Where the Pavement Ends Part 27

The ore boat had drawn level with them, so near they might have tossed a biscuit to the rude decks. And there under the break of the p.o.o.p they saw three women, scarcely more than girls, crouched against the bulkhead. One raised her face for an instant, a face struck out like a pallid, sharp-carven cameo from its ruddy setting--struck out with the poignant, mute intimacy that sometimes springs between craft and craft across a widening gulf. A vivid and unforgettable face!

The head boatman snarled, and the ragged creatures huddled from sight like nestlings under shadow of a hawk, while the proa swept in toward an upper jetty.

"Couldn't ever be proved," muttered Nivin at last.

"Of course not," agreed Tunstal genially. "Who wants to prove it? And anyway the commodity is still in transit--coming in from those coast villages, very likely."

"What would they be doing here?"

"Oh, they probably have a local clearing house for the trade," said Tunstal, learned in wickedness.

"Why should you think so?"

"Well, observe the commodity again. It hasn't been delivered, has it?

You'll notice it shows no stain of cinnabar--_yet_!"...

The mate's face was stony as he stood gripping the rail, but Tunstal only smiled with the proper cynical detachment of the globe-trotter.

From a silver case he drew a fat and sophisticated cigar to adorn that smile.

"And so much for your superior Malay. Chief, I'm surprised at you, trying to string me. Fancy a native how you like, but don't put it on grounds of respect--because I know 'em. I've seen 'em pretty much, and I've no more respect for any coffee-shaded tribe using two legs instead of four than I have for so many monkeys. Monkeys--that's what they are.

Apes!

"Play with 'em? Sure. It's all they're fit for--cute little rascals sometimes too. But they simply have no moral sense. I take 'em as I find 'em; always ready for any of their cunning little games, you understand. Now here's this burg. I don't expect a complete Arabian Night's Dream, but I'm dead sure of finding a joint of some kind, and I mean to look it over--the place where the monkeys perform for you."

"I can't help you," said Nivin, tight-lipped. "You may be right--and yet I'd swear these people have never been spoiled. There's so few whites come here. You see, sir, you're pretty far East--"

"Too far for a 'sailor's rest'?" laughed Tunstal. "Pshaw! Come now; are you going to turn me loose on my own or will you steer me up to the local tropic drink, at least?"

Nivin might have been seen to wince a trifle, as one sorely tried, and his melancholy gaze sought the sh.o.r.e. Was there or was there not the beginning of a twinkle in the gray depths? He would have denied it--he afterward did deny it.

"A drink?" he murmured. "A drink? Oh, aye, I could name a drink if that would fill your need. Look over yonder on the slope beyond the Government House, that purple blaze. It's a big bachang tree in bloom, and if you should take the path that climbs beside it you might find such entertainment as perhaps you're seeking. Local I believe it is and quite tropic. Keep always to the left till you reach a pair o' green gates--three turns, or it may be four--and mind your footing as you go, sir--"

So this was the way Mr. Tunstal won his wish in the early morning when he came to the garden of Lol Raman, up from terrace to terrace above that far, that very far Eastern town.

He met his first thrill where Ezekiel met his in the vision, within the threshold of the gate. The high wall he had been following gave suddenly under an arch. There were the double green doors, standing open, and he entered a sort of open-air conservatory. At least he had no better word for the place so crammed with color and scent, and no word at all for the strange flowers and improbable trees that cl.u.s.tered along the walks.

Down by the farther end of the inclosure stood a low house almost lost in shrubbery. An arbor with some chairs and tables seemed to invite the pa.s.ser-by. And just before him, in Buddhistic meditation under a palm, squatted the reception committee of one--a monstrous orang-utan, the true red-haired jungle man, with a face like a hideous black caricature of Death.

Things happened. At sight of a visitor the huge beast reared himself, and sprang abruptly into vehement life, bouncing on bent knuckles. He started out to the limit of his chain until the bright steel links snicked ominously behind him and the leather harness drew taut about his shoulders, pumping and roaring in the great cavern of his chest to top a gale of his own forests. He scurried around the trunk and s.n.a.t.c.hed at something--a packet of leaves. He ran around the other way and retrieved a little lacquer box. Crouching over these treasures with every appearance of the most frantic rage, he began, swiftly and incredibly--to roll cigarettes!

And meanwhile, impa.s.sive as a wax manikin, a white-jacketed, white-saronged servitor glided from s.p.a.ce somewhere to prepare a table and to offer a chair in the arbor, to set out a square-faced bottle, to pour a gla.s.s of golden yellow liquor, and to collect the tiny, fresh cylinders of tobacco which the earnest ape was shedding about him in a shower--all with the gesture of conjuring.

Tunstal sat down hard. He succeeded in lighting one of the cigarettes.

Exquisite. He gulped the gla.s.s of liquor. Delicious....

"I seem," said Tunstal, mopping his brow--"I seem to have landed as per invoice."

And yet these portents were valid enough too, as Nivin could have told him--the customary welcome at Lol Raman's. For even among the byways a resort must have its features, though it boast no cafe chantant and hang no battery of conscientious nudes. In the warm, clammy evenings when the fog crept up from the river marshes it was nothing unusual for Lol Raman--whoever or whatever he might be--to entertain as many as a dozen patrons in his garden on the hill. They gathered about his tables and admired his pet orang-utan, they smoked his cigarettes and more particularly they fortified themselves with his private stock, which was arrack. A very potent safeguard against the seasonal fever is arrack, being country spirit of a golden tint and undisciplined taste. But Lol Raman's owned a private recipe, and hither came the initiated--traders, wanderers, officials of the island government, officers of pa.s.sing tramps. Here they came, and here they often remained until their friends bore them away again, thoroughly safeguarded to the point of petrifaction.

