The Disentanglers

‘Have you seen him?’

‘No, but I have seen her, the hen bird. She was sitting on eggs. No man knows her nest but myself, and old Te-iki-pa, the chief medicine-man, or Tohunga, of the Maori King. The Moa’s eyrie is in the King’s country. It is a difficult country, and a dangerous business, if the cock Moa chances to come home.’

‘Bude, is this worthy of an old friend, this blague?’

‘Do you doubt my word?’

‘If you give me your word I must believe – that you dreamed it.’

Then a strange thing happened.

Bude walked to a small case of instruments that stood on a table in the smoking-room. He unlocked it, took out a lancet, brought a Rhodian bowl from a shelf, and bared his arm.

‘Do you want proof?’

‘Proof that you saw a hen Moa sitting?’ asked Merton in amazement.

‘Not exactly, but proof that Te-iki-pa knew a thing or two, quite as out of the way as the habitat of the Moa.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Bare your arm, and hold it over the bowl.’

The room was full of the yellow dusky light of an early summer morning in London. Outside the heavy carts were rolling by: in full civilisation the scene was strange.

‘The Blood Covenant?’ asked Merton.

Bude nodded.

Merton turned up his cuff, Bude let a little blood drop into the bowl, then performed the same operation on his own arm.

‘This is all rot,’ he said, ‘but without this I cannot show you, by virtue of my oath to Te-iki-pa, what I mean to show you. Now repeat after me what I am going to say.’

He spoke a string of words, among which Merton, as he repeated them, could only recognise mana and atua. The vowel sounds were as in Italian.

‘Now these words you must never report to any one, without my permission.’

‘Not likely,’ said Merton, ‘I only remember two of them, and these I knew before.’

‘All right,’ said Bude.

He then veiled his face in a piece of silk that lay on a sofa, and rapidly, in a low voice, chanted a kind of hymn in a tongue unknown to Merton. All this he did with a bored air, as if he thought the performance a superfluous mummery.

‘Now what shall I show you? Something simple. Look at the bookcase, and think of any book you may want to consult.’

Merton thought of the volume in M. of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The volume slowly slid from the shelf, glided through the air to Merton, and gently subsided on the table near him, open at the word Moa.

Merton walked across to the bookcase, took all the volumes from the shelf, and carefully examined the backs and sides for springs and mechanical advantages. There were none.

‘Not half bad!’ he said, when he had completed his investigation.

‘You are satisfied that Te-iki-pa knew something? If you had seen what I have seen, if you had seen the three days dead – ’ and Bude shivered slightly.

‘I have seen enough. Do you know how it is done?’

‘No.’

‘Well, a miracle is not what you call logical proof, but I believe that you did see the Moa, and a still more extraordinary bird, Te-iki-pa.’

‘Yes, they talk of strange beasts, but “nothing is stranger than man.” Did you ever hear of the Berbalangs of Cagayan Sulu?’

‘Never in my life,’ said Merton.

‘Heaven preserve me from them,’ said Bude, and he gently stroked the strange muddy pearls in the sleeve-links on his loose shirt-cuff. ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us,’ he exclaimed, crossing himself (he was of the old faith), and he fell silent.

It was a moment of emotion. Six silvery strokes were sounded from a little clock on the chimney-piece. The hour of confidences had struck.

‘Bude, you are serious about Miss McCabe?’ asked Merton.

‘I mean to put it to the touch at Goodwood.’

‘No use!’ said Merton.

Bude changed colour.

‘Are you?’

‘No,’ interrupted Merton. ‘But she is not free.’

‘There is somebody in America? Nobody here, I think.’

‘It is hardly that,’ said Merton. ‘Can you listen to rather a long story? I’ll cut it as much as possible. You must remember that I am practically breaking my word of honour in telling you this. My honour is in your hands.’

‘Fire away,’ said Bude, pouring a bottle of Apollinaris water into a long tumbler, and drinking deep.

Merton told the tale of Miss McCabe’s extraordinary involvement, and of the wild conditions on which her hand was to be won. ‘And as to her heart, I think,’ he added, ‘if you pull off the prize —

If my heart by signs can tell,

Lordling, I have marked her daily,

And I think she loves thee well.’

‘Thank you for that, old cock,’ replied the peer, shaking Merton’s hand. He had recovered from his emotion.

‘I’m on,’ he added, after a moment’s silence, ‘but I shall enter as Jones Harvey.’

‘His name and his celebrated papers will impress the trustees,’ said Merton. ‘Now what variety of nature shall you go for? Wild men count. Shall you fetch a Berbalang of what do you call it?’

