FATHER AND SON
Willatopy, standing in dignified solitude upon the Captain's bridge,
conned the _Humming Top_ through the deep water channels of bewildering
intricacy which led from the Dungeness Reef to Thursday Island. Ching,
too good a sailor not to recognise a master when he met one, had
withdrawn to the chart-room, and left Willatopy to his unchallengeable
eminence. The boy, quickly grasping the purpose and use of the steering
telegraph, now transmitted his orders direct to the quartermaster
beneath his feet in the wheel-house. He was a sailor by right of birth
on both sides of the house. His ancestors of Devon had played a
faithful, if not a very distinguished part, in the history of the Royal
Navy; there has not often been a generation since Harry the Eighth
without at least one Toppys in the books of the Navy Office. The Hulas
of New Guinea, who to this day build their huts out to sea upon the butt
ends of roughly driven piles--like our Neolithic ancestors of the Swiss
Lake Dwellings--are a tribe of amphibians. Upon the maritime side of his
being there was no collision between white and brown blood in the veins
of Willatopy. He was salt all through; saturated with the sea lore which
is the subconscious heritage from a naval ancestry; bitten to the bone
by sea instincts derived from countless generations of Hula fishers in
the Coral waters.
"How in blazes do you remember like that?" asked Ching once as Willatopy
drove at full speed with a five-knot tide under him into the hidden maze
of coral.
"I don't remember," replied Willie easily, as he delicately manipulated
the steering telegraph, and swung the big yacht this way and that, as
surely as a racing motorist swings his car. "I don't remember; I know."
He never looked at Ching's chart; he never appeared to take any
bearings--although those bright, penetrative blue eyes, ranging out over
the encircling islands, were all the while noting familiar land features
and making their own quick unconscious calculations. He never hesitated
for one instant. The Skipper down below, following Willatopy's course
upon the chart, would sometimes tremble when he saw by how much the boy
ignored the line a careful Admiralty had laid down. But he was too wise
to interfere. If you take a pilot you must trust to him, and Willatopy,
though he scorned the professional title, was a pilot beyond compare. He
did not remember; he knew.
Madame Gilbert was on the boat deck when the yacht drew in towards Port
Kennedy. She frowned viciously upon Thursday Island, that sorry western
gate of the lovely tropic Straits. A treeless, desolate waste dotted
with corrugated iron buildings. Cluster the iron buildings a little,
drive wide dusty roads between clumps of them, and one has Port Kennedy,
the seat of government. Impelled by greed of pearl and shell, and
undeterred by the stark hideousness of the Island, the sweepings of
most nations have poured down upon that uncomely spot, and have greatly
contributed to make it what it is, and to keep from reaching up towards
better things.
"Poor Willatopy," murmured Madame as she gazed upon the polluted scene.
"So this is his point of contact with white civilisation. Better Tops
Island, a hundred times."
A mile away from the port, Willatopy handed over his charge to her
lawful skipper. "Take her in. I go in my yawl." He dropped down the
bridge ladder, and ran pattering along the deck. At a sign from Madame
he stopped.
"I go in my yawl," cried he, pointing to where that little craft of his
bobbed up and down in the yacht's wash at the end of her towing line.
"But, Willatopy," protested Madame, "I am going to your island, and we
can't possibly find our way unless you come as our pilot."
"I come, Madame, after two, three days. You wait for me. I go to see my
banker, and to get my money, in a bag. Then I go to one of my brown
girls. She loves my eyes which are like the sky before dawn."
Willatopy raced away aft. He pulled the yawl in by her line, vaulted
over the yacht's rail, and plumped down in the middle of her swaying
deck. Up went mainsail, foresail, jib; she had no topsail. The driver
had remained set. Willie cast off the line and a moment later his little
vessel was leaning over to the trade wind and flying up the harbour. The
boy had not even troubled to stop the yacht's engines to make more easy
his transhipment. And Ching did not love Willatopy enough to stop them
for him. It was a flying transfer, but done so easily and surely that
Madame hardly realised the simian skill of it. She stood by the rail
watching the yawl pitch as the swell took her, and the white bare-headed
figure which grew smaller and smaller every instant.
