phrase, and I leave you to gauge its impact. We had had no hint of it.
Here was the diary before us. We were only waiting to learn the present
address of the diarist. Indeed our whole attitude toward the singular
discovery we were making had been quite cheerful, even exultant, like
that of children who follow the tribulations of some favorite hero,
secure of the happy solution.
"Couldn't get _out_?" squeaked Jeckol. "How do you mean--he couldn't?"
"He was locked up in that blasted diving dress!"
"Locked up?"...
"Sewed up--sacked up," said Peters heavily. "Did you ever see
the damn' stuff? He calls it canvas, which it ain't, but tanned
twill--two-ply--with rubber between. He can't tear his way out with a
stick, he says. And small wonder. Talk about strait-jackets!"
"But--but why doesn't he take off the helmet?"
Peters stared unseeing at the packet in his hand, and his face was
saturnine.
"By Joe, what a mess!" he murmured. "What a beau-ti-ful mess! Look
here--d'y' know a diver's outfit? First he wears a solid
breastplate--see?--that sets about his shoulders. Then the helmet fits
on that with segmental neck rings and screws hard down with a quarter
turn to a catch. Aye, there's a catch to snap it home.... And where is
that catch? Why at the _back_! No diver was ever intended to take off
his own helmet!"
We could only blink at him dumbly.
"Albro couldn't reach it. Of course if he should manage to rip away the
cloth from the eyelets he'd be all right--he'd simply shift the whole
upper works. But them eyelets, now, they lock down all around through a
vulcanized collar. He couldn't reach more'n two of them either."
"There's the glass--"
Peters offered the diary.
"What does he say himself? There's only one removable glass to a helmet
and that's in front--an inch thick and screws tight in a gun-metal
socket. It's guarded with a gridiron of bars--same as the two side
glasses. He wants to break it, but he can't. He wants to unscrew it, but
he can't. He wants to cut himself loose, but he has no knife. Do you see
him--by Joe!--do you see him twistin' and writhin' and fightin' for his
life in there--_with one good arm_?"
"Why--" cried Jeckol, in sudden appalled perception. "He couldn't even
eat. He's starving inside that suit!"
"Starving?" echoed Bartlet, from colorless lips. "God--if that was all!
He's dying of thirst by inches!"...
I do not know how it struck Jeckol, but it seemed to me as if a
blackness came in upon the sun.
"Go on," urged Bartlet. "Go on!"
But it was not so easy to go on. Peters found whole pages of the Book
impossible to decipher. At places it lapsed to a mere jumble of
sprawling characters. Again the soft lead was hopelessly blurred over,
where the pages had been often thumbed, or perhaps crumbled and thrown
aside. He shuffled them hastily and we hung upon his search.
_... uneasy god. They got me tied up now to keep me safe [words
missing] joke, to pass out here like a rat under a bell jar. Not
me. I don't mean to...._
Curious. When Peters resumed the thread, when he read that eloquent
line, those of us who had known Jim Albro nodded solemnly, one to
another, as if sharing a profound and secret thrill. For this was the
man's real triumph--and we felt it then, regardless of the outcome--that
alone, beyond any conceivable aid for the first time in his life,
speechless, helpless, at the end of all those amiable arts which had
given him his way so often with men and devils, and women, too, Jim
Albro was still the Jim Albro "that you couldn't keep down."
His body was consuming and shriveling with its own heat. He had to
scheme for each scant breath he drew, spreading the dress and collapsing
it at short intervals to renew the foul air. He had to view the tempting
tribute laid out before the altar: juicy mangoes and figs and sugar
cane, wild berries and young drinking coconuts freshly opened, with the
new, cool milk frothing up at the brim. He had to receive the homage of
a people, and to count by the wheeling sun how many hours of torment
were left him. Worse than all, he had to withstand the pitiless irony of
it, the derisive grin of fate that drives men mad. He did these things,
and he would not yield. He did not mean to. And lest you should think
the phrase a mere flourish--observe the testimony of the Book....
* * * * *
The tribes flocked in that second day to do him honor. There was a great
gathering in the square. Some vivid pantomime was displayed before the
high seat. Some unusual rites were enacted before the temple, when the
bamboo pipes and drums were going and the doctors wore their vermilion
mop wigs and masks of ceremony and chains of naked dancers were stamping
and circling to the chant. Jim Albro watched and noted it all behind his
solid inch of plate glass; not passively, not indifferently, but with
close attention and the very liveliest interest. Aye, this god took an
interest in the welfare of his people!
