Part 15

It seemed as if that plain would never end, but it did end at last, and a green fringe of pandanus announced the beginning of the bush. The elderly young lady and most of the others were making excellent time ahead, and they reached the verge of the plain some little while before Lady Victoria and Mr. de Coverley came to it. The latter pair, as it happened, were really not thinking very much about their lunch, because a still more interesting matter absorbed their attention.

“Not understood!” Mr. de Coverley was saying bitterly. “And so we die and go down to the grave—not understood! The pathos of it!”

“We are never understood,” sighed Lady Victoria, patting the side waves of her “transformation” to see that it was on straight. “We women, especially. And those who should understand us best of all are so often——”

“Exactly—so they are. But, Lady Victoria—Victoria!—there are some who are different; there are men, rare souls, who——”

“What in Heaven’s name is the matter?” interrupted the misunderstood one, stopping dead in her tracks (literally, for the sand was deep) and staring at the edge of the bush.

From the valley below the plain had just risen a long, loud shriek, followed by another and another, and then by a burst of laughter that sounded scarcely human. The other members of the party had disappeared, but it was clear that something had happened.

“Good God, the savages!” exclaimed Lady Victoria; and she began to run. Let it be stated, for the credit of her race and name, that she ran towards the sound. As for Mr. de Coverley....

But this story is not about Mr. de Coverley. If it were, it would be interesting to tell why the Sydney steamer that called at Sulphur Bay two days later found an unexpected passenger waiting at the trader’s, and why Lady Victoria and Mr. Abel Jenkins, of Jenkins’s Perfect Pills, became eventually reconciled and lived the life of a model couple. As things are, it must be enough to state that Mr. Jack de Coverley turned and ran away at the sound of the shouts—ran right across the plain into the bush at the other side—ran as far as he could get, and did not come back at all—and thereby ran once and for ever out of the life of the lady whom he “understood.”

Lady Victoria, speeding in the opposite direction, reached the edge of the little valley in a very few minutes, and, looking over, beheld what was certainly the strangest sight she had encountered in all her varied life.

Round about the elaborately-laid luncheon were squatting a dozen or so of naked brown savages, painted, feathered, and slashed with ornamental scars. A few women, clad only in a six-inch fringe of grass, stood behind them, eyeing the eatables eagerly, but not daring to touch them while their masters fed. The talking-man, a big, hulking savage with a huge bush of hair, and a match-box stuck in each ear-lobe, had buried his face in the savoury interior of a boned turkey, and was gnawing out the stuffing. The principal chief, one hand in a dish of Spanish cream and the other in a chicken curry, was casting double supplies into his mouth with the regularity of a patent feed-machine. A fat young fighting man, with nose and forehead painted scarlet, and white ashes in his hair, had tucked a ham under one arm, and was sitting on a peach pie, with intent to secure as many good things as possible, while he hastily worried large mouthfuls off the forequarter of lamb he was holding in both hands. Another man was drinking mint sauce out of the silver sauceboat with horrible grimaces; his neighbour, having captured a handful of maraschino jelly, fast melting in the sun, was industriously rubbing it on his hair; and a grizzly old fellow, with a monkey-like face, was half-choking himself over a soufflé, which he was trying to swallow case and all. The necks of the champagne bottles were all knocked off, and from engraved wine-cases, empty entrée-dishes, and dredged-out tins the savages were drinking Lady Victoria’s excellent wines with every appearance of satisfaction. Between mouthfuls they stopped to look at the party from the yacht, and to roar with laughter at their evident fright. Too terrified even to run away, the voyagers, in their dainty frocks and smart white suits, stood huddling together for protection, the women crying, the men looking rather white and foolish, for every Tannaman had a loaded rifle slung to his side, and there was not so much as a saloon pistol among the whites. A few yards off Vaiti stood, regarding the whole scene with an expressionless countenance that covered a good deal of quiet enjoyment. She knew, if the visitors did not, that the cannibal bushmen were really not at all a bad lot of fellows when you knew them, and that the yacht party, against whom they had no grudge, were perfectly safe. In fact, the Tannamen merely thought these oddly-behaved whites were a new party of missionaries, and were quite ready to be civil to them, since they thought all the mission people harmless, if eccentric.

But the true inwardness of the situation not being apparent, the _Alcyone’s_ guests were very frightened indeed.

“P-perhaps if we go away very quietly, they won’t f-follow us,” said a wealthy young stockbroker, who had retained a little presence of mind, though his teeth were chattering in his head.

