ads:
The Heathen
Jack London
I met him first in a hurricane; and though we had gone through the hurricane on the same
schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on
him. Without doubt I had seen him with the rest of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not
consciously been aware of his existence, for the Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In
addition to her eight or ten kanaka seamen, her white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her
six cabin passengers, she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck
passengers-- Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each with a trade box, to
say nothing of sleeping mats, blankets, and clothes bundles.
The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were returning to Tahiti. The
six of us cabin passengers were pearl buyers. Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon (the
whitest Chinese I have ever known), one was a German, one was a Polish Jew, and I
completed the half dozen.
It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor one of the
eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well, and all were looking forward to a
rest-off and a good time in Papeete.
Of course, the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. She was only seventy tons, and she had no
right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board. Beneath her hatches she was crammed
and jammed with pearl shell and copra. Even the trade room was packed full with shell. It
was a miracle that the sailors could work her. There was no moving about the decks. They
simply climbed back and forth along the rails.
In the night time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck, I'll swear, two deep.
Oh! And there were pigs and chickens on deck, and sacks of yams, while every conceivable
place was festooned with strings of drinking cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both
sides, between the fore and main shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the
foreboom to swing clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty bunches of bananas were
suspended.
It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or three days that
would have been required if the southeast trades had been blowing fresh. But they weren't
blowing fresh. After the first five hours the trade died away in a dozen or so gasping fans.
The calm continued all that night and the next day--one of those glaring, glassy, calms,
when the very thought of opening one's eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a headache.
The second day a man died--an Easter Islander, one of the best divers that season in the
lagoon. Smallpox--that is what it was; though how smallpox could come on board, when
there had been no known cases ashore when we left Rangiroa, is beyond me. There it was,
though--smallpox, a man dead, and three others down on their backs.
There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could we care for them.
We were packed like sardines. There was nothing to do but rot and die--that is, there was
ads:
Livros Grátis
http://www.livrosgratis.com.br
Milhares de livros grátis para download.
nothing to do after the night that followed the first death. On that night, the mate, the
supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four native divers sneaked away in the large whale boat.
They were never heard of again. In the morning the captain promptly scuttled the remaining
boats, and there we were.
That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it jumped to eight. It was
curious to see how we took it. The natives, for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid
fear. The captain--Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman--became very nervous and voluble.
He actually got the twitches. He was a large fleshy man, weighing at least two hundred
pounds, and he quickly became a faithful representation of a quivering jelly-mountain of
fat.
The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whiskey, and
proceeded to stay drunk. The theory was beautiful--namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in
alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact with us would immediately be
scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I must confess that neither Captain
Oudouse nor Ah Choon were attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink at
all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one drink daily.
It was a pretty time. The sun, going into northern declination, was straight overhead. There
was no wind, except for frequent squalls, which blew fiercely for from five minutes to half
an hour, and wound up by deluging us with rain. After each squall, the awful sun would
come out, drawing clouds of steam from the soaked decks.
The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with millions and millions of
germs. We always took another drink when we saw it going up from the dead and dying,
and usually we took two or three more drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff. Also, we
made it a rule to take an additional several each time they hove the dead over to the sharks
that swarmed about us.
We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well, or I shouldn't be alive
now. It took a sober man to pull through what followed, as you will agree when I mention
the little fact that only two men did pull through. The other man was the heathen--at least,
that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware of the
heathen's existence. But to come back.
It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl buyers sober, that I
happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin companionway. Its normal
register in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between
29.85 and 30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient to
sober the most drunken pearl buyer that ever incinerated smallpox microbes in Scotch
whiskey.
I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he had watched it going
down for several hours. There was little to do, but that little he did very well, considering
the circumstances. He took off the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread
life lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the wind came. He
hove to on the port tack, which was the right thing to do south of the Equator, if--and there
was the rub--if one were not in the direct path of the hurricane.
ads:
We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of the wind and the
equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him to turn and run with the wind on the port
quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was
reduced to hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest
of the pearl buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about the sea and its
ways than a properly qualified captain? was what was in their minds, I knew.
