The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife (53 page)

‘What is it, Punnett?” whispered Mr. Darby, aghast.

‘The war drums, sir,' said Punnett.‘ I'd better be getting you up, sir'

Upon the long nightmare of the days that followed it would be painful to dwell. The first terrifying advance into Tongal, during which Mr. Darby, preceded by the roar of drums and surrounded by a great horde of braves in full war-paint, was rushed on his lurching litter through miles of jungle, across the parching, red, snake-haunted belt of desert, and into the north-east corner of Tongal, from which, among horrible scenes of butchery, he was promptly driven; the subsequent retreat, a headlong joggling midnight course, harassed by pursuing Tongali, flights of poisoned arrows, and encounters with huge Ompàs, the highly poisonous snakes that haunted the desert, upon whom in their headlong course through the darkness they were continually blundering; the mad nights of war-dance and howling war-chant by which his excitable subjects heartened themselves for a new effort; all these appalling events, although throughout them Mr. Darby never once used his legs, served to reduce his growing corpulence as no amount of exercise could ever have done. Had not Punnett, only a little less imperturbable than usual, been his constant attendant he would have died of terror at the outset; and when, after all the sufferings of the advance and, worse still, of the retreat, he realized that they were to advance again, it needed all Punnett's efforts to persuade him that death itself was not better than another such ordeal.

‘Just grin and bear it, sir, if I may use the expression. It's bound to end sooner or later. I find, sir, that if I take no notice of their goings-on, I get through pretty comfortably.'

‘Take no notice, Punnett,' wailed Mr. Darby, ‘when the air's alive with poisoned arrows?'

‘Well, taking notice won't help you, sir, if I may say so.
It only upsets the nerves. If an arrow's going to get you, it'll get you whether you take notice or not. I should have thought, if I may say so, sir, that
you
might have got a bit of a thrill out of it, and you such a one for adventures.'

‘I've had enough and more than enough adventures, Punnett,' said poor Mr. Darby, ‘and more than enough jungle, too, and more than enough of foreign parts. I'd give a hundred thousand pounds, Punnett, and welcome, to wake up and find myself at home.'

‘Well, I've never been a one for adventures meself, sir,' Punnett replied, ‘and the more I see of them the less I like them. So when there's adventures about, sir, I do my best to take no notice of them, as I was saying. When things get very bad I find it helpful to fancy it's all a show, the sort of thing you might see at Wembley, if you understand my meaning, sir.'

Mr. Darby dismissed the suggestion with a weary sigh. ‘No amount of fancying'll turn this into Wembley for me, Punnett.'

‘Then bear in mind, sir, that, fancy or no fancy, you're King of the Mandrats.'

Mr. Darby's features collected themselves; he raised his head, a light came into his spectacles. ‘Thank you, Punnett,' he said in a firmer voice than he had commanded for many days. ‘Thank you for recalling me to … ah … myself. Get me my shaving-water. I must be ready when the moment comes.'

This conversation had taken place at five o'clock in the morning. Long before the drums sounded the advance Mr. Darby was ready. Newly shaved, pale but calm, he sat in the doorway of the royal hut awaiting the moment when Umbahla would come with the other chiefs to summon him to battle.

But the summons never came. Instead of the grim rolling of the drums, a wild, unaccountable clamour broke out suddenly from every quarter of Umwaddi Taan and in the growing light Mr. Darby saw a confusion of figures hurrying madly to and fro. His kingly calm rocked on its none too
secure foundations. ‘Punnett!' he shouted into the hut, ‘Punnett! Something seems to have … ah … gone wrong. Please see what's the matter.'

Punnett ignoring the ladder, leapt from the platform to the ground and ran across the clearing. The clamour increased. Something struck smartly against the wooden platform not a yard from where Mr. Darby sat. It was an arrow. Fixed slantwise in the floorboard it vibrated for a moment with the force of its impact. Mr. Darby promptly rolled sideways into the shelter of the hut and waited, crouching against its wall in a fever of agitation. The twang of footsteps on the latter announced Punnett's return.

‘We've been surprised, sir,' he said, his words punctuated by the smart crack of arrows transfixing the walls of the hut. ‘The Tongali have surrounded us. It's touch and go, I'm afraid, sir, but we may pull through.'

