Джек Лондон
Adventure
CHAPTER XIV – THE MARTHA
They were deep in a game of billiards the next morning, after the eleven o’clock breakfast, when Viaburi entered and announced, —
“Big fella schooner close up.”
Even as he spoke, they heard the rumble of chain through hawse-pipe, and from the veranda saw a big black-painted schooner, swinging to her just-caught anchor.
“It’s a Yankee,” Joan cried. “See that bow! Look at that elliptical stern! Ah, I thought so – ” as the Stars and Stripes fluttered to the mast-head.
Noa Noah, at Sheldon’s direction, ran the Union Jack up the flagstaff.
“Now what is an American vessel doing down here?” Joan asked. “It’s not a yacht, though I’ll wager she can sail. Look! Her name! What is it?”
“Martha, San Francisco,” Sheldon read, looking through the telescope. “It’s the first Yankee I ever heard of in the Solomons. They are coming ashore, whoever they are. And, by Jove, look at those men at the oars. It’s an all-white crew. Now what reason brings them here?”
“They’re not proper sailors,” Joan commented. “I’d be ashamed of a crew of black-boys that pulled in such fashion. Look at that fellow in the bow – the one just jumping out; he’d be more at home on a cow-pony.”
The boat’s-crew scattered up and down the beach, ranging about with eager curiosity, while the two men who had sat in the stern-sheets opened the gate and came up the path to the bungalow. One of them, a tall and slender man, was clad in white ducks that fitted him like a semi-military uniform. The other man, in nondescript garments that were both of the sea and shore, and that must have been uncomfortably hot, slouched and shambled like an overgrown ape. To complete the illusion, his face seemed to sprout in all directions with a dense, bushy mass of red whiskers, while his eyes were small and sharp and restless.
Sheldon, who had gone to the head of the steps, introduced them to Joan. The bewhiskered individual, who looked like a Scotsman, had the Teutonic name of Von Blix, and spoke with a strong American accent. The tall man in the well-fitting ducks, who gave the English name of Tudor – John Tudor – talked purely-enunciated English such as any cultured American would talk, save for the fact that it was most delicately and subtly touched by a faint German accent. Joan decided that she had been helped to identify the accent by the short German-looking moustache that did not conceal the mouth and its full red lips, which would have formed a Cupid’s bow but for some harshness or severity of spirit that had moulded them masculinely.
Von Blix was rough and boorish, but Tudor was gracefully easy in everything he did, or looked, or said. His blue eyes sparkled and flashed, his clean-cut mobile features were an index to his slightest shades of feeling and expression. He bubbled with enthusiasms, and his faintest smile or lightest laugh seemed spontaneous and genuine. But it was only occasionally at first that he spoke, for Von Blix told their story and stated their errand.
They were on a gold-hunting expedition. He was the leader, and Tudor was his lieutenant. All hands – and there were twenty-eight – were shareholders, in varying proportions, in the adventure. Several were sailors, but the large majority were miners, culled from all the camps from Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. It was the old and ever-untiring pursuit of gold, and they had come to the Solomons to get it. Part of them, under the leadership of Tudor, were to go up the Balesuna and penetrate the mountainous heart of Guadalcanal, while the Martha, under Von Blix, sailed away for Malaita to put through similar exploration.
“And so,” said Von Blix, “for Mr. Tudor’s expedition we must have some black-boys. Can we get them from you?”
“Of course we will pay,” Tudor broke in. “You have only to charge what you consider them worth. You pay them six pounds a year, don’t you?”
“In the first place we can’t spare them,” Sheldon answered. “We are short of them on the plantation as it is.”
“We?” Tudor asked quickly. “Then you are a firm or a partnership? I understood at Guvutu that you were alone, that you had lost your partner.”
Sheldon inclined his head toward Joan, and as he spoke she felt that he had become a trifle stiff.
