The Luck of the Irish/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
THE tourist train from Venice drew into Brindisi late at night, and the menagerie, as William now dubbed his fellow-tourists, made straight for the Ark. A mild condition of pandemonium reigned for a time. Those who had taken the Sicilian trip, and those who had remained in or near by Naples, had arrived earlier; and they all had to compare notes at once. Of course, William understood that notes of this character were perishable and were not fit to exchange twelve hours later, and he was conditionally charitable in his comments. It was after midnight before the confusion quieted down.
William was genuinely glad to see his two ancients, the archeologists. They had been burrowing among the fresh excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and were as happy as two boys on a summer's Saturday afternoon. They talked across him, over and around him, crackling like firecrackers. When they finally went below William felt very lonely and very old.
The truth is, the nearest approach to happiness possible to William was work for his hands; and these hands of his had been practically idle for weeks. His brain was healthy and normal, but it had not been constructed for the solving of problems. It readily absorbed pictures and construed their import relative to life, but in the realm of pure thinking it was the old story of the round peg in the square hole.
The problem which confronted him was too big for his resources, too deep for his deductions to reach bottom, and too close for a clear perspective. When a man's in love he is not much good for anything else. William tried in vain to crush down this love, to divorce it from the sexual, to play the brother in spirit as well as in fact. But he never came close to Ruth now that he did not long fiercely to snatch her up in his arms and never let her go. How long could he hold out? He lacked the diversions of a well-educated man; the obsession was always with him. Why hadn't he some fad like these two archeologists, something that would for the time being make him forget everything else in the world? Once upon a time he had poked fun at them; now he envied them from the bottom of his heart. They never knew any heartaches. Naturally he forgot that these two old bachelors had once been young like himself. And who was he to say that they carried no tombs in their hearts?
In no mood for his bunk, William loitered by the gang-plank and smoked. There came an interval when both dock and ship seemed deserted except for himself. Presently he saw a man emerge from the gloom, stagger to the gang-plank, and climb up. His efforts were spasmodic. He would pull himself up a few feet by hauling at the rail, then he would rest for a moment. William eyed him callously. It was some one who was going to have a fine headache in the morning. As the straggler came under the cluster of lights, he steadied himself as if marshaling what remained of his forces.
"Hello, Camden!"
The man peered into William's face. "Well, if it isn't m' old frien' W. Grogan! But your face is like Gaul, divided int' three parts. Any one of 'em 'll do me. Remember what you said? I'll have that kink in m' back in the morning, all righty. Ye gods, to get back to sea, where it's clean!"
"Want a pilot?" asked William, sensing that the man was deep in liquor.
"Fine! Pilot's the thing I need. Lo's of rocks in the channel, and I've los' m' chart." Camden accepted William's arm and commented upon the brawn of it. "You're 's strong 's a hoist-boom! Don't ever hit me, William; don't you ever hit me." At the companionway he pulled back. "I'll leave it to you, pilot. Three doors, and one of 'em 's right, but which is which, damn me!"
"I guess I'd better steer you down to your bunk, my lord. Some little load. Where'd you collect it?"
"Rome and her seven hills. Got to go to China. Boss wants some queues. Ha, ha! That's good! Boss wants some queues!"
William manœuvered him into the cabin and turned on the lights. "Where'd you come from?"
"Rome yesterday. Got here 'safternoon. Lonesome 's hell! Old cabin empty; took it. Catch P. & O. boat at Aden. Grogan, it can't be done, it can't be done!" Camden swayed on his heels and William straightened him up. "Twenty years I've been fighting the Demon Rum, and all I can get 's a draw. Game called on 'count of darkness. What? I've fought the Demon all over the old top, and all I get 's a draw. Where'd I come from? A saloon on the water-front, where I swilled champagne with rough-neck sailors. Fine business, eh? Lot of drunken sailors, gentlemen of leisure. Well, you've stumbled on to the state secret. Periodical; got to have it just so often. You're right; keep away from it. It broke me; it '11 break any man in the end. You're a good sort, keep away from it. Periodical sot." Without troubling himself to undress, Camden flung himself into the bunk.
