Wild Blood/Chapter 17

Y STORY is told. Other things happened, of course; and there was much fighting; many people died. Hurricane Williams again took the web out of the hands of the Fates and snarled it up to serve his own ends. Luck did not help him.

If Captain Lumholtz and his officers had not, as naval officers were always eager to do, stayed on shore and taken up quarters in Grahame's house, Williams would, I believe, have boarded the gunboat. And who shall say that he would have failed? Not I. He never failed where the risk of his own life and his inordinate daring could win.

Certainly the Germans, skirmishing upward from the beach, driving us back, almost outflanking our few numbers, had reason to believe themselves as safe behind the walls of Grahame's garden as on their own ship.

How many of them died that afternoon I do not know. That night they were bunched at the gates, and they patrolled the grounds and surrounded the house while their officers dined well and drank.

The Friedrich came in close to the landing so her guns covered the beach between the house and the water. All was safe as intelligent precaution could make it.

We drew back late that afternoon, firing as we went. On the morrow we could expect to be hunted down, crushed out by weight of numbers. Our little party was thinned. When night came two Samoans had been killed, another wounded. And that was not all.

Hawkins had an arm made useless and cursed his thigh, where another bullet lay in the flesh so that he could hardly drag himself. But drag himself he did. Whenever he could find prop or rest he shot with his one hand. He enviously damned me because I was too thin, he said, to be a target.

He had the stuff within him that doesn't give way. He fought as hard as he could, though one arm was useless and a leg was worse than useless. Though he expected, as I did too, death and hell on the morrow, he jeered at the men he shot, cursed those he missed.

Requiescat in pace; may he rest in peace. The snow-fall of years since then has buried him.

Raikes died. Shaylor and a half dozen skirmishers came almost upon our rear. For seconds the fighting was hand to hand. Whether Raikes, with a sudden gallantry leaped to take the blow of the cutlas that came at Williams or sprang blindly away from the swipe of a rifle at his own head and dodged into the cutlas, I shall not try to say. He died like a hero in that his life saved probably the life of another. No doubt in the Great Judgment-Hall God won't be too inquisitive about what was courage and what was cowardice. Anyway Hawkins pronounced a blessing, a blessing though well filled with oaths, over the little twisted body, its head sliced, the one eye opened still with a kind of impudent stare. Perhaps as life fled that one eye caught a glimpse of the mysteries into which the dead go, and was unimpressed.

I thought that Shaylor died. I shot him. Hawkins, having two good arms then, threw a rifle hurtling and hit him—and nearly hit Williams, too. Williams, turning with his rifle club-like, smote Shaylor; then stooped and picked the cutlas from his hand.

I did not see Shaylor move again. But some years afterward I heard of a Red Shaylor, a seaman, a big fellow, muchly scarred from temple to chest. Perhaps the Fates, wholly unaware that Williams had snatched him from the sea when the Roanoke sank, had made no further provision for Shaylor's death, so that he went on living, living, living, indefinitely.

Night came and we rested. That is, Hawkins and I rested. I felt futile, akin to disgrace, because 1 did not have a scratch on my body. It was as if the people who had fought with us did not think me worthy of even a blow, of the waste of time it took to put a bead on to a rifle.

Williams rested not at all; and the Samoans lay out in the darkness, watching. He went alone through the blackness to the cannibals; and before he came back a full moon raised itself in the cloudless sky as if pale with horror at the things men do.

How he met, and what he said to that pack of cannibals I do not know; but it probably had something to do with the renewed terrific din and clamor they set up. They slipped down through the groves and burned the outbuildings; they danced and shrieked in the far-flung glare of the fires and dashed leapingly through the moonlight from shadow to shadow.

But they remained in the same whereabouts. They did not attack anybody, though the Germans at first were alarmed and fired at them, but did not move out to come well within the range.

The fear in the Germans quieted somewhat, but not the noise; and the sailors watched, fascinated. They grouped themselves to look from a comfortable distance, on that sight; and many of those stationed on guard and patrol gave their attention chiefly to staring in the direction of the cannibals, who kept tirelessly at their spectacle.

Then Williams and Malua and six Samoans went down to the wall about Grahame's house; and some inattentive sentries found their throats crushed stranglingly. Perhaps more of them died than would have, had not the man with the white flag lied when he told that Taulemeito was dead.

The entrances were choked with guards. Patrols—maybe—evaded in the shadows and from behind bushes; and doors are not the only means of entering a large, rambling house banked with shrubs and vines. Windows in hot countries are always wide, and netting screen is easily cut.

Captain Lumholtz had dined well with two of his officers; and they drank—drank so much that perhaps they did not believe their eyes when dark figures began to materialize within the shadows at the outer edge of the lamps in the large room. Anyway it was true—what their eyes told them; and Captain Lumholtz and his next in command respected the order for silence, as well-trained officers should.

Their younger and more impulsive companion leaped up. No doubt he felt, a little alcoholically, that there are times when it is better to die than to keep still.

He died, and without breaking the silence, Hurricane Williams, as if going from a spring-board, caught him—hands to throat—and one of the Samoans struck across his head.

