Durand didn't ask him what he meant by that last. Perhaps a chill sensation running down his back told him only too well.
The captain was named Fletcher. He was deliberate of speech; the type of man who thinks well before speaking, and thus later does not have to think ill of what he has spoken. His memory, by way of his hand, sought refreshment in his luxuriant black beard.
"Yes," he said at long last, after hearing Downs's exhaustive description. "Yes, I do recall a little lady such as you describe. The breeze caught up her skirt just as we were both coming along the deck from opposite directions. And she quickly held it down with her hands. But for a moment--" He didn't finish it; his eyes, however, were reminiscently kind. "Then as I passed, I tipped my cap. She dropped her eyes and would not see me-" he gave a little chuckle; "yet as she passed, she smiled, and I know the smile was for me, for there was no one else in sight."
"And now this one," Downs said.
He offered in assistance a small photograph of Julia, supplied them by Bertha, much similar to the one once owned by Durand.
The captain studied it at length, but with no great relish; and then after that ruminated a considerable while longer.
"No," he said at last. "No, I've never seen this old mai-- this woman." He handed it back, as if glad to be rid of it.
"You're sure ?"
The captain had no more interest in trying to recall, even if he could have.
"We carry many people, sir, trip after trip, and I cannot be expected to remember all their faces. I am only a man, after all."
"And strange," Downs repeated to Durand later, "are the ways of men; they see with their pulses and their blood. For the one whom I could only describe to him by word of mouth, and secondhand at that, he could recall instantly, and will go on recalling probably for the rest of his active life. But the one whose very photograph he had before him, he could not recall at all !"
Durand thumbed the pushbutton in their little cubbyhole, and after an in ordinate length of time, a shambling steward appeared.
"Not you," Durand told him. "Who takes care of the ladies' cabins?"
A stewardess appeared in dilatory turn. He gave her a coin.
"I want to ask you something. See if you can remember. Did you ever come to one of your ladies' cabins, of a morning, and find the bunk undisturbed, no one had been in it?"
She nodded readily. "Sho', lots times. We ain't full up every trip. Sometime' mo'n half my cabin' plumb empty."
"No, I'll have to ask it another way, then. Did you ever come to one of your ladies' cabins which had had someone in it first, and then find the bunk untouched ?"
It seemed to present difficulties to her. "You mean nobody slep' in it, but somebody done tuk it just the same?"
"That's it; that's about it."
She wasn't sure; she scratched and strove, but she wasn't sure.
He tried to help her. "With somebody's clothes in it, perhaps. With somebody's belongings there for you to see. Surely you could tell by that. But no one had lain in the bunk."
She still wasn't sure.
He tried his trump card. "With a birdcage in it, perhaps."
She ignited into recollection, like tinder when the spark strikes it square. "Tha's right, tha's how it was! How you know that? Cab'n with a birdcage in it, and I didn't have to tech the bunk nohow--"
He nodded darkly. "No one had lain in it the night before."
She drew up short. "I di'n say that. The lady fix up her berth herseff befo' I get there; she kine of tidy that way, and used to doing things with her own han's 'thout waiting fo' nobody."
"Who told you that, how do you kn--?"
"She in there when I come in. The pretties' little lady I ever done see; blon' like an angel and li'l like a chile."
In the dining saloon, Durand saw, Downs had held back one of his plates even after he had finished with it. At the end of the meal, when all others but the two of them had left the single, long table, Downs called the waiter over and said to him simply: "Watch this. Watch me do this a minute."
Then he took out a pocket handkerchief, spread it flat on the table top. Into it he put a small scrap of lettuce that had decorated his plate as a garnish, folded the corners of the handkerchief over toward the center, like a magician about to cause something to disappear.
"Did you ever see anyone do that, at the end of a meal? Did you?"
"You mean fold up their napkin like-?"
"No, no." Downs had to reopen it to show him the lettuce, then start the process over. "Put a leaf of lettuce in first, to carry away. It's a handkerchief. Think of it as a smaller one, far smaller, a little wisp--"
The waiter nodded now. "I seen a lady do that, one trip. I wondered what she-- It wasn't meat or nothin', just a little old--"
Downs held up his finger in admonition. "Now listen carefully. Think well. How many times can you remember seeing her do that? After how many meals ?"
"Just once. On'y once. After on'y one meal. That was the on'y time I ever seen her, just at that one meal."
"I can't get the two of them together," Downs said to Durand under his breath afterward. "One ends before the other begins. But it happened sometime during the first night. At suppertime the waiter saw the real one filch a scrap of lettuce for her bird. At eight in the morning the stewardess found a blonde 'like an angel' had already made up her own bunk, in that cabin where the birdcage was."
The first stop, at eight the following morning, Durand found Downs already making his preparations for departure.
"You're getting off here?" he queried in surprise. "So soon? Already?"
Downs nodded. "That boat's first stop this time was the boat's first stop that time too. The same schedule is held to. She was already hours dead and hours in the water by this moment. To go on past here only carries me farther away at every turn of the paddles. Come, walk me to the landing plank."
"If she is anywhere," he said, lowering his voice as they went out on the misty early-morning deck together, "she is back there somewhere, along the stretch we have covered this past night. If she ever floats ashore--or has already, unrecognized or maybe even unseen--it will be back there somewhere. I will go back along the shoreline, hamlet by hamlet, yard by yard, inch by inch; on foot if necessary. First on this side, then on the opposite. And if she is not ashore already, I will wait until she comes ashore."
His face was that of a fanatic, with whom there is no reasoning.
"Back there she is, on the river bottom, in the great wide eddy below Cape Girardeau, and back there I will wait for her."
Durand's blood ran a little cold at the turn of speech.
Downs held out his hand.
"Good luck to you," Durand said, half frightened of the man now.
"And to you," Downs answered. "You will see me again some day, sooner or later. I can't say when, but you will surely see me again some day."
He went down the gangplank. Durand watched his head sink from sight. Then he turned away with an involuntary shiver, the last thing he had heard the other man say repeating itself strangely in his mind:
You will see me again some day. You will surely see me again some day.
30
The death of a man is a sad enough thing to watch, but he goes by himself, taking nothing else with him. The death of a house is a sadder thing by far to watch. For so much more goes with it.