“It don't leave much for ambition, does it?” said the sunburnt man.
“I was one of those men who were saved from the Ocean Pioneer. Gummy!
how time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll remember
anything of the Ocean Pioneer?”
The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had read
it. The Ocean Pioneer? “Something about gold dust,” I said vaguely, “but
the precise--”
“That's it,” he said. “In a beastly little channel she hadn't no
business in--dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh on
that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something and all the rocks
was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you fair have to follow
the rocks about to see where they're going next. Down she went in twenty
fathoms before you could have dealt for whist, with fifty thousand
pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said, in one form or another.”
“Survivors?”
“Three.”
“I remember the case now,” I said. “There was something about salvage--”
But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. “Excuse me,” he said,
“but--salvage!”
He leant over towards me. “I was in that job,” he said. “Tried to make
myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings--
“It ain't all jam being a god,” said the sunburnt man, and for some time
conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms. At last he
took up his tale again.
“There was me,” said the sunburnt man, “and a seaman named Jacobs, and
Always, the mate of the Ocean Pioneer. And him it was that set the
whole thing going. I remember him now, when we was in the jolly-boat,
suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence. He was a wonderful
hand at suggesting things. 'There was forty thousand pounds,' he said,
'on that ship, and it's for me to say just where she went down.' It
didn't need much brains to tumble to that. And he was the leader from
the first to the last. He got hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they
were brothers, and the brig was the Pride of Banya, and he it was bought
the diving-dress--a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus
instead of pumping. He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him
sick going down. And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart
he'd cooked up, as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and
twenty miles away.
“I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink
and bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean and
straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we used to
speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers, who'd started
two days before us, were getting on, until our sides fairly ached. We
all messed together in the Sanderses' cabin--it was a curious crew, all
officers and no men--and there stood the diving-dress waiting its turn.
Young Sanders was a humorous sort of chap, and there certainly was
something funny in the confounded thing's great fat head and its stare,
and he made us see it too. 'Jimmie Goggles,' he used to call it, and
talk to it like a Christian. Asked if he was married, and how Mrs.
Goggles was, and all the little Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And
every blessed day all of us used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in
rum, and unscrew his eye and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead
of that nasty mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as
a cask of rum. It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell
you--little suspecting, poor chaps! what was a-coming.
“We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry, you
know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where the Ocean
Pioneer had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy grey rock--lava
rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had to lay off about half a
mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was a thundering row who should
stop on board. And there she lay just as she had gone down, so that
you could see the top of the masts that was still standing perfectly
distinctly. The row ending in all coming in the boat. I went down in the
diving-dress on Friday morning directly it was light.
“What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly. It was
a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People over here
think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore and palm trees
and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance, wasn't a bit that way.
Not common rocks they were, undermined by waves; but great curved banks
like ironwork cinder heaps, with green slime below, and thorny shrubs
and things just waving upon them here and there, and the water glassy
calm and clear, and showing you a kind of dirty grey-black shine, with
huge flaring red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and
darting things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and
pools and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again
after the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other
way forest, too, and a kind of broken--what is it?--ambytheatre of black
and rusty cinders rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay in
the middle.
“The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour about
things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight up or down
the channel. Except the Pride of Banya, lying out beyond a lump of rocks
towards the line of the sea.
“Not a human being in sight,” he repeated, and paused.
“I don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling so
safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing. I was
in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always, 'there's
her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale, I caught
up the bogey and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought the boat
round. When the windows were screwed and everything was all right, I
shut the valve from the air belt in order to help my sinking, and
jumped overboard, feet foremost--for we hadn't a ladder. I left the boat
pitching, and all of them staring down into the water after me, as my
head sank down into the weeds and blackness that lay about the mast.
I suppose nobody, not the most cautious chap in the world, would have
bothered about a lookout at such a desolate place. It stunk of solitude.
“Of course you must understand that I was a greenhorn at diving. None of
us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get the way of
it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels damnable. Your
ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt yourself yawning or
sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten times worse. And a pain
over the eyebrows here--splitting--and a feeling like influenza in the
head. And it isn't all heaven in your lungs and things. And going down
feels like the beginning of a lift, only it keeps on. And you can't turn
your head to see what's above you, and you can't get a fair squint at
what's happening to your feet without bending down something painful.
