CHAPTER II
HARD-BIT DERELICTS
With Allen and his coming in the back of my brain, it was only naturalthat my thoughts, as I ground and sifted and sorted the golden powders,should turn to Kai and the train of events leading up to the ghastlytragedy of the _Cora Andrews_, so distorted a version of which had goneabroad as a consequence of the fact that Allen was alive and Bell wasdead, and that I, so far, had not told what I knew of the circumstancesunder which the one and the other had been induced to board the stricken"black-birder."
It must have been, I reflected, its comparative remoteness from all ofeven the least-sailed of the South Pacific trade routes that wasresponsible for making Kai Atoll, a barely perceptible smudge on thechart of the Louisiades, the unofficial rendezvous for the mostpicturesque lot of cut-throats, blackguards and beachcombers that "TheIslands" had known since the days of "Bully" Hayes and his care-freecontemporaries. Like had attracted like after the original nucleusgathered, safety had come with numbers, and at the time of my arrival noman whose misdeeds had not made him important enough to send a gunboatafter needed to depart from that secure haven except of his own freewill.
Among a score of hard-bit derelicts whose grinning or scowling phizzesflashed up in memory at the thought of that sun-baked loop of coral,with its rag-tag of wind-whipped coco palms and its crescent of zinc andthatch-roofed shacks, only three--or four including myself--occupied mymind for the moment. Allen--reckless daredevil that he was--had come toKai from somewhere in the Solomons for the very good and sufficientreason that it was the only island south of the Line at the time wherehis welcome would not have been either too hot or too cold to suit hisfastidious taste. Bell had come, in a stove-in whaleboat, because Kaiwas the nearest settlement to the point where he put the _FlyingScud_--the trading schooner that was his last command, if we except the_Cora Andrews_--aground on Tuka-tuva Reef. The girl, who arrived withBell in the whaleboat, came because he brought her. The tide-rips of Kaipassage and the Devil's own toboggan were all the same to Rona--at thisstage of the game, at least--so long as the big, quiet, masterful Yankeewas bumping-the-bumps with her. And even afterwards--but let thattranspire.
I, Roger Whitney, artist, formerly of New York and Paris, and, latterly,man-about-the French-colonies, with no fixed abode, had been landed atKai by a French gunboat from the Noumea station. I packed myself offfrom that accursed hole because the suicide of a couple of officers inwhose company I had been drinking absinthe at the _Cercle Militaire_ forsome weeks had reminded me altogether too poignantly of what I might, inthe ordinary course of things, expect to be doing myself before long. Achange of scene and, if possible, a modification of habits was the onlyhope. I would never have had the initiative to tackle even the first hadnot the feeling persisted that I was on the verge of doing somethingworth while with my painting. I went to Kai because the archipelagothereabouts was reputed to have the most gorgeous sky and watercolouring in Polynesia.
Neither the promised beauties nor the reputed badness of Kai stirred megreatly in anticipation. With a bitter smile I told myself that everynight I was seeing sights more lovely than anything my eyes were likelyto rest on short of Paradise, while the Chamber of Horrors in which Iawoke every morning was a veritable annex to the Inferno itself. No, itwas out of the question that Kai could unfold in realities, whether todelight or shock, things to outdo those that were already mine in dreamsthat had themselves become more real than realities. Well, it turned outthat I was only half right, or wrong, whichever way you want to put it.While, on the one hand, I found the bluff, open badness of Kai rathermore refreshing than shocking; on the other hand, it was hardly morethan a week before I was ready to swear that not the most ethereal hourithat ever laid her cool green hand upon my fevered brow was of a classto run one-two-three with a flame-quivering slip of a nymph whom I hadsurprised at her bath in a beryline pool inside the windward reef. Ibegan to pull myself together from that hour. Rona, the very sight ofwhom threw most men out of hand, had quite the opposite effect upon me.I knew she was not for me, and the thought that the world actually heldsuch loveliness in the form of flesh and blood had a sort of reassuranceabout it, like the knowledge that one has an ample income fromgovernment bonds.
Because I had landed from the _Zelee_, and also, perhaps on account ofmy rig-out (especially the brimless Algerian sun-helmet), the "beach" ofKai put me down at once as a "We-we," and, therefore, a creature quiteapart. The only Frenchmen on the island were a couple of escapes fromthe convict settlement of New Caledonia, and because neither of themcould ride or shoot or fight with their fists, they had no standing withthe predominant Australian "push," most of whom were more or less handyat all three. It was, indeed, the fact that, in spite of all my years inParis and the French colonies had done to make a physical wreck of me, Istill retained something of the quickness of eye and hand and foot whichhad conspired to make my Harvard record as an all-round-athlete one thatonly two or three men have equalled even down to the present day, thatgave me such easy sledding in making my way with the "best people" ofKai.
