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THEY POURED OUT OF THE VALLEY like an army on the march.
Plumed and painted, armed with stone axes and clubs and bows and arrows, the warriors strode out to the beat of the black kundus. Their marching song was a long repetitive ululation, counterpointed to the pattern of the snakeskin drums. The sound echoed and re-echoed till it hung like a moving haze of melody along the shoulders of the mountains.
Behind the warriors came the unmarried girls dressed in their finery, their blood pulsing in time with the kundus, their flesh fired by the sight of the sweating male bodies rippling and swaying in the stamping gait of the march. Between them were the pigs—some carried trussed on long poles, others leashed and led like dogs, while the laughing, screaming children prodded them with sticks to urge them to greater speed. They grunted and snuffled and squealed, and the sound was a new theme in the wild orchestration of the tribal triumph.
Then came the married women, old and young, their bodies bowed under the weight of suckling children and huge string baskets filled with taro and paw-paws and bananas. They, too, were decked in unaccustomed finery, with necklets of green snail shell and pubic skirts of fresh taro leaves. They giggled and gossiped and took up the refrain in short breathless bursts of song. For them the pig festival was a rare release from the domestic slavery into which they had lapsed when their kunande days were over and they shed the cane belt and the ornaments of courtship.
The procession wound through the defiles like a long, bright snake. It formed into a solid, shouting phalanx when they broke out of the jungle into broad patches of kunai grass, and drummed up the rises onto the high spine of the ranges. They were the last to come to the assembly of the tribes. It was part of their pride to make an impressive entrance into the broad, green crater of the Lahgi Valley.
When they topped the final rise, they halted and reassembled and looked down into the broad, rich basin that was the cradle of their race. Here was the spreading village of the tribe paramount, grown now to double its normal size, with new huts and long kunande houses for the reception of the guests. Here were the broad taro plots, crisscrossed by the sluggish runnels of the irrigation ditches. There was the long formal avenue of the dancing place and, at the end of it, a great palisade pen of casuarina wood to hold the pigs that would be slaughtered at the festival.
The village was alive with plumed and painted figures, misty with the smoke of a hundred cooking fires, and murmurous with the gossip of a dozen valleys. A small knot of elders was moving towards the main entrance of the compound, ready to offer formal welcome to the last-comers and receive the pigs and the taro that were their tribute to the festival.
When the watchers on the hill caught sight of them, they set up a great shout that rang and echoed round the crater rim, to be answered by another cry that drifted up from the village like a wind. Then the luluai gave a sharp command. The drummers dressed their ranks; the warriors hefted their axes and their clubs. The women took a tight grip on their children and their baskets. The unmarried hoisted the pig poles on their shoulders and waited.
There was a moment of tense silence. Then the drums broke out, and the singing—a mighty roar that crashed like thunder over the valley as the plumed and painted army rolled down the green slope to the meeting of the tribes.
Lee Curtis stood on the veranda of Sonderfeld’s bungalow and stared across the empty valley. Gerda was with him, and Nelson, and Wee Georgie. Below him, on the lawn, the police boys were drawn up waiting the order to march. It was three in the afternoon. The silence and the emptiness were strange to them—strange and frightening after the disciplined activity of the normal plantation days. There were no labourers among the coffee rows. The new clearing was deserted. There was no smoke from the village. No chattering garden boys clipped the lawns or raked the river gravel on the paths. Even the houseboys had left them, and the bungalow was a hollow, echoing shell.
Curtis finished his cigarette and flicked the stub over the bamboo rail. Then he gave them his final instructions.
“You’ll stay around the house until Oliver arrives. He may come tonight. Personally, I don’t expect him till tomorrow morning. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble—in fact, I’m sure you won’t—but, just in case, I want you to stay together. Understand?”
The others nodded agreement but said nothing. On the face of it, what was there to say?
Curtis continued briskly.
“You’ll sleep at the house, Nelson. Same with you, Georgie—and lay off the liquor or I’ll run you in on a charge of sleeping with tribal women!”
Wee Georgie grinned and tugged his shaggy forelock.
“I’m leaving you one rifle and fifty rounds. That’s all I can spare. Gerda, you’ll look after that.”
Nelson flushed at the snub but made no reply.
