The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (14 page)

“Well,” said Coke, “ seems to me he is playing both ends against the middle. I don’t know anything about Nora Black, but-”

The three other students expressed themselves with conviction and in chorus. “ Coleman’s all right.”

“Well, anyhow,” continued Coke, “ I don’t see my way free to admiring him introducing Nora Black to the Wainwrights.”

“He didn’t,” said the others, still in chorus.

“Queer game,” said Peter Tounley. “ He seems to know her pretty well.”

“Pretty damn well,” said Billie.

“Anyhow he’s a brick,” said Peter Tounley. “We mustn’t forget that. Lo, I begin to feel that our Rufus is a fly guy of many different kinds. Any play that he is in commands my respect. He won’t be hit by a chimney in the daytime, for unto him has come much wisdom, I don’t think I’ll worry.”

“Is he stuck on Nora Black, do you know?” asked Billie.

“One thing is plain,” replied Coke. “ She has got him somehow by the short hair and she intends him to holler murder. Anybody can see that.”

“Well, he won’t holler murder,” said one of them with conviction. “ I’ll bet you he won’t. He’ll hammer the war-post and beat the tom-tom until he drops, but he won’t holler murder.”

“Old Mother Wainwright will be in his wool presently,” quoth Peter Tounley musingly, “ I could see it coming in her eye. Somebody has given his snap away, or something.” “ Aw, he had no snap,” said Billie. “ Couldn’t you see how rattled he was? He would have given a lac if dear Nora hadn’t turned up.”

“Of course,” the others assented. “He was rattled.”

“Looks queer. And nasty,” said Coke.

“Nora herself had an axe ready for him.”

They began to laugh. “ If she had had an umbrella she would have basted him over the head with it. Oh, my! He was green.”

“Nevertheless,” said Peter Tounley, “ I refuse to worry over our Rufus. When he can’t take care of himself the rest of us want to hunt cover. He is a fly guy-”

Coleman in the meantime had become aware that the light of Mrs. Wainwright’s countenance was turned from him. The party stopped at a well, and when he offered her a drink from his cup he thought she accepted it with scant thanks. Marjory was still gracious, always gracious, but this did not reassure him, because he felt there was much unfathomable deception in it. When he turned to seek consolation in the manner of the professor he found him as before, stunned with surprise, and the only idea he had was to be as tractable as a child.

When he returned to the head of the column, Nora again cantered forward to join him. “ Well, me gay Lochinvar,” she cried, “ and has your disposition improved?”

“You are very fresh,” he said.

She laughed loud enough to be heard the full length of the caravan. It was a beautiful laugh, but full of insolence and confidence. He flashed his eyes malignantly upon her, but then she only laughed more. She could see that he wished to strangle her. “ What a disposition! “ she said. “ What a disposition! You are not. nearly so nice as your friends. Now, they are charming, but you-Rufus, I wish you would get that temper mended. Dear Rufus, do it to please me. You know you like to please me. Don’t you now, dear? “ He finally laughed. “ Confound you, Nora. I would like to kill you.”

But at his laugh she was all sunshine. It was as if she. had been trying to taunt him into good humour with her. “Aw, now, Rufus, don’t be angry. I’ll be good, Rufus. Really, I will. Listen. I want to tell you something. Do you know what I did? Well, you know, I never was cut out for this business, and, back there, when you told me about the Turks being near and all that sort of thing, I was frightened almost to death. Really, I was. So, when nobody was looking, I sneaked two or three little drinks out of my flask. Two or three little drinks-”

“GOOD God!” said Coleman. “You don’t Mean-”

Nora smiled rosily at him. “ Oh, I’m all right,” she answered. “ Don’t worry about your Aunt Nora, my precious boy. Not for a minute.”

Coleman was horrified. “ But you are not going to-you are not going to-”

“Not at all, me son. Not at all,” she answered.

I’m not going to prance. I’m going to be as nice as pie, and just ride quietly along here with dear little Rufus. Only * * you know what I can do when I get started, so you had better be a very good boy. I might take it into my head to say some things, you know.”

Bound hand and foot at his stake, he could not even chant his defiant torture song. It might precipitate — in fact, he was sure it would precipitate the grand smash. But to the very core of his soul, he for the time hated Nora Black. He did not dare to remind her that he would revenge himself; he dared only to dream of this revenge, but it fairly made his thoughts flame, and deep in his throat he was swearing an inflexible persecution of Nora Black. The old expression of his sex came to him, “ Oh, if she were only a man! “ she had been a man, he would have fallen upon her tooth and nail. Her motives for all this impressed him not at all; she was simply a witch who bound him helpless with the pwer of her femininity, and made him eat cinders. He was so sure that his face betrayed him that he did not dare let her see it. “ Well, what are you going to do about it? “ he asked, over his shoulder.

