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A Cassowary and a Hymn-Book

A CASSOWARY and a HYMN-BOOK

by

BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES SARKA

IT'S a wise child that knows 'tis folly to be wise,” said the Marquis.

He was sitting at ease in the supper-room, enjoying trifle, floating-island, tipsy-cake, and the other items of a somewhat sticky and gassy supper. His partner, Mrs. Vandaleur, a very fascinating little widow in a demure black dress, and the most scarlet of scarlet silk stockings, had just been carried off by the fluffy and indignant young Government officer to whom she rightly owed the supper dances.

The Marquis, who had danced without intermission from the first striking-up of the band (one piano, out of tune; one violin, much affected by the climate, and given to emitting rat-like squeaks) until the eighteenth item in the program, was now resting and refreshing. I, who had given up dancing many years before, and who wasn't likely to begin again at a Port Moresby “shivoo,” was watching—if the truth must be told, watching the Marquis.

I was already getting uneasy about him, though we had returned to the comparative civilization of Port Moresby only the week before. We had a good ten days to wait for the next steamer to Sydney, and Port Moresby has nearly three hundred inhabitants, being a good deal the largest settlement in Papua. What were the chances of some one of the three hundred finding out in the course of those ten days that we possessed the second biggest diamond in the world, if the Marquis went on as he was doing now?

It was his turn to wear the stone, and nothing would induce him to give it up to me for the night, even though it was much harder for him—being fat—to hide it about his person, than for me. There it was, perfectly visible to me at all events, sticking out like a small tumor under the front of his shirt; and unless I was much more stupid than I supposed myself to be, it had already attracted some attention from little Mrs. Vandaleur.

Mrs. Vandaleur—Daisy Vandaleur, as most people called her: she signed herself “Daisie,” in her numerous letters—was always referred to as “little;” she was, as a matter of fact, about the average height of womankind. But she had a small head and very small hands and feet, and a way of looking little and forlorn. And she was fond of calling herself a “poor little widow.” I needn't go on describing “Daisie”—every one who has reached the age of thirty has met her and knows her by heart.

She had a puggy sort of little dog and a catty sort of companion, and she was a little pious, and more than a little musical, and knew how to put on her clothes (I said as much to a lady at the dance, and she replied that, in that case, it was a pity Mrs. Vandaleur didn't use her knowledge more liberally; also that at all events she knew how to put on her hair. Which gives you the attitude of feminine New Guinea toward “Daisie” in a word).

The little widow, of course, had set her cap at the Marquis from the moment of our return. That did not trouble me or the Marquis either. “Many dear women, they have done so, and I love them for it,” he explained to me. “I find it altogether natural.” Nor did it trouble me much from any ordinary point of view, that she should have sprained her ankle—just a trifle—when they were coming back from a stroll on the grass outside the hall—because Daisie was given to spraining her ankle at appropriate times. But when the Marquis lifted her up the steps of the veranda and carried her to a long chair to rest her foot for the next dance—why, then I saw Mrs. Daisie's little hand, as it dipped down from the Marquis's huge shoulder, pause for a moment at the odd lump under his shirt, and feel it with the dexterity of a pickpocket.

The Marquis did not notice; he was gazing into her eyes, which were blue eyes, and went prettily with her Titian-red hair. I began to wonder, however. And when the supper-dances came, and I saw Mrs. Vandaleur walking in with the Marquis, as lightly as he walked himself, I concluded that it was time to offer him a hint. And I did.

He answered with the mangled proverb I have already quoted, and filled another glass of ginger-ale, with the roistering air of a gallant in a Christmas number supplement.

It was the southeast season at its worst; in Port Moresby, that means that you live in the midst of a roaring gale day and night for months. Up here on the hill where the dance-room was built the veranda trembled like the hurricane deck of an Atlantic liner; the flags in the ballroom tore at their moorings on the walls; down the long tunnel of the supper-room the wind went yelling like a lost soul on its way to hell. The table cloth flapped and slatted; the crackers flew about.

Mrs. Daisie, dancing beyond the doorway with the fluffy boy, clutched at her woeful black skirts, and twinkled the scarlet stockings that so piquantly contradicted them. I could see she was keeping an eye on me. For some reason or other, Mrs. Daisie did not like me—much.

