CHAPTER XX
The dog, like the horse, abases the base. Being base, Waiter MerrittEmory was abased by his desire for the possession of Michael. Had therebeen no Michael, his conduct would have been quite different. He wouldhave dealt with Daughtry as Daughtry had described, as between white men.He would have warned Daughtry of his disease and enabled him to take shipto the South Seas or to Japan, or to other countries where lepers are notsegregated. This would have worked no hardship on those countries, sincesuch was their law and procedure, while it would have enabled Daughtryand Kwaque to escape the hell of the San Francisco pest-house, to which,because of his baseness, he condemned them for the rest of their lives.
Furthermore, when the expense of the maintenance of armed guards over thepest-house, day and night, throughout the years, is considered, WalterMerritt Emory could have saved many thousands of dollars to thetax-payers of the city and county of San Francisco, which thousands ofdollars, had they been spent otherwise, could have been diverted to thereduction of the notorious crowding in school-rooms, to purer milk forthe babies of the poor, or to an increase of breathing-space in the parksystem for the people of the stifling ghetto. But had Walter MerrittEmory been thus considerate, not only would Daughtry and Kwaque havesailed out and away over the sea, but with them would have sailedMichael.
Never was a reception-roomful of patients rushed through moreexpeditiously than was Doctor Emory's the moment the door had closed uponthe two policemen who brought up Daughtry's rear. And before he went tohis late lunch, Doctor Emory was away in his machine and down into theBarbary Coast to the door of the Bowhead Lodging House. On the way, byvirtue of his political affiliations, he had been able to pick up acaptain of detectives. The addition of the captain proved necessary, forthe landlady put up a stout argument against the taking of the dog of herlodger. But Milliken, captain of detectives, was too well known to her,and she yielded to the law of which he was the symbol and of which shewas credulously ignorant.
As Michael started out of the room on the end of a rope, a plaintive callof reminder came from the window-sill, where perched a tiny, snow-whitecockatoo.
"Cocky," he called. "Cocky."
Walter Merritt Emory glanced back and for no more than a momenthesitated. "We'll send for the bird later," he told the landlady, who,still mildly expostulating as she followed them downstairs, failed tonotice that the captain of the detectives had carelessly left the door toDaughtry's rooms ajar.
* * * * *
But Walter Merritt Emory was not the only base one abased by desire ofpossession of Michael. In a deep leather chair, his feet resting inanother deep leather chair, at the Indoor Yacht Club, Harry Del Maryielded to the somniferous digestion of lunch, which was for himbreakfast as well, and glanced through the first of the early editions ofthe afternoon papers. His eyes lighted on a big headline, with a brieffive lines under it. His feet were instantly drawn down off the chairand under him as he stood up erect upon them. On swift second thought,he sat down again, pressed the electric button, and, while waiting forthe club steward, reread the headline and the brief five lines.
In a taxi, and away, heading for the Barbary Coast, Harry Del Mar sawvisions that were golden. They took on the semblance of yellow, twenty-dollar gold pieces, of yellow-backed paper bills of the governmentstamping of the United States, of bank books, and of rich coupons ripefor the clipping--and all shot through the flashings of the form of arough-coated Irish terrier, on a galaxy of brilliantly-lighted stages,mouth open, nose upward to the drops, singing, ever singing, as no doghad ever been known to sing in the world before.
* * * * *
Cocky himself was the first to discover that the door was ajar, and waslooking at it with speculation (if by "speculation" may be described themental processes of a bird, in some mysterious way absorbing into itsconsciousness a fresh impression of its environment and preparing to act,or not act, according to which way the fresh impression modifies itsconduct). Humans do this very thing, and some of them call it "freewill." Cocky, staring at the open door, was in just the stage ofdetermining whether or not he should more closely inspect that crack ofexit to the wider world, which inspection, in turn, would determinewhether or not he should venture out through the crack, when his eyesbeheld the eyes of the second discoverer staring in.
The eyes were bestial, yellow-green, the pupils dilating and narrowingwith sharp swiftness as they sought about among the lights and glooms ofthe room. Cocky knew danger at the first glimpse--danger to theuttermost of violent death. Yet Cocky did nothing. No panic stirred hisheart. Motionless, one eye only turned upon the crack, he focused thatone eye upon the head and eyes of the gaunt gutter-cat whose head haderupted into the crack like an apparition.
Alert, dilating and contracting, as swift as cautious, and infinitelyapprehensive, the pupils vertically slitted in jet into the midmost ofamazing opals of greenish yellow, the eyes roved the room. They alightedon Cocky. Instantly the head portrayed that the cat had stiffened,crouched, and frozen. Almost imperceptibly the eyes settled into awatching that was like to the stony stare of a sphinx across aching andeternal desert sands. The eyes were as if they had so stared forcenturies and millenniums.
