The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife (51 page)

‘Strike, King!' translated Punnett. ‘It's got to be done, sir. Shove the spear into its heart, sir. Make a good show of it.'

Mr. Darby, with a sudden desperate effort of will, did what was demanded of him, and then in a paroxysm of loathing let go the spear. The point remained fixed between the corpse's ribs and the haft dropped to the ground. The Head Chief still held the cloak about the corpse, but the two attendant chiefs, who had supported it, stepped aside. For a moment the body stood alone, propped by the spear: then it swayed, fell out of the upheld cloak, and pitched forward headlong on its face. Then the Head Chief, still holding the cloak open, advanced on Mr. Darby, walked round him, and flung the cloak about him. Mr. Darby's flesh recoiled in horror, but he stood firm, while one of the attendant chiefs set a great head-dress of jewels and feathers on his head. A riot of shouting broke from the silent crowd that edged the arena. ‘Daabee!' they shouted. ‘Daabee Taan! Aboo Daabee Taan!'

It was a tremendous moment. The universal exultation infected Mr. Darby himself: his spirit rose to the greatness
that had been thrust upon him, and flinging aside the folds of the green cloak he freed his arms and stretched them to their full extent as if blessing his subjects. At that instant he savoured to the lees the glory and power of sovereignty.

The shouting died away: there was silence once more. The Head Chief made a sign to Mr. Darby. ‘Follow him, sir!' translated Punnett, and Mr. Darby followed him, himself followed by Punnett, to one of the two strawthatched huts. At the foot of the ladder the Head Chief stepped aside and motioned to Mr. Darby to ascend. He did so and Punnett followed him. Having reached the platform Mr. Darby stood and surveyed the scene. In the empty space below, another less impressive ceremony was taking place. Two attendant chiefs were bearing the poor dishonoured corpse to the other thatched hut, the hut which had been its home in life. They hoisted it, like a stiff beam, up the ladder, and dragged it inside. Next moment they emerged and a slow mist of smoke followed them. With bated breath the whole arena stood watching. The smoke suddenly increased, thickened, and the whole roof flowered suddenly into a great bloom of fire. It burned with fury: blazing sparks showered upwards from the flaming thatch like swarms of angry golden bees from a hive of fire. Minute by minute the thatch crumbled from flame to ash, from ash to nothing. Then the whole hut fell in, crashed down upon its smouldering piles and lay in a heap of glowing wreckage.

And quite suddenly Mr. Darby realized that he was dead tired. His physical endurance had sufficed for the great claims which had been made upon it, but now it was at an end.

‘Punnett,' he said, ‘I must lie down. I'm at the end of my … ah … tether.'

Punnett stepped forward to the edge of the platform and spoke to the thirteen giants who stood in a circle round King Darby's hut. ‘The King would sleep,' he said in Mandratic.

A hoarse sound came from below and the circle of black
figures scattered across the flame-shot arena and melted into the thinning crowd.

Mr. Darby and Punnett retired into the royal hut. Mr. Darby flung off his royal cloak and headdress and dropped on to the first couch that caught his eye.

‘Good-night, Punnett!' he said.

Punnett, mindful as ever of his duties, took up the cloak and carefully began to fold it. ‘Good-night, Your Majesty!' he replied.

Uneasy, it has been said, lies the head that wears a crown. Mr. Darby was no exception to the rule. Though on the first night of his reign he slept soundly, his other nights were restless. But it was not the cares of sovereignty that troubled his sleep. His nights were haunted by dreams of Sarah, of England, Newchester, and all the friends from whom he was so utterly cut off, and by weary intervals of wakeful longing and scheming. Nor did his troubles end with daylight. Much of his life as King soon began to be very irksome; for a king, he soon discovered, or at least a king ruling over a people as primitive as the Mandrats, enjoys very little real liberty. It was not the strange, meaningless ceremonies which he was called upon to perform that bothered Mr. Darby. On the contrary, he performed these with gusto and a fine sense of their dramatic possibilities, for he had always had a weakness for formal and dignified occasions. To assume his jewelled head-dress and green-feathered cloak and proceed in pomp to the Place of Justice, a fenced enclosure on the site of the late King's hut, was less of a duty than a pleasure to him. Punnett was of great assistance on these occasions for he sometimes recognized a prisoner as one who had been a notorious rascal at the time of his previous visit to Mandratia, and so was able to advise King Darby to convict with a fair probability of justice. Another duty which devolved upon Mr. Darby a fortnight after his accession, a duty which he performed with gratifying success, was to cure an eclipse of the sun and restore that indispensable body to perfect working order. This act enormously enhanced his prestige.