“Look, Marky,” I said (the howling of the southeaster isolated us from the other guests in our corner, as much as if we had been in a room by ourselves), “I want you to think for a moment what it means if people get on to the fact that we have a diamond worth the whole island of New Guinea in our possession. From that moment any peace we have—and Lord knows we haven't had much—ceases. In a small place like this one is safe enough from robbery; but once on a liner or in Sydney, we'd want a corps of detectives to guard the stone—if we can't keep it dark. And of course it doesn't matter where or how the news gets out—it'll run all over the world in a week, just the same.”

“All over the world!” said the Marquis thoughtfully. “You have reason. We shall be famous, me and you. Flint, I love to be famous. It is the glory of our adventures that has already made that little flower of the tropic, Dai-see Vandaleur. love me as the poor little one loves. It is true, she also thinks me beautiful. But handsome is who tells no tales!”

“Will you let me keep the stone till the steamer comes in?” I asked, dropping the vexed subject. When a man of forty-odd begins to tell you about the women who admire his beauty, you had better get off that line of rails as quick as you can.

“On my conscience, and my honor as a peer of the ancient regiment of France, I will—not,” said the Marquis. “I have the heart of a child, as the little Dai-see tells me, but a child I am not. To-morrow you will guard our property; the day after, I, and so on to the end. To the end, my friend.” He drank another bottle of ginger-ale in two gulps, and waved his empty tumbler in the air. “And even if the end shall be death, then, my friend, a dead man is out of the wood. I love your English axes.”

“Saws, I suppose you mean,” I said.

“I knew it had to do with tools; it is altogether the same. Now I will show this little beautiful some species of dancing that will make her ready to die of love, there on my feet.”

1 really think the amount of ginger-ale he had drunk must have gone to his head a little; or else it had so inflated him, mentally and physically, that he was a trifle above himself. At any rate, he volunteered to give the company an exhibition of solo dancing; and, the offer being promptly accepted, started to do—of all things—Queen Elizabeth dancing before the Scots ambassador, Melville.

“It is to please your English sentiment, and at the same time to warm the heart of the little Dai-see by laughter,” he explained to me. “This is comic: a frolic idea.”

What a scene it was! The dancers, in their odd mixture of day and evening dress, gathered round the walls under the slatting, tearing flags; the wild southeaster yelling along the veranda, so that the music, despairingly pitted against it, sounded starved and thin; in the midst of the cleared space, the Marquis, beneath a row of guttering hurricane lamps, dancing Queen Elizabeth....

He had a scarlet table-cloth about his waist and a fan in his hand; he had rouged his cheeks with a scrap of red cracker-paper dipped in water; he had borrowed a pair of high-heeled shoes (big man though he was, his foot was amazingly small), and in spite of his bulk, and his pink fat face, and his twinkling trouser-legs showing below the drapery, he was the ancient coquette of England to the life. You could even see the sour face of Melville looking on, as the dancer stepped and pirouetted “high and disposedly,” watching eagerly for the ambassador's approval.

At the end he laughed a high-pitched, cackling, old woman's laugh; struck the imaginary Melville coquettishly on the shoulder with his fan, dropped the table cloth, and became instantly a dignified nobleman of the ancient peerage of France.

Mrs. Vandaleur ran forward impulsively as he finished, and begged for more. The room applauded. The Marquis danced again.

“Let a Papuan with a drum be brought,” he ordered.

A boy was fetched from the grass slope outside the hall, where a number of natives had been looking on. He beat his iguana-skin drum as if for a native dance, with the throbbing, intoxicating beat of the New Guinea drummer. The Marquis snatched a native feather crown off the wall where it had been hung as an ornament, put it on his head, and danced “The Love Dance of the Sorcerer,” looking at Mrs. Vandaleur all the time.

I must say he had used his Papuan experiences well. The dance was New Guinea, yet something more. It had sorcery in it, mystery, magic, and sinister, wicked charm. You felt the sorcerer loved the lady and meant to win her; but you were not quite sure he did not mean to roast her on the fire and pick her pretty bones by and by.... The lookers-on applauded violently, and Mrs. Daisie, whether truthfully or not, declared herself faint when he had done, and had to be supported to a chair.

“Oh, you terrible man—you dangerous sorcerer!” I heard her murmur as he gave her his arm. “How many trusting little women's hearts have you charmed away? Do you know the power you have? I think you must be very cruel.”

“No, for I make my spelling gently: 'fair and softly is always to be blest,'” he answered, through the yelling of the wind.

Mrs. Daisie put up her hand anxiously among her curls, to see, I think, that nothing was breaking away from its moorings, and, being assured of this, fainted a little more, in the corner to which the Marquis had conducted her. Her head grazed his shirt-front, as she sank back in her chair.

