Hell's Hatches
by Lewis R. Freeman · English · Gutenberg #44632 · 519,919 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Hell's Hatches
Author: Lewis R. Freeman
Release date: January 9, 2014 [eBook #44632]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HELL'S HATCHES ***
HELL'S HATCHES
NEW FICTION
THE CURTAIN
_By Alexander Macfarlan_
THE SYRENS
_By Dot Allan_
OLD MAN'S YOUTH
_By William de Morgan_
THE PURPLE HEIGHTS
_By M. C. Oemler_
HAGAR'S HOARD
_By George Kibbe Turner_
THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK
_By Richard Dehan_
IN CHANCERY
_By John Galsworthy_
SNOW OVER ELDEN
_By Thomas Moult_
EUDOCIA
_By Eden Phillpotts_
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
21, Bedford Street, W.C. 2
HELL'S HATCHES
BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN
Author of "In the Tracks of the Trades," etc.
[Illustration: 1921]
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A REPUTATION QUESTIONED 1
II HARD-BIT DERELICTS 10
III THE GIRL HERSELF 25
IV "SLANT" ALLEN RETIRES AGAIN 38
V A SHIP OF DEATH 50
VI COMPULSORY VOLUNTEERING 65
VII RONA COMES ABOARD 80
VIII I LEAVE THE ISLAND 93
IX A GRIM TALE OF THE SEA 106
X ART AND SUSPENSE 124
XI A HERO'S HOMECOMING 142
XII A BAD MAN'S PLEA 180
XIII THE SCENE OF THE FINAL DRAMA 193
XIV HELL'S HATCHES OFF 206
XV THE FACE 220
XVI A SUDDEN VISITOR 231
XVII DOWN THE FLUME 255
XVIII THE MASTERPIECE 268
XIX AFTER ALL 282
HELL'S HATCHES
CHAPTER I
A REPUTATION QUESTIONED
"Slant" Allen and I, between us, had been monopolizing a good share of
the feature space in the Queensland and New South Wales papers for a
week or more--he as "the Hero-Ticket-of-Leave-Man" and I as "the gifted
Franco-American painter whose brilliant South Sea marines have taken the
Australian art world by storm"--and now that it was definitely reported
that he had left Brisbane on his way to connect with the reception the
boyhood home from which he had been shipped in disgrace five years
before had prepared for him, I knew it was but a matter of hours before
he would be doing me the honour of a call.
He simply _had_ to see me, I figured; that was all there was to it: for
with Bell and the girl dead (that much seemed certain, both from the
newspaper accounts of the affair and from what I had been able to pick
up in the few minutes I had been ashore during the stop of my southbound
packet at Townsville) I was the only living person who knew _he_ was not
the hero of the astonishing _Cora Andrews_ affair, the audacious daring
and almost sublime courage characterizing which had touched the
imagination of the whole world; that, far from having _volunteered_ to
navigate a shipload of plague-stricken blacks through some hundreds of
miles of the worst reef-beset--and likewise the most ill-charted--waters
of the Seven Seas on the off chance of saving the lives of perhaps one
in ten of them, he had been brought off and forced to mount the gangway
of that ill-fated schooner at the point of a knife in the hands of a
slender slip of a Kanaka girl.
To be sure, two or three of the blacks who were hanging over the rail at
the end of that accursed afternoon may have been among the survivors
(for it could have been only the strongest of them that had been able to
fight their way up to the air when Bell chopped open the hatches they
had been battened under ever since the _Cora's_ officers had succumbed
who knows how many hours before); but, even so, their rolling, bloodshot
eyes could have fixed on nothing to have led them to believe that the
greasy shawl of Chinese embroidery the girl appeared to have thrown
affectionately over the shoulder of the belated passenger in the leaking
outrigger concealed the diminutive Malay _kris_ whose point she was
pressing into the fleshy part of his neck above the jugular.
No, there could be no doubt that I was all that stood between "Slant"
Allen, "Ticket-of-Leavester," beachcomber, black-birder, pearl-pirate
and (more or less incidentally to all of the foregoing) murderer, and
the Hon. Hartley Allen, second son of the late James Allen, Bart.,
racing man, polo player and once the greatest gentleman jockey on the
Australian turf. Pardon for the comparative peccadilloes--a "pulled"
horse or two, a money fraud in connection with a "sweep," and the rather
rough treatment of a chorus girl, who had foolishly asked for "time to
consider" his proposal that she come to him _at once_ from the
Queensland stockman who was only just finishing refurnishing her George
Street flat--which, cumulatively, had been responsible for his being
packed off to "The Islands," was already assured, and it looked as
though more was to come--that his "spectacular and self-sacrificing
heroism" was going to wipe out the unpleasant memories that had barred
him from sporting and social circles even before the law stepped in. A
sporting writer in that morning's _Herald_ had speculated as to whether
or not he would be seen again riding "Number 1" for the unbeaten
"Boomerang" Four, with whom he had qualified for his handicap of "8,"
still standing as the highest ever given an Australian polo player; and
the racing column of the latest _Bulletin_ had devoted a good part of
its restricted space to a discussion of the possibility that the weight
he had put on in his years of "easy life in 'The Islands'" might force
him to confine his riding to steeplechases. Of the record which had made
the name of "Slant" Allen a byword for all that was desperate and
devilish from Port Moresby to Papeete, from Yap to Suva, little seemed
to be known and nothing at all was said. But then, that old
beach-combers' maxim to the effect that "What a man does in 'The
Islands' don't figure in St. Peter's 'dope sheet,'" was one from which
even I myself had been wont to extract no little solace.
With nothing but my fever-wracked and absinthe-soaked (I may as well
confess at the outset that I was "in the grip of the green" at this
time) anatomy standing between, on the one hand, and Allen more
despicable than even I, who was fairly familiar with the lurid swath he
had cut across Polynesia, had ever dreamed he could be, and, on the
other hand, an Allen who might easily become more the idol of sporting
(which is, of course, the real) Australia than he had ever been at the
zenith of his meteoric career as a turfman and athlete, it was plain
enough that he would not--nay, could not--ignore for long my presence in
a city that was standing on tiptoe to acclaim him as a native son whose
deed had done it honour in the eyes of the world. It was something like
that the _Telegraph_ had it, I believe.
Where a word from me (and Allen would know that my friendship for Bell,
to say nothing of the girl, would impel me to speak it in my own good
time) would dash him from the heights to depths which even he had not
yet sounded--there were degrees of treachery which "The Islands"
themselves would not stand for--it was only to be expected that a man of
his stamp would make some well-thought-out move calculated to impose
both immediate and eventual silence upon me. If we were still "north of
twenty-two" I would have had no doubt what form that "move" would take,
and even here in the heart of the Antipodean metropolis--well, that I
was leaving no unnecessary loop-holes of attack open was attested by the
fact that I was awaiting his coming wearing a roomy old shooting jacket,
in the wide pockets of which a man's fingers could work both freely and
unobtrusively. I had shot away a good half-dozen patch pockets from that
old jacket in practising "unostentatious self-defence," and when a man
gets to a point where he can spatter a sea-slug at five paces from his
hip he really hasn't a great deal to fear from the frontal attack of
anyone--or anything--that hunts by daylight.
Yes, though I hardly expected to have to shoot Allen, at least on this
first showdown, I was quite prepared to do so if he gave me any excuse
at all for it; indeed, I may as well admit that I was going to be
disappointed if he did not furnish me such an excuse. There need be
nothing on my conscience, that was sure, for, if the fellow had had his
deserts according to civilized law, he would have been put out of the
way something like twenty times already. I had heard him make that boast
himself one night in Kai, just before he went under Jackson's table as a
consequence of trying to toss off three-fingers of "Three Star" for
every man he claimed to have killed. Moreover, I had a sort of a feeling
that old Bell would have liked to have seen his score evened up that
way, for he, more than almost anyone I could recall, had marvelled at
what he called the tricks I had tucked away in my "starboard trigger
pocket." But--I may as well own it--my principal reason for hoping for a
decisive showdown straightaway was that I felt sure I could see my way
through an affair of that kind, even with so cool and resourceful a hand
as I knew Allen to be. As an absinthe drinker, what I dreaded was to
have the crisis postponed, knowing all the while that during only about
from four to six hours of the twenty-four would I be fit in mind or body
to oppose a child, let alone a man who, for five years and among as
desperate a lot of cut-throats as the South Pacific had ever known, had
lived up to his boast that he drew the line at no act under heaven to
gain his end.
It had struck me as just a bit providential that Allen almost certainly
would be coming to see me in the early afternoon--the very time at
which, physically and mentally, I would be best prepared for him. It
varies somewhat with different addicts of the drug, but with me the
"hour of strength"--the interval of the swinging back of the pendulum,
when all the faculties are as much above normal as they have been below
it during the preceding interval of depression--was mid-afternoon. From
about ten in the morning I was just about my natural self--just about at
the turn of the tide between weakness and strength--for three or four
hours; but from about three to five, when the renewed cravings began to
stir and it had long been my custom to pour my first thin trickle of
green into the cracked ice, I was preternaturally alive in hand and
brain. The rigorous restriction of my painting to these brief hours of
physical and spiritual exaltation must share with my colours the credit
for the fact that I had already done work that was to win me a niche
distinctively my own as a painter of tropical marines. How much
absinthe--or the reaction from absinthe--had to do with my earlier
successes was conclusively proven by the way my work at first fell off
when those colourful years I was later to spend with the incomparable
Huntley Rivers in the Samoas and Marquesas began to bring me back
manhood of mind and body and to rid me--I trust for good and all--of the
curse saddled upon me in my student days in Paris. But that is neither
here nor there as regards the present story.
I had ascertained that Allen's train was to arrive from Brisbane at ten
in the morning, and that he was to be taken directly from the station to
the Town Hall to receive the "Freedom of the City." Then, out of
consideration for the fact "that the hero" (as the _Herald_ had it) was
"still far from recovered from the terrible hardships he had endured as
a consequence of his unparalleled self-sacrifice," the remainder of the
day was to be left at his disposal to rest in. The further program--in
which His Excellency the Governor-General himself was to take
part--would be arranged only after the personal desires of the "modest
hero" had been consulted.
A 'phone to the gallery where my Exhibition was on--or an inquiry of
almost anyone connected with the show at the Town Hall, for that
matter--would apprise Allen that I was staying at the _Australia_, and
there I knew he would come direct the moment he could shake himself free
from his entertainers. Someone was to take him off to lunch, to be sure,
but--especially as it was reported that he was already dieting to get
back to riding weight--I felt sure this would not detain him long. "It
will be about three," I told myself, and left word at the office that
any man asking for me around that hour should be brought straight to my
rooms without further question. I also 'phoned Lady X---- and begged off
from showing her and a party of friends from Government House my
pictures at four, as I had promised a couple of days previously. Being
borne off to the inevitable and interminable Australian afternoon
teas--or to anything else I could not easily shake myself free from very
shortly after five--was one of the worst ordeals incident to the spell
of lionizing that had set in for me from the day of my arrival in
Sydney. What did I care for Sydney, anyhow? Paris was my goal--gay,
cynical, heartless Paris, who took or rejected what her lovers laid at
her feet only as it stirred, or failed to stir, her jaded pulses, asking
not how it was made or what it had cost. Paris! To bring that languid
beauty fawning to my own feet for a day--even for an hour, my
hour--_that_ would be something worth living--or dying--for. For many
years I had been telling myself that (between three and five in the
afternoon, of course) and now--quite aside from my nocturnal flights
there on the wings of the "Green Lady"--it seemed that the end so long
striven for was almost in sight.
I lunched lightly--a planked red snapper and a couple of alligator
pears--in my room, and toward two o'clock (to be well on the safe side)
slipped into the old hunting jacket I have mentioned, and was ready;
just that--ready. My nerves were absolutely steady. The hand holding the
palette knife with which (to kill the passing minutes) I began daubing
pigments upon a rough rectangle of blotched canvas on an easel in the
embrasure of the windows, might have adjusted the hair-spring of my
wrist-watch, and the beat of my heart was slow and strong and steady
like the throb of the engines of a liner in mid-ocean. If either hand or
nerve inclined more one way than the other, it was toward relaxation
rather than tenseness. Tenseness--with a man who has himself in hand--is
for the moment of action, not for the interval of waiting which precedes
it. My whole feeling was that of complete _adequacy;_ but then, the
sensation was no new one to me--at that time of day.
Exhausting the gobs of variegated colour on my palette, I went to a
table in the bathroom and started chipping the delicately tinted linings
from the contents of a packing case of assorted sea shells, confining my
attentions for the moment to a species of bivalve whose refulgent inner
surface had caught and held the lambent liquid gold of sunshine that had
filtered through five fathoms of limpid sea-water to reach the coral
caverns where it had grown. Powdering the coruscant scalings in a
mortar, I screened them from time to time, carefully noting the
gradations of colour--ranging from soft fawn to scintillant saffron--as
the more indurated particles stood out the longer against the friction
of the pestle. At this time, I might explain, I was in the tentative
stage of my experimentation to evolve and perfect a greater variety of
media than had hitherto been available with which to express in colour
the interminable moods of sea and sky and sunshine. The value of my
contribution to art--not yet complete after five years--will have to be
judged when I pass it on to my contemporaries and posterity. Of the part
these colours played in my later and more permanent success (to
differentiate it from the spectacular but transient spell of fame upon
the threshold of which I stood at the moment of which I write), I can
only say that had I been confined to the pigments with which my
predecessors had been forced to express themselves, I should never have
risen above the rating of a second or third class dauber of sea-scapes.
CHAPTER II
HARD-BIT DERELICTS
With Allen and his coming in the back of my brain, it was only natural
that my thoughts, as I ground and sifted and sorted the golden powders,
should turn to Kai and the train of events leading up to the ghastly
tragedy of the _Cora Andrews_, so distorted a version of which had gone
abroad as a consequence of the fact that Allen was alive and Bell was
dead, and that I, so far, had not told what I knew of the circumstances
under which the one and the other had been induced to board the stricken
"black-birder."
It must have been, I reflected, its comparative remoteness from all of
even the least-sailed of the South Pacific trade routes that was
responsible for making Kai Atoll, a barely perceptible smudge on the
chart of the Louisiades, the unofficial rendezvous for the most
picturesque lot of cut-throats, blackguards and beachcombers that "The
Islands" had known since the days of "Bully" Hayes and his care-free
contemporaries. Like had attracted like after the original nucleus
gathered, safety had come with numbers, and at the time of my arrival no
man whose misdeeds had not made him important enough to send a gunboat
after needed to depart from that secure haven except of his own free
will.
Among a score of hard-bit derelicts whose grinning or scowling phizzes
flashed up in memory at the thought of that sun-baked loop of coral,
with its rag-tag of wind-whipped coco palms and its crescent of zinc and
thatch-roofed shacks, only three--or four including myself--occupied my
mind for the moment. Allen--reckless daredevil that he was--had come to
Kai from somewhere in the Solomons for the very good and sufficient
reason that it was the only island south of the Line at the time where
his welcome would not have been either too hot or too cold to suit his
fastidious taste. Bell had come, in a stove-in whaleboat, because Kai
was the nearest settlement to the point where he put the _Flying
Scud_--the trading schooner that was his last command, if we except the
_Cora Andrews_--aground on Tuka-tuva Reef. The girl, who arrived with
Bell in the whaleboat, came because he brought her. The tide-rips of Kai
passage and the Devil's own toboggan were all the same to Rona--at this
stage of the game, at least--so long as the big, quiet, masterful Yankee
was bumping-the-bumps with her. And even afterwards--but let that
transpire.
I, Roger Whitney, artist, formerly of New York and Paris, and, latterly,
man-about-the French-colonies, with no fixed abode, had been landed at
Kai by a French gunboat from the Noumea station. I packed myself off
from that accursed hole because the suicide of a couple of officers in
whose company I had been drinking absinthe at the _Cercle Militaire_ for
some weeks had reminded me altogether too poignantly of what I might, in
the ordinary course of things, expect to be doing myself before long. A
change of scene and, if possible, a modification of habits was the only
hope. I would never have had the initiative to tackle even the first had
not the feeling persisted that I was on the verge of doing something
worth while with my painting. I went to Kai because the archipelago
thereabouts was reputed to have the most gorgeous sky and water
colouring in Polynesia.
Neither the promised beauties nor the reputed badness of Kai stirred me
greatly in anticipation. With a bitter smile I told myself that every
night I was seeing sights more lovely than anything my eyes were likely
to rest on short of Paradise, while the Chamber of Horrors in which I
awoke every morning was a veritable annex to the Inferno itself. No, it
was out of the question that Kai could unfold in realities, whether to
delight or shock, things to outdo those that were already mine in dreams
that had themselves become more real than realities. Well, it turned out
that I was only half right, or wrong, whichever way you want to put it.
While, on the one hand, I found the bluff, open badness of Kai rather
more refreshing than shocking; on the other hand, it was hardly more
than a week before I was ready to swear that not the most ethereal houri
that ever laid her cool green hand upon my fevered brow was of a class
to run one-two-three with a flame-quivering slip of a nymph whom I had
surprised at her bath in a beryline pool inside the windward reef. I
began to pull myself together from that hour. Rona, the very sight of
whom threw most men out of hand, had quite the opposite effect upon me.
I knew she was not for me, and the thought that the world actually held
such loveliness in the form of flesh and blood had a sort of reassurance
about it, like the knowledge that one has an ample income from
government bonds.
Because I had landed from the _Zelee_, and also, perhaps on account of
my rig-out (especially the brimless Algerian sun-helmet), the "beach" of
Kai put me down at once as a "We-we," and, therefore, a creature quite
apart. The only Frenchmen on the island were a couple of escapes from
the convict settlement of New Caledonia, and because neither of them
could ride or shoot or fight with their fists, they had no standing with
the predominant Australian "push," most of whom were more or less handy
at all three. It was, indeed, the fact that, in spite of all my years in
Paris and the French colonies had done to make a physical wreck of me, I
still retained something of the quickness of eye and hand and foot which
had conspired to make my Harvard record as an all-round-athlete one that
only two or three men have equalled even down to the present day, that
gave me such easy sledding in making my way with the "best people" of
Kai.
It took just three minutes--the length of the first round of the
"friendly bout" I fought with "Heifer" Halligan, ex-welter-weight
champion of Victoria, at Jackson's pub one afternoon--to change Kai's
openly expressed contempt for me to something very near respect. I
thoroughly appreciated the attitude of that breezy lot of sport-loving
rascals toward a Frenchified Yankee artist, especially one that did not
appear to be a fugitive from justice, and so took the first opportunity
to win a standing with them which would at least incline them to let me
go my own way when I wanted to. Notwithstanding my wretched condition, I
outpointed my chunky opponent a good three to one in that opening round;
indeed, the "Heifer's" excuse for the foul which put me to sleep in the
Second was that both his "bloomin' peepers" were so nearly swelled shut
he couldn't see "stryght." But it was my swelling groin and battered
hands, rather than "Heifer's" bruised optics, that came in for first
attention from deft-fingered Doc Wyndham--once of Guy's, on his own
admission. The next day I was waited upon by a delegation sent from
"Jackson's Sporting Club" to urge me to put myself in training for a
go-to-the-finish with "Shark-mouth" Kelly of Suva, the Fiji open champ.
My speed would dazzle a cow-footed dolt like "Shark-mouth" was, they
said, and he would be easy picking for me. They further urged that we
could clean up all the loose money west of the "Hundred and
Eightieth"--what odds would Fiji not give in backing a fourteen-stone
stoker against an artist that only weighed ten stone and looked half
dished with the "green" besides? Moreover, I could keep the whole purse
for myself; all they wanted out of it was the sport. God bless the
scalawags, it was more than half true, that last.
The funny thing about it was that the project actually tempted me at the
time, principally, I think, because there seemed a chance that the hard
exercise of training--the very thing, indeed, that helped work the
miracle a few years later--might effect me at least a temporary
separation, if not a permanent divorce, from the "Green Lady." I was
still temporizing with "delegations" when the _Cora Andrews_ dropped her
hook in Kai Lagoon and gave us something else to think about.
If the little cunning I had left with my fists won me the respect of the
"beach," it remained for my proficiency with the revolver--something
which I had never allowed myself to grow rusty in--to give me real
prestige. My father had been only less famous as a pistol shot than as a
builder of steel bridges, and from my birth it had been his dream that I
should carry on the tradition in both lines. If it had broken the old
boy's heart when I turned my back on engineering for art--insisting on
going from Harvard to Beaux Arts instead of to Boston "Tec" as he had
planned--he at least had nothing to complain of on the score of my
aptitude for the revolver. He admitted that I had bred true in hand and
eye, even on the day that he called my "art tomfoolery" a throwback from
my French grandmother. I have always thought that the one circumstance
which prevented the Governor from cutting me off in his will when he
finally had definite proofs of the depths to which I had sunk in Paris,
was the fact that, on my last visit to the old home on the Hudson, I had
beaten him, shot for shot, with his own pistols, and at his favourite
distance.
