# Heathens

The trappings and furbelows of civilized people do not always succeed in hiding the evil in their hearts, nor does the nakedness of savages expose the goodness in theirs. A weird yarn of the South Sea Islands.
Heathens
by Gordon Young
Author of "The Serpent's Phrase," "His Wonders to Perform," etc.
THE young stranger—Rideout was his name, a nephew of "Buck" Rideout, the planter—sat on the outrigger of a beached canoe and stared at the dark-hued Tavau, who stood some distance away as she coyly poked the sand with her toes and glanced up from time to time with artful shyness.
"Women," said "Lean Jake," removing his pipe and scratching his chin with the mouthpiece, "women is all alike."
Having delivered that favorite bit of wisdom, he replaced the pipe and continued to watch Rideout, who was ready enough to carry the flirtation forward, but hesitated a little, being embarrassed by the presence of Jake and myself as we stretched in the shade beside the shanty bar and idly looked on.
"Nice boy," Jake said some minutes later after the enticing Tavau had walked out of sight in the pandanus grove with the breeze immodestly pulling her calico gown against her body; and after Rideout had followed her, but with an effort to appear merely wandering at random.
"Nice boy," Jake repeated, "but he's learnin' fast—learnin' fast."
Jake called it "lar-r-nnin'," and disguised many other words in much the same way; but he spoke from the wisdom of sixty-odd years, more than forty of them spent below the equator. For all of his years, he was built like six feet some inches of taut hawser. An old-time sailor he was, but beardless, slow of movement and speech, and as full of yarns as ever a man was who has roved. No doubt some of those yarns were true.
"But he's learnin' fast," Jake went on, nodding his head toward the grove. "He's twenty-some hours on the island and hasn't been bit by a cannibal yet. He thought they'd be ugly as the pictures always is that missionaries send back to help raise funds, and then Tavau gets her eyes on him. And he just simply can't hardly believe his own eyes 'cause she acts like some of the girls back home—only does it better. Yes. He's learnin' fast.
"And he thinks the devil won't sign him up for no longer cruise on the sulfur lake for an hour or so with this heathen than for hours or so with other Marys he's forgot quick-like; and her bein' a heathen it don't make no difference no-how. Uh-huh, he's got a lot to learn, too."
The Rev. Ollivant and his niece, Miss Rankin, would have been shocked to know that Jake called Tavau a heathen; for didn't she wear a calico gown instead of a yellow tiputa and lava-lava? The missionaries thought the wrapper much more civilized than a breast-cloth, usually tucked under the chin to be out of the way, or else failing its purpose with every puff of wind when not tucked up; and the lava-lava had never been devised that did not appear on the verge of dropping from the shapely legs it concealed.
"Uh-huh, he's got a lot to learn," Jake repeated j, thoughtfully, again glancing toward the grove.
JAKE had a wild and extravagant yarn for special confidences about having known and fought under the chief who had been Tavau's grandfather; of having held a musket to the heads of an enemy boat-crew as he sailed away in the starless night for whatever port God willed, to keep Tavau's grandmother, Numoo, from being the prize as she had been the cause of that obscure Homeric war wherein her husband fell beneath a jagged club.
Numoo must have been a fiery and resolute woman if she did not only what Jake, but legend as well, reported of her. She was said to have stood watch with the musket when Jake needs must sleep; and the ancient gods of her Tongian people answered her prayers, for the canoe reached a not unfriendly island where Numoo was welcomed and the crew, at. her vengeful request, was promptly beheaded.
Numoo married a chief and at last succeeded in nagging him into war for her revenge; but he fared badly because the missionaries were busy in his domain and reported him to the British Government as a turbulent, blood-thirsty fellow who had killed some of their converts. A gunboat scattered his war canoes and Numoo was again a widow.
She prayed that the unborn child would be a son, and went daily deep into the forest to an idol hidden from the jealous missionaries; but the bulging-eyed god answered her with a daughter, whom, to keep from the missionaries, she carried to another island and raised in the faith of her tribal gods. The white men—traders, beach-combers, colonists and inevitable missionaries—crowded even that island; but the daughter, Naima, was instructed in the old Tongian faith. As she grew up into her teens she was wooed in the divers ways of the white men, with, however, less success than the amorous adventurers often have.
But to make Lean Jake's epic brief: after the mother's death Naima married the handsomest of the unconverted natives, who happened to be a Samoan; and to the great amusement and scandal of the island a few years later she clubbed him out of his own hut when the missionaries finally saved his soul, largely through the efficacy of a job—so delightful to Samoan vanity—of bossing in the construction of some thatched huts for the missionary station. But Tavau, the seven-year old daughter, was forcibly taken from the incorrigibly heathenish mother and given into Christian hands; and later she was sent to the Rev. Ollivant and his niece as a mission girl at Niko.
That was ten years before; but in the South Seas seven years plus ten bring a girl to maturity of body and to all the instinctive subtleties of womanhood everywhere.
There is another dramatic chapter to this history, a chapter that I suspected of being apochryphal and added for the benefit of the big German trader, Schwartz. Ever since Tavau came to Niko he had been after her; and Jake opportunely either invented or remembered the chapter in which Tavau's mother, shortly before her death, had driven a fishing spear into the belly of an overly gallant trader who, inevitably enough, had been a German—since Jake detested all German traders and planters—but who, by a most remarkable coincidence, had been named Schwartz.
