# The Dim Dim Girl

Extracted from The Sunday Star, 1921, Sept 4,, p. 4. Accompanying illustration may be omitted. Alert: Some may find the white supremacy subtext offensive.
THE DIM DIM GIRL
the Mountain Cannibals
IF you were not accustomed to the houses of the New Guinea inland ranges—and in the world not 100 white people are—it seemed unsafe. Willis Rothery wanted to know why we had camped in a place that seemed likely to tumble into the middle of last week if you coughed.
He sat on the floor and looked down through the splits of the palm sheathing between his own feet, at the sunset making a hell pit of the boiling mountain mists 2,000 feet below. The sight did not please him.
"This house," he said, "is simply bracketed onto a perpendicular precipice, God knows how! When we came along in those treetops that you called a track—track, good heaven, for monkeys, or men?—and saw these things stuck above us like the nests of some mad bird, I couldn't believe you when you said they were houses. The only sensible thing I can see about the people who built the place is that they've deserted it."
"I don't suppose they did," I said, without paying too much attention to what he said. The fact was that all this mad mountain scenery—the scarped peaks and tumbled camel humps, and dislocated spines of the mighty Owen Stanley—and the smell of the closing night up here in the clouds—it was a wet smell, and smoky from the ancient thatching of the hut—was hypnotizing me.
I had not known it since the days when I had been living a white boy savage among the mountain folk who had captured me. It was half a life since then—almost so in years, and utterly in happenings and history. The years of the great war alone, when I had fought and been pensioned and refused my pension because I, the white savage, had no real need of money, loomed up behind as big as a century.
Yet they were unreal tonight, and the adventures of Rothery, the poet, and myself, all over the island world were unreal, and Rothery was unreal, too. Nothing was true except the small of the scented forests wet with long mountain rain and the reek of smoky thatch and the sinister sound of evening storm, ravening and blundering up the chines of the Cloven ranges, as it had sounded for me on a hundred nights of this half-forgotten mountain world—years ago.
"What did they do, then?" asked Rothery, drawing-in his legs—for it was damp and cold up here above the 5,000 feet, and the fire that the other carriers had lighted at the end of the ruinous room was damp, and smoked more than it blazed.
"What did who do?" I asked, half absently. Hornbills, huge-headed, wide of wing, were planing home above, with a sound like a Gnome engine in want of repairs. The "6 o'clock" locusts had started a vast whirring and rattling among the treetops far below, as if some one had on a sudden turned the tap of a reservoir of sound. Swift as spring tides, the enormous, lonely night of the mountains was rising—rising.
"The people who you say didn't desert this place," answered Willis.
"O, those? Eaten out, I should think." Willis looked at me oddly.
"A nice place to be in," he said.
"You wanted to see the unexplored country and you put up the money," I reminded him.
"O, I'm not sorry; I rather like the idea of being surrounded by cannibal tribes whom no one's ever seen. It seems exciting—or would if you weren't so calm over it all."
"If you'd been a year and a half in the war," I remarked, mixing myself a chew of betel nut, "the liveliest of the New Guinea cannibals would seem like lambs to you. I spent yesterday evening, after you'd gone to sleep, telling a lot of them about Belgium. They were very genuinely shocked.
"You—where were they? I never knew."
"No. They don't advertise. I didn't think you ripe for them yet, so I let you sleep. And, anyhow, you wouldn't have seen them even if you'd been awake."
"Why?"
"You wouldn't see them if they were all round you, unless they wanted."
"I bet you I should. You don't know what quick perception I have "
"I do not. You can't even see them now."
Rothery jumped—just a little. Then he settled himself more firmly on the floor, loosened his knife in his belt and felt the trigger of his revolver—they do in books, but in real life one doesn't; one might shoot some one I doing it—and told me he was ready if there were a thousand.
