experienced, as if the props of life were fallen away. And so they were,
for those she had known she had thrust behind and Motauri's magic no
longer sustained her. Worse than all was the pressure gathering in her
mind, a tide of doubt that she had to deny, like the rising fill in a
lock. She dared not let herself think. Still no Motauri.
Benumbed, exhausted, sunk in hebetude, she waited until she could wait
no more, until intolerable suspense drove her blindly. She crept through
the bush and so came suddenly to the edge of a clearing by a native
hut--to see what it was written she should see at that particular
moment....
Before the door burned a blink of fire that revealed the dwelling and
its tattered alcove of sewn leaves, as if the scene had been set with
footlights. It was a very simple little domestic scene. On a fibre mat
sprawled a woman. She might have been young, but she was old in the
native way, flabby, coarse-grained, with sagging wrinkles, with
lusterless hair streaming about her face. A ragged, sleeveless wrapper
rendered her precarious service, bulging with flesh. At her side
squatted a youngster, an imp of seven it might be, who noisily chewed a
stick of sugarcane and spat wide the pith. The woman kept one hand free
to admonish him--by his beady eye he required it--and to tend a
simmering pot. With the other, tranquilly, she nursed a naked babe.
There was no reticence about that firelight, no possible illusion--and
certainly no romance. In grim fidelity it threw up each bald detail, the
cheerful dirt and squalor, the easy poverty, the clutter--the plain,
animal, every-day facts of a savage home. It touched the bronze skins
with splashes of copper, shone in the woman's vacant, bovine stare and
gleamed along the generous swell of her breast. And just there it made a
wholly candid display of the central figure in this pantomime--the brown
babe. Not so brown as he would be some day, indeed quite softly tinted,
but unmistakably Polynesian. A most elemental mite of humanity. A most
eloquent interpreter of primordial delights. A fat little rascal, with a
bobbing fuzzy poll and squirming limbs. And hungry--so very frankly, so
very boisterously hungry--!
* * * * *
Miss Matilda went away from that place.
She had a confused idea of flight, but her feet were rebellious, and
before she had taken twenty steps she was lost. Without direction,
groping in the darkness, even then by some intuition she kept to the
trees and the undergrowth for hiding. That was her only effective
impulse--to hide. She could not go on. Under heaven there was no going
back. People were awake all about her in the huts. More people would be
strolling and skylarking along the chapel path, supposing she could have
found it. She had the sole, miserable craving that the earth might open
to receive her.
And thus it was chance alone that guided her course through the fringe
of the village, through garden and sand strip, and that brought her
finally, all unseen, to the wall of a large house, to a post, to a
slatted gallery aglow inside with lamps, and to her second discovery....
"Curse your black soul!" a voice was saying, with heavy, slow brutality,
"when I tell you to drink--you drink! D'y' hear?"
"No can do, Mahrster," came the faltering response, in the broken _beche
de mer_ that is the token of the white man's domination in the islands.
"That fella rum taboo 'long me altogether."
"What do I care for your taboo? _Drink!_"
Fell an interval of silence.
"Drink again--drink hearty!"
Captain Hull Gregson sat leaning forward by the side of his living-room
table, shoving down the length of it a glass that brimmed and sparkled
redly. On his knee, in a fist like a ham, he balanced a black bottle.
His jutted jaw took a line with the outthrust arm, with the lowering
brow, as if the whole implacable force and will of the man were so
projected.
And at the end, facing him, stood Motauri--a different, a sadly
different Motauri. A Motauri not in the least the joyous woodland faun
in his attitude now. His proud crest was lowered, stripped of its
wreath; his magnificent muscles drooped. He stood humbly, with chest
collapsed, on shuffling feet, as became an inferior. He drew the back of
his hand across his lips and eyed the white man furtively....
"That's better," grunted Gregson, and leaned back to set the bottle on
the table amid a litter of odds and ends, books, papers, a revolver, a
tarred tiller-rope with a roseknot. "Perhaps that'll loosen your
tongue. First time I ever seen your breed hold off the stuff. But then,
you're one of these independent lads, ain't you? Old chief stock, you
call yourself. Plenty wild Kanaka, you.... Plenty bold, bad fella
you--hey?"
"No, Mahrster," said Motauri, deprecating.
Gregson regarded him with a hard smile.
"And now you're going to tell me why you tried to sneak a boat at this
hour o' night."
"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.
