And swift tropic night smote the _Arangi_, as she alternately rolled in
calms and heeled and plunged ahead in squalls under the lee of the
cannibal island of Malaita. It was a stoppage of the south-east trade
wind that made for variable weather, and that made cooking on the exposed
deck galley a misery and sent the return boys, who had nothing to wet but
their skins, scuttling below.
The first watch, from eight to twelve, was the mate's; and Captain Van
Horn, forced below by the driving wet of a heavy rain squall, took Jerry
with him to sleep in the tiny stateroom. Jerry was weary from the
manifold excitements of the most exciting day in his life; and he was
asleep and kicking and growling in his sleep, ere Skipper, with a last
look at him and a grin as he turned the lamp low, muttered aloud: "It's
that wild-dog, Jerry. Get him. Shake him. Shake him hard."
So soundly did Jerry sleep, that when the rain, having robbed the
atmosphere of its last breath of wind, ceased and left the stateroom a
steaming, suffocating furnace, he did not know when Skipper, panting for
air, his loin cloth and undershirt soaked with sweat, arose, tucked
blanket and pillow under his arm, and went on deck.
Jerry only awakened when a huge three-inch cockroach nibbled at the
sensitive and hairless skin between his toes. He awoke kicking the
offended foot, and gazed at the cockroach that did not scuttle, but that
walked dignifiedly away. He watched it join other cockroaches that
paraded the floor. Never had he seen so many gathered together at one
time, and never had he seen such large ones. They were all of a size,
and they were everywhere. Long lines of them poured out of cracks in the
walls and descended to join their fellows on the floor.
The thing was indecent--at least, in Jerry's mind, it was not to be
tolerated. _Mister_ Haggin, Derby, and Bob had never tolerated
cockroaches, and their rules were his rules. The cockroach was the
eternal tropic enemy. He sprang at the nearest, pouncing to crush it to
the floor under his paws. But the thing did what he had never known a
cockroach to do. It arose in the air strong-flighted as a bird. And as
if at a signal, all the multitude of cockroaches took wings of flight and
filled the room with their flutterings and circlings.
He attacked the winged host, leaping into the air, snapping at the flying
vermin, trying to knock them down with his paws. Occasionally he
succeeded and destroyed one; nor did the combat cease until all the
cockroaches, as if at another signal, disappeared into the many cracks,
leaving the room to him.
Quickly, his next thought was: Where is Skipper? He knew he was not in
the room, though he stood up on his hind-legs and investigated the low
bunk, his keen little nose quivering delightedly while he made little
sniffs of delight as he smelled the recent presence of Skipper. And what
made his nose quiver and sniff, likewise made his stump of a tail bob
back and forth.
_But_ _where_ _was_ _Skipper_? It was a thought in his brain that was as
sharp and definite as a similar thought would be in a human brain. And
it similarly preceded action. The door had been left hooked open, and
Jerry trotted out into the cabin where half a hundred blacks made queer
sleep-moanings, and sighings, and snorings. They were packed closely
together, covering the floor as well as the long sweep of bunks, so that
he was compelled to crawl over their naked legs. And there was no white
god about to protect him. He knew it, but was unafraid.
Having made sure that Skipper was not in the cabin, Jerry prepared for
the perilous ascent of the steep steps that were almost a ladder, then
recollected the lazarette. In he trotted and sniffed at the sleeping
girl in the cotton shift who believed that Van Horn was going to eat her
if he could succeed in fattening her.
Back at the ladder-steps, he looked up and waited in the hope that
Skipper might appear from above and carry him up. Skipper had passed
that way, he knew, and he knew for two reasons. It was the only way he
could have passed, and Jerry's nose told him that he had passed. His
first attempt to climb the steps began well. Not until a third of the
way up, as the _Arangi_ rolled in a sea and recovered with a jerk, did he
slip and fall. Two or three boys awoke and watched him while they
prepared and chewed betel nut and lime wrapped in green leaves.
Twice, barely started, Jerry slipped back, and more boys, awakened by
their fellows, sat up and enjoyed his plight. In the fourth attempt he
managed to gain half way up before he fell, coming down heavily on his
side. This was hailed with low laughter and querulous chirpings that
might well have come from the throats of huge birds. He regained his
feet, absurdly bristled the hair on his shoulders and absurdly growled
his high disdain of these lesser, two-legged things that came and went
and obeyed the wills of great, white-skinned, two-legged gods such as
Skipper and Mister Haggin.
Undeterred by his heavy fall, Jerry essayed the ladder again. A
temporary easement of the _Arangi's_ rolling gave him his opportunity, so
that his forefeet were over the high combing of the companion when the
next big roll came. He held on by main strength of his bent forelegs,
then scrambled over and out on deck.
