But only—how did you die?”
How was he dying? Not as an English officer might gladly die in the
cause of his country and in loyal obedience to orders. Not even as a
man, with a sword in his hand, facing the foe. He was dying an
unfaithful servant, false to his trust, and suffering because of that
falseness, as a slaughtered brute struck down with a club like a
bullock, and afterwards....
The red remains of the luckless Aki, jointed and piled in a ghastly
heap, told the rest.
Tempest did not look at that ugly pile any more than he could help. He
wanted all the nerve he could muster for he was haunted by a deadly fear
that he might cry out for mercy when it came to the last, and he did not
want to add cowardice to the tale of his many shortcomings. If he could
have died here as a prisoner of war—as a captured scout, a fighting
enemy, taken in a skirmish—the death, hideous as it was, would have been
honourable, and his pride of country would have upheld him. But it
seemed as if his courage had nothing to stand on now, and he was
almost—almost, but, thank God! not quite—afraid.
The Malekulans had been dancing for full two hours, ever since they had
brought him to the valley and flung him down upon the ground. In the
middle of the open village square were three huge idols, carved out of
entire tree-trunks set upright. They had black, empty sockets for eyes;
their mouths were curved upwards into a ghastly wrinkled grin, and their
tongues hung mockingly out. On the head of each was perched a huge
black wooden bird, with beak bent down and gloomy wings outspread—the
very spirit of Nightmare herself. Round and round these devilish things,
in the red glow of the fires, danced the cannibals ceaselessly and
untiringly, fleeing with heads down and outspread hands, wheeling and
turning, circling with measured steps; and all the time the huge hollow
idols, beaten with heavy clubs “to make the spirits speak,” thundered
death and doom. It was plainly a religious ceremony which must be fully
enacted down to the last detail; but Tempest thought, as clearly as he
could think in such a place and at such a time, that it could not last
much longer.
“A fellow ought to say his prayers,” he thought; but the thunder of the
drums and the wild, shrieking song of the dancers bewildered him, and
his swollen wrists and ankles hurt him so much as almost to confuse his
mind.... What could he say? Only one prayer remained clear in the
turmoil of his brain—just the old, old prayer that he had prayed at his
mother’s knee. Well, it would serve—and up above he hoped they’d
understand how sorry he was ... for lots of things....
“Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom
come....”
It was coming, indeed! The dance had stopped.
“Thy will be done....”
What came next? He could not remember—and the savages were advancing
across the square.
“Forgive us our trespasses ... and lead us not into temptation, but
deliver us from evil....”
It was _now_! The women were hiding themselves in the houses, and two
of the men, armed with clubs, were stepping forward.
He was only conscious of one feeling—joy that he had the courage to look
the cannibals in the face as they advanced, and meet his fate “game.”
He hardly knew that he was still praying—
“... For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory....”
Death!
It came with a blaze of light—a sound as of a wild, deep shout and the
rushing of many waters—then——
Was this the end? Was it indeed death? He had felt nothing—but a man
does not feel the blow that kills—and his eyes were so dazzled with a
strange, blue glory that he could not see.... The rushing sound
continued; it was like the thunder of hundreds of flying feet.... The
light burst forth again, and yet again, and then died away, and there
was a great silence. Tempest saw the hideous faces of the idols
standing out in the empty square, and began to understand. He was not
dead—but something had happened. What was it? He tried to break loose
and sit up so as to see all round.
“Stop um little bit,” said a voice, and some one drew a sharp knife
across the lashings that bound his limbs, and lifted him into a sitting
position.
The blinding light had almost died away now, and he could see the whole
square. There was no one in it. The cannibals were gone, and the
beautiful half-caste girl who had brought about his downfall—innocently,
as Tempest of course supposed—was squatting beside him and putting a
flask to his lips.
“Drink a little bit whisky,” she said. “Good whisky; he make strong.
No good stop here, you Belitani sailor-man; more better we go away too
much quick.”
The spirit cleared Tempest’s head and put some life into his limbs.
Vaiti poked him unceremoniously in the ribs as soon as she saw that he
was reviving.
“Show um leg there, lively!” she ordered, dragging him by the arms.
Rather to his surprise, Tempest found that he could walk, once on his
feet. He wasted no time in getting away, after Vaiti’s brief
explanation of the blue-light stratagem, and the probable return of his
enemies before very long. At something as near a run as his cramped
limbs would allow, he followed her down the pathway that led away from
the village—narrow, wet, and dark as a wolf’s gullet—and into the
comparative security of the bush, towards the advancing relief column
from the _Alligator_.
