by Peter Watt
‘Jack has a well-known sense of humour,’ Sen beamed. ‘He would not tell you about me just so that he could see the expression on your face now.’
‘Is it that obvious, Mr Sen?’
‘I am a Methodist, Mr Spencer, and my Christian name is Sen. We Chinese use our family name first, unlike you Europeans who place your family name last. I would be honoured if you also called me Sen as my friend Jack does.’
‘I must say that you speak English like a native,’ George complimented. ‘I mean like an Englishman.’
‘I was educated by Methodist missionaries in China before I came to Papua.’
‘Well, now that you have met your first Papuan,’ Jack said, ‘I suggest that we adjourn for a cold beer. Sen’s boys will look after unloading our kit.’
‘Too right,’ Sen said. ‘I have the sulky waiting for us and the trip to my place will give me a chance to catch up with all that has happened in your life since I last saw you in ’15. I heard around the town that you won some medals in the war.’
George was impressed with Sen’s residence an hour’s journey from the town. A large sprawling house of timber walls and corrugated iron roof, it was raised off the ground and surrounded by a verandah. A mass of well-watered trees, shrubs and ferns shielded the house from the harshness of the dry stunted and drooping vegetation of the countryside. The windows lacked glass panes but were framed by shutters instead. The sweet perfume of frangipani wafted by as they stepped up onto the verandah where a young native man dressed in a clean wrap-around skirt of cotton cloth met them.
‘Hey, Dademo,’ Jack said. ‘Is that you?’ The young man’s face broke into a broad smile at being recognised. ‘You were just a piccaninny when I last saw you.’
‘It’s me, Mr Jack,’ the young man said. ‘Mr Sen said you come back.’
‘This is Mr George,’ Jack said, indicating the tall Englishman following him onto the verandah. ‘He’s one of those bloody pommies.’ Dademo nodded his head shyly.
‘There have been a few changes since you left,’ Sen said removing his hat. ‘I have a wife and sister-in-law living with me.’ Jack’s expression betrayed his surprise. ‘This is my wife My Lee,’ Sen continued when a pretty young Chinese woman presented herself with a small bow to the men on the verandah. My Lee wore her jet black hair tied back in a bun and dressed European-style in a long white cotton dress. She appeared fragile like a china doll and her serene beauty immediately impressed both men. ‘This is my friend Jack Kelly and his friend Mr George Spencer, My Lee,’ Sen said. Both men mumbled their greetings and Sen was pleased to see how impressed they were by his new wife.
‘And this is my wife’s sister, Iris,’ he added when another young woman appeared at the door. Yet again the visitors were stunned. George hoped that he was not gaping. The second woman was an extraordinary Eurasian beauty in her late teens. She stood slightly taller than Sen himself and her eyes were a deep mysterious colour that seemed to be neither dark nor light. Her silky dark hair was bobbed in the European fashion of the day. She did not acknowledge her brother-in-law’s visitors with the same diffidence as shown by her half sister but turned back to the coolness of the house.
An ice maiden, George reflected to himself. An ice maiden men would kill for.
Sen could see the confusion on his visitors’ faces. ‘I will fill you in later, Jack,’ he said softly in the Australian’s ear. ‘But not now, when I know you both could do with a beer.’
After a sumptuous meal of meat and vegetables prepared in the Chinese style of cooking, Jack retired to the verandah. He leant on the rail and puffed on a cigar.
Sen joined him and stood beside his friend, staring into the warm tropical night of familiar sounds. ‘Your friend George seems to be taken by my wife’s sister,’ he said. ‘She is teaching him mah-jong.’
‘A beautiful woman,’ Jack responded. ‘I was rather impressed by her myself. What’s her story?’
‘Ah, that is a mystery,’ Sen sighed. ‘All I know is that her father was a European back in China. I suspect a missionary. My wife will not tell me any more.’
‘Well, she is in good company with George. He is a bit of a mystery man himself. I still don’t know much about him after all the years we served together through the war. All I know is that he seems to have an unlimited source of money from somewhere.’
