STORY: THE PRINCESS
A fire burned cheerfully in the jungle camp, and beside the fire
lolled a cheerful-seeming though horrible-appearing man. This was
a hobo jungle, pitched in a thin strip of woods that lay between a
railroad embankment and the bank of a river. But no hobo was the
man. So deep-sunk was he in the social abyss that a proper hobo
would not sit by the same fire with him. A gay-cat, who is an
ignorant new-comer on the "Road," might sit with such as he, but
only long enough to learn better. Even low down bindle-stiffs and
stew-bums, after a once-over, would have passed this man by. A
genuine hobo, a couple of punks, or a bunch of tender-yeared road-
kids might have gone through his rags for any stray pennies or
nickels and kicked him out into the darkness. Even an alki-stiff
would have reckoned himself immeasurably superior.
For this man was that hybrid of tramp-land, an alki-stiff that has
degenerated into a stew-bum, with so little self-respect that he
will never "boil-up," and with so little pride that he will eat out
of a garbage can. He was truly horrible-appearing. He might have
been sixty years of age; he might have been ninety. His garments
might have been discarded by a rag-picker. Beside him, an unrolled
bundle showed itself as consisting of a ragged overcoat and
containing an empty and smoke-blackened tomato can, an empty and
battered condensed milk can, some dog-meat partly wrapped in brown
paper and evidently begged from some butcher-shop, a carrot that
had been run over in the street by a wagon-wheel, three greenish-
cankered and decayed potatoes, and a sugar-bun with a mouthful
bitten from it and rescued from the gutter, as was made patent by
the gutter-filth that still encrusted it.
A prodigious growth of whiskers, greyish-dirty and untrimmed for
years, sprouted from his face. This hirsute growth should have
been white, but the season was summer and it had not been exposed
to a rain-shower for some time. What was visible of the face
looked as if at some period it had stopped a hand-grenade. The
nose was so variously malformed in its healed brokenness that there
was no bridge, while one nostril, the size of a pea, opened
downward, and the other, the size of a robin's egg, tilted upward
to the sky. One eye, of normal size, dim-brown and misty, bulged
to the verge of popping out, and as if from senility wept copiously
and continuously. The other eye, scarcely larger than a squirrel's
and as uncannily bright, twisted up obliquely into the hairy scar
of a bone-crushed eyebrow. And he had but one arm.
Yet was he cheerful. On his face, in mild degree, was depicted
sensuous pleasure as he lethargically scratched his ribs with his
one hand. He pawed over his food-scraps, debated, then drew a
twelve-ounce druggist bottle from his inside coat-pocket. The
bottle was full of a colourless liquid, the contemplation of which
made his little eye burn brighter and quickened his movements.
Picking up the tomato can, he arose, went down the short path to
the river, and returned with the can filled with not-nice river
water. In the condensed milk can he mixed one part of water with
two parts of fluid from the bottle. This colourless fluid was
druggist's alcohol, and as such is known in tramp-land as "alki."
Slow footsteps, coming down the side of the railroad embankment,
alarmed him ere he could drink. Placing the can carefully upon the
ground between his legs, he covered it with his hat and waited
anxiously whatever impended.
Out of the darkness emerged a man as filthy ragged as he. The new-
comer, who might have been fifty, and might have been sixty, was
grotesquely fat. He bulged everywhere. He was composed of bulges.
His bulbous nose was the size and shape of a turnip. His eyelids
bulged and his blue eyes bulged in competition with them. In many
places the seams of his garments had parted across the bulges of
body. His calves grew into his feet, for the broken elastic sides
of his Congress gaiters were swelled full with the fat of him. One
arm only he sported, from the shoulder of which was suspended a
small and tattered bundle with the mud caked dry on the outer
covering from the last place he had pitched his doss. He advanced
with tentative caution, made sure of the harmlessness of the man
beside the fire, and joined him.
"Hello, grandpa," the new-comer greeted, then paused to stare at
the other's flaring, sky-open nostril. "Say, Whiskers, how'd ye
keep the night dew out of that nose o' yourn?"
Whiskers growled an incoherence deep in his throat and spat into
the fire in token that he was not pleased by the question.
"For the love of Mike," the fat man chuckled, "if you got caught
out in a rainstorm without an umbrella you'd sure drown, wouldn't
you?"
"Can it, Fatty, can it," Whiskers muttered wearily. "They ain't
nothin' new in that line of chatter. Even the bulls hand it out to
me."
"But you can still drink, I hope"; Fatty at the same time mollified
and invited, with his one hand deftly pulling the slip-knots that
fastened his bundle.
From within the bundle he brought to light a twelve-ounce bottle of
alki. Footsteps coming down the embankment alarmed him, and he hid
the bottle under his hat on the ground between his legs.
But the next comer proved to be not merely one of their own ilk,
but likewise to have only one arm. So forbidding of aspect was he
that greetings consisted of no more than grunts. Huge-boned, tall,
gaunt to cadaverousness, his face a dirty death's head, he was as
repellent a nightmare of old age as ever Dore imagined. His
toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a
great curved nose that almost met the chin and that was like a
buzzard's beak. His one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon. The
beady grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were bitter as death,
as bleak as absolute zero and as merciless. His presence was a
chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinctively drew together for
protection against the unguessed threat of him. Watching his
chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a chunk of rock several pounds
in weigh close to his hand if need for action should arise. Fatty
duplicated the performance.
Then both sat licking their lips, guiltily embarrassed, while the
unblinking eyes of the terrible one bored into them, now into one,
now into another, and then down at the rock-chunks of their
preparedness.
"Huh!" sneered the terrible one, with such dreadfulness of menace
as to cause Whiskers and Fatty involuntarily to close their hands
down on their cave-man's weapons.
"Huh!" the other repeated, reaching his one talon into his side
coat pocket with swift definiteness. "A hell of a chance you two
cheap bums 'd have with me."
The talon emerged, clutching ready for action a six-pound iron
quoit.
"We ain't lookin' for trouble, Slim," Fatty quavered.
"Who in hell are you to call me 'Slim'?" came the snarling answer.