It would have been no more than fitting if Vaiti, like a true heroine of
romance, had vanished silently into the forest when they encountered the
man-of-war’s men, leaving Tempest to “turn to thank his preserver,” and
“find that she had disappeared.” But Vaiti, as it happened, was born
under the Southern Cross, where the poetry of the footlights does not
flourish. So she gave the men her company on the way down as a matter of
course, asked the officer in command for a cigar, smoked it and accepted
half a dozen more out of his case, and made herself wonderfully
pleasant—for Vaiti. She had further driven Tempest to distraction by
starting a flirtation with a handsome petty officer, eaten up two
emergency rations, “borrowed” some one’s gold tie-pin, and very soundly
boxed the ears of a leading seaman who tried to kiss her in the dark,
before the long roll of the surf on the barrier reef, and the welcome
glimmer of the _Alligator’s_ riding lights, told the tired-out party
that they were safe back again. Then, like the mysterious heroine, at
last she disappeared, and slipped off to the _Sybil_ in a native canoe,
for the reason that she did not want to be seen on board the man-of-war
in a very untidy and dirty dress, without any flowers in her hair, or
fresh scent on her laces. Tempest had found time to “thank his
preserver” on the way down, haltingly enough; but the preserver, instead
of accepting his thanks after the fashion he would have preferred, had
laughed wildly and somewhat wickedly, and gone on walking right in the
middle of the column, without a glance to spare for him.... Still—he
thought he knew women—and.... Time would show.
* * * * *
The rest of the wardroom did not envy Mr. Tempest his interview with the
commander. It took place immediately after his return to the ship, and
he came out from it with a countenance of entire inexpressiveness and
extreme whiteness. One sentence—the last—was unavoidably heard by the
lieutenant who followed immediately after Tempest, to deliver his
report.
“Finally, Mr. Tempest—this Miss—a—Saxon—has risked her life to save your
life and reputation. I think there is only one way in which you can
repay her—by never seeing her again.”
Tempest’s answer was inaudible. But—he never did.
*CHAPTER XVII*
*INVADERS IN TANNA*
“What a beautiful girl! Is she one of the heathens, I wonder?” said
Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the rail of her yacht.
The _Alcyone_ floated on a sea of living silver. The coral reefs forty
feet before her keel showed like a pavement of pale turquoise in the
searching splendour of the tropic moon. Close at hand loomed the dark
woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out half the crystal
broidery of the stars, rose the cone of the great volcano, crowned by a
canopy of fire. So, in the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this
southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of cloud by day
and a pillar of fire by night. So it stands yet, its deathless fires
unquenched, its awful voice breaking the forest silences hour by hour—as
the dead and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and heard it
long ago, and as those who follow us will find it in the days to come,
when we and our thoughts and hopes, and adventures and loves are but a
whisper in the homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing about on
long-forgotten graves.
There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere more famous, and none
less frequently visited, than the fiery cone of Tanna. The island lies
thousands of miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are known
to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile to whites, although the
expression of their hostility has been kept considerably in check of
late years. But Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of
Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins (“Jenkins’s Perfect Pills”), is
well known as a romanticist and a lover of all things unusual and
strange. Mr. Abel Jenkins’s income is only exceeded by that of two
other commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins’s ugliness and
ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and ill-temper of any one
known to polite society. If the reader will piece these detached facts
together, and consider them, he will readily understand why Lady
Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her celebrated
steam-yacht, the _Alcyone_, why she had come to look at Tanna, and why,
including a good deal of miscellaneous company, the travelling party
somehow was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria’s husband.
The yacht had come in that afternoon after a somewhat stormy voyage from
Sydney (“They call it the Pacific Ocean,” said Lady Victoria
plaintively, “instead of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since
we cleared the Heads”), and had instantly, by the mere fact of her
dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded the whole seaboard of its
population. This was because the conscience of Tanna is never quite
clear, and the Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought the
_Alcyone_ was a man-of-war. Only two kinds of ships were known to the
islands, outside trading schooners: British and French warships, and the
lazy little monthly steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group
once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries and traders
about. The _Alcyone_ was not a schooner; she was certainly not the
well-known “B.P.” steamer; therefore she must be some new variety of
man-of-war. As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered
trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time—he had been very
annoying, but a British man-of-war is prejudiced about these affairs.
So the Tannese of the coast, like the modest violet of the poem,
concealed their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior, and
coyly hid from view. Like the modest violet, too—only with a
difference—you might, if you wished, have located them by their—— But
no; this is a polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite
people. Let us change carriages.
Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland with an empty ship
and a full money-bag, and were just starting a fresh recruiting trip,
regarded the appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust. What were the
good old islands coming to if this sort of thing was to be permitted?