It took just three minutes--the length of the first round of the"friendly bout" I fought with "Heifer" Halligan, ex-welter-weightchampion of Victoria, at Jackson's pub one afternoon--to change Kai'sopenly expressed contempt for me to something very near respect. Ithoroughly appreciated the attitude of that breezy lot of sport-lovingrascals toward a Frenchified Yankee artist, especially one that did notappear to be a fugitive from justice, and so took the first opportunityto win a standing with them which would at least incline them to let mego my own way when I wanted to. Notwithstanding my wretched condition, Ioutpointed my chunky opponent a good three to one in that opening round;indeed, the "Heifer's" excuse for the foul which put me to sleep in theSecond was that both his "bloomin' peepers" were so nearly swelled shuthe couldn't see "stryght." But it was my swelling groin and batteredhands, rather than "Heifer's" bruised optics, that came in for firstattention from deft-fingered Doc Wyndham--once of Guy's, on his ownadmission. The next day I was waited upon by a delegation sent from"Jackson's Sporting Club" to urge me to put myself in training for ago-to-the-finish with "Shark-mouth" Kelly of Suva, the Fiji open champ.My speed would dazzle a cow-footed dolt like "Shark-mouth" was, theysaid, and he would be easy picking for me. They further urged that wecould clean up all the loose money west of the "Hundred andEightieth"--what odds would Fiji not give in backing a fourteen-stonestoker against an artist that only weighed ten stone and looked halfdished with the "green" besides? Moreover, I could keep the whole pursefor myself; all they wanted out of it was the sport. God bless thescalawags, it was more than half true, that last.
The funny thing about it was that the project actually tempted me at thetime, principally, I think, because there seemed a chance that the hardexercise of training--the very thing, indeed, that helped work themiracle a few years later--might effect me at least a temporaryseparation, if not a permanent divorce, from the "Green Lady." I wasstill temporizing with "delegations" when the _Cora Andrews_ dropped herhook in Kai Lagoon and gave us something else to think about.
If the little cunning I had left with my fists won me the respect of the"beach," it remained for my proficiency with the revolver--somethingwhich I had never allowed myself to grow rusty in--to give me realprestige. My father had been only less famous as a pistol shot than as abuilder of steel bridges, and from my birth it had been his dream that Ishould carry on the tradition in both lines. If it had broken the oldboy's heart when I turned my back on engineering for art--insisting ongoing from Harvard to Beaux Arts instead of to Boston "Tec" as he hadplanned--he at least had nothing to complain of on the score of myaptitude for the revolver. He admitted that I had bred true in hand andeye, even on the day that he called my "art tomfoolery" a throwback frommy French grandmother. I have always thought that the one circumstancewhich prevented the Governor from cutting me off in his will when hefinally had definite proofs of the depths to
which I had sunk in Paris,was the fact that, on my last visit to the old home on the Hudson, I hadbeaten him, shot for shot, with his own pistols, and at his favouritedistance.
They were rather free with their gun play during my first fortnight atKai, each little affair having been followed by one or two more or lessceremonious burials in the coral-walled cemetery on the south lip of thewindward passage. It was merely as a precautionary measure--on the offchance that they should be tempted to draw me into something of the kindat a time when I might not be quite on edge for it--that I took earlyopportunity to uncover a trifle of what I had crooked in mytrigger-finger. A casually winged gull or two, and a few plugged pennies(not a miss at the latter, luckily, even when they tried to spin themedge on to my line of fire) effected all that was necessary. After that,though they were continually sending for me to come down to Jackson'sand shoot the wire off champagne corks (fizz, loot of some kind, was thefreest flowing drink on the island at the time), or perform some otherequally useful and spectacular gun stunt, not the roughest of the gangbut took the most meticulous care not to press his invitation theinstant it sank home to him that my mood of the moment wasn't of a kindcalculated to blend smoothly with the free and easy spirit of abeach-combers' carousal.
