“There you go!” I cried indignantly.
“What does it matter what my lips utter?” he argued. “They are only my
lips. But I shall think Otoo always. Whenever I think of myself, I shall
think of you. Whenever men call me by name, I shall think of you. And
beyond the sky and beyond the stars, always and forever, you shall be
Otoo to me. Is it well, master?”
I hid my smile, and answered that it was well.
We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate; and he went on
in a cutter to his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back.
I was surprised, for he had told me of his wife, and said that he was
returning to her, and would give over sailing on far voyages.
“Where do you go, master?” he asked, after our first greetings.
I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question.
“All the world,” was my answer--“all the world, all the sea, and all the
islands that are in the sea.”
“I will go with you,” he said simply. “My wife is dead.”
I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men's
brothers, I doubt if any man ever had a brother that was to him what
Otoo was to me. He was brother and father and mother as well. And this
I know: I lived a straighter and better man because of Otoo. I cared
little for other men, but I had to live straight in Otoo's eyes. Because
of him I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal, compounding
me, I fear, chiefly out of his own love and worship and there were times
when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell, and would have taken
the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me. His pride in me
entered into me, until it became one of the major rules in my personal
code to do nothing that would diminish that pride of his.
Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me.
He never criticized, never censured; and slowly the exalted place I held
in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I
could inflict upon him by being anything less than my best.
For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at
my shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and
wounds--ay, and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the
same ships with me; and together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to
Sydney Head, and from Torres Straits to the Galapagos. We blackbirded
from the New Hebrides and the Line Islands over to the westward clear
through the Louisades, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We
were wrecked three times--in the Gilberts, in the Santa Cruz group, and
in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar promised in
the way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche-de-mer, hawkbill turtle
shell, and stranded wrecks.
It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was
going with me over all the sea, and the islands in the midst thereof.
There was a club in those days in Papeete, where the pearlers, traders,
captains, and riffraff of South Sea adventurers forgathered. The play
ran high, and the drink ran high; and I am very much afraid that I kept
later hours than were becoming or proper. No matter what the hour was
when I left the club, there was Otoo waiting to see me safely home.
At first I smiled; next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I
stood in need of no wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when
I came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I
discovered that he still saw me home, lurking across the street among
the shadows of the mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do.
Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in
the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would persist in coming
to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes.
Truly, he made a better man of me. Yet he was not strait-laced. And he
knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora
Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the
island, a gross materialist, who believed that when he died he was dead.
He believed merely in fair play and square dealing. Petty meanness, in
his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide; and I do believe
that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices.
Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was
hurtful to me. Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler himself.
But late hours, he explained, were bad for one's health. He had seen men
who did not take care of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler,
and welcomed a stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the boats. On
the other hand, he believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many
men killed or disgraced by square-face or Scotch.
Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my
plans, and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first,
when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to
divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated
going partners with a knavish fellow-countryman on a guano venture. I
did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither
did Otoo know, but he saw how thick we were getting, and found out for
me, and without my asking him. Native sailors from the ends of the seas
knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and Otoo, suspicious merely,
went among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his
suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters. I
couldn't believe it when Otoo first narrated it; but when I sheeted it
home to Waters he gave in without a murmur, and got away on the first
steamer to Aukland.
At first, I am free to confess, I couldn't help resenting Otoo's poking
his nose into my business. But I knew that he was wholly unselfish; and
soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He had his
eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and
far-sighted. In time he became my counselor, until he knew more of my
business than I did myself. He really had my interest at heart more than
I did. Mine was the magnificent carelessness of youth, for I preferred
romance to dollars, and adventure to a comfortable billet with all night
in. So it was well that I had some one to look out for me. I know that
if it had not been for Otoo, I should not be here today.
Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in
blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were on
the beach in Samoa--we really were on the beach and hard aground--when
my chance came to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on
before the mast; and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we
knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he
always pulled stroke-oar in my boat. Our custom in recruiting labor was
to land the recruiter on the beach. The covering boat always lay on its
oars several hundred feet off shore, while the recruiter's boat, also
lying on its oars, kept afloat on the edge of the beach. When I landed
with my trade goods, leaving my steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his
stroke position and came into the stern sheets, where a Winchester lay
ready to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat's crew was also armed,
the Sniders concealed under canvas flaps that ran the length of the
gunwales.