Heaven knows what he saw in the Papuans of Barange. By all accounts they
are a plum-black race of rather superior ferocity--six feet is their
medium stature and their favorite dish a human ear, nicely broiled. So
the old traders report, and never an explorer has improved the
description. It required some one who could sit down among them without
losing his head--quite literally--to learn more. Albro filled the bill.
He had nothing to do but to sit. And while he sat he busied himself with
the thoughts that have made the strangest, and blindest, reading in the
diary.
_A prime lot of raw material. Why [do?] people always lie about
niggers? Unspoiled [part illegible] the makings. Their orators told
me in dumb show [words missing] behind the hills [lines
missing].... Wonderful!_
Wonderful, he says. Wonderful what? Chances, perhaps. Opportunities.
Possibilities. Certainly nobody else ever had such as lay before Jim
Albro if he could have won free to take them, as a conqueror, as a god.
Was he dreaming even then of empire? Had he had a glimpse into the
meaning of Papua that struck fire to his roving and restless soul? Had
he fallen enamored of the sphinx, and had she drawn the veil for him? It
may be. The fact stands that, fevered and tortured as he was, burning
with thirst and pain, he discovered something capable of rousing that
cry from him. We hear the cry, and that is all we hear--nearly.
... _suppose I should take a hand at this dumb show myself. I could
do it. I know I could. Am going to trust old Gum-eye. And
afterward_....
Peters looked up from the last page.
"Well?" said Jeckol impatiently.
"That's the end," announced Peters.
I cannot say what the breathless group of us had been expecting.
Possibly the first-hand memoir of a miracle would have satisfied us, or
the harrowing confessions and last wishes of the moribund. But so
natural and unfanciful a thing as a full stop to the tension left us
stupefied. We felt aggrieved, too, as if the author should have
postponed his business long enough to let us know whether he was dead or
not.
"It can't be!" cried Jeckol, all abroad. "How could it end there? What
happened to him? Where is he?"
Peters swung his gaze around the vacant clearing and the impenetrable
palisade of the forest.
"This was written three months ago, remember," he said.
"But he had a plan," insisted Jeckol. "He surely had a plan. He says he
was going to do something. He'd found a friend he could trust. What
next?"
"That friend must ha' failed him."
Cap'n Bartlet shook himself like one awaking. "No friend would have
failed him," he said deliberately. "And--you're forgetting that ship boy
again."
* * * * *
Once more, with a rattled oath, Peters pounced on the unfortunate Kakwe,
quailing beside him. Once more he brought to bear the persuasion he best
knew how to use; and once more the black boy submitted, wholly, and
showed. He had nothing to tell. He could throw no light on events. But
he had seen from the trees where the "white fella mahrster him diver"
forgathered with all the fiends of the pit, whereat he was "too much
fright," and he showed us this time up the platform of the identical
wide-thatched house by which we had been standing. We crept in through
the low entrance and across a floor of sagging bamboo mats and found
ourselves before a curtain of pandanus that hung midway. We were long
past astonishment, but Jeckol, arresting a gesture, dropped his hand.
"I daren't," he whimpered.
It was Bartlet who put the curtain aside. And there, in the twilight of
the place, we saw the god as he had appeared in his recent earthly
phase. His great copper head gleamed at the back of a shallow niche,
made fast against the wall. The muffled, stiff clumsiness of his diving
dress revealed a heroic figure, still disposed in the attitude of a
sitting Buddha, with the leaden-soled diving shoes thrust out by either
knee. His single huge eye glared down at us balefully from over the
altar as we stood, overwhelmed in the presence. "And so he did--pass
out," said Jeckol.
Something had caught the quick eye of Peters. Horrified, we saw him step
forward and lay a vigorous and sacrilegious hold on that high divinity,
saw the shape start and tremble as with life, saw it shake and flutter
like a bundle of rags in the wind, and flap--emptily....
"Yes," said Peters. "He's passed out, right enough. Leastways from here.
Passed out, and on. And quite easy too. Look at these slits--would you?"
* * * * *
The diving suit had been laid open like a stripped pelt with long cuts
of a keen blade, one down the middle of the back, one across the
shoulders, and others connected along the inside of each limb to the
wrists and ankles.
