centipede, and Pita’s quarry—nearly a foot long, as thick as a sausage,
scarlet feelers on its hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long
lithe body—was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself
lightning-wise across a forest path. Pita, however, with swift
dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the neck and tail, holding it so
that it could neither bite nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion.
Vaiti’s eyes dilated ever so little. She drew her knife and slashed the
creature in two; then, stooping down, she struck at the flying halves as
they ran away in opposite directions, and cut them up into mincemeat.
Leaving the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an
unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.
“It is no matter,” she said. “We two shall see what we shall see. Keep
your heart warm within you.”
“And if we come back safe?” cried the impetuous Pita, catching the
girl’s warm round arms in his two sinewy hands, and letting his black
eyes gaze into hers.
Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea. The spell of
her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained as if frozen. Far away the
surf hummed on the reef, and a sea-bird cried. Above the two beautiful,
motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the long trade
wind.
“... If we come back” ... said Vaiti at last, her eyes still fixed on
the far-off line of the outer sea—“if we come back—we will go away
together, you and I.”
She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are not unknown even
now, in strange Atiu) that Pita’s hands dropped from her arms, and he
felt half frightened in the moment of his triumph. But Vaiti recalled
him to himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying with a
laugh, as they footed it through the dry, sun-struck woods side by side:
“I think some day my father will make a parrot cage to hang a green Atiu
parrot in, and it will be made of your ribs and breast-bone, little
Pita—all the same as my grandfather did in the islands to the man who
stole his wife.”
At that moment the woods opened out and the cave came into view—a
velvet-dark blot in the dazzling glare of greenery that tangled itself
about the shoreward cliffs.
Pita’s hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an exclamation of
angry surprise. Beside the cave stood a tall, brown, naked figure
painted like a witch-doctor and armed with a spear.
“Do not shoot,” said Vaiti quickly. “It will do no good. Let me look
to him myself.”
She walked right up to the native, stood within a yard of him, and
stared at him, in a silence that somehow managed to express unflattering
things. The man, stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned
away from her and addressed Pita.
“I have nothing to do with this woman of yours,” he said. “It is with
men I would speak.”
“Speak, then, pig-face,” said Pita insolently, hoping to provoke a
fight, since the man seemed to be alone.
“Enter if you wish,” replied the other. “We have sent no fighting-men
to hinder you; the way is clear. Yet if you think the hot sun on the
pleasant land is good to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the
living breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to lay
evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti. Enough.”
The man’s words were strangely void of heat or anger, and he held his
spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an ambush, for she knew that no
native would enter the cave. Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped
to the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening herself and Pita
from out the cold-breathing world of darkness that lay within that
rugged arch, and for one prophetic instant she could smell the very
smell of death.
But Vaiti’s courage was of the kind that rises, wave by wave, the higher
for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled within her to flood-tide in
that moment. She turned upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face.
Then she stretched out her hand, and Pita’s leaped into it, warm and
strong, and together they stepped over the threshold of the cave.
The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.
“Shall we not kill him?” asked Pita.
“There is no use,” said Vaiti. “It is plain to me that all the tribe
know, and they trust to the dangers of the place, whatever these may be.
This island is at the very end of the world, it is true, and strange
things may happen here.”
“Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe in this place,” said
Pita, looking back. Already the gloom of Hades itself was winding about
them, and the air struck gravelike and cold. In the distance the mouth
of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the dewy ferns and
mosses close to the threshold, so that they shone like the jewelled
foliage of some magic forest in a fairy play. Then came the dripping
roof, the enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged with
light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.
Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side down dark tunnel
after dark tunnel, across empty, thunderous-echoing black halls and
archways—their little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim
world of unconquerable gloom. Pita, however, was strangely gay. He
yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the black domes above, when
they crossed some invisible great goblin market-place, full of hollow
sounds and half-glimpsed monstrosities. He sang when the way along the
endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening stalactite candelabra
succeeded one another, thick as forest branches, for mile after mile
unchanged. When the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth and
ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their lights on their
heads and swim for it, he pretended to cry at the cold, and played
tricks on Vaiti by slipping behind her and catching her feet in his
teeth. So they went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and
grave. And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and changeless, as
they passed farther and farther away life and light into the cold black
depths of the cave.
When it was about noon, as near as they could guess, Vaiti took the
biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack, and they ate, squatting on the
wet floor of the tunnel. They knew that the journey was a long one, and
that the way could not well be missed, yet they were beginning to feel a
little uneasy now. Did this cave go on for ever?
Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when they rose and went on
again they did not talk. And now a worse difficulty than any they had
yet encountered suddenly barred the way. The winding tunnel along which
they were walking turned sharp round a corner, and then ended to all
appearance in nothing. They stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black
as a starless sky and of depth unknowable. Thin trickles of light, from
the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and showed that the
colossal crack had a farther side, but it was impossible to see what lay
beyond, and the depth below cast back the candle rays as an armoured
hull throws off a rifle bullet.
Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the edge. Vaiti watched
him with sombre eyes. “There is no bottom there,” she said. “It goes
through the earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think.”
“Children’s talk,” said Pita, listening intently. There was an echoing
rattle as the stone bounded from side to side on its way down. The
rattle grew fainter and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking
of a watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and then seemed
to die out. Seemed—for although there was nothing left for the ear to
catch, the sharpened sensory nerves of the body still responded to a
faint tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound had faded
away.
“I told you,” said Vaiti. “There is no bottom.” Pita did not answer;
he was measuring the narrowest part of the gulf with his eye, and
estimating the value of the three short steps of a run that were
possible before taking off.
“It is not two fathoms wide here,” he said, throwing the provision sack
across to judge his distance better in the uncertain light. Yet,
despite the three steps of a run, there was not an inch to spare when he
landed on the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle of
his powerful young body.
“Can you jump it?” he called to Vaiti—without any particular anxiety,
for the Maori has no nerves, and he knew what the girl could do aloft on
the schooner.
To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but stood leaning up against
the wall of the tunnel, both hands pressed against her chest. In a
moment more she was violently sick.
“The smell!” she said presently, turning a ghastly face towards the
light of Pita’s candle.
“I smell nothing,” said Pita, puzzled. “The wind blows your way. There
is perhaps some dead thing down there.”
Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes seemed to fill half her
face as she looked down into the gulf. Suddenly she sprang, her white
drapery flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita, with a
leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan. “Come, come,” she said,
taking his hand and fairly dragging him on.
They had little farther to go. The tunnel wound on for perhaps another
hundred yards, and then stopped. They found themselves in a low-roofed
circular chamber, such as is often met with at the end of long
underground passages—a small, insignificant place, roofed with drooping
green stalactites and floored with shapeless, slimy hummocks of
stalagmite. Numbers of deep shelves were quarried out in the rocky
sides, and in these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls of
Falaite’s long-ago chiefs—many of them cracked and split, and not a few
fallen into shapeless fragments, though there were a score or two in
excellent condition. They were curious skulls indeed, had their
discoverers been able to understand them. In the projecting jaws, huge
canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly developed ridges near the
opening of the ear were the materials of a problem contradictory and
complicated enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science. But
Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things. They only noted with
disappointment, that most of the skulls had gone to decay—picked out the
best of the unbroken specimens, packed the great sack full of them, and
turned homewards.
“Vaiti,” said Pita, as they walked down the rocky tunnel, and felt the
slope of the gulf beginning under their feet. “Vaiti, what did you——”
Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born question on his
lips.
It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in their path yet again.
The leap was worse on this side, for the clustered cones of stalagmite
did not allow a fair take-off. Pita looked calculatingly at the farther
side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and picked up a
fallen stalactite to throw across.
“Do not throw!” said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.
“Why not? I can jump better if I hear where it hits,” replied Pita,
casting the stone before Vaiti had time to snatch at his hand. It fell
short, and rolled down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.
“Fool! fool! Jump quickly!” exclaimed Vaiti, in the same strained,
horrible whisper.... Just for a second before he sprang, Pita looked
down into the black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the darkness
shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the crevasse—that for the
fragment of a second something long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up in
the light of the candles, and then was gone.... There was a sickening
odour in the air—a living smell, not a dead one; there was a sliding,
rustling sound....
“Jump!” shrieked Vaiti.
They leaped through the air as one, but it was only Vaiti who landed on
the farther side. Behind her, as she touched the rock, rose a shriek
that blasted the leaden air into red-hot drops of horror—that went on
and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof like a rocket fired
from the mouth of hell; breaking at last into a gasping bellow, and
snapping off into grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking
roar, in which there was nothing left of human.
... Pita had jumped short. Falling on the far side, with his legs half
over the abyss, he had grasped for an instant at Vaiti’s outstretched
hands, and in the very act had been snatched away—snatched by a long,
ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering red antennas, that
shot with the speed of a bullet out from the depths of the chasm, and
back again with its prey.... The head was a foot long at least, the
horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black and red body,
that just flashed into view for a second, was as thick as a man’s thigh.
It was a nightmare, an impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt,
the Black Viri.