While I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to
come and labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch. And often
and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and impending
treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle, knocking a
nigger over, that was the first warning I received. And in my rush to
the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard. Once, I
remember, on SANTA ANNA, the boat grounded just as the trouble began.
The covering boat was dashing to our assistance, but the several score
of savages would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otoo took a flying
leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade goods, and scattered tobacco,
beads, tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all directions.
This was too much for the woolly-heads. While they scrambled for the
treasures, the boat was shoved clear, and we were aboard and forty feet
away. And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four
hours.
The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage
island in the easterly Solomons. The natives had been remarkably
friendly; and how were we to know that the whole village had been taking
up a collection for over two years with which to buy a white man's head?
The beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially esteem a white
man's head. The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole
collection. As I say, they appeared very friendly; and on this day I was
fully a hundred yards down the beach from the boat. Otoo had cautioned
me; and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief.
The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp
at me. At least a dozen were sticking into me. I started to run,
but tripped over one that was fast in my calf, and went down. The
woolly-heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled, fantail
tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were so eager for the
prize that they got in one another's way. In the confusion, I avoided
several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the sand.
Then Otoo arrived--Otoo the manhandler. In some way he had got hold of a
heavy war club, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon
than a rifle. He was right in the thick of them, so that they could
not spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was
fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage. The way he handled
that club was amazing.
Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had
driven them back, picked me up in his arms, and started to run, that
he received his first wounds. He arrived in the boat with four spear
thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot. Then
we pulled aboard the schooner, and doctored up.
Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should today be a
supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.
“You spend your money, and you go out and get more,” he said one day.
“It is easy to get money now. But when you get old, your money will be
spent, and you will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master.
I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are many old men
who were young once, and who could get money just like you. Now they are
old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the young men like
you to come ashore and buy drinks for them.
“The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a
year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard. He rides a horse
and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year.
I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That
is because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double
awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul
a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month.
I am a sailor. He is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good
for you to know navigation.”
Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first
schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than I was myself. Later
on it was:
“The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping,
and he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better
paid--the owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money
over.”
“True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars--an old schooner at
that,” I objected. “I should be an old man before I saved five thousand
dollars.”
“There be short ways for white men to make money,” he went on, pointing
ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.
We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory nuts
along the east coast of Guadalcanar.
“Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles,” he said.
“The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year--who
knows?--or the year after, men will pay much money for that land. The
anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land
four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco,
ten bottles of square-face, and a Snider, which will cost you, maybe,
one hundred dollars. Then you place the deed with the commissioner; and
the next year, or the year after, you sell and become the owner of a
ship.”
I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years,
instead of two. Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar--twenty
thousand acres, on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years'
lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety days,
when I sold it to a company for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who
looked ahead and saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the
salving of the Doncaster--bought in at auction for a hundred pounds, and
clearing three thousand after every expense was paid. He led me into the
Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.
We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days. I was too well off.
I married, and my standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same
old-time Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the office,
his wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back, and a
four-shilling lava-lava about his loins. I could not get him to spend
money. There was no way of repaying him except with love, and God knows
he got that in full measure from all of us. The children worshipped
him; and if he had been spoilable, my wife would surely have been his
undoing.
The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their
feet in the world practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat
up with them when they were sick. One by one, when they were scarcely
toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon, and made them into
amphibians. He taught them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish
and the ways of catching them. In the bush it was the same thing. At
seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed. At six, Mary
went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver, and I have seen strong men
balk at that feat. And when Frank had just turned six he could bring up
shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.
“My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen--they are all Christians;
and I do not like Bora Bora Christians,” he said one day, when I, with
the idea of getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully
his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island
in one of our schooners--a special voyage which I had hoped to make a
record breaker in the matter of prodigal expense.
I say one of OUR schooners, though legally at the time they belonged to
me. I struggled long with him to enter into partnership.
“We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down,”
he said at last. “But if your heart so wishes, then shall we become
partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large. I
drink and eat and smoke in plenty--it costs much, I know. I do not pay
for the playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still the
money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a rich man's pleasure. It is
shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes; it is necessary that
we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get it from the
head clerk in the office.”
So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled
to complain.
“Charley,” said I, “you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint,
a miserable land crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our
partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me
this paper. It says that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven
dollars and twenty cents.”
“Is there any owing me?” he asked anxiously.
“I tell you thousands and thousands,” I answered.
His face brightened, as with an immense relief.