"So I have to wait at this horrible Thursday Island while Master Willie
takes his pleasure with one of his brown girls. And it was only
yesterday that he proposed himself to me as my husband! First it was
Ching he put down; now it is Madame Gilbert. Presently it will be
Alexander, and then it will be Marie. When you come to sit in the House
of Lords, friend Willatopy, what a very, very masterful Baron of Topsham
you will be."
* * * * * * *
The _Humming Top_ tied up at the hulk which does duty for a wharf at
Thursday Island. Ewing, armed with a manifest of stores, and with the
joyous light of battle in his shrewd Scots eye, departed to open an
offensive upon the local markets. The Skipper disappeared as skippers
always disappear in harbour, and Madame was left alone. Port Kennedy was
flagrantly uninviting, yet she felt impelled to go ashore. One always
does. First she exchanged gracious compliments with the Administrator to
whom she carried letters of introduction from the Colonial Office, and
then, by a happy inspiration, wandered off to find Willatopy's banker.
The boy fascinated her, and she wanted to talk about him. He was so
entirely different from what Roger Gatepath had led her to expect that
her mind was in a whirl. Perhaps this banker, who kept Willatopy's
money--in large bags--might prove to be an understanding and
communicative friend. He proved to be both--though Robert Grant, like
all managers of banks in the outer fringes of the Empire, was a Scot of
Scots. Madame commanded confidences even from a Scot of Scots.
"Mr. Grant," said she, after her connection with the Family of Toppys
had been discreetly explained. "This queer boy Willatopy swooped down
upon us in his yawl out of the wide sea, saved the Family yacht from
imminent destruction on the reefs in your most dangerous Straits,
piloted us here as easily as if he were sailing his own little boat, and
then vanished. I understand that he has been here to draw his money in a
bag, and has skipped away in his own rapid decided fashion to lay
tribute at the naked feet of one of his brown girls. As a scorcher this
Willatopy of yours would give points to any young man whom I have ever
met."
Grant smiled. "He is what the Americans call a live wire. But before I
tell you what I know about him, may I be permitted to ask the purpose of
your enquiries?"
Madame saw that she must put most of her cards on the table. The finer
arts of feminine diplomacy would be wasted upon a creature so direct.
"That yacht yonder of mine," said she, "is owned by Sir John Toppys of
Wigan, cousin and heir of the late Lord of Topsham. I have come out at
his request to visit the irregular branch of the Family which is settled
in the Torres Straits, and to do what I can to help them if they need or
will accept my help."
"Sir John Toppys, cousin and heir," repeated Grant curiously. "Has the
direct line then failed?"
Madame explained how the casualties of war had left the House desolate.
"So Sir John Toppys, cousin of the late Lord, is the heir," mused Grant
reflectively. His brow puckered, and he looked at Madame acutely and
suspiciously. She bore the scrutiny in that bland impenetrable way which
has so often baffled me.
"So you are interested," said he at last, "in the irregular branch?" The
emphasis upon the adjective was unmistakable.
"Well," drawled Madame Gilbert, "you will agree that the colour is
somewhat unusual."
Grant smiled again. He was thinking hard, and it was plain that he was
familiar with the ramifications of the Family of Toppys, and with the
lawful rights of the Twenty-Eighth Baron. Until that moment, however, he
had not known that the direct white heirs had failed.
When he spoke it was with deliberate, anxiously deliberate, emphasis.
"The kindest service which you can render, Madame, to the coloured
branch of Toppys is to leave them alone--in happy ignorant security. I
repeat, ignorant security."
Madame drew a deep breath. For reasons which she did not yet appreciate,
but which she was soon to understand, Willatopy's banker was on her
side, the side of Sir John Toppys, Baronet of Wigan.
