fewer diplomas in outlandish parts than the one that can save souls. By the same token Chris Wickwire undertook to do both.

* * * * *

You can figure how this bleak moralist would fasten on a type like Sutton. Soft airs and sweet skies had no appeal for the Cameronian; to him the balmy East was all one net of the devil baited with strange seductions, and unnameable allurements. The rest of us were hardly worth a serious warning. But our youthful mate, with the milk scarce dry on his lips, as you might say, and his fresh appetite for life and confident humor--here was a brand to be snatched from the burning: here was a stray lamb for an anxious shepherd!

And Sutton--at the first he took to it like a treat. It made a new game for him, you see, amusing and rather flattering as well, the kind of a jape he was all too apt at.

"Where ha' ye been the day--ashore again? Buyin' gauds an' silk pajamies, I notice. Laddie, do ye never tak thocht for your immortal speerit, which canna hide under lasceevious trickeries nor yet cover its waeful' nakedness? No' to speak of yon blazin' Oriental bazzaars, fu' o' damnable pitfalls for the unwary! Aye, laugh now!... Laddie, ye're light-minded. Heaven send down its truth upon ye before ye wuther like the lilies o' the field!"

This sort of thing was good fun for Sutton--at the start, as I say. He must have had many a rare chuckle from superior ground. Being damned with such assurance, he naturally inquired into means of grace, and so developed the jest.

* * * * *

With the streak of slyness that marked him, he kept it pretty much between himself and the censor, but I chanced to overhear an odd passage. He called one day for a Bible, offering to prove the other wrong on some argued matter.

"Na, fegs," said Christopher. "I hae nane."

"What--no Book!"

"I need nane. What for?"

"Why, for me, of course. It's a remedy for all ills, they say.... I'm surprised at your not trying it on."

They made a picture there by the rail in a strong glint of sunlight--the chief, squatted on a bollard like a grim and battered Moses giving the law; Sutton, dapper in fresh ducks, his hands in his pockets, swaying easily to the ship's motion.

Wickwire seemed to reflect. "Aye, it's a grand book, nae doot, but wad ye listen? I been watchin' ye, laddie--I ken ye better than maybe ye think."

"Much obliged, I'm sure," said Sutton pertly.

"Aye, there it is, ye see. Ye never tak' the straight way wi' life. But what I dinna just ken is this: are ye a'thegither past the reach o' good words for remedy? Puttin' aside the false glitter, could ever ye cast the beam from yer eye an' listen how hell gapes for ye?"

"I might," said Sutton. "You haven't a notion how I enjoy hearing about it. You might read to me."

I was startled then to see the depth of yearning in Wickwire's regard, to see his hands knotting and twisting one in the other. However it might be with the mate, it was no play with him; he was wrung with pity as toward an erring son, or toward some younger memory of himself, perhaps--for Sutton had this appeal.

"Suppose I should tell ye now I canna read the heid o' one printed word frae the hurdies o' it?"

The idea took slow hold of Sutton while he stared and brightened.

"Can't read?" he echoed. "You can't read? Why, in that case--I could read to you," he cried--"couldn't I? By gum, there's a notion! I'll do a bit of instructing myself, d'y'see?... Truth--oodles of truth! I'll show you old boy--"

And he did. At our very next port he went prowling among the shops where the Government students get their second-hand textbooks, and when he came back he brought the book with him, a book with a gilt cross on the cover. You would have fancied the chief must have gained a great point for salvation; on the other hand, Sutton apparently skimmed the cream of the joke, for he certainly read. Thereafter one heard them in a quiet hour, a harsh voice like the rasp of an ash hoist rising now and then to protest and a lighter response, droning a line or perhaps breaking over into merriment....

"Where's the chief?"

"Prayer meetin' on the after 'atch."

"Saved anybody yet?"

"Give 'im 'is chawnce," said the third. "Give 'im 'is bleedin' chawnce. He'll fetch that myte to glory if 'e 'as to spatchcock 'im!"

But it ended as, of course, it was bound to. The one grew weary or the other too insistent; their sittings were suspended.

For a time they were not even on speaking terms, and the very day we were coaling at Calcutta--seven weeks before, you remember--they broke suddenly on an open quarrel. What it was about none could say, but all that afternoon the mate went strutting with a very pink face, while Christopher kept bobbing up the scuttle to glower after him with a long-drawn lip over his pipe.

"Did he say he's gaun ashore the nicht?" he asked me once, in a whisper. "Aye, there it is, ye see," he added to himself. "Wae's me for the fool in his heart! He's young--he's ower young. What he needs is to come to gripples with raw, immortal truth for one moment. What he needs is a rod an' a staff to comfort him--an' by this an' that," he breathed through the pipestem, "I'd like to have the layin' on o' it!" The same night we lost Wickwire....

