All the world meets beneath the towering spire of Shway Dagohn, which pins back the clouds and throws a shadow between India and the China Sea. All paths in the East tend toward that great pagoda with its mighty shaft of gold. Around the sweep of its pedestal, among its terraced mazes, is one of the common crossroads where men as various as their skins and their faiths come to mingle; to worship or to wonder: seeking each in his own fashion whatever clue to the meaning of things he can take from that vast finger which carries the eye and the soul up and up and points forever to the heart of mystery.
So it was natural enough, as it was also inevitable and ordained since the beginning of time, that Cloots should have met the headman of Apyodaw at last in one of the tiny shrines clustering under the Temple of the Slanted Beam on Thehngoottara Hill....
The shrine in no way differed from the many lesser chapels andzaydeesthat lined the ramp and the inner and outer platforms. Together they might have seemed a jumble of booths thrown up there to attract the unhurrying, sweet-voiced, hip-swinging natives who drifted and gossiped like holiday makers at a fair.
But those booths were built of enduring stone with a serene and flawless symmetry. And the wares they offered were the philosophies of an old, old religion. And the folk themselves in their thighbound silks of softened maroon and olive and citrine and cutch, with the pink fillets about their brows and their open and twinkling brown faces, were a very ancient folk indeed, who knew what they knew and did as they did a small matter of thirty centuries ago.
Cloots stepped into the chapel for no purpose, in mere idle discernment of color and contrast.
The pagoda and its whole base, dominating the city, swam in a level flood of late sunset. Every surface had taken an almost intolerable richness and warmth, from the far, jeweled spike of thehteefour hundred feet above, down through fire-gilt and smoldering saffron to the pigeon-blood ruby of the monastery roofs below. Even the shadows gave off a purplish haze. But here, inside this plain, windowless cell of white-washed wall and gray pavement, the visitor passed with the swift relief of a diver's plunge to cool and quiet, and the pervading peace of the Excellent Law.
At the end facing the doorway was the sole furnishing—a deep niche and altar where sat the Buddha in perpetual contemplation.
Some forgotten devotee, toiling wearily like the rest of us up the ladder of existence, had once earned the right to skip a step or two by the gift of this life-size image. Some forgotten artist had acquired merit by faithfully carving and lacquering it on teak, with the left hand lying palm upward in the lap and the right hanging over the knee—with the calm and passionless regard which somehow, no matter what the medium, no matter what conventions interpose, is always so surely portrayed. But that had been long and long ago. Decay had eaten through those painted and gilded robes. The soot of many years had tanned those sacred lineaments to an obscure and homely human tint.
Along the near edge of the altar lay a shallow trough for the better disposal of such offerings as the shrine might receive: fresh flowers and flakes of popped and colored rice, incense sticks of which thevapor rose in a slow, unwavering veil, and a row of paper flags to record the prayers of the pious.
Midway there burned a single taper, a point of light that dimly illumined the holy spot and revealed to Cloots, as he entered, its only other occupant.
On a bamboo mat knelt a young girl, fairly on her knees, as the Rule allows for such frail creatures. Her black hair was drawn sleek as a bird's wing. At her breast she held a new lotus blossom, no softer nor more delicate than the fingers that offered it. Her little feet were carefully tucked within the silkentamehn. Her head was bowed. And the gleaming curve of her body, all her lithe vigor, was subdued, was humbled, to the act of ecstatic supplication before the Excellent One.
Cloots arrived as a confident and more or less truly appreciative observer of all these details. They were familiar to him. He understood them, so far as any perceptive, far-wandering white is likely to understand. They ministered to him.
He approved the flaring sunset and he approved this discreet retreat—the hushed and perfumed air of worship no less than the stir and brilliance outside. He could interpret the sigh of imploring lips and the trouble of a fluttered little breast before the altar as keenly as the murmur and laughter of the barefoot crowds and the distant music of numberless pagoda chimes. He enjoyed the more intimate delights of exotic life as well as its bright outward cheek. Particularly, having just renewed his contact with an engaging and responsive native people, he enjoyed this opportunity with a native girl—decidedly engaging and responsive probably.
No mere brutal, casual sensualist was Cloots. He found it good to be alive. He found it very good to be back in a country where he was master of the idiom and the customs. He found it exceeding goodto be contemplating the skillful conquest of such a pilgrim, so earnest, so adorable, and so appropriately concerned. The lady, he gathered, was praying for a husband....
He smiled, and when he turned his glance it encountered the eyes of the headman of Apyodaw, who had entered noiselessly at his side and who now stood between him and the entrance.
"I knew I should find thee, Shway Cloots."
It said something for Cloots that he did not cease smiling all at once, that he gave no outward sign, and that he was able to answer quite soon and quite steadily in the same dialect.
"Hast been looking for me, Moung Poh Sin?"
"I did not have to look, Shway. It was written."
"Hast been waiting for me, then?"
"It was written I would have to wait."
"Was it also written that I had become any safe or easy game to track into a corner?" demanded Cloots.
"I did not track thee."
"Half an hour ago I left the docks, newly landed from Moulmein. No man could have given thee word of my return. No man knew if ever I should return."
"I knew."
"By that I mark thee a liar and a fool, Moung Poh Sin, for I knew it not myself. I see now thou hast been watching and spying for me. By the harbor, or by the pagoda here, belike. A long vigil.... But it can profit nothing. What could it profit thee? I am not the kind to be followed and hunted down."
"I tell thee, Shway, I did not follow at all. At the appointed time I came and thou wert here. The talk and all things else come in their order."
"So and so. And what else is to come, thinkest thou?"
"At sunset to-day," said the other quietly, "atbig-bell time, I am to slay thee in this chapel under the Slanted Beam."...
Cloots loosened his collar. He had had a bit of a start. He had been surprised into rather nervous speech. But he recovered himself. Merely he was aware of a slight oppression, due, no doubt, to the scented fumes in this inclosed space. Also, he took occasion in lowering his hand to run one finger lightly down the front of his green twill shooting jacket so that the buttons were slipped and the lapels left open. "Art mad?" he inquired. "What babble is this, Moung Poh Sin?" he rasped abruptly. "Stand away from that door, dog! Remove—stand off!"
But Moung Poh Sin did not budge.
Now, there are ways and ways of regarding the native within the areas of white empery. As a sort of inferior and obedient jinn, supplied by Providence and invoked by a gesture to fetch and to carry at need. As a specimen of the genus homo, also inferior and obedient, but quite quaint and decorative too, and really rather useful, you know, in his place. Or again, less commonly, as an elder member of the family, with resources and subtleties of his own which may or may not be inferior, and which may or may not lead to obedience, but which lie as far outside the chart of the Western mind as a quadratic complex lies outside a postage stamp.
This last view is not popular, and when brought home to the invader has proved at times extremely discomposing.