The innermost nature of a man is revealed only in moments of desperate emergency. At Punnett's terrible announcement Mr. Darby was suddenly transformed. ‘
May
pull through?' he shouted, ‘But we
must
.' He rose to his feet. ‘Give me my robe, Punnett,' he commanded, unconsciously echoing another royal person at a famous literary crisis; ‘put on my … ah … crown.'

Crowned and robed he stepped out on to the platform and, oblivious of the hiss of arrows, stood there, not perhaps metrically speaking but in the true, spiritual sense of the term, every inch a king.

‘Call my bearers,' he shouted. But there were no bearers to call. The great arena of the King's Clearing was bare, bare but for the circumference along which a violent agitation of bronze bodies swayed and gesticulated in a pandemonium of hoarse cries and rattling war-drums. Sometimes a figure dropped to the ground, writhed convulsively and lay still; sometimes the circumference bulged inwards, let in a driblet of blacker and stockier figures who were instantly set upon, beaten down or driven to frantic attempts to escape outside the fatal circle. Thwarted for a moment, Mr. Darby glanced angrily about him. Then, careless of his sanctity and
of his royal dignity, he stooped down, set the palm of his right hand on the floor of the platform and leapt to the ground. Like a lean and hungry wolf Punnett leapt after him and followed him across Umwaddi Taan to where the circumference showed signs of breaking. A javelin, missing the King by a hair's breadth, struck the ground between them, and Punnett snatched it up in mid course. But before Mr. Darby was half way across the great arena, a long wailing cry rose suddenly above the clamour and, as though an overstretched cord had snapped, the circumference shattered into fragments and a rabble of Tongali swept into Umwaddi Taan. Mr. Darby and Punnett paused, stood still, and from all sides the swarming enemy closed in on them. They closed in till they were within touch, but they did not touch the King. They stood, staring at Mr. Darby with their keen white eyes, and Mr. Darby, his spectacles blazing defiance, his hands clasped behind his back, stared back at them.

Punnett raised the javelin above his head. ‘The King is sacred,' he shouted in Mandratic.

Though Mr. Darby stood on Mother Earth, technically unsanctified, the enemy did not dispute Punnett's claim.

‘The King is sacred,' a hoarse voice replied, and a Tongali, whose head-dress showed him to be a chief, stepped into the ring that surrounded them. ‘The King is sacred. He shall be carried to the Queen.'

Thereupon, as on the occasion when Mr. Darby and Punnett were captured by the Mandrats, the savages plaited their javelins into a litter, and Mr. Darby, who now that resistance was vain resisted no longer, was lifted on to it and raised shoulder high. Punnett, and five captured Mandrat chiefs, their arms bound behind them, followed. There were no other prisoners, for the Tongali spared only chiefs among the hundreds that fell into their hands. Closely guarded against surprise and rescue, the victors and their prisoners crossed the corpse-strewn Clearing and plunged northwards into the jungle.

Now that all immediate need for courage was past, Mr. Darby sank into a black dejection. The hideous scenes of
blood and slaughter had roused in him a horrified loathing of the Peninsula and its barbarous inhabitants, and, added to this, the thought, the agonizing thought, that in six weeks time the trading vessel, the unique hope of escape to which he had passionately clung through all the vicissitudes of the past year, was due in the estuary of the Sampoto, and that he and Punnett would be far out of reach of it, prisoners in Tongal, filled him with despair. The bare idea of another long year of life in the Peninsula, and a year that would undoubtedly hold miseries undreamt of in the former one, was a horror worse than death. In imagination he saw the ship, a sailing ship with a golden figurehead, anchored near the little bay where he and Punnett had landed. In horror he saw her weigh anchor and begin to move, and felt remorse in his vitals and the numbing weight of nightmare in his legs, as with an effort that actually made his muscles twitch as he sat on his rocking litter, he struggled in vain to reach her.

But perhaps—and terrible as the possibility was, it brought a sense of relief—perhaps he would not be called upon to face that second year. Perhaps the Queen of the Tongali would condemn him to death, murder him herself, perhaps, in some hideous ceremony like the one in which he himself had driven the spear into the heart of his dead predecessor. He shuddered, recalling the horrible sensation which the spear-shaft had transmitted to his grasping hand, of a resistance, a toughness, and then the sickening surrender, the flaccid yielding of the dead flesh.

