CHAPTER X
Daylight saw the Arangi under way, her sails drooping heavily in the
dead air while the boat's crew toiled at the oars of the whaleboat
to tow her out through the narrow entrance. Once, when the ketch,
swerved by some vagrant current, came close to the break of the
shore-surf, the blacks on board drew toward one another in
apprehension akin to that of startled sheep in a fold when a wild
woods marauder howls outside. Nor was there any need for Van Horn's
shout to the whaleboat: "Washee-washee! Damn your hides!" The
boat's crew lifted themselves clear of the thwarts as they threw all
their weight into each stroke. They knew what dire fate was certain
if ever the sea-washed coral rock gripped the Arangi's keel. And
they knew fear precisely of the same sort as that of the fear-struck
girl below in the lazarette. In the past more than one Langa-Langa
and Somo boy had gone to make a Su'u feast day, just as Su'u boys,
on occasion, had similarly served feasts at Langa-Langa and at Somo.
"My word," Tambi, at the wheel, addressed Van Horn as the period of
tension passed and the Arangi went clear. "Brother belong my
father, long time before he come boat's crew along this place. Big
fella schooner brother belong my father he come along. All finish
this place Su'u. Brother belong my father Su'u boys kai-kai along
him altogether."
Van Horn recollected the Fair Hathaway of fifteen years before,
looted and burned by the people of Su'u after all hands had been
killed. Truly, the Solomons at this beginning of the twentieth
century were savage, and truly, of the Solomons, this great island
of Malaita was savagest of all.
He cast his eyes speculatively up the slopes of the island to the
seaman's landmark, Mount Kolorat, green-forested to its cloud-capped
summit four thousand feet in the air. Even as he looked, thin
smoke-columns were rising along the slopes and lesser peaks, and
more were beginning to rise.
"My word," Tambi grinned. "Plenty boy stop 'm bush lookout along
you eye belong him."
Van Horn smiled understandingly. He knew, by the ancient telegraphy
of smoke-signalling, the message was being conveyed from village to
village and tribe to tribe that a labour-recruiter was on the
leeward coast.
All morning, under a brisk beam wind which had sprung up with the
rising of the sun, the Arangi flew north, her course continuously
advertised by the increasing smoke-talk that gossiped along the
green summits. At high noon, with Van Horn, ever-attended by Jerry,
standing for'ard and conning, the Arangi headed into the wind to
thread the passage between two palm-tufted islets. There was need
for conning. Coral patches uprose everywhere from the turquoise
depths, running the gamut of green from deepest jade to palest
tourmaline, over which the sea filtered changing shades, creamed
lazily, or burst into white fountains of sun-flashed spray.
The smoke columns along the heights became garrulous, and long
before the Arangi was through the passage the entire leeward coast,
from the salt-water men of the shore to the remotest bush villagers,
knew that the labour recruiter was going in to Langa-Langa. As the
lagoon, formed by the chain of islets lying off shore, opened out,
Jerry began to smell the reef-villages. Canoes, many canoes, urged
by paddles or sailed before the wind by the weight of the freshening
South East trade on spread fronds of coconut palms, moved across the
smooth surface of the lagoon. Jerry barked intimidatingly at those
that came closest, bristling his neck and making a ferocious
simulation of an efficient protector of the white god who stood
beside him. And after each such warning, he would softly dab his
cool damp muzzle against the sun-heated skin of Skipper's leg.
Once inside the lagoon, the Arangi filled away with the wind a-beam.
At the end of a swift half-mile she rounded to, with head-sails
trimming down and with a great flapping of main and mizzen, and
dropped anchor in fifty feet of water so clear that every huge
fluted clamshell was visible on the coral floor. The whaleboat was
not necessary to put the Langa-Langa return boys ashore. Hundreds
of canoes lay twenty deep along both sides of the Arangi, and each
boy, with his box and bell, was clamoured for by scores of relatives
and friends.
In such height of excitement, Van Horn permitted no one on board.
