Wild Blood/Chapter 14

by Gordon Young

 

FEVER, RUM AND A BITTER TALE

WE WERE sighted from afar by the people at Dakaru, and a boat met us at the mouth of the narrow little bay entrance.

A Portuguese was in the boat with many natives, velvety black fellows from Western Melanesia.

He called out ill-temperedly in broken English to know who we were and what we wanted. From our stern through cupped hands a quick loud roar of Hawkins:

“Hurricane Williams!”

The Portuguese stayed not to learn more. That boat started off for the shore, and we could hear him cursing the rowers for their slowness.

We came in almost motionless. The wind was dead. We rode with the tide and scarcely drifted. The sails were down.

So close inside as almost to block the entrance—but not actually to block it—we let go an anchor.

There were two ships in the harbor besides the Sally Martin. One was a little clipper-like craft moored off the landing. That was Grahame's. The other was a tub of a brig. With almost inaudible surprise Hawkins identified her as the Fijian Maid—Carp Taylor's ship.

The anchor was hardly down before a small boat hit the water; Malua and a half dozen natives jumped down into it, and Williams shoved a piece of folded paper into my hand.

“For Grahame,” he said, and pointed across the bay.

All that hurry left me dazed. I was into the boat and being rowed off before I was hardly aware of having started.

Dakaru had been roughly sketched in lines of beauty by the Great Landscape Gardener that laid out His many Edens in the South Seas; and for years Grahame had been using up ship-loads of blacks in improvements. He did not run his plantation for money, but threw the profits away. Isolation suited him better than commerce.

He had a lugger or two on the other end of the island, and he raked the bottom of a large virgin atoll for pearl and shell. This paid his expenses and gave him the name of being rich. A queer life, a queer character; but something centrifugal in the northern, civilized lands seemed to have thrown out the men of queer, grotesque minds and purposes, and they landed in those seas.

The paper Williams gave me was not sealed. So I read it. I would probably have read it any way.

Grahame:

I have brought you back a ship. I shall have to take her out again to get away. Put your own crew on her and they can bring her back. She is yours.

I have two passengers for Dakaru, but one may not want to stay. You may not want the other to leave. Let me have an answer at once. Williams.

I reflected on that note. I almost grinned at the irony of Williams satisfying his curious sense of honor by returning at Dakaru a ship he had stolen at Turkee.

But it had ever been so. He could not escape such irony, and probably saw it, felt it, much as any man. Good people have a hard enough time doing what they think is right; but an outlaw—he rides the horns of dilemma.

“Two passengers.” The one that might not want to stay was surely the woman. “You may not want the other to leave”; that was sardonic.

Had Williams, so strangely faithful to his promise, brought Davenant all the way to Dakaru expecting Grahame would kill him? Perhaps there was at once punishment for Davenant and a favor to Grahame in that. Williams had a grim sense of justice.

The boat swept on rapidly toward the landing. Many people were waiting there. Some had rifles in their hands. Overhead gulls swirled, crying harshly. I heard the deep bay of a dog, and saw two among the group on the beach.

Malua shouted. The rowers lifted their oars. The boat streaked rapidly broadside to the landing, and the boys grappled with its coral wall, bringing blood through the scratches on their hands but holding the boat.

I got out slowly, going up the slimy landing-steps, and faced a squat little black Portuguese armed to his chin, and a whip in his hand. He was not alone. Two other dirty-looking Portuguese were with him. Their clothes were clean enough but they looked dirty anyway.

“——, w'at you want?” he demanded overbearingly.

I glanced searchingly along the landing. A white man was there, but it wasn't Grahame. This man had a beard; and Grahame was taller than he. Black boys and women were there, huddled curiously, sensing in their marvelous way that trouble was in the air.

“Grahame,” I said.

“No see him.”

The dirty squat man was trying to be mean in the way he spoke.

I started forward. He blocked my way.

My hair isn't red for nothing, and I never was likely to be intimidated in daylight by Portuguese. At night when any shadow may hold a knife—that is different. Besides Williams through his glasses was probably watching me.

I pointed to the boat where Malua and the boys stood with heads and shoulders above the landing, watching.

“Get out of my way. Get out, or those Samoans'll come up here. And there won't be enough Portuguese left to show your own blacks where to bury you!”

