Part 12

“Not I.” His head-shake was more vehement than mine. “But I want to be on deck if anything should turn up. I want to see it through. At least--I can’t quite see that I’ve the right to go out.”

I sighed. Chalmers had always gone his own way; and certainly in this greatest matter he would be tenacious, if ever. He seemed for the moment to have forgotten me, and sat once more, his arms folded on the table, his shoulders hunched, as beneath a burden, in the speckled brown coat, his head moving slightly from side to side--again fantastically like the tortoise that bears up the world. I didn’t quite know what to do with him.

Then a charitable impulse came to me. The bar, I knew, didn’t close until one. I ordered up a bottle of brandy. When it came I poured out enough to set the brain of any abstemious man humming. Chalmers was still staring in front of him at the table. I wanted him to sleep that night at any cost. Pursuing my impulse, I pushed the glass across to him. “Here; you’d better take this,” I said. He reached out his hand mechanically, and mechanically drank. I waited. The stuff had no visible effect on him. Five minutes later, I repeated the dose. As before, he obeyed me with a mechanical, an almost mesmerized implicitness. Then I took him home in a cab and put him to bed. I never told, myself, but it leaked out--he had such a bad hang-over--and I was much and enviously congratulated. You see, we had all tried, for five years, to get Chalmers to take a drink.

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM

It was like Hoyting to be lying up for repairs in Soerabaya when the Dorriens drifted by; like him to be there at the psychologic moment; like him, above all, not to follow up their trail for a solution, but to tack off into the China Sea to renew his acquaintance with belligerent Mongols. It was I, years later, at Marseilles, who supplied Hoyting with the last act of the play; and I can see his gray eyes narrowing above his glass of vermouth as, for once, he listened. I shall have to put it together as best I can, though I shall, as best I can, put Hoyting’s part of it in his own mouth. I’ve learned a kind of mental stenography by dint of listening to him; and though it’s unfair to quote a man inexactly, I’m not sure it isn’t less unfair than inditing Hoyting’s jerks and pauses, his zigzag structure. Some of the story, as I say, he got from me. That part--most of it--I’ll give you in the beginning. After that, if only for the sake of one or two of his own phrases, I shall make shift to let him talk as he talked to me. If I could reproduce for you that evening at Marseilles--Hoyting, his arms folded on the café table, paying out his story unevenly, as if in response to unseen strains and unseen relaxations at the other end--oh, as if Dorrien himself had been fitfully pulling and letting go; and then the sharpening of the eyes, the shrug of the great shoulders, when I told him the end--if I could, I might let it go at that. But you who know Hoyting will know that I had to shape it; and you who don’t might loathe the imperfectly visualized scene.

Science moves at an extraordinarily uneven gait. We laymen follow as best we can. I don’t pretend to make a history of medical discoveries, and poor Dorrien’s theories may have been exploded long since. The public knows only vain gossip of the laboratory’s “expectations” until the serum is born. I don’t even know how much he contributed, but I do know that at one moment terror-stricken multitudes were looking to him for help. He had been the last man, in college days, who seemed marked out for the work of discovery: easy-going, delighting in musical comedy, to which he listened with the least subtle laugh in the world. He married, at about thirty, the very worldly daughter of a public-spirited American family. There wasn’t anything for two centuries, from witch-burning to slave-rescuing, the Hewells hadn’t had their fingers in. The Hewell spinsters have always headed intense and short-lived leagues for the suppression of unsuspected evils or the maintenance of out-dated ideals. The Hewell men are bred to reform as the English race-horse is bred to the turf. Their marriages are apt to be bloodlessly tragic.

Agatha Hewell--that is, Agatha Dorrien--was a special case, very worldly, as I’ve said. She didn’t care for money, but she cared for fame, which meant, she had the sense to see, marrying a clever man. She made herself rather absurd, when she came out, by dashing at celebrities; but she also made herself popular with her contemporaries by letting the dancing men alone. When she married Dorrien, she seemed likely to eat her cake and have it, too; for he was young and good-looking, and there could be by that time no question about his ability. She and Dorrien both danced a good deal in the earlier years of their marriage. The serious Hewells approved of him none the less, for he had interested himself pretty constantly, since his Johns Hopkins days, in tuberculosis, which suited their public spirit admirably. The Hewells found campaigns rather nasty work, but they loved legislation, and Dorrien was always appearing passionately before boards and commissions, and getting “machine” mayors to lift the submerged tenth into so many cubic feet of air. He had always a natural leaning, though, it was interesting to recall later, to the maladies of immigrants; and Ellis Island had more than once summoned him. He chafed a little, in the end, under the vocabularies of boards and commissions, and I once heard him say that he’d be damned if he’d lecture again to any woman’s club, no matter if they built a sanatorium the next minute. He was flat against woman suffrage, and said so, but the Hewell aunts forgave him on account of his tuberculosis activity. They called it a crusade. Agatha said nothing.

