CHAPTER III

“No maker of images worships the gods; he knows what they are made of!”—Chinese Proverb.

“I am not sure that I am not making a mistake!” said Chum to her reflection, as she tied her tie in severe perfection, and pinned on the Panama hat. “If I could only get hold of the real man himself, I am sure I could do something. After all, Mr. Halton is only the shadow—he will pass as shadows do, and his influence cannot really push Ally.”

She took up her riding-whip slowly, and stood a minute in thought. It was ten minutes to seven, and she could afford to arrange her ideas. On the dressing-table stood the tray with her early coffee, but Ally must breakfast alone this morning; she did not expect to get back from China Town till then. The room was very large and very airy, for furniture is superfluous in Key Island, and the lack of it increased the sense of size. The bare boards were not even polished or stained, and only two African goat-skins were thrown down as rugs to break its monotony; there were basket-work chairs and a lounge from Madeira, and a bed draped with a mosquito curtain with the usual bridal effect. The window-frames were many, and were filled with shutters turned to let in the air, but not the sun, and there was a door with the same contrivance in its upper panels. Outside the windows ran the wide bare stoep carefully clear of creepers, because vegetation means mosquitoes, which need no encouragement. Chum fretted over the bareness, for her hammock was slung there, and she would have liked to swing in a bower of flame-colour and rose and greenery, which is to be had for the asking in the island. But common-sense was triumphant over sentiment, and the stoep was comparatively flyless.

Common-sense was just then fighting for the upper hand in Mrs. Lewin’s mental attitude, and her pause with the riding-whip idly tapping her skirt was the result. It was easy, to say nothing of being pleasant, to go on as she had begun, with the garrison quite ready to follow in her train, and the Commissioner to lend it a certain distinction. But it meant no future good for Ally, and Leoline Lewin had, without admitting it, begun to see that if Ally went up the ladder somebody would have to push him rung by rung.

“Mr. Halton is so much more interesting!” said inclination.

“The Administrator has the real power!” said reason.

It was all the harder because in the one case she knew herself sure of success, and in the other she saw probable failure—and Mrs. Lewin disliked failure. Every woman in Key Island had made tentative efforts to bind Mr. Gregory to her chariot wheels, and had quietly drawn back without a hint of her defeat, after the manner of her sex. The only difference to Mrs. Lewin’s case was that she really wished to interest Mr. Gregory in her husband and not in herself; but she could not hope that this would make her any more successful.

“Besides, he must begin by liking me, and being interested in me, though he doesn’t know it,” she said to herself candidly. “And at present he simply does not know that I exist. Well, perhaps China Town may prove useful—some day.”

She went across the house to her husband’s dressing-room, where he had slept in order that her early rising might not disturb him, and looked in before starting. Alaric was lying with his arm thrown up above his head, in a boyish fashion that made him seem very young in spite of the manliness of the bronzed dark face, and the thick moustache on his upper lip. Chum bent down and ruffled his hair rather fondly, and he sighed in his sleep and turned over, but did not wake. There was a shadow of vague yearning in her eyes as she turned away and went out on to the stoep. Marriage had touched her lightly, but this was one of the rare moments when she felt a craving after something more satisfying—something that might even be welcome pain if it were only less ephemeral.

The morning air was brisk compared to the general laxity of Key Island. Mrs. Lewin mounted the pony which the sais held for her, and rode away through the listening day, with her senses equally alert. For it seemed at this hour as if everything had ears, or a keener vitality that looked for new experiences. Even Liscarton trod daintily, and sidled through the gate into the highway, pretending that he saw bogies among the ragged fans of the bananas. Where the path dipped down into Port Victoria the hoofs of a second pony became audible, and a minute later the Commissioner overtook her and drew up alongside.

“You are before your time, Mrs. Lewin; I meant to pick you up at your own gate,” he said gaily. He also seemed in unusual harmony with Nature. “Isn’t it worth while to rise early and get the spring of the morning into one’s system? I feel like that charming person in Scripture who ‘walked delicately,’ though I am afraid he was hardly a model to copy in his after-history.”

“Agag, wasn’t it?” said Chum. “I always felt I should have liked to follow his career a little further, but one never gets a chance. Do you notice how very badly they tell a story in the Bible? They have no idea of keeping back the end of the plot. ‘Now Ahab was fallen sick of the sickness whereof he died,’ they say, and, of course, as you know what is coming, it seems superfluous to read any further.”

“In fact, you don’t care about Ahab unless he is going to live.”

“I never did care for the pawns in the game who are sacrificed. It is the big pieces who accomplish the struggle, whether they do ill or well, who interest me. I feel that they have made something out of life, instead of life making something out of them.”