Of course, the sea rose with the wind frightfully; and I shall never forget the first three seas
the Petite Jeanne shipped. She had fallen off, as vessels do at times when hove to, and the
first sea made a clean breach. The life lines were only for the strong and well, and little
good were they even for them when the women and children, the bananas and cocoanuts,
the pigs and trade boxes, the sick and the dying, were swept along in a solid, screeching,
groaning mass.
The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne'S decks flush with the rails; and, as her stern sank
down and her bow tossed skyward, all the miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft.
It was a human torrent. They came head first, feet first, sidewise, rolling over and over,
twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now and again one caught a grip on a
stanchion or a rope; but the weight of the bodies behind tore such grips loose.
One man I noticed fetch up, head on and square on, with the starboard bitt. His head
cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming, sprang on top of the cabin, and from there into
the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one
jump ahead of them. The American was swept away and over the stern like a piece of chaff.
Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel, and swung in behind it. But a strapping Raratonga
vahine (woman)--she must have weighed two hundred and fifty--brought up against him,
and got an arm around his neck. He clutched the kanaka steersman with his other hand; and
just at that moment the schooner flung down to starboard.
The rush of bodies and sea that was coming along the port runway between the cabin and
the rail turned abruptly and poured to starboard. Away they went--vahine, Ah Choon, and
steersman; and I swear I saw Ah Choon grin at me with philosophic resignation as he
cleared the rail and went under.
The third sea--the biggest of the three--did not do so much damage. By the time it arrived
nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck perhaps a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and
half-stunned wretches were rolling about or attempting to crawl into safety. They went by
the board, as did the wreckage of the two remaining boats. The other pearl buyers and
myself, between seas, managed to get about fifteen women and children into the cabin, and
battened down. Little good it did the poor creatures in the end.
Wind? Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow
as it did. There is no describing it. How can one describe a nightmare? It was the same way
with that wind. It tore the clothes off our bodies. I say tore them off, and I mean it. I am not
asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and felt. There are times
when I do not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is enough. One could not face
that wind and live. It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that
it increased and continued to increase.
Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing along at
ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour. Imagine,
further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand.
Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like.
Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable, but heavy
as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mudbank in itself.
Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mudbanks. No; it is beyond me. Language
may be adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express
any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind. It would have been better had I stuck
by my original intention of not attempting a description.
I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind. 'more:
it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up in the maw of the hurricane, and hurled
on through that portion of space which previously had been occupied by the air.
Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But Captain Oudouse had on the Petite Jeanne
something I had never before seen on a South Sea schooner--a sea anchor. It was a conical
canvas bag, the mouth of which was kept open by a huge loop of iron. The sea anchor was
bridled something like a kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites into the air, but with
a difference. The sea anchor remained just under the surface of the ocean in a perpendicular
position. A long line, in turn, connected it with the schooner. As a result, the Petite Jeanne
rode bow on to the wind and to what sea there was.
The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the path of the storm.
True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a
raffle of our running gear, but still we would have come through nicely had we not been
square in front of the advancing storm center. That was what fixed us. I was in a state of
stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I
was just about ready to give up and die when the center smote us. The blow we received
was an absolute lull. There was not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening.
Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful
pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly, the pressure was removed. I know that I felt as
though I was about to expand, to fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom
composing my body was repelling every other atom and was on the verge of rushing off
irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a moment. Destruction was upon us.
In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it soared straight
toward the clouds. Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind
was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every
point of the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks
released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability. They
were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at
all. They resembled no sea a man had ever seen.
They were splashes, monstrous splashes--that is all. Splashes that were eighty feet high.
Eighty! They were more than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts,
explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another;
they collided. They rushed together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a
thousand waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of, that
hurricane center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell pit of sea
water gone mad.
