Part 6

Of that descent she retained chiefly a memory of the stream and its voices, now low and urgent, now babbling and chuckling in her ear. At times they groped through its luminous mists, again waded from stone to stone in the current or lowered themselves by its brink among the tangled roots. It hurried them, hid them, showed them the way, set the high pulse for their hearts and the pace for their purpose like an exultant accomplice. Nor did Miss Matilda shrink from its ardor.

Once embarked, she had no further fear. Unguessed forces awoke in her. With the hands that had never handled anything rougher than crewelwork she chose her grip along the tough ladder of looped lianas. As confidently as a creature of the wild she sprang across a gulf, or threw herself to the cliff, or slipped to the man's waiting clasp on the next lower ledge. Massed shadows, shifting patches of moonlight, the glimpsed abyss and silvered sea far down--these held no terrors. Sharp danger and quick recovery, sliding moss and rasping rock, the clutch of thorn and creeper--all the rude intricacies of wet earth and teeming jungle seemed things accepted and accessory. She was tinglingly alive, gloriously alert. This was her wonderful night, the great adventure that somehow fulfilled a profound expectancy of her being.

Only at the chute she could not hope to aid. Motauri meant to find a certain slanted fault beyond the last break that offered like a shelf. If they could reach that, they might clamber under the very spout of the hissing outfall, drenched but comparatively safe, for the rest was no more than a scrubby staircase that bore away leftward to the gentler slopes of the valley and the beach below. He told her his plan, then swung her up again and took the whole task to himself, easing inch by inch down the narrow channel. The water boiled and raved about his knees; she could see the streak of its solid flood ahead, where it straightened for a last rush, where the least misstep must dash them down the glistening runaway into space.

But she would not look ahead. She looked at the dim, adorable face so near her own, at the carven lip, the quivering, arched nostril, the fine, proud carriage and dauntless glance of her godling. The flash of their eyes met sidelong. With a deep-drawn sigh of content she surrendered herself to him, drew her arms about his neck until she was pillowed on his smooth shoulder....

"Strange there should be no boats at this end," said Motauri.

They paused by the outskirts of the village and peered toward its clustered, ruddy firelights flickering out upon the shore. There was no one abroad on that empty, nebulous expanse, but they could hear stir and laughter among the huts and the shrill wailing of a child.

"It is still too early," he murmured, and led her back to the cover of a thicket.

Miss Matilda was aware of a slackening from the keen excitement and zested peril of their escape. She had a vague feeling that the boat should have been ready to waft them miraculously over star-lit seas.

"How are you going to get one?" she asked.

"Any of these people would lend me a dugout, but I thought merely to take the first at hand."

"I see none."

"No--they are gone. Perhaps the men are fishing on the reef to-night.... But that would be strange too," he added, perplexed.

Somehow the delay, the uncertainty, began to weigh upon her like an affront. She missed their wild communion, the high, buoying sense of romance and emprise and impossibilities trampled under foot. She missed the single complicity of the stream and its turbulent heartening. Here were voices too, but these were harsh and displeasing, common human voices. An odor of cookery and unclean hearths stole greasily down the air. The fretful child began screaming again and went suddenly silent at a brusque clap. Somebody fell to quarreling in a muttered monotone.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded.

"It will be better if I go search."

"You will not leave me--!"

"Only for a time. I must find someone who has a boat and borrow it. If there are no others, the trader will lend me his."

"Gregson--?"

"He cannot know what I want of it."

"Motauri--" she cried, appalled, "keep away from that man!"

"I have used his boat before," he soothed. "It will be all right. And we must--we must have a boat. Remember where we are."...

She had caught his wrist unwittingly, but now she released it. They stood so for a moment. She was remembering.

"Very well," she said, subdued.

"You will be safe here," he assured her. "Stay close in the brush. Nobody passes this last house. And when I come I will sing a little, very quietly, to let you know. Good-bye, Hokoolele--!"

"Good-bye," she said, with a catch at her throat and a strange foreboding.

Abruptly he had vanished....

