Wild Blood/Chapter 11

MONTH later I was as near Heaven as I ever expect to be. And I could drowse through eternity very well if left alone on a white-hot beach.

I had been there some days. For me, it was like coming home. All the children in the village knew me. To them I wasn't a papalagi—outlander, foreigner.

All the maidens envied me my red hair and tried to coax from me the secret for bleaching it. Ten years before other maidens, now mothers of some of the impudent imps, had tried to wheedle my secret out; and taught me their liquid tongue in the moonlight, no doubt that I might better understand their coaxing.

Women are alike, always; the first thing the mother of them all did when she awakened in Eden was to rub her lips with a red flower's petal and, snatching cruelly the fluttering butterflies, dust the powder from their radiant wings against her cheeks. The only place to learn a new language is in the moonlight; that is in the shadows of a moonlit night. It was there Adam was trained to say, “I love you,” as some years later in another and serpentless Eden I, in less than one lesson, learned aloha ai—and much else.

Lelela was a village of five or six hundred souls, and some of them “saved.” The same whaler that brought me ten years before had brought an elderly priest; a man already worn with years, calm, wise, patient.

Father Rinieri had not been a half-day's journey from the village since. Except for his robe one would never have suspected that he was a missionary. A missionary can have no greater praise than that from me.

Other missionaries had come and gone, all Yankees, prayerful and easily horrified. There was always one or more at the village. Two were there now. They very openly exposed their belief that the priest was an emissary of the devil.

They had even tried to save me from the evil influence of the priest after seeing him embrace me on the sand when I splashed wet and panting up on the beach. They had furtively caught me off to one side in the evening and tried to talk about my “soul.”

Not in the whole ten years had Father Rinieri mentioned my soul, or heaven or hell. They retreated fully convinced that I was a vivid illustration of the unregenerate. But I am far ahead of my story.

After Hawkins had taken the deck the voyage had been uneventful. For one thing, Williams began to come on deck. He moved very slowly, cautiously.

It had been strange to see him, always like a tiger against a leash, sitting quietly, motionless. That took as much sheer will as anything he had ever done.

He shot the sun himself and made corrections on Shaylor's calculations. They needed them.

Also he learned how Hawkins happened to be in command. He made no comment. Not even when I said:

“You know, Hawkins does hold a master's certificate. Won it in a poker game.”

But he had turned away his eyes.

Life became very uneventful. Except for Raikes's continual implorings for me to believe that he had saved Hawkins's life instead of betrayed him, I was left almost as much alone as if I had been a stranger.

Raikes had tried to talk to Hawkins, but had been roughly told to shut up. He even approached Williams with the tale of woe. Williams listened and said, “All right,” and nothing more.

Raikes came to me to find out what “all right” meant.

“That you'll be cooked at Savaii,” I had told him.

“Samoans ain't cannibals,” he declared.

“Yes, but at Lelela are good friends of mine. They'll eat a fellow any time to oblige me.”

To court my sympathies he reported from time to time that Shaylor was “showin' a lot o' canvas in the fo'c'sle,” boasting that he would yet be revenged on Williams, Hawkins and myself. Raulson, being asked, said it was true.

The men were afraid of Shaylor's fists, and listened respectfully. But they disliked him.

They were devoted to Hawkins, praised him among themselves. They did their best, too, to make life unpleasant for Raikes.

During those days Davenant conspicuously avoided Williams. Dula was again on deck most of her time, but she ignored me. She usually sat near Williams, but they talked very little.

Two or three times I heard voices at the foot of the companion, insistent voices, and presently Dula would come up, a little flushed, her eyes angry—running away from Davenant.

Williams had not forgotten his fake log. He wrote a little in it and dictated some to me. I finally got enough out of him to understand what he had in mind. A clever idea, too.

He had at first thought the shortage of supplies on board would force him to put into some mainland, or possibly Fijian, port, where the chances of his being recognized as Hurricane Williams were not great. In leaving the ship to go ashore he would fall overboard and pretend that his papers had been in a tin box under his arm, and lost.

Thereupon he would demand new papers from the consul—and if necessary offer the log to support his story. He intended to keep the log up, for there was still the chance that it might be used.