“Miss Lackland has become interested in the plantation since then. But to return to the boys. We can’t spare them, and besides, they would be of little use. You couldn’t get them to accompany you beyond Binu, which is a short day’s work with the boats from here. They are Malaita-men, and they are afraid of being eaten. They would desert you at the first opportunity. You could get the Binu men to accompany you another day’s journey, through the grass-lands, but at the first roll of the foothills look for them to turn back. They likewise are disinclined to being eaten.”
“Is it as bad as that?” asked Von Blix.
“The interior of Guadalcanal has never been explored,” Sheldon explained. “The bushmen are as wild men as are to be found anywhere in the world to-day. I have never seen one. I have never seen a man who has seen one. They never come down to the coast, though their scouting parties occasionally eat a coast native who has wandered too far inland. Nobody knows anything about them. They don’t even use tobacco – have never learned its use. The Austrian expedition – scientists, you know – got part way in before it was cut to pieces. The monument is up the beach there several miles. Only one man got back to the coast to tell the tale. And now you have all I or any other man knows of the inside of Guadalcanal.”
“But gold – have you heard of gold?” Tudor asked impatiently. “Do you know anything about gold?”
Sheldon smiled, while the two visitors hung eagerly upon his words.
“You can go two miles up the Balesuna and wash colours from the gravel. I’ve done it often. There is gold undoubtedly back in the mountains.”
Tudor and Von Blix looked triumphantly at each other.
“Old Wheatsheaf’s yarn was true, then,” Tudor said, and Von Blix nodded. “And if Malaita turns out as well – ”
Tudor broke off and looked at Joan.
“It was the tale of this old beachcomber that brought us here,” he explained. “Von Blix befriended him and was told the secret.” He turned and addressed Sheldon. “I think we shall prove that white men have been through the heart of Guadalcanal long before the time of the Austrian expedition.”
Sheldon shrugged his shoulders.
“We have never heard of it down here,” he said simply. Then he addressed Von Blix. “As to the boys, you couldn’t use them farther than Binu, and I’ll lend you as many as you want as far as that. How many of your party are going, and how soon will you start?”
“Ten,” said Tudor; “nine men and myself.”
“And you should be able to start day after to-morrow,” Von Blix said to him. “The boats should practically be knocked together this afternoon. To-morrow should see the outfit portioned and packed. As for the Martha, Mr. Sheldon, we’ll rush the stuff ashore this afternoon and sail by sundown.”
As the two men returned down the path to their boat, Sheldon regarded Joan quizzically.
“There’s romance for you,” he said, “and adventure – gold-hunting among the cannibals.”
“A title for a book,” she cried. “Or, better yet, ‘Gold-Hunting Among the Head-Hunters.’ My! wouldn’t it sell!”
“And now aren’t you sorry you became a cocoanut planter?” he teased. “Think of investing in such an adventure.”
“If I did,” she retorted, “Von Blix wouldn’t be finicky about my joining in the cruise to Malaita.”
“I don’t doubt but what he would jump at it.”
“What do you think of them?” she asked.
“Oh, old Von Blix is all right, a solid sort of chap in his fashion; but Tudor is fly-away – too much on the surface, you know. If it came to being wrecked on a desert island, I’d prefer Von Blix.”
“I don’t quite understand,” Joan objected. “What have you against Tudor?”
“You remember Browning’s ‘Last Duchess’?”
She nodded.
“Well, Tudor reminds me of her – ”
“But she was delightful.”
“So she was. But she was a woman. One expects something different from a man – more control, you know, more restraint, more deliberation. A man must be more solid, more solid and steady-going and less effervescent. A man of Tudor’s type gets on my nerves. One demands more repose from a man.”
Joan felt that she did not quite agree with his judgment; and, somehow, Sheldon caught her feeling and was disturbed. He remembered noting how her eyes had brightened as she talked with the newcomer – confound it all, was he getting jealous? he asked himself. Why shouldn’t her eyes brighten? What concern was it of his?
