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GEORGE OLIVER was a disappointed man. He was forty-five years of age and he had reached the limit of his stretch—Assistant District Officer, third in the small pyramid of authority whose apex was the District Commissioner and whose base was the thin line of cadet patrol officers strung out over ten thousand square miles of half-controlled territory. He knew it and he knew why, but the knowledge was no salve to his pride.
More than twenty years of his life had been spent in the Territory and his record of service was unblemished. He had come as a cadet when the Highlands were a blank space on a green map, and he himself had opened up and brought under control more territory than any other single man in the service. His work during the Japanese occupation had earned him a D.S.O. and a Military Cross, and his knowledge of the tribes was intimate and encyclopedic. Yet promotion had passed him by. The higher honours of the service had been denied him. He knew now that they were beyond his reach.
The defect was in himself. He was no diplomat. He lacked the subtlety to sway with the eddies of politics, to profit from the influence of men whose experience and knowledge were less than his own, but who understood the devious shifts of the lobbies and the arts of patronage and preferment. His trenchant decisions were often unpalatable. His raw tongue had made him many enemies. So they left him, close at hand because they needed him, low in the scale of authority because they disliked and often feared him.
Yet there was much in him to love. He had charm and sympathy, rare justice and a cool courage, and he loved the rich, bursting island and its dark peoples with a deep, passionate attachment, unsoured even by his frustrated ambition. He was generous to his younger colleagues and he covered their mistakes even when he castigated their follies.
Now he sat in his small bare office at Goroka, a lean, compact man, with a tight face and a jutting jaw, and a firm, ironic mouth under the small cavalry moustache. He was a tidy fellow in his person as in his thought. His whites were starched and immaculate. His body, brown as a nut, had an air of disciplined cleanliness. His movements were few and carefully controlled. Absorbed as a student in his texts, he was reading the reports of Père Louis and Lee Curtis on the situation in Sonderfeld’s valley.
The runner, sweating and exhausted, had been dismissed to his quarters, glowing with the curt approval of the Kiap, and George Oliver was alone. He was glad of the solitude. He needed it as other men need company, to refresh his spirit and clear his mind of trifles and distractions for concentration on the problem in hand.
The problem was far from simple. Lee Curtis’s report, written in haste and anxiety, was not likely to appeal to the District Commissioner, a shrewd, subtle fellow, who liked his files kept dry and academic against the possibility of inquiry from Moresby or Canberra or an unscheduled mission from the United Nations. Père Louis’ hasty addendum was no improvement. The District Commissioner had small sympathy with the Missions, and tribal magic was to him an anthropological oddity better ignored.
These, however, were minor things beside the problem of Sonderfeld himself. The big German stood well with the Administration. His services were a matter of record. The Administration had approved his tenancy. The Administration would be involved in any charges made against him and would be less than happy with the flimsy case presented by a half-trained youth and an eccentric French cleric.
Yet George Oliver knew that they were right. He had lived too long and too dangerously to be skeptical about tribal unrest and the fermenting influence of the sorcerers. As to Sonderfeld, there had been adventurers before him, and their bids for wealth and power were recorded in more than one bloody page of the history of the Territory.
He laid the reports on his desk, covered them carefully with a blotter and leant back in his chair, pondering.
First he must see the Commissioner and present the reports with his own summary of the situation. The Commissioner would accept it, because then the responsibility would be shifted to the shoulders of an unpopular subordinate—and because he knew that George Oliver was the best man to deal with an explosive situation like this one.
Then he would go up himself to the valley. He would take two police boys and a pair of cargo carriers. He might take twenty or fifty, but they would serve him no better than two against the massed violence of the assembled tribes. It was his job to forest all violence. He had done it before, he could do it again. It wasn’t a question of strength but of courage and understanding and, above all, timing. His mouth relaxed into an ironic grin. They paid him few compliments; they gave him little thanks; but whenever they landed themselves in a mess—“Let George handle it!” He’d still be handling it when they pensioned him off with an O.B.E. to comfort his declining years. To hell with them! See the Commissioner and get it over. Get on the move again. There was nothing to hold him here but paper and red tape. He would feel better once he started slogging over the hills—brushing the dust off his heart, sweating the sourness out through the pores of his skin.
He was halfway to the door when he remembered Gerda Sonderfeld. He walked slowly back to his desk, fished in the drawer for a pack of cigarettes, lit one and sat on the edge of the table looking out his window at the trim lawn with its border of bright salvias.