“0-o-oh,” she drawled, impudently. “Nothing.” He could see that she was determined not to be confessed. “ I may do this or I may do that. It all depends upon your behaviour, my dear Rufus.”

As they rode on, he deliberated as to the best means of dealing with this condition. Suddenly he resolved to go with the whole tale direct to Marjory, and to this end he half wheeled his horse. He would reiterate that he loved her and then explain- explain! He groaned when he came to the word, and ceased formulation.

The cavalcade reached at last the bank of the Aracthus river, with its lemon groves and lush grass. A battery wheeled before them over the ancient bridge -a flight of short, broad cobbled steps up as far as the centre of the stream and a similar flight down to the other bank. The returning aplomb of the travellers was well illustrated by the professor, who, upon sighting this bridge, murmured : “ Byzantine.”

This was the first indication that he had still within him a power to resume the normal.

The steep and narrow street was crowded with soldiers; the smoky little coffee shops were a-babble with people discussing the news from the front. None seemed to heed the remarkable procession that wended its way to the cable office. Here Coleman resolutely took precedence. He knew that there was no good in expecting intelligence out of the chaotic clerks, but he managed to get upon the wires this message :

“Eclipse, New York: Got Wainwright party; all well. Coleman.” The students had struggled to send messages to their people in America, but they had only succeeded in deepening the tragic boredom of the clerks.

When Coleman returned to the street he thought that he had seldom looked upon a more moving spectacle than the Wainwright party presented at that moment. Most of the students were seated in a row, dejectedly, upon the kerb. The professor and Mrs. Wainwright looked like two old pictures, which, after an existence in a considerate gloom, had been brought out in their tawdriness to the clear light. Hot white dust covered everybody, and from out the grimy faces the eyes blinked, red-fringed with sleeplessness. Desolation sat upon all, save Marjory. She possessed some marvellous power of looking always fresh. This quality had indeed impressed the old lady on the little pony until she had said to Nora Black: “That girl would look well anywhere.” Nora Black had not been amiable in her reply.

Coleman called the professor and the dragoman for a durbar. The dragoman said: “Well, I can get one carriage, and we can go immediate-lee.”

“Carriage be blowed! “ said Coleman. “ What these people need is rest, sleep. You must find a place at once. These people can’t remain in the street.” He spoke in anger, as if he had previously told the dragoman and the latter had been inattentive. The man immediately departed.

Coleman remarked that there was no course but to remain in the street until his dragoman had found them a habitation. It was a mournful waiting. The students sat on the kerb. Once they whispered to Coleman, suggesting a drink, but he told them that he knew only one cafe, the entrance of which would be in plain sight of the rest of the party. The ladies talked together in a group of four. Nora Black was bursting with the fact that her servant had hired rooms in Arta on their outcoming journey, and she wished Mrs. Wainwright and Marjory to come to them, at least for a time, but she dared not risk a refusal, and she felt something in Mrs. Wainwright’s manner which led her to be certain that such would be the answer to her invitation. Coleman and the professor strolled slowly up and down the walk.

“Well, my work is over, sir,” said Coleman. “ My paper told me to find you, and, through no virtue of my own, I found you. I am very glad of it. I don’t know of anything in my life that has given me greater pleasure.”

The professor was himself again in so far as he had lost all manner of dependence. But still he could not yet be bumptious. “ Mr. Coleman,” he said, “I am placed under life-long obligation to you. * * * I am not thinking of myself so much. * * * My wife and daughter—” His gratitude was so genuine that he could not finish its expression.

“Oh, don’t speak of it,” said Coleman. “ I really didn’t do anything at all.”

The dragoman finally returned and led them all to a house which he had rented for gold. In the great, bare, upper chamber the students dropped wearily to the floor, while the woman of the house took the Wainwrights to a more secluded apartment., As the door closed on them, Coleman turned like a flash.

“Have a drink,” he said. The students arose around him like the wave of a flood. “You bet.” In the absence of changes of clothing, ordinary food, the possibility of a bath, and in the presence of great weariness and dust, Coleman’s whisky seemed to them a glistening luxury. Afterward they laid down as if to sleep, but in reality they were too dirty and too fagged to sleep. They simply lay murmuring Peter Tounley even developed a small fever.

