Wild Blood/Chapter 13

by Gordon Young

 

A ROPE'S END FALLS, SWISH—WHIR!

“THAT,” I said to Hawkins in a mood to throw him overboard, “is Dakaru.”

“That,” he repeated with complacent stubbornness, taking his pipe in one hand and extending the other requestfully, “ain't nothin'. Just a cloud or somethin'.”

We had the morning watch. The sun was peeping up and the sails were full.

“Think those boys there in the bow don't know land when they see it?”

I flung an indignant gesture at the Samoans who were staring at the faint low bluish mist-like form that touched the sea where sky and water met.

“Awright,” he rumbled. “Give me that pouch. It's Dakaru.” And having the pouch he added: “—If it ain't somethin' else!”

But it was Dakaru, and with ten Samoans headed by Malua and a half dozen white men—who rather imagined they would have something dreadful done to them any hour—with Dula and Davenant on board too, we were nearly at the long voyage's end.

We had left Lelela two days after Captain Lumholtz proudly went away with his cherished prisoner.

In those two days a few things perhaps worth mentioning had happened.

Malua had returned from Apia, empty-handed and furious.

At the feet of Taulemeito, before whom he poured out his story, he had brained the miserable Senva. And again at Williams's request a party of men hurried the Yankee missionaries off to the hills. Malua swore to club them to death. They had inspired Senva to treachery.

The American engineer at Apia, undoubtedly frightened and possibly truthful also, had said it was impossible to furnish dynamite. He had heard the report Senva gave out even before Malua learned it had been given out; and he conspired to hold Malua at Apia so he could not get away and give warning before the Friedrich had started.

He and his German employers might have held a large healthy conger eel much more easily than Malua, when that young chief discovered what was in the air. He did not even appreciate the joke that had been played on the gunboat. His temper was up.

And what had happened the night before he arrived home did not lessen his resentment against white men, all white men, who came overrunning the islands of his people, laying out plantations, feeding the natives rum and gewgaws, defiling the women, spreading disease and thrusting Bibles with the threat of hell-fire into their faces.

Strangely enough he did not think of Williams as a white man; but even face to face with the immobile serenity of Father Rinieri he had, with surprising bitterness for a Samoan, loosened his anger.

That night when I had waited so long outside of Father Rinieri's house I had not been eavesdropping. Of course I did not thrust my fingers into my ears or anything of the kind. But the little cockney, who had a very great admiration for Hawkins, had searched him out and told him that Raikes and Davenant were cooking up some deviltry; and that he, Cockney George, wasn't “hidiot henough to try to tyke the wind hout hof 'Urricane Wylliams's syles.”

No sir. George didn't have any love for Hurricane Williams. But he would he “bloomin' well blasted” if he didn't have too much sense to try to come anything over that fellow.

So I waited to give Williams what I had heard from Hawkins. At least that was the excuse I had given myself for remaining so long near Father Rinieri's door. I knew the crew felt miserable and in a mood to think they ought to do something, anything; but I really did not suppose that they would try to seize the ship.

What they expected to do with it after they got her I don't know. They had nothing to do but go on board. She was ready to sail—only she would have to be towed out, and by not less than a half dozen boatfuls of strong rowers.

But Davenant, it appeared, had told them of the rifles. Raikes, who alone knew something of ships, had talked foolish and gestured aside the difficulties.

Anyway they went on board and broke out the rifles.

Davenant had tried to get Dula to go on board too. What she told him I do not know. But one of the native girls who was present told me, though she understood scarcely a word of English, that the hairy-faced man had been very angry and tried to talk loud; and that Dula had been quiet and smiled. It was the native girl who had screamed when he raised his hand to strike her. And he went away.

Perhaps she had told Davenant much the same that I overheard Father Rinieri tell to Williams. I did not hear much, though my ears grew about two inches from the strain; but I did catch the fact that Dula had withheld nothing—nothing—from Father Rinieri, and that she was more relieved, more at ease with herself, than had ever seemed possible to her. But Father Rinieri was not himself yet at ease over her.

However, that has nothing to do with the attempt to steal the Sally Martin. By the time I told Williams what was planned, the plan had been accomplished.

