They sprang upward continually, with short, agonized leaps, like drowning creatures struggling to keep afloat above some invisible flood.

The action, repeated mult.i.tudinously into the obscure background, exaggerated in the foreground by magnified shadows tossing and falling on the white walls, suggested the influence of some evil stratum, some vapor subtle and diabolic, crawling poisonously along the ground.

Heywood stamped angrily, without effect. Wutzler stood abject, a magician impotent against his swarm of familiars. Gradually the rats, silent and leaping, pa.s.sed away into the darkness, as though they heard the summons of a Pied Piper.

"It doesn't attack Europeans." Heywood still used that curious inflection.

"Then my brother Julien is still alive," retorted Doctor Chantel, bitterly.

"What do you think, Gilly?" persisted Heywood.

His compatriot nodded in a meaningless way.

"The doctor's right, of course," he answered. "I wish my wife weren't coming back."

"Dey are a remember," ventured Wutzler, timidly. "A warnung."

The others, as though it had been a point of custom, ignored him. All stared down, musing, at the vacant stones.

"Then the concert's off to-morrow night," mocked Heywood, with an unpleasant laugh.

"On the contrary." Gilly caught him up, prompt and decided. "We shall need all possible amus.e.m.e.nts; also to meet and plan our campaign.

Meantime,--what do you say, Doctor?--chloride of lime in pots?"

"That, evidently," smiled the handsome man. "Yes, and charcoal burnt in braziers, perhaps, as Pere Fenouil advises. Fumigate."--Satirical and debonair, he shrugged his shoulders.--"What use, among these thousands of yellow pigs?"

"I wish she weren't coming," repeated Gilly.

Rudolph, left outside this conference, could bear the uncertainty no longer.

"I am a new arrival," he confided to his young host. "I do not understand. What is it?"

"The plague, old chap," replied Heywood, curtly. "These playful little animals get first notice. You're not the only arrival to-night."

CHAPTER III

UNDER FIRE

The desert was sometimes Gobi, sometimes Sahara, but always an infinite stretch of sand that floated up and up in a stifling layer, like the tide. Rudolph, desperately choked, continued leaping upward against an insufferable power of gravity, or straining to run against the force of paralysis. The desert rang with phantom voices,--Chinese voices that mocked him, chanting of pestilence, intoning abhorrently in French.

He woke to find a knot of bed-clothes smothering him. To his first unspeakable relief succeeded the astonishment of hearing the voices continue in shrill chorus, the tones Chinese, the words, in louder fragments, unmistakably French. They sounded close at hand, discordant matins sung by a mob of angry children. Once or twice a weary, fretful voice scolded feebly: "Un-peu-de-s'lence! Un-peu-de-s'lence!" Rudolph rose to peep through the heavy jalousies, but saw nothing more than sullen daylight, a flood of vertical rain, and thin rivulets coursing down a tiled roof below. The morning was dismally cold.

"Jolivet's kids wake you?" Heywood, in a blue kimono, nodded from the doorway. "Public nuisance, that school. Quite needless, too. Some bally French theory, you know, sphere of influence, and that rot. Game played out up here, long ago, but they keep hanging on.--Bath's ready, when you like." He broke out laughing. "Did you climb into the water-jar, yesterday, before dinner? Boy reports it upset. You'll find the dipper more handy.--How did you ever manage? One leg at a time?"

Echoes of glee followed his disappearance. Rudolph, blushing, prepared to descend into the gloomy vault of ablution. Charcoal fumes, however, and the glow of a brazier on the dark floor below, not only revived all his old terror, but at the stair-head halted him with a new.

"Is the water safe?" he called.

Heywood answered impatiently from his bedroom.

"Nothing safe in this world, Mr. Hackh. User's risk." An inaudible mutter ended with, "Keep clean, anyway."

At breakfast, though the acrid smoke was an enveloping reminder, he made the only reference to their situation.

"Rain at last: too late, though, to flush out the gutters. We needed it a month ago.--I say, Hackh, if you don't mind, you might as well cheer up. From now on, it's pure heads and tails. We're all under fire together." Glancing out of window at the murky sky, he added thoughtfully, "One excellent side to living without hope, maskee fashion: one isn't specially afraid. I'll take you to your office, and you can make a start. Nothing else to do, is there?"

