Beatrice Grimshaw

“ The girl girl was miserable clearly; the girl was a savage, but the girl was beautiful.
Do I seem changeable or small-minded when when I say that on the instant I saw Grace Gordon laboring under her pack of food and firewood up the stony track my thoughts about the whole matter of search and rescue changed and I became as resolved as Willis Rothery himself?
If so, I can only plead that beauty is beauty and that since the beginning of the world man has instinctively bowed before it. ”

“ It grew light; we were on our way. The village where Nambu had said we should find the dim-dim girl was one that I had known long ago; I needed no guide to the lifting precipice, plumed with dangling trees, up which our pathway lay.
Rothery, though he had as plucky a soul as every small, weak body held, seemed somewhat daunted at the sight of this typical Papuan "road," with its faint streak of liana ladder, half rotten, dropped from ledge to ledge and waiting in the wind raised by the waterfall that spumed beside it.
"It looks bad," he said. "Can we take a long time?" ”

“ It would be absurd and you would not believe me if I told you that I, a strong man in the thirties, had never taken interest in any woman before. Only in books does a man pass half his life asleep like the silly princess in the wood waiting for love.
I had been broad awake since first they tied the armlet of manhood on me in these very mountains, and, as Nambu, my friend, had said, there were girls even then who were ready to cook my food for me—in Papua, a significant act. ”

“ There was the sound of a mighty waterfall not far away. I felt once more to make sure—as if one who had seen the battlefields of Europe did not know death at first sight!—and then I left Grace for a moment, warning her to keep hidden, tramped through a few rods of tangled bush, came out on the verge of a great white torrent that seemed to light up the moonless night, and with a single word of farewell gave Willis' body to the deep.
"You are eating tears," whispered Grace to me as we ran along side by side through the dusk, her hand in mine. "Why?" ”

“ I answered. "Anything to please. Nambu will take us to the village tomorrow, and you can do all the rescuing you want; I expect it won't be much. No doubt they'll be glad to get rid of her. She doesn't seem the idol of the village, exactly."
"That's settled, then," said Willis. "Why—where are the men?"
"Went a minute ago while you were talking. They don't move about like elephants—or white people."
"What way did they go?"
"Out at the front."
"But that's impossible!" screamed the poet, balancing hurricane lamp in hand, over the verge of a pretty steep precipice. ”

“ For so they had named me, because of my piping voice, in the days when I was a little white savage among them.
"I've asked them to dinner," I bracketed to Rothery.
"If you are quite sure that the dinner won't be on us, I've no possible objection." he said.
"On the contrary, they're probably worrying now a to whether you and the carriers don't intend to make a feast of them. It's a favorite trick in Papua to ask people to dinner, and then, make them provide the dinner themselves."
"Travel enlarges the mind," said Willis. "I always like to discover an entirely new crime." ”

“ Then the night rain burst like a dam, and we began moving about the hut to find a dry place to sit in.
You couldn't hear any one talk at first; I found, to my annoyance somewhat, that I had lost the old power of hearing through the thunderous downpours of the hills. When the rain suddenly jerked itself short off and took a breathing space, I had got a good bit behind the conversation.
"Oh, companion," Nambu was saying, "she is very much devil-devil."
"Most women are," I agreed, not particularly interested. ”

“ Then I opened some tins of meat. They looked at the picture on the outside—a highly colored representation of Uncle Sam: it was an American brand—and jerked their heads approvingly.
"Oh, companion," said Nambu with a happy smile "this is good food that you are bringing us; man is our proper eating."
"What does he say?" asked Willis curiously.
"Says he likes the brand," I translated. I didn't want to give the poet too much all at once.
When they had eaten, they and I sat staring at each other in the light of the hurricane lamp. ”

“ You can never accept the look of things in the mountains, and besides we had to keep under shadow of the bush all the way.
It was certain that the women of the place would be coming home from their gardens about 5, and if the dim dim girl caught sight of us I was fairly certain she would make a bolt of it. I should have been none the worse pleased, but I didn't want to disappoint Willis, since he was set upon carrying the matter through.
We came in sight of a break in the deep forest and of a little track leading to it; we concealed ourselves and sat still. ”

“ There were men among them who had been boys with the little white savage, who had speared wallaby with him, strangled sleeping birds on the trees at night in his company, danced the boy dances with him as leader, passed through the secrets of the temple life togeter with him. ”

“ I showered questions on Nambu. Generally speaking, the passage of any of white person through the interior of New Guinea leaves a wake as big as that traced by a white elephant in an English village. It seemed unthinkable, first, that any white woman should have penetrated to those formidable fastnesses ”

“ Years had accustomed me to the curious views the average man holds on the subject of cannibals. I only beckoned, and out off the dusk, up among the piles of the house, from rocks and bushes and holes, came two or three and twenty short chunky, naked figures, carrying ebony spears and obsidian clubs that a collector would have bought for much money. ”

“ Some of them had the brightest and merriest brown-black eyes that a man could wish to laugh into, and there were one or two men who had features as dainty as squirrels, and hands, too, small and neat, as squirrel's little hands. ”

“ Willis looked at me oddly.
"A nice place to be in," he said.
"You wanted to see the unexplored country and you put up the money," I reminded him.
*⁠*⁠*⁠*
"O, I'm not sorry; I rather like the idea of being surrounded by cannibal tribes whom no one's ever seen. It seems exciting—or would if you weren't so calm over it all."
"If you'd been a year and a half in the war," I remarked, mixing myself a chew of betel nut, "the liveliest of the New Guinea cannibals would seem like lambs to you. I spent yesterday evening, after you'd gone to sleep, telling a lot of them about Belgium. ”

“ Civilized on the surface, beneath it I was the man of the forests and the seas, not tied to houses hating the indoor life with a hatred deep as death.
*⁠*⁠*⁠*
THERE are men like myself in the world; more, perhaps, than you of the cities would believe, and the same problem strikes them every one. But, almost every one, they solve it by taking a brown woman to wife, or a half-caste. ”