# Bobby-the-Clock

Extracted from Everybody's magazine, Feb 1914, pp. 242–253. Accompanying illustrations by Charles Sarka may be omitted. Story #6 in The Sorcerer's Stone series. Included in in The Sorcerer's Stone (collection), 1914, as "How They Buried Bobby-the-Clock"
BOBBY-the-CLOCK
by
BEATRICE GRIMSHAW
AUTHOR OF “VAITI OF THE ISLANDS,” “WHEN THE RED GODS CALL,” ETC
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES SARKA
The Sorcerers Stone tells its own Secret
“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 building little clearing, and looked across a small space of muddy earth, planted with clothes-props, into a wide, doorless open doorway. It was night, and you could see little of the 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 farther down toward 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 before.
But in that week or two we had been through adventures before which all the troubles previously brought up)on us by the great diamond we had been pursuing and guarding 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 in the Stone-Oven Country and nearly eaten by them; had been imprisoned on the edge of an apparently trackless gulf, and been asked for the Sorcerer's Stone 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. 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 very mixed elements, as is the goldfields crowd all the world over. In Papua rich discoveries are very soon worked out, as a rule, and the riffraff attracted by the gold—larrikin 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.
The process takes some time, though, 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. 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 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.
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 worn-out gramophone 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 Hub bard, who had shared a claim with me the Yodda years before, and held out my hand, saying something in the way of greeting.
It was received with an instantaneous and universal “Hush!” 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 will 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, and I saw the Marquis's 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?”
Must 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 trouser-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—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 round 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 unforgetable 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. To-night, 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 action from the 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 to-day, 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 pay 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 be; 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 I 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 Kilori River. At least, the place was safe if you didn't go into it one by one, and if you kept a good look-out 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 bathe in the Kilori River could seriously affect any one's fortunes. But 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.
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 had not recollected that scores of men had stood it, off and on, for years.
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 the next day, or the next, as our condition might permit. I didn't fancy sleeping any longer than I could help in an open shed with the riffraff of Australia, while the Sorcerer's Stone was on my person—or worse, on the Marquis's.
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 be neath 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, safety, 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 dare say 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 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 of 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 Kilori. Hubbard and I were wearing exactly the same pattern 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 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 toward me as I answered.
“Got it out of a sorcerer's charm-bag in Kata-Kata,” I said, reaching out for the gem. “It's rather pretty, and they made a great puri-puri of it down there. Some of the museums dovn South will give quite a lot for good charms.”
A dirty, hairy man in tom 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 if 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 to-day 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 appearances 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, came forward to carry him out into the air. I volunteered to help, and took care to slip the stone into my pocket again, as I lifted the drunkard's limply-hanging knees. We took him on to 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 to-morrow, 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 old 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 to-morrow?”
“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-eyed 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 of 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. “1 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 celebrate 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 minute, 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 mornings 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 baked 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 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 afterward explained to me, “in artist.”
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.
He did not resist. I caught another lightning wink from underneath the surging pile, and I did my best to get the 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 to-day, 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.
“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.”
The final adventure in the quest of “The Sorcerer's Stone” will appear in the March number.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1953, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 71 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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