How long Miss Matilda crouched in her thicket by the beach of Wailoa she could not have told. It seemed an eternity. The night clouded down, even the stars were veiled. An on-shore breeze whined forlornly across the sands. Her fever had passed. She was damp, bedraggled, bruised and aching, soiled with mud. The wind sought her out, cut through her limp garments.... She waited, shivering.

She was very much alone. She felt helpless beyond anything she had ever experienced, as if the props of life were fallen away. And so they were, for those she had known she had thrust behind and Motauri's magic no longer sustained her. Worse than all was the pressure gathering in her mind, a tide of doubt that she had to deny, like the rising fill in a lock. She dared not let herself think. Still no Motauri.

Benumbed, exhausted, sunk in hebetude, she waited until she could wait no more, until intolerable suspense drove her blindly. She crept through the bush and so came suddenly to the edge of a clearing by a native hut--to see what it was written she should see at that particular moment....

Before the door burned a blink of fire that revealed the dwelling and its tattered alcove of sewn leaves, as if the scene had been set with footlights. It was a very simple little domestic scene. On a fibre mat sprawled a woman. She might have been young, but she was old in the native way, flabby, coarse-grained, with sagging wrinkles, with lusterless hair streaming about her face. A ragged, sleeveless wrapper rendered her precarious service, bulging with flesh. At her side squatted a youngster, an imp of seven it might be, who noisily chewed a stick of sugarcane and spat wide the pith. The woman kept one hand free to admonish him--by his beady eye he required it--and to tend a simmering pot. With the other, tranquilly, she nursed a naked babe.

There was no reticence about that firelight, no possible illusion--and certainly no romance. In grim fidelity it threw up each bald detail, the cheerful dirt and squalor, the easy poverty, the clutter--the plain, animal, every-day facts of a savage home. It touched the bronze skins with splashes of copper, shone in the woman's vacant, bovine stare and gleamed along the generous swell of her breast. And just there it made a wholly candid display of the central figure in this pantomime--the brown babe. Not so brown as he would be some day, indeed quite softly tinted, but unmistakably Polynesian. A most elemental mite of humanity. A most eloquent interpreter of primordial delights. A fat little rascal, with a bobbing fuzzy poll and squirming limbs. And hungry--so very frankly, so very boisterously hungry--!

* * * * *

Miss Matilda went away from that place.

She had a confused idea of flight, but her feet were rebellious, and before she had taken twenty steps she was lost. Without direction, groping in the darkness, even then by some intuition she kept to the trees and the undergrowth for hiding. That was her only effective impulse--to hide. She could not go on. Under heaven there was no going back. People were awake all about her in the huts. More people would be strolling and skylarking along the chapel path, supposing she could have found it. She had the sole, miserable craving that the earth might open to receive her.

And thus it was chance alone that guided her course through the fringe of the village, through garden and sand strip, and that brought her finally, all unseen, to the wall of a large house, to a post, to a slatted gallery aglow inside with lamps, and to her second discovery....

"Curse your black soul!" a voice was saying, with heavy, slow brutality, "when I tell you to drink--you drink! D'y' hear?"

"No can do, Mahrster," came the faltering response, in the broken _bêche de mer_ that is the token of the white man's domination in the islands. "That fella rum taboo 'long me altogether."

"What do I care for your taboo? _Drink!_"

Fell an interval of silence.

"Drink again--drink hearty!"

Captain Hull Gregson sat leaning forward by the side of his living-room table, shoving down the length of it a glass that brimmed and sparkled redly. On his knee, in a fist like a ham, he balanced a black bottle. His jutted jaw took a line with the outthrust arm, with the lowering brow, as if the whole implacable force and will of the man were so projected.

And at the end, facing him, stood Motauri--a different, a sadly different Motauri. A Motauri not in the least the joyous woodland faun in his attitude now. His proud crest was lowered, stripped of its wreath; his magnificent muscles drooped. He stood humbly, with chest collapsed, on shuffling feet, as became an inferior. He drew the back of his hand across his lips and eyed the white man furtively....