“When Oliver comes, tell him I’ve gone up to the Lahgi Valley. I’m picking up Père Louis on the way, and we’ll camp tonight on the lip of the crater I’ll wait for him there, unless they turn on the big ceremony sooner than I expect. In that case I’ll move into the village. Is that clear?”
“I’ll tell him,” said Gerda simply. “Is there anything else?”
“No. That’s the lot. Take it easy and don’t worry. Whatever happens will be twenty miles away. I count on having it under control before you hear a whisper back here.”
“Er—care for a drink before you go, Mr. Curtis?” said Wee Georgie, licking his dry lips.
“No, thanks, Georgie. I’m on duty.”
He grinned boyishly, hitched up his pistol belt and held out his hand to Gerda.
“Good luck, Gerda. Good luck with Oliver, too.”
“Good luck, and thank you, Lee.”
Ignoring Nelson’s offered hand, and with a friendly pat on Wee Georgie’s drooping shoulder, he left them and walked swiftly down the steps to the lawn.
The police boys snapped to attention. The fuzzy-wuzzy sergeant came to the salute. Curtis barked an order. They shouldered arms like guardsmen, and the next moment saw them striding down the path—a tiny army of black-skinned mercenaries, led by a stripling boy.
Gerda Sonderfeld stood watching them until they disappeared in the turning of the valley, then without a word she walked into the house and shut herself in the bedroom.
Wee Georgie stuck his thumbs in his string belt and puffed out his belly like a great, happy toad.
“What would you say to a drink—eh, Mr. Nelson?”
George Oliver was still plugging over the high saddles of the southward ranges. He was making good time. He expected to arrive in Sonderfeld’s valley shortly before midnight. He grinned wryly as he remembered his constant lectures to the young patrol officers on the costly folly of forced marches. If they had to meet trouble, they should meet it fresh. Tired men make mistakes of judgment and timing. Weary bodies fall easy prey to the parasitic infections of the wild valleys.
His own body was bone tired. Weariness was lead in his marrow and a stink on his brown, sweating skin. His feet were swollen in his soft boots and his throat was parched like a lime pit. As he walked, he rinsed his mouth with water and spat the residue on the ground. That was another lesson in his syllabus. A tired man cannot march with liquid slopping around in his stomach.
He looked round at the police boys and the cargo carriers. They were dragging their feet with weariness. panting with effort to match his steady slogging pace. He was driving them as hard as he was driving himself—but they were loaded with packs and rifles while he had his shoulders free.
When they dropped down into the shadows of a narrow valley and came to the edge of a small creek, he halted them for a brief rest. They slipped off their packs, laid their rifles against a rock and threw themselves flat on their bellies, scooping up the water with their cupped hands.
George Oliver sat propped against the rock face and smoked a cigarette.
Times like these, he thought, were the happiest of his life. He was alone, master of himself and of the situation of the moment. He need not defer to the opinions of the uninformed, or bend to the pressures of the diplomats and the politicos. Success was sweeter because it was seasoned with his own sweat. Even failure was bearable when it came from the strength of the opposition and not from the folly of colleagues or the blindness of superiors.
But a man could not always be alone. The time would come when his strength would fail him and he would be forced to turn to the comfort of a community in which he had no firm place, the support of friendships, rare in his lonely life. It was easier when a man was married. There was love and companionship, sometimes a family. There was a pride of possession and a place of refuge. There was the small but decent kingship of his own household.
So, by inevitable conjunction, his thought came back to Gerda Sonderfeld.
He knew now that he still loved her. Else why was he driving himself on this crazy, breakneck march over the mountains? He had travelled slower to more urgent meetings than this with Père Louis and Lee Curtis. He could, if he chose, make camp for the night and still arrive in time for the critical performance of the pig festival. What else but love compelled him to the final trial of her heart and his own, to the abasement of the beggar and the imminent despair of the rejected?
He hoisted himself stiffly to his feet, shouted an order to the boys and stood over them while they loaded the packs and adjusted the webbing straps for the last, stiff haul. Then he grinned at them and jerked his thumb towards the farther hills.
“Come! We will show the mountain men how we can march.”
