The love line

by H. de Vere Stacpoole

The Love Line

By H. De Vere Stacpoole

Author of “The Beach of Dreams,”
“The Man Who Lost Himself,” etc.

 

A story of two men and two women.

 

THERE’S a thing not marked on any map,” said Tyrebuck, “and that’s the Love Line. North of forty-five degrees people don’t know anything about love—no more than they do about mangoes. I mean the real thing, the thing that makes folks dig knives into one another and poison their rivals. North of forty-five degrees Cupid goes about with cold feet, in a Burberry, with an account book. South of it he goes about naked with a dagger.”

James Mason got up and fetched down an atlas. His rooms at Prince’s were furnished quietly but with an eye for effect and with excellent taste, which he had full liberty to indulge.

Old Peter Mason supplied the money. He made it out of esparto grass and paper mills. He regarded Cambridge as a sort of mill for the manufacture of gentlemen and didn’t bother about the expense nor about degrees. James would have plenty of money. He was a good-looking boy with a level head and the gift of speech, and when Cambridge had finished with him he would marry well and go into Parliament, maybe. He did not know that his level-headed son had engaged himself to marry a tobacconist’s daughter in the Petty Cury, a rather good-looking, but rather bilious-looking girl, older than himself and with an impossible father. And he had done this in his second year and no one knew, not even his closest friends.

That was the worst point about James; he had done the business like an old hand in folly, and with the craft and precision of legerdemain and with the secrecy of a sharper, yet his intentions were as honorable as the promises of Mr. Bradbury, and his passion for Jane Hogg as genuine as the passion of Romeo for Juliet.

It was the vision of Jane that made him contest Tyrebuck’s dictum.

“Venice is north of forty-five degrees,” said he, looking up from the atlas.

“And Venice is a sewer,” said Tyrebuck, “and cold as charity in winter—and gondolas and guitars and the lies of poets aren’t what I was meaning. You must go south, my boy, to find out—travel.”

“I will some day,” said Mason, little dreaming how near that day was to him, “but at the same time, and with all due deference, I believe you are talking through your hat. Daggers and devilish southern tempers don’t spell love, any more than gondolas and guitars and the lies of poets. Give me a straightforward English girl, be she ever so humble——”

Then Count Janis strolled in with a couple of other men. Cards were produced and Tyrebuck, who had no taste for gambling, took his departure.

Janis was an “out-coll” man, one of the foreign brigade, an Austrian nobleman with rooms in Hill Street and a big pile of debts. At cards, when he lost, which was seldom, he gave checks on the Crédit Lyonnais. He was reckoned wealthy, but the university already had its eye on him.

He had developed the gambling instinct in Mason. It was another bad point about James that, though he was credited with the taste for a game of cards, no one suspected the big sums he had lost, or the extent to which this disease had laid hold upon him; and another point not altogether rosy was the size of his wine bills contrasted with his almost untarnished reputation for sobriety. He scored by rarely cutting chapel, by holding aloof from rags and bonfires and such frivolities, by his manner, at once self-respecting and respectful when confronted with authority, and by the quietness of his staircase. When the junior tutor was kept awake of nights by the uproar from Huntingdon’s rooms above and such choruses as:

“Then up I came with my little lot
And the air went blue for miles”

he could not but contrast it with the peace of Mason’s rooms below, where, nevertheless, the brandy was quietly going its rounds and the cards being dealt.

Then, one night, about a fortnight after Tyrebuck’s discourse on latitude forty-five degrees, the smash came.

II.

It was eleven o'clock, a full moon was shining on the quad and peace reigned over Prince’s. Huntingdon was out or asleep, and the junior tutor was in bed reading Joseph Hocking.

Suddenly, from the rooms below, came sounds of uproar. Now these sounds, coming from the rooms above, would have been natural; coming from the rooms below they were suggestive of fire or catastrophe of some sort.

The junior tutor, seizing a dressing gown, descended, wrapped as in a toga, knocked at Mason’s door, received no answer and entered.

Mason, Janis, a man named Lomax, and a Pi man by name of Fairbanks were disclosed, standing and fronting Marcus Leaf of Peter’s, a pallid-faced pseudo-gentile, son of old Moses Leaf, the carpet manufacturer.

And Leaf was shouting, “Four hundred pounds you’ve got out of me in the last week, may I die if you haven’t—and the cards marked—marked, so help me! Swindlers!”

This in a haze of cigarette smoke, cards, brandy bottles, counters and money on the board, and the Pi man not improving matters by an attempt to get under the table.

