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Title: The Sorceror's Stone
Author: Beatrice Grimshaw
Illustrator: Charles N. Sarka
Release date: December 11, 2023 [eBook #72378]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: The John C. Winston Company, 1914
Credits: Carol Brown, Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SORCEROR'S STONE ***
THE
SORCERER’S
STONE
[Illustration:
_I saw Mrs. Daisie’s little hand pause for a moment at the odd lump
under his shirt and feel it with the dexterity of a pickpocket_]
THE
SORCERER’S STONE
BY
BEATRICE GRIMSHAW
Author of “Vaiti of the Island,” “When the
Red Gods Call,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES SARKA
PHILADELPHIA
THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1914, by
THE JOHN C. WINSTON CO.
Copyright, 1913, 1914, by
THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. _The Sorcerer’s Stone_ 11
II. _The Jumping Bamboo_ 55
III. _The Empty Diving Dress_ 93
IV. _The Fight at Twelve Fathoms_ 133
V. _The Secret of the Stone Oven Country_ 175
VI. _How they Buried Bobby-the-Clock_ 223
VII. _Concerning a Cassowary and a Hymn Book_ 267
ILLUSTRATIONS
_I saw Mrs. Daisie’s little hand pause for a moment at the odd
lump under his shirt and feel it with the dexterity of a
pickpocket_ _Frontispiece_
PAGE
_I made straight for the sound, and there in the growing
moonlight, behind the white stems of a clump of betel-palm,
was the Marquis――dancing_ 18
_I have never been called a nervous man; but I was down the
ladder and out in the street almost before the Marquis_ 67
_The spectacle of the Marquis, in a dirty singlet and
trousers, and bare feet, doing the war-dance of the priests
in “Athalie” in the main street at two o’clock in the
morning, is one of the things I expect to remember all the
rest of my life_ 120
_It was awful to see them struggling and reeling and gripping
at each other, there at the bottom of the sea, where a
tangled life-line or a nipped air-tube meant certain death_
159
_I cannot describe the extraordinary appearance he made there
on the mountain-top in the scarlet dawn, with the cannibals
looking on while he performed his incantations_ 217
_His gigantic figure, clad in pink and green pajamas, seemed
to fill the store; he had at least a dozen arms and legs
and every one of them smashed everything it touched_ 260
_The bird stretched out its neck with the darting pounce of a
snake, snatched at the gaudy little book, gulped, swallowed
and_―――― 301
I
THE SORCERER’S STONE
CHAPTER I
THE SORCERER’S STONE
It was dark in the _marea_, yet not so dark but that the Marquis and
I could see about us. We had been inside this New Guinea temple, or
club-house, or Parliament building――you might call it a little of all
three, and not go very far wrong――for over half an hour, and our eyes
were getting accustomed to the gloom.
There were thirty or forty men in it, squatting about the floor, or
lying on the bamboo shelves they used as beds. In the brown dusk of
the unwindowed building, they seemed to melt into their surroundings
like ghosts, for they were brown too, and wore no clothes save a
bark loin-cloth. You could see the whites of their eyes, and their
bead necklaces, and the halos of colored feathers they wore in their
hair――little more. They were smoking, chewing betel-nut, and spitting
its blood-red juice out on the floor――grunting, scratching, staring at
us. They had heads like a soldier’s fur busby; their bodies were small,
according to white men’s standards, but they were notably well-made and
muscled, and evenly developed. Most of them had wooden spears and tall
war-bows lying on the ground within reach; and the walls of the _marea_
were covered with clubs, shields, spears and bunches of barbed arrows.
The scene was old to me――old to weariness. I had been in these temples,
or others like them, more times than I could count, recruiting boys for
some island trip, trading, getting food. It was true that I had never
been in this especial district of New Guinea, but I did not see much
difference between the savages I knew and the savages I didn’t know.
And anyhow, I had long since lost interest in them, save as a means of
making money.
But the Marquis, I think, felt it to be the moment of his life.
There he sat, on a pile of our baggage, as on a throne, holding his
head erect, and swelling out from the chest even more than usual――which
is to say something, for the Marquis is six feet four, and weighs near
eighteen stone. He had come the whole way from France to study――what
do you think? Magic――of which he had heard there was plenty in New
Guinea. So there is: it is the greatest nuisance in the country, and I
for my part would as soon think of going out to look for red ants or
for stinging-tree. But the Marquis took what he called a scientific
interest in the occult――which meant that he was bored for want of
a little honest hard work to do, and didn’t know it――and I had had
bad luck with my last prospecting trip into the interior: lost four
carriers (clubbed and eaten) and two mates (blackwater fever) and found
nothing.
So I was rather glad to take on the Marquis, when he turned up in Port
Moresby wanting a resident of the country to find carriers for him and
lead a trip through the country lying about the coast. I thought I
might light on payable gold after all――I’ve always had an idea that
there might be something in the Kata-Kata country, and I thought, too,
that I could do with a quiet, peaceful, easy sort of trip for once,
after the kind of thing I had been having.
Quiet! Peaceful! Just wait till I have done.
It looked peaceful enough that evening, at all events. We had had a
fairly long tramp to get to the village――which is celebrated all over
Kata-Kata as the headquarters of local sorcery――and had not arrived
till sundown. The Marquis, on hearing that the Kata-Kata people were
not cannibals, had insisted on sleeping in the _marea_ instead of in
our tents. It would be better for his purpose of studying the natural
man and his connection with the occult――so he said. I thought it might
turn out in his seeing a little more natural man than he wanted,
since the Kata-Kata folk were by reputation a nasty lot, and had been
man-eaters ten years ago, though the Government had sent punitive
expeditions in often enough to reform them since then.
Unless the Marquis was asleep, or eating, he never stopped talking. His
English was not quite English, but you could understand it all right;
at any rate, he did not talk like a Frenchman on the stage. He was
talking now, and I was not listening closely; it went in at one ear and
out at the other. The village men, crouched on the ground, chewed, and
spat red, and looked out at him from under their sullen brows.
They did not like us very much, it struck me. They were not accustomed
to white people up there, except with punitive expeditions, which do
not exactly smooth the way for those who come after.
Our interpreter――who could not interpret very much of the Kata-Kata
talk after all――had told us that Mo, the big sorcerer, was out in the
forest making spells, but that he would be in at sundown, and then
perhaps he might consent, if we gave him plenty of tobacco and a lot of
salt, to show us something. We had been waiting for him a good while,
but there was no sign of Mo.
I was getting quite sleepy, as I sat on the ground, smoking and
thinking. It had grown darker; the men had thrown some cocoanut shells
on the pile of hot ashes in the center of the floor, and a small,
fierce blaze had sprung up, showing the white boar-tusk bracelets on
the brown arms, and the quiver of the long head-feathers. The Marquis,
I knew without listening, was telling me about a “dear woman who loved
him――a beautiful, a kind”――because he was twisting the ends of his
mustache while he talked――he always did that when he began sentimental
confidences, and the ends of his mustache, in consequence, were like
nothing but long, sharp pins.
Of a sudden, he dropped his hands, sprang off the throne of sacks like
a wallaby――he was wonderfully light on his feet, for his size――and went
down the ladder leading from the door to the ground, in two jumps. I
had been sitting with my back to the doorway, and could not see what
it was that had agitated him; however, I got up, without undue haste,
undid the fastening of the revolver holster that was strapped to my
belt, and went down the ladder after the Marquis.
The village street was wide and sandy, reflecting back the light; there
was a young moon coming up now above the cocoanut palms, and the sharp
brown gables of the houses stood out clear among the stars. I could see
the natives slipping like shadows in and out among the platforms and
supporting piles all down the street; I saw a wolf-like kangaroo dog
sitting in the moon, and a small tame cassowary taking a running kick
at it, as it went past. But I could not see the Marquis.
This did not altogether please me, for Kata-Kata is a good way outside
Government influence, and things might happen, though they are not
likely to. I walked about in the soft sand for a minute or two, and
stopped to look and listen. I could hear nothing of the Marquis, but
I heard what located him for me just as well as a flood of French or
English conversation――the coy, pleased, flattered giggle of a girl.
I made straight for the sound, and there in the growing moonlight,
behind the white stems of a clump of betel-palm, was the
Marquis――dancing.
I have not mentioned it――being unaccustomed to writing, and apt to lose
my way――but I ought to have said that the Marquis had two special fads,
and they were sorcery and dancing. He knew all about every dance that
had ever been danced in the history of the world, from David’s fandango
before the ark, down to Genée’s latest pirouette at the Empire. And, in
spite of his height and weight, he could dance them all himself, more
or less, but mostly more.
You might have thought he would look ridiculous when he danced, but he
did not: no man looks ridiculous doing that which he does supremely
well. He did not look ridiculous even now――pink, fat, a bit disheveled,
stepping and springing, advancing and retreating, and wreathing his fat
arms above his bullet head, here in the moonlight, behind a clump of
betel, with a grass-kilted, giggling New Guinea girl looking on at
the mad procedure.
[Illustration:
_I made straight for the sound, and there in the growing moonlight,
behind the white stems of a clump of betel-palm, was the
Marquis――dancing_]
“Hallo, Mark!” I said (I used to call him that, because, being only
a plain Australian without much schooling, I never could remember or
pronounce his own extraordinary name). “What are you dancing?”
“It is the Love Dance of the Red Men of Roraima,” said the Marquis,
doing something quite extraordinary――I think with the calves of his
legs, but he was too quick for one to see.
“Why the Love Dance, and why Red Men?” I asked.
“Because,” said the Marquis, beginning to walk with a cross-swaying
motion that really was fine――like Indian corn blowing in the wind――“I
desire to find the key to the heart of this little beautiful, since I
saw her on the steps of the _marea_; and the dance talks, even when one
does not know a word of their own blessed language. And the Red Men――I
chose their dance because they will, without doubt, be spiritually akin
to the soul of this _boshter_ little kid.”
The girl drew up one leg under her grass crinoline like a hen, and
giggled as if she understood. She was really pretty――if a New Guinea
girl is ever pretty; I do not admire them myself, but it is all a
matter of taste. She was lighter in color than most, a sort of golden
brown, and of course, being a young savage, and not a civilized person,
she had a perfect figure. She had the little, aristocratic-looking
hands these Papuans often have (their hands, I reckon, are like those
of the old families among white people, because neither Papuans nor old
families ever do a stroke of work that they can help), and she had big
eyes and a bush of hair, and was a good deal dolled up with red and
yellow flowers and pearl-shell necklaces and things.
All the same, she was just a little nigger, and the Marquis never ought
to have flattered her by taking notice of her. It puts them out of
their place.
Still, he went on dancing, and I really forgot about the girl for
a little, watching him. It was so good, and the scene was so
extraordinary――the open space of sandy soil, all lit up by the moon,
and that great figure, dancing with incomparable lightness, against the
background of long banana leaf and slender betel palm, like a very new
sort of fairy in a very strange kind of fairy glade.
Then I happened to glance at the girl, and immediately all my amusement
went out like a candle in the wind, and I fell to counting up what this
especial freak of the Marquis’ might be likely to cost us. For the
little Papuan, who had been standing some way off at first, chewing
her necklace and giggling, had suddenly turned quite grave――solemn,
even――and was advancing, step by step, like some one in a dream, toward
the space where the Marquis danced. Her hands were spread out as if she
were blind, and her eyes never looked at the ground, or the moonlight,
or the village houses showing through the trees――only at the Marquis,
dancing. And she stepped nearer and nearer.
I don’t go about with cotton-wool in my ears in the Papuan bush
country, even when things are――or seem――as quiet as Sunday evening
church in Sydney with the wrong girl alongside of you. I heard
something moving in the scrub that wasn’t a pig or a dog; the Marquis
didn’t hear it, for he was whistling softly to himself all the time he
danced, and the girl didn’t, for she was hypnotized, or something like
it. But I thought it as well to stop the circus just there; so, without
looking round, I went forward, grabbed the Marquis by the shoulder, and
said, “Cut it out!”
He had been long enough in my company by this time to know that I had
generally very good reasons for anything I might say or do.
He stopped――not without a turn or two to finish it off nicely――and,
responding to a pinch on the arm, moved away with me quite amicably.
When we got back to the _marea_――the girl had vanished, somehow, as
these natives can, without one’s even seeing how――he asked me what the
matter was.
I did not answer him at first, for I was annoyed at the whole
proceeding. Of course, I knew that he was only bent on a little
trifling amusement――the Marquis let off most of his feelings in
talk, and never took anything what you might call seriously――but all
the same, he ought to have remembered, I thought, that we were in a
strange, possibly a hostile country, and not have started flirting with
any “little beautiful” before we had been an hour in the town.
So I sat down on the floor of the _marea_ again, and lit my pipe before
I would answer.
“Flint, my very good friend, I fear that you are in a blooming wax,”
said the Marquis. “Why should you wax with me? What have I done?”
I took out my pipe. “You don’t seem to remember,” I said, “that we’re
in a hostile country. I’d be obliged if you would.” I put back my pipe.
“What did you see?” asked the Marquis, quite grave and sensible now.
“I saw nothing,” I said. “I don’t know that there was anything. But I
think I heard――the little creak that some of these big blackwood bows
make.”
“When you take them to your bosom and pull hard?” asked the Marquis,
who had been trying his strength on some of these weapons, and had been
a good deal impressed by their power.
“Just that,” I said. “I wouldn’t dance the Love Dance of the Red Men
of Roraima any more, if I were you. Or I wouldn’t dance it at that
particular girl. Or at any girl.”
“She is a beautiful,” said the Marquis. “She is what you Australians,
in your touching symbolism, call a tart. I remember an Australian
little girl, in――――”
He had got hold of both sides of his mustache――I saw that I was in for
the deluge, so I cut it short.
“I believe that’s your sorcerer coming at last,” I said.
There was a noise of throbbing drums in the village, a tramping down
the street, that evidently foretold the commencement of the evening
dance. Now, it was hardly to be supposed that the village would begin
its entertainment before the sorcerer came back from his spells in the
forest to join in the revels. I told the Marquis this, and suggested
we should have some trade stuff taken out of the packs in readiness.
We got one of our boys to untie a sack or so, and selected some beads,
knives, salt and tobacco.
“And here is the sorcerer, back from his spelling,” declared the
Marquis, peering through the door at a tall, fine-looking man who was
striding down the street with a general air of owning the whole place.
He carried a big torch in his hand, and had a netted string bag over
one shoulder. Slung on his breast was a large, hollow piece of bamboo,
which he took some care to keep in a perpendicular position. His face,
rather a fine one for a New Guinea native, showed clearly in the light
of his torch: it was painted in stripes of black and scarlet, with
a very fiendish effect. On his head was a magnificent head-dress of
paradise and parrot feathers, rising fully three or four feet above
his mat of hair. He had no clothes except a bark belt, and did not wear
the bead and shell necklaces affected by most of the other people.
There was something slung round his throat like a locket; it swayed
about so that I could not see what it was.
“Yes, that’s the sorcerer without a doubt,” I said. “He’s making right
here.”
He was; and our interpreter, a timid little lad from the coast, was
so terrified at the sight that he ran and hid himself at the back of
the _marea_, and had to be dragged out by force. By the time we had
succeeded in quieting him down and assuring him that our weapons would
protect us all from any sorcerer, the man was at the steps and mounting
them.
In the light of the fire we saw at last what his locket was. I took
it, at first, for a monkey’s paw, but, remembering that there are no
monkeys in New Guinea, I had another look, and then realized that it
was a human hand, dead and dried.
The Marquis looked at the ugly ornament much as a collector of insects
looks at a hideous and valuable beetle.
“Flint, this is what you call the real Mackay,” he said. “This is the
worth of my money.” He rose, and was about to greet the sorcerer with
all the grace of Versailles――in fact, he had already begun a courtly
bow――when a small and very ugly man, with ears like a bat, came running
out of the dark from nowhere, and grabbed the great man by the foot, as
he went up.
“Mo! Mo!” he cried; and then came a flood of native, intermingled with
the wildest gestures. The ugly little man beat the air with his hands,
thumped himself in the ribs, jumped up and down till the feathers on
his head waved like cocoanut leaves in a hurricane, and all the time
yelled, chattered, gasped and choked. Mo, who had come down the ladder
again at the first word, stood looking at the furious little creature
with an absolutely inexpressive face.
“What’s he saying?” I asked our interpreter, Koppi Koko.
The native’s face grew purposely blank and dull. “I no savvy,” he said.
“You do savvy,” I told him, beginning to unbuckle my belt.
“I savvy, I savvy,” he cried nervously. “Savvy little bit. That fellow
man, him telling Mo some one make gammon along him, he no like. That
fellow, he brother along Mo. ’Fore God, Taubada [master], I no more I
savvy.”
He seemed a good deal scared about something, and when a Papuan is
thoroughly scared, you may leave him alone for all you will get out of
him. I said no more, and the furious little man, after a final jump and
yell, shoved something into Mo’s hand and bolted away under the house
like a rat. The sorcerer put his hand into his string bag for a moment,
drew it out empty and mounted the ladder once more.
You could not tell what he thought, or if he thought anything, so
complete was the veil of indifference he had drawn over his face.
He had of course heard of our arrival in the village, so I was not
surprised at his taking our visit as calmly as he did. But I did
not――quite――like the way he had accepted the plaint of the bat-eared
little man.
The rickety floor of sago-sheath creaked and dipped as Mo strode up the
building. He went straight to where the Marquis and I were standing,
folded his arms over his breast and uttered something in native that
was evidently a greeting. The Marquis bowed, took his hand and shook
it. I nodded at him. Mo turned aside a minute to hang up the hollow
bamboo he carried so carefully (we could see it was plugged at one end
with wood), and then swept Koppi Koko to him with a gesture of one hand.
We were great chiefs, no doubt, he said; he was glad we had come to see
his village. Did we belong to the Government?
We assured him we did not――knowing that Kata-Kata had probably
been saving up a good long score to settle with His Majesty’s
representatives, since the last punitive expedition. This great chief,
I said (through Koppi Koko), had come a very long way from his
village, which was many, many moons away, to see Mo and hear about his
wonderful doings. If Mo would show him any sorcery, he would give much
tobacco and salt and beads, and other treasures. And (since sorcery is
illegal) he would promise not to tell the Government anything about it.
While I talked, I could hear the dance getting ready in the village:
feet were stamping; drums were throbbing with the intoxicating triple
beat that all Papuan travelers know; loud, brassy voices were rising
and falling in a monotonous chorus. I was glad to hear them, for I know
the difference between songs of peace and songs of war, and this was
not one of the latter.
Still――many years in New Guinea have given me an instinct for danger
that has nothing at all to do with sight or hearing; and it was
stirring, ever so slightly, now. I watched the sorcerer’s face as I
talked.
It was still a blank; you could no more have read it than you could
read a stone wall. Mo replied to my address that he had been making
magic all day and was tired. Another day, he said, he would show us
some. Tonight we could give him that tobacco and salt he saw, and
he would think and prepare himself. Magic, he explained, took much
preparation.
I did not care for the whole thing――a nigger is a nigger to me, and
I can’t stand seeing them put on airs. Besides, I do not believe in
their nonsense. But the Marquis did, and he was very anxious to see
something; so I swallowed my own feelings and told Mo we should be glad
to see his performance tomorrow, if that would suit him, and in the
meantime he might have the tobacco――not the salt: that would come when
he had done something to earn it. Salt is precious in the interior of
New Guinea, and I was not minded to throw any of it away.
The Marquis was almost ready to cry――he had been looking forward to an
immediate satisfaction of his curiosity, and he was like a child when
disappointed.
“Ask him something,” he demanded. “Ask him at least what it is that he
has in his bamboo, and why he carries a human hand round his neck, and
what is in that string bag of his. Not to hear anything tonight, my
Flint, that would indeed be the long lane that breaks the camel’s back.
I’m not made of patience!”
“That’s right; you’re not,” said I. “Well, Koppi Koko, ask him.”
But here our interpreter went on strike. He was “too much fright,” he
declared. He would not ask Mo what was in the bamboo, or about the
hand, or anything else. It struck me that he already knew, since he
came from the coast, only a few days away. But if he did, he would not
tell.
“You need not worry,” I said to the Marquis. “I know all that’s in his
old bag without looking. I’ve seen other sorcerers’ bags. There’ll
be a lot of trash like lizards’ tails and bats’ wings, and frogs’
feet, and there’ll be queer-shaped stones he has picked up, and bits
of carved wood, and dried leaves and plants, and there’s sure to be
some quartz crystals――that’s great magic, with them――and there’ll very
likely be a dagger made of human bone, and a native fork or two, and a
betel-chewing outfit――poker-worked gourd, with a boar-tooth stopper,
nuts, nice little spatula with carved head. That’s about all.”
“There could be nothing of more interest in the world,” declared the
Marquis. “Ethnologically, you can see, without doubt, the connection
between the Witches of Macbeth――――”
“Cut it out, Mark,” I said. “You ought to know by this time that this
horse isn’t yarded with that kind of corn. But if you don’t feel you
can lay your golden head on your little pillow tonight without seeing
the curio shop, I’ll work it all right. It only means a handful or two
of salt.”
As I said before, I hate spending my salt when I haven’t got to; but
I opened a tin, took a good handful and offered it to Mo, pointing at
the same time to his bag and to our eyes. Koppi Koko had disappeared.
I noted the fact, and decided to argue with him――helped by a bit of
lawyer cane――later on.
The other natives had all cleared out by this time, and the sound of
the dance was growing. Thud-thud went the feet; gallop-gallop the drum,
like a horse’s hoofs. The fire was low in the _marea_, but it cast up a
deep red glow toward the roof, giving light enough to see the contents
of the wonderful bag, as Mo tumbled them out on the floor beside us.
The salt had been too much for him; he accepted it eagerly, and was
eating it like sugar, smearing his paint all to bits, and nearly
choking himself as he sucked it down. These inland natives hardly ever
see salt, and they are as keen for it as an alligator for fish, once
they get the chance of a little.
Everything that was in the bag the Marquis handled, weighed, even
smelt. I could tell him about most of the things. I did not know the
Kata-Kata country, but quite a lot of the charms were familiar enough.
This stone, I said, was meant to make the yam crops grow. This one was
used for charming down rain. This carved monstrosity, like a pig that
was half a beetle, probably was a charm for making war.
All the time he was handling and exclaiming over the trash in the bag,
I kept a lookout on the sorcerer’s face. There was something I did not
like in the air; the fact that I could not define it made it none the
less real. It had to do, maybe, with the wooden demeanor of Mo――or
with the disappearance of all the other men from the _marea_――or with
a certain strange pitiful whimpering that had been going on under the
house for quite a good while――a dog, perhaps; perhaps not.
Anyhow, I looked at Mo a good deal. If there was mischief in the
village――no matter of what kind――the sorcerer was sure to be at the
bottom of it.
The drums galloped outside, the dance went on. The moon climbed over
the motionless tops of the cocoanut palms, and looked down into
the open mouth of the _marea_. Half in the moonlight, half in the
firelight, Mo’s face grew suddenly dark: he made a snatch at something
that the Marquis was examining and hid it away――where, I could not see.
It was a trifling object, only a piece cut out of one of the plaited
red and yellow belts that nearly every one in the village wore, men,
women, and older children. The Marquis had been handling it rather
closely, to examine the pattern. A smile crept over the sorcerer’s
face when it was gone――a cunning, ugly smile, worse than the stony
inexpressiveness that had gone before. I saw he was bent on making us
forget that scrap of plaited stuff. He pulled out a lot of other things
from the bag――fossils, beaks, bats’ wings, lumps of quartz crystal that
glittered in the moon――and began showing them off.
More: by the sound of a certain word I had heard Koppi Koko use, I
understood him to say that he was ready to do some magic for us, if we
liked. He took down a cocoanut shell from the wall, and intimated that
it was to be filled with salt first of all. I filled it, and Mo got up
from his crouching posture on the floor and disappeared, making signs
to show that he would return.
“How do you find that?” asked the Marquis.
“Lucky he had that rag in his collection,” I said. “He evidently forgot
it was there, didn’t want us to see it, and is going to do some of his
nonsense to put it out of our heads. It’s a throw-in for us, Mark.”
“If that signifies a bit of good luck, I am entirely of accord,” said
the Marquis. “Flint, I am joyous; I must dance.”
And dance he did, lightly as a girl of sixteen, there in the huge dusk
_marea_, in the moonlight and the firelight, holding out his arms like
wings, and whistling as he danced. Before he had done, Mo appeared
again with something in his hand; and for an instant the stony veil was
lifted altogether from his face, and he shot such a look of hate at the
Marquis that I felt my hand slip involuntarily round to my hip.
“The old curio dealer doesn’t like your dancing, Mark,” I warned.
“Somehow your accomplishments don’t seem popular here.”
“It was the dance of Marianne before Herod,” said the Marquis, stopping
at the end of a pirouette. “I dance that dance when I am glad. The
second part of it, I mean――the part when Marianne has got the head of
John the Baptist, and is satisfied of that.”
“Old Ikey Mo isn’t satisfied about something or other,” I said. “Let’s
get him to work; perhaps he’ll forget his troubles then.”
“What has he got in his hand?” asked the Marquis, with interest.
It was a lizard, about ten inches long, yellowish in color and quite
dead. He gave it to us to handle. We both saw that it was dead and
beginning to grow stiff; it seemed to have died naturally, as there
were no marks upon it. Mo squatted down on the floor and motioned us to
keep quiet. He laid the lizard out upon a banana-leaf, shut his eyes
and began to chant something in a low, monotonous voice. We could not
hear very clearly, for the drums throbbed on and on in the village and
the distant dance had risen to a thundering chorus of feet and voices,
like the beat of the tradewind surf on the long beaches of Papua.
By and by he stopped, opened his eyes and took something out of his
bag. The dance still thundered on; through all its far-off roar we
could hear the dog that cried under the house――if it was a dog.
Mo had taken a crystal out of his bag――the biggest one――and unwrapped
it from its covering of leaves. It was a pretty thing, like the end
off a chandelier luster, and just about the same size, only it was
double-ended, with two points. The lizard lay still and dead upon the
ground. Mo pointed the crystal at it and began stroking the air just
above the little corpse, without actually touching it. Over and over
it he went with the crystal, making lines of light as the dying fire
caught the quartz and drew violet and green and crimson colors out of
it.
He was breathing very hard all the time and sweat was pouring off his
naked body. One could see that he was making a tremendous effort, but
where, or how, one could not understand.
At last he stopped, laid the crystal down on the banana-leaf and looked
intently at the lizard. We looked too.
I know that no one will believe what happened next, but I must tell the
thing as it occurred. The lizard moved.
We watched it, holding our breath. It moved again. It drew its legs
under it.
The sorcerer took the crystal up and drew more lines in the air,
breathing hard and narrowing down his eyes till they were two black
sparks beneath his beetling eyebrows.
The lizard got up, staggered and walked away. It was alive.
I never wished I knew French until that minute. It would have been
something to understand the expletives that the Marquis was pouring out
in a sharp, rattling, musketry fire of amazed profanity and delight. I
said a thing or two myself, but it sounded meek and mild by comparison.
And he did not stop for a good three minutes. Then he got up――the
sorcerer was standing now――and seized the greasy savage in his arms,
rocking him about as if he were a child.
“I have found it――the true occult power――genuine article, all-wool and
a yard wide――my God, yes!” he exclaimed. In his excitement he was going
to our stores to give the sorcerer I don’t know what or how much of our
invaluable food, but I stopped him in time.
“Don’t do it, Marky,” I said. “Never let these brutes know how much you
have, or they’ll loot you, first chance. You’ve given him quite enough.
I allow it’s wonderful, but there may be some very simple explanation
after all.”
“You do not understand,” said the Marquis. “You have no faith. Let me
look yet again at the crystal. It is of course but an instrument of the
power――still――――”
He took it in his hands, and began examining it. Mo kept a close watch
on it, hovering over us like a hen over her chickens when a hawk is
about. It was plain that he valued his charm quite a good deal.
“The finest crystal I ever saw, with any one of these sorcerers,” I
declared, handling it....
I don’t know how the idea came into my head, but it did come, like a
shock from a battery――just about as hard and as quick. And what was
queer, it came into the Marquis’ head at exactly the same moment. For
just as my hand made a sudden clutch at the crystal, his hand met it
and the two hands closed on each other. Our eyes met, and if mine were
as glaring and excited as his――――
I think they must have been. Mo had the thing out of our two hands
before we knew where we were. It was gone, back in the bag like a
conjuring trick, and the stony veil had fallen before the sorcerer’s
face again.
We were both breathing hard, like men who have run a race, but I think
we kept pretty cool. It was the Marquis who begged then, by signs, to
see the crystal again, and succeeded in getting Mo to show the end of
it, shining out of the green wrapping of fresh banana-leaf, between
the string meshes of the bag. But it was I who pulled my watch out and
got the face of it up against the point of the crystal――all of it that
Mo would let us touch now. The sharp end of the thing scored into the
glass of it as if it had been butter.