“Ah! you have hurt my little face! Is it your heart that feels so hard and sharp?" she asked.

The Marquis, instead of answering, lifted her on to her feet again as lightly as if she had been a baby, and swung her back into the dancing-room, where now the music was beginning again.

“What happened to the wife of Bluebeard, little wicked?” he said, as they dropped into the waltz.

I do not know that I have the best temper in the world. Some of my friends say I have the worst when you rouse it; but that is an exaggeration. Anyhow, I could not stay in the ballroom any longer and see our fortune swinging over a gulf of disaster, on the frail thread of the Marquis's amorous folly. I went out to smoke and to swear.

The next day it was my turn to wear the Sorcerer's Stone, and I was ready enough to claim it. We had cased it in a piece of silk and sewn that up again in a piece of chamois leather, safely attached to a strong cord. No one wears waistcoats in Port Moresby, but I took care to select a shirt some sizes too wide for me, when I wore the stone, and, with a coat on, the loose folds concealed it effectively.

I was feeling a little easier about the Marquis since I had succeeded in extracting from him a solemn promise that he would not on any account or for any reason betray to any person the secret of the diamond. At the same time I managed to persuade him into altering his clothing a little, so that the stone could not be noticed unless some one went actually feeling about after it. More than this I could not do.

There is very little in the capital of Papua to occupy the mind of any reasonable person. When you have been out to see the native village, gone for a walk to Koki, where the native servants employed in the town hold nightly dances, and taken a boat across to one or two of the islands, you have about exhausted the interests of the place. It is barren and rather ugly; the white people are more civilized and therefore less interesting than those of Samarai; the natives speak English, wear trade clothing, and cheat the tourist over curios. To any one recently returned, like the Marquis and myself, from the mysteries, horrors, and adventures of the unknown interior, nothing could be more flat and tiresome than the silly little capital town.

All the more was I uncomfortable over my companion's evident fascination by Mrs. Vandaleur, whom I frankly took for an adventuress. Her very name was against her: it savored too much of stage posters to be natural. She was clever enough, I could see, to keep free of scandals; the dead or missing Vandaleur had not divorced her; cards were religiously left at her door by the ladies of the capital, who seemed to find a weird delight in playing at a strange imitation of the strange game called Society, away here in the wilderness of New Guinea.

“Like your Israelites of the Bible,” said the Marquis, who always spoke of the Old Testament as if it were the exclusive property of the English race, “these dear ladies make brick in the desert without no straw; it is for that reason, I observe, that their bricks do not hold together the one with the other.” And, indeed, the inhabitants of Port Moresby love each other scarcely better than do those of Samarai.

But though Daisie Vandaleur was quite respectable, according to the canons of the card-tray, and though in any case there was no risk of the Marquis's historic coronet descending upon her well-dressed head, I thought her none the less dangerous; perhaps rather the more.

“That dear little one, she desires quite simply to marry herself with me. I find that very touching, though I can not accord her her desire,” he said sentimentally. “Flint, I can't tell you how much pity I nave for all those beautiful women who so desire to marry with me. Of course, the day shall come at last when one of those lovely ones shall—what do you call it?—yank me in. But the rest, my heart is bleeding for those!”

He took out his embroidered silk handkerchief, and looked lovingly at the coronet. I knew he was minded to tell me the history of the lady who had worked it for him, so I got away before he had made a start. That was where I made my mistake. He went right off to Mrs. Vandaleur's, and told her.

They invited him to join the tennis-club after this. I never had time or inclination myself to learn how to throw balls at a man who doesn't want them and work hard trying to get them back when I don't want them myself—so I didn't see very much of the Marquis at this period, although for want of room we were sharing our quarters at the hotel.

After all, I had not been brought up at the court of France; I did not know half the kings of Europe, and I did not possess even a shanty in New Guinea, let alone a castle on the Loire. These things had not seemed to matter, when we were away in the wilds together, getting chased by cannibals, or being shipwrecked, or having snakes set on us by sorcerers—going ragged and hungry sometimes, and at all times not being quite as sure as we could have wished that we were ever going to get safely back again. But here in the little tin-pot capital, the kings and castles and things began to crop up again. And—as they say in sentimental novels—the Marquis and I drifted apart.