Nivin might have explained these matters, but he had omitted so to do, and Tunstal's was the sheer delight of discovery.

"_Stengah_," he observed, reaching for the bottle. "_Manti dooloo!_"

The waxen gentleman looked a trifle more intelligent than an eggplant.

Evidently his island Malay was not up to the cla.s.sical standard. Tunstal tried him in fragmentary Dutch to the same effect and with the same result.

"d.a.m.n it--I say I want more and never mind taking that bottle away!"

The manikin's face opened.

"Oh, sure. Three dolla' hap'."

On being paid in Singapore silver he vanished into s.p.a.ce once more while Tunstal philosophized.

"Too bad about the simple native that has no use for a tourist!"

The garden had fallen to a drowsy hush. Within its four walls only the great red ape stayed to do the honors, and he had subsided, applying himself seriously now to the cigarette industry. He sat cross-legged, workmanlike, with a bobbing of his ugly head and a ridiculous curling tongue above the delicate task. Selecting a leaf of the natural weed and adding a pinch for filler, he would somehow twist the spill and nip under the ends with flying fingers. Curious fingers he had--long and black and muscular--sinister talons that yet were nimble enough to trick the eye. It was amazing to watch him. As if a fiend from the pit had been trained to do featherst.i.tch!

Tunstal watched for a time and drank for a time and chuckled like a parrot over sugar. The adventure suited him; it developed well. There was promise in it of something different, something quite local and tropic indeed.

A smooth exhilaration began to crawl through his veins, a heightened sense of power and perception. He found a special charm in each detail about him, each to be separately savored. The sunlight, he noted, was singularly rich and fluid. The yellow lights in his gla.s.s seemed to wink with recondite confidences. A tender spray of vanna showered its tribute of orange stars upon him; some glorious rose-pink rhododendrons drooped seductively toward his shoulder. He reached to reap them, and at that moment--the leaves parted and he saw the girl....

If the event had only transpired a trifle later, as the bard so nearly says, it would never have transpired at all. Two gla.s.ses more of the golden arrack, one gla.s.s even, and the subsequent proceedings could hardly have interested Mr. Tunstal or anybody else, except possibly Nivin--Nivin, who had laid his innocent plot to that end. So narrow is the margin of trouble! He should have blinked at the lovely vision and slept peacefully safeguarded beside the square-faced bottle until carried thence aboard the steamer and gone on to tell another globe-trotting yarn. But he was just a snifter short on that potent and undisciplined drink. And here was the girl.... "By jing!" breathed Mr.

Tunstal.

Truly by any standard East or West, she was very fair. Of her face he marked only the oval, the delicate bisque-tinted skin that shames mere white, and the straight brows, not too broad for a tight-drawn casque of hair. A striped sarong clipped her waist below the jutting front of her little green jacket, and he saw the soft swell at her throat and the fine, free swing of lines as she leaned forward, startled, downward-looking. An alluring and timely apparition!

Tunstal thought so--to call it thinking. "You pippin," he remarked as he pulled himself to his feet by the table. He fumbled at his helmet with some confused notion of beginning gallantly, but it fell from his fingers, and he stood flushed and staring. "You pippin!" he said again.

She belonged in this garden, in the checker of light and shadow and exotic color, slender like a young bamboo and rounded as a purple pa.s.sion fruit. She belonged with the whole affair. She was just the thing he had been waiting for. He took an unsteady step, and another.

She made no move. She still regarded him as he stayed, swaying. Through the play of sun-threaded foliage she seemed even to smile, provocative, as if to mock him for hesitating on his cue; and at that he lost his head altogether--what was left him. Thrusting aside shrubs and creepers, he reached for her as he had reached to pluck the rhododendron.

"D'you--d'you come seeking me, m'dear?" he stammered fatuously. "Come right along, then, you beauty--and gie's a kiss, won't you?"

He did not do it well--in fact by the time he arrived at the gesture he did it very badly.

Smoking-room audiences that had hung upon the fervid tales of Tunstal, globe-trotter; his fellow pa.s.sengers, instructed in speed by the same--they must have felt somehow cheated if they could have seen him then. They must have suspected the sad, sad dog, a wolf for theory but a pug for practice, whose snap and dash in outlandish parts had been harmless enough after all. There is a technique to such affairs. Even arrack cannot supply the deficiencies of the amateur--as Tunstal was, and as he presently knew himself to be....

He recognized her. His arms were about the lithe figure, drawing her close when he became aware of the clean-carven cameo face so near him.

She was the girl of the cinnabar boat, the girl that had glanced upward from the evil decks. Yet the shock of discovery was not his chief reaction, neither amazement at her presence in the garden and her changed attire. He was looking into her eyes.

They were wide and brown, deep as grotto pools, and strange, with a hint of obliquity alien to him by untold centuries. But he could read--as they blazed into his own--he could read their language. Terror was there and bewilderment. But pride too--pride of soul like the chill purity of mountain peaks. And from that height she feared and loathed him, the brutish creature of another race who dared to lay his defiling and incomprehensible touch upon her.