By Reef and Palm

L >> Louis Becke >> By Reef and Palm

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A curious feeling of satisfaction possessed the man, and next day
Letia, the "show" girl of the village, visiting Challis's store to buy
a tin of salmon, saw Nalia, the Lucky One, seated on a mat beneath the
seaward side of the trader's house, surrounded by a billowy pile of
yellow silk, diligently sewing.

"Ho, dear friend of my heart! Is that silken dress for thee? For the
love of God, let me but touch it. Four dollars a fathom it be priced
at. Thy husband is indeed the king of generosity. Art thou to become a
mother?"

"Away, silly fool, and do thy buying and pester me not."

* * * * *

Challis, coming to the corner of the house, leant against a post, and
something white showed in his hand. It was a letter. His letter to the
woman of violet eyes, written a week ago, in the half-formed idea of
sending it some day. He read it through, and then paused and looked at
Nalia. She raised her head and smiled. Slowly, piece by piece, he tore
it into tiny little squares, and, with a dreamy hand-wave, threw them
away. The wind held them in mid-air for a moment, and then carried the
little white flecks to the beach.

"What is it?" said the bubbling voice of Letia, the Disappointed.

"Only a piece of paper that weighed as a piece of iron on my bosom. But
it is gone now."

"Even so," said Letia, smelling the gaudy label on the tin of salmon in
the anticipative ecstasy of a true Polynesian, "PE SE MEA
FA'AGOTOIMOANA (like a thing buried deep in ocean). May God send me a
white man as generous as thee--a whole tin of SAMANI for nothing! Now
do I know that Nalia will bear thee a son."

* * * * *

And that is why Challis the Doubter has never turned up again.

"'TIS IN THE BLOOD"

We were in Manton's Hotel at Levuka-Levuka in her palmy days. There
were Robertson, of the barque ROLUMAH; a fat German planter from the
Yasawa Group; Harry the Canadian, a trader from the Tokelaus, and
myself.

Presently a knock came to the door, and Allan, the boatswain of our
brig, stood hat in hand before us. He was a stalwart half-caste of
Manhiki, and, perhaps, the greatest MANAIA (Lothario) from Ponape to
Fiji.

"Captain say to come aboard, please. He at the Consul's for papers--he
meet you at boat," and Allan left.

"By shingo, dot's a big fellow," said Planter Oppermann.

"Ay," said Robertson, the trading skipper, "and a good man with his
mauleys, too. He's the champion knocker-out in Samoa, and is a match
for any Englishman in Polynesia, let alone foreigners"--with a sour
glance at the German.

"Well, good-bye all," I said. "I'm sorry, Oppermann, I can't stay for
another day for your wedding, but our skipper isn't to be got at
anyhow."

The trading captain and Harry walked with me part of the way, and then
began the usual Fiji GUP.

"Just fancy that fat-headed Dutchman going all the way to Samoa and
picking on a young girl and sending her to the Sisters to get educated
properly! As if any old beach-girl isn't good enough for a blessed
Dutchman. Have you seen her?"

"No," I said; "Oppermann showed me her photo. Pretty girl. Says she's
been three years with the Sisters in Samoa, and has got all the virtues
of her white father, and none of the vices of her Samoan mammy. Told me
he's spent over two thousand dollars on her already."

Robertson smiled grimly. "Ay, I don't doubt it. He's been all round
Levuka cracking her up. I brought her here last week, and the
Dutchman's been in a chronic state of silly ever since. She's an
almighty fine girl. She's staying with the Sisters here till the
marriage. By the Lord, here she is now coming along the street! Bet a
dollar she's been round Vagadace way, where there are some fast Samoan
women living. 'Tis in the blood, I tell you."

The future possessor of the Oppermann body and estate WAS a pretty
girl. Only those who have seen fair young Polynesian
half-castes--before they get married, and grow coarse, and drink beer,
and smoke like a factory chimney--know how pretty.

Our boat was at the wharf, and just as we stood talking Allan sauntered
up and asked me for a dollar to get a bottle of gin. Just then the
German's FIANCEE reached us. Robertson introduced Harry and myself to
her, and then said good-bye. She stood there in the broiling Fijian sun
with a dainty sunshade over her face, looking so lovely and cool in her
spotless muslin dress, and withal so innocent, that I no longer
wondered at the Dutchman's "chronic state of silly."

Allan the Stalwart stood by waiting for his dollar. The girl laughed
joyously when Harry the Canadian said he would be at the wedding and
have a high time, and held out her soft little hand as he bade her
adieu and strolled off for another drink.

The moment Harry had gone Allan was a new man. Pulling off his straw
hat, he saluted her in Samoan, and then opened fire.

