The Stranger (Stock)

By RALPH STOCK

PPROACHING Valina by night, you made fast to a rickety landing and passed up a narrow avenue of mangroves, along a track that quaked under your feet. On either hand there was blue-black darkness, a stench of rotting vegetation, and more mangroves—mangroves and darkness and silence as far as the mind of man could conceive.

A little further along the track there was a bend from which you could see a solitary yellow light. This was Marsden, going over the accounts in the mosquito-proof room of the bungalow, or planning some new drainage scheme, or swallowing quinine wrapped in cigarette papers. He was sure to be doing one of the three, for Yalina was like that. Marsden had leased it—a thousand odd acres of it—for ninety-nine years at an annual rental of rather less than a halfpenny an acre. He had then stood by his pet theory of drainage, in spite of ridicule and fever, and converted a swamp into a promising cocoa-nut plantation, and himself into a living skeleton.

He sat now, with unnaturally bright eyes and uncertain hands, trying to realise that he was a moderately wealthy man. Two days ago Moseley—of Moseley and Frieburg, land sharks—had sauntered over Valina with a green-lined umbrella, and, after a few disparaging remarks, had offered Marsden five thousand for the place. This meant that it" was worth at least ten as it stood, and probably five times that as a going concern in a few years' time. Marsden had chuckled inwardly, swallowed a quinine pellet, and declined the offer with thanks, much to Moseley's astonishment.

"You'll die here in another couple of years," he remarked cheerfully, casting his cannibal eye over the other's emaciated carcase.

"Oh, I don't know," said Marsden. "But, as it happens, I don't intend to stay here another two years. I promised myself a holiday when the job was done, and it is done—for the present."

Moseley looked out over Valina, an oasis of young palms in a desert of mangroves, and was constrained to admit that it was—to the tune of five thousand five hundred, not a penny more.

But Marsden smiled grimly and shook his skull-like head. Valina had cost more than money to create, and it was going to take more than money to buy. There were a few trifles, such as health and happiness, still owing, and Marsden was resolved that they should be paid before the property left his hands.

And now the evening of the great day had arrived. The accounts were in perfect order, the half-caste overseer had received his instructions, and Marsden's battered tin trunk stood packed beside his bed. For the first time in three years he was free. He was trying to disengage the rusty mechanism of his mind from drainage and labour and fever, and centre it on cool rains and the other things worth having; but in the present surroundings he found it difficult. These other things that were so desirable seemed unreal, infinitely far off. Well, they should soon be nearer, Marsden promised himself.

But on board the steamer it was the same. Slowly it was borne in on him that actual distance had nothing to do with it, for here, only two days from Sydney, things seemed just as far off as they had been at Valina. This troubled Marsden. He took to self-communings in his cabin.

There were people on deck—white women in flimsy dresses, sitting about in cane chairs or playing deck billiards with immaculate, care-free men. And there was an immensely popular youth, who wore white serge and a lavender tie and check socks, and ordered strange and frequent refreshment from the bar. Marsden had conscientiously worn a complete change of clothing every day of his three years at Valina, "to keep civilised," as he had told himself, but, if this were civilisation, he saw now that he had failed. He was as far removed from these people as—as a black-beetle from a butterfly. That was it, he announced savagely, while contemplating his unlovely reflection in the looking-glass—a black-beetle! Malaria and drainage schemes certainly do play the mischief with a man.

One day from Sydney a sort of panic seized him. What if he were so changed that no one would recognise him—even she would not recognise him? He was a different man to the one who had set out for the Solomons three years ago, different in character as well as appearance—he knew that now. What if she did not care for this different man? It was perfectly possible. He trembled already at the thought of meeting her, and had recourse to quinine pellets. For a few minutes he hovered outside the barber's shop, hesitant as to the fate of his beard, but came to the conclusion that he would look worse without it. Also he was beginning to extract grim satisfaction from the thought that people would have to accept him as he was, or not at all. It was the work—the work for her that had wrought the change; she, also, would have to put up with it. He left the steamer with a feeling of vague resentment against the world, which goes to still further show that malaria and drainage schemes can play the mischief with a man.

At the house in Darlinghurst the maid did not know him. Miss Levison had gone to stay with friends in the Blue Mountains, he was informed. Marsden knew this meant the Tates of Leura. Of course, he had forgotten—these civilised people moved out of Sydney in the hot weather. They were able to. Also he seemed to remember something, about it in her last letter: "I'm going to the Tates again this year …" Those were the words. It was queer that he should have forgotten them.

In the taxi, going to the station, he fell to wondering what he had said in reply to this letter of hers, and to the others, and for the life of him he could think of no other news that he had given her beyond a detailed description of the work at Valina—drainage, labour, cocoa-nuts and all, except the fever. He looked out on Sydney's well-kept streets, thronged with correctly dressed men and women, and smiled grimly. Of what possible interest could drainage be to these people, to a Sydney girl of twenty-two? Then he remembered that her letters had fallen off latterly …

In the train, going up to Leura, he saw himself sitting in the mosquito-proof-room at Yalina, writing these 'absurd things that should have been love-letters, and he almost wished himself back there again.

"Leura!"

The very word, droned out by the solitary porter, made him start visibly, and, when the train came to rest, he instinctively shrank back into his corner. She was on the platform. She was seeing someone off, chatting and laughing with them at the carriage door.

Marsden had wondered lately how the first sight of her would affect him, and now he knew. Her face was the same, identically the same as the picture he had carried at the back of his mind all those days and weeks and months and years at Valina, yet he could not bring himself to think that he had known her well—so well that he had asked her to marry him, and not been surprised out of his senses when she accepted him. He could not bring himself to feel that she belonged to him now, this dainty figure of health and lightness. It seemed effrontery on his part to imagine it. … Then the train moved on, and Marsden with it.