"Gone!"
"Gone," confirmed Peters. "Whether the niggers dug him from it piece by
piece like the kernel from a nut or whether that friend of his helped
him to shed complete--you can take your choice. In either case he's
gone--and gone this time to stay."
"There's no--no blood!" gasped Jeckol. "Anyhow!"
Cap'n Bartlet had removed his hat to polish his shiny forehead with the
colorful kerchief, and he was looking out of the door over the tops of
the trees to the far blue and nameless mountains of Papua, with an eye
at peace.
"You could always bank on the luck of James O'Shaughnessy Albro," he
said simply. "I knew he was alive."
But Jeckol was still reeling.
"I shan't write this yarn," he assured us earnestly.
"It's too--it's too--and besides, there's no end to it."...
"_Hic finis fandi_," suggested Peters.
THE PASSION VINE
It is difficult to find an excuse for Miss Matilda. She was a
missionary's daughter, committed to the sacred cause of respectability
in a far land. Motauri was a gentleman of sorts and a scholar after his
own fashion, a high chief and a descendant of kings; but he was also a
native and a pagan. Strictly, it should have been nothing to Miss
Matilda that Motauri looked most distractingly like a young woodland
god, with a skin the exact shade of new heather honey, the ringlets of a
faun, the features of a Roman cameo and the build of a Greek athlete.
Being a chief in the flower valley of Wailoa meant that Motauri owned a
stated number of cocoanut-trees and never had to do anything except to
swim and to laugh, to chase the rainbow-fish a fathom deep and to play
divinely on the nose-flute. But being as handsome as Motauri meant that
many a maiden heart must sigh after him and flutter in strange, wild
rhythm under the compelling of his gentle glance. This was all very well
so long as the maidens were among his own people. It took a different
aspect when he turned the said glance on Miss Matilda, who was white and
slim and wore mitts to keep her hands from tanning and did crewelwork in
the veranda of her father's house behind the splendid screen of the
passion-vine....
Now falling in love with a man of color is distinctly one of the things
that are not done--that scarcely endure to be spoken of. We have it on
the very highest authority that the East has a stubborn habit of never
being the West. Where two eligible persons of opposite sex are
concerned the stark geographic, not to say ethnologic fact comes grimly
into play, and never these twain shall meet: or anyway the world agrees
they never ought.
Yet Miss Matilda had been meeting Motauri. Perhaps the passion-vine was
to blame. The passion-vine is too exuberant to be altogether
respectable. One cannot live in an atmosphere of passion-vine--and that
embraces all the heady scent and vivid tint and soft luxuriance of the
islands where life goes as sweetly as a song; the warm caress of the
trade-wind, the diamond dance of spray; the throbbing organ-pipe of the
reef, the bridal-veiling of mountain streams, the flaunting of palm and
plantain, the twinkling signal of fireflies at dusk--one cannot live
with all this and confine one's emotions to a conventional pattern of
gray and blue worsted yarns. At least one has trouble in so doing while
the thrill and spring of youth remain.
They remained with Miss Matilda, though guarded by natural discretion.
Nothing could have been cooler than the gleam of her starched gingham,
as she moved sedately down the mountain path to chapel of a Sunday
morning. Nothing more demure than the droop of her lashes under the rim
of the severe, Quakerish bonnet, as she smote the wheezy old melodeon
for the dusky choir. In that flawless face, a little faded, a little
wearied, you would have sought vainly for any hint of hard repression,
for any ravaging of secret revolt--unless, like Hull Gregson, the
trader, you had made a despairing study of it and had kept its image
before your hot eyes throughout long, sleepless nights; unless, more
particularly, like Motauri, you had been privileged to see it by the
moonlight that sifts through the rifts of the passion-vine. Then,
perhaps....
Certainly her excellent father would have been the last unprompted and
of his own motion, to develop any such suspicion. Pastor Spener had
learned to fight shy of so many suspicions, so many discomfortable
questions. And this was well. Otherwise he might have been led to wonder
occasionally at his own presence and his own work; at the whole imposed
and artificial shadow of a bleak civilization upon these sunny isles,
these last remnants of an earthly paradise.
