THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY DUVERSIIl OF CA1 , SAN LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA 3 1822 00196 9104 f/7 I I t KRIS-GIRL MILLS & BOON'S SPRING NOVELS The Shining Height* I. A. R. WVLIE The Picture Book HAROLD BEGBIE The Strength of the Strong JACK LONDON A London Posy SOPHIE COLE Days of Probation LOUISE GERARD He Whom I Follow HORACE W. C. NEWTE The Conquest HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES Big Happiness PAN Kris-Girl BEATRICE GRIMSHAW The Lady in the Black Mask TOM GALLON Hayle OXFORD SOMERSET The Dividing Sword HAROLD SPENDER The Unknown Mr. Kent ROY NORTON Kiddies J. J. BELL Love The Magnet PAN KRIS- GIRL BY BEATRICE GRIMSHAW AUTHOR OF " WHEN THE RED GODS CALL,' "GUINEA GOLD," ETC. MILLS & BOON, LIMITED 49 RUPERT STREET LONDON, W. COLONIAL UBBAET, Published CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAQK THE RUBBER QUEEN ... 1 CHAPTER II ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG ... 44 CHAPTER III THE GHOST OF MACASSAR . . .95 CHAPTER IV THE DANGEROUS TOWN .... 149 CHAPTER V ABOUT A PINK BEAST . . . .182 CHAPTER VI MERMAID JANE 249 CHAPTER VII THE TALE OF THE BEAUTIFUL BARMAID . 279 V KRIS-GIRL CHAPTER I THE RUBBER QUEEN SOMETHING had frightened the birds in the jungle : the white cockatoos flew shrieking from tree to tree ; the small bright feathered things that swing in the sunlight gathered themselves into the innermost clefts of bamboo clumps, and whistled pitifully. Something was darkening the glory of the equatorial noon. Hidden as we three were in the forest, we could not see what was happening be- yond, but the round white spots of sun sprayed off no longer from the varnished leaves, and the dark of the mysterious gullies and gorges had grown very dark indeed. " It's going to rain," said the old lady in a thin voice, looking up at the dense roof of palm and teak and cotton wood, hung with thick cordage of liana, that shut out all view of the sky. Cristina (I addressed her as Miss Raye, but thought is free) stopped chasing an opal-blue butterfly as big as a 1 2 KRIS-GIRL swallow, and put on the hat she had been using as a net. " It's going to do more than that, unless those birds are fools," she said. " We had better get back to the steamer, quick march." "This is outside the hurricane belt," I put in timidly. Cristina seemed to have travelled the whole world over, and I had never been away from Europe before this voyage ; moreover, I had only known the girl and her chaperon for two or three days since the Juliana called at Macassar from Singapore and took them on. Still, I put in my word, as I happened to know a few rough facts about tropical conditions in general. It had been my business to know. We are manufacturers and wholesale exporters of but it wouldn't in- terest you to hear. " Oh, yes," she allowed, shortening her dress with rapid fingers. " Still, Celebes can put up a very pretty show at times. . . . Mrs. Ash, dear woman, pull your skirt into your belt and take Mr. Garden's arm ; you've got to break your own record in the next three-quarters of an hour." She was still speaking, when an appalling sound broke upon our ears the whistle of the Juliana, unmistakably in a starting humour. "Oh, the brute ! she can't, she daren't ! " exclaimed Cristina ; " she wasn't due to go till six." . . . For a moment we stood like figures in a stereoscope photo, struck stiff in the very act of movement. Then the Juliana whistled again THE RUBBER QUEEN 3 the long loud hoot that means " Going at once." We started b; ck down the track at a pace that none of us could have kept up for three minutes but it was not two, before the last long howl sounded up from the beach below. At this, we all stopped again, and then began to run. I dragged Mrs. Ash along as if she had been a sack, Cristina trotted like a little mule. It was all of no avail. When we came out on the top of the great cliff that overhung the shore, the faithless ship was just clearing the passage in the reef, half a mile out at sea. Cristina, up to this, had been behaving like a silly school-girl, calling the steamer pettish names, stamping her tiny foot in its Cuban shoe when- ever we halted for breath, and scolding at every- body in general. Xow a sudden change came over her : something that I had not seen looked out from her face. She became calm, and her small blue eyes (they were small, though very blue and pretty) grew curiously bright and seemed to be looking at something a long way off ... not the Juliana. " There was a reason," she said. " Weather yes, probably. Some reefs can't be passed through unless the wind is in the right quarter. The opening here is to the west, and that nasty cloud is rising from the west. And the water of the bay is black-blue-green no soundings probably. . . . Yes, if the Juliana hadn't got out, she'd have been blown ashore." 4 KRIS-GIRL The old lady, who had more ways of being silent than anyone I had ever known, took her arm out of mine, looked round for a fallen log, and com- posedly sat down upon it. Without saying a word, she succeeded in making Cristina and my- self understand that she held us responsible for the whole thing. It seemed plain that we were abandoned marooned, practically in the wilds of the Celebes jungle, no one knew how far from any white man's habitation. We had not so much as a biscuit or a box of matches by way of stores, and no clothes but those we stood up in which clothes were as completely wet through with the heat of the jungle as if we had been dropped into a river. The birds kept on crying ; a cold wind suddenly blew out of the forest and as suddenly stopped. Up the open sky to seaward a strange black screen was slowly rising ; as it rose the sunlight died. "Cristina!" said the old lady suddenly and sharply. There was something expectant in the tone. Cristina answered never a word. She seemed to be thinking. It was an odd time to think, out there in the jungle, with a storm chasing us from the open sea, and I began to break in with some question or remark, but the old lady shook her umbrella at me, and said : "Sh! Let her alone." There was a very short space of silence, the cloud climbing all the while, and then Cristina said briskly : THE RUBBER QUEEN 5 " There'll be a plantation within a mile or two ; the captain calculated on that, or he wouldn't have done it. It isn't copra, or they'd have been loading it. The only other thing they grow just here is rubber. Take this track, help Mrs. Ash along, and look sharp for rubber trees. Now, pigi ! " If I had not known the expressive Malay word for " hurry up," I should have guessed it, from the look of the weather. " Pigi," we did. Mrs. Ash made wonderful progress, half carried on my arm, her black thin draperies flying, and her feather-weight little body scarcely touching the ground. In scarcely ten minutes, the expected happened. We came out of the dense jungle of palm and creepers, into an enchanted forest. It was a rubber plantation, in sober fact. A carpet of fine green grass supported innumerable reddish-coloured columnar trunks, holding up a dark, cool canopy of leaves at a uniform height of some twenty feet. Wherever you looked, you were the centre of a radiating star of avenues, grassy, soundless, solitary, bordered by the red trunks, and the great varnished leaves and long crimson buds of the rubber trees. Over all the avenues, and all the trees together, spread that dark, cool, shining canopy of leafage, like one huge tent. There were doubtless gaps among the tree tops, but from where we stood, they did not show. It was a wonderful and a lovely sight. We had about twenty seconds to look at it, standing on the borders of the clearing ; and theii 6 KRIS-GIRL the sky fell on our heads. This may seem an extravagant way of saying that it rained, but it is the truth. The thick tent above us made scarcely any difference in the way of shelter : the rain simply flung itself down in huge sheets of water, as if a colossal tank had broken somewhere just above. And the sound of its trampling on the leaves was like the sound of a troop of cavalry going over a railway bridge. " When the rain's before the wind, you must then your topsails mind," quoted Cristina in a piercing shout. " Pigi, it's coming." She fled through the rubber forest, as light on her feet as Botticelli's Flora, her soaked white draperies glimmering among the trees as she led us, I do not know how. In a minute or two, we had crossed the corner of the plantation, and were out in an open clearing ; the rain was bucketing down on short grass planted with ornamental trees, and we were flying along a wide tiled walk towards a house with steps leading up to its verandah, and tall white marble pillars in front. At this point, I picked up Mrs. Ash in my arms and sprinted after Cristina, who was running wonderfully. I had heard "it"; it was howling behind us in the forest like a beast let loose, and through its long, terrible cry came the crack of falling trees. The next thing I remember was the slamming of doors tall, mahogany doors set in lintels of marble and the sudden silence of a great dim central hall, furnished with things that looked THE RUBBER QUEEN 7 rich and costly, and floored with wonderful painted tiles, over which our soaked clothes were dropping mud and water. There were no windows in the hall, and all its doors had been shut. It was lighted by a great cut crystal lamp hung in the centre. Under the lamp, standing with her jewelled hand on a table of Florentine mosaic, was one of the handsomest women I had ever seen. It is difficult to describe beauty, since the terms are almost the same in every case, though the results of different combinations vary infinitely. Pretty women have almost always straight noses and short upper lips, low-growing hair and plenty of it, good colour, enticing corners to the mouth and eyes, well-developed figures, white necks and arms. The variations you must put in for yourself. Pink cheeks, yellow hair, small mouths, and blue eyes are not much beloved by novelists on the look- out for originality I have observed that the tendency of the present day heroines is towards green eyes and " mouths too large for perfect beauty," but the ideal above described is good enough for the average man. The lady of the marble palace had every advantage I have named, and one or two more just that one or two that you cannot describe, and must look for among your own recollections. This is what I saw. Mrs. Ash told me after- wards that she had seen a little more ; she had seen that the lady was no longer young close on forty if a day. Well, Helen was forty when she 8 KRIS-GIRL ran away with Paris, and I suppose the Trojan women rubbed the damning circumstance into her, during every day of the ten years' siege, with chronological emendations up to date. But ap- parently Paris did not mind. After that wild rush into the hall, and the slamming of the doors in the face of the gale out- side, it was Cristina who first recovered her presence of mind if she had ever lost it, which is doubtful. Dripping as she was, she advanced with perfect dignity to the lady of the house, and addressed her in Dutch. The lady replied : " There, for gracious sake, talk English, if you can. You don't sound Dutch, and anyhow I hardly know a word of the beastly language." I was a trifle startled ; the address of this queen of beauty hardly seemed to match her splendid presence. " I'm so glad you're English," said Cristina prettily, " we're in a dreadful plight. That wretched steamer went off at two minutes' notice when the storm came on, and left us to perish in the jungle." "Oh, she would, with that sort of a gale getting up. Mind you, there oughtn't to be any gale at this time of year, and I supposs she counted on that when she put in to let the passengers see things, but the one thing you can't count on in this part of Celebes is weather. She would have been on the coral bottom half an hour ago if she hadn't cleared. Listen to that ! " THE RUBBER QUEEN 9 Not even the solid marble walls could shut away the crashing of the wind outside, and the waterfall roar of the rain. We could feel the house quiver every time a new gust struck it. " The captain knew I was here all right," said the beauty consolingly. " Everybody knows me : I'm the only white but one for fifty miles. You'll ' all have to stay till the steamer comes back ; she'll be here in a week, and I'd love to have you. I could fair bite my nails off sometimes, for loneli- ness, in this great jail of a place. I'm a widow, you know, Australian ; married a Dutch, more fool I, and settled down in this awful place, because he was rich. He died two years ago, and I'm managing for myself. I have to stay because ..." Here, much to everyone's dismay, the lady of the palace suddenly sat down upon a yellow satin chair, put her hands over her face, and began to cry. " If you knew what a brute he was to me," she sobbed. ' If you knew what a will he left ..." Mrs. Ash, dripping mud and water from every pore, stood stiffly up and regarded the lady with the air of one to whom no manifestations of grief accompanied by bad grammar, could possibly be interesting or touching. But Cristina's eyes had taken on that odd sparkle that I had seen before, and she looked excited. A curious thing followed. She dived into her wet pocket, produced a silver card-case, and handed a card to the weeping lady. The latter read it, 10 KRIS-GIRL rose to her full five feet ten of height, and solemnly embraced Cristina. " ' Miss Cristina Raye,' why, that's the Kris- Girl !" she said. "My dear, there's no one in the whole world whom I'd rather see. All Malaysia is talking about you." " I suppose," said Cristina with a slightly bored expression, " it was the diamond-mine manager's wife who started that." " Not so much her as the Sultana who had the gold parasol." " She has it now," remarked Cristina with an enigmatic smile. " So she has, so she has ! " cried the widow admiringly. " And the Governor whose daughter's dowry ' ' " Oh, please ! " said Cristina deprecatingly. " If you don't like it, my dear. But God bless us and keep us, you're all as wet as drowned rats ; what am I thinking of ? Jonges ! ' ' A thin, dark native, in white jacket and red sarong, appeared in a doorway. The lady spoke to him in somewhat halting Malay. Then she led the way into a suite of rooms opening off the hall, and began disposing of us in magnificent style bedroom, dressing-room and boudoir to each. Clothes of her late husband were exhumed from wardrobes for me ; other wardrobes ransacked for the two women. *' They're bringing you all hot schnapps and water," she announced as she left us. " Just you THE RUBBER QUEEN 11 put it down and none of you'll be a hair the worse." She stepped with the pace of an empress out into the hall ; I am sure Cleopatra never looked so queenly. As she went she turned her head. " Don't be too long," she said, " lunch is coming- in, and I'm sure you're all fair empty in your in- sides." The slightest possible sound, resembling the uncorking of a soda-water bottle, came from Cristina's room. As for Mrs. Ash's feelings, a treacherous ventilator made me master of them shortly after. " Torchon or crochet is neither here nor there, but real Venice point upon them makes you feel like Jezebel ..." The storm was already slackening when we came forth, dry and clothed ; these baby hurricanes of equatorial Malaysia are brief as they are keen. The lady of the house was waiting in the grand saloon. " You look splendid," was her comment. " Miss Raye, you must be a witch to make that worked gauze fit you so well. Mr. Garden, you want nothing on earth but a couple of buttons moved in over your stomach ; you're almost of a size with Van Cloon, but he would eat right through thirty dishes of rice-table, every ' makan siang ' at twelve o'clock. I do hope you find yourself comfortable in my things, Mrs. Ash." 12 KRIS-GIRL " Thank you extremely," replied Mrs. Ash with polite bitterness. I never saw a human being so expressive of wordless protest, from head to shoe- sole, as Mrs. Ash in the widow's gorgeous, over- flowing gown. The meal was splendidly served, on heavy solid silver, china, and cut glass ; it was liberal enough, and the wines were better than necessary, but there was a suggestion of something got up in a hurry about the whole entertainment, that con- vinced me Mrs. Van Cloon did not treat herself so handsomely as she treated her guests. Her dress, too, and the dresses she had lent, struck me though I am not a connoisseur as being none of the newest, in spite of their gorgeousness. There was, indeed, an air of pinched magnificence, of slightly limping grandeur, about the whole place, that set one wondering as to whether the opulent lady were not a little of a miser. Money must be there: the rubber estate was clearly a big one, and well managed ; and the price of rubber, that year, was higher than it had ever been before or, for the matter of that, has ever been since. And yet the place was pinched. We went into the grand saloon after " makan." The storm was quite over now ; all the splendid windows were thrown open down to the marble pavement ; a delicious scent of wet grass and flowers came in across the verandah. Mrs. Van Cloon, who saw that Mrs. Ash was not feeling at home, took her off into a corner and, with wonder- THE RUBBER QUEEN 13 ful good luck, started the subject of kitchen stoves. Kitchen stoves and the Idylls of the King were the two themes on which Mrs. Ash could be eloquent. To hear her explain the theory of draught and dampers, or give you, in clear-cut tones, her reasons for considering Guinevere, Elaine, Isolt, Ettarre, Enid, and Vivien, lazy- boned hussies who were enough to drive three Round Tables to destruction and despair because they were never known to do anything but loaf about the castle, or go hunting in unsuitable silk gowns was to understand the views and the philosophy of Mrs. Ash as nothing else could make you understand them. Cristina found a seat upon a chair that imitated a harp in appearance, and played a tune happily a brief one when you sat on it. There was another chair near it, which I took myself. It looked like a huge scarlet crab with gold legs (I am not exaggerating : you can buy the same hideous thing for an appalling price in the Mercatoria of Venice, any day you are fool enough to wish to do so). One lifted the back of the crab up by its china eyes, and found a cushioned seat inside. This, and the awful bunch of green glass grapes, each grape the size of a hen's egg, that contained the electric light, led me to conclude that the late Van Cloon had been possessed of more money than taste. The widow loved her various curios ; she called our attention to their beauties, and also to a clock that had a Spanish girl's face above it, 14 KRIS-GIRL which unrolled its eyes distractingly from side to side at every tick, a mechanical fan, meantime, raising and lowering itself with ghastly mechanical coquetry. I had never thought to see flirting done by machinery. " Isn't she a dear, and isn't it all delightfully Victorian ? " commented Cristina, under cover of a vigorous onslaught of Mrs. Ash's upon German circular stoves. ' ' Our grandmothers would just have loved all this. Amber satin and beads it's gloriously beady and cornices and pilasters and etageres and mirrors and marble tables and all these dear hideous chairs, and did you see the fire?" "The what ? " I asked, surreptitiously wiping my face, under cover of driving away a fly. I think the thermometer must have been standing at about ninety-five in the shade. Cristina pointed with her chin. I looked, and saw the oddest and most pathetic decoration, surely, that drawing-room ever boasted. There was a fireplace, marble, and very hand- some ; an overmantel also of marble ; a hearth of costly Dutch tiles. There were fire-irons, a fender, bars. Behind the bars was a mimic fire, with coals of black and scarlet enamel, flames of yellow tinsel, and smoke of bluish-coloured wool. " Good.Lord ! " was all that I found to say. " It shows Van Cloon must have been fond of her," commented Cristina, somewhat ellipticallv. " How ? " THE RUBBER QUEEN 15 '' The thing is a monument of home-sickness exile that almost makes one cry, in spite of its absurdity. Somebody was very homesick ; it wasn't the Dutchman, for they use stoves in Holland ; so it must have been she. And Van Cloon indulged her with this horror. It's as clear as glass." " It would not have been to me, but I can see you're right," I said humbly. And in the same moment Mrs. Ash gave us a proof of Cristina's Tightness. She fixed her eyes longingly on the mimic fire, got up from her chair (it was solid gilt, with looking-glass-panelled legs) and drifted over to the marble mantel and hearth. There she sat down, and, with her creased, elderly hands stretched out to an imaginary blaze, seemed to lose herself in thoughts of winter England. Mrs. Van Cloon followed her. "My husband put in that for me," she said, nodding at the hideous thing. " Bonzer, isn't it ? He was always ready to spend money on me, was Van I must say that for him ; and when I began to fret after the Gippsland winters, he said he'd settle things so that I could fancy I was up in the mountains in June." I glanced at Cristina. She smiled slightly ; I thought she looked a little bored, as if she had gone through this sort of thing very often. . . . What sort of thing ? I found no answer to the question yet. 16 KRIS-GIRL Next day we were taken out in a couple of sulkies, drawn by fiery small Macassar horses, to see the plantation. Our clothes had turned up by this time ; Cristina had sent down to the jetty to see if the captain of the Juliana hadn't dumped them ashore before he left, and luckily, he had. So we drove along the shaded avenues, comfortable in body and mind. I think none of us was quarrelling with the accident that had brought us here, by this time ; the establishment of the widow Van Cloon promised to be interesting. Cristina Raye, it seemed, had been making good use of her time. She told me quite a good deal about our hostess, as we bumped lightly along the grass avenues towards the central collection of smoke-houses and sheds. The widow had married Van Cloon when she was thirty ; some unhappy love affair had kept her single until then. He was old when she married him, but he had lived for eight years. He had been dead two years now, leaving behind him a will that was, as his widow declared, " a sin and a scandal." According to Cristina, it was quite the most interesting thing she had come across for a long time. Indeed, the very mention of it seemed to brighten her up, but why, I could not imagine. By this time, I was feeling not a little " in- trigued " about Miss Raye. I had met her for the first time on board the Juliana, just as we were sailing from Macassar, several days earlier. I do not speak Dutch, and my German is an uncer- THE RUBBER QUEEN 17 tain quantity ; in consequence, the easily-flowing ship-talk that commonly puts one in possession of all sorts of facts about all kinds of passengers, within a day or two of sailing, was of little more use to me than a piano to a deaf man. I did pick up a stray word or two it was said that the girl was English (which needed no saying), that she was well off, and travelling for pleasure with her chaperon. There was also some suggestion, dimly comprehended through fogs of unfamiliar lan- guages, of a tragic story, a grief . . . and, indeed, I had caught a look on the delicate girlish face at times that seemed strangely ungirlish and sad. This was all I knew except that Miss Cristina, Raye and her chaperon kept very much to them- selves, were conscientious in seeing all the sights, and clung to their own national ways of dressing, living, and eating, as far as possible. When the hour of siesta arrived, and all the ship, male and female, calmly unclad itself and lay down to doze in pyjamas, combing jacket and Malay sarong, according to sex, and the decks of the Juliana blossomed with bare legs and bath slippers pendent from sleepy toes ; when the fifteen-stone lady of a Commissioner waddled in to lunch wearing nothing but a brief bedgown and a sort of coloured table- cloth wrapped about her legs, and her unmarried daughter, debarred by Dutch-colonial custom from the kabaja dan sarong of the matron, pro- menaded the hurricane deck at four p.m. in the thinnest of silk wrappers, worn over a sole chemise 2 18 KRIS-GIRL Cristina Raye and Mrs. Ash, as if in protest, grew more and more lineny and tailored and tied and collared and bonneted. At least, Cristina wore collars and linen tailor-mades, fitting her as a stocking fits a foot, while Mrs. Ash encountered the ardours of the equatorial noon in gauzes of black and grey, Victorian bonnet, and corsets as uncom- promising and unmistakable as a picket-fence. Yes, they were undoubtedly British, the old lady especially so. What more were they ? That was the matter that puzzled me. Cristina was not the ordinary pretty girl ; not even the ordinary pretty girl with a ' ' disappointment ' ' to give her character and single her out. There was some- thing . . . something else. . . . What had Mrs. Van Cloon's greeting meant ? Why was Miss Raye called the "Kris-Girl?" Kris in Malay, means dagger, the pronunciation being not quite " Kriss " and not quite " Krees," but something between the two. Was it a play on her name ? It was a bad play, if that were the case Cristina is undoubtedly " Criss." Had she* any special interest in the national weapon of Malaysia ? I did not think so. They had brought krises on board for sale early in the trip modern German rubbish, got up to sell ; plain Sheffield stuff ; one or two real old Celebes weapons, made of native hammered iron. I had bought a couple as curios. I did not recollect that Miss Raye had bought any, or even looked at the weapons. I shot a glance at her as she sat there by my THE RUBBER QUEEN 19 side, handling the reins of the fiery little Macassar horse with an easy, almost careless touch. She wore a gown that was very soft and dainty, and very white ; she had a little silver belt about her little waist ; her face was shaded by a broad- leaved, Watteau-sheplierdess sort of hat. She looked very young and very simple to be the owner of such a nickname. . . . Before I knew what I was doing I had asked right out " Why do they call you Kris-Girl ? " "They don't," said Cristma calmly. " Prem- pooan-Kris is the word." " But. that's what it means ? " " Yes." " Well, what does it signify in itself ? " " It might amuse you to guess." She sparkled a little, and turned her bright small face towards me. We were bouncing very fast along an avenue of great forest trees, with green ostrich -feather- shaped leaves and flowers of geranium scarlet, alternated with trees that carried not a single leaf but massed themselves against the sky in enormous domes of brightest heliotrope bloom. The ground beneath the horses' hoofs was thick with fallen flowers. A good way off, at the end of the avenue, you could see the bay of Goonong Kuda, like a sheet of blue crystal, surrounded by mountains of blue velvet. The gold and the green and the red and the purple, the smiting diamond brilliance of the sun, the scents and splendour of the whole thing, almost took my breath away. But Cristma 20 KRIS-GIRL looked at it all very coolly ; she was not new to the colour-show of the equatorial lands, as I was. " I'll tell you something," she said, as we drew up in a valley of darkly canopied rubber. ' ' You are to take me to call somewhere to-morrow. On a bachelor. An attractive bachelor, just at the age when Balzac says that " " Hold on about Balzac," I interrupted gloomily. " I'm not so very much below that age myself, as not to know that Balzac was just whistling to keep his courage up, when he said what he did." " Very well, then. To call on a bachelor who is attractive, whatever his age. Planter in a small way. Lives near here. A great friend of Mrs. Van Cloon, and has some mystery about him ; she won't say what it is, but I'm to go and see, and then I'll understand everything. And you're to go too, because she thinks dear Ash is unsym- pathetic." "All right, Miss Kris-Girl," I said. "I'm be- ginning to see a little light." We had to get out of the sulkies at this point, and go over the greater part of the plantation, marshalled by Mrs. Van Cloon. I need hardly tell you of all we saw the tapping of the trees, the milky sap running into neat tin vessels ; the coagulating in long, tidy sheds, by means of but you wouldn't care to hear it interested me very much, and I could give you all the chemical formulae, still ... I asked Cristina how she liked it, and she said the smell of the smoke-houses THE RUBBER QUEEN 21 was lovely, and reminded her of Red Indian stories. Also, she took certain specimen balls of rubber and bounced them in her hands, and did amazing tricks with them ; she seemed to have the eyes and fingers of Cinquevalli. She shied away with determination from all attempts to explain me- chanical details, but I thought she enjoyed herself on the whole. As for Mrs. Van Cloon, she stalked like Semiramis through plantation, manufactory, drying-sheds and stores, ordering about the silent, swift Malay workmen, showing processes and results, discussing percentages, investments, ex- penses, returns, with the tones of a cathedral bell, and the gestures of a caryatid come to life. It interested me extremely. Rubber has not been one of our specialities, but one never knows and it was a pleasure in itself to hear a woman discourse so ably upon business matters. The place was paying splendidly, too ; I could not have picked a hole in the management, except a tendency to- wards cutting expenses almost over-finely. There was a Malay overseer, but Mrs. Van Cloon managed for herself. More and more I puzzled over the contradictions of the place. I would have sworn that Mrs. Van Cloon was naturally no screw ; her cheerful hospitality to us would have proved that, had proof been wanting. She was making good money with the plantation ; her needs were small ; she had, as she told us in a burst of confidence, neither chick nor child, and not a relation whom she valued 22 KRIS-GIRL at twopence halfpenny. Where did all the money go ? It was of course no affair of mine ; but, as a business man, I could not help wondering. Here and there I could see places where money ought to have been laid out, and was not. I ventured to speak of one. The widow listened to me, nodded her head goodnaturedly, thanked me and said she wished to God she could afford it. Then she dismissed the subject and called " Jonges ! " in a tone that Clara Butt might have envied, and the boy came running up with the sulkies, and we drove home. Next afternoon, the sulkies came round again, and we started off for what proved to be a fairly extended drive, along a shaded forest track. The place was full of magnificent butterflies, like floating flowers ; parrots, painted in all the colours of Joseph's coat, flew squawking in and out of the trees ; once and again a furry, mocking little monkey face peered down and disappeared. It was atrociously hot, but Mrs. Ash, whom I was driving, looked as dry and cool as a chip. More in order to make conversation than anything else, I asked her what she had thought of the rubber plantation. " Didn't look at it," she said woodenly. " Don't you like that kind of thing ? " I asked. " My good man," replied the old lady, in a sudden spate of communicativeness, " I like London, Kensington, coal fires, and concerts at the Albert Hall." THE RUBBER QUEEN 23 " Then why " I began. " Because one must earn one's salary honestly. Play the game, as they say now-a-days. It's in the job. Seeing things, I mean. Liking them isn't in the bargain. I hate 'em. Hate mountains, lakes, castles, Swiss railways, gondolas, Buddhist ruins, mines, plantations, savages, hate steamers, hate hotels, hate travelling." " Good gracious ! " was all I found to say. "But I'm honest," she went on. "I'm paid well, and I earn it. I'm worth any money. You can't get a chaperon like me now-a-days. There aren't any real old ladies left. They wear wavy brown wigs with a spring inside. And a touch of pink, and some white on the top. And corsets down to their knees. And heels and hats. Look at me real bonnet with strings, grey hair grown on my own head, elastic boots and stays that are just stays. Cristina knows I'm worth all she can give. It's not in the job that I'm to take an interest, but I have to go and see, with her. Seen the Kremlin, Taj Mahal, Boro Bodoor, Rio Harbour, Pyramids, Sphinx, Niagara, Victoria Falls, wistaria festival in Japan, Chinese New Year in Canton, Brittany Kermesse, Panama Canal, Midnight Sun. Don't remember twopence ha'penny-worth of the lot, don't want to. Been out hunting nasty tigers on the back of a nasty elephant. Been camping in disgusting damp jungles full of dirty lions. Got two more years of it, and then I'll go back to my decent home in Kensington, and buy it own it 24 KRIS-GIRL live there. Never take a ticket as far as Brighton again." " Why two years ? " I asked. " Cristina wants to travel for five, and we've only done three," was the mystifying answer. " What's that f or ? " I asked unashamedly ; and Mrs. Ash, biting her words off as we bumped faster and faster in chase of the sulky ahead, replied : " Wouldn't tell if I knew, but I don't. Some fad. Cristina can be close. I respect her for it. Everyone knows about her fianc&s dreadful death three years ago bitten by a mad dog, and died snapping and howling. She doesn't take it as well as you'd think, even yet. Never has that ring off, night or day, in her bath or out of it." " That curious old ring, like a long marquise ? " " Yes. Chinese toe-ring really. I've never seen her without it ; she had it when we