Henry C. Rowland

“ But we wanted more than dust—we wanted the pure metal which none doubted we should find on the virgin breast of the mountain, and our fancy saw us winding back to the sea with our native tribe deep-laden with the wealth of buccaneers winding out through defiles of mountain and forest, heavy with the plunder of the dread Malang-o-mor.
"Odd, Doctor; gold and dreams and sweat and death how they all mixed together to strike the average which maintains the trim of the world——" Leyden's voice had sunk to muttering again, and he shivered, despite the humid warmth of the night. ”

“ Before Deshay’s arm began to descend the hound had sprung. There was the shock of contact, gurgling noises, convulsive forms heaving upon the sand, the guttering sounds of—of—the abattoir! I saw the snout of the hound twisted sideways, the nose pushed comically upwards, the full mouth in a grotesque grin. Ah, what is more terrible, Doctor, than to see something in human guise worried and throttled by something in the guise of a brute beast?”
Leyden walked to the rail, drummed upon it with his fingers and spat several times into the sea. ”

“ It was not a pleasant laugh; one feels sorry, Doctor, for a man who sacrifices his self-respect for the sake of some one else, but one laughs as I did at the man who does so for himself. This was the proportion between Claud and Deshay, and, although I found it amusing, I was nevertheless grievously disappointed when I saw that Deshay was subtle enough to feel his side of the see-saw go down—for, as I have said, I wanted to see Claud kill him before any of us died. ”

“ Our co-operation was really quite admirable!
"'Lynch,' said I, and it seemed to me as if my voice came from a very great distance—the fever, Doctor, not emotion, I beg you to believe; I was never more composed mentally in my life. 'Lynch,' said I, 'will you and Mr. McAdoo kindly come into the library—there are some matters which I wish to discuss with you both.' It was growing dark then, so I clapped my hands, quite softly, but a servant flittered out of the shadow like a bat. The tension was high in that bungalow that night. ”

“ It was hot in that valley—a stewpan, withering, stifling with the equatorial reek which wilts one to the bone; the nights stunk of fever. It was the southeast slope of the mountain which presented to us; and as we gazed up toward it from the little nest of trees where we had made our camp, the late sun blazed against its worn flank, and suddenly the broad, barren belt between the forest and the formation of quartz above the timber belt seemed to burst into flame and shone and sparkled and glittered as if flecked with scales of gold.
“‘An omen!’ cried Vinckers. ”

“ He knew, we both knew, that Jacob was dying; there was no mistaking that. It would be a matter of at least two hours’ hard work to liberate him without noise, and we both felt that by that time he would be already liberated; and Rosenthal, the Jew, whose habit and training and every instinct was that of weighing cost and gain, decided that he could not afford to wait, garrison or no garrison. Apparently life held nothing which could compensate him for the privilege of holding his crippled brother in his powerful arms while the struggling soul was fighting its way to the God of his fathers. ”

“ These are the conditions which often give the bully his amazing autocracy; his victims are auto-hypnotized by the sheer impudence of his assertions, until some day the bubble is pricked by an individual more practical and less imaginative and the reign of terror is at an end. In a week’s time Deshay had Claud, and Dixie, too, for that matter, as entirely cowed and subjugated as if he had broken their spirits with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and the harrowing part of it was that, in spite of their high degree of sensitiveness, neither the dog nor the master were weak. ”

“ He treated our half-wild Dyaks as if they were the bellboys of his club; appeared to have not the slightest notion in the world that they could so far forget their manners as to become insubordinate; would sometimes relax and joke with them a bit. He would turn his back upon the most dangerous, sleep with both eyes apparently shut, seemed contemptuous of danger or treachery; yet the twice that it did occur he had anticipated it. Between us we were an efficient combination, for I am governed by instinct, Doctor; Lynch acted only from coldly wrought logic. ”

“ Soon Madame paused in her promenade, and, walking to the rail, gazed at the glowing light in the sky, and as she stood, the drum, partially drowned before by her light step and the swish of her skirts, welled out resonantly. I glanced at her curiously. It was still too dark to distinguish her features, but a naturalist, or, more properly, perhaps, a collector, can see things to which better eyes than his are blind, and it seemed to me that I caught a swift quiver as it flashed across her mobile face. ”

“ The Countess was quick to recover her poise; not through breeding nor modesty, but from sheer combativeness. She seemed suddenly to realize—and I have no doubt that it struck her as quite a new idea—that a man could be too familiar with his eyes alone. There was plenty of fight in her, as one could see from the flash of her dark blue eyes and the rounded squareness of her jaw. She promptly assumed so great an air of chilly condescension that Stewart stared again and then began to grin. ”

