And had Bashti hastened delivery of the wives by one day, or by even two
days, Nalasu would have entered the feared, purgatory of matrimony. But
Bashti kept his word, and on the third day was too busy, with a more
momentous problem, to deliver Bubu and Nena to the blind old man who
apprehensively waited their coming. For the morning of the third day all
the summits of leeward Malaita smoked into speech. A warship was on the
coast--so the tale ran; a big warship that was heading in through the
reef islands at Langa-Langa. The tale grew. The warship was not
stopping at Langa-Langa. The warship was not stopping at Binu. It was
directing its course toward Somo.
Nalasu, blind, could not see this smoke speech written in the air.
Because of the isolation of his house, no one came and told him. His
first warning was when shrill voices of women, cries of children, and
wailings of babes in nameless fear came to him from the main path that
led from the village to the upland boundaries of Somo. He read only fear
and panic from the sounds, deduced that the village was fleeing to its
mountain fastnesses, but did not know the cause of the flight.
He called Jerry to him and instructed him to scout to the great banyan
tree, where Nalasu's path and the main path joined, and to observe and
report. And Jerry sat under the banyan tree and observed the flight of
all Somo. Men, women, and children, the young and the aged, babes at
breast and patriarchs leaning on sticks and staffs passed before his
eyes, betraying the greatest haste and alarm. The village dogs were as
frightened, whimpering and whining as they ran. And the contagion of
terror was strong upon Jerry. He knew the prod of impulse to join in
this rush away from some unthinkably catastrophic event that impended and
that stirred his intuitive apprehensions of death. But he mastered the
impulse with his sense of loyalty to the blind man who had fed him and
caressed him for a long six months.
Back with Nalasu, sitting between his knees, he made his report. It was
impossible for him to count more than five, although he knew the fleeing
population numbered many times more than five. So he signified five men,
and more; five women, and more five children, and more; five babies, and
more; five dogs, and more--even of pigs did he announce five and more.
Nalasu's ears told him that it was many, many times more, and he asked
for names. Jerry know the names of Bashti, of Agno, and of Lamai, and
Lumai. He did not pronounce them with the slightest of resemblance to
their customary soundings, but pronounced them in the whiff-whuff of
shorthand speech that Nalasu had taught him.
Nalasu named over many other names that Jerry knew by ear but could not
himself evoke in sound, and he answered yes to most of them by
simultaneously nodding his head and advancing his right paw. To some
names he remained without movement in token that he did not know them.
And to other names, which he recognized, but the owners of which he had
not seen, he answered no by advancing his left paw.
And Nalasu, beyond knowing that something terrible was
impending--something horribly more terrible than any foray of
neighbouring salt-water tribes, which Somo, behind her walls, could
easily fend off, divined that it was the long-expected punitive man-of-
war. Despite his three-score years, he had never experienced a village
shelling. He had heard vague talk of what had happened in the matter of
shell-fire in other villages, but he had no conception of it save that it
must be, bullets on a larger scale than Snider bullets that could be
fired correspondingly longer distances through the air.
But it was given to him to know shell-fire before he died. Bashti, who
had long waited the cruiser that was to avenge the destruction of the
_Arangi_ and the taking of the heads of the two white men, and who had
long calculated the damage to be wrought, had given the command to his
people to flee to the mountains. First in the vanguard, borne by a dozen
young men, went his mat-wrapped parcels of heads. The last slow trailers
in the rear of the exodus were just passing, and Nalasu, his bow and his
eighty arrows clutched to him, Jerry at his heels, made his first step to
follow, when the air above him was rent by a prodigiousness of sound.
Nalasu sat down abruptly. It was his first shell, and it was a thousand
times more terrible than he had imagined. It was a rip-snorting, sky-
splitting sound as of a cosmic fabric being torn asunder between the
hands of some powerful god. For all the world it was like the roughest
tearing across of sheets that were thick as blankets, that were broad as
the earth and wide as the sky.
