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

“I was married, and long married, and I fathered three brave sons. But they are dead. I shall not live so long as you. I think of my young days as pleasant dreams remembered after sleep. More I think of death, and the end. Of marriage I think not at all. I am too old to marry. I am old enough to make ready to die, and a great curiousness have I about what will happen to me when I am dead. Will I be for ever dead? Will I live again in a land of dreams – a shadow of a dream myself that will still remember the days when I lived in the warm world, the quick juices of hunger in my mouth, in the chest of the body of me the love of woman?”

Bashti shrugged his shoulders.

“I too, have thought much on the matter,” he said. “Yet do I arrive nowhere[306]. I do not know. You do not know. We will not know until we are dead, if it happens that we know anything when what we are we no longer are. But this we know, you and I: the tribe lives. The tribe never dies. Wherefore, if there be meaning at all to our living, we must make the tribe strong. Your work in the tribe is not done. You must marry so that your cunning and your courage live after you. I have a wife for you – nay, two wives, for your days are short and I shall surely live to see you hang with my fathers from the canoe-house ridgepole.”

“I will not pay for a wife,” Nalasu protested. “I will not pay for any wife. I would not pay a stick of tobacco or a cracked coconut for the best woman in Somo.”

“Worry not[307],” Bashti went on placidly. “I shall pay you for the price of the wife, of the two wives. There is Bubu. For half a case of tobacco shall I buy her for you. She is broad and square, round-legged, broad-hipped, with generous breasts of richness. There is Nena. Her father sets a stiff price upon her – a whole case of tobacco. I will buy her for you as well. Your time is short. We must hurry.”

“I will not marry,” the old blind man proclaimed hysterically.

“You will. I have spoken.”

“No, I say, and say again, no, no, no, no. Wives are nuisances. They are young things, and their heads are filled with foolishness. Their tongues are loose with idleness of speech. I am old, I am quiet in my ways[308], the fires of life have departed from me, I prefer to sit alone in the dark and think. Chattering young things about me, with nothing but foam and spume in their heads, on their tongues, would drive me mad. Of a surety they would drive me mad – so mad that I will spit into every clam shell, make faces at the moon, and bite my veins and howl.”

“And if you do, what of it? So long as your seed does not perish. I shall pay for the wives to their fathers and send them to you in three days.”

“I will have nothing to do with them,” Nalasu asserted wildly.

“You will,” Bashti insisted calmly. “Because if you do not you will have to pay me. It will be a sore, hard debt. I will have every joint of you unhinged so that you will be like a jelly-fish, like a fat pig with the bones removed, and I will then stake you out in the midmost centre of the dog-killing ground to swell in pain under the sun. And what is left of you I shall fling to the dogs to eat. Your seed shall not perish out of Somo. I, Bashti, so tell you. In three days I shall send to you your two wives…”

He paused, and a long silence fell upon them.

“Well?” Bashti reiterated. “It is wives or staking out unhinged in the sun. You choose, but think well before you choose the unhinging.”

“At my age, with all the vexations of youngness so far behind me!” Nalasu complained.

“Choose. You will find there is vexation, and liveliness and much of it, in the centre of the dog-killing yard when the sun cooks your sore joints till the grease of the leanness of you bubbles like the tender fat of a cooked sucking-pig.”

“Then send me the wives,” Nalasu managed to utter after a long pause. “But send them in three days, not in two, nor to-morrow.”

“It is well,” Bashti nodded gravely. “You have lived at all only because of those before you, now long in the dark[309], who worked so that the tribe might live and you might come to be. You are. They paid the price for you. It is your debt. You came into being with this debt upon you. You will pay the debt before you pass out of being. It is the law. It is very well.”

Chapter XIX

And had Bashti hastened delivery of the wives by one day, or by even two days, Nalasu would have entered the feared, purgatory of matrimony[310]. But Bashti kept his word, and on the third day was too busy, with a more momentous problem, to deliver Bubu and Nena to the blind old man who apprehensively waited their coming. For the morning of the third day all the summits of leeward Malaita smoked into speech. A warship was on the coast – so the tale ran; a big warship that was heading in through the reef islands at Langa-Langa. The tale grew. The warship was not stopping at Langa-Langa. The warship was not stopping at Binu. It was directing its course toward Somo.