Kundu, page 2
“I try’, boss. Strike me dead, if I don’t. Me girl tries, too, but it won’t lie down. Not unless I douse it with oil. And you wouldn’t want me stinking of pig fat while I serve the drinks. Now would you? Besides, me shirt’s clean, isn’t it—and me pants?”
“We should be thankful for so little, I suppose. Pour me a drink. A strong one.”
He sat down in the nearest chair and watched Wee Georgie with sardonic amusement. The fellow’s hands were trembling. He moistened his lips continually as he sniffed the liquor. It was one of Sonderfeld’s small pleasures to calculate how long it would be before Wee Georgie would ask for a drink.
Wee Georgie was a survival from the prehistory of the Territory. His origins were misted with legend. He had been deckhand on the copra-luggers, prospector, recruiter, water-front pimp, and a dozen other things, mercifully buried when the Japanese destroyed the records. Sonderfeld had picked him off the beach in Lae, cured him of clap, stones in the kidney and a score of minor ailments, and brought him up to the valley as foreman to the boy labour and contact man with the tribes. He had settled down in squalid comfort with a pair of village girls, and Sonderfeld thought he would die in twelve months of cirrhosis of the liver.
But by some miracle he managed to survive, and Sonderfeld had made much profit from his alcoholic Caliban. Wee Georgie was a slovenly old reprobate, but he “thought kanaka” and he had no scruples. With care and caution and a judicious ration of liquor, he, too, had served the master-pian.
“There’s your drink, boss.”
“Thanks.”
“Er—Ah—What about a small one for the help—eh, boss?”
Sonderfeld grinned and looked at his watch.
“Thirty seconds! You’re doing well, my friend. You may have a drink.”
“Thanks, boss—thanks.”
He wheezed and chuckled and shuffled to the table to pour a stiff noggin.
“Mud in yer eye and pretty girls in yer bed!”
“Prosit!” said Kurt Sonderfeld absently.
Wee Georgie tossed his drink off with a practiced gulp. His master drank slowly, savouring the spirit, feeling the slow warmth gather like warm coals in his belly. Drinking, for Sonderfeld, was a princely pleasure and he took it like a prince, with leisure and deliberation.
“Lansing’s arrived, boss.”
“Mr. Lansing to you, Georgie.”
“Mr. Lansing, then. He came about half an hour ago.”
“Where is he now?”
Sonderfeld put the question with studious indifference; but Wee Georgie’s little eyes were lit with malicious humour.
“Out back. Looking at the flowers with Mrs. Sonderfeld.”
“The poor fellow has few pleasures,” said Sonderfeld smoothly. “Who are we to deny him this one?”
Wee Georgie spat contemptuously over the railing.
“Few pleasures is right! What does he do down there in the village? Lives like a kanaka, he does. Eats their food. Sits round the cook fires. Never even touches the girls. What’s the point in that, for Gawd’s sake?”
“He’s an anthropologist.”
“Yup, I know. But what does he do?”
Sonderfeld stared into the golden liquor. His tone was velvet.
“He studies, Georgie. He studies the language, the beliefs, the manners, the customs and the mating habits of the indigenous population. He is paid, I understand, by grant from an American foundation which finances such worthy enterprises.”
“Paid? For what? Gawdstrewth! I could tell ’em twice as much as Lansing’ll ever know—and for half the price.”
“I know. I know,” said Sonderfeld gently. “But Lansing leaves out the dirty words.”
“You’re not very fond of Lansing, are you, boss?”
The whisky caught him full in the face. As he gasped and whimpered and rubbed his eyes, Sonderfeld jerked him upright by the hair and smacked him, full on the mouth. Then he chided him gently, without anger, as one admonishes a child.
“You will remember, Georgie, that you are a servant in this house. You will attend to my guests and mind your own business. You will remember that you are filth—alive by my skill and favour. You will have no more to drink this evening. Now clean yourself up and pour me a drink. Père Louis will be here any minute.”
