heathen niggers,” was the reply. “Also, ’tis very expensive. Come below,
Mr. Grief. You’ll be better for the information with a long glass in your
hand. After you.”
“How did you settle things?” his employer demanded as soon as they were
seated in the cabin.
The little Scotchman shook his head. “There was nothing to settle. It all
depends how you look at it. The other way would be to say it was settled,
entirely settled, mind you, before I got there.”
“But the plantation, man? The plantation?”
“No plantation. All the years of our work have gone for naught.’Tis back
where we started, where the missionaries started, where the Germans
started—and where they finished. Not a stone stands on another at the
landing pier. The houses are black ashes. Every tree is hacked down, and
the wild pigs are rooting out the yams and sweet potatoes. Those boys
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73
from New Georgia, a fine bunch they were, five score of them, and they
cost you a pretty penny. Not one is left to tell the tale.”
He paused and began fumbling in a large locker under the companion-
steps.
“But Worth? And Denby? And Wallenstein?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. Take a look.”
McTavish dragged out a sack made of rice matting and emptied its
contents on the floor. David Grief pulled himself together with a jerk, for
he found himself gazing fascinated at the heads of the three men he had
left at New Gibbon. The yellow mustache of Wallenstein had lost its fierce
curl and drooped and wilted on the upper lip.
“I don’t know how it happened,” the Scotchman’s voice went on drearily.
“But I surmise they went into the bush after the old devil.”
“And where is Koho?” Grief asked.
“Back in the bush and drunk as a lord. That’s how I was able to recover the
heads. He was too drunk to stand. They lugged him on their backs out of
the village when I rushed it. And if you’ll relieve me of the heads, I’ll be
well obliged.” He paused and sighed. “I suppose they’ll have regular
funerals over them and put them in the ground. But in my way of thinking
they’d make excellent curios. Any respectable museum would pay a
hundred quid apiece. Better have another drink. You’re looking a bit
pale—There, put that down you, and if you’ll take my advice, Mr. Grief, I
would say, set your face sternly against any joking with the niggers. It
always makes trouble, and it is a very expensive divertissement.”
A Little Account With Swithin Hall
(First published in The Saturday Evening Post, v. 184, September 2, 1911:
12-14, 40-41)
I
With a last long scrutiny at the unbroken circle of the sea, David Grief
swung out of the cross-trees and slowly and dejectedly descended the
ratlines to the deck.
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74
“Leu-Leu Atoll is sunk, Mr. Snow,” he said to the anxious-faced young
mate. “If there is anything in navigation, the atoll is surely under the sea,
for we’ve sailed clear over it twice—or the spot where it ought to be. It’s
either that or the chronometer’s gone wrong, or I’ve forgotten my
navigation.”
“It must be the chronometer, sir,” the mate reassured his owner. “You
know I made separate sights and worked them up, and that they agreed
with yours.”
“Yes,” Grief muttered, nodding glumly, “and where your Summer lines
crossed, and mine, too, was the dead centre of Leu-Leu Atoll. It must be
the chronometer—slipped a cog or something.”
He made a short pace to the rail and back, and cast a troubled eye at the
Uncle Toby’s wake. The schooner, with a fairly strong breeze on her
quarter, was logging nine or ten knots.
“Better bring her up on the wind, Mr. Snow. Put her under easy sail and let
her work to windward on two-hour legs. It’s thickening up, and I don’t
imagine we can get a star observation to-night; so we’ll just hold our
weather position, get a latitude sight to-morrow, and run Leu-Leu down on
her own latitude. That’s the way all the old navigators did.”
Broad of beam, heavily sparred, with high freeboard and bluff, Dutchy
bow, the Uncle Toby was the slowest, tubbiest, safest, and most fool-proof
schooner David Grief possessed. Her run was in the Banks and Santa Cruz
groups and to the northwest among the several isolated atolls where his
native traders collected copra, hawksbill turtle, and an occasional ton of
pearl shell. Finding the skipper down with a particularly bad stroke of
fever, Grief had relieved him and taken the Uncle Toby on her semiannual
run to the atolls. He had elected to make his first call at Leu-Leu,
which lay farthest, and now found himself lost at sea with a chronometer
that played tricks.
