A few days after this conversation I found myself at sea, a regularly enrolled trader of the firm’s, and one of the after-guard of the bark Belle Mahone, Captain Mins. We were bound, according to the timehonoured formula, “for the island of Guam or any other port the master may so direct.” I presume there are ships that actually do go to Guam,—if, indeed, there be such a place at all,—but it has never been my fate to come across one. Our Guam was like the rest, a polite fiction to cover up our track and leave a veil of mystery over our voyage. Besides John Cæsar Bibo, with whom I have already made you acquainted, there were three others in our little company astern. Captain Mins was a short, bullnecked man of fifty, with abrupt manners and a singularly deliberate way of speech, due perhaps to some impediment of the tongue. This lent to his utterance a gravity almost judicial, and gave an added force to the contradiction which was his only conversational counter. Jean Bonnichon, or “Frenchy,” as we called him, was one of the firm’s traders returning to the Islands after a brief holiday. He, like Mins, was short and thick-set, but with this ended all resemblance between them. Bonnichon’s story was that he had come of a wealthy family in Normandy; and it was indubitable (from the papers he had in his possession) that he had served as an officer of horse-artillery in the French army. What he had done to leave it no one precisely knew, nor was our curiosity satisfied by the conflicting explanations he himself was at pains to give. As a soldier of fortune in the Old World, with the Turks, the Bulgarians, and finally with the Arabs of Sus, he had sunk lower and lower, until he had come at last to Australia, there to sink lower still.
Six years of colonial life, followed by seven on the island of Apaiang, had transformed Frenchy into one of those strange creatures without a country. Under the heel of adversity the Frenchman had been completely stamped out of him; only some fragments of the army officer remained; the bulging chest, the loud, peremptory voice, the instant obedience to any one he counted his superior. He annoyed Old Bee excessively by leaping to his feet whenever our employer addressed him, a military habit so ingrained that he was quite unable to break himself of it. Intended for deference, its effect on John Cæsar (the most fidgety and preoccupied of patriarchs) was to drive him into one of his sudden tempers, when woe betide the man who dared to first address him. Adam Babcock, a humble, silent creature, completed the number of our mess. He was the mate of the ship, and took his meals alone after we had quitted the table, a forlorn arrangement that is usual in small vessels. He was so completely null in our life that I have some difficulty in recollecting him at all. He had seen misfortunes, I remember, and had certainly come down very much in the world, for he was the only person aft who treated me with the least consideration. On one occasion he even called me “sir,” and gave me a present of some shells.
With Frenchy I was soon on terms of shipboard acquaintance, but for the others I might have been invisible, for all they ever noticed me. Old Bee, for the matter of that, seldom spoke to any one, and the sight of his bilious cheek would have daunted, I believe, the most incorrigible bore in London. We saw little of him save at meal-times, for he was perpetually busy in his cabin, adding up figures, or stamping on his copying-book like a dancing dervish. I am at a loss to say what his labours were all about; they were, and always have been, to me the cause of unceasing amazement. I was not sorry, however, that Old Bee kept so much to himself, for I feared him like the plague, and never felt comfortable within the range of his bloodshot eyes. It fell to Frenchy and the captain to keep the ball of conversation rolling, which they did by disputing with each other on every topic that came up. Were the captain, with some warmth, to make a statement, it was just as certain to be met by Frenchy’s great horse-laugh and shrill, jeering contradiction. They could agree on nothing, whether it was the origin of the Russo-Turkish war or the way the natives cook devil-fish. No provocation was too unimportant to set them at each other’s throats, no slight too trivial to be ignored.
Once, to my extreme embarrassment, they differed on the subject of myself; the Frenchman saying that I was the type of young ne’er-do-well under which the colony of Queensland was sinking; while the captain just as vehemently persisted (for the time being only) that it was such as I who had made the British Empire! The complimentary view of Captain Mins’s made very little practical difference in his treatment of me, which from the beginning had been marked by coldness and dislike. In fact, I could not help perceiving, for all their wrangling and apparent disagreement, that the pair were fast friends. It was I, not Frenchy, who was the outsider on that ship. Indeed, I count some of those lonely days on the Belle Mahone as the very bitterest part of my life, and I wished myself at home a thousand times.