first met. She started travelling just after he died, and nothing can stop her since. Five years I'm engaged for, and I'll go through with it, if it kills me. She pays well. And she's a good girl. And as for cleverness, she's got a great deal more than any girl's got any business to have." "Why do they call her that odd name ? " I was utterly ashamed of myself, but could not stop asking questions. " The Kris-Girl ? Malay name ; she's become quite celebrated since we began travelling, for what the natives here call cutting knots. Give THE RUBBER QUEEN 25 Cristina something to disentangle that nobody else can make head or tail of, and see her cut it clear with a sweep. She's wonderful. Ought to have been a diplomat's wife or a detective's. Or something in a circus ; she can juggle with her hands as well as with her head. But I don't hold with any of it. In my time, girls who had lost their lovers stayed at home, and took an interest in the poor. A great deal more sensible, and more refined, too. But Cristina's parents are dead, and she does as she likes." Mrs. Ash shut up like a tap that has been turned off. I do not think she made ten consecutive remarks in the whole of the next two days. When we reached the end of the Van Cloon estate which was a good way off the widow descended from her sulky, and beckoned to Mrs. Ash. " You and I are going to stay here in the tea- house, and wait," she said. " You can trust Miss Raye in Mr. Garden's care, I'm certain sure." " Got anything you want to show me ? " asked Mrs. Ash, her elastic-sided boot hesitating on the step. , " I'm sorry I haven't anything to see here at all nothing but the little tea-house that I " " I'll stop," announced Mrs. Ash, bringing the second boot after the first. Cristina and I drove on. If I had had any capacity for astonishment left in me, which I scarcely had by this time, I might have been astonished to observe that Mrs. 26 KRIS-GIRL Van Cloon entered the little rustic rest-house with her handkerchief up to her eyes. We bounced along for a while through sun and shade, and then I asked despairingly, " Is everybody mad ? or what is it all about ? " Cristina bubbled with laughter. Despite the shadow that never quite seemed to leave the depths of her eyes, she was a merry creature. " I'll tell you every bit I know," she said. " I have Mrs. Van Cloon's leave. She says you are a ' fair treat,' and I gathered she meant to be complimentary. Well in the first place, the late Van Cloon was not a good husband ; he seems to have been quite half mad with jealousy, and I don't honestly believe that Mrs. Van ever gave him cause. He kept her shut up here on the plantation, and wouldn't let her go down to Macas- sar more than about once a year. He used to have parties of people staying, and then he liked to see her dressed up gorgeously, and wearing jewels, but he kept spying and watching about her all the time. And by-and-by she cried when she told me, poor dear someone came whom she did care for very much. There's a mystery about him ; she won't tell me, because she says I must see him to understand. He lives on a tumble-down little plantation near here, and she used to meet him by chance in the forest." " Sounds rather thin." " Well, she says I'll understand when I see him THE RUBBER QUEEN 27 and anyhow there was no harm in it ; I would swear to that." " So would I, somehow I like the amazing widow." " Van Cloon got to know," went on Cristina, " and there was a terrible row. He died soon after and left a very unjust will. She was to have the estate and income ; there are a lot of charges to relations of his that reduce it a good deal, but as you see, she's well off. If she re-marries, she loses all but five hundred a year. If she marries this man, she loses every guilder. Isn't it mean, after she'd spent the best years of her life nursing and taking care of the old villain ? " " It all depends. The other man may be an adventurer." " That's what she thought I'd think, so she asked me to go and see him. She wouldn't give me a letter of introduction ; it's funny. She told me just to say to him she was a friend of mine." " What's his name, and who is he ? " " English ; name Captain Ord." " Ami}' or navy ? " I asked suddenly. " Army," said Cristina. I whistled. Cristina was too young yes, she undoubtedly was to remem- ber about Ord of the Nilghiris, and his noble de- fence of the British fort. What that defence had cost him, I remembered now. ... So Ord of the Xilghiris was living on " a tumble-down plantation ' ' here at the end of the world, and my Cleopatra of the rubber estate had been forbidden to marry him. 28 KRIS-GIRL "Do you know anything about him ? " asked Cristina. I was just going to tell her what I knew, when something occurred that made speech unnecessary. We had come to a boundary a well-made, hand- some fence of posts and wire, cutting off the Van Cloon estate from something that looked like a half-redeemed wilderness on the other side. There was a gate in the fence, and through that gate was coming slowly, very slowly, an exceedingly tall man dressed in a khaki shirt and trousers, belted at the waist. The rough and ready costume showed off to full advantage a magnificent figure, held finely erect. The head was thrown somewhat backwards, and the chin a little raised, in a listen- ing attitude. Under the shade of the plantation hat that sat upon the man's thick, grizzled hair, one could see that his eyes were fixed upwards and far ahead . . . yet here the dense high forest shut in the track like a wall. Cristina pulled up the horse, and the man in the gateway moved forward, and called out " Who is there ? " still with his head raised and his bright, sword-grey eyes looking up at the forest roof. No answer came at first, and he stretched out his hands with the pathetic gesture that no one can mistake. . . . "Oh, poor thing, poor thing ! he's blind ! " whispered Cristina with a sob in her voice ; and I knew I cannot tell how that her pity was not for the blind man before us, but for the rich lonely THE RUBBER QUEEN 29 woman in her empty palace, unable to share her riches with the man who needed them and who loved her. That last item was a doubt solved for me in the next few seconds. Cristina sprang from the sulky, and walked towards the gate. Waves of hope and fear chased each other visibly over the face of the blind soldier as she came, settling down into disappointment as soon as she spoke. " Captain Ord, I am Miss Cristina Raye, and my friend Mr. Garden is with me. We have come to see your place, if we may." Captain Ord's hat was already in his hand. "I'm afraid there is nothing to see ; it is a very poor little place," he said courteously. " But come in by all means. Are you from the Juliana ? " " We got left behind by her, and are staying with Mrs. Van Cloon for a few days ; she has very kindly put us up," replied Cristina. The dark, lean face brightened suddenly. "She's always kind," was all he said. "Ah- met!" A Malay appeared from nowhere in particular. The captain delivered the sulky to him, and gave some order in Malay. Then, walking with astonish- ing certainty, he led the way through a wretched unweeded patch of cacao trees to a small brown house in a clearing. It was built of plaited bam- boos, and furnished very poorly. I do not think that it had more than two rooms. Here, under the dusk of the deep-thatched roof, with the fierce 30 KRIS-GIRL white sunlight striking at us through the open door, we sat on native-made chairs, and drank the fresh coconuts brought by the Malay. I don't believe there was a solitary other creature about the place no wonder it looked unweeded and I don't imagine there was anj^thing in the Chinese box that served for a cupboard, except the dry biscuits that the Captain produced for our refresh- ment. But the place was perfectly clean and tidy, and Ord's own clothes, though old, were mended well. The look that Ahmet cast upon his Tuan, when bending down to serve him Avith a coconut, ex- plained many things. I believe the Malay would have died for his master. Well, many a man did die for him, in that year of the forgotten eighteen- nineties without saving Ord, after all, from some- thing that was worse than swift and easy death. When the coconuts were finished, Cristina announced shamelessly that I was dying to look at Captain Ord's cacao, and chased me out into the hot sun, while she remained in the house with her host. For the best part of an hour, I was left to wander disconsolately about the weedy patches of bush, pinching pods that seemed unlikely ever to ripen, poking my head into the mean little drying shed where half a dozen trays of beans lay on a packing-case table, observing here and there and everywhere the naked poverty of the place. The plantation, I heard long after, had come to Captain Ord, as payment of a bad debt, some few THE RUBBER QUEEN 31 years after his blindness. God alone knows what disappointment, disillusion, faithlessness, had driven him out of Europe into this forest hermitage. Straining my memory, I could recollect something about a Lady Aline Somebody. Whoever and whatever she was, she had evidently failed him. ... I could understand how the big-hearted woman in Van Cloon's great palace had appealed to him, in spite of her surface roughness even in spite of the fact that he had never seen her beauty. I could understand how she came upon him during some of his wanderings in the forest how perhaps she had led or helped him, in her compassionate way the solitary, afflicted man. hungry for love. . . . Yes, I saw the story, plain man of commerce as I am. When Cristina came out, she was very silent, but her eyes sparkled and her little mouth was tight. Mrs. Van Cloon and she exchanged some mysterious feminine signal as we joined them, and they had a long talk after we got in. I noticed that the widow was unusually bright that evening. Tropical houses, even when built of marble, are treacherous regarding secrets, because everyone lives out of doors on the verandah. Drives or walks offer the only possible chance for private conversations. That is why I could not help hearing something that was not meant for me, as we all lay in long chairs upon the marble terrace after dinner, watching the fireflies dance among the orange blooms below. Mrs. Van Cloon was 32 KRIS-GIRL some way off, but marble carries sound almost like water. " I've saved and scrimped," I heard. " I've saved on iny very back and belly, so I have not a new dress for two years, and not even a pudding for dinner when I'm alone but all I can do, with the charges on the estate, I can't save enough out of the income to make a capital we could live on, for another five or six years. And oh, my dear, my dear, time's creeping upon me like the tide I'm getting old. . . . And he all alone. ..." " Beast ! " was Cristina's reply. Mrs. Van Cloon seemed to place the epithet where it belonged, without any difficulty, for she went on " " Yes, that's what he was and me slaving and nursing all those years without looking at another man, so much as to see whether he'd got two legs and a head on him or not except. . . . And as for these quiet-looking Dutch, you know what they really are, my dear, and the amount of keeping off they take " It seemed Cristina did know, for I thought I heard her giggle. " So there's how it is, and sometimes I wish I had the pluck to go and jump into the Goonong Kuda Bay, and a' done with it all. But while he's alive " Handkerchiefs came out here, and I woke up rather late to the necessity of coughing or of scraping my chair. I did both. Followed a good deal of whispering ; at the end, Mrs. Van Cloon THE RUBBER QUEEN 33 kissed Cristina with some violence, rose and withdrew. " I'm going to pack twelve clean chemises this very minute," I heard her say. A coastal steamer called next day, and with it Mrs. Van Cloon went down to Macassar, leaving us three in charge of the plantation. Before she went, she asked me to help her in making out a complete statement of the expenses and profits of the plantation for the previous year. This she took with her, together with a copy of her late husband's will. She also took three feathered hats designed to strike with amazement the Hooge Pad at driving time, and a box that contained, I suppose, the necessaries she had mentioned, to- gether with some others. Cristina and I stood on the verandah and cheered her as she went. Mrs. Ash, her elastic-sided boots well in view, and a genuine 1870 cap on her head, sat knitting warm vests for North Sea Fishermen, underneath the biggest of the electric punkahs. She did not feign any interest whatever in the events proceed- ing. Doubtless she considered such interest " not in the bargain." " Now," said the Kris-Girl, leading me into the central hall and selecting two chairs, " sit down, and I will tell you my story. . . . Isn't it exactly like an Adelphi play ? Even the chairs are the right pattern, with all those gilt legs. Well, I believe I've cut Mrs. Van Cloon's knot about through." 3 34 KRIS-GIRL " Good for you," I said. "Have you noticed," asked Cristina, rather dreamily, " that when people want anything in the world very, very, very much, they " " Hold on, Kris-Girl, I have noticed. I didn't either, you see." " Or," she went on, small hands round small silken knee, clear eyes looking up at the gaudy crystal chandelier " if there's anything they have that they like very, very, very much, some- thing comes between, and takes it away. . . . And there are knots and nets and tangles. Always ; it's a law." She stopped a minute, and (I knew) ranged back over the past. How do I know ? . Because I did too. "It's another law," she went on, "that you can't help yourself or hardly ever. But you can help other people, if you are a little less stupid than they are. For most people are stupid, you know ; Carlyle was so right in that. Well there's been a lot of stupidity over this matter. And it can be cleared away I think." " I must be stupid myself," I said. " For I can't see where any possible hope comes in. The will is good. Lots of married men make wills like it, and they're never overthrown that I know of." "And yet!" said Cristina, "perhaps lots of them might have got over the difficulty. Because it was so simple in this case. I really do think you must be stupid ; most nice people are. I'll THE RUBBER QUEEN 35 have to tell you. When I came back from that visit to the poor thing in the forest, I thought hard all the way home you know I told you not to speak to me and that night I got up at one o'clock, and went for a walk, round and round the terrace that's the way I think when I have to think hard. And Ash would get up and walk too, because she said it was what she was paid for ; but she never said a word, only once or twice she whispered the names of the Metropolitan Tube stations over to herself like an incantation, and three times she yawned. So in an hour or so I saw it all, and I came in. " What I said to myself was ' Who benefits ? ' Because that is what you must ask in everything, not only in crimes people are so stupid about that. And would you believe, the answer was, ' No one does.' ' " How ? " "I mean, that no one benefits as things ; re. Not Mrs. Van Cloon, not Captain Ord, not the people to whom the money would go. And then I asked I don't pretend to give you the processes, only the results ' Who would benefit ? ' That is, if she married him. And the answer was, of course, ' The other inheritors.' Therefore they must be anxious for her to marry him. But she can't without money. Therefore, they must provide it it is to their interest. ... So then I saw the whole thing. You can't believe how simple most things are, when you cut away the mass of 36 KRIS-GIRL stupidity that accumulates round them. I asked her who were the people who would get the money. She said that her husband's relations would, if she remarried ; if she did not, she could do what she liked with it, so long as she gave none of it to Captain Ord you see, he had provided against that. Now of course, being Colonial Dutch, they are desperately money-hungry. So I said to her, ' Go to them. Say just this " If you'll buy the estate from me for fifty thousand pounds, you can have it to-morrow. It's worth a hundred and fifty thousand, and if you wait for me to marry Captain Ord or anyone else, you'll never get it, for I couldn't marry him, and wouldn't marry any other man. So this is your chance." Just that. Then you see, when one asks the question, ' Who benefits ? ' one gets a new answer. She does, and he does, and they do. So the knot comes in pieces. At least, I hope so." "Kris-Girl, it does sound simple," I said. " Without doubt I am stupid." " Oh no, not a bit more than anyone else," she said consolingly. " The trouble with most people is that they can't see facts that are staring them i \ the face. Can't get the focus of them have looked at them too close. . . . Come and have a game of billiards." " Come and let you walk all over me at billiards, you mean," I said. " Well, if it makes you happy ..." THE RUBBER QUEEN 37 In the absence of Mrs. Van Cloon, we spent a pleasant time enough. There were horses, and Cristina and I went many drives rides were tabooed, on account of that necessity of earning her money fairly, which seemed to press so hard upon Mrs. Ash, I could have wished myself that she had not been quite so fiercely honest. She evidently hated bumping about the grass roads in buggies and sulkies only a shade less than she hated the various sights we went to see ; but nothing short of an attack of bubonic plague would have kept her from making one of the party. Cristina seemed used to her ways, but I must say it got upon my nerves a little at times, to see the old lady, as British-looking as the lions in Trafalgar Square, making a God-Save-the-Queen effect with her bonnet and her knitting and her elastic boots, in the middle of some exotic kampong full of piratical-looking Malay fishermen, and palms, and wild little naked children. There was a Chinese temple in a neighbouring town, that really turned out to be a wonder of wonders I still dream some- times at night of its incredible fagade and sky- piercing ornaments, dragons, goblins, ten-foot centipedes, ducks, tigers, fruits, faces, flowers, all made in coloured and enamelled china, and standing out in screaming relief against a heaven of sun- steeped blue ; I fancy I see its weirdly exquisite bronzes, its grinning, sea-sick lions, its wonderful gateway leading to a still green garden just one huge circular opening in the wall ; try it, and 38 KRIS-GIRL marvel at the effect. . . . Upon these things, and all other-" sights," of that district of Celebes, Mrs. Ash shed the withering blight of her utter indiffer- ence. She sat on the pedestal of an idol, and knitted hard, all through our visit to the temple ; even when the chief Chinese dignitary of the quarter and Chinese dignitaries can be exceed- ingly impressive appeared suddenly in scarlet satin over blue and gold silk, knelt down at the head of a retinue of splendid followers, and bumped his lordly forel.ead three times on the steps of the principal altar . Mrs. Ash merely turned a corner in her work and murmured softly : " Knit twenty ; purl eighteen. And the same again." The Jvliarta returned, and the captain ro 'e up to Mrs Van Cloon's to apologise for having deserted us. It was a case of leaving us or losing the ship, he said. (Like all the captains of the K.P.M., he spoke amazingly perfect English besides Dutch, French, German, and Malay.) He was grieved beyond all expression (thank you, he would take a very little), but it had been some comfort to him to know that our charming and hospitable hostess was close to the landing, and would be sure to take us in. He was again grieved beyond expression (a mere spoonful, please) to hear that Mrs. Van Cloon had gone to Macassar. Should he have the pleasure of taking us on board again ? We were unanimous in agreeing to deprive him of that happiness. Wild Commissioners would not have shifted Miss Raye or mj'self, before THE RUBBER QUEEN 39 hearing the result of the widow's high emprize ; and as for Mrs. Ash, nothing in heaven or earth or sea would have shifted her (and quite rightly) from her duties as chaperon. A few days later, the Macassar boat bellowed down at the landing place, and a hurried Jonges slammed horses into a buggy, and bounced away down the grass drive. Mrs. Van Cloon was return- ing. She descended from the buggy like an Amazon queen stepping forth from her chariot ; the light of victory shone on her face, and irradiated the very plume of her Paris hat made, I fear, strictly for export from Paris, on the same principle that governs the export of German bands from music- loving Germany. We had not time to ask her how she had fared. She threw the reins to the Jonges, made three steps into the hall, and enveloped Cristina in a smothering embrace. " You darling," she said. " Then you've won ? " asked Cristina, as soon as the widow's affectionate clutch had relaxed enough to allow her to speak. Mrs. Van Cloon nodded, and sank into a chair. It was one of the awful musical-box chairs, and it immediately began tinkling out : " When Johnny comes marching home, my boys hurrah, hurrah ! We'll give him a hearty welcome, boys hurrah, hurrah ! " I could not stand it, and collapsed, weakly laugh- 40 KRIS-GIRL ing, on another chair, which at once started proclaiming that " Champagne Charley was its name." It seemed to suggest an idea to Mrs. Van Cloon ; she called loudly " Jongesf Champagne mintaf" The two chairs played on ; I could not get up for laughing, and Mrs. Van Cloon, after giving her order, seemed totally unaware that the rival musical boxes were fighting it out under her person and mine. Cristina, with what I must think was malice afore- thought, sat down on the third musical chair, and when the strains of " Hold the Fort " were added to the cat-concert already proceeding, I became almost hysterical. Mrs. Ash, dry, chip-like, and unmoved, sat reading in a corner. I saw the title of her pamphlet ; it was The Garden in De- cember. The boy trotted in with champagne. " Let me give you some, Mrs. Ash and Miss Raye," pleaded our hostess. The chairs answered forcibly, together, " Wave the answer back to heaven, By thy grace we '11 all get blind drunk, when Johnny conies marching home ! " Mrs. Van Cloon got up with a tray in her hand ; Cristina rose too, and as I jumped to take the glasses, the chairs snapped off on " See the mighty host advancing, Satan is my name ! " Mrs. Ash refused champagne politely. "I find it goes to the head," she said, with the air of one enunciating a newly discovered fact of THE RUBBER QUEEN 41 nature. Cristina took some I think out of politeness. I poured myself a glass, because I felt I really wanted it. "There, drink it down," said Mrs. Van Cloon kindly. " It lies easy on the stomach at any hour of the day." She did not inquire the reason of my untimely mirth, being apparently of the opinion of George Eliot's "Dolly," that "men were made so." " To Mrs. Ord ! " I said, and drank. Cristina re- peated the toast. The future Mrs. Ord acknow- ledged it by a few tears, and a completely blissful giggle. " Oh, my dears and my dears ! " she said, sitting down again not on "Johnny" or "Champagne Charley " this time ; I saw to that, for my ribs were shaken almost loose from my spine " I've done it thanks to the Kris-Girl ! They've given in. They hated to but the money fascinated them that much that they couldn't help them- selves ! You should have heard them argue there was one old cow of a notary who wanted but there it's done, and I'm a free woman, or will be just as soon as they can get the legal papers through. And Ord and me, we'll go down to Gippsland by the first boat we can catch, and I've got a buyer for his plantation who'll give him enough to provide him in pocket-money anyhow, the dear, and if any of you ever come to Victoria, and leave it without seeing us " " I can answer for myself," I said. " I've had 42 KRIS-GIRL the time of my life here." 1 looked at Oistina as I spoke, but she did not seem to see me. She was standing by the "Champagne Charley" chair examining its mechanism. " Have you," I said to her, determined to make her notice me but she suddenly sat down on one of the other chairs, and my sentence was broken off by " We'll all get blind drunk, when Johnny comes marching home ! " The next Macassar boat left in a week We saw very little of Mrs. Van Cloon during that time ; she seemed to live on the road between her own property and the Captain's, and when in the house, occupied herself chiefly in reading Singapore drapery catalogues, and writing letters with cheques in them. When the steamer left, she pressed a splendid diamond brooch on Cristina, and wept over and kissed her to such an extent that the little lady vanished altogether in her mighty embrace. "Ash, you take this bit of vanity," said Cris- tina, as we steamed out of Goonong Kuda Bay. " Couldn't refuse, but you know I don't like that sort of thing." " I will take it, thank you," said the old lady, fastening it in her dress. " It'll buy me a bath with hot and cold water, and a good kitchen range. . ." She looked back at the vanishing island with relief. THE RUBBER QUEEN 43 " Another place seen and done with,* she said, and turned down into the social hall. Cristina was hanging over the rail looking at the blue water layered with streaming gold. I heard her quote something from Kipling, half under her breath : " Can him wlw helps others help himself ? answer me that, sorr." And I, too, went below and left her. CHAPTER II ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG So we sailed away, and sailed on up the coast of Celebes. Our new steamer, the Halmaheira, was as like the Juliana as one coconut is like another, and just as amazing, viewed as a product of the utmost ends of the earth. Cristina Raye voiced her feelings on the subject, as we thudded steadily along a blue, mountainous coast of wonderful love- liness, inhabited only by wild-looking Malays. " Look at the place on the map," she said, " think about it at home it's so remote and im- possible that you don't believe it really exists, till you've taken a ticket to it why, Borneo's a synonymous term for wildness and out-of-the- wayness, and this is a step further on. You think you'll paddle up the coast in a canoe, guarding yourself against pirates with two revolvers in your belt, a rifle over your shoulder, and a knife in your teeth and you find things like Atlantic liners going up and down about twice a week with forty- one courses for lunch " 44 ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 45 " It couldn't have been forty-one," I remon- strated. We were tramping up and down the promenade deck at 3 p.m., I think, with the view of cnnoying the siesta folk. We felt I did, at any rate that they had no business to be having siestas. Whoever has suffered as the business man in the Farthest East must suffer, through that confounded habit kept up by the local whites of going to sleep every day from one o'clock till five, will sympathise with me. " It was," said Cristina, with determination. " If you count all the things handed round on the rice- table. I am tasting six new ones every day, to see what they are like. To-day it was that thing that looks like fried worms I think it is, by the way and bits of inside buffalo skin, and the cleanings of fish in oil, and pieces of cuttle- fish tentacles, and crabs' legs I don't really think it was tarantula and something that tasted as if one had eaten a set piece of fire- works just after it was touched off. There are eighteen more things to try, but I've given up. To-morrow I mean to ask " " M inta a jam, telor, dan ikan sadja," I inter- rupted in fluent Malay. "Right," said Cristina, nodding. "I wanted to know why they had that phrase in the conver- sation book, and now I've found out. All the tourists begin like me, and all end in the same way. ' Bring me only chicken, eggs, and fish.' I suppose they don't want to die till they've 46 KRIS-GIRL had the value of their ticket. It is quite pathe- tic." " Phrase books generally are, except when they're tragic," I said. " Listen to this series 'I won't do it.' 'I won't give it.' 'I don't want it.' ' That's enough.' ' It is no use bother- ing me any more.' ' Be off.' ' " Oh, that's tragedy remember the harbour of Macassar ? " said Cristina with a laugh. I did remember ; I thought we were getting on pretty well. When two travellers begin to ask each other '' D> you remember?" they are already on the way to friendship.- I was quite clear in my mind that I wanted to be friends with Miss Cristina Raye. Friends ? Yes. I was sure that I meant no more. Because, you see, I was nearly forty, and she could not be more than twenty-five or so, and everyone knew that she was inconsolable for the loss of her fiance, and I had always supposed, when I had time to think about it, that I was inconsolable for the loss of mine this fifteen years or more. I thought of her, deliberately, as we thudded on up the far strange coasts of Celebes of Mabel, born in '75, and dead in '93 Mabel, the pretty creature who wore a "f;inge" and a bustle, did not like the " new woman " (Lord ! where has the phrase hidden itself, these latter days ?) and who was not certain about fin-de-siede man- ners" Mabel, the dear little soul who had ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 47 never been further than Scotland in her life, and who was quite sure that no " really nice girl," when in London, would go outside a bus or drive in a hansom cab. . . . I remembered the lad who had been so pleased and proud to put the ring on her finger . . . and my thoughts drifted off from Mabel for a moment. Something hummed in my brain something of Stevenson's " Sing me a tale of a lad that is gone Say, could that lad be I ? ... Give me again all that was there, Give me the sun that shone, Give me the eyes, give me the soul, Give me the lad that's gone ! " It goes to the tune of " Over the Sea to Skye." I found myself humming the air as I leaned on the rail, watching the thunder-blue ranges of Celebes slip by, and seeing them scarce at all. And Cristina, standing beside me, took up the air, and sang in the tiniest voice not " Skye," but Stevenson's much less widely known refrain. " How did you know ? " I asked her, turning from Celebes to her. But she only smiled. " Was she very pretty ? " she asked. "Yes, sorceress," I said. "She was. Like a flower or a small, soft bird. She wasn't meant to stand the storms of life, and she didn't." The Halmaheira thudded on ; the beat of her engines echoed against the cliffs ; the silky-blue water hissed beneath her forefoot. 