A BLACK OBJECT-LESSON
"It's a wonderful world!" said Aunt Jannet Harvey, for the four hundred
and fourteenth time since, one by one, the Forelands and Dungeness and
Beachy Head faded over the quarter as they ran down Channel. "And it
gets more and more wonderful the further you go. Jean, my dear, have
you ever in your dreams seen anything equal to that?"
"Never!" murmured Jean, wide-eyed and breathless, lest the smallest
display of the ordinary functions of living should resolve into its
natural elements the ethereal vision before them.
And yet it was only a tiny South Sea atoll, one of the myriad gleaming
gems that deck the bosom of the great southern ocean in clusters, and
strings, and ropes, and solitaires, from the Pelews to Pitcairn, of
visible beauty indescribable, and in some cases possessed of natural
latent treacherousness hardly second thereto.
It was still dusky twilight when they three climbed the companion, to
taste the sweet of the dawn and watch the perpetual wonder of the
coming day. They had learned already to rejoice in the dawnings as the
purest and fullest revelations of Nature's exuberant largesse. The
sunsets were gorgeous and magnificent beyond compare, but they had in
them the elements of dissolution and decay, whereas the pure pearl
splendours of the dawn sang full and true of new birth, new hopes, and
the deep springs of life and joy.
Anxious as he was to get to his life's work, and grudging every moment
and every league that lay between it and him, Blair had still felt it a
duty to afford Jean every possible enjoyment of travel which the voyage
could offer her. She was giving up much, she was going into outer
exile for his sake; the chance might never come again. She should see
all that was possible before the fringes fell behind them. And so they
had come by way of Suez, and touched at Bombay and Ceylon, and then
away to Australia and New Zealand, and then a great stretch round the
outer skirts of the Australs and Paumotus, with only such stoppages as
were absolutely necessary, and then straight for the work that awaited
them.
"The rest of the Islands we can take by degrees," he said. "They will
be our holiday grounds in the years to come. But now I am anxious to
know what is going on in the Dark Islands. So very much may be
happening behind that black curtain."
They were a gay and gallant company on board, not a long face among
them. They were going to whatever might await them of strenuous life
and heroic endeavour. No single one of them but was ready to lay down
his or her life in the cause that lay so close to their hearts, and
they found therein reason, not for doubts or fears, but wholly of
exaltation. It was a mighty work, and they rejoiced in being chosen
for it.
Blair had selected for his fellow-workers, from among a host of
applicants, two young fellows whose qualifications satisfied him in
every respect, and whose special training supplemented the deficiencies
in his own. He is the wisest man who best knows what he knows least.
The man who knows everything is generally useless at a pinch.
Well-equipped as he was in most respects--perfect, indeed, in the eyes
of his wife, as was only right and proper--no man had a deeper
appreciation of his own limitations than Blair himself. He had the
fiery heart for the righting of wrongs, and the clear head and strong
hand. But there were things beyond his ken--that is, in their very
fullest compass--and in choosing his co-workers he kept these steadily
in view.
For instance, he had a fair knowledge himself of medicine and
rough-and-ready surgery. But he wanted very much more. And so Charles
Evans, a Devonshire man, and M.D. and M.S. of London, became his
medical right hand.
Then he had himself a certain aptitude for languages and dialects. He
had picked up the _lingua franca_ of the islands rapidly. But he
wanted very much more. Charles Stuart, M.A., of Edinburgh, had made
languages the congenial study of a lifetime which ran to nearly
twenty-eight years. If any man could reduce phonetic elisions and
hiatuses to written and printed symbols, Stuart was that man.
Then they were both big athletic fellows, runners and swimmers, great
at games of all kinds, and handy with their hands, and they were as
keen on letting light into the dark places of the earth as Blair
himself. And they had both got married, at Blair's suggestion, and to
the great satisfaction of the four people most immediately
concerned--Evans, the Devonshire man, marrying Alison Carmichael,
daughter of Dr. Carmichael of Edinburgh, and herself a medical student
of no mean pretensions, and withal a good-looking, hearty girl, full of
energy and spirits; and Stuart, the Scot, had married Mary Coventry, an
English girl, daughter of a professor in a Lancashire theological
college. She had a great natural aptitude for teaching, and was
governessing when Stuart fell in love with her. She had promised to
marry him when his circumstances should permit, and was cheerfully
facing that very indefinite future when Blair's offer of the coveted
post swept all the clouds away, and lifted her to a pinnacle of
happiness which she was only becoming accustomed to by degrees.