Wee Georgie backed away, a cowed, repulsive animal. Sonderfeld wiped his hands on a silk handkerchief and waited calmly for the arrival of his second guest.
The little priest came hurrying up the path, arms flailing, square beard bobbing on his chest. A small canvas bag hung over his shoulder and slapped up and down on his rump. His wizened, walnut face streamed with perspiration. He was like a goat, thought Sonderfeld, a wise and ancient goat with his grey beard and his bright, canny eyes. And yet of all the men who came to share his table, this was the one for whom he had most respect. He must have been more than sixty, yet he had the gnarled and stringy strength of an old tree. More than thirty years of his life had been spent in the mountains of Papua and New Guinea. When the first prospectors came through the southern valley, Père Louis was there waiting for them. When the recruiters came in to the Highlands to find new labour pools, Père Louis was there to see that they kept their hands off his girls.
The years had not robbed him of his spry, peasant humour and, for all the isolation of his life, he was as modem a European as Sonderfeld had ever known. When they met, they spoke French first and then German. They talked books and medicine and politics and morals and philosophy; and when they parted, Sonderfeld had the uneasy feeling that the little man had been sounding him, tapping the hollow places of his soul as a cooper taps a barrel.
If he feared any man—and this he was not prepared to admit, even to himself—he feared the little priest. Therefore he was careful with him, careful and courteous and humorously attentive as to a fellow exile on the outposts.
“Sit down, Father Sit down. Get your breath back. Georgie will fix you a drink. My wife will be here presently. She has taken our friend Lansing to see the flowers.”
“Madame is well?”
“Very well, thank you. The climate here is kinder to women than on the coast.”
“She is still happy in the valley?”
Sonderfeld shot him a quick glance, but finding no malice in the bright eyes, he smiled and shrugged.
“If she is unhappy, she has not told me.”
“Good, good. I have brought her an orchid. One of the big gold fellows. My boys found it in the gorge this afternoon.”
He reached down into the canvas bag, took out the plant and laid it on the table. Its long, fleshy stalk carried one full bloom and a row of bursting buds. Its roots were clotted in rich, black earth and bound in bark cloth. Sonderfeld smiled, approving the gentle gesture.
“Thank you. Gerda will be pleased. She has wanted one of those for a long time.”
“’Ere’s your drink, Padre.” Wee Georgie shuffled over and laid the glass on the table. His hand trembled and a few drops splashed on the tabletop. Sonderfeld frowned but said nothing. Père Louis looked up, grinning.
“You have the shakes again, Georgie.”
Wee Georgie sniffed petulantly.
“Always ’appens when I’m on the wagon, Padre. Stands to reason, don’t it? A man’s only flesh and blood.”
“Try this, Georgie. It’s easier on the liver than the native toddy.”
The fat man’s eyes lit up as the little priest produced a small bottle of altar wine. He reached out and, with a look of sidelong triumph at Sonderfeld, rammed it into the torn pocket of his trousers.
“That’s charity, Padre. Real Christian charity. If there was anyone could get me singin’ ’ymns at my age—which there ain’t—but if there was, it’d be you.”
Père Louis chuckled and waved him away. He raised his glass.
“Santé, mon ami.”
“Á la vôtre, mon père.”
They drank comfortably, a pair of exiles twelve thousand miles from home. Sonderfeld offered a cigar. The little priest refused it, grinning as he produced a foul briar and a wad of trade tobacco.
“You would waste your cigar I have smoked this stuff for so long, I cannot taste a good tobacco.”
He lit up, puffing frantically to light the treacly plug. Then, when it was drawing comfortably, he said, “The tribes are still moving into the Lahgi Valley.”
“I know.” Sonderfeld’s tone was indifferent, but he was prickling with interest. “It’s the usual thing, isn’t it? They always come for the pig festival.”
The Lahgi Valley was a great green crater over the lip of the northern barrier. Here was the principal village from which all the scattered colonies had spread over the surrounding mountains in search of new garden plots. Here they returned for the pig festival once every three years. Their coming was a mass migration spread over many weeks. When the festival was over, they would return to their own villages and their separate tribal lives. Sonderfeld’s people had not yet begun to move; before they did, his preparations must be completed if his whole project were not to fall in ruins about his ears. Père Louis chewed irritably at his pipe and went on.
