Laura Lee Hope - "The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms"

Harold Begbie - "The Story of Baden Powell"

G. W. Steevens - "From Capetown to Ladysmith"

Various - "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431"

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Perceval Gibbon - The Second Class Passenger

P >> Perceval Gibbon >> The Second Class Passenger




"I have found my happiness in meditation," Regnault was saying, in a
still, silken voice. "But tell me, O'Neill--will she come?"

"Yes," said O'Neill, wearily, "she will come." Regnault made a gentle
gesture of thanks and closed his eyes. His long fingers slid on the
ivory beads and his lips moved. O'Neill gazed down on him with a
weakness of bewilderment; his landmarks were shifting.

He was standing thus, looking in mere absence of mind, when a
footfall beyond the screen reached his ear.

"Oh Lord!" he cried.

It was she. As his eyes fell upon her she was letting fall her long
cloak. It lay on the floor about her feet, and she towered over it,
in superb scarlet. Against her background of shadow her neck and arms
and the abundance of her breast shone like silver. Ere he could go to
her she waved him away with a sweep of a naked arm. A hand was on her
hip, and she moved towards the bed with the sliding gait of the
Spanish dancer.

It was an affair of an instant. Buscarlet and Truelove hastened upon
his exclamation, and Buscarlet, stumbling, brushed against the
screen. He caught at it to save it from falling, and the bed was bare
to the room. Regnault and his wife looked into each other's face.
She, undisturbed by the suddenness of it all, held yet her posture of
the stage, glowing in her silk with something dangerous and ominous
about her, something blatant and yet potent, like a knife in a
stocking. It was as though she wrought in violence for the admiration
of the man on the bed. He, on his elbow, turned to her a thin face
with lips parted and trembling; for an intolerable instant they hung,
mute and motionless. Then, slowly, she turned with one foot sliding,
and the light of the lamp was full on her face.

It seemed to break the tense spell; Regnault's face was writhing; of
a sudden he burst into shrill, hideous laughter, and his right hand
flung out and pointed at her. None moved; none could. His laugh rang
and broke, and rang again, outrageous and uncontrollable, merry and
hearty and hateful. The woman, at the first peal of it, started and
stood as though stricken to stone; they could see her shrivel under
the blast of it, shrivel and shrink and age.

Then, as though it had been overdue and long awaited, the laugh
checked and choked. It freed them from the thrall that held them.
Regnault's head fell back.

"The amyl!" cried O'Neill, and they were all about him. "The amyl--
where is it?"

Regnault's face was a mask of paralyzed pain; but the silver patch-
box that held the capsules was not on the table. It took a minute to
find it on the floor. O'Neill smashed a couple, and thrust his hand
into the waxen face--and waited. Buscarlet was breathing like a man
in a nightmare. Truelove stood to attention. But Regnault did not
return to the shape of life.

O'Neill let his hand drop, and turned to Truelove. "He's got it," he
said; "But fetch a doctor."

His eyes fell on the dancer in her shimmering scarlet, where she
knelt at the bedside, with her head bowed to the counterpane and her
hands clasped over it.

He sighed. He did not understand.



X

THE POOR IN HEART

It was his habit of an evening to play the flute; and he was playing
it faithfully, with the score propped up against a pile of books on
his table, when the noises from the street reached him, and
interrupted his music. With the silver-dotted flute in his hand he
moved to the window and put aside the curtains to look out.

The flute is the instrument of mild men; and Robert Lucas had
mildness for a chief quality. At the age of thirty-five, in the high
noon of his manhood, he showed to the world a friendly,
unenterprising face, neatly bearded, and generally a little vacant.
The accident that gave him a Russian mother was his main
qualification for the post he now held--that of representative of a
firm of leather manufacturers in the Russian town of Tambov. He spoke
Russian, he knew leather, and he could ignore the smells of a
tanyard; these facts entitled him to a livelihood.

To right and left, as he looked forth, the cobbled street was dark;
but opposite, in the silversmith's shop, there were lights, and,
below, a small crowd had gathered. He watched wonderingly. He knew
the silversmith well enough to nod as he passed his door--a young,
laborious man with a rapt, uncertain face and a tumbled mane of black
hair. There were also a little, grave wife and a fat, grave baby; and
these, when they were visible, received separate and distinctive
nods, and always returned them. The hide-sellers and tanners were,
for the most part, crude and sportive persons with whom he could have
nothing in common; they lived, apparently, on drink and uproar; and
he had come to regard the silversmith and his family as vague
friends. He pressed his face closer to the glass of the double
casement to see more certainly.

