CHAPTER IV
The companionway into the main cabin was a steep ladder, and down
this, after his meal, Jerry was carried by the captain. The cabin
was a long room, extending for the full width of the Arangi from a
lazarette aft to a tiny room for'ard. For'ard of this room,
separated by a tight bulkhead, was the forecastle where lived the
boat's crew. The tiny room was shared between Van Horn and
Borckman, while the main cabin was occupied by the three-score and
odd return boys. They squatted about and lay everywhere on the
floor and on the long low bunks that ran the full length of the
cabin
In the little stateroom the captain tossed a blanket on the floor in
a corner, and he did not find it difficult to get Jerry to
understand that that was his bed. Nor did Jerry, with a full
stomach and weary from so much excitement, find it difficult to fall
immediately asleep.
An hour later he was awakened by the entrance of Borckman. When he
wagged his stub of a tail and smiled friendly with his eyes, the
mate scowled at him and muttered angrily in his throat. Jerry made
no further overtures, but lay quietly watching. The mate had come
to take a drink. In truth, he was stealing the drink from Van
Horn's supply. Jerry did not know this. Often, on the plantation,
he had seen the white men take drinks. But there was something
somehow different in the manner of Borckman's taking a drink. Jerry
was aware, vaguely, that there was something surreptitious about it.
What was wrong he did not know, yet he sensed the wrongness and
watched suspiciously.
After the mate departed, Jerry would have slept again had not the
carelessly latched door swung open with a bang. Opening his eyes,
prepared for any hostile invasion from the unknown, he fell to
watching a large cockroach crawling down the wall. When he got to
his feet and warily stalked toward it, the cockroach scuttled away
with a slight rustling noise and disappeared into a crack. Jerry
had been acquainted with cockroaches all his life, but he was
destined to learn new things about them from the particular breed
that dwelt on the Arangi.
After a cursory examination of the stateroom he wandered out into
the cabin. The blacks, sprawled about everywhere, but, conceiving
it to be his duty to his Skipper, Jerry made it a point to identify
each one. They scowled and uttered low threatening noises when he
sniffed close to them. One dared to menace him with a blow, but
Jerry, instead of slinking away, showed his teeth and prepared to
spring. The black hastily dropped the offending hand to his side
and made soothing, penitent noises, while others chuckled; and Jerry
passed on his way. It was nothing new. Always a blow was to be
expected from blacks when white men were not around. Both the mate
and the captain were on deck, and Jerry, though unafraid, continued
his investigations cautiously.
But at the doorless entrance to the lazarette aft, he threw caution
to the winds and darted in in pursuit of the new scent that came to
his nostrils. A strange person was in the low, dark space whom he
had never smelled. Clad in a single shift and lying on a coarse
grass-mat spread upon a pile of tobacco cases and fifty-pound tins
of flour, was a young black girl.
There was something furtive and lurking about her that Jerry did not
fail to sense, and he had long since learned that something was
wrong when any black lurked or skulked. She cried out with fear as
he barked an alarm and pounced upon her. Even though his teeth
scratched her bare arm, she did not strike at him. Not did she cry
out again. She cowered down and trembled and did not fight back.
Keeping his teeth locked in the hold he had got on her flimsy shift,
he shook and dragged at her, all the while growling and scolding for
her benefit and yelping a high clamour to bring Skipper or the mate.
In the course of the struggle the girl over-balanced on the boxes
and tins and the entire heap collapsed. This caused Jerry to yelp a
more frenzied alarm, while the blacks, peering in from the cabin,
laughed with cruel enjoyment.
When Skipper arrived, Jerry wagged his stump tail and, with ears
laid back, dragged and tugged harder than ever at the thin cotton of
the girl's garment. He expected praise for what he had done, but
when Skipper merely told him to let go, he obeyed with the
realization that this lurking, fear-struck creature was somehow
different, and must be treated differently, from other lurking
creatures.
Fear-struck she was, as it is given to few humans to be and still
live. Van Horn called her his parcel of trouble, and he was anxious
to be rid of the parcel, without, however, the utter annihilation of
the parcel. It was this annihilation which he had saved her from
when he bought her in even exchange for a fat pig.