“As you say, it is the usual thing. But this time it is different. Something is stirring.”
Now, thought Sonderfeld, now we come to the bones of it. He probed gently, cautiously, masking his anxiety with the tolerant smile of the philosopher.
“There is always something stirring in these people. They are restless as children. In the old times they could work it off with a war or a raid on their neighbour’s taro patch. Now they are controlled. The Administration disapproves of cathartic killings.” He shrugged ironically. “Don’t worry about it, Father. They will get rid of their fleas at the festival. They will sing and dance and get drunk, and come home quietly to cure their headaches.”
“No.” The little priest shook his head. “No, my friend, it is not so simple as that. You do not know these people as I do. They are not children. They are old—older than Greece and Rome, older than Babylon, old as the men who left their pictures in the sunken caves of the Pyrenees. Evil is rooted deep among them. Ancient evil, dark and frightening. It is stirring now. I know it, though I cannot put a name to it.”
“But there must be signs, rumours—”
“There are signs—yes.” He frowned. His weathered face seemed suddenly shrunken and tired. “My Christians tell me the elders are saying that the Red Spirit himself will appear at the festival. He will come in human shape and will lead his people to prosperity and power beyond their dreams.”
Sonderfeld chuckled tolerantly.
“The old, old wish fulfillment. It appears in a thousand forms among the primitives and always at times of celebration or tribal crisis. It disappears as quickly—when the hangover starts. Look a little further, you will find the rumour begins with some witch doctor who wants to make a name for himself—and a profit, too, when all the people come together.”
“I know the man already,” said Père Louis flatly. “His name is Kumo. He lives in your village.”
“Kumo, eh?” He must be interested now, but not too interested. “I have heard of him of course, as one hears of tribal identities. I have never paid any attention to him. A local charlatan, a little more intelligent than his fellows. How can such a man be important?”
“Kumo,” said the priest, carefully. “Kumo was one of my mission boys. He was intelligent beyond the average. I hoped that he would become a catechist and even, one day, a priest—the first, possibly, from the Highlands here. Then there arose”—he hesitated, groping for words—“a problem of conscience. I cannot tell you what it was since it came to me under the seal of the confessional. I pointed out to Kumo what he must do. He refused. I denied him the Sacraments. He left me—left the Mission, too. He went up to the mountains to the teachers of the old, dark mysteries. He became a sorcerer.” Again Père Louis paused, as if reluctant to put the thought into words. “I—I have reason to believe that he sold his soul to the Devil.”
Sonderfeld exploded into laughter.
“No, no, no, Father! Not from you! You are too intelligent for that! Werewolves in Carinthia, with the village priest as ignorant as his flock? A scrubby curate in Sicily with his weeping Madonna! But not from you. You are too wise, too old for this—this Kinderspiel. Look—we can be frank with each other. After all—”
“Mother of God!” Père Louis crackled into fiery anger. “How great a fool can a man be! You sit there rocking on your chair laughing—at what? The monstrous evil of ten thousand years.”
Sonderfeld was swift in apology. He had made a mistake. The luxury of laughter would come later. He could not afford it yet.
“Forgive me, my friend. I was tactless. I did not mean—”
Père Louis shook his head. His anger died as suddenly as it had quickened. His voice was somber and sad.
“I know very well what you mean. Evil is an accident of the cosmos. The cosmos itself is an imperfect evolution of primal chaos. God is a name without substance. Satan is a medieval myth—Bah!” He took the pipe out of his mouth and laid it on the table. Hands and voice and eyes pieced out the low, passionate exposition. “Look, Kurt, try to understand. For your own sake, not for mine. I am too old to be troubled by laughter. But I am afraid for you. You cannot dismiss the mystery of creation with a shrug and a phrase. No man is big enough for that.”