Mrs. Dorrien was inexhaustibly pretty in a white and gold type, all purity and lustre; and she wore endless French tea-gowns, each lovelier than the last. They doubtless explained Dorrien’s sticking to his fat and fashionable practice when his desire was to this or that new disease out of Italy. Yet I’ve heard her take him lightly to task for letting the dust grow thick in his laboratory. She certainly didn’t think she wanted money. Nor, I fancy, in any bloated and disproportionate way did she. She was, as I say, ambitious--muddle-headedly, sentimentally, but incurably ambitious; and she seemed always, I’ve been told, to be watching his career in the hope of its suddenly flaring into the spectacular. It was she, I’ve also been told, who defended Dorrien from outraged Hewells when he broke entirely with official tuberculosis and turned his attention publicly to leprosy. There had been one of the periodic “scares”; some respectable artisan in Kansas City had developed it quite unaccountably. There was a good deal of the yellow peril in the yellow journals. They sent for Dr. Dorrien. I’ve a notion that the Misses Hewell were almost reconciled to him in that moment. Mrs. Dorrien did not go to Kansas City with her husband. She stayed at home, and explained to every one that leprosy was really becoming a public menace, that the danger should be considered, that steps should be taken, especially that research should be subsidized.

It had been a chance current that had swept me for a little into the Dorriens’ world, and my main stream of life soon swept me out of it. At the moment of my departure from America, the Kansas City scare was over, and Dr. Dorrien had still done nothing that one could legitimately present to one’s wife as spectacular. That was all I knew of them for years--until I knew the last. The last set us all to wondering, and by an odd chance I once wondered aloud before Hoyting. “Oh, the Dorriens? Yes, of course, the Dorriens. I knew them.”

That was all, and it sufficed. Whatever Hoyting knew was sure to be the right answer. It would take too long to expound Hoyting to those of you who don’t know him. Those of you who do will understand my faith. He’s like nothing so much, I’ve sometimes thought, as a badly tinkered craft plying between obscure and unsafe ports. Sometimes he carries junk, and sometimes treasure; you never know beforehand. But I always bargain for the cargo. Hoyting has wandered so much: the mere dust on the crazy little capstan may have blown from some unpronounceable paradise. He doesn’t always know, himself; he “steams for steaming’s sake,” Hoyting does. Somewhere inside his lurching bulk is an inexhaustible hunger for life, which has made of two hemispheres an insufficient meal. For some of us he’s an unfailing cache in the desert. Provided he has had life at first hand, the jackals are welcome to do the rest. So I had only to wait my moment. In Marseilles, that haven of ships, Hoyting’s tongue would be loosed. I should not have to wait long.

* * * * *

“Vermouth,” said Hoyting; “yes, just vermouth. I always did like Marseilles. Full of people who really want to get somewhere, and know how to go, and don’t talk more than is necessary. Brindisi’s disgusting. I never touch Brindisi if I can help it.”

“The Dorriens.” I held him to his promise.

“Oh, the Dorriens. Yes. Funny, the kind of thing a woman who looks like that is sometimes willing to muck about in. She seemed like a good sport, too. Ever been in Turkestan? I suppose not. If you go to places in this world, you haven’t time left for anything else. So very likely you never saw a Kirghiz nomad hunting on horseback with a golden eagle on his wrist. Using it like a falcon, you know. They go after wildish game--wolves and such. Ripping. But not very practical, after all. Mrs. Dorrien was a little like that. She was ripping, too. But I’ve always had a notion that Dorrien might have had better hunting with almost any other kind of woman.

“I don’t understand modern medical science--scrapping with ultravisible germs that good may come. Blood is different: when you see that, it’s your business to stop it anyhow. A flow of blood is the devil at war with man. You know it instinctively. I myself don’t hold much with anything that doesn’t come by instinct. And as for deciding things by theory! There wasn’t a mouldering idea any one had held since the Christian era that Mrs. Dorrien didn’t drag out of its grave to get help from. That was the trouble: all the mouldering ideas were knocking about together in her mind. And therefore, exit Dorrien.

