South of the Line/The Peep Show
The Peep Show
THE two men broke from the bush and stood blinking in the sudden glare of beach, and sea, and sky, like owls strayed from their cranny in the light of day.
One was tall and very thin, the other short and thin also. Both were ragged, unspeakably begrimed, and so weary that they could scarce stand.
"Gaw!" said the shorter man, and, as though this strange utterance were some sort of signal, collapsed on the spot.
The other said nothing, but carefully lowered a round, compact bundle from his shoulder to the ground, and sat upon it.
At this juncture Felisi, who had watched their advent from the doorway of her father's house, saw fit to make her presence known; and a very engaging presence it was, consisting of five feet two inches and fifteen years of bronze femininity, lithe and upstanding like a boy, clad in her best sulu, a red hibiscus blossom, and a dazzling smile. But what would you? It is not for nothing that one is the eldest daughter of the chief of a village like Luana. The position has its responsibilities, and Felisi was duly aware of them.
"You want 'im guest house?" she suggested amiably.
The tall man surveyed her for a moment with infinitely tired gray eyes before a flicker of light came into them and a smile puckered the corners of his month.
"Are you a Kanaka kid or an angel out of heaven?" he demanded irrelevantly.
"Me Kanaka kid," replied Felisi, whereat the tall man chuckled weakly.
"Guest house?" he echoed. "I should just say we do want a guest house. Lead on, Macduff!"
"Me Felisi, no Macduff," corrected the "presence." "All along this way, please."
The tall man plucked his prone companion by the arm. "Morgan!" he shouted. "Hi, Morgan! We're being offered a guest house by the head of the department."
"Go t' 'ell!" muttered Morgan.
With an alacrity evidently born of habit, the tall man jerked the other to his feet and half carried, half dragged him along the grass-grown village path. The bundle he treated with infinitely more respect, and when Felisi offered to relieve him of it, merely smiled and shook his head.
The cool, dim spaciousness of the guest house had no sooner received its visitors than Felisi withdrew, to continue her observations from outside through a hole of her own making in the reed wall. It was not precisely the thing to do, but Felisi had no notion of that. All she did know was that the advent of these two dilapidated white men was the first occurrence of interest that had taken place in Luana for three months, and she intended to make the most of it. They came from the world that she knew and loved so well, throbbing centre of civilization such as Levuka and Suva, where governors and their ladies drove in glittering carriages, where immense ships unloaded impossible freights of passengers and cargo on to the groaning wharves, and where, incidentally, it was possible to amass a fortune by merely looking as charming as one happened to be, and selling imitation pink coral to credulous tourists. Already by this means she (Felisi) had been instrumental in securing to her family a sewing-machine, a boat, and a typewriter, and she had no doubt, when the novelty of this last acquisition had worn off, she would be hurled again into the vortex. She only prayed that it might be soon.
With this boundless experience of the white man and his ways at her finger tips, Felisi was in no way surprised at what she saw through the hole in the guest house wall. Morgan lay as he had fallen on the mats, a sprawling, heavily breathing heap of unclean humanity. The other looked about him, found a bamboo of water, and washed, took off his boots and, squatting on the floor, drew from his bundle a pair of faded pyjamas and a toothbrush.
The rites that followed interested Felisi not at all; her attention was for the moment centred on the bundle. Other things came out of it, yet its dimensions remained miraculously the same. It was still heavy, and round, and about the size of a ripe mummy apple. It
The tall man placed it under his head, and on the instant, so it seemed, fell into a trance-like sleep. The curtain was rung down on the first act of Felisi's peep show. But there was still the bundle.
Within five minutes she knew what it contained, and like a dutiful daughter, made a report to her father.
"They have come far and are very tired," she told him, squatting in her proper place at the doorway.
The Chief of Luana looked up from a litter of meaningless papers, and fixed Felisi with his official frown. He was a quaint little man, who, under pretence of being eternally busy, did nothing whatever. As a newly elected member of the local native district council, he had been inordinately impressed at the first assembly by the importance of anything in the nature of a printed form. Whatever its shape or colour or size, it was apparent to him that all things had their inception, their proper conduct, and ultimate fruition in "forms," so he had brought away a kerosene tin full of them for his own use. The typewriter followed as a second and culminating stroke of originality. He would send in the returns of Luana's health, population, and trade as they should be sent in. He intended to get on. Carefully selecting a faded blue document issued for the returns of cattle diseases in the year 1891, he slipped it into the machine and proceeded with two gnarled fingers to pound it with purple hieroglyphics.