The days passed very slowly before the steamer's call. In the afternoons when the southeast was howling harder than ever and almost laying flat the little eucalyptus trees, that stand up all over the many hills on which Port Moresby is built, I used to climb the heights above the town and wander idly about, holding my hat on and thinking what I'd do with my share of the price of the diamond—if we ever got it safe away to civilization. And down below on the flat the Marquis would be playing tennis with Mrs. Vandaleur, or squiring her about on the beach.

I never felt inclined to watch him on the days when it was my turn to guard the Sorcerer's Stone. But on his days I don't mind admitting that I shadowed him like a detective. In a town that is all small hills, with every house overlooking all the others, there is not much difficulty about that. And I grew more and more uneasy, as the time went on, to see the increasing number of hours he spent with Daisie. Every second evening, when he handed over the chamois-leather case in the privacy of our own room and said, “All right, my Flint!” I felt as if another barrier between our fortune and its realization had been painfully passed over; another cast of the dice fallen in our favor. For I knew now that Mrs. Vandaleur had her suspicions; and I trusted her—well, not half so far as I could have thrown her supple, eel-like little body.

Sometimes, from my aerie among the rocks above, I saw amusing scenes on the tennis-ground and the flat. The most amusing was on the day when Daisie persuaded the Marquis to dance on the tennis-court with a cassowary, a pet of some one of the residents, which us to hang about the grounds, begging humbly for cake, and if refused instantly turning vicious and jumping up into the air to kick with both feet at the person who had repulsed it. The players used to tease the creature a good deal in order to see it fly into a rage; it was a young bird, and not half grown, but it was very active, and went into the most amusing frenzies of stamping, whistling rage.

Cassowaries, as most people know, are extremely fond of dancing; and Mrs. Vandaleur incited the Marquis first to dance with the bird and afterward to give an imitation of its style. I do not think I ever saw anything funnier than the tall, thin bird and the tall, fat Marquis setting to partners on the green grass court, the cassowary taking its part quite seriously, and sidling, chasséing, springing, like a girl in a theatre, the man craning his neck in imitation, stepping stiff-legged as it stepped, and using his arms exactly as it used its wings.

Afterward, the Marquis improvised a “Dance of the Cassowary,” and it was one of the very best things I had ever seen him do. I have heard since then that it has met with much approval in his castle on the Loire.

It was my day for the Sorcerer's Stone, so I looked on with an easy mind. After all, it seemed to me, I had been making too much fuss. The Marquis was not a fool, and even if the little widow succeeded in worming out of him the secret of the diamond, it was only what would probably happen sooner or later somewhere. We had been through so many risks with the Sorcerer's Stone that I had nearly come to believe there was something supernatural about it, for it always seemed to work out right in the end.

Next day I was suffering from a touch of fever, as most New Guinea residents do at times, and I did not go out at all, but stayed in my room and took quinine till the walk spun round me. The attack passed off toward evening, and I was lying on my bed, feeling weak, but better, when the Marquis came in.

“Had a pleasant day?” I asked. He did not answer, but went over to the wash-stand and began washing his hands, with his back to me. I was feeling almost too tired to talk, so I lay silent for a while, watching the eastern sky-line, through our little square window, turn pink with the reflected glow of the sunset in the unseen west, and the green-gray eucalyptus trees streaming before the ceaseless thrash of the “trade” that blew up strong and stronger as the night came on.

... It occurred to me that the Marquis was a very long time washing his hands. The room was getting darker; the peopled the hotel were clashing plates and clinking glasses down below. It was nearly the dinner-hour.... What could be the matter with my companion?

“Say Mark!” I called out from my bed, “have you been murdering any one, like Lady Macbeth, and are you trying to wadi the 'damned spot' away, or what?”

The Marquis turned round so suddenly that he flung the tin basin rattling on the floor, and the water rushed in a deluge across the room. He did not take the slightest notice of it. He came up to the bed, and even in the twilight I could see that his face was white.

I knew what had happened before he spoke.

“Flint,” he said, beating his pink, soapy hands up and down in the air, “I can not tell you. I can not tell you. O God, what have I done!”

He sat down on the floor—we had no chair—right in the middle of the deluge of water, and began to cry.

“I have betrayed and ruined you, my friend,” he said. “I would like to die here where I am. What is the use that I should live? I say that I can not tell you what I have done.” He wept again.

“Oh, get out of that water and sit on the bed,” I said. “You don't need to tell me: all I want to know is, how it happened and what Mrs. Vandaleur has to do with it.” I was feeling pretty badly about the affair, for I saw in a moment that he had lost the diamond; but there is never any use, to my mind, in making a fuss.

