Kundu, page 3
A moment ago she had been in his arms, clinging to him, pressing his mouth down upon her own, exciting him almost to frenzy with the urgent straining of her tight strong body. Then, suddenly, she had thrust him away without regret or apology and begun this maddening little ritual of the toilet.
The passion had died in her, abruptly as a light dies when the current is switched off. The flush was gone from her skin, leaving it smooth as old, fine ivory. Her small hands were steady and patient in the intimacies of restoration. Her dark eyes were enigma. He could not tell whether they mocked or caressed him. Her parted lips were cool and dry.
Yet she was neither capricious nor a coquette. There was a bluntness in her desire, a blandness in her acceptance that had shocked him at first, then pricked him to greater need. It was the suddenness of the transformation that angered him and affronted his vanity. His own nerves were ragged and screaming with want. She was as calm and comfortable as a kitten on a hearth rug. He made as if to take her in his arms again. She moved a step beyond his reach, still pinning up her hair.
“No, Max. Not now. Kurt will be here any minute. It would be embarrassing for all of us.”
“Embarrassing!” It was as if the word gagged him. His flat midwestern voice was full of disgust and petulant anger “Goddammit, Gerda! What do you think I am? I love you, don’t you know that?”
“Keep your voice down, Max,” she said calmly. “I can hear you. There is no need to shout at me.”
“I’m not shouting. I’m trying to make you see—”
“But, darling, I see everything very plainly.”
She patted the last hairs into place, then reached up and laid a cool hand on his cheek. The maternal gesture irritated him and he drew back from it abruptly.
“O.K.! You see everything. You understand everything. Do you understand how much I love you? Do you understand what it’s like to lie in my hut and listen to those goddamn drums night after night, while you’re up here with him ? If I could just pack up and take you out of here …”
She smiled at him then—the tolerant, pitying smile of the adult for the stamping child.
“But you can’t, can you, Max? You must stay here until your term is out—otherwise you lose the grant from the University. And even if you could, where would you take me?”
“Home—to the States.”
She shook her head.
“To what? To a little apartment in a big city? To a little cottage near the campus? I would stifle there. Besides, for me, it would be hard to enter the United States. Be sensible, my dear, Let us enjoy the little we have. Look, tonight, if Kurt goes down to the village, you can come to me—”
“For God’s sake, Gerda!”
His anger went out like a snuffed candle. He stood before her, shoulders stooped, arms dangling, in an attitude of weary despair. Looking at him, she thought how sick and tired he was. His face was lined and yellow with suppressed malaria. His long, bony fingers were discoloured with tobacco. His clothes hung loosely over his big bones. His eyes were hollow and burning. Soon, she thought, he would be old and all his dreams would have cheated him. One day he would go home with his notes in a little canvas bag and his heart still hungry in his gangling body, and he would write his thesis and give his modest lectures and they would raise no ripple on the wide waters. For Max Lansing would always be the wrong man in the wrong place—too late, too early. His plans a little out of scale, his work out of rhythm, his life lonely and out of kilter.
Sudden pity took hold of her and she caught her hands and raised them gently to her lips. He bent over her and smelt the perfume of her hair.
“Listen to me, Max!” Her voice was gentle. He caught the faint gutturals that marked her for an alien. “I have said this to you before, I say it again. You are not meant for this sort of life. You are not one of those who can live alone. Give it up. Go home. Find yourself a nice American girl who will keep your house and give you children—”
“I can’t go home.” It was almost a cry. “This is my big chance. Don’t you see that? This is one of the few places in the world where a research man can break new ground. If I can stick it out, I can make a name for myself, get myself a Chair at one of the big colleges—”
“All right, Max, all right.” She had no heart to rob him of this last illusion. “But if you must stay, then at least accept what is here. Make yourself comfortable. Get yourself a village girl to look after you.” She smiled up at him. “You would learn more from her in a week than you would in a year alone.”
