The sands of Oro

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE:

I. A Wedding in Far-Away. 1

II. Birds of Paradise. 16

Chapter I

N EAP tide is evil tide, in that sinister, strange land called Papua.

Wander about Port Moresby of a neap tide night, down Ela beach—among the mangrove swamps near the houses or under Goldie Law, where the foul mud palpitates to the heave of poisonous life—and, if you go alone, listen, with the tumpery tin town and its jangling people shut quite away from your mind, and you will hear, in the wicked stillness of the tides, the heart of Papua speaking.

She does not change. In nineteen hundred and ten, with a few score miners, Government folk, traders, and missionaries for all her population, with never a town that could justly be called a town, with not a carriage road in the Territory, she was what to-day, with towns and plantations, and roads of a sort, and traffic of a kind, she still is: a sinister wilderness informed with the spirit of evil.

Papua will get you—if she can. That is what she tells you, with insolent plainness, the first hour that you spend away from the steamer, when you look across from Port Moresby’s shores and hotels to the untamed black hills beyond the blue harbour. No one has ever put into words just what it is that those hills say to the newcomer, of a scarlet evening at sundown, when the Day of Judgment seems impending over the doomed town, and the lands where no man goes are darkening into a night that is like the last night of all.

But it is not only the sensitive, the people of moods and words, who hear this inimical snarl. Every one hears it. The road-gang overseer, the woman coming up to cook for the hotel, and the clerk in whose ears, heretofore, has sounded —“Even in dreams the chink of his pence ”—stares round, and says, with a shiver not quite disagreeable: “My word, it is a queer place all right; looks like getting up and biting you, if you understand what I mean.” . . .

When the Morinda , carrier of half the hopes and fears of Papua, made herself fast to the wharf at Port Moresby, it was hot February, it was neap tide, and it was sunset. Stacy Rowan, the newest bride, looked out from the rails at the straggling town; mangroves edging, like mourning borders, the gray mud of Konedobu; far off, the wicked sunset was dying behind the wicked hills. Natives, who in their slim brown naked¬ ness looked overbalanced by their tremendous New Guinea wigs of black wool, loafed about the wharf, spit¬ ting red betel nut, and staring at the strangers.

As many a bride had asked before, Stacy, the latest and newest, asked herself with dismay: “However am I to live here?” Then she gathered up her forces, and put on a smile, seeing the man she was to marry next morning step across the gangway.

“He might have been a little quicker,” was her thought, instantly suppressed. Now was not the time for criticism. Nor ever any more, if she was to be wise and happy. And she meant to be both.

Holliday had his newest white suit on and a freshly pipe-clayed helmet. His face was pale under the elec¬ tric lights of the Morinda that had shone on so many meeting and parting couples through the years. The sarcastic interest of friends standing and staring on the wharf, the looks directed at Stacy, stung him like mosquito bites. True, he had always accepted mar¬ riages—other men’s marriages—as essentially farcical incidents; he had cheapened the looks of many a bold or shy young woman, meeting her betrothed on that pier. But when it was yourself—your marriage . . . Thank God, Stacy had turned herself out

well; he liked that white flibberty, lacy gown, and the big simple hat. What a little gentlewoman she looked among all these commonplace or brazen women. It wasn’t often they saw a bride of her class step down the gangway.

He threw out his chest, and went to meet her with a comfortable feeling of pride. After all, no one could say that he wasn’t in luck.

Stacy stood to meet him at the door of her cabin, a light figure that somehow looked smaller than it really was; a slim thing with something rare about her; eyes dark and sweet yet almost boyish in their direct gay glance; pink lips in a pointed cream-pale face.

Pretty? Attractive rather; elusive, a little—the in¬ tellectual, not the fleshy type. Stacy, you could see, was not just every one’s fancy. You would pique yourself on knowing how to appreciate her. You would wonder—if you had not had cause to wonder a hundred times before—how it is that some men fancy some women; odder still, how some women fancy some men. . . .

The solution, here, would have been simpler than you thought. Stacy did not fancy this man—especially.

