looking down from her seat on the top of the deck-house. “Only nine
hundred and eighty-seven. You not remember Charley’s in Apia?”
“I’d forgotten Samoa,” said Harris, in a more cheerful tone, picking up
the marlinspike, and going to work again, as if revived by Vaiti’s
arithmetic.
“A miss is as good as a mile, for all me, specially when it’s nine
hundred mile,” remarked the gloomy boatswain. “Couldn’t you manage to
talk about something rather less ’arrowing to a man’s insides?”
“I’d like to know why she’s going skull-huntin’ to Friday Island, then,”
said the mate, casting a cautious glance at Vaiti, who was scarcely out
of ear-shot, up on the deck-house.
“Trade I can understand,” he went on, “and shell-huntin’—we haven’t done
too bad all round over that last little job, and the old man’s a sight
more sober since he’s owned the ship again. But skulls—and old skulls
at that—filthy natives’ bones that’s been lyin’ in the caves since
Heaven knows when! Besides, they ain’t our skulls, however you may look
at it——”
“Nor I hope they won’t be,” said the boatswain darkly. “In no way, I
mean. The Friday Islanders aren’t people to ask out to an afternoon
tea-party without you’ve got your knuckle-duster on underneath your
voylet kid gloves. And you know what natives are about their old bones
and graves.”
“I do. What I don’t know is how she thinks she’s going to make anything
out of a proper nasty job like that.”
“Oh, she’s on the make, is she!”
“Did you ever know her anything else, bless her?” asked the mate. “She
wants sixty pounds, havin’ spent all the old man give her out of the
shell business in Wellington, takin’ boxes at the theaytres and halls,
and buyin’ women’s gear, and staying at the Constantinople, where she
wore two new ’ats a day for a week; and other games of a similar kind.
Pity you was sick, and not there to see the fun. I tell you, she made
the town look silly.”
“What’s the sixty pound for?” asked the boatswain, chewing fondly on his
quid.
Harris giggled explosively, and whispered:
“She wants a Dozey dress!”
“What in ——’s that? It don’t sound respectable,” virtuously observed
the boatswain, who had never heard of the famous French dressmaker.
“You bet it is, then. Dozey’s a regular bang-up swell in Paris, who
makes the most expensive gownds in the world, and every one in them
parts treats him just the same as a baronight or a duke. You can’t get
so much as a jumper from him for less than sixty pound, and Vaiti she
says every woman in Papeëte or Aucklan’ or Sydney who saw one of his
dresses would spot it right away, and go and throw herself over the
Heads. She read about his things in a piece in one of them female papers
in the hotel, and she saw an actress wearin’ of one, and she’s been
layin’ out to get one ever since, somethin’ awful. Seems when a woman
in London, or Paris, or Yarmouth gets a Dozey dress, and takes to
standin’ off and on before the others, who’s only got new velveteens
with musling frills or such-like it just makes them other women drag
their anchors and run head-on to the shore. So Vaiti, she——”
“Hold on,” interrupted the boatswain. “Why, if she ’ad one of those
gownds, she couldn’t bend it on to her yards, not if it cost a million.
Man alive, she ain’t laid down on the same lines as them Frenchwomen,
anyway.”
“You let her alone for that,” chuckled Harris. “But what beats me is
_who_ she’s going to do with them skulls, and _how_. We won’t know in a
hurry, either, because she and Pita’s fixed it up between them to do the
job alone. Thank ’eaven for small mercies, says I. ’Er on the
war-path’s rather more than I care for; and this isn’t going to be any
picnic, if I know anything of natives.”
“Pita!” whistled the boatswain. “The old man will ’ave ’is gore before
the voyage is out, if Vaiti goes on like this. It’s Ritter, that fat
German trader in Papeëte, that he’s wanting to marry her to; and as for
natives, it’s ’ands off for them, if she is ’alf of one ’erself.”
“Well, she and Pita was planning it all out in the fore-top last night.