“Oh, let us! Victoria, save me! Oh, what shall we do?” wailed the elderly young lady, rushing up the bank and flinging her arms round the mistress of the violated feast. Lady Victoria, though white as her own Belfast linen collar, kept her head fairly well. She saw that Vaiti was not one of the invaders, and called to her. “Do you speak English? What are we to do? Will they kill us?” she asked.

Vaiti walked over to her with the bearing of a stage duchess, and favoured her with a fashionable high handshake that was the one thing wanting to complete the insanity of the whole impossible scene. A new idea had suddenly struck her—a fresh spark of mischief was lit. With an immovable countenance she replied:

“No kill you, I think. Suppose you want go ’way all right by’n-by, very good I think you sit down, eatum dinner alonga those fellow—then they think you all right, let you go home, no kill.”

“Oh, Victoria, anything to please them!” sobbed the elderly young lady.

“Yes—a—I think we’d better do anything we can to get into their good graces, since we’re not armed,” submitted the stockbroker.

Vaiti exchanged a few words with the Tannese. She explained that these white people had come a long way, and were very hungry. The Melanesian has not many virtues, but hospitality is certainly one of them; and a man who may be planning to dine off you himself to-morrow will certainly not refuse you half of his own leaf of yams to-day. The Tannese were delighted at the chance of sharing their good fortune with the white chiefs, even in spite of the latter’s extremely silly manners, and they beckoned to them at once to come and sit down.

Thereafter took place a scene incapable of description by mortal pen. The chief took his head out of the turkey, chewed off a leg, and grinningly handed it to Lady Victoria. The young warrior got off the pie, disembowelled it with one scoop of the hand that had not known water “for ten moons,” and laid its interior in the elderly young lady’s lap. Another knowingly poured out a champagne glass of Worcester sauce and handed it to the stockbroker, while the much-bitten lump of mutton that was at that moment circling from mouth to mouth, native-fashion, was hospitably passed on to all the whites. Driven by fear, they tried to swallow something; choked in the effort, made futile remarks to each other, laughed nervous laughs, and all the time watched with eyes of utmost apprehension the dusky hosts who were thus entertaining them with their own audaciously ravished goods. And above the crazy party the burning Tanna sun beat down, and the great volcano-cone far across the plain smoked and thundered.

It had been Vaiti’s design to dismiss them in peace by and by, assured that their compliance had saved their lives, and anxious to make steam out of Sulphur Bay as soon as was reasonably possible. Fate, however, reserved a more dramatic ending to the entertainment, And it was “all along of” that talking-man.

The cannibal native is invariably shy of displaying his tastes before whites, since people who do not share the “point of view” are so frequently prejudiced. Therefore the talking-man did not open a certain small green parcel tied up with sinnet string, which he had brought down with him from the mountain village. A feast in the hand is worth two in the pandanus-bush, thought the talking-man, so he brought his _bonne bouche_ with him for dessert and said nothing about it. And thereby came the end.

For Lady Victoria, unable to swallow the clawed and chewed morsels pressed upon her by dirt-encrusted hands, began to hunt despairingly about for something that she could really eat, so that she should not offend the dangerous monsters who surrounded her.

“Isn’t there anything clean to be had?” she asked the stockbroker anxiously. “I can’t eat—and yet we must! What are we to do?”

The stockbroker, who had once been to Honolulu, and thought he knew something about native foods, spied the packet of green banana-leaf, and reached out for it.

“This’ll be some of their own boiled yam,” he said. “Natives always do it up like this. You can eat it all right if you scrape it with a knife. Allow me.”

Before the talking-man could stretch out his filthy claw to stop him, the Englishman had cut the sinnet string, the parcel had burst open, and right into the middle of a half-demolished chicken pie fell a large white foot, cut off at the ankle, nicely browned across the instep and all crackled on the toes.

There was a wild shriek from the women, a splutter of horrified exclamations from the men, a boiling up of white petticoats like to the breaking of a wave on a pebbly shore, and then nothing but a diminishing string of rapidly trotting figures, each woman hand in hand with a man who was dragging her along far away, farther and farther, down the long, black, sandy path into the bush. Then ... they were gone.

Vaiti stood on the bank to look after them, and laughed quietly.

“Now I think we keep Sulphur Bay all our own self,” she said.

As for the Tannamen, they rolled on the ground with laughter, and then picked the dainty morsel out of the chicken pie and ate it up.

