Part 1

LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. =906= Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

A Devil of a Fellow and The Yellow Cat

Wilbur Daniel Steele

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS GIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright, 1918, By Harper and Brothers

Reprinted by Arrangement

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A DEVIL OF A FELLOW AND THE YELLOW CAT

A DEVIL OF A FELLOW

He had always been spoiled, by men, and especially by women. Even in the name they called him in Portuguese Old Harbor, down cape, there was a ring of irrepressible triumph--“Va Di! Va Di!”--as it were, “a devil of a fellow,” or “a gay bird.”

They had been dead for more than half a year, he and Stiff Peter--dead, that is, in the knowledge of the home world. And as befitting one out of the unknown, he returned more magnificent than ever, stepping down the fruit steamer’s plank at the Boston dock dressed in a suit of cream-colored flannels gotten in the tropics, between which and the pale block of the Panama hat above, his face showed more than ever swarthy, rich-toned, and clean-drawn, with its crisp black spurs of mustache breaking the line of either cheek, like a brigand on a poster. In his right hand he poised a slender cane, something he had learned in Port au Prince. Stiff Peter came behind, carrying the new straw suitcase, clothed himself in much the same sort of shoddy in which he and his captain had been picked up from the fisherman’s wreckage, seven months before, by a southward-going tramp. Stiff Peter was a small fellow; he had to look up to Va Di; had he had to look down to Va Di the world would have been quite inexplicable.

The pair stood outside the dock gates, staring about them at the heavy summer city, the venders of colored fruits, the hot blue Elevated trains thundering overhead, the ice-carts sweating long, cold threads across the cobbles.

“Here’s the country fer you, eh, Peter?”

Peter nodded, showing his bad teeth. “Betcha!”

The master pointed the tips of his mustache and smiled easily at a passing shop-girl. “Say, Peter, I a’most wisht now I didn’t send that letter home. Be some sport, now, coming ashore into Old Harbor, like a--miracle.”

“Betcha!” The little fellow grinned, thinking that would have been fine. “I wisht you didn’t, either,” he echoed. The fact that Peter himself had sent the letter, Va Di never having learned to read or write, did not obtrude itself upon either of them. Peter waited patiently, eyes on the cobbles.

“Well, Peter, we’ll see a night afore we go down home, anyhow. Wonder who’ll be to Schlinsky’s? Them boys off the fleet’ll be tickled to see me.”

“Betcha!”

Outside Schlinsky’s place they were confronted by a slovenly jointed man whose little, red-rimmed eyes seemed to be looking at ghosts.

“Thousand devils!” the fellow gasped in his long throat.

Va Di straightened the left lapel of his coat and flicked a damp curl from his forehead. No one enjoyed this sort of thing more than he.

“Hello, Costa! How’s fishin’--good? Any the boys done good this year?”

“But for Gawd’s s-a-k-e!” Costa stretched out an absurdly long finger to touch the flannel stuff. “And is that Stiff Peter?” His eyes wabbled about in a grotesque fashion. “Say, you fellahs is _drowned_!”

He closed his eyes tight and mopped the sweat from his brow with the back of a wrist. “I was onto the _Arbitrator_ myself las’ fall when she picked up your wreckage. Me and Tony Silva catched a dory-load o’ corpses ourselves. The hull o’ you’s got good granite stones up to the graveyard. And here you come tackin’ up to me in broad daylight.” He popped his eyes very suddenly at the conclusion, as if to give nature a chance.

“And you never _knowed_?” Va Di demanded, losing his dramatic composure.

“Knowed _what_?”

“Knowed we was picked up, me and Peter, and took to Brazil.”

Costa shook his head uneasily, still a little suspicious of them.

“But looky here, didn’t--Who was it I sent that letter to, Peter? Mamie Cabral? Say, man, didn’t Mamie get no letter offa me? Eh?”

“N-n-naw.” Costa’s face changed abruptly from pale brown to brick color and his unmanageable fingers fussed with his beard. “Mamie’s went--”

“_Went?_ Went _where_?”

“Nowheres. Only she went an’ got married.”

“Got _married_?”

“Got married.”

“Onto _who_?”

“Onto that old storekeep, Henny Lake--you know.”