"Me? I'm just Fatty, an' seein' 's I never seen you before--"
"An' I suppose that's Whiskers, there, with the gay an' festive
lamp tan-going into his eyebrow an' the God-forgive-us nose joy-
riding all over his mug?"
"It'll do, it'll do," Whiskers muttered uncomfortably. "One
monica's as good as another, I find, at my time of life. And
everybody hands it out to me anyway. And I need an umbrella when
it rains to keep from getting drowned, an' all the rest of it."
"I ain't used to company--don't like it," Slim growled. "So if you
guys want to stick around, mind your step, that's all, mind your
step."
He fished from his pocket a cigar stump, self-evidently shot from
the gutter, and prepared to put it in his mouth to chew. Then he
changed his mind, glared at his companions savagely, and unrolled
his bundle. Appeared in his hand a druggist's bottle of alki.
"Well," he snarled, "I suppose I gotta give you cheap skates a
drink when I ain't got more'n enough for a good petrification for
myself."
Almost a softening flicker of light was imminent in his withered
face as he beheld the others proudly lift their hats and exhibit
their own supplies.
"Here's some water for the mixin's," Whiskers said, proffering his
tomato-can of river slush. "Stockyards just above," he added
apologetically. "But they say--"
"Huh!" Slim snapped short, mixing the drink. "I've drunk worse'n
stockyards in my time."
Yet when all was ready, cans of alki in their solitary hands, the
three things that had once been men hesitated, as if of old habit,
and next betrayed shame as if at self-exposure.
Whiskers was the first to brazen it.
"I've sat in at many a finer drinking," he bragged.
"With the pewter," Slim sneered.
"With the silver," Whiskers corrected.
Slim turned a scorching eye-interrogation on Fatty.
Fatty nodded.
"Beneath the salt," said Slim.
"Above it," came Fatty's correction. "I was born above it, and
I've never travelled second class. First or steerage, but no
intermediate in mine."
"Yourself?" Whiskers queried of Slim.
"In broken glass to the Queen, God bless her," Slim answered,
solemnly, without snarl or sneer.
"In the pantry?" Fatty insinuated.
Simultaneously Slim reached for his quoit, and Whiskers and Fatty
for their rocks.
"Now don't let's get feverish," Fatty said, dropping his own
weapon. "We aren't scum. We're gentlemen. Let's drink like
gentlemen."
"Let it be a real drinking," Whiskers approved.
"Let's get petrified," Slim agreed. "Many a distillery's flowed
under the bridge since we were gentlemen; but let's forget the long
road we've travelled since, and hit our doss in the good old
fashion in which every gentleman went to bed when we were young."
"My father done it--did it," Fatty concurred and corrected, as old
recollections exploded long-sealed brain-cells of connotation and
correct usage.
The other two nodded a descent from similar fathers, and elevated
their tin cans of alcohol.
By the time each had finished his own bottle and from his rags
fished forth a second one, their brains were well-mellowed and a-
glow, although they had not got around to telling their real names.
But their English had improved. They spoke it correctly, while the
argo of tramp-land ceased from their lips.
"It's my constitution," Whiskers was explaining. "Very few men
could go through what I have and live to tell the tale. And I
never took any care of myself. If what the moralists and the
physiologists say were true, I'd have been dead long ago. And it's
the same with you two. Look at us, at our advanced years,
carousing as the young ones don't dare, sleeping out in the open on
the ground, never sheltered from frost nor rain nor storm, never
afraid of pneumonia or rheumatism that would put half the young
ones on their backs in hospital."
He broke off to mix another drink, and Fatty took up the tale.
"And we've had our fun," he boasted, "and speaking of sweethearts
and all," he cribbed from Kipling, "'We've rogued and we've ranged-
-'"
"'In our time,'" Slim completed the crib for him.
"I should say so, I should say so," Fatty confirmed. "And been
loved by princesses--at least I have."
"Go on and tell us about it," Whiskers urged. "The night's young,
and why shouldn't we remember back to the roofs of kings?"
Nothing loth, Fatty cleared his throat for the recital and cast
about in his mind for the best way to begin.
"It must be known that I came of good family. Percival Delaney,
let us say, yes, let us say Percival Delaney, was not unknown at
Oxford once upon a time--not for scholarship, I am frank to admit;
but the gay young dogs of that day, if any be yet alive, would
remember him--"
"My people came over with the Conqueror," Whiskers interrupted,
extending his hand to Fatty's in acknowledgment of the
introduction.
"What name?" Fatty queried. "I did not seem quite to catch it."
"Delarouse, Chauncey Delarouse. The name will serve as well as
any."
Both completed the handshake and glanced to Slim.
"Oh, well, while we're about it . . . " Fatty urged.
"Bruce Cadogan Cavendish," Slim growled morosely. "Go on,
Percival, with your princesses and the roofs of kings."
"Oh, I was a rare young devil," Percival obliged, "after I played
ducks and drakes at home and sported out over the world. And I was
some figure of a man before I lost my shape--polo, steeple-chasing,
boxing. I won medals at buckjumping in Australia, and I held more
than several swimming records from the quarter of a mile up. Women
turned their heads to look when I went by. The women! God bless
them!"
And Fatty, alias Percival Delaney, a grotesque of manhood, put his
bulgy hand to his puffed lips and kissed audibly into the starry
vault of the sky.
"And the Princess!" he resumed, with another kiss to the stars.
"She was as fine a figure of a woman as I was a man, as high-
spirited and courageous, as reckless and dare-devilish. Lord,
Lord, in the water she was a mermaid, a sea-goddess. And when it
came to blood, beside her I was parvenu. Her royal line traced
back into the mists of antiquity.
"She was not a daughter of a fair-skinned folk. Tawny golden was
she, with golden-brown eyes, and her hair that fell to her knees
was blue-black and straight, with just the curly tendrilly tendency
that gives to woman's hair its charm. Oh, there were no kinks in
it, any more than were there kinks in the hair of her entire
genealogy. For she was Polynesian, glowing, golden, lovely and
lovable, royal Polynesian."
Again he paused to kiss his hand to the memory of her, and Slim,
alias Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, took advantage to interject:
"Huh! Maybe you didn't shine in scholarship, but at least you
gleaned a vocabulary out of Oxford."
