your giving the bungalow up to me and building a grass house for
yourself. And I won’t have it. You may as well consider
everything settled. On the other hand, if you don’t agree, I will
go across the river, beyond your jurisdiction, and build a village
for myself and my sailors, whom I shall send in the whale-boat to
Guvutu for provisions. And now I want you to teach me billiards.”
CHAPTER VII–A HARD-BITTEN GANG
Joan took hold of the household with no uncertain grip,
revolutionizing things till Sheldon hardly recognized the place.
For the first time the bungalow was clean and orderly. No longer
the house-boys loafed and did as little as they could; while the
cook complained that “head belong him walk about too much,” from
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the strenuous course in cookery which she put him through. Nor did
Sheldon escape being roundly lectured for his laziness in eating
nothing but tinned provisions. She called him a muddler and a
slouch, and other invidious names, for his slackness and his
disregard of healthful food.
She sent her whale-boat down the coast twenty miles for limes and
oranges, and wanted to know scathingly why said fruits had not long
since been planted at Berande, while he was beneath contempt
because there was no kitchen garden. Mummy apples, which he had
regarded as weeds, under her guidance appeared as appetizing
breakfast fruit, and, at dinner, were metamorphosed into puddings
that elicited his unqualified admiration. Bananas, foraged from
the bush, were served, cooked and raw, a dozen different ways, each
one of which he declared was better than any other. She or her
sailors dynamited fish daily, while the Balesuna natives were paid
tobacco for bringing in oysters from the mangrove swamps. Her
achievements with cocoanuts were a revelation. She taught the cook
how to make yeast from the milk, that, in turn, raised light and
airy bread. From the tip-top heart of the tree she concocted a
delicious salad. From the milk and the meat of the nut she made
various sauces and dressings, sweet and sour, that were served,
according to preparation, with dishes that ranged from fish to
pudding. She taught Sheldon the superiority of cocoanut cream over
condensed cream, for use in coffee. From the old and sprouting
nuts she took the solid, spongy centres and turned them into
salads. Her forte seemed to be salads, and she astonished him with
the deliciousness of a salad made from young bamboo shoots. Wild
tomatoes, which had gone to seed or been remorselessly hoed out
from the beginning of Berande, were foraged for salads, soups, and
sauces. The chickens, which had always gone into the bush and
hidden their eggs, were given laying-bins, and Joan went out
herself to shoot wild duck and wild pigeons for the table.
“Not that I like to do this sort of work,” she explained, in
reference to the cookery; “but because I can’t get away from Dad’s
training.”
Among other things, she burned the pestilential hospital,
quarrelled with Sheldon over the dead, and, in anger, set her own
men to work building a new, and what she called a decent, hospital.
She robbed the windows of their lawn and muslin curtains, replacing
them with gaudy calico from the trade-store, and made herself
several gowns. When she wrote out a list of goods and clothing for
herself, to be sent down to Sydney by the first steamer, Sheldon
wondered how long she had made up her mind to stay.
She was certainly unlike any woman he had ever known or dreamed of.
So far as he was concerned she was not a woman at all. She neither
languished nor blandished. No feminine lures were wasted on him.
He might have been her brother, or she his brother, for all sex had
to do with the strange situation. Any mere polite gallantry on his
part was ignored or snubbed, and he had very early given up
offering his hand to her in getting into a boat or climbing over a
log, and he had to acknowledge to himself that she was eminently
fitted to take care of herself. Despite his warnings about
crocodiles and sharks, she persisted in swimming in deep water off
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the beach; nor could he persuade her, when she was in the boat, to
let one of the sailors throw the dynamite when shooting fish. She
argued that she was at least a little bit more intelligent than
they, and that, therefore, there was less liability of an accident
if she did the shooting. She was to him the most masculine and at
the same time the most feminine woman he had ever met.
A source of continual trouble between them was the disagreement
over methods of handling the black boys. She ruled by stern
kindness, rarely rewarding, never punishing, and he had to confess
that her own sailors worshipped her, while the house-boys were her
slaves, and did three times as much work for her as he had ever got
out of them. She quickly saw the unrest of the contract labourers,
and was not blind to the danger, always imminent, that both she and
Sheldon ran. Neither of them ever ventured out without a revolver,
and the sailors who stood the night watches by Joan’s grass house
were armed with rifles. But Joan insisted that this reign of
terror had been caused by the reign of fear practised by the white
men. She had been brought up with the gentle Hawaiians, who never
were ill-treated nor roughly handled, and she generalized that the
Solomon Islanders, under kind treatment, would grow gentle.
One evening a terrific uproar arose in the barracks, and Sheldon,
aided by Joan’s sailors, succeeded in rescuing two women whom the
blacks were beating to death. To save them from the vengeance of
the blacks, they were guarded in the cook-house for the night.
They were the two women who did the cooking for the labourers, and
their offence had consisted of one of them taking a bath in the big
cauldron in which the potatoes were boiled. The blacks were not
outraged from the standpoint of cleanliness; they often took baths
in the cauldrons themselves. The trouble lay in that the bather
had been a low, degraded, wretched female; for to the Solomon
Islander all females are low, degraded, and wretched.
Next morning, Joan and Sheldon, at breakfast, were aroused by a
swelling murmur of angry voices. The first rule of Berande had
been broken. The compound had been entered without permission or
command, and all the two hundred labourers, with the exception of
the boss-boys, were guilty of the offence. They crowded up,
threatening and shouting, close under the front veranda. Sheldon
leaned over the veranda railing, looking down upon them, while Joan
stood slightly back. When the uproar was stilled, two brothers
stood forth. They were large men, splendidly muscled, and with
faces unusually ferocious, even for Solomon Islanders. One was
Carin-Jama, otherwise The Silent; and the other was Bellin-Jama,
The Boaster. Both had served on the Queensland plantations in the
old days, and they were known as evil characters wherever white men
met and gammed.
“We fella boy we want ‘m them dam two black fella Mary,” said
Bellin-Jama.
“What you do along black fella Mary?” Sheldon asked.
“Kill ‘m,” said Bellin-Jama.
“What name you fella boy talk along me?” Sheldon demanded, with a
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36
show of rising anger. “Big bell he ring. You no belong along
here. You belong along field. Bime by, big fella bell he ring,
you stop along kai-kai, you come talk along me about two fella
Mary. Now all you boy get along out of here.”
The gang waited to see what Bellin-Jama would do, and Bellin-Jama
stood still.
“Me no go,” he said.
“You watch out, Bellin-Jama,” Sheldon said sharply, “or I send you
along Tulagi one big fella lashing. My word, you catch ‘m strong
fella.”
Bellin-Jama glared up belligerently.
“You want ‘m fight,” he said, putting up his fists in approved,
returned-Queenslander style.
Now, in the Solomons, where whites are few and blacks are many, and
where the whites do the ruling, such an offer to fight is the
deadliest insult. Blacks are not supposed to dare so highly as to
offer to fight a white man. At the best, all they can look for is
to be beaten by the white man.
A murmur of admiration at Bellin-Jama’s bravery went up from the
listening blacks. But Bellin-Jama’s voice was still ringing in the
air, and the murmuring was just beginning, when Sheldon cleared the
rail, leaping straight downward. From the top of the railing to
the ground it was fifteen feet, and Bellin-Jama was directly
beneath. Sheldon’s flying body struck him and crushed him to
earth. No blows were needed to be struck. The black had been
knocked helpless. Joan, startled by the unexpected leap, saw
Carin-Jama, The Silent, reach out and seize Sheldon by the throat