Part 11

“This is foolish talk,” said Tuisunga. “Do we not need Zosimus to talk for us in Apia? Do we not know the ways of whites, and their disdain and pride? Who will speak to the German doctor? Everywhere we shall be disregarded and mocked at. We will say that the wife of Tutumanaia is dying, and behold, they will answer with contumely. ‘There is no such minister,’ for we know not his name in the foreign stutter.”

“Let us start,” cried Father Zosimus. “We have no time to waste.”

On the rocky beach they found the boat had already been drawn from the shed and made ready by the young men. Ngau’s house, which stood close by the landing, was packed with his relatives and family, who looked out from beneath the eaves with lowering faces. The sea was white as far as the eye could reach, and was bursting furiously against the coast and into the half-moon of the bay, while overhead, and against the obliterated sky-line, the wild clouds drove stormily to leeward. The young men looked troubled, and old Tuisunga himself was lost in gloom as he studied the breakers that seemed about to engulf them. Father Zosimus alone was calm and unconcerned in the busy tumult of their making ready; for was not God beside him, with the blessed saints? Bidding Filipo tell the minister of their errand, he took his seat without a tremor when the young men lined themselves beside the gunwales, and began to drive the boat slowly into the water.

There was a yell as she floated off. The young men sprang to their paddles, while Tuisunga seized the steering-oar in his sinewy hands. They rode dry over the first wave, then dug into the next bow foremost, and rose half swamped. The third was a huge comber, green as bottle-glass, steep as a park wall, which shot up before them and raced shoreward with a smoking crest. There was a convulsive scurry among the crew; a roar from the crowded beach; as Tuisunga, standing full upright in the stern, and swaying with every jerk of the paddles, headed the boat into the boiling avalanche. The whaler rose like a cork, darted her nose high in air, and for one awful moment seemed to stand on end. When Father Zosimus opened his eyes, she was speeding seaward on something like an even keel, sixteen eager paddles driving her past the point where the breakers sprang. But working out of the bight, they lost the shelter it gave them, and began to feel, for the first time, the unrestrained fury of the gale. There was a frightful sea running; the boat took in water at every turn; and though the wind was favourable, they could not take advantage of it at once. A rag of sail was raised at last, and a straight course laid for Apia, while half the crew rested and the other half baled. But no boat could run before such a sea as followed them. They had one narrow escape, then another by a hair’s-breadth; and as they tried to turn, a great black wave suddenly caught and smothered them beneath mountains of water. The crew rose laughing and shouting to the surface, but one grey head was missing. Father Zosimus had received his martyr’s crown.

FRENCHY’S LAST JOB

FRENCHY’S LAST JOB

My health at college having shown signs of giving way, Uncle George had been kind enough to advance the means for my passage to Brisbane, Australia, and back, in order to carry out the doctor’s recommendation for a long sea-voyage. I scarcely think the good man intended me to go steerage in a cargo-boat, which I did to make my money last; and I imagine he would have been anything but pleased if he could have seen me on the eve of starting from Brisbane itself for the South Sea Islands with twelve tons of assorted merchandise. Indeed, I was not a little surprised at myself, and at times in the long night watches I blubbered like a baby at my own venturesomeness. But with me, though my people at home did not know it, college had been a failure. I sometimes wondered whether I was unusually dull, or my companions at that inhospitable northern university were above the normal intelligence; but whatever the cause, I know only that I was unable to keep the pace that was set me to follow.