* * * * *

Perhaps you can see now how hard it came for us to believe, as we hastened on his rescue toward Colootullah, that this kind of a man, that this particular man, had fallen the victim to a loathsome vice.

By what we could piece out from Sutton's report, at the time of the accident, Wickwire had never dropped into the river at all. He must have landed in one of the empty coal barges alongside--there had been one missing next morning which later was picked up near the Howrah Bridge--and so reached shore.

"He got hisself shook in his wits," said the captain, breaking a silence. "Is that how you make it?"

"Something of the kind," I agreed, and recalled a lad from Milford Haven I once was shipmates with who took a clip over the head from a falling block and for a month thereafter was dumb, though otherwise hale enough.

"It'd be an almighty clip over the head would strike the chief dumb," said Raff simply-- "or anything like it."

Sutton said nothing.

Meanwhile we went plunging on through rain-swept darkness. I never knew the course nor the place where we left our gharri and took to narrower ways afoot, but here the nightmare closed in upon us. We breathed an air heavy with mortality, on pavements made slimy by countless naked feet, in a shaft, in a pit, between dank walls. Shapes drifted by like sheeted corpses, peering, floating up, melting away; from pools and eddies of lamplight sinister faces started out and fingers pointed after us. For we had come to strange waters, the teeming backwaters of the city.

* * * * *

Port Said has its tide rips if you like, is wickeder perhaps in its hectic way; you need to keep to soundings in Singapore, and parts of Macao and Shanghai you do well to navigate with an extra lookout and pressing business somewhere else. But Calcutta at night is the Sargasso Sea. There you wander among the other derelicts, helpless, hopeless, moving always deeper down lost channels, uncharted, fetid, clogged with infinite suggestions of dim horrors--

To top our bewilderment, the captain and I found ourselves being piloted swiftly through this welter, without pause or fault, by alleys and reeking courts, doubling and twisting. We dived into a lurid, crowded cavern that echoed with some dismal merrymaking of string and drum. We jostled the loungers in a low-caste drinking shop and pushed on to a dark stair that rose like the ladder of a dovecote. The place was alive with twitterings and shufflings. Steps fled before us and half-naked bodies caromed against us from the void until a last rush landed us on the floor above the street.

There was a dusky room hung with blue stuffs where dragons black and gold crawled and ramped. It ran along the front of the house as a gallery, but it had no windows--only a row of shallow cells, so to say, divided by the hangings. Down at the far end low lights burned hot and small under wreaths of greasy incense, and a big, green joss grinned from a niche. He was fat and crass and ugly, that joss, a fit deity for such a den, and he seemed to nod and to listen!

Perhaps because we were listening!...

"Whaur's that pipe? Whaur's that pipe? Boy, you smoke wallah, whaur's that pipe?" A voice to send the chill into your marrow, slab and dreary and overlaid, but with a rasp that we knew and would have known anywhere on earth, or under. "_Not_ the silver one, ye blistered limb--"

Nobody came; nothing stirred among the curtains. Sutton had closed the door, to lean there. It was very still. Except for the leering joss and the monstrous embroidered things on the walls the rooms showed empty. And the plaint began again, monotonous, muffled:

"Whaur's that pipe o' mine?"...

Raff was first to break the spell that held us. With a brusque gesture he set us in motion, and we followed on from curtain to curtain down the gallery, and at the end near the joss we found him we sought. He lay propped on a charpoy in a nest of squab blue cushions. On a stand beside him glowed a tiny lamp, and a yellow Eurasian lad was tending him as perhaps the imps tend the damned. Evidently the pipe had been found; he held the length of polished bamboo ready for the fuming pellet, and he raised himself on an elbow as we three drew silently near and stood by. "Chief!" said the captain, and stopped dead.

He looked up at us then, and it was Chris Wickwire, his very self. He looked and looked and made no sign.

I think I might have been less shocked to see some change, some altered trait to veil the normal image of him. But there was none. He was the same, the same weather-beaten old tinker with the lean, long face and hard-set jaw and the dour eye that could quell a mutinous stokehole at a glance. In the midst of this evil and fantastic luxury he still wore the same old shiny alpaca too, his regular shore-going and Sunday garb, and a ragged bit of ribbon at his throat. Somehow that cut me all up.

"Wickwire!" began Raff again. "Come away out of that. What are y' doin' here?"

No answer; the smoker's concern was for his pipe.

"Chief, d'you hear me? You're needed on board." The captain shook him gently, and then not so gently.

"Drop it. We've come to bring you away. For any sakes quit that devilment, now, will y'!"...

The figure on the couch made a languid effort.

