The Gulf of Tongal, as any good atlas will show, is formed by the semi-circular sweep of coast where the north-western shore of the Mandratic Peninsula swings westward into the main coastline of Eutyca.
The yacht which Sarah had chartered at Sydney had just left her moorings in the Gulf and was steaming southwards, and the ex-King of Mandras and the ex-Queen of Tongal, peacefully seated under the deck awning, at last found time for conversation. They wore European dress. Their crowns and robes, mementoes of an experience which had more than satisfied even Mr. Darby’s hunger for romance, had been carefully bestowed in a trunk. Mr. Darby’s flannel suit, which had fitted him perfectly in the old days at home, appeared grievously fallen-in in front, for a fever, caught during his long journeys through the jungle and aggravated by his recent appalling experiences had kept him raving during the last week. They had carried him, unconscious still, from the strange scene of reunion in the Queen’s hall in Aba Taana to the yacht which had been waiting at anchor during the eight months in which Sarah’s search-party had scoured the south-western coast of Eutyca and the whole of the Tongali territory for traces of Mr. Darby and Punnett. Fortunately his recovery, under the care of Sarah and her doctor, had been rapid, and already, though still somewhat shaky, he was, in mind if not in body, his old self again.
‘Well, I must say, Jim,’ said Sarah, smiling maternally at the little man, ‘you’ve led me a dance. I might just as well have come with you at the start, seeing that I’ve been let in for all this exploring in any case. All I can say is, I hope you liked the place better than I did.’
‘Like it?’ said Mr. Darby.’ I hate it. It’s … ah … what I should call Hell, Sarah. No! No more adventures for me, no more jungles, no more green parrots, no more scarlet orchids, thank you. Thank God they’re all safely behind me.’ He heaved a deep, satisfied sigh.
‘Yes, thank God! And you can thank me, too, Jim. There aren’t many women that would have put up with it, I can tell you, husband or no husband.’
Mr. Darby smiled guiltily. ‘But tell me, Sarah, what put it into your head that I wasn’t drowned?’
‘Well, what do you think, Jim? Poor Punnett, of course. When I heard that Punnett had gone overboard too, and not only Punnett but a couple of life-buoys as well, I knew there was a chance for you. If you’d gone over alone, I’d have ordered my mourning and said no more. But you’d only got to have a word or two with Punnett to see that he was a man in a thousand. He told me, in his quiet way, that I could rely on him, but I knew it already without his telling me. He gave his life for yours, Jim; don’t you forget it.’ She fumbled for a handkerchief. ‘And to think,’ she said in a voice husky with tears,’ that I couldn’t so much as thank him. But he would know, Punnett would know all right what I felt.’
Mr. Darby stared in front of him with spectacles glittering like diamonds, and for a while they sat silent.
‘The Utopia put back for you, you know Jim; they put back fifty miles, but there wasn’t a trace of you. The captain said he hadn’t much hope because of the sharks.’
‘Sharks?’ said Mr. Darby. ‘I didn’t know there were sharks. Punnett didn’t mention sharks.’
‘He wouldn’t,’ Sarah replied. ‘He’d have enough of a job keeping you quiet without mentioning sharks, I’ll be bound. But how long were you in the water, Jim?’
‘Oh, a matter of a few hours, Sarah,’ said Mr. Darby nonchalantly.
‘A few hours? We made all sorts of enquiries about the currents, and they told us you’d be sure to be carried right up into the Gulf of Tongal.’
‘I don’t suppose they know very much about the currents in England,’ Mr. Darby replied with a touch of scorn. Already he was beginning to remember England’s obtuseness in some matters. ‘So that’s why you made for Tongal, Sarah. But why did they make you Queen?’
Ever since he had regained consciousness Mr. Darby had been troubled by a small, secret annoyance—an annoyance which, even if he had been aware of it, he would not have confessed even to himself—at Sarah’s achievement of royal rank. It seemed fated that whenever, after infinite labours, he attained to some new eminence, reached, as it were, a yet higher plateau on the mountain of human greatness, he must always find Sarah, through no effort of her own, no desire to compete with him, coolly waiting for him on a slightly higher altitude.
‘Oh,’ said Sarah impatiently, ‘it was a silly business but it served its purpose. It was all owing to a fever, a sort of’flu they were having. It was something new to them and when we arrived three months ago they were having a terrible attack of it in Aba Taana. So we dosed them with quinine and aspirin. Fortunately we had lots of both on board. As you know, Jim, I’ve always had a great faith in aspirin. That soon put them right,—all, that is, except the King. He died of it: but then he was so terribly fat that he hadn’t a chance from the first. You see, he took no exercise. They had a ridiculous idea that he mustn’t walk.’
‘I know,’ said Mr. Darby feelingly. ‘My people had the same idea about me.’
‘Well, they tried it on me when they made me Queen, but I soon put a stop to that nonsense.’
