Brand, Max - 1924

by Clung (v1. 1)

  "So," said Li, nodding. "But you will come back."

  "Never."

  "No man can live alone. It is written."

  "It shall be unwritten again."

  "The white women," said Li. "The hunger, my son."

  "Damn you!" whispered Clung.

  But he dropped to his knees; he folded his hands on his breast.

  "I go," he said. "Give me the blessing of one who departs?"

  The calloused, yellowed hands touched the black, rough-shorn head, and Li uttered a sing-song incantation in the language of his fathers. Afterwards Clung rose and spurred out of the town of Mortimer, but because of the devil that was in him, he chose a way through the very heart of the place where men could not choose but see him pass. A crackle of firing rose on either side of him, and Clung fired four times in return. Spenser and Wilson fell with bullets in their legs; Jefferson was hit in the shoulder and spun like a top before he dropped; Marshal Clauson was not touched, but his best horse was shot under him. The tall dapple-grey which Clung rode flickered out into the night and the men of Mortimer rose in crowds and formed six different posses and combed the desert in every direction. For four days they stuck by the trail.

  Nevertheless, they did not catch Clung. They sighted him several times sliding over the hills or down some hollow as swiftly as a cloud shadow on a windy March day, and as soundlessly. They tried to chase him in a circle, as men chase wild horses; Clung broke through that circle and left Sandy Matthews and young Glover badly shot up behind him. That put heart in the men of Mortimer, because it proved conclusively that Clung was not shooting to kill. If he had been — well, the men of Mortimer remembered sundry Mexicans shot neatly through the head. So they rode recklessly on the trail of Clung, but at the end of four days he had disappeared hopelessly into the desert; the purple hills which shroud men and their doings had swallowed him up. The posses went back to Mortimer and a fat price was placed on the head of Clung.

  As for Clung, he was sorry when the posses went back. It had been good fun — much better than any game of tag; he even followed the posses to the outskirts of Clauson in the late afternoon of the fourth day, and he sat his horse on the brow of a hill and watched the lights grow out in the dusk of the evening, street by street, striping the broad heart of the night. Then he turned his horse about and rode towards the northern hills.

  All was not well with Clung. He was thinking of those days when he sat cross-legged on the little table at the door of the laundry, with his eyes closed, smiling into the heat of the sun. Also, he thought of old Li, sitting with the tall taper on either side and the big volume spread across his knees; he thought, last of all, about the yellow-haired girl who had laughed at him. The hollowness returned to the heart of Clung.

  He remembered now that he was white — he remembered it every time the edges of the rough-shorn hair flipped in the wind across his face; but what good was there in being white if no one would believe it? He hardly believed it himself, and hardly prized it, as yet, for the old precepts of Li swept through his brain: "The white man is a fool before whom one listens twice and speaks once." The chief new sense which came to Clung was one of freedom, of a power and a will to roam at ease through all the desert and the hills. He was an American; he felt a sense of ownership in three million square miles; the first spark of patriotism smouldered in him, the first sense of nationality.

  As yet, it worked obscurely. He had lived with his thoughts harking back to the lives of his ancestors. Now those yellow ancestors were gone, but still his thoughts harked back. Newness overwhelmed him; his blood ran faster; the air drew keenly down in his lungs; there was a tang to life; there was a birth of pride of race.

  It was this same thing that caused his loneliness, perhaps, for he was like a mariner who returns from a long voyage and meets all his old friends, and knows them, but they will not recognize him. On the very day that he became a white man, the whites commenced to hunt him.

  He knew perfectly well the outcome of the chase. They had missed him today; they would miss him the next time and the next that they hunted him, but in the end he would be taken; his destiny was no less certain through being postponed. There is no outlaw who has not known, and there is none who has not thrown away, the thought of tomorrow and lost himself in today. The law of compensation worked in Clung; freedom was doubly sweet because it would not last forever.

