South of the Line/The Rules of the Game
The Rules Of The Game
FFELISI was hoeing in the family taro patch, when the white man crawled out of the green cavern of the bush on to the beach at Luana.
There was blood on his face, his ducks were tattered and besmeared, and his left hand trailed lifelessly in the sand at his side. For a moment he stared along the stretch of glistening beach, then quite suddenly he collapsed in a little heap and lay still.
Now, the way of the white man is beyond belief. Felisi, who for many months had lived among him and his women, while selling imitation pink coral on the wharf at Levuka, had learned this great truth from the bitter-sweet experience that goes to make up life—even the life of a South Sea Islander. She had studied the white man in his love and in his hate, in prosperity and poverty, peace and war, and at the end of an eventful fourteen years, found herself no nearer discovering the cause of his ineffable conceit, colossal ignorance, monumental selfishness, and undoubted greatness, than she had been as a tiny bronze infant, playing under the breadfruit trees of her native village.
Wherefore the genus white man claimed a good deal of Felisi's attention. His antics interested her in the same way that her own life and habits interested some white men, though, of course, it never occurred to the latter that while they were studying "the quaint customs of a quaint people," they themselves were being studied.
For instance, when the dear old gentleman on the wharf at Levuka had patted Felisi's head and bought a shilling's worth of spurious coral for the sake of studying the texture of her hair, he had not the faintest idea that the soft brown eyes that wandered langourously over his superannuated person had noted that tufts of hair grew out of his ears in a most comical manner, that his false teeth moved when he talked, and that, save for his red skin, he was the living image of a doddering lunatic that Felisi knew of in a certain village up the coast.
But there it was.
And here was another case—a white man lying in a limp heap on the beach at Luana. He was quite young, as white men went, and when Felisi had climbed a palm and given him a drink from a green cocoanut, he sat up with startling abruptness.
"Where am I?" he demanded.
"Luana," Felisi answered, squatting in the sand and watching with interest the contortions of his pink face as he tried to lift his arm.
"Luana! Ouch! Yes, I seem to have been on Luana for the last twenty years. But what part? Ouch!"
"Senai Keba," said Felisi.
The white man whistled.
"Great Scott!" he muttered. "The north end! I must have"
But Felisi was thinking of this gentleman Scott. He was so universal, and always so great. Who was he? She determined to find out at the first opportunity. At the moment she became aware that the white man was staring at her with suddenly awakened interest.
"You speak English?" he exclaimed, as though this accomplishment of Felisi's had just reached his notice.
"Some," she answered glibly, using the word she had learned on the wharf at Levuka, and always found so useful.
"Thank heaven!" muttered the white man. "Have you seen any one—a white man, I mean, a large white man who limps when he walks and carries a rifle under his arm?" He was looking over his shoulder now, and when he turned, there was a furtive look in his eyes.
Felisi shook her head.
"Then you soon will," snapped the white man. "Get me out of here, kid, somewhere safe, and—and you shall have all I've got. He's after me—they're all after me. I haven't slept for three nights—the bush—I can't stand it any more!" He moaned and pitched face forward into the sand.
It was an interesting phenomenon that, when the white man is strong and well, he is a god in his own estimation, infinitely removed above the Polynesian race; but when he is sick or frightened, he is as humble as a child. It was as a child that Felisi saw this white man. She knew of a place, a perfectly safe place, and when she had brought him round for the second time, she guided him to it. The Buli of Senai Keba had built a new look-out on the edge of the beach, but the old one still remained up amongst the branches of a giant dilo tree. It was a big business getting the white man up the broken ladder of liana, and he had no sooner crawled on to the platform of woven branches than he collapsed again.
He was very humble.
Felisi brought him green cocoanuts and cooked taro root, and while he ate, in great hungry mouthfuls, she examined his arm. There was a clean hole on one side, just above the elbow, and a rather larger one on the other.
"So long as it hasn't got the bone it's nothing," mumbled the white man, with his mouth full; "but I rather fancy it has—ouch!" He leant back against the dilo trunk while Felisi bound the wound with a strip torn from her sulu. "It was a good shot," he continued to mumble reminiscently, between munches at the taro root—"five hundred yards, if it was an inch. I was crawling up the other side of the valley, the only bit of open country we'd seen for—how long was it?—four—five days...." His voice trailed off into silence. He was asleep—asleep with the half-eaten taro root in a hand lying limply palm upward on the platform.