"I never seen him myself," Jake had drawled to the group of listeners in the shanty bar as he finished this new episode of his oft-recited Odyssey, "but Schwartz, just supposin' you pull up your shirt-tail and let's have a look?"
Schwartz cursed angrily and stamped out, almost shaking the earth with his bulky tread, while our laughter followed him into the moonlight. All of us thought that Jake had neatly put over an elaborate joke, and Schwartz was not popular.
TAVAU was half-Samoan, and the Samoans are the coquettes of the South Seas. The Tongans themselves—though not quite civilized, or rather Christianized—are a paradox: in wrath they are undoubtedly as fierce as any tribe that touches the Pacific, but their disposition is such as to have won for their group of islands the geographical designation of "friendly."
Tavau was an outrageous flirt for all of her calico wrapper, hymnals and quaint tutoring of native tots in Biblical lore. When anywhere near the missionaries or elder converts, this precious little hypocrite of seventeen tropical Summers was unsmiling and serious as a nun; but with half a chance she flirted, and for the same reason that a parakeet suns and preens its brilliant feathers.
Tavau knew all of Jake's story, possibly excepting the apocryphal chapter; and she often queried him for infinite details as to her mother and grandparents, though perhaps in her inmost mind she doubted, as some of us did, the entire tale. The Rev. Ollivant and the efficient Miss Rankin solemnly assured her that it was unlikely there was a word of truth in the story. But Tavau, hungering for the legends of her scattered tribe, quested among Jake's memories for more and more details, when, as frequently, she crept to his side in some remote thicket. There she stared wistfully into the shadows while he repeated the old, old tale.
What all else Jake may have talked about to her I do not know; but often he said something like this to me: these missionaries come out here from people that have had two thousand years of the Bible and aren't Christians yet. They expect these heathens to take a bath, put on Mother Hubbards and never again feel the wild blood that can't be got rid of except by a knife that opens their veins and lets it run out.
"Ever see a Christian nigger when the wood drum booms the devil-devil dance? He's just like a good healthy fish that suddenly wakes up and finds he's been sleeping on the beach about ten feet above where the little waves are running along over the sand, whispering and looking for him. And there's the forest, older than the Bible, where every leaf's a tongue chanting the ancient songs—where the ghosts of old cannibal chiefs are darting through the shadows, beating drums and sounding conches that white men can't hear. And we white men—don't we get it so strong that we come tumbling out of the cities, forget the prayers learned in the cradle, and go knocking about the world?
"It takes mighty little to make a heathen—mighty little in this climate," Jake usually said when bringing one of his ethnological lectures to an end.
II
IT WAS some time before Jake and I realized that we had that afternoon watched the first scene of a little South Sea drama. A few days later a Queensland labor-trader put into Niko short-handed from a little skirmish with reluctant laborers over at Santa Cruz—the natives there were cannibals, fierce and wary—and Jake was taken on as mate and I went along.
When we came back the village hummed with gossip and rumors.
Buck Rideout was the richest planter on ten islands. He thought missionaries were only one degree removed from witch-doctors, but he was a stern moral man himself and had contempt for "white niggers," as he called the fathers of half-breeds, whether or not there had been a marriage ceremony.
Some of the gossips said that young Rideout had knocked his uncle down in a quarrel over Tavau.
This rumor was founded largely on the fact that Buck Rideout had worn a bandage about his head when he came wrathfully to the Rev. Ollivant and told him that if he did not keep that young Mary-preacher from his nephew there would be one female less to sing-sing at prayer-meeting.
However, regarding the cause for the bandage, some—the less scandal-loving on the island—said that a ripe coconut had fallen on his head.
Anyway, he came to complain of Tavau, and her name was bandied on the beach.
"They've got her locked up tighter 'an a clam in its shell and they're after sendin' her off on the missionary ship that's due next month," one fellow indignantly explained to me. "Just as though ever' girl in the parish back up there where they make missionaries don't go for a moonlight stroll with some lad that likes her and her him."
We who loafed on the beach were what is called in some quarters pretty "broad-minded;" and in our indignation nobody referred to the fact that converted native girls are forbidden to go out after sundown, and that Tavau had resorted rather fluently to pious lies to get out—saying she was to visit a sick sister-Christian or to tell Bible stories to a doubting household. And not once did I hear anybody suggest that both the Rev. Ollivant and Miss Rankin were painfully aware of the ease with which white men parted from native girls, and that the missionaries might really be on the watch-out for Tavau's comfort of mind as well as security of soul.
True enough, young Rideout was not a beach-comber, trader, or even a planter. He was just a stripling of twenty or thereabout, full of the curious impulses and strange intensities of youth, who had come out to five with his bachelor uncle and, eventually, to inherit the plantation.
The Rev. Ollivant had only past experiences to guide him; and among those had never been such a figure as this boy, who was neither fugitive, adventurer nor tourist.
Some man who wrote a book that was left around one time where I had nobody to talk to and nothing else to read, said that from infancy to maturity the human being reflects in a minute way the entire evolutionary history of the race.