The labored breathing which immediately followed convinced William that there was nothing more for him to do. He gazed down with pitying contempt at the puffed face which alcohol had robbed of everything that made for good looks. He believed in personal liberty, but, on the other hand, he had no sympathy for booze-fighters. And so this was Camden's secret, a periodical boozer? William was familiar with the brand: they kept away from the stuff for weeks at a time, but when they broke loose they were beasts. So he was going as far as Aden with them, en route for China? Was this the beginning of the bat or the wind-up? Would the fool have brains enough to keep out of sight until he was sober?
William took an old envelope from his pocket and tore off the back. Upon the clean side he scribbled: "Keep your cabin until you sober up.—Grogan." He laid this in the middle of the floor, put out the lights, and went out, closing the door softly.
"A souse!" he murmured. "Pah!"
In his own cabin the patriarchs were sound asleep. Carefully he opened the port, for the cabin was stuffy.
"The old Santy Clauses!"
A pair of clean old sports, and he was going to miss them when they hiked into the deserts for their eternal tombs. That was the way with life; just as you began to grow fond of something it died or went away. … He caught his breath sharply. What a chance! To go with these two old boys into the yellow wildernesses, to play the game as they played it, to take his life in his palm for an idea that only a baker's dozen in the world would understand! Why not? What was there to hold him? Why waste any more time coddling a dream that was never going to come true? It couldn't come true; they did not live in the same worlds; he was only a rough-neck, even if he did let his hair grow down to his collar-band. … A torn photograph and a chamois bag that might hold diamonds and rubies and pearls—the price of what? God, how that hurt! … To go away with these two old codgers into the deserts—the Irish soul of him rose to this thought as a trout rises to the May-fly. But in through the port, out of the starry October night, there seemed to drift a plaint.
No. He had tied a burden to his shoulders, of his own volition, and he could not in honor lay it down simply because his heart ached. He stared through the port. What was she thinking of? What was she doing? Was she awake?
Yes, she was awake. The cabin was dark save for the bar of light that came in obliquely from the dock lamp. She was sitting up in bed. The bar of light fell upon her lap; and idly through her fingers trickled a stream of pearls. Over and over she gathered them up and poured them down, without, however, so much as a glance at them.
She could hear the regular breathing of the two spinsters who shared the cabin with her. Life! To some, great canvases; to others, slender little pastels that one tucked away in the corner as pretty but innocuous. Had these withered little old sisters ever been stirred, quickened, tempted? Had anything ever happened (aside from this wonderful voyage) beyond their garden gate?
By and by she put the pearls back into the chamois bag, tied the strings about her neck, and lay back, her eyes still open.
Camden stirred uneasily as the sunshine blazed into the port. He licked his parched lips several times with a tongue which was moistureless, then he opened his puffed eyelids, only to close them quickly. The light was like a blow. How his brain throbbed! The damnable thirst! He sat up, reached for the water-bottle, and gulped deep draughts of the lukewarm water. He fell back weakly, a fit of vertigo seizing him. … Still dressed, he sat up again and pulled out his watch. He had to close one eye to see the time. Ten o'clock; that would be three hours out of Brindisi.
He rested his head upon his knees and tried to think. How had he reached the cabin? Had some steward helped him down? He unbuttoned his vest and explored the inside pocket. It was empty. He lay back for the second time, exhausted. Feebly he pressed the electric button. "Tea and toast for a pick-me-up." He drank the tea greedily, but his gorge rose at the sight of the golden toast. If only he could pile into a hot salt tub!
"Steward, a hot salt bath; and when the tub is ready, come back and help me to it."
"Yes, sir."
Slowly and painfully Camden got out of the berth and stood up. Swaying and balancing himself, he took off his coat and vest and flung them upon the lounge. Next he took inventory of his pockets. Four louis, a twenty-lire piece and some small silver—all that was left of two hundred pounds.
"Damned fool!"
