Kitabı oku: «The Ebbing Of The Tide», sayfa 11
THE FALLACIES OF HILLIARD
I
With clenched hand grasping the two letters—the one that sank his last hope of saving his plantation, and the other that blasted his trust in human nature—Hilliard, the planter of Nairai Viwa, walked with quick, firm step to his house, and sat down to think awhile. The great cotton “burst-up” had ruined most men in Fiji, and although long delayed in his case the blow had crushed him utterly.
An angry flush tinged his set features for a few seconds as he re-read the curt, almost savage denial, by his father of the “couple of thousand” asked for. “A fool to resign his commission in the Service and go into a thing he knew nothing about, merely to humour the fantastic whim of a woman of fashion who will, no doubt, now sheer very clear of your wrecked fortunes.”
Ten minutes previously when Hilliard, who had thought his father would never see him go under for the sake of a couple of thou., had read these lines he had smiled, even with the despair of broken fortune at his heart, as he looked at the other letter yet unopened.
Kitty, at least, would stick to him. He was not a maudlin sentimentalist, but the memory of her farewell kisses was yet strong with him; and his past experiences of woman’s weaknesses and his own strength justified him in thinking that in this one woman he had found his pearl of great price.
Then he read her letter; and as he read the tappa mallets at work in the Fijian houses hard by seemed to thump in unison with the dull beats of his heart as he stared at the correctly-worded and conventionally-expressed lines that mocked at his fond imaginings of but a few breaths back.
Jimmy, the curly-headed half-caste who had brought him his letters from Levuka, had followed in his steps and was sitting, hat in hand, on the sofa before him when Hilliard raised his face. The fixed pallor had left his bronzed cheeks. For an instant the face of another man had passed before him—Lamington, his one-time fellow-officer, whom every one but Hilliard himself looked upon as being “first in the running” with the woman who had pledged herself to him. But, then, Lamington himself had told him that she had refused him, heir to a big fortune as he was, and they had shaken hands, and Lamington had wished him luck in his honest, good-natured fashion. “Perhaps,” and here the dark flush mantled his forehead, “he’s tried again and she’s slung me. And I… what a damnably unpleasant and quick intuition of women’s ways my old dad has! I always wondered why such a fiery devil as he was married such a milk-and-water creature as my good mother. By –, I begin to think he went on safe lines, and I on a fallacy!”
The stolid face of Jimmy recalled him to the present. He must give up the plantation and take a berth of some sort. From the sideboard he took a flask of liquor and poured out two big drinks.
“Here, Jimmy, my boy. This is the last drink you’ll get on Nairai Viwa. I’m burst up, cleaned out, dead broke, and going to hell generally.”
Jimmy grunted and held out his brown hand for the grog. “Yes? I s’pose you’ll go to Levuka first? I’ll give you a passage in the cutter.”
Hilliard laughed with mingled bitterness and sarcasm. “Right, Jimmy. Levuka is much like the other place, and I’ll get experience there, if I don’t get a billet.”
“Here’s luck to you, sir, wherever you go,” and Jimmy’s thick lips glued themselves lovingly to the glass.
Hilliard drank his oft quietly, only muttering to himself, “Here’s good-bye to the fallacies of hope,” and then, being at bottom a man of sense and quick resolution, he packed his traps and at sunset went aboard the cutter. As they rippled along with the first puffs of the land-breeze, he glanced back but once at the lights of Nairai Viwa village that illumined the cutter’s wake, and then, like a wise man, the hopes and dreams of the past drifted astern too.
And then for the next two years he drifted about from one group to another till he found an island that suited him well—no other white man lived there.
II
The laughing, merry-voiced native children who, with speedy feet, ran to the house of Iliâti, the trader, to tell him that a visitor was coming from the man-of-war, had gathered with panting breath and hushed expectancy at the door as the figure of the naval officer turned a bend in the path, his right hand clasped with a proud air of proprietorship by that or the ten-year-old son of Alberti the Chief.
