Where the Pavement Ends Part 52

They knew how he was hunted all about that rabbit warren, in and out, by pa.s.sages and traps and holes in the wall, upstairs and down. They knew how he sought refuge through filth and dust and blows with the blind cunning of a harried and flank-torn cur. How he got away at some turn.

How he dragged himself to some innermost recess of the place before he collapsed. How he was found there at last, and how he found himself, in a sense--though exactly why or by what dispensation these matters came to pa.s.s, naturally the said witness never had any very clear idea.

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

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

She set down the empty cup.

"We got no more," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You missed me, all right. You missed me at the start--at Singapore.

That was the time to find me."

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

"I did look for you at Singapore."

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

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

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

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

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

"I was drunk," he said. "G.o.d forgive me!"

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

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

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

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

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

"That's one reason."

The man drew himself convulsively to his knees.

"Who did it? Who did that?"

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

"Silva?"

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

"Zimballo!"

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

Mr. Merry made never a sound.

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

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

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

He was the same man they chased and worried--that helpless and harmless outcast--just before. But so it is with all such outcasts: always helpless and harmless--just before. Heaven had fas.h.i.+oned Mr. Merry in one image, but the climatic devil had finished him in quite another.

Most of his few rags had been torn from him, he was swathed about the middle with a Malay sarong, and his lean body was scored and pulped with blows. But his face was mottled and bluish now, with a fleck of foam in his beard. And when he came in among them he neither paused nor turned aside.

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

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

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

He emptied a shelf, and the next, and the bottles still flew from him, streaking through s.p.a.ce, smas.h.i.+ng among the enemy.

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

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

All about them were the walls of the night, the dark, blank walls of land and sky and their prison. But outward lay a great silvered streak.