sailor’s ear. Vaiti was a straight thrower, but the crew seldom failed
to dodge; they had every opportunity of becoming proficient. On this
occasion, however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape, and
the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of the jaw, and knocked
him over. He was hurt, but not stunned, and sat up immediately on the
deck, gazing at the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes
that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.
“Bring ’em that pin,” commanded Vaiti, still in what stood for English
with her. She never addressed the crew in the tongue that was native to
both.
The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her. She motioned to him to
replace it neatly in the rail, and then pointed to the trailing halyard.
It did not escape her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck,
that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that his pareo was
tied with a carelessness unusual among Polynesians, and significant of
trouble and depression when seen. But she put the one down to the
swelled and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face and
the other to the orgies of the previous night. If the men chose to make
brutes of themselves on bush-beer, they need not expect that she was
going to slacken their work for them on that account. No, not if she
broke the head of every man in the ship. She was not Saxon’s daughter
for nothing, as they very well knew.
It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.
She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear sunlight of the
sea. The trade wind ran through the sky like a warm, blue river, the
rigging sang, the sails drew steadily. It was a good day, a happy day,
a pleasant day to be alive. The girl felt pleased with the world. She
took the wheel from the sailor who held it, for the sheer pleasure of
feeling the flying vessel answer to the touch of her own light hand.
All the force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to
concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a great dynamo
passes through a single wire. It was almost as if she drove the ship
herself. The _Sybil_ went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the
spokes fairly shook in her hands.
“The wheel is laughing to-day,” she said in Maori, using the island
sailor’s expression.
Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended to eat with Harris alone.
Saxon himself did not particularly care whether he dined with his bo’sun
or not, if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on deck; but
Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly as a man-of-war at all times,
if she could have had her way. Indeed, she would have liked to dine in
solitary state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too much
good sense to fly in the face of merchant service custom by excluding
the mate.
As things were, she graciously condescended to order Harris down to the
cabin with her, and they discussed together the inevitable curried tin
of Pacific cookery. It was wonderfully light and bright in the little
cabin, which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty of berth
and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade shelves. The
bulkheads were painted white picked out with blue (they were satinwood
and bird’s-eye maple underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished
and perplexed more than one ship’s carpenter in the past quarter of a
century), and there was a pretty bird’s-nest fern in a basket hanging
from the skylight, and the seats were covered with the neatest thing in
blue and white trade prints that Auckland could produce. Vaiti’s taste
was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair freshly combed and held
back with a bright ribbon, laces and frills dainty and immaculate as
ever, looked, as she demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the
teapot absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last sort of
person by whom a native A.B. might expect to be knocked into the
scuppers. Yet, truth to tell, the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at
the opposite side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew,
even though he was heavy-handed enough at times; and he certainly
understood more about the five A.B.’s and one ordinary seaman who
inhabited the forecastle than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves,
and therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.
Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when the curry and the
tea and the fried bananas were almost done, and nobody’s dinner could be
spoilt by unpleasant news.
“Think you’re in for a good time, don’t you, Cap?” he said.
Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded. But her face spoke for
her.
Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti in an uncomfortable,
indefinite way, or heartily hated her. To-day the balance perhaps
inclined in the latter direction. He watched her face with some
interest as he said:
“That’s where you spoils yourself, Cap. You ain’t. And if you want my
advice, which you never do, I’d tell you that the sooner you ’bouts ship
and back to Niué the better.”
Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was eating and
deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all the time, before she
condescended to answer.
“Mph!” was all she said at last. She had never studied diplomacy, but
she knew how much more you learn in general by letting the other person
lead the conversation than by talking yourself. And it occurred to her
that Harris wanted to make himself important by hinting and patronising
over some ship business which might, or might not, be in his department.
Well, let him. She would not give him a lead.
Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted out what he had
meant to keep a good deal longer.