What the Marquis said that time I have always wanted to know――it
sounded much livelier than the last. I cut him short with a kick.
“For God’s sake, keep cool,” I said. “Don’t let him suspect anything;
it’s our only chance. You don’t know how they value those charms of
theirs――it’s no question of buying.... Come away and leave him alone.
Don’t let him think we care about it.”
I almost dragged him away. It was deliciously cool and fresh in the
moon outside; there was a smell of coming rain, and the wind brought
whiffs of pawpaw blossom from somewhere in the forest, heavy and
treacly-sweet. The noise of the dance was dying down: it was almost
quiet.
Under the _marea_, in the space among the piles, that doglike whimper
went on. But the Marquis and I were too excited to notice it.
Afterward, I remembered how we had heard it.
“It’s bigger than the Kohinoor, but not near so big as the Cullinan,” I
said, when we were out of earshot.
“Nevertheless, it is a king’s fortune,” affirmed the Marquis. He was
quite pale, and almost trembling. “And this sorcerer is using it to
make charms!”
“If we can get it――” I began.
“Where shall there be any difficulty? It is only to buy.”
“Is it? You don’t know these sorcerers. Probably he thinks his whole
power depends on it.”
“Flint, my Flint, it would be hard to say what it depends on. He has
power, we know it. He has power of life and death. What a man!”
“Oh, he’s only a greasy nigger after all, whatever conjuring tricks he
can play,” I said irritably. “They claim a lot, these sorcerers. They
say they can kill any one by wishing, and bring him to life again by
making spells. If you listened to what they say――――”
“But the lizard――he was dead,” said the Marquis, in a solemn voice.
“Hang the lizard! It’s the diamond we are after now. First to get it,
and then to find out where it came from――if that’s possible.”
“Flint, my friend, I am not rich――you know that,” said the Marquis,
with something like tears in his fat voice. “I have strained
myself――have, what is it you say? bust――have bust my resources, to
make this voyage in New Guinea. But if we can get that diamond――see,
the glories of my house are restored; I am once more the proper kind
of a marquis, you bet! And you――you are rich. You are a gentle and a
spiritual, Flint――I shall be glad to think of you rich.”
All this time we had been making away from the _marea_, but the cry
under the house never ceased to follow us. I could not stand it at
last. There are many things in a New Guinea inland town which you had
better not inquire into unless you are prepared to put up a fight. But
somehow I felt I wanted to look into this, and I told the Marquis so.
“Is it not a dog?” he asked, surprised.
“I don’t think it is,” I said. “Anyhow, give me your box of matches and
we’ll go back and see. It gets me, somehow.”
The _marea_ was dark and empty when we returned; the sorcerer was gone.
The dance was taking new life――it roared like a forest fire, down there
at the end of the village. There was not a soul in sight as we got
under the _marea_ and struck our matches to look.
It was not a dog. It was the girl who had been so fascinated with
the Marquis’ dancing a few hours earlier. She was crouching on the
ground like a sick monkey, her head on her knees, moaning in a cold,
frightened sort of way as if she did not expect that any one would hear
or heed.
“Hold! the little beautiful!” cried the Marquis. I got him by the slack
of his trousers just in time. He was springing forward to catch her in
his arms and console her――a kind and a manly impulse, no doubt, but one
that, I judged, might cost the little creature dear.
She did not even notice him. She went on softly wailing like a thing
that was doomed to die and knew and feared it. In one slight brown hand
she held something that was half wrapped round her waist, half torn
loose. I struck another match and looked at it. It was a red and yellow
waist-belt, with a piece cut out. The gap was just about the size of
the piece of red-and-yellow stuff we had seen in the sorcerer’s bag.
She would not listen when we spoke to her; she only drew away and
shivered. I judged it best to leave her, for the present at all
events. We crept along under the piles, walking half doubled up, till
we were out in the moonlight once more. The street was still quiet,
but the ugly little man with the bat-like ears, who had been so angry
earlier in the evening, was coming up toward the house. He seemed to
hear the crying: he turned half round as he passed, and shook his spear
at the _marea_, glaring at the little, crouching shadow below.
Then he looked at us and deliberately spat toward the Marquis; turned,
went on and entered another house.
“That throws some light,” I said. “Mark, I reckon that the girl has
been too much struck with that beautiful performance of yours, and that
the ugly little man is her lover and doesn’t like it. I rather think he
has complained to his brother, Mo, and got him to puri-puri her, and
she’s half mad with fright.”
“What is puri-puri?” asked the Marquis, looking grave.
“They’ve another word here. All over Papua, mostly, it means the
same――sorcery. He’s got a bit of her waist-belt to make a spell of,
and she thinks she’s going to die in consequence. Of course she won’t,
but she’s badly scared.”
“Flint, he has the power of life and death――that man,” said the
Marquis. “What can we do?”
“Rats, he hasn’t power of life and death!” I said. “We can give him a
talking to and keep him from scaring the poor little soul any more, or
she might really die of fright. Don’t go talking to her――it would only
make things worse.”
“The first thing in the morning we must talk to him, isn’t it?”
“First thing. We might as well have our tent, Marky; I think it would
be more healthy than the _marea_, somehow.”
We had, and slept in it――part of the night. About the small chill
hour that comes near dawn we were roused out by a wild crying from
one of the houses near at hand――a house into which we had seen the
little maiden creep, still sobbing, before we turned in ourselves,
for, needless to say, the Marquis and I had been keeping as much of a
lookout over her as we could. But this was not the girl’s crying; it
was horrified yells from the other inmates of the house――yells of such
dismay that we wasted no time in catching up our arms and running in.
The house was nothing but a brown thatch roof set on a sago-palm floor.
It was dimly lighted by a fire; in the short interval before I could
get my hurricane lantern alight I saw a dozen or two brown naked forms,
moving about distractedly, and howling. Something was visible on the
floor among their feet.
I got the lantern alight, and held it up. There lay the pretty little
girl, dead and stiff. She had not a wound or a mark on her, but she
seemed to have been cold for hours. Probably the growing chill of her
small body was what had attracted the attention of her companions.
“Flint, my friend, she is dead, the little beautiful, and I have been
her murderer, by gum!” said the Marquis, in a low, shocked whisper.
“You haven’t anything of the kind, Mark; don’t be morbid.... Poor
little girl!” I said, looking at her again, as the women, howling
loudly, picked her up and carried her away.
“Life and death――life and death!” said the Marquis. “Flint, we are in
deep water.”
“If it’s only water, we’re lucky,” I said, leading the way out of the
house again. “Sentries after this, Mark. I take no chances.”
The Marquis was looking at the _marea_, where the sorcerer, no doubt,
was coolly sleeping.
“Blood――blood!” he said. “Always, where there is a great diamond, there
shall be blood. The stone is blooded now, my Flint. When will be the
next?”
II
THE JUMPING BAMBOO
CHAPTER II
THE JUMPING BAMBOO
To enter an unknown, hostile town in the heart of New Guinea――to have
trouble over a village beauty, see a sorcerer restore the dead to life,
discover a huge diamond, and be involved in a sudden death――all within
twenty-four hours――is adventure enough for any one. Enough even for the
Marquis.
It was more than enough for me――I do not go out looking for adventures,
any more than I suppose a confectioner’s boy would go out looking for
cakes; and for the same reason――I am sick of them. I go looking for
gold, as a rule; sometimes I find it, and sometimes I don’t. If I do, I
can have a good time with it in Sydney or Melbourne; if I didn’t, I can
look again. But I never saw the adventure that you could pay in over
the counter of a bar, or at the box-office of a theater. Adventures
are a nuisance and a hindrance, so far as I have experienced them; and
as to going out actually hunting for them――――
Well, that was very much what the Marquis was doing. I will say this
much for him――he wasn’t any sort of a coward. I have seen him cry like
a girl; I have seen him shiver with excitement, but I never saw him
frightened, and I never saw him give anything the best of it. That
would have kept me in his company, even if the big diamond had not.
But now we were inevitably linked by that double interest. It shows
what a good sort the Marquis was, that we hadn’t a word’s dispute as to
who found it first, or whose was the right to claim it――if we ever got
it. We just assumed that, being in the thing together, it was “halves.”
I was to stick to the Marquis, and he to me, till the business was
through.
Good Lord! if we had had an idea of how much that meant!...
We were beginning to have an inkling, no more, the morning after the
poor little pretty girl had been buried. They carried her away, wrapped
in mats, to some burial place in the forest as soon as the daylight
broke, and we did not get a chance to examine the corpse, as I had
wished to do. That hurried look-over in her own house, when we found
her dead, had shown me that there was no obvious trace of injury; but I
thought her slightly swollen. I suspected poison――the sorcerers of New
Guinea are clever poisoners, and very ready to use their powers. But
nothing would ever tell us now.
Under ordinary circumstances I would have cleared out of the town
straight away, for I knew well that some kind of trouble was sure to
follow such an unlucky introduction. But with a diamond the size of
a chandelier-luster knocking about in a sorcerer’s bag, within a few
yards of us, we were not likely to move on in a hurry.
The Marquis and I, on the morning following that eventful night, held a
council of war in front of our tent where we could see all that went
on in the village street, and keep an eye on the whereabouts of Mo. So
long as we saw him, we knew that he could not be doing much mischief.
The bat-eared little man was not to be seen that day. (I had
ascertained through Koppi Koko that the dead girl was his promised
wife, and that she had told him, after watching the Marquis dance,
that she never would marry an ugly little thing like him.) He was the
sorcerer’s youngest and favorite brother, so the useful Koppi Koko
had found out――being very anxious to retrieve his character, and save
himself the hammering that he feared his desertion might bring down
on him. I did not touch him as it happened, not because I thought he
didn’t deserve it, but because I knew he would be more useful if he
were kept in suspense.
I thought his information interesting, but by no means reassuring. It
was too much to suppose that the matter would be allowed to end there.
The little man must have developed a worse grudge against us than
against his late unlucky fiancée, and if her fate was an example of
what we had got to expect, things were looking lively.
So I told the Marquis. We were sitting on the ground outside
our tent and watching the villagers moving about their daily
tasks――water-carrying, net-making, wood-cutting, fetching sago from the
forest, going out to dig yams, or to hunt pig. They looked peaceable
enough, and it was a peaceful, pretty scene, with the sun just rising
over the tall green palms and the smoke curling thin and blue from
under the deep thatch roofs.
But the old hand in New Guinea knows well――too well――that the Papuan is
most dangerous when, apparently, most friendly. The quiet aspect of the
place meant nothing――or worse.
“There is a feeling of sadness upon me this morning; I have the
blooming hump,” said the Marquis, his fat chin resting upon his pink
fat hand. “If you offered me the――the big diamond itself――in payment, I
could not dance a step.”
“That’s right. I reckon you’d better keep on feeling that way as long
as you can,” I said. “We’ve trouble enough on our hands without making
any more, and your accomplishments do seem to bring the thunder about
one’s ears, somehow. Mark, let’s talk it all out.”
“Perfectly,” said the Marquis, turning his full-moon face round upon me.
“Look here. We’ve got to get that diamond. And we’ve got to avoid being
poisoned, as the girl was. And we’ve got to get our carriers out safe
with ourselves, and be on our way to the coast inside of a day or so at
the most: it isn’t healthy to stop here too long.”
“Perfectly. That’s right.”
“Well, then, I reckon the sorcerer’s not going to go on keeping the
diamond where he did, because a blind baby could have seen that we
wanted it. We must get some idea of likely hiding-places――――”
“Hold a minute. Could we not buy it, quite simply?”
“No, Mark; I’ve tried.”
“Already?”
“This morning, while you were choosing between your heliotrope shirt
with the green tie, and your pink one with the blue, I went and had a
talk with the brute――I’d rather have pounded him to a jelly, but you
can’t always do the thing you ought to do, up-country in Papua. Told
him we had a fancy for his magic crystal; said you were a bit of a
sorcerer yourself, and would give a lot for it; offered all it was safe
to offer. No go; he didn’t rise to it worth twopence. You see, if I had
shown him all we had, he would simply have looted our stores and had us
knocked on the head――or tried to――and anything I offered didn’t tempt
him, in comparison with the stone. We have pretty short tucker, you
know, Mark――I’m not blaming you, for I know you couldn’t afford a big
outfit, but there it is: we can’t bid high even if it was safe to show
everything.”
“But, see then!” exclaimed the Marquis. “Could we not promise him?”
“Oh, you could promise him anything, but he wouldn’t believe you.
They never keep promises themselves, and can’t understand any one
else doing it. And I put it to you: Would even a white man part with
something he valued quite a lot, to a couple of strangers, just on a
promise?”
“No,” said the Marquis thoughtfully. “Assuredly he would say that a
bird in the bush blows nobody good, and laugh in your nose at you.”
“Well, what I propose to do is just to take the diamond any way we can
get it――steal it, if you like to say so――and when we get back to Port
Moresby, send him a big equivalent for it――a case of valuable goods of
some kind or other. That would be treating him as fairly as we can.
Anyhow, there is one thing we aren’t going to do, Marky, and that is,
leave a chunk of a rough diamond you could break a man’s head with
knocking loose about Kata-Kata in a sorcerer’s bag.”
“I am all of accord with you――no blooming fear!” said the Marquis.
“But, Flint, there is one thing that I must not forget, even on account
of the diamond――my seek for the occult. Can we not get this Mo to show
us more things of his magic?”
“If Mo doesn’t intend to show you more of his ‘magic’ without being
asked or wanted, you may call me a yellow Chow,” I said. “Don’t you
worry about that; you’ll get all you want, I reckon.”
We had left the tent now, as it was growing very hot in the village,
and we were walking along the bank of the river that ran close beside
the street. It was a pretty river, shallow and foamy, and full of big
rocks covered with moss and fern. Here and there you could see a pink
or purple orchid, and the cocoanuts cast wonderful shadows on the pools.
Just where the shadow was deepest and coolest something stirred in the
brown of the water――something that was brown itself and that glittered
with wet. It was Mo, bathing.
I pulled the Marquis back into the shade. “This is luck!” I whispered.
“The village is quiet; we can very likely get into Mo’s own house, and
have a look round. Come on as quick as you can.”
... How still the wide brown street was, under the terrible mid-day
sun! Noon is the lonely hour in Papua, when the heat is at its worst;
no man stirs about who is not compelled to do so. The women were in the
yam fields, taking their mid-day rest from toil beneath the shelter of
the bush. The men were loafing about somewhere in the depths of the
forest, pretending to hunt. In the town itself there were only a few
old people and children, all asleep. The main street was a river of
white fire; the shadows beneath the long-legged houses were like pools
of tar. Not a dog stirred out from shelter. Not a footstep rustled or a
palm-sheath floor gave forth a creak. It was undoubtedly the moment.
We knew where Mo’s house was――a fine building with a high-gabled roof,
and an extraordinary amount of ornament in the way of carved birds and
crocodiles, and fringes of waving fiber. We scuttled up the ladder
silently and swiftly, like two thieves, and dodged in under the low
door. Inside, the house was high and cool and empty. A pleasant amber
light filtered down from somewhere in the lofty roof; but there were no
windows, and the door was buried in the overhanging thatch. Straining
our eyes, we looked about us.... Mats, wooden sleeping-pillows shaped
like alligators; lime gourds carved and poker-worked; tall shields with
devilish faces carved upon them; a string of human skulls, extending
from the gable to the floor; a dagger carved from a thigh-bone;
dancing-masks made in the semblance of sharks and birds and kangaroos;
arrows; pineapple-shaped stone clubs; long, barked, ebony spears....
In one corner hung the sorcerer’s great feather bonnet, taken off for
bathing; his ugly human-hand locket was tidily laid away on a rafter.
The thick bamboo that we had seen him carrying like a wand lay on the
floor――tightly corked up. But what interested us more than anything was
the big charm-bag, hung on the wall, and bursting full.
We had it down in a moment, and tumbled the things out on the floor,
tossing them recklessly here and there, in the search for our
wonderful stone. I took the opportunity of looking at all the quartz
crystals it contained――there were a good many――and opening all the
little banana-leaf parcels, hoping to find another diamond in the
absence of our first discovery, which (I saw almost at once) was not
there. But there was nothing.
This did not surprise me much, for Koppi Koko had told me (under
pressure of certain threats) that the crystal, which was well known
to all the natives, had been the property of innumerable sorcerers
from time to time, and had, in all probability, passed about over
half Papua. Nothing could be more impossible, in that country of
Babel-dialects, than to find out where the stone had originally come
from. However, if we could only get hold of it, I was not bothering
much about anything else.
“It seems to me,” said the Marquis, drawing himself erect and kicking
aside the bag with his foot, “that our friend, Monsieur Mo, is not such
a fool as he glitters.”
[Illustration:
_I have never been called a nervous man; but I was down the ladder
and out in the street almost before the Marquis_]
“That’s right,” I answered, looking round again. Rolled-up
mats?――gourds?――clay water-pots? Impossible to say. At all events, we
might――――
“My God, Flint!” said the Marquis, in a low, horrified voice. “My God
of Gods, look at that!”
The flimsy flooring shook as he bounded back toward the door. I jumped
back with him――and then looked.
The bamboo was rolling about on the floor, and trying to stand on its
end!
We stood with our backs against the thatch by the door, breathing very
hard, and staring still harder. The thing kept on jumping and rolling.
It was rolling toward us.
I have never been called a nervous man; but I was down the ladder and
out in the street almost before the Marquis. It has always seemed to me
a special Providence that we did not meet, and stick, in the door.
We were scarcely out, and beginning to feel a little foolish――I, for
one, had made up my mind already to go back and investigate the thing,
sorcery, trick, or whatever it was――when we saw the tall, wet figure of
Mo coming up through the trees from the river. It did not seem a happy
time to continue our investigations, so we made for the tent, trying
to look as if we had only been out for a stroll, and (I dare say)
succeeding just about as well as a couple of small boys caught coming
away from the fruit garden.
“No go,” I said, flinging myself down on the pile of sacks inside our
tent. “Mark, we’ll have a smoke and a game of cards, and then we’ll go
to sleep.”
“What for, to sleep?” asked the Marquis.
“Because I don’t propose to sleep much tonight――nor will you. It seems
to me that things are given to happening here at night, and I intend to
keep a look-out instead.”
“We will sleep, then,” agreed my companion. And we did, after our smoke
and our game――all through the burning afternoon, until the sun began
to drop behind the cocoanuts, and the leather-necks commenced their
evening squawking and squabbling, and the smoke of supper fires stole
out, smelling pleasant and peaceful and homey and everything that it
particularly was not――here in the heart of cannibal Papua, in the
sorcerer’s town.
When we woke up we were thoroughly rested, for we had slept long and
deep, after our broken rest the night before. I called up Koppi Koko,
and bade him get the supper ready. The Marquis yawned, stretched, and
sat up on his mat.
“Hallo!” I said. “There’s another of your singlets going; you won’t
have enough clothes to carry you back to Port Moresby, at this rate.”
For the Marquis, being big and fat, stretched his clothes terribly,
and, in consequence, they were wearing very fast.
“I do feel like a cool window in my back; have a look, kindly,” he
said, trying to see over his own shoulder.
I looked at his back. “Mark,” I said, “take off your singlet and look
at it. I don’t like this.”
I had to peel him out of it, for it had shrunk and was tight. When he
was clear, and had the garment on his knee, he gave it one glance and
then looked at me.
“My friend, as I said yesterday, we are in deep waters,” he remarked.
“This, while I lay asleep, has been cut. This cut, it has taken out a
piece, and the piece is the same size as――――”
“As the piece out of the girl’s belt,” I finished.
We looked at each other; the leather-necks squawked outside; the dogs
of the village began that peculiarly mournful, wolf-like howling that
native dogs always do set up about sunset.
“And the girl, the little beautiful, that night she died,” observed
the Marquis. He whistled softly to himself: an air I did not know――a
crying, sobbing sort of tune it was, and not calculated to raise any
one’s spirits if they had needed it――which I should have thought the
Marquis’ might.
“See, I will dance her requiem,” he said. “Perhaps my own, good Flint.
One never knows.”
Singing the air gently to himself――I can not describe how mournful
and calling-you-to-come-back it sounded, or how the horrid wailing
of the native dogs chimed in and became a part――he danced, in the
twelve-by-fourteen space of the tent.... I have seen something like
it in the Islands, when the warriors were dancing for the funeral of
a great dead chief――something, but not so good. It was grief, and
death, and despair put into motion, and translated, by the Marquis’
huge limbs, into a language that even the Papuans themselves would have
understood. All, too, as lightly as――as――well, as the feathers waving
in the wind upon a hearse.
When he had done he sat down, and smiles broke out all over his pink,
fat face.
“Good, eh?” he said. “That was a funeral dance of prehistoric Crete,
that I found among the buried carvings of the palace of Minos, which
they have lately――――”
“Come back,” I said. “This isn’t ancient Crete, it’s modern New Guinea,
and we’re in a hole. Mark, I propose, for tonight, that we let on to go
to sleep, but don’t――and then we’ll see what happens. As for supper,
I’m going out to cook that myself. I’m not taking any chances just now.”
“As you wish,” said the Marquis. “But you can not deny that it is all
most interesting.”
“Oh, very――damned――interesting,” I said. “I hope it doesn’t get any
more so. I’d like a little boredom for a change, if you ask me.” And I
went to cook the supper――not that I thought it really necessary, but
just――in case. One does a lot of things for that reason, in the queer
places of Papua.
We had a little coffee in our stores, and I brewed a billy-can full,
for I did not want any mistakes made about going to sleep. At the usual
hour we put out our light and lay down on the rough sack-beds I had
fixed up. The Marquis and I were near enough together to touch each
other if we wished. We turned in all standing, even to our boots. The
carriers were camped in a little hut close by; our stores were mostly
piled up in the tent, and we had our revolvers strapped round our
waists.
It was arranged that we were to take watch and watch about, for two
hours each, and that the man on watch should sit on his bed, not lie.
I could guess the time easily enough, and the Marquis thought he could
also. In any case, there should be no striking of matches.
The night wore on but slowly. At first there were constant stirrings
in the village――talking, squabbling, moving here and there; then the
dogs began to fight; then some of the roosters waked up and crowed,
and roused out the rest a good many hours too soon. But by degrees the
town settled to rest. I had taken the first watch; had lain down――not
to sleep――through the Marquis’; and now my second watch was well on its
way.
After a time it grew so still that the silence seemed to tingle, in
the way it does when you are awake at night and listening. There was
not a breath of wind, no moon, and few stars; the weather had been
heavy and thunderous all day, and the sky was clouded. In the triangle
made by the opening of the tent I could see――when I had been straining
my eyes into the dark for quite a long time――the dim grayness of the
village street, and the black bank of palms beyond.
I say there was not a sound, nor anything to see. Seated there on my
rough bed, every sense alert, I might have been alone at the end of the
world, with the last man dead beside me.
But it came to me, not suddenly, quietly and surely, that we were not
alone. I do not know whence the first warning conveyed itself; it came,
however, and I found myself listening and looking expectantly, with a
certainty in my mind that something was going to happen.
Sight and hearing are not the only senses that a bushman can use to
good effect. I smelt, cautiously and without noise.
There was the marshy odor of the river behind the palms. There was
the indescribable smell of a native village――dry, sun-baked earth,
insanitary whiffs of decaying stuff, the hay-like odor of old thatch.
And something more――the smell of cocoanut-oil warm and fresh, and very
near.
I remembered that the Papuan always oils himself after bathing. I
recollected having seen Mo in the river.
Very cautiously I stretched out and touched the Marquis’ hand. He was
awake――he was not the kind of man to sleep when he ought to have been
waking, for all his flummery――and his hand met mine with a squeeze. We
listened hard. There was not the ghost of a sound, but the smell grew
stronger, passed, and died away. And, just after, the faintest possible
shadow crossed the gray of the road.
We listened again, and I for one did not like it, for I knew that
whatever Mo had meant to do was done. Then, suddenly, the Marquis’ hand
caught hold of mine in a grip that was painful.
“Flint, a light!” was all he said. I had my matches in my hand, and I
struck one almost before he had done speaking. The Marquis was sitting
up on his bed, looking white and drawn.
“It is the ‘touch of death,’” he said. “I have felt it――cold as――as
nothing but death is cold.” He sat like a statue; his hand had let mine
go and was gripping tight to the edge of the bed. I was up in a moment,
and looking all round the tent. There was not a thing to be seen.
Having searched, I put out the light again and waited. It is not a good
thing to make yourself a target for possible arrows shot in the dark. I
could hear the Marquis breathing heavily.
Then, in a moment, he gave a terrible cry, leaped right on to my bed,
and brought it and me and himself down to the earth together in one
tremendous crash.
There was no use trying to “lie low” after that. I struggled out
somehow, lit the hurricane lamp, and asked the Marquis, who was sitting
half-dazed in the midst of the ruins, what he supposed had happened.
He was still deadly pale.
“I don’t know, my Flint,” he answered, looking at me with the fixed
expression of a man who has had a shock. “I know only that the hand of
death itself was laid upon me, there in the dark――first it has touched
my arm, and then my heart where my clothes were open for the heat.”
“How do you know it was the hand of death?” I asked, getting a bottle
of whisky out of one of our swags. “How do you know you weren’t asleep
after all, and having a bad dream?”
“I was not asleep; you will remember I clasped your hand. And that
thing was death, I know, because in these plains where it is all the
time hot there is nothing cold at all, and that which has touched me
was the cold of death.”
“Rats! You aren’t dead. Have some whisky,” I said, pouring it out.
“Yes, I am escaped; that’s what I don’t comprehend,” said the Marquis
thoughtfully. “That is good whisky; that warms the muscles of the
heart. Flint――” with a sudden revival―― “you can not but must allow,
this is the very devil interesting!”
* * * * *
We were rather sleepy in the morning, I remember――the effect of the
coffee having worn off. I had an idea or two as to what course we had
best follow for the capturing of the stone; but nothing could be done
before midday. So I and the Marquis kept watch for each other to sleep,
and we got in a good three hours apiece before noon.
When the white blaze of twelve o’clock was searing the palms once
more, and the village folk were away or asleep, and Mo had gone down
to the river again to bathe, I beckoned the Marquis out. We wore the
rubber-soled shoes that one uses for easy bush-walking, and made not a
sound as we passed along the street. The shadows of the palms were ink
upon white paper; the dogs slept beneath the houses; the tame cockatoos
and parrots drowsed upon the eaves. The heat was awful: it seemed as
though the village in its stillness lay dead beneath a torrent of white
fire from the implacable sky.
We gained the sorcerer’s house without being seen and slipped into the
cool interior, gasping like creatures that find water after drought.
“What a day!” choked the Marquis, in a whisper――we feared, somehow,
to talk aloud. “You may have thankfulness that you are as lean as a
herring, Flint. If you had my weight――――”
He sat down on the floor to cool off――and it promptly gave way beneath
him. I hauled him out with some trouble, and set him in a safe place.
“I believe that’s a trap-door,” I said, looking at it. “Seems to be
meant for a hurried get-away in case of trouble. Not a bad idea. I
wonder how he came to leave it open.”
We looked about us. The bamboo that had given us such an unpleasant
start on the day before was nowhere to be seen. Otherwise the house
was the same. Still――whether it was the effect of the alarm in the
night, or simply the discouragement that always treads close on the
heels of excited hope――I did not feel that we were nearer our goal.
Rather, I felt farther away.
“We must look,” said the Marquis, who evidently did not share my
discouragement. “You will look one side of the house, I will look the
other, and before Mo will come back――――”
He did not finish the sentence, for up the long ladder leading to the
door (Mo’s house was the highest in the village) came, at that moment,
a slowly creaking step.
With one consent we dived through the trap-door and pulled it flat
after us. Then we halted under the house, listening and looking eagerly.
“If he doesn’t see us――” I whispered.
“I think he can not,” answered the Marquis, cautiously. “But we can see
him through these cracks――What chance! What chance!”
... It is long ago now, but to this day I am vexed when I think how
easily the greasy old villain took us in――how readily we dropped into
his snare. That Mo had been perfectly aware of our visit the day
before, that he guessed we would come again, had returned early in
order to hurry us out, had left the trap-door open in order that we
might go through it and watch him underneath the house――had indeed
planned the whole thing from start to finish――never occurred to either
of us at the time, though, indeed, we might have guessed that the chief
sorcerer of the chief town of sorcery-riddled Kata-Kata was not likely
to be quite so simple as he seemed.
At any rate, there we stood in the dark under the house, looking
breathlessly through the cracks in the floor, and watching Mo. And Mo
knew it, little as we thought it.
First of all, he took the long bamboo off his breast――it had
accompanied him to the river today, seemingly――uncorked the top, and
looked cautiously in. We could not see what was inside. He put his palm
over the opening, and with the other hand drew toward him one of the
large clay water-pots standing on the floor. These water-pots narrowed
to a mouth about four inches across; some of them had baked-clay lids
on the top. He chose one that had a lid, uncovered it, and dropped
something in.