I heard them, when she thought I was sleeping on the top of the galley.
And the old man came out and roared at her like a Marquesas bull to come
down; so down she came, laughing at him, like the devil she is. There’s
no one else on this ship would laugh, without it was on the wrong side
of his mouth, when the old man gets ratty. Coming! All right!”
The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti’s sharp hail in person,
a deprecating smile spreading like spilt treacle all over his face as he
came up to her, cap in hand. Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and
looked at him for a minute without speaking. The _Sybil_ rolled on the
towering swell like a captured beast trying to beat its brains out
against a wall, but Saxon’s Maori daughter stood as steady as the
slender main-mast upon the reeling deck. Harris smiled more than ever,
and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking a little foolish.
“You wanting Captain Saxon come and lay you out in the scupper pretty
soon?” inquired Vaiti presently.
“Not particular,” answered the mate, the smile sliding slowly off his
face.
“Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more better shut,” said Vaiti,
walking off with a contemptuous swing in the very fall of her laced
muslin skirts. And Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the
mate, and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ out
of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly and frantically, making a
noise exactly like the buzzing of a mad bluebottle on a warm
window-pane. Further, he plucked a frangipani flower out of the
wreath—a good deal the worse for wear—that hung round his neck, and
stuck the blossom behind his ear. Now, every one who has ever been in
the Islands knows that these two actions are significant of courtship.
Pita was courting Vaiti, as everybody knew—Pita, a mere deck hand, who
had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands, because he was a
relation of Saxon’s dead native wife. Very handsome was Pita, very young
and tall and broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans, but
smooth and pleasant of countenance. Were not the men of Atiu nicknamed
“meek-faced Atiuans,” even in the days, only a generation gone, when
they were the cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?
Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had “views” for Vaiti,
ever since she left the Tahitian convent school that had given her such
fragments of civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the
compromising attentions of Pita. As for Vaiti, her father’s
prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the handsome Atiuan more,
nor alarmed her into favouring him less, than she found agreeable. At
present there was rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon
was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti foresaw the usual
result. It was not at all likely that her father would be able to help
her in her forthcoming raid. Harris she did not choose to rely on at a
pinch; Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious to aid
in such a sacrilege as she proposed. There remained Pita, who, if he
was a wild Atiuan, was at least “misinari” after a fashion, had been
educated, more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in love
with herself.... Yes, Pita would do.
That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced, and a lew large
crystal stars were just beginning to glimmer through the pink of the
ocean sunset, Vaiti descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and
Harris’s berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and then sat
down on the cushioned locker opposite her father.
“What is it?” asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue eyes. He had been
sitting with his head propped in the corner of the cabin, silent as a
fish, since the clearing away of tea an hour before. You might have
thought him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk. He was
neither; but dead and drowned things were rising up from the black sea
caverns of his heart to-night, and their bones showed white and ghastly
upon the desert shores of his life. So he sat silent, with his face
turned to the darkening porthole and to the night that was striding down
upon the sea.
Through the port he saw the shining harbour of Papeëte as it looked a
week or two ago—a tall grey British war-ship lying at anchor, the
_Sybil’s_ dinghy, small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the
man-of-war’s accommodation-ladder, himself, a weather-scarred, red-faced
figure, in a worn duck suit and bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and
waiting patiently until the Governor’s steam-launch should have passed
in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.
He saw the captain of the great Queen’s ship standing at the top of the
ladder, slight and trig and trim, all white and gold from top to toe,
all smiling self-possession and cool command.
He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod; tall, clean,
grey-moustached men following them; a cordial welcome on the deck; a
flutter of light drapery and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures
afterwards, framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain’s cabin in
the stern. They were laughing and talking, and he could hear the clink
of cups and glasses. After—a long time after—he could see his own
shabby little boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and
business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking to him on the
deck about a certain anchorage in the Cook Islands group, concerning
which he was known to have information; himself, burningly conscious of
his shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with some
embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very shabby, very broken, very
old.... Was it twenty-five years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of
the Fleet, and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the mess of his
own regiment, had dined on board his biggest yacht at Cowes a week
before—it—happened?... Now a mere commander left him standing on the
deck, and spoke to him like a native or a dog. Well, what did it all
matter to a dead man? Was not his name of those days carved on the
family monument in letters half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward
Saxon, whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the farthermost
islands, a thousand miles from anywhere?...