He seldom permitted himself to wonder about anything except the singular
inadequacy of mission support and the rising cost per head of making
converts, and keeping them. But there were times when he chanced to
consider, perhaps, some drunken derelict outsprawled by a hospitable
breadfruit, or again some lovely sea-born creature of his flock,
stumbling past in all the naive absurdity of Mother Hubbard and
brogans--these were moments that brought doubt to the good pastor;
moments when he glimpsed the unanswered problem of commingled races, of
white exile and brown host, of lonely invader and docile subject.
"We have our little trials--" he said, and smoothed them rather
fretfully, and as speedily as might be, from his pink, bald brow and
laid them with the well-ordered weft of ungrayed hair atop.
For had he not also his mission, his infant class, his home, his books,
his reports?--a whole solid and established institution from which to
draw the protective formulae of respectability. Even in the lands of the
passion-vine, the Pastor Speners will inevitably gather such formulae
about them as a snail secretes its shell....
"Undeniably," he said, abstractedly, "we have our perplexities. Guidance
is not always forthcoming in these matters. Would you take the little
money we have put by--you remember we were going to purchase a new oil
lamp for the chapel--would you take that money to buy yellow ribbons for
Jeremiah's Loo?"
"Why does Jeremiah's Loo need ribbons?" asked Miss Matilda.
"She is going to marry that tramp shell-buyer from Papeete. At least she
consents to a ceremony, if she can have the ribbons. A wild girl. I've
never had much hold over her.... It would be in some sort a bribe, I
admit--"
Father and daughter were seated in the arbored veranda at the daily
solemn rite of tea. For many years Pastor Spener had been used to hold
forth on sins and vanities at this hour before twilight. For many years
the meek partner of his joys and sorrows had assisted there, dispensing
the scant manna of dry toast and tapping the prim bulk of the
tea-urn--that sure rock of respectability the world around. And since
she had passed to the tiny cemetery on the hillside, it had not been
easy to alter the patriarchal custom; not easy always to remember that
the place across from him was now filled by another, a younger, and in
the ways of the world and the flesh, a wholly innocent auditor.
* * * * *
Ordinarily Miss Matilda did little to remind him. Ordinarily she
listened with the same meek deference. But Miss Matilda's state of mind
for some time past had been very far from ordinary; it chanced that on
this particular afternoon the private, the very private, affairs of Miss
Matilda had brought her to a condition altogether extraordinary--almost
reckless.
"You don't know the man," she suggested, "or anything about him."
He blinked.
"I don't--no. Nothing good."
"Still you are willing to marry them."
Now this was a clear departure, and a daring one, but considering all
things perhaps not strange.
For the last thirty minutes, since the pastor's return from the village
below, Miss Matilda had been conscious of a tension in the domestic air.
Up to his mention of Jeremiah's Loo an oppressive silence had brooded,
and from his manner of eyeing her over his teacup there was reason to
fear that something more troublous than yellow ribbons had ruffled his
pink serenity. If Miss Matilda had been the trembling kind she would
have trembled now at her own temerity--the result of indefinable
impulse. And yet when his answer came it was no rebuke, rather it was
eager, with an unwonted touch of embarrassment.
"What would you have me do, my dear?" he said. "I can't pass judgment on
these people. Our society is limited--largely primitive. How many months
is it since you saw another white woman here in Wailoa, for instance?
They wish to wed--that's enough."
"The man is white and the girl is a native, and you would marry them so
readily?"
* * * * *
Miss Matilda put the query with perfect outward calm. The Reverend
Spener himself was the one to clatter his cup.
"What would you have?" he repeated. "I marry them; yes. I will marry any
that ask--barring known criminals--and only too thankful to lend
religious sanction. Because--don't you see?--they are bound to marry
anyhow. Matilda--" He brought up short and regarded her with sharpened
concern, very curious for a man who was commonly so sure of himself. "My
dear daughter, I don't believe I've ever explained this point to you
before. It's not--er--it's a subject rather awkward to discuss. But
since we've reached it, there is a need why I should intrude briefly
upon your delicacy.... A very definite need."
If she gave a quick movement, it was only to set the tea-cozy in place.
If there came a flush athwart her pale cheek, it might have been a
chance ray of the deep western sun, filtering through the trellis.
"Yes?" she said.
