It might be for the last time.
She was, indeed, becoming reconciled to partings as incidental to the missionary life. The Torch was constantly coming and going among the islands now, and sometimes the ladies were allowed to go and sometimes not. Relations with the outlying tribes were progressing satisfactorily. In most cases, after two or three calls with no exhibition of cloven hoofs or ulterior designs on the part of their visitors, the natives welcomed them in the most friendly fashion. In some cases they still held back, and regarded them with suspicion and distrust, but on the whole the tendency was towards confidence and friendship.
CHAPTER XX
MANY FORMS OF GRACE
We have glanced at the higher phases of Kenneth Blair's character, the more homely ones were no less strenuous and striking.
Anything less like a saint in daily life one could hardly imagine. In his love of fun and frolic he was a big, clean-hearted schoolboy, full of jokes, and with a laugh that did one good to listen to and was as infectious as the mumps. Out of harness, on the sands or in the sea, with the brown men and boys and his own, or up the hills after pigs and goats, he let himself go with an abandon which only helped to brace the straps when he geared again.
He set them to football, cricket, boxing, and fencing, for all of which his foresight had made provision, kite-flying on a scale so gigantic as to set the natives gaping, rowing, swimming—anything and everything that might harmlessly take the place of the excitements their savage natures craved, and which served at the same time to strengthen the bonds between white and brown, he pressed into the service.
The boxing-gloves and basket-hilted fencing-sticks became absolute means of grace to the islanders. Here was scope for fighting to any extent, with no ill results. They took to them amazingly, and what was lacking in science was more than made up in zeal. And if these fighting bouts filled specific wants of their own, they also provided no less excellent entertainment for the onlookers.
At first they put both gloves and sticks to the primitive service of belabouring their opponents to the utmost capacity of their muscles, and the sight of two stalwart brown men, clad only in boxing-gloves or basket-hilt, pounding away at one another with every ounce that was in them, and with never an attempt at defence, kept the white men in paroxysms of laughter. But punishment even of so comparatively mild a character as that soon led to more advanced ideas, and before long the browns were a match for the whites, and were never tired of the sport.
Captain Cathie, when he was not ranging the seas in the Torch, put his men through their cutlass drill on the beach as regularly as if the houses behind had been a coastguard instead of a mission-station, and to the brown men this was a sight never to be missed. The measured sweep and clash of the glancing steel fascinated them. Presently they were asking for cutlass drill also, and it was not denied them. Such things might to some seem roundabout steps on the road to salvation—to Kenneth Blair they were very direct and important ones.