Gerda Sonderfeld! She had dismissed him long ago with tender indifference, but she was still an ache in his heart and a slow fire in his blood. Of all the women he had ever met, this was the one with whom he had come nearest to love—the only one who had left him without clinging and without apparent regret.
It was an old, stale story that had begun during his brief tour of duty on relief in Lae and had ended when Sonderfeld returned from his first survey in the northern valleys. Yet it had touched him more deeply than he was prepared to admit, even to himself. The new Gazette had just been published and his name was not listed among the promotions. He was obsessed with a sense of futility and failure. He was lonelier than he had ever been in his life. He shunned the bar and the club and spent himself, without restraint, in the fierce hunger of a late romance. Gerda had given herself without question and without stint. Her passion charmed him, her rare, perceptive gentleness soothed him. Her uncalculating generosity was a constant surprise. When she dismissed him, his heart was wrenched and he felt empty and old and solitary.
Now he was going back—as her husband’s executioner. He toyed with the sardonic thought but found no pleasure in it. Gerda had made no secret of her cold dislike of her husband; the secret lay in her refusal to leave him for any one of half a dozen men who would gladly have married her—George Oliver among them! He wondered how she would receive him now, how he would bear himself with her. If he indicted Sonderfeld, what then? Would she support her husband in loyalty or would she turn in love to George Oliver, the man who was sending him to criminal trial?
It was a fruitless question, but he worried it like a dog gnawing a dry bone. He told himself he should have more pride, but with the long, disappointing years ahead of him, he knew that pride was a threadbare coat with little warmth in it.
The cigarette burnt down till it scorched his fingers. A long tube of ash fell soundlessly on the desk. He brushed it carefully into the ashtray, stubbed out the butt and walked across the passage to see the District Commissioner.
The District Commissioner had the hard eyes of a politician and the soft voice of a bishop in partibus infidelium. He looked like a retired colonel, which he wasn’t, and talked like a very canny businessman, which he was.
“These reports—” He tapped the stained, scrawled sheets which the runner had brought. “They’re no earthly use to me. They say everything and nothing. Curtis expects a revival of the cargo cult in the area under patrol. He believes Sonderfeld is in league with a man named Kumo to set it up. This belief is confirmed by unspecified evidence in the hands of the local missionary, Père—whatever his name is. Curtis expects serious trouble at the pig festival. He suggests we check Sonderfeld’s background. What the hell does he mean by that? Sonderfeld was checked and double-checked before he was accepted as a migrant in Australia. If there’s anything wrong with his background, that’s the business of Immigration, not External Territories.”
“Yes, sin” said George Oliver flatly.
There was a pit opening under his feet and one more thrust from the Commissioner would land him at the bottom of it. If Sonderfeld’s background was shady, so would Gerda’s be. If Sonderfeld were deported from the Territory and Australia, so would Gerda be. And he, George Oliver, would be the instrument of her ruin.
He was relieved when the Commissioner thrust the sketchy report back in his hand with a petulant command.
“Can’t put that sort of stuff in the files. You keep ’em, Oliver Give me, say, half a page of your own summary for the record—with your suggestions for appropriate action, then we’ll deal with it. Yes?”
“No,” said George Oliver.
“Oh? Why not?” He spread his palms and set his fingertips together in a gesture of clerical distaste.
“Because that leaves me holding the can, and I’m not paid to do that. You are.”
The District Commissioner was nettled, but he knew better than to argue with this sardonic, grinning fellow who knew too many answers for his own good.
“I don’t see that you have to be rude about it, Oliver.”
“I’m not being rude. I’m stating a fact. I’ve been in the game too long. I’m tired of being bumped around. Those are the reports. What do you want to do about them?”
“It’s your area, isn’t it?”
“And yours.”
“But you are in direct control. What do you suggest?”
“I’ll go up there, take a look and report when I get back.”
“What—er—force will you take?”
“Two police boys, two cargo carriers.”
The District Commissioner looked relieved. Apparently Oliver didn’t expect too much trouble.
“You don’t think there’s much to worry about then?”
“I didn’t say that. Curtis already has his own detachment up there. Between the two of us we should be able to keep things in hand.”
“I see. You know the area, of course.”
The Commissioner pursed his lips and frowned over the small spire of his fingertips while he considered the next question. Oliver watched him with ironic amusement. The D.C. was worried. He had reason to be. And George Oliver had no reason to spare him the experience.
