Uneasy, it has been said, lies the head that wears a crown. Mr. Darby was no exception to the rule. Though on the first night of his reign he slept soundly, his other nights were restless. But it was not the cares of sovereignty that troubled his sleep. His nights were haunted by dreams of Sarah, of England, Newchester, and all the friends from whom he was so utterly cut off, and by weary intervals of wakeful longing and scheming. Nor did his troubles end with daylight. Much of his life as King soon began to be very irksome; for a king, he soon discovered, or at least a king ruling over a people as primitive as the Mandrats, enjoys very little real liberty. It was not the strange, meaningless ceremonies which he was called upon to perform that bothered Mr. Darby. On the contrary, he performed these with gusto and a fine sense of their dramatic possibilities, for he had always had a weakness for formal and dignified occasions. To assume his jewelled head-dress and green-feathered cloak and proceed in pomp to the Place of Justice, a fenced enclosure on the site of the late King’s hut, was less of a duty than a pleasure to him. Punnett was of great assistance on these occasions for he sometimes recognized a prisoner as one who had been a notorious rascal at the time of his previous visit to Mandratia, and so was able to advise King Darby to convict with a fair probability of justice. Another duty which devolved upon Mr. Darby a fortnight after his accession, a duty which he performed with gratifying success, was to cure an eclipse of the sun and restore that indispensable body to perfect working order. This act enormously enhanced his prestige.
In the performance of all such royal tasks Mr. Darby was in his element. It was the restrictions which, by the very reason of his divinity, hedged him about that irked him and very soon made life a burden to him. The fact that, at the risk of losing his sanctity, his feet must never touch the ground, he found an almost unbearable imposition. To be forbidden ever to stroll about Umwaddi Taan and, worse still, to be debarred from investigating the jungle that so alluringly surrounded it, to know that never again would he be able to paddle in the river, as he had done on the first day of his arrival on the Peninsula,—these vetoes were hateful not only in themselves but in their consequence, which was that he became distressingly plump.
Another tiresome law was the one which ordained that he should be fed by the King’s Butler, a priestlike person who tore rags of meat with his fingers or rolled balls of a soft unguessable food between his hands and introduced them into Mr. Darby’s mouth. At first Mr. Darby found the process so revolting that he could hardly bring himself to swallow the food; and, even after he had habituated himself to it, it remained a grievous burden, for table talk and the leisurely freedom of meals were among his chief pleasures, and a chatty picnic with Punnett three or four times a day would have gone far to alleviate the rigours and confinements of his life as King.
In fact Mr. Darby soon discovered that a little sovereignty goes a very long way. He yearned for his home and Sarah: the thought that all this time she would be grieving for his loss was very painful to him. He even went so far, at his moments of deepest dejection, as to curse Uncle Tom Darby’s fortune which had snatched him from his home and friends and the comfortable routine of the office. Gradually even the royal ceremonies began to bore him. Sometimes when he sat in the Place of Justice, listening in a semi-doze to the incoherent chatterings of the litigants and their witnesses, the old office in Ranger Street would appear to him in such extraordinarily visible form that it seemed to him that he had actually skipped across those thousands of miles of land and sea and paid the familiar spot a brief, an all too brief, visit. He saw it all, the desks, the floor-boards, the elaborate Victorian cornice, the very dust on the windowledges; and to the very dust he loved it and longed for it. Then, with a flicker like the momentary blur in an oldfashioned film, the office was replaced by the mad, improbable actuality, the wide circle of bronze-skinned savages, the glare of the stark sunshine, the fierce, sombre luxuriance of the jungle that walled Umwaddi Taan, and the incomprehensible chatter of the litigants of which Punnett would presently give some sort of interpretation.
And so at the very beginning of his reign the poor little man began to dream of escape. His hopes fixed themselves desperately on the bare chance that the trading vessel would soon call, for this provided the one obvious and simple rescue. On the very morning following his coronation he charged Punnett to discover when it was expected, and waited all day in a fever of hope, for at first Punnett could elicit no information. So desperate was his reliance on this one hope that it began to seem to him impossible that it could fail him. He felt in his bones that the boat was coming soon. But in the evening when Punnett for the third time that day returned to the royal hut, Mr. Darby saw by a single glance at his face that he had learned the truth and that the truth was terrible. The trader had called and left two days before their arrival.
For some minutes Mr. Darby sat silent while the tears trickled down behind his spectacles. The awful possibility that he was destined to spend the rest of his life among savages stared him in the face. But at least there was Punnett. Punnett, surely, would be able to devise ways and means.
