CHAPTER XIX
And had Bashti hastened delivery of the wives by one day, or by even
two days, Nalasu would have entered the feared, purgatory of
matrimony. But Bashti kept his word, and on the third day was too
busy, with a more momentous problem, to deliver Bubu and Nena to the
blind old man who apprehensively waited their coming. For the
morning of the third day all the summits of leeward Malaita smoked
into speech. A warship was on the coast--so the tale ran; a big
warship that was heading in through the reef islands at Langa-Langa.
The tale grew. The warship was not stopping at Langa-Langa. The
warship was not stopping at Binu. It was directing its course
toward Somo.
Nalasu, blind, could not see this smoke speech written in the air.
Because of the isolation of his house, no one came and told him.
His first warning was when shrill voices of women, cries of
children, and wailings of babes in nameless fear came to him from
the main path that led from the village to the upland boundaries of
Somo. He read only fear and panic from the sounds, deduced that the
village was fleeing to its mountain fastnesses, but did not know the
cause of the flight.
He called Jerry to him and instructed him to scout to the great
banyan tree, where Nalasu's path and the main path joined, and to
observe and report. And Jerry sat under the banyan tree and
observed the flight of all Somo. Men, women, and children, the
young and the aged, babes at breast and patriarchs leaning on sticks
and staffs passed before his eyes, betraying the greatest haste and
alarm. The village dogs were as frightened, whimpering and whining
as they ran. And the contagion of terror was strong upon Jerry. He
knew the prod of impulse to join in this rush away from some
unthinkably catastrophic event that impended and that stirred his
intuitive apprehensions of death. But he mastered the impulse with
his sense of loyalty to the blind man who had fed him and caressed
him for a long six months.
Back with Nalasu, sitting between his knees, he made his report. It
was impossible for him to count more than five, although he knew the
fleeing population numbered many times more than five. So he
signified five men, and more; five women, and more five children,
and more; five babies, and more; five dogs, and more--even of pigs
did he announce five and more. Nalasu's ears told him that it was
many, many times more, and he asked for names. Jerry know the names
of Bashti, of Agno, and of Lamai, and Lumai. He did not pronounce
them with the slightest of resemblance to their customary soundings,
but pronounced them in the whiff-whuff of shorthand speech that
Nalasu had taught him.
Nalasu named over many other names that Jerry knew by ear but could
not himself evoke in sound, and he answered yes to most of them by
simultaneously nodding his head and advancing his right paw. To
some names he remained without movement in token that he did not
know them. And to other names, which he recognized, but the owners
of which he had not seen, he answered no by advancing his left paw.
And Nalasu, beyond knowing that something terrible was impending--
something horribly more terrible than any foray of neighbouring
salt-water tribes, which Somo, behind her walls, could easily fend
off, divined that it was the long-expected punitive man-of-war.
Despite his three-score years, he had never experienced a village
shelling. He had heard vague talk of what had happened in the
matter of shell-fire in other villages, but he had no conception of
it save that it must be, bullets on a larger scale than Snider
bullets that could be fired correspondingly longer distances through
the air.
But it was given to him to know shell-fire before he died. Bashti,
who had long waited the cruiser that was to avenge the destruction
of the Arangi and the taking of the heads of the two white men, and
who had long calculated the damage to be wrought, had given the
command to his people to flee to the mountains. First in the
vanguard, borne by a dozen young men, went his mat-wrapped parcels
of heads. The last slow trailers in the rear of the exodus were
just passing, and Nalasu, his bow and his eighty arrows clutched to
him, Jerry at his heels, made his first step to follow, when the air
above him was rent by a prodigiousness of sound.
Nalasu sat down abruptly. It was his first shell, and it was a
thousand times more terrible than he had imagined. It was a rip-
snorting, sky-splitting sound as of a cosmic fabric being torn
asunder between the hands of some powerful god. For all the world
it was like the roughest tearing across of sheets that were thick as
blankets, that were broad as the earth and wide as the sky.
