Chapter 20

Never was a maid in sadder straits, widowed before she was a wife, and unceasingly plagued by Samuelu to marry either Viliamu or Carl. She grew thin, and when she walked it was like a sick person, staggeringly, and once of so passionate a temper she changed to a gentleness that nothing could disturb. The compassion of the other maids lavished itself upon her, for they saw that she was dying of grief for her beloved; and at night, when wooed under the stars, they spoke with tenderness of O'olo and Evanitalina, and of their love so cruelly ruptured; so that every one wept, even young men who previously had had neither consideration nor sense, to whom a maid was a maid, were only she pretty, and who would have hastened for another had the first died; which shows that true love is like a seed, growing and becoming a tree, from which others eat the fruit to their own improvement, and increased understanding.

Every day Evanitalina grew more weak, yet unlike most sick persons, she was without fear at her condition, even welcoming it, and saying: "Soon I shall pass beyond the skies on my last _malanga_"; an once when she saw a wilted _aute_, she said: "Such am I, once blooming and now a-droop," and with that she plucked fiercely at the petals, and crushed them in her hand, as though she were hastening her own extinction.

One morning, shortly after prayers, as she reclined on a mat, with her eyes raised to that far-away country of which she often spoke, while Samuelu sat at the table, writing his sermon, there appeared on the village green three old gentlemen of stately and impressive appearance, bearing staves, who, stopping at that distance, inquired loudly whether this was the house of Samuelu, the clergyman? Then being greeted, and answered, "Yes," the three old gentlemen ceremoniously advanced, and ranged themselves within the eaves, saying that they had come on a wooing-party of sixty boats with Cloud-of-Butterflies, the young chief of Leatatafili, who was seeking a wife. At this, marveling greatly, Samuelu informed them they were mistaken as to the house, since his highness Cloud-of-Butterflies was unknown to him, and he surely unknown to Cloud-of-Butterflies. But the old orators replied, No, they were not mistaken, and asked had he not a daughter named the Lady Evanitalina, for it was for her that Cloud-of-Butterflies, in sixty boats, was at hand to offer marriage.

Then Samuelu's amazement redoubled, and even Evanitalina, previously languid, looked up surprised, and in her face was a strange expression like that of a startled pigeon; and on being asked in a becoming speech whether she would condescend to receive the visitor and his gifts, she answered with bewilderment that it was as her father wished, at which Samuelu said, "Yes," with no great willingness, desiring to continue his sermon, and dreading the outlay in _'ava_ for the reception of so vast a company. Then the three old gentlemen excused themselves in polished phrases, full of beauty and eloquence, and retired to inform Cloud-of-Butterflies that the Lady Evanitalina was desirous that he should come.

Shortly afterwards there was the beat of drums, and the tramp of multitudes, and the screaming of innumerable pigs borne on poles, and a sound like that of an advancing army, thunderous and roaring. The eaves of every house was black with onlookers, and there were white people, galloping up on horses, astounded, and many others on foot, running. Then, shaking the ground with its progress the procession marched into view; and of pigs there seemed two hundred, and of men a number beyond counting; and at the head were youths, throwing their rifles in the air as they sang and danced. But of these things Evanitalina was scarcely heedful, for with breathless body and quivering heart her whole attention was on Cloud-of-Butterflies in the center of the pageant, who, girded in a priceless mat, and wearing at his throat a whale-tooth necklace, and surrounded with deference and honor, was not to her Cloud-of-Butterflies at all, but O'olo, arisen from the grave, and hastening to claim her for his bride.

BEN

I was in the bark Ransom, with twenty tons of trade aboard, and looking for a station up in the Westward, when I fixed it up with Tom Feltenshaw at Arorai Island to buy him out. It was a good little station, and far better than I could have hoped for at the money I had to offer, with a new tin roof and a water tank and a copra shed with a cement floor, and an imported banana in an imported ton of earth to give a natty effect to the back view--the front being all reef and dazzle and Pacific Ocean.

