Cumners Son and Other South Sea Folk | Page 3

soul simply as an incident, but the incident as seen
with the eye-- and that eye as truthful and direct as possible--of one
individual personality. George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson
might each have chosen the same subject and the same story, and each
have produced a masterpiece, and yet the world of difference between
the way it was presented by each was the world of difference between
the eyes that saw. So I am content to let these stories speak little or
much, but still to speak for me.

CUMNER'S SON
I
THE CHOOSING OF THE MESSENGER
There was trouble at Mandakan. You could not have guessed it from
anything the eye could see. In front of the Residency two soldiers
marched up and down sleepily, mechanically, between two
ten-pounders marking the limit of their patrol; and an orderly stood at
an open door, lazily shifting his eyes from the sentinels to the black
guns, which gave out soft, quivering waves of heat, as a wheel,
spinning, throws off delicate spray. A hundred yards away the sea
spread out, languid and huge. It was under-tinged with all the colours
of a morning sunrise over Mount Bobar not far beyond, lifting up its
somnolent and massive head into the Eastern sky. "League-long
rollers" came in as steady as columns of infantry, with white streamers
flying along the line, and hovering a moment, split, and ran on the
shore in a crumbling foam, like myriads of white mice hurrying up the
sand.

A little cloud of tobacco smoke came curling out of a window of the
Residency. It was sniffed up by the orderly, whose pipe was in barracks,
and must lie there untouched until evening at least; for he had stood at
this door since seven that morning, waiting orders; and he knew by the
look on Colonel Cumner's face that he might be there till to-morrow.
But the ordinary spectator could not have noticed any difference in the
general look of things. All was quiet, too, in the big native city. At the
doorways the worker in brass and silver hammered away at his metal, a
sleepy, musical assonance. The naked seller of sweetmeats went by
calling his wares in a gentle, unassertive voice; in dark doorways
worn-eyed women and men gossiped in voices scarce above a whisper;
and brown children fondled each other, laughing noiselessly, or lay
asleep on rugs which would be costly elsewhere. In the bazaars nothing
was selling, and no man did anything but mumble or eat, save the few
scholars who, cross-legged on their mats, read and laboured towards
Nirvana. Priests in their yellow robes and with bare shoulders went by,
oblivious of all things.
Yet, too, the keen observer could have seen gathered into shaded
corners here and there, a few sombre, low-voiced men talking covertly
to each other. They were not the ordinary gossipers; in the faces of
some were the marks of furtive design, of sinister suggestion. But it
was all so deadly still.
The gayest, cheeriest person in Mandakan was Colonel Cumner's son.
Down at the opal beach, under a palm-tree, he sat, telling stories of his
pranks at college to Boonda Broke, the half-breed son of a former
Dakoon who had ruled the State of Mandakan when first the English
came. The saddest person in Mandakan was the present Dakoon, in his
palace by the Fountain of the Sweet Waters, which was guarded by four
sacred warriors in stone and four brown men armed with the naked kris.
The Dakoon was dying, though not a score of people in the city knew it.
He had drunk of the Fountain of Sweet Waters, also of the well that is
by Bakbar; he had eaten of the sweetmeat called the Flower of
Bambaba, his chosen priests had prayed, and his favourite wife had lain
all day and all night at the door of his room, pouring out her soul; but

nothing came of it.
And elsewhere Boonda Broke was showing Cumner's Son how to
throw a kris towards one object and make it hit another. He gave an
illustration by aiming at a palm-tree and sticking a passing dog behind
the shoulder. The dog belonged to Cumner's Son, and the lad's face
suddenly blazed with anger. He ran to the dog, which had silently
collapsed like a punctured bag of silk, drew out the kris, then swung
towards Boonda Broke, whose cool, placid eyes met his without
emotion.
"You knew that was my dog," he said quickly in English, "and--and I
tell you what, sir, I've had enough of you. A man that'd hit a dog like
that would hit a man the same way."
He was standing with the crimson kris in his hand above the dog. His
passion was frank,