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He had never read of anything to compare with it. The fictionists, as usual, were exceeded by fact. The whole thing was too preposterous to be true. He gnawed his moustache and smoked cigarette after cigarette. Satan, back from a prowl around the compound, ran up to him and touched his hand with a cold, damp nose. Sheldon caressed the animal's ears, then threw himself into a chair and laughed heartily. What would the Commissioner of the Solomons think? What would his people at home think? And in the one breath he was glad that the partnership had been effected and sorry that Joan Lackland had ever come to the Solomons. Then he went inside and looked at himself in a hand-mirror. He studied the reflection long and thoughtfully and wonderingly.
CHAPTER XIV-THE MARTHA
CHAPTER XV-A DISCOURSE ON MANNERS
CHAPTER XVI-THE GIRL WHO HAD NOT GROWN UP
CHAPTER XIV-THE MARTHA
They were deep in a game of billiards the next morning, after the eleven o'clock breakfast, when Viaburi entered and announced, –
«Big fella schooner close up.»
Even as he spoke, they heard the rumble of chain through hawse– pipe, and from the veranda saw a big black-painted schooner, swinging to her just-caught anchor.
«It's a Yankee,» Joan cried. «See that bow! Look at that elliptical stern! Ah, I thought so-« as the Stars and Stripes fluttered to the mast-head.
Noa Noah, at Sheldon's direction, ran the Union Jack up the flag– staff.
«Now what is an American vessel doing down here?» Joan asked. «It's not a yacht, though I'll wager she can sail. Look! Her name! What is it?»
«Martha, San Francisco,» Sheldon read, looking through the telescope. «It's the first Yankee I ever heard of in the Solomons. They are coming ashore, whoever they are. And, by Jove, look at those men at the oars. It's an all-white crew. Now what reason brings them here?»
«They're not proper sailors,» Joan commented. «I'd be ashamed of a crew of black-boys that pulled in such fashion. Look at that fellow in the bow-the one just jumping out; he'd be more at home on a cow-pony.»
The boat's-crew scattered up and down the beach, ranging about with eager curiosity, while the two men who had sat in the stern-sheets opened the gate and came up the path to the bungalow. One of them, a tall and slender man, was clad in white ducks that fitted him like a semi-military uniform. The other man, in nondescript garments that were both of the sea and shore, and that must have been uncomfortably hot, slouched and shambled like an overgrown ape. To complete the illusion, his face seemed to sprout in all directions with a dense, bushy mass of red whiskers, while his eyes were small and sharp and restless.
Sheldon, who had gone to the head of the steps, introduced them to Joan. The bewhiskered individual, who looked like a Scotsman, had the Teutonic name of Von Blix, and spoke with a strong American accent. The tall man in the well-fitting ducks, who gave the English name of Tudor-John Tudor-talked purely-enunciated English such as any cultured American would talk, save for the fact that it was most delicately and subtly touched by a faint German accent. Joan decided that she had been helped to identify the accent by the short German-looking moustache that did not conceal the mouth and its full red lips, which would have formed a Cupid's bow but for some harshness or severity of spirit that had moulded them masculinely.
Von Blix was rough and boorish, but Tudor was gracefully easy in everything he did, or looked, or said. His blue eyes sparkled and flashed, his clean-cut mobile features were an index to his slightest shades of feeling and expression. He bubbled with enthusiasms, and his faintest smile or lightest laugh seemed spontaneous and genuine. But it was only occasionally at first that he spoke, for Von Blix told their story and stated their errand.
They were on a gold-hunting expedition. He was the leader, and Tudor was his lieutenant. All hands-and there were twenty-eight– were shareholders, in varying proportions, in the adventure. Several were sailors, but the large majority were miners, culled from all the camps from Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. It was the old and ever-untiring pursuit of gold, and they had come to the Solomons to get it. Part of them, under the leadership of Tudor, were to go up the Balesuna and penetrate the mountainous heart of Guadalcanar, while the Martha, under Von Blix, sailed away for Malaita to put through similar exploration.
«And so,» said Von Blix, «for Mr. Tudor's expedition we must have some black-boys. Can we get them from you?»
«Of course we will pay,» Tudor broke in. «You have only to charge what you consider them worth. You pay them six pounds a year, don't you?»
«In the first place we can't spare them,» Sheldon answered. «We are short of them on the plantation as it is.»
«WE?» Tudor asked quickly. «Then you are a firm or a partnership? I understood at Guvutu that you were alone, that you had lost your partner.»
Sheldon inclined his head toward Joan, and as he spoke she felt that he had become a trifle stiff.
«Miss Lackland has become interested in the plantation since then. But to return to the boys. We can't spare them, and besides, they would be of little use. You couldn't get them to accompany you beyond Binu, which is a short day's work with the boats from here. They are Malaita-men, and they are afraid of being eaten. They would desert you at the first opportunity. You could get the Binu men to accompany you another day's journey, through the grass– lands, but at the first roll of the foothills look for them to turn back. They likewise are disinclined to being eaten.»
«Is it as bad as that?» asked Von Blix.
«The interior of Guadalcanar has never been explored,» Sheldon explained. «The bushmen are as wild men as are to be found anywhere in the world to-day. I have never seen one. I have never seen a man who has seen one. They never come down to the coast, though their scouting parties occasionally eat a coast native who has wandered too far inland. Nobody knows anything about them. They don't even use tobacco-have never learned its use. The Austrian expedition-scientists, you know-got part way in before it was cut to pieces. The monument is up the beach there several miles. Only one man got back to the coast to tell the tale. And now you have all I or any other man knows of the inside of Guadalcanar.»
«But gold-have you heard of gold?» Tudor asked impatiently. «Do you know anything about gold?»
Sheldon smiled, while the two visitors hung eagerly upon his words.
«You can go two miles up the Balesuna and wash colours from the gravel. I've done it often. There is gold undoubtedly back in the mountains.»
Tudor and Von Blix looked triumphantly at each other.
«Old Wheatsheaf's yarn was true, then,» Tudor said, and Von Blix nodded. «And if Malaita turns out as well-«
Tudor broke off and looked at Joan.
«It was the tale of this old beachcomber that brought us here,» he explained. «Von Blix befriended him and was told the secret.» He turned and addressed Sheldon. «I think we shall prove that white men have been through the heart of Guadalcanar long before the time of the Austrian expedition.»
Sheldon shrugged his shoulders.
«We have never heard of it down here,» he said simply. Then he addressed Von Blix. «As to the boys, you couldn't use them farther than Binu, and I'll lend you as many as you want as far as that. How many of your party are going, and how soon will you start?»
«Ten,» said Tudor; «nine men and myself.»
«And you should be able to start day after to-morrow,» Von Blix said to him. «The boats should practically be knocked together this afternoon. To-morrow should see the outfit portioned and packed. As for the Martha, Mr. Sheldon, we'll rush the stuff ashore this afternoon and sail by sundown.»
As the two men returned down the path to their boat, Sheldon regarded Joan quizzically.
«There's romance for you,» he said, «and adventure-gold-hunting among the cannibals.»
«A title for a book,» she cried. «Or, better yet, 'Gold-Hunting Among the Head-Hunters.' My! wouldn't it sell!»
«And now aren't you sorry you became a cocoanut planter?» he teased. «Think of investing in such an adventure.»
«If I did,» she retorted, «Von Blix wouldn't be finicky about my joining in the cruise to Malaita.»
«I don't doubt but what he would jump at it.»
«What do you think of them?» she asked.
«Oh, old Von Blix is all right, a solid sort of chap in his fashion; but Tudor is fly-away-too much on the surface, you know. If it came to being wrecked on a desert island, I'd prefer Von Blix.»
«I don't quite understand,» Joan objected. «What have you against Tudor?»
«You remember Browning's 'Last Duchess'?»
She nodded.
«Well, Tudor reminds me of her-«
«But she was delightful.»
«So she was. But she was a woman. One expects something different from a man-more control, you know, more restraint, more deliberation. A man must be more solid, more solid and steady– going and less effervescent. A man of Tudor's type gets on my nerves. One demands more repose from a man.»
Joan felt that she did not quite agree with his judgment; and, somehow, Sheldon caught her feeling and was disturbed. He remembered noting how her eyes had brightened as she talked with the newcomer-confound it all, was he getting jealous? he asked himself. Why shouldn't her eyes brighten? What concern was it of his?
A second boat had been lowered, and the outfit of the shore party was landed rapidly. A dozen of the crew put the knocked-down boats together on the beach. There were five of these craft-lean and narrow, with flaring sides, and remarkably long. Each was equipped with three paddles and several iron-shod poles.
«You chaps certainly seem to know river-work,» Sheldon told one of the carpenters.
The man spat a mouthful of tobacco-juice into the white sand, and answered, –
«We use 'em in Alaska. They're modelled after the Yukon poling– boats, and you can bet your life they're crackerjacks. This creek'll be a snap alongside some of them Northern streams. Five hundred pounds in one of them boats, an' two men can snake it along in a way that'd surprise you.»
At sunset the Martha broke out her anchor and got under way, dipping her flag and saluting with a bomb gun. The Union Jack ran up and down the staff, and Sheldon replied with his brass signal– cannon. The miners pitched their tents in the compound, and cooked on the beach, while Tudor dined with Joan and Sheldon.