"You've said that a dozen times, and it's no better. It don't pass. Go
fish? Go soak your black head! What are you up to, hey? Come now--tell."
Motauri made no answer, and the other controlled himself. Behind his
dark mask the big trader was under the empire of some powerful emotion.
His hands clenched and opened again, trembling a little. His face shone
like wet leather. But it was in a tone oddly detached, musing, that he
went on.
"You're smart. I don't say a Kanaka can't be smart when he wants to hide
anything. He can. I ain't figgered you yet. And that's a mighty healthy
thing for you, my boy, d'y' see? Because, if I could once make sure it
was you I saw slipping away by the chapel hedge two nights ago, I'd--" A
purplish haze suffused his cheek. "I'd dig the heart out of your carcass
with my two hands," he ended, very quietly, and hit the table so that
it jumped. "Was it?" he roared.
"No-o, Mahrster," said Motauri.
"You lie--blast you--it was!"
"No, Mahrster."
"Was it you that's been hanging around that white fella girl b'long
missionary--that's dared lift your dog's eyes to her?"
He crouched like a beast, ferine--all the obscure and diabolic passion
of him ready to spring.
"No, Mahrster."
Gregson glared at him steadily.
"What did you want of that boat?"
"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.
The trader sat back again, plying his billowy silk handkerchief.
"The trouble with me--" he said, reflectively, "I can't believe my own
eyes; that's the trouble with me. And how could I believe 'em?" he
inquired, with almost a plaintive note. "Such things don't happen. They
can't. Why--what kind of a man are you? Black, I believe--leastways
brown. And she--_she_--
"A Kanaka. If not you, then another. A Kanaka! To know her, be near
her--touch her--play all manner of pretty, cuddlin' tricks around
her--to--to kiss her, maybe! To crush her up in his arms--!" The words
came away from him hot and slow, from under half-shut eyes. "And I've
sat here behind them slats and watched her go by and wished I might
crawl where her little feet could walk on me....
"How should one of your sort have the cursed impudence to think of such
things? What have you got to do with heaven? Could _you_ see anything in
that blind-like look sideways--and hair so smooth over the ear? Do you
know what level eyebrows and a fullish underlip mean--hey? Do you? A
lip like a drop of blood--
"What did you want that boat for?" he cried, in a terrible voice.
"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.
"I tell you one thing, you don't leave here till I'm sure. There's
something rotten going on. I smell it. I'm on the track, and I'll never
give up--never give up. Right now I've got the mission path watched by
my own men. Nobody gets up or down without my knowing it--to-night or
ever. D'y' mind that, before I screw the thumbs off you to make you
talk?"
It was then that he heard the slight, sobbing breath in his gallery, the
rattle of his slatted door that brought him to his feet and bounding
across the room. Reaching into the darkness he dragged out the
eaves-dropper--whose poor knees had simply given like paper, whose
desperate effort to save herself had thrown her against the jamb and
betrayed her--Miss Matilda....
"You--!" said Gregson. "You--!"
He dropped her by the threshold and started away from her with spread
fingers and fallen jaw. For a time only the sound of his labored
breathing filled the silence and the three stayed so, the woman
collapsed against a chair, Motauri swaying and winking stupidly and
Gregson, struck dumb, incredulous, empurpled at first and then slowly
paling. Without a word he spun on his heel, returned to the table and
poured himself a drink and tossed it off.
* * * * *
"Respectability!" he said, in the tone of conversation, caught his
collar and ripped it loose. "By Heaven!" he cried, and wrung his great
hands. "What am I going to do now? What am I going to do?"
His wandering glance lighted on the rope's end on the table-top, and he
coiled it in his hand. He began to walk to and fro before them. His face
was ghastly, his bloodshot blue eyes were set like jewels. Now he
stopped before Motauri and looked him up and down curiously. Laughter
took him like a hiccup: laughter not good to hear: but he left off as
quickly. He came back and stood over the cowering figure on the floor.
"And you're the thing that was too good for me!"
He let his gaze possess her deliberately, noting each stain and smirch,
her disordered dress and loosened hair, and pitiful, staring face.
"Well, you're not too good now," he said, wetting his lips. "No--you're
none too good! You'll marry me to-morrow--and you'll crawl on your knees
to have me. And that father of yours--that sniveling old
hypocrite--he'll crawl to make the lines, if I choose....
"When I think how I've dreamed of you! How I've lived through days and
nights of perdition, wanting you--you sweet, cold, white saint you--and
a devil after all!
