The man with the scarred face leant over the table and looked at my
bundle.
“Orchids?” he asked.
“A few,” I said.
“Cypripediums?” he said.
“Chiefly,” said I.
“Anything new?—I thought not. _I_ did these islands
twenty-five—twenty-seven years ago. If you find anything new here—well,
it’s brand new. I didn’t leave much.”
“I’m not a collector,” said I.
“I was young then,” he went on. “Lord! how I used to fly round.” He
seemed to take my measure. “I was in the East Indies two years, and in
Brazil seven. Then I went to Madagascar.”
“I know a few explorers by name,” I said anticipating a yarn. “Who did
you collect for?”
“Dawsons. I wonder if you’ve heard the name of Butcher ever?”
“Butcher—Butcher?” The name seemed vaguely present in my memory; then I
recalled _Butcher_ v. _Dawson_. “Why!” said I, “you are the man who sued
them for four years’ salary—got cast away on a desert island—”
“Your servant,” said the man with the scar, bowing. “Funny case, wasn’t
it? Here was me, making a little fortune on that island, doing nothing
for it neither, and them quite unable to give me notice. It often used
to amuse me thinking over it while I was there. I did calculations of
it—big—all over the blessed atoll in ornamental figuring.”
“How did it happen?” said I. “I don’t rightly remember the case.”
“Well—you’ve heard of the Æpyornis?”
“Rather. Andrews was telling me of a new species he was working on only
a month or so ago. Just before I sailed. They’ve got a thigh bone, it
seems, nearly a yard long. Monster the thing must have been!”
“I believe you,” said the man with the scar. “It _was_ a monster.
Sinbad’s roc was just a legend of ’em. But when did they find these
bones?”
“Three or four years ago—’91 I fancy. Why?”
“Why?—Because _I_ found ’em—Lord!—it’s nearly twenty years ago. If
Dawsons hadn’t been silly about that salary they might have made a
perfect ring in ’em.—_I_ couldn’t help the infernal boat going adrift.”
He paused. “I suppose it’s the same place. A kind of swamp about ninety
miles north of Antananarivo. Do you happen to know? You have to go to it
along the coast by boats. You don’t happen to remember, perhaps?”
“I don’t. I fancy Andrews said something about a swamp.”
“It must be the same. It’s on the east coast. And somehow there’s
something in the water that keeps things from decaying. Like creosote it
smells. It reminded me of Trinidad. Did they get any more eggs? Some of
the eggs I found were a foot and a half long. The swamp goes circling
round, you know, and cuts off this bit. It’s mostly salt, too. Well—What
a time I had of it! I found the things quite by accident. We went for
eggs, me and two native chaps, in one of those rum canoes all tied
together, and found the bones at the same time. We had a tent and
provisions for four days, and we pitched on one of the firmer places. To
think of it brings that odd tarry smell back even now. It’s funny work.
You go probing into the mud with iron rods, you know. Usually the egg
gets smashed. I wonder how long it is since these Æpyornises really
lived. The missionaries say the natives have legends about when they
were alive, but I never heard any such stories myself.[1] But certainly
those eggs we got were as fresh as if they had been new-laid. Fresh!
Carrying them down to the boat one of my nigger chaps dropped one on a
rock and it smashed. How I lammed into the beggar! But sweet it was as
if it was new-laid, not even smelly, and its mother dead these four
hundred years perhaps. Said a centipede had bit him. However, I’m
getting off the straight with the story. It had taken us all day to dig
into the slush and get these eggs out unbroken, and we were all covered
with beastly black mud, and naturally I was cross. So far as I knew they
were the only eggs that had ever been got out not even cracked. I went
afterwards to see the ones they have at the Natural History Museum in
London: all of them were cracked and just stuck together like a mosaic,
and bits missing. Mine were perfect, and I meant to blow them when I got
back. Naturally I was annoyed at the silly devil dropping three hours’
work just on account of a centipede. I hit him about rather.”
Footnote 1:
No European is known to have seen a live Æpyornis, with the doubtful
exception of MacAndrew, who visited Madagascar in 1745. H. G. W.
The man with the scar took out a clay pipe. I placed my pouch before
him. He filled up absent-mindedly.
“How about the others? Did you get those home? I don’t remember—”
“That’s the queer part of the story. I had three others. Perfectly fresh
eggs. Well, we put ’em in the boat, and then I went up to the tent to
make some coffee, leaving my two heathens down by the beach—the one
fooling about with his sting and the other helping him. It never
occurred to me that the beggars would take advantage of the peculiar
position I was in to pick a quarrel. But I suppose the centipede poison
and the kicking I’d given him had upset the one—he was always a
cantankerous sort—and he persuaded the other.