I didn't say anything. Years had accustomed me to the curious views the average man holds on the subject of cannibals. I only beckoned, and out off the dusk, up among the piles of the house, from rocks and bushes and holes, came two or three and twenty short chunky, naked figures, carrying ebony spears and obsidian clubs that a collector would have bought for much money.
They had their hair plaited in small tails, mountain fashion, and adorned, not with white men's heads, but with beads made of native shells, showing thereby that they had no friendly communications with the tribes from the coast; whom, indeed, if I remembered correctly, they were apt to eat on sight.
Willis stared as hard as a cat, and, if you will remember, there is nothing that that stares harder. The mountaineers did not stare at him; nevertheless, I knew these indifferent, deep-dug eyes of theirs had not missed a single hair on his head or button on his clothes. With the politeness of the inland cannibal—I will make you a present of the ill manners of the coastal breed—they waited for my pleasure, not setting foot on the ladder of the house.
"Nambu and Maisi and Rore," I said, "tell the others of your village that the food is ready, and come up, my brothers, without fear. You know me as your friend, the Pigeon of the Hills."
For so they had named me, because of my piping voice, in the days when I was a little white savage among them.
"I've asked them to dinner," I bracketed to Rothery.
"If you are quite sure that the dinner won't be on us, I've no possible objection." he said.
"On the contrary, they're probably worrying now a to whether you and the carriers don't intend to make a feast of them. It's a favorite trick in Papua to ask people to dinner, and then, make them provide the dinner themselves."
"Travel enlarges the mind," said Willis. "I always like to discover an entirely new crime."
BISCUITS these people did not understand, nor sugar. Salt I gave them in handfuls, and they licked it up with joyous cries. Then I opened some tins of meat. They looked at the picture on the outside—a highly colored representation of Uncle Sam: it was an American brand—and jerked their heads approvingly.
"Oh, companion," said Nambu with a happy smile "this is good food that you are bringing us; man is our proper eating."
"What does he say?" asked Willis curiously.
"Says he likes the brand," I translated. I didn't want to give the poet too much all at once.
When they had eaten, they and I sat staring at each other in the light of the hurricane lamp. There were men among them who had been boys with the little white savage, who had speared wallaby with him, strangled sleeping birds on the trees at night in his company, danced the boy dances with him as leader, passed through the secrets of the temple life togeter with him.
My heart was drawn to them. Maneaters though they were, they were brave and simple, and they treated their prisoners better than I have been treated at Ruhleben. Oh there are worse people in the world, and so I thought, as I sat on my heels In the dusk light of the hurricane lamp and ate meat with the men of the ranges.
And Willis, his yellow hair ruffled into strange feathers, his queer, forty-year-old little face looking old and young at the same time, as I suppose only poets' faces do look, stared and stared and drew and drew long breaths of interest.
"It is all invaluable—from a literary point of view," he said.
As for me, his saying made me sorry for him. I can't exactly explain. It seemed connected with his little legs and his thin, roosterlike neck, and the fact that he had never been drunk in his life. I'd hate to be—outside. Of course, you have to be outside to see. But who wants to see? Doing is so much more.
The night had fully come; there were bell birds clanking and clinking all through the gorges below the house, and once a giant frog bleated from some creek. Then the night rain burst like a dam, and we began moving about the hut to find a dry place to sit in.
You couldn't hear any one talk at first; I found, to my annoyance somewhat, that I had lost the old power of hearing through the thunderous downpours of the hills. When the rain suddenly jerked itself short off and took a breathing space, I had got a good bit behind the conversation.
"Oh, companion," Nambu was saying, "she is very much devil-devil."
"Most women are," I agreed, not particularly interested.
"And you were devil-devil, too, Pigeon of the Hills, so no doubt it is the custom of your people."
"Oh, yes, companion," I said absently. I was getting very sleepy now. I thought I would like to curl up on my mat in the old, old way and let the thunder of the night rains and the rain-fed river whelm me into sleep—as in long ago.
I MUST have nodded forward, for the next thing I remember is jerking myself back and listening, suddenly quite wide awake, to what Nambu was saying.