Where had he produced it from? The man was like a conjurer. I had not
seen anything in his hand a moment before――but it was undoubtedly
the great diamond that he dropped into the jar. I even heard it
tinkle against the hard clay bottom as it fell. The Marquis, in
his excitement, pinched my arm so hard that it was black and blue
afterward. I knew he was simply boiling with corked-up speech, and I
wondered how long he could hold on.
Now the sorcerer, after a hurried look round the empty house (he really
was a splendid actor), removed his palm from the top of the bamboo,
and inverted it over the jar. We could see by his motions that he was
pouring something from the one to the other; it seemed to come slowly,
and take some time. When he had done, he put the clay cover on the jar,
shook the empty bamboo, and threw it down.
After this he produced a small trade looking-glass, oiled his hair, put
feathers in it, painted his face, took his bag of charms off the wall,
slung a tall bow on his shoulder, and whistled to his dog. It was plain
that he was going hunting――probably courting also, the two occupations
often mixing and overlapping a good deal in the Papuan forests.
We waited. We waited till Mo and his dog and his bow and his bag had
disappeared down the village street, pale and unsubstantial in the
glaring overhead sun. We waited another ten minutes after. Silence: the
village slept beneath the fiery enchantment of noon; the birds were
voiceless in the forest; the giant leaves hung still.
“Now!” I said, and we crept back through the trap-door.
For a moment we stood silent in the lonely house, the scene of Satan
alone knew what deviltries. The hideous dancing-masks grinned at us
from the walls; the skulls showed their teeth. The sorcerer’s bamboo
lay on the floor, empty, open, defying us to solve its mystery. And at
our very feet stood the water-jar, its wide-splayed mouth covered only
by the lid of baked clay.
Was the prize really in our grasp at last? I hesitated, stretched out a
hand, and took it back――stopped, listened....
There certainly was a sound somewhere. It was a familiar sound, and yet
I could not say exactly what it was. It was near and it was not near.
It was――What in the name of the devil was it?
“See, Flint, I tire of this!” shouted the Marquis suddenly and
imprudently. (I judge that he had heard it too, and it and other things
had “got on his nerves,” as women say.) “Faint heart gathers no
moss――here goes for France, my brave!” He made a dart at the jar and
snatched off the lid.
Do you know what is the swiftest thing in the animal kingdom? Did you
ever see a brown flash of lightning get up from the ground and strike?
I know, and I had seen just such a thing before. So I didn’t have to
stop and think.... The Marquis got my punch fair in the chest; it
doubled him up and sent him half across the house. My right hand being
thus occupied, I hadn’t time to attend to my left and it got in the
way. It was on the first joint of the third finger that the snake got
me. He held on like a bulldog.
Now, I must have knocked the wind pretty well out of the Marquis,
in throwing him out of the way as I did; but you never saw a man
recover quicker. He was up on his feet before one would have time to
tell of it. He had got a great steel clearing-knife down from the
wall (evidently Mo did a bit of coastal trading) in two seconds or
thereabouts, and had slashed the snake clean through before I got it
shaken off. I pulled its head away then and threw it on the floor. I
had had a look at it and saw that there was only one thing to do.
“Give me the knife,” I said. The Marquis gave it and, as I am alive, he
was crying as he did.
There was nothing to make a fuss about. I had the top joint of the
finger off in two clean chops. And there is no finger a man can spare
better than the left-hand third.
I tied it up and put a sort of tourniquet on. Then I remembered the
diamond――it was not so strange that I’d forgotten it for a minute or
two, all things considered――and put my right hand into the jar that had
lately held such an unpleasant occupant. I pulled out――not the diamond,
but a bit of common stone tied up in a leaf.
The sorcerer had us again. No doubt he had palmed the jewel, somehow or
other, when setting his trap.
I was feeling a bit sick, what with loss of blood and the small amount
of poison that had got into circulation before I took the finger off.
I was sure now that we had not a chance of getting the stone――as things
were. Mo was thoroughly awake, and there was nothing for it but to
retreat――for the present.
“Wait till I come back with an R. M. and a score of armed native
constabulary, you heathen beast,” I said to myself. “Just wait. You’ve
earned what you’ll get――richly earned it.”
“We’ve got to go, Mark,” I said aloud. “Get the carriers together for
me as quick as you can; it’s the best time, with all the people away.
If we stay on, there’ll be a row tonight as sure as Fate, and the
Government don’t like unofficial people to do its killing for it. We’ll
come back, and give them what-for with the chill off. Oh, Lord, don’t
do that!”
For the Marquis was hanging round my neck――a pretty solid weight――and
had already kissed me loudly on both cheeks.
“My brave retainer!” he said, with tears in his voice (I reckoned
he meant preserver, but it was all one), “what can I ever do to
recompense you of my life that you have saved?”
“I told you what to do just now,” I said. “Get the carriers under way,
and sharp. I want to drink some ammonia.”
I did, and it did me good; I was able to walk almost as well as usual
in half an hour. I slung my arm up in a long sheaf of grass, and we
set off from the village as hard as we could, keeping a look-out for
ambushes all the way. But the noonday hush lay on all the forest and
the track, and there was not a sign of life.
When we were an hour or two away, I halted for a rest; the bite was
getting at me a little, and I felt slightly giddy, though I knew by now
that there was no danger.
“Tell me, what was all this thing that has happened?” demanded the
Marquis, dropping on a log at my side and fanning himself with his hat.
“I am bursting of curiosity, but I would not disturb you.”
“Well,” I said, “if I had known Kata-Kata as I know other districts in
New Guinea, none of them would have happened at all. The whole thing
might have been foreseen. It’s true I had heard silly yarns about
this part of the country, but I didn’t believe them, they seemed so
exaggerated――and they quite went out of my head, anyhow, for I was
hardly more than a kid when I did hear them. But I’ve remembered them
today.”
“What were they, then?”
“People――natives, I mean――said that the Kata-Kata sorcerers know how
to tame snakes and make them like dogs, and that the brutes would bite
any one their masters told them to. The sorcerers would get a bit of a
man’s clothing, taken next his skin where it had the scent of his body,
and worry and tease the snake with it so that it would know the smell,
and hate it. And then they said the sorcerer would let loose his snake
at night in the house of the man he wanted to kill, and the brute would
bite him, and the sorcerer would get it and take it home again before
he was seen.”
“_Taubada_, true you talk,” broke in Koppi Koko, who was squatting
on the ground close to us, chewing betel-nut most contentedly. “That
puri-puri man, he take him snake all the time ’long one bamboo, carry
him along him chest.”
“That accounts for the milk of the cocoanut,” I said. “What a pair of
babies to be scared by a stick with a snake in it, hopping about! Of
course, the thing heard people and was trying to get loose.”
“Yes, and the snake――the cold snake――that was the touch of death last
night――not?”
“Very nearly,” I said. “The general smash you made saved your life,
Marky.”
“And the little beautiful, and the piece cut out of her belt――yes, now
one sees all,” said the Marquis, musingly. “Flint, this is a devil of a
country of yours; but, on my soul, it is interesting. What adventures!”
“I take no stock in adventures,” I said. “I’d rather keep out of them.
But I reckon, somehow, there’s more ahead before we get that stone.”
III
THE EMPTY DIVING
DRESS
CHAPTER III
THE EMPTY DIVING DRESS
Night in Samarai Island town.
Stars in the water all round about the houses; stars glinting and
disappearing, high among the eighteen-foot leaves of Samarai’s splendid
palms. At the back of the island, where one walks for quiet, the sea
lying like a witch’s mirror of black glass between the scarcely visible
white of the coral pathway and the dark, lurking hills of Sariba and
Basilisk.
Strolling there in the pleasant gloom, by the fresh, salt-smelling
straits, the Marquis and I pursued our quest of the great stone that we
had seen in the charm-bag of Mo, the Sorcerer of Kata-Kata, and that
had already nearly cost us our lives.
“I like this Samarai,” observed the Marquis, treading along the
tinkling gravel of the path with the lightness Nature had oddly linked
to his enormous bulk. “So small that you go round it all in the quarter
of an hour; so beautiful that it resembles a dream of heaven. This
place is Eden, my friend.”
“So all the steamer passengers say,” I answered. “If you’d seen some of
the ladies of Samarai punching one another’s heads with umbrellas in
front of Bunn’s Hotel, or watched half the people of the town going off
in boats on Sunday afternoon and all rowing away from each other, you’d
maybe reckon the Eden part was wearing a little thin. You’ve never
lived on coral islands; I have.”
“I shut my eyes for what I do not like, and look at the rest in a
strange novelty like this: I am not the new broom that never rejoices,”
replied the Marquis, twisting the proverb in a superior tone. “We are
come here on a confounded dangerous and fragile mission; therefore, we
need all the refreshness we can get for our minds.”
“Well, admire the scenery all you like,” I said, “though I don’t see
how it is going to help you to find out where Mo has got to with the
diamond.”
“I demand of you, don’t we jolly well know he is here?” asked the
Marquis. “Wasn’t it on the cause of that, that we are come from
Kata-Kata right off, as soon as we are found that he is taken fright
and enlisted on a pearling vessel to get away before the magistrate and
ourselves should come back to punish him?”
“We don’t know,” I said. “We only guessed. You remember, when the
police had burned the town, and killed the pigs, and all the people had
run off into the bush, being well scared, as they deserved to be――that
was when we heard from our boys that Mo wasn’t there at all; but they
only knew he’d gone down to the coast.”
“But we ourselves, we knew that the pearler vessel had been recruiting
along that veritable coast; that suffices, since the boys have said
that Mo recruited once a long time ago to Thursday Island, and knows
the diving.”
“One can’t tell he didn’t merely go off into the bush,” I said. “I’d
rather he had. A man who goes among a lot of pearlers with a rough
diamond about him that he doesn’t know the value of, isn’t likely to
keep it long――if he keeps his life, he’s fortunate.”
“We shall know on tomorrow, when the fleet comes in for Sunday. It
seems to me that I haven’t always been thankful enough for Sunday.
Flint, tell me, it is surely unusual that a great sorcerer like Mo
should engage himself to work in a pearl fleet?”
“Not so very,” I said. “He bosses the other boys round a lot, as
they’re all afraid of him, and he generally manages to get the best
part of their wages. But I don’t think Mo would have come away if he
hadn’t been scared. He certainly had a very good job where he was.”
“He is wonderful, that man,” said the Marquis, musingly. “I shall be
glad to see him again, although he has done so much bad.”
“Don’t go asking after him,” I warned. “Best leave it to me. We’re
playing for a big stake. My word, Marky, it is a big one! All the money
for everything we want, all the rest of our lives――and we can’t afford
to excite suspicion. These pearler folk keep their eyes skinned, I can
tell you; they live by that.”
“A stitch in time is as good as a mile. I comprehend your warning,
and leave it to you,” said the Marquis, with what one must call (for
the want of a better term) his most Marquisatorial air. “I have all
confidence in you. Do you think that they may perhaps have some
excellent billiard-tables in those hotels?”
“I don’t think; I know they haven’t,” I said. “But they have something
we can knock balls about on, if that will do.”
The next day was Saturday, and on Saturday afternoon, according to the
customs of the pearling fleet, all the luggers were due to come in for
Sunday. It was not a large fleet, there at Samarai. New Guinea has
never been much of a pearling center; but Thursday and Broome Islands
were temporarily exhausted, and a few of the fleet had run over to
Samarai to try what they could do about China Strait.
It is a nasty place for pearling: the shell is none too plentiful, the
depths are appalling; and the current in the straits is at all times
exceedingly dangerous. Still, it is better than nothing when nothing
better is to be had. The best class of pearler does not come to New
Guinea, as a rule. I expected to see none but the riffraff of Thursday
Island when the fleet came in.
There were signs of their presence already. Samarai had not been
improved by the shelling. The hotels were prosperous, and, in
consequence, rowdy; the Papuans, who had come over from various places
in the Territory to take service with the fleet in different ways,
were a nasty-looking lot. There was a new store, kept by a Greek named
George. It had divers’ gear in it, also pearl-shell, curios, cards,
dice, firearms, and knives. I had heard something of George himself, in
my journeyings about the north coasts of Australia, and I didn’t think
him an addition to the society of Samarai, doubtful as the latter was.
However, I wanted a talk with him before the boats came in; so I
disposed of the Marquis safely. It was not difficult: the police were
having a dance on the green near the Government jetty, and he had only
to hear of it to be off like a bandicoot. Then I went down the curious
little main street that is so like something in a theater, with its
primly built offices and stores on one side, and the palms, and the
flaming blue sea, and the great carved canoes from Misima Island on the
other, to the tin shanty where George the Greek was to be found.
I bought some of his rubbishing curios for a commencement, taking care
to inform him that I had a French nobleman tourist in tow, as I knew
well George the Greek wasn’t likely to suppose I wanted the stuff
for myself. And I made the transaction seem natural by demanding a
percentage on the sale, and getting it, too. (Of course, I handed it
over to the Marquis afterward.) By this time the little beast was
quite pleasant and friendly, and disposed to talk, so I proposed an
adjournment to the hotel, intending to pump him cautiously as to the
natives employed in the fleet. He took his keys and began shutting up
shop; it was near closing time already, and they don’t take much stock
of hours in an island town. I had a good look at him while he locked
up, and liked him not at all. I had never seen him so close before.
He was good-looking, but unpleasantly so――black, shiny eyes, too
large, with lashes too long; hooked Mephistophelian nose; jet-black
curls like a spaniel’s; boot-brush mustache――all cheap and gaudy and
smart-looking, and all a bit greasy, somehow. He had horrible little
soft hands, with turn-back fingers; and his figure, though good, was
as twisty and wriggly as a snake’s. It came upon me right then that
if there was a man in New Guinea likely to give us trouble about
that stone (should any breath of the secret creep out), there he
stood――George the Greek.
We didn’t get our talk in the hotel, after all. Before the Greek had
done locking up, the natives raised a cry of “Sail-O!” and we ran out
to see if by any chance it was the fleet. The hour was too early. I
scarcely expected anything but some stray cutter up from Port Moresby
or the East.
But it was the fleet――two hours before its time. We saw the thin masts
pricking like black needles against the sky, a long way off, as we
stood among the trails of pink beach convolvulus, looking into the
Straits. We saw the hulls rise up above the sea-line, and the shapes of
the little vessels appear, and then――――
“Ba God, dey’re half-masted!” said the Greek.
“Half-masted!” repeated the Marquis, who had just turned up, the dance
being done. “But that signifies death!”
“That’s right,” I said. “Some one in the fleet’s dead. That’s why they
are coming home early, and have their flags half-masted. Look, you can
see now――every boat’s got it.”
“What was the name of the boat that came recruiting?” asked the Marquis.
“The _Gertrude_,” I said, treading sharply on his toe. He took the hint
angelically.
“Da _Gertrude_, she is coming first,” contributed the Greek, watching.
“There is a nigger on da _Gertrude_, he owe me three pound nineteen
shillin’. I hope he is not dead.”
“A Malay?” I asked.
“A New Guinea――Mo. He is bad man, dat Mo. He promise, he no pay. I go
down to da jet’, and look. If he is dead, I make da owner pay me.”
We tramped down together through the burning sun to the wooden jetty
that stretched its stilty legs out into water of such a wonderful green
that nobody could hope to describe it or compare it to anything save
itself. We waited there for near half an hour, before the fleet came
up――a dozen or so of poor-looking luggers, dirty and ill-mannered.
The _Gertrude_ came in first, and George the Greek was into a dingey
and over her gunwale before she had time to drop anchor. In a minute
he reappeared, with a face of demoniac fury; spat violently over the
counter, cursed the ship and all in her in at least four different
languages, and jumped into his boat again.
“Lost your money?” I asked, as the dingey shot up to the steps.
George the Greek did not reply, otherwise than by stating, in
gross and in detail, the things he would do to the owner of the
_Gertrude_――should fortune favor him with a chance. The owner of the
_Gertrude_, meantime, a fair, flushed, bloated man, who seemed to have
been drinking, and to have arrived at the pathetic stage, leaned over
the counter and called out to George to “let the poor blighter rest
in ’is blooming grave, and don’t go bringin’ bad luck on yourself by
cursin’ the dead.”
“He got no grave!” shouted George, with much bad language. (He seemed
to think it a very mean circumstance that Mo should have no grave.) “He
lie dere at bottom of da sea, like one damned lobsta.”
“Don’t you make no mistake,” rejoined the captain with drunken
gravity. “He’s here in the cabin, wrapped in his dress, as we took the
poor blighter up, and he’ll be buried proper, just as he is. No one can
say I don’t treat my niggers decent, dead or alive. Good Joe Gilbert:
that’s what I’m known as, and that’s what I am.” He took a bottle out
of his pocket and inverted it on his nose.
“Marky,” I said quietly, “I’d be much obliged if you would go off and
wait for me somewhere; I’ll join you by and by. I want to see if Mo
left any baggage that we could get hold of, and the fewer of us there
are in it, the better. We don’t want to attract notice.”
“I go,” said the Marquis, departing. “I wait near the shop of the
Greek. He interest me, somehow, that beggar.”
I waited until George had gone off, cursing, and then got aboard the
lugger. The captain, on hearing that I was collecting curios for
the Marquis, let me see all the stuff that Mo had left behind. His
sorcerer’s bag, full of the odds and ends we had already seen, lay in
a corner of the little forecastle. I scarcely expected to find what I
was looking for there, and I did not. After purchasing one or two bits
of carving at a price that put the captain in a good temper, I asked
him if that was all the Papuan had had.
“All that I know of,” he said, “unless it was the rubbish he used to
put round his neck before he’d get into the diving-dress.”
My heart beat a little faster. “What was that?” I asked.
“Couldn’t tell you; some of their sorcerer’s charms. Most like, a bone
or a queer bit of coral. His brother would tie it on for him; most
times he went down he’d have something of the sort, and he’d be praying
to his devils before he started, to keep away the sharks. Seems to me
he got the wrong sort of prayer under way: his devils kept away the
sharks all right, but they didn’t take no care about divers’ paralysis,
and that’s what got Mo. He was dead Lord knows how long when we pulled
him up, and he must have lost his air, as he’s all jammed into the
helmet and corselet, and we can’t get it off.”
“Thanks,” I said, picking up my purchases. “I’ll go and take these to
the Marquis.”
I found him waiting near the Greek’s, looking at the things displayed
in the window. Among them was a diving-dress complete: great copper
and gun-metal helmet joined to a wide breast-plate or “corselet;”
leaden-soled boots; rubber-cloth body.
“Did you see that dress?” I asked, as we walked on. “Mo’s inside of one
just like it, jammed in tight. I didn’t see him, but I have seen that
sort of thing before. The face is all flattened out against the glasses
of the helmet....”
“Enough, enough!” cried the Marquis.
“It isn’t enough,” I said. “I’ve got to explain, for a reason. Well,
being like that, there’s no getting them out of the dress without
cutting them to pieces, so it’s the custom of the diving trade to
bury them as they are. Mo will be buried this afternoon over at the
cemetery island. And――_and_――anything he may have had on his person
when he died will be buried with him. And, Marky, the captain told me
he usually went down with some sort of a charm hung round his neck. And
the diamond’s not among his gear that he left behind.”
“It is too horrible!” said the Marquis, his pink face paling.
“All right; if you think it is, I don’t. I’ll take over your share and
welcome.”
“No, I don’t desire that.” The color was coming back to his face. “If
it must be, it shall. Tell me all you think.”
“Come for a walk round the island, and we’ll talk,” I said, leading
off by the big Calophyllum tree that bears such fine nuts. We didn’t
say much till we were away at the back of the island, where we had
strolled the night before. It looked fine there: the view was like the
back-cloth to the scene of “The Pirate’s Island” in a melodrama, and
the arcade of palms was cool and green in the glare of the afternoon.
We talked, walking up and down. I did not want to go back to the town
side until we had finished our plan of campaign, for Samarai, like all
tiny island towns, is full of ears. The Marquis, I must say, came out
rather well here; he had a good, clear head of his own, when it wasn’t
temporarily thrown out of business by one of his three fads, and, as
there was no dancing, no sorcery, and nothing with a petticoat, grass
or silken, in this affair, he was quite sensible.
“First it is to discover,” he said, “whether any one has found out
about the stone. What do you think?”
“No knowing,” I said, “but I think not, on the whole. Mo had only been
here a few days, and unless he was actually doing magic, he wouldn’t
have been opening up his bag. You know he was shy of that, anyhow.”
“Point one: It was probably not discovered that he had the stone. Point
two: Had he taken the stone with him when he dived?”
“Again, no knowing. But I reckon he did. There’d be room on his chest
below the corselet――that’s the breastplate thing that extends over the
diver’s shoulders and chest, to keep off water pressure. And, if he
didn’t know what a diamond was, he certainly valued the thing a lot,
for his sorcery work. And the captain says he usually took some charm
to keep him safe.”
“Good. Point three: How shall we do this sacrilege, since it is
convented that we do it?”
“We’ll have to wait a few days, till the nights are dark all
through――there’s an hour or two of moonlight just now――go over to the
cemetery island in a canoe by ourselves, and do what we have to do.
Makes you creep, doesn’t it?”
“I creep, but I think of my beautiful château in Indre-et-Loire,
all ruined, and my mother, who is already very old, and who has but
little money for the candles she will burn in church at my safety in
traveling, and then, by Jove, old chap, I say to me that the proof of
the pudding sweeps clean, as your excellent English proverbs make it,
and I decide to act.”
“Well, your proverbs are original, Marky, but I don’t know that they
haven’t a queer sort of sense of their own. A pudding this size ought
to sweep most things clean――if you will have it that way. And we’re not
breaking any law of God or man that I know of, in taking a diamond from
a corpse that didn’t know what to do with it when he was alive, and
doesn’t need it now.”
“Perfectly.”
“There’s only one thing. Don’t get to asking any questions anywhere of
any kind of person, about anything. I hope that’s definite. Because you
might, without meaning it in the least, get George or some other fellow
thinking, and we don’t want them to think.”
“I comprehend perfectly. Flint, this is altogether so good that I feel
myself exalted. I will dance――――”
“No, Marky, don’t,” I begged. “Somebody might come. I like your dancing
all right, and I think you’d knock spots off Pavlova and Mordkin, and
the girl who served up prophet’s head――but I don’t want you to dance
now. Anything that excites remark and draws attention to us two is
going to be bad policy at present. Swear off, Marky, if you’re wise.”
“It was but the dance of _Marguerite_ with the casket of jewels that I
desired to make――nothing more, my friend,” said the Marquis, a little
wistfully. “The dance, I mean, that she ought to make――it is never
right done by the theater.”
“Wait till you get the jewel before you start jewel dances,” I said.
“Did you ever hear of the cuckoo clock and the parson?”
“Never; tell me of it.”
“Well, there was once a poor woman who had a cuckoo clock, and the
clock stopped, and wouldn’t go on. Now it happened just then that the
parson came in to make a call on her, and he was rather a bit of an
amateur clock-maker.
“So he took the clock off home with him to fix up, and the poor woman
was overcome with gratitude. And, by and by, he sent it back, saying
it was all right. A few days after, he called on the poor woman again,
and said, in that high and mighty tone a lot of parsons have, ‘Well, my
good woman, how does your clock go now?’ And the poor creature said,
trembling, ‘Thank you, sir, it’s only too kind of you, sir, and it goes
very well indeed, sir. There’s only just one little thing, sir――since
you was so good as to mend it, it oos before it cucks!’ Mark, don’t you
ever oo before you cuck. Lots of people do, and it’s a mighty bad habit
to get into.”
“Certainly, I will remember, and I will not dance the dance of
_Marguerite_ and the jewels, or indeed any dance at all. You have
much wisdom, Flint,” said the Marquis, quite gravely. “I am afraid it
shall be a good while that we have to wait and do nothing. Truly, hope
deferred makes a long turning.”
It certainly seemed a long time, though it was only a week, before I
thought the nights were dark enough to carry out our plan. In the
blazing moonlight of New Guinea some wandering native would without
doubt have seen us crossing the straits to the cemetery island, even if
no white man spied us. The moonless nights were our only chance. But it
was irksome to wait, and wonder and speculate whether any one, by any
possible chance, knew as much as we knew ourselves.
Well, the moonless nights came round, and the evening I had fixed
upon arrived. It was Saturday, when I reckoned that the greater part
of Samarai would be drunk and not in a condition to notice any one’s
movements very closely. I had not adopted a disguise, which the Marquis
was very anxious for me to do. I explained to him that one might as
well hope to disguise the keeper of an elephant successfully――the
elephant would be bound to give him away. And the elephant itself, I
added, couldn’t be made to look like anything but an elephant.
The conclusion was obvious. We did not disguise.
With two spades and a pick in the bottom of a good, double-outrigged
canoe, we set out quietly from the beach in the starlit dusk, not too
early and not too late. There was not the least difficulty about it,
which fact I am sure disappointed the Marquis terribly. I think he
would have liked to black his face and wear a conspirator’s cloak,
and wriggle on his stomach from the hotel to the beach, and have
half-a-dozen Greeks and Malays chase him with revolvers.
But, as a matter of fact, nobody saw us, and we got away without so
much as a splash.
It was a glorious night: we floated in a hollow globe of stars――stars
above, stars below, some flashing like the great diamond we had gone
out to find, some glowing like little moons and casting long spears of
light into the sea. We had a mile or two to go to the cemetery island;
I paddled all the way, and the Marquis, crouched rather uncomfortably
on the rough perch that does duty for a seat in native canoes, sang
softly to himself in I do not know how many languages. The more his
emotions were stirred, the more polyglot he became, as a rule. He
seemed to be a perfect Tower of Babel that night.
We grounded on a white sand beach that shone faintly in the starlight,
and made our way up to the cemetery, along a dank, overgrown track,
with the weird nightbirds of New Guinea chipping and sawing, and
clanking bells, and cracking whips, in the bush alongside. The
intoxicating scent of the tropical forest came sweet and strong in
our faces, on the fresh night-breeze――the smell that “makes your
heart-strings crack,” when you encounter it unexpectedly in some warm,
scented hothouse, far away from the burning equatorial lands.
I do not think either of us thought more than we could help of the
horrible task we had come to do. I, for one, rigidly kept my mind
away from it, and thought only of the stone.... How many carats was
it?――I wondered. We were all familiar with the photographs of the great
Cullinan in the rough, just then. I judged the Sorcerer’s Stone,
compared with that, to be small, but large compared with any other in
the world. Say, three hundred in the rough.... What would it cut to?
How much would it be worth? How many tens of thousands? And who would
buy such a costly gem?
Sometimes these very large diamonds were harder to dispose of
than smaller stones, since purchasers were so few. There were the
millionaires of America――and the rajahs of India――and it would take the
very biggest of either to make bids for our treasure, when we got it.
I didn’t say _if_ we got it. I was determined that we should get it.
We had no lanterns with us: the light of the stars was enough for a
good bushman, and I knew the cemetery track by heart. So do most men
who have lived long in New Guinea.
I guessed where the diver must have been buried: there were not many
suitable spots left. We stumbled along among the overgrown, neglected
mounds, destitute of name or stone to mark them out one from another,
and found what I was looking for――a new, bare grave. I think my heart
was beating rather fast as I struck a match and looked, to make sure....
I dropped the match, and stamped on it.
“Marquis,” I said, “we’re done――” and my voice sounded strange in my
own ears, as I spoke.
“They are before us?” cried the Marquis, going down on his knees by the
grave. “A match!”
“No good,” I said, striking one, however, for a moment. “You see how
the ground’s trampled――and the grave has certainly been dug up, and
covered in very roughly afterward. We’ll open it, of course, but――――”
“They would make a grave of a native roughly! They would trample about
it!”
“Not on the top of it, Mark. When you’re burying a man, black or white,
you don’t stamp over his head. No, you take my word for it, we’ve lost
this trick. But even if we have, we’ve not lost the game. Remember,
we’re on an island, and there isn’t a boat for another fortnight.”
I was digging as I spoke, spading up the loose soil in big lumps, and
throwing it out of the way. The Marquis, again with his Marquisatorial
air, took up the other spade, and joined in. I told him not to worry,
but he insisted.
“It would not be fitting a gentleman of France, if I should let you
commit this sin for me, and not sin also,” he said. I thought that if
the measure of his iniquity were to be calculated by the amount of
digging he got through, it needn’t trouble his conscience much; but
I said nothing, even when he caught a crab with his spade, and fell
almost on top of me. It pleased him, and did not harm any one――least of
all, in my opinion, the poor black wretch below.
In a very few minutes our spades struck something. I felt about in
the soil, and touched a soft, indefinite mass. Exploring carefully, I
found, to my astonishment, that, whatever else I might discover in the
grave, there was no heavy metal helmet and corselet. It was imperative
to strike a light now, no matter what the risk, and I took out a little
bit of candle I had brought with me.
