The Last Ditch

Romney saw the rug before he saw the woman. It was the yellow of India, the yellow you see on the breast of the purple martin and on the inner petals of an Emperor rose. The weave of the rug was like no other. Its folds looked heavy like raw silk, yet the fabric itself was thin. It would last a life time, and then become a priceless gift for the one held most dear. It was soil-proof as a snake's skin. It was either holy or savage.

They were on the little river steamer, Sungkiang, a day's passage below Hankow. The woman had boarded that forenoon at Wu-chang. Romney had come through from Ngan-king. The yellow rug lay across the knees of the woman. The afternoon was breezy and bright. It was May, and the rice was green along the flats of the southern shore.... She was either English or American, Romney reflected, and also that the world was well supplied with pretty women, but not with rugs like that.

Just now the woman held out her arms to a missionary's child-a passing boy-child of five in sandals. His legs were bare and brown and scratched. His name was Paul and he was a stoic from much manhandling. He went to her arms in silence, and there was a burning now in Romney's chest. Her voice had been a thirsty primitive note, like a cry, as if the presence of the child hurt her.

The little boy stood erect and silent against her limbs. She lifted the rug and drew it about his waist to hold him close. She was lost to everything else. Romney had fancied her the most exquisite and delicate creature, but this face that he saw now had the plain earthy passion of a river-woman talking to her first-born-a love of the child's body and face and lips, the love of a woman who loves the very soil of play on her child. Paul had been running the decks for two days, making enough noise to give the missionary the reputation of being a widower. The child was moist from running at this moment, and the woman buried her face in his throat.

Romney wished whimsically that he were the missionary so he could come into the picture for the sake of meeting the woman. The child was drawing away. Her dark eyes were untellably hungry already. Paul must have told his name, for she was saying:

"Such a right name for a noble boy. And where are you going?"

"To Hankow."

"It's like a fairy-tale-a young man going to Hankow to seek his fortune-"

"My father does not like me to read fairy-tales-"

Paul's eyes were full of pictures. Romney did not hear what she said to that, but circled the little deck again, thinking of her eyes and voice. They went with the yellow rug. As Romney returned, the child pulled back from the woman, announcing:

"That's my father."

And now for the first time Romney's eyes and the woman's met. The child had pointed his way, though the missionary was behind him. Her look came up with something that seemed to say, "I beg of you-don't disappoint me." Then Romney forgot the peculiarity of that, in the sudden sense that she was like the blood-sister of some one he had known. At the same time flat in his consciousness was the fact that he had not known any such "some one." She was young, but this was not the look of a girl at all-the look of a hungry imperious woman who had known love and been denied-adult understanding, the shoals of cheap illusion passed. She was looking beyond him at the real father of Paul.

Under his own calm, Romney was intensely sensitized. Something had happened to him from her eyes. He felt he was out somewhere in the deep waters of life wherein she sailed-the shallow problems already put from them, all decoration, convention and imitation thrust aside. The missionary and the little boy had passed. And now Romney did a very good thing for him, and something that he would not have thought possible before this day. He drew a chair close to the yellow rug, saying:

"May I?"

"Yes."

... They talked of Paul, of missionaries, of Asia, travel. Her manner was easy and genuine, her observations wise and humorous, but her eyes full of challenge. There was tenderness in them, and something that for a better name he called deviltry. He felt himself in the presence of a big nature, whose sweep was from the primitive passions of birth and death, of fear and hunger, to some consummate and mysterious ambition. He could not tell what she wanted; and at the same time her thrall was stealing over him, preventing him from seeing her the same at different moments. He felt that her sweetness could be unfathomable to one she loved. She was exquisite in every detail-lip, nostril, finger-tip, hair, figure, voice, manner, wear-all as perfect as the yellow rug. Yet it was beauty, rather than loveliness, something to fear about it.

Romney knew in that first hour that he did not challenge her. He felt his youth, his imperfections, the wastes of his past years. All that he had fancied good about those years looked questionable now. If he had known that he was to meet this woman, his life would have been different. He had met no one like her. She accepted his best with ease and without wonder. No man had been able to do that. She tossed a crown over the highest of his mental offerings and added a higher one of her own on his favourite subjects. Yet they were not showing each other their wares. She stimulated him as no one had done before, and as for her part-it was the pleasant passage of an hour.

