Chapter 3

But as time passed, and one false alarm was succeeded by another, Jack plucked up a little heart. He began to make allowance for native exaggeration and laughed at his own former fears. If the men-of-war should come to Oa, were they likely to bombard an undefended village full of women and children, or burn, pillage, and destroy as mercilessly as he had been told? Bah! a pack of Kanaka lies, the gradual distortion of the truth as it passed along the line, until one burned house became a hundred and one village the whole coast of Atua! He went back to his neglected plantation, now overgrown with weeds, and set to work again with a determination not to borrow trouble. But, in spite of himself, he would find himself listening for the sound of cannon, laying down his ax or his bush knife in a panic and running back to the shore to make sure that nothing had happened in the hour he had been gone.

It was during one of these mornings in the bush, a morning singularly free of the apprehensions which usually beset him, that Fetuao came rushing through the bananas where he was at work, crying out, "_Manuao, manuao!_" Together, without exchanging a single word, they flew headlong to the beach, never stopping until they took shelter beneath the eaves of their own house. Yes, there was the man-of-war, a Britisher with yellow funnels, well outside the reef, towing behind her a flotilla of boats chock-a-block with natives. The red head-dresses of their crews showed them to be the followers of Tanumafili, and a couple of unmistakable pith helmets in the stern of the biggest betrayed the presence of directing white men. At the tail of the boats was a large steam launch flying the stars and stripes, the American contribution to the little fleet.

Jack breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of his own flag. Wherever that flew he knew that he and his were safe. By George! everybody in Oa Bay was safe so long as they didn't try to make a fight of it; and he could have laughed to see the terrified women scooting for the church, the children bawling at their heels. The fools, what had they to fear? American officers were not the kind to fire on women and children, nor were they likely to look on mum-chance, and let the lime-juicers do it neither. No, sirree!

The man-of-war slowed down her engines and came almost to a standstill. There was a sudden flash from one of her sponsons, a puff of smoke, and then the roar of a six-inch gun. The shell struck a palm not a hundred yards from where Jack was standing, and with a loud explosion took off the entire top as neatly as though a knife had sliced it.

"Good God!" cried the sailor; and the words were scarcely out of his mouth before he heard the venomous rush of another shell. Jack could not believe his senses. What! no warning, no notice beforehand; not even ten minutes to allow the women and children to get out of danger!

Bang! The church this time! He clutched Fetuao as he saw the shower of cement and rocks, and the frenzied flight of its occupants for safety. If that shell had gone through the window instead of striking the corner----

Bang!

"Run! run!" cried Fetuao, and without even waiting for him to follow or turning round to see that he did so, she darted through the house and disappeared. But Jack, in a white heat of indignation, folded his arms and remained doggedly where he was. Let them shoot, the skunks! Let them shoot, the stinking cowards! This was his house, and he would remain beside it until the crack of doom, shells or no shells. He would stand off them fire-bugs and looters when they landed, and tell them officers what a plain American citizen thought of them. He wasn't afraid of the swine. By God! he would like to boot the raft of them. He shook his fist in their faces, he did; and as for that villainous launch rolling idly in the swell while the big bully fired on the defenseless town, he spat to express his disgust for it.

The bombardment, like a salute, continued with regular intermissions between each gun. The marksmanship was poor, many of the shells falling short or bursting prematurely in midair. Except for the church, which was twice struck, and the chief's house that was set on fire, the damage done was inappreciable; and Jack, whose heart at first had been in his mouth, now grinned with derision as he watched for the recurring flashes.

"The Chilaneans could do better nor you!" he cried.

"Jack," whispered a voice beside him, and there was Fetuao back again in a state of the sweetest contrition and remorse. He took her in his arms and kissed her; and then, like a pair of lovers, they held each other's hands and shrank close together as the shells burst over the village.

The firing lasted for an hour, and then the flotilla of boats, preceded by the American launch, passed in procession through the break in the reef, and headed for Jack's house.

"Oh, it's the flag they see!" cried Fetuao, and she besought Jack, with tears in her eyes, to haul it down.

"Never!" he said, grinding his teeth.

There were some three or four hundred men in the boats, and as they raced in, cheering and yelling at the top of their voices, Jack quailed in spite of himself. But outwardly, at least, he showed no sign of agitation, standing like a rock before his house and facing the storm that was about to burst.

It wasn't for himself that he was afraid, not so long as that puffing-billy of a steamboat held the lead, and the grand old flag streamed out behind her. The jackies would see him through this business, whatever deviltry they might inflict on the rest of the unfortunate village, for blood's thicker than water every time, and Americans stand together all the world over. He wasn't no politician nor side-taker, and it was all the same to him whether he had a missionary king or a benighted papist. All he asked of anybody, by God! was to be let alone, though this broadsiding of defenseless people made him sick at the stummick, it did.