There is no need to say exactly what I saw, or detail anything I may
have done. It was a brief business. Almost at once, I understood that
the grave had been opened, as I had feared; that the body had been
removed from the helmet and corselet with considerable violence,
and that, whatever else there might be in the ravaged tomb of Mo,
ex-sorcerer of Kata-Kata town, diamond there was none.
You might think that the Marquis and I would have been knocked over
by this. We weren’t a bit. We were disappointed; but we had been
disappointed about the sorcerer’s stone before, and the chances of
getting it were not much worse now than they had been on our arrival.
Samarai, a very small island, with every one in sight of every one
else all the time, and no calling steamer due, was about as good a
hunting-ground as one could wish for. And, anyhow, I didn’t mean to
lose heart, if things looked twice as black. So I told the Marquis,
and he agreed with me. He even offered to prove how little he was
discouraged by doing the war-dance of the priests in “Athalie” all the
way back to the shore. I told him I had always reckoned it was a march,
and he explained he would do the dance they ought to have done, and
didn’t.
As I wanted to return as quickly as possible, I persuaded him to put
off the performance until we had got back to the town. I thought he
would have forgotten it by that time, but he hadn’t. The spectacle
of the Marquis, in a very dirty singlet and trousers and bare, sandy
feet, doing the war-dance of the priests by starlight all down the main
street of Samarai at two o’clock in the morning is one of the things
that I expect to remember all the rest of my life.
[Illustration:
_The spectacle of the Marquis, in a dirty singlet and trousers,
and bare feet, doing the war-dance of the priests in “Athalie”
in the main street at two o’clock in the morning, is one of the
things I expect to remember all the rest of my life_]
Next morning, as might have been expected, we were both suffering
from the sort of mental sore-head that follows after great excitement,
and in consequence were somewhat depressed. We walked round and round
the island, chafing, as every one in Samarai chafes, at its narrow
confines, and discussing the affair of the diamond ceaselessly. I don’t
think I shall ever see green palms on a white shore again, or smell the
dank, weedy smell of a coral reef, without thinking of diamonds and
divers and graves. We talked it over inside and out, and upside down,
and arrived at the following conclusion:
George the Greek was probably at the bottom of the matter.
But why George the Greek was at the bottom of the matter, we did not
understand.
If George the Greek had known of the diamond, he would have got it away
from Mo by fraud or force, long before our arrival in Samarai or Mo’s
unlucky death. He would have got it, if he had had to cut the sorcerer
to pieces, alive.
But if George the Greek did not know about the stone (and, indeed, his
conduct on the jetty suggested that he did not), why should he dig the
body up?
These conclusions seemed to point to the fact that George the Greek had
not been in the matter, after all. But neither the Marquis nor I would
accept that explanation――I am sure I do not know why. We said we felt
he had been in it; and the Marquis proposed a visit to his store, to
find out what we could.
In the hot, sleepy hours of the afternoon we went down to George’s
little shanty, feeling more dispirited, now, than either of us would
have cared to admit. The Marquis, I think, wouldn’t have danced the
war-dance of the priests for an audience of a hundred pretty women. I
wouldn’t have laughed at one of his upside-down proverbs for a case of
iced champagne. The street was steaming with the peculiarly unpleasant
heat that follows after a heavy shower in a high temperature, and the
sea, under the westering sun, dazzled like a mirror flashed in one’s
eyes by a mischievous boy.
The Marquis said, as far as I gathered, that “a feeling of sadness came
o’er him that his heart could not resist,” and I said that I felt like
chewed string.
Then happened something that put starch into both of us, as quickly as
if the thermometer had dropped twenty degrees. We heard a row beginning.
“By gum, my friend, they fight somewhere; let’s go and see,” said the
Marquis.
“It’s going to be the father of a row, I reckon,” said I, cheerfully.
“Hurry up, or we’ll miss the best.” For the shouts and stamps that we
had heard were rising into a chorus of yells, punctuated by crashes,
and by shrill screams from one especial voice. It was not a woman’s
voice, but it wasn’t exactly like the ordinary white man’s, and it had
a shrewish quality in it that I seemed to recognize.
“George, for a sovereign!” I cried. And I began to run, the Marquis
coming after as quickly as he could――which was quicker than you would
think, if you had never seen him in action.
George’s shanty, when we reached it, was invisible, except for the
roof. The rest had disappeared under a sort of human wave. At least
twenty men, black, white, and yellow, were shoving and fighting in
front of it, all apparently moved by one desire――to get inside. From
within the store came the owner’s frantic yells, mingled with language
that really was astonishing, even for a Greek. And the crashing and
smashing and banging went on and on, getting louder.
Helping each other as two strong men can, the Marquis and I shoved
somehow through the press――which, we now observed, was composed
entirely of divers. This was Sunday, and the fleet, of course, did not
work, so a number of white men and a few Papuans, Malays, and Japs, all
employed on the luggers as a rule, were left free to spend the Sabbath
as they liked. It seemed that this was what they liked; and it looked
very much like burglary, battery, and murder.
“What’s the row, Bob?” I yelled through the noise to a diver whom
I recognized. He had a tomahawk in his hand and was smashing the
window-frame of the store, the window-panes having long since gone.
Inside, I could see the Greek literally tearing his hair――the first
time I had ever seen any one do it; up till then, I thought only people
in books did so――and trying to get away from Big Carl, a huge Swede,
who had got both arms around George and was holding on like the serpent
in the statue whose name I can’t remember.
All the divers who could get into the store were inside, and they were
very busy indeed, wrecking it with tomahawks. The counter was gone, the
shelves were firewood, the curios and shells were smashed, and there
were some indistinguishable fragments of metal on the floor, which
seemed to arouse the special hatred of the invaders. Bob, too, while I
was trying to make him hear, got away from me, and into the store; and
immediately he began hacking away at the metal on the floor. It looked,
what was left of it, rather like a diver’s corselet.
I wanted to know what it was all about, and as no one seemed disposed
to stop long enough to tell me, I “cut out” by main force another man I
knew and hauled him half across the street. He swore at me, and tried
to fight, but I held him.
“You’ll go when you’ve told me what the row is about,” I said.
The man, swearing at intervals, told me.
“It’s George the Greek,” he said. “Will you let me go?” (Blank.) “It
was the helmet and corselet――Parratt, of the _Dawn_, wanted to buy one,
and George had a second-hand one in his window, cheap――They’re smashing
the floor now――why didn’t I think of that? Let me go.” (Impolite
expressions.) “Well, if you won’t” (impoliteness continued), “Parratt
was looking at it, to decide if he’d go in and buy it tomorrow――it was
only nine pounds, and a new one’s fourteen, and Parratt thought he
would, and he looked at it close, and he saw a rivet in the helmet,
and he knew the rivet, because he put it there himself――Oh!” (very
impolite remarks) “they’ve got him frog’s-marched, and they’re going to
throw him――Don’t hit me, I’ll finish――And the corselet was the one they
buried with Mo, the Papuan who got drowned the other day, and the beast
had dug him up and cut him out of it, to make the price of what Mo owed
him. So when all the divers heard that” (Will you let me go? they’re
taking him to the jetty!), “they came and made a row. Damn!”
He bit a new litany off at the commencement, as I released him, and
made for the jetty at a run. I saw them swing the yelling Greek out
over the water, and let him go with a splash. He could swim all right,
and a ducking was likely to do him good, so I didn’t trouble to
interfere, especially as I saw that the men had about satiated their
anger. I went back to the Marquis, who was staring blankly at the whole
proceeding, and told him what I had heard.
“Admirable, excellent!” he said. “What we tried to do, and have not
done, they are wrecking the shop of the Greek on account of. My
friend, I see that you and I are certainly black-watches.”
“No, Marky, no fear. We’ll keep what we know about ourselves to
ourselves, but there’s not a man in the fleet would call you or me
blackguard for what we’ve tried to do.”
“And for why?”
“Because,” I said, “this is a pearling fleet. And in a pearling fleet
you may do anything you like, sacrilege, robbery, piracy, or murder,
for a pearl, if only it’s big enough. No one would think any the less
of you really, though they might have to pretend they did, if there
were too many authorities about. As for a diamond like old Mo’s――why,
you might dig up the whole of the cemetery without upsetting any one’s
stomach or conscience. But divers don’t like being hacked out of their
dresses when they die in them, which they do pretty often, to gratify
the meanness of a mean little cur like George. That’s the case, Marky.
Anyhow, you and I have no cause to quarrel with it, for it’s shown us
that we were on a wrong scent after all. If the Greek had found such a
thing as a diamond under the corselet――and mind you, he made mincemeat
of old Mo, getting him out of it――he’d never have taken the risk he
did, in showing off the gear second-hand.”
“Then,” demanded the Marquis, “where is the diamond?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out yet,” I said.
IV
THE FIGHT AT TWELVE
FATHOMS
CHAPTER IV
THE FIGHT AT TWELVE FATHOMS
It was no use. I threw down my pen, tossed my unfinished letters on the
floor, and went out with murder in my heart. The mail was due in a day
or two, and I had neglected all my relations and friends for so long
that they must have had every reason for thinking me dead. But not a
word could I write.
There was a native singing on the beach below the hotel: the day was
hot and windless, and one could hear every sound. No one who has ever
lived in Papua will want to be told why I could not go on with my mail.
For the benefit of those who have not, I may explain that, of all
maddening sounds ever invented by the malice or ingenuity of man,
Papuan solo-singing is a long way the worst. The choral singing is
noisy and not very musical, but it lacks the brain-destroying texture
of the solo. An idle Papuan native (and a Papuan is always idle, unless
some one is making him work) seems able to pass away half a day, at
any time, chanting his own autobiography, and the history of his
immediate friends, in a long-drawn nasal howl that holds one note till
you feel the very substance of your brain giving way under its hideous
boring――and then takes a sudden gimlet twist.
At this point you get up, saying things that in all likelihood do no
credit to your education and upbringing, and throw the twelve-pound
clam-shell that probably ornaments the veranda, right at the furry head
of the singer. A clam-shell has a row of sharp points on its edge, and
it is extremely solid. As a rule, it penetrates far enough to convey
your wishes. If it does not, or if the singer takes it for an encore
and goes on again, you can generally find a tomahawk somewhere about
the house.
But on this occasion the singer was invisible, down on the beach, and
out of clam-shot, also out of boot, stove-lifter, jug, and tomahawk
shot. The only thing was to go and find him.... Down the stairs,
through the bar, and out across the glaring sandy street, where the
shadows of the palms were faint and feeble, in the cruel midday sun....
The scrap of bush that shaded the sea-beach concealed me as I stole
along. I meant to catch him at it.
“Yah-yah aaaaaaaaaaah-yah, yah-yah aaaaaah, yah-ah, yah-ah!” burst
forth another preliminary yell. I halted for a minute to locate the
sound. The singer took breath, and went on in a tone that bored through
one’s ears exactly as a dentist’s drill bores when it is coming down on
the nerve of a tooth. The words were distinguishable now, in spite of
the chanting manner. I caught a sentence as I drew near.
“Good Lord!” I said to myself, and straightened up, all idea of
vengeance disappearing from my mind like the foam on the Straits when
a southeaster flings it ashore. The man was singing in a dialect that
I knew――the usual bald recitative about various native affairs. But
there was something in this recitative that concerned me very nearly,
or I was much mistaken. I stood and listened. At first I could only
hear the word for “sorcerer” coming in again and again, mingled with
“Kata-Kata”――the name of the district where we had been first met with
the wonderful diamond that the Marquis and I were now pursuing. Then
the chanting became clearer:
“Aaaaa-yah, Mo is dead, Mo is dead and buried, and his spirit walks
about and bites men as they sleep. Aaaaaaah-yah!
“Aaaaa-yah, ah-yah, yah, Mo, the great sorcerer, did not take his
charm. Ah-yah, ah-yah, he took it before, and he did not die. Aaaaaa!
when he did not take it, he died.
“Aaah, aaaaah, ah-yah, the brother of Mo will not die: the brother of
Mo will take it. Aaaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah!”
The song, or chant, was repeated more than once while I listened.
Evidently the singer had been running it off like a phonograph for
some time. He was a Kiwai from the west and he used the Kiwai tongue,
which many white men understand, especially among the pearling crowd. I
wondered whether any one besides myself had heard him, and whether, if
any one had, the chant had conveyed any special meaning.
It did not seem likely. Most white men pay no more attention to native
singing than they pay to a howling dog. If the singing or the howling
annoys you, you throw something at the disturber of your peace: that is
all.
Further, if any one did hear it and take notice of it, there was
nothing dangerous in the song――unless one had the clue――the knowledge
of what the charm really was. Had any one the clue save myself and the
Marquis? Had George the Greek――who had dug Mo out of his grave, to get
his diving dress? Impossible. Still, I might as well stop the singing:
it was certainly irritating, and the Kiwai had no right to be annoying
the town in the middle of the day, almost opposite the hotel.
I went down on to the beach, and shouted to him to stop. He seemed to
understand English well enough, and he did stop, though with an amazed
and injured air. I noted that he was a boy I had not seen before;
probably a diver, though he did not seem to be on duty. He was loafing
on the sand, with a big, opened cocoanut beside him, and he looked
extremely comfortable and lazy.
“Why aren’t you out with the boats?” I asked. I did not question him
about his song: very few Papuans, no matter how well you may know them,
will tell you anything about their chants, and I was, as I say, a
stranger to this boy.
“Me sick,” he said, with a grin. I never saw a sturdier specimen of a
malingerer.
“You no sick, you too much fright,” I said.
“Yes, me fright,” he agreed. “All a time too much fright, long that
puri-puri man (sorcerer) he die. I no want I die finish all same. Me
sick, more better.”
“You rascal,” I said, “what boat do you belong to?”
“_Gertrude_,” he answered, turning the cocoanut up on his face, and
drinking loudly.
“Brother belong Mo, Kata-Kata boy, stop along _Gertrude_? Man he got
too much big ear?” I asked, making signs about my own ears.
“Yes, he stop.”
“He puri-puri man?”
“What-name that word? I no savvy,” said the savage, looking at me with
cunningly narrowed eyes.
I saw it was no use trying to pump him, so I left. As I came out into
the street I saw George the Greek in front of me, walking rather
aslant, as if he had just come up from the neighborhood of the beach
himself. He did not look behind, but walked quickly on, and disappeared
inside the ruins of his store. I thought there was nothing in it; yet,
somehow, I would rather not have seen him there.
I went back to the Marquis overjoyed with my discovery, but before
telling him I got him outside, and out of range of the hotel. In
Papua, if you see two men out in the open, talking confidentially
together, you may be sure that they are talking secrets. All Papua’s
important secrets are discussed under the sky. The iron house of New
Guinea, with its low partitions, and the projecting veranda roof that
acts as a natural sounding-board, is, I suppose, about the worst place
in the world for talking over private matters――apart from the fact
that a native who understands English, or a curious white man, may be
standing unseen under the floor at your very feet.
“This is good,” said the Marquis. “I can take heart again; I was
beginning to fear that we had lost that wonderful-wicked valuable.
Still, the shorn lamb must not halloo till it is out of the window.
What will we do?”
“Well, it seems so simple,” said I, “that I can hardly believe it. But
from what I see, all we have to do is to catch Mo’s brother when he
comes back tonight, get him in a quiet place, offer him a pound or two
for the stone, and take it right off. A nigger who’s been with the
Thursday Island fleet, even if it was some years ago, will know the
value of money.”
“What will you offer?” asked the Marquis.
“Curio price,” I said. “From ten shillings to a couple of pounds. If he
seems very much attached to it, spring five pounds more. One must be
careful not to give so much that the other white men would hear of it
and get thinking. Otherwise, I see no trouble.”
“It seems too good to be true,” said the Marquis thoughtfully.
Unfortunately, it was.
When the _Gertrude_ got in that evening, I was on the jetty looking out
for her. So was the Marquis; so was George the Greek. He never glanced
at either of us, and seemed to be quite absorbed in cutting up some
singularly villainous looking tobacco. But when the lugger had run
alongside the jetty, and the boys were coming off, he attached himself
to the bat-eared man, and followed him down the street. We followed
also, perplexed.
“Do you think he knows?” whispered the Marquis.
“He can’t,” I said. “I should guess that he thinks we’re trying to do
illicit pearl buying. The result’s the same, however. He’ll probably
stick to us.”
He did. He loafed along in the rear of the bat-eared man until the two
reached the temporary shed put up for the native divers to sleep in.
Then he sat down on the ground outside the shed, stuffed his pipe full
of the ugly tobacco, and coolly began to smoke.
“He’s prepared for all night,” I said. “Let’s leave him. He knows
nothing really, or he wouldn’t tag round after us like this. For two
pins I’d give him a hammering――”
We went and left him, still smoking.
I slept badly that night, on account of a touch of fever. In
consequence, I was late up next morning, and the Marquis, who was
always an early riser, was dressed and out-of-doors when I awoke. I was
just preparing to rise when he came into my room and sat down on the
bed, his pink face curiously pale.
“Flint, my Flint!” he said. “Give me a brandy. I am shook.”
I gave it to him, and asked what was the matter. He drank quickly, and
looked round the room before replying.
“It is too much, this,” he whispered.
“It’s not too much――I only gave you a couple of fingers,” I said.
“Not that――the bat man, I mean. Flint, God of my Gods, he is walking up
and down the main street on this minute, with the stone slung round his
neck, like a locket!”
“And nothing on it!” I exclaimed――if you can exclaim under your breath.
“There is but a small native case of weaved grass, and see you, he has
left the end that it almost shows out――one can see the entire shape of
it!”
“Why didn’t you buy it right there!” I demanded, jumping out of bed,
and beginning to fling on my clothes with all possible haste.
A New Guinea native walking down the main street of Samarai, in broad
day, with the second largest diamond of modern times slung round his
neck! It was indeed a nice situation.
“My Flint, it was impossible. The Greek, he was looking out of his
window all the time.”
“Oh, hang the Greek! It’s better the news of the stone should get
out――once we’ve got it――than that it should be knocking loose round
Samarai like that,” I declared. “It’s true that if we let the folks
here get wind of it, we shall have to sleep on it in turns, and keep
sort of watch and watch all the time till the boat comes, and after
that the real fun will only be beginning. But anything’s better than
losing it. Why, that confounded Greek may suspect already what we are
after. Come on.” I counted out a handful of sovereigns, put them in my
pocket, and started off.
The bat-eared man was nowhere to be seen.
“He’s gone to breakfast before they start,” I said, turning back toward
the native quarters. Just as plainly as if he were before my eyes, I
could see the little Papuan, with his woolly head and cramped, crooked
figure, striding along with the price of a kingdom a-swing about
his greasy neck, in a rude locket of grass――the treasure that would
assuredly glitter in the crown of a queen, or shine upon the turban of
some rich Indian rajah, within a few brief months.
For, whether the Marquis and I secured it or whether we did not, the
destiny of the Sorcerer’s Stone was fixed by this time. It had passed
too near civilization to escape. Its track of blood and terror――the
track of every great diamond――was opening out before it. What had the
Marquis said in Kata-Kata――“First blood for the diamond: I wonder who
shall be the next?”
The next had been the sorcerer himself. And the next after that?...
The man was not in the quarters; none of the boys was there. The
remains of their meal were scattered about the ground. It seemed that
for some reason or other the boats were going early today.
“The jetty, and look sharp!” I said.
We looked as sharp as we could, but the _Gertrude_ was off before we
got half-way down the street. Others of the fleet preceded her; one
remained behind.
“Come on, Marky,” I said. “We’ll go with the fleet today. We’re curious
to see the pearling, you know.”
“I have seen it many confounded times in other countries, and I am
quite fatigued of it,” declared the Marquis. “Always one gets some ugly
shells, and one does not find no pearls, and they tell one foolish
stories, and there is gin, and one goes home.”
“Well, you’re going to see it some more,” I said.
The captain of the _Dawn_ was willing to take us out for a
consideration. He was a long time getting away from the jetty, and I
grew more impatient every minute, for there was the _Gertrude_ far
ahead, and gradually drawing out of sight, while we still delayed. By
the time the _Dawn_ had spread her dirty sails to the breeze, the other
lugger had diminished to a speck.
The Marquis and I sat side by side on the hatch, watching Sariba and
the Basilisk open out into emerald and purple bays, and the tall blue
D’Entrecasteaux show up on the far horizon. We did not talk: we were
too anxious.
We cast anchor in a wide plain of blue water, with the _Gertrude_ not
very far away. She was anchored also, and I saw by the ladder and the
trailing air-tube that her diver was down. Looking closer, a second
air-tube appeared.
“Why, she has two down,” I said.
“She got a new diver this morning,” remarked the captain of the _Dawn_.
“George the Greek. He’s broke, and has to work. I wish I’d got him
myself: he’s a rare fine diver.”
The Marquis and I looked at each other, and there was uneasiness in
our faces. The _Dawn_ rolled steadily on a long, windless swell like
watered silk; the sappy, luscious green of the island forests rose up
beyond the sea; in the near foreground, the _Gertrude_, with stern
pointed toward us, showed two gray spider-threads dropping down into
the water. At the ends of those two threads, far down among the coral
and the sponges and the beds of weed and shell, crept all along at the
bottom of the sea two men, one with the ransom of a king hung round his
neck, the other....
What was the other doing?
I did not mean to be very long finding out.
“Run us up as close to the _Gertrude_ as you can, without interfering,”
I said.
The captain worked a little nearer. “That’s about as far as I can go,”
he said. “And now I’m going to send my diver down. You and his lordship
can see everything beautiful. It’s not too deep here――since that Mo got
finished off with diver’s paralysis the other day, we’ve shifted to
shallower water; this isn’t more than twelve fathom.”
“Your diver isn’t going down just yet,” I said, bending down to unlace
my boots. “I’m going. I want to have a look at things.”
“It’s a loss to me,” said the captain sourly. “Are you prepared to make
it good?”
“Certainly,” declared the Marquis, who seemed to understand the state
of affairs. “We will pay you what is the value of the shell that your
diver should bring up.”
“And what about the pearls?” demanded the captain.
“Oh, come off it!” I said. “How many pearls has the whole fleet got
since it went to work here?”
“Uncommon few, and bad at that,” admitted the captain gloomily. “And
what there is, no doubt the Malays and Japs poach for the most part.”
“Had any stealing?” I asked. I was getting myself into the diver’s
heavy suit of woolen underwear now as quickly as I could.
“You’ve been down before, haven’t you?”
“Yes.” (I did not think it necessary to say that my experiences had
been confined to a single trip, made in shallow water, for two or three
minutes, over at Thursday, and that I had not liked it a little bit.)
“About that stealing, now?”
“Well, I reckon the Greek has some idea of the kind, by the way he was
keepin’ round after that Papuan diver, followin’ him along the street,
and watchin’ him like a cat watches a mouse.”
“And do you think the Papuan has been stealing?” I had got into the
woolens now, and the tender, a Malay, came forward to help me into the
dress itself.
“Naw! Papuans aren’t no pearl-stealers. They’ll steal food, or clothes,
or tools, but pearls――they haven’t no use for them, and they’re not
sharp enough to smuggle and sell them.”
I had learned almost as much as I wanted now. The rest, though I did
not hear it from Joe Gilbert till later, I will tell here. The Greek
had “shadowed” the Papuan down to the boat, on which both were engaged.
He had got close to him during the run out, and tried to examine the
curio-bag that the Papuan carried round his neck. Most of the natives
disliked and distrusted the Greek, and Mo’s brother was not likely to
feel any kindness toward the white man who had dug up and maltreated
the body of his only relative. He drew away and refused to let the
Greek put a finger on his bag.
The Greek pretended that he had been only jesting, and let him alone
till they arrived over the pearling grounds. Then the two descended
together, from opposite sides of the vessel. When we came up they had
been alone in the depths of the sea for over an hour.
Our captain noted the length of time the divers had been under, and
talked self-righteously about the carelessness of “Good Joe Gilbert.”
“He had them down long before we was in sight,” said our skipper.
“Bring along that corselet, Tanjong. Give me a wrench. I see to things
myself on my ship, I do.” (He began screwing me into my dress by means
of the wrench, talking all the time.) “And look at them tenders of
Gilbert’s――pre-tenders, I call them. Are they watching the air-tubes
proper, or are they not?”
I really did not know enough to say.
The captain went on: “Now I’ll tend you myself, and you’ll be as safe
as if you was in the hotel in Samarai, drinkin’ a long beer. You know
the signals?”
“I know one pull on the signal-line is ‘pull me up,’ and I know how to
work the taps in the helmet. I reckon that’s enough.” They were putting
on my lead-soled boots now and hanging a huge locket of lead round my
neck. I can not express how I hated the idea of going down.
And the Marquis, sitting on the hatch, his large pink face standing
out like a harvest moon against the heaving sea, was whistling――of all
tunes on earth――the Dead March in “Saul.” By this, I guessed that his
thoughts were somber.
“Marky,” I said, “if you could choose some other tune I’d be obliged to
you.”
“It was not on the cause of you that I whistled it,” he replied
gloomily. “It is on the cause of myself, who can not make this
journey, because I am too large that any diver dress can take me in.”
“Well, one of us has got to go,” I said, knotting the life-line round
my waist. The captain had moved off to inspect the working of the pump.
“And of a truth!” cried the Marquis, “the pitcher that goes to the well
is soonest mended!”
Tanjong now came with the front glass to screw up my helmet. I looked
round at the _Gertrude_ once more. Still the two spider threads dangled
down her counter, across the littered, dangerous deck, with its
careless tenders and the empty, heaving swell of the silent sea.
“They’ve been down too long――every one must be asleep on that mud-scow
of Gilbert’s,” growled the captain. “Maybe something’s got them. I near
forgot to tell you: you keep your eyes skinned for clams, down below
there.”
“Clams?”
“Yes――you don’t need to worry about sharks: we haven’t seen one, not
for days; and as for diamond-fish, if they come along and get a hold
of your air-tube, it’s no use you or any one worryin’. But them clams,
they are dangerous. There’s some proper big ones, and if you put your
foot in one――――-”
“I can guess,” I said; for I knew something of the terrible giant
tridacna of these southern seas. “I’m ready: screw up.”
The Marquis had of course waited for this moment to make a speech――when
I could not possibly hear him, being shut into my metal shell like a
lobster into its carapace――and he rushed forward to seize and press my
hand, as I stepped over the side of the lugger to the ladder below. He
spoke eloquently and I judged imprudently; and tears rose in his eyes.
I cut short the scene by sliding my feet off the ladder and letting
myself go.
I feared the effect of such a depth as seventy feet of water on an
inexperienced diver like myself; but I need not have been uneasy.
The skipper of the _Dawn_ was not minded to have an accident, and
he let me down very slowly. I saw the green water, full of silver
air-bubbles, rushing up and past the window of my helmet, for what
seemed quite a long while――though it could not have been more than a
minute or two before my lead-soled boots came down as lightly as a
dancer’s sandal on the crumbling coral at the bottom.
This was the real thing, and not like my amateur experiment at
Thursday: I began to feel interested and to forget the shrinking fear
that all new divers experience in leaving the light and life of the
world above and trusting themselves, cased in benumbing metal and
rubber, to the choking depths of the sea. My ears were very painful,
and my lungs worked badly; my arms and legs seemed to move with a
deliberation of their own, and the curious change in the conditions of
gravity made me feel like a large cork doll.
But I could make my way about, and it was almost as light as on the
surface. I could see the tiny blue and emerald and violet buds on the
coral, and the eyes of the painted parrot-fish, and every blade and
frond of the tall green seaweeds that waved about as I moved by. The
whole scene was so wonderfully beautiful that I almost forgot the grim
errand that had brought me down into the midst of it.
Coral beds, when you see them from the surface on a calm day, are
like a garden of flowers below the water. Seen from beneath the ocean
itself, they take on the hues of actual jewels: the huge fans and
mushrooms and ferns of the reef glow with lights of emerald, sapphire,
and amethyst; the sun that falls through the water makes magical fires
of gold and green. Fish come gently past the windows of your helmet,
hurrying not at all, and look in with their cold eyes as they go by;
their bodies shine with all the colors of a painted butterfly, and they
make broken little rainbows in the water as they move.
You are walking on the coral: it crumbles away like over-baked biscuits
under your boots and keeps you slipping and staggering, and you must
keep a sharp lookout over those ugly indigo-colored gulfs that open in
its surface here and there, for coral reefs shelter many a dangerous
guest.
All this I saw, treading with the long, soft pace of the diver at the
bottom of the sea, breathing short with the weight of the seventy feet
above me, and trying not to think about the invisible nails that kept
boring into my ears. I had taken my bearings when I dropped down from
the lugger, and I could see her now far above me, like a shadowy whale
basking on the surface. A good way ahead I could dimly discern another
shadow――that of the _Gertrude_. So far, not a sign of her divers.