Bude shuddered. ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘I think I shall fetch a Moa.’

‘But no steamer could hold that gigantic denizen of the forests.’

‘You leave that to Jones Harvey. Jones is ’cute, some,’ he said, reminiscent of the adored one, and he fell into a lover’s reverie.

He was aroused by Merton’s departure: he finished the Apollinaris water, took a bath, and went to bed.

II. The Adventure of the Muddy Pearls

The Earl of Bude had meant to lay his heart, coronet, and other possessions, real and personal, before the tiny feet of the fair American at Goodwood. But when he learned from Merton the involvements of this heiress and paragon, that her hand depended on the choice of the people, that the choice of the people was to settle on the adventurer who brought to New York the rarest of nature’s varieties, the earl honourably held his peace. Yet he and the object of his love were constantly meeting, on the yachts and in the country houses of their friends, the aristocracy, and, finally, at shooting lodges in the Highlands. Their position, as the Latin Delectus says concerning the passion of love in general, was ‘a strange thing, and full of anxious fears.’ Bude could not declare himself, and Miss McCabe, not knowing that he knew her situation, was constantly wondering why he did not speak. Between fear of letting her secret show itself in a glance or a blush and hope of listening to the words which she desired to hear, even though she could not answer them as her heart prompted, she was unhappy. Bude could not resist the temptation to be with her – indeed he argued to himself that, as her suitor and an adventurer about to risk himself in her cause, he had a right to be near her. Meanwhile Merton was the confidant of both of the perplexed lovers; at least Miss McCabe (who, of course, told him nothing about Bude) kept him apprised as to the conduct of her trustees.

They had acted with honourable caution and circumspection. Their advertisements guardedly appealed to men of daring and of scientific distinction under the age of thirty-five. A professorship might have been in view for all that the world could see, if the world read the advertisements. Perhaps it was something connected with the manufacture of original explosives, for daring is not usually required in the learned. The testimonials and printed works of applicants were jealously scrutinised. At personal interviews with competitors similar caution was observed. During three weeks in August the papers announced that Lord Bude was visiting the States; arrangements about a yachting match in the future were his pretence. He returned, he came to Scotland, and it was in a woodland path beside the Lochy that his resolution failed, and that he spoke to Miss McCabe. They were walking home together from the river in the melancholy and beautiful close of a Highland day in September. Behind them the gillies, at a respectful distance, were carrying the rods and the fish. The wet woods were fragrant, the voice of the stream was deepening, strange lights came and went on moor and hills and the distant loch. It was then that Bude opened his heart. He first candidly explained that his heart, he had supposed, was dead – buried on a distant and a deadly shore.

‘I reckon there’s a lost Lenore most times,’ Miss McCabe had replied to this confession.

But, though never to be forgotten, the memory of the lost one, Bude averred, was now merged in the light of a living love; his heart was no longer tenanted only by a shadow.

The heart of Miss McCabe stood still for a moment, her cheek paled, but the gallant girl was true to herself, to her father’s wish, to her native land, to the flag. She understood her adorer.

‘Guess I’m bespoke,’ said Miss McCabe abruptly.

‘You are another’s! Oh, despair!’ exclaimed the impassioned earl.

‘Yes, I reckon I’m the Bride of Seven, like the girl in the poem.’

‘The Bride of Seven?’ said Bude.

‘One out of that crowd will call me his,’ said Miss McCabe, handing to her adorer the list, which she had received by mail a day or two earlier, of the accepted competitors. He glanced over the names.

1. Dr. Hiram P. Dodge, of the Smithsonian Institute.

2. Alfred Jenkins, F.R.S., All Souls College, Oxford.

3. Dr. James Rustler, Columbia University.

4. Howard Fry, M.A., Ph.D., Trinity College, Cambridge.

5. Professor Potter, F.R.S., University of St. Andrews.

6. Professor Wilkinson, University of Harvard.

7. Jones Harvey, F.G.S., London, England.

‘In Heaven’s name,’ asked the earl, ‘what means this mystification? Miss McCabe, Melissa, do not trifle with me. Is this part of the great American Joke? You are playing it pretty low down on me, Melissa!’ he ended, the phrase being one of those with which she had made him familiar.

She laughed hysterically: ‘It’s honest Injun,’ she said, and in the briefest terms she told him (what he knew very well) the conditions on which her future depended.

‘They are a respectable crowd, I don’t deny it,’ she went on, ‘but, oh, how dull! That Mr. Jenkins, I saw him at your Commemoration. He gave us luncheon, and showed us dry old bones of beasts and savage notions at the Museum. I druther have been on the creek,’ by which name she intended the classical river Isis.