Yes, you would have had a chance—perhaps. For at this moment, standing, in the last of her maiden days, on the Morinda’s deck, with her bridegroom just ready to greet her, Stacy is, for the final time in her life, quite fancy-free.

You see, the girl had a conscience; she would not have promised to promise all sorts of things to God and Charlie Holliday if there had been any one else— any one else in the whole world. It might have been you—had you been on the Morinda’s deck, and had Stacy—rare little Stacy—seen you in just the right light. You may, for what I know, be most attractive. And there would have been no sin in Stacy’s changing her mind—that night.

But you were not there, you know, and Charlie Hol¬ liday was and Stacy had promised to marry him be¬ cause—most unlike a real heroine—she had not had any other proposals, and was anxious to settle down in a home of her own. The trouble with Stacy was that she belonged to the wrong generation. She was still quite young, but in spirit she was of the ’eighties and ’nineties; a rather highly educated girl, with the student paleness and the student nervousness just a little developed; a dainty taste in clothes, but no lik¬ ing for public semi-nakedness; not mad on motoring; without the Boccaccio freedom of speech that many a decent, innocent girl affects. Yet feminine. Yet rare. Yet with a heart—the rarest thing of all.

And the young men of Sydney had not proposed to her. Worse, she had not wanted them to do so.

There was a story of fallen fortunes—everybody’s story—of “coming out to the Colonies” to retrieve them; of a father who died without retrieving anything. Stacy, named Anastatia, after some impossible greataunt, did not fit into her cheap suburban surroundings. The better class of Australia was not for her. Holli¬ day was from “home.” He had stayed at the same boarding house when on his leave—the widow and her daughter could just afford a boarding house existence, faintly liked by one, detested by the other. And so it had come about.

From sixteen until twenty-six Stacy had waited, shyly, secretly, for the Prince. At twenty-six, among Mrs. Walker’s distressful “paying-guests” she had de¬ cided, in her clear, college-trained mind, that he was not coming, and that she had better, with her eyes open and her heart tight closed, set forth along the common way of womanhood.

Therefore, the Morinda and the staring electric lights; therefore, Charlie Holliday drawing her back into her cabin, to kiss her unobserved; therefore, the dead, strange feeling as his lips met hers—the cer¬ tainty that she might like, but would never love, the man whose wife, this time to-morrow evening, she would be.

What Charlie Holliday thought was much more com¬ monplace; it turned upon his luck, upon the “saucy pieces” some men had got for wives; upon the certainty that this sweet maiden would never bring scandal to his name. Upon the nuisance of the ceremony to-mor¬ row ; upon the comfortable home he was going to have.

. . . Stacy’s point of view did not occur to him

at all.

They went ashore together. Holliday had arranged that Stacy should spend the night at the house of a married friend. Next day, after the wedding, a boat would take them down the coast to Siai, the Govern¬ ment station, of which Holliday was the Resident Mag¬ istrate.

The wonderful green dusk of a Port Moresby “north¬ west” evening was settling fast into night. Out on the reef two tiny beacon towers showed red-lit heads against a faded sunset. In the embrace of the great sweep of harbour hills the town was a toy, a little noth¬ ing, overshadowed by the blackening peaks behind Tatana. To Stacy, sensitive, highly strung, some¬ what inclined toward nerves and depression, as a girl may not unnaturally be on the last day of her girlish life, the sinister aspect of the place struck home. Yet she knew that it had its own loveliness if she had but been in the mood to see it. Of a sudden, as she stepped down the slanting gangway, supported by Charlie’s hand, a wind from nowhere broke over her soul, and she felt what this evening, this place, might have been, if only the dream that she had put from her had found its realization. The dream and the glory! The one man whom she had never met, never now would meet! What they would have meant to her in this wild, strange land! . . . “The desert were a paradise .

if thou wert there—if thou wert there!”

