South of the Line/The Spell

by Ralph Stock

 

The Spell

IF FENNER had thrown away that absurd wreath of flowers, things might have turned out differently. I—even I—admit that now, because I know.

Jimmy Fenner enjoyed a huge popularity on Miatu, and it was not of the "grog" variety, either. I don't believe he had ever given a nigger alcohol in his life. He had the right temperament, that was all; and, as surely as a dog or a child knows its friend, so surely does the South Sea Kanaka recognize and appreciate a kindred spirit.

There were those "at home" who deplored Jimmy Fenner. They said there was nothing in him, and neither was there—of evil. For all his six feet of good-looking, powerfully built manhood, backed by an income that would have been the ruination of most men, he was a child—pleasure-loving, irresponsible, simple of soul.

But to return to the absurd wreath of flowers. It was made of crimson drala blossoms and thrown to him from one of the canoes that swarmed round the schooner like a flock of sea birds. Fenner was standing at the rail, and when he slipped the wreath over his head, and stood there like a six-foot, twentieth-century Dryad, a great shout went up.

"Ah, of course," he muttered, and smiled whimsically. He had learnt something of Island custom in the last six months and knew that if a man did this, it meant that he would return. "What a liar I am," he added guiltily.

"Samoce, Samoce!" he called over the water as the schooner headed for the channel in the barrier reef, then turned abruptly from the rail and lit a cigar.

"It's been a great time, Clem," he said with a catch in his voice that I attributed to smoke.

"Great," I agreed.

"There's nothing quite like it," he added after a pause.

"No, nothing," I answered.

He glanced at me with a certain disappointment, walked aft, and stood looking out over our wake to where a green dot that was Miatu danced in the shimmering heat haze.

There was cause for his disappointment. I should have enthused over these fairy isles and their child-like people. I should have met his mood, and capped comparative with superlative, for it would all have been genuine, but—I was thinking of Lady Fenner, already wondering how I should account for our long-delayed return to civilization and things practical. Fenner's mother was methodical, and after the fashion of such people, demanded method in others. "Why had I not returned on the date specified?" I could hear her asking the question in her incisive falsetto. "Because Fenner wouldn't leave!" It sounded weak on my part, and savoured of betrayal. "Because the tropics are demoralizing, and——" But that was worse.

Between Miatu and Levuka, Fenner spent most of his time hunched on the deck, staring over his knees.

"Whew!" I exclaimed, strolling past him for the third time without being noticed. "You've still got those flowers round your neck. They're getting high."

He looked down at them, then at me.

"Yes," he answered absently.

"Heigh ho for a few theatres," I sighed presently, looking for'ard.

"Don't," he snapped, still staring aft.

I left him. It would wear off, I decided. There was plenty of time.

At lunch—fish, turtle steak, taro, and pineapples—he became more communicative.

"With another three months' practice Pope would make a really fine bat," he observed, apropos of nothing. Then again: "A year's sound coaching for the whole team and they'd give the average county club a run for its money." Or: "I can just see Miatu with a resident's bungalow on Beritania Hill; white, of course, with an avenue of coral and pandanus. They've got the secret, Clem; there's no getting away from that."

"Secret of what?" I demanded brusquely. It is a dangerous sign when a healthy, normal young man begins to talk about houses on hills with pandanus avenues.

"Life," said Fenner.

"That isn't life," I told him, waving a dramatic hand in the wrong direction; "it's a dream, a pleasant one I'll grant, but you'll wake up the minute you rub shoulders with your own world."

"I wonder," he mused. And, to tell the truth, so did I—until we reached Levuka, where four cablegrams from Lady Fenner persuaded me that I had spoken nothing but the truth.

I think Fenner was "wondering" most of the way to London. He kept very much to himself, and spent most of his time in a deck chair, smoking, and looking out to sea, with his hands interlocked behind his head.

He was to stand for Parliament, and marry a Miss Strickland, Lady Fenner informed me on our return to Craigmoor.