The launch came bumping into shallow water, blowing off clouds of steam as her crew jumped out with their rifles and waded ashore, while the Tanumafili boats, dashing up in quick succession, amid a furious and ever-deepening uproar, discharged in their turn cargo upon cargo of shrieking warriors. In the indescribable commotion that followed there seemed to be no prearranged plan nor any settled order of operation. The Tanus scattered in a dozen noisy parties, looting and burning the houses, barking the breadfruit trees, shooting the pigs and horses, devastating with diabolical thoroughness the inland plantations that sustained the village. The Americans, fearful of ambuscades, stuck to the shore and systematically destroyed the boats, which for a mile or two were drawn up on the edge of the beach. These boats, in a country without roads, are as much a necessity to a man as the house which shelters him. They often represent the hoardings of years, and are not seldom the result of a stern frugality and self-denial; they constitute, indeed, the only wealth of Samoa, and in them is invested the united savings of the whole population. In Oa these boats numbered perhaps a hundred, or a hundred and twenty in all, which, under the direction of a red-faced boatswain with a package of dynamite sticks, were one by one blown to pieces, and the shattered boards drawn into heaps and fired. That day the whole of Oa went up in smoke and flame. Nothing was spared, not even the church, nor the school, nor the pastor's house; not a canoe nor a dugout; not a net, nor a fish trap, nor a float; not a pig, a horse, nor a chicken. The boundary walls, emerging black and desolate above the embers of the village, alone survived the universal waste.

Jack's boat, being the nearest, was the first to be singled out; and as the blue-jackets began to bore it with auger holes in which to place the dynamite, he walked down to the petty officer and roughly bade him leave it alone. "Hold on, there!" he said. "That's my boat!"

The boatswain looked him up and down. "You get out of this!" he said.

Jack twitched the auger from one of the seamen and flung it into the lagoon. Then, seizing a rifle from the heap lying on the ground, he whirled it round his head like a club and advanced furiously on the boatswain, who pulled out a six-shooter and leveled it at his head. Even as he did so, one of the officers came running up, waving his sword and shouting; while Jack, confident that he had nothing now to apprehend, dropped the rifle and turned to meet him. He had scarcely got so far as, "Please, sir, this boat is my property," when a scream from Fetuao warned him that the natives were rushing his house. Abandoning the boat, he ran back to face this new danger, which, of the two, was so infinitely the worse. His first instinct was to snatch a hatchet and kill one of the half-naked plunderers, but Fetuao, catching his hands, held him back, and the impulse passed as he realized his utter helplessness. With smarting eyes and a heart that seemed to burst within his breast, he saw his house gutted of everything--his chests torn open, his tools taken, his wife's poor finery divided, and her twenty-dollar sewing machine the subject of a wrangle that ended in its being smashed under the butt of a gun. It was horrible to look on, impotent and raging, and see the fruit of three years the prey of these yelling savages; to realize that he must begin again from the bottom; that all his labor, and care, and thrift, had gone for nothing. Not daring to leave Fetuao behind, he took her with him and started off to find the officer to whom he had at first complained. His protest had not apparently been very effective, to judge from the torn fragments of the boat now blazing in a bonfire, and he was hardly encouraged to make a second attempt. However, slim as the chance was, it was now the only thing left to do. Surely it was not possible that they would let his house be looted and fired with the others!

The officer, a thin young man with a cigar, was standing in the shade of a palm.

"Mister," said Jack timidly, for somehow all the fight had oozed out of him, "Mister, they're looting my house up there!"

"Well?" said the officer.

"I'm an American," said Jack.

"Well?" said the officer.

Jack regarded him helplessly. "Can't you do nothing for an American?" he asked.

"Not for a damned beach-comber," said the officer, turning on his heel.

Jack did not attempt to follow or to pester him. He knew when he was beat. He sat down on the nearest log, and making room for Fetuao beside him, drew out his pipe, filled it and began to smoke. The girl tried to speak to him, but he would not answer. She whispered to him that their house was burning, and he never even turned his head to look. She took his hand, but he snatched it impatiently away, refusing to be comforted. Thus he remained for hours, sullen and half-stupefied, until the returning Tanus embarked again, and the launch, with jubilant whistles, led the flotilla back to the man-of-war. It was only when the ship was out of sight that Jack rose, stretched himself, and breathed the profound sigh of a man who has endured and has survived the most terrible experience of a lifetime.

