Joan took hold of the household with no uncertain grip, revolutionizing
things till Sheldon hardly recognized the place. For the first time the
bungalow was clean and orderly. No longer the house-boys loafed and did
as little as they could; while the cook complained that "head belong him
walk about too much," from the strenuous course in cookery which she put
him through. Nor did Sheldon escape being roundly lectured for his
laziness in eating nothing but tinned provisions. She called him a
muddler and a slouch, and other invidious names, for his slackness and
his disregard of healthful food.
She sent her whale-boat down the coast twenty miles for limes and
oranges, and wanted to know scathingly why said fruits had not long since
been planted at Berande, while he was beneath contempt because there was
no kitchen garden. Mummy apples, which he had regarded as weeds, under
her guidance appeared as appetizing breakfast fruit, and, at dinner, were
metamorphosed into puddings that elicited his unqualified admiration.
Bananas, foraged from the bush, were served, cooked and raw, a dozen
different ways, each one of which he declared was better than any other.
She or her sailors dynamited fish daily, while the Balesuna natives were
paid tobacco for bringing in oysters from the mangrove swamps. Her
achievements with cocoanuts were a revelation. She taught the cook how
to make yeast from the milk, that, in turn, raised light and airy bread.
From the tip-top heart of the tree she concocted a delicious salad. From
the milk and the meat of the nut she made various sauces and dressings,
sweet and sour, that were served, according to preparation, with dishes
that ranged from fish to pudding. She taught Sheldon the superiority of
cocoanut cream over condensed cream, for use in coffee. From the old and
sprouting nuts she took the solid, spongy centres and turned them into
salads. Her forte seemed to be salads, and she astonished him with the
deliciousness of a salad made from young bamboo shoots. Wild tomatoes,
which had gone to seed or been remorselessly hoed out from the beginning
of Berande, were foraged for salads, soups, and sauces. The chickens,
which had always gone into the bush and hidden their eggs, were given
laying-bins, and Joan went out herself to shoot wild duck and wild
pigeons for the table.
"Not that I like to do this sort of work," she explained, in reference to
the cookery; "but because I can't get away from Dad's training."
Among other things, she burned the pestilential hospital, quarrelled with
Sheldon over the dead, and, in anger, set her own men to work building a
new, and what she called a decent, hospital. She robbed the windows of
their lawn and muslin curtains, replacing them with gaudy calico from the
trade-store, and made herself several gowns. When she wrote out a list
of goods and clothing for herself, to be sent down to Sydney by the first
steamer, Sheldon wondered how long she had made up her mind to stay.
She was certainly unlike any woman he had ever known or dreamed of. So
far as he was concerned she was not a woman at all. She neither
languished nor blandished. No feminine lures were wasted on him. He
might have been her brother, or she his brother, for all sex had to do
with the strange situation. Any mere polite gallantry on his part was
ignored or snubbed, and he had very early given up offering his hand to
her in getting into a boat or climbing over a log, and he had to
acknowledge to himself that she was eminently fitted to take care of
herself. Despite his warnings about crocodiles and sharks, she persisted
in swimming in deep water off the beach; nor could he persuade her, when
she was in the boat, to let one of the sailors throw the dynamite when
shooting fish. She argued that she was at least a little bit more
intelligent than they, and that, therefore, there was less liability of
an accident if she did the shooting. She was to him the most masculine
and at the same time the most feminine woman he had ever met.
A source of continual trouble between them was the disagreement over
methods of handling the black boys. She ruled by stern kindness, rarely
rewarding, never punishing, and he had to confess that her own sailors
worshipped her, while the house-boys were her slaves, and did three times
as much work for her as he had ever got out of them. She quickly saw the
unrest of the contract labourers, and was not blind to the danger, always
imminent, that both she and Sheldon ran. Neither of them ever ventured
out without a revolver, and the sailors who stood the night watches by
Joan's grass house were armed with rifles. But Joan insisted that this
reign of terror had been caused by the reign of fear practised by the
white men. She had been brought up with the gentle Hawaiians, who never
were ill-treated nor roughly handled, and she generalized that the
Solomon Islanders, under kind treatment, would grow gentle.