“You will forgive me if I doubt your explanation of it.”
“Doubt it if you must, but do not dismiss it. Look!” There was a note almost of pleading in the old voice. “You know how I live here. You know how long I have lived here. I have no plantation as you have. I have no wife as you have. Yet I could have enjoyed them both, as you do now. Why did I choose to give them up? Because I believe in God and I believe in the Devil. I know that they exist, really, personally, actively. That is the whole meaning of a priest’s life. To serve God and to fight the Devil—and to strengthen his flock to the same service and the same struggle.”
“It is a notable belief, Father. It is also a harsh one. It is my loss, perhaps, that I cannot accept it. I have never seen God. I have never seen the Devil. Until I do …” He shrugged eloquently.
“The footprints of God are on every acre of your valley. His handiwork is there on your table.” He lifted the golden orchid bloom and held it up for Sonderfeld to examine.
Sonderfeld waved it aside.
“And the Devil, Father? Where do you see the Devil?”
Something akin to pity showed in the bright, wise eyes.
“If I were to tell you, my friend, that I have seen women dash the brains from their firstborn and turn calmly to suckle a pig, if I were to tell you that there are magicians in the mountains—and this Kumo is one of them—who change themselves into cassowary birds and travel between the villages faster than man can run, if I were to tell that I have seen a girl suspended in the air, so that six men could not drag her down, that I have heard her screaming curses in the Latin of Saint Jerome while I, myself, pronounced the exorcism—and she a mountain girl who could not even speak pidgin—what would you say then?”
“Then,” said Sonderfeld blandly, “then, Father, I should say that you have lived longer than I—and a good deal less comfortably. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will fetch my wife.”
He heaved himself out of his chair. The little priest stayed him with a gesture.
“A moment, please.”
“Yes?”
“You are concerned in this.”
“I? How am I concerned?” His voice was harsh but steady.
“As I came up the path I met N’Daria. She was dressed for the sing-sing tonight.”
“And how does that concern me? The girl belongs here. It is natural that she should want to join in the amusements of her own people. Even if I wished, I have no authority to prevent her.”
“There is no question of prevention,” said the old priest wearily. “It is simply that N’Daria is the chosen lover of Kumo. I thought you should know that.”
“Thank you, Father.” Sonderfeld’s voice was cold. “Now that I know, I find it interests me not at all. Georgie! A drink for Père Louis. Forgive me, I shall not be a moment.”
He turned on his heel and walked into the cool half-light of the house. Wee Georgie poured himself a double slug of whisky and tossed it off in one furtive gulp.
Père Louis sat slumped in his chair, staring out across the valley and the lengthening shadows of the mountains.
Chapter Two
•
GERDA SONDERFELD’S GARDEN was a riotous miracle of colour and bursting life.
Two garden boys, the summer rains, the tropic warmth, the mountain cool, and Gerda’s own careful hands had turned a quarter acre of black volcanic soil into a private Eden.
Here in the high valleys there is no quartering of the seasons, no cyclic symbol of childhood and youth and maturity and age. Here there are only the big rains and the small, the sun in Cancer, the sun in Capricorn. Here you may plant what you will and when it pleases you. It will burst into life, bud, flower, as if in a forcing house.
In Gerda Sonderfeld’s garden there were salvias, red as live coals, gladioli with long spears and monstrous velvet blooms, beyond the avarice of temperate gardeners. There were dahlias and delphiniums, tall poppies and asters and white trumpet vines, giant coleus with mottled leaves, crotons and pied lilies, rock orchids and drooping ferns, and a passion vine trailing over a bamboo summerhouse. There were casuarina trees and clumps of bamboo, and shrubs with berries, red, purple and shining orange. There were plants that might have graced an English garden, and wild grotesques that belonged only to the jungles and the rain forests. The air was still and heady with perfume.
It was a masterwork, as full of contradictions as the woman who planted it.
She was in the summerhouse now, with Max Lansing.
