“What would you do with a woman like that? A rope’s end wouldn’t be the thing, I guess.”
“Well, to tell the truth, I have always found those fat doubloons the most perfect instruments of rape. They glitter so.”
“No, no. But see this. Nearly all women will repurchase their diamonds with their virtue. When you have the second, it is an easy thing to reacquire the first.”
“What does old One-arm say about it—The Other Burgundian? Hey! will you be taking the Red Saint for your fat friend there?”
The Other Burgundian bowed.
“There would be no need,” he said. “My friend is very capable. Why, I could tell a tale—” He turned to The Burgundian. “Have I your permission, Emil?”
The Burgundian seemed trying to get through the wall, but he did manage a nod.
“Then I will tell you gentlemen a story,” The Other Burgundian began. “There were four friends in Burgundy; three who squeezed a little sour milk from the dugs of art, and one who had possessions. Also there was a lovely girl in Burgundy; beautiful, accomplished, a veritable Circe, most lovely in the country. And the four friends all fell in love with this sweet exquisite.
“Each one gave her the gifts which were most dear to himself. The first folded his soul in a sonnet and laid it at her feet. The second filled a viol with her name; and I—the third, I mean—painted the rosy image of her face. Thus did we artists bid for her in all friendliness to one another. But the last of the four was the true artist. He was quiet; he was subtle. What an actor! He won her with a superb gesture. He opened his hand—so—and there, on the cushion of his palm, lay a laughing rose pearl. They were married.
“Now, soon after this marriage, Delphine gave evidence of greater virtues than anyone had suspected. Not only was this paragon a perfect wife, but she was also the discreet and delightful mistress—not to one, but to all three—of the husband’s friends. And Emil, the husband, did not mind. He loved his friends. Why not? They were his true friends, but poor.
“Ah, where is a force so blind, so idiotic, as public opinion! This time, two deaths and one banishment were born of it. This hydra of a Public Opinion—consider to yourselves what it did! It forced Emil to challenge his three friends. Even then, all might have ended with the kiss, the embrace—‘my honor is whole again, dear friend’—if it had not been for Emil’s deplorable habit of leaving his rapier point in putrefying meat. Two of the men died, and I lost my arm.
“Now, here again comes this Public Opinion, like a blundering, powerful ox. Having forced the duels, it forced the victor out of France. Here is Emil, beside me—lover, swordsman, artist, landowner. The Public Opinion—But I have strayed from the tale in my hatred of this force. What I wanted to tell you is that Emil asks no consideration, no quarter at all. I know it appears that a swarm of hungry ants has been feasting on his spirit; but let great beauty be placed before him, let the Red Saint be mirrored in those eyes, and you shall see and remember what I say. He is quiet; he is subtle; he is an artist. Where other men cry ‘Virility! Force! Rape!’—Emil carries a rose pearl in his pocket as an aphrodisiac.”
II
An army of flatboats was floating on the River Chagres, each one taxed to the limit of its buoyancy with the men of the Free Brotherhood. Frenchmen there were, wearing striped nightcaps and full, loose pantaloons; Frenchmen who had sailed out of St. Malo or Calais one time, and now had no fatherland to sail back to. Some of the barges were filled with Cockneys, dirty men for the most part, with black teeth and the look of petty thievery about them. There were dour, silent Zeerovers from Holland, lumpishly sitting in their boats, gazing with the dull eyes of gourmands along the course of Chagres.
The heavy, square barges were poled along by Caribs and Cimarones, joyfully fierce then who loved war so well that they could be persuaded to bend their sleek brown shoulders to labor if the reward were blood. One section of the parade of piracy was composed of Negroes lately escaped from Spanish servitude. They wore red bandoliers, crossing like wounds on their naked breasts. The leader, a huge buck with a face like a ferocious black moose, wore nothing at all save a broad yellow belt and a cavalier hat, the plume of which hung limply down and curled under his glistening black chin.
The boats, in a long line, edged up the stream. The English shouted tuneless chanteys, swaying their bodies to preserve the rhythm; the French sang softly of the little loves they might have had; and the Cimarones and blacks chattered their endless monologues directed at no one in particular.
And Chagres twisted on ahead in loops and tremendous horseshoe turns. The yellow water, like a frightened, leprous woman, timidly caressed the hulls. On this Chagres you might pole your boat all day, and at night make your camp not half a mile by straight line from the starting place. It was a sluggish, apathetic river of many shallows where the bright sand glittered in the sun. Chagres was a dilettante in the eternal and understood business of rivers—that of getting to the ocean with as little bother and effort as possible. Chagres dreamed about over the country, seemingly reluctant to lose its lazy individuality in the worried sea.
After a time the boats came to a land where the thick jungle rolled to the river’s edge and stopped in a curving crest, like a frozen green wave. There were spotted tigers cruising along through the trees, watching the
