Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas

by Lloyd Osbourne

Women are always alike at bottom; it is only men that are different. A bit of finery would make Rosie happy for a week. Her hair was an everlasting job, so was her skin, which she kept out of the sun and rubbed down very careful with oil. She took walks to see how the other women wore the single bushy garment that they do in the Gilberts, the fashion varying from time to time: now it is swung very jaunty from side to side, now it's low and now it's high, and sometimes it's thick and sometimes it's thin, and sometimes the modest-and-quiet is the dressy way of it. She took care of the house very nice, and what few clothes and things we had were arranged most tidy in three chests with bell locks. I never hear a little bell ting-a-ling to-day but what it brings those days back to me, with her so busy at our funny housekeeping. When I coasted around the island, trading, she 'ud stay behind and guard the place like a bulldog, and never took a thing except a little soap or tobacco or maybe a tin of meat for her Pa, a nosing old gentleman dressed in a mat, who always bobbed up when I was out of the way, being discouraged at other times from living and dying with us.

Yes, I got very fond of her—loved her, you might call it, for all she was a little savage, and ate squid, and carried a shark-tooth dagger against any of the girls that might show a fancy for me. In time I taught her to play cribbage and checkers and dominoes, so that at night we would sit very sociable under the lamp, she and I, with the surf groaning on the outer reef, and it was more like a home than I'd ever had in my wandering, lonely, up-and-down life. She was quick to learn, and loving to beat the band, yet ever kind of imperious and saucy like I belonged to her instead of its being the other way around. She had no idea of white people—used to say they looked like Kanakas who had been drowned for a week—and was most scornful how it was always copra, copra, copra with us. It was just her way to tease me and make me cross, for then she would snuggle up and ripple over with laughter and hold me tight in her soft, round girlish arms, and say that I was her copra—a whole ship of it, and how she 'ud hang herself from a coconut tree if I were to die—and by God, she would have done it, too, them Gilbert women being great on love, and the thing happening often enough.

Several years passed, and I can't recall a single word of disagreement between us. She was all the world to me in those days, and I doubt if in the whole group there was a pair so happy. Ben's Rosie, they called her—the captains and supercargoes and mates that came our way—and they all thought a lot of her, and brought her many a little present that made her eyes sparkle—such pretty eyes as they were, and so full of fun—gold fish, and rolls of silk, and music boxes or a trade hat. It was always a standing joke that she was tired of me, and was going to run away with them; and if they were quite old, like Captain Smith or Billy Baker, there wasn't any length she wouldn't go to, even to hugging them and playing with their whiskers right before me, and saying in her sweet, broken English: "Oh, you poor old captain, with nobody to love you—but never mind, I go with you this time, sure I go, and Bennie can get a girl from Big Muggin, oh, so pretty, who bite him like a dog!"

Then little Ben came, and for a time it looked as though he was going to be quite a boy, and grow up. But at the end of twenty-one months, as he was nearing his second birthday, he sickened and died; and we dressed him up in his poor little best, and put him away forever in the coral. Rosie took on about it terrible—so terrible that I think something must have broken in her brain. She was never the same afterwards; not that she was always mourning, I don't mean that—but she grew cranky and queer and changed in every way. She would start into a fury at a word, and throw things about, and scream. She would tell the most awful lies about how I had treated her, and invent things that never took place. Even on a dot of a coral island there is gossip and slander and a Kanaka Mrs. Grundy, and Rosie was doing her best to ruin me, so that I was avoided, and the King and the other high muck-a-mucks went to Tyson's, the opposition trader, and tabooed my store till I didn't know which way to turn.

I ought to have sold out and quit, and left Rosie on the other fellow like Feltenshaw had done me. But I loved her for what she had been to me, and for the poor mite moldering under ground, and so just took my medicine for a whole miserable year and let it go at that. Every misfortune I've had in life I seem to trace to what was good and generous in me. Certainly if I'd shaken her off then and there, I would have been a happier man, and been saved things that have since almost drove me mad.

The upshot of it was that finally I did sell the station to a couple of Chinamen—brothers—and I would like to say right here there never was a whiter pair than these two, or any that stood up straighter to a bargain. Once the main price was fixed, there was no haggling over valuations, nor any backwardness or suspicion, though in the rush I was in not to hold the schooner over long, it would have been easy to beat me out of a hundred dollars or two. They pulled us off to the vessel—me and Rosie and them three camphor-wood chests with the bell locks and a big roll of mats and a keg of silver dollars—and an hour later six years of my life had sunk with the palms, as lost and disappeared as the schooner's wake in the sea behind us.

After the Line Apia struck me as a wonderfully bustling, busy little place, and I took to it like a man does who's had nothing but coral and coconuts to look at till all the world seems nothing else. It came over me what a prisoner I'd been up there, and how much I had paid in unthought-of ways for that keg of Chile money. Rosie, too, brightened up considerable with the novelty of it all, and was so gay and laughing and like her old self that I was gladder than ever at having made the change.

It didn't take me long to size up conditions; and the better part of that keg soon put me in possession of a two-story house and store in the center of the town on the main street, with a pretty good stock taken over from the widow of the man who had lately died there. I was hardly what could be called a trader any more, what with a place so big and fine, with a tramway running down to a shaky wharf, and a busted bookkeeper coming in every Tuesday night to post my books. I was a South Sea merchant now, and was reaping the fruit of all them lonely slaving days on the Line. No more pajamas neither, but a clean, white suit every day, and with Rosie perking up like she did, them were real good times for me, and pleasant to look back on; and though I do say it myself, my neighbors liked me and I was respected and looked up to, and I was called the Gilbert Island Consul from the way I was always ready to befriend anybody from there, whether white or native, even once going before the Supreme Court and being complimented by the Chief Justice on behalf of some Nonootch people whose wages were being held back.

Then my ward run me for the Municipal Council, and I was elected by twenty-two votes to four over Grevsmuhl; and I can tell you it made me feel a mighty proud man to be honored like that and placed so high; and if my head didn't swell I guess my heart did, to almost bursting, at such a rise in life, and one so unexpected and undreamed of. It hardly seemed it could be me the police touched their caps to, or the consuls confabbed with about local affairs as they dropped in to buy a toothbrush or a pair of socks—me who had landed there so short a time before in my pajamas and kind of dazed at the size and noise of the place after the silence of the Line—just common old me, with earrings in my ears and gaping like a Rube.

It meant a big uplift to me in every kind of a way, and I was a better man for all that confidence and trust, and wanted like hell to show I was worth it. The week after I was elected to the Council I married Rosie proper and right, thinking a Councillor ought to set an example in his community; and every one was very cordial to me about it, especially in my own ward, where two or three of them even followed my lead, saying that with the mail steamers now calling and the town generally on the up grade, it was time to let go on the old, wrong way of things, and get into line with civilization.