Iliati with a half-angry, half-pleased look, held out his hand. “Lamington!”
“Hilliard! old fellow. Why didn’t you come on board i Are all your old friends forgotten?”
“Pretty nearly, Lamington. Since I came a cropper over that accursed cotton swindle I’ve not had any inclination to meet any one I knew—especially any one in the Service, but”—and his voice rang honestly, “I always wondered whether you and I would ever meet again.”
“Hilliard,” and Lamington placed his hand on the trader’s shoulder, “I know all about it. And look here, old man. I saw her only two months ago—at her especial request. She sent for me to talk about you.”
“Ah!” and the trader’s voice sounded coldly, “I thought, long ago, that she had reconsidered her foolish decision of other days and had long since become Mrs. Lamington. But it doesn’t interest me, old fellow. Can you drink Fiji rum, Lamington? Haven’t anything better to offer you.”
“I’ll drink anything you’ve got, old fellow, even liquid Tophet boiled down to a small half-pint; but I want you to listen to me first. I’ve been a bit of a scoundrel to you, but, by God, old man, I exchanged into the beastly old Petrel for this cruise expressly to find you and make a clean breast of it. I promised her I would.”
“Confound it all, Lamington, don’t harrow your feelings needlessly, and let us have the rum and talk about anything else.”
“No, we won’t. Look here, Hilliard, it sounds beastly low, but I must get it out. We met again—at a ball in Sydney more than two years ago. Some infernal chattering women were talking a lot of rot about the planters in Fiji having very pretty and privileged native servants—and all that, you know. She fired up and denied it, but came and asked me if it was true, and I was mean enough not to give it a straight denial. How the devil it happened I can’t tell you, but we danced a deuce of a lot and I lost my senses and asked her again, and she said ‘Yes.’ Had she been any other woman but Miss –, I would have concluded that the soft music and all that had dazed her. It does sometimes—lots of ‘em; makes the most virtuous wife wish she could be a sinner and resume her normal goodness next day. But Kitty is different. And it was only that infernal twaddle caused it and made her write you that letter. A week hadn’t passed before she wrote to me and told me how miserable she was. But I knew all through she didn’t care a d–about me. And that’s the way it occurred, old man.”
Hilliard’s hand met his. “Say no more about it, Lamington; it’s a mea matê as we say here—a thing that is past.”
“But, good God, old fellow, you don’t understand. She’s written ever so many times to you. No one in Levuka knew where you had gone to; there’s thousands of islands in the South Seas. And this letter here,” he held it toward him, “she gave to me, and I promised her on my honour as a man to effect an exchange into the Petrel and find you.”
“Thanks, Lamington. You always were a good fellow.” He laid the letter on the table quietly and rose and got the rum.
A young native girl, with deep lustrous eyes shining from a face of almost childish innocence, had entered the door and stood with one bare and softly-rounded arm clasped round the neck of Alberti’s little son. Her lips parted in a smile as Lamington, with a gasping cough, set down his glass after drinking the potent spirit, and she set her brows in mock ferocity at Hilliard who drank his down like an old-time beachcomber.
“By Jove, Hilliard, what an astonishingly pretty face! She could give any New Orleans créole points. Time you got out of this before some of the Rotumah beauties make you forget things; and oh, by the way, I’m forgetting things. Remember you are to come aboard and dine with us to-night, and that you’re in indifferent health, and that Captain –, of Her Majesty’s ship Petrel is going to give you a passage to Sydney.”
At an angry sign from Hilliard the girl disappeared. Then he shook his head. “No, Lamington. I appreciate your kindness, but cannot accept it. I’ve been here two years now, and Alberti, the principal local chief, thinks no end of me; and he’s a deuced fine fellow, and has been as good as ten fathers to me. And I’ve business matters to attend to as well.”
