small boat in any kind of a sea can move forty-seven different ways
within one and the same minute. This is no trifling bit of knowledge, as
those who have acquired it can tell. It was nearly fatal to Pellett.
On the third day he awoke with a mouth and a stomach of fumed leather
and a great weakness, but otherwise in command of his few faculties. The
gale had fallen and Karaki was quietly preparing fresh coconuts. Pellett
quaffed two before he thought to miss the brandy with which his
breakfast draft was always laced. But when he remembered the milk choked
in his throat.
"Me like'm rum."
"No got'm rum."
Pellett looked forward and aft, to windward and to lee. There was a
great deal of horizon in sight, but nothing else. For the first time he
was aware of a strangeness in events.
"What name you come so far?" he asked.
"We catch'm one big fella wind," explained Karaki.
Pellett was in no condition to question his statement nor to observe
from the careful stocking of the proa that they had not been blown to
sea on a casual fishing trip. Pellett had other things to think of. Some
of the things were pink and others purple and others were striped like
the rainbow in most surprising designs, and all were highly novel and
interesting. They came thronging out of the vasty deep to entertain
Christopher Alexander Pellett. Which they did.
You cannot cut off alcohol from a man who has been continuously pickled
for two years without results more or less picturesque. These were days
when the proa went shouting across the empty southern seas to madrigal
and choric song. Tied hand and foot and lashed under a thwart, Pellett
raved in the numbers of his innocent youth. It would have been singular
hearing had there been any to hear, but there was only Karaki, who did
not care for the lesser Cavalier poets and on whom whole pages of
"Atalanta in Calydon" were quite wasted. Now and then he threw a
dipper-ful of sea water over the white man, or spread a mat to keep the
sun from him, or fed him coconut milk by force. Karaki was a poor
audience, but an excellent nurse. Also, he combed Pellett's whiskers
twice every day.
They ran into calms. But the trade picked them up again more gently, so
that Karaki ventured to make westing, and they fled under skies as
bright as polished brass.
_My heart is within me
As an ash in the fire;
Whosoever hath seen me
Without lute, without lyre,
Shall sing of me grievous things,
even things that were ill
to desire--_
Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett, whose face began to show a
little more like flesh and a little less like rotten kelp....
Whenever a fair chance offered Karaki landed on the lee of some one of
the tiny islets with which the Santa Cruz region is peppered and would
make shift to cook rice and potatoes in the tin dipper. This was risky,
for one day the islet proved to be inhabited. Two white men in a cutter
came out to stop them. Karaki could not hide his resemblance to a
runaway nigger, and he did not try to. But when the cutter approached
within fifty yards he suddenly announced himself as a runaway nigger
with a gun. He left the cutter sinking and one of the men dead.
"There's a bullet hole alongside me here," said Pellett from under the
thwart. "You'd better plug it."
Karaki plugged it and released his passenger, who sat up and began
stretching himself with a certain naive curiosity of his own body.
"So you're real," observed Pellett, staring hard at Karaki. "By George,
you _are_, and that's comfort."
He was right. Karaki was very real.
"What side you take'm this fella canoe?"
"Balbi," said Karaki, using the native word for Bougainville.
Pellett whistled. An eight-hundred-mile evasion in an open boat was a
considerable undertaking. It enlisted his respect. Moreover, he had just
had emphatic proof of the efficiency of this little black man.
"Balbi all some home b'long you?"
"Yes."
"All right, commodore," said Pellett. "Lead on. I don't know why you
shipped me for supercargo, but I'll see you through."
* * * * *
Strangely--or perhaps not so strangely--the whole Fufuti interval of his
history had been fading from his brain while the poison was ebbing from
his tissues. The Christopher Alexander Pellett that emerged was one from
earlier years: pretty much of a wreck, it was true, and a feckless,
indolent, paltry creature at best, but ordinarily human and rather more
than ordinarily intelligent.
He was very feeble at first, but Karaki's diet of coconuts and sweet
potatoes did wonders for him, and the time came when he could rejoice in
the good salt taste of the spray on his lips and forget for hours
together the crazy craving for stimulant. They made a strange crew, this
pair--simple savage and convalescent drunkard--but there was never any
question as to which was in command. That was well seen in the third
week when their food began to fail and Pellett noticed that Karaki ate
nothing for a whole day.
