The Ragged Edge | Page 6

that ... his own name! After all these
weeks of trying to obliterate even the memory of it!... to have given it
to this girl without her asking!
The thought of peril cleared a space in the alcoholic fog. He saw the
expression on the girl's face and understood what it signified, that it

was the reflected pattern of his own. He shut his eyes and groped for
the wall to steady himself, wondering if this bit of mummery would get
over.
"I beg your pardon!... A bit rocky this morning.... That window there....
Cloud back of your hat!" He opened his eyes again.
"I understand," she said. The poor boy, imagining things! "That's want
of substantial food. Better take these sandwiches."
"All right; and thank you. I'll eat them when we start. Just now the
water-chestnuts...."
She smiled, and returned to the spinsters.
Spurlock began to munch his water-chestnuts. What he needed was not
a food but a flavour; and the cocoanut taste of the chestnuts soothed his
burning tongue and throat. He had let go his name so easily as that!
What was the name she had given? Ruth something; he could not
remember. What a frightened fool he was! If he could not remember
her name, it was equally possible that already she had forgotten his.
Conscience was always digging sudden pits for his feet and common
sense ridiculing his fears. Mirages, over which he was constantly
throwing bridges which were wasted efforts, since invariably they
spanned solid ground.
But he would make it a point not to speak again to the girl. If he
adhered to this policy--to keep away from her inconspicuously--she
would forget the name by night, and to-morrow even the bearer of it
would sink below the level of recollection. That was life. They were
only passers-by.
Drink for him had a queer phase. It did not cheer or fortify him with
false courage and recklessness; it simply enveloped him in a mist of
unreality. A shudder rippled across his shoulders. He hated the taste of
it. The first peg was torture. But for all that, it offered relief; his brain,
stupefied by the fumes, grew dull, and conscience lost its edge to bite.

He wiped the sweat from his chin and forehead. His hand shook so
violently that he dropped the handkerchief; and he let it lie on the floor
because he dared not stoop.
Ah Cum, sensing the difficulty, approached, recovered the damp
handkerchief and returned it.
"Thanks."
"Very interesting," said the Chinaman, with a wave of his tapering hand
toward the roofs. "It reminds you of a red sea suddenly petrified."
"Or the flat stones in the meadows, teeming with life underneath.
Ants."
"You are from America?"
"Yes." But Spurlock put up his guard.
"I am a Yale man," said Ah Cum.
"Yale? Why, so am I." There was no danger in admitting this fact.
Spurlock offered his hand, which Ah Cum accepted gravely. A broken
laugh followed the action. "Yale!" Spurlock's gaze shifted to the dead
hills beyond the window; when it returned to the Chinaman there was
astonishment instead of interest: as if Ah Cum had been a phantom a
moment since and was now actually a human being. "Yale!" A
Chinaman who had gone to Yale!
"Yes. Civil engineering. Mentally but not physically competent. Had to
give up the work and take to this. I'm not noble; so my honourable
ancestors will not turn over in their graves."
"Graves." Spurlock pointed in the sloping fields outside the walls. "I've
counted ten coffins so far."
"Ah, yes. The land about these walls is a common graveyard. Every
day in the year you will witness such scenes. There are no funerals
among the poor, only burials. And many of these deaths could be

avoided if it were not for superstition. Superstition is the Chinese
Reaper. Rituals instead of medicines. Sometimes I try to talk. I might
as well try to build a ladder to heaven. We must take the children--of
any race--if we would teach knowledge. Age is set, impervious to
innovations."
The Chinaman paused. He saw that his words were falling upon dull
ears. He turned to observe what this object was that had so
unexpectedly diverted the young man's attention. It was the girl. She
was standing before a window, against the background of the
rain-burdened April sky. There was enough contra-light to render her
ethereal.
Spurlock was basically a poet, quick to recognize beauty, animate or
inanimate, and to transcribe it in unuttered words. He was always
word-building, a metaphorist, lavish with singing adjectives; but often
he built in confusion because it was difficult to describe something
beautiful in a new yet simple way.
He had not noticed the girl particularly when she offered the
sandwiches; but in this