And being deep it was dark, let alone the blackness of the ashes and mud
that formed the bottom. It was like going down out of the dawn back into
the night, so to speak.
“The mast came up like a ghost out of the black, and then a lot of
fishes, and then a lot of flapping red seaweed, and then whack I came
with a kind of dull bang on the deck of the Ocean Pioneer, and the
fishes that had been feeding on the dead rose about me like a swarm of
flies from road stuff in summer time. I turned on the compressed air
again--for the suit was a bit thick and mackintoshery after all, in
spite of the rum--and stood recovering myself. It struck coolish down
there, and that helped take off the stuffiness a bit.
“When I began to feel easier, I started looking about me. It was
an extraordinary sight. Even the light was extraordinary, a kind of
reddy-coloured twilight, on account of the streamers of seaweed that
floated up on either side of the ship. And far overhead just a moony,
deep green-blue. The deck of the ship, except for a slight list to
starboard, was level, and lay all dark and long between the weeds, clear
except where the masts had snapped when she rolled, and vanishing into
black night towards the forecastle. There wasn't any dead on the decks,
most were in the weeds alongside, I suppose; but afterwards I found two
skeletons lying in the passengers' cabins, where death had come to them.
It was curious to stand on that deck and recognise it all, bit by bit; a
place against the rail where I'd been fond of smoking by starlight, and
the corner where an old chap from Sydney used to flirt with a widow we
had aboard. A comfortable couple they'd been, only a month ago, and now
you couldn't have got a meal for a baby crab off either of them.
“I've always had a bit of a philosophical turn, and I dare say I spent
the best part of five minutes in such thoughts before I went below
to find where the blessed dust was stored. It was slow work hunting,
feeling it was for the most part, pitchy dark, with confusing blue
gleams down the companion. And there were things moving about, a dab at
my glass once, and once a pinch at my leg. Crabs, I expect. I kicked a
lot of loose stuff that puzzled me, and stooped and picked up something
all knobs and spikes. What do you think? Backbone! But I never had
any particular feeling for bones. We had talked the affair over pretty
thoroughly, and Always knew just where the stuff was stowed. I found it
that trip. I lifted a box one end an inch or more.”
He broke off in his story. “I've lifted it,” he said, “as near as that!
Forty thousand pounds worth of pure gold! Gold! I shouted inside my
helmet as a kind of cheer and hurt my ears. I was getting confounded
stuffy and tired by this time--I must have been down twenty-five minutes
or more--and I thought this was good enough. I went up the companion
again, and as my eyes came up flush with the deck, a thundering great
crab gave a kind of hysterical jump and went scuttling off sideways.
Quite a start it gave me. I stood up clear on deck and shut the valve
behind the helmet to let the air accumulate to carry me up again--I
noticed a kind of whacking from above, as though they were hitting the
water with an oar, but I didn't look up. I fancied they were signalling
me to come up.
“And then something shot down by me--something heavy, and stood a-quiver
in the planks. I looked, and there was a long knife I'd seen young
Sanders handling. Thinks I, he's dropped it, and I was still calling him
this kind of fool and that--for it might have hurt me serious--when I
began to lift and drive up towards the daylight. Just about the level
of the top spars of the Ocean Pioneer, whack! I came against something
sinking down, and a boot knocked in front of my helmet. Then something
else, struggling frightful. It was a big weight atop of me, whatever it
was, and moving and twisting about. I'd have thought it a big octopus,
or some such thing, if it hadn't been for the boot. But octopuses don't
wear boots. It was all in a moment, of course. I felt myself sinking
down again, and I threw my arms about to keep steady, and the whole lot
rolled free of me and shot down as I went up--”
He paused.
“I saw young Sanders's face, over a naked black shoulder, and a spear
driven clean through his neck, and out of his mouth and neck what looked
like spirts of pink smoke in the water. And down they went clutching
one another, and turning over, and both too far gone to leave go. And
in another second my helmet came a whack, fit to split, against the
niggers' canoe. It was niggers! Two canoes full.
