HARD-BIT DERELICTS
With Allen and his coming in the back of my brain, it was only natural
that my thoughts, as I ground and sifted and sorted the golden powders,
should turn to Kai and the train of events leading up to the ghastly
tragedy of the _Cora Andrews_, so distorted a version of which had gone
abroad as a consequence of the fact that Allen was alive and Bell was
dead, and that I, so far, had not told what I knew of the circumstances
under which the one and the other had been induced to board the stricken
"black-birder."
It must have been, I reflected, its comparative remoteness from all of
even the least-sailed of the South Pacific trade routes that was
responsible for making Kai Atoll, a barely perceptible smudge on the
chart of the Louisiades, the unofficial rendezvous for the most
picturesque lot of cut-throats, blackguards and beachcombers that "The
Islands" had known since the days of "Bully" Hayes and his care-free
contemporaries. Like had attracted like after the original nucleus
gathered, safety had come with numbers, and at the time of my arrival no
man whose misdeeds had not made him important enough to send a gunboat
after needed to depart from that secure haven except of his own free
will.
Among a score of hard-bit derelicts whose grinning or scowling phizzes
flashed up in memory at the thought of that sun-baked loop of coral,
with its rag-tag of wind-whipped coco palms and its crescent of zinc and
thatch-roofed shacks, only three--or four including myself--occupied my
mind for the moment. Allen--reckless daredevil that he was--had come to
Kai from somewhere in the Solomons for the very good and sufficient
reason that it was the only island south of the Line at the time where
his welcome would not have been either too hot or too cold to suit his
fastidious taste. Bell had come, in a stove-in whaleboat, because Kai
was the nearest settlement to the point where he put the _Flying
Scud_--the trading schooner that was his last command, if we except the
_Cora Andrews_--aground on Tuka-tuva Reef. The girl, who arrived with
Bell in the whaleboat, came because he brought her. The tide-rips of Kai
passage and the Devil's own toboggan were all the same to Rona--at this
stage of the game, at least--so long as the big, quiet, masterful Yankee
was bumping-the-bumps with her. And even afterwards--but let that
transpire.
I, Roger Whitney, artist, formerly of New York and Paris, and, latterly,
man-about-the French-colonies, with no fixed abode, had been landed at
Kai by a French gunboat from the Noumea station. I packed myself off
from that accursed hole because the suicide of a couple of officers in
whose company I had been drinking absinthe at the _Cercle Militaire_ for
some weeks had reminded me altogether too poignantly of what I might, in
the ordinary course of things, expect to be doing myself before long. A
change of scene and, if possible, a modification of habits was the only
hope. I would never have had the initiative to tackle even the first had
not the feeling persisted that I was on the verge of doing something
worth while with my painting. I went to Kai because the archipelago
thereabouts was reputed to have the most gorgeous sky and water
colouring in Polynesia.
Neither the promised beauties nor the reputed badness of Kai stirred me
greatly in anticipation. With a bitter smile I told myself that every
night I was seeing sights more lovely than anything my eyes were likely
to rest on short of Paradise, while the Chamber of Horrors in which I
awoke every morning was a veritable annex to the Inferno itself. No, it
was out of the question that Kai could unfold in realities, whether to
delight or shock, things to outdo those that were already mine in dreams
that had themselves become more real than realities. Well, it turned out
that I was only half right, or wrong, whichever way you want to put it.
While, on the one hand, I found the bluff, open badness of Kai rather
more refreshing than shocking; on the other hand, it was hardly more
than a week before I was ready to swear that not the most ethereal houri
that ever laid her cool green hand upon my fevered brow was of a class
to run one-two-three with a flame-quivering slip of a nymph whom I had
surprised at her bath in a beryline pool inside the windward reef. I
began to pull myself together from that hour. Rona, the very sight of
whom threw most men out of hand, had quite the opposite effect upon me.
I knew she was not for me, and the thought that the world actually held
such loveliness in the form of flesh and blood had a sort of reassurance
about it, like the knowledge that one has an ample income from
government bonds.
Because I had landed from the _Zelee_, and also, perhaps on account of
my rig-out (especially the brimless Algerian sun-helmet), the "beach" of
Kai put me down at once as a "We-we," and, therefore, a creature quite
apart. The only Frenchmen on the island were a couple of escapes from
the convict settlement of New Caledonia, and because neither of them
could ride or shoot or fight with their fists, they had no standing with
the predominant Australian "push," most of whom were more or less handy
at all three. It was, indeed, the fact that, in spite of all my years in
Paris and the French colonies had done to make a physical wreck of me, I
still retained something of the quickness of eye and hand and foot which
had conspired to make my Harvard record as an all-round-athlete one that
only two or three men have equalled even down to the present day, that
gave me such easy sledding in making my way with the "best people" of
Kai.
