By Reef and Palm

L >> Louis Becke >> By Reef and Palm

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* * * * *

And then in the blackness of night, lightened now by the white,
seething, boiling surge, the people saw in the phosphorescent water
countless hundreds of the savage terrors of the Tia Kau darting hither
and thither amongst the canoes--for the smell of blood had brought them
together instantly. Presently a great grey monster tore the paddle from
out the hands of the steersman of the canoe wherein were the terrified
Palu and the four children, and then, before the man for'ard could
bring her head to the wind, she broached to and filled. Like ravening
wolves the sharks dashed upon their prey, and ere the people had time
to give more than a despairing cry, those hideous jaws and gleaming
cruel teeth had sealed their fate. Maddened with fear, the rest of the
people threw everything out of the six other canoes to lighten them,
and as the bundles of mats and baskets of food touched the water the
sharks seized and bit, tore and swallowed. Then, one by one, every
paddle was grabbed from the hands of the paddlers, and the canoes
broached to and filled in that sea of death--all save one, which was
carried by the force of the wind away from the rest. In this were the
only survivors--two men.

* * * * *

The agony could not have lasted long. "Were I to live as long as he
whom the FAIFEAU (missionary) tells us lived to be nine hundred and
sixty and nine, I shall hear the groans and cries and shrieks of that
PO MALAIA, that night of evil luck," said one of the two who lived, to
Denison, the white trader at Nanomea. "Once did I have my paddle fast
in the mouth of a little devil, and it drew me backwards, backwards,
over the stern till my head touched the water. TAH! but I was strong
with fear, and held on, for to lose it meant death by the teeth. And
Tulua--he who came out alive with me, seized my feet and held on, else
had I gone. But look thou at this"--and he pointed to his scarred neck
and back and shoulders "ere I could free my FOE (paddle) and raise my
head, I was bitten thus by others. Ah, PAPALAGI, some men are born to
wisdom, but most are fools. Had not Atupa been filled with vain fears,
he had killed the man who caused him to lose so many of our people."

"So," said the white man, "and wouldst thou have killed the man who
brought thee the new faith? Fie!"

"Aye, that would I--in those days when I was PO ULI ULI [Heathen, lit. "In
the blackest night"]. But not now, for I am Christian. Yet had Atupa
killed and buried the stranger, we could have lied and said he died of a
sickness when they of his people came to seek him. And then had I now my
son Tagipo with me, he who went into the bellies of the sharks at
Tia Kau."

PALLOU'S TALOI

A Memory Of The Paumotus

I stayed once at Rotoava--in the Low Archipelago, Eastern
Polynesia--while suffering from injuries received in a boat accident
one wild night. My host, the Rotoava trader, was a sociable old pirate,
whose convivial soul would never let him drink alone. He was by trade a
boat-builder, having had, in his early days, a shed at Miller's Point,
in Sydney, where he made money and married a wife. But this latter
event was poor Tom Oscott's undoing, and in the end he took his chest
of tools on board the THYRA trading brig, and sailed away to Polynesia.
Finally, after many years' wandering, he settled down at Rotoava as a
trader and boat-builder, and became a noted drinker of bottled beer.

The only method by which I could avoid his incessant invitations to
"have another" was to get his wife and children to carry me down to his
work-shed, built in a lovely spot surrounded by giant PUKA trees. Here,
under the shade, I had my mats spread, and with one of his children
sitting at my head to fan away the flies, I lay and watched, through
the belt of coconuts that lined the beach, the blue rollers breaking on
the reef and the snow-white boatswain-birds floating high overhead.

* * * * *

Tom was in the bush one morning when his family carried me to the
boat-shed. He had gone for a log of seasoned TOA wood [A hard wood much
used in boat building] to another village. At noon he returned, and I
heard him bawling for me. His little daughter, the fly-brusher, gave an
answering yell, and then Tom walked down the path, carrying two bottles of
beer; behind him Lucia, his eldest daughter, a monstrous creature of
giggles, adipose tissue, and warm heart, with glasses and a plate of
crackers; lastly, old Marie, the wife, with a little table.

"By ----, you've a lot more sense'n me. It's better lyin' here in the
cool, than foolin' around in the sun; so I've brought yer suthin' to
drink."

"Oh, Tom," I groaned, "I'm sure that beer's bad for me."

The Maker of Boats sat on his bench, and said that he knew of a
brewer's carter in Sydney who, at Merriman's "pub," on Miller's Point,
had had a cask of beer roll over him. Smashed seven ribs, one arm, and
one thigh. Doctors gave him up; undertaker's man called on his wife for
coffin order but a sailor chap said he'd pull him through. Got an
indiarubber tube and made him suck up as much beer as he could hold;
kept it up till all his bones "setted" again, and he recovered. Why
shouldn't I--if I only drank enough?

"Hurry up, old dark-skin!"--this to the faded Marie. Uttering merely
the word "Hog!" she drew the cork. I had to drink some, and every hour
or so Tom would say it was very hot, and open yet another bottle. At
last I escaped the beer by nearly dying, and then the kind old fellow
hurried away in his boat to Apatiki--another island of the group--and
came back with some bottles of claret, bought from the French trader
there. With him came two visitors--a big half-caste of middle age, and
his wife, a girl of twenty or there-about. This was Edward Pallou and
his wife Taloi.