Dripping bearers and shrouded chairs received them on the lower floor, carried them out into a chill rain that drummed overhead and splashed along the compound path in silver points. The sunken flags in the road formed a narrow aqueduct that wavered down a lane of mire. A few grotesque wretches, thatched about with bamboo matting, like bottles, or like rosebushes in winter, trotted past shouldering twin baskets. The smell of joss-sticks, fish, and sour betel, the subtle sweetness of opium, grew constantly stronger, blended with exhalations of ancient refuse, and (as the chairs jogged past the club, past filthy groups huddling about the well in a marketplace, and onward into the black yawn of the city gate) a.s.sailed the throat like a bad and lasting taste. Now, in the dusky street, pent narrowly by wet stone walls, night seemed to fall, while fresh waves of pungent odor overwhelmed and steeped the senses. Rudolph's chair jostled through hundreds and hundreds of Chinese, all alike in the darkness, who shuffled along before with switching queues, or flattened against the wall to stare, almost nose to nose, at the pa.s.sing foreigner. With chairpoles backing into one shop or running ahead into another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he swung round countless corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare bazaar. Overhead, a slit of cloudy sky showed rarely; for the most part, he swayed along indoors, beneath a dingy lattice roof. All points of the compa.s.s vanished; all streets remained alike,--the same endless vista of mystic characters, red, black, and gold, on narrow suspended tablets, under which flowed the same current of pig-tailed men in blue and dirty white. From every shop, the same yellow faces stared at him, the same elfin children caught his eye for a half-second to grin or grimace, the same shaven foreheads bent over microscopical tasks in the dark. At first, Rudolph thought the city loud and brawling; but resolving this impression to the hideous shouts of his coolies parting the crowd, he detected, below or through their noise, from all the long cross-corridors a wide and appalling silence. Gradually, too, small sounds relieved this: the hammering of bra.s.s-work, the steady rattle of a loom, or the sing-song call and mellow bell of some burdened hawker, b.u.mping past, his swinging baskets filled with a pennyworth of trifles.

But still the silence daunted Rudolph in this astounding vision, this masque of unreal life, of lost daylight, of annihilated direction, of placid turmoil and multifarious ident.i.ty, made credible only by the permanence of nauseous smells.

Somewhere in the dark maze, the chairs halted, under a portal black and heavy as a Gate of Dreams. And as by the anachronism of dreams there hung, among its tortuous symbols, the small, familiar placard--"Fliegelman and Sons, Office." Heywood led the way, past two ducking Chinese clerks, into a sombre room, stone-floored, furnished stiffly with a row of carved chairs against the wall, lighted coldly by roof-windows of placuna, and a lamp smoking before some commercial G.o.d in his ebony and tinsel shrine.

"There," he said, bringing Rudolph to an inner chamber, or dark little pent-house, where another draughty lamp flickered on a European desk.

"Here's your cell. I'm off--call for you later. Good luck!"--Wheeling in the doorway, he tossed a book, negligently.--"Caught! You may as well start in, eh?--'Cantonese Made Worse,'"

To his departing steps Rudolph listened as a prisoner, condemned, might listen to the last of all earthly visitors. Peering through a kind of butler's window, he saw beyond the shrine his two pallid subordinates, like mystic automatons, nodding and smoking by the doorway. Beyond them, across a darker square like a cavern-mouth, flitted the living phantoms of the street. It seemed a fit setting for his fears. "I am lost," he thought; lost among goblins, marooned in the age of barbarism, shut in a labyrinth with a Black Death at once actual and mediaeval: he dared not think of Home, but flung his arms on the littered desk, and buried his face.

On the tin pent-roof, the rain trampled inexorably.

At last, mustering a shaky resolution, he set to work ransacking the tumbled papers. Happily, Zimmerman had left all in confusion. The very hopelessness of his accounts proved a relief. Working at high tension, Rudolph wrestled through disorder, mistakes, falsification; and little by little, as the sorted piles grew and his pen traveled faster, the old absorbing love of method and dispatch--the stay, the cordial flagon of troubled man--gave him strength to forget.