It took just three minutes--the length of the first round of the
"friendly bout" I fought with "Heifer" Halligan, ex-welter-weight
champion of Victoria, at Jackson's pub one afternoon--to change Kai's
openly expressed contempt for me to something very near respect. I
thoroughly appreciated the attitude of that breezy lot of sport-loving
rascals toward a Frenchified Yankee artist, especially one that did not
appear to be a fugitive from justice, and so took the first opportunity
to win a standing with them which would at least incline them to let me
go my own way when I wanted to. Notwithstanding my wretched condition, I
outpointed my chunky opponent a good three to one in that opening round;
indeed, the "Heifer's" excuse for the foul which put me to sleep in the
Second was that both his "bloomin' peepers" were so nearly swelled shut
he couldn't see "stryght." But it was my swelling groin and battered
hands, rather than "Heifer's" bruised optics, that came in for first
attention from deft-fingered Doc Wyndham--once of Guy's, on his own
admission. The next day I was waited upon by a delegation sent from
"Jackson's Sporting Club" to urge me to put myself in training for a
go-to-the-finish with "Shark-mouth" Kelly of Suva, the Fiji open champ.
My speed would dazzle a cow-footed dolt like "Shark-mouth" was, they
said, and he would be easy picking for me. They further urged that we
could clean up all the loose money west of the "Hundred and
Eightieth"--what odds would Fiji not give in backing a fourteen-stone
stoker against an artist that only weighed ten stone and looked half
dished with the "green" besides? Moreover, I could keep the whole purse
for myself; all they wanted out of it was the sport. God bless the
scalawags, it was more than half true, that last.
The funny thing about it was that the project actually tempted me at the
time, principally, I think, because there seemed a chance that the hard
exercise of training--the very thing, indeed, that helped work the
miracle a few years later--might effect me at least a temporary
separation, if not a permanent divorce, from the "Green Lady." I was
still temporizing with "delegations" when the _Cora Andrews_ dropped her
hook in Kai Lagoon and gave us something else to think about.
If the little cunning I had left with my fists won me the respect of the
"beach," it remained for my proficiency with the revolver--something
which I had never allowed myself to grow rusty in--to give me real
prestige. My father had been only less famous as a pistol shot than as a
builder of steel bridges, and from my birth it had been his dream that I
should carry on the tradition in both lines. If it had broken the old
boy's heart when I turned my back on engineering for art--insisting on
going from Harvard to Beaux Arts instead of to Boston "Tec" as he had
planned--he at least had nothing to complain of on the score of my
aptitude for the revolver. He admitted that I had bred true in hand and
eye, even on the day that he called my "art tomfoolery" a throwback from
my French grandmother. I have always thought that the one circumstance
which prevented the Governor from cutting me off in his will when he
finally had definite proofs of the depths to which I had sunk in Paris,
was the fact that, on my last visit to the old home on the Hudson, I had
beaten him, shot for shot, with his own pistols, and at his favourite
distance.
They were rather free with their gun play during my first fortnight at
Kai, each little affair having been followed by one or two more or less
ceremonious burials in the coral-walled cemetery on the south lip of the
windward passage. It was merely as a precautionary measure--on the off
chance that they should be tempted to draw me into something of the kind
at a time when I might not be quite on edge for it--that I took early
opportunity to uncover a trifle of what I had crooked in my
trigger-finger. A casually winged gull or two, and a few plugged pennies
(not a miss at the latter, luckily, even when they tried to spin them
edge on to my line of fire) effected all that was necessary. After that,
though they were continually sending for me to come down to Jackson's
and shoot the wire off champagne corks (fizz, loot of some kind, was the
freest flowing drink on the island at the time), or perform some other
equally useful and spectacular gun stunt, not the roughest of the gang
but took the most meticulous care not to press his invitation the
instant it sank home to him that my mood of the moment wasn't of a kind
calculated to blend smoothly with the free and easy spirit of a
beach-combers' carousal.
