Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/19

 where he could not follow. He remembered with pain the many little deceits she had practiced upon him, nothing harmful or really wrong, but why should she hide anything from him, her husband? He had the normal Englishman's horror of intrigue or mystery.

There was that morning when Captain Stayne had come up on their veranda when they were at breakfast, and Ballinger had caught a look that passed between him and Nadine. He could have sworn that it spoke astonishment on his part and entreaty on hers, but it was gone almost as soon as seen. He had introduced him to Nadine, and she had been her usual sweet self in a moment, and afterward as he had walked down to the wharves with the Captain he had deliberately mentioned Nadine, but without eliciting a response of any kind from him. In fact the good old trader had seemed constrained, and had shaken hands with Ballinger at parting without meeting his eyes.

He had of course asked Nadine about it, but she had laughed and pulled his ears, and told him that he had imagined it, and he had said no more, knowing how useless it was to question her. There was no harm in her having known good old Stayne. Why hide the fact?

Then there was his partner Karl Newmann. He had picked Karl up one night out of O'Halloran's place, the lowest sailor dive in Suva, and had nursed him over a broken head. Afterwards, being badly in need of help, and Karl seemingly having sloughed his drinking, Ballinger had taken him on: he had rested more and more responsibility in him, and for this last year they had been, in a way, partners.

Karl was a blond giant, of undoubted Teutonic origin, and handsome in his own rather obvious physical way. He was absolutely without fear, and a hard, steady worker, and Ballinger had found him a wonderful help. But he couldn't like him, try as he would. There was a streak of cold-blooded brutality about him that was always cropping out in various ways, and which had kept Ballinger from ever having the feeling of friendship for him that would have been natural between two white men in a world of blacks.

He had had to stand constantly between Karl and the field hands. He thought of the time he had come upon him whipping one of the blacks with his rhinoceros-hide whip. The man was unconscious and covered with blood, and there was a look on Karl's face that had been the definite beginning of his dislike and aversion for his partner. And it had grown steadily worse.

From the very first moment of their acquaintance, however, Karl and Nadine had been congenial, and they spent much of their time together. There seemed to be a bond of friendship between them that, to Ballinger, knowing Karl as he did, seemed incomprehensible.

The little vessel struck a cross-sea, and a wave slapped across Ballinger's face. He got up rather wearily.

"I am just where I started in," he said to himself, "and I guess I am more or less of a fool. I have a lovely wife, a partner who is honest and hardworking, and two plantations that in a few years will make me a rich man, and I sit here glooming like a sick calf."

He shook himself and went into his little cabin.

The three of them sat that night in the twilight of a tropic day, the scent of hibiscus and crotons heavy in the air, and the great black-winged bats slanting here and there through the garden. The moon had not yet risen, and they were bathed in that magic blue light that lies between sun and moon, and which in these latitudes is as evanescent as a dream.

"There is my man Friday," said Nadine, idly, nodding towards the path down the clearing.

Ever since they had lived at the plantation they had seen with increasing frequency about the clearing one of the huge gray apes that live in the inner fastnesses of the islands but which are seldom seen at the plantations. He had evidently become more and more accustomed to their presence, and would stand at the edge of the clearing, his back to the jungle wall, staring unblinkingly at them. He must have stood nearly seven feet tall, with great, hanging arms.

There was something about him tremendously repellent to Ballinger. He often declared that he would shoot him, although not without a little secret feeling of blood-guiltiness, because in spite of his brutishness, the ape was, in many ways, so like a man. But Nadine declared she liked him, and was going to tame him for a servant. However, the ape had never allowed them to approach any nearer, and if they attempted it, he would slip into the bush. It was one of the mysteries of the country to Ballinger that into a wall of jungle absolutely impenetrable to a human, the ape would slip as soundlessly as if it had been water.

Tonight he stood as usual at the edge of the clearing, watching them.

"I'd give a good deal to know what goes on in his mind, if he has a mind," said Karl lazily. "I never saw an ape take so much interest in humans before."

"I'm going to dance for him," said Nadine suddenly, "and see what he thinks of that."

She took a step or two down the terrace and began the upanahura,—the "singing dance of love," as it is called by the Marquesans.

Words cannot portray this dance, filled as it is with all the magic of the tropics. She sang, as she danced, in her hushed, throaty voice, a little native refrain. All of the passion of love, all of the striving, the inarticulate longing, the elemental pain of life itself, were in the notes, and woven with it the wailing melancholy, which is in the very fiber of all native music.

The ape stood motionless, watching.

No one could listen to the haunting refrain and not feel its spell. Karl thought of the glistening, liquid folds of a python he had seen coiled under a causurina, one day; Duane, with a profound sadness, felt how a part of the very soil was Nadine; she seemed to breathe the spirit of the night itself. A wave of nostalgia swept over him, a longing for the cool green fields of his own English countryside. In one more year he would take her away from all this, from the islands, to England—home.

He reached a hand impulsively and drew her back. There was something in the whole scene, the impalpable blue twilight, the slender waving figure, the watching animal, that seemed to him suddenly grotesque, unreal.

"I don't want you to dance the native dances, Nadine," he said, shortly.

She rubbed her head against his arm like a kitten, and laughed up into his face.

"Let's walk a little," she said. "I feel restless."

"You and Karl walk," said Duane. "I have some figuring to do."

He walked toward the house, his spirit weighted by a nameless depression. He stopped a moment at the veranda rail, his eyes resting on a great red star, hanging low over the ocean.

"Antares," he said—