She smoothed down the bright cotton frock, moulding it back over her full breasts and downwards to where it flared away from the roundness of her hips. Then she repaired her smudged lips and rearranged her dark hair in the small formal bun on the nape of her neck. Lansing watched her, impatient and puzzled.
“We should be thankful for so little, I suppose. Pour me a drink. A strong one.”
He sat down in the nearest chair and watched Wee Georgie with sardonic amusement. The fellow’s hands were trembling. He moistened his lips continually as he sniffed the liquor. It was one of Sonderfeld’s small pleasures to calculate how long it would be before Wee Georgie would ask for a drink.
Wee Georgie was a survival from the prehistory of the Territory. His origins were misted with legend. He had been deckhand on the copra-luggers, prospector, recruiter, water-front pimp, and a dozen other things, mercifully buried when the Japanese destroyed the records. Sonderfeld had picked him off the beach in Lae, cured him of clap, stones in the kidney and a score of minor ailments, and brought him up to the valley as foreman to the boy labour and contact man with the tribes. He had settled down in squalid comfort with a pair of village girls, and Sonderfeld thought he would die in twelve months of cirrhosis of the liver.
But by some miracle he managed to survive, and Sonderfeld had made much profit from his alcoholic Caliban. Wee Georgie was a slovenly old reprobate, but he “thought kanaka” and he had no scruples. With care and caution and a judicious ration of liquor, he, too, had served the master-pian.
“There’s your drink, boss.”
“Thanks.”
“Er—Ah—What about a small one for the help—eh, boss?”
Sonderfeld grinned and looked at his watch.
“Thirty seconds! You’re doing well, my friend. You may have a drink.”
“Thanks, boss—thanks.”
He wheezed and chuckled and shuffled to the table to pour a stiff noggin.
“Mud in yer eye and pretty girls in yer bed!”
“Prosit!” said Kurt Sonderfeld absently.
Wee Georgie tossed his drink off with a practiced gulp. His master drank slowly, savouring the spirit, feeling the slow warmth gather like warm coals in his belly. Drinking, for Sonderfeld, was a princely pleasure and he took it like a prince, with leisure and deliberation.
“Lansing’s arrived, boss.”
“Mr. Lansing to you, Georgie.”
“Mr. Lansing, then. He came about half an hour ago.”
“Where is he now?”
Sonderfeld put the question with studious indifference; but Wee Georgie’s little eyes were lit with malicious humour.
“Out back. Looking at the flowers with Mrs. Sonderfeld.”
“The poor fellow has few pleasures,” said Sonderfeld smoothly. “Who are we to deny him this one?”
Wee Georgie spat contemptuously over the railing.
“Few pleasures is right! What does he do down there in the village? Lives like a kanaka, he does. Eats their food. Sits round the cook fires. Never even touches the girls. What’s the point in that, for Gawd’s sake?”
“He’s an anthropologist.”
“Yup, I know. But what does he do?”
Sonderfeld stared into the golden liquor. His tone was velvet.
“He studies, Georgie. He studies the language, the beliefs, the manners, the customs and the mating habits of the indigenous population. He is paid, I understand, by grant from an American foundation which finances such worthy enterprises.”
“Paid? For what? Gawdstrewth! I could tell ’em twice as much as Lansing’ll ever know—and for half the price.”
“I know. I know,” said Sonderfeld gently. “But Lansing leaves out the dirty words.”
“You’re not very fond of Lansing, are you, boss?”
The whisky caught him full in the face. As he gasped and whimpered and rubbed his eyes, Sonderfeld jerked him upright by the hair and smacked him, full on the mouth. Then he chided him gently, without anger, as one admonishes a child.
“You will remember, Georgie, that you are a servant in this house. You will attend to my guests and mind your own business. You will remember that you are filth—alive by my skill and favour. You will have no more to drink this evening. Now clean yourself up and pour me a drink. Père Louis will be here any minute.”
Wee Georgie backed away, a cowed, repulsive animal. Sonderfeld wiped his hands on a silk handkerchief and waited calmly for the arrival of his second guest.
