Adventure
Page 6
«What of that? I shot him just the same. There was no need for you to jump down there that way. It was brutal and cowardly.»
«Oh, now I say-« he began soothingly.
«Go away. Don't you see I hate you! hate you! Oh, won't you go away!»
Sheldon was white with anger.
«Then why in the name of common sense did you shoot?» he demanded.
«Be-be-because you were a white man,» she sobbed. «And Dad would never have left any white man in the lurch. But it was your fault. You had no right to get yourself in such a position. Besides, it wasn't necessary.»
«I am afraid I don't understand,» he said shortly, turning away. «We will talk it over later on.»
«Look how I get on with the boys,» she said, while he paused in the doorway, stiffly polite, to listen. «There's those two sick boys I am nursing. They will do anything for me when they get well, and I won't have to keep them in fear of their life all the time. It is not necessary, I tell you, all this harshness and brutality. What if they are cannibals? They are human beings, just like you and me, and they are amenable to reason. That is what distinguishes all of us from the lower animals.»
He nodded and went out.
«I suppose I've been unforgivably foolish,» was her greeting, when he returned several hours later from a round of the plantation. «I've been to the hospital, and the man is getting along all right. It is not a serious hurt.»
Sheldon felt unaccountably pleased and happy at the changed aspect of her mood.
«You see, you don't understand the situation,» he began. «In the first place, the blacks have to be ruled sternly. Kindness is all very well, but you can't rule them by kindness only. I accept all that you say about the Hawaiians and the Tahitians. You say that they can be handled that way, and I believe you. I have had no experience with them. But you have had no experience with the blacks, and I ask you to believe me. They are different from your natives. You are used to Polynesians. These boys are Melanesians. They're blacks. They're niggers-look at their kinky hair. And they're a whole lot lower than the African niggers. Really, you know, there is a vast difference.»
«They possess no gratitude, no sympathy, no kindliness. If you are kind to them, they think you are a fool. If you are gentle with them they think you are afraid. And when they think you are afraid, watch out, for they will get you. Just to show you, let me state the one invariable process in a black man's brain when, on his native heath, he encounters a stranger. His first thought is one of fear. Will the stranger kill him? His next thought, seeing that he is not killed, is: Can he kill the stranger? There was Packard, a Colonial trader, some twelve miles down the coast. He boasted that he ruled by kindness and never struck a blow. The result was that he did not rule at all. He used to come down in his whale-boat to visit Hughie and me. When his boat's crew decided to go home, he had to cut his visit short to accompany them. I remember one Sunday afternoon when Packard had accepted our invitation to stop to dinner. The soup was just served, when Hughie saw a nigger peering in through the door. He went out to him, for it was a violation of Berande custom. Any nigger has to send in word by the house-boys, and to keep outside the compound. This man, who was one of Packard's boat's-crew, was on the veranda. And he knew better, too. 'What name?' said Hughie. 'You tell 'm white man close up we fella boat's-crew go along. He no come now, we fella boy no wait. We go.' And just then Hughie fetched him a clout that knocked him clean down the stairs and off the veranda.»
«But it was needlessly cruel,» Joan objected. «You wouldn't treat a white man that way.»
«And that's just the point. He wasn't a white man. He was a low black nigger, and he was deliberately insulting, not alone his own white master, but every white master in the Solomons. He insulted me. He insulted Hughie. He insulted Berande.»
«Of course, according to your lights, to your formula of the rule of the strong-«
«Yes,» Sheldon interrupted, «but it was according to the formula of the rule of the weak that Packard ruled. And what was the result? I am still alive. Packard is dead. He was unswervingly kind and gentle to his boys, and his boys waited till one day he was down with fever. His head is over on Malaita now. They carried away two whale-boats as well, filled with the loot of the store. Then there was Captain Mackenzie of the ketch Minota. He believed in kindness. He also contended that better confidence was established by carrying no weapons. On his second trip to Malaita, recruiting, he ran into Bina, which is near Langa Langa. The rifles with which the boat's-crew should have been armed, were locked up in his cabin. When the whale-boat went ashore after recruits, he paraded around the deck without even a revolver on him. He was tomahawked. His head remains in Malaita. It was suicide. So was Packard's finish suicide.»