“Mind that last step,” said Charlie’s somewhat squeaky voice. “You shouldn’t wear such high heels; they’re not safe.” His well-bred, undistinguished face, with the sandy hair showing under the helmet, and the scrubby moustache bristling over a lower lip that went too far back, looked up, lighted by a bunch of cargo electrics, as she stepped down. The winches had sprung to work slinging cases and bales out of the holds; the noise they made was deafening, bewildering. Stacy could hardly “hear herself think.” A face that showed suddenly, for a moment, in the blaze of light, behind the head of Charlie Holliday, seemed so unreal to her that she did not fully understand she had seen it until she and Holliday were away from the ship and walking down the encumbered, noisy wharf.

Then she remembered the face clearly. She thought it was new to her, and yet, somehow, familiar—an odd contradiction in terms for logical Stacy.

It was shadowed by a white sun-helmet, like most of the others on the pier, sunset being, as yet, not far behind, but it seemed to her to have something curiously arresting about it. It looked at her—but plenty of people did that; Stacy, if she had gone short of actual “offers,” had nevertheless enjoyed her share of ordi¬ nary “attention.” She could not recall the features exactly; only the impression they made, which was one of hardness, keenness, and immense, almost discon¬ certing self-possession. And the eyes looked out— right out. They carried.

It was like the trick you play, glancing at something in a vivid light, and then swiftly looking away again. The image stays, like a photograph, for a moment.

The face stayed with Stacy, momentarily, and was gone. She found she had lost step with Charlie’s conver¬ sation, and would have to pick up. He had been talking steadily almost from the instant of their meeting. He was talking steadily still—telling her about some in¬ tolerable act of iniquity and oppression which had to do with him, Charles Holliday, with the Hon: The Government Secretary, and with certain minutes and reports callously annotated “Please Explain.” The Hon: The Government Secretary, it seemed, had sinned against all canons of humanity. It appeared to be a case where the Geneva Convention should have been called in—in justice to wounded Holliday.

He burbled on. Stacy walked beside him through the violent lights and shadows of the wharf, past the town, and to the quiet house where she was to spend the night. She hardly opened her lips. She had not re¬ membered him so selfish. Did he not even want to know what sort of a voyage she had had ?

It seemed he did, at last. When the introduction to the elderly ex-missionary host and hostess was over, and he was moving away to pass down the veranda stairs again, he suddenly turned about.

“Had a good trip and all that?” he asked, care¬ lessly.

Stacy had not had a good trip. It had been rough; she had been sick most of the way; the passengers had been an unpleasant crowd, and one of the men had an¬ noyed her by trying, persistently, to get up the sort of cheap flirtation that the engaged girl knows so well.

She remembered all this, but she deliberately replied, pardoning herself for the lie:

“Quite all right, thanks.”

“ ’S’right,” said Charlie, twisting his moustache. He looked about him. The missionary pair, who had be¬ friended countless brides and bridegrooms in their time, were discreetly invisible. “ ’S’right,” said Char¬ lie again, in a satisfied tone. He kissed her heartily. “Night-night,” he said, and went.

Stacy stayed for a moment on the veranda and then went in to join her hosts.

Since she had dined they showed her to her room, leaving her, with the finest of tact, entirely to herself. The night was cooling down, the after-sunset breeze had begun to blow. White curtains in the room were flapping pleasantly. There was a small white bed; a little simple furniture. Stacy’s suit-case and dress¬ ing bag, carried ahead by boys, had already come. The place looked home-like, pleasant; after the cramped quarters of the ship and the crowding and staring on the pier it was infinitely restful.

Stacy took off her hat and smoothed her hair. She did not purpose to leave the room again that night. There was a comfortable lounge chair; she lay down upon it, hands beneath her head, and tried her hardest not to think. Now was not the time for thinking— that time was past. It was the time for making up one’s mind to go through with it. Just a resolution, an accepting of things as they were. Perhaps it was better not even to make resolutions; you didn’t resolve about things that were settled. What were those pic¬ tures on the wall ?—one could interest oneself with them for awhile. There were a good many. “The Sea Hath Its Pearls”—tiresome, inevitable thing! Wasn’t there a song? How did it go?

. . . The sea hath its pearls.

And my heart hath its love.

She felt as one feels who picks up an innocentseeming piece of dark iron and finds it almost red-hot. Not that song to-night! What was the next picture? Equally inevitable—Leighton’s love-intoxicated pair, the famous “Wedded.” Oh! not that either!