“Father,” said Vaiti.
“What is it?” answered Saxon’s voice dully, as befitted a dead man.
“The wind is rising at last,” said the girl in Maori, “We shall be off
the island by morning. Will you, or will you not, go with me into this
cave of death, where I have told you that I shall find what is worth
finding?”
“I have no heart. I will not.”
“Then I and Pita will go,” said Vaiti, fixing the Englishman’s blue eyes
with her own black, stabbing and savagely unfathomable, yet set in
Saxon’s very own narrow high-bred face.
The captain’s dark mood was on him, and he turned his face to the wall,
with a Maori oath consigning Vaiti and Pita to a cannibal end.
“I go; stay you there,” said Vaiti, using the quaintly courteous native
form of farewell, barbed with a little sneer unknown to the original.
Then she went to her cabin. And Saxon turned in his seat, and reached
for the brandy bottle at last.
* * * * *
Handsome Pita had a great awe for Vaiti, for she was a princess of Atiu
by her mother’s side. But she was beautiful, and he admired her—also he
hoped that her imperious soul harboured one soft spot for him. It seemed
good, on the whole, when they were pulling the dinghy over the reef next
morning, to ask Vaiti openly where the value of the booty came in—with a
secret hope in the background of securing as much as possible for a
certain very deserving, more or less Christian youth of Atiu.
Vaiti, her white dress girded up high over her scarlet pareo, waded
through the last yard or two of the emerald lagoon before she answered.
The boat being safe on shore, she stood up and looked sharply about her.
They had chosen a quiet spot at the back of the island for landing, all
the natives being down at the harbour loading copra. The weird pandanus
trees, standing on their high wooden stilts at the verge of the shore,
the rustling coco-palms swinging their great fronds far over the water,
the golden and pink-flowered vines trailing yard on yard of green
garlandry over the paper-white sand, could carry no tales, and they were
the only witnesses.
Vaiti looked at Pita up and down, from head to foot, and Pita gave the
flower behind his ear a knowing cock, and set one hand saucily on his
hip. He knew that he was the handsomest man in the Cook archipelago,
and he felt that the way his pareo was tied that day was a pure
inspiration. So he shut up his mouth very tight, and made play with his
burning black eyes as only a South Sea Islander can, waiting confidently
the while for the information that the whole ship’s company of the
_Sybil_ could not have extracted from Vaiti in a week.
The girl stepped forward, and with a commanding finger tapped Pita’s
biggest dimple, as if he had been a baby.
“Suppose I tell you, then you know too much, you plenty frighten, go
back to ship,” she laughed.
“Speak Maori, high chieftainess!” implored Pita.
“No fee-ah!” answered Saxon’s daughter succinctly. Pita understood at
once that Vaiti was unwilling to use a language that gave free rein to
her tongue and his, and the knowledge elated him.
“Perhaps I tell you,” went on Vaiti, watching him narrowly. “I think
you got heart in belly belong you, more better than Alliti. I tell you,
you want plenty heart by-and-by.”
“High chieftainess, Vaiti, speak Maori!” was Pita’s answer, linked to an
attempted embrace that only fell short of its main object because Vaiti
quite calmly pulled a seaman’s knife out of her dress and laid it edge
upwards across her lips. Pita, who had learned the real European kiss
during his visits to civilisation, and wanted very much to show it off,
felt disappointed, although there was a smile behind the blade that
almost out-dazzled the steel.