“Oh, very well,” he said. “You can do just as you likes, of course, but
where you’ll find yourself when it comes to a question of mutiny, that’s
another two-and-six. Musling curtains on the ports, and white
table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is going to help you
a lot then, ain’t they? And if ever I’ve seen signs of trouble in a
crew, I seen them to-day, and you knows it—ma’am.”
The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it were, by an ominous
flash of Vaiti’s eye.
Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but you would not have
imagined it if you had seen her slowly scooping out the inside of a
mummy-apple, and as slowly eating it. She was obliged to acknowledge to
herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been something unusual
about the demeanour of more than one of the men since their departure
yesterday. But mutiny? Nonsense! Indigestion from too much pork, more
likely. She did not believe for an instant that any crew once handled
by her father and herself would have an ounce of mutiny left in the lot,
if you ran them through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times
over.
So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:
“You talk plenty nonsense. You keep those men work, they no squeak.
Suppose you finish eat, you go tell Gray he come down ki-ki.”
“All right!” said Harris meaningly, trying to make an effective and
tragic exit. He was really not at all easy in his mind, and Vaiti’s
attitude did nothing to relieve his apprehension of what might be about
to follow. The men had never dragged on the rein as they had done these
two days past, and he felt it in his bones that there was more than met
the eye in the matter.
Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone of his
remonstrance that she would not even listen to the conviction which
began to force itself upon her own mind, next day, that there was really
something astray. Luck in general seemed to have deserted them. With a
fair wind the schooner should have made the run to Raratonga in three
days, but on the afternoon of the second day a dead calm had fallen, and
they lay helpless in the trough of the sea by four o’clock, three
hundred miles from anywhere.
“All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds, when that
(adjective) Cook Islands be near,” sighed Vaiti, scanning the horizon
vainly right and left. Like a true sailor, she was generally cross in a
calm.
“I wish we was out of this, ma’am, I do,” remarked Gray, who was busy
spinning sinnet at her feet on the deck. For some odd reason, the sour
old bo’sun generally found her more approachable than the others.
“Why?” asked Vaiti, almost amiably.
“Because, ma’am, of that, for one thing. And hothers.”
He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had not noticed before, the
ship’s carpenter, a powerful young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc’sle
head and obviously weeping.
“They’ve been at that game, one and another, off and on, ma’am, all
to-day,” he said. “And you know yourself ’ow we’ve been put to it to
get the work out of them. Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they’s
up to, but I allow we’re liable to understand all about it before very
long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow, Shalli, he’s bin speechifyin’
down in the foc’sle ’alf of this watch, like a bloomin’ ’Yde Park
sosherlist, he has.”
Vaiti glanced at her watch.
“Make him eight bell,” she ordered, scanning the foc’sle hatch.
“Ay, ay, ma’am,” said Gray readily, passing on the order.
The watch below were prompt enough about turning out, but Shalli the
forlorn could not, it seemed, find energy enough to get up and turn in.
Instead, he beat his curly head upon the planks and began to sob. Vaiti
took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled nonchalantly for a
minute into her cabin, and reappeared with a slight projection in the
bosom of her muslin dress that had not been there before. Harris and
Gray looked at each other significantly, and the former cast a swift
glance about the vacant horizon. No, not a shred of sail, not a trail
of smoke. Only the glancing flying-fish, and the oily, glittering
swell, and the hard, pale, empty sky.
The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by the hatch, now
signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest of his weeping to a more
convenient season, and got upon his feet. Then the six began advancing
slowly and uncertainly to the break of the poop. They were a
good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men, with bright
eyes and well-featured brown faces, and their dress—the brilliant red or
yellow “pareo” of the islands, gaily figured with enormous white
flowers, and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey—lent a
distinctly operatic air to the little scene. Vaiti and her officers,
however (like Molière’s _bourgeois_ who had talked prose all his life
without knowing it), had lived in the midst of picturesque and
extraordinary things most of their lives, and therefore took no
interest, as a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.
And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact with which they
were confronted. The men were mutinous, beyond doubt.
