I could paper my house (if it would not be misunderstood) with blue
official letters about nothing.”
“I am so happy, Paul,” she said,--“so happy that I tremble for my
happiness!”
He smiled at her again as he reached his hand for the letter.
Nonchalantly he tore it open, but turned deadly pale as he ran his eyes
down the sheet inside.
“You must go back to prison?” she cried in a voice of agony.
He could only shake his head.
“Speak!” she cried again. “Paul, Paul, I must know, if it kills me!”
He gave her a dreadful look.
“I am pardoned,” he said. “I am free!”
THE HAPPIEST DAY OF HIS LIFE
THE HAPPIEST DAY OF HIS LIFE
His thirtieth birthday! His first youth was behind him, with all its
heartburnings, its failures, its manifold humiliations. What had he
done these years past but drift, forlorn, penniless, and unattached,
over those shallows where others had stuck and prospered--a gentle
decline all the way from college in hope and fulfilment? The army and
civil service had alike refused him. In the colonies he had toiled
unremittingly in half a hundred characters,--groom, cook, boundary
rider, steamer roustabout,--always sinking, always failing. Then those
last four years in the Islands, and his tumble-down store in Vaiala!
Had life nothing more for him than an endless succession of hot, empty
days on the farthest beach of Upolu, with scarcely more to eat than
the commonest Kanaka, and no other outlet for his energies than the
bartering of salt beef for coprah and an occasional night’s fishing on
the reef? On the other hand, he was well in body, and had times of even
thinking himself happy in this fag-end of the world. The old store,
rotten and leaky though it was, gave him a dryer bed than he had often
found in his wandering life, and the food, if monotonous and poor, was
better than the empty belly with which he had often begun an arduous
day in Australia. And the place was extraordinarily beautiful. Yes,
he had always admitted that, even in his blackest days of depression,
though the beauty of it seemed almost to oppress him at times. But
beautiful or not, this was a strange place for his father’s son, a
strange thirtieth birthday for one who had begun the world with every
prospect of faring well and rising high in its esteem, and the sense of
his failure again seized him by the throat.
The noise of an incoming boat drew him to the door, and he looked out
to see the pastor’s old whaler heading through the reef. They had made
a night trip to avoid the heat, and all looked tired and weary with
their long pull from Apia, and the song with which they timed their
paddles sounded mournfully across the lagoon. A half-grown girl leaped
into the water and hastened up to the store with something fastened in
a banana-leaf.
It was a letter, which she shyly handed the trader. Walter Kinross
looked at it with surprise, for it was the first he had received in
four years, and the sight of its English stamp and familiar handwriting
filled him with something like awe.
“The white man said you would give us a tin of salmon and six _masi_,”
said the little girl, in native.
Kinross unlocked the dingy trade-room, still in a maze of wonder and
impatience, and gave the little girl a box of matches in excess of
postage. Then he opened the letter.
MY DEAR NEPHEW [it ran]: Your letter asking me to send you a book or
two or any old papers I might happen to have about me has just come
to hand, and finds me at Long’s Hotel, pretty miserable and ill.
Yours was a strange note, after a silence of eight years, telling me
nothing on earth about yourself save that you are trading in some
islands, and seldom see a white face from one year’s end to another.
When a man is seventy years of age and is ill, and his nigh-spent
life unrolls before him like the pages of a musty old book, and
when he wonders a little how it will feel to be dead and done with
altogether, I tell you, my boy, he begins to see the spectres of
all sorts of old misdeeds rising before him. Past unkindnesses,
past neglects, a cold word here, a ten-pound note saved there and
an old friend turned empty away--well, well! Without actually going
the length of saying that I was either unkind or negligent in your
case, I feel sometimes I was rather hard on you as to that mess of
yours in London, and that affair at Lowestoft the same year. I was
disappointed, and I showed it.
I know you’re pretty old to come back and start life afresh here, but
if you have not had the unmitigated folly to get married out there
and tied by the leg for ever, I’ll help you to make a new start. You
sha’n’t starve if three hundred pounds a year will keep you, and if
you will try and turn over a new leaf and make a man of yourself in
good earnest, I am prepared to mark you down substantially in my
will. But mind--no promises--payment strictly by results. You’re no
longer a boy, and this is probably the last chance you’ll ever get of
entering civilised life again and meeting respectable folk. I inclose
you a draft at sight on Sydney, New South Wales, for two hundred and
fifty pounds, for you will doubtless need clothes, etc., as well as
your passage money, and if you decide not to return you can accept
it as a present from your old uncle. I have told Jones (you would
scarcely know the old fellow, Walter, he’s so changed) to send you a
bundle of books and illustrated papers, which I hope will amuse you
more than they seem to do me.
