The Second Class Passenger Part 16

"Thank you, sir," replied Conroy. "It was a shock, findin' him dead like that."

"Yes, yes," agreed the captain. "I can understand--a great shock.

Yes!"

He was bending over his papers at the table; Conroy smiled over his bowed head. Returning on deck, he winked to the man at the wheel, who smiled uncomfortably in return. Later he borrowed a knife to sc.r.a.pe some spots of paint off the deck; he did not want to spoil the edge of his own.

They buried the mate at eight bells; the weather was thickening, and it might be well to have the thing done. The hands stood around, bareheaded, with the grating in the middle of them, one edge resting on the rail, the other supported by two men. There was a dark smudge on the sky up to windward, and several times the captain glanced up from his book towards it. He read in German slowly, with a dwelling upon the sonorous pa.s.sages, and towards the end he closed the book and finished without its aid.

Conroy was at the foot of the ladder; the captain was above him, reading mournfully, solemnly, without looking at the men. They were rigid, only their eyes moving. Conroy collected their glances irresistibly. When the captain had finished his reading he sighed and made a sign, lifting his hand like a man who resigns himself. The men holding the grating tilted it; the mate of the Villingen, with a little jerk, went over the side.

"Shtand by der tobs'l halliards!" roared the second mate.

Conroy, in the flurry, found himself next to a man of his watch. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the second mate, who was still vociferating orders.

"Hark at him!" he said. "Before we're through I'll teach him manners too."

And he patted his knife.

V

THE VICTIM

Cobb was crossing the boulevard, and was actually evading a taxi-cab at the moment when he sighted the little comedy which he made haste to interrupt. Upon the further pavement, Savinien, whom he once believed in as a poet, had stopped in the shelter of a shop door, an unlighted cigarette between his lips, and was prospecting his vast person with gentle little slaps for a match. The current of the pavement rippled by him; the great expanse of his back was half turned to it, so that he and his search were in a kind of privacy, and the situation was favorable to the two inconspicuous men who approached him from either side. The one, with an air of hurry, ran against him at the instant, when he was exploring his upper waistcoat pocket, staggered and caught at him with mumbled apologies; the other, with the sure and suave movement of an expert, slid an arm between the two bodies, withdrew it, and was making off.

"Hi!" shouted Cobb, as the taxi shaved past him, and came across with a rush. People stopped to see what he was shouting at, and a group of them, momentarily blocking the pavement, made it easy for the lanky Cobb to bowl the fleeing pickpocket against the wall and lay secure hands on him.

"You come along with me," said Cobb, who always forgot his French when he was excited.

The thief, helpless under the grip on the nape of his neck, whined and stammered. He was a rat of a man, white-faced, pale-eyed, with a sagging, uncertain mouth.

"M'sieur!" he whimpered. "But I have got nothing! It is a mistake.

The other man----"

Cobb thrust him at the end of a long arm to where Savinien stood, the cigarette still unlighted. The other man, of course, was gone.

"Hullo, Savinien," said Cobb. "You know you've been robbed, don't you? I just caught this fellow as he was bolting. See what you've lost, won't you?"

"Lost!" Savinien stared, a little stupidly, Cobb thought, and suddenly smiled. He was bulky to the point of grotesqueness, with a huge white torpid face and a hypochondriac stoop of the shoulders, and the hand that traveled over his waistcoat, from pocket to pocket, looked as if it had been shaped out of dough.

"Well!" said Cobb impatiently, stilling the thief's whimpering protests with a quick grip of the hand that held him.

"My watch," murmured Savinien, still smiling though he were pleased and relieved to be the victim of a theft. "But let him go."

"Let him go! Oh no," said Cobb. "I'll hand him over to the police and we'll get the watch out of him."

"The watch is nothing," said Savinien. "Let him go before there arrives an agent, or it will be too late."

He came a pace nearer as he spoke, and nodded at Cobb confidentially, as though there were reasons for his request which he could not explain before the on-lookers.

"But----" began Cobb.