With these four we have not very much to do. They proved most devoted
assistants and pleasant and helpful companions throughout. But this is
the story of Kenneth and Jean Blair, and if these others receive but
slight mention, it is not because their hearts lacked fire or their
lives incident, but simply through limitations of space.
So the _Torch_ held three happy couples on their honeymoons, and Aunt
Jannet Harvey played mother-in-law to them all, and kept the whole ship
in high good-humour by her own energetic enjoyment of every smallest
item of the day's doings.
Captain Cathie, by means of diligent search and stringent inquiry, had
secured a crew after his own heart, every man a Clydesman, and some of
them he had known since they were boys.
They carried a full complement. Besides himself and the mate, there
were twenty men all told, stalwarts all, and Blair expected to find use
for every man of them. Besides the big white whale-boats at the
davits, there were two extra steam-launches in sections in the hold for
inter-island work, and there were other reasons why he wanted behind
him a thoroughly dependable band of tried white men instead of the
usual mixture of Kanakas.
Forecasted shadows of those other reasons might have been found in the
way in which he set to work, during the long weeks that lay between New
Zealand and the Australs, to make marksmen of his peaceful crew.
Bottles, hung from the yards, or set afloat on the sea, were their
targets, and they most of them became fair shots. And one day Captain
Cathie turned a cask overboard and stuck a white flag in it, and when
it had floated almost out of sight he trained the long brown steel gun
amidships on it, and bent and squinted carefully, and kept them so long
in suspense, that the ladies screamed aloud when the gun did at last go
off, and the white water flashed up close alongside the white flag.
"Within three feet, I should say, captain," said Blair, with the
captain's glass at his eye. "Your hand and eye have not lost their
cunning." And again and again the smiling captain displayed his
prowess.
Another day he had the Maxim up and showed the men how to handle it.
And cutlass drill became as regular a part of the daily routine as the
fifteen-minute service that opened and closed the day.
Strange traffic indeed for a ship dedicated to peace and the spreading
of the Light! But they all understood the meaning of these things, and
the necessities that might arise, and the advisability of being
prepared. For the very first Sunday night out from New Zealand, Blair,
in that quiet, masterful fashion of his, which carried conviction once
and for all into his hearers' souls and admitted of no shadow of a
doubt, had taken occasion to explain the why and the wherefore of these
apparent incongruities, and none of them ever forgot it.
It was a windless evening after a blistering day. The sea was like
oil, with a long, slow, unbroken swell that set the little ship rolling
in solemn rhythmical fashion which Stuart, the man of tongues, had long
since dubbed heroic hexameters. And there, to the little company
sitting facing him on deck in the gathering darkness, with an
occasional sleepy "moo" from the farmyard in the bows, or the shrill
squeakings of discontented piglets, and an admonitory grunt from their
over-taxed mother, Blair described some of the things he had seen with
his own eyes, and others which he had had direct from his dear old
friend and leader, John Gerson, whose experience had been so much
vaster than his own. Their hearts boiled at the mere recounting of the
things he told them, and not a man or woman of them all but was ready
to answer his utmost bidding in the effort to put them down.
"Ignorant these islanders are, and degraded, and the victims of
horrible superstitions and practices unspeakable," he said, in closing;
"but they have common living rights with the rest of us. Until those
rights are secured to them, and until they learn that a white face is
not necessarily the mask for a black heart, our work is futile. That
security, by God's help, we intend to bring to them. If we can do it
peacefully, I shall be grateful. If force is necessary, force we shall
apply. But remember--we are going, not to punish, but to protect.
Christ in righteous anger drove the defilers out of the Temple so that
the Temple might be clean. God's Temple is here also. To the extent
of our power and opportunity we will cleanse it, and by freeing these
simple folk from bodily perils, we will give them the chance to redeem
their souls alive."
They had swept along on the steady west wind for weeks. Now and again
it dropped and left them rolling idly, with listless sails and jerking
masts. But it always blew up again in time, and sent them swinging
once more on their way, and at times it blew up so strong, and set up
such an awkward sea, that their lives were almost battered out of them.
