Malays bringing on board their varied possessions
As the last of the praus was cleared of baggage they clustered on the gangway, shouting adieus
He extends his hand, a hand wrinkled and seamed like a last-year’s apple and brown as a claro from Sumatra. “My moniker’s Reache,” he tells us, and we tell him our names. He continues: “You are Americans, eh? Well, put ’er there! I like the way you fellows handled the railroad situation in France. Here for long? Wait: stay here a moment while I see the mate there, and I’ll take you over to the club for a drink. We’ll spin a yarn and get acquainted. Can’t spin a yarn or get chummy sudden, ’less there’s some square-face in sight; that’s solid. Back in a minute.”
As we watch him go we smile. So there is a club in Merauke! Five white men,—and a club! It is proper. Where there is a club there must be a bar. The barkeeper draws a salary, after a fashion. He must be kept awake to lend an air of liveliness to the institution, so the members foregather of an evening and sing raucously in the wee sma’ hours expressly for that purpose. True, the club is but a palm-thatched edifice with a slightly corrugated floor and reputation; nevertheless it is a club. Nondescript furniture ungraces its airy spaciousness and mud-wasps’ nests now and then fall upon one’s head as some fly-hungry chick chack lizard carelessly dislodges them, but it is still “The Club.” It being “The Club,” one must always remember to wear his coat therein, for the etiquette of fleshpots is brought to this land of the stewpots and observed with due reverence. No matter how deep in his cups the superior white man may be, he must never appear at “The Club” in negligée. It isn’t done.
The native may wander in the simmering heat of midday clad in what approximates nothing, but the Tuan, being superior even when most satisfyingly inebriated, to maintain his proper dignity must wear at all times a coat over his regulation soft-collared shirt. Of course we Americans are not really bound to do this, for our many eccentricities are passed over without undue comment. When one of those who really “belong” does make some allusion to one of our—what shall I say?—indecorums, one of his fellows offers the all-sufficient excuse or explanation, “Oh, he’s American.” This always suffices; and, too, it is said as though the speaker expected as much and would have been disappointed otherwise. And despite all this they like us. They really like our devil-may-care expediency, and I think secretly envy us. In this they “have nothing on us,” though, for it seems to be a human tendency to envy something in the other fellow.
Reache joins us in a few moments, and we are soon ensconced in rather rickety chairs on the veranda of the club. Between tumblerfuls of square-face gin and long draws at an excellent Dutch cigar, he entertains us with tales of bird-of-paradise hunting, which avocation he follows somewhat successfully. He now and then makes our flesh creep with a particularly hair-raising recital delivered somewhat in this fashion:
“You fellows know, I guess, what I’m here for. It’s paradise. Not the country, no! The country is hell and no mistake, but the birds,—that is what I go after, and get, too. I outfitted in Moresby and when I got my hunters together and plenty of petrol for the launch I headed for the upper Diegul. It’s way up in the interior where we get the best birds. It’s bad country up there, and no mistake, for the natives have a little habit of lunching off one another when pig becomes scarce. The governor warned me that I was taking my life in my hands, but I don’t know any one else’s hands I’d rather have it in, so I went inside. My crew of hunters was as ripe a gang of cutthroats as one would wish to see and they tried cutting a few didoes among themselves, but after I’d knocked a couple of them cold they took to behaving and I let things go at that.
“You want a gang like that for hard going. They’re necessary. The only way to keep them happy is to give them plenty of work or, what they like best, plenty of scrapping. Then they haven’t time to brood over differences of opinion amongst themselves. I loaded a couple of bushels of shells like that nigger out there has on. They wear them for pants. One shell and Mr. Cannibal is all dressed up. Well, I use those shells for currency. One first-class shell which costs me about ten cents Dutch money buys a bird-of-paradise skin that is worth twelve hundred guilders a cody,—that is, twenty skins,—or, as it figures out in real money, forty dollars a skin. It’s a fair margin of profit.” Here Reache grins and absorbs another tumblerful of square-face.
“Well,” he continues, “we went inside,—I, seven shooters, and some other Moresby boys for packers. Soon we had all the shooting and trading we wanted. Everything went all right for a time and there was no trouble with the natives. I gave them one nice shiny shell for one prime skin and they were as pleased as possible. The trouble started over some fool thing that one of my boys said or did to one of the native women and soon matters began to tense up a little. There was a Chinese outfit inside, too, that were doing some trading and they tried to take advantage of the natives. They gummed the game that season. The natives stood for the Chinamen for a time, but pretty soon the old women of the tribe called all the younger women and girls aside and told them that the men were taboo till the Chinamen were put out of the way, and as usual the younger ones agreed to what the old women said. (They always have their way.) One fine evening the Kia Kias had a little dinner-party to celebrate the resumption of domestic felicity attendant upon the demise of the Chinese.