At times, felt shoes scuffed the stone floor without, and high, scolding voices rose, exchanging unfathomable courtesy with his clerks. One after another, strange figures, plump and portly in their colored robes, crossed his threshold, nodding their b.u.t.toned caps, clasping their hands hidden in voluminous sleeves.

"My 'long speakee my goo' flien'," chanted each of these apparitions; and each, after a long, slow discourse that ended more darkly than it began, retired with fatuous nods and smirks of satisfaction, leaving Rudolph dismayed by a sense of cryptic negotiation in which he had been found wanting.

Noon brought the only other interval, when two solemn "boys" stole in with curry and beer. Eat he could not in this lazaret, but sipped a little of the dark Kirin brew, and plunged again into his researches.

Alone with his lamp and rustling papers, he fought through perplexities, now whispering, now silent, like a student rapt in some midnight fervor.

"What ho! Mustn't work this fashion!" Heywood's voice woke him, sudden as a gust of sharp air. "Makee finish!"

The summons was both welcome and unwelcome; for as their chairs jostled homeward through the reeking twilight, Rudolph felt the glow of work fade like the mockery of wine. The strange seizure returned,--exile, danger, incomprehensibility, settled down upon him, cold and steady as the rain. Tea, at Heywood's house, was followed by tobacco, tobacco by sherry, and this by a dinner from yesterday's game-bag. The two men said little, sitting dejected, as if by agreement. But when Heywood rose, he changed into gayety as a man slips on a jacket.

"Now, then, for the masked ball! I mean, we can't carry these long faces to the club, can we? Ladies' Night--what larks!" He caught up his cap, with a grimace. "The Lord loveth a cheerful liar. Come ahead!"

On the way, he craned from his chair to shout, in the darkness:--

"I say! If you can do a turn of any sort, let the women have it. All the fun they get. Be an a.s.s, like the rest of us. Maskee how silly! Mind you, it's all hands, these concerts!"

No music, but the click of ivory and murmur of voices came down the stairway of the club. At first glance, as Rudolph rose above the floor, the gloomy white loft seemed vacant as ever; at second glance, embarra.s.singly full of Europeans. Four strangers grounded their cues long enough to shake his hand. "Mr. Nesbit,--Sturgeon--Herr Kempner--Herr Teppich,"--he bowed stiffly to each, ran the battery of their inspection, and found himself saluting three other persons at the end of the room, under a rosy, moon-bellied lantern. A gray matron, stout, and too tightly dressed for comfort, received him uneasily, a dark-eyed girl befriended him with a look and a quiet word, while a tall man, nodding a vigorous mop of silver hair, crushed his hand in a great bony fist.

"Mrs. Earle," Heywood was saying, "Miss Drake, and--how are you, padre?--Dr. Earle."

"Good-evening," boomed the giant, in a deep and musical ba.s.s. "We are very glad, very glad." His voice vibrated through the room, without effort. It struck one with singular force, like the shrewd, kind brightness of his eyes, light blue, and oddly benevolent, under brows hard as granite. "Sit down, Mr. Hackh," he ordered genially, "and give us news of the other world! I mean," he laughed, "west of Suez.

Smoking's allowed--here, try that!"

He commanded them, as it were, to take their ease,--the women among cushions on a rattan couch, the men stretched in long chairs. He put questions, indolent, friendly questions, opening vistas of reply and recollection; so that Rudolph, answering, felt the first return of homely comfort. A feeble return, however, and brief: in the pauses of talk, misgiving swarmed in his mind, like the leaping vermin of last night. The world into which he had been thrown still appeared disorderly, incomprehensible, and dangerous. The plague--it still recurred in his thoughts like a sombre motive; these friendly people were still strangers; and for a moment now and then their talk, their smiles, the click of billiards, the cool, commonplace behavior, seemed a foolhardy unconcern, as of men smoking in a powder magazine.

"Clearing a bit, outside," called Nesbit. A little, wiry fellow, with cheerful c.o.c.kney speech, he stood chalking his cue at a window. "I say, what's the matter one piecee picnic this week? Pink PaG.o.da, eh? Mrs.