But perhaps Punnett would be able to bribe the Tongali Queen to let them go free, might offer her a dazzling sum to escort them safely on board the trader. A King's ransom! How much was a King's ransom? In imagination he saw himself and Punnett borne on litters out of the dark jungle into the little white-sanded bay, and there, only a few yards from the water's edge rode the trader,—blessed, three times blessed sight. He heard the splash of the water churned by the feet of the natives as they carried them towards their salvation. And then he felt himself, actually felt himself,
sitting on board, Punnett at his side, and the fancy sent a flood of blissful happiness tingling through his veins.

A trailer of scarlet orchid grabbed at his shoulder and pulled him back into his despair.

•    •    •    •    •    •    •    •

For two days and nights, during which Mr. Darby alternately hoped and dreaded that his people would rally and attempt a rescue, they followed the jungle tracks of Mandras with only the briefest halts. But until the end of the second night the Mandrats gave no sign. Then, when they had almost reached the northern skirt of the jungle and the first glimmer of dawn showed them the red desert belt across which their course now lay, a wild yell broke the morning silence and, as if the dark shadow of every tree-trunk had suddenly been galvanized into life and leapt from its anchorage, a dense horde of Mandrats burst upon them. The encounter was fierce and brief. For five minutes, ten minutes, all was madness and fury. Mr. Darby, idle, powerless and in terror, closely fenced by his guard who had lowered the litter to the ground, saw nothing of what was happening, and it was only when the noise died down and he was hoisted again on the shoulders of his bearers and the march resumed that he knew that all was over and he himself still a prisoner.

When the sun rose they were already four miles on their way across the desert. A screen of savages ran before them, carrying on their spears tufts of blazing tow to scare from their path the hideous and deadly Ompà, the snake which haunted the Mandratic desert. Mr. Darby saw one huge creature rear itself on end like a capital S and shoot itself with the tense precision of a released spring at a bunch of natives who leapt aside with the agility of spiders. Instantly half a dozen blazing bouquets of tow were whirling round it, but again it drew itself up to strike, and again its aggressors scattered nimbly and then again closed on it. Mr. Darby, though ringed by his ample guard, shuddered with horror each time he caught sight of one of the creatures. Yet there was fascination in the horror: he could not turn away his
eyes; he had to look, had to glance about in the horrible hope of seeing others. Before the afternoon had turned to evening they had crossed the desert and were entering the southern confines of Tongal.

•    •    •    •    •    •    •    •

For five long days Mr. Darby, a melancholy figure in spectacles and pyjamas with his crown and parrot-robe neatly disposed at his side, sat his litter with six woolly heads in profile on either side of him. His bones and muscles ached from the incessant motion, for relays of bearers carried him and the halts were of the briefest.

During these halts he was able to exchange a few words with Punnett, who, as usual, was sadly and deprecatingly optimistic. ‘It's bound to be all right, sir. With your leave I shall put it to the Queen that you have great riches across the sea; that if she kills you she'll be doing herself no good, but if she gives you a strong escort to take us back to Mandras in time to catch the trader, you'll send her …'

‘I'll send her anything she likes to ask, Punnett,—diamond necklaces, golden dinner services, whatever you think will persuade her.'

‘Those'ud be no good, sir, if you'll excuse my saying so. There's not enough novelty about them for the likes of these folk. A hundred tins of sardines, a hundred pots of raspberry jam, a few dozen of Johnny Walker, half-a-mile of cheap cretonne and a penny-in-the-slot machine would be nearer the mark, sir. That's the sort of thing the trader brings to exchange for the rubies and opals. I've seen a ruby worth heaven knows what, sir, go for a matter of one tin of sardines. The only fear is that we may miss the trader. She may be turning up any time now.'

‘Don't speak of it, Punnett,' whispered Mr. Darby, as if he feared that a malignant fate might overhear them. ‘Don't even
think
of it. I should die. I can't bear very much more of this: it's wearing me out.' Tears glittered behind his spectacles, and Punnett, looking at his master more critically than he had recently done, saw that it was true. The poor
little man looked terribly tired and ill: his endurance was nearing its limit: he might, Punnett believed, break down at any moment.