The little priest came hurrying up the path, arms flailing, square beard bobbing on his chest. A small canvas bag hung over his shoulder and slapped up and down on his rump. His wizened, walnut face streamed with perspiration. He was like a goat, thought Sonderfeld, a wise and ancient goat with his grey beard and his bright, canny eyes. And yet of all the men who came to share his table, this was the one for whom he had most respect. He must have been more than sixty, yet he had the gnarled and stringy strength of an old tree. More than thirty years of his life had been spent in the mountains of Papua and New Guinea. When the first prospectors came through the southern valley, Père Louis was there waiting for them. When the recruiters came in to the Highlands to find new labour pools, Père Louis was there to see that they kept their hands off his girls.
The years had not robbed him of his spry, peasant humour and, for all the isolation of his life, he was as modem a European as Sonderfeld had ever known. When they met, they spoke French first and then German. They talked books and medicine and politics and morals and philosophy; and when they parted, Sonderfeld had the uneasy feeling that the little man had been sounding him, tapping the hollow places of his soul as a cooper taps a barrel.
If he feared any man—and this he was not prepared to admit, even to himself—he feared the little priest. Therefore he was careful with him, careful and courteous and humorously attentive as to a fellow exile on the outposts.
“Sit down, Father Sit down. Get your breath back. Georgie will fix you a drink. My wife will be here presently. She has taken our friend Lansing to see the flowers.”
“Madame is well?”
“Very well, thank you. The climate here is kinder to women than on the coast.”
“She is still happy in the valley?”
Sonderfeld shot him a quick glance, but finding no malice in the bright eyes, he smiled and shrugged.
“If she is unhappy, she has not told me.”
“Good, good. I have brought her an orchid. One of the big gold fellows. My boys found it in the gorge this afternoon.”
He reached down into the canvas bag, took out the plant and laid it on the table. Its long, fleshy stalk carried one full bloom and a row of bursting buds. Its roots were clotted in rich, black earth and bound in bark cloth. Sonderfeld smiled, approving the gentle gesture.
“Thank you. Gerda will be pleased. She has wanted one of those for a long time.”
“’Ere’s your drink, Padre.” Wee Georgie shuffled over and laid the glass on the table. His hand trembled and a few drops splashed on the tabletop. Sonderfeld frowned but said nothing. Père Louis looked up, grinning.
“You have the shakes again, Georgie.”
Wee Georgie sniffed petulantly.
“Always ’appens when I’m on the wagon, Padre. Stands to reason, don’t it? A man’s only flesh and blood.”
“Try this, Georgie. It’s easier on the liver than the native toddy.”
The fat man’s eyes lit up as the little priest produced a small bottle of altar wine. He reached out and, with a look of sidelong triumph at Sonderfeld, rammed it into the torn pocket of his trousers.
“That’s charity, Padre. Real Christian charity. If there was anyone could get me singin’ ’ymns at my age—which there ain’t—but if there was, it’d be you.”
Père Louis chuckled and waved him away. He raised his glass.
“Santé, mon ami.”
“Á la vôtre, mon père.”
They drank comfortably, a pair of exiles twelve thousand miles from home. Sonderfeld offered a cigar. The little priest refused it, grinning as he produced a foul briar and a wad of trade tobacco.
“You would waste your cigar I have smoked this stuff for so long, I cannot taste a good tobacco.”
He lit up, puffing frantically to light the treacly plug. Then, when it was drawing comfortably, he said, “The tribes are still moving into the Lahgi Valley.”
“I know.” Sonderfeld’s tone was indifferent, but he was prickling with interest. “It’s the usual thing, isn’t it? They always come for the pig festival.”
The Lahgi Valley was a great green crater over the lip of the northern barrier. Here was the principal village from which all the scattered colonies had spread over the surrounding mountains in search of new garden plots. Here they returned for the pig festival once every three years. Their coming was a mass migration spread over many weeks. When the festival was over, they would return to their own villages and their separate tribal lives. Sonderfeld’s people had not yet begun to move; before they did, his preparations must be completed if his whole project were not to fall in ruins about his ears. Père Louis chewed irritably at his pipe and went on.