‘I gathered that you could not have purchased all the stores my boys unloaded,’ Sen grinned, ‘and that your friend was the backer in whatever you are plotting.’
‘Plotting!’ Jack exclaimed with an expression of feigned shock. ‘Plotting is an English word with nefarious overtones, old friend.’
Sen gazed at the soft shadows of the night. ‘I remember a story about a man you knew before the war,’ he said casually. ‘A pretty tough prospector man by the name of Arthur Darling who in 1913 took a whaleboat crewed by Orakaiva boys and slipped past the authorities in the Kaiser’s territory up into the mouth of the Markham River in search of gold. It seems from rumours that he did all right until the Kukukukus put five arrows in him and he had to get out after a running battle with them. He was just lucky to survive. Of course you would not be planning to head up into Kukukuku territory, would you Jack?’
The Australian glanced at the Chinese entrepreneur. ‘You wouldn’t perhaps know of any further attempts to go up into the MarkhamValley?’
Sen rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘I have heard that Sharkeye Park has been hanging around Morobe way.’
‘Park!’ Jack spat. ‘Darling must have told him something before he died. I heard they had teamed up after Darling got picked up at sea.’
‘How did you know about Darling’s strike?’ Sen asked softly. ‘Very few people had any idea.’
‘An Orakaiva boy related to another Orakaiva working with Darling told me the story of his gold find,’ Jack answered. ‘I once did his family a favour.’
Sen nodded. He knew that in such places as Papua and New Guinea – with their small populations of Europeans – it was hard to keep a secret. As a man whose moderate wealth was carefully husbanded through various enterprises on the island, Sen had his own intelligence garnered from a network of scattered native sources. His initial money had been made as a recruiter for the German plantation owners before the Great War. But he had also provided native labour to the Australians. He knew that William ‘Sharkeye’ Park was a veteran gold prospector who had worked in the Klondike rush of Alaska at the turn of the century and had a lot of experience with minor gold rushes in the tropics. So if Sharkeye had been seen around the Morobe township in the former German territory it seemed to confirm that the experienced prospector was onto something. Sen remembered how, as a young man before the war, Jack had confided to him that he had joined a covert expedition of experienced prospectors who had crossed the border into German territory to seek out geologically promising sites inland. But the expedition had been intercepted by the German native police near Salamaua just after they had landed ashore. The incident had caused trouble between the German authorities in New Guinea and the Australians in Papua. Only the personal intervention by the respected chief Australian administrator Sir Hubert Murray had extricated the Australian prospectors from languishing in a German lockup. Sen also knew that Jack’s own German heritage had helped them out. His charm and easy-going nature had helped defuse the situation with the German administrator, Hahl.
His intuition told him loudly that Jack Kelly was planning to return and finish what he and others had started. But the terrain of the country was known for its rugged, almost vertical mountains. And there was the high risk of fever, and fierce warriors who would suddenly appear out of the steaming mists of the jungles to shower arrows on intruders, finishing off their victims with striated stone killing clubs. It was the territory of the dreaded Kukukuku tribesmen.
Sen liked Jack Kelly. He was a man who did not discriminate against him because he was an Oriental and with no rights in European territory. Maybe it was because Jack had hi
mself fought the prejudice of being half-German and half-Irish. Both cultures had taken a battering from the British Empire. Jack, however, had considered himself a South Australian first, but lately just an Australian.
The two men had befriended when Jack had gone to Sen to recruit native porters for a small prospecting expedition in the Kerema region. Sen had been struck by the young man’s self-assurance. Jack had expressed an interest in learning how to play mah-jong and from the moment they had built the four walls of ivory and bamboo tiles the friendship had developed to the point where Jack had gained concessions for Sen through his friendship with the Papuan administrator, Sir Hubert Murray. It was a debt Sen recognised. But above all it was a friendship that transcended racial origins.
Sen sighed as the smoke of Jack’s cigar wafted pungently around them. ‘Maybe you should think twice about what I strongly suspect that you are planning to do, Jack,’ he said.