They gave way; whether because of my valiant words, or because the heavy hand of the white man who had approached seemed about to jerk the other two aside, I do not know. He roughly pushed one out of his way and faced me.

“What d'you want?” he said unpleasantly.

“I've a message for Grahame,” I told him and made a movement with the hand that held the folded paper.

“Give it to me,” and he reached for it.

“Who are you?”

“What does that——”—he referred to Williams with the use of many words that must be left to the imagination, though the imagination of most people will be unable to supply them—“——want here?” Adding: “I'm Carpenter Taylor. He'd better go about with the tide an' get to hell out of here. What'd you want with Grahame?”

“Supposin' you go out and tell him all that. I'm not much good at delivering messages—unless they're written. Like this one. Where is Grahame?”

“Give it to me. Grahame's a sick man.”

Again he reached for the paper.

He was a broad-shouldered, short-legged man, with a short, tobacco-smeared beard and a thick nose.

“Listen to my words of wisdom, Captain Taylor. Unless I put this in Grahame's own hands Hurricane Williams himself'll come ashore an' do it. And he hasn't changed much since you last met him—an' put your blacks back on the beach!”

There was a sting in that phrase, and it jabbed Carp Taylor where he had a sore memory.

He wished that dog Williams would come ashore. He'd find it different at Dakaru now. The damn thief. Just let him set his feet on the sands

“I think I can deliver that message all right—but this one first.”

“Are you fellows here after trouble?” he demanded, his thick arms bristling from his sides.

He probably felt the security of numbers, the Portuguese, the dogs, the high wall, fort-like, about the house; and with those odds on his side he was ready to fight.

“You're talking to the wrong man, Captain. You want to go out and speak to Williams. He can tell you. I can't.”

More words equally futile and uninteresting passed between us; then he decided to lead me to Grahame.

We went up the white sanded roadway lined with slabs of coral and along the coral were planted roses. Half a ship-load, so I had heard, of clay soil had been brought up from Australia to bed roses. The grilled iron gates of the eight-foot wall were closed but unlocked.

On every side were the marks of long, hard work from human hands. Grahame had used up his blacks much as the old kings of Egypt had used up their fellaheen. Inside of the walls were masses of flowers and trees and stretches of green lawn: jasmine, hibiscus, trumpet-flowers, acacia, and great flame-tipped poinsettia, the sweet wild-orange and enormous shrubs sagging under the weight of bright-winged blossoms. Cockatoos fluttered drowsily in the shadows of fig-trees and complained irritably.

The house—a mile from the beach—was a low, great-flanked structure based with coral mortar and breasted with vines that reached over and festooned the low broad veranda, burying it in cool shadows. The big wide door of carved oak had been sent out from England.

“Fever,” Carp Taylor had explained, significantly jerking a thick hand toward the house, and adding:

“Some men can't drink—in this climate.”

As we trudged along, the sand grinding under his shoes—I was barefoot—he spoke of what was uppermost in his mind:

“What d'you fellows want here anyhow?”

And again without waiting for an answer he added:

“I'm in charge here—since Grahame's sick.”

He looked at me; and I thought there was something queer in his eyes, something like hope, great expectations lurking there a little furtively. Well, it was a rich plantation; and if Grahame died who would get it? The first man to claim it.

There was the girl, the bright-haired little angel that had got down from the Florentine wall where some old Italian artist had 'prisoned her, and wandered to Dakaru—but what was a girl-child between a man and his loot?

He stopped on the veranda with his hand at the door to come back to his question. He asked it with a strained effort at friendliness, confidence-inviting, as if he had been thinking things over and did not want trouble. Perhaps he would seek for the soft answer to turn away Williams. What did we want, anyway?

I answered with reasonable truth in saying I did not know, that I sailed with Hurricane Williams and inquired not at all into his business.

He stared at me for a moment or two. His eyes were dull, but a cunning light was at the back of them. There was something thick and clod-like about the man, even to his eyes, and tongue too. He took a nubbin of tobacco from his trousers pocket, bit into it, worked his jaws and said:

“Grahame's queer. I'm warnin' you. Fever—an' rum.”

We went in.

The door swung back noiselessly. Though it was dark and cool inside, and for a few seconds I could scarcely distinguish anything, I had the impression of forms vanishing. There was certainly the soft plop-plop of light bare feet in the distance.