I remember only three of his many citations: one was that the new-born infant has strength enough in its tiny fingers to support its weight by clinging to a trapeze, which is a throw-back to arboreal days when our ancestors lived in trees and the babe had to hang on to its mother or drop; another was that the instinctive cruelty of children of about eight to fifteen, their urge to play at fighting and their joy in weapons, reflects the savagery through which the race has passed; and the other, that the extravagant sentimentality and emotional devotion of the youth from around sixteen to twenty when he is in love—as he usually is—attests the shadowy presence in his brain cells of the famous old knights errant who, in the age of chivalry, jousted mightily with their ladies' garter, or veil, or glove, at the lance's haft, and quixotically forswore even principalities to win the smile and hand of some maid who capriciously put them to strange quests and vows.
Young Rideout was not over twenty and I reflected that the knights errant must be holding a magnificent tourney under his cranium if he would crack an ax handle over the head of his uncle, endanger the very valuable plantation, and set the beach gleefully a-roar with his talk of "real love," all because a native girl, who, but for a little less fulness of the lips, was not unlike hundreds back in the bush that danced, howling and naked, in the moonlight feast of cannibals.
But even with all the reports I heard, Jake gathered something more and swore that he believed it, too. However, Schwartz being a German, I knew that Jake would believe anything to his discredit. The report that Jake believed came straight from a reliable source—or as straight as anything ever could come from the mission to the bar shanty.
That is, Ollivant told the native preacher, who was overheard swearing his wife to secrecy by one of the mission girls, who told a boy that she wished to favor, who told his elder brother because naturally he had to tell somebody; and the brother told Jake for a secret drink of gin. That wise law, enforced by the full majesty of British authority, which permits a white man all the liquor on earth if he can get it, but which makes the punishment severe for giving or selling so much as a drop to a native, assures the beach-comber of always having the wherewith to extract favors from black boys.
It seemed that Schwartz, ever with his eyes on Tavau, was quick to suspect that she had tossed her witchery over young Rideout. Schwartz, bulky as an ox and with a beard that was likely to get tangled in the bush at night, had begun soft-footedly to spy on her.
"Him fella Torti," was as near as Jake's informant could manage the German's name; but the rest of the story had come in native dialect, for Jake knew enough native dialects to have filled a half-dozen South Sea dictionaries.
Schwartz had discovered that when Tavau was supposed to be proselyting, or even when supposed to be on her mat asleep, she stole out and met Rideout.
"Instead of doing as anybody but a Deutscher would have done," Jake contemptuously told me, "and have kicked the boy to —— and away from her and sat down hisself, the Deutscher went to Ollivant and says he believes it his duty to inform the missionary of what's going on, because he, Schwartz mind you, is a Christian, though rheumatism don't let him get to church often as he would like. Yes. Schwartz believes in looking out for native morals——"
Jake expatiated most of the night on Schwartz's tale-bearing; and convinced himself while trying to convince me that Schwartz—"Tip'cal Deutscher"—had carried his story to the missionary with a good deal of cunning. Jake said that Schwartz reasoned this way: here is a good chance for me to let the missionary know what a fine Christian gentleman I am; and with Tavau's reputation badly soiled, it will appear magnanimous of me later on to offer to marry her. The missionary will be grateful to me because he will want to be rid of her any way—so she will be pushed right into my arms.
"And," Jake concluded, "what's one marriage more or less to a Deutscher!"
I did not take any stock in Jake's deductions, or in the circumambulated story on which they were based—not until about a week before the mission ship was due, when the shanty bar rang with laughter over the latest and best joke.
How the truth of the matter got out I never knew; but undoubtedly by a relay of native mouths, ending with a drink or two of gin for the last. Anyway the report we heard was as near the truth as anything ever is in the South Seas; and along toward midnight a few of the more reckless fellows made their way to Schwartz's shack and endeavored to offer condolences through the walls of plaited palm leaves.
It seems that Schwartz, knowing that the mission ship on which Tavau was to be sent away would be along soon, saw there was no time to lose, and fitting himself out with some attention to personal appearance, he had gone to the Rev. Ollivant and offered to relieve him of all anxiety as to Tavau's future.
THE missionary could be hoodwinked and taken in by the dullest native, but he knew pretty much about whites. He was ordinarily a gentle, soothing soul, with a hard substratum of stubbornness, however, and a wholly unsuspected ability to express himself in anger.
He had blasted Schwartz with the wrath of the prophets; and, as eminently became his calling, he had spoken nothing but the truth in telling Schwartz that he was a "venomous hypocrite," "a secret-drinking whisky barrel of iniquity," that it were better to lay any girl, native or white, "in her unhallowed grave" than to give her into his "lecherous arms."
And in the course of his comments, however, the Rev. Ollivant disclosed the information that Tavau was not being sent away because she was no longer loved in the mission, or because she was "disgraced"—for she was loved and she wasn't disgraced—but because young Rideout was unreasonably set on marrying her against the wishes and orders of his guardian uncle; but that if Tavau were to be given in marriage to anybody it would certainly be to the young man who had "beseeched" her hand with "the light of purity in his tearful eyes" and a "heart undefiled with beastial lust."
Schwartz had been rather bewildered. It is hard for a German to believe that things can go otherwise than the way he plans that they shall; but it did dawn on him finally that the missionary had answered in the negative, and returning to his shack he had taken to his low-built bed with a bottle of whisky.
The condolence delegation shied a few shells against the matting that served as walls to let Schwartz know that it had arrived.
"Oh, Schwartzy, we come to dance at the weddin' that ain't to be," some one called.
"Too bad, Schwartz, when you took a bath and all that," another contributed.