‘Punnett,’ he said at last, raising mournful spectacles to his chief magician, ‘we must escape by the … ah … interior.'
Punnett, the resourceful Punnett, shook his head doubtfully. ‘It would be very risky, sir,’ he said, ‘very risky indeed.’
‘But you came that way with Professor Harrington, Punnett.’
‘Yes, sir; but we had a very complete outfit, sir,—guns, tents, tinned food and suchlike, and a dozen native porters. Besides Professor Harrington was a very experienced explorer, sir. He spoke goodness knows how many of these native languages, and he had a wonderful way with natives. It would be better, if I may say so, sir, to wait for the trader.’
‘Wait a year, Punnett?’ cried poor Mr. Darby with a sinking heart.
Punnett nodded. ‘A year soon goes, sir. And meanwhile we’re safe here and well looked-after.’
Safe, hundreds of miles from the nearest white man, in the middle of a lot of howling heathen more like fierce animals than men! And well looked-after when a black savage smelling like a wild beast rolls balls of a sickening paste in his corpse-like hands and pushes them into your mouth! The poor little man’s heart sank and his stomach turned: he felt as if Punnett, even Punnett, were letting him down. He had no one to rely on, no one but himself, and he dropped into a melancholy silence, his spectacles lightless and fixed on the floor. A year might seem a short time to Punnett who appeared to have no home-ties and had spent no less than five years here with Professor Harrington; but to himself a year’s imprisonment in Umwaddi Taan, cut off from Sarah and home and friends, was an appalling prospect, and, Punnett or no Punnett, he clung to the hope that some means of escape might yet be devised. If only he had had his maps with him, his maps which were now on their way to Sydney on board the Utopia, he felt sure he could have found a way.
• • • • • • • •
Weeks passed, weeks that seemed to be months. The days grew hotter and hotter until Mr. Darby feared that he would melt away. The nights, though they brought a blessed respite from sunshine, brought also the ceaseless torment of mosquitoes and pium flies, and the bonfires, which Punnett caused to be lighted to drive them away, filled the royal hut with a stifling smoke which was only less unendurable than the flies. Mr. Darby grew to loathe his hut: the hours of unbroken idleness which he passed there almost drove him mad. Conversation with Punnett afforded some relief, but it was impossible to converse all day; in fact even moderate conversation soon became exhausting in that fierce and enervating heat, and he and Punnett soon fell into a dazed silence in which interminable hours passed over them with a slothfulness unbelievable. Even royalty palled, for the kingship Mr. Darby was called upon to exercise could equally well have been carried out by a machine. He had not the smallest personal contact with his subjects. Among a people bound by iron laws and customs of which he was totally ignorant, a people of whose language and ways of thought he knew nothing, Mr. Darby’s great qualifications as a beneficent autocrat were wasted. He who had long cherished an ambition to govern, to sway multitudes as he had swayed the assembled guests at his birthday party at Number Seven Moseley Terrace, found himself, now that he was actually a king, with no more real power than a successful scarecrow. The only advantage to be derived from this form of kingship was the gratifying but at present rather empty fact itself, the fact that he was a king. If ever he contrived to escape and return to England, the fact would then assume its proper significance. He already imagined himself ordering new calling-cards: ‘H.M. King James of Mandras,’ or ought it to be ‘H.M. James, King of Mandras’? Or perhaps simply ‘Mr. W.J. Darby,’ and under it, in brackets, ‘(Ex-King of Mandras)’. Meanwhile Mr. Darby was getting precious little pleasure out of his exalted position.
Despite the heat, he found his enforced immobility the hardest thing of all to bear. If only he could have taken a little walk occasionally, if only he could have revisited the bay where he and Punnett had landed, and paddled and bathed in the river, life would have been less unendurable. Best of all, a thing that would have made all the privations and boredoms of sovereignty richly worth while, if only he could have explored the jungle whose dense green wall so invitingly and tantalizingly ringed Umwaddi Taan. His brief glimpses of it—the first, when he had boldly forced his way through its wall and stood alone in its mysterious twilight for a few moments: the second, when on the evening of his coronation he had glided through it, borne on the shoulders of his captors—had filled him with a greater longing than ever to explore its depths. But that, he knew, was impossible. If once he set foot to earth his sanctity, and therefore his safety, would vanish.