"We think she is bad to look at," he said. "Our young men do not wish to marry her, and yet there were girls who cooked potatoes for you, Pigeon of the Hills, when you lived with us, though you were so young. It is quite true, you were bad to look at also, but they did not mind that. But a dim-dim girl, that is another thing."
"A what?" I yelled.
Nambu looked at me reproachfully. The man-eater of the ranges does not rudely raise his voice unless he happens to be raiding a village; then—but you men who have been through the war don't need to be told. We are like the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady, all one family under our skins.
"Did you say there was a dim-dim girl here?" I cried. "Who is she. How long has she been here? And how—how—how did she get here?"
You cannot say "how the devil" in any native language; it is a pity.
"What's a dim-dim girl?" asked Rothery, who knew the word for "woman."
"Good Lord!" I said. "It means a white girl, no less. And he says there's one here."
"Isn't that impossible?"
"Of course. But it seems to have happened." I showered questions on Nambu. Generally speaking, the passage of any of white person through the interior of New Guinea leaves a wake as big as that traced by a white elephant in an English village. It seemed unthinkable, first, that any white woman should have penetrated to those formidable fastnesses; secondly, that the whole country should not have been ringing with it if she had.
"Hold on!" said Willis unexpectedly, after I had translated a question and answer or two. "I think I can tell you something. He says that it was a white baby, and that they got it fifteen yam seasons ago, counted on two hands and one foot, and that he doesn't know how they did."
"Yes, but the last only means that he won't tell."
"Hold on! I remember everything I read. I read about this. It's Grace Gordon."
"Grace how much? This isn't the time or place to make poetry, Rothery. What tree do you think you're barking up?"
"I don't think; I know. Fifteen years ago there was a missionary and his wife murdered somewhere in this part of New Guinea or near it. Her name was Jessie Gordon and his was Campbell Gordon, and they had a baby girl called Grace, who was killed, too—so it was said. Why, man, there was quite a lot of fuss made about it."
"I remember, now you tell me. At least, I remember something. But it was never thought any one survived."
"It seems clear some one did," said Willis Rothery positively. "This is Grace Gordon for a ducat, carried off into the hills."
"IF she is," I said, "she will be a proper little savage. I was pretty much of a Papuan when they found me, and I'd had ten years of white people first. But this child can't have been two. They spoke of her as a 'prattling babe,' if I remember."
Willis rose to his feet. It may have been because he had been ruffling up his hair, but I swear he looked an inch or two taller.
"Simon," he said, with a tremble in his voice, "you and I will go and rescue her."
"What from?" I asked. "She wouldn't thank you. She has settled down among them, and must be a native in all but color. Remember what the Jesuit said about the first six years of a child's life."
He brushed my words aside.
"She must be rescued," he said.
"By all means, if it amuses you, old man," I answered. "Anything to please. Nambu will take us to the village tomorrow, and you can do all the rescuing you want; I expect it won't be much. No doubt they'll be glad to get rid of her. She doesn't seem the idol of the village, exactly."
"That's settled, then," said Willis. "Why—where are the men?"
"Went a minute ago while you were talking. They don't move about like elephants—or white people."
"What way did they go?"
"Out at the front."
"But that's impossible!" screamed the poet, balancing hurricane lamp in hand, over the verge of a pretty steep precipice. It was not quite perpendicular, but it looked very nearly so.
"Is it. Those are their torches bobbing about half-way down."
"Marsh lights surely!"
"Do you want me to go down and show you?" I asked, unlacing my boots. "Just let me take my clothes off, and—why. I know that scarp as well as you know the Hotel Australia. I could walk down without using my hands."
"For God's sake, don't! Simon, you make my blood run cold among these mountains. The things I've seen you——"
"Oh, you forget I'm one of themselves. Well, it's settled about tomorrow, then. I want to see the dim-dim girl as much as you do; it's a thing that interests me far more than it could interest you, for the matter of that. But I don't see the sense of this rescuing idea."