Affectionately yours,
ALFRED BANNOCK.
The trader read the letter with extraordinary attention, though the
drift of it was at first almost beyond him--read it and re-read it,
dazed and overcome, scarcely realising his good fortune. He spread out
the bill on his knee and smoothed it as he might have patted the head
of a dog. It spelled freedom, friends, the life he had been trained and
fitted to lead, a future worth having and worth dividing. The elation
of it all tingled in his veins, and he felt like singing. London, the
far distant, the inaccessible, now hummed in his ears. He saw the
eddying, crowded streets, the emptying play-houses, the grey river
sparkling with lights. The smoke of a native oven thrilled him with
memories of the underground, and he had but to close his eyes and the
surf thundered with the noise of arriving trains.
The house could not contain him and his eager thoughts; he must needs
feel the sky overhead and the trades against his cheek, and take all
nature into his puny confidence. Besides, Vaiala had now a new charm
for him, one he had never counted on to find. Soon, now, it would
begin to melt into the irrevocable past; its mist-swept mountains, its
forests and roaring waterfalls would fade into nothingness and become
no more than an impalpable phantom of his mind, the stuff that dreams
are made of. He wandered along the path from one settlement to another,
round the great half-moon of the bay, absorbing every impression with a
new and tender interest.
There were a dozen little villages to be passed before he could attain
the rocky promontory that barred the western shore, pretty hamlets in
groves of cocoanuts and breadfruit, in each perhaps a dozen beehive
houses and as many sheds and boat-shelters. Between village and village
the path led him under rustling palms and beside the shallow waters of
the lagoon and across a river where he surprised some laughing girls at
their bath. In the deep shade old men were mending nets, and children
were playing tag and cricket with boisterous shouts, or marbles in
sandy places. From one house he heard the clapping hands that announced
the _’ava_; in another the song and stamp of practising dancers. Hard
and lonely though his life had been, this Samoan bay was endeared to
him by a thousand pleasant memories and even by the recollection of
his past unhappiness. Here he had found peace and love, freedom from
taskmasters, scenes more beautiful than any picture, and, not least,
a sufficiency to eat. A little money and his life might have been
tolerable, even happy--enough money for a good-sized boat, a cow or
two, and those six acres of the Pascoe estate he had so often longed
to buy. Only the month before, the American consul had offered them
for two hundred dollars Chile money, and here he was with two hundred
and fifty pounds in his pocket, seventeen hundred and fifty dollars
currency! Cruel fate, that had made him in one turn of her wrist
far too rich to care. He would buy them for Leata, he supposed; he
must leave the girl some land to live on. But where now were all the
day-dreams of the laying out of his little estate?--the damming of the
noisy stream, the fencing, terracing, and path-making he had had in
mind; the mangoes, oranges, and avocados he had meant to plant in that
teeming soil, with coffee enough for a modest reserve? What a snug,
cosy garden a man could make of it! What a satisfaction it might have
been! How often had he talked of it with Leata, who had been no less
eager than himself to harness their quarter-acre to the six and make of
them all a little paradise.
Poor Leata! whom he had taken so lightly from her father’s house and
paid for in gunpowder and kegs of beef--his smiling, soft-eyed Leata,
who would have died for him! What was to become of her in this new
arrangement of things? The six acres would provide for her, of course;
in breadfruit, cocoanuts, and bananas she would not be badly off: but
where was the solace for the ache in her heart, for her desolation and
abandonment? He sighed as he thought of her, the truest friend he had
found in all his wanderings. He would get her some jewellery from Apia,
and a chest of new dresses, and a big musical box, if she fancied it.
What would it matter if he did go home in the steerage? It would be no
hardship to a man like him. She would soon forget him, no doubt, and
take up with somebody else, and live happily ever afterwards in the six
acres. Ah, well! he mustn’t think too much about her, or it would take
the edge off his high spirits and spoil the happiest day of his life.