"To think how I've schemed and trembled and trembled and waited, afraid
to say a word or make a move lest I'd queer any chance. Me--a common
trader with a native wife that wouldn't die. And you up there on the
hill so prim and fine. A missionary's daughter. Too respectable to
touch! And what are you now--that's been out in the night--?"
He whirled around and the maddened, jealous rage and hate rose up in his
soul like scum on a dark pool.
"With a nigger!" he screamed.
All his strength was behind the tiller-rope. It slashed Motauri over the
face so that the red welt seemed to spurt. As he lifted his arm to
repeat, with a strangled cry Motauri leapt upon him and the rest was
fury. They fought baresark, interlocked and silent, spinning from side
to side of the room. Gregson had the weight and the thews and the
cunning. He kept the other's clutch away from his throat and maneuvred
toward the table. As they reeled against it, he put forth a mighty
effort, tore off Motauri and hurled him away for an instant--long enough
to grab the revolver.
"_Nigger_--I said!"
But in the very gasp he choked. The weapon raised for a chopping,
pointblank shot, dropped over his shoulder. He rocked, pressing at his
heart, frowned heavily once, and fell crashing forward....
* * * * *
"Hokoolele! Hokoolele--! Up and make haste!"
Miss Matilda lifted her face from her hands.
"Let us hurry while there is time," urged Motauri, thickly. "No one has
seen or heard us yet. His boat-shed is open. We are safe!"
"Go away from me!" said Miss Matilda.
"What do you say?" he stammered. "Come. Nobody will stop us. Nobody will
know anything, about us--"
She fended him off with a gesture of instinctive loathing....
"Please go--"
"But you cannot stay here! It would be a very evil thing for you if you
were found in this house. It must never be known you were here at all."
"Don't touch me!" That seemed the only important thing.
"Hokoolele--what of the golden chain of love between us? Come with me
now!"
"I was mad. I was blind. It is judgment!"
He regarded her sorrowfully, but sternly too.
"You mean you do not want me any more?"
"No--!" she moaned, in the stupor of horror and despair. And then the
brown man, the native, whose blood had been roused by every agency that
can stir wild blood to frenzy--by love and shame, by drink, by battle
and triumph--then Motauri, the high chief, struck unerringly to the
heart of the matter and made his swift decision by his own primitive
lights. Recovering her shawl he wrapped it about her tightly, caught her
up once more willy-nilly in his arms and bore her away from that
sinister place by force....
She was lying on a bench in the veranda of her father's house and her
father himself was calling her name, when she came to herself.
"Matilda, I'm speaking to you! Where are you?"
He came through the window of her room.
"Gracious me!--have you been sleeping out there?"
She could only stare at him and down at the twisted shawl about her, for
it seemed it must be so, she had only been sleeping--with what dreams!
But his next words showed her the truth.
"Matilda, my dear," he quavered, "you must prepare yourself. Be brave.
Something dreadful has happened. One of Captain Gregson's boys has just
come up from the village with terrible news. The Captain is dead! He had
some kind of a stroke, it seems--very sudden--all alone at the time. I
shall have to hurry right down. And at this hour too, when the woods are
so damp! What a loss, what a loss, Matilda, when I had so hoped--!"
He left her, and it came to her then that she too had hoped and that she
too had lost. The mountain stream was singing in her ears, and it seemed
threaded with mockery. The moonlight came filtering through the vine,
and it was old and cold. Her wonderful night was over. She was safe. Her
life would begin again where she had dropped it, in formulated routine,
and nobody would ever know--unless Motauri--
Some curious twinge, half fearful, half regretful, drove her to peer
through the leaves and to listen for his crooning song.
_"Bosom, here is love for you,
O bosom, cool as night!"_
But it did not come. She was to listen for it many times, and it was
never to come. Having reached such heights and depths that night, having
achieved the impossible and the doubly impossible, going down the stream
and climbing it again, Motauri had gone down once more and at last by
way of the chute and the outfall. For Motauri was a gentleman of sorts.
But perhaps, because he was also a pagan, he had been at some pains
before that final descent to enmesh his wrists firmly and helplessly in
a knotted tendril from the passion-vine.