But one day, as he sat despondently dreaming on the floor of his hut, an idea came to him. He raised his head: for the first time for many weeks a light gleamed in his spectacles.
‘Punnett,’ he said, ‘though I mayn’t walk, is there any reason why I shouldn’t be carried? Can’t you tell them I want to visit the river? I couldn’t bathe, of course, but surely I might get them to pour water over me?’
Punnett thought for a moment. ‘It might be done, sir,’ he said at last. ‘Of course, there’d be no good putting it plain and simple. We’d have to give it what you call a fancy turn. I might say, sir, that the place where they found you is a holy place and you want to have a bit of a ceremony there. And we might perhaps work in something about the river. For instance, I might tell them the river’s your wife, if you’ll excuse my suggesting it, sir.’
‘By all means, Punnett,’ said Mr. Darby. ‘Say whatever you think best, and fix it up, if you can, for the early morning, before it gets too hot.’
From such simple origins sprang the great ceremony of the King’s Union with the Sampoto Goddess, one of the most interesting and instructive of all primitive rites, destined to revolutionize the study of folklore because of the extraordinary insight it has afforded into the psychology of the savage mind. Punnett, resourceful as ever, managed to connect the ceremony in the minds of the Mandrats with the phases of the moon, so that Mr. Darby thenceforward had the delicious alleviation of a shower bath once a week.
The success of this idea suggested to Mr. Darby another.
‘Now in this matter of the jungle, Punnett,’ he said one morning during the fourth month of his reign;’ though, of course, I’m … ah … precluded from exploring it like … well, what I should call a commoner; as King it seems to me highly expedious that I should see something of my … ah …. dominions. Now couldn’t something be done in the way of a tour in a hammock?’
Punnett smiled sadly.’ I’ll see what I can fix up, sir,’ he replied.
What he fixed up was, in its ultimate results, something that neither he nor Mr. Darby had bargained for.
And yet no one who was not a Mandrat or at least an anthropologist even more learned in Mandratic folklore than the late Professor Harrington himself, could have guessed to what the King’s journey through the jungle was the inevitable and time-honoured prelude. For Mr. Darby’s innocent desire and Punnett’s simple and successful measures for its satisfaction set in motion a mechanism which shook the Mandratic Peninsula from end to end.
• • • • • • • •
‘He seemed a bit surprised when I mentioned it to him, sir,’ said Punnett when discussing, weeks later, the whole business and its disquieting outcome;’ surprised but gratified, very highly gratified.’ Punnett was speaking of Umbahla, the Head Chief, to whom he had communicated Mr. Darby’s desire to travel about his kingdom.’ “The King,” I said to him, “wants to go round the land.” It seemed a simple thing to mention, sir, but Umbahla got terribly wrought up about it. “The King wishes to show himself to his people? Is it true?” he said, as though I had told him you wanted to give him a cheque for a thousand, sir. “Yes,” I said to him, “it’s true enough.” Then he began to call on his grandfathers and great-grandfathers and I don’t know who all. “Good,” he says to me. “Good. I will tell the chiefs.” Then he called you a great warrior, sir, and mentioned that the late King was a coward who never wished to show himself to his people. It was all very strange, sir, and looking back on it I see now that I ought to have smelt a rat, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
But the point was that Punnett did not smell a rat. He accounted for Umbahla’s unaccountable behaviour by reminding himself that the behaviour of savages was always unaccountable,—a curious slip in one who had been valet to an eminent anthropologist, a man who had spent most of his life in accounting brilliantly for the behaviour of savages. But the fact remains, Punnett was, for once, caught napping and Mr. Darby’s exploration of the jungle opened under the happiest auspices.
What a blessed relief it was to escape from the hateful Umwaddi Taan into the dim and solemn retreats of the jungle. Borne upon the shoulders of twelve specially elected Mandrats, Mr. Darby at last fulfilled his ambition and under ideal conditions, for a bodyguard of his subjects swept from his path all those creatures which for less fortunate travellers detract from the enchantment of the jungle. Though it is laid down that a cat may look at a king, the black panthers of Mandratia were not allowed the most cursory glance at Mr. Darby; snakes and the more aggressive parrots were sent summarily about their business; the fire-ants and tarantula spiders which beset the paths of adventurous commoners, found him utterly inaccessible. Only mosquitoes and the pium flies took their toll as they had done in Umwaddi Taan.