  He had led a strange, shut-in existence. Now he saw the world, since he was in danger of being lost from it, and behold! it was fair to see, and filled, now, with his white brothers. At this point in his reflections a gun banged close by and a bullet whizzed by his head; a group of the posse, returning late, had sighted him through the dusk. He raised his gun, poised it — and then spurred the grey off through the dark. At that moment he had no further taste for blood, but he carried away at that galloping pace the certainty that his white brothers who filled the world would be in no hurry to claim their relationship with him.

  Chapter 4

  There followed a month of comparative inactivity for Clung. On several occasions he descended upon stores and purchased what he needed in the way of supplies, but the most picturesque incident recorded of him during that period was the ride into San Marco, where he held up a barber's shop — backed the customers into one end of the room, and then took his seat, guns in hand, and forced the barber to trim his wild, black hair. He had the image of the barber in the glass before him and the latter could not make a suspicious move without being seen. When his hair was cut Clung ordered one of the men to drop a five dollar goldpiece in the hand of the barber, and before he left, he announced that if the stranger attempted to collect that five again he would have to reckon with Clung later on. The five was never collected; and the heart of the barber was softened towards Clung.

  Rumor had not dealt too gently with the fugitive in the meantime. Crimes performed hundreds of miles away from Clung were saddled upon his luckless shoulders, and all men believed the tales. They could hardly accumulate fast enough; men taxed their inventions to create appropriate crimes for Clung. He was the only Chinese desperado known to Arizona, and much was expected of him. In the episode of the barber's shop, for instance, rumor made him kill everyone in the place before leaving, winding up his pleasant little party by cutting the throat of the barber with his own razor.

  Meanwhile, Clung rode by night and slept during the day. He missed the long sun baths at the door of the laundry and moreover this continual life by night was beginning to dim his tan; once when he saw himself in the mirror behind a bar he hardly recognized the rapidly changing color of his face. He did not mind the loneliness — all his life he had had it, and it might be said that he was educated for the part of a lone rider of the mountain-desert. Only one vision returned to disturb him both by day and by night, and this was the picture of the girl with the pale yellow hair, laughing sometimes, sometimes merely smiling; but always with an air of mockery as if she had something to confide in him if he could only reach her and listen.

  It was because of this troubling vision, perhaps, that he started riding one day before the dusk had set in. His goal was nameless; activity was his only end, until, in the slant light of the late sun, he caught a flash of color. He swung the grey to the left and raced for two miles up a gulley; then he dismounted and crept to the top of "he ridge and sheltered himself behind a bush.

  In due time the color reappeared — bright blue, with a splash of yellow, developing into a girl riding at a dog-trot. The blue was the color of her waist, and the yellow was the straw of her hat. She passed close, but not close enough for Clung to see her face. He followed her with his eyes until she had passed out of view around a winding of the trail; the moment the sun had winked for the last time on the bright yellow of her hat, something went out in Clung. It was as if a light had been shining in him, and being puffed out, he was suddenly left all dark and cold inside.

  He went back to the gulley, swung into the saddle, and pursued the blue and ye
llow vision, keeping always just out of her vision, lurking, and trailing her like a dangerous shadow until she came to the largest ranch-house that Clung had ever seen. It was rather more like some fine old Colonial house in the south, and around it, on every side, stretched a deep verandah, with a roof supported by white pillars. There were evidently artesian wells near the house, for green things grew around it — a stretch of lawn — a hedge of some unfamiliar plant — a number of spreading palms whose fringed limbs brushed together, like whispers in the wind of the evening.

  The barn behind the house was almost as large as the residence itself, and up to this the girl rode, dismounted, tossed the reins to a man who came from the barn-door, and ran into the house carrying a small parcel. All this Clung witnessed from behind the brow of a hill, squinting his eyes to pierce the distance and it seemed to him that all the brightness and the happiness in the world was bounded there by the four walls. Truly, he was marvelously lonely.

  He left his horse again, waited until the darkness formed a sufficient screen, and then approached the house, soft as one of those oncoming shadows of the night. It was completely dark, now, and he sat comfortably on the moist, cool sod under a palm, only a few yards from the front of the verandah.

