South of the Line/'—How the Other Half Lives'
"—How the Other Half Lives"
IT IS a disconcerting thing, when dressing for dinner, ;o find that someone has been watching you through the entire process. Mr. Mumpus jerked the absurd little curtain over as much of the open porthole as it would cover, and fell to doing the same thing with his hair.
As a matter of fact, and although he would not have had it known for worlds, Mr. Mumpus was not in the habit of dressing for dinner at all. He was a hack accountant, if you know what that means, and when his day's work of mental acrobatics was done, he was only too pleased to climb into a moth-eaten dressing gown and abandon himself to the production of uncertain noises on the clarionet, this being his only means of expressing what was in him apart from a mind like a ready-reckoner.
But on the S. S. Wykeba it was a different matter. He was on holiday, the first clean breakaway in his routine-sodden life. He had fallen for the cunningly devised announcements of the Phipps Gilroy Navigation Co. anent Island travel. He was "revelling in the romance of 'the Islands of the Blest'; witnessing the strange customs of a picturesque people; casting off for thirty days (and incidentally thirty pounds) the shackles of present-day civilization, and harking back to untrammelled Nature." Or so the announcements read, and who was he to argue the point? Had not the Wykeba touched at three separate South Sea Islands for not less than twelve hours apiece? Had he not witnessed a hula or a meke or whatever they called it, nauseated himself in an effort to drink kava, and bought a war club (manufactured in Sydney), and a rush basket of coral fronds that he had no notion what to do with when he had it?
And now the Wykeba was alongside Mahiti wharf. Mr. Mumpus had looked it all up. Mahiti was a French protectorate with twelve thousand inhabitants. Its chief exports were copra, pearl shell, and vanilla, and he was there for twelve mortal hours. What was to be done? According to schedule, and the dictates of an intensely methodical mind, he should go ashore and "revel, etc.," but for the first time on this epoch-making tour his spirit rebelled. He refused to do any one of those things that Messrs. Phipps Gilroy had mapped out for him. Instead, he would take his clarionet into the music room and get the rather dull little person in apparently eternal mauve "semi-evening" to play his accompaniments. She would do it. She seemed of the type that will do anything for anybody, and consequently receives little or no attention herself.
With this object in view, Mr. Mumpus pieced together his beloved instrument and tested the reed by playing the opening movement of a cavatina. During the pause that followed, a faint clapping of hands and a whispered "encore" came from behind the porthole curtain, and with a cluck of annoyance he drew it aside.
"Go away," he ordered severely. "D'you hear? Go" and there he stopped.
There was something in the little picture he had disclosed that gave him pause. It was beautiful, far too beautiful to dispel peremptorily. The porthole was level with the wharf, and as though in a dull gold frame an elfin figure reclined, its soft brown eyes fastened on Mr. Mumpus in a child-like stare of wonderment; while from out the background of velvet darkness came a medley of tropic scent and sound—frangipane, copra, and sandalwood, the ceaseless chatter of crickets, the patter of naked feet, snatches of song.
"What you want?" demanded Mr. Mumpus with a valiant effort at bêche-de mer.
The elf nodded at the instrument in his hand.
"Me like 'im," it solemnly averred.
"You do, eh?" A whim seized Mr. Mumpus. He knelt on the settee, and trilled a stanza from the "Mikado." "How's that?"
The elf wriggled its approval. Mr. Mumpus experienced the acute satisfaction of holding an audience in his hand.
"Ze 'Marseillaise'!" it ordered, beating its small brown fists on the planking of the wharf. "Ze 'Marseillaise'! 'E is ze day of France!"
And Mr. Mumpus found himself obliging with the utmost zest.
"Papa belong me 'im Frenchman," explained the elf with a touch of pride when it was done.
"Indeed?" murmured Mr. Mumpus. "And your mother?"
"Mama belong me Mahitienne. Them finish."
"Finish?"
"Mais oui, pouf! like zat."
