Jerry of the Islands / Джерри-островитянин. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Me fella Ishikola,” came the answer in the quavering falsetto of age.

Van Horn, before speaking again, loosened his automatic pistol half out of its holster, and slipped the holster around from his hip till it rested on his groin conveniently close to his hand.

“How many fella boy stop along you?” he demanded.

“One fella ten-boy altogether he stop,” came the aged voice.

“Come alongside then.” Without turning his head, his right hand unconsciously dropping close to the butt of the automatic, Van Horn commanded: “You fella Tambi. Fetch ’m lantern. No fetch ’m this place. Fetch ’m aft along mizzen rigging and look sharp eye belong you[164].”

Tambi obeyed, exposing the lantern twenty feet away from where his captain stood. This gave Van Horn the advantage over the approaching canoe-men, for the lantern, suspended through the barbed wire across the rail and well down, would clearly illuminate the occupants of the canoe while he was left in semi-darkness and shadow.

“Washee-washee!” he urged peremptorily, while those in the invisible canoe still hesitated.

Came the sound of paddles, and, next, emerging into the lantern’s area of light, the high, black bow of a war canoe, curved like a gondola, inlaid with silvery-glistening mother-of-pearl; the long lean length of the canoe which was without outrigger[165]; the shining eyes and the black-shining bodies of the stark blacks who knelt in the bottom and paddled; Ishikola, the old chief, squatting amidships and not paddling, an unlighted, empty-bowled, short-stemmed clay pipe upside-down between his toothless gums; and, in the stern, as coxswain, the dandy, all nakedness of blackness, all whiteness of decoration, save for the pig’s tail in one ear and the scarlet hibiscus that still flamed over the other ear.

Less than ten blacks had been known to rush a blackbirder officered by no more than two white men, and Van Horn’s hand closed on the butt of his automatic, although he did not pull it clear of the holster, and although, with his left hand, he directed the cigar to his mouth and puffed it lively alight.

“Hello, Ishikola, you blooming old blighter[166],” was Van Horn’s greeting to the old chief, as the dandy, with a pry of his steering-paddle against the side of the canoe and part under its bottom, brought the dug-out broadside-on to the Arangi so that the sides of both crafts touched.

Ishikola smiled upward in the lantern light. He smiled with his right eye, which was all he had, the left having been destroyed by an arrow in a youthful jungle-skirmish.

“My word!” he greeted back. “Long time you no stop eye belong me.[167]”

Van Horn joked him in understandable terms about the latest wives he had added to his harem and what price he had paid for them in pigs.

“My word,” he concluded, “you rich fella too much together.”

“Me like ’m come on board gammon along you,” Ishikola meekly suggested.

“My word, night he stop,” the captain objected, then added, as a concession against the known rule[168] that visitors were not permitted aboard after nightfall: “You come on board, boy stop ’m along boat.”

Van Horn gallantly helped the old man to clamber to the rail, straddle the barbed wire, and gain the deck. Ishikola was a dirty old savage. One of his tambos (tambo being bêche-de-mer and Melanesian for “taboo”) was that water unavoidable must never touch his skin. He who lived by the salt sea, in a land of tropic downpour, religiously shunned contact with water[169]. He never went swimming or wading, and always fled to shelter from a shower. Not that this was true of the rest of his tribe. It was the peculiar tambo laid upon him by the devil-devil doctors. Other tribesmen the devil-devil doctors tabooed against eating shark, or handling turtle, or contacting with crocodiles or the fossil remains of crocodiles, or from ever being smirched by the profanity of a woman’s touch or of a woman’s shadow cast across the path.

So Ishikola, whose tambo was water, was crusted with the filth of years[170]. He was sealed like a leper, and, weazen-faced and age-shrunken, he hobbled horribly from an ancient spear-thrust to the thigh that twisted his torso droopingly out of the vertical. But his one eye gleamed brightly and wickedly, and Van Horn knew that it observed as much as did both his own eyes.

Van Horn shook hands with him – an honour he accorded only chiefs – and motioned him to squat down on deck on his hams close to the fear-struck girl, who began trembling again at recollection of having once heard Ishikola offer five twenties of drinking coconuts for the meat of her for a dinner.

Jerry needs must sniff, for future identification purposes, this graceless, limping, naked, one-eyed old man. And, when he had sniffed and registered the particular odour, Jerry must growl intimidatingly and win a quick eye-glance of approval from Skipper.

“My word, good fella kai-kai dog,” said Ishikola.

“Me give ’m half-fathom shell money that fella dog.”