“And yet there can be no attainment without self-sacrifice,” said Halton quietly.

They were riding through the little town, sometimes in the shadow of the unruly palms, which waved like banners over the low wooden houses, sometimes in the new-born sunshine. There were a few natives about, but no white people. At the hotel a single disconsolate Chinaman was flapping a cloth on the stoep, and Mrs. Lewin looked up, remembering her first night there, and laughed. Discomforts passed by her easily at present. By-and-by the ponies began to ascend the further hill which circles the back of the town by a zigzag path, and it seemed that the little white houses and the blue bay fell gradually below them, until they topped the ridge and drew rein a moment to breathe their mounts before they began to descend on the other side of the hill called the Pass. In Africa it would have been a “Nek,” for it really connected Maitso and the lower heights of Mitsinjovy, but Key Island has not caught so much of the Dutch influence.

“Are you afraid to canter?” Halton said. “Your pony does not seem blown.”

“He is Captain Nugent’s pony, and you probably know his capacities better than I. He danced when I set off, but the hill has sobered him—however, we can soon see. Come up, Liscarton!”

The game little chestnut stretched his neck to the loosened rein, and broke into the rocking Key’land canter. There was a rough, tangled path before them, and a gradual descent, but the ponies were used to it and took it with a sober joy. As the second valley opened before them Mrs. Lewin saw the draped hills and the patches of liquid yellow-green that meant cane intermixed with the darker hemp, and as they rounded a curve of the track they came suddenly in view of a tiny native settlement.

The Commissioner drew rein. “I’m not going to take you absolutely into it,” he said, “but that is China Town. It is suspected of yellow fever just now, and a man has died—it is probably only biliousness though. The doctors are always quarrelling about the two.”

It looked the happiest and most innocent little spot on earth—far more innocent than Port Victoria, with its ominous wharves and coaling jetties for the sea traffic. There was even a little pagoda to one building, and tiny blue-coated figures were moving about busily, looking like a new kind of ant from the distance of the hillside. Most of the huts were thatched with reed, and the whole village was little more than a scattered group.

“Do you see that larger house apart from the others?” said Halton, pointing across the valley. “That is where Burton, the Town Warden, lives. He is Gregory’s right-hand man out here, and watches the place like a sleuth-hound.”

“It seems impossible that anything could be hidden there!” Mrs. Lewin exclaimed involuntarily. “Why, there is nowhere to hide it!”

“Nevertheless they very successfully have hidden their source of murder,” said Halton dryly. “That large barn-like arrangement is the sugar factory, but you cannot very well distinguish it from here. Unless they manage to conceal their evil brew there it must be done in their own houses.”

“And is it really so serious an evil?”

“It caused the death of some eighty white people, indirectly. The rioters were mad with drink—with this hashish—and they rose with a suddenness no one could foresee, because it was unpremeditated on their own part. Let a native get drunk on hashish and he goes out to kill. There were no regular troops here in the time of the Company, only a police force officered by men lent by the War Office, and these gentlemen appear to have been mostly on leave, shooting in Madagascar.”

“But how were the rioters armed?”

“They broke into the houses and armed themselves. The favourite weapon was a razor bound on to a stick, with which they jabbed upwards, but no kind of knife was despised. The most appalling thing was when they made a kind of torch out of the half-worked hemp soaked in oil and set their victims alight—am I frightening you, Mrs. Lewin?”

“No—but I have a very vivid imagination. I can see it all, and it turns me rather sick. Did the Chinamen fight too?”

“A few, though the worst offenders were the half-castes and the Malagasy. The Arab is as great a coward as the pure native, so that part of the population were comparatively harmless. There was a good deal of carnage among the planters and residents before the police got the upper hand, and the consequence was that Government had to step in and take over the island to reduce it to order.”

“Whence followed a Commissioner to make enquiries, and Mr. Gregory to teach them a lesson. Did he teach them, by the way?”

“I believe he did—a slight one,” said Halton briefly. “I arrived on the scene a week or so later.”

“I wonder the Government puts power into his hands, considering that they always seem to have to censure him afterwards,” said Mrs. Lewin musingly.

“It is rather difficult to ignore a successful man,” said Halton, “even the British Government find that. And he has been most uncomfortably successful on several occasions, though his measures may have been drastic.”

“I see. You generally come out a week or so later, I suppose?”

“It is the one boon I wring out of the Colonial Office; but I am speaking confidentially, Mrs. Lewin. You happen to know these things because you are here and in touch with them. At home they know little, because Mr. Gregory has quite a prejudice against the Press.”

