THE SCENE OF THE FINAL DRAMA
We spent the night at the hotel and went together to call on Rona at the
Mission the following morning. The change in the girl was startling, far
too great to be accounted for by the baggy Mother Hubbard that had
replaced the close-clinging _sarongs_ and _sulus_ in which I had grown
accustomed to seeing her at Kai. Her face was thinner and the former
peach-like bloom of her cheeks had given way to a dusky sallowness. The
curve of her lips had flattened--and hardened; hard, too, was the fixed
stare of her great sloe eyes. To a stranger the pucker of concentration
between her eyebrows might almost have suggested sullenness. The lines
about her eyes and mouth, which spoke to me of suffering, might have
seemed to another as stamped there by hate. She was still beautiful, but
in a new way. It was a wild, fluttered sort of loveliness that haunted
rather than allured. The woman before me could never "sit Buddha," I
told myself; those dreamy spells of repose had not punctuated her
present life with intervals of Oriental peacefulness.
Decidedly reserved in her manner toward Allen, Rona tried to be warm in
her greeting to me, but quickly showed signs of restraint and
embarrassment. She became even more ill at ease when "Slant," after
genial old Dr. Oakes invited him out to see a new saddle horse that had
just arrived from Singapore, excused himself and left us alone. She
sheered off so sharply from my first mention of the name of Bell, and
became so palpably nervous at a couple of attempts I made to lead round
to him by degrees, that I gave up trying to induce her to speak of him
out of sheer pity. Even my inquiry after the health of "Peeky" of the
embroidered shawl drew only a weary little smile and a sad shake of her
riotous tumble of blue-black hair.
She was ready enough to talk about the picture, though even in that
connection I was at once conscious of a lack of real enthusiasm on her
part. She seemed anxious to get it started, however, and said she
supposed we would be going to live on the schooner in a day or two. She
even confessed to having worried a good deal for fear the _Cora_ would
be broken up by a storm before the picture was made. When I told her
that we would not need to live on the schooner, and perhaps would not
have to make more than one or two short visits to it, she appeared a
good deal put out for a few moments. She scowled angrily and started to
speak; then thought better of it, bit her lip and held her tongue. She
appeared a bit mollified when I said we would make our first visit, to
plan the picture, just as soon as the quarantine people would disinfect
the schooner for us. (That this had not been done yet I had already
learned through 'phoning to the Station the night before.) She observed
impatiently that she thought disinfection was a needless precaution, and
I had to explain that it was not a matter of precaution at all on our
part; that it was against the law for anyone to board a ship that had
carried plague until it was disinfected, and that if we tried it on the
_Cora_ the whole lot of us would probably be clapped in jail and
quarantined afterwards.
She softened a little as I got up to go, and her "Next time I show you
'Peekie,' Whit-nee--'Peekie' is a ver-ee sick bird," sounded almost like
old times. The hand she gave me was hot and dry but unshaking, and the
almost cutting grip of it tense with nervous force. I noticed that her
finger nails, though trimmed closer than of old and no longer stained,
were still of unusual length.
I found Allen, his face flushed with enthusiasm, putting the doctor's
new colt up and down the sward before the Mission chapel in sharp bursts
of terrific speed. The animal, Oakes explained to me, had been given to
him by a petty Rajah of the Federated Malay States as a token of his
appreciation of the doctor's success in removing a troublesome appendix
from a favourite dancing girl some months previously. It was a chunky
bay gelding, only his small head, full neck and a certain trimness of
hock bearing out Oakes' claim that he was out of a Mameluke imported
direct from Bassorah by the Sultan of Johore. For the rest he favoured
his Timor dam, and looked built for endurance and handiness rather than
speed. The instant Allen was on his back, however, his sure instinct
told him that the powerful little beast had swiftness as well as staying
powers, and he was already itching to put his judgment to the test. A
week later, having quietly entered him in the race of the day--the
Planters' Handicap--at the Townsville midsummer meet, he rode the
gelding himself and gave the local betting public the worst jolt in
North Queensland track annals by winning at two-hundred-to-one. Every
pound that the wily Allen cleaned up on the race went to build the good
Doctor Oakes, shortly transferred to Fiji, the largest and best equipped
Medical Mission in all of Polynesia. The full story of what the winning
of that race meant to the game old missionary with the sporting blood
has yet to be written.
My plan of visiting the _Cora_ to make a preliminary study of the
"Black-birder" met with an unexpected check. The quarantine people had
readily consented to give the schooner a rough disinfection, one that
would make it quite safe for us to board her as long as we kept clear of
the holds, which would require more drastic treatment. Before the
formaldehyde squad got away, however, several cases of smallpox were
reported in the native quarter, and all the available disinfecting
apparatus was called upon for use there. It would be at least a week or
ten days, we were told, before an outfit would be free for the _Cora_.