With slow steps, and many expressions of anger and resentment, Fetuao and he walked through the village, gazing with bitter curiosity at the ruins that everywhere surrounded them. They made their way to their own little plantation, to find it devastated like the others, the breadfruit trees ringed, the coffee bushes torn up by the roots, the _taro_, bananas, and vanilla cut to pieces. In the paddock the cow and calf lay dead in a pool of blood; of the dairy, half-set in the stream, nothing remained but some stumps and smoking ashes; under a felled mango tree they saw the protruding hoofs of Fetuao's mare, Afiola.

Returning with a few bananas they managed to find in the plantation, they built a fire and roasted them within a few feet of where, that morning, their house had stood. Though nothing now was left of it but some charred wood, the place was still home to them. As Fetuao moved forlornly about, picking up a few trifles that had been dropped or thrown away by the invaders--a comb, a spool of thread, a flatiron, a book or two with the covers scorched off--she lifted up a grimy rag and tossed it, with a little gesture of disdain, at her husband's feet. He spread it out and saw that it was the consul's flag, the flag he had flown above his house with such confidence in its protection; the flag which, until then, he had always reverenced.

Jack slowly tore it into pieces.

V

Nothing is stranger than the effect of the same misfortune on different natures. To Jack, arrested in the full tide of his petty activities, it was absolutely overwhelming. When everything he possessed was swept away, and with it the routine that for three years had kept him busy and content, he knew not what to do nor which way to turn. Sunk in apathy, he spent whole days in dully mourning for what he had lost. He would have starved had not Fetuao forced him to follow her into the mountains, where, under her direction, he dug _tamu_ and climbed the trees for wild chestnuts; while she, with deft hands and a little tangled bunch of weeds, caught prawns in the pools and streams. At her bidding he made a tiny hut of cocoanut branches, a clumsy canoe good enough to fish with, and nets from the sinnet she taught him how to twist out of cocoanut husks. She even sent him back to work in the plantation, for the bananas at least could be saved, and there was a well of sprouting yams and some _tingapula_ that had somehow escaped destruction. But Jack's spirit was broken; the old incentive was gone; he could not revive the energy, the zest, the interest that before had never failed him. He did what Fetuao bade him and no more, and the days, once so short, seemed now never to end.

One morning early he was awakened by the murmur of voices in the dark, and on going to the door of the hut he was surprised to see Fetuao's brothers, Tua and Anapu, Mele her uncle, Lapongi the orator, and a dozen others, some of them boys not yet tattooed. In answer to his questions Tua told him that a messenger had come for them with orders to at once join the Mataafa forces behind Apia.

"And thou also, Jack," said Lapongi the orator, "for every man now is needed to withstand the fury of the whites."

Jack, as usual, turned to Fetuao.

"We shall both of us go," said she, "I to carry water for the wounded, thou with the _muaau_, a rock of strength and terror."

Jack made no protest. Hell! what did it matter where they went? Munching the food that was handed him, he looked across the bay, now silvering in the dawn, and wondered whether he was not seeing it for the last time.

It was late at night when they passed the outposts and reached the Mataafa camp, which stood on a high plateau overlooking Apia. Below them the search-lights of the men-of-war moved restlessly about, shining at times with a bewildering brilliancy into their very faces; and from the little war-encompassed capital there rose a distant drumming and bugling as the missionary boy king, unsafe even under the guns of Britain and America, took his precautions against a night attack. After the stillness of Oa there was something confusing in the stir and bustle of Mataafa's big camp--in the constant passing of armed men, the change of guards, and the rousing choruses around the fires. There was, besides, an atmosphere of recklessness and gayety, engendered by excitement, by danger, by the very desperation of their cause, that could not long be resisted by even the most impassive recruit. Jack alone, of his whole party, remained indifferent and unmoved; but his wife, all of the savage in her rising to the surface, grew intoxicated almost to the point of delirium.

Ordinarily so demure and quiet, she became from henceforward a creature of another clay. Whirling her ax and dancing almost naked at the head of the Oa contingent, she led it wherever it was sent, daring bullets and shells with smiling intrepidity. In her wild beauty an artist might have taken her for the spirit of war itself, as she moved undaunted along the firing line, or with biting reproaches drove up skulkers from the rear. Like some untried actress bringing down her house, she was overborne with her own success; and the more she was praised the more extravagantly and unflinchingly she exposed herself. Under the stress of those fierce emotions her character in every way underwent a change for the worse. In war time, death, always in the air, seems to annihilate with its dark shadow all the bonds that bind society together. Life, hitherto so assured, of a sudden becomes the most transient of human gifts, to be enjoyed with a feverish heedlessness before it vanishes forever into the unknown. Thus Fetuao found and accepted a dozen lovers among her men, and while still according her husband the first place, she yet permitted them liberties and familiarities that they were not slow to take advantage of.

