under fifty feet of water. I could stay down four minutes. I’ve gone
down, with a coral-rock to sink me, in a hundred and ten feet to clear a
fouled anchor. And I could back-dive with a once-over and go in
feet-first from eighty feet above the surface—”
“Quit it, delete it, cease it,” Chauncey Delarouse admonished testily.
“Tell of the Princess. That’s what makes old blood leap again. Almost
can I see her. Was she wonderful?”
Percival Delaney kissed unutterable affirmation.
“I have said she was a mermaid. She was. I know she swam thirty-six
hours before being rescued, after her schooner was capsized in a
double-squall. I have seen her do ninety feet and bring up pearl shell
in each hand. She was wonderful. As a woman she was ravishing, sublime.
I have said she was a sea-goddess. She was. Oh, for a Phidias or a
Praxiteles to have made the wonder of her body immortal!
“And that day, out for squid on the reef, I was almost sick for her.
Mad—I know I was mad for her. We would step over the side from the big
canoe, and swim down, side by side, into the delicious depths of cool and
colour, and she would look at me, as we swam, and with her eyes tantalize
me to further madness. And at last, down, far down, I lost myself and
reached for her. She eluded me like the mermaid she was, and I saw the
laughter on her face as she fled. She fled deeper, and I knew I had her
for I was between her and the surface; but in the muck coral sand of the
bottom she made a churning with her squid stick. It was the old trick to
escape a shark. And she worked it on me, rolling the water so that I
could not see her. And when I came up, she was there ahead of me,
clinging to the side of the canoe and laughing.
“Almost I would not be denied. But not for nothing was she a princess.
She rested her hand on my arm and compelled me to listen. We should play
a game, she said, enter into a competition for which should get the more
squid, the biggest squid, and the smallest squid. Since the wagers were
kisses, you can well imagine I went down on the first next dive with soul
aflame.
“I got no squid. Never again in all my life have I dived for squid.
Perhaps we were five fathoms down and exploring the face of the reefwall
for lurking places of our prey, when it happened. I had found a likely
lair and just proved it empty, when I felt or sensed the nearness of
something inimical. I turned. There it was, alongside of me, and no
mere fish-shark. Fully a dozen feet in length, with the unmistakable
phosphorescent cat’s eye gleaming like a drowning star, I knew it for
what it was, a tiger shark.
“Not ten feet to the right, probing a coral fissure with her squid stick,
was the Princess, and the tiger shark was heading directly for her. My
totality of thought was precipitated to consciousness in a single
all-embracing flash. The man-eater must be deflected from her, and what
was I, except a mad lover who would gladly fight and die, or more gladly
fight and live, for his beloved? Remember, she was the woman wonderful,
and I was aflame for her.
“Knowing fully the peril of my act, I thrust the blunt-sharp end of my
squid-stick into the side of the shark, much as one would attract a
passing acquaintance with a thumb-nudge in the ribs. And the man-eater
turned on me. You know the South Seas, and you know that the tiger
shark, like the bald-face grizzly of Alaska, never gives trail. The
combat, fathoms deep under the sea, was on—if by combat may be named such
a one-sided struggle.
“The Princess unaware, caught her squid and rose to the surface. The
man-eater rushed me. I fended him off with both hands on his nose above
his thousand-toothed open mouth, so that he backed me against the sharp
coral. The scars are there to this day. Whenever I tried to rise, he
rushed me, and I could not remain down there indefinitely without air.
Whenever he rushed me, I fended him off with my hands on his nose. And I
would have escaped unharmed, except for the slip of my right hand. Into
his mouth it went to the elbow. His jaws closed, just below the elbow.
You know how a shark’s teeth are. Once in they cannot be released. They
must go through to complete the bite, but they cannot go through heavy
bone. So, from just below the elbow he stripped the bone clean to the
articulation of the wrist-joint, where his teeth met and my good right
hand became his for an appetizer.
“But while he was doing this, I drove the thumb of my left hand, to the
hilt into his eye-orifice and popped out his eye. This did not stop him.
The meat had maddened him. He pursued the gushing stump of my wrist.
Half a dozen times I fended with my intact arm. Then he got the poor
mangled arm again, closed down, and stripped the meat off the bone from
the shoulder down to the elbow-joint, where his teeth met and he was free
of his second mouthful of me. But, at the same time, with my good arm, I
thumbed out his remaining eye.”
