Kitabı oku: «Wednesday the Tenth, A Tale of the South Pacific», sayfa 2

CHAPTER II.
THE BOAT'S CREW

Presently, as we headed towards the black object on the horizon, Nassaline stretched out that skinny finger of his once more (no amount of feeding ever seemed to make Nassaline one ounce fatter), and cried out in his shrill little piping voice, "Two man on the boat! him makey signs for call us!"

I'd give anything to have eyes as sharp as those Polynesians. I looked across the sea, and the loppy waves in the foreground, and could just make out with the naked eye that the row-boat had something that looked like a red handkerchief tied to her bare mast, and a white signal flapping in the wind below it; but not a living soul could I distinguish in her without my binocular. So I put up my glasses and looked again. Sure enough, there they were, two miserable objects, clinging as it seemed half-dead to the mast, and making most piteous signs with their hands to attract our attention. As soon as they saw that we had really sighted them, and were altering our course to pick them up, their joy and delight knew no bounds, as we judged. They flung up their arms ecstatically into the air, and then sank back, exhausted, as I guessed, on to the thwarts where they had long ceased sitting or rowing.

They were wearied out, I imagined, with long buffeting against that angry and immeasurable sea, and must soon have succumbed to fatigue if we hadn't caught sight of them.

We put on all steam, as in duty bound, and made towards them hastily. By and by, my brother Jim, who had been off watch, came up from below and joined me on deck to see what was going forward. At the same moment Nassaline cried out once more, "Him no two man! Him two boy! Two English boy! Him hungry like a dying!" And as he spoke, he held his own skinny bare arm up to his mouth dramatically, and took a good bite at it, as if to indicate in dumb show that the crew of the boat were now almost ready to eat one another.

Jim looked through the glasses, and handed them over to me in turn. "By George, Julian," he said, "Nassaline's right. It's a couple of boys, and to judge by the look of them, they're not far off starving!"

I seized the glasses and fixed them upon the boat. We were getting nearer now, and could make out the features of its occupants quite distinctly. A more pitiable sight never met my eyes. Her whole crew consisted of two white-faced lads, apparently about twelve or thirteen years old, dressed in loose blue cotton shirts and European trousers, but horribly pinched with hunger and thirst, and evidently so weak as to be almost incapable of clinging to the bare mast whence they were trying to signal us.

Now, you land-loving folk can hardly realize, I dare say, what such an incident means at sea; but to Jim and me, who had sailed the lonely Pacific together for five years at a stretch, that pathetic sight was full both of horror and unspeakable mystery. For anybody, even grown men long used to the ocean, to be navigating that awful expanse of water alone in an empty boat is little short of ghastly. Just think what it means! A stormy sheet that stretches from the north pole to the south without one streak of continuous land to break it; a stormy sheet on which the winds and waves may buffet you about in almost any direction for five thousand miles, with only the stray chance of some remote oceanic isle to drift upon, or some coral reef to swallow you up with its gigantic breakers. But a couple of boys! – mere children almost! – alone, and starving, on that immense desert of almost untraveled water! On the Atlantic itself your chance of being picked up from open boats by a passing vessel is slight enough, heaven knows! but on the Pacific, where ships are few and routes are far apart, your only alternative to starvation or foundering is to find yourself cast on the tender mercies of the cannibal Kanaka. No wonder I looked at Jim, and Jim looked at me, and each of us saw unaccustomed tears standing half ashamed in the eyes of the other.

"Stop her!" I cried. "Lower the gig, Tom Blake! Jim, we must go ourselves and fetch these poor fellows."

At the sound of my bell the engineer pulled up the Albatross short and sharp, with admirable precision, and we lowered our boat to go out and meet them. As we drew nearer and nearer with each stroke of our oars, I could see still more plainly to what a terrible pitch of destitution and distress these poor lads had been subjected during their awful journey. Their cheeks were sunken, and their eyes seemed to stand back far in the hollow sockets. Their pallid white hands hardly clung to the mast by convulsive efforts with hooked fingers. They had used up their last reserve of strength in their wild efforts to attract our attention.

I thanked heaven it was Nassaline who kept watch at the mast-head when they first hove in sight. No European eye could ever have discovered the meaning of that faint black speck upon the horizon. If it hadn't been for the sharp vision of our keen Polynesian friend, these two helpless children might have drifted on in their frail craft for ever, till they wasted away with hunger and thirst under the broiling eye of the hot Pacific noontide.