They were rather free with their gun play during my first fortnight at
Kai, each little affair having been followed by one or two more or less
ceremonious burials in the coral-walled cemetery on the south lip of the
windward passage. It was merely as a precautionary measure--on the off
chance that they should be tempted to draw me into something of the kind
at a time when I might not be quite on edge for it--that I took early
opportunity to uncover a trifle of what I had crooked in my
trigger-finger. A casually winged gull or two, and a few plugged pennies
(not a miss at the latter, luckily, even when they tried to spin them
edge on to my line of fire) effected all that was necessary. After that,
though they were continually sending for me to come down to Jackson's
and shoot the wire off champagne corks (fizz, loot of some kind, was the
freest flowing drink on the island at the time), or perform some other
equally useful and spectacular gun stunt, not the roughest of the gang
but took the most meticulous care not to press his invitation the
instant it sank home to him that my mood of the moment wasn't of a kind
calculated to blend smoothly with the free and easy spirit of a
beach-combers' carousal.
It was hardly to be expected that they would ever quite understand why a
man who could "blot out a cove's blinker as easy wiv his fist as wiv his
gun" (as I was told that "Reefer" Ogiston, penal absentee and pearler,
put it one day) and who "'peared mo' than comfitabl' heeled fo' coin,"
should be "light an' looney enuf tu go roun' smearin' smashed barnculs
on sail cloth"; and yet it was on that very score--or at least to their
quick comprehension of what I was driving at in my pictures--that the
"beach" of Kai rendered me a priceless service. Almost from the outset
they began to "twig" my marines, to feel the living atmosphere I was
striving to paint into them. They were all men who had lived by the sea,
on the sea; yes, and not a few of them had worked under the sea. Well,
when I began to see those deep-set, wrinkle-clutched eyes squint to a
focus of concentration, and, presently, the quick heave of a hairy chest
as the message of the canvas flashed home, I knew that I was on the
right track. Nothing less than that would have given me the courage to
go on working, as I had set myself to do, on a steadily decreasing
allowance of absinthe, a certain supply of which, of course, I had
brought with me from Noumea.
So much for me and my relations to Kai at the time of which I am
writing. Now as to Bell....
"Who is that tall, square-jawed chap who looks as though he was not
quite sober?" I had asked a day or two after I landed.
"Yank--calls himself Bell," Jackson replied laconically; adding that he
was "not quite sober" when he tried to take a cross-cut over Tuka-tuva
Reef with the _Flying Scud_, that he was "not quite sober" when he hit
the beach in a busted whaleboat, that he had been "not quite sober" all
the time since, and that there was no doubt that he would still be "not
quite sober" when the time came for him to leave the island, whether he
went out with the tide in an outrigger canoe or shuffled off up the
Golden Stairs. "Allus been pickled and allus goin' to be pickled,"
Jackson continued; then, qualifyingly: "Course I don't know he was
pickled when he kum int' the world, but I'm willin' to lay any odds that
he'll be pickled when he shuffles out of it."
Just about all of which was, or proved to be, "stryght dope."
After quoting this terse summing of Jackson's, it may sound a little
strange when I say that Bell was a gentleman--not _had been_, understand
(that could have been said with some truth about a dozen or more of us
at Kai), but _was_ a gentleman. Though undeniably never "quite sober,"
the fact remained that no one on the island had ever seen him "quite
drunk." And no matter how much liquor he had stowed "under hatches," no
one could say that it interfered either with his trim or his navigation.
His even rolling gait was always the same, whether it was the glow of
his eye-opening plunge at dawn that lighted his face, or the flush of
twelve hours of steady tippling that darkened it at twilight. Nor was he
ever known to omit that gravely courteous, almost "old-fashioned," bow
which, with the flicker of smile that was more of his eyes than his
mouth, was the invariable greeting he bestowed upon friend and stranger
alike. The mellow drawl of his "It's suah goin' to be a fine mawnin',"
had made it easier for me to weather dawns that--in my inflamed
imagination--menaced monstrously in jagged lines like a cubist's
nightmare. If drink had any effect on his speech, it was to incline him
to reserve rather than garrulity. His temper appeared to be under quite
as perfect control as his legs. Even when he broke "Red" Logan's jaw
with a swift short-arm jolt the time that sanguine Lochinvar tried to
nip Rona off his arm as they passed on the beach in the twilight, they
said that Bell hardly raised his voice as he "guessed that'd hold the
varmit fo' a while." And when, a few days later, Doc Wyndham told him
with a grin that "Red" wouldn't be screwing a diving helmet on his block
for some weeks to come, it was said there was real regret in the
Yankee's voice as he hoped that the injury wouldn't be "pumanant."
Yes, before I had been a week at Kai I felt that there was a little
addition I could safely make to Jackson's comprehensive estimate. I knew
that Bell had been born a gentleman, and--whatever lapses there may have
been, or might be--I knew he was going to die a gentleman. And that also
(had I put it on record) would have proved pretty nearly "stryght dope."
What stumped me at first was trying to reconcile the remarkable control
Bell maintained over all his faculties in spite of his hard drinking
with the fact (apparently fully authenticated) that he had run
aground--through drunkenness--every ship he had ever commanded,
beginning with a U. S. gunboat. He cleared up that matter for me himself
one afternoon, however, by casually observing--at the moment he chanced
to be watching me trying to transfer to canvas the riot of opalescence
between the _lapis lazuli_ of the barely submerged reef and the deep
indigo where a hundred fathoms of brine threw back the reflection of the
sinister core of cumulo-nimbus in the heart of a menacing squall--that
the sea had always acted as a tremendous stimulant to him, especially
when he trod a deck.
"If I could just have managed to cut out the whisky at sea, all would
have been smooth sailin'," he said in his deep rich Southern drawl. "On
land--heah ... anywheah--kawn jooce is lak food to me; mah body convuts
it into ene'gy just lak an engine does coal. But with a schoonah kickin'
undah me--we'ell, I guess theah's just one kick too many, something lak
mixin' drinks p'raps. It suah elevates me good an' plenty ... and when I
come down theah's natchaly some crash. My ship an' I gen'aly strike
bottom at about the same time. But, s'elp me Gawd" (a tensing _timbre_
in his voice) "on mah next command--"
It was the one sure sign that Bell was beginning to feel the kick of his
"kawn jooce" when he spoke of his "next command." Unless that kick was
beginning to carry a pretty weighty jolt behind it he knew just as well
as everyone else on the beach did that he would never get his Master's
Certificate back again, and that even if he did there was no house from
Honolulu to Hobart that would trust a ship to a man who had already
beached a half-dozen.
Kai was glib to the last detail--rig, tonnage, cargo, insurance, owner
and the like--respecting the several merchant craft Bell had piled up in
the course of his downward career; but the extent of local "dope" in the
matter of the gunboat episode was to the effect that it happened "up
Manila-way," and that "that was the bally smash that started him goin'."
Personally, I took little stock in the naval part of the yarn--that is,
at first. Then, one morning--it was the day after the tail of a typhoon
had sucked up the end of Ah Yung's laundry shack and left everyone on
the beach short of clothes--Bell came out in a suit of immaculate
_starched_ whites. It was the cut of the jacket and the way he wore it
that drew and held my puzzled gaze; that its shoulders were "drilled"
for epaulettes and that its thin pearl buttons barely held in
buttonholes that had been worked for something thicker and wider I did
not notice till later. Steady-eyed, lean-jawed, square-shouldered,
ready-poised--not even a flapping Payta _sombrero_ could quite disguise,
nor five years of heavy tippling quite obliterate, the marks of type.
Then I understood why it was that Bell, all but down and out though he
might be, was, and would remain to the last, a gentleman. There are
things the Navy puts into a man that not even a court-martial can take
away.
The only allusion Bell ever made to his remoter past was drawn from him
a few days later, when--he was watching me paint again--I chanced to
mention that I had spent a fortnight in the Philippines on my way south
from Saigon to Australia. Glancing up at the sound of his sharp intake
of breath, I saw his jaw set over the questions that leapt to the tip of
his tongue, to relax gradually as a faraway look came into his wide-set
grey eyes and a wistful smile of reminiscence parted his lips.
"Did you heah the band play on the Luneta in the evenin'?" he asked
eagerly, "while the _spiggoties_ in their _calesas_ wuh racin' round the
circle, an' the kiddies an' theyah nusses wuh rompin' on the grass, an'
the big red sun was goin' down behind Mariveles beyond the bay? An' did
you know the Ahmy an' Navy Club--not the new one ... the ol' one ovah
cross the moat inside the wall?"
"Put up there all my time in Manila," I replied. "A very comfy old
hangout, especially considering what the hotels were."
"An'--did you--" (he gulped once or twice as though the question came
hard) "did you evah heah them speak at the Club of a chap called Blake
... Lootenant-Commandah Blake? He was a son of Captain Blake, who helped
Sampson polish off Cervera, an' a gran'son of Adm'al Blake. Ol' naval
fam'ly."
"You mean the man who pulled off that coup when Wood was cleaning up the
crater of Bud Dajo? Some kind of a bluff on his own with one of the
little old gunboats Dewey captured after the Battle of Manila Bay,
wasn't it? Scared some Jolo Dato into giving up a bunch of our men he
already had lined up against a wall to _bolo_, didn't he? Of course, I
remember perfectly now. General X----" (mentioning the Military Governor
of Mindanao by name) "told me the yarn himself the night I dined with
him in Zamboanga. He said no one but an old poker shark would ever have
thought of the stunt, much less had the nerve to bluff it out.
Incidentally he mentioned that the chap was the best poker player in the
Navy, as he was also the speediest baseball pitcher ever graduated from
Annapolis; that he had been missed almost as much for the one as the
other since he dropped out of sight several years before. Some
difficulty about--"
"Tryin' to push Corregidor out of the entrance to Manila Bay with the
nose of his gunboat," Bell cut in harshly, the hell in his soul glowing
through his eyes as the glare of the coal-bed welters beyond a stoker's
lifted furnace flap. That, and a single sob sucked through his
contracted throat as the vacuum in his chest called for air, were the
only outward signs of the intensest spasm of throttled emotion I ever
saw assail a human being. Then the square jaw tightened, the cords of
the muscular neck drew taut, and what would have been another body and
soul racking sob was noiselessly absorbed in the buffer of a flexed
diaphragm. The fires of agony behind the eyes paled and died down like
an expiring coal. The corrugations of the brow smoothed out as a
smile--half amused, half wistful--relaxed the set lips. The old
controlled Bell (I shall continue to call him so) was in the saddle
again.
"So they still remembah mah ball-playin'," he drawled musingly, his left
hand digits gently massaging the bulbous swelling remaining after some
red-hot drive had telescoped the middle finger of his right. "Ye'es, of
co'se they'd miss mah wing in the Ahmy-Navy game at Ca'nival time. But
mah pokah--we'ell I reckon a few of 'em did find mah pokah hand about as
bafflin' as mah baseball ahm. But it was straight deliv'ry, tho'--both
of 'em. An' they wouldn't be callin' me a fo'-flushah, etha. No, you
didn't heah any of 'em say that, I'm right suah."
A smile more whimsical than bitter twitched his lips twice or thrice in
the minute or two he stood alone with his thoughts. "So I've sort o'
dropped out o' sight to 'em?" he said finally. "We'ell, I guess that was
about the best thing to happen for all consuned. But, just the same, if
you evah go back Manila-way I won't be mindin' it if you tell 'em that,
tho' the ol' wing's tuhn'd to glass from long lack o' limberin', an'
tho' I don't play pokah down heah fo' feah o' bein' knifed fo' mah luck,
I'm still hittin' true to fohm in mah own lil' game of alterin' the sea
map with the noses of ships. I reckon they'll know the reason why."
There was another interval of silence, but, unlike the other, not
charged, electric. Bell's blow-off through the safety-valve of frank
speech had taken the peak off the pent-up pressure within, and when he
spoke again it was merely to quote what the Governor of North Carolina
had said about its having been a long time between drinks. "Great thust
aggravateh, the Sou'east Trade." Would I mind--ahem--hiking home with
him and lubricating my tonsils with a drop of "J. Walkah"? That was
simply his delicate way of pretending to ignore my slavery to absinthe,
a habit which not even the most whisky-saturated sot of an Anglo-Saxon
can ever quite forgive one of his race for falling a victim to. I
wouldn't? "We'ell, _hasta manyanah_."
With a crunch of coral clinkers under his feet and a stave of "Carry Me
Back to Ol' Virginny" on his lips, Bell, disdaining the smooth path by
the beach, swung off through the pandanus scrub on what he called a
"bee-line for home"! He had a weakness for taking "short-cuts" on land
as well as at sea. Never again--not even in the moment of his great
decision--did he lift for me or any other man the "furnace flap" of iron
reserve that masked the fires of his innermost soul.
Their saving "sense of sport," which was the golden vein in the rough
iron of the "beach push" of Kai, made it inevitable that they should
have a substantial sense of respect for a man of Bell's stamp, and this
might easily have ripened to an active popularity had not the American's
quiet but inflexible reserve prevented their knowing him better. They
suspected that he was no novice in handling the big Colt's that was
flopping on his hip when he landed, they knew that there was a weighty
punch behind his long arm, and they were frankly outspoken in their
admiration of the manner in which he stowed and carried his booze. But
what had impressed them more than anything else was the way in which he
had taken the devil out of a vicious imp of a Solomon Island pony on the
beach one morning. "Hellish hard-handed," "Slant" Allen had said, as his
steel-blue eyes narrowed down to slits in the intensity of his interest
and admiration; "but a seat like he was screwed to the brute's backbone.
Old cross-country rider--hundred to one on it. Man in a million in a
steeplechase on a horse strong enough to carry the weight. Gawd, what a
seat!"
All in all, indeed, there was only one thing the "beach" held against
Bell, and that was Rona, or rather his possession of her. There was
nothing personal in this, of course. They merely regarded the big
American in the same light they had always regarded a man with a chest
of pearls or anything else of value that their simple, direct natures
made them yearn for the possession of. There was this difference,
however. Where the "push" of Kai would have combined to a man to get
away with a box of pearls or a cargo of shell, the annexing of a woman
was essentially a lone-hand game, and--well, Bell was hardly the kind of
a "one-man job" any of them cared to tackle. I feel practically certain
that, but for the disturbance of the even tenor of Kai's way incident to
the _Cora Andrews_ affair, his "rights" in Rona would never have been
challenged.
CHAPTER III
THE GIRL HERSELF
As for the girl herself, words fail me in trying to picture her, just as
my brush and pencil (save perhaps for that one rough memory sketch, done
at white heat while still gripped in the exaltation that first glimpse
of her splashing inside the reef had thrown me into) have always failed.
This is, I fancy, because, unbelievably beautiful though she was, there
was still so much of her appeal that was of the spirit rather than the
flesh--something intangible which had to be sensed rather than seen. She
was compact of contradictions, physical as well as mental. So slender as
almost to suggest fragility at a first glance, there was still not a
straight line, nor an angle, nor a hint of boniness, from the arch of
her instep to the tips of her ears. Again, pixie-like as she was in the
dainty perfection of her modelling, there was yet a fairly feral
suggestion of suppleness and strength underrunning the soft fluency of
contour. The strength was there, too, held in reserve in the flexible
frame like the power of a coiled spring. I saw her unleash it one
morning when, impatient of the slowness of a clumsy Fijian who was
launching a very sizable dugout for her, she yanked him aside by the
hair of his fuzzy head and did the job herself. I can still see the run
of muscles under the olive-silk skin of arm and ankle, and the bent-bow
arch of her slender back, as she gave a last push to the cranky
outrigger. Indeed, my mind is full of pictures like that--paddling,
swimming, leaning hard against the buffets of a passing squall, with a
lock of wet hair streaking across her glowing face and her drenched
garments clinging to her lithe limbs; and yet, as I have said, the
buoyant, flaming spirit of her always escaped my brush and pencil as it
now eludes portrayal by my pen.
But the most baffling, as it was also the most fascinating, of Rona's
contradictions was the combination she presented of inward intensity and
outward calm. The fire of her was, perhaps, the first thing one was
conscious of. Even I, with my blood thinned and cooled with the ice of
absinthe, could never watch her movements without a quickening of my
jaded pulses; to the sanguine combers of Kai the sight of her (whether
the rippling undulations of arms and shoulders as she drove a canoe
through the water, or the hawk-like immobility of her as she poised on a
pinnacle of reef waiting for a chance to cast her little Dyak purse-net)
was palpably maddening.
So much for the flaming appeal of the girl in action, or suspended
action, which was, of course, about the only way in which she was ever
revealed to the "beach." Now picture the same creature (as Bell--and
occasionally myself, his only intimate friend on the island--so often
saw her) seated cross-legged on a mat, her sloe-eyes, set slightly
slant, fixed dreamily on nothingness, like a sort of reincarnated
girl-Buddha. The sight of her thus never failed to awaken in my nostrils
the smell of smouldering _yakka_ sticks, and to set my ears ringing with
the throb of temple bells.
To my hyper-sophisticated (I will not say degenerate) senses this
Oriental side of the girl made a subtle appeal that was like an
enchantment. The passion to paint her--always burning within me when I
saw her in action--never assailed me when she fell into one of those
contemplative calms. Rather the peace of her soothed me like an opiate
and made me content to sit and dream myself. It was the one thing (until
I got the habit by the throat years afterward) that ever held my nerves
steady when the "absinthe hour" drew near at the end of the afternoon.
As long as Rona would continue to "sit Buddha" I had myself completely
in hand, even till well on after sunset. But if she moved, or spoke, or
even showed by her eyes that she was following Bell's words (it was
he--less sensitive to this phase of her than I--who did most of the
talking at these times), the spell was broken. The haste of my bolt for
home was almost indecent. I have sometimes thought that a few months
alone with Rona at this time might have effected very near to a complete
cure in me--by a sort of involuntary mental therapeutic treatment on her
part, I mean. But perhaps the other side of her--the "unreposeful"
one--might have complicated the case.
Both the fire and the repose of Rona--the passion and the peace of
her--were reflected in the olive oval of her face, the one by the full,
sensuous lips and the sensitive nostrils, and the other by the smooth,
low brow. The low-lidded blue-black eyes were "debatable territory," now
in the hands of one, now the other. So, too, that infallible "gauge of
temperament," whose dial is the pucker between the eyebrows. With Rona,
this "passion-pressure index" was a corrugated knot of intensity or an
olive blank according as to whether her inner fires were flaming or
banked.
Bell knew little of the girl's origin and said less. "Rona's _trousseau_
consisted of huh peacock sca'f an' this heah baby _bolo_," he said in
his slow drawl one afternoon when he had borrowed the exquisite little
dagger to show me how the Jolo _juramentado_ executed his favourite
belly-ripping stroke; "an' I reckon they'll comprise 'bout the sum total
of huh mo'nin' at mah fun'ral." That, and "I guess Rona knows no mo'
'bout mah past reco'd than I do 'bout huhs," was all I recollect his
ever having said on the subject. He was content to let it rest at that.
It was old Jackson who told me that he had seen the girl at
Ponape, where she had been brought by an "owl-eyed" (referring to
horn-spectacles rather than to the almond orbs themselves, I took it)
"chink" when he came back to the Carolines after buying bird-of-paradise
skins down New Guinea-way. She was dressed "Java-style" at the time, and
was said to have been picked up at Ternate or Ambon in the Moluccas.
Although the wily old Celestial kept the girl practically under lock and
key from the first, customers of his shop occasionally glimpsed her, and
she them, it would seem. Among these was the Yankee skipper of the
trading schooner, _Flying Scud_. The coming together of those two must
have been like the touching off of a _ku-kui_-nut torch, Jackson opined,
adding that he supposed I "twigged that thar was no snuffin' uv
_ku-kui_, onst aflar."
Just how the sequel eventuated no one in Ponape save the old Chinaman
knew, and he never told. With only half her copra discharged, the _Scud_
was heard getting under way at midnight, shortly after which the
silhouette of her, close-reefed, was observed to blot out the moon three
or four times as she beat out of that "hell's craw" of a passage in the
teeth of a rising sou'wester. The girl was never seen in the Carolines
again. Neither was Bell nor the _Scud_, for that matter, as it was but a
few days later that he attempted his disastrous short-cut across
Tuka-tuva Reef.
The next morning the Chinaman waited on his customers with his neck
heavily, obscuringly swathed in bandages. He kept these on for a
fortnight or more, and when they were finally dispensed with replaced
his loose shirt with a close-buttoned jacket having an unusually
high-cut neck. Even the latter, however, could not entirely conceal a
number of parallel red cicatrices which, beginning on his fat jowls, ran
down, slightly converging, onto his puffy yellow throat. Jackson felt
sure that the point where those red furrows came to a focus must have
been "fairish messed up."