She sprang up from the lounge, and began to walk about the room, hands behind her, as was her way when restless. What other pictures? A gallery of family enlargements—three pairs of brides and bridegrooms among them. Had some evil spell descended on her?

Why could she see nothing but love pictures on this night of all others?

It came to her that all pictures—all, that is, of uni¬ versal appeal—were love pictures. The room contained nothing in the least degree uncommon. Its ornaments were the ornaments of a million others. It was she who, somehow or other, had fallen out of step with simple, common, human thoughts and ways—and she, setting forth to-morrow on the common road, from which there could be no drawing-back.

Any more? Marcus Stone’s “The Lovers’ Quarrel.” Inevitable, too. Then Watts’s “Love and Life” and “Love and Death.” She knew these also; the first said little to her, but before the second she stood for a moment, hands behind her, grave eyes staring. What would it be to love like that? She could fancy herself —no, could have fancied herself; that was the term to use now—standing in the place of the weak small Love, holding back, with bleeding hands—with shattered arms, maybe, like Scottish Margaret—that imminent white form of Death.

Next picture—the last. No painting of love or separation this; a simple, enlarged photographic group of men. White suits, bare heads; the roof of a veranda over. Men sitting round a table, intent upon some business—turning away from it just for a mo¬ ment, to face the camera. That was the impression. There was a line printed in ornamental characters underneath—“The Papuan Trading and Mining and Plantation Association. First meeting, 19-.”

Out of them all one face seemed to leap; to look at her, and hold her eyes. Stacy could not, afterward, remember any of the others clearly.

It was a man at the near end of the table, dressed, like the others, in white. He had turned in his chair, and was leaning on the back of it with one arm. His eyes, large, light, intensely masculine, looked straight into hers. There was something candid about the face, yet reserve sat there; the candour told you nothing but what it chose. Black eyebrows barred the fore¬ head heavily, with an effect almost odd; a dark mous¬ tache, thick grown and long, in the fashion of the day, gave a certain touch of fierceness. Hard, concen¬ trated, determined, the face was that of the typical pioneer. It was not till you had noted all these things that you saw it was a handsome face; immediately on this came the conviction that the owner of it knew, and that he did not care. A certain touch of awkward¬ ness about the figures and attitudes of the other men, rather than anything very noticeable in the leaning figure, led you to observe that the man was well-made, graceful beyond the average. His age seemed to be somewhere about forty; but a forty as different from the forty of cities and civilization as middle-age of the cattle-dog, that runs all day among flying hoofs and threatening horns, is different from the middle-age of a snuffling watch-dog in a square.

Across the mind of Charlie Holliday’s bride flitted an unbidden vision of the future. Charlie was thirty-five, and looked every day of it. He would be more like the house-dog than the cattle-dog—much more so—in ten years’ time. She could see him with an expandingfigure. The man in the picture had a waist like a bit of spring steel. He had a small, slightly boned hand, but it looked as if it could hold. . . . Charlie’s

fingers were inclined to be podgy.

Determinedly, Stacy wrenched her mind away from that train of thought. Charlie was a good fellow, and very fond of her. What would it be like if this man was fond of any one?

Like a flash the answer came. This man would not be “fond” of any one, he would love.

“Oh!” cried Stacy, sitting down and putting her hands over her eyes. “Am I a bad woman? How can I think like this, the very night before my wedding? A man I never—never . . . even . . .”

She could not finish the sentence. She knew—had known from the first moment her eyes fell on the pic¬ ture—that the face was the face she had seen, for an instant, under the staring electrics upon the wharf an hour ago.

And it had looked at her—she knew that, too—as no man ever had looked at her before; as never Charlie could look at any woman in the world.

She turned slowly, magnetized, and fixed her eyes once more on the pictured face, so careless, so strong, so certain of itself. After a time—she could not tell how long—she withdrew her eyes. The candle that she had lit on coming in was wasted, and guttering low in its holder. The night was waxing late . . . To¬

morrow ! To-morrow!