Moung Poh Sin was a squat, middle-aged person about half the size of Cloots, with a flat and serious face resembling a design punched laboriously on a well-worn saddle flap. There was a little about him to be called either quaint or decorative. His bare, rugged chest under the narrow-edged coat; his sturdy,misshapen legs to which the silkpasohlent scanty disguise; the slitted eyes that held a glint of the green jade from his own hills—all his features were rude and resistant. And he came by them in the way of average after his kind, for he was part Kachin, which is the warlike strain of the upcountry and the breed of dacoits and raiders from the dawn of history.
Cloots had taken the measure of him months before and once for all, he would have said, in his smoky little village. And to appearance the fellow had not changed a hair from the simple, untaught, somewhat hard-bitten but altogether undistinguished headman of Apyodaw. He was just what he had always been. Yet Cloots saw now with transfixing clarity that he did not know him in the least—could never have known him. For this native, who was a very ordinary native, had withdrawn himself, after the immemorial manner of the native on his own occasions, beyond every index of temper or purpose: fear, respect, rage, hate, injured pride, or lacerated honor; impatience, vindictiveness, greed—or doubt.
Cloots could not fathom Moung Poh Sin. He could not follow the thought process of Moung Poh Sin. Worst of all, he could not divine those elements from which Moung Poh Sin had borrowed such absolute and amazing assurance. It made him cautious.
"Softly," he said. "Softly a while. There is some folly here. Name the business."
"There is no business, Shway. Only a debt."
"All debts of money were long ago settled between us."
"It is not money, Shway. Only my house is empty; my hearth is cold. My heart is both cold and empty. There is no one under my roof to husk the paddy, or to cook, or to sing, or to drive away evil spirits with laughter. There will never be any fat babies rollingabout the mats or swinging in the basket at my home while the mother tells theSehn-nee, the cradle song. Once I had a treasure in my house, Shway. Where is that treasure now?"
"Meaning thy daughter, Moung Poh Sin?" asked Cloots directly to show himself quite cool and firm. "Meaning Mah Soung, thy daughter?"
"Mah Soung is dead," said the headman.
"Mah Soung is dead," repeated Cloots, and an echo ran back and forth between the walls with his word. He glanced swiftly toward the kneeling maiden by the altar in the dim taper light, and for all his control he could not repress the strangest flicker of fancy. She looked very like Mah Soung. Very like. Some tilt of the head, some odd, soft line of the shining tress over the ear started a poignant dart of memory, caught his breath sharp. It was in just such a place as this, he recalled, in pursuit of just such an idle, colorful adventure, that he first had found Mah Soung....
But then—he told himself hastily—he had seen Mah Soung die. Who but he had seen her die? She had died with her adoring eyes and her slender yellow fingers uplifted to him as this girl's eyes and fingers were lifted to the sacred image.
A curious qualm took him, one of those turns of sick uncertainty that now and then seek out and wring the nerve of any white man who ventures a bit too far off white man's ground.
He was still staring as the worshiper rose from the mat, placed her water lily reverently on the altar and with obeisance and the murmured invocation that begins "Awgatha, by this offering I free me from the Three Calamities," faced about and glided in silence between Cloots and Moung Poh Sin and so on and out of the chapel and out of their ken forever.
She did not notice either man. She was quite unconscious of them. They had spoken in a hill dialect,all incomprehensible to her.... She was not Mah Soung, of course—though Cloots wiped a brow gone damp and chill.
"I have learned," continued the headman of Apyodaw—"I have learned how my child died—"
Cloots regained his speech in a curt laugh.
"What is that to me, old man? Yesterday's rice is neither eaten nor paid for twice."
"There remains, however, Shway, every man's account with thenatsand such guarding spirits as may be; and their just pay is taken always in due course."
"Do they ask more than thee for a daughter? Thy payment was the highest market rate, at least—But again I say, stand aside. I weary of thee, Moung Poh Sin."
But Moung Poh Sin did not move.
"There is not much longer to wait," he said, neither grim nor humorous, simply unvarying. "The sun already has dipped. Soon the big bell speaks when all will be paid."
And in fact it became clear to Cloots that this affair would have to be solved on the spot. He was not minded to stand any more of it nor to leave Moung Poh Sin in train to repeat such performances. He had lost that perfectly ripping new love toy of a girl. A very jolly evening had been ruined for him, and his confident balance most inexplicably and painfully shaken. And here this insignificant relic of a discarded past was undertaking to block his steps. This flute-toned, slab-faced little heathen was presuming to threaten him, to name the moment when a superior white, with his strength and his vision, with his civilized capacity for perceptions and enjoyments, should suddenly cease to be....
He shifted both fists easily to his belt and took a watchful survey of the figure by the doorway—and he did some rapid calculating.
Outside on the platform between west and east, between flame and dark, Shway Dagohn showed now like one cutting from a jasper opal. Each flake and streak of coloring had mellowed. And, with that, all sounds seemed mellower too, as if they came more resonantly on the burdened air. Everywhere, all about, the pagoda bells were ringing: bells of bronze and silver and gold, bells hammered by devout and lusty celebrants, bells insistently jangled by begging priests, bells that tinkled and sighed to any stray breeze. And the whole tide of color and of sound was drawing to an end, a definite climax: presently the tropic night would fall like a curtain, and presently the huge central bell, Mahah Ganda, "the great sweet voice" which is the voice of a continent, would bestir itself ever so slightly for an instant at the touch of its monstrous battering-ram and wake brazen thunder far and wide.
Cloots reckoned that he had perhaps five minutes before the stated limit. It was to be a sort of test, as he saw and accepted. He would have to decide how well, after all, he did understand the ancient half of the earth to which he and others like him went swaggering as conquerors and masters. He would have to demonstrate which of the various ways and ways and just how seriously he was going to take this ancient people and their self-sufficing and queerly keyed formulas, so strange and vivid and charming. And whether he was going to be laid under some kind of psychic blackmail every time he chose to snatch a delicious interpretation.
If he meant to be quite sure of that essential white superiority of this, the time had come to make it good.
He smiled again as he swung the right lapel of his twill jacket a little farther to the right....
"Moung Poh Sin," he began, almost amiably, "withthe rest of these matters which seem so well and so fully known to thee, is it also known where I have been since I went away?"
"No, Shway."
"Now, as it chanced, I went to the Salween country; even up into Yunnan, the Cloudy South. And there, in those wild parts, I hunted the painted leopard and the fishing cat and the tiger cat and other such, as I have done before.... Thou hast seen me shoot?"
"Yes, Shway."
"Rememberest thou, perhaps, how once at Apyodaw in a merry mood, to show my skill and for a jest, I shot away one by one the six strings from a minstrel's harp?"
"Yes, Shway."
"And again, how with the short gun I slew a pigeon on a housetop and tore the head from its body?"
"Yes, Shway."