Lamington pressed him no further. “Lucky devil,” he thought. “I suppose he’ll clear out in the trading schooner to Sydney, next week; be there long before us any way, and I’ll find them well over the first stage of married infatuation when I see him next.”
Another hour’s chat of old times and old shipmates in the Challenger and Lamington, with his honest, clean-shaven face looking into the quiet, impassive features of the ex-officer, had gripped his hand and gone, and Hilliard went over to the house of Alberti, the chief, to drink kava—and see the old French priest. From there, an hour afterward, he saw the cruiser with wet, shining sides dip into the long roll of the ocean swell, as with the smoke pouring from her yellow funnel she was lost to sight rounding the point.
Said the son of Alberti to Léla, the innocent-faced girl with the dancing, starlike eyes and red lips, as they stood watching the last curling rings of the steamer’s smoke—“And so that is why I knew much of what the papalagi from the man-of-war said to your Iliâti; Alberti, my father, has taught me much of your man’s tongue. # And, look thou, Léla the Cunning, Iliâti hath a wife in his own country!”
“Pah!”—and she shook her long, wavy locks composedly, and then plucked a scarlet hibiscus flower to stick in front of one of her pretty little ears—“what does that matter to me, fathead? I am she here; and when Iliâti goeth away to her she will be me there. But he loveth me more than any other on Rotumah, and hath told me that where he goeth I shall go also. And who knoweth but that if I have a son he may marry me? Then shalt thou see such a wedding-feast as only rich people give. And listen—for why should I not tell thee: ‘Tis well to starve thyself now, for it may be to-morrow, for look! fathead, there goeth the priest into thy father’s house, and Iliâti is already there.”
A TALE OF A MASK
Lannigan, who lived on Motukoe, was in debt to his firm. This was partly due to his fondness for trade gin and partly because Bully Hayes had called at the island a month or so back and the genial Bully and he had played a game or two of poker.
“I’ll give you your revenge when I come back from the Carolines, Lannigan,” said the redoubtable captain as he scooped in every dollar of the trader’s takings for the past six months. And Lannigan, grasping his hand warmly and declaring it was a pleasure to be “claned out by a gintleman,” bade him good-bye and went to sleep away from home for a day with some native friends. Tariro, his Manhiki wife, had a somewhat violent temper, and during the poker incident had indulged in much vituperative language outside, directed at white men in general and Lannigan in particular.
“See, thou swiller of gin, see what thy folly has brought us to,” said the justly-incensed Tariro, when he came back, and with her took stock of his trade goods; “a thousand and five hundred dollars’ worth of trade came we here with, and thou hast naught to show for it but five casks of oil and a few stinking shark-fins; and surely the ship of the malo (his firm) will be here this month.”
Lannigan was in a bit of a fix. The firm he was trading for on Motukoe didn’t do business in the same free-and-easy way as did Bobby Towns’ captains and the unconventional Bully Hayes. They made him sign papers, and every time the ship came the rufous-headed Scotch supercargo took stock, and a violent altercation would result over the price of the trade; but as the trader generally had a big lot of produce for the ship, matters always ended amicably. He—or rather his wife, Tariro—was too good a trader to have an open rupture with, and the wordy warfare always resulted in the trader saying, in his matter-of-fact way, “Well, I suppose it’s right enough. You only rob me wanst in twelve months, and I rob the natives here every day of my life. Give me in a case of gin, an’ I’ll send ye a pig.”
But he had never been so much in debt as he was now. Tariro and he talked it over, and hit upon a plan. He was to say, when the ship came, that he had but five casks of oil; all his trade had been sold for cash, and the cash—a thousand dollars—represented by a bag of copper bolts picked up on the reef from an old wreck, was to be taken off to the ship and accidentally dropped overboard as it was being passed up on deck. This was Lannigan’s idea, and Tariro straightway tied up the bolts in readiness in many thicknesses of sail-cloth.
