CHAPTER XIII
THE SCENE OF THE FINAL DRAMA
We spent the night at the hotel and went together to call on Rona at theMission the following morning. The change in the girl was startling, fartoo great to be accounted for by the baggy Mother Hubbard that hadreplaced the close-clinging _sarongs_ and _sulus_ in which I had grownaccustomed to seeing her at Kai. Her face was thinner and the formerpeach-like bloom of her cheeks had given way to a dusky sallowness. Thecurve of her lips had flattened--and hardened; hard, too, was the fixedstare of her great sloe eyes. To a stranger the pucker of concentrationbetween her eyebrows might almost have suggested sullenness. The linesabout her eyes and mouth, which spoke to me of suffering, might haveseemed to another as stamped there by hate. She was still beautiful, butin a new way. It was a wild, fluttered sort of loveliness that hauntedrather than allured. The woman before me could never "sit Buddha," Itold myself; those dreamy spells of repose had not punctuated herpresent life with intervals of Oriental peacefulness.
Decidedly reserved in her manner toward Allen, Rona tried to be warm inher greeting to me, but quickly showed signs of restraint andembarrassment. She became even more ill at ease when "Slant," aftergenial old Dr. Oakes invited him out to see a new saddle horse that hadjust arrived from Singapore, excused himself and left us alone. Shesheered off so sharply from my first mention of the name of Bell, andbecame so palpably nervous at a couple of attempts I made to lead roundto him by degrees, that I gave up trying to induce her to speak of himout of sheer pity. Even my inquiry after the health of "Peeky" of theembroidered shawl drew only a weary little smile and a sad shake of herriotous tumble of blue-black hair.
She was ready enough to talk about the picture, though even in thatconnection I was at once conscious of a lack of real enthusiasm on herpart. She seemed anxious to get it started, however, and said shesupposed we would be going to live on the schooner in a day or two. Sheeven confessed to having worried a good deal for fear the _Cora_ wouldbe broken up by a storm before the picture was made. When I told herthat we would not need to live on the schooner, and perhaps would nothave to make more than one or two short visits to it, she appeared agood deal put out for a few moments. She scowled angrily and started tospeak; then thought better of it, bit her lip and held her tongue. Sheappeared a bit mollified when I said we would make our first visit, toplan the picture, just as soon as the quarantine people would disinfectthe schooner for us. (That this had not been done yet I had alreadylearned through 'phoning to the Station the night before.) She observedimpatiently that she thought disinfection was a needless precaution, andI had to explain that it was not a matter of precaution at all on ourpart; that it was against the law for anyone to board a ship that hadcarried plague until it was disinfected, and that if we tried it on the_Cora_ the whole lot of us would probably be clapped in jail andquarantined afterwards.
She softened a little as I got up to go, and her "Next time I show you'Peekie,' Whit-nee--'Peekie' is a ver-ee sick bird," sounded almost likeold times. The hand she gave me was hot and dry but unshaking, and thealmost cutting grip of it tense with nervous force. I noticed that herfinger nails, though trimmed closer than of old and no longer stained,were still of unusual length.
I found Allen, his face flushed with enthusiasm, putting the doctor'snew colt up and down the sward before the Mission chapel in sharp burstsof terrific speed. The animal, Oakes explained to me, had been given tohim by a petty Rajah of the Federated Malay States as a token of hisappreciation of the doctor's success in removing a troublesome appendixfrom a favourite dancing girl some months previously. It was a chunkybay gelding, only his small head, full neck and a certain trimness ofhock bearing out Oakes' claim that he was out of a Mameluke importeddirect from Bassorah by the Sultan of Johore. For the rest he favouredhis Timor dam, and looked built for endurance and handiness rather thanspeed. The instant Allen was on his back, however, his sure instincttold him that the powerful little beast had swiftness as well as stayingpowers, and he was already itching to put his judgment to the test. Aweek later, having quietly entered him in the race of the day--thePlanters' Handicap--at the Townsville midsummer meet, he rode thegelding himself and gave the local betting public the worst jolt inNorth Queensland track annals by winning at two-hundred-to-one. Everypound that the wily Allen cleaned up on the race went to build the goodDoctor Oakes, shortly transferred to Fiji, the largest and best equippedMedical Mission in all of Polynesia. The full story of what the winningof that race meant to the game old missionary with the sporting bloodhas yet to be written.
My plan of visiting the _Cora_ to make a preliminary study of the"Black-birder" met with an unexpected check. The quarantine people hadreadily consented to give the schooner a rough disinfection, one thatwould make it quite safe for us to board her as long as we kept clear ofthe holds, which would require more drastic treatment. Before theformaldehyde squad got away, however, several cases of smallpox werereported in the native quarter, and all the available disinfectingapparatus was called upon for use there. It would be at least a week orten days, we were told, before an outfit would be free for the _Cora_.