Amidships, squatting on the deck near the sky-light, he investigated
several of the boat's crew and Lerumie. He identified them
circumspectly, going suddenly stiff-legged as Lerumie made a low,
hissing, menacing noise. Aft, at the wheel, he found a black steering,
and, near him, the mate keeping the watch. Just as the mate spoke to him
and stooped to pat him, Jerry whiffed Skipper somewhere near at hand.
With a conciliating, apologetic bob of his tail, he trotted on up wind
and came upon Skipper on his back, rolled in a blanket so that only his
head stuck out, and sound asleep.
First of all Jerry needs must joyfully sniff him and joyfully wag his
tail. But Skipper did not awake and a fine spray of rain, almost as thin
as mist, made Jerry curl up and press closely into the angle formed by
Skipper's head and shoulder. This did awake him, for he uttered "Jerry"
in a low, crooning voice, and Jerry responded with a touch of his cold
damp nose to the other's cheek. And then Skipper went to sleep again.
But not Jerry. He lifted the edge of the blanket with his nose and
crawled across the shoulder until he was altogether inside. This roused
Skipper, who, half-asleep, helped him to curl up.
Still Jerry was not satisfied, and he squirmed around until he lay in the
hollow of Skipper's arm, his head resting on Skipper's shoulder, when,
with a profound sigh of content, he fell asleep.
Several times the noises made by the boat's crew in trimming the sheets
to the shifting draught of air roused Van Horn, and each time,
remembering the puppy, he pressed him caressingly with his hollowed arm.
And each time, in his sleep, Jerry stirred responsively and snuggled
cosily to him.
For all that he was a remarkable puppy, Jerry had his limitations, and he
could never know the effect produced on the hard-bitten captain by the
soft warm contact of his velvet body. But it made the captain remember
back across the years to his own girl babe asleep on his arm. And so
poignantly did he remember, that he became wide awake, and many pictures,
beginning, with the girl babe, burned their torment in his brain. No
white man in the Solomons knew what he carried about with him, waking and
often sleeping; and it was because of these pictures that he had come to
the Solomons in a vain effort to erase them.
First, memory-prodded by the soft puppy in his arm, he saw the girl and
the mother in the little Harlem flat. Small, it was true, but
tight-packed with the happiness of three that made it heaven.
He saw the girl's flaxen-yellow hair darken to her mother's gold as it
lengthened into curls and ringlets until finally it became two thick long
braids. From striving not to see these many pictures he came even to
dwelling upon them in the effort so to fill his consciousness as to keep
out the one picture he did not want to see.
He remembered his work, the wrecking car, and the wrecking crew that had
toiled under him, and he wondered what had become of Clancey, his right-
hand man. Came the long day, when, routed from bed at three in the
morning to dig a surface car out of the wrecked show windows of a drug
store and get it back on the track, they had laboured all day clearing up
a half-dozen smash-ups and arrived at the car house at nine at night just
as another call came in.
"Glory be!" said Clancey, who lived in the next block from him. He could
see him saying it and wiping the sweat from his grimy face. "Glory be,
'tis a small matter at most, an' right in our neighbourhood--not a dozen
blocks away. Soon as it's done we can beat it for home an' let the down-
town boys take the car back to the shop."
"We've only to jack her up for a moment," he had answered.
"What is it?" Billy Jaffers, another of the crew, asked.
"Somebody run over--can't get them out," he said, as they swung on board
the wrecking-car and started.
He saw again all the incidents of the long run, not omitting the delay
caused by hose-carts and a hook-and-ladder running to a cross-town fire,
during which time he and Clancey had joked Jaffers over the dates with
various fictitious damsels out of which he had been cheated by the
night's extra work.
Came the long line of stalled street-cars, the crowd, the police holding
it back, the two ambulances drawn up and waiting their freight, and the
young policeman, whose beat it was, white and shaken, greeting him with:
"It's horrible, man. It's fair sickening. Two of them. We can't get
them out. I tried. One was still living, I think."
But he, strong man and hearty, used to such work, weary with the hard day
and with a pleasant picture of the bright little flat waiting him a dozen
blocks away when the job was done, spoke cheerfully, confidently, saying
that he'd have them out in a jiffy, as he stooped and crawled under the
car on hands and knees.
Again he saw himself as he pressed the switch of his electric torch and
looked. Again he saw the twin braids of heavy golden hair ere his thumb
relaxed from the switch, leaving him in darkness.
"Is the one alive yet?" the shaken policeman asked.
And the question was repeated, while he struggled for will power
sufficient to press on the light.
He heard himself reply, "I'll tell you in a minute."
Again he saw himself look. For a long minute he looked.
"Both dead," he answered quietly. "Clancey, pass in a number three jack,
and get under yourself with another at the other end of the truck."