The little shop seemed to be full of lights and people, and outside
its door there was a press of folk. The murmur of voices was audible,
though he could distinguish nothing that was said. But now and again
there was laughter. It was the laughter that held him gazing and
apprehensive; it had a harsher note than mirth. It seemed to him,
too, that some of the men in the doorway were in uniform; he could
see them only in outline, mere black silhouettes against the interior
lights; but there was about them the ominous cut of the official,
that Russian bird of ill-omen. And then, while yet he doubted, there
sounded the very keynote of disaster. From somewhere within the
silversmith's shop a woman screamed, sudden and startling.

"Now, now!" said Robert Lucas, at his window, grasping his flute
nervously. And, as though in answer to his remonstrance, there was
again that guttural, animal laughter. He frowned.

"I must see into this," he told himself very seriously.

He turned from the window. His pleasant room, with the bright lamp on
the table and the music leaning beside it, seemed to advise him to
proceed with caution. He and his life were not devised for situations
in which women screamed on that tense note of anguish and terror; he
had never done a violent thing in all his days. There was no clear
purpose in his mind as he pulled open his door to go out--merely an
ill-ease that forced him to go nearer to the cause of those screams.
He had descended the stairs and was fumbling at the latch of the
street-door before he realized that he was still holding the flute.

"Oh, bother!" he exclaimed, in extreme exasperation when the
instrument proved too long for his pocket, and went out carrying it
like some remarkable and ornate baton.

The small crowd before the silversmith's shop numbered, perhaps, a
hundred people, and even before his eyes were acclimatized to the
darkness he smelt sheepskin coats and tan-bark. He touched one big
man on the arm and asked a question. The lights in the shop lit up
the fellow's hairy face and loose grin as he turned to answer.

"Eh?" said the man. "Why, it's a Jew that the police are clearing
out. Did you hear the Jewess squeal?"

"Yes, I heard," said Lucas, and moved away.

He was cut off from the door of the shop by the backs of the crowd,
and passed along the street to get round them. Inside the lighted
house the baby had begun to cry, but there was no more screaming. He
had a sense that unless he hurried he might be too late for what was
in preparation. The crowd seemed to be waiting for some culminating
scene, with more than screams in it. A touch of nervous excitement
came to fortify him, and he thrust in between two huge slaughterers,
whose clothes reeked of the killing sheds.

"Make way!" he said breathlessly, as they turned on him.

One of them swore and would have shoved him back, and others looked
round at the sound of strife. Lucas put up an uncertain hand to guard
the blow. It, was the hand that held the flute, whose silver keys
flashed in the lights from the shop.

"Ha!" grunted the slaughterer, arrested by that sight. He looked at
Lucas doubtfully, his neat clothes, his general aspect of a superior.
"Who are you?" he demanded.

"Make way!" repeated Lucas.

It seemed to confirm the slaughterer in his suspicion that this was a
personage to be deferred to.

"Hi, there!" he bellowed helpfully. "Give room for his Excellency.
Let his Excellency come through! Don't you see what he's got in his
hand? Make way, will you?"

He bent his huge, unclean shoulder to the business of clearing a
path, and drove through like a snow-plough. Lucas followed along the
lane that he made, and came to the pavement close by the shop.

It was fortunate that events marched sharply from that point, and
forced him to act without thinking. He had some vague notion of
finding the officer in charge of the police and speaking to him. But
before he could move to do so there was a fresh activity of the
people within the bright windows; he saw something that had the look
of a struggle. Voices babbled, and the crowd pressed closer; and
suddenly, from the open doorway, two figures reeled forth, clutching
and thrusting. One was in uniform, the other was a woman. For a
couple of seconds they wrenched and fought, staged before the crowd
on the lighted doorstep; and then the woman broke away and ran
blindly towards the spot where Lucas stood. She had, he saw suddenly,
a child in her arms that cried unceasingly.

The uniformed man who had tried to hold her came plunging after her;
his face was creased in clownish and cruel smiles. Lucas saw the
thing stupidly; his mind prompted him to nothing; he stood where he
was, empty of resource. He was directly in the flying woman's path,
and she rushed at him as to a refuge. He was the sole thing in that
narrow arena of dread which she did not recognize as a figure of
oppression; and she floundered to her knees at his-feet and held
forth the terrified child to him in an agony of appeal. Her tormented
and fearful face was upturned to him; he knew her for the Jewess, the
wife of the silversmith.