The Marquis jumped up and tore open his shirt with the air of a man opening his very heart for your inspection. Round his neck was hanging a string, and on the string was a small silk bag—empty.

“Not one confoundable thing has that angel had to do with it,” he said. “It is altogether me. I took it out of the chamois case this morning because when I play tennis that chamois sticks, and comes to out of the front of my shirt; but the silk, it slips and does not come out. So I take away the chamois and I play tennis all the afternoon. And in the end, when it is time to and they have all gone, all but Mrs. Dai-see and me, I feel my hand into my shirt and there is nothing there! Wildly I tear out the bag, and it is splitted-”

“Didn't you know that no silk will stand in the tropics? It was only a protection for the stone. You might as well trust tissue-paper as silk in New Guinea,” I said wearily.

“I did not know, I swear. Well, when I see it is gone, I tell Dai-see that I have lost a something I have the greatest value for, a gem—I do not say a diamond. And she call many native boys. And they look, look, look, till it get dark. And I will swear, if it were that I was dying, we look every inch. But there is no stone.”

“I reckon Mrs. Daisie could tell you,” I began.

“Halt!” cried the Marquis. “Dai-see is as innocent as the lamb unborn. When we see the stone is lost, she will not look herself. She sit on the seat and watch. She weep for me, that little one; she is most blooming sorry. But she will not be suspect: she won't touch that searching herself. She can not understand, and I can not understand. It was all razed clean, that ground: there was no gulfs anywhere, and the weeds was not. It should have been finding all right. But, alas it is not!”

He seemed so exceedingly distressed that I could not find it in my heart to say what I thought of him and his carelessness and of Mrs. Vandaleur—whom I could not believe altogether innocent—and of the whole wretched affair altogether. After all. Marquis or no Marquis, the man was my “mate,” and we had been through a lot together, and a nicer fighter than he was, when one got into a tight place, I never wished to find. And neither he nor I was worse off than either had been a month or two before: we had lost nothing—except a dream. It was a splendid dream, no doubt, and one that I at least was never likely to have a chance of dreaming again. But I thought I could do without it, on the whole; and if I could, who hadn't done the mis chief, so, I reckoned, could he.

I said something to this effect, and the Marquis wiped away his tears. It was with a red silk handkerchief this time, and the embroidery of the coronet, as he told me, had a story attached to it that was written in his heart's blood.

“Has Mrs. Daisie given you a handkerchief yet?” I asked.

“No,” he said quite gravely, “she has but given me a hymn-book.”

“A hymn-book!” I yelled, choking with laughter. “What, in the name of everything inappropriate, should Mrs. Vandaleur give you hymn-books for?”

“She is very devoted,” said the Marquis reprovingly. “She thinks that she will make a Lutheran of me. Of course there isn't any dashed chance that such a consummation could arrive, but it makes the little one happy. Me also. As for the hymns, she sings them to me: I hear her sing them when I come up the road past her little bird-nest of a house.”

“Are you going to ask her to help us to look for the diamond to-morrow?”

“I won't do nothing you don't wish,” said the Marquis with sudden meekness. “I can not forget that I have ruined you."

“No fear,” I told him. “Are you going down to dinner, or aren't you? Tell them to send me up a bit: I'm getting better. I rather think you and I are going to have a busy day to-morrow, Marky.”

We had. I got up a bit before daylight and had a dozen natives helping me to search the tennis-ground before the sun was well up. We hunted for a good hour and I came to the conclusion that, if the diamond had ever been on the tennis-court, it certainly was not there now.

I came back and reported the result of my labors to the Marquis. He was sitting in our room, and looked very gorgeous m a marvelous pink silk kimono embroidered with green and gold dragons; but his hair had not been brushed up into its usual fierce bristles; his mustache was as limp as a walrus's, and his general aspect suggested a pink cockatoo that has been out in the rain.

“Don't lose heart,” I told him. “The stone is somewhere. It's been picked up, you take my word for it. It must be in Port Moresby, and you can leave me to find out where.”

It was in my mind, and I could not get it out, that if I wanted to know where the Sorcerer's Stone had gone to, I had better keep as much in Mrs. Vandaleur's company as possible. So, without giving vent to any suspicions I had, I allowed the Marquis to think that I had got the better of my prejudices against the little widow. I even accompanied him to tea with her when he went there to call a day or two after the loss of the stone.