第6章 THE RED ONE(6)

Ngurn had he failed to bribe with the inevitable curing of his head when he was dead.Vngngn, imbecile and chief that he was, was too imbecilic, too much under the sway of Ngurn, to be considered.Remained Balatta, who, from the time she found him and poked his blue eyes open to recrudescence of her grotesque female hideousness, had continued his adorer.Woman she was, and he had long known that the only way to win from her treason of her tribe was through the woman's heart of her.

Bassett was a fastidious man.He had never recovered from the initial horror caused by Balatta's female awfulness.Back in England, even at best the charm of woman, to him, had never been robust.Yet now, resolutely, as only a man can do who is capable of martyring himself for the cause of science, he proceeded to violate all the fineness and delicacy of his nature by making love to the unthinkably disgusting bushwoman.

He shuddered, but with averted face hid his grimaces and swallowed his gorge as he put his arm around her dirt-crusted shoulders and felt the contact of her rancidoily and kinky hair with his neck and chin.But he nearly screamed when she succumbed to that caress so at the very first of the courtship and mowed and gibbered and squealed little, queer, pig-like gurgly noises of delight.It was too much.And the next he did in the singular courtship was to take her down to the stream and give her a vigorous scrubbing.

From then on he devoted himself to her like a true swain as frequently and for as long at a time as his will could override his repugnance.But marriage, which she ardently suggested, with due observance of tribalcustom, he balked at.Fortunately, taboo rule was strong in the tribe.Thus, Ngurn could never touch bone, or flesh, or hide of crocodile.This had been ordained at his birth.Vngngn was denied ever the touch of woman.Such pollution, did it chance to occur, could be purged only by the death of the offending female.It had happened once, since Bassett's arrival, when a girl of nine, running in play, stumbled and fell against the sacred chief.And the girl-child was seen no more.In whispers, Balatta told Bassett that she had been three days and nights in dying before the Red One.As for Balatta, the breadfruit was taboo to her.For which Bassett was thankful.The taboo might have been water.

For himself, he fabricated a special taboo.Only could he marry, he explained, when the Southern Cross rode highest in the sky.Knowing his astronomy, he thus gained a reprieve of nearly nine months; and he was confident that within that time he would either be dead or escaped to the coast with full knowledge of the Red One and of the source of the Red One's wonderful voice.At first he had fancied the Red One to be some colossal statue, like Memnon, rendered vocal under certain temperature conditions of sunlight.But when, after a war raid, a batch of prisoners was brought in and the sacrifice made at night, in the midst of rain, when the sun could play no part, the Red One had been more vocal than usual, Bassett discarded that hypothesis.

In company with Balatta, sometimes with men and parties of women, the freedom of the jungle was his for three quadrants of the compass.But the fourth quadrant, which contained the Red One's abiding place, was taboo.He made more thorough love to Balatta - also saw to it that she scrubbed herself more frequently.Eternal female she was, capable of any treason for the sake of love.And, though the sight of her was provocative of nausea and the contact of her provocative of despair, although he could not escape her awfulness in his dream-haunted nightmares of her, he nevertheless was aware of the cosmic verity of sex that animated her and that made her own life of less value than the happiness of her lover with whom she hoped to mate.Juliet or Balatta? Where was the intrinsic difference? The soft and tender product of ultra- civilization, or her bestial prototype of a hundred thousand years beforeher? - there was no difference.

Bassett was a scientist first, a humanist afterward.In the jungle-heart of Guadalcanal he put the affair to the test, as in the laboratory he would have put to the test any chemical reaction.He increased his feigned ardour for the bushwoman, at the same time increasing the imperiousness of his will of desire over her to be led to look upon the Red One face to face.It was the old story, he recognized, that the woman must pay, and it occurred when the two of them, one day, were catching the unclassified and unnamed little black fish, an inch long, half-eel and half-scaled, rotund with salmon-golden roe, that frequented the fresh water, and that were esteemed, raw and whole, fresh or putrid, a perfect delicacy.Prone in the muck of the decaying jungle-floor, Balatta threw herself, clutching his ankles with her hands kissing his feet and making slubbery noises that chilled his backbone up and down again.She begged him to kill her rather than exact this ultimate love- payment.She told him of the penalty of breaking the taboo of the Red One - a week of torture, living, the details of which she yammered out from her face in the mire until he realized that he was yet a tyro in knowledge of the frightfulness the human was capable of wreaking on the human.