THE PRICE OF THE HEAD
The possessions of Christopher Alexander Pellett were these: his name,
which he was always careful to retain intact; a suit of ducks, no longer
intact, in which he lived and slept; a continuous thirst for liquor, and
a set of red whiskers. Also he had a friend. Now, no man can gain
friendship, even among the gentle islands of Polynesia, except by virtue
of some quality attaching to him. Strength, humor, villainy: he must
show some trait by which the friend can catch and hold. How, then,
explain the loving devotion lavished upon Christopher Alexander Pellett
by Karaki, the company boat boy? This was the mystery at Fufuti.
There was no harm in Pellett. He never quarreled. He never raised his
fist. Apparently he had never learned that a white man's foot, though it
wabble ever so much, is given him wherewith to kick natives out of the
road. He never even cursed any one except himself and the Chinese
half-caste who sold him brandy: which was certainly allowable because
the brandy was very bad.
On the other hand, there was no perceptible good in him. He had long
lost the will to toil, and latterly even the skill to beg. He did not
smile, nor dance, nor exhibit any of the amiable eccentricities that
sometimes recommend the drunken to a certain toleration. In any other
part of the world he must have passed without a struggle. But some
chance had drifted him to the beaches where life is as easy as a song
and his particular fate had given him a friend. And so he persisted.
That was all. He persisted, a sodden lump of flesh preserved in
alcohol....
Karaki, his friend, was a heathen from Bougainville, where some people
are smoked and others eaten. Being a black, a Melanesian, he was as much
an alien in brown Fufuti as any white. He was a serious, efficient
little man with deeply sunken eyes, a great mop of kinky hair, and a
complete absence of expression. His tastes were simple. He wore a red
cotton kerchief belted around his waist and a brass curtain ring
suspended from his nose.
Some powerful chief in his home island had sold Karaki into the service
of the trading company for three years, annexing his salary of tobacco
and beads in advance. When the time should be accomplished, Karaki would
be shipped back to Bougainville, a matter of some eight hundred miles,
where he would land no richer than before except in experience. This was
the custom. Karaki may have had plans of his own.
It is seldom that one of the black races of the Pacific shows any of the
virtues for which subject populations are admired. Fidelity and humility
can be exacted from other colors between tan and chocolate. But the
black remains the inscrutable savage. His secret heart is his own. Hence
the astonishment of Fufuti, which knew the ways of black recruits, when
Karaki took the worthless beachcomber to his bosom.
* * * * *
"Hy, you, Johnny," called Moy Jack, the Chinese half-caste. "Better you
come catch this fella mahster b'long you. He fella plenty too much
drunk, galow."
Karaki left the shade of the copra shed where he had been waiting an
hour or more and came forward to receive the sagging bulk that was
thrust out of doors. He took it scientifically by wrist and armpit and
swung toward the beach. Moy Jack stood on his threshold watching with
cynic interest.
"Hy, you," he said; "what name you make so much bobeley 'long that fella
mahster? S'pose you bling me all them fella pearl; me pay you one dam
fella good trade--my word!"
It annoyed Moy Jack that he had to provide the white man with a daily
drunk in exchange for the little seed pearls with which Pellett was
always flush. He knew where those pearls came from. Karaki did forbidden
diving in the lagoon to get them. Moy Jack made a good thing of the
traffic, but he could have made a much better thing by trading directly
with Karaki for a few sticks of tobacco.
"What name you give that fella mahster all them fella pearl?" demanded
Moy Jack offensively. "He plenty too much no good, galow. Close up he
die altogether."
Karaki did not reply. He looked at Moy Jack once, and the half-caste
trailed off into mutterings. For an instant there showed a strange light
in Karaki's dull eyes, like the flat, green flicker of a turning shark
glimpsed ten fathoms down....
Karaki bore his charge down the beach to the little thatched shelter of
pandanus leaves that was all his home. Tenderly he eased Pellett to a
mat, pillowed his head, bathed him with cool water, brushed the filth
from his hair and whiskers. Pellett's whiskers were true whiskers, the
kind that sprout like the barbels of a catfish, and they were a glorious
coppery, sun-gilt red. Karaki combed them out with a sandalwood comb.
Later he sat by with a fan and kept the flies from the bloated face of
the drunkard.
It was a little past midday when something brought him scurrying into
the open. For weeks he had been studying every weather sign. He knew
that the change was due when the southeast trade begins to harden
through this flawed belt of calms and cross winds. And now, as he
watched, the sharp shadows began to blur along the sands and a film
crept over the face of the sun.