“Old Henny Lake with the crooked leg? Looky here, Costa--”

Costa backed away a step, licked his lips, fumbled uneasily in and out of his pockets, and after a moment spoke in a voice unnecessarily loud:

“Come on up an’ have a drink, Va Di, old fellah.” He slapped the other on the back crying: “There’s other fish into the water, man!”

“You go straight to hell!”

Va Di stood for a long time after Costa had retreated up the stairway, scowling into the yellow sun of evening, his teeth playing with his nether lips, his hands tormenting the frail Malacca.

“They--they’s other fish into the water,” Peter stammered, desperate to shift the great man’s humor. Va Di wheeled with out-flung hands.

“Other fish! Well, I _guesso_. Mary Virgin! but I got a dozen girls in town, right here, better ’n that run-around slut that jumps after an old man’s money the minute I get out o’ sight. Fish? I _guesso_! Come on up, Stiff Peter. I’ll show ’em.”

He mounted the dusty stairs, with Peter sweating after him, and in the wide, many-tabled hall of the Jew, heavy with the arid lushness of a summer night in the city, he drank himself into a heroic insensibility, so that he had to be carried away to dark T Wharf, in the willing hands of the fish fleet, and dumped aboard a schooner bound down on the morning tide for the end of the Cape.

They opened the town around Long Point, a straggling arc of infinitesimal houses and wharves and spires, all colored alike in the sulphur fires of sunset, with here and there a gleam of clear flame refracted from a windowpane, a whole broadside from the cold-storage in the western sands.

“Seven month,” Peter mused, an eye cornerwise on the silent man beside him in the bows. “Seven month; and it’s like yiste’day--er mebby ten, twenty year, lookin’ at it another way, eh, Cap’n?”

“They’ll be took aback,” Va Di muttered, rousing himself from his sour preoccupation. “I’m goin’ to see the Silvado girls tonight, Peter. You watch their faces, now. Fish into the water--I guesso.” He fell into another silence, broken only by the faint rustle of the cutwater and the tiny crescendo of men’s voices as the bow gang straggled forward to make the anchor ready. The fleet at mooring drifted nearer, spiring purple on a mat of pellucid gold.

“I see Maya’s shifted his offshore trap,” Peter struggled patiently.

The tide was low when the dories came ashore, leaving a wide stretch of flats, soggy, half-reflecting. Two of the crew, to tell of it afterward, carried Va Di on their shoulders and saved his white shoes from the wet, their own boots leaving tiny lakes behind, full of yellow sky. A bare-legged girl with a clam-rake in her hand turned curiously as she crossed in front of them, opened her eyes wider, ran away blushing richly, the damp skirts flinging about her knees.

Va Di called after her: “Ai there, you Angie! You watch out for me.”

People began to come out on the stranded wharves; some padded across the flats, hallooing to one another. At the “rising,” Va Di kicked to be let down, and stood with the great hat held dramatically across his breast, watching the townspeople converging upon him. A party of summer visitors from the East End passed in a motor; one of them, a handsome woman of forty or so, smiled amusedly at the figure, flushed and tightened her lips as she found her smile returned with a shocking candor, made to pluck her companion’s sleeve, thought better of it, lowered her eyes to her lap, and so whirled on into nothingness.

“Le’ me alone,” Va Di cried with a sudden ferocity. “Peter, gi’ me that dress-suit case.” Grasping the shiny thing he wheeled and strode away into the mouth of a lane, leaving lips and eyes wondering behind him.

The day died very suddenly now. Passing beneath the willows that hung out of Ma Deutra’s chicken-pen, it was almost night already, cool and struck through with the acrid fetor of the roots; and when he came out beyond, the world’s color had changed perceptibly, its passion chilled by the faint white influence of the moon. Turning into the back street, he paused before a small weathered building with “Henry Lake, Merchandise & Provisions” lettered across the false front.

“Shut up a’ready,” he mused, with a hard-won sneer. “Stays home of evenin’s _now_--the old bastard. I’ll wring his dried-up neck--you watch.”