Stupid, worthless, spiritless, sick, not more than a dozen years
old, no delight in the eyes of the young men of her village, she had
been consigned by her disappointed parents to the cooking-pot. When
Captain Van Horn first encountered her had been when she was the
central figure in a lugubrious procession on the banks of the
Balebuli River.
Anything but a beauty--had been his appraisal when he halted the
procession for a pow-wow. Lean from sickness, her skin mangy with
the dry scales of the disease called bukua, she was tied hand and
foot and, like a pig, slung from a stout pole that rested on the
shoulders of the bearers, who intended to dine off of her. Too
hopeless to expect mercy, she made no appeal for help, though the
horrible fear that possessed her was eloquent in her wild-staring
eyes.
In the universal beche-de-mer English, Captain Van Horn had learned
that she was not regarded with relish by her companions, and that
they were on their way to stake her out up to her neck in the
running water of the Balebuli. But first, before they staked her,
their plan was to dislocate her joints and break the big bones of
the arms and legs. This was no religious rite, no placation of the
brutish jungle gods. Merely was it a matter of gastronomy. Living
meat, so treated, was made tender and tasty, and, as her companions
pointed out, she certainly needed to be put through such a process.
Two days in the water, they told the captain, ought to do the
business. Then they would kill her, build the fire, and invite in a
few friends.
After half an hour of bargaining, during which Captain Van Horn had
insisted on the worthlessness of the parcel, he had bought a fat pig
worth five dollars and exchanged it for her. Thus, since he had
paid for the pig in trade goods, and since trade goods were rated at
a hundred per cent. profit, the girl had actually cost him two
dollars and fifty cents.
And then Captain Van Horn's troubles had begun. He could not get
rid of the girl. Too well he knew the natives of Malaita to turn
her over to them anywhere on the island. Chief Ishikola of Su'u had
offered five twenties of drinking coconuts for her, and Bau, a bush
chief, had offered two chickens on the beach at Malu. But this last
offer had been accompanied by a sneer, and had tokened the old
rascal's scorn of the girl's scrawniness. Failing to connect with
the missionary brig, the Western Cross, on which she would not have
been eaten, Captain Van Horn had been compelled to keep her in the
cramped quarters of the Arangi against a problematical future time
when he would be able to turn her over to the missionaries.
But toward him the girl had no heart of gratitude because she had no
brain of understanding. She, who had been sold for a fat pig,
considered her pitiful role in the world to be unchanged. Eatee she
had been. Eatee she remained. Her destination merely had been
changed, and this big fella white marster of the Arangi would
undoubtedly be her destination when she had sufficiently fattened.
His designs on her had been transparent from the first, when he had
tried to feed her up. And she had outwitted him by resolutely
eating no more than would barely keep her alive.
As a result, she, who had lived in the bush all her days and never
so much as set foot in a canoe, rocked and rolled unendingly over
the broad ocean in a perpetual nightmare of fear. In the beche-de-
mer that was current among the blacks of a thousand islands and ten
thousand dialects, the Arangi's procession of passengers assured her
of her fate. "My word, you fella Mary," one would say to her,
"short time little bit that big fella white marster kai-kai along
you." Or, another: "Big fella white marster kai-kai along you, my
word, belly belong him walk about too much."
Kai-kai was the beche-de-mer for "eat." Even Jerry knew that.
"Eat" did not obtain in his vocabulary; but kai-kai did, and it
meant all and more than "eat," for it served for both noun and verb.
But the girl never replied to the jeering of the blacks. For that
matter, she never spoke at all, not even to Captain Van Horn, who
did not so much as know her name.
It was late afternoon, after discovering the girl in the lazarette,
when Jerry again came on deck. Scarcely had Skipper, who had
carried him up the steep ladder, dropped him on deck than Jerry made
a new discovery--land. He did not see it, but he smelled it. His
nose went up in the air and quested to windward along the wind that
brought the message, and he read the air with his nose as a man
might read a newspaper--the salt smells of the seashore and of the
dank muck of mangrove swamps at low tide, the spicy fragrances of
tropic vegetation, and the faint, most faint, acrid tingle of smoke
from smudgy fires.
The trade, which had laid the Arangi well up under the lee of this
outjutting point of Malaita, was now failing, so that she began to
roll in the easy swells with crashings of sheets and tackles and
thunderous flappings of her sails. Jerry no more than cocked a
contemptuous quizzical eye at the mainsail anticking above him. He
knew already the empty windiness of its threats, but he was careful
of the mainsheet blocks, and walked around the traveller instead of
over it.