"See here, this won't do," he cried. "You've given me the last coconut
and kept none for yourself."
"Me no like'm eat," said Karaki shortly.
Christopher Alexander Pellett pondered many matters in long, idle hours
while the rush of foam under the proa and the creak and fling of her
outriggers were the only sounds between sea and sky. Sometimes his brow
was knotted with pain. It is not always pleasant to be wrenched back
into level contact with one's memories. Thoughts are no sweeter company
for having long been drowned. He had met the horrors of delirium. He had
now to face the livelier devils of his past. He had fled them before.
But here was no escape of any kind. So he turned and grappled with them
and laid them one by one.
* * * * *
When they had been at sea twenty-nine days they had nothing left of
their provisions but a little water. Karaki doled it out by moistening a
shred of coconut husk and giving Pellett the shred to suck. In spite of
Pellett's petulant protest, he would take none himself. Again the
heathen nursed the derelict, this time through the last stages of
thirst, scraping the staves of the cask and feeding him the ultimate
drop of moisture on the point of a knife.
On the thirty-sixth day from Fufuti they sighted Choiseul, a great green
wall that built up slowly across the west.
Once fairly under its headlands, Karaki might have indulged a certain
triumph. He had taken as his target the whole length of the Solomons,
some six hundred miles. But to have fetched the broadside of them
anywhere in such a craft as the proa through storm and current, without
instrument or chart, was distinctly a feat of navigation. Karaki,
however, did no celebrating. Instead, he stared long and anxiously over
his shoulder into the east.
The wind had been fitful since morning. By noon it was dead calm on a
restless, oily sea. A barometer would have told evil tales, but Karaki
must have guessed them anyway, for he staggered forward and unstepped
the little mast. Then he bound all his cargo securely under the thwarts
and put all his remaining strength into the paddle, heading for a small
outpost island where a line of white showed beach. They had been very
lucky thus far, but they were still two miles off-shore when the first
rush of the hurricane caught them.
Karaki himself was reduced to a rattle of bones in a dried skin, and
Pellett could scarce lift a hand. But Karaki fought for Pellett among
the waves that leaped up like sheets of fire on the reef. Why or how
they got through neither could have said. Perhaps because it was written
that after drink, illness, madness, and starvation the white man should
be saved by the black man again and a last time from ravening waters.
When they came ashore on the islet they were both nearly flayed, but
they were alive, and Karaki still gripped Pellett's shirt....
For a week they stayed while Pellett fattened on unlimited coconut and
Karaki tinkered the proa. It had landed in a water-logged tangle, but
Karaki's treasures were safe. He got his bearings from a passing native
fisherman, and then he knew that _all_ his treasures were safe. His home
island lay across Bougainville Strait, the stretch of water just
beyond....
"Balbi over there?" asked Pellett.
"Yes," said Karaki.
"And a mighty good thing too," cried Pellett heartily. "This is the
limit of British authority, old boy. Big fella mahster b'long Beretani
stop'm here, no can go that side."
Karaki was quite aware of it. If he feared one thing in the world, he
feared the Fiji High Court and its Resident Commissioner for the
Southern Solomons, who did sure justice upon all who transgressed in its
jurisdiction. Once beyond the Strait he might still be liable for the
stolen goods and the broken contract. But never--this was the
point--never could he be punished for anything he might choose to do
over there in Bougainville.
So Karaki was content.
And so was Christopher Alexander Pellett. His body had been wrung and
swept and scoured, and he had downed his devils. Sweet air and sunshine
were on his lips and in his heart. His bones were sweet in him. As his
vigor returned he swam the lagoon or helped Karaki at the proa. He would
spend hours hugging the warm sand or rejoicing in the delicate tracery
of some tiny sea shell, singing softly to himself while the ground swell
hushed along the beach, savoring life as he never had done.
"Oh, this is good--good!" he said.
Karaki puzzled him. Not that he vexed himself, for a smiling wonder at
everything, almost childlike, filled him these days. But he thought of
this taciturn savage, how he had capped thankless service with rarest
sacrifice.
And now that he could consider soberly, the why of it eluded him. Why?
Affection? Friendship? It must be so, and he warmed toward the silent
little man with the sunken eyes and the expressionless face from which
he could never raise a wink.