But on one horrible occasion the vigilance of the King’s bodyguard was defied. A fine speciman of the giant Iggarù, that loathsome snake whose touch Punnett had once compared with that of a cow’s tongue, contrived an audience with the Sovereign by the monstrous device of secreting itself in the royal couch. But the creature’s diabolical ingenuity was of little service to it. The screech with which Mr. Darby greeted his unexpected bedfellow summoned his bodyguard in a flash and the creature, which proved to be fifteen feet long and five feet in circumference, paid for its sacrilege with its life. This was the only time that nature was permitted to infringe the sanctity of the King.
c If only we could get into communication with Gamage’s, Punnett,’ said Mr. Darby as they halted one evening in a village clearing;’ if only we could send an order to Gamage’s for some mosquito curtains, it would be what I should call perfect, absolutely perfect.’
‘If it was possible to write to Gamage’s, sir, we might already be on our way home,’ Punnett replied sadly.
Stage by stage, Mr. Darby progressed through his dominions. Long days through the strange twilight of the jungle, a twilight sometimes variegated by pools, ponds, and lakes o glaring sunshine where a fallen tree had left a rare hole in the green roofage or the natives had carved a clearing,—a twilight electrified sometimes by a hanging shower of mauve or scarlet orchids, a noisy flock of green parrots, or the brief apparition of a huge metallic blue butterfly. Nights in some remote clearing, where bonfires slashed the sultry darkness with the flickering scarlet of flame. Other nights in jungle villages, among scenes of barbaric enthusiasm, where black demons danced and yelled and called down destruction on the King’s enemies. Nights, the best of all, in villages on the sea coast, where the jungle receded and the clusters of thatched huts nestled among rocks; where sometimes a delicious sea breeze, smelling of brine, freshened the stagnant air and called up, in the King’s mind, memories of seaside holidays with Sarah at Scarborough or Saltburn.
The last village to be visited lay neither in the jungle nor on the sea coast, but on the high summit of Umfo, the ankle-bone of the Peninsula. It was the village of the Head Chief Umbahla, the largest and most important in Mandras. All day the sweating bearers hoisted the royal litter up rocky paths of an extreme steepness, hoisted it out of the hot, tree-shrouded, stagnant jungle-atmosphere into the clean upper airs of the mountain. With a leap of the heart Mr. Darby found himself suddenly lifted, as through a trap-door on a tower, out of the green-roofed dimness of the forest into stark daylight; saw below him the vast green matted roofage oi the jungle, like the congregated roofs of an immense cathedral on whose tower he sat, and breathed an air that was like wine to his torpid senses. Here and there the rolling greenness flashed miraculously into scarlet or lilac or yellow where the tangle of orchids and lianas broke through the tree-tops in a riot of bloom.
There they halted so that the King might enjoy the spectacle of his kingdom and the bearers take breath and ease their aching muscles. They seemed to be standing on the summit of the world: yet the mountain, gaunt and treeless now, still rose sheer behind them, for they had not yet reached the top of the tower. They had merely emerged from the interior on to an open gallery upon which stood the bare, domed crown of the mountain. Now, as if by an external stair, began the ascent of the dome. For many hours yet the toiling bearers strained and sweated, while beneath Mr. Darby’s wondering gaze the jungle-roof dropped lower and lower and miles of undulating treetops, reaches of curving, silvery-gleaming shore, and boundless tracts of an ocean blue as heaven and translucent as a crystal opened out into an ever growing immensity. Away to the north the green of the jungle died abruptly into a tract of red sand. It was the band of desert that divided the territory of the Mandrats from that of the Tongali, the northern boundary of Mr. Darby’s dominions.
Upwards and upwards still their slow journey progressed through the long, hot afternoon, till it seemed to Mr. Darby, seated upon his lurching litter, that he was being thrust slowly aloft out of earth into Heaven.
At last the steepness decreased, the ground flattened out; they were rounding the crest of the dome; and an hour before sunset they paused on the summit where another wonder revealed itself. For the summit of Umfo is the lip of a huge crater, an inverted dome set in the top of the greater dome of the mountain; and, looking down into the great bowl Mr. Darby saw, wonderfully displayed beneath him, hundreds of beehives faultlessly disposed in a formal pattern. It was the village of Umbahla. For a long while he gazed down upon it, fascinated by its exquisite order after the riotous disorder of nature through which he had travelled. But as he gazed, the peaceful scene changed, became alive. Swarms of bees poured from the hives, circulated like a flow of brown blood through the veins and arteries of the village, flooded into the central heart where they coagulated into a great brown clot. Then the clot stirred, boiled, broke into patterned fragments, and in a series of formal evolutions wove and unwove itself towards that part of the bowl from whose high rim the King and his followers looked down upon it. Umbahla and his people were coming to welcome the King to their village.