Their guest seemed to have been everywhere and seen everything and met everybody, and, encouraged by Joan, his talk was largely upon his own adventures. He was an adventurer of adventurers, and by his own account had been born into adventure. Descended from old New England stock, his father a consul-general, he had been born in Germany, in which country he had received his early education and his accent. Then, still a boy, he had rejoined his father in Turkey, and accompanied him later to Persia, his father having been appointed Minister to that country.
Tudor had always been a wanderer, and with facile wit and quick vivid description he leaped from episode and place to episode and place, relating his experiences seemingly not because they were his, but for the sake of their bizarreness and uniqueness, for the unusual incident or the laughable situation. He had gone through South American revolutions, been a Rough Rider in Cuba, a scout in South Africa, a war correspondent in the Russo-Japanese war. He had mushed dogs in the Klondike, washed gold from the sands of Nome, and edited a newspaper in San Francisco. The President of the United States was his friend. He was equally at home in the clubs of London and the Continent, the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, and the selector's shanties in the Never-Never country. He had shot big game in Siam, pearled in the Paumotus, visited Tolstoy, seen the Passion Play, and crossed the Andes on mule-back; while he was a living directory of the fever holes of West Africa.
Sheldon leaned back in his chair on the veranda, sipping his coffee and listening. In spite of himself he felt touched by the charm of the man who had led so varied a life. And yet Sheldon was not comfortable. It seemed to him that the man addressed himself particularly to Joan. His words and smiles were directed impartially toward both of them, yet Sheldon was certain, had the two men of them been alone, that the conversation would have been along different lines. Tudor had seen the effect on Joan and deliberately continued the flow of reminiscence, netting her in the glamour of romance. Sheldon watched her rapt attention, listened to her spontaneous laughter, quick questions, and passing judgments, and felt grow within him the dawning consciousness that he loved her.
So he was very quiet and almost sad, though at times he was aware of a distinct irritation against his guest, and he even speculated as to what percentage of Tudor's tale was true and how any of it could be proved or disproved. In this connection, as if the scene had been prepared by a clever playwright, Utami came upon the veranda to report to Joan the capture of a crocodile in the trap they had made for her.
Tudor's face, illuminated by the match with which he was lighting his cigarette, caught Utami's eye, and Utami forgot to report to his mistress.
«Hello, Tudor,» he said, with a familiarity that startled Sheldon.
The Polynesian's hand went out, and Tudor, shaking it, was staring into his face.
«Who is it? « he asked. «I can't see you.»
«Utami.»
«And who the dickens is Utami? Where did I ever meet you, my man?»
«You no forget the Huahine?» Utami chided. «Last time Huahine sail?»
Tudor gripped the Tahitian's hand a second time and shook it with genuine heartiness.
«There was only one kanaka who came out of the Huahine that last voyage, and that kanaka was Joe. The deuce take it, man, I'm glad to see you, though I never heard your new name before.»
«Yes, everybody speak me Joe along the Huahine. Utami my name all the time, just the same.»
«But what are you doing here?» Tudor asked, releasing the sailor's hand and leaning eagerly forward.
«Me sail along Missie Lackalanna her schooner Miele. We go Tahiti, Raiatea, Tahaa, Bora-Bora, Manua, Tutuila, Apia, Savaii, and Fiji Islands-plenty Fiji Islands. Me stop along Missie Lackalanna in Solomons. Very soon she catch other schooner.»
«He and I were the two survivors of the wreck of the Huahine,» Tudor explained to the others. «Fifty-seven all told on board when we sailed from Huapa, and Joe and I were the only two that ever set foot on land again. Hurricane, you know, in the Paumotus. That was when I was after pearls.»
«And you never told me, Utami, that you'd been wrecked in a hurricane,» Joan said reproachfully.
The big Tahitian shifted his weight and flashed his teeth in a conciliating smile.
«Me no t'ink nothing 't all,» he said.
He half-turned, as if to depart, by his manner indicating that he considered it time to go while yet he desired to remain.
«All right, Utami,» Tudor said. «I'll see you in the morning and have a yarn.»
«He saved my life, the beggar,» Tudor explained, as the Tahitian strode away and with heavy softness of foot went down the steps. «Swim! I never met a better swimmer.»
And thereat, solicited by Joan, Tudor narrated the wreck of the Huahine; while Sheldon smoked and pondered, and decided that whatever the man's shortcomings were, he was at least not a liar.
«Big fella schooner close up.»
Even as he spoke, they heard the rumble of chain through hawse– pipe, and from the veranda saw a big black-painted schooner, swinging to her just-caught anchor.
«It's a Yankee,» Joan cried. «See that bow! Look at that elliptical stern! Ah, I thought so-« as the Stars and Stripes fluttered to the mast-head.
Noa Noah, at Sheldon's direction, ran the Union Jack up the flag– staff.
«Now what is an American vessel doing down here?» Joan asked. «It's not a yacht, though I'll wager she can sail. Look! Her name! What is it?»
«Martha, San Francisco,» Sheldon read, looking through the telescope. «It's the first Yankee I ever heard of in the Solomons. They are coming ashore, whoever they are. And, by Jove, look at those men at the oars. It's an all-white crew. Now what reason brings them here?»
«They're not proper sailors,» Joan commented. «I'd be ashamed of a crew of black-boys that pulled in such fashion. Look at that fellow in the bow-the one just jumping out; he'd be more at home on a cow-pony.»
The boat's-crew scattered up and down the beach, ranging about with eager curiosity, while the two men who had sat in the stern-sheets opened the gate and came up the path to the bungalow. One of them, a tall and slender man, was clad in white ducks that fitted him like a semi-military uniform. The other man, in nondescript garments that were both of the sea and shore, and that must have been uncomfortably hot, slouched and shambled like an overgrown ape. To complete the illusion, his face seemed to sprout in all directions with a dense, bushy mass of red whiskers, while his eyes were small and sharp and restless.
Sheldon, who had gone to the head of the steps, introduced them to Joan. The bewhiskered individual, who looked like a Scotsman, had the Teutonic name of Von Blix, and spoke with a strong American accent. The tall man in the well-fitting ducks, who gave the English name of Tudor-John Tudor-talked purely-enunciated English such as any cultured American would talk, save for the fact that it was most delicately and subtly touched by a faint German accent. Joan decided that she had been helped to identify the accent by the short German-looking moustache that did not conceal the mouth and its full red lips, which would have formed a Cupid's bow but for some harshness or severity of spirit that had moulded them masculinely.
Von Blix was rough and boorish, but Tudor was gracefully easy in everything he did, or looked, or said. His blue eyes sparkled and flashed, his clean-cut mobile features were an index to his slightest shades of feeling and expression. He bubbled with enthusiasms, and his faintest smile or lightest laugh seemed spontaneous and genuine. But it was only occasionally at first that he spoke, for Von Blix told their story and stated their errand.
They were on a gold-hunting expedition. He was the leader, and Tudor was his lieutenant. All hands-and there were twenty-eight– were shareholders, in varying proportions, in the adventure. Several were sailors, but the large majority were miners, culled from all the camps from Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. It was the old and ever-untiring pursuit of gold, and they had come to the Solomons to get it. Part of them, under the leadership of Tudor, were to go up the Balesuna and penetrate the mountainous heart of Guadalcanar, while the Martha, under Von Blix, sailed away for Malaita to put through similar exploration.
«And so,» said Von Blix, «for Mr. Tudor's expedition we must have some black-boys. Can we get them from you?»
«Of course we will pay,» Tudor broke in. «You have only to charge what you consider them worth. You pay them six pounds a year, don't you?»
«In the first place we can't spare them,» Sheldon answered. «We are short of them on the plantation as it is.»
«WE?» Tudor asked quickly. «Then you are a firm or a partnership? I understood at Guvutu that you were alone, that you had lost your partner.»
Sheldon inclined his head toward Joan, and as he spoke she felt that he had become a trifle stiff.
«Miss Lackland has become interested in the plantation since then. But to return to the boys. We can't spare them, and besides, they would be of little use. You couldn't get them to accompany you beyond Binu, which is a short day's work with the boats from here. They are Malaita-men, and they are afraid of being eaten. They would desert you at the first opportunity. You could get the Binu men to accompany you another day's journey, through the grass– lands, but at the first roll of the foothills look for them to turn back. They likewise are disinclined to being eaten.»
«Is it as bad as that?» asked Von Blix.
«The interior of Guadalcanar has never been explored,» Sheldon explained. «The bushmen are as wild men as are to be found anywhere in the world to-day. I have never seen one. I have never seen a man who has seen one. They never come down to the coast, though their scouting parties occasionally eat a coast native who has wandered too far inland. Nobody knows anything about them. They don't even use tobacco-have never learned its use. The Austrian expedition-scientists, you know-got part way in before it was cut to pieces. The monument is up the beach there several miles. Only one man got back to the coast to tell the tale. And now you have all I or any other man knows of the inside of Guadalcanar.»
«But gold-have you heard of gold?» Tudor asked impatiently. «Do you know anything about gold?»
Sheldon smiled, while the two visitors hung eagerly upon his words.
«You can go two miles up the Balesuna and wash colours from the gravel. I've done it often. There is gold undoubtedly back in the mountains.»