On the beach of Ponape opinion was fairly divided as to whether the big,
close-mouthed Yank had "strong-armed" the Chinaman and carried off the
girl bodily, perhaps against her will, or whether she had made the
get-away unaided, going off to the _Scud_ on her own. In Jackson's mind
there were no doubts.
"I see them welts wi' my own peepers," he said, "an' they wan't the
marks uv a man. They wuz _scratches_. That lanky Yank don't scratch ...
'e _wallops_. But that gal--s'y, did y'u ever tyke a squint at 'er
taloons? Them's the ans'er. She kum to 'im; an' she's stickin' lika
oktypus."
Again I must credit old "Jack" with handing me pretty near to the
"stryght dope."
Yes, I had indeed noticed Rona's wonderful fingernails; likewise the
astonishing amount of care she lavished on them. One could not have
helped noticing them. A quarter to half an inch long, meticulously
manicured, and stained a maroon-brown (rather darker than the rich _sang
du boeuf_ of _henna_), she was always polishing them--those of one hand
on the palm of the other--even when "sitting Buddha" with dreaming
half-closed eyes. I inferred the habit of letting them grow was acquired
in the course of her association with the Chinese. She cut them just
short of where they would begin to curl and be a nuisance. A fraction of
an inch longer, and they would have been as useless as the tusks of an
old boar that had curved back more than a half circle. As they were....
One man's guess was as good as another's in the matter of Rona's racial
origin. Kai, though agreeing that she came from "somewhere Java-side,"
always spoke of her as a Kanaka, just as they did of all the rest of the
"beach" women who were not palpably Jap, Chinese or white. I doubt very
much, however, that she had a drop of real Polynesian blood in her
veins. Flaring with temperament though she was, there was still nothing
about her of the happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care sensuousness of the
Caroline or Samoan, the only women of the Islands to whom she bore even
the faintest resemblance in face or figure. If she had come from
Marquesas-way--but no, not even an admixture of old Spanish pirate blood
would have accounted for either the spirit or the body of Rona.
The girl's practice of wearing her _sulu_ (Kai used the Fijian name for
the inevitable South Sea waist-cloth which the Samoans call _lava-lava_
and the Tahitians _pareo_) Malay-fashion--looped over the breasts and
secured by a hitch under the left arm--indicated that her outdoor life
at least had been spent somewhere in the Insulinde Archipelago. Her very
considerable English vocabulary, however, and especially her fluency in
"pidgin," could hardly have been acquired save through some years of
residence in the Straits Settlements or the Federated Malay States. I
was inclined to favour Singapore, especially as she had once let slip
something about a fling at _fan-tan_ at Johore. But even had she been
born in that amazing island melting pot, her unmistakably Hindu cast of
features and mould of figure were hardly accounted for. The Madrassi
Tamils of the Straits were coolies, and Rona radiated _caste_ from her
slender pink-tipped toes to her crown of indigo-black hair coils.
In my own mind I harboured the theory that the girl was a "by-product"
of the harem of one of the innumerable petty Sultanates of Malaysia,
among which I knew were to be found girls of all the tribes and races of
the Moslem world. In no other way could I account for the flaming spirit
and the physical perfection of her. Not even descent from that strange
Hindu remnant of the lovely island of Lombok, just east of Java (a
theory which I had also turned over in my mind), quite satisfied on both
these scores. As to what sort of a centrifugal impulse might have
operated to spin her forth to the clutches of the currents of the
outside world, I had not speculated very deeply. But--well, I knew
something of the strange currencies in which Malaysian potentates paid
their debts to Singapore rug and jewel merchants!
In spite of the increasing warmth of Bell's friendship for me, my way to
Rona's confidence proved far from easy sledding. This was partly because
I had got in bad at the outset by starting to sketch that capricious
lady at her reef-side bath in the face of her very outspoken disapproval
of anything so unseemly, and partly because she was slow in making up
her mind that I did not necessarily classify with the predatory males
against whom her whole life had unquestionably been an unrelieved
defence. Obsessed by the desire to paint her, I had not improved my
standing with the girl by asking Bell (after she had refused me
pointblank) to intercede to get her to sit for me. Indeed, that _faux
pas_ on my part seemed to have put an end for good to any chance I might
have had of getting her to pose. Rona was openly indignant that I should
have presumed to regard her own decision as other than final in the
matter, while Bell, though perfectly good-natured about it, was no less
decided in his disapproval.
"No, sah, I'm not fo' it in the least, ol' man," he drawled decisively.
"Lil' Rona's 'bout the neahest thing to a true, lovin' an' lawful wife I
evah had, awh evah will have, fo' that mattah. So you must see that it
doan quite jibe with mah sense o' what is right an' propah unda the
ci'cumstances fo' me to aid an' abet a proceduah that might culminate in
huh appeahin' on the wall o' somun's bathroom as a spo'tin nymph awh a
wallowin' mumaid. Nothin' doin', ol' man; not with mah blessin'."
That ended it, of course. From then on I had to content myself with the
hopeless "sketches from memory," in not the best of which was I able to
catch more than a suggestion of what I sought. I could not have failed
more utterly had I set myself to do a "character portrait" of the "Green
Lady" herself.
But on the personal side it was not long before I began to make an
appreciable gain of ground with Rona. First she ceased avoiding me when
I dropped in for a mid-afternoon yarn with Bell; then she began to
assume a sort of "benevolent tolerance" by coming and sitting on the mat
as we talked; finally she started taking an active interest in the
conversation, coming out of her Buddha-like trances every now and then
to cut in with some trenchant comment in fluent _bêche-de-mer_ jargon,
or perhaps a shrewd question phrased in carefully chosen and enunciated
English.
At last, one memorable afternoon, she came (quite on her own initiative,
he assured me) with Bell to call at the little thatch-roofed,
woven-walled hut I was calling home at the time, wearing in honour of
the occasion her most treasured possession, the "peacock" shawl. It was
this astonishingly fine piece of Cantonese embroidery which Bell had
mentioned as having made up, with the little Malay _kris_, the sum total
of the dower Rona had brought him. It was the first time I had had a
chance to examine it at close quarters and I saw at a glance that,
however it had come into her possession, it had once been a priceless
thing, a real work of art, a treasure fit for the _trousseau_ of a
princess.
The body of the shawl was amber-coloured silk of so close a weave that
it would have shed water as it stopped light. A rubber blanket would not
have thrown a blacker shadow when held against the sun. Yet so sheer and
fine was the fabric that a twist of it streamed from one hand to the
other as brandy pours out of a flask. The peacock itself, done in a
thousand tints and shades of delicate floss, was all of life-size in
body and something more than that in tail. Stitching and matching,
stitching and matching--you could almost _see_ the artist growing old
before your eyes as you thought of the years he must have bent above his
glacially-growing masterpiece.
With this rainbow-bright rectangle of shimmering silks worn folded over
the shoulders in the ordinary way the peacock must have been
considerably telescoped and distorted. It was doubtless for this reason
that Rona always wore it Malay-fashion, as the Javanese women wear their
_sarongs_. This displayed the jewel-gay bird in all his pride, the
bright breast swelling over Rona's own and the coruscant cascade of tail
(you could almost hear the rustle of it) falling about her limbs like
the feather mantle of an early Hawaiian queen.
I have said that this shawl _had been_ a priceless thing. As a matter of
fact it still was such. So lovingly had it been cared for, not only by
Rona but by the many owners it may well have had before her (for Canton
had done no such work as this for half a century at least), that not a
corner was frayed, not a one of its countless thousands of stitches
started. In texture it was scarcely less perfect than the day it was
finished. The only thing wrong with it was that the colours were a good
deal dulled, not by age (for the old Cantonese dyes are as deathless of
hue as ancient Phoenician glass), but by grease. This had happened, I
suspected, largely during Rona's stewardship, for the _tiare_-scented
coco oil she used so freely as a hair-perfume often found its way to her
arms and shoulders--and so to the shawl. All the latter needed to
restore it to its pristine freshness and refulgency was a good
"dry-cleaning."
"Even Rona does not dream of the brilliance of colour under that
grease," I said to myself. "Oh, for a can of naphtha!" Then the fact
that my benzine would do the same trick flashed into my mind. I was all
but out of it, I reflected, with replenishment uncertain; but I could at
least contrive to spare enough to make a start with. Pouring a teacupful
of the pungent solvent out of the scant pint I found still on hand, I
saturated a clean rag with it and, without a word of explanation to the
girl, walked up to her and started washing the bird's face and hackle.
For an instant she stiffened angrily, evidently under the impression
that my solicitude for the embroidery was only a thinly veiled excuse
for chucking her under the chin. (Indeed, she confessed to me later
that "gentlemen" could always be counted on to employ such indirect
methods of approach, and that she found them rather more difficult to
combat than the straight cave-man stuff of the less sophisticated
beach-comber). But as the first glad flash of brightening colour caught
the corner of a suspiciously-lowered eye, the innocence--even the
laudability--of my purpose shot home to her quick mind. With a twirl of
thumbs and a twist of shoulders, she came out of the shawl as a golden
moth spurns its cocoon, and, leaving it in my hand, darted over to a peg
and purloined an old smoking-jacket to take its place.
"Bath heem good, Whitnee," she chirruped, giving her slipping _sulu_ a
hitch with one hand as she thrust the other into an arm of the jacket.
"Makee heem first-chop clean. He too much dirtee long time."
That she lapsed thus into "pidgin" was a sure sign of the girl's
ecstatic excitement. Usually her English--especially when she had time
to ponder and polish it in advance, as when she put questions--was much
better than that.
Sopping gently to avoid pulling the delicate stitches, I managed to
"bath heem good" from his saucy crest, down over the royal purple
hackle, and well out upon his comparatively sober-coloured breast before
my benzine came to an end. A slightly more vigorous dabbing beyond the
embroidery line "alchemized" a patch of clouded amber to a halo of
lucent gold, against which the bird's haughtily-held head stood out like
the profile of a martyred saint on an old stained-glass window. Thus far
would the precious contents of that teacup go, and no farther.
Rona was in raptures. What though there was a blotchy high- (or rather
low-) water mark where the dabbing had ceased near the base of the
erupting splash of tail-feathers, what though the magic liquid had come
off second best in its bout with an indurated gob of egg-yolk drooling
across one wing, what though the worst of our Augean labours--the
cleansing of the mighty green tail--had yet to be tackled--just look at
the glory already wrought!
Crooning with pleasure, the girl stroked and petted the renovated
iridescence of the lordly neck--until I called her attention to the fact
that the still unevaporated benzine was dissolving her finger-nail
stain. It was an ill-advised remark on my part, for it turned her
attention to the still unreclaimed tail and set her begging for "just
nuff fo' one-piecee featha, Whitnee; he need it vehry ba-ad."
She had her way, of course, and would have finished my benzine then and
there had not Bell come to my rescue. Laughing and muttering something
about "thustiness" (not drinking whisky myself, I had none in stock), he
took Rona by the arm and started off on the homeward path. Strutting and
preening she went, the very reincarnation of the royal bird upon her
bosom, the very living, breathing spirit of "peacock-iness."
She might just as well have finished the job--or rather the benzine--at
once, though, for she got it all in the end. Every day or two--sometimes
with Bell, sometimes alone--she began paying calls. Always she was in
gala dress and always, after more or less "finessive" preliminaries, she
made the same plea.
"Just one mo' featha, Whitnee," she would coo ingratiatingly, putting a
long-nailed finger-tip on the "eye" of the particular quill next in line
for renovation. "Ple-ese, Whitnee.... 'Peakie' has been one veh-ry good
fella bird too-dayee. Pu-retty ple'ese, Whitnee."
Of course that always got me, and incidentally the benzine--as long as
it lasted. I had remarked to Bell once or twice how his soft Southern
drawl was beginning to creep into Rona's English, and how fetching a
combination it made with her "pidgin-_bêche-de-mer_" blend. Getting wind
of this, the sly minx played the card to the limit. That "one mo' fetha,
Whitnee," had me fated, and she knew it. I was completely out of benzine
for three weeks, and at a time when I was in especial need of it in
connection with my experiments in colour-mixing; but Rona's friendship
was cheap at the price. When I finally got hold of a five-gallon can of
naphtha from Suva (sent up to Bougainville by Burns, Phillip packet,
where one of Jackson's cutters picked it up), the dry-cleaning the two
of us gave old "Peakie" was the best fun I'd had since I used to scrub
my Newfoundland pup as a kid.
CHAPTER IV
"SLANT" ALLEN RETIRES AGAIN
Although "Slant" Allen had "retired" to Kai on three or four occasions
previous to my arrival, his latest sojourn--the one which ended with his
enforced departure on the _Cora Andrews_--began about a month after I
took up my residence there. Two questions which Jackson asked of the man
who told him "Slant" had landed on the beach the night before have
always struck me as especially illuminative. One was: "Did 'e fetch a
'awse?" and the other--even more laconic--was: "Gin, Kanak, Jap or
Chinee this croose?"
And equally illuminative was his comment when told that Allen had come
across in a catamaran, bringing neither girl nor horse. "Then 'e musta
sloped in a 'ell uv a rush," said the old trader with finality.
Kai was frankly disappointed that "Slant" had come without his "stable,"
for the "beach race meets" which had made his name a byword throughout
the Islands were always productive (it was universally agreed) of no end
of sport and excitement. Allen, it was claimed, had transported ponies
about the South Seas by every known craft that plied their waters, from
a steam packet to a Papuan head-hunting canoe. Once, in Fiji, he had
even swum a horse across the flooded Rewa in order to get it to Suva in
time to run for the "Roku's Cup." Of course he won out. "Slant" always
did that--by hook or by crook--whether with a horse or a woman. Thus
Kai, in discussing Allen's advent.
It was characteristic of that hard-hit bunch of "gentlemen and
sportsmen" (a phrase often on the lips of the post-prandial speakers at
their "race-banquets") that they should hasten to tell me that Allen had
once owned a Melbourne Cup winner--"came jolly near riding the gelding
himself, too"--while the fact that he had killed more of his
fellow-creatures than any man of twice his age in the South Seas was
only a matter of casual mention. You had to credit the frank minded and
mouthed rascals for running true to form in that touch of naïveté,
though. To them the Melbourne Cup was the greatest thing in the world
beyond any possible comparison: a human life was just about the least.
But they were quite as careless about their own lives as of those of
others, and that alone always raised them in my eyes far above the
pettiness of lesser if more conventionally moral men.
Although there was not a horse on the island at the time of Allen's
arrival, within a week he had wangled it somehow to have a bunch of
Solomon ponies brought over from Malaite, and at the end of a fortnight
had pulled off the first Kai "Grand National." "Slant" called it that,
he said, because, like the great Liverpool classic from which he
borrowed the name, it was to be a steeplechase. The half-wild little
beasts were brought over on the deck of a trading schooner, travelling
in such restricted quarters in the waist that they had to be thrown and
held down to let the foreboom go over every time she was put about.
A bit stiff in the knees but uncurbed of spirit, the vicious quartette
clambered out on the beach, shook off the water soaked up during their
swim from the schooner, laid back their ears and stood ready to fight
all-comers with tooth and hoof. As a consequence, naturally, the
preliminaries of the "Grand National" were more in the character of
broncho-busting contests than speed trials, and it was in one of these
that the mighty Bell had won the plaudits and the respect of the "beach"
by breaking the spirit of a wild-eyed lump of a cayuse which had just
managed to give the momentarily overconfident "Slant" a nasty spill.
The "Grand National" was run round the curve of the beach, with two
"water-jumps," the "stonewall" of the quay, and three hurdles in the
form of old dugout canoes to be negotiated. Bell declined to accept a
mount, and, in any event, his weight would have told prohibitively
against him in competition with any one of at least a dozen lighter men,
all of whom had had more or less actual racing experience.
Allen was the only one to go the full route at the first running of the
"National," all three of his rivals falling out at the water-jumps. When
one of the defeated riders limped in and started to attribute "Slant's"
win to the fact that he had picked the best-broken if not the speediest
mount, that imperturbable sportsman cheerfully agreed to ride the race
over mounted on any one of the ponies the judges cared to designate.
Again he had a walkaway. It was all a matter of sheer horse-mastership;
the speed of the beast had little to do with it.
Finally, just to prove that the running was all on the square, "Slant"
rode the race on each of the two remaining ponies, one of which had
strained a tendon and rasped most of the hide off one side of him in
trying to jump _through_ the coral blocks of the quay instead of over
them. We gave the laughing centaur a great ovation when he brought even
the cripple--dripping blood and sweat it was, but still responsive to
the magic of the hand that imposed its will at the pressure of a bridle
rein--under the wire a half-breach-length winner.
And still more wildly we cheered him when "Quill" Partington--a
broken-down and broken-out (from jail, I mean) newspaper writer, late of
Melbourne and formerly of Calcutta and London--chivvied up an ancient
tortoise that Jackson used to keep around his shop as a pet, and,
mounting "Slant" on the ridge of its shell, offered to back the pair at
catch-weights against anything on the island. "Quill," a most engaging
character, was the poet and minstrel of Kai. He did not, however, figure
in the _Cora Andrews_ affair, save that he later wrote some rather
spirited verses in celebration of it, or rather of what little he knew
of it.
If the feeling in Kai had been one of disappointment when it was first
reported Allen had landed without a horse, that awakened by the still
more astonishing intelligence that he did not have a girl with him was
somewhat different--rather more akin to apprehension, it seemed to me.
"Slant" was no more of a laggard on the love-path than the race-track,
and the gay gossip of his amazing _amours_ was sipped with the tea of
effete Apia and Papeete with scarcely less gusto than when it sauced the
salt-horse of the pearling fleets of Port Darwin and Thursday Island.
The lightning of his love was likely to strike anywhere, you were told,
sometimes in the most unexpected places. There was that vixen of a
_gin_--a straight Australian aboriginal black--whom he had risked his
life for in cutting across a corner of the "Never-Never" when he ran
away with her, only to have her turn and knife him later in Deli out of
jealousy of a half-caste Portugee Timorese who had caught his fickle
fancy. And--to take the other extreme--there was that little
golden-haired doll of a niece of the Governor of Fiji, who fell heels
over head in love with "Slant" after seeing him play polo in Suva, and
who, when they packed her off for home to break up the disgraceful
affair, made what was described as a really sincere attempt to go over
the rail of the Auckland-bound Union packet. Then there was "Slant's"
affair with that notorious pearl-pirate "Squid" Saunders' girl--the one
the missionaries adopted and tried to reclaim, and who promised for a
while to be such a credit to their teaching--with its ghastly sequel.
And so it went.
It was said that "Slant" boasted of having a son (he never kept track of
girls, he said) and a saddle in every group west of the "hundred and
eightieth." I daresay this was true, though those who put it _island_
instead of group doubtless exaggerated. I had landed at several islands
myself where I had been unable to borrow a saddle.
Most of the little unpleasantnesses that disturbed the _dolce far
niente_ atmosphere of Kai had their roots in the fact that the male
population of the island was always a good jump ahead of the female,
that there were not, in short, enough girls to go round. Under these
conditions the advent of so notorious a "feminist" as Allen could not
but be provocative of a certain anxiety, especially on the part of those
who were (to use Jackson's terse if inelegant expression) "'arborin'
'igh-class 'ens."
"Don't you coves make no mistake," Jackson was quoted as saying;
"'Slant' 'll be tykin' a myte stryght aw'y. Only question is 'oo's myte
'e's goin' to tyke. If it was any bloke but that squar'-jawed Yank w'at
'ad 'is grapplin' 'ooks slung into the plumage uv that perky peacock
pullet, I'd 'ave no doubt w'at bird 'Slant' ud be baggin' an' draggin'
'ome to broil. But--layin' low as 'e is fer a bit--I'm thinkin' it ain't
_that_ presarve 'e'll be gunnin' in just yet aw'ile."
"Stryght dope" again from old "Jack." Allen had his own reasons for not
wishing his presence in Kai to be called too forcibly to the attention
of the authorities in the British Solomons, where his latest escapade
(something to do with the forcible recruiting of blacks) came pretty
near the line where they were likely to ask for a gunboat from the
Sydney station to aid in bringing him to book. Allen was by no means
inadept of his fellow men, and he must have known that a showdown with a
man of Bell's stamp--even though he had the best of it and copped the
most desirable thing he ever set eyes on for his very own--could hardly
fail to prove a clash that men would like to talk about, the inspiration
of a tale that would shudder itself from Yap to Tasmania in delirious
beach-comber jargon, setting tongues wagging about him at a time when
publicity was quite the last thing that he wanted.
Pipped as he was by the pullet's pulchritude (his own expression--he
admitted as much to Jackson offhand) the cool-headed if hot-blooded
Allen evidently decided to ride a waiting race for at least the first
half or three-quarters, and so have something to draw on for the
straightaway. "Easy starter but a hell of a finisher," was the popular
appraisal of "Slant's" way of winning with a horse, and it was but
natural that he should pin his faith to similar tactics where a woman
was in the running. There's a lot in common between the two, and it is
rarely indeed that a man who has a way with the one comes a cropper with
the other.