A second boat had been lowered, and the outfit of the shore party was landed rapidly. A dozen of the crew put the knocked-down boats together on the beach. There were five of these craft – lean and narrow, with flaring sides, and remarkably long. Each was equipped with three paddles and several iron-shod poles.
“You chaps certainly seem to know river-work,” Sheldon told one of the carpenters.
The man spat a mouthful of tobacco-juice into the white sand, and answered, —
“We use ’em in Alaska. They’re modelled after the Yukon poling-boats, and you can bet your life they’re crackerjacks. This creek’ll be a snap alongside some of them Northern streams. Five hundred pounds in one of them boats, an’ two men can snake it along in a way that’d surprise you.”
At sunset the Martha broke out her anchor and got under way, dipping her flag and saluting with a bomb gun. The Union Jack ran up and down the staff, and Sheldon replied with his brass signal-cannon. The miners pitched their tents in the compound, and cooked on the beach, while Tudor dined with Joan and Sheldon.
Their guest seemed to have been everywhere and seen everything and met everybody, and, encouraged by Joan, his talk was largely upon his own adventures. He was an adventurer of adventurers, and by his own account had been born into adventure. Descended from old New England stock, his father a consul-general, he had been born in Germany, in which country he had received his early education and his accent. Then, still a boy, he had rejoined his father in Turkey, and accompanied him later to Persia, his father having been appointed Minister to that country.
Tudor had always been a wanderer, and with facile wit and quick vivid description he leaped from episode and place to episode and place, relating his experiences seemingly not because they were his, but for the sake of their bizarreness and uniqueness, for the unusual incident or the laughable situation. He had gone through South American revolutions, been a Rough Rider in Cuba, a scout in South Africa, a war correspondent in the Russo-Japanese war. He had mushed dogs in the Klondike, washed gold from the sands of Nome, and edited a newspaper in San Francisco. The President of the United States was his friend. He was equally at home in the clubs of London and the Continent, the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, and the selector’s shanties in the Never-Never country. He had shot big game in Siam, pearled in the Paumotus, visited Tolstoy, seen the Passion Play, and crossed the Andes on mule-back; while he was a living directory of the fever holes of West Africa.
Sheldon leaned back in his chair on the veranda, sipping his coffee and listening. In spite of himself he felt touched by the charm of the man who had led so varied a life. And yet Sheldon was not comfortable. It seemed to him that the man addressed himself particularly to Joan. His words and smiles were directed impartially toward both of them, yet Sheldon was certain, had the two men of them been alone, that the conversation would have been along different lines. Tudor had seen the effect on Joan and deliberately continued the flow of reminiscence, netting her in the glamour of romance. Sheldon watched her rapt attention, listened to her spontaneous laughter, quick questions, and passing judgments, and felt grow within him the dawning consciousness that he loved her.
So he was very quiet and almost sad, though at times he was aware of a distinct irritation against his guest, and he even speculated as to what percentage of Tudor’s tale was true and how any of it could be proved or disproved. In this connection, as if the scene had been prepared by a clever playwright, Utami came upon the veranda to report to Joan the capture of a crocodile in the trap they had made for her.
Tudor’s face, illuminated by the match with which he was lighting his cigarette, caught Utami’s eye, and Utami forgot to report to his mistress.
“Hello, Tudor,” he said, with a familiarity that startled Sheldon.
The Polynesian’s hand went out, and Tudor, shaking it, was staring into his face.
“Who is it?” he asked. “I can’t see you.”
“Utami.”
“And who the dickens is Utami? Where did I ever meet you, my man?”
“You no forget the Huahine?” Utami chided. “Last time Huahine sail?”
Tudor gripped the Tahitian’s hand a second time and shook it with genuine heartiness.
“There was only one kanaka who came out of the Huahine that last voyage, and that kanaka was Joe. The deuce take it, man, I’m glad to see you, though I never heard your new name before.”