"Then, for the third and the last time, I warn thee to get clear of that door and of me—and to keep clear, Moung Poh Sin. I have been patient and tolerant, marveling too much at thy insolence to be rightly angered. But I have had enough. By every law of the land and by common privilege of my kind, thy life is forfeit to me for daring to breathe these threats. And it was a pity of thy cunning, and a flaw in thy information, not to have learned whence I came—and whether I would be likely to come from a place like Yunnan unarmed, Moung Poh Sin!"
But Moung Poh Sin did not stir.
"That can make no change, Shway. My own life is of no moment, and thine is surely forfeit, as I told thee—here by the Slanted Beam when the sun sets. What will be will be. It is written."
Whereupon Cloots very quickly and expertly fired once from the hip. The shot burst with a racketingsmash against the eardrums. To any on the platform it might have just sounded as a clap of hands, no louder. But within these solid blank walls it multiplied like a volley, then dwindled and passed. A weft of smoke went drifting across the taper, and that too passed. The chapel fell quiet. There had been no visible result.
At one side stood the white man, half crouching in the act, tense and expectant; and by the doorway stood the headman of Apyodaw, planted in the same position he had held throughout, with the rectangle of fading daylight behind him—a little brown figure in neutral tinted silks....
"They do not strike the big bell until the last ray of the sun," explained Moung Poh Sin, without the least quiver of emotion, without the least break of intonation. "We have yet some moments to wait."
Cloots glared at him, astonished, unable and unwilling to believe, picturing the collapse, waiting from one tick of time to the next to see the fellow crumple on the stones. But nothing happened, nothing came of it, and he brought up his arm and the glittering, compact fistful of steel, and this time he took deliberate aim.
Again the shot and smashing echo. Again the still pause.
"They will be making ready now," said Moung Poh Sin evenly. "They will be swinging out the striker of the big bell."
All shadows about the pagoda had run long and black like spurts of jet and its western edge was no more than lined with copper; only the topmost peak caught a last radiance and spread and shed a faint ruddy glow and a patch of that lay on the threshold of the chapel....
Cloots had fallen back to the wall with sagging jaw,with eyes fixed and starting in their sockets. He was stricken; he was beaten. For he had come to the end of things known and conceivable. He had reached the end of the white man's resource and had made the ultimate appeal of the white man's civilization—and had failed. Beyond lay the incredible and the impossible. It was rather a galvanic impulse than any reasoned operation by which he brought up his weapon in both shaking hands, steadied an elbow against his side and fired a third and last despairing shot.
From somewhere, from under their feet as it seemed, there issued a vast booming vibration; the air fluttered to a single gigantic, metallic stroke. And it was then and not until then that Moung Poh Sin moved at last and drew from the silken folds at his waist a broad, short-shafted knife and all with perfect precision and deliberation advanced to do what he was there to do.
"The time has come," said Moung Poh Sin....
Outside it had gone quite dark.
Those two busy officials of colonial administration whose duty it was to gather up and to sort out the threads of local crime in that far Eastern port wasted no time and few words about their work. They had been on many cases together. Moreover, this particular case offered a bare simplicity in its few apparent details. Also, since it concerned the death of a white, it called for urgent action, and they went at it with precision and dispatch while the police guard held the entrance against a wondering throng.
"How long has he been dead?" asked the assistant inspector.
"Some ten minutes, I should say," returned the medical examiner. "He's still warm."
"Instantaneous?"
"As nearly as possible. His heart's been split in half, you might say, with thisdah." The doctor indicated a short iron dagger buried to its iron handle in the victim's left breast. "One jab, and no bungling about it."
"Done by a native," remarked the inspector, bending over.
"Evidently. But what kind of a Buddhist was he, giving himself to the frozen Buddhist hell by taking a life?"
"Not much of a Buddhist. That's a hill weapon. They're hardly what you'd call orthodox in the hills."
"Quite true," agreed the doctor. "Buddhism is a modern novelty to the hills. What's a matter of three thousand years? They've got a system rather older."
"And we've got a story here, if we could only read it, that's older than any system."
"But still—to kill a man in a shrine, eh?"
"Yes. He must have had a pretty good reason."
Something in the other's tone made the doctor look up.
"You knew this chap?"
"Slightly," said the inspector. "Name of Cloots. He's been cruising about after jade and ruby mines one time and another, living among the people. Kind of a prospecting tramp and adventurer—you know the type. Rather an obnoxious beast, if he's the one I've heard about."
The doctor sought no further comments on Cloots—that was quite sufficient and might serve for an epitaph. He preferred to jot down certain necessary official entries in his little book, and as the light was bad he moved away toward the altar. Meanwhile the inspector remained by the body, outsprawled there in a crimson pool, until an exclamation brought him spinning around to find his colleague standing under the glimmer of the lone taper and looking singularly pale, he thought.
But the doctor's question was quietly put.
"Have you any notion what became of the murderer?"
"It's a queer business," admitted the inspector, frowning. "I wish I could begin to learn something of the capabilities of these people. There must have been three hundred about the platform and the stairs. And we can't dig up a clue to save ourselves."
"No theory yet?"
"What theory can there be? You see the material as well as I. A corpse, a knife, and an empty shrine. It's a clear get-away, without a witness."
"Quite so. But aren't you forgetting this witness?"
The doctor laid a finger on the image of the Buddha. There it sat behind the taper and the offerings and the veiling vapor of the incense. There it sat cross-legged in its niche, with the left hand lying palm upward in the lap and the right hanging over the knee—with the calm and passionless and inscrutable regard of the tradition—a life-size image, whose painted garments in gilt and old rose, whose set and peaceful features had been dimmed to a uniform human tint. A very ordinary image....
At least so it seemed to the bewildered inspector. Until he saw it sag a trifle. Until he saw it give flaccidly under the doctor's touch. And then he saw that the actual image had been displaced and jammed back into the niche for a support and that this—this was a substitute.
"Dead!" he breathed.
The doctor dropped the wrist he had been thumbing.
"Dead," he affirmed rather shakily. "And not only dead, but cold!... Inspector, I'm not a fanciful man, would you say? I'm not one to believe much in deviations from the normal—in aberrations from the positive, eh?—even under the Temple of the SlantedBeam. But I'd swear in any court—west of Suez, I mean—I'd take my solemn oath the fellow was dead when he climbed to that altar!... It's the plain evidence. It's as certain as anything I know, if I know anything.... Dead?... He was dead the first of the two! He was obliterated, wiped out, blasted out of existence,a full five minutes before he ever killed that white chap there on the floor!"
"Capabilities," stammered the inspector. "Would you call that suspended animation, now—or what?"
"I'd call it suspended extinction, if there were such a thing in medical science. As it is, I'll call it suspended judgment and let it go at that."
They stayed staring at Moung Poh Sin for a while.
"'There are more things 'twixt'—" began the doctor.