‘All I am going to do is look for gold,’ Jack replied, turning his attention back to the night shadows. ‘No law against that. Anyway, let’s see how George is shaping up as a mah-jong player. Maybe we have someone new who we can convince to put his money down for a few rounds. Someone we can both beat.’
George was more interested in the delicate hands of his teacher than in the instructions she was giving. Iris had changed into the traditional body-clinging dress of China. The cheongsam was of cream dyed silk, brightly patterned with swallows and willow trees. The swell of her hips, buttocks and breasts seemed to be accentuated and the tall, normally reserved Englishman found that he was gazing at her as she knelt on a coir mat. His face flushed when she glanced up at him between explanations and caught him staring at her. If his badly hidden and brazen attention had annoyed her she was careful not to express her thoughts on the matter. She appeared to ignore his stolen glances and concentrate on the game.
‘I must say, Miss Iris, that you are a most beautiful woman,’ George impulsively blurted as he knelt uncomfortably on the opposite side of the low teak table. ‘And I must apologise if my observation has caused you any alarm.’ Iris avoided his eyes and looked demurely down at the tiles.
‘I take no exception, Mr Spencer,’ she replied. ‘I think that you have been away from the pretty ladies for a long time and your judgment of me is that of a man who would say any lady was pretty.’
‘Not so,’ George defended indignantly. ‘I have not long left Australia where there are many beautiful women – in a sort of rough, colonial way – but your beauty is quite extraordinary. Like that of the most exquisite orchid.’
Iris looked up from the table with a hint of a teasing smile. ‘I take your compliment as a gracious gesture, Mr Spencer, but you are here in a place of very few women.’
‘George, please call me George, Miss Iris,’ the Englishman said. ‘I would be honoured if you did so.’
The two players had not noticed Jack and Sen close by on the other side of a cotton net curtain dividing the spacious room. Both men looked at each other with a frown. Maybe George might become smitten to the point of forgetting that he was in this mostly unexplored land to search for his fabled Orangwoks, Jack thought. If so he might lose his financial support to search for gold.
For Sen the Englishman’s unabashed attraction to his wife’s sister was a matter of family honour. Although she may not be of pure blood, she was still Chinese. The thought of a member of his family being romantically involved with a European was unthinkable, they were not a civilised people, an inferior race. He felt a guilty twinge at his recriminations. Beside him stood his friend Jack Kelly who was of European stock. Why would such a thought occur to him when he himself was a Christian Chinese? The answer eluded him, except that he realised that he did not condone mixed race relationships. Was not the ostracising of his sister-in-law by his Chinese relatives an example of the tragedy of such crossings? No good could come of the Englishman’s attraction to Iris.
FIVE
The bitter chill of winter permeated the house. Paul Mann hunched against the cold as he sat in the small room that was his retreat from the world. It had once been a library with an impressive collection of books accumulated over the years by his father. But now many of the books had been sold off in lots to collectors for little more than a day’s supply of coal for heating. Before him lay the letter he had waited impatiently for. Its contents gave him a warmth that he had not felt in a long time. A new decade was almost upon them and a chance for a new life.
The footsteps on the stairs told him his sister had returned from wherever she had been. He glanced at the clock on the wall and scowled at the time. It was early morning and a time long past the hour any respectable lady should be coming home.
‘Erika,’ he called softly from the library.
His sister entered the small room, glowering defiantly at her brother seated in a chair frayed by age. ‘What do you want me to say?’ she demanded as she stood belligerently in the doorway. ‘I am no longer a child. And you are not Father.’
‘Were you with them tonight?’ he accused.
‘That is my business,’ she replied with a tilt of her chin.
‘They are no good. They are little more than thugs and their ideas are dangerous to Germany.’
‘Adolf has a vision,’ Erika said, with a dreamy expression on her strikingly beautiful face. ‘He has the soul of an artist and the heart of a warrior. His words will some day change the world.’