“Yes, everybody speak me Joe along the Huahine. Utami my name all the time, just the same.”
“But what are you doing here?” Tudor asked, releasing the sailor’s hand and leaning eagerly forward.
“Me sail along Missie Lackalanna her schooner Miélé. We go Tahiti, Raiatea, Tahaa, Bora-Bora, Manua, Tutuila, Apia, Savaii, and Fiji Islands – plenty Fiji Islands. Me stop along Missie Lackalanna in Solomons. Very soon she catch other schooner.”
“He and I were the two survivors of the wreck of the Huahine,” Tudor explained to the others. “Fifty-seven all told on board when we sailed from Huapa, and Joe and I were the only two that ever set foot on land again. Hurricane, you know, in the Paumotus. That was when I was after pearls.”
“And you never told me, Utami, that you’d been wrecked in a hurricane,” Joan said reproachfully.
The big Tahitian shifted his weight and flashed his teeth in a conciliating smile.
“Me no t’ink nothing ’t all,” he said.
He half-turned, as if to depart, by his manner indicating that he considered it time to go while yet he desired to remain.
“All right, Utami,” Tudor said. “I’ll see you in the morning and have a yarn.”
“He saved my life, the beggar,” Tudor explained, as the Tahitian strode away and with heavy softness of foot went down the steps. “Swim! I never met a better swimmer.”
And thereat, solicited by Joan, Tudor narrated the wreck of the Huahine; while Sheldon smoked and pondered, and decided that whatever the man’s shortcomings were, he was at least not a liar.
CHAPTER XV – A DISCOURSE ON MANNERS
The days passed, and Tudor seemed loath to leave the hospitality of Berande. Everything was ready for the start, but he lingered on, spending much time in Joan’s company and thereby increasing the dislike Sheldon had taken to him. He went swimming with her, in point of rashness exceeding her; and dynamited fish with her, diving among the hungry ground-sharks and contesting with them for possession of the stunned prey, until he earned the approval of the whole Tahitian crew. Arahu challenged him to tear a fish from a shark’s jaws, leaving half to the shark and bringing the other half himself to the surface; and Tudor performed the feat, a flip from the sandpaper hide of the astonished shark scraping several inches of skin from his shoulder. And Joan was delighted, while Sheldon, looking on, realized that here was the hero of her adventure-dreams coming true. She did not care for love, but he felt that if ever she did love it would be that sort of a man – “a man who exhibited,” was his way of putting it.
He felt himself handicapped in the presence of Tudor, who had the gift of making a show of all his qualities. Sheldon knew himself for a brave man, wherefore he made no advertisement of the fact. He knew that just as readily as the other would he dive among ground-sharks to save a life, but in that fact he could find no sanction for the foolhardy act of diving among sharks for the half of a fish. The difference between them was that he kept the curtain of his shop window down. Life pulsed steadily and deep in him, and it was not his nature needlessly to agitate the surface so that the world could see the splash he was making. And the effect of the other’s amazing exhibitions was to make him retreat more deeply within himself and wrap himself more thickly than ever in the nerveless, stoical calm of his race.
“You are so stupid the last few days,” Joan complained to him. “One would think you were sick, or bilious, or something. You don’t seem to have an idea in your head above black labour and cocoanuts. What is the matter?”
Sheldon smiled and beat a further retreat within himself, listening the while to Joan and Tudor propounding the theory of the strong arm by which the white man ordered life among the lesser breeds. As he listened Sheldon realized, as by revelation, that that was precisely what he was doing. While they philosophized about it he was living it, placing the strong hand of his race firmly on the shoulders of the lesser breeds that laboured on Berande or menaced it from afar. But why talk about it? he asked himself. It was sufficient to do it and be done with it.
He said as much, dryly and quietly, and found himself involved in a discussion, with Joan and Tudor siding against him, in which a more astounding charge than ever he had dreamed of was made against the very English control and reserve of which he was secretly proud.