"Are they turagas (gentlemen)?" he snapped during a pause in proceedings, and precisely in the manner of the local J.P.
"One of them is a turaga," replied his daughter, who was the only member of his household he seemed unable to impress.
"And what is their business?"
"I do not know—yet. They have not spoken. They are asleep."
"Have they many cigars and much wisiky?"
"They have nothing," said Felisi, "except"
The Chief of Luana had intended to smite the wicker table after the fashion of the Native Commissioner when exasperated, but, instead, his wrist caught the typewriter keys, causing several bars to rear on end and unite in a tangled mass.
"One is a turaga," he scoffed, "yet they have nothing!"
"That is so," returned his imperturbable daughter. "It is often so with turagas. This one has nothing but a lump of ambergris the size of my head, which he keeps ever by him."
Her father's eyes goggled at her over the typewriter.
"Ambergris!" he repeated in an awed undertone.
"Yes. It is one hundred pounds for a piece no bigger than a pigeon's egg in Suva. I have seen."
And the Chief of Luana knew this to be so. For a while his brow was creased by a myriad wrinkles, which signified that he was trying to think; then he waved Felisi from the presence.
"Go," he ordered, "and tend these guests as you would others. I will make known the Government's wishes when I have submitted my report."
Felisi proceeded to carry out instructions with all the pleasure in life, so that when the visitors awoke, after twenty-four hours of log-like slumber, they found the matting spread with delicacies, and their guide of the previous night in discreet attendance.
"This is a bit of all right," quoth Morgan, ravenously attacking the prawns.
"Very kind," said the tall man; "but I think we ought to tell you," he added, turning to Felisi, "we can't pay for anything. We have no money."
"Oh, that's all right," said Morgan through a mouthful. "This is the way in the out-back villages—guest house and all the rest of it. I know down-and-outs who've lived like princes for three months and more in one of 'em for nothing but an old shirt. We're on velvet, Slade, and about time, too, I reckon."
The tall man waited until the other's voice was entirely deadened by food, then turned again to their hostess.
"Where are we?" he asked, with his whimsical smile.
"Him Luana," came the response out of the shadows.
"Luana, eh? Well, it sounds pretty, and is pretty, but how do we get out of here to where there are steamers—steamers, savvy?"
"Me savvy," replied Felisi, with a pout at the reflection on her intelligence. "You wait maybe six, maybe thirty day, and cutter him take you outahere."
"Maybe six, maybe thirty," mused the tall man. "And whom do we thank for looking after us all that time?"
Felisi wriggled in delicious self-consciousness on the mats.
"Oh, cut it out, Slade," interposed Morgan. "They don't want thanks. Don't understand 'em. They look after us for the honour of the thing. Pleases the chief, and all that. As long as we are looked after, what does it matter who does it, or why? You make me tired. Hi, Mary, some more taro, lively!"
"Will you go to the Chief of Luana," continued the tall man, as though the other had not spoken, "and convey to him our thanks?"
Felisi nodded and retired, whereupon the tall man drew a battered pouch from his pocket and thoughtfully filled his pipe.
"Look here, Morgan," he said, "it's about time you and I understood one another."
"I'm on," agreed Morgan.
"We're partners," the other continued slowly, "until we sell and divide the proceeds; there's no avoiding that. But there's no need to hide the fact that we dislike each other pretty thoroughly, is there?"
Morgan drew his knees to his chin, and sat staring over them with his bright, furtive little eyes.
"All right," he said, "we'll let it go at that."
"And personally I don't see any need for us to rely solely on one another's company for perhaps thirty more days, either, do you?"
There was no answer.
"So, while we're waiting for a cutter, I suggest that either you or I get out of here. Which is it to be?"
"Who looks after the stuff?"
"I do," said Slade.
"I see," sneered Morgan.
"I do," Slade repeated, puffing meditatively at his pipe. "I don't trust you, Morgan."
"And why should I trust you?"
