The Ragged Edge

  CHAPTER III

  He had said it, spoken it like that ... his own name! After allthese weeks of trying to obliterate even the memory of it!... tohave given it to this girl without her asking!

  The thought of peril cleared a space in the alcoholic fog. He sawthe expression on the girl's face and understood what it signified,that it was the reflected pattern of his own. He shut his eyes andgroped for the wall to steady himself, wondering if this bit ofmummery would get over.

  "I beg your pardon!... A bit rocky this morning.... That windowthere.... Cloud back of your hat!" He opened his eyes again.

  "I understand," she said. The poor boy, imagining things! "That'swant of substantial food. Better take these sandwiches."

  "All right; and thank you. I'll eat them when we start. Just nowthe water-chestnuts...."

  She smiled, and returned to the spinsters.

  Spurlock began to munch his water-chestnuts. What he needed was nota food but a flavour; and the cocoanut taste of the chestnutssoothed his burning tongue and throat. He had let go his name soeasily as that! What was the name she had given? Ruth something; hecould not remember. What a frightened fool he was! If he could notremember her name, it was equally possible that already she hadforgotten his. Conscience was always digging sudden pits for hisfeet and common sense ridiculing his fears. Mirages, over which hewas constantly throwing bridges which were wasted efforts, sinceinvariably they spanned solid ground.

  But he would make it a point not to speak again to the girl. If headhered to this policy--to keep away from her inconspicuously--shewould forget the name by night, and to-morrow even the bearer of itwould sink below the level of recollection. That was life. Theywere only passers-by.

  Drink for him had a queer phase. It did not cheer or fortify himwith false courage and recklessness; it simply enveloped him in amist of unreality. A shudder rippled across his shoulders. He hatedthe taste of it. The first peg was torture. But for all that, itoffered relief; his brain, stupefied by the fumes, grew dull, andconscience lost its edge to bite.

  He wiped the sweat from his chin and forehead. His hand shook soviolently that he dropped the handkerchief; and he let it lie onthe floor because he dared not stoop.

  Ah Cum, sensing the difficulty, approached, recovered the damphandkerchief and returned it.

  "Thanks."

  "Very interesting," said the Chinaman, with a wave of his taperinghand toward the roofs. "It reminds you of a red sea suddenlypetrified."

  "Or the flat stones in the meadows, teeming with life underneath.Ants."

  "You are from America?"

  "Yes." But Spurlock put up his guard.

  "I am a Yale man," said Ah Cum.

  "Yale? Why, so am I." There was no danger in admitting this fact.Spurlock offered his hand, which Ah Cum accepted gravely. A brokenlaugh followed the action. "Yale!" Spurlock's gaze shifted to thedead hills beyond the window; when it returned to the Chinamanthere was astonishment instead of interest: as if Ah Cum had been aphantom a moment since and was now actually a human being. "Yale!"A Chinaman who had gone to Yale!

  "Yes. Civil engineering. Mentally but not physically competent. Hadto give up the work and take to this. I'm not noble; so myhonourable ancestors will not turn over in their graves."

  "Graves." Spurlock pointed in the sloping fields outside the walls."I've counted ten coffins so far."

  "Ah, yes. The land about these walls is a common graveyard. Everyday in the year you will witness such scenes. There are no funeralsamong the poor, only burials. And many of these deaths could beavoided if it were not for superstition. Superstition is theChinese Reaper. Rituals instead of medicines. Sometimes I try totalk. I might as well try to build a ladder to heaven. We must takethe children--of any race--if we would teach knowledge. Age is set,impervious to innovations."

  The Chinaman paused. He saw that his words were falling upon dullears. He turned to observe what this object was that had sounexpectedly diverted the young man's attention. It was the girl.She was standing before a window, against the background of therain-burdened April sky. There was enough contra-light to renderher ethereal.

  Spurlock was basically a poet, quick to recognize beauty, animateor inanimate, and to transcribe it in unuttered words. He wasalways word-building, a metaphorist, lavish with singingadjectives; but often he built in confusion because it wasdifficult to describe something beautiful in a new yet simple way.

