I’ll make ‘cards’ on you. That’s all I need.”
“I’ll let you save little casino—” Grief paused to calculate. “Yes, and the
ace as well, and still I’ll make ‘cards’ and go out with big casino. Play.”
“No ‘cards,’ and I win!” Deacon exulted as the last of the hand was played.
“I go out on little casino and the four aces. ‘Big casino’ and ‘spades’ only
bring you to twenty.”
Grief shook his head. “Some mistake, I’m afraid.”
“No,” Deacon declared positively. “I counted every card I took in. That’s
the one thing I was correct on. I’ve twenty-six, and you’ve twenty- six. ”
“Count again,” Grief said.
Carefully and slowly, with trembling fingers, Deacon counted the cards he
had taken. There were twenty-five. He reached over to the corner of the
table, took up the rules Grief had written, folded them, and put them in his
pocket. Then he emptied his glass, and stood up. Captain Donovan looked
at his watch, yawned, and also arose.
“Going aboard, Captain?” Deacon asked.
“Yes,” was the answer. “What time shall I send the whaleboat for you?”
“I’ll go with you now. We’ll pick up my luggage from the Billy as we go
by. I was sailing on her for Babo in the morning.”
Deacon shook hands all around, after receiving a final pledge of good luck
on Karo-Karo.
“Does Tom Butler play cards?” he asked Grief.
“Solitaire,” was the answer.
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“Then I’ll teach him double solitaire.” Deacon turned toward the door,
where Captain Donovan waited, and added with a sigh, “And I fancy he’ll
skin me, too, if he plays like the rest of you island men.”
The Feathers of the Sun
(First published in The Saturday Evening Post, v. 184, March 9, 1912: 6-9,
72-74)
I
It was the island of Fitu-Iva—the last independent Polynesian stronghold
in the South Seas. Three factors conduced to Fitu-Iva’s independence. The
first and second were its isolation and the warlikeness of its population.
But these would not have saved it in the end had it not been for the fact
that Japan, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States
discovered its desirableness simultaneously. It was like gamins scrambling
for a penny. They got in one another’s way. The war vessels of the five
Powers cluttered Fitu-Iva’s one small harbour. There were rumours of war
and threats of war. Over its morning toast all the world read columns
about Fitu-Iva. As a Yankee blue jacket epitomized it at the time, they all
got their feet in the trough at once.
So it was that Fitu-Iva escaped even a joint protectorate, and King Tulifau,
otherwise Tui Tulifau, continued to dispense the high justice and the low
in the frame-house palace built for him by a Sydney trader out of
California redwood. Not only was Tui Tulifau every inch a king, but he
was every second a king. When he had ruled fifty-eight years and five
months, he was only fifty-eight years and three months old. That is to say,
he had ruled over five million seconds more than he had breathed, having
been crowned two months before he was born.
He was a kingly king, a royal figure of a man, standing six feet and a half,
and, without being excessively fat, weighing three hundred and twenty
pounds. But this was not unusual for Polynesian “chief stock.” Sepeli, his
queen, was six feet three inches and weighed two hundred and sixty, while
her brother, Uiliami, who commanded the army in the intervals of
resignation from the premiership, topped her by an inch and notched her
an even half-hundred weight. Tui Tulifau was a merry soul, a great feaster
and drinker. So were all his people merry souls, save in anger, when, on
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occasion, they could be guilty even of throwing dead pigs at those who
made them wroth. Nevertheless, on occasion, they could fight like Maoris,
as piratical sandalwood traders and Blackbirders in the old days learned to
their cost.
II
Grief’s schooner, the Cantani, had passed the Pillar Rocks at the entrance
two hours before and crept up the harbour to the whispering flutters of a
breeze that could not make up its mind to blow. It was a cool, starlight
evening, and they lolled about the poop waiting till their snail’s pace
would bring them to the anchorage. Willie Smee, the supercargo, emerged
from the cabin, conspicuous in his shore clothes. The mate glanced at his
shirt, of the finest and whitest silk, and giggled significantly.
“Dance, to-night, I suppose?” Grief observed.
