Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

It must have been, I reflected, its comparative remoteness from all of even the least-sailed of the South Pacific trade routes that was responsible for making Kai Atoll, a barely perceptible smudge on the chart of the Louisiades, the unofficial rendezvous for the most picturesque lot of cut-throats, blackguards and beachcombers that "The Islands" had known since the days of "Bully" Hayes and his care-free contemporaries. Like had attracted like after the original nucleus gathered, safety had come with numbers, and at the time of my arrival no man whose misdeeds had not made him important enough to send a gunboat after needed to depart from that secure haven except of his own free will.

Among a score of hard-bit derelicts whose grinning or scowling phizzes flashed up in memory at the thought of that sun-baked loop of coral, with its rag-tag of wind-whipped coco palms and its crescent of zinc and thatch-roofed shacks, only three—or four including myself—occupied my mind for the moment. Allen—reckless daredevil that he was—had come to Kai from somewhere in the Solomons for the very good and sufficient reason that it was the only island south of the Line at the time where his welcome would not have been either too hot or too cold to suit his fastidious taste. Bell had come, in a stove-in whaleboat, because Kai was the nearest settlement to the point where he put the Flying Scud—the trading schooner that was his last command, if we except the Cora Andrews—aground on Tuka-tuva Reef. The girl, who arrived with Bell in the whaleboat, came because he brought her. The tide-rips of Kai passage and the Devil's own toboggan were all the same to Rona—at this stage of the game, at least—so long as the big, quiet, masterful Yankee was bumping-the-bumps with her. And even afterwards—but let that transpire.

I, Roger Whitney, artist, formerly of New York and Paris, and, latterly, man-about-the French-colonies, with no fixed abode, had been landed at Kai by a French gunboat from the Noumea station. I packed myself off from that accursed hole because the suicide of a couple of officers in whose company I had been drinking absinthe at the Cercle Militaire for some weeks had reminded me altogether too poignantly of what I might, in the ordinary course of things, expect to be doing myself before long. A change of scene and, if possible, a modification of habits was the only hope. I would never have had the initiative to tackle even the first had not the feeling persisted that I was on the verge of doing something worth while with my painting. I went to Kai because the archipelago thereabouts was reputed to have the most gorgeous sky and water colouring in Polynesia.

Neither the promised beauties nor the reputed badness of Kai stirred me greatly in anticipation. With a bitter smile I told myself that every night I was seeing sights more lovely than anything my eyes were likely to rest on short of Paradise, while the Chamber of Horrors in which I awoke every morning was a veritable annex to the Inferno itself. No, it was out of the question that Kai could unfold in realities, whether to delight or shock, things to outdo those that were already mine in dreams that had themselves become more real than realities. Well, it turned out that I was only half right, or wrong, whichever way you want to put it. While, on the one hand, I found the bluff, open badness of Kai rather more refreshing than shocking; on the other hand, it was hardly more than a week before I was ready to swear that not the most ethereal houri that ever laid her cool green hand upon my fevered brow was of a class to run one-two-three with a flame-quivering slip of a nymph whom I had surprised at her bath in a beryline pool inside the windward reef. I began to pull myself together from that hour. Rona, the very sight of whom threw most men out of hand, had quite the opposite effect upon me. I knew she was not for me, and the thought that the world actually held such loveliness in the form of flesh and blood had a sort of reassurance about it, like the knowledge that one has an ample income from government bonds.

Because I had landed from the Zelee, and also, perhaps on account of my rig-out (especially the brimless Algerian sun-helmet), the "beach" of Kai put me down at once as a "We-we," and, therefore, a creature quite apart. The only Frenchmen on the island were a couple of escapes from the convict settlement of New Caledonia, and because neither of them could ride or shoot or fight with their fists, they had no standing with the predominant Australian "push," most of whom were more or less handy at all three. It was, indeed, the fact that, in spite of all my years in Paris and the French colonies had done to make a physical wreck of me, I still retained something of the quickness of eye and hand and foot which had conspired to make my Harvard record as an all-round-athlete one that only two or three men have equalled even down to the present day, that gave me such easy sledding in making my way with the "best people" of Kai.