He slept for a day and a night and nearly half a day, and when he awoke he ate until Felisi thought he would burst. He seemed to swell with the food, just like a Buli at a feast; his eyes grew brighter, and he was not so humble. He laughed.
"We've didled 'em, kid," he said, yawning and stretching luxuriously. "This is great!"
Felisi squatted on the platform and watched him in silence. Suddenly his hand went to his hip pocket, and he drew out a joint of bamboo corked at one end. He extracted the cork with his teeth and poured out on to the platform a stream of pearls. He hummed a little air as he sat looking at them.
"Worth a bit of trouble, aren't they?" he suggested.
Felisi nodded, though personally she preferred imitation pink coral. It was easier to come by, and more colourful.
"And there was trouble," he added reminiscently. "Crane didn't play the game by me. Partnerships again! Never did believe in partnerships, but what's a fellow to do when he's got the will, and the knowledge, and the muscle, and no dibs to back 'em up?"
Felisi shook her head and looked sympathetic. Amongst her many other accomplishments she was probably the best listener in the world. Her attitude appeared to encourage the white man.
"Such a time!" he breathed. "First chance I've had of thinking about it or having a look at them," he added, rolling the pearls to and fro under his lean brown fingers. "First of all in the cutter. You get to hate the way a man hangs up his hat if you're alone with him long enough. Heavens, how I came to hate that man! He was mean—dirty mean in thought and action—and he was one of your oily sort until something went wrong, then he was peevish as a sick child, and with as much to back it up. You couldn't hit him. You felt you were up against a man-woman, or a woman-man, whichever way you like to put it—worst of both, you know, like a half-caste."
"Me know 'um," Felisi thought fit to interpolate.
"It was after we got to the lagoon," the white man
went on—"after the third pearl, to be exact. The whole lot weren't worth fifty pounds, but we were gloating over them on the cabin table. Crane would pick 'em up, then I would. We were talking some bosh about the biggest being worth a possible fifty pounds. Fifty pounds, when it was as deformed as a hunchback! But we liked to talk big. It kept our pecker up. I looked at Crane suddenly, and I saw his eyes by lamp-light. They were fastened on me, and they hated me. They hated me as much as I hated him, but for a different reason. The pearls were the reason for his case. I laughed—I couldn't help it. It struck me as so darned funny, us two sitting in a cabin twelve feet by ten, hating one another."
Felisi laughed, too. It was a white man's joke.
"I think Crane must have mistaken my laugh. Anyway, we both knew what we thought of each other as surely as though we had spoken. It got worse. We did quite well, and Crane's hate increased with the quantity and size of the pearls. Mine couldn't get any worse than it had been at the beginning, so I was out of the running. But do you suppose we said nasty things to one another? Not a bit of it. For sheer politeness you couldn't have equalled us south of the Line. It was 'An uncommonly good day, Jim,' from Crane, and 'Good enough,' and 'Right-oh,' from me. 'If we go on like this'—from Crane, and 'Touch wood!' from me. It came to being polite at meals in the end, and I didn't laugh. I must have lost my sense of humour those days."
Felisi nodded her head understandingly. The white man might have been talking to the lady with the gold hair behind the bar in Levuka for all the difference he seemed to find in his audience. Felisi took it as an unconscious compliment, which indeed it was.
"Then came what I'd been expecting. But I'd hidden the dinghy oars, and hadn't given him credit for the pluck of swimming a hundred yards through sharks. He did it. It's wonderful what fifty first-grade pearls will do with a man-woman. Luckily it was a mangrove country we were anchored off, and there were three miles of it before you could get to real solid earth. I tracked him as easily as you would an elephant, and just before nightfall something white moved on the other side of a gully. I fired, and went over. It was Crane, lying on his face, with his fat legs sprawled, dead as meat; and the pearls were in the corner of his beastly bandana handkerchief, that hadn't been washed for months."
The white man sat propped against the dilo trunk, staring out to sea with a disgusted expression still lingering on his face, presumably at the thought of the bandana handkerchief.