48 KRIS-GIRL " I'm sorry," said Cristina, and I knew she meant it. We fell silent. I wondered if confi- dence were to be exchanged for confidence if in return, I was to hear anything about I looked at her, and saw that I was not. She was far away from me ; yes, very far. Her face was pale, and her eyes were looking I know " Beyond the clouds, and beyond the tomb." I slipped away, and went forward to the smoking saloon. I was thinking very hard about no, you are quite wrong about the gum damar trade. " There's a lot of it in the Minahassa," I said to myself. " Quite a lot. We shall get to Menado the day after to-morrow. I will leave the ship there, and travel round a bit. It might pay me, as things are going in the markets just now." I have always hated Menado. I was there only a week or two ; and the town is an extremely pretty one ; and the residents are friendly, and the climate is fairty good, but Anyhow, I hate it. I have a right to hate any part of the earth's surface that I choose, and I choose to hate Menado. And the Minahassa. If you want to know what the Minahassa is, I shall not tell you. You have got an atlas, and you can look it up. I am not paid to teach you geography. There is something detestable about long. 1 ng roads, very well kept and edged with shady trees all nicely clipped and about scores and scores of native residences, set down in the midst of over- ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 49 flowing green ; houses built in a fashion half European, half Malay, and filled with merry, fat, prosperous people who are any blend you like to mention except plain white. I can't see why people should be happy in droves in thousands driving about all day in pony karettas which they shouldn't be able to afford, and giggling inanely with each other ; filling the wide quiet streets and the long, long, long roadways with a flutter of muslin arid a gleam of oiled hair and flowers, and with laughter of small fat children, and jokes of sarong-cl&d young men. The Dutch residents have such pretentious villas, too, stone and brick, and sometimes marble in part with such garden- ing about them, and avenues, and stoeps where ladies from Holland make embroidery and drink coffee and chat, happily and contentedly. Pretentious that was what I felt it all to be. The hotels were pretentious, with their marble halls and electric lights and crowds of merry people having dinner and the motor-cars, pant- ing up and down the long roads with cargoes of Dutch tourists going to Tondano and Limboto Lakes and the Chinese bazaar, and the harbour. Especially the harbour. Those two great over- hanging volcanoes, the Klabat and the Lokon, smoking away above the town, had an effect that seemed to me unbearably theatrical. The whole thing was like a drop scene in a pantomime. And the canoes paddling up and down with fruit and fish and beggars all the beggars in Malaysia, 4 50 KRIS-GIRL which means almost everyone, go about in canoes it was a nuisance from beginning to end. And people laughed at such silly things. There was an English bagman : he came back to the hotel one day crowing with laughter, and insisted on explaining what it was all about as if anyone wished to know. He had seen a canoe paddled by a Buginese-pirate sort of person without any clothes, and had noted that the craft had a name painted on it. And he had read the name. And it was " SHERLOX HOLM." And the unclothed heathen had explained that this was the name of a hero exceedingly celebrated in Malaysia since some kind Tuan had translated his doings into Malay ; that all the people had the translation, and they liked it better than the Koran or the Bible. Asked why, he explained that there were so many ways of stealing in it, and it taught people to steal cleverly. And that he was a Buddhist, when he did not happen to be going to the Dutch Mission church, and that he had quite frequently burned sticks of incense and red paper in the porcelain temple at the other side of the town, in honour of Sir Doyle, that saint of far-off countries who had written the book. Did anyone ever hear such childish nonsense ? Possibly it was true in fact, I think it was but who cared whether it was or not ? I left the giggling commercial on the stoep, and went off to my own room. It looked like a prison cell furnished with unusual luxury, and ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 51 smelt like a swimming-bath most rooms in Dutch- Malayan hotels are like that : they build them of concrete and tiles, usually with one barred window some twenty feet up from the floor, and they hose them down every day as if you were small-pox or scarlet fever. Still, it was a refuse, and there were no commercial travellers there. I lit a pipe, and sat down on the edge of my vast Dutch bed (apparently the Dutch expect you to bring your entire family with you, and house it under the one mosquito net) with a paper of notes on the trade of Celebes, which I wanted to look over. I did not care a trouser button about the trade of Celebes, but I was quite aware that I ought to care. And then I got a steamer time-table, and began calculating when the Halmaheira would meet the Timor, and on what date the Timor would get to Ternate, and what boat would go on to the Moluccas. No, I wasn't going to the Moluccas. I just looked them up because I wanted to look them up. There was no harm in that. And one had to distract one's mind somehow or other from such a hateful place as Menado and the Minahassa. Did I mention, by the way, that Mrs. Ash and Cristina were travelling by the Timor ? If I thought for a moment you would look up Celebes on the map, I would ask you to do so ; but I know you will not. You and I are alike. When they tell me, in a story, that " it is important the 52 KRIS-GIRL reader should remember the second passage branched off from the left before one came to Sir Jasper's room, and that this second passage was parallel for about ten yards with the staircase leading from the kitchen. This staircase turned round on its way to the second floor, and the reader will understand, by consulting the appended diagram, that Lady Gladys's maid was able, her- self unseen, to view the" etc. when, I say, the writer tells me to remember and work out all these things, I turn the page, yawn, and recom- mend Gladys and Jasper to fight it out among themselves, and let me know the result when they've done. So I won't explain to you about the Tomini Bocht and the routes by Tidore, and why one may, on occasion, go west in order to go east. I will only say that I went back to Macassar. Ques- tioned as to my motives by the commercial traveller, I told him I was going to look up the trade in hair-oil which is a real trade, by the way, though it did not, and does not, come within the province of my house. He met me in the offices of the Koninklijke, Paketvaart Maatschappij, the day after my return, and asked me if I was looking for hair-oil there. I told him I was looking for balm of Gilead, and walked off to the ticket office. The K.P.M., like other steamship companies, does sell balm of Gilead, on occasion. I hoped'it might sell some to me. ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 63 " I say, though, I thought you were after gum damar," he said, following me up. "I thought of making a little tour myself where did you say was the place for it ? " I hadn't said, but I was quite ready to do so. " Oh, the Aru Islands, without a doubt," I told him. " Thanks," he said, and I left him buying a ticket for the Arus, where you can get nothing but pearl-shell and not much of that, now-a-days. Somehow the incident did me good. I never saw him again. I went on my journey to the islands north and east of Celebes, where gum damar is to be had, and filled two notebooks and a half with facts that I thought would be extremely useful later on. Then I began to drift south. You can't help drifting, once you are in the full tide of the K.P.M. Its steamers are the net result of three hundred years of trading in that particular corner of earth, and they go to all the places you have heard of, and all you have not especially the latter with such frequency and speed, and they pelt you so constantly with pictured guides, and tempt you so cunningly with additions to tickets, and bar- gains in the way of inclusive trips, that you drift on and on like Maeldune, from island to island, with no particular intention, at last, of ever going home at all. . . . I did not mean to go to Amboyna, but I found 54 KRIS-GIRL myself there, somehow or other. 1 looked up the history of the place, and found it unexpectedly exciting. The world has forgotten all about the Amboyna massacre of British subjects and the wars that ensued thereafter ; all about the extir- pating of cloves in other islands, to grow them exclusively in Amboyna at an advanced price ; &11 about the enslavement of the natives, and the fact that Amboyna once was ours, for a little while. I looked these things up, and found them interest- ing. And the Moluccas did I mention that AmbojTia is a Molucca ? seemed, somehow or other, much, much more attractive than the Mina- hassa. And as the ship went on south-eastward the attractiveness increased. We came to Banda at the last, and Banda seemed to me a jolly and a delightful place ; I made up my mind that I would see something of Banda. Now Banda Banda Xeira is not an island where you can investigate the gum damar trade. I am quite ready to allow that, but one never knows what product of interest to a big importing house may not turn up in a place like Banda Neira. So I arranged for a stop-over, and left the steamer at the port. I will tell you what Banda is like, whether you wish or not. There is not a place in the world like Banda. I have Cristina's authority, which is better than my own, for that. You come in in the early morning. The ship glides softly from the blue open sea into the crater ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 55 of a volcano, floored with water that is clear and still, and jasper-green. This is the harbour, and it is so deep that your great Dutch liner moors herself right among the branches of the overhang- ing trees. All round you, the volcano-rim, like the edge of a giant cup, shuts away the sky ; you feel imprisoned, till you look at the width of the great water-floor, and see the many islets strewn about its surface. So near that you could throw a stone into its streets, you see a town ; an in- credible, stone-built, mediaeval town, with a for- tress and a castle. Overhanging the town, and throwing a sinister shadow upon its narrow lanes, mounts the cruel crater of the Goonong Api, a volcano within a volcano. Day and night, a flag of smoke or of fire flies from the red-scarred peak ; the Goonong Api is not dead, and gives constant warning of the fact. It has destroyed Banda more than once during past centuries, and may do so again to-morrow. " That is why the town is sleepy," said Cristina. 1 met her on the canary tree walk, near the sea, soon after I had landed. We greeted as if we had expected one another ; perhaps we had I don't know. " Did you ever notice," she went on, " that the people who live about active volcanoes are always sleepy and lazy ? One would think a volcano was the sort of thing that might keep you awake and lively. But it doesn't. Vesuvius, Stromboli, Popocatapetl, Teneriffe it's all the same." 56 KRIS-GIRL " If that comparison holds," I said, " one might expect a chain of active volcanoes all round this town. I never saw anything like it. Have I lost count of time, and is it Sunday or some holiday ? and where are the inhabitants anyhow ? " We Cristina, Mrs. Ash and I were walking slowly along a green, silent avenue of canary trees, in what should have been a suburb of the tiny town. The wind from the sea rushed down the tunnel made by the high arched boughs. There was a grassy lawn between us and the water. On the other side were houses ; quaint old bungalows built of stone, with pillars and deep tiled roofs ; here and there marble steps and piazzas ; here and there plants growing in stone vases. The shutters of all these houses were closed ; there was no one moving about the dark verandahs. There was no one on the grass beside the blue, still sea. "Where are they ? " said Cristina, looking as one who sees visions. " If you want to know, you must ride the Pale Horse to find out. He'll carry you where they are." " Dead ? " I asked startled. " Dead, and gone away ; last year, and last century, and a hundred years ago. . . . Banda is dying. There are people in some of those houses, but most have lain empty for years. You could have your choice of a mansion to live in, anywhere about the place, for nothing." It seemed incredible. The avenue with its wide roadway, meant for busy traffic ; the level lawns ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 57 near the sea, where hundreds of promenading folk might have sauntered up and down to take the evening air ; the solid, splendid building of the houses everything spoke of large population and ample resources. Already I had wandered away from the two or three streets near the steamer, where languid Chinamen sustained a pretence of shop-keeping, and brown women in white jacket and sarong passed at long intervals, carrying babies or fruit. I had found dry abandoned- looking roads shut in by enormous walls, iron- grilled doors that seemed to open upon nothing, dusty, sagging porticoes and always, no one and no one and no one. But I had had an idea that the people were merely away I had not paused to ask where. Now Cristina had told me. "There are a hundred or two left," she said, as we walked on down the empty avenue, hushing our voices through some odd instinct that I cannot explain. " But they hardly count, and they seem to live mostly about the inner rooms, sleeping. It's the strangest place I ever was in. You can't believe that you are awake. Some- times I think it is the influence of Banda itself, and then again I suppose the scent of the nutmegs may have something to do with it." " I've noticed it, though I did not know what it was," I said. "Nutmegs! Of course that subtle sort of scent which floats through everything. Yes, I can imagine." I broke off ; I did not quite know why. The 58 KRIS-GIRL place seemed to hold up an invisible hand, motion- ing " Silence." It was late in the afternoon ; the sun was slanting low under the huge canaries, and the sea was turning gold. Someone has spoken of " the infinite sadness of a summer afternoon." He was right I am not philosopher enough to say why. But I can add this, that sad as the English summer afternoon may be, the waning day of the tropic lands holds a subtler and deeper melancholy. There is something in that eternal summer that touches one, in such hours, like one's childish thoughts of Valhalla or the Elysian Fields something soul- less, wistful, through all its unchanging gold. . . . " Where are we going ? " I asked, as we still walked on. " To the fort," said Cristina. " I want to show you that." Mrs. Ash marched beside us, a little robin of an old lad} 7 , her elastic-sided boots scarcely marking the dust, her thin black clothes looking, as they alwaj's did, just as if nothing at all were inside them, and as if they were propelled along by mere force of will. She stared straight in front of her all the time, deliberately abstracting her mind from Banda. We reached the fort, and there, under the shadow of the mighty grey walls built by the Portu- guese, and finished but fourteen years after the death of England's Elizabeth, Cristina told me what had brought her to the Spice Islands. 59 "It was Richilda Van den Hofdyk," she ex- plained. " I had a letter from her." " Who in the name of goodness ? " " She's a girl, just like myself, and a very nice girl. She had heard something about me, so she wrote to me in Macassar, and asked me to come and see Banda. and, if I could, do something for her. She sa3 r s she wants me to find the Golden Nutmeg." " May one ask what that is ? " "Oh, one may ask. as much as one likes ; it's what I'm asking myself all the time just now. The thing is to find the answer. No, I'd rather not go into the details just yet ; it's about the most interesting thing I have come across but Did you ever see anything like this fort ? " I had, but not in this quarter of the world. Great stone forts with moats and draw-bridges, and gateways that run back like a railway tunnel, are not unknown to the European traveller. But here, on this fly-speck of an island, in the far end of outer Malaysia, it was an astonishing thing to see. Nor was it the only one. I had already chanced on the ruins of three others, wandering about the town looking for I may as well acknow- ledge it looking for Cristina. '' There used to be Portuguese soldiers here in armour, with arquebuses," said Cristina, stand- ing within the great empty space of grass en- closed by the fort, and looking up to the untrodden ramparts, where encroaching trees spread out their 60 KRIS-GIRL greedy hands of green. " There were girls in hoops and ruffs, who cried for them when they left Lisbon, two years' journey away. It was only the Portuguese and then the Dutch, who knew the way to get here ; they hid their charts, and wouldn't tell other people. And they had forts against the pirates ; the seas were full of pirates, and even fifty years ago they weren't all quite gone. And they made slaves of the natives, and forced them to work in the spice plantations, and took all their land away. There were no nutmegs anywhere in the world like these. And by-and-by , the Dutch came along and took the place." " When ? " I asked ; I found this bit of history interesting. " I hate dates. It was about that Henrietta Maria time, when men had beautiful lace collars. So when the Dutch knew how good the nutmegs were, they killed all the trees in other places, and only kept them here, and made it death for any- one to carry away a plant or a seed. And you can't think what money they made. This was an island of palaces. There are some of them still. Lots of white marble, all the way from Italy hundreds of years ago ! " Mrs. Ash, with no expression whatever on her face, stood in the midst of the fort beside us, not listening to a word. She put me out somewhat, but Cristina was used to her, and did not mind. " They kept that up longer than you would think," she said. " In the crinoline times, when ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 61 one wore slippers with points like a chisel, and said, ' La ! ' they were still monopolising. But by-and-by, people did smuggle out a few plants. And then it was all up, because they began to plant them in South America, and other places. So the prices went down and down. And Banda is dying as fast as it can. They hardly trouble to pick the nutmegs now. And any people there are are half-caste, except just a few. And the planters who used to have ivory tables, and silver kitchen kettles, are as poor as Job. So that's how Richilda Van den Hofdyk came to write to me about the Golden Nutmeg I'll tell you about it by-and-by. I can't talk in the middle of that sunset." On the dying glories of Banda fell the glory of the dying day. We stood silent, watching. A small wind got up and cried about the darkening walls, like the spirit of the ancient place lamenting days gone by. ... " Would you," said Mrs. Ash, suddenly breaking her long silence, and turning to me, " would you buy your bacon at Smith's or the Stores ? " Do you know you may hardly believe me, but it is the truth the remark struck me as pathetic. The old lady, in her dusty black, deaf and blind to the wonders of the Farthest East, turning wist- fully, in the midst of Banda's dying beauties, to dreams of Kensington, motor-buses and grilled bacon. . . . "I would buy it' at the Stores/' I said, quite seriously. " Not that I have anything to say 62 KRIS-GIRL against any other place. But you can't get better than the best." " I will buy it there," she said, looking animated for the first time that afternoon. We walked back to the queer, sleepy hotel, in silence. I have said before that there is no privacj' in a tropical house. I did not mean to hear Cristina say that evening, when she was lying on her verandah (I being invisible on mine; " I like men to have clean-shaven faces, rather hard, and to fit nicely into the shoulders of their coats." Mrs. Ash replied, with what seemed to me the most extraordinary irrelevance " I suppose, when a person is paid by the year, they get a year's notice or salary." I didn't wonder that Cristina said simply : " Bosh ! " When breakfast was over I remember it con- sisted of cold cabinet pudding and cold cauliflower, among other things ; all the flotsam and jetsam of last night's dinner, as is the custom in provincial Dutch hotels Cristina met me on the verandah. Her dress rather surprised me ; I am no hand at describing ladies' clothes, but I may safely say that it was something from the Rue de la Paix, and that the satisfaction she evidently derived from it had nothing to do with such minor ques- tions as comfort or ease. " I put this on," she said, confidentially, " be- ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 63 cause I shall have such a lot of thinking to do to- day." Probably my face showed that I did not see the connection as clearly as might have been wished. Cristina, making an impatient mouth at me, spread out her gloved hands on her gown. " It is beautiful, don't you see ? " she said. " I like the lining, rather," was my comment. " Nonsense." "The stuffing, then." " I'll whistle for Ash. What I mean is, that it goes to my head, and makes me above myself, and one wants to be made above oneself to think one's best. I am quite half -drunk on this dress. Men drink whiskey ; women drink clothes ..." She looked round to see that there was no one in sight, and then gave the neatest little spring-bok jump into the air, clapping her tiny heels together twice before she came down. "That's the way it makes me feel," she said. " Now we're all going to call on Richilda Van den Hofdyk. She didn't ask us to stay with her, be- cause she has a mother, and the mother doesn't approve of Bernhardt and Ellen Terry. Is that you, dear Ash ! come on, we're waiting." I felt rather curious on the subject of Bernhardt and Terry, thus unceremoniously shipped into a galley that seemed singularly alien from them. But there was no more talk on the subject of Richilda. We walked for a long waj' through 64 KRIS-GIRL what I think must be the most beautiful woods in the whole world the nutmeg forests of Banda, never meeting a soul, except one dark-faced Malay with the demeanour of a Buginese pirate, who was engaged in peaceably picking nutmegs off boughs with a split bamboo. Giant canaries shut out most of the sun ; beneath their shade on the open brown forest floor, stood up slight nutmeg trees of twenty feet or so. There were ripe nutmegs, like apricots, on all the trees ; drifts of the opened fruits lay on the ground, showing bright lacework, the colour of arterial blood, about the satin-black stone. There were flowers, too, on the trees and on the ground, so thick that we had to kick them away as we walked carved-ivory flowers with a heady scent of spice. In the forest, as we walked along soft-footed upon dead leaves and drifted blooms, it was very quiet, very green and cool, and the sea breathed gently far away below. " We aren't going to the Van den Hofdyk house," explained Cristina. " That's near the town, away below. Mevrouw Van den Hofdyk knows nothing about Richilda's goings-on with me ; I'm going to meet her at the house of the Golden Nutmeg. Now don't ask me questions that nobody can answer yet. I don't mind telling you that the place has had that name for a generation or two, and that no one seems to know why. I think we're coming to it." We were ; a narrow, overgrown path opened off the main roadway at this point, and, following it, ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 66 we found ourselves in less than five minutes at the mysterious house. Have you ever dreamed, when a child, of wandering through a wood, and coming suddenly upon a splendid mansion that someone had abandoned & mansion in which you proceeded at once to settle yourself, taking possession of all the furniture and all the treasures it contained ? This was that dream. The house of the Golden Nutmeg, built of stone and marble, green-stained with rains, and cracked with earthquake shocks, stood in the midst of a grove of tangled trees, that broke all over it in waves of forest spray. Wild banana leaves, as large as hearthrugs, thrust their huge green hands under the tiles of the verandah, and touched the dark shutters of the windows. Lianas tied themselves about the stone urns by the door. There were things growing on the roof that had no business to be there, and things living among them that had less. One such thing took flight as we came up, sending an angry hiss at us as it slipped like a coil of copper-brown rope over the side of the house. " Richilda hasn't come," said the Kris-Girl, disappointedly. " We must wait for her a little. I know how to get in." She took a slate-shaped stone that was lying on the terrace, levered up the sagging door with it, and let us inside. We entered upon a maze of rooms that surprised me by its extent ; there must have been a dozen, opening in and out of each 6 66 KRIS-GIRL pther in a curious straggling fashion. They were all big, all lofty, all beautifully tiled. The furniture was colossal acres of dining-table upheld by legs like carved barrels ; towers of sideboard rising tier on tier to the sculptured Carrara ceiling ; cellarets larger than any coffin I have ever seen ; four-post beds that looked like the scaffolding for a house. Everything was mahogany, rosewood, marqueterie, and carved oak ; nothing plain or cheap. Most of the things dated back two or three generations, and some were even older. " What do you think of it ? " asked Cristina, coming to a pause in the middle of a room that seemed to have been used as a sort of lounge. I had opened what was left of the shutters, and the afternoon sun was spilling golden pools on the tiles of the floor, and trying vainly to call forth an answering ray of light from the* dulled polish of the great chests and chairs. " I think," I said, " that it is fairly evident ' Todgers could do it when it chose ' about this part of the world." " I've got a suite of maple," said Mrs. Ash, restraining herself with a visible effort, " that I wouldn't give for the whole lot of it ." Immediately she detached herself from her surroundings, took out a flag of knitting from some pre-Cambrian pocket, sat down, and began to click and flash. Do you know The Island of Dreams ? I can whistle well it is my only accomplishment and I began to whistle the song. There was something ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 67 about this Sleeping-Beauty sort of place, lost in the woods of far-away, lovely, dying Banda, that made me dream, hard-headed business man though I am . Perhaps I looked at Cristina . I think I did . Cristina did a curious thing. I knew the mean- ing of it, years after. . . . She lifted the hand that wore the great Chinese ring, and beat it on a marble table, so that the ring struck into the flesh, and bruised her finger. There was a tall oak press breast-high between us, but I saw in the dulled panes of the window what she did. " Come on and look over the rest of the house," she said, in a rather hard voice. " I don't believe that Dutch girl is coming." We had been sitting very quietly in the big stone and marble hall, making no noise that could be heard through the thick walls of the house, and hearing nothing but our own low voices and the chuckling of a few green parrots in the forest out- side. Now suddenly, from what we had thought was an empty room at the far side of the verandah, came a sound that stopped us dead. It was a voice but what a voice ! No ; it was not anyone singing. Richilda Van den Hofdyk (Richilda Thornivale now ; she married Viscount Thornivale a year after she first came out, as everyone knows) never sang ; she was like Trilby, tone-deaf, in spite of her magnifi- cent speaking voice, and unlike Trilby, she never found a Svengali to wake unsuspected music in her. She was, on that first occasion when I heard 68 KRIS-GIRL her how many times have I, and you, others, heard her since ! rehearsing Lady Macbeth ; and she did it in a way to stir the hair on your head, and send small shivers down your spine. Speak- ing, Richilda could not express herself at that time in commonly decent English, but reciting she was perfect. Most people know of similar cases. She had come to the famous passage about " This little hand," and we heard her glorious voice who does not know Richilda's voice of gold ? trembling down from sudden passion into despair " All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand ! " " Good Lord ! " was all I found to say. "Just so," remarked Cristina. "Now you know why old Mevrouw Van den Hofdyk talks about stage divorces and so on, and has pink fits whenever she finds a European steamer time-table in the house. If Richilda had twopence to spare, or could get it, she would be off to London to- morrow. She has acted in private theatricals about the islands, and everyone went mad over her. I saw her myself in a Dutch play. She was simply wonderful the finest thing since Bern- hardt, if she was trained. * And she is not too old yet, very little over twenty. You can't think how she wants to go to Europe. . . . Listen that's Dutch now she is rehearsing the part of a girl who is entreating her lover not to leave her. I suppose she doesn't know we are here. This ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 69 place is her private stage ; her mother would never allow it at home." " She ought to," I said with conviction. " No Mevrouw has the right to bury that in the forests of Malaysia. Besides, think of what she might earn ! " " Mevrouw Van den Hofdyk doesn't care about that. She is a determined Calvinist, and thinks the stage is perdition. Richilda's her only child, too. She could afford to let her go, with economy, but she won't, and the girl has nothing of her own. You see, up till about thirty years ago, the Van den Hofdyks were so rich that everyone called the place the House of the Golden Nutmeg because nobody could make out how a small plantation paid so well. They always seemed to have cash to spend upon everything, though nutmegs were going down and down, and it grew into a kind of legend that they had one nutmeg tree that bore golden fruit. I can't say how much of the idea was figurative, and how much plain superstition ; these out-of-the-way corners can show you curious survivals. . . . Well, Richilda swears there is something in the idea. Her uncle, who lived here with his sons, was the last about whom they told the yarn ; he and the sons all died together in the cholera year, some time in the eighteen-seventies. So, if there was any handing down of a secret, as she thinks there was, it died with them. Since then, the other Van den Hofdyks, who have mostly died out, took 70 KRIS-GIRL away all the light furniture, and left the place as it is. No one cares to live in it ; people haven't the money to keep up these big houses now." " And this Miss Miss Richilda actually believes that there's a golden nutmeg tree growing about the place ? " " She doesn't know what she believes. She's thought and thought, and brooded and brooded till she hardly seems sane about the idea. Still, I think there is decidedly something in what she has told me. Come in ; she must have arrived by the back door while we were talking." We found Miss Van den Hofdyk in the further room, standing with one hand on a colossal mahogany table. I need not describe her at this time of day everyone who is likely to read this knows Madame Richilda's round Dutch face and massive flaxen hair ; can tell you how she stands on the stage, with just that trick of resting her hand lightly on some support (and what an exquisite hand and arm it is !) can picture to you her velvets and her furs, worn in the Rubens- esque manner that we have come to regard as peculiar to herself. We know Richilda; or else we are ourselves unknown. Well, then, it was Richilda who stood there but as we knew her at the time, just a badly- dressed, fairly pretty Colonial Dutch girl. " You dear one ! " she said in English, as Cristina appeared. She kissed the little lady affectionately. Cristina endured the embrace with 71 politeness, and introduced me as an English friend who was fond of the theatre. "It is not of the theatre that I shall wish to talk," said the girl. "It is about the Golden Nutmeg. Cristina, I have thought greatly, but still I do not find the secret. And my mother always recites for me the devil influences of the stage, and says she has not the single guilder. I bought me detective novels from the steward of the steamer, but still I cannot detect." " Oh, Richilda ! what have you been doing ? " asked the Kris-Girl, strangling a laugh in its birth. Richilda drew a notebook out of her ample pocket. " Sit down. It is still the house of a Van den Hofdyk," she said grandly ; and we sat. Mrs. Ash, all the time, had been knitting like the Ven- geance herself, only pausing to give Richilda an uninterested bow. She went on knitting, while we talked. " The deductive method following," began Richilda, " I first deduct that my uncle was a clever man ; therefore he will not hide any secret where the first one may find. On the roof I climb, since that is the last place of which one should think. With a magnifying glass I examine every tile ; some I pull off. There is nothing. In the cellar then I looked, because my uncle would much drink, for what my mother says ; so I deduct that he the secret would hide where he very much would go to. All the bottles that are left I have opened, and everyone I taste " 72 KRIS-GIRL " My dear Richilda ! " " But I drank not much, only to see what there might be a taste of strange thing therein. For I have read a story " "So I have. Richilda, didn't it make you awfully screwed ? " " Perhaps no matter. I lie down till I am good again, and then some more I have deducted. With my magnifying glass I look at all the dust in the corners " The click of Mrs. Ash's needles paused. " Couldn't you see it without that ? " she asked, in an accent of the bitterest scorn. Richilda flowed evenly on, calm and passion- less as one of her country's canals. ' ' I have from that no result. I then on my uncle's bed lay down, and his way of thinking tried to reconstruct. At the ceiling I looked, where his eyes should most often rest. From this I deduct nothing, nor nothing from the walls. I walk like him the verandah round and round, and where his eyes should naturally fall, I say ' Here the idea may have come to him,' and in that place I search and search. The gutters for this reason I have scraped all round. Down the well I have gone with a ladder, and in the wlel there is nothing to deduct. In the common places I have not looked at all, for my uncle was a graduate of Arts, a man of great mind, and it should never happen that he could have concealed anything in a mattress, or a hearthstone, or up a 73 chimney. It may be that my mind is not great, or not enough great, for I cannot solve this problem. With all the deduction I have made, there is no result." " Well ? " said Cristina. She was sitting on the corner of the massive table, dangling one narrow-toed foot, and playing with the ribbons of her dress. There was something about her, all the same, that suggested she was not inattentive. There was a certain tenseness. ... I find it hard to describe. Most people are somewhat limp, men- tally and physically. Cristina never was. In moments of excitement, one could almost see her nerves tighten up like violin strings. All the same, she spoke carelessly : " Well, Richilda, I'm sure you have done your best, and none of us can do more. Now you'll recite for us, to reward us for coming up all that long hill, won't you ? " But of the recitation I need say nothing. Who does not know Richilda ? It was very hot when we went down the hill, through solitary dark woods to the town that lay asleep all day and all night beside the glassy Malaysian sea. Cristina, in her airy, dainty dress, flitted from gloom to gloom among the enormous trees like some butterfly that had acquired the form of a human being, while keeping all the butterfly nature. She seemed to have dis- missed the problem of the day altogether from her mind ; nothing less serious, less intellectual than 74 KRIS-GIRL she, decking herself with the ivory flowers of the nutmegs, and making " fairy wands " of peeled saplings with a star-shaped bloom set on top. Miss Van den Hofdyk trod slowly and seriously, laden with thought. Mrs. Ash walked with mo (she seemed to have taken an odd fancy to me of late, varied by little flashes of resentment