Percival Delaney shrugged his shoulders, ere he resumed.
“From above, those in the canoe had beheld the entire happening and were
loud in praise of my deed. To this day they still sing the song of me,
and tell the tale of me. And the Princess.” His pause was brief but
significant. “The Princess married me. . . . Oh, well-a-day and
lack-a-day, the whirligig of time and fortune, the topsyturviness of
luck, the wooden shoe going up and the polished heel descending a French
gunboat, a conquered island kingdom of Oceania, to-day ruled over by a
peasant-born, unlettered, colonial gendarme, and . . . ”
He completed the sentence and the tale by burying his face in the
down-tilted mouth of the condensed milk can and by gurgling the corrosive
drink down his throat in thirsty gulps.
* * * * *
After an appropriate pause, Chauncey Delarouse, otherwise Whiskers, took
up the tale.
“Far be it from me to boast of no matter what place of birth I have
descended from to sit here by this fire with such as . . . as chance
along. I may say, however, that I, too, was once a considerable figure
of a man. I may add that it was horses, plus parents too indulgent, that
exiled me out over the world. I may still wonder to query: ‘Are Dover’s
cliffs still white?’”
“Huh!” Bruce Cadogan Cavendish sneered. “Next you’ll be asking: ‘How
fares the old Lord Warden?’”
“And I took every liberty, and vainly, with a constitution that was
iron,” Whiskers hurried on. “Here I am with my three score and ten
behind me, and back on that long road have I buried many a youngster that
was as rare and devilish as I, but who could not stand the pace. I knew
the worst too young. And now I know the worst too old. But there was a
time, alas all too short, when I knew, the best.
“I, too, kiss my hand to the Princess of my heart. She was truly a
princess, Polynesian, a thousand miles and more away to the eastward and
the south from Delaney’s Isle of Love. The natives of all around that
part of the South Seas called it the Jolly Island. Their own name, the
name of the people who dwelt thereon, translates delicately and justly
into ‘The Island of Tranquil Laughter.’ On the chart you will find the
erroneous name given to it by the old navigators to be Manatomana. The
seafaring gentry the round ocean around called it the Adamless Eden. And
the missionaries for a time called it God’s Witness—so great had been
their success at converting the inhabitants. As for me, it was, and ever
shall be, Paradise.
“It was _my_ Paradise, for it was there my Princess lived. John Asibeli
Tungi was king. He was full-blooded native, descended out of the oldest
and highest chief-stock that traced back to Manua which was the primeval
sea home of the race. Also was he known as John the Apostate. He lived
a long life and apostasized frequently. First converted by the
Catholics, he threw down the idols, broke the tabus, cleaned out the
native priests, executed a few of the recalcitrant ones, and sent all his
subjects to church.
“Next he fell for the traders, who developed in him a champagne thirst,
and he shipped off the Catholic priests to New Zealand. The great
majority of his subjects always followed his lead, and, having no
religion at all, ensued the time of the Great Licentiousness, when by all
South Seas missionaries his island, in sermons, was spoken of as Babylon.
“But the traders ruined his digestion with too much champagne, and after
several years he fell for the Gospel according to the Methodists, sent
his people to church, and cleaned up the beach and the trading crowd so
spick and span that he would not permit them to smoke a pipe out of doors
on Sunday, and, fined one of the chief traders one hundred gold
sovereigns for washing his schooner’s decks on the Sabbath morn.
“That was the time of the Blue Laws, but perhaps it was too rigorous for
King John. Off he packed the Methodists, one fine day, exiled several
hundred of his people to Samoa for sticking to Methodism, and, of all
things, invented a religion of his own, with himself the figure-head of
worship. In this he was aided and abetted by a renegade Fijian. This
lasted five years. Maybe he grew tired of being God, or maybe it was
because the Fijian decamped with the six thousand pounds in the royal
treasury; but at any rate the Second Reformed Wesleyans got him, and his
entire kingdom went Wesleyan. The pioneer Wesleyan missionary he
actually made prime minister, and what he did to the trading crowd was a
caution. Why, in the end, King John’s kingdom was blacklisted and
boycotted by the traders till the revenues diminished to zero, the people
went bankrupt, and King John couldn’t borrow a shilling from his most
powerful chief.