"Oh, yes," I murmured, or something equally absurd.

Lady Fenner fixed me with the penetrating gray eyes that had haunted me from Levuka to London.

"The tour was a mistake," she announced with her usual abruptness. "It was badly managed."

I wanted to ask her how she would have ordered the movements of a twenty-five-year-old child of independent means and nature during a year's world wanderings, but refrained. She would have told me.

"Rex was to have seen the world," she accused. "But from what I can learn he has seen nothing but some islands—somewhere or other. What was the attraction?"

My eye wandered through the bay window over Craigmoor's well-ordered acres, then conjured a vision of Miatu on a moonlit night with brown-skinned men and women dancing a meke.

"I really can't say," I admitted, "except——"

"Yes?"

"Except that they were very beautiful, and we stayed there some time."

Lady Fenner frowned. From boyhood I remembered that frown, and still feared it.

"There was—nothing else? No feminine attraction?" Lady Fenner leant forward. "Remember, Clem, you are Rex's oldest—only friend; I relied on you."

"No, no, certainly not," I stammered. "It was, well, just the place. I can't define its attractions exactly—no one has been able to from Stevenson downward—but, there it was."

"And here it is still apparently," snapped Lady Fenner. "Rex is not the same. I hoped—I always thought—that extensive travel only proved that there is no place like home."

We talked a great deal more about Rex, Craigmoor, and the future, but I left with a vague presentiment that in "those islands, somewhere or other," Lady Fenner had found her match, if not her master.

"I can't stand this," Fenner told me one day in town. "Just look at it!"

I looked, and saw Hyde Park on a May morning.

"Well?" I demanded. "What's the matter with it?"

"I don't mean this exactly," he answered, indicating the Row with a flick of his stick, "although it's futile enough in its own way—liver brigade, clothes, pretence, pretence, pretence but—everything. They're trying to make me stand for Parliament."

"It doesn't appeal to you?"

"Appeal?" He struck savagely at a pebble, and sent it hurtling into the wheels of a passing perambulator. "Look at the finished article!"

"You'd sooner umpire at Miatu," I sneered.

He stopped in his stride and confronted me. His face was transfigured.

"Just that!" he said; and the trouble was I could entirely sympathize.

"Went to a theatre—and supper the other night," he mumbled presently. "Such drivel! Such belly worship!"

"Perhaps you'd prefer a meke and a fish feast?" I suggested.

He looked at me, but did not answer with his lips.

In the circumstances I was hardly surprised at receiving an urgent wire from Lady Fenner toward the end of June.

"He's gone," she said as soon as the drawing-room door had closed. "Vanished!"

I had never seen Lady Fenner so—I was going to say "human." She was agitated, and showed it.

"Good gracious!" I exclaimed, with as much astonishment as I could muster.

"And in the midst of everything!" she wailed. "He left me this. Read it, and tell me what it means."

I read:

My dear Mater:

It's no go; I can't stand it. I avoided farewells because they would mean explanations that I couldn't give, and you wouldn't understand. Ask Clem; I think he has an inkling.

I'm sorry to have upset all your arrangements, but, after all, what does it matter? If you are as annoyed over this as I expect you will be, keep saying that—"What does it matter?" and you'll get as near to my reasons for cutting it all as I could ever take you.

Your affectionate son,

Rex.

I pretended to be reading for several seconds after I had finished. I could feel an outraged mother's eyes riveted upon me. What, in Heaven's name, was I to tell her? What I suspected—that because he had worn an absurd wreath of drala blossoms when he left Miatu he was bound to return there? Yes, even at that time I had begun to wonder.... But the mere thought of offering such a preposterous suggestion to Lady Fenner in the drawing room of Craigmoor must have brought a shadow of a smirk to my lips. I heard Lady Fenner speaking.

"Is this a practical joke?" Her tone was almost eager.

I looked up at that.

"No," I said. "It's not a joke. He has gone back to Miatu."

"Miatu?"