‘Dr. Hiram P. Dodge is one of our rising scientists, a boss of the Smithsonian Institute. Well, Washington is a finer location than Oxford! Dr. Rustler is a crank; he thinks he can find a tall talk mummy that speaks an unknown tongue.’

‘A Toltec mummy? Ah,’ said Bude, ‘I know where to find one of them.’

‘Find it then, Alured!’ exclaimed Miss McCabe, blushing scarlet and turning aside. ‘But you are not on the list. You are an idler, and not scientific, not worth a red cent. There, I’ve given myself away!’ She wept.

They were alone, beneath the walls of a crumbling fortalice of Lochiel. The new risen moon saw Bude embrace her and dry her tears. A nameless blissful hope awakened in the fair American; help there must be, she thought, with these strong arms around her.

She rapidly disposed of the remaining names: of Howard Fry, who had a red beard; of Professor Potter of St. Andrews, whose accent was Caledonian; of Wilkinson, an ardent but unalluring scientist. ‘As for Jones Harvey,’ she said, ‘I’ve canvassed everywhere, and I can’t find anybody that ever saw him. I am more afraid of him than of all the other galoots; I don’t know why.’

‘He is reckoned very learned,’ said Bude, ‘and has not been thought ill-looking.’

‘Do tell!’ said Miss McCabe.

‘Oh, Melissa, can you even dream of another in an hour like this?’

‘Did you ever see Jones Harvey?’

‘Yes, I have met him.’

‘Do you know him well?’

‘No man knows him better.’

‘Can’t you get him to stand out, and, Alured, can’t you – fetch along that old tall talk mummy? He would hit our people, being American himself.’

‘It is impossible. Jones Harvey will never stand out,’ and Bude smiled.

By the telepathy of the affections Miss McCabe was slowly informed, especially as Bude’s smile widened almost unbecomingly, while he gazed into the deeps of her golden eyes.

‘Alured,’ she exclaimed, ‘that’s why you went to the States. You– are – Jones Harvey!’

‘Secret for secret,’ whispered the earl. ‘We have both given ourselves away. Unknown to the world I am Jones Harvey; to live for you: to love you: to dare; if need be, to die for you.’

‘Well, you surprise me!’ said Miss McCabe.

* * * * *

The narrator is unwilling to dilate on the delights of a privileged affection. In this love affair neither of the lovers could feel absolutely certain that their affection was privileged. The fair American had her own secret scheme if her hopes were blighted. She could not then obey the paternal will: she would retire into the life religious, and, as Sister Anna, would strive to forget the sorrows of Melissa McCabe. Bude had his own hours of gloom.

‘It is a six-to-one chance,’ he said to Merton when they met.

‘Better than that, I think,’ said Merton. ‘First, you know exactly what you are entered for. Do the others? When you saw the trustees in the States, did they tell you about the prize?’

‘Not they. They spoke of a pecuniary reward which would be eminently satisfactory, and of the opportunity for research and distinction, and all expenses found. I said that I preferred to pay my own way, which surprised and pleased them a good deal.’

‘Well, then, knowing the facts, and the lady, you have a far stronger motive than the other six.’

‘That’s true,’ said Bude.

‘Again, though the others are good men (not that I like Jenkins of All Souls), none of them has your experience and knowledge. Jones Harvey’s testimonials would carry it if it were a question of election to a professorship.’

‘You flatter me,’ answered Bude.

‘Lastly, did the trustees ask you if you were a married man?’

‘No, by Jove, they didn’t.’

‘Well, nothing about the competitors being unmarried men occurs in the clause of McCabe’s last will and testament. He took it for granted, the prize being what it is, that only bachelors were eligible. But he forgot to say so, in so many words, and the trustees did not go beyond the deed. Now, Dodge is married; Fry of Trinity is a married don; Rustler (I happen to know) is an engaged man, who can’t afford to marry a charming girl in Detroit, Michigan; and Professor Potter has buried one wife, and wedded another. If Rustler is loyal to his plighted word, you have nobody against you but Wilkinson and old Jenkins of All Souls – a tough customer, I admit, though what a Stinks man like him has to do at All Souls I don’t know.’

‘I say, this is hard on the other sportsmen! What ought I to do? Should I tell them?’

‘You can’t: you have no official knowledge of their existence. You only know through Miss McCabe. You have just to sit tight.’

‘It seems beastly unsportsmanlike,’ said Bude.

‘Wills are often most carelessly drafted,’ answered Merton, ‘and the usual consequences follow.’