Two hundred pounds in three days, on riffraff he did not know, hangers-on at American bars, hotel gamblers, sailors' dives. God! hadn't he one shred of dignity left? Always the latest bout carried him into lower company, fouler haunts. All his good resolutions gone to pot!
The supreme agony came when he stooped over his shoes; and then he knew that this carouse was at an end. He noticed, as the second shoe came off, that the hem of the trousers leg was rolled up. He unrolled it, and a slip of white paper fluttered to the floor. He recovered it. It was a hundred-pound note. He laughed weakly. For the first time in his life, then, he had shown caution in his cups!
He was pulling on his bath-robe when he saw the torn envelope. His first impression was that he had discovered more money, something that had fallen out of his pocket the night before. It was merely William's contribution: "Keep your cabin until you sober up.—Grogan."
Grogan? Camden slowly made a ball of the note and threw it out the port. Grogan?—so the Irishman had piloted him down to the cabin? Camden sat down on the edge of his bunk and stared at the carpet. In this position the steward found him.
"Your bath is ready, sir."
"Thank God for that!"
William did not see Camden again until the Ajax dropped anchor in the basin at Piraeus. In Athens the man turned up perfectly normal except for a pallor which added to his manner a touch of scholarly meditation. Such recuperation was a clear sign to William that Camden's constitution was a tough one. Camden totally ignored the episode.
In Constantinople he put up at the Para Palace; and as this hotel was not included in Mr. Cook's itinerary, William saw little or nothing of him. William did not miss him to any considerable extent; yet, Camden was likable. He had been everywhere and seen everything, and he had imparted to William many a serviceable bit of information. There was only a grain or two of William's original dislike. The majority of these grains had been swept aside by Camden's apparent indifference to Ruth's charms.
The tourists remained four days in the city of pariah dogs; and William was more interested in the habits of these homeless animals than in all the mosques lumped together. The way the brutes had divided up the city among themselves was a whole volume on local politics.
On the night of the fourth day William decided to tempt fate once more. He wanted to prove to himself that the assaults in Italy had been acts of the Black-Handers advised from New York. Since Florence there had been no demonstration. If he could prowl about Constantinople at night without molestation, it would confirm his suspicions that outside of Italy he was immune.
He prowled through the city until after midnight, and nothing happened more serious than sundry snaps and curses from sleeping dogs and beggars. He had dropped his enemies down the horizon—a very comfortable feeling. In Smyrna he visited the dance-halls along the water-front. This, too, was barren of results, if you excepted an altercation over the price of the syrupy coffee. He was able to smooth out this difficulty by adopting the oldest-known method—he paid ten times too much.
It was in dusty, topas-tinted Cairo that he found the world he had been longing for, the world which had irresistibly drawn him out of the humdrum of drains and catch-basins. It was this strange, smelly, colorful Orient that his warm Irish soul was going to revel in, to memorize in detail.
The marvels of antiquity in Italy and Greece had scarcely scratched his soul, though he had not been impervious to the geographical beauties of these two countries. Besides, he knew Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, and Russians. Burns, Dolan & Co. stood in the center of their bakeries, their shoe-shining parlors, their curio-shops, their tonsorial palaces, their candy and fruit stands; types so familiar that he had long ceased to pay any attention to them. But now he stood upon the enchanted shores of Aladdin's country (or near it). William had read an innocuous translation of the Arabian Nights, and he would not have been astonished to see the djinn pop out of soda-bottles. The splendid bronze men of North Africa, with their brown, drab, yellow, and blue burnooses, their brown and white and green turbans; their thrilling kettledrums and reeds, their donkeys, their trains of pack-camels, their indescribably bewildering bazaars—his interest in these pictures was ecstatic.
He was one of the many millions who accept life as a series of pictures, impressionable most to those which do not conform with every-day routine. I repeat, what he knew of life had been hammered into him cruelly and unforgetably. To digress for a moment, Burke was Burns's favorite author. Over the office desk was a printed card. William could not remember it literally, but he had the basic truth of it. To quote William in preference to Burke: "Learning is a painful job; a whole lot of pains rammed into your coco whether you wanted 'em or not; and the more pains you could stand up under without throwing up the sponge, the bigger the know; and you could enjoy learning only when you'd digested these pains. I guess my brain, like my stomach, is built on the corned-beef-and-cabbage plan."
