Daylight saw the _Arangi_ under way, her sails drooping heavily in the
dead air while the boat's crew toiled at the oars of the whaleboat to tow
her out through the narrow entrance. Once, when the ketch, swerved by
some vagrant current, came close to the break of the shore-surf, the
blacks on board drew toward one another in apprehension akin to that of
startled sheep in a fold when a wild woods marauder howls outside. Nor
was there any need for Van Horn's shout to the whaleboat: "Washee-washee!
Damn your hides!" The boat's crew lifted themselves clear of the thwarts
as they threw all their weight into each stroke. They knew what dire
fate was certain if ever the sea-washed coral rock gripped the _Arangi's_
keel. And they knew fear precisely of the same sort as that of the fear-
struck girl below in the lazarette. In the past more than one
Langa-Langa and Somo boy had gone to make a Su'u feast day, just as Su'u
boys, on occasion, had similarly served feasts at Langa-Langa and at
Somo.
"My word," Tambi, at the wheel, addressed Van Horn as the period of
tension passed and the _Arangi_ went clear. "Brother belong my father,
long time before he come boat's crew along this place. Big fella
schooner brother belong my father he come along. All finish this place
Su'u. Brother belong my father Su'u boys kai-kai along him altogether."
Van Horn recollected the _Fair_ _Hathaway_ of fifteen years before,
looted and burned by the people of Su'u after all hands had been killed.
Truly, the Solomons at this beginning of the twentieth century were
savage, and truly, of the Solomons, this great island of Malaita was
savagest of all.
He cast his eyes speculatively up the slopes of the island to the
seaman's landmark, Mount Kolorat, green-forested to its cloud-capped
summit four thousand feet in the air. Even as he looked, thin
smoke-columns were rising along the slopes and lesser peaks, and more
were beginning to rise.
"My word," Tambi grinned. "Plenty boy stop 'm bush lookout along you eye
belong him."
Van Horn smiled understandingly. He knew, by the ancient telegraphy of
smoke-signalling, the message was being conveyed from village to village
and tribe to tribe that a labour-recruiter was on the leeward coast.
All morning, under a brisk beam wind which had sprung up with the rising
of the sun, the _Arangi_ flew north, her course continuously advertised
by the increasing smoke-talk that gossiped along the green summits. At
high noon, with Van Horn, ever-attended by Jerry, standing for'ard and
conning, the _Arangi_ headed into the wind to thread the passage between
two palm-tufted islets. There was need for conning. Coral patches
uprose everywhere from the turquoise depths, running the gamut of green
from deepest jade to palest tourmaline, over which the sea filtered
changing shades, creamed lazily, or burst into white fountains of sun-
flashed spray.
The smoke columns along the heights became garrulous, and long before the
_Arangi_ was through the passage the entire leeward coast, from the salt-
water men of the shore to the remotest bush villagers, knew that the
labour recruiter was going in to Langa-Langa. As the lagoon, formed by
the chain of islets lying off shore, opened out, Jerry began to smell the
reef-villages. Canoes, many canoes, urged by paddles or sailed before
the wind by the weight of the freshening South East trade on spread
fronds of coconut palms, moved across the smooth surface of the lagoon.
Jerry barked intimidatingly at those that came closest, bristling his
neck and making a ferocious simulation of an efficient protector of the
white god who stood beside him. And after each such warning, he would
softly dab his cool damp muzzle against the sun-heated skin of Skipper's
leg.
Once inside the lagoon, the _Arangi_ filled away with the wind a-beam. At
the end of a swift half-mile she rounded to, with head-sails trimming
down and with a great flapping of main and mizzen, and dropped anchor in
fifty feet of water so clear that every huge fluted clamshell was visible
on the coral floor. The whaleboat was not necessary to put the Langa-
Langa return boys ashore. Hundreds of canoes lay twenty deep along both
sides of the _Arangi_, and each boy, with his box and bell, was clamoured
for by scores of relatives and friends.
In such height of excitement, Van Horn permitted no one on board.