It was hardly to be expected that they would ever quite understand why aman who could "blot out a cove's blinker as easy wiv his fist as wiv hisgun" (as I was told that "Reefer" Ogiston, penal absentee and pearler,put it one day) and who "'peared mo' than comfitabl' heeled fo' coin,"should be "light an' looney enuf tu go roun' smearin' smashed barnculson sail cloth"; and yet it was on that very score--or at least to theirquick comprehension of what I was driving at in my pictures--that the"beach" of Kai rendered me a priceless service. Almost from the outsetthey began to "twig" my marines, to feel the living atmosphere I wasstriving to paint into them. They were all men who had lived by the sea,on the sea; yes, and not a few of them had worked under the sea. Well,when I began to see those deep-set, wrinkle-clutched eyes squint to afocus of concentration, and, presently, the quick heave of a hairy chestas the message of the canvas flashed home, I knew that I was on theright track. Nothing less than that would have given me the courage togo on working, as I had set myself to do, on a steadily decreasingallowance of absinthe, a certain supply of which, of course, I hadbrought with me from Noumea.
So much for me and my relations to Kai at the time of which I amwriting. Now as to Bell....
"Who is that tall, square-jawed chap who looks as though he was notquite sober?" I had asked a day or two after I landed.
"Yank--calls himself Bell," Jackson replied laconically; adding that hewas "not quite sober" when he tried to take a cross-cut over Tuka-tuvaReef with the _Flying Scud_, that he was "not quite sober" when he hitthe beach in a busted whaleboat, that he had been "not quite sober" allthe time since, and that there was no doubt that he would still be "notquite sober" when the time came for him to leave the island, whether hewent out with the tide in an outrigger canoe or shuffled off up theGolden Stairs. "Allus been pickled and allus goin' to be pickled,"Jackson continued; then, qualifyingly: "Course I don't know he waspickled when he kum int' the world, but I'm willin' to lay any odds thathe'll be pickled when he shuffles out of it."
Just about all of which was, or proved to be, "stryght dope."
After quoting this terse summing of Jackson's, it may sound a littlestrange when I say that Bell was a gentleman--not _had been_, understand(that could have been said with some truth about a dozen or more of usat Kai), but _was_ a gentleman. Though undeniably never "quite sober,"the fact remained that no one on the island had ever seen him "quitedrunk." And no matter how much liquor he had stowed "under hatches," noone could say that it interfered either with his trim or his navigation.His even rolling gait was always the same, whether it was the glow ofhis eye-opening plunge at dawn that lighted his face, or the flush oftwelve hours of steady tippling that darkened it at twilight. Nor was heever known to omit that gravely courteous, almost "old-fashioned," bowwhich, with the flicker of smile that was more of his eyes than hismouth, was the invariable greeting he bestowed upon friend and strangeralike. The mellow drawl of his "It's suah goin' to be a fine mawnin',"had made it easier for me to weather dawns that--in my inflamedimagination--menaced monstrously in jagged lines like a cubist'snightmare. If drink had any effect on his speech, it was to incline himto reserve rather than garrulity. His temper appeared to be under quiteas perfect control as his legs. Even when he broke "Red" Logan's jawwith a swift short-arm jolt the time that sanguine Lochinvar tried tonip Rona off his arm as they passed on the beach in the twilight, theysaid that Bell hardly raised his voice as he "guessed that'd hold thevarmit fo' a while." And when, a few days later, Doc Wyndham told himwith a grin that "Red" wouldn't be screwing a diving helmet on his blockfor some weeks to come, it was said there was real regret in theYankee's voice as he hoped that the injury wouldn't be "pumanant."
Yes, before I had been a week at Kai I felt that there was a littleaddition I could safely make to Jackson's comprehensive estimate. I knewthat Bell had been born a gentleman, and--whatever lapses there may havebeen, or might be--I knew he was going to die a gentleman. And that also(had I put it on record) would have proved pretty nearly "stryght dope."
What stumped me at first was trying to reconcile the remarkable controlBell maintained over all his faculties in spite of his hard drinkingwith the fact (apparently fully authenticated) that he had runaground--through drunkenness--every ship he had ever commanded,beginning with a U. S. gunboat. He cleared up that matter for me himselfone afternoon, however, by casually observing--at the moment he chancedto be watching me trying to transfer to canvas the riot of opalescencebetween the _lapis lazuli_ of the barely submerged reef and the deepindigo where a hundred fathoms of brine threw back the reflection of thesinister core of cumulo-nimbus in the heart of a menacing squall--thatthe sea had always acted as a tremendous stimulant to him, especiallywhen he trod a deck.