“Do you know Soerabaya? No? It was there I saw them. I had known Dorrien long ago somewhere. There wasn’t much of any one else in that crazy thing that called itself a hotel--kept by a Portuguese Jew named D’Acunha. It was in the town, mind you, not in the suburbs, and the guests ran accordingly. Very good drinks, and plenty of mosquito-netting, but everything else in the place that mosquito-netting wouldn’t keep out. Mrs. Dorrien always dressed for dinner, I remember. Dorrien wasn’t happy. She had come to please him, though just why to Soerabaya I never made out, and was always reminding him of it, and he wasn’t pleased. They had left the little girl at home, and I dare say the mother wanted to get back to her. She kept saying she was afraid Aunt Emma wouldn’t have Virginia’s teeth properly straightened. Wonderful thing a woman is! Lizards climbing all round over the walls, and the eternal promise of a snake coiling up on the tail of her dress, and she’ll look past it all with her far-sighted eyes and say she is afraid a safe little kid at home with steam-heat and a governess isn’t having her teeth straightened.

“I didn’t come in on the Dorriens’ affairs at all at first, you understand. I was there on my own business, and I supposed they were. At least I supposed he was. I never could see what she got out of it: I’ll swear she never looked at scenery, and there wasn’t anything in the mucky little bazaars she wanted. Apparently they had no letters to European residents; or if they had, they didn’t use them. If ever a woman wasn’t meant for the tropics--” His voice trailed off for a little, then boomed out again, softly resonant, like a ship’s gong going intermittently somewhere beyond in the offing. “I admired her more than a little. But I saw that Dorrien had no show. Women are apt to shout with the majority. How is a husband going to be a majority, if he takes a line of his own? Oh, Dorrien was down and out from the start.

“They must have been worrying along in Soerabaya for two weeks. I think Dorrien stayed on like a cross child who knows he’s got to go home. He drags at his nurse’s hand, and asks questions about every object they pass. He wasn’t interested in the place, but at least it wasn’t a P. & O. port. He saw perfectly that the next stop would be. If I had had him alone, I could have amused him. Dorrien was the sort that finds an absorbing interest in native--eh--customs, and that sort of thing. But his wife naturally didn’t care about--sociology. She wandered around under the teaks and tamarinds, waiting for his last shadow of an excuse to fade out utterly. When he couldn’t chuck the bluff any more, she’d have him, and she knew it. She’d march him home.

“I myself didn’t quite know at first why Dorrien wanted to stay out there. One would have to have more general curiosity than the Dorriens appeared to, in order to find Soerabaya interesting. I knew that if his wife weren’t along, he’d drag me into every kind of native dive; but I knew, too, that he hadn’t come for the dives. He didn’t seem to be very much in love with the place. Who could be? He swore at everything, beginning with the monkeys and ending with the prices. He just didn’t want to go home--as if he knew he’d be put to bed in the dark and have to go to sleep, when he got there. Queer guy! You remember how big he was? He had a trick of looking round any room as if it were too small for him. And that voice of his, with never a modulation, and those red-brown eyes that seemed to take in everything and give back no comment? Then, one night, I thought I had struck it. He came across to my corner of porch about midnight.

“‘My wife’s gone to bed, and I think she’s gone to sleep,’ he said. ‘There’s no sleep in me, and I shall swear at the lizards if I turn in. I should wake her. You know what these fool partitions are. Let’s talk. You never have anything to do.’ It wasn’t very polite, but it was quite true. I haven’t anything to do except see what things are like. When I’ve made an exhaustive study of all the degrees of civilization, I’m going home to vote. I don’t see that, until then, I’m equipped to.

“‘All right,’ I said. ‘I never sleep, I never write letters, and I never criticize. Go ahead.’

“Odd thing: that happened to be just what he wanted--to ‘go ahead’ indefinitely. I learned a lot of things about Dorrien that night. I made out from his talk that he must have mucked around a good deal with tuberculosis at home, but he’d dropped it. He told me some queer things about tuberculosis germs, but he had got tired of it. Exotic diseases were more in his line. He asked the most extraordinary number of questions about beri-beri and things like that. I never quite understood it all; but I think the commonness of tuberculosis bored him. The antipodes take men’s imaginations in different ways--who should know if I don’t?--and they had simply taken his, across all the world, by their physical malignancies. He didn’t give a copper cash for what you folk call psychology, but his brown eyes used to rake the meanest little streets in Soerabaya for any sign of disease. It might have been unpleasant if he hadn’t been such a loud-voiced, businesslike chap. If you ask me, I should say he had come to the East just as a sportsman goes to Africa for big game. There’s good hunting in Canada, I’m told, but some people want to hunt hippopotami just because hippopotami have such queer complexions. Dorrien could get interested in what the human body is capable of, regardless of unpleasantness. But he could as well have stayed at home and stuck to cancer, if he had wanted mere unpleasantness.