«I grant that precaution is necessary in dealing with them,» Joan agreed; «but I believe that more satisfactory results can be obtained by treating them with discreet kindness and gentleness.»
«And there I agree with YOU, but you must understand one thing. Berande, bar none, is by far the worst plantation in the Solomons so far as the labour is concerned. And how it came to be so proves your point. The previous owners of Berande were not discreetly kind. They were a pair of unadulterated brutes. One was a down– east Yankee, as I believe they are called, and the other was a guzzling German. They were slave-drivers. To begin with, they bought their labour from Johnny Be-blowed, the most notorious recruiter in the Solomons. He is working out a ten years' sentence in Fiji now, for the wanton killing of a black boy. During his last days here he had made himself so obnoxious that the natives on Malaita would have nothing to do with him. The only way he could get recruits was by hurrying to the spot whenever a murder or series of murders occurred. The murderers were usually only too willing to sign on and get away to escape vengeance. Down here they call such escapes, 'pier-head jumps.' There is suddenly a roar from the beach, and a nigger runs down to the water pursued by clouds of spears and arrows. Of course, Johnny Be-blowed's whale– boat is lying ready to pick him up. In his last days Johnny got nothing but pier-head jumps.
«And the first owners of Berande bought his recruits-a hard-bitten gang of murderers. They were all five-year boys. You see, the recruiter has the advantage over a boy when he makes a pier-head jump. He could sign him on for ten years did the law permit. Well, that's the gang of murderers we've got on our hands now. Of course some are dead, some have been killed, and there are others serving sentences at Tulagi. Very little clearing did those first owners do, and less planting. It was war all the time. They had one manager killed. One of the partners had his shoulder slashed nearly off by a cane-knife. The other was speared on two different occasions. Both were bullies, wherefore there was a streak of cowardice in them, and in the end they had to give up. They were chased away-literally chased away-by their own niggers. And along came poor Hughie and me, two new chums, to take hold of that hard-bitten gang. We did not know the situation, and we had bought Berande, and there was nothing to do but hang on and muddle through somehow.
«At first we made the mistake of indiscreet kindness. We tried to rule by persuasion and fair treatment. The niggers concluded that we were afraid. I blush to think of what fools we were in those first days. We were imposed on, and threatened and insulted; and we put up with it, hoping our square-dealing would soon mend things. Instead of which everything went from bad to worse. Then came the day when Hughie reprimanded one of the boys and was nearly killed by the gang. The only thing that saved him was the number on top of him, which enabled me to reach the spot in time.
«Then began the rule of the strong hand. It was either that or quit, and we had sunk about all our money into the venture, and we could not quit. And besides, our pride was involved. We had started out to do something, and we were so made that we just had to go on with it. It has been a hard fight, for we were, and are to this day, considered the worst plantation in the Solomons from the standpoint of labour. Do you know, we have been unable to get white men in. We've o
ffered the managership to half a dozen. I won't say they were afraid, for they were not. But they did not consider it healthy-at least that is the way it was put by the last one who declined our offer. So Hughie and I did the managing ourselves.»
«And when he died you were prepared to go on all alone!» Joan cried, with shining eyes.
«I thought I'd muddle through. And now, Miss Lackland, please be charitable when I seem harsh, and remember that the situation is unparalleled down here. We've got a bad crowd, and we're making them work. You've been over the plantation and you ought to know. And I assure you that there are no better three-and-four-years-old trees on any other plantation in the Solomons. We have worked steadily to change matters for the better. We've been slowly getting in new labour. That is why we bought the Jessie. We wanted to select our own labour. In another year the time will be up for most of the original gang. You see, they were recruited during the first year of Berande, and their contracts expire on different months. Naturally, they have contaminated the new boys to a certain extent; but that can soon be remedied, and then Berande will be a respectable plantation.»