By this time he had worked quite round the bay, and almost without
knowing it he found himself in front of Paul Engelbert’s store.
Engelbert was the other trader in Vaiala--a passionate, middle-aged
Prussian, who had been a good friend of his before those seven
breadfruit-trees had come between them. In his new-found affluence and
consequent good humour the bitterness of that old feud suddenly passed
away. He recalled Engelbert’s rough, jovial kindness--remembered how
Paul had cared for him through the fever, and helped him afterwards
with money and trade. How could he have been so petty as to make a
quarrel of those breadfruit-trees? He recollected, with indescribable
wonder at himself, that he had once drawn a pistol on the old fellow,
and all this over six feet of boundary and seven gnawed breadfruits!
By Jove! he could afford to be generous and hold out the right hand of
friendship. Poor old Paul! it was a shame they had not spoken these two
years.
On the verandah, barefoot and in striped pyjamas, was Engelbert,
pretending not to see him. Kinross thought he looked old and sick and
not a little changed.
“How do you do, Engelbert?” he said.
The German looked at him with smouldering eyes. “Gan’t you see I’m
busy?” he said.
“You might offer a man a chair,” said Kinross, seating himself on the
tool-chest.
“Dere iss no jare for dem dat issn’t welgome,” said the German.
“I used to be welcome here,” said Kinross. “There was a time when you
were a precious good friend of mine, Paul Engelbert.”
“Dat wass long ago,” said the trader.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Kinross, “that I’ve acted like a damned fool
about those trees.”
“Dat wass what I wass dinking, too, dese two dree years,” responded the
other.
“Take them; they are yours,” said Kinross. “You can build your fence
there to-morrow.”
“So!” said Engelbert, with dawning intelligence. “The Yerman gonsul has
at last to my gomplaint listened.”
“Hang the German consul! No!” cried Kinross. “I do it myself, because I
was wrong--because you were good to me that time I was sick, and lent
me the hundred dollars and the trade.”
“And you want noding?” asked Engelbert, still incredulous.
“I want to shake your hand and be friends again, old man,” said
Kinross, “same as we used to be when we played dominoes every night,
and you’d tell me about the Austrian War, and how the Prince divided
his cigars with you when you were wounded.”
The German looked away. “Oh, Kinross,” he said, with a shining look
in his eyes, “you make me much ashamed.” He turned suddenly round and
wrung the Englishman’s hand in an iron grasp. “I, too, was dam fool.”
“A friend is worth more than seven breadfruits,” said Kinross.
“It wass not breadfruid: it wass brincible,” said the German. “Poof! de
drees dey are noding; here it wass I wass hurted,” and he laid a heavy
paw against his breast. “Ho, Malia, de beer!”
His strapping native wife appeared with bottles and mugs; at the sight
of their guest she could scarcely conceal her surprise.
“Prosit!” said Engelbert, touching glasses.
“You know dem six agers of de Pasgoe estate,” he said, looking very
hard at his companion. “Very nice leetle place, very sheap, yoost
behind your store?”
Kinross nodded, but his face fell in spite of himself.
“I from the American gonsul bought him,” went on the German, “very
sheap: two hundred dollars Chile money.”
Kinross looked black. Engelbert patted his hand and smiled ambiguously.
“Dey are yours,” he said. “Pay me back when you have de money. I buy
dem only to spite you. _My friend_, take dem.”
“Paul, Paul,” cried Kinross, “I don’t know what to say--how to thank
you. Only this morning I got money from home, and the first thing I
meant to do was to buy them.”
“All de better,” said Engelbert; “and, my boy, you blant goffee.
Cobrah, poof! Gotton, poof! It’s de goffee dat bays, and I will get you
blenty leetle drees from my friend, de gaptain in Utumabu Blantation.
You must go? So? Yoost one glass beer. Nein? I will be round lader.”
Kinross tore himself away with difficulty and started homeward, his
heart swelling with kindness for the old Prussian. He exulted in the
six acres he had so nearly lost, and they now seemed to him more
precious than ever. It was no empty promise, that of the coffee-trees
from Utumapu; these would save him all manner of preparatory labor and
put his little plantation six months ahead. Then he remembered he was
leaving Vaiala, and again he heard the hum of London in his ears. Well,
he would explain about the trees to Leata, and would beg old Engelbert
to help and advise her a bit. Poor Leata! she had lots of good sense
and was very quick to learn. He could trust Leata.