The junior tutor was a man with a big under jaw. He had been captain of the school at Bradley and he could tolerate Huntingdon’s gayety and condone rags—but this!

Janis he knew, and Lomax he knew, and Fairbanks he suspected—but Mason! He swooped, collected the cards, heard Leaf’s story and duly presented it next morning in the council chamber of the president’s lodge, where Mason was arraigned before the president, the bursar, and the dean.

And the curious thing was that though Mason was innocent of swindling, Lomax and Janis being the real criminals, the greater fury of the storm fell on him. He couldn’t quite clear himself, and his excellent past became an accuser. He had been leading a “hidden life.” He certainly had, as far as Miss Hogg and cards and brandy were concerned, but when he looked back as he did that evening, seated alone in his rooms and waiting for the verdict of the authorities, it seemed to him that he had concealed nothing and that he was the innocent victim of other men’s faults, the sport of fate and the football of the gods.

In a way this was so, for that week old Peter Mason had incurred large money losses over a speculation in wood pulp, and the telegram that brought him to Cambridge brought him primed like a gun.

He put up at the Bull, received the sentence of the university on James—rustication only, as the marked cards were proved to be the personal property of Janis—and had an interview with the president of Prince’s. Then, like a business man, he went into accounts and the terrible pile of bills unpaid. The tradesmen had got wind of the mischief.

“Is this all?” Peter had asked of his son when he had examined the last bill. “Yes,” James had said, “that’s all, I believe.”

Yet an hour later a tradesman arrived in person, who had been sent on from Prince’s to the Bull and who bore in his hand a bill for sixty-five pounds, fifty for a lady’s gold wrist watch and fifteen for a lady’s brooch.

Then a scene ensued, the incommunicative James suddenly disclosing a concealed manhood and a temper on all fours with Peter’s.

“Who is the hussy?” demanded Peter. “Don’t dare to answer me, sir; don’t dare to excuse your conduct. Who is the hussy?”

“The hussy, as you call her, is the girl I’m going to marry,” replied the other, “and her father is a tradesman, if you want to know more, and as good as you or me. What are we but tradesmen?”

He left the room without waiting for a reply, left the hotel, and walked off down Trumpington Street. He felt elated with that false elation which comes from alcohol or sudden release from mind strain. He had cut free from everything and fate could do no more—so he thought—and there was nothing left to be discovered. For the last six months he had always feared the discovery of Jane Hogg by his father, and time and again the faint prompting had come to him to make a clean breast and tell the old man of the engagement, knowing full well that the storm which would arise over Jane, produced openly, would be nothing to the hurricane over Jane accidentally discovered. He had even thought of marrying her and producing her married. But Jane, when the thing was suggested to her, absolutely refused. She was not going to be married in any hole-and-corner fashion, but married like a lady; openly or not at all. Hers was, no doubt, the type of love referred to by Tyrebuck when he spoke of a burberry and an account book. Well, he had produced her openly at last, the worst was over. He would marry her openly.

In his frenetic state of mind he scarcely remembered his financial position and leaving Trumpington Street he made for the Petty Cury.

Five minutes later he was in the Hogg back parlor, fronting Jane across a table adorned with a flower vase placed on a Berlin wool mat, and Jane, pale and with red-rimmed eyes, was saying, “What have you been doing?” The Hoggs had heard. The bedders and college servants of Prince's had spread the news in a distorted fashion, and old Hogg, a well-to-do and sensible man who had never approved of his daughter flying higher than her fellows, had been “rubbing it in” all the morning.

“It wasn’t my fault,” said James

He explained so clearly and with such evident honesty that she believed. Janis had let him in for this, she saw that clearly enough, but the strange thing was she seemed to feel no anger against Janis and no commiseration for James.

“Does your father know?” asked she.

“He’s here,” replied James, “and I’ve told him about you!”

“And what did he say?"

James was dumb, but his speechlessness was eloquent.

It was then that old Hogg entered.

The funny thing was that James owed the old man over twenty pounds for cigars. He had forgotten this debt.

“I want to have a word with you, Mr. Mason,” said Hogg.

He was quite respectful, but firm. It didn’t do any good girls marrying above their station; he had always said that; he had seen it over and over again.

“Nonsense,” said James. “You are just as good as we are.”

Well, maybe—but what about Mason’s family, how did he stand with his father and what would his father say to the idea of his marrying Jane?

It was here that Jane cut in with the information that James’ father was staying at the Bull.