"Father!" she breathed, in the pitiful idiom of that land of orphans.

"Ye-es," said Robert Lucas vaguely, and put a hand on her head.

Never before, in all the orderly level of his life, had a human being
chosen him for champion and savior. He was aware of something within
him that surged, some spate of force and potency in his blood; he
stood upright with a start to confront the policeman who was on the
woman's heels. The man was grinning still, fatuously and consciously,
like a buffoon who knows he will be applauded; Lucas fronted his
smiling security with a still fury that wiped the mirth from his face
and left him gaping.

"Get back!" said Lucas. He spoke in a low tone, and the crowd jostled
nearer to hear.

The policeman stared at him, amazed and uncomprehending.

"Sir," he stammered; "Excellency--this Jewess she----"

He stopped. Lucas was pointing at him with the flute across the bowed
head of the woman, who crouched over her child at his feet.

"You shall report the matter to the Governor," said Lucas, in the
same tone of icy anger. "And I will report it to the Minister."

He touched the woman. "Get up," he said. "Come with me."

He had to repeat it before she understood; she was numb with terror.
She rose with difficulty to her feet, clasping the child, whose wail
was now weak with exhaustion. The peering crowd made a ring of brute
faces about them, full of menace and mystery, but the new power in
him moved them to right and left at his gesture, and they gave him
passage, with the woman behind him, across the road. The stupefied
policeman watched them go, and then ran off to place the matter in
the hands of his superior.

Lucas was at his door when the officer whom the policeman had fetched
touched him on the elbow. He was a young man; if he had been older
Lucas's difficulties might have been increased. He peered in the
darkness, and was visible as a narrow, black-moustached face, with
heavy eyebrows and a brutal mouth. The one thing that deterred him
from brisk action was the fact that Lucas was a foreigner, whose
rights and liabilities were therefore uncertain.

"This woman," he said, "is arrested."

Lucas was unlocking the door. He turned with his hand on the key, and
the woman touched his arm. Perhaps that touch aided him to use big
words. As a resident in Tambov he knew the officer by sight, and had
always been a little daunted by his manner of power. In Russia one
comes easily to fear the police. But now he was free of fear.

"You be careful," he said. "I saw what was being done."

With his left hand he pushed the door, and it swung open. He motioned
the woman to enter, and nodded as he saw her cross the threshold.

The officer vented a click of impatience.

"I tell you----" he began, and moved forward a step. Lucas extended
an arm and the hand that held the flute across his chest.

"Back!" he said. "You mustn't enter this house--you know that! You
can go to the Governor, if you like, and I will go over his head. But
you shall not touch that woman."

"She is arrested," said the officer obstinately, still studying his
antagonist. "If you wish to aid her, you must go to the Bureau; but
you cannot take her away like this."

"Eh?" Lucas swung round on him; the time was fertile in inspirations.
"Can't I?!" he demanded threateningly. "But I have taken her, man. If
you seize her now you must arrest me, too, and then--we shall see!"

"I must do my duty," persisted the other.

"Do it, then," said Lucas, standing square across the door. "Do it,
and see if you can explain afterwards how you did it. I am not a
woman who can be insulted with safety; my arrest will have to be
explained to St. Petersburg, and you will have to pay for it. I saw
how she was being handled, and how your duty was being done. I tell
you, you're in danger. Be careful!"

"So?" replied the officer slowly. He turned to the folk who were the
absorbed audience of this conference. "Move away, there," he
commanded harshly. "This is none of your business. Off with you!"

They shifted back reluctantly, and he waited till he could speak
unheard by them. Then he turned to Lucas again with a touch of the
confidential in his manner.

"What do you want with her?" he asked.

"Want with her?" repeated Lucas, not immediately comprehending. Then,
as the man's meaning reached him he trembled. "I don't want her," he
cried. "I don't want her. You want her, not I; and you shan't have
her. Do you understand? You shan't have her!"

"Shan't I?" retorted the officer, but there was indecision in his
voice.

"No!" said Lucas.

There was a pause. Neither of them was sure of himself. The officer
found himself in face of a situation which he could not gauge; and
it would never do for a provincial police official to attract notice
in remote St. Petersburg. For all he knew, this flimsy little man,
who had snatched his Jewess from him, might be able to set in motion
those mills which grind erring servants of the State into disgrace
and ruin. He certainly had a large and authoritative way with him.

