PPROACHING Valina by night, you made fast to a rickety landing and passed up a narrow avenue of mangroves, along a track that quaked under your feet. On either hand there was blue-black darkness, a stench of rotting vegetation, and more mangroves—mangroves and darkness and silence as far as the mind of man could conceive.
A little further along the track there was a bend from which you could see a solitary yellow light. This was Marsden, going over the accounts in the mosquito-proof room of the bungalow, or planning some new drainage scheme, or swallowing quinine wrapped in cigarette papers. He was sure to be doing one of the three, for Yalina was like that. Marsden had leased it—a thousand odd acres of it—for ninety-nine years at an annual rental of rather less than a halfpenny an acre. He had then stood by his pet theory of drainage, in spite of ridicule and fever, and converted a swamp into a promising cocoa-nut plantation, and himself into a living skeleton.
He sat now, with unnaturally bright eyes and uncertain hands, trying to realise that he was a moderately wealthy man. Two days ago Moseley—of Moseley and Frieburg, land sharks—had sauntered over Valina with a green-lined umbrella, and, after a few disparaging remarks, had offered Marsden five thousand for the place. This meant that it" was worth at least ten as it stood, and probably five times that as a going concern in a few years' time. Marsden had chuckled inwardly, swallowed a quinine pellet, and declined the offer with thanks, much to Moseley's astonishment.
"You'll die here in another couple of years," he remarked cheerfully, casting his cannibal eye over the other's emaciated carcase.
"Oh, I don't know," said Marsden. "But, as it happens, I don't intend to stay here another two years. I promised myself a holiday when the job was done, and it is done—for the present."
Moseley looked out over Valina, an oasis of young palms in a desert of mangroves, and was constrained to admit that it was—to the tune of five thousand five hundred, not a penny more.
But Marsden smiled grimly and shook his skull-like head. Valina had cost more than money to create, and it was going to take more than money to buy. There were a few trifles, such as health and happiness, still owing, and Marsden was resolved that they should be paid before the property left his hands.
And now the evening of the great day had arrived. The accounts were in perfect order, the half-caste overseer had received his instructions, and Marsden's battered tin trunk stood packed beside his bed. For the first time in three years he was free. He was trying to disengage the rusty mechanism of his mind from drainage and labour and fever, and centre it on cool rains and the other things worth having; but in the present surroundings he found it difficult. These other things that were so desirable seemed unreal, infinitely far off. Well, they should soon be nearer, Marsden promised himself.
But on board the steamer it was the same. Slowly it was borne in on him that actual distance had nothing to do with it, for here, only two days from Sydney, things seemed just as far off as they had been at Valina. This troubled Marsden. He took to self-communings in his cabin.
There were people on deck—white women in flimsy dresses, sitting about in cane chairs or playing deck billiards with immaculate, care-free men. And there was an immensely popular youth, who wore white serge and a lavender tie and check socks, and ordered strange and frequent refreshment from the bar. Marsden had conscientiously worn a complete change of clothing every day of his three years at Valina, "to keep civilised," as he had told himself, but, if this were civilisation, he saw now that he had failed. He was as far removed from these people as—as a black-beetle from a butterfly. That was it, he announced savagely, while contemplating his unlovely reflection in the looking-glass—a black-beetle! Malaria and drainage schemes certainly do play the mischief with a man.
One day from Sydney a sort of panic seized him. What if he were so changed that no one would recognise him—even she would not recognise him? He was a different man to the one who had set out for the Solomons three years ago, different in character as well as appearance—he knew that now. What if she did not care for this different man? It was perfectly possible. He trembled already at the thought of meeting her, and had recourse to quinine pellets.