“Black girls,” said Carp Tador. “Grahame coddles 'em. Kills his natives out there—but here——”

He laughed low, coarsely.

“Don't want that girl o' his'n to know he'd hurt a fly!”

He laughed again. It was if not humorous at least queer.

As I rapidly grew used to the dimness I saw that we had entered not into a room but into a wide hall with great open doors on either side. On the right I caught a glimpse of rows of books and chairs. We passed on down the mat-covered hall.

Taylor opened a door. A native woman, having heard us, was at the same time opening the door.

Grahame lay on a great wide bed. Everything was spacious in that house. By the bed was a teak table. Its three legs in the form of slender dragons' bodies ran to above the edge of the table and became little black savage monsters, watchfully leering about the room.

On the table was a glass, a bowl of sugar, a few limes, sliced, and a bottle of rum. Wretched medicine for fever.

Grahame raised himself on his pillows and stared forward. He was thin, wasted. His long mustache was now scarcely more than streaked with black and drooped far below his chin dispiritedly. His hair had thinned and was long and white.

The native woman effacedly, patiently, stood to one side of the large open window, through which I caught a glimpse of a peering child. He saw me look at him and at once began to pull a long rope, and a breath of air stirred down from the ceiling from a punkah.

On the other side of the bed from me sat the girl, the girl of the bright hair, her elbows on the bed and her slender hands almost invisible against the covering of pure white tappa cloth. A large pearl, like a miniature harvest moon in a faint mist, was on a finger.

But she was a girl no longer; the tropics rush flowers, fruit and maidens to their ripening overnight; and men to seed. She was yet sweet and innocent and inexpressibly weary, pale, and under her eyes were faint bluish rings. She recognized me at once, and fright coiled in her purple eyes.

Grahame, though weak, spoke savagely, hoarsely.

“You come from that pig-born Williams?”

The English think they know a viler phrase than “pig-born”; but the South Seas know none. Perhaps with vicious subtlety he took the lowest word of the Samoans, among whom Williams was the brother of a chief.

“I have a message,” I said, and held out my hand.

He looked at the paper, then at me, and took it with an air of distrustfulness. His hands were nervous and shook. His fingers fumbled in opening it.

With difficulty he read; it took him a long time. So long in fact that he did not notice Carp Taylor, who had leaned downward and read too. When Grahame looked up toward me in surprise, and seeing Taylor near, turned the paper face down on the bed coverlet, he concealed nothing.

“Father, may I?” the girl asked, her thin, almost transparent, fingers moving toward the paper.

“No, no,” he said a little uneasily, pulling it away.

Silence, except for the slow and scarcely audible weaving of the punkah overhead and the faint crackle of the paper as Grahame with something like an air of furtiveness again read the message.

“Go out, go out,” he said abruptly, nervously. “All of you go out. Taylor, get out. Eunice, I want to talk to him.”

He glanced again at the paper.

“I'm all right.”

Eunice stood up slowly and gave me a long steady look of reproach. She spoke, and though her voice expressed an unforgiving bitterness it was soft and sweet.

“My father has never been well since that day,” she said. Then impulsively: “Oh, what do you terrible men want now? Come, Nolopu.”

Carp Taylor said something about himself being there to look after her and her father. But she seemed not to hear him; more than that, seemed to ignore him, though he came close to her.

I glanced scrutinizingly at the native woman. Nolopu was a Samoan name. She was a Samoan too. She did not look toward me as she went out after Taylor and the girl.

Two hours later there were three emptied bottles of rum on the table of the dragons, and I was cold, coldly sober. My hands shook a little and my heart shivered.

Grahame—Grahame was drunk, drunk and dying. He hated death terribly, fought against it, vowed he could and would rise and walk to-morrow; that he could do so that day, that hour. He needed the rest, he said; but it didn't hurt him to talk.

He said death was months off. He hated it; but he was not afraid—except for the girl, for Eunice. Eunice had been the name of her mother.

It wasn't the knife that had gone into his shoulder. Damn Hurricane Williams—but drink to him again! It was his liver; too much rum. And his heart—the —— thing wabbled and sometimes tried to stop.

The first thing he had demanded as the door closed was to know who were those people that we had brought to Dakaru. I told him. His curses were frightful. They fell on the head of Francis Davenant.