"You're a heathen and I won't argue with you," said Rothery. I scarcely heard him, for I had curled myself up on the floor and was three-quarters asleep.
Long ago I had never been used to dream in the mountains, but that night the river flooded all my rest.
"Where is it carrying me?" I cried, and woke to find the rain finished and the hut full of slatter moonlight sifting through the roof. Far, far below the invisible stream ran heavily. To my half-awakened mind it sounded big with fate.
"WHAT is to happen?" I thought. "Will the door open tomorrow?" For that was the way I had always thought of death; it seemed to me like a hall with rows of doors, each door marked with the name of some disease or disaster, and through one. of the doors you were sure, quits sure, to pass—but till the door opened you were not to know which of them all was to be yours.
When the snake bit me in Queensland and I was scarcely drawn back from death in time, I thought, "Is it this door, then?" But the door closed before me. And in Flanders in '15, when there was one great door open night and day, and hundreds of thousands were passing through in crowds, I said: "It is to be this door, then?" But I recovered of my wound and was sent home, and that door clanged again. I knew which door would, in all probability, swing on its hinges to let my friend the poet pass; it as a pale, heart-shaped door.
And for me, I thought, one of two would most certainly open, the red door that hurried you through on the swing of sharp, sudden death, or the far-away, low-bent door, gray with cobweb rime, that bore a name almost worn out with years—"Old Age."
Half awake in the moonlight, I sat and listened to and smelled the night and I felt more surely than ever, that some strange fate was ascending and rolling through the waves of time to me.
"Whether there Is or is not, I may as well sleep," I thought, and so I slept again.
I woke a little before dawn and had the carriers out of their blankets and boiling their morning rice just as sunrise burst like a red volcano flame through the seas of mist that tossed about our peaks. Willis and I had food, packed up and got away. He was anxious, I remember, and could not hurry me enough.
"What am I going to see?" he said, And again with that fluttering eagerness strong on him: "What am I going to see?"
"I'll tell you," I said, "when we are back again tonight."
But I did not, and to this day I do not know, although I shall.
It grew light; we were on our way. The village where Nambu had said we should find the dim-dim girl was one that I had known long ago; I needed no guide to the lifting precipice, plumed with dangling trees, up which our pathway lay.
Rothery, though he had as plucky a soul as every small, weak body held, seemed somewhat daunted at the sight of this typical Papuan "road," with its faint streak of liana ladder, half rotten, dropped from ledge to ledge and waiting in the wind raised by the waterfall that spumed beside it.
"It looks bad," he said. "Can we take a long time?"
"Not if we are to get up before dark to the village," I said. "Don't come if you feel it too much."
"I shan't let myself feel it too much," he said. "I wish you had a shred or two more soul, Simon. Can't you see that the rescuing of this girl is simply a sacred duty to one's race?"
"I don't mind taking it so from you," I assured him; indeed, I had a considerable respect for Rothery's odd fancies, little though I understood them at times.
AFTER that It was impossible to talk—not on my account, since I felt very much at home, but because of the difficulty Rothery found in ascending the rock faces and the straight-up banks of bush, where you hold on by roots and by your toes—unless, like him, you wore hampering, inconvenient boots. I went first and showed Rothery where to a trust it.
"Lord!" he said, pausing half way up to wipe the streaming sweat out of his eyes. "You are a perfect Pithecanthropus. When that rung gave way beneath you just now, you simply hiccupped with one foot and went on; whereas, by all the laws of gravitation you ought to be lying at the—I can't get my breath."
"Give it up," I advised. "If she's lived fifteen years among these people, she might as well go on living to the end."
For answer he began to climb again. I reached down for him and half-dragged him on to the top. I don't think he could have done it otherwise. At the summit we sat for a long time, staring back and down; the view was one on which a disembodied spirit might have looked, wondering why Heaven was called the fairer of the two.