“Er—al—with regard to Sonderfeld …”
“Yes?”
“These reports are a flat contradiction of our own knowledge of the man.”
“How much do we know about him?”
“Well—ah—ah—the Immigration people must have checked his record before they accepted him. He did good service as a medical man in Lae. He’s been very helpful over this malaria control business. It’s not a great deal, of course, but—er—”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Dammit, man!” The Commissioner was suddenly and unreasonably angry. “What are you trying to do? Convict the man without evidence? I tell you there’s a first-class scandal in this if ever—”
“I’m not trying to do anything,” said George Oliver mildly. “I’m going up to investigate a situation that is reported to exist. Until I get there and look round, I can’t tell you what I’m going to do or even whether there is a situation at all. If you want a memo to that effect, I’ll give it to you before I go. Is there anything else?”
The Commissioner was beaten but couldn’t afford to admit it.
He said curtly, “No, there’s nothing else. You’ll want to get away this evening, of course. But I warn you, Oliver, if you make a mistake on this one, I’ll have your head.”
“I’ll give it to you—on a chafing dish.”
George Oliver grinned sourly and went out. He had won a victory, but it was as tasteless as the dust of defeat.
One hour and twenty minutes later he was slogging over the first foothills northward to Sonderfeld’s valley. He reckoned it would take him two days to get there. The runner had made the trip in thirty-three hours, but George Oliver had to think of his heart and his arteries.
He was forty-five years old. He was beginning to feel his age.
Kurt Sonderfeld was beginning to feel the strain. His plans had been laid a long time now, but as the day of their fulfillment approached, he was conscious of a mounting tension, a thrusting eagerness that battered against the barriers of his habitual control. His project had been framed in isolation and retirement; now he was hemmed in by people, familiar but unfriendly, polite but mistrustful, whom his courtesy could not charm or his cleverness wholly mystify.
Père Louis had stayed to breakfast and luncheon and dinner. He had slept a second night in the guest room and taken his departure at first light the following morning. He had paid careful respect to the memory of Max Lansing; he had shared, solicitously, the grief of his friends. For the rest, he had refused to involve himself in discussions with Sonderfeld and had interested himself in the small problems of Gerda’s garden, the gossip of the plantation and the minor comedies of Curtis’s census-taking.
Sonderfeld had tried, more than once, to reopen the question of the unrest in the valleys, but the old man refused to be drawn. There had been one rift between them. He did not care to risk another. Sonderfeld had the impression that the priest regretted his bluntness but dared not lose face by an open apology. His attitude towards Gerda was one of solicitude and paternal interest in her feminine affairs. He wondered vaguely if Père Louis were trying to convert her to the Church.
He was glad to see the last of the canny old cleric.
The attitude of Lee Curtis troubled him even more. The boy was terse and abrupt, refusing all invitations to drink or share a meal as if he wished to be spared the demands of courtesy to a host whom he disliked. The Kiap house and the village—these were his domain, and he kept to them religiously, as a monk to his cloisters.
Theodore Nelson was a different proposition. The round-faced Englishman was too seasoned a voyager to involve himself in the personal affairs of his company’s clients. He made the rounds with Sonderfeld, talked volubly and accurately of pest control and double cropping and experimental strains and marketing problems; but he was blankly disinterested in any but professional subjects or the safe reminiscences of European exiles. His thick spectacles were a visor that hid his wary eyes and the fear that lurked behind them. He, too, was warmer in his attentions to Gerda, more gentle in his courtesy, more attentive to her quiet conversation. Sonderfeld asked himself if it were the beginning of a new attachment. He would have welcomed it as a useful diversion.
Gerda herself was as distant as the moon and just as cold. If she grieved for the death of Lansing, she gave no sign. If she suspected his own part in it, she made no show of resentment. She kept his house and tended her flowers and slept, unsmiling, the whole night through. She had walled herself round with indifference, and he was not yet ready to lay siege to her defense.
It seemed to Sonderfeld that Wee Georgie was the only one whose attitude towards him had not changed. The gross old reprobate shuffled and wheezed around him like a court jester, tattered and filthy in his motley, full of bawdy tales and sly obscenities, fawning at his frown, leering happily when Sonderfeld, for want of better company, bent to his shabby slave. But when he came to question him on his surveillance of N’Daria, Wee Georgie’s face went suddenly blank.