I trod on, balancing with my hands like an acrobat as I passed the
edges of deep crevasses in the coral, and watching carefully for
the serrated double edge that marks the presence of the formidable
_Tridacna gigas_――the huge shell that most people have seen in museums,
from three to six or seven feet long, and as heavy as the great stone
basin of a fountain in a park. Small ones I saw everywhere; bigger
ones, a foot or two in length, now and then. But none of the giants
was to be seen.
I must have been down fully ten minutes and was beginning to feel
the effects of my submersion, in a certain giddiness of the head and
numbness of the limbs, when I saw something a good way in front of me
that was not rock, nor coral, nor fish. What it was I could not tell,
for it was in rapid motion and agitated the water so much that one
could only see something waving and bending about. I took a good grip
of my ax and went on faster. Be it what it might, I had got to have a
look at it.
The water seemed to clear as I drew nearer, and then I began to run――as
one runs at the bottom of the sea, sprawling and waving and half
swimming, working arms and legs together. For now I saw. There were two
divers a little way ahead, attached spiderwise to their ship by long
threads of life-line and air-tube, and they were fighting. I floundered
up close to them and they never saw me; hear me they could not, for
we were all isolated in our metal shells one from the other.
[Illustration:
_It was awful to see them struggling and reeling and gripping at
each other, there at the bottom of the sea, where a tangled
life-line or a nipped air-tube meant certain death_]
It was awful to see them struggling and reeling and gripping at each
other――there at the bottom of the sea, where a tangled life-line or a
nipped air-tube meant certain death. The silence――the muffled, stifled
silence of the deep――made the horror more horrible yet. It was like a
struggle of lost souls among the shades.
I made my way as close as I dared, keeping my life-line and air-tube
well out of the way, and snatched at the arm of the nearest diver. But
in the unfamiliar medium of the water I missed; and the fight went on,
the two dark monsters, with their round metal heads and hideous huge
glass eyes, dodging, slipping, striking.... I saw now, with a thrill
of horror, that both were using their knives, or trying to. They had
an immense advantage over me, in being accustomed to the water; they
moved easily where I could hardly stir for fear of losing my balance.
Something, however, had to be done. I flung myself forward anyhow, and
made another snatch at the reeling figures. Crunch went the coral
under my feet, and I went down right into the black crevasse.
I caught my signal-line, and hauled as I fell. They were doing their
duty upon the _Dawn_: my tender answered with a sturdy haul that sent
me swinging toward the surface again. I signaled “Lower,” and they let
me down. But the swing had carried me a little way from the scene of
the fight.
With a horrible fear thumping at my heart, I flapped and stumbled
forward through the wavering green.... I was too late.
The biggest diver had got one home at last. As I came up he sheathed
his knife in the dress of the other and ripped it up; out came a
fearful rush of silvery air, and the wretched creature, drowning,
kicked and struggled, and snatched wildly at its signal-line, which I
now saw had been cut.
The other man drove his hand into the gap in the dress, tore out a
small brown object dangling on a string, and jumped backward out of
the way of his grasping, struggling victim. In the jump he fell, and
instantly the water vibrated to an iron clang that struck my helmet
like a shot. He was caught in something; he fought terribly to be
loose; from his imprisoned arm spread out a sudden cloud of brilliant
red.
“Sharks! Blood brings sharks!” was the thought that beat upon my brain,
as I flapped forward to give him help. Dulled as my senses were by the
pressure of the sea, what I saw nearly drove me out of my mind with
horror. A tridacna had got him.
It was set in a hole of the coral, its two fearful zigzag edges lying
almost even with the surrounding level. It had been gaping open until
the diver fell back upon it, and the clang that had struck upon my
helmet was the sound of its ponderous shells, each some quarter ton
in weight, slamming shut. The arm of the diver had been snapped and
crushed between the edges: even as I looked, he fell back, the last
rag of flesh tearing away. The tridacna had nipped off the limb like a
carrot.
By this time I was so dazed and giddy with my submersion that I
scarcely knew what I was about, and the horror of the two deaths
before my eyes did not overcome me as it might have done had I been
able to feel anything clearly. I knew the small man must be drowned: I
guessed that the other was beyond help. I caught at the bigger man’s
signal-line, knotted it together, and tugged furiously. Up on the
_Gertrude_ they felt it and began to haul. The two black monsters, with
their gleaming eyes, went slowly up toward the shadow of the boat,
dangling loose and limp as they rose.
“Sharks!” my mind kept saying to me. I looked fearfully round and
round. The green wavering water was clear of all large shadows: no
living torpedo, snout down, darted between me and the daylight. At my
feet the serrated jaws of the terrible clam jutted slightly up from the
coral cleft in which it lay; they were closed like a vise, and an end
of shattered bone protruded from the middle.
I have always wondered that I was able to think as quickly and as
clearly as I did, there at the bottom of the sea, with my mind dazed
by unaccustomed pressure and shaken by the horrible tragedy that had
just passed before my eyes. But I was quite certain of what I had to
do. It was the Greek’s right arm that had been severed. The diamond,
in its casing of grass, was in his hand as he fell. A thousand to one
that diamond was inside the tridacna. I had got to get it out, and
quickly――for two reasons――first, I could not stay down much longer,
and secondly, nothing but a miracle could have kept the sharks away so
long, with the smell of blood in the water.
The tridacna had been open when I came up. It would probably open
again, as the morsel it had caught was scarcely in accordance with its
ordinary food. When it opened, I must be ready with my ax, and strike
as deep as possible into the yielding flesh, in the hope of hitting the
great muscle that controlled the swinging of the valves. Should I miss
that, I stood to lose the diamond, the ax, and not impossibly myself,
for those giant shells as they closed might grab me as they had the
Greek.
Well, I must hope not to miss. I poised the ax, and waited.
It must have been several minutes before any movement took place in the
tridacna, but at last I saw the least possible gaping between the rows
of tight-clinched scallops. The shells moved apart, slowly, slowly.
Something gleamed between their separating edges――something that shot
out rays of blue and green.
Was it the diamond? No! It was the tridacna itself.
Much as I had heard of these creatures, I had never heard anything of
their beauty, and when I first saw it, it almost stunned me. From out
the gates of those gigantic shells, as they opened more and more, came
pouring forth the “mantle” of the fish, rising high above the marble
edges of the shell, and trembling away in a cloud of glory several
feet beyond. All the colors of a peacock flaunting in the sun were
there: purples, violets, gold and green and blue, and, over all, the
iridescent haze of the water, breaking into crumbled rainbows upon this
miracle of unknown, unseen beauty.
I fairly gasped, it was so wonderful. Then, remembering myself, I bent
as near the shell as I dared and looked for the ghastly relic it had
seized. There was nothing to be seen but the gorgeous mantle itself.
The murderous hand and its booty had alike disappeared.
I waited for a moment to collect myself, felt the blade of the ax to
see that it was keen, poised it, and swung.
“Now or never!” I thought. And, as the blade went home, I leaped back,
and stiffened myself for the shock of the great valves slamming down on
the handle.
It did not come.
I tried to draw the ax out and could not. The tridacna, in its dying
agony, had gripped its muscles round the blade. But the closing-muscle
was severed: the valves could not shut. Or at least I thought so. I
drew my diver’s knife and took the risk of putting my hand inside the
shells, slashing away at the huge mass of meat inside. By degrees the
mechanical grip on the ax-blade lessened and I pulled it out.
Now it was possible to empty the clam, and I began tearing the meat
away in lumps as big as butchers’ joints, and flinging it down on the
coral. The whiteness of the inner shell, pure as polished marble, began
to shine through. I had thrown away the greater part of the contents
when I came at last on what I sought.
There it was, the little brown parcel, lying loose beside the greedy
hand that had clutched at it and at death together. It seemed to me,
as I took the Sorcerer’s Stone and put it in the bag round my neck, as
if a wave of cold passed through me that had nothing to do with the
benumbing water in which I stood. The evil thing!――the thing that had
caused death before, that would assuredly cause it again. There, at the
bottom of the sea, it would have been safe: the trail of blood that
marks the path of every great diamond would have been washed away in
the safe, the secret waves, to begin never more again. And I was taking
it back.
I declare I stood with the stone in my hand and thought――I do not know
what I thought: something mad, if madness it be to think as other men
do not. Whether I should have gone beyond thinking or not I can not
say. I did not get the chance. For, just as I had taken the diamond
out of my bag, something happened that made me drop it back again
in frantic haste and tug at my signal-cord as hard as I could. Not
hurriedly, but quietly, softly, and almost gracefully, a large, long,
deep-blue form came gliding through the water, and, with a sweep of its
scythe-shaped tail, made straight for me.
I believe now that it was going simply for the remains of the tridacna
and was not troubling about me at all: I could not have smelt so
attractive, cased up in metal and rubber, as did the raw scattered
flesh. But nobody waits to try conclusions with a shark in its own
element. I went up through the water as fast as the captain of the
_Dawn_ could drag me, alarmed, as he was, at my long stay, and I felt
that shark at my toes every inch of the seventy feet.
Nothing touched me, however. The hull of the _Dawn_ appeared above my
head――a welcome sight, indeed; the ladder flashed before my eyes, and
then two pairs of hands were pulling me over the bulwarks and screwing
away at the glasses on my helmet. I am not of the fainting kind, but I
will admit I had to sit down while they were doing it, and was not very
clear as to my whereabouts for a moment or two after.
Then, when they had got the helmet off, and my lungs were full of the
good, fresh air――the glorious air of free heaven itself――I saw that the
Marquis was kneeling on the deck beside me to get his head on a level
with mine, and gazing so anxiously into my face that I could not help
bursting out into laughter.
“Grace to God, you are well!” said the Marquis, his face lighting up
like sunshine after rain. “You signaled ‘all right’ when we pulled,
but, my friend, we was near bringing you up at force! Did we not see
that the two divers of the _Gertrude_ had come up sick?”
“Sick!” I yelled. “Dead!”
“Dead!” cried the Marquis and the captain together.
“Why!” the captain declared, “that _Gertrude_, she up sailed and off
with her before they was well on board.”
So she had; there was no vestige of her to be seen. It appeared
afterward that Good Joe Gilbert had completely lost his head at the
sight of his two divers, one obviously murdered, the other dead and
mutilated, and had started off as hard as he could for the magistrate
and the police on Samarai. This job was too much for him to handle, he
said, and he didn’t want to get his head into no murdering rows and
have the Government jumping on a harmless man that only wanted to do
well by every one.
It was to his panic haste that I owed my freedom to carry out my own
plans, there at the bottom of the sea. Had the Marquis or the captain
realized that Gilbert’s divers were dead they would have pulled me up
at once. But divers’ paralysis had been common in the fleet, and they
took the disturbance on the _Gertrude_ to mean nothing worse, as her
flag, in the confusion, had not been half-masted.
The Marquis and I discussed afterward whether the Greek could have
known or not that Mo’s brother had a diamond on his ugly little person.
I inclined to think that he did not. In a pearling fleet the minds
of men run exclusively on pearls, and nobody, so far as I knew, had
said anything about diamonds at any time. The acute little Greek had
somehow sensed the existence of a small and precious valuable in which
we were interested; he had shadowed the Papuan to try and find out what
he could, and, being baffled, had taken service on the _Gertrude_ for
the sole purpose (or so I judged) of following Mo’s brother beneath
the water and robbing him, there where no man was likely to see or
interfere.
I do not think it ever entered his head that a stranger, not a diver by
profession, would risk the descent in twelve fathoms of dangerous water
merely on the chance of seeing what he was up to. But then, he did not
know the stake.
Or so I thought. The Marquis had his own opinion.
He had his own opinion about the diamond, too. That night we ventured,
very cautiously, to take it out and examine it in a quiet corner. He
handled its beauty――our own at last――with a touch that was almost
reluctant.
“Flint, now that it is to us, I do not feel as I have felt about it
before,” he said. “I hope these misfortunes are at an end.”
“Well, you wanted it badly enough; you should be glad now we have it,”
I said.
“Distant fields are always green,” quoted the Marquis gravely; and I
was so amazed to hear him quote a proverb right side up for once that
I almost dropped the diamond on the floor.
V
THE
SECRET OF THE STONE
OVEN COUNTRY
CHAPTER V
THE SECRET OF THE STONE OVEN COUNTRY
The Marquis and I sat on the hot black sand of Kara Bay and tried to
realize that we were shipwrecked.
It was not easy. There was the calm, blue, burning sea in front of
us, there was the ruffle of foam on the coral reef a mile or two out
from the beach. There were the sea-hawks hovering and veering just as
they had been doing an hour or two ago, when we had left the little
coastal steamer for a stroll on shore while some small trouble in the
engine room was repaired. And there――was not――the _Waiwera_. With our
own eyes we had seen her get under steam again, start to make a little
closer in shore before putting out her boat to fetch us off, strike the
ill-charted reef bow on, and go down in the deep water outside like a
tin can that fills and sinks in a well.
It was so quick that they had not even time to sling the boat out.
The reef, with its long knife edges, had ripped her open from end to
end. She was overloaded with ore from a new mine near Samarai. She
was a crank little boat at best, and as for water-tight compartments,
you might as soon have expected electric light, or cold storage, or
a satinwood grand piano made to turn into a high altar for Sunday
services――such as they have on the western ocean liners. There were no
frills of any kind about the _Waiwera_. When she hit, she went down and
made no fuss about it.
The Marquis and I saw the whole thing, there on the beach two miles
away. We heard the rattle of the engines as they broke loose and
plunged when she up-ended. We heard the piteous cry, thin and faint
with distance, that rose to an unpitying heaven, as the decks went
under water. After that there was nothing any more, just the blue sea,
and the burning sky, and the circling and hovering bronze sea-hawks,
busy with their fishing again.
“Is it real?” asked the Marquis, his hands flat on the sand, supporting
his huge body, his eyes staring, like the fixed eyes of a doll, out
to the empty sea. “Flint, what shall a man say when he sees a thing
like that? This is a devil of a country, where one may see twenty men
encounter death out there at one’s eyes and sit and look as calm as
this! My Flint, if I am mad, then you are it also, because you have no
emotion no more than me.”
“We’re neither of us mad, or bad either,” I said. “We’ll be sorry
enough when we’ve had time to realize that poor old Tommy Gregg is
gone, and Jensen and the rest; but we’re shipwrecked ourselves, and in
a bit of a fix, Marky, and that’s going to take all our thinking for
some time.”
“Where are we?” asked the Marquis, looking round. It was not a pretty
bit of scenery. Kara Bay is the sort of place a man might go to die in
if he felt like it, but it is not the sort of place any one would ever
want to live in. As a matter of fact, no one ever has.
The bay is like a black-lip shell, in curve and in color. The sand is
like powdered cinder to look at, and as hot as the innocent-looking
iron door of a furnace, to feel. Behind comes a belt of poisonous
painty-green low bush; behind that again, forest, so dark and tangled
that it looks black even at midday. The whole place has a deadly,
fungoid sort of look, as if it had sprung up in a night out of the heat
and rain and general decay, and never had been or could be natural and
normal in its growth.
I knew where we were well enough, and did not like the knowledge.
The _Waiwera_, on her voyage to join a North-German Lloyd boat at
Wilhemshafen, ran along a lonely and unfrequented coast; and the
loneliest, most unfrequented and most generally undesirable bit was the
bit where the Marquis and I had been marooned――here, in Kara Bay, with
a suit of clothes apiece, two revolvers, a few dozen cartridges, two
tins of meat and a paper bag of biscuits.
The Marquis, of course, did not quite understand how bad a fix we were
in. I did, and I had no time to spare for anything but consideration of
our case.
Kara Bay is a hundred miles or more from anywhere along the coast. The
sea-line is precipitous thereabouts; there is no easy beach to follow,
as in the western country. A boat is your only chance. But when you
have no boat?
The Kara River runs into the sea close at hand. It comes from the
Kiloki Range, a rampart of rock and forest eleven thousand feet high.
It is a succession of rapids and falls. I knew all about the Kara
River: no help there.
Behind the Kiloki Range you strike down towards country that is at
least known if not inhabited. There is a Government station there. I
calculated it to be something like sixty miles away from us in a direct
line――a fortnight’s journey over those mountains if we were lucky.
It seemed to be the Kiloki Range or nothing. We wanted about forty
carriers with food and tents and trade goods, and we wanted maps and
field-glasses and compasses, and rifles and shotguns and ammunition,
to take the journey as most people in Papua take such trips. But as we
were not likely to get any of these things on the black-sand beach of
Kara Bay, it was up to us to try what we could do without them; or else
stop there and die.
That was what I told the Marquis, not exaggerating the seriousness of
our situation, but not making little of it. He listened patiently and
sighed. I really do not think any one, even a man who knew him as I
did, could have anticipated what he would reply.
“Flint, my very good friend,” he said, twisting both ends of his
mustache at once, “that which I chiefly regret in the affair is that
it shall now be so many weeks that we shall see no white woman. And
look, on the Norddeutscher Lloyd, we should in three or four days have
been sitting on the feet of many beautiful ladies, and they should have
said politenesses――what do you say?――smooged us greatly, because of
the horrors we have encountered. I regret to lose that. Also, I begin
to feel that this sacred pig of a diamond has made us enough adventure
already.”
“You don’t suppose it was the Sorcerer’s Stone sunk the _Waiwera_?” I
said.
“I don’t know, but I think it’s confoundedly likely,” said the Marquis,
putting up his hand to the string that ran round his fat neck. “She
brought us adventure, yes, adventure, that diamond, and she brings us
more. And Flint, my friend, there comes the time, after all, when the
rolling stone maketh the heart sick. Don’t you think it?”
“I reckon this isn’t just the time to think it, if I do,” I said. “We
may get through this, and we mayn’t, Marky.”
“Is it so bad as that?”
“Just so bad,” I said.
The Marquis looked out at the sea, lying blue and calm above our late
companions’ grave. He then produced a large, white silk handkerchief
embroidered with a coronet at the corner, spread it between his two
hands and deliberately began to shed tears.
I was long past being astonished at anything that he might do. I
watched him, reasonably certain that my statement of our difficulties
had nothing to do with his emotion. He cried quite simply and
unaffectedly for a minute or two. Then he stopped, wiped his eyes and
face with the handkerchief and said:
“I have wept them who died. I am finished. Lead on.” Adding as an
afterthought: “It is a magnificent embroidery on that handkerchief. It
was made for me by a little beautiful who loved me. Shall I tell you of
her?”
“I’d be delighted, another time,” I answered. “Just now, we have to
think of how we’re ever going to get back again to the ‘beautifuls’ who
love us both. Marky, you and I have got to get up and travel right now.
Do you see those mountains up there?”
“That range of enchanting beauty? Yes.”
“I hope you’ll go on thinking it beautiful. We’ve got to cross it
before we die of starvation or fever. Our lunch that we brought from
the steamer is going to last us a good while.”
“We will depart at once,” said the Marquis, lifting his huge bulk
lightly enough from the ground and drawing himself up like a soldier on
parade. “March!”
* * * * *
It was the wild pig, I think, that saved our lives――and at the same
time nearly caused their loss.
We were three days from the beach, well up into the Kiloki Range, but
almost broken down with hardship and short commons, when we chanced
upon the brute in a gully, and shot it with our revolvers. We cut it up
and set a leg to roast; the savory smell spread far into the forest;
and, as we soon had reason to know, ours were not the only nostrils
that perceived it.
When the leg was done, we stuffed. No food could be carried far in that
climate, and the more we ate, the less we lost. We were both greasy
with the richness of the meat; our hands were slippery, our faces
shining, and, I think, our hearts felt stouter than they had done for
the last forty-eight hours.
“Another one, my Flint; make hay while the iron is hot,” counseled
the Marquis, filling his own mouth to speechlessness. He was sitting
opposite me as he spoke, and I saw his face grow suddenly swelled; the
eyes started out, the cheeks became puffy.... At first I thought he was
choking; then I guessed he was trying to say something; then I knew
that he had seen something and I turned round like a shot.
Behind us, looking, as savages in the bush always do, just as if they
had grown there instead of arriving, were ten or a dozen ugly-looking
heads standing quite still in the underbrush. The tips of a number
of spears showed up in the tangled green beside them. They were an
unpleasant crew; their foreheads sloped enormously, making them look
scarcely human; their hair was trained in greasy curls that fell far
back and increased the beast-like angle of the face. Their black and
white eyes looked steadily at us out of their brown faces, and the
look was that of savage man, near, yet ten thousand æons of evolution
distant. Across the gulf, what thought could travel?
We got up on our feet at once, and I spoke to the men in half a dozen
different languages――all the New Guinea tongues I knew anything
of――hoping to find some means of communication. I was lucky enough to
hit on one at last. When I got down to the Mambare tongue, one of the
faces showed signs of intelligence; the others remained blank.
I explained that we were great chiefs who had lost our way; that our
ship had sunk and that we desired to go to the Government station on
the other side of the range. If the men would guide us there, I said,
the Government would give them any amount of treasure――salt, tobacco,
knives and tomahawks, calico cloth.
The interpreter spoke to the others. They seemed dissatisfied, but they
came out of the brush into the clearing and we were able to see them.
“Marky,” I said, “we’ve got to keep our eyes skinned; these seem to be
Koiroros, and they’re among the worst cannibals in New Guinea. Probably
they’ve never seen white men before up here; it’s all unexplored
country.”
“Do you suppose we shall be eat?” asked the Marquis.
“Not necessarily. Cannibals aren’t always eating other people. We may
be able to make friends and get them to guide us.”
With a view to this, I collected any little trifles we could spare――a
tin match-box, a silk tie, a small penknife――and offered them to the
tallest man, who seemed, by his demeanor, to be something of a chief.
He was a splendidly made fellow, quite naked save for a bark
waist-cloth, and all hung over with shell and dog’s tooth ornaments.
I looked anxiously for any trade beads in his jewelry, but didn’t see
any, nor had any of the party steel knives or tomahawks. They were
armed, besides the spears, with stone-headed clubs and long daggers
made of human thigh-bone. It seemed plain that they had had no dealings
with civilized men; and this was so much the worse for us.
The chief seemed pleased with the gifts, and said something to the man
who could speak Mambare. It appeared that he wanted us to come to his
village, which was only a little way off. He said that he would give us
guides; but I noticed that he looked at the ground as he spoke and did
not face us.
“We had better go,” I told the Marquis. “I don’t like making friends
with natives as a rule; nine times out of ten it’s a mistake――but want
of tucker gives us no choice. We’ll try and get carriers there, and
some yams to take us on.”
The way proved to be very much longer than we expected, but, tired as
we both were, the sight of the village aroused us when it came into
view. It was certainly one of the strangest things I had seen, even in
strange New Guinea.
We were now in the midst of the high ranges, and there was no level
anywhere――not so much as one could use to lay out a tennis ground.
Every hill clasped hands with the next; torrents, foaming white and
furious among the ferny green, cut up the ranges into a gigantic
pattern of “ridge and furrow.” The mountains nudged and crowded one
another; their shoulders, their hips, their elbows were massed like
the shoulders, hips and elbows of a human crowd. The peaks ran up into
needle points like incredible pictures in geography books; they stuck
out battlements, roofs and buttresses into empty air; they sloped at
every angle, into every shape. It was the world run through a chopping
machine and thrown out at random. And in this place, without a spot
where you could set down the sole of your foot in comfort, men lived
who had not wings!
The village crowned the impossibility of the scene. It was exactly like
a clump of enormous brown toadstools, and it was bracketed――one could
not say set――on to the sides of a needle-point peak more like a church
spire than anything else. The houses were mere semicircular roofs of
thatch, placed upon bamboo floors that were stuck to the mountain by
piles in some incomprehensible fashion. Up the peak of this amazing
place we were guided by the Koiroros, who kept unpleasantly close
about us and seemed resolved that we should not get away from them. As
nothing unprovided with wings could have got away from the mountain men
in their own country, we did not think of trying, even though it began
to be unpleasantly clear that we were in reality not employers of these
people, but prisoners.
The Koiroros began to sing as they approached their homes, chanting
loudly and triumphantly, with an indescribable undertone of something
that――as we understand the word――was not human; something that harked
back the ages very near to them and very far from us.
The Marquis heard it too. Tired as he was, he managed to gasp out as we
toiled up the frightful slope:
“Flint, if you desire a proof that this Darwin of yours had reason,
listen then――listen to the wild beast howling over its preys!”
“We aren’t going to be any prey,” I snapped, being a little cross with
fatigue. “And anyhow, the less you talk, the better. They can guess a
lot from one’s tone.”
But I must say, when we got into the village itself, onto the slope
that seemed to take the place of its Plaza, or Place Royale, or Unter
den Linden, I began to feel that we were in a tighter place than I had
thought. For I saw something that I had not quite expected to see.
Dug out in the side of the hill and lined with neatly fitted stones,
were certain long, coffin-like holes that I knew at once for the stone
ovens of the main range people. They seemed to be nearly six feet in
length. Now there is only one kind of game that needs a stone oven six
feet long to bake it in――man.
Of course, the greater number of Papuan inland tribes are cannibals now
and then. I was accustomed to that sort of thing, and had even seen
human joints made ready for cooking――not, of course, the killing of the
game, which I shouldn’t have allowed for a moment. But cannibalism,
among most of the tribes, is not at all an every-day affair; it is the
sequel of a big, victorious raid or the end of some unusually bitter
private quarrel.
There are tribes, however, who eat man whenever and wherever they get
the chance; and it is those tribes who go to the trouble of building
big stone ovens, especially designed for cooking human beings. That is
why I was not too well pleased to find that we had got into the Stone
Oven country without expecting it. I wondered if we should ever get out
again. I trusted a good deal to our revolvers: firearms will go far
among men who have never seen them――but the mountain tribes are good
fighters, for Papuans, and I did not anticipate that it would be easy
to get away, if we had occasion to try it.
They led us into the largest house of the village, a ramshackle shanty
of a place, with spears and shields hung up on the walls and bamboo
shelves to sleep on. It smelled of unwashed nigger, old hay, damp and
rain; and you could see the mountain clouds curling and wreathing,
through the splits in the crazy floor――very much of the house
projecting right out over nothing at all.
Down the hill, like ants coming out of the top of a tall ants’-nest,
ran the people of the place, yelling with excitement at our arrival.
They had not a stitch of clothes among the lot; even the women were
dressed merely in a few small land-shells strung round the neck and a
handful of dogs’ teeth fastened like tassels into the hair.
“When we shall leave this place,” remarked the Marquis, “I will take
with me a complete costume of one of these women, to carry in my purse
all the time, so that I may show it to the delightful English misses
when I go to London, and hear them say, ‘Oooh, shocking!’ That is what
they love to say, my Flint.”
He looked about the ugly crowd again.
“They are not natural, these people; I do not love them,” he commented.
“See, then, how they are every one bended back from the waist like a
man who has a tetanus fit, because of the climbing they always do. When
we go away from here――――”
He looked about again.
“If we go away from here,” he amended, coolly, “you shall see that
I will give a lecture to the scientifics in Paris, a most blooming
learned lecture.”
“I hope you will, Marky,” I said. We were sitting on the bamboo
bed-place now, smoking a little of our cherished tobacco and wondering
when or if the Koiroros would give us something to eat. One of the
children――rather a pretty little chap of toddling age, who had been
half walking, half crawling, on the verge of an appalling precipice as
we came up to the village――made its way over to us and began touching
our clothes with childish curiosity. The older people watched it, but
did not go near; they seemed shy of putting their hands on us.
The Marquis, who was fond of children, caressed the little thing and
tried to make friends with him (rather foolishly, I thought) by taking
the diamond out of the case in which we carried it, and making it
flash. The child looked at it and then retreated, at a call from his
mother, striking at the stone as he went. It dropped and we both went
after it with a hasty exclamation, as the floor was full of holes. I
recovered it and fastened it up again in its case with a bit of string.
“I’ll take my turn now, Marky,” I said, hanging it around my neck. For
we had been carrying it day and day about, under our clothes.
“Look!” said the Marquis, making a small motion with his hand.
I looked and saw a Koiroro, whom I had not previously noticed,
literally glaring at me as I put the stone away. He was by a good
deal the tallest man in the village, and he had a very fine crown of
bird-of-paradise feathers on his head――among them the plumes of the
rare blue species that is worth almost what you like to ask for it in
civilization. It was evident that he was a man of some standing. I
suspected him to be the village sorcerer, as he had an ugly necklace
about his neck, made of locks of human hair, strung alternately with
some of the small bones out of the ear, and supporting a kind of trophy
made of double teeth.
“More trouble about the diamond,” I said. “That city brute has a mind
to get it if he can. A sorcerer, I reckon.”