‘It is not cricket,’ said Bude, and really he seemed much more depressed than elated by the reduction of the odds against him from 6 to 1 to 2 to 1.

This is the magnificent type of character produced by our British system of athletic sports, though it is not to be doubted that the spirit of Science, in the American gentlemen, would have been equally productive of the sense of fair play.

* * * * * *

A year, by the terms of McCabe’s will, was allotted to the quest. Candidates were to keep the trustees informed as to their whereabouts. Six weeks before the end of the period the competitors would be instructed as to the port of rendezvous, where an ocean liner, chartered by the trustees, was to await them. Bude, as Jones Harvey, had obtained leave to sail his own steam yacht of 800 tons.

The earl’s preparations were simple. He carried his usual stock of scientific implements, his usual armament, including two Maxim guns, and a package of considerable size and weight, which was stored in the hold. As to the preparations of the others he knew nothing, but Miss McCabe became aware that Rustler had not left the American continent. Concerning Jenkins, and the probable aim of his enterprise, the object of his quest, she gleaned information from a junior Fellow of All Souls, who was her slave, was indiscreet, and did not know how deeply concerned she was in the expeditions. But she never whispered a word of what she knew to her lover, not even in the hour of parting.

It was in an unnamed creek of the New Zealand coast, six weeks before the end of the appointed year, that Bude received a telegram in cipher from the trustees. Bearded, and in blue spectacles, clad rudely as a mariner, Bude was to all, except Logan, who had accompanied him, plain Jones Harvey. None could have recognised in his rugged aspect the elegant aristocrat of Mayfair.

Bude took the message from the hands of the Maori bearer. As he deciphered it his fingers trembled with eagerness. ‘Oh, Heaven! Here is the Hand of Destiny!’ he exclaimed, when he had read the message; and with pallid face he dropped into a deck-chair.

‘No bad news?’ asked Logan with anxiety.

‘The port of rendezvous,’ said Bude, much agitated. ‘Come down to my cabin.’

Entering the sumptuous cabin, Bude opened the locked door of a state-room, and uttered some words in an unknown tongue. A tall and very ancient Maori, tatooed with the native ‘Moka’ on every inch of his body, emerged. The snows of some eighty winters covered his broad breast and majestic head. His eyes were full of the secrets of primitive races. For clothing he wore two navy revolvers stuck in a waist-cloth.

‘Te-iki-pa,’ said Bude, in the Maori language, ‘watch by the door, we must have no listeners, and your ears are keen as those of the youngest Rangatira’ (warrior).

The august savage nodded, and, lying down on the floor, applied his ear to the chink at its foot.

‘The port of tryst,’ whispered Bude to Logan, as they seated themselves at the remotest extremity of the cabin, ‘is in Cagayan Sulu.’

‘And where may that be?’ asked Logan, lighting a cigarette.

‘It is a small volcanic island, the most southerly of the Philippines.’

‘American territory now,’ said Logan. ‘But what about it? If it was anybody but you, Bude, I should say he was in a funk.’

‘I am in a funk,’ answered Bude simply.

‘Why?’

‘I have been there before and left – a blood-feud.’

‘What of it? We have one here, with the Maori King, about you know what. Have we not the Maxims, and any quantity of Lee-Metfords? Besides, you need not go ashore at Cagayan Sulu.’

‘But they can come aboard. Bullets won’t stop them.’

‘Stop whom? The natives?’

‘The Berbalangs: you might as well try to stop mosquitoes with Maxims.’

‘Who are the Berbalangs then?’

Bude paced the cabin in haggard anxiety. ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ he muttered.

‘Well, I don’t want your confidence,’ said Logan, hurt.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Bude affectionately, ‘you are likely to know soon enough. In the meantime, please accept this.’

He opened a strong box, which appeared to contain jewellery, and offered Logan a ring. Between two diamonds of the finest water it contained a bizarre muddy coloured pearl. ‘Never let that leave your finger,’ said Bude. ‘Your life may hang on it.’

‘It is a pretty talisman,’ said Logan, placing the jewel on the little finger of his right hand. ‘A token of some friendly chief, I suppose, at Cagayan – what do you call it?’

‘Let us put it at that,’ answered Bude; ‘I must take other precautions.’

It seemed to Logan that these consisted in making similar presents to the officers and crew, all of whom were Englishmen. Te-iki-pa displaced his nose-ring and inserted his pearl in the orifice previously occupied by that ornament. A little chain of the pearls was hung on the padlock of the huge packing-case, which was the special care of Te-iki-pa.