And here I was, with my heart in my mouth, starting on a career of my own choosing, the lessee of a trading station on an island called Tapatuea! More I knew not, beyond the fact that I was to receive a moiety of any profits I might earn, and had bound myself to stay where I was put for the space of three years. Considering my age and inexperience, this was a most liberal arrangement, and I have never ceased wondering since how my employers, Messrs. John Cæsar Bibo & Co., were ever dragooned into adding me to their forces. I say “dragooned” advisedly, for it was due entirely to my good friend Henry Mears, the shipping broker of Lonsdale Place, that I happened to be engaged, in spite of the firm’s most strenuous protest. Mears had taken to me from the day I first wandered into his office by an accident; and from that time down to the sailing hour of the _Belle Mahone_ there was nothing he would not do to serve me. I am not sure that he was financially interested in the firm of John Cæsar Bibo & Co., but he always acted as though his was the controlling voice in its affairs, and he was the only man I ever knew who dared stand up to Old Bee, as we called him. This last-named, the directing spirit of a business that spread its net over half the islands of the Pacific, was a grim, taciturn individual of an indeterminable age,--it was variously reckoned from seventy to a hundred and ten,--who made periodical descents into Mears’s office, and sat closeted there for hours. His presence always inspired constraint, and the sight of his ancient, sallow cheek was enough to thin the ranks of the broker’s clients--shipmasters and supercargoes for the most part, not all of them sober, and none, apparently, able to look Old Bee in the eye.

I shall never forget my introduction to the great man.

“This is a nice boy, Mr. Bibo, sir,” said Mears, indicating me with a cast of his eye.

“Oh!” said Old Bee.

“I want him to have that Tapatuea store,” said Mears.

“You mean the easterly one, where Bob killed the Chinaman?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’ll see him in hell first,” said Old Bee.

I thought this ended the matter for good, and said as much to Mears when John Cæsar had departed. But my friend was far from being cast down.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “I count it as good as settled.”

This was more than I could say, and I had no cause to change my mind on my next meeting with Old Bee.

“I’m putting twelve tons of stuff aboard for the Tapatuea store,” said Mears, “and I’ve told Young Hopeful, here, that you’ll keep a berth for him.”

“The devil!” said Old Bee, and went straight on with the business he had in hand.

The next day the broker signed my contract by virtue of some power of attorney he possessed for Bibo & Co.

“If he backs out now, you can sue him for damages,” he said cheerfully.

I was in a tremble when I next met my employer. It was near our sailing time, and he was in a violent hurry. He threw down a paper on the desk and told Mears it was the list of things he had put by for the last.

“Send some one along for them,” he said, “some one that knows how to keep his mouth shut. I’ve clean forgot all that business of the King of Pingalap’s: the breech-loading cannon I promised him from Hudson’s, and those damned guinea-fowls, and that cylinder for his musical box!”

“Here’s one of your own men,” said Mears. “You know young Bence?”

“Good God, that child!” cried the old man. “Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t have him?”

“Pity you hadn’t spoken before,” said the broker, with surprise. “I only signed his contract yesterday.”

Old Bee regarded me sourly.

“I don’t understand the joke,” he said.

“Oh, come, come. He’s twenty-two if he’s a day,” said Mears, adding four years to my age; “and as to being young, I dare say he’ll get over it.”

“What’s he done, that you’re so keen to get him off?” said Old Bee, still eyeing me with strong disfavour. “However, as you have made it your business to push him down my throat, I suppose I’ve got to bolt him.”

“He’d sue you like a shot if you didn’t,” said Mears. “With that contract in his pocket he’s regularly got you in his power.”

This view of the situation made even Old Bee smile, and caused Mears to laugh outright. For me it was scarcely so entertaining; never in my life had I felt so small or insignificant, though I plucked up courage when the great man handed me his list and bade the broker count me out sixty sovereigns. This showed that in some small measure I must have won his good opinion, a conviction that was still further strengthened by his departure, when, in the excitement and flurry of the moment, he even shook me by the hand.