“The Yankees talk a lot about what they do and have done,” Tudor said, “and are looked down upon by the English as braggarts. But the Yankee is only a child. He does not know effectually how to brag. He talks about it, you see. But the Englishman goes him one better by not talking about it. The Englishman’s proverbial lack of bragging is a subtler form of brag after all. It is really clever, as you will agree.”
“I never thought of it before,” Joan cried. “Of course. An Englishman performs some terrifically heroic exploit, and is very modest and reserved – refuses to talk about it at all – and the effect is that by his silence he as much as says, ‘I do things like this every day. It is as easy as rolling off a log. You ought to see the really heroic things I could do if they ever came my way. But this little thing, this little episode – really, don’t you know, I fail to see anything in it remarkable or unusual.’ As for me, if I went up in a powder explosion, or saved a hundred lives, I’d want all my friends to hear about it, and their friends as well. I’d be prouder than Lucifer over the affair. Confess, Mr. Sheldon, don’t you feel proud down inside when you’ve done something daring or courageous?”
Sheldon nodded.
“Then,” she pressed home the point, “isn’t disguising that pride under a mask of careless indifference equivalent to telling a lie?”
“Yes, it is,” he admitted. “But we tell similar lies every day. It is a matter of training, and the English are better trained, that is all. Your countrymen will be trained as well in time. As Mr. Tudor said, the Yankees are young.”
“Thank goodness we haven’t begun to tell such lies yet!” was Joan’s ejaculation.
“Oh, but you have,” Sheldon said quickly. “You were telling me a lie of that order only the other day. You remember when you were going up the lantern-halyards hand over hand? Your face was the personification of duplicity.”
“It was no such thing.”
“Pardon me a moment,” he went on. “Your face was as calm and peaceful as though you were reclining in a steamer-chair. To look at your face one would have inferred that carrying the weight of your body up a rope hand over hand was a very commonplace accomplishment – as easy as rolling off a log. And you needn’t tell me, Miss Lackland, that you didn’t make faces the first time you tried to climb a rope. But, like any circus athlete, you trained yourself out of the face-making period. You trained your face to hide your feelings, to hide the exhausting effort your muscles were making. It was, to quote Mr. Tudor, a subtler exhibition of physical prowess. And that is all our English reserve is – a mere matter of training. Certainly we are proud inside of the things we do and have done, proud as Lucifer – yes, and prouder. But we have grown up, and no longer talk about such things.”
“I surrender,” Joan cried. “You are not so stupid after all.”
“Yes, you have us there,” Tudor admitted. “But you wouldn’t have had us if you hadn’t broken your training rules.”
“How do you mean?”
“By talking about it.”
Joan clapped her hands in approval. Tudor lighted a fresh cigarette, while Sheldon sat on, imperturbably silent.
“He got you there,” Joan challenged. “Why don’t you crush him?”
“Really, I can’t think of anything to say,” Sheldon said. “I know my position is sound, and that is satisfactory enough.”
“You might retort,” she suggested, “that when an adult is with kindergarten children he must descend to kindergarten idioms in order to make himself intelligible. That was why you broke training rules. It was the only way to make us children understand.”
“You’ve deserted in the heat of the battle, Miss Lackland, and gone over to the enemy,” Tudor said plaintively.
But she was not listening. Instead, she was looking intently across the compound and out to sea. They followed her gaze, and saw a green light and the loom of a vessel’s sails.
“I wonder if it’s the Martha come back,” Tudor hazarded.
“No, the sidelight is too low,” Joan answered. “Besides, they’ve got the sweeps out. Don’t you hear them? They wouldn’t be sweeping a big vessel like the Martha.”
“Besides, the Martha has a gasoline engine – twenty-five horse-power,” Tudor added.
“Just the sort of a craft for us,” Joan said wistfully to Sheldon. “I really must see if I can’t get a schooner with an engine. I might get a second-hand engine put in.”