"And in the South Seas garnered a better vocabulary from the
lexicon of Love," Percival was quick on the uptake.
"It was the island of Talofa," he went on, "meaning love, the Isle
of Love, and it was her island. Her father, the king, an old man,
sat on his mats with paralysed knees and drank squareface gin all
day and most of the night, out of grief, sheer grief. She, my
princess, was the only issue, her brother having been lost in their
double canoe in a hurricane while coming up from a voyage to Samoa.
And among the Polynesians the royal women have equal right with the
men to rule. In fact, they trace their genealogies always by the
female line."
To this both Chauncey Delarouse and Bruce Cadogan Cavendish nodded
prompt affirmation.
"Ah," said Percival, "I perceive you both know the South Seas,
wherefore, without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am
assured that you will appreciate the charm of my princess, the
Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess of the Isle of Love."
He kissed his hand to her, sipped from his condensed milk can a
man-size drink of druggist's alcohol, and to her again kissed her
hand.
"But she was coy, and ever she fluttered near to me but never near
enough. When my arm went out to her to girdle her, presto, she was
not there. I knew, as never before, nor since, the thousand dear
and delightful anguishes of love frustrated but ever resilient and
beckoned on by the very goddess of love."
"Some vocabulary," Bruce Cadogan Cavendish muttered in aside to
Chauncey Delarouse. But Percival Delaney was not to be deterred.
He kissed his pudgy hand aloft into the night and held warmly on.
"No fond agonies of rapture deferred that were not lavished upon me
by my dear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise
flitting just beyond my reach. Every sweet lover's inferno
unguessed of by Dante she led me through. Ah! Those swooning
tropic nights, under our palm trees, the distant surf a langourous
murmur as from some vast sea shell of mystery, when she, my
Princess, all but melted to my yearning, and with her laughter,
that was as silver strings by buds and blossoms smitten, all but
made lunacy of my lover's ardency.
"It was by my wrestling with the champions of Talofa that I first
interested her. It was by my prowess at swimming that I awoke her.
And it was by a certain swimming deed that I won from her more than
coquettish smiles and shy timidities of feigned retreat.
"We were squidding that day, out on the reef--you know how,
undoubtedly, diving down the face of the wall of the reef, five
fathoms, ten fathoms, any depth within reason, and shoving our
squid-sticks into the likely holes and crannies of the coral where
squid might be lairing. With the squid-stick, bluntly sharp at
both ends, perhaps a foot long, and held crosswise in the hand, the
trick was to gouge any lazying squid until he closed his tentacles
around fist, stick and arm.--Then you had him, and came to the
surface with him, and hit him in the head which is in the centre of
him, and peeled him off into the waiting canoe. . . . And to think
I used to do that!"
Percival Delaney paused a moment, a glimmer of awe on his rotund
face, as he contemplated the mighty picture of his youth.
"Why, I've pulled out a squid with tentacles eight feet long, and
done it under fifty feet of water. I could stay down four minutes.
I've gone down, with a coral-rock to sink me, in a hundred and ten
feet to clear a fouled anchor. And I could back-dive with a once-
over and go in feet-first from eighty feet above the surface--"
"Quit it, delete it, cease it," Chauncey Delarouse admonished
testily. "Tell of the Princess. That's what makes old blood leap
again. Almost can I see her. Was she wonderful?"
Percival Delaney kissed unutterable affirmation.
"I have said she was a mermaid. She was. I know she swam thirty-
six hours before being rescued, after her schooner was capsized in
a double-squall. I have seen her do ninety feet and bring up pearl
shell in each hand. She was wonderful. As a woman she was
ravishing, sublime. I have said she was a sea-goddess. She was.
Oh, for a Phidias or a Praxiteles to have made the wonder of her
body immortal!
"And that day, out for squid on the reef, I was almost sick for
her. Mad--I know I was mad for her. We would step over the side
from the big canoe, and swim down, side by side, into the delicious
depths of cool and colour, and she would look at me, as we swam,
and with her eyes tantalize me to further madness. And at last,
down, far down, I lost myself and reached for her. She eluded me
like the mermaid she was, and I saw the laughter on her face as she
fled. She fled deeper, and I knew I had her for I was between her
and the surface; but in the muck coral sand of the bottom she made
a churning with her squid stick. It was the old trick to escape a
shark. And she worked it on me, rolling the water so that I could
not see her. And when I came up, she was there ahead of me,
clinging to the side of the canoe and laughing.
"Almost I would not be denied. But not for nothing was she a
princess. She rested her hand on my arm and compelled me to
listen. We should play a game, she said, enter into a competition
for which should get the more squid, the biggest squid, and the
smallest squid. Since the wagers were kisses, you can well imagine
I went down on the first next dive with soul aflame.
"I got no squid. Never again in all my life have I dived for
squid. Perhaps we were five fathoms down and exploring the face of
the reefwall for lurking places of our prey, when it happened. I
had found a likely lair and just proved it empty, when I felt or
sensed the nearness of something inimical. I turned. There it
was, alongside of me, and no mere fish-shark. Fully a dozen feet
in length, with the unmistakable phosphorescent cat's eye gleaming
like a drowning star, I knew it for what it was, a tiger shark.
"Not ten feet to the right, probing a coral fissure with her squid
stick, was the Princess, and the tiger shark was heading directly
for her. My totality of thought was precipitated to consciousness
in a single all-embracing flash. The man-eater must be deflected
from her, and what was I, except a mad lover who would gladly fight
and die, or more gladly fight and live, for his beloved? Remember,
she was the woman wonderful, and I was aflame for her.
"Knowing fully the peril of my act, I thrust the blunt-sharp end of
my squid-stick into the side of the shark, much as one would
attract a passing acquaintance with a thumb-nudge in the ribs. And
the man-eater turned on me. You know the South Seas, and you know
that the tiger shark, like the bald-face grizzly of Alaska, never
gives trail. The combat, fathoms deep under the sea, was on--if by
combat may be named such a one-sided struggle.
"The Princess unaware, caught her squid and rose to the surface.
The man-eater rushed me. I fended him off with both hands on his
nose above his thousand-toothed open mouth, so that he backed me
against the sharp coral. The scars are there to this day.
