The trade-room of the _Morning Star_; Lying Bill Pincher;
M. L'Hermier des Plantes, future governor of the Marquesas;
story of McHenry and the little native boy, His Dog.
"Come 'ave a drink!" Captain Pincher called from the cabin, and
leaving the spray-swept deck where the rain drummed on the canvas
awning I went down the four steps into the narrow cabin-house.
The cabin, about twenty feet long, had a tiny semi-private room for
Captain Pincher, and four berths ranged about a table. Here, grouped
around a demijohn of rum, I found Captain Pincher with my three
fellow-passengers; McHenry and Gedge, the traders, and M. L'Hermier
des Plantes, a young officer of the French colonial army, bound to
the Marquesas to be their governor.
The captain was telling the story of the wreck in which he had lost
his former ship. He had tied up to a reef for a game of cards with a
like-minded skipper, who berthed beside him. The wind changed while
they slept. Captain Pincher awoke to find his schooner breaking her
backs on the coral rocks.
"Oo can say wot the blooming wind will do?" he said, thumping the
table with his glass. "There was Willy's schooner tied up next to me,
and 'e got a slant and slid away, while my boat busts 'er sides open
on the reef, The 'ole blooming atoll was 'eaped with the blooming
cargo. Willy 'ad luck; I 'ad 'ell. It's all an 'azard."
He had not found his aitches since he left Liverpool, thirty years
earlier, nor dropped his silly expletives. A gray-haired, red-faced,
laughing man, stockily built, mild mannered, he proved, as the
afternoon wore on, to be a man from whom Münchausen might have
gained a story or two.
"They call me Lying Bill," he said to me. "You can't believe wot I
say."
"He's straight as a mango tree, Bill Pincher is," McHenry asserted
loudly. "He's a terrible liar about stories, but he's the best
seaman that comes to T'yti, and square as a biscuit tin. You know how,
when that schooner was stole that he was mate on, and the rotten
thief run away with her and a woman, Bill he went after 'em, and
brought the schooner back from Chile. Bill, he's whatever he says he
is, all right--but he can sail a schooner, buy copra and shell cheap,
sell goods to the bloody natives, and bring back the money to the
owners. That's what I call an honest man."
Lying Bill received these hearty words with something less than his
usual good-humor. There was no friendliness in his eye as he looked
at McHenry, whose empty glass remained empty until he himself
refilled it. Bullet-headed, beady-eyed, a chunk of rank flesh shaped
by a hundred sordid adventures, McHenry clutched at equality with
these men, and it eluded him. Lying Bill, making no reply to his
enthusiastic commendation, retired to his bunk with a paper-covered
novel, and to cover the rebuff McHenry turned to talk of trade with
Gedge, who spoke little.
The traderoom of the _Morning Star_, opening from the cabin, was to
me the door to romance. When I was a boy there was more flavor in
traderooms than in war. To have seen one would have been as a
glimpse of the Holy Grail to a sworn knight. Those traderooms of my
youthful imagination smelt of rum and gun-powder, and beside them
were racks of rifles to repel the dusky figures coming over the
bulwarks.
The traderoom of the _Morning Star_ was odorous, too. It had no
window, and when one opened the door all was obscure at first, while
smells of rank Tahiti tobacco, cheap cotton prints, a broken bottle
of perfume and scented soaps struggled for supremacy. Gradually the
eye discovered shelves and bins and goods heaped from floor to
ceiling; pins and anchors, harpoons and pens, crackers and jewelry,
cloth, shoes, medicine and tomahawks, socks and writing paper.
Trade business, McHenry's monologue explained, is not what it was.
When these petty merchants dared not trust themselves ashore their
guns guarded against too eager customers. But now almost every
inhabited island has its little store, and the trader has to pursue
his buyers, who die so fast that he must move from island to island
in search of population.
"Booze is boss," said McHenry. "I have two thousand pounds in bank
in Australia, all made by selling liquor to the natives. It's
against French law to sell or trade or give 'em a drop, but we all
do it. If you don't have it, you can't get cargo. In the diving
season it's the only damn thing that'll pass. The divers'll dig up
from five to fifteen dollars a bottle for it, depending on the
French being on the job or not. Ain't that so, Gedge?"
"_C'est vrai_," Gedge assented. He spoke in French, ostensibly for
the benefit of M. L'Hermier des Plantes. That young governor of the
Marquesas was not given to saying much, his chief interest in life
appearing to be an ample black whisker, to which he devoted incessant
tender care. After a few words of broken English he had turned a
negligent attention to the pages of a Marquesan dictionary, in
preparation for his future labors among the natives. Gedge, however,
continued to talk in the language of courts.
It was obvious that McHenry's twenty-five years in French
possessions had not taught him the white man's language. He demanded
brusquely, "What are you _oui-oui_-ing for?" and occasionally
interjected a few words of bastard French in an attempt to be jovial.
To this Gedge paid little attention.