Tudor and Von Blix looked triumphantly at each other.
«Old Wheatsheaf's yarn was true, then,» Tudor said, and Von Blix nodded. «And if Malaita turns out as well-«
Tudor broke off and looked at Joan.
«It was the tale of this old beachcomber that brought us here,» he explained. «Von Blix befriended him and was told the secret.» He turned and addressed Sheldon. «I think we shall prove that white men have been through the heart of Guadalcanar long before the time of the Austrian expedition.»
Sheldon shrugged his shoulders.
«We have never heard of it down here,» he said simply. Then he addressed Von Blix. «As to the boys, you couldn't use them farther than Binu, and I'll lend you as many as you want as far as that. How many of your party are going, and how soon will you start?»
«Ten,» said Tudor; «nine men and myself.»
«And you should be able to start day after to-morrow,» Von Blix said to him. «The boats should practically be knocked together this afternoon. To-morrow should see the outfit portioned and packed. As for the Martha, Mr. Sheldon, we'll rush the stuff ashore this afternoon and sail by sundown.»
As the two men returned down the path to their boat, Sheldon regarded Joan quizzically.
«There's romance for you,» he said, «and adventure-gold-hunting among the cannibals.»
«A title for a book,» she cried. «Or, better yet, 'Gold-Hunting Among the Head-Hunters.' My! wouldn't it sell!»
«And now aren't you sorry you became a cocoanut planter?» he teased. «Think of investing in such an adventure.»
«If I did,» she retorted, «Von Blix wouldn't be finicky about my joining in the cruise to Malaita.»
«I don't doubt but what he would jump at it.»
«What do you think of them?» she asked.
«Oh, old Von Blix is all right, a solid sort of chap in his fashion; but Tudor is fly-away-too much on the surface, you know. If it came to being wrecked on a desert island, I'd prefer Von Blix.»
«I don't quite understand,» Joan objected. «What have you against Tudor?»
«You remember Browning's 'Last Duchess'?»
She nodded.
«Well, Tudor reminds me of her-«
«But she was delightful.»
«So she was. But she was a woman. One expects something different from a man-more control, you know, more restraint, more deliberation. A man must be more solid, more solid and steady– going and less effervescent. A man of Tudor's type gets on my nerves. One demands more repose from a man.»
Joan felt that she did not quite agree with his judgment; and, somehow, Sheldon caught her feeling and was disturbed. He remembered noting how her eyes had brightened as she talked with the newcomer-confound it all, was he getting jealous? he asked himself. Why shouldn't her eyes brighten? What concern was it of his?
A second boat had been lowered, and the outfit of the shore party was landed rapidly. A dozen of the crew put the knocked-down boats together on the beach. There were five of these craft-lean and narrow, with flaring sides, and remarkably long. Each was equipped with three paddles and several iron-shod poles.
«You chaps certainly seem to know river-work,» Sheldon told one of the carpenters.
The man spat a mouthful of tobacco-juice into the white sand, and answered, –
«We use 'em in Alaska. They're modelled after the Yukon poling– boats, and you can bet your life they're crackerjacks. This creek'll be a snap alongside some of them Northern streams. Five hundred pounds in one of them boats, an' two men can snake it along in a way that'd surprise you.»
At sunset the Martha broke out her anchor and got under way, dipping her flag and saluting with a bomb gun. The Union Jack ran up and down the staff, and Sheldon replied with his brass signal– cannon. The miners pitched their tents in the compound, and cooked on the beach, while Tudor dined with Joan and Sheldon.
Their guest seemed to have been everywhere and seen everything and met everybody, and, encouraged by Joan, his talk was largely upon his own adventures. He was an adventurer of adventurers, and by his own account had been born into adventure. Descended from old New England stock, his father a consul-general, he had been born in Germany, in which country he had received his early education and his accent. Then, still a boy, he had rejoined his father in Turkey, and accompanied him later to Persia, his father having been appointed Minister to that country.
Tudor had always been a wanderer, and with facile wit and quick vivid description he leaped from episode and place to episode and place, relating his experiences seemingly not because they were his, but for the sake of their bizarreness and uniqueness, for the unusual incident or the laughable situation. He had gone through South American revolutions, been a Rough Rider in Cuba, a scout in South Africa, a war correspondent in the Russo-Japanese war. He had mushed dogs in the Klondike, washed gold from the sands of Nome, and edited a newspaper in San Francisco. The President of the United States was his friend. He was equally at home in the clubs of London and the Continent, the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, and the selector's shanties in the Never-Never country. He had shot big game in Siam, pearled in the Paumotus, visited Tolstoy, seen the Passion Play, and crossed the Andes on mule-back; while he was a living directory of the fever holes of West Africa.
Sheldon leaned back in his chair on the veranda, sipping his coffee and listening. In spite of himself he felt touched by the charm of the man who had led so varied a life. And yet Sheldon was not comfortable. It seemed to him that the man addressed himself particularly to Joan. His words and smiles were directed impartially toward both of them, yet Sheldon was certain, had the two men of them been alone, that the conversation would have been along different lines. Tudor had seen the effect on Joan and deliberately continued the flow of reminiscence, netting her in the glamour of romance. Sheldon watched her rapt attention, listened to her spontaneous laughter, quick questions, and passing judgments, and felt grow within him the dawning consciousness that he loved her.
So he was very quiet and almost sad, though at times he was aware of a distinct irritation against his guest, and he even speculated as to what percentage of Tudor's tale was true and how any of it could be proved or disproved. In this connection, as if the scene had been prepared by a clever playwright, Utami came upon the veranda to report to Joan the capture of a crocodile in the trap they had made for her.
Tudor's face, illuminated by the match with which he was lighting his cigarette, caught Utami's eye, and Utami forgot to report to his mistress.
«Hello, Tudor,» he said, with a familiarity that startled Sheldon.
The Polynesian's hand went out, and Tudor, shaking it, was staring into his face.
«Who is it? « he asked. «I can't see you.»
«Utami.»
«And who the dickens is Utami? Where did I ever meet you, my man?»
«You no forget the Huahine?» Utami chided. «Last time Huahine sail?»
Tudor gripped the Tahitian's hand a second time and shook it with genuine heartiness.
«There was only one kanaka who came out of the Huahine that last voyage, and that kanaka was Joe. The deuce take it, man, I'm glad to see you, though I never heard your new name before.»
«Yes, everybody speak me Joe along the Huahine. Utami my name all the time, just the same.»
«But what are you doing here?» Tudor asked, releasing the sailor's hand and leaning eagerly forward.
«Me sail along Missie Lackalanna her schooner Miele. We go Tahiti, Raiatea, Tahaa, Bora-Bora, Manua, Tutuila, Apia, Savaii, and Fiji Islands-plenty Fiji Islands. Me stop along Missie Lackalanna in Solomons. Very soon she catch other schooner.»
«He and I were the two survivors of the wreck of the Huahine,» Tudor explained to the others. «Fifty-seven all told on board when we sailed from Huapa, and Joe and I were the only two that ever set foot on land again. Hurricane, you know, in the Paumotus. That was when I was after pearls.»
«And you never told me, Utami, that you'd been wrecked in a hurricane,» Joan said reproachfully.
The big Tahitian shifted his weight and flashed his teeth in a conciliating smile.
«Me no t'ink nothing 't all,» he said.
He half-turned, as if to depart, by his manner indicating that he considered it time to go while yet he desired to remain.
«All right, Utami,» Tudor said. «I'll see you in the morning and have a yarn.»
«He saved my life, the beggar,» Tudor explained, as the Tahitian strode away and with heavy softness of foot went down the steps. «Swim! I never met a better swimmer.»
And thereat, solicited by Joan, Tudor narrated the wreck of the Huahine; while Sheldon smoked and pondered, and decided that whatever the man's shortcomings were, he was at least not a liar.
CHAPTER XV-A DISCOURSE ON MANNERS
The days passed, and Tudor seemed loath to leave the hospitality of Berande. Everything was ready for the start, but he lingered on, spending much time in Joan's company and thereby increasing the dislike Sheldon had taken to him. He went swimming with her, in point of rashness exceeding her; and dynamited fish with her, diving among the hungry ground-sharks and contesting with them for possession of the stunned prey, until he earned the approval of the whole Tahitian crew. Arahu challenged him to tear a fish from a shark's jaws, leaving half to the shark and bringing the other half himself to the surface; and Tudor performed the feat, a flip from the sandpaper hide of the astonished shark scraping several inches of skin from his shoulder. And Joan was delighted, while Sheldon, looking on, realized that here was the hero of her adventure-dreams coming true. She did not care for love, but he felt that if ever she did love it would be that sort of a man-«a man who exhibited,» was his way of putting it.
He felt himself handicapped in the presence of Tudor, who had the gift of making a show of all his qualities. Sheldon knew himself for a brave man, wherefore he made no advertisement of the fact. He knew that just as readily as the other would he dive among ground-sharks to save a life, but in that fact he could find no sanction for the foolhardy act of diving among sharks for the half of a fish. The difference between them was that he kept the curtain of his shop window down. Life pulsed steadily and deep in him, and it was not his nature needlessly to agitate the surface so that the world could see the splash he was making. And the effect of the other's amazing exhibitions was to make him retreat more deeply within himself and wrap himself more thickly than ever in the nerveless, stoical calm of his race.
