Jones was thunderstruck. "Why should she go in one of those things, when she turned down an offer to go in the tender? You must be mistaken!"
"I know your wife when I see her, Mr. Jones," the man insisted. "I stood there by the rail looking right down at her."
They were both staring at him a little curiously. The shock must have shown quite plainly on his face, he supposed. He didn't care about that so much; what shook him was that she'd gone off like that without a word of warning.
"They'll be coming back soon, and then you'l! see for yourself," the man suggested.
Jones stood there for a while by the rail with him, pretending to talk of other things. He heard hardly a word that his companion said; he couldn't think of anything but this incalculable defection of hers.
"Here comes the tender now."
It had an awning over it, so those in it couldn't be seen from overhead until they had emerged. He shifted farther over, to a position directly above the foot of the Jacob's ladder, and looked down on their heads as they bobbed into sight one by one.
There weren't very many of them. And she wasn't with them, she hadn't come back.
He hovered there on the outskirts of the little group as they stood on the deck. Some woman greeted him, and he instantly asked her the question that was really needless, since he could see the answer for himself. "Didn't my wife come back with you?"
"No, she wasn't with us."
He found himself immensely relieved for a moment. "Somebody claimed they'd seen her going ashore. I didn't think she—"
She promptly gave the report devastating confirmation. "She was. I caught sight of her myself, some distance off, in the town, when we were being led about by the nose. There was no sign of her when we gathered to get back in the tender again, so we thought maybe she'd come back ahead of us in that same little boat she hired." Then, noting the strain in his face, "Hasn't she?"
"No."
"You'd better go back after her yourself! She may have been left stranded on the—"
He didn't need to be told that by now. He was already at the ladder head, roaring down in advance of his own floundering descent, "Wait a minute, hold that thing! I'm coming with you. My wife's still ashore."
"We're sailing in three quarters of an hour, Mr. Jones! Don't stay too long!" one of the officers called overside to him as the tender nosed along the heat-blistered hull and then veered off landward.
Jones subsided uneasily into the pit of the boat. The heat was unbearable down this close to the water; it was like cutting through boiling tar. He instinctively withdrew his hand to avoid touching it, as if afraid of being scalded, though that was only a sensory illusion.
The age-old verdigris-coated stone quay slowly reared itself above the water line before them. Jones jumped out and ran up the slimy slabs that formed the stairs, his foot skidding from the Up of one and striking the one below in momentary misstep that failed to slow or throw him down save for a momentary lurch.
She wasn't in sight anywhere. There was no sign of her. He turned to one of the idlers lounging about. "SenoraF' he said, dredging up one of the few Spanish words he knew.
The fellow pointed out to the ship and said something that probably meant, "They all went back a few minutes ago."
"Not the one I mean," Jones muttered. He didn't loiter there bothering to translate it, but struck off the landing stage and into the town proper without wasting any more time.
One of the sailors called out some warning about returning in time, but he paid no heed. His mind was intent on one thing and one alone: on finding her.
Now that he was in the midst of it the place had condensed itself still further, so that it looked even smaller than when seen from the ship out in the roadstead. A main street of sorts ran up straight before him from the quayside plaza. A few lesser ones crossed it at uneven intervals, like misplaced ties on a railroad track. And that, seemingly, was the whole sum and substance of it. It seemed unbelievable that anyone could lose himself in a place such as this for any length of time; that is, fail to find a way back to the starting point. But then—where was she, what had become of her?
He chose this spinal thoroughfare first, up one side, down the other, trying the interiors of the handful of shops that might have attracted her. She was in none of them, she had been seen in none of them. Everywhere heads shook, hands widened.
He returned to the quay again, still without her. One of the sailors from the tender again shouted a warning to him, pointed out to the ship. There wasn't much time. It spurred him to an added frenzy of distracted searching.
He ran into one of the side streets. Cheap little drink shops, tawdry booths, all the eflBuvia of tropical barter. She wouldn't be in any of these. What was there here for her? For that matter, what was there for her in this entire place? He turned, went back again.
He was good and frightened now, and in a deplorable state of breathlessness, dishevelment, and cumulative perspiration brought on by his own eflForts.
He discovered a hotel of sorts, probably the only one the place boasted, but again all he got were shrugs and splayed hands.
He even looked inside a crumbling pink-sandstone church he came across, glossy-coated buzzards nestling along its peristyle and cornices like lacquered sentinels of corruption. The cavernous place was empty. Candle flames fluttered with the disturbance of his entrance, in a serried line ascending one side of the altar, descending again on the other; first all leaning over one way, then bending back again to lean the other, before they righted themselves again.
He took off his hat, withdrew backward, less cycloni-cally than he had entered, dropping a coin into the alms box for amends as he turned and went out.
Outside, he tottered down the steps again, palm flat to his forehead in a sort of salute to bewilderment. Where, then? Where else? Where was there left? He'd been all over the confounded little place.
There must be a police station of some sort, even in this benighted little backwater. That was it. He'd have to go there for help.
And then, well on his way to it, and already almost there, the need for it was suddenly done away with.