“They might hinder him, but I doubt anything really stopping his drastic measures, as you call them.” A memory of the Administrator’s face rose before her like a revelation—the overhanging brows and forehead, the savage, lidless eyes, the secretive mouth, that lurked under the ragged moustache. Above all, the voice that spoke under his breath seemed to her ominous. Here was a strong man, not afraid to do lawless things and call them law by his own authority. Her blood tingled a little with the thought. “How they must hate him!” she said. “How weaker men must long to tie his hands and make him pay for proving them his inferiors, in action at least!”

“If we could tax success it would no doubt be a popular measure with the majority—who have not succeeded.”

There was a flash of appreciation in Mrs. Lewin’s eyes, but all she said was, “The lighter green is the cane, I suppose?” in an irrelevant tone.

“Yes, but this is a small crop compared to a big sugar estate—Denver’s, or the Tsara Valley crops, for instance. There is no considerable hemp-growing in Key’land, and we wish there was none at all. There it is at present, however.”

He pointed with his whip, and her eyes followed and distinguished the two plantations. The hemp was thinly sown, as it always is for intoxicating purposes, whereas when honestly cultivated for fibre the plants are crowded together. It was not yet in flower, for the sowing was in October or November—the spring of the Key’land year, the Tsara of Madagascar. The young plants stood stiffly, and were branched even to the roots; from the distance where Mrs. Lewin and Halton had paused it was just possible to distinguish how far apart the plants grew, unlike the unbroken sweep of the sugar-cane. The crop was always sown on higher ground too, generally on the gentle slope of the further hills, for hemp does not love a low level. The dark green of its wide leaves contrasted boldly with the lighter cane, and made a pleasant patchwork of the valley.

“They don’t pull the male flowers until January, and the female a month later,” remarked Halton, looking across the wicked sexual hemp that flowered twelve feet high in Hashish Valley, for it liked the rich soil. “You know, of course, that it has two genders.”

“And then?”

“Then it is converted, ostensibly, into ropes, and food for small birds, and other innocent and useful things, in that hemp mill down there. Now, Mrs. Lewin, you are looking at the sugar factory.”

“I am not, indeed; I can see the mill quite plainly. And I suppose the Chinese really turn it into hashish?”

“Well, I suppose it is stolen and secretly converted into bhang or ganja first. I don’t exactly know what form it takes here, but I’ve seen bhang, and its results, in India. So has Gregory!” he added significantly.

“I wonder they are not found out.”

“It is so simple, you see. Bhang is only the dried leaves and stalks of the hemp, and if you heat it with water and butter I assure you that you get quite a surprising result! My own opinion is, though, that they are yet more diabolical down there in China Town, and dissolve the resin in rum; you can use any alcohol for the purpose, but the rum being at hand they would naturally take it.”

“And then they dance thecarrabdance. I remember the pictures in the illustrated papers at the time of the rioting. Ally—I mean Captain Lewin—says they were quite wrong, but I found them sufficiently impressive. I should like to be that man down there, nevertheless—Burton, did you say his name was?—who is working with Mr. Gregory. I feel I want to have a hand in it too—to meddle, in fact. It has its advantages, being a man, though I seldom see them.”

“I thought that to be a pretty girl was the height of bliss,” said Halton, with his gentlest insinuation.

“So it is, until you meet with a prettier, perhaps,” said Chum. There was a flash of mirth in her eyes, and the deeper drift of the conversation passed away like the shadow of the clouds over the sugar-cane.

“I suppose we ought to turn back,” said Halton regretfully, as the sun’s warmth began to increase to undoubted heat and glare. “If I bring you home in the trying part of the day I shall expect to hear of it from Captain Lewin.”

Chum had loosened her rein, and Liscarton, with his lean head stretched out, was cropping an early breakfast on the hillside. Liscarton was always hungry—his sais calls it greedy—and the instant his rein was relaxed, he would wrench it through his rider’s hands and nose the ground for something to eat. Mrs. Lewin had already learned that he had a will of his own that threatened to take the skin off her fingers did she keep his head up when standing; and she loved him none the less. She could forgive wrong-headedness, but she found it very difficult to forgive docility when it meant laziness. She sat easily in her saddle, her right hand resting on the pony’s flank, her body turned that she might look down on China Town with those musing eyes that were green and dusk and lavender-grey by turns. And Alfred Halton watched her with fastidious appreciation, while by an irony of fate she thought definitely of the Administrator and his plans, and the ominous strength that was his attribute. A man to have as a friend—a power to reach to high places—yes, decidedly an influence to have for you rather than against you!

“Have you noticed the names in Key Island?” said Halton, as they gathered up the reins and rode their ponies slowly homeward over the Pass.

“No, not particularly, except that I heard Mrs. Churton say she should go out to Vohitra if it grew much hotter. Where is Vohitra?”