The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The heathen told me afterwards that he did not know. She
was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood,
annihilated. When I came to I was in the water, swimming automatically, though I was
about two-thirds drowned. How I got there I had no recollection. I remembered seeing the
Petite Jeanne fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my own consciousness
was buffeted out of me. But there I was, with nothing to do but make the best of it, and in
that best there was little promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much smaller
and more regular, and I knew that I had passed through the center. Fortunately, there were
no sharks about. The hurricane had dissipated the ravenous horde that had surrounded the
death ship and fed off the dead.
It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it must have been two
hours afterwards when I picked up with one of her hatch covers. Thick rain was driving at
the time; and it was the merest chance that flung me and the hatch cover together. A short
length of line was trailing from the rope handle; and I knew that I was good for a day, at
least, if the sharks did not return. Three hours later, possibly a little longer, sticking close to
the cover, and with closed eyes, concentrating my whole soul upon the task of breathing in
enough air to keep me going and at the same time of avoiding breathing in enough water to
drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices. The rain had ceased, and wind and sea were
easing marvelously. Not twenty feet away from me, on another hatch cover were Captain
Oudouse and the heathen. They were fighting over the possession of the cover--at least, the
Frenchman was. "Paien noir!" I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him kick the
kanaka.
Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes, except his shoes, and they were heavy
brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the heathen on the mouth and the point of the
chin, half stunning him. I looked for him to retaliate, but he contented himself with
swimming about forlornly a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of the sea threw him
closer, the Frenchman, hanging on with his hands, kicked out at him with both feet. Also, at
the moment of delivering each kick, he called the kanaka a black heathen.
"For two centimes I'd come over there and drown you, you white beast!" I yelled.
The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very thought of the effort to swim
over was nauseating. So I called to the kanaka to come to me, and proceeded to share the
hatch cover with him. Otoo, he told me his name was (pronounced o-to-o ); also, he told me
that he was a native of Bora Bora, the most westerly of the Society Group. As I learned
afterward, he had got the hatch cover first, and, after some time, encountering Captain
Oudouse, had offered to share it with him, and had been kicked off for his pains.
And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He was all sweetness
and gentleness, a love creature, though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a
gladiator. He was no fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion; and in
the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never dream of taking. What I
mean is that while he was no fighter, and while he always avoided precipitating a row, he
never ran away from trouble when it started. And it was "Ware shoal!" when once Otoo
went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in German
Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the American Navy. He was a
big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of those hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and
clever with his fists as well. He picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck
him once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to fight. I don't think it lasted four minutes, at
the end of which time Bill King was the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a broken
forearm, and a dislocated shoulder blade. Otoo knew nothing of scientific boxing. He was
merely a manhandler; and Bill King was something like three months in recovering from
the bit of manhandling he received that afternoon on Apia beach.
But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch cover between us. We took turn
and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting, while the other, submerged to the
neck, merely held on with his hands. For two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover
and in the water, we drifted over the ocean. Towards the last I was delirious most of the
time; and there were times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving in his native
tongue. Our continuous immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water
and the sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt pickle and sunburn.
In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach twenty feet from the water,
sheltered from the sun by a couple of cocoanut leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged
me there and stuck up the leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off again; and
the next time I came round, it was cool and starry night, and Otoo was pressing a drinking
cocoanut to my lips.
We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must have succumbed to
exhaustion, for several days later his hatch cover drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I
lived with the natives of the atoll for a week, when we were rescued by the French cruiser
and taken to Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of
exchanging names. In the South Seas such a ceremony binds two men closer together than
blood brothership. The initiative had been mine; and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I
suggested it.
"It is well," he said, in Tahitian. "For we have been mates together for two days on the lips
of Death."
"But death stuttered," I smiled.
"It was a brave deed you did, master," he replied, "and Death was not vile enough to speak."
"Why do you 'master' me?" I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings. "We have exchanged
names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And between you and me, forever and
forever, you shall be Charley, and I shall be Otoo. It is the way of the custom. And when we
die, if it does happen that we live again somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall
you be Charley to me, and I Otoo to you."
"Yes, master," he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.
"There you go!" I cried indignantly.