She was in a shop of sorts, scarcely a shop, a booth set back into the walls like a niche. The white of her dress gleamed out palely from the dimness of its interior. She was standing motionless, her back to the roadway outside.
His sudden appearance at the single-file entrance darkened over the little light there was, blotting out the interior for a moment.
"Mitty!" he exclaimed hoarsely.
She seemed not to hear him, she was so absorbed.
He stepped quickly over to her and took her by the arm. "Mitty are you crazy? I've been frightened half outof my skin! I've been hunting everywhere for you, all up and down this town!"
She turned to him as though she didn't know him for a minute.
Then, as though his presence had finally registered, she exclaimed belatedly, but with perfect composure, "Oh, it's you, Larry! How did you get here?" "Mitty, d'you know what I've been through?" "Have I been in here very long?" she asked vaguely. ''I've been trying to remember something."
She turned and followed him docilely enough out into the open once more. The shopkeeper trailed behind her, saying something in tactful insistence. Jones turned in time to see her give him back one of the curios, a grotesque little clay figurine of a squatting human form, arms laced about its knees, head disproportionately large, which she had unknowingly retained in her hand.
"What possessed you?" Jones was saying disjointedly, as they struck back in the direction he'd just come from.
She looked behind her; whether at the shop itself, or the shopkeeper standing there in its opening looking after them, or at the little clay figure, he couldn't be sure.
"I was roaming around, I happened to pass by there, and I looked in. I caught sight of those things on the shelf, those rows of little stone figures he had, and I don't know—every time I picked one up, I got the funniest feeling, I co
uldn't seem to tear myself a—"
He had no time to hear her out. Some blurred remark in postscript swept glancingly past his attention. "It's like when you open an old trunk, and see things that you haven't seen in a long time, and try to remember where and when you—"
"We're going to lose that ship if we don't htirry." He began to beckon violently.
A little hooded carriage turned, toiled laboriously up to them—the street was on a sharp incline—turned once more, and drew up. Jones helped her in.
"El puerto. The water front. Understand? Quick!" They clattered, noisily over the cobbles, on an acute downgrade, the strips of street scene going by now fast on each side of them, like film whirring through a projection machine. His head and shoulders were held slanted out at one side of the carriage, while he stared down ahead of their own course.
"There it is, I see it at the end of this street. We're finally getting therel"
Suddenly he stood bolt upright in the carriage as the enclosing buildings fell back and it swept out onto the quayside plaza.
"I don't see the launch! It's not here any more!"
He jumped down without waiting for the vehicle to slacken and swing broadside, and ran out onto the landing stage. The same black cur with yellow undersides was lolling there, the same somnolent loungers, backs to warehouse walls, hats over their eyes, legs out before them on the ground. Everything the same as before.
But down at the bottom of the steps the water heaved green and glassy and empty.
Out beyond the harbor roadstead, black smoke trailed like a scar across the translucent sky, from a rodlike attenuation that crept in misleading sluggishness along the line where sea joined sky.
He came back to her finally. It seemed like a long time after. It no doubt was. She had stayed in the carriage.
Even the ship's smokestack was gone now. The black smoke hung disembodied, unraveling on the air like yam, a symbol without a visible cause below it.
There was nothing to say. Words were superfluous to add clarity to the situation, impotent to remedy it. An occasional slap from the green water lapping emptily against the understones of the quay was tiie only sound there was.
Two people standing silently, wonderingly, side by side; at the edge of nowhere, poised at the brink of the sea, in a strange place.
The sea and the place alike began to darken rapidly around them, as night came down like a black roller shade.
Chapter Six
"God, what a place!" he exclaimed with suppressed savagery that night, in the fusty cavernous hotel room. "Thirty days in a trap like this! Talk about being buried alive! It's worse than that. When you're buried, the earth is cool around you, at least."
She was sitting huddled in one of the two gigantic beds, her face a ghostly oval against the mosquito netting that misted her over.
He took a turn or two around the tiled floor, one hand worrying the skin at the back of his neck. "It's good-by job, too. They'll never hold it for me thirty days. I was due to report by the tenth, at the latest."
"Larry, have we any money?" she faltered. "Or are we—?"
"We're not completely broke, if that's what you mean. I happened to have a little money in the pocket of this suit. The rest of it's in the purser's safe, going north without us, at this moment. But I suppose they'll hold it until we claim it. That's not what worries me. It's just that this knocks all my plans sky-high. I was counting on that job."
"Can't we take a plane out and still get up there on time?"
"Not a chance," he said glumly. "That was the first thing I asked downstairs, when we came in. Even the planes skip this place, it's so far off the beaten track. They don't come within hundreds of miles of it. Nothing to bring them here."
He paced another desultory lap or two. "Let's kill the light, shall we? It's attracting all sorts of things in here. There's shoals of them flying around it already. Want it any more?"
"No," she said docilely. "It's probably cooler without it."
After a moment or two a match winked out, over by the window, where he must have come to a halt, staring sightlessly out at nothing.