“I remember I was sitting and smoking and boiling up the water over a
spirit-lamp business I used to take on these expeditions. Incidentally I
was admiring the swamp under the sunset. All black and blood red it was,
in streaks—a beautiful sight. And up beyond, the land rose grey and hazy
to the hills, and the sky behind them red, like a furnace mouth. And
fifty yards behind the back of me was these blessed heathen—quite
regardless of the tranquil air of things—plotting to cut off with the
boat and leave me all alone with three days’ provisions and a canvas
tent, and nothing to drink whatsoever, beyond a little keg of water. I
heard a kind of yelp behind me, and there they were in this canoe
affair—it wasn’t properly a boat—and perhaps twenty yards from land. I
realised what was up in a moment. My gun was in the tent, and besides I
had no bullets—only duck shot. They knew that. But I had a little
revolver in my pocket and I pulled that out as I ran down to the beach.
“‘Come back!’ says I, flourishing it.
“They jabbered something at me, and the man that broke the egg jeered. I
aimed at the other—because he was unwounded and had the paddle, and I
missed. They laughed. However, I wasn’t beat. I knew I had to keep cool,
and I tried him again and made him jump with the whang of it. The third
time I got his head, and over he went, and the paddle with him. It was a
precious lucky shot for a revolver. I reckon it was fifty yards. He went
right under. I don’t know if he was shot, or simply stunned and drowned.
Then I began to shout to the other chap to come back, but he huddled up
in the canoe and refused to answer. So I fired out my revolver at him
and never got near him.
“I felt a precious fool, I can tell you. There I was on this rotten,
black beach, flat swamp all behind me, and the flat sea, cold after the
sunset, and just this black canoe drifting steadily out to sea. I tell
you I damned Dawsons and Jamrachs and Museums and all the rest of it
just to rights. I bawled to this nigger to come back, until my voice
went up into a scream.
“There was nothing for it but to swim after him and take my luck with
the sharks. So I opened my clasp-knife and put it in my mouth and took
off my clothes and waded in. As soon as I was in the water I lost sight
of the canoe, but I aimed, as I judged, to head it off. I hoped the man
in it was too bad to navigate it, and that it would keep on drifting in
the same direction. Presently it came up over the horizon again to the
south-westward about. The afterglow of sunset was well over now and the
dim of night creeping up. The stars were coming through the blue. I swam
like a champion, though my legs and arms were soon aching.
“However, I came up to him by the time the stars were fairly out. As it
got darker I began to see all manner of glowing things in the
water—phosphorescence, you know. At times it made me giddy. I hardly
knew which was stars and which was phosphorescence, and whether I was
swimming on my head or my heels. The canoe was as black as sin, and the
ripple under the bows like liquid fire. I was naturally chary of
clambering up into it. I was anxious to see what he was up to first. He
seemed to be lying cuddled up in a lump in the bows, and the stern was
all out of water. The thing kept turning round slowly as it drifted—kind
of waltzing, don’t you know. I went to the stern and pulled it down,
expecting him to wake up. Then I began to clamber in with my knife in my
hand, and ready for a rush. But he never stirred. So there I sat in the
stern of the little canoe, drifting away over the calm phosphorescent
sea, and with all the host of the stars above me, waiting for something
to happen.
“After a long time I called him by name, but he never answered. I was
too tired to take any risks by going along to him. So we sat there. I
fancy I dozed once or twice. When the dawn came I saw he was as dead as
a doornail and all puffed up and purple. My three eggs and the bones
were lying in the middle of the canoe, and the keg of water and some
coffee and biscuits wrapped in a Cape ‘Argus’ by his feet, and a tin of
methylated spirit underneath him. There was no paddle, nor in fact
anything except the spirit tin that one could use as one, so I settled
to drift until I was picked up. I held an inquest on him, brought in a
verdict against some snake, scorpion, or centipede unknown, and sent him
overboard.