“That would mean the additional expense of an engineer’s wages,” he objected.
“But it would pay for itself by quicker passages,” she argued; “and it would be as good as insurance. I know. I’ve knocked about amongst reefs myself. Besides, if you weren’t so mediaeval, I could be skipper and save more than the engineer’s wages.”
He did not reply to her thrust, and she glanced at him. He was looking out over the water, and in the lantern light she noted the lines of his face – strong, stern, dogged, the mouth almost chaste but firmer and thinner-lipped than Tudor’s. For the first time she realized the quality of his strength, the calm and quiet of it, its simple integrity and reposeful determination. She glanced quickly at Tudor on the other side of her. It was a handsomer face, one that was more immediately pleasing. But she did not like the mouth. It was made for kissing, and she abhorred kisses. This was not a deliberately achieved concept; it came to her in the form of a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. For the moment she knew a fleeting doubt of the man. Perhaps Sheldon was right in his judgment of the other. She did not know, and it concerned her little; for boats, and the sea, and the things and happenings of the sea were of far more vital interest to her than men, and the next moment she was staring through the warm tropic darkness at the loom of the sails and the steady green of the moving sidelight, and listening eagerly to the click of the sweeps in the rowlocks. In her mind’s eye she could see the straining naked forms of black men bending rhythmically to the work, and somewhere on that strange deck she knew was the inevitable master-man, conning the vessel in to its anchorage, peering at the dim tree-line of the shore, judging the deceitful night-distances, feeling on his cheek the first fans of the land breeze that was even then beginning to blow, weighing, thinking, measuring, gauging the score or more of ever-shifting forces, through which, by which, and in spite of which he directed the steady equilibrium of his course. She knew it because she loved it, and she was alive to it as only a sailor could be.
Twice she heard the splash of the lead, and listened intently for the cry that followed. Once a man’s voice spoke, low, imperative, issuing an order, and she thrilled with the delight of it. It was only a direction to the man at the wheel to port his helm. She watched the slight altering of the course, and knew that it was for the purpose of enabling the flat-hauled sails to catch those first fans of the land breeze, and she waited for the same low voice to utter the one word “Steady!” And again she thrilled when it did utter it. Once more the lead splashed, and “Eleven fadom” was the resulting cry. “Let go!” the low voice came to her through the darkness, followed by the surging rumble of the anchor-chain. The clicking of the sheaves in the blocks as the sails ran down, head-sails first, was music to her; and she detected on the instant the jamming of a jib-downhaul, and almost saw the impatient jerk with which the sailor must have cleared it. Nor did she take interest in the two men beside her till both lights, red and green, came into view as the anchor checked the onward way.
Sheldon was wondering as to the identity of the craft, while Tudor persisted in believing it might be the Martha.
“It’s the Minerva,” Joan said decidedly.
“How do you know?” Sheldon asked, sceptical of her certitude.
“It’s a ketch to begin with. And besides, I could tell anywhere the rattle of her main peak-blocks – they’re too large for the halyard.”
A dark figure crossed the compound diagonally from the beach gate, where whoever it was had been watching the vessel.
“Is that you, Utami?” Joan called.
“No, Missie; me Matapuu,” was the answer.
“What vessel is it?”
“Me t’ink Minerva.”
Joan looked triumphantly at Sheldon, who bowed.
“If Matapuu says so it must be so,” he murmured.
“But when Joan Lackland says so, you doubt,” she cried, “just as you doubt her ability as a skipper. But never mind, you’ll be sorry some day for all your unkindness. There’s the boat lowering now, and in five minutes we’ll be shaking hands with Christian Young.”
Lalaperu brought out the glasses and cigarettes and the eternal whisky and soda, and before the five minutes were past the gate clicked and Christian Young, tawny and golden, gentle of voice and look and hand, came up the bungalow steps and joined them.