He thrust her away roughly.
“And come to you afterwards? Hold you in my arms? Make love to you?”
She shrugged and spread her hands in a small disarming gesture.
“Why not? It would not worry me. If you were content, I should be glad for you.”
“And you say you love me!”
He turned away and began to fumble, defensively, for a cigarette.
“I have never said I loved you, Max,” said Gerda quietly.
He whirled to face her.
“What then? In God’s name, Gerda, what sort of a woman are you?”
She was still smiling. She would neither break nor bend nor give any hint of need to match his own.
“My husband,” she said quietly, “calls me a whore. And yet I do not think I am. I have need of tenderness, as I have need of food, of the flowers in my garden. Kurt does not give it to me. I take it where I find it.”
“From me or from the next man!”
“That’s right, Max. From you or from the next man. Admit at least that I am honest about it.”
“Sure, sure, you’re honest about it!”
He let out a long, shuddering breath and ran his fingers through his cropped hair.
“Well … thanks for telling me. I know where I stand now. I guess I’d better push off.”
“My dear fellow,” said Kurt Sonderfeld from the doorway, “you can’t leave now. You are our guest. Your room is prepared. The others are expecting you. Shall we go in, Gerda?”
There were two new arrivals sitting in the canvas chairs drinking Wee Georgie’s iced whisky—a blond youth in stained khaki, and a round, ruddy-faced fellow, immaculate in starched shirt and tropic shorts. They had come up from the Kiap house, a large thatched hut on the edge of the village, built and maintained by the tribe as a staging camp for the officers of the Administration.
The blond youth was Lee Curtis, cadet patrol officer under the command of the District Commissioner at Goroka. His appointment constituted him policeman, judge, census taker, and semi-military controller of three thousand square miles of territory and fifty thousand human beings. He had blue eyes and a baby mouth, and he sweated uneasily in the polyglot company of his elders. His frank adoration of Gerda was a constant amusement to Sonderfeld.
His companion was a Britisher, representative of an international coffee combine, investigating the resources of the Highlands under the auspices of the Agriculture Department of the Trustee Territory. He had the bland and easy manner of the seasoned traveller. He smiled continually, but his eyes were wary and shrewd behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. His unlikely name was Theodore Nelson. He was an expert in crop estimates and the diseases of the coffee plant, but his principal value to his employers was as a canny judge of the men who would one day come to them for finance, when the thrips destroyed a crop or the cost of clearing caught up with their bank balance.
They stood up, smiling, when Gerda came in, and shuffled for positions as Sonderfeld ushered her into the company with practiced charm. Each of them wanted the chair beside her, and Sonderfeld was bleakly amused when she ignored their invitations and settled herself beside Père Louis and eagerly began to admire the golden orchid. Still they could not take their eyes off her. The panic unease was stirring them as wind stirs a wheat field, as the kundu drums stir the heavy silence of the uplands.
Strange, thought Sonderfeld sourly, that a woman could set fires in other men and yet be colder than stone to the man who married her.
The reflection irritated him. He put it away and turned to the entertainment of his guests.
“You have seen my coffee, Mr. Nelson. What do you think of it?”
The Englishman was enthusiastic.
“Excellent! Excellent! I can safely say it is one of the best plantations I have seen on the Highlands. The soil is good and well manured. You have chosen the best shade trees. I watched your boys spraying. You have trained them well.”
Sonderfeld nodded, acknowledging the professional compliment.
“I made a close study of the problems before I opened the land here. The soil is rich. The climate is perfect. Given normal care, there is no reason why this country cannot produce the best coffee in the world.”
“There is one thing that worries me,” said Nelson carefully. “At least, it may worry the company, should we ever come to do business together”
“What is that?”
“You have no road. You are fifty miles from Goroka. How are you going to get your crop out to the market?”
Lee Curtis cut in, stammering a little in his eagerness to join the discussion.