"Will you come to the Bureau, then, and speak with the chief?" he
suggested. "You see, your action causes a difficulty."

"No, I won't," said Lucas flatly.

He also was in doubt. It seemed to him that he stood in a
considerable peril, and he was aware that his mood of high temper was
failing him. It needed an effort to maintain an assured and
uncompromising front. Behind him, on the unlighted stairs, the woman
breathed heavily. He summoned what he had of stubbornness to uphold
him. The affair so far had gone valiantly; he meant that it should
continue on the same plane.

He saw the officer hesitate frowningly, and quaked. In a moment the
man might make up his mind and seize him; there was an urgent
necessity for some action that should quell him. Like all weak men,
he saw a resource in violence, and as the officer opened his lips to
speak again he interrupted.

"No more!" he shouted. "You have heard what I had to say; that is
enough. Now go!"

He pointed frantically with his flute, and the officer, at the sudden
lifting of his arm, made a surprised movement, which Lucas
misunderstood.

With a cry that was half terror and half ecstasy he smote, and the
flute beat the officer's cap down over his eyes.

"Yei Bohu!" ejaculated the officer, falling back,

Lucas did not wait for him to thrust the cap away and recover
himself. He had done his utmost, and the next step must rest with
Providence. It was but two paces to the doorway. The officer was not
quick enough to see his panic-stricken retirement. He recovered his
sight only to see the slam of the door, which seemed to close in his
face with a contemptuous and defiant emphasis. It was like a final
fist shaken at him to drive home a warning. He shook his head
despondently.

On the other side of the door Lucas, fighting with his loud breath,
heard his slow footsteps on the cobbles as he departed. He waited,
hardly daring to relax his mind to hope, till he heard the party of
them drawing off. He was weak with unaccustomed emotions.

What struck him as marvelous was that the woman, whose face he had
last seen as a writhen mask of fear, should appear in the light of
his room with her calm restored, with nothing but some disorder of
her hair and dress to betoken her troubles. Even the child in her
arms, worn out with weeping perhaps, had fallen asleep. He stared at
the pair of them vacantly. His lamp, his music, all the apparatus of
his gentle and decorous existence were as he had left them; their
familiar and prosaic quality made his adventure appear by contrast
monstrous.

The Jewess was watching him. In her dark, serious way she had a
certain striking beauty. Her grave eyes waited for him to look at
her.

"What is it?" he said at last.

"If I might put the child down," she suggested timidly.

Lucas pointed to the double-doors of his bedroom. "My bed is in
there," he answered. She lowered her head, as though in obedience to
a command he had given, and carried the child out. Lucas watched her
go, and then crossed the room to a cupboard which contained, among
other things, a bottle of brandy.

While he was drinking she returned, pausing in the door to look back
at the child. He noticed that she left the door partly open to hear
it if it should wake, and somehow this struck him as particularly
moving.

She came across the room to him, with her steadfast eyes on his face,
and, without speaking, fell on her knees before him and put the edge
of his coat to her lips.

Lucas stood while she did it; he hardly dared to move and interrupt
that reverent and symbolic act of gratitude. But once again, as when
on the pavement she had held the child to him in frantic appeal, the
simple soul within him flamed into splendor, and he was in touch with
great passions and mighty emotions. It is the mood of martyrs and
heroes. He looked down to her dark eyes, bright with swimming tears,
and helped her to her feet.

"You shall be safe here," he told her. "Nobody shall touch you here."

She believed it utterly; he was a champion sent straight from God;
she had seen him conquering and irresistible. To fear now would be a
blasphemy.

"I am quite safe," she agreed. "I am not afraid. To-morrow some of my
people will come for me."

He nodded. "There is some food in the cupboard there," he told her.
"Milk, too, if the child wants it. And nobody can come up the stairs
without meeting me; and if they try, God help them!"

She half smiled at the idea. "They would never dare," she agreed
confidently.

He would have been glad of his overcoat, but that was in his bedroom,
and he dreaded the indelicacy of going there while she was present.
So in the event he bade her a brief good-night, and found himself on
the dark and chilly stairs without so much as a pillow or a blanket
to make sleep possible. For lack of anything else in the shape of a
weapon, he had brought his silver-keyed flute with him; if he were
invaded in the small hours it might serve him again; it seemed to
have a virtue for quelling police officials.

