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The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom




(1888)
Country of origin: Australia Australia
Available texts by the same author here Dokument


XXI. Hafid Finds His Bride.

   WITHOUT doubt, General Flag-Croucher was the biggest personage who had yet set military heels upon the coast of New Guinea.
   He was not an explorer, although he had once upon a time tried to organize an expedition in England, the purpose of which was to take possession of the land something after the style of William at Hastings, the noble General to be William the Conqueror, of course. The project had fallen through, as a great many of the General's projects fell to pieces, from lack of the one thing needful--cash.
   The General felt that he was born to be a leader of men; he was himself a man of parts and inches. Having served all nations and escaped from many dangers--decorated at different courts, police and otherwise, he looked upon the world as his oyster, a very much alive oyster, which his private necessities made him resolve at all hazards to open as energetically as possible. He did not know anything about either geology, botany, or those little points of learning which an explorer requires to enable him to traverse a new country, but as he emphatically remarked, "Damn it, sir!--a soldier, and a man who has served under one hundred and eighty-five flags, surely don't want knowledge to guide a body of men through the country of an enemy; it's courage, sir!--courage does it, and I flatter myself I have that."
   He did flatter himself, very much at most times, when he had the chance, this gallant general.
   This was the first spectacle which greeted the eyes of Bowman and Danby after they had anchored at Port Moresby, and been rowed ashore;--a tall, gaunt, high-cheekboned, moustached figure, with small blue-grey eyes, gleaming wildly under a much battered pulp helmet; he stood in position number one, with feet advanced and leaning on his staff, as a leader of armies might appear when reviewing his troops. He was not very well dressed, but then no one dressed much at Moresby except the Governor and his limited staff; the General's costume consisted of a pair of muchpatched breeches, a stained red sash, into which he had stuck an old rusted revolver, a flannel-shirt originally white, now grey from use and lack of soap--the native washer had declined to trust the hero any longer, and he had too much dignity to do his own washing. An old yellow silk jacket completed the outer man. This costume the General had adopted on leaving Brisbane some few months before, and not at present employing a servant, he wisely did not encumber himself with more luggage than he could carry easily, for in hot countries an extra shirt even becomes cumbersome, and the General did not like to be encumbered, so he did not carry an extra shirt.
   The Thunder had some of the varied experience of the other vessels in crossing the stormy Gulf of Papua; but having the advantage of steam, had been able to steer a pretty straight course, luck serving the gallant old sea-dog of a skipper in better stead than knowledge.
   Poor Hafid found his peace at Murray Island; he had made no further effort to retain life after that disappointment at Darnley, but passed into the sleep of death as a lamp going out without oil, painlessly and quietly, with the steady decrease of light until the final flicker came before the flame expired.
   We have all watched the lamp grow dry and the flame diminish as the wick became charred; now we turn it up, gaining but a moment longer, while we read a few lines more,--so they tried to reanimate the soul that was passing out of that hope-dried heart, and thought when they saw the mirage of a smile that he was getting over it.
   The flame does not always leap up when it leaves that crusted wick--edge; but in light, as in life, there must always be a last moment when the ambient spirit lets go its grasp of the material.
   Hafid went out like the lamp, and had but an instant's re-lighting as the soul went out--that instant of illumination when the senses are supplanted by the outer influences, and revelation takes the place of instinct. To those about him it seemed only to be the stretching-out of arms towards the setting sun and distant palm-fringed strand, the dawn of a pallid flush behind the olive cheeks, and the opening of the mouth as the sigh went forth, while from the deep-set eyes a gleam shone out like a shaft of golden sunshine mingled with amber; then the head fell back on the seaman's jacket they had laid for a pillow, and the opalescent space above became dimly reflected in the glazing eyes.
   That instant had given to Hafid all his desires, the woman he loved and the mud-flats of the Ganges;--true, she herself may have forgotten his existence, and, while he held her girl-shape in his outspread arms, may have been toiling from the paddy fields of his successor and her master, dragging her weary load homewards, with the last of the other man's brood clinging to the prematurely withered breasts of this mindless slave.
   What mattered the reality, if the vision was radiant which those heaven-lighted eyes beheld? What mattered the pitiless march of time, if the spirit was young and ardent which that flying spirit caught in its passage and bore onwards in its close embrace?
   Perhaps, as the woman paused in her homeward walk to change the infant to the other pendulous breast, the hot yellow sun-shaft smote her in the wearied eyes and pierced her dazed brain with a stroke of memory that cast the shards of labour and affliction from her, renewing in that quicker pulse of her sluggish blood the throbs of a day gone by, when her heart beat fast and her shape was round and smooth as satin; perhaps on that shaft of sunlight her soul sped forth to join the other soul not far away.
   Who can tell how a life may be filled out in a second, or eternity accomplished in a glance, as she trudges onward with her load? the dead body of Hafid is not more lifeless than that living burden by the Ganges. Happy each that they can only see love in his eternal youth.
   They buried Hafid before they left Murray Island;--he lies in the little mission graveyard under the shadow of the sago palms, where the sea--breezes rustle softly through the long grasses and pensile branches, and leaves droop down; where the sounds of the silky rustlings are blent with the bubbling of the wavelets as they roll gently amongst the lovely shells.
   Here, at this island, they were entertained by the missionaries, this being one of the headquarters of the Society. Here they found the natives orderly and docile, their savage traits seemingly subdued, and cleanliness with comfort pervading every hut and bungalow. It was a pleasant sight to see the genial influence of religion here. It was a good memory to carry away, the devotion and brotherhood of the self-exiled men and women who labour here so far from the friends they may never see again.
   A bundle of newspapers, more than four months old, was seized with avidity by the young teacher who had at present taken up his quarters at the house upon the hill. He had been forced to leave New Guinea, having caught the fever there; he was just getting over it, but very weak and listless.
   Here they saw amongst the black skins, the pallid features of a delicate woman, one of those gentle heroines, who move quietly in their onward path, braving danger which would appall many bold men; enduring troubles which might well break down the strongest mind. She was wasted almost to a shadow by repeated attacks of the malaria; she seemed like one of those bloodless, but refined creations of Orchardson, with eyes and lips alike blanched with the debilitation of that soft but insidious breeze, yet she moved with languid grace to do her duty to the young teacher whose life she had saved, to the husband whose troubles she shared, and she felt the thousand anxieties which only a refined woman can endure amongst savages, even though they are so far reclaimed. Here she lived with none of her own sex of her own colour, with her children about her, bearing her fate as a daily cross.
   The white and dark children played and splashed about the clear waters, coral-protected from the sharks who swarmed outside. Both white and dark children swam with equal ease; they were equally shy at the sight of strangers as they were at home in the sea, and the curious part of it all was that the white children spoke the native language fluently and their mother-tongue with considerable difficulty.
   From Murray Island, with its memories, the Thunder ploughed across the briny furrows, and tossed and tumbled in a most fearful manner upon the storm-beaten ocean; there was nothing which could stand upright, or keep its place when the Thunder was on the roll. From captain to steward they fell about in utter disregard of all the laws of gravity, while the only object that appeared to retain its equilibrium was the solitary rat which they had fattened since leaving port.
   This rat nibbled calmly and gleaned a rich harvest, while the plates and cups rattled about him. He had lived upon the best, and grown out of all proportion for the size of the hole which formed his first retreat; now he was compelled to hide in out-of-the-way corners, and dodge the knives and forks which Danby shied at him as they sat opposite one another--the rat clinging to the floor, while Danby clutched at the table. Sometimes the rat, in its endeavours to evade the missile, lost its hold and slid for a yard or two, but not far before recovering its balance. The rat seemed to be the best-fed sailor on board.
   The captain called his vessel the "Hummer," as a term of endearment. He always used this pet name when she spun extra furiously round, or as he recovered himself after one of her most forcible thuds; at such moments he would pass his hands over his matted locks to feel if the skull was not fractured, then clearing the mist from his eyes, as he sat upon the floor and held on to the table-leg, "Aint she a little hummer?"
   The Thunder did not always go as her captain wished her to go, she did not often obey her propeller, either; but she always went, if not in an orthodox way, in a manner peculiarly all her own.
   Through the Papuan Gulf she rocked, upsetting all ideas of propriety as regards the progress of screwguided craft; indeed, upsetting all which could be upset in the material, as well as ideal laws of order. She appeared to have such a contempt for waves, that she could in no other manner express it so well as sitting upon them, and as she was by build a heavy sitter, when she sat down the wave was generally squashed; also, as a rule, when she chose to sit, every object within or upon her had to leap.
   One, two, THREE! that is how the little hummer asserted her position and the inferiority of the advancing wave--one, a slight premonitory touch; two, a decided thud, and three, the total collapse of convulsed nature.
   Number three was a clash like the colliding of two trains, or the chance meeting of rival stars; but the Thunder seemed to be the least conscious of the accident, for next moment she rose as easily to repeat the motion of contempt, as a ball-room belle might rise to her twentieth invitation. In one sense she strongly resembled the lady in question, inasmuch as when not sitting she was the rest of her time waltzing.
   Many were the ghastly legends told of her aquatic feats, the fearful havoc she had made in former trips amongst the property and persons of those who had entrusted their fates to her tender mercies; dark hints of her diabolic powers were not wanting, how she had encountered and overcome difficulties in the form of sandbanks and rocks, which would have wrecked the strongest-built ironclads. Gaps were pointed out even in the great barrier reef as the traces of spots she had butted against and broken through; these might be sailors yarns, of course, and slightly exaggerated truth, yet a general belief prevailed on board from the humble Sudy boy to the Irish mate, that while her present Ajax-looking skipper controlled--or rather yielded to her whims, and stuck faithful to her caprices, wreckage was an impossibility; the reef might be wrecked, but the Thunder never, and all things considered it consoled those aboard for the hourly fractures received.
   Through the storm and the gulf they lived, and after three long days and nights of bodily and mental anguish, sighted the lofty mountains of New Guinea.
   It was early morning when from the mellow haze the vast proportions upheaved, and the captain exclaimed joyously, yet in a tone of astonishment,--
   "New Guinea, by----"
   "You didn't expect it to be Africa, did you?" inquired the calm young Danby.
   "Where is it?" asked Bowman, getting up from his deck-pillow, yellow-faced and bilious-looking, and rubbing his heavy eyes with his dirty hands--no man could wash or eat, while the Thunder swept the main.
   "Over there, about ten miles off."
   "Which part do you think it is?" again inquired Bowman.
   "Well, it ought to be Moresby by the course and charts; but somehow I don't think it is," answered the captain doubtfully, and scratching his head.
   The old Malay at the wheel looked ahead steadily for a moment, and, as he had been to the coast before, they all looked towards him for instruction.
   "Mount Yule over there, sir!"
   "Good," cried the skipper, merrily, "she's done well. We are only sixty miles out of our course, and she's a little hummer."


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