Not a bushman would come near the beach as long as the _Alcyone_ stayed,
and the sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of the yacht
were worse than useless, for they neither recruited nor encouraged their
heathen friends to do so. Besides, the airs and graces of the _Alcyone_
were sickening. Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling
all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been run hot on to
the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake; sparkling glass and brasswork
all over the ship, and dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and
a little funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white as
trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like a beautiful
sea-bird settled down to rest—all these unnecessary and disgusting
affectations made a smart schooner like the _Sybil_ look no better than
a mud-scow in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South Seas
and the most famous ocean adventuress from ’Frisco to Hobart Town.
Besides, Saxon would not stir out of his cabin while the yacht was
there, having developed the lumbago that always attacked him whenever
English society folk loomed on the horizon—Vaiti knew that lumbago!—and
he might really have been of use about Sulphur Bay, where, for a wonder,
no one had any old scores against him.
It was all most abominable, thought the “Kapitani,” and she cast an
unfriendly glance on the luxurious _Alcyone_, as her boat shot past the
yacht in the moonlight, returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast
for any stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting signal—a stick
or two of dynamite set afloat on a board and exploded—and come down to
the coast.
Lady Victoria’s comment on the “beautiful girl” did not soften her in
the least, coupled as it was with the unspeakable assumption that she
was “a heathen.” Probably she was, in one sense, having long ago given
up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the accusation of
moral deficiencies that galled her: it was the idea that she, Vaiti,
daughter of a great Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should
have been “evened” to the black, monkey-like, naked hags of Tanna. The
resentful spirit of the half-caste burned hot within her as she steered
the boat through the moonlit water. She could see Lady Victoria and her
friends, a brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling gems,
leaning over the rail, and watching her as impersonally as if she were a
porpoise or a shark. She could catch their comments, loudly and
carelessly spoken.
“I suppose she is one of them. But she looks quite nice. See her
pretty dress. She is quite decently clothed, isn’t she?”
“I wonder is she a cannibal? She does not look dangerous. I would like
to ask her on board, and give her some tea and cake, and things of that
kind, and talk to her. Just to try and reform her from their own
horrible food, you know,” said Lady Victoria angelically.
“That would be so dear of you,” chimed in her special sycophant and
foil, a plain and elderly young woman who knew when her bread was
buttered on both sides, and why.
But here the rowers—urged by a signal from Vaiti who thought she had
heard about as much as she could stand without exploding—gave way
vigorously, and pulled the boat out of earshot.
That was not a happy evening for any one on board the _Sybil_. Vaiti
would not give out any grog for supper though it was a settled custom on
the ship; would not have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane
sky over the mate and boatswain’s sociable game of cards until Gray, out
of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy ace upon his knee, and was
thereupon accused by Harris of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him
with an operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis. At
this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the air of a
convent-bred princess who had never so much as heard a jibbing donkey
“confounded”; and went to sit on deck near the wheel, where she stayed
so long, smoking so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night
watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead, dark hour of two
o’clock, when the spongy heat of the island night stiffens for a while
into fever-bringing chill, shook her out of her sulks and into her
cabin.
When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things happened before
very long. But on this occasion the exception seemed to rule. The
disgusting yacht stayed all the next day, and the _Sybil_ lay quietly at
anchor on the other side of the bay. Some of the yacht people went
ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously about the beach,
wondering at the hot springs and tasting everything in the way of fruit
they happened to see. (It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a
fortunate chance, happened to be poisonous.) Lady Victoria was
disappointed with her day on the whole. The natives from the mission,
who had officiously attended them all day long, were unromantically
clothed, clean, and English-speaking. The wild savages did not appear;
and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely unromantic kind.
“How did you enjoy it, darling?” asked the plain young woman of Lady
Victoria, when the daring pioneers returned.
Mr. Jenkins’s partner shook out her soiled tussore silk disgustedly.
“It was untidy and ugly and nasty,” she declared; “and when I sat down
under a great pineapple tree all covered with fruit, and said that I was
realising one of my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it
was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and that pineapples
grew on the ground. And when we started to walk among the palms, and I
was saying that I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral
strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands, something as big as
a horse’s head suddenly thundered down like a bombshell from a hundred
feet high, and buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful
shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like anything! So then the
missionary came out, and said he wondered I wasn’t killed; and if you’ll
believe me, it was nothing but a horrible nut! And the coral strand was
pretty enough, all over little bits of branching coral stuff; but why
doesn’t anyone ever tell you that coral strands burn all the skin off
your nose and blacken you into a nigger? We’re going up the volcano
to-morrow—the missionary says it’s quite safe—and I’m sure I hope it’s
true, but one never knows. Darling, if I die, see that the new
Lafayette photo is sent to the papers—not on any account the other; and
I like Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very thick, and
just one short text, something nice, like ’They were lovely and pleasant
in their lives’—you know.”