Lonesome? Coffin-lid, nail-her-down, lonesome--why, of course! Was there ever a coral island that wasn't? But there was copra in plenty; only one other trader and him a boozer; quite a bit of pearl shell, and Tom's book showing how he had cleared thirty-three hundred dollars in a year. He had boils something awful, and for the last two years it had just been a fight to stick it out. I came along when the boils had won all along the line, with Tom ready to leave everything all standing in order to get away.

There hadn't been a ship in five months, and he had come mighty near pegging out, having made his will and tacked it to the shed door, besides giving the natives receipts in advance that he had died a natural death, they being afraid some passing man-of-war might hold them responsible and shoot up the island.

We had settled everything, counted out the money, and shook hands when Tom says, over a good-by nip of Square-face: "Oh, that girl of mine, Ben,--you'll take care her, won't you?"

"Girl?" says I.

"She's broke in to cooking and washing and white ways," explains Tom, "and it'd go against my conscience to feel I hadn't left her comfortable."

"Let's see her," I said.

He called her in, and one glance at her settled the matter. She was about eighteen, as slim and straight as a dart, and, by far and away, the prettiest woman I had seen in the group. She stood there mighty sullen as I sized her up, and admired her splendid black hair that was bound by a red ribbon at the nape of her neck, very coquettish and attractive. I've always liked that proud, to-hell-with-you look in a girl, and it seemed to make her better worth having, like there was something to master before you could have your will with her. Yes, it was bargain day for me all right, and the store wasn't the only thing I was getting cheap.

"What she saying?" I asked, as she spoke something in Kanaka to Tom, showing real pretty teeth.

"She won't stay if you whip her," grins Tom.

"Bless her heart, I won't whip her," I says, thinking to break the ice by pulling her down on my knee. But she struggled like a wildcat, and Tom, he suddenly turns red-hot jealous.

"Leave that till I'm gone," he says, kind of choking. "If it wasn't for these damn boils I should never have parted with her or the station." Then after another nip he takes his bag of money, and calls out to the Kanakas at the porch to carry his two chests down to the boat that was laying there ready to take him aboard. He ups as though to kiss the girl good-by, but she sprang back from him, as fierce as she had been with me--fiercer, I guess; and when he caught her she turned away her head like she hated him. Then he swore and stumbled out of the house without another word or anything, while me and the girl stood side by side, both of us in our different ways deserted, and slung together by the fate of things. She didn't fight this time when I made free with her again, but began to sob like her heart would break, while I squeezed and cuddled her and watched the sinking topsails of the Ransom.

* * * * *

Women are always alike at bottom; it is only men that are different. A bit of finery would make Rosie happy for a week. Her hair was an everlasting job, so was her skin, which she kept out of the sun and rubbed down very careful with oil. She took walks to see how the other women wore the single bushy garment that they do in the Gilberts, the fashion varying from time to time: now it is swung very jaunty from side to side, now it's low and now it's high, and sometimes it's thick and sometimes it's thin, and sometimes the modest-and-quiet is the dressy way of it. She took care of the house very nice, and what few clothes and things we had were arranged most tidy in three chests with bell locks. I never hear a little bell ting-a-ling to-day but what it brings those days back to me, with her so busy at our funny housekeeping. When I coasted around the island, trading, she 'ud stay behind and guard the place like a bulldog, and never took a thing except a little soap or tobacco or maybe a tin of meat for her Pa, a nosing old gentleman dressed in a mat, who always bobbed up when I was out of the way, being discouraged at other times from living and dying with us.