«You are so stupid the last few days,» Joan complained to him. «One would think you were sick, or bilious, or something. You don't seem to have an idea in your head above black labour and cocoanuts. What is the matter?»
Sheldon smiled and beat a further retreat within himself, listening the while to Joan and Tudor propounding the theory of the strong arm by which the white man ordered life among the lesser breeds. As he listened Sheldon realized, as by revelation, that that was precisely what he was doing. While they philosophized about it he was living it, placing the strong hand of his race firmly on the shoulders of the lesser breeds that laboured on Berande or menaced it from afar. But why talk about it? he asked himself. It was sufficient to do it and be done with it.
He said as much, dryly and quietly, and found himself involved in a discussion, with Joan and Tudor siding against him, in which a more astounding charge than ever he had dreamed of was made against the very English control and reserve of which he was secretly proud.
«The Yankees talk a lot about what they do and have done,» Tudor said, «and are looked down upon by the English as braggarts. But the Yankee is only a child. He does not know effectually how to brag. He talks about it, you see. But the Englishman goes him one better by not talking about it. The Englishman's proverbial lack of bragging is a subtler form of brag after all. It is really clever, as you will agree.»
«I never thought of it before,» Joan cried. «Of course. An Englishman performs some terrifically heroic exploit, and is very modest and reserved-refuses to talk about it at all-and the effect is that by his silence he as much as says, 'I do things like this every day. It is as easy as rolling off a log. You ought to see the really heroic things I could do if they ever came my way. But this little thing, this little episode-really, don't you know, I fail to see anything in it remarkable or unusual.' As for me, if I went up in a powder explosion, or saved a hundred lives, I'd want all my friends to hear about it, and their friends as well. I'd be prouder than Lucifer over the affair. Confess, Mr. Sheldon, don't you feel proud down inside when you've done something daring or courageous?»
Sheldon nodded.
«Then,» she pressed home the point, «isn't disguising that pride under a mask of careless indifference equivalent to telling a lie?»
«Yes, it is,» he admitted. «But we tell similar lies every day. It is a matter of training, and the English are better trained, that is all. Your countrymen will be trained as well in time. As Mr. Tudor said, the Yankees are young.»
«Thank goodness we haven't begun to tell such lies yet!» was Joan's ejaculation.
«Oh, but you have,» Sheldon said quickly. «You were telling me a lie of that order only the other day. You remember when you were going up the lantern-halyards hand over hand? Your face was the personification of duplicity.»
«It was no such thing.»
«Pardon me a moment,» he went on. «Your face was as calm and peaceful as though you were reclining in a steamer-chair. To look at your face one would have inferred that carrying the weight of your body up a rope hand over hand was a very commonplace accomplishment-as easy as rolling off a log. And you needn't tell me, Miss Lackland, that you didn't make faces the first time you tried to climb a rope. But, like any circus athlete, you trained yourself out of the face-making period. You trained your face to hide your feelings, to hide the exhausting effort your muscles were making. It was, to quote Mr. Tudor, a subtler exhibition of physical prowess. And that is all our English reserve is-a mere matter of training. Certainly we are proud inside of the things we do and have done, proud as Lucifer-yes, and prouder. But we have grown up, and no longer talk about such things.»
«I surrender,» Joan cried. «You are not so stupid after all.»
«Yes, you have us there,» Tudor admitted. «But you wouldn't have had us if you hadn't broken your training rules.»
«How do you mean?»
«By talking about it.»
Joan clapped her hands in approval. Tudor lighted a fresh cigarette, while Sheldon sat on, imperturbably silent.
«He got you there,» Joan challenged. «Why don't you crush him?»
«Really, I can't think of anything to say,» Sheldon said. «I know my position is sound, and that is satisfactory enough.»
«You might retort,» she suggested, «that when an adult is with kindergarten children he must descend to kindergarten idioms in order to make himself intelligible. That was why you broke training rules. It was the only way to make us children understand.»
«You've deserted in the heat of the battle, Miss Lackland, and gone over to the enemy,» Tudor said plaintively.
But she was not listening. Instead, she was looking intently across the compound and out to sea. They followed her gaze, and saw a green light and the loom of a vessel's sails.
«I wonder if it's the Martha come back,» Tudor hazarded.
«No, the sidelight is too low,» Joan answered. «Besides, they've got the sweeps out. Don't you hear them? They wouldn't be sweeping a big vessel like the Martha.»
«Besides, the Martha has a gasoline engine-twenty-five horse– power,» Tudor added.
«Just the sort of a craft for us,» Joan said wistfully to Sheldon. «I really must see if I can't get a schooner with an engine. I might get a second-hand engine put in.»
«That would mean the additional expense of an engineer's wages,» he objected.
«But it would pay for itself by quicker passages,» she argued; «and it would be as good as insurance. I know. I've knocked about amongst reefs myself. Besides, if you weren't so mediaeval, I could be skipper and save more than the engineer's wages.»
He did not reply to her thrust, and she glanced at him. He was looking out over the water, and in the lantern light she noted the lines of his face-strong, stern, dogged, the mouth almost chaste but firmer and thinner-lipped than Tudor's. For the first time she realized the quality of his strength, the calm and quiet of it, its simple integrity and reposeful determination. She glanced quickly at Tudor on the other side of her. It was a handsomer face, one that was more immediately pleasing. But she did not like the mouth. It was made for kissing, and she abhorred kisses. This was not a deliberately achieved concept; it came to her in the form of a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. For the moment she knew a fleeting doubt of the man. Perhaps Sheldon was right in his judgment of the other. She did not know, and it concerned her little; for boats, and the sea, and the things and happenings of the sea were of far more vital interest to her than men, and the next moment she was staring through the warm tropic darkness at the loom of the sails and the steady green of the moving sidelight, and listening eagerly to the click of the sweeps in the rowlocks. In her mind's eye she could see the straining naked forms of black men bending rhythmically to the work, and somewhere on that strange deck she knew was the inevitable master-man, conning the vessel in to its anchorage, peering at the dim tree-line of the shore, judging the deceitful night-distances, feeling on his cheek the first fans of the land breeze that was even then beginning to blow, weighing, thinking, measuring, gauging the score or more of ever– shifting forces, through which, by which, and in spite of which he directed the steady equilibrium of his course. She knew it because she loved it, and she was alive to it as only a sailor could be.
Twice she heard the splash of the lead, and listened intently for the cry that followed. Once a man's voice spoke, low, imperative, issuing an order, and she thrilled with the delight of it. It was only a direction to the man at the wheel to port his helm. She watched the slight altering of the course, and knew that it was for the purpose of enabling the flat-hauled sails to catch those first fans of the land breeze, and she waited for the same low voice to utter the one word «Steady!» And again she thrilled when it did utter it. Once more the lead splashed, and «Eleven fadom» was the resulting cry. «Let go!» the low voice came to her through the darkness, followed by the surging rumble of the anchor-chain. The clicking of the sheaves in the blocks as the sails ran down, head– sails first, was music to her; and she detected on the instant the jamming of a jib-downhaul, and almost saw the impatient jerk with which the sailor must have cleared it. Nor did she take interest in the two men beside her till both lights, red and green, came into view as the anchor checked the onward way.
Sheldon was wondering as to the identity of the craft, while Tudor persisted in believing it might be the Martha.
«It's the Minerva,» Joan said decidedly.
«How do you know?» Sheldon asked, sceptical of her certitude.
«It's a ketch to begin with. And besides, I could tell anywhere the rattle of her main peak-blocks-they're too large for the halyard.»
A dark figure crossed the compound diagonally from the beach gate, where whoever it was had been watching the vessel.
«Is that you, Utami?» Joan called.
«No, Missie; me Matapuu,» was the answer.
«What vessel is it?»
«Me t'ink Minerva.»
Joan looked triumphantly at Sheldon, who bowed.
«If Matapuu says so it must be so,» he murmured.
«But when Joan Lackland says so, you doubt,» she cried, «just as you doubt her ability as a skipper. But never mind, you'll be sorry some day for all your unkindness. There's the boat lowering now, and in five minutes we'll be shaking hands with Christian Young.»
Lalaperu brought out the glasses and cigarettes and the eternal whisky and soda, and before the five minutes were past the gate clicked and Christian Young, tawny and golden, gentle of voice and look and hand, came up the bungalow steps and joined them.
He felt himself handicapped in the presence of Tudor, who had the gift of making a show of all his qualities. Sheldon knew himself for a brave man, wherefore he made no advertisement of the fact. He knew that just as readily as the other would he dive among ground-sharks to save a life, but in that fact he could find no sanction for the foolhardy act of diving among sharks for the half of a fish. The difference between them was that he kept the curtain of his shop window down. Life pulsed steadily and deep in him, and it was not his nature needlessly to agitate the surface so that the world could see the splash he was making. And the effect of the other's amazing exhibitions was to make him retreat more deeply within himself and wrap himself more thickly than ever in the nerveless, stoical calm of his race.
«You are so stupid the last few days,» Joan complained to him. «One would think you were sick, or bilious, or something. You don't seem to have an idea in your head above black labour and cocoanuts. What is the matter?»
