Chapter XII

BREAKING THE MANA

Vaiti all this time had been steadily watching the men as they lay about on the main-deck in various attitudes of limp resignation. One or two—notably the emotional Shalli—were already beginning to look ill. Matters looked badly enough for the Sybil. It was in the hurricane season, and signs were not wanting that the calm would break up with energy when it did break. If the crew persisted in their dying, other people who had not been in any way subjected to the witch-doctor’s operations might find it incumbent on them to die too. She did not for a moment doubt the Niuéan’s power to slay. Had she not more than once seen the queen, who was her own cousin, politely dismiss some offender with the significant remark, “I wish I may never see you again after to-morrow” (for the queen was always courteous, and would never have used the crude terms of a Niuéan witch-doctor); and had not every one on the island known that with the next evening’s sunset the wretch would lay him down and die as surely as the dark would fall? These men were doomed, and the ship would miss the steamer and the cargo would not be sold, and possibly the schooner would be lost in the blow that was creeping up, and none of them would ever go home any more.

Thus the native side of Vaiti spoke. But now the white side woke up and demanded its innings too. Was it endurable that the red-headed rat of a Donahue (for she was as certain that he had been at the bottom of the matter as only a woman with no direct evidence to go on can be) should win the last move in the deadly game they had been playing this year and more. Was she to get into difficulties, and perhaps lose the ship, the very first time that she had taken off the Sybil all alone? The fact that such a disaster would include the losing of herself did not trouble, as it did not console, her. She would leave her reputation behind her, and people, when they spoke of Vaiti of the Islands, would say——

No, they wouldn’t, and they shouldn’t. The white blood was up now. It was impossible to prevent the “mana” from working. Well, let it be. She would do the impossible. She had done the impossible before, in many ways; it was the only sort of thing really very well worth doing, in the opinion of Vaiti of the Islands.

Whatever was to be done must be done quickly. The storm was not far away, and the Sybil was rolling in the trough of the increasing swell with every rag of sail set.

“What you goin’ to do?” asked Harris hopelessly, as he saw her move. “Give them medicine? It ain’t any good.”

“Yes, give ’em medicine—you and Gray, you giving it plenty by’n-by,” said Vaiti calmly, beckoning the two men over to her. The crew continued to lie on the deck, giving no sign of life but an occasional groan. The wind was beginning to cry a little among the rigging, just whimpering, like a chidden child. A glassy tinkling of foam sounded about the keel. The sun was almost down.

“You listen me,” said the girl, her handsome, hawk-like features looking curiously sombre in the orange light. “I speak those men in Maori. I tell them some thing—thing not belong ’papalangi.’ You no understan’. Wait.”

Then, with a look on her face that the white men had never seen there before, and were never to see again, she stepped swiftly down the ladder, crossed the main-deck, and stood in the midst of the prostrate crew.

As though struck themselves by a spell, Harris and Gray remained motionless on the poop, only swaying with the unconscious movement of the sailor to the roll of his ship, while they watched with fascinated eyes the scene upon the lower deck. The crew at first lay still as logs, while Vaiti stood and looked at them—only looked. Presently they began to open their eyes and roll over, and the weeping, which had apparently ceased, began again.

Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above her head, with her light muslin dress fluttering in the wind and all her magnificent hair falling to her knees, burst into such a flood of speech as made the two hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid amaze. There is no language in the world so full of eloquent possibilities as the Maori tongue—even in the somewhat debased and altered type that is current among the islands. And, hidden away somewhere in the strange nature of this strange thing in woman’s shape, there was more than a touch of the true witch wildness and fire.

“Lord!” said Harris, in a tone of awe. “She’s the devil himself!”

She looked it, as she stood there in that livid light, her arms stretched high to heaven, her voice—was there ever a voice so full of passion, prophecy, command?—ringing out, now high, now low, now in tones vibrating with some subtle suggestion of horror that caused even the uncomprehending whites upon the poop to feel a cold shudder about the region of the spine. Upon the crew the effect was marvellous, yet, from Gray’s and Harris’s point of view, unsatisfactory as well. The limp figures sat up, it was true, wept afresh, and even rose to their feet before long; but it was only to rush wildly up and down the heaving deck, driven, it seemed, by the sting of an agony greater than any they had suffered yet. Above the loose sails thundered and the wind wailed wickedly.

Gray, at a motion from the mate, went to the idle wheel and grasped the spokes. The Sybil would want watching soon.

