CHAPTER XIV
For many days, tied by the stick, Jerry remained Lamai's prisoner.
It was not a happy time, for the house of Lumai was a house of
perpetual bickering and quarrelling. Lamai fought pitched battles
with his brothers and sisters for teasing Jerry, and these battles
invariably culminated in Lenerengo taking a hand and impartially
punishing all her progeny.
After that, as a matter of course and on general principles, she
would have it out with Lumai, whose soft voice always was for quiet
and repose, and who always, at the end of a tongue-lashing, took
himself off to the canoe house for a couple of days. Here,
Lenerengo was helpless. Into the canoe house of the stags no Mary
might venture. Lenerengo had never forgotten the fate of the last
Mary who had broken the taboo. It had occurred many years before,
when she was a girl, and the recollection was ever vivid of the
unfortunate woman hanging up in the sun by one arm for all of a day,
and for all of a second day by the other arm. After that she had
been feasted upon by the stags of the canoe house, and for long
afterward all women had talked softly before their husbands.
Jerry did discover liking for Lamai, but it was not strong nor
passionate. Rather was it out of gratitude, for only Lamai saw to
it that he received food and water. Yet this boy was no Skipper, no
Mister Haggin. Nor was he even a Derby or a Bob. He was that
inferior man-creature, a nigger, and Jerry had been thoroughly
trained all his brief days to the law that the white men were the
superior two-legged gods.
He did not fail to recognize, however, the intelligence and power
that resided in the niggers. He did not reason it out. He accepted
it. They had power of command over other objects, could propel
sticks and stones through the air, could even tie him a prisoner to
a stick that rendered him helpless. Inferior as they might be to
the white-gods, still they were gods of a sort.
It was the first time in his life that Jerry had been tied up, and
he did not like it. Vainly he hurt his teeth, some of which were
loosening under the pressure of the second teeth rising underneath.
The stick was stronger than he. Although he did not forget Skipper,
the poignancy of his loss faded with the passage of time, until
uppermost in his mind was the desire to be free.
But when the day came that he was freed, he failed to take advantage
of it and scuttle away for the beach. It chanced that Lenerengo
released him. She did it deliberately, desiring to be quit of him.
But when she untied Jerry, he stopped to thank her, wagging his tail
and smiling up at her with his hazel-brown eyes. She stamped her
foot at him to be gone, and uttered a harsh and intimidating cry.
This Jerry did not understand, and so unused was he to fear that he
could not be frightened into running away. He ceased wagging his
tail, and, though he continued to look up at her, his eyes no longer
smiled. Her action and noise he identified as unfriendly, and he
became alert and watchful, prepared for whatever hostile act she
might next commit.
Again she cried out and stamped her foot. The only effect on Jerry
was to make him transfer his watchfulness to the foot. This
slowness in getting away, now that she had released him, was too
much for her short temper. She launched the kick, and Jerry,
avoiding it, slashed her ankle.
War broke on the instant, and that she might have killed Jerry in
her rage was highly probable had not Lamai appeared on the scene.
The stick untied from Jerry's neck told the tale of her perfidy and
incensed Lamai, who sprang between and deflected the blow with a
stone poi-pounder that might have brained Jerry.
Lamai was now the one in danger of grievous damage, and his mother
had just knocked him down with a clout alongside the head when poor
Lumai, roused from sleep by the uproar, ventured out to make peace.
Lenerengo, as usual, forgot everything else in the fiercer pleasure
of berating her spouse.
The conclusion of the affair was harmless enough. The children
stopped their crying, Lamai retied Jerry with the stick, Lenerengo
harangued herself breathless, and Lumai departed with hurt feelings
for the canoe house where stags could sleep in peace and Marys
pestered not.
That night, in the circle of his fellow stags, Lumai recited his
sorrows and told the cause of them--the puppy dog which had come on
the Arangi. It chanced that Agno, chief of the devil devil doctors,
or high priest, heard the tale, and recollected that he had sent
Jerry to the canoe house along with the rest of the captives. Half
an hour later he was having it out with Lamai. Beyond doubt, the
boy had broken the taboos, and privily he told him so, until Lamai
trembled and wept and squirmed abjectly at his feet, for the penalty
was death.
It was too good an opportunity to get a hold over the boy for Agno
to misplay it. A dead boy was worth nothing to him, but a living
boy whose life he carried in his hand would serve him well. Since
no one else knew of the broken taboo, he could afford to keep quiet.