In the performance of all such royal tasks Mr. Darby was in his element. It was the restrictions which, by the very
reason of his divinity, hedged him about that irked him and very soon made life a burden to him. The fact that, at the risk of losing his sanctity, his feet must never touch the ground, he found an almost unbearable imposition. To be forbidden ever to stroll about Umwaddi Taan and, worse still, to be debarred from investigating the jungle that so alluringly surrounded it, to know that never again would he be able to paddle in the river, as he had done on the first day of his arrival on the Peninsula,—these vetoes were hateful not only in themselves but in their consequence, which was that he became distressingly plump.

Another tiresome law was the one which ordained that he should be fed by the King's Butler, a priestlike person who tore rags of meat with his fingers or rolled balls of a soft unguessable food between his hands and introduced them into Mr. Darby's mouth. At first Mr. Darby found the process so revolting that he could hardly bring himself to swallow the food; and, even after he had habituated himself to it, it remained a grievous burden, for table talk and the leisurely freedom of meals were among his chief pleasures, and a chatty picnic with Punnett three or four times a day would have gone far to alleviate the rigours and confinements of his life as King.

In fact Mr. Darby soon discovered that a little sovereignty goes a very long way. He yearned for his home and Sarah: the thought that all this time she would be grieving for his loss was very painful to him. He even went so far, at his moments of deepest dejection, as to curse Uncle Tom Darby's fortune which had snatched him from his home and friends and the comfortable routine of the office. Gradually even the royal ceremonies began to bore him. Sometimes when he sat in the Place of Justice, listening in a semi-doze to the incoherent chatterings of the litigants and their witnesses, the old office in Ranger Street would appear to him in such extraordinarily visible form that it seemed to him that he had actually skipped across those thousands of miles of land and sea and paid the familiar spot a brief, an all too brief, visit. He saw it all, the desks, the floor-boards, the
elaborate Victorian cornice, the very dust on the windowledges; and to the very dust he loved it and longed for it. Then, with a flicker like the momentary blur in an oldfashioned film, the office was replaced by the mad, improbable actuality, the wide circle of bronze-skinned savages, the glare of the stark sunshine, the fierce, sombre luxuriance of the jungle that walled Umwaddi Taan, and the incomprehensible chatter of the litigants of which Punnett would presently give some sort of interpretation.

And so at the very beginning of his reign the poor little man began to dream of escape. His hopes fixed themselves desperately on the bare chance that the trading vessel would soon call, for this provided the one obvious and simple rescue. On the very morning following his coronation he charged Punnett to discover when it was expected, and waited all day in a fever of hope, for at first Punnett could elicit no information. So desperate was his reliance on this one hope that it began to seem to him impossible that it could fail him. He felt in his bones that the boat was coming soon. But in the evening when Punnett for the third time that day returned to the royal hut, Mr. Darby saw by a single glance at his face that he had learned the truth and that the truth was terrible. The trader had called and left two days before their arrival.

For some minutes Mr. Darby sat silent while the tears trickled down behind his spectacles. The awful possibility that he was destined to spend the rest of his life among savages stared him in the face. But at least there was Punnett. Punnett, surely, would be able to devise ways and means.

‘Punnett,' he said at last, raising mournful spectacles to his chief magician, ‘we must escape by the … ah … interior.'

Punnett, the resourceful Punnett, shook his head doubtfully. ‘It would be very risky, sir,' he said, ‘very risky indeed.'

‘But you came that way with Professor Harrington, Punnett.'

‘Yes, sir; but we had a very complete outfit, sir,—guns,
tents, tinned food and suchlike, and a dozen native porters. Besides Professor Harrington was a very experienced explorer, sir. He spoke goodness knows how many of these native languages, and he had a wonderful way with natives. It would be better, if I may say so, sir, to wait for the trader.'

