"I have no wish, we have no wish, that Willatopy should leave the Torres Straits, least of all that he should go to England. But he interests me extremely, and I would see more of him and of his home before we go away. It will be but for a few weeks, Mr. Grant, and all that while I will be his zealous guardian. Besides myself there is only one white woman in the yacht and she is my maid and at my strict orders. I can appreciate the danger of alcohol for him, but surely a boy like Willatopy—whose eyes are blue as the sky at dawn—has already experienced the seductions of sex?"
"No," emphatically declared Robert Grant. "Where there are no clothes there is no curiosity, and where there is no conscious shame, there is no viciousness. Willatopy in the hands of an unscrupulous white woman would become a devil. Drink and debased white women are the man-eating tigers in the path of his life; if they fall upon Willatopy they will devour him. Go back to your yacht, Madame Gilbert, turn her head towards England, and trouble us no more."
"Bereft of our accomplished pilot we should be ashore within the hour," quoth Madame slyly.
"The boy's a wonder," mused Grant. "He arrives and conquers without an effort. He has bound you to him by his skill in pilotage, and now, I suppose, you will make him lead you to his island, happy no longer. The curses of the white man will descend upon it and upon him. Drink and Lust.... You will not have known the father of Willatopy; he was before your time. In the eyes of the world he was mad; in all eyes, perhaps, except my own. He gave up his home in England, he married a Hula girl out of New Guinea, and he settled upon Tops Island. All these evidences of rank insanity are known to you; to me alone is known an incident which would class Will Toppys among the doddering idiots. When I first heard of it from the man's own lips I was staggered. I am a Scot and a banker and a materialist. I should not have done what he did; I would have realised a quick fortune, and dashed home to bonny Scotland. I do not live on this filthy island for fun. You cannot conceive, Madame, how after thirty years of the tropics I ache for a bitter Scots haar. But Will Toppys was true to himself; he rejected the lure of the millions as he had rejected that of the thousands and the hundreds. During the wanderings of Will Toppys some twenty years ago, when first he went to New Guinea, he came across an old Australian gold hunter, one of the original gang who in the fifties had staked out claims and washed gravel for gold dust in the river beds beyond Balaarat. This old fellow had found gold in a creek in New Guinea, and was washing for dust in the old, old patient fashion when Toppys discovered him. The old man was unhappy. He had, it is true, found gold in paying quantities, but mixed with the gold was some dark, heavy obtrusive substance which marred the serenity of his daily operations. The gold would not wash clear by itself. Always it was mixed with this miserable stuff which had to be painfully separated from it. The old man showed Toppys some of it; he had kept a little under his bunk, but had thrown the rest away. Neither Toppys nor the digger knew anything of the stuff except that it was a nuisance. But Toppys took a pinch or two away with him in an envelope. His curiosity was so far stimulated that he despatched the envelope to the Assay Office at Brisbane, and asked for particulars of identity. Years afterwards he showed me the reply which came to him from the Assay Office. The dark, obtrusive, heavy metal, which the old digger had been throwing away because it interfered with the purity of his gold dust, was one of the iridium family, of great commercial importance, and was valued at fifty pounds sterling an ounce. Fifty pounds an ounce! By comparison the gold dust was mere dross. You will inquire, as I did, what course William Toppys took. Many men, who pass for honest, would have persuaded the old man to sell his claim for some derisory pittance and have stolen the fruits of his discovery. Others would have offered to help the old man at his gold washing and have taken their payment in osmiridium. Others again would have slain the discoverer. Toppys did none of these things. He went to the old digger's hut to acquaint him with the gift which God had sent, and found that, while he waited, God had vouchsafed another and a greater boon. The old man lay in his bunk dead. Toppys buried him there among the wealth of which he had never learned the value—and went away. The man was true to himself. He had come to the Torres Straits to live the simple native life, and he would not look back for all the riches of New Guinea at fifty pounds an ounce. And he never disclosed to anyone, even to me, the secret of the deposits. They were somewhere on the south coast, that was all that he would tell. His reason was like himself, sanely mad. God, who had hidden those treasures for millions of years, had disclosed them to two men—one who was dead, and the other who was as good as dead. Toppys accepted the revelation as a Divine test of his sincerity, and it would, in his eyes, have been sacrilege to have given away or sold the knowledge. I admit," concluded Grant rather savagely, "that if I could have won the secret from him, I would have scratted up the blessed stuff with my finger nails. Fifty pounds an ounce! More than a million pounds a ton. From his own point of view Will Toppys was right in rejecting the useless wealth, but I still think that he might have given me the tip."