It was at this time that Coleman. suddenly discovered his acute interest in the progressive troubles of his affair of the heart had placed the business of his newspaper in the rear of his mind. The greater part of the next hour he spent in getting off to New York that dispatch which created so much excitement for him later. Afterward he was free to reflect moodily upon the ability of Nora Black to distress him. She, with her retinue, had disappeared toward her own rooms. At dusk he went into the street, and was edified to see Nora’s dragoman dodging along in his wake. He thought that this was simply another manifestation of Nora’s interest in his movements, and so he turned a corner, and there pausing, waited until the dragoman spun around directly into his arms. But it seemed that the man had a note to deliver, and this was only his Oriental way of doing it.

The note read: “ Come and dine with me to-night.” It was, not a request. It was peremptory. “All right,” he said, scowling at the man.

He did not go at once, for he wished to reflect for a time and find if he could not evolve some weapons of his own. It seemed to him that all the others were liberally supplied with weapons.

A clear, cold night had come upon the earth when he signified to the lurking dragoman that he was in readiness to depart with him to Nora’s abode. They passed finally into a dark court-yard, up a winding staircase, across an embowered balcony, and Coleman entered alone a room where there were lights.

His, feet were scarcely over the threshold before he had concluded that the tigress was now going to try some velvet purring. He noted that the arts of the stage had not been thought too cheaply obvious for use. Nora sat facing the door. A bit of yellow silk had been twisted about the crude shape of the lamp, and it made the play of light, amber-like, shadowy and yet perfectly clear, the light which women love. She was arrayed in a puzzling gown of that kind of Gre- cian silk which is so docile that one can pull yards of it through a ring. It was of the colour of new straw. Her chin was leaned pensively upon her palm and the light fell on a pearly rounded forearm. She was looking at him with a pair of famous eyes, azure, per- haps-certainly purple at times-and it may be, black at odd moments-a pair of eyes that had made many an honest man’s heart jump if he thought they were looking at him. It was a vision, yes, but Coleman’s cynical knowledge of drama overpowered his sense of its beauty. He broke out brutally, in the phrases of the American street. “Your dragoman is a rubber-neck. If he keeps darking me I will simply have to kick the stuffing out of him.”

She was alone in the room. Her old lady had been instructed to have a headache and send apologies. She was not disturbed by Coleman’s words. “Sit down, Rufus, and have a cigarette, and don’t be cross, because I won’t stand it.”

He obeyed her glumly. She had placed his chair where not a charm of her could be lost upon an observant man. Evidently she did not purpose to allow him to irritate her away from her original plan. Purring was now her method, and none of his insolence could achieve a growl from the tigress. She arose, saying softly: “You look tired, almost ill, poor boy. I will give you some brandy. I have almost everything that I could think to make those Daylight people buy.” With a sweep of her hand she indicated the astonishing opulence of the possessions in different parts of the room.

As she stood over him with the brandy there came through the smoke of his cigarette the perfume of orris-root and violet.

A servant began to arrange the little cold dinner on a camp table, and Coleman saw with an enthusiasm which he could not fully master, four quart bottles of a notable brand of champagne placed in a rank on the floor.

At dinner Nora was sisterly. She watched him, waited upon him, treated him to an affectionate inti. macy for which he knew a thousand men who would have hated him. The champagne was cold.

Slowly he melted. By the time that the boy came with little cups of Turkish coffee he was at least amiable. Nora talked dreamily. “ The dragoman says this room used to be part of the harem long ago.” She shot him a watchful glance, as if she had expected the fact to affect him. “Seems curious, doesn’t it? A harem. Fancy that.” He smoked one cigar and then discarded tobacco, for the perfume of orris-root and violet was making him meditate. Nora talked on in a low voice. She knew that, through half-closed lids, he was looking at her in steady speculation. She knew that she was conquering, but no movement of hers betrayed an elation. With the most exquisite art she aided his contemplation, baring to him, for instance, the glories of a statuesque neck, doing it all with the manner of a splendid and fabulous virgin who knew not that there was such a thing as shame. Her stockings were of black silk.

Coleman presently answered her only in monosyllable, making small distinction between yes and no. He simply sat watching her with eyes in which there were two little covetous steel-coloured flames.

He was thinking, “To go to the devil-to go to the devil-to go to the devil with this girl is not a bad fate-not a bad fate-not a bad fate.”