We pulled alongside, and lifted them into the gig. As we reached them, both boys fell back faint with fatigue and with the sudden joy of their unexpected deliverance. "Quick, quick, Jim! your flask!" I cried, for we had brought out a little weak brandy and water on purpose. "Pour it slowly down their throats – not too fast at first – just a drop at a time, for fear of choking them."

Jim held the youngest boy's head on his lap, and opened those parched lips of his that looked as dry as a piece of battered old shoe-leather. The tongue lolled out between the open teeth like a thirsty dog's at midsummer, and was hard and rough as a rasp with long weary watching. We judged the lad at sight to be twelve years old or thereabouts. Jim put the flask to his lips, and let a few drops trickle slowly down his burnt throat. At touch of the soft liquid the boy's lips closed over the mouth of the flask with a wild movement of delight, and he sucked in eagerly, as you may see a child in arms suck at the mouthpiece of its empty feeding-bottle. "That's well," I said. "He's all right, at any rate. As long as he has strength enough to pull at the flask like that, we shall bring him round in the end somehow."

We took away the flask as soon as we thought he'd had as much as was good for him at the time, and let his head fall back once more upon Jim's kindly shoulder. Now that the first wild flush of delight at their rescue was fairly over, a reaction had set in; their nerves and muscles gave way simultaneously, and the poor lad fell back, half-fainting, half-sleeping, just where Jim with his fatherly solicitude chose to lay him.

Tom Blake and I turned to the elder lad. His was a harder and more desperate case. Perhaps he had tried more eagerly to save his helpless brother; perhaps the sense of responsibility for another's life had weighed heavier upon him at his age – for he looked fourteen; but at any rate he was well-nigh dead with exposure and exhaustion. The first few drops we poured down his throat he was clearly quite unable to swallow. They gurgled back insensibly. Tom Blake took out his handkerchief, and tearing off a strip, soaked it in brandy and water in the cup end of the flask; then he gently moistened the inside of the poor lad's mouth and throat with it, till at last a faint swallowing motion was set up in the gullet. At that, we poured down some five drops cautiously. To our delight and relief they were slowly gulped down, and the poor white mouth stood agape like a young bird's in mute appeal for more water – more water.

We gave him as much as we dared in his existing state, and then turned to the boat for some clue to the mystery.

She was an English-built row-boat, smart and taut, fit for facing rough seas, and carrying a short, stout mast amidships. On her stern we found her name in somewhat rudely-painted letters, Messenger of Peace: Makilolo in Tanaki. Clearly she had been designed for mission service among the islands, and the last words which followed her title must be meant to designate her port, or the mission station. But what that place was I hadn't a notion.

"Where's Tanaki, Tom Blake?" I asked, turning round, for Tom had been navigating the South Seas any time this twenty years, and knew almost every nook and corner of the wide Pacific, from Yokohama to Valparaiso.

Tom shifted his quid from one cheek to the other and answered, after a pause, "Dunno, sir, I'm sure. Never heerd tell of Tanaki in all my born days; an' yet I sorter fancied, too, I knowed the islands."

"There are no signs of blood or fighting in the boat," I said, examining it close. "They can't have escaped from a massacre, anyhow." For I remembered at once to what perils the missionaries are often exposed in these remote islands – how good Bishop Patteson had been murdered at Santa Cruz, and how the natives had broken the heads of Mason and Wood at Erromanga not so many months back, in cold blood, out of pure lust of slaughter.

"But they must have run away in an awful hurry," Tom Blake added, overhauling the locker of the boat, "for, see, she ain't found; there ain't no signs of food or anything to hold it nowheres, sir; and this ere little can must 'a' been the o'ny thing they had with 'em for water."

He was quite right. The boat had clearly put to sea unprovisioned. It deepened our horror at the poor lads' plight to think of this further aggravation of their incredible sufferings. For days they must have tossed in hunger and thirst on the great deep. But we could only wait to have the mystery cleared up when the lads were well enough to explain to us what had happened. Meanwhile we could but look and wonder in silence; and indeed we had quite enough to do for the present in endeavoring to restore them to a state of consciousness.

"Any marks on their clothes?" my brother Jim suggested, with practical good sense, looking up from his charge as we rowed back toward the Albatross, with the Messenger of Peace in tow behind us. "That might help us to guess who they are, and where they hail from."