"I must tell that story to Alexander," said Madame, "if only to enjoy his writhings. Fifty pounds the ounce. Poor Mr. Grant and poor Alexander. Though one does not need to be a Scot to jump at fifty pounds an ounce. I could do a bit of scratching at that price with my own lily hands."
"That was William Toppys, the father of Willatopy. Though how that serene and unworldly soul came to inhabit the body of an ancient and commonplace Toppys passes my poor comprehension. Willatopy, who worshipped his father as a god, is not a bit like him in temperament. He reminds me sometimes curiously of an English public school boy. He has the typically English unintellectual love of life. There is nothing of the anchorite about him. He enjoys every minute of his life. His virility and extraordinary endurance are Melanesian. Do you know how William Toppys died when that boy of his was twelve years old? No? Let me tell you, and perhaps my story of the son will be as illuminating as my story of the father. Toppys loved his son, though he could have wished him to have been less dark. The sisters are almost white, not darker in skin than many southern Europeans. They wear nothing but the native petticoats, so that one has full opportunity of inspecting their colour. Willatopy is black beside them. Toppys and his son were always about in their yawl, which the father brought out from England. It is fully decked and a fine seaboat. They went everywhere in it, and cared nothing for the storms or the currents which make our navigation so difficult and dangerous. It was in March of 1912 that William Toppys was killed, accidentally killed, in the presence of Willatopy."
"Killed!" exclaimed Madame. "I did not know that."
"Yes, killed. I have the particulars here in my drawer with the—the other papers. Toppys and the boy were cruising to the north and one evening at sunset had let go their anchor in the lee of a wide coral garden. It was the season of monsoon, when storms and rain sweep down from the north-west. The wind blows sometimes with hurricane velocity. We have a very brief twilight; at one rush comes the dark, or almost. The anchor had gone down in fifteen feet of water on the edge of the coral, and Toppys had gone forward to lower the sails. Somehow, I don't know how, his feet became entangled, and he pitched overboard. This was nothing in itself. The yawl has no more than two inches of rail, and both father and son frequently went overboard without intention. Willatopy swims like a seal, and Toppys was quite at home in the water. Willatopy, when he heard the splash, ran forward, cast off the halliard of the mainsail, and threw the bight over the rail. It was difficult to climb back without a line. He saw his father come to the surface, gasp, roll over, and sink again, leaving a trail of blood in the sea. As he fell, Toppys must have struck his head against a spur of coral, and when he gasped must have filled his lungs with water. He sank like a stone to the bottom. It was after sunset, and rapidly growing dark. Willatopy, the small boy of twelve, dived at once and sought for the heavy man of twelve stone on the floor fifteen feet below. It was already dark below, and quite a minute passed before Willatopy got his hand under his father's arm and struck up to the surface. Then he found himself six feet from the yawl, and drifting past her. There followed a furious struggle. The small boy, hopelessly overweighted, fought every inch of the distance, struggled across those interminable two yards, and just got his fingers on the counter as the current carried him away. If he had missed his last grab at the rail, Willatopy could never have swum back bearing his father's body, and he would never have let go. He is Melanesian in muscle and skin, but his heart is that of an English bulldog. The boy's fingers gripped the rail, he hung at arm's length, and with the other arm he grappled to him the man whom he worshipped as a god. Picture to yourself the situation. The night had fallen, the wind was soughing overhead, and threatening a gale, the tide was swirling past the coral and dragging at Willatopy's burden—and the mainsail halliard, by which alone he could essay to regain the yawl, was more than fifteen feet distant toward the bows. And Willatopy was twelve years old, and his father weighed twelve stone. I want you to get all these details clear before you, Madame. An English boy could never have done what Willatopy did then, and afterwards. He would have possessed the heart but not the lithe enduring strength nor the profound sea knowledge. Willatopy pulled himself in towards the boat, and her side inclined slightly towards him. Then he gave the leap and kick of a dolphin, and shifted his grip from the counter to the side rail. By a succession of kicks and leaps he worked his way forward inch by inch, foot by foot. He does not know how long it took him to reach the halliard, which trailed in the water. He says it was hours, but Willatopy has vague ideas of time. At last he arrived. He seized the line and swung clear. Treading water he passed the line under his father's