Melanesians, unlike cattle, are as prone to stampede to attack as to
retreat. Two of the boat's crew stood beside the Lee-Enfields on
the skylight. Borckman, with half the boat's crew, went about the
ship's work. Van Horn, Jerry at his heels, careful that no one
should get at his back, superintended the departure of the Langa-
Langa returns and kept a vigilant eye on the remaining half of the
boat's crew that guarded the barbed-wire rails. And each Somo boy
sat on his trade-box to prevent it from being tossed into the
waiting canoes by some Langa-Langa boy.
In half an hour the riot departed ashore. Only several canoes
lingered, and from one of these Van Horn beckoned aboard Nau-hau,
the biggest chief of the stronghold of Langa-Langa. Unlike most of
the big chiefs, Nau-hau was young, and, unlike most of the
Melanesians, he was handsome, even beautiful.
"Hello, King o' Babylon," was Van Horn's greeting, for so he had
named him because of fancied Semitic resemblance blended with the
crude power that marked his visage and informed his bearing.
Born and trained to nakedness, Nau-hau trod the deck boldly and
unashamed. His sole gear of clothing was a length of trunk strap
buckled about his waist. Between this and his bare skin was thrust
the naked blade of a ten-inch ripping knife. His sole decoration
was a white China soup-plate, perforated and strung on coconut
sennit, suspended from about his neck so that it rested flat on his
chest and half-concealed the generous swell of muscles. It was the
greatest of treasures. No man of Malaita he had ever heard of
possessed an unbroken soup-plate.
Nor was he any more ridiculous because of the soup-plate than was he
ludicrous because of his nakedness. He was royal. His father had
been a king before him, and he had proved himself greater than his
father. Life and death he bore in his hands and head. Often he had
exercised it, chirping to his subjects in the tongue of Langa-Langa:
"Slay here," and "Slay there"; "Thou shalt die," and "Thou shalt
live." Because his father, a year abdicated, had chosen foolishly
to interfere with his son's government, he had called two boys and
had them twist a cord of coconut around his father's neck so that
thereafter he never breathed again. Because his favourite wife,
mother of his eldest born, had dared out of silliness of affection
to violate one of his kingly tamboos, he had had her killed and had
himself selfishly and religiously eaten the last of her even to the
marrow of her cracked joints, sharing no morsel with his boonest of
comrades.
Royal he was, by nature, by training, by deed. He carried himself
with consciousness of royalty. He looked royal--as a magnificent
stallion may look royal, as a lion on a painted tawny desert may
look royal. He was as splendid a brute--an adumbration of the
splendid human conquerors and rulers, higher on the ladder of
evolution, who have appeared in other times and places. His pose of
body, of chest, of shoulders, of head, was royal. Royal was the
heavy-lidded, lazy, insolent way he looked out of his eyes.
Royal in courage was he, this moment on the Arangi, despite the fact
that he knew he walked on dynamite. As he had long since bitterly
learned, any white man was as much dynamite as was the mysterious
death-dealing missile he sometimes employed. When a stripling, he
had made one of the canoe force that attacked the sandalwood-cutter
that had been even smaller than the Arangi. He had never forgotten
that mystery. Two of the three white men he had seen slain and
their heads removed on deck. The third, still fighting, had but the
minute before fled below. Then the cutter, along with all her
wealth of hoop-iron, tobacco, knives and calico, had gone up into
the air and fallen back into the sea in scattered and fragmented
nothingness. It had been dynamite--the MYSTERY. And he, who had
been hurled uninjured through the air by a miracle of fortune, had
divined that white men in themselves were truly dynamite, compounded
of the same mystery as the substance with which they shot the swift-
darting schools of mullet, or blow up, in extremity, themselves and
the ships on which they voyaged the sea from far places. And yet on
this unstable and death-terrific substance of which he was well
aware Van Horn was composed, he trod heavily with his personality,
daring, to the verge of detonation, to impact it with his insolence.
"My word," he began, "what name you make 'm boy belong me stop along
you too much?" Which was a true and correct charge that the boys
which Van Horn had just returned had been away three years and a
half instead of three years.
"You talk that fella talk I get cross too much along you," Van Horn
bristled back, and then added, diplomatically, dipping into a half-
case of tobacco sawed across and proffering a handful of stick
tobacco: "Much better you smoke 'm up and talk 'm good fella talk."