Mountains and forests and rifts through the heart of the hills; pure wreaths of foam floating above waterfalls unseen; tree tops felted to green and golden velvet and flowing—flowing—to the verge of the horizon and beyond, a seamless robe of exceeding beauty; the crystal sun and the pale, bright maiden blue of high-level skies; airs of Paradise blowing.
How can I tell in words the solitary, unstained wonder of it all?
"Does no one live here?" asked Rothery when he had caught his errant breath again.
"You may say no one. The village is the only one for a long way. There, you can see it now!"
"Those brown toadstools on the queer little truncated cone of a hill?"
"Yes. They probably cut off the top of the hill to build on it. We shall have to keep off the high points after this."
"Why?"
"I shouldn't have welcomed strange white people myself when I was living up here. I didn't. They practically captured me."
"And after that," remonstrated Rothery as we began descending ito green depths below, "you would abandon this white girl!"
"For two reasons," I agreed. "One—that she has been among the natives all her life, not part of it. Two——"
"What about two?" he asked as I hesitated.
"I've sometimes wondered," I said, and broke off. "I've wondered if I—— Whether I shouldn't have been—— Mind, that's a tiger!"
He leaped three feet in the air, and then paused in the middle of the track to tell me that there were no tigers in New Guinea, so he couldn't imagine what I meant by——
I HAD to take him by the back of the neck and swing him away, or the peppery tiger snake would have brushed him. It was hanging from a tree. It did not strike. I knocked its head off with my knife just in time.
So I did not finish what I was saying at the moment, and on reflection I decided to leave it unfinished for good.
We did not near the village till late in the afternoon, close though it looked. You can never accept the look of things in the mountains, and besides we had to keep under shadow of the bush all the way.
It was certain that the women of the place would be coming home from their gardens about 5, and if the dim dim girl caught sight of us I was fairly certain she would make a bolt of it. I should have been none the worse pleased, but I didn't want to disappoint Willis, since he was set upon carrying the matter through.
We came in sight of a break in the deep forest and of a little track leading to it; we concealed ourselves and sat still.
"That is the clearing for the garden," I said. "The women will come along by and by with the food for the evening meal, and we can see without being seen—if you keep quiet."
"Of course, I shall keep quiet," said Willis, indignantly. He struck a match. I took it away and relieved him of his cigarette.
"Do you suppose they have no noses?" I asked him.
We sat there for some time before they came. The sun dipped quite suddenly behind a tall rampart of forest. and it became greenishly dark, like the look of things when you swim under water. Still, it was not really late; there was another hour of daylight.
A dog yelped at last, and I knew they were coming, for it was a young dog, such as the women carry about with them and tend often more carefully than they tend their own children.
I touched Willis to impress on him the necessity for silence, and he said in a rustling whisper, "Yes, all right."
Then they were upon us—a file of small, bent, brown creatures, dressed in the narrowest fringes of grass hung about their hips, each woman loaded down incredibly under a mountain of firewood, babies, sweet potatoes and bananas, and some, in addition, carrying her small pet dog.
They were not ugly women, though their hair was short and plaited into two small black tails, each weighed down with a single white dog's tooth, and their figures were bowed with labor. Some of them had the brightest and merriest brown-black eyes that a man could wish to laugh into, and there were one or two men who had features as dainty as squirrels, and hands, too, small and neat, as squirrel's little hands.
They talked as they came in soft, tinkling voices, like the wind blowing through boughs or water running on small stones. It was harder than I could have thought not to spring up and greet them in their own odd tongues, every word of which I knew. Last of all came a woman, taller by six inches than any, though she was no more than five feet two. This woman was very young, but she wore no ornaments, no shell beads or medals, no feather necklaces, no white dog's tooth, nor was her hair braided into tails. Instead it hung down her back, a glorious mass of ruddy gold, and half-clothed the unprotected, girlish bosom.
Her dress was no more and no less than that of the others. On her shoulders she carried the heaviest load borne by any of the crowd, and the shoulder and the figure and the slim, well-turned limbs, arched feet and narrow, pointed hands were white.