Vaiti’s mind rapidly ran over all possible causes for the trouble, even
while Shalli was stepping forward and opening his mouth to speak. It
could not be rough treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were
no worse handled on the _Sybil_ than on most other island schooners, and
an occasional knock-down blow is not the sort of thing that a Pacific
native will seriously resent. It could not be any objection to go to
Raratonga—the crew were mostly Cook Islanders themselves, and glad of a
chance of seeing their homes. Nor could it be dislike to her command,
for a chief rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and islanders
who were ruled at home by a queen of her family would be most unlikely
to strike against the authority of one of the Makea race, unless for
some very grave cause. It was, of course, possible that they had
planned to seize the schooner and run off with it.... She put her hand
up to her bosom, and played with the laces that lay over that hard
substance under the dress....
But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp query as to what
they wanted there.
He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing eyes and much
eloquence, using his slender, pointed, brown fingers a good deal to
emphasise his remarks, and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti,
and back to his mates again. Harris listened anxiously, catching only a
stray word here and there, for his knowledge of Maori was confined to
the few phrases used in running the ship. Shalli was certainly saying
that somebody was going to die—that somebody had got to die, and
immediately—to judge by the emphasis with which he spoke.... The mate
was, as Vaiti had once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his
great bulk and strength. He felt himself turning chilly, for all the
burning sky. What the devil did that fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing
there listening as calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her
eyes? Perhaps there was no particular trouble after all; but her
demeanour was no guarantee, for she would have looked like that if they
had all been on the verge of drowning, or burning, or hanging together,
any day of the week.
Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and make out anything,
but cut a large quid and chewed it at leisure, idly looking on. He did
not know if the men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly
care. They were three whites against six niggers, and there were
firearms on their side. And he had seen mutinies in his time beside
which any little amusement that could be got up by half a dozen amiable
Cook Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party. Let them
mutiny if they liked. It would not mean the interruption of the work
for half a watch.
And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop, and the _Sybil_
rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and the useless sails slapped
rhythmically upon the mast. And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the
group of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved countenance
until quite the end of Shalli’s long speech.
When he had finished he turned his face away, and instantly began to
weep. And the five other men, exactly as if a tap had been turned on,
also began to weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting their
hands to heaven.
“If this isn’t a bloomin’ mutiny, it’s a bloomin’ lunatic asylum,”
declared Harris quite inaudibly in the midst of the hideous noise from
the main-deck. It is not a common thing, even in that world where all
things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean, to see a whole
ship’s company shedding tears in concert on a calm and peaceful
afternoon, with nothing more alarming in sight than a handsome young
woman in an expensively pretty frock.
“Ow-ow-ow!” went Shalli, getting quite beyond his own control.
“Ey-ah, eyah!” screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki, fluttering his hands
like frantic pigeons.
“For God’s sake, Vaiti, tell us what’s up,” called Harris, sending his
bull-like tones through the confusion.
And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice in order to be
heard. Her face, its hard calm broken up at last, was black with rage,
and she had pulled out her revolver, and was holding it in her hand,
though, strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.
“That ——, —— witch-man belong Niué, he curse them, they say they die!”
she screamed. “By’n-by I cut him liver out!”
“What witch-man?” bellowed Harris. “Don’t understand. That white
bloke—him with the red hair and the scar on his nose—who dresses native,
and lives native up in the bush? Saw him lookin’ at you like as if he’d
like to knife you, from behind Mata’s house.”
“No, pig-head! no white man got ’mana’ for make die that way,” shrieked
Vaiti, shaking her revolver without effect at the men. “Niué witch-man.
What man you mean? I not see——”
But she did see at that moment, and to Harris’s utter dismay she dropped
the revolver on the deck and flung her skirt over her head.
“My Gord! she’s mad now,” cried Harris. The crew paid not the least
attention, but continued to weep with lungs of brass. The mate’s head
went round. He felt as if he was going out of his senses, too. Gray,
who seemed to be the only normal person left on board, went up to Vaiti
and plucked her dress off her face.
