Jerry of the Islands
FOREWORD
It is a misfortune to some fiction-writers that fiction and
unveracity in the average person's mind mean one and the same thing.
Several years ago I published a South Sea novel. The action was
placed in the Solomon Islands. The action was praised by the
critics and reviewers as a highly creditable effort of the
imagination. As regards reality--they said there wasn't any. Of
course, as every one knew, kinky-haired cannibals no longer obtained
on the earth's surface, much less ran around with nothing on,
chopping off one another's heads, and, on occasion, a white man's
head as well.
Now listen. I am writing these lines in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Yesterday, on the beach at Waikiki, a stranger spoke to me. He
mentioned a mutual friend, Captain Kellar. When I was wrecked in
the Solomons on the blackbirder, the Minota, it was Captain Kellar,
master of the blackbirder, the Eugenie, who rescued me. The blacks
had taken Captain Kellar's head, the stranger told me. He knew. He
had represented Captain Kellar's mother in settling up the estate.
Listen. I received a letter the other day from Mr. C. M. Woodford,
Resident Commissioner of the British Solomons. He was back at his
post, after a long furlough to England, where he had entered his son
into Oxford. A search of the shelves of almost any public library
will bring to light a book entitled, "A Naturalist Among the Head
Hunters." Mr. C. M. Woodford is the naturalist. He wrote the book.
To return to his letter. In the course of the day's work he
casually and briefly mentioned a particular job he had just got off
his hands. His absence in England had been the cause of delay. The
job had been to make a punitive expedition to a neighbouring island,
and, incidentally, to recover the heads of some mutual friends of
ours--a white-trader, his white wife and children, and his white
clerk. The expedition was successful, and Mr. Woodford concluded
his account of the episode with a statement to the effect: "What
especially struck me was the absence of pain and terror in their
faces, which seemed to express, rather, serenity and repose"--this,
mind you, of men and women of his own race whom he knew well and who
had sat at dinner with him in his own house.
Other friends, with whom I have sat at dinner in the brave,
rollicking days in the Solomons have since passed out--by the same
way. My goodness! I sailed in the teak-built ketch, the Minota, on
a blackbirding cruise to Malaita, and I took my wife along. The
hatchet-marks were still raw on the door of our tiny stateroom
advertising an event of a few months before. The event was the
taking of Captain Mackenzie's head, Captain Mackenzie, at that time,
being master of the Minota. As we sailed in to Langa-Langa, the
British cruiser, the Cambrian, steamed out from the shelling of a
village.
It is not expedient to burden this preliminary to my story with
further details, which I do make asseveration I possess a-plenty. I
hope I have given some assurance that the adventures of my dog hero
in this novel are real adventures in a very real cannibal world.
Bless you!--when I took my wife along on the cruise of the Minota,
we found on board a nigger-chasing, adorable Irish terrier puppy,
who was smooth-coated like Jerry, and whose name was Peggy. Had it
not been for Peggy, this book would never have been written. She
was the chattel of the Minota's splendid skipper. So much did Mrs.
London and I come to love her, that Mrs. London, after the wreck of
the Minota, deliberately and shamelessly stole her from the Minota's
skipper. I do further admit that I did, deliberately and
shamelessly, compound my wife's felony. We loved Peggy so! Dear
royal, glorious little dog, buried at sea off the east coast of
Australia!
I must add that Peggy, like Jerry, was born at Meringe Lagoon, on
Meringe Plantation, which is of the Island of Ysabel, said Ysabel
Island lying next north of Florida Island, where is the seat of
government and where dwells the Resident Commissioner, Mr. C. M.
Woodford. Still further and finally, I knew Peggy's mother and
father well, and have often known the warm surge in the heart of me
at the sight of that faithful couple running side by side along the
beach. Terrence was his real name. Her name was Biddy.
JACK LONDON
WAIKIKI BEACH,
HONOLULU, OAHU, T.H.
June 5, 1915
CHAPTER I
Not until Mister Haggin abruptly picked him up under one arm and
stepped into the sternsheets of the waiting whaleboat, did Jerry
dream that anything untoward was to happen to him. Mister Haggin
was Jerry's beloved master, and had been his beloved master for the
six months of Jerry's life. Jerry did not know Mister Haggin as
"master," for "master" had no place in Jerry's vocabulary, Jerry
being a smooth-coated, golden-sorrel Irish terrier.