BURNED by sun and beaten by mountain rains, darkened almost to the hue of a half-caste—none the less, among those small bronze figures the girl, in shape, size, color alike, proclaimed herself of Rothery's race and mine.
I heard him catch his breath, and I pinched him to keep him quiet I knew what it was that had startled him. The creature was beautiful. She did not look happy; she was sullen in expression, and her fine brown eyebrows seemed to be permanently fixed in a frown, but no cloud could spoil the loveliness of her face.
The eyes, brown, like those of the native women, but most unlike them in keenness and fire, were very large and deeply lashed; they were set with the finish of gems under a brow that—relieved of hard, angry lines and of searing sunburn—would have looked like pale new ivory. The mouth and nose were graceful, the shape of the face exquisite.
I never saw a prouder or a sadder lip on any human countenance, nor, outside of a Da Vinci drawing, had I thought such a graceful flow of cheek into delicate neck could exist. Her hair was a wonder; her figure, undisguised save by the brief grass fringe, seemed in its loveliness to scorn all veiling. The girl girl was miserable clearly; the girl was a savage, but the girl was beautiful.
Do I seem changeable or small-minded when when I say that on the instant I saw Grace Gordon laboring under her pack of food and firewood up the stony track my thoughts about the whole matter of search and rescue changed and I became as resolved as Willis Rothery himself?
If so, I can only plead that beauty is beauty and that since the beginning of the world man has instinctively bowed before it.
Yet there was more in my change of feeling that plain admiration of Grace Gordon's face and figure. The sense of some great event about to dawn—of a door near to opening—that had haunted my sleep the night before, now seemed to gather itself together and break into light.
"This is it," my mind said to me. "Not death, but life."
For I knew that I had found the woman at last.
It would be absurd and you would not believe me if I told you that I, a strong man in the thirties, had never taken interest in any woman before. Only in books does a man pass half his life asleep like the silly princess in the wood waiting for love.
I had been broad awake since first they tied the armlet of manhood on me in these very mountains, and, as Nambu, my friend, had said, there were girls even then who were ready to cook my food for me—in Papua, a significant act. And in France and in Queensland——
Why should I speak of any of these? Not one was the woman. In no case had it ever appeared possible to me that I might marry. I had taken it for granted that light loves, fancies that came and passed, were all that life could hold for me. I was not as other men. Civilized on the surface, beneath it I was the man of the forests and the seas, not tied to houses hating the indoor life with a hatred deep as death.
THERE are men like myself in the world; more, perhaps, than you of the cities would believe, and the same problem strikes them every one. But, almost every one, they solve it by taking a brown woman to wife, or a half-caste.
I was different. White Australian to the roots of my soul, I would not give my name nor the mothering and care of my children to a woman with one dark drop in her veins. And so it had seemed certain that children, companionship, home would never be mine—until, in the emerald light of the mountain evening I met Grace Gordon.
Here was the native woman, the creature of forests and rivers, the hardy, bush-trained girl, careless of money and the things that money brings—yet, though uncultured, uneducated, utterly uncivilized, white with the noble teachable white mind and the pure white blood that holds and carries onward no stain.
And—let me say it once again—she was beautiful.
I don't know how the thing might have struck me if she had been squat or crooked or frog-mouthed or cat-eyed. Perhaps I might have held to my original opinion, that it was kinder to leave her where she had lived. But being what she was, it was not in tho heart of man to see her and pass by on the other side.
And the natives thought her ugly. They did—and the young men would not look at her, or she at them, according to Nambu. Yes, I remember that the mountain tribes had called me ugly, with my queer pale skin and foolish light hair and eyes. It had taken a strong man and an eloquent tongue to win them to another opinion.
Grace Gordon, if I judged her right had been despised and set aside till she was utterly sullen and sulky. No wonder she was not popular. Well, I did not desire anything else.