It has occurred to me, too, that a very wholesome respect for Bell as a
man may have had a good deal to do with Allen's failure to force the
running at the start in the matter of Rona. The steel of his own hard
purposefulness could not have but struck sparks on the flint beneath the
American's mask of suave reserve at their first meeting, and the
Australian was far too intelligent not to sense that in Bell's Jovian
spirit there was a force more compelling than anything in his own.
Moreover, at riding, fighting and shooting--all that carried much weight
when they judged a man in the Islands--Allen must have known that if the
balance inclined either way, it was in the American's favour.
It may well have been the sheer rugged, manly forcefulness of Bell that
gave Allen pause, at least in those early weeks before the Australian's
infatuation for the girl became an obsession in which his reason had no
part. For years he had been taking life and property out of downright
contempt for his victims. "I'm the better man, and therefore the more
deserving," was sufficient excuse in his own mind for his most
high-handed outrages. But in Bell--for almost the first time perhaps--he
had met a man who had an "edge" on him--even his soaring ego could not
prevent his recognizing that. This must have been plain to him even when
he measured the Yankee with the yardstick of his own primitive code.
Yes, I really think that Allen, in his innermost mind, rated Bell as a
man who, like himself, had a "right" to the best of everything. I am
even convinced that, for a while at least, he even tried to respect
Bell's right to Rona.
But do not let me leave the impression that there was one iota of
physical fear of Bell in this attitude of Allen's. From what I had seen,
and was to see, of the cool-eyed Antipodean that was unthinkable, even
though he knew that the powerful ex-athlete could come pretty near to
staving in his ribs with a single punch, and though he may have
suspected that the Yankee was the deadlier man on the draw. I honestly
believe that "Slant" Allen had no fear in his heart of anyone or
anything under heaven. At that time, I mean; what came to him later is
another matter.
"Slant" ran true to Jackson's "dope sheet" in the matter of "tykin' a
myte," though, but it was done quite decently and in order--that is, as
such things go in the Islands. He put up with "Quill" Partington (an old
pal) for a fortnight, and then, when "Quill's" lyric spirit led him to
run over to Malaite in search of a queer native banjo that someone had
told him the bush niggers of the interior of that island made, strings
and all, from the wild boar, "Slant" simply stayed on to "look after the
pigs and chickens" (as he told them at Jackson's) and, incidentally,
Mary Regan. Mary came from Norfolk Island, and claimed lineal descent
from the mutineers of the "Bounty." Certainly she looked the part--of a
descendant of mutineers, I mean. She had specialized in unhappy love
affairs, and showed it. She had a thin, bony, angular frame, a voice
like the wail of a cracked fog-horn, and a temper "calid enough for
cooking purposes," as "Quill" described it. "Quill," who had developed a
taste for curries and hot seasonings while living in India, claimed that
the reason he had put up with Mary for so long was because of the saving
she enabled him to effect in _paprika_.
How "Slant"--straight meat-eating and unpampered of palate as he
was--hit it off with the mercurial Mary no one seemed to know. At any
rate, I feel sure that he found her "condimental" disposition useful as
a counter-irritant against the rising fever of his passion for Rona,
something which, though he kept it under astonishingly good outward
control, had been burning with increasing heat from the very first time
he saw her. He confessed that to me later. Curbed passion, like wounded
pride, if it cannot find outward expression, bites inward. With all his
despicable record well in mind, I still cannot help thinking with a
certain admiration of the game bluff the rascal put up during those six
or eight weeks that the enchantment of Rona worked within him, of the
gay, devil-may-care smile that so successfully masked the writhings of
his racked spirit. First and last, there was something about the
fellow--I think it must have been his flaming courage--that attracted me
strongly in spite of all that I knew, and all that I came to hold,
against him.
Since Kai held no regular intercourse with any of the surrounding
islands, the news that the plague--a pernicious form of bubonic--had
broken out and was making terrible ravages among both the bush and
saltwater niggers of the Solomons was received with no especial interest
on the beach, save perhaps by those who were wont now and then to take a
flyer in "black ivory." The labour-recruiting trade--itself almost the
only medium through which the pest had been spread--was hard hit of
course; indeed, had there been anything like adequate control of the
pernicious traffic at this time, it would have been suspended entirely
until all of the islands from which blacks were being taken, or to which
they were being returned, were able to present something approximating
clean bills of health.
Since this was not done, however, the only check on the movement of
blacks--infected or otherwise--was the possible reluctance of the
masters of ships engaged in the trade to take the risk of carrying them.
And since the average black-birding skipper lived as a matter of course
with a gun in one hand, his life in the other, and the devil's tow-line
between his teeth, it was hardly to be expected that a little thing like
the spectre of the "Black Death" looming up on the windward horizon was
going to make him reef much canvas. The "Black Death" in another form
would ambush him sooner or later anyhow. With niggers waiting to settle
accounts with him in every bay it was only a matter of time at the best.
Why worry about a few cases of a disease that might not kill him even if
he did get it? Heave in and get under way! That was about the way the
black-birder looked at it, and he went right on scattering infected
niggers around the South Seas like a cook stirring raisins into a
pudding.
But in the secluded and peaceful haven of Kai lagoon they reckoned that
they had little to fear from the epidemic whatever happened elsewhere.
Let the plague and the heathen rage for all they cared. They were their
own quarantine officers, and, until the "Black Death" ceased to stalk in
the neighbouring islands, "No Visitors" was the order of the day. All
very simple and efficient--in theory. Covered every possible
contingency--just about.
I had spent several colourful days once--getting about from island to
island in the New Hebrides--with red-haired old Mike Grogan on the _Cora
Andrews_, and had heard from that hard-fisted giant's own lips something
of the grim balances checked against his life in practically every
black-birding island of Melanesia. A black's home bay holds a
labour-recruiting skipper responsible for the man's safe return at the
end of his contract time, and if he does not come back they figure that
the only fair way to even up the score is by killing the captain of the
ship which took him away. Grogan calculated that he would have to be
killed something like one hundred and forty times to make a clean sheet
of all the accounts thus reckoned against him. He took a sort of grim
pleasure in running over the items of the various tallies, but always
ended with: "B'gorra, the devils'll be gittin' me yit!" He was convinced
that it would be a "cutting-out" party that would do for him in the end,
and I have no doubt that he fought over in his mind that final bloody
showdown every night he stood the "graveyard" watch alone. A sudden
volley from the bush, his whaleboat caught in a swarming rush of blacks,
his crew disabled or deserting, and himself alone battling it out
single-handed with the niggers at the last.... It was something like
that he expected for a grand finale, and all the "fighting Irish" in him
yearned for it as a sunflower turns to the setting sun.
"An' it ain't as if I won't be givin' the spalpeens a run for their
money, me bhoy," he had cried one afternoon, clapping me on the shoulder
where I swayed with him to the plungings of the _Cora_ in a nasty
cross-swell. "An', b'gorra, it's a way to die after a man's own
heart--shootin' an' clubbin' into a mob o' niggers out under God's own
sky!"
Full as my mind was of other things on that accursed day of which I am
about to write, I could not help but think of these words when they told
me at Jackson's that old Mike's fighting spirit had passed on a windless
midnight, and while Mike himself was jack-knifed over the _Cora's_
wheel, spitting blood and curses, and imploring the devil to quit tying
knots in his tortured guts with a red-hot pitchfork.
What little we heard of how things came to go wrong with the _Cora_ in
the first place fell from the blackening lips of her "Agent" (as the
recruiter is called), who managed to reach the beach of Kai in a
whaleboat, and who did not go into a delirium until a half-hour before
he died that evening. She was packed to the hatches with "return" boys
from Samoa. Although the plague had been claiming a very heavy toll
among the Melanesian blacks of the coco plantations of Upolou, Grogan
decided to take a chance at making the Solomons with a load which, on
account of the risk, was offered him at double rates. They would have
made it all right, the Agent thought, had not the southerly gale which
blew them a long way out of their course been followed by many days of
calms and alternating winds. Grogan's softness in trying to doctor the
first case of plague--instead of following the customary practice, cruel
but effective, of shooting the infected black (doomed anyhow) and
throwing the body to the sharks--was probably responsible for the
ghastly sequel. The blacks fell sick by dozens, until at last the
Skipper--doubtless already in the first throes of the disease
himself--ordered every living man except the surviving members of the
crew driven below and battened under hatch. Grogan died that night and
the mate the following morning.
The only white man remaining was the Agent, and he, obsessed with a
life-long horror of being buried at sea, steered the best course he
could for the nearest island. The _Cora_, luckily heading into the
treacherous reef-beset passage at the turn of the tide, dropped her hook
in Kai lagoon in the first flush of the dawning of the next day.
CHAPTER V
A SHIP OF DEATH
With a good many days of my life to which I cannot look back without
a blush of shame, I write deliberately when I say that the one
ushered in by the raucous grind of the _Cora Andrews'_ chain running
through its hawse-pipe as she let go anchor a couple of cables'
lengths off Kai beach, stands alone in the horror and the painfulness
of its memories. It is characteristic of all but the most degraded of
beach-combers--doubtless their general contempt of life has much to do
with it--that "once in a while" they "can finish in style"; that, on a
showdown, they are usually there with the goods. I had always felt sure
that, in a pinch, I could force myself to come through in the same
way--the thought had gilded many a slough of despond for me. Well, this
day, I had my chance and funked it--funked it clean, as a yellow dog
slinks from a fight with its tail between its legs, as an underbred
hunter refuses a jump. Oh yes, I had an excuse. "Seeing green" is next
thing to "seeing yellow." Almost anyone knows that. But I had thought
that there was enough red blood left in me to make it possible for me to
take the bit in my teeth and finish like a thoroughbred at the last. But
there was not. That was the thought which had made the ghastly tragedy
even more tragical to me, which made a mockery of the triumph which I
might otherwise have felt when, first Australia and then Europe,
acclaimed me as the greatest marine painter of the decade.
For several days previous to the coming of the _Cora Andrews_ I had
been slipping up pretty badly on my "absinthe reform" program. It was
largely the fault, I think, of a positively infernal spell of weather.
The ozone-laden trade winds, falling light after a spell of low
barometer, had finally failed altogether. Kai was lapped in sluggish
moisture-saturated airs that clung like a wet blanket. The Gargantuan
popcorn-like piles of the trade clouds were replaced by strata of
miasmic mists which awakened all the latent fevers in a man's body and
mind. The sea, slatily slick of surface, heaved in oily, indolent
smoothness, sliding over the reef without sound or foam. The brooding,
ominous sullenness was all-pervading, oppressive with sinister
suggestion.
Everyone on the island was drinking heavily, and mostly alone. No tipsy
choruses boomed out from under the sounding-board of Jackson's
sheet-iron roof. Even "Slant" Allen failed to appear for his wild
end-of-the-afternoon dashes up and down the beach. Rona dropped in
languidly one afternoon to say that Bell was tilting the bottle more
frequently than she had ever known him to do before, and that for three
days he had missed his early morning plunge from the reef.
"Too much walkee with Jo'nnee Walkah, Whitnee," she punned in a feeble
flicker of pleasantry. "I veh-ry much worree along Bel-la."
She needn't have worried, though. _He_, at least, had the stuff in him
for a proper finish.
It was only to be expected that I should seek solace in a time like this
by snuggling closer than ever into the enfolding arms of the "Green
Lady." That fickle jade was at her best--and her worst. Never had she
winged me to loftier pinnacles of sensuous delight; never had she
dropped me to profounder depths of horror and despond. The night before
the _Cora_ came marked a new "high"; also a new "low." I dropped like a
plummet straight from a pea-green grotto full of lilies of the valley,
maiden's hair ferns and ambrosia-breathed houri to the fire-scorched
cliffs ringing the mouth of the Bottomless Pit. I knew that Pit of old.
Most of the early hours of my mornings for the last five years had been
spent in trying to keep from being pushed into it.
But this time, though, it looked as if they were going to get away with
it. Failing to break my grip (I always managed to hang on somehow), they
had tried new tactics. They were pushing in the side of the Pit itself
so as to carry me with it. I felt the relentless creeping of the ledge
on which I struggled to maintain precarious footing. If I could only
push back into the rock ... through it ... out to the air! Nothing could
stand against the mighty heave I gave with my shoulders. The cliff
parted with a great rip-roar of rending, and I reeled back, back,
straight through--the pandanus siding of my hut. An instant before a
nigger had knocked off the shackle of the _Cora's_ anchor chain. The
unchecked run of forty-odd fathoms of rusty iron links through a
hawse-pipe is very like in sound to the rending of a rocky cliff--that
is, to a man in an absinthe nightmare.
That violent awakening did not bring me straight back to normal by any
means. You never come out of the "green horrors" that way, unless, of
course, you fall into water, or set fire to the house, or do something
else that calls for instant action. You usually come out by gradual
stages, each successive one marked by a shade more of the earth-earthy
than the last.
In this instance my fall only changed the spirit of my nightmare. I was
by no means out of the woods, either. I had backed away from the Mouth
of the Pit all right, but what brought that Ship of Death--black and
sinister she was against the bloody redness of the infernal
sunrise--unless it was to take me there again? I _knew_ that it was a
real ship. I _knew_ those black things festooned along its rails were
real dead men. I _knew_ that the horrible reek which presently came
pouring in over the oily water to penetrate my contracted nostrils was
the real smell of rotting flesh. I _knew_ that I was looking out at Kai
lagoon, and from the door of my own hut. I _knew_ these things, just as
I _knew_ it was real blood I saw and tasted when I bit my finger to
prove that I knew them.
But it was still as in a dream that I became aware of an erratically
rowed whaleboat pulling away from the Death Ship and making for the
beach. It was with an agreeable sense of relief that I noted that it was
apparently heading for the quay rather than in my direction. Drawing
near, it sheered away from the weed-slippery landing and went full-tilt
for the beach. A man--a big man, bare of legs and of chest, wearing only
a red _sulu_--ran down to meet it. It seemed no more than a perfectly
natural development of the ghastly pantomime that the big man should
raise a revolver and shoot one of the black rowers when the latter
jumped over the gunwale of the whaleboat and started to bolt up the
beach. I saw the flash from the revolver, saw the fugitive crumple and
fall, and the sharp report, impacting on the side of my sheet-iron
rain-water tank, slammed against my ear-drums with a shattering "whang."
That close-at-hand shot had the effect of shocking me back a notch or
two more nearer normal; but, nerve-shattered as I always was at the end
of a night, it was something very akin to the abject terror that gripped
me as I backed away from the Brink of the Pit which now impelled me to
"back away" from the new menace. Seizing my painting things from sheer
force of habit, I slunk off through the long early morning shadows of
the coco palm boles, not to stop until I came out upon the broken coral
of the steep-shelving leeward beach of the island. It was as far as I
could go without swimming.
Here Laku, my Tonga boy, found me toward noon. The coffee from the flask
he brought was the first thing to pass my lips since I had poured my
last drink the night before. It steadied me somewhat, but my nerves
still refused to react. The shock of the morning had been too much for
them. I realized that Kai had a mighty knotty problem on its hands with
that shipload of dead and dying niggers in the lagoon (Laku had told me
it was the _Cora_, and something of what the trouble was), and it took a
lot of screwing before I got my courage up to a point where I could
force my reluctant feet to carry me back to shoulder my share of the
responsibilities.
I was still streaking and dabbing at my canvas at three o'clock, and it
must have been nearly an hour later before I packed up and started back
toward the village. I burned that bizarre rectangle of colour-slashed
canvas on the very first occasion (which was not until a day or two
later) that I had a chance to stand off and look at it objectively.
There was revealed in it too much of the utter unmanliness which marked
my conduct on this most shameful day of my life to make it a pleasant
thing to have around. For me to have kept it would have been like a
man's framing and hanging the excoriation of the judge who had sentenced
him for some despicable crime.
What had transpired in the village up to the moment of my return at the
end of the afternoon I must set down as I learned of it later.
Everything considered, it seems to me that Kai--with one or two notable
exceptions--behaved very creditably in an extremely trying emergency.
Awakened when the _Cora's_ anchor was let go, a number of men had run
out to the beach, from where their glasses quickly gave them a pretty
good idea of the state of affairs aboard the luckless black-birder. Then
they got together at Jackson's--the lot of them in their pajamas or
_sulus_, just as they had tumbled out of their sleeping mats--to decide
what was to be done. The majority at first seemed inclined to stand by
their predetermined plan of shooting the first, and every man from a
plague-infested ship that tried to land on the beach. But at this
juncture Doc Wyndham, calling their attention to the fact that a
whaleboat had already put away from the _Cora_, suggested that they wait
and learn just how things stood before starting off gunning.
"I'm with you as far as shooting any nigger that tries to break
quarantine goes," he said, "but I'm dam'd if I'll stand by and see
anyone take a pot shot at Mike Grogan, or any other sick white man, for
that matter. Old Mike nursed me through a spell of 'black-water' once at
Port Darwin, and if he is in that boat I dope it it's up to me to tote
him home to my shack and do what I can for him. If he can't clamber out
I'm going to wade in and carry him back to the beach, so you'll have to
shoot the two of us if you shoot at all. But I don't think you will. I'm
not asking any of you chaps to have anything to do with the stunt. You
needn't touch him. I'll take him home and swear not to budge from there
till the thing's over one way or the other. After that I'll put myself
in a ten-day quarantine. Moreover, I won't be expecting attention from
any white man or nigger on the island in case the luck goes against me
and I catch the pest myself. It's my own little game and I won't stand
for any interfering in it."
That was the gist of Doc Wyndham's remarks as Jackson outlined them to
me the next day. They met with hearty assent from all of the dozen or
more present, except on the score of letting the Doc have the job all to
himself. He turned down every one of the volunteer nurses, however,
saying it was his own kettle of fish and that he'd have to stew it in
his own way. He even insisted on meeting the boat alone, urging that
there was no use in multiplying the points of possible "plague contact."
So it must have been the distinguished surgeon from Guy's that I saw
shoot the bolting black that morning. Had I continued to watch, instead
of bolting myself at that juncture, I would have seen him wade out, lift
a man tenderly from the stern-sheets of the whaleboat, and start
carrying the limp body up the beach to where a spreading bread-fruit
tree shaded the door of the sheet-iron shack which he was wont
humorously to refer to as his "professional, social and domestic
headquarters for Melanesia." Following that, I would have seen a bunch
of motley-clad figures prance down and start menacing the irresolute
boat-pullers with flourished revolvers, forcing the frightened blacks to
back off and begin splashing their wobbly way out to the _Cora_.
Wyndham's conduct all through struck me as rather fine, especially for a
man who was a convict of three continents and two hemispheres.
Disappointed in finding his friend Grogan in the whaleboat, on learning
that the latter and his mate were already dead, Doc just as cheerfully
set about paying to the Agent the debt he felt he owed to old Mike.
Before entering his house, he called to his girl--a saucy little Samoan
named Melita, who had gone right on sleeping through all the
racket--ordering her to make a hurried departure by the back door and
not to return until he sent for her. The Doc was never a man to let
sentiment interfere with business, Jackson opined.
Making the doomed man as comfortable as possible in his own canvas
folding bed, Wyndham deferred giving an opiate until he had gained such
information as he could of how things were on the _Cora_. Then, after
communicating (from a safe distance) what he had learned to a delegation
from executive headquarters at Jackson's, he nailed a red _sulu_ to his
front door as a danger signal and disappeared behind the bars of his
self-imposed quarantine.
I may as well state here that Wyndham--thanks, doubtless, to the
precautions which he, as a medical man, would have known how to
take--side-stepped the plague completely, quite as completely, indeed,
as he sidestepped the Thursday Island customs authorities a year or so
later, when a half season's shipment of pearls from Makua Reef, Limited,
disappeared as into thin air.
Of the information Wyndham gleaned from the Agent before giving the
latter a shot of morphine to relieve his agony and mercifully hasten the
inevitable end, the most important as affecting Kai's action was that
something over a hundred blacks had been battened down in the schooner's
forecastle and 'midships hold for seventy-two hours, with nothing but a
couple of stubby wind-sails feeding them air. The dead had all been
cleared out before this was done, but there were a lot of bad cases
among the living who were driven or thrown down the hatches. By the
stench, the Agent knew that some of these had already died; but that
many still had life in their bodies he judged by the unabated vigour of
the howling.
The most reassuring news passed on by the dying man was that Ranga-Ro,
Grogan's gigantic Malay Bo'sun, had remained in charge of the _Cora_,
and that he appeared to have the black crew (only three or four of them,
luckily, had succumbed to the plague so far) well in hand. That
brightened the outlook a good deal, for what Kai had feared above all
else was a general breakout and stampede, which might inundate the
island with plague-infected niggers, crazy beyond all possibility of
control.
Ranga, who claimed to have had at one time or another every tropical
disease on record, was--or believed himself to be--a plague immune. He
was not in the least worried over the responsibilities that had fallen
on him, and could be counted upon, the Agent thought, to see the game
through. The only trouble was that he couldn't navigate, so that if the
_Cora_ was going to be taken to a port where any real relief could be
obtained, she would have to have at least one competent white officer.