But in Jerry's vocabulary, "Mister Haggin" possessed all the
definiteness of sound and meaning that the word "master" possesses
in the vocabularies of humans in relation to their dogs. "Mister
Haggin" was the sound Jerry had always heard uttered by Bob, the
clerk, and by Derby, the foreman on the plantation, when they
addressed his master. Also, Jerry had always heard the rare
visiting two-legged man-creatures such as came on the Arangi,
address his master as Mister Haggin.
But dogs being dogs, in their dim, inarticulate, brilliant, and
heroic-worshipping ways misappraising humans, dogs think of their
masters, and love their masters, more than the facts warrant.
"Master" means to them, as "Mister" Haggin meant to Jerry, a deal
more, and a great deal more, than it means to humans. The human
considers himself as "master" to his dog, but the dog considers his
master "God."
Now "God" was no word in Jerry's vocabulary, despite the fact that
he already possessed a definite and fairly large vocabulary.
"Mister Haggin" was the sound that meant "God." In Jerry's heart
and head, in the mysterious centre of all his activities that is
called consciousness, the sound, "Mister Haggin," occupied the same
place that "God" occupies in human consciousness. By word and
sound, to Jerry, "Mister Haggin" had the same connotation that "God"
has to God-worshipping humans. In short, Mister Haggin was Jerry's
God.
And so, when Mister Haggin, or God, or call it what one will with
the limitations of language, picked Jerry up with imperative
abruptness, tucked him under his arm, and stepped into the
whaleboat, whose black crew immediately bent to the oars, Jerry was
instantly and nervously aware that the unusual had begun to happen.
Never before had he gone out on board the Arangi, which he could see
growing larger and closer to each lip-hissing stroke of the oars of
the blacks.
Only an hour before, Jerry had come down from the plantation house
to the beach to see the Arangi depart. Twice before, in his half-
year of life, had he had this delectable experience. Delectable it
truly was, running up and down the white beach of sand-pounded
coral, and, under the wise guidance of Biddy and Terrence, taking
part in the excitement of the beach and even adding to it.
There was the nigger-chasing. Jerry had been born to hate niggers.
His first experiences in the world as a puling puppy, had taught him
that Biddy, his mother, and his father Terrence, hated niggers. A
nigger was something to be snarled at. A nigger, unless he were a
house-boy, was something to be attacked and bitten and torn if he
invaded the compound. Biddy did it. Terrence did it. In doing it,
they served their God--Mister Haggin. Niggers were two-legged
lesser creatures who toiled and slaved for their two-legged white
lords, who lived in the labour barracks afar off, and who were so
much lesser and lower that they must not dare come near the
habitation of their lords.
And nigger-chasing was adventure. Not long after he had learned to
sprawl, Jerry had learned that. One took his chances. As long as
Mister Haggin, or Derby, or Bob, was about, the niggers took their
chasing. But there were times when the white lords were not about.
Then it was "'Ware niggers!" One must dare to chase only with due
precaution. Because then, beyond the white lord's eyes, the niggers
had a way, not merely of scowling and muttering, but of attacking
four-legged dogs with stones and clubs. Jerry had seen his mother
so mishandled, and, ere he had learned discretion, alone in the high
grass had been himself club-mauled by Godarmy, the black who wore a
china door-knob suspended on his chest from his neck on a string of
sennit braided from cocoanut fibre. More. Jerry remembered another
high-grass adventure, when he and his brother Michael had fought
Owmi, another black distinguishable for the cogged wheels of an
alarm clock on his chest. Michael had been so severely struck on
his head that for ever after his left ear had remained sore and had
withered into a peculiar wilted and twisted upward cock.
Still more. There had been his brother Patsy, and his sister
Kathleen, who had disappeared two months before, who had ceased and
no longer were. The great god, Mister Haggin, had raged up and down
the plantation. The bush had been searched. Half a dozen niggers
had been whipped. And Mister Haggin had failed to solve the mystery
of Patsy's and Kathleen's disappearance. But Biddy and Terrence
knew. So did Michael and Jerry. The four-months' old Patsy and
Kathleen had gone into the cooking-pot at the barracks, and their
puppy-soft skins had been destroyed in the fire. Jerry knew this,
as did his father and mother and brother, for they had smelled the
unmistakable burnt-meat smell, and Terrence, in his rage of
knowledge, had even attacked Mogom the house-boy, and been
reprimanded and cuffed by Mister Haggin, who had not smelled and did
not understand, and who had always to impress discipline on all
creatures under his roof-tree.