Whenever I tried to rise, he rushed me, and I could not remain down
there indefinitely without air. Whenever he rushed me, I fended
him off with my hands on his nose. And I would have escaped
unharmed, except for the slip of my right hand. Into his mouth it
went to the elbow. His jaws closed, just below the elbow. You
know how a shark's teeth are. Once in they cannot be released.
They must go through to complete the bite, but they cannot go
through heavy bone. So, from just below the elbow he stripped the
bone clean to the articulation of the wrist-joint, where his teeth
met and my good right hand became his for an appetizer.
"But while he was doing this, I drove the thumb of my left hand, to
the hilt into his eye-orifice and popped out his eye. This did not
stop him. The meat had maddened him. He pursued the gushing stump
of my wrist. Half a dozen times I fended with my intact arm. Then
he got the poor mangled arm again, closed down, and stripped the
meat off the bone from the shoulder down to the elbow-joint, where
his teeth met and he was free of his second mouthful of me. But,
at the same time, with my good arm, I thumbed out his remaining
eye."
Percival Delaney shrugged his shoulders, ere he resumed.
"From above, those in the canoe had beheld the entire happening and
were loud in praise of my deed. To this day they still sing the
song of me, and tell the tale of me. And the Princess." His pause
was brief but significant. "The Princess married me. . . . Oh,
well-a-day and lack-a-day, the whirligig of time and fortune, the
topsyturviness of luck, the wooden shoe going up and the polished
heel descending a French gunboat, a conquered island kingdom of
Oceania, to-day ruled over by a peasant-born, unlettered, colonial
gendarme, and . . . "
He completed the sentence and the tale by burying his face in the
down-tilted mouth of the condensed milk can and by gurgling the
corrosive drink down his throat in thirsty gulps.
After an appropriate pause, Chauncey Delarouse, otherwise Whiskers,
took up the tale.
"Far be it from me to boast of no matter what place of birth I have
descended from to sit here by this fire with such as . . . as
chance along. I may say, however, that I, too, was once a
considerable figure of a man. I may add that it was horses, plus
parents too indulgent, that exiled me out over the world. I may
still wonder to query: 'Are Dover's cliffs still white?'"
"Huh!" Bruce Cadogan Cavendish sneered. "Next you'll be asking:
'How fares the old Lord Warden?'"
"And I took every liberty, and vainly, with a constitution that was
iron," Whiskers hurried on. "Here I am with my three score and ten
behind me, and back on that long road have I buried many a
youngster that was as rare and devilish as I, but who could not
stand the pace. I knew the worst too young. And now I know the
worst too old. But there was a time, alas all too short, when I
knew, the best.
"I, too, kiss my hand to the Princess of my heart. She was truly a
princess, Polynesian, a thousand miles and more away to the
eastward and the south from Delaney's Isle of Love. The natives of
all around that part of the South Seas called it the Jolly Island.
Their own name, the name of the people who dwelt thereon,
translates delicately and justly into 'The Island of Tranquil
Laughter.' On the chart you will find the erroneous name given to
it by the old navigators to be Manatomana. The seafaring gentry
the round ocean around called it the Adamless Eden. And the
missionaries for a time called it God's Witness--so great had been
their success at converting the inhabitants. As for me, it was,
and ever shall be, Paradise.
"It was MY Paradise, for it was there my Princess lived. John
Asibeli Tungi was king. He was full-blooded native, descended out
of the oldest and highest chief-stock that traced back to Manua
which was the primeval sea home of the race. Also was he known as
John the Apostate. He lived a long life and apostasized
frequently. First converted by the Catholics, he threw down the
idols, broke the tabus, cleaned out the native priests, executed a
few of the recalcitrant ones, and sent all his subjects to church.
"Next he fell for the traders, who developed in him a champagne
thirst, and he shipped off the Catholic priests to New Zealand.
The great majority of his subjects always followed his lead, and,
having no religion at all, ensued the time of the Great
Licentiousness, when by all South Seas missionaries his island, in
sermons, was spoken of as Babylon.
"But the traders ruined his digestion with too much champagne, and
after several years he fell for the Gospel according to the
Methodists, sent his people to church, and cleaned up the beach and
the trading crowd so spick and span that he would not permit them
to smoke a pipe out of doors on Sunday, and, fined one of the chief
traders one hundred gold sovereigns for washing his schooner's
decks on the Sabbath morn.
"That was the time of the Blue Laws, but perhaps it was too
rigorous for King John. Off he packed the Methodists, one fine
day, exiled several hundred of his people to Samoa for sticking to
Methodism, and, of all things, invented a religion of his own, with
himself the figure-head of worship. In this he was aided and
abetted by a renegade Fijian. This lasted five years. Maybe he
grew tired of being God, or maybe it was because the Fijian
decamped with the six thousand pounds in the royal treasury; but at
any rate the Second Reformed Wesleyans got him, and his entire
kingdom went Wesleyan. The pioneer Wesleyan missionary he actually
made prime minister, and what he did to the trading crowd was a
caution. Why, in the end, King John's kingdom was blacklisted and
boycotted by the traders till the revenues diminished to zero, the
people went bankrupt, and King John couldn't borrow a shilling from
his most powerful chief.
"By this time he was getting old, and philosophic, and tolerant,
and spiritually atavistic. He fired out the Second Reformed
Wesleyans, called back the exiles from Samoa, invited in the
traders, held a general love-feast, took the lid off, proclaimed
religious liberty and high tariff, and as for himself went back to
the worship of his ancestors, dug up the idols, reinstated a few
octogenarian priests, and observed the tabus. All of which was
lovely for the traders, and prosperity reigned. Of course, most of
his subjects followed him back into heathen worship. Yet quite a
sprinkling of Catholics, Methodists and Wesleyans remained true to
their beliefs and managed to maintain a few squalid, one-horse
churches. But King John didn't mind, any more than did he the high
times of the traders along the beach. Everything went, so long as
the taxes were paid. Even when his wife, Queen Mamare, elected to
become a Baptist, and invited in a little, weazened, sweet-
spirited, club-footed Baptist missionary, King John did not object.
All he insisted on was that these wandering religions should be
self-supporting and not feed a pennyworth's out of the royal
coffers.