Sheldon smiled and beat a further retreat within himself, listening the while to Joan and Tudor propounding the theory of the strong arm by which the white man ordered life among the lesser breeds. As he listened Sheldon realized, as by revelation, that that was precisely what he was doing. While they philosophized about it he was living it, placing the strong hand of his race firmly on the shoulders of the lesser breeds that laboured on Berande or menaced it from afar. But why talk about it? he asked himself. It was sufficient to do it and be done with it.
He said as much, dryly and quietly, and found himself involved in a discussion, with Joan and Tudor siding against him, in which a more astounding charge than ever he had dreamed of was made against the very English control and reserve of which he was secretly proud.
«The Yankees talk a lot about what they do and have done,» Tudor said, «and are looked down upon by the English as braggarts. But the Yankee is only a child. He does not know effectually how to brag. He talks about it, you see. But the Englishman goes him one better by not talking about it. The Englishman's proverbial lack of bragging is a subtler form of brag after all. It is really clever, as you will agree.»
«I never thought of it before,» Joan cried. «Of course. An Englishman performs some terrifically heroic exploit, and is very modest and reserved-refuses to talk about it at all-and the effect is that by his silence he as much as says, 'I do things like this every day. It is as easy as rolling off a log. You ought to see the really heroic things I could do if they ever came my way. But this little thing, this little episode-really, don't you know, I fail to see anything in it remarkable or unusual.' As for me, if I went up in a powder explosion, or saved a hundred lives, I'd want all my friends to hear about it, and their friends as well. I'd be prouder than Lucifer over the affair. Confess, Mr. Sheldon, don't you feel proud down inside when you've done something daring or courageous?»
Sheldon nodded.
«Then,» she pressed home the point, «isn't disguising that pride under a mask of careless indifference equivalent to telling a lie?»
«Yes, it is,» he admitted. «But we tell similar lies every day. It is a matter of training, and the English are better trained, that is all. Your countrymen will be trained as well in time. As Mr. Tudor said, the Yankees are young.»
«Thank goodness we haven't begun to tell such lies yet!» was Joan's ejaculation.
«Oh, but you have,» Sheldon said quickly. «You were telling me a lie of that order only the other day. You remember when you were going up the lantern-halyards hand over hand? Your face was the personification of duplicity.»
«It was no such thing.»
«Pardon me a moment,» he went on. «Your face was as calm and peaceful as though you were reclining in a steamer-chair. To look at your face one would have inferred that carrying the weight of your body up a rope hand over hand was a very commonplace accomplishment-as easy as rolling off a log. And you needn't tell me, Miss Lackland, that you didn't make faces the first time you tried to climb a rope. But, like any circus athlete, you trained yourself out of the face-making period. You trained your face to hide your feelings, to hide the exhausting effort your muscles were making. It was, to quote Mr. Tudor, a subtler exhibition of physical prowess. And that is all our English reserve is-a mere matter of training. Certainly we are proud inside of the things we do and have done, proud as Lucifer-yes, and prouder. But we have grown up, and no longer talk about such things.»
«I surrender,» Joan cried. «You are not so stupid after all.»
«Yes, you have us there,» Tudor admitted. «But you wouldn't have had us if you hadn't broken your training rules.»
«How do you mean?»
«By talking about it.»
Joan clapped her hands in approval. Tudor lighted a fresh cigarette, while Sheldon sat on, imperturbably silent.
«He got you there,» Joan challenged. «Why don't you crush him?»
«Really, I can't think of anything to say,» Sheldon said. «I know my position is sound, and that is satisfactory enough.»
«You might retort,» she suggested, «that when an adult is with kindergarten children he must descend to kindergarten idioms in order to make himself intelligible. That was why you broke training rules. It was the only way to make us children understand.»
«You've deserted in the heat of the battle, Miss Lackland, and gone over to the enemy,» Tudor said plaintively.
But she was not listening. Instead, she was looking intently across the compound and out to sea. They followed her gaze, and saw a green light and the loom of a vessel's sails.
«I wonder if it's the Martha come back,» Tudor hazarded.
«No, the sidelight is too low,» Joan answered. «Besides, they've got the sweeps out. Don't you hear them? They wouldn't be sweeping a big vessel like the Martha.»
«Besides, the Martha has a gasoline engine-twenty-five horse– power,» Tudor added.
«Just the sort of a craft for us,» Joan said wistfully to Sheldon. «I really must see if I can't get a schooner with an engine. I might get a second-hand engine put in.»
«That would mean the additional expense of an engineer's wages,» he objected.
«But it would pay for itself by quicker passages,» she argued; «and it would be as good as insurance. I know. I've knocked about amongst reefs myself. Besides, if you weren't so mediaeval, I could be skipper and save more than the engineer's wages.»
He did not reply to her thrust, and she glanced at him. He was looking out over the water, and in the lantern light she noted the lines of his face-strong, stern, dogged, the mouth almost chaste but firmer and thinner-lipped than Tudor's. For the first time she realized the quality of his strength, the calm and quiet of it, its simple integrity and reposeful determination. She glanced quickly at Tudor on the other side of her. It was a handsomer face, one that was more immediately pleasing. But she did not like the mouth. It was made for kissing, and she abhorred kisses. This was not a deliberately achieved concept; it came to her in the form of a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. For the moment she knew a fleeting doubt of the man. Perhaps Sheldon was right in his judgment of the other. She did not know, and it concerned her little; for boats, and the sea, and the things and happenings of the sea were of far more vital interest to her than men, and the next moment she was staring through the warm tropic darkness at the loom of the sails and the steady green of the moving sidelight, and listening eagerly to the click of the sweeps in the rowlocks. In her mind's eye she could see the straining naked forms of black men bending rhythmically to the work, and somewhere on that strange deck she knew was the inevitable master-man, conning the vessel in to its anchorage, peering at the dim tree-line of the shore, judging the deceitful night-distances, feeling on his cheek the first fans of the land breeze that was even then beginning to blow, weighing, thinking, measuring, gauging the score or more of ever– shifting forces, through which, by which, and in spite of which he directed the steady equilibrium of his course. She knew it because she loved it, and she was alive to it as only a sailor could be.
Twice she heard the splash of the lead, and listened intently for the cry that followed. Once a man's voice spoke, low, imperative, issuing an order, and she thrilled with the delight of it. It was only a direction to the man at the wheel to port his helm. She watched the slight altering of the course, and knew that it was for the purpose of enabling the flat-hauled sails to catch those first fans of the land breeze, and she waited for the same low voice to utter the one word «Steady!» And again she thrilled when it did utter it. Once more the lead splashed, and «Eleven fadom» was the resulting cry. «Let go!» the low voice came to her through the darkness, followed by the surging rumble of the anchor-chain. The clicking of the sheaves in the blocks as the sails ran down, head– sails first, was music to her; and she detected on the instant the jamming of a jib-downhaul, and almost saw the impatient jerk with which the sailor must have cleared it. Nor did she take interest in the two men beside her till both lights, red and green, came into view as the anchor checked the onward way.
Sheldon was wondering as to the identity of the craft, while Tudor persisted in believing it might be the Martha.
«It's the Minerva,» Joan said decidedly.
«How do you know?» Sheldon asked, sceptical of her certitude.
«It's a ketch to begin with. And besides, I could tell anywhere the rattle of her main peak-blocks-they're too large for the halyard.»
A dark figure crossed the compound diagonally from the beach gate, where whoever it was had been watching the vessel.
«Is that you, Utami?» Joan called.
«No, Missie; me Matapuu,» was the answer.
«What vessel is it?»
«Me t'ink Minerva.»
Joan looked triumphantly at Sheldon, who bowed.
«If Matapuu says so it must be so,» he murmured.
«But when Joan Lackland says so, you doubt,» she cried, «just as you doubt her ability as a skipper. But never mind, you'll be sorry some day for all your unkindness. There's the boat lowering now, and in five minutes we'll be shaking hands with Christian Young.»
Lalaperu brought out the glasses and cigarettes and the eternal whisky and soda, and before the five minutes were past the gate clicked and Christian Young, tawny and golden, gentle of voice and look and hand, came up the bungalow steps and joined them.
CHAPTER XVI-THE GIRL WHO HAD NOT GROWN UP
News, as usual, Christian Young brought-news of the drinking at Guvutu, where the men boasted that they drank between drinks; news of the new rifles adrift on Ysabel, of the latest murders on Malaita, of Tom Butler's sickness on Santa Ana; and last and most important, news that the Matambo had gone on a reef in the Shortlands and would be laid off one run for repairs.
«That means five weeks more before you can sail for Sydney,» Sheldon said to Joan.
«And that we are losing precious time,» she added ruefully.
«If you want to go to Sydney, the Upolu sails from Tulagi to-morrow afternoon,» Young said.
«But I thought she was running recruits for the Germans in Samoa,» she objected. «At any rate, I could catch her to Samoa, and change at Apia to one of the Weir Line freighters. It's a long way around, but still it would save time.»
«This time the Upolu is going straight to Sydney,» Young explained. «She's going to dry-dock, you see; and you can catch her as late as five to-morrow afternoon-at least, so her first officer told me.»