“Maori!” he persisted, putting his arm round her waist, with a cool
disregard of her well-known readiness with the knife that won Vaiti’s
admiration a step further than before. She laughed, wavered, and then,
still playing with the keen, bright blade, she lowered it a little, and
spoke in the soft language of the Islands at last.
It was a fairly long tale that she had to tell. When last the _Sybil_
had been in the Society Islands, some weeks before, there had been a
German man of science in the group, collecting native skulls for museums
at home. The grizzly old gentleman and his pursuits had not troubled
Vaiti’s mind particularly until her chief admirer, Ritter, a Papeëte
trader, happened to drop a remark one day about the amount of money some
of these old skulls were worth. Vaiti’s sharp intelligence linked on
the casual saying at once to certain other wandering rumours she
remembered, and she decided to find out something more. She did not ask
Ritter, for he was no talker, even to a handsome girl whom he admired;
and the German was his compatriot, in any case. But when the schooner
reached Raiatea, where Professor Spricht was staying, Vaiti drifted off
among the native huts, and squatted for an hour or two on the mats of
the second chief’s wife’s mother’s cousin’s house, smoking a great deal,
talking very little, and listening quietly. By degrees the house filled
up with interested natives all eager for gossip and chatter; and to
Vaiti, pulling steadily at her cigar, and maintaining the grave,
unsmiling demeanour proper to a princess of Atiu and a great Belitani
chieftain’s daughter, the drawing out of the secret she wanted was as
easy as spinning sinnet out of cocoanut husk.
Nothing is private in the Eastern Pacific, and it was not long before
all the professor’s personal affairs were tossing about like seaweed on
the flood of general gossip—mostly unfit for publication—that surged
about the apparently uninterested ears of the silent, splendid sea-queen
throned on the pile of pandanus mats.... The Siamani (German) had got
skulls in Niué, in Uea, in Mangaia, and was now collecting them about
the Society group.... He was an ugly, grey-snouted pig to look at, and
rooted in the earth like any pig; still, Taous and Mahina, daughters of
Falani, seemed to think that—(details lost in a heated argument about
the personal characteristics of the ladies).... Anyhow, Vekia from the
hills said he was going to buy her two silk dresses from San Francisco
when he came back from Falaite Island; so he was not as mean as he
looked. Yes, he was going to Falaite Island in a great hurry; he would
not even take time to finish his pig-rooting in Raiatea, on account of
something he had heard from an old man who had once lived up in
Falaite.... What fools the papalangi (whites) were. Did not every one
in the Islands know about the old, old people that used to live on
Falaite, hundreds of moons before the days of Tuti (Cook), and how they
all died, and nobody lived there for very, very long, until some people
wandered up from Niué in Tuti’s time; and how the skulls of the old, old
people were still there, buried in a cave that was a hundred miles long,
and guarded by as many devils as would fill twenty war canoes? Of
course, these things were known, and always had been—but when would any
man of Tahiti or Raiatea have thought of such folly as travelling more
than a thousand miles to fight the devils and take away the skulls?
What if they were worth money enough to buy a big schooner, as the old
grey pig had told Vekia when he promised her those dresses? Would a
whole schooner, loaded down with dollars, be any good to a man after the
devils had killed him? Vekia would never get her trade finery, for all
her airs; and Jacky Te Vaka, whose schooner was to be hired to take the
Siamani up to Falaite, would never come back from such a sacrilegious
journey.... Why could he not wait, and go by Kapitani Satoni’s schooner
when she made her yearly trip by and by? Every one knew that the
_Sipila_ was under a charm, and no harm could come to any one on board
her. But he would not wait, and just as soon as Jacky’s boat came back
from Bora-Bora, next week, they were to go.... Ahi! and Jacky was such
a handsome man—it was a great pity!
Such was the substance of the information gathered by Vaiti. It
resulted in her ordering the course of the ship to be changed, and
heading direct for Friday Island, instead of going down to Auckland.