  A servant appeared — a Chinese — and Clung smiled to himself, tilting back his head with half-closed eyes; the yellow race were servants in his land — but he was one of the white brothers. There is no warmth like that of self-content. It stole over Clung now like a man from the Arctic warming himself before a pleasant fire and caressing the objects of comfort with his eyes. The servant lighted a row of square-framed Japanese lanterns; at once the verandah grew bright with the soft flames. Now the Chinese turned, his pig-tail flopping awkwardly, and the door clicked shut after him.

  The doors opened again almost at once, held wide by a little old man in black clothes with a white vest, crossed by a golden chain. He was stooped from work at a desk, and age had bared his head as religion bares the head of a monk. Against the redness of that bald head the circle of silver hair made pleasant contrast. As he held the doors he was smiling and speaking back towards the hall within, which lay just out of range of Clung's vision. Next came an invalid chair wheeled by the girl he had seen riding. Her clothes were now filmy white, to be sure, and until this moment he had never seen her face; nevertheless, he knew that it was she. He closed his eyes. He felt that he could tell her presence as one tells the species of a flower in the night — by its peculiar fragrance.

  Clung had the Oriental love of perfumes. He could construct the history of his life out of the smells he had known. The peculiar, steamy aroma of the ironing room in the laundry, to be sure, was the background out of which all else grew, but against that background other things were trebly precious. Old Li had some rare silks from China and there hung about them a faint lilac fragrance which had clothed Clung's boyhood as with an atmosphere of poesy. Then there was the garden of Marshal Clauson. Flowers were to Clung what wine is to others. He had loved to walk slowly past the garden of the marshal in the night, slowly, inch by inch, breathing deeply — his head back and his eyes half closed — distinguishing the various scents and naming each unseen flower in the dark. He thought of this now when the girl came out on the verandah, wheeling the invalid. He hardly knew whether she were beautiful or ugly, young or old; he merely wished suddenly to be close enough to have the wind blow a fragrance from her to him. He sat there on his heels in a sort of happy expectation until this thing should be.

  It was a rather sad emotion, also. It reminded him of certain paintings of flowers upon silk — Chinese work which old Li also owned and brought forth on state occasions.

  Clung had loved these paintings but they always made him sad. There were other flowers, to be sure, which he could have and enjoy, but these peculiar, beautiful ones which the artist had painted, they must have been dust a thousand years before. It was the same with the girl. She entered his life with the scents of the flowers of other years; she was apart from him, unpossessed, unpossessable — another age and another world. He wondered that the two men did not sit before her as he would have done — with his head tilting back and his eyes half closed, drinking in her presence. This thought made him lower his head with a frown and look more closely upon the two fortunate ones who sat so close to her — see! they could reach out their hands and touch her, if they wished!

  Chapter 5

  This rapturous possibility, strangely enough, left them quite unmoved. They were as impassive as old Li discussing with a customer the prospects of collecting an old bill. Age in the one and sickness in the other doubtless explained it. The old man had tilted back in his chair and lighted a cigar; now he was turning the cigar slowly in his lips with one hand and insulting the night with drifting clouds of stench. They reached Clung and made him curl his upper lip in that smile of which Marshal Clauson so strongly disapproved. Contempt unutterable filled the soul of Clung, and hatred for one who could so violate the sweetness of the night air. He turned his disgusted stare on the invalid, prepared to be displeased. His fullest expectations were surpassed.

  The man was large — a gross and heavy largeness. His shoulders quite filled the chair from side to side. Even in the distance Clung could adequately measure the size of the man's hand on the cane arm of the chair — it was fearfully wasted — it had strength left only to meet the grip of death — but still it was appallingly vast; the knuckles thrust out as if they would break the skin. Such a hand, filled out with muscle, could have crushed the bones in the fingers of Clung. Indeed, as he stared he felt a pain there running up to his elbow. Disease had made the sufferer ugly. His eyes were sunken, his neck was a gruesome thing of cords and sinews, and about those mighty, wasted shoulders the faint wind shook the clothes.