"There are many TEINE LALELEI (beautiful girls) in the world, but there
is none so beautiful as thou. Only truth do I speak, for I have been to
all countries of the world. Ask him who is here--our supercargo--if I
lie. O maid with the teeth of pearl and face like FETUAO (the morning
star), my stomach is drying up with the fire of love."

The sunshade came a little lower, and the fingers played nervously with
the ivory handle. I leant against a coconut tree and listened.

"Thy name is Vaega. See that! How do I know? Aha, how do I? Because,
for two years or more, whenever I passed by the stone wall of the
Sisters' dwelling in Matafele, I climbed up and watched thee, O Star of
the Morning, and I heard the other girls call thee Vaega. Oho! and some
night I meant to steal thee away."

(The rascal! He told me two days afterwards that the only time he ever
climbed the Mission wall was to steal mangoes.)

The sunshade was tilted back, and displayed two big, black eyes,
luminous with admiring wonder.

"And so thou hast left Samoa to come here to be devoured by this fat
hog of a Dutchman! Dost thou not know, O foolish, lovely one, that she
who mates with a SIAMANI (German) grows old in quite a little time, and
thy face, which is now smooth and fair, will be coarse as the rind of a
half-ripe bread-fruit, because of the foul food these swine of Germans
eat?"

"Allan," I called, "here's the captain!"

There was a quick clasp of hands as the Stalwart One and the Maid
hurriedly spoke again, this time in a whisper, and then the white
muslin floated away out of sight.

The captain was what he called "no' so dry"--viz. half-seas over, and
very jolly. He told Allan he could have an hour to himself to buy what
he wanted, and then told me that the captain of a steam collier had
promised to give us a tug out at daylight. "I'm right for the
wedding-feast after all," I thought.

* * * * *

But the wedding never came off. That night Oppermann, in a frantic
state, was tearing round Levuka hunting for his love, who had
disappeared. At daylight, as the collier steamed ahead and tautened our
tow-line, we could see the parties of searchers with torches scouring
the beach. Our native sailors said they had heard a scream about ten at
night and seen the sharks splashing, and the white liars of Levuka
shook their heads and looked solemn as they told tales of monster
sharks with eight-foot jaws always cruising close in to the shore at
night.

* * * * *

Three days afterwards Allan came to me with stolid face and asked for a
bottle of wine, as Vaega was very sea-sick. I gave him the wine, and
threatened to tell the captain. He laughed, and said he would fight any
man, captain or no captain, who meddled with him. And, as a matter of
fact, he felt safe--the skipper valued him too much to bully him over
the mere stealing of a woman. So the limp and sea-sick Vaega was
carried up out of the sweating foc'sle and given a cabin berth, and
Allan planked down two twenty-dollar pieces for her passage to the
Union Group. When she got better she sang rowdy songs, and laughed all
day, and made fun of the holy Sisters. And one day Allan beat her with
a deal board because she sat down on a band-box in the trade-room and
ruined a hat belonging to a swell official's wife in Apia. And she
liked him all the better for it.

* * * * *

The fair Vaega was Mrs Allan for just six months, when his erratic
fancy was captivated by the daughter of Mauga, the chief of Tutuila,
and an elopement resulted to the mountains. The subsequent and
inevitable parting made Samoa an undesirable place of residence for
Allan, who shipped as boatsteerer in the NIGER of New Bedford. As for
Vaega, she drifted back to Apia, and there, right under the shadow of
the Mission Church, she flaunted her beauty. The last time I saw her
was in Charley the Russian's saloon, when she showed me a letter. It
was from the bereaved Oppermann, asking her to come back and marry him.

"Are you going?" I said.

"E PULE LE ATUA (if God so wills), but he only sent me twenty dollars,
and that isn't half enough. However, there's an American man-of-war
coming next week, and these other girls will see then. I'll make the
PAPALAGI [foriegn] officers shell out. TO FA, ALII [Good-bye]."

THE REVENGE OF MACY O'SHEA

A Story Of The Marquesas

I.

Tikena the Clubfooted guided me to an open spot in the jungle-growth,
and, sitting down on the butt of a twisted TOA, indicated by a sweep of
his tattooed arm the lower course of what had once been the White Man's
dwelling.

"Like unto himself was this, his house," he said, puffing a dirty clay
pipe, "square-built and strong. And the walls were of great blocks made
of PANISINA--of coral and lime and sand mixed together; and around each
centre-post--posts that to lift one took the strength of fifty men--was
wound two thousand fathoms of thin plaited cinnet, stained red and
black. APA! he was a great man here in these MOTU (islands), although
he fled from prison in your land; and when he stepped on the beach the
marks of the iron bands that had once been round his ankles were yet
red to the sight. There be none such as he in these days. But he is now
in Hell."