that I could not quite understand) and broke silence as much as two or three times on the journey back to town. I do not know that I listened to her as closely as politeness demanded, but I gathered that she was telling me how to force hyacinths in a frosty winter. It was extremely hot ; my collar was a rag before we got in, and my coat clung to my shoulders, limp and soaked. When we arrived at the hotel, Mrs. Ash, putting her drenched handkerchief into her pocket as of no further use, stopped a moment at the door to explain that snow was good for certain hardy perennials, but you mustn't mistake your kinds. Then she went in. After dinner, when the stars had begun to glow like little moons upon the water-floor of the old volcano, and the Goonong Api was sending up a pillar of vermilion light, I wandered out into the town. There is some little business in the place, and your Colonial Dutchman does not hold the after-dinner hour sacred to friendship. I wanted to see and talk to a certain trader whom I had been hearing about. He owned a good many small islands farther north, and concerning this ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 75 matter of the corner in gum damar. k . . But I forget again. You must not be told about the new tax, and what it was going to do. . . . Well, I went out, with an excellent Sumatra cigar for company, and walked down the sea-road. And by-and-by I met a Malay woman, tripping along in those inevitably Malay heelless slippers flip-flop, flip-flop. It was dusk, but I could see that she had a good figure, and held herself very well, with a certain pride of carriage not common among women of savage races. She had on the usual folded table-cloth of a skirt that they call a sarong, and the usual white combing- jacket about the ugliest native dress there is. Her hair was hidden under an Indian sari, pulled half over her shoulders ; by this, I 'judged her to be of mixed race. She slip-slopped past me in the semi-dark, and I never should have thought of noticing her, only that . . . I don't know the name of the perfume ; Cristina doesn't use it nowadays. She did then, however ; it was very dainty and delicate, not so much a perfume as a suggestion that somebody, somewhere, had been picking small golden roses, the hardly- sweet-at-all kind. ... I stepped aside and blocked the figure's way. " Miss Raye," I asked, " what mad freak is this ? " She answered in Malay. " You needn't trouble, I know you," I said. " Where are you going, and where in the name of chaperonship is your Mrs. Ash ? " 76 KRIS-GIRL At this ehe gave in, with a merry chuckle that no Malay could possibly have given forth. " I'm going to the native kampong," she said. " Mrs. Ash, bless her dear heart, is off to the Lutheran Church (I suppose you forgot it was Sunday) and thinks I'm asleep on the verandah." I threw away the cigar. "I'm going with you," I said. "You must remember I'm not quite a new-chum here now, and I don't consider " " Oh, but you can't come," she said. " I must pass for a Malay, or I shall hear nothing. . . . And there's no danger, really. And if there was " She drew aside the folds of her sarong. In the starlight, I could just make out the crooked handle of a kris. " Well, Kris-Girl," I said. " You may say what you like, but I shall stay outside any house you go into." Cristina looked at me, and saw (I think) that there was no moving me from my purpose. She accepted the situation. " Walk a good way behind," she said ; and we went on. It was some way to the cluster of Malay houses whither we were bound. Cristina walked on before me in the starlight, swiftly, but with the dragging shuffle inseparable from the heelless bath slipper that is worn by the coloured folk of Malaysia. I Admired her dexterity in managing the wretched ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 77 things ; for myself, it was as much as I could do to get to the hotel bathroom from .my own room, without losing a slipper on the way, or (more likely still) kicking it into the face of the first person who happened to be passing. The Chinese slipper of Malaysia is one of the most dangerous and unmanageable of projectiles. I have seen an innocent British female tourist, of discreet age and conduct, kick her bath slipper down an alleyway as smartly as if she had been a Rugby forward, landing it unerringly upon the bald head of an Excellency who was going in to breakfast. I have seen a shy clergyman, on the Sydney-Singapore boat, hit a golden-haired variety actress in the back, and instantly flee to the shelter of his cabin, leaving the astonished actress, who had not seen her assailant, alone with a mystery and a slipper the size of a small bucket. You are bound to come to that slipper sooner or later, travelling in Malaysia it is so universal and so cheap and cool but you will never, never, unless you are as agile as a professional acrobat, learn to walk in it without slip-slopping it off. Well ! I tramped behind Cristina, a little doggedly, disapproving of her errand, whatever it might be, yet determined to see her through it. What I thought about during that night walk under the huge canary trees, with the warm wind blowing off the Banda Sea, and flaring my cigarette all to one side, doesn't matter. Perhaps I was musing on the unsuitability of 78 KRIS-GIRL too much freedom for solitary young gentlewomen of four-and-twenty or thereabouts, and considering the advantages, for such young gentlewomen, of having a sensible business head in the immediate neighbourhood, as a permanent thing. Perhaps I was wondering if the man who had died a horrible death two years before, had been careful of dainty Cristina, and stood between her and the rough things of the world ; if she missed that care, and had grown a little reckless in conse- quence. . . . We went on in silence. When we came to the clump of native houses, showing faint light through their semi-transparent walls, Cristina held up her hand, without looking round, as a warning to me, and disappeared in the shadows. I followed her, and saw where she went in. She ran up the crazy ladder leading to the doorway as lightly as a bird, for all her shuffling native footgear. I heard her say something in Malay, and then I drew back, and peeped through the outer wall. I knew she did not want me, but none the less I was resolved to stay about. In the brown Malay house, set on low piles, and built of bamboo, there was only one rude kerosene lamp, placed on the floor. Still, a man standing outside in the dark could see all he wanted through the chinks. Cristina was sitting among a number of Malays, men and women, helping herself to hot rice with her hands (it struck me that the quality of her ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 79 brown paint must be good). She picked bits of fish from a pile on a banana leaf, and added them to the mass, cramming the whole into her mouth with three fingers. It seemed to be a house where there was plenty for all comers ; quite a score were scattered on the floor, munching crabs' legs, curry, and pieces of the inner parts of fowls. I judged them to be the coolies ; engaged by day in unload- ing steamers or carrying goods. The women were apparently their wives. Cristina was not talking much, but she seemed to be leading a certain ancien^dame, in a silk jacket and sarong, to converse as much as possible. That was a good deal. The old lady, warmed with food and with something out of a coarse German tumbler, seemed to be relating a long story, with much gesticulation. Cristina, keeping in the dusk, and throwing in an occasional remark in Malay, listened. I am bound to say that the porters and their wives paid her very little atten- tion. Her disguise was good, and she was not beautiful according to the native standard, else it, and she, might have been scrutinised too closely for safety. The old woman chattered on, moving her head about excitedly, and eating as fast as she talked. I was picking up Malay by this time the pigeon- Malay which passes current all over the Farthest East, is one of the easiest languages in the world and I could guess at something of what was being said, but it did not seem to be particularly 80 KRIS-GIRL exciting. A certain " Tuan Hendrik " came into the talk ; they seemed so far as I could guess to be discussing his love-affairs. I wondered who he might be. Cristina seemed interested in his history ; she was clearly egging on the old lady, by means of certain glasses of comforting " sago- weer," to talk as much as possible. I thought but I could not be sure that the story seemed a trifle scandalous. If so, the Kris-Girl took it coolly ; she merely nodded, and held up her small, stained brown hands, with an expressive cluck or two, purely native in tone. " They may talk about this Miss Richilda as an actress," I said to myself, " but Cristina Raye could beat her hollow at that, if she cared." And then I felt indignant at the idea. I sup- pose the man does not live, the common, mascu- line man, who is gratified by the thought, especi- ally the sudden thought, of seeing his dear ones on the stage. Even in the case of dear ones who are not his, and never may be, the truth still holds. Anything of the mountebank business, from leading lady at a great theatre down to a speech in the. village hall, is repugnant to man where his women are concerned. I do not ven- ture to say whether this is right and natural, or merely an outbreak of the Grand Turk that exists, suppressed, in most of us. But I do know that I hated to see Cristina masquerading as a native, and that I was rapidly growing to hate this whole detective business of hers, from end to ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 81 end. Perhaps I understood why she clung to it what troubles it beat away from her mind and perhaps I liked the cause even less than the effect produced. Banda had seemed to me a much nicer place than the Minahassa, but, somehow or other, that night I began to think that it might be rather a detestable spot too. . . . In half an hour or so, Cristina rose to her feet, placed a half-eaten piece of fish politely back in the common stock, and nodded good-bye, explain- ing (as she afterwards told me) that she heard her mistress's voice somewhere outside, and wanted to get off and hide before " Mevrouw " caught her away from her work. She joined me some distance away from the bamboo house, and walked with me by unfre- quented paths back to the hotel. " Come to afternoon coffee to-morrow, and you shall see what you shall see," she whispered, as she left me. You cannot, generally speaking, have a private sitting-room in a Malaysian hotel, because no one stays indoors except when in bed. But the great stone verandahs take the place of sitting-rooms well enough, especially when the hotel is all but empty. Most of these strangely palatial hotels are empty, or nearly so, the greater part of the time. I used to wonder if the proprietors kept them open simply because they had fallen into the habit of doing it, and couldn't stop. . . . 6 82 KRIS-GIRL In an undisturbed corner of the verandah, then, we met about four o'clock Cristina, Mrs. Ash and I. The native servants, to a loud accom- paniment of Jonges ! (" Boy ! ") were bringing round coffee to the various rooms. Fat Dutch- men loomed in distant perspective, pink-pyjama'd, bare feet up on " planter " chairs. But no one was within ear-shot. By the time the boys had got round to our corner with coffee, Miss Van den Hofdyk had appeared, walking slowly down the white-hot road. Behind her came slip-slopping a little old Malay woman, withered up like a walnut. They joined us on the verandah, and then Cristina, without pause for anything more in the way of greeting than a quickly offered cup of coffee, dashed into her subject. There was nothing frivolous or elusive about the Kris-Girl this after- noon. Sharp, hard and keen as her namesake blade, she cut across Richilda Van den Hofdyk's leisurely politeness with : " Does she understand English ? " " Neither English nor Dutch," said Richilda, looking at the small old woman, who was standing in an attitude of subjection close beside her. " And yet they say in the kampong she was married to your uncle ! " Richilda at this fairly " sat up." "They say the untrue," she declared, her voice shaking with annoyance. " Not a truth in it. My Uncle Hendrik had her for cook in many years. ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 83 She was the very good cook. She was pretty iu those days. A man is not an angel. And this old woman, if there was some Malay ceremony, it was for her quite good enough. But married, we don't call it." " Still, she was married according to some Malay idea, and he was fond of her." " Oh, fond ! that I shall g^ve you," rejoined Miss Van den Hofdyk calmly. " How shall it matter ? She has forgot him many years ago, and she makes a little cook for my mother and me, and we give her eat and sleep." " Now, Richilda," said the Kris-Girl, " I want to tell you, if you understand me, that you've been barking up the wrong tree, as Americans say, all this time. I do think there is something in the idea of your uncle's secret, but the way you've been trying to find it out is just detective story stuff. And you must remember we aren't in a detective story, you and I ; we're here in Banda, in the real world. And things in the real world aren't planned out like funny puzzles that work when you get the right key-piece. They're much more ragged. And full of loose ends. You must simplify. If I were asked for a motto, to be used in this sort of work, I should say, ' Select the rele- vant.' That covers nearly everything. And when you've selected the relevant, cut away every- thing else." She made a downward sweeping motion with her small hand. 84 KRIS-GIRL " Cut away," she repeated. " Now, let me ask this old creature some questions." She turned to the old woman, and spoke in Malay. I will translate, as it was translated to me after : " Do you remember Tuan Hendrik ? " " I remember," came dully from the dried-up old face. " Was it true that Tuan Hendrik was a black sorcerer 1 " The old face became suddenly moved. " No, no never ! The Tuan was a good man, and he was very good to me." " Then what " Cristina fixed the woman with her sharp blue eyes, and held up a little pointed finger "what used he to do, when he shut him- self up in that room, and forbid you to come in ? " " Why, how do you " began Richilda ; but Cristina silenced her. "Hush! Idon't. lamtryingtogetit. Bequiet!" The old woman had been endeavouring to speak, and now the words came out in a rush : " I do not know, and it does not matter. Why should the Tuan not do so if he liked ? " It was strange to see how her aged face was reviving, under the influence of a feeling that must have lain dead or forgotten for thirty years. Already one could understand that this dusty wrinkled hag might have been lovely once might have been loved herself, and loved the strength and fairness of the big blond Dutchman. ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 85 " But in that room ! " Cristina watched the dark, lined face. " Why should a Tuan not come and cook, or drink, or sleep, in his own kitchen, if he wished ! I tell you, there was no sorcery. He was a good man, and he was good to me. . . ." She put both hands over her eyes, withdrew them, and looked at them, as if wondering to find no tears - on their wrinkled surface. " It is all so long ago," she said, and, none keeping her, got up, and slip-slopped away off the verandah. " Let her go," said Cristina. " That is enough/' " Now," she went on, turning to Richilda, " you can go up to the House of the Golden Nut- meg, look under the hearth-stone of the kitchen, and tell me what you find there." Mrs. Ash put down the Home Gardener, which she seemed to have been reading all through the visit, clapped her hands emphatically, and said : " Bravo ! " She then immersed herself once more in the Directions for Budding Alpine Rosea. " I do not comprehend," said Miss Van den Hofdyk. " In what way have you deduct ? " "I'll tell you nothing now!" said Cristina. " When you've been to the house " Richilda was buttoning her gloves. "I have time to go now," she said. "It will not be dark for two hours." " Take Mr. Garden and a crow-bar with you," said Cristina. " I'm going to my room to sleep, 86 KRIS-GIRL and not a soul is to dare to come near me till dinner-time." " Dinner is half-past eight. I'll see to it," observed Mrs. Ash, disappearing after her charge. Richilda was already away down the road, tramping hard, through heat that I cannot hope to describe. With something of a sigh, I went to look for the crowbar, and followed her. I did not catch her up till she was nearly at the House of the Golden Nutmeg. By this time, it was getting cooler, and the shadow of the woods was grateful. " What do you expect to find ? " I said, rang- ing alongside as she stooped to lever up the door. " Let me, please ? " " Thank you. I do not know. Perhaps the secret of a bank deposit that we know not of. Perhaps hundred-guilder notes. Perhaps Oh, I'm impatient to know. Come, come ! " The kitchen (we had seen it on the day before, among other rooms) was a massive stone building, standing a little apart from the rest of the house. It was empty, save for an old oak dresser that would have brought its weight in silver, anywhere on the Continent of Europe. The late sun slanted through the broken shutters, and made spots of irregular light on the floor, which, like all the other floors in the house, was made of small neat tiles, prettily and elaborately set. I saw at once why Cristina had come to that conclusion about the hearth-stone. It was the ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 87 only thing that could have been lifted without leaving traces. And it had been lifted often. Although thirty years had passed since the last raising of the stone, it came away easily enough ; the cement was a mere blind, set in a bevel about the edges. Underneath was a hole in the ground, and nine small leather bags, full, also, I do not know how many, empty. "Money!" screamed Richilda, upon her top note. " Money, Europe, Paris, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw ah, ah ! give me your knife quick ! " She was down on her knees on the dirty floor, tearing at the bags. " Money ! ah, ah ! " she screamed. I thought her rather premature ; I also thought her prettier than I previously judged. She had such a colour in her cheeks such a scarlet in her greedy lip Well, if premature, she was right. When the bags were slashed, out came gold; good sterling sovereigns, English every one. They were all dated in the first half of the nineteenth century ; none later than 1850. They ran out like water ; they fell in heaps. They rang with the sound that only gold in heaps can give. Did I tell you that I had once been employed in a bank ? I can judge the look of a lot of coin better than most. This heap I guessed at about nineteen hundred, and I was very nearly right, as we proved after- wards. 88 KRIS-GIRL When I turned my attention from the gold to the girl, I was astonished to find Richilda, who had been looking at the dates, squatted back on her heels, regarding the heap of coin with horror. " Uncle Hendrik, Uncle Hendrik ! " she was saying, and then something in Dutch. " What's the matter ? " I asked. " The matter it is that I am the niece of a pirate ! " said Richilda, in low tones of dismay. " And I do not like it. It is a a disgusting ancestry." " Pirate ! " I said. ' ' ' Yes. In the early time of your Queen Victoria, there was an English ship came by the Spice Islands here. And she stopped at Banda, for water. And it was said she had very much gold on board, for the buying of merchandise. In the harbour under the Goonong Api, she sank, and it was very deep, and no one knew why she shall have thus sunk in the night. But some persons were saying that the natives it had done, and that was what we were believing. But all those English, they was drowned. And my Uncle Hendrik, he went away the same night with his own ship, and not for a long time came back ; my mother she tells that. And six of his serfs of the plantation, they was dead. . . . Heer Garden, it is a clear thing for me. He did that crime, and the money he never dared to show, so all the time when he was so rich, they would say it was the golden nutmeg that on his plantation grew, and ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 89 none of them knew the true. I am a pirate's niece." " Oh, well, it's none of your funeral, Miss Van den Hofdyk," I said. " You've got what will take you to Europe ; don't you worry about what your Uncle Hendrik did. As for Miss Raye, I think she's wonderful to have found it all out." "She is my only friend," said Richilda, incon- sistently. By this time she was looking some- what more lovingly at the gold. She gathered it up in the front of her dress, rose with my help, and stood holding the coin, a heavy load, to her breast. " It shall be consecrated to art, for to em- purify it," she said, solemnly. " It shall purchase my freedom, and that, too, shall whiten it. I want to be free. I have told my mother this, again and again ; she has again and again refused me. On one day, I spoke to her the words of Hilda Wangel " " Ibsen's ? " " Yes. I spoke them like flame ! And she was a stone. My freedom she would not give, .even for that." " I really don't see how you could have expected her to," I said. Indeed, it seemed to me a crazy thing, to suppose that anyone would be won over from a firmly conceived determination, by a few minutes' reciting. " Nee ? " said Richilda, using the strong Dutch negative. " Don't you ? " Then she did a 90 KRIS-GIRL strange thing. She laid down the gold, took a step forward into the middle of the room, and gave forth Hilda Wangel's speech to her husband. " Wangel, let me tell you this ! you can indeed keep me here ! You have the means and the power to do it. And you intend to do it. But my mind all my thoughts, all the longings and desires of my soul these you cannot bind ! These will rush and press out into the unknown that I was created for, and that you have kept from me." Well ! Most of you who read this have heard Richilda in the celebrated revival of The Sea-Lady, and you will know how she spoke. Those who have not heard her can perhaps guess, by her effect on Europe, what effect she had on me there, in the strange dead room of that dead house, on an island at the earth's far ends Richilda the tragedienne of the twentieth century, pleading for her freedom. . . . No, after that, with all my prejudice against the stage, I would never have lifted a finger to keep her in Malaysia, had any power lain with me. I only wondered that her mother had not, after all, been influenced by the speech, given as it was. I wonder more now. Richilda has talked many a man's and woman's soul half out of its body, since those days. A silence followed. Richilda stood with her arms hanging down by her sides, and her eyes looking out through the window. There was not much to be seen from that window a space of stone verandah, a springing insurgence of leaves ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 91 and lianas and spraying orchid blossoms, all run wild together in the deserted garden where Tuan Hendrik had been used, no doubt, to stroll and tend his flowers, in the days when Victoria was young. You could scarce even see the sky, save for a thread of blue above the smothering forest that walled the garden in, and threatened, soon, to blot it out altogether, as the resistless forests of Malaysia do blot out the work of man, if he leaves it unguarded for a few brief years. Yet Richilda looked as if she saw much, and far : and I, the bystander, knew that her spirit was " pressing out into the unknown that it was created for." And in her arms, forgotten, yet held close, was the gold of dead Tuan Hendrik, the " Golden Nutmeg " that had so long been sought in vain. Dark comes swiftly, in Banda Neira of the Spice Islands. I had to wake up the " Sea Lady," and remind her that it was a long way down to the town, and that Mevrouw Van den Hofdyk would probably send out the boys to hunt for her, if she did not make haste back. So we hurried down the narrow, darkening track a good deal more quickly than we had ascended, I carrying the gold, and Richilda " pressing out into the unknown," at such a rate that I had all I could do, laden as I was, to keep up with her. Richilda wanted to take the gold home with her, but I vetoed that promptly. I did not wish to hear of a native murder next morning. Then 92 KRIS-GIRL she asked me to take charge of it, an honour that I thought best to decline. Instead, we used the last gleam of daylight to hunt up the local banker, and get him to put the coin in safety. I don't know what he thought ; I fancy he shut up the human side of his mind as tight as possible, and opened the banker side as widely as it could be opened. It is not every day that a bank, in the Spice Islands, gets a deposit of nineteen hundred solid English sovereigns. I will wager that Heer De Haan treated himself to an extra bottle of wine on the strength of it. Anyhow, when I saw him in the hotel, after the tardy nine o'clock dinner, that tried my British stomach so sorely, he was seated in a long chair with a big Sumatra cigar, looking as sleek and sleepy and happy as a sea-cow in a sandy bay. Next morning Miss Van den Hofdyk came to see the Kris-Girl, and to thank her. Nothing but Cristina's innate fine courtesy, I know, prevented her from clearing away into the nutmeg forests, to escape the ordeal ; this part of her feats was always detestable to her. She succeeded in keeping Richilda from any very violent demonstra- tions of affection, and as for gifts such as the Rubber Queen and others had pressed upon her (gifts that she always handed over to Mrs. Ash, when she could not possibly escape them) Richilda Van den Hofdyk had quite enough good Dutch thrift about her to keep her from any danger of committing such extravagance. ABOUT A GOLDEN NUTMEG 93 She was anxious to know how the miracle had been worked. " Tell me, you wonder-girl," she said, " how did you think these things ? Is there some sense you have that no other " " Nonsense," said Cristina, crisply. " Here it is in a nutshell a nutmeg shell, if you like. Of course, I saw all that stuff about deducting and following out wasn't going to bring you anywhere, so I just went down to the kampong and found out what woman your Uncle Hendrik was in love with, in those days. When I heard it was a Malay, of course I knew he wouldn't tell her where anything was. But all the same, she must have been about the house enough to know when he went to look for the stuff, if he had any hidden away. So I fished. And I had a bite. And then one only had to reel in the line. That's all." " It" is magic," said Richilda, sentimentally, holding the Kris-Girl's hand. " It's something a lot more uncommon, and that's common sense," said Cristina. Richilda left at last, declaring her intention of breaking the news to her mother that day, and buying a steamer ticket on the morrow. " What can I do for you ? " she asked Cristina, with perhaps a little too much grace. " Send me a ticket for your first big night," said Cristina. " I will send you fifty ! " promised Richilda, liberally. 94 KRIS-GIHL But I happen to know that when Cristina met her two years later, coming out of the Duchess Theatre in Piccadilly, she had lost all recollection of the " Kris-Girl." There is nothing people hate more than the remembrance of having been helped out of a difficulty. CHAPTER III THE GHOST OF MACASSAR Is there anything in all the world so weary as a Dutch -Indian hotel ? The " Daendels," of Macassar, was buried in its afternoon sleep. A baking wind blew down its dry stone corridors ; the blinds in the cloistered archwaj^s clicked and swung. Through the slats of the blinds the glare of the central courtyard sifted in. It was a Sahara of a courtyard, wide and dry, and coloured like the cheap blue and yellow Bible pictures of one's youth ; and it had a Biblical sort of stone-curb well in the middle, which wanted nothing but a Rebecca and a camel or two to be complete. Behind Venetian shutter doors, or stretched on long-armed planter chairs, the guests of the " Daendels " slept. The German manager, in his Pornpeian-bath bedroom, slept. The native clerk, in his official tank ; the native " boys," under the arch of the great stone stair- case, lay coiled and piled and sleeping. The locust that ought to be called the brain- fever locust, whether it is or not. had started, as 96 96 KRIS-GIRL usual, to celebrate the hottest hour with a con- tinuous, shrieking zizz-zizz, somewhere among the trees out at the back. It had all the sounds to itself ; otherwise, the " Daendels," at this dead hour of three, was still as the Sleeping Beauty's palace. I wandered down the interminable stone galleries alone of all these black and white human beings awake, alone wearing the dress of daylight hours. The restless English blood, no more resembling Dutch blood in its flow, than the swift far-running rivers of England resemble Holland's dank canals, kept me on my feet and moving, in the midst of a world of dreams. But, for all occupation I could find, I might as well have been dreaming with the rest. There was no business to be done outside at this hour ; no one inside or outside to talk with ; nothing anywhere to read but Dutch papers full of -ik's and -je's. The stodginess, the wearif ulness, the barrenness, were a British Sunday afternoon raised to the nth power . . . and it happened every day ! There is a breaking point for every strain. I snatched my sun-helmet, and fled into the Hooge Pad. Well ! it was better ! Down the great white road, beneath the immense kanaris, rolled a flood of traffic jangling karettas drawn by rat-like horses, and conveying jolly-looking half-castes in clean muslins ; bicycles ridden by natives and " breeds " of all sorts ; buffaloes in carts ; strings THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 97 of blue-clad Chinese loaded with fruit, and wearing the identical umbrella hat that we all remember in the picture books ; Malays and Indians selling hot fritters, selling curry, custard apples, ice- water, pink poison in dirty blue glasses, fowls, slippers, gold embroidery, dried fish. A motor-car buzzed past, carrying more than a full load of Celebese princesses in sarongs of gorgeous silks ; a party of Chinese women in blue coats and black satin trousers drove by. One white man, distinguished by a fine grey beard, an aristocratic countenance, and a suit of green cotton pyjamas, went down the road on a tricycle I had not thought there was a tricycle left in the world. For the rest, the Hooge Pad hummed and clattered and smoked with native and coloured traffic only. I tramped along in the hot wind and the shade that was not shady, smoking for the sake of some- thing to do, watching the traffic, and going nowhere that I knew of. I felt as usual, save for a little melancholy that had hung about me since my ship put out from Banda Neira, a week or two before. I looked as usual at least, no one had suggested, by word or by demeanour, that there was anything peculiar about my appearance. I slept, ate, read, did business as usual. And yet I was going mad. This time yesterday I had been sane. To-day I was crazy. I could not believe it, and yet proof had been forced upon me. In the early morning, walking towards the 7 98 KRIS-GIRL harbour for exercise, I had strayed on to the long wooden quays that are the pleasantest walking- ground when space permits in the town. The breeze comes up very fresh from the sea there ; the ships lie at anchor and alongside, full of quaint sights and strange peoples ; there are (an impor- tant point) fewer, much fewer smells than in the crowded town itself. I was swinging along the quay, watching the big Duymaer Van Rumphius sling out her gangways, listening carelessly to the songs of the native sailors as they lowered away, and thinking if I was thinking of anything about Banda Neira and the wicked cone of the Goonong Api against a sunset sky when I saw, coming down the jetty within a few yards of ine " Mabel ! Now Mabel was in her grave since ninety-three. She had had an attack of bronchial influenza that left her out of health ; a relative, going to take up an official post in Singapore, had insisted she should winter there with himself and his wife. Mabel had gone, amiably, though unwillingly she was one of that race of gentle and yielding girls, now extinct as the dodo, who always did whatever any male creature, armed with ever so little family or friendly authority, told them to do. She was to be away for the winter, and we were to be married on her return. She never returned. The visit lengthened into spring, into summer, into autumn. Then came a cable. She was dead. THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 99 I wrote, a short, wretched letter blotted with boyish tears. It crossed one from the relatives, short and wretched also, tear-stained also. Mabel had died of cholera. She was buried in the local cemetery. They sent me a photograph of the grave, with the name and date on it. I had loved her very dearly ; her death, for the time being, broke my life in two. One recovers from any sorrow in time ; I recovered from mine. But it left me changed : a sober, grave young man of business, attending strictly to work, little interested in anything outside. ... I will not say that there were no women in my life ; but, in the common phrase, none of them " mattered." Till I took the long journey that was to lay the foundation of a new Eastern trade for our house, no woman, or girl, had given me an unhappy hour. I had loved Mabel, as I say, very dearly ; in- deed, after a fashion, I