“It was lively times, I tell you! Overboard came Always with three
spears in him. There was the legs of three or four black chaps kicking
about me in the water. I couldn't see much, but I saw the game was up at
a glance, gave my valve a tremendous twist, and went bubbling down again
after poor Always, in as awful a state of scare and astonishment as you
can well imagine. I passed young Sanders and the nigger going up again
and struggling still a bit, and in another moment I was standing in the
dim again on the deck of the Ocean Pioneer.
“'Gummy,' thinks I, 'here's a fix!' Niggers? At first I couldn't see
anything for it but Stifle below or Stabs above. I didn't properly
understand how much air there was to last me, but I didn't feel like
standing very much more of it down below. I was hot and frightfully
heady--quite apart from the blue funk I was in. We'd never repined with
these beastly natives, filthy Papuan beasts. It wasn't any good, coming
up where I was, but I had to do something. On the spur of the moment, I
clambered over the side of the brig and landed among the weeds, and set
off through the darkness as fast as I could. I just stopped once and
knelt, and twisted back my head in the helmet and had a look up. It was
a most extraordinary bright green-blue above, and the two canoes and the
boat floating there very small and distant like a kind of twisted H. And
it made me feel sick to squint up at it, and think what the pitching and
swaying of the three meant.
“It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness, pressure something awful, like being buried in
sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing as it
seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit, I found
myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had another squint to see
if anything was visible of the canoes and boats, and then kept on. I
stopped with my head a foot from the surface, and tried to see where I
was going, but, of course, nothing was to be seen but the reflection of
the bottom. Then out I dashed like knocking my head through a mirror.
Directly I got my eyes out of the water, I saw I'd come up a kind of
beach near the forest. I had a look round, but the natives and the brig
were both hidden by a big, hummucky heap of twisted lava, the born fool
in me suggested a run for the woods. I didn't take the helmet off, but
eased open one of the windows, and, after a bit of a pant, went on out
of the water. You'd hardly imagine how clean and light the air tasted.
“Of course, with four inches of lead in your boot soles, and your head
in a copper knob the size of a football, and been thirty-five minutes
under water, you don't break any records running. I ran like a ploughboy
going to work. And half way to the trees I saw a dozen niggers or more,
coming out in a gaping, astonished sort of way to meet me.
“I just stopped dead, and cursed myself for all the fools out of London.
I had about as much chance of cutting back to the water as a turned
turtle. I just screwed up my window again to leave my hands free, and
waited for them. There wasn't anything else for me to do.
“But they didn't come on very much. I began to suspect why. 'Jimmy
Goggles,' I says, 'it's your beauty does it.' I was inclined to be
a little light-headed, I think, with all these dangers about and the
change in the pressure of the blessed air. 'Who're ye staring at?'
I said, as if the savages could hear me. 'What d'ye take me for? I'm
hanged if I don't give you something to stare at,' I said, and with that
I screwed up the escape valve and turned on the compressed air from the
belt, until I was swelled out like a blown frog. Regular imposing it
must have been. I'm blessed if they'd come on a step; and presently one
and then another went down on their hands and knees. They didn't know
what to make of me, and they was doing the extra polite, which was very
wise and reasonable of them. I had half a mind to edge back seaward and
cut and run, but it seemed too hopeless. A step back and they'd have
been after me. And out of sheer desperation I began to march towards
them up the beach, with slow, heavy steps, and waving my blown-out arms
about, in a dignified manner. And inside of me I was singing as small as
a tomtit.
“But there's nothing like a striking appearance to help a man over a
difficulty,--I've found that before and since. People like ourselves,
who're up to diving-dresses by the time we're seven, can scarcely
imagine the effect of one on a simple-minded savage. One or two of these
niggers cut and run, the others started in a great hurry trying to knock
their brains out on the ground. And on I went as slow and solemn and
silly-looking and artful as a jobbing plumber. It was evident they took
me for something immense.
“Then up jumped one and began pointing, making extraordinary gestures
to me as he did so, and all the others began sharing their attention
between me and something out at sea. 'What's the matter now?' I said. I
turned slowly on account of my dignity, and there I saw, coming round
a point, the poor old Pride of Banya towed by a couple of canoes. The
sight fairly made me sick. But they evidently expected some recognition,
so I waved my arms in a striking sort of non-committal manner. And then
I turned and stalked on towards the trees again. At that time I was
praying like mad, I remember, over and over again: 'Lord help me through
with it! Lord help me through with it!' It's only fools who know nothing
of dangers can afford to laugh at praying.