Melanesians, unlike cattle, are as prone to stampede to attack as to
retreat. Two of the boat's crew stood beside the Lee-Enfields on the
skylight. Borckman, with half the boat's crew, went about the ship's
work. Van Horn, Jerry at his heels, careful that no one should get at
his back, superintended the departure of the Langa-Langa returns and kept
a vigilant eye on the remaining half of the boat's crew that guarded the
barbed-wire rails. And each Somo boy sat on his trade-box to prevent it
from being tossed into the waiting canoes by some Langa-Langa boy.
In half an hour the riot departed ashore. Only several canoes lingered,
and from one of these Van Horn beckoned aboard Nau-hau, the biggest chief
of the stronghold of Langa-Langa. Unlike most of the big chiefs, Nau-hau
was young, and, unlike most of the Melanesians, he was handsome, even
beautiful.
"Hello, King o' Babylon," was Van Horn's greeting, for so he had named
him because of fancied Semitic resemblance blended with the crude power
that marked his visage and informed his bearing.
Born and trained to nakedness, Nau-hau trod the deck boldly and
unashamed. His sole gear of clothing was a length of trunk strap buckled
about his waist. Between this and his bare skin was thrust the naked
blade of a ten-inch ripping knife. His sole decoration was a white China
soup-plate, perforated and strung on coconut sennit, suspended from about
his neck so that it rested flat on his chest and half-concealed the
generous swell of muscles. It was the greatest of treasures. No man of
Malaita he had ever heard of possessed an unbroken soup-plate.
Nor was he any more ridiculous because of the soup-plate than was he
ludicrous because of his nakedness. He was royal. His father had been a
king before him, and he had proved himself greater than his father. Life
and death he bore in his hands and head. Often he had exercised it,
chirping to his subjects in the tongue of Langa-Langa: "Slay here," and
"Slay there"; "Thou shalt die," and "Thou shalt live." Because his
father, a year abdicated, had chosen foolishly to interfere with his
son's government, he had called two boys and had them twist a cord of
coconut around his father's neck so that thereafter he never breathed
again. Because his favourite wife, mother of his eldest born, had dared
out of silliness of affection to violate one of his kingly tamboos, he
had had her killed and had himself selfishly and religiously eaten the
last of her even to the marrow of her cracked joints, sharing no morsel
with his boonest of comrades.
Royal he was, by nature, by training, by deed. He carried himself with
consciousness of royalty. He looked royal--as a magnificent stallion may
look royal, as a lion on a painted tawny desert may look royal. He was
as splendid a brute--an adumbration of the splendid human conquerors and
rulers, higher on the ladder of evolution, who have appeared in other
times and places. His pose of body, of chest, of shoulders, of head, was
royal. Royal was the heavy-lidded, lazy, insolent way he looked out of
his eyes.
Royal in courage was he, this moment on the _Arangi_, despite the fact
that he knew he walked on dynamite. As he had long since bitterly
learned, any white man was as much dynamite as was the mysterious death-
dealing missile he sometimes employed. When a stripling, he had made one
of the canoe force that attacked the sandalwood-cutter that had been even
smaller than the _Arangi_. He had never forgotten that mystery. Two of
the three white men he had seen slain and their heads removed on deck.
The third, still fighting, had but the minute before fled below. Then
the cutter, along with all her wealth of hoop-iron, tobacco, knives and
calico, had gone up into the air and fallen back into the sea in
scattered and fragmented nothingness. It had been dynamite--the MYSTERY.
And he, who had been hurled uninjured through the air by a miracle of
fortune, had divined that white men in themselves were truly dynamite,
compounded of the same mystery as the substance with which they shot the
swift-darting schools of mullet, or blow up, in extremity, themselves and
the ships on which they voyaged the sea from far places. And yet on this
unstable and death-terrific substance of which he was well aware Van Horn
was composed, he trod heavily with his personality, daring, to the verge
of detonation, to impact it with his insolence.
"My word," he began, "what name you make 'm boy belong me stop along you
too much?" Which was a true and correct charge that the boys which Van
Horn had just returned had been away three years and a half instead of
three years.
"You talk that fella talk I get cross too much along you," Van Horn
bristled back, and then added, diplomatically, dipping into a half-case
of tobacco sawed across and proffering a handful of stick tobacco: "Much
better you smoke 'm up and talk 'm good fella talk."