Personally, I didn't mind the delay in the least; for one reason,because Rona's strange mood had quenched my initial surge of ardour forthe picture, and, for another, because I had still to find a suitableplace in which to work. Allen seemed to be worrying very little over theforced wait. "I've laid my bets to win or lose, and I'll be there tocash in after the finish," he said philosophically. He spent most of thetime in the saddle, getting out mornings at daybreak to give the"Missionary Colt" (as he called the Oakes gelding) workouts on thequiet. As far as I could observe, he saw very little of Rona.
It was the girl who really chafed under the inaction of waiting. Two orthree times she sent for me to urge that we disregard the quarantineregulations and go off to the schooner. Allen mentioned that she hadalso begged him to take her out for a look-see at the _Cora_ on thequiet. How she spent her time I did not know. Oakes told me that shewent out for long walks every day, sometimes going toward the hills andsometimes along the shore. I found freshly picked tiger-lilies on Bell'sgrave the day I visited it, and it occurred to me that the gathering ofthese might have furnished the motive for the solitary walks. But if shewas still devoted to Bell's memory, why wouldn't she speak of him?--andwhy the plan to go off to the Islands with Allen? The girl's conduct wasquite beyond my understanding. That was one thing I was sure of, atleast.
Meanwhile I went ahead looking for a place I could turn into a studio.It had been Allen's idea that the suburban bungalow he occupied aftercoming out of quarantine would be suitable, but I was compelled to vetoit on account of the poor light--a consequence of the dense tropicalgrowth surrounding it. The same difficulty--light--ruled out a number ofother attractive places that were offered me, and I was about to closewith a rather squalid little shack near the beach as a last resort, whenAllen got wind of a temporarily vacant house on a big sugar estate, somemiles from town.
This little gem of a hillside bungalow had been built by the sugarpeople for a sub-overseer of the plantation, who had gone to Melbourneto meet and marry a girl from home. As the lucky chap had been given athree-months holiday for a honeymoon in New Zealand, the local managerof the sugar company decided that there could be no objection to myoccupying the nest in the interim; in fact, he was sure his directorswould be highly honoured to have their property used by so distinguishedan artist, and for so laudable a purpose. He hoped I would not hesitateto call upon him for help at any time. He would see to it that theservants already hired against the return of Borton and his bridereported at once, and that Borton's trap and saddle horses were placedat my immediate disposal.
I was greatly pleased with my find for a number of reasons besides thefact that it had a large and well-lighted living-room that could be madeall I could ask to work in. Not the least of these was its location.Several hundred feet above the sea, its wide verandas caught cool
currents of the Trade wind that the sultry lower levels never knew.Infinitely refreshing, too--both in fact and in suggestion,--I found thesplendid stream which circled close under the rear wall, forming, wherea mossy ledge reared a natural dam, a deep, clear pool to which I couldjump from my bedroom window. The revitalizing effect of an early morningplunge, I had found by long experience, was beyond comparison the bestantidote against the insidious absinthe poisoning paralyzing body andbrain at the end of the night.
A couple of hundred yards further down the stream took a swift runthrough a verdant tunnel of fern fronds and overhanging palm leaves,before it leaped in a fine compact spout of green and white over theverge of a creeper-clad cliff, to a lucent hyacinth-lined basin thirtyfeet below. From there, quieter of mood and mind after its hillsidegambols, it meandered by pleasant reaches across a broad belt ofshimmering sugar cane, beyond which it disappeared in tangled growth ofprimeval bush. By dark ways and devious, broadening and deepening in thelower levels, it finally lost itself in the mangrove swamp that fringedthe sea fifteen miles to the northward.
I mention this stream particularly because of the part it was destinedto play in the final act of the drama of the _Cora Andrews_. For asimilar reason it may be in order to say a few words about the greatflume, which took off from the stream at the pool below the waterfalland led down to the big central sugar mill on the shore of the firstdeeply indented bay north of Townsville. It was built, following thesuccessful Hawaiian practice, for the purpose of floating the cut canefrom the fields to the mill, a method which, wherever the naturalconditions were suited to it, had proved both cheaper and moreexpeditious than the old system of transporting the succulent stalks bytramway and bullock carts.
The flume itself was built of imported Oregon pine planks, and wascarried on a trestle of rough-hewn blue-gum and _jarra_ trunks. Insection, the box of the flume was about four feet wide by three feetdeep. The water it carried--about a quarter of the normal flow of thestream that fed it--varied in depth according to its velocity. Thelatter, of course, depended upon the grade of the flume, this varyingfrom two or three per cent. in the broad upper valley to all of fifteenper cent. in a couple of short steep pitches near the coast.