Therefore, his mental attitude was inclined toward such pictures as he saw in Cairo. When he read a book he took the story and stored it away; the useful or practical information made a negligible impression and was rarely serviceable. When he was somewhere around fifty his education would be complete—that is, he would possess an unlimited number of pictures, some of them badly done, some of them in outrageous perspective, and some of them so indistinct that he would remember them only as old masters.
But he knew how to love, which is my warranty for telling his story.
At Assuan he lost his two old archeologists. It was the first heart-tug he had known since his youth. There was something in his soul that went out to those old graybeards, something communicable but inexpressible, which his friends recognized in his hand-shakes and his blundering, lingering farewells.
"Sister, I hate to see those old geezers go. We rowed the first two or three nights, and I used to make fun of them; but after Gibraltar I got to loving them. Kind of funny, huh? An ignorant boob like me cottoning to a couple of book-sharks like those two. Search me why. Think of 'em starting out to-night, with half a dozen camels and a couple of umbrellas! I wish I'd had the right kind of start. I'd have gone with 'em, sure. And in three or four months little Willie Grogan will be back in his cellar. … No! What do you know about that? I'd forgotten all about my being a partner in Burns, Dolan & Co.'s But that was only Irish luck."
"Who was Praxiteles?" Ruth interrupted, whimsically.
"He was the Greek bootblack across the street from the shop. Aw! You know I'm not good at remembering those guys. I've enough names in my head to start a city directory, and all blamed strangers."
"I was only in fun. What do you care? You're learning something fine and splendid every day. It's only the pedant who could remember all those names and what they meant. Some day you're going to be all there is of the firm Burns, Dolan & Co.; and what's knowing Praxiteles compared to that? Did it ever occur to you that God has given you something which He gives to few scholars?"
"What's that?" eagerly.
"Some day I'll tell you."
"Eventually—why not now, as the advertisement says?"
"No." She spoke seriously and decidedly, for the reason that she herself did not know exactly what she meant.
"All right. So long 's it's good it 'll keep. But say," he added, with diffidence, "I forgot to tell you. You know that busy missioner who's always making himself chairman of the Doc Gloom Association when anybody starts a laugh?—the one that's going to Calcutta? Well, he had the nerve … You see, you and I've been going around together a good deal."
"What did he say?"
"Well, he asked me when we were going to get married, and I told him when I could patent a mouth-organ as good as his."
"You told him that?"
"Ye-ah. Of course I could have told him to go to hell," William added, gravely.
"You mustn't talk like that—you mustn't."
"I know it; so I didn't. But I thought I'd tell you, so if he speaks to you you can hand him a line of talk that 'll curl his Horace Greeley for him."
"You must learn to laugh such things away. But don't let that bother you. No silly thing like that shall spoil our friendship. Mercy! it's ten o'clock! time for me to go to bed. To-morrow we sail down the Nile. Isn't it wonderful! Good night."
William went into the garden for a cigar. His school-teacher could be very abrupt at times. He looked up at the sky and down at the river. The night was inexpressibly beautiful, but William's imagination took a mournful turn. Somewhere over there the two old codgers were hiking along, arguing, that is, if they weren't asleep. He had heard vague rumors of men sleeping on the backs of camels, but be doubted it; and he had excellent reasons for doubting it. Hadn't he ridden a camel out to Memphis and back and discovered a new set of muscles that clamored poignantly for recognition?
And this was the same little old creek where they had planted Moses in the bulrushes! Lately he understood why the Decalogue had been given to humanity. Nobody could live in Egypt without it, not if he went tagging around after a dragoman.
And it was strange that that old moon should be working with this old river long after the mold of ten thousand years lay upon his bones. What a speck he was!
"No silly thing like that shall spoil our friendship."
Well, after all, what more could he ask? Hadn't he put aside forever that magnificent but foolish dream? In this life the sensible person was he who, when he could not get what he wanted, took what was offered and made the most of it. Friendship? If only dreams had substance, and you could bury them and feel certain that they would stay buried!