Would Kai furnish that officer? was the question up before the meeting
called at Jackson's to decide what should be done with the ill-fated
black-birder.
This was rather a larger assemblage than the one which had gathered at
dawn, called up by the rattle of the _Cora's_ anchor-chain. The latter
was mostly made up of the "inside push," "Jackson's Own," as they were
sometimes alluded to, and that they were a dead game bunch of sports was
attested by the way in which they had volunteered in a body to nurse for
Doc Wyndham. The later and more representative meeting was hardly up to
the earlier one on the score of quality. There were a few out-and-out
rotters on the island, and about the worst of these was a typical
Wooloofooloo larrikin from Sydney, whose name I have forgotten. As foul
of tongue as of face, he was as sneaking and cowardly as a wild Malaite
pup reared in a black-birder's galley. He it was who, with a smirk on
his tattoo-defiled face, got up and suggested that the simplest way out
of the difficulty was to "blow up an' burn the bloomin' 'ooker w'ere she
lies. Cook the bloody niggers to a frizzle, pleg an' all." Give him a
few sticks of dynamite and he'd pull off the bally job himself.
The leering wretch, in his eagerness, pushed right out in front of
gaunt-framed old Jackson, who was "presiding." "Wi'out battin' a
blinker," as he told me later, that old Kalgoorlie outlaw took the
proper and necessary action. His straight-from-the-hip kick doubled the
miscreant up, breathless, speechless, upon the floor--the only floor of
sawed boards in all Kai. He rather favoured that method when he had to
throw a man out, Jackson explained, on account of the convenient parcel
it made of him when lifted by the back of his belt.
When Jackson called the meeting to order again and explained what word
Wyndham had sent as to the lay of things on the _Cora_, "Froggy"
Frontein, one of the escapes from Noumea, his Gallic soul aflame, popped
up and volunteered to sail her to any non-French port in the Pacific.
That brought a cheer for "Froggy," but the enthusiasm died down a bit
when it transpired that the only ships the gallant ex-counterfeiter had
ever boarded in his life were the steamer which deported him from
Marseilles and the cutter in which he--buried under copra in its
hold--had escaped from New Caledonia.
More competent volunteers were not lacking, however, and several of
these were trying to urge their respective claims at once when "Slant"
Allen's magnetic glance drew the eye of the chairman and he was given
the floor.
Calling several of the more insistent of the volunteers by name, "Slant"
asked if it had occurred to them that the nearest port which had
quarantine facilities equal to handling more than a dozen cases of
infectious disease was in Australia--probably Townsville, but possibly
Brisbane. They admitted that they hadn't thought that far ahead.
"In that case," Allen cut in with, "it may be in order for me to point
out that there's not a one of the whole mob of you young hopefuls that
wouldn't be pinched and clapped in the brig just as soon as they saw
your face and recollected what it was you sloped for in the first
place."
That shot made some impression, though "Crimp" Hanley seemed to think he
had countered not uneffectively when he asked: "Who in hell thinks he's
going to last long enough to get her there?"
What "Slant" had got up to say, he went on without deigning to engage
the logical "Crimp" in argument, was that there was one first-class
sailor in Kai against whom nothing was booked in Australia, a man,
moreover, who had been known to be looking for a command for a number of
months. He referred to Captain Bell, who, he regretted to say, had not
been summoned to their meeting. If it was agreeable to those present, he
would be glad to wait upon Captain Bell and acquaint him with the facts
in connection with the emergency which confronted them all. In the event
that Captain Bell should see fit to assert his claim to this place of
honour, as he had no doubt would be the case, he--"Slant"--was in favour
of giving that claim precedence over all others, both because of Captain
Bell's well-known ability as a navigator (his late slip, they would all
admit, was due to circumstances quite beyond his control), and because
he was the only competent man available who would not have to step out
of the frying pan into the fire on making port in Australia. What was
more, in case Captain Bell felt that he needed a mate for a voyage which
could not but be beset with much danger and many difficulties,
he--"Slant"--wished to take the occasion to put in his claim for that
berth. He had been in bad in Sydney, he had to admit, but it was nothing
very serious, and he felt assured that, in a pinch, there were certain
influences which could be counted upon to get him clear. No fear that he
would not be seen in the Islands again in due course.
Considering what "Slant" was really driving at, you'll have to admit
that this was put with consummate adroitness. The meeting voted by
acclamation to allow him to carry out his suggestion, adjourning in the
meantime to await developments. It was significant, in the light of what
transpired later, that Allen flatly refused the offer of Jackson and two
or three others to go along to Bell's with him and "make a delegation of
it."
No suspicion was aroused by the fact that Allen, on the way to Bell's
shack, stopped in at his own for five or ten minutes. Indeed, nothing
that he did at any time awakened anybody's suspicions--among the beach
push, I mean.
When "Slant" came out of Bell's at the end of half an hour, he was
accompanied by the American, the latter apparently leaning heavily on
the Australian's shoulder. This occasioned little surprise, as Bell, who
had hardly been seen for the last three days, was believed to have been
drinking heavily. Instead of returning round the curve of the beach to
report at Jackson's, as it had been assumed he would, "Slant" led the
way to a little dugout canoe lying in the shade of the coco palms in
front of Bell's and started pulling it down to the water's edge. When it
was seen that the slender Australian was doing most of the tugging,
while the big American seemed to be blundering about to small purpose,
it was remarked at Jackson's that Bell, for the first time since he hit
the beach of Kai, appeared to have stowed enough booze to submerge his
"Plimsol" and affect his trim. At the same time it was admitted that the
Yankee was a wonderful "weight-carrier"--nothing like him ever seen in
the Islands. It was thus that they mixed nautical and racing idiom at
Jackson's Sporting Club.
When the little canoe was finally launched, Bell, helped by Allen,
stumbled forward and slithered down in the bow. The Australian plied his
paddle from the stern. It was remarked that the dugout's progress was
very slow, but "Slant's" leisurely paddling was attributed to the care
he had to take on account of the trim Bell's lopsided sprawl gave the
cranky craft.
By the time the canoe slid in alongside the _Cora_, Bell appeared to
have collapsed completely. Lifting carefully by the shoulders, Allen was
seen to raise the inert body in the bow enough for a hulking yellow
giant--easily recognizable as the lusty Ranga-Ro--to throw a mighty arm
around its waist. Then, with his other arm looped round a stanchion, he
swung his burden high above the rail and into the arms of two of the
black crew. Thereafter nothing was seen of the _Cora's_ new skipper for
an hour or more.
"Doosed smart loadin'," was Jackson's laconic comment on the teamwork
Allen and Ranga had displayed in hoisting Bell's husky frame out of a
wobbling canoe and up over the _Cora's_ four feet of freeboard topped by
five strands of "nigger wire."
Allen did not go aboard, but continued to lie alongside for ten or
fifteen minutes, evidently giving extended orders to the Malay bos'n.
Immediately the canoe pushed off, great activity was observable among
the crew, who were evidently rushing preparations for getting under way
before the ebb began to race through the passage.
The rate at which Allen paddled back to the beach was in marked contrast
to his leisurely progress on the way out. Grounding the canoe on the
beach near where it had been launched, he made directly for the door of
Bell's house and bolted inside. Reappearing almost immediately, he came
on along the beach at a more deliberate gait.
At Jackson's he told them that Bell had jumped at the chance of taking
the _Cora_ to Townsville.... Said it might be the means of getting his
master's certificate back in case he pulled it off all right. But
he--"Slant"--couldn't allow a white man to tackle a job like that alone.
He had only landed to pick up his kit and a few things Bell wanted. He
was going to get back aboard the _Cora_ before they began to shorten in.
It was going to be a ticklish job, fetching the passage from where she
lay in those fluky airs.
Leaving Jackson's, Allen went to his own (or rather "Quill"
Partington's) house, where, according to what I heard from Mary Regan a
couple of days later, he took several drinks but did not do anything
toward throwing his things together. A half-hour later he was seen
hurrying along the beach to Bell's again, and when he came out from
there it was in the company of a girl--plainly the "Peacock." Paddled by
a third party, who came upon the scene at this juncture, these two went
off to the schooner, boarding her just as she filled away on the first
tack of the almost dead beat to the entrance of the narrow seaward
passage. For all they knew on the beach, Allen was carrying out his
program (with the little incidental of Rona--doubtless taken along at
the last moment by way of a surprise for Bell--thrown in), just as he
had outlined it to them. They were not hurt by his failure to say
good-bye. They were not strong for the gentler amenities in the Islands,
anyhow.
CHAPTER VI
COMPULSORY VOLUNTEERING
As a matter of fact, however, there had been a very considerable slip-up
in "Slant's" carefully doped slate. That was plain from a number of
little things which sunk into even my absinthe-addled brain in the few
minutes I spent in his and Rona's company while paddling them off to the
_Cora_. How staggering a slip-up it must have been for him I was not
able to figure until I got my nerves under control the following day.
I was still far from pulled together when I came back to the village
after my day of hiding (for that's what it amounted to) on the other
side of the island. With my head twanging like an overstrung banjo, I
was feverishly anxious to get home and seek relief in the only thing I
knew would relax the tension of my breaking nerves. I had told Laku to
"putem littl' fella pickaninny in rock-a-bye belonga him" just as soon
as he got back to the shack. This was a long-standing joke between us,
and I knew that he would interpret aright this _bêche-de-mer_ order to
"put the baby in its cradle" as a strict injunction to lay a certain
long green bottle in a little basket of porous coco husk, which,
dampened and hung in a draught, answered the purpose of a crude
refrigerator. The vision of the slender green trickle I should shortly
pour from the dewy fresh lip of that bottle was drawing me on as the
thought of the oasis with its fountain draws the thirsting desert
traveller.
Between horrors fancied and real--from my struggle at the mouth of the
Bottomless Pit to the coming of the Ship of Death--my nerves had
suffered a number of trying shocks since the dawning of that accursed
day; but the one that came nearest to bowling me over I had still to
receive. I had _known_ there was a Bottomless Pit; I had _known_ there
was a Death Ship; I had _known_ they were shooting niggers on the beach.
As each of these horrors was projected upon my vision in turn I had
accepted their reality as a matter of course. Didn't I see them with my
own eyes? Didn't I continue to see them after I had bitten my finger?
But _Rona, with her arm and her peacock shawl thrown over "Slant"
Allen's shoulder, coming out of Bell's house_.... No, that wouldn't
do.... That was one thing they couldn't put over on me. My eyes must be
playing tricks on my brain. I must be in even worse shape than I
thought. Never before had my fancy conjured up a thing so utterly,
impossibly absurd. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed, I pulled up and started
kicking the shin of one foot with the toe of the other. That was another
little trick I had of proving whether or not I saw what I "saw."
At the clink of the broken coral under my shuffling feet the girl turned
her head in my direction, but, far from releasing "Slant's" neck from
her embrace, she only drew the lanky Australian closer with her right
arm, while with her left she beckoned me imperiously.
"Whitnee, come alonga this side, washy-washy!" Her thin clear voice cut
the air like the swish of a rapier.
It was, strangely enough, the fact that she lapsed into the vulgarest of
_bêche-de-mer_, rather than the eagerness of her gesture, that drove
home to my wandering wits the fact that Rona was confronted with
difficulties, that she needed help. Verging on nervous and physical
collapse as I was (and as I knew I would continue to be until I had
gulped my first steadying draught from the cool green bottle), the
realization that something concrete was demanded brought me instantly
out of the half-trance in which I had walked since dawn. Still a sorry
enough specimen, I was at least sufficiently in hand not to need any
more finger-bitings or shin-kickings to know the difference between what
seemed real and what was really real. Letting my easel go one way and my
paint box the other, I hastened forward in answer to Rona's summons.
"Katchem washy-washy one piecee boat," Rona began as I came up, her
heaving breast, flushed face and flashing eyes revealing the emotion
that held her in its grip.
"Man-man; my word, what name this fella thing you do?" I interrupted
between breaths, blurting mixed _pidgin_ and _bêche-de-mer_ English of a
brand to match the vile blend the girl had discharged at me.
"I too much cross this fella 'Slan','" she started to explain. "Him too
much--"
"You'd think she was cross with me, Whitney, if you could see the way
she's sticking me in the neck with her hat pin," Allen cut in, the
half-sheepish, half-amused grin he had worn from the first broadening as
he spoke.
That was the first "straight" English to be spoken, and the words had
the effect of reminding Rona that she had been speaking nothing but low
jargon from the outset. For weeks she had been taking the greatest pains
to avoid both of the weird volapuks in all her chats with me. Pulling
herself together with an effort, she strove again to be a purist.
"'Scuse me, Whit-nee," she chirruped, paying "Slant" for his sally with
a prod that made him duck like a prize-fighter avoiding a straight-arm
punch; "'scuse me, but I'm veh-ry mad. This bloody boundah he put
_kor-klee_ in Bel-la's drink. He take Bel-la to schoonah. Now we all go
off to schoonah. If Bel-la he dead, then I keel this boundah, 'Slan'.'
You will do us the paddl'?--ple-ese, Whit-nee."
There was a deal more that I would fain have been enlightened about, but
my brain was clear enough now to understand the urgent necessity of
getting off to the _Cora_ without delay. A drugged man (or a poisoned
one--it was not until later that I learned how that strange essence of
the wild Papuan fig might be expected to act) on a plague-infested
black-birder looked like just about the last word in hopelessness; but
(I told myself) if there was anything I could do for my friend, it was
up to me to try to do it. Rona seemed to have some sort of plan in her
head, though just what she was taking Allen along for I didn't quite
twig at the moment.
The funny part of it was that the Australian didn't seem particularly
averse from going off to the schooner. Indeed, it was he who cut in to
call Rona's attention to the fact that they were rushing preparations on
the _Cora_ for getting under way, adding: "If you don't want to be left
at the post I might suggest you whip up a bit." Even as he spoke the
throbbing wail of a chantey came to our ears across the water, and I
could just make out the blur of motion on the forecastle where a knot of
niggers was circling round the capstan.
"Washy-washy! Quick! quick! Whit-nee," implored Rona, leading the way,
with Allen's head still in the crook of her arm, to the canoe; "we must
make the great hur-ee."
Luckily, the dugout, although Allen had left it pulled well up on the
beach when he landed, was half awash through the rising of the tide, now
just about to ebb. I launched it without difficulty. Still with her
knife at "Slant's" neck, Rona made him enter ahead of her and crouch in
the bottom of the canoe, well forward, while she seated herself on the
sinnet-wrapped thwart immediately behind his hunched shoulders. When the
unabashed rascal coolly leaned back and started to make himself
comfortable with an arm thrown over her knee, the girl stiffened with a
start of repulsion. It was more than a prick she gave him this time, for
I saw the sudden swell of his jaw muscles wipe out the lines of his grin
as his teeth set over a repressed oath.
Pushing off, I slid gingerly along the port weatherboard until the canoe
heeled just enough to bring a gaping hole in the starboard bow clear of
the water that started to pour through it, and began to paddle
cautiously inside the outrigger, the only place I could get at from
where I sat. Our progress was, of course, slow as to speed and wobbly as
to direction. Even at that, a good deal of water kept slopping in, and I
couldn't blame Allen, who was sitting in it, for asking Rona if she
minded if he baled a bit with his sun-helmet.
Her only reply was another prod with the needlepointed _kris_. (I knew
it was the little Jolo dagger, for I had seen it as she adjusted her
shawl on sitting down). "Hur-ee, Whit-nee," she urged, quiveringly
tense, and continued to keep her flaming gaze riveted on the schooner,
where the latter, foot by foot, was moving up on her shortening chain.
About halfway out Rona gave a start and a glad little cry. "I see
Bel-la," she laughed. "He stand up by wheel. By jingo, he look--he look
like he lick his weight in wile cats!"
That had been the big Southerner's favourite expression when, glowing
with the reaction from his deep, eye-opening dive from the reef, he
would come prancing back to his door of a morning. The sight of his bare
muscular torso, white as marble against the dingy folds of the
half-hoisted mainsail, must have called up in the girl's mind the
picture of Bell breezing in from his bath, and brought the tersely
quaint phrase to her lips. As a matter of fact, there was no saying at
that distance _how_ Bell looked; but it was good to see him on his feet,
at any rate. Probably Rona had been mistaken about the poisoning.
"I told you he was all right," Allen remarked drily, shifting a few
inches to get clear of the water that was beginning to swish about his
knees. "He was drunk--dead drunk; that's all. He began to buck up an
hour ago. Looked through my glass and saw them dousing him with water.
First thing he did was to take a drink (plenty of it aboard)--saw him
tilt the bottle. Then he must have made them open up the hatches.
There's more than the crew lining the rail there for'ard; besides--you
don't think the slop-chute from the galley spills out the bait that's
drawing those black fins, do you? I won't need to tell you they don't
belong to chambered nautili out for an afternoon sail. There's a
man-eating shark under every one of them. Can I lend you my binoculars?"
He started to slip the strap of the powerful racing glasses over his
neck, but desisted when Rona refused to clear the way by lifting the
point of her dagger. Save for maintaining that one important little
point of contact, she ignored him completely, and "Slant" seemed rather
to resent the latter more than the former.
"Well, if you don't want to use it, I suppose you won't mind if I have a
bit of a look-see," he went on in half-assumed petulance. Rona replied
with the usual prod, but interposed no further objection when he raised
and began focussing the glasses.
"Clubbing niggers on the fo'c'sl'," he commented presently, as signs of
commotion were visible forward. "Skipper don't want 'em too thick on
deck while he's getting under way, most likely."
Then, a minute later: "Looks like you'll need an ice-breaker to clear a
passage through those sharks, Whitney; or perhaps we can walk across
their backs from the edge of the jam. Seem to be thick enough to give
good solid footing."
And again, shortly: "Chain almost straight-up-and-down, Whitney. Mudhook
going to break out in a couple of minutes. Can't accelerate that 'long,
long pull' of yours, can you? Looks as if they weren't planning to wait
for us."
It was a gruesome passage, that last hundred yards. The sharks were
hardly as thick as Allen's picturesque hyperbole might have led one to
believe, but there were undoubtedly more than a score of triangular
dorsals slashing about in swift circles. But the sharks, for the most
part, gave us a good berth. It was the things that _didn't_ get out of
the way that came near to flooring me at the last--black, bloated
bodies, floating face down, like logs awash, till the canoe struck them,
then to roll shudderingly over and sweep you with the sightless gaze of
their wide, staring eyes as you fended with the paddle. Rona, her
flashing glances running back and forth over the schooner (following
Bell, who appeared to be lending a hand now and then on sheet or
halyard), seemed not to see the floating horrors around us. Allen's
steely eyes met the corpses stare for stare, and looked them down. But
upon me the horrors which passed the others by descended with full
force. How I kept going is more than I can guess. But I did it. At last
the loom of the _Cora's_ blistered starboard quarter cut off the seaward
view, and I steadied the dugout in close to the upper line of her
weed-foul copper sheathing.
Apparently no notice whatever had been taken of us up to this time.
Short-handed as he was, Bell was doubtless too busy to keep a lookout,
while to the few niggers watching us through the wire the sight of a
dugout carrying "two fella white marsters and one fella Mary" was of
indifferent interest. All they cared about was getting away from the
Death Ship, and they didn't need to be told that this "pickaninny boat"
hadn't come to help forward their desires in that direction. Besides,
the guard walking up and down behind them with a Lee-Enfield over his
black shoulder had undoubtedly given them to understand that the first
one to start over the side would be shot.
It must have been the guard who reported us finally. Burning with
impatience, Rona was just prodding up Allen and ordering him to clamber
aboard and tell "Mistah Bell" she wanted to speak to him, when I heard
the shout of "'Vast heavin'!" ring out, and presently a familiar tousled
head was poked over the top of the barbed wire. (I should explain,
perhaps, that three or four strands of "nigger wire" are run all the way
round the rail of every labour-recruiting ship. This is done with a
double purpose--to make it difficult for the blacks aboard to bolt,
should the spirit move them, and to serve as a partial protection while
at anchor against the always imminent attacks of the treacherous shore
natives.)
There was a look in Bell's face I had never seen there before. The old
familiar furrows of dissipation showed deep around the mouth, but if he
had been drinking heavily, there was nothing to indicate it. What struck
me at once was his air of determination--I might almost say exaltation.
His head was held high, his shoulders were thrown back, and he might
have been treading the deck of a battle-ship as he swung up to the rail.
Everything about him betokened the man who has taken a great resolve,
and means to see it through if it kills him.
Although I had heard no word of it up to that moment, I understood at
once that Bell had taken command of the schooner, that he was going to
try to sail her to some port where the plague-stricken blacks could be
given medical attention and kept under control. It was like Bell to take
on a job like that, I said to myself; but he would do it as a matter of
course. It would never occur to him that there was any alternative, just
as with an order in the Navy. There must be something more to account
for that air of high resolve.... I couldn't help thinking that, and I
was right. He let out what it was shortly.