Taulemeito, the chief of chiefs at Lelela and vicinity, was very much of a heathen. He was a great handsome fellow, who disliked missionaries, traders and Germans of any description.

He did not consider Father Rinieri a missionary. “Missionary” in his mind was associated with arrogant meddlesomeness and interminable shouting about a lake of boiling fire, bigger than the ocean.

And Taulemeito, who had a lot of common sense, knew that anybody who talked like that was a liar. There could be no such lake.

He bitterly regretted the persistent encroachment of whites. And his village was much more free from them than any other large village of the Samoan group.

But he liked Williams, who was honest and generous and did not meddle. Their friendship was many years old. The more the whites denounced Williams the better Taulemeito favored him, and took no trouble to conceal it.

Finally one of the numerous German gunboats that were prowling like hungry dogs all over the South Seas, “protecting German interests” and very obviously looking for any stray bits of property to annex without offending England or America, came to Lelela to remonstrate. The captain had learned that Taulemeito had given Williams permission to blast an entrance through the inner reefs and thereby secure excellent harborage.

That was a monstrous offense. Something would have to be done about it. If Taulemeito would accept a German consul as adviser and give German planters lands and German traders certain monopolies, and turn Williams over to the few German soldiers that would be left to seize him on his return, then the monstrous offense would be ignored.

Taulemeito was furious, but he had the judgment not to show it. He was too proud to yield, too sensible to fight.

So he implored the pagan gods of his fathers to send a terrible storm and wreck the German on the outer reefs—for though there was the entrance into the harbor, the German had been timid about using it. It was very narrow.

The terrible storm did not arrive. But a British gunboat did. In some mysterious way the Britisher, who was probably detailed to keep German topsails on the horizon, learned why the German had slipped from the Apia Harbor—after circulating the report that she was homeward-bound.

Taulemeito was very sorry that the gods of his fathers had compromised on a British gunboat when it was a hurricane he had wanted. But as the British captain came through the reef-entrance and complimented Taulemeito on his harbor and said that even if Williams had done it it was a good job, the chief decided that maybe his gods knew what they were about after all. But he was exceedingly disappointed that there had not been a battle. The German departed and the Britisher, after many compliments and no requests, also disappeared.

And whenever Williams showed up, Taulemeito welcomed him and gave him the supplies that had in one way and another been gathered and stored away. Perhaps traders and storekeepers even as far away as Apia wondered what on earth that “heath'n king” was doing with so much tinned stuff, rope, canvas, oil and—tar. There was no accounting for the tastes of heathen kings. And though strictly against the law of three nations, Taulemeito often succeeded in getting powder and even dynamite—and Williams paid him well.

After the affair at Dakaru, when Williams had released Samoans from Grahame's slavery and caused one man from Lelela itself to be returned home, Taulemeito himself declared Williams to be his own brother and threw the protection of his kingship—such as it was—about him. That was how it came about that the Sally Martin was a welcomed ship at Lelela.

We had made a trip of a good three thousand miles and used up some three months' time; and of course Williams thought the schooner had to be bleached and scraped, et cetera, et cetera. In cold climates a fellow may find it convenient to do a little work to get his blood circulating. But not at Lelela. Williams must have got his brother the chief to take an interest, for everybody from babies to doddering ancients turned to and made so much clatter and bustle that my absence was not noticed. Yet the crew had a rich, glorious time. Work was like play; play like what it always was in those unchristianized days. Everything that a generous Creator, who must have loved the old Samoans well, had bestowed in the way of food was laid at the feet of the men; bananas, cooked, as Hawkins said “forty-'leven ways,” breadfruit baked in the juice of coconut, yams, palusami, though there was also meat; fish and fruit—and flowers.

Many a puaka squealed plaintively, but in vain. We were ravenous for green vegetables and fruit. Hawkins undertook to eat all the custard apples on the island. To our weary, hungry bodies it was all nonu fiafia—“fruit that makes you happy.”

There were sports, games and dances, laughter and flirtations. Sivas and—horrors—the dreadful po-ula in the moonlight.

The Yankee missionaries came to see the dance that lost people their souls, and had all their expectations gratified. I fancy they nearly lost their own angangas to see those exquisite, rippling rhythms of dark, moonlit bodies fluttering in wild grace—frenetic, but never awkward, never without a liquid, symmetrical movement.

