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.