"I'll grant ye--I'll grant ye the siller's weel enough for a change. Aye, it makes a change." He wagged his head at us confidentially. "But the bamboo's the best. It smokes sweet--varra sweet it smokes. An' that unhandy thief of a boy--" He paused to draw lazily at the mouthpiece and loosed a slow gout of vapor. "He's always mislayin' it somewhere--"

Raff cried a round oath and snatched the pipe from him; flung it down. But the chief only sank back among the pillows and closed his eyes, even smiling a little to himself, as one accustomed to the vagaries of phantom guests....

For the last few moments he had forgotten our appointed guide and leader. He had been standing by, a stricken witness, but with a common impulse the captain and I turned on him, and he started from contemplation of his handiwork as if he had pulled a secret wire.

"You brought us here," roared Raff, accusing.

"I--I didn't think he was as bad as this."

"Bad! He's crazy as a coot. What were you going to do about it?"

The flurry of our passage had begun to draw in behind us in a back-lash wave. The house seemed to hum under our feet. A door opened on a gust of muttering voices. Down by the entrance to the gallery a knot of vague shadows had gathered. It occurred to me, and time enough you might suppose, that we were very far from possible aid in a region where visitors are a poor risk. And suddenly, out of space for all I knew, appeared a little noiseless silken apparition of a Chinese who regarded us from twin lenses with a phosphorescent gleam.

It was of a piece with the whole mysterious side of the affair that he should address Sutton a screed in the vernacular and that the mate should answer. I was long past wonder--anything might happen now--and I only noted that our companion could be wheedling and plausible in more than one language. But Raff seemed curiously put out and broke upon their chatter.

"Friend of yours?" he rumbled.

Sutton span around nervously.

"He--he says we've got to go away quick. He says we've no business here."

"Tell him sure thing, soon as we get our friend."

"But he says--he says Chris is his lodger, in a private house, and mustn't be disturbed."

"Oh, he does, hey? Well, we'll give him a chance to explain to the police in another minute!"

"That's no good either."

"Does he figger we can't get no police?"

"'Tisn't that, sir. The police couldn't help."

"Why not?"

"Why, it seems he's breaking no law. There's no bar to private smoking. I've been trying to get around him somehow, but there doesn't seem to be anything we can do. He says the white man has a right to stay here, and he has a right to keep him."...

"Keep him! Well, by God!"

"I suppose Chris must have a little money banked somewhere," continued the mate miserably. "Li Chwan'll never let go of him while it lasts."

"And you mean we got to leave him after all--leave the ol' chief to rot where he lays?"

"Unless he wants to--to come away of his own motion," stammered Sutton. "I thought he'd come quite easy when he saw the three of us. But he won't. He doesn't want to--and that's the dreadful fact. And--and--only look at him now!"

* * * * *

His fascinated gaze had coasted back to the face on the cushions. It might have been cut from tan marble, impassive and stern, and we saw what he meant--though perhaps not as vividly as he saw--the wretched incongruous tragedy of such a face in such a setting.

"So this is the end of your grand scheme!" said Captain Raff bitterly.

Well, you see, it came rather rough on a superior young optimist. For the very first time in his life, I suppose, Sutton found himself called to account without a chance either to smile or to sulk, to palter or to play at clever tricks. Whatever his share in the unhappy business had been--and we had never fully fathomed it, you remember--he was facing the result of that folly without the possibility of disguise or excuse or easy escape. Here was actual, physical hell to equal Wickwire's own preaching--the murky depth of it. And here was Wickwire himself, condemned to the dreariest fate ever devised by unamusing devils. And who to blame?...

What he suffered we had a guess even then. Being the sort of chap he was, he fought a very pretty little fight with himself in that moment--which we might have guessed as well. His face was gridironed, studded with sweat, and his hands clenched and opened. He turned here and there, seeking the careless word or the flippant gesture, some relief to an intolerable sense of guilt. But writhe as he liked, his darting glances always painfully returned to the still victim on the charpoy.

The Chinese touched his arm....

"No," he quavered. "No--no, by gum, _no_! It's not the end. Keep off of me!" Like a man who clears himself of a vileness, he slung Li Chwan across the room. "And you--" he cried to us "--hoist the chief up out of that, and lively. There's a way yet if we take the straight of it. Grab him!"

We responded--just as we had hesitated before--to some subtle quality behind the words, and while we were gathering the limp body Sutton himself was laying wide hold on the draperies across the wall. They ripped and swayed, swirled down about him so that he stood waist deep wrestling with figurative monsters until the whole blue screen tore away and revealed the glass partition which closed the end of the gallery. Solid at the base, it was latticed above with small panes, and, taking the straight way with a vengeance, he flung himself literally and bodily against it. The jingling crash brought a howl from the stairhead, but he broke a gap with his bleeding fists, wrenched out the crosspieces.... A spatter of warm rain blew in upon us.

"There's only the street below!" I gasped.