It was hardly to be expected that they would ever quite understand why a
man who could "blot out a cove's blinker as easy wiv his fist as wiv his
gun" (as I was told that "Reefer" Ogiston, penal absentee and pearler,
put it one day) and who "'peared mo' than comfitabl' heeled fo' coin,"
should be "light an' looney enuf tu go roun' smearin' smashed barnculs
on sail cloth"; and yet it was on that very score--or at least to their
quick comprehension of what I was driving at in my pictures--that the
"beach" of Kai rendered me a priceless service. Almost from the outset
they began to "twig" my marines, to feel the living atmosphere I was
striving to paint into them. They were all men who had lived by the sea,
on the sea; yes, and not a few of them had worked under the sea. Well,
when I began to see those deep-set, wrinkle-clutched eyes squint to a
focus of concentration, and, presently, the quick heave of a hairy chest
as the message of the canvas flashed home, I knew that I was on the
right track. Nothing less than that would have given me the courage to
go on working, as I had set myself to do, on a steadily decreasing
allowance of absinthe, a certain supply of which, of course, I had
brought with me from Noumea.
So much for me and my relations to Kai at the time of which I am
writing. Now as to Bell....
"Who is that tall, square-jawed chap who looks as though he was not
quite sober?" I had asked a day or two after I landed.
"Yank--calls himself Bell," Jackson replied laconically; adding that he
was "not quite sober" when he tried to take a cross-cut over Tuka-tuva
Reef with the _Flying Scud_, that he was "not quite sober" when he hit
the beach in a busted whaleboat, that he had been "not quite sober" all
the time since, and that there was no doubt that he would still be "not
quite sober" when the time came for him to leave the island, whether he
went out with the tide in an outrigger canoe or shuffled off up the
Golden Stairs. "Allus been pickled and allus goin' to be pickled,"
Jackson continued; then, qualifyingly: "Course I don't know he was
pickled when he kum int' the world, but I'm willin' to lay any odds that
he'll be pickled when he shuffles out of it."
Just about all of which was, or proved to be, "stryght dope."
After quoting this terse summing of Jackson's, it may sound a little
strange when I say that Bell was a gentleman--not _had been_, understand
(that could have been said with some truth about a dozen or more of us
at Kai), but _was_ a gentleman. Though undeniably never "quite sober,"
the fact remained that no one on the island had ever seen him "quite
drunk." And no matter how much liquor he had stowed "under hatches," no
one could say that it interfered either with his trim or his navigation.
His even rolling gait was always the same, whether it was the glow of
his eye-opening plunge at dawn that lighted his face, or the flush of
twelve hours of steady tippling that darkened it at twilight. Nor was he
ever known to omit that gravely courteous, almost "old-fashioned," bow
which, with the flicker of smile that was more of his eyes than his
mouth, was the invariable greeting he bestowed upon friend and stranger
alike. The mellow drawl of his "It's suah goin' to be a fine mawnin',"
had made it easier for me to weather dawns that--in my inflamed
imagination--menaced monstrously in jagged lines like a cubist's
nightmare. If drink had any effect on his speech, it was to incline him
to reserve rather than garrulity. His temper appeared to be under quite
as perfect control as his legs. Even when he broke "Red" Logan's jaw
with a swift short-arm jolt the time that sanguine Lochinvar tried to
nip Rona off his arm as they passed on the beach in the twilight, they
said that Bell hardly raised his voice as he "guessed that'd hold the
varmit fo' a while." And when, a few days later, Doc Wyndham told him
with a grin that "Red" wouldn't be screwing a diving helmet on his block
for some weeks to come, it was said there was real regret in the
Yankee's voice as he hoped that the injury wouldn't be "pumanant."
Yes, before I had been a week at Kai I felt that there was a little
addition I could safely make to Jackson's comprehensive estimate. I knew
that Bell had been born a gentleman, and--whatever lapses there may have
been, or might be--I knew he was going to die a gentleman. And that also
(had I put it on record) would have proved pretty nearly "stryght dope."
What stumped me at first was trying to reconcile the remarkable control
Bell maintained over all his faculties in spite of his hard drinking
with the fact (apparently fully authenticated) that he had run
aground--through drunkenness--every ship he had ever commanded,
beginning with a U. S. gunboat. He cleared up that matter for me himself
one afternoon, however, by casually observing--at the moment he chanced
to be watching me trying to transfer to canvas the riot of opalescence
between the _lapis lazuli_ of the barely submerged reef and the deep
indigo where a hundred fathoms of brine threw back the reflection of the
sinister core of cumulo-nimbus in the heart of a menacing squall--that
the sea had always acted as a tremendous stimulant to him, especially
when he trod a deck.