‘Luckily I had the yacht’s painting altered before leaving England,’ said Bude. ‘I’ll sail her under Spanish colours, and perhaps they won’t spot her. Any way, with the pearls – lucky I bought a lot – we ought to be safe enough. But if any one of the competitors has gone for specimens of the Berbalangs, I fear, I sadly fear, the consequences.’ His face clouded; he fell into a reverie.

Logan made no reply, but puffed rings of cigarette smoke into the still blue air. There was method in Bude’s apparent madness, but Logan suspected that there was madness in his method.

A certain coolness had not ceased to exist between the friends when, after their long voyage, they sighted the volcanic craters of the lonely isle of Cagayan Sulu and beheld the Stars and Stripes waving from the masthead of the George Washington (Captain Noah P. Funkal).

Logan landed, and noted the harmless but well-armed half-Mahometan natives of the village. He saw the other competitors, whose ‘exhibits,’ as Miss McCabe called them, were securely stored in the George Washington– strange spoils of far-off mysterious forests, and unplumbed waters of the remotest isles. Occasionally a barbaric yap, or a weird yell or hoot, was wafted on the air at feeding time. Jenkins of All Souls (whom he knew a little) Logan did not meet on the beach; he, like Bude, tarried aboard ship. The other adventurers were civil but remote, and there was a jealous air of suspicion on every face save that of Professor Potter. He, during the day of waiting on the island, played golf with Logan over links which he had hastily improvised. Beyond admitting, as they played, that his treasure was in a tank, ‘and as well as could be expected, poor brute, but awful noisy,’ Professor Potter offered no information.

‘Our find is quiet enough,’ said Logan.

‘Does he give you trouble about food?’ asked Mr. Potter.

‘Takes nothing,’ said Logan, adding, as he holed out, ‘that makes me dormy two.’

From the rest of the competitors not even this amount of information could be extracted, and as for Captain Noah Funkal, he was taciturn, authoritative, and, Logan thought, not in a very good temper.

The George Washington and the Pendragon (so Jones Harvey had christened the yacht which under Bude’s colours sailed as The Sabrina) weighed anchor simultaneously. If possible they were not to lose sight of each other, and they corresponded by signals and through the megalophone.

The hours of daylight on the first day of the return voyage passed peacefully at deck-cricket, as far as Logan, Bude, and such of the officers and men as could be spared were concerned. At last night came ‘at one stride,’ and the vast ocean plain was only illuminated by the pale claritude that falls from the stars. Logan and Bude (they had not dressed for dinner, but wore yachting suits) were smoking on deck, when, quite suddenly, a loud, almost musical, roar or hum was heard from the direction of the distant island.

‘What’s that?’ asked Logan, leaping up and looking towards Cagayan Sulu.

‘The Berbalangs,’ said Bude coolly. ‘You are wearing the ring I gave you?’

‘Yes, always do,’ said Logan, looking at his hand.

‘All the men have their pearls; I saw to that,’ said Bude.

‘Why, the noise is dwindling,’ said Logan. ‘That is odd; it seemed to be coming this way.’

‘So it is,’ said Bude; ‘the nearer they approach the less you hear them. When they have come on board you won’t hear them at all.’

Logan stared, but asked no more questions.

The musical boom as it approached had died to a whisper, and then had fallen into perfect silence. At the very moment when the mysterious sound ceased, a swarm of things like red fire-flies, a host of floating specks of ruby light, invaded the deck in a cluster. The red points then scattered, approached each man on board, and paused when within a yard of his head or breast. Then they vanished. A queer kind of chill ran down Logan’s spine; then the faint whispered musical moan tingled in each man’s ears, and the sounds as they departed eastwards gathered volume and force till, in a moment, there fell perfect stillness.

Stillness, broken only by a sudden and mysterious chorus of animal cries from the George Washington. A kind of wail, high, shrieking, strenuous, ending in a noise as of air escaping from a pipe; a torrent of barks such as no known beast could utter, subsiding into moans that chilled the blood; a guttural scream, broken by heavy sounds as if of water lapping on a rock at uncertain intervals; a human cry, human words, with unfamiliar vowel sounds, soon slipping into quiet – these were among the horrors that assailed the ears of the voyagers in the Pendragon. Such a discord of laments has not tingled to the indifferent stars since the ice-wave swept into their last retreats, and crushed among the rocks that bear their fossil forms, the fauna of the preglacial period, the Ichthyosaurus, the Brontosaurus, the Guyas Cutis (or Ring-tailed Roarer), the Mastodon, and the Mammoth.