All Fufuti was asleep. The house boys snored in the back veranda. Under
his netting the agent dreamed happily of big copra shipments and
bonuses. Moy Jack dozed among his bottles. Nobody would have been mad
enough to stir abroad in the noon hour of repose: nobody but Karaki, the
untamed black, who cared nothing for custom nor yet for dreams. The
light pad of his steps was lost in the surf drone on the barrier reefs.
He flitted to and fro like a wrath. And while Fufuti slept he applied
himself to a job for which he had never been hired....
Karaki had long ago ascertained two vital facts: where the key to the
trade room was kept and where the rifles and ammunition were hidden. He
opened the trade room and selected three bolts of turkey red cloth, a
few knives, two cases of tobacco, and a fine small ax. There was much
else he might have taken as well. But Karaki was a man of simple tastes,
and efficient.
With the ax he next forced the rifle chest and removed therefrom one
Winchester and a big box of cartridges. With the ax again he broke into
the boat sheds. Finally with the ax he smashed the bottoms out of the
whaleboat and the two cutters so they would be of no use to any one for
many days to come. It was really a very handy little ax, a true
tomahawk, ground to a shaving edge. Karaki took a workman's pleasure in
its keen, deep strokes. It was almost his chief prize.
* * * * *
On the beach lay a big proa, a stout outrigger canoe; of the kind
Karaki's own people used at Bougainville, so high of prow and stern as
to be nearly crescent-shaped. The northwest monsoon of last season had
washed it ashore at Fufuti, and Karaki had repaired it, by the agent's
own order. This proa he now launched in the lagoon, and aboard of it he
stored his loot.
Of supplies he had to make a hasty selection. He took a bag of rice and
another of sweet potatoes. He took as many coconuts as he could carry in
a net in three trips. He took a cask of water and a box of biscuit.
And here happened an odd thing.
In his search for the biscuit he came upon the agent's private store of
liquor, a dozen bottles of rare Irish whisky. He glanced at them and
passed them by. He knew what the stuff was, and he was a savage, a black
man. But he passed it by. When Moy Jack heard of that later he
remembered what he had seen in Karaki's eyes and ventured the surprising
prediction that Karaki would never be taken alive.
When all was ready Karaki went back to his thatch and aroused
Christopher Alexander Pellett.
"Hy, mahster, you come 'long me."
Mr. Pellett sat up and looked at him. That is to say, he looked. Whether
he saw anything or not belongs among the obscurer questions of
psychopathy.
"Too late," said Mr. Pellett profoundly. "This shop is closed. Copy boy!
Give all those damned loafers good night. I'm--I'm goin'--bed!"
Whereupon he fell flat on his back.
"Wake up, mahster," insisted Karaki, shaking him. "You too much strong
fella sleep. Hy-ah, mahster! Rum! You like'm rum? You catch'm rum any
amount--my word! Plenty rum, mahster!"
But even this magic call, which never failed to rouse Pellett from his
couch in the mornings, fell now on deaf ears. Pellett had had his
skinful, and the fitness of things decreed that he should soak the clock
around.
Karaki knelt beside him, pried him up until he could get a shoulder
under his middle, and lifted him like a loose bag of meal. Pellett
weighed one hundred and fifty pounds; Karaki not much more than a
hundred. Yet in some deft coolie fashion of his own the little black man
packed his burden, with the feet dragging behind, clear down to the
beach. Moreover, he managed to get it aboard the proa. Pellett was half
drowned and the proa half swamped. But Karaki managed.
No man saw their departure. Fufuti still dreamed on. Long before the
agent awoke to wrath and ruin their queer crescent craft had slipped
from the lagoon and faded away on the wings of the trade.
That first day Karaki had all he could do to keep the proa running
straight before the wind. Big smoky seas came piling up out of the
southeast and would have piled aboard if he had given them the least
chance. He was only a heathen who did not know a compass from a degree
of latitude. But his forefathers used to people these waters on
cockleshell voyages that make the venture of Columbus look like a ride
in a ferry-boat. Karaki bailed with a tin pan and sailed with a mat and
steered with a paddle: but he proceeded.
* * * * *
Along about sunrise Mr. Pellett stirred in the bilge and raised a
peagreen face. He took one bewildered glance overside at the seething
waste and collapsed with a groan. After a decent interval he tried
again, but this was an illusion that would not pass, and he twisted
around to Karaki sitting crouched and all aglisten with spray in the
stern.
"Rum!" he demanded.
Karaki shook his head, and a haunted look crept into Pellett's eyes.
"Take--take away all that stuff," he begged pathetically, pointing at
the ocean....