We did not know it then. The maneuver had been carried out with an effort at secrecy—only there is no such thing in a Samoan village. We knew it presently, for the village was in a hubbub.

But Williams said nothing. Not a word. I would not believe that myself if I had not stood by him, tagged after him, followed him, in eager expectancy to hear him snap a few words of orders, then go toward the beach and set out with boats for the ship. It seemed as if all the village had the same expectancy.

Williams went to the house Taulemeito had set apart for him. I followed. So did the village. The village squatted on the grass and in the shadows. I loitered in the doorway.

At last I demanded:

“Skipper, what you going to do about it?”

He stirred himself from moody reflections, but they had obviously not been on the Sally Martin, for he said bruskly, as if unwillingly recalled to something of scant importance:

“Do about it? Go aboard in the morning and put those men to work.”

And he did.

In the most matter-of-fact way, shortly after dawn, he was rowed to the ship. Hawkins and I were with him in the same boat. The rail bristled with rifles menacingly laid across it.

Raikes, yelling ah the top of his voice, warned us off. Davenant, cool, even a little polite, warned us off.

“Red-Top,” said Hawkins, pretending to be—and perhaps not wholly pretending—a little anxious, “how's anybody goin' miss me? If I 's skinny like you——”

He broke off.

Raikes was crying that another stroke of the paddles would bring a volley.

The natives let the paddles trail and twisted anxious faces toward Williams.

He told them to row on.

Hawkins took a deep breath like a man about to plunge into cold water.

“Fire!” commanded the high, chill voice of Davenant.

We could see the expression of amazement on the faces above the rail. Not a rifle went off. Some of the men looked at their guns as if they had bewitched things in their hands, and peered, stupefied, at the unexploded shells.

I laughed, a bit hysterical perhaps, but none the less in merriment. I had forgotten that Williams, a capable gunsmith, who had often had rifles stolen from him, had removed the firing-pins. No wonder he cared very little how many men had gone on board and armed themselves.

The crew was flabbergasted, literally. They did not understand it. It savored of the devil, of real black wizardry.

What followed from Williams may have seemed to them more devilish but without any wizardry in it. Whether what Williams soon proceeded to do was actually diabolical or was even stinted, inadequate justice, I do not know. No other man would have done it, at least in just the way that he did.

He shouted for the sea-ladder to be thrown over, and he was up it in a bound. The crew were a little awed and somewhat frightened.

He seemed to ignore their recent pitiable effort at mutiny. He turned his back on this man and that carelessly. Some of them still held rifles in their hands and could have clubbed him. But when he said to help Hawkins up they jumped to obey.

The Samoans scrambled on deck.

Upon the poop Davenant stood, absolutely trembling—no doubt with nervousness and anger and disappointment.

Williams looked up at him and snapped:

“Come here!”

Every face was upturned toward Davenant, waiting for what he would do—summonsed like that.

“You will please speak to me as to a gentleman!” he said.

His voice got away from him though. It was shriller than I had ever heard it. Davenant was shaken through and through.

Williams scarcely moved except to jerk his head to one side, and a score of words, not so many perhaps, crackled from his mouth. He spoke to the Samoans. I caught each word and weakly grasped at Hawkins and muttered, “My God!” as the Samoans streaked aft.

Davenant saw them coming and was alarmed. He backed away, but seemed incredulous that they would presume to lay hands on him. They not only did lay hands on him, but they grasped him and roughly but not abusively hurried him down the ladder and into the waist.

He struggled and cried out, mad with a goaded sense of indignity—if not too with fear. He was no longer the chill, poised, enigmatic figure, hiding Sicilian passions under the shell of an Englishman. He raged venomously. Nothing was left him of dignity, of prestige—nothing was left him but flesh to feel pain.

When Williams sent the natives aft he had told them to bring Davenant there and bind him to the mast, arms encircling it.

And they did.

They stripped his coat from him, thrust him against the mainmast, pulled his arms around, tied each wrist, then brought each of the lines clear around both the mast and his body. They tied his legs vise-like too. He was helpless as if on a rack.

Williams took the long knife from his belt, cut an end from a half-inch rope and casually flicked the four feet of length as if testing it.