"And now the threads of my recital draw together in the paragon of
female exquisiteness--my Princess."
Whiskers paused, placed carefully on the ground his half-full
condensed milk can with which he had been absently toying, and
kissed the fingers of his one hand audibly aloft.
"She was the daughter of Queen Mamare. She was the woman
wonderful. Unlike the Diana type of Polynesian, she was almost
ethereal. She WAS ethereal, sublimated by purity, as shy and
modest as a violet, as fragile-slender as a lily, and her eyes,
luminous and shrinking tender, were as asphodels on the sward of
heaven. She was all flower, and fire, and dew. Hers was the
sweetness of the mountain rose, the gentleness of the dove. And
she was all of good as well as all of beauty, devout in her belief
in her mother's worship, which was the worship introduced by
Ebenezer Naismith, the Baptist missionary. But make no mistake.
She was no mere sweet spirit ripe for the bosom of Abraham. All of
exquisite deliciousness of woman was she. She was woman, all
woman, to the last sensitive quivering atom of her -
"And I? I was a wastrel of the beach. The wildest was not so wild
as I, the keenest not so keen, of all that wild, keen trading
crowd. It was esteemed I played the stiffest hand of poker. I was
the only living man, white, brown, or black, who dared run the
Kuni-kuni Passage in the dark. And on a black night I have done it
under reefs in a gale of wind. Well, anyway, I had a bad
reputation on a beach where there were no good reputations. I was
reckless, dangerous, stopped at nothing in fight or frolic; and the
trading captains used to bring boiler-sheeted prodigies from the
vilest holes of the South Pacific to try and drink me under the
table. I remember one, a calcined Scotchman from the New Hebrides.
It was a great drinking. He died of it, and we laded him aboard
ship, pickled in a cask of trade rum, and sent him back to his own
place. A sample, a fair sample, of the antic tricks we cut up on
the beach of Manatomana.
"And of all unthinkable things, what did I up and do, one day, but
look upon the Princess to find her good and to fall in love with
her. It was the real thing. I was as mad as a March hare, and
after that I got only madder. I reformed. Think of that! Think
of what a slip of a woman can do to a busy, roving man!--By the
Lord Harry, it's true. I reformed. I went to church. Hear me! I
became converted. I cleared my soul before God and kept my hands--
I had two then--off the ribald crew of the beach when it laughed at
this, my latest antic, and wanted to know what was my game.
"I tell you I reformed, and gave myself in passion and sincerity to
a religious experience that has made me tolerant of all religion
ever since. I discharged my best captain for immorality. So did I
my cook, and a better never boiled water in Manatomana. For the
same reason I discharged my chief clerk. And for the first time in
the history of trading my schooners to the westward carried Bibles
in their stock. I built a little anchorite bungalow up town on a
mango-lined street squarely alongside the little house occupied by
Ebenezer Naismith. And I made him my pal and comrade, and found
him a veritable honey pot of sweetnesses and goodnesses. And he
was a man, through and through a man. And he died long after like
a man, which I would like to tell you about, were the tale of it
not so deservedly long.
"It was the Princess, more than the missionary, who was responsible
for my expressing my faith in works, and especially in that
crowning work, the New Church, Our Church, the Queen-mother's
church.
"'Our poor church,' she said to me, one night after prayer-meeting.
I had been converted only a fortnight. 'It is so small its
congregation can never grow. And the roof leaks. And King John,
my hard-hearted father, will not contribute a penny. Yet he has a
big balance in the treasury. And Manatomana is not poor. Much
money is made and squandered, I know. I hear the gossip of the
wild ways of the beach. Less than a month ago you lost more in one
night, gambling at cards, than the cost of the upkeep of our poor
church for a year.'
"And I told her it was true, but that it was before I had seen the
light. (I'd had an infernal run of bad luck.) I told her I had
not tasted liquor since, nor turned a card. I told her that the
roof would be repaired at once, by Christian carpenters selected by
her from the congregation. But she was filled with the thought of
a great revival that Ebenezer Naismith could preach--she was a dear
saint--and she spoke of a great church, saying:
"'You are rich. You have many schooners, and traders in far
islands, and I have heard of a great contract you have signed to
recruit labour for the German plantations of Upolu. They say, next
to Sweitzer, you are the richest trader here. I should love to see
some use of all this money placed to the glory of God. It would be
a noble thing to do, and I should be proud to know the man who
would do it.'
"I told her that Ebenezer Naismith would preach the revival, and
that I would build a church great enough in which to house it.
"'As big as the Catholic church?' she asked.
"This was the ruined cathedral, built at the time when the entire
population was converted, and it was a large order; but I was afire
with love, and I told her that the church I would build would be
even bigger.
"'But it will take money,' I explained. 'And it takes time to make
money.'
"'You have much,' she said. 'Some say you have more money than my
father, the King.
"'I have more credit,' I explained. 'But you do not understand
money. It takes money to have credit. So, with the money I have,
and the credit I have, I will work to make more money and credit,
and the church shall be built.'
"Work! I was a surprise to myself. It is an amazement, the amount
of time a man finds on his hands after he's given up carousing, and
gambling, and all the time-eating diversions of the beach. And I
didn't waste a second of all my new-found time. Instead I worked
it overtime. I did the work of half a dozen men. I became a
driver. My captains made faster runs than ever and earned bigger
bonuses, as did my supercargoes, who saw to it that my schooners
did not loaf and dawdle along the way. And I saw to it that my
supercargoes did see to it.
"And good! By the Lord Harry I was so good it hurt. My conscience
got so expansive and fine-strung it lamed me across the shoulders
to carry it around with me. Why, I even went back over my accounts
and paid Sweitzer fifty quid I'd jiggered him out of in a deal in
Fiji three years before. And I compounded the interest as well.
"Work! I planted sugar cane--the first commercial planting on
Manatomana. I ran in cargoes of kinky-heads from Malaita, which is
in the Solomons, till I had twelve hundred of the blackbirds
putting in cane. And I sent a schooner clear to Hawaii to bring
back a dismantled sugar mill and a German who said he knew the
field-end of cane. And he did, and he charged me three hundred
dollars screw a month, and I took hold of the mill-end. I
installed the mill myself, with the help of several mechanics I
brought up from Queensland.