The ceremonies and dances of that final evening exceeded in wildness and splendour all that had preceded them. It seemed to Mr. Darby that he had landed not in Heaven, not in Hell, but in an insane amalgamation of both. By the time the festival was ended Mr. Darby’s brain was in a whirl and his bodily strength exhausted.
Next morning, soon, too soon, after dawn, the village awoke, and Mr. Darby and his suite accompanied by the whole population poured down the slopes of Umfo and set out in triumph for Umwaddi Taan. They reached it on the evening of the second day.
And there, as on the evening of his coronation ten months ago, Mr. Darby to his amazement found the whole tribe congregated. Every village that he had visited in his long progress through his dominions had emptied its population, as if for another great festival, into the King’s Clearing. And there, in the celebrations that immediately followed, Umbahla and the twelve chiefs, assisted by choruses of their villagers, extolled the nobility and bravery of their King, the mighty Daabee Taan whom the gods had sent to restore the Mandrat people to their former greatness.
What was it all about? What did it mean? Mr. Darby ordered Punnett instantly to find out; and when the night was far advanced, when silence had fallen on Umwaddi Taan and the bonfires were burning low, Punnett returned to the royal hut with the unpalatable truth.
‘I’m sorry to say, sir, we’ve gone and declared war.’
Mr. Darby’s mouth fell open: terror blazed from his spectacles.’ War, Punnett? But who declared war? Not us, not me, certainly.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Punnett sadly. ‘I’m afraid we did, sir. A little mistake, sir! A misunderstanding, so to speak. It turns out that when a king travels round his kingdom, anyway in these parts, it always means he’s going to declare war. It’s a sine qua non, if I may say so. I wish we’d known it before, sir; I wish Professor Harrington had made a note of it.’
Mr. Darby’s cheeks had fallen in. ‘But it’s … it’s ridiculous, Punnett!’ he stammered. ‘It’s against common sense. It’s … it’s outrageous! Outrageous! You mean to say that just because I take a … ah … a little tour round the country, I … ah … what I should call automatically declare war?’
‘That’s it, sir!’ replied Punnett with a melancholy smile.’ That’s the trouble with savages, sir; you never know where you have them. The most harmless thing you do or say, sir, especially when you happen to be King, may turn the tap on, so to speak.’
‘Then,’ said Mr. Darby in great consternation,’ you must go and … ah … countermand the war at once, Punnett. Tell them from me that they’ve mistaken my meaning, that I don’t want a war. Not in the least! Far from it! Anything but! Quite, quite the … ah … contrary!’
With a melancholy and deprecating smile Punnett shook his head.’ I daren’t do it, sir, if you’ll excuse my saying so. They’re so wrought up, as you saw this evening, sir, that nothing would stop them now. It’ud be as much as our lives are worth to try, and I promised Mrs. Darby I’d look after you, sir.’
Mr. Darby’s face had shrunk with terror into the face of a rabbit. ‘Then what, in Heaven’s name, Punnett, are we to do?’
‘Try and get a good night’s sleep, if I may suggest it, sir. We’ll need it.’
‘And let the war go on?’
‘And let the war go on, sir. It’s much safer to let it go on than to try and stop it.’
There was silence in the hut. Punnett stretched himself on his mattress: it might have been supposed that both were asleep. But Mr. Darby was far from sleep. He was thinking, feverishly and furiously.’ By the way, Punnett/ he asked after some minutes,’who is the … ah … the enemy?’
’ The Tongali, sir. There’s no others available.’
• • • • • • • •
In spite of Punnett’s wise advice, not a wink of sleep did Mr. Darby sleep all that night. About four a.m. he fell into a dull stupor from which, all too soon, he was roused by a low rumble like far-distant thunder. With terrifying speed it grew to the formidable drumming of rain on an iron roof, grew from that to the all-confounding roar of a hundred swooping aeroplanes, and then died away gradually to soft remote thunder again. Then again it increased, boiled up once more to the same terrifying pandemonium, and sank back in the same sustained gradations to a long threatening mutter, heavy with menace.
‘What is it, Punnett?” whispered Mr. Darby, aghast.
‘The war drums, sir,’ said Punnett.‘ I’d better be getting you up, sir’