“‘The only thing I know anything about is leprosy,’ he said, that night, after a lot of queer talk. I very seldom argue; I just smoke and wait. You’ve _got_ to assume that people know their own business best. Dorrien had run down to Molokai while his wife stayed in Honolulu. I’ve never been there myself. He told me a lot about it that same night. He wasn’t romantic _pour deux sous_, Dorrien wasn’t; but he talked about it as if his heart were in it. I remember an old missionary chap who went on in the same way about the Fijis. Not that Dorrien held with the missionaries; but they both spoke with passion--as if sin and disease could draw men like lovers, panting with blind desire, sheer across the planet, just to help, and then die. Men will go out and overturn the stew-pots, and preach vegetarianism to cannibals, and go into the stew-pot themselves in the end, who couldn’t stand a week of Salvation Army slum-work. Dorrien was something like that, only with the idealism left out. He seemed all passionate perception, like a child. Yet somewhere in him was that thin little adamantine streak of pure intellectualism. If it hadn’t been there, he’d never have held together at all: there _must_ have been something inflexible for all that clay to mass itself upon. And so he somehow cared, when it came to leprosy. I suppose, some time or other, the thing had baffled him--tantalized him like an unscrupulous woman.

“It’s no use saying, ‘Why didn’t he love elsewhere?’ He happened not to. Meanwhile his wife was taking him home to a fashionable practice which he was sadly endangering by absence. And there were the little girl’s teeth, you see. There had been some excuse of a holiday combined with study of special conditions in the Orient, but all excuses had expired. He was facing a P. & O. boat, and he was just sparring for time. It was all rather a mess, as I had learned by three in the morning. But it distinctly wasn’t a mess that an outsider had anything to do with. To tell the truth, if Mrs. Dorrien hadn’t seemed such a good sport, I’d have had more faith in him; but who can ever tell? He left me finally and went to bed, and the next day Mrs. Dorrien went into the town to look up steamer connections while he made up sleep. At least, that was the account she gave.

“I went off into the interior for a few days; pretended I was going to look up a lot of ruins that, of course, I’d seen before--tombs of Arab priests and such. The hotel had got on my nerves, and the suburbs, full of Europeans, were even less what I was looking for. Besides, the Dorriens weren’t my affair; yet Dorrien was beginning to clutch me as if they were. I wouldn’t run away from any solitary creature, either man or woman--and I’ve been in some strange galleys, too--but when it comes to man and wife, ‘_ruf’ nicht die Polizei_,’ as the Germans have it. The Dorriens looked to me pretty near the breaking-point. I hoped they would either leave or have it out before I got back. When I got away, I forgot about it. I’m foot-loose, and nobody’s business is really mine. Fancy being responsible to and for a white-and-gold creature like Mrs. Dorrien! The very thought of it makes you want to take ship.

“That particular interior wasn’t much good--eternal rice-fields, and little villages, one just like another, full of little people. The vegetation was something you couldn’t dream, even on hashish, but I’m dead used to vegetation. I nosed around for a few days, and then decided to quit the island entirely. I had engagements elsewhere, if I chose to think so. Anyhow, I wanted something doing. So I went back to Soerabaya. You get boats from there all over.

“They said at the hotel that the Dorriens were leaving the next day. I didn’t look them up; but when I came down to dinner, Mrs. Dorrien was in her place, waiting for her husband. She beckoned to me and smiled, and I had to go over, though she looked more like a Frenchwoman than ever, and I was more a sweep than usual. I had to go; but I went thinking what a damn subtle thing marriage is at home, and how glad I was to be single. There are other sides to it, of course; but that’s the permanent one. Think of being married to a woman who would dress like that for an undercooked, half-caste dinner in a steaming Soerabaya hotel! Think, that is, of what she must be like at close range. She made me sit down.

“‘We are leaving to-morrow, Mr. Hoyting.’

“‘Sorry.’ I couldn’t screw out more.

“‘Yes. We’ve had our mail. We have to go.’ She straightened her shoulders and swept the room with a bored look, as if it were a ballroom full of men who danced badly. I didn’t know whether she was lying about the mail or not. I never get letters, thank God! I haven’t any address. What was certain was that I did not want her to tell me what was in their mail. I sidestepped.

“‘I don’t suppose Soerabaya will soon see the like of that dress again, Mrs. Dorrien.’ It _was_ the most civilized thing I’d seen in a long time, though of course I don’t frequent table d’hôtes in most places. Anyhow, you know how colonial Dutch women get themselves up. ‘Aren’t you afraid the lizards will spoil it?’

“‘This rag?’ The ‘rag’ was gold-colored, as she was, and her laugh clinked like gold. ‘I shall give it to the stewardess if she is half decent to me. We shall have to stop in Paris on the way back. I haven’t had so much as a new _sarong_ since we left America. My clothes are faded, tattered, fly-blown, tarnished with the sea.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Is it really so long since you’ve seen a well-dressed woman? Surely in India--’ That was the best she could do for badinage, and she looked uneasily towards the door as she spoke.