"I was an intimate friend of Will Toppys," went on Grant. "I loved him,
and think that I, alone among his white friends, sympathised with his
withdrawal from white civilisation. Money and honours meant nothing to
his simple soul. The few hundreds a year which he drew through me from
his property in England, the small plantation which he bought upon Tops
Island, sufficed. He was in his way wealthy, and also in his own way
gloriously happy. His wife--you have not seen his wife--honoured him as
a king of men. Willatopy, his only son, worshipped him as a god. You may
perhaps have noticed how Willatopy, although but twelve years old when
his father died, quotes his lightest saying as the last word in human or
divine wisdom?"
Madame nodded.
"I was my friend's executor, and, in my humble way, have tried to be a
guardian to Willatopy. I love the boy for his father's sake and his own
sake. He is a good boy. His courage has the quality of tempered steel:
he is honest and generous. He comes here about once a month, draws a
pound or two in silver from me, buys gear for his yawl and a few
delicacies for his family--they all have a queer passion for sardines
and tinned tongue--picks up some beads for his brown girls, and then
disappears. He does not drink; he has not, I believe, ever tasted
alcohol. His relations with brown girls are those customary in the
Straits. Here, Madame, boys and girls follow their inclinations, but
they are free from the vices of the white races. The unmarried flit from
flower to flower, but those who are married--though wedded by the
sketchiest of native ceremonial--are faithful to one another with a
rigidity unknown in Europe or America. All the vices and all the
diseases in these islands are the gift of the white man. I have always
feared for Willatopy, and now your coming fills me with dread for him.
White and brown blood form a bad mixture--an explosive mixture. A
mixture unstable as nitro-glycerine. So long as Willie remains brown,
and follows the precepts of his father, he will be safe and happy. But
let him incline by ever so little towards the white side of him, let him
once awaken to a taste for wine or whisky, and become conscious of the
seductions of white women--and Willatopy will be a lost soul. Here in my
desk lies the will of my friend Toppys and--other papers. I see the
danger which threatens Willatopy, and I tremble. Take your yacht away,
Madame Gilbert, and trouble the boy no more."
"I have no wish, we have no wish, that Willatopy should leave the Torres
Straits, least of all that he should go to England. But he interests me
extremely, and I would see more of him and of his home before we go
away. It will be but for a few weeks, Mr. Grant, and all that while I
will be his zealous guardian. Besides myself there is only one white
woman in the yacht and she is my maid and at my strict orders. I can
appreciate the danger of alcohol for him, but surely a boy like
Willatopy--whose eyes are blue as the sky at dawn--has already
experienced the seductions of sex?"
"No," emphatically declared Robert Grant. "Where there are no clothes
there is no curiosity, and where there is no conscious shame, there is
no viciousness. Willatopy in the hands of an unscrupulous white woman
would become a devil. Drink and debased white women are the man-eating
tigers in the path of his life; if they fall upon Willatopy they will
devour him. Go back to your yacht, Madame Gilbert, turn her head
towards England, and trouble us no more."
"Bereft of our accomplished pilot we should be ashore within the hour,"
quoth Madame slyly.
"The boy's a wonder," mused Grant. "He arrives and conquers without an
effort. He has bound you to him by his skill in pilotage, and now, I
suppose, you will make him lead you to his island, happy no longer. The
curses of the white man will descend upon it and upon him. Drink and
Lust.... You will not have known the father of Willatopy; he was before
your time. In the eyes of the world he was mad; in all eyes, perhaps,
except my own. He gave up his home in England, he married a Hula girl
out of New Guinea, and he settled upon Tops Island. All these evidences
of rank insanity are known to you; to me alone is known an incident
which would class Will Toppys among the doddering idiots. When I first
heard of it from the man's own lips I was staggered. I am a Scot and a
banker and a materialist. I should not have done what he did; I would
have realised a quick fortune, and dashed home to bonny Scotland. I do
not live on this filthy island for fun. You cannot conceive, Madame, how
after thirty years of the tropics I ache for a bitter Scots haar. But
Will Toppys was true to himself; he rejected the lure of the millions as
he had rejected that of the thousands and the hundreds. During the
wanderings of Will Toppys some twenty years ago, when first he went to
New Guinea, he came across an old Australian gold hunter, one of the
original gang who in the fifties had staked out claims and washed gravel
for gold dust in the river beds beyond Balaarat. This old fellow had
found gold in a creek in New Guinea, and was washing for dust in the
old, old patient fashion when Toppys discovered him. The old man was
unhappy. He had, it is true, found gold in paying quantities, but mixed
with the gold was some dark, heavy obtrusive substance which marred the
serenity of his daily operations. The gold would not wash clear by
itself. Always it was mixed with this miserable stuff which had to be
painfully separated from it. The old man showed Toppys some of it; he
had kept a little under his bunk, but had thrown the rest away. Neither
Toppys nor the digger knew anything of the stuff except that it was a
nuisance. But Toppys took a pinch or two away with him in an envelope.