“But these niggers weren't going to let me walk through and away like
that. They started a kind of bowing dance about me, and sort of pressed
me to take a pathway that lay through the trees. It was clear to me they
didn't take me for a British citizen, whatever else they thought of
me, and for my own part I was never less anxious to own up to the old
country.
“You'd hardly believe it, perhaps, unless you're familiar with savages,
but these poor misguided, ignorant creatures took me straight to their
kind of joss place to present me to the blessed old black stone there.
By this time I was beginning to sort of realise the depth of their
ignorance, and directly I set eyes on this deity I took my cue. I
started a baritone howl, 'wow-wow,' very long on one note, and began
waving my arms about a lot, and then very slowly and ceremoniously
turned their image over on its side and sat down on it. I wanted to sit
down badly, for diving-dresses ain't much wear in the tropics. Or, to
put it different like, they're a sight too much. It took away their
breath, I could see, my sitting on their joss, but in less time than a
minute they made up their minds and were hard at work worshipping me.
And I can tell you I felt a bit relieved to see things turning out so
well, in spite of the weight on my shoulders and feet.
“But what made me anxious was what the chaps in the canoes might think
when they came back. If they'd seen me in the boat before I went down,
and without the helmet on--for they might have been spying and hiding
since over night--they would very likely take a different view from the
others. I was in a deuce of a stew about that for hours, as it seemed,
until the shindy of the arrival began.
“But they took it down--the whole blessed village took it down. At the
cost of sitting up stiff and stern, as much like those sitting Egyptian
images one sees as I could manage, for pretty nearly twelve hours, I
should guess at least, on end, I got over it. You'd hardly think what
it meant in that heat and stink. I don't think any of them dreamt of the
man inside. I was just a wonderful leathery great joss that had come
up with luck out of the water. But the fatigue! the heat! the beastly
closeness! the mackintosheriness and the rum! and the fuss! They lit a
stinking fire on a kind of lava slab there was before me, and brought
in a lot of gory muck--the worst parts of what they were feasting on
outside, the Beasts--and burnt it all in my honour. I was getting a bit
hungry, but I understand now how gods manage to do without eating, what
with the smell of burnt offerings about them. And they brought in a lot
of the stuff they'd got off the brig and, among other stuff, what I was
a bit relieved to see, the kind of pneumatic pump that was used for the
compressed air affair, and then a lot of chaps and girls came in and
danced about me something disgraceful. It's extraordinary the different
ways different people have of showing respect. If I'd had a hatchet
handy I'd have gone for the lot of them--they made me feel that wild.
All this time I sat as stiff as company, not knowing anything better to
do. And at last, when nightfall came, and the wattle joss-house place
got a bit too shadowy for their taste--all these here savages are afraid
of the dark, you know--and I started a sort of 'Moo' noise, they built
big bonfires outside and left me alone in peace in the darkness of my
hut, free to unscrew my windows a bit and think things over, and feel
just as bad as I liked. And, Lord! I was sick.
“I was weak and hungry, and my mind kept on behaving like a beetle on a
pin, tremendous activity and nothing done at the end of it. Come round
just where it was before. There was sorrowing for the other chaps,
beastly drunkards certainly, but not deserving such a fate, and young
Sanders with the spear through his neck wouldn't go out of my mind.
There was the treasure down there in the Ocean Pioneer, and how one
might get it and hide it somewhere safer, and get away and come back for
it. And there was the puzzle where to get anything to eat. I tell you
I was fair rambling. I was afraid to ask by signs for food, for fear of
behaving too human, and so there I sat and hungered until very near
the dawn. Then the village got a bit quiet, and I couldn't stand it any
longer, and I went out and got some stuff like artichokes in a bowl
and some sour milk. What was left of these I put away among the other
offerings, just to give them a hint of my tastes. And in the morning
they came to worship, and found me sitting up stiff and respectable on
their previous god, just as they'd left me overnight. I'd got my back
against the central pillar of the hut, and, practically, I was asleep.
