PAGE 5
It
by
“T’ ho la scia to e son contento
Non m’in cresca niente, niente
Altro giovine hogia in mente
Pin belino assai di te.”
And I woke up tingling with the remembered fear (it was a mixed feeling, half fright, and half an insane desire to burst out laughing to see what the old man would do), and I looked over the rim of my hat, and there walking toward me, in the baby-blue and pink of the bright dawn (but a big way off), came a straggling line of naked niggers, headed by the It-god, Itself.
One look told me that, one look at a great bulk of scarletness, that walked upright like a man. I didn’t look twice, I scuttled out to my nearest mine, lighted the fuse, tumbled back into the hollow, fingers in ears, face screwed up as tight as a face can be screwed, and waited.
When it was over, and things had stopped falling, I looked out again. The tropic dawn remained as before, but the immediate landscape was somewhat altered for the worse, and in the distance were neither niggers nor the god. It is possible that I stuck my thumbs into my armpits and waggled my fingers. I don’t remember. But it’s no mean sensation to have pitted yourself against a strange god, with perfectly round heels, and to have won out.
About noon, though, the god came back, fortified perhaps by reflection, and more certainly by a nigger who walked behind him with a spear. You’ve seen the donkey boys in Cairo make the donkeys trot?… This time I put my trust in the Colt forty-five; and looked the god over, as he came reluctantly nearer and nearer, singing a magic.
Do you know the tragedian walk as taken off on the comic opera stage, the termination of each strutting, dragging step accentuated by cymbals smashed together F-F-F? That was how the god walked. He was all in scarlet, with a long feather sticking straight up from a scarlet cap. And the magic he sang (now that you knew the sounds he made were those of a tenor voice, you knew that it was a glorious tenor voice) was a magic out of “Aida.” It was the magic that what’s-his-name sings when he is appointed commander-in-chief of all the Egyptian forces. Now the niggers may have thought that their god’s magics were stronger than my dynamite. But the god, though very, very simple, was not so simple as that. He was an Italian colored man, black bearded, and shaped like Caruso, only more so, if that is possible; and he sang, because he was a singing machine, but he couldn’t have talked. I’ll bet on that. He was too plumb afraid.
When he reached the hole that the dynamite had made in the landscape–I showed myself; trying to look as much like a dove of peace as possible.
“Come on alone,” I called in Italian, “and have a bite of lunch.”
That stopped his singing, but I had to repeat. Well he had an argument with the nigger, that finished with all the gestures that two monkeys similarly situated would have made at each other, and after a time the nigger sat down, and the god came on alone, puffing and indignant.
We talked in Dago, but I’ll give the English of it, so’s not to appear to be showing off.
“Who and what in the seventh circle of hell are you?” I asked.
He seemed offended that I should not have known. But he gave his name, sure of his effect. “Signor —-” and the name sounded like that tower in Venice that fell down the other day.
“You don’t mean it!” I exclaimed joyfully. “Be seated,” and, I added, being silly with joy and relief at having my awful devil turn into a silly child–“there may be some legacy–though trifling.”
Well, he sat down, and stuck his short, immense hirsute legs out, all comfy, and I, remembering the tracks on the beach, had a look at his feet. And I turned crimson with suppressed laughter. He had wooden cylinders three inches high strapped to his bare heels. They made him five feet five inches high instead of five feet two. They were just such heels (only clumsier and made of wood instead of cork and crimson morocco or silk) as Siegfried wears for mountain climbing, dragon fighting, or other deeds of derring-do. And with these heels to guide me, I sighed, and said: