Chapter XI

A DEAD MAN’S REVENGE

When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty, with a good ship underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily from the right quarter, and a pleasant goal ahead, it is hard to be unhappy. Vaiti’s sense of bereavement at the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before the Sybil had fairly cleared the land, and was gone altogether by the next day. She had done what she felt to be the right thing by Mata; the score was even. Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had not left any behind her. She smiled as she thought of it, and paused in her official-looking walk across and across the poop, to revile a native A.B. for leaving the end of a halyard trailing on deck.

“You d—— lazy nigger,” she said. “What sort ship you thinking you stop? You thinking one mud scow” (Mud cow was her pronunciation), “one pig-boat, one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy? I teaching you some other thing pretty quick. Suppose you no flemish-coil that halyard, keep him coil all-a-time, I let ’em daylight inside that black hide belong you, knock ’em two ugly eye into one.”

She plucked a belaying-pin out of the rail and sent it flying at the sailor’s ear. Vaiti was a straight thrower, but the crew seldom failed to dodge; they had every opportunity of becoming proficient. On this occasion, however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape, and the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of the jaw, and knocked him over. He was hurt, but not stunned, and sat up immediately on the deck, gazing at the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.

“Bring ’em that pin,” commanded Vaiti, still in what stood for English with her. She never addressed the crew in the tongue that was native to both.

The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her. She motioned to him to replace it neatly in the rail, and then pointed to the trailing halyard. It did not escape her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck, that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that his pareo was tied with a carelessness unusual among Polynesians, and significant of trouble and depression when seen. But she put the one down to the swelled and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face and the other to the orgies of the previous night. If the men chose to make brutes of themselves on bush-beer, they need not expect that she was going to slacken their work for them on that account. No, not if she broke the head of every man in the ship. She was not Saxon’s daughter for nothing, as they very well knew.

It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.

She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear sunlight of the sea. The trade wind ran through the sky like a warm, blue river, the rigging sang, the sails drew steadily. It was a good day, a happy day, a pleasant day to be alive. The girl felt pleased with the world. She took the wheel from the sailor who held it, for the sheer pleasure of feeling the flying vessel answer to the touch of her own light hand. All the force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a great dynamo passes through a single wire. It was almost as if she drove the ship herself. The Sybil went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the spokes fairly shook in her hands.

“The wheel is laughing to-day,” she said in Maori, using the island sailor’s expression.

Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended to eat with Harris alone. Saxon himself did not particularly care whether he dined with his bo’sun or not, if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on deck; but Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly as a man-of-war at all times, if she could have had her way. Indeed, she would have liked to dine in solitary state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too much good sense to fly in the face of merchant service custom by excluding the mate.

As things were, she graciously condescended to order Harris down to the cabin with her, and they discussed together the inevitable curried tin of Pacific cookery. It was wonderfully light and bright in the little cabin, which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty of berth and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade shelves. The bulkheads were painted white picked out with blue (they were satinwood and bird’s-eye maple underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished and perplexed more than one ship’s carpenter in the past quarter of a century), and there was a pretty bird’s-nest fern in a basket hanging from the skylight, and the seats were covered with the neatest thing in blue and white trade prints that Auckland could produce. Vaiti’s taste was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair freshly combed and held back with a bright ribbon, laces and frills dainty and immaculate as ever, looked, as she demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the teapot absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last sort of person by whom a native A.B. might expect to be knocked into the scuppers. Yet, truth to tell, the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at the opposite side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew, even though he was heavy-handed enough at times; and he certainly understood more about the five A.B.’s and one ordinary seaman who inhabited the forecastle than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves, and therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.

Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when the curry and the tea and the fried bananas were almost done, and nobody’s dinner could be spoilt by unpleasant news.

“Think you’re in for a good time, don’t you, Cap?” he said.

Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded. But her face spoke for her.

Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti in an uncomfortable, indefinite way, or heartily hated her. To-day the balance perhaps inclined in the latter direction. He watched her face with some interest as he said:

“That’s where you spoils yourself, Cap. You ain’t. And if you want my advice, which you never do, I’d tell you that the sooner you ’bouts ship and back to Niué the better.”

Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was eating and deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all the time, before she condescended to answer.

“Mph!” was all she said at last. She had never studied diplomacy, but she knew how much more you learn in general by letting the other person lead the conversation than by talking yourself. And it occurred to her that Harris wanted to make himself important by hinting and patronising over some ship business which might, or might not, be in his department. Well, let him. She would not give him a lead.

Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted out what he had meant to keep a good deal longer.

“Oh, very well,” he said. “You can do just as you likes, of course, but where you’ll find yourself when it comes to a question of mutiny, that’s another two-and-six. Musling curtains on the ports, and white table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is going to help you a lot then, ain’t they? And if ever I’ve seen signs of trouble in a crew, I seen them to-day, and you knows it—ma’am.”

The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it were, by an ominous flash of Vaiti’s eye.

Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but you would not have imagined it if you had seen her slowly scooping out the inside of a mummy-apple, and as slowly eating it. She was obliged to acknowledge to herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been something unusual about the demeanour of more than one of the men since their departure yesterday. But mutiny? Nonsense! Indigestion from too much pork, more likely. She did not believe for an instant that any crew once handled by her father and herself would have an ounce of mutiny left in the lot, if you ran them through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times over.

So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:

“You talk plenty nonsense. You keep those men work, they no squeak. Suppose you finish eat, you go tell Gray he come down ki-ki.”

“All right!” said Harris meaningly, trying to make an effective and tragic exit. He was really not at all easy in his mind, and Vaiti’s attitude did nothing to relieve his apprehension of what might be about to follow. The men had never dragged on the rein as they had done these two days past, and he felt it in his bones that there was more than met the eye in the matter.

Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone of his remonstrance that she would not even listen to the conviction which began to force itself upon her own mind, next day, that there was really something astray. Luck in general seemed to have deserted them. With a fair wind the schooner should have made the run to Raratonga in three days, but on the afternoon of the second day a dead calm had fallen, and they lay helpless in the trough of the sea by four o’clock, three hundred miles from anywhere.

“All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds, when that (adjective) Cook Islands be near,” sighed Vaiti, scanning the horizon vainly right and left. Like a true sailor, she was generally cross in a calm.

“I wish we was out of this, ma’am, I do,” remarked Gray, who was busy spinning sinnet at her feet on the deck. For some odd reason, the sour old bo’sun generally found her more approachable than the others.

“Why?” asked Vaiti, almost amiably.

“Because, ma’am, of that, for one thing. And hothers.”

He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had not noticed before, the ship’s carpenter, a powerful young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc’sle head and obviously weeping.

“They’ve been at that game, one and another, off and on, ma’am, all to-day,” he said. “And you know yourself ’ow we’ve been put to it to get the work out of them. Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they’s up to, but I allow we’re liable to understand all about it before very long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow, Shalli, he’s bin speechifyin’ down in the foc’sle ’alf of this watch, like a bloomin’ ’Yde Park sosherlist, he has.”

Vaiti glanced at her watch.

“Make him eight bell,” she ordered, scanning the foc’sle hatch.

“Ay, ay, ma’am,” said Gray readily, passing on the order.

The watch below were prompt enough about turning out, but Shalli the forlorn could not, it seemed, find energy enough to get up and turn in. Instead, he beat his curly head upon the planks and began to sob. Vaiti took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled nonchalantly for a minute into her cabin, and reappeared with a slight projection in the bosom of her muslin dress that had not been there before. Harris and Gray looked at each other significantly, and the former cast a swift glance about the vacant horizon. No, not a shred of sail, not a trail of smoke. Only the glancing flying-fish, and the oily, glittering swell, and the hard, pale, empty sky.

The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by the hatch, now signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest of his weeping to a more convenient season, and got upon his feet. Then the six began advancing slowly and uncertainly to the break of the poop. They were a good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men, with bright eyes and well-featured brown faces, and their dress—the brilliant red or yellow “pareo” of the islands, gaily figured with enormous white flowers, and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey—lent a distinctly operatic air to the little scene. Vaiti and her officers, however (like Molière’s bourgeois who had talked prose all his life without knowing it), had lived in the midst of picturesque and extraordinary things most of their lives, and therefore took no interest, as a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.

And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact with which they were confronted. The men were mutinous, beyond doubt.