Felisi neither moved nor spoke. She knew by instinct when to do either, and presently the white man went on, though more slowly:
"It's the first man I've killed. I'm not used to shooting at men, much less killing them. But I wasn't sorry. It rather surprised me how I took it when I found him dead. Somehow it never struck me that I couldn't go out into the world and get on with life as I had before. It seemed to me that I had rid the world of something dirty mean, and that was all there was to it. The other came later—in the bush, and especially at night, when the mist rises and the tree fungus glows through it like a lamp in a London fog. I came to know what it is to have killed a man—even a man-woman and—what it is to be the pet of a man-hunt. Heavens"—he glanced over his shoulder, then laughed nervously—"it's worse than playing spooks with the lights out! They haunt you all right. You think you're done with them—thrown them off—but you haven't; they bob up again and come creeping on through the bush. I don't know, but I think it must be Hanson that's got my track. He's a good shot—that was a classy shot, five hundred yards, and I was moving—the only man of them worth thinking about, middling tall and chunky, with a toothbrush moustache. You're sure you haven't seen him?"
"Sure," mimicked Felisi.
"I got him, though, through the leg—waited behind a lantana bush until he was on top of me, and then hadn't the pluck to shoot him anywhere but in the leg. I'm glad I didn't, too; he's all right, and he's got to do his work. It's queer, but you positively get to like a man that sticks to you the way he's stuck to me. It becomes a sort of ghastly game, with unwritten rules to it—through mangrove swamps and mazes of underbrush, up over volcanic rocks and across rivers with the worst sort of shark in them. I was lost, properly lost, and I know he was, but we kept on. He never left me—day and night he never—left—me!"
The white man's eyes were suddenly alert and staring fixedly at the reed brake on the far side of the beach. His voice had dropped, then ceased altogether. His jaw hung down. Out of the reed brake on to the beach limped a man with a rifle under his arm.
He was a hundred yards away, and looking out to sea, but the man up on the look-out seemed to shrivel into himself on the far side of the dilo trunk. Felisi was wearing a red hibiscus blossom, but the white man snatched it out of her hair.
"S-sh! Lie down!" he breathed.
"You all right," whispered Felisi reassuringly.
The white man seized her roughly by the wrist and jerked her down beside him.
"Lie there!" he hissed. "It is Hanson! How's the beach?"
"Beach, him all right," quavered Felisi, looking out through the branches. The white man forced her down to the platform.
"You little fool! I mean, is it dry where we came over it—powdery? Will it show the difference—difference, savvy?—between a naked foot—your foot and mine?" The white man indicated his long-legged boots with a slight movement.
"Beach, him all right," pouted Felisi with the air of one defending her personal property against unfair aspersion. "Him no show diff'rence."
"What's he doing now?"
Felisi could feel the white man's body trembling against her own. She peeped out and saw the man on the beach bending over the disturbance in the sand where the white man had fallen. Felisi was at a loss. The very humble child lying beside her needed soothing.
"What's he doing?" it repeated peevishly.
"Him go so," said Felisi, dropping her head with the pantomimic art of the meke dancer. "Him very tired."
"Ah!" muttered the white man, and smiled grimly.
Felisi knew that she was committed beyond recall. She had taken sides, and she did not regret her choice. The heart of a woman instinctively goes out to the fugitive—he is the weaker—and when once the Polynesian has taken sides, there is no turning back.
Presently she had to tell him—
"Him come close up."
The man on the beach was limping along its edge, peering into the reed brake. He would come directly under the dilo tree.
The white man at Felisi's side lay as still as stone. His jaw was set, his muscles tense. Felisi's hand went out as stealthily as a snake, drew the revolver from its holster, and placed it in his hand. The white man seemed not to notice it, and still lay motionless, staring into the twisted branches of the dilo tree, but listening—listening with every nerve to the soft crunch of approaching footsteps in sand. They ceased directly under the platform. Felisi could hear the beating of her own heart. A minah bird squawked shrilly in the branches overhead, and she felt her wrist crushed in a vise-like grip. There was the click of an opening lid. A match was struck. The pleasant smell of good tobacco smoke floated up to them on the still air; then the footsteps passed on.
"Wonder he didn't smell me," grinned the white man. "It's Hanson all right; he smokes Heraldic—Heraldic in a good airtight box, and a woody briar." He smacked his lips.