The women had passed by, the sun was rapidly going down behind the forest walls. Willis and I rose from our cramped position and loked at one another.
"Well, what do you think now?" asked he.
I did not answer him at all, but led the way up the hill to the village.
"You are going to get her away? he said, toiling behind me. "You have seen that I am right. Simon, Simon what a lovely creature! One could almost—a man might almost——"
"Yes," I said, "a man almost might."
"Will she run away?" he asked, still panting and toiling.
"Doesn't matter; she wouldn't get far. I only wanted to prevent her taking to the bush before I got there."
We said nothing more, Rothery because he could not, I because I do not talk unless there is something to say, and there was nothing just then.
It was quite dark by the time we reached the little cluster of brown huts on the hilltop. As I said, the summit had been sliced off to make a site. The houses stood like ornament on a table; there was hardly a yard of spare ground on any side.
BELOW, the mountain mists wreathed and blew, and from the inevitable gorge came a low grumbling of waterfalls. Within the village the women were passing to fro, carrying large wooden dishes of food, lifting clay pots on and off the fires. There was a smell of hot sweet potatoes and of stewed bananas on the air; nothing more pronounced.
"Just as well, on Rothery's account," I thought. I had never shared in any of the meat that the fighting men brought home from time to time; still, I had seen too much of it to be shocked.
Of course they had seen us long before we reached the place, and of course they knew who I was—every soul in the range knew it by that time. Nevertheless, you should have heard the yell they thought it necessary raise when we came in.
The men seized their spears and danced madly; the women put down the cooking pots and howled like dogs. And every dog in the place joined in the clamor.
"Are they going to attack?" asked the poet with interested curiosity.
"Wait and see," I said. I walked up to the biggest warrior—they were none of them very big—called him by his tribal name and clapped him on the shoulder. He had me round the neck in a minute, and I remember I found myself thinking that it would be a good missionary act to introduce that unknown luxury, soap, to the people of the ranges.
"Pigeon of the Hills," he yelled, rubbing his face on mine.
"Pigeon of the Hills?" the whole village took up in chorus. Most of them did not remember me, as they had been children when I left, but all acted as if they had only lived for that moment and that event—to see me back again. Food was crammed into my mouth and into Rothery's.
We were dragged to a sitting position, and two old women began to rub our legs. The dogs stood afar off and howled like wolves, as native dogs do, and the girls acted in much the same way, simulating unbearable terror.
But the white girl, in her fringe of grass, with her wonderful hair falling down, stood and looked at us silently. She did not run away. She crept nearer and nearer. No one in the village seemed to notice. The old women finished their rubbing and left us. Somebody started a dance, and they were hard at it before long, pounding the earth, leaping to express their joy and excitement. And Grace Gordon, in the fire-light, crept up and up.
When she had come within arm's length she reached out and touched my hand. Something told me what she wanted. I laid my hand beside hers, and long and earnestly she compared the two. Then she spoke in the mountain tongue.
"YOU are like me," she said.
"We are of the same village," I answered her, using the native idiom. "There are many, many others in that village. Will you come to it with me?"
"Would they love me there?" she asked, an infinite sadness in her voice
I hesitated. Somehow I could not lie to her, this poor white-savage girl. Never, I thought, would the people of "her village" receive her as quite one of themselves. It had gone on too long for that.
"They will love you a little," was all I could say.
"Will no one love me much?" she asked, leaning forward with her brown eyes full of fear. "Then I will not go."
Something broke in my breast at that, and I took her firmly by the hand.
"I will love you," I told her. "I will love you very, very much, and you shall cook my food and make my garden, and I will cut down the forest and keep the devils of the bush away and carry spear and club for you." For I knew I must speak to her after the way of the natives or she would not have understood.
"What are you saying?" asked Willis, who had never taken his eyes off her, though I am bound to say she swept him with her glance as though he was something insignificant on the far horizon.
I told him.
"When will you take her away?"
"Now."
"Now! Why?"