“Tha—that’s what everybody in the Highlands would like to know. It—it’s been a sort of a standing joke ever since Sonderfeld came up here. All the rest of the settlers took up land along the road. There’s three hundred miles of it from Lae to Mount Hagen. Even the old hands in the Territory wouldn’t come out as far as this.”
Sonderfeld smiled tolerantly. This was an old question. It had long since ceased to be dangerous to him.
“There, in part at least, is the answer to your question, Mr. Nelson. This is the newest country in the world—the least exploited. Germany held it first, but before she could capitalize her holding, it was taken from her with the rest of her colonial empire. The League of Nations handed it over as a mandate to the Commonwealth of Australia. Then the Japanese came and occupied the northern coast and some of the hinterland for the best part of the Pacific War. When Japan was defeated, Australia resumed the Administration under a new mandate from the United Nations.”
Nelson looked puzzled.
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with the economics of coffee.”
Sonderfeld smiled tolerantly.
“You would be surprised how much it has to do with coffee, my dear fellow. The Administration is a trustee, not an owner in perpetuity. As a trustee her prime duty is the welfare of the indigenous people. Under the terms of the United Nations mandate, land must not be alienated permanently from the native population in favour of private individuals. Land which is not essential to the tribes may be acquired by the Government and leased by them for terms up to ninety-nine years. I was a latecomer. By the time I was ready to acquire a lease, the best land—that which borders the Highland road—was already preempted. So I had to move farther out. As you have seen yourself, I have not done badly.”
“No,” said Nelson dubiously. “But you still have the problem of getting your crop out. Load the freights too high and you price yourself out of the market.”
Sonderfeld shook his head.
“I am not so short-sighted as that, believe me. By the time my crop is ready to flush, I shall have a road—my own road.”
“You’ll build it yourself?”
“My people will build it for me,” said Sonderfeld calmly.
Père Louis looked up sharply. Max Lansing started, as if at a monstrous revelation. Only Nelson and the young patrol officer seemed to find nothing strange in the simple assurance of their host.
Nelson looked inquiringly at Curtis. The youth nodded agreement.
“It could be done—provided the tribes cooperate, of course. At the moment they’re very cooperative.” He laughed loudly, like a self-conscious schoolboy. “Hope they stay that way. Makes my job easy.”
Sonderfeld bowed in ironic acknowledgment.
“A compliment from the Administration! Thank you, my friend. Unfortunately, it would seem Père Louis does not agree with you.”
“Oh? Why not?” Curtis rose truculently to the bait. The Missions were an old burr in the pelt of the Administration. The doctrine of the immortal soul raises more than one problem for colonial officials.
Père Louis chewed on his pipe. His eyes were veiled. His mouth was an enigma behind the square, Trotsky beard.
Theodore Nelson studied him with mild disapproval. He had the Englishman’s distaste for clerics who ventured beyond the cathedral close. There was a time and place for everything, and the Gospel of Saint John needed organ voluntaries and gothic gloom to make it half palatable. Among the Stone Age men it was Gallic indiscretion.
Père Louis looked up. His answer was mild and without emphasis.
“I happened to mention to our friend that the tribes are restless. The pig festival is approaching, as you know. The sorcerers are spreading rumours that the Red Spirit will appear in person at the time of the big sacrifice.”
“So that’s it!” Lansing almost leapt from his chair. His voice cracked like a dry stick. The others looked at him in amazement. Only Sonderfeld seemed unmoved. He questioned Lansing with quizzical irony.
“Come, come, my friend. Don’t tell me it surprises you. You live with these people, don’t you? It is your profession to study the social patterns of primitive peoples. You must have heard these rumours, as Père Louis has?”
“Sure, sure, I’ve heard ’em.”
“Père Louis tells me they begin with a man named Kumo, a sorcerer in my own village.”
“I disagree with Père Louis!”
