Part 14

The yacht had come in that afternoon after a somewhat stormy voyage from Sydney (“They call it the Pacific Ocean,” said Lady Victoria plaintively, “instead of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since we cleared the Heads”), and had instantly, by the mere fact of her dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded the whole seaboard of its population. This was because the conscience of Tanna is never quite clear, and the Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought the _Alcyone_ was a man-of-war. Only two kinds of ships were known to the islands, outside trading schooners: British and French warships, and the lazy little monthly steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries and traders about. The _Alcyone_ was not a schooner; she was certainly not the well-known “B.P.” steamer; therefore she must be some new variety of man-of-war. As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time—he had been very annoying, but a British man-of-war is prejudiced about these affairs. So the Tannese of the coast, like the modest violet of the poem, concealed their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior, and coyly hid from view. Like the modest violet, too—only with a difference—you might, if you wished, have located them by their—— But no; this is a polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite people. Let us change carriages.

Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland with an empty ship and a full money-bag, and were just starting a fresh recruiting trip, regarded the appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust. What were the good old islands coming to if this sort of thing was to be permitted? Not a bushman would come near the beach as long as the _Alcyone_ stayed, and the sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of the yacht were worse than useless, for they neither recruited nor encouraged their heathen friends to do so. Besides, the airs and graces of the _Alcyone_ were sickening. Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been run hot on to the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake; sparkling glass and brasswork all over the ship, and dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and a little funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white as trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like a beautiful sea-bird settled down to rest—all these unnecessary and disgusting affectations made a smart schooner like the _Sybil_ look no better than a mud-scow in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South Seas and the most famous ocean adventuress from ’Frisco to Hobart Town. Besides, Saxon would not stir out of his cabin while the yacht was there, having developed the lumbago that always attacked him whenever English society folk loomed on the horizon—Vaiti knew that lumbago!—and he might really have been of use about Sulphur Bay, where, for a wonder, no one had any old scores against him.

It was all most abominable, thought the “Kapitani,” and she cast an unfriendly glance on the luxurious _Alcyone_, as her boat shot past the yacht in the moonlight, returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast for any stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting signal—a stick or two of dynamite set afloat on a board and exploded—and come down to the coast.

Lady Victoria’s comment on the “beautiful girl” did not soften her in the least, coupled as it was with the unspeakable assumption that she was “a heathen.” Probably she was, in one sense, having long ago given up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the accusation of moral deficiencies that galled her: it was the idea that she, Vaiti, daughter of a great Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should have been “evened” to the black, monkey-like, naked hags of Tanna. The resentful spirit of the half-caste burned hot within her as she steered the boat through the moonlit water. She could see Lady Victoria and her friends, a brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling gems, leaning over the rail, and watching her as impersonally as if she were a porpoise or a shark. She could catch their comments, loudly and carelessly spoken.

“I suppose she is one of them. But she looks quite nice. See her pretty dress. She is quite decently clothed, isn’t she?”

“I wonder is she a cannibal? She does not look dangerous. I would like to ask her on board, and give her some tea and cake, and things of that kind, and talk to her. Just to try and reform her from their own horrible food, you know,” said Lady Victoria angelically.

“That would be so dear of you,” chimed in her special sycophant and foil, a plain and elderly young woman who knew when her bread was buttered on both sides, and why.

But here the rowers—urged by a signal from Vaiti who thought she had heard about as much as she could stand without exploding—gave way vigorously, and pulled the boat out of earshot.

That was not a happy evening for any one on board the _Sybil_. Vaiti would not give out any grog for supper though it was a settled custom on the ship; would not have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane sky over the mate and boatswain’s sociable game of cards until Gray, out of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy ace upon his knee, and was thereupon accused by Harris of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him with an operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis. At this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the air of a convent-bred princess who had never so much as heard a jibbing donkey “confounded”; and went to sit on deck near the wheel, where she stayed so long, smoking so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead, dark hour of two o’clock, when the spongy heat of the island night stiffens for a while into fever-bringing chill, shook her out of her sulks and into her cabin.

When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things happened before very long. But on this occasion the exception seemed to rule. The disgusting yacht stayed all the next day, and the _Sybil_ lay quietly at anchor on the other side of the bay. Some of the yacht people went ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously about the beach, wondering at the hot springs and tasting everything in the way of fruit they happened to see. (It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a fortunate chance, happened to be poisonous.) Lady Victoria was disappointed with her day on the whole. The natives from the mission, who had officiously attended them all day long, were unromantically clothed, clean, and English-speaking. The wild savages did not appear; and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely unromantic kind.