“After that I had a drink of water and a few biscuits, and took a look
round. I suppose a man low down as I was don’t see very far; leastways,
Madagascar was clean out of sight, and any trace of land at all. I saw a
sail going south-westward—looked like a schooner, but her hull never
came up. Presently the sun got high in the sky and began to beat down
upon me. Lord!—it pretty near made my brains boil. I tried dipping my
head in the sea, but after a while my eye fell on the Cape ‘Argus,’ and
I lay down flat in the canoe and spread this over me. Wonderful things
these newspapers. I never read one through thoroughly before, but it’s
odd what you get up to when you’re alone, as I was. I suppose I read
that blessed old Cape ‘Argus’ twenty times. The pitch in the canoe
simply reeked with the heat and rose up into big blisters.
“I drifted ten days,” said the man with the scar. “It’s a little thing
in the telling, isn’t it? Every day was like the last. Except in the
morning and the evening I never kept a look-out even—the blaze was so
infernal. I didn’t see a sail after the first three days, and those I
saw took no notice of me. About the sixth night a ship went by scarcely
half a mile away from me, with all its lights ablaze and its ports open,
looking like a big firefly. There was music aboard. I stood up and
shouted and screamed at it. The second day I broached one of the
Æpyornis eggs, scraped the shell away at the end bit by bit, and tried
it, and I was glad to find it was good enough to eat. A bit flavoury—not
bad, I mean, but with something of the taste of a duck’s egg. There was
a kind of circular patch about six inches across on one side of the
yolk, and with streaks of blood and a white mark like a ladder in it
that I thought queer, but I didn’t understand what this meant at the
time, and I wasn’t inclined to be particular. The egg lasted me three
days, with biscuits and a drink of water. I chewed coffee berries
too—invigorating stuff. The second egg I opened about the eighth day.
And it scared me.”
The man with the scar paused. “Yes,” he said—“developing.
“I daresay you find it hard to believe. _I_ did, with the thing before
me. There the egg had been, sunk in that cold black mud, perhaps three
hundred years. But there was no mistaking it. There was the—what is
it?—embryo, with its big head and curved back and its heart beating
under its throat, and the yolk shrivelled up and great membranes
spreading inside of the shell and all over the yolk. Here was I hatching
out the eggs of the biggest of all extinct birds, in a little canoe in
the midst of the Indian Ocean. If old Dawson had known that! It was
worth four years’ salary. What do _you_ think?
“However, I had to eat that precious thing up, every bit of it, before I
sighted the reef, and some of the mouthfuls were beastly unpleasant. I
left the third one alone. I held it up to the light, but the shell was
too thick for me to get any notion of what might be happening inside;
and though I fancied I heard blood pulsing, it might have been the
rustle in my own ears, like what you listen to in a seashell.
“Then came the atoll. Came out of the sunrise, as it were, suddenly,
close up to me. I drifted straight towards it until I was about half a
mile from shore—not more, and then the current took a turn, and I had to
paddle as hard as I could with my hands and bits of the Æpyornis shell
to make the place. However, I got there. It was just a common atoll
about four miles round, with a few trees growing and a spring in one
place and the lagoon full of parrot fish. I took the egg ashore and put
it in a good place well above the tide lines and in the sun, to give it
all the chance I could, and pulled the canoe up safe, and loafed about
prospecting. It’s rum how dull an atoll is. When I was a kid I thought
nothing could be finer or more adventurous than the Robinson Crusoe
business, but that place was as monotonous as a book of sermons. I went
round finding eatable things and generally thinking; but I tell you I
was bored to death before the first day was out. It shows my luck—the
very day I landed the weather changed. A thunderstorm went by to the
north and flicked its wing over the island, and in the night there came
a drencher and a howling wind slap over us. It wouldn’t have taken much,
you know, to upset that canoe.
“I was sleeping under the canoe, and the egg was luckily among the sand
higher up the beach, and the first thing I remember was a sound like a
hundred pebbles hitting the boat at once and a rush of water over my
body. I’d been dreaming of Antananarivo, and I sat up and holloaed to
Intoshi to ask her what the devil was up, and clawed out at the chair
where the matches used to be. Then I remembered where I was. There were
phosphorescent waves rolling up as if they meant to eat me, and all the
rest of the night as black as pitch. The air was simply yelling. The
clouds seemed down on your head almost, and the rain fell as if heaven
was sinking and they were baling out the waters above the firmament. One
great roller came writhing at me, like a fiery serpent, and I bolted.
Then I thought of the canoe, and ran down to it as the water went
hissing back again, but the thing had gone. I wondered about the egg
then, and felt my way to it. It was all right and well out of reach of
the maddest waves, so I sat down beside it and cuddled it for company.
Lord! What a night that was!