"It's right nice of you to come off to say good-bye, honey--and of you,
too, Whitney," Bell called down genially; "but, as we'ah not quite what
you'd call fixed fo' cawlahs, you'd bettah do it from wheah you a'. You,
Mistah Allen, if you have fin'ly made up youah mind in the mattah of
signin' up for the voyage, I reckon we can find accommodation fo' you.
But fust, let me say that if you've got any mo' of that dope you put in
my whisky stowed about youah puson, you'd best scuppah it befo' you
climb abo'd. I doan quite twig what you did it fo', unless it was to
dodge out of goin' yo'self, afta you had promised to help me see the job
through. But now, seein' you've come off of youah own free will, I
reckon I can fo'get that lil' slip, providin' it ain't repeated."
Although Rona could hardly have known the exact meaning of "free will,"
she caught the drift of Bell's remarks readily enough. "This rotten
boundah" (bounder was the worst name she knew to call a man in "pure"
English) "not come himself," the girl cut in shrilly, speaking for the
first time. "I fetch him. See!" and she threw back the folds of the
peacock shawl to reveal the bright wavy blade of her little _kris_
boring into the hollow between Allen's right shoulder-blade and the
corded column of his sinewy neck.
"From the reef I see you an' this fella 'Slan''" (Allen's shoulder
quivered under her designative prod) "go off to schoonah in boat," Rona
went on, avoiding as well as she could in her excitement the jargons she
knew Bell disliked so much. "Bime-by I see 'Slan'' come back--you stop
schoonah. When I go home I smell'em _kor-klee_. You no sabe _kor-klee_,
Bel-la. I sabe him too much long time. I smell _kor-klee_ in one
glass--not in othah. Pu-retty soon this boundah 'Slan'' come house. He
say: 'Bel-la go off in schoonah. Now I stop with you all time!' Then I
sabe what for _kor-klee_ veh-ry queeck. So I katch'em this fella by neck
an' fetch'm off schoonah. I say myself: 'If Bel-la dead, I keel this
boundah; if Bel-la not dead, _he_ keel him.' Heah he is, Bel-la--you fix
him pu-lenty. Then we go home-side."
"So that's what upset the appl'-ca't?" There was nothing of the wrath of
the jealous male in Bell's deep, chesty laugh. "Well, I'm not blamin'
Mistah Allen fo' fallin' in love with you, honey. No propah man could
quite help doin' that, as I see it. Just the same, I can't quite approve
of his way of goin' about it, no' the occasion he took fo' it, eethah.
So you brought him off fo' me to execute, honey. That's right rich.
Youah a brick, you shuah a'. But I won't be killin' him, honey--no,
hahdly that. I'm just goin' to sign him on as Fust Mate of the _Cora
Andrews_, just as he 'lowed he do at the beginnin'. Of co'se I won't be
goin' home with you, honey. Doan you see I'm in command of this heah
ship?"
A sudden shiver shook Rona's tense frame at those last words. Half
rising, she started to speak, but Bell cut her short with lifted hand
and went on himself.
"Mistah Allen," he said, addressing himself now to the huddled figure in
the bottom of the canoe; "I said I was goin' to sign you on an' take you
with me. Let me qualify those wuds just a trifle. I'll pumit you to go
if you'll agree in advance to my tums. I might explain that theah's two
dif'rent views in the mattah of the best way of avoidin' catchin' the
pleg. One is, that you must keep strictly soba--straight teetotal; the
otha--diametrically opposed to the fust--is that you must keep dead
drunk--pif'ucated. Now I reckon that it's goin' to take at least one
white man to sail this hookah all the way to Australyuh; that is to say,
at least one white man must steah cleah of the pleg fo' the entahprise
to be crowned with success. But as theah ain't no suah data as to which
is the safe an' sutin way to 'complish this, I figa theah's nothin' else
to do but sta't with two white men, and let one of 'em try the fust
purscripshun an' the otha the second.
"Now (tho' I must admit it's a bit high-handed on my pa't) I've already
picked the one I'm goin' to take; so, if you elect to sign on, Mistah
Allen, you'll have to take the otha. Theah's a dozen cases of whisky
abo'd--not Jawny Wakah, to be suah, but still fayah to middlin' cawn
jooce--an' I had to toss off a tumblah o' two of it as an antidote fo'
that dream-provokin' dope you wished onto me. But"--Bell's head was up
and his shoulders back again--"_that's the last_." His square jaw
snapped shut on the words like a sprung wolf-trap. Now I understood.
_That_ was his Great Resolve.
Bell paused, and in the waiting silence I became aware for the first
time of the low rumble of groaning from the bowels of the ship.
"So you'll see, Mistah Allen"--the corners of his mouth relaxed into a
smile as Bell resumed--"that since the Skippah's plumped to try the
'soba man' preventative, theah's nothin' left for the Mate to do but to
fight off the pleg by the 'drunk man' method. Theah'll only be two of
us, you see, an' it's theahfo' up to us to hedge ouah bets an' play
safe. But you won't be havin' to go if you ain't hankerin' after it. I'm
not (in spite of what the way you've been 'shanghaied' by--by Miss Rona
might lead you to think) runnin' a press-gang. It's entiahly up to you
as to whethah o' not you want to sail as the drunken Mate of the soba
Skippah of a black-birdah full of pleg-rotten niggahs. You see, Mistah
Allen"--the whimsical grin broadened--"you see I'm not tryin' to luah
you on by paintin' the picture any brightah than it is. 'Drunk Mate of a
soba Skippah'--do you get that?"
Allen made no reply, that is, not directly. Raising his hand to fend the
expected prod from Rona, he wriggled halfway round and started to speak
to me, where, in the stern, I still paddled the canoe gently against the
turning tide and held it close alongside the schooner. For an instant I
was puzzled with the look on the side-face he presented, but almost at
once saw the reason for it. For the first time in my recollection the
thin upper lip was uncurled by its mocking smile. By that, I thought I
could gauge something of the extent of his slip-up. Yet--if I could have
read the man's mind--I would have known that it was something even
deeper than the wreck of personal hopes that had sobered "Slant" Allen.
What it was I learned later.
"Whitney," he began, the words coming huskily from the dryness of his
throat; "I don't dope a man's chances for finishing inside the distance
flag in this little Handicap of Captain Bell's as better than a hundred
to one. That's long odds to be on the short end of when a man's life is
his stake. I don't give a damn about my life. Anyone will tell you that.
I've thrown it into the pool on worse than a hundred-to-one shot a good
many times before this. But--well, I'd rather appreciate it if--if you
could see fit to make a point of not telling my friends on the beach
that--that I had any help in--in volunteering--volunteering to lend
Captain Bell a hand in getting this hooker on her way."
Rona, sensing that her responsibilities, so far as Allen was concerned,
were at an end, raised the _kris_ from his neck and thrust it into the
knot of her _sulu_. The Australian lifted himself lightly to his feet
and looked Bell straight between the eyes. "Lead me to your whisky," he
said in a steadied voice.... "By Gawd, I need it!"
Poising an instant on the middle of a forward thwart of the canoe, he
sprang to the rail, clambered smartly to the top strand of the barbed
wire, and swung lightly down to the deck on the main backstay.
It was at this juncture that I went through the feeble motions of trying
to act the part of a man myself. I pointed out to Bell that I had
knocked about on yachts a good deal, and, while I couldn't claim to be
much of a hand with niggers, was probably as good a navigator as Allen
was. I also said something about three men standing a better chance than
two of pulling off the job, and even added, half jocularly, that I was
about ready to go to Australia anyway, as I had had word that an
exhibition of my pictures was due to open in Sydney in a fortnight. I
only hope my words didn't sound as hollow to Bell as they did to me--for
they were the last ones I was ever to speak to him.
Bell's gentlemanliness--nay, rather, his gentleness--came home to me
more in what he refrained from saying in his reply than in what he said.
He did _not_ say that he had no absinthe aboard, and that, as a
consequence, I would be only more useless and undependable than if he
had. He did _not_ say that his hands would be full enough looking after
crazy niggers without having a crazy white man to keep an eye on. He
even refrained from recalling to my mind a story I had told him of a
French official in New Caledonia whose absinthe supply had run out while
he was at an isolated post, and who, unable to stand the deprivation to
the end of the three-days' run in to Noumea in a trading cutter, had
taken a header over the side almost in sight of port--and relief.
All he _did_ say was: "Nonsense, ol' man.... Quite out of the
question.... Nothin' doin'." Then, as though to soften the curtness of
his refusal: "'Twouldn't be propa, Whitney, to set a man that can slap
colour on canvas like you can to herdin' sick niggas. Besides, I'm
countin' on you to stick 'roun' Kai an' be a sort o' fatha an' motha' to
Rona while I'm gone. Youah the only man on the island I'd ca'ah to trust
with that job."
There was nothing more to be said after that, I told myself; nothing
more to be done. I gave up limply and relapsed into wondering how long
it would take me to paddle Rona ashore and traverse the quarter of a
mile of coral clinkers between the place where she would land and the
long green bottle cooling in its breeze-swept swing beneath my coco leaf
jalousies.
CHAPTER VII
RONA COMES ABOARD
Well, I still think I was right on the score of the futility of further
words. Nothing more that I could have _said_ would have changed the
situation; but was there nothing more that I could have _done_? Rona
answered that question, so far as she herself was concerned, then and
there, though hardly in a way that I had the wit or the will to profit
by.
Bell's answer to the girl's anxious appeal that she be allowed to join
him had been no less brusque and decided than that he had made to mine.
"Sorry, honey. No 'commodations fo' ladies this voyage. You wun't
intended to nu'se niggas, anyhow. Can't be done, honey." Then, to me:
"Time to be shovin' off now, Whitney. Tide's already on the tu'n. Right
sorry to have to hurry you-all this way." Not a word of farewell....
Navy training would not down.
"Bel-la, leesten to me!" There was more threat than entreaty in Rona's
voice now. Beyond doubt, he had never crossed her before. That she was
hurt and angry showed in every line of her tense figure, as she balanced
precariously with her left foot on the outrigger and her right on the
port weatherboard. "Bel-la, by crackee, I say I go with you! If you let
me come on schoona, all good. If you say no, by crackee, I--I sweem! I
sweem afta you. You know I good sweema, Bel-la."
Swim! I knew the girl well enough to know it was not a bluff, and Bell
must have known even better. I had heard him speak many a time of her
absolute lack of fear. Also, although at that moment his imagination was
not quickened (as mine was) by the drunken roll a black cadaver under
the counter gave as a questing nose pushed into it from below, he must
have known what shrift a swimmer would have in those shark-infested
waters.
Bell's mouth twitched at her words (I could just see his head and
shoulders where he conned ship with a foot on the starboard rail and a
hand in the shrouds of the mainmast), but he made no reply. Doubtless he
counted on my doing what I could to fish her out before anything
happened. Sweeping his eye fore and aft, he noted how the turning tide
had swung the schooner so that she headed directly away from the
passage, with the fluky puffs of the freshening trade wind coming over
her port quarter. Then, cautioning the men standing by at the fore and
main sheets to "take in sma't" as she gathered way, he bellowed the
order to "Heave away!"
The ululant surge of the _bêche-de-mer_ anchor chantey floated aft as
the blacks resumed their rhythmic tramp around the capstan.
"_What name you b'longa?
What name you b'longa?
You Mary come catch'm ride.
What name you b'longa?
Come hear my songa--
I take you to Sydney-side._"
I have often wondered if the frank invitation in the swinging lines
might not have been the inspiration of Rona's astonishing action.
The obligato of the incoming chain grinding through the hawse-pipe had
accompanied the chantey for only a stave or two, when Allen's clear,
ringing voice (he had not needed to be told where a mate belonged when a
ship was getting under way) announced from the forecastle: "Anchor
broken out, sir!"
"Walk lively! Get catted 'fore she hits the passage!" Bell roared back,
anxious lest the great length of chain still out would make trouble
where the lagoon shoaled at its seaward entrance. A moment later he came
aft and relieved the man at the wheel, ordering the latter to stand by
to keep the mainsheet from fouling the nigger wire. It was the gigantic
Malay, Ranga-Ro, bulking mightily against the purpling eastern twilight
sky, who responded with a deep-rumbling "Ay, ay, su!" and sprang to the
starboard rail to clear the sagging lines running back from the
unstable-minded main boom. Then the amazing thing befell.
As the schooner gathered way and began gliding ahead under the impulse
of the half-filled mainsail, Rona had crouched as though for a spring at
the towing whaleboat. The painter of the latter, however, made fast on
the port side of the taffrail, brought the yawning double-ender too far
away for anything but a creature with wings to bridge the gap. Seeing it
was impossible to jump to the whaleboat, she straightened up again,
swaying undulantly as the dugout bobbed about in the gently heaving wake
of the schooner.
"Bel-la, I come!" There was more of anger than despair in that
steel-clear cry; more indignation than resignation in the hair-trigger
poise of the reed-slender figure. The instant that she hesitated on the
chance that this final threat might soften Bell's resolve was all that
prevented what at best could not have been other than a nasty mess for
the both of us. There was no possible chance for me to intercept her
before she jumped, and, once in the water, I knew she was quite equal to
upsetting the canoe rather than be dragged back into it. As for help
from the schooner--Bell had determined upon his course, and his eyes,
like his mind, were directed ahead, not astern.
It was Ranga-Ro (deftly fending the slack of the mainsheet from the
nigger wire), not Bell, who turned at the sound of Rona's cry. Whether
or not he had glimpsed her during the previous ten minutes, I am not
sure; but for the girl (whose eyes had been on Bell from first to last),
I was certain that the big Malay had not impinged upon her vision
before. Recognition of his racial characteristics must have been
instantaneous. They were written for even an ethnic novice to read in
the giant's straight black hair, high cheek bones, wide mouth, with its
betel nut-stained teeth, and the light golden yellow skin clothing the
monstrously muscled limbs. The peculiar twist of the loosely-looped
_sarong_ and a wisp of rolled leaf behind an ear would have located him
even more definitely; but to Rona the fact that there was an indubitable
Malay staring into her eyes from the nearest rail of the receding
schooner, made the incidental of his being a Moluccan--a Spice Island
man--of little moment. She was used to handling big golden-yellow
men.... They had proved a deal more manageable than a certain white man
she could mention.
I heard, without understanding, the swift run of her tripplingly-tongued
Malay, and only the sibilant hiss of "_Lekas! Lekas!_" at the end told
me that what she had ordered done was to be done "quickly! quickly!" Her
next order--to me--was no less insistent. "Paddl' catch'n schoona,
Whit-nee! Paddl' lak hell!"
The girl's imperious mood brooked no delay. My work was cut out clear
for me, and, everything considered, I am not at all sure that the yellow
man--on the score of zeal, at least--outdid the white man in carrying
out the orders he had received. Slipping back to the stern to even up
the down-by-the-head trim Rona's presence in the bow gave the cranky
dugout, I plied the stubby paddle with all the strength and skill at my
command. The crazy craft rode higher now with Allen out of it, but even
so the speed with which I drove it threw a wave inches above the hole in
the crumbling bow. The up-curling water poured through in a steady
stream. My race, I saw, was against that rising flood in the bottom of
the canoe quite as much as against the schooner.
There were only eight or ten yards to make up on the still slowly moving
_Cora_, and, barring swamping or a collision with a shark or a floating
nigger, I felt that I could do it easily. But what to do when we had
caught her up? Ah, there was where the yellow man was to come in. Ranga
was just as busily carrying out his orders as was I. "Clear away the
nigger wire and stand by to pick me up," had plainly been the drift of
that swift stream of Malay Rona had directed at him. Superbly disdainful
of the sharp barbs that were slashing his bare palms to ribbons, he
forced the whole savage entanglement down to the deck with no more
apparent effort than a child would have used in collapsing a
string-strung "cat's-cradle." Rove through steel stanchions set at close
intervals along the rail, the wire could not be torn entirely clear. So
the direct and simple-minded Ranga did the next best thing--gave a
mighty heave and brought three or four of the nearest stanchions down to
the deck in the tangle of wire they had supported.
An order from Bell at this juncture would probably have stopped this
wholesale destruction of his protective entanglement; or perhaps I
should say _possibly_ rather than probably. One cannot be sure just how
strong a force Rona had lashed into action. It has since occurred to me
that the man must have been gripped with something very closely akin to
the madness of _amok_ to handle that wire with his naked hands as he
did. It may be that the only one from whom he would have brooked
interference was the one who had fired that savage train of
energy--Rona. These points were not to be put to the test, however. From
first to last Bell--although, from the wrecking of the wire almost under
his very eyes, he must have known what was going on--never looked back.
What with the settling of the half-swamped canoe and the accelerating
speed of the schooner, it was touch-and-go at the end. I had gained by
feet at first; then by inches; and finally, with but a couple of yards
more needed to bring the bow up even with the schooner's counter, I
realized that I was no better than holding my own. It was the last ounce
of reserve in my aching frame that I called upon for that final spurt.
Rona must have sensed that I was going my limit, for she said no word
... only crouched, tense as a waiting wild-cat, for the moment of her
spring.
For the first few seconds the gap closed quickly as the canoe gathered
increased headway from the impulse of my wildly driven paddle; then more
slowly and more slowly, until, again, I was no better than holding even.
Another foot, and the jump would be safe. Bending low to make the most
of my expiring strength, my eyes wandered from the goal for an instant.
It was a shuddering gasp of consternation from the bow that brought them
back again. The swooning mainsail, filled by the freshening puffs, was
beginning to make its pull felt in earnest. The gap had widened. Instead
of gaining a foot I had lost two. That dished me completely. "No good,
Rona--I'm--all in," I groaned, and slid limply down into the bottom of
the canoe, where the water now lapped level with the thwarts.
Half fainting though I was, the picture of that super-simian spring of
Rona's is indelibly etched upon my memory. Save for that one quick gasp,
she made no sound. The jump was an impossible one ... sheerly
impossible. And yet-- Only a swift gathering of muscles--very like the
final quivering hunch of an ape that leaps from tree to tree--heralded
action. Then, with a back-kick that forced the already half-submerged
bow right under, she flashed up to her full height and launched her body
into the air.
It was a good jump,--a wonderful one, indeed, considering the unstable
take-off--but of course she missed the rail--and by feet. That didn't
surprise me.... I had seen it was inevitable. But what I had _not_
reckoned upon was the astonishing length of Ranga's mighty left arm.
Standing by with a bight of the mainsheet gripped in his right hand to
keep from overbalancing, he had sprung to the top of the rail as Rona
jumped, leaning out at all of an angle of forty-five degrees, probably
more. It was into the solidly pliant muscles of his great corded left
wrist, extended to the full reach of the arm, that Rona clawed with the
last half inch of her out-stretched fingers--clawed and _held_. I say
_clawed into_, not clutched or seized. The girl's hold on Ranga's wrist
was not that of an acrobat grabbing over the bar for which he has jumped
(her leap was short by an inch at least of giving her a chance to do
that), but rather that of a flung cat clawing into the limb or the trunk
of a tree. With less strength of fingers or length of nails her hands
would merely have brushed the outstretched arm and missed a hold.
Under the impact of that flying hundred and twenty pounds (in spite of
her slenderness, Rona must have weighed quite that) of bone and muscle,
striking, as it did, just where the greatest leverage would be exerted,
Ranga was all but swung round and thrown from his footing. The
hastily-seized mainsheet was hardly a scientifically-run guy for the
leaning tower of his stressed frame, nor did the wreck of the barbed
wire entanglement writhing over the rail offer the solidest of
foundations. Back and forth he swayed, like the half unstepped mast of a
grounded sloop; then steadied, quiveringly, up to his original tense
slant.
The acrobatic miracle wrought by Ranga in swinging Rona's precariously
hanging form inboard was the most perfect feat of strength and balance I
ever saw, or ever expect to see. It looked as sheerly impossible as the
jump had looked--and was accomplished scarcely less quickly. The drawing
up of the extended left arm (what a marvellous rippling and bunching of
golden muscles that was!) brought the girl's pendant form close in
against the corrugated bulge of the giant's chest, reducing the terrific
leverage by a good half. A similar doubling up of the right, with a
sudden tug on the mainsheet at the end of it, did the rest. For an
instant the great rangy rack of corded muscles balanced erect in the
midst of the wire-tangle festooned over the rail; then jumped lightly
down beyond and deposited its burden on the deck.
Hardly ten seconds could have elapsed from the instant of Rona's jump to
the one in which Ranga plumped her down beside Bell at the wheel. The
gap between the canoe and the schooner had widened to hardly twenty
yards. I could see both the Malay and the girl quite distinctly as, with
the latter still looped in the crook of his fingernail-torn left arm, he
poised for a moment on the rail. Neither appeared to have turned a hair.
Neither seemed in the least flustered ... might have been in the habit
of doing that sort of thing every day for all the excitement they showed
about it.