“How did you enjoy it, darling?” asked the plain young woman of Lady Victoria, when the daring pioneers returned.

Mr. Jenkins’s partner shook out her soiled tussore silk disgustedly.

“It was untidy and ugly and nasty,” she declared; “and when I sat down under a great pineapple tree all covered with fruit, and said that I was realising one of my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and that pineapples grew on the ground. And when we started to walk among the palms, and I was saying that I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands, something as big as a horse’s head suddenly thundered down like a bombshell from a hundred feet high, and buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like anything! So then the missionary came out, and said he wondered I wasn’t killed; and if you’ll believe me, it was nothing but a horrible nut! And the coral strand was pretty enough, all over little bits of branching coral stuff; but why doesn’t anyone ever tell you that coral strands burn all the skin off your nose and blacken you into a nigger? We’re going up the volcano to-morrow—the missionary says it’s quite safe—and I’m sure I hope it’s true, but one never knows. Darling, if I die, see that the new Lafayette photo is sent to the papers—not on any account the other; and I like Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very thick, and just one short text, something nice, like ’They were lovely and pleasant in their lives’—you know.”

... “’And in death they were not divided,’” finished the plain young woman with mechanical piety.... “Darling! dearest! what have I said? What is the matter?”

“Now you _have_ done it!” roared Mr. de Coverley, who was rather a well-bred, but sometimes rather a vulgar young man. “Not divided! Oh, great Scott! Oh, my eye! Oh, I’ll die of laughing! Hold me up! Never mind, Vic; I’ll see you aren’t divided, or cooked either—trust to me!”

* * * * *

Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she started off the next morning into the interior, to recruit on her own account. It was not a very safe thing to do, but the bushmen would not come down to the coast, and the _Sybil_ could not hang out indefinitely, since the doubtful character of her methods had given the French and English Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit of asking questions about her. Saxon, who had relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills at a safe distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter accompany him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and departed with a guide seduced from the mission towards a village lying a mile or two above the volcano. She preferred the glory of working on her own account, and besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.

She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed herself for her part in a robe of scarlet sateen, with liberal necklaces of different coloured trade beads, and stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an ornamented sheath-knife. Across her splendid young bosom she slung an incongruous-looking bandolier of cartridges, designed apparently for the slaughter of elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her shoulder, completed the outfit. All these valuables, though designed to assist her plans by suggesting the enormous store of desirable goods possessed by the recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a sudden and unprovided end, by reason of the natives’ covetousness. She took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was used to taking chances. It is easier than most people suppose to take the risk of being killed every day of your life. In the strange places of the earth, where such things are a common happening, men do not look upon the inevitable end after the pursy, secretive, never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and Brixton. Death is just death in the earth’s wild places—yours to-day, mine to-morrow—a thing to walk with shoulder to shoulder, to meet face to face at noonday; in any case, to make no bones of it until it makes bones of you; and after that circumstances will keep you from complaining if you feel like it.

It was a long, hot walk up to the village. A “walk” is mostly a scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides, where roads are mere foot-wide cracks and canyons in the dense forest growth, and level ground apparently does not exist. Besides, a bandolier of cartridges and an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery for such a climate. Vaiti, however, possessed the enviable gift of never looking, or apparently feeling, hot or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying pace that caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had waxed fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish himself back in the mission school writing copies, instead of slaving up and down precipitous gullies in the rear of a woman-devil who did not know what it was to want a rest.

At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village came in sight, and they entered the open square, shaded by an immense banyan tree and surrounded by low, ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the mountain villages of Tanna. There were sentries perched up in the trees outside the gate, and others squatted on the ground at every entrance, their rifles ready in the crook of the elbow. Within, the dusty tan-coloured square, quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot sky, was all alive with moving figures—ugly women in brief grass skirts humped out into swaying bustles; young boys with murderous little faces, and full-sized rifles; wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into myriads of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders, stripes of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save their native impudence and a cartridge belt—all seething about in a very bee-hive of excitement and alarm. As for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about like piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked and loaded.

Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an attack, and picking out a native who could speak English, asked what the trouble was. The man replied that they feared the little man-of-war down below, but that they were entirely innocent. Questioned further, they said naïvely that they had never eaten a white man, and that none of them were low cannibals in any case. Vaiti, who had not heard of this little affair before, saw her chance.

“No good you speak alonga that fellow way,” she said, using the _bêche-de-mer_ talk that some of the Tannese understood; for Vaiti, like many half-castes, could handle almost any dialect or corruption of a dialect, though she could not speak decent English or French. “I savvy plenty, you eatum one fellow white man. By’n by, big fellow man-of-war come, shoot you all-a-same one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying fox], burn altogether house belong you. Very good you come alonga Saxon ship, go Queensland; then you all right.”

“No eatum,” persisted the man (who was the professional talking-man or orator of the village), with a coy smile.

Vaiti’s nose was keen, and she had already guessed something by its aid. She marched straight across the square into a little yam-house, and pointed to a small parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with cocoanut sinnet. Five toes and an instep protruded from one end. The game had been well hung, as the Tannaman likes it to be, and there was no mistaking the fact of its presence in any sense.

The talking-man giggled like a school-girl caught consuming surreptitious chocolates.

“Eatum jus’ little-fellow bit,” he allowed, with a bad-child chuckle. The other men took up the laugh, and the village resounded with a roar like the bellowing of a herd of bulls.

Vaiti, seeing her advantage, stepped out into the square and began to talk, marching to and fro in Tannese fashion as she spoke. The sun cast dancing spangles on her many-coloured beads as she moved, and threw back darts of fire from her heavy bandolier. One arm emphasised her remarks with sweeping gesture; in the other the tall rifle pounded the earth with its stock, marking the points of her discourse. The fat, stolid mission native watched her with staring eyes and open mouth, and the chiefs gloomed at her under sullen savage brows, evidently impressed, but restive.

The sum of her discourse was that they and their women would do well to come down with her to the schooner, recruit at once, and fly to a land of safety where men-of-war never came, where Tanna people reclined all day under the shade of banyan and banana, picked a little cane for their employers occasionally, lived upon tinned meat and sugared tea, and eventually returned loaded with riches in the shape of rifles, cartridges, cotton, and knives. There was a good deal more of the same highly-coloured stuff. This was old business to the people of the _Sybil_.

The talking-man, also strutting backwards and forwards, Tanna fashion, in a kind of continual country dance with the glittering vision from the ship, answered now and then. It was very well to talk about recruiting, and perhaps some of them might go if they got lots of tinned salmon and “bisketti” to eat before they went on board, and promise of rifles to be paid the tribe when the bargain was complete. But they did not believe that the new ship was not a little man-of war, and until she was gone they would not go down to the coast—no, not even to bathe, although they had all decided to have a bath soon, for the weather was hot and their skins were like the bark of trees, and it was now about ten moons since they had had their last bath.

At this Vaiti’s eyes lit up, for she suddenly saw a plan, a plan which might give her a score of recruits, drive the objectionable yacht out of Sulphur Bay, and pay off every rankling insult inflicted by the _Alcyone_ and her people. But the savages were watching her, so she veiled her eyes with her long lashes, and replied carelessly:

“All that very good. To-morrow, small-fellow man-of-war he go ’way; then you coming longa schooner. To-day, what name [why?] you no go wash big water ’long place one-fellow-fire stop? Very good place that. Suppose you going, I come up from schooner, bring plenty-plenty tucker. Plenty-plenty bulimacow [beef], bisketti, tucker belong white man, cost ten rifle. All the Tannaman he eat; by’n-by he stop lie down, he break, so much he eat.”

This tempting picture had its effect, backed up by a few presents of beads and cartridges. The Tannamen agreed that the plain below the burning mountain, where a wide, stagnant lake spread out its dull expanse, would do for a bathing place, short of the impossible shore, and they chuckled with joyous anticipation of the feast. They also agreed, rather doubtfully, to embark as soon as the “man-of-war” was gone; and it seemed evident that a fair number would at least come down and negotiate on board the schooner after which—well, the _Sybil’s_ smart heels would do the rest.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

*A CANNIBAL PARTY*

Vaiti went off to get ready the feast, telling the natives that they might follow her before long, as everything would be ready soon; and they might trust her, the great Kapitani, that it would be a feast such as no Tannaman, not even of those who had served in Queensland, had ever witnessed in his wildest dreams.