Friday Island—out of the way, infertile, uninteresting, and little
known—had been one of Saxon’s private preserves for some years. He
touched there once a year, purchased all the copra that the little place
produced at his own price, and paid for it in cheap tinned meat, boxes
of damaged biscuit, and tins of imitation salmon instead of cash. He
seldom went ashore, and certainly did not waste his time cave-hunting,
if he did chance to set foot on the beach. Vaiti, with her odd faculty
for acquiring miscellaneous information, had known since the first time
the _Sybil_ called that there were great caves on the island, and that a
devil of unusual quality and size guarded them. So much might have been
said of a hundred similar islands, however, and she had not troubled
herself about either caves or devils until the German professor’s secret
set her on the alert for something that looked like a dangerous,
exciting, and profitable adventure.
*CHAPTER IV*
*THE BLACK VIRI*
Moreover, as Harris had said, she had been devoured with desire of a
real Paris dress ever since her stay in the Wellington hotel. There had
been a famous actress there at the same time, and all her garments had
been freely paragraphed in the ladies’ column of the local press. When
she swam languidly through the hall of the Constantinople, shining
mystic and wonderful out of a cloud of rainbow silks and chiffons that
had cost a formidable row of figures in the Rue de la Paix, all the
women caught their breath, looked once, and then gazed determinedly out
of the windows, pretending that they had noticed nothing. When she came
in to a late supper, floating in spangled mists and sparkling with
constellations of diamonds, every head was turned her way, and half the
heads—the short-cropped ones—stayed turned, in more senses than one. It
was a revelation and a martyrdom to Vaiti. What were her muslin frocks
and her ten new hats at a whole pound apiece compared to this? And the
vision of money saved up faded away for the time being before the vision
of one such frock—only one—belonging to her. Life could surely offer
nothing more.
Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely relating the matter
of the skulls in as few words as possible. Pita, for his part, made no
comment, but took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust one
into his belt, handing the other to the girl. Then he girded up his
pareo—a significant action among islanders—and felt the handle of his
knife to see that it was loose in the sheath. There was a large sack in
the boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample space for other
filling later on. Vaiti tossed it to Pita, and the two began their
walk, barefoot, swift and silent, casting a quick glance every now and
then among the weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as
they went.
“They are all down with the _Sybil_—it is safer now than it would be at
night,” said Pita. “Vaiti, if we get these things, and sell them for
much money in Sitani, you and I will leave the _Sybil_ when she next
goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I shall be king, and we
shall eat roast pork and ’uakari’ every day.”
“My father would burn the villages and kill the chiefs, and hang your
head on the bowsprit of the ship,” replied Vaiti conversationally.
“Besides, I like Sitani, and I will buy myself a wonder dress from
Palisi town there.”
“Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs there, if these old
bones indeed sell for so much money. And we will buy a little schooner
for ourselves, and you shall be the real captain, and there will be four
gold bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap; and you shall
get a _sitificati_ from the chiefs of the great harbour, and take the
schooner out of Sitani Heads yourself. And every one shall be afraid of
me and you, and they will say——”
Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting a glance of
approval at the handsome lad while he spoke cunningly of the schooner
she should command, now shooting out her lip a little, and slashing
impatiently with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds. Suddenly,
looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.
“Pita, you talk too fast. There are things you do not know. Tell me,
is your heart strong within you?”
“It is strong,” answered the island Maori.
“Then listen. There is a devil in the cave.”
“I do not believe in devils. I am misinari, and go to church five times
on Sundays; also I have a black coat and two boots very nearly the same
as each other to wear on collection days.”
“There is a devil all the same; you do not know everything that is in
the world, little Pita,” replied Vaiti. “There is something bad there.
I do not believe in native devils, for I am ’papa-langi’; but I know
there is—a thing of some kind—there. A bad thing. A black viri, they
say, but I do not understand that.”
“A black viri is nothing. You and I do not mind such things. See—there
will perhaps be one in this rotten wood.” Pita struck and kicked at a
mass of decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the great black
centipedes that are common in the equatorial islands.