We were a group of amazed, even horrified, men. In our minds, at least, Davenant was the owner of the ship. But more than that he was a peer of England, a lord, the son and heir of a marquis.

But all that Williams said was, “Stand back,” and we gave way. He tossed the line into the air and brought it down on Davenant's shoulder.

The man screamed. It was not pain. It was outrage. The blow did not break the skin of his back, but it cut through his heart.

Incredible as it is to say so, there was not a sign of passion on Williams's face or in his manner. He was tense; the muscles of his neck stood out like large cords, and his eyes had the force of physical strength. But he was always tense, always strained, always seemingly at the point of fury.

Blow after blow came down. They stung, but he was not putting his weight to them. He was not beating the man's flesh so much as the man's spirit.

Davenant's cries were more like those of a beast than a man. His black beard was flecked with foam; his mouth white with it.

And there was no way of knowing whether Williams was paying punishment for the shot into his back as he slept, or for the late, abortive, senseless attempt to steal the ship—or for something else that had aroused his terrible sense of vengeance. There had been the long, patient devoted hours that Dula put in by his bed; and there had been the long hours that he sat across from Father Rinieri, that night before when I waited in the shadows.

There he had heard her story from the time the Sicilian countess came as a bride to England—the whole story, with its tragedies and bitterness, told with the solemn, dramatic, yet compassionate words of an old, wise man who knew the hearts of men and of women. As a priest, Father Rinieri had heard what she would not, could not, have told to another; but, having told, she gave permission, if she had not indeed made the request, that her story be given to Hurricane Williams.

Why a woman, when she loves, feels, and scarcely can ever resist, the urge to cast herself humbly, confessionally—whatever her disgrace—at the feet of the man, is something belonging to the inscrutable secrets of God Himself. It seemed she had chosen to make her confession vicariously.

And perhaps those blows that fell on Davenant's back were the expression of what Williams felt and thought of the cruel, evil way in which Davenant had not only kept her fermented with hate against her father—kissing the knife with which she was to kill him—but had deliberately, malevolently, caused her to learn and endure other, and worse things.

He, a grown man when she was a child. He, the brother of her mother. But perhaps, too, there was something even more that surged within Williams—some response, some answer that would not be stilled, to her bold, unashamed love for him.

But that is all conjecture, no better than shooting at a target hidden from view. And I maunder on like an old woman at gossip. The fact is that Williams beat with a rope-end the body of Sir Francis Davenant for three or four minutes; then with two strokes of his knife cut him loose.

“I'll kill you! I'll kill you!” the man shrieked.

His arms were upraised, his fingers talon-like. The rope that had bound him still dangled from his wrists. He was weak from fury that had in frantic impotence burned up his own strength. He was not unlike a madman. For the time he was one. All the Sicilian hate and mania for revenge of which he was capable was wildly flaunted at Williams. Davenant was simply unrecognizable as the poised, chill, aloof man with the carefully combed black beard and disturbing, cynical white smile.

There was no plumbing Williams's mind. At least I could not. So, whether he really felt that whatever Davenant could threaten or do was nothing to notice, or whether his appearance of not even hearing or seeing Davenant was deliberately assumed to make the man more sufferingly mad, is for those who feel they understand to guess at.

He turned from Davenant and spoke to the crew. It was their turn. And they jumped to the dirty, hard work he ordered, jumped for flush-pots and tar-buckets. They moved with a will. One might have thought there was a big money-prize dangling before their fingers.

Davenant saw his chance. He swooped at the deck, snatched a rifle and swung it. I shouted; Hawkins shouted. The Samoans nearest him lurched forward—too late.

But Williams did not carry his life in his hand without knowing pretty well what went on behind him. I believe that he sensed that coming blow through some faculty developed by years of strain and watchfulness. I believe that, only because I can't believe that he saw it.

Anyway he expected it, and all the while must have been poised to wheel. He did. His hand shot out and up, caught the descending gun at the barrel, wrenched it from Davenant's grip, flung it to the deck—and he simply turned his back again.