"Nobody loves a fat man," another fiend chanted, and was loudly corrected by—
"A fat Christian shentleman, you mean."
"Gottdam go vay," Schwartz bellowed, growling and muttering.
A reply was what the condolence delegation wanted; and it jeered, mocked and taunted, goading the big trader into fury. But this sport soon grew stale: Schwartz only repeated the same oaths and made the same threats, and the tormentors had used up their jibes.
Then somebody with a sense of the dramatic called out convincingly:
"Oh, Schwartz, young Rideout's here. Come on out and congratulate him. Be a sport, come on."
No answer followed, but the muttering stopped behind the mats.
"Rideout says if you don't leave his girl alone he'll tie your heels to the back of your neck and leave you out in the bush," another imaginative fellow added.
A huge, almost naked, bushy-faced white figure burst from the house.
"Vere iss he! Vere iss he?" Schwartz cried, brandishing a large automatic.
"There he is," one of the thoughtless grinning devils shouted, pointing at a sailor who had come along to see the fun, and who had stood discreetly in the back-ground.
At the first shot the sailor—an innocent stranger to our port— went into the air with a yell and came down some fifteen feet away with steam up and sails crowded; and he traveled so fast that, as one of the fellows afterward said, you had to throw your glance about forty feet ahead to see him go by.
Schwartz floundered forward, cursing and shooting drunkenly. He soon stopped for breath and the lack of a target, then blundered back toward his shack, calling upon God to hear his oaths and strike him dead if he failed to cut Rideout's heart away and eat it!
"Uh-huh," said Lean Jake when he heard of it, "it takes mighty little to make a heathen. Mighty little in this climate. And that Deutscher got murder in him. Uh-huh."
The missionary ship having run for a week before a gale arrived a day or two sooner than was expected.
That afternoon Lean Jake sat on his sea-chest oiling his long pearl-handled, single-action old revolver; and as usual when caring for the veteran companion of his roaming days, he was oddly silent. It was as though intercourse incommunicable to a third party was passing between them, and despite its years in that land of torpid dampness where metal oxidizes as quickly as clothes mildew, not a fleck or scar of rust was on it.
From time to time he would go to the doorway and view the weather with a seaman's eyes; but he made no comment until I hopefully suggested that it would clear up. He answered—
"You're right—worse luck," and not another word did I get out of him until after sundown when he said casually, "I'm going for a little walk. Maybe a week 'fore I'm back. Maybe more. Maybe a month."
It was a month or so before I really understood, but early the next morning I had my suspicions.
Young Rideout and Tavau had eloped during the night and disappeared into the bush.
There was a great to-do—much running about and searching. Though the drizzle had lasted until around midnight—when a brilliant moon came out—there was not much trouble in finding the trail; but the footprints of the boy and girl had vanished as if by magic after a few miles. The vanishing point, I surmised, was where Jake had met them. Though a sailor and a good one, he was crafty in forest lore; whereas those two children, if left to themselves, would have splashed about miserably all through the night and have been overtaken shortly after sunrise. They would probably never have thought of wading up-stream.
The search was hard and earnest. Buck Rideout offered twenty pounds to whoever found his nephew. The missionaries were as agitated over Tavau as they were over the boy, for though there were no cannibal tribes living back in those hills, canoes full of them frequently blown out of their course arrived from other islands, sometimes from long distances, and held dances and feasts.
A large searching-party started out, some intent on the reward and others enjoying the excitement. The native boys scampered gleefully through the brush; and I did not believe there was one among them who, if he had come upon the fugitives, would not have at once warned and aided them. It might have been different if the boys' minds could have visualized the beads, calico, tobacco, fishing hooks, mirrors and ironware that twenty pounds represented.
The searchers soon split into a score of parties, rushing about in twos, threes and half-dozens; and for the most part having a lark of a time, though the missionaries and Buck Rideout were threatening and entreating.
Near where the trail vanished I suddenly came upon Schwartz arguing earnestly with Iako, a withered old bushman, who, though peaceable enough, held aloof from the "One God" people; but he had come along on the search for the same reason that black boys or white follow the crowd. Iako was not liked by the missionaries—it being reported that he was one of those ancient fellows who made a practise of slipping out through the forest to the hidden and deserted shrines of the old tribal gods. And as I moved by unseen my listening ears caught falling from Schwartz's mouth extravagant promises of tobacco and even brandy for some service or other which I did not hear mentioned.
It was a month before the search stopped. It never really stopped, for to this day I believe boys go slipping through the forest wondering where are the bones of Tavau and her white lover. But in even less than a month the searchers lost hope. Evidence that sent most everybody scampering back out of possible dangers was found of war-parties from savage islands.
Their beached canoes had been seen in the distance from the hill-tops; and though Rideout, Ollivant and some of the missionaries from the ship, with armed and braver natives, later went from one end of the island to the other, they could not come upon either the savages whose canoes had been seen from afar, or traces of the boy and girl. It was supposed that young Rideout and Tavau had been captured and … One doesn't think of what happens afterward.
During that time when there was much excitement and so many parties were out for days together, the absence of any one from the village was only casually noticed, if at all, and was no cause for comment.
It was only when the searching was about over, and almost everybody was back and loafing around as usual, that the beach began to wonder what had become of Schwartz and Lean Jake.
Then I awoke one morning and found Jake, who was about as noiseless as a cat anyway, stretched on his bunk.