“Now, ma’am, keep ’er ’ead to wind,” he remonstrated. “What’s got ’old
of the Capting? Blest if we ever saw you afraid before.”
Vaiti turned on him like a tigress.
“You think me frighten, you parrot-face, bal’-head, humpback pig-monkey!
Think some more those thing, and I shoot some hole in you lie-making
tongue, learn you talk to me. I tell you——”
The hubbub on deck was calming down a little now, and subsiding into
lost and homeless wails. It was possible to make oneself heard.
“I tell you, that thing Alliti see ’long Niué, he one dead man. Captain
schooner _Ikurangi_—same I making tart [chart] all wrong, so he go
drown, he and him mate. You think it good thing one dead man he go walk
along Niué, looking me?”
“A cat may look at a king,” said Harris, who had realised that no
fighting was afoot, and therefore was very brave just now. “Besides,
that red-head man wasn’t no ghost—he borrowed a pouchful of tobacco off
of me, and never paid it back.”
“What sort that man?” demanded Vaiti. “He small, all same Gray, he ugly
all same you, got red hair, cut ’long him nose, tooth all break?”
“That’s him,” agreed Harris.
Vaiti took a turn across the deck, and fell silent, angrily chewing a
lock of her hair. The horrid vision of Donahue risen from his ocean
grave, and wandering about the islands as a malignant ghost, bent on
avenging his death, had struck her as such a fancy could only strike an
islander, and almost paralysed her active mind. Now she realised that it
was merely a case of mistaken newspaper report, and that Donahue had
somehow escaped from the wreck of his schooner, and was once more
roaming the islands in the flesh—at the very lowest ebb of fortune, it
was evident, but probably none the less dangerous for that. She was
quite certain that he was in some way at the bottom of this business of
cursing the crew, although no doubt the witch-doctor and Mata had been
intermediary. And it was no trifle. Sheer mutiny she would have much
preferred.
“Wot’s it all about?” asked Gray, who had not been so long in the
islands as the mate. “Wot’s the odds if a lot of bally niggers thinks
they’ve been cursed? Seems to me anythin’ the witch-doctor could do
wouldn’t be likely to harm a crew that’s been salted by our old man in
the cursin’ way. There ain’t no witch-what-d’ye-call-’em about the
islands that can lay over ’im for language.”
“Oh, shut up! You don’t know anything about it,” said Harris with
irritation.
“Suppose you tells me,” suggested Gray, tucking another quid into his
cheek, and looking dispassionately at the crew, who were now lying on
deck rolling about with the motion of the vessel, and looking half dead
already. “Doesn’t seem as if we was goin’ to have much bother with that
lot.... And you gettin’ as white at the gills as a flounder, thinkin’
they was goin’ to take charge. Go ’ome and learn a ladies’
dancin’-class, Mr. ’Arris; you ain’t fit to ’andle men.”
“I’ll handle you if——” Harris was beginning roughly, when Vaiti, whose
temper had been badly ruffled by the events of the last half-hour,
stepped across the deck and delivered two stinging blows, one on
Harris’s right ear and one on Gray’s left.
“You take’m that,” she said. “Alliti, you speak bo’sun about Maori
’mana.’ Glay, you lemember Alliti mate, no give cheek.”
“Want to know if I’ve got any left for myself, before I start givin’ it
away,” observed the bo’sun ruefully, rubbing his face. “But better be
slapped nor neglected by a pretty girl, hany day, says I.”
Vaiti did not smile, but leaned over the rail, and began staring at the
crew. She was in no mood for flattery.
“Well, if you want to know, it’s like this,” said Harris. “These native
blokes, they thinks some of their chiefs has got what they call ’mana.’”
“Wot’s that mean?”
“Pretty near any thin’, take it by and large, but one meanin’s all we
want, and that’s the notion they have that these chiefs can sort of
blast ’em with a curse, so’s they’ll go away and die. Like as if I was
a chief, and you was a common man, same as you are, anyhow, and I was to
say, ’Gray, you go off out of this and die next Thursday at four bells
in the afternoon watch.’ And you says to me, says you, ’Ay, ay, sir,’
says you.”