I looked close at the belt of the lads' blue shirts. On the elder's I read in a woman's handwriting, "Martin Luther Macglashin, 6, '87." The younger boy's bore in the same hand the corresponding inscription, "John Knox Macglashin, 6, '86." It somehow deepened the tragedy of the situation to come upon those simple domestic reminiscences at such a moment.

"Sons of a Scotch missionary, apparently," I said, as I read them out. "If only we could find where their father was at work, we might manage to get some clue to this mystery."

"We can look him up," Jim answered, "when we get to Fiji."

We rowed back in silence the rest of the way to the Albatross, lifted the poor boys tenderly on board, and laid them down to rest on our own bunks in the cabin. Serang-Palo, our Malay cook, made haste at the galleys to dress them a little arrowroot with condensed milk; and before half an hour the younger boy was sitting up in Jim's arms with his eyes and mouth wide open, craving eagerly for the nice warm mess we were obliged to dole out to his enfeebled stomach in sparing spoonfuls, and with a trifle of color already returning to his pale cheeks. He was too ill to speak yet – his brother indeed lay even now insensible on the bunk in the corner – but as soon as he had finished the small pittance of arrowroot which alone we thought it prudent to let him swallow at present, he mustered up just strength enough to gasp out a few words of solemn importance in a very hollow voice. We bent over him to listen. They were broken words we caught, half rambling as in delirium, but we heard them distinctly —

"Steer for Makilolo … Island of Tanaki … Wednesday the tenth … Natives will murder them … My mother – my father – Calvin – and Miriam."

Then it was evident he could not say another word. He sank back on the pillow breathless and exhausted. The color faded from his cheek once more as he fell into his place. I poured another spoonful of brandy down his parched throat. In three minutes more he was sleeping peacefully, with long even breath, like one who hadn't slept for nights before on the tossing ocean.

I looked at Jim and bit my lips hard. "This is indeed a fix," I cried, utterly nonplussed. "Where on earth, I should like to know, is this island of Tanaki!"

"Don't know," said Jim. "But wherever it is, we've got to get there."

CHAPTER III.
THE MYSTERY SOLVED

We paused for a while, and looked at one another's faces blankly.

"Suppose," Jim suggested at last, "we get out the charts and see if such a place as Tanaki is marked upon them anywhere."

"Right you are," says I. "Overhaul your maps, and when found, make a note of."

Well, we did overhaul them for an hour at a stretch, and searched them thoroughly, inch by inch, Jim taking one sheet of the Admiralty chart for the South Pacific, and I the other; but never a name could we find remotely resembling the sound or look of Tanaki. Tom Blake, too, was positive, as he put it himself, that "there weren't no such name, not in the whole thunderin' Pacific, nowheres." So after long and patient search we gave up the quest, and determined to wait for further particulars till the boys had recovered enough to tell us their strange story.

Meanwhile, it was clear we must steer somewhere. We couldn't go beating wildly up and down the Pacific, on the hunt for a possibly non-existent Tanaki, allowing the Albatross to drift at her own sweet will wherever she liked, pending the boys' restoration to speech and health. So the question arose what direction we should steer in. Jim solved that problem as easy as if it had come out of the first book of Euclid (he was always a mathematician, Jim was, while for my part, when I was a little chap at school, the asses' bridge at an early stage effectually blocked my further progress. I could never get over it, even with the persuasive aid of what Dr. Slasher used politely to call his vis a tergo.)

"They're too weak to row far, these lads," Jim said in his didactic way – ought to have been a schoolmaster or a public demonstrator, Jim: such a head for proving things! "Therefore they must mostly have been drifting before the wind ever since they started. Now, wind for the last fortnight's been steadily nor'east" – the anti-trade was blowing. "Therefore, they must have come from the nor'east, I take it; and if we steer clean in the face of the wind, we're bound sooner or later to arrive at Tanaki."

"Jim," said I, admiring him, like, "you're really a wonderful chap. You do put your finger down so pat on things! Steer to the nor'-east it is, of course. But I wonder how far off Tanaki lies, and what chance we've got of reaching there by Wednesday the tenth?" For though we didn't even know yet who the people were who were threatened with massacre at this supposed Tanaki, we couldn't let them have their throats cut in cold blood without at least an attempt to arrive there in time to prevent it.

Of course, we knew with our one brass gun we should be more than a match for any Melanesian islanders we were likely to meet with, if once we could get there; but the trouble was, should we reach in time to forestall the massacre?