“There was nothin’, boss. Nothin’ at all, I tell yer. Twice she went up to the bungalow to draw rations. That was all. The rest of the time she stayed in the laboratory. True as Gawd she did.”
“But the nights. What did she do then?”
‘Same thing, boss. Stayed in the hut. Never stirred a foot outside it.”
Sonderfeld took hold of him by his shirtfront and shook him till his face was purple and his eyes were popping.
“You’re lying to me, Georgie! Lying!”
“Why should I want to lie, boss?” Georgie choked and spluttered unhappily. “Why should I want to lie?”
“Because you were drunk! Because you don’t know what she did.”
“Even suppose I were—which I weren’t—me girls were awake, weren’t they? Think they’d let her get out without knowin’? They went to the carry-leg every night, whoring down the village the way they always do. But she wasn’t there. They ‘ d have seen her if she was, wouldn’t they? Ask ’em yourself, if you don’t believe me.”
The logic of it was sound enough, but Sonderfeld refused to accept it.
“Did anyone talk to her? The priest perhaps? Or Curtis or Nelson? Or my wife?”
“How could they, boss? When she was in the hut the whole time. The missus might have had a few words with her when she went up to the house. But I doubt it. They haven’t been speakin’ for a while, have they? Anyway, why ask me when you can get it from the girl herself? So help me, if I’m lyin’ you can cut me liquor ration! I can’t say better than that, now can I?”
“No, Georgie, you can’t.” Sonderfeld’s lips parted in a thin smile. “And you know I’ll do it, don’t you? I’ll have you screaming in torment in forty-eight hours. You know that, don’t you?”
He turned on his heel and walked up the path towards the laboratory. Wee Georgie watched him go and licked his dry lips. Already he was regretting his offer to submit to trial by ordeal. His story was true as far as it went. The only part he hadn’t told was the night when he and his two girls had huddled, cursing and scared, under the blanket listening to the footsteps of the cassowary bird and the low murmur of voices from the open door of the laboratory.
Halfway to the hut, Sonderfeld stopped to light a cigar. As he held the match, he noticed with surprise and irritation that his hand was trembling. He tossed away the match and stretched out his arm full length, his wrist rigid, splaying out his fingers like a fan. Still he could not control the tremor. He frowned and dropped his arm to his side.
He was disappointed in himself. Weakness like this was for other men, not for Kurt Sonderfeld. He was tired, of course. He had underestimated the pressures of the last few days. A small sedative and his nerves would be under control again. A sedative or—?
He smiled at the simplicity of the diagnosis. He had not had a woman in a long time. He was a potent man, but he had been so busy with affairs of importance that he had ignored the needs of his nature. Gerda’s coldness had helped him to continence, and his desire for N’Daria had been tempered by his need to discipline her. Now she would serve him in a different fashion.
Slowly, and with infinite relish, he finished his cigar, standing in the warm sunshine, surrendering himself to the soft, crawling itch of desire. He had worked hard, he had planned meticulously, he had gambled against the folly and blindness of inferior men. He had only to wait a little longer and the winnings would tumble into his lap. He needed pleasure and relaxation—there was a woman waiting to give him both. He tossed away the stub of his cigar and went into the laboratory.
The first sight of N’Daria shocked him deeply. Her eyes were puffy. Her skin was grey and tired. Her movements were slack and listless. When he greeted her, she answered him mechanically, her voice empty of resentment or pleasure, and bent again to her notes. He remembered the urgent, pleading youth of her and was faintly disappointed.
But desire was still strong in him and he flattered himself with the thought that he could make such ravages on a woman and still repair them with a touch of his hand. Softly, restraining his eagerness, he began to coax her. She shivered at his touch and tried to draw away, but his grasp was too strong for her. She stiffened in revulsion, but he laughed softly and held her closer. Then slowly her body began to awaken and she was divided against herself.
Suddenly she clung to him, urging him, native fashion, by beating her body against his own. Then he lifted her in his arms and carried her into the sleeping room and made her teach him kunande and carry-leg, as if he were Kumo and she the bright and bird-like girl with the cane belt of courtship and the crown of green beetles and red feathers.
Spent at last, he lay beside her, wrapped in the soft, sad triumph of completion. …
After a long while he got up, dressed himself and walked out into the laboratory without a word or a backward glance. When he stretched out his hand again, it was as steady as a rock. He smiled and told himself that he was a sensible fellow who kept a wise balance between discipline and enjoyment.
He did not understand that Kurt Sonderfeld had already cracked under the strain.