Blair, Evans, and Stuart apprenticed themselves to carpenter and
engineers, and learned many things they did not know before. The men
grew intimate with their rifles and cutlasses, the ladies talked much,
read much, and they all took regular lessons in Samoan, as a foundation
for the Polynesian tongues generally, from a native teacher who had
been sent over to Sydney to meet them at Blair's request. His name was
Matti, and he was a pleasing specimen of his kind, intelligent,
painstaking, and of infinite good temper, but of a most peaceful, not
to say lamb-like, disposition.
Among the many other diversions of their long voyage, Evans one day
suggested that they should all be vaccinated, and was unmercifully
chaffed for the idea.
"Isn't that like a young sawbones?" laughed Captain Cathie. "Just
because we've got a clean bill, and he's got nothing to do, he's after
making work just to keep his hand in."
But Evans persisted that they were going they knew not where, and no
precautions ought to be omitted. And he talked so learnedly, and with
so grave a foreboding, that by degrees they came to think he was
perhaps right, and that it might be as well to be on the safe side of
possibility. So, one after another, they meekly submitted their arms
to the needle, and time came when they were glad of his persistence.
"Wonderful!--wonderful!" said Aunt Jannet Harvey once more that
morning, in a whisper of concentrated rapture, and the others gazed at
the tiny atoll without speaking, lest a breath should destroy it.
They had sighted the island the evening before, just a feathery fringe
on the rim of the sea; but Captain Cathie was a devout believer in the
enchantment of distance till full light of day should disclose possible
pitfalls. For in these Southern Seas Nature sometimes gets ahead of
the cartographers, and he had no desire to mark new reefs for the next
comers with the stark ribs of his ship.
But now, in the dim of the dawn, they were wafting slowly towards it,
with intent to land there for vegetables and fruit and water, and it
grew visibly on their sight like a new-created thing.
Until a moment ago it had lain in the shadows. Then the eastern
dimness softened, a mere quickening of hidden life, almost
imperceptible, felt rather than seen. Then a soft pulsation, a throb
from the heart of the coming day. The dimness trembled, a rosy
softness diffused itself, and suddenly the background of the sky was
filled with colour, palest green and tenderest rose and amber. And
these grew and grew and deepened into crimson and gold, with swathes of
diaphanous purple as the soft greens strengthened slowly into blue.
And as it was above, so it was below, all duplicated in the flawless
mirror of the sea. And there, between the upper and the lower glory,
lay the enchanted isle gleaming darkly in the broken lights--a ring of
feathery coco-palms and bosky undergrowth round an inner lagoon, a
placid lake outside it, and outside that, still another protecting ring
of reef dotted here and there with tiny feathered islets. A most
wonderful and entrancing sight, so fairy-like and fragile that Jean
felt it almost dangerous to breathe aloud.
Then the sun soared up above the sea-rim, and the atoll solidified and
came out in its natural colours of dazzling white beach, and blue
lagoons, and greens of every shade, from the tender tints of the
budding palms to the cast-iron crests of the grey-boled giants, and the
huddled mixture of the undergrowth. It lost in beauty as it gained in
strength, but it looked more like solid land and less like a fairy
vision, more like possible fruit and vegetables and less like a
dissolving view.
All the company was on deck by this time, and all eyes were fixed on
the island, as Captain Cathie in the bows conned the little ship slowly
towards a wide opening in the outer reef, with a vigilant eye for
hidden perils.
He had told them from the chart that it was the Three-Ringed Island of
Atoa, but he had never been there himself and one could not be too
cautious.
Then in the clear depths below them, as they crept slowly through the
water-gate, they could see the wonderful forestry of the branching
coral and the gleam of many-coloured shells, and the place was all
alive with fishes of every tint and hue, sailing and darting like
fragmentary rainbows.
But Captain Cathie was staring through his glasses at the distant white
beach for signs of occupation, and found none. It was still early,
however, and the village might be round the bend of the island. He
carried the _Torch_ in as far as he deemed safe, and then, at the word,
the anchor plunged and the chain ran merrily out, and the little ship
rode at rest for the first time in many days.
"Who is for the shore?" cried Blair, in the voice and manner of a jolly
schoolboy offering treats.