“Then I’ll go and see him,” said Hogg. “I’ll go right now.”

“No,” said James hurriedly, “you mustn’t do that.”

“Then,” said Hogg, “it’s all off between you and Jane—and I’ll ask you to take your leave and not see her again.” He suddenly waxed warm. “And it’s not only that. I’ve heard of what’s been doing at Prince’s. I don’t blame nobody, but there it is. I must ask you to take your leave and not see her again.”

“Jane, how is it to be?” asked Mason, turning to her.

Jane broke into tears and ran from the room.

“You've broke her heart,” said Hogg, “but that’s better than ruining her life—— I tell you straight I don’t want to have no more truck with you, neither me nor she. I was always against it.”

Five minutes later James found himself in the street, feeling like a man who had fallen downstairs. That night, having borrowed some money from Tyrebuck, he started for London. Arrived there he took rooms, and lost no time in writing a long letter to Jane. It was promptly returned by Hogg. Then a fortnight later, finding the situation impossible, he made peace with his father, and these were the terms of peace as dictated by Peter:

“You have had your chance and thrown it away and disgraced yourself. I'll have no more of Cambridge, but I'll make you an offer. The Tangye Company want a man to handle their work at Sarafax. The business is easy and any fool can do it, but it’s a post of responsibility. You can talk French and that’s the main thing. If you go there for a year and make good, then I'll see what I can do for you. If you don’t, then I disown you! I give you five minutes to make up your mind!”

“I’ll go,” said James wearily, “I can’t do anything else.”

III.

Mail boats don’t run to Sarafax, only freighters to unload Manchester goods and hardware and other products of the west, and to take on esparto grass and great bales of dates and hammered copperware and carpets. There is no harbor, the cargo being taken ashore and brought off in boats manned by plum-colored men, half naked, and with eyes screwed up against the blaze of the blue Mediterranean.

Mason took passage on the Thirlwall, a seven-hundred-ton Black Star boat with a rust-red funnel. The sight of her lying in Cardiff docks with the hatches open and the cargo winches roaring nearly drove him back to London.

Once at sea, however, he began to forget things and to pick up his spirits. The bay was a flat calm and Gibraltar stood guard of a blue summer sea that seemed to deepen in color each day. They passed Oran and Algiers and Tunis, and left the lights of Tripoli behind them under a night of stars, till, one afternoon, the pounding of the propeller ceased and the anchor fell, while the Thirlwall swung to the current off a heat-hazy coast where the date palms showed above the sea shimmer and the shore line of creamy foam.

Amid the date palms a giant seemed to have emptied a box of dice and above the cubes, all huddled together, showed the minarets of a mosque.

That was Sarafax.

Shore boats were pulling out and among the others a boat in whose stern sheets sat a man dressed in white drill and wearing a sun helmet. This was Logan, agent of the Nipal Date Company which had also an interest in tobacco, madder, and castor oil.

Logan was a pale-faced man with, habitually, a cigarette between his fingers. He spotted Mason at once.

“You the new man for the Esparto people?” asked Logan.

“Yes,” said Mason.

“Well, I’ll take you ashore with me,” said the other. “Ringwell, the man whose job you’re taking, couldn’t come off, he’s dicky—I said I'd look after you. Wait a mo’, I have two cases of whisky on this hooker and I must clear them.”

Then, when the whisky and Mason’s luggage had been lowered, Mason said good-by to the captain and officers of the Thirlwall, and followed the other into the boat.

Logan held the yoke lines and in a tongue foreign to Mason gave directions to the rowers.

“You’ll soon pick up the lingo,” said he, “and you’ve got an interpreter for the business till you do. Ringwell will be all right to-morrow and able to ‘put you wise,’ as the Yankees say, before the Thirlwall starts. He’s due to go by her, but she'll be lying here another three days. Liver, that’s what he’s got. Liverish place, Sarafax.”

They were coming in, now, toward the sheeting foam, and he half stood up as he gave his directions to the rowers. The boat hung for a moment, then seizing her chance she came on a glass-green roller and was seized and rushed beyond wave reach by the waiting Arabs.

The sands off Sarafax seem an outcrop of the desert that lies behind the town, the same color, the same desolation; they are mournful, despite the sun blaze and the blueness and noise of the sea, and on days of perfect calm when the sea just lips them they are more mournful still.

Logan, followed by porters carrying his cases and Mason’s luggage, led the way.

The old town wall has long gone to ruin but the part near the sea gate still stands, almost as it stood in the days of Barbarossa.