‘Wait a
year,
Punnett?' cried poor Mr. Darby with a sinking heart.

Punnett nodded. ‘A year soon goes, sir. And meanwhile we're safe here and well looked-after.'

Safe, hundreds of miles from the nearest white man, in the middle of a lot of howling heathen more like fierce animals than men! And well looked-after when a black savage smelling like a wild beast rolls balls of a sickening paste in his corpse-like hands and pushes them into your mouth! The poor little man's heart sank and his stomach turned: he felt as if Punnett, even Punnett, were letting him down. He had no one to rely on, no one but himself, and he dropped into a melancholy silence, his spectacles lightless and fixed on the floor. A year might seem a short time to Punnett who appeared to have no home-ties and had spent no less than five years here with Professor Harrington; but to himself a year's imprisonment in Umwaddi Taan, cut off from Sarah and home and friends, was an appalling prospect, and, Punnett or no Punnett, he clung to the hope that some means of escape might yet be devised. If only he had had his maps with him, his maps which were now on their way to Sydney on board the
Utopia,
he felt sure he could have found a way.

•    •    •    •    •    •    •    •

Weeks passed, weeks that seemed to be months. The days grew hotter and hotter until Mr. Darby feared that he would melt away. The nights, though they brought a blessed respite from sunshine, brought also the ceaseless torment of mosquitoes and pium flies, and the bonfires, which Punnett caused to be lighted to drive them away, filled the royal hut with a stifling smoke which was only less unendurable than the flies. Mr. Darby grew to loathe his hut: the hours of
unbroken idleness which he passed there almost drove him mad. Conversation with Punnett afforded some relief, but it was impossible to converse all day; in fact even moderate conversation soon became exhausting in that fierce and enervating heat, and he and Punnett soon fell into a dazed silence in which interminable hours passed over them with a slothfulness unbelievable. Even royalty palled, for the kingship Mr. Darby was called upon to exercise could equally well have been carried out by a machine. He had not the smallest personal contact with his subjects. Among a people bound by iron laws and customs of which he was totally ignorant, a people of whose language and ways of thought he knew nothing, Mr. Darby's great qualifications as a beneficent autocrat were wasted. He who had long cherished an ambition to govern, to sway multitudes as he had swayed the assembled guests at his birthday party at Number Seven Moseley Terrace, found himself, now that he was actually a king, with no more real power than a successful scarecrow. The only advantage to be derived from this form of kingship was the gratifying but at present rather empty fact itself, the fact that he was a king. If ever he contrived to escape and return to England, the fact would then assume its proper significance. He already imagined himself ordering new calling-cards: ‘H.M. King James of Mandras,' or ought it to be ‘H.M. James, King of Mandras'? Or perhaps simply ‘Mr. W.J. Darby,' and under it, in brackets, ‘(Ex-King of Mandras)'. Meanwhile Mr. Darby was getting precious little pleasure out of his exalted position.

Despite the heat, he found his enforced immobility the hardest thing of all to bear. If only he could have taken a little walk occasionally, if only he could have revisited the bay where he and Punnett had landed, and paddled and bathed in the river, life would have been less unendurable. Best of all, a thing that would have made all the privations and boredoms of sovereignty richly worth while, if only he could have explored the jungle whose dense green wall so invitingly and tantalizingly ringed Umwaddi Taan. His brief glimpses of it—the first, when he had boldly forced his way
through its wall and stood alone in its mysterious twilight for a few moments: the second, when on the evening of his coronation he had glided through it, borne on the shoulders of his captors—had filled him with a greater longing than ever to explore its depths. But that, he knew, was impossible. If once he set foot to earth his sanctity, and therefore his safety, would vanish.

But one day, as he sat despondently dreaming on the floor of his hut, an idea came to him. He raised his head: for the first time for many weeks a light gleamed in his spectacles.

‘Punnett,' he said, ‘though I mayn't walk, is there any reason why I shouldn't be carried? Can't you tell them I want to visit the river? I couldn't bathe, of course, but surely I might get them to pour water over me?'