II
No stars showed that night, nor was the sun visible next day. A stuffy,
sticky calm obtained, broken by big wind-squalls and heavy downpours.
From fear of working too far to windward, the Uncle Toby was hove to,
and four days and nights of cloud-hidden sky followed. Never did the sun
appear, and on the several occasions that stars broke through they were too
dim and fleeting for identification. By this time it was patent to the veriest
tyro that the elements were preparing to break loose. Grief, coming on
deck from consulting the barometer, which steadfastly remained at 29.9o,
encountered Jackie-Jackie, whose face was as brooding and troublous as
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75
the sky and air. Jackie-Jackie, a Tongan sailor of experience, served as a
sort of bosun and semi-second mate over the mixed Kanaka crew.
“Big weather he come, I think,” he said. “I see him just the same before
maybe five, six times.”
Grief nodded. “Hurricane weather, all right, Jackie-Jackie. Pretty soon
barometer go down—bottom fall out.”
“Sure,” the Tongan concurred. “He goin’ to blow like hell.”
Ten minutes later Snow came on deck.
“She’s started,” he said; “29.85, going down and pumping at the same
time. It’s stinking hot—don’t you notice it?” He brushed his forehead with
his hands. “It’s sickening. I could lose my breakfast without trying.”
Jackie-Jackie grinned. “Just the same me. Everything inside walk about.
Always this way before big blow. But Uncle Toby all right. He go through
anything.”
“Better rig that storm-trysail on the main, and a storm-jib,” Grief said to
the mate. “And put all the reefs into the working canvas before you furl
down. No telling what we may need. Put on double gaskets while you’re
about it.”
In another hour, the sultry oppressiveness steadily increasing and the stark
calm still continuing, the barometer had fallen to 29. 70. The mate, being
young, lacked the patience of waiting for the portentous. He ceased his
restless pacing, and waved his arms.
“If she’s going to come let her come!” he cried. “There’s no use shilly-
shallying this way! Whatever the worst is, let us know it and have it! A
pretty pickle-lost with a crazy chronometer and a hurricane that won’t
blow!”
The cloud-mussed sky turned to a vague copper colour, and seemed to
glow as the inside of a huge heated caldron. Nobody remained below. The
native sailors formed in anxious groups amidships and for’ard, where they
talked in low voices and gazed apprehensively at the ominous sky and the
equally ominous sea that breathed in long, low, oily undulations.
“Looks like petroleum mixed with castor oil,” the mate grumbled, as he
spat his disgust overside. “My mother used to dose me with messes like
that when I was a kid. Lord, she’s getting black!”
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76
The lurid coppery glow had vanished, and the sky thickened and lowered
until the darkness was as that of a late twilight. David Grief, who well
knew the hurricane rules, nevertheless reread the “Laws of Storms,”
screwing his eyes in the faint light in order to see the print. There was
nothing to be done save wait for the wind, so that he might know how he
lay in relation to the fast-flying and deadly centre that from somewhere
was approaching out of the gloom.
It was three in the afternoon, and the glass had sunk to 29:45, when the
wind came. They could see it on the water, darkening the face of the sea,
crisping tiny whitecaps as it rushed along. It was merely a stiff breeze, and
the Uncle Toby, filling away under her storm canvas till the wind was
abeam, sloshed along at a four-knot gait.
“No weight to that,” Snow sneered. “And after such grand preparation!”
“Pickaninny wind,” Jackie-Jackie agreed. “He grow big man pretty quick,
you see.”
Grief ordered the foresail put on, retaining the reefs, and the Uncle Toby
mended her pace in the rising breeze. The wind quickly grew to man’s
size, but did not stop there. It merely blew hard, and harder, and kept on