"That's better," grunted Gregson, and leaned back to set the bottle on the table amid a litter of odds and ends, books, papers, a revolver, a tarred tiller-rope with a roseknot. "Perhaps that'll loosen your tongue. First time I ever seen your breed hold off the stuff. But then, you're one of these independent lads, ain't you? Old chief stock, you call yourself. Plenty wild Kanaka, you.... Plenty bold, bad fella you--hey?"

"No, Mahrster," said Motauri, deprecating.

Gregson regarded him with a hard smile.

"And now you're going to tell me why you tried to sneak a boat at this hour o' night."

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

"You've said that a dozen times, and it's no better. It don't pass. Go fish? Go soak your black head! What are you up to, hey? Come now--tell."

Motauri made no answer, and the other controlled himself. Behind his dark mask the big trader was under the empire of some powerful emotion. His hands clenched and opened again, trembling a little. His face shone like wet leather. But it was in a tone oddly detached, musing, that he went on.

"You're smart. I don't say a Kanaka can't be smart when he wants to hide anything. He can. I ain't figgered you yet. And that's a mighty healthy thing for you, my boy, d'y' see? Because, if I could once make sure it was you I saw slipping away by the chapel hedge two nights ago, I'd--" A purplish haze suffused his cheek. "I'd dig the heart out of your carcass with my two hands," he ended, very quietly, and hit the table so that it jumped. "Was it?" he roared.

"No-o, Mahrster," said Motauri.

"You lie--blast you--it was!"

"No, Mahrster."

"Was it you that's been hanging around that white fella girl b'long missionary--that's dared lift your dog's eyes to her?"

He crouched like a beast, ferine--all the obscure and diabolic passion of him ready to spring.

"No, Mahrster."

Gregson glared at him steadily.

"What did you want of that boat?"

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

The trader sat back again, plying his billowy silk handkerchief.

"The trouble with me--" he said, reflectively, "I can't believe my own eyes; that's the trouble with me. And how could I believe 'em?" he inquired, with almost a plaintive note. "Such things don't happen. They can't. Why--what kind of a man are you? Black, I believe--leastways brown. And she--_she_--

"A Kanaka. If not you, then another. A Kanaka! To know her, be near her--touch her--play all manner of pretty, cuddlin' tricks around her--to--to kiss her, maybe! To crush her up in his arms--!" The words came away from him hot and slow, from under half-shut eyes. "And I've sat here behind them slats and watched her go by and wished I might crawl where her little feet could walk on me....

"How should one of your sort have the cursed impudence to think of such things? What have you got to do with heaven? Could _you_ see anything in that blind-like look sideways--and hair so smooth over the ear? Do you know what level eyebrows and a fullish underlip mean--hey? Do you? A lip like a drop of blood--

"What did you want that boat for?" he cried, in a terrible voice.

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

"I tell you one thing, you don't leave here till I'm sure. There's something rotten going on. I smell it. I'm on the track, and I'll never give up--never give up. Right now I've got the mission path watched by my own men. Nobody gets up or down without my knowing it--to-night or ever. D'y' mind that, before I screw the thumbs off you to make you talk?"

It was then that he heard the slight, sobbing breath in his gallery, the rattle of his slatted door that brought him to his feet and bounding across the room. Reaching into the darkness he dragged out the eaves-dropper--whose poor knees had simply given like paper, whose desperate effort to save herself had thrown her against the jamb and betrayed her--Miss Matilda....

"You--!" said Gregson. "You--!"

He dropped her by the threshold and started away from her with spread fingers and fallen jaw. For a time only the sound of his labored breathing filled the silence and the three stayed so, the woman collapsed against a chair, Motauri swaying and winking stupidly and Gregson, struck dumb, incredulous, empurpled at first and then slowly paling. Without a word he spun on his heel, returned to the table and poured himself a drink and tossed it off.

* * * * *

"Respectability!" he said, in the tone of conversation, caught his collar and ripped it loose. "By Heaven!" he cried, and wrung his great hands. "What am I going to do now? What am I going to do?"