loved her yet. I was glad of it. It seemed likely to save me from the humiliation^ that waits on affection unreturned. Deep-rooted in my heart was the conviction that no girl in the world, no matter how fascinating she might seem, could ever in reality be so sweet, so pure, so lovable and loving as my dead Mabel. Even when I found myself obliged to get away from Banda, and return to affairs of business in Macassar as fast as the steamers would take me even then I found that my sleep had grown restless, that I could not settle to reading, and that meals were always too soon and too long for 100 KRIS-GIRL me I put it down largely to the climate. There was no use in putting it down to anything else. And, with the fair, distant shadow of Mabel as my guardian, I knew without arguing the matter out in words, that I should be able to keep it at that climate. I cannot hope to explain what I felt when I saw SAW Mabel, her very own self, walking down the Macassar quays. At first I thought I had got a touch of sun ; but then, I told myself, I should be feeling the other symptoms sickness, faintness, headache. I didn't feel any of them. I was only conscious of being stunned by this sudden uprising of the utterly impossible. " Good God ! " I said to myself, and then " I must be mad." I stared at the slender figure in white, as I suppose a man must stare at a ghost. From the deck of the steamer, I watched the figure advance along the quays . It walked steadily, looking neither to right nor left. The face Mabel's face, pouted mouth, pointed chin, large, very brilliant brown eyes was slightly drooped. That was a habit of hers heavens, how well I remembered it ! The figure walked with a slight swing from the hips Mabel's walk. She came on, without pausing, passed the boat, and " My God, she'll be gone ! " I thought, and made a wild dash to the gangway. It was raised ! I don't know what operation of ship business 101 had required the raising at that moment the ship was not due to sail till next day but I knew better than to remonstrate with Dutch steamship officers about anything concerning their work. One might quite as profitably remonstrate with a cargo winch in full swing. I fled aft to the second- class, found another gangway, took it in three jumps, and started in pursuit of the slim white figure that I could see some distance up the quays. I caught it in a minute or two and it was another woman ! Mabel had vanished as utterly as if the grave that had given her forth had yawned in the middle of the jetty and swallowed her up again. I remember that I put down my helmet very tight on my head before I started back to the town. " This comes of walking about at three in the afternoon," I thought ; and then " Non- sense the jetty is full of white people." I felt as a man feels when he has had just two glasses of whisky too much. Things seemed unreal. People passed me like flat shadows ; I could not feel that they had backs or other sides. The traffic in the main roadway seemed to flow past me as a river flows past a stone ; I was not part of it, or of earth. I have not the least recollec- tion of hailing a pony karetta, but I was in one presently, and bouncing along through the tangle of buffaloes, water-sellers, giant-hatted Chinese, half-castes slip-slopping along the pavement. The driver put me down at the " Daendels," and 102 KRIS-GIRL I went straight to the big marble staircase, and waked up the mandoer (hall-porter) with my foot. He awoke reluctantly, and stared at me with sullen eyes, which brightened instantly at the sight of a florin in my hand. " Who is the best doctor in Macassar ? " I asked him. " Titan, best doctor the Tuan Merkus. He will sleep this time, Tuan." " What's his address ? " I asked. The Malay gave it, staring. Malays are in- veterate gossips ; I knew, inevitably, that the occurrence would furnish talk for all the servants of that end of Macassar, in the grand exchange of chatter that goes on every night. Doubtless the boys of the Tuan Merkus would have their word too. It could not be helped. I was not going to go about with this thing on my mind a mo- ment longer than could be helped. The waiting karetta galloped me away to the other side of the town among numberless small stone villas, each with its pillared stoep, its stone vases of ferns and flowers set out in the stone courtyard, its stone or tile paved hall visible through wide glass doors ajar . . . There seems something about the use of stone and tile that is inevitably bound up with the Dutch character. No Dutchman still more surely, no Dutchwoman can live happily in a house that cannot be hosed ("own every day like a stable or a gaol. Heer Merkus, used, no doubt, to invasions of THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 103 the sacred siesta hour that would be tolerated by no other Dutchman came out of the inner room, yawning, and in pyjamas. He was, like almost all Colonial Dutch, very tall, very massive, fair, and calm. He dropped into a rocking chair, pointed to one for myself, and asked, sleepily, ' ' Some emergency case ? Perhaps my lady, your wife " " I want to consult you on my own account," I said. " Yes ? " Heer Doktor Merkus directed a calm, scrutinis- ing gaze upon my face. He had looked more or less through me before ; he looked at me now. People who disturb other people in siesta time, about the Dutch Malayan colonies, are supposed not to do so for a trifle. " You look to be healthy," he stated. There was no reproach in the remark ; Heer Merkus merely suspended his opinion. " Do you see anything abnormal about me ? " I questioned. " Look well. " The calm, bluish eyes fixed me as if they never meant to detach themselves again. "No," came the answer. " You have not drunk. You are not unsleeping. You can eat. You do not suffer pain. Your pulse " He took my hand. "There has been recently some disturbance of the nerves. You have been frighted, is it not true ? " 104 KRIS-GIRL " I have," I said. " That's why I am here. I want to know if you think I'm going mad." Over the broad, pink countenance of Heer Doktor Merkus dawned a certain brightness. Mental cases are sometimes paying, always interesting. To a general practitioner immersed in a monotonous round of babies, fevers, chronic dyspepsias, and minor accidents, a mental case comes as a breath of fresh wind. " What are the symptoms ? " he asked, almost briskly. " There's only one," I said. " I've just seen a dead person on the K.P.M. jetty." " Yes ? The dead person looked how ? " " Quite alive." " Man or woman ? " "Woman. The girl I was going to marry fifteen years ago ; she died." " Yes ? She had any extraordinary circum- stances attending her ? " " How do you mean ? " " She had any dog, pig, snake, something by that kind ? " " No. I don't drink, Heer Doktor." " You do not look it, but it is hard always to be sure. She had any bright light, any cloud ? " " No. Nothing fancy of any kind. She was just walking along the jetty like you or me." " The other people, they noticed her ? " " I I can't say they did." " No. You have heard her speak ? " THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 105 " She didn't speak," I said, and then pulled myself up. It was only at this moment that I recollected hearing her call "Jack ! Jack ! " to some invisible dog that had evidently strayed away. It was a funny thing to have imagined. " Please to be very careful. This is impor- tant." " I think she did say something just ' Jack,' ' I told him. "Yes." Heer Doktor Merkus deliberately picked up my card from the marble table at his side, and studied it. " J. E. Garden. The J. stands for which ? " " John." " Or other words, Jack ? " " Yes, but I think she was calling a dog." " You have told me that she was not by any dog attended." " Neither was she." " Yes." Merkus detached his gaze from my face, considerately. "I mean," I explained carefully, "that I saw no dog with her." " Yes. I understand." Merkus was so con- siderate that I could have smacked his head. " Is this the first time you have seen visions, heard voices ? " Put in that way, it sounded appalling. I felt myself grow white as I answered " Certainly it is. Do you think badly of it, doctor ? " 106 KRIS-GIRL " I do not think yet. I will now ask you some question." A catechism followed, embracing my family history, personal constitution, and ordinary and extraordinary habits, down to the smallest detail. Through it all something that was in the catechism, but not of it, flowed secretly and silently. The Heer Doktor was trying something ; I could not tell what. I grew tired out at last. I was suffering a severe strain, and the shock of seeing Mabel had left its traces. At the four hundredth minute question, I snapped. " That's enough," I said. " I won't be badgered any more. You've got plenty to go on." Then I apologised, realising that I had been rude. The apology was received with a bow and a smile. Heer Doktor Merkus seemed rather pleased about something. I realised, with a shock, that I had been put through something corres- ponding to the American " Third Degree," and had given the expected reaction. " What am I to do 1 " I said. " What do you think about it ? " Merkus was busj* with the neatest of little tablets and pencils. " You will have this prescription made," he answered. "You shall not smoke much, and drinking you must avoid. You are not sleeping well ? " " Not very," I said. " But that was before it has been some time " THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 107 " Yes. This other prescription you will take for night. You will not be excited of ai^thing.- You will have quiet, agreeable society." I saw what he was coming at. " The society of relation is always the most agreeable." I did not answer. " Your relation are not in this India ? " " They are all at home." " Yes. You are making a long stay here ? " " You don't think I'm fit for an asylum, do you ? " I asked bluntly. ' ' Xee ! Nee ! Mr. Garden, you must not take up me so. I wish only to say that the heats of Celebes are not good for nerve disorder ; rather they produce them. You have without doubt heard of the ' run-amuck ' that is common among the natives of Malaysia, but above all it is common here in Celebes. Celebes is not healthy. It has disturbed your nerve. I prescribe these medicines not only, but a change, so soon as Yes, this side door goes into the main avenue ; you will better take it. Thank you You have your Tcaretta to wait ? the sun is yet Good-day." " So that's the verdict," I said to myself, as 1 drove along through the glancing shade and sun of the great canary trees, down the dead-asleep avenues of the residential quarter. " So that's what he thinks." A Macassar horse, harnessed to a small gover- ness-cart full of native ladies dressed in splendid 108 KRIS-GIRL Dongola silks, went slap-bang down the road, fighting and boxing the ground as only a Macassar horse can. A string of Chinese who had appar- ently escaped from a willow-pattern plate padded silently by in the dust. Rattle, jingle, bounce, my karetta fled down the sun-spotted avenues. There was something restorative in the look of these now familiar sights. It seemed, after all, an agreeable, everyday sort of world, where un- heard-of things didn't really happen. " I'm damned if I am f " I said out loud. The Malay driver took no notice, beyond asking where he was to go next. I told him to leave me on the wharf. I was resolved to reconstruct the scene of my vision, and see whether it would be repeated. I walked up and down the wharf till I got tired ; I saw two boats come in, and one go out ; I waited till the sun set, and the genteel inhabitants of the town came forth in the brief butterfly splendour of their evening dress for the ceremonial drive. Then I went back to the " Daendels." The vision had not reappeared. "There's nothing really to worry about," I thought. " Nothing in the world. Probably Merkus is right, and the heat has upset me. Any- how, things like that happen quite often. The records of the Society of Psychological Research have got 'em by the hundred." I went to bed, and had a good night perhaps, because I had had several bad ones lately. Next morning, while I was tying my tie before a mirror THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 109 that was placed in the one spot where no light could reach it, according to the inflexible rule of hotels (why do they do it, will someone tell me ?) Merkus, quite suddenly, came into my head again. I saw the way he looked at me when I made the mistake about the dog. I saw the considerate expression, the soothing manner in which he received my explanation, the deft change of subject. ... I saw, I felt, the dead wall that stands, in talk, in discussion, in matters of truth and untruth, between the sane and the insane. I cannot express the horror with which it smote me. At breakfast time, I fancied that the guests were looking at me more than they had done. I thought the manager, from his distant table, was casting curious glances. . . . " But they think like that ! " I remembered. " They think that people are watching and per- secuting and spying." Then it occurred to me that I must not let Merkus know of these ideas. Then it occurred, again, that lunatics were secre- tive and cunning. Was I growing secretive and cunning ? The piece of prikkadel dropped from my fork. The manager was coming my way ! " He wants to know if I am comfortable," I thought, and helped myself to more prikkadel minced chicken, done up in a way that I have wished they knew in other countries. I do not know if the manager was born a 110 KRIS-GIRL Dutchman, a German, or even a Swiss or an Italian, nor does it matter. There is only one race among foreign hotel managers, and that is their own. They are all the same manager. Every- one knows their white waistcoats, their short legs, their high shiny foreheads, the hard un- blinking stare of their stony pale eyes, that look at you with a look that has had suspicion stamped and branded into it, through years of dealing with mixed humanity even while the ready tongue is uttering politenesses and offering service. The manager of the ' ' Daendels " was a manager and he looked at me like one. " You like your rooms ? " he began. I had been right after all. ... Of course, when a guest takes a suite, and pays handsomely, the management are specially interested in him. . . . I answered that I liked my rooms, and helped myself to an iced mangosteen. The manager remained, looking genial and sus- picious at the same time, and resting his pink knuckles (they always have pink knuckles) on the table. ''Shall you require it very long ? " he asked. " Because I have an Austrian, an Archduke com- ing in by the Waerwyck, and I should like to know beforehand whether it will be necessary for me to throw two suites into one in another part of the house. Yours is the best. If we should unhappily be losing you " You will not have to suffer that unhappi- THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 111 ness," I said, with the brief bow that ends an interview. The manager smiled with his mouth, his eyes keeping watch, and withdrew. Inwardly flaming, but outwardly calm, I finished my meal deliberately, and went into the reading-room, which is, in most Dutch hotels, a scoured and polished wilderness during at least twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four. " That damned doctor ! " was the matter of my musings, as I walked up and down, my boots clicking on the parquet. " Now I wonder what will be the next ? " I did not have to wonder long. In the course of the afternoon, I received an official-looking paper from the Lieutenant-Governor's office. His Excellency, it seemed, had withdrawn the per- mission without which no foreigner may remain over a day in the country. I was requested to remove by the next steamer no reasons given. I should be sorry, in cold blood, to write down just what I said of the Lieutenant Governor, and of Dutch-colonial government in general. Somehow, the fit of rage into which I had fallen, cleared my head, and I perceived that whatever I might have seen or not seen down on the wharf, whatever Merkus might have believed, said, or circulated, I was not mad. I clung to that as to a rock. Then, how could I account for long-dead Mabel out of her grave, and walking down a steamer wharf in the light of twentieth-century day ? 112 KRIS-GIRL I didn't account for it. I went to the post- office, sent a telegram to the steamer that I knew was lying at Banda, and asked Cristina to come to Macassar by that boat. I knew that she and Mrs. Ash intended returning sooner or later, so there was nothing very unreasonable about the request. I ended it with " Bring your kris." " That'll fetch her in two senses," I said to myself, signing the radio. Then I went back to the " Daendels." I had informed the manager who, of course, was entirely ignorant of the arrival of any Government message that I intended going on to Borneo by the boat that left at the end of the week, my next destination being the big oil town on the east coast. I knew that I should be allowed to go, as Borneo is under yet another Governor. They have them to shy sticks at, down in the Eastern Seas. A day or two later, the Van Outhoorn came in, and I was on the jetty to meet her. Cristina, in the most fascinating of her many pink dresses she had a love for pink waved to me from the gangway, and so strange to relate did Mrs. Ash. The manner of the salutation was charac- teristic of each, Cristina waved a handkerchief dainty and delicate as the wing of a white butter- fly. Mrs. Ash napped a large brown volume, which I afterwards discovered to be somebody's Journal of Arctic Research. One of the iceberg and Polar Bear pictures fell out of it, and fluttered down on the quay, where it came to rest on the THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 113 top of a crate of custard apples that were literally melting away in the sun. I wondered vaguely whether, if Cristina took a fancy for Arctic travel, Mrs. Ash would bring books on Borneo and India with her, and read them in the midst of the eternal snows ? I was quite sure that, whatever she might do, she would not flatter the Arctic by taking any notice of it. . . . The " Daendels " seemed a pleasanter place that evening. The dreary waste of reading-room suddenly blossomed into a drawing-room a homely drawing-room you almost expected a fire. . . . Cristina, in another pink thing I recall that it had edges you could see through, and was buttoned with roses, or tried to make you think it was, looked amazingly pretty. Mrs. Ash was dressed with exceeding respectability in thin black and a real cap: she had mittens, too when does one see caps and mittens now-a-days ? Somehow, the look of the two sitting there, with their sewing and their books, made me realise sharply that I was not a married man. I do not say, made me realise that I was a bachelor. No man minds being a bachelor. There is a jolliness, a freedom, a flavour of pipes and slippers and beer, about the very word. . . . But, as I say, there come times in the life of a bachelor when he realises that he isn't married. That bits of stitchery, and high-heeled shoes set comfortably on fenders (I do not suggest that 8 114 KRIS-GIRL there was a fender in the " Daendels : " I only say that there was the atmosphere of one), and easy, leisured talk over the doings of to-day, and the prospects of to-morrow's doing, don't come into his life. You can be a bachelor all day with perfect comfort ; you can be a bachelor, very satisfactorily, on all nights when there is enter- tainment of a,ny kind. But on the nights when you are at home, in your boarding-house, cham- bers, hotel, what not, you are not a bachelor. You are just a man who hasn't got a wife. Talking things over is the especial sport and pastime of the married. If you talk things over at your club, you will find yourself quarantined for a bore. If you discuss your doings of to-day and to-morrow at a dinner party, you will block the courses, and induce your partner to wish for 3 r our speedy death. But your wife actually wants to know queer being ! what you said to the general manager, and what he answered, and how } T OU then put the matter, briefly and ably, to him, and how he hadn't a word to say. She is excited to hear that you almost lost the train coming home, but relieved on knowing that you managed to catch it by running all the way down the stairs after the lift was closed. She debates anxiously the question of thin overcoat or none, now that the days are "drawing out"; she discusses with serious consideration the right place to sow the scarlet runners. . . . Well ! on that still, hot evening in the library THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 115 of the " Daendels," in company of the two women reading and stitching and ready to talk over my affairs, I realised, with the unpleasant feeling that attends the putting down of a foot on a non-existent step, that I was not a married man. That the loss of Mabel, coming at a critical age, and turning away my attention from all thoughts of " settling down," had caused me to miss some- thing, of which Mabel herself was only a part something, perhaps, that mattered something represented by those dresses and books and bits of sewing, and other trivial little affairs, that mounted up into a sum by no means trivial. I had actually forgotten that Cristina was speaking. " Well, Mr. Garden, after putting our pro- gramme out by ten days, I hope you've furnished yourself with a suitable excuse." " Yes," I answered. " You can take your kris out of the sheath : it's going to be wanted I think." " Ah ! " said Cristina. She did not look at Mrs. Ash, and she was not near enough to that respected lady to kick her on the shins, but nevertheless some signal must have passed. For Mrs. Ash got up, gathered her books, papers, and work together, and trippeted neatly out of the room. When she was young, I will swear she " tripped," like those Dickensian and Thackerayan damsels who were deliberately taught (I have it on the authority of one of themselves) to put the 116 KRIS-GIRL toe down before the heel in walking. Look at the engravings of the period, and at the chisel- shaped slipper pointed out under the crinoline ; realise that the girls of that day were actually compelled to walk like fowls, rather than planti- grade animals ; and thank your stars that your sister or your sweetheart "flourishes," as they say of historic characters, in the age of the suffra- gette. Mrs. Ash, in the sixties, had been taught to " trip." Now she trippeted. Although the action was not ungraceful, and suggested, somewhat pleasantly, an atmosphere of dried pot-pourris and faded looks of beauty, of crystal chandeliers, cabbage-rose carpets, and slanted Venetian blinds, one could realise that it was not eminently adapted for climbing tropical mountains and racing about lakes and ruins. " She's wonderfully plucky to stick it the way she does," I said, as the gauzy black figure vanished down the verandah. " Ash ? She's a dear, a darling little wooden Mrs. Japheth out of the ark ; I wouldn't change her for worlds." " We're awfully liberal with our ' worlds ' ; but I don't suppose Mrs. Ash would give you much for another world or so." " She, poor dear ? she wouldn't give you a half-hardy bulb for a dozen of them. It's less world, not more, that she wants . . . but about your affairs ? " THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 117 I should have been content to leave them for a little ; it had seemed, in that moment, as if we were nearing the debatable ground of Cristina and her travels, but . . . " I will tell you from the beginning to the end," I said, and I did. "Now tell me," I said, "am I mad, or has something happened that is out of the order of nature ? " Cristina got on her feet, and began marching up and down the library, hands thoughtfully clasped behind her back, head a little raised. She walked so for quite ten minutes. At the end of that time she said " I am glad you sent for me," and then went on walking in silence. The even- ing traffic of Macassar whirled madly up and down the Nooge Pad outside. Carriages, motor- cars, karettas, conveyed tall, intensely clean Dutchmen in white suits, and massive Dutch ladies in Paris dresses and hats, to call upon their friends or to see the one small picture show of which Macassar (very literally) boasts. Endless, rainbow-coloured native crowds flowed by in the electric light that made the town as bright as day. From the immense dining-room of the " Daendels " came clinking of glasses and plates, and loud talking in iks and je's. A giant lizard, somewhere about the cornice, swelled out its throat, remarked malignantly " Tuc-too ! ">[and then subsided into silence. As if that had been the signal for which she was 118 KRIS-GIRL waiting, Cristina stopped her walk, flowed into a rocking-chair (she was incapable of " dropping ") and fixed me with her bright blue eyes. " There are some things I want to know," she said. " First, tell me all you can about Mabel." I told her the sad little story, leaving nothing out. She listened to it without emotion, which somewhat surprised me. I should have thought that any woman, anywhere, would have found this tale of love and separation and death appeal- ing. " She is cold," I thought. " Bright and keen as the blade she is nicknamed after but cold as the steel itself." Well, it was nothing to me if she was as cold as the icebergs in Mrs. Ash's misplaced book. It was with Cristina's intellect that I had to deal, not with her heart. She crossed her knees lightly, and regarded the point of the uppermost shoe with some interest. Like all women who have pretty feet, she was very choice with her shoes. This one was of golden bronze, with a needle toe, and an abso- lutely wicked heel, and it made her foot look small enough for a fairy. " Tell me this," she said, twittering the shoe about, so as to catch the rays of the electric light on its golden polish, " when you saw her on the jetty, what was she wearing ? " " Wearing ? " I answered, somewhat astonished by the frivolity of the question. " Why, what THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 119 other women wear, I suppose. I did not notice anything in particular." " She did not seem different from the rest ? " " Xo. She wasn't wearing a white robe and a palm, if that's what you mean, and I didn't observe a harp. She was just dressed like a woman." " Had she a hat on ?" " Yes the sort of hat that other people have." " That would be a large, deep, waste-paper- basket shape of hat," said Cristina. " And her dress would be something slim and white, and not very noticeable. This year's fashions are very simple." " I suppose so," I said, wondering what she was driving at. " You say she died in eighteen ninety-three ? " " That was the year," I said. Ninety-three ! Ninety-three ! Again through my brain sang the wild, wind-like music of Stevenson's lament " Sing me a tale of a lad that ia gone Say, could that lad be I ? " No, he was not I. Twenty-four and thirty-nine what had they in common ? No one thing except love for, reverence for the memory of, lost Mabel. " Do you remember the fashions of ninety- three ? " asked the Kris-Girl, quietly and dis- tinctly. I saw in a flash what she was driving at. 120 KRIS-GIRL " Why why they were very extravagant, were they not ? " I stammered, still a trifle dazzled with this new light. " I can tell you just what they were. I was only nine years old then, but I can recall exactly what my mother and my young aunts used to wear. They wore tiny close-fitting toques or bonnets, such as no girl ever wears now. They had immense sleeves, stiffened out like wings, and their skirts were sometimes seven or eight yards round, flapping all over the place. They looked as unlike the girls of the present days as " " I see what you mean," I burst in. " I'm not quite sure that I see myself yet," she said slowly. " But I know one thing you might have had a vision, or call it an illusion, of Mabel dressed as you saw her last, but I really do not see how you could have a vision of her dressed in the fashions of to-day, which she never even dreamed of, and which you wouldn't know how to reconstruct out of your own head anyhow. If the girl you saw on the jetty looked like other women, depend on it, she was like other women. If she'd been dressed as your fiancee used to dress, she would have stood out from the crowd like a griffin or a phoanix, or any other fabulous monster you like to name. And everyone on the jetty would have been staring at her." " Do you know," I said, staring at her, " that with all the things Dr. Merkus asked yesterday, he never even hinted at that ! " THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 121 "No ? " said Cristina, with a small fine smile that did not compliment the doctor. " I suppose he had made up his mind on the whole question before he began. Now let us get down to essen- tials." " Your way," I said, with a touch of admira- tion. " No. The commonsense way. I've no patent on common sense. What do you in the bottom of your heart, suppose you saw ? " " I haven't an idea. It was because my mind was such a blank that I " " One always has an idea. Cut the way clear to it give Truth a hand up from the bottom of the well." "It's impossible " I began, wavering. "Nevermind. Goon." " Well, if I think anything, I think it was she, but I know it couldn't be." Cristina smiled. " You see, you had the idea. Now let's go into it. You will not mind my asking some questions about her Mabel I don't know her other name." " Mabel is good enough," I said. What did it matter whether a dead little girl were " Miss'd " or not ? " How old was she when she died ? " "Not quite nineteen." " How old when you last saw her ? " " Seventeen and a half." 122 KRIS-GIRL "Poor baby," said Cristina, with such gentle- ness that my iceberg theory suddenly flew to the four winds of heaven to collect itself again, however, before very long. " She was very sorry to part with you ? " "Very! Very!" " But she was well taken care of, and there were pleasant people with her ? " " Yes. Her own relations. Her aunt and uncle, and the secretaries. He took a brace of secretaries with him. They were all of them as kind to Mabel as they could be. She wrote to me about it. She had a very happy voyage poor child ! " " Would it hurt you too much," asked Cristina, " to show me some of her letters ? " " How did you know I had them with me ? " " I thought you were that kind of man," said Cristina, very simply. " It would not hurt me. These things don't hurt after the first two or three years. They leave you changed yes but you take up life again." She sat as still as a stone, looking at me. I suddenly remembered the personal application of my words, and wondered if she thought they had been meant for her. I wondered, too, how far they fitted her case. I left her there in the big empty reading-room, immobile, with the electric glare from above whitening the locks of her soft dark hair. I won- THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 123 dered, as I went to my room, what kind of an old woman she would make when it came to the days of real snowy locks ; I wondered who would see that old age. . . . Not the casual acquain- tance of an Eastern tour for certain. With the letters I brought back a photograph of Mabel's grave. They were all tied up together in a little Indian box of inlaid sandalwood and silver. It was years since I had opened it ; the papers were yellow with being shut up, and the photograph was turning pale. Cristina took the latter out, and examined it In silence. It was a simple thing enough a grave fenced round with iron rails, and headed by a small white cross. The lettering had been new when the photograph was taken ; it stood out very clearly "MABEL MEREDITH DIED 29TH NOVEMBER, 1893 AGED 18." Cristina looked long at the picture. " Who wrote the inscription ? " she asked presently. " The inscription ? her aunt or her uncle, I suppose. They must have paid for it. The Mere- diths were not were not very well off." Cristina said nothing. " May I take it to my room with me ? " she asked presently. " Certainly you may." 124 KRIS-GIRL " I wonder, might I ask you " " I am sure you might, though I don't know what it is." " Don't be too sure. I was going to ask you for some of her letters." I hesitated a moment, but no more. " There's no reason in the world why you should not see them," I said, putting the box in her hands. She slipped the photograph inside and closed the lid. "Good night," she said gravely. "Sleep well, and don't dream of poor little ghosts." The stars showed the flutter of her light dress as she crossed the open courtyard. She was not to be seen next morning. I went out to look for curios, in that main street which promises so much, and provides so little, save cheap German crockery and lamps, English cottons of a jolly-Bank-Holiday character and draperies of the kind you can buy much better in Regent Street. I had just refused, for the fifteenth time, the inescapable beaten silver scarf that worries the traveller right through from Port Said to Hong-Kong, and had turned with ex- treme weariness from the five-hundred and fortieth ugly Japanese tray, when I caught a glimpse of Cristina and Mrs. Ash, getting into a karetta at the door of the steamship company's office. The manager came out after them, talk- ing and smiling. I could see at a glance that Cristina had thought it worth while to expend THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 125 a few of her carefully hoarded fascinations on him. For what reason ? . . . . The karetta plunged into the whirlpool of galloping horses, bullock-carts, padding Chinese, slip-slopping Malays, soldiers, hot-pancake sellers, half-naked Dyaks, tall pink Dutchmen dressed in gleaming white. I followed on foot, wondering. I supposed I should be allowed to wonder in- definitely unless, or until, Cristina had finished her work. Somehow, I did not doubt that she would finish it. And all the time, I had not an idea what she was at. It was getting dusk when I went in again as much as one ever goes " in," about the tropic world. "In," for this occasion, meant a rock- ing-chair on a white stone terrace (I wonder if the American acquired their rocking-chair habit from the early Dutch settlers ?) with tables in the pleasing shape of mimic liquor-barrels beside me, and drinks thereon. The traffic of the Hooge Pad went rattling and hoofing and chug-chugging by, beneath the cathedral-like arcade of the great kanaris. The sun had set : Macassar was abroad, and you might hope for dinner in the course of some two hours and a half, if you sur- vived. I sat there, contented enough, with my cigar and the inevitable liqueur, thinking of I do not quite know what, and enjoying the relief from the shadowy anxiety that had tormented me of late, but that had taken flight beneath the clear 126 KRIS-GIRL daylight of Cristina's common sense. Whatever might be the result of the Kris-Girl's investiga- tions, I was satisfied that madness had nothing to do with the thing I had seen. I could not understand the visit to the steamship office un- less, which I didn't believe, it had been uncon- nected with my affair. I put that out of my head, and tried to guess what her next move would be. There was a queer old mandarin in the Chinese quarter, reputed to be something of a wizard, and to know more about the things of the occult world than could be known by people with plain w r hite skins and heads unpigtailed. . . . She might have probably had. . . . I cannot say how astonished I was when I saw the thin-edged pink dress beside me, and heard Cristina, unaccompanied for once by the inevit- able Ash speaking. Somehow, I had not ex- pected "Mr. Garden," the low, pleasant voice was saying, " I want to tell you that I had rather not go on with that investigation." " What ! " was all I found to say. I had risen to my feet, and stood staring at her. It was dark now ; a silver moon, horned like the buffaloes in the Hooge Pad, looked down a long, long way from the tops of the kanaris. Very pale and wan it seemed in the screaming glare of the electric lights. I could not tell whether the Kris-Girl was pale too, or whether it was only the lights that made her look so. THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 127 " Why do you wish to give it up ? " I asked. "I wish to give it up," she repeated. "You may rest assured that you personally are all right. Let it go at that. You won't be sorry." And again, beneath the pitiless clarity of the electrics, I thought I saw her face turn pale. ''If it troubles you if it's tiresome " I said. " It isn't. I am interested. But you would do better to take my advice, and let it go." I have no doubt that such situations are com- mon enough ; probably, every man and woman in the world has once, at least, been advised to hold off from some subject of inquiry, because he or she would be better without knowing. It is, without question, a " stock incident " in the drama of life. I could give dozens of instances if I paused to think, and so could you. But I could not nor could you give dozens, half dozens, or even one or two, instances when the advice thus offered was taken. I acted like everybody else. I said I would rather know. Who would not run the chance of pinching his fingers in the hinge of a forbidden door, for the certainty of seeing inside ? There was a silence of quite half-a-minute. Then Cristina, looking not at me but at the clat- tering stream of Macassar's evening callers, said lightly " Why, then, I'll tell you " I waited, breathless. What was I going to hear ? 