But Nau-hau grandly waved aside the gift for which he hungered.
"Plenty tobacco stop along me," he lied. "What name one fella boy
go way no come back?" he demanded.
Van Horn pulled the long slender account book out of the twist of
his loin-cloth, and, while he skimmed its pages, impressed Nau-hau
with the dynamite of the white man's superior powers which enabled
him to remember correctly inside the scrawled sheets of a book
instead of inside his head.
"Sati," Van Horn read, his finger marking the place, his eyes
alternating watchfully between the writing and the black chief
before him, while the black chief himself speculated and studied the
chance of getting behind him and, with the single knife-thrust he
knew so well, of severing the other's spinal cord at the base of the
neck.
"Sati," Van Horn read. "Last monsoon begin about this time, him
fella Sati get 'm sick belly belong him too much; bime by him fella
Sati finish altogether," he translated into beche-de-mer the written
information: Died of dysentery July 4th, 1901.
"Plenty work him fella Sati, long time," Nau-hau drove to the point.
"What come along money belong him?"
Van Horn did mental arithmetic from the account.
"Altogether him make 'm six tens pounds and two fella pounds gold
money," was his translation of sixty-two pounds of wages. "I pay
advance father belong him one ten pounds and five fella pounds. Him
finish altogether four tens pounds and seven fella pounds."
"What name stop four tens pounds and seven fella pounds?" Nau-hau
demanded, his tongue, but not his brain, encompassing so prodigious
a sum.
Van Horn held up his hand.
"Too much hurry you fella Nau-hau. Him fella Sati buy 'm slop chest
along plantation two tens pounds and one fella pound. Belong Sati
he finish altogether two tens pounds and six fella pounds."
"What name stop two tens pounds and six fella pounds?" Nau-hau
continued inflexibly.
"Stop 'm along me," the captain answered curtly.
"Give 'm me two tens pounds and six fella pounds."
"Give 'm you hell," Van Horn refused, and in the blue of his eyes
the black chief sensed the impression of the dynamite out of which
white men seemed made, and felt his brain quicken to the vision of
the bloody day he first encountered an explosion of dynamite and was
hurled through the air.
"What name that old fella boy stop 'm along canoe?" Van Horn asked,
pointing to an old man in a canoe alongside. "Him father belong
Sati?"
"Him father belong Sati," Nau-hau affirmed.
Van Horn motioned the old man in and on board, beckoned Borckman to
take charge of the deck and of Nau-hau, and went below to get the
money from his strong-box. When he returned, cavalierly ignoring
the chief, he addressed himself to the old man.
"What name belong you?"
"Me fella Nino," was the quavering response. "Him fella Sati belong
along me."
Van Horn glanced for verification to Nau-hau, who nodded affirmation
in the reverse Solomon way; whereupon Van Horn counted twenty-six
gold sovereigns into the hand of Sati's father.
Immediately thereafter Nau-hau extended his hand and received the
sum. Twenty gold pieces the chief retained for himself, returning
to the old man the remaining six. It was no quarrel of Van Horn's.
He had fulfilled his duty and paid properly. The tyranny of a chief
over a subject was none of his business.
Both masters, white and black, were fairly contented with
themselves. Van Horn had paid the money where it was due; Nau-hau,
by virtue of kingship, had robbed Sati's father of Sati's labour
before Van Horn's eyes. But Nau-hau was not above strutting. He
declined a proffered present of tobacco, bought a case of stick
tobacco from Van Horn, paying him five pounds for it, and insisted
on having it sawed open so that he could fill his pipe.
"Plenty good boy stop along Langa-Langa?" Van Horn, unperturbed,
politely queried, in order to make conversation and advertise
nonchalance.
The King o' Babylon grinned, but did not deign to reply.
"Maybe I go ashore and walk about?" Van Horn challenged with
tentative emphasis.
"Maybe too much trouble along you," Nau-hau challenged back. "Maybe
plenty bad fella boy kai-kai along you."