Gedge was chief of the commercial part of the expedition, and his
manner proclaimed it. Thin-lipped, cunning-eyed, but strong and
self-reliant, he was absorbed in the chances of trade. He had been
twenty years in the Marquesas islands. A shrewd man among kanakas,
unscrupulous by his own account, he had prospered. Now, after
selling his business, he was paying a last visit to his long-time
home to settle accounts.
"'Is old woman is a barefoot girl among the cannibals," Lying Bill
said to me later. "'E 'as given a 'ole army of ostriches to fortune,
'e 'as."
One of Captain Pincher's own sons was assistant to the engineer,
Ducat, and helped in the cargo work. The lad lived forward with the
crew, so that we saw nothing of him socially, and his father never
spoke to him save to give an order or a reprimand. Native mothers
mourn often the lack of fatherly affection in their white mates.
Illegitimate children are held cheap by the whites.
[Illustration: Lieutenant L'Hermier des Plantes, Governor of the
Marquesas Islands]
[Illustration: Entrance to a Marquesan bay]
For two days at sea after leaving Papeite we did not see the sun.
This was the rainy and hot season, a time of calms and hurricanes,
of sudden squalls and maddening quietudes, when all signs fail and
the sailor must stand by for the whims of the wind if he would save
himself and his ship. For hours we raced along at seven or eight
knots, with a strong breeze on the quarter and the seas ruffling
about our prow. For still longer hours we pushed through a windless
calm by motor power. Showers fell incessantly.
We lived in pajamas, barefooted, unshaven and unwashed. Fresh water
was limited, as it would be impossible to replenish our casks for
many weeks. McHenry said it was not difficult to accustom one's self
to lack of water, both externally and internally.
There was a demijohn of strong Tahitian rum always on tap in the
cabin. Here we sat to eat and remained to drink and read and smoke.
There was Bordeaux wine at luncheon and dinner, Martinique and
Tahitian rum and absinthe between meals. The ship's bell was struck
by the steersman every half hour, and McHenry made it the knell of
an ounce.
Captain Pincher took a jorum every hour or two and retired to his
berth and novels, leaving the navigation of the _Morning Star_ to
the under-officers. Ducat, the third officer, a Breton, joined us at
meals. He was a decent, clever fellow in his late twenties,
ambitious and clear-headed, but youthfully impressed by McHenry's
self-proclaimed wickedness.
One night after dinner he and McHenry were bantering each other
after a few drinks of rum. McHenry said, "Say, how's your kanaka
woman?"
Ducat's fingers tightened on his glass. Then, speaking English and
very precisely, he asked, "Do you mean my wife?"
"I mean your old woman. What's this wife business?"
"She is my wife, and we have two children."
McHenry grinned. "I know all that. Didn't I know her before you? She
was mine first."
Ducat got up. We all got up. The air became tense, and in the
silence there seemed no motion of ship or wave. I said to myself,
"This is murder."
Ducat, very pale, an inscrutable look on his face, his black eyes
narrowed, said quietly, "Monsieur, do you mean that?"
"Why, sure I do? Why shouldn't I mean it? It's true."
None of us moved, but it was as if each of us stepped back, leaving
the two men facing each other. In this circle no one would interfere.
It was not our affair. Our detachment isolated the two--McHenry quite
drunk, in full command of his senses but with no controlling
intelligence; Ducat not at all drunk, studying the situation,
considering in his rage and humiliation what would best revenge him
on this man.
Ducat spoke, "McHenry, come out of this cabin with me."
"What for?"
"Come with me."
"Oh, all right, all right," McHenry said.
We stepped back as they passed us. They went up the steps to the deck.
Ducat paused at the break of the poop and stood there, speaking to
McHenry. We could not hear his words. The schooner tossed idly, a
faint creaking of the rigging came down to us in the cabin. The same
question was in every eye. Then Ducat turned on his heel, and
McHenry was left alone.
Our question was destined to remain unanswered. Whatever Ducat had
said, it was something that hushed McHenry forever. He never
mentioned the subject again, nor did any of us. But McHenry's
attitude had subtly changed. Ducat's words had destroyed that last
secret refuge of the soul in which every man keeps the vestiges of
self-justification and self-respect.
McHenry sought me out that night while I sat on the cabin-house
gazing at the great stars of the Southern Cross, and began to talk.
"Now take me," he said, "I'm not so bad. I'm as good as most people.
As a matter of fact, I ain't done anything more in my life than
anybody'd've done, if they had the chance. Look at me--I had a
singlet an' a pair of dungarees when I landed on the beach in T'yti,
an' look at me now! I ain't done so bad!"
He must have felt the unconvincing ring of his tone, lacking the
full and complacent self-assurance usual to it, for as if groping
for something to make good the lack he sought backward through his
memories and unfolded bit by bit the tale of his experiences. Scotch
born of drunken parents, he had been reared in the slums of American
cities and the forecastles of American ships. A waif, newsboy, loafer,
gang-fighter and water-front pirate, he had come into the South Seas
twenty-five years earlier, shanghaied when drunk in San Francisco.
He looked back proudly on a quarter of a century of trading, thieving,
selling contraband rum and opium, pearl-buying and gambling.