They passed the gate and entered a street, and to Mason it seemed that the gate had closed behind him shutting out the West forever. For this was a street of the Arabian Nights, less a street than a bazaar, squalid, brilliant in the afternoon sun, colored with the colors of the East and completed by a line of camels stringing in through the desert gate from the limitless, mysterious country beyond. A street without a pane of glass, a street without house windows, a street of dazzling light and hat-black shadows, a street where a thousand blazing years have baked the color of the sun into tile and brick and to which the caravans had brought their goods in the time of the Sultan Selim, camel after camel, with bales of goods and bearded merchants, brothers and images of the traffickers of to-day.

They passed along through a crowd where the Levantine, the Spaniard, and the Greek mixed with the Arab and the Jew, a crowd topped with the turban and the fez, scented with garlic and Oriental tobacco and original dirt, all blending and mixing with the wind of the desert and the perfume of camels.

“Here’s your place,” said Logan, stopping before a doorway in a blank wall. “Ringwell has got a room for you and when he goes you can have his apartments. An old chap called Succi owns the house; he’s a cigarette maker, got a booth down the street and rolls cigarettes all day—but he’s rich. Wait a minute.”

He sent the porters with his cases to the house where he lived and then they entered the house of Succi, a porter following with Mason’s luggage.

The house of Succi like all the houses in Sarafax, had an inner court upon which all the rooms opened and a terrace on top which gave a view of the desert and the sea. The place seemed as desolate as a barn and Ringwell’s rooms, when they reached them by going up a flight of stone stairs, struck a chill into the heart of Mason.

Colored prints torn from La Gaudriole and Spanish illustrated papers and stuck upon the walls were the only artistic adornment. Old steamboat deck chairs, native mats and brasswork, and a table laden with tattered books and empty cigar boxes, the furniture.

Ringwell was lying on his bed in the room that served as his bedroom. He was a man of forty or thereabouts, used up by four years of Sarafax, sun, and sirocco.

IV.

Ringwell three days later departed with the Thirlwall, and Mason found himself alone to face the world and make good in a town where lying is a virtue, robbery a trade, and assassination by poisoned knife or coffee mixed with finely chopped hair, an art—one of those passionate arts that flourish only in the sun.

Having been “put wise” to the tricks of the Esparto trade by Ringwell, he managed to hold his own in business. During the first few weeks, getting a grip of things and fitting himself to this new environment, time passed quickly. Then came the reaction. When the novelty had worn away, the reality of life in Sarafax began to appear before him in all its truth. This strange, new-colored environment was unsympathetic to his mind and antagonistic to most of his desires and opinions. The mornings were bearable; the evenings, passed mostly with Logan and the two other Englishmen who lived in Sarafax, endurable, but the afternoons were terrible. He tried to sleep in the afternoons, but he knew not the art of the siesta. His mind was too active; and after half an hour of semi-drowsiness he would rise from the bed and go out into the street, or seek the roof terrace where there was generally a breeze. From here one caught a glimpse of the dun desert to the south and to the north a,glimpse of the Mediterranean, now polished like a glittering shield in the flat calms, now like a tray of smashed sapphires under the breeze, while, between the desert and the sea and all around, the rooftops of Sarafax lay in the baking sunlight girdled by the changeless palms.

To complete all things would come the voice of the muezzin from the minaret of the marabout-haunted mosque:

“Allah il Allah—God is Great.”

Clear sometimes, sometimes dimmed and half blown away by the breeze.

When they did not meet at the Café Abesslem, Logan would come to his rooms and they would drink gin and smoke and yarn; and Mason, when sometimes half fuddled, would talk of “that girl.” He had told Logan the story of Jane Hogg. He kept her photograph and letters in an old biscuit tin to protect them from the black ants, and one night he showed them to Logan. He was no longer really in love with Jane, and in his right mind he rarely thought of her. It was only when he had taken a few glasses of gin—the gin they sell in long stone bottles at Gibraltar and the Mediterranean ports—that her image returned to him. Logan was not interested, though he pretended to be. Logan had only three interests outside his business: whisky, cards, and love-making. It was not long before he got Mason on to cards and after a while it became a common occurrence for Mason to take a hand at a game in the back premises of the Café Abesslem. Logan, Abesslem, the proprietor, a gentleman with a beard of burned-up black, and the two other Englishmen in Sarafax formed the rest of the circle.