"What does it matter what my lips utter?" he argued. "They are only my lips. But I shall
think Otoo always. Whenever I think of myself, I shall think of you. Whenever men call me
by name, I shall think of you. And beyond the sky and beyond the stars, always and forever,
you shall be Otoo to me. Is it well, master?"
I hid my smile, and answered that it was well.
We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate; and he went on in a cutter to his own
island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back. I was surprised, for he had told me of his
wife, and said that he was returning to her, and would give over sailing on far voyages.
"Where do you go, master?" he asked, after our first greetings.
I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question.
"All the world," was my answer--"all the world, all the sea, and all the islands that are in the
sea."
"I will go with you," he said simply. "My wife is dead."
I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men's brothers, I doubt if any man
ever had a brother that was to him what Otoo was to me. He was brother and father and
mother as well. And this I know: I lived a straighter and better man because of Otoo. I cared
little for other men, but I had to live straight in Otoo's eyes. Because of him I dared not
tarnish myself. He made me his ideal, compounding me, I fear, chiefly out of his own love
and worship and there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell, and would
have taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me. His pride in me entered
into me, until it became one of the major rules in my personal code to do nothing that
would diminish that pride of his.
Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me. He never criticized,
never censured; and slowly the exalted place I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly
I grew to comprehend the hurt I could inflict upon him by being anything less than my best.
For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at my shoulder, watching
while I slept, nursing me through fever and wounds--ay, and receiving wounds in fighting
for me. He signed on the same ships with me; and together we ranged the Pacific from
Hawaii to Sydney Head, and from Torres Straits to the Galapagos. We blackbirded from the
New Hebrides and the Line Islands over to the westward clear through the Louisades, New
Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We were wrecked three times--in the Gilberts, in
the Santa Cruz group, and in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar
promised in the way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche-de-mer, hawkbill turtle shell, and
stranded wrecks.
It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was going with me over all
the sea, and the islands in the midst thereof. There was a club in those days in Papeete,
where the pearlers, traders, captains, and riffraff of South Sea adventurers forgathered. The
play ran high, and the drink ran high; and I am very much afraid that I kept later hours than
were becoming or proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the club, there was Otoo
waiting to see me safely home.
At first I smiled; next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I stood in need of no wet-
nursing. After that I did not see him when I came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week
or so later, I discovered that he still saw me home, lurking across the street among the
shadows of the mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do.
Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the thick of the folly
and the fun, the thought would persist in coming to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil
under the dripping mangoes. Truly, he made a better man of me. Yet he was not strait-laced.
And he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were
Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who
believed that when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square dealing.
Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide; and I do believe
that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices.
Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was hurtful to me.
Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler himself. But late hours, he explained,
were bad for one's health. He had seen men who did not take care of themselves die of
fever. He was no teetotaler, and welcomed a stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the
boats. On the other hand, he believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many men killed
or disgraced by square-face or Scotch.
Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my plans, and took
a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of
his in my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I
contemplated going partners with a knavish fellow-countryman on a guano venture. I did
not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know, but
he saw how thick we were getting, and found out for me, and without my asking him.
Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and Otoo,
suspicious merely, went among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his
suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters. I couldn't believe it when
Otoo first narrated it; but when I sheeted it home to Waters he gave in without a murmur,
and got away on the first steamer to Aukland.
At first, I am free to confess, I couldn't help resenting Otoo's poking his nose into my
business. But I knew that he was wholly unselfish; and soon I had to acknowledge his
wisdom and discretion. He had his eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both
keen-sighted and far-sighted. In time he became my counselor, until he knew more of my
business than I did myself. He really had my interest at heart more than I did. 'mine was the
magnificent carelessness of youth, for I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a
comfortable billet with all night in. So it was well that I had some one to look out for me. I
know that if it had not been for Otoo, I should not be here today.
Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in blackbirding before I
went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were on the beach in Samoa--we really were on
the beach and hard aground--when my chance came to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig.
Otoo signed on before the mast; and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we
knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he always pulled
stroke-oar in my boat. Our custom in recruiting labor was to land the recruiter on the beach.