"Indeed," repeated Mr. Mumpus sympathetically and for lack of something better to say. He still knelt on the settee, and contemplated at a range of perhaps twelve inches this diverting work of nature. It was apparently perfect. The hair was blue-black and of amazing length and richness, the teeth white and even, the skin a dull gold, the eyes—there was something in the eyes that vaguely disturbed Mr. Mumpus. They were essentially not of his world, but of another, mysterious, alluring, out there through the porthole. They caused him temporarily to overlook the fact that he was a hack accountant, much less an exemplary tourist already late for an exemplary dinner of frozen meats and tinned asparagus. For the first time in his life Mr. Mumpus obeyed impulse without question. Mechanically slipping a section of clarionet into either pocket of his "ready to wear" dinner jacket, he insinuated his meagre person through the porthole, and stood looking down on the elf.
"Now!" he cried with challenging abandon.
She took him to a shop across the way, and pointed out a perfectly preposterous mask of bucolic cheeks and elongated nose.
"I'mall right," she said judicially, and Mr. Mumpus bought it. What was more, he put it on, to the intense delight of his companion, and they set off into the town, as strangely assorted a pair as ever Mahitian moon has smiled upon.
Unquestionably it was the day of France. A band played somewhere. The flamboyant-bordered streets seethed with heterogeneous humanity—stolid Anglo-Saxons, vivacious Latins, Chinamen, Kanakas, and a blending of each too subtle for analysis. Carnival was in the air. No one cared, least of all Mr. Mumpus. No one knew him. He did not know himself. A solid handful of confetti caught him in the nape of the neck, and slowly worked its passage down his spine. A paper tongue, full three feet long, shot from out the laughing face of a passer-by and smote him on his false nose. This was too much. He bought a bag full of miniature bombs that exploded on impact, and used them with telling effect.
At a crowded café he ordered vin rouge and an omelette with the air of an habitué, and derived infinite satisfaction from watching a sprinkling of his fellow passengers looking bored and a trifle foolish in their bizarre surroundings. There was the ponderous lady in blue who at one time had no doubt possessed a voice, and her lap husband; also the young couple that had such an annoying habit of getting under foot on the boat deck of an evening; the Yankee inventor of an entirely new abortion in safety razors, and a successful composer who rendered life in the music-room unendurable with luscious ballads. They were all so obviously what they were, whereas he, Mr. Mumpus, behind his impenetrable incognito of vermilion pasteboard, might be anything—anything! Was he not sitting cheek by jowl with such romantic figures as schooner skippers, shellers, planters, adventurers? Their very conversation, heard in snatches and in conjunction with a second glass of vin rouge, held a mystery all its own—
"... too deep for skin diving ... yes, and sharks ... hear they've got compressors, up in the Straits ... forty-two fathoms, what d'you say to that?"
Or—
"We could get a court in behind the old vanilla."
"Wouldn't be enough run-back."
"Chop down vanilla. Must have a court ... put the boys onto it on Monday ... play you for that Passing Show record on Wednesday."
"That's a go."
"Here's how!"
"Cheer-o."
Or—
"Who's the gink in the proboscis?"
"Search me, but the kid's got him, anyway."
"May be one of them."
"Don't think so; Pete's watching 'em like a cat."
"But I thought Pete ...."
"Out a week ago ... kid can't shake him off ... too bad, but there you are...."
It was at this juncture that the elf seized Mr. Mumpus by the hand and literally dragged him into the street.
"Too much 'ot," she contrived to explain as they wormed a passage through the throng, yet it occurred to Mr. Mumpus that her hand was cold, deathly cold. "Ah Wong all right," she added, and steered him into a fetid haunt of fan tan and "dope" where they found a vacant corner of a battered settee.
Exactly why they had come there, Mr. Mumpus never discovered, for it seemed that he had no sooner taken in his surroundings of smoke, a Chinese banker by murky lamplight, wrangling humanity and the staccato click of counters, and was fairly launched on coffee, liqueur, and a freckled cigarette, than he was for some obscure reason wafted out of the place and across the street to the Palais de Dance.
