The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 59

I had to leave him standing there, up to his knees in the inky water, heaping me frankly with curses. I shall not repeat the curses. At the end of them he bawled after me:

"But I'll get there! You watch me all the same, all the same, you d.a.m.n--"

The reason I didn't up-anchor and get out that night was that, when I came aboard I discovered not far from my berth the un.o.btrusive loom of that Dutch gunboat, arrived for a "look-in" at last.

The only thing for me to do was to sit tight. If, when the state of the island's affairs had been discovered, there should be want of explanation or corroboration, it would be altogether best for me to give it. I wasn't yet through trading in those waters, you understand.

But Signet was no fool. He, too, must have seen the discreet shade of the visitor. When the morning dawned, neither he nor the royal dancer from the Marquesas was to be found. Some time in that night, from the windward beach, ill-manned and desperate, the royal sailing canoe must have set forth tumultuously upon its pilgrimage again.

I sat in a place in Honolulu. Soft drinks were served, and somewhere beyond a tidy screen of palm fronds a band of strings was playing. Even with soft drinks, the old instinct of wanderers and lone men to herd together had put four of us down at the same table. Two remain vague--a fattish, holiday-making banker and a consumptive from Barre, Vermont.

For reasons to appear, I recall the third more in detail.

He let me know somewhere in the give-and-take of talk that he was a railway telegraph operator, and that, given his first long vacation, an old impulse, come down from the days of the Hawaiian _hula_ phonograph records, had brought him to the isle of delight. He was disappointed in it. One could see in his candid eyes that he felt himself done out of an illusion, an illusion of continuous dancing by girls in rope skirts on moonlit beaches. It was an intolerable waste of money. Here, come so far and so expensively to the romantic goal, he was disturbed to find his imagination fleeing back to the incredible adventure of a Rock Island station, an iron-red dot on the bald, high plain of eastern Colorado--to the blind sun flare of the desert--to the immensity of loneliness--to the thundering nightly crisis of the "Eleven-ten," sweeping monstrous and one-eyed out of the cavern of the West, grating, halting, glittering, gossiping, yawning, drinking with a rush and gurgle from the red tank--and on again with an abrupt and always startling clangor into the remote night of the East.

He s.h.i.+fted impatiently in his chair and made a dreary face at the screening fronds.

"For the love o' Mike! Even the rags they play here are old."

The consumptive was telling the banker about the new cooperative scheme in Barre, Vermont.

"For the love o' Mike!" my friend repeated. "That ain't a band; it's a historical s'ciety. Dead and buried! Next they'll strike up that latest novelty rage, 'In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree!'--Now will you listen to that. Robbin' the cemetery!"

He needn't have asked me to listen. As a matter of fact I had been listening for perhaps a hundred seconds; listening, not as if with the ears, but with the deeper sensatory nerves. And without consciously grasping what the air was I had suffered an abrupt voyage through s.p.a.ce.

I saw a torch-lit sward, ringed with blue and saffron faces and high forest walls; I saw the half-nude, golden loveliness of a Polynesian woman shaken like a windy leaf. And the beat of a goat-hide drum was the beat of my blood. I felt my shoulders swaying.

I looked at the young man. His face expressed a facetious weariness, but his shoulders, too, were swaying.

"What tune is that?" I asked, in a level tone.

His contemptuous amazement was unfeigned.

"Holy Moses! man. Where you been?"

He squinted at me. After all, I might be "stringing him."

"That," he said, "is as old as Adam. It was run to death so long ago I can't remember. That? That's 'Paragon Park.' That is the old original first 's.h.i.+mmie' dance--with whiskers two foot long--"

"The original what?"

"s.h.i.+mmie! _s.h.i.+mmie!_ Say, honest to G.o.d, don't you know--?" And with his shoulders he made a wriggling gesture in appeal to my wits, the crudest burlesque, it seemed, of a divinely abominable gesture in my memory.--"That?" he queried. "Eh?"

"s.h.i.+mmie," I echoed, and, my mind skipping back: "_Shemdance! Shame Dance!_--I see!"

"Why?" he demanded, intrigued by my preoccupation.

"Nothing. It just reminded me of something."

Then he lifted a hand and smote himself on the thigh. "Me, too! By jinks! Say, I'd almost forgot that."