"Hy, you, Karaki, what name you no laugh all same me? What? You too much
fright 'long that fella stuff you steal? Forget it, you old black scamp.
If they ever trouble you, I'll square them somehow. By George, I'll say
I stole it myself!"
Karaki only grunted and sat down to clean his Winchester with a bit of
rag and some drops of oil he had crushed from a dried coconut.
"No, that don't reach him either," murmured Pellett, baffled. "I'd like
to know what's going on under that topknot of yours, old chap. You're
like Kipling's cat, that walks by himself. God knows I'm not ungrateful.
I wish I could show you--"
He sprang up.
"Karaki! Me one big fella friend 'long you: savee? You one big fella
friend 'long me: savee? We two dam big fella friend, my word!... What?"
"Yes," said Karaki. No other response. He looked at Pellett and he
looked away toward Bougainville. "Yes," he said, "my word," and went on
cleaning his gun--the black islander, inscrutable, incomprehensible, an
enigma always, and to the end.
* * * * *
The end came two days later at Bougainville.
Under a gorgeous dawn they came into a bay that opened before their prow
as with jeweled arms of welcome. The land lay lapped in bright garments
like a sleeper half awakened, all flushed and smiling, sensuous
intimate, thrilling with life, breathing warm scents--
These were some of the foolish phrases Pellett babbled to himself as he
leaped ashore and ran up on a rocky point to see and to feel and to draw
all the charm of the place to himself.
Meanwhile Karaki, that simple and efficient little man, was proceeding
methodically about his own affairs. He landed his bolts of cloth, his
tobacco, his knives, and the other loot. He landed his box of cartridges
and his rifle and his fine tomahawk. The goods were somewhat damaged by
sea water, but the weapons had been carefully cleaned and polished....
Pellett was declaiming poetry aloud to the alluring solitude when he was
aware of a gentle footfall and turned, surprised to find Karaki standing
just behind him with the rifle at his hip and the ax in his hand.
"Well," said Pellett cheerfully, "what d'you want, old chappie?"
"Me like," said Karaki, while there gleamed in his eyes the strange
light that Moy Jack had glimpsed there, like the flicker of a turning
shark; "me like'm too much one fella head b'long you!"
"What? Head! Whose--my head?"
"Yes," said Karaki simply.
That was the way of it. That was all the mystery. The savage had fallen
enamored of the head of the beachcomber, and Christopher Alexander
Pellett had been betrayed by his fatal red whiskers. In Karaki's country
a white man's head, well smoked, is a thing to be desired above wealth,
above lands and chiefships, fame, and the love of women. In all
Karaki's country was no head like the head of Pellett. Therefore Karaki
had served to win it with the patience and single faith of a Jacob. For
this he had schemed and waited, committed theft and murder, expended
sweat and cunning, starved and denied himself, nursed, watched, tended,
fed, and saved his man that he might bring the head alive and on the
hoof--so to speak--to the spot where he could remove it at leisure and
enjoy the fruits of his labor in safety.
* * * * *
Pellett saw all this at a flash, understood it so far as any white could
understand: the whole elemental and stupendous simplicity of it. And
standing there in his new strength and sanity under the fair promise of
the morning, he gave a laugh that pealed across the waters and started
the sea birds from their cliffs, the deep-throated laugh of a man who
fathoms and accepts the last great jest....
For finally, by corrected list, the possessions of Christopher Alexander
Pellett were these: his name, still intact; the ruins of some rusty
ducks; his precious red whiskers--and a soul which had been neatly
recovered, renewed, refurbished, reanimated, and restored to him by his
good friend Karaki.
_"Thou shouldst die as he dies,
For whom none sheddeth tears;
Filling thine eyes
And fulfilling thine ears
With the brilliance ... the bloom
and the beauty...."_
Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett over the waters of the bay,
and then whirled, throwing wide his arms:
"Shoot, damn you! It's cheap at the price!"
THE SLANTED BEAM
All the world meets beneath the towering spire of Shway Dagohn, which
pins back the clouds and throws a shadow between India and the China
Sea. All paths in the East tend toward that great pagoda with its mighty
shaft of gold. Around the sweep of its pedestal, among its terraced
mazes, is one of the common crossroads where men as various as their
skins and their faiths come to mingle; to worship or to wonder: seeking
each in his own fashion whatever clue to the meaning of things he can
take from that vast finger which carries the eye and the soul up and up
and points forever to the heart of mystery.