Nothing was withheld from the malaga, the traveling party, of the chief's brother. Big, bearded men, solemn old fellows who hadn't laughed since the treacherous barbecue at Turkee, made themselves ridiculous with merriment.

The Yankee missionaries, like a pair of dyspeptic Jeremiahs, brooded gloweringly. Father Rinieri went his way, gentle, perceptive; the imperturbable half-smile, like a flame of benediction, never vanished. He never went far without a troop of imps charging down on him, nudging and jostling to get their little black heads under his hands.

I wondered what Dula thought of it all. Davenant himself, perhaps the more troubled because Williams ignored him, gave no sign of enmity; stared in a sort of detached curiosity. He kept apart from everybody—or seemed to. And it was not by accident that I found he and Shaylor were sometimes together at night.

The chiefs wife, one of them—Taulemeito was a remorseless old sinner and had three or four wives; and he kept peace in his family, too—took Dula into her own house. There was no way of my knowing what she thought of having no privacy; of having groups of eager, friendly, chattering girls and women crowding in upon her, fingering every garment in wondering innocence, watching her dress, watching her undress, pressing gifts upon her, laughing, decking her willy-nilly with flowers, offering perfumes of their own distillation, and begging the secrets of her own toilet. She found some relief, if it was relief, from the pressing attention of the irrepressible women, in the company of Father Rinieri.

We stayed on and on at Lelela. I had begun to won- der a little if we would make Dakaru within the hundred and eighty days.

Some other people may have also wondered a little that Williams remained so long when he knew it was risky. The crew did not have much time to wonder—they were that contented.

They did learn what Williams's reputation was like in those waters. It was known all over Australia, too; but from Samoa westward was where he had made that reputation what it was.

They learned how greatly many white men were afraid of him. The German traders then at Lelela, three of them, bowed respectfully and kept out of his way. They even seemed to tremble under his eyes.

Didn't they have reason to tremble? Wasn't he a ferocious pirate—killed men quickly, as men killed flies?

Wasn't he sometimes called “Williams the Cannibal”? He was.

And the German traders probably believed it. One thing was certain: They believed that Williams was dangerous.

The crew was having a perpetual holiday. The Sally Martin had long before been put into shipshape, and the men lay around eating, flirting, sleeping, doing nothing with that magic ease that settles upon men in the tropics.

The original land of the lotus was Samoa. I know other beach-combers say it was some other place. But they are wrong. It was Samoa.

I know. I have been drunk on every island from Tahiti to Ysabel. Well, maybe not on every one. There are about three thousand of them, and some of the stuff a fellow has to put up with in the remoter places is weak. Wouldn't make a fly dizzy.

Williams, always a solitary man, kept pretty much out of sight when the work was done. Except that he had not shown his usual energy at work, and a new uninterpretable expression—which I thought might have been due to a certain thinness of face—shadowed his features, he appeared to be but little the worse for his wound.

Just at the present he was waiting for a boat to return that Taulemeito had sent to Apia. Williams wanted dynamite. Taulemeito had none in store for him.

A note to an American engineer—doing some work for a German company, who had on previous occasions furnished the explosive at about ten times its value—had been sent. It was better to try to get it that way than to go himself or send me. He was known at Apia, known well. I was untrustworthy—and known well to every shanty bar on the apia beach.

Malua, a young chief himself, and a man of temper, was in charge of the party. Had his tongue been cut out he would not any sooner have told where Williams was. The American engineer would know; but that was one of the risks that had to be taken.

Let me say here and get it over with that, though Williams—who knew a great deal about explosives and how to make them explode—tried always to have dynamite on hand, he wanted it this time for a definite and commonplace purpose. After he reached Dakaru he intended to go up to the Carolines, where the drowsy Spaniards were not inquisitive, and the officials were sympathetic toward any one who weighed their palms with gold. He knew where there was an obscure and excellent harbor, if, like the one at Lelela, an entrance was widened. He would get hold of a ship somehow and, as restless and foredoomed to fail as the accursed Flying Dutchman, start again.

At the back of his head, I surmise, was the vague idea of getting together a fortune and some day quietly returning to civilization. That is the sort of mirage that all the wild, roaming, reckless men of the far places see, though down at the bottom of their souls most of them realize they would rather die than settle amid the stupid comforts of their tamed fellows.