When and where would he see that sleek yacht again?
Upon his return to Cairo William found a draft from Burns and a letter bristling with questions and warnings. Another letter informed him that his stolen letter of credit had not yet been offered anywhere, and that a new one would be issued not later than November loth and forwarded to any city he should designate. Upon the advice of the agent at Cook's he directed the bankers to forward the new letter to Rangoon. A hundred pounds ought easily to carry him to that city. This important business off his mind, he proceeded to enjoy himself with a thoroughness which generally left the girl breathless. It seemed to her that he did not know what fatigue was.
He ran amuck in the amber bazaars, purchasing amber beads, cigar-holders, and pipe-stems in bulk. He explained that he was going to give the beads to the little typewriter in the office, to Mrs. Burns, and to his landlady, and the smokers' articles to the boys in the shop and over at the engine-house.
He had picked up one phrase in Arabic: Ma andish fulus means "I have no money." He sang it in tenor, barytone, and bass. If an Arab politely said, "Salaam!" William would hurl his phrase into his teeth and pass on. Many reviled him for a dog of a giaour, but he brushed aside the curses as he brushed aside the flies, which was ceaselessly during the day. Unwisely, he had begun the first day in Cairo by giving alms. About three hundred beggars from the tombs of the califs now loitered on the curb opposite his hotel, and they loved him as the ladies in "Olivette" loved the whale.
The night previous to the departure for Port Said, where they were to go aboard the Ajax, Camden invited William to go to the Théâtre des Nouveautes, where three or four good boxing-bouts were to be held. William threw up his hat. After ten thousand painted saints, and as many cathedrals and tombs, this prospective entertainment was manna in the desert.
But, with the exception of five sovereigns to meet the expenses of the evening, he wisely turned over his money to Ruth ; and, ironical as it may seem, this very caution was the cause of his downfall.
"Don't go prowling around after your boxing-match is over," she advised. "This is the last night, and if anything happened to you you would miss the boat."
"I'll never miss it, sister; take it from me."
Camden announced, as they entered the theater, that after the bouts William would have to shift for himself. "I'm off for a rubber or two of bridge at Shepheard's; so you'll have to guide yourself back to the hotel. And remember the boat."
"I know the way," replied William.
William knew the return route to his hotel. But he who hesitates is lost, and on the way back William hesitated against his better judgment.
A man had followed him from the theater, and when William became detached from the crowd, the man approached him secretly.
"Would the American gentleman like to see the celebrated Cairene dancers?"
"Not at all," said William.
"Ah, but you do not see Cairo if you miss these dancers. If you have not been to Madame Rene's, you have not seen Cairo, sir."
William, recalling the twenty-one nationalities in the dance-halls of Smyrna's water-front, paused. Had he been carrying a large sum of money he would have gone on instantly. It was a questionable exploit; but, then, he was no prude. He recalled that only this very night Camden had spoken in regret of his inability to see some of the Cairene dancers this trip. William was out to see the world, and a Cairene dance-hall might as well take its place on the program in exchange for some future tomb or ruin.
"Lay on, Macduff; but I tell you what, if these dancers aren't up to the mark, I'll sic Thomas Cook on to you."
He was not very much impressed by the scene at madame's. It was sordid, and William did not like sordid pictures. The dancing girls were even less graceful than those ladies in Naples who danced the tarantella in the drawing-rooms of the hotels. Sold! He was certain at last that the skilled barkers at the side-shows home had been born and reared in this part of the world. He kept his eyes open, bought a bottle of cheap wine, but declined to drink it or touch the pasties laid out before him. When he looked around presently and found his guide absent, he got up.
Madame regretted that he was not amused. Nobody made the least attempt to stay him. Indeed, the dancers at once lost interest in him. They invariably lost interest in men who bought one bottle of wine and no more.
To reach Madame Rene's door you had to pass down a dark alley whose single illumination came from a wall-lamp at the corner. It was in this alley that William was struck down.