They were all for the shore. After three weeks of continuous sailing
the feel of solid ground under one's feet would be a novelty.
"Though I expect," said Aunt Jannet Harvey, "it'll be as hard to walk
straight at first as it was not to walk crooked on the ship. I've got
so used to walking on the sides of my feet, and balancing to the
rolling, that I've almost forgotten what it feels like to walk any
other way."
In ten minutes they were all speeding shorewards in one of the white
whale-boats, and when Aunt Jannet Harvey cumbrously made the close
acquaintance of the white beach, she found her feet no whit behind
those of her younger companions in their eager activity.
They all stamped up the crunching coral with merry talk and laughter.
Aunt Jannet Harvey stood at the foot of her first really intimate
coco-nut tree, and gazed up the slim spire to the great benignant
fronds and hanging fruit, with such intention of longing, that Jean, in
a convulsion of laughter, cried--
"Do try it, auntie! I'm sure you could manage it if you tried hard."
"And if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, Aunt Jannet!"
laughed Blair.
They left her still gazing, and scattered, Jean and Mary Stuart and
Alison Evans diving into the undergrowth after armfuls of greenery and
trailing vines, and twittering like escaped birds when, now and again,
they came on treasure-trove of scarlet hibiscus blooms glowing on the
green like fiery stars--or splashes of blood.
The men pressed on at once up the ridge to get a general view of their
surroundings, and Captain Cathie, with a couple of his men, pulled
slowly down the lagoon in search of the village.
He heard the merry calls of the explorers, and wondered at the absence
of any sign of life on the island. The very sight of an approaching
ship used, in his time, to bring the population to the beach. But
things had changed of course since then, and byways had become highways.
The white boat jerked slowly along round the bend, and the voices
ashore grew less distinct. And suddenly his lips pinched and his brow
crumpled, and he gazed ahead with a fixed, angry glare which set his
men wondering what they were coming to, and carried their chins to
their shoulders unconsciously.
A stretch of white beach, a bristle of black posts jutting out of the
cleared ground above--that was all. But Cathie's experience read them
like three-feet letters on a city hoarding.
He threw up one hand and jammed the tiller hard down with the other.
"Round with her, boys!" and they were swinging back up the lagoon to
get the women aboard again. For there might be sights in the brush
along that ridge to shock the souls of men.
Blair, Evans, and Stuart, with Matti, the Samoan, and the rest of the
boat's crew, climbed the backbone of the island, whose highest point
attained an altitude of perhaps thirty feet.
They were standing looking across the flawless mirror of the central
lagoon, when the Samoan broke out suddenly, "Sirs, I presume advice.
Return fortwit to ship. This place is not good," and when they all
turned on him in surprise, they found his brown face strained and
pallid with fear, his eyes starting, and his nose dilated like a
startled stag's.
"Why, Matti, what's wrong?" said Blair.
The brown man shook his head.
"I know not, sirs," and his white teeth chattered so that his chin
wagged visibly. "There is evil abroad. It is in the air, in the
tree-tops."
They looked up for sign of the evil, but saw only the heavy plumes of
the coco-palms nodding mournfully in the breeze. Down below the air
seemed heavy and somewhat sickly, and so far they had seen no sign of
life on the island.
"The place seems deserted," said Evans.
"We will go on along here a bit further," said Blair, "and if there is
nothing more to be seen, we'll turn back I'm afraid it's a poor
look-out for fruit and vegetables," and they tramped on in silence,
Matti well in the rear, reluctant to go, still more reluctant to be
left.
And presently the brush thinned, and they came out on the clearing, and
Blair stopped abruptly with a face as strained as Matti's, but grimmer
and whiter, and Matti, stumbling up to the rear, gave a groan as though
to say, "I knew it."
"God help us!" said Blair through his teeth, for they had found what
Cathie had feared.
The blackened posts of the houses stuck up starkly through the sand as
though in mute and pitiful appeal. Beneath them were heaps of
wind-blown ashes barely covering that which they had mercifully hidden.
And among the mounds as they drew near was a sound of rustling and
stealthy movement, and here and there monstrous crabs, too gorged to
move almost, essayed escape into their temporary burrows.