Personally, I didn't mind the delay in the least; for one reason,
because Rona's strange mood had quenched my initial surge of ardour for
the picture, and, for another, because I had still to find a suitable
place in which to work. Allen seemed to be worrying very little over the
forced wait. "I've laid my bets to win or lose, and I'll be there to
cash in after the finish," he said philosophically. He spent most of the
time in the saddle, getting out mornings at daybreak to give the
"Missionary Colt" (as he called the Oakes gelding) workouts on the
quiet. As far as I could observe, he saw very little of Rona.
It was the girl who really chafed under the inaction of waiting. Two or
three times she sent for me to urge that we disregard the quarantine
regulations and go off to the schooner. Allen mentioned that she had
also begged him to take her out for a look-see at the _Cora_ on the
quiet. How she spent her time I did not know. Oakes told me that she
went out for long walks every day, sometimes going toward the hills and
sometimes along the shore. I found freshly picked tiger-lilies on Bell's
grave the day I visited it, and it occurred to me that the gathering of
these might have furnished the motive for the solitary walks. But if she
was still devoted to Bell's memory, why wouldn't she speak of him?--and
why the plan to go off to the Islands with Allen? The girl's conduct was
quite beyond my understanding. That was one thing I was sure of, at
least.
Meanwhile I went ahead looking for a place I could turn into a studio.
It had been Allen's idea that the suburban bungalow he occupied after
coming out of quarantine would be suitable, but I was compelled to veto
it on account of the poor light--a consequence of the dense tropical
growth surrounding it. The same difficulty--light--ruled out a number of
other attractive places that were offered me, and I was about to close
with a rather squalid little shack near the beach as a last resort, when
Allen got wind of a temporarily vacant house on a big sugar estate, some
miles from town.
This little gem of a hillside bungalow had been built by the sugar
people for a sub-overseer of the plantation, who had gone to Melbourne
to meet and marry a girl from home. As the lucky chap had been given a
three-months holiday for a honeymoon in New Zealand, the local manager
of the sugar company decided that there could be no objection to my
occupying the nest in the interim; in fact, he was sure his directors
would be highly honoured to have their property used by so distinguished
an artist, and for so laudable a purpose. He hoped I would not hesitate
to call upon him for help at any time. He would see to it that the
servants already hired against the return of Borton and his bride
reported at once, and that Borton's trap and saddle horses were placed
at my immediate disposal.
I was greatly pleased with my find for a number of reasons besides the
fact that it had a large and well-lighted living-room that could be made
all I could ask to work in. Not the least of these was its location.
Several hundred feet above the sea, its wide verandas caught cool
currents of the Trade wind that the sultry lower levels never knew.
Infinitely refreshing, too--both in fact and in suggestion,--I found the
splendid stream which circled close under the rear wall, forming, where
a mossy ledge reared a natural dam, a deep, clear pool to which I could
jump from my bedroom window. The revitalizing effect of an early morning
plunge, I had found by long experience, was beyond comparison the best
antidote against the insidious absinthe poisoning paralyzing body and
brain at the end of the night.
A couple of hundred yards further down the stream took a swift run
through a verdant tunnel of fern fronds and overhanging palm leaves,
before it leaped in a fine compact spout of green and white over the
verge of a creeper-clad cliff, to a lucent hyacinth-lined basin thirty
feet below. From there, quieter of mood and mind after its hillside
gambols, it meandered by pleasant reaches across a broad belt of
shimmering sugar cane, beyond which it disappeared in tangled growth of
primeval bush. By dark ways and devious, broadening and deepening in the
lower levels, it finally lost itself in the mangrove swamp that fringed
the sea fifteen miles to the northward.
I mention this stream particularly because of the part it was destined
to play in the final act of the drama of the _Cora Andrews_. For a
similar reason it may be in order to say a few words about the great
flume, which took off from the stream at the pool below the waterfall
and led down to the big central sugar mill on the shore of the first
deeply indented bay north of Townsville. It was built, following the
successful Hawaiian practice, for the purpose of floating the cut cane
from the fields to the mill, a method which, wherever the natural
conditions were suited to it, had proved both cheaper and more
expeditious than the old system of transporting the succulent stalks by
tramway and bullock carts.
The flume itself was built of imported Oregon pine planks, and was
carried on a trestle of rough-hewn blue-gum and _jarra_ trunks. In
section, the box of the flume was about four feet wide by three feet
deep. The water it carried--about a quarter of the normal flow of the
stream that fed it--varied in depth according to its velocity. The
latter, of course, depended upon the grade of the flume, this varying
from two or three per cent. in the broad upper valley to all of fifteen
per cent. in a couple of short steep pitches near the coast.