Not only did he sit down just outside his door, but he crouched his
head to his knees and shielded it with the arch of his arms. And
Jerry, who had never heard shell-fire, much less imagined what it
was like, was impressed with the awfulness of it. It was to him a
natural catastrophe such as had happened to the Arangi when she was
flung down reeling on her side by the shouting wind. But, true to
his nature, he did not crouch down under the shriek of that first
shell. On the contrary, he bristled his hair and snarled up with
menacing teeth at whatever the thing was which was so enormously
present and yet invisible to his eyes.
Nalasu crouched closer when the shell burst beyond, and Jerry
snarled and rippled his hair afresh. Each repeated his actions with
each fresh shell, for, while they screamed no more loudly, they
burst in the jungle more closely. And Nalasu, who had lived a long
life most bravely in the midst of perils he had known, was destined
to die a coward out of his fear of the thing unknown, the chemically
propelled missile of the white masters. As the dropping shells
burst nearer and nearer, what final self-control he possessed left
him. Such was his utter panic that he might well have bitten his
veins and howled. With a lunatic scream, he sprang to his feet and
rushed inside the house as if forsooth its grass thatch could
protect his head from such huge projectiles. He collided with the
door-jamb, and, ere Jerry could follow him, whirled around in a part
circle into the centre of the floor just in time to receive the next
shell squarely upon his head.
Jerry had just gained the doorway when the shell exploded. The
house went into flying fragments, and Nalasu flew into fragments
with it. Jerry, in the doorway, caught in the out-draught of the
explosion, was flung a score of feet away. All in the same fraction
of an instant, earthquake, tidal wave, volcanic eruption, the
thunder of the heavens and the fire-flashing of an electric bolt
from the sky smote him and smote consciousness out of him.
He had no conception of how long he lay. Five minutes passed before
his legs made their first spasmodic movements, and, as he stumbled
to his feet and rocked giddily, he had no thought of the passage of
time. He had no thought about time at all. As a matter of course,
his own idea, on which he proceeded to act without being aware of
it, was that, a part of a second before, he had been struck a
terrific blow magnified incalculable times beyond the blow of a
stick at a nigger's hands.
His throat and lungs filled with the pungent stifling smoke of
powder, his nostrils with earth and dust, he frantically wheezed and
sneezed, leaping about, falling drunkenly, leaping into the air
again, staggering on his hind-legs, dabbing with his forepaws at his
nose head-downward between his forelegs, and even rubbing his nose
into the ground. He had no thought for anything save to remove the
biting pain from his nose and mouth, the suffocation from his lungs.
By a miracle he had escaped being struck by the flying splinters of
iron, and, thanks to his strong heart, had escaped being killed by
the shock of the explosion. Not until the end of five minutes of
mad struggling, in which he behaved for all the world like a
beheaded chicken, did he find life tolerable again. The maximum of
stifling and of agony passed, and, although he was still weak and
giddy, he tottered in the direction of the house and of Nalasu. And
there was no house and no Nalasu--only a debris intermingled of
both.
While the shells continued to shriek and explode, now near, now far,
Jerry investigated the happening. As surely as the house was gone,
just as surely was Nalasu gone. Upon both had descended the
ultimate nothingness. All the immediate world seemed doomed to
nothingness. Life promised only somewhere else, in the high hills
and remote bush whither the tribe had already fled. Loyal he was to
his salt, to the master whom he had obeyed so long, nigger that he
was, who so long had fed him, and for whom he had entertained a true
affection. But this master no longer was.
Retreat Jerry did, but he was not hasty in retreat. For a time he
snarled at every shell-scream in the air and every shell-burst in
the bush. But after a time, while the awareness of them continued
uncomfortably with him, the hair on his neck remained laid down and
he neither uttered a snarl nor bared his teeth.
