The boy sidled nearer her and dropped the bag on the threshold.
Simpson waited in silence. His affairs had got beyond him somehow, and he seemed to himself but the tool of circumstance. It did occur to him, though dimly, that he was being introduced to native life rather quickly.
The cripple, squatting with his back against the bag, launched into a stream of patois, of which Simpson could not understand a word. Gestures explained somewhat; he was reënacting the scenes of the last half hour. When he had finished, the negress, not so hostile as she had been but by no means friendly, turned to Simpson and looked at him a long time without speaking. He had all he could do not to fidget under her gaze; finally, she stood aside from the door and said, without enthusiasm:
Simpson entered automatically. The kitchen, with its hard earth floor and the sunlight drifting in through the bamboo sides, was not unclean, and a savoury smell came from the stew-pot on the ramshackle stove. In one of the bars of sunlight a mango-coloured child of two years or so was playing with his toes--he was surprisingly clean and perfectly formed.
"_Aha, mon petit_!" exclaimed Simpson. He loved children. "He is handsome," he added, addressing the woman.
"Mine!" She turned the baby gently with her foot; he caught at the hem of her dress, laughing. But she did not laugh. "Neither spot nor blemish," she said, and then: "He is not yet three years old."
Simpson shuddered, recalling the pock-marked drummer on the _Arequipa_. That was momentary--a coincidence, he told himself. The woman was looking down at the child, her eyes softer than they had been, and the child was lying on its back and playing with her Mother Hubbard.
The woman lifted the lid from the pot and peered into it through the sun-shot steam.
"It is ready," she said. She lifted it from the stove and set it on the earthen floor. The cripple placed a handful of knives and spoons on the table and three tin plates; he thrust a long fork and a long spoon into the pot and stood aside.
"Seat yourself," said the woman, without looking at Simpson, "and eat."
She explored the pot with the fork, and stabbed it firmly--there was a suggestion of ruthlessness about her action that made Simpson shudder again--into a slab of meat, which she dropped on a plate, using a callous thumb to disengage it from the tines. She covered it with gravy and began to eat without further ceremony. The cripple followed her example, slobbering the gravy noisily; some of it ran down his chin. Neither of them paid any attention to Simpson.