The Second Class Passenger Part 35

"There was a police officer," began Lucas obediently; "his name was Semianoff;" and in bald, halting words he told the story. He told it absently, languidly, for no words within his reach could convey the thing as it dwelt in his memory, the warmth and color of it, its uplifting and transfiguring quality.

The man behind the pigeon-hole heard him intently.

"Yes," he said again, as Lucas finished. "You are de man. Ve do not reguire further broof, Mr. Lugas."

He produced a slip of paper and a pen which he laid on the ledge before his pigeon-hole.

"I am instrugted to say dat if you vill fill in and sign dis cheque, ve vill cash it."

"Eh?" Lucas was slow to understand.

"Ve vill cash it," repeated the other. "You fill it in--and sign it-- and I vill cash it now."

"But"--Lucas took the pen from him in mere obedience to his gesture-- "but--what for?"

"My instrugtions are to cash it--no more!"

Lucas stared at the tight-lipped, elderly face, like the face of a wise and distrustful gnome, and held the pen uncertainly above the cheque form.

"How much am I to write?" he asked.

"I haf no instrugtions about de amount," was the reply.

"But," cried Lucas, "I might write fifty thousand dollars!"

"My instrugtions are to cash de cheque ven you haf written it."

"Oh!" said Lucas.

He stared incredulously at the face for some moments and then wrote a cheque for the sum he had named--fifty thousand dollars. He was about to add his signature when something occurred to him.

"Is it because I went across the road to that little woman in Tambov?" he asked suddenly.

The whiskered face answered composedly: "No. It is because you went out of your rooms and slept on de stairs."

"Because"--he seemed puzzled--"but that is a thing--why, any gentleman would do it."

"Dose are my instrugtions," said the man behind the pigeon-hole.

"I see."

Lucas stood upright, the uncompleted cheque in his fingers. All surprise and excitement had vanished from his regard; he seemed taller and stronger than he had been a minute before. He had yet many calls to make, and, in the nature of things, many rebuffs to receive, before he went home to supper; and the money in his pocket totaled seventy-five cents. He needed new boots, new clothes, leisure, consideration, and a sight of his native land; in short, he needed fifty thousand dollars.

"You will cash this because I didn't fail to respect a helpless woman?" he asked, in level tones.

The whiskered cas.h.i.+er replied: "Yes. Because you gave up your room and kept watch on de stairs."

Lucas laughed gently. "That is not the way to deal with a gentleman,"

he said. "I will make your firm a present of fifty thousand dollars."

He showed the cheque he had written, with the figures clear and large. And then, with leisurely motions, he tore it across and again across.

"Much obliged," said Robert H. Lucas, and made for the door.

XI

THE MAN WHO KNEW

Bearded, bowed, with hard blue eyes that questioned always, so we knew David Uys as children; an old, remotely quiet man, who was to be pa.s.sed on the other side of the street and in silence. I have wondered sometimes if the old man ever noticed the hush that, ran before him and the clamor that grew up behind, the games that held breath, while he went by, and the children that judged him with wide eyes. He alone, of all the people in the little dorp, made his own world and possessed it in solitude; about him, the folk held all interest in community and measured life by a trivial common standard.

At his doorstep, though, lay the frontier of little things; he was something beyond us all, and therefore greater or less than we. The mere pictorial value of his tall figure, the dignity of his long, forked beard, and the expectancy of his patient eyes, must have settled it that he was greater. I was a child when he died, and remember only what I saw, but the rest was talk, and so, perhaps, grew the more upon me.

One day he died. For years he had walked forth in the morning and back to his house at noon, a purple spot on the raw color of the town. He had always been still and somewhat ominous, and conveyed to all who saw him a sense of looking for something. But on this day he went back briskly, walking well and striding long, with the gait of one that has good news, and he smiled at those he pa.s.sed and nodded to them, unheeding or not seeing their strong surprise nor the alarm he wrought to the children. He went straight to his little house, that overlooks a crowded garden and a pool of the dorp spruit, entered, and was seen no more alive. His servant, a sullen Kafir, found him in his bed when supper-time came, called him, looked, made sure, and ran off to spread the news that David Uys was dead. He was lying, I have learned, as one would lie who wished to die formally, with a smile on his face and his arms duly crossed. This is copiously confirmed by many women who crowded, after the manner of Boers, to see the corpse; and of all connected with him, I think, his end and the studied manner of it, implying an ultimate deference to the conventions, have most to do with the awe in which his memory is preserved.

Now, a death so well conceived, so aptly preluded, must, in the nature of things, crown and complete a life of singular and strong quality. A murder without a good motive is mere folly; properly actuated, it is tragedy, and therefore of worth. So with a death one seldom dies well, in the technical sense, without having lived well, in the artistic sense; and a man who will furnish forth a good death- bed scene seldom goes naked of an excellent tradition. I have been at some pains to discover the story of David Uys; and though some or the greater part of it may throw no further back than to the vrouws of the dorp, it seems to me that they have done their part at least as well as David Uys did his, and this is the tale I gleaned.

When David was a young man the Boers were not yet scattered abroad all over the veldt, and the farms lay in to the dorps, and men saw one another every day. There was still trouble with the Kafirs at times, little risings and occasional murders, with the sacking and burning of homesteads, and it was well to have the men within a couple of days' ride of the field-cornet, for purposes of defense and retaliation. But when David married all this weighed little with him.

"What need of neighbors?" he said to his young wife. "We have more need of land--good land and much of it. We will trek."

"It shall be as you will, David," answered Christina. "I have no wish but yours, and neighbors are nothing to me."

There was a pair of them, you see--both Boers of the best, caring more for a good fire of their own than to see the smoke from another's chimney soiling the sky. Within a week of their agreement the wagons were creaking towards the rising sun, and the whips were saluting the morning. David and Christina fronted a new world together, and sought virgin soil. For a full month they journeyed out, and out-spanned at last, on a mellow evening, on their home.

"Could you live here, do you think, Christina?" asked David, smiling, and she smiled back at him and made no other answer.

There was no need for one, indeed, for no Boer could pa.s.s such a place. It was a rise, a little rand, flowing out from a tall kopje, gra.s.s and bush to its crown, and at its skirts ran a wide spruit of clear water. The veldt waved like a sea--not nakedly and forlorn, but dotted with grey mimosa and big green dropsical aloes, that here and there showed a scarlet plume like a flame. The country was thigh-deep in gra.s.s and spoke of game; as they looked, a springbok got up and fled. So here they stayed.

David and his Kafirs built the house, such a house as you see only when the man who is to make his home in it puts his hand to the building. David knew but one architecture, that of the great hills and the sky, and when all was done, the house and its background clove together like a picture in a fit frame, the one enhancing the other, the two being one in perfection. It was thatched, with deep eaves, and these made a cool stoep and cast shadows on the windows; while the door was red, and took the eye at once, as do the plumes of the aloes. It was not well devised--to say so would be to lend David a credit not due to him; but it occurred excellently.

The next thing that occurred was a child, a son, and this set the pinnacle on their happiness. His arrival was the one great event in many years, for the multiplication of David's flocks and herds was so well graduated, the growth of his prosperity so steady and of so even a process, that it tended rather to content than to joy. It was like having money rather than like getting it. In the same barefoot quiet their youth left them, and the constant pa.s.sing of days marked them, tenderly at first and then more deeply. Their boy, Frikkie, was a man, and thinking of marrying, when the consciousness of the leak in their lives, stood up before them.

They were sitting of an evening on the stoep, watching the sun go down and pull his ribbons after him, when Christina spoke.

"David," she said, "yesterday was twenty-five years since our marriage. We--we are growing old, David."

She spoke with a falter, believing what she said. For though the blood is running strong and warm, and the eye is as clear as the heart is loyal, twenty-five years is a weary while to count back to one's youth.

David turned and looked at her. He saw for a moment with her eyes-- saw that the tenseness of her girlhood had vanished, and he was astonished. But he knew he was strong and hale, well set-up and a good man to be friends with, and as he gripped his knees, he felt the tough muscle under his fingers, and it restored him.

"Christina," he said, seeing she was troubled, "it is the same with both of us. You are not afraid to grow old with me, little cousin?"

She came closer to him but said nothing. It was soon after that, and a wonderful thing in its way, such as David had never heard of before, that there came to them another boy, a wee rascal that shattered all the cobwebs of twenty-five years, and gave Christina something better to think of than the footsteps of time.

Frikkie had been glorious enough in his time, and was glorious enough still, for the matter of that; but this was a creature with exceptional points, which neither David nor Christina--nor, to do him justice, Frikkie--could possibly overlook. Frikkie had a voice like a bell, and whiskers like the father of a family, and stood six foot two in his naked feet, and lacked no excellence that a st.u.r.dy bachelor should possess. But the other, who was born to the name of Paul, lamented his arrival with a vociferous note of disappointment in the world that was indescribably endearing; had a head clothed in down like the intimate garments of an ostrich chick, and was small enough for David to put in his pocket. He brought a new horizon with him and imposed it on his parents; he was, in brief, a thing to make a deacon of a Jew peddler.

Thereafter, life for David and Christina was no longer a single phenomenon, but a series of developments. It was like sailing in agreeably rough water. No pensive mood could survive the sight of mighty Frikkie gambolling like a young bull in the company of Paul; nor could quiet hours impart a melancholy while the welkin rang with the voice of the kleintje bullying the adoring Kafirs. Where before life had glided, now it steeplechased, taking its days bull-headed, and Paul grew to the age of four as a bamboo grows, in leaps.