And when he parted from what had been and which had ceased to be,
not like the bush dogs did he whimper and run. Instead, he trotted
along the path at a regular and dignified pace. When he emerged
upon the main path, he found it deserted. The last refugee had
passed. The path, always travelled from daylight to dark, and which
he had so recently seen glutted with humans, now in its emptiness
affected him profoundly with the impression of the endingness of all
things in a perishing world. So it was that he did not sit down
under the banyan tree, but trotted along at the far rear of the
tribe.
With his nose he read the narrative of the flight. Only once did he
encounter what advertised its terror. It was an entire group
annihilated by a shell. There were: an old man of fifty, with a
crutch because of the leg which had been slashed off by a shark when
he was a young boy; a dead Mary with a dead babe at her breast and a
dead child of three clutching her hand; and two dead pigs, huge and
fat, which the woman had been herding to safety.
And Jerry's nose told him of how the stream of the fugitives had
split and flooded past on each side and flowed together again
beyond. Incidents of the flight he did encounter: a part-chewed
joint of sugar-cane some child had dropped; a clay pipe, the stem
short from successive breakages; a single feather from some young
man's hair, and a calabash, full of cooked yams and sweet potatoes,
deposited carefully beside the trail by some Mary for whom its
weight had proved too great.
The shell-fire ceased as Jerry trotted along; next he heard the
rifle-fire from the landing-party, as it shot down the domestic pigs
on Somo's streets. He did not hear, however, the chopping down of
the coconut trees, any more than did he ever return to behold what
damage the axes had wrought.
For right here occurred with Jerry a wonderful thing that thinkers
of the world have not explained. He manifested in his dog's brain
the free agency of life, by which all the generations of
metaphysicians have postulated God, and by which all the
deterministic philosophers have been led by the nose despite their
clear denouncement of it as sheer illusion. What Jerry did he did.
He did not know how or why he did it any more than does the
philosopher know how or why he decides on mush and cream for
breakfast instead of two soft-boiled eggs.
What Jerry did was to yield in action to a brain impulse to do, not
what seemed the easier and more usual thing, but to do what seemed
the harder and more unusual thing. Since it is easier to endure the
known than to fly to the unknown; since both misery and fear love
company; the apparent easiest thing for Jerry to have done would
have been to follow the tribe of Somo into its fastnesses. Yet what
Jerry did was to diverge from the line of retreat and to start
northward, across the bounds of Somo, and continue northward into a
strange land of the unknown.
Had Nalasu not been struck down by the ultimate nothingness, Jerry
would have remained. This is true, and this, perhaps, to the one
who considers his action, might have been the way he reasoned. But
he did not reason it, did not reason at all; he acted on impulse.
He could count five objects, and pronounce them by name and number,
but he was incapable of reasoning that he would remain in Somo if
Nalasu lived, depart from Somo if Nalasu died. He merely departed
from Somo because Nalasu was dead, and the terrible shell-fire
passed quickly into the past of his consciousness, while the present
became vivid after the way of the present. Almost on his toes did
he tread the wild bushmen's trails, tense with apprehension of the
lurking death he know infested such paths, his ears cocked alertly
for jungle sounds, his eyes following his ears to discern what made
the sounds.
No more doughty nor daring was Columbus, venturing all that he was
to the unknown, than was Jerry in venturing this jungle-darkness of
black Malaita. And this wonderful thing, this seeming great deed of
free will, he performed in much the same way that the itching of
feet and tickle of fancy have led the feet of men over all the
earth.
Though Jerry never laid eyes on Somo again, Bashti returned with his
tribe the same day, grinning and chuckling as he appraised the
damage. Only a few grass houses had been damaged by the shells.
Only a few coconuts had been chopped down. And as for the slain
pigs, lest they spoil, he made of their carcasses a great feast.
One shell had knocked a hole through his sea-wall. He enlarged it
for a launching-ways, faced the sides of it with dry-fitted coral
rock, and gave orders for the building of an additional canoe-house.
The only vexation he suffered was the death of Nalasu and the
disappearance of Jerry--his two experiments in primitive eugenics.