It was a long time before he mentioned Dula, his daughter; then he asked what she was like, what she looked like. I can not say there was tenderness or anything akin to it, but there was no bitterness. He did not curse her.

“Williams has brought him here to hound me!” he had cried with uplifted, clenched fists.

I told of the shot into Williams's back; of Davenant lashed to the mast and beaten. Grahame laughed wickedly. He knew how that had hurt, gone deep, eaten in like the scalding of molten iron.

Then he had thrust the bottle toward me, saying:

“Drink!”

Grahame's thoughts went helter-skelter; but his tongue never stopped. When he seemed to be taking thought of what next to say his tongue mechanically cursed, and himself not least.

Such a life as had seemed ahead of him in his youth! He had been one of the youngest captains in the British Army—cavalry—and had won medals in India.

That sister of the hell-hound Davenant—he had lost his head over her. She was a woman that made a man's flesh burn! Fierce, passionate, jealous—and grew to hate him.

What could a young fool do with a woman like that, who believed her brother's lies—when he didn't even know there had been lies? Thought it was a wild woman's jealousy. Wondered in his bed if he would awaken with a knife in his throat. Of course he floated his troubles in wine!

Davenant, cold, poised, insistently friendly, idled neither day nor night from the work of ruining him. The cause? God knew, perhaps.

There were clubs and messes where not even the son of a marquis was welcome. Grahame would not try to take him into them.

Rumors of a kind never told except in whispers went from mouth to mouth with his name. Once a friend pointedly insulted Davenant, and Grahame kept the friend still.

Nor could he shake Davenant off. The wife loved the brother. The door was always open. Davenant, cold, inscrutable, seemed friendly. There was no shaking him off.

Fellow officers in Captain Grahame's quarters for an evening's sport found themselves playing with marked cards. There was nothing to do but what he did. Resign.

He thought his wild wife had revenged her jealousies. A bitter quarrel—and Davenant gave him sympathy. Grahame, himself slipping out of his caste and class, his own name going about in whispers, began to lean on Davenant's friendship.

All friends and family shunned him except a cousin, Eunice, an angel. They had loved, but cousins may not marry. It is wicked. He had forgotten the love a little; let it bury itself. She had kept it burning like a secret flame.

Then came a murder. The friend who had insulted Davenant, who had been one of those about the table of the marked cards, when by evil fortune Grahame was winning, was dead. Shot in the back.

Davenant had said:

“Looks bad, Grahame. If you were going to do a thing like that you shouldn't have talked about it before hand, drunk.”

Grahame had protested, shaken, fearful. He had loved that friend, and he began to feel the Satanic patience and deadliness of Davenant.

“Yes, you did,” Davenant answered with his slow, cold, white smile. “I could swear to it myself. My sister would too—to punish you for what she thinks is worse guilt. Other women.”

Grahame had none in all the world to listen to him but the cousin who loved him. He snatched desperately right and left for what funds he could get. He took money that belonged to his wife and to Davenant, too. But he left property.

Fear of Davenant had got into his blood. He feared nothing else. Not even God. The implacable patience of the man was terrifying. Grahame had cursed himself for cowardice, but he had trembled in the belief that Davenant would search him out.

Much wandering found Dakaru. Luck gave him pearls. Nothing could be more remote, more secure; but he needed labor, and he had had blackbirders, who occasionally touched there in combing the seas, bring blacks.

A daughter was born again unto him. It was as if Heaven were to give him a whole new start, and an Eden too. They were happy and treated the blacks like children. He got Samoan girls to watch over his daughter, the kindest and most intelligent of natives.

Then the terrible thing happened—the cannibal feast. He had been at the atoll for pearls. The Samoans had hidden in the hills with the baby.

Every black on the island, male and female, had been butchered, hunted down. He and his Portuguese did it. But he had to have blacks to work the island. He got others, and bloodhounds, and more Portuguese.

“The crudest of all whites as a race,” he said.

He stayed on Dakaru, for there was no place to go. Besides there was pleasure in killing blacks where they had killed her. He fed them—for food went to waste; he housed them—for he wanted their strength to fail under burdens, not under disease; and he built his plantation, his gardens, his house and his roads and his walls, as a monument to Eunice his wife, as an inheritance for Eunice her daughter.

He had to traffic with England, for no luxuries were to be denied her; and somehow Davenant had heard of and reached Carp Taylor, who carried supplies and orders for Dakaru. With pearls and threats Grahame had made Carp Taylor refuse to meet Davenant as promised.