“The storm was over before the morning. There wasn’t a rag of cloud left
in the sky when the dawn came, and all along the beach there were bits
of plank scattered—which was the disarticulated skeleton, so to speak,
of my canoe. However, that gave me something to do, for, taking
advantage of two of the trees being together, I rigged up a kind of
storm shelter with these vestiges. And that day the egg hatched.
“Hatched, sir, when my head was pillowed on it and I was asleep. I heard
a whack and felt a jar and sat up, and there was the end of the egg
pecked out and a rum little brown head looking out at me. ‘Lord!’ I
said, ‘you’re welcome,’ and with a little difficulty he came out.
“He was a nice friendly little chap, at first, about the size of a small
hen—very much like most other young birds, only bigger. His plumage was
a dirty brown to begin with, with a sort of grey scab that fell off it
very soon, and scarcely feathers—a kind of downy hair. I can hardly
express how pleased I was to see him. I tell you, Robinson Crusoe don’t
make near enough of his loneliness. But here was interesting company. He
looked at me and winked his eye from the front backwards like a hen, and
gave a chirp and began to peck about at once, as though being hatched
three hundred years too late was just nothing. ‘Glad to see you, Man
Friday!’ says I, for I had naturally settled he was to be called Man
Friday if ever he was hatched, as soon as ever I found the egg in the
canoe had developed. I was a bit anxious about his feed, so I gave him a
lump of raw parrot fish at once. He took it and opened his beak for
more. I was glad of that, for, under the circumstances, if he’d been
fanciful, I should have had to eat him after all.
“You’d be surprised what an interesting bird that Æpyornis chick was. He
followed me about from the very beginning. He used to stand by me and
watch while I fished in the lagoon and go shares in anything I caught.
And he was sensible, too. There were nasty green warty things, like
pickled gherkins, used to lie about on the beach, and he tried one of
these and it upset him. He never even looked at any of them again.
“And he grew. You could almost see him grow. And as I was never much of
a society man, his quiet, friendly ways suited me to a T. For nearly two
years we were as happy as we could be on that island. I had no business
worries, for I knew my salary was mounting up at Dawsons’. We would see
a sail now and then, but nothing ever came near us. I amused myself too
by decorating the island with designs worked in sea-urchins and fancy
shells of various kinds. I put ÆPYORNIS ISLAND all round the place very
nearly, in big letters, like what you see done with coloured stones at
railway stations in the old country. And I used to lie watching the
blessed bird stalking round and growing, growing, and think how I could
make a living out of him by showing him about if ever I got taken off.
After his first moult he began to get handsome, with a crest and a blue
wattle, and a lot of green feathers at the behind of him. And then I
used to puzzle whether Dawsons had any right to claim him or not. Stormy
weather and in the rainy season we lay snug under the shelter I had made
out of the old canoe, and I used to tell him lies about my friends at
home. It was a kind of idyll, you might say. If only I had had some
tobacco it would have been simply just like Heaven.
“It was about the end of the second year our little Paradise went wrong.
Friday was then about fourteen feet high to the bill of him, with a big
broad head like the end of a pickaxe, and two huge brown eyes with
yellow rims set together like a man’s—not out of sight of each other
like a hen’s. His plumage was fine—none of the half mourning style of
your ostrich—more like a cassowary as far as colour and texture go. And
then it was he began to cock his comb at me and give himself airs and
show signs of a nasty temper.
“At last came a time when my fishing had been rather unlucky and he
began to hang about me in a queer, meditative way. I thought he might
have been eating sea-cucumbers or something, but it was really just
discontent on his part. I was hungry too, and when at last I landed a
fish I wanted it for myself. Tempers were short that morning on both
sides. He pecked at it and grabbed it, and I gave him a whack on the
head to make him leave go. And at that he went for me. Lord!
“He gave me this in the face.” The man indicated his scar. “Then he
kicked me. It was like a cart horse. I got up, and seeing he hadn’t
finished I started off full tilt with my arms doubled up over my face.
But he ran on those gawky legs of his faster than a race horse, and kept
landing out at me with sledge-hammer kicks, and bringing his pickaxe
down on the back of my head. I made for the lagoon, and went in up to my
neck. He stopped at the water, for he hated getting his feet wet, and
began to make a shindy, something like a peacock’s, only hoarser. He
started strutting up and down the beach. I’ll admit I felt small to see
this blessed fossil lording it there. And my head and face were all
bleeding, and—well, my body just one jelly of bruises.