"If I could just have managed to cut out the whisky at sea, all wouldhave been smooth sailin'," he said in his deep rich Southern drawl. "Onland--heah ... anywheah--kawn jooce is lak food to me; mah body convutsit into ene'gy just lak an engine does coal. But with a schoonah kickin'undah me--we'ell, I guess theah's just one kick too many, something lakmixin' drinks p'raps. It suah elevates me good an' plenty ... and when Icome down theah's natchaly some crash. My ship an' I gen'aly strikebottom at about the same time. But, s'elp me Gawd" (a tensing _timbre_in his voice) "on mah next command--"
It was the one sure sign that Bell was beginning to feel the kick of his"kawn jooce" when he spoke of his "next command." Unless that kick wasbeginning to carry a pretty weighty jolt behind it he knew just as wellas everyone else on the beach did that he would never get his Master'sCertificate back again, and that even if he did there was no house fromHonolulu to Hobart that would trust a ship to a man who had alreadybeached a half-dozen.
Kai was glib to the last detail--rig, tonnage, cargo, insurance, ownerand the like--respecting the several merchant craft Bell had piled up inthe course of his downward career; but the extent of local "dope" in thematter of the gunboat episode was to the effect that it happened "upManila-way," and that "that was the bally smash that started him goin'."
Personally, I took little stock in the naval part of the yarn--that is,at first. Then, one morning--it was the day after the tail of a typhoonhad sucked up the end of Ah Yung's laundry shack and left everyone onthe beach short of clothes--Bell came out in a suit of immaculate_starched_ whites. It was the cut of the jacket and the way he wore itthat drew and held my puzzled gaze; that its shoulders were "drilled"for epaulettes and that its thin pearl buttons barely held inbuttonholes that had been worked for something thicker and wider I didnot notice till later. Steady-eyed, lean-jawed, square-shouldered,ready-poised--not even a flapping Payta _sombrero_ could quite disguise,nor five years of heavy tippling quite obliterate, the marks of type.Then I understood why it was that Bell, all but down and out tho
ugh hemight be, was, and would remain to the last, a gentleman. There arethings the Navy puts into a man that not even a court-martial can takeaway.
The only allusion Bell ever made to his remoter past was drawn from hima few days later, when--he was watching me paint again--I chanced tomention that I had spent a fortnight in the Philippines on my way southfrom Saigon to Australia. Glancing up at the sound of his sharp intakeof breath, I saw his jaw set over the questions that leapt to the tip ofhis tongue, to relax gradually as a faraway look came into his wide-setgrey eyes and a wistful smile of reminiscence parted his lips.
"Did you heah the band play on the Luneta in the evenin'?" he askedeagerly, "while the _spiggoties_ in their _calesas_ wuh racin' round thecircle, an' the kiddies an' theyah nusses wuh rompin' on the grass, an'the big red sun was goin' down behind Mariveles beyond the bay? An' didyou know the Ahmy an' Navy Club--not the new one ... the ol' one ovahcross the moat inside the wall?"
"Put up there all my time in Manila," I replied. "A very comfy oldhangout, especially considering what the hotels were."
"An'--did you--" (he gulped once or twice as though the question camehard) "did you evah heah them speak at the Club of a chap called Blake... Lootenant-Commandah Blake? He was a son of Captain Blake, who helpedSampson polish off Cervera, an' a gran'son of Adm'al Blake. Ol' navalfam'ly."
"You mean the man who pulled off that coup when Wood was cleaning up thecrater of Bud Dajo? Some kind of a bluff on his own with one of thelittle old gunboats Dewey captured after the Battle of Manila Bay,wasn't it? Scared some Jolo Dato into giving up a bunch of our men healready had lined up against a wall to _bolo_, didn't he? Of course, Iremember perfectly now. General X----" (mentioning the Military Governorof Mindanao by name) "told me the yarn himself the night I dined withhim in Zamboanga. He said no one but an old poker shark would ever havethought of the stunt, much less had the nerve to bluff it out.Incidentally he mentioned that the chap was the best poker player in theNavy, as he was also the speediest baseball pitcher ever graduated fromAnnapolis; that he had been missed almost as much for the one as theother since he dropped out of sight several years before. Somedifficulty about--"
"Tryin' to push Corregidor out of the entrance to Manila Bay with thenose of his gunboat," Bell cut in harshly, the hell in his soul glowingthrough his eyes as the glare of the coal-bed welters beyond a stoker'slifted furnace flap. That, and a single sob sucked through hiscontracted throat as the vacuum in his chest called for air, were theonly outward signs of the intensest spasm of throttled emotion I eversaw assail a human being. Then the square jaw tightened, the cords ofthe muscular neck drew taut, and what would have been another body andsoul racking sob was noiselessly absorbed in the buffer of a flexeddiaphragm. The fires of agony behind the eyes paled and died down likean expiring coal. The corrugations of the brow smoothed out as asmile--half amused, half wistful--relaxed the set lips. The oldcontrolled Bell (I shall continue to call him so) was in the saddleagain.