His wandering glance lighted on the rope's end on the table-top, and he coiled it in his hand. He began to walk to and fro before them. His face was ghastly, his bloodshot blue eyes were set like jewels. Now he stopped before Motauri and looked him up and down curiously. Laughter took him like a hiccup: laughter not good to hear: but he left off as quickly. He came back and stood over the cowering figure on the floor.

"And you're the thing that was too good for me!"

He let his gaze possess her deliberately, noting each stain and smirch, her disordered dress and loosened hair, and pitiful, staring face.

"Well, you're not too good now," he said, wetting his lips. "No--you're none too good! You'll marry me to-morrow--and you'll crawl on your knees to have me. And that father of yours--that sniveling old hypocrite--he'll crawl to make the lines, if I choose....

"When I think how I've dreamed of you! How I've lived through days and nights of perdition, wanting you--you sweet, cold, white saint you--and a devil after all!

"To think how I've schemed and trembled and trembled and waited, afraid to say a word or make a move lest I'd queer any chance. Me--a common trader with a native wife that wouldn't die. And you up there on the hill so prim and fine. A missionary's daughter. Too respectable to touch! And what are you now--that's been out in the night--?"

He whirled around and the maddened, jealous rage and hate rose up in his soul like scum on a dark pool.

"With a nigger!" he screamed.

All his strength was behind the tiller-rope. It slashed Motauri over the face so that the red welt seemed to spurt. As he lifted his arm to repeat, with a strangled cry Motauri leapt upon him and the rest was fury. They fought baresark, interlocked and silent, spinning from side to side of the room. Gregson had the weight and the thews and the cunning. He kept the other's clutch away from his throat and maneuvred toward the table. As they reeled against it, he put forth a mighty effort, tore off Motauri and hurled him away for an instant--long enough to grab the revolver.

"_Nigger_--I said!"

But in the very gasp he choked. The weapon raised for a chopping, pointblank shot, dropped over his shoulder. He rocked, pressing at his heart, frowned heavily once, and fell crashing forward....

* * * * *

"Hokoolele! Hokoolele--! Up and make haste!"

Miss Matilda lifted her face from her hands.

"Let us hurry while there is time," urged Motauri, thickly. "No one has seen or heard us yet. His boat-shed is open. We are safe!"

"Go away from me!" said Miss Matilda.

"What do you say?" he stammered. "Come. Nobody will stop us. Nobody will know anything, about us--"

She fended him off with a gesture of instinctive loathing....

"Please go--"

"But you cannot stay here! It would be a very evil thing for you if you were found in this house. It must never be known you were here at all."

"Don't touch me!" That seemed the only important thing.

"Hokoolele--what of the golden chain of love between us? Come with me now!"

"I was mad. I was blind. It is judgment!"

He regarded her sorrowfully, but sternly too.

"You mean you do not want me any more?"

"No--!" she moaned, in the stupor of horror and despair. And then the brown man, the native, whose blood had been roused by every agency that can stir wild blood to frenzy--by love and shame, by drink, by battle and triumph--then Motauri, the high chief, struck unerringly to the heart of the matter and made his swift decision by his own primitive lights. Recovering her shawl he wrapped it about her tightly, caught her up once more willy-nilly in his arms and bore her away from that sinister place by force....

She was lying on a bench in the veranda of her father's house and her father himself was calling her name, when she came to herself.

"Matilda, I'm speaking to you! Where are you?"

He came through the window of her room.

"Gracious me!--have you been sleeping out there?"

She could only stare at him and down at the twisted shawl about her, for it seemed it must be so, she had only been sleeping--with what dreams!

But his next words showed her the truth.

"Matilda, my dear," he quavered, "you must prepare yourself. Be brave. Something dreadful has happened. One of Captain Gregson's boys has just come up from the village with terrible news. The Captain is dead! He had some kind of a stroke, it seems--very sudden--all alone at the time. I shall have to hurry right down. And at this hour too, when the woods are so damp! What a loss, what a loss, Matilda, when I had so hoped--!"

He left her, and it came to her then that she too had hoped and that she too had lost. The mountain stream was singing in her ears, and it seemed threaded with mockery. The moonlight came filtering through the vine, and it was old and cold. Her wonderful night was over. She was safe. Her life would begin again where she had dropped it, in formulated routine, and nobody would ever know--unless Motauri--

Some curious twinge, half fearful, half regretful, drove her to peer through the leaves and to listen for his crooning song.

