Dragons Blood | Page 8

continually, with short, agonized leaps, like drowning creatures struggling to keep afloat above some invisible flood. The action, repeated multitudinously 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, passed 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 amusements; 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