My only friend on board was Lum, the Chinese cook, whose circumstances were so akin to mine that we were drawn together by a common instinct. He, too, was condemned to solitude, having little in common with our crew of Rotumah Islanders, who shunned him like a leper; while I, as the reader knows, held a scarcely better position among the after-guard. When his work was done, Lum and I used to smoke cigarettes together under the lee of a boat, or, if it rained, within the stuffy confines of his cabin next the galley. He was a mine of worldly wisdom, for there was nothing he had not done or had not tried to do, from piracy to acting on the stage; and he would unfold the tale of his experiences with such drollery and artlessness that his society was to me an endless entertainment. Poor Lum! there was little of the seamy side of life he had not seen, scarcely a treachery he had not endured, in the years he had followed the sea.
Our first port was to be Lascom Island, an immense atoll which had remained uninhabited until Bibo & Co. took possession of it in the eighties. Their intention had been to extend its few cocoanut-palms into one vast grove, and for this purpose they maintained a force of half a dozen indentured labourers from Guadalcanar, who were superintended by a white man named Stocker. It was for the purpose of carrying this Stocker supplies and inspecting his year’s work that we were here to make our first call.
We reached the island late at night, and lay off and on till dawn. The daylight showed me a narrow, bush-grown strip of unending sand, which stretched in a great curve until lost to view beneath the horizon. As far as the eye could reach, the breakers were thundering against the huge horseshoe with a fury that made one sick to hear them. Of all forsaken and desolate places it has ever been my lot to see, I search my memory in vain for the match of Lascom Island. Once, however, that we had opened its channel and made our hesitating way into the lagoon beyond, I found more to please me. Skimming over the lake-like surface, with every stitch drawing, and the captain in the crosstrees conning the ship through the gleaming dangers that beset us on every hand, it was indeed an experience not to be recalled without a thrill. We had need of a lynx eye aloft, for the lagoon was thick with coral rocks, and the channel, besides, was so tortuous and so cramped that one false turn of a spoke would have torn our bottom out.
I let myself down beside the dolphin-striker, and sat there above our hissing bows, enjoying as I did so an extraordinary sense of danger and exhilaration. At times it seemed to me as though we were sailing through air, so transparent was the medium through which we moved, so clear the tangled coral garden that lay below. From my perch I contemplated the gradual unfolding of the little settlement towards which we were tending: first of all a faint blur, which gradually became transformed into a grove of cocoanuts; bits of white and brown which resolved themselves into houses and sheds; a dark patch on the lagoon shore that I made out to be a sort of pier; then, last of all, the finished picture, in which there was nothing hid, or left to the imagination to decipher. There was something most depressing in the sight of this tiny village, with its faded whitewash, its general appearance of lifelessness and decay, and above its roofs the palm-tops bending like grass in the gusty breeze. Nothing stirred in the profound shade; not a sound came forth to greet us; and, except for a faint haze of smoke above one of the trees, we might have thought the place abandoned. I remembered that Stocker was in likelihood planting cocoanuts with his men, perhaps miles away on the wild sea-beach; in my mind’s eye I could see him pursuing his monotonous vocation, a miserable Crusoe toiling for a wage. My thoughts were still running in some such channel when I was suddenly startled by the apparition of a man who came running out of the shadow with a bundle in his arms. It was a flag, which he fixed to the halyards of the staff and slowly ran up. When it was half-mast high he twitched it loose, displaying the British ensign upside down. Then, as I was still gazing at him, he made fast the ropes and hurried down to the pier.
Realising that something must be wrong on shore, I climbed back to the deck and hastened to where Old Bee and Frenchy were standing aft. I think the former must have seen the question on my lips, for he gave me such a swift, angry look that I dared not open my mouth, but slunk behind Frenchy in silence. He, the trader, must have just endured some such rebuff himself, for he was in a frightful ill humour, and swore at me when I tried to whisper in his ear. To learn anything from Babcock was impossible, for he was jumping about the topgallant forecastle, clearing the anchors and getting in the head-sails. When the vessel had been brought to a standstill near a rusty buoy, a boat was cleared and lowered, and we all got into it with alacrity: Old Bee, Mins, Frenchy, and I, and a couple of hands to pull.
We were met at the pier by some natives in singlets and dungaree trousers, who gazed at us as solemnly as we gazed back at them. One grizzled old fellow was spokesman for the rest,—Joe, they called him,—and he told us, with a great deal of writhing (as though he had pain in his inside), that Stocker was dead. He had died ten days before, “of some kind of sickness,” as Joe called it; and lest we had any doubt about it, we were pressed to walk up to Stocker’s house and see for ourselves. For, fearing that they might subsequently be accused of making away with him, they had left Stocker’s body untouched in the bed where he had died. The fact was palpable enough before we had gone a hundred yards in the direction of a little house, which from the distance looked very quaint and pretty. But I forbore to follow the others any further in the investigation they were obviously inclined to make, and I struck off from them to examine the settlement alone.