For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went mad, and then that
the world went out and she died. A long time after, she found herself
sitting on the floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut
where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle guttering down
towards extinction, her revolver empty and smelling of powder—she did
not remember in the least how it had become so—and the whole black,
horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea. Pita was gone.
The bag of skulls had disappeared—fallen, no doubt, into the abyss.
There was not a movement or a sound, save the whisper of the water—drops
trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools upon the ground.
* * * * *
That evening, when the early starlight was beginning to shine down upon
the creepers veiling the mouth of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and
rushing like a madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti
herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard, trembling, and
almost old. He asked for Pita, and was answered only by a shuddering
gesture of the hands. Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to
the beach and brought her on board the schooner. There, when they had
sailed, he left her undisturbed in her cabin for many days, while they
ran steadily southward to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes,
farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten Falaite. The story of
the day in the cave was known to him, as to every one on the island, for
the witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving only the
one interesting fact—how he became possessed of the information. And as
no one else alive on Falaite knew that there were two ways of reaching
the skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could hide
unseen, the witch-doctor’s reputation as a prophet and a clairvoyant was
greatly increased; so that he suffered continually from a
happily-acquired indigestion, and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig and
fowl. And no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of Falaite
Island.
Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the tale, opining rather
that the “blanked old wizard Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole
himself, and good riddance of bad rubbish, too.”
None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti’s rather prolonged depression, and
though he dared not break in upon her solitude further than to hand her
in her meals and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened almost
constantly at her state-room door, and gave up whisky for at least ten
days.
About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan A.B., sat upon the main
hatch in the pleasant coolness of the second dog-watch, and sang the
farewell song of sweet Samoa, “Good-bye, my F’lennie”—the song that
plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who have ever loved and
sailed away among the far-off fairy islands of the wide South Seas.
“Good-bye, my F’lennie (friend)—o le a o tea,
Efau lau le va’a, o le alii pule i....”
he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch.... Then suddenly he
stopped, and the little group of mates and captain on the poop did not
see why.
Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed laughter, knocked at
the captain’s door.
“Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster, sir?” he said.
“Who for?” asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow roll that lies handy in
every shipmaster’s cabin about the peaceful Pacific.
“Te Ai, sir. He’s been knocked down, and his head got cut against the
pump.”
“Who did it?” bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his own peculiar
privileges, at once.
“She did, sir,” said Harris, nearly choking. “Te Ai, he was singin’
’Good-bye, my F’lennie,’ on the main ’atch and out she come from the
deck cabin like a—like a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir—and she ups
with a belayin’ pin from the rail, an——”
“All right, all right; there’s your plaster,” interrupted Saxon.
“Harris! Here.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Give this to Te Ai.”
“Lor’ bless you, sir, ’e don’t mind; ’e’s a——”
“You do what you’re told. Stop. Where’s my daughter?”
“Walkin’ on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and looking like dirty
weather ahead.”
“That’s all right,” sighed the captain, with an air of infinite relief.
*CHAPTER V*
*A DIAMOND WEB*
It was six o’clock in Apia, and the round sun was hanging low above the
rim of the level sea, like a burning coal ready to drop down upon a
breadth of hyacinth silk. The stores were closed along the straggling
beach street, where the sand was white under foot, and parrakeets
tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered flamboyant trees. Native
dandies, greatly oiled and dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom
over each ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their golden
brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English bath-towel that is
popular as full dress for steamer days in the little island capital.
Girls with high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered
lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses open all round to the
sunset sky. They went in groups, and sang as they walked—windy, fitful
gusts of strange island melody, breaking out and dying away like the
evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms. Smells of yam and
breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of fish cooked in green, savoury
leaves, and taro spinach stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the
cooling air. The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.
In “Charley’s”—the least reputable of Apia’s tavern-hotels—the egregious
_table d’hôte_ was in full progress out in the green-shuttered verandah.
Charley himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste, dressed in
striped pyjamas, was eating curried tin—nature unknown—with a knife and
two fingers, at the head of the table. A corpse-faced Chinese was
shuffling round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in a watery
soup. The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging lamp guttered and
smoked, the cutlery was dislocated and black. But there was English
beer on the bar counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the whisky that
mounted high in each man’s smeary tumbler was good of its kind. Charley
knew his customers, and sought first the essential.
Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside, and his copra
advantageously sold to an Auckland agent, sat eating at the table,
heavy-faced, a little intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind.
This was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that he enjoyed
often enough, for, since thought meant pain to him, he had managed to
acquire a wonderful agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most
part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.