So it was natural enough, as it was also inevitable and ordained since
the beginning of time, that Cloots should have met the headman of
Apyodaw at last in one of the tiny shrines clustering under the Temple
of the Slanted Beam on Thehngoottara Hill....
The shrine in no way differed from the many lesser chapels and _zaydees_
that lined the ramp and the inner and outer platforms. Together they
might have seemed a jumble of booths thrown up there to attract the
unhurrying, sweet-voiced, hip-swinging natives who drifted and gossiped
like holiday makers at a fair.
But those booths were built of enduring stone with a serene and flawless
symmetry. And the wares they offered were the philosophies of an old,
old religion. And the folk themselves in their thighbound silks of
softened maroon and olive and citrine and cutch, with the pink fillets
about their brows and their open and twinkling brown faces, were a very
ancient folk indeed, who knew what they knew and did as they did a
small matter of thirty centuries ago.
* * * * *
Cloots stepped into the chapel for no purpose, in mere idle discernment
of color and contrast.
The pagoda and its whole base, dominating the city, swam in a level
flood of late sunset. Every surface had taken an almost intolerable
richness and warmth, from the far, jeweled spike of the _htee_ four
hundred feet above, down through fire-gilt and smoldering saffron to the
pigeon-blood ruby of the monastery roofs below. Even the shadows gave
off a purplish haze. But here, inside this plain, windowless cell of
white-washed wall and gray pavement, the visitor passed with the swift
relief of a diver's plunge to cool and quiet, and the pervading peace of
the Excellent Law.
At the end facing the doorway was the sole furnishing--a deep niche and
altar where sat the Buddha in perpetual contemplation.
Some forgotten devotee, toiling wearily like the rest of us up the
ladder of existence, had once earned the right to skip a step or two by
the gift of this life-size image. Some forgotten artist had acquired
merit by faithfully carving and lacquering it on teak, with the left
hand lying palm upward in the lap and the right hanging over the
knee--with the calm and passionless regard which somehow, no matter what
the medium, no matter what conventions interpose, is always so surely
portrayed. But that had been long and long ago. Decay had eaten through
those painted and gilded robes. The soot of many years had tanned those
sacred lineaments to an obscure and homely human tint.
Along the near edge of the altar lay a shallow trough for the better
disposal of such offerings as the shrine might receive: fresh flowers
and flakes of popped and colored rice, incense sticks of which the
vapor rose in a slow, unwavering veil, and a row of paper flags to
record the prayers of the pious.
Midway there burned a single taper, a point of light that dimly
illumined the holy spot and revealed to Cloots, as he entered, its only
other occupant.
On a bamboo mat knelt a young girl, fairly on her knees, as the Rule
allows for such frail creatures. Her black hair was drawn sleek as a
bird's wing. At her breast she held a new lotus blossom, no softer nor
more delicate than the fingers that offered it. Her little feet were
carefully tucked within the silken _tamehn_. Her head was bowed. And the
gleaming curve of her body, all her lithe vigor, was subdued, was
humbled, to the act of ecstatic supplication before the Excellent One.
Cloots arrived as a confident and more or less truly appreciative
observer of all these details. They were familiar to him. He understood
them, so far as any perceptive, far-wandering white is likely to
understand. They ministered to him.
He approved the flaring sunset and he approved this discreet
retreat--the hushed and perfumed air of worship no less than the stir
and brilliance outside. He could interpret the sigh of imploring lips
and the trouble of a fluttered little breast before the altar as keenly
as the murmur and laughter of the barefoot crowds and the distant music
of numberless pagoda chimes. He enjoyed the more intimate delights of
exotic life as well as its bright outward cheek. Particularly, having
just renewed his contact with an engaging and responsive native people,
he enjoyed this opportunity with a native girl--decidedly engaging and
responsive probably.
No mere brutal, casual sensualist was Cloots. He found it good to be
alive. He found it very good to be back in a country where he was master
of the idiom and the customs. He found it exceeding good to be
contemplating the skillful conquest of such a pilgrim, so earnest, so
adorable, and so appropriately concerned. The lady, he gathered, was
praying for a husband....