The first thing Ranga did, as the dropped mainsheet gave him a free
hand, was to reach to the knot of his _sarong_ and satisfy himself that
the little bamboo flute tucked in there had ridden out the storm. And
Rona--her first move was to gather up and stow an amber-streaming corner
of the peacock shawl, which was threatening to catch in an uprearing
strand of the nigger wire. Those two funny little incidentals complete
my recollections of that breathless quarter-minute. Whether Rona, or
Bell, or anyone else on the schooner waved good-bye in my direction I do
not recall. Ranga was taking in the slack of the mainsheet when I looked
again, and Bell, peering up at the flapping headsails, was grinding away
at the wheel. Two or three shots rang out following a commotion
forward--probably fired to check a fresh up-surge of the blacks from
below.
As Bell brought her round in a wide circle, the _Cora's_ sails were
flattened in and she began to beat up toward the entrance of the passage
in a series of short tacks. As she headed in past the quay, I heard a
burst of cheers roll up from a knot of humanity blurring the beach in
front of Jackson's. It was just a big, full-throated general whoop, that
first one, but it was quickly followed by a number of other volleys of
"huroars" that seemed to carry suggestions of control and leadership.
The last of these was a hearty "three-times-three," topped off with a
"tiger." "Cheering the parting heroes by name," I muttered to myself,
and wondered who that last rousing "tiger" was meant to speed. I was
still speculating when the sharp whish of a heeling dorsal, as a
sheering shark avoided the submerged outrigger by a hair, awakened me to
a rude realization of the fact that the swift tropic night had all but
fallen and that I was drifting out with the tide in a holed and barely
floating dugout.
Of all the ebbings of the tide of courage that my sorrily spent life had
known, and had still to know, those next few minutes--with the _Cora_
dissolving into the swimming dusk as she beat out through the passage,
the weirdly green wakes of the sharks lacing the oily-black water with
welts of phosphorescence as they assembled for their ghastly banquet,
and my swamped canoe teetering in balance between positive and negative
buoyancy--registered low-water mark. I have never heard of a despairing
absinthe slave trying to break his bonds at the end of the day. It is
invariably at the end of the night that he makes his break for
liberty--at the beginning of the day he has not the courage to face. But
it was the shame of the yellow in me, rather than the green, that held
empire now. Rona had brooked no refusal of her demand to be taken on the
_Cora_. Why had I? She had been ready to swim for it. Why should not I?
Surely the sea, better than anything else, would wash that yellow stain
from my honour and leave it white at the last. I didn't even have to
screw my nerve up to the point of jumping over. Listing heavily to
starboard as the half-capsized dugout was, one little inch edged to the
right, and not even the leverage of the outrigger could keep it from
overturning. Just the inclination of my shoulders would do the trick....
I would not even have to take the initiative to the extent of edging
along. Surely--
With a quick gasp, I slid sharply to one side--but it was to the
left--the outrigger side. The great starshaped welter of green
luminescence, where a half-dozen wallowing man-eaters nuzzled into a
bobbing witch-fire-streaked shape of unreflecting opacity, proved too
much for my last unbroken filament of nerve--all that I needed to make
my honour white. I had always dreaded sharks, and it was my horror of
them now that checked the worthiest impulse that had stirred me that
day. The momentarily eclipsed image of the cooling green bottle took
shape again before my eyes, and, after that, there was nothing to do but
make the best fight I could to reach it.
Proceeding with infinite caution to avoid the upset which I now feared
above everything in the world, I crawled forward along the outrigger
side and stopped the hole in the bow with my folded drill jacket, as a
necessary preliminary to beginning to bail out with my waterproof
sun-helmet. But before I turned to on what could have hardly proved
other than a hopeless task, the sound of oars and voices reached my
ears, and presently the bow of a hard-pulled whaleboat came pushing up
out of the darkness. It was old Jackson whose strong arm reached out and
dragged me in over the gunwale. When they got back their breaths lost in
cheering the departing schooner, he explained, after depositing my limp
form in the stern sheets, Doc Wyndham bawled over to them from
"Quarantine" that some cove had been left behind in a foundered canoe.
Jackson himself reckoned that the Doc was beginning to go off his nut
and see things; but as several of the others seemed to have hazy
recollections of something of the same kind, it was thought best to put
off and investigate.
"'Ow'd you 'appen to miss c'nections?" Jackson asked sympathetically. "I
spotted you paddlin' the canoe off, an' we was so sure the Skipper 'ad
signed you on that we give a speshul w'oop in your 'onour. 'W'at's the
matter wiv W'itney?' I bellered ('member the night you learned us that
one?--time the looted fizz from the _Levuka_ was on tap); an' the boys
cum back wiv: ''E's all right!--you bet!--Ev'ry time!'"
"That wasn't the big 'three-times-three' at the end, was it, Jack?" I
asked, my face burning with shame at the thought.
"Well, no; 'ardly that un," was the half-apologetic reply. "That
ripsnorter was in 'onour uv 'Slant' Allen. Long time pal uv all uv us,
'e is. Slash-bangin' finisher, li'l ol' 'Slant.'... Trust 'im allus to
be on 'and w'en they're liftin' 'ell's 'atches."
I knew then that I wasn't going to be tumbling over myself to tell
"Slant's" friends on the beach that his volunteering to go with the
_Cora_ had been just a shade less voluntary than they reckoned. _He_ had
not pulled up dead at his first hurdle as I had, anyhow. No, until I
knew more of what had transpired earlier in the day, I was not going to
give the man away; and not to his old friends in any case. I would do at
least that much homage to his nerve.
Seeing how dead beat I was, Jackson waved back the crowd at the quay and
headed me straight for home. He knew what I needed, and I was as
grateful for the bluff old outlaw's unspoken sympathy as I was for the
help of his sustaining arm. With rare delicacy, he avoided being a
witness to my assault on the green bottle by leaving me at the door.
Like all the rest of those rough, red-blooded roysterers of Kai, Jackson
felt that habitual absinthe drinking was degenerate, almost immoral....
All right for a "Froggy," of course, but not for a proper white man....
A thing that a real self-respecting beach-comber would never allow
himself to be guilty of. The fact (which could not be concealed for
long) that I was known to be addicted to the habit had taken even more
living down than my painting, especially when they learned I was
straight Yankee and not a "_We-we_."
I drank hungrily at first--gulping glass after glass of the cool green
liquid,--but stopped just as soon as I found my nerves were steadied and
before the first stage of "elevation" was entered upon. (A seasoned
drinker takes some time to reach the latter.) Unspeakably tired
physically, I dropped off to sleep almost as soon as the absinthe
relaxed the tension on my nerves. My rest was dreamless and
untroubled--or comparatively so.
CHAPTER VIII
I LEAVE THE ISLAND
Rolling out of bed at the end of twelve straight hours of sleep, I found
the Trades blowing fresh and strong again, and the air--after the
soddenness of the past week--almost bracing. A plunge from the reef and
a piping hot breakfast of fried clams and duck eggs--my first solid food
in over thirty-six hours--bucked me up astonishingly. For almost the
first time since I came to the island, I was out before ten o'clock--and
well in hand, too. I had to be.... There was much that it was up to me
to learn--and perhaps to act upon.
That which I most desired to get some line upon was what Allen had been
driving at in drugging Bell, or even, possibly, trying to poison him.
What was _kor-klee_? (of which Rona appeared to be so terrified), and
how did it act? were questions which I wanted especially to find the
answers to. Was it a drug with a delayed action, following a preliminary
stupefaction of comparative mildness? If so--no, there was nothing that
could be done for Bell in that case; but, as a friend of his, I might do
what I could to square the account later on. There was no lack of
confidence _that_ morning. The reaction (which had eluded me completely
the day before) was strong upon me, and I felt quite equal to any
situation that might arise. I still blushed with shame at the thought of
the contemptible figure I had cut from dawn to darkness of the day
previous, but I was ready to make such atonement as was humanly
possible. It was merely one of my "high" moods coming three or four
hours ahead of time. I could have slung my colours with telling effect
that morning, if there had been a chance for me to get at canvas.
From one and another at Jackson's I gathered a fairly connected account
of what had happened during the hours I was away on the leeward side of
the island. The salient incidents of this I have already set down. None
of them knew much of anything about _kor-klee_, but all agreed that Doc
Wyndham would be sure to be an authority upon it. I dropped the subject
for the moment, as I did not care to be pressed for an explanation of
why I sought the information. The next day I slipped quietly over and
had a long-distance interview with the learned Wyndham.
The Doc had buried the _Cora's_ recruiting agent the night the schooner
sailed, doing everything except the digging of the grave with his own
hands. He had then returned home and shut himself in for his ten days of
solitary quarantine. Solitary is hardly the word, though. Wyndham was
far from being alone. Unlike Bell, he was a "spree drinker" rather than
a speedy tippler. It was his habit (as he put it himself) to accumulate
aridity during five or six months of the most rigorous teetotalism, and
then blow up the dam and make the desert blossom like the rose under the
stimulus of a generous flood. The breaking up of the Monsoon and the
culmination of Doc Wyndham's biennial sprees were bracketed together in
the Islands' list of seasonal disturbances.
The desert was hardly due for its wetting at this time, but Wyndham,
shaken by his unsuccessful fight to save the Agent's life, was loath to
face the ordeal of the confinement ahead of him without company. So (as
he explained after he had halted me a dozen paces from his door with a
revolver flourished from the window) he called in the only dead sure
plague-immune he knew--his old friend John Barleycorn--and raised the
floodgates. The last thing he had impressed upon his brain before
putting Barleycorn in charge was that he must rigidly confine his desert
reclamation project to his own wastes. On no account was he to leave his
own house, and, on no account, was anyone to be allowed to enter it.
"Strict quarantine's the word," he had repeated to himself many times
before he started drinking, and "Strict quarantine's the word" was the
greeting--and the warning--I heard when I stepped into the shadow of the
big breadfruit tree in front of his door.
Solemn as an owl, Wyndham had been catching purple shrimps (or something
of the kind) with a butterfly net and putting them under his microscope
for examination. The big brass instrument was set upon a table pulled up
to the window, while the shrimps were being harvested from the bosky
depths of a patch of elephant-eared taro just outside. It was his
favourite hunting and fishing preserve, that taro patch, the Doc had
confided to me once, and the rarity and variety of the specimens
captured there were rather remarkable. I don't remember many of them,
but a sea-cow and a sabre-tooth tiger were among the commonest he had
made slides of. Everything went under the microscope, of course. His
captures were small in size during the first few days, starting with
mere animalculae, but bulked steadily bigger as the desert blossomed to
a jungle. It required a microscope with a great latitude of adjustment
to handle such a wide range of subjects--but his was a most excellent
instrument ... most excellent. Thus the Doc.
Pretending to ignore my approach completely, Wyndham continued squinting
through the eye-piece of his microscope until I crunched over the
dead-line he had established. Then he flourished the revolver, barked
out his quarantine formula, and asked what I wanted. "When I replied
that I had come to inquire respecting the effects of a drug called
_kor-klee_, his manner changed instantly. By some queer psychological
process quite beyond me to fathom, he started at once speaking French,
or rather what he thought was French. It was a weird jargon he had
picked up in the Marquesas, where he had spent a year in research work
when he first came to the Islands, and where (it was said) only his
passion for collecting pearls--other people's--had prevented his winning
to international fame for his all-but-successful efforts to isolate the
bacteria responsible for the dread _fe-fe_ or _elephantiasis_.
"_Kor-klee--mais oui, mon ami. Je comprend him fella kor-klee too much.
Parfaitement. C'est la liqueur essential de la ficus--ficus--nom d'un
chien--ficus what-dyucalum. C'est la aphrodisique le plus exquite, le
plus fort, en tout le monde. Prenez vous comme ca--whouf!_"--and he made
a great pretence of inhaling the contents of his shrimp net to show how
the drug was administered for that particular purpose.
"_Encore--quand--quand eat'm like kai-kai!_" he floundered on learnedly;
"_quand eat'm kor-klee il fait--mak'm mort--dead--tres vite_."
Here he interrupted himself to ask for which purpose it was I intended
to use the stuff.
"Neither," I denied stoutly. "I was merely asking out of curiosity."
"_Parle that talkee a la marines_," he scoffed. "_Le meme chose talkee
parle_ 'Slant' Allen. _Je voudrais connoce ou--ou in hell you fella
catch'm kor-klee._ I'd like to get my fist on some of the blooming
elixir myself," he trailed off into English.
Save for that one lapse, Wyndham, in spite of my reiterated appeals
that he speak straight English, rattled on in his impossible
Franco-_bêche-de-mer_ from first to last. That which I have tried to
render does it scant justice. Most of it was quite unintelligible. At
the end of a rather trying half-hour (though it would have been amusing
enough had I been less anxious for information that might throw light on
the mystery I had set myself to unravel), about all that I had been able
to gather was that _kor-klee_ was the name given in the Dutch Indies to
several preparations made from the latex of the wild fig of New Guinea.
A crude infusion of it was employed by the Papuans in stupefying fish in
their rivers. More elaborated extracts were distilled for their narcotic
and other properties. One of these, vapourized and inhaled, was much
prized by the Rajahs of Malaysia as a quickener of the languid pulse, a
restorer of youth. Another--the most powerful extract of all--was a
deadly poison--very neat and incisive in its action.
I also understood Wyndham to say that the use of the drug in any form
acted as a great exciter of the cravings for alcohol and narcotics on
the part of those addicted to these habits. "If that's the case," I said
to myself as I turned home, "God pity poor old Bell's teetotal
resolutions! It would have been hard enough without anything further in
the way of a 'thust aggravata.' I'm afraid he'll be having to exchange
rôles with 'Slant' after all--to let the latter be the 'soba Mate of a
drunken Skippa.'" Now that I had a chance to think about it, I didn't
have any great faith in Bell's ability to refrain from drink for any
length of time--certainly for not more than a day or two at the outside.
He'd probably see the thing through, I admitted, but not as a "soba
Skippa."
Turning over all I had picked up at the end of a couple of days, I felt
that I could come pretty near to reconstructing in my mind those scenes
of the drama of which there had been no witnesses save the actors
themselves. Allen's infatuation for the girl had undoubtedly got the
better of him the instant the turn of events suggested a plan which
promised to give him undisputed possession of her. To this end he had
plotted to get Bell off on a voyage from which there was no more than a
negligible chance of his ever returning, while he himself remained
behind to enjoy the spoils.
Considering that Allen's plan was evolved upon little more than a
moment's notice, there could be no question that it was laid with
consummate cleverness and carried out without a hitch--save, of course,
for that final fatal slip-up which undid all the rest. To make sure of
Bell and disarm his suspicions, Allen had assured the American that he
himself would also go on the _Cora_. That he had tried to poison Bell, I
had my doubts. I had not learned enough of how the drug acted to make my
speculations on that point of much use. At any rate, with Bell
unconscious on the schooner, it had clearly been the Australian's plan
to return to the beach and remain there until she sailed, at the turn of
the tide. That the _Cora_ should get under way at that time had already
been arranged between the unsuspecting Ranga and himself. The pretence
that he had missed the schooner while engaged in getting his own and
Bell's kits together would save his face with his friends on the beach.
This latter consideration, it appears, was something the rascal never
lost sight of. In the improbable event that Bell ever returned--but that
bridge need not be crossed until it was in sight.
Allen's cropper at the last jump was directly due to his cool assumption
(natural enough, considering his success with South Sea ladies
generally) that the girl, once Bell was out of the way, would fall into
his lap like a ripe mango. That, and his long-curbed passion for her,
led him to rush in search of Rona the moment he landed from his first
visit to the schooner, and, missing her then, to return before the
_Cora_ had got her anchor up. The consequences of his finding her in on
this latter occasion I had seen something of myself. How that slip of a
girl got the drop on the most notorious bad man in the Islands I could
only conjecture. Probably, with Allen, it was the old story--prudence
going out of one door as passion entered at the other. I didn't reckon
that Rona had ever read the story of Delilah; yet I felt pretty
confident that the point of that little Joloano _kris_ had found its way
to the pulse of "Slant's" jugular some time after the girl's arm had
gone round his neck in what he thought--for a second or two at
least--was a warm embrace. Rona's uncanny faculty for getting away with
everything she went after--from having her peacock shawl dry-cleaned to
boarding a schooner which was all of "two jumps" beyond her reach--had
greatly impressed me. And well it might have....
Even allowing that Allen had not tried to poison Bell outright, the fact
remained that he had played the worst kind of a low-down trick on the
American in treacherously attempting to railroad the latter out of the
way and deprive the girl of his protection. That much was plain, and it
was dead against the shifty Australian. In "Slant's" favour was the game
manner in which he had stood the gaff at the last, when Bell left the
way wide open for him to return ashore without even going over the side
of the plague-infested schooner. He had not hesitated an instant in
staking his life in what he had very fairly characterized as the short
end of a hundred-to-one shot. There must be redeeming qualities in a man
who could do that, no matter how shot through with infamy his past
record had been. It occurred to me as just possible that Bell's
magnanimity had struck a responsive chord in Allen's sense of
sportsmanship--that the latter was going to play whatever remained of
that grim game on the square. If the _Cora_ was lost, or if Allen and
Bell and the girl all died of the plague (one or both of which
contingencies seemed practically inevitable), the whole slate would be
wiped clean anyhow. If not--if the _Cora_ won through with any of those
three surviving--some hint of what had transpired on the voyage would
certainly be obtainable at Townsville, or whatever port the schooner
succeeded in making. In any event, I told myself, it was up to me to get
on to Australia at the earliest possible moment.
The fact that my Exhibition would be sure to have opened in Sydney by
the time I reached Australia, really had nothing to do with my decision.
In spite of the bluff I had tried to put over on Bell, I had had no
intention of leaving Kai for a number of months to come. Nor, even after
I began getting ready to go, did I attempt to ignore the fact that there
might be duties for me to carry out in Townsville, the performance of
which would be more likely than not to interfere seriously with my
freedom of action for a good deal longer than the art world of Sydney
would be inclined to pay homage to my marines.
No, my coming show had nothing to do with my resolve to hurry south,
although, naturally, I fully intended to take it in if things shaped so
as to make it possible. Since my daubs had been making good with the
connoisseurs of Kai--men who knew at first hand the things I was trying
to paint,--I had little fear that the more sophisticated critics of
civilization would not fall for them. I hadn't any worry on that score.
I knew I had been doing good work. But--well, an artist who isn't
interested in the way his work will react on his fellow-beings is
lacking in a very important stimulus to success.
Kai manifested its usual sympathetic interest in my preparations for
departure, but, with characteristic delicacy, asked no questions. Well
off the steamer routes, and with only the most infrequent comings and
goings of pearling and trading craft, the problem of reaching Australia
with any dispatch seemed, at first, a hopeless one. For a while it
looked like the best I could do would be to accept "Slim" Patton's
kindly offer to run me over in his pearling sloop to Thursday Island,
where I could count on getting a south-bound China-Australia liner
inside of a fortnight. As Patton was known to be in bad for several
little things at Thursday Island, his offer did more credit to his heart
than to his head, and I was a good deal relieved when Jackson figured
out a plan that promised to make it possible for me to reach my goal by
another route. After thumbing a greasy sheet of Burns, Phillip sailings
for the best part of an afternoon, the old outlaw suddenly announced he
had found reason to believe that, with luck, a cutter getting away from
Kai that night could intercept the Solomon-Australia packet at Samarai,
off the easternmost tip of New Guinea. To be sure that the thing was
done properly, he would take one of his own cutters and sail her
himself. As my impedimenta consisted of little beyond a few changes of
drills and ducks, my painting kit, and a case of absinthe, and as
Jackson used neither paint nor absinthe and wore a flowered _sulu_ in
place of ducks and drills, we had little difficulty in getting away on
schedule.
Jackson's carefully tabulated calculations--you can do that kind of
thing in those latitudes when the southeast Trades are blowing steady
and you know your boat--were only wrong by an hour. That is to say, we
would have missed the _Utupua_ by something like that had we pushed
right in to Samarai. Old "Jack," however, sighting a bituminous smear
trailing off above the tufted tops of the coco palms that line the inner
passage, promptly shook out all his reefs, hauled up four or five
points, and headed away on a course calculated to converge with that of
the outgoing steamer a couple of miles to seaward. It was only after an
abrupt greening of the tourmaline depths of the passage we had been
threading suggested a sudden shoaling that it occurred to him to unroll
and study his chart.
"Five 'undred fathom--three 'undred fifty fathom," he read laboriously
as his tarry forefinger cruised along the tiny rows of dots and figures
indicating soundings. "Three 'undred fathom--two 'undred fifty
fathom--_one_ bloody fathom! By Gawd, W'itney, we're 'igh an' dry
already! This bally chart says they's only one fathom uv water on this
kerblasted coral patch, an' the cutter draws two feet mor'n that."
But he never luffed her, never altered her course a fraction of a point.