“Here’s Lannigan coming,” called out the captain of the trading vessel to the supercargo, a week or so afterwards, “and that saucy Manhiki woman as usual with him, to see that he doesn’t get drunk. The devil take such as her! There’s no show of getting him tight.”
“How are you, Lannigan?” said the supercargo, wiping his perspiring brow. He had just come out of the hold where he had been opening tinned meats, and putting all the “blown” tins he could find into one especial case—for Lannigan. This was what he called “makin’ a mairgin for loss on the meats, which didna pay well.”
“Fine,” said the genial Lannigan, “an’ I haven’t got but five casks of oil for yez. Devil a drop av oil would the people make when they looked at the bewtiful lot av trade ye gave me last time. They just rushed me wid cash, an’ I tuk a matter av a thousand dollars or so in a month.”
“Verra guid business,” said the supercargo, “but ye made a gran’ meestake in selling the guids for Cheelian dollars instead of oil. An’ sae I must debit ye wi’ a loss of twenty-five par cent, on the money–”
“Chile dollars be damned!” said Lannigan; “all good American dollars—we’ve had about twenty whaleships here, buyin’ pigs an’ poultry an’ pearl shell.”
“Twenty-one ship!” said Tariro, blowing the smoke of her cigarette through her pretty little nose.
“Whaur’s the money, onyway?” said the supercargo; “let’s get to business, Lannigan. Eh, mon, I’ve some verra fine beef for ye.”
“Get the bag up out of the boat, Tariro,” said the trader; “it’s mighty frightened I was havin’ so much money in the house at wanst, wid all them rowdy Yankee sailors from the whaleships ashore here.”
There was a great crowd of natives on deck—over a hundred—and the mate was swearing violently at them for getting in his way. The schooner was a very small vessel, and Motukoe being her first place of call for cargo, she was in light trim, having only her trade and a little ballast on board.
“Send those natives away from the galley,” he called out to the cook, who was giving some of the young women ship-biscuits in exchange for young cocoanuts; “can’t you see the ship keeps flying up in the wind with all those people for’ard!”
Hekemanu, Lannigan’s native “Man Jack,” sat in the boat towing alongside, with the bag of “dollars” at his feet. He and all the boat’s crew were in the secret. Lannigan owned their souls; besides, they all liked him on Motukoe.
Tariro stood for a moment beside the captain, indulging in the usual broad “chaff,” and then leaning over the rail she called out to Hekemanu: Ta mai te taga tupe (“give me the bag of money”).
The man for’ard hauled on the line to bring the boat alongside the schooner, and Hekemanu stood up with the heavy bag in his hand.
“Hold on there, you fool! If you drop that bag I’ll knock your head off,” said the skipper. “Here, Mr. Bates, just you jump down and take that money from that native, or he’ll drop it, sure.”
Before Hekemanu had time to let it fall over the side the mate had jumped into the boat and taken it.
Lannigan, putting his head up out of the little cabin, groaned inwardly as he saw the mate step over the rail with the fateful bag and hand it to the supercargo.
“Be the powers, ye’re in a mighty hurry for the money,” said Lannigan, roughly, taking it from him, “ye might ax me if I had a mouth on me first.”
The supercargo laughed and put a bottle of gin on the table, and Lannigan’s fertile brain commenced to work. If he could only get the supercargo out of the cabin for a minute he meant to pick up the bag, and declaring he was insulted get it back into his boat and tell him to come and count it ashore. Then he could get capsized on the reef and lose it. They were always having “barneys,” and it would only be looked upon as one of his usual freaks.
“What the deuce is that?” he said, pointing to a hideous, highly-coloured paper mask that hung up in the cabin.
The supercargo handed it to him. “It’s for a man in Samoa—a silly, joking body, always playing pranks wi’ the natives, and I thoct he would like the thing.”
“Bedad, ‘tis enough to scare the sowl out av the divil,” said Lannigan.