So he ordered Lamai forthright down to live in the youths' canoe
house, there to begin his novitiate in the long series of tasks,
tests and ceremonies that would graduate him into the bachelors'
canoe house and half way along toward being a recognized man.
In the morning, obeying the devil devil doctor's commands, Lenerengo
tied Jerry's feet together, not without a struggle in which his head
was banged about and her hands were scratched. Then she carried him
down through the village on the way to deliver him at Agno's house.
On the way, in the open centre of the village where stood the
kingposts, she left him lying on the ground in order to join in the
hilarity of the population.
Not only was old Bashti a stern law-giver, but he was a unique one.
He had selected this day at the one time to administer punishment to
two quarrelling women, to give a lesson to all other women, and to
make all his subjects glad once again that they had him for ruler.
Tiha and Wiwau, the two women, were squat and stout and young, and
had long been a scandal because of their incessant quarrelling.
Bashti had set them a race to run. But such a race. It was side-
splitting. Men, women, and children, beholding, howled with
delight. Even elderly matrons and greybeards with a foot in the
grave screeched and shrilled their joy in the spectacle.
The half-mile course lay the length of the village, through its
heart, from the beach where the Arangi had been burned to the beach
at the other end of the sea-wall. It had to be covered once in each
direction by Tiha and Wiwau, in each case one of them urging speed
on the other and the other desiring speed that was unattainable.
Only the mind of Bashti could have devised the show. First, two
round coral stones, weighing fully forty pounds each, were placed in
Tiha's arms. She was compelled to clasp them tightly against her
sides in order that they might not roll to the ground. Behind her,
Bashti placed Wiwau, who was armed with a bristle of bamboo splints
mounted on a light long shaft of bamboo. The splints were sharp as
needles, being indeed the needles used in tattooing, and on the end
of the pole they were intended to be applied to Tiha's back in the
same way that men apply ox-goads to oxen. No serious damage, but
much pain, could be inflicted, which was just what Bashti had
intended.
Wiwau prodded with the goad, and Tiha stumbled and wabbled in
gymnastic efforts to make speed. Since, when the farther beach had
been reached, the positions would be reversed and Wiwau would carry
the stones back while Tiha prodded, and since Wiwau knew that for
what she gave Tiha would then try to give more, Wiwau exerted
herself to give the utmost while yet she could. The perspiration
ran down both their faces. Each had her partisans in the crowd, who
encouraged and heaped ridicule with every prod.
Ludicrous as it was, behind it lay iron savage law. The two stones
were to be carried the entire course. The woman who prodded must do
so with conviction and dispatch. The woman who was prodded must not
lose her temper and fight her tormentor. As they had been duly
forewarned by Bashti, the penalty for infraction of the rules he had
laid down was staking out on the reef at low tide to be eaten by the
fish-sharks.
As the contestants came opposite where Bashti and Aora his prime
minister stood, they redoubled their efforts, Wiwau goading
enthusiastically, Tiha jumping with every thrust to the imminent
danger of dropping the stones. At their heels trooped the children
of the village and all the village dogs, whooping and yelping with
excitement.
"Long time you fella Tiha no sit 'm along canoe," Aora bawled to the
victim and set Bashti cackling again.
At an unusually urgent prod, Tiha dropped a stone and was duly
goaded while she sank to her knees and with one arm scooped it in
against her side, regained her feet, and waddled on.
Once, in stark mutiny at so much pain, she deliberately stopped and
addressed her tormentor.
"Me cross along you too much," she told Wiwau. "Bime by, close--"
But she never completed the threat. A warmly administered prod
broke through her stoicism and started her tottering along.
The shouting of the rabble ebbed away as the queer race ran on
toward the beach. But in a few minutes it could be heard flooding
back, this time Wiwau panting with the weight of coral stone and
Tiha, a-smart with what she had endured, trying more than to even
the score.
Opposite Bashti, Wiwau lost one of the stones, and, in the effort to
recover it, lost the other, which rolled a dozen feet away from the
first. Tiha became a whirlwind of avenging fury. And all Somo went
wild. Bashti held his lean sides with merriment while tears of
purest joy ran down his prodigiously wrinkled cheeks.
And when all was over, quoth Bashti to his people: "Thus shall all
women fight when they desire over much to fight."
Only he did not say it in this way. Nor did he say it in the Somo
tongue. What he did say was in beche-de-mer, and his words were:
"Any fella Mary he like 'm fight, all fella Mary along Somo fight 'm
this fella way."