The covering boat always lay on its oars several hundred feet off shore, while the recruiter's
boat, also lying on its oars, kept afloat on the edge of the beach. When I landed with my
trade goods, leaving my steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke position and came into
the stern sheets, where a Winchester lay ready to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat's
crew was also armed, the Sniders concealed under canvas flaps that ran the length of the
gunwales.
While I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to come and labor
on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch. And often and often his low voice warned
me of suspicious actions and impending treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from
his rifle, knocking a nigger over, that was the first warning I received. And in my rush to the
boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard. Once, I remember, on Santa Anna,
the boat grounded just as the trouble began. The covering boat was dashing to our
assistance, but the several score of savages would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otoo
took a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade goods, and scattered tobacco, beads,
tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all directions.
This was too much for the woolly-heads. While they scrambled for the treasures, the boat
was shoved clear, and we were aboard and forty feet away. And I got thirty recruits off that
very beach in the next four hours.
The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage island in the
easterly Solomons. The natives had been remarkably friendly; and how were we to know
that the whole village had been taking up a collection for over two years with which to buy
a white man's head? The beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially esteem a white
man's head. The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole collection. As I say,
they appeared very friendly; and on this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach
from the boat. Otoo had cautioned me; and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to
grief.
The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me. At least a
dozen were sticking into me. I started to run, but tripped over one that was fast in my calf,
and went down. The woolly-heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled, fantail
tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were so eager for the prize that they got in
one another's way. In the confusion, I avoided several hacks by throwing myself right and
left on the sand.
Then Otoo arrived--Otoo the manhandler. In some way he had got hold of a heavy war club,
and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon than a rifle. He was right in the
thick of them, so that they could not spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than
useless. He was fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage. The way he handled
that club was amazing.
Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had driven them back,
picked me up in his arms, and started to run, that he received his first wounds. He arrived in
the boat with four spear thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot.
Then we pulled aboard the schooner, and doctored up.
Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should today be a supercargo, a recruiter,
or a memory, if it had not been for him.
"You spend your money, and you go out and get more," he said one day. "It is easy to get
money now. But when you get old, your money will be spent, and you will not be able to go
out and get more. I know, master. I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are
many old men who were young once, and who could get money just like you. Now they are
old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the young men like you to come ashore
and buy drinks for them.
"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a year. He works hard.
The overseer does not work hard.
He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year. I
am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That is because I am a good
sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles. I
have never seen him haul a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a
month. I am a sailor. He is a navigator. 'master, I think it would be very good for you to
know navigation."
Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first schooner, and he
was far prouder of my command than I was myself. Later on it was:
"The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping, and he is never free from
the burden. It is the owner who is better paid--the owner who sits ashore with many
servants and turns his money over."
"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars--an old schooner at that," I objected. "I
should be an old man before I saved five thousand dollars."
"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on, pointing ashore at the
cocoanut-fringed beach.
We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory nuts along the east coast
of Guadalcanar.
"Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles," he said.
"The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year--who knows?--or the year
after, men will pay much money for that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie
close up. You can buy the land four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of
tobacco, ten bottles of square-face, and a Snider, which will cost you, maybe, one hundred
dollars. Then you place the deed with the commissioner; and the next year, or the year after,
you sell and become the owner of a ship."
I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years, instead of two. Next
came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar--twenty thousand acres, on a governmental nine
hundred and ninety-nine years' lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely
ninety days, when I sold it to a company for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who looked
ahead and saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the salving of the Doncaster--bought
in at auction for a hundred pounds, and clearing three thousand after every expense was
paid. He led me into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.
We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days. I was too well off. I married, and my
standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same old-time Otoo, moving about the house
or trailing through the office, his wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his
back, and a four-shilling lava-lava about his loins. I could not get him to spend money.
There was no way of repaying him except with love, and God knows he got that in full
measure from all of us. The children worshipped him; and if he had been spoilable, my wife
would surely have been his undoing.
The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their feet in the world
practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat up with them when they were sick.