‘You … ah … you defied them, Sarah.’
‘Certainly,’ Sarah replied. ‘You’ve got to treat those sort of people like children: it’s the only way to manage them. That’s why I let them make me Queen. They wanted to: they said I was the great white enchantress, or some such childishness, because the quinine and aspirin had cured their’ flu: so as it seemed likely to be more convenient on the whole, not only for us but for them, I consented. But the trouble I had with them, Jim! I’d rather run an infant-school any day. If you knew the job I had to get them to kill mosquitoes for instance. The doctor said that very likely mosquitoes were the cause of this’flu. But they said mosquitoes were sacred and that I was the Mosquito Queen. “Very well,” I said, “I’m the Mosquito Queen and I command you to kill mosquitoes!” That worried them dreadfully. They got terribly excited and for a whole night we thought they were going crazy. But they came round in the end; and now the mosquito isn’t sacred any longer in Tongal, or rather, only the particular mosquito who happens to be King or Queen.’ Sarah grunted sardonically. ‘That was one reform anyhow; but it would be a life’s work to put anything like common sense into them, and, upon my word, they hardly seemed worth while, even if I hadn’t had you on my hands.’
‘To be shaw!’ said Mr. Darby. It was soothing, exquisitely soothing to him now to be treated by Sarah as a child. And the blessed comfort and security of this yacht, with the pleasant Australian captain and crew, the pleasant, friendly members of Sarah’s search party, the doctor, the young Cambridge man who had acted as interpreter, and the others who had not yet become quite real to him. What a marvellous change from the horrible life of the last year, a life like a mad dream of snakes and blue devils and nightmare forests.
And yet how lovely the Peninsula looked now as they steamed along its silver coast; the rosy pink of the rocks, the vivid emerald of the jungle, rising, screen behind screen, from the mottled rose and silver of the shore, and the great orange-stained ivory dome of Umfo, the ankle-bone of Mandratia, protruding starkly and grandly above the matted forests. Umfo, in its beautiful fallacious serenity, was typical of the whole Peninsula, thought Mr. Darby, recalling the swarming village of savages that raged, like an angry, seething brain, within the summit of that bland exterior.
‘And yet,’ he said, indicating the coast with a sweeping gesture, ‘there’s no denying, Sarah, that it’s extraordinarily beautiful.’
‘Oh, it’s beautiful enough, I grant you,’ Sarah replied, ‘especially from here. Distance lends enchantment, Jim. And the flowers, I must say I never saw anything like them. I used to make my women in Aba Taana go out and get me different kinds of orchids, and you never saw such a show as they sometimes brought in. I wish I could have taken a few plants home; they’d have looked well in pots in the dining-room. The Savershills’ conservatories can’t touch them; not even the conservatories at Blanchford.’ She gave one of her grim chuckles. ‘From housemaid at Blanchford to Queen of Tongal,—a bit of a jump, isn’t it, Jim, when you come to think of it?’
‘Oh, no doubt! No doubt!’ Mr. Darby replied, hastily dismissing the idea.
And now the Peninsula, slowly, imperceptibly shifting and changing along its length under the influence of the yacht’s progress, began to disclose the belt of desert that bisected it.
‘Look, Sarah,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘there’s our frontier,—my northern and your southern frontier. I wish I had my telescope: with it one might even catch sight of an Ompà or two. A horrible place, that desert! I crossed it three times, Sarah. Did you visit it at all?’
‘No, your folk didn’t give us the chance,’ Sarah replied, ‘and I’m glad, now, they didn’t. We were just trying to arrange about moving south and searching Mandras when your folk raided us. Now what possessed you, Jim, to let them do that?’
Mr. Darby coloured slightly. ‘It was what I should call a slip, Sarah, a trifling … ah … misinterpretation.’
‘H’m!’ said Sarah laconically. ‘Trifling, was it? I suppose you didn’t happen to see, as I did, the forty-nine corpses that were the result of it? Ten of our people and thirty-nine Mandrats!’
Mr. Darby opened his eyes. ‘Did you see them, Sarah?’
Sarah shuddered. ‘Yes, I did, Jim. Forty-nine splendid men, poor silly quarrelsome creatures. We rushed down there as soon as we heard what was up. We couldn’t afford to let things slide: we might have woken up to find ourselves murdered. And it was just as well we did what we did. When we arrived, the Tongali were on the point of marching into Mandras in one great crowd, and in broad daylight if you please. And the job I had to stop them! You’d have thought we were trying to cancel a school-treat instead of trying to save the lives of a good half of them.’
‘But you didn’t succeed, Sarah,’ said Mr. Darby and there was a trace of gratification in his voice at Sarah’s powerlessness. ‘They attacked us all the same.’