I was interested in this flume from the first time I saw it. In the
course of a visit to Hawaii some years previously, I had found no end of
sport in what was called "sugar-fluming"--riding from the mountainside
plantations down to the mills seated on a water-propelled bundle of
sugar-cane. On my inquiring of the local manager if the highly diverting
stunt was practicable here, he had answered with a most emphatic
negative. "You could go down the flume all right," he said, "but the
volume of water is so great that you could not stop yourself by holding
to the sides even where the grades are the slightest. On the sharp
inclines, where the flume runs down to the mill, a team of bullocks
couldn't hold you back. Only one man ever tried the feat deliberately,
and we were picking fragments of him out of the _bagasse_ for a month.
Also spoiled a lot of sugar--everything from the juice in the vats to
the unfinished article in the centrifugals had to be thrown away. Same
thing has had to be done on the several occasions coolies have fallen
into the flume while at work. Jolly costly accidents for the company. I
hope that you're not contemplating...."
I hastened to assure him that, after what he had told me, I most
certainly had ceased any contemplations I might have allowed myself to
indulge in up to then. Still I couldn't help picturing in my mind what
sport could be got out of the thing if only some sort of buffer were
rigged up at the lower end. That prompted me, a day or two after I was
settled in the bungalow and while time was still hanging on my hands, to
put my horse down the bridle-path along the flume when I went out for a
ride in the cool of the afternoon. After that I lost all interest in
"sugar-fluming" as a sport. It was just conceivable that a man of great
strength and agility might stop himself by gripping the sides of the
flume at several points in the first five or six miles, but from where
the sharp descent to the coast began I was inclined to agree with the
manager's statement, that the drag of a man's body in the pull of the
racing stream would take a team of bullocks off their feet.
I dismounted and leaned over the edge of the flume where it ran through
a narrow cut in the rock at the brow of the great basaltic cliff that
followed the curve of the beach of the bay. This was the upper end of
the first of the two sharp drops and the water, which was running within
a foot of the top of the flume a hundred yards above, and here flattened
down to a scant six inches in the bottom, grey-green and solid like a
great endless belt of flying steel. The butt of my riding-whip was all
but jerked from my hand as I touched it lightly to the speeding water,
and a curving fan of spray was projected up into my face and over the
sides. The evidence of such a solidity of kick in running water seemed
almost beyond belief, until I recalled having heard how a jet escaping
from the pressure pipe of a hydro-electric plant somewhere in the
American West had penetrated a man's body, cleanly, like an arrow.
My desire to ride the flume died then and there, though even yet I
couldn't help regretting that there wasn't a level stretch above the
jump-off, where a man could check his headway and crawl out. It would
have been rattling good sport down to there, but beyond--sheer suicide.
There was, it is true, a couple of hundred yards of perhaps five per
cent. grade between the first steep pitch over the edge of the cliff,
and a second one, even steeper, that seemed to run almost directly upon
the roaring, churning mass of cane-crushing machinery that began at the
upper end of the big mill. Even there the water was lightning-swift,
however, so that a man, once over the edge of the first pitch, looked to
be less than a thousand-to-one shot in bringing up before going on into
the second. And that would have been--how was it the manager put
it?--more "spoiled sugar"--another "jolly costly accident for the
company."
The bridle-path I had been following continued on along the flume to the
mill, but, desiring to strike the main highway to Townsville as quickly
as possible, I put my sure-footed little Timor mare down what appeared
to be an abandoned road graded into the face of the cliff. When I
finally came out in the rear of what was plainly the remains of an
ancient water-driven cane-crushing mill, I realized that the old grade
by which I had descended must have been the bullock-cart road from the
plantation. The mill was a picturesque old ruin, with its mossy
water-wheel, crumbling roof and sprawling pier, and I made mental note
of the lovely little cove as a place well worth returning to with
paintbox and easel when opportunity offered.
Returning through the town, I had the good luck to be hailed from the
sidewalk by my bluff old friend, Captain "Choppy" Tancred. He was
southbound with the _Utupua_ again, he said, but she was going to go to
drydock immediately on arrival in Sydney and he was going to command the
_Mambare_--a new steamer just turned out on the Clyde for the
company--and start north the following day. It was hard luck missing his
week at home with the wife and nippers at Manley, but his promotion to a
ship on the Singapore run was some consolation. He would be back in
Townsville again in a little over a week, and, as he had a lot of sugar
to load for the Straits, hoped to have the time for a good yarn with me.
