CHAPTER II
Dag Daughtry strolled along the beach, Michael at his heels or
running circles of delight around him at every repetition of that
strange low lip-noise, and paused just outside the circle of
lantern light where dusky forms laboured with landing cargo from
the whale-boats and where the Commissioner's clerk and the
Makambo's super-cargo still wrangled over the bill of lading.
When Michael would have gone forward, the man withstrained him
with the same inarticulate, almost inaudible kiss.
For Daughtry did not care to be seen on such dog-stealing
enterprises and was planning how to get on board the steamer
unobserved. He edged around outside the lantern shine and went on
along the beach to the native village. As he had foreseen, all
the able-bodied men were down at the boat-landing working cargo.
The grass houses seemed lifeless, but at last, from one of them,
came a challenge in the querulous, high-pitched tones of age:
"What name?"
"Me walk about plenty too much," he replied in the beche-de-mer
English of the west South Pacific. "Me belong along steamer.
Suppose 'm you take 'm me along canoe, washee-washee, me give 'm
you fella boy two stick tobacco."
"Suppose 'm you give 'm me ten stick, all right along me," came
the reply.
"Me give 'm five stick," the six-quart steward bargained.
"Suppose 'm you no like 'm five stick then you fella boy go to
hell close up."
There was a silence.
"You like 'm five stick?" Daughtry insisted of the dark interior.
"Me like 'm," the darkness answered, and through the darkness the
body that owned the voice approached with such strange sounds that
the steward lighted a match to see.
A blear-eyed ancient stood before him, balancing on a single
crutch. His eyes were half-filmed over by a growth of morbid
membrane, and what was not yet covered shone red and irritated.
His hair was mangy, standing out in isolated patches of wispy
grey. His skin was scarred and wrinkled and mottled, and in
colour was a purplish blue surfaced with a grey coating that might
have been painted there had it not indubitably grown there and
been part and parcel of him.
A blighted leper--was Daughtry's thought as his quick eyes leapt
from hands to feet in quest of missing toe- and finger-joints.
But in those items the ancient was intact, although one leg ceased
midway between knee and thigh.
"My word! What place stop 'm that fella leg?" quoth Daughtry,
pointing to the space which the member would have occupied had it
not been absent.
"Big fella shark-fish, that fella leg stop 'm along him," the
ancient grinned, exposing a horrible aperture of toothlessness for
a mouth.
"Me old fella boy too much," the one-legged Methuselah quavered.
"Long time too much no smoke 'm tobacco. Suppose 'm you big fella
white marster give 'm me one fella stick, close up me washee-
washee you that fella steamer."
"Suppose 'm me no give?" the steward impatiently temporized.
For reply, the old man half-turned, and, on his crutch, swinging
his stump of leg in the air, began sidling hippity-hop into the
grass hut.
"All right," Daughtry cried hastily. "Me give 'm you smoke 'm
quick fella."
He dipped into a side coat-pocket for the mintage of the Solomons
and stripped off a stick from the handful of pressed sticks. The
old man was transfigured as he reached avidly for the stick and
received it. He uttered little crooning noises, alternating with
sharp cries akin to pain, half-ecstatic, half-petulant, as he drew
a black clay pipe from a hole in his ear-lobe, and into the bowl
of it, with trembling fingers, untwisted and crumbled the cheap
leaf of spoiled Virginia crop.
Pressing down the contents of the full bowl with his thumb, he
suddenly plumped upon the ground, the crutch beside him, the one
limb under him so that he had the seeming of a legless torso.
From a small bag of twisted coconut hanging from his neck upon his
withered and sunken chest, he drew out flint and steel and tinder,
and, even while the impatient steward was proffering him a box of
matches, struck a spark, caught it in the tinder, blew it into
strength and quantity, and lighted his pipe from it.
With the first full puff of the smoke he gave over his moans and
yelps, the agitation began to fade out of him, and Daughtry,
appreciatively waiting, saw the trembling go out of his hands, the
pendulous lip-quivering cease, the saliva stop flowing from the
corners of his mouth, and placidity come into the fiery remnants
of his eyes.
What the old man visioned in the silence that fell, Daughtry did
not try to guess. He was too occupied with his own vision, and
vividly burned before him the sordid barrenness of a poorhouse
ward, where an ancient, very like what he himself would become,
maundered and gibbered and drooled for a crumb of tobacco for his
old clay pipe, and where, of all horrors, no sip of beer ever
obtained, much less six quarts of it.
And Michael, by the dim glows of the pipe surveying the scene of
the two old men, one squatted in the dark, the other standing,
knew naught of the tragedy of age, and was only aware, and
overwhelmingly aware, of the immense likableness of this two-
legged white god, who, with fingers of magic, through ear-roots
and tail-roots and spinal column, had won to the heart of him.