A few days after this conversation I found myself at sea, a regularly enrolled trader of the firm’s, and one of the after-guard of the bark _Belle Mahone_, Captain Mins. We were bound, according to the timehonoured formula, “for the island of Guam or any other port the master may so direct.” I presume there are ships that actually do go to Guam,--if, indeed, there be such a place at all,--but it has never been my fate to come across one. Our Guam was like the rest, a polite fiction to cover up our track and leave a veil of mystery over our voyage. Besides John Cæsar Bibo, with whom I have already made you acquainted, there were three others in our little company astern. Captain Mins was a short, bullnecked man of fifty, with abrupt manners and a singularly deliberate way of speech, due perhaps to some impediment of the tongue. This lent to his utterance a gravity almost judicial, and gave an added force to the contradiction which was his only conversational counter. Jean Bonnichon, or “Frenchy,” as we called him, was one of the firm’s traders returning to the Islands after a brief holiday. He, like Mins, was short and thick-set, but with this ended all resemblance between them. Bonnichon’s story was that he had come of a wealthy family in Normandy; and it was indubitable (from the papers he had in his possession) that he had served as an officer of horse-artillery in the French army. What he had done to leave it no one precisely knew, nor was our curiosity satisfied by the conflicting explanations he himself was at pains to give. As a soldier of fortune in the Old World, with the Turks, the Bulgarians, and finally with the Arabs of Sus, he had sunk lower and lower, until he had come at last to Australia, there to sink lower still.

Six years of colonial life, followed by seven on the island of Apaiang, had transformed Frenchy into one of those strange creatures without a country. Under the heel of adversity the Frenchman had been completely stamped out of him; only some fragments of the army officer remained; the bulging chest, the loud, peremptory voice, the instant obedience to any one he counted his superior. He annoyed Old Bee excessively by leaping to his feet whenever our employer addressed him, a military habit so ingrained that he was quite unable to break himself of it. Intended for deference, its effect on John Cæsar (the most fidgety and preoccupied of patriarchs) was to drive him into one of his sudden tempers, when woe betide the man who dared to first address him. Adam Babcock, a humble, silent creature, completed the number of our mess. He was the mate of the ship, and took his meals alone after we had quitted the table, a forlorn arrangement that is usual in small vessels. He was so completely null in our life that I have some difficulty in recollecting him at all. He had seen misfortunes, I remember, and had certainly come down very much in the world, for he was the only person aft who treated me with the least consideration. On one occasion he even called me “sir,” and gave me a present of some shells.

With Frenchy I was soon on terms of shipboard acquaintance, but for the others I might have been invisible, for all they ever noticed me. Old Bee, for the matter of that, seldom spoke to any one, and the sight of his bilious cheek would have daunted, I believe, the most incorrigible bore in London. We saw little of him save at meal-times, for he was perpetually busy in his cabin, adding up figures, or stamping on his copying-book like a dancing dervish. I am at a loss to say what his labours were all about; they were, and always have been, to me the cause of unceasing amazement. I was not sorry, however, that Old Bee kept so much to himself, for I feared him like the plague, and never felt comfortable within the range of his bloodshot eyes. It fell to Frenchy and the captain to keep the ball of conversation rolling, which they did by disputing with each other on every topic that came up. Were the captain, with some warmth, to make a statement, it was just as certain to be met by Frenchy’s great horse-laugh and shrill, jeering contradiction. They could agree on nothing, whether it was the origin of the Russo-Turkish war or the way the natives cook devil-fish. No provocation was too unimportant to set them at each other’s throats, no slight too trivial to be ignored.

Once, to my extreme embarrassment, they differed on the subject of myself; the Frenchman saying that I was the type of young ne’er-do-well under which the colony of Queensland was sinking; while the captain just as vehemently persisted (for the time being only) that it was such as I who had made the British Empire! The complimentary view of Captain Mins’s made very little practical difference in his treatment of me, which from the beginning had been marked by coldness and dislike. In fact, I could not help perceiving, for all their wrangling and apparent disagreement, that the pair were fast friends. It was I, not Frenchy, who was the outsider on that ship. Indeed, I count some of those lonely days on the _Belle Mahone_ as the very bitterest part of my life, and I wished myself at home a thousand times.