  He had not noticed the girl particularly when she offered thesandwiches; but in this moment he found her beautiful. Her facereminded him of a delicate unglazed porcelain cup, filled withblond wine. But there was something else; and in his befoggedmental state the comparison eluded him.

  Ruth broke the exquisite pose by summoning Ah Cum, who was luredinto a lecture upon the water-clock. This left Spurlock alone.

  He began munching his water-chestnuts--a small brown radish-shapedvegetable, with the flavour of coconut--that grow along the riverbrims. Below the window he saw two coolies carrying a coffin, whichpresently they callously dumped into a yawning pit. This made theeleventh. There were no mourners. But what did the occupant of thebox care? The laugh was always with the dead: they were out of themuddle.

  From the unlovely hillside his glance strayed to the severalfive-story towers of the pawnshops. Celestial Uncles! Spurlockchuckled, and a bit of chestnut, going down the wrong way, set himto coughing violently. When the paroxysm passed, he was forced tolean against the window-jamb for support.

  "That young man had better watch his cough," said SpinsterPrudence. "He acts queerly, too."

  "They always act like that after drink," said Ruth, casually.

  She intercepted the glance the spinsters exchanged, and immediatelysensed that she had said too much. There was no way of recallingthe words; so she waited.

  "Miss Enschede--such an odd name!--are you French?"

  "Oh, no. Pennsylvania Dutch. But I have never seen America. I wasborn on an island in the South Seas. I am on my way to an aunt wholives in Hartford, Connecticut."

  The spinsters nodded approvingly. Hartford had a very respectablesound.

  Ruth did not consider it necessary, however, to add that she hadnot notified this aunt of her coming, that she did not know whetherthe aunt still resided in Hartford or was underground. These twoelderly ladies would call her stark mad. Perhaps she was.

  "And you have seen ... drunken men?" Prudence's tones were full ofsuppressed horror.

  "Often. A very small settlement, mostly natives. There was atrader--a man who bought copra and pearls. Not a bad man as mengo, but he would sell whisky and gin. Over here men drink becausethey are lonely; and when they drink too hard and too long, theywind up on the beach."

  The spinsters stared at her blankly.

  Ruth went on to explain. "When a man reaches the lowest scalethrough drink, we call him a beachcomber. I suppose the phrase--theword--originally meant a man who searched for food on the beach.The poor things! Oh, it was quite dreadful. It is queer, but men ofeducation and good birth fall swiftest and lowest."

  She sent a covert glance toward the young man. She alone of themall knew that he was on the first leg of the terrible journey tothe beach. Somebody ought to talk to him, warn him. He was allalone, like herself.

  "What are those odd-looking things on the roofs?" she asked of AhCum.

  "Pigs and fish, to fend off the visitations of the devil." Ah Cumsmiled. "After all, I believe we Chinese have the right idea. Thedevil is on top, not below. We aren't between him and heaven; he isbetween us and heaven."

  The spinsters had no counter-philosophy to offer; so they turned toRuth, who had singularly and unconsciously invested herself withglamour, the glamour of adventure, which the old maids did notrecognize as such because they were only tourists. This child atonce alarmed and thrilled them. She had come across the wickedSouth Seas which were still infested with cannibals; she had seendrunkenness and called men beachcombers; who was this moment asinnocent as a babe, and in the next uttered some b
itter wisdom ithad taken a thousand years of philosophy to evolve. And there wasthat dress of hers! She must be warned that she had been imposedupon.

  "You'll pardon an old woman, Miss Enschede," said Sister Prudence;"but where in this world did you get that dress?"

  Ruth picked up both sides of the skirt and spread it, looking down."Is there anything wrong with it?"

  "Wrong? Why, you have been imposed upon somewhere. That dress isthirty years old, if a day."

  "Oh!" Ruth laughed softly. "That is easily explained. I haven'tmuch money; I don't know how much it is going to cost me to reachHartford; so I fixed over a couple of my mother's dresses. Itdoesn't look bad, does it?"

  "Mercy, no! That wasn't the thought. It was that somebody hadcheated you."