"Because I've never given you cause to distrust me," returned Slade. He turned slowly and looked full into the venomous eyes of his partner. "I found you out—that's why you hate me so, Morgan. I suppose you've forgotten all that happened back there in the mangroves. I haven't. Why, man, you wouldn't be here now if I hadn't dragged and carried and kicked you here! Yet ever since I ran across this stuff your one thought has been how to rob me of my share of it. Twice I caught you, Morgan, slinking off. The first time I believed the yarn you put up, instead of leaving you to rot. The second time you confessed and asked my forgiveness, grovelling there in the swamp"
"Who'll believe that?"
"No one, because no one will be told of it; but I know it, and that's why you hate me, and that's why I distrust you, and why I'm going to look after our property until it's sold."
A glint came into Morgan's eyes.
"I'll toss you for the lot," he suggested magnanimously, "and that'll make an end of it. Come, be a sport, Slade; just the flick of a coin—your coin, if you like."
Slade shook his head wearily.
"If that's being a sport, I've finished with sport," he said. "I've had too many little fortunes within cooee and lost them, to do the same with this. I'm afraid to take the chance if you like. I tell you, this last little jaunt's taken it clean out of me. I'm getting old. I'm going to stick to what I've got this time, in spite of you or the devil, and make a clean breakaway for the cool rains and other things worth having." His hand rested on the bundle at his side. "This means more to me than I'd ever dream of telling you, or you'd understand," he added gravely. "It means—everything."
Morgan's glance travelled to the weather-worn sack- ing that covered their joint fortune, and rested there a moment. The other smiled.
"You'll have to kill me to get it, Morgan," he said quietly, "and I don't think you'd do that."
"Why not?" The question came involuntarily.
"Because you haven't the pluck," said Slade. "You're a sneak thief, not a murderer."
Morgan sat motionless for a long moment, then got slowly to his feet.
"That's straight," he said.
"It's meant to be," returned Slade. "Why should we be anything else with one another? You know me, and I know you, or, if we don't, we ought to by now. What's the good of pretence between us two?"
Morgan shrugged his lean shoulders.
"And just what is it you want now?" he asked, after a pause.
"I want a rest," said Slade, "don't you? The length of the village apart will suit me, if it suits you."
"And what if it doesn't suit me?"
"The next month will have to be rather more trying for both of us than it need be, that's all," said Slade.
Morgan went over to the doorway and stood looking out at the glare.
"All right," he said suddenly, and passed outside, whistling.
Slade sat staring after him for a while, then drew the back of his hand across his forehead and sank back on to the mats.
"Now," he muttered. "Now, of all times!" and drew a mat over his already trembling body.
The second act of Felisi's peep show had been entertaining. Perhaps the acting was rather more subdued than a transpontine audience could have wished, but it gave promise of development. Felisi lowered the curtain by the simple expedient of allowing the reed wall to resume its normal contour, and went into the guest house to clear away.
The tall man lay watching her from under his mat with unnaturally bright eyes and compressed lips. Felisi recognized the symptoms: he was trying to keep his teeth from chattering. Why did they all do that? Because it was in their nature to make a fight? Perhaps. But the tall man was fighting something stronger than himself, and by nightfall he was in a raging fever.
"Another mat, and I shall be all right," he jerked out; "just one more. Ah, thank you, little girl! And keep everyone away. Don't let them know—any one, mind. I mustn't lose control mustn't...." The words came from him in convulsive jerks. It was terrible to watch. And all the while the bundle was clasped tight in his straining arms. "After all—and so near the end, so near.... Out of here, away home, start afresh, go slow; it's the last chance, the last....' Hark! There he is!" But it was only a hurricane bird crying overhead, and Felisi told him so, and knelt beside him with a cocoanut shell of water. "Quite the little nurse, aren't you?" stuttered the tall man, his eyes blazing at her out of the darkness. "I shan't forget this. What was your name? Ah, Felisi! Felisi, no Macduff, eh? Well, I shan't forget it. There—there he is!"
The water spilled from his lips, his body remained rigid while a trickle of laughter filtered through the night. It was Morgan's over kava in the chief's house not fifty yards distant. He had a way with chiefs, had Morgan. If he heard! If he came—now! Felisi took the sick man's burning hand between her own and tried to soothe him to silence.