“ Vinckers was rather low in the animal scale—by low I mean primitive; as a man he was a splendid specimen, but he was animal enough to get rather more from his instincts than from his reasoning—like most women. He watched this thing, this yellow light coming through the mist and touching with its sickly yellow tinge all of the fantastic objects in the picture that belonged to the imaginative school of painting. He looked quite steadily at the dream-trees, too symmetrical to be real; the fantastic rock shapes, too fancifully grotesque to be the work of nature ”

“ He cursed the Count, the Countess, the schooner, himself; in fact, he gave such an exhibition of savage and unbridled rage as I have never seen before but once. You see, Doctor, the man was sufficiently intelligent to appreciate that he was several very undesirable things—a scoundrel, an ass, and an object, as it appeared to him, of such utter contempt to this French nobleman as to be quite beneath his resentment—and he felt that when a man’s behavior crawled beneath the contempt of a Frenchman he was quite a way down! ”

“ I had studied Claud and felt his underlying force; he was of that high-bred, nervous type, vacillating in little things, but, deeper, of the resistance of chilled steel; like the bulkheads in the ward-room of a battle-ship, white and gold on the surface, but able to stand the pressure of hundreds of tons. If the petty aggressions of Deshay had all been combined into a solid weight, requiring a forceful resistance, he could no more have held Claud than he could have held a handful of guncotton detonated in his clenched fist ”

“ Cullen,’ said Lynch, in his pleasant voice, but hardly was the name between his lips when this hairy giant of ours wheeled on him like a boar. You know the stiff, muscle-bound motion, Doctor: the swift sling of the rigid body all on one axis, the great, brutish head swung on its thick neck, the mean little eyes slanting up evilly. That is what this hairy brute was, a boar, with all of the cunning and surly moroseness of this animal. ”

“ It was intensely hot—just before the afternoon shower. We were sitting on the raised veranda of Meyers’ house, and down below us the river oozed along, viscid and brown and sticky-looking, like molasses flowing out of a stove-in vat. The clouds were banking up black and forbidding on the other side of the stream, and occasionally a rumble of thunder reached us.
“‘You do not know—do not understand,’ said Meyers, finally. He raised one skinny, mottled hand to his red, untidy beard, which was getting gray around his muzzle, like an old collie, which, in fact, he somewhat resembled. ”

“ The dog slept always at his master’s side, and, although the nights were cool to men starved and shelterless, Claud would never draw near the fire, because he wished to avoid the propinquity of Deshay. More than once I had awakened from my light, fitful, fever sleep to see this sneaking wretch creeping stealthily on hands and knees toward the sleeping animal, but with invariable result—Dixie would slip silently away and Deshay would return to the fire, cursing savagely. Often through the day one would see him slyly maneuvering to get within reach of his prey ”

“ Imagine, Doctor, such a spectacle! I had brought a lot of mosquito netting—pink, it was—and with that I had shown the savages how to make insect nets. Such a sight! Forty or fifty Indians and bush-niggers, some naked except for a fawn-colored opera hat and a pair of iron spectacles without the lenses; others swathed in flaming calico prints, sitting around my camp blowing into a harmonica or a jew’s-harp, or sneaking through the jungle with shrimp-pink butterfly net! The very crocodiles used to crawl out upon the banks and laugh! And the natives all so proud and pleased! ”

“ I pondered. ‘They are in a small sail-boat,’ thought I, and glanced at the map of the archipelago hanging from the wall. ‘They will, of course, make for Zamboanga, but on the way they are apt to stop at Port Isabella.’ You know the place, Doctor—in Basilan; a beautiful spot: the little village, the hot slope of open country rolling gradually upward to meet the cool forests on the heights; the late sun painting it all golden and shining back from the towering boles that form the ramparts of the primeval woods? ”

“ It welded to itself the dim, broken outline of the mountain-tops and gave to the sable contour of the land the sinister aspect of looming almost to the zenith—and all the while from somewhere just beneath the surface came the hollow, rhythmic beat of the bamboula.
“Enough to drive one loi,” muttered Leyden.
I heard a rustling from the shore-boat lying at the staging. The crew were softly picking up their oars.
“They are getting restless, those fellows below. They cannot stand it long, this night and that noise. Ho! they are shoving off without their fares.” ”