Lansing was tight as a fiddle string. His chin was thrust out in nervous challenge. He was like a fighter moving in to his first opening. Sonderfeld was still smiling, but his eyes were wary.
“I am sure Père Louis would be glad to hear your views.”
Lansing grinned.
“They might interest the Administration as well.”
The patrol officer looked up. His boyish face took on an expression of comic gravity.
“We’re always interested in the views of local residents. They help us considerably in making our own appreciation of the situation.”
Lansing spread his long, bony hands and laid them fingertip to fingertip in a careful academic gesture. He was silent a moment, choosing his words. The others watched him silently. Gerda’s eyes were troubled. Then he spoke, slowly, flatly, precisely.
“It is my considered opinion that the coming pig festival will be the occasion for an outbreak of the cargo cult in this area.”
His words dropped into the silence like pebbles counted into still water. A ripple of interest stirred the small company. It was Theodore Nelson who spoke first.
“Cargo cult? That’s new to me.”
Lee Curtis was eager to explain.
“The cargo cult is—”
Lansing brushed aside the interruption and plunged into his own exposition.
“The cargo cult has many forms, but in essence it is very simple. It is the direct result of the impact of modem civilization on primitive man. The coming of the white man has revealed to the tribes a new heaven and a new earth, a way of life beyond their attainment. Time was when a man’s wealth was measured by the number of his pigs or by his store of gold-lip shell. His manhood was rated by his skill in battle and the tally of his slain enemies. Now, tribal killings are a crime. The boys who come back from the coast after serving their indentures are discontented. They have seen bicycles and automobiles and refrigerators and moving pictures. They are no longer satisfied with pigs and trochus shell. The glory of the plumed headdress and the sing-sing costume is a matter of secret contempt. Knowledge has come into Eden, and Adam is ashamed of his nakedness.”
He paused, gauging their interest, savouring the secret discomfort of Sonderfeld. Then he went on:
“That is the beginning of the cult—the new need, the new heaven beyond the stretch of dark fingers. Next comes the new prophet of the new promise. He uses the old symbols—the Pig God, the Red Spirit. He practices the old magic, the old rituals of sacrifice and propitiation. But the promise is new—‘Follow me and I will give you the riches of the white man, a share in the powers of the white man. The great droning birds will fly at my command. The cargoes they carry will be cargoes of wealth for you.’ Ask any of the old hands. They will tell you of Black Christs and Black Kings. They will tell you how American Negro troops were hailed as liberating legions. Ask Patrol Officer Curtis, here, and he will tell you of wireless houses with vines for aerials and little armies carving wooden guns like those of the native police boys.”
He broke off, a little breathless from the fervent monologue. Then he made his final sober summation.
“That is how I read these rumours of the Red Spirit and his promised revelation at the pig festival. To this point, I believe, Père Louis will agree with me.”
The little priest nodded, still chewing on his pipe.
“But,” said Lansing, “this is where I disagree with him. The prophet is not Kumo. Kumo is the mouthpiece. The voice is the voice of another.”
“What other?” Père Louis’ question was deceptively mild.
Lansing turned to him and jabbed an emphatic finger at his shirtfront.
“You have lived in the Territory longer than any of us, Father. You know how often trouble among the tribes has been fomented by white men for their own ends—by gold seekers and labour exploiters and crazy kingmakers, who think that a mountain barrier can stop the march of civilization and enlightenment.”
“I know it—yes,” said Père Louis placidly. “I know also that their power has been brief and their end violent. Are you suggesting that the man behind Kumo is a white?”
“I’m stating it as a fact,” said Lansing bluntly.
Darkness had come upon them unawares. The first stars were pricking out, low and bright, in the purple sky. As if to set a dramatic period to Lansing’s speech, the black drums thudded into rhythm across the valley. Caught in the sudden mystery of the moment, no one spoke. Then, clear, boyish, pragmatic, the voice of Lee Curtis shattered the illusion.