*CHAPTER XIX*

*THE RIVAL PRINCESSES*

It was full mid-day when the schooner _Sybil_ dropped anchor off Liali Island. The hot season was at its height. The long, white coral strand blazed in the sun, the moated lagoon was raw emerald, the waveless outer sea blue fire. Beyond the beach stretched a green, grassy lawn, dotted with quaintly-shaped Norfolk pines, tall palms, and feather-tressed ironwood trees; and against its enamelled background rose a palace like a picture in a fairy-tale—white, long-windowed, lofty-towered, and crowned with a crimson flag set below a gilded vane.

Vaiti, standing on the break of the poop, with the inevitable cigar between her fingers, looked critically at the island, and liked it well. A mere little matter of kidnapping somebody’s indentured labourers—the sort of thing that any gentleman with an extensive island practice might easily find himself obliged to do—had brought about her father’s expulsion from the New Hebrides labour trade, and obliged him to seek new fields for the activities of the notorious and naughty _Sybil_. Saxon himself was virtuously indignant, Vaiti not particularly sorry. She was getting tired of the gloomy feverish New Hebrides and their ugly savages. The Eastern Pacific was her heart’s home after all, semi-Polynesian as she was; and even the wild excitement of the cruel western isles could not hold her away very long. So when Saxon was wavering between the advantages of strictly illegal gun-running in the Solomons and honest trading about the Liali group (which had just wrecked its native schooner, and was open to employ a successor), Vaiti’s influence went for once on the side of peace and virtue, and the course was set for Liali. The group was new to both father and daughter, but was none the less attractive on that account, since all over the wide island world the _Sybil_ and her owners were best loved and most warmly welcomed where they were least known.

The Liali group, as many people in the Southern hemisphere agree, offers the nearest possible approach to comic opera known off the actual stage. Liali itself, the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite extraordinarily theatrical in appearance. Its handsome, merry, brown people wear the most picturesque costume in the Pacific—a knee-length kilt of fine cashmere, girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with a silken or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according to sex—all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour. Liali is civilised after a fashion. It goes barefoot and barelegged, sits on mats, lives in reed-woven houses devoid of furniture, worships a sacred lizard on the sly, and sometimes breaks out openly into club-fights and devil-dances. But it has a king, and a palace and a Parliament, a brass band, and quite a number of very active Nonconformist churches, run by white missionaries, who find that “labouring” among the well-off and amiable Lialians is a task in which the meritorious martyrdom of missionary life can be combined with quite a number of pleasant alleviations.

Nothing in Liali is entirely what it seems. The palace, when one comes close to it, is perceived to be built of painted wood, like a “practicable” scene in a theatre. The Parliament never passes any laws, because the Lords, who are chiefs, always on principle throw out every bill introduced by the vulgar Commons, just to “teach” them. The Prime Minister is oftener in prison for _lése majestè_ than out of it, and several Chancellors of the Exchequer have been transported to the Colonies for theft. But there is a real throne in the palace, all crimson velvet and gilt wood, and a wonderful gold crown (the verdigris is cleaned off it with a wad of cocoanut husks by the Chief Equerry every Saturday afternoon), and when the King goes out in state he wears a purple velvet train, held up by two pages in tights and plumes, and a marvellous ermined robe, all exactly like the Savoy Theatre in the consulship of Gilbert and Sullivan. On occasions not of state he sits cross-legged upon the palace parquet, clad in a shirt and a kilt, and plays _écarté_ with his native guards.

There are a few colonial traders in Liali, and a dozen or so of the English “legion that never was listed”—just such as one finds in all the odd corners of the Pacific—talkative, plausible, thin and nervous, given to avoid home topics and discourse with awful fluency upon small local politics; hospitable, restless and lazy, and usually married more or less to some dark beauty of the islands, who has grown as fat as a feather bed and spends a fortune on store muslins.

These, as a matter of course, took possession of the _Sybil’s_ people at once, hardly waiting for the schooner to cast anchor before they were alongside with their boats. Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore immediately, and begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different houses. With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected Bob Peter’s public-house, misnamed hotel, and immediately held a _levée_ in the bar, wearing his smartest Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be) and looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache, blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated figure, quite like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels. (And, as a matter of fact.... But that was Saxon’s long-buried secret, and must not be told.)

Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of yellow silk, with a gold chain twisted through her misty black hair, sat in the midst of a court of her own, and drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul’s content. She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of the dear eastern islands once more. She had a necklace of perfumed red berries round her neck, and white “tieré” flowers behind each ear, and the well-remembered scent almost intoxicated her. Outside she could hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by interludes of clapping; and from the very next house, a big native reed-built structure, came now and then in the quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man calling out the names at a kava-drinking.