"Twixt East and West," suggested the inspector.
"Quite so. And if you doubt my word for it—look!"...
He lifted aside the narrow-edged coat to show the naked, rugged breast beneath; and there, a little to the left, within a space that might have been covered with a lotus leaf were three smooth, round bullet holes where the late headman of Apyodaw had been drilled through the heart—three times.
Even now nobody can tell his name, though doubtless it was a grand and a proud one. Perhaps you could find it in the files of the Bordeaux press twenty years ago, when they sentenced him to transportation for life for five proved murders. Since then it has been officially forgotten. But the man himself has lived on. He lives and he continues to develop his capabilities—as we are all expected to do here in New Caledonia.
M. de Nou, we call him. He is our only convict official. Ordinarily, you comprehend, our jailers do not admit convicts to the administration. We are citizens, if you like, in this criminal commonwealth. We are the populace of this outlaw colony at the far navel of the earth. We are artisans, workmen, domestics: we are masons, cooks, farmers: we are even landholders and concessionaires—enjoying the high privilege of forced labor, the lofty civic title of cattle in a bull-pen. It is all very philanthropic: but we have not yet risen to fill posts under the government. Except one of us. He has been raised because they could find no other, convict or free, to perform the peculiar duties of the position. That is M. de Nou. We hate him. There is not a creature of us from Balade to Nouméa, from the nickel mines of Thio to the forests of Baie du Sud, that does not hate and fear him as some other people hate and fear sin. The very Canaques flee at the whisper of his coming and invoke their own dark gods against this white demon in the flesh. Eight thousand felons bear the thought of him in daily bitterness. We have been thieves, assassins, poisoners: we have beenset aside in a sort of infected rubbish-box, the sweepings of the prisons: but the last of us, perishing from thirst, would turn back a cup that had been polluted by the touch of M. de Nou. When M. de Nou comes to die the devil will have to dig a deeper pit. Hell is too good for M. de Nou.
He is the executioner. He operates the guillotine. Not for any pay or profit nor for the rank it gives him: but from choice. It is his capability! It is the thing he likes to do.
Me, I am even with him. I am even with him against all time. Should it be my fate to pass through his hands some day, should he stand to perform his last dreadful offices for me, still am I even with him. I would grin from under the slide itself and I would say to him—"M. de Nou, I am even with you!" But I would not tell him how. I would turn silent from those haunted yellow eyes, half-understanding and ravening at me, and I would die content to leave him to his damnation. No, I would not tell!... Only I am telling you, truly, so that perhaps this tale may reach some of our friends who have escaped from New Caledonia into the world again. They will remember, and they will rejoice to hear how I evened the score on M. de Nou. Listen:
It was soon after my release from the Collective—when I was considered to be properly chastened by residence in the cells—that I had the ill-luck to meet this individual.
You can see for yourself I was never built for rude labor. But I have a certain deftness of my fingers and perhaps also—well, a certain polish—what?... Monsieur agrees? Too kind! Your servant, Monsieur.... Anyway, it was quite natural I should find employment with Maître Sergeo, he who keeps the barber shop in the Rue des Fleurs.
Maître Sergeo is a worthy man, a libéré, whichmeans he was formerly a life convict himself, you understand, though since restored to certain rights within the colony limits. Requiring an assistant at his lathery trade he applied to the penitentiary on Ile de Nou.
"Here is a brisk fellow," said the sub-commandant, leading me out like a horse at a fair. "Number 7897. Docile and clever. Condemned for eight years. Having served his Collective with a clear record. If you are ever dull about your place he will sing you the latest operas. He has all the polite accomplishments."
"A duke in trouble," suggested Maître Sergeo, regarding me with his sober twinkle. "What romance!... Perhaps he is the Red Mark himself!"
Strange he should have said that. Strange, too, that I should have heard the term then and there for the first time in my life. Afterwards I found it common enough, a kind of by-word among people who affect to share the inner mysteries of police and crime. And later still I had good reason to remember it.
Meanwhile the sub-commandant was encouraging no unofficial illusions on my account.
"I said nothing about a duke," he returned. "But this is a superior type. He has been a student in his day and even has taken prizes."
"I hope he has not the habit of taking them from the till," said Maître Sergeo, like a prudent patron. "What was his little affair?"
The sub-commandant consulted my ticket.
"An argument with a knife, it appears. A favorable case. Only his enemy was so ill-conditioned as to die."
"I shall employ him," decided Maître Sergeo. "A man who is handy with a knife should also qualify with a razor."
That is how I came, as Bibi-Ri always said, to be scraping throats instead of cutting them. Myself, Iconsidered the jest rather poor taste and Bibi-Ri a good deal of a chattering monkey. But what would you? Nobody could be angry with that mad fellow. He was privileged.
Also, as it happened, Bibi-Ri himself was my single client on this particular afternoon of which I speak. I recall it with an authentic clearness: one of those days made in paradise for a reproach upon us poor wretches in purgatory: the air sweet and mellow, spiced with tropic blossoms: the sky a blue ravishment: the sunlight tawny in the street outside as if seen through a glass of rich wine.
It was very quiet and peaceful. From the Place des Cocotiers not far away one heard the band discoursing. Those convict musicians were playingPerle d'Italie, as I bring to mind: a faded but graceful melody. One could be almost happy at moments like this, forgetting the shameful canvas uniform and the mockery of one's freedom on a leash. I even hummed the tune as I listened and kept the measure with stropping my blade.
I waited for Bibi-Ri. By an amiable conceit he never failed each day to get his chin new razored—though in truth it resembled nothing so much as a small onion: as I often told him.
"That is no reason why you should peel it, sacred farceur!" he would sputter. "Please to notice I have only the one skin to my face!"
But this day he was late. I missed the merry rascal. His hour went by and still he did not come. And then, of a sudden, I spied him.
He was passing among the market stalls on the opposite pave: unmistakable, his quick, spare figure in the jacket tight-buttoned to the chin as he always wore it and the convict's straw hat pulled low on his brow. Bibi-Ri in fact. But he never even glanced to my side. At the pace of a rent collector he hurried by and disappeared.... This is singular, I thought. What game has he started now?
Presently he came hurrying back again, and this trip I discovered he was following a girl. But yes! A market girl. Only a slip of a thing—I could not see her well—a dainty piece she seemed, supple as a kitten, who threaded her way with a basket on her arm. I caught a flash of bare ankle white as milk, the sheen of her hair, smooth like a raven's wing: and she was gone, with Bibi-Ri at her skirts.
Three times I saw them so, through the drifting chaffering throng.
"The rogue!" I murmured. "He has found a better amusement than getting himself flayed by me. Evidently!"
At the very word came a swift clatter of sandals and who should burst into the shop upon me but that same Bibi-Ri. I had a finger lifted to accuse him, but I stopped at sight of his face.