“By this time he was getting old, and philosophic, and tolerant, and
spiritually atavistic. He fired out the Second Reformed Wesleyans,
called back the exiles from Samoa, invited in the traders, held a general
love-feast, took the lid off, proclaimed religious liberty and high
tariff, and as for himself went back to the worship of his ancestors, dug
up the idols, reinstated a few octogenarian priests, and observed the
tabus. All of which was lovely for the traders, and prosperity reigned.
Of course, most of his subjects followed him back into heathen worship.
Yet quite a sprinkling of Catholics, Methodists and Wesleyans remained
true to their beliefs and managed to maintain a few squalid, one-horse
churches. But King John didn’t mind, any more than did he the high times
of the traders along the beach. Everything went, so long as the taxes
were paid. Even when his wife, Queen Mamare, elected to become a
Baptist, and invited in a little, weazened, sweet-spirited, club-footed
Baptist missionary, King John did not object. All he insisted on was
that these wandering religions should be self-supporting and not feed a
pennyworth’s out of the royal coffers.
“And now the threads of my recital draw together in the paragon of female
exquisiteness—my Princess.”
Whiskers paused, placed carefully on the ground his half-full condensed
milk can with which he had been absently toying, and kissed the fingers
of his one hand audibly aloft.
“She was the daughter of Queen Mamare. She was the woman wonderful.
Unlike the Diana type of Polynesian, she was almost ethereal. She _was_
ethereal, sublimated by purity, as shy and modest as a violet, as
fragile-slender as a lily, and her eyes, luminous and shrinking tender,
were as asphodels on the sward of heaven. She was all flower, and fire,
and dew. Hers was the sweetness of the mountain rose, the gentleness of
the dove. And she was all of good as well as all of beauty, devout in
her belief in her mother’s worship, which was the worship introduced by
Ebenezer Naismith, the Baptist missionary. But make no mistake. She was
no mere sweet spirit ripe for the bosom of Abraham. All of exquisite
deliciousness of woman was she. She was woman, all woman, to the last
sensitive quivering atom of her—
“And I? I was a wastrel of the beach. The wildest was not so wild as I,
the keenest not so keen, of all that wild, keen trading crowd. It was
esteemed I played the stiffest hand of poker. I was the only living man,
white, brown, or black, who dared run the Kuni-kuni Passage in the dark.
And on a black night I have done it under reefs in a gale of wind. Well,
anyway, I had a bad reputation on a beach where there were no good
reputations. I was reckless, dangerous, stopped at nothing in fight or
frolic; and the trading captains used to bring boiler-sheeted prodigies
from the vilest holes of the South Pacific to try and drink me under the
table. I remember one, a calcined Scotchman from the New Hebrides. It
was a great drinking. He died of it, and we laded him aboard ship,
pickled in a cask of trade rum, and sent him back to his own place. A
sample, a fair sample, of the antic tricks we cut up on the beach of
Manatomana.
“And of all unthinkable things, what did I up and do, one day, but look
upon the Princess to find her good and to fall in love with her. It was
the real thing. I was as mad as a March hare, and after that I got only
madder. I reformed. Think of that! Think of what a slip of a woman can
do to a busy, roving man!—By the Lord Harry, it’s true. I reformed. I
went to church. Hear me! I became converted. I cleared my soul before
God and kept my hands—I had two then—off the ribald crew of the beach
when it laughed at this, my latest antic, and wanted to know what was my
game.
“I tell you I reformed, and gave myself in passion and sincerity to a
religious experience that has made me tolerant of all religion ever
since. I discharged my best captain for immorality. So did I my cook,
and a better never boiled water in Manatomana. For the same reason I
discharged my chief clerk. And for the first time in the history of
trading my schooners to the westward carried Bibles in their stock. I
built a little anchorite bungalow up town on a mango-lined street
squarely alongside the little house occupied by Ebenezer Naismith. And I
made him my pal and comrade, and found him a veritable honey pot of
sweetnesses and goodnesses. And he was a man, through and through a man.
And he died long after like a man, which I would like to tell you about,
were the tale of it not so deservedly long.
“It was the Princess, more than the missionary, who was responsible for
my expressing my faith in works, and especially in that crowning work,
the New Church, Our Church, the Queen-mother’s church.
“‘Our poor church,’ she said to me, one night after prayer-meeting. I
had been converted only a fortnight. ‘It is so small its congregation
can never grow. And the roof leaks. And King John, my hard-hearted
father, will not contribute a penny. Yet he has a big balance in the
treasury. And Manatomana is not poor. Much money is made and
squandered, I know. I hear the gossip of the wild ways of the beach.