"Of course there was a rival. His name was Motomoe. He was the
very highest chief blood next to King John's. He was full native,
a strapping, handsome man, with a glowering way of showing his
dislikes. He certainly glowered at me when I began hanging around
the palace. He went back in my history and circulated the blackest
tales about me. The worst of it was that most of them were true.
He even made a voyage to Apia to find things out--as if he couldn't
find a plenty right there on the beach of Manatomana! And he
sneered at my failing for religion, and at my going to prayer-
meeting, and, most of all, at my sugar-planting. He challenged me
to fight, and I kept off of him. He threatened me, and I learned
in the nick of time of his plan to have me knocked on the head.
You see, he wanted the Princess just as much as I did, and I wanted
her more.
"She used to play the piano. So did I, once. But I never let her
know after I'd heard her play the first time. And she thought her
playing was wonderful, the dear, fond girl! You know the sort, the
mechanical one-two-three tum-tum-tum school-girl stuff. And now
I'll tell you something funnier. Her playing WAS wonderful to me.
The gates of heaven opened to me when she played. I can see myself
now, worn out and dog-tired after the long day, lying on the mats
of the palace veranda and gazing upon her at the piano, myself in a
perfect idiocy of bliss. Why, this idea she had of her fine
playing was the one flaw in her deliciousness of perfection, and I
loved her for it. It kind of brought her within my human reach.
Why, when she played her one-two-three, tum-tum-tum, I was in the
seventh heaven of bliss. My weariness fell from me. I loved her,
and my love for her was clean as flame, clean as my love for God.
And do you know, into my fond lover's fancy continually intruded
the thought that God in most ways must look like her.
"--That's right, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, sneer as you like. But I
tell you that's love that I've been describing. That's all. It's
love. It's the realest, purest, finest thing that can happen to a
man. And I know what I'm talking about. It happened to me."
Whiskers, his beady squirrel's eye glittering from out his ruined
eyebrow like a live coal in a jungle ambush, broke off long enough
to down a sedative draught from his condensed milk can and to mix
another.
"The cane," he resumed, wiping his prodigious mat of face hair with
the back of his hand. "It matured in sixteen months in that
climate, and I was ready, just ready and no more, with the mill for
the grinding. Naturally, it did not all mature at once, but I had
planted in such succession that I could grind for nine months
steadily, while more was being planted and the ratoons were
springing up.
"I had my troubles the first several days. If it wasn't one thing
the matter with the mill, it was another. On the fourth day,
Ferguson, my engineer, had to shut down several hours in order to
remedy his own troubles. I was bothered by the feeder. After
having the niggers (who had been feeding the cane) pour cream of
lime on the rollers to keep everything sweet, I sent them out to
join the cane-cutting squads. So I was all alone at that end, just
as Ferguson started up the mill, just as I discovered what was the
matter with the feed-rollers, and just as Motomoe strolled up.
"He stood there, in Norfolk jacket, pigskin puttees, and all the
rest of the fashionable get-up out of a bandbox, sneering at me
covered with filth and grease to the eyebrows and looking like a
navvy. And, the rollers now white from the lime, I'd just seen
what was wrong. The rollers were not in plumb. One side crushed
the cane well, but the other side was too open. I shoved my
fingers in on that side. The big, toothed cogs on the rollers did
not touch my fingers. And yet, suddenly, they did. With the grip
of ten thousand devils, my finger-tips were caught, drawn in, and
pulped to--well, just pulp. And, like a slick of cane, I had
started on my way. There was no stopping me. Ten thousand horses
could not have pulled me back. There was nothing to stop me.
Hand, arm, shoulder, head, and chest, down to the toes of me, I was
doomed to feed through.
"It did hurt. It hurt so much it did not hurt me at all. Quite
detached, almost may I say, I looked on my hand being ground up,
knuckle by knuckle, joint by joint, the back of the hand, the
wrist, the forearm, all in order slowly and inevitably feeding in.
O engineer hoist by thine own petard! O sugar-maker crushed by
thine own cane-crusher!
"Motomoe sprang forward involuntarily, and the sneer was chased
from his face by an expression of solicitude. Then the beauty of
the situation dawned on him, and he chuckled and grinned. No, I
didn't expect anything of him. Hadn't he tried to knock me on the
head? What could he do anyway? He didn't know anything about
engines.
"I yelled at the top of my lungs to Ferguson to shut off the
engine, but the roar of the machinery drowned my voice. And there
I stood, up to the elbow and feeding right on in. Yes, it did
hurt. There were some astonishing twinges when special nerves were
shredded and dragged out by the roots. But I remember that I was
surprised at the time that it did not hurt worse.
"Motomoe made a movement that attracted my attention. At the same
time he growled out loud, as if he hated himself, 'I'm a fool.'
What he had done was to pick up a cane-knife--you know the kind, as
big as a machete and as heavy. And I was grateful to him in
advance for putting me out of my misery. There wasn't any sense in
slowly feeding in till my head was crushed, and already my arm was
pulped half way from elbow to shoulder, and the pulping was going
right on. So I was grateful, as I bent my head to the blow.
"'Get your head out of the way, you idiot!' he barked at me.
"And then I understood and obeyed. I was a big man, and he took
two hacks to do it; but he hacked my arm off just outside the
shoulder and dragged me back and laid me down on the cane.
"Yes, the sugar paid--enormously; and I built for the Princess the
church of her saintly dream, and . . . she married me."
He partly assuaged his thirst, and uttered his final word.
"Alackaday! Shuttlecock and battle-dore. And this at, the end of
it all, lined with boilerplate that even alcohol will not corrode
and that only alcohol will tickle. Yet have I lived, and I kiss my
hand to the dear dust of my Princess long asleep in the great
mausoleum of King John that looks across the Vale of Manona to the
alien flag that floats over the bungalow of the British Government
House. . . "
Fatty pledged him sympathetically, and sympathetically drank out of
his own small can. Bruce Cadogan Cavendish glared into the fire
with implacable bitterness. He was a man who preferred to drink by
himself. Across the thin lips that composed the cruel slash of his
mouth played twitches of mockery that caught Fatty's eye. And
Fatty, making sure first that his rock-chunk was within reach,
challenged.