This was the long-deferred funeral oration of Macy O'Shea, sometime
member of the chain-gang of Port Arthur, in Van Dieman's Land, and
subsequently runaway convict, beachcomber, cutter-off of whaleships,
and Gentleman of Leisure in Eastern Polynesia. And of his many known
crimes the deed done in this isolated spot was the darkest of all.
Judge of it yourself.

* * * * *

The arrowy shafts of sunrise had scarce pierced the deep gloom of the
silent forest ere the village woke to life. Right beside the
thatch-covered dwelling of Macy O'Shea, now a man of might, there
towers a stately TAMANU tree; and, as the first faint murmur of women's
voices arises from the native huts, there is a responsive twittering
and cooing in the thickly-leaved branches, and further back in the
forest the heavy, booming note of the red-crested pigeon sounds forth
like the beat of a muffled drum.

* * * * *

With slow, languid step, Sera, the wife of Macy O'Shea, comes to the
open door and looks out upon the placid lagoon, now just rippling
beneath the first breath of the trade-wind, and longs for courage to go
out there--there to the point of the reef--and spring over among the
sharks. The girl--she is hardly yet a woman--shudders a moment and
passes her white hand before her eyes, and then, with a sudden gust of
passion, the hand clenches. "I would kill him--kill him, if there was
but a ship here in which I could get away! I would sell myself over and
over again to the worst whaler's crew that ever sailed the Pacific if
it would bring me freedom from this cruel, cold-blooded devil!"

* * * * *

A heavy tread on the matted floor of the inner room and her face pales
to the hue of death. But Macy O'Shea is somewhat shy of his two years'
wife this morning, and she hears the heavy steps recede as he walks
over to his oil-shed. A flock of GOGO cast their shadow over the lagoon
as they fly westward, and the woman's eyes follow them--"Kill him, yes.
I am afraid to die, but not to kill. And I am a stranger here, and if I
ran a knife into his fat throat, these natives would make me work in
the taro-fields, unless one wanted me for himself." Then the heavy step
returns, and she slowly faces round to the blood-shot eyes and
drink-distorted face of the man she hates, and raises one hand to her
lips to hide a blue and swollen bruise.

The man throws his short, square-set figure on a rough native sofa,
and, passing one brawny hand meditatively over his stubbly chin, says,
in a voice like the snarl of a hungry wolf: "Here, I say, Sera, slew
round; I want to talk to you, my beauty."

The pale, set face flushed and paled again. "What is it, Macy O'Shea?"

"Ho, ho, 'Macy O'Shea,' is it? Well, just this. Don't be a fool. I was
a bit put about last night, else I wouldn't have been so quick with my
fist. Cut your lip, I see. Well, you must forget it; any way, it's the
first time I ever touched you. But you ought to know by now that I am
not a man to be trifled with; no man, let alone a woman, is going to
set a course for Macy O'Shea to steer by. And, to come to the point at
once, I want you to understand that Carl Ristow's daughter is coming
here. I want her, and that's all about it."

* * * * *

The woman laughed scornfully. "Yes, I know. That was why"--she pointed
to her lips. "Have you no shame? I know you have no pity. But listen. I
swear to you by the Mother of Christ that I will kill her--kill you, if
you do this."

O'Shea's cruel mouth twitched and his jaws set, then he uttered a
hoarse laugh. "By God! Has it taken you two years to get jealous?"

A deadly hate gleamed in the dark, passionate eyes. "Jealous, Mother of
God! jealous of a drunken, licentious wretch such as you! I hate
you--hate you! If I had courage enough I would poison myself to be free
from you."

O'Shea's eyes emitted a dull sparkle. "I wish you would, damn you! Yet
you are game enough, you say, to kill me--and Malia?"

"Yes. But not for love of you, but because of the white blood in me. I
can't--I won't be degraded by you bringing another woman here."

"'Por Dios,' as your dad used to say before the devil took his soul,
we'll see about that, my beauty. I suppose because your father was a
d----d garlic-eating, ear-ringed Dago, and your mother a
come-by-chance Tahiti half-caste, you think he was as good as me."

"As good as you, O bloody-handed dog of an English convict. He was a
man, and the only wrong he ever did was to let me become wife to a
devil like you."