One evening a terrific uproar arose in the barracks, and Sheldon, aided
by Joan's sailors, succeeded in rescuing two women whom the blacks were
beating to death. To save them from the vengeance of the blacks, they
were guarded in the cook-house for the night. They were the two women
who did the cooking for the labourers, and their offence had consisted of
one of them taking a bath in the big cauldron in which the potatoes were
boiled. The blacks were not outraged from the standpoint of cleanliness;
they often took baths in the cauldrons themselves. The trouble lay in
that the bather had been a low, degraded, wretched female; for to the
Solomon Islander all females are low, degraded, and wretched.
Next morning, Joan and Sheldon, at breakfast, were aroused by a swelling
murmur of angry voices. The first rule of Berande had been broken. The
compound had been entered without permission or command, and all the two
hundred labourers, with the exception of the boss-boys, were guilty of
the offence. They crowded up, threatening and shouting, close under the
front veranda. Sheldon leaned over the veranda railing, looking down
upon them, while Joan stood slightly back. When the uproar was stilled,
two brothers stood forth. They were large men, splendidly muscled, and
with faces unusually ferocious, even for Solomon Islanders. One was
Carin-Jama, otherwise The Silent; and the other was Bellin-Jama, The
Boaster. Both had served on the Queensland plantations in the old days,
and they were known as evil characters wherever white men met and gammed.
"We fella boy we want 'm them dam two black fella Mary," said
Bellin-Jama.
"What you do along black fella Mary?" Sheldon asked.
"Kill 'm," said Bellin-Jama.
"What name you fella boy talk along me?" Sheldon demanded, with a show of
rising anger. "Big bell he ring. You no belong along here. You belong
along field. Bime by, big fella bell he ring, you stop along _kai-kai_,
you come talk along me about two fella Mary. Now all you boy get along
out of here."
The gang waited to see what Bellin-Jama would do, and Bellin-Jama stood
still.
"Me no go," he said.
"You watch out, Bellin-Jama," Sheldon said sharply, "or I send you along
Tulagi one big fella lashing. My word, you catch 'm strong fella."
Bellin-Jama glared up belligerently.
"You want 'm fight," he said, putting up his fists in approved, returned-
Queenslander style.
Now, in the Solomons, where whites are few and blacks are many, and where
the whites do the ruling, such an offer to fight is the deadliest insult.
Blacks are not supposed to dare so highly as to offer to fight a white
man. At the best, all they can look for is to be beaten by the white
man.
A murmur of admiration at Bellin-Jama's bravery went up from the
listening blacks. But Bellin-Jama's voice was still ringing in the air,
and the murmuring was just beginning, when Sheldon cleared the rail,
leaping straight downward. From the top of the railing to the ground it
was fifteen feet, and Bellin-Jama was directly beneath. Sheldon's flying
body struck him and crushed him to earth. No blows were needed to be
struck. The black had been knocked helpless. Joan, startled by the
unexpected leap, saw Carin-Jama, The Silent, reach out and seize Sheldon
by the throat as he was half-way to his feet, while the five-score blacks
surged forward for the killing. Her revolver was out, and Carin-Jama let
go his grip, reeling backward with a bullet in his shoulder. In that
fleeting instant of action she had thought to shoot him in the arm,
which, at that short distance, might reasonably have been achieved. But
the wave of savages leaping forward had changed her shot to the shoulder.
It was a moment when not the slightest chance could be taken.
The instant his throat was released, Sheldon struck out with his fist,
and Carin-Jama joined his brother on the ground. The mutiny was quelled,
and five minutes more saw the brothers being carried to the hospital, and
the mutineers, marshalled by the gang-bosses, on the way to the fields.
When Sheldon came up on the veranda, he found Joan collapsed on the
steamer-chair and in tears. The sight unnerved him as the row just over
could not possibly have done. A woman in tears was to him an
embarrassing situation; and when that woman was Joan Lackland, from whom
he had grown to expect anything unexpected, he was really frightened. He
glanced down at her helplessly, and moistened his lips.
"I want to thank you," he began. "There isn't a doubt but what you saved
my life, and I must say--"
She abruptly removed her hands, showing a wrathful and tear-stained face.
"You brute! You coward!" she cried. "You have made me shoot a man, and
I never shot a man in my life before."
"It's only a flesh-wound, and he isn't going to die," Sheldon managed to
interpolate.
"What of that? I shot him just the same. There was no need for you to
jump down there that way. It was brutal and cowardly."
"Oh, now I say--" he began soothingly.
"Go away. Don't you see I hate you! hate you! Oh, won't you go away!"