"Larry, can I have a cigarette?" she murmured penitently.
"Here," he said grudgingly. His tread came toward her hollowly across the tiled floor. "Hold your net out of the way, so I don't set fire to it."
The second match flare illumined her face into a coral-tinted mask for a minute. Then the mask faded again.
"Larty, are you very angry at me?" she muttered.
He didn't answer. Which was his answer.
She tried again. "Larry, I'm sorry about getting us into this fix."
"Then why did you do it?" he answered tersely.
"I didn't want to," she said tractably.
He took a deep breath of exasperation, bajffled at the contradiction. "But you did come ashore, Mitty, so how can you say that?"
"I don't know, Larry. I'm telling you the truth, please beheve me. I didn't want to come ashore and I didn't mean to. I had no such idea when I first stepped out on deck this morning. I was only going to take a quick look from the rail, and then turn around and come right in again. Can't you see that by the way I was dressed? I didn't even have a hat or anything, to keep the sun off me. I left the cabin just the way I was."
His silence was an indication that that point had just occurred to him, himself, now that she mentioned it.
"One of those little native boats came drifting by below me. It had some things to sell, but nothing that interested me. Fruit and things. But there was a clay water jug in it, in the form of a hollowed-out image. He'd brought it along just to keep his produce fresh, maybe, or to drink from it himself. I kept staring at it, and staring at it, and—I felt so funny, Larry."
"How, funny?" he demanded.
"I don't know, myself. I only know I couldn't take my eyes off it. The little boat, by now, had sneaked into place at the foot of the ladder, where the tender had been before. First I leaned as far over the rail as I could. Then before I knew it I was edging my way down the ladder step by step, to get a closer look, and then there I was standing right in the little boat itself. And then I was sitting there, holding this jug in my arms and fondling it. I don't remember after that; maybe I asked him where it came from, and he pointed to the shore, and then I told him to take me there. But I don't remember that part of it. I only remember that the next thing I knew I was in the town, walking around on dry land."
"The whole time you were ashore, the whole afternoon long, didn't you think of me at all? Didn't you think of the ship, even? Didn't you realize it was due to sail at a certain hour, and I was on it waiting for you?"
"I seemed to forget everything. I couldn't help it. I wandered around the whole time with the strangest feeling. Did you ever have a word on the tip of your tongue, you're just about to remember it, but you never quite can, it keeps slipping back each time? Well, it was that feeling, that sort of agonizing, expectant feeling. Only, it was something on the tip of my memory, and not on the tip of my tongue. It seemed to drive everything else completely out of my mind, and yet it wouldn't take over itself, it wouldn't complete itself; so I was left in a sort of blank state, a walking daze."
"If you ask me, I think it was a touch of the sun. Wandering around with your head uncovered."
"No," she insisted vaguely. "It was something on the tip of my memory. Then when I saw this little clay figure, this idol, inside that shop where you found me, I couldn't tear myself away. Time stood still. Each time I tried to put it down, my hand would reach out and pick it up again. It seemed to have something to tell me."
"Something to tell you," he scoiffed with impatience.
"I'd stand holding it for the longest time. I'd have this feeling of a word creeping out on the tip of my tongue, just hanging there, but never quite emerging. Oh, I know; you asked me not to speak that way. But that's the only way that fits it. There's no other way."
He had relapsed into a moody silence.
"I've a
ntagonized you, haven't I, Larry?" she said presently.
"No, you've just made me feel sort of peculiar."
He crushed out his cigarette and unraveled the furled mosquito netting from atop its frame.
"Well, it's a mystery to me. It's the strangest thing I've ever heard of."
The stillness that descended was one with the heat. It was a smothering; sort of silence. Even the stars visible beyond the window seemed to pulse hotly, with a sort of vindictive fever.
Chapter Seven
The days were like successive pairs of handcuffs, each one composed of twenty-four separate links, holding them prisoner.
The sun would come up in a blaze of yellow, gaseous heat, fuming in at them through the slats of the blinds, searing livid tiger stripes across the walls of the room. Its ferocity too was tigerish, at six o'clock.
Her wan voice would sound through the mosquito netting. "Are you awake yet? So am I. Oh, it's terrible, isn't it?"
"I tried thinking of snow," he said, eying the ceiling. "It works a little."
"He'll be here pretty soon. Here he is now, I can hear the water slapping onto the tiles as he carries the buckets along."
There wasn't any running water in the place. There was an artesian well, and the porter would trundle up bucketsful, two by two, on a crosspiece arrangement over his shoulders, and duly empty them into a slab-sided stone quadrangle that looked as though it were made of basalt. "The concrete mixer," Jones had called it the first time he saw it. It had taken a good deal of hammering insistence in the beginning, but the porter now brought the water daily without being told, for these peculiar people who bathed not only on church holidays but every morning of the year.
And yet, for all its crudeness, this was one of the brief respites of the day, this plunge into coolness.
The rest, from then on for the remainder of the day, was simply the fatuousness of motion without purpose, without aim. A vacuum that was so much more empty even than boredom that to have called it that would have been flattery.
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