While Captain Van Horn, taking advantage of the calm to exercise the
boat's crew with the fire-arms and to limber up the weapons, was
passing out the Lee-Enfields from their place on top the cabin
skylight, Jerry suddenly crouched and began to stalk stiff-legged.
But the wild-dog, three feet from his lair under the trade-boxes,
was not unobservant. He watched and snarled threateningly. It was
not a nice snarl. In fact, it was as nasty and savage a snarl as
all his life had been nasty and savage. Most small creatures were
afraid of that snarl, but it had no deterrent effect on Jerry, who
continued his steady stalking. When the wild-dog sprang for the
hole under the boxes, Jerry sprang after, missing his enemy by
inches. Tossing overboard bits of wood, bottles and empty tins,
Captain Van Horn ordered the eight eager boat's crew with rifles to
turn loose. Jerry was excited and delighted with the fusillade, and
added his puppy yelpings to the noise. As the empty brass
cartridges were ejected, the return boys scrambled on the deck for
them, esteeming them as very precious objects and thrusting them,
still warm, into the empty holes in their ears. Their ears were
perforated with many of these holes, the smallest capable of
receiving a cartridge, while the larger ones contained-clay pipes,
sticks of tobacco, and even boxes of matches. Some of the holes in
the ear-lobes were so huge that they were plugged with carved wooden
cylinders three inches in diameter.
Mate and captain carried automatics in their belts, and with these
they turned loose, shooting away clip after clip to the breathless
admiration of the blacks for such marvellous rapidity of fire. The
boat's crew were not even fair shots, but Van Horn, like every
captain in the Solomons, knew that the bush natives and salt-water
men were so much worse shots, and knew that the shooting of his
boat's crew could be depended upon--if the boat's crew itself did
not turn against the ship in a pinch.
At first, Borckman's automatic jammed, and he received a caution
from Van Horn for his carelessness in not keeping it clean and thin-
oiled. Also, Borckman was twittingly asked how many drinks he had
taken, and if that was what accounted for his shooting being under
his average. Borckman explained that he had a touch of fever, and
Van Horn deferred stating his doubts until a few minutes later,
squatting in the shade of the spanker with Jerry in his arms, he
told Jerry all about it.
"The trouble with him is the schnapps, Jerry," he explained. "Gott-
fer-dang, it makes me keep all my watches and half of his. And he
says it's the fever. Never believe it, Jerry. It's the schnapps--
just the plain s-c-h-n-a-p-p-s schnapps. An' he's a good sailor-
man, Jerry, when he's sober. But when he's schnappy he's sheer
lunatic. Then his noddle goes pinwheeling and he's a blighted fool,
and he'd snore in a gale and suffer for sleep in a dead calm.--
Jerry, you're just beginning to pad those four little soft feet of
yours into the world, so take the advice of one who knows and leave
the schnapps alone. Believe me, Jerry, boy--listen to your father--
schnapps will never buy you anything."
Whereupon, leaving Jerry on deck to stalk the wild-dog, Captain Van
Horn went below into the tiny stateroom and took a long drink from
the very bottle from which Borckman was stealing.
The stalking of the wild-dog became a game, at least to Jerry, who
was so made that his heart bore no malice, and who hugely enjoyed
it. Also, it gave him a delightful consciousness of his own
mastery, for the wild-dog always fled from him. At least so far as
dogs were concerned, Jerry was cock of the deck of the Arangi. It
did not enter his head to query how his conduct affected the wild-
dog, though, in truth, he led that individual a wretched existence.
Never, except when Jerry was below, did the wild one dare venture
more than several feet from his retreat, and he went about in fear
and trembling of the fat roly-poly puppy who was unafraid of his
snarl.
In the late afternoon, Jerry trotted aft, after having administered
another lesson to the wild-dog, and found Skipper seated on the
deck, back against the low rail, knees drawn up, and gazing absently
off to leeward. Jerry sniffed his bare calf--not that he needed to
identify it, but just because he liked to, and in a sort of friendly
greeting. But Van Horn took no notice, continuing to stare out
across the sea. Nor was he aware of the puppy's presence.