My only friend on board was Lum, the Chinese cook, whose circumstances were so akin to mine that we were drawn together by a common instinct. He, too, was condemned to solitude, having little in common with our crew of Rotumah Islanders, who shunned him like a leper; while I, as the reader knows, held a scarcely better position among the after-guard. When his work was done, Lum and I used to smoke cigarettes together under the lee of a boat, or, if it rained, within the stuffy confines of his cabin next the galley. He was a mine of worldly wisdom, for there was nothing he had not done or had not tried to do, from piracy to acting on the stage; and he would unfold the tale of his experiences with such drollery and artlessness that his society was to me an endless entertainment. Poor Lum! there was little of the seamy side of life he had not seen, scarcely a treachery he had not endured, in the years he had followed the sea.

Our first port was to be Lascom Island, an immense atoll which had remained uninhabited until Bibo & Co. took possession of it in the eighties. Their intention had been to extend its few cocoanut-palms into one vast grove, and for this purpose they maintained a force of half a dozen indentured labourers from Guadalcanar, who were superintended by a white man named Stocker. It was for the purpose of carrying this Stocker supplies and inspecting his year’s work that we were here to make our first call.

We reached the island late at night, and lay off and on till dawn. The daylight showed me a narrow, bush-grown strip of unending sand, which stretched in a great curve until lost to view beneath the horizon. As far as the eye could reach, the breakers were thundering against the huge horseshoe with a fury that made one sick to hear them. Of all forsaken and desolate places it has ever been my lot to see, I search my memory in vain for the match of Lascom Island. Once, however, that we had opened its channel and made our hesitating way into the lagoon beyond, I found more to please me. Skimming over the lake-like surface, with every stitch drawing, and the captain in the crosstrees conning the ship through the gleaming dangers that beset us on every hand, it was indeed an experience not to be recalled without a thrill. We had need of a lynx eye aloft, for the lagoon was thick with coral rocks, and the channel, besides, was so tortuous and so cramped that one false turn of a spoke would have torn our bottom out.

I let myself down beside the dolphin-striker, and sat there above our hissing bows, enjoying as I did so an extraordinary sense of danger and exhilaration. At times it seemed to me as though we were sailing through air, so transparent was the medium through which we moved, so clear the tangled coral garden that lay below. From my perch I contemplated the gradual unfolding of the little settlement towards which we were tending: first of all a faint blur, which gradually became transformed into a grove of cocoanuts; bits of white and brown which resolved themselves into houses and sheds; a dark patch on the lagoon shore that I made out to be a sort of pier; then, last of all, the finished picture, in which there was nothing hid, or left to the imagination to decipher. There was something most depressing in the sight of this tiny village, with its faded whitewash, its general appearance of lifelessness and decay, and above its roofs the palm-tops bending like grass in the gusty breeze. Nothing stirred in the profound shade; not a sound came forth to greet us; and, except for a faint haze of smoke above one of the trees, we might have thought the place abandoned. I remembered that Stocker was in likelihood planting cocoanuts with his men, perhaps miles away on the wild sea-beach; in my mind’s eye I could see him pursuing his monotonous vocation, a miserable Crusoe toiling for a wage. My thoughts were still running in some such channel when I was suddenly startled by the apparition of a man who came running out of the shadow with a bundle in his arms. It was a flag, which he fixed to the halyards of the staff and slowly ran up. When it was half-mast high he twitched it loose, displaying the British ensign upside down. Then, as I was still gazing at him, he made fast the ropes and hurried down to the pier.

Realising that something must be wrong on shore, I climbed back to the deck and hastened to where Old Bee and Frenchy were standing aft. I think the former must have seen the question on my lips, for he gave me such a swift, angry look that I dared not open my mouth, but slunk behind Frenchy in silence. He, the trader, must have just endured some such rebuff himself, for he was in a frightful ill humour, and swore at me when I tried to whisper in his ear. To learn anything from Babcock was impossible, for he was jumping about the topgallant forecastle, clearing the anchors and getting in the head-sails. When the vessel had been brought to a standstill near a rusty buoy, a boat was cleared and lowered, and we all got into it with alacrity: Old Bee, Mins, Frenchy, and I, and a couple of hands to pull.