By Wednesday the tenth we must reach Tanaki – wherever that might be.

Jim took out a piece of paper and totted up a few figures carelessly on the back. "We've plenty of coal," he said, "and I reckon we can make nine knots an hour, if it comes to a push, even against this head wind. To-day's the sixth; that gives us four clear days still to the good. At nine knots, we can do a run of two hundred and thirty-six knots a day. Four two-hundred-and-thirty-sixes is nine hundred and forty-four, isn't it? Let me see; four sixes is twenty-four; put down four and carry two: four three's is twelve, and two's fourteen: four two's – yes, that's all right: nine hundred and forty-four, you see, ex-actly. Well, then, look here, Julian: unless Tanaki's further off than nine hundred and forty-four nautical miles – which isn't likely – we ought to get there by twelve o'clock on Wednesday at latest. Nine hundred and forty-four miles is an awful long stretch for two boys to come in an open boat. I don't expect these boys can have done as much as that or anything like it."

"Wind and current were with them," I objected, "and she was drifting like one o'clock when we first sighted her. I shouldn't be surprised if she was making five or six knots an hour before half a gale all through that hard blow. And the poor boys look as if they might have been out a week or more. Still, it isn't likely they would have come nine hundred knots, as you say, or anything like it. If we put on all steam, we ought to arrive in time to save their father and mother. Anyhow we'll try it." And I shouted down the speaking tube, "Hi, you there, engineer! – pile on the coal hard and make her travel. We want all the speed we can get out of the Albatross for the next three days."

"All square, sir," says Jenkins; and he piled on, accordingly.

So we steamed ahead as hard as we could go, in the direction where we expected to find Tanaki.

Half an hour later, Nassaline, who had been down below with the Malay cook and one of the men, looking after the patients, came up on deck once more, with a broad grin on his jet-black face from ear to ear, and exclaimed in his very best Kanaka-English, "Boy come round again. Eat plenty arrowroot. Eat allee samee like as if starvee. Call very hard for see Massa Captain."

"What do you think's the matter with them, Nassaline?" I asked, as I walked along by his side towards the companion-ladder.

Nassaline's ideas were exclusively confined to a certain fixed and narrow Polynesian circle. "Tink him fader go sell him for laborer to a man oui-oui, or make oven hot for him," he answered, grinning; "so him run away, and come put himself aboard Massa Captain ship; so eat plenty – no beat, no starvee."

It was his own personal history put in brief, and he fitted it at once as the only possible explanation to these other poor fugitives.

"Nonsense!" I said, with a compassionate smile at his innocence. "White people don't sell or eat their children, stupid! It's my belief, Nassaline, we'll never make a civilized Christian creature of you, in a tall hat, and with a glass in your eye. You ain't cut out for it, somehow. How many times have I explained to you, boy, that Christians never cook and eat their enemies?.. They only love them, and blow them up with Gatlings or Armstrongs – a purely fraternal method of expressing slight differences of international opinion… Now, come along down and let's see these lads. It's some of your heathen relations, I expect, the poor fellows are flying from."

But I omitted to have remarked to him (as I might have done) that I hadn't seen such a painful sight before, since I saw the inhabitants of a French village in Lorraine – old men, young girls, and mothers with babies pressed against their breasts – flying, pell-mell, before the sudden onslaught of a hundred and fifty Christian Prussian Uhlans. These little peculiarities of our advanced civilization are best not mentioned to the heathen Polynesian.

In the cabin we found both boys now fairly on the high-road to recovery, though still, of course, much too weak to talk; but bursting over, for all that, with eagerness to tell us their whole eventful history. For my own part, I, too, was all eagerness to hear it; but anxiety for their safety made me restrain my impatience. The elder boy, now leaning on his elbow and staring wildly before him with horror – a mere skeleton to look at, with his sunken cheeks and great hollow eyes – began to break forth upon me with his long tale in full; but I soon put a stop to that, you may be pretty sure, with most uncompromising promptitude. "My dear Mr. Martin Luther Macglashin," I said severely, giving him the full benefit of all his own various high-sounding names for greater impressiveness, "if you don't lean back this moment upon your pillow, quiet your rolling eye down to everyday proportions, and answer only in the shortest possible words nothing but the plain questions I put to you, hang me, sir, if I don't turn you and John Knox adrift again upon the wild waves, and continue on my course for Levuka in Fiji."