Vaiti’s mind rapidly ran over all possible causes for the trouble, even while Shalli was stepping forward and opening his mouth to speak. It could not be rough treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were no worse handled on the Sybil than on most other island schooners, and an occasional knock-down blow is not the sort of thing that a Pacific native will seriously resent. It could not be any objection to go to Raratonga—the crew were mostly Cook Islanders themselves, and glad of a chance of seeing their homes. Nor could it be dislike to her command, for a chief rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and islanders who were ruled at home by a queen of her family would be most unlikely to strike against the authority of one of the Makea race, unless for some very grave cause. It was, of course, possible that they had planned to seize the schooner and run off with it.... She put her hand up to her bosom, and played with the laces that lay over that hard substance under the dress....

But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp query as to what they wanted there.

He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing eyes and much eloquence, using his slender, pointed, brown fingers a good deal to emphasise his remarks, and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti, and back to his mates again. Harris listened anxiously, catching only a stray word here and there, for his knowledge of Maori was confined to the few phrases used in running the ship. Shalli was certainly saying that somebody was going to die—that somebody had got to die, and immediately—to judge by the emphasis with which he spoke.... The mate was, as Vaiti had once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his great bulk and strength. He felt himself turning chilly, for all the burning sky. What the devil did that fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing there listening as calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her eyes? Perhaps there was no particular trouble after all; but her demeanour was no guarantee, for she would have looked like that if they had all been on the verge of drowning, or burning, or hanging together, any day of the week.

Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and make out anything, but cut a large quid and chewed it at leisure, idly looking on. He did not know if the men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly care. They were three whites against six niggers, and there were firearms on their side. And he had seen mutinies in his time beside which any little amusement that could be got up by half a dozen amiable Cook Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party. Let them mutiny if they liked. It would not mean the interruption of the work for half a watch.

And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop, and the Sybil rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and the useless sails slapped rhythmically upon the mast. And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the group of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved countenance until quite the end of Shalli’s long speech.

When he had finished he turned his face away, and instantly began to weep. And the five other men, exactly as if a tap had been turned on, also began to weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting their hands to heaven.

“If this isn’t a bloomin’ mutiny, it’s a bloomin’ lunatic asylum,” declared Harris quite inaudibly in the midst of the hideous noise from the main-deck. It is not a common thing, even in that world where all things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean, to see a whole ship’s company shedding tears in concert on a calm and peaceful afternoon, with nothing more alarming in sight than a handsome young woman in an expensively pretty frock.

“Ow-ow-ow!” went Shalli, getting quite beyond his own control.

“Ey-ah, eyah!” screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki, fluttering his hands like frantic pigeons.

“For God’s sake, Vaiti, tell us what’s up,” called Harris, sending his bull-like tones through the confusion.

And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice in order to be heard. Her face, its hard calm broken up at last, was black with rage, and she had pulled out her revolver, and was holding it in her hand, though, strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.

“That ——, —— witch-man belong Niué, he curse them, they say they die!” she screamed. “By’n-by I cut him liver out!”

“What witch-man?” bellowed Harris. “Don’t understand. That white bloke—him with the red hair and the scar on his nose—who dresses native, and lives native up in the bush? Saw him lookin’ at you like as if he’d like to knife you, from behind Mata’s house.”

“No, pig-head! no white man got ’mana’ for make die that way,” shrieked Vaiti, shaking her revolver without effect at the men. “Niué witch-man. What man you mean? I not see——”

But she did see at that moment, and to Harris’s utter dismay she dropped the revolver on the deck and flung her skirt over her head.

“My Gord! she’s mad now,” cried Harris. The crew paid not the least attention, but continued to weep with lungs of brass. The mate’s head went round. He felt as if he was going out of his senses, too. Gray, who seemed to be the only normal person left on board, went up to Vaiti and plucked her dress off her face.

“Now, ma’am, keep ’er ’ead to wind,” he remonstrated. “What’s got ’old of the Capting? Blest if we ever saw you afraid before.”

Vaiti turned on him like a tigress.

“You think me frighten, you parrot-face, bal’-head, humpback pig-monkey! Think some more those thing, and I shoot some hole in you lie-making tongue, learn you talk to me. I tell you——”

The hubbub on deck was calming down a little now, and subsiding into lost and homeless wails. It was possible to make oneself heard.

“I tell you, that thing Alliti see ’long Niué, he one dead man. Captain schooner Ikurangi—same I making tart [chart] all wrong, so he go drown, he and him mate. You think it good thing one dead man he go walk along Niué, looking me?”

“A cat may look at a king,” said Harris, who had realised that no fighting was afoot, and therefore was very brave just now. “Besides, that red-head man wasn’t no ghost—he borrowed a pouchful of tobacco off of me, and never paid it back.”