About three o'clock in the morning he awoke from an uneasy doze,
chilled to the marrow, and was prompted to try if the flute would
still make music. It would not. It is too much to ask of any
instrument that has been used as an instrument of war. It had saved a
Jewess and her child, magnified its owner into a man of action, and
was thenceforth silent for ever.

"I must have hit that officer pretty hard," was the reflection of
Robert Lucas.

The episode closed shortly before noon next day, when two elderly men
of affairs came to fetch his guests away. They entered the room while
he was entertaining the baby with a whistled selection from his
repertoire of flute music, and he broke off short as they regarded
him from the doorway. The Jewess looked up alertly as they entered.

They bowed to Lucas with a manner of servility in which there was an
ironic suggestion, while their eyes examined him shrewdly. They were
bearded, aquiline persons, soft-spoken and withal formidable. He had
a notion that they found him amusing, but suppressed their amusement.

"Then it is you we have to thank," said the elder of them, when
formal greetings had been exchanged, "for the safety of this girl and
her child."

"I don't want any thanks," protested Lucas.

He could not tell them how the thanks he had already received
transcended any words they could speak.

"It was a villainous thing," he went on. "I'm glad I could help. Er--
is the silversmith all, right?"

"Money was paid," answered the grey-haired Jew; "he is safe,
therefore. But he spent the night in chains, while his wife was here
with you."

He spoke with a pregnant gravity. The Jewess started up and addressed
him in a tongue Lucas could not understand. He saw that she pointed
to him and to the bedroom and to the stairs, and that she spoke with
heat. The old Jew heard her intently.

"So!" he said, in his deep voice. "Then we have more to thank you for
than we thought. You gave up your rooms, it seems?"

"It is nothing," said Lucas. "You see, a lady--well, I could hardly--"

"Yes, I see," agreed the old Jew. "I have to do with a noble spirit.
And you do not want any thanks? So? But we Jews, we have more things
to give than thanks, and better things."

"I don't want anything," Lucas answered him. "I'm glad everything's
all right."

"You are very good," said the old man, "very good and generous. But
some day, perhaps, you will have a need--and then you will find that
our people do not forget."

The Jewess had nothing to take with her but her child. She bowed her
head and murmured something as she passed out, and the baby laughed
at him.

"Our people do not forget," repeated the old Jew, as he bowed himself
forth.

"Well," said Lucas, half aloud, when he was once more alone in his
room, "that's finished, anyhow."

It was the knell of his greater self, of the man he had contrived to
be for a few hours. He sat in his chair, dimly realizing it, with
vague and wordless regrets. Then, upon the table, he saw the flute,
and rose to put it in the cupboard. It would never be useful again,
but he did not want to throw it away.

The old dramas, which somehow came so close to reality with so little
art--or because of so little art--had a way of straddling time like
life itself. "Twenty years elapse between Acts II and III," the
playbills said unblushingly, and the fact is that what most men sow
at twenty they reap at forty; the twenty years do elapse between the
acts. The curtain that goes down on Robert Lucas in his room at
Tambov rises on Robert H. Lucas in New York, with the passage of time
marked on him as clearly as on a clock. With grey in his beard and
patches on his boots, and quarters in a boarding-house in Long Island
City, he is still concerned with leather, but no longer prosperous.
His work involves much calling on dealers and manufacturers, and
their manner of receiving him has done nothing to harden his manner
of diffidence and incompetence. His linen strives to be
inconspicuous; his clothes do not inspire respect; the total effect
of him is that of a man who has been at great pains to plant himself
in a wrong environment. Tambov now is no more than a memory; it is
less than an experience, for it has left the man unchanged. It is a
thing he has seen--not a thing he has lived.

The accident that gave his name and the address of his boarding-house
a place in the papers has no part in his story; he was an unimportant
witness in the trial of a man whom he had seen in the street cutting
blood-spots out of his clothing. He had bought a paper which
mentioned him to read on the ferry as he returned home, and had been
mildly thrilled to find that an artist had sketched him and
immortalized him in his columns. And next morning came the letter.

"Guelder and Zorn" was the name engraved across the head of it, in a
slender Italian script; it conveyed nothing to him. The body of the
communication was typewritten, and stated that if Mr. Robert H. Lucas
would present himself at the above address, the firm would be glad to
serve him. Nothing more.

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