"Him no come," she crooned. "Him no" But he was coming. A musical whistling drew nearer.
"Keep him away!" gasped the tall man in what he had intended for a whisper, but what was jerked from his throat in a raucous shout.
The whistling ceased abruptly. There was a pause, then the faint sound of naked feet on the wooden runway leading up to the guest house, and Morgan came in.
What he saw appeared to amuse him, for his mouth twisted into a smile.
"Got it, eh?" he observed, looking down on his stricken partner.
"Just a touch," said Slade between clenched teeth.
"Only a touch. Well, that's all right. Pity we haven't any quinine; but you'll be better after a bit."
And then he went. Felisi could scarcely bring herself to believe it, but it was so. He had gone. The other's ramblings provided the explanation.
"Hardly ripe... might put up a fight... wait till I'm helpless...." A defiant chuckle came from under the quaking pyramid of mats. "But that's where he makes the mistake—big mistake. I'm not going under. I'm better. D'you hear that, Felisi—no Macduff? Better—ah...." And with that the tall man lost consciousness.
Morgan had returned to the chief's house, and was beguiling him with titbits of officialdom when Felisi found time to shift her sphere of activities.
"... and I don't mind telling you, chief, I am favourably impressed with the conduct of affairs in Luana," he was saying in glib dialect, "very favourably impressed. It seems to me you are wasted here. What you want is influence, commonly called 'boost.'"
"Boost," repeated the chief, who was rapidly becoming impressed.
"Yes. Now, there's my dear old friend Bettington, the Commissioner—you may have heard of him?" The chief nodded with bulging eyes. "There's a man who could give you a lift, if any one could, and sometimes, over one of our little dinners, I can do a lot. You send in your report, and I'll see that it's noticed in the proper quarter. That's the way we do things."
With his customary expression of bemused anxiety when dealing with matters beyond his depth, the Chief of Luana sat fingering buff Form No. 21875, and wondering what this exceedingly pleasant person required. He was not long left in suspense.
"In the meantime," proceeded the pleasant person, "my friend is too ill to travel, and I shall be obliged to go on alone at once. If you place a good sailing canoe and two men at my disposal for a week from to-night, and look after my friend until I return for him in the Government launch—probably with Bettington himself—I will simply hand you here and now what we call in official circles a promissory note"
"A form," muttered the chief uncertainly.
"Exactly, a form," agreed Morgan, "duly signed, sealed, and delivered for any amount within reason. As you know, we of the Government are not sticklers as to cost...."
He said a great deal more, but Felisi could wait no longer. Her services were in request elsewhere.
The third act of the peep show was eminently satisfactory. It opened on an empty stage save for a pile of mats in a far corner of the guest house and the flickering light of a candlenut that cast long shadows across the yellow matting of the floor.
It seemed a long time before it came, but at last another and more definite shadow joined the rest, moving swiftly across the guest house. At the pile of mats it paused, kneeling, peering, outstretching an arm. It was a hesitant shadow even now, and not without cause, for in its gropings under the mats its arm became suddenly transfixed, and in a moment the guest house was a chaos of struggling men.
But it did not last long. Morgan was infinitely the stronger. With a wrench he was free and away, the bundle under his arm, his partner, a gaunt, dishevelled figure, stumbling impotently in his wake. Felisi watched them go—down through the moon-mottled fringes of the palm grove and out on to the beach.
There a canoe was waiting on a sea of inky shadows, and Morgan was soon lost to sight. The other stood for a moment, swaying gently, his long arms hanging nerveless at his sides until the last iota of his strength had ebbed, and he crumpled face downward on the sand.
Felisi smiled to herself in the shadow of the guest house. Undoubtedly the third act had been a success. It only remained to supply a fitting climax, which she proceeded to do by combing her hair, and taking from its hiding place a bundle wrapped in weather-worn sacking. This she carried down to the beach, that it might be the first thing her patient's eye should rest upon.
Unfortunately, the more telling phase of the climax was perforce enacted "off," when somewhere and at some time an exactly similar bundle was exultantly unwrapped, exposing to view a congealed mass of Luana's good red clay. But you cannot have it both ways, even in a peep show.