Sheldon was white with anger.
"Then why in the name of common sense did you shoot?" he demanded.
"Be-be-because you were a white man," she sobbed. "And Dad would never
have left any white man in the lurch. But it was your fault. You had no
right to get yourself in such a position. Besides, it wasn't necessary."
"I am afraid I don't understand," he said shortly, turning away. "We
will talk it over later on."
"Look how I get on with the boys," she said, while he paused in the
doorway, stiffly polite, to listen. "There's those two sick boys I am
nursing. They will do anything for me when they get well, and I won't
have to keep them in fear of their life all the time. It is not
necessary, I tell you, all this harshness and brutality. What if they
are cannibals? They are human beings, just like you and me, and they are
amenable to reason. That is what distinguishes all of us from the lower
animals."
He nodded and went out.
"I suppose I've been unforgivably foolish," was her greeting, when he
returned several hours later from a round of the plantation. "I've been
to the hospital, and the man is getting along all right. It is not a
serious hurt."
Sheldon felt unaccountably pleased and happy at the changed aspect of her
mood.
"You see, you don't understand the situation," he began. "In the first
place, the blacks have to be ruled sternly. Kindness is all very well,
but you can't rule them by kindness only. I accept all that you say
about the Hawaiians and the Tahitians. You say that they can be handled
that way, and I believe you. I have had no experience with them. But
you have had no experience with the blacks, and I ask you to believe me.
They are different from your natives. You are used to Polynesians. These
boys are Melanesians. They're blacks. They're niggers--look at their
kinky hair. And they're a whole lot lower than the African niggers.
Really, you know, there is a vast difference."
"They possess no gratitude, no sympathy, no kindliness. If you are kind
to them, they think you are a fool. If you are gentle with them they
think you are afraid. And when they think you are afraid, watch out, for
they will get you. Just to show you, let me state the one invariable
process in a black man's brain when, on his native heath, he encounters a
stranger. His first thought is one of fear. Will the stranger kill him?
His next thought, seeing that he is not killed, is: Can he kill the
stranger? There was Packard, a Colonial trader, some twelve miles down
the coast. He boasted that he ruled by kindness and never struck a blow.
The result was that he did not rule at all. He used to come down in his
whale-boat to visit Hughie and me. When his boat's crew decided to go
home, he had to cut his visit short to accompany them. I remember one
Sunday afternoon when Packard had accepted our invitation to stop to
dinner. The soup was just served, when Hughie saw a nigger peering in
through the door. He went out to him, for it was a violation of Berande
custom. Any nigger has to send in word by the house-boys, and to keep
outside the compound. This man, who was one of Packard's boat's-crew,
was on the veranda. And he knew better, too. 'What name?' said Hughie.
'You tell 'm white man close up we fella boat's-crew go along. He no
come now, we fella boy no wait. We go.' And just then Hughie fetched
him a clout that knocked him clean down the stairs and off the veranda."
"But it was needlessly cruel," Joan objected. "You wouldn't treat a
white man that way."
"And that's just the point. He wasn't a white man. He was a low black
nigger, and he was deliberately insulting, not alone his own white
master, but every white master in the Solomons. He insulted me. He
insulted Hughie. He insulted Berande."
"Of course, according to your lights, to your formula of the rule of the
strong--"
"Yes," Sheldon interrupted, "but it was according to the formula of the
rule of the weak that Packard ruled. And what was the result? I am
still alive. Packard is dead. He was unswervingly kind and gentle to
his boys, and his boys waited till one day he was down with fever. His
head is over on Malaita now. They carried away two whale-boats as well,
filled with the loot of the store. Then there was Captain Mackenzie of
the ketch _Minota_. He believed in kindness. He also contended that
better confidence was established by carrying no weapons. On his second
trip to Malaita, recruiting, he ran into Bina, which is near Langa Langa.
The rifles with which the boat's-crew should have been armed, were locked
up in his cabin. When the whale-boat went ashore after recruits, he
paraded around the deck without even a revolver on him. He was
tomahawked. His head remains in Malaita. It was suicide. So was
Packard's finish suicide."
"I grant that precaution is necessary in dealing with them," Joan agreed;
"but I believe that more satisfactory results can be obtained by treating
them with discreet kindness and gentleness."
"And there I agree with _you_, but you must understand one thing.
Berande, bar none, is by far the worst plantation in the Solomons so far
as the labour is concerned. And how it came to be so proves your point.
