Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 1 (1923-12).djvu/28

THE MAN WHO BANISHED HIMSELF 27

tongue stroked their burning coats. The babies panted and staggered too. The mother came and looked with dying, trusting eyes into the face of the dying white man.

"M'Lungu. M'kewa," the Kaffir muttered. "There is meat. Why not kill them?"

The woman made a hungry grab and the man stopped her. Suddenly he laughed.

"Why kill them, umfazi? They are my only friends on earth—all that I have left."

In her last day the woman questioned: "Why keep a dog alive?"

"A dog? She had nine pups, umfazi. She caught rats for them and I found her milk. The goats died. The rats died. The country died. The lizards died. The country burned. Then I killed her pups one by one and fed her on them that she might feed the rest and keep me company."

The woman dully moved her eyes and she, too, looked into the haze. Her skeleton hands touched flabby, leathery breasts and she appeared to dream.

"M'Lungu," she breathed, "not only the get of dogs die that way—sometimes."

The man went back into the store and opened the last tin of sardines between him and the question of the Hereafter.

"Eat this," he told the woman. "Somehow it seems to me that you are the incarnation of the woman who turned on me, the spirit of her. It seems that, after all, I have to die with a woman who can't save herself and who I now can't save."

Little Africa, things come back on us. There is a Divinity which sees to everything.

The woman ate—fell forward.

And the man pulled her away. His strength was gone, his life was gone, all he could do was pull. And he pulled the Kaffir woman as reverently as he'd have done his own sister. Pulled her and staggered over stumps and stones. Pulled her to hide her from the ants and blazing sun. And over her he built a tossed-up cairn of stones.

And the man knelt down and prayed—prayed as he'd never done since those years before in London when help meant a matter of standing at a door and whistling and pleasure and comfort were only a minute off.

"God," he asked, "help me to be bad. I've prayed to be good in my own way and I've wanted to be good, but you've not heard me. Help me now my last day to be bad. Let me be bad. Let me have one last fling. I'm going. I have to face it. Give me the strength to do one devilish thing."

The man stood up, knelt down and kissed the pile of stones in crazy reverence. Then moved away.

The earth was burning, the sand a mass of fire, the man stepped over skeletons and over bones of many things. With naked feet kicked heads from necks and ribs from whitened frames. Pah! what were burned human beings, what starved and tortured ones? What? And tomorrow he'd be one. The man laughed squeakily, and each laugh shook his flickering life.

Little Africa, in death there's less than any think. Death is nothing—only the end of something.

The man laughed, sobbed, kicked at the dried-up carcasses. Touched them. Poked at them. Picked up dried bones and threw them like a boomerang. Talked to them. Talked till his lips went cracked and sound was almost past forever. Then the man stooped a weary back and picked a head from a much more shriveled body. And in his craziness he looked at it and saw that the sunken cheeks were simply whole dry flesh.

Little Africa, this isn't pretty, but the truth sometimes is hard to hear.

The man took that head home to the place he might yet live in for one more night and for a while gloated over it. A human head, a head like his, a skull! That which we all must go to, and he—he had to go. The end of everyone, and he to follow just as surely as the sun would rise next day.

The man fingered the head, felt it, caressed it, smelt the dry flesh and laughed at it. Turned to his starving dog and let her smell it.

And with trembling limbs he found a ladder to fix the skull above his store that death might be above and death within.

The man put the skull on the peak of the grass roof, and came down and stared queerly up at it. Looked at it and saw himself as he would be in but two days or less.

Little Africa, do you ever see that you are but the living, throbbing thing outside a skeleton?

The man looked up, walked in the store, staggered. Looked at the useless whisky and the empty shelves which should hold food. Stroked his feet and twiddled his toes as a man who must do something. The man counted the whisky bottles—counted them seventy-two—dry eyed, counted them eighty-five—dead eyed, counted them ninety-six—dry mouthed, cracked-lipped, tried to see the humor of them. A hundred and five in the shade, no food again forever, whisky which boiled and steamed in the bottles!

And the man stroked the bottles and saw, through burning eyes, the days in the old Savoy and the same old Pavilion and the same old times when the crook of a finger meant instant attention. Stupidly, he stood away and awkwardly made the same old motions and mumbled to himself.

There's no harm in being a fool on the day you die, Little Africa, is there?

The exertion tired, and the man slopped back onto the stretcher in the end of the store. The stretcher burned like living fire, but he was too far gone to worry. Just lay and looked, dry eyed, up at the dry tarantulas hanging listless above him.

The man half died, and in his death he heard the little mother dog call to him. Still looking at the roof, he told her of his helplessness. The little woman hadn't the strength to rise on her hind legs to lick his hand: hadn't the moisture on her tongue to lick at all.

"Girlie," the man said feebly, "we're all going out, but you won't suffer. Wait just a while till I have a rest and get the strength to pull a trigger. You and your babies will go out with me."

The dog looked up at her God and whimpered, then saw the man was almost out and, with the intuition of a woman, left him. Her puppies, in the awful heat, lay as they'd have lain forever if she hadn't gone numbly to mother them.

The man hazed off, and in his haze was once more back with the crowd. Was at Kempton Park at the races and playing billiards and watching the Oxford and Cambridge boat race and doing Monte Carlo all in a congested, overlapping muddle. Thinking sixteen things at once and thinking nothing. And Mabel and the Carlton and the Cecil and Goodwood and Her.

And Him.

His earth! His Heaven! His boy! His son!

And then the other him! And the shame he'd rushed away from.

Little Africa, the strange twists of life are not in books; they really happen. We can't make them or unmake them. It isn't destiny or fate, or anything else. Twists are twists and we can't evade them.

And I don't think that our great God would want them different. It's just the way it is.