Just then a mob of natives came aft, and the two men in the cabin heard the captain tell them to clear out again. They were saucy and wouldn’t go. Hekemanu had told them of the failure of Lannigan’s dodge, and they had an idea that the ship would take him away, and stood by to rescue him at the word of command.
“I’ll verra soon hunt them,” said the supercargo, with a proud smile, and he put the mask on his face. Tariro made a bolt on deck and called out to the natives that the supercargo was going to frighten them with a mask.
Instead of wild yells of fear and jumping overboard, as he imagined would happen, the natives merely laughed, but edged away for’ard.
The schooner was in quite close to the reef; the water was very deep, and there was no danger of striking. She was under jib and mainsail only, but the breeze was fresh and she was travelling at a great rate. The wind being right off the land the skipper was hugging the reef as closely as possible, so as to bring up and anchor on a five-fathom patch about a mile away.
“Here, quit that fooling,” he called out to the supercargo, “and come aft, you fellows! The ship is that much down by the head she won’t pay off, with the helm hard up.”
One look at the crowd of natives and another at the shore, and a wild idea came into Lannigan’s head. He whispered to Tariro, who went up for’ard and said something to the natives. In another ten seconds some of them began to clamber out on the jib-boom, the rest after them.
“Come back!” yelled the skipper, jamming the helm hard up, as the schooner flew up into the wind. “Leggo peak halyards. By G—d! we are running ashore. Leggo throat halyards, too!”
The mate flew to the halyards, and let go first the peak and then the throat halyards, but it was too late, and, with a swarm of natives packed together for’ard from the galley to the end of the jib-boom, she stuck her nose down, and, with stern high out of the water, like a duck chasing flies, she crashed into the reef—ran ashore dead to windward.
No one was drowned. The natives took good care of the captain, mate, and supercargo, and helped them to save all they could. But Lannigan had a heavy loss—the bag of copper bolts had gone to the bottom.
THE COOK OF THE “SPREETOO SANTOO”—A STUDY IN BEACHCOMBERS
We were in Kitti Harbour, at Ponape, in the Carolines, when, at breakfast, a bleary-eyed, undersized, more-or-less-white man in a dirty pink shirt and dungaree pants, came below, and, slinging his filthy old hat over to the transoms, shoved himself into a seat between the mate and Jim Garstang, the trader.
“Mornin’, captin,” said he, without looking at the skipper, and helping himself to about two pounds of curry.
“Morning to you. Who the deuce are you, anyway? Are you the old bummer they call ‘Espiritu Santo’?” said Garstang.
“That’s me. I’m the man. But I ain’t no bummer, don’t you b’lieve it. I wos tradin’ round here in these (lurid) islands afore you coves knowed where Ponape was.”
“Are you the skunk that Wardell kicked off the Shenandoah for stealing a bottle of wine?” said the mate.
“That’s me. There was goin’ ter be trouble over that on’y that the Shennydor got properly well sunk by the Allybarmer (history wasn’t his forte), and that – Wardell got d–d well drownded. Hingland haint a-goin’ to let no Yankee insult nobody for nuthin’—an’ I’m a blessed Englishman. I didn’t steal the wine. Yer see, Wardell arst me off to dinner, and then we gets talkin’ about polertics, an’ I tells ‘im ‘e wos a lyin’ pirut. Then he started foolin’ around my woman, an’ I up with a bottle of wine an’–”
“Why, you thundering liar,” said Garstang, “you stole it out of the ward-room.”
“I wouldn’t call no man a liar if I was you, Mister—by G–, that Chinaman cook knows how to make curry.”
He ate like a starving shark, and between mouthfuls kept up a running fire of lies and blasphemy. When he had eaten three platefuls of curry and drunk enough coffee to scald a pig, the skipper, who was gettin’ tired of him, asked him if he had had enough.
Yes, he had had enough breakfast to last him a whole (Australian adjective) week.