There was some murmuring among the men, and they drew off into a corner
of the house by themselves, talking and looking at us, especially at
me. The inevitable evening rain of the mountains was coming down
now in a waterfall rush; the purple gorge beneath us, that we could
see through the open door, was filling up with a stormy sea of white
cloud. Without, precipices, tree-tops, clouds and plunging steps, all
drenched in roaring rain; within, a gloomy, damp-smelling house of
rotten thatch, white skulls gleaming through the dusk from the place
where they hung a-swing upon the rafters; shadowy men-things, more than
half brute, glowering at us from their corner.... And out upon the
hill-side, just a few yards away, the long stone ovens――waiting.
No, it was not a pleasant prospect, take it all in all.
For the moment, however, I thought there was no actual danger. I have
seen much of the Papuan tribes, and it did not seem to me that these
Koiroros had the blood-seeking mood on, that night.
“I don’t think they’ll attack just yet,” I told the Marquis. “But I’d
be as glad if they hadn’t seen the stone. They’re talking about it
now.”
“What do they say?” asked the Marquis eagerly.
“I can’t tell you that, but I can guess they’re telling each other all
about it. I’d be willing to make a bet it’s known to them. It must be
one of the celebrated sorcerer’s charms that go knocking about all over
the country, passed from one to the other.”
“And they will try to get it?”
“Yes, it and us.”
It grew darker in the chief-house, there as we sat on the bamboo
sleeping shelf, listening to the unvarying roar of the rain and
watching the excited waving of the head-plumes in the corner where the
cannibals held their conference――the plumes were all we could see now,
for a naked Papuan becomes rapidly and completely invisible, once it
begins to grow dark. The Marquis was very much quieter than usual, but
I do not think he was at all afraid. I think he reckoned on having a
fight by-and-by, and liked the idea. As for myself, well, a man with
any sense isn’t afraid in a tight place; it would be idiotic, because
you want all the nerve you have, to get out of it. And usually you are
much too busy thinking what to do to worry over what may happen if you
don’t do it.
A woman brought a torch in by and by, and said something that caused
great excitement. The men jumped about and clapped their hands and
made noises exactly like the noise a dog makes when it sees its food
in front of it. The Marquis and I both had our hands ready upon our
revolver butts, but we needn’t have troubled――it was only the pig that
had already had so much to do with our fortunes, coming in again. They
had been heating it up and were bringing it in for supper.
We all sat down on the floor then――and the meat was shared out,
together with a lot of sweet potatoes, hot from the ashes. The
cannibals gave us a liberal share and offered us a bamboo full of water
to drink out of. They tore and gnawed their food in a way that was not
pleasant to watch――remembering those long ovens on the hill.
“Sacred name of a camel, what a lecture I will give!” sighed the
Marquis, with his mouth full of sweet potato. “Look at their chests all
blowed out with the climbing, and their feet that have monkey toes, and
the cords on the insteps, and the nostril of the pig that they have!
See how they jump, they flitter, they are all the time nervous and
distracted! That comes of living on the edge of the cook-pot; if you
hold your finger up at one, and say ‘Hi!’ he should jump to break the
floor.”
“I hope you won’t,” I said, looking down at the velvet-black gulf of
vacancy that one could see between the slats of the flooring. “Don’t
you get too scientific, Marky; I warn you, that nervousness of theirs
is a bad sign. Also, their friendliness is a bad sign. Shove back and
finish your food with your shoulders against the wall, if you take my
advice.” I moved over as I spoke and the Marquis followed me.
We ate as men eat who do not know where their next meal is to come
from; we filled our pockets quietly, when we could swallow no more.
The Koiroros were so busy chattering among themselves that they did not
notice what we were doing. They did not molest us, though I could feel
there was trouble in the air.
I cannot say we passed a pleasant night. We kept watch in turns, and
got some sleep, through sheer fatigue, lying just where we had eaten
our meal, on the floor of the chief-house. The cannibals were sleeping
all around us, snorting and snoring like walruses. One of them lay
across the door, I noticed, and as it was hardly large enough to crawl
through, he guarded it efficiently.
Towards four o’clock in the morning (I found the time by feeling the
hands of my watch), the presentiment of coming trouble got hold of me
so completely that I resolved to make an attempt at getting away, cost
what it might. The more I thought about that liberal supper, the less I
liked it. The more I considered those long stone ovens on the hill, the
more likely I thought it that they would be filled on the morrow――if
we did not get away.
I felt for the Marquis in the dark; it was his turn to sleep, but he
was not sleeping. I put my mouth to his ear and whispered a little.
Then I got out my knife and began cutting away the flimsy bamboo
flooring. It was the time of the waning moon; I knew that we should
have light enough to see by, once we got outside, and that it would
last till dawn came up. By dawn we might hope to be out of the way.
It was easy enough to cut the floor without waking the Koiroros, since
all natives are heavy sleepers, and these men had fed full before they
slept. Getting through was more difficult; I gritted my teeth at the
creaking noise made by the Marquis’s weight as he lowered himself after
me. Where I had cut through there was sloping soil underneath; we got
hold of the supporting piles that were thrust into it, and holding on
by them, made our way very cautiously down the precipice to the place
where the trees and lianas began once more. The angle here was awful,
but we had plenty of hand-hold, and crept along securely enough in the
watery moonlight. The rain was over now and the river far below us at
the bottom of the gorge roared full-fed along its way.
Not a sound came from the toadstool clump of houses above as we crept
down the precipice. We were out of earshot before long, and able to
speak as we mounted the next great wall of rock, keeping always in
the direction of the far-off Government station, which I now began to
hope we should reach. By the lay of the land, I guessed we had forty
miles or more to go, and that might mean a week in this country of
precipices. Still, if we could find anything to eat on the way, and
if the Koiroros did not recapture us, it was――just――possible to get
through.
Dawn, rising red through the tableland of white cloud, like spilled
blood spreading on snow, came up and caught us sooner than I liked.
We were out of sight of the village, having crossed two ridges, but
our position, climbing up the bare rock at the side of a waterfall,
was dangerously exposed should any of the Koiroros be within sight. I
stopped where I was, on a ledge of stone overgrown with white butterfly
orchids, and looked over the tossing billows of tree-tops that lay
behind. There was small satisfaction in that. An army might have been
hidden in the bush, following us up. Still――considering the speed the
Koiroros could keep up in this mountain country when they chose――it
certainly did look as if they were not pursuing us. The Marquis was
jubilant.
“They are not spiritual, these people,” he declared, scrambling like a
cockroach in my rear. “By gum! I think their mentality is far back in
the scale of evolution; they are blessed idiots. They lock the stable
door when the milk is spilt. I can figure how they are saying injuries
to one another about our invasion, now we are safe away.”
I did not say anything, for the reason that I was not very sure we were
safe away――yet. There was something I did not understand about this
easy letting go. All the same, there was only one thing to do――go on as
fast as possible, and we did.
Towards midday, as we were crawling painfully up a perpendicular
forest hung out like a hearth-rug left to dry, over the side of a
three-thousand-foot cliff, I fancied the light ahead was growing very
clear. All morning we had been working along as one generally does in
the interior, right at the bottom of the forests, judging our direction
by compass and by the rise of the land, and seeing no more of the
country in general than if we had been crawling along in the depths of
the sea. But the light ahead and above looked as if there were a big
break-off somewhere. I pointed it out to the Marquis, to encourage him.
“I believe that’s the southwestern face of the Kiloki Range we’re
coming to,” I said. “If there’s a big drop there, and if we can get
down, it will give us a long lift on our way to the Government station.”
The Marquis paused to wipe his dripping face; it was atrociously hot
in there, sheltered from all cooling breezes. He cast a glance at his
khaki shirt and trousers, crumpled and stained and torn in many places.
“Has he a wife or a daughter, and is she beautiful?” he asked.
“Who? The R. M.? Don’t know who he is; but I should think it most
unlikely he has any womenkind up there.”
The Marquis sighed and was silent.
We were coming up to the light now, and it grew clearer and clearer.
There was evidently a big drop somewhere very near. And unless my ears
were much mistaken, there was also a big waterfall.
“Hear that, Marky,” I said, “that roaring sound? You’ll probably see a
young Niagara somewhere when we get to the top.”
Well, it was not a Niagara or a Victoria Falls, but it could have held
its own very well with any other fall in the world you might like
to mention. When we came out on the summit we saw that the whole
countryside was broken away under our feet and that the nearest thing
to us, as we stood up there on the verge of a mighty basalt wall, was
the feathery top of a forest so far beneath as to be half blue with
distance. And we saw that the whole of this immense rampart, greater
than any straight-down drop I had ever seen in my life, was taken at
one leap by a river that came down from a ridge above the one we had
been climbing.
The Marquis stood quite still on the summit, looking at the
indescribably magnificent view spread out below, for some minutes.
“To think,” he said, at last, “that it is ours alone――that no other eye
shall――――”
“Get your revolver out,” I said. There was no use making a fuss――I hate
fusses――but there was also no use trying to deny that our unlucky fate
had caught up with us again, and that the puzzle of the morning was
fully explained at last. There, on the verge of the precipice, standing
nonchalantly with their toes half over, as only a mountain native
can, were a dozen or more Koiroros who had slipped out of the bush
like snakes as the Marquis was speaking. From what I could see, they
must have taken a short cut, got to the precipice before us and been
comfortably waiting for our arrival.
This time there could be no doubt whatever about their intention.
They had surrounded us before you could say “knife”――not very close,
but near enough to be dangerous――and were creeping closer and closer,
poising their stone-headed clubs in an ominous manner. From the dense
wall of greenery behind, a spear came whistling out, excellently aimed
for the Marquis; it missed him by no more than an inch. Another went
into my hat and knocked it off.
We drew our revolvers and fired. The Marquis got his man clean through
the temple and dropped him as neatly as one could wish. Mine was hit
in the ribs; he fell over the precipice, and his cry, as he went down,
grew thin like the whistle of a train running away in the distance,
until we ceased to hear it. We had not much leisure for listening, in
any case. The Koiroros had bolted at the first shot, as natives usually
do; but they were busy throwing spears from cover now, and the Marquis
and I had to use more ammunition than we liked, firing at random into
the green, before we succeeded in stopping them.
They did seem to be driven off at last, however, and we began walking
along the edge of the precipice, to try and find a way down, for that
was now a vital necessity.
There was none.
We tramped and climbed and looked for half the afternoon. The sun got
down in the west; we ate a little of our food as we clambered about,
seeking endlessly, and drank from the pools made by the spray of the
waterfall. That waterfall! It blocked us like a wall of iron; we could
not cross it, or swim it, or get down alongside it. It was, in truth,
an efficient gatekeeper to the country of the Stone Ovens.
“Marky, I’m of opinion that they knew this all along,” I said. “They
played with us like cats with a mouse. They let us go just this far,
knowing we could get no farther. As to what I think of the beasts――――”
I said what I thought, without laying any restraint on myself. The
Marquis listened for a moment, and then jumped up――he had been sitting
on a stone――and gave a kind of howl.
“Look down!” he cried. I looked. Far, very far below I saw the figure
of one of the Koiroros, carrying a dead body on his shoulders, like an
ant going home with a grain of corn.
We were a good way from the waterfall at that moment, but the wall was
still unbroken, and I could not see any place where the man could have
got down. Still down he had evidently got, and the sight encouraged us
more than I could say.
“The sun’s failing us now, Marky,” I said, “but tomorrow we’ll find
that track or die.”
“I think you have reason; if we do not find it, we shall undoubtedly
kick the bucket in this out-of-the-road wilderness,” replied the
Marquis. “And if we were to finish like that, how many women of a great
beauty and a great kindness would pour tears for we two over all the
world!”
The sun was going down.
“Your watch first tonight, Marky,” I said. “And my turn for the
diamond.”
* * * * *
I had the stone around my neck next morning when it came daylight. We
were both pretty tired, with short sleep, short food and hard work, but
neither of us was anything like done, and I for one felt almost brisk
when the fresh wind of sunrise sprang up, blowing the ferns and orchids
about on the edge of the precipice and sending the spray of the great
waterfall flying out into the sun. The Marquis was sleeping just then.
I did not wake him, but got up to reconnoitre; this sunrise hour is the
clearest of all the day, and one can see the distant peaks and ranges
that are invisible once the eight o’clock clouds begin.
I did not particularly like what I saw. In all the wide expanse of
close-furred green before me there was not a break, not a suggestion
of a clearing or a station; only the wave on wave of primeval sea of
tree-tops that buries all New Guinea beneath its overwhelming flood.
Far in front the green lapped into a fold that suggested a river; that
was my only hope. As to these mountain torrents....
Was that a cough?
It sounded like one――the cough that a native gives when he wishes to
attract attention. I turned around to face the wall of bush, but could
see nothing, and I could not even be sure I had heard anything, for we
were not far from the waterfall and its thundering noise.
Well, if there had not been anything to hear, there was certainly
something to see――a green bough waving frantically, all by itself, as
if shaken by an unseen hand. The hand itself appeared by and by, and
now the bough was waved more violently than ever, while a voice cried
out in the Mambare dialect, “Let us speak!”
“Speak!” I answered, waking the Marquis with a push and telling him to
keep ready with his revolver.
“Is it peace?” continued the unseen native, whom I guessed to be the
Koiroro who had interpreted before.
“What do you want?” I yelled.
“We want the sorcerer’s great charm,” came the reply.
“Come out,” I said. “I will do no harm to you.”
Out they came, two of them――the interpreter and (as I had rather
expected) the big sorcerer man who had worn the crown of paradise
plumes. They motioned that we should lay down our arms, while they laid
down their clubs and spears, and this being done, the interpreter and
the sorcerer came forward.
“You have guns that bite badly in your belts,” said the interpreter.
“We thought you had none, because there were no long sticks such as
the white men’s guns usually have. But you have good guns; we shall not
fight you any more.”
“Very kind of you,” I said.
“All the same,” continued the interpreter, “we will not let you go
unless we like. There is a way down, but you will never find it if we
do not tell you about it. If we do not tell, you will stay here till
you die, and the wild pigs and dogs will come and tear your tongues out
and eat your throats.”
“What do you want?” I asked, guessing the answer before it came.
“This sorcerer, who is a very great chief, wants your charm. If you
give it you can go, and we will give you sweet potatoes to take with
you.”
“Get the sweet potatoes and we will talk more,” I answered, being
willing to gain time. The men disappeared.
“What do you think of that, Marky?” I said, translating.
“I think it is damn presumptuous cheek,” replied that nobleman, trying
to smooth his hair with his pocket-handkerchief and ruefully feeling
his bristly beard. “What a species of an object I shall be if we get to
that station!”
“Well, it does seem as if the diamond landed us in a fix everywhere we
go,” I remarked. “What on the living earth are we going to do?”
I took the stone out of its case and looked at it. All in the rough as
it was, it had some splendid rays when you got it into the sun. Just
now it shot out crimson, blue and green like a display of fireworks.
“Mark, it’s a beauty,” I said. “I don’t see myself giving it up to
a man-eating savage to make spells with; not much. But I don’t see
either――――”
“The Aryan races,” began the Marquis.
“Oh, don’t get scientific,” I begged. “I don’t feel as if I could stand
it this morning, somehow. Besides, I was discussing what we were going
to do.”
“Also I, if you would permit. The Aryan races――or, if you will be
impatient and make grimace at me, I will jump some thousand years. You
say you can not think what we shall do; it is solely because you are
of the Teutonic descent. It has courage, this branch, but nimbleness in
the mind it has not. The Latin races of whom I am one――――”
“Oh, cut it, Marky,” I begged. “I believe they’re coming back; we’ve
got to be serious.”
“I am everything that there is of serious, man with a head of a
cabbage! I myself will show you what it is to belong to the Latin. Do
you leave the negotiation to me?”
“Oh, you can do the talking,” I said. “You can do no harm, if you can’t
do good. I’ll pass on anything you say, and at the same time keep a
lookout for an ambush, which is just as likely as not.”
The Koiroros, it appeared, had brought the sweet potatoes with them,
and concealed them not far away, for there they were, back again with a
good load before the Marquis and I had well finished our discussion.
“Now,” said my companion, drawing himself up to his full height, “it
is for you to see what it shall mean to be of the Latin and not of the
Teutonic race. Behold! Tell them they shall not have the diamond.
“Tell them that I am a greater sorcerer than this man is and that I
know many wonderful sorceries.
“Tell them I will sell this man a sorcery that will make him king of
his tribe, you bet, if he will give us the secret of the path.
“Tell him to behold me and see!”
The two Koiroros, already much impressed with the lordly tones and
gestures of the Marquis, watched narrowly as he took a packet of
cigarette papers out of his pocket, looked solemnly towards the rising
sun, held up one paper to its rays and then bent his head over it,
muttering to himself.... I asked him afterwards what he had been saying
that sounded so impressive, and he confessed that it was merely the
French for “Twice one is two, twice two is four,” etc.
[Illustration:
_I cannot describe the extraordinary appearance he made there on
the mountain-top in the scarlet dawn, with the cannibals looking
on while he performed his incantations_]
When he had finished his muttering――the Koiroros now drawing back a
little in obvious fear――he lit a match and burned the paper, waving
his hands over it as it burned. I can not describe the extraordinary
appearance he made, there on the mountain-top in the scarlet dawn,
with the naked, feathered cannibals looking on while he performed his
incantations――his dirty, huge, bedraggled figure carrying a dignity all
its own.
At the end of these mummeries, he cast the ashes of the paper to the
winds, raised a terrifying shout, and taking hold of his (false) front
teeth, pulled them down to the level of the lower lip and let them go
again with a snap.
The two Koiroros turned tail and fled into the bush, actually leaving
their spears and clubs behind them in their panic. A long way off we
could hear them howling with fright. The Marquis and I had to call for
quite a long time to get them to return. When they did come back, the
sorcerer seemed to have recovered his nerve in some degree, but he
still looked uneasily towards the Marquis, whom he now appeared to
recognize as a superior in his own line.
“Tell them,” said the Marquis, “to show us the way and I will give them
the papers.”
“He says he wants one now, to do the trick,” I reported.
Solemnly the Marquis pointed to the rising sun.
“It is above the horizon――did he not see that it was not yet cleared of
the earth when I enchanted?” he said. “Say that he shall make the spell
at tomorrow’s sunrise, but never before again.”
The sorcerer, his eyes starting out of his head, half walked, half
crawled to the Marquis’ feet and accepted the cigarette papers,
trembling. He stowed them away in his charm bag and then made signs to
us to follow. We went after him along the rim of the precipice to the
very edge of the waterfall, and saw――――
Well, after all!
Only a six-sided column of the black basalt――the sort of thing you see
in photographs of the Irish Giant’s Causeway――that lifted out of its
place as neatly as a finger out of a glove and left a hole through
which a man might squeeze himself. And once squeezed through, a man
came out――behind the waterfall.
There it hung in front of us, as we passed, like a gigantic crystal
curtain, magnificent beyond all telling. And in the hollow at the back,
where the water had worn the hard basalt away, foot by foot through
countless æons of years, was the roughest of rough staircases, cut
by native hands and leading down the cliff. Slippery wet with spray,
perilous to the last degree and scarce passable for a white man’s foot,
yet, after all, it was not quite impassable, or so we found. In an hour
or less we were down at the bottom of the wall; the secret of the Stone
Oven country was told.
More than that, the sorcerer had informed us as we went down that the
Government station was a bare two days away, down the valley of the
river that we had dimly discerned from the height. And we had potatoes
enough to last us all the way. And the diamond was still ours.
“Heaven tempers the wind to the lame dog; we are well out,” said the
Marquis, looking up at the top of the ridge as we paused in the river
bed below. The sorcerer, far away against the skyline, was faintly
visible, feeling his jaw.
“I wager, on sunrise tomorrow morning, there shall be some sore teeth
in the chief-house!” said the Marquis, with a chuckle.
VI
HOW THEY BURIED
BOBBY-THE-CLOCK
CHAPTER VI
HOW THEY BURIED BOBBY-THE-CLOCK
“Name of a name of a name of a name of a dog!” said the Marquis through
his teeth. “What’s this that we have arrived at?”
We stood in the bush at the edge of the little clearing and looked
across a small space of muddy earth, planted with clothes-props, into a
wide, doorless open door. It was night, and you could see little of the
building itself――only a long, low outline against the stars and that
big oblong of orange light.
Inside, about a score of men were sitting on rough benches nailed to
the wall. They all had glasses or tin pannikins in their hands, and
they were drinking, slowly and quietly and without any joviality or
talk. Their eyes were fixed in one direction; it seemed that they were
looking at something beyond our range of view.
Inside the room some one was singing; a rollicking, vulgar music-hall
song with a great deal of “beer” and “booze” in it and not a little
bad language, apparently thrown in by the singer. Some of the song was
certainly funny, though with a coarse kind of fun; and, all in all, it
was not the sort of thing that most men would have listened to with
faces like tombstones――especially the rough-looking crowd that was
seated there on the benches round the wall. But there was never a smile
on a face. They listened and they drank, grave, unmoved and gloomy.
The Marquis used some more curious expressions, apparently translated
from the French.
“This is evidently not the Government station upon which we are
fallen,” he said. “Tell me, then, is it by chance some lunatic asylum?
Or has the impossible things we have encountered in that Country of the
Stone Ovens made me myself insane?”
“I reckon we’ve hit on the Kilori goldfield,” I said. “That comes of
having no compass and being chased all over the shop without a chance
to see where you are going. We must be twenty miles further down
towards the coast than I thought, and a good bit to the westward. It’s
as good as the Government station, Marky. There’s a store here, and
we’re in known country now all the way.”
“We are arrived somewhere, if it is store or station or asylum of
lunatics――I don’t care me,” said the Marquis. His face was neither fat
nor pink in these strenuous days; it was yellow with starvation and
hardship, and there were lines from his ears to his neck. His clothes
were a mass of rags and exceedingly dirty; his boots nearly worn out.
You would never have known him for the spruce, smart gentleman of
France who had lounged about the coral walks of Samarai only a week or
two ago. But in that week or two we had been through adventures before
which all the troubles previously brought upon us by the Sorcerer’s
Stone seemed as nothing at all. We had been shipwrecked and marooned
on a foodless, uninhabited shore a hundred miles from anywhere,
along an inaccessible coast. We had wandered starving, houseless and
guideless, about an unexplored tract of country only fit for birds or
monkeys to travel. We had been captured by cannibals and nearly eaten
by them; had been imprisoned on the edge of an apparently trackless
gulf and asked for the great diamond, no less, as the price of the
secret that would show us the way down; had got away and struggled
through the trackless wilds below, racing desperately to find the
Government station before we should succumb to hunger or exposure――and
at the last had found, apparently, not the Government station, but the
Kilori goldfield.
I would rather have found the station, in spite of the fact that
the field was nearer to the coast and had more supplies for us to
draw upon. In an ordinary way I would sooner have trusted myself on
a New Guinea goldfield with a priceless diamond on my person than
in a civilized city. The old hands among the miners of Papua are,
I suppose, about the most honest people in the world. You can leave
your “chamois” of gold knocking about the store for a week, if you
choose to be so careless, and know that not a grain of its contents
will be missing when you wake up to its existence again. You can leave
your claim in charge of a mate, to be worked for you, and go off to
Australia for six months, confident that when you return, every weight
that has been mined out of your property will be fairly handed over
to you. The men who have stood the brunt of the fearful hardships and
taken the atrocious risks that were and are the price of finding gold
in New Guinea, are not the kind to play a fellow-miner dishonest tricks.
But the Kilori was another affair. It was a field that had never
produced very much, until a rich find was made a few months before
our arrival. The find, of course, attracted the usual “rush” from
Australia, a crowd made up of every mixed element, as is the goldfields
crowd all the world over. In Papua, rich discoveries are very soon
worked out, as a rule, and the riff-raff attracted by the gold,
larrikins and sharps, parasites and wasters of every kind, sorts itself
out from the men who are of any use, and drifts back to the continent
of Australia, where there is more room for its kind. But the process
takes some time, and I knew that the backward stream from the Kilori
field was hardly yet in flood.
It seemed to me, therefore, that we could hardly have struck upon a
worse place to stay at. But stay we must, till we were fed, clothed and
sufficiently recruited in strength to go on again.
I said something of this to the Marquis, and he said that there was no
use crying over a bridge till you came to it, and, for his part, what
he wanted was “some many tins of meat and a jeremiad of champagne.”
“Well, the sooner we get into the store, the sooner you’re likely to be
gratified,” I said. I broke through the last of the bush――there was no
doubt a track somewhere in the neighborhood, but in the growing dark
we had somehow or other missed it――and led the way across the clearing.
Meantime, inside the store the ribald song went on and the miners,
seated round with solemn faces, listened as if at church.
“I am intrigued to find out the meaning of this, my Flint,” breathed
the Marquis down the back of my neck. “It is so blessed queer.”
He had not long to wait. We were inside the store in a few seconds, and
there before us there appeared what was surely the oddest scene that
even Papua, the country of oddities, had produced for many a year.
There was a table at the far end of the room; on the table was a
gramophone, muffled up in black and surrounded with white flowers from
the bush.
All the miners were looking at the instrument, and listening to it as
they slowly and seriously drank their whisky and their beer. And the
gramophone was bellowing out the song that we had heard, not in the
voice of a trained singer, such as one associates with mechanical
records, but in the raucous, howling tones of a man who could sing very
little and had handicapped that little ability by getting drunk before
he began to sing.
It was a dead still night, here in the clearing on the river flat,
with the trees shutting off every breath of wind all round us, and the
Kilori, inky-black and quiet, running smooth as a canal behind the
store. The lantern in the rafters did not waver, the white flowers
thrown about the gramophone lay still as flowers about the body of some
one dead. You could hear the men suck in their drinks and swallow, in
the pauses of the song, and the grinding of the wornout needle sounded
sharply.
Many of the men I knew, though some were strangers, and I was anxious
to greet my mates――doubly so, after all the troubles that the Marquis
and I had been through. So I stepped right in, walked up to Hubbard,
who had shared a claim with me on the Yodda years before, and held out
my hand, saying something in the way of a greeting.
It was received with an instantaneous and universal “Hist!” Hubbard
himself said, “Wait――we must finish,” and pulled me down on the bench
beside him. The Marquis, his innate courtesy rising above his natural
impatience and weariness, also took a seat. The song went on to its
dreary end.
Then the storekeeper, an elderly man with a wooden face, who looked as
if he had seen so many surprising things that nothing on earth could
by any possibility surprise him again, took the black cloth off the
gramophone, removed the flowers and lifted the instrument to put it
away on a shelf.
“Hold on!” said one of the miners, stretching out his glass of beer.
“We’ll give the poor beggar a last drink.” He poured his beer into the
gramophone, the others looking on quite seriously.
“Are you all mad?” I inquired. “And can’t you spare half a second to
give a drink to men who haven’t had any for three weeks, when you’ve
done feeding a gramophone?”
“Where have you been?” asked the storekeeper. I told him briefly.
We had no cause to complain after that; old Burchell, the storekeeper,
Hubbard, and all the men I knew bestirred themselves to find us food,
drink, tobacco, clothing, beds and to make us warmly welcome to the
Kilori. Our adventures didn’t astonish any one very much; most of the
men had had experiences quite as startling in their time. Yarns and
reminiscences, mostly colored with gore, ran like a flood in the little
slab-built bar of the storekeeper’s house, and I saw the Marquis’ eyes
grow rounder and rounder as he listened.
I had really forgotten the gramophone incident, being pretty well
used to the eccentricities of men who live for the most part alone in
the bush, when the Marquis touched me with his elbow and asked me to
“demand the signifying of that astounded event.”
“Oh, by the way,” I said, “what on earth were you playing at when we
came up?”
Most of the men fell silent again. Hubbard took up the word.
“Why,” he said, “we’d just buried poor old Bobby-the-Clock, and when we
came back from planting him we thought we’d hear him sing again for the
last time――he did love singing, poor old Bobby, though he never could
do it; and Burchell here had a record he’d made one day when Bobby was
having an unusually good time. So when we came back, we put it on. And
we gave poor old Bobby-the-Clock a last drink, and we put him away on
the shelf. You needn’t look shocked, you, whoever you are――” addressing
the Marquis.
The Marquis rose, bowed and introduced himself. I said I never could
remember his name, so I won’t try to write it down.
“Well, Mr. Marquis,” went on Hubbard, totally unmoved, “as I say, you
needn’t look shocked, for we did the whole thing as reverent as if we’d
been in church and nobody could say we didn’t. Now he’s planted, and
we’ve done all we could for him, and we’re going to forget about him
and cheer up; so here’s luck, Mr. Marquis.”
He finished his beer.
We got away as soon as we could from Bobby-the-Clock’s memorial
service, for we were both suffering from the effects of the “perish” we
had been through, and the Marquis declared he could not exist another
hour without a new set of clothes. The store, rough as it was, provided
sufficient for our needs; we took the plain shirts and trousers over
to the men’s sleeping-place, washed, dressed and made ourselves decent
again.
“Marky, you look like a miner now,” I said.
