“El puerto. The water front. Understand? Quick!”
They clattered, noisily over the cobbles, on an acute downgrade, the strips of street scene going by now fast on each side of them, like film whirring through a projection machine. His head and shoulders were held slanted out at one side of the carriage, while he stared down ahead of their own course.
“There it is, I see it at the end of this street. We’re finally getting there!”
Suddenly he stood bolt upright in the carriage as the enclosing buildings fell back and it swept out onto the quayside plaza.
“I don’t see the launch! It’s not here any more!”
He jumped down without waiting for the vehicle to slacken and swing broadside, and ran out onto the landing stage. The same black cur with yellow undersides was lolling there, the same somnolent loungers, backs to warehouse walls, hats over their eyes, legs out before them on the ground. Everything the same as before.
But down at the bottom of the steps the water heaved green and glassy and empty.
Out beyond the harbor roadstead, black smoke trailed like a scar across the translucent sky, from a rodlike attenuation that crept in misleading sluggishness along the line where sea joined sky.
He came back to her finally. It seemed like a long time after. It no doubt was. She had stayed in the carriage.
Even the ship’s smokestack was gone now. The black smoke hung disembodied, unraveling on the air like yam, a symbol without a visible cause below it.
There was nothing to say. Words were superfluous to add clarity to the situation, impotent to remedy it. An occasional slap from the green water lapping emptily against the understones of the quay was the only sound there was.
Two people standing silently, wonderingly, side by side; at the edge of nowhere, poised at the brink of the sea, in a strange place.
The sea and the place alike began to darken rapidly around them, as night came down like a black roller shade.
Chapter Six
“God, what a place!” he exclaimed with suppressed savagery that night, in the fusty cavernous hotel room. “Thirty days in a trap like this! Talk about being buried alive! It’s worse than that. When you’re buried, the earth is cool around you, at least.”
She was sitting huddled in one of the two gigantic beds, her face a ghostly oval against the mosquito netting that misted her over.
He took a turn or two around the tiled floor, one hand worrying the skin at the back of his neck. “It’s good-by job, too. They’ll never hold it for me thirty days. I was due to report by the tenth, at the latest.”
“Larry, have we any money?” she faltered. “Or are we—?”
“We’re not completely broke, if that’s what you mean. I happened to have a little money in the pocket of this suit. The rest of it’s in the purser’s safe, going north without us, at this moment. But I suppose they’ll hold it until we claim it. That’s not what worries me. It’s just that this knocks all my plans sky-high. I was counting on that job.”
“Can’t we take a plane out and still get up there on time?”
“Not a chance,” he said glumly. “That was the first thing I asked downstairs, when we came in. Even the planes skip this place, it’s so far off the beaten track. They don’t come within hundreds of miles of it. Nothing to bring them here.”
He paced another desultory lap or two. “Let’s kill the light, shall we? It’s attracting all sorts of things in here. There’s shoals of them flying around it already. Want it any more?”
“No,” she said docilely. “It’s probably cooler without it.”
After a moment or two a match winked out, over by the window, where he must have come to a halt, staring sightlessly out at nothing.
“Larry, can I have a cigarette?” she murmured penitently.
“Here,” he said grudgingly. His tread came toward her hollowly across the tiled floor. “Hold your net out of the way, so I don’t set fire to it.”
The second match flare illumined her face into a coral-tinted mask for a minute. Then the mask faded again.
“Larry, are you very angry at me?” she muttered.
He didn’t answer. Which was his answer.
She tried again. “Larry, I’m sorry about getting us into this fix.”
“Then why did you do it?” he answered tersely.
“I didn’t want to,” she said tractably.
He took a deep breath of exasperation, baffled at the contradiction. “But you did come ashore, Mitty, so how can you say that?”
“I don’t know, Larry. I’m telling you the truth, please believe me. I didn’t want to come ashore and I didn’t mean to. I had no such idea when I first stepped out on deck this morning. I was only going to take a quick look from the rail, and then turn around and come right in again. Can’t you see that by the way I was dressed? I didn’t even have a hat or anything, to keep the sun off me. I left the cabin just the way I was.”
His silence was an indication that that point had just occurred to him, himself, now that she mentioned it.
“One of those little native boats came drifting by below me. It had some things to sell, but nothing that interested me. Fruit and things. But there was a clay water jug in it, in the form of a hollowed-out image. He’d brought it along just to keep his produce fresh, maybe, or to drink from it himself. I kept staring at it, and staring at it, and — I felt so funny, Larry.”
“How, funny?” he demanded.
“I don’t know, myself. I only know I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The little boat, by now, had sneaked into place at the foot of the ladder, where the tender had been before. First I leaned as far over the rail as I could. Then before I knew it I was edging my way down the ladder step by step, to get a closer look, and then there I was standing right in the little boat itself. And then I was sitting there, holding this jug in my arms and fondling it. I don’t remember after that; maybe I asked him where it came from, and he pointed to the shore, and then I told him to take me there. But I don’t remember that part of it. I only remember that the next thing I knew I was in the town, walking around on dry land.”
“The whole time you were ashore, the whole afternoon long, didn’t you think of me at all? Didn’t you think of the ship, even? Didn’t you realize it was due to sail at a certain hour, and I was on it waiting for you?”
“I seemed to forget everything. I couldn’t help it. I wandered around the whole time with the strangest feeling. Did you ever have a word on the tip of your tongue, you’re just about to remember it, but you never quite can, it keeps slipping back each time? Well, it was that feeling, that sort of agonizing, expectant feeling. Only, it was something on the tip of my memory, and not on the tip of my tongue. It seemed to drive everything else completely out of my mind, and yet it wouldn’t take over itself, it wouldn’t complete itself; so I was left in a sort of blank state, a walking daze.”
“If you ask me, I think it was a touch of the sun. Wandering around with your head uncovered.”
“No,” she insisted vaguely. “It was something on the tip of my memory. Then when I saw this little clay figure, this idol, inside that shop where you found me, I couldn’t tear myself away. Time stood still. Each time I tried to put it down, my hand would reach out and pick it up again. It seemed to have something to tell me.”
“Something to tell you,” he scoffed with impatience.
“I’d stand holding it for the longest time. I’d have this feeling of a word creeping out on the tip of my tongue, just hanging there, but never quite emerging. Oh, I know; you asked me not to speak that way. But that’s the only way that fits it. There’s no other way.”