The clay pipe smoked utterly out, the old black, by aid of the
crutch, with amazing celerity raised himself upstanding on his one
leg and hobbled, with his hippity-hop, to the beach. Daughtry was
compelled to lend his strength to the hauling down from the sand
into the water of the tiny canoe. It was a dug-out, as ancient
and dilapidated as its owner, and, in order to get into it without
capsizing, Daughtry wet one leg to the ankle and the other leg to
the knee. The old man contorted himself aboard, rolling his body
across the gunwale so quickly, that, even while it started to
capsize, his weight was across the danger-point and
counterbalancing the canoe to its proper equilibrium.
Michael remained on the beach, waiting invitation, his mind not
quite made up, but so nearly so that all that was required was
that lip-noise. Dag Daughtry made the lip-noise so low that the
old man did not hear, and Michael, springing clear from sand to
canoe, was on board without wetting his feet. Using Daughtry's
shoulder for a stepping-place, he passed over him and down into
the bottom of the canoe. Daughtry kissed with his lips again, and
Michael turned around so as to face him, sat down, and rested his
head on the steward's knees.
"I reckon I can take my affydavy on a stack of Bibles that the dog
just up an' followed me," he grinned in Michael's ear.
"Washee-washee quick fella," he commanded.
The ancient obediently dipped his paddle and started pottering an
erratic course in the general direction of the cluster of lights
that marked the Makambo. But he was too feeble, panting and
wheezing continually from the exertion and pausing to rest off
strokes between strokes. The steward impatiently took the paddle
away from him and bent to the work.
Half-way to the steamer the ancient ceased wheezing and spoke,
nodding his head at Michael.
"That fella dog he belong big white marster along schooner . . .
You give 'm me ten stick tobacco," he added after due pause to let
the information sink in.
"I give 'm you bang alongside head," Daughtry assured him
cheerfully. "White marster along schooner plenty friend along me
too much. Just now he stop 'm along Makambo. Me take 'm dog
along him along Makambo."
There was no further conversation from the ancient, and though he
lived long years after, he never mentioned the midnight passenger
in the canoe who carried Michael away with him. When he saw and
heard the confusion and uproar on the beach later that night when
Captain Kellar turned Tulagi upside-down in his search for
Michael, the old one-legged one remained discreetly silent. Who
was he to seek trouble with the strange ones, the white masters
who came and went and roved and ruled?
In this the ancient was in nowise unlike the rest of his dark-
skinned Melanesian race. The whites were possessed of unguessed
and unthinkable ways and purposes. They constituted another world
and were as a play of superior beings on an exalted stage where
was no reality such as black men might know as reality, where,
like the phantoms of a dream, the white men moved and were as
shadows cast upon the vast and mysterious curtain of the Cosmos.
The gang-plank being on the port side, Dag Daughtry paddled around
to the starboard and brought the canoe to a stop under a certain
open port.
"Kwaque!" he called softly, once, and twice.
At the second call the light of the port was obscured apparently
by a head that piped down in a thin squeak.
"Me stop 'm, marster."
"One fella dog stop 'm along you," the steward whispered up.
"Keep 'm door shut. You wait along me. Stand by! Now!"
With a quick catch and lift, he passed Michael up and into unseen
hands outstretched from the iron wall of the ship, and paddled
ahead to an open cargo port. Dipping into his tobacco pocket, he
thrust a loose handful of sticks into the ancient's hand and
shoved the canoe adrift with no thought of how its helpless
occupant would ever reach shore.
The old man did not touch the paddle, and he was unregardless of
the lofty-sided steamer as the canoe slipped down the length of it
into the darkness astern. He was too occupied in counting the
wealth of tobacco showered upon him. No easy task, his counting.
Five was the limit of his numerals. When he had counted five, he
began over again and counted a second five. Three fives he found
in all, and two sticks over; and thus, at the end of it, he
possessed as definite a knowledge of the number of sticks as would
be possessed by the average white man by means of the single
number SEVENTEEN.
More it was, far more, than his avarice had demanded. Yet he was
unsurprised. Nothing white men did could surprise. Had it been
two sticks instead of seventeen, he would have been equally
unsurprised. Since all acts of white men were surprises, the only
surprise of action they could achieve for a black man would be the
doing of an unsurprising thing.
Paddling, wheezing, resting, oblivious of the shadow-world of the
white men, knowing only the reality of Tulagi Mountain cutting its
crest-line blackly across the dim radiance of the star-sprinkled
sky, the reality of the sea and of the canoe he so feebly urged
across it, and the reality of his fading strength and of the death
into which he would surely end, the ancient black man slowly made
his shoreward way.