‘Oh we weren’t trying to stop them attacking you,’ said Sarah. ‘That would have been mere madness. The Mandrats would only have attacked us again at some point where we weren’t ready for them and murdered every man, woman, and child of us, and got most of themselves killed into the bargain. What we were after was to get our people to set about things in a businesslike manner. The doctor and I worked it out between us with our maps. The thing was, of course, to attack the Mandrats on all sides at once, to round them up, in fact. You didn’t need to be a Field Marshal to see that. These folk are as brave as tigers and as senseless as babies, so we did what we could to put some sense into them. We sent small parties along both coasts, telling them to travel by night and hide by day. It was a nasty business, Jim; but as it was bound to be a matter of wholesale murder in any case, it seemed the safest thing to do. Of course I gave them the strictest orders that if they found any white men they were to be brought to me, safe and sound.’ Sarah sighed deeply. ‘Well, it worked, you see. But I must say I had my doubts. Short of going with them yourself you couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t lose their heads. However that’s all over now, thank Heaven. It was a ghastly time and no mistake. Not a wink of sleep did I get till they brought you into my house looking like a poor sick poll-parrot and we got you safely to bed on this yacht. I’d never have recognised you, nor Punnett either, Jim, if it hadn’t been for your spectacles. You were like a couple of chimpanzees: you can’t have shaved for days.’
‘Ah … no!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘In point of fact, we … ah … hadn’t.’
He fell into a reverie. It was no good. Sarah was Sarah and there was no good struggling against fate. For once, in that brief reverie, he saw himself through the cold, steel-grey spectacles of reality, a poor feather-bedizened puppet in the clutches of his terrifying, bronze-skinned subjects, a puppet torn from his throne and captured without protest by the Machiavellian strategy of the warlike and masterful Queen of Tongal. But the horribly veracious vision faded and Mr. Darby did not attempt to detain it. He alone had seen it and he alone promptly dismissed it, forgot it so utterly that the facts it so undeniably revealed faded for ever from existence, leaving the ex-King to cherish his kingly memories. Already those memories were assuming their proper tinge of romance. Even Mandras itself, the outward and visible Mandras which swam slowly past his brooding gaze, began to arouse in him those affectionate and proprietary regrets with which exiled sovereigns regard their lost dominions. With time and perhaps a little more firmness he might have made the Mandrats into an industrious and civilized nation: he and Sarah might even have united the two Kingdoms in a single beneficent and Arcadian tyranny and invited their friends to court. But these things were not to be, and perhaps on the whole it was as well. England, though less spectacular, was undeniably more comfortable. He stirred in his chair, sensible of an inward pang: a delicious smell of cooking had drifted from some open hatchway. ‘Isn’t it about … ah … lunch-time, Sarah?’ he asked.
Sarah glanced at her watch. ‘Only ten minutes now, Jim,’ she said. ‘I can see you’re getting your appetite back.’
• • • • • • • •
Towards four o’clock that afternoon they began to round the extreme point of the Peninsula and the Sampoto estuary slowly opened to view. Mr. Darby borrowed the captain’s telescope. It was a more manageable one than his own and he used it more discreetly, an immediate return to the Peninsula being foreign to his plans. Blue, silver, rose, and a great stream of green swam past his vision. Then, after some trouble, he got what he sought.
There, before his single, absorbed, incredulous eye, lay the little bay exactly as it had first appeared to him. It seemed to him, as he stared at it now, that he had lived in it for years, so intensely familiar was every shrub, every rock and stone. There, as if they had just left it, was the hut of leaves and branches Punnett had built for them to sleep in. There was still a great heap of dry fuel outside it, ready for the nightly bonfire whose smoke kept off the piums and mosquitoes.
‘Extraordinary! Extraordinary!’ he muttered to Sarah who stood at his side. ‘You must look at it, Sarah. There’s the very bonfire. Extraordinary!’ He continued his exclamations, exhorting Sarah to look, but too absorbed to realize that he himself retained the telescope. ‘And there’s where I paddled. And there’s the arbour Punnett made for me. And … and … good Heavens! My …! But …!’ Mr. Darby nearly dropped the telescope overboard again.
‘What is it, Jim?’ asked Sarah, steadying him with a hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s Punnett!’ said Mr. Darby in a shaken whisper. ‘Poor Punnett’s suit, just where he hung it out to dry. I thought at first …!’ He continued to stare absorbedly down the telescope at the poor shape that faced his eye, the very shape, the very lines, the sad, deprecating attitude of Punnett himself; the arms drooping limply from the sides as if with a last modest appeal to his master who was leaving the place for ever and leaving him to rot in his solitary grave in Tongal a thousand miles from the nearest white man. ‘Take it, Sarah! Take it!’ sobbed Mr. Darby, dropping the telescope into her hands.
By sunset the Mandratic Peninsula was no more than a thin blue finger with a swollen knuckle-bone, jutting into a lake of pale and limpid gold. A week later they steamed into Sydney harbour.