Anyway, this would be the only chance he would have of getting his precious dynamite without returning to Samoa—and for months to come gunboats, if not soldiers, would be watching 1 Lelela. There were two or three resident traders there, Germans stubbornly hanging on and being solicitously well behaved and agreeable; there were missionaries, converted natives, and others too, ready to babble excitedly.

A trading-schooner, bringing supplies to the resident storekeepers, might come at any time and scatter the report—though there was a poor chance of its getting out to do the scattering if it came before we left.

Nor was there any chance of a boat getting away until Malua returned from Apia. Taulemeito prohibited any boats going beyond the outer reefs. But Williams had to wait after he was ready to leave.

That sums up the general situation.

Raikes knew how to catch the palm-sap, and the little patience and no labor needed for its fermentation appealed to him; so he got drunk. He was harmless enough, but more lamentatious than ever. When I am sober, drunken men are disagreeable in my sight. Even after—to be done with him—I promised never to doubt in the least that he had been a true friend to Hawkins and myself, he persisted in wanting to prove it.

He was a venomous little devil. His present hate was Davenant and Shaylor. Davenant had money. He said Shaylor was getting it. Did I know they met frequently after dark? I did. Did I know Shaylor and the Yankee missionaries were “chummy”? I did—so did Williams. It is ghastly to see a one-eyed man cry. I walked off. I went down to watch Hawkins eat. That had very nearly become Lelela's favorite amusement.

Hawkins was an adored monstrosity to those simple natives. They never grew weary of wondering at his size. His heartiness and untiring fun made them love him. But they, valiant eaters themselves, became obsessed with the futile ambition to see him so filled with food he would refuse another bite.

“My heavens, man,” he said with aggrieved accent, stroking the huge outline of his body when I had sarcastically commented on his capacity, “you mus' remember I was empty!”

I told him Raikes was drunk, vaguely implying that we too could soon be likewise. He absent-mindedly waved the suggestion away, and looked with a kind of studious apprehension at the very large pineapple some giggling girls were triumphantly peeling. He ate it. His relish was insincere, but he ate it.

Then he very craftily saved his reputation by singing. He did not sing very loudly, it is true; but the second pineapple, which would surely have vanquished him, was laid aside while the giggling girls, cross-legged on the grass, listened to the amazing vocal rumble of a monotonous chantey.

Sometime after somebody gave me a drink of kava. Then I bribed a boy to bring down the shells of fermented juice Raikes had hired him to set in the coconut-palm.

And, being started, I took a paopao, a small dugout, and went to the ship; went into Williams's room, broke the lock and carried away the three remaining bottles. By night I was carried away with the idea of visiting and conversing with, and possibly disputing high questions of theology, with Father Rinieri—and also discussing the deviltry of Christians.

It was night, starlit, and the moon was not up. I had many things on my mind, and again was submerged in the recurrent world-weariness that ebbed and flowed in from time to time upon me.

I went into Father Rinieri's house. Dula was standing by a table, the oil lamp throwing its glow up into her dark, vivid face. A chair was by the table. An open book on it. She had perhaps stood up when she heard me coming. Somehow I did not then feel the least uncomfortable under her eyes, though she looked at me very hard, directly.

I waved a friendly hand, said something by way of greeting and sat down. She had treated me on the ship with a kind of pointed disregard that hurt, that reached down almost to a feeling of shame.

I had seen but little of her in the village. Now we were face to face, and I was wholly at ease.

She probably at once noticed the bottle under my arm, and for a moment seemed about to assume an attitude of chill disapproval. But I inquired for Father Rinieri.

He would be back presently. A baby was sick. A baby that had but recently been baptized, and the parents were a little fearful lest the sickness was punishment from the native gods. He had gone to reassure them.

Dula sat down. Her fingers idly closed the book. She adjusted the wick, or pretended to, and said:

“These people seem to think a great deal of you.”

She looked at me as if awaiting an answer, if not an explanation. I was in a mood for using words. I told her these people were savages, which meant they didn't care for anything but the essentials of life—love, laughter and kindness; that awkward clothes, cold, heartless morals, and the cruel, merciless rigmarole of law were things they cared nothing about.