One by one, when they were scarcely toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon, and made
them into amphibians. He taught them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish and the
ways of catching them. In the bush it was the same thing. At seven, Tom knew more
woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed. At six, Mary went over the Sliding Rock without a
quiver, and I have seen strong men balk at that feat. And when Frank had just turned six he
could bring up shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.
"My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen--they are all Christians; and I do not like Bora
Bora Christians," he said one day, when I, with the idea of getting him to spend some of the
money that was rightfully his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own
island in one of our schooners--a special voyage which I had hoped to make a record
breaker in the matter of prodigal expense.
I say one of our schooners, though legally at the time they belonged to me. I struggled long
with him to enter into partnership.
"We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down," he said at last. "But if
your heart so wishes, then shall we become partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet
are my expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in plenty--it costs much, I know. I do not
pay for the playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still the money goes. Fishing on
the reef is only a rich man's pleasure. It is shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes;
it is necessary that we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get it from the head
clerk in the office."
So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled to complain.
"Charley," said I, "you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a miserable land crab.
Behold, your share for the year in all our partnership has been thousands of dollars. The
head clerk has given me this paper. It says that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven
dollars and twenty cents."
"Is there any owing me?" he asked anxiously.
"I tell you thousands and thousands," I answered.
His face brightened, as with an immense relief.
"It is well," he said. "See that the head clerk keeps good account of it. When I want it, I
shall want it, and there must not be a cent missing.
"If there is,:" he added fiercely, after a pause, "it must come out of the clerk's wages."
And all the time, as I afterwards learned, his will, drawn up by Carruthers, and making me
sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul's safe.
But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations.
It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the wild young days,
and where we were once more-- principally on a holiday, incidentally to look after our
holdings on Florida Island and to look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We
were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of burying their dead in
the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from making the adjacent waters a hangout. It
was my luck to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing
capsized. There were four woolly-heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to it. The
schooner was a hundred yards away.
I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to scream. Holding on to
the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were dragged under several
times. Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had got him.
The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of the canoe. I
yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a
blind funk. The canoe could barely have supported one of them. Under the three it upended
and rolled sidewise, throwing them back into the water.
I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be picked up
by the boat before I got there. One of the niggers elected to come with me, and we swam
along silently, side by side, now and again putting our faces into the water and peering
about for sharks. The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that he was
taken. I was peering into the 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!"
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.
Livros Grátis
( http://www.livrosgratis.com.br )
Milhares de Livros para Download:
Baixar livros de Administração
Baixar livros de Agronomia
Baixar livros de Arquitetura
Baixar livros de Artes
Baixar livros de Astronomia
Baixar livros de Biologia Geral
Baixar livros de Ciência da Computação
Baixar livros de Ciência da Informação
Baixar livros de Ciência Política
Baixar livros de Ciências da Saúde
Baixar livros de Comunicação
Baixar livros do Conselho Nacional de Educação - CNE
Baixar livros de Defesa civil
Baixar livros de Direito
Baixar livros de Direitos humanos
Baixar livros de Economia
Baixar livros de Economia Doméstica
Baixar livros de Educação
Baixar livros de Educação - Trânsito
Baixar livros de Educação Física
Baixar livros de Engenharia Aeroespacial
Baixar livros de Farmácia
Baixar livros de Filosofia
Baixar livros de Física
Baixar livros de Geociências
Baixar livros de Geografia
Baixar livros de História
Baixar livros de Línguas
Baixar livros de Literatura
Baixar livros de Literatura de Cordel
Baixar livros de Literatura Infantil
Baixar livros de Matemática
Baixar livros de Medicina
Baixar livros de Medicina Veterinária
Baixar livros de Meio Ambiente
Baixar livros de Meteorologia
Baixar Monografias e TCC
Baixar livros Multidisciplinar
Baixar livros de Música
Baixar livros de Psicologia
Baixar livros de Química
Baixar livros de Saúde Coletiva
Baixar livros de Serviço Social
Baixar livros de Sociologia
Baixar livros de Teologia
Baixar livros de Trabalho
Baixar livros de Turismo
