Where the Pavement Ends Part 7

"A diver's pipe," he repeated. "A diver, d'you see? They had a diver, and--according to your notions, Peters--" He drew a slow breath.

"What--what if that there diver _did_ happen to be overboard at the minute the rush came?"

And then came the voice of Peters, cool and drawling: "Some one's left a message on the box."

As we span around he turned it over atilt, so that all might see the bold letters, scarred in lead, of that laconic legend--all but Bartlet, who fumbled for his spectacles. "Writ with a Snider bullet, I take it,"

continued the trader. "One of them soft-nosed kind as supplied to heathen parts for a blessin' of civilization."

"Read it, can't you?" begged the cap'n.

And this was the notice Jeckol read:

The Crew of the Schooner _Timothy S._ of Cooktown that tried a cast with fortune and turned a deuce. Barange Bay, Jan. 22, 19--

J. MULLHALL, _master_ BAMBA, KOHO B. SMYTHE, _mate_ KAKWE, JACK-JACK HENRY NEW MENOMI, FRANK

_Hic finis fandi_

Cap'n Bartlet removed his hat and wiped away a steam of sweat with deliberate care and a red-barred kerchief. "Sounds natural," he observed, clearing his throat. "Though I never did make much of that 'hic' language."

"It means 'here ended the talk,' or something of the kind," explained Jeckol. "But still," he added, quite seriously, "the list isn't complete, you know. Where's your friend Albro?"

Peters rolled the white of an eye on him. "Is it your fancy," he inquired, "that the n.i.g.g.e.rs run much to writin' epitaphs? Or books--?"

He held up to our gaze the object he had found on lifting the lid of the box--a packet of thin bark strips covered with coa.r.s.e markings and bound with a twist of fiber which next he unknotted, to run the leaves over in his hand. "I knew he was alive," said Cap'n Bartlett simply....

And that was the way we won to the story of James O'Shaughnessy Albro.

Even now I can recall each tone and gesture of its telling, each detail of the group we made there in empty Barange village; the trader's drawl and check as he read a line or turned to Kakwe with a question or flung in some vivid comment of his own; the strained attention on Bartlet's earnest face; incredulous sniff and squint of little Jeckol, still unsubdued, fidgeting about; the statued bronze figures of our Tonga boys as they stood leaning patiently on their rifles, awaiting the master's next whim; the ma.s.sed ring of the jungle; the odd, high-peaked houses with their cavernous fronts like gaping and grinning listeners; the lances of sunlight that began to splinter and fall out among lengthening shadows across the open; and through all and over all the heat and the smell and the brooding, ominous, inscrutable mystery of Papua!

_Seeking wealth I found glory. I went below as an amateur diver and I came up a professional G.o.d. But I wish I could find which son of a nighthawk it was that cut my pipe. I'd excommunicate him on the altar._

This is a page from the Book of Jim Albro, and it shows him as he lived.

Later entries are not so clear, not by any means so sprightly, and some are pitiful enough in all truth. It must have been set down in the early hours of his reign, while he was still in the flush of his stupendous adventure, before he had begun to understand what lay ahead. But here was the man "with an eye like a blue gla.s.s marble," that "never held his fist or his smile." No other could have written it after the events he had survived.

Just as Peters inferred to have been the case, the attack on the _Timothy S._ caught the whole crew of pearl hunters unready. They had seen no natives at Barange, they kept no lookout, and when Albro stepped off the ladder that morning of January 22 he left his s.h.i.+pmates contentedly employed on deck. He never saw any of them again, or--what might have been a different matter--any part of them. He went down to the sh.e.l.l bed, and while he was there the black raiders made their sweep of the schooner.

It is likely the savages took the diving lines for an extra mooring--it is certain they knew nothing whatever about the apparatus--and Albro's first warning was the cutting of that air pipe, when he found his pressure gone and water trickling through the inlet valve. Fortunately, he was just preparing to ascend and had tightened his outlet to inflate the suit. Fortunately, too, his helmet was furnished with an adjustable inlet and he was able hastily to close both valves.

He tugged at his life line, but it drew loose in his hand. He turned over on his side to look upward, but he could see nothing--only the vague blue twilight through which the slack coils of his severed air pipe came sagging. Then he knew that he had been cut off, and the hideous fear that lies in wait for every diver, amid the perils and loneliness of the sea bottom seized upon him. He might have popped to the surface by throwing off his forty-pound weights, but he was aware that no chance accident could have served him so, and his impulse was to get away, from schooner and all, to sh.o.r.e. Under water he had some few minutes to live, perhaps four or five, as long as the inclosed air should last him. Frantically he began to struggle toward the beach, yielding to a moment's panic that was to cost him dear.... While trying blindly to slash free the useless pipe he lost his diver's knife.

The rotten coral burst and sank under footing. Clogging weeds enwreathed and held him back with evil embrace. A tridacna spread its jaws before his steps so that he nearly plunged into the deadly springtrap of the deep. But he kept on up the slope; his keen spirit rallied and bore him through, and he came surging from the waves at last on a point of rocks outside the bay where he could cling and open the emergency c.o.c.k in the helmet. The suit deflated and he breathed new life. But here he suffered his second immediate mishap, for as he scrambled to his feet a dizziness took him and he slipped and pitched forward heavily, and with a great clang of armor the G.o.d fell fainting at the very threshold of his world.