"Dumail!" he cried. "Hide me!"
My faith, he took one's breath away.
"Hide me and say nothing!" he implored.
Well, then I thought he was simply up to some of his jokes again. You understand there is no actual hiding in a penal settlement, where we all live in the eye of the police. Nevertheless I obeyed, planted him in my chair, flung a cloth about his neck and slapped on a great mask of lather.
I had him well settled under the razor when a shadow edged across the doorway. Glancing over his shoulder, Bibi-Ri made a jump to rise.
"Animal!" I protested. "Will you take care!"
But I saw him staring with a strange fear.
Just outside by the threshold stood a man, an amazingly tall man, looking in at us. The sunlight descended on him there like the flood of a proscenium and he himself might have seemed a player in somestage burlesque. Yes, one might have smiled at first glimpse of him: a travesty of fashion in his long black redingote and varnished high hat of ancient form which added the touch of caricature to his height. One might have smiled, I say ... but the smile would have frozen next instant as a ripple freezes on a street puddle.
His face was a moist and shining white, the white of a corpse under the icy spray of the Morgue. He was old, of reverend years, though still straight and strong as a poplar. And with that mouth of painted passion and a great nose curved like a saber and the glittering tiger eyes in the skull of him—I leave you to imagine any one more appalling.
Close behind him came another: a bandy-legged, squat fellow like a little black spider, in attendance.
Even then, before knowing, I shrank from them both. They resembled the bizarre and evil figures of the Guignol that used to haunt my dreams in childhood. Truly. And the tall one was Polichinelle, the image of a gratuitous and uncomprehended wickedness.
"Well done, hireling," he observed, in the voice of a crow. "Well done indeed! You are something of a craftsman too. A good beginning. And a good subject, who is ripe to have the head shaved from his shoulders, I should think.... Pray continue," he said. "Cut again and cut deeper!"
Thereupon I became aware he was addressing me, and with the most pointed, the most sinister interest: and next I found myself still holding the razor over Bibi-Ri's cheek where he had taken an ugly gash. That big devil smiled and chuckled in intimate fashion at my red blade. His eyes shone like topaz. Stupidly I followed their gaze. When I looked up again ... the two outside were gone.
"Name of God!" I cried. "Who are those?"
Bibi-Ri had fallen back in his chair.
"The vultures!"
Well, I understood fast enough that I had made acquaintance of the terrible M. de Nou. The other would be his aide and familiar, a former Polish anarchist—I had heard—whom even the society of convicts rejected and who bore the fit name: Bombiste. These were the dreaded servants of the guillotine. But now they had passed I was bold as the best: I could mock myself.
"Imbeciles!" I laughed. "To be scared by an old bogey like that! The executioner? So be it. We can curse him and let him go.... Though in truth he has a sickly notion of an afternoon call, the lascar! ... Sit still while I plaster that sliced onion of yours."
But something had come upon Bibi-Ri. For once he gave me back no jest.
"The monster has marked me down! You heard him? It is a warning!" At that he started up, all streaky with soap and blood as he was, and must rush away on some errand. And then remembering it would be impossible to run the police limits of Nouméa before dark, collapsed again. "I am lost!"
Figure my amazement.
"But how?" I demanded. "Does your blessed executioner have power to pick his own victims?... Does he go about cropping heads, for example, like a man in a flower garden? What can he make to you? ... Unless perhaps he has come between you and that fair fortune I saw you pursuing so ardently a moment ago."
The way his jaw dropped! As if I had touched the very spring of his destiny.
Now you can guess that I knew perhaps a little—no matter how little—of lawlessness and violence and secret intrigue persisting within this model criminal laboratory of ours. Do you change vice to virtue bytransporting it half a world away and bottling it up? A disturbing question. At least if you expect your convicts to work, to aspire, even to marry and to multiply like free men, you must expect them also to covet, to scheme, to quarrel and to sin—again like free men. These facts I had noted without exploring too deeply, you comprehend. But Bibi-Ri was the last I should have credited with a share in their darker meaning.
Only picture this client as I had found him. A nimble rogue: a kind of licensed pest, with a droll face resembling those rubber toys that wink and grimace between your fingers. True, he had been shipped with the worst of us. But what of that? One knows these gentlemen the Parisian police: how they cry a wolf and then go out and nab some stray puppy in the street. Bibi-Ri! One wondered how he had ever earned his sentence.
And yet—and yet there was certainly something about the fellow. In his eyes were depths. Something fateful and despairing. Something, in view of his accustomed mad humor, to make me pitiful and uneasy.
"Look here, my zig," I said. "I have seen too much and not enough. What have you done? I spy a gay mystery that makes a comedian like you play such a part."
"Perhaps it is the other part I have to play," he returned, with a gleam of his proper spirit. "Perhaps I am playing it at the last gasp of fright—my poor knees clapping like castanets......
"Dumail," he said, "put it this way: Suppose you were within three counted weeks of your final release from this hell of an island. Your little red ticket in hand and the actual ship in harbor that presently should bear you home. Within sight of heaven—you understand. Able to taste it. Able to count the days still left you like so many bars on a red-hot gridironstill to be crossed. Three little weeks, Dumail!... And then your sacred luck offered to trip you up and cheat you again.... Rigolo—what?"
"Very rigolo," I agreed, luring him. "But it seems to me you are borrowing your effects from the martyrdom of the holy St. Laurent."
"Oh, I have a stranger impersonation than that in my repertoire," he flashed. "Conceive, if you can, that I am also supposed to fill the rôle of a seigneur—and a very noble gentlemen, too—in disguise!"
Perched there on the chair with a dirty towel about his neck, his hair in a wisp, smeared like a clown and preaching his gentility, he made a figure completely comic—should I say?—or tragic. Anyway I gave a gesture of derision that stung him past endurance.
"Dumail—" he broke out. "You laugh? Dumail, will you believe this? There is awaiting me back home at the present moment a heritage of millions. Of millions, I swear to you! Not the treasure of an opium dream, Dumail, but a place ready established among the great and the fortunate. For me: Number Matricule 2232! Life in a gondola, do you see? Luxury, leisure, rank. Beauty. Women. Happiness! Everything a poor lost devil could crave!"
Well, you know, it was a bit too much for me.
"Comedian!" I applauded. "Ah-ah—comedian!"
A sort of fury took him. All else forgotten, he jerked loose the collar of his jacket: made to spread it wide—checked himself and instead drew out from his breast an object for my inspection.
I had view of a miniature: one of those cherubic heads on ivory that relate to the model, perhaps, as a promise relates to a fact in this naughty world. Nevertheless I could trace a sort of semblance to that roguish front as it might have seemed in childhood—all ringlets and innocence, cerulean eye and carmine cheek—the whole encircled by a double row of pearls: Bibi-Ri himself.
"My title deed."