Less than a month ago you lost more in one night, gambling at cards, than
the cost of the upkeep of our poor church for a year.’
“And I told her it was true, but that it was before I had seen the light.
(I’d had an infernal run of bad luck.) I told her I had not tasted
liquor since, nor turned a card. I told her that the roof would be
repaired at once, by Christian carpenters selected by her from the
congregation. But she was filled with the thought of a great revival
that Ebenezer Naismith could preach—she was a dear saint—and she spoke of
a great church, saying:
“‘You are rich. You have many schooners, and traders in far islands, and
I have heard of a great contract you have signed to recruit labour for
the German plantations of Upolu. They say, next to Sweitzer, you are the
richest trader here. I should love to see some use of all this money
placed to the glory of God. It would be a noble thing to do, and I
should be proud to know the man who would do it.’
“I told her that Ebenezer Naismith would preach the revival, and that I
would build a church great enough in which to house it.
“‘As big as the Catholic church?’ she asked.
“This was the ruined cathedral, built at the time when the entire
population was converted, and it was a large order; but I was afire with
love, and I told her that the church I would build would be even bigger.
“‘But it will take money,’ I explained. ‘And it takes time to make
money.’
“‘You have much,’ she said. ‘Some say you have more money than my
father, the King.
“‘I have more credit,’ I explained. ‘But you do not understand money.
It takes money to have credit. So, with the money I have, and the credit
I have, I will work to make more money and credit, and the church shall
be built.’
“Work! I was a surprise to myself. It is an amazement, the amount of
time a man finds on his hands after he’s given up carousing, and
gambling, and all the time-eating diversions of the beach. And I didn’t
waste a second of all my new-found time. Instead I worked it overtime.
I did the work of half a dozen men. I became a driver. My captains made
faster runs than ever and earned bigger bonuses, as did my supercargoes,
who saw to it that my schooners did not loaf and dawdle along the way.
And I saw to it that my supercargoes did see to it.
“And good! By the Lord Harry I was so good it hurt. My conscience got
so expansive and fine-strung it lamed me across the shoulders to carry it
around with me. Why, I even went back over my accounts and paid Sweitzer
fifty quid I’d jiggered him out of in a deal in Fiji three years before.
And I compounded the interest as well.
“Work! I planted sugar cane—the first commercial planting on Manatomana.
I ran in cargoes of kinky-heads from Malaita, which is in the Solomons,
till I had twelve hundred of the blackbirds putting in cane. And I sent
a schooner clear to Hawaii to bring back a dismantled sugar mill and a
German who said he knew the field-end of cane. And he did, and he
charged me three hundred dollars screw a month, and I took hold of the
mill-end. I installed the mill myself, with the help of several
mechanics I brought up from Queensland.
“Of course there was a rival. His name was Motomoe. He was the very
highest chief blood next to King John’s. He was full native, a
strapping, handsome man, with a glowering way of showing his dislikes.
He certainly glowered at me when I began hanging around the palace. He
went back in my history and circulated the blackest tales about me. The
worst of it was that most of them were true. He even made a voyage to
Apia to find things out—as if he couldn’t find a plenty right there on
the beach of Manatomana! And he sneered at my failing for religion, and
at my going to prayer-meeting, and, most of all, at my sugar-planting.
He challenged me to fight, and I kept off of him. He threatened me, and
I learned in the nick of time of his plan to have me knocked on the head.
You see, he wanted the Princess just as much as I did, and I wanted her
more.
“She used to play the piano. So did I, once. But I never let her know
after I’d heard her play the first time. And she thought her playing was
wonderful, the dear, fond girl! You know the sort, the mechanical
one-two-three tum-tum-tum school-girl stuff. And now I’ll tell you
something funnier. Her playing _was_ wonderful to me. The gates of
heaven opened to me when she played. I can see myself now, worn out and
dog-tired after the long day, lying on the mats of the palace veranda and
gazing upon her at the piano, myself in a perfect idiocy of bliss. Why,
this idea she had of her fine playing was the one flaw in her
deliciousness of perfection, and I loved her for it. It kind of brought
her within my human reach. Why, when she played her one-two-three,
tum-tum-tum, I was in the seventh heaven of bliss. My weariness fell
from me. I loved her, and my love for her was clean as flame, clean as
my love for God. And do you know, into my fond lover’s fancy continually
intruded the thought that God in most ways must look like her.
