The small pantomime was lost on Pawling. In his eyes, full as they were of the reflected sky, she remained but a darkish spot, separated from the rest of the universe by that boundary-line which has been the chief and historic preoccupation of art. She was very young, and at the same time there was about her a singular maturity. His thoughts drifted easily from his work to its reward. Some day he would marry. He would marry a girl, probably, whom he did not yet know. She would be quite young-younger, at any rate, than he. She would be plump, but not too plump, and she would have brown hair and white arms. They would take a house in Toronto, with a lawn and a garden. She would have babies. . . He was dimly aware of Clymer's voice somewhere, saying: "Not bad! I give you my word of honor!"

He remained engrossed in the golden vista and the train of thought which it induced. She would have very dark brown hair, soft to the touch.. Clymer's voice was louder and

sistent:

more in

"Not bad! Not half bad! I say! I give you my

Pawling looked up. Then he got up and stood stiff and straight on his meager, pipe-clayed legs. Heat came out of the sun-baked earth and ran over him in a wave, striking fire to his neck and jaws and upward across his face.

Clymer ran on with a venomous delight: "You're a smooth beggar. You're a smooth Christian beggar, Pawling."

He stood with his stomach thrust out, his arms akimbo, his finger-tips meeting in the small of his back, his head tilting now to one side and now to the other in a heavy, bird-like estimation of the young figure across the road. A smile moved his lips, sarcasm giving way to a kind of paternal indulgence.

"All right. But look-a-here, who is she? Hang take it! . . . I say, ugly chap! You! What's your name, eh? Badhoor? Yes, yes, I remember now. I remember you well, Badhoor. Listen, Badhoor, have you ever heard of praedal larceny? No? Well, they'll tell you what it means one day in the Demerara Sessions if you don't stop your cocoapoaching. Keep looking at me! That's

VOL. CXXXVI.-No. 813.-54

right.... But just now, something else. You'll observe that Pawling Sahib has been looking at the bit of brown over there. Tell me, Badhoor, what's she called? Eh? What house? Eh? Come, come!"

Pawling wanted to turn quietly and walk away up the hill to the house. But, after all, it didn't matter enough. He was not even angry with Clymer. He had a moment of imagination. Here he was, and then there lay a vast, deep gulf, and there on the other side, very small, was Clymer. He folded his hands behind his back and looked at Badhoor. The seller of hasheesh was an old, lean man with a big head and a gray beard. His legs protruded from his soiled loincloth as black and thin as a wadingbird's, and, like a wading-bird, he stood on one foot, with the sole of the other resting on the inner face of the opposite thigh. When he closed his eyelids, as he did from moment to moment, he seemed but to veil his eyes, like an owl.

"Protector of the Poor," he mumbled. Clymer began to bellow. "Poor! Will you hear that-poor! Selling hasheesh to all the wormy beggars in Holy Trinity and poaching cocoa into the bargain. Poor! But see here, I asked you a question!"

"Salaam, sahib, yes. Yes. She-she is called Léah, sahib. Yes, sahib. But as the sahib sees, and as Pawling Sahib sees, she is nothing-a poor, ugly child of a dung-bitten cow-belly-"

He veiled his eyes and remained standing on his one lean leg, dry, motionless, removed into another country. The bones of his chest betrayed no breath. The gold had gone out of the river and the sky, leaving the world to float in the violet-gray liquor of dusk.

Clymer's eyeballs seemed to swell, like tiny balloons, pressing out against their lids. He was not used to receiving advice in the ranges.

"Well, I am damned!"

Badhoor was shaken. He put down his other foot. his other foot. "Salaam, sahib, Protector of the Old! I-I am a poor man, sahib, and she has no beauty. The sahib would not give two claps of the hands for her, sahib. She is my wife, sahib, these three days. Salaam, sahib, Pro

tector of the Innocent, and sahib, Protector of the Poor!"

It was late. Pawling stood motionless in the shade of the last drying-shed, his head and neck thrust out from the paleblue collar of his pajamas, the pupils of his eyes, confused by the moon patterns among the cocoa-trees, dilating moment by moment. With an absurd, elaborate caution he brought his gun up toward his shoulder. It was a fine weapon, a fine, twelve-gauge, repeating shot-gun with his name-plate on the stock, given him at parting by his fellow-members in the Highditch Club. . . . He stared with one eye along the blue moon-fire on the barrel.

The recoil stung his collar-bone; his ears were deafened; smoke made a white Icloud before his eyes. He let all the breath out of his lungs with a grunt and felt better, as if a spring had been released. And, after all, it was only another cocoa-pod. He could see it still hanging there on the lowermost branch of the third tree down, with a piece bitten out of the side. A jaguar coughed a mile away down-river, and off in the back-bush a troop of red howlers was swinging through the branches. heard them in the hush following the gun-shot. It seemed silly to remain standing here.