"If I could just have managed to cut out the whisky at sea, all would
have been smooth sailin'," he said in his deep rich Southern drawl. "On
land--heah ... anywheah--kawn jooce is lak food to me; mah body convuts
it into ene'gy just lak an engine does coal. But with a schoonah kickin'
undah me--we'ell, I guess theah's just one kick too many, something lak
mixin' drinks p'raps. It suah elevates me good an' plenty ... and when I
come down theah's natchaly some crash. My ship an' I gen'aly strike
bottom at about the same time. But, s'elp me Gawd" (a tensing _timbre_
in his voice) "on mah next command--"
It was the one sure sign that Bell was beginning to feel the kick of his
"kawn jooce" when he spoke of his "next command." Unless that kick was
beginning to carry a pretty weighty jolt behind it he knew just as well
as everyone else on the beach did that he would never get his Master's
Certificate back again, and that even if he did there was no house from
Honolulu to Hobart that would trust a ship to a man who had already
beached a half-dozen.
Kai was glib to the last detail--rig, tonnage, cargo, insurance, owner
and the like--respecting the several merchant craft Bell had piled up in
the course of his downward career; but the extent of local "dope" in the
matter of the gunboat episode was to the effect that it happened "up
Manila-way," and that "that was the bally smash that started him goin'."
Personally, I took little stock in the naval part of the yarn--that is,
at first. Then, one morning--it was the day after the tail of a typhoon
had sucked up the end of Ah Yung's laundry shack and left everyone on
the beach short of clothes--Bell came out in a suit of immaculate
_starched_ whites. It was the cut of the jacket and the way he wore it
that drew and held my puzzled gaze; that its shoulders were "drilled"
for epaulettes and that its thin pearl buttons barely held in
buttonholes that had been worked for something thicker and wider I did
not notice till later. Steady-eyed, lean-jawed, square-shouldered,
ready-poised--not even a flapping Payta _sombrero_ could quite disguise,
nor five years of heavy tippling quite obliterate, the marks of type.
Then I understood why it was that Bell, all but down and out though he
might be, was, and would remain to the last, a gentleman. There are
things the Navy puts into a man that not even a court-martial can take
away.
The only allusion Bell ever made to his remoter past was drawn from him
a few days later, when--he was watching me paint again--I chanced to
mention that I had spent a fortnight in the Philippines on my way south
from Saigon to Australia. Glancing up at the sound of his sharp intake
of breath, I saw his jaw set over the questions that leapt to the tip of
his tongue, to relax gradually as a faraway look came into his wide-set
grey eyes and a wistful smile of reminiscence parted his lips.
"Did you heah the band play on the Luneta in the evenin'?" he asked
eagerly, "while the _spiggoties_ in their _calesas_ wuh racin' round the
circle, an' the kiddies an' theyah nusses wuh rompin' on the grass, an'
the big red sun was goin' down behind Mariveles beyond the bay? An' did
you know the Ahmy an' Navy Club--not the new one ... the ol' one ovah
cross the moat inside the wall?"
"Put up there all my time in Manila," I replied. "A very comfy old
hangout, especially considering what the hotels were."
"An'--did you--" (he gulped once or twice as though the question came
hard) "did you evah heah them speak at the Club of a chap called Blake
... Lootenant-Commandah Blake? He was a son of Captain Blake, who helped
Sampson polish off Cervera, an' a gran'son of Adm'al Blake. Ol' naval
fam'ly."
"You mean the man who pulled off that coup when Wood was cleaning up the
crater of Bud Dajo? Some kind of a bluff on his own with one of the
little old gunboats Dewey captured after the Battle of Manila Bay,
wasn't it? Scared some Jolo Dato into giving up a bunch of our men he
already had lined up against a wall to _bolo_, didn't he? Of course, I
remember perfectly now. General X----" (mentioning the Military Governor
of Mindanao by name) "told me the yarn himself the night I dined with
him in Zamboanga. He said no one but an old poker shark would ever have
thought of the stunt, much less had the nerve to bluff it out.
Incidentally he mentioned that the chap was the best poker player in the
Navy, as he was also the speediest baseball pitcher ever graduated from
Annapolis; that he had been missed almost as much for the one as the
other since he dropped out of sight several years before. Some
difficulty about--"
"Tryin' to push Corregidor out of the entrance to Manila Bay with the
nose of his gunboat," Bell cut in harshly, the hell in his soul glowing
through his eyes as the glare of the coal-bed welters beyond a stoker's
lifted furnace flap. That, and a single sob sucked through his
contracted throat as the vacuum in his chest called for air, were the
only outward signs of the intensest spasm of throttled emotion I ever
saw assail a human being. Then the square jaw tightened, the cords of
the muscular neck drew taut, and what would have been another body and
soul racking sob was noiselessly absorbed in the buffer of a flexed
diaphragm. The fires of agony behind the eyes paled and died down like
an expiring coal. The corrugations of the brow smoothed out as a
smile--half amused, half wistful--relaxed the set lips. The old
controlled Bell (I shall continue to call him so) was in the saddle
again.