He moved on again, smoothing out his coat-folds and tipping the Panama further back and to the side, for he had to pass the house now. The perfectly inexplicable thing was that he should find himself so upset over Mamie Cabral--_Mamie Cabral_--a good-enough girl, but.... He walked along the white pickets of the fence, shoulders squared back, heartrending chin thrust forward in a heroic preoccupation, eyes fastened on the moon where Fergus’s willows chopped it into ragged white fragments. But, somehow, he could not get past the gate; he faltered there, set down the suitcase, and leaned his elbows on the posts.

Through all the years of his boyhood he had played around that house of Lake’s; later he had stalked past it going to or from his various vessels. And yet he could not have told any one definitely what it looked like. He retained a dim impression of a grape-vine, that was all. Now he looked at it for the first time with eyes of interest, intense glowering interest. The vine, shooting thick and rough from the ground near the front door and sprawling haphazard over the dimming whiteness of the walls till it came to the semi-restraint of a pergola, touched the man’s ponderous imagination and made him think of a snake, or a kind of guardian dragon.

“And them two are in there,” he mumbled to himself. “Into the dark.” He leaned still more heavily on the gate-post, his garments melting into the luminous streak of the fence, his dark, working face invisible against a further hedge, only that monstrous exotic bloom of a hat hanging in the dusk, air-sustained.

“Tony! Oh--Oh, Tony Va Di!”

The low cry came from the side of the house where a bay window sheltered beneath the vine-strangled pergola. Va Di stood up rigid, leaning slightly backward as if before a blow, his tongue running over his lips. He muttered, “Name of God!”

The cry repeated itself, half in appeal, half ecstatic.

“Ton’! Ton’!”

Opening the gate, careless now of who might see or hear him, he strode along the nasturtium-bordered walk and stood beneath the pergola, staring at the window slightly above the level of his head.

She was kneeling inside, so that no more than her head was visible against the interior darkness, and her forearms crossed on the sill, bare and brown and sweetly modeled. The last dim effulgence of the sunset warmed her right cheek, the other was chilled by the waxing power of the moon--like the two phases of a man’s passion. Neither seemed to have any words, save those scared, triumphant articulations of their eyes. So they gazed at each other for a long time, while the knotted shadows of the vine established themselves upon the ground and the house-side, austere and grotesque.

A slow bewilderment took hold of Va Di; something began to flutter in the back of his brain, an intolerable, weightless thudding, and the pupils of his eyes dilated curiously. He could not understand. He had an instinctive desire to huddle down or to turn and run away, as a coral-islander might feel, put down miraculously in the midst of the Himalayas.

“Where--where is he?” he whispered, by and by.

“He’s dead, Tony.”

“Dead!”

“Three days, Ton’.”

The man took off his hat and stared into it; vaguely astonished at a jewel shining on the brim, he raised his hand to find tears rolling out of his eyes. He had an almost uncontrollable impulse to pray.

“Old Lake’s dead,” he echoed in a shallow, vacant voice. Sluggish visions tumbled through his mind as he stared at Mamie’s dark, unmoving eyes.

“Wha’--what was ailin’ of him?”

“I killed him.”

The air about the open window grew dank and old, shot with a faint reek of never-opened rooms, unaired wall-paper, crumbs of funeral cakes and spilled wine, and a memory hanging about it of withered old dead limbs. Va Di shrank back till his shoulders touched an upright of the pergola. His face was yellow in the half-light and one yellow finger scratched a cross on his breast.

“You--y-y-you--”

“I killed him, Ton’--after I got your letter.”

If she would take her eyes away for an instant, then he could run.

“You--got it--then?”

She nodded slowly.

“I didn’t tell nobody. Why? I don’t know, Ton’. But then I prayed to all the saints that he would die, and to the Blessed Virgin, and even to Christ Hisself--and three days ago he fell off Maya’s wharf and drowned.”

“O-o-oh!” It was not tears now that wet his cheeks, but sweat, released suddenly from its pores. “They can’t git--you--for--_that_.”

“They can’t. _They_ can’t. No. But--”

For all the frightful, occult implication of her words, her eyes were still level and unfrightened, full of a deep, transfigured calm. Va Di could not live up to that; without ceasing he crossed himself and looked out of the corners of his eyes, as though fearful of beholding in that moon-checkered nook the form of a black, relentless priest.

