oached. The skipper gazed
in an inanimate way between his feet: he seemed to be swollen to an
unnatural size by some awful disease, by the mysterious action of an
unknown poison. He lifted his head, saw the two before him waiting,
opened his mouth with an extraordinary, sneering contortion of his
puffed face--to speak to them, I suppose--and then a thought seemed to
strike him. His thick, purplish lips came together without a sound, he
went off in a resolute waddle to the gharry and began to jerk at the
door-handle with such a blind brutality of impatience that I expected to
see the whole concern overturned on its side, pony and all. The driver,
shaken out of his meditation over the sole of his foot, displayed at
once all the signs of intense terror, and held with both hands, looking
round from his box at this vast carcass forcing its way into his
conveyance. The little machine shook and rocked tumultuously, and the
crimson nape of that lowered neck, the size of those straining thighs,
the immense heaving of that dingy, striped green-and-orange back, the
whole burrowing effort of that gaudy and sordid mass, troubled one's
sense of probability with a droll and fearsome effect, like one of those
grotesque and distinct visions that scare and fascinate one in a fever.
He disappeared. I half expected the roof to split in two, the little box
on wheels to burst open in the manner of a ripe cotton-pod--but it only
sank with a click of flattened springs, and suddenly one venetian blind
rattled down. His shoulders reappeared, jammed in the small opening; his
head hung out, distended and tossing like a captive balloon, perspiring,
furious, spluttering. He reached for the gharry-wallah with vicious
flourishes of a fist as dumpy and red as a lump of raw meat. He roared
at him to be off, to go on. Where? Into the Pacific, perhaps. The driver
lashed; the pony snorted, reared once, and darted off at a gallop.
Where? To Apia? To Honolulu? He had 6000 miles of tropical belt to
disport himself in, and I did not hear the precise address. A snorting
pony snatched him into "Ewigkeit" in the twinkling of an eye, and I
never saw him again; and, what's more, I don't know of anybody that ever
had a glimpse of him after he departed from my knowledge sitting inside
a ramshackle little gharry that fled round the corner in a white smother
of dust. He departed, disappeared, vanished, absconded; and absurdly
enough it looked as though he had taken that