_Broke left arm getting ash.o.r.e. Walking the beach when I met the n.i.g.g.e.rs. They dropped on their faces, and I saw I was elected._

These are the words with which Jim Albro chooses to make his note of a scene that can scarcely have had its parallel in human experience. With two dozen words, no more. You figure him there, I hope, that m.u.f.fled colossus with his huge copper helm flas.h.i.+ng red and his monstrous cyclopean eye agleam, striding along the strip of white beach against the hostile green hills of Papua. You see him break, an incredible apparition of power and majesty, upon the view of the dusky cannibal folk and stand towering over their stricken ranks, triumphant--a glimpse as through the flick of a shutter that pa.s.ses and leaves the beholder dazzled and unsatisfied! But the whole record is only a series of such glimpses, some focused with startling lucidity, some clouded and confused, and all too brief.

One other bit remains to fix the picture--an inimitable splash of color, flung at the end of a perplexing page....

_I picked out the chief devil-devil doctor, and raised him to honor. Old Gum-eye. Friend of mine._

Mark the spirit of the man. Whole chapters could supply no clearer tribute to his resilience and entire adequacy. Unerringly he took the right course to enforce the role thus amazingly thrust upon him and to establish his G.o.dhead. Already he had caught up the situation, had put its shock behind him. The inscription on the box remains his only reference to the loss of the schooner and her crew. And while this might seem to argue a certain lack of sensibility, I cannot feel it was so with Albro. His was a nature essentially episodic, prompt to the play of circ.u.mstance. The thing was done and past crying over; the blacks had acted by their lights, and he had very swiftly to act by his. They had given him his cue. How well he filled the part we can guess. By evening he had been installed in some kind of temple or devil house as an accredited deity to the Barange tribes....

Here ends the first part of the Book, so far as its unnumbered and fugitive entries can be arranged--the first part and the only part quite comprehensible, before the haze of distress and anxiety has dimmed our image of that strange G.o.d, whose mortality was all too real. He began its composition that same night, picking up the Snider cartridge and the bark strips while still he had some measure of liberty. Perhaps he foresaw that he would want to leave the record. Perhaps he merely sought distraction, and he had need of it.

Squatting above his own altar, he prepared his own epistle. Around his sanctuary slept a guard of devil doctors, priests, sorcerers--he uses all three terms. No sleep for Albro. But while he wrestled there alone through long hours he found the pluck to jot those early notes by the flare of a guttering torch, beguiling the pain of his broken arm and the new terror that was now rapidly closing upon him.

Like a glint of lightning from a cloud comes the following spurted item, written the next day:

_Forty hours of this. Am growing weaker. My arm--[word scratched out]. Had to give up trying to start the gla.s.s in my helmet. Can't budge it...._

Soon afterward occurs another pa.s.sage in the same startling altered key:

_Tried to get away this [morning], but the priests too suspicious.

I wanted to try smas.h.i.+ng the gla.s.s on a rock. Likely would have burst my ear drums anyway--_

And further:

_If I could get hold of a knife for three minutes. Bamboo stick [part illegible here]--can't tear vulcan canvas. No use...._

When Peters read those lines aloud and looked up he confronted a sickly ring of auditors.

"Good G.o.d!" breathed Bartlet. "_He couldn't get out!_"

The knowledge of Albro's actual plight crashed upon us all in just that phrase, and I leave you to gauge its impact. We had had no hint of it.

Here was the diary before us. We were only waiting to learn the present address of the diarist. Indeed our whole att.i.tude toward the singular discovery we were making had been quite cheerful, even exultant, like that of children who follow the tribulations of some favorite hero, secure of the happy solution.

"Couldn't get _out_?" squeaked Jeckol. "How do you mean--he couldn't?"

"He was locked up in that blasted diving dress!"

"Locked up?"...

"Sewed up--sacked up," said Peters heavily. "Did you ever see the d.a.m.n' stuff? He calls it canvas, which it ain't, but tanned twill--two-ply--with rubber between. He can't tear his way out with a stick, he says. And small wonder. Talk about strait-jackets!"

"But--but why doesn't he take off the helmet?"

Peters stared unseeing at the packet in his hand, and his face was saturnine.

"By Joe, what a mess!" he murmured. "What a beau-ti-ful mess! Look here--d'y' know a diver's outfit? First he wears a solid breastplate--see?--that sets about his shoulders. Then the helmet fits on that with segmental neck rings and screws hard down with a quarter turn to a catch. Aye, there's a catch to snap it home.... And where is that catch? Why at the _back_! No diver was ever intended to take off his own helmet!"

We could only blink at him dumbly.

"Albro couldn't reach it. Of course if he should manage to rip away the cloth from the eyelets he'd be all right--he'd simply s.h.i.+ft the whole upper works. But them eyelets, now, they lock down all around through a vulcanized collar. He couldn't reach more'n two of them either."