"Let him go," urged Savinien. "It is necessary. Afterwards, I will explain to you." He put his shapeless soft hand on Cobb's arm which held the thief.

"Let him go."

"You are serious?" demanded Cobb. "He's to go, is he? With your watch? All right!"

He let go the scraggy neck which he held in the fork of his hand.

They were, by this time, ringed about by spectators, but the thief was not less expert with crowds than with pockets. He was no sooner loose than he seemed to merge into the folk about, to pa.s.s through and beyond them like a vapor. Heads turned, feet shuffled. Savinien came about ponderously like a battles.h.i.+p in narrow waters, but the thief was gone.

"Tiens!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed someone, and there was laughter.

Savinien's arm insinuated itself through Cobb's elbow.

"Let us go where we can sit down," said the poet. "You are puzzled-- not? But I will explain you all that."

"It wasn't a bet, was it?" asked Cobb.

The poet laughed gently. "That possibility alarms you?" he suggested.

"But it was not a bet; it is more vital than that. I will tell you when we sit down."

At Savinien's slow pace they came at last to small marble-topped tables under a striped awning. Savinien, with loud gasps, let himself down upon an exiguous chair, rested both fat hands upon the head of his stick, and smiled ruefully across the table at Cobb. A tinge of blue had come out around his lips.

"Even to walk," he gasped, "that discomposes me, as you see. It is terrible."

"Take it easy," counseled Cobb.

An ap.r.o.ned waiter served them, Cobb with beer, Savinien with a treacly liqueur in a gla.s.s the size of a thimble. When he was a little restored from his exertions, he laid his arm on the table, with the little gla.s.s held between his thumb and forefinger, and remained in this att.i.tude.

"Go ahead," said Cobb. "Tell me why you are distributing watches to the deserving poor in this manner."

"It is not benevolence," replied Savinien. "It is simply that I have a need of some misfortune to balance things."

There was a m.u.f.fled quality in his voice, as though it were subdued by the bulk from which it had to emerge; but his enunciation was as clean and dexterous as in the days when he had made a vogue for his poems by reading them aloud. It was the voice of a poet issuing from the mouth of a glutton.

"To balance things," he repeated. "Fortune, my dear Cobb, is a pendulum; the higher it rises on the side of happiness, the further it returns on the side of disaster. And with me, who cannot take your arm for a promenade along the pavement without a tightness in the neck and a flutter of my heart, who may not go upstairs quicker than a step a minute, disaster has only one shape. It arrives and I am extinguished! It is for that reason that I fear a persistence of good luck. Of late, the luck that dogs me has been incredible.

"Listen, now, to this! Three days ago, being in a difficulty, I go in search of Rigobert. You know Rigobert, perhaps?"

"Yes," said Cobb. "That is, I have lent him money!"

"Precisely," agreed Savinien. "The sum which he owed me was no more than two hundred and fifty francs but I had not much hope of him. I went leisurely upon the way towards his studio, and at the corner by the Madeleine I entered the post office to obtain a stamp for a letter I had to send. The first thing which I perceived as I opened the door was the back of Rigobert, as he sprawled against the counter, signing his name upon a form while the clerk counted out money to him. Hundred franc notes, my friend--n.o.ble new notes, ten in number, a thousand francs in all, which Rigobert received for his untidy autograph upon a blue paper. As for me, I planted myself there at his back in an att.i.tude of expectancy and determination to await his leisure. He was cramming the money into his trousers pocket as he turned round and beheld me. He was embarra.s.sed. He, the universal debtor, the bottomless pit of loans and obligations, to be discovered thus.

"You!" he exclaimed.

"I!" I replied, and took him very firmly by the arm and mentioned my little affair to him. He was not pleased, Rigobert, but for the moment he was empty of excuses. When he suggested that we should go to a cafe, to change one of the notes, that he might pay me my two hundred and fifty, I agreed, for I had him by the arm, but I could see that he was gathering his faculties, and I was wary. A bon rat bon chat!