A thousand deaths by Jack London

hands and go down.

But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:

“I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark feel sick!”

He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.

“A little more to the left!” he next called out. “There is a line there on the

water. To the left, master–to the left!”

I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely

conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on board.

I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant he broke

surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting blood.

“Otoo!” he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that thrilled

in his voice.

Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by that

name.

“Good-by, Otoo!” he called.

Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in the

captain’s arms.

And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in the

end. We met in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of a shark, with

seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of which I dare to assert

has never befallen two men, the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be

from His high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His kingdom

shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora.

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58

THE TERRIBLE SOLOMONS

There is no gainsaying that the Solomons are a hard-bitten bunch of islands.

On the other hand, there are worse places in the world. But to the new chum

who has no constitutional understanding of men and life in the rough, the

Solomons may indeed prove terrible.

It is true that fever and dysentery are perpetually on the walk-about, that

loathsome skin diseases abound, that the air is saturated with a poison that

bites into every pore, cut, or abrasion and plants malignant ulcers, and that

many strong men who escape dying there return as wrecks to their own

countries. It is also true that the natives of the Solomons are a wild lot,

with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for collecting human heads.

Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned

and to smite him a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column

at the base of the brain. It is equally true that on some islands, such as

Malaita, the profit and loss account of social intercourse is calculated in

homicides. Heads are a medium of exchange, and white heads are extremely

valuable. Very often a dozen villages make a jack-pot, which they fatten moon

by moon, against the time when some brave warrior presents a white man’s head,

fresh and gory, and claims the pot.

All the foregoing is quite true, and yet there are white men who have lived in

the Solomons a score of years and who feel homesick when they go away from

them. A man needs only to be careful– and lucky–to live a long time in the

Solomons; but he must also be of the right sort. He must have the hallmark of

the inevitable white man stamped upon his soul. He must be inevitable. He must

have a certain grand carelessness of odds, a certain colossal

self-satisfaction, and a racial egotism that convinces him that one white is

better than a thousand niggers every day in the week, and that on Sunday he is

able to clean out two thousand niggers. For such are the things that have made

the white man inevitable. Oh, and one other thing–the white man who wishes to

be inevitable, must not merely despise the lesser breeds and think a lot of

himself; he must also fail to be too long on imagination. He must not

understand too well the instincts, customs, and mental processes of the

blacks, the yellows, and the browns; for it is not in such fashion that the

white race has tramped its royal road around the world.

Bertie Arkwright was not inevitable. He was too sensitive, too finely strung,

and he possessed too much imagination. The world was too much with him. He

projected himself too quiveringly into his environment. Therefore, the last

place in the world for him to come was the Solomons. He did not come,

expecting to stay. A five weeks’ stop-over between steamers, he decided, would

satisfy the call of the primitive he felt thrumming the strings of his being.

At least, so he told the lady tourists on the MAKEMBO, though in different

terms; and they worshipped him as a hero, for they were lady tourists and they

would know only the safety of the steamer’s deck as she threaded her way

through the Solomons.

There was another man on board, of whom the ladies took no notice. He was a

little shriveled wisp of a man, with a withered skin the color of mahogany.

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59

His name on the passenger list does not matter, but his other name, Captain

Malu, was a name for niggers to conjure with, and to scare naughty

pickaninnies to righteousness from New Hanover to the New Hebrides. He had

farmed savages and savagery, and from fever and hardship, the crack of Sniders

and the lash of the overseers, had wrested five millions of money in the form

of bˆche-de-mer, sandalwood, pearl-shell and turtle-shell, ivory nuts and

copra, grasslands, trading stations, and plantations. Captain Malu’s little

finger, which was broken, had more inevitableness in it than Bertie

Arkwright’s whole carcass. But then, the lady tourists had nothing by which to

judge save appearances, and Bertie certainly was a fine-looking man.

Bertie talked with Captain Malu in the smoking room, confiding to him his

intention of seeing life red and bleeding in the Solomons. Captain Malu agreed

that the intention was ambitious and honorable. It was not until several days

later that he became interested in Bertie, when that young adventurer insisted

on showing him an automatic 44-caliber pistol. Bertie explained the mechanism

and demonstrated by slipping a loaded magazine up the hollow butt.

“It is so simple,” he said. He shot the outer barrel back along the inner one.

“That loads it and cocks it, you see. And then all I have to do is pull the

trigger, eight times, as fast as I can quiver my finger. See that safety

clutch. That’s what I like about it. It is safe. It is positively fool-proof.”

He slipped out the magazine. “You see how safe it is.”

As he held it in his hand, the muzzle came in line with Captain Malu’s

stomach. Captain Malu’s blue eyes looked at it unswervingly.

“Would you mind pointing it in some other direction?” he asked.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Bertie assured him. “I withdrew the magazine. It’s not

loaded now, you know.”

“A gun is always loaded.”

“But this one isn’t.”

“Turn it away just the same.”

Captain Malu’s voice was flat and metallic and low, but his eyes never left

the muzzle until the line of it was drawn past him and away from him.

“I’ll bet a fiver it isn’t loaded,” Bertie proposed warmly.

The other shook his head.

“Then I’ll show you.”

Bertie started to put the muzzle to his own temple with the evident intention

of pulling the trigger.

“Just a second,” Captain Malu said quietly, reaching out his hand. “Let me

look at it.”

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60

He pointed it seaward and pulled the trigger. A heavy explosion followed,

instantaneous with the sharp click of the mechanism that flipped a hot and

smoking cartridge sidewise along the deck.

Bertie’s jaw dropped in amazement.

“I slipped the barrel back once, didn’t I?” he explained. It was silly of me,

I must say.”

He giggled flabbily, and sat down in a steamer chair. The blood had ebbed from

his face, exposing dark circles under his eyes. His hands were trembling and

unable to guide the shaking cigarette to his lips. The world was too much with

him, and he saw himself with dripping brains prone upon the deck

“Really,” he said, “. . . really.”

“It’s a pretty weapon,” said Captain Malu, returning the automatic to him.

The Commissioner was on board the Makembo, returning from Sydney, and by his

permission a stop was made at Ugi to land a missionary. And at Ugi lay the

ketch ARLA, Captain Hansen, skipper. Now the Arla was one of many vessels

owned by Captain Malu, and it was at his suggestion and by his invitation that

Bertie went aboard the Arla as guest for a four days’ recruiting cruise on the

coast of Malaita. Thereafter the ARLA would drop him at Reminge Plantation

(also owned by Captain Malu), where Bertie could remain for a week, and then