“As you say, it is the usual thing. But this time it is different. Something is stirring.”
Now, thought Sonderfeld, now we come to the bones of it. He probed gently, cautiously, masking his anxiety with the tolerant smile of the philosopher.
“There is always something stirring in these people. They are restless as children. In the old times they could work it off with a war or a raid on their neighbour’s taro patch. Now they are controlled. The Administration disapproves of cathartic killings.” He shrugged ironically. “Don’t worry about it, Father. They will get rid of their fleas at the festival. They will sing and dance and get drunk, and come home quietly to cure their headaches.”
“No.” The little priest shook his head. “No, my friend, it is not so simple as that. You do not know these people as I do. They are not children. They are old—older than Greece and Rome, older than Babylon, old as the men who left their pictures in the sunken caves of the Pyrenees. Evil is rooted deep among them. Ancient evil, dark and frightening. It is stirring now. I know it, though I cannot put a name to it.”
“But there must be signs, rumours—”
“There are signs—yes.” He frowned. His weathered face seemed suddenly shrunken and tired. “My Christians tell me the elders are saying that the Red Spirit himself will appear at the festival. He will come in human shape and will lead his people to prosperity and power beyond their dreams.”
Sonderfeld chuckled tolerantly.
“The old, old wish fulfillment. It appears in a thousand forms among the primitives and always at times of celebration or tribal crisis. It disappears as quickly—when the hangover starts. Look a little further, you will find the rumour begins with some witch doctor who wants to make a name for himself—and a profit, too, when all the people come together.”
“I know the man already,” said Père Louis flatly. “His name is Kumo. He lives in your village.”
“Kumo, eh?” He must be interested now, but not too interested. “I have heard of him of course, as one hears of tribal identities. I have never paid any attention to him. A local charlatan, a little more intelligent than his fellows. How can such a man be important?”
“Kumo,” said the priest, carefully. “Kumo was one of my mission boys. He was intelligent beyond the average. I hoped that he would become a catechist and even, one day, a priest—the first, possibly, from the Highlands here. Then there arose”—he hesitated, groping for words—“a problem of conscience. I cannot tell you what it was since it came to me under the seal of the confessional. I pointed out to Kumo what he must do. He refused. I denied him the Sacraments. He left me—left the Mission, too. He went up to the mountains to the teachers of the old, dark mysteries. He became a sorcerer.” Again Père Louis paused, as if reluctant to put the thought into words. “I—I have reason to believe that he sold his soul to the Devil.”
Sonderfeld exploded into laughter.
“No, no, no, Father! Not from you! You are too intelligent for that! Werewolves in Carinthia, with the village priest as ignorant as his flock? A scrubby curate in Sicily with his weeping Madonna! But not from you. You are too wise, too old for this—this Kinderspiel. Look—we can be frank with each other. After all—”
“Mother of God!” Père Louis crackled into fiery anger. “How great a fool can a man be! You sit there rocking on your chair laughing—at what? The monstrous evil of ten thousand years.”
Sonderfeld was swift in apology. He had made a mistake. The luxury of laughter would come later. He could not afford it yet.
“Forgive me, my friend. I was tactless. I did not mean—”
Père Louis shook his head. His anger died as suddenly as it had quickened. His voice was somber and sad.
“I know very well what you mean. Evil is an accident of the cosmos. The cosmos itself is an imperfect evolution of primal chaos. God is a name without substance. Satan is a medieval myth—Bah!” He took the pipe out of his mouth and laid it on the table. Hands and voice and eyes pieced out the low, passionate exposition. “Look, Kurt, try to understand. For your own sake, not for mine. I am too old to be troubled by laughter. But I am afraid for you. You cannot dismiss the mystery of creation with a shrug and a phrase. No man is big enough for that.”
“You will forgive me if I doubt your explanation of it.”