Not only did he sit down just outside his door, but he crouched his head
to his knees and shielded it with the arch of his arms. And Jerry, who
had never heard shell-fire, much less imagined what it was like, was
impressed with the awfulness of it. It was to him a natural catastrophe
such as had happened to the _Arangi_ when she was flung down reeling on
her side by the shouting wind. But, true to his nature, he did not
crouch down under the shriek of that first shell. On the contrary, he
bristled his hair and snarled up with menacing teeth at whatever the
thing was which was so enormously present and yet invisible to his eyes.
Nalasu crouched closer when the shell burst beyond, and Jerry snarled and
rippled his hair afresh. Each repeated his actions with each fresh
shell, for, while they screamed no more loudly, they burst in the jungle
more closely. And Nalasu, who had lived a long life most bravely in the
midst of perils he had known, was destined to die a coward out of his
fear of the thing unknown, the chemically propelled missile of the white
masters. As the dropping shells burst nearer and nearer, what final self-
control he possessed left him. Such was his utter panic that he might
well have bitten his veins and howled. With a lunatic scream, he sprang
to his feet and rushed inside the house as if forsooth its grass thatch
could protect his head from such huge projectiles. He collided with the
door-jamb, and, ere Jerry could follow him, whirled around in a part
circle into the centre of the floor just in time to receive the next
shell squarely upon his head.
Jerry had just gained the doorway when the shell exploded. The house
went into flying fragments, and Nalasu flew into fragments with it.
Jerry, in the doorway, caught in the out-draught of the explosion, was
flung a score of feet away. All in the same fraction of an instant,
earthquake, tidal wave, volcanic eruption, the thunder of the heavens and
the fire-flashing of an electric bolt from the sky smote him and smote
consciousness out of him.
He had no conception of how long he lay. Five minutes passed before his
legs made their first spasmodic movements, and, as he stumbled to his
feet and rocked giddily, he had no thought of the passage of time. He
had no thought about time at all. As a matter of course, his own idea,
on which he proceeded to act without being aware of it, was that, a part
of a second before, he had been struck a terrific blow magnified
incalculable times beyond the blow of a stick at a nigger's hands.
His throat and lungs filled with the pungent stifling smoke of powder,
his nostrils with earth and dust, he frantically wheezed and sneezed,
leaping about, falling drunkenly, leaping into the air again, staggering
on his hind-legs, dabbing with his forepaws at his nose head-downward
between his forelegs, and even rubbing his nose into the ground. He had
no thought for anything save to remove the biting pain from his nose and
mouth, the suffocation from his lungs.
By a miracle he had escaped being struck by the flying splinters of iron,
and, thanks to his strong heart, had escaped being killed by the shock of
the explosion. Not until the end of five minutes of mad struggling, in
which he behaved for all the world like a beheaded chicken, did he find
life tolerable again. The maximum of stifling and of agony passed, and,
although he was still weak and giddy, he tottered in the direction of the
house and of Nalasu. And there was no house and no Nalasu--only a debris
intermingled of both.
While the shells continued to shriek and explode, now near, now far,
Jerry investigated the happening. As surely as the house was gone, just
as surely was Nalasu gone. Upon both had descended the ultimate
nothingness. All the immediate world seemed doomed to nothingness. Life
promised only somewhere else, in the high hills and remote bush whither
the tribe had already fled. Loyal he was to his salt, to the master whom
he had obeyed so long, nigger that he was, who so long had fed him, and
for whom he had entertained a true affection. But this master no longer
was.
Retreat Jerry did, but he was not hasty in retreat. For a time he
snarled at every shell-scream in the air and every shell-burst in the
bush. But after a time, while the awareness of them continued
uncomfortably with him, the hair on his neck remained laid down and he
neither uttered a snarl nor bared his teeth.