“A cat may look like a king,” said the Marquis, “but a king in
gloves catches no mice. I fear I should not make myself much wealth,
even in these uniforms of the field, with the pick and plate of Mr.
Bobby-the-Clock. And, by the road, Flint, what is the signifying of
that singular name?”
“Oh, that,” I said, laughing, as I struggled into my own new
clothes――“that was only something Bobby did up on the Yodda, years
and years ago. He was always a bit of a crank, and he got it into his
head that the storekeeper had cheated him out of seven-and-sixpence
over a bag of rice――I don’t believe poor old Whitworth ever thought of
such a thing. But, anyhow, Bobby believed he had; and it became what
I suppose you’d call an ‘obsession’ with him, to try and get it out
of Whitworth somehow or other. And one day, when he was alone in the
store, he nipped up a seven-and-sixpenny little alarm clock――Bobby
wouldn’t have stolen to save his life, but he reckoned that Whitworth
owed him that――and put it away in his clothes. And just then a
missionary turned up, visiting the goldfields, and nothing would do
him――being Sunday――but he must hold a service and pray for those
terrible villains, the miners of the Yodda. Well, they started the
service right away, in Whitworth’s store, and poor old Bobby was let
in for it and couldn’t get out. And they all heard the clock ticking,
but they couldn’t make out where it was, till right in the middle of
the missionary’s longest prayer, off with a buzz and a rattle went the
clock, from somewhere about Bobby’s left trousers-leg. The missionary
reckoned they’d done it on purpose, and he just shut up his book with a
bang and walked out, and Bobby, who was terribly distressed, ran after
him, shouting, ‘Mr. Parson――Mr. Parson――I beg your pardon! I beg your
pardon!’ and all the time the clock yelling away down his leg. The
miners were yelling too; some of them were almost rolling on the floor.
We none of us meant to be rude to the missionary, but it broke him up
altogether; he went right off that night, and we never had the finish
of the meeting. Bobby-the-Clock kept the clock, and used it to waken
himself in the mornings; he was always a sleepy beggar. And now he’s
gone where he won’t want clocks to waken him any more.”
I fastened my last button and buckled my belt. It was not supper-time
yet, and we had already fed, so we were not impatient. We sat down
on the canvas beds that had been allotted to us and looked about.
The “dormitory” was a rudely built shed, used for storing goods, and
open on one side; among the bags and boxes were scattered bush-made
stretchers, covered with sacks. All around the little clearing on the
flat, the great, menacing, unknown forest stretched its hands; it made
me think of people crowding and shouldering round about an accident.
And to complete the parallel, the atmosphere was so still and confined
that one longed to cry out, “Back――stand back and give us air!”
The stars that had been above our heads so many nights were before us
now all down the open side of the shed――the unforgettable stars of
Papua glowing like tiny moons in the velvet-violet dark. I sat and
looked and smoked and thought the “long, long thoughts” of the man who
lives in lonely places.... Many and many a year they had been my roof,
those holding, haunting stars; they had me fast; they would not let
me go. They were more faithful to me than wife or child could be; they
had been my friends when friends had failed; they had told me things
beyond the tongue of men and angels. Tonight, they looked down upon the
grave of poor, harmless, mind-bewildered Bobby-the-Clock; how soon, I
wondered, and where, would they look down upon mine....
Diamond or no diamond, it came to me then that the stars and the bush
and cruel, beautiful Papua, had got me for good. A man may make a
fortune ten times over; but if he is not made of the clay that sticks
to gold when it touches it, he will come back where he belongs in the
end.
* * * * *
We slept that night as sound as Bobby-the-Clock himself, in his forest
bed a dozen yards away. With the morning came reaction from our
excitement of arriving; we were both dead tired and could do nothing
but saunter and lie about. It was a hard week’s tramp to the coast,
over ugly country; I foresaw that we should have to put in some days
of resting before we could face it. Carriers, too, would have to be
found somehow or other――if necessary, borrowed from among the boys
employed by the various miners. The delay was unpleasant to me, knowing
what risks we ran, but I did not see what else we could do.
There were many more men about the store today; a much rougher-looking
lot than the friends of the late Bobby-the-Clock. A dozen or so of
them――bad lots from odd corners of the Commonwealth, who had failed
in finding payable gold, seemed to be merely loafing about, living on
the storekeeper and waiting until the long-suffering Government of
Papua should be driven into conveying them back to Australia at its
own cost. They and another score or two who had found a little gold,
were drunk together as long and as often as Burchell would let them;
they hung about other men’s camps after dark; they had been accused of
shooting natives who were friendly to us and thereby laying up trouble
for the whole camp――they were, in fine, a danger and a nuisance to the
field and every one of the decent, quiet old hands would have been
exceedingly glad to see them cleared out.
Neither the Marquis nor myself liked this company, so we kept away from
the neighborhood of the store and spent the greater part of the morning
bathing with my old mate Hubbard in a safe, shallow part of the Kiloki
River. At least, the place was safe if you didn’t go into it one by
one, and if you kept a good lookout for alligators while you were in.
That was as much as we wanted. You would not have thought that such a
simple matter as a bath in the Kiloki River could seriously affect any
one’s fortunes. But――as events afterwards turned out――the Sorcerer’s
Stone was never put into quite so much danger as it was by our lazy
hour or two in the water that morning.
What brought us out at last was an incident not at all uncommon in the
interior of Papua, but none the less unpleasant――the sudden plunging
of a long blackwood spear, liberally barbed, into the sand right among
us. We had none of us seen it coming, but there it was, quivering with
the impetus of its flight, and showing plainly, by the depth to which
it had buried itself, that it had been thrown with force sufficient to
drive it right through any one it might have hit. And as the opposite
bank was not at all far away, and as none of us had brought a gun, we
thought it best to clear out for the store as rapidly as we could.
There was a regular scramble after our clothes, which had all fallen in
a heap; but we were dressed before you could say “one, two, three, go!”
and away after our arms in about two seconds more.
Of course, nothing showed up when we fired into the bush; but we sent
a few bullets smashing into the close-knit lianas and orchids, just
as an expression of opinion. Hubbard wanted to go back and finish our
bath then, and I would not have cared; the Marquis, however, told us
we were “ostentatious brigands,” and that, for his faith, he had had
enough. So we returned to the store.
I don’t think I shall ever forget that afternoon. It was one of the
awful black days that one experiences at times about the steaming river
flats of Papua; the sky was a dark lead-pencil sort of color and seemed
to sit down on our heads like the lid of a hot saucepan. The enormous
trees that had escaped the clearing and stood about at its edges,
lifted their endless run of naked trunk and their weird, sky-pointing
branches up into the heights of the sky with never a motion or a
tremor. Their leaves, far up beneath the iron lid of the clouds, were
as still as photographs. Indeed, the whole clearing had the unnaturally
dead appearance that one notices in a stereoscope; a thing that always
seems to me like the ghosts of dead scenes and places.
As for the heat, it was just the next thing to unendurable, and would
have been quite unendurable if one did not recollect that scores of
men had stood it, off and on, for years. So that one reckoned, after
all, one could stand it too.
And it was on an afternoon such as this that Burchell gave out his
intention of holding an auction of Bobby-the-Clock’s effects, according
to the custom of the field. The money, of course, would be sent to any
surviving relatives Bobby might be found to possess.
The Marquis wanted to go and see it, and I went with him, though I was
not particularly anxious to do so. Burchell had arranged to lend me
three or four of the carriers belonging to the store, and I wanted to
get my packs ready and prepare for a start tomorrow or the next day, as
our condition might permit. I didn’t fancy sleeping any longer than I
could help in an open shed with the riff-raff of Australia, while the
Sorcerer’s Stone was on my person――or, worse, on the Marquis’. There
were several days of utter wilderness between us and the coast, along
the worst of tracks, through pathless, unexplored forests, full of
natives who might at any time turn hostile. That sort of thing provided
far too many ready-made occasions for accident, in my opinion――should
any one want an accident to happen.
I have said that Papua is not a lawless country on the whole, and it is
not. But there are things that affect the value of laws and principles
in their neighborhood, as a mountain of ironstone affects the working
of the compasses on ships that pass beneath it. A big diamond is one of
these. In the Sorcerer’s Stone we had, so to speak, a charge of moral
dynamite that was ready at any moment to shatter friendship, honesty,
regard for human life, even regard for a man’s own precious skin....
There was not a bulwark built up through æons of evolution, against the
savage passions of mankind, that this lump of crystal in our possession
could not send flying in a second.
Which meant, in brief, that if the rabble at present polluting the
Kilori goldfield got the faintest inkling of the royal fortune we
carried, our lives, on that long track through the lonely primeval
forests down to the solitary, unsettled coast might not be worth the
smallest of the chips that the wheels of busy Amsterdam one day would
send flying from the surface of the stone.
I was thinking about this a good deal while the auction went on. The
proceedings themselves did not interest me very much, though I daresay
the Marquis found them amusing. Bobby-the-Clock’s old clothes, his
cooking-pots, his tin box, his blankets, were put up and bid for; and
most of them brought very little. No gold had been found in his camp;
he had died of fever, and was quite alone when he passed out, so that
the place had been left unguarded for a day or more before any one
found him. There were those of us who thought that some among the
new-chums might have told where Bobby’s gold had gone; but nothing
could be proved.
It seemed as if the auction, all in all, would scarce produce the worth
of a couple of pounds to send to Bobby-the-Clock’s relations.
Then the celebrated clock itself was put up, and the bidding brightened
at once. Most of the old miners wanted it as a souvenir, and some of
the new ones seemed determined to get it out of spite――for there was
much bad blood between the two different parties. The bidding went
up and up, till at last the clock was knocked down to my old mate,
Hubbard, for no less than two ounces――which, at the price of the Kilori
gold, was worth about seven pounds eight.
“I’ll take it and pay for it now,” said Hubbard, reaching out for his
property. He put it on the counter before him (we were all sitting or
standing about the bar, with the doors and windows open for air; the
men who could not get places loafing round the wall) and looked at it.
“Poor old Bobby! I’ve got the last bit of him,” he said. “Two ounces,
Burchell? I’ve just about that on me, or a little more. Weigh it for
yourself.”
He thrust his hand into his trousers-pocket and took out a packet.
“What’s this?” he said. “This isn’t my gold.” He pulled the wrapper off
and flung down upon the table――the Sorcerer’s Stone.
I felt my heart turn over and do a somersault inside my chest. I don’t
know what I looked like, but nobody was noticing me, so it did not
matter. Everybody was looking at the great crystal as it lay there on
the table, like a double-ended bit off a glass chandelier. Hubbard
stared at it uncomprehendingly and said, “Where’s my gold gone to?”
with several strong expressions.
I put my hand in my pocket and felt a small heavy parcel.... Of course!
It was all clear to me now. I had been carrying the diamond in my
trousers-pocket, because it was the best place to hide it, in a country
where one wore so few clothes as one did about the Kiloki. Hubbard and
I were wearing exactly the same pattern of rough store clothes; we had
got them mixed when we dressed together in a hurry down on the river
bank, with the spear that the natives had thrown at us sticking in the
sand at our elbows, to liven us up. And there was the gem that the
Marquis and I had been concealing all these weeks, almost at the cost
of our lives, lying out on the bar before the eyes of a crowd of sharps
and scamps from all the odd corners of Australia!
One thinks quickly in moments of sudden emergency; at least, if one
doesn’t, one won’t continue thinking or living long in a country
like Papua. I saw that there was nothing for it but bluff to carry
us through. Giving the Marquis a kick under the table, to warn him
that the affair was best left to me (he had taken the incident with
wonderful coolness), I stretched out my hand carelessly and remarked:
“Why, that’s my crystal. Where did you get it?”
I would have given all I possessed for a quiet word with Hubbard,
whom I knew I could trust; but there was no chance of that, so I had
to do as best I could. The thing was so enormous for a diamond and so
glass-like in appearance, here in the dim light of the bar, that I
thought it might pass as a mere curio, if only I could keep my nerve.
“I don’t know where I got it, but I do know my gold isn’t in my
pocket,” grumbled Hubbard, feeling all over himself.
I handed over the little bag of dust.
“Here it is; I reckon you and I must have got each other’s clothes when
we were bathing,” I said. Hubbard took the gold and opened it.
“Weigh out two ounces; there’s near three there,” he said. The
storekeeper took the bag and poured part of its contents into the
scales.
“That’s a fine crystal,” he said, looking curiously at the great
diamond as it lay on the rough, hacked counter of the bar. “Where did
you get it?”
I did not altogether like the way in which the bloated, evil faces of
the new-chum crowd turned towards me as I answered.
“Got it out of a sorcerer’s charm-bag in Kata-Kata,” was what I said,
reaching out for the gem. “It’s rather pretty, and they made a great
puri-puri (charm) of it down there. Some of the museums down South will
give quite a lot for good charms.”
A dirty, hairy man in torn moleskins let out a sudden cackling laugh.
“Let’s have a look,” he said.
I handed it over at once, though my fingers felt as though they were
glued to the stone. The day was so black and the bar so ill-lighted
that I did not think the diamond, uncut as it was, would give out any
of those sudden rays that had first attracted the attention of the
Marquis and myself. And if you did not catch it when it was shooting
green and violet and red, there was really nothing to distinguish it
from a common bit of quartz――unless by chance there happened to be a
gem expert among the crowd――――one never knew.
I stole a cautious glance at the Marquis. He looked perfectly
unconcerned; he was not even watching the diamond. He had lit a
cigarette and started smoking. His face, a little pinker and a little
plumper today than yesterday, showed no emotion beyond a slight shade
of boredom with the whole proceedings.
Meantime, the hairy man was handling the diamond, weighing, turning and
squinting at it. He abandoned it in a minute or two, at the request
of another tough-looking customer at the other end of the bar, who
called out, “Throw it over!” and the hairy man threw. After that it
was chucked about from hand to hand like a cricket ball among the men,
most of whom were half or more than half drunk by this time――pausing
occasionally in its wild flight, as one or another kept it to take
another look.... I bit a piece of the inner side of my lip right
through, but I said nothing and held out not so much as a finger to
check the stone’s career.
“Say! did this come from the Aikora by any chance?” suddenly yelled
a gray, dilapidated creature with red eyes and ragged beard, who
was sitting on a case of goods, being too far intoxicated to stand.
“There’s blue clay on the Ai――Aikora.”
“I tell you,” I said, wearily, “I got it in Kata-Kata――black soil
swamp country, if you want to know. What’s that got to do with it?”
The red-eyed man essayed to answer, but a wave of intoxication mounted
to his brain and he replied in words that were intelligible to himself
alone. He would not let go the stone, however. The rest of the men
seemed to have lost interest in it by this time, and the dusk, which
was now darkening down in the stifling gloom of the bar, seemed to
promise me a chance of slipping quietly away.
But the red-eyed man held on to the stone. His words remained
unintelligible; he managed, however, to rise from his seat and stagger
round to the back of the bar, helping himself to more liquor, and
smashing about with his hands among the glasses for a considerable
time. By the coolness with which Burchell received these proceedings,
I judged the red-eyed man was better able to pay for his fun than
appearance might suggest.
It was not long before the final stage arrived. He staggered against
the wall, muttered and sank in a heap on the floor, the Sorcerer’s
Stone dropping from his pulpy hand as he fell. The storekeeper, with a
bored expression of face, came forward to carry him out into the air. I
volunteered to help and took care to slip the stone in my pocket again
as I lifted the drunkard’s limply-hanging knees. We took him onto the
veranda and dropped him on the earthen floor, his head on a sack.
“Drinking himself into the jumps, he is,” observed the wooden-faced
Burchell. “Now tomorrow, like as not, he won’t remember a mortal thing
about this afternoon. He’ll forget where he’s put his gold some of
these days; he’s drunk his mind half away. Have a whisky with me?”
“Not after that,” I said, and walked away.
The Marquis escaped and followed me in a minute or two. In the dusk of
the goods shed where the beds were, he fell upon my neck――and it was no
joke to have a man of his size making a locket of himself about your
jugular vein――and cried:
“Splendid! magnificent! I felicitate you, my friend! You have saved
us both two. You have the ingenious soul, the spiritual mind――you are
what they call a bully-boy! Look, if that heap of misfortunates had
found out, we would have had a sudden death hanging on the end of every
minute till we get back!”
“Not so bad as that, perhaps,” I said. “Still, we’re well out of it. I
wasn’t afraid of the New Guinea lot; in the first place, they mostly
wouldn’t know a double-brilliant-cut Cullinan if they found it in their
soup――they’re gold diggers and no more――and in the second place, they
wouldn’t have turned dog on us――at least, none of them that I know. But
this ‘rush’ crowd gets me altogether; it’s the worst lot we’ve ever had
in New Guinea. Do you think you could travel tomorrow?”
“I don’t know if I can, but assuredly I will,” said the Marquis
cheerfully. And so it was settled.
The next morning my companion woke me up very early, complaining of
headache. He was, as I have mentioned, extremely temperate, and the
small amount of bad whisky he had taken for politeness’ sake while
looking on at the auction the day before had been quite enough to upset
him. I told him that he had better go across to the bar and get himself
some soda water; Burchell would not be up, but he could get the keys
and help himself. Then I turned over for another sleep.
I had hardly dozed off when the Marquis came back, looking strangely
pale in the yellow sunrise light.
“Flint, get up!” he said. “Come out to me.”
He certainly looked unlike himself; I wondered if he were going to be
ill. Slipping on some clothes, I followed him out into the clearing,
where the black oozy soil sank down under our feet after the night’s
fierce rain and the pools were sending out unwholesome steam in the
growing warmth of day.
“What’s to pay now?” I said.
The Marquis looked all round and then replied in a cautious
half-whisper:
“Flint, God of my Gods, he has engraved all the glass!”
“Who has engraved what glass? Are you crazy?” I asked. “Did you get
that soda water? This place is fairly soaking in whisky; seems it’s you
now.”
“You mistake yourself――I am not drunk. It is that red-eye man I talk
of. Last night, when he walk about behind the bar with that stone, he
has cut all the glass with it.”
“Burchell says he never remembers anything next day,” I said, not
seeing the full force of what had happened.
“That may be, but when Burchell come into the bar by a little, he shall
see it, and all the men who shall drink out of those glass, they shall
see, and, my word, the jig is up!”
“You’re right, Marky, it will be,” I said seriously. “Seems to me the
best thing we can do is to clear off right away.”
“No, that’s a cabbage-head thing to do, my Flint. We are too near, if
some of them begins to think. No, it is for you, or for me, to get very
much drunk very quick, and smash all that glass in one blow!”
“Let’s go and have a look,” I said.
It was only too true. The whisky, like Clara Vere de Vere, must have
“put strange memories in the head” of the red-eyed man, whom I now
suspected to have had more experience with stones than the rest. He
had scratched and cut two or three bottles, and a number of glasses in
a way that could not possibly have passed unnoticed, and that could
not, either, have been mistaken for anything but the work of a diamond.
There are some things that will scratch glass fairly well, but nothing
on earth that will cut into it clear and deep and clean save the king
of precious stones.
We stood there in the half light of the ugly slab-built room, that was
all stale with dregs of drink and littered with rubbish, straw and
paper――looking at each other.
“There isn’t much time to waste,” I said. “Which of us is going to do
it?”
“My friend, it is I who make this sacrifice,” said the Marquis
solemnly. “I haven’t no doubt that you could get intoxicated if I asked
you in the name of friendship――――”
“Oh, yes, I think I could manage that much,” I said. “Though I’m not a
drinking man, Marky, and never have been.”
“But I do not ask. Because, you see, Flint, you are brave, but you are
not artist. Now me, I am both the two. I can act――name of a little good
man, but I can act! You have seen me, in the dance――if I had not been
noble, I had been the most celebrated actor in Europe.”
“That’s right; I’ll allow you can act,” I said.
“And see, if you were to do this thing, you would not do it as an
artist; you would quite simply get drunk, and perhaps, in the strong
man’s rage, you should kill some one, but you should not keep the head
cool to destroy this evidence here. So I am drunk. In two minutes, I
sacrifice my character. You shall see.”
I did see.
I do not think, while I still hold on to life, I shall ever forget
the scene that took place in the bar of the Kilori goldfield, there,
in the early sunrise, with the Papuan carriers coming in singing to
their morning’s work, and the giant Gaura pigeons, in the bush outside,
beginning to toll their golden bells. It was a quiet spot enough at
six o’clock; at five minutes past it was pandemonium. The Marquis
went outside to find a miner’s pick; came back with it, looked about
him, spat deliberately on his hands, “to envulgarize himself,” as he
explained, seized the pick, uttered a madman’s yell and went Berserk on
the spot.
It was exactly like poking a stick into an ants’ nest. You find a quiet
little hill of clay, with nothing stirring round about; you smash into
it with your boot-heel or a bit of wattle, and instantly the earth is
covered in every direction with a scrambling, scurrying――doubtless, if
one could hear them, a screaming――crowd, all bent on knowing what has
caused the disturbance.
That was what occurred at the Kilori goldfield store on that peaceful,
beautiful southeast season morning, with the birds singing and the
river gently flowing just outside and the sun coming up above the
trees to look down on another day. The storekeeper jumped out of his
bed and ran into the bar, pajama-clad; the cooky-boys scuttled in from
the kitchen and peered round the corner of the doorway, wonder-eyed;
the miners and the new-chums and the hangers-on of the camp all came
running as fast as they could, some with blankets still hanging round
their necks, to see what was going on. They were used to rows in the
neighborhood of the store, but not to the sort of row that the Marquis
kicked up――doing it, as he afterwards explained to me, “in artist.”
[Illustration:
_His gigantic figure, clad in pink and green pajamas, seemed to
fill the store: he had at least a dozen arms and legs and every
one of them smashed everything it touched_]
If I had not known the truth, I should have thought him not only
intoxicated but mad. His gigantic figure, clad in pink and green
pajamas, seemed to fill the store; he had at least a dozen arms and
legs and every one of them smashed everything it touched. The canvas
chairs were trampled as though by an elephant. The rickety bar, built
up of whisky cases, went like a match-box. He leaped the remnants and
swung his pick along the shelf where the glasses stood. Not one of them
survived. He seized a bottle of whisky in each hand and slung the two
half across the clearing.
“Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lord!” the storekeeper kept saying. “Who’s to pay
for this?”
“Stop him!” yelled the miners, as they saw the whisky begin to go. The
Marquis shot me a glance as he swung his pick above a cask of beer, and
I will swear there was a wink in it. By this time all the incriminating
glass was gone.
The murder of a man, I think, would have been looked upon more calmly
than the murder of a cask of beer, up here on the Kilori goldfield,
a long week from the coast. But this last exploit was never carried
through. With one accord, the miners flung themselves upon the handle
of the pick and dragged it down. They dragged the Marquis down next by
sheer force of numbers and sat upon him. One even counseled them to
“sit upon his head!” and flung his own body across the Marquis’s fat
cheek, as if he were a kicking horse.
He did not resist. I caught another lightning wink from underneath the
surging pile and I did my best to get the indignant miners off.
“He’ll be all right now if you let him alone,” I declared. “I’ve often
known him like this, and when it’s over, it’s over. After all, he’s
only done for a couple of quarts of whisky and a few tumblers.”
“Where’s what he’s drunk, to make him like this?” yelled the insulted
storekeeper. “He’s got to pay for all he took and all he done. Marquis!
A nice sort of marquis he is, I don’t think!”
“He took a bottle to his room with him last night,” I said hastily. “It
doesn’t take much to make him like this; he has no head. You’ll be
paid all right, Burchell; he’s got any amount of money.”
“Let him up, boys,” ordered the storekeeper. The diggers got off
reluctantly and left the Marquis on the floor, breathing hard and
looking wild.
“Come and lie down somewhere,” I said. “We’ve got to make a start today
and you won’t be fit. Come on.” I led him off, reeling and staggering
realistically and falling on my neck in a mimic drunken frenzy of
affection. He kept it up till we reached the sleeping shed――empty
now――and then drew himself erect and became more dignified and
Marquisatorial than I should have thought any man could be in bare feet
and pink pajamas, with his hair all over his face.
“I have sacrificed myself,” he said. “My character, she is gone. But
procrastination is the steed that is stolen; I have act at once and we
are saved.”
“You stop there and don’t get well too quick, in case any one comes
back,” I said. “I’m off to get our packs ready and the carriers under
way. The sooner we get out of this the better, Marky. I want the
society of a few nice restful cannibals to quiet down my nerves.”
VII
CONCERNING A CASSOWARY
AND A HYMN
BOOK
CHAPTER VII
CONCERNING A CASSOWARY AND A
HYMN BOOK
“It’s a wise child that knows ’tis folly to be wise,” said the Marquis.
He was sitting in the supper-room, enjoying trifle, floating-island,
tipsy-cake and the other items of a somewhat sticky and gassy supper.
His partner, Mrs. Vandaleur, a very fascinating little widow in a
demure black dress and the most scarlet of scarlet silk stockings, had
just been carried off by the fluffy and indignant young Government
officer to whom she rightly owed the supper-dances. The Marquis, who
had danced without intermission from the first striking-up of the band
(one piano, out of tune; one violin, much affected by the climate and
given to emitting rat-like squeaks) until the eighteenth item in the
programme, was now resting and refreshing; I, who had given up dancing
many years ago and who wasn’t likely to begin again at a Port Moresby
“shivoo,” was watching――if the truth must be told――watching the Marquis.
I was already getting uneasy about him, though we had only returned to
the comparative civilization of Port Moresby the week before. We had a
good ten days to wait for the next steamer to Sydney, and Port Moresby
has nearly three hundred inhabitants, being a good deal the largest
settlement in Papua. What were the chances of some one of the three
hundred finding out in the course of those ten days that we possessed
the second biggest diamond in the world, if the Marquis went on as he
was doing now? It was his turn to wear the stone, and nothing would
induce him to give it up to me for the night, even though it was much
harder for him――being fat――to hide it about his person than for me.
There it was, perfectly visible to me at all events, sticking out like
a small tumor under the front of his shirt; and unless I was much more
stupid than I supposed myself to be, it had already attracted some
attention from little Mrs. Vandaleur.
Mrs. Vandaleur――Daisy Vandaleur, as most people called her (she signed
herself “Daisie,” in her numerous letters)――was always referred to as
“little”; she was, as a matter of fact, about the average height of
womenkind. But she had a small head and very small hands and feet and a
way of looking little and forlorn. And she was fond of calling herself
a “poor little widow.” I needn’t go on describing “Daisie”――every one
who has reached the age of thirty has met her and knows her by heart.
She had a puggy sort of little dog and a catty sort of companion, and
she was a little pious and more than a little musical, and knew how
to put on her clothes (I said as much to a lady at the dance, and she
replied that in that case it was a pity Mrs. Vandaleur didn’t use her
knowledge more liberally; also, that she at all events knew how to
put on her hair. Which gives you the attitude of feminine New Guinea
towards “Daisie,” in a word).
The little widow, of course, had set her cap at the Marquis from the
moment of our return. That did not trouble me or the Marquis either.
(“Many dear women, they have done so, and I love them for it,” he
explained to me. “I find it altogether natural.”) Nor did it trouble me
much, from any ordinary point of view, that she should have sprained
her ankle――just a trifle――when they were coming back from a stroll
on the grass outside the hall――because Daisie was given to spraining
her ankle at appropriate times. But when the Marquis lifted her up
the steps of the veranda and carried her to a long chair to rest her
foot for the next dance――why, then I saw Mrs. Daisie’s little hand, as
it slipped down from the Marquis’ huge shoulder, pause for a moment
at the odd lump under his shirt and feel it with the dexterity of a
pickpocket. The Marquis did not notice; he was gazing into her eyes,
which were blue eyes and went prettily with her Titian-red hair. I
began to wonder, however. And when the supper-dances came and I saw
Mrs. Vandaleur walking in with the Marquis as lightly as he walked
himself, I concluded that it was time to offer him a hint. Which I did.
He answered with the mangled proverb I have already quoted, and filled
himself another glass of ginger ale with the roystering air of a
gallant in a Christmas Number supplement. It really seemed to be going
to his head. I had had several whiskies myself by this time; but my
head is perhaps of a different quality.
It was the southeast season at its worst; in Port Moresby, that means
that you live in the midst of a roaring gale, day and night, for
months. Up here on the hill where the dance-room was built, the veranda
trembled like the hurricane deck of an Atlantic liner; the flags in the
ball-room tore at their moorings on the walls; down the long tunnel of
the supper-room the wind went yelling like a lost soul on its way to
hell. The tablecloth flapped and slatted; the crackers flew about.
Mrs. Daisie, dancing beyond the doorway with the fluffy boy, clutched
at her woeful black skirts and twinkled the scarlet stockings that so
piquantly contradicted them. I could see she was keeping an eye on me.
For some reason or other, Mrs. Daisie did not like me――much.