“Doubt it if you must, but do not dismiss it. Look!” There was a note almost of pleading in the old voice. “You know how I live here. You know how long I have lived here. I have no plantation as you have. I have no wife as you have. Yet I could have enjoyed them both, as you do now. Why did I choose to give them up? Because I believe in God and I believe in the Devil. I know that they exist, really, personally, actively. That is the whole meaning of a priest’s life. To serve God and to fight the Devil—and to strengthen his flock to the same service and the same struggle.”
“It is a notable belief, Father. It is also a harsh one. It is my loss, perhaps, that I cannot accept it. I have never seen God. I have never seen the Devil. Until I do …” He shrugged eloquently.
“The footprints of God are on every acre of your valley. His handiwork is there on your table.” He lifted the golden orchid bloom and held it up for Sonderfeld to examine.
Sonderfeld waved it aside.
“And the Devil, Father? Where do you see the Devil?”
Something akin to pity showed in the bright, wise eyes.
“If I were to tell you, my friend, that I have seen women dash the brains from their firstborn and turn calmly to suckle a pig, if I were to tell you that there are magicians in the mountains—and this Kumo is one of them—who change themselves into cassowary birds and travel between the villages faster than man can run, if I were to tell that I have seen a girl suspended in the air, so that six men could not drag her down, that I have heard her screaming curses in the Latin of Saint Jerome while I, myself, pronounced the exorcism—and she a mountain girl who could not even speak pidgin—what would you say then?”
“Then,” said Sonderfeld blandly, “then, Father, I should say that you have lived longer than I—and a good deal less comfortably. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will fetch my wife.”
He heaved himself out of his chair. The little priest stayed him with a gesture.
“A moment, please.”
“Yes?”
“You are concerned in this.”
“I? How am I concerned?” His voice was harsh but steady.
“As I came up the path I met N’Daria. She was dressed for the sing-sing tonight.”
“And how does that concern me? The girl belongs here. It is natural that she should want to join in the amusements of her own people. Even if I wished, I have no authority to prevent her.”
“There is no question of prevention,” said the old priest wearily. “It is simply that N’Daria is the chosen lover of Kumo. I thought you should know that.”
“Thank you, Father.” Sonderfeld’s voice was cold. “Now that I know, I find it interests me not at all. Georgie! A drink for Père Louis. Forgive me, I shall not be a moment.”
He turned on his heel and walked into the cool half-light of the house. Wee Georgie poured himself a double slug of whisky and tossed it off in one furtive gulp.
Père Louis sat slumped in his chair, staring out across the valley and the lengthening shadows of the mountains.
Chapter Two
•
GERDA SONDERFELD’S GARDEN was a riotous miracle of colour and bursting life.
Two garden boys, the summer rains, the tropic warmth, the mountain cool, and Gerda’s own careful hands had turned a quarter acre of black volcanic soil into a private Eden.
Here in the high valleys there is no quartering of the seasons, no cyclic symbol of childhood and youth and maturity and age. Here there are only the big rains and the small, the sun in Cancer, the sun in Capricorn. Here you may plant what you will and when it pleases you. It will burst into life, bud, flower, as if in a forcing house.
In Gerda Sonderfeld’s garden there were salvias, red as live coals, gladioli with long spears and monstrous velvet blooms, beyond the avarice of temperate gardeners. There were dahlias and delphiniums, tall poppies and asters and white trumpet vines, giant coleus with mottled leaves, crotons and pied lilies, rock orchids and drooping ferns, and a passion vine trailing over a bamboo summerhouse. There were casuarina trees and clumps of bamboo, and shrubs with berries, red, purple and shining orange. There were plants that might have graced an English garden, and wild grotesques that belonged only to the jungles and the rain forests. The air was still and heady with perfume.
It was a masterwork, as full of contradictions as the woman who planted it.
She was in the summerhouse now, with Max Lansing.
She smoothed down the bright cotton frock, moulding it back over her full breasts and downwards to where it flared away from the roundness of her hips. Then she repaired her smudged lips and rearranged her dark hair in the small formal bun on the nape of her neck. Lansing watched her, impatient and puzzled.