"Because she is a sort of slave to these people, and they probably wouldn't give her up in cold blood. They are all worked up with dancing now, and excited over seeing me. They will let me have anything, if they happen to notice my taking her. Tomorrow they will repent, but we shall be out of reach, I hope."
Willis answered nothing, but his eyes remained on the girl and there was a certain sadness in their glance.
"You're thinking no one will ever make much of her," I said. "You're wrong. She would never quite civilize, but give me six months and she'll speak English as well as you or I, wear all the clothes any one needs, read and write and sew and do dim-dim cooking. No, I shan't teach her all that, only some of it. The mission will do the rest and do it well."
"And then?" said Willis.
I did not answer at once. By and by—— "Do you remember," I said, "the island where we first met?"
"Well," said he, "I've sometimes been sorry that I closed the door as I did."
"Don't let it be closed," I said. "People forget. Come back with us."
"You're going back?"
"Yes. To the white beach there and the little palm leaf house and my great open seas that feed me. There might be a little palm leaf house for you. Isn't it a life for a poet?"
Willis looked hard at me.
"You don't see everything, Simon," he said. I was so stupid that indeed I did not understand. And yet she was very beautiful——
"Come," I kept on begging. "Come now, and keep on coming. We'll all let the world go by and be happy."
"You haven't asked for the girl," was all he said.
I went to where the headman of the village was leaping and twisting in a mad abandon of dance.
"Companion, companion.," I said touching him, "I want that this girl should come with us: she is no good to you. You give her?" And I held up a fine tomahawk head for payment.
He snatched it.
"Take her, companion," he howled, with an extra leap. "She is not worth half so much as a good pig."
NOW I was anxious to get away, for I knew by experience that this dancing orgy might end in trouble, and it was from all points best to get off while the village was still drunk with its own exertions. Already the howling that accompanied the dance had somewhat changed in character.
I slipped out of the light of the fires, Grace Gordon gliding before—she understood perfectly—and Willis close beside me. We were right in the narrow, stockaded entrance, and almost out of sight, perceived, it seemed, by none, when, without the least warning, an ebonywood spear, thrown by some dancer who had reached the crazy stage, came through the air with an ugly "Whoof!" straight for Grace Gordon.
I don't suppose the man knew what he was doing. He simply flung the spear anywhere, at random, because he felt like it. Nevertheless, the weapon would have gone through the girl had not Willis Rothery—who was next her, I being some way in the rear—made a quicker spring than I should ever have thought possible to him, and flung her out of the way. In so doing he flung himself into the way, and the spear transfixed him.
He fell instantly, and lay still.
I could not answer for the people of the hills when their blood was worked up with dancing. I slung my poor friend over one shoulder before any one had time to see what was happening, took the girl by one hand, and ran down the narrow track in the dark as hard as I could go.
When we were a few hundred yards away, and apparently unnoticed, I put down my burden, struck a match or two, felt the heart and the lungs, held my ear close and listened. He was dead.
In places like the interior of Papua one thinks quickly. I saw that it was best to get out of the way, lest my friends of the hills should think well to illustrate practically a certain famous adage about dead men and the telling of tales. I could not take the body with me. But neither could I, nor would I, leave it behind me, to be found and dealt with as the men of the mountains would deal with it.
There was the sound of a mighty waterfall not far away. I felt once more to make sure—as if one who had seen the battlefields of Europe did not know death at first sight!—and then I left Grace for a moment, warning her to keep hidden, tramped through a few rods of tangled bush, came out on the verge of a great white torrent that seemed to light up the moonless night, and with a single word of farewell gave Willis' body to the deep.
"You are eating tears," whispered Grace to me as we ran along side by side through the dusk, her hand in mine. "Why?"
"He was my friend," I said.
"Will you love me as much?"
"As much, but otherwise," I said.
"Now, mountain girl, run hard."
And as we ran through the night I heard the door that had opened, but not for me, swing loud on its hinges behind us.
(Copyright, 1921.)
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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