The previous owners of Berande were not discreetly kind. They were a
pair of unadulterated brutes. One was a down-east Yankee, as I believe
they are called, and the other was a guzzling German. They were slave-
drivers. To begin with, they bought their labour from Johnny Be-blowed,
the most notorious recruiter in the Solomons. He is working out a ten
years' sentence in Fiji now, for the wanton killing of a black boy.
During his last days here he had made himself so obnoxious that the
natives on Malaita would have nothing to do with him. The only way he
could get recruits was by hurrying to the spot whenever a murder or
series of murders occurred. The murderers were usually only too willing
to sign on and get away to escape vengeance. Down here they call such
escapes, 'pier-head jumps.' There is suddenly a roar from the beach, and
a nigger runs down to the water pursued by clouds of spears and arrows.
Of course, Johnny Be-blowed's whale-boat is lying ready to pick him up.
In his last days Johnny got nothing but pier-head jumps.
"And the first owners of Berande bought his recruits--a hard-bitten gang
of murderers. They were all five-year boys. You see, the recruiter has
the advantage over a boy when he makes a pier-head jump. He could sign
him on for ten years did the law permit. Well, that's the gang of
murderers we've got on our hands now. Of course some are dead, some have
been killed, and there are others serving sentences at Tulagi. Very
little clearing did those first owners do, and less planting. It was war
all the time. They had one manager killed. One of the partners had his
shoulder slashed nearly off by a cane-knife. The other was speared on
two different occasions. Both were bullies, wherefore there was a streak
of cowardice in them, and in the end they had to give up. They were
chased away--literally chased away--by their own niggers. And along came
poor Hughie and me, two new chums, to take hold of that hard-bitten gang.
We did not know the situation, and we had bought Berande, and there was
nothing to do but hang on and muddle through somehow.
"At first we made the mistake of indiscreet kindness. We tried to rule
by persuasion and fair treatment. The niggers concluded that we were
afraid. I blush to think of what fools we were in those first days. We
were imposed on, and threatened and insulted; and we put up with it,
hoping our square-dealing would soon mend things. Instead of which
everything went from bad to worse. Then came the day when Hughie
reprimanded one of the boys and was nearly killed by the gang. The only
thing that saved him was the number on top of him, which enabled me to
reach the spot in time.
"Then began the rule of the strong hand. It was either that or quit, and
we had sunk about all our money into the venture, and we could not quit.
And besides, our pride was involved. We had started out to do something,
and we were so made that we just had to go on with it. It has been a
hard fight, for we were, and are to this day, considered the worst
plantation in the Solomons from the standpoint of labour. Do you know,
we have been unable to get white men in. We've offered the managership
to half a dozen. I won't say they were afraid, for they were not. But
they did not consider it healthy--at least that is the way it was put by
the last one who declined our offer. So Hughie and I did the managing
ourselves."
"And when he died you were prepared to go on all alone!" Joan cried, with
shining eyes.
"I thought I'd muddle through. And now, Miss Lackland, please be
charitable when I seem harsh, and remember that the situation is
unparalleled down here. We've got a bad crowd, and we're making them
work. You've been over the plantation and you ought to know. And I
assure you that there are no better three-and-four-years-old trees on any
other plantation in the Solomons. We have worked steadily to change
matters for the better. We've been slowly getting in new labour. That
is why we bought the _Jessie_. We wanted to select our own labour. In
another year the time will be up for most of the original gang. You see,
they were recruited during the first year of Berande, and their contracts
expire on different months. Naturally, they have contaminated the new
boys to a certain extent; but that can soon be remedied, and then Berande
will be a respectable plantation."
Joan nodded but remained silent. She was too occupied in glimpsing the
vision of the one lone white man as she had first seen him, helpless from
fever, a collapsed wraith in a steamer-chair, who, up to the last heart-
beat, by some strange alchemy of race, was pledged to mastery.
"It is a pity," she said. "But the white man has to rule, I suppose."
"I don't like it," Sheldon assured her. "To save my life I can't imagine
how I ever came here. But here I am, and I can't run away."
"Blind destiny of race," she said, faintly smiling. "We whites have been
land robbers and sea robbers from remotest time. It is in our blood, I
guess, and we can't get away from it."
"I never thought about it so abstractly," he confessed. "I've been too
busy puzzling over why I came here."