128 KRIS-GIRL " As soon as I know myself," said Crist ina, and went back into the hotel. I lit another cigar, and pondered on the curious ways of women. " But she isn't ' a woman,' " protested some inner voice. " Why not, pray ? " asked I. " She's different," said the voice. " They always are ' different ' when it conies to that," said I, and like Mrs. Primrose, for the second time in this history, I " fell into a great fit of laughter." "Comes to what?" said the other Garden, who was not laughing at all. " How many women can a man be in love with ? " " Oh, damn it, nobody's in love with anybody, that I know of," I said, and the other Garden went out like a candle or as a candle used to do, when we had such things. And I sat on my rocking-chair, swinging about, and thinking of where I was on the map, and wondering why it wasn't stranger. And I thought of R. L. Steven- son's " There's nothing under Heaven so blue That's fairly worth the travelling to ... . . . But whereso'er the roadways tend, Be sure there's nothing at the end." A Dutchman, like all the other Dutchmen of the extreme East, which is to say that he was tall and stoutish, and pink and scrubbed very clean, came up the stone steps of the verandah. THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 129 " Heer Garden ? " he said, removing his hat. I recognised him as one of a firm upon whom I had been calling. " About that gum damar ? " he said. And I became a man of business. The Borneo boat was not due to leave till the end of the week. I had still some few days' grace. Half of every day I occupied in conscientious sight- seeing, together with Cristina and Mrs. Ash. We saw over the fort ; we went to the Spermunde Archipelago ; we visited the Chinese and Malay kampongs ; we drove to the waterfalls. I do not think Mrs. Ash enjoyed herself at all ; I am sure I did not, for Cristina seemed preoccupied, and was clearly occupied in mind with matters quite other than sight-seeing most of the time. During the late hours of the afternoon, she was never to be seen. I did not ask what she was about, knowing that it concerned myself, and that she would speak all in good time, but not a moment sooner. As for her chaperon, I had begun to develop an odd sort of liking for the plucky old lady who was earning her salary so hardly. I don't know that it is in the story, but I choose to say that I gave Mrs. Ash what Americans call " the time of her life " one morning, when Cristina was occupied, alone, and the old lady was marooned out on the verandah with her North-Sea fishermen's knitting, expressing in every line of her countenance an 130 KRIS-GIRL ineradicable contempt for the " dirty blacks " who surrounded her. The Rajah of Palontalo was one he had stopped to have a liqueur on the stoep ; some three -parts -naked coolies, shifting luggage in the blinding sun outside, were others, coming under the condemnation, whom it was clear that Mrs. Ash did not differentiate in any degree from His Highness. " Come out with me, if you aren't busy," I said. " I've been asked to call on a business friend, and you might like to meet his wife. I hear she's the smartest housekeeper in Macassar." "Thank you, I should like it," said the old lady briskly, pulling a pair of light-coloured kid gloves out of her pocket. She was (of course) already bonneted ; she put on the gloves as we drove away down the avenues. I thought her a little formal, but Dutch people like formality in their callers. Mrs. Ash buttoned up the kids, which were so pale as to look almost white, and regarded them with satisfaction. I think she must have had a pretty hand once ; it was still small and neat. When we came back to the hotel, the old lady, for the first time in my acquaintance with her, was pink in the face, and almost excited. It was close on twelve o'clock and very warm ; we saw Cristina coming in as we drove up. " I have had," said Mrs. Ash deliberately, as we met on the stoep, " a most delightful time." " I am so glad," said Cristina. " Been sight- seeing ? " THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 131 " God forbid," said the old lady piously. " Mr; Garden has been so good as to take me to call on Mevrouw Van Noordwyck. And I have seen her kitchen, and her bedroom, and her first spare bedroom, and her second spare bedroom, and her children's room, and her dining-room, and her drawing-room, and her store-room, and both her pantries, and the scullery. And " She held out her ceremonial visiting gloves, spotless as when we started. "I tested things," she said. "Everything. I trailed my gloves as I went ; I wiped them on things, my dear girl. I touched the floor with them when she wasn't looking. . . . Cristina, the Dutch are a great nation, and deserve to have colonies nearly as good as our own though I must admit I did grudge them Java. ... I will never do so again." She extended her gloved hands. " Clean as new milk," she said. " They are a great nation." We walked in to lunch. " Prikkadel," said Mrs. Ash, using a Malay word for the first time, in her agitation. Usually she scorned the heathen tongues that beat about her unheeding ears, and calmly gave her orders in English. " She has a linen-room I didn't tell you about that," said Mrs. Ash. " She couldn't use all the linen in it. Not if she lived a hundred and fifty years. I have more respect for the Dutch than Water! Soda water, please." 132 KRIS-GIRL I translated. " We had a very pleasant talk, while you were with the husband," went on Mrs. Ash, galvanised to surprising fluency. " She told me all about the way they cheat you in the market or try to. And how hard it is to find all the things you want fresh for the rice-table. And about the laundry-men. A most agreeable morning. She has twenty-seven " I do not know what she had twenty-seven of, for Cristina at this moment had a slight coughing fit, and some words were lost. " No lace," said Mrs. Ash emphatically. " Cro- chet and edgings. Most respectable. She tells me that the wife of the Assistant Governor has " Cristina was talking to me rather rudely, I thought so I did not hear what the wife of the Assistant Governor had. When I came to the surface again, Mrs. Ash was just finishing a sen- tence with " Of course her position makes her a law unto herself, but I may say that the really nice Dutch- women do not approve of it. They think like me that no matter how large your stock may be, simplicity is necessary, to avoid confusion with the " There was another gap here. Cristina, oddly enough, could not make the Malay waiter under- stand her, and called me to help. When I had straightened out the difficulty, Mrs. Ash was just concluding THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 133 " As for me I call it simply demi-monde. And Mevrouw Van Noordwyck is of my opinion. A most agreeable morning. I forgot to mention that she uses, personally, four sets of bed-linen a week, and goes over all the wash and the market accounts. There are not many like her in the world." She contrived I do not know how to give this last statement the air of something pious. It was actually the last, for she shut up like an umbrella, and talked no more that day or the next. But I owed to the morning's excursion a new understanding with Mrs. Ash, which I told myself was well worth the little trouble it had cost. I knew Mevrouw Van Noordwyck, and I had been certain that her house would prove a paradise to the poor lady who had seen so many " sights," and cared so little about any of them. I had no other motive than a good-natured one. Still it put Mrs. Ash on my side. " What side ? " I asked the other Garden, who had begun to talk. " As if you didn't know," he jeered. " I do not know," I said to myself, determinedly. Somehow or other, the week went by, and it was Saturday. Our boat was to start late in the afternoon ; she was due to arrive in Macassar about nine o'clock in the morning, and would just have time to land her cargo and proceed before dark. It was the Duymaer Van Rumphius, I remember 134 KRIS-GIRL the very ship that I had watched away from the jetty on the day when I saw the apparition. I went down to the landing stage to see about cabins, accompanied by Cristina and Mrs. Ash. They had been unable to promise any particular accommodation, at the office ; they told us we should have to take what we could get when the ship had discharged her passengers for Macassar. It was a busy time of year. Somehow the sight of the Duymaer Van Rumphius, with her piled-up strata of white decks, and the glittering range of plate-glass windows looking forward from the first-class lounge, re- called with unpleasant vividness the day when I last had seen her. The old dread began to creep back. Could a man safely call himself sane, when he had seen the dead alive, and walking down Macassar jetty, past the Duymaer Van Rumphius, in full glare of a tropic moon ? And it was Mabel I had seen : Mabel at seventeen, as she had left me, in the year 1891 ; no chance resemblance, no fancied likeness in some stranger girl, born of the unsatisfied, old wish to see my young love again. . . . Had I wished to see her ? I did not know. I supposed I must have. Of course ! I had always wanted to see her again. That was it. I must have been wishing very much, and the wish projected itself But in that case, what about the dress ? " I give it up," I thought wearily, and turned THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 135 my attention to handing Mrs. Ash and Cristina over the gangway of the ship. She was fast to the jetty; her passengers were disembarking. We interfered with them somewhat ; it was necessary to draw aside from the gangway, once on deck, and let the stream go by. Mrs. Ash found a seat on one of the deck lounges. I stood idly watching the passengers. I don't know where Cristina went to, but presently she appeared at my elbow, a trifle out of breath. And again, as under the electric lights the other night, I thought she looked pale. I don't think that, in real life, people " get warnings ' ' of what is going to happen ; although I will allow that the "warning" is a stock pro- perty in the world of books. If you remember, you did not get warning of it yourself. You recall what I mean. It came when things were all right, and when you had every reason to suppose they were going to remain so when you were careless and happy coming home from a jolly day at the races, perhaps, and "feeling good," or taking a happy evening over an old pipe and a new book. And the door opened, and they said someone wanted to see you. . . . And after that, nothing was ever the same. But there is no use in saying you had a warning or a presentiment. I had none at that moment. I only thought that Cristina had been running about the boat looking for cabins, and wondered at that, or any- thing else, putting her out of breath. I had not 136 KRIS-GIRL travelled so much in her company without having the difference between the lungs of four-and- twenty and the lungs of nine-and-thirty, rubbed home pretty hard. And here she was, just at my elbow out of breath. "Mr. Garden ! " she said, very low but that might have been lack of strength to speak loud. " Yes ? " I said, turning round. She was be- side, a little behind ; she was dressed in one of her usual modish white clouds with fluttering edges ; she had a hat that hid three-quarters of her face. " Mr. Garden ! remember I warned you. I would like to warn you more definitely now, but I can't. I can't help your knowing. You would know." "Know what? " I asked. For answer, Cristina fairly pulled me round, face towards the descending stream of passengers. Then she shut both hands tightly round the ivory handle of her parasol, and looked not at the passengers, but at me. I think she must have seen something strange, for in that moment, past me within a couple of yards came a slim girlish shape, helped through the crowd by the arm of a strong, elderly man with white hair and pointed beard. I did not know who the man was : I had never seen him before. But the girl was Mabel. Mabel in modern dress, with her bright fair hair parted and drawn back, a little higher than I remembered it in eigh teen-ninety-one, but the THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 137 same hair, the same girl Mabel, chattering, laughing, turning to speak to the man beside her ; Mabel, with a basket of feather flowers that she had bought from a Malay, and was trying to shield from injury in the crowd ; Mabel, here in Celebes, and alive. I do not know what I thought. I believe I was incapable of thinking, in that moment. I simply stared. Then I was conscious of Cristina's hand laid on my arm, and Cristina's voice saying could it be, with a choke in it ? " Come away." I came I don't know why. I was scarcely capable of thinking or acting for myself, and was conscious of nothing, very clearly, until I found myself sitting by Cristina on a deck seat. The seat was on the quiet side of the ship ; we could see nothing but boats and blue water, and were seen by no one. " Do you want to know who that was ? " asked Cristina. "It was Mabel," I said. "But I " "It was Mabel Mabel Molyneux." " Molyneux ? " I said. " But her name wasn't and she is Miss Raye, if you can't help me out of this tangle, I shall certainly think the doctor was right and you are wrong. I feel as much out of my mind as any lunatic in Bedlam." "I was wrong to try and break it," said the Kris-Girl. " You shall have it straight. Your 138 KRIS-GIRL Mabel did die, and was buried, in 1893. She didn't die of cholera. She died when Mabel Molyneux was born." I tried to speak. " Let me finish, it's best. Molyneux was her uncle's secretary ; he travelled with them. He fell in love with her at once. She remembered you till they got to Singapore. Then don't think hardly of her she was only a baby, poor little soul, and Molyneux was accounted the most attractive man in Singapore they called him ' the Apollo of the East ' then, she forgot." The Kris-Girl paused and clasped her small hands what tiny hands they were ! more closely yet about the ivory parasol-handle. " And they wouldn't tell me she married him ! " I exclaimed. " In God's name, why ? I was no baby if she was." " They could not tell you," said Cristina very gently, " because Molyneux had a wife." I was silent for quite a long time or, at least, it seemed so ; perhaps it was no more than a minute or two. Time loses all significance in such moments. There was no need to tell me the rest. I knew it now the secret that had been hidden from me for fifteen years ; not for my sake who cared about me ? but because of Mabel's name. Mabel the little, gentle soul who had fallen upon evil days ; Mabel, who had not known how to resist " the Apollo of the East." What a name, and THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 139 lat a man he must have been no doubt, a Blatant, smirking " It is a curious thing, but I met him once," went on Cristina. " He was not what you might have thought. He was a fine character, but a man most unhappily married. I believe he and Mabel were happy for a while. . . . They ran away to some one of the islands. And he was drowned it was a dreadful story and her people took her back. No one knew about-^- Mabel Molyneux. Molyneux's brother adopted her, and she has been brought up by him and his wife. The old lady went down with them, but you would not have noticed her. They are travelling about the Dutch islands, or rather, they have been they go back to Singapore to-day." "They are Singapore people?" I asked. I still felt rather stunned ; it seemed strange to me that I was not suffering more. " Yes ... I know what you are going to ask. I don't think the story was guessed at till lately but Mabel Molyneux has grown up so like her " " But, good God ! " I said, " she can't be seventeen it's only fifteen years and three- quarters since " " She is not sixteen. You must remember she has been brought up in the East ; an Eastern reared girl at sixteen is fully eighteen to look at." I said nothing for some time. The shining, salt-blue water of Macassar Harbour was before 140 KRIS-GIRL me, canoes plied up and down, the air was full of the spice-and-salt-fish perfume of the Eastern island world. But what I saw was England ; grey water and black ships, and slapping waves ; the dreary Southampton pier in a February rain- storm ; young Jack Garden, who now was young no more, holding a girl in his arms as the last bell rang, and the calls of " Any more for the shore ? " began sounding over the steamer Branksome Hall, bound for far away. . . . Black ship and gre}>- water faded ; the pale, sweet vision of Mabel died. Again there was blue sea and brazen sun before me ; the canoes were paddling under the big white steamers ; the Kris-Girl, warm and living and alive, sat beside me, with sympathy and pity in her eyes. I do not know why that pity should have irri- tated me, but it undoubtedly did. Somehow, I did not want to be sympathised with or did not want her to provide the sympathy or God knows what strange tangle of feelings filled my heart. I felt that I must speak, and break it through. " Do you know where they are gone ? " I asked. " I would like to see and speak to her." Now it is a strange thing, after all the trouble she had taken to bring us together, but it is true, that Cristina's eyes looked momentary annoy- ance. She wiped the expression out immediately, but I had seen it. It did not displease me at all ; I had not time to think why. THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 141 " They are staying at the ' Nassau,' " she said. " You would like to call on them ? " " I should," I said very decidedly. " Then I can give you a letter of introduction. I don't know Mr. and Mrs. Molyneux intimately, but I once travelled to Hong-kong with them, and we got on very well. You shall have the letter at once." She was only a minute or two writing it in the saloon. I took it away with me. " Xo need to say good-bye," I said. " We shall meet again to-night." Cristina looked at me a little oddly. "Shall we?" she said. "Well, in any case I'll shake hands." It was a light, formal shake, and she was gone almost as soon as my fingers released hers. I followed her with my eyes for a moment. " Nothing weak about the Kris-Girl," I thought, as I passed down the gangway again. " And her worst enemy could not call her " I paused before the word I had in my mind. There was something in my mood that shied away from the term " Insipid." I ought to have been excited and moved, driv- ing to the "Nassau" with that letter in my hand ; but, somehow, I was not. However, I reflected that it would be an exceedingly pleasant thing to see Mabel's daughter and second self, and that I was most fortunate to have discovered such an ending to my troubles. What troubles ? 142 KRIS-GIRL Why, the trouble about the supposed apparition. There could be no other with which Mabel Moly- neux was connected . . . could there ? " Her mother was a full year older," I thought, irrelevantly. I found that the party were not in their hotel. This disappointed me. " Annoying most annoying," I murmured. " The Juffrouw she coming back, an' the Heer, one minute," volunteered the mandoer, watching me with glassy brown eyes. " Mynheer wait ? " " Yes," I said, and found a seat under the stone arcade. The mandoer shuffled away in his heel- less slippers. It was not yet really hot ; a plea- sant breeze blew down the great main road ; there was a smell of something fresh and scented. I smoked, and waited, with the letter in my hand. I meant to wait till they had gone in, and then send it with the mandoer. I had pencilled across my own card " Sailing to-night," so that I might be pardoned the unconventionally of calling with my own letter of introduction. Suddenly, a question struck me. Was I " sail- ing to-night ? " I saw what Cristina had meant. I understood that I had got to decide, here and now, whether I was ever to see her again, or not. I had to find out whether the obvious course to love, follow, and wait for Mabel's daughter, the girl who was my lost love herself was to be my course ; or whether the strange, wild wanderings about THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 143 Malaysia in the train of a girl who was for no man's taking, were to continue until That was just it. There was no " until." Whereas, with this " simple maiden in her flower," there would of course be a chance. Girls of sixteen usually fancied men much older than themselves. Fathers, uncles, and guardians gener- ally favoured the suitor with the long purse. Was I going to repeat my courtship of the year ninety- one, here in nineteen-eight, to woo the gentle ghost who seemed to have risen out of the grave for my sake, or A tall, grey-haired man with a pointed beard came into the courtyard. A slim girl with fair hair, looking quite eighteen years of age, followed him. I have never been able to explain what I did. Before the girl and her uncle were half way to the stone cloister, I was out in the Hooge Pad, hailing a karetta. The salt wind from the sea blew upon my face, as I bowled away down the road. Certainly the south-east was getting up. The fragments of Cristina's letter of intro- duction danced and spun in my wake like sportive butterflies. I went out of town, and did not return till the Duymaer Van Rumphius was almost ready to cast off. When she sidled away from beneath the sizzling glare of the electrics, and began to tramp her way out toward the sleeping Spermundes, I went up on deck. Cristina was sitting near the saloon companion-way, in a discreet evening dress. 144 KRIS-GIRL It was not pink this time ; I think the colour was black and very pale green. "Good evening," I said. I thought there was the least possible flash of her blue eyes, but the lashes were so long. . . . "I am not the least surprised," she said com- posedly. " You never are. I am quite certain that you knew what I was going to do much better than I did myself." "I wonder ! ... Is the ghost laid ? " " The ghost is laid. It will never walk again." " I wonder," said Cristina again. Dinner was not quite over ; there was no one on deck. " I will show you," I said. I took out of my pocket a little box of sandalwood and silver, and laid it in her hands. " What am I to do with it ? " she asked. "Bury it," I said. "Poor little box poor little girl ! Let it rest. . . . She's resting this long time. They both wandered long and far enough." Cristina Raye rose, and let the little casket slip very softly from her fingers into the sea. We sat for a while without talking after that. "I wonder," I said presently, "if you would mind telling me how you found it all out." " It won't hurt you ? " asked Cristina, gently. "No. Dreams and ghosts can't hurt when you know what they are." THE GHOST OF MACASSAR 145 "Well," she said slowly, "it was, I think, the hat." " What hat ? " " Hers. Of course, I did not think you mad, but I could not understand, until you told me that she was wearing a peach-basket hat." "I never did!" " Oh yes, you did ; you told me that her head looked like other people's and everyone is wear- ing peach-basket hats this year and last. Well, after that I just knew it must be someone alive. Now, of course, people don't as a rule go wander- ing about the quay at least, women don't unless they are arriving by a ship, or going away in one. You may leave out seeing friends off, in the case of an English visitor, as there are never six English staying in the town together. Well, I went to the steamship office, and looked up passenger lists for some time past it wasn't easy to get at them, but I managed " "I know," I said. "I saw you managing." Cristina did not giggle, but she twinkled just a tiny bit. " Well, I found the list of the passengers by the Duymaer Van Rumphius, from the day when you saw your vision. She was going to Booton and other islands; and 'Mr., Mrs., and Miss Molyneux, Singapore,' were among the Booton passengers." Cristina stopped a moment, and looked out across the plain of night-black sea. We had 10 146 KRIS-GIRL turned out of the harbour by now ; the land and its lights lay behind, the steamer was fast gathering way on the road to unseen Borneo. " I can't explain the way one thinks things out," she said. " It seems rather as if they thought themselves out if one may put it so clumsily. There are a lot of detached facts, and you feel they are related to each other somehow, but you can't for the life of you tell how, and no amount of thinking would make it clear. So you don't think. You wait, and just leave the doors open. And by-and-by, if you turn your back and pretend there's no door there, some- thing comes in through it." "What? " " I wish I knew. A sort of brownie. I sup- pose you remember about Scotch brownies, and how they clean and tidy up all the house with- out a sound when everyone's asleep. Well, it tidies up. And when you look round, it's gone but there are your detached facts, all set in order and laid out in a row ; and you say ' W T hy, of course ! ' and that's all there is to it." " And in this case ? " " It sorted up Singapore, and the vision, and the Duymaer Van Rumphius, and and Mabel's letters, and the other things." I don't know how I knew, but I did under- stand, very clearly, that she was thinking of that grave in Singapore, with its strange, brief inscrip- 147 tion, and that she did not care to bring it into the tale. "And they all laid themselves out in a row, one, two, three, four. . . . And it was clear so clear that I was frightened. But I knew that you would see her again, when the Duymaer Van Rumphius returned because no one stays long at Booton : when you've seen the pearling, there's nothing else. And that's all." " All that you can tell," I said. "You have a power that other people have not, and you don't tell me anything about that, because you don't know." " Have I a power that other people haven't ? " she asked, dreamily. " I sometimes wonder if I have or if it has me ? " We were silent then ; the black sea, sparked with foam, went hissing down the flanks of the ship ; the lights of Macassar were dying out behind. Something, I knew, was dying with them ; a part of my old life sank, as they sank, beneath the sea. It struggled in its death ; the old dream, the old regret, died hard, now that the end had come. For the thing that was dying was not my late, calm, temperate sorrow that was scarcely a sorrow at all, but the bitter grief of the days when I had been young, and mourned, with all my young simple heart, the girl who had played me as false as woman could play man. It seemed to be myself that I had lost, not Mabel. 148 KRIS-GIRL Out of the dark drifted a line, half -forgot ten, from a poem I had not seen in many years "I am shamed through all my being to have loved so slight a thing. " What man would love Mabel Molyneux, that early-blooming flower of the East ? what history would she make for him ? " Like mother, like daughter," I thought. " The man who loves her will take a risk. . . . Thank God, the man will never be I." And the lights of Macassar sank beneath the sea. CHAPTER IV THE DANGEROUS TOWN VERY slowly the ship glided through the water, coming up to the quay. The land we were approaching was not like any land that I had ever seen ; the sea was unlike every other sea. You saw no blue sparkle ; it did not look alive. It had the colours of decay, corpse-yellow and livid green, and it shone with a slimy, sickening glitter. There was some small breeze that after- noon, but the water did not seem to notice it ; it only heaved in an unwholesome kind of way. " Why, it's oiled ! " said Cristina, leaning over the rail. " What did you expect, of the biggest oil town of the East ? " I asked. " Nothing half so decayed and wicked-looking. I think this is the sort of place where people ought not to live. If I were a native, I should say it was full of devils. There's something devilish- looking even in those trees." There was ; they seemed to have a personality of their own something witch-like and wicked. 