He smiled, and when he turned his glance it encountered the eyes of the
headman of Apyodaw, who had entered noiselessly at his side and who now
stood between him and the entrance.
"I knew I should find thee, Shway Cloots."
It said something for Cloots that he did not cease smiling all at once,
that he gave no outward sign, and that he was able to answer quite soon
and quite steadily in the same dialect.
"Hast been looking for me, Moung Poh Sin?"
"I did not have to look, Shway. It was written."
"Hast been waiting for me, then?"
"It was written I would have to wait."
"Was it also written that I had become any safe or easy game to track
into a corner?" demanded Cloots.
"I did not track thee."
"Half an hour ago I left the docks, newly landed from Moulmein. No man
could have given thee word of my return. No man knew if ever I should
return."
"I knew."
"By that I mark thee a liar and a fool, Moung Poh Sin, for I knew it not
myself. I see now thou hast been watching and spying for me. By the
harbor, or by the pagoda here, belike. A long vigil.... But it can
profit nothing. What could it profit thee? I am not the kind to be
followed and hunted down."
"I tell thee, Shway, I did not follow at all. At the appointed time I
came and thou wert here. The talk and all things else come in their
order."
"So and so. And what else is to come, thinkest thou?"
"At sunset to-day," said the other quietly, "at big-bell time, I am to
slay thee in this chapel under the Slanted Beam."...
Cloots loosened his collar. He had had a bit of a start. He had been
surprised into rather nervous speech. But he recovered himself. Merely
he was aware of a slight oppression, due, no doubt, to the scented fumes
in this inclosed space. Also, he took occasion in lowering his hand to
run one finger lightly down the front of his green twill shooting jacket
so that the buttons were slipped and the lapels left open. "Art mad?" he
inquired. "What babble is this, Moung Poh Sin?" he rasped abruptly.
"Stand away from that door, dog! Remove--stand off!"
But Moung Poh Sin did not budge.
* * * * *
Now, there are ways and ways of regarding the native within the areas of
white empery. As a sort of inferior and obedient jinn, supplied by
Providence and invoked by a gesture to fetch and to carry at need. As a
specimen of the genus homo, also inferior and obedient, but quite quaint
and decorative too, and really rather useful, you know, in his place. Or
again, less commonly, as an elder member of the family, with resources
and subtleties of his own which may or may not be inferior, and which
may or may not lead to obedience, but which lie as far outside the chart
of the Western mind as a quadratic complex lies outside a postage stamp.
This last view is not popular, and when brought home to the invader has
proved at times extremely discomposing.
Moung Poh Sin was a squat, middle-aged person about half the size of
Cloots, with a flat and serious face resembling a design punched
laboriously on a well-worn saddle flap. There was a little about him to
be called either quaint or decorative. His bare, rugged chest under the
narrow-edged coat; his sturdy, misshapen legs to which the silk _pasoh_
lent scanty disguise; the slitted eyes that held a glint of the green
jade from his own hills--all his features were rude and resistant. And
he came by them in the way of average after his kind, for he was part
Kachin, which is the warlike strain of the upcountry and the breed of
dacoits and raiders from the dawn of history.
Cloots had taken the measure of him months before and once for all, he
would have said, in his smoky little village. And to appearance the
fellow had not changed a hair from the simple, untaught, somewhat
hard-bitten but altogether undistinguished headman of Apyodaw. He was
just what he had always been. Yet Cloots saw now with transfixing
clarity that he did not know him in the least--could never have known
him. For this native, who was a very ordinary native, had withdrawn
himself, after the immemorial manner of the native on his own occasions,
beyond every index of temper or purpose: fear, respect, rage, hate,
injured pride, or lacerated honor; impatience, vindictiveness, greed--or
doubt.
* * * * *
Cloots could not fathom Moung Poh Sin. He could not follow the thought
process of Moung Poh Sin. Worst of all, he could not divine those
elements from which Moung Poh Sin had borrowed such absolute and amazing
assurance. It made him cautious.
"Softly," he said. "Softly a while. There is some folly here. Name the
business."
"There is no business, Shway. Only a debt."
"All debts of money were long ago settled between us."