Mr. Blonk

By Rosa Moore

IT is May and the candle trees are in bloom. Their spikes of puffed yellow blossoms stand sharply up, like tapers lit for a banquet. All along the grass plains of Guadalcanal the air is stiff with heat. Sometimes a distant grass fire springs ud as you watch, the smoke bil lowing up to the scalding blue of the sky, the fire launching itself hungrily over the brittle grass until it rolls back and dies against a patch of lush green valley jungle.

At night the dry and dusty toads come out to sigh over the sparse dew. They sit three feet apart on the clover lawn, intent on catching their supper. All ex cept Mr. Blonk.

Mr. Blonk enterprisingly hops up the ten steps of the front circular stairway at 7 o’clock each night. Plop, plop, plop, up he comes, sits for a while like an ante diluvian clubman on the topmost step and stares blankly, unemotionally into space; then he turns and hops ponderously across the floor and under the white canvas easy chair, where he goes into a trance of in trospection.

But not for long. A silver moth, giddy from tapdancing round the light and side stepping the circle of ghecko outfielders, flips to the mat for a rest. Out and in snaps Mr. Blonk’s pink measuring-tape of a tongue and the silver moth is gone. A skip—and Mr. Blonk collects a flying ant from the crossbar of the chair; a hop— and he’s off the mat and has absorbed a horrid green beetle from the plywood floor, leaving a damp little patch from his efficient little tongue.

Then Mr. Blonk spots a grandma moth, all done up in a loose grey shawl, tottering about by the table. He tiptoes with portly roll nearer and nearer to grandma, stop ping to glare now and then, while his toes twitch with expectation. Look out, grandma, here comes Mr. B.! Too late, grandma and her shawl have been whipped inside Mr. Blonk, who does not even pay her the compliment of looking gratified.

But all that skitters is not moth, Mr.

Blonk. I toss down a segment of toast: Mr Blonk catches it. He catches, willy nilly, four other bits. Then I try beans.

Mr. Blonk cannot stop himself; he scoops up eight pieces of bean. He looks at the ninth and doesn’t budge and (do I imagine it?) a slightly testy look passes over his prehistoric features. He turns back to the moth department but he seems a little

preoccupied.

Soon his efforts languish. With a brooding, inward look, Mr. Blonk lumbers towards the exit, arid as he pauses on the top step he is like an overfed clubman hoping the hall porter will have a diges tive tablet handy.

I suffer qualms over Mr. Blonk’s early departure and the possible battle going on in Mr. Blonk’s inside over toast (hard) and beans (tough). Flop, flop, flop, he goes down the steps and disappears into the night. Whether he suffers pangs or whether he boasts to the ground-level toads still glumly catching their supper on the lawn I cannot say. But the next night Mr. Blonk does not make his entry until the table has been cleared and we are deep in our copies of six-months old magazines.

Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Seton, well-known residents of the British Solomon Islands, paid a brief visit to Sydney in September, and are to return by Qantas plane on the 17th to their plantation home at Lutee, on Choiseul, about 220 miles from Honiara. Mr. Seton rendered notable service as a Coast-watcher during the Pacific war and was decorated.