Joan nodded but remained silent. She was too occupied in glimpsing the vision of the one lone white man as she had first seen him, helpless from fever, a collapsed wraith in a steamer-chair, who, up to the last heart-beat, by some strange alchemy of race, was pledged to mastery.
«It is a pity,» she said. «But the white man has to rule, I suppose.»
«I don't like it,» Sheldon assured her. «To save my life I can't imagine how I ever came here. But here I am, and I can't run away.»
«Blind destiny of race,» she said, faintly smiling. «We whites have been land robbers and sea robbers from remotest time. It is in our blood, I guess, and we can't get away from it.»
«I never thought about it so abstractly,» he confessed. «I've been too busy puzzling over why I came here.»
CHAPTER VIII-LOCAL COLOUR
At sunset a small ketch fanned in to anchorage, and a little later the skipper came ashore. He was a soft-spoken, gentle-voiced young fellow of twenty, but he won Joan's admiration in advance when Sheldon told her that he ran the ketch all alone with a black crew from Malaita. And Romance lured and beckoned before Joan's eyes when she learned he was Christian Young, a Norfolk Islander, but a direct descendant of John Young, one of the original Bounty mutineers. The blended Tahitian and English blood showed in his soft eyes and tawny skin; but the English hardness seemed to have disappeared. Yet the hardness was there, and it was what enabled him to run his ketch single-handed and to wring a livelihood out of the fighting Solomons.
Joan's unexpected presence embarrassed him, until she herself put him at his ease by a frank, comradely manner that offended Sheldon's sense of the fitness of things feminine. News from the world Young had not, but he was filled with news of the Solomons. Fifteen boys had stolen rifles and run away into the bush from Lunga plantation, which was farther east on the Guadalcanar coast. And from the bush they had sent word that they were coming back to wipe out the three white men in charge, while two of the three white men, in turn, were hunting them through the bush. There was a strong possibility, Young volunteered, that if they were not caught they might circle around and tap the coast at Berande in order to steal or capture a whale-boat.
«I forgot to tell you that your trader at Ugi has been murdered,» he said to Sheldon. «Five big canoes came down from Port Adams. They landed in the night-time, and caught Oscar asleep. What they didn't steal they burned. The Flibberty-Gibbet got the news at Mboli Pass, and ran down to Ugi. I was at Mboli when the news came.»
«I think I'll have to abandon Ugi,» Sheldon remarked.
«It's the second trader you've lost there in a year,» Young concurred. «To make it safe there ought to be two white men at least. Those Malaita canoes are always raiding down that way, and you know what that Port Adams lot is. I've got a dog for you. Tommy Jones sent it up from Neal Island. He said he'd promised it to you. It's a first-class nigger-chaser. Hadn't been on board two minutes when he had my whole boat's-crew in the rigging. Tommy calls him Satan.»
«I've wondered several times why you had no dogs here,» Joan said.
«The trouble is to keep them. They're always eaten by the crocodiles.»
«Jack Hanley was killed at Marovo Lagoon two months ago,» Young announced in his mild voice. «The news just came down on the Apostle.»
«Where is Marovo Lagoon?» Joan asked.
«New Georgia, a couple of hundred miles to the westward,» Sheldon answered. «Bougainville lies just beyond.»
«His own house-boys did it,» Young went on; «but they were put up to it by the Marovo natives. His Santa Cruz boat's-crew escaped in the whale-boat to Choiseul, and Mather, in the Lily, sailed over to Marovo. He burned a village, and got Hanley's head back. He found it in one of the houses, where the niggers had it drying. And that's all the news I've got, except that there's a lot of new Lee– Enfields loose on the eastern end of Ysabel. Nobody knows how the natives got them. The government ought to investigate. And-oh yes, a war vessel's in the group, the Cambrian. She burned three villages at Bina-on account of the Minota, you know-and shelled the bush. Then she went to Sio to straighten out things there.»
The conversation became general, and just before Young left to go on board Joan asked, –
«How can you manage all alone, Mr. Young?»