“What sort that man?” demanded Vaiti. “He small, all same Gray, he ugly all same you, got red hair, cut ’long him nose, tooth all break?”

“That’s him,” agreed Harris.

Vaiti took a turn across the deck, and fell silent, angrily chewing a lock of her hair. The horrid vision of Donahue risen from his ocean grave, and wandering about the islands as a malignant ghost, bent on avenging his death, had struck her as such a fancy could only strike an islander, and almost paralysed her active mind. Now she realised that it was merely a case of mistaken newspaper report, and that Donahue had somehow escaped from the wreck of his schooner, and was once more roaming the islands in the flesh—at the very lowest ebb of fortune, it was evident, but probably none the less dangerous for that. She was quite certain that he was in some way at the bottom of this business of cursing the crew, although no doubt the witch-doctor and Mata had been intermediary. And it was no trifle. Sheer mutiny she would have much preferred.

“Wot’s it all about?” asked Gray, who had not been so long in the islands as the mate. “Wot’s the odds if a lot of bally niggers thinks they’ve been cursed? Seems to me anythin’ the witch-doctor could do wouldn’t be likely to harm a crew that’s been salted by our old man in the cursin’ way. There ain’t no witch-what-d’ye-call-’em about the islands that can lay over ’im for language.”

“Oh, shut up! You don’t know anything about it,” said Harris with irritation.

“Suppose you tells me,” suggested Gray, tucking another quid into his cheek, and looking dispassionately at the crew, who were now lying on deck rolling about with the motion of the vessel, and looking half dead already. “Doesn’t seem as if we was goin’ to have much bother with that lot.... And you gettin’ as white at the gills as a flounder, thinkin’ they was goin’ to take charge. Go ’ome and learn a ladies’ dancin’-class, Mr. ’Arris; you ain’t fit to ’andle men.”

“I’ll handle you if——” Harris was beginning roughly, when Vaiti, whose temper had been badly ruffled by the events of the last half-hour, stepped across the deck and delivered two stinging blows, one on Harris’s right ear and one on Gray’s left.

“You take’m that,” she said. “Alliti, you speak bo’sun about Maori ’mana.’ Glay, you lemember Alliti mate, no give cheek.”

“Want to know if I’ve got any left for myself, before I start givin’ it away,” observed the bo’sun ruefully, rubbing his face. “But better be slapped nor neglected by a pretty girl, hany day, says I.”

Vaiti did not smile, but leaned over the rail, and began staring at the crew. She was in no mood for flattery.

“Well, if you want to know, it’s like this,” said Harris. “These native blokes, they thinks some of their chiefs has got what they call ’mana.’”

“Wot’s that mean?”

“Pretty near any thin’, take it by and large, but one meanin’s all we want, and that’s the notion they have that these chiefs can sort of blast ’em with a curse, so’s they’ll go away and die. Like as if I was a chief, and you was a common man, same as you are, anyhow, and I was to say, ’Gray, you go off out of this and die next Thursday at four bells in the afternoon watch.’ And you says to me, says you, ’Ay, ay, sir,’ says you.”

“Blowed if I would,” ejaculated the bo’sun.

“Yes, you would, you chump, because you’d be a bloomin’ native, and they always does. So off you’d go, and when Thursday come you’d lie down and die at four bells, wherever you happened to be.”

“Wot of?”

“Nothin’—you’d run down like a watch—sort of ’stop short never to go again’ business, like the grandfather’s clock—and when you was dead you’d stay dead. That’s all.”

“And I never ’eard worse rot in all me days,” said the bo’sun disgustedly. “Think I’m going to believe all that?”

“Who cares what you believes or what you don’t?” demanded Harris, “You’ll —— well see all about it soon enough. Vaiti she says they says Mata went to the witch-doctor, who they’re as much afraid of as any chief in Niué, for all they’re by way of bein’ Christian, and he cursed them up and down and inside and out, worst style, and says they’re all to die by sunset, to-night. And if I knows anything of natives they’ll do it. I’ll lay you, we got to work the ship up to Raratonga ourselves—if we ever get there. Of all the low-down, mean skinks that ever walked, them natives are the worst. They haven’t a blessed scrap of consideration in them for anyone but themselves. Here we are with every man-jack of these fellows got an advance on his wages, and they says they’re going to die! Die! I’ve no patience with them. I do hate selfishness and meanness.”