"Yes; an island in the Lau group, west of Fiji."

"But——" Lady Fenner swallowed something, and looked about the room.

"We may as well face it," I went on with a sudden access of candour. "He has gone back to the Islands because he likes the life there better than here. It's quite possible, you know. What's more, I doubt if he means to come back."

Then it was that Lady Fenner rallied her forces—such forces!—and for a solid hour I was attacked, propitiated, flattered, argued into pledging myself to do my utmost to bring back her son.

"I relied on you," was her parting shot, and two weeks later I sailed for the South Seas, primed to the brim with every argument, every appeal, calculated to swell the heart if not the mind of man.

I was sick to death of them by the time I reached Colombo, not altogether sure of them at Sydney, and at Miatu the last vestige of them was wiped from my mind like a drawing from a slate. I was still frenziedly groping for them as I walked up the powdered coral pathway to the guest house. What was it in this infernal paradise of a place that made one forget?

Red earth paths, vivid greensward, shady cocoanut palms, and yellow sunlight all was the same, except for a wooded hill behind and above the village. Here a score of natives were leisurely felling trees or squatting in circles, alternately rolling banana-leaf salukas and scraping bamboos with their copra knives.

I found Fenner entertaining the Buli at afternoon tea.

"Well, well, well," he drawled, and pushed me into a wicker chair. "Kava or tea?"

"Whisky-and-soda, thanks," I replied.

He shook his head and dropped one eyelid.

"'Fraid we can't do it. But I can recommend the tea; it's Miatu."

The Buli grinned from ear to ear.

"Vinaka, vinaka Miatu!" he chuckled, and waddled out into the sunlight.

Fenner stretched his legs and yawned, then went over to a cupboard in the corner and produced a whisky tantalus.

"You ought to have seen my welcome," he said, pushing it across the table. "I thought the old Buli would have a fit. And the others—nothing would do them but they must build me a house—you remember my house—on the hill behind the village; they're at it now."

For a while he sat watching me at my whisky-and-soda. Suddenly he laughed, and I think it was that riling laugh that brought back to me in a flood all Lady Fenner's arguments.

"Fire ahead," he jeered. "You're aching to get it off your chest, and I'm ready now; I'm on my native heath."

"I'm going to try to persuade you to come home."

"Back to England, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Of course you are; fire ahead."

"You owe it to your mother—to Craigmoor. Think——"

"Do you suppose I haven't thought, Clem?" He was serious now, and leant forward, tapping the wicker table with a strong brown finger. "Do you suppose I didn't cudgel my brains almost to bits before taking this step? I owe the mater nothing except the accident of birth. As for Craigmoor, I'm on the credit side there."

"Your mother wants you."

"Does she? It's funny she's never shown it before. But, yes, I admit she may want me—for Parliament or some equally futile career, so that she can hear people say of her son: 'He's getting on,' or 'He's a coming man.' Getting on—toward what?"

"Work of some kind is necessary for every man." I remembered that very distinctly. It had sounded well—in the drawing room at Craigmoor.

"It all depends what you call work. A lover of birds is 'working' when he studies their habits. A botanist—a naturalist——"

"Work is doing something that one doesn't particularly care about," I ventured. "We need it as a discipline, restraint. It's the curse of Adam, but somehow it still holds good. "

Fenner smiled his exasperating smile.

"Well, all I can say is that we're out of the cursed area here," he drawled. "I don't feel as if I ought to be doing something I don't particularly care about. What's more, I don't do it, and behold—a man!" He protruded his deep chest and thumped it triumphantly.

"You'll 'go native,'" I suggested.

"Not at all," he answered suavely. "I wear seven duck suits a week, and live—as you see. Besides, although I don't work according to your standards, I have interests—plenty to occupy me. We're planning a polo ground. I'm getting in some Tongan ponies. Then there's the tea; that was my idea."

I felt that we were straying from the point.

"Look here," I blurted desperately, "you have an income of fifteen thousand pounds a year. Is it going to lie idle?"