The mission native being a rather weak-kneed convert, and anxious to enjoy a good heathen gossip with his old companions, wanted very much to stay on in the village. But that was just what Vaiti did not want, so she drove him out in front of her like a fat and nervous sheep, hastening his movements all the way down with occasional reminders from the butt of her rifle. He had given her certain information about a picnic at the foot of the volcano, arranged by the people of the yacht for that afternoon, and she did not want him to share his news with the men of the village and cause them, perhaps, to put two and two together where he himself had failed to do so. She despatched him therefore to his own town on the coast, and saw that he went, before herself turning off in the direction of the track that led to the volcano.

Near to the lake there lies a curious little valley with a soft, clean flooring of black volcanic sand and sheltering walls of green pandanus. Here, shaded from the burning heat, yet close to the volcano plain, was the only possible place for the picnickers to enjoy their meal. Beyond lay only a lurid plateau of red and yellow lava beds, curdled and coiled as they had flowed down from the crater lip long ago; a desert of black ash and sand, and a dark, wicked, smoking, rumbling cone in the centre of all. Not a native would have climbed the cone for all the goods in the _Sybil’s_ hold; it was the mouth of hell, they said, and full of devils of every kind. But they were not afraid of the valley below, within safe limits, and even if they had been, the feast and the bathe after it were attractive enough to conquer a little nervousness.

As Vaiti had anticipated, there were several picnic baskets stowed under a tree in the valley, and a big wine hamper as well. Four mission natives, who had acted as guides and carried up the provisions, were lying on their stomachs in the shade, smoking and talking.

It was essential to get them out of the way, and time was short. Vaiti did not waste any unnecessary words. She simply pointed her rifle at the men and told them to clear. They cleared, howling, and she was left alone.

With quick, neat hands she unpacked the hampers, spread the cloth, and laid out the food. It was a goodly display—hams and tongues and fowls, cold meats, pies, cakes, tarts, fruits, and tinned dainties of every kind. There was plenty of champagne, also a supply of whisky and soda. She set all the bottles in a row, and looked with satisfaction upon the glittering array. Then she went up to the edge of the plain and looked at the crater. No one was yet in sight. The exploring party at that moment were on the other side of the cone, standing on the black lip of an appalling gulf eight hundred feet deep and half a mile across; looking down, awe-struck and amazed, upon colossal fire fountains that uplifted their gory spray three hundred feet in the air, and listening to the heart-shaking thunders of the volcano’s awful voice, as from time to time that terrifying note of illimitable force and fury made the whole plain tremble and echoed far out to sea.... It was indeed no wonder that the ignorant Tannamen feared to ascend the cone.

Vaiti sat down at the edge of the plain, and watched till she saw a number of many-coloured dots creeping down the black pyramid in its centre. Then she suddenly lay down upon the ashy ground, and writhed with silent laughter. People were in the habit of saying that Vaiti had no more sense of humour than the jibboom of her father’s ship. They might have modified that judgment, could they have seen her now.

* * * * *

Lady Victoria Jenkins had enjoyed her morning very much indeed. She had dressed for the ascent in a mountaineering costume that combined equal suggestions of “Carmen” and the Alpine Club, and gave great opportunities to her ankles. She had been helped up the cone by four devoted admirers, all at once, and had come down it at a wild running slide, ably braked by two strong hands of two or three others who wanted to have their turn. The other women had trodden on their skirts, and torn them, burned and cut their foolish boots, and also got unbecomingly hot and out of breath, because there was not nearly one man apiece to help them up, after Lady Victoria had annexed all the best. It must be allowed that the men were the weak point of the _Alcyone’s_ travelling party. Mr. de Coverley and his set were “dear boys” and charming companions, no doubt, but they were not quite as manly as some of the ladies. Lady Vic and her companions did not attract the best sort of men, as a rule.

They were all very hungry when they reached the plain, and thirsty with a thirst unknown outside the tropics. All the way across the baking black sand and the tinkling lava beds, “one fair vision ever fled” before the eyes of the party—vision of gold-necked champagne bottles lying coolly embedded in icebaskets; of topaz-coloured jellies, trembling on silver dishes; of flaky, savoury pies, and delicate cold meats, and crisp green salads concocted as only the hand of the _Alcyone’s_ _chef_ could concoct them.