«But I've got to go to Guvutu first.» Joan looked at the men with a whimsical expression. «I've some shopping to do. I can't wear these Berande curtains into Sydney. I must buy cloth at Guvutu and make myself a dress during the voyage down. I'll start immediately-in an hour. Lalaperu, you bring 'm one fella Adamu Adam along me. Tell 'm that fella Ornfiri make 'm kai-kai take along whale-boat.» She rose to her feet, looking at Sheldon. «And you, please, have the boys carry down the whale-boat-my boat, you know. I'll be off in an hour.»
Both Sheldon and Tudor looked at their watches.
«It's an all-night row,» Sheldon said. «You might wait till morning-«
«And miss my shopping? No, thank you. Besides, the Upolu is not a regular passenger steamer, and she is just as liable to sail ahead of time as on time. And from what I hear about those Guvutu sybarites, the best time to shop will be in the morning. And now you'll have to excuse me, for I've got to pack.»
«I'll go over with you,» Sheldon announced.
«Let me run you over in the Minerva,» said Young.
She shook her head laughingly.
«I'm going in the whale-boat. One would think, from all your solicitude, that I'd never been away from home before. You, Mr. Sheldon, as my partner, I cannot permit to desert Berande and your work out of a mistaken notion of courtesy. If you won't permit me to be skipper, I won't permit your galivanting over the sea as protector of young women who don't need protection. And as for you, Captain Young, you know very well that you just left Guvutu this morning, that you are bound for Marau, and that you said yourself that in two hours you are getting under way again.»
«But may I not see you safely across?» Tudor asked, a pleading note in his voice that rasped on Sheldon's nerves.
«No, no, and again no,» she cried. «You've all got your work to do, and so have I. I came to the Solomons to work, not to be escorted about like a doll. For that matter, here's my escort, and there are seven more like him.»
Adamu Adam stood beside her, towering above her, as he towered above the three white men. The clinging cotton undershirt he wore could not hide the bulge of his tremendous muscles.
«Look at his fist,» said Tudor. «I'd hate to receive a punch from it.»
«I don't blame you.» Joan laughed reminiscently. «I saw him hit the captain of a Swedish bark on the beach at Levuka, in the Fijis. It was the captain's fault. I saw it all myself, and it was splendid. Adamu only hit him once, and he broke the man's arm. You remember, Adamu?»
The big Tahitian smiled and nodded, his black eyes, soft and deer– like, seeming to give the lie to so belligerent a nature.
«We start in an hour in the whale-boat for Guvutu, big brother,» Joan said to him. «Tell your brothers, all of them, so that they can get ready. We catch the Upolu for Sydney. You will all come along, and sail back to the Solomons in the new schooner. Take your extra shirts and dungarees along. Plenty cold weather down there. Now run along, and tell them to hurry. Leave the guns behind. Turn them over to Mr. Sheldon. We won't need them.»
«If you are really bent upon going-« Sheldon began.
«That's settled long ago,» she answered shortly. «I'm going to pack now. But I'll tell you what you can do for me-issue some tobacco and other stuff they want to my men.»
An hour later the three men had shaken hands with Joan down on the beach. She gave the signal, and the boat shoved off, six men at the oars, the seventh man for'ard, and Adamu Adam at the steering– sweep. Joan was standing up in the stern-sheets, reiterating her good-byes-a slim figure of a woman in the tight-fitting jacket she had worn ashore from the wreck, the long-barrelled Colt's revolver hanging from the loose belt around her waist, her clear-cut face like a boy's under the Stetson hat that failed to conceal the heavy masses of hair beneath.
«You'd better get into shelter,» she called to them. «There's a big squall coming. And I hope you've got plenty of chain out, Captain Young. Good-bye! Good-bye, everybody!»
Her last words came out of the darkness, which wrapped itself solidly about the boat. Yet they continued to stare into the blackness in the direction in which the boat had disappeared, listening to the steady click of the oars in the rowlocks until it faded away and ceased.
«She is only a girl,» Christian Young said with slow solemnity. The discovery seemed to have been made on the spur of the moment. «She is only a girl,» he repeated with greater solemnity.
«A dashed pretty one, and a good traveller,» Tudor laughed. «She certainly has spunk, eh, Sheldon?»
«Yes, she is brave,» was the reluctant answer for Sheldon did not feel disposed to talk about her.
«That's the American of it,» Tudor went on. «Push, and go, and energy, and independence. What do you think, skipper?»
«I think she is young, very young, only a girl,» replied the captain of the Minerva, continuing to stare into the blackness that hid the sea.
The blackness seemed suddenly to increase in density, and they stumbled up the beach, feeling their way to the gate.
«Watch out for nuts,» Sheldon warned, as the first blast of the squall shrieked through the palms. They joined hands and staggered up the path, with the ripe cocoanuts thudding in a monstrous rain all around them. They gained the veranda, where they sat in silence over their whisky, each man staring straight out to sea, where the wildly swinging riding-light of the Minerva could be seen in the lulls of the driving rain.
Somewhere out there, Sheldon reflected, was Joan Lackland, the girl who had not grown up, the woman good to look upon, with only a boy's mind and a boy's desires, leaving Berande amid storm and conflict in much the same manner that she had first arrived, in the stern-sheets of her whale-boat, Adamu Adam steering, her savage crew bending to the oars. And she was taking her Stetson hat with her, along with the cartridge-belt and the long-barrelled revolver. He suddenly discovered an immense affection for those fripperies of hers at which he had secretly laughed when first he saw them. He became aware of the sentimental direction in which his fancy was leading him, and felt inclined to laugh. But he did not laugh. The next moment he was busy visioning the hat, and belt, and revolver. Undoubtedly this was love, he thought, and he felt a tiny glow of pride in him in that the Solomons had not succeeded in killing all his sentiment.
An hour later, Christian Young stood up, knocked out his pipe, and prepared to go aboard and get under way.
«She's all right,» he said, apropos of nothing spoken, and yet distinctly relevant to what was in each of their minds. «She's got a good boat's-crew, and she's a sailor herself. Good-night, Mr. Sheldon. Anything I can do for you down Marau-way?» He turned and pointed to a widening space of starry sky. «It's going to be a fine night after all. With this favouring bit of breeze she has sail on already, and she'll make Guvutu by daylight. Good-night.»
«I guess I'll turn in, old man,» Tudor said, rising and placing his glass on the table. «I'll start the first thing in the morning. It's been disgraceful the way I've been hanging on here. Good– night.»
Sheldon, sitting on alone, wondered if the other man would have decided to pull out in the morning had Joan not sailed away. Well, there was one bit of consolation in it: Joan had certainly lingered at Berande for no man, not even Tudor. «I start in an hour»-her words rang in his brain, and under his eyelids he could see her as she stood up and uttered them. He smiled. The instant she heard the news she had made up her mind to go. It was not very flattering to man, but what could any man count in her eyes when a schooner waiting to be bought in Sydney was in the wind? What a creature! What a creature!
Berande was a lonely place to Sheldon in the days that followed. In the morning after Joan's departure, he had seen Tudor's expedition off on its way up the Balesuna; in the late afternoon, through his telescope, he had seen the smoke of the Upolu that was bearing Joan away to Sydney; and in the evening he sat down to dinner in solitary state, devoting more of his time to looking at her empty chair than to his food. He never came out on the veranda without glancing first of all at her grass house in the corner of the compound; and one evening, idly knocking the balls about on the billiard table, he came to himself to find himself standing staring at the nail upon which from the first she had hung her Stetson hat and her revolver-belt.
Why should he care for her? he demanded of himself angrily. She was certainly the last woman in the world he would have thought of choosing for himself. Never had he encountered one who had so thoroughly irritated him, rasped his feelings, smashed his conventions, and violated nearly every attribute of what had been his ideal of woman. Had he been too long away from the world? Had he forgotten what the race of women was like? Was it merely a case of propinquity? And she wasn't really a woman. She was a masquerader. Under all her seeming of woman, she was a boy, playing a boy's pranks, diving for fish amongst sharks, sporting a revolver, longing for adventure, and, what was more, going out in search of it in her whale-boat, along with her savage islanders and her bag of sovereigns. But he loved her-that was the point of it all, and he did not try to evade it. He was not sorry that it was so. He loved her-that was the overwhelming, astounding fact.
Once again he discovered a big enthusiasm for Berande. All the bubble-illusions concerning the life of the tropical planter had been pricked by the stern facts of the Solomons. Following the death of Hughie, he had resolved to muddle along somehow with the plantation; but this resolve had not been based upon desire. Instead, it was based upon the inherent stubbornness of his nature and his dislike to give over an attempted task.
But now it was different. Berande meant everything. It must succeed-not merely because Joan was a partner in it, but because he wanted to make that partnership permanently binding. Three more years and the plantation would be a splendid-paying investment. They could then take yearly trips to Australia, and oftener; and an occasional run home to England-or Hawaii, would come as a matter of course.