His curiosity was so far stimulated that he despatched the envelope to
the Assay Office at Brisbane, and asked for particulars of identity.
Years afterwards he showed me the reply which came to him from the Assay
Office. The dark, obtrusive, heavy metal, which the old digger had been
throwing away because it interfered with the purity of his gold dust,
was one of the iridium family, of great commercial importance, and was
valued at fifty pounds sterling an ounce. Fifty pounds an ounce! By
comparison the gold dust was mere dross. You will inquire, as I did,
what course William Toppys took. Many men, who pass for honest, would
have persuaded the old man to sell his claim for some derisory pittance
and have stolen the fruits of his discovery. Others would have offered
to help the old man at his gold washing and have taken their payment in
osmiridium. Others again would have slain the discoverer. Toppys did
none of these things. He went to the old digger's hut to acquaint him
with the gift which God had sent, and found that, while he waited, God
had vouchsafed another and a greater boon. The old man lay in his bunk
dead. Toppys buried him there among the wealth of which he had never
learned the value--and went away. The man was true to himself. He had
come to the Torres Straits to live the simple native life, and he would
not look back for all the riches of New Guinea at fifty pounds an ounce.
And he never disclosed to anyone, even to me, the secret of the
deposits. They were somewhere on the south coast, that was all that he
would tell. His reason was like himself, sanely mad. God, who had hidden
those treasures for millions of years, had disclosed them to two
men--one who was dead, and the other who was as good as dead. Toppys
accepted the revelation as a Divine test of his sincerity, and it would,
in his eyes, have been sacrilege to have given away or sold the
knowledge. I admit," concluded Grant rather savagely, "that if I could
have won the secret from him, I would have scratted up the blessed stuff
with my finger nails. Fifty pounds an ounce! More than a million pounds
a ton. From his own point of view Will Toppys was right in rejecting the
useless wealth, but I still think that he might have given me the tip."
"I must tell that story to Alexander," said Madame, "if only to enjoy
his writhings. Fifty pounds the ounce. Poor Mr. Grant and poor
Alexander. Though one does not need to be a Scot to jump at fifty pounds
an ounce. I could do a bit of scratching at that price with my own lily
hands."
"That was William Toppys, the father of Willatopy. Though how that
serene and unworldly soul came to inhabit the body of an ancient and
commonplace Toppys passes my poor comprehension. Willatopy, who
worshipped his father as a god, is not a bit like him in temperament. He
reminds me sometimes curiously of an English public school boy. He has
the typically English unintellectual love of life. There is nothing of
the anchorite about him. He enjoys every minute of his life. His
virility and extraordinary endurance are Melanesian. Do you know how
William Toppys died when that boy of his was twelve years old? No? Let
me tell you, and perhaps my story of the son will be as illuminating as
my story of the father. Toppys loved his son, though he could have
wished him to have been less dark. The sisters are almost white, not
darker in skin than many southern Europeans. They wear nothing but the
native petticoats, so that one has full opportunity of inspecting their
colour. Willatopy is black beside them. Toppys and his son were always
about in their yawl, which the father brought out from England. It is
fully decked and a fine seaboat. They went everywhere in it, and cared
nothing for the storms or the currents which make our navigation so
difficult and dangerous. It was in March of 1912 that William Toppys was
killed, accidentally killed, in the presence of Willatopy."