A labor-recruiting schooner, which did not seem very anxious for Niko's boys, however, had slipped into the harbor during the night; and I judged that Jake had come on her, in view of the fact that she was a stranger and could not have got a pilot until morning. She would have had to wait outside if there had not been somebody on board who knew the reefs and channels as well as Jake did.
It was some time before I could get him to talk. For days he wandered off or sat around meditatively smoking, sometimes staring out across the sea at the strange schooner, sometimes standing with arms folded behind him and looking into the shadowy depths of the forest that climbed up and up until it crested the mountains.
On the fourth morning the recruiting-schooner stood out to sea. Jake watched her out of sight, then called to me.
III
I NEVER knew Lean Jake to tell a lie that I wouldn't have readily told myself; but I have sometimes felt that his sense of the dramatic in his narratives was never embarrassed by what actually happened. Judge for yourself:
Tavau had sent him a note several days before the missionary ship had arrived, saying that she and Rideout would elope and take to the bush the first night that the ship put into the harbor. She knew that it would be gone again in a few days and would not return for three months. In the name of Namoo, her grandmother, to whom Jake forty years before had given a fighting allegiance, she invoked his help—and got it. Jake had already taken a strong fancy to the boy, and always he had been Tavau's slave.
As I had surmised, he arranged to meet them at a point where the trailers could not possibly associate his footprints with theirs. They entered a stream and waded for miles and hours until reasonably sure of having evaded pursuit because the natives—all except the bushmen who are rarely found except on the larger islands—are not adepts in forest lore. Then the little party struck out over a pig trail.
At first Tavau had drawn the calico wrapper high and tucked it around her waist to be out of the way of her legs; but it kept getting loose, so she tore it off and wound it into a short lava-lava. When the moon came out she snatched a handful of scarlet flowers from an hibiscus and stuck them into her hair. Then from somewhere in her memory there stirred the old tribal songs of war and love that Naima, her mother, had chanted to her from the time she first lay crooning on a mat; and as the moon lifted itself to the dome of the sky, she rushed into a grassy open space and leaped about, swaying her body and throwing her hands to the rhythm of the wild songs.
Rideout stood and watched her. He had never seen anything like it. Then the magic of the moon, of youth and love and the joy of having her at last, loosened his bashfulness before Jake, and he began to sing out and playfully to sway tire ax he carried—"to build their nest with back in the bush," he had told Jake. He tried to catch her, and soon he was leaping about and whooping almost as madly as she.
Around and around they circled and spun, wild with youth and love, and instinctively celebrating their joy in that same bounding play and rhythmic shouting that no doubt startled the newly-created animals in the forests of Eden when the father and mother of us all first awoke and found themselves alive. Then tired, exhausted, they sprang at each other with open arms; and they sank to the grass, gripped in a mutually tense embrace, and lay panting with mouth against mouth.
"'T was safe as any place for the night," Jake explained, "and they was too tired for the damp to hurt 'em, so I got in a dry spot under a banyan and dozed off."
The next morning the boy and girl said that they were too stiff and sore to move, and coaxed Jake to let them rest in the warm sun; so, knowing that the searching-party had not had time to get within range of the sound, he shot a pig for breakfast, and the first word that popped from Tavau's laughing lips as he brought it in was "bokolo"—instantly with her warning eyes she told Jake not to let the boy know what it meant. "Long pig" is a cannibal's Anglicized euphemism for human flesh, and "bokolo" is the native's word for the same thing.
Tavau threw away the drab, wet, torn calico and wove herself a heavy garland of leaves—a kind of lava-lava; and when Jake left them to climb a peak nearby and scan the coast on the opposite side of the island from the village, she was making fun of Rideout's mud-spattered, torn, stained, white duck trousers, and her nimble fingers were busy on a lava-lava of pandanus leaves—for him!
When Jake came back Schwartz lay on the grass, his head cleft to the chin, and the boy, naked but for the girdle of leaves about his loins, was squatting over the bloody ax and staring dully at the dead man.
Tavau vainly petted and praised and scolded, but the boy's brain was numbed: the knowledge of what he had done overpowered and stupefied that unhardened, sensitive mind, schooled ancestrally for a thousand years in the commandment—"Thou shalt not kill."
Iako was squatting beside him, grinning ecstatically with bared toothless gums, and cackling praise.
"Im fella stop along palienti goot kaikai," the old savage shouted at Jake, and pointed to the corpse.
He had suggested that one horrible, and nearly unmentionable thing that makes the blood of even the most evil white man run cold—kaikai is to eat!
Jake would have killed Iako on the spot—and came near to doing it—if Tavau had not begun to pour out the story which told how that grinning old savage had, after all, really saved Rideout's life. Iako had explained it all to her.
Schwartz had hired Iako to trail them down for him, and had made no secret of the hope to kill Rideout on sight. Precious little Iako cared whether one white man killed another. Schwartz had promised big pay in terms that Iako could understand, and the old bushman had merely followed up-stream, mile after mile, until his sharp eyes found their trail leaving the water as he had known he must find it eventually if he did not overlook the markings. And a bushman overlooks nothing.
But as they sneaked upon the boy and girl, Iako had heard Tavau chanting one of the old, old fetish songs; and coming closer he had seen Rideout leaping about as Iako himself had leaped before many a maiden in the long ago. He was an exile, a lonesome outlander among the Christianized natives of Niko, and the thought had burst within his head that if the "One God" people took converts from natives, maybe the old gods that he still worshiped could be restored to power and prestige by taking converts from the whites.
