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