But on the beach, when the blacks, whose terms of service were up
came down with their trade-boxes on their heads to depart on the
Arangi, was the time when nigger-chasing was not dangerous. Old
scores could be settled, and it was the last chance, for the blacks
who departed on the Arangi never came back. As an instance, this
very morning Biddy, remembering a secret mauling at the hands of
Lerumie, laid teeth into his naked calf and threw him sprawling into
the water, trade-box, earthly possessions and all, and then laughed
at him, sure in the protection of Mister Haggin who grinned at the
episode.
Then, too, there was usually at least one bush-dog on the Arangi at
which Jerry and Michael, from the beach, could bark their heads off.
Once, Terrence, who was nearly as large as an Airedale and fully as
lion-hearted--Terrence the Magnificent, as Tom Haggin called him--
had caught such a bush-dog trespassing on the beach and given him a
delightful thrashing, in which Jerry and Michael, and Patsy and
Kathleen, who were at the time alive, had joined with many shrill
yelps and sharp nips. Jerry had never forgotten the ecstasy of the
hair, unmistakably doggy in scent, which had filled his mouth at his
one successful nip. Bush-dogs were dogs--he recognized them as his
kind; but they were somehow different from his own lordly breed,
different and lesser, just as the blacks were compared with Mister
Haggin, Derby, and Bob.
But Jerry did not continue to gaze at the nearing Arangi. Biddy,
wise with previous bitter bereavements, had sat down on the edge of
the sand, her fore-feet in the water, and was mouthing her woe.
That this concerned him, Jerry knew, for her grief tore sharply,
albeit vaguely, at his sensitive, passionate heart. What it
presaged he knew not, save that it was disaster and catastrophe
connected with him. As he looked back at her, rough-coated and
grief-stricken, he could see Terrence hovering solicitously near
her. He, too, was rough-coated, as was Michael, and as Patsy and
Kathleen had been, Jerry being the one smooth-coated member of the
family.
Further, although Jerry did not know it and Tom Haggin did, Terrence
was a royal lover and a devoted spouse. Jerry, from his earliest
impressions, could remember the way Terrence had of running with
Biddy, miles and miles along the beaches or through the avenues of
cocoanuts, side by side with her, both with laughing mouths of sheer
delight. As these were the only dogs, besides his brothers and
sisters and the several eruptions of strange bush-dogs that Jerry
knew, it did not enter his head otherwise than that this was the way
of dogs, male and female, wedded and faithful. But Tom Haggin knew
its unusualness. "Proper affinities," he declared, and repeatedly
declared, with warm voice and moist eyes of appreciation. "A
gentleman, that Terrence, and a four-legged proper man. A man-dog,
if there ever was one, four-square as the legs on the four corners
of him. And prepotent! My word! His blood'd breed true for a
thousand generations, and the cool head and the kindly brave heart
of him."
Terrence did not voice his sorrow, if sorrow he had; but his
hovering about Biddy tokened his anxiety for her. Michael, however,
yielding to the contagion, sat beside his mother and barked angrily
out across the increasing stretch of water as he would have barked
at any danger that crept and rustled in the jungle. This, too, sank
to Jerry's heart, adding weight to his sure intuition that dire
fate, he knew not what, was upon him.
For his six months of life, Jerry knew a great deal and knew very
little. He knew, without thinking about it, without knowing that he
knew, why Biddy, the wise as well as the brave, did not act upon all
the message that her heart voiced to him, and spring into the water
and swim after him. She had protected him like a lioness when the
big puarka (which, in Jerry's vocabulary, along with grunts and
squeals, was the combination of sound, or word, for "pig") had tried
to devour him where he was cornered under the high-piled plantation
house. Like a lioness, when the cook-boy had struck him with a
stick to drive him out of the kitchen, had Biddy sprung upon the
black, receiving without wince or whimper one straight blow from the
stick, and then downing him and mauling him among his pots and pans
until dragged (for the first time snarling) away by the unchiding
Mister Haggin, who; however, administered sharp words to the cook-
boy for daring to lift hand against a four-legged dog belonging to a
god.
Jerry knew why his mother did not plunge into the water after him.
The salt sea, as well as the lagoons that led out of the salt sea,
were taboo. "Taboo," as word or sound, had no place in Jerry's
vocabulary. But its definition, or significance, was there in the
quickest part of his consciousness. He possessed a dim, vague,
imperative knowingness that it was not merely not good, but
supremely disastrous, leading to the mistily glimpsed sense of utter
endingness for a dog, for any dog, to go into the water where
slipped and slid and noiselessly paddled, sometimes on top,
sometimes emerging from the depths, great scaly monsters, huge-jawed
and horribly-toothed, that snapped down and engulfed a dog in an
instant just as the fowls of Mister Haggin snapped and engulfed
grains of corn.