“No,” said the mate. “It’s Taitua. Willie’s stuck on her.”
“Catch me,” the supercargo disclaimed.
“Then she’s stuck on you, and it’s all the same,” the mate went on. “You
won’t be ashore half an hour before you’ll have a flower behind your ear, a
wreath on your head, and your arm around Taitua.”
“Simple jealousy,” Willie Smee sniffed. “You’d like to have her yourself,
only you can’t.”
“I can’t find shirts like that, that’s why. I’ll bet you half a crown you won’t
sail from Fitu-Iva with that shirt.”
“And if Taitua doesn’t get it, it’s an even break Tui Tulifau does,” Grief
warned. “Better not let him spot that shirt, or it’s all day with it.”
“That’s right,” Captain Boig agreed, turning his head from watching the
house lights on the shore. “Last voyage he fined one of my Kanakas out of
a fancy belt and sheath-knife.” He turned to the mate. “You can let go any
time, Mr. Marsh. Don’t give too much slack. There’s no sign of wind, and
in the morning we may shift opposite the copra-sheds.”
A minute later the anchor rumbled down. The whaleboat, already hoisted
out, lay alongside, and the shore-going party dropped into it. Save for the
Kanakas, who were all bent for shore, only Grief and the supercargo were
in the boat. At the head of the little coral-stone pier Willie Smee, with an
apologetic gurgle, separated from his employer and disappeared down an
avenue of palms. Grief turned in the opposite direction past the front of the
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old mission church. Here, among the graves on the beach, lightly clad in
ahu’s and lava-lavas, flower- crowned and garlanded, with great
phosphorescent hibiscus blossoms in their hair, youths and maidens were
dancing. Farther on, Grief passed the long, grass-built himine house,
where a few score of the elders sat in long rows chanting the old hymns
taught them by forgotten missionaries. He passed also the palace of Tui
Tulifau, where, by the lights and sounds, he knew the customary revelry
was going on. For of the happy South Sea isles, Fitu-Iva was the happiest.
They feasted and frolicked at births and deaths, and the dead and the
unborn were likewise feasted.
Grief held steadily along the Broom Road, which curved and twisted
through a lush growth of flowers and fern-like algarobas. The warm air
was rich with perfume, and overhead, outlined against the stars, were fruitburdened
mangoes, stately avocado trees, and slender-tufted palms. Every
here and there were grass houses. Voices and laughter rippled through the
darkness. Out on the water flickering lights and soft-voiced choruses
marked the fishers returning from the reef.
At last Grief stepped aside from the road, stumbling over a pig that
grunted indignantly. Looking through an open door, he saw a stout and
elderly native sitting on a heap of mats a dozen deep. From time to time,
automatically, he brushed his naked legs with a cocoanut-fibre fly-flicker.
He wore glasses, and was reading methodically in what Grief knew to be
an English Bible. For this was Ieremia, his trader, so named from the
prophet Jeremiah.
Ieremia was lighter-skinned than the Fitu-Ivans, as was natural in a fullblooded
Samoan. Educated by the missionaries, as lay teacher he had
served their cause well over in the cannibal atolls to the westward. As a
reward, he had been sent to the paradise of Fitu-Iva, where all were or had
been good converts, to gather in the backsliders. Unfortunately, leremia
had become too well educated. A stray volume of Darwin, a nagging wife,
and a pretty Fitu-Ivan widow had driven him into the ranks of the
backsliders. It was not a case of apostasy. The effect of Darwin had been
one of intellectual fatigue. What was the use of trying to understand this
vastly complicated and enigmatical world, especially when one was
married to a nagging woman? As Ieremia slackened in his labours, the
mission board threatened louder and louder to send him back to the atolls,
while his wife’s tongue grew correspondingly sharper. Tui Tulifau was a
sympathetic monarch, whose queen, on occasions when he was
particularly drunk, was known to beat him. For political reasons—the
queen belonging to as royal stock as himself and her brother commanding
the army—Tui Tulifau could not divorce her, but he could and did divorce
Ieremia, who promptly took up with commercial life and the lady of his