“And your people and mine,” I went on, “come here and tell 'em God won't listen to prayers that aren't said in English!”

“Father Rinieri is Italian,” she said quickly with a suggestion of pride.

“Well,” I returned, “God used to require prayers in Latin. But the Yankees have changed all that.”

She said almost fearfully that she believed I really meant it, and it was incredible—such words as I used.

I went off like a handful of powder touched by a match.

“Your blessed uncle, bearded to conceal his kinship with the devil; this fellow Shaylor, who seems to think every native girl is like a taataa a le ala—no, I won't tell you what it means—and those lean Yankees yeowling about sin to people that even haven't a word for it—they are Christians. And Hurricane Williams is a cursed outlaw, and heathen.

“So it was right for them to work with prayers, money and threats of God's sulphur lake on one of the half-converted fellows in Malua's party that's gone to Apia. And he's to spread the news so if there isn't a gunboat handy the law-abiding whites can put out in a whaler or trader, or something and come here and catch him.”

I waved her into silence. Her face was aflame, anguished with surprise, fear, a mingling of emotions. Obviously too she was trying to doubt my truth.

“I know I'm drunk. I know I'm drunk,” I insisted coarsely—though of course I was not anything of the kind. “I know what you think of me, too. But somebody had to get drunk, didn't they? With such a thing like that hangin' over us? Williams and I are all that know it—and now you.

“I came to tell Father Rinieri—'cause Williams made me swear not to tell a native or a member of the crew. He meant not to tell anybody, but I'm civilized enough to know how to evade an oath. I can tell a woman or a priest—

“Hurricane Williams, the outlaw, cannibal-lover, brutal blackguard, pirate, ruffian, murderer, doesn't want Chief Taulemeito to find out 'cause he might kill Davenant, Shaylor, missionaries and all the natives that have learned to pray in English. Williams wouldn't believe a white man on oath—no,” I shot at her cruelly, revengefully—“no, or a white woman either. But he does believe that no Lelelan would betray him. For one thing, Taulemeito would poke a spear into a native that showed any such symptom of being civilized—

“Aw, it isn't for any love of Davenant or Shaylor or the hungry Yankees that Williams's doin' it. He knows if Taulemeito killed them all the gunboats under heaven would come in here and hang Taulemeito, shell the village, blow to pieces the girls that put those flowers in your hair and the babies that Father Rinieri's christened, those larking boys yelling at play down there on the grass now, and the old, old hags that sit and mumble of their girlhood.

“That's what you white people do. I'm an outcast, a drunkard, half-naked, thievish beach-comber and proud of it!”

I was not proud of it, of course. But there is pride in shame, a certain glory to be squeezed out of even self-debasement.

She flared: “You don't hate them any more than I do. I would ask nothing better than to stay here, stay right here, become as one of the natives ”

She paused, her voice changed to a lower pitch, and I saw the subtle presence of some kind of doubt, though she said: “—after we go—after we come back from—”

Her slender arm reached out in a slow gesture toward the ocean and Dakaru.

Then meditatively, scarcely speaking for me though directly to me, she said

“My grandmother was very religious, but after her death—He”—another gesture toward the doorway—“he is almost the first priest I have seen since then, and—and—I haven't forgotten as much as I thought.”

She added quickly, almost fiercely clenching her hands: “But he shan't know! His lips would shrivel before they would pronounce,  'absolvo te'  to' me.

“Oh, I must, I will go through with it! My poor mother—I'd rather lose my soul too than—than—let him go on contented and thinking he is safe!”

There were actually tears in her eyes. Her mother had died outside of the church when she died by her own hand; and that must have been a terrible grief to the old grandmother, and in a way contributed to Dula's hatred for Grahame.

I blurted out, probably with some nebulous, half-formed intention of giving her a little relief of mind, that Grahame had not 'scaped scatheless. I told most of what I knew, and other things as well.

I told of how we—Williams and I and certain Samoans, some of them from this very village—had gone to Dakaru, of the way men ran and yelled and died; of the dogs and Portuguese; of the yellow-haired girl-child; of how Williams—the “nigger-lover”—had killed cannibals, suddenly gone wild, that rushed for the house; how Grahame rode and Williams sprang; of the knife that went like an arrow.