"Killed!" exclaimed Madame. "I did not know that."
"Yes, killed. I have the particulars here in my drawer with the--the
other papers. Toppys and the boy were cruising to the north and one
evening at sunset had let go their anchor in the lee of a wide coral
garden. It was the season of monsoon, when storms and rain sweep down
from the north-west. The wind blows sometimes with hurricane velocity.
We have a very brief twilight; at one rush comes the dark, or almost.
The anchor had gone down in fifteen feet of water on the edge of the
coral, and Toppys had gone forward to lower the sails. Somehow, I don't
know how, his feet became entangled, and he pitched overboard. This was
nothing in itself. The yawl has no more than two inches of rail, and
both father and son frequently went overboard without intention.
Willatopy swims like a seal, and Toppys was quite at home in the water.
Willatopy, when he heard the splash, ran forward, cast off the halliard
of the mainsail, and threw the bight over the rail. It was difficult to
climb back without a line. He saw his father come to the surface, gasp,
roll over, and sink again, leaving a trail of blood in the sea. As he
fell, Toppys must have struck his head against a spur of coral, and when
he gasped must have filled his lungs with water. He sank like a stone to
the bottom. It was after sunset, and rapidly growing dark. Willatopy,
the small boy of twelve, dived at once and sought for the heavy man of
twelve stone on the floor fifteen feet below. It was already dark below,
and quite a minute passed before Willatopy got his hand under his
father's arm and struck up to the surface. Then he found himself six
feet from the yawl, and drifting past her. There followed a furious
struggle. The small boy, hopelessly overweighted, fought every inch of
the distance, struggled across those interminable two yards, and just
got his fingers on the counter as the current carried him away. If he
had missed his last grab at the rail, Willatopy could never have swum
back bearing his father's body, and he would never have let go. He is
Melanesian in muscle and skin, but his heart is that of an English
bulldog. The boy's fingers gripped the rail, he hung at arm's length,
and with the other arm he grappled to him the man whom he worshipped as
a god. Picture to yourself the situation. The night had fallen, the wind
was soughing overhead, and threatening a gale, the tide was swirling
past the coral and dragging at Willatopy's burden--and the mainsail
halliard, by which alone he could essay to regain the yawl, was more
than fifteen feet distant toward the bows. And Willatopy was twelve
years old, and his father weighed twelve stone. I want you to get all
these details clear before you, Madame. An English boy could never have
done what Willatopy did then, and afterwards. He would have possessed
the heart but not the lithe enduring strength nor the profound sea
knowledge. Willatopy pulled himself in towards the boat, and her side
inclined slightly towards him. Then he gave the leap and kick of a
dolphin, and shifted his grip from the counter to the side rail. By a
succession of kicks and leaps he worked his way forward inch by inch,
foot by foot. He does not know how long it took him to reach the
halliard, which trailed in the water. He says it was hours, but
Willatopy has vague ideas of time. At last he arrived. He seized the
line and swung clear. Treading water he passed the line under his
father's arms, and made sure that when his own support was withdrawn,
the man's head would be clear of the water. All through that desperate,
one-armed progress from the stern to the midships of the yawl Willatopy
had never once loosened his grip upon his father, nor allowed the dear
drooping head to sink under water. Then when his father had been
securely tied, Willatopy worked forward to the anchor chain and climbed
on board by the bowsprit. He was up and hauling in an instant. The yawl
inclined more and more as the heavy body came in over the rail, but the
boy took a grip on the deck with his naked toes, and hauled more
vigorously than ever. Now was the beloved body stretched at last upon
the deck. The boy felt a long gash on his father's head, and could not
distinguish a sign of life. There was no breath that he could perceive
in the limp sodden body. The Hula fishers of New Guinea have their own
methods of restoring the apparently drowned. Willatopy applied them. He
also remembered his father's lessons and turned them to account, working
the dead arms up and down to induce respiration. It was dark as a wolf's
mouth; Willatopy had to work by touch and ear. The time passed, how long
I do not know, and without pause for rest or food the boy worked on. He
went on until the grey dawn found him still working. And then he knew
that his father was dead. The blue Toppys eyes were cold and sightless.
