第34章 THE PRINCESS(7)
"And good! By the Lord Harry I was so good it hurt.My conscience got so expansive and fine-strung it lamed me across the shoulders to carry it around with me.Why, I even went back over my accounts and paid Sweitzer fifty quid I'd jiggered him out of in a deal in Fiji three years before.And I compounded the interest as well.
"Work! I planted sugar cane - the first commercial planting on Manatomana.I ran in cargoes of kinky-heads from Malaita, which is in the Solomons, till I had twelve hundred of the blackbirds putting in cane.And I sent a schooner clear to Hawaii to bring back a dismantled sugar mill and a German who said he knew the field-end of cane.And he did, and he charged me three hundred dollars screw a month, and I took hold ofthe mill-end.I installed the mill myself, with the help of several mechanics I brought up from Queensland.
"Of course there was a rival.His name was Motomoe.He was the very highest chief blood next to King John's.He was full native, a strapping, handsome man, with a glowering way of showing his dislikes.He certainly glowered at me when I began hanging around the palace.He went back in my history and circulated the blackest tales about me.The worst of it was that most of them were true.He even made a voyage to Apia to find things out - as if he couldn't find a plenty right there on the beach of Manatomana! And he sneered at my failing for religion, and at my going to prayer- meeting, and, most of all, at my sugar-planting.He challenged me to fight, and I kept off of him.He threatened me, and I learned in the nick of time of his plan to have me knocked on the head.You see, he wanted the Princess just as much as I did, and I wanted her more.
"She used to play the piano.So did I, once.But I never let her know after I'd heard her play the first time.And she thought her playing was wonderful, the dear, fond girl! You know the sort, the mechanical one-two-three tum-tum-tum school-girl stuff.And now I'll tell you something funnier.Her playing WAS wonderful to me.The gates of heaven opened to me when she played.I can see myself now, worn out and dog-tired after the long day, lying on the mats of the palace veranda and gazing upon her at the piano, myself in a perfect idiocy of bliss.Why, this idea she had of her fine playing was the one flaw in her deliciousness of perfection, and I loved her for it.It kind of brought her within my human reach.Why, when she played her one-two-three, tum- tum-tum, I was in the seventh heaven of bliss.My weariness fell from me.I loved her, and my love for her was clean as flame, clean as my love for God.And do you know, into my fond lover's fancy continually intruded the thought that God in most ways must look like her.
" - That's right, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, sneer as you like.But I tell you that's love that I've been describing.That's all.It's love.It's the realest, purest, finest thing that can happen to a man.And I know what I'm talking about.It happened to me."Whiskers, his beady squirrel's eye glittering from out his ruined eyebrow like a live coal in a jungle ambush, broke off long enough to down a sedative draught from his condensed milk can and to mix another.
"The cane," he resumed, wiping his prodigious mat of face hair with the back of his hand."It matured in sixteen months in that climate, and I was ready, just ready and no more, with the mill for the grinding.Naturally, it did not all mature at once, but I had planted in such succession that I could grind for nine months steadily, while more was being planted and the ratoons were springing up.
"I had my troubles the first several days.If it wasn't one thing the matter with the mill, it was another.On the fourth day, Ferguson, my engineer, had to shut down several hours in order to remedy his own troubles.I was bothered by the feeder.After having the niggers (who had been feeding the cane) pour cream of lime on the rollers to keep everything sweet, I sent them out to join the cane-cutting squads.So I was all alone at that end, just as Ferguson started up the mill, just as I discovered what was the matter with the feed-rollers, and just as Motomoe strolled up.
"He stood there, in Norfolk jacket, pigskin puttees, and all the rest of the fashionable get-up out of a bandbox, sneering at me covered with filth and grease to the eyebrows and looking like a navvy.And, the rollers now white from the lime, I'd just seen what was wrong.The rollers were not in plumb.One side crushed the cane well, but the other side was too open.I shoved my fingers in on that side.The big, toothed cogs on the rollers did not touch my fingers.And yet, suddenly, they did.With the grip of ten thousand devils, my finger-tips were caught, drawn in, and pulped to - well, just pulp.And, like a slick of cane, I had started on my way.There was no stopping me.Ten thousand horses could not have pulled me back.There was nothing to stop me.Hand, arm, shoulder, head, and chest, down to the toes of me, I was doomed to feed through.
"It did hurt.It hurt so much it did not hurt me at all.Quite detached, almost may I say, I looked on my hand being ground up, knuckle by knuckle, joint by joint, the back of the hand, the wrist, the forearm, all in order slowly and inevitably feeding in.O engineer hoist by thine ownpetard!O sugar-maker crushed by thine own cane-crusher!
"Motomoe sprang forward involuntarily, and the sneer was chased from his face by an expression of solicitude.Then the beauty of the situation dawned on him, and he chuckled and grinned.No, I didn't expect anything of him.Hadn't he tried to knock me on the head? What could he do anyway?He didn't know anything about engines.
"I yelled at the top of my lungs to Ferguson to shut off the engine, but the roar of the machinery drowned my voice.And there I stood, up to the elbow and feeding right on in.Yes, it did hurt.There were some astonishing twinges when special nerves were shredded and dragged out by the roots.But I remember that I was surprised at the time that it did not hurt worse.