‘It was inspired words that got us into this mess,’ Paul growled. ‘Words of patriotism and Fatherland.’
‘You speak like those cursed Jews who have profited from Germany’s misery,’ she retorted with a snarl. For a moment Paul did not recognise her. Although the war had separated them and disrupted their closeness as brother and sister, he still thought of her as the happy little girl whose smile could melt the coldest of hearts.
‘It was not only the Jews who profited from the war,’ he replied. ‘Look around at the Junkers families. Look at Krupps and men like him. Are they suffering with us? No, they live in their fancy homes and have goose for supper. The rich of any country are to blame if blame is to be apportioned.’
Erika blanched. ‘Are you a communist?’
Paul frowned. ‘I am not a communist. I am a German and proud of who I am.’
‘You swear to me on our parents’ honor that you are not a communist?’ Erika asked again.
‘I damned well told you that I am not,’ Paul answered irritably. ‘If I was one of them I would tell you.’
The blood returned to Erika’s face. She knew her brother would not lie to her. He was a man of honour and his word always held. To be a communist was akin to being a Jew, according to Adolf.
‘I am sorry, Paul,’ Erika softened. ‘It is just that we are in troubled times.’
‘I know, that is why I want you to be the first to hear my important news.’
Erika stared at her brother with a quizzical expression. ‘Why would you want me to be the first?’ she asked. ‘I thought that you would tell Karin any important news first.’
‘You are my sister,’ he replied simply. ‘I have a buyer for the house – and a letter from New Guinea.’
The shock registered on Erika’s face. She immediately understood the relationship between the two statements. ‘We are not leaving Germany to go to New Guinea,’ she gasped. ‘I will not go with you. Adolf needs me here to help him in his work. I . . .’
‘Are you sleeping with Herr Hitler?’ Paul snapped as he rose from the chair.
His anger frightened Erika and she took a step back. Very rarely had she seen her brother so angry. ‘No. I wish I was his lover,’ she blurted. ‘Given time I know he will take me to his bed and I will truly share . . .’
‘Share what?’ Paul exploded. ‘Share the thuggery of the streets as we are seeing now? Share another round of sabre rattling by fanatics bent on sending us into another war? Herr Hitler’s kind of ideology is not new. It has always been in the European way of thinking. Oh, I k
now a lot about your Adolf,’ he continued with a cold anger. ‘He is little different to the men who sent my boys to their deaths on the front. Men who preach the greatness of war and sit safely at home drinking their brandy and complaining that we are not bleeding enough for them.’
Erika was shocked by the explosion of raw emotion in her brother. Since returning from the war he had been so quiet, saying little or nothing of his feelings on any subject. She felt him grip her shoulders and was afraid.
‘Do you know what it was like to see the rats in the trenches bloated with human flesh? Do you know what it was like to see school boys sent to the front just to give us the numbers to counter the French and British? To hear them screaming for their mothers as they tried to hold in their bellies ripped by shrapnel? No, you do not, and I pray that you never will see or hear what we did at the front.’
As suddenly as his anger had come it went. He let go of Erika’s shoulders and slumped back in his chair. ‘We are all going to New Guinea,’ he said calmly. ‘We are going to start a new life in a new country. I received a letter today from an Australian planter who had taken over our plantation at Finschhafen. He is prepared to sell it back to me at a reasonable price. It seems that the price for copra is not good but I already had plans to diversify the crops before the war put a stop to everything in our lives.’
‘I will not go with you,’ Erika responded. ‘My place is here in Germany.’
‘You will go with us,’ Paul answered firmly. ‘You forget that you cannot inherit any part of our parents’ estate until you turn twenty-one. And that by the terms of the will your share is in my control until then. So, as we are all going to New Guinea, you are forced to stay with us until then.’
Erika glared at her brother. He was right, and as she was only a year short of her twenty-first year she would comply. After that she would return to Germany and reclaim her place in the cause of her beloved Adolf. ‘One year,’ she spat, ‘and I will be rid of you, brother.’