We were met at the pier by some natives in singlets and dungaree trousers, who gazed at us as solemnly as we gazed back at them. One grizzled old fellow was spokesman for the rest,--Joe, they called him,--and he told us, with a great deal of writhing (as though he had pain in his inside), that Stocker was dead. He had died ten days before, “of some kind of sickness,” as Joe called it; and lest we had any doubt about it, we were pressed to walk up to Stocker’s house and see for ourselves. For, fearing that they might subsequently be accused of making away with him, they had left Stocker’s body untouched in the bed where he had died. The fact was palpable enough before we had gone a hundred yards in the direction of a little house, which from the distance looked very quaint and pretty. But I forbore to follow the others any further in the investigation they were obviously inclined to make, and I struck off from them to examine the settlement alone.

I have good reasons for thinking that it had been planned originally for other purposes than that of merely sheltering a gang of indentured labourers. It was to have been the entrepôt or hub of a huge South Sea system, and from its central warehouses a whole empire of surrounding groups was to have been supplied. Indeed, the whole project had so far taken shape that large sheds had even been erected for the commerce that was destined never to come, and commodious houses raised for the managers and clerks whose contracts were still unwritten. I wandered at will through those crumbling rooms, some of which had never been occupied, though they were now in decay; and along the grassy street on which they had been made to face. I found a battery of four small cannon covering the approach from the pier; a dozen ship’s tanks filled with rain-water (the only kind obtainable on the island); and in a shuttered room I stumbled over a hundred Snyder rifles shining in the dark. But what riveted my attention most was the interior of a long, low warehouse full of wreckage. Here, in mouldering, unsorted confusion, had been thrown all that a dozen years had seen salvaged from the sea: binnacles, hatches, yards and canvas, old steering-wheels, blocks, and strange tangles of gear and junk that seemed scarcely worth the saving. Here were life-belts in the last stages of rottenness; odds and ends of perished cargoes; barrels of tallow; twisted drums of what had once been paint or varnish; some cuddy-chairs of the folding kind; and a quantity of boards, barnacled and water-worn. I must have spent the better part of an hour turning over all this stuff, and in reconstructing in my mind the bygone ships from which they had been taken; musing on the fate of those who had once sailed them so unwisely that Lascom Island had been their final port and its bursting seas their grave.

When at last I emerged again into the open air, I perceived with relief that our boat still lay beside the steps of the pier, for I had no desire to be left alone on Lascom Island even for a single hour. I counted for so little on board the ship that I had a panic fear that they might go to sea again without me, and I accordingly returned to the seamen who were smoking under the lee of a palm. We waited there a long time before we were aroused by the sound of voices and the sight of Old Bee and Frenchy walking slowly towards us. The old rogue looked pale and agitated; he had his arm through Frenchy’s, and was speaking to him with intense seriousness and a volubility quite unusual. He seemed pleading with the trader, urging him apparently to something distasteful, something that was perpetually negatived by Frenchy’s bullet-head and his reiterated “No, sare; no, sare; it is eempossible.”

“I’ll make it seventy-five a month,” quavered Bibo, “and all found.”

Again the Frenchman shook his head.

“Ask anysing else, sare,” he said; “but this, oh, no. But why not the boy?” he added.

“That young ass!” cried Old Bee.

“I won’t stay here alone, if that’s what you mean,” said Frenchy. “But if you’ll run down to Treachery Island and let me get a girl there, I tell you, sare, I will do it for the seventy-five. But alone? Good Lord! I’d follow Stocker in ze mont’.”

Bibo groaned aloud. “It’ll take a day and a half to run down there, and all of three to beat back,” he said; “and you might be a week getting a girl.”