Often he had heard his father and mother, on the safety of the sand,
bark and rage their hatred of those terrible sea-dwellers, when,
close to the beach, they appeared on the surface like logs awash.
"Crocodile" was no word in Jerry's vocabulary. It was an image, an
image of a log awash that was different from any log in that it was
alive. Jerry, who heard, registered, and recognized many words that
were as truly tools of thought to him as they were to humans, but
who, by inarticulateness of birth and breed, could not utter these
many words, nevertheless in his mental processes, used images just
as articulate men use words in their own mental processes. And
after all, articulate men, in the act of thinking, willy nilly use
images that correspond to words and that amplify words.
Perhaps, in Jerry's brain, the rising into the foreground of
consciousness of an image of a log awash connoted more intimate and
fuller comprehension of the thing being thought about, than did the
word "crocodile," and its accompanying image, in the foreground of a
human's consciousness. For Jerry really did know more about
crocodiles than the average human. He could smell a crocodile
farther off and more differentiatingly than could any man, than
could even a salt-water black or a bushman smell one. He could tell
when a crocodile, hauled up from the lagoon, lay without sound or
movement, and perhaps asleep, a hundred feet away on the floor mat
of jungle.
He knew more of the language of crocodiles than did any man. He had
better means and opportunities of knowing. He knew their many
noises that were as grunts and slubbers. He knew their anger
noises, their fear noises, their food noises, their love noises.
And these noises were as definitely words in his vocabulary as are
words in a human's vocabulary. And these crocodile noises were
tools of thought. By them he weighed and judged and determined his
own consequent courses of action, just like any human; or, just like
any human, lazily resolved upon no course of action, but merely
noted and registered a clear comprehension of something that was
going on about him that did not require a correspondence of action
on his part.
And yet, what Jerry did not know was very much. He did not know the
size of the world. He did not know that this Meringe Lagoon, backed
by high, forested mountains and fronted and sheltered by the off-
shore coral islets, was anything else than the entire world. He did
not know that it was a mere fractional part of the great island of
Ysabel, that was again one island of a thousand, many of them
greater, that composed the Solomon Islands that men marked on charts
as a group of specks in the vastitude of the far-western South
Pacific.
It was true, there was a somewhere else or a something beyond of
which he was dimly aware. But whatever it was, it was mystery. Out
of it, things that had not been, suddenly were. Chickens and
puarkas and cats, that he had never seen before, had a way of
abruptly appearing on Meringe Plantation. Once, even, had there
been an eruption of strange four-legged, horned and hairy creatures,
the images of which, registered in his brain, would have been
identifiable in the brains of humans with what humans worded
"goats."
It was the same way with the blacks. Out of the unknown, from the
somewhere and something else, too unconditional for him to know any
of the conditions, instantly they appeared, full-statured, walking
about Meringe Plantation with loin-cloths about their middles and
bone bodkins through their noses, and being put to work by Mister
Haggin, Derby, and Bob. That their appearance was coincidental with
the arrival of the Arangi was an association that occurred as a
matter of course in Jerry's brain. Further, he did not bother, save
that there was a companion association, namely, that their
occasional disappearances into the beyond was likewise coincidental
with the Arangi's departure.
Jerry did not query these appearances and disappearances. It never
entered his golden-sorrel head to be curious about the affair or to
attempt to solve it. He accepted it in much the way he accepted the
wetness of water and the heat of the sun. It was the way of life
and of the world he knew. His hazy awareness was no more than an
awareness of something--which, by the way, corresponds very fairly
with the hazy awareness of the average human of the mysteries of
birth and death and of the beyondness about which they have no
definiteness of comprehension.
For all that any man may gainsay, the ketch Arangi, trader and
blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry's
mind as much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two
worlds, as, at one time, the boat that Charon sculled across the
Styx signified to the human mind. Out of the nothingness men came.
Into the nothingness they went. And they came and went always on
the Arangi.
And to the Arangi, this hot-white tropic morning, Jerry went on the
whaleboat under the arm of his Mister Haggin, while on the beach
Biddy moaned her woe, and Michael, not sophisticated, barked the
eternal challenge of youth to the Unknown.