“Oh, Ton’!” she called, softly. He had to look at her, and even the cold exhalations of the night light could not kill the color sweeping her cheeks. He became aware of her hand reaching out to him, wavering close before him; heedless of all things else, earthly and unearthly, he took it in his own and turned it over and kissed the palm--kissed it over and over again till it smothered him.

“Mamie!” he cried, searching her face with his reckless eyes. “You’re mine, ain’t you, Mame? Ain’t you?” He came nearer and stood on tiptoe to draw down her lips, but she went white at that and pulled back, fluttering her free hand over her bosom.

“Ton’--Ton’! Don’t! I--I ain’t--smart--Tony.”

He stood perfectly quiet for a moment, as it stuck there in stone by a flash of some Medusa-head. After a time, becoming aware that he still held the girl’s hand in his, he let it drop abruptly. He began working his lips, as if they were stiff from long disuse. His face was yellow and hard.

“The hell you say!”

Turning away, he walked around the corner of the house, a singular woodenness in his knees. But he returned immediately to lean against the upright and confront her with his blighted rancor.

“You didn’t waste no time, did you?”

She did not appear to have grasped it yet. Once again he flung off around the corner, and this time he did not return.

When he came into his own lane, gated with clumpy willows and at the further end fading out into the blue-white slope of a dune dotted with rubbish, he saw that the news had run ahead of him and all the neighborhood was out of doors in the dusty thoroughfare, shouting, sobbing, squealing. His mother lunged forward at sight of him, an old, ragged-haired woman, full of fecund years, tripping over the torn hem of her skirt.

Va Di glowered at her, holding her off with his strong hands. She had been handsome once too; even now there were fine foundation-lines which the folds of her cheeks, red and rutted like a rooster’s wattles, could not altogether hide.

“Ma!” he cried, of a sudden. “Ma, I’m back.” Folding her in his arms, he patted her back with a rough tenderness, and wept. Then all the others, who had come pattering, fell to weeping and screeching and pounding _him_ on the back. They got, finally, into the house, a bleak, tall, narrow structure with peeling clapboards without and a pervasion of linoleum within; into the kitchen, full of all the essentials of life, a stove, a pump, a lithograph of the Virgin, a mahogany wardrobe leaking cornmeal and onions, a phonograph, cot-bed, chairs, and a table.

Eight brothers and sisters had to be heard; a ninth came running from her husband’s house up-street, her stolid velocity not in the least hampered by the protuberance under her shawl, understood to be a nursing infant, miraculously adhesive.

“You’ll git the house painted,” she murmured, with a hint of severity, to Angelina, seventeen, and in high school.

“Yeh.” Angelina had thought of that herself, having callers.

His mother busied herself in an oily nimbus above the stove, frying a _linguisa_ and other things, watching her first-born all the while with convulsive tremors about her mouth which made her appear to grin, at intervals, idiotically. Va Di pounded the red table-cloth with the butt of his knife.

“Ma, git a move onto that. Ain’t I told you I’m hungry?”

“Well, ain’t I hurryin’?” The old woman made the _linguisa_ crackle by poking it with a knife.

Va Di rubbed the back of his hand across his lips and justified himself. “Well, I’m hungry.”

He ate in silence, only once raising his voice, and his hands, to bid the company be quiet. “You make me nervous,” he cried. After he had finished he got up and dusted the crumbs off his fine clothes, scratching an old spot with a thumbnail and rubbing it with his coat-cuff, ran a hand through his straight, black hair, and lounged to the front door. His mother called after him, with a curious cluck in her voice.

“Where you goin’, son?”

“Aw, see the town.”

But he got no farther than the step to the gate, where he leaned on his elbows and gloomed at the roofs across the lane. Curious ones passed, turned back, cleared their throats, and, seeing his face, did not speak.

“A kid,” he mumbled in his throat. “A kid off o’ that crooked-legged old sow.” And after another sour silence: “I never remembered what a good-looker she was. Say! And crazy about me. But.... Hell!”

The moon swam high over the end of the lane, filling the dusty passage with its effulgent silver. The clear notes of town hall telling eleven floated across the huddled dwellings, and Va Di, wondering at the hour, looked about to find all the windows dark in the lane, save one toward the street end where a mandolin twinkled an Island melody. A solitary figure moved in the vista, coming nearer, a girl, dark-faced and with her dark hair piled on either side of her ears, wearing a white linen skirt and a crimson sweater. Opposite Va Di’s gate she paused to kick a twig lying in the dust and discovered the man with a slight start.