Schwartz, evidently aware that he was a poor shot, seemed intent on creeping as close as he could before firing.
Iako suddenly jerked the gun from his hand and screamed a warning, at the same time darting away and attempting to shoot Schwartz. But it was a bewitched weapon—an automatic with an unreleased safety, of which the old savage knew nothing.
Schwartz was badly frightened and had started to run, but when Tavau tauntingly leaped near him, he had turned, snatched up a heavy stick cut for the fire and dashed at Rideout.
The boy, who never in his life had had other than a playground fight, stood helpless, aghast; but Tavau sprang between them and tugged at the powerful German's arm.
Schwartz shifted the club and held her, passionately pulling her up to his bearded mouth.
She screamed.
Then young Rideout wildly caught up the ax and struck.
In her struggles against Schwartz, Tavau had torn the shirt from his breast; and as he lay on the grass there was exposed on his right side, just below the ribs, a long, uneven scar as though—years before—a jagged weapon had torn at his abdomen.
Jake hurried them away as soon as possible, not because he was afraid they would be found—for only an accident, or eyes sharp as Iako's could bring any one to that particular spot—but because he had sighted a canoe on the distant beach; and besides he felt that the boy would go mad if he stared much longer at the dead man.
THAT night Jake left Rideout, who was even then a little out of his head, and Tavau well back in the bush while he and Iako crept forward in the moonlight to see who had come in the canoe and what they were doing.
It was pretty near as he had suspected and exactly as he had guessed when Iako's sharp eyes identified the gorged, sleeping figures lying about on the beach as tribesmen from an island slightly east of Niko who held an inveterate grudge against the Santa Cruzians. A big raid had been made on Santa Cruz and scores of prisoners taken from the Quosoli tribe; but a heavy gale coming up on the trip home, the fleet of war-canoes had been scattered, and the warriors in this one, dashed from their course and hungry, had put in at the north-western shore of Niko to hold a feast.
Prisoners had evidently been plentiful, for six were left alive, securely tied, and stretched in a row, while about them the food-drunken guards slept like the rest of the war-party.
Iako and Jake cut the prisoners loose; then with difficulty convinced them that it was dangerous to try to slaughter the sleeping enemies that would be aroused if a single blow wounded instead of killed.
Tavau and Rideout were brought down to the canoe which was shoved off without so much as a yell from the stranded warriors who, anyway, were likely enough picked up in a day or two by other members of the scattered war-fleet.
The Quosoli, a bad lot themselves, made straight for home; and a favorable wind helped them along. Jake remained awake most of the time, alertly on watch, for though the Quosoli said that they were grateful a Quosoli is likely to say many things that he does not mean.
Tavau was frantic with worry over Rideout who sat for hours on hours with an idiotic stare in his eyes. She argued and scolded, and like a true maid of the South Seas, was unashamed to show before the crew how intensely she loved the boy.
Commandeering what mats there were to make him comfortable, seizing the nearly empty bamboo water-pipes and telling the thirsty crew to drink out of the ocean, she fussed over him like a mother over a sick baby. And all the while she drew wonderful pictures of the idyllic life they would live in the bush of Santa Cruz; and sometimes at night, when the air was cool, stirred a flicker of response with her caresses and buoyant words.
Also hour after hour old Iako sat clucking and chattering, happy to be among people who worshiped gods that could be seen and talked to, and not a vague Fellow topside the sky bowl.
They reached the island of the Quosoli, whose village sets at Bundy Bay—Bloody Bay, it is often called, and which in spite of the massacres that had taken place was often visited by labor-recruiters.
The party no sooner landed than the savages, brandishing spears and seven-foot bows, wanted to eat the foreigners, black and white; but the returning Quosoli explained to a little wizened old chief whose mummy-like chest was covered by the insignia of rank—a white disk, large as a dinner-plate, cut from a giant clam shell—and he took them as his guests. That is, he took all except Iako, whom, so Jake thought, they promptly carried off and cooked, for he was not seen again; and that night a big feast was held for the returned warriors.
Moreover, Tonogo, the chief's eldest son, a stalwart fellow twice his father's size with a stone ring big as a doughnut through his nose, came around smacking his greasy lips and staring amorously at Tavau while he proffered a revolting hunk of steaming meat on a tray of fresh plantain leaves. Jake said that he could tell by the odor that it wasn't pork.
Tavau merely ignored him at first, then as he persisted, tearing away a piece of the meat with his fingers and pressing it against her mouth, her temper flared and she angrily told him to go away. But her blazing anger only made her the more beautiful, for her bare breast heaved and the bright eyes snapped as her head was thrown back haughtily.
Tonogo grinned, dropped the piece of meat into his own mouth and stared admiringly while he leisurely chewed on it.
He turned to Jake and said in the wretched patois that natives conceive as being English:
"Bimeby me fella kaikai Englis fella. Make Mary stop along Tonogo. You fella stop along him."
And having some humor in him he laughed, but not pleasantly, for he evidently meant what he said, i.e., that when the time came and he got ready, he would kill the boy, Rideout, and Jake, too, then take the girl.