“Blowed if I would,” ejaculated the bo’sun.
“Yes, you would, you chump, because you’d be a bloomin’ native, and they
always does. So off you’d go, and when Thursday come you’d lie down and
die at four bells, wherever you happened to be.”
“Wot of?”
“Nothin’—you’d run down like a watch—sort of ’stop short never to go
again’ business, like the grandfather’s clock—and when you was dead
you’d stay dead. That’s all.”
“And I never ’eard worse rot in all me days,” said the bo’sun
disgustedly. “Think I’m going to believe all that?”
“Who cares what you believes or what you don’t?” demanded Harris,
“You’ll —— well see all about it soon enough. Vaiti she says they says
Mata went to the witch-doctor, who they’re as much afraid of as any
chief in Niué, for all they’re by way of bein’ Christian, and he cursed
them up and down and inside and out, worst style, and says they’re all
to die by sunset, to-night. And if I knows anything of natives they’ll
do it. I’ll lay you, we got to work the ship up to Raratonga
ourselves—if we ever get there. Of all the low-down, mean skinks that
ever walked, them natives are the worst. They haven’t a blessed scrap
of consideration in them for anyone but themselves. Here we are with
every man-jack of these fellows got an advance on his wages, and they
says they’re going to die! Die! I’ve no patience with them. I do hate
selfishness and meanness.”
*CHAPTER XII*
*BREAKING THE MANA*
Vaiti all this time had been steadily watching the men as they lay about
on the main-deck in various attitudes of limp resignation. One or
two—notably the emotional Shalli—were already beginning to look ill.
Matters looked badly enough for the _Sybil_. It was in the hurricane
season, and signs were not wanting that the calm would break up with
energy when it did break. If the crew persisted in their dying, other
people who had not been in any way subjected to the witch-doctor’s
operations might find it incumbent on them to die too. She did not for
a moment doubt the Niuéan’s power to slay. Had she not more than once
seen the queen, who was her own cousin, politely dismiss some offender
with the significant remark, “I wish I may never see you again after
to-morrow” (for the queen was always courteous, and would never have
used the crude terms of a Niuéan witch-doctor); and had not every one on
the island known that with the next evening’s sunset the wretch would
lay him down and die as surely as the dark would fall? These men were
doomed, and the ship would miss the steamer and the cargo would not be
sold, and possibly the schooner would be lost in the blow that was
creeping up, and none of them would ever go home any more.
Thus the native side of Vaiti spoke. But now the white side woke up and
demanded its innings too. Was it endurable that the red-headed rat of a
Donahue (for she was as certain that he had been at the bottom of the
matter as only a woman with no direct evidence to go on can be) should
win the last move in the deadly game they had been playing this year and
more. Was she to get into difficulties, and perhaps lose the ship, the
very first time that she had taken off the _Sybil_ all alone? The fact
that such a disaster would include the losing of herself did not
trouble, as it did not console, her. She would leave her reputation
behind her, and people, when they spoke of Vaiti of the Islands, would
say——
No, they wouldn’t, and they shouldn’t. The white blood was up now. It
was impossible to prevent the “mana” from working. Well, let it be.
She would do the impossible. She had done the impossible before, in
many ways; it was the only sort of thing really very well worth doing,
in the opinion of Vaiti of the Islands.
Whatever was to be done must be done quickly. The storm was not far
away, and the _Sybil_ was rolling in the trough of the increasing swell
with every rag of sail set.
“What you goin’ to do?” asked Harris hopelessly, as he saw her move.
“Give them medicine? It ain’t any good.”
“Yes, give ’em medicine—you and Gray, you giving it plenty by’n-by,”
said Vaiti calmly, beckoning the two men over to her. The crew
continued to lie on the deck, giving no sign of life but an occasional
groan. The wind was beginning to cry a little among the rigging, just
whimpering, like a chidden child. A glassy tinkling of foam sounded
about the keel. The sun was almost down.