Madame had won the heart of the Widow Toppys when as a beautiful white stranger she had clasped the little creature to the bosom of her wet trench coat, and she speedily gained also the hearts of the two "useless daughters," scorned by Roger Gatepath. They were twins, very light in colour, aged about sixteen. Their names, as locally rendered, were Joytopy and Crytopy. Queer names. Mrs. Toppys, who spoke an English of her own in the halting accent to which the middle-aged Roger Gatepath had lingered to listen, explained that one of the girls in her early infancy had been the most joyous, smiling angel that ever came down from Heaven. The other twin had howled unceasingly. The Hon. William Toppys had called one Joy and the other Cry, and had dug up real names which would suggest the infantile characteristics. The girls had been christened Joyce and Chrystal, but Joytopy and Crytopy they had always remained. When Madame met them there was much bubbling joy and little cry about either of them. They frisked about in their short voluminous petticoats of stripped banana leaf, wearing bright beads round their necks, and short-lived tropical flowers in their dusky hair. The girls were not pretty by European standards, and the blue eyes of Toppys had passed them by. But there was a glow of splendid health on their pale brown skin, and the lithe grace of free tropical creatures about their fully developed figures.
These girls had never worn European clothes. Will Toppys, true to his theory that the mystery of woman, which has played so devastating a role in human history, is due to the seduction of clothes, always insisted that his daughters should wear the native petticoats. They were enough for decency, said he, but not enough to excite the smallest curiosity. Especially as the native girls, amphibious as their men folk, always stripped bare when plunging into the sea. But though Joy and Cry had never worn, never even seen, the contents of a European draper's shop, they showed the most fascinated interest in the toilet fripperies of Madame Gilbert. It was some little time before she could induce them to enter her tent. To them it suggested a trap of canvas of which one pulled the string and smothered the incautious entrant. But gradually she won their confidence. With instinctive courtesy they never would approach her dwelling unless by direct invitation, and when within moved about gravely and spoke seldom. Madame to them was a remote royal personage. The silver toilet service did not move them—thinking that silver was always money, they called the precious metal bright tin—and the Persian rugs were an encumbrance to the feet. They hinted also that the floor coverings and hangings would in time prove a happy hunting ground for insects and other vermin of the woods. But when one day Madame opened a trunk and spread before their astonished eyes the glories of her underwear, they instantly fell down and worshipped. They had never seen such garments, they had not the slightest notion of how to put them on, yet the beautiful texture and soft feel of the feminine things bowled them over instantly. Perhaps it was the instinct of clothes in their white blood bursting forth; perhaps it was some deeper, more universal, instinct which makes women of all races kin. I don't know. But Madame assures me, and I believe her, that at the first sight and touch of her "things," Joy and Cry bowed their frizzy heads and did obeisance. They did more than that a few days later. Coming home late one afternoon after a turtle hunt with Willatopy, Madame found Joy and Cry in her tent posturing before the deeply interested eyes of her maid Marie. The banana petticoats lay neglected on the floor, where they had been tossed, and the girls were clad in French frillies with which Marie had invested them. Madame was angry, and the girls shrank away from her. In rapid, furious French, Madame scarified that thoughtless, warm-hearted maid of hers, and warned her to leave the girls alone as she had warned her to leave Willatopy alone. Robbed by Madame's stern orders of the fascinating frillies, the girls resumed their own petticoats and sadly withdrew. The incident worried Madame not a little, and she spoke very plainly and seriously to Marie about it. It showed by how frail a tie these half-white feminine creatures were held to the simple native habit of life which their white father had laid down for them. I had nearly written "native life and customs," but checked when I remembered a discovery which Madame had made concerning these girls. Though they dressed like natives, and lived in all other respects the lives of natives, there was a subconscious force in their white blood which cut them off from familiar commerce with native boys. Girls and widows in the Torres Straits follow their inclinations, the girls of their hearts, the widows—one is told—more commonly of their mature avarice. Married women, by immemorial and most potent custom, are chaste as Junos. But from this most universal of social customs these two girls, Joy and Cry, tacitly yet resolutely stood apart. Their own mother was astonished; she could not comprehend an abstinence which consorted so queerly, to her mind, with their vigorous healthy natures. Yet it was so, as she almost tearfully assured Madame.
"But surely you should be glad," said Madame, puzzled and inclined towards laughter at the woeful visage of little Mrs. Toppys. "Their father, had he lived, would have honoured his daughters for this—exclusiveness."
"But how will they ever claim husbands?" wailed the Hula woman from New Guinea. "How ever can they ask a boy in marriage if already they are known to be so cold and unnatural?" It is the woman who proposes marriage in the Straits, and the man who, after full consideration, gives or withholds his assent.
Madame soothed the disconsolate widow, and went away smiling. Grant had declared that all the vices and diseases in the Torres Straits were the gift of the white man, but the instinctive aloofness of Joy and Cry revealed to the uncomprehending world of Tops Island that some hidden virtue after all sprang from the white strain in their blood.
Madame, a hardy investigator and always frank in her dealings with mankind, tackled Willatopy, the brother of Joy and Cry, and the lover of numberless brown girls whom his blue eyes vanquished at sight.
"My brown girls, they are nothing," declared this easy-mannered Don Juan, "but Joy and Cry are the daughters of my father, the Great White Chief. They are not meat for the scum of Baru. The boys here, what are they but tillers of my garden when they work and whipping blocks for my stick when they don't? I am rich, I do not work. These others I make work for me, and pay in white silver from my banker. They are the dirt under my feet, and if one of them drew near to Joy or Cry, to speak to them without my leave, I would let out his blood upon the sand, and would smoke his head over the fire in my cookhouse."
There was nothing of the modern democrat about Willatopy.
As he imagined to himself, and declared to Madame, the fate of a native island suitor for the temporary favours of his sisters, he drew forth one of the deadly trench daggers which Alexander, a trader in hardware for the Islands, had given him in a moment of expansion. I beg the pardon of Alexander Ewing, man of business. He had sold two daggers to Willatopy at "trade prices," at a tremendous discount which had made them seem to him like gifts.
These two trench daggers, which had attracted Willatopy as "just the things for sharks," bring me to the display before my patient readers of Willatopy the Sportsman. He was rich, he did no work. He paid reluctant impecunious native boys to cut his bananas and plant their rhizomes—even the bountiful banana needs some culture—to sow and reap vegetables in his garden, to feed his fowls and pigs, and to keep fresh and sweet the sago palm thatch of his hut. But though he did no work, Willatopy was an indefatigable sportsman. Incidentally, it is true, he supplied the family with fish and dugong and turtle, but in his code—which had a recognisable family likeness to the code of his father's country—fishing and hunting and shooting, whatever their yield in food, were not to be confounded with loathsome and derogatory Work. The labour which they exacted was Sport, and rich man that he was he could pour out his sweat over them and still remain proudly and unstainedly idle.