The cruel eyes were close to hers now, and the rough, brawny hands
gripped her wrists. "You spiteful Portuguese quarter-bred ----! Call me
a convict again, and I'll twist your neck like a fowl's. You she-devil!
I'd have made things easy for you--but I won't now. Do you hear?" and
the grip tightened. "Ristow's girl will be here to-morrow, and if you
don't knuckle down to her it'll be a case of 'Vamos' for you--you can
go and get a husband among the natives," and he flung her aside and
went to the god that ran him closest for his soul, next to women--his
rum-bottle.

* * * * *

O'Shea kept his word, for two days later Malia, the half-caste daughter
of Ristow, the trader at Ahunui, stepped from out her father's
whaleboat in front of O'Shea's house. The transaction was a perfectly
legitimate one, and Malia did not allow any inconvenient feeling of
modesty to interfere with such a lucrative arrangement as this, whereby
her father became possessed of a tun of oil and a bag of Chilian
dollars, and she of much finery. In those days missionaries had not
made much head-way, and gentlemen like Messrs Ristow and O'Shea took
all the wind out of the Gospel drum.

And so Malia, dressed as a native girl, with painted cheeks and bare
bosom, walked demurely up from the boat to the purchaser of her
sixteen-years'-old beauty, who, with arms folded across his broad
chest, stood in the middle of the path that led from the beach to his
door. And within, with set teeth and a knife in the bosom of her blouse
bodice, Sera panted with the lust of Hate and Revenge.

* * * * *

The bulky form of O'Shea darkened the door-way. "Sera," he called in
English, with a mocking, insulting inflection in his voice, "come here
and welcome my new wife!"

Sera came, walking slowly, with a smile on her lips, and, holding out
her left hand to Malia, said in the native language, "Welcome!"

"Why," said O'Shea, with mocking jocularity, "that's a left-handed
welcome, Sera."

"Aye," said the girl with the White Man's blood, "my right hand is for
this"--and the knife sank home into Malia's yellow bosom. "A cold bosom
for you to-night, Macy O'Shea," she laughed, as the value of a tun of
oil and a bag of Chilian dollars gasped out its life upon the matted
floor.

II

The native drum was beating. As the blood-quickening boom reverberated
through the village, the natives came out from their huts and gathered
around the House of the Old Men, where, with bound hands and feet,
Sera, the White Man's wife, sat, with her back to one of the
centre-posts. And opposite her, sitting like a native on a mat of
KAPAU, was the burly figure of O'Shea, with the demon of disappointed
passion eating away his reason, and a mist of blood swimming before his
eyes.

The people all detested her, especially the soft-voiced, slender-framed
women. In that one thing savages resemble Christians--the deadly hatred
with which some women hate those of their sex whom they know to be
better and more pure than themselves. So the matter was decided
quickly. Mesi--so they called O'Shea--should have justice. If he
thought death, let it be death for this woman who had let out the blood
of his new wife. Only one man, Loloku the Boar Hunter, raised his voice
for her, because Sera had cured him of a bad wound when his leg had
been torn open by the tusk of a wild boar. But the dull glare from the
eyes of O'Shea fell on him, and he said no more. Then at a sign from
the old men the people rose from the mats, and two unbound the cords of
AFA from the girl, and led her out into the square, and looked at
O'Shea.

"Take her to the boat," he said.

* * * * *

Ristow's boat had been hauled up, turned over, and covered with the
rough mats called KAPAU to keep off the heat of the sun. With
staggering feet, but undaunted heart, the girl Sera was led down. Only
once she turned her head and looked back. Perhaps Loloku would try
again. Then, as they came to the boat, a young girl, at a sign from
O'Shea, took off the loose blouse, and they placed her, face downwards,
across the bilge of the boat, and two pair of small, eager, brown hands
each seized one of hers and dragged the white, rounded arms well over
the keel of the boat. O'Shea walked round to that side, drawing through
his hands the long, heavy, and serrated tail of the FAI--the gigantic
stinging-ray of Oceana. He would have liked to wield it himself, but
then he would have missed part of his revenge--he could not have seen
her face. So he gave it to a native, and watched, with the smile of a
fiend, the white back turn black and then into bloody red as it was cut
to pieces with the tail of the FAI.

* * * * *

The sight of the inanimate thing that had given no sign of its agony
beyond the shudderings and twitchings of torn and mutilated flesh was,
perhaps, disappointing to the tiger who stood and watched the dark
stream that flowed down on both sides of the boat. Loloku touched his
arm--"Mesi, stay thy hand. She is dead else."

"Ah," said O'Shea, "that would be a pity; for with one hand shall she
live to plant taro."

And, hatchet in hand, he walked in between the two brown women who held
her hands. They moved aside and let go. Then O'Shea swung his arm; the
blade of the hatchet struck into the planking, and the right hand of
Sera fell on the sand.