Deep in every woman's heart there is a love for the men of her race, a love motherly and pitiful, that will bring the tears to her eyes at the sight of a passing regiment and cause her to passionately mourn the unknown soldier dead. This sentiment, this instinct, is a thousandfold intensified on the bloody field itself. The pang when those brave fellows fall is inexpressible; her pride is strangely humbled, and in her mad exaltation she shrinks from nothing, and makes a virtue of her own abandonment.

Jack followed Fetuao everywhere, a despondent, woe-begone figure, who, amid the hail of bullets and the yells of contending warriors, lay or ran or advanced with the others in a black preoccupation. He had not a spark of interest in the struggle; his thoughts were forty miles away in that ruined home, with his plants, and trees, and shrubs, his cow, and his chickens. What victory could give them back? What terror had a defeat for one who had already lost his all! He lived in the past, in those frugal, thrifty, laborious years; for the present he had but an indifference, an apathy, that he had not even the desire to shake off.

He became the butt of the warriors, who brought him their rifles to mend and called him a coward for his pains. They envied him Fetuao, who, for all her flirtations, slept every night by his side and was not happy when he was out of her sight. They nicknamed him her "Paalangi dog," and would whistle to him derisively and shout, "Come 'ere!" secure in the chronic absent-mindedness that had become a joke to them all. When he answered, as he always answered, "Eh, what?" and raised his vacant, moody face, there would be an outburst of laughter, in which he himself joined with a mirthless geniality, like a man unbending to a lot of children. If a shell went off some one was sure to cry, "Eh, what?" and this phrase, together with a mimicry of Jack's slow, dejected utterance of it, became the stock pleasantry of the camp humorists, who brought it out on all occasions.

The conflicts about Apia were mostly affairs of outposts, a pressing in and a pressing back of the pickets on either side. The naval commanders, in spite of repeated bombardments and the enormous havoc they wrought along the coasts, found themselves hardly able to do more than hold their own against the Mataafa army. The safety of Apia was constantly in jeopardy, though barricades were thrown up in the streets and three hundred men landed from the ships. A desperate night attack on the main guard at the Tivoli Hotel betrayed the weakness of the whites to friends and foes alike, and redoubled the anxiety of the admiral and captains. It was plain that no decisive blow could be struck pending the arrival of the reënforcements that had been urgently cabled for from New Zealand, unless a better use were made of the missionary levies on the spot. These loose native organizations were accordingly broken up, consolidated into a single compact force of eight hundred men, well armed and well drilled, and placed under the absolute command of a naval lieutenant.

This fine force, supported by whites and Maxims, was counted on to retrieve the situation and drive Mataafa from his mountain stronghold. The plan for a joint attack was accordingly drawn up. A quota of seamen and marines, with a couple of machine guns, was to form the center of the little army, while the native brigade on either wing was to advance simultaneously, lap round and outflank the Mataafas. This operation, covered by a terrific bombardment from the three ships of war, was forthwith begun; on its success was staked the hopes of the little clique who had so lightly adopted the cause of a divinity student of seventeen, against the vote and wish of well-nigh all Samoa.

On that day the Oa party held the center of the Mataafa line, a stone wall stretching across a wide clearing to the forest on either side. It was the post of honor, for it crossed the road up which the enemy were toiling with their guns, and guarded the headquarters of the patriot king, not a hundred yards behind. In the trampled grass two hundred men sat or lay with their rifles in their hands and listened to the measured periods of the orators exhorting them to remember their wrongs and die fighting. These old men, white-haired, scarred with the wounds of bygone battles, their wrinkled hands clasping the staves on which they leaned, never winced as the shells whistled above their heads, nor abated by a hair's breadth their tone of strident warning and encouragement. At such a distance, and against a target six hundred feet above the sea level, the men-of-war made poor practice and did little more than waste their ammunition. But the shattering detonations of their guns, and the thundering echoes rolling and re-rolling round the bay, made pleasant music for their crews ashore. It seemed incredible that such earth-shaking explosions could be wholly without effect, and the tired seamen sweating up the hill were kindled by the thought that the rebels were already suffering heavily and likely to run at the first encounter.

Sitting listlessly on a boulder, Jack scarcely took in the fact that anything out of the way was about to happen. His only concern was not to be too far from Fetuao, and so long as he had her in his sight he was dumbly content. He was as solitary among the thronging warriors as any castaway in mid-ocean, and his patient, stolid, inexpressive face, grown older in a month by a dozen years, was the only one which failed to reflect the coming conflict. Fetuao, on the contrary, was on fire from top to toe; her saucy tongue was loosened, and her bright eyes dancing in wild excitement. Joking and laughing in the roaring circle of her admirers, she matched her quick wit against them all in a victorious scream of banter and repartee.