I was impressed. Impossible to deny a richness in this miniature. And while the likeness was thin the pearls were indubitable. Still—
"Blagueur!" I murmured. "Where did you snaffle it?"
Gloomily he regarded me. "You are like the others. Always while I was kicking about the gutters or the jail it was that way. No one would listen. Another of Bibi-Ri's jokes! And I lacked any clew to this trinket: my single poor inheritance.... But now—look! These queer signs on the reverse. They have been deciphered. Oh, an unbelievable stroke of chance! Of course I have much to learn. The name of the family. My own true name itself. But at least I am in the way of proof and this time I was going to win!... A famished man—a man famished since his birth, Dumail—is set before a boundless feast. Does he joke about that?"
"Perhaps not," I admitted. "Go on."
"But I am showing you what Life means to me!"
"And M. de Nou—?" I reminded him.
He shuddered: his head dropped upon his breast.
"M. de Nou—is Death!"
Well, you know, this was all very thrilling for emotion, but as a statement it left something to be desired.
"Answer me," I commanded. "Have you killed any one?"
"No!"
"Is there another sentence hanging over you? Have you some stain on your prison record?"
"None."
"Whom have you wronged?"
"Nobody."
"Then sacred pig! It is only a folly of nervesafter all! Just because you expect to cash your millions and swim in champagne at last?... Bear up under it, my boy. Stiffen your lip! Faith, you might be a missing dauphin or even the Red Mark himself—as people say—and still you could meet your luck with a little courage!"
Like a jack on wires Bibi-Ri sprang to his feet.
"True!" he laughed, shrill. "You are right, Dumail. You are the friend in need!... Where is that blessed mop, to dry my face at least. So! I'm off!... But to-night—what? I owe you something, Dumail: you and your curiosity! To-night you shall come behind the scenes. If you dare. Understood?" He wheeled at the step: his eyes held their old twinkling deviltry. "I was a thief before I was ever a gentleman," he said, with his weird grin, "and I can still play that farce to its end—get through and done with it and pull out once for all!... You shall see for yourself!"
Thereupon he left me to the haze of bewilderment in which I lived for the rest of the day.
Now you can imagine without much telling that we have ways—we convicts assigned here and there on service—to conduct our own underground affairs in despite authority. Unnecessary to explain these little evasions. Enough to say my client was as good as his word that evening. Enough to say that under misty stars, while the military of the watch were safely watching, Bibi-Ri crept out of town by forbidden paths: and that I crept along with him.
Inland from Nouméa for a wide district is all one checkerboard of gardens and small estates where libérés and convict proprietors—the aristocrats of our settlement—enjoy their snug retreat. Not being a reformed bandit myself, skilled in agriculture and piety, I was strange to this countryside. But Bibi-Ri had the key. I could only tag at his heels throughblind plantations and admire his silence and his speed. Truly, as he said, he was taking me behind the scenes: until at last, in a grove of flamboyants that wrapped the night with darker webbing, he set hand to a door.
For all I knew it could have opened on the Pit itself: but a shaft of light guided me stumbling into a stone-flagged kitchen, low and dim and smoky in fact as some lesser inferno.
By the hearth a woman turned from tending the kettle to overlook us steadily. She was alone, but my faith! she had no need to fear. Figure to yourself this massive sibyl with a face planned on a mason's square, deep-chiselled and brooding in the flush of firelight. She was like that. Yes, a sibyl in her cave, to whom Bibi-Ri entered gingerly as a cat.
"I am here, Mother Carron," he said.
Then for sure and for the first time I saw where we stood. Mother Carron! In Nouméa—through all the obscure complex of convict life—no name bore more significance: or less, in the official sense. For she had no number. Consider what that means to a community of jailbirds. The finger of the law had never touched her. Consider how singular in a country of keepers and felons!
She was a free colonist. Her husband, a distinguished housebreaker, had been transported some years before. Whereupon she had had the hardihood—sufficient if you like!—to immigrate, to claim a concession and to have that same husband assigned her as a convict laborer.
Since then she had wielded a curious power. Her size, her tongue, her knowledge of crime and criminals and her contempt of them all—these made her formidable. But also it was whispered that queer things went on at her plantation under the flamboyant trees: a famous rendezvous where no prying agent ever found a shred of evidence—against her or any one else. Successful escapes had been decided there, they said. And disputes of convict factions that troubled no other court, and even politics of the underworld at home, referred to certain great ones among us. Our inner conclave of transportés—so dread and secret that to be identified a member brings solitary confinement in the black cells—had assembled there to seek her counsel. Had demurred to it and been routed with her broom whisking about their ears, if rumor spoke true. For she was a lady of weighty ways.
Me, I was glad to slip aside unchallenged. I had no desire to linger between that dame and the purpose, whatever it might be, that dwelt in the fixity of her frown. As a spectator I blotted myself in the shadows, to attend the next act of this hidden and somber drama.
"Monsieur," she began, with an affectation wholly foreign to her rough voice, "I have the felicity to inform you that our beloved Zelie is home from Fonwhary again."
"I knew it," murmured Bibi-Ri.
"She resides at present under this poor roof."
He cast a nervous glance toward the stairway. "I knew that," he said.
"Ah? You know so much? After staying away so long?... We began to doubt it."
She came to plant herself before him, and the effect of her politeness was like a bludgeon.
"In that case be kind enough to sit, Monsieur Bibi-Ri. Dear little Monsieur Bibi-Ri: we have missed you! Be seated. You bring your pockets full of news, it seems."
But it seemed on the other hand, not so. I saw my companion brace himself. Evidently this was his stage-play: the ordeal he had now to meet.
"You must excuse me, Madame. I cannot remain and I have no news.... Except that I drop thisbusiness on the spot. Like a live coal, Madame!"
His whimsy might have disarmed any other.
"I have done my best with Zelie. Sad! Somehow she fails to perceive any longer my true charm.... You had sent me mysterious word, Madame, of some danger to which you said she was drifting. Well—seeing her in the public market to-day I sought to question her: at the least to give her brotherly advice. Madame—she repulsed me. Like that! Would neither talk nor listen. Said we were watched. Said it was not safe.
"Sapristi!... You can believe I was ready to quit then and there! But presently I found a better reason—if I needed one, Madame. For casting about, perplexed as I was, of a sudden I recognized—can you guess? Why the man! The individual you expected to send me against, I imagine. From whom I am supposed to guard her, perhaps! I saw him.
"After that: enough and many thanks!" he laughed, with a catch in his throat. "No place for Bibi! Finished. Rien ne va plus!... For who am I to chase any maid so unwilling? And at the same time who am I and what should I be doing—in my present station, Madame—to cross the little harmless fancies of such a personage?... It was M. de Nou!" he cried.
Still she made no move.
