Arthur Upfield - Sands of Windee

Whilst he was speaking he saw the blood mount slowly to her cheeks and brow. He saw her hands clasp tightly and the fingers work in and out among the others. Genuinely astonished by her request, he failed to divine the motive that prompted it. The motive might be one of many things. Was it fear that prompted this request? Did she fear something consequent on the arrest of these two trappers? If so, then he had let her out of his net too soon. If so, then he had failed dreadfully on one point. He had failed in his reading of her character. And failure in anything stung him always, lashed his self-esteem, struck at his vanity, tended to make mock of “the greatest detective in Australia”.

“You will not do this which I ask unless I explain why I askit? ”

He nodded. “You ask a great deal, Miss Stanton. Give a little. The more powerful the reason of your request, the more enthusiastic will I be to accord it.”

“You will promise never to repeat a word?”

Again he nodded. Beyond the house he heard Jeff Stanton roaring his name. Then he heard that which brought him to his feet, spoken with bowed head, softly:

“It is because I-I love Hugh Trench.”

He stood as a man of stone. Even his eyelids remained seemingly fixed whilst he stared down at her bowed head.

“You love-Dash?”

He saw her head sink a little farther in acquiescence.

Old Jeff Stanton continued to roar out his name, but Bony hardly heard. He could hear hardly anything but Marion Stanton’s slow sobbing, and think of nothing but the fact that this woman, to whom he owed so much, loved the man he was hounding down.

The Necessity for a Wedding Present

PRESENTLY OLD JEFF ceased to cry Bony’s name and the man himself heard the sound of a motor-engine roar for a short space, slow down when the driver changed gears, speed up again, slow once more, again speed up and its sound grow faint. The truck had gone without him.

Still he did not speak, nor did Marion raise her head. He heard footsteps coming along the corridor without, listened with strained intentness to their passing beyond the door, and to the gentle tapping that followed. To them came Mrs Poulton’s voice.

“Marion!”

Bony began to think the girl would never speak. Then quickly she stood up and, whilst looking at him, said:

“Yes, Mrs Poulton. What is it?”

“The master is just leaving for the fire. He would like to say good-bye.”

“Tell him I will come at once.”

They heard Mrs Poulton departing, and, when her steps sounded no more, Marion gazed steadily into Bony’s blue eyes, saying:

“Well, will you do what I ask?”

Bony’s face was drawn. Had he been white, his complexion would have been whiter than usual. Then:

“You present me with a mental battle,” he said slowly. “Leave me here while you farewell old Jeff. You must give me time-indeed you must. You ask of me a hard thing, a far harder thing than you can guess.”

And so that she should not see the pain in his eyes he turned away from her, and was but dimly conscious of hearing the door open and close behind her. His feet almost faltering, he reached a chair placed beside a writing-table, and, sinking into it, covered his face with his hands, his head falling forward, his elbows resting on his knees.

If ever a man was impaled on the horns of a dilemma, Bony then was that man. The tip of one horn represented pride; the tip of the other, a fierce admiration for the pure and the beautiful.

Pride! Yes, pride in achievement. He had been born with the white man’s blood in him and, as is sometimes the case, a skin as white as his father’s. From an early age he had felt his superiority over the other little boys at the mission station, most ofwhom were black, or of that dark putty colour there is no mistaking. At eighteen years of age he had fallen in love with a girl at the high school both attended. Life and the passion of life were opening to him as a flower-bud will open, and he revelled in his power to make the girl love him.

With the inevitability of fate his long-dead black mother claimed him from the grave, claimed him and held him. He was bathing with several companions one afternoon, and one of them remarked how peculiar it was that his legs were darker in colour than the upper part of his body. The horror, the agony, which succeeded that afternoon! The realization, the knowledge that, after all, when he had been so certain that the black strain in him would never show, it was at last asserting itself!

His soul in torment, he told the girl of his mixed ancestry. At first she would not believe it. To her honour, however, she clung to him for a year; but at last, when the colour mark had crept up his body and reached his face, she had to believe. Even so she would have married Bony, had he permitted it.

But Bony put her from him. The act cut out of his life temporarily all the joys of youth save one, and that one the joy of knowledge. Yet always was he acutely aware of his inferiority to the full-blooded white man. He strove and excelled the white man in one thing: knowledge; he equalled the white man in one other thing: personal honour.

The hereditary influences that had battled for him ever since his early manhood wearied him at times to the point of exhaustion. He seemed never to escape them, never to be free from them. He had so wanted to become a great scholar, had so dreamed of becoming a famous Australian; and, when the call of his mother, and through her the call of the vast bushlands, clashed within his soul, he knew his ambitions to be but dreams, and his dreams the epic of absurdity.

His mental gifts and natural faculties, plus fortuitous circumstances, led him into police circles. The life of a detective, especially one specializing in bush crimes, suited his complex racial make-up, and to this calling he had given his talents gladly, and lived for it and of it. The white man’s ambition denied him, the black man’s life repugnant to his finer instincts, there was but one thing left. Pride of achievement, pride of success, the joys of mental victories. His tremendous vanity was bred from his absolute immunity from failure. Never had he failed at a case entrusted to him, and in consequence he sat in the seats of the supermen.

And now this! For the first time since he had renounced the love of his youthful sweetheart he had met a white woman who never had looked down on him from a higher plane, who aroused in him the ecstasy of the worshipper of beauty, who had made him forget his inferior birth and status, and who recognized unreservedly his spiritual superiority. Knowing not who he was, she had besought him to fail in a case, had urged a service that would mean but one thing. And that thing was that his chiefs would know he was as other men, as other men who sometimes failed.

There was the torturing point of these two horns drawn together into one. This case of the missing Marks was all but complete. It was the deepest mystery he had ever had to unravel. It revealed almost the perfect crime. He was morally certain that he would complete this case as he had completed all others. Yet, knowing that, and because of Marion Stanton, was he to go back to Headquarters in Sydney and admit failure, and then on to Colonel Spender, in Brisbane, and admit to him as well that he had failed? Easily could bevisualize the Chief Commissioner’s expression of astonishment, of disbelief, and finally the look of disillusionment deep in the fierce grey-blue eyes.

Failure! What a word to include in his vocabulary!

If he allowed Dash to escape, it meant that Dot also would escape. Should he drop the case against Dash, it meant he would have to drop the case against his partner and that third man whom Ludbi had seen fighting with Marks in the runaway car. There was no way of saving only Dash. There was no way out for him, Bony. There was no loophole of escape for him from his plighted word that he would do anything for the white goddess to whom his spirit went out in worship.