It took just three minutes—the length of the first round of the "friendly bout" I fought with "Heifer" Halligan, ex-welter-weight champion of Victoria, at Jackson's pub one afternoon—to change Kai's openly expressed contempt for me to something very near respect. I thoroughly appreciated the attitude of that breezy lot of sport-loving rascals toward a Frenchified Yankee artist, especially one that did not appear to be a fugitive from justice, and so took the first opportunity to win a standing with them which would at least incline them to let me go my own way when I wanted to. Notwithstanding my wretched condition, I outpointed my chunky opponent a good three to one in that opening round; indeed, the "Heifer's" excuse for the foul which put me to sleep in the Second was that both his "bloomin' peepers" were so nearly swelled shut he couldn't see "stryght." But it was my swelling groin and battered hands, rather than "Heifer's" bruised optics, that came in for first attention from deft-fingered Doc Wyndham—once of Guy's, on his own admission. The next day I was waited upon by a delegation sent from "Jackson's Sporting Club" to urge me to put myself in training for a go-to-the-finish with "Shark-mouth" Kelly of Suva, the Fiji open champ. My speed would dazzle a cow-footed dolt like "Shark-mouth" was, they said, and he would be easy picking for me. They further urged that we could clean up all the loose money west of the "Hundred and Eightieth"—what odds would Fiji not give in backing a fourteen-stone stoker against an artist that only weighed ten stone and looked half dished with the "green" besides? Moreover, I could keep the whole purse for myself; all they wanted out of it was the sport. God bless the scalawags, it was more than half true, that last.

The funny thing about it was that the project actually tempted me at the time, principally, I think, because there seemed a chance that the hard exercise of training—the very thing, indeed, that helped work the miracle a few years later—might effect me at least a temporary separation, if not a permanent divorce, from the "Green Lady." I was still temporizing with "delegations" when the Cora Andrews dropped her hook in Kai Lagoon and gave us something else to think about.

If the little cunning I had left with my fists won me the respect of the "beach," it remained for my proficiency with the revolver—something which I had never allowed myself to grow rusty in—to give me real prestige. My father had been only less famous as a pistol shot than as a builder of steel bridges, and from my birth it had been his dream that I should carry on the tradition in both lines. If it had broken the old boy's heart when I turned my back on engineering for art—insisting on going from Harvard to Beaux Arts instead of to Boston "Tec" as he had planned—he at least had nothing to complain of on the score of my aptitude for the revolver. He admitted that I had bred true in hand and eye, even on the day that he called my "art tomfoolery" a throwback from my French grandmother. I have always thought that the one circumstance which prevented the Governor from cutting me off in his will when he finally had definite proofs of the depths to which I had sunk in Paris, was the fact that, on my last visit to the old home on the Hudson, I had beaten him, shot for shot, with his own pistols, and at his favourite distance.

They were rather free with their gun play during my first fortnight at Kai, each little affair having been followed by one or two more or less ceremonious burials in the coral-walled cemetery on the south lip of the windward passage. It was merely as a precautionary measure—on the off chance that they should be tempted to draw me into something of the kind at a time when I might not be quite on edge for it—that I took early opportunity to uncover a trifle of what I had crooked in my trigger-finger. A casually winged gull or two, and a few plugged pennies (not a miss at the latter, luckily, even when they tried to spin them edge on to my line of fire) effected all that was necessary. After that, though they were continually sending for me to come down to Jackson's and shoot the wire off champagne corks (fizz, loot of some kind, was the freest flowing drink on the island at the time), or perform some other equally useful and spectacular gun stunt, not the roughest of the gang but took the most meticulous care not to press his invitation the instant it sank home to him that my mood of the moment wasn't of a kind calculated to blend smoothly with the free and easy spirit of a beach-combers' carousal.

It was hardly to be expected that they would ever quite understand why a man who could "blot out a cove's blinker as easy wiv his fist as wiv his gun" (as I was told that "Reefer" Ogiston, penal absentee and pearler, put it one day) and who "'peared mo' than comfitabl' heeled fo' coin," should be "light an' looney enuf tu go roun' smearin' smashed barnculs on sail cloth"; and yet it was on that very score—or at least to their quick comprehension of what I was driving at in my pictures—that the "beach" of Kai rendered me a priceless service. Almost from the outset they began to "twig" my marines, to feel the living atmosphere I was striving to paint into them. They were all men who had lived by the sea, on the sea; yes, and not a few of them had worked under the sea. Well, when I began to see those deep-set, wrinkle-clutched eyes squint to a focus of concentration, and, presently, the quick heave of a hairy chest as the message of the canvas flashed home, I knew that I was on the right track. Nothing less than that would have given me the courage to go on working, as I had set myself to do, on a steadily decreasing allowance of absinthe, a certain supply of which, of course, I had brought with me from Noumea.