Logan was bad. Loneliness had attached him to Mason and was the real bond that united them. but despite loneliness and the desire for company with another of his color and kind, Mason recognized the fact that Logan was bad and a man to be avoided, recognized the fact without acting on it. He had not stamina enough to stand apart, to work out this trial trip that old Peter Mason had imposed on him, alone. So he forgathered with Logan in the house of Abesslem, and drank with him in the house of Succi, and discovered one day that Logan came to see him very often not on his, Mason’s, account, but on account of Giovanna Succi, the daughter of his landlord.

Now this girl was a most astonishing figure, quite unique, even in that town of strange figures, Sarafax. She was beautiful. Born of a Spanish mother and an Italian father her beauty was a blend of the characteristics of each race. Her dress was fantastical, almost a little mad, yet perfectly completing her strangeness, from the brooch that held her robe at the bosom to the horn-handled dagger stuck in her belt.

Mason had often passed her coming in or going out, yet he had never saluted her. She held herself quite apart from the lodgers of the house as though she were ashamed of the fact that old Succi let apartments, yet she knew Logan. Logan had repeatedly tried to make love to her. He might just as well have tried his attractions on the Sphinx. With an intuitive knowledge of men she despised him, yet she never repulsed him, accepting him as one of her numerous admirers, nothing more.

She made lace for amusement as well as profit, and in her spare time she would spend hours in wandering alone on the sands. The sea fascinated her and though the sands of Sarafax have danger spots where underlying springs make them unsafe, she walked free of danger, her knowledge of the place and her quick eye protecting her, just as her dagger and her knowledge of the dangers of Sarafax protected her in the town.

Mason, while admiring her, never dreamed of admiring her as a girl. She seemed a being not only of another race, but of another century, and there was something about her that almost repelled him. This vague repulsion came, perhaps, not from herself so much as from her attire, so outré and bizarre. The little dagger, the silver bangles on her arms, the brilliancy of her robe; all seemed to him stagy. Correctness still clung to him as well as the Englishman’s horror of things not quite correct, and thus it came about that while Giovanna never spoke to him, he never wished to speak to Giovanna.

Did she find this out by instinct, and was her pride touched by the fact that she, who had only to whistle to be followed by every man in Sarafax, was, yet, an object of no interest to the stranger? Or was it his good looks? No one can say, but the fact remains that one day in passing she turned on him the blaze of her eyes.

Mason was just entering the house when this thing took place; he was depressed by losses at cards on the night before and by the heat of the day, but, as he went up to his rooms, cards and everything else were forgotten, forgot ten as completely as they would have been had he stepped into one of those quicksands on the beach.

That night in the Café Abesslem, in the back room where a Sudanese boy served absinth with sirup of gum and colored, sticky drinks, and where Abesslem with a Minghetti cigar between his thick lips dealt the cards, Mason, in splendid good spirits, played high and—won.

He had got himself into very low water, but the winnings of that night recouped him in part. It was almost as though the dark gaze of the woman had brought him luck.

Next day she passed him without a glance. For two days he did not see her. Then one day, as he was lighting a cigarette in the inner court, a rose fell from the gallery above right at his feet. He glanced up and saw a hand on the gallery rail suddenly withdrawn and heard a faint laugh. Then he ran up the stairs.

That was the beginning of his love affair with Giovanna Succi.

But do not for a moment imagine that he had it all his own way and that Giovanna’s rose was the ambassador from a conquered city. He had caught her fancy, nothing more, and when that day in the gallery he had tried to kiss her, she drew back and her hand went toward the hilt of the little dagger that was not worn for ornament alone.

Giovanna was not the woman to have a lover, and though old Succi spent his days in rolling cigarettes and his evenings in counting up his money, and though he frankly let lodgings, he and his daughter held themselves high, disdained the Levantines and the Jews and the Tripolitans, and looked upon the Arabs as dust beneath their feet.

There are primitive and most curious social circles in Sarafax, and there are no shades of morality. There is only morality, pure and simple, or abomination. Love with Giovanna meant marriage, and this fact was very presently engraved upon the mind of Mason, as was also the fact that to carry on a flirtation with this strange being would be a business fraught with danger. But these considerations and forecasts had no power to deter him. He was in the grasp of elemental passions stronger than the powers of mind, and of an art old as life and exercised unconsciously by the medium that had him under control.

She evaded him; sometimes for days he would not see her, then he would meet her and she would give him a flower or a glance or a few words—she spoke French—and perhaps the next time she would pass him with scarcely a word, as though he had in some way insulted her.