_"Bosom, here is love for you, O bosom, cool as night!"_

But it did not come. She was to listen for it many times, and it was never to come. Having reached such heights and depths that night, having achieved the impossible and the doubly impossible, going down the stream and climbing it again, Motauri had gone down once more and at last by way of the chute and the outfall. For Motauri was a gentleman of sorts. But perhaps, because he was also a pagan, he had been at some pains before that final descent to enmesh his wrists firmly and helplessly in a knotted tendril from the passion-vine.

THE PRICE OF THE HEAD

The possessions of Christopher Alexander Pellett were these: his name, which he was always careful to retain intact; a suit of ducks, no longer intact, in which he lived and slept; a continuous thirst for liquor, and a set of red whiskers. Also he had a friend. Now, no man can gain friendship, even among the gentle islands of Polynesia, except by virtue of some quality attaching to him. Strength, humor, villainy: he must show some trait by which the friend can catch and hold. How, then, explain the loving devotion lavished upon Christopher Alexander Pellett by Karaki, the company boat boy? This was the mystery at Fufuti.

There was no harm in Pellett. He never quarreled. He never raised his fist. Apparently he had never learned that a white man's foot, though it wabble ever so much, is given him wherewith to kick natives out of the road. He never even cursed any one except himself and the Chinese half-caste who sold him brandy: which was certainly allowable because the brandy was very bad.

On the other hand, there was no perceptible good in him. He had long lost the will to toil, and latterly even the skill to beg. He did not smile, nor dance, nor exhibit any of the amiable eccentricities that sometimes recommend the drunken to a certain toleration. In any other part of the world he must have passed without a struggle. But some chance had drifted him to the beaches where life is as easy as a song and his particular fate had given him a friend. And so he persisted. That was all. He persisted, a sodden lump of flesh preserved in alcohol....

Karaki, his friend, was a heathen from Bougainville, where some people are smoked and others eaten. Being a black, a Melanesian, he was as much an alien in brown Fufuti as any white. He was a serious, efficient little man with deeply sunken eyes, a great mop of kinky hair, and a complete absence of expression. His tastes were simple. He wore a red cotton kerchief belted around his waist and a brass curtain ring suspended from his nose.

Some powerful chief in his home island had sold Karaki into the service of the trading company for three years, annexing his salary of tobacco and beads in advance. When the time should be accomplished, Karaki would be shipped back to Bougainville, a matter of some eight hundred miles, where he would land no richer than before except in experience. This was the custom. Karaki may have had plans of his own.

It is seldom that one of the black races of the Pacific shows any of the virtues for which subject populations are admired. Fidelity and humility can be exacted from other colors between tan and chocolate. But the black remains the inscrutable savage. His secret heart is his own. Hence the astonishment of Fufuti, which knew the ways of black recruits, when Karaki took the worthless beachcomber to his bosom.

* * * * *

"Hy, you, Johnny," called Moy Jack, the Chinese half-caste. "Better you come catch this fella mahster b'long you. He fella plenty too much drunk, galow."

Karaki left the shade of the copra shed where he had been waiting an hour or more and came forward to receive the sagging bulk that was thrust out of doors. He took it scientifically by wrist and armpit and swung toward the beach. Moy Jack stood on his threshold watching with cynic interest.

"Hy, you," he said; "what name you make so much bobeley 'long that fella mahster? S'pose you bling me all them fella pearl; me pay you one dam fella good trade--my word!"

It annoyed Moy Jack that he had to provide the white man with a daily drunk in exchange for the little seed pearls with which Pellett was always flush. He knew where those pearls came from. Karaki did forbidden diving in the lagoon to get them. Moy Jack made a good thing of the traffic, but he could have made a much better thing by trading directly with Karaki for a few sticks of tobacco.

"What name you give that fella mahster all them fella pearl?" demanded Moy Jack offensively. "He plenty too much no good, galow. Close up he die altogether."