But Nau-hau grandly waved aside the gift for which he hungered.
"Plenty tobacco stop along me," he lied. "What name one fella boy go way
no come back?" he demanded.
Van Horn pulled the long slender account book out of the twist of his
loin-cloth, and, while he skimmed its pages, impressed Nau-hau with the
dynamite of the white man's superior powers which enabled him to remember
correctly inside the scrawled sheets of a book instead of inside his
head.
"Sati," Van Horn read, his finger marking the place, his eyes alternating
watchfully between the writing and the black chief before him, while the
black chief himself speculated and studied the chance of getting behind
him and, with the single knife-thrust he knew so well, of severing the
other's spinal cord at the base of the neck.
"Sati," Van Horn read. "Last monsoon begin about this time, him fella
Sati get 'm sick belly belong him too much; bime by him fella Sati finish
altogether," he translated into beche-de-mer the written information:
_Died_ _of_ _dysentery_ _July_ _4th_, 1901.
"Plenty work him fella Sati, long time," Nau-hau drove to the point.
"What come along money belong him?"
Van Horn did mental arithmetic from the account.
"Altogether him make 'm six tens pounds and two fella pounds gold money,"
was his translation of sixty-two pounds of wages. "I pay advance father
belong him one ten pounds and five fella pounds. Him finish altogether
four tens pounds and seven fella pounds."
"What name stop four tens pounds and seven fella pounds?" Nau-hau
demanded, his tongue, but not his brain, encompassing so prodigious a
sum.
Van Horn held up his hand.
"Too much hurry you fella Nau-hau. Him fella Sati buy 'm slop chest
along plantation two tens pounds and one fella pound. Belong Sati he
finish altogether two tens pounds and six fella pounds."
"What name stop two tens pounds and six fella pounds?" Nau-hau continued
inflexibly.
"Stop 'm along me," the captain answered curtly.
"Give 'm me two tens pounds and six fella pounds."
"Give 'm you hell," Van Horn refused, and in the blue of his eyes the
black chief sensed the impression of the dynamite out of which white men
seemed made, and felt his brain quicken to the vision of the bloody day
he first encountered an explosion of dynamite and was hurled through the
air.
"What name that old fella boy stop 'm along canoe?" Van Horn asked,
pointing to an old man in a canoe alongside. "Him father belong Sati?"
"Him father belong Sati," Nau-hau affirmed.
Van Horn motioned the old man in and on board, beckoned Borckman to take
charge of the deck and of Nau-hau, and went below to get the money from
his strong-box. When he returned, cavalierly ignoring the chief, he
addressed himself to the old man.
"What name belong you?"
"Me fella Nino," was the quavering response. "Him fella Sati belong
along me."
Van Horn glanced for verification to Nau-hau, who nodded affirmation in
the reverse Solomon way; whereupon Van Horn counted twenty-six gold
sovereigns into the hand of Sati's father.
Immediately thereafter Nau-hau extended his hand and received the sum.
Twenty gold pieces the chief retained for himself, returning to the old
man the remaining six. It was no quarrel of Van Horn's. He had
fulfilled his duty and paid properly. The tyranny of a chief over a
subject was none of his business.
Both masters, white and black, were fairly contented with themselves. Van
Horn had paid the money where it was due; Nau-hau, by virtue of kingship,
had robbed Sati's father of Sati's labour before Van Horn's eyes. But
Nau-hau was not above strutting. He declined a proffered present of
tobacco, bought a case of stick tobacco from Van Horn, paying him five
pounds for it, and insisted on having it sawed open so that he could fill
his pipe.
"Plenty good boy stop along Langa-Langa?" Van Horn, unperturbed, politely
queried, in order to make conversation and advertise nonchalance.
The King o' Babylon grinned, but did not deign to reply.
"Maybe I go ashore and walk about?" Van Horn challenged with tentative
emphasis.
"Maybe too much trouble along you," Nau-hau challenged back. "Maybe
plenty bad fella boy kai-kai along you."