The transition was a trifle sudden, but then so was the elf, and somehow it seemed to fit in with the generally kaleidoscopic nature of the evening's happenings. He could not play fan tan, neither could he dance, yet he found his arms encircling the elf, and his feet moving more or less rhythmically to the strains of a two-piece orchestra. In fact, it seemed to him that he was doing rather well. This, then, was dancing. He had no idea it was so simple—merely a matter of one two, and one two, so that it came as all the more of a shock when he found himself on a moonlit beach. They had evidently danced clean through the Palais, and out of the open door at the far end. The elf was rearranging his "made-up" tie that had an uncanny knack of standing on end. He looked into her upturned face, and fancied that he saw fear in her eyes.
But there was no time to make sure of anything in this fantasia that had caught him up like a whirlwind. They were off again, hand in hand along the hard wet sand, skirting the festoons of silver ripples, and sending the hermit crabs scuttling and crackling to their burrows. There was no sense to it all, no sense whatever, he reflected, and thanking Providence on that account, joined his raucous barytone to the elf's clear contralto as she chanted a meke to the moon.
At a place where coral mushrooms reared fantastic shapes out of the still waters of the lagoon, they cried a halt and, sitting side by side in the sand, Mr. Mumpus "by request" boomed the fine, round notes of his clarionet into the night, while the elf listened enthralled. She had never met such a man. Indeed, it was extremely doubtful if she would ever meet such another.
To Mr. Mumpus it seemed that he had never produced such exquisite sound. "Damon," "O Santissima," Raff's "Cavatina," floated in turn over the lagoon, and were lost in the distant thunder of surf on the barrier reef. He was as lost to the world as the great beyond.
He did not even notice when the elf left his side, and went to meet the slinking shadow of a man that approached them along the edge of the beach.
She stood before him when they met, her two hands at her breast, as though to ward off a blow.
"Well?" he said in French.
She did not answer.
"Well?" he repeated and, taking her two shoulders in his powerful hands, crushed them as in a vise.
"He is so small," pleaded the elf, her face twisted with pain, "and—and he has nothing—nothing—ah!"
"Then why...."
"I do not know," wailed the elf. "Pete, mon Dieu, stop! I do not know, unless—unless it was that." A note hung on the still air, a reed-like note that swelled and faded, and died.
The man turned his head in the direction of a grotesque figure squatting on the sand in the moonlight. Its profile was one of bloated cheeks and absurdly misshapen nose, and it swayed in rhythmic ecstasy.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Mumpus was in the throes of his favourite serenade, and nothing short of an earthquake would have disturbed him.
"Is he mad, or drunk, or both?" demanded the man.
"I do not know," repeated the elf dully, "but he is so small, so helpless—Pete!"
He flung her aside and took two strides toward the squatting figure, but only two. The elf's hand shot out and caught him by the ankle, spilling him to the ground, and a wild-cat, not an elf, was on his shoulders, raining blow after blow with a coral rock upon his head.
He did not move. The elf stood back panting, and viewed her handiwork. Still he did not move. Then she turned and ran, blindly, madly along the beach, a flitting figure in the moonlight that dwindled, and faded, and was lost amongst the palm groves.
And Mr. Mumpus finished his favourite serenade, and looked about him. The elf was gone. The spell was broken ... perhaps it was as well. He consulted his watch, the first sign of rational thought, and clucked in horror at the hour. It was nearly four ... and the Wykeba sailed at dawn ... and there was a hint of pallor on the horizon! He scrambled to his feet and hurried along the beach, passing within a few yards of an oblong shadow on the sand, until the dark bulk of the Wykeba loomed ahead.
But it was not until he emerged into the searching rays of the bunch-light at the head of the gangway, and the deck hand had at first stared, then grinned, that he remembered his incognito and snatched it from his face. He hung it on the same hook as the rush basket of coral fronds, lay smiling through the porthole for a space, and slept.