His mind was in a perpetual ferment. He told Logan, he showed Logan a flower she had given him, and Logan, to whom she had never given even a word of encouragement, looked at the flower and laughed. Laughter with Logan was never an indication of joy.

So it went on till one night on the terrace of the house, under a sickle moon, Mason coming up for a breath of air found Giovanna gazing at the half-seen sea. They spoke for awhile of indifferent things and then there was a silence, and then, without a word, she was in his arms, and for the first time he knew what life meant as he held her with the wind of the desert blowing her hair across his face.

Ah, that night! And the night that followed when they met again on the lonely terrace, with only the moon and the stars to watch them swearing eternal love, swearing one to the other that neither had ever loved before, making plans for the future, vague as the plans of children, clasped together as though by the warm arms of the night.

And then, next day, meeting her in the inner court, she flung something in his face, spat a word of hatred at him, and vanished.

He picked up what she had thrown at him. It was the bundle of letters and the photograph of his first love.

When his reason returned to him as he sat, ten minutes later in the Café Abesslem, before a marble-topped table and a glass of absinth, he came on the idea that it was she who had found these letters secreted in the tin box in his room. She must have entered his rooms and searched about; there was no one else possible. The old Arab woman who cleaned the place, and brought him his coffee was his friend. He had done her many a kindness and she knew nothing of his love affairs. No, there was no single person who could have done this thing but Giovanna—and she had a reason, a low-down reason. She wished to pry into the affairs and past life of the man she loved. This thought, this knowledge—for he looked on the thing as assured—almost destroyed his passion for her by half turning it against her. It was the measure of his power for real love that he failed to refuse the idea as monstrous and to seek elsewhere for a solution. Then he might have thought of Logan, Logan who, in fact, had done this thing under the whip of drink and thwarted passion. He had taken the letters from Mason’s room, presenting them to Giovanna and affirming that he had picked them up in the courtyard. Each letter was in its original envelope with Mason’s name upon it, and Giovanna knew enough English to understand what each letter meant. There were twenty and they covered twenty weeks—and he had sworn that he had never loved another woman.

As Mason sat sipping his absinth Logan entered the café, looking white and shaky. Logan had a profound and intuitive knowledge of women. Some men are like that. Perhaps they have been women themselves in some recent, previous incarnation. When he had given Giovanna the letters that morning his head had been still full of the fumes of last night’s alcohol, yet clear enough to be able to reckon what Giovanna would probably do. She had done it.

His first glance at Mason told him that. He sat down at the same table, called for an apéritif and Mason brought out his story.

Logan, with his ten and sixpenny Panama on the back of his head, listened. He did not inwardly exult; the affair, accomplished, seemed pretty flat. She had fired Mason, but that did not bring her any closer to him, Logan, and now that Mason was fired, jealousy no longer existed, though ready enough to spring to life again if she were to relent.

They had dinner together at the café and Mason unconsciously took his revenge on Logan by boring him to death with his talk.

Then, in the back room with the cards on the table, Mason, to avenge himself on Giovanna, played high and lost—lost more than he could afford to pay. He returned home under the moon that was now more than a sickle and, stumbling up the stairs, threw himself on his bed.

He did not see Giovanna next day and the following night he played again heavily, and lost and paid his losses. But he paid them with the money of the Tangye Company, money due for bills and wages, money that was not his own.

He awoke next morning to this fact. Two thousand seven hundred francs was the amount he had had in hand yesterday afternoon and every centime had belonged to the Tangye Company. His salary was not due for another three weeks and that week-end he would have to pay over a thousand francs to meet business engagements and wages. He had lost nineteen hundred francs. There were left eight hundred. He could not meet the week-end engagements. The bills were overdue and there could be no extension of credit, and the wages were imperative. He had three courses open to him, suicide, another try for luck at the cards, or flight. He could get away, perhaps, on one of the trading ships lying at anchor off the shore, or he might get along the coast, disguised, and reach Alexandria. With eight hundred francs he could do a lot.

If he tried a last cast with luck at the cards, he might lose everything and then escape would be impossible. On the other hand he might gain enough to save himself.

Suicide he quite ruled out.

All that day he fought out the question in his mind, luck calling him to try once again, fear warning him of the consequences. Early in the morning he had drawn the balance to his credit from the Crédit Lyonnais and he had it in his pocket in gold ready to throw it into either gamble. He lunched at the café with Logan who, noticing his curious manner, put it down to the affair with Giovanna. As a matter of fact Giovanna and all things about her were of little concern to Mason now, with prison his major consideration and his mind oscillating between methods of escape.