"More she 'eels the less she draws," he muttered philosophically,
sitting down on the weather rail of the cockpit and starting to whittle
at the end of a stick of tobacco with his clasp-knife. "Save a lot of
wig-waggin' if we do pile up," he continued presently, rolling the
shaved-off blackjack between his palms. "Ol' 'Choppy' Tancred never giv'
the go-by to even a nigger dugout he could len' a han' to." Then he
lighted his pipe, whoofed two or three whirling jets of blue smoke to
leeward as he brought it to a proper draw, and settled comfortably back
in puffing contentment. Ten minutes later he unrolled the chart again,
produced a greasy stub of pencil from the band of his _koui_-leaf hat,
and wrote with great care the letters "P.D." across the dotted expanse
where curving lines of figure "1s," like the graphic representation of
telegraph lines on a bird's-eye map, indicated six feet of water where
the eight-feet-draught cutter had just crossed without a bump.
"As I figger it," Jackson observed drily, rolling up the chart and
tossing it down the companionway as a thing whose usefulness was
ended,--"as I figger it, a bloke's only manifestin' proper conserv'tism
w'en 'e marks as 'Position Doubtful' a reef that ain't tangibl' enuf to
stop 'im w'en 'e 'its it." Then, presently, between puffs, as he
stretched himself and sidled along to take the wheel as the cutter began
to close the slowing steamer: "Wonder 'oo the bally cove'll be 'oo bumps
a mis-charted reef w'en 'e thinks 'e's got four 'undred fathom uv brine
'tween his keel an' the bottom uv the Pacific." The notorious inaccuracy
of the South Sea charts is a continual source of amusement or
wrath--according to whether a misplaced shoal or passage has spelt
comedy or tragedy to him--for the man who sails their reef-beset waters.
It was Captain Tancred himself who came tumbling down from the
_Utupua's_ bridge to greet me as I clambered up the Jacob's ladder
thrown over from the forecastle head. Hearing of him often before, this
was the first time I ever set eyes on one of the best-loved characters
in the South Pacific. He was a red-faced, blue-eyed, sandy-haired Scot,
with a heart as big as his fist, and as soft as his voice was rough.
Square himself as his own broad shoulders, and strictly law-abiding
personally, he was credited with an amiable weakness for befriending
every man who had run afoul of the statutes. I had heard them yarn by
the hour at Kai of the way he had smuggled this one out of Australia,
and that one into New Guinea; of how he had all but bumped South Head
while standing-off-and-on in a "Southerly Buster" one night, on the off
chance of picking up a jail-breaker, whose only claim upon Tancred had
been that the latter had once before performed a similar service for the
reprobate when he had forced his way out of the jug in Suva. Several of
the push at Jackson's claimed actually to owe their lives to the bluff
old Scot; many of them their liberty. "Choppy" Tancred--so called from
his sun-washed red-brown mutton-chop side whiskers--was the nearest
thing to a patron saint Kai ever had--that is, until the Rev. Horatio
Loveworth hove up on their skyline some years later and converted the
lot of them (just about) with the knuckles of his brawny fists.
The last thing Jackson had said, as he steadied the ladder for me to
swarm up the _Utupua's_ side, was to the effect that I ought to consider
myself dead lucky to be stacking up with "Choppy" Tancred; "or,
leastways," he qualified, "you would be if you was in any kind uv a mess
'e could fish you out uv."
"Don't give up hope, Jack," I chaffed back, clawing round a projecting
ventilator; "I may land in a mess yet."
"Then don't be forgettin' ther'll allus be a refooge for the errin' on
the banks an' brays uv Kai Lagoon," he sang back, taking in the
mainsheet as the cutter came up to the wind; "an' that 'Choppy'
Tancred'll be the cove to give you a first leg-up on the way back
there."
Except for his very evident disappointment over the fact that I
disclaimed any need of his help in getting ashore in Australia, Captain
Tancred seemed not in the least put out over being stopped and boarded
so high-handedly. He had carried many queer birds in his time, so that a
man eccentric enough to take a case of drinkables with him on the
_return_ trip from the Islands didn't worry him as much as it might have
some others. He was also kindly charitable about my "exclusiveness" of
evenings (when all normal beings expand and grow sociable at sea), and
even good-naturedly tolerant of my weakness for having breakfast in my
cabin. I made it up to him to the best of my ability in my "quickened"
hours of the afternoon, and we became good friends.... Really good
friends. I felt that I could count upon him in a pinch.
The grounding of the company's Port Moresby steamer somewhere along the
Barrier Reef was responsible for the fact that the _Utupua_, this
voyage, had been ordered to pick up freight at both Cooktown and Cairns,
instead of proceeding direct to Townsville on her regular schedule. This
set her back two days, and brought us into the offing at Townsville
twenty-four hours after--instead of twenty-four hours before--a
sun-blistered, foul-smelling labour-recruiting schooner, with a dead
Captain and a score or more of dying niggers, was brought to anchor off
the Quarantine Station by the Mate, who, immediately the hook was let
go, collapsed on the deck and went to sleep. The empty hulk of the _Cora
Andrews_, swinging lazily to the turning tide, was one of the first
things to catch my eye as the _Utupua_ steamed in and tied up to her
buoy.
CHAPTER IX
A GRIM TALE OF THE SEA
I have often tried to figure just what effect on the succeeding train of
events my earlier arrival in Townsville might have had. I have never
come to any very definite conclusions in that connection. There were two
or three things that were pretty well bound to happen, and if they
hadn't come about one way, there is little doubt that they would have
done so in another. Had I been there when the _Cora_ arrived, it is
probable that I would have learned definitely at once (instead of
somewhat tardily) that Bell had _not_ died of the plague. Certainly, on
learning that fact, my impulse would have been to try to force Allen to
an immediate showdown--to insist on his proving that the dope he had put
in the American's whisky at Kai had not been the direct cause of the
latter's death. Such a showdown would have been impossible to bring
about at the time, however: for one reason, because Allen had been put
into quarantine immediately, and, for another, because, completely
played out by thirty-six hours at the wheel without relief, he had sunk
into a sleep from which he had not rallied for over two days. Similar
considerations would have prevented my seeing Rona. Besides being in
quarantine she was in a state of raving delirium, which would have made
it impossible for her to convey coherent information. Even Ranga,
unaffected in mind and body though he was, I would hardly have been
permitted to talk with when he landed, any more than I was two days
later. No, everything considered, I fail to see where my earlier arrival
would have made much difference in what happened. It must have been
slated anyhow, I think--just bound to come off however the incidentals
shaped.
Still askance at what he rated as my temerity in making an open landing
in Townsville, Captain Tancred had somewhat reluctantly granted my
request for a boat to take me ashore as soon as the quarantine officials
were through with the ship. I couldn't, of course, go off in the
quarantine launch, but one of the doctors lingered a few minutes to tell
me what he knew of the _Cora_. Although her captain had died twenty-four
hours before the schooner anchored, his remains had not been buried at
sea. This, it appeared, had been largely due to the protests of some
sort of a Kanaka girl the Skipper had had with him. According to the
Bo'sun's statement (fine upstanding fellow that looked like some kind of
a Java man), she had gone plumb off her chump. Tried to knife the Mate
first, and then plumped down by the Skipper's remains and threatened to
stick the first man to touch it. The Mate, endeavouring to humour her,
had not insisted on the burial--a reprehensible weakness on his part....
Common prudence demanded that the dead on a plague ship should be
scuppered as soon as the breath was out of their bodies. That is, with a
white man; with a nigger it did no harm to anticipate that event by an
hour or so--as long as you were sure the fellow was going to whiff out
anyway.
The funny part of it was, though (the Doctor went on), that the Skipper
had not died of the plague at all. They had not, it was true, made any
post-mortem in the rush of things; but it was certain, nevertheless,
that his body had not displayed even the preliminary evidences of
infection--no swelling of the glands of the groin or under the arms.
Magnificent physical specimen the chap was, but plainly a man who had
punished an ocean of booze in his day. And yet--confound it all!--there
was no evidence that the fellow had drunk himself to death, either. Now
if it had been the Mate--_he_ was exuding alcohol from every
pore--absolutely reeking with it. Almost made a man drunk to breathe the
air down to leeward of him. Seemed to have been on one glorious spree
all the way from--somewhere up Solomon-way, he thought it was. Harried
the niggers like a fiend, according to the Bo'sun. Clubbed three or four
of them to death for not stepping lively enough to his orders. Lucky
thing the Skipper had scuppered all but one of the guns the first day
out. But not all the booze he had soaked up had effected the nerve of
the Mate. Kept his head and his legs to the last, finishing up with a
straight twenty-four-hour trick at the wheel. Said none of the crew knew
the Barrier Reef as well as he did. Had one nigger holding a parasol
over him, another playing a concertina, another waiting handy with a
bottle of whisky, and a fourth standing by to block any rushes from the
Kanaka girl with her knife. Funny thing it never occurred to him to have
her disarmed and tied up, or shut up. Grabbed the bottle of whisky and
started to brain the Bo'sun with it every time the latter tried to push
in and relieve him at the wheel.
A chap of terrible determination and iron nerves, that Mate was,
observed the Doctor. But no wonder.... Think who he was! Allen! The
Honourable Hartley Allen! The great Allen! Son of old Sir Jim Allen!
Melbourne Cup winner! Best horseman in all Australia! Crooked as they
make 'em--but how he could ride! Sent off to the Islands four or five
years back for raising some sort of hell. His old Ticket-of-Leave had
given him away when they came to strip him for a bath. No possible
mistake about it. One of the doctors at the Quarantine Station had set a
broken collar-bone for him once after he had fallen in a steeplechase at
Coolgardie. Found the marks of the old compound fracture still humping
up on the clavicle--the left one....
It was not without difficulty that I brought the excited young medico
round to speaking of Bell again. The astounding fact that he himself,
with his own hands, had actually helped to put the great and only
Hartley Allen to bed, was proving almost too much for him. It was
certainly not less than three separate times that he assured me that it
was his own silk pajamas that were encasing the limbs of the resurrected
hero. He switched subjects reluctantly, rising to go to his waiting
launch.
"Nothing in the world the matter with the big fellow--not even too much
drink," he said as he began shuffling his health sheets together. "He
must have passed away from the sheer mental strain of the stunt he had
tackled. Intense nervous strain--that was the one thing written all over
the man. Face was starting to bloat a bit from the heat by the time I
saw it first; but, even so, it still showed the lines of the most
terrible mental suffering. Seemed to have gone out fighting hard to pull
himself together--shoulders hunched up, finger-nails clenched deep into
palms, lower lip bitten clean through."
"May not those--those things you mention have been caused by physical
rather than mental agony?" I asked, speaking very slowly to hide the
agitation aroused by this significant intelligence. "Isn't that about
the way a man would repress his feelings if he was racked with--with
stomach cramps--if he had eaten something that disagreed with him?"
"Possibly so," admitted the Doctor, with the air of a man weighing
an idea that had not occurred to him before; "but somehow that
wasn't the suggestion they carried to me--nor to any of us. Fact is,
though, we didn't give the matter very much attention. That chap was
dead--finished,--while the other white man and the girl--to say nothing
of forty or fifty niggers--were alive. Then, with the excitement of
finding we had the great Hartley Allen on our hands--and, on top of
that, having the girl run _amuck_ and give us the slip complete,--there
was enough else to think about. The only--"
"The girl gave you the slip?" I interrupted. "How was that? You didn't
mention it before."
"Bolted and drowned herself in the creek," he replied; "or at least
there's every reason to believe she drowned herself, though they haven't
found her body yet. She wasn't going to leave the Skipper, even when we
started to take his body away for burial.... And of course we couldn't
allow her to leave the Station until her period of quarantine was over.
Had to take her away from the body by main force. She fought the whole
lot of us with tooth and nail and a wicked little curly-bladed dagger.
Stood us all off, too, and looked like getting ready to use the knife on
herself when the big Malay (who chanced to be there, but had taken no
part in the shindy up to that moment) stepped in, caught her wrist and
took the nasty little toy away from her.
"The big yellow man seemed to have rather a quieting effect on the girl.
Blind mad as she was, she didn't try to stick him. It seemed to steady
her a good deal when he talked to her in her own lingo. She was panting
like a cat coming out of a fit when we left her, but was quite over her
raving--wasn't even sobbing aloud. She was coming out of her
hysteria--getting rational again. Her eyes, though still wild and almost
throwing off sparks of anger, were quite free of the crazy look. It
looked like our trouble with her was about over, but, to be on the safe
side, we locked her up in one of the 'mad' rooms. That was the last
anyone has seen of her alive--or any other way, for that matter.
"You wouldn't have believed the thing possible!" he ejaculated
feelingly, turning back from the door and slapping the table
resoundingly with his portfolio. "That room was made to confine
dangerous lunatics in, and it had fulfilled its purpose, too--up to
night before last. To make it perfectly secure, it had been constructed
without windows--nothing but a two-by-two hole up against the
twelve-foot-high ceiling admitted light and air. There were no beds or
chairs to be broken up when the occupant had tantrums.... Just sleeping
mats, a sheet, a blanket and a mosquito net. No more. Even the wash
basin was brought in and taken out by the attendant.
"In locking the girl in, no precautions were omitted except that of
strapping her in a strait-jacket, and we had never resorted to that save
in violent cases. The window--or rather air-hole--was so high and so
small that it had never been considered worth while to put bars on it.
But as it was the only conceivable way she could have got out (the
attendant is absolutely trustworthy, and the key was not in his hands
more than a minute or two anyway), we would have been forced to conclude
that the girl had reached it with wings--had not we found the lower four
or five feet of wall marked with the prints of the toes and balls of the
bare feet which had apparently been violently projected against it. That
led us to get a ladder and light and examine about the window more
closely. For a foot or more below it the wall was splashed with blood
and slightly scratched, where lacerated fingers had clawed at the narrow
ledge.
"It did not take us long to figure that, taking the whole length of the
room to get going in, the girl had flung herself up the wall something
in the way that a terrier will run six or eight feet up the side of a
house for a ball or handkerchief fastened there. That's the only way we
could account for the toe-prints on the wall, though it is quite
possible that, after failing to pull off the trick in that fashion--it's
a stunt that looks dead hopeless for anything but a monkey,--she managed
it with a straight spring, high enough to get her fingers over the
ledge. Even from there, not one woman in a million could pull herself
up. But we had already remarked on the extreme wiriness of the girl (a
regular human ape she was for agility), and so found it a bit easier to
accept the evidence of our eyes. In some way or another she had managed
it.
"The air-hole opened out under the eaves of the sheet-iron roof," the
Doctor went on, forgetting his waiting launch in the interest of the
story, and seating himself again at the table. "It must have taken some
jolly snaky wriggling to crawl through the hole, out over the eaves and
on top of the roof; but she did it, else she could never have jumped
across the big banyan, where we found some twigs broken at the point she
hit, and some wisps of silk floss. The other side of that banyan--a
hundred feet from the wall of the hospital--spreads until it comes to
about fifteen feet from the station wall. The wall is ten feet high, has
broken glass on the top of it, with three or four strands of barbed wire
above that.
"Swinging to the ground by a pendent air-root on the side she had landed
in, the girl crossed under the tree--the marks of her bare feet showing
plainly in the soft earth--and used a similar ladder with which to mount
on the other side. To be sure of clearing the barbed wire, she had
climbed to a firm perch fully twenty-five feet from the ground, and made
her final jump from there. Luckily for her, the cane field on the other
side of the wall had been flooded but a day or two before--though I
don't doubt she would have jumped just the same if it had been to a
cobblestone pavement.
"We found the deep prints of her feet, knees and hands where she had
sprawled on striking. Her tracks down to the edge of a sprouting row of
seed-cane, and the marks where she had crawled up out of a deep
irrigating ditch to the road, were all we had to indicate the direction
she had taken. As she had seemed plumb daft about the dead Skipper, we
figured that she had probably broken out with the idea of going to his
grave, and perhaps making an end of herself there. If that was it, she
failed. There were no signs whatever of her having been near the fresh
mound we had tucked the big fellow away under. It was some distance away
from the Station, and, in the night, it isn't likely she would have met
anyone to ask the way of. The only grave she found was her own, and not
a very restful one at that, I'm afraid.
"We had noticed that she seemed to set great store by a big yellow shawl
she wore--rather a fine old piece of Oriental work it looked, with a
dragon or some other kind of wild animal embroidered on it. Well, when
we found that lying on the bank of Ross Creek, just a bit inland of the
town, we felt so sure that it marked the jumping-off place for her in
more ways than one. For that reason, what search has been pressed since
has been in the form of shooting alligators, and seeing if one of them
appears to have enjoyed anything extra-special in the way of tucker
lately."
An impatient toot from his launch carried the Doctor to the door again,
where he paused long enough to assure me for the third or fourth time
that it would be most unlikely that permission would be granted me to
see the Mate or the Boatswain of the _Cora_ until their spell of
quarantine was over. If I was really anxious about it, he would gladly
put in a word for me with the Chief. I would have to show good reason
for my request, of course. Perhaps, if it chanced that I was able to
shed any light on how the schooner came to get into such a mess--I cut
him short by saying that I might call at the Quarantine Station when I
came ashore a little later. What I knew about the sailing of the _Cora_
from Kai happened to be the one thing I didn't care to confide to
anyone--just yet. Asking the Mate to order my boat to stand by for me a
few minutes longer, I went to my cabin to be alone while I turned the
fresh developments over in my mind.
I had been prepared to await the coming of the _Cora_ indefinitely. In
fact, what I expected above anything else was that the final news would
be a report that she had been found piled up on any one of a thousand
reefs that spread their coral claws all the way from the Louisiades to
the Great Barrier. And in case she did get through, I was quite prepared
to learn that both of the white men and the girl had succumbed to the
plague. But to be told that, after the schooner had avoided disaster,
and all three of them the plague, that the two upon whom my interest and
affection had centred were gone--dead,--was just a bit staggering. It
was now up to me to determine upon a definite course of action, and,
since it was now out of the question attempting to follow my first
impulse of going to Allen at once and forcing a showdown, I wanted time
to think.
What the Doctor had told me of the way Bell appeared to have died had
instantly reawakened my suspicions of Allen. Had the _kor-klee_, working
with a recurrent effect, finally proved fatal? Or had Allen, perhaps,
administered a second and stronger dose? He would have had a hundred
opportunities to do that had he desired to. Rona's attacks on the Mate,
indicating the deadliest hatred, seemed to prove that her first
suspicions of him had not weakened during the voyage--more likely,
indeed, had hardened to a certainty. The belief I had been entertaining
that Allen had made up his mind to play the game out on the square was
not very deeply grounded.
My sense of personal loss in the passing of Bell and Rona was not a
thing I cared to let myself dwell upon for the moment. There was no
question that the news of Rona's death had shocked me even more than
that of Bell's. Not that there was anything more between us than I have
already told. I had never let myself think of her in terms of physical
possession, though the sheer animal attraction of the girl was beyond
anything I had ever experienced in a woman. But her appeal to the
artistic side of me had been stronger even than that. Just as the thrill
I felt at the first sight of her bathing in the pink-lipped bowl of the
reef had made the very world itself seem more wonderful and beautiful,
so now the depression that filled me on realizing that I was never again
to have sight of her made the world seem emptier and drearier.
Another thing: there was no denying that Bell, splendid fellow that he
was, had shot his bolt. A real come-back with him was too much to
expect. The most that could have been hoped for was that he would
"finish in style," and that I was assured he had done, no matter in what
agony of soul and body his brave spirit had taken flight. But Rona's
bolt was still unsped. The girl had hardly begun to finger Life's
bowstring. It was almost as hard to think of the flaming, soaring spirit
of her as quenched, as it was to believe that the matchless perfection,
the supple gracefulness of her body--_shooting alligators to see if any
of them had been enjoying anything extra-special in tucker lately_! I
could not pursue that line of thought any further. I agreed with the
Doctor that the fact that the girl had parted with her beloved shawl
indicated that she had reached a jumping-off place--a point where she
had no further use for it. I could not picture her--living--without its
amber-bright flame streaming about her limbs. The wonder was that she
had not kept it for a shroud. As I came out upon the deck to go to my
boat, the intermittent crack of rifle shots along the shore told me that
the "search" had not been abandoned.
Beyond deciding to go ashore and see if anything further could be
learned, I had made no plans. It seemed that about the best I could do
would be to wait in Townsville until Allen and Ranga were out of
quarantine, and then let things shape as they would; but always assuming
that, in case the former could not satisfy me he was innocent of Bell's
death, I should do what I could to settle the reckoning with him. That
would be my atonement--to Bell and to myself--for my sorry failure to
"measure up" the day the _Cora Andrews_ came to Kai Lagoon.
Captain Tancred, who had never quite settled it in his own mind how a
man who openly admitted he had been living in the Kai colony for months
would not have to be smuggled ashore on the quiet if he expected to
avoid arrest in Australia, met me at the gangway.
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