Adventure Magazine Cover, June 18, 1921 — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

fe ‘Tropic ldy! eager for his companionship. But Stort could think of nothing save drink and wo- men, and his handling of these subjects in conversation always bored and angered Bruce. There had been so far no repetition of the quarrel of the first evening; but their tem- pers ever’ simmered on the verge of out- break. They lived in a state of truce; they passed the time of day, ate together and were carefully civil to each other. Stort had made a few attempts, during the first couple of weeks, to loaf and chum with Bruce. Bruce repulsed the overtures as tactfully as he could. Thereafter the men peaceably and cordially hated each other. Bruce knew why Stort hated him. After the first night, he could hardly avoid know- ing. Stort hated him for Marua’s sake. The Q-T man was mad about his brown woman and lived in constant dread of losing her to another man. His passion for Marua was abnormal; so was his jealousy of her. ' His love—if so unwholesome a feeling could be termed love—manifested itself in ugly cruelty; he humiliated her in public, and, as Bruce well knew, beat her in private; and did a strange man’s eyes fall upon her, Stort was filled with rage and terror. Stort hated Bruce because Bruce was younger, cleaner, more to be desired by a woman; and because Marua’s eyes followed Bruce as he moved about Moorabal. Marua’s eyes had come to be not the least of Bruce’s trials on the island of Moorabal. They were the large, liquid eyes of dark people and they regarded him expectantly. A query lurked in their soft, black depths. He passed a large portion of his waking hours conscious that Marua’s eyes were upon him. If he were working in the go-down, he might look up and see her in the distance, standing in the blazing sunshine like a golden-green statue, staring in his direction; if he passed Stort’s hut, he would feel her gaze upon his back; when he sat in his own ‘ house, writing in the black book to Mazie, he might glance up and see the soft, plead- ing eyes regarding him through the window; at meals, Marua, squatting behind Stort’s chair, looked at him steadily and hopefully, ‘with a grave and compelling insistence, un- til her master, sensing Bruce’s discomfort and its cause, turned to her— then her gaze dropped modestly to her brown, spreading toes. 85 Marua’s eyes began to get upon Bruce’s nerves. More than once, as he slept and dreamed, the haunting eyes of the brown girl visited his pillow, where only the frank, blue eyes of his distant sweetheart had a right to stop. More and more often, in his days, as he day-dreamed away the slow, idle hours, the picture of Mazie he held in his mind’s eye would imperceptibly dis- solve into Marua’s image. They were hard to endure, these leaden, slothful, Moorabal days. About once a week—rarely twice a week—a plantation cutter with copra from up the coast, or a beach-comber’s dingey with trepang from the Barrier Reef, or a pearling lugger with shell, would arrive and moor to the T-T wharf. Then Bruce had a few hours wel- come work, superintending the removal of the cargoes to the go-down and signing vouchers to be honored by the T-T agents at Thursday Island, or Rockhampton. The rest of the time he had nothing to do save write to Mazie and think. He thought mostly about love. ‘ZA think about love when he is ma- rooned in a land where nature as- sails his every sense with wanton, riotous excess of life. Love could not be pale and timid on Moorabal nor strait-jacketed by reflection. The air of Moorabal was rich with the heavy, passionate scents of tropic gardens and Bruce breathed its fire into his IT IS not well for a young man to veins. Bruce would not willingly think of any woman save Mazie. But Marua was young and good to look at and near by: moreover, her condition as Stort’s woman was wretched and pitiful in the extreme. Only a heart of stone could have met her gaze untroubled—and Bruce had not a heart of stone. He told himself he pitied the brown girl. Being an honest youth and wholly given to his betrothed, he wrote pages about Marua in the black book. T hen, reflecting, he tore out the pages, because he felt that Mazie could not understand, and, in any case, it was not good that so evil a matter be brought to her attention. Pitying Marua, Bruce was very careful to be kind to her on the occasions of. their meetings. These occasions were rare and their intercourse confined merely to saluta- tions. Marua never showed the least COmicloo oN UH) C©