Jerry rested the length of his chin on Skipper's knee and gazed long
and earnestly into Skipper's face. This time Skipper knew, and was
pleasantly thrilled; but still he gave no sign. Jerry tried a new
tack. Skipper's hand drooped idly, half open, from where the
forearm rested on the other knee. Into the part-open hand Jerry
thrust his soft golden muzzle to the eyes and remained quite still.
Had he been situated to see, he would have seen a twinkle in
Skipper's eyes, which had been withdrawn from the sea and were
looking down upon him. But Jerry could not see. He kept quiet a
little longer, and then gave a prodigious sniff.
This was too much for Skipper, who laughed with such genial
heartiness as to lay Jerry's silky ears back and down in self-
deprecation of affection and pleadingness to bask in the sunshine of
the god's smile. Also, Skipper's laughter set Jerry's tail wildly
bobbing. The half-open hand closed in a firm grip that gathered in
the slack of the skin of one side of Jerry's head and jowl. Then
the hand began to shake him back and forth with such good will that
he was compelled to balance back and forth on all his four feet.
It was bliss to Jerry. Nay, more, it was ecstasy. For Jerry knew
there was neither anger nor danger in the roughness of the shake,
and that it was play of the sort that he and Michael had indulged
in. On occasion, he had so played with Biddy and lovingly mauled
her about. And, on very rare occasion, Mister Haggin had lovingly
mauled him about. It was speech to Jerry, full of unmistakable
meaning.
As the shake grew rougher, Jerry emitted his most ferocious growl,
which grew more ferocious with the increasing violence of the
shaking. But that, too, was play, a making believe to hurt the one
he liked too well to hurt. He strained and tugged at the grip,
trying to twist his jowl in the slack of skin so as to reach a bite.
When Skipper, with a quick thrust, released him and shoved him
clear, he came back, all teeth and growl, to be again caught and
shaken. The play continued, with rising excitement to Jerry. Once,
too quick for Skipper, he caught his hand between teeth; but he did
not bring them together. They pressed lovingly, denting the skin,
but there was no bite in them.
The play grew rougher, and Jerry lost himself in the play. Still
playing, he grew so excited that all that had been feigned became
actual. This was battle a struggle against the hand that seized and
shook him and thrust him away. The make-believe of ferocity passed
out of his growls; the ferocity in them became real. Also, in the
moments when he was shoved away and was springing back to the
attack, he yelped in high-pitched puppy hysteria. And Captain Van
Horn, realizing, suddenly, instead of clutching, extended his hand
wide open in the peace sign that is as ancient as the human hand.
At the same time his voice rang out the single word, "Jerry!" In it
was all the imperativeness of reproof and command and all the
solicitous insistence of love.
Jerry knew and was checked back to himself. He was instantly
contrite, all soft humility, ears laid back with pleadingness for
forgiveness and protestation of a warm throbbing heart of love.
Instantly, from an open-mouthed, fang-bristling dog in full career
of attack, he melted into a bundle of softness and silkiness, that
trotted to the open hand and kissed it with a tongue that flashed
out between white gleaming teeth like a rose-red jewel. And the
next moment he was in Skipper's arms, jowl against cheek, and the
tongue was again flashing out in all the articulateness possible for
a creature denied speech. It was a veritable love-feast, as dear to
one as to the other.
"Gott-fer-dang!" Captain Van Horn crooned. "You're nothing but a
bunch of high-strung sensitiveness, with a golden heart in the
middle and a golden coat wrapped all around. Gott-fer-dang, Jerry,
you're gold, pure gold, inside and out, and no dog was ever minted
like you in all the world. You're heart of gold, you golden dog,
and be good to me and love me as I shall always be good to you and
love you for ever and for ever."
And Captain Van Horn, who ruled the Arangi in bare legs, a loin
cloth, and a sixpenny under-shirt, and ran cannibal blacks back and
forth in the blackbird trade with an automatic strapped to his body
waking and sleeping and with his head forfeit in scores of salt-
water villages and bush strongholds, and who was esteemed the
toughest skipper in the Solomons where only men who are tough may
continue to live and esteem toughness, blinked with sudden moisture
in his eyes, and could not see for the moment the puppy that
quivered all its body of love in his arms and kissed away the salty
softness of his eyes.