Yes, I got very fond of her--loved her, you might call it, for all she was a little savage, and ate squid, and carried a shark-tooth dagger against any of the girls that might show a fancy for me. In time I taught her to play cribbage and checkers and dominoes, so that at night we would sit very sociable under the lamp, she and I, with the surf groaning on the outer reef, and it was more like a home than I'd ever had in my wandering, lonely, up-and-down life. She was quick to learn, and loving to beat the band, yet ever kind of imperious and saucy like I belonged to her instead of its being the other way around. She had no idea of white people--used to say they looked like Kanakas who had been drowned for a week--and was most scornful how it was always copra, copra, copra with us. It was just her way to tease me and make me cross, for then she would snuggle up and ripple over with laughter and hold me tight in her soft, round girlish arms, and say that I was _her_ copra--a whole ship of it, and how she 'ud hang herself from a coconut tree if I were to die--and by God, she would have done it, too, them Gilbert women being great on love, and the thing happening often enough.

Several years passed, and I can't recall a single word of disagreement between us. She was all the world to me in those days, and I doubt if in the whole group there was a pair so happy. Ben's Rosie, they called her--the captains and supercargoes and mates that came our way--and they all thought a lot of her, and brought her many a little present that made her eyes sparkle--such pretty eyes as they were, and so full of fun--gold fish, and rolls of silk, and music boxes or a trade hat. It was always a standing joke that she was tired of me, and was going to run away with them; and if they were quite old, like Captain Smith or Billy Baker, there wasn't any length she wouldn't go to, even to hugging them and playing with their whiskers right before me, and saying in her sweet, broken English: "Oh, you poor old captain, with nobody to love you--but never mind, I go with you this time, sure I go, and Bennie can get a girl from Big Muggin, oh, so pretty, who bite him like a dog!"

Then little Ben came, and for a time it looked as though he was going to be quite a boy, and grow up. But at the end of twenty-one months, as he was nearing his second birthday, he sickened and died; and we dressed him up in his poor little best, and put him away forever in the coral. Rosie took on about it terrible--so terrible that I think something must have broken in her brain. She was never the same afterwards; not that she was always mourning, I don't mean that--but she grew cranky and queer and changed in every way. She would start into a fury at a word, and throw things about, and scream. She would tell the most awful lies about how I had treated her, and invent things that never took place. Even on a dot of a coral island there is gossip and slander and a Kanaka Mrs. Grundy, and Rosie was doing her best to ruin me, so that I was avoided, and the King and the other high muck-a-mucks went to Tyson's, the opposition trader, and tabooed my store till I didn't know which way to turn.

I ought to have sold out and quit, and left Rosie on the other fellow like Feltenshaw had done me. But I loved her for what she had been to me, and for the poor mite moldering under ground, and so just took my medicine for a whole miserable year and let it go at that. Every misfortune I've had in life I seem to trace to what was good and generous in me. Certainly if I'd shaken her off then and there, I would have been a happier man, and been saved things that have since almost drove me mad.

The upshot of it was that finally I did sell the station to a couple of Chinamen--brothers--and I would like to say right here there never was a whiter pair than these two, or any that stood up straighter to a bargain. Once the main price was fixed, there was no haggling over valuations, nor any backwardness or suspicion, though in the rush I was in not to hold the schooner over long, it would have been easy to beat me out of a hundred dollars or two. They pulled us off to the vessel--me and Rosie and them three camphor-wood chests with the bell locks and a big roll of mats and a keg of silver dollars--and an hour later six years of my life had sunk with the palms, as lost and disappeared as the schooner's wake in the sea behind us.

After the Line Apia struck me as a wonderfully bustling, busy little place, and I took to it like a man does who's had nothing but coral and coconuts to look at till all the world seems nothing else. It came over me what a prisoner I'd been up there, and how much I had paid in unthought-of ways for that keg of Chile money. Rosie, too, brightened up considerable with the novelty of it all, and was so gay and laughing and like her old self that I was gladder than ever at having made the change.