And I told of what Williams had learned since then, getting it from a Portuguese who had been on the island at the time, and was one of those whom Grahame had made promise never to whisper the horrible story. But then the Portuguese, being far from Dakaru, had thought to win favor with Hurricane Williams by relating the grim, ghastly tragedy that had years before befallen his enemy; and he had told how the big Solomon blacks, dragged to Dakaru by slavers, had caught the woman—the wife—the mother of the radiant child—who had trustingly treated those cannibals as if they were human, had sentiments and feelings.

I told too that the blacks often threw their victims on to the fire alive to give the flesh a richer flavor. Dula had bent forward pressing her hands to her face before my story was ended. I had in my time seen a cannibal feast, a wild one, not baked in ovens, but in the hills quivering, scorched, raw. And I went on and on and on, transposing to Dakaru what I had seen in the uplands of Ysabel, telling all my sickened eyes had seen. Again and again she begged me to stop and cried out low-voiced, pleading, aghast.

But the gift of tongues was upon me. I could not stop. I had never told that unforgettable tale before, though memory of it had often awakened me chokingly out of sleep.

Williams too had been there. True, blacks had feasted on blacks; but he must, as I did, have envisioned the children, the women, the men of our own color and race that had suffered and perished likewise—for why else did that iron, cruel man avert his face and put his hand to his forehead when the wild brutes were only punishing other savages that had treacherously tried to kill him?

And I told her that it was because of what Williams had seen at Ysabel, and elsewhere, that “he rushed back to Grahame's compound to protect your—sister!”

I had said it without thinking. A mere sense of the dramatic, one that often without forethought or intention makes me twist even the truth and imagine things that never happened, leaped unerringly to that word. Then too, I had nearly emptied the bottle I brought. Words, sentences, streamed out effortlessly, heedlessly.

“Since then he met the Portuguese and learned how her mother died. I know nothing of what's at the base of his brain, no one else does, but I don't believe he would have taken those Solomon Islanders back had he known why Grahame killed so many of them—

“You see, Grahame still treats 'em better than any other planter, except he butchers 'em first time they wiggle their toes over his faintest chalk-line. Break any kind of a rule, you know.

“Williams—I can't say he loves 'em. No. But he can't think the worst of them are bad as the worst o' the whites—and it's the worst of them that come down into these seas. Missionaries an' all! Thank God I'm damned, and no kin to any man that worships Him!”

I roared it out, for my story was done. And if there had been anything more blasphemous to say, and I could have thought of it, I would have said it. A sudden impulsive red anger was on me to say the worst and mean it. I don't think Dula heard, for I glared at her waiting for her to speak or look up, but she was still leaning over, her back to me, her hands against the sides of her head. She was sobbing noiselessly.

Then in the stillness I heard a slow step, right by the door. Father Rinieri had paused; he had heard.

He came in slowly, gently—so very slowly, quietly—looked at me, looked across to the girl who had been caught and crushed between emotions as between millstones. He came up to me with a half-smile deepening, broadening like a glow upon his worn face.

His very presence was quieting. There was no anger, no offense, not even the twinge of an injury forgiven, on his countenance. It was as if from the serene wisdom of years upon years, and knowledge gathered straight from the hearts of men, he felt just the least little shadow of amusement for the hot words of fools who had no idea what they were saying or doing.

There was nothing of sorrow in his face. Nothing. He was too ripened with wisdom to show it, no matter how much he may have been hurt at heart. He glanced at the bottle in my hand, then into my eyes; and there was not a flickering trace of reproach, but only the old, calm, sweet gentleness, and somehow the impression of sympathetic understanding that had neither approved nor disapproved, and yet made one feel stirred, troubled with some kind of inner uneasiness away down where a discarded conscience still lurked.

He, put an arm around my shoulders gently, affectionately. And he said in that low, full-toned, rich, tender voice whose very sound—no matter what the words—reached the ears like a benediction: “Dan, my boy”—he smiled, and there was actually light on his face—“if you were even as bad as you try to be, He would still love you!”

Father Rinieri lifted his hand slightly, pointing upward. Silence and pause; he raised his arm from my shoulder, for a moment softly rested his hand on my lowered head, then turned away toward Dula. I hurried out into the night, my head drooping, feet stumbling.