"Why you no shoot?" demanded Felisi. "Pouf, bang—him finish!"
"Not till I'm cornered," answered the white man. "I don't want to kill Hanson. He's a good fellow. I've got nothing against him."
Felisi scrambled into a squatting position to think this out. Her small bronze face was puckered with bewilderment. Here was one man chasing another man to catch him and have him killed, yet the pursued "had nothing against" the pursuer! Was there ever such an amazing state of affairs? "A sort of ghastly game with unwritten rules in it." Then there was no need to make the suggestion that had been in her mind—namely, that she should dispatch the man on the beach herself in one of the many ways that she had at her command.
"Besides," the white man went on, with a hint of apology in his tone, "it wouldn't make any difference. Have you ever heard of the law?"
Felisi nodded vigorously. She happened to know something about this thing called "law."
"Well, there it is. It never stops. The law says that I shall be strung up by the neck until I'm dead, and Hanson is the law. If I kill him, another man takes his place, and so on for ever. The law never stops."
"Him big fellah, law," mused Felisi.
"I should just say he is," muttered the white man, leaning limply against the dilo trunk and looking out to sea with melancholy eyes. "He's a bad fellah to bunt up against, too, but sometimes—sometimes he can be given the slip. Look here," he added, with sudden eagerness, "Hanson may have gone on, and he may not; I wouldn't trust him a yard. There's only one way out of this thing. You be fishing in a canoe—a canoe with a sail in it, mind you off the beach to-night. I'll swim out... all I've got," he ended abruptly.
Felisi nodded.
"Bless you, kid!" said the white man, and fell to collecting the scattered pearls.
On her way to the village she met "the law." He was sitting on a fallen palm beside the track that commanded a view of the beach and the village.
"Sayadra," was his cheerful greeting, though his brown face was haggard with exhaustion.
Felisi giggled and squirmed in the approved fashion of Island girls who have never had the opportunity of studying white human nature in Levuka.
But "the law" did not smile. His steady gray eyes seemed to burn holes in Felisi's face, and he spoke sharply, with the air of a man who is used to receiving prompt answers.
"Have you seen a white man about here?" he demanded, in her own tongue.
Felisi continued to giggle and shuffle her feet in the red earth of the track.
"Answer me!" snapped "the law."
"No, sir," faltered Felisi.
"Where have you just come from?"
The question came so quickly that the answer was out of Felisi's mouth before she could properly form it.
"The beach, sir."
"Then why didn't I see you on the beach just now?"
But Felisi's mind was nimble enough when it was alert. She giggled, though it was an effort, with the awful eyes of "the law" upon her.
"Answer me," he barked.
"I was bathing, sir," she simpered, with long, blue-black lashes sweeping her cheeks.
"Well, what of that?"
"I hid myself, sir."
"The law" laughed—he actually laughed, though it was a mirthless sort of sound.
"There, run along to the village, my girl, and tell the Buli that Beritania Levu (Great Britain) wants him here at once. And tell him to send down something to eat and drink in the meantime."
"The village is quite close," suggested Felisi diffidently, "and the guest-house is cool." A wild scheme flitted through her mind of launching the canoe while "the law" was in the village.
"Thank you," he answered, and his eyes resumed the burning process, "but I shall stay here."
As Felisi turned to go, these same eyes were sweeping the beach. They seemed to see all things.
She felt them at her back as she swung on toward the village. "The law" was certainly a "big fellah."
Not long before sunset Felisi was fishing in the canoe perhaps fifty yards out from the beach of Luana. It was very simple, very unexhilarating. If you dropped an old boot on the end of a string over the side, you would catch something off the beach of Luana; but Felisi's hand trembled as she continued to land fish after fish. The sun kissed the sea and went to bed, and Felisi continued to fish, with her eyes on the shore. There was no moon, and there were few stars, but there was the vague half-light that never deserts a tropical night, and presently a shadow flitted across the beach and dissolved into the sea, but not entirely. A still smaller shadow, and round, was gliding on the surface of the water. Nearer and nearer it came, until it was possible to see the spreading fan of ripples in its wake and something on its summit that gleamed even in the half-light.