After luncheon he went and sat on the old town wall in a corner of shadow, with the desert before him shaking in the sunshine and stretching away and away south, east, and west. It was here, sitting alone, that self-pity seized him. It seemed to him that his past held nothing but one long conspiracy conducted by viewless powers against himself. What had he done wrong with the exception of this last act, which was less an act of his than an act of madness, owing to his treatment by Giovanna? Nothing. At Cambridge he had had no hand in the marking of those cards; he had played for money, but lots of other men did the same; he had fallen in love with a girl beneath him socially, but his love had been honest and honorable; he had never wronged a single person—yet now he had come to this. Why?

He reasoned it out with himself, or tried to. It was not his fault. Whose, then? It was the fault of circumstance and the women. But for the business of Jane coming on top of the gambling affair, old Peter would not have exiled him to Sarafax. But for Giovanna he would not have destroyed himself by play at the Café Abesslem. There were parallelisms between his Cambridge life and his life here that seemed to mark distinctly the hand of fate—cards in both places had helped in his undoing, and as though fate were not above a grim bit of humor, the woman in each case was the daughter of a tobacco seller.

When evening came on, he returned to the Café Abesslem and dined; then he left the place and walked down the street toward the desert gate.

It was now that the battle between the two alternatives, cards or flight, really began. To play hard and high and risk everything to gain everything, or to slink away defeated but still with eight hundred francs to help him in escape.

To lose was to be absolutely cut off and ruined; to win was to be saved. His fingers clutching and turning over the gold pieces in his pockets seemed endowed with thought. They kept telling him: “These, these alone can save you.” And again: “Without these you are destroyed.”

At the desert gate the wind told him that even now the card table was set and that time had suddenly become a factor in the business. Then, all of a sudden, as though the wind of the desert had brought him strength, he came to the grand and heroic determination. He would chance everything on the cards, make one bold bid for life and freedom. With the decision, it seemed suddenly revealed to him that all his failures and his present situation were due to the fact that he had never yet acted on his own determination and initiative; he had always been a marionette worked by pleasant things and other people’s wills; he had always chosen the easiest course.

Well, this was not an easy course. The idea of this tragic gamble was hateful to him, yet he determined to engage in it, fling the gauntlet in the face of fate and stand or fall by the result.

He turned and came back along the street, thronged, now, with the evening crowd. As he drew near the Café Abesslem he increased his pace. As he drew closer, his fingers tightened on the gold pieces in his pockets. He clutched them as a man clutches a life buoy, his will or what seemed his will crying to him: “Cast your life buoy away and swim to your salvation; it’s your only real chance, your only real chance.”

Yet, at the supreme moment, he couldn't.

He hesitated at the doors of the Café Abesslem and passed on.

He reached the sea gate and passed through it; reached the sands, those dangerous sands where even Giovanna would have been wary in the light of a half moon. He had three days before settling day at the end of the week, and the hunt would not be after him till then, so he reckoned, and in three days he would be amidst the crowds of Alexandria, where, as a stoker on board a ship, he could get safely away.

He struck east, leaving Sarafax forever.

V.

It was not till noon next day that Giovanna learned of Mason’s disappearance. The old Arab woman told her that he had not slept in his room, also that she had seen him last evening walking away from the sea gate toward the sands.

Giovanna was a creature of intuition. A shiver ran through her at the words of the old woman. Still passionately in love with Mason, despite the rage of jealousy, the idea that some ill had befallen him paralyzed her heart. She went up to his room.

Mason had torn the letters and photographs across and thrown the fragments into a brass bowl standing on the floor. She saw them, picked them up, and examined them. Then she threw them back into the bowl. She knew, now, that the other woman was of no account to him and, jealousy banished, she stood gazing about the empty room and thinking. He loved her. He had been driven to despair by her action. He was dead. These were her thoughts. He had left Sarafax last night, and wandering about distracted on the beach, had been swallowed in one of those quicksands ever ready for the unwary. There was no other explanation of his failure to return. He was dead. She knew it. And her action had killed him,

She stared dry eyed at the fact. Then she left the room, and leaving the house took her way through the sea gate to the sands.

There was no ship in the anchorage to-day. The ships that had been here yesterday had put out at dawn, and the sands east and west lay desolate, flown over by gulls, and trembling beneath the warmth of the sun.

It was here that the vision of Logan came to her, the man who had inspired her to strike the man she loved. Logan had done this thing, really, and he had done it to spite the man who had been his friend. Logan and Mason had always been together, and the perfidy of Logan stood like a nimbus around his act. She had not seen it before; jealousy had blinded her.