He spent his evenings poring over accounts, or making endless calculations based on cheaper freights for copra and on the possible maximum and minimum market prices for that staple of commerce. His days were spent out on the plantation. He undertook more clearing of bush; and clearing and planting went on, under his personal supervision, at a faster pace than ever before. He experimented with premiums for extra work performed by the black boys, and yearned continually for more of them to put to work. Not until Joan could return on the schooner would this be possible, for the professional recruiters were all under long contracts to the Fulcrum Brothers, Morgan and Raff, and the Fires, Philp Company; while the Flibberty-Gibbet was wholly occupied in running about among his widely scattered trading stations, which extended from the coast of New Georgia in one direction to Ulava and Sikiana in the other. Blacks he must have, and, if Joan were fortunate in getting a schooner, three months at least must elapse before the first recruits could be landed on Berande.
A week after the Upolu's departure, the Malakula dropped anchor and her skipper came ashore for a game of billiards and to gossip until the land breeze sprang up. Besides, as he told his super-cargo, he simply had to come ashore, not merely to deliver the large package of seeds with full instructions for planting from Joan, but to shock Sheldon with the little surprise born of information he was bringing with him.
Captain Auckland played the billiards first, and it was not until he was comfortably seated in a steamer-chair, his second whisky securely in his hand, that he let off his bomb.
«A great piece, that Miss Lackland of yours,» he chuckled. «Claims to be a part-owner of Berande. Says she's your partner. Is that straight?»
Sheldon nodded coldly.
«You don't say? That is a surprise! Well, she hasn't convinced Guvutu or Tulagi of it. They're pretty used to irregular things over there, but-ha! ha!– « he stopped to have his laugh out and to mop his bald head with a trade handkerchief. «But that partnership yarn of hers was too big to swallow, though it gave them the excuse for a few more drinks.»
«There is nothing irregular about it. It is an ordinary business transaction.» Sheldon strove to act as though such transactions were quite the commonplace thing on plantations in the Solomons. «She invested something like fifteen hundred pounds in Berande-«
«So she said.»
«And she has gone to Sydney on business for the plantation.»
«Oh, no, she hasn't.»
«I beg pardon?» Sheldon queried.
«I said she hasn't, that's all.»
«But didn't the Upolu sail? I could have sworn I saw her smoke last Tuesday afternoon, late, as she passed Savo.»
«The Upolu sailed all right.» Captain Auckland sipped his whisky with provoking slowness. «Only Miss Lackland wasn't a passenger.»
«Then where is she?»
«At Guvutu, last I saw of her. She was going to Sydney to buy a schooner, wasn't she?»
«Yes, yes.»
«That's what she said. Well, she's bought one, though I wouldn't give her ten shillings for it if a nor'wester blows up, and it's about time we had one. This has been too long a spell of good weather to last.»
«If you came here to excite my curiosity, old man,» Sheldon said, «you've certainly succeeded. Now go ahead and tell me in a straightforward way what has happened. What schooner? Where is it? How did she happen to buy it?»
«First, the schooner Martha,» the skipper answered, checking his replies off on his fingers. «Second, the Martha is on the outside reef at Poonga-Poonga, looted clean of everything portable, and ready to go to pieces with the first bit of lively sea. And third, Miss Lackland bought her at auction. She was knocked down to her for fifty-five quid by the third-assistant-resident-commissioner. I ought to know. I bid fifty myself, for Morgan and Raff. My word, weren't they hot! I told them to go to the devil, and that it was their fault for limiting me to fifty quid when they thought the chance to salve the Martha was worth more. You see, they weren't expecting competition. Fulcrum Brothers had no representative present, neither had Fires, Philp Company, and the only man to be afraid of was Nielsen's agent, Squires, and him they got drunk and sound asleep over in Guvutu.
«'Twenty,' says I, for my bid. 'Twenty-five,' says the little girl. 'Thirty,' says I. 'Forty,' says she. 'Fifty,' says I. 'Fifty-five,' says she. And there I was stuck. 'Hold on,' says I; 'wait till I see my owners.' 'No, you don't,' says she. 'It's customary,' says I. 'Not anywhere in the world,' says she. 'Then it's courtesy in the Solomons,' says I.
«And d'ye know, on my faith I think Burnett'd have done it, only she pipes up, sweet and pert as you please: 'Mr. Auctioneer, will you kindly proceed with the sale in the customary manner? I've other business to attend to, and I can't afford to wait all night on men who don't know their own minds.' And then she smiles at Burnett, as well-you know, one of those fetching smiles, and damme if Burnett doesn't begin singing out: 'Goin', goin', goin'-last bid-goin', goin' for fifty-five sovereigns-goin', goin', gone-to you, Miss-er-what name, please?'
«That means five weeks more before you can sail for Sydney,» Sheldon said to Joan.
«And that we are losing precious time,» she added ruefully.
«If you want to go to Sydney, the Upolu sails from Tulagi to-morrow afternoon,» Young said.
«But I thought she was running recruits for the Germans in Samoa,» she objected. «At any rate, I could catch her to Samoa, and change at Apia to one of the Weir Line freighters. It's a long way around, but still it would save time.»
«This time the Upolu is going straight to Sydney,» Young explained. «She's going to dry-dock, you see; and you can catch her as late as five to-morrow afternoon-at least, so her first officer told me.»
«But I've got to go to Guvutu first.» Joan looked at the men with a whimsical expression. «I've some shopping to do. I can't wear these Berande curtains into Sydney. I must buy cloth at Guvutu and make myself a dress during the voyage down. I'll start immediately-in an hour. Lalaperu, you bring 'm one fella Adamu Adam along me. Tell 'm that fella Ornfiri make 'm kai-kai take along whale-boat.» She rose to her feet, looking at Sheldon. «And you, please, have the boys carry down the whale-boat-my boat, you know. I'll be off in an hour.»
Both Sheldon and Tudor looked at their watches.
«It's an all-night row,» Sheldon said. «You might wait till morning-«
«And miss my shopping? No, thank you. Besides, the Upolu is not a regular passenger steamer, and she is just as liable to sail ahead of time as on time. And from what I hear about those Guvutu sybarites, the best time to shop will be in the morning. And now you'll have to excuse me, for I've got to pack.»
«I'll go over with you,» Sheldon announced.
«Let me run you over in the Minerva,» said Young.
She shook her head laughingly.
«I'm going in the whale-boat. One would think, from all your solicitude, that I'd never been away from home before. You, Mr. Sheldon, as my partner, I cannot permit to desert Berande and your work out of a mistaken notion of courtesy. If you won't permit me to be skipper, I won't permit your galivanting over the sea as protector of young women who don't need protection. And as for you, Captain Young, you know very well that you just left Guvutu this morning, that you are bound for Marau, and that you said yourself that in two hours you are getting under way again.»
«But may I not see you safely across?» Tudor asked, a pleading note in his voice that rasped on Sheldon's nerves.
«No, no, and again no,» she cried. «You've all got your work to do, and so have I. I came to the Solomons to work, not to be escorted about like a doll. For that matter, here's my escort, and there are seven more like him.»
Adamu Adam stood beside her, towering above her, as he towered above the three white men. The clinging cotton undershirt he wore could not hide the bulge of his tremendous muscles.
«Look at his fist,» said Tudor. «I'd hate to receive a punch from it.»
«I don't blame you.» Joan laughed reminiscently. «I saw him hit the captain of a Swedish bark on the beach at Levuka, in the Fijis. It was the captain's fault. I saw it all myself, and it was splendid. Adamu only hit him once, and he broke the man's arm. You remember, Adamu?»
The big Tahitian smiled and nodded, his black eyes, soft and deer– like, seeming to give the lie to so belligerent a nature.
«We start in an hour in the whale-boat for Guvutu, big brother,» Joan said to him. «Tell your brothers, all of them, so that they can get ready. We catch the Upolu for Sydney. You will all come along, and sail back to the Solomons in the new schooner. Take your extra shirts and dungarees along. Plenty cold weather down there. Now run along, and tell them to hurry. Leave the guns behind. Turn them over to Mr. Sheldon. We won't need them.»
«If you are really bent upon going-« Sheldon began.
«That's settled long ago,» she answered shortly. «I'm going to pack now. But I'll tell you what you can do for me-issue some tobacco and other stuff they want to my men.»
An hour later the three men had shaken hands with Joan down on the beach. She gave the signal, and the boat shoved off, six men at the oars, the seventh man for'ard, and Adamu Adam at the steering– sweep. Joan was standing up in the stern-sheets, reiterating her good-byes-a slim figure of a woman in the tight-fitting jacket she had worn ashore from the wreck, the long-barrelled Colt's revolver hanging from the loose belt around her waist, her clear-cut face like a boy's under the Stetson hat that failed to conceal the heavy masses of hair beneath.
«You'd better get into shelter,» she called to them. «There's a big squall coming. And I hope you've got plenty of chain out, Captain Young. Good-bye! Good-bye, everybody!»
Her last words came out of the darkness, which wrapped itself solidly about the boat. Yet they continued to stare into the blackness in the direction in which the boat had disappeared, listening to the steady click of the oars in the rowlocks until it faded away and ceased.
«She is only a girl,» Christian Young said with slow solemnity. The discovery seemed to have been made on the spur of the moment. «She is only a girl,» he repeated with greater solemnity.
«A dashed pretty one, and a good traveller,» Tudor laughed. «She certainly has spunk, eh, Sheldon?»
«Yes, she is brave,» was the reluctant answer for Sheldon did not feel disposed to talk about her.
«That's the American of it,» Tudor went on. «Push, and go, and energy, and independence. What do you think, skipper?»
