A SON OF THE SUN By Jack London
Contents:
· A Son of the Sun
· The Proud Goat of Aloysius Pankburn
· The Devils of Fuatino
· The Jokers of New Gibbon
· A Little Account With Swithin Hall
· A Goboto Night
· The Feathers of the Sun
· The Pearls of Parlay
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A SON OF THE SUN
(First published in The Saturday Evening Post, May 27, 1911)
The Willi-Waw lay in the passage between the shore-reef and the outerreef.
From the latter came the low murmur of a lazy surf, but the sheltered
stretch of water, not more than a hundred yards across to the white beach
of pounded coral sand, was of glass- like smoothness. Narrow as was the
passage, and anchored as she was in the shoalest place that gave room to
swing, the Willi-Waw’s chain rode up-and-down a clean hundred feet. Its
course could be traced over the bottom of living coral. Like some
monstrous snake, the rusty chain’s slack wandered over the ocean floor,
crossing and recrossing itself several times and fetching up finally at the
idle anchor. Big rock-cod, dun and mottled, played warily in and out of the
coral. Other fish, grotesque of form and colour, were brazenly indifferent,
even when a big fish-shark drifted sluggishly along and sent the rock-cod
scuttling for their favourite crevices.
On deck, for’ard, a dozen blacks pottered clumsily at scraping the teak rail.
They were as inexpert at their work as so many monkeys. In fact they
looked very much like monkeys of some enlarged and prehistoric type.
Their eyes had in them the querulous plaintiveness of the monkey, their
faces were even less symmetrical than the monkey’s, and, hairless of body,
they were far more ungarmented than any monkey, for clothes they had
none. Decorated they were as no monkey ever was. In holes in their ears
they carried short clay pipes, rings of turtle shell, huge plugs of wood,
rusty wire nails, and empty rifle cartridges. The calibre of a Winchester
rifle was the smallest hole an ear bore; some of the largest holes were
inches in diameter, and any single ear averaged from three to half a dozen
holes. Spikes and bodkins of polished bone or petrified shell were thrust
through their noses. On the chest of one hung a white door-knob, on the
chest of another the handle of a china cup, on the chest of a third the brass
cog-wheel of an alarm clock. They chattered in queer, falsetto voices, and,
combined, did no more work than a single white sailor.
Aft, under an awning, were two white men. Each was clad in a sixpenny
undershirt and wrapped about the loins with a strip of cloth. Belted about
the middle of each was a revolver and tobacco pouch. The sweat stood out
on their skin in myriads of globules. Here and there the globules coalesced
in tiny streams that dripped to the heated deck and almost immediately
evaporated. The lean, dark-eyed man wiped his fingers wet with a stinging
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stream from his forehead and flung it from him with a weary curse.
Wearily, and without hope, he gazed seaward across the outer-reef, and at
the tops of the palms along the beach.
“Eight o’clock, an’ hell don’t get hot till noon,” he complained. “Wisht to
God for a breeze. Ain’t we never goin’ to get away?”
The other man, a slender German of five and twenty, with the massive
forehead of a scholar and the tumble-home chin of a degenerate, did not
trouble to reply. He was busy emptying powdered quinine into a cigarette
paper. Rolling what was approximately fifty grains of the drug into a tight
wad, he tossed it into his mouth and gulped it down without the aid of
water.
“Wisht I had some whiskey,” the first man panted, after a fifteenminute
interval of silence.
Another equal period elapsed ere the German enounced, relevant of
nothing:
“I’m rotten with fever. I’m going to quit you, Griffiths, when we get to
Sydney. No more tropics for me. I ought to known better when I signed on
with you.”
“You ain’t been much of a mate,” Griffiths replied, too hot himself to
speak heatedly. “When the beach at Guvutu heard Ifd shipped you, they all
laughed. ‘What? Jacobsen?’ they said. ‘You can’t hide a square face of
trade gin or sulphuric acid that he won’t smell out!’ You’ve certainly lived
up to your reputation. I ain’t had a drink for a fortnight, what of your
snoopin’ my supply.”
“If the fever was as rotten in you as me, you’d understand,” the mate
whimpered.
“I ain’t kickin’,” Griffiths answered. “I only wisht God’d send me a drink,
or a breeze of wind, or something. I’m ripe for my next chill to-morrow.”
The mate proffered him the quinine. Rolling a fifty-grain dose, he popped
the wad into his mouth and swallowed it dry.
“God! God!” he moaned. “I dream of a land somewheres where they ain’t
no quinine. Damned stuff of hell! I’ve scoffed tons of it in my time.”
Again he quested seaward for signs of wind. The usual trade-wind clouds
were absent, and the sun, still low in its climb to meridian, turned all the
sky to heated brass. One seemed to see as well as feel this heat, and
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Griffiths sought vain relief by gazing shoreward. The white beach was a
searing ache to his eyeballs. The palm trees, absolutely still, outlined flatly
against the unrefreshing green of the packed jungle, seemed so much
cardboard scenery. The little black boys, playing naked in the dazzle of
sand and sun, were an affront and a hurt to the sun-sick man. He felt a sort
of relief when one, running, tripped and fell on all-fours in the tepid seawater.
An exclamation from the blacks for’ard sent both men glancing seaward.
Around the near point of land, a quarter of a mile away and skirting the
reef, a long black canoe paddled into sight.
“Gooma boys from the next bight,” was the mate’s verdict.
One of the blacks came aft, treading the hot deck with the unconcern of
one whose bare feet felt no heat. This, too, was a hurt to Griffiths, and he
closed his eyes. But the next moment they were open wide.
“White fella marster stop along Gooma boy, the black said.
Both men were on their feet and gazing at the canoe. Aft could be seen the
unmistakable sombrero of a white man. Quick alarm showed itself on the
face of the mate.
“It’s Grief,” he said.
Griffiths satisfied himself by a long look, then ripped out a wrathful oath.
” What’s he doing up here?” he demanded . . . of the mate, of the aching
sea and sky, of the merciless blaze of sun, and of the whole superheated
and implacable universe with which his fate was entangled.
The mate began to chuckle.
I told you you couldn’t get away with it,” he said.
But Griffiths was not listening.
“With all his money, coming around like a rent collector,” he chanted his
outrage, almost in an ecstasy of anger. “He’s loaded with money, he’s
stuffed with money, he’s busting with money. I know for a fact he sold his
Yringa plantations for three hundred thousand pounds. Bell told me so
himself last time we were drunk at Guvutu. Worth millions and millions,
and Shylocking me for what he wouldn’t light his pipe with.” He whirled
on the mate. “Of course you told me so. Go on and say it, and keep on
saying it. Now just what was it you did tell me so?”
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“I told you you didn’t know him, if you thought you could clear the
Solomons without paying him. That man Grief is a devil, but he’s straight.
I know. I told you he’d throw a thousand quid away for the fun of it, and
for sixpence fight like a shark for a rusty tin. I tell you I know. Didn’t he
give his Balakula to the Queensland Mission when they lost their Evening
Star on San Cristobal?—and the Balakula worth three thousand pounds if
she was worth a penny? And didn’t he beat up Strothers till he lay abed a
fortnight, all because of a difference of two pound ten in the account, and
because Strothers got fresh and tried to make the gouge go through?”
“God strike me blind!” Griffiths cried in impotency of rage.
The mate went on with his exposition.
“I tell you only a straight man can buck a straight man like him, and the
man’s never hit the Solomons that could do it. Men like you and me can’t
buck him. We’re too rotten, too rotten all the way through. You’ve got
plenty more than twelve hundred quid below. Pay him, and get it over