“It is well,” he said. “See that the head clerk keeps good account
of it. When I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent
missing.
“If there is,” he added fiercely, after a pause, “it must come out of
the clerk's wages.”
And all the time, as I afterwards learned, his will, drawn up by
Carruthers, and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul's
safe.
But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations.
It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the
wild young days, and where we were once more--principally on a holiday,
incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look
over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at
Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of
burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from
making the adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck to be coming aboard
in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized. There
were four woolly-heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to it. The
schooner was a hundred yards away.
I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to
scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of
the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch
and disappeared. A shark had got him.
The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the
bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with
my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could
barely have supported one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled
sidewise, throwing them back into the water.
I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting
to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the niggers
elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now
and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks.
The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that he was
taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly
beneath me. He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing.
He got the woolly-head by the middle, and away he went, the poor devil,
head, shoulders, and arms out of the water all the time, screeching in
a heart-rending way. He was carried along in this fashion for several
hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.
I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark.
But there was another. Whether it was one that had attacked the natives
earlier, or whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do
not know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could
not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort was devoted to
keeping track of him. I was watching him when he made his first attack.
By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum
nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off. He veered clear,
and began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the same
manoeuvre. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He sheered at the
moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his sandpaper hide
(I had on a sleeveless undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm from
elbow to shoulder.
By this time I was played out, and gave up hope. The schooner was still
two hundred feet away. My face was in the water, and I was watching him
manoeuvre for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between us.
It was Otoo.
“Swim for the schooner, master!” he said. And he spoke gayly, as though
the affair was a mere lark. “I know sharks. The shark is my brother.”
I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always
between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.
“The davit tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls,” he
explained, a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another
attack.
By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I
could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but
they continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no
hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time
Otoo was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course, Otoo
could have saved himself any time. But he stuck by me.
“Good-by, Charley! I'm finished!” I just managed to gasp.
I knew that the end had come, and that the next moment I should throw up
my hands and go down.
But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:
“I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark feel sick!”
He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.
“A little more to the left!” he next called out. “There is a line there
on the water. To the left, master--to the left!”
I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely
conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on
board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant
he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting
blood.
“Otoo!” he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that
thrilled in his voice.
Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by
that name.
“Good-by, Otoo!” he called.
Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in
the captain's arms.
And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in
the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of
a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of
which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and the
other white. If Jehovah be from His high place watching every sparrow
fall, not least in His kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora
Bora.
THE TERRIBLE SOLOMONS
There is no gainsaying that the Solomons are a hard-bitten bunch of
islands. On the other hand, there are worse places in the world. But to
the new chum who has no constitutional understanding of men and life in
the rough, the Solomons may indeed prove terrible.
It is true that fever and dysentery are perpetually on the walk-about,
that loathsome skin diseases abound, that the air is saturated with a
poison that bites into every pore, cut, or abrasion and plants malignant
ulcers, and that many strong men who escape dying there return as wrecks
to their own countries. It is also true that the natives of the Solomons
are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for
collecting human heads. Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to
catch a man with his back turned and to smite him a cunning blow with a
tomahawk that severs the spinal column at the base of the brain. It is
equally true that on some islands, such as Malaita, the profit and loss
account of social intercourse is calculated in homicides. Heads are a
medium of exchange, and white heads are extremely valuable. Very often a
dozen villages make a jack-pot, which they fatten moon by moon, against
the time when some brave warrior presents a white man's head, fresh and
gory, and claims the pot.
All the foregoing is quite true, and yet there are white men who have
lived in the Solomons a score of years and who feel homesick when they
go away from them. A man needs only to be careful--and lucky--to live
a long time in the Solomons; but he must also be of the right sort.
He must have the hallmark of the inevitable white man stamped upon his
soul. He must be inevitable. He must have a certain grand carelessness
of odds, a certain colossal self-satisfaction, and a racial egotism that
convinces him that one white is better than a thousand niggers every
day in the week, and that on Sunday he is able to clean out two
thousand niggers. For such are the things that have made the white man
inevitable. Oh, and one other thing--the white man who wishes to be
inevitable, must not merely despise the lesser breeds and think a lot
of himself; he must also fail to be too long on imagination. He must not
understand too well the instincts, customs, and mental processes of the
blacks, the yellows, and the browns; for it is not in such fashion that
the white race has tramped its royal road around the world.