For all her keen mind, for all the college training on which she prided herself, Stacy did not know the mean¬ ing of the wild fit of tears that swept over her and left her beaten down as corn is beaten down by rain. She did not know that it was Nature’s last despairing cry —the immemorial cry of the unborn children for the father that God meant for them and civilization denied.

The Government launch, Tatana , under a foaming northwest breeze, was rolling on the road to Siai, out¬ side Idler’s Bay. In Port Moresby, it being a Saturday midday, men were gathered about the great ex¬ change of conversation, Flanagan’s bar.

Somebody—a trader—cursed the “blanky Govern¬ ment” for the state of native trade. Somebody—a Government official—pretended not to hear, lest he should be obliged to take notice; finished his glass of beer, and spoke loudly on the ever-green and interest¬ ing question of the steamer time-table. Somebody—a plantation manager from out back, who had been cele¬ brating mail-day—broke into comment about the mag¬ istrate’s wedding, and criticized him freely for a stingy beggar that grudged his friends a glass of champagne, and had “gone and got married in a whisper, away at the mission house.”

“And a pretty girl,” he continued, leaning back in his deck chair, and looking mournfully at the tum¬ bler he held in his hand, as if Stacy were somewhere buried within the depths of it. “Mind you, a pretty girl, a nice girl, decent too, none of your (blank) Port Moresby weddings where a chap is hauled off by the scruff of his neck to make an honest woman of her— you know-”

Some of the men nodded. It appeared they did.

“A pretty girl, from down south,” went on the manager, sentimentally. “A girl with a (blank) com¬ plexion, and we don’t even have a look at her!”

The barmaid, a skinny little old-young woman with a face plastered like a wall, and a sly, evil look, lifted her hand and yawned behind it, contemptuously.

“The Mosquito’s jealous,” suggested a miner, lean¬ ing across the bar.

“Not me,” said the barmaid, with a high, affected laugh. “I daresay she’s no better than she need be, no more than any one else.”

“That’s right, Mosquito, wire into her. Of course she isn’t,” agreed the trader. A neighbour jogged him sharply by the elbow.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, with an oath.

“Hold your jaw. Look at him!” whispered his friend.

The trader turned round. A tall lean man, with regular features and a hard expression, was looking fixedly at him.

“Well, what do you want?” he blustered.

“Ladies,” said the tall man, very clearly, “have the privilege of criticizing each other if they like. When a man criticizes a lady, he has to answer for it.”

“What the blazes is she to you?”

“Shut it! Shut it!” urged his friend, whispering, and dragging him by the arm. “Come away. I want you.”

“Mrs. Holliday,” said the tall man, “isn’t anything to me. I simply don’t choose to have a decent woman’s name spoken lightly of when I’m about to prevent it.” His face turned dangerously white as he spoke. The friend of the trader saw, and half laughing, wholly in earnest, managed somehow to urge and drag him into the billiard-room.

“You never gave me that hundred up,” he said. “Come on.” Shamming reluctance, the man let him¬ self be led.

“What’s it all about?” asked the official of another, putting down his empty glass, and preparing to go. “Does he know her?”

“Never met her,” declared the other in a low tone of voice, looking across at the tall man, who had come back to his normal colour now. “She’s a stranger to every one here—some one from Home, I believe.

Rather a swell, like what Holliday thinks himself. But that chap was just getting ready to punch the face off Cripps. He’s a terrible hitter when he does get his monkey up, and it’s up about something to-day.”

“Yes?”

“I should think so. Bear with a sore head he is, and he’s had a good few nips since breakfast. Doesn’t show on him, of course. I daresay he’s got a nasty letter by the mail. Happens to all of us sometimes.”

“It does,” agreed the official, with a bitten-off sigh. “Pity he runs with such a crowd; he’s one of the very best.”

“He doesn’t run with any crowd, he runs with the whole Territory—Government House down to Dutch Joe. Only fellow in New Guinea who can,” declared the other official. “But I wonder what’s started him having a couple this morning; he’s mostly on the water wagon. It must have been an earthquake of some kind or other that put him out; he’s made of rub¬ ber and cast iron, I should say.”

“Yes, so should I. Are you coming to lunch?”