Then the silence of the night was split asunder by the crack of a rifle, and a bullet splashed into the water a foot from the moving shadow. It vanished, and silence closed down, but only for a moment. It was clear that the eyes of "the law" saw all things. The next bullet was nearer, and each time the shadow vanished it was for a shorter time, and there was a shorter silence. Felisi strained her eyes into the darkness, and at last there was a long silence—a very long silence. Her clasped hands were pressed down over her heart. And still the silence continued. She paddled swiftly in its direction, and as the canoe slid gently on to the sand, shots came muffled from the bush. The shadow had missed the canoe, then, and returned to the shore.
They were fighting in a palm grove now—the shadow and "the law"—still fighting. Would it ever cease? Felisi wondered, as she followed up the sounds of conflict. Truly "the law" never stops. From palm trunk to lantana bush they flitted, the shadow always retreating, "the law" always advancing. A tongue of flame would be answered with a tongue of flame, report with report. It was an argument in flame and lead. Then quite suddenly there fell a silence—a silence that lasted an unconscionable time, and out of it came a voice in breathless jerks—
"What's—the use—Lucas?"
And an answering voice replied—
"That's—my business. You'd—have—shot him yourself—Hanson."
"I dare say; but—I must warn you—that anything you may say—will"
A breathless laugh came from somewhere.
"You can get all that—off your chest—when you've got me."
"You're out of ammunition."
"Don't be too sure. You are. I know the Government ration, and I've counted."
There was a short silence, then—
"What's more, I'll prove it."
The shadow emerged from behind a lantana bush, resolving into the form of the white man. He stood quite still out there in the open, his white ducks looming clear against the inky background of the underbrush. The revolver was levelled from his hip in his right hand. The other hung inert by his side.
"Now," he said, "will you let me go without killing you, Hanson? I don't want to."
"Let you go!" snapped the voice of "the law," and a glint of white showed behind a palm trunk not forty paces distant.
"Don't come out!" cried the white man, as though afraid. "Don't come out without your hands up, Hanson!"
For answer, "the law" came out from behind the palm trunk. He carried his rifle clubbed, and, though he limped painfully, he came straight on.
"You're out of ammunition, Lucas," he said, as he advanced, and he said it as though trying to convince himself that it was true. You know you're out of ammunition." The revolver was pointing directly at his chest, and still he came on. "It'll save no end of trouble, both for you and me"
He was not more than five paces distant now, and he was staring at the muzzle of the revolver as though fascinated. Just so had Felisi seen fish come up out of the depths of the rock pools to see the light of the torch and be speared. The white man stood quite still as though thinking what he would do. Then, in a flash, he raised the revolver to fling it in the face of "the law," and the butt of the clubbed rifle fell. Both missed their mark.
"Didn't I say" grunted "the law," and the rest was lost in the impact of their bodies. The white man had but one arm, the other could scarce stand for lameness, yet they rocked in one another's embrace for what seemed minutes to Felisi, before crashing to earth in a writhing heap. They were on the bank of a stream that ran through the grove, and Felisi caught her breath as they rolled nearer and nearer the edge. It was a four-foot drop at most, and the water was shallow, trickling slowly over the bed of powdered coral sand. But Felisi knew that stream. There were many like it on Luana.
Here, on the ground, "the law" had the upper hand, for he had the use of both arms, and his lame leg was not such a handicap. He was strong, too—stronger than the white man, though both were pitifully weak from their exertions. Would it never end? They jerked and strained.
Suddenly the white man lay still staring up into the roof of palm leaves with agony written on every line of his haggard face. It was as though he had been seized with sudden paralysis. It was paralysis, for "the law" had a hold on his arm—a certain hold. Surely this was the end. But Felisi had taken sides, and the Polynesian never turns back. "The law" uttered a stifled cry as her teeth sank into the back of his hand. The hold was lost, the arm free. The white man kicked out with all his strength, and "the law" tottered for a moment before rolling down the bank into the stream.
The water was not two inches in depth, yet when he struggled to rise he sank knee-deep. Another supreme effort, and the glistening white sand was about his waist. After that he sank by inches, his stern gray eyes turned toward firm ground, not three yards distant, but uttering no sound.
The white man had fainted, and when his eyes opened Felisi was bending over him.
"Come quick!" she said. "You all right. Come quick! Canoe, him"
"Where's Hanson?" muttered the white man.
Felisi pointed toward the river bank.