“I decided to swim across the lagoon and leave him alone for a bit,
until the affair blew over. I shinned up the tallest palm-tree and sat
there thinking of it all. I don’t suppose I ever felt so hurt by
anything before or since. It was the brutal ingratitude of the creature.
I’d been more than a brother to him. I’d hatched him. Educated him. A
great, gawky, out-of-date bird! And me a human being—heir of the ages
and all that.
“I thought after a time he’d begin to see things in that light himself,
and feel a little sorry for his behaviour. I thought if I was to catch
some nice little bits of fish, perhaps, and go to him presently in a
casual kind of way, and offer them to him, he might do the sensible
thing. It took me some time to learn how unforgiving and cantankerous an
extinct bird can be. Malice!
“I won’t tell you all the little devices I tried to get that bird round
again. I simply can’t. It makes my cheek burn with shame even now to
think of the snubs and buffets I had from this infernal curiosity. I
tried violence. I chucked lumps of coral at him from a safe distance,
but he only swallowed them. I shied my open knife at him and almost lost
it, though it was too big for him to swallow. I tried starving him out
and struck fishing, but he took to picking along the beach at low water
after worms, and rubbed along on that. Half my time I spent up to my
neck in the lagoon, and the rest up the palm-trees. One of them was
scarcely high enough, and when he caught me up it he had a regular Bank
Holiday with the calves of my legs. It got unbearable. I don’t know if
you have ever tried sleeping up a palm-tree. It gave me the most
horrible nightmares. Think of the shame of it too! Here was this extinct
animal mooning about my island like a sulky duke, and me not allowed to
rest the sole of my foot on the place. I used to cry with weariness and
vexation. I told him straight that I didn’t mean to be chased about a
desert island by any damned anachronisms. I told him to go and peck a
navigator of his own age. But he only snapped his beak at me. Great ugly
bird—all legs and neck!
“I shouldn’t like to say how long that went on altogether. I’d have
killed him sooner if I’d known how. However, I hit on a way of settling
him at last. It’s a South American dodge. I joined all my fishing lines
together with stems of seaweed and things, and made a stoutish string,
perhaps twelve yards in length or more, and I fastened two lumps of
coral rock to the ends of this. It took me some time to do, because
every now and then I had to go into the lagoon or up a tree as the fancy
took me. This I whirled rapidly round my head and then let it go at him.
The first time I missed, but the next time the string caught his legs
beautifully and wrapped round them again and again. Over he went. I
threw it standing waist-deep in the lagoon, and as soon as he went down
I was out of the water and sawing at his neck with my knife—
“I don’t like to think of that even now. I felt like a murderer while I
did it, though my anger was hot against him. When I stood over him and
saw him bleeding on the white sand and his beautiful great legs and neck
writhing in his last agony—Pah!
“With that tragedy, Loneliness came upon me like a curse. Good Lord! you
can’t imagine how I missed that bird. I sat by his corpse and sorrowed
over him, and shivered as I looked round the desolate, silent reef. I
thought of what a jolly little bird he had been when he was hatched, and
of a thousand pleasant tricks he had played before he went wrong. I
thought if I’d only wounded him I might have nursed him round into a
better understanding. If I’d had any means of digging into the coral
rock I’d have buried him. I felt exactly as if he was human. As it was I
couldn’t think of eating him, so I put him in the lagoon and the little
fishes picked him clean. Then one day a chap cruising about in a yacht
had a fancy to see if my atoll still existed.
“He didn’t come a moment too soon, for I was about sick enough of the
desolation of it, and only hesitating whether I should walk out into the
sea and finish up the business that way, or fall back on the green
things.
“I sold the bones to a man named Winslow—a dealer near the British
Museum, and he says he sold them to old Havers. It seems Havers didn’t
understand they were extra large, and it was only after his death they
attracted attention. They called ’em Æpyornis—what was it?”
“_Æpyornis vastus_,” said I. “It’s funny, the very thing was mentioned
to me by a friend of mine. When they found an Æpyornis with a thigh a
yard long they thought they had reached the top of the scale and called
him _Æpyornis maximus_. Then some one turned up another thigh bone four
feet six or more, and that they called _Æpyornis Titan_. Then your
_vastus_ was found after old Havers died, in his collection, and then a
_vastissimus_ turned up.”
“Winslow was telling me as much,” said the man with the scar. “If they
get any more Æpyornises, he reckons some scientific swell will go and
burst a blood-vessel. But it was a queer thing to happen to a man;
wasn’t it—altogether?”