"Well, how about yourself, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish? It's your
turn."
The other lifted bleak eyes that bored into Fatty's until he
physically betrayed uncomfortableness.
"I've lived a hard life," Slim grated harshly. "What do I know
about love passages?"
"No man of your build and make-up could have escaped them," Fatty
wheedled.
"And what of it?" Slim snarled. "It's no reason for a gentleman to
boast of amorous triumphs."
"Oh, go on, be a good fellow," Fatty urged. "The night's still
young. We've still some drink left. Delarouse and I have
contributed our share. It isn't often that three real ones like us
get together for a telling. Surely you've got at least one
adventure in love you aren't ashamed to tell about--"
Bruce Cadogan Cavendish pulled forth his iron quoit and seemed to
debate whether or not he should brain the other. He sighed, and
put back the quoit.
"Very well, if you will have it," he surrendered with manifest
reluctance. "Like you two, I have had a remarkable constitution.
And right now, speaking of armour-plate lining, I could drink the
both of you down when you were at your prime. Like you two, my
beginnings were far distant and different. That I am marked with
the hall-mark of gentlehood there is no discussion . . . unless
either of you care to discuss the matter now . . . "
His one hand slipped into his pocket and clutched the quoit.
Neither of his auditors spoke nor betrayed any awareness of his
menace.
"It occurred a thousand miles to the westward of Manatomana, on the
island of Tagalag," he continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine
disappointment in that there had been no discussion. "But first I
must tell you of how I got to Tagalag. For reasons I shall not
mention, by paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of
my manhood and the prime of my devilishness in which Oxford
renegades and racing younger sons had nothing on me, I found myself
master and owner of a schooner so well known that she shall remain
historically nameless. I was running blackbird labour from the
west South Pacific and the Coral Sea to the plantations of Hawaii
and the nitrate mines of Chili--"
"It was you who cleaned out the entire population of--" Fatty
exploded, ere he could check his speech.
The one hand of Bruce Cadogan Cavendish flashed pocketward and
flashed back with the quoit balanced ripe for business.
"Proceed," Fatty sighed. "I . . . I have quite forgotten what I
was going to say."
"Beastly funny country over that way," the narrator drawled with
perfect casualness. "You've read this Sea Wolf stuff--"
"You weren't the Sea Wolf," Whiskers broke in with involuntary
positiveness.
"No, sir," was the snarling answer. "The Sea Wolf's dead, isn't
he? And I'm still alive, aren't I?"
"Of course, of course," Whiskers conceded. "He suffocated head-
first in the mud off a wharf in Victoria a couple of years back."
"As I was saying--and I don't like interruptions," Bruce Cadogan
Cavendish proceeded, "it's a beastly funny country over that way.
I was at Taki-Tiki, a low island that politically belongs to the
Solomons, but that geologically doesn't at all, for the Solomons
are high islands. Ethnographically it belongs to Polynesia,
Melanesia, and Micronesia, because all the breeds of the South
Pacific have gravitated to it by canoe-drift and intricately,
degeneratively, and amazingly interbred. The scum of the scrapings
of the bottom of the human pit, biologically speaking, resides in
Taka-Tiki. And I know the bottom and whereof I speak.
"It was a beastly funny time of it I had, diving out shell, fishing
beche-de-mer, trading hoop-iron and hatchets for copra and ivory-
nuts, running niggers and all the rest of it. Why, even in Fiji
the Lotu was having a hard time of it and the chiefs still eating
long-pig. To the westward it was fierce--funny little black kinky-
heads, man-eaters the last Jack of them, and the jackpot fat and
spilling over with wealth--"
"Jack-pots?" Fatty queried. At sight of an irritable movement, he
added: "You see, I never got over to the West like Delarouse and
you."
"They're all head-hunters. Heads are valuable, especially a white
man's head. They decorate the canoe-houses and devil-devil houses
with them. Each village runs a jack-pot, and everybody antes.
Whoever brings in a white man's head takes the pot. If there
aren't openers for a long time, the pot grows to tremendous
proportions. Beastly funny, isn't it?
"I know. Didn't a Holland mate die on me of blackwater? And
didn't I win a pot myself? It was this way. We were lying at
Lango-lui at the time. I never let on, and arranged the affair
with Johnny, my boat-steerer. He was a kinky-head himself from
Port Moresby. He cut the dead mate's head off and sneaked ashore
in the might, while I whanged away with my rifle as if I were
trying to get him. He opened the pot with the mate's head, and got
it, too. Of course, next day I sent in a landing boat, with two
covering boats, and fetched him off with the loot."
"How big was the pot?" Whiskers asked. "I heard of a pot at Orla
worth eighty quid."
"To commence with," Slim answered, "there were forty fat pigs, each
worth a fathom of prime shell-money, and shell-money worth a quid a
fathom. That was two hundred dollars right there. There were
ninety-eight fathoms of shell-money, which is pretty close to five
hundred in itself. And there were twenty-two gold sovereigns. I
split it four ways: one-fourth to Johnny, one-fourth to the ship,
one-fourth to me as owner, and one-fourth to me as skipper. Johnny
never complained. He'd never had so much wealth all at one time in
his life. Besides, I gave him a couple of the mate's old shirts.
And I fancy the mate's head is still there decorating the canoe-
house."
"Not exactly Christian burial of a Christian," Whiskers observed.
"But a lucrative burial," Slim retorted. "I had to feed the rest
of the mate over-side to the sharks for nothing. Think of feeding
an eight-hundred-dollar head along with it. It would have been
criminal waste and stark lunacy.
"Well, anyway, it was all beastly funny, over there to the
westward. And, without telling you the scrape I got into at Taki-
Tiki, except that I sailed away with two hundred kinky-heads for
Queensland labour, and for my manner of collecting them had two
British ships of war combing the Pacific for me, I changed my
course and ran to the westward thinking to dispose of the lot to
the Spanish plantations on Bangar.