Although Van Horn did not know it, at this challenge he experienced the
hair-pricking sensations in his scalp that Jerry experienced when he
bristled his back.
"Hey, Borckman," he called. "Man the whaleboat."
When the whaleboat was alongside, he descended into it first, superiorly,
then invited Nau-hau to accompany him.
"My word, King o' Babylon," he muttered in the chief's ears as the boat's
crew bent to the oars, "one fella boy make 'm trouble, I shoot 'm hell
outa you first thing. Next thing I shoot 'm hell outa Langa-Langa. All
the time you me fella walk about, you walk about along me. You no like
walk about along me, you finish close up altogether."
And ashore, a white man alone, attended by an Irish terrier puppy with a
heart flooded with love and by a black king resentfully respectful of the
dynamite of the white man, Van Horn went, swashbuckling barelegged
through a stronghold of three thousand souls, while his white mate,
addicted to schnapps, held the deck of the tiny craft at anchor off
shore, and while his black boat's crew, oars in hands, held the whaleboat
stern-on to the beach to receive the expected flying leap of the man they
served but did not love, and whose head they would eagerly take any time
were it not for fear of him.
Van Horn had had no intention of going ashore, and that he went ashore at
the black chief's insolent challenge was merely a matter of business. For
an hour he strolled about, his right hand never far from the butt of the
automatic that lay along his groin, his eyes never too far from the
unwilling Nau-hau beside him. For Nau-hau, in sullen volcanic rage, was
ripe to erupt at the slightest opportunity. And, so strolling, Van Horn
was given to see what few white men have seen, for Langa-Langa and her
sister islets, beautiful beads strung along the lee coast of Malaita,
were as unique as they were unexplored.
Originally these islets had been mere sand-banks and coral reefs awash in
the sea or shallowly covered by the sea. Only a hunted, wretched
creature, enduring incredible hardship, could have eked out a miserable
existence upon them. But such hunted, wretched creatures, survivors of
village massacres, escapes from the wrath of chiefs and from the long-pig
fate of the cooking-pot, did come, and did endure. They, who knew only
the bush, learned the salt water and developed the salt-water-man breed.
They learned the ways of the fish and the shell-fish, and they invented
hooks and lines, nets and fish-traps, and all the diverse cunning ways by
which swimming meat can be garnered from the shifting, unstable sea.
Such refugees stole women from the mainland, and increased and
multiplied. With herculean labour, under the burning sun, they conquered
the sea. They walled the confines of their coral reefs and sand-banks
with coral-rock stolen from the mainland on dark nights. Fine masonry,
without mortar or cutting chisel, they builded to withstand the ocean
surge. Likewise stolen from the mainland, as mice steal from human
habitations when humans sleep, they stole canoe-loads, and millions of
canoe-loads, of fat, rich soil.
Generations and centuries passed, and, behold, in place of naked
sandbanks half awash were walled citadels, perforated with launching-ways
for the long canoes, protected against the mainland by the lagoons that
were to them their narrow seas. Coconut palms, banana trees, and lofty
breadfruit trees gave food and sun-shelter. Their gardens prospered.
Their long, lean war-canoes ravaged the coasts and visited vengeance for
their forefathers upon the descendants of them that had persecuted and
desired to eat.
Like the refugees and renegades who slunk away in the salt marshes of the
Adriatic and builded the palaces of powerful Venice on her deep-sunk
piles, so these wretched hunted blacks builded power until they became
masters of the mainland, controlling traffic and trade-routes, compelling
the bushmen for ever after to remain in the bush and never to dare
attempt the salt-water.
And here, amidst the fat success and insolence of the sea-people, Van
Horn swaggered his way, taking his chance, incapable of believing that he
might swiftly die, knowing that he was building good future business in
the matter of recruiting labour for the plantations of other adventuring
white men on far islands who dared only less greatly than he.
And when, at the end of an hour, Van Horn passed Jerry into the
sternsheets of the whaleboat and followed, he left on the beach a stunned
and wondering royal black, who, more than ever before, was respectful of
the dynamite-compounded white men who brought to him stick tobacco,
calico, knives and hatchets, and inexorably extracted from such trade a
profit.