"And so—Bibi-Ri retires," he concluded, unsteadily, edging for his exit. "I withdraw! You can find someone better fitted. My time is up. My ship sails soon. I will not need to come again, I think. In parting—"
"What!" It was like the break of a banking storm. "What did you sing me there? 'Not come again?' Forty devils! Do you know if you hadn't come to-night in answer to my message I would have had you haled by the leg?... Why you two sous' worth!You think to employ your sneaking pickpocket tricks on me? To decamp with the prize I taught you to use: and pay nothing for it?"
There was incredulity in her wrath: the measure pf her rude mastery.
"Before God! Where did you get the courage to try that?" she marvelled. "As if I had not trouble enough already with the other stubborn brat herself. And now you!... Have you altogether forgotten that I betrothed you myself to my niece—my own dead sister's child—when she came visiting from the church school at Fonwhary some weeks ago?"
"You said it was so," admitted Bibi-Ri, squirming.
"Good! Then you can wager it was so, my boy.... And at that time did you or did you not strike a solemn bargain with me?"
He made no denial.
"You wept—sacred pipe! You called every saint to witness your gratitude. Anything I wanted! Zelie? Of course. You would always be the defense of that precious infant against the taint and the curse of Nouméa!"
He shrugged.
"You swore by your own hope of salvation to save her—to pluck this pure flower from the dung-hill and marry her the very hour of your release. Your bridal trip should carry her away to France.... Are these your words?"
"I offered to," he retorted. "But Zelie refused even then—you know she did! And so she has since."
"Fichtre! You and your offers! Tell me—from the day you discovered your heritage have you ever been back to persuade her?"
He avoided that stern eye.
"There it is, you see!" She gave an eloquent gesture. "As for her—leave her to me. She is only a stiff-necked little idiot who knows nothing. Youshould have made up her mind for her. You! I picked you for that: and you were willing enough before. But straightway: instead: what did you do?... Why you began to swell up over notions of your coming greatness! That is what happened to you. Shrimp! Can't I read your soul?
"Suddenly you found yourself to be a somebody! Ambition grew in you like a mushroom. Not good enough—Zelie, of New Caledonia! She might handicap you in your fine career. You beheld a glorious future that had no place for her. But who opened that prospect? Cré tonnerre! Who sold it you? Who deciphered the miniature? Who but I?
"And now at last, when the girl falls in deadly peril—as much through pique as through mere blindness, be sure of it!—when I call you to redeem your pledge and protect her: you quit! You 'withdraw'! You decide to use your new airs and graces and pull your feet out of the wet! Because you prefer the excuse of a coward to that of a traitor—Monsieur—is that it?"
Her fist hit the table like a sledge.
"Faineant!... Unless you brand yourself as shamefully as any Red Mark that ever lived.... Sit down!"
He had been sidling, bit by bit: he had taken himself almost to the door-sill: but under that tone of thunder—under that sudden amazing and cryptic jibe—he started, he faltered, he obeyed. She bulked above him and it was about this time I began truly to be sorry for my harlequin friend.
It was plain enough by this time, you understand, that I was witnessing one of those obscure human tangles which ravel themselves in the depths of a penal society. Possible nowhere else, I suppose. Yet its threads were the passions and its center was the heart: and poor Bibi-Ri no poorer hero than you or I or anyof us might prove. At this point he had fallen back to his defense: sullen, awed, but also intently curious of her. How she expected to force him to her design I could not guess. But breathlessly I watched while she wove about him and about.
Back by the hearth she stood meditative for a space in silence: a dim presence in that room where the kettle hissed and gave off its vapors—of brewing fates, perhaps.
"Give me a man if he be a bad one. A man who can stand to his game two days on end—how do they put it: those savants?—'developing his capabilities.' Ah! Not like these others. Waffles! Half-baked. Mixed with small impulses good and evil. Let him be saint or devil, so he develop that capability. Let me see him anyway stand to it!... As I have seen a few:
"I remember many years ago at the prison of Mazas," she went on, as if in casual retrospect, "they kept a certain famous captive. Myself, I was never a resident there—no thanks!—I prefer the comforts of honesty. But my one sister, now dead, she was beginning her own silly career about then. She lacked the brains to steer it safe. So for a time she inhabited that same institution. And one day as we went by the visitors' room she pinched my arm to look.
"'There goes the wickedest man in France,' she said.
"Down the courtyard came a dozen of gendarmes parading a prisoner. That was a devil—if you like! That was a type—for example. Tall and fierce and unbeaten, with the eyes of a tiger. Once to see him was never to forget him again.... While he was still newly-caught they had always to guard him that way lest he slay some one with his manacled fists.
"He belonged to the very oldest stock of the South, it appeared: the old high noblesse. And was he rich? And proud? You can believe it. But also he was agreat criminal such as walks the earth every while or so to remind us after all how short a journey it is to hell. A true devil. My sister knew him. She had been a servant in the household. She knew his whole story—which soon was hushed, I can tell you: a scandal too black to publish."
Her voice rose a rumbling note under the vault.
"Messieurs, never mind the rest of the tale at present. But inquire only this: Did they slay him? Did they give him his deserts?... Oh, naturally not—else where is the use of Nouméa! We must suppose those savants were glad of the specimen. 'The wickedest man'—do you see? And as for him: he was strong. And cunning to seize his opportunities. And above all true to his own devilment. So he won reprieve, Messieurs. They preserved him. They shipped him out to this tropic forcing house of ours—to let him keep on developing!... And he has. He does. My faith! With the approval of the Administration. With all kinds of special privileges and gratifications!"
She moved from the shadow again.
"Why do you tell me this?" demanded Bibi-Ri, hoarsely.
"For your instruction, Bibi-Ri," she returned, with her tone of intolerable significance. "To show you how one man stood to it. Admirable—eh?... A moment ago you spoke of his 'harmless fancies.' Well: he gluts them. He gets what he wants. A fancy of pride? Behold him in his black coat and his lofty office! A fancy for blood? From time to time he stands to spill it publicly on the scaffold! A fancy for young and innocent flesh—a solace to his old age?... Do you imagine he would be balked of that? Or rather are you prepared to hear how—with official permission and even the clerical benediction—how he manages to bedevil and to win the particular young girl of his choice?"
In hammer blows she planted each phrase.
"How this same man has let no grass grow under his feet in his little rivalry with yourself, Bibi-Ri!"
She spared him nothing.
"How, having desired your Zelie without 'ifs' or 'buts' he found means to make his purpose good, Bibi-Ri!"
He could only gape at her.
"How he followed her to Fonwhary: how he followed her back: how he missed no trick of persuading and persisting: how he finally forced her consent like any true lover in this very house this morning!"
"It is not possible!" gasped Bibi-Ri.
