Victory | Page 8

Capricorn,
trading brig, and was understood to be doing well with her, except for
the drawback of too much altruism. He was the dearly beloved friend of
a quantity of God-forsaken villages up dark creeks and obscure bays,
where he traded for produce. He would often sail , through awfully
dangerous channels up to some miserable settlement, only to find a
very hungry population clamorous for rice, and without so much
"produce" between them as would have filled Morrison's suitcase.
Amid general rejoicings, he would land the rice all the same, explain to
the people that it was an advance, that they were in debt to him now;
would preach to them energy and industry, and make an elaborate note
in a pocket-diary which he always carried; and this would be the end of
that transaction. I don't know if Morrison thought so, but the villagers
had no doubt whatever about it. Whenever a coast village sighted the
brig it would begin to beat all its gongs and hoist all its streamers, and
all its girls would put flowers in their hair and the crowd would line the
river bank, and Morrison would beam and glitter at all this excitement
through his single eyeglass with an air of intense gratification. He was
tall and lantern-jawed, and clean-shaven, and looked like a barrister
who had thrown his wig to the dogs.
We used to remonstrate with him:
"You will never see any of your advances if you go on like this,
Morrison."
He would put on a knowing air.
"I shall squeeze them yet some day--never you fear. And that reminds
me"--pulling out his inseparable pocketbook--"there's that So-and-So
village. They are pretty well off again; I may just as well squeeze them
to begin with."

He would make a ferocious entry in the pocketbook.
Memo: Squeeze the So-and-So village at the first time of calling.
Then he would stick the pencil back and snap the elastic on with
inflexible finality; but he never began the squeezing. Some men
grumbled at him. He was spoiling the trade. Well, perhaps to a certain
extent; not much. Most of the places he traded with were unknown not
only to geography but also to the traders' special lore which is
transmitted by word of mouth, without ostentation, and forms the stock
of mysterious local knowledge. It was hinted also that Morrison had a
wife in each and every one of them, but the majority of us repulsed
these innuendoes with indignation. He was a true humanitarian and
rather ascetic than otherwise.
When Heyst met him in Delli, Morrison was walking along the street,
his eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the hopeless
aspect of those hardened tramps one sees on our roads trudging from
workhouse to workhouse. Being hailed on the street he looked up with
a wild worried expression. He was really in trouble. He had come the
week before into Delli and the Portuguese authorities, on some pretence
of irregularity in his papers, had inflicted a fine upon him and had
arrested his brig.
Morrison never had any spare cash in hand. With his system of trading
it would have been strange if he had; and all these debts entered in the
pocketbook weren't good enough to raise a millrei on- -let alone a
shilling. The Portuguese officials begged him not to distress himself.
They gave him a week's grace, and then proposed to sell the brig at
auction. This meant ruin for Morrison; and when Heyst hailed him
across the street in his usual courtly tone, the week was nearly out.
Heyst crossed over, and said with a slight bow, and in the manner of a
prince addressing another prince on a private occasion:
"What an unexpected pleasure. Would you have any objection to drink
something with me in that infamous wine-shop over there? The sun is
really too strong to talk in the street."

The haggard Morrison followed obediently into a sombre, cool hovel
which he would have distained to enter at any other time. He was
distracted. He did not know what he was doing. You could have led
him over the edge of a precipice just as easily as into that wine- shop.
He sat down like an automaton. He was speechless, but he saw a glass
full of rough red wine before him, and emptied it. Heyst meantime,
politely watchful, had taken a seat opposite.
"You are in for a bout of fever, I fear," he said sympathetically.
Poor Morrison's tongue was loosened at that.
"Fever!" he cried. "Give me fever. Give me plague. They are diseases.
One gets over them. But I am being murdered. I am being murdered by
the Portuguese. The gang here downed me at last among them. I am to
have my