Outside, the northwester rattled in the palms and blew white feathers of foam along the sea-road by the wharves. Plates chinked in Flanagan’s dining room; the black boys shuffled about from table to table.

Above, in the deserted bedroom story, the man who was made of rubber and cast iron sat alone in his room, with his head buried in his hands.

Chapter II

I N JUNE, all along the coast of the Central Divi¬ sion, the southeaster blows furiously.

Siai station is a little sheltered from the full force of these cool-season gales. Nevertheless, the long verandas of the Magistrate’s house are swept all day by a steady breeze; papers, if not weighted down, take wings; canvas blinds tear loose from their fasten¬ ings. Upon the iron cook-house roof the low young palms beat madly, with a sound as of a giant clapping hands. In the wonderful flame-tree and frangipanni avenue, planted long ago by some beauty-loving Presi¬ dent, the southeaster has its will; of windy mornings, sweeping up from a sea that is blue as scilla flowers, it riots among the blossoming tops of the trees, and spreads a carpet of scarlet and ivory, fit for a fairy king, on the coral-gravelled roadway. And still the trees—the weird, polyp-fingered frangipanni, the fea¬ thery flame-tree, with its blooms like red dragonflies— stand full of flowers; and still, each day, the scented shower is shed anew. And of those who see the wonder —a trader, a recruiter, coming to sign on boys; an official inspecting stations; some planter calling in to beg a case of benzine for his launch—not one in ten looks at it, or cares that it is there.

Stacy Holliday, wife of the Magistrate of Siai, 16 liked the frangipanni avenue. When her husband was away upon patrol—and of late his patrols had been extraordinarily long and frequent—she used to walk there often, treading upon the falling clusters of red and creamy flowers, and silently staring at the sea— the sea, blue as nothing else on earth can be blue, burst¬ ing out, in shouts of colour, from behind some peaked brown native roof or beneath some lattice of green palm. The beauty of Siai, of New Guinea as a whole, gave her little pleasure. It seemed too beautiful; it passed the saturation point of the esthetic sense. It was like saccharin for over-sweetness, like a high, thrill¬ ing, long-drawn violin note, singing and never ceasing. She wanted it to stop.

She understood, now, how Papua burned the life out of people by means other than fever. She knew that all emotions in that land of fierce beauty and strong contrast were sharpened to a point almost unbearable. Even in the white settlements, there was incessant quar¬ relling; there was love-making—hot and primitive as that of the Papuans themselves; excitement, incredible to folk of cooler lands, about the smallest happenings of daily life. Out in the “bush,” the mind, abnormally active, thrashed like a ship’s propeller in the air for the want of its accustomed restraining medium of other minds and lives. Out in the bush, life was nak¬ edly simple, feeling starkly unmodified. Out in the bush was not a good place for people—for most people. Especially, it was not a good place for a woman who had made a mistake.

In the long weeks of Holliday’s absences—those weeks that fret the heart and nerves of the Papuan official’s wife—Stacy, left alone in the care of half a dozen black police, had time to think. And the burden of her thinking, as she walked between the be¬ witched frangipanni trees, or down by the shore, where shells and shards of coral fled tinkling to the breeze, was always the same—It never should have been.

She did not know which she hated most—the long stretches of utter loneliness, when, for weeks at a time, not a white face showed at Siai station save her own, staring dumbly at her in the shadowy glass, or the weeks in between, when Charlie was at home, with his endless demands on her time and attention—which she met willingly, as a small part of the debt she could not help owing him—and on her love, which she did not give at all.

It seemed impossible for Holliday to recognize the fact. Stacy was a dutiful wife; beyond that, he did not appear to see. His egotism was so enormous as to fill his life from east to west and north to south again. He was proud of himself for having married a girl of good family and good looks; proud, when rare visitors arrived, of Stacy’s able housekeeping which enabled him to show off the resources of his home; proud, always and inevitably, of Charles Holli¬ day, of everything he said, did, and intended to do. The thought that any woman could be less than en¬ chanted to be Charlie Holliday’s wife and the mis¬ tress of his home could not have found lodging in his mind.