He

And yet he did not wish to return to the house-not until Clymer had gone to bed. He had stood about all he could of that. Up beyond the sheds and the compound he could hear the befuddled voice even now, carrying on to an empty chair an interminable, drunken rigmarole. No, he would not go back, on any account. He was afraid of himself, of what he might do to Clymer or say to Clymer. All the evening, till he had broken away, it had hung on his tongue to cry out: You smut! You disgusting, drunken smut!" No, he would not go.

A sudden rain fell upon him while the moon still shone; one of those crystal peltings of the dry season which he had been warned to avoid as he would avoid poison. The night was heavy and hot; the rain-drops were hot, too, but afterward the evaporation from his clinging pajamas lowered his pulse and soothed his nerves. He felt better, very much

better. Clymer must have turned in now, for his voice was no longer audible.

Pawling went back between the sheds and across the pegging-ground. On the compound, streaked with the shadows of cabbage-palms, he passed Tung, the house-boy. He turned to look after him; the Chinese, at the lower end of the compound, had done the same. For a moment their eyes met across the streaks, and then, making a sign of respect, the house-boy stole away downhill in the direction of the coolie range. It meant nothing to Pawling.

Clymer had not retired, after all. As Pawling mounted the long steps to the veranda, a voice powerful and turgid came out of the depths of the hammock, resuming the threadbare burden:

"Bu'-bu' she's not black, y' un'erstan'-not black-like a nigger-black. No, no, no! White, Pawlin', white. Not white, y' un'erstan'. No, no-but white. Ary-Aryan. Tha's it. Aryan. Tha's what I been tryin' to Funny! 'Member g'ography. Aryan, white. White enough, anyway. 'Member g'ography-"

Pawling raised on his toes and spat over the railing into the poinsettias. His neck-cords throbbed with a dull pain.

"Good night," he said, and would have passed into the house had not Clymer, upending suddenly in his hammock, detained him. There is no telling what the man had it in his muddled brain to say, for the touch of Pawling's damp nightclothes sent him off on a fresh tack.

"Soppin' wet! Oh, my God! Standin' in rain. Fever-come down-feverDie! Oh, my God! Young man-young white man-dead-dead as a-a doornail! Oh, my God!" He began to weep, fat tears coursing down his fat cheeks. "Dead! Young white man dead as aa door-nail!" In a sudden excess of compassion he staggered up and flung his huge, soft arms about Pawling's neck, bearing him down, sobbing, “Must take care o' young white man-like fatherlike father an'-an'-son-”

Pawling fought with his teeth and nails and knees, smothered with flesh, sickened with stinking breath, making strange noises in his throat, panting, incoherent. He was free, without quite

knowing how, and Clymer was down on the floor, a soft mountain of remorse, wailing over and over again that he had been a young man himself ence upon a time-a young man like Pawling—a young white man.

Pawling stood quite still with his knuckles pressed to his cheeks. For the first time since he had come into the tropics he was cool-cold. A breath of ice blew over him and he shivered. His whole frame was racked with shivering. His teeth pounded together. "Y-y-you s-s-smut! s-s-s-smut!"

Y-you-y-y-you

And then he ran, shuddering with the cold, into the dark of his own room. . . . He was sorry he had said that when he found Clymer dead next morning, "dead as a door-nail," in truth, lying on his back on his bed with his arms stretched out and his mouth open.

It is strange, as he stood there in the dawn, with the chamber sweeping in dim circles about the fever of his head-it is strange that he was conscious of no touch of the irony of things. Clymer's hour had struck on the night of his prophecy, the night when he had been too drunk to arrange the bed-net, and when Tung had been about another business, and yet there was no mark of an incision on him, not one. Somewhere, deep under the rolling fat of his skull, a tiny vessel had given away with an infinitesimal "pop," and the vampires had left him to lie in peace, with his naked stomach confronting the ceiling and his mouth fallen open.

Pawling was thinking that it was too bad he himself had said what he had. The irony of that did not escape him—that he should have kept his silence so long, only to break it at last when a single moment more would have been enough.

Beyond the veil of his bodily discomfort he was conscious of three emotions -remorse for having called the man a "smut," horror of the presence of the body, and the sense of an awful isolation. He thought of the miles. A window opened in a by-chamber of his brain, showing him the miles-the river miles, crawling between the hot jungles, down and down; the estuary miles, a thin liquor of mud stretching without end, sweat, mosquitoes, a fetor of swamp

lands; the sea miles, pleasant miles, days and nights and weeks built of blue miles cast on the reckoning; the miles by train, the wheat-fields, towns, lakes, the night stops, cinders in the blanket folds, voices of trainmen outside the transommiles, miles, thousands upon thousands of miles over which the tidings of a death in exile would creep very slowly-almost as slowly as if he were as far away from the world as the sun, where everything was burning up in molten fire-blistering -hot on the neck and cheeks and behind the ears. . . . Tung, the houseboy, came running on his soft wicker soles to pick him up.