No less frozen was Cocky. He drew no film across his one eye that showedhis head cocked sideways, nor did the passion of apprehension thatwhelmed him manifest itself in the quiver of a single feather. Bothcreatures were petrified into the mutual stare that is of the hunter andthe hunted, the preyer and the prey, the meat-eater and the meat.
It was a matter of long minutes, that stare, until the head in thedoorway, with a slight turn, disappeared. Could a bird sigh, Cocky wouldhave sighed. But he made no movement as he listened to the slow,dragging steps of a man go by and fade away down the hall.
Several minutes passed, and, just as abruptly the apparitionreappeared--not alone the head this time, but the entire sinuous form asit glided into the room and came to rest in the middle of the floor. Theeyes brooded on Cocky, and the entire body was still save for the longtail, which lashed from one side to the other and back again in anabrupt, angry, but monotonous manner.
Never removing its eyes from Cocky, the cat advanced slowly until itpaused not six feet away. Only the tail lashed back and forth, and onlythe eyes gleamed like jewels in the full light of the window they faced,the vertical pupils contracting to scarcely perceptible black slits.
And Cocky, who could not know death with the clearness of concept of ahuman, nevertheless was not altogether unaware that the end of all thingswas terribly impending. As he watched the cat deliberately crouch forthe spring, Cocky, gallant mote of life that he was, betrayed his one andforgivable panic.
"Cocky! Cocky!" he called plaintively to the blind, insensate walls.
It was his call to all the world, and all powers and things andtwo-legged men-creatures, and Steward in particular, and Kwaque, andMichael. The burden of his call was: "It is I, Cocky. I am very smalland very frail, and this is a monster to destroy me, and I love thelight, bright world, and I want to live and to continue to live in thebrightness, and I am so very small, and I'm a good little fellow, with agood little heart, and I cannot battle with this huge, furry, hungrything that is going to devour me, and I want help, help, help. I amCocky. Everybody knows me. I am Cocky."
This, and much more, was contained in his two calls of: "Cocky! Cocky!"
And there was no answer from the blind walls, from the hall outside, norfrom all the world, and, his moment of panic over, Cocky was his bravelittle self again. He sat motionless on the window-sill, his head cockedto the side, with one unwavering eye regarding on the floor, soperilously near, the eternal enemy of all his kind.
The human quality of his voice had startled the gutter-cat, causing herto forgo her spring as she flattened down her ears and bellied closer tothe floor.
And in the silence that followed, a blue-bottle fly buzzed rowdilyagainst an adjacent window-pane, with occasional loud bumps against th
eglass tokening that he too had his tragedy, a prisoner pent by bafflingtransparency from the bright world that blazed so immediately beyond.
Nor was the gutter-cat without her ill and hurt of life. Hunger hurther, and hurt her meagre breasts that should have been full for the sevenfeeble and mewing little ones, replicas of her save that their eyes werenot yet open and that they were grotesquely unsteady on their soft, younglegs. She remembered them by the hurt of her breasts and the prod of herinstinct; also she remembered them by vision, so that, by the subtlechemistry of her brain, she could see them, by way of the broken screenacross the ventilator hole, down into the cellar in the darkrubbish-corner under the stairway, where she had stolen her lair andbirthed her litter.
And the vision of them, and the hurt of her hunger stirred her afresh, sothat she gathered her body and measured the distance for the leap. ButCocky was himself again.
"Devil be damned! Devil be damned!" he shouted his loudest and mostbelligerent, as he ruffled like a bravo at the gutter-cat beneath him, sothat he sent her crouching, with startlement, lower to the floor, herears wilting rigidly flat and down, her tail lashing, her head turningabout the room so that her eyes might penetrate its obscurest corners inquest of the human whose voice had so cried out.
All of which the gutter-cat did, despite the positive evidence of hersenses that this human noise had proceeded from the white bird itself onthe window-sill.
The bottle fly bumped once again against its invisible prison wall in thesilence that ensued. The gutter-cat prepared and sprang with suddendecision, landing where Cocky had perched the fraction of a secondbefore. Cocky had darted to the side, but, even as he darted, and as thecat landed on the sill, the cat's paw flashed out sidewise and Cockyleaped straight up, beating the air with his wings so little used toflying. The gutter-cat reared on her hind-legs, smote upward with onepaw as a child might strike with its hat at a butterfly. But there wasweight in the cat's paw, and the claws of it were outspread like so manyhooks.
Struck in mid-air, a trifle of a flying machine, all its delicate gearstangled and disrupted, Cocky fell to the floor in a shower of whitefeathers, which, like snowflakes, eddied slowly down after, and after theplummet-like descent of the cat, so that some of them came to rest on herback, startling her tense nerves with their gentle impact and making hercrouch closer while she shot a swift glance around and overhead for anydanger that might threaten.