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water when I saw a big shark pass directly beneath me. He was fully sixteen
feet in length. I saw the whole thing. He got the woolly-head by the middle,
and away he went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of the water
all the time, screeching in a heart-rending way. He was carried along in this
fashion for several hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.
I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark. But there
was another. Whether it was one that had attacked the natives earlier, or
whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do not know. At any
rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could not swim so rapidly now,
for a large part of my effort was devoted to keeping track of him. I was
watching him when he made his first attack. By good luck I got both hands on
his nose, and, though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep
him off. He veered clear, and began circling about again. A second time I
escaped him by the same manoeuvre. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He
sheered at the moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his
sandpaper hide (I had on a sleeveless undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm
from elbow to shoulder.
By this time I was played out, and gave up hope. The schooner was still two
hundred feet away. My face was in the water, and I was watching him manoeuvre
for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between us. It was Otoo.
“Swim for the schooner, master!” he said. And he spoke gayly, as though the
affair was a mere lark. “I know sharks. The shark is my brother.”
I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always between
me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.
“The davit tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls,” he explained,
a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another attack.
By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I could
scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but they
continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no hurt, had
become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otoo was there
just the moment before it was too late. Of course, Otoo could have saved
himself any time. But he stuck by me.
“Good-by, Charley! I’m finished!” I just managed to gasp.
I knew that the end had come, and that the next moment I should throw up my
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!”
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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.
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
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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.
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