Although Van Horn did not know it, at this challenge he experienced
the hair-pricking sensations in his scalp that Jerry experienced
when he bristled his back.
"Hey, Borckman," he called. "Man the whaleboat."
When the whaleboat was alongside, he descended into it first,
superiorly, then invited Nau-hau to accompany him.
"My word, King o' Babylon," he muttered in the chief's ears as the
boat's crew bent to the oars, "one fella boy make 'm trouble, I
shoot 'm hell outa you first thing. Next thing I shoot 'm hell outa
Langa-Langa. All the time you me fella walk about, you walk about
along me. You no like walk about along me, you finish close up
altogether."
And ashore, a white man alone, attended by an Irish terrier puppy
with a heart flooded with love and by a black king resentfully
respectful of the dynamite of the white man, Van Horn went,
swashbuckling barelegged through a stronghold of three thousand
souls, while his white mate, addicted to schnapps, held the deck of
the tiny craft at anchor off shore, and while his black boat's crew,
oars in hands, held the whaleboat stern-on to the beach to receive
the expected flying leap of the man they served but did not love,
and whose head they would eagerly take any time were it not for fear
of him.
Van Horn had had no intention of going ashore, and that he went
ashore at the black chief's insolent challenge was merely a matter
of business. For an hour he strolled about, his right hand never
far from the butt of the automatic that lay along his groin, his
eyes never too far from the unwilling Nau-hau beside him. For Nau-
hau, in sullen volcanic rage, was ripe to erupt at the slightest
opportunity. And, so strolling, Van Horn was given to see what few
white men have seen, for Langa-Langa and her sister islets,
beautiful beads strung along the lee coast of Malaita, were as
unique as they were unexplored.
Originally these islets had been mere sand-banks and coral reefs
awash in the sea or shallowly covered by the sea. Only a hunted,
wretched creature, enduring incredible hardship, could have eked out
a miserable existence upon them. But such hunted, wretched
creatures, survivors of village massacres, escapes from the wrath of
chiefs and from the long-pig fate of the cooking-pot, did come, and
did endure. They, who knew only the bush, learned the salt water
and developed the salt-water-man breed. They learned the ways of
the fish and the shell-fish, and they invented hooks and lines, nets
and fish-traps, and all the diverse cunning ways by which swimming
meat can be garnered from the shifting, unstable sea.
Such refugees stole women from the mainland, and increased and
multiplied. With herculean labour, under the burning sun, they
conquered the sea. They walled the confines of their coral reefs
and sand-banks with coral-rock stolen from the mainland on dark
nights. Fine masonry, without mortar or cutting chisel, they
builded to withstand the ocean surge. Likewise stolen from the
mainland, as mice steal from human habitations when humans sleep,
they stole canoe-loads, and millions of canoe-loads, of fat, rich
soil.
Generations and centuries passed, and, behold, in place of naked
sandbanks half awash were walled citadels, perforated with
launching-ways for the long canoes, protected against the mainland
by the lagoons that were to them their narrow seas. Coconut palms,
banana trees, and lofty breadfruit trees gave food and sun-shelter.
Their gardens prospered. Their long, lean war-canoes ravaged the
coasts and visited vengeance for their forefathers upon the
descendants of them that had persecuted and desired to eat.
Like the refugees and renegades who slunk away in the salt marshes
of the Adriatic and builded the palaces of powerful Venice on her
deep-sunk piles, so these wretched hunted blacks builded power until
they became masters of the mainland, controlling traffic and trade-
routes, compelling the bushmen for ever after to remain in the bush
and never to dare attempt the salt-water.
And here, amidst the fat success and insolence of the sea-people,
Van Horn swaggered his way, taking his chance, incapable of
believing that he might swiftly die, knowing that he was building
good future business in the matter of recruiting labour for the
plantations of other adventuring white men on far islands who dared
only less greatly than he.
And when, at the end of an hour, Van Horn passed Jerry into the
sternsheets of the whaleboat and followed, he left on the beach a
stunned and wondering royal black, who, more than ever before, was
respectful of the dynamite-compounded white men who brought to him
stick tobacco, calico, knives and hatchets, and inexorably extracted
from such trade a profit.