Davenant looked at him, just stared in a kind of stupid daze; and then—no doubt unconsciously—he made the sign of the cross on his breast. Silently he went aft; went to his room. He had not been seen out of it since.

The Samoans that came on board with Williams remained. White men were under native eyes. They became the crew. Not those men, or not all of them; but others came to take their place.

Malua came with a half dozen eager to follow Williams over the world. Why? He would lead them into trouble. He told, and made them understand, hemp or at least prison awaited them if he should be caught.

They came eagerly. Not for his money or trade or for anything that could be bought with money. Why? I do not know; and I have often wondered. Perhaps it is because men, no matter what their color, follow the intrepid ones. Perhaps it was because Williams never broke a promise to them. He never broke his promise to any man. A simple way to get rid of Williams from the high seas would have been through getting him to agree to go to Sydney and stick his head through the noose. He would have gone. Indeed, he would have gone.

He made lots of promises and he kept all. He went to Sydney once to keep a promise with a brute of an old captain—and stole that skipper's brig under the eyes of the forts. And he wrecked it, as he promised he would if that thief did not split fairly on the cargo of very fine shell that Williams had gathered but could not take into port himself.

Too, he had promised to take Davenant and the woman to Dakaru; and he was taking them.

I do not think that Dula wanted to go except with the ship. I mean that I imagined she did not particularly care whether the ship went to Dakaru or Denmark; but wherever it went she wanted to go.

I guessed that she was not eager to go to Dakaru because Father Rinieri came on board with her and the native woman, Laulai; and he would not have come on board to give his parting blessing unless he knew that her first urge for going to Dakaru had vanished. He remained with us until the ship was towed to the outer reefs; then a boat came alongside for him.

Dula—I was watching closely—held his hand for seconds at parting. Her face had a strange mildness that turned into a smile as she said good-by. What they said I do not know, for their talk was in a language of which I understood nothing. I helped him down the poop ladder. He walked very slowly.

“Father,” I said, “if you don't think it'll make the Lord angry with you, you might mention my name to Him. You know, I'm not bad as He must think, since He only hears o' me from other missionaries.”

He looked at me questioningly, quietly. I was perhaps irreverent, but I was not insincere.

“I've been to Dakaru before. And, Father, the crust 'tween it and hell's mighty thin!”

And he answered with something I have often thought on, and wondered at his understanding of men, of wicked men like myself. “Dan, Dan,” he smiled, “I'm afraid I'll be of most service to you twenty years from now—when you remember me.”

A prophetic benediction. I never saw him again, but the memory of him and his wise goodness has not left me.

Williams was waiting to help him down the sea-ladder, and in parting Father Rinieri said something to him that I did not understand, and I do not think I have ever understood.

“Captain Williams, I shall always consider it an honor to have known you.”

And I had enough already to think on without cudgeling my head half the night wondering what Father Rinieri could have meant by that. He had seen Williams several times during the past years and hardly spoken with him. Perhaps Williams, too, had made a confessional across that lamp-lit table; or perhaps that wise old priest had looked deep through Williams's silence and understood the man as no one else did. I do not know. There are so many things I don't know, and for one as curious as I it's often fretful and increases sleeplessness.

One thing was clear, however: Father Rinieri would not have considered it an honor a week before to have known Williams.

Dula had Laulai, a Samoan woman, as a companion. Laulai could speak a little English. When a girl she had married an Englishman and lived with him for ten years. He had made money in trade and gone back home to spend it on white women. She never saw him again.

It was Laulai who told me with that free sense of criticism that women have—particularly native women after they have learned impudence from white husbands—that she did not think Williams was such a fine man. He had sent Red Shaylor away for Germans to hang him. Williams should have killed him outright.

Had anybody annoyed the wives of Taulemeito and lived? Could any man grab a woman in the shadows that loved Malua, and not die? Williams was a great alii, brother of the chief; but he was no tausea, no protector.

Laulai was taking it for granted that I and every one else knew of what she was talking. Apparently she was talking of many things, or at least two or three.