He was crossing the _malae_, or common, of Polapola, when the sight of
the chief’s house put a new thought into his head. It was Tangaloa’s
house, and he could see the chief himself bulking dimly in the shadow
of a _siapo_. Tangaloa! He hadn’t spoken with him in a year. The old
fellow had been good to him, and in the beginning had overwhelmed him
with kindnesses. But that was before he had shot the chief’s dog and
brought about the feud that had existed between them for so long. It
was annoying to have that everlasting dog on his verandah at night,
frightening Leata to death and spilling the improvised larder all about
the floor, not to speak of the chickens it had eaten and the eggs it
had sucked. No, he could not blame himself for having shot that beast
of a dog! But it had made bad blood between him and Tangaloa, and had
cost him, in one way or another, through the loss of the old chief’s
custom and influence, the value of a thousand chickens. But he would
make it up with Tangaloa, for he meant to leave no man’s ill will
behind him. So he walked deliberately towards the house, and slipped
under the eaves near the place where the old chief was sitting alone.
“_Talofa_, Tangaloa,” he cried out cordially, shaking hands.
The chief responded somewhat drily to the salutation and assumed a
vacant expression.
“That dog!” began the trader.
“That dog!” repeated the chief, with counterfeit surprise.
“Thy dog, the one I shot near my house,” said Kinross, firing up with
the memory of its misdeeds, “the dog that chased my chickens, and ate
my eggs, and plagued me all night like a forest devil--I want to take
counsel with your Highness about it.”
“But it is dead,” said Tangaloa.
“But thy high-chief anger is not dead,” said Kinross. “Behold, I used
to be like your son, and the day was no longer than thy love for me. I
am overcome with sorrow to remember the years that are gone, and now to
live together as we do in enmity. What is the value of thy dog, that I
may pay thee for it, and what present can I make besides that will turn
thy heart towards me again?”
“Cease,” said the chief; “there was no worth to the dog, and I have no
anger against thee, Kinilosi.”
“You mock at me, Tangaloa,” said Kinross. “There is anger in thine eyes
even as thou speakest to me.”
“Great was my love for that dog,” said the chief. “It licked my face
when I lay wounded on the battle-ground. If I whistled it came to me,
so wise was it and loving; and if I were sick it would not eat.”
“Weighty is my shame and pain,” said the trader. “Would that I had
never lifted my gun against it! But I will pay thee its worth and make
thee a present besides.”
“Impossible,” said Tangaloa. “When the cocoanut is split, who can make
it whole?”
“One can always get a new cocoanut,” said Kinross. “I will buy thee the
best dog in Apia, a high chief of a dog, clever like a consul, and with
a bark melodious as a musical box.”
At this Tangaloa laughed for the first time. “And what about thy
chickens?” he demanded, “and thy things to eat hung out at night?”
“It can eat all the chickens it likes,” returned Kinross, “and I will
feed it daily, also, with salt beef and sardines, if that will make us
friends again, your Highness.”
“Cease, Kinilosi; I am thy friend already,” said Tangaloa, extending
his hand. “It is forgotten about the dog, and lo, the anger is buried.”
“And the price?” inquired Kinross.
“One cannot buy friendship or barter loving-kindness,” said Tangaloa.
“Again I tell thee there is no price. But if thou wouldst care to give
me a bottle of kerosene, for the lack of which I am sore distressed
these nights--well, I should be very glad.”
“I shall be pleased indeed,” said the trader, who of a sudden assumed
an intent, listening attitude.
“What is the matter?” demanded Tangaloa.
“Sh-sh!” exclaimed the white man.
“There is nothing,” said the chief.
“Yes, yes,” said Kinross; “listen, your Highness! A faint, faint bark
like that of a spirit dog.”
“Oh,” said the chief, looking about uneasily.
“Dost thee not hear it?” cried Kinross, incredulously. “To me it is
clear like the mission bell, thus: ‘Bow-wow-wow-give-also-some-sugar-
and-some-tea-and-some-tobacco-to-his-Highness-Tangaloa-bow-wow-wow!’”
The old chief fairly beamed. “Blessed was my dog in life, and blessed
in death also!” he cried. “Behold, Kinilosi, he also barks about a few
fish-hooks in a bag, and for a small subscription to our new church.”
