Heywood clapped him on the shoulder, and gave a queer cough.

"If that's all, never you fear! I'll teach you your guard. 'Once in a
while we can finish in style.' Eh?--Rudie, you blooming German, I--I
think we must have been brothers! We'll pull it off yet."

Heywood spoke with a strange alacrity, and tried again to cough. This
time, however, there was no mistake--he was laughing.

Rudolph shot at him one glance of startled unbelief, and then, tossing
his head, marched on without a word. Pride and loneliness overwhelmed
him. The two at his side were no companions--not even presences. He
went alone, conscious only of the long flood of sunset, and the black
interlacing pattern of bamboos. The one friendly spirit had deserted,
laughing; yet even this last and worst of earthly puzzles did not
matter. It was true, what he had read; this, which they called death,
was a lonely thing.

On a broken stone bench, Sturgeon, sober and dejected, with puffy
circles under his eyes, sat waiting. A long parcel, wrapped in green
baize, lay across his knees. He nodded gloomily, without rising. At his
feet wandered a path, rankly matted with burnt weeds, and bordered with
green bottle-ends, the "dimples" choked with discs of mud. The place was
a deserted garden, where the ruins of a European house--burnt by natives
in some obscure madness, years ago--sprawled in desolation among wild
shrubs. A little way down the path stood Teppich and Chantel, each with
his back turned and his hands clasped, like a pair of sulky Napoleons,
one fat, one slender. The wooden pretense of their attitude set Rudolph,
for an instant, to laughing silently and bitterly. This final
scene,--what justice, that it should be a mean waste, the wreck of silly
pleasure-grounds, long forgotten, and now used only by grotesque
play-actors. He must die, in both action and setting, without dignity.
It was some comfort, he became aware, to find that the place was fairly
private. Except for the breach by which they had entered, the blotched
and spotted compound walls stood ruinous yet high, shutting out all but
a rising slant of sunlight, and from some outpost line of shops, near
by, the rattle of an abacus and the broken singsong of argument, now
harsh, now drowsy.

Heywood had been speaking earnestly to Sturgeon:--

"A little practice--try the balance of the swords. No more than fair."

"Fair? Most certainly," croaked that battered convivialist. "Chantel
can't object."