A man put his arms around her, and lifted her off the boat. He placed
his hand on the blood-stained bosom and looked at Macy O'Shea.

"E MATE! [Dead!]" he said.

THE RANGERS OF THE TIA KAU

Between Nanomea and Nanomaga--two of the Ellice Group--but within a few
miles of the latter, is an extensive submerged shoal, on the charts
called the Grand Cocal Reef, but by the people of the two islands known
as Tia Kau (The Reef). On the shallowest part there are from four to
ten fathoms of water, and here in heavy weather the sea breaks. The
British cruiser BASILISK, about 1870, sought for the reef, but reported
it as non-existent. Yet the Tia Kati is well known to many a Yankee
whaler and trading schooner, and is a favourite fishing-ground of the
people of Nanomaga--when the sharks give them a chance.

* * * * *

One night Atupa, Chief of Nanomaga, caused a huge fire to be lit on the
beach as a signal to the people of Nanomea that a MALAGA, or party of
voyagers, was coming over. Both islands are low--not more than fifteen
feet above sea-level--and are distant from one another about
thirty-eight miles. The following night the reflection of the answering
fire on Nanomea was seen, and Atupa prepared to send away his people in
seven canoes. They would start at sundown, so as to avoid paddling in
the heat (the Nanomagans have no sailing canoes), and be guided to
Nanomea, which they expected to reach early in the morning, by the far
distant glare of the great fires of coconut and pandanus leaves kindled
at intervals of a few hours. About seventy people were to go, and all
that day the little village busied itself in preparing for the
Nanomeans gifts of foods--cooked PURAKA, fowls, pigs, and flying-fish.

* * * * *

Atupa, the heathen chief, was troubled in his mind in those days of
August 1872. The JOHN WILLIAMS had touched at the island and landed a
Samoan missionary, who had pressed him to accept Christianity. Atupa,
dreading a disturbing element in his little community, had, at first,
declined; but the ship had come again, and the chief having consented
to try the new religion, a teacher landed. But since then he and his
sub-chiefs had consulted the oracle, and had been told that the shades
of Maumau Tahori and Foilagi, their deified ancestors, had answered
that the new religion was unacceptable to them, and that the Samoan
teacher must be killed or sent away. And for this was Atupa sending off
some of his people to Nanomea with gifts of goodwill to the chiefs to
beseech them to consult their oracles also, so that the two islands
might take concerted action against this new foreign god, whose priests
said that all men were equal, that all were bad, and He and His Son
alone good.

* * * * *

The night was calm when the seven canoes set out. Forty men and thirty
women and children were in the party, and the craft were too deeply
laden for any but the smoothest sea. On the AMA (outrigger) of each
canoe were the baskets of food and bundles of mats for their hosts, and
seated on these were the children, while the women sat with the men and
helped them to paddle. Two hours' quick paddling brought them to the
shoal-water of Tia Kau, and at the same moment they saw to the N.W. the
sky-glare of the first guiding fire.

* * * * *

It was then that the people in the first canoe, wherein was Palu, the
daughter of Atupa, called out to those behind to prepare their ASU
(balers), as a heavy squall was coming down from the eastward. Then
Laheu, an old warrior in another canoe, cried out that they should
return on their track a little and get into deep water; "for," said he,
"if we swamp, away from Tia Kau, it is but a little thing, but here--"
and he clasped his hands rapidly together and then tore them apart.
They knew what he meant--the sharks that, at night-time forsaking the
deep waters, patrolled in droves of thousands the shallow waters of the
reef to devour the turtle and the schools of TAFAU ULI and other fish.
In quick, alarmed silence the people headed back, but even then the
first fierce squall struck them, and some of the frail canoes began to
fill at once. "I MATAGI! I MATAGI! (head to the wind)" a man called
out; "head to the wind, or we perish! 'Tis but a puff and it is gone."

* * * * *

But it was more than a puff. The seven canoes, all abreast, were still
in shallow water, and the paddlers kept them dead in the teeth of the
whistling wind and stinging rain, and called out words of encouragement
to one another and to the women and children, as another black squall
burst upon them and the curling seas began to break. The canoe in which
was Atupa's daughter was the largest and best of all the seven, but was
much overladen, and on the outrigger grating were four children. These
the chief's daughter was endeavouring to shield from the rain by
covering them with a mat, when one of them, a little girl, endeavoured
to steady herself by holding to one of the thin pieces of grating; it
broke, and her arm fell through and struck the water, and in an instant
she gave a dull, smothered wail. Palu, the woman, seized her by her
hair and pulled the child up to a sitting posture, and then shrieked
with terror--the girl's arm was gone.

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