It didn't take me long to size up conditions; and the better part of that keg soon put me in possession of a two-story house and store in the center of the town on the main street, with a pretty good stock taken over from the widow of the man who had lately died there. I was hardly what could be called a trader any more, what with a place so big and fine, with a tramway running down to a shaky wharf, and a busted bookkeeper coming in every Tuesday night to post my books. I was a South Sea merchant now, and was reaping the fruit of all them lonely slaving days on the Line. No more pajamas neither, but a clean, white suit every day, and with Rosie perking up like she did, them were real good times for me, and pleasant to look back on; and though I do say it myself, my neighbors liked me and I was respected and looked up to, and I was called the Gilbert Island Consul from the way I was always ready to befriend anybody from there, whether white or native, even once going before the Supreme Court and being complimented by the Chief Justice on behalf of some Nonootch people whose wages were being held back.

Then my ward run me for the Municipal Council, and I was elected by twenty-two votes to four over Grevsmuhl; and I can tell you it made me feel a mighty proud man to be honored like that and placed so high; and if my head didn't swell I guess my heart did, to almost bursting, at such a rise in life, and one so unexpected and undreamed of. It hardly seemed it could be me the police touched their caps to, or the consuls confabbed with about local affairs as they dropped in to buy a toothbrush or a pair of socks--me who had landed there so short a time before in my pajamas and kind of dazed at the size and noise of the place after the silence of the Line--just common old me, with earrings in my ears and gaping like a Rube.

It meant a big uplift to me in every kind of a way, and I was a better man for all that confidence and trust, and wanted like hell to show I was worth it. The week after I was elected to the Council I married Rosie proper and right, thinking a Councillor ought to set an example in his community; and every one was very cordial to me about it, especially in my own ward, where two or three of them even followed my lead, saying that with the mail steamers now calling and the town generally on the up grade, it was time to let go on the old, wrong way of things, and get into line with civilization.

Whether it was the change from the coral islands or the lavish new diet or what, Rosie had been laying on flesh for a long time in a quiet, unnoticed kind of way till finally she suddenly plumped up like a balloon. My, but she grew something awful, a waddling, monstrous mountain of a woman, with her eyes burying like a pig's, and the whole of her shaking as she walked. She was ashamed to go out any more except by night, sulking all day indoors, instead, and rocking in a hammock. As I said before, she'd never been right since Benny's death, and though she had pulled up for a time and acted very much improved she slumped at last, and slumped worse than she ever had been. Her old surly fits on the Line were nothing compared with the rampageous way she went on now, and if there was ever a she devil on earth or a man driven plumb distracted it was Rosie and me in our splendid house.

When she was taken with those spells of hers she was nothing less than a cursing, snarling, foaming maniac, and stopped at nothing to make me a spectacle and a byword. Again and again she chased me out with an ax; she would fling into the store with nothing over her but a single dirty garment, and pull down whole shelves of stuff out of sheer devilment, screaming with rage. She slandered everybody, and reflected on every woman who was unfortunate enough to know us, so that I was sued twice for defamation--or rather she--with verdict and damages, all that I could do being to hold up my hands and tell the judge she wasn't answerable for her actions. Hell, that was what it was--straight, unadulterated hell--with no way out that I could see till I died or she.

It was about this time I began to notice a fellow named Tyne on the beach--a thin, tall, hungry-looking man in a derby hat, very shabby black clothes, and no socks--who was said to be a busted doctor landed off of a French bark. His name came up before the Council, but as he had no papers or diplomas to show, and was hazy besides where he came from and how, we refused to let him practice, and were insulted besides at his daring to ask us.

Well, one day this Tyne, he comes into my store, very hang-dog, and so famished and shaky that I couldn't but feel sorry for him, and he asks for the job of pushing my handcart around the beach, getting stuff out of Customs, and making deliveries--he having heard I had fired my Nieue boy for pilfering.

"Fifty cents a day, Doc," I says. "It's hardly fit for a white man."

"My God," he says, in a real gentleman's voice, "I'm starving. I'd push anything anywhere for a bite of bread and a corner of a shed to sleep in. Ain't there a spark of charity in this town for a white man who is down on his uppers?"