arms, and made sure that when his own support was withdrawn, the man's head would be clear of the water. All through that desperate, one-armed progress from the stern to the midships of the yawl Willatopy had never once loosened his grip upon his father, nor allowed the dear drooping head to sink under water. Then when his father had been securely tied, Willatopy worked forward to the anchor chain and climbed on board by the bowsprit. He was up and hauling in an instant. The yawl inclined more and more as the heavy body came in over the rail, but the boy took a grip on the deck with his naked toes, and hauled more vigorously than ever. Now was the beloved body stretched at last upon the deck. The boy felt a long gash on his father's head, and could not distinguish a sign of life. There was no breath that he could perceive in the limp sodden body. The Hula fishers of New Guinea have their own methods of restoring the apparently drowned. Willatopy applied them. He also remembered his father's lessons and turned them to account, working the dead arms up and down to induce respiration. It was dark as a wolf's mouth; Willatopy had to work by touch and ear. The time passed, how long I do not know, and without pause for rest or food the boy worked on. He went on until the grey dawn found him still working. And then he knew that his father was dead. The blue Toppys eyes were cold and sightless. The body which Willatopy had rubbed and kneaded all though the night was becoming fixed in the rigor of death. Willatopy rose up and went below. He filled himself vigorously with food, thinking hard all the time of a method by which he might transfer his father from the exposed deck to the little bunk which had been his bed at sea. He felt very lonely. His white god had withdrawn its presence; no longer would the two, father and son, sail the seas together. In the ordinary sense, I do not think that Willatopy grieved at all. He was too busy. After a vigorous attempt he was obliged to leave the body on the deck. His strength was not equal to the work of transfer to the cabin, but he did what he could. He lashed the body so that it could not be disturbed by the rough movements of the yawl, or by the washing of heavy seas. Then he set the sails, hauled up the anchor, and laid a course for home. The disaster had occurred some fifty miles to the north of Tops Island. But three days passed before a small boy, grey with exhaustion and the continual beating upon his naked body of salt sea foam, sailed a yawl, with the corpse of his father lashed to the deck, into the harbour of Murray Island thirty miles to the south.
"Of those three days Willatopy can tell little. He had been caught in a furious gale and blown out into the Gulf, driving before it with no sails set except the small jib. Soon after leaving the fatal anchorage, where Toppys had been killed, Willatopy's eye for weather had told him to strip the yawl of her canvas, and she had come down, as it were, from full dress to a loin cloth before the tempest burst. For twenty-four hours—as Willie put it, 'from sun to sun'—he had sat by the tiller without food or sleep. And the previous night had been sleepless, too. Then the wind fell, but the waves ran high under the eternal Pacific swell. By lashing the tiller for a few minutes at a time the boy was able to take food, but sleep was still denied to him. He came back in long reaches, steering by the sun, for he had been blown far from familiar waters. He was a long way to the south of Tops Island, and east of the Great Barrier itself, so that when he sighted land after two whole days in the open, it was a great unknown, unfriendly reef within which the passages were narrow and tortuous. Still he worked his way through, and getting under shelter of a strange island, let go his anchor and slept. I do not think that he could have held out but for that God-given sleep. And so after yet another day he arrived in Murray Island. They took his father's body and would have buried it there, but Willatopy forbade. He was all right, he said, and going on home, but for the moment he was tired, and wanted to lie up among friends. So the good souls of Murray Island made a rough coffin, and laid Toppys upon that bunk in the little cabin where he had so often slept. Willatopy slept peacefully on the opposite bunk. He did not shrink from his father's body as an English boy would have done; he was happy in the thought that his god was still with him. And then, still alone, that boy of twelve sailed homewards with his father's corpse. He laughed when assistance was offered, and scorned companionship. 'Now that my father is dead I will sail his yawl,' said he. 'No one understands her except him and me.' Will Toppys is buried near the hut where he had lived with his wife and children. The family buried him themselves, and repeated over his body the prayers which the dead man had taught them. That is how William Toppys died, and that is how his son, a little boy of twelve years old, brought the father home."
Madame Gilbert's eyes were full of tears, and she did not speak for a few minutes.