It must have been more from habit than anything else (for the old boy
should have read enough about me in the papers by this time to be
convinced that I was not a fugitive from justice), that he repeated his
injunction that I must not fail to let him know if there was ever
anything he could do for me--"ye'll ken wha' I mean, lad." And, equally
from habit, I assured him that I "kenned wha'," and would not fail to
call upon him in my extremity.
As I had nothing but what I had brought with me on the steamer to move,
and as the house was practically ready for occupancy, I was comfortably
settled in my hillside bungalow at the end of the third day after our
arrival from the south. A Chinese cook and house-boy, a Hindu groom, a
couple of New Hebridean blacks as roustabouts, and Ranga as general
factotum, gave me a very tidy and self-contained establishment. Ranga I
had taken to at once. He was quick-minded and quick-handed, extremely
good-natured, and ready to do anything at any time of the day or night.
I resolved to keep him with me indefinitely as a personal servant--that
is, if it fell in with his own inclinations after he had given me a fair
trial.
I made a number of rather successful studies of Ranga by way of getting
my hand in again, and that suggested that it might be profitable to put
in the days of waiting by trying what could be done along the same lines
with the others who were to figure in the picture. Allen, although busy
with his secret training of the Oakes colt (all unknown even to the good
missionary, by the way, who thought that "Slant" was merely borrowing
the gelding for his morning ride), found time to come up and give me
several sittings. It was easy to see that he hated the whole thing, and
was only going through with it as a part of the bargain with Rona. The
latter, after promising me faithfully to come, was reported missing on
all of the three occasions I sent the trap for her. As her whim was at
the bottom of the whole mad plan, I was not a little mystified at the
girl's action. Also, as it was she whom I was most anxious to do full
justice to in the picture, I was a good deal annoyed. Allen had no
explanation or excuse to offer for her, saying the girl had him pocketed
at every turn anyhow, but volunteered to try and round her up for me
himself as soon as the Planters' Handicap was out of the way, and he had
a bit more time on his hands. For all of his light way of speaking, I
knew that he was as hard hit as ever, and had thrown himself into the
training of the "Missionary Colt" only to give him something else to
think about.
Two unostentatious acts of kindness on the part of Allen in the course
of the week which followed added fresh refulgency to his halo of
popularity. Townsville had gone madder than ever about him following his
sudden and unexpected return from the south, and the same appeared to be
true of the rest of the country. In all sincerity, he had tried to do
both of the things I have referred to strictly on the quiet, and that
they became public was only a consequence of the zeal of the fresh army
of "war correspondents" that had been rushed north again to camp upon
the hero's trail.
One of Allen's little kindnesses was an appeal, in his own name, to the
Governor of Western Australia to have dismissed the proceedings that had
been instituted to bring "Squid" Saunders back to be locked up for the
twenty-three and a half years which still remained to be served of his
original twenty-five-year sentence. This appeal was accompanied by a
promise to send the ex-convict, immediately he was released, back to the
Islands at Allen's expense.
Doubtless the momentary magic of Allen's name had something to do with
the Westralian Governor's complaisance. In any event, "Squid" Saunders
was out of jail and off as a first-class passenger on one of the Solomon
Island boats inside of a week. Allen, the correspondents were not long
in learning, had bought the ticket, footed all of the very sizable
telegraph bills, and given the purser of the steamer a hundred pounds in
gold to be handed to "Squid" when he was disembarked at Bougainville.
The correspondents, long baulked of any real "Allen stuff," went to that
story like hungry hounds.
But scarcely was the "Squid" Saunders story onto the wires before it was
followed by the news of Allen's astonishing win of the Planters'
Handicap with the rank outsider, Yusuf, at two-hundred-to-one. That win
was spectacular enough in itself, but when, on the heels of it, was
flashed the word that not only the thousand-guinea purse hung up for the
race, but approximately twenty-five hundred pounds paid to Allen by the
"tote" as well, had been donated to the owner of Yusuf to forward the
realization of his long-cherished dream--the erection of a modern
medical mission in Fiji--the climax was capped. Australia echoed anew
with acclaim of the "philanthropist hero" (it was now), and press and
pulpit moralized and maundered afresh on the Hon. Hartley Allen's
goodness of heart and greatness of soul. The clamour of the people of
the country to see their idol in the flesh fused the Townsville wires
from every direction. It was all very well that the incomparable heroism
of the saving of the _Cora Andrews_ should be perpetuated upon canvas,
but why should the pushful American artist drag the hero off before his
own people had a chance to do him homage? Let the artist rise to the
occasion with a display of that famous "Yankee hustle" they had heard so
much about and get the job over "right quick." It was the man himself
they wanted; let the picture wait if it couldn't be finished
straightaway!