He got out at the next station, and waited for a train back to Leura, alternately anathematising himself for a weak fool, and wondering if it would not be wiser to go back to Valina, and have done with it.

In the end he returned to Leura, and strayed at an hotel about a mile from the Tates' bungalow.

There are certain prescribed things to do in the Blue Montains [sic], and everyone does them. You may ride, golf, play tennis, walk, or frankly lounge in the dry, bracing sunlight, surrounded by a rolling sea of eucalyptus-clad hills, luxuriant, semi-tropical gorges, and hazy blue distances. Marsden rode. So did Evelyn Levison. She had a habit, much to her friends' annoyance, of claiming at least an hour of the day for herself, when she would canter out to one of the gorges, dismount, and sit on the grassy edge, staring out over the endless sea of blue gums, and thinking her own thoughts. Exactly what these were, no one had been able to discover, though there were one or two shrewd guesses in the Tate household.

"Tied to a ghost, that's what I call it," was the unanimous verdict of the female element.

"Deuced hard luck on a girl!" was the opinion of the males.

Needless to say, both remarks had reference to her engagement to John Marsden, of Valina, Solomon Islands. It was on her return from one of these solitary excursions that Marsden met her on the track. It was a narrow track, and they passed within three yards of one another, and continued on their way. A little further on Marsden dismounted and stood watching her retreating figure with unnaturally bright eyes and twitching mouth. She had not recognised him! Was it not enough?

Apparently it was not, for precisely the same thing occurred the next day. On the third, while lying in the grass on the edge of her favourite gorge. Miss Levison was surprised—or should have been—by a tall, lean man, with bright, rather sunken eyes and a black beard, dismounting and addressing her.

"Beautiful view, isn't it?" he remarked.

"Glorious," she agreed, smiling up at him a trifle uncertainly.

They talked in this strain for upwards of five minutes. Then the man sat down and swallowed something wrapped in cigarette paper.

"You like being alone," he suggested abruptly.

"Sometimes," she answered; "it allows one to think."

"Yes, that's the worst of it," said the man.

"The worst of it?"

"Yes. To think is usually to suffer—in the end. A man should work, that's all, if he wants to live at peace with himself and the world."

The girl supported herself on her elbow, and plucked at the wiry brown stems of grass.

"Doesn't it depend on the thoughts?" she suggested, without looking up.

"Quite," agreed the man. He was sitting now with his bony knees drawn up to his chin. " But, unfortunately, one can't order them. They just come, especially when you are alone."

The girl nodded, and he went on—

"When you are alone, and a long way from everything that really matters, thoughts that you are fond of come and live with you. In time they become a sort of permanent dream, the kind that makes you want to wake up and find it true. Then, when at last it materialises"

"You find it horribly disappointing," supplied the girl. "Yes, I know."

"Not quite that," said the man evenly, "but you find it very different from what you expected. At first you think this is the fault of the people and things that went to make up your dream; then, after a little while, you see that it is not their fault at all, but your own. You are different, not they."

"I see," said the girl slowly, after a pause. "Then it comes to much the same thing, doesn't it? In either case you no longer care for them."

The man turned on her swiftly, his pale face suffused with colour.

"You mean they no longer care for you," he corrected. The girl's eyes met his frankly.

"Isn't that for them to decide?" she suggested.

"They do," exclaimed the man triumphantly. "You can't imagine how thoroughly they do decide these things sometimes." He stopped abruptly, looked for a moment over the rolling sea of blue gums, and gave a short laugh. "Take my own case"

"Yes?" prompted the girl.

"Shall I tell you? It may amuse you."

The girl nodded gravely.

"Some time ago," said the man, "I went out to the Back of Beyond to make enough money to marry. The work was hard, and there were other things that made life a bit difficult, but I always had my dream with me, and that kept me going. Then, when I found myself in the position to come back, I woke up and saw that one thing and another had made a different man of me—so different that even the girl I was engaged to didn't know me. That's all. What do you think of it?"

The girl sat quite still, looking out over the gorge. "I don't like it," she said presently. "I believe it's impossible, and I don't like impossible stories."

"But if it's true?" the man insisted.

"If it's true, I should say that the life you have been living has made you fanciful, morbid, or else the girl you were engaged to is blind, deaf, or not worth troubling about."

A faint chuckle escaped the man.

"Oh, yes, she is," he said; "that's the worst of it." "Then why not take the trouble to make yourself known to her? She may know you all the time, and think it is you who do not want to renew the acquaintance. It's quite possible, from the girl's point of view, you know."

"Not this one," the man objected.

"Girls are wonderfully alike," said the girl, smiling. The man clasped and unclasped his hands about his knees.

"I did think of doing what you suggest," he said; "but fancy the shock to a girl of finding herself tied to a comparative stranger!"

"But she wouldn't be."

"You mean she would break it off?"

"I mean that, if a woman once knows a man, she always knows him. He could never be a stranger to her."

The girl still looked steadily before her. The man watched the glint of sunlight in her hair. It had been part of his dream at Valina to sit just so, watching the glint of sunlight in her hair.

"I wonder if you're right?" he said.

"As it happens, I can prove it by my own experience," said the girl, and her voice was very low. "I was engaged—years ago. He went out to the Back of Beyond, and when he came back he thought that, because he had grown a beard and become very, very thin, I didn't know him. He actually thought that!"

The man's hand went out like a child's.

"Eve!" he said.

And later, when he lay in the crisp grass, with his head pillowed on her lap, and the cool breeze of the Blue Mountains fanned his cheek—

"It's so wonderful, Eve."

And there are those who will admit that it is.