I was a fool, she said. Samoan ladies are outspoken. Did I not know that the beautiful woman had been fearful of the lima toto man—the red, the bloody-handed Shaylor? Did I not know that there had been cause? She was afraid too of the black-haired man. Why hadn't Williams settled with the one and with the other, too? Gave one to the Germans. Whipped the other with a little string. Bah! She, Laulai, had heard that he was a man.

I recalled how Dula had on the ship seemed to sense the wisdom of avoiding Red Shaylor, even though the alternative was to make a companion of me; and how he had blustered before her and looked at her from a distance. Word by word I pried from Laulai that Shaylor had been objectionable in the village.

Though she was sworn to secrecy, the oath was not what made it so difficult to get information out of her. Woman-like, she wanted to express her opinion instead of tell facts.

It had got so that Dula could not walk out in the evening without Shaylor waylaying her. Once he had grabbed her, perhaps thinking that Dula was alone, when she had walked on from two or three of the girls who stopped to gossip with somebody. Dula had made the girls promise to say nothing about it, and by some miracle they seemed to have done so.

“Well,” I reflected, “Red Shaylor is gone. Probably the Fates are patching up the hole that Williams tore in their design when the Roanoke went down. Or maybe they really didn't want him to die then. There is no more telling about the Fates than about any other woman—they all get a man into trouble.”

And Dula had me into trouble before we were two days out.

She came to me early one morning when she should have been trying to sleep. I was. The wheel was lashed, and I was sprawled on the skylight. Malua had the deck, and he was in the waist hobnobbing with the watch.

The details are needless. Dula had not spoken to me for two weeks. For one thing I had kept out of her way. To be unable to keep her face out of my mind was disturbing enough without coming closer.

She came up as if we had parted but an hour ago, the best of friends. I mean that without any explanation at all for the chilliness she had radiated toward me, without any apology or expectation of one, she came and sat down on the skylight beside me when I sat up. She had a favor to ask, of course.

She called me Dan. But then all the other women in the village did, or tried to—usually said “Lan”; there is no “d” in their language—so perhaps Dula came by it unconsciously. But somehow to hear her say it was not, for instance, like when Laulai said it.

“Why have you tried so hard to stay away from me, Dan?” she asked.

I don't know what I wanted to say. Certainly something different from what I did say. What I did say was of no importance. Something vague about having been working hard, very hard.

She smiled. It was a real smile with nothing reserved in it. She smiled receptively, as if any explanation would have done as well. I doubt if she heard what I said, for she asked at once with a little stir of eagerness if I had told Williams how Tom Gibson had met death.

“After being bribed to silence with so much jewelry?” I was a little hurt. I don't know what by; but I felt hurt anyway.

“Please do,” she said quickly, leaning toward me.

Her dark face with its strange irregular lines was close to mine. Her thick hair was matted down and covered her ears. Her eyes were earnest, pleading.

“You will, won't you?” she added.

“You tell him. He'll be interested. Very. Williams likes to hear things.”

“Please do, Dan.”

“Father Rinieri—didn't you tell him?”

“Dan—” there was a little note of pleading impatience. “Father Rinieri is a priest.”

“And Williams is a pirate. It won't shock him either.”

“Please, I am in earnest! I want him to know. I can't tell him. Don't you see I can't?”

“Why didn't Father Rinieri tell him?”

“Repeat a confession!” she exclaimed with a low overtone of horror.

I said that I had heard him tell.

“You listened!” Dula hardened a little in an instant.

It seemed that I was guilty of something terrible. But I was stubbornly shameless; so much so that she seemed a little confused. Anyway she explained that what Father Rinieri had had confided with him was something separate and apart from the confessional. That being a differentiation I did not understand or care anything about.

The point was that she wanted Williams to know it was not only her knife but her hand that had struck poor inoffensive Gibson. She had thought it over. She now wanted him to know.

Something internally goaded me, and I said:

“You want Williams to know you did it for him. Your story told by even Father Rinieri hasn't moved him as you thought it would. Is that it? You love him, don't you? You went in a passion over that word love once, but it's different now—isn't it? You were afraid he would be horrified if he knew about Gibson, so you wouldn't let him know that. Now you want me to tell him. If he is horrified you can say I lied!”

She struck me across the face with her palm. She said: “You are a beast!”

And she left me.