"Eh? It is true of true!" she trumpeted. "Name of God—where do you think you are? This is Nouméa!... Let her pass for a fool—half-mad with bitterness and chagrin though she be—and still you must admit it is not every poor orphan who gets such a chance hereabouts. What? To occupy a little manor outside the prison grounds. To enjoy the little benefits of official standing. To wear the pretty trifles of jewelry, the rings and keepsakes and lockets, that fall to the master's share every time he strikes off a lucky head!... Dieu!... Can you picture to yourself the home-coming at that menage after a day's honest labor? To be sure, she might require him first to wash his hands for fear of spoiling her new gown! But these stains of the trade—what do they matter? And so your Zelie, your sweet pigeon, your simple Caledonienne who was all too simple for you—whom you cast aside with 'brotherly advice'—she chooses to embrace that ghoul, that hell-hound, that old satyr of all the infamies.... To-morrow she weds with M. de Nou!"
In blind distress he stumbled to his feet and shied from her with hands outspread to fend away the monstrous thing. But skillfully she headed him around tothe foot of the stairs and brought him face to face with the actual vision descending there.
"Ask her yourself!"...
You have seen those figures in a window of old stained glass which leap from the haze of color as if illumined of themselves. The girl who waited just above us on the step bore that same transparent loveliness, with all the fleshly promise of my glimpse of her in the market. She wore a single belted garment of some white peasant's stuff, but nothing could have suited better in the somber light of that place, smoke-blued against smoky walls. In truth it might have seemed the subtlest coquetry to clothe such beauty in the coarsest garb. For she herself was delicate as a bud. Vital and lithe: with a close-set casque of jet hair, mouth like a crushed mulberry against satin, mutinous eyes and chin: the wild, slight, heavy-scented flower of these climes.
There she stood quite coolly: even languidly.
"Visitors?" she inquired, aware of us with impersonal gaze. "I wondered if any would stop to-night. It would be kind of them to come and wish me happiness."
Except that she spoke unsmiling and ignored Bibi-Ri, except for her deathly pallor, she seemed without the least consciousness of a terrible irony. And when my poor friend made some sound in his throat her pure brow clouded a bit: she pouted.
"Have you been making yourself tiresome again with the visitors, Maman? Now where is the good of that? I wish you would not start fretting with everybody.... Yes, I shall be married. Yes, I shall be married to-morrow. By special civil license and by the priest from La Foa. There! It is all settled.... I hope you can find something more amusing for our guests."
Incredible to see how quiet she was, how composed,how youthfully unstrained. Only when her heavy lids swept over Bibi-Ri and their glances crossed could you detect like electric charges the unacknowledged tension behind.
"Oh, for amusement," chuckled Mother Carron, with a savage humor, "Bibi-Ri is amused: right enough. Sacred stove—yes!... Only he says the affair is impossible."
For the first time Zelie regarded him fairly.
"I see no reason why any one should think so. Unless he forgets—as I never do any more—that I am the daughter of convicts."
Ah, there was steel in that girl! What? The way she said it! Very simply. Without rancor, you understand. Letting it bite of itself. Without a quaver from that crisis of despair in which she must have learned to say it. In a flash I knew how the gleaming, soft, full-blooded slip of a creature had stood up against this tremendous aunt of hers. And could stand. And would!... And Bibi-Ri: he knew too. His babbling protest died cold on his lips.
"My convict father married my convict mother in this convict country," she went on, evenly. "I was born here. I must live and die here. I could never look to marry outside—could I?... They would say I was tainted.... For the rest—well, I have only to please myself, I believe."
And mother Carron nodded like a grim showman.
"Eh? What do you think of that? A wise infant—eh? Could anything be more just and reasonable?"
And it was so. She was right. It was perfectly just: perfectly reasonable. There you had the stark and appalling fact. For this is Nouméa—as Mother Carron reminded us in good season. This is Nouméa—the Noah's Ark toy of penology. If you expect your convicts to pair off and to breed like freefolk, you must expect their children likewise to couple as they can—or will: free folks themselves. And with whom? Where do you draw the line? What kind of a social formula have you left for the second generation, reared in an out-door jail? Our wise philanthropists who devised the experiment: I wonder if they ever thought so far ahead. They should have been interested in Zelie—the perfect product.
Meanwhile there remained my companion—Bibi-Ri. Poor Bibi-Ri.... Whatever had passed between him and that unhappy deluded child I could not know, you comprehend—in truth I never did know. But they must have been very close at one time: those two: before his great ambition nipped him. He was suffering. He writhed. Nevertheless I saw it was going to make no difference with him.... Not now. Not this late along. I sensed his effort. I heard him draw his breath sharp like a man who plucks the barb from the wound.
"One moment, Madame!" He avoided Zelie. In abrupt and flurried speech he addressed himself to Mother Carron. "A moment, Madame—I beg. This is mere madness. And painful. And unnecessary.... There is still one easy way out for her, you know—for Zelie, for me, for everybody. Still a way."
She unbent to him all at once as to a prodigal son.
"Tiens!" she cried. "You have perceived it?"
"I have remembered. I intended not to tell you: to let it come of itself. And truly—you drove it somewhat out of mind. But now—"
"At last!"
"If we can only get Zelie to listen—"
"Ha! Just look at her there!"
"It fits the need."
"She never had but one, my boy—to hear you speak out once like this: as if you meant it.""And besides," he stammered, "it should cancel any—any obligations you might still hold against me, myself."
"Parbleu! I should hope so!"
He labored on, with a kind of desperate snuffle.
"At the end, Madame, we can always turn for aid to the Church—the patient friend of us all.... This afternoon—uneasy about Zelie, I confess, and thinking a decisive step would be best for every one—this very afternoon I took myself to St. Gregory's and there I saw—"
"Bibi-Ri: in a moment I shall kiss you!"
"For God's sake let me speak, Madame!... I saw the Directress of the Order of St. Joseph of Cluny. She heard me readily. You know—these good nuns—how they rescue any they can of the children of Nouméa.... Well: I arranged it.... To-night a travelling sister will visit you here. By great luck she is returning home very soon. If the dispositions are favorable she has promised to take Zelie at once, to guard her and to see her safe—passage free—to France, where refuge and the consolations of religion, Madame, await her!"
In the silence that dropped you should have seen Mother Carron.
"Refuge!" she began, empurpled. "What is the fellow talking about? Conso—.... Look here. Do you mean a convent?"
"Of course, Madame."
"A convent! In truth? Is this all you have to offer?"
"Yes, Madame."
She flung up her arms.
"Faith of God! You dare to make me ridicule like that? Animal low of ceiling!... But no, I tell you, but no! It is too much. My turn now. Listen to me, both. Listen to my plan!... To-day I also wentto St. Gregory's: do you hear? I also sought the aid of Holy Church, which never refuses in the cause of morality—Heaven be praised!—to perform a convict marriage where it can. I also obtained help. That good Father Anselm: he also promised. He also is coming here to-night!... And word of honor, I hope to be turned into a pepper-mill if I don't have him marry the two of you on the spot."