The white man's eyes opened wide.
"In the river—drowned?"
Felisi shook her head.
"Him go long road, all the same, pretty quick," she told him reassuringly. But for some strange reason it failed to reassure. The white man crawled to the edge of the bank and lay there in the grass. Felisi could hear his voice.
"What about it, Hanson?"
There was no answer.
"It'll get you in less than an hour. Don't be a fool."
Still no answer, and a long pause, during which the white man could have reached the canoe. Felisi could have shaken him.
"I must get out of here, Hanson. I shall get clean away. The girl has a canoe. Whatever difference will it make?"
Another pause.
"What about it, Hanson?"
There was actually a pleading note in the voice.
Was this one of the rules of the game? Felisi gave it up. Her white teeth snapped together in sheer exasperation.
"Good-bye, Hanson!"
The white man staggered to his feet and stood upright, swaying for a moment, then lurched off toward the beach, leaning on Felisi's shoulder.
Twice he stopped dead in his tracks and listened intently, but no sound came to them except the soft breath of the wind amongst the palm leaves.
They launched the canoe in silence. Felisi hoisted the sail, and presently the ripple of water past the canoe's side told them they were under way. The dark line of the shore grew slowly fainter. The white man sat in the stern, steering with the paddle, and staring straight before him. He was heading for the open sea and freedom, yet his face was a grim mask, and there was no joy in his eyes.
Felisi did not speak; she sat watching him from the main thwart and noticing many things. A frown had come to his forehead and his eyes were restless, casting this way and that at nothing save the dark waters slip- ping past the canoe. Sometimes, too, he would hold the paddle under his arm and pass his hand over his eyes as though trying to brush aside some vision that haunted them. But slowly she saw a change steal over him. Set purpose came into his eyes, the grim mask of his face gave way to animation—eagerness. He muttered a curse at the failing wind, and Felisi became aware that their course had changed, with his mind. The canoe no longer headed for the open sea, and a little later she saw the well-known coastline of Luana looming over the bows. He had put back.
The canoe had no sooner grounded than the white man leapt ashore and ran up the beach. Felisi found him at the bank of the stream—the sand had risen to the chin of "the law"—tugging and straining with his one hand.
It took them fully half an hour of such work to extricate "the law," and at the end of it the two men lay side by side on the river bank, too exhausted to move or speak.
Then at last the silence was broken, it was "the law" who spoke.
"Edward Lucas," he said, rolling on to his side, "I arrest you, in the name of the King, for the murder of Walter Crane."
The white man lay on his back with closed eyes.
"Give me a fill of your Heraldic, Hanson," he said.
Even this was not all. Felisi was despatched to the village by "the law," but before going she waited for confirmation of the order. The white man gave it by opening his eyes and nodding wearily. The two men were carried to the guest-house on litters, and a guard of native police—very smart in their blue tunics and fluted sulus—stationed itself outside the door.
It was two days before the white man could walk. And when he crossed the room, trailing Heraldic tobacco smoke in his wake, he caught sight of the guard and turned back.
"Hanson," he said, "won't you get rid of this pantomime?"
The guard was dismissed—very smartly.
"The law" was undoubtedly the stronger man. In one night his vitality returned, and, when the white man was up and about, he sat talking with him in the guest-house. Felisi heard the white man tell the story of the cutter and the pearls and the hate. And when it was done, "the law" nodded slowly and said: "Yes, I knew Crane."
That was all.
Later that evening he went to the door and stood looking out over the green hills that tumbled to the sea.
"It's going to be a dark night," he said absently.
The white man was lying on a pile of mats, and did not answer.
"A deuced dark night," repeated "the law"—"one of those nights when things happen."
The white man lifted himself on to his elbow, but still remained silent.
"And there's a fair northerly breeze," added the other irrelevantly.
The white man was staring fixedly at the broad back of "the law," silhouetted in the doorway. An eager light flashed into his eyes and was gone.
"Yes," he said slowly, and lay back on the mats.
In the morning he was gone.
So was Felisi's canoe. But "the law" made that good, even as he scowled his displeasure at the escape.
In the taro patch Felisi often puckers her brow over the problems of an eventful life, but in this particular case she can get no further in her deductions than that "the law" is a "big fellah," and the way of the white man beyond belief.