He lay on his back, staring straight up at one single star that rocked
mistily through a thinning of cloud-stuff overhead. The old ache was in
his throat, the old harsh dryness in mouth and eyes. And he knew--what
no other man knew--why he was in the Solomons, skipper of the teak-built
yacht _Arangi_, running niggers, risking his head, and drinking more
Scotch whiskey than was good for any man.
Not since that night had he looked with warm eyes on any woman. And he
had been noted by other whites as notoriously cold toward pickanninnies
white or black.
But, having visioned the ultimate horror of memory, Van Horn was soon
able to fall asleep again, delightfully aware, as he drowsed off, of
Jerry's head on his shoulder. Once, when Jerry, dreaming of the beach at
Meringe and of _Mister_ Haggin, Biddy, Terrence, and Michael, set up a
low whimpering, Van Horn roused sufficiently to soothe him closer to him,
and to mutter ominously: "Any nigger that'd hurt that pup. . . "
At midnight when the mate touched him on the shoulder, in the moment of
awakening and before he was awake Van Horn did two things automatically
and swiftly. He darted his right hand down to the pistol at his hip, and
muttered: "Any nigger that'd hurt that pup . . ."
"That'll be Kopo Point abreast," Borckman explained, as both men stared
to windward at the high loom of the land. "She hasn't made more than ten
miles, and no promise of anything steady."
"There's plenty of stuff making up there, if it'll ever come down," Van
Horn said, as both men transferred their gaze to the clouds drifting with
many breaks across the dim stars.
Scarcely had the mate fetched a blanket from below and turned in on deck,
than a brisk steady breeze sprang up from off the land, sending the
_Arangi_ through the smooth water at a nine-knot clip. For a time Jerry
tried to stand the watch with Skipper, but he soon curled up and dozed
off, partly on the deck and partly on Skipper's bare feet.
When Skipper carried him to the blanket and rolled him in, he was quickly
asleep again; and he was quickly awake, out of the blanket, and padding
after along the deck as Skipper paced up and down. Here began another
lesson, and in five minutes Jerry learned it was the will of Skipper that
he should remain in the blanket, that everything was all right, and that
Skipper would be up and down and near him all the time.
At four the mate took charge of the deck.
"Reeled off thirty miles," Van Horn told him. "But now it is baffling
again. Keep an eye for squalls under the land. Better throw the
halyards down on deck and make the watch stand by. Of course they'll
sleep, but make them sleep on the halyards and sheets."
Jerry roused to Skipper's entrance under the blanket, and, quite as if it
were a long-established custom, curled in between his arm and side, and,
after one happy sniff and one kiss of his cool little tongue, as Skipper
pressed his cheek against him caressingly, dozed off to sleep.
Half an hour later, to all intents and purposes, so far as Jerry could or
could not comprehend, the world might well have seemed suddenly coming to
an end. What awoke him was the flying leap of Skipper that sent the
blanket one way and Jerry the other. The deck of the _Arangi_ had become
a wall, down which Jerry slipped through the roaring dark. Every rope
and shroud was thrumming and screeching in resistance to the fierce
weight of the squall.
"Stand by main halyards!--Jump!" he could hear Skipper shouting loudly;
also he heard the high note of the mainsheet screaming across the sheaves
as Van Horn, bending braces in the dark, was swiftly slacking the sheet
through his scorching palms with a single turn on the cleat.
While all this, along with many other noises, squealings of boat-boys and
shouts of Borckman, was impacting on Jerry's ear-drums, he was still
sliding down the steep deck of his new and unstable world. But he did
not bring up against the rail where his fragile ribs might well have been
broken. Instead, the warm ocean water, pouring inboard across the buried
rail in a flood of pale phosphorescent fire, cushioned his fall. A
raffle of trailing ropes entangled him as he struck out to swim.
And he swam, not to save his life, not with the fear of death upon him.
There was but one idea in his mind. _Where_ _was_ _Skipper_? Not that
he had any thought of trying to save Skipper, nor that he might be of
assistance to him. It was the heart of love that drives one always
toward the beloved. As the mother in catastrophe tries to gain her babe,
as the Greek who, dying, remembered sweet Argos, as soldiers on a
stricken field pass with the names of their women upon their lips, so
Jerry, in this wreck of a world, yearned toward Skipper.
The squall ceased as abruptly as it had struck. The _Arangi_ righted
with a jerk to an even keel, leaving Jerry stranded in the starboard
scuppers. He trotted across the level deck to Skipper, who, standing
erect on wide-spread legs, the bight of the mainsheet still in his hand,
was exclaiming:
"Gott-fer-dang! Wind he go! Rain he no come!"
He felt Jerry's cool nose against his bare calf, heard his joyous sniff,
and bent and caressed him. In the darkness he could not see, but his
heart warmed with knowledge that Jerry's tail was surely bobbing.