“Strike me pink if this isn’t the craziest ship’s company outside a lunertic asylum from Yokohama to the ’Orn,” muttered the bo’sun to himself. “Now, what the ’ell is that? Ho, Jemmy Gray, why don’t you look for a berth as a bally stoker in a bally Red Sea liner, or a supercargo on a Chinese pirate junk, and ’ave a quiet life at your age? Here, Mr. ’Arris, you going to let ’er shoot ’erself before your heyes?”

Vaiti had plucked out her revolver again, but instead of threatening the crew with it, she was holding it close to her own curly head, all the time pouring forth a river of eloquent Maori, strongly charged with adjurations and threats. It needed no translation to understand so much, not to see the abject if inexplicable terror of the crew, who cowered and howled in an extremity of distress every time she raised the pistol to her head.

“Vaiti, Vaiti! What’re you doing, Cap?” yelled Harris. “You’ll shoot yourself! Are you crazy? What are you givin’ ’em, for Cord’s sake?”

Vaiti turned round, and cried angrily at him:

“Hold ’m tongue! You no leave me myself, very quick I shooting you. I tell those men I great chief, no one can take ’um curse away, but can come ’long all those men myself, suppose they die—go Raratonga when ’um night come, an’ all those man soul he running quick, quick, all a-cold, ’long those mountains top Raratonga where ’um dead man he go to jumping-off place. A—a—h! I put one bullet in head belong me, very quick, suppose those men they got dam cheek go an’ die. I coming, very dead, very angry, I go ’long that soul, all a-time; no let ’um rest, no let ’um see woman fliend, die long time ago—I take big club belong chief, make ’um run, cry, all-a-time—no sleep, no eat, no lie down! A—a—h! no go heaven, no go hell, all-a-time, for ever’n ever, Amen. I pay him out for going die!”

She stormed through the brief speech like a hot-season squall, and instantly returned to the natives. Harris, struck dumb by the entirely unprecedented nature of the situation, could find no vent for his feelings save in plucking off his cap and casting it under his feet. She was threatening the crew that she would kill herself if they died; follow them to the land of shades (the entrance to which was popularly supposed to be over the edge of a certain desolate, far-up mountain precipice in Raratonga), and make it so hot for them in the “otherwhere” that they would certainly wish they hadn’t dared to die.... What on earth was a man to do in a ship commanded by a thing—he could not call it a woman—that talked like that—with night coming on, too, and something very like a bad blow unpleasantly near?

Vaiti did not leave him long in doubt as to what he was to do. The crew, driven previously to the verge of frenzy by her gruesome threats, became entirely frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed her address to Harris. They ran up and down the deck; they shrieked, they prayed, they besought. Vaiti, with the eye of a hunter watching a quarry almost driven to bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery eloquence, and just at the moment when the men seamed driven to the highest point of human endurance, turned to the mate with a triumphant cry.

“Now, Alliti! he all right by’n-by: I no shoot myself, I think. You and bo’sun you get rope’s end very quick, give ’um order shorten sail, make ’um go. I think he go; he too much plenty frighten die ’long me.”

“Too much plenty frighten” the men were indeed. The threat that Vaiti had made—for the carrying out of which they doubted neither her ability nor her will, any more than she did herself—was so much more potent than the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of the one paled before the terror of the other. For the moment, they felt that they might not be able to live, but they certainly must not die; and it was right in the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate and bo’sun came in with their rope’s ends and settled the matter once for all. An hour ago, red-hot irons only would have moved them to hurry up with their dying. Now a couple of ropes’ ends, laid about among the six with a will, drove them howling up the masts and out along the yards, where, with Gray and Harris still after them, and Vaiti threatening from below, they succeeded in getting the sails stowed and the vessel snug in very little over the ordinary time. The blow that followed kept all hands busy the night through, but it came from the right quarter, and the Sybil fled before it at such a speed that morning found her only half a day’s run from Raratonga, with the wind quieting down to a pleasant breeze, the schooner uninjured, and the crew as cheerful and busy as they had ever been in their lives.

Vaiti caught the steamer, sold her copra, and saw it on the wharf ready to load. Then she went back to the schooner, and waited till the last of the men returned.

“Suppose you like go die now, plenty time for you,” she said. “Plenty good sailor-man stop Raratonga. You go ’long die; I no want.”

The men looked at her sheepishly, and Shalli, the spokesman, scratched his head and surveyed a heap of tributary pigs, fowls, and fruit that lay on the deck of the schooner before he answered. The crew had many relations about Raratonga, and the relations had done them very well this trip.

“Many thanks, great chieftainess,” he said at last, in his own tongue. “We are much obliged to you, but we have changed our minds, and now we do not ever mean to die at all.”