Rideout was sick and fairly out of his head. Tonogo could see that. He went away, then came back with a witch-doctor whom Tavau would not let get within an arm's length of the boy—not even when the old chief himself, strangely solicitous over his guest, appeared and assured her that this particular witch-doctor held high powers of life and death.
"Which was pretty much so," Jake said, "for there be no slicker poisoners than the Quosoli devil-devil doctors."
Jake surmised that the old chief was cunningly hospitable to them because he, the chief, had reason to believe that a British gunboat was coming along in the slow but angry way that British gunboats have of coming after a missionary has been killed; and Jake gathered from words dropped here and there that a new missionary had—as usual among the Quosoli—been killed some three months before, but that the chief hoped the "Government" would believe he had died of dysentery, especially if two white men were found alive and well treated in the tribe.
The Quosoli are dirty, treacherous, amazingly cunning, and as ugly-faced as a race of poisoners are likely to be. They are notoriously inveterate cannibals, filthy and lazy; and on the first night Jake overheard Tavau praying impatiently in English to the "One God" to make her boy well so she could have him, and to send plenty hell-fire and like-Job-boils on the dirty witch-doctor that brought crushed spiders in a skull bowl to smear the sick boy with; and very emphatic was her request that a similar visitation plague Tonogo, who had squatted around talking love while she sat fanning the feverish face of the boy that had her heart. She further called attention to the fact that this was a no-good island and that she wanted plenty quick to get off it.
The next morning she told Jake the same thing. She was sure that the boy was going to die if he did not get away. There was also much more dangerous than mere illness, to be feared; but he was worse, too—he was weak and crazy as a bat.
Tonogo came around and grinningly touched the ringlet of hair he had twisted with fiber cord so that it dangled stiffly down the side of his face, and he said something which Jake did not catch. But Tavau turned almost pale.
The twisted ringlet indicated that between midnight and dawn Tonogo had taken an inexorable vow, one that he could never forget with that ringlet dangling remindingly against the side of his face; one that he must accomplish or perish in the attempt. And the ringlet could never be cut until the vow was fulfilled.
Tavau did not send him away that morning. He squatted beside her and talked. She laughed a few times. Flies settled undisturbed on Rideout's face as she looked half-smilingly into Tonogo's. The next morning they went off together and were gone most of the day.
Jake said that the savage in her just oozed out and covered her from that time on.
The following night there was another feast—a stray bushman had been caught—and against Jake's urging, Tavau decked herself out in flowers and threaded shells and joined the dancing girls.
After that Jake heard no more prayers to the "One God," nor further complaints about the no-good island, and she was the wildest heathen on the beach; though occasionally she would rush in with Tonogo, glowering, at her heels and stroke Rideout's face for a moment, begging him to recognize her.
Jake said it was a clever play to heighten Tonogo's jealousy—and it did.
Jake tried to guard Rideout night and day, even picking out the green cocoanuts from which he drank lest Tonogo, aided by the witch-doctor, might poison the boy. If a missionary could die of "dysentery" after being brained by a war club, why not this stranger if he passed out quietly under the witch-doctor's charm? Jake would still have been left to show the "Government" that the Quosoli did not harm white men.
BUT a labor-recruiter put into the bay before the gunboat. The skipper was new to the South Seas, but he was careful, as most men had to be in those days if they grew old; and he did not come on shore at all, but parleyed with the disarmed natives on his deck when they swarmed into the roped-off quarters.
The old chief firmly refused to let Jake go on board or even go down to the beach where he might be seen from the ship; and a guard, headed by Tonogo himself, was put over the hut. Rideout could hardly stand on his feet so there was little fear of his getting in range of the white man's magic eyes—binoculars. Tavau could go where she pleased.
Tonogo, as if to make assurance doubly sure regarding Jake, sent him and the guard back into the bush and clear out of sight of the village.
Jake was certain that he would find Rideout dead when he returned, for it seemed too favorable a chance for Tonogo to overlook. But Jake knew there was no possibility of evading the watchful savages. He propped himself against a palm bole and sat there motionless until late in the afternoon, when another party of warriors joined that which had squatted suspiciously around him. Then he was told to get up and come with them; and as though afraid that he might make trouble, several of the savages took the pains to keep their spears near his back.
They rushed him along the neck of land circling the harbor, ordered him into a canoe and made him lie down; then set out frantically for the schooner which was getting under way. He could get no answers for his questions, though he knew very well that somebody was fooling with the orders of the old chief who had not wanted the labor-recruiters to think white men could live overnight among the Quosoli. He wanted the gunboat to think so; but labor-recruiters were discouraged in every way.
The schooner hove to and waited.
The skipper, looking over the side, showed no surprise at seeing a white man in the bottom of the canoe.
As soon as Jake went over the ladder the skipper explained that he had only pretended to stand out to sea to make the "niggers hurry and fetch you," adding that the sick white boy was already on board—thereby drawing a volley of questions from the amazed Jake.
The skipper said that Tavau and a big buck with a green bracelet hanging from his nose, and a pigtail of wool bobbing down the side of his face, had been out to the schooner that morning, and wanted to know if he, the skipper, would take away two white men.
The skipper said that "nothing but an affidavit from a priest" would make him really believe that two white men were alive on the island; but the girl had spoken English quite clearly, and judging from her unusual beauty and the jealous eyes of the big nigger, she spoke pretty much the truth. The skipper said that she had laughed and affectionately patted the big black's arm from time to time as he stood by her, listening watchfully, but unable to catch more than a word here and there, if even so much.