However, I did what she wanted. I did tell Williams everything—down to the palm-blow in the face.

He looked at me hard with anger gathering in his eyes. I had known that all the time and said nothing? He thought that I was his friend, not the confederate of any strange woman that happened to be on his ship.

“But she did it for you!” I cried, involuntarily pleading for her in an uneasy effort to justify myself.

“And you did it for her!” he said. “You love her, McGuire. I knew that from the first. The thing called love makes strange fools.”

I denied it with might and main, with outpoured oaths and hard-flung gestures.

He said something about an innocent man never overemphasizing his plea.

“Good God!” I cried; “then do you love her?”

A thin crooked smile hung itself on his lips. Motionless, he looked at me, fire in his eyes, and a cryptic, twisted line on his hard mouth.

I could say nothing more; and he gave no answer except what I chose to read in the anger of his eyes and the crooked smile that may have been sardonic or may have been confessional. I do not know.

So on we went day after day, as miserable a boat-load as ever ruffled the sea. I wished with embittered futility that I had at no time kept anything back from Williams. Hawkins became my solace and companion, though there were times when I hated his big fat bellying body, his heavy rumbling voice. But I talked with him; told him much—and much I didn't tell.

“Cheer-up, Red-Top; cheer-o. We're rollin' down to Dakaru. Lots o' drink there, old mate. An' eat—oh! What's that you said oncet? Blood'll be splashed to the moon. Funny, wasn't it? Carp Taylor's the man this Lord Davenant o' ourn hired to take 'im to Dakaru.

“Taylor split my head an' walloped me 'cross the hatch. Beat up an unconscious fellow—me! An' Davenant got his floggin' wide awake. Raulson says he's never seen his face—just shoves the tucker through the door. Sometimes it ain't touched——

“Say, little Raikes is scared frozen. Says he was drunk at Lelela—didn't want to steal the ship. He ain't through pesterin' me yet t' b'lieve he done me a favor that day on the fo'c's'le. Maybe he did, Red-Top. Maybe he did.

“The whole pack o' the men are scared as Raikes that Williams'll turn the natives loose on 'em. 'Cept Cockney George. He keeps at me to know 'ow 'e 'll be rewarded.

“Say, I glimpsed a native sharpenin' Williams's knife. What does that mean, Red-Top?”

I told him for heaven's sake to stop that interminable chatter; that his tongue was long as a bowsprit, his mouth empty as a rat-eaten cheese. All that nonsense when there were important things to worry about! The world had shifted from its foundation, and everything was topsyturvy.

What did I mean? Listen: That woman was a trouble-maker. She was after Williams. No, it would have been simple if she had merely wanted to kill him. But she wanted him to love her—and she looked just like the woman that had had him hanged. And he had loved that one.

Ought to make him hate this one? Of course it ought. But what man does as he should?

“And how many women could you hate that looked like the first one you loved? And she hasn't worn that black coat with red lining—not since Williams was shot. What has that to do with it? Lots— only I don't know in what way. She is like that; black on the surface and crimsonly passionate inside of her. She has flung herself at him, Hawkins. Flung herself at him! And I'm not sure she hasn't brought him to her moorings! Think of it, man! She came out here to kill her father—her own blood-father. And love was stronger than the hate that was put into her in the nursery. She thinks it was the priest that moved her—but it was Williams. It was Williams, I tell you. And look at him, Hawkins. He's not like you and me. He hates the very sight of drunken beach-combers like you and me. But he'd wade through blood neck-deep to pull either one of us out—because he thinks it would be right. Right? Right! What is right? Maybe it tells in some of those queer books he reads.

“Do you know why he's coming here? It's to give back this ship to Grahame for the one we stole when we were here before! Some more of that damn right of his. The same as when he wrecks blackbirders and sets natives loose—likely enough to murder the next white men that come! He does that; and yet—have you ever seen him kill? Pouf—Pouf—Pouf with knife or gun. And never a quiver—no more than if he was spearing fish! Aye, he's been hanged himself, so probably he knows how little life is worth. No, you fool, I'm not drunk! I'm sober—that's what's the matter with me!”

.… And the next morning we raised Dakaru.