  The spinster did not ask if the mother lived; the question wasinconsequent. No mother would have sent her daughter into the worldwith such a wardrobe. Straitened circumstances would not havemattered; a mother would have managed somehow. In the '80s such adress would have indicated considerable financial means; under thesun-helmet it was an anachronism; and yet it served only to add aquainter charm to the girl's beauty.

  "Do you know what you make me think of?"

  "What?"

  "As if you had stepped out of some old family album."

  The feminine vanities in Ruth were quiescent; nothing had everoccurred in her life to tingle them into action. She was dressed asa white woman should be; and that for the present satisfied herinstincts. But she threw a verbal bombshell into the spinsters'camp.

  "What is a family album?"

  "You poor child, do you mean to tell me you've never seen a familyalbum? Why, it's a book filled with the photographs of yourgrandmothers and grandfathers, your aunts and uncles and cousins,your mother and father when they were little."

  Ruth stood with drawn brows; she was trying to recall. "No; wenever had one; at least, I never saw it."

  The lack of a family album for some reason put a little ache in herheart. Grandmothers and grandfathers and uncles and aunts ... tolove and to coddle lonely little girls.

  "You poor child!" said Prudence.

  "Then I am old-fashioned. Is that it? I thought this very pretty."

  "So it is, child. But one changes the style of one's clothesyearly. Of course, this does not apply to uninteresting old maids,"Prudence modified with a dry little smile.

  "But this is good enough to travel in, isn't it?"

  "To be sure it is. When you reach San Francisco, you can buysomething more appropriate." It occurred to the spinster to ask:"Have you ever seen a fashion magazine?"

  "No. Sometimes we had the _Illustrated London News_ and _Tit-Bits._Sailors would leave them at the trader's."

  "Alice in Wonderland!" cried Prudence, perhaps a little enviously.

  "Oh, I've read that!"

  Spurlock had heard distinctly enough all of this odd conversation;but until the spinster's reference to the family album, no phrasehad been sufficient in strength of attraction to break the trend ofhis own unhappy thoughts. Out of an old family album: here was thevery comparison that had eluded him. His literary instincts beganto stir. A South Sea island girl, and this was her first adventureinto civilization. Here was the corner-stone of a capital story;but he knew that Howard Spurlock would never write it.

  Other phrases returned now, like echoes. The beachcomber, thelowest in the human scale; and some day he would enter into thisestate. Between him and the beach stood the sum of six hundreddollars.

  But one thing troubled him, and because of it he might never arriveon the beach. A new inexplicable madness that urged him to shrillironically the story of his coat--to take it off and fling it atthe feet of any stranger who chanced to be nigh.

  "Look at it!" he felt like screaming. "Clean and spotless, butbeginning to show the wear and tear of constant use. I have worn itfor weeks and weeks. I have slept with it under my pillow. Observeit--a blue-serge coat. Ever hear of the djinn in the bottle? Likeenough. But did you ever hear of a djinn in a blue-serge coat?_Stitched_ in!"

  Something like this was always rushing into his throat; and he hadto sink his nails into his palms to stop his mouth. Veryfascinating, though, trying to analyse the impulse. It was not anaffair of the conscience; it was vaguely based upon insolence anddefiance. He wondered if these abnormal mental activities presagedillness. To be ill and helpless.

  He went on munching his water-chestnuts, and stared at the skyline.He hated horizons. He was always visualizing the Hand whenever helet his gaze rest upon the horizon. An enormous Hand that rose upswiftly, blotting out the sky. A Hand that strove to reach hisshoulder, relentless, soulless but lawful. The scrutiny of anystrange man provoked a sweaty terror. What a God-forsaken fool hewas! And dimly, out there somewhere in the South Seas--the beach!

  Already he sensed the fascination of the inevitable; and with thisfascination came the idea of haste, to get there quickly and havedone. Odd, but he had never thought of the beach until this girl(who looked as if she had stepped out of the family album) referredto it with a familiarity which was as astonishing as it wasprofoundly sad.

  The beach: to get there as quickly as he could, to reach the whiteman's nadir of abasement and gather the promise of that soothingindifference which comes with the final disintegration of thefibres of conscience. He had an objective now.