"Typhoon season. We caught it. The Merry Mist was my schooner's
name, and I had thought she was stoutly built until she hit that
typhoon. I never saw such seas. They pounded that stout craft to
pieces, literally so. The sticks were jerked out of her,
deckhouses splintered to match-wood, rails ripped off, and, after
the worst had passed, the covering boards began to go. We just
managed to repair what was left of one boat and keep the schooner
afloat only till the sea went down barely enough to get away. And
we outfitted that boat in a hurry. The carpenter and I were the
last, and we had to jump for it as he went down. There were only
four of us--"
"Lost all the niggers?" Whiskers inquired.
"Some of them swam for some time," Slim replied. "But I don't
fancy they made the land. We were ten days' in doing it. And we
had a spanking breeze most of the way. And what do you think we
had in the boat with us? Cases of square-face gin and cases of
dynamite. Funny, wasn't it? Well, it got funnier later on. Oh,
there was a small beaker of water, a little salt horse, and some
salt-water-soaked sea biscuit--enough to keep us alive to Tagalag.
"Now Tagalag is the disappointingest island I've ever beheld. It
shows up out of the sea so as you can make its fall twenty miles
off. It is a volcano cone thrust up out of deep sea, with a
segment of the crater wall broken out. This gives sea entrance to
the crater itself, and makes a fine sheltered harbour. And that's
all. Nothing lives there. The outside and the inside of the
crater are too steep. At one place, inside, is a patch of about a
thousand coconut palms. And that's all, as I said, saving a few
insects. No four-legged thing, even a rat, inhabits the place.
And it's funny, most awful funny, with all those coconuts, not even
a coconut crab. The only meat-food living was schools of mullet in
the harbour--fattest, finest, biggest mullet I ever laid eyes on.
"And the four of us landed on the little beach and set up
housekeeping among the coconuts with a larder full of dynamite and
square-face. Why don't you laugh? It's funny, I tell you. Try it
some time.--Holland gin and straight coconut diet. I've never been
able to look a confectioner's window in the face since. Now I'm
not strong on religion like Chauncey Delarouse there, but I have
some primitive ideas; and my concept of hell is an illimitable
coconut plantation, stocked with cases of square-face and populated
by ship-wrecked mariners. Funny? It must make the devil scream.
"You know, straight coconut is what the agriculturists call an
unbalanced ration. It certainly unbalanced our digestions. We got
so that whenever hunger took an extra bite at us, we took another
drink of gin. After a couple of weeks of it, Olaf, a squarehead
sailor, got an idea. It came when he was full of gin, and we,
being in the same fix, just watched him shove a cap and short fuse
into a stick of dynamite and stroll down toward the boat.
"It dawned on me that he was going to shoot fish if there were any
about; but the sun was beastly hot, and I just reclined there and
hoped he'd have luck.
"About half an hour after he disappeared we heard the explosion.
But he didn't come back. We waited till the cool of sunset, and
down on the beach found what had become of him. The boat was there
all right, grounded by the prevailing breeze, but there was no
Olaf. He would never have to eat coconut again. We went back,
shakier than ever, and cracked another square-face.
"The next day the cook announced that he would rather take his
chance with dynamite than continue trying to exist on coconut, and
that, though he didn't know anything about dynamite, he knew a
sight too much about coconut. So we bit the detonator down for
him, shoved in a fuse, and picked him a good fire-stick, while he
jolted up with a couple more stiff ones of gin.
"It was the same programme as the day before. After a while we
heard the explosion and at twilight went down to the boat, from
which we scraped enough of the cook for a funeral.
"The carpenter and I stuck it out two days more, then we drew
straws for it and it was his turn. We parted with harsh words; for
he wanted to take a square-face along to refresh himself by the
way, while I was set against running any chance of wasting the gin.
Besides, he had more than he could carry then, and he wobbled and
staggered as he walked.
"Same thing, only there was a whole lot of him left for me to bury,
because he'd prepared only half a stick. I managed to last it out
till next day, when, after duly fortifying myself, I got sufficient
courage to tackle the dynamite. I used only a third of a stick--
you know, short fuse, with the end split so as to hold the head of
a safety match. That's where I mended my predecessors' methods.
Not using the match-head, they'd too-long fuses. Therefore, when
they spotted a school of mullet; and lighted the fuse, they had to
hold the dynamite till the fuse burned short before they threw it.
If they threw it too soon, it wouldn't go off the instant it hit
the water, while the splash of it would frighten the mullet away.
Funny stuff dynamite. At any rate, I still maintain mine was the
safer method.
"I picked up a school of mullet before I'd been rowing five
minutes. Fine big fat ones they were, and I could smell them over
the fire. When I stood up, fire-stick in one hand, dynamite stick
in the other, my knees were knocking together. Maybe it was the
gin, or the anxiousness, or the weakness and the hunger, and maybe
it was the result of all of them, but at any rate I was all of a
shake. Twice I failed to touch the fire-stick to the dynamite.
Then I did, heard the match-head splutter, and let her go.
"Now I don't know what happened to the others, but I know what I
did. I got turned about. Did you ever stem a strawberry and throw
the strawberry away and pop the stem into your mouth? That's what
I did. I threw the fire-stick into the water after the mullet and
held on to the dynamite. And my arm went off with the stick when
it went off. . . . "
Slim investigated the tomato-can for water to mix himself a drink,
but found it empty. He stood up.
"Heigh ho," he yawned, and started down the path to the river.
In several minutes he was back. He mixed the due quantity of river
slush with the alcohol, took a long, solitary drink, and stared
with bitter moodiness into the fire.
"Yes, but . . . " Fatty suggested. "What happened then?"
"Oh," sad Slim. "Then the princess married me, of course."
"But you were the only person left, and there wasn't any princess .
. . " Whiskers cried out abruptly, and then let his voice trail
away to embarrassed silence.
Slim stared unblinkingly into the fire.
Percival Delaney and Chauncey Delarouse looked at each other.
Quietly, in solemn silence, each with his one arm aided the one arm
of the other in rolling and tying his bundle. And in silence,
bundles slung on shoulders, they went away out of the circle of
firelight. Not until they reached the top of the railroad
embankment did they speak.
"No gentleman would have done it," said Whiskers.
"No gentleman would have done it," Fatty agreed.
Glen Ellen, California,
September 26, 1916.