And when he parted from what had been and which had ceased to be, not
like the bush dogs did he whimper and run. Instead, he trotted along the
path at a regular and dignified pace. When he emerged upon the main
path, he found it deserted. The last refugee had passed. The path,
always travelled from daylight to dark, and which he had so recently seen
glutted with humans, now in its emptiness affected him profoundly with
the impression of the endingness of all things in a perishing world. So
it was that he did not sit down under the banyan tree, but trotted along
at the far rear of the tribe.
With his nose he read the narrative of the flight. Only once did he
encounter what advertised its terror. It was an entire group annihilated
by a shell. There were: an old man of fifty, with a crutch because of
the leg which had been slashed off by a shark when he was a young boy; a
dead Mary with a dead babe at her breast and a dead child of three
clutching her hand; and two dead pigs, huge and fat, which the woman had
been herding to safety.
And Jerry's nose told him of how the stream of the fugitives had split
and flooded past on each side and flowed together again beyond. Incidents
of the flight he did encounter: a part-chewed joint of sugar-cane some
child had dropped; a clay pipe, the stem short from successive breakages;
a single feather from some young man's hair, and a calabash, full of
cooked yams and sweet potatoes, deposited carefully beside the trail by
some Mary for whom its weight had proved too great.
The shell-fire ceased as Jerry trotted along; next he heard the rifle-
fire from the landing-party, as it shot down the domestic pigs on Somo's
streets. He did not hear, however, the chopping down of the coconut
trees, any more than did he ever return to behold what damage the axes
had wrought.
For right here occurred with Jerry a wonderful thing that thinkers of the
world have not explained. He manifested in his dog's brain the free
agency of life, by which all the generations of metaphysicians have
postulated God, and by which all the deterministic philosophers have been
led by the nose despite their clear denouncement of it as sheer illusion.
What Jerry did he did. He did not know how or why he did it any more
than does the philosopher know how or why he decides on mush and cream
for breakfast instead of two soft-boiled eggs.
What Jerry did was to yield in action to a brain impulse to do, not what
seemed the easier and more usual thing, but to do what seemed the harder
and more unusual thing. Since it is easier to endure the known than to
fly to the unknown; since both misery and fear love company; the apparent
easiest thing for Jerry to have done would have been to follow the tribe
of Somo into its fastnesses. Yet what Jerry did was to diverge from the
line of retreat and to start northward, across the bounds of Somo, and
continue northward into a strange land of the unknown.
Had Nalasu not been struck down by the ultimate nothingness, Jerry would
have remained. This is true, and this, perhaps, to the one who considers
his action, might have been the way he reasoned. But he did not reason
it, did not reason at all; he acted on impulse. He could count five
objects, and pronounce them by name and number, but he was incapable of
reasoning that he would remain in Somo if Nalasu lived, depart from Somo
if Nalasu died. He merely departed from Somo because Nalasu was dead,
and the terrible shell-fire passed quickly into the past of his
consciousness, while the present became vivid after the way of the
present. Almost on his toes did he tread the wild bushmen's trails,
tense with apprehension of the lurking death he know infested such paths,
his ears cocked alertly for jungle sounds, his eyes following his ears to
discern what made the sounds.
No more doughty nor daring was Columbus, venturing all that he was to the
unknown, than was Jerry in venturing this jungle-darkness of black
Malaita. And this wonderful thing, this seeming great deed of free will,
he performed in much the same way that the itching of feet and tickle of
fancy have led the feet of men over all the earth.
Though Jerry never laid eyes on Somo again, Bashti returned with his
tribe the same day, grinning and chuckling as he appraised the damage.
Only a few grass houses had been damaged by the shells. Only a few
coconuts had been chopped down. And as for the slain pigs, lest they
spoil, he made of their carcasses a great feast. One shell had knocked a
hole through his sea-wall. He enlarged it for a launching-ways, faced
the sides of it with dry-fitted coral rock, and gave orders for the
building of an additional canoe-house. The only vexation he suffered was
the death of Nalasu and the disappearance of Jerry--his two experiments
in primitive eugenics.