"Out!" was Sutton's crisp order. "Out--and through--and over with you!"

We had no choice; his furious energy drove us. Wickwire hung a dead weight in our arms, but we propped him on the jagged sill and scrambled after, any fashion. Clinging there, we had one last glimpse into the gallery behind us, set like a stage for our benefit.

We saw the little Chinese come on with uplifted knife, spitting and glaring like a wildcat, saw the knobbed, bare shoulders and coppery, brute faces of his crew, saw Sutton turning back. He had no weapon, but he armed himself. He dragged the big green joss from its niche, lamps, incense, and all, twirled it over his head, exultant, transformed with berserk fury, shouting some free battle cry of his own--and met them. Thereafter the place went dark in a babble of shrieks, and we dropped like slugs from a garden wall.

So we brought Chris Wickwire home again--what was left of him....

There was small joy in that homecoming, you can figure. Dawn broke weeping as we were hurrying aboard with our unconscious burden. The reaches of the river were beginning to show slaty downstream and a little damp wind running with the day was like a chill after fever, unfriendly and comfortless. The lamp in the chief engineer's cabin had paled from saffron to citrine in the morning light when the officers of the _Moung Poh_ took stock of themselves once more, and of each other and an ill prospect.

Wickwire had neither spoken nor stirred, though his breathing was regular and he seemed to have taken no immediate hurt from his fall except the reopening of an old, ragged wound above the ear. Captain Raff had done the bandaging: he stood back from the last neat pleat.

"A clip over the head, as you say," he observed, addressing me pointedly while he wiped his clumsy great hands that yet had wrought as tenderly as a woman's. "And pretty lucky at that. H'll do well enough now till we get a doctor. You better dig out after one yourself--try the Port Office; they'll have to be notified anyway, I judge, when he wakes."

We looked at the shell of a man on the bunk. "It's got to be the--the hospital, then?" I asked.

"I believe that's what they call it," said Raff gruffly.

"Beg pardon, sir," put in Sutton very quietly, "but we'll notify no office and no doctor either--not till we sheer have to."...

The mate was planted by the door where he had been waiting in silence while we two ministered to the chief. Raff had ignored him since our return, but he eyed him now sternly up and down. Most people would have eyed him so, for he made rather an appalling figure, streaked and stained, with his wounds half dried upon him, a raking cut along one cheek and his coat hanging in shreds.

"What in Hull t' Halifax are you talkin' about?"

Sutton drew from his pocket a certain familiar object, a small, black-bound volume. "There was a chap in a book I read, sir--"

The captain regarded him, purpling.

"Is this more of your wonderful notions?"

"It's my plan to save Chris Wickwire," returned the mate firmly, "and I'm bound to try it on. Just as it says here. 'Sirs,' it says, 'sirs, I will practice on this drunken man--'"

He held out the shabby octavo and, considering it again with heightened amazement, of a sudden I knew where I had seen it before.

"Why," I cried, "that's the Book you got for the chief. I can tell from the gilt cross on the cover. That's Wickwire's Bible!"

"It is the book I got for the chief," he said slowly, making plain the case against himself, "and it has a cross on the cover. But it's no Bible. Only an old collection of plays I bought to gammon him with. Shakespeare wrote it.

"There was no cover to it either, so I bought an old cover off a hymn book and pasted it over. You can see for yourselves--the cross is upside down." And, in fact, that we might miss nothing he showed us the cover, wrong way with the pages. "I remember the chief, taking lessons from me but having only the cross to go by, d'y'see--the chief used always to hold the book wrong side up. I remember," he added with an odd smile, quite mirthless--"I remember how I laughed. I used to think it funny."

Someway that made the captain froth. Since our invasion of Colootullah he had been increasingly rigid toward the mate, and here he broke out.

"So we've had nothin' but your damn' lyin' tricks from the start! All the time you was readin' to him--"

"Only gammon, sir. I used to experiment on him with choice bits--calling 'em truth and Scripture."

"And now you're after more fool games of the same kind! Can't you look what's come of 'em? Look there!" He pointed to the stark figure.

"I see what's come, sir," said Sutton, and though he was white under his stains he never flinched. "And Wickwire, he saw what _would_ come. He was trying to stop me the night I dropped him into the river--when we quarreled. Because, d'y'see, from fooling with the works of life just to learn how they're made I'd begun fooling with the works of hell. And he had found me out."

"Ah," said Raff, with one of his rare flashes. "_That_ was how you knew the road to Li Chwan's!"

"To Li Chwan's--and--other places. I've been hitting it pretty regular for six months or so. The chief tried to save me, but I wouldn't hearken, and there, as you say--there's the result. It's just as if he'd done it all as a sacrifice, to show me. It's just as if--as if he'd paid for mine with the price of his own immortal soul!"...

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?"