Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

The girl's practice of wearing her sulu (Kai used the Fijian name for the inevitable South Sea waist-cloth which the Samoans call lava-lava and the Tahitians pareo) Malay-fashion—looped over the breasts and secured by a hitch under the left arm—indicated that her outdoor life at least had been spent somewhere in the Insulinde Archipelago. Her very considerable English vocabulary, however, and especially her fluency in "pidgin," could hardly have been acquired save through some years of residence in the Straits Settlements or the Federated Malay States. I was inclined to favour Singapore, especially as she had once let slip something about a fling at fan-tan at Johore. But even had she been born in that amazing island melting pot, her unmistakably Hindu cast of features and mould of figure were hardly accounted for. The Madrassi Tamils of the Straits were coolies, and Rona radiated caste from her slender pink-tipped toes to her crown of indigo-black hair coils.

In my own mind I harboured the theory that the girl was a "by-product" of the harem of one of the innumerable petty Sultanates of Malaysia, among which I knew were to be found girls of all the tribes and races of the Moslem world. In no other way could I account for the flaming spirit and the physical perfection of her. Not even descent from that strange Hindu remnant of the lovely island of Lombok, just east of Java (a theory which I had also turned over in my mind), quite satisfied on both these scores. As to what sort of a centrifugal impulse might have operated to spin her forth to the clutches of the currents of the outside world, I had not speculated very deeply. But—well, I knew something of the strange currencies in which Malaysian potentates paid their debts to Singapore rug and jewel merchants!

In spite of the increasing warmth of Bell's friendship for me, my way to Rona's confidence proved far from easy sledding. This was partly because I had got in bad at the outset by starting to sketch that capricious lady at her reef-side bath in the face of her very outspoken disapproval of anything so unseemly, and partly because she was slow in making up her mind that I did not necessarily classify with the predatory males against whom her whole life had unquestionably been an unrelieved defence. Obsessed by the desire to paint her, I had not improved my standing with the girl by asking Bell (after she had refused me pointblank) to intercede to get her to sit for me. Indeed, that faux pas on my part seemed to have put an end for good to any chance I might have had of getting her to pose. Rona was openly indignant that I should have presumed to regard her own decision as other than final in the matter, while Bell, though perfectly good-natured about it, was no less decided in his disapproval.

"No, sah, I'm not fo' it in the least, ol' man," he drawled decisively. "Lil' Rona's 'bout the neahest thing to a true, lovin' an' lawful wife I evah had, awh evah will have, fo' that mattah. So you must see that it doan quite jibe with mah sense o' what is right an' propah unda the ci'cumstances fo' me to aid an' abet a proceduah that might culminate in huh appeahin' on the wall o' somun's bathroom as a spo'tin nymph awh a wallowin' mumaid. Nothin' doin', ol' man; not with mah blessin'."

That ended it, of course. From then on I had to content myself with the hopeless "sketches from memory," in not the best of which was I able to catch more than a suggestion of what I sought. I could not have failed more utterly had I set myself to do a "character portrait" of the "Green Lady" herself.

But on the personal side it was not long before I began to make an appreciable gain of ground with Rona. First she ceased avoiding me when I dropped in for a mid-afternoon yarn with Bell; then she began to assume a sort of "benevolent tolerance" by coming and sitting on the mat as we talked; finally she started taking an active interest in the conversation, coming out of her Buddha-like trances every now and then to cut in with some trenchant comment in fluent bêche-de-mer jargon, or perhaps a shrewd question phrased in carefully chosen and enunciated English.

At last, one memorable afternoon, she came (quite on her own initiative, he assured me) with Bell to call at the little thatch-roofed, woven-walled hut I was calling home at the time, wearing in honour of the occasion her most treasured possession, the "peacock" shawl. It was this astonishingly fine piece of Cantonese embroidery which Bell had mentioned as having made up, with the little Malay kris, the sum total of the dower Rona had brought him. It was the first time I had had a chance to examine it at close quarters and I saw at a glance that, however it had come into her possession, it had once been a priceless thing, a real work of art, a treasure fit for the trousseau of a princess.

The body of the shawl was amber-coloured silk of so close a weave that it would have shed water as it stopped light. A rubber blanket would not have thrown a blacker shadow when held against the sun. Yet so sheer and fine was the fabric that a twist of it streamed from one hand to the other as brandy pours out of a flask. The peacock itself, done in a thousand tints and shades of delicate floss, was all of life-size in body and something more than that in tail. Stitching and matching, stitching and matching—you could almost see the artist growing old before your eyes as you thought of the years he must have bent above his glacially-growing masterpiece.

With this rainbow-bright rectangle of shimmering silks worn folded over the shoulders in the ordinary way the peacock must have been considerably telescoped and distorted. It was doubtless for this reason that Rona always wore it Malay-fashion, as the Javanese women wear their sarongs. This displayed the jewel-gay bird in all his pride, the bright breast swelling over Rona's own and the coruscant cascade of tail (you could almost hear the rustle of it) falling about her limbs like the feather mantle of an early Hawaiian queen.

I have said that this shawl had been a priceless thing. As a matter of fact it still was such. So lovingly had it been cared for, not only by Rona but by the many owners it may well have had before her (for Canton had done no such work as this for half a century at least), that not a corner was frayed, not a one of its countless thousands of stitches started. In texture it was scarcely less perfect than the day it was finished. The only thing wrong with it was that the colours were a good deal dulled, not by age (for the old Cantonese dyes are as deathless of hue as ancient Phœnician glass), but by grease. This had happened, I suspected, largely during Rona's stewardship, for the tiare-scented coco oil she used so freely as a hair-perfume often found its way to her arms and shoulders—and so to the shawl. All the latter needed to restore it to its pristine freshness and refulgency was a good "dry-cleaning."