“Then clear out on deck and swab the curry off your face, you beast!”
“That’s always the way with you tradin’ skippers. A stranger don’t get no civility unless he comes aboard in a (red-painted) gig with a (crimson) umbrella and a (gory) ‘elmet ‘at, like a (vermilion) Consul.”
The mate seized him, and, running him up the companion way, slung him out on deck.
“What do you think of him?” asked the skipper, a man fond of a joke—it was Bully Hayes. “I thought I’d let you all make his acquaintance. He’s been bumming around the Ladrones and Pelews since ‘50; used to be cook on a Manilla trading brig, the Espiritu Santo.”
Then he told us how this wandering mass of blasphemy got his name of “Spreetoo Santoo.” While in the brig he had been caught smuggling at Guam by the guarda costas, and had spent a year or two in the old prison fort at San Juan de ‘Apra. (I don’t know how he got out: perhaps his inherently alcoholic breath and lurid blasphemy made the old brick wall tumble down.)
After that he was always welcome in sailors’ fo’c’s’les by reason of his smuggling story, which would commence with—“When I was cook on the Espiritu Santo” (only he used the English instead of the Spanish name) “I got jugged by the gory gardy costers,” &c, &c.
When we came on deck he was sitting on the main-hatch with the Chinese carpenter—whose pipe he was smoking—and telling him that he ought to get rid of his native wife, who was a Gilbert Island girl, and buy a Ponape girl.
“I can git yer the pick o’ the (crimson) island, an’ it won’t cost yer more’n a few (unprintable) dollars. I’m a (bad word) big man ‘ere among the (adjective) natives.”
Hung looked up at him stolidly with half-closed eyes. Then he took the pipe out of his mouth and said in a deadly cold voice—
“You palally liar, Spleetoo.”
He slouched aft again presently, and asked the mate, in an amiable tone of voice, if he had “any (ruddy) noospapers from Sydney.”
“What the devil do you want newspapers for?” inquired Hayes, turning round suddenly in his deck-chair, “you can’t read, Spreetoo.”
“Can’t read, eh?” and his red-rimmed, lashless eyes simulated intense indignation. “Wot about that ‘ere (red) bishop at Manilla, as wanted me to chuck up me (scarlet) billet on the Spreetoo S antoo and travel through the (carnaged) Carryline Grewp as ‘s (sanguinary) sekketerry? ‘Cos why? ‘Cos there ain’t any (blank) man atween ‘ere an’ ‘ell as can talk the warious lingoes like me.”
“Here,” said the mate, giving him two or three old Maoriland newspapers—“here’s some Auckland papers. Know anybody there?”
“No,” he answered, promptly, “not a soul, but he knowed Sydney well. Larst time I wos there I sold old Bobby Towns £6,000 worth of oil—a bloomin’ shipful. I got drunk, an’ a (blank) policeman went through me in the cell and took the whole blessed lot outer me (scarlet) pocket.” (Nine bad words omitted.)
“Bank notes?” queried Bully.
“No, sov’reigns—(gory) sov’reigns.”
He asked us if we had seen any men-o’-war about lately, and said that the captain of H.M.S. – had wanted to marry his daughter, but he wouldn’t let her marry no man-o’-war cove after the way that – Wardell had treated him. He thought he would go back to Sydney again for a spell. His brother had a flaming fine billet there.
The Cook of the “Spreetoo Santoo” 243
“What is he?” asked Hayes.
“‘E’s a (blessed) Soopreme Court Judge, wears a (gory) wig big enough to make chafin’ gear for a (crimson) fleet o’ ships; ‘e lives at Guvment ‘Ouse, and Vs rollin’ in money an’ drinks like a (carmine) fish. I thought I might see somethin’ about the – in a (blank) Sydney noospaper. I’ll come in for all his (ensanguined) money when ‘e dies.”
Bully gave him a bottle of gin after a while. Then he hurriedly bade us farewell and went ashore.