“Vohitra is our health-resort—it is a big bungalow up in the hills at the northern part of the island, some two miles or so from Port Albert. Vohitra is a badly-chosen name, for it simply means hill. The place is shut up unless any one wants to go out there, but sometimes the garrison ladies make up a house-party, and then I believe it is pleasant, though there is nothing to do except shoot fish.”

“How very unsportsmanlike!”

“Well, you can’t catch them otherwise. No fly has ever been found that they will take. Can you shoot?”

“Yes—though I prefer a revolver to a gun. I object to a bruised shoulder! What language is Vohitra?”

“Malagasy. All the names on this side the island—the Madagascan side—have a flavour of their giant neighbour, though she is some two hundred and fifty miles off, except Port Victoria and Port Albert, which are strictly loyal, you will note. Maitso means ‘green,’ and Mitsinjovy ‘look out’ or ‘see’; but,” he added, laughing, “the Gunners’ quarters have almost been renamed by White’s little boy, who calls Mitsinjovy the ‘By-Jovey-Hill!’ and the name has stuck.”

“How lovely! I do like the way children wrestle with names they don’t understand, and turn them into the sense that lies nearest. You said Vohitra was at Port Albert—I have not been there yet.”

“Well, it is rather in the Tsara Valley. There is another lovely name for you—Tsara, spring o’ the year! And the Volofatsy River that cuts the valley in two, means the silver river. I wish, for the sake of euphony, that Key Island had all Malagasy names; but on the west coast you feel the influence of Africa, and get Sand Bay, and Africa Point, and even the Little Zambesi.”

“I like that—there seems some suggestion in it. But then I am rather inclined to like Key Island.”

“So I am amazed to observe. You will forgive my wondering if it will last, or if you too will grow to look on it as a three years’ probation to better things.”

“And call it a rat-trap, as you did! I dare say I shall—and yet I cannot imagine it. The place seems to me too recently dangerous to be dull, and too possibly important in the near future to be ignored. And then one can always hope for one of Mr. Gregory’s drastic measures, and a little excitement!”

“Do let me get home first!” said Halton plaintively. “You have never seen him through one of his shindies, and you don’t know how fatiguing it is. I hope the Government will recall me while I can plead peace with honour, and give me an armchair in a quiet corner, from which to contemplate Gregory burning the hemp-crops seven thousand comfortable miles away.”

For a minute Mrs. Lewin looked a little startled, but she did not comment on the suggestion, which was lightly made. Even her ignorance of the popular feeling and prejudices could not blind her to the seriousness of such a step as the burning of the hemp-crops would be, and she wondered if the man who gave orders under his breath would have the nerve for such an incredible stroke. She also wondered why Halton had put such an idea into her head under the guise of absurd exaggeration, for she did not believe in his lack of motive.

“I am really very much obliged to you!” she said frankly, as they shook hands at her own gate. “You have appeased some of my curiosity, and given me a delightful ride before the heat.” Her eyes met the sleepy brown ones that watched her so covertly. “I can’t, of course, repay you——”

“Unless you will let me plan another like excursion?”

“Will I not?” said Chum gaily. “Only try me! Good-bye, Mr. Halton—if you see my husband you might tell him not to be late for luncheon. There are granadillas and flying-fish, and he loves both!”

As he rode away Halton thought of the shady dining-room in the bungalow, the fruit-laden table, and the wife who thought of her husband’s tastes and sat opposite to him in the cool sweetness of her white gowns. No one thought of his tastes, without irritated supervision, and he found Evelyn Gregory a poor alternative to the tall girl whose effect haunted his mind. He did not see her exactly in detail, as a woman whose inches looked more from her slight build, and whose hair was a warm brown, and her eyes as changing as

“The rare glooms on the far blue hills,”

but he said inclusively that she was charming, and her atmosphere left a blank in his consciousness when it was removed.

“Note from garrison,” the Administrator said briefly, tossing it across the luncheon-table as he sat down. “Mrs. Churton has a function of sorts next week. Gymkana, or some such foolery, at the polo-ground—she hopes we will refresh at her house.”

“I can’t stand that woman!” said Halton, fretted by a comparison. “She leaves a taste in my mouth like a cigarette that has gone out.”

“It’s your liver. Who hasn’t a liver in this heat? My ideal, these days, is a clean tongue and a desire for breakfast.”

“Mrs. Churton is forty,” pursued Halton spitefully. “And she aims at three-and-thirty. A woman of forty is only tolerable as a background for her daughters!”

The Administrator looked across the space of white cloth and guavas—there were no granadillas!—with a grim line about the corners of his hidden lips.

“I hope you enjoyed your ride!” he said politely, with a suggestion of unappreciated humour.

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