"So they still remembah mah ball-playin'," he drawled musingly, his lefthand digits gently massaging the bulbous swelling remaining after somered-hot drive had telescoped the middle finger of his right. "Ye'es, ofco'se they'd miss mah wing in the Ahmy-Navy game at Ca'nival time. Butmah pokah--we'ell I reckon a few of 'em did find mah pokah hand about asbafflin' as mah baseball ahm. But it was straight deliv'ry, tho'--bothof 'em. An' they wouldn't be callin' me a fo'-flushah, etha. No, youdidn't heah any of 'em say that, I'm right suah."
A smile more whimsical than bitter twitched his lips twice or thrice inthe minute or two he stood alone with his thoughts. "So I've sort o'dropped out o' sight to 'em?" he said finally. "We'ell, I guess that wasabout the best thing to happen for all consuned. But, just the same, ifyou evah go back Manila-way I won't be mindin' it if you tell 'em that,tho' the ol' wing's tuhn'd to glass from long lack o' limberin', an'tho' I don't play pokah down heah fo' feah o' bein' knifed fo' mah luck,I'm still hittin' true to fohm in mah own lil' game of alterin' the seamap with the noses of ships. I reckon they'll know the reason why."
There was another interval of silence, but, unlike the other, notcharged, electric. Bell's blow-off through the safety-valve of frankspeech had taken the peak off the pent-up pressure within, and when hespoke again it was merely to quote what the Governor of North Carolinahad said about its having been a long time between drinks. "Great thustaggravateh, the Sou'east Trade." Would I mind--ahem--hiking home withhim and lubricating my tonsils with a drop of "J. Walkah"? That wassimply his delicate way of pretending to ignore my slavery to absinthe,a habit which not even the most whisky-saturated sot of an Anglo-Saxoncan ever quite forgive one of his race for falling a victim to. Iwouldn't? "We'ell, _hasta manyanah_."
With a crunch of coral clinkers under his feet and a stave of "Carry MeBack to Ol' Virginny" on his lips, Bell, disdaining the smooth path bythe beach, swung off through the pandanus scrub on what he called a"bee-line for home"! He had a weakness for taking "short-cuts" on landas well as at sea. Never again--not even in the moment of his greatdecision--did he lift for me or any other man the "furnace flap" of ironreserve that masked the fires of his innermost soul.
Their saving "sense of sport," which was the golden vein in the roughiron of the "beach push" of Kai, made it inevitable that they shouldhave a substantial sense of respect for a man of Bell's stamp, and thismight easily have ripened to an active popularity had not the American'squiet but inflexible reserve prevented their knowing him better. Theysuspected that he was no novice in handling the big Colt's that wasflopping on his hip when he landed, they knew that there was a weightypunch behind his long arm, and they were frankly outspoken in theiradmiration of the manner in which he stowed and carried his booze. Butwhat had impressed them more than anything else was the way in which hehad taken the devil out of a vicious imp of a Solomon Island pony on thebeach one morning. "Hellish hard-handed," "Slant" Allen had said, as hissteel-blue eyes narrowed down to slits in the intensity of his interestand admiration; "but a seat like he was screwed to the brute's backbone.Old cross-country rider--hundred to one on it. Man in a million in asteeplechase on a horse strong enough to carry the weight. Gawd, what aseat!"
All in all, indeed, there was only one thing the "beach" held againstBell, and that was Rona, or rather his possession of her. There wasnothing personal in this, of course. They merely regarded the bigAmerican in the same light they had always regarded a man with a chestof pearls or anything else of value that their simple, direct naturesmade them yearn for the possession of. There was this difference,however. Where the "push" of Kai would have combined to a man to getaway with a box of pearls or a cargo of shell, the annexing of a womanwas essentially a lone-hand game, and--well, Bell was hardly the kind ofa "one-man job" any of them cared to tackle. I feel practically certainthat, but for the disturbance of the even tenor of Kai's way incident tothe _Cora Andrews_ affair, his "rights" in Rona would never have beenchallenged.