It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice anything unusual
in the demeanour of that singularly unknown quantity, Vaiti, his
daughter. And yet Vaiti—sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous
red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah thrust into
the marvellous waves of her hair—was evidently not quite herself. She
sat a little apart from the noisy company that sprawled about the table,
looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and pulled little strips
off the decaying oilcloth of the table-cover with a steady industry that
made Charley wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to
remonstrate.
Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not. A short, stocky man,
with burning grey eyes, a fiery red beard, and a sharp furrow between
the eyebrows, that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope’s ends, was
looking at her every now and then as he noisily sucked in his soup. The
inspection did not appear to please him altogether. He finished his
dinner quickly, took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and rolled
off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by a grey-haired,
greasy-faced mate who had been sitting beside him.
“Still on for it, cap?” asked the latter, leaning over the railing with
an air of careless ease that contrasted oddly with his watchful eye.
“Yes, blank asterisk your condemned foolishness, sure I am on for it!”
replied the captain, betraying his nationality by a slight touch of
brogue.
There is no nation that swings so high and so low between opposite
extremes of character as the impetuous race that is handcuffed, by an
odd freak of geography, to steady, serious England. Great saints and
great rogues are commoner in Ireland than ordinary people, and each
displays the fullest flavour of his kind. Donahue, master of the island
schooner _Ikurangi_, was, or had been, Irish; and it was assuredly not
the company of the saints that claimed his membership.
The two spoke together for a little while in level tones that sounded
loud and careless enough, yet somehow did not carry. One learns these
things by practice.
“She smells a rat, I’m thinking,” said the old mate, looking critically
the while at Charley, as if he were valuing the half-caste’s clothes for
pawn.
“Let her. You and I are apt to be a match for her, for all that,”
answered the captain. He looked at Charley also. You would have sworn
the two were discussing him, and rather unfavourably. Charley himself
shifted in his seat, and showed his magnificent teeth uncomfortably.
“Think she’ll come on board?”
Vaiti was watching them, her chin on her hand. Her expression was not to
be read.
“I’ll get her on board all right,” answered the captain, keeping his
eyes away from the girl with an effort. “You play up, that’s all.”
“’Jer think you’re a match for that weasel in a woman’s skin—you or any
of us?”
“I do, then. Forty’s a match for twenty any day in the year, if the
heads of them comes anything near equal. Cunnin’ as Old Nick she is,
but I’ve been cunnin’ twenty years longer than her.”
“You pitched her a good yarn, I’ll lay.”
“I did that—about the derelick we boarded nor’-east of the Paumotus, and
the Spanish ladies’ clothes and cases of goods that was lying about, and
how we took what there was, includin’ of a di’mond necklashe that was
sittin’ all its lone on the table in the old man’s cabin (Be minding me,
now, or you’ll be making mistakes), and the way a gale riz on us before
we was through, and hurried us back to the _Ikurangi_, so that we lost
the derelick, and didn’t see no more of her; and how we heard in Noumea
afterwards that there was like to be joolery on boord her, so that we’re
all on to go and find her again.”
“Straight fact up to finding the di’monds, and gory lyin’ after that, I
see. But how d’ye make out the people that deserted the ship was such
fat-headed idiots as to leave the joolery?”
“Why, they was fat-headed idiots right enough; they did leave a good lot
of saleable stuff, as you and I knows; and it’s only addin’ on a bit to
say that the ship had been on fire and made them clear for their lives,
so that they didn’t think of the valuables. There’s the necklashe I
have for proof. And, mind me now, what we heard was that the people of
the ship knows now that she didn’t go down, and will be out after her
themselves when they can raise the cash, so that hurry’s the word.”
“How much of that’s true?”
“Not a —— bit. The people was drowned, I allow. But it hangs well, and
don’t you go and forget none of it. I pitched the yarn that way because
of that bit of pashtry joolery I got hould of in mistake for goods down
Melbourne way.... I misremember if I tould you.”
“You did, more nor once, and you was jolly well served right by her,”
candidly replied the mate. “The yarn’s all right, I suppose, and the
paste necklace is good business; but where does this Vaiti come in?”
“Quit lookin’ at her, ye —— fool, and give me a light for me poipe.
Talk easy, can’t you.... Why, she knows more navigation than most men
that’s got a master’s ticket, and she’s as vain of it as a paycock. And
that’s how I’ll have her. Always get a woman t’rough her consate, me
boy, especially if her eyes are too sharp in common. That’ll pull the
wool over them when nothing else will.”
“When I was in Callao——” began the mate, with an evil chuckle.