I was interested in this flume from the first time I saw it. In thecourse of a visit to Hawaii some years previously, I had found no end ofsport in what was called "sugar-fluming"--riding from the mountainsideplantations down to the mills seated on a water-propelled bundle ofsugar-cane. On my inquiring of the local manager if the highly divertingstunt was practicable here, he had answered with a most emphaticnegative. "You could go down the flume all right," he said, "but thevolume of water is so great that you could not stop yourself by holdingto the sides even where the grades are the slightest. On the sharpinclines, where the flume runs down to the mill, a team of bullockscouldn't hold you back. Only one man ever tried the feat deliberately,and we were picking fragments of him out of the _bagasse_ for a month.Also spoiled a lot of sugar--everything from the juice in the vats tothe unfinished article in the centrifugals had to be thrown away. Samething has had to be done on the several occasions coolies have falleninto the flume while at work. Jolly costly accidents for the company. Ihope that you're not contemplating...."
I hastened to assure him that, after what he had told me, I mostcertainly had ceased any contemplations I might have allowed myself toindulge in up to then. Still I couldn't help picturing in my mind whatsport could be got out of the thing if only some sort of buffer wererigged up at the lower end. That prompted me, a day or two after I wassettled in the bungalow and while time was still hanging on my hands, toput my horse down the bridle-path along the flume when I went out for aride in the cool of the afternoon. After that I lost all interest in"sugar-fluming" as a sport. It was just conceivable that a man of greatstrength and agility might stop himself by gripping the sides of theflume at several points in the first five or six miles, but from wherethe sharp descent to the coast began I was inclined to agree with themanager's statement, that the drag of a man's body in the pull of theracing stream would take a team of bullocks off their feet.
I dismounted and leaned over the edge of the flume where it ran througha narrow cut in the rock at the brow of the great basaltic cliff thatfollowed the curve of the beach of the bay. This was the upper end ofthe first of the two sharp drops and the water, which was running withina foot of the top of the flume a hundred yards above, and here flatteneddown to a scant six inches in the bottom, grey-green and solid like agreat endless belt of flying steel. The butt of my riding-whip was allbut jerked from my hand as I touched it lightly to the speeding water,and a curving fan of spray was projected up into my face and over thesides. The evidence of such a solidity of kick in running water seemedalmost beyond belief, until I recalled having heard how a jet escapingfrom the pressure pipe of a hydro-electric plant somewhere in theAmerican West had penetrated a man's body, cleanly, like an arrow.
My desire to ride the flume died then and there, though even yet Icouldn't help regretting that there wasn't a level stretch above thejump-off, where a man could check his headway and crawl out. It wouldhave been rattling good sport down to there, but beyond--sheer suicide.There was, it is true, a couple of hundred yards of perhaps five percent. grade between the first steep pitch over the edge of the cliff,and a second one, even steeper, that seemed to run almost directly uponthe roaring, churning mass of cane-crushing machinery that began at theupper end of the big mill. Even there the water was lightning-swift,however, so that a man, once over the edge of the first pitch, looked tobe less than a thousand-to-one shot in bringing up before going on intothe second. And that would have been--how was it the manager putit?--more "spoiled sugar"--another "jolly costly accident for thecompany."
The bridle-path I had been following continued on along the flume to themill, but, desiring to strike the main highway to Townsville as quicklyas possible, I put my sure-footed little Timor mare down what appearedto be an abandoned road graded into the face of the cliff. When Ifinally came out in the rear of what was plainly the remains of anancient water-driven cane-crushing mill, I realized that the old gradeby which I had descended must have been the bullock-cart road from theplantation. The mill was a picturesque old ruin, with its mossywater-wheel, crumbling roof and sprawling pier, and I made mental noteof the lovely little cove as a place well worth returning to withpaintbox and easel when opportunity offered.
Returning through the town, I had the good luck to be hailed from thesidewalk by my bluff old friend, Captain "Choppy" Tancred. He wassouthbound with the _Utupua_ again, he said, but she was going to go todrydock immediately on arrival in Sydney and he was going to command the_Mambare_--a new steamer just turned out on the Clyde for thecompany--and start north the following day. It was hard luck missing hisweek at home with the wife and nippers at Manley, but his promotion to aship on the Singapore run was some consolation. He would be back inTownsville again in a little over a week, and, as he had a lot of sugarto load for the Straits, hoped to have the time for a good yarn with me.It must have been more from habit than anything else (for the old boyshould have read enough about me in the papers by this time to beconvinced that I was not a fugitive from justice), that he repeated hisinjunction that I must not fail to let him know if there was everanything he could do for me--"ye'll ken wha' I mean, lad." And, equallyfrom habit, I assured him that I "kenned wha'," and would not fail tocall upon him in my extremity.