And that's how I became a god among the heathen--a false god no doubt,
and blasphemous, but one can't always pick and choose.
“Now, I don't want to crack myself up as a god beyond my merits, but I
must confess that while I was god to these people they was extraordinary
successful. I don't say there's anything in it, mind you. They won
a battle with another tribe--I got a lot of offerings I didn't want
through it--they had wonderful fishing, and their crop of pourra was
exceptional fine. And they counted the capture of the brig among the
benefits I brought 'em. I must say I don't think that was a poor record
for a perfectly new hand. And, though perhaps you'd scarcely credit it,
I was the tribal god of those beastly savages for pretty nearly four
months....
“What else could I do, man? But I didn't wear that diving-dress all the
time. I made 'em rig me up a sort of holy of holies, and a deuce of a
time I had too, making them understand what it was I wanted them to do.
That indeed was the great difficulty--making them understand my wishes.
I couldn't let myself down by talking their lingo badly--even if I'd
been able to speak at all--and I couldn't go flapping a lot of gestures
at them. So I drew pictures in sand and sat down beside them and hooted
like one o'clock. Sometimes they did the things I wanted all right,
and sometimes they did them all wrong. They was always very willing,
certainly. All the while I was puzzling how I was to get the confounded
business settled. Every night before the dawn I used to march out in
full rig and go off to a place where I could see the channel in which
the Ocean Pioneer lay sunk, and once even, one moonlight night, I tried
to walk out to her, but the weeds and rocks and dark clean beat me. I
didn't get back till full day, and then I found all those silly niggers
out on the beach praying their sea-god to return to them. I was that
vexed and tired, messing and tumbling about, and coming up and going
down again, I could have punched their silly heads all round when they
started rejoicing. I'm hanged if I like so much ceremony.
“And then came the missionary. That missionary! It was in the afternoon,
and I was sitting in state in my outer temple place, sitting on that old
black stone of theirs when he came. I heard a row outside and jabbering,
and then his voice speaking to an interpreter. 'They worship stocks and
stones,' he said, and I knew what was up, in a flash. I had one of my
windows out for comfort, and I sang out straight away on the spur of
the moment. 'Stocks and stones!' I says. 'You come inside,' I says, 'and
I'll punch your blooming head.' There was a kind of silence and more
jabbering, and in he came, Bible in hand, after the manner of them--a
little sandy chap in specks and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me
sitting there in the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles,
struck him a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in
calico?' for I don't hold with missionaries.
“I had a lark with that missionary. He was a raw hand, and quite
outclassed with a man like me. He gasped out who was I, and I told him
to read the inscription at my feet if he wanted to know. Down he goes
to read, and his interpreter, being of course as superstitious as any of
them, took it as an act of worship and plumped down like a shot. All my
people gave a howl of triumph, and there wasn't any more business to be
done in my village after that journey, not by the likes of him.
“But, of course, I was a fool to choke him off like that. If I'd had any
sense I should have told him straight away of the treasure and taken him
into Co. I've no doubt he'd have come into Co. A child, with a few hours
to think it over, could have seen the connection between my diving-dress
and the loss of the Ocean Pioneer. A week after he left I went out
one morning and saw the Motherhood, the salver's ship from Starr Race,
towing up the channel and sounding. The whole blessed game was up, and
all my trouble thrown away. Gummy! How wild I felt! And guying it in
that stinking silly dress! Four months!”
The sunburnt man's story degenerated again. “Think of it,” he said, when
he emerged to linguistic purity once more. “Forty thousand pounds worth
of gold.”
“Did the little missionary come back?” I asked.
“Oh, yes! Bless him! And he pledged his reputation there was a man
inside the god, and started out to see as much with tremendous ceremony.
But there wasn't--he got sold again. I always did hate scenes and
explanations, and long before he came I was out of it all--going home to
Banya along the coast, hiding in bushes by day, and thieving food from
the villages by night. Only weapon, a spear. No clothes, no money.
Nothing. My face was my fortune, as the saying is. And just a squeak
of eight thousand pounds of gold--fifth share. But the natives cut up
rusty, thank goodness, because they thought it was him had driven their
luck away.”