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

Van Horn motioned the old man in and on board, beckoned Borckman to take charge of the deck and of Nau-hau, and went below to get the money from his strong-box. When he returned, cavalierly ignoring the chief, he addressed himself to the old man.

“What name belong you?”

“Me fella Nino,” was the quavering response. “Him fella Sati belong along me.”

Van Horn glanced for verification to Nau-hau, who nodded affirmation in the reverse Solomon way[189]; whereupon Van Horn counted twenty-six gold sovereigns into the hand of Sati’s father.

Immediately thereafter Nau-hau extended his hand and received the sum. Twenty gold pieces the chief retained for himself, returning to the old man the remaining six. It was no quarrel of[190] Van Horn’s. He had fulfilled his duty and paid properly. The tyranny of a chief over a subject was none of his business.

Both masters, white and black, were fairly contented with themselves. Van Horn had paid the money where it was due; Nau-hau, by virtue of kingship, had robbed Sati’s father of Sati’s labour before Van Horn’s eyes. But Nau-hau was not above strutting. He declined a proffered present of tobacco, bought a case of stick tobacco from Van Horn, paying him five pounds for it, and insisted on having it sawed open so that he could fill his pipe.

“Plenty good boy stop along Langa-Langa?” Van Horn, unperturbed, politely queried, in order to make conversation and advertise nonchalance.

The King o’ Babylon grinned, but did not deign to reply[191].

“Maybe I go ashore and walk about?” Van Horn challenged with tentative emphasis.

“Maybe too much trouble along you,” Nau-hau challenged back. “Maybe plenty bad fella boy kai-kai along you.”

Although Van Horn did not know it, at this challenge he experienced the hair-pricking sensations in his scalp that Jerry experienced when he bristled his back.

“Hey, Borckman,” he called. “Man the whaleboat.”

When the whaleboat was alongside, he descended into it first, superiorly, then invited Nau-hau to accompany him.

“My word, King o’ Babylon,” he muttered in the chief’s ears as the boat’s crew bent to the oars, “one fella boy make ’m trouble, I shoot ’m hell outa you first thing. Next thing I shoot ’m hell outa Langa-Langa. All the time you me fella walk about, you walk about along me. You no like walk about along me, you finish close up altogether.”

And ashore, a white man alone, attended by an Irish terrier puppy with a heart flooded with love and by a black king resentfully respectful of the dynamite of the white man, Van Horn went, swash-buckling bare-legged through a stronghold of three thousand souls, while his white mate, addicted to schnapps, held the deck of the tiny craft at anchor off shore, and while his black boat’s crew, oars in hands, held the whaleboat stern-on to the beach[192] to receive the expected flying leap of the man they served but did not love, and whose head they would eagerly take any time were it not for fear of him.

Van Horn had had no intention of going ashore, and that he went ashore at the black chief’s insolent challenge was merely a matter of business. For an hour he strolled about, his right hand never far from the butt of the automatic that lay along his groin, his eyes never too far from the unwilling Nau-hau beside him. For Nau-hau, in sullen volcanic rage, was ripe to erupt at the slightest opportunity. And, so strolling, Van Horn was given to see what few white men have seen, for Langa-Langa and her sister islets, beautiful beads strung along the lee coast of Malaita, were as unique as they were unexplored.

Originally these islets had been mere sand-banks and coral reefs awash in the sea or shallowly covered by the sea. Only a hunted, wretched creature, enduring incredible hardship, could have eked out a miserable existence[193] upon them. But such hunted, wretched creatures, survivors of village massacres, escapes from the wrath of chiefs and from the long-pig fate of the cooking-pot, did come, and did endure. They, who knew only the bush, learned the salt water and developed the salt-water-man breed[194]. They learned the ways of the fish and the shell-fish, and they invented hooks and lines, nets and fish-traps, and all the diverse cunning ways by which swimming meat can be garnered from the shifting, unstable sea.

Such refugees stole women from the mainland, and increased and multiplied. With herculean labour, under the burning sun, they conquered the sea. They walled the confines of their coral reefs and sandbanks with coral-rock stolen from the mainland on dark nights. Fine masonry, without mortar or cutting chisel, they builded to withstand the ocean surge. Likewise stolen from the mainland, as mice steal from human habitations when humans sleep, they stole canoe-loads, and millions of canoe-loads, of fat, rich soil.