Tavau told the skipper that Tonogo, son of the chief, had vowed to have her as his woman or kill the two white men; but that he was willing to let them escape if she married him because the old chief would make a roar if they were killed, but not quite so big a roar if they escaped—which seemed to the skipper, from all he had heard about the island, a complete reversal of Quosoli psychology.
Tavau said that she loved both white men: the lean one because he had been good to her grandmother, from which the skipper—much to Jake's disgust—got the impression that Jake had given the old lady plenty of tobacco in her toothless dotage; but that she loved the young, handsome one because "he was him" and it couldn't be helped, but that he was terribly bad off now and was going to be worse off if he got well; therefore it was all right to marry Tonogo plenty-quick, which wasn't so bad in a way because he would soon be chief, and she could always kill him if he wasn't good to her—but he would be, for, as the skipper could see, he had a kind, handsome face.
And the skipper said to Jake that it was only something that he didn't quite understand in the girl's eyes that kept him from laughing outright: he swore that for an instant he saw tears there; but Jake scornfully told him that when he had been below the fine forty-odd years he would know that heathens never shed tears, not even when they cried all night. The skipper finally compromised with the suggestion that maybe it was tobacco smoke or something that had got in her eyes for a moment, for after all it couldn't have been real tears because she laughed right away after she said it.
She had done another queer thing too, for though she spoke English almost like a white girl, she had lapsed into the trader's argot, understood by natives from the Solomons to the Carolines, to tell the skipper that she did not like the "One God" any more because she had prayed to Him, and Tonogo had had the witch-man do his praying to the Quosoli gods; and they were the more powerful, for hadn't he got what he asked for, and she failed, so that now she loved Tonogo very much?
Then as she and the big buck started to leave the ship she had asked the skipper for his knife; and he gave it to her, thinking she wanted it as a present—the natives are always begging something or other—but she took it and quickly cut off the dangling pig-tail of hair on the big buck nigger's head, and Tonogo had grinned approvingly. Then she offered the knife back to the skipper, who, however, told her to keep it, and they climbed over the side into the waiting canoe and shoved off.
Broth and medicine from the ship's chest brought Rideout around to a bit of strength and his senses in a few days, but he could not forget Schwartz at any hour of the day or night, though he did not remember hardly anything after the fight up in the hills.
He wanted Tavau.
He would not be quiet when he found that she was not on the ship, and nearly went out of his head again when Jake told him how Tonogo had roused the wild blood in her so that she had gone right back to devil-devil dancing and idol-worship like her wild grandmothers before her.
"I always thought Tavau was different," Jake said tenderly to the boy. "I did for a fact. But being forty-odd years down here I ought t' have known better. Once a heathen, always a heathen—and her having such a grandmother and mother. Anyhow it takes too long for religion to soak through black skins and get down where it does a lot o' good. It's been soaking in the hides of us whites for two thousand-odd years and it ain't reached all our hearts yet. But it's live and learn, my boy—an' learnin' costs a lot o' brainaches and unweeped tears—'specially in this climate.
"Now Schwartz was just a drunken Deutscher. Just pretend I killed him. I'd a-done it and with joy, so don't let that worry you none. And Tavau—she was just a nigger, and she fooled us all just like women does no matter what their color is."
A labor-trade, or recruiting, schooner travels pretty much to suit itself; and the skipper dropped some two hundred miles off his course to bring Jake and Rideout to Niko.
But Rideout did not come on shore.
Jake had gone over and had a talk with the uncle; and Buck was mad and had a good deal to say; but, all things considered, he agreed with Jake that it was best for Niko not to learn what had happened, and after Buck had gone on board to see the boy he thought maybe the boy would be just as well off with a cousin back in Liverpool who had wanted to bring him up in his business. And Buck made arrangements with the skipper to see that the boy got to Sydney from where he could take a boat home.
IV
THAT was the story as Jake told it to me.
But a few days later a British gunboat put into Niko, after a visit to Bloody Bay over in the Santa Cruz group.
The sailors that gathered at the shanty bar said that they had not shelled the village because they found that the missionary hadn't been killed at all, but had died of dysentery—just like lots of fool missionaries do, and then their friends make a howl to the Government and say cannibals ate 'em.
Why, the sailors had found the Quosoli the friendliest tribe anywhere. True, their experience with natives was not great because their gunboat had only recently been sent into the South Seas for duty, but they guessed they knew when even niggers were friendly.
But a funny thing had happened a day or two before they got there. The pretty young wife of the chief's son had killed herself—driven a knife right into her heart, and everybody in the tribe was afraid to touch her body—funny thing—because never in the memory of the oldest man in the tribe had a woman done that—killed herself, you know; and there she lay, right on the mat in a new hut the chief's son had just built—still beautiful, she was, though two days dead in that climate.
A party from the gunboat had given her a decent burial; and the captain had said a prayer because he was a religious man and believed heathens had souls. Moreover, he had been overheard saying to his first officer that anybody could see that she was different from the Quosoli women. But none of the natives would talk about her, or where or how or when she came, because she was tapoo—a woman who had killed herself.
And the sailors, drinking there in the shanty bar, appealed to Jake to know if in his forty-odd years he had ever heard of such a thing before.
But Jake, staring dully straight ahead of him, got up and went out into the night, and did not answer.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1948, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 75 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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