“I think he says fifty cents,” said Kinross.
“No, no,” cried the chief; “it was like this--quite plain:
‘One-dollar-one-dollar!’”
“That ends it,” said Kinross. “I must haste to obey the voice of the
spirit dog. Good-bye, your Highness.”
“Good-bye, Kinilosi,” returned the chief, warmly. “I laugh and talk
jestingly, but my heart--”
“Mine also,” added Kinross, quickly, again grasping the old man’s hand.
He strode off with a light step, in a glow of enthusiasm and high
spirits. It would be hard to leave the old village, after all. He might
travel far and not find hearts more generous or kindly, and he vowed
he would never forget his Samoans--no, if he lived a thousand years.
And if, after all, the new order of things should fail to please, and
he should find himself stifled by the civilisation to which he had
been so long a stranger, could he not always return to this little
paradise, and live out the number of his days in perennial content? He
would search for some savings-bank in London, and place there to his
credit a sum large enough to ship him back to the Islands. Whatever
the pinch, it should lie there untouched and sacred; and as he toiled
in the stern, grey land of his birth, the thought of that secret hoard
would always be a comfort to him. But what if the bank should break, as
banks do in those centres of the high civilisation, and he should find
himself stranded half the world away from the place he loved so dearly?
He shivered at the thought. There should be two hoards, in two banks,
or else he would feel continually uneasy. The line to the rear must be
kept open at any cost.
He found Leata sitting on the floor, spelling out “The Good News from
New Guinea” in the missionary magazine. She was fresh from her bath,
and her black, damp hair was outspread to the sunshine to dry. She
rippled with smiles at his approach, and it seemed to him she had
never looked more radiant and engaging. He sat down beside her, and
pressed her curly hair against his lips and kissed it. How was it that
such a little savage could appear to him more alluring than any white
woman he had ever seen? Was he bewitched? He looked at her critically,
dispassionately, and marvelled at the perfection of her wild young
beauty, marvelled, too, at her elegance and delicacy. And for heart
and tenderness, where was her match in all the seas? He threw his arm
round her and kissed her on the lips.
“Of all things in the world what wouldst thou like the most, Leata?” he
asked.
“To have thee always near me, Kinilosi,” she answered. “Before, I had
no understanding and was like the black people in the missionary book,
but now my heart is pained, so full it is with love.”
“But there are other things than love,” persisted Kinross. “Ear-rings,
musical boxes, print for dresses.”
“Yes, many things,” she said. “But I trouble not myself about them,
Kinilosi. But sometimes I think of the land behind our house and the
fine plantation we will make there some day.”
“But if I gave you a little bag of gold shillings,” he said, “and took
thee to Apia, my pigeon, what wouldst thou buy?”
“First I would give ten dollars to the new church,” she began. “Then
for my father I would buy an umbrella, and a shiny bag in which he
could carry his cartridges and tobacco when he goes to war. For
my mother, also, an umbrella and a picture-book like that of the
missionary’s, with photographs of Queen Victoria and captains of
men-of-war. For my sister a Bible and a hymn-book, and for my brother a
little pigeon gun.”
“O thou foolish Leata,” said Kinross, “and nothing for thyself?”
“There is still more in my bag,” she answered, “enough for a golden
locket and a golden chain. And in the locket there will be your picture
and a lock of your hair--like the one the naval officer gave Titi’s
sister; and when I die, lo, no one shall touch it, for it shall lie on
my breast in the grave!”
“To-morrow we shall go to Apia and buy them,” said Kinross. “This
morning the pastor brought me a letter from Britain with a present of
many dollars. The six acres I have already purchased, and in Apia I
shall get prickly wire for fencing, and many things we need for the
clearing and planting of the land.”
Leata clapped her hands for joy. “Oh, Kinilosi,” she cried, “it was
breaking my heart. I feared the letter would make thee return to the
White Country!”
Kinross looked at her with great gentleness. His resolution was taken,
be it for good or evil.
“I shall never go back,” he said.
Then in a rousing voice he cried, so loudly that the natives in the
neighbouring houses started at the sound: “In Vaiala shall I live, and
in Vaiala die!”
FATHER ZOSIMUS
FATHER ZOSIMUS