The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste surged within the girl.... This, this, this, and all it meant—how she loved it! And yet, the wild, fierce life of the western islands; the chance, the risk, the strong wine of danger, adventure, power! The two natures of the soldier of fortune and the sensuous island princess who had given her birth, fought together in her heart.... If one could eat one’s cake and have it! If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under the singing casuarina trees, and yet be the daring sea-queen, the “Kapitani” of the _Sybil_, if only....

Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock chair, and asked for ginger beer with sugar in it. She hated thinking, and felt as if she were going mad when the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a strange fit of sober industry. Swift, instinctive plotting and planning were one thing, deliberate reflection quite another.... Ugh! she must be sick.... And for once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable offer of “a stick in it,” as her ginger beer was handed to her by an eager admirer.

The “sickness” passed away, and she began to listen and watch in her old fashion, smiling all the time to the compliments and sweet sayings that were being poured into her ears. A trader was telling her father all about the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon was not even pretending to listen. The affairs of “niggers” never interested him, unless there was a question of immediate profit ahead.

“You see,” said the trader, “King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., which is his full title, wants for to get married. He’s thirty, and there’s no heir. And there being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn’t his sisters—Mahina and Litia—what does he do but go and propose to both of them, and, of course, gets snapped up like winkin’ by the two. It’s no small potatoes being Queen of Liali, mind you. Te Paea gets lots of money out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown lands is half the island, there’s presents besides. And he’s a real king if he is coffee-coloured—why, the kings of Liali goes back hundreds of years before Captain Cook, and he was in Henry Eighth’s time, wasn’t he? And if you was to see the pink satin chairs in the throne-room, and the phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums, and lookin’-glasses, and the lovely wax flowers in cases, and real hand-painted oil pictures—ah! it’s a good job, is Te Paea’s, and either Mahina or Litia’s going to be a very lucky girl. What he’d like, you see, is to marry both of them, same as his old grandfather—only he married nine, he did. But the King’s a Methody, good as they make them—when he don’t forget, or want a spree—and of course the missionaries won’t hear of his havin’ two queens. And, says he, Mahina’s real fat; there’s nothing mean about Mahina; she fills the eye, says he, and that’s what a Lialian likes, for they don’t hold with any sort of stinginess, says he. But Litia, he says, has eyes like the buttons on his Auckland boots, they’re so round and black and bright, says he, and she walks for all the world like a lovely young mutton-bird, says he. And what’s a king to do, with both the girls’ relations fighting and squabbling over him like land-crabs fighting over a bit of fish, and he himself liking them both, and the girls clean mad for him—because, you see, Te Paea he’s a handsome fellow, and when he’s got his military uniform on, and all his orders and medals what he drew out himself on paper, and got made in Sydney, he’s a fancy man, he is. The wedding’s to be in three weeks, and the invites is being printed down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to write the bride’s name in—and the House of Lords has bought the bride’s dress for her, which is what the Kings says it’s their right to do, according to custom,—and no one knows which he’s going to marry, and no more does he. And it’s my belief that there’ll be war over it, before all’s said and done, for Mahina’s people say they’ll burn down every village belonging to Litia’s tribe, and Litia’s folks say they’ll kill Mahina’s people’s cattle and cut up their gardens. That’s the way things are, and you may take my word it’s a pretty kettle of fish.”

“What are you giving for copra at present?” asked Saxon, yawning unrestrainedly. And the conversation turned at once to the inevitable trading “shop.”

A few days afterwards the _Sybil_ spread her wings and started for Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands. She was to make the whole round of the group afterwards, and might not be back for some weeks, so that it seemed likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the King’s wedding. This Vaiti declared was no reason why she should miss them, and she insisted on being left behind. Saxon was not too well pleased, for if he had a remnant of conscience left, it was connected with the care of his daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving her alone in a group to which they were both strangers. But Vaiti promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore said that she would stay with one of the married traders, and not in the native villages. She also added that she meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use making a fuss.

So the _Sybil_ sailed away out of Liali harbour, and became a little pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue horizon, and then melted quite away. And Vaiti went to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was received with the unquestioning hospitality of the islands.

Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk of anything but the King’s matrimonial affairs. Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann’s parlour more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a handful of sugar in it, and related their several woes at length. They did not come together, except once, when Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found Mahina there, crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann’s wife that the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed with lace, only the day before, and that in consequence she considered him a monster and a perjured villain, although she knew perfectly well that he meant nothing whatever by it. What was a chemise? He had sent her two pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last. She would show Litia yet that the King was her King, and nobody else’s.