He refused to be ill. He was not a drinking man, not at all the sort to be bowled over by a touch of tropical rain. It was all bosh. He swore at the China boy for interfering with him and with his indomitable purpose-strange brothel-house oaths which had never before passed his lips or sullied his mind. . . . They got him into his bed. . .

It was high day when he opened his eyes, for he could see the sun streaking the shutters with white threads. He watched the flies. They came in through the sun-streaks and flew across his room and straight away across the big room beyond, and turned there and disappeared through the doorway into Clymer's room. He remembered, with a grunt of loathing. At the sound, a white-clad negro appeared beside his bed, McCarthy, the under-manager. "Yes, sir?"

"The flies. The body."

"Quite right, sir." The man spoke in the respectful west London accents of the black colonial. "It was removed last evening, sir. last evening, sir. I took the liberty. You were indisposed, sir."

"Last evening? Oh yes-I see. Last evening."

"Yes, sir. If you will be so good as to rest easy, sir. The doctor from New Roordam Estate should be here by night. I sent Quigley down-river with four paddlers, sir, and they should-"

"Doctor? Why the doctor? I'm all right. I tell you I'm all right."

"Surely, sir, surely. Capital, sir! The China boy is here, sir, and Quigley's woman is looking out. Thank you, sir. The man receded. Tung's eyes were

Propped in his chair on the veranda, he sat in judgment upon Badhoor, the hemp-seller, who had been taken redhanded at last among the trees, with half a bag of cocoa-beans still damp from the pod. His half-closed eyes rested upon the East-Indian standing before him, erect, unmoving, unmoved, like a figure in wood, blackened and emaciated by time. More than anything else, he wondered at himself, sitting in judgment.

His ears throbbed with the lees of the quinine they had given him, like a drum beating without end. From beyond it came the voice of the under-manager, carrying the indictment forward from period to period with his mellifluous precision.

"Yes," he murmured from time to time. "Yes, yes."

"If you might pardon, sir," McCarthy ventured, "I rightly think it would be best to send him down-river to the Sessions. I doubt, sir, he could put up with the flogging. A strong, wellfleshed man now-yes-quite right, sir. And after a bit they're fit for the work again. But, as you may see, sir, this chap-"

"Yes-yes

Pawling's eyes played slowly over the naked torso before him, modeled between the counter-fires of the moon on the one side, and on the other the faint yellow radiance from the lamp burning within the house the intricate, gnarled arch of the rib-structure, the muscles like sheaves of folded parchment, shadow-penciled, the sere pectoral muscles, the arid subdivisions of the abdominals, the caverns eaten under the collar-bones and above the crests of the pelvis.

His lips were slightly dry and his tongue ran over them. He had never seen a man flogged. He had seen the flogging-post, down beyond the compound, but he had never seen a naked man tied to it with his arms about it and his wrists bound together with a thong, making one shadow with the post on the dust. He was wondering what sort of a sound the lash would make, in the air, and when it struck; what sort of a mark it would leave on bone structures and on muscles like sheaves of folded parchment; what color the mark would be, at the instant, and later say an hour.

His lips were dry again. He licked them. Then he discovered that he was shivering from head to foot, and, running his hand over his eyes, he cried out:

"What the devil, McCarthy! I tell you I'm tired out. To-morrow! I sayI'll think it over to-morrow! Now, now! That's enough!"

A wave of disgust swept over him. He closed his eyes tight to be rid of Badnoor and his naked whip-meat. He heard them moving off, down the steps, across the compound, the negro's cowhide alpargatas slapping softly on the dust long after the East-Indian's footfalls had merged with the silence of the night.

But this silence of the night was not a silence. When he had been alone with it a few moments it began to touch the raw of his perception with its myriad voices. The mist rising in the river valley was woven with fine threads of sound-the snarl of a kill in the farther jungle, the single, hushed wailing of a poor-me-one, the cumulative impact of a hundred thousand twigs falling simultaneously upon the forest floor. A breeze, moving the "women's tongues at the corner of the veranda, set the long pods to whispering. The only things silent in the tropical night were the serpents —fat gray adders, bushmasters coiled in the poisonous dark beneath the leaves, pythons, their bodies making no sound on the tree-trunks or across the stems of swaying grasses.... Pawling lifted his

voice:

"I say Tung! Bring me my gun. Tung! I say are you there? My gun -directly!"