"I am quite clear about these marriages. Quite clear. I cannot say I
advocate them, but in any such community as ours they have always been
inevitable. The missionary merely provides the service of the church, as
in duty bound. Who shall deny that he does the Lord's work toward
unifying the island type?" He blinked nervously, balked at his own lead
and started again.
"As to any stigma that may attach to such a union--really, you know,
it's not as if our natives had the least negroid taint. They are
Caucasians. Yes, my dear, that is scientifically true. The Polynesian
people are an early migration of the great Caucasian race. Besides
which, they are very fair to look upon--undeniably--very fair indeed."
She sat transfixed, but the most amazing part was to come....
"Consider, moreover," he pleaded--actually it was as if he
pleaded--"considered the position of the resident white in these
isles, far from the restraints and manifold affairs of his own world.
Life is apt to become very dreary, very monotonous for him. Ah,
yes, Matilda, you could scarce imagine, but it palls--it palls. He
requires--er--diversion, as it were, companionship, a personal share in
such charm and--er--sensuous appeal as flourish so richly on all sides
of him. Have you ever thought of the question in that light? You
haven't, of course, my dear. But consider the temptation."
He ended by retreating hastily behind his teacup, quite unnecessarily,
as it proved. Miss Matilda was in no condition just then to deploy the
expected maidenly emotions. "Consider!" Had she not? Had she been
thinking of anything else these past feverish weeks? What other exile
could have taught any secrets of monotony or dreariness to the daughter
of a lone missionary?
Chapel, school, home and chapel again, and in this round each daily move
foreseen and prescribed. An hour for getting up and an hour for lying
down; an hour for eating and an hour for praying; for turning a page and
for threading a needle. No escape from the small formal proprieties in
which her father had molded their lives. No friend, no neighbor, no
acquaintance except native pupils and servants. No stimulus except the
moral discourse of a reverend tyrant. No interests except the same petty
worries and the same money needs....
From where she sat in the veranda she could see no single object to
break the deadly sameness of it. There were the same sticks of
unsuitable furniture in the same immutable order, the same rugs at the
same angles; the same dishes, the same books, the same pictures on the
walls--"The Prodigal's Return," chromolithograph, in a South Pacific
isle! And all this not merely happening so, as it might very well happen
elsewhere. Here it was laboriously achieved, a triumph of formulated
rectitude, transplanted bodily for a reproof and an example to the heart
of the riotous tropics....
"Why did you say there was need to explain to me, father?" she managed
to ask at last.
But the pastor had had time to reform his lines.
"I spoke somewhat at large," he said, with a wave. "My specific purpose
was to define an attitude which perhaps you may have mistaken--to warn
you against undue intolerance, my dear. You see, as a matter of fact, I
had a talk to-day on this same head--quite a helpful talk--with Captain
Gregson."
For all her preoccupation with her own problems the name caught her with
new astonishment.
"Gregson! The trader?"
"Captain," he repeated, significantly. "Captain Gregson."
"You talked with him?" she exclaimed. "But he--but you--I've heard you
say--"
Thereupon Pastor Spener took the upper hand decisively, like one who has
come off well in an anxious skirmish over difficult ground.
"Never mind what you have heard, my dear. Many things have been said of
him--idle chatter of the beaches. He has been sadly misjudged. Captain
Gregson is a very remarkable man, besides being the wealthiest in the
islands--undeniably, quite the wealthiest.... He intends joining our
church."
Miss Matilda rose from the table and moved away to the open side of the
veranda, looking off to seaward. Tall, erect, with her hands resting on
the high rail, she made a decorous and restful figure against the sunset
sky. But those hands, so casual seeming, were driving their nails into
the wood. For within the maiden breast of Miss Matilda, behind that
obtrusive composure, there seethed a tumult of question, alarm,
bewilderment....
This startling dissertation of her father's--she could not begin to
think what it meant. Was it possible, in spite of all assurance, was it
possible that he knew, had heard or guessed--about Motauri? And if he
had, was it conceivable that he should speak so--to state, as it might
be, the very terms of her guilt, an actual plea for that unnameable
temptation to which she had been drifting? It was mad. She could no
longer be sure of anything, of her safety, her purpose, her father,
herself--truly, of herself. And Gregson! An evil presentiment had
pierced her at his mention of the gross, dark, enigmatic trader, whose
intent regard she had felt fixed upon her so often--whenever she met him
on the village path or passed his broad-eaved house by the beach. What
did it mean?