The newcomers stared wide-eyed and horror-stricken. Blair had seen it
all before, and the grim white of his face gave place to grim red and
black as his heart drummed furiously with righteous indignation.
"This is the horror we have come to fight," he said hoarsely. "This is
what I told you of. Now you see it with your own eyes. The place has
been swept bare by kidnappers. These died in defence of their homes
and wives and children. Let us get back. It is no sight for the
women."
He waved them away, but something caught his eye, and he went forward
and bent over it with tight-pinched face for a moment, and then turned
abruptly and followed the others.
But, even as he turned, a shriek from the lower brush told that it was
too late to save the women from some visible knowledge of what had
taken place. They turned and ran back along the ridge.
Mary Stuart, reaching for a flower, saw at her feet what she took for a
fallen coco-nut, and stooped to pick it up, and then screamed aloud and
sat down suddenly with a sick, white face. The others hurried up,
Alison Evans and Aunt Jannet Harvey reaching her first.
"What is it, dear?" asked Aunt Jannet, and then she saw, and sat down
heavily beside her.
Alison had her nerves under better control. She had seen little dead
bodies before, but the sight of a murdered child is a shock to any
woman. Her face was white and rigid, but she had her wits about her
also.
"Take them all away," she whispered fiercely to Aunt Jannet Harvey, and
Aunt Jannet, just needing that spur, scrambled up and gripped Mary
Stuart by the shoulder and dragged her away as Jean came running up,
asking, "What is it? What's the matter?"
"Come away, child!--come away! It is a little murdered baby. Alison
is seeing to it, but it is quite dead. Let us get away. Here is the
boat and Captain Cathie."
Everything was changed as the white boat plunged back across the lagoon
to the ship. The men's faces were hard and angry, the women's white
and pitiful. Alison Evans wept silently now. She had seen more than
the others, and that soft little head, crushed in by one murderous blow
against the tree, would haunt her dreams for nights to come.
The sun shone as brightly as before, but there was something pitiless
in his unwinking glare. The sea was as placid and sparkling as before,
but there was a fawning treachery in its very smoothness. The palms
behind waved their feathers just as before, but now they were funeral
plumes. The very oars no longer chirped merrily in the rowlocks, but
croaked in a way that got on the women's nerves. And not one of them
spoke till they were safe aboard the ship.
"Yes," nodded Blair to Cathie's look of interrogation, "we will go on
at once," and the anchor chain rattled up hoarsely, and they went
slowly and silently on their way, and left the beautiful island to its
dead.
"I saw it from the water," said Cathie later to Blair, "and turned to
get the ladies away, but I was too late. Did you see anything to give
you any hint as to who it was, sir?"
"Yes. Peruvians, I should say. There was one yellow man among the
dead, and they recruit mostly from these outer islands. Before God,
captain, I will put a stop to this kind of work, whatever the cost may
be."
"We're with you, sir, every man of us. See those men's faces!"
And grim and determined enough were the men's faces as they went about
their work. For those who had seen had told those who had not seen,
and the impression was a deep one.
That night Blair called them all together, and spoke of the matter in a
way that went home and confirmed the spirit that had been roused in
them by that holocaust on the island.
"It is devil's work, men," he wound up, "and, please God, we'll stop
it. Are you with me?"
"Ay, ay, sir!" "That we are, sir!" "All the way, sir!" and so on, in
tones that left no mistake about it.
"You can understand the effect of that kind of work on these islanders.
It is not often so clean a sweep is made as the one we saw this
morning. And where part are taken and part are left, can you wonder
that those who remain hate and fear the very sight of a white face?
Have they not reason? It will be our endeavour to stop these raids,
and, by protecting the islanders, gradually win them over to better
ways. Once we can make them see that we care for them, and think of
their welfare and not our own, half the battle is won. On the one side
we may have to fight--not our own countrymen, I am glad to say. These
raiders come mostly from the west coast of South America, and they go
to lengths which the Queenslanders rarely do. And, on the other hand,
in our dealings with the natives, we must remember what they have
suffered, what reason they have to mistrust us, and we must be very
forbearing and longsuffering. On the one side I want you--and I shall
need the whole-hearted assistance of every man of you--I want you to be
bold as lions, and on the other side as mild as milk. Only so can our
work be done, and it is a mighty work."