Soon they were back into the plodding rhythm of the road, and the dusty paths were falling away beneath them while the shadows lengthened and the slow chill of the mountains crept into their bones.
When they came to the last great shoulder that stood like a black sentinel on the southern limit of Sonderfeld’s domain, Oliver called another halt. The stars hung low in the velvet arch of the sky—so low and so bright it seemed he had only to reach up and pluck them like silver fruit. There was no moon. The air was keen as a knife blade, and he shivered as the chill struck him after the warm exertion of the trek.
The boys squatted on the ground, glad of the respite, chewing betel nuts and asking themselves whether the Kiap would let them rest in the valley or whether he would thrust them farther into the dark and tedious mountains. The Kiap was a hard man and an ill one to cross. Their eyes followed him as he walked to the edge of the plateau and stood looking down at the broad valley, locked between the black arms of the mountains.
He saw it first as a dark and brooding pool refusing even the reflection of the cold stars. He heard it first as a silence, for there were no drums and the singers were far away. He felt it as an emptiness, from which even the pungent smoke of the village fires was long since blown away and lost. Then he saw the light—a tiny yellow pinpoint, far away at the bottom of the shadowy lake. It was so small, so faint and pitiful, that it moved him almost to tears—as if it were a star at the bottom of a well or a last brave hope in the black desert of despair.
The tribes had left the valley. He had come later than he wished, to assert the authority of the Kiap law. There was a light in the bungalow. Gerda was there. He asked himself with sour irony whether he had come too late for love.
Then, because he was a tidy fellow, he put the thought away and set himself to consider the situation in the light of Curtis’s report and his own knowledge. The villagers had moved out. They always moved at sunrise, so they had been gone at most two days—possibly only one. If the villagers were gone, Sonderfeld was gone also, since the success of his project depended on his presence at the festival.
Curtis would have moved out. Père Louis would be waiting in his own village. That left Wee Georgie, the coffee fellow—whatever his name was—and Gerda. Two men and a woman waiting for the curtain to rise on a primitive drama of ambition, sorcery and lust.
To hell with it! He was dramatizing the situation to make it fit his mood—a dangerous luxury which had brought more than one luckless fellow an arrow in the guts or a stone ax crashing into his skull.
He called the boys to their feet and together they walked down the long, winding path that led to the tiny yellow light in the center of the valley.
Wee Georgie was drunk and snoring on the veranda. Theodore Nelson tossed restlessly behind the locked door of the guest room. Gerda Sonderfeld sat alone in the lamplight and waited for George Oliver to arrive.
In spite of Lee Curtis’s warning not to expect him before morning, the conviction was strong in her that he would come that same night. It was as if she were plotting the stages for him, willing him to be at this point or that in time to make the final landfall before midnight. It was folly and she knew it, just as it was folly to expect love to survive the shock of such humiliation as she had inflicted on George Oliver—not a boy, like Lee Curtis, but a lonely, tired man with a bitter strength and a perverse dignity. It was folly, too, to believe that, after so much profanation in the name of love, she herself could ever come to the enjoyment of the fruits of love. Love—so simple a reality to which others came, effortless, unknowing, but, for herself, a peak beyond attainment. Folly! Yet what was left to her but folly, with Kurt raving after his crazy crown, and Curtis gone, and Père Louis solicitous for the needs of his own flock so that he had little time for the lost, contrary lamb still bleating in the dark desert? What was left but folly and folly’s dream to rest her heart on as she dozed over the tabletop and waited for George Oliver to come?
She woke to the sound of his footsteps on the veranda, and when she leapt up, in sudden fear, she saw him standing in the doorway.
“Hullo, Gerda!”
“George! Thank God !”
Her heart cried out to him, but she stood motionless as a statue. She saw him, rocking with weariness, his face lined and haggard, his eyes bloodshot, his clothes dusty and stained with sweat—and yet her feet would not carry her to him and her slack hands were empty of comfort.
For a long moment he stood looking at her, drooping and tired, then he straightened up and his voice was dry with dust and fatigue.
“When did the tribe move out?”
“This morning.”
“Where’s Curtis?”
“Left this afternoon. He’s picking up Père Louis. They’ll wait for you on the lip of the crater. He said—”
“Where’s your husband?”
“Gone.”