An Irish woman with an olive skin and dark hair and eyes-slender and not too tall. Her face in profile had the Greek essential of beauty, but with a hardly imaginable delicacy covering the rigour of that austere line of bone structure. She seemed the most conserved creature he had ever met, as if every excellence of life had been known to her from a child-all love and reverence and protection. He suddenly remembered that fury of instinct with which she had kissed the boy Paul in the throat. Something earthy and ample about that, sound and deeply-grounded like a peasant woman's passion.

He wondered again and again what she wanted. It had nothing to do with money or position-Romney was sure of this. Queerly enough the truth did not come to him until later. They dined together humorously in the little cabin of the Sunkiang.... A Burmese tiger had killed her husband.

"I can stand it-if I don't stay in one place too long," she said, looking at the farthest punkah. "It is always with me. If I stay at home, or any one place many weeks, the thoughts seem to pile up so that I cannot breathe. They drive me away-"

She had evidently not found before much understanding of this point-seemed without hope to make herself clear to him.

"The thoughts of it become heavy in any one place," she added, "so that there is no home-"

"I know," Romney said.

She looked at him quickly. Any one might have said it, but Romney spoke as if he had earned the right, and she questioned that.

"The tiger killed my baby, too,-though I was in England-"

She said it apparently with little emotion, but Romney sensed a slow pounding of agony in her breast, like a sea that cannot quiet down.

"I have thought of everything," she was saying. "I have some philosophy. I have no foolish sense of this life being all-or death being all, but, oh, I was going to take him his little baby-as soon as it was born. I was at his father's in Kent, England. And to think that a bit of pink paper and the word tiger-"

Romney was silent.

"My baby would have been as old as that little boy with the silly missionary father," she added.

"Why silly? I only saw a bent drab man with his particular idea of God-"

"Silly because he doesn't permit the child to hear fairy stories-"

"Ah-"

Romney found himself regarding her judgment as quite right.

He thought he was beginning to understand now, yet she seemed to live too powerfully in the present hour to be lost altogether in a tragedy of five years ago. The look of her eyes had to do with the future, not with the past. At the same time there was something tremendous in the slow, still way she had spoken of her child and its father. A magnificent sort of Englishman he must have been to hold this woman's life to his....

They were on deck again. The wind had gone down. The moon played upon the mists of the ricelands on the southern shore. To the north the river was crowded with small boats and the myriad lights of a low-lying city were fused into a dull red glow. The woman was thrilling him now with every sentence:

"I am not hugging a grief. I see that I gave you that impression. Perhaps I carry it with me-and give it forth from time to time as a matter of habit. It is doubtless as interesting as another, but it is not true. Life is too short to try to make most people understand. If I care enough to explain, I tell a different, a more real story. You are good to talk to. I think I must have been lonely when you came and drew up your chair. That startled me pleasantly-your doing that. At least, I knew you weren't common. Grown-ups-men and women adults-should dare to be real to each other. How chatty I am-"

"I like it. I do feel the gift of it-"

"No, I'm not going around the world clinging to an ancient bereavement.... He was a very good man, patient, a man's man-a tiger-hunter. It's all in that. I was younger five years ago. I was so young that I thought for a time my future sufficiently wrapped in his. Then I had his baby. That made a kind of devil of me. I had lived those months. I found that there was something huge and endless about that experience. I am not giving you any cant about motherhood. I could smell and taste and see into things as never before. I was in a rage when he went away to hunt tigers. Why, he took it as a matter of mere nature-as something in the natural course of events-that I should bring his child into the world. I was growing into a real creature and he could not rise out of the annual tiger rhamadan. It is a sort of religion with his family-and couldn't be broken. And then I was smothered in his family. When the word was brought a kind of madness came over me-sorrow-yes, there was real sorrow. I remembered all his good, but the madness had to do with perpetuating him-a man who could leave me in that smothering British household.... It seemed I wanted a child that had nothing to do with him-with them.... What I wanted in those days, I wanted with a kind of madness. They said it was my grief that killed the little one. These things are mysterious.... And now-"

She laughed softly. Romney was trying to adjust this story with the earlier talk, but each part destroyed the other. He could as readily believe the first as the final. It dawned upon him that the real truth might lie somewhere between, but there were no tangible forms to grip in this middle distance. He was not inclusive enough to know that she was for the moment intensely what she said. In any event the strange lapses of the tale did not break the enchantment.

"Don't try to understand," she added gently. "No man could understand-at least, none but a very great artist."

"But now," he repeated.

"Oh, I search and search. I know that travel does not bring me nearer to what I want, but I can't rest long in one place. He left me everything that the world can give, but I can't live long in his houses. Yet what I search for is as likely to come to me at home, as here in Asia-"

"What is it you search for?" Romney asked.

"A man," she said.