“ Vinckers and MacFarlane slept heavily, torpidly, and their breathing was the stertorous gasping of drunkards. We lay in hammocks of plaited grass under a shelter of thatch; the girl’s hammock was beside MacFarlane; and as I lay there, broad awake and still depressed, my lungs half drowned in the dense humor of the valley and my ears ringing from the clamorous insect mob without, I heard a stifled, whimpering cry—the moan of a little child who has been whipped for inheriting nerves. ”

“ You see, Doctor, the two were dying men; we were all dying men. Deshay’s investment was ultra-physical, and consequently low; Claud’s was psychical, and although he might not last any longer, or as long, for that matter, he was all there as long as he did last; he was either alive or dead, not half-alive, like Deshay—and as the springs of our lives ran low Deshay’s grew muddy, while Claud’s was still clear and cold. ”

“ We laughed at the fears of the night and awaited the coming of the Papuans, but awaited in vain. I think, Doctor, that Tomba’s scream had floated across the valley, telephonic beneath the mist to reach the listeners in the hills. At any rate, no human thing came near us that day. Later, when the shadows began to lengthen again, we wandered out, Vinckers and I, prospecting towards the native camp—I with a rifle, watchful for game, Vinckers humming to himself an old Dutch tune, careless in the full force of the sunlight, wandering behind me and clicking on the rocks with his little hammer. ”

“ One guessed that he longed to throw off the man's hand, which still clutched his shoulder good-humoredly, but he was too sensitive, too fearful of giving offense, not through any liking for the man, but because it seemed gauche, boorish, and would fill the air with a sort of rough impulse, shocking to his fine sensitiveness. No doubt he had suffered at times from rebuffs to his own timid advances, and had not enough knowledge of the world and men to keep from putting a coarse, thick-skinned brute like Deshay in his own class of emotions. ”

“ I think that he was feeling Deshay’s shame as if it had been his own—not through any charity, but through sympathy, which is such an entirely different thing. You see, Doctor, Claud was one of those hyper-sensitized natures which reflects an emotion as a still lake reflects its bank: you know the type—that which will listen to a poorly given address with a sense of deepest personal responsibility toward the speaker, or will see some person in a conspicuous place make a fool of himself and fairly writhe with shame—as Dixie had done. ”

“ He greeted me quietly as I came in.
"'Doctor Leyden, ' said he, 'it is a terrible thing to be blind, is it not?'
"I did not answer.
" 'But it is not a terrible thing to die. We none of us fear to face death; most of us enjoy a bit of a tussle with the grim old man.'
"I had expected this and waited for him to go on.
"'To myself,' said Dalton, 'I consider that I am dead, practically dead.' He was silent for a few minutes and then said, 'Do you not consider, Doctor Leyden, that we have all of us a certain claim upon each other as fellow-men!'
"'Undoubtedly,' I answered. ”

“ Perhaps you have seen a gentleman, Doctor, a fearless man, avoid a quarrel thrust upon him by a low fellow, and avoid it quietly and without loss of dignity. This was Dixie’s behavior.
“We were not a pleasant party on that schooner. I had come to detest Deshay, and he knew it; Lentz would no longer speak to him; the old fellow simply grunted when Deshay addressed him, as if he considered the captain a swine and able to understand the language. Claud did not hate him; he simply loathed him, and yet was dominated by him, and the same was true of Dixie. ”

“ I never did a thing so difficult as to get on my feet and walk to the hammock of that poor girl. She was quite dead—and the wet frost of the fear which had killed her lay moist and chill on face and breast. I did not dare to light a match to look at her; there is a limit, Doctor, to the courage of every man. ”

“ Now and then a light would spark out and disappear, in many cases its swinging motion proving it to be a torch carried in some black fist. A thin land breeze had sprung up, and it brought off the scent of the damp earth, whiffs of wood smoke, and now and then the heavy fragrance of the stephanotis. Deeper in the gloom tossing hills threw their rough shoulders against the opaque sky.
Suddenly, from a shadowy recess in the black land there arose the steady beat of a drum—a pulsing, cavernous sound, measured in rhythmic time, neither loud nor fast ”

“ The servant in placing the lamp upon the shelf had moved a little clock, which had run down, and the jar had set it ticking, and this and the sharp rustle as Lynch turned the leaves were the only noises in that room—unless my mutterings were audible, which may have been.
“Such a fever as mine is like a fire, Doctor; it leaps upward, then sinks, flickers, smoulders for a while, and then bursts out to rage with fresh fury. ”