Later the officer of the guard came in to report. And he did not go out. He too stayed to sit in meditative silence and await the morning.

With the dawn Laulai and Nopolu, sent by Williams, came searching for us. And we, with Hawkins leaning heavily on the three of us, and a sapling crutch as well—his leg stiff but his heart high—went down among the baffled, glowering sailors of the Friedrich.

Orders were orders even in those days to Germans in uniform; and Captain Lumholtz dearly loved his stout pudgy body and the life that dwelt in that dumpy habitation. His fellow officers shared a similar affection for themselves. They were much pained because Hurricane Williams would not take their words to let him sail unmolested from Dakaru.

He said that he would kill them the moment he or any of his party was attacked; that he would kill them the instant they refused to carry out his orders. And they believed him.

It is true the sailors did not realize until too late to have done anything courageous—though mutinous—just what the situation was. Group after group was called into the house and ordered by their own captain to lay down their arms. Every last man remaining on the Friedrich was called off, together with the astonished crew of the Sally Martin who had been put on board, prisoners.

Williams had said:

“If a shot is fired from her as the boats go out to board her, you die.”

Captain Lumholtz protested, and he even might have been willing to die had he known what was to be sent out in those boats. Cannibals. They boarded the undefended, the deserted gunboat and they wrecked her. They smashed everything that was smashable. They hacked the masts, but did not cut them down. That was too much like work. They cut the rigging—that was more like fun. By special instructions they went into the engine-room and twisted and battered everything that in their childish, unscientific way could be twisted and battered. They wrecked the Friedrich and they looted her. Williams was remembering Lelela and German vengeance there.

It would be many long hard weeks before she could take the sea again. And in the dull, dry archives of the German Admiralty is the report that off Dakaru the Friedrich was disabled by a hurricane. The Germans are literal.

Williams took toll of the Friedrich's pride for what she did, and claimed to have done, at Lelela. We went out in the late afternoon of that great day. It was our hour, our day; it was the Friedrich's men in the Friedrich's boats that warped us out.

But we did not go in the Sally Martin. She was shattered. However, the Fijiian [sic] Maid and the smaller, swifter, and as stanch little Eunice were brought alongside of her and supplies transferred.

Our crew worked in a kind of feverish exaltation. They, remembering cuffs and blows and abuse, jeered the Germans.

The blacks worked too. They were going Home. Hurricane Williams had promised.

The richness of Grahame's trees and fields was raided. Chickens and pigs fairly overran the Fijiian Maid. All was helter-skelter of course; but what was needed was put on board, and that was the thing of importance.

And when the German sailors, sweating, furious, helpless, had towed us out, we who had been on the Sally Martin, by way of thanks and reward, gave them a cheer—of a kind—as we cast off. And, ungrateful to be alive, they answered not at all.

Williams, on board the Fijiian Maid, and all canvas out, with his cannibals and the Samoans, led the way westward. And we followed on the Eunice, sails shortened and little to do except to talk and remember.

As the sun fell away, burning the lazy clouds that banked the east, filling them with strange fires, and night threw up her impalpable cooling incense to foretell her coming, the elation of the day died out in me. Down in the cabin a girl of wonderful golden hair and fragile features—her cheek now bruised, her eyes black underneath and swollen—sobbed, disconsolate, and shivered, though about her shoulders I had thrown a heavy black cloak lined with crimson.

What the future had for her none could guess. She, who knew nothing of the world, least of all.

What Williams eventually did do was to rerig and rename the Fijiian Maid and sell her. He gave the money and Eunice Grahame, together with a letter telling the facts, into the keeping of a wealthy young Englishman by the name of Trevalyan, who was cruising in the Carolines. I heard that love at last disposed of her ill-fortune. Trevalyan married her.

Hawkins, who refused to be put to bed, sat on deck with his arm bound across his breast and his stiff leg propped up. And he was silent.

Perhaps he too was thinking of the large grave, dug under the shadow of an orange-tree, where the sweet-scented blossoms would fall; dug near the row of fire- tipped poinsettias whose burning flowers reached from their leafless stems like flames magically turned motionless, and not far from the towering figs where the multicolored cockatoos preened and scolded. Into that grave we had laid father and daughter, each wrapped about in clean tappa cloth, unspotted, fragrant from the press of sandal-wood.

And though there were the flat stolid faces of Germans all about, staring, I had tried to say a prayer—aloud. God in His infinite wisdom knew how greatly those poor passion-ridden bodies were in need of long rest. And He knew what was in my heart.

But only He knew what was in the heart of Hurricane Williams—though it was in keeping with his fate, with the irony that burned him and turned to ashes almost all that he did, for him to have loved her at the moment Davenant struck. But, his face inscrutably tense, he stared down into that coffinless hole where Dula lay by her father, and said nothing, then or afterward.

Their faces were covered with the white cloth as if to offer some courteous little protection from the black, moist dirt that was pushed back in upon them. There were many new graves at Dakaru, but none were near enough to disturb the rest of Dula and her father.

“Look—look! oh, look!” Hawkins cried with an uneasy thrill of awe as he thrust his hand toward the eastern sky. I looked. And there, coming through the clouds, was a great full moon, red as if it had been splashed with blood.