“I heard you’re back,” she said, drifting easily nearer. “Glad t’ see you.”

The man smoothed his mustache. “Hullo, Mary! Didn’t ’spect to see me again, eh, girlie? How’s things?”

“Lookin’ up, _now_.” She leaned against the other side of the fence, smiling and fussing idly with her hair, her eyes lowered demurely. By and by she raised them, nonplussed by his failure to go on, and found him staring at the sky as if he had forgotten she was there. She drifted away, after a time, flinging her shoulders a little, and once looking back with a wounded, malignant expression.

Va Di shook himself and stared after her, moved by a faint sensation of regret. “I must be turnin’ foolish,” he muttered to himself.

For a moment he thought she was coming back, and straightened up with a not unaccountable thrill. But then he sank down again, recognizing old Baldy Minn by a faint flapping of soles, many sizes too large for her, on the dust. Baldy Minn had a wide, gelatinous person, forever billowing and breaking against the precarious dams of her clothing when she moved about; a silky gray beard blurred the contour of her chin; her small eyes floated in a brownish liquor, prying, inquisitorial, continually suspicious of women’s figures, seeming to say: “Mmmm--so you’re at it again. Don’t lie about it, because you can’t fool _me_.” A most horrible old woman. She came flapping through the moonlight and stopped in front of the gate.

“Ai, ai!” she greeted, in a strong, bubbly voice. “They telled me you’re back, Va Di. Too much f’ the devil, was y’u? Well, blessed saints take pity onto the maids, if they’s any lef’.... Is y’r ma up?”

“I dunno.” Va Di was a little afraid of this woman, and disliked her accordingly. “I’ll take a look,” he mumbled, after enduring her eyes for a moment. He turned to the door and called: “Ma! Hey there, _ma_!”

A sudden faint crash sounded from the other end of the house, as if some one had started out of a doze and knocked something over.

“Huh, Tony! That you, Tony?”

“A’right,” Va Di grumbled. “You c’n go in, Baldy Minn.... Say--” He peered at the bundle swinging in her hand, an old shawl full and exuding ragged ends of things. “Say, what you want, this time o’ night?”

The old crone turned within the entry and winked a leering eye. “That big kittle o’ y’r ma’s,” she bubbled.

“Oh! O-o-oh, I git y’u! Who is it this time, Baldy Minn?”

The woman grinned and flapped a hand at him with a horrible coyness.

“None o’ your beezness, _any_how.”

After a time, driven by an unaccountable restlessness, he moved into the house, felt his way softly along a wall, and stood in what had been meant for the dining-room. The air was heavy and sour with the sleeping of the three younger boys, but the door was open a crack into the kitchen, and in the lean, bright aperture he could see Baldy Minn’s face with all its dewlaps shivering.

“I knowed it all along,” she was saying. “I knowed she’d never carry it--ugh-ugh--not outa that old crook-leg.”

The boards groaned ever so slightly beneath Va Di’s heels.

His mother’s voice came through the crack, heavy with the burden of ages.

“I’ve hear of seven-monthers livin’.”

“I kep’ one myself.” The midwife’s lips sucked in and exploded with a suggestion of defiance. “Mis’ Deutra claims she kep’ one oncet, but she never. Sam Raphael’s boy’s a seven-monther an’ _I_ kep’ _him_, an’ don’ you let nobody tell y’u diff’nt, Annie.... But a six-monther--ugh-ugh. No.”

Va Di’s mother had borne sixteen and brought up ten. He heard her now, moaning gently through her apron: “Well, well, I don’t know--I don’t know.... I go ’long with you, Baldy Minn. Poor thing! Poor thing! I put my shawl, go ’long with you, Baldy Minn.”

“Naw; ain’t no need, Annie. I got Angie Bragg up there now, an’ Rosie Courier’s there, anyhow. Gimme the kittle. She ought to be comin’ ’long now. Rosie come down two hour ago.” She stood for a moment ringing the huge kettle with a thumb-nail. “Won’er what started her up. She ain’t fell or nothin’ I hear of. Well....”