He hitched his chair upon me; held me down with a forefinger.

"Listen. That was funny. It was one night--last fall. It was just after Number Seventeen had pulled out, westbound, about one-forty in the morning. There wasn't anything else till six-one. Them are always the hardest hours. A fellow's got to stay awake, see, and nothin' to keep him--unless maybe a coyote howlin' a mile off, or maybe a b.u.m knockin'

around among the box cars on the sidin', or, if it's cold, the stove to tend. That's all. Unless you put a record on the old phonograph and hit 'er up a few minutes now and then. Dead? Say, boy!"

"Well, this night it was a b.u.m. I'm sittin' there in the coop, countin'

my fingers and listenin' to Limon calling off car numbers to Denver--just like that I'm sittin'--when I hear somethin' out in the waitin' room. Not very loud.--Well, I go out there, and there's the b.u.m.

Come right into the waitin' room.

"b.u.m! If he wasn't the father and mother and brother and sister of the original b.u.m, I'll eat my hat. Almost a Jew-lookin' guy, and he'd saw hard service. But he's got a kind o' crazy glitter in his eye.

"'Well,' says I, just like that, 'Well, what do you want?'

"He don't whine; he don't handle the pan. He's got that look in his eye.

"'My woman is out in them box cars,' says he. 'I'm goin' to bring her in here where it's warm.' That's what he says. Not '_can_ I bring her in?'

but '_goin_' to bring her in!' From a _hobo_!

"Can you imagine? It makes me think. It comes to me the guy is really off his trolley. To keep him calm I says, 'Well--'

"He goes out. 'I'm shed o' _him_,' I says to myself. Not a bit. About three minutes and here he comes trottin' back, sure enough, bringin' a woman with him. Now Mister--What's-y'r-name--prepare to laugh. That there woman--listen--make up your face--she's a _n.i.g.g.e.r_!

"He says she ain't a n.i.g.g.e.r.

"'Mexican?' says I.

"'No,' says he.

"I give her another look, but I can't make much out of her, except she's some kind of a n.i.g.g.e.r, anyhow. She's sittin' on the bench far away from the light, and she's dressed in a second-hand horse blanket, a feed sack, and a bran' new pair of ar'tics. And she don't say a word.

"'Well,' says I, 'if she ain't some kind of n.i.g.g.e.r, I'll eat my--'

"But there he is, all of a sudden, squarin' off in front o' me, his mug stuck up and his eyes like a couple o' headlights. Imagine! The guy ain't got enough meat on his bones for a rest'rant chicken. Honest to G.o.d, he looked like he'd been through a mile o' sausage mill. But crazy as a bedbug. And there's somethin' about a crazy man--

"'Hold y'r gab!' says he. To _me_! That gets my goat.

"'Just for that,' says I, 'you can get out o' this station. And don't forget to take your _woman_ along with you. Get out!'

"'Get out--_h.e.l.l!_' says he. He sticks his mug right in my face.

"'That woman you speak so light of,' says he, 'is a queen. A Canuck queen,' say he.

"I had to laugh. 'Since when was there queens in Canada?' says I. 'And since when has the Canuck queens been usin' stove polish for talc.u.m powder?'

"The guys grabs me by the coat. Listen. He was strong as a wire. He was deceivin'. A wire with ten thousand volts into it.

"'Look at me!' says he, breathin' hard between his teeth. 'And take care!' says he. 'I'm a man no man can monkey with. I'm a man that'll go through. I'm stained with crime. I've waded through seas o' blood.

Nothin' in heaven or earth or h.e.l.l can stop me. A month from now rubes like you'll be glad to crawl at my feet--an' wipe their dirty mugs on the hem o' that there woman's skirt.--Now listen,' says he. 'Get the h.e.l.l into that there box o' yourn over there and be quiet.'

"Crazy as a loon. I hope to die! the guy was _dangerous_. I see that. It come to me it's best to humor him, and I go into the coop again. I sit there countin' my fingers and listenin' to Denver tellin' back them car numbers to Limon again. By and by I'm jumpy as a cat. I get up and stick a record in the old machine.--That's what brings the whole thing back to mind. That record is this 'Paragon Park.'