Many of the frightened return boys had crowded on deck, and their
plaintive, querulous voices sounded like the sleepy noises of a roost of
birds. Borckman came and stood by Van Horn's shoulder, and both men,
strung to their tones in the tenseness of apprehension, strove to
penetrate the surrounding blackness with their eyes, while they listened
with all their ears for any message of the elements from sea and air.
"Where's the rain?" Borckman demanded peevishly. "Always wind first, the
rain follows and kills the wind. There is no rain."
Van Horn still stared and listened, and made no answer.
The anxiety of the two men was sensed by Jerry, who, too, was on his
toes. He pressed his cool nose to Skipper's leg, and the rose-kiss of
his tongue brought him the salt taste of sea-water.
Skipper bent suddenly, rolled Jerry with quick toughness into the
blanket, and deposited him in the hollow between two sacks of yams lashed
on deck aft of the mizzenmast. As an afterthought, he fastened the
blanket with a piece of rope yarn, so that Jerry was as if tied in a
sack.
Scarcely was this finished when the spanker smashed across overhead, the
headsails thundered with a sudden filling, and the great mainsail, with
all the scope in the boom-tackle caused by Van Horn's giving of the
sheet, came across and fetched up to tautness on the tackle with a crash
that shook the vessel and heeled her violently to port. This second
knock-down had come from the opposite direction, and it was mightier than
the first.
Jerry heard Skipper's voice ring out, first, to the mate: "Stand by main-
halyards! Throw off the turns! I'll take care of the tackle!"; and,
next, to some of the boat's crew: "Batto! you fella slack spanker tackle
quick fella! Ranga! you fella let go spanker sheet!"
Here Van Horn was swept off his legs by an avalanche of return boys who
had cluttered the deck with the first squall. The squirming mass, of
which he was part, slid down into the barbed wire of the port rail
beneath the surface of the sea.
Jerry was so secure in his nook that he did not roll away. But when he
heard Skipper's commands cease, and, seconds later, heard his cursings in
the barbed wire, he set up a shrill yelping and clawed and scratched
frantically at the blanket to get out. Something had happened to
Skipper. He knew that. It was all that he knew, for he had no thought
of himself in the chaos of the ruining world.
But he ceased his yelping to listen to a new noise--a thunderous slatting
of canvas accompanied by shouts and cries. He sensed, and sensed
wrongly, that it boded ill, for he did not know that it was the mainsail
being lowered on the run after Skipper had slashed the boom-tackle across
with his sheath-knife.
As the pandemonium grew, he added his own yelping to it until he felt a
fumbling hand without the blanket. He stilled and sniffed. No, it was
not Skipper. He sniffed again and recognized the person. It was
Lerumie, the black whom he had seen rolled on the beach by Biddy only the
previous morning, who, still were recently, had kicked him on his stub of
a tail, and who not more than a week before he had seen throw a rock at
Terrence.
The rope yarn had been parted, and Lerumie's fingers were feeling inside
the blanket for him. Jerry snarled his wickedest. The thing was
sacrilege. He, as a white man's dog, was taboo to all blacks. He had
early learned the law that no nigger must ever touch a white-god's dog.
Yet Lerumie, who was all of evil, at this moment when the world crashed
about their ears, was daring to touch him.
And when the fingers touched him, his teeth closed upon them. Next, he
was clouted by the black's free hand with such force as to tear his
clenched teeth down the fingers through skin and flesh until the fingers
went clear.
Raging like a tiny fiend, Jerry found himself picked up by the neck, half-
throttled, and flung through the air. And while flying through the air,
he continued to squall his rage. He fell into the sea and went under,
gulping a mouthful of salt water into his lungs, and came up strangling
but swimming. Swimming was one of the things he did not have to think
about. He had never had to learn to swim, any more than he had had to
learn to breathe. In fact, he had been compelled to learn to walk; but
he swam as a matter of course.
The wind screamed about him. Flying froth, driven on the wind's breath,
filled his mouth and nostrils and beat into his eyes, stinging and
blinding him. In the struggle to breathe he, all unlearned in the ways
of the sea, lifted his muzzle high in the air to get out of the
suffocating welter. As a result, off the horizontal, the churning of his
legs no longer sustained him, and he went down and under perpendicularly.
Again he emerged, strangling with more salt water in his windpipe. This
time, without reasoning it out, merely moving along the line of least
resistance, which was to him the line of greatest comfort, he
straightened out in the sea and continued so to swim as to remain
straightened out.
Through the darkness, as the squall spent itself, came the slatting of
the half-lowered mainsail, the shrill voices of the boat's crew, a curse
of Borckman's, and, dominating all, Skipper's voice, shouting:
"Grab the leech, you fella boys! Hang on! Drag down strong fella! Come
in mainsheet two blocks! Jump, damn you, jump!"