«I think she is young, very young, only a girl,» replied the captain of the Minerva, continuing to stare into the blackness that hid the sea.
The blackness seemed suddenly to increase in density, and they stumbled up the beach, feeling their way to the gate.
«Watch out for nuts,» Sheldon warned, as the first blast of the squall shrieked through the palms. They joined hands and staggered up the path, with the ripe cocoanuts thudding in a monstrous rain all around them. They gained the veranda, where they sat in silence over their whisky, each man staring straight out to sea, where the wildly swinging riding-light of the Minerva could be seen in the lulls of the driving rain.
Somewhere out there, Sheldon reflected, was Joan Lackland, the girl who had not grown up, the woman good to look upon, with only a boy's mind and a boy's desires, leaving Berande amid storm and conflict in much the same manner that she had first arrived, in the stern-sheets of her whale-boat, Adamu Adam steering, her savage crew bending to the oars. And she was taking her Stetson hat with her, along with the cartridge-belt and the long-barrelled revolver. He suddenly discovered an immense affection for those fripperies of hers at which he had secretly laughed when first he saw them. He became aware of the sentimental direction in which his fancy was leading him, and felt inclined to laugh. But he did not laugh. The next moment he was busy visioning the hat, and belt, and revolver. Undoubtedly this was love, he thought, and he felt a tiny glow of pride in him in that the Solomons had not succeeded in killing all his sentiment.
An hour later, Christian Young stood up, knocked out his pipe, and prepared to go aboard and get under way.
«She's all right,» he said, apropos of nothing spoken, and yet distinctly relevant to what was in each of their minds. «She's got a good boat's-crew, and she's a sailor herself. Good-night, Mr. Sheldon. Anything I can do for you down Marau-way?» He turned and pointed to a widening space of starry sky. «It's going to be a fine night after all. With this favouring bit of breeze she has sail on already, and she'll make Guvutu by daylight. Good-night.»
«I guess I'll turn in, old man,» Tudor said, rising and placing his glass on the table. «I'll start the first thing in the morning. It's been disgraceful the way I've been hanging on here. Good– night.»
Sheldon, sitting on alone, wondered if the other man would have decided to pull out in the morning had Joan not sailed away. Well, there was one bit of consolation in it: Joan had certainly lingered at Berande for no man, not even Tudor. «I start in an hour»-her words rang in his brain, and under his eyelids he could see her as she stood up and uttered them. He smiled. The instant she heard the news she had made up her mind to go. It was not very flattering to man, but what could any man count in her eyes when a schooner waiting to be bought in Sydney was in the wind? What a creature! What a creature!
Berande was a lonely place to Sheldon in the days that followed. In the morning after Joan's departure, he had seen Tudor's expedition off on its way up the Balesuna; in the late afternoon, through his telescope, he had seen the smoke of the Upolu that was bearing Joan away to Sydney; and in the evening he sat down to dinner in solitary state, devoting more of his time to looking at her empty chair than to his food. He never came out on the veranda without glancing first of all at her grass house in the corner of the compound; and one evening, idly knocking the balls about on the billiard table, he came to himself to find himself standing staring at the nail upon which from the first she had hung her Stetson hat and her revolver-belt.
Why should he care for her? he demanded of himself angrily. She was certainly the last woman in the world he would have thought of choosing for himself. Never had he encountered one who had so thoroughly irritated him, rasped his feelings, smashed his conventions, and violated nearly every attribute of what had been his ideal of woman. Had he been too long away from the world? Had he forgotten what the race of women was like? Was it merely a case of propinquity? And she wasn't really a woman. She was a masquerader. Under all her seeming of woman, she was a boy, playing a boy's pranks, diving for fish amongst sharks, sporting a revolver, longing for adventure, and, what was more, going out in search of it in her whale-boat, along with her savage islanders and her bag of sovereigns. But he loved her-that was the point of it all, and he did not try to evade it. He was not sorry that it was so. He loved her-that was the overwhelming, astounding fact.
Once again he discovered a big enthusiasm for Berande. All the bubble-illusions concerning the life of the tropical planter had been pricked by the stern facts of the Solomons. Following the death of Hughie, he had resolved to muddle along somehow with the plantation; but this resolve had not been based upon desire. Instead, it was based upon the inherent stubbornness of his nature and his dislike to give over an attempted task.
But now it was different. Berande meant everything. It must succeed-not merely because Joan was a partner in it, but because he wanted to make that partnership permanently binding. Three more years and the plantation would be a splendid-paying investment. They could then take yearly trips to Australia, and oftener; and an occasional run home to England-or Hawaii, would come as a matter of course.
He spent his evenings poring over accounts, or making endless calculations based on cheaper freights for copra and on the possible maximum and minimum market prices for that staple of commerce. His days were spent out on the plantation. He undertook more clearing of bush; and clearing and planting went on, under his personal supervision, at a faster pace than ever before. He experimented with premiums for extra work performed by the black boys, and yearned continually for more of them to put to work. Not until Joan could return on the schooner would this be possible, for the professional recruiters were all under long contracts to the Fulcrum Brothers, Morgan and Raff, and the Fires, Philp Company; while the Flibberty-Gibbet was wholly occupied in running about among his widely scattered trading stations, which extended from the coast of New Georgia in one direction to Ulava and Sikiana in the other. Blacks he must have, and, if Joan were fortunate in getting a schooner, three months at least must elapse before the first recruits could be landed on Berande.
A week after the Upolu's departure, the Malakula dropped anchor and her skipper came ashore for a game of billiards and to gossip until the land breeze sprang up. Besides, as he told his super-cargo, he simply had to come ashore, not merely to deliver the large package of seeds with full instructions for planting from Joan, but to shock Sheldon with the little surprise born of information he was bringing with him.
Captain Auckland played the billiards first, and it was not until he was comfortably seated in a steamer-chair, his second whisky securely in his hand, that he let off his bomb.
«A great piece, that Miss Lackland of yours,» he chuckled. «Claims to be a part-owner of Berande. Says she's your partner. Is that straight?»
Sheldon nodded coldly.
«You don't say? That is a surprise! Well, she hasn't convinced Guvutu or Tulagi of it. They're pretty used to irregular things over there, but-ha! ha!– « he stopped to have his laugh out and to mop his bald head with a trade handkerchief. «But that partnership yarn of hers was too big to swallow, though it gave them the excuse for a few more drinks.»
«There is nothing irregular about it. It is an ordinary business transaction.» Sheldon strove to act as though such transactions were quite the commonplace thing on plantations in the Solomons. «She invested something like fifteen hundred pounds in Berande-«
«So she said.»
«And she has gone to Sydney on business for the plantation.»
«Oh, no, she hasn't.»
«I beg pardon?» Sheldon queried.
«I said she hasn't, that's all.»
«But didn't the Upolu sail? I could have sworn I saw her smoke last Tuesday afternoon, late, as she passed Savo.»
«The Upolu sailed all right.» Captain Auckland sipped his whisky with provoking slowness. «Only Miss Lackland wasn't a passenger.»
«Then where is she?»
«At Guvutu, last I saw of her. She was going to Sydney to buy a schooner, wasn't she?»
«Yes, yes.»
«That's what she said. Well, she's bought one, though I wouldn't give her ten shillings for it if a nor'wester blows up, and it's about time we had one. This has been too long a spell of good weather to last.»
«If you came here to excite my curiosity, old man,» Sheldon said, «you've certainly succeeded. Now go ahead and tell me in a straightforward way what has happened. What schooner? Where is it? How did she happen to buy it?»
«First, the schooner Martha,» the skipper answered, checking his replies off on his fingers. «Second, the Martha is on the outside reef at Poonga-Poonga, looted clean of everything portable, and ready to go to pieces with the first bit of lively sea. And third, Miss Lackland bought her at auction. She was knocked down to her for fifty-five quid by the third-assistant-resident-commissioner. I ought to know. I bid fifty myself, for Morgan and Raff. My word, weren't they hot! I told them to go to the devil, and that it was their fault for limiting me to fifty quid when they thought the chance to salve the Martha was worth more. You see, they weren't expecting competition. Fulcrum Brothers had no representative present, neither had Fires, Philp Company, and the only man to be afraid of was Nielsen's agent, Squires, and him they got drunk and sound asleep over in Guvutu.
«'Twenty,' says I, for my bid. 'Twenty-five,' says the little girl. 'Thirty,' says I. 'Forty,' says she. 'Fifty,' says I. 'Fifty-five,' says she. And there I was stuck. 'Hold on,' says I; 'wait till I see my owners.' 'No, you don't,' says she. 'It's customary,' says I. 'Not anywhere in the world,' says she. 'Then it's courtesy in the Solomons,' says I.
«And d'ye know, on my faith I think Burnett'd have done it, only she pipes up, sweet and pert as you please: 'Mr. Auctioneer, will you kindly proceed with the sale in the customary manner? I've other business to attend to, and I can't afford to wait all night on men who don't know their own minds.' And then she smiles at Burnett, as well-you know, one of those fetching smiles, and damme if Burnett doesn't begin singing out: 'Goin', goin', goin'-last bid-goin', goin' for fifty-five sovereigns-goin', goin', gone-to you, Miss-er-what name, please?'