"Ah," mused Fenner, "I never thought of that. I see your point—I'm receiving without giving. Quite good! Would you like it? I don't want it."

"I?"

"Yes; it's you or a charity. Which shall it be?"

"Good heavens!" I gasped. "You're not all there, Rex. Think, man—think what it means."

"I've done all the money thinking I'm going to do," said Fenner. "Have a cigarette."

"But——"

"Have a cigarette."

I took one and lit it mechanically.

"You're under a spell, Rex—that's it," I muttered, looking at him across the table.

"Perhaps," he admitted, emitting smoke with the words. "It's very pleasant. I see nothing against it."

He levered himself out of his chair and came round to me.

"It's no good, Clem," he said; "they've discovered the secret of life on Miatu, and I'm going to share it with them."

"And the secret?" I suggested, with a poor effort at superiority. I must have looked foolish as I said it, for he laughed his deep, riling laugh.

"Do you mean to say you don't know?" he queried. "Happiness, you old fathead! Come and have a look at the tea."

During the sun-bathed days that followed I was torn between the growing conviction that Fenner was right and my pledge to his mother. How was the man to be moved? For hours I would sit thinking out crushing arguments that Fenner dispersed as though they had been smoke.

His obstinacy annoyed me intensely, but, had I known it, his annoyance was far greater than mine. It found vent with startling unexpectedness.

We were walking along the beach road with .22 rifles on the off chance of pigeon, and, as usual, I was improving—or trying to improve—the occasion with my half-hearted appeals to his better judgment, when he turned on me with a swiftness of which I had never dreamt him capable. I had never seen Fenner angry in my life, but I did now, and it was not pleasant.

"Look here," he said evenly, but his teeth were bared, "I'm sick of this—sick of you. When are you going?"

"When you come with me," I managed to jerk out.

"Well, you'll die and rot here before that," he answered, still with a terrible restraint. "And I don't want a man who has been my friend doing that on Miatu. You leave here to-morrow, or I won't be answerable for the consequences."

"What on earth do you mean by that?" I demanded, aghast.

"What I say."

"You must be mad."

"Perhaps—a homicidal maniac. But there it is: you leave here to-morrow, or you'll be shot."

"And who will do the shooting?"

"I will."

He meant it. In that instant I realized that he actually meant it. We spoke no more that day.

After my bath the next morning I found all my belongings packed and piled outside the guest house, and Fenner sitting in the doorway with a rifle across his knees. There was nothing for it but to follow the porters down to the waiting cutter. I never felt so small in my life, but what was the use of coming to violence?

I had already stepped aboard when Fenner strolled down the landing.

"Good-bye, Clem," he said.

I think I grunted.

"I shall be glad to see you back any time—when you've changed your views. At present they're boring, and we're not cultivating boredom on Miatu. By the way," he added, as the boys began hauling on the main sheet, "about that fifteen thou' a year: it's going to Charing Cross Hospital unless I hear from you to the contrary inside of two months. Think it over."

I leant over the gunwale.

"Go to the devil!" I exploded. Lord, how he annoyed me!

"'Fraid we don't cultivate him, either, on Miatu, " said Fenner, and smiled his exasperating, self-satisfied smile. Suddenly it was blotted out. Something had hurtled between us, and fell in a jumble about my neck. A great shout went up from the natives on the wharf when it was seen to be a wreath of scarlet drala blossoms.

For an instant I fought with the desire to tear it from me and fling it into the sea. Then it occurred to me that this would be rather a childish thing to do, so I left it where it was as the cutter slid from the wharf and headed for the channel in the barrier reef.

 

"I've failed," I told Lady Fenner, "That's all I can say—I've failed."

I've no idea now what she said to me; I was thinking of other things.

At the end of a month I had booked my passage, and in two more I was walking up a coral and pandanus avenue to a white house on the hill behind the village at Miatu.

"I've changed my views," I said.

"Come in," said Fenner.

THE END