  It was at once apparent that the fellow had not even the strength to raise himself and sit up in the chair, but what energy remained to him he consumed in endless shifting about. No position pleased him long. He kept shrugging his shoulders, moving his feet, clasping and unclasping his hands, twisting his head suddenly. His lips were never still. Now he attempted to whistle, now he scowled, now he talked — the complaining tone drifted across to Clung.

  Now, since it was apparent to all eyes that the man was to die, why did he not bear fate with inscrutable countenance, smiling most when pain wrung his vitals? Clung remembered when a devil entered the body of his uncle Chu Wee, and sat in Chu's stomach. It took Chu Wee six months to die, but all the time he sat impassive, smiling, amiable; when he was well he had been a snarling demon. Truly the way of the yellow man in meeting death was much more beautiful than the way of the white. Clung was very glad of his double inheritance; he would take the best from the yellow and the best from the white.

  The old man, on one side of the invalid, and the girl on the other, were very patient. She, in especial, continually rose to shift the pillows behind his shoulders and rearrange the robe which covered his enormous, lanky legs. The sick man coughed violently, and made a furious gesture towards the old man, who at once threw away his cigar, but he did it with an ill-grace which Clung could very easily see. He caught their voices now. The invalid had stretched out a hand to the other man.

  "Father," he said, "I’m a terrible weakling — but the whiff of smoke just then — it nearly strangled me!"

  "Beast," thought Clung, "why did he not strangle and say nothing?"

  "H-m-m," said the other, "it's all right, Will. I’m — I’m really through smoking, for a while."

  "And you, my dear!" said the sick man, turning to the girl.

  She reached out with a smile, and took his hand between both of hers. At that the world reeled before the eyes of Clung. It was plain; it was written clear; she was the man's woman!

  "You ought to be out in the world of action and pleasant things," said the man. His voice was bass, but sickness had raised it into a sort of nasal key. "But I keep you down here in my little hell, burdening you with my own small misery. Good h
eavens, Winifred, sometimes I hate myself. I wish to God I could die now and get the thing over with."

  "My dear!" she cried. So beautiful a thing must have such a voice. It was not high, and yet its quality was light, and there was a vibrant quality about it — a tone that pierced like the muted G-string of a violin. Now the man laughed, harshly and briefly.

  "But sometimes I'm sure," he said, "that you would have never told me you loved me if I had not been so sick."

  "Will," said the old man, "sometimes you're just a plain damned fool! Excuse me, Winifred; I’m going inside."

  He got up and stamped into the house. It was all very disgusting to Clung. He thought of the girl as of a rare blossom which grows out of a foul soil.

  "I wouldn't say it like that," murmured the girl, "but you are foolish to think I don't love you, dear."

  "I don't doubt it," said the sick man, "but you never showed much liking for me while I was on my feet. When I got down and out you discovered — well, Winifred, to put it frankly, you discovered a place where you could be of service, and you took the place. %

  "Hush!" she said, and laid a white finger across his lips. The man kissed that finger and then rolled up his eyes to her with a ghastly smile. Clung shuddered; it was as if she had touched flesh white with leprosy; it was as if he had stood idly by and watched a holy thing polluted, and now his lithe, slender fingers coiled about the hilt of his knife. Even at that distance he could have thrown it accurately. He could have struck the colorless gash of the man's mouth; better still, he could have buried the blade in the hollow of the gaunt throat. She spoke again, and lost in the pleasure of her voice his nerveless fingers uncoiled and fell away.

  "Surely I have proved how dear you are to me, Will?"

  "Don't think I complain," he said. "I thank God that I can have even the sight of you for a moment. I know I'm going to die; I know Fm never going to live to make you my wife. Die! and at my age; with all the world before me. I feel — oh, God! — sometimes I feel as if I were already buried alive — and everything beautiful fills me with horror because I have to give it up — Winifred — even you!"