... “’And in death they were not divided,’” finished the plain young
woman with mechanical piety.... “Darling! dearest! what have I said?
What is the matter?”
“Now you _have_ done it!” roared Mr. de Coverley, who was rather a
well-bred, but sometimes rather a vulgar young man. “Not divided! Oh,
great Scott! Oh, my eye! Oh, I’ll die of laughing! Hold me up! Never
mind, Vic; I’ll see you aren’t divided, or cooked either—trust to me!”
* * * * *
Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she started off the
next morning into the interior, to recruit on her own account. It was
not a very safe thing to do, but the bushmen would not come down to the
coast, and the _Sybil_ could not hang out indefinitely, since the
doubtful character of her methods had given the French and English
Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit of asking questions about
her. Saxon, who had relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills
at a safe distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter accompany
him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and departed with a guide seduced
from the mission towards a village lying a mile or two above the
volcano. She preferred the glory of working on her own account, and
besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.
She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed herself for her part in
a robe of scarlet sateen, with liberal necklaces of different coloured
trade beads, and stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an
ornamented sheath-knife. Across her splendid young bosom she slung an
incongruous-looking bandolier of cartridges, designed apparently for the
slaughter of elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her
shoulder, completed the outfit. All these valuables, though designed to
assist her plans by suggesting the enormous store of desirable goods
possessed by the recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a
sudden and unprovided end, by reason of the natives’ covetousness. She
took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was used to taking chances. It
is easier than most people suppose to take the risk of being killed
every day of your life. In the strange places of the earth, where such
things are a common happening, men do not look upon the inevitable end
after the pursy, secretive, never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and
Brixton. Death is just death in the earth’s wild places—yours to-day,
mine to-morrow—a thing to walk with shoulder to shoulder, to meet face
to face at noonday; in any case, to make no bones of it until it makes
bones of you; and after that circumstances will keep you from
complaining if you feel like it.
It was a long, hot walk up to the village. A “walk” is mostly a
scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides, where roads are mere
foot-wide cracks and canyons in the dense forest growth, and level
ground apparently does not exist. Besides, a bandolier of cartridges
and an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery for such a
climate. Vaiti, however, possessed the enviable gift of never looking,
or apparently feeling, hot or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying
pace that caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had waxed
fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish himself back in the
mission school writing copies, instead of slaving up and down
precipitous gullies in the rear of a woman-devil who did not know what
it was to want a rest.
At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village came in sight,
and they entered the open square, shaded by an immense banyan tree and
surrounded by low, ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the
mountain villages of Tanna. There were sentries perched up in the trees
outside the gate, and others squatted on the ground at every entrance,
their rifles ready in the crook of the elbow. Within, the dusty
tan-coloured square, quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot
sky, was all alive with moving figures—ugly women in brief grass skirts
humped out into swaying bustles; young boys with murderous little faces,
and full-sized rifles; wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into
myriads of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders, stripes
of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save their native
impudence and a cartridge belt—all seething about in a very bee-hive of
excitement and alarm. As for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about
like piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked and
loaded.
Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an attack, and picking
out a native who could speak English, asked what the trouble was. The
man replied that they feared the little man-of-war down below, but that
they were entirely innocent. Questioned further, they said naïvely that
they had never eaten a white man, and that none of them were low
cannibals in any case. Vaiti, who had not heard of this little affair
before, saw her chance.
“No good you speak alonga that fellow way,” she said, using the
_bêche-de-mer_ talk that some of the Tannese understood; for Vaiti, like
many half-castes, could handle almost any dialect or corruption of a
dialect, though she could not speak decent English or French. “I savvy
plenty, you eatum one fellow white man. By’n by, big fellow man-of-war
come, shoot you all-a-same one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying
fox], burn altogether house belong you. Very good you come alonga Saxon
ship, go Queensland; then you all right.”
“No eatum,” persisted the man (who was the professional talking-man or
orator of the village), with a coy smile.
Vaiti’s nose was keen, and she had already guessed something by its aid.
She marched straight across the square into a little yam-house, and
pointed to a small parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with
cocoanut sinnet. Five toes and an instep protruded from one end. The
game had been well hung, as the Tannaman likes it to be, and there was
no mistaking the fact of its presence in any sense.