As I had nothing but what I had brought with me on the steamer to move,and as the house was practically ready for occupancy, I was comfortablysettled in my hillside bungalow at the end of the third day after ourarrival from the south. A Chinese cook and house-boy, a Hindu groom, acouple of New Hebridean blacks as roustabouts, and Ranga as generalfactotum, gave me a very tidy and self-contained establishment. Ranga Ihad taken to at once. He was quick-minded and quick-handed, extremelygood-natured, and ready to do anything at any time of the day or night.I resolved to keep him with me indefinitely as a personal serv
ant--thatis, if it fell in with his own inclinations after he had given me a fairtrial.
I made a number of rather successful studies of Ranga by way of gettingmy hand in again, and that suggested that it might be profitable to putin the days of waiting by trying what could be done along the same lineswith the others who were to figure in the picture. Allen, although busywith his secret training of the Oakes colt (all unknown even to the goodmissionary, by the way, who thought that "Slant" was merely borrowingthe gelding for his morning ride), found time to come up and give meseveral sittings. It was easy to see that he hated the whole thing, andwas only going through with it as a part of the bargain with Rona. Thelatter, after promising me faithfully to come, was reported missing onall of the three occasions I sent the trap for her. As her whim was atthe bottom of the whole mad plan, I was not a little mystified at thegirl's action. Also, as it was she whom I was most anxious to do fulljustice to in the picture, I was a good deal annoyed. Allen had noexplanation or excuse to offer for her, saying the girl had him pocketedat every turn anyhow, but volunteered to try and round her up for mehimself as soon as the Planters' Handicap was out of the way, and he hada bit more time on his hands. For all of his light way of speaking, Iknew that he was as hard hit as ever, and had thrown himself into thetraining of the "Missionary Colt" only to give him something else tothink about.
Two unostentatious acts of kindness on the part of Allen in the courseof the week which followed added fresh refulgency to his halo ofpopularity. Townsville had gone madder than ever about him following hissudden and unexpected return from the south, and the same appeared to betrue of the rest of the country. In all sincerity, he had tried to doboth of the things I have referred to strictly on the quiet, and thatthey became public was only a consequence of the zeal of the fresh armyof "war correspondents" that had been rushed north again to camp uponthe hero's trail.
One of Allen's little kindnesses was an appeal, in his own name, to theGovernor of Western Australia to have dismissed the proceedings that hadbeen instituted to bring "Squid" Saunders back to be locked up for thetwenty-three and a half years which still remained to be served of hisoriginal twenty-five-year sentence. This appeal was accompanied by apromise to send the ex-convict, immediately he was released, back to theIslands at Allen's expense.
Doubtless the momentary magic of Allen's name had something to do withthe Westralian Governor's complaisance. In any event, "Squid" Saunderswas out of jail and off as a first-class passenger on one of the SolomonIsland boats inside of a week. Allen, the correspondents were not longin learning, had bought the ticket, footed all of the very sizabletelegraph bills, and given the purser of the steamer a hundred pounds ingold to be handed to "Squid" when he was disembarked at Bougainville.The correspondents, long baulked of any real "Allen stuff," went to thatstory like hungry hounds.
But scarcely was the "Squid" Saunders story onto the wires before it wasfollowed by the news of Allen's astonishing win of the Planters'Handicap with the rank outsider, Yusuf, at two-hundred-to-one. That winwas spectacular enough in itself, but when, on the heels of it, wasflashed the word that not only the thousand-guinea purse hung up for therace, but approximately twenty-five hundred pounds paid to Allen by the"tote" as well, had been donated to the owner of Yusuf to forward therealization of his long-cherished dream--the erection of a modernmedical mission in Fiji--the climax was capped. Australia echoed anewwith acclaim of the "philanthropist hero" (it was now), and press andpulpit moralized and maundered afresh on the Hon. Hartley Allen'sgoodness of heart and greatness of soul. The clamour of the people ofthe country to see their idol in the flesh fused the Townsville wiresfrom every direction. It was all very well that the incomparable heroismof the saving of the _Cora Andrews_ should be perpetuated upon canvas,but why should the pushful American artist drag the hero off before hisown people had a chance to do him homage? Let the artist rise to theoccasion with a display of that famous "Yankee hustle" they had heard somuch about and get the job over "right quick." It was the man himselfthey wanted; let the picture wait if it couldn't be finishedstraightaway!