149 150 KRIS-GIRL Out of a lower sea of poisonous green bush, they rose incredibty high, lifting stark trunks against a sky that was like the iron lid of a cauldron, and flinging out a branch or two at the top dark hands extended in menace, not in welcome. Beyond the curve of the bay, where the houses and the road had been made, came rank green mangrove swamp ; more trees ; more brooding, iron sky. "Why does it all look wicked?" mused Cristina. '' One has seen big, solitary trees before, and mangroves, and swamps, still ..." "Too much lunch," said Mrs. Ash briskly. " Anything would look wicked after that. r Lunch. Heat. And liver. That's all." ^ "Not when you don't eat lunch," said Cris- tina. " I never do. It's quite enough for me to watch the Dutch eating. I feel absolutely stodged after that." The conversation languished. We were gliding in and into the oil town, and as we went, the heat of the land came out upon us, as if the door of some invisible furnace were being slowly swung on its hinges. It was the unbearable hour of three o'clock. All over the deck fat Dutchmen in pyjamas, and fatter Dutch ladies in their amazing costume of sarong and combing- jacket, lay spilled out on chairs, unstockinged legs can- didly extended. They were nearly all asleep ; it did not appear that the thirty courses of the " rice-table " had inspired them with any interest, THE DANGEROUS TOWN 151 gloomy or otherwise, in the approach to Balik Papan. We were all going to the oil town together. I had business with the Dutch company that runs the oil-field, and Cristina had a fancy to take a flying look at Borneo. From what we could see, up on the deck of the steamer, it seemed as though the flying look ought to be enough to content any- one. Balik Papan is a town of some twelve thousand natives and three hundred whites, on a site that is simply one bite taken out of the jungle. The offices and workshops of the company are strung along a black cinder road, oiled with kerosene, that for roasting, blinding heat, is like the high- way to Hell. Warehouses rise on piles in slimy marshes. Factories stand at the far end. The unbroken forest rises up in a wall behind. Behind that, and not so very far away, are unexplored swamps and jungles, ourang-outangs, wild ele- phants, and head-hunting Dyaks. " What are all those gas containers for ? " asked Cristina, as we began tying up alongside, and brightly dressed coolies came running to adjust the long pipe that was to give the Van Diemen her drink of oil. " To contain oil." /" Petroleum ? all those dozens and scores of tbmgs, as big as churches ? " " Yes. Balik Papan has a big output, though the field isn't here, it's sixty miles away." 152 KRIS-GIRL " What happens if they take fire ? " " They don't. And the villas are at the other side of the hill." "If it did whoof ! " said a ship's officer, spreading out his hands expressively. " The sea itself will be on fire, if that should occur, and as to escape, they would have only the jungle." " Where the head-hunters are ? " " We do not encourage the head-hunters. There are some, but not many, oh no ! " " One apiece ought to be enough," mused Cristina. " Don't throw away matches, Mr. Garden, while we're here." " If he shall smoke, we will perhaps put him in gaol," observed the Dutchman, calmly. " When you go on shore, you may see the notices." We did. Cristina insisted on going for a walk in the worst heat of the afternoon, and the devoted Mrs. Ash accompanied her. I went too, and as the officer had foretold, I saw notices couched in Dutch, English, German, Chinese, Javanese, and Hindustani, threatening with I do not know what penalties, anyone who dared t6 smoke. Looking upon those serried lines of oil-containers, each as large as the gasworks' receivers that most people know ; seeing the colossal oil-refineries at the end of the town ; noting the pipes that snaked here and there and everywhere, carrying kerosene, one understood that the notices about smoking, and the other notices about fire apparatus, and the obvious provision for dealing everywhere and THE DANGEROUS TOWN 153 immediately with the smallest outbreak of fire, were by no means unnecessary. " How do you like it ? " Cristina asked her companion, as we struggled along the fiery road, drawn in under our sun umbrellas like so many tortoises under their shells. Mrs. Ash, thin, black, and rigid as ever, re- marked, with a comprehensive glance : " One could save several shillings a week on kerosene, I'll be bound. They would never have the face to charge retail prices, with all that running about." She relapsed into a dream, and I could guess that she was reckoning up the price of petroleum in Kensington. I recommended them both to go back to the ship as soon as they could, and went off about my business among the great piles of office build- ings. Later in the day, we met on the windy side of the promenade deck. The sun was begin- ning to set ; a little coolness not much was creeping into the hot-lead atmosphere ; the slimy sea stirred faintly. " Had enough of Balik Papan ? " I asked light- ing the cigar for which I had been longing all day. In answer, Cristina said " What are the people here afraid of ? " " Afraid of ? " I parried, for I had some idea of what she meant. " Yes. They're afraid of something. Mrs. Ash and I were asked to go and see some people in their house, and we went and we noticed it there. 154 KRIS-GIRL And \ve noticed it in stores. And some of those Javanese coolies they seemed jumpy if you spoke to them, and they kept looking out over their shoulders. And do you know ? every berth on the ship is engaged, for wives and daughters of officials." I suppressed a whistle. I had noticed some- thing odd about the people I had been to see that afternoon ; a certain suggestion of anxiety and strain. . . . But no one had made any con- fidences to me. And this was the first I had heard of the booking up of the ship. " We don't sail till the day after to-morrow ; there is lots of cargo," went on Cristina. I saw that her eyes were very bright, and I noticed now that she was wearing something very pretty and smart. " Been thinking again, Kris-Girl ? " I asked. "Wouldn't you?" she flashed. "And I'll tell you something. It isn't Dyaks. And it isn't coolies rising the coolies are frightened, too. I'm going to know all about it as soon as I can get hold of a woman. But the trouble is, most of the women don't talk English or French. I've tried the men, but they pretend not to know what I mean. So it's the women or nothing. And I don't think it will be nothing." The sun set low and red beneath a bar of black. The astonishing electric lights of Balik Papan came out like large white stars. In their thin radiance, the looming reservoirs showed tall and THE DANGEROUS TOWN 155 grey and very, very many. The steamer, with a snaky oil-pipe set to some hidden mouth, drank on and on. Cristina and I were silent. Before long, she nodded good-night, and left. As for me, I sat thinking until far into the night, and ray thoughts were not of the mystery that seemed to lurk about this odd, dangerous town ; not yet were they concerned with prices of oil fuel to be supplied on the spot to certain cargo vessels. These vessels were named after myself, my sister, my country-house, the county we live in, and the river that supplies water to our largest works. They had been to me very much what children are to other men . . . still, my thoughts were not concerned with them, nor with their conversion to oil fuel, that night. I was thinking more about a large gold Chinese ring, marquise shaped, belting a small finger with a rosy, shining nail. I was thinking that I would like to take off that ring and throw it into Balik Papan's scummy, slimy sea. Other thoughts came ; the dominant note in them all was " She is flying from herself . ..." Why? Why? Was there some man she should not love ? Was the memory of her dead fiance no, it was not that, or not only that. My upper, reasonable self declared it must be ; the subliminal Jack Garden obstinately maintained it was not. "A man would drink," ran my disconnected thoughts. " She intoxicates herself with these intellectual feats. Once the mood is on her, she 156 KRIS-GIRL can think of nothing else. She is glad of that. . . . She was glad to-night that there was some- thing here for her to cut into with that sharp mind of hers. It's like chopping down trees to make yourself forget the toothache." "Well! " I finished, strolling round the deck. " I have no right to pry. No right," I repeated. "No right." The thought struck coldly. I threw the end of my cigar on to the jetty, and then stopped short, and cursed myself for a careless fool. The ship might still be drinking, for all I knew and anyhow, the place was full of oil pipes, probably leaky. . . . What a howl ! The officer in charge of the steamer came over to the landward side of the deck, above my head and looked out. I looked, too, and I saw, of all things on earth, an excited Chinaman some sort of watchman, I supposed flinging himself on my cigar-end, and hastily spitting upon it to put it out. He could not have seen me clearly in the shadow of the hurricane deck, but he looked up and shouted Chinese abuse at me, flapping his hands like a turtle in a temper, and pointing indignantly to the forest of reservoirs behind. Now I had never, to my knowledge, seen an excited Chinese before, and it struck me that I might be in for trouble. The officer was already making his way to the companion. My deck- shoes, were rubber-soled and silent ; I slipped into my cabin as quietly as a cat, snapped off the THE DANGEROUS TOWN 157 light, dropped coat and shoes on the floor, and fell into my berth. When someone turned a bull's-eye lantern on to me a few moments later, I was lying sound asleep so far as anyone could tell. Next morning, on the deck, very early, I met the Kris-Girl. " How goes the mystery ? " I asked. " No time to find out yet," she said, rather curtly. " I mean to, though, if I stop here after the boat goes." She had found a chessboard full of pieces, left out on deck, and was doing the most amazing things with pawns and kings and castles while she spoke juggling them through the air from one hand to another, in a flying stream ; making them stop short and cross ; sending them up in spirals. The curious thing was that she did it absentmindedly, and gave all her attention, apparently, to what she was saying. " Did you hear that Chinaman howl last night ? " she asked. " Yes," I said. I told her what had happened. The stream of bishops and knights suddenly wavered ; a queen dived toward the deck, and was deftly caught. Then the pieces began to fly up in a corkscrew curve, gaily. " Dear Mr. Garden of Eden," she said, " weren't you clever enough to see ? " " What ? " The chessmen executed a final flight, and came back to Cristina's hand like homing pigeons. 158 KRIS-GIRL She set them all neatty back on the board before she answered. " That's what it is they are afraid of." "What? Chinamen?" " Xot Chinamen. Fire." " Why, they're always afraid of fire here ; look at the precautions." " Yes, but now they're frightened of it. When a Chinaman goes on as you describe, it doesn't mean ordinary routine precautions." "No," I agreed. " I see what you mean." " There is some special reason for fearing it just now," she went on, " and it's evidently a reason over which they have no control. Shipping off the women and children as they are doing " " Are they all going ? " " Oh, no. Only twenty or thirty of them. But that's enough to show that someone is seri- ously alarmed." " Well, the Dutch officer didn't know anything about it when we came in, to judge by the way he talked." " He will now?" said Cristina. " Try him." I looked up the plump, white-and-gold clad young man to whom we had been talking when the ship came in, and asked him, by and by, what he thought of the chances of fire in the town. There was no light reply this time. He changed the subject brusquely, and told me something or other I did not want to hear, about the natural history of crocodiles. THE DANGEROUS TOWN 159 I came back to Cristina. "You're right," I said. "He knows. And like a true Dutchman, he won't have foreigners poking their noses into his affairs. I don't think you will make much by inquiries, in Balik Papan." " Shan't I ? " she asked, her little pointed face looking up elfishly under its halo of dark, soft hair. " Would you like to come and see ? " " I should," I answered, promptly. Never as long as I live am I likely to forget the heat of that afternoon's walk. Again, at the un- holy hour of three, did that sprite of a girl insist on setting forth, accompanied by myself and the tireless Mrs. Ash. " I'm sorry," she explained, coolly (there was nothing else cool upon the length and breadth of Borneo that afternoon), " but it's an excellent rule to go out at the siesta hour when you want to know things. You see, no one's expected to go out then ; that's why." We paced along on the petroleum-caked road- way, under the lee of a huge rock wall that flung heat at us instead of shade. Behind us the many- coloured crowd of Indian, Javanese, and Chinese coolies, went languidly about their work ; leather- skinned buffaloes with enormous horns dragged heavy carts ; native women wearing pink and yellow saris on their heads went by with a tinkle of anklets. The coloured man and woman do not rest in the fierce hours of mid-day heat, but the white, in Dutch Malaysia, is invisible from 160 KRIS-GIRL one o'clock till four or five. We walked on and on ; a small breeze from the sea came up as we left the town. Bungalows, built on piles, began to show in front of us. We were coming to the residential quarter. It was like a city of the dead, when we reached it. Behind shut jalousies, on enormous Dutch beds veiled with tents of mosquito netting, the inhabitants were dozing, three-quarters undressed, waiting for the cool of five o'clock. For all we could see of them, they might have been in Amsterdam. Dusty -looking dogs slept in shaded spots ; beneath verandahs you could see the coiled-up bodies of Javanese house-boys. The sun struck wickedly down from the sky, and up from the road ; a giant cricket, the only thing awake in this enchanted city, sat up in a mango tree and made a fiendish whizzing, boring noise, that seemed to go round and round like a centre- bit working through a door. We stopped ; it seemed that Cristina, for once, was undecided. The sea broke hotly on the burning sand ; the maddening cricket kept up its ceaseless zizz-zizz, zizz-zizz. We stood at the beginning of the little suburb, looking about us. Mrs. Ash broke the silence abruptly. " Ordinary nigger-looking natives I don't mind," she said. " You needn't consider them human. But good-looking natives haven't any business to exist." THE DANGEROUS TOWN 161 " But why, dear Ashie ? " asked Cristina. " I find them offensive," said Mrs. Ash, ex- planatorily. " Have you seen any lately ? " I asked, more for the sake of making conversation than any- thing else. In reply, the lady stretched out a thin, black- silk-covered finger. " I dislike niggers in general, and on principle," she said. " But I dislike that particularly." " That," which had just come out, soft-footed, from behind a great concrete bungalow, was a Dyak a young Dyak ; a chief ; a very hand- some chief. The Dyaks will not work for the Dutch, and very few of them are to be seen about Balik Papan, where they have, strictly speaking, no business. This man had a slightly furtive look about him, in spite of his admirable swagger. There was no Chinese slyness about him, no Indian subservience, no Javanese meekness ; he " Trod the earth like a buck in spring, And he stood like a lance in rest ; " yet all the same he contrived to look as if he were up to something I can find no other phrase. He was of a reddish-copper colour, with straight black hair half hidden under a crimson-and-gold turban ; he wore nothing but a loin-cloth, but it was of fine yellow silk, and I could not be certain that the usual brass rings on arms and legs were not, in his case, gold. More than one dagger, richly hilted, was stuck in his waist-cloth, 11 162 KRIS-GIRL " He really is handsome," said Cristina, look- ing at him narrowly. The young Dyak returned her glance, with more freedom than I liked. There was nothing savage about him except his eyes ; there the wild man leapt out. They were large eyes, black and fiery as a bull's, and deep- set, under brows that frowned a little. It seemed to me that he was not altogether pleased at our presence ; he muttered something, half to him- self. Cristina, to my surprise, answered him. " Do you know Dyak ? " I asked. " No. That was Dutch." " I didn't catch it. What business had a Dyak knowing Dutch ? " "A good deal less than one, according to the authorities. They don't allow natives to learn it." " What did the impertinent brute say ? " " Oh, he wasn't impertinent. He only said that the sun was too strong for white ladies to be out." " Confounded cheek," I muttered. Cristina, somehow or other, was managing to lead me away. I think she had her arm in mine ; I was not quite sure, because when I became fully alive to the fact, I found it was not there any longer. By this time we were on the highway to Balik Papan again, retracing our steps. I will allow that I was extremely angry, and was scarcely conscious of where I was. " Mr. Garden," said Cristina, earnestly, " I know exactly what you are thinking, but you THE DANGEROUS TOWN 163 really must not. The man did nothing actually rude, and he is fully armed, whereas you have only a sun umbrella. And Mrs. Ash and I don't want a row." " As you wish," I said. The whole affair had made me angry and sulky ; I did not speak again. It seemed intolerable that any man, black, white, or red, should dare to look with admiration at the Kris-Girl. We had gone some little way when Cristina, who seemed in very good spirits, stopped, and asked me for the loan of my field-glass. I unslung it and gave it to her. She slipped behind a rock, and looked long and steadily through the lenses. Presently she came back to us, and returned the glass. Her face was pink. " Do you know what I saw ? " she said, address- ing Mrs. Ash, who did not seem especially in- terested. " I saw him go beneath the verandah, put up his hand, and catch a bunch of flowers that somebody threw down." " What flowers ? " demanded Mrs. Ash, yawn- ing wearily behind her black silk glove. " Big j r ellow alamanda. He's putting them in his hair. They've got some funny customs, these natives. They can't read, but they make appoint- ments with each other, sometimes, by means of flowers." " Like the lover when Maud sent him a rose to say she'd meet him among the roses ? " I asked. " Something of the kind. These resemblances 164 KRIS-GIRL are really very interesting, from an ethno-what- is-it point of view. I could be quite scientific, if it were all about things of that kind. Do you know, in the betrothal customs of the " " I want my tea," said Mrs. Ash. " You shall have it. Pigi ! " ordered Cristina and we pigi'd straightway. We did not talk much on the way back to the ship, but just as we reached the gangway, Cristina turned to me and remarked, incomprehensibly " Do you know, I believe THAT was connected with IT." Then she went to her cabin. After dark, about seven the visiting hour of Dutch Malaysia I saw her setting out with Mrs. Ash to make a call of some kind. By the beauty and delicacy of the dress she wore, I guessed that she was (as Americans say) "feeling good," and that some further development of her enterprise was on hand. I did not expect to see her again that night, but we met half-an-hour later. A man with whom I had been doing some business during the day, asked me to visit his wife and family, and it turned out that this was the family to whom Cristina and Mrs. Ash also had introduc- tions. We found the fat mother, fat daughter, and three fat younger children, all on the concrete verandah, all dressed and laced and bow'ed and ribboned, as if they had never seen such a thing as a sarong or a bath slipper in their lives. Coffee THE DANGEROUS TOWN 165 was being handed round, and, so far as my small knowledge of Dutch permitted me to judge, the gossip of Balik Papan was being eagerly retailed, in gross and in detail. The master of the house said something, on presenting me, that changed the conversation to English. I don't know that I should have troubled to listen to it, had I not seen that the Kris-Girl was giving it more attention than it seemed to deserve. This made me fix my attention, though the result did not seem valuable ..." No, we get on very well here the one with the other ; we are not a quarrelsome what is the word ? commonwealth no, community. It is true, there is not much to do, and we talk about one another, but we are very good friends on a whole. A great many of the town have ceased to call on Mevrouw " (I did not catch the name), " because of that dreadful scandal ; it is true she is half-caste, but in Holland we count half-caste as white, and we do not like to see a white woman to encourage a native admiring her." " That is her house near the beginning of the villas, with all the yellow flowers on it, is it not ? " asked Cristina. " Yes, they are beautiful, are they not ? " " Do they grow anywhere else about the town ? " " I think not that flower," said the Dutch- woman thoughtfully. " It grows all over their verandah, the back and the front. Would you like to have a cutting procured for you ? " 166 KRIS-GIRL "Thank you, I'm afraid I could not use it. But tell me about this half-caste lady have I seen her, I wonder ? " " Oh, no," the Dutchwoman said eagerly, fan- ning herself with a large Japanese fan, and leaning forward to speak with more emphasis. " Why, her husband has shut her up ! So angry he is for he is old, and she is young, and he will not have her look at someone else than him, even if it was a white that he has had the gateway of the upper staircase locked, and himself keeps the key. As soon as the boat goes, I think he will take her down to it himself, and they will go away to Holland. It is time for his leave, you see. She will not be glad to go, for she was born in Batavia, and she does not like to think of the cold and the dark of Europe, but he will make her go, for he is very angry. But, my dear lady, what does one expect ? so old a man should not have married a pretty young girl. When I was married to my husband " She went off into a long chapter of autobiography. One or two men came in, and the conversation became general. Mrs. Ash did not join in any of it ; thin and black and upright, she sat in a corner of the verandah, and surveyed the scene with that unchangeable disapproval of "foreigners" which I had come to recognise as her most notable trait. I think she enjoyed herself, in an odd, upside-down way of her own. I talked to my host, and watched Cristina in the intervals. The THE DANGEROUS TOWN 167 rocking-chairs clicked and swung ; the filled and refilled coffee-cups tinkled as the Javanese boys carried them about. Outside the lighted verandah was the hot darkness of equatorial Borneo, warm sea breaking on warm alligator-haunted sand, great flying-foxes winging by among the stars. A few spectral flowers showed dimly in the stone vases about the enclosure. Either from the flowers, or from the near-by jungle, came every now and then a breath of perfume that was wickedly, cloyingly sweet. A huge young Dutchman, packed into a rock- ing-chair that seemed a very tight fit, was talking to Cristina. " I have heard your name, Miss Raye," he said. " Are you making some stay in Borneo ? No ? Going on with the boat ? That is good. I think you won't like Borneo, if you stayed. And we don't want visitors much in Balik Papan ; we have no place to put them, and nothing for them to see." " Oh, I think the town is interesting enough," said Cristina, with a small fine smile. The Dutchman's mind, apparently, did not match his slow and bulky body, for he seemed to read her unspoken meaning clearly enough. " We don't want people to find us interesting," he said bluntly. " I have heard that you have done some clever things in other parts of Dutch India. You should rest satisfied with that. We don't want any krises here." 168 KRIS-GIRL Cristina did not seem to hear him ; she played with her fan, and stifled a little yawn, in a dainty but wearied fashion. Her head dropped back against her chair ; you could see boredom and fatigue in every line of her figure, struggling with a politeness that still kept the attention nominally at work. ... I, who knew very well she was not bored at all, could scarcely keep back a laugh at the little witch's power of acting. " I am so sorry," she said, apparently recover- ing herself with an effort, " but there is something in the Dutch accent that always seems to make me sleepy. I am afraid I didn't catch would you mind saying it again ? " The young giant, his mind suddenly turned to the fact that a pretty girl found him boresome and tedious, was incapable for the moment of catching his broken train of thought. He muttered something scarcely audible, and in the pause that followed, Cristina contrived to slip away. She was scarcely out of the enclosure before I caught her up. " Miss Raye," I said. " I know what you're going to do to-night as well as if you had told me, and I don't mean to let you do it." If it had been moonlight instead of starlight but I could almost swear her breast did heave a little faster, under its silks and laces. Still, her voice was steady as she answered " You seem to know a great deal. What am I going to do ? " THE DANGEROUS TOWN 169 " You're going to take that beastly Indian dress of yours and go wandering about this dan- gerous place, God knows where. You shan't do it." " You are both unexpected and unreasonable, my dear guardian, is it, or uncle, or what rela- tion ? I'm afraid I must have forgotten. What relation are you really to me ? " " Now you're satirical, which I suppose means that you are angry," I said, rather miserably, " but I don't mean to mind what you say ; you are not to go. You know I can stop you like a shot, by giving a hint to any of the authorities, but I hope you won't drive me into that." " Well," said Cristina, suddenly giving in in the most amazing way, and turning to face me like some small bird at bay, " if you go and spoil all my plans, how do you propose to pay for it ! " " Anyway you like to ask." " Then you shall pay for it," she said, crushing the French heel of her shoe into the gravel, as we stood. " You shall go and do what I want, for me." " Certainly I will," I said, hardly able to believe that she had given in so readily, and feeling curiously elated at the fact. " You can com- mand as you like." " You will probably do something stupid," said the Kris-Girl, " but still, it might possibly be better to have a man. . . . Dyaks are about the worst kind of savage they've got in Malaysia," She seemed to be thinking. 170 KRIS-GIRL " I can run you couldn't believe how fast," she said. " I always won the school races. But a Dyak could run faster I suppose." She looked behind her through the hot, heavy- scented dusk. Mrs. Ash was out of sight ; we had just entered on a level bit of pathway, with a turn in it. " What do you think ? " she said. She lifted her skirt over her neat silk ankles, held it with one hand, and suddenly darted off in a run as swift and easy as the flight of a bird. Like a bird, she wheeled in her flight, and came back. " Against a Dyak, Miss Raye," I said calmly, " that pretty turn of speed would be about as much use as a sparrow's against a sparrow hawk. Please, won't you tell me why you suppose the Dyak we saw to-day is likely to annoy you 1 There's nothing simpler than to give warning to the police." " He isn't," said Cristina, simply. " I am likely to annoy him, very much indeed. I want to be among the yellow alamandas in the court- yard to-night, when he comes along but I shan't let him see me if I can help it and after .... That remains to be seen. I told you that I thought it, and he, were connected." " Do you mean the Dyak and the danger of fire ? " I asked, suddenly enlightened. Cristina nodded. " Well, I can't " " No, of course not. That doesn't alter it. I THE DANGEROUS TOWN 171 don't know that I could tell you just why yet. I keep asking myself ' Who benefits if the town is destroyed ? ' and the answer isn't quite, quite clear. If it was, I should know what to do. But I may tell you " "Imagine the waste. Disgusting, I call it. And they say the Dutch are a thrifty people." Mrs. Ash's voice suddenly sounded just over our shoulders I dare say we had been walking more slowly than we knew. " \Vhat waste, dear Ashie ? " asked Cristina. " They say there's four thousand tons in each of them. If you don't call that waste, why, you won't call anything. And I dare say it might set light to something. Carelessness like that when people at home are paying such a price by the gallon " I am sure Cristina did not know it but in her excitement she actually pinched my arm, on which her hand was resting. Still, her voice was very calm. " It was the old lady who said so ? " " No. The young married one. She looked so worried that I watched to see what the matter was. And when her husband came in, she gave a sort of jump, and said in English because everyone was talking English just then ' Have they stopped the running of the oil ? ' And he answered her in Dutch, with a frown. They are bad tempered, these foreigners. And wasteful. Letting tanks with four thousand tons in thein 172 KRIS-GIRL if the place was English, there'd be none of this nonsense." She turned off the tap of her speech, and marched silently back to the ship. I don't know what she saw, as she looked straight ahead of her into the dark of the hot, low sky. Probably a stone-paved London street, bright with frost ; snow like sugar icing piled upon the roof-tops ; people in furs and ulsters hurrying by. . . . What I saw was something less pleasing a vision of great oil- tanks exploding all round us like volcanoes, of a street running into one single blaze of twelve thousand coolies rushing about like stampeded beasts in a prairie re ... of the jungle, and the alligators, and the ourang-outangs, and the Dyaks, behind us ; the sea covered with flaming oil, before. When we got back to the boat, Cristina beckoned me into the empty dining-saloon, and stood there in the garish glitter of the electric light, her face paler than usual, her eyes gleaming like the blue sparks of a dynamo. " Have you learned enough Malay to follow a conversation ? " she asked. " Yes," I said. I am a good linguist, and the pigeon-Malay of these seas is about the easiest language in the world. I was by this time fairly fluent in Malay, though my Dutch was nothing to boast of. "Put on khaki," said the Kris-Girl, "it's less easily seen at night. And go to that house with the yellow alamanda, and stay near it for a good THE DANGEROUS TOWN 173 while, and see if the Dyak comes. If he does, try and hear anything he says to anyone. Try your best, Mr. Garden. You don't know how much may depend on it." " I've some idea," I said. " I'll take a re- volver, though I suppose it's breaking at least half a dozen Dutch laws to do so. And if he seems to be up to any nonsense, I'll use it. Still I can't see what connection this love-making business has with the attempts on the oil receivers. That might be the work of a lunatic or a Malay who wants to revenge some insult ; they're quite capable of it." " It might, but it just isn't," said Cristina. The violent electric light shone full on her face ; she was as pale as a pearl, but whether through excitement, or mere weariness, I could not tell. It struck me hard just then that I had not the right to ask not the right to know not any right to shield her, however weary or anxious she might be. Well I swallowed the hardness down, as one does, somehow. " Good-night," I said, perhaps a little shortly. There was so much I could not say. ... She remained in the empty saloon ; she did not sit down. I looked back as I went to my cabin to change, and saw her, with her head bent, standing very still. I could not make the re- motest guess as to what she might be thinking of. I did not particularly fancy the job on which I 174 KRIS-GIRL was engaged, but still, it was clear to me that no suspicion or even guess, concerning the danger that threatened the town, ought to be neglected. It was useless, I knew, to say anything to the Dutch authorities. Neither the Kris-Girl nor I had the shadow of proof to offer, and the mind of the Hollander moves slowly. We should only have been told to mind our own business per- haps to stop on the ship. The night was purple-dark, with nd light but starlight. The town was a blaze of electric lamps, but down the road, and nearing the villas, there were many lakes of black shadow. In one of these, the house of the yellow alamandas stood. I thought everyone must be out, for there seemed to be no lights about the place, except a sort of nightlight in one upper room. The villa ran round three sides of a square ; it had two stories, the upper supported by white stone pillars. Wide verandahs extended completely round both stories, and there was a fine staircase of some whitish stone. By the glimmer of the night-lamp, I saw something that startled me a little an iron grille across one end of the upper verandah, tightly shut. It had no doubt been placed there originally to protect some room where valuables were kept, but it was now un- doubtedly being used as a means of imprison- ment, for the one lighted room was within, and I could see a white figure moving. So the story about the jealous old husband was true ! THE DANGEROUS TOWN 175 " A beastly dangerous sort of thing to do," I thought. " There's no way of getting in or out of that end verandah except through the gate. . . . What if there were a fire ? " On that my heart gave a jump, and some chain of separate links suddenly snapped itself together in my mind. " Of course," I all but cried out. " He would a Dyak they'd dare anything. With an oil- tank alight in the town, the old husband would fly to unlock the gate. And she'd be let out in the middle of the night, in a wild confusion, with no one on the look-out. And he wouldn't spirit her off a prisoner in the steamer after all." Here I checked, feeling as if a cold drop of water had slipped down my spine. " But the steamer leaves at daylight to- morrow," I thought. The inference was so obvious that I felt for the butt of the revolver I had put into a handy pocket. " No, he doesn't with Cristina in the dashed town," I said to myself. I had been standing some way from the villa, in the shade. Now I began to walk quietly round to the back, for I judged that the room with the light had an open- ing on the side of the forest, and that this was the likeliest place to flush my quarry. Providentially, there was a clump of orna- mental crotons in the right place. I got into them, and looked about me. The bedroom had a window to the back, a window wreathed in yellow 176 KRIS-GIRL alamanda. I could see that, for the light seemed to have been turned up a little. I settled down for a long wait, wishing to heaven I could smoke. As it happened, my wait was not two minutes. I was scarcely well settled among the bushes, when the light went up a little more, and a slim figure in a very loose, transparent muslin robe, came to the window in the wall, and looked down. " By Jove ! " I said to myself, just stopping a whistle in time. She was half-caste undoubtedly I should have said a bit more but she was pretty. Yes, I should think so. A dark, slender, slip of a thing, with black hair falling straight as a cloak of satin to somewhere about her knees ; a figure that seemed to vibrate like a flower-stalk as she stood ; eyes that even in the dim lamp-light, even at twenty feet height, shone warm and starry. And the Dyak chief thought her worth burning down a city for, did he ? Well, from a mere man's point of view, he did not seem so very far wrong. She stood leaning far out among the alamandas for the great golden flowers were trained about the back of her room as well as the front and I saw that she was watching. In about a minute more, the Dyak stood below. I had not heard him come, I had not even seen his approach. He seemed to have sprung up out of the earth ; and I realised, with unpleasant distinctness, that his movements and bushcraft, compared to mine, were as the progress of a weasel matched with THE DANGEROUS TOWN 177 that of a working bullock. I stiffened myself in the effort to keep still and unseen. But the Dyak was speaking. " Red Flower," he said softly, " is he out ? " " Hush, he is in, pretending to sleep down below," was her reply. " Good," said the copper statue in the twilight. " To-morrow, you and I, with my tribe, will be far away in the jungle, and after to-morrow it will be my brown tree-house for you, instead of this old monkey's home." The girl leaned far out over the window-sill. Her hair fell a good yard or two down the wall. " Be careful," she said, and I could see that she was breathing very quickly. " Be careful of yourself." " I walk in the darkness like the snake, and in the forest I go like the wild monkey of the woods," replied the Dyak. " There is no fear for me." I looked up again at the girl she was so won- derfully pretty, that it was an inevitable thing to do, but I gave her only one glance, of that I am sure. Still when I turned my eyes back to the Dyak, he was not there. He had vanished again. The girl, with a gesture of farewell that would have immortalised any sculptor who could have fixed it in marble, seemed to sink back among the alamandas, and the light went down. In two seconds more, I was running hard for the front of the house. I dare say I made a noise. I did not care, for I remembered that I had seen a bicycle 12 178 KRIS-GIRL leaning up against the well curb in the courtyard whose, I neither knew nor cared and if my guess was right, it lay with that bicycle and myself to save the town. I was horribly out of practice ; I hopped and hopped, trying to get on, like some absurd, gigantic frog. But when I got my feet on the pedals, they remembered that I had held three championships, in eighteen hundred and some- thing, and the wheels went round to some purpose. Ghost-white in the electric glare of the town, I saw the sinister forms of the huge oil-tanks, when I swung round the bend of the road. Surely they were well-lighted, well-watched, too, in such a place as this ? And yet there had been two interrupted attempts already : one before we came, of what nature I did not know, the other only a single night past for the cutting of the oil-pipe could have been nothing else. After see- ing the Dyak appear and vanish as he did, I wondered less at the inability of the watchmen to catch him. Moreover, the jungle came very close up behind the tanks. He might be there now. He might be there now. The downward stroke of the pedals beat it out, along the wide, hard road. I saw the steamer lying by the quay ; Cristina's face leapt up before me. I bent over the handle-bar, and the night wind, drenched with perfume, screamed in my face, and the pedals, speeding up, declared " He is there now. He is there now." Round the corner, behind the range of tanks, I swung with such a curve that the bicycle skidded violently, and staggered like a drunken thing for a hundred yards or more. As soon as I could stop it, I leapt off. It dropped on the road with a clang. The thing was happening as I came. I had not time to think, not time to do anything but act. Cristina was running among the gigantic shadows of the tanks, where the glaring arc-lights made a maze of black and white upon the ground. She was running in and out, doubling like a hunted hare, faster than she had run that evening on the path outside the villas. I had never seen any woman thing run like it. And behind her, catch- ing her up as a sparrow-hawk catches up a sparrow, ran the Dyak. One cry I heard from Cristina as I rushed to- wards her. " Put it out ! Forty-nine ! " I thank Heaven to this day that I had the sense to understand, and the determination to leave her yes, even to leave her to the Dyak. Forty-nine was one tank further on. I ran to it for my life, and for the lives of all Balik Papan. In the shadow underneath' the great tank a spark was creeping . . . creeping. There is nothing easier in the world than to put out a fuse, even when it is very close indeed to the plug of dynamite. It only needs a sharp knife or a good set of teeth. I hadn't the one, but I had the other. I bit it off, in time. 180 KRIS-GIRL Then but it was really good luck more thaft anything else that caused me to wing the Dyak in one leg. I might have shot him dead, or missed him. One would have been dangerous, in the absence of evidence, the other well, it did not happen. At the sound of the shot, an Amboynese soldier in full uniform came trotting up, rifle over his shoulder. Of course he arrested Cristina and me ; and of course there was turning out of guards, and extracting of sleepy officials from their beds, and red tape, and trouble all round. You would have thought we had been trying to burn down the town, instead of trying to save it at the risk of our lives, if you had been there. But after a while they got on to the facts, aided by the remains of the fuse, and then Well, then they said we had better get on to the steamer and go away as quick as we could ; Balik Papan was no place for tourists. I remem- ber a certain tall, pink, fat official in pyjamas escorted us down to the ship, yawning terribly as he went, and told us, perfunctorily, that he was obliged to us. I did not think he looked it. The night watchman on the gangway was openly curious ; he seemed to think we were both under arrest for some anarchistic crime. He looked disappointed when the pyjama'd functionary and his attendant soldiers went away, without leaving any suggestions as to handcuffs. They had tied the Dyak up promptly, with no 181 particular consideration for his broken leg, before they went into our case at all, so we had the satisfaction of knowing that he was likely to get his deserts. He did, at the mouth of a dozen rifles, two days later. " Miss Kris-Girl/' I said, as we separated to go to our cabins, " why did you not play fair ? " " Where would you and the town have been if I had ? " was her illogical answer. " It needed somebody at both^ends. I meant to ask you to help me, all along ; but you were troublesome, so I had to " " Deceive." " Hard words break no bones," she said coolly. " Call it anything you like. I knew it would take two to catch that Dyak, and it did as a matter of fact, he caught me stalking him, and was going to make sure I shouldn't tell, when you came up. I hadn't even time to stop the fuse he went for me with his kris, and I could only run. . . . You were right, but not as right as you thought ; I did hold my own against him, for just a little bit, because I was so very, very frightened. Then he began to catch me up, and then if you had not come ' I think she saw what was in my face, for she turned into her cabin quickly. And I, seeing that she had no wish to hear me, went away to mine. CHAPTER V ABOUT A PINK BEAST THE day was one of pure silver, such as one only sees in these still waters of Malaysia. The sky, shaded by a light wash of cloud, was silver, the silver-glass sea met it without a break. Back from the shearing bow of the steamer ran two blue folds of water ; everything else was of the one silver hue, save for sharp pen-scratches of black made by the flying-fish as they struck and skimmed, low down on the waveless glass. It was early in the day ; few passengers were about, and no land in sight. A sky, a place, an hour, of perfect peace. Sitting in my deck armchair, I smoked and looked out over the rail at nothing in particular. I do not know that I was thinking of anything in particular either, unless certain dim visions of Cannon Street on a November afternoon could be described as thoughts. They contrasted agree- ably with what I saw. Mrs. Ash's needles had been clicking away be- hind me for so long that I had almost ceased to 182 ABOUT A PINK BEAST 183 hear the sound ; I think I must have been near to dozing, there on the high promenade deck of the Dutch steamer, with the parted seas sounding like shaken silk on the bow, and the Malayan passengers singing monotonously, somewhere for- ward. . . . " Did you get your gum ? " The question, to my sleepy perception, came through the air like a shot. I sat up, and swung round. " What gum ? " I asked, defensively, scenting a meaning that I did not care for. " Gum dammit, or whatever its impious name is ? " replied the old lady, clicking faster than ever, but lifting her eyes off her work to fix them on me. It came into my head just then, irrelevantly and absurdly, that she must surely sleep in that preposterous black bonnet of 1880, with the three upright feathers, and the tinkling danglements of jet. I could not recollect that I had ever seen her without it. Did the late Mr. Ash strange thought that there must once have been an Ash male ! wake up in the silent watches of the night, to see . . . I awoke to the fact that she was waiting. "Oh, gum damar," I replied. " I didn't want any." " Didn't you ? " replied Mrs. Ash. " Thought so. Hump ! " The small sharp snort that she emitted was not 184 KRIS-GIRL exactly rude, but, considered as a criticism of my character and aims in general, it was morti- fying. " My dear Mrs. Ash," I said, drawing my chair back to hers, " one may be engaged in com- mercial negotiations about a particular product especially one that has lately become so impor- tant as gum damar without " " One may," she said, suddenly biting off a woollen thread in a way that I cannot tell how seemed to throw doubt on the whole of my statement. I felt myself becoming rather hot. " But I am so engaged," I said. " I have been getting facts of the kind I want all through. It's really important. Haven't you heard that the Army Flying Corps " " No," cut in Mrs. Ash. She put down the piece of web she was weaving, took up another portion, and, stabbing in a pair of fresh needles, seemed to dismiss the last remark. " Is Puhi Panas the centre of the trade ? " she snipped out, working busily. " Why I think Macassar is rather but Puhi Panas is worth seeing, when one's there*." "Worth seeing when one's there," repeated Mrs. Ash. She did not say in so many words that Pulu Panas was some eighteen hundred miles from the roadsteads of Macassar, but the inference was clear. Now, in spite of the fact that the Kris-Girl's ABOUT A PINK BEAST 185 chaperon was thus proving herself hostile, or at least aggressive, I did not dislike the old lady. Nor did I think that she actually disliked me. So I threw away the last third of my cigar, pulled my chair closer to the flashing needles, and asked plainly, as became a plain man " Why don't you want me in your party ? " But Mrs. Ash was not to be defeated by the use of her own sharp-shooting methods. She replied with perfect coolness, answering my thoughts instead of my words, " Because knit two, purl three you're too old. And because impossibilities are impossible anyhow. Seven, eight, nine, ten. And one." I did not agree with the first half of her remark, and I did not like the second. I said so, avoid- ing the main point at issue as skilfully as I could. " Three years we've been at it," was the old lady's reply. "Steamers, trains, hotels. Hotels, trains, steamers. Waterfalls, castles, forts, is- lands, native dances, native kings all of 'em dirty customs of the countries, every one of 'em nasty. And men. White men, half-white, Euro- peans, colonials, German, Dutch, God knows what. All of them after her, and a lot of them after what she's got. She doesn't want 'em. c Keep 'em off, Ashie, sweep 'em out/ she says to me. And I do. I'm paid for it." " How, exactly," I said, looking the old lady straight in the face, "do you propose to keep me off?" 186 KRIS-GIRL " Purl three, knit two," said Mrs. Ash. "Same as all the rest of 'em. By telling you it's no good. And one, two, three." " What do they do then ? " I asked. " Some of them are fools enough to go on." The needles stabbed at me viciously, withdrawing themselves just in time, at the end of every stroke. I said nothing, and sat still. As a business man, I have found it an excellent plan, when you want to make the other fellow talk. Mrs. Ash was no exception. After a flourish with the needles that would certainly have been a fantasia if executed on the piano, she laid the work on her lap, looked all round, and then said cautiously " I'll tell you what. It won't be anyone. But it would be better you than Schintz." " Schintz ? " I said. I had been away from the Kris-Girl and her guardian for a while, trying to ... well, no matter . . . let us say, trying to work out the gum damar problem. And having failed in ... no matter what ... I had joined their wanderings once more, only twenty-four hours ago. Therefore I had not heard of Schintz. " He's a Dutch-German-Austrian, and the King of Pulu Panas. It's outside Dutch possessions, and he really owns it," explained Mrs. Ash. " As for what Cristina thinks of him, it's one, two, three, four never easy to say. But I think, of all the foreigners I ever saw, he's and eight, nine ABOUT A PINK BEAST 187 ten the foreignest. That's he at the other side of the deck," she explained with Victorian punc- tiliousness of grammar. I looked, and behold, it was the Beast. I had called him that to myself, when I saw him in the smoking-room, the night before. He had sat there for half an hour or so, smoked a long Borneo cigar spitting ^unpleasantly the while and gone out without addressing anyone. In the intervals of listening to the pleasant babble of the third officer, I had looked at him, and decided that he was a beast a bounding beast. He had such flaxen hair, and it was parted in such a clipped oily way. And his face was pinkish and whitish. Moreover, his moustache was trained above his thick red lips into a Kaiser Wilhelm brush a thing I hate. And he half shut his eyes, and looked under the lids, with his chin up. He had fat legs, and thinnish arms, a combination that tells of self-indulgence. Worst of all, he had beautiful hands, pinky-white, like his face, and flourished them as he smoked. His feet were small and very flat. I never took such a dislike to any man in my life. And there he was on deck, in a long chair, with his chin tilted up, looking at me under his eyelids. The captain was sitting near him, and talking to him with an emphasis and interest that marked him out at once as the " star passenger" of the trip. " King " of Pulu Panas, was he ? No doubt he gave and took more cargo than anyone 188 KRIS-GIRL in the archipelago. Well, if he were Emperor of Malaysia, I disliked him none the less. " Has that pink beast been paying attentions to Miss Raye ? " I asked. The enchanted peace and beauty of the morning had gone all in a breath ; it was simply a greyish shiny day, with fish jumping about. . . . Mrs. Ash nodded her three plumes in the direc- tion of the main companion. " Look/' she said. Cristina had come up the broad stairway, and was making for her chair. She wore something thin and pink, as crisp as a new flower, and she had little white shoes with ivory buckles. Schintz had seen her coming before I did ; he got out her chair in two seconds, pushed it forward, and deftly lifted those small feet on to the rest as she sat down. Then he tucked a cushion at her back, deliberately, looking at her under his fat eyelids. Cristina just as deliberately pulled the cushion out, and dropped it on the deck. " It's too hot," she said. I went over and joined the two. Cristina in- troduced me to Heir Schintz, and seemed to pass him over to my charge. Schintz looked for a Chair, drew it up unnecessarily close to Cristina's, and began to talk to her in perfect English. He turned his back on me, in doing so, with the ut- most nonchalance. I stuck to my guns, and talked to her too. She answered both of us politely, and seemed to see nothing odd in the situation. Schintz kept hia ABOUT A PINK BEAST 189 back to me, and I talked over his shoulder. I would have gone on doing so all day. But the bell for breakfast rang, and released us. " Mr. Garden, how could you ? " asked Cris- tina in the alley-way. " It looked so'absurd." " Well, if you don't want to look absurd all the time, don't let Schintz hang about," I replied. " How can you be civil to such a bounder " " Foreigners aren't bounders ; they're different, that's all. And we've got to be civil to Mr. Schintz." " Why on earth ? " " Because Pulu Panas belongs to him, and he never lets anyone see the Buddhist ruins unless he likes. Hardly anyone ever goes there, it's not on the steamer line, but the ruins are really won- derful, only second to Boro Budur. It's a pity he is so crabby about it. It's his launch that will take us to the island, when we leave this ship at Wangi. You can't do anything at Pulu Panas without Mr. Schintz." " Is there a Mrs. Schintz ? " " Why no," said Cristina hesitatingly. I guessed at the usual Oriental household. "We were thinking of staying there," she added. " It's the only place." " Then I must be civil to Schintz," I said, " for I mean to be asked too." I was civil, though it cost me more of my self- respect than any man can afford to dispense with. JL did not fancy the idea of Cristina staying in the ISO KRIS-GIRL house of that pink beast, with only the old lady for protection. And I attained my end. Cris- tina skilfully turned the talk to the accommoda- tion on Pulu Panas one afternoon when we were drawing near the island, and expressed much dis- tress on hearing (what she knew very well already) that there was no hotel of any kind. She asked me where I was going to stay, and I said I did not know ; I might not stop at all. " Mr. Schintz has been so good as to ask us to stay," she said. A significant pause followed. Schintz deliberately examined his glassy nails. " But I am not sure that we can accept his in- vitation," she went on. " I dare say we shall go on to Thursday Island with you." Schintz appeared to come to a decision. " I should be happy to see Mr. Guardian too," he remarked, displaying the curves of his disgust- ing pinky-white hands. " My name is Garden," I corrected. " Really but my knowledge of your English tongue is, unfortunately, so imperfect," replied Schintz, with easy fluency. "I am much obliged by your invitation," I said. " I should like to see something of the Buddha Temple. It belongs to you, I under- stand ? " " The island belongs to me, and the ruins are included. The people also are my property." " But that is impossible ! " exclaimed Cristina. " Pardon me, not at all. When I acquired the ABOUT A PINK BEAST 191 island, a good many years ago, it was native owned. Subsequently Portugal took possession. The Portuguese are not opposed to a modified form of servitude serfage we will not call it slavery, for it is the name that smells in the nostrils of your English Puritans. For a consideration, I was allowed to retain the rights over the persons of the people that I had previously held. Without my permission, no one can leave Pulu Panas or enter it. What work I require on my plantations is performed by labourers permanently attached to the estates." "Slaves?" I asked politely. Schintz's reply was addressed to Cristina. " If you will take the binoculars," he said, " you can see the island, very far away from here. This afternoon we stop at Wangi, and there my launch will meet us to go to Pulu Panas." He touched her hand the one with the great Chinese ring on it as he gave her the glasses. " That is a strange ring," he said. " May I look at it ? " " I do not take it off," replied Cristina, and a sudden paleness crept like a thin white veil over her face. She let the hand drop to her side, and took the binoculars in the other. They began to talk about the island. " What do you think of it all ? " I asked cau- tiously. " I think I'm dreaming," answered Cristina. 192 KRIS-GIRL We were standing out of the moonlight, in the shadow of a horse-shoe archway that led to a walled garden with flowers and fountains in it. There was a verandah just above us, and it had a wonderful screen of carved and pierced marble all down the open part beautiful to look at, in that tropic full moon, but calculated to rouse thoughts of invisible listeners. " To think that a Schintz should own all this ! " she whispered. The scent of orange-trees, fruiting and flowering, the cloying sweetness of moon-white trumpet flower and pawpaw, came through the open archway of the garden. From the outer world across the wide central courtyard, stole the unforgettable odour of Malaysia dust, sandalwood, spice, and fish. A drum began to beat down in the harbour to announce the depar- ture of a sailing vessel ; it sounded like the hot throbbing of a fevered heart. The night was still and very warm. "Yes," I said. "He is owner in every sense of the word." I pointed to a slender Indonesian woman with a spangled sari over her head, slip- ping into the garden with a water- vase. " That woman wore chains the best part of last year. She had a child it is at the bottom of the harbour." " Why ? " asked Cristina, her face white even in the shadow of the archway. - " Better not ask an ugly story," I said. " I heard it in the village. I've heard a good many things." ABOUT A PINK BEAST 193 " I've guessed a good many," she said. A leaf rustled somewhere. We stopped, and looked about us. " All to-day," I said presently, " I've had no chance of speaking to you. That wasn't acci- dental. Kris-Girl, I don't like this place, and I wish we had never come." " I don't like it but I don't wish that," she said. I drew her a little forward into the moonlight, and looked closely at her small pale face, with the glittering blue eyes. There was something in it that I knew. " Again, Kris-Girl ? " I said, stepping back into the shade. She nodded. " What is it this time ? " I asked. Before answering, she looked up at the screen of carved marble. It was very close. " Come into the garden ; the moonlight is better than this," she said. ..." Maybe that screen was put up just because people were likely to hide in there out of the moon and talk . . ." The garden did not seem to be overlooked but in these places you never know. Anyhow, we were out of earshot, standing there by the great cool bowl of the fountain, where the stephanotis spread a milky way of scented stars along the marble curb, and orchids, pale gold and dim purple in the moonlight, dropped from the mango trees. " I want to know," said Cristina, " where, and to whom, he takes meat." 13 194 ^KRIS-GIRL " Does he take meat ? and why should he not ? " I asked perplexedly. As usual, I found her rapid mind hard to follow. " Every second night/' she said, " he takes it in a basket. I saw him once, and then I watched those marble screens are useful in some ways. The moon has been on the wane since we came ; he waits a little later every time he goes, so that he can be sure of that dead sort of dark that comes before moonrise. Once in two nights and not more than twenty minutes' walk away. When he comes back, the basket is empty." " Why didn't you try and follow him not that I think you ought," I asked. " If there's any- thing odd about it though I can't see there is that would be the best way. Let me do it for you ; it wouldn't be the first time, would it ? " The Kris-Girl laughed a little. " One might as well try to follow a Red Indian," she said. "It's well to know when you're out- classed. He can hear you breathe fifty yards away hear you think guess what you're going to do before you know yourself. . . . He doesn't know I have seen him, but that's because I never dared to move away from the marble screen." " Well, what do you propose to do ? " " Keep looking out, and so must you. I don't like that meat. And . . . it wasn't good meat. It smelt. No, I don't know anything at all, or suspect anything. But I feel something." " How am I to tell you if I hear anything that ABOUT A PINK BEAST 195 would interest you ? " I asked. " It seems as if we could never get a word together. I don't know how we have managed this." " Oh, I'm in bed and asleep," she replied calmly, " and you've gone for a walk to the kampong. But it won't do to stay long. As to getting notes carried, or anything of that sort, it may not be easy. I wish you knew the Morse code ; I learnt it years ago. It's the most useful thing a traveller can know, after languages." " But I do," I said eagerly. " My greatest chum is a wireless engineer, and he taught me. I'm not rapid, but I can send fairly, and take pretty well." " Can you read like this ? " she asked, tap- ping noiselessly with her slight fingers on the marble basin. " Yes. . . . You are saying ' I must go back to my room.' ' "Eight," said the Kris-Girl. "And I must. Just one word. We have to stay here till the next Dutch boat calls at Wangi, and that won't be for ten days. I suppose you've noticed that that " " I should think so the Pink Beast ! It's like his confounded hide." " Well, if you see me polite, don't be as- tonished. It's for a purpose." " I wish to God you were out of it," I said. " If one had understood but who could guess at such a mediaeval arrangement of a place, in the twentieth century ? " 196 KRIS-GIRL " It's impossible if one hadn't seen it." " Everything's possible east of Suez and everything else, east of Malacca Straits, I know," she said reminiscently. " The things poor Ashie has been through ! There'll be somebody or other here in a minute ; I feel it in my bones. Good-night." She fled up the archway like a night-moth on the wing ; I was left alone with the dripping fountain and the moon. Someone did come ; Schintz himself, padding softly on the marble I think he wore rubber shoes. He looked at me, and passed on into the house without a word. I saw that he carried an empty basket in his hand. Next day we were occupied with the antiquities of Pulu Panas. It had rained punctually from one o'clock till six, wet-season fashion, for several days after our arrival. But now the weather improved, and Pulu Panas became a place of wonder and of jbeauty. It was a large island, some thirty miles in cir- cumference. The greater part of it we never saw ; I think there were secrets about the Schintz plantations and their manner of working, not meant for visitors to know. But the blue-velvet mountains, the deep palm forests, the inlets and fiords starred with plumy islets, and edged with china-white coral sand, made a setting of supreme loveliness to Schintz's palatial home, which had ABOUT A PINK BEAST 197 been built mostly in the Indian style, and was even more gorgeous than the other houses of wealthy Malayan planters, that I had seen in my wanderings up and down. Schintz, in his own way, was hospitable : he fed us royally, and provided excellent wines ; he had horses for us to ride, a motor, a fine oil-launch for sea trips, and a retinue of trained Javanese performers, male and female, ready to dance and sing for our amusement at a moment's notice. All the same, I could see that he loved me not at all, and that he loved the little Kris-Girl if such a word describes the feelings of such a man much more than was . . . than was . . . Much more than was safe. The phrase cut itself cleanly out in my mind, as I stood waiting for Cristina and Mrs. Ash to start on a trip to the Buddha ruins. Why was it not safe ? The answer came, sharp and plain. Because this man owned the island and all that was on it, body and soul ; and if Cristina rejected his advances as she un- doubtedly would why, there would be only myself to stand between her and plain mediaeval capture or imprisonment. " I wish to God the steamer was due," was the result of my meditations. And then the women came out, and Schintz spun up the drive in his motor-car, and we started for the Buddha Temple. I am not going to talk about the ruins of Pulu Panas, though they are very wonderful, and ought 198 KRIS-GIRL to be better known. The truth is, that I hardly took in anything of the amazing panorama of terraced sculptures, smiling, squat-legged gods, rock walls carved out into heavy, complicated groups of figures and animals. It was the man- oeuvres of Schintz that chiefly occupied my attention. He attached himself to Cristina, and stayed beside her all the afternoon. Not a word could I slip in. Mrs. Ash, secretly hostile to " eights " as ever, and myself, were left to follow side by side, almost in silence. I thought the old lady did not like the way that things were going, but it was clear she was far from realising the actual dangers of the situation, and I had no wish whatever to enlighten her. The yellow sun of afternoon climbed up the hill of sculptured stone, waking to momentary life the impassive faces of Buddha images, and throw- ing out in a relief that was almost startling, the spirited groups of battles, triumphs, funerals. Close on it followed the rising flood of dusk. From the unbroken jungle that rose behind the hill of ruins, black flying-foxes began to flit through the golden twilight, like evil thoughts invading a pious soul. It was surely time to go home. But Cristina and Schintz still lingered, away there on the top of the hill, where the ruined central shrine was drinking up the last drops of day. " Cristina ! " called the chaperon, shrilly and with determination. She had to call more than ABOUT A PINK BEAST 199 once before they came ; but once down the hill, Schintz hurried us all into the motor, and took the driving wheel without a word. His pinky features showed no emotion of any kind, and he talked as usual. Nevertheless, I caught a look just one under those half-dropped eyelids, that gave the lie to every calm word, every quiet move- ment he made. If ever a man had self-control when he chose to have it that man was assuredly the Pink Beast. Things were becoming strenuous, for a plain business man like myself. And meeting that look, I was glad to remember that I had a Browning pistol in my luggage. I resolved to load it that night. Schintz, with his usual demoniac cleverness, contrived by one device and another to keep Cristina and myself from speech together during the evening. But before she went up the marble stairs with Mrs. Ash to her room, the Kris-Girl contrived to give me the sign I wanted. Under the very eyes of Schintz, sitting upon a great gilt settee beside him, she dropped one hand half under her skirt, and beat out a few words long, short, long, short, in the invaluable Morse code. " He proposed I refused look out." When I went up to my room, I remembered that Schintz had not, for one moment, been absent from his guests since dark. . . . Was he going out that night with his mysterious basket ? Somehow, I wanted to know. I leaned out of 200 KRIS-GIRL my window, and watched, till I was tired of watch- ing. But Schintz remained in the house. The prisoner, whoever he was, went hungry. Every morning som party of pleasure was pro- posed. On the next day it was an excursion by launch to the great coral reef that extended out to sea below the house. This reef was noted for its splendid shells ; the house and garden were decorated with many fine specimens gathered at low tide immense " balers " with tessellated curves and whorls, and orange-porcelain lips ; Venus's combs, with long scarlet and yellow teeth ; pearl-lined "snail" shells as large as one's head ; nautilus, gigantic clam I cannot begin to name the different kinds. For once, Mrs. Ash was pleased with the day's programme, and ex- hibited interest. She said she could put her shells in a cabinet, and save at least five pounds that would otherwise be spent on china ornaments. . . . The launch made a long curve out, and then ran back inside the reef, bringing us fairly close to the house again. We could have walked out much more quickly from the terrace below the garden, but a coral reef is a nasty thing to walk on. It was pleasanter to work slowly along the deep-water channels in the comfortable boat, landing now and then on a prickly patch of coral to secure the coveted treasure. The sun climbed high and grew hotter and hotter as we pursued our game ; the launch's deck was covered with the spoil, 201 " Oh, I am hot ! " sighed Cristina by and by, drawing up her arm from an aquamarine-coloured pool, out of which she had just captured a brown shell, with a blue and green " eye." Schintz, pinker than ever in the roasting sun, smiled at her in a forgiving sort of way. " I have thought of your comfort," he said. He nodded to the Malayan launch-driver, and the native produced a parcel from the cabin. Un- doing it, Schintz handed to Cristina two ladies' bathing suits, beautifully made, of black and of light green silk. With them were tied up two silk caps, two pairs of bathin shoes, and two towels. " In my house," he said, a little grandilo- quently, " there is always everything that a guest can desire. If you wish to enjoy the refreshing water there is a little way off a shallow with a sand beach ; there ladies can bathe in safety from any shark, and with no danger of being drowned." " You are most kind," said Cristina gravely. She told me afterwards, that the bathing dresses had made her suspicious, but for the moment she could not tell of what, or why. " Mrs. Ash and myself will be very glad to have a dip." " You need not fear that you will be observed," went on Schintz in his formal, too-good English, " for this reason, that I and Mr. Garden will also bathe, but at some considerable distance away." "I'm n