The body which Willatopy had rubbed and kneaded all though the night was
becoming fixed in the rigor of death. Willatopy rose up and went below.
He filled himself vigorously with food, thinking hard all the time of a
method by which he might transfer his father from the exposed deck to
the little bunk which had been his bed at sea. He felt very lonely. His
white god had withdrawn its presence; no longer would the two, father
and son, sail the seas together. In the ordinary sense, I do not think
that Willatopy grieved at all. He was too busy. After a vigorous attempt
he was obliged to leave the body on the deck. His strength was not equal
to the work of transfer to the cabin, but he did what he could. He
lashed the body so that it could not be disturbed by the rough movements
of the yawl, or by the washing of heavy seas. Then he set the sails,
hauled up the anchor, and laid a course for home. The disaster had
occurred some fifty miles to the north of Tops Island. But three days
passed before a small boy, grey with exhaustion and the continual
beating upon his naked body of salt sea foam, sailed a yawl, with the
corpse of his father lashed to the deck, into the harbour of Murray
Island thirty miles to the south.
"Of those three days Willatopy can tell little. He had been caught in a
furious gale and blown out into the Gulf, driving before it with no
sails set except the small jib. Soon after leaving the fatal anchorage,
where Toppys had been killed, Willatopy's eye for weather had told him
to strip the yawl of her canvas, and she had come down, as it were, from
full dress to a loin cloth before the tempest burst. For twenty-four
hours--as Willie put it, 'from sun to sun'--he had sat by the tiller
without food or sleep. And the previous night had been sleepless, too.
Then the wind fell, but the waves ran high under the eternal Pacific
swell. By lashing the tiller for a few minutes at a time the boy was
able to take food, but sleep was still denied to him. He came back in
long reaches, steering by the sun, for he had been blown far from
familiar waters. He was a long way to the south of Tops Island, and
east of the Great Barrier itself, so that when he sighted land after two
whole days in the open, it was a great unknown, unfriendly reef within
which the passages were narrow and tortuous. Still he worked his way
through, and getting under shelter of a strange island, let go his
anchor and slept. I do not think that he could have held out but for
that God-given sleep. And so after yet another day he arrived in Murray
Island. They took his father's body and would have buried it there, but
Willatopy forbade. He was all right, he said, and going on home, but for
the moment he was tired, and wanted to lie up among friends. So the good
souls of Murray Island made a rough coffin, and laid Toppys upon that
bunk in the little cabin where he had so often slept. Willatopy slept
peacefully on the opposite bunk. He did not shrink from his father's
body as an English boy would have done; he was happy in the thought that
his god was still with him. And then, still alone, that boy of twelve
sailed homewards with his father's corpse. He laughed when assistance
was offered, and scorned companionship. 'Now that my father is dead I
will sail his yawl,' said he. 'No one understands her except him and
me.' Will Toppys is buried near the hut where he had lived with his wife
and children. The family buried him themselves, and repeated over his
body the prayers which the dead man had taught them. That is how William
Toppys died, and that is how his son, a little boy of twelve years old,
brought the father home."
Madame Gilbert's eyes were full of tears, and she did not speak for a
few minutes.
"He comes of good stock," said she at last. "Blood always tells."
"Good stock," assented Grant, "on both sides of the house. If his father
was a Toppys of Devon, his mother is a Hula of New Guinea. Willatopy is
grit all though."
"I am very very much obliged to you," said Madame. "I understand now
something of the father and more of the son. Believe me I wish Willatopy
nothing that is not good."
"Then," said Grant very seriously, "if you mean him nothing except good
you will sail away from the Torres Straits and trouble him no more."