“Look, Marky,” I said (the howling of the southeaster isolated us from
the other guests, in our corner, as much as if we had been in a room by
ourselves), “I want you to think for a moment what it means, if people
get on to the fact that we have a diamond worth the whole island of New
Guinea in our possession. From that moment, any peace we have――and Lord
knows we haven’t had much――ceases. In a small place like this, one is
safe enough from robbery, but once on a liner, or in Sydney, we’d want
a corps of detectives to guard the stone――if we can’t keep it dark. And
of course, it doesn’t matter where or how the news gets out――it’ll run
over the world in a week, just the same.”
“All over the world!” said the Marquis, thoughtfully. “You have reason.
We shall be famous, me and you. Flint, I love to be famous. It is the
glory of our adventures that has already made that little flower of the
tropic, Dai-see Vandaleur, love me as the poor little one loves. It is
true, she also thinks me beautiful. But handsome is who tells no tales!”
“Will you let me keep the stone till the steamer comes in?” I asked,
dropping the vexed subject. When a man of forty odd begins to tell you
about the women who admire his beauty, you had better get off that line
of rails as quick as you can.
“On my conscience and my honor as a peer of the ancient regiment of
France, I will――not,” said the Marquis. “I have the heart of a child,
as the little Dai-see tells me, but a child I am not. Tomorrow you will
guard our property; the day after, I, and so on to the end. To the
end, my friend.” He drank another bottle of ginger ale in two gulps
and waved his empty tumbler in the air. “And even if the end shall
be Death, then, my friend, a dead man is out of the wood. I love your
English axes.”
“Saws, I suppose you mean,” I said.
“I knew it had to do with tools; it is altogether the same. Now I will
show this little beautiful some species of dancing that will make her
ready to die of love, there on my feet.”
I really think the amount of ginger ale he had drunk must have gone
to his head a little; or else it had so inflated him, mentally and
physically, that he was a trifle above himself. At any rate, he
volunteered to give the company an exhibition of solo-dancing; and the
offer being promptly accepted, started to do――of all things――Queen
Elizabeth dancing before the Scots’ ambassador, Melville.
“It is to please your English sentiment and at the same time to warm
the heart of the little Daisee by laughter,” he explained to me. “This
is comic; a frolic idea.”
What a scene it was! The dancers, in their odd mixture of day and
evening dress, gathered round the walls under the slatting, tearing
flags; the wild southeaster yelling along the veranda, so that the
music, despairingly pitted against it, sounded starved and thin;
in the midst of the cleared space, the Marquis, beneath a row of
guttering hurricane lamps, dancing Queen Elizabeth.... He had a scarlet
tablecloth about his waist and a fan in his hand; he had rouged his
cheeks with a scrap of red cracker paper dipped in water; he had
borrowed a pair of high-heeled shoes (big man though he was, his foot
was amazingly small) and, in spite of his bulk and his pink, fat face
and his twinkling trousers-legs showing below the drapery, he was the
ancient coquette of England to the life. You could even see the sour
face of Melville looking on as the dancer stepped and pirouetted “high
and disposedly,” watching eagerly for the ambassador’s approval.... At
the end he laughed a high-pitched, cackling, old woman’s laugh; struck
the imaginary Melville coquettishly on the shoulder with his fan,
dropped the tablecloth and became instantly a dignified nobleman of the
ancient peerage of France.
Mrs. Vandaleur ran forward impulsively as he finished and begged for
more. The room applauded. The Marquis danced again.
“Let a Papuan with a drum be brought,” he ordered. A boy was fetched
from the grass slope outside the hall, where a number of natives had
been looking on. He beat his iguana-skin drum, as if for a native
dance, with the throbbing, intoxicating beat of the New Guinea drummer.
The Marquis snatched a native feather crown off the wall, where it had
been hung as an ornament, put it on his head and danced “The Love Dance
of the Sorcerer,” looking at Mrs. Vandaleur all the time.
I must say he had used his Papuan experiences well. The dance was New
Guinea, yet something more. It had sorcery in it, mystery, magic and
sinister, wicked charm. You felt the sorcerer loved the lady and meant
to win her; but you were not quite sure he did not mean to roast her
on the fire, and pick her pretty bones, by and by.... The lookers-on
applauded violently and Mrs. Daisie, whether truthfully or not,
declared herself faint when he had done, and had to be supported to a
chair.
“Oh, you terrible man――you dangerous sorcerer!” I heard her murmur as
he gave her his arm. “How many trusting little women’s hearts have you
charmed away? Do you know the power you have? I think you must be very
cruel.”
“No, for I make my spelling gently; ‘fair and softly is always to be
blest!’” he answered, through the yelling of the wind. Mrs. Daisie put
up her hand anxiously among her curls to see, I think, if nothing was
breaking away from its moorings and, being assured of this, fainted a
little more in the corner to which the Marquis had conducted her. Her
head grazed his shirt-front as she sank back in her chair.
“Ah! you have hurt my little face! Is it your heart that feels so hard
and sharp?” she asked. The Marquis, instead of answering, lifted her
onto her feet again as lightly as if she had been a baby and swung her
back into the dancing-room, where now the music was beginning again.
“What happened to the wife of Bluebeard, little wicked?” he said as
they dropped into the waltz.
I do not know that I have the best temper in the world. Some of
my friends say I have the worst when you rouse it; but that is an
exaggeration. Anyhow, I could not stay in the ball-room and see our
fortune swinging over a gulf of disaster on the frail thread of the
Marquis’ amorous folly any longer. I went out to smoke and to swear.
* * * * *
The next day it was my turn to wear the Sorcerer’s Stone, and I was
ready enough to claim it. We had cased it in a piece of silk and sewn
that up again in a piece of chamois leather, safely attached to a
strong cord. No one wears waistcoats in Port Moresby, but I took care
to select a shirt some sizes too wide for me when I wore the stone,
and with a coat on, the loose folds concealed it effectively.
I was feeling a little easier about the Marquis, since I had succeeded
in extracting from him a solemn promise that he would not, on any
account or for any reason, betray to any person the secret of the
diamond. At the same time, I managed to persuade him into altering his
clothing a little, so that the stone could not be noticed unless any
one went actually feeling about after it. More than this I could not do.
There is very little in the capital of Papua to occupy the mind of any
reasonable person. When you have been out to see the native village,
gone for a walk to Koki, where the native servants employed in the
town hold nightly dances, and taken a boat across to one or two of
the islands, you have about exhausted the interests of the place. It
is barren and rather ugly; the white people are more civilized, and
therefore less interesting, than those of Samarai; the natives speak
English, wear trade clothing and cheat the tourist over curios. To any
one recently returned, like the Marquis and myself, from the mysteries,
horrors and adventures of the unknown interior, nothing could be more
flat and tiresome than the silly little capital town.
All the more was I uncomfortable over my companion’s evident
fascination by Mrs. Vandaleur, whom I frankly took for an adventuress.
Her very name was against her; it savored too much of stage posters
to be natural. She was clever enough, I could see, to keep free of
scandals; the dead or missing Vandaleur had not divorced her; cards
were religiously left at her door by the ladies of the capital, who
seemed to find a weird delight in playing at a strange imitation of the
strange game called Society, here away in the wilderness of New Guinea.
(“Like your Israelites of the Bible,” said the Marquis, who always
spoke of the Old Testament as if it were the exclusive property of the
English race――“these dear ladies make brick in the desert without no
straw; it is for that reason, I observe, that their bricks do not hold
together the one with the other.” And, indeed, the inhabitants of Port
Moresby love each other scarcely better than do those of Samarai.)
But, though “Daisie” Vandaleur was quite respectable, according to the
canons of the card-tray, and though, in any case, there was no risk of
the Marquis’ historic coronet descending upon her well-dressed head, I
thought her none the less dangerous; perhaps rather the more.
“That dear little one, she desires quite simply to marry herself
with me. I find that very touching, though I can not accord her her
desire,” he said, sentimentally. “Flint, I can’t tell you how much pity
I have for all those beautiful women who so desire to marry with me.
Of course, the day shall come at last when one of those lovely ones
shall――what do you call it?――yank me in. But the rest――my heart is
bleeding for those!”
He took out his embroidered silk handkerchief and looked lovingly at
the coronet. I knew he was minded to tell me the history of the lady
who had worked it for him, so I got away before he had made a start.
That was where I made my mistake. He went right off to Mrs. Vandaleur’s
and told her.
They invited him to join the tennis club after this. I never had time
or inclination myself to learn how to throw balls at a man who doesn’t
want them, and work hard trying to get them back when I don’t want
them myself――so I didn’t see very much of the Marquis at this period,
although for want of room we were sharing our quarters at the hotel.
After all, I had not been brought up at the Court of France; I did
not know half the kings of Europe and I did not possess even a shanty
in New Guinea, let alone a castle on the Loire. These things had not
seemed to matter when we were away in the wilds together getting
chased by cannibals or being shipwrecked or having snakes set on us
by sorcerers――going ragged and hungry sometimes and at all times not
being quite as sure as we could have wished that we were ever going to
get safely back again. But here, in the little tin-pot capital, the
kings and castles and things began to crop up again. And――as they say
in sentimental novels――the Marquis and I drifted apart.
The days passed very slowly, before the steamer’s call. In the
afternoons, when the southeaster was howling harder than ever and
almost laying flat the little eucalyptus trees that stand up all over
the many hills on which Port Moresby stands, I used to climb the
heights above the town and wander idly about, holding on my hat and
thinking what I’d do with my share of the price of the diamond――if we
ever got it safe away to civilization. And down below on the flat, the
Marquis would be playing tennis with Mrs. Vandaleur or squiring her
about on the beach.
I never felt inclined to watch him on the days when it was my turn to
guard the Sorcerer’s Stone. But on his days I don’t mind admitting
that I shadowed him like a detective. In a town that is all small
hills, with every house overlooking all the others, there is not much
difficulty about that. And I grew more and more uneasy, as the time
went on, to see the increasing number of hours he spent with “Daisie.”
Every second evening, when he handed over the chamois leather case, in
the privacy of our own room and said, “All right, my Flint!” I felt as
though another barrier between our fortune and its realization had been
painfully passed over; another cast of the dice fallen in our favor.
For I knew now that Mrs. Vandaleur had her suspicions; and I trusted
her――well, not half so far as I could have thrown her supple, eel-like
little body.
Sometimes, from my eyrie among the rocks above I saw amusing scenes
on the tennis ground and the flat. The most amusing was on the day
when “Daisie” persuaded the Marquis to dance on the tennis court with
a cassowary, a pet of some one of the residents, which used to hang
about the grounds, begging humbly for cake, and if refused, instantly
turned vicious and jumped up into the air to kick with both feet at
the person who had repulsed it. The players used to tease the creature
a good deal in order to see it fly into a rage; it was a young bird
and not half grown, but it was very active and went into the most
amusing frenzies of stamping, whistling rage. Cassowaries, as most
people know, are extremely fond of dancing; and Mrs. Vandaleur incited
the Marquis, first to dance with the bird, and afterwards to give an
imitation of its style. I do not think I ever saw anything funnier than
the tall, thin bird and the tall, fat Marquis, setting to partners on
the green grass court, the cassowary taking its part quite seriously,
and sidling, chasséeing, springing, like a girl in a theater; the man
craning his neck in imitation, stepping stiff-legged, as it stepped and
using his arms exactly as it used its wings. Afterwards, the Marquis
improvised a “Dance of the Cassowary,” and it was one of the very best
things I had ever seen him do. I have heard since then that it has met
with much approval in his castle on the Loire.
It was my day for the Sorcerer’s Stone, so I looked on with an easy
mind. After all, it seemed to me, I had been making too much fuss.
The Marquis was not a fool, and even if the little widow succeeded in
worming out of him the secret of the diamond, it was only what would
probably happen sooner or later, somewhere. We had been through so many
risks with the Sorcerer’s Stone that I had nearly come to believe there
was something supernatural about it, for it always seemed to work out
right in the end.
Next day I was suffering from a touch of fever, as most New Guinea
residents do at times, and I did not go out at all, but stayed in my
room and took quinine till the walls spun round me. The attack passed
off towards evening, and I was lying on my bed, feeling weak but
better, when the Marquis came in.
“Had a pleasant day?” I asked. He did not answer, but went over to
the washstand and began washing his hands, with his back to me. I was
feeling almost too tired to talk, so I lay silent for a while, watching
the eastern sky-line, through our little square window, turn pink with
the reflected glow of the sunset in the unseen west, and the green-gray
eucalyptus trees streaming before the ceaseless thrash of the “trade”
that blew up strong and stronger as the night came on....
It occurred to me that the Marquis was a very long time washing his
hands. The room was getting darker; the people of the hotel were
clashing plates and clinking glasses down below. It was nearly dinner
time.... What could be the matter with my companion?
“Say, Mark!” I called out from my bed, “have you been murdering any
one, like Lady Macbeth, and are you trying to wash the ‘damned spot’
away, or what?”
The Marquis turned round so suddenly that he flung the tin basin
rattling on the floor, and the water rushed in a deluge across the
room. He did not take the slightest notice of it. He came up to the
bed, and even in the twilight I could see that his face was white.
I knew what had happened before he spoke.
“Flint,” he said, beating his pink, soapy hands up and down in the air,
“I can not tell you. I can not tell you. My God, what have I done!”
He sat down on the floor (we had no chair) right in the middle of the
deluge of water and began to cry.
“I have betrayed and ruined you, my friend,” he said. “I would like to
die, here where I am; what is the use that I should live? I say that I
can not tell you what I have done.” He wept again.
“Oh, get out of that water and sit on the bed,” I said. “You don’t
need to tell me; all I want to know is, how it happened and what Mrs.
Vandaleur has to do with it.” I was feeling pretty bad about the
affair――for I saw in a moment that he had lost the diamond――but there
is never any use, to my mind, in making a fuss.
The Marquis jumped up and tore open his shirt with the air of a man
who was opening his very heart for your inspection. Round his neck was
hanging a string and on the string was a small silk bag――empty.
“Not one confoundable thing has that angel had to do with it,” he said.
“It is altogether me. I took it out of the chamois case this morning,
because when I play tennis that chamois sticks and comes to go out of
the front of my shirt. But the silk, it slips and does not come out. So
I take away the chamois and I play tennis all the afternoon. And in the
end, when it is time to go and they have all gone, all but Mrs. Daisee
and me, I feel my hand into my shirt and there is nothing there! I tear
out the bag and it is splitted――――”
“Don’t you know that no silk will stand in the tropics? It was only a
protection for the stone. You might as well trust tissue-paper as silk,
in New Guinea,” I said wearily.
“I did not know, I swear. Well, when I see it is gone, I tell Daisee
that I have lost a something I have the greatest value for, a gem――I do
not say a diamond. And she call many native boys. And they look, look,
look, till it get dark. And I will swear, if it were that I was dying,
we look every inch. But there is no stone.”
“I reckon Mrs. Daisie could tell you――――” I began.
“Halt!” cried the Marquis. “Daisee is as innocent as the lamb unborn.
When we see the stone is lost, she will not look herself. She sit on
the seat and watch. She weep for me, that little one, she is most
blooming sorry. But she will not be suspect; she won’t touch that
searching herself. She can not understand and I can not understand. It
was all razed clean, that ground; there was no gulfs anywhere, and the
weeds was not. I should have been finding all right. But, my God, it is
not!”
He seemed so exceedingly distressed that I could not find it in my
heart to say what I thought of him and his carelessness, and of Mrs.
Vandaleur――whom I could not believe altogether innocent――and of the
whole wretched affair altogether. After all, Marquis or no Marquis, the
man was my “mate,” and we had been through a lot together, and a nicer
fighter than he was when one got into a tight place, I never wished to
find. And neither he nor I was worse off than either had been a month
or two ago; we had lost nothing――except a dream. It was a splendid
dream, no doubt, and one that I at least was never likely to have a
chance of dreaming again. But I thought I could do without it, on the
whole; and if I could, who hadn’t done the mischief, so, I reckoned,
could he.
I said something to this effect, and the Marquis wiped away his tears.
It was with a red silk handkerchief this time, and the embroidery of
the coronet, as he told me, had a story attached to it that was written
in his heart’s blood.
“Has Mrs. Daisie given you a handkerchief yet?” I asked.
“No,” he said quite gravely, “she has but given me a hymn book.”
“A hymn book!” I yelled, choking with laughter. “What in the name of
everything inappropriate should Mrs. Vandaleur give you hymn books for?”
“She is very devoted,” said the Marquis reprovingly. “She thinks that
she will make a Lutheran of me. Of course, there isn’t any dashed
chance that such a consummation could arrive, but it makes the little
one happy. Me also. As for the hymns, she sings them to me; I hear her
sing them when I come up the road past her little bird-nest of a house.”
“What does she sing?” I asked.
“Something that is in the hymn book, and that the great Clara Tun――no,
Butt――Clara Butt sings also; it is altogether touching. ‘Abide with
me.’”
“Does she?” said I, sitting up. “I call it irreligious and bad manners
both, if she does. Every man to his taste. Are you going to ask her to
help us to look for the diamond tomorrow?”
“I won’t do nothing you don’t wish,” said the Marquis, with sudden
meekness. “I can not forget that I have ruined you.”
“No fear,” I told him. “Are you going down to dinner, or aren’t you?
Tell them to send me up a bit; I’m getting better. I rather think you
and I are going to have a busy day tomorrow, Marky.”
* * * * *
We had. I got up a bit before daylight and had a dozen natives helping
me to search the tennis ground before the sun was well up. We hunted
for a good hour and I came to the conclusion that if the diamond had
ever been on the tennis court it certainly was not there now. I came
back and reported the result of my labors to the Marquis. He was
sitting in our room and looked very gorgeous in a marvelous pink silk
kimono embroidered with green and gold dragons; but his hair had not
been brushed up into its usual fierce bristles; his mustache was as
limp as a walrus’ and his general aspect suggested a pink cockatoo that
has been out in the rain.
“Don’t lose heart,” I told him. “The stone is somewhere. It’s been
picked up, you take my word for it. It must be in Port Moresby, and you
can leave me to find out where.”
It was in my mind, and I could not get it out, that if I wanted to know
where the Sorcerer’s Stone had gone to, I had better keep as much in
Mrs. Vandaleur’s company as possible. So, without giving vent to any
suspicions I had or guessed at, I allowed the Marquis to think that I
had got the better of my prejudices against the little widow. I even
accompanied him to tea with her when he went there to call a day or two
after the loss of the stone.
It did not strike me that “Daisie” was overjoyed to see me, but she
greeted me prettily and made tea for both of us. I don’t know whether
it was by accident or design that she made mine cold and weak and left
out the sugar; if so, she did a foolish thing, for it set me wondering
just why the little lady disliked me as much as she did. In spite of
the Marquis’ accusation, I am not, and never have been, unhappy in
women’s society; nor have I had occasion to observe that they are
unhappy in mine――to take a leaf out of my companion’s books.
But Daisie didn’t want me, didn’t like me, was more or less afraid of
me.
Why?
I watched her, sitting on the sheltered veranda, with the southeaster
roaring ceaselessly outside, slamming at the blinds and lifting the
long mats nailed on the floor. It was a wild day; a day to make any
one restless. Most Port Moresby folk find the southeast season trying
to the nerves, by reason of the unending uproar of the persistent
“trade,” and I judged that the wind――or something――was affecting Mrs.
Vandaleur’s nerves. She dropped a cup. She snapped at the boy who was
bringing the tray. She started when one spoke to her suddenly――as I
confess I did. Her color did not pale, but there may have been reasons
for that. She looked pretty enough, with her floating black draperies
and her wicked little scarlet shoes, and her daintily-dressed red-brown
hair, to have turned almost any man’s head, and I was not surprised to
see the Marquis more devoted than ever. But as for me, I mistrusted her
from the crown of her expensive curls to the sole of her little red
shoe. I drank my ill-tasting tea in silence, listened to the roar of
the wind and watched the lady and her lover. And I thought.
She could not have picked up the stone on the court――by what the
Marquis said, it was clear she had not known of the loss until he told
her. It seemed that she had questioned him shrewdly then concerning
what it was that he had lost, and had managed to extract from him a
pretty accurate description of the gem. He had not actually said it was
a diamond, but――from what he told me――he must have allowed her to guess
what it was.
She knew, then, that he had had a diamond of remarkable size; that he
had lost it in a small, easily-searched area. She had not picked it
up, and she had been careful――too careful, I thought――to avoid all
possible suspicion of having done so.
Did she know where it was?
These were the thoughts that ran through my mind while the Marquis
flirted with the lady, leaving me to talk to the uninteresting elderly
companion in the background.
I think he began to feel sorry, before very long, that he had asked
me to accompany him to Daisie’s; for the little lady seemed in a
fascinating mood, and looked as though she would not have been sorry
to have the drawing-room and the piano left to herself and her friend.
Doubtless, even the Marquis’ self-possession shrank from picking out
sentimental-sounding bits of hymns and reading or singing them in her
company before a couple of more or less unsympathetic observers. Mrs.
Daisie gave me a look or two that were certainly meant to be taken as
hints, but I was astonishingly stupid that afternoon and could not
understand her. Even when the Marquis proposed going out to the little
back garden to look at Mrs. Vandaleur’s plants, I was so stupid that I
couldn’t see they did not want me, and I got up to go too, protesting
that there was nothing in the world interested me so much as the
selection and care of roses in the tropics.
“I never knew you were an amateur of the garden,” observed the Marquis
somewhat ruefully. “You are then interested in culture? Don’t put out
yourself to please us, my friend, if you would rather love to stay in
the house.”
“It doesn’t put me out worth twopence,” I assured him. We went out
through the sun and the wind, to the back of the house, a rather
gloomy party of four, all trying more or less to be cheerful. I fancy
I succeeded the best. Mrs. Daisie made great play with the care of
her black draperies in the storm, yet found time to glance at me, I
thought, unpleasantly, and the Marquis was pulling his mustache. But I
was determinedly stupid.
The two got away in a corner of the garden before long, shamelessly
deserting myself and the companion, and I could see that Mrs. Daisie
was talking religion again; a thing that disgusted me, and inclined
me to have no mercy on her, if ever she should need it at my hands. I
can’t say I am particularly religious myself, but any decent man hates
to see piety used as a cloak. They had got out the hymn book she had
given him――a tiny, fancy little white leather thing, the size of a
match-box――and were looking up something or other in it, their heads
very close together....
“Would you like to see the cassowary?” asked the companion suddenly. I
had almost forgotten her existence; she was of those gray, dusty women
of no particular age, whom, somehow or other, one always does overlook.
“What cassowary?” I asked.
“Ours. It’s such a funny thing. It dances and fights and does lots of
queer tricks of its own. We have it shut up in the fowl-house.”
“What for?” I asked, yawning. The companion certainly did bore me.
“Because Mrs. Vandaleur says it’s sick. She bought it the other day;
the people who owned it wanted quite a lot for it.”
The companion was opening the door of the fowl-house as she spoke. Mrs.
Vandaleur, hearing the creak of the lock, turned around, and if I did
not mistake, her look was very black. It cleared at once, and a sunny
smile overspread her face.
“So you are looking at my new pet,” she said. “Poor thing, I think it
is sick; but it is very amusing when it is well.”
“Oh, this is my partner of the dance!” said the Marquis, as the great
bird came solemnly out, turning its big brown eyes suspiciously about
and about. He held out his hand to it, bowed, and began to dance
towards it, flapping his coat-tails in imitation of wings, and singing,
to an absurd tune, the well-known nonsense rhyme:
“I wish I was a cassowary
On the plains of Timbuctoo,
For then I’d eat a missionary,
Arms, legs and hymn book too.”
[Illustration:
_The bird stretched out its neck with the darting pounce of a
snake, snatched at the gaudy little book, gulped, swallowed
and_――――]
“Beautiful missionary!” he said, pausing in his dance, “do you think
the savage animal would eat you?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Vandaleur pettishly. “I can’t stand this
wind; it makes Daisie’s little foots too cold. Let’s go in.”
“If it will not eat the lovely missionary, will it eat the lovely
hymn book too?” asked the Marquis, teasing the bird with the little
book he held in his hand. The answer came suddenly, and in a way that
he hardly expected. I do not think the Marquis had ever heard that
the cassowaries are much the same as ostriches in their appetite
for strange and seemingly inappropriate food. If he had not, he was
enlightened now. The bird stretched out its neck with the darting
pounce of a snake, snatched at the gaudy little book, gulped, swallowed
and....
“By gum!” cried the Marquis, “she has eat up the hymn book too!”
“Daisie’s little foots are so cold,” complained Mrs. Vandaleur,
shivering in the wind. “Daisie wants to go to her little own home
again.”
It seemed to me that she was anxious to pass over the incident without
remark, which struck me as odd, considering that it was her own gift
to the Marquis that the mischievous bird had destroyed. We all went
back to the house, and before very long our hostess began to yawn in
an elegant but obvious manner that conveyed an unmistakable hint. The
Marquis rose to leave and I followed him.
He was looking worried and depressed, and I should have been glad
enough to say something to comfort him a little if I had thought
it safe. But in the light of past events, I certainly did not.
Nevertheless, I was mentally skipping and dancing all the way back to
the hotel. For now I thought I saw my way.
When I had left the Marquis in his room, I waited for a little while
and then went straight back to Mrs. Vandaleur’s. I found her alone on
the veranda; and this time all her rouge could not conceal the sudden
paleness that crept like a white mist over her pretty face when she saw
me return alone.
“I am flattered,” she said. “To what do I owe the honor of this――very
late――call?”
I looked her straight in the eyes.
“What will you take for your cassowary,” I said, “your cassowary that
is sick (though it doesn’t look it) and that will probably die in a day
or two, suddenly?”
I always said the woman was an adventuress. She never turned a hair or
hesitated a moment.
“A thousand pounds,” she said.
“You mean fifty,” I told her.
“A thousand,” she said, opening her eyes very wide and trying to stare
me down. The wind was working up for night; we had to shout at each
other in order to be heard.
“Fifty,” I said again. “It isn’t worth a thousand to you to be driven
out of the country by that story.”
“Perhaps it is,” said she insolently.
“You forget,” I told her, “that this is going to be a world-famous
stone. You can’t go to――Tahiti――or Nounea――or anywhere, and cut loose
from a tale that links you up to a thing like the Kohinoor. You’ll go
with that story chained to you like the ball on a convict’s leg and
a thousand pounds in your pocket――or we’ll keep our own counsel, and
you’ll keep yours and fifty pounds.”
For a moment there was silence in the veranda――silence but for the
tearing of the wind. The reed curtain in the doorway slashed back and
forth. The canvas awning rattled like a sail.
“Give me the money,” said Mrs. Vandaleur, without the slightest change
of countenance. But I could see that the gauzy, sable laces on the
bosom of her dress were heaving like black seaweeds in a storm.
I had brought a check-book and a fountain pen. I wrote a check and gave
it to her.
“You might tell me how it happened,” I said as I handed the paper.
“You know,” she said. “He told me what he had lost. I’d seen the
cassowary in the corner of the ground, gulping down something a moment
before. They always go for anything bright. So I guessed. And when he
told me, I brought the bird over to the seat, while he was searching
for the stone, and I saw the thing going down its neck inch by inch――as
you can see if you watch them swallow anything. Oh, I didn’t take any
chances. You’ve spoiled――you’ve spoiled――the best――――Did you ever think
what it is to be a woman and not so young as you were, and with no
prospects――none? You never thought, or felt, or cared, about any woman
in the world――and yet――――”
Her eyes were very, very blue, and they were very soft to see through
the tears that were gathering in them.
She looked at me and then looked away.
“And yet――――”
I am never likely to know what she meant by that. Nor do I very much
care. For there is a girl down in Sydney.
I never saw Mrs. Vandaleur again.
* * * * *
The Marquis slept better that night than he had done for some nights
past. I had a job to do before we slept; I did it――any man who has been
on sheep and cattle stations understands that sort of thing completely.
I tidied up before I came into the Marquis’ room with the recovered
stone; but there was a stain that I had overlooked on one shirt sleeve.
The Marquis saw it.
“It began in dying and blood and it ends in dying and blood,” he said.
“Flint, in one week we shall be in Melbourne and we shall find a
syndicate of Jews, and they will buy our stone for very many thousand
pounds, and by gum! my friend, I shall think we are blooming well rid
of this so remarkable treasure trophy of the wilderness!”
“I’m with you there,” I said; and I was.
Transcriber’s Note
This book was written in a period when many words had not become
standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple spelling
variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been
left unchanged unless indicated below. Obsolete and alternative
spellings were left unchanged.
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, reversed
order, upside down, or partially printed letters and punctuation,
were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and
abbreviations were added. Accents were corrected.
The following items were changed:
women to woman, line 3532
celebrate to celebrated, line 4631
minute to minutes, line 4648
detectices to detectives, line 4848
doen’t to doesn’t, line 4849
walz to waltz, line 4946
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