“When?”
“Early this morning. He’s mad, George. We think he left with Kumo and—”
“That’s all I need to know for the present.”
He stood a moment, eyes closed, weighing the facts, then apparently satisfied, he relaxed once more. He lurched into the room, pulled out a chair and sat down heavily.
“Have you got a drink? I’m dog tired.” He grinned wearily, brushing his grey face with the back of his hand. “Fifty miles in thirty-eight hours. Not bad for an old stager.”
She came to him then—came with little running steps from the far side of the table. She wanted to throw her arms around him and kiss him on the lips and on his tired eyes, but she dared not. Instead she took off his slouch hat and unfastened the webbing pistol belt and knelt to loosen the boots from his swollen, blistered feet. He suffered the service with the thankless resignation of a man too tired to care. He was slumped across the table, head pillowed on his arms, his breath corning in long, sobbing gasps. She laid a tentative hand on his dusty greying hair, but if he felt it he gave no sign.
She brought him whisky and soda and watched while he drank two stiff drinks in succession and sat silently till the slow, illusory strength flowed back into his body.
“Thanks,” he said flatly. “Thanks, I needed that.”
“Have you eaten, George?”
He nodded absently.
“On the road. I’ve told my fellows to camp in your boy houses, do you mind?”
“Of course not. You—you’re staying then?”
She tried to conceal her eagerness, but her voice was shaky and she stammered over the question. He answered in the same flat, listless voice.
“Yes, I’ll sleep the night here and push off in the morning. Nothing will happen till the day after tomorrow.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Yes. The big ceremony comes last of all. There’s a ritual of preparation first.”
“Lee Curtis seemed to think—”
“Lee Curtis is new. He doesn’t know everything.”
His voice was edged with irritation. Without waiting for an invitation, he splashed another drink into his glass and drank, more slowly this time. Then he set it down, half finished, and lifted his eyes, studying her feature by feature as if seeing her for the first time.
Now, she thought, it would come—the tired mockery, the knife pricking at the one tender spot in her heart, the pressure on the hilt, slow and calculated, the blade sliding in, the brief but final agony before love was slain and faith and hope died with it. Silent and rigid, she sat with downcast eyes, waiting. When he spoke, his voice seemed to come from a great distance.
“You’d better give me the whole story. The reports I got were pretty scrappy.”
So the execution was to be deferred. George Oliver was a good official. He would postpone his private pleasures until the business of the state was dispatched. She felt no relief—only a chill calm. She raised her eyes and saw that he was lighting a cigarette and that his hands were unsteady. He pushed the pack across to her.
“Have one yourself.”
“Thanks.”
He did not offer her a light, so she reached across for the matchbox, lit up, pushed the box back across the shining tabletop and smoked for a few moments while she collected her thoughts.
Then she told him.
So that he would understand fully, so that there would be no doubt at all in his mind when he came to the moment of execution, she told him from the beginning—the far beginning when Sonderfeld was Reinach and Gerda was Gerda Rudenko and there was still hope in the world and love had not yet become a folly-fire beyond the stretch of her fingers.
As she talked, he smoked and drank, sitting slackly in the chair, his chin sunk on his chest, his eyes closed as if in sleep. But he was not sleeping. When she told him of N’Daria and Kumo and Lansing and Père Louis and Sonderfeld’s final madness at the dinner table, he became alert, questioning her closely on detail after detail, while his eyes darkened and his tired mouth stiffened into a thin line. Then at last her story was finished.
“That’s all, George. I have no secrets left.”
That was what her voice said; but her heart was crying, “Now you know everything. There is no spice lacking to the enjoyment of the triumph. I am bound and blindfolded—at least let the execution be swift.”
Now he was looking at her again, measuring her with brooding eyes, like a gambler calculating the odds on his final, fateful throw.
Then he spoke.
“I’ve got one more question.”
“Yes?”
He waited a long moment, then, one by one, he laid the words down like chips on a green baize tabletop.
“I told you once I loved you. I still do. If—if you could be free of Sonderfeld, would you marry me?”
The next moment she was in his arms, crying, laughing, sobbing in a wild ecstasy of relief.
“Oh, God! Oh, God in heaven! Yes! Yes! Yes!”