Read Online Man on a Rope by George Harmon Coxe - Free Book Online Page A

during the weeks before he started his diamond venture and while he was studying the rudiments of the business at Clarke & Company. He had thought her attractive enough, but at the time the idea of love was farthest from his mind. He had recently been in love and found it a singularly shattering experience from which he had not yet recovered.
    He had been familiar with the so-called “Dear John” letters that had come to acquaintances in Korea, and the one he received in Surinam was similar in content. The girl he had planned to marry when he returned to the States from his tour of duty had decided she could never be happy married to a geologist, even one with a new Stateside assignment coming up and the promise of home-office work in the future. She was sorry. She was sure he would understand and she hoped they would always be friends.
    Barry had read that letter in the air-conditioned bar of the Palace Hotel in Paramaribo. He was nearing the end of a four-month survey, and he had come out of the bush for a week-end of civilization after forty straight days during which he had worked with an Indian foreman and an eighteen-man native crew, living under a tarpaulin and mosquito net and eating rice and beans and canned goods, fish when it was available, an occasional piece of fresh meat when his men were lucky in their hunting. The thought of that week-end with its clean sheets and showers and quiet drinking had kept him going, and, coming as it did, that letter had disastrous effects on his plans and his hopes.
    In retrospect he was ashamed of himself and his inability to cope with his loss in an adult manner. Better men than he had suffered similar disappointments. In his case, anger and resentment crowded out any chance of a more philosophic viewpoint and as his bitterness festered he gave in to his resentment.
    Before he left for camp on Monday morning he had cabled his resignation. He had another three weeks’ work to do before the survey could be finished; three weeks in which to brood about the injustice of life and the moral dishonesty of women. He was sick of his job, sick of the country, and indifferent to the future.
    Because Georgetown was like a metropolis compared to Paramaribo in Dutch Guiana, he had come here to continue his brooding, and the emotional scar was a long time healing. He slept late and drank too much. He borrowed some clubs from a friend and played some golf, a game scorned by the Dutch fathers below the Courantyne River. But such inactivity finally sickened him, and having heard of others who had found the search for diamonds profitable—the exception rather than the rule, since the average price per carat mined was exceedingly low—he made his agreement with Colin Lambert.
    In the end he discovered he had worked very cheaply, but by that time the catharsis was complete and he was emotionally sound. Somehow women had again become desirable and he knew it was time for him to knuckle down and get on with the work for which he was trained.
    He had met Lynn again at a tennis party and, once more in the proper frame of mind, had persuaded her to have dinner with him. Two days later he learned a “Dear Lynn” letter from a man in the Royal Navy was partly responsible for her being here.
    The letter had come at a time shortly after the death of her mother—her father had passed on years earlier—and while she was trying to pick up the pieces that remained of her well-ordered existence she had received a note from her uncle, asking her to come to Guiana and spend some time with him. A check for her passage had been enclosed, and because at the time she wanted most to turn her back on the life she had known, she accepted.
    But as with Barry, the enforced idleness, the easy way of living began to pall. Her uncle was often away. The cocktail and tennis parties became too demanding. She was not yet ready to go back to England, but she was an experienced secretary and when