"So they still remembah mah ball-playin'," he drawled musingly, his left
hand digits gently massaging the bulbous swelling remaining after some
red-hot drive had telescoped the middle finger of his right. "Ye'es, of
co'se they'd miss mah wing in the Ahmy-Navy game at Ca'nival time. But
mah pokah--we'ell I reckon a few of 'em did find mah pokah hand about as
bafflin' as mah baseball ahm. But it was straight deliv'ry, tho'--both
of 'em. An' they wouldn't be callin' me a fo'-flushah, etha. No, you
didn't heah any of 'em say that, I'm right suah."
A smile more whimsical than bitter twitched his lips twice or thrice in
the minute or two he stood alone with his thoughts. "So I've sort o'
dropped out o' sight to 'em?" he said finally. "We'ell, I guess that was
about the best thing to happen for all consuned. But, just the same, if
you evah go back Manila-way I won't be mindin' it if you tell 'em that,
tho' the ol' wing's tuhn'd to glass from long lack o' limberin', an'
tho' I don't play pokah down heah fo' feah o' bein' knifed fo' mah luck,
I'm still hittin' true to fohm in mah own lil' game of alterin' the sea
map with the noses of ships. I reckon they'll know the reason why."
There was another interval of silence, but, unlike the other, not
charged, electric. Bell's blow-off through the safety-valve of frank
speech had taken the peak off the pent-up pressure within, and when he
spoke again it was merely to quote what the Governor of North Carolina
had said about its having been a long time between drinks. "Great thust
aggravateh, the Sou'east Trade." Would I mind--ahem--hiking home with
him and lubricating my tonsils with a drop of "J. Walkah"? That was
simply his delicate way of pretending to ignore my slavery to absinthe,
a habit which not even the most whisky-saturated sot of an Anglo-Saxon
can ever quite forgive one of his race for falling a victim to. I
wouldn't? "We'ell, _hasta manyanah_."
With a crunch of coral clinkers under his feet and a stave of "Carry Me
Back to Ol' Virginny" on his lips, Bell, disdaining the smooth path by
the beach, swung off through the pandanus scrub on what he called a
"bee-line for home"! He had a weakness for taking "short-cuts" on land
as well as at sea. Never again--not even in the moment of his great
decision--did he lift for me or any other man the "furnace flap" of iron
reserve that masked the fires of his innermost soul.
Their saving "sense of sport," which was the golden vein in the rough
iron of the "beach push" of Kai, made it inevitable that they should
have a substantial sense of respect for a man of Bell's stamp, and this
might easily have ripened to an active popularity had not the American's
quiet but inflexible reserve prevented their knowing him better. They
suspected that he was no novice in handling the big Colt's that was
flopping on his hip when he landed, they knew that there was a weighty
punch behind his long arm, and they were frankly outspoken in their
admiration of the manner in which he stowed and carried his booze. But
what had impressed them more than anything else was the way in which he
had taken the devil out of a vicious imp of a Solomon Island pony on the
beach one morning. "Hellish hard-handed," "Slant" Allen had said, as his
steel-blue eyes narrowed down to slits in the intensity of his interest
and admiration; "but a seat like he was screwed to the brute's backbone.
Old cross-country rider--hundred to one on it. Man in a million in a
steeplechase on a horse strong enough to carry the weight. Gawd, what a
seat!"
All in all, indeed, there was only one thing the "beach" held against
Bell, and that was Rona, or rather his possession of her. There was
nothing personal in this, of course. They merely regarded the big
American in the same light they had always regarded a man with a chest
of pearls or anything else of value that their simple, direct natures
made them yearn for the possession of. There was this difference,
however. Where the "push" of Kai would have combined to a man to get
away with a box of pearls or a cargo of shell, the annexing of a woman
was essentially a lone-hand game, and--well, Bell was hardly the kind of
a "one-man job" any of them cared to tackle. I feel practically certain
that, but for the disturbance of the even tenor of Kai's way incident to
the _Cora Andrews_ affair, his "rights" in Rona would never have been
challenged.