His large, almost girlish eyes rested on her for a moment before he replied, and then it was in the softest and gentlest of voices.
«Oh, I get along pretty well with them. Of course, there is a bit of trouble once in a while, but that must be expected. You must never let them think you are afraid. I've been afraid plenty of times, but they never knew it.»
«You would think he wouldn't strike a mosquito that was biting him,» Sheldon said when Young had gone on board. «All the Norfolk Islanders that have descended from the Bounty crowd are that way. But look at Young. Only three years ago, when he first got the Minerva, he was lying in Suu, on Malaita. There are a lot of returned Queenslanders there-a rough crowd. They planned to get his head. The son of their chief, old One-Eyed Billy, had recruited on Lunga and died of dysentery. That meant that a white man's head was owing to Suu-any white man, it didn't matter who so long as they got the head. And Young was only a lad, and they made sure to get his easily. They decoyed his whale-boat ashore with a promise of recruits, and killed all hands. At the same instant, the Suu gang that was on board the Minerva jumped Young. He was just preparing a dynamite stick for fish, and he lighted it and tossed it in amongst them. One can't get him to talk about it, but the fuse was short, the survivors leaped overboard, while he slipped his anchor and got away. They've got one hundred fathoms of shell money on his head now, which is worth one hundred pounds sterling. Yet he goes into Suu regularly. He was there a short time ago, returning thirty boys from Cape Marsh-that's the Fulcrum Brothers' plantation.»
«At any rate, his news to-night has given me a better insight into the life down here,» Joan said. «And it is colourful life, to say the least. The Solomons ought to be printed red on the charts-and yellow, too, for the diseases.»
«The Solomons are not always like this,» Sheldon answered. «Of course, Berande is the worst plantation, and everything it gets is the worst. I doubt if ever there was a worse run of sickness than we were just getting over when you arrived. Just as luck would have it, the Jessie caught the contagion as well. Berande has been very unfortunate. All the old-timers shake their heads at it. They say it has what you Americans call a hoodoo on it.»
«Berande will succeed,» Joan said stoutly. «I like to laugh at superstition. You'll pull through and come out the big end of the horn. The ill luck can't last for ever. I am afraid, though, the Solomons is not a white man's climate.»
«It will be, though. Give us fifty years, and when all the bush is cleared off back to the mountains, fever will be stamped out; everything will be far healthier. There will be cities and towns here, f
or there's an immense amount of good land going to waste.»
«But it will never become a white man's climate, in spite of all that,» Joan reiterated. «The white man will always be unable to perform the manual labour.»
«That is true.»
«It will mean slavery,» she dashed on.
«Yes, like all the tropics. The black, the brown, and the yellow will have to do the work, managed by the white men. The black labour is too wasteful, however, and in time Chinese or Indian coolies will be imported. The planters are already considering the matter. I, for one, am heartily sick of black labour.»
«Then the blacks will die off?»
Sheldon shrugged his shoulders, and retorted, –
«Yes, like the North American Indian, who was a far nobler type than the Melanesian. The world is only so large, you know, and it is filling up-«
«And the unfit must perish?»
«Precisely so. The unfit must perish.»
In the morning Joan was roused by a great row and hullabaloo. Her first act was to reach for her revolver, but when she heard Noa Noah, who was on guard, laughing outside, she knew there was no danger, and went out to see the fun. Captain Young had landed Satan at the moment when the bridge-building gang had started along the beach. Satan was big and black, short-haired and muscular, and weighed fully seventy pounds. He did not love the blacks. Tommy Jones had trained him well, tying him up daily for several hours and telling off one or two black boys at a time to tease him. So Satan had it in for the whole black race, and the second after he landed on the beach the bridge-building gang was stampeding over the compound fence and swarming up the cocoanut palms.
«Good morning,» Sheldon called from the veranda. «And what do you think of the nigger-chaser?»
«I'm thinking we have a task before us to train him in to the house-boys,» she called back.
«And to your Tahitians, too. Look out, Noah! Run for it!»