“—That’s right, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, sneer as you like. But I tell
you that’s love that I’ve been describing. That’s all. It’s love. It’s
the realest, purest, finest thing that can happen to a man. And I know
what I’m talking about. It happened to me.”
Whiskers, his beady squirrel’s eye glittering from out his ruined eyebrow
like a live coal in a jungle ambush, broke off long enough to down a
sedative draught from his condensed milk can and to mix another.
“The cane,” he resumed, wiping his prodigious mat of face hair with the
back of his hand. “It matured in sixteen months in that climate, and I
was ready, just ready and no more, with the mill for the grinding.
Naturally, it did not all mature at once, but I had planted in such
succession that I could grind for nine months steadily, while more was
being planted and the ratoons were springing up.
“I had my troubles the first several days. If it wasn’t one thing the
matter with the mill, it was another. On the fourth day, Ferguson, my
engineer, had to shut down several hours in order to remedy his own
troubles. I was bothered by the feeder. After having the niggers (who
had been feeding the cane) pour cream of lime on the rollers to keep
everything sweet, I sent them out to join the cane-cutting squads. So I
was all alone at that end, just as Ferguson started up the mill, just as
I discovered what was the matter with the feed-rollers, and just as
Motomoe strolled up.
“He stood there, in Norfolk jacket, pigskin puttees, and all the rest of
the fashionable get-up out of a bandbox, sneering at me covered with
filth and grease to the eyebrows and looking like a navvy. And, the
rollers now white from the lime, I’d just seen what was wrong. The
rollers were not in plumb. One side crushed the cane well, but the other
side was too open. I shoved my fingers in on that side. The big,
toothed cogs on the rollers did not touch my fingers. And yet, suddenly,
they did. With the grip of ten thousand devils, my finger-tips were
caught, drawn in, and pulped to—well, just pulp. And, like a slick of
cane, I had started on my way. There was no stopping me. Ten thousand
horses could not have pulled me back. There was nothing to stop me.
Hand, arm, shoulder, head, and chest, down to the toes of me, I was
doomed to feed through.
“It did hurt. It hurt so much it did not hurt me at all. Quite
detached, almost may I say, I looked on my hand being ground up, knuckle
by knuckle, joint by joint, the back of the hand, the wrist, the forearm,
all in order slowly and inevitably feeding in. O engineer hoist by thine
own petard! O sugar-maker crushed by thine own cane-crusher!
“Motomoe sprang forward involuntarily, and the sneer was chased from his
face by an expression of solicitude. Then the beauty of the situation
dawned on him, and he chuckled and grinned. No, I didn’t expect anything
of him. Hadn’t he tried to knock me on the head? What could he do
anyway? He didn’t know anything about engines.
“I yelled at the top of my lungs to Ferguson to shut off the engine, but
the roar of the machinery drowned my voice. And there I stood, up to the
elbow and feeding right on in. Yes, it did hurt. There were some
astonishing twinges when special nerves were shredded and dragged out by
the roots. But I remember that I was surprised at the time that it did
not hurt worse.
“Motomoe made a movement that attracted my attention. At the same time
he growled out loud, as if he hated himself, ‘I’m a fool.’ What he had
done was to pick up a cane-knife—you know the kind, as big as a machete
and as heavy. And I was grateful to him in advance for putting me out of
my misery. There wasn’t any sense in slowly feeding in till my head was
crushed, and already my arm was pulped half way from elbow to shoulder,
and the pulping was going right on. So I was grateful, as I bent my head
to the blow.
“‘Get your head out of the way, you idiot!’ he barked at me.
“And then I understood and obeyed. I was a big man, and he took two
hacks to do it; but he hacked my arm off just outside the shoulder and
dragged me back and laid me down on the cane.
“Yes, the sugar paid—enormously; and I built for the Princess the church
of her saintly dream, and . . . she married me.”
He partly assuaged his thirst, and uttered his final word.
“Alackaday! Shuttlecock and battle-dore. And this at, the end of it
all, lined with boilerplate that even alcohol will not corrode and that
only alcohol will tickle. Yet have I lived, and I kiss my hand to the
dear dust of my Princess long asleep in the great mausoleum of King John
that looks across the Vale of Manona to the alien flag that floats over
the bungalow of the British Government House. . . ”