But this pride on which he had so long depended failed him now.
Successful fights that he had waged, profitable crimes committed,
grew pale upon his tongue. Listening in the darkness while the
engine drove us through a black sea and the canvas awning flapped
overhead, I felt the baffled groping behind his words.
"So I don't take nothing from no man!" he boasted, and fell into
uneasy silence. "The folks in these islands know me, all right!" he
asserted, and again was dumb.
"Now there was a kid, a little Penryn boy," he said suddenly.
"When I was a trader on Penryn he was there, and he used to come
around my store. That kid liked me. Why, that kid, he was crazy
about me! It's a fact, he was crazy about me, that kid was."
His voice was fumbling back toward its old assurance, but there was
wonder in it, as though he was incredulous of this foothold he had
stumbled upon. He repeated, "That kid was crazy about me!
"He used to hang around, and help me with the canned goods, and he'd
go fishing with me, and shooting. He was a regular--what do you call
'em? These dogs that go after things for you? He'd go under the
water and bring in the big fish for me. And he liked to do it. You
never saw anything like the way that kid was.
"I used to let him come into the store and hang around, you know.
Not that I cared anything for the kid myself; I ain't that kind. But
I'd just give him some tinned biscuits now and then, the way you'd do.
He didn't have no father or mother. His father had been eaten by a
shark, and his mother was dead. The kid didn't have any name because
his mother had died so young he hadn't got any name, and his father
hadn't called him anything but boy. He give himself a name to me,
and that was 'Your Dog.'
"He called himself my dog, you see. But his name for it was Your Dog,
and that was because he fetched and carried for me, like as if he
was one. He was that kind of kid. Not that I paid much attention to
him.
"You know there's a leper settlement on Penryn, off across the lagoon.
I ain't afraid of leprosy y'understand, because I've dealt with 'em
for years, ate with 'em an' slept with 'em, an' all that, like
everybody down here. But all the same I don't want to have 'em right
around me all the time. So one day the doctor come to look over the
natives, and he come an' told me the little kid, My Dog, was a leper.
"Now I wasn't attached to the kid. I ain't attached to nobody. I
ain't that kind of a man. But the kid was sort of used to me, and I
was used to havin' him around. He used to come in through the window.
He'd just come in, nights, and sit there an' never say a word. When
I was goin' to bed he'd say, 'McHenry, Your Dog is goin' now, but
can't Your Dog sleep here?' Well, I used to let him sleep on the
floor, no harm in that. But if he was a leper he'd got to go to the
settlement, so I told him so.
"He made such a fuss, cryin' around--By God, I had to boot him out
of the place. I said: 'Get out. I don't want you snivelin' around me.'
So he went.
"It's a rotten, God-forsaken place, I guess. I don't know. The
government takes care of 'em. It ain't my affair. I guess for a
leper colony it ain't so bad.
"Anyway, I was goin' to sell out an' leave Penryn. The diving season
was over. One night I had the door locked an' was goin' over my
accounts to see if I couldn't collect some more dough from the
natives. I heard a noise, and By God! there comin' through the
window was My Dog. He come up to me, and I said: 'Stand away, there!'
I ain't afraid of leprosy, but there's no use takin' chances. You
never know.
"Well sir, that kid threw himself down on the floor, and he said,
'McHenry, I knowed you was goin' away and I had to come to see you.'
That's what he said in his Kanaka lingo.
"He was cryin', and he looked pretty bad. He said he couldn't stand
the settlement. He said, 'I don't never see you there. Can't I live
here an' be Your Dog again?'
"I said, 'You got to go to the settlement.' I wasn't goin' to get
into trouble on account of no Kanaka kid.
"Now, that kid had swum about five miles in the night, with sharks
all around him--the very place where his father had gone into a shark.
That kid thought a lot of me. Well, I made him go back. 'If you don't
go, the doctor will come, an' then you got to go,' I said. 'You
better get out. I'm goin' away, anyhow,' I said. I was figuring on
my accounts, an' I didn't want to be bothered with no fool kid.
"Well, he hung around awhile, makin' a fuss, till I opened the door
an' told him to git. Then he went quiet enough. He went right down
the beach into the water an' swum away, back to the settlement. Now
look here, that kid liked me. He knowed me well, too--he was around
my store pretty near all the time I was in Penryn. He was a fool kid.
My Dog, that was the name he give himself. An' while I was in T'yti,
here, I get a letter from the trader that took over my store, and he
sent me a letter from that kid. It was wrote in Kanaka. He couldn't
write much, but a little. Here, I'll show you the letter. You'll see
what that kid thought of me."
In the light from the open cabin window I read the letter, painfully
written on cheap, blue-lined paper.
"Greetings to you, McHenry, in Tahiti, from Your Dog. It is hard to
live without you. It is long since I have seen you. It is hard. I go
to join my father. I give myself to the _mako_. To you, McHenry, from
Your Dog, greetings and farewell."
Across the bottom of the letter was written in English: "The kid
disappeared from the leper settlement. They think he drowned himself."