first thing I saw on entering the room was my beach-comber; for the , which was the cabin's sole illumination, stood on a soap-box beside the couch on which the outcast lay. Dressed in a shrunken and dirty cotton suit, he was propped up against the rough mud wall, a grimy and threadbare wrap thrown across his knees. Despite the awful stuffiness of the place, he shivered beneath this ragged coverlet, although his face and chest glistened with perspiration.
Once upon a time, I judged, as I measured him with my eye, he must have been a fine figure of a man. Though now coarse and bloated with white and flabby flesh, it could easily be seen that he was tall beyond the ordinary with the narrow hips of the athlete. His eyes were deeply sunk in his head; and in them flickered wanly that strange, restless light which one sees so often in the faces of those whom Death is soon to claim. Even amid the ravages which undernourishment, drink, and drugs had made in his features, the influence of gentle birth might yet be marked in the straight, firm pencilling of the eyebrows and the well-shaped, aquiline nose. I thought the man looked dreadfully ill, and I noted about nose and mouth that pinched look which can never deceive.
The whole shack appeared to consist of the one room in which I found myself. It was pitiably bare. A table, on which stood some unappetizing remnants of food, was set against the wall beneath the unglazed window which faced the sick man's couch. A broken stool and a couple of soap-boxes, one furnished with a tin basin and a petrol can of water, completed the furniture.
“There's a bar to go across the door,” said a weak voice from the corner where the sick man lay; “would you be good enough to put it down? I don't want us to be disturbed...”
He cast an apprehensive glance at the window. I fitted the rough beam across the door and approached the couch. It was merely a bed of maize stalks.
“You're very ill, I'm afraid,” I said, pulling over one of the boxes and seating myself by the Englishman. “Have you seen a doctor?”
The vagrant waved his hand in a deprecatory manner.
“My dear fellow,” he said—and again I noted the refinement in his voice—“no sawbones can help me. I never held with them much anyway. Luisa got paid to-day—she washes at Bard's, you know (it was she who told me you were here)—and so I've got some medicine...”—he touched a little pannikin which stood on the floor at his side—“it's all that keeps me alive now that I can't get the 'snow'!”
I recognized the name which the drug traffic gives to cocaine.
The sick man was rent by a spasm of coughing.
“It's paradoxical,” he gasped out presently, “but the more I take of my life-giving elixir here, the quicker the end will come. All I live for now, it seems to me, is to shorten as much as possible the intervals between the bouts.”
I've seen something in my time of the cynical resignation of your chronic drunkard. So I wasted no good advice on the poor devil, but held my peace while he swallowed a mouthful from the pannikin at his elbow.
“You went out of your way to do me a good turn once, Okewood,” he said, setting the vessel down and wiping his mouth on his soiled sleeve. “I know your name, you see. I made some enquiries about you before they ran me out of San Salvador. You got a D.S.O. in the war, I think?”
“They gave away so many!” I said idiotically. But that sort of remark always engenders an idiotic reply.
“No, no,” he insisted. “Yours was one of the right ones, Okewood: I can see that by looking at you. You're the real type of British officer. And, though you may not think it to see me now, I know what I'm talking about. You fellows had your chance in the war and, by Gad, sir, some of you took it”
I knew he was an Army man, and I said so.
He nodded.
“Cavalry,” he answered. “You might be in the cavalry, too, by your build!”
I told him I was a field-gunner—or used to be, and then I asked him his name.
He smiled wanly at that.
“No names, no court-martials!” he quoted.
He drank from his pannikin again.
“Call me Adams,” he said.
There was a moment's silence. The sick man moved restlessly about on his rustling couch and I heard his teeth rattle in his head. Outside, the pulsating life of the negro quarter shattered the brooding stillness of the tropical night. The sound of low, full-throated laughter, mingling with the jangling of guitars, drifted up from the lane.