I answered him with a can of sardines and some pilot break, which he went out and wolfed right there on the front stoop, and then came back wanting to know where was the cart and what was he to do? This was first how we got acquainted, Doc and me; and a remarkably finely educated man he was, too, and I don't doubt for a minute all that he represented himself. I fixed up a small shed for him with some mats, a tin basin and a lamp; and after a day or two, seeing how willing he worked and how faithful in spite of every one staring at a white man between the shafts, I let him take his meals regular with me and Rosie like one of the family.

For all he was down and out, and trundled my things about the beach like a donkey, in knowledge and everything he was miles above me and I knew it--and he made it plain he knew it, too. He was not at all a genial man, but had a rasping, bitter way about him, and a tongue as sharp as a razor, and a line of talk as to how the world was made up of flats and sharpers, all of them hypocrites, and how there wasn't but one sin--and that was to be found out. He talked like the devil might be expected to talk, there being no goodness or honor anywhere; and in some ways he wasn't unlike him in looks as generally represented, being tall and thin, with keen gray eyes that seemed to bore right through you, and a wicked, sneering mouth like a slit across his face.

Very soon he was doctoring natives on the sly for quarters and half dollars and bonito hooks and tappa, and quite a row of bottles and drug-store stuff began to accumulate along the ledges of the shed walls. I didn't think it was my business to interfere as long as he let white people alone, besides feeling sorry for him, and appreciating the way he paid no attention to Rosie's outbreaks, sitting there like he was air, and not passing a single remark--being, for all his faults, a gentleman through and through. At last he chucked the handcart altogether, though he went on messing with me and living in my shed, his Kanaka practice growing very extensive. It grew and grew till finally the regular doctor called a halt, and he was warned in an official letter, and told he would get three months' imprisonment if he persisted. At this I thought he would go back to the shafts again, though I didn't care to propose it lest it should hurt his feelings. But instead he bought an accordion and did nothing but play and play on it for days, beginning awful bad like he didn't know one end of it from another, but improving wonderful till it was dandy to hear him.

I guess there was nothing Doc couldn't do if he tried, though why accordion was more than I could answer. But it wasn't loafing that kept him stuffed in a hot shed all day, wheezing polkas out of the hurdy-gurdy, but a real good idea of improving on the handcart. What if he didn't make a whole band out of himself, with a harness holding a comb across his mouth, and a bass drum for him to kick with one foot and a tambourine to frisk with the other. My, when he started off with "The Stars and Stripes Forever" you might have thought he was six, with a drum major prancing along in front! He give a demonstration that night in the Tivoli Hotel, and drew the town; and when he come home it was with a pocketful of silver and a couple of dates for a wedding and the Kaiser's birthday.

After that Doc became an institution, with a pretty Kanaka girl to carry the drum and pass round the saucer; and every night when he hadn't a special engagement he would make the round of the bars, picking up what little he could. If there was a ship to be sold at auction, or a public meeting to protest against a high-handed something, it got to be the fashion to plaster the notice of it on Doc's back, him playing under a tree for all he was worth with the sweat pouring down his face, while all hands turned out to see what was the rumpus. He made money hand over fist, and would have paid for his keep only I wouldn't have it. We had grown to be sort of friends, him and me, from both having so much to bear--for he was too proud and highly educated a man to like making a monkey of himself, and it ground into him hard, and with me it was Rosie, Rosie, Rosie.

Oh, God, what things I had to put up with! What endless mortifications! What everlasting, heartbreaking scenes and scandals! She got to following me to Council meetings, bellowing like a wildcat, and clawing the policeman who was ordered to put her out; and again and again I had to leave in the middle to try and get her home, half the beach tagging along with us, laughing and jeering till I could have died of shame.

The day I resigned from the Council, being unable to stand it any longer, I was sitting in the front room, with my head in my hands, when Doc came in, and patted me on the back.

"Too bad," he says, "too bad."

"Oh, Doc," I says, "I'm the most miserable chap alive."

"It's bound to end some time," he remarked.