I made straight for the sound, and there in the growing moonlight, behind the white stems of a clump of betel-palm, was the Marquis—dancing
“Hallo, Mark!” I said (I used to call him that, because, being only a plain Australian without much schooling, I never could remember or pronounce his own extraordinary name). “What are you dancing?”
“It is the Love Dance of the Red Men of Roraima,” said the Marquis, doing something quite extraordinary—I think with the calves of his legs, but he was too quick for one to see.
“Why the Love Dance, and why Red Men?” I asked.
“Because,” said the Marquis, beginning to walk with a cross-swaying motion that really was fine—like Indian corn blowing in the wind—“I desire to find the key to the heart of this little beautiful, since I saw her on the steps of the marea; and the dance talks, even when one does not know a word of their own blessed language. And the Red Men—I chose their dance because they will, without doubt, be spiritually akin to the soul of this boshter little kid.”
The girl drew up one leg under her grass crinoline like a hen, and giggled as if she understood. She was really pretty—if a New Guinea girl is ever pretty; I do not admire them myself, but it is all a matter of taste. She was lighter in color than most, a sort of golden brown, and of course, being a young savage, and not a civilized person, she had a perfect figure. She had the little, aristocratic-looking hands these Papuans often have (their hands, I reckon, are like those of the old families among white people, because neither Papuans nor old families ever do a stroke of work that they can help), and she had big eyes and a bush of hair, and was a good deal dolled up with red and yellow flowers and pearl-shell necklaces and things.
All the same, she was just a little nigger, and the Marquis never ought to have flattered her by taking notice of her. It puts them out of their place.
Still, he went on dancing, and I really forgot about the girl for a little, watching him. It was so good, and the scene was so extraordinary—the open space of sandy soil, all lit up by the moon, and that great figure, dancing with incomparable lightness, against the background of long banana leaf and slender betel palm, like a very new sort of fairy in a very strange kind of fairy glade.
Then I happened to glance at the girl, and immediately all my amusement went out like a candle in the wind, and I fell to counting up what this especial freak of the Marquis’ might be likely to cost us. For the little Papuan, who had been standing some way off at first, chewing her necklace and giggling, had suddenly turned quite grave—solemn, even—and was advancing, step by step, like some one in a dream, toward the space where the Marquis danced. Her hands were spread out as if she were blind, and her eyes never looked at the ground, or the moonlight, or the village houses showing through the trees—only at the Marquis, dancing. And she stepped nearer and nearer.
I don’t go about with cotton-wool in my ears in the Papuan bush country, even when things are—or seem—as quiet as Sunday evening church in Sydney with the wrong girl alongside of you. I heard something moving in the scrub that wasn’t a pig or a dog; the Marquis didn’t hear it, for he was whistling softly to himself all the time he danced, and the girl didn’t, for she was hypnotized, or something like it. But I thought it as well to stop the circus just there; so, without looking round, I went forward, grabbed the Marquis by the shoulder, and said, “Cut it out!”