She walked toward the east, for it was toward the east that the danger places were worst. She noticed them. Any of these might be the grave of her lover. Even in daylight they might have taken him, let alone vague moonlight, for they were all but indistinguishable to any but her eyes and the eyes of the Arabs and the few fishermen who used the place, nothing but a slight change of color marking the spots where underground springs made the sand treacherous as liquid mud.

Mason did not return that night and next morning Giovanna again sought the sands, the sea wind blowing her black hair and pleating her crimson robe. It was the dress she had worn on the day when she flung the letters in his face. It was hateful to her; that is perhaps why she wore it. She came here as if to walk with the ghost of her dead lover. She rarely spoke now with the townspeople, yet, all the same, rumors came to her that he had left the company’s debts unpaid and that he had lost all his money at cards at the Café Abesslem just before his disappearance. These rumors did not disturb her faith in his love for her; they increased it. He had gone, wrong because of her, because of her treatment of him, because of Logan. Logan had led him to play. He was one of the Café Abesslem crowd.

One day, leaving the sea gate for the sands, she passed Logan and in passing she gave him a glance.

He stopped dead, paused for a moment and then turned and followed her.

The anchorage was empty of ships to-day, the sands were deserted, and the sea came creaming in, showing a long line of foam, white as the gulls blowing about under the sapphire of the sky.

She seemed, without turning her head, to know that she was followed, for she increased her pace so that when Logan, his heart leaping in him, drew up to her, they were a mile away, beyond view of eyes from the town that lay in the burning distance—alone with the gulls, the wind and the sun.

The rumor of the waves and the perfume of the sea filled the air. To the right lay the desert with its stone outcrop and its vast spaces of sand, a few lone trees, and far away, small as flies, a line of camels passing east along the old caravan road that leads from Kassaba Zargha to Alexandria.

As he came close he called to her and she turned her head. Then joined her and they walked together.

It was the first time he had got her alone, away from every one. He fancied that the affair with Mason had left her ready for his advances, out of pique, if for no other reason, and that burning glance she had given him had disturbed his mentality like absinth.

He was silent at first and then when he began to talk his voice trembled like the voice of a nervous girl. As he grew bolder the hot words came ringing and full of passion. He had loved her for more than a year. She must have known it. He was ready to die for her His dream was to live for her and work for her—he was due to leave Sarafax in six months—her eyes followed him waking and in sleep.

She listened, looking over the sands where Mason had met his doom, drawn to it by two women and by himself.

Then as they walked she picked up two shells, one purple, one pale.

“They will tell me if you speak the truth,” said Giovanna. “It is the Arab way. By which you will bring me back, I will know whether what you say is from the heart of men’s lies.”

She cast the shells, one after the other, far across the sands. She had chosen her spot.

Logan laughed. He knew that Arab idea of the pale shell and the purple shell chosen in the dark, and he knew that the purple shell was the lucky one. He imagined that she thought him ignorant of the fact, else she would not have given him the choice in daylight. He exulted in the idea that luck had dealt him such a good card and he determined to pause as if undecided as to his choice when he reached the shells.

He did not know that she had thrown them over the bottomless pit.

He started running, and as he ran, suddenly he stumbled as a man stumbles whose foot is caught in the kink of a carpet, and carried forward by the impetus he was suddenly engulfed to the knees. He turned with a violent effort to reach back to firm ground and the effort sunk him to mid-thigh.

She stood watching, motionless as a figure of bronze. She saw his arms cast out toward her and heard his cries. A down-swooping sea gull passed over him and he clutched at it though it was yards and yards above his head. And now the sand had taken him to the armpits. He no longer cried out.

She drew closer. Nothing now remained but the head and arms, the head thrown back like the head of a man luxuriating in a bath. The liquid sand poured into the open mouth despite the efforts of the fingers to empty it. Then the sand covered the eyes and hair. Nothing was left now but the hands, almost black. They vanished, mysteriously drawn from sight.

The far-off camels on the old caravan road seemed scarcely to have altered their position, and beyond the quicksand, now smooth and traceless, like emblems of the two women, lay the shells that had formed the lure, one purple, one pale.

 

I saw Giovanna only last year in Sarafax, and it is an index of the character of Sarafax that her story, even to the end of Logan, is public property and had gained for her public respect. Jane Hogg you may see any day in the Petty Cury. She is respected, also, but in a different way.