Grahame was no longer afraid of Davenant. He feared nothing except what would happen to Eunice when he died. There was nobody on earth to trust.

Look at Carp Taylor, now. The beast, with his eyes looking forward across Grahame's grave.

Rum was killing him. But rum he had to have. Memories would kill him quicker if he didn't have it.

And Carp Taylor was all that would stand between her and the Portuguese.

Not one man on earth to trust. Nor one whose oath was better than his lies.

A British man-o'-war had been in a year ago, and Grahame had fruitlessly begged the captain to raise the flag on the island. Grahame had not been as sick then. He thought the end of life was years ahead.

He ought to have sent her to England. To have gone himself. Dared everybody—been hanged as a murderer if necessary.

But she believed him a great and noble man. When shots were fired and lagging blacks fell she thought pigs or chickens were being killed.

She was all he had in life; and in eternity God wouldn't so much as let him see her from hell; he had kept her so innocent, so like her mother, that she would be too high in Heaven for his eyes to reach.

Hurricane Williams—the nigger-lover; Grahame had abhorred his name for years. Officers from wandering gunboats spoke it. Blackbirders told of his hideous friendship with cannibal blacks. Even stray whalers had heard it and cursed it; for blacks armed with rifles that were said to have come from Williams fought them off at times when they landed for water, food—and women.

However, the British captain there about a year ago—who did not dare raise his flag because at that time the politicians in the Colonial Office did not like the study of geography, and evaded it by calling themselves anti-imperialists—seemed to know more about Williams than other people had known. Was it true—Grahame demanded of me, that he had been hanged—and through the lies of a fierce, beautiful, dark woman? Actually hanged? Cut down unconscious by an impatient doctor late to his dinner-party? Saved by convicts who rolled a dummy in quicklime and buried it?

That captain had said:

“He's a dangerous man, you know. He kills quick. I've poked about among the trustworthiest reports of the blighter. Doesn't seem to care how or how many if they get him going. But take it long and short he doesn't seem to have potted many that the queen wouldn't have paid the hangman for the crackin' of their necks—if the Crown had caught 'em with all the evidence. And a lot o' them have been natives.”

And to me Grahame said a little incredulous, mystified, unready to believe what the facts suggested, but putting them straight:

“When he left Dakaru that time there were two dead cannibals inside the wall—where it's always death for any of those blacks to be. Eunice and the women saw him kill them. He tried to kill me—but he—You were with him, and did he do it to protect her?”

I nodded.

“Then, curse him, we'll drink to his health. Get out another bottle from that chest.

“Carp Taylor and all of 'em think I'm rich. But it's all in that chest. Rum! And in the atoll—pearls, unfished.”

He laughed sardonically in a kind of malicious glee. More soberly:

“That ring that Eunice wears—it was one of the first I found. Her mother used to wear it. I'd cut my heart out and sell it first.”

I brought a third bottle from the chest. His hand shook so that more was spilled, far more, than went into the glass; and the glass was filled.

His wavering hand held the bottle out to me. I took it. He picked up the glass and from his trembling the liquor fell in little unheeded splashes over the brim, wetting the white coverlet, staining it more and more with deep brown spots.

“Here's to——”

He stopped, put down the glass awkwardly, drunkenly, and fumbled about for the paper Williams had sent. He found it, laboriously opened it. His fingers could not hold it steady; and the lines would not remain in place before his eyes. He thrust it at me.

“The first line—read that. Then we'll drink. Curse him, he's a man! I don't want his ship. He can have it. He can have all the ships I've got. The yacht, the luggers, all of 'em. He kills niggers, too, does he? Does he? —— Damn you, answer me! Then we'll drink to 'im! Curse him, he writes like a gentleman. Is he? Is he?

“Oh, these rotten tropics! Doesn't he drink? Then we'll drink to 'im more 'an ever!”

Grahame was more than drunk. I was more than sober. I was cold. There was the mark on him of one toward whom Death's invisible hand is outstretched.

The name of Davenant had smitten his memories, given tinder to his fever; and the rum had unleashed the cords of his tongue. Time had struck two hours from the life of each of us.

Then the door opened. Carp Taylor, followed by Davenant, Dula, Eunice, came in.