* * * * *

I was in the house when Tom returned, enjoying a long-denied smoke.
Pallou and his wife entered and greeted me. The man was a fine,
well-set-up fellow, wiry and muscular, with deep-set eyes, and bearing
across his right cheek a heavy scar. His wife was a sweet, dainty
little creature with red lips, dazzling teeth, hazel eyes, and long
wavy hair. The first thing I noticed about her was, that instead of
squatting on a mat in native fashion, she sank into a wide chair, and
lying back enquired, with a pleasant smile and in perfect English,
whether I was feeling any better. She was very fair, even for a
Paumotuan half-caste, as I thought she must be, and I said to Pallou,
"Why, any one would take your wife to be an Englishwoman!"

"Not I," said Taloi, with a rippling laugh, as she commenced to make a
banana-leaf cigarette; "I am a full-blooded South Sea Islander. I
belong to Apatiki, and was born there. Perhaps I have white blood in
me. Who knows?--only my wise mother. But when I was twelve years old I
was adopted by a gentleman in Papeite, and he sent me to Sydney to
school. Do you know Sydney? Well, I was three years with the Misses
F----, in ---- Street. My goodness! I WAS glad to leave--and so were
the Misses F---- to see me go. They said I was downright wicked,
because one day I tore the dress off a girl who said my skin was
tallowy, like my name. When I came back to Tahiti my guardian took me
to Raiatea, where he had a business, and said I must marry him, the
beast!"

"Oh, shut up, Taoi!" growled the deep-voiced Pallou, who sat beside me.
"What the deuce does this man care about your doings?"

"Shut up yourself, you brute! Can't I talk to any one I like, you
turtle-headed fool? Am I not a good wife to you, you great, over-grown
savage? Won't you let a poor devil of a woman talk a little? Look here,
Tom, do you see that flash jacket he's wearing? Well, I sat up two
nights making that--for him to come over here with, and show off before
the Rotoava girls. Go and die, you ----!"

The big half-caste looked at Tom and then at me. His lips twitched with
suppressed passion, and a dangerous gleam shone a moment in his dark
eyes.

"Here, I say, Taloi," broke in Tom, good-humouredly, "just go easy a
bit with Ted. As for him a-looking at any of the girls here, I knows
better--and so do you."

Taloi's laugh, clear as the note of a bird, answered him, and then she
said she was sorry, and the lines around Pallou's rigid mouth softened
down. It was easy to see that this grim half-white loved, for all her
bitter tongue, the bright creature who sat in the big chair.

Presently Taloi and Lucia went out to bathe, and Pallou remained with
me. Tom joined us, and for a while no one spoke. Then the trader,
laying down his pipe on the table, drew his seat closer, and commenced,
in low tones, a conversation in Tahitian with Pallou. From the earnest
manner of old Tom and the sullen gloom that overspread Pallou's face, I
could discern that some anxiety possessed them.

At last Tom addressed me. "Look here, ----, Ted here is in a mess, and
we've just been a-talkin' of it over, and he says perhaps you'll do
what you can for him."

The half-caste turned his dark eyes on me and looked intently into
mine.

"What is it, Tom?"

"Well, you see, it come about this way. You heard this chap's
missus--Taloi--a-talkin' about the Frenchman that wanted to marry her.
He had chartered a little schooner in Papeite to go to Raiatea. Pallou
here was mate, and, o' course, he being from the same part of the group
as Taloi, she ups and tells him that the Frenchman wanted to marry her
straightaway; and then I s'pose, the two gets a bit chummy, and Pallou
tells her that if she didn't want the man he'd see as how she wasn't
forced agin' her will. So when the vessel gets to Raiatea it fell calm,
just about sunset. The Frenchman was in a hurry to get ashore, and
tells his skipper to put two men in the boat and some grub, as he meant
to pull ashore to his station. So they put the boat over the side, and
Frenchy and Taoi and Pallou and two native chaps gets in and pulls for
the land.

"They gets inside Uturoa about midnight. 'Jump out,' says the Frenchman
to Taloi as soon as the boat touches the beach; but the girl wouldn't,
but ties herself up around Pallou and squeals. 'Sakker!' says the
Frenchy, and he grabs her by the hair and tries to tear her away.
''Ere, stop that,' says Pallou; 'the girl ain't willin',' an' he pushes
Frenchy away. 'Sakker!' again, and Frenchy whips out his pistol and
nearly blows Pallou's face off'n him; and then, afore he knows how it
was done, Ted sends his knife chunk home into the other fellow's
throat. The two native sailors runned away ashore, and Pallou and Taloi
takes the oars and pulls out again until they drops. Then a breeze
comes along, and they up stick and sails away and gets clear o' the
group, and brings up, after a lot of sufferin', at Rurutu. And ever
since then there's been a French gunboat a-lookin' for Pallou, and he's
been hidin' at Apatiki for nigh on a twelvemonth, and has come over
here now to see if, when your ship comes back, you can't give him and
his missus a passage away somewhere to the westward, out o' the run of
that there gunboat, the VAUDREUIL."

* * * * *

I promised I would "work it" with the captain, and Pallou put out his
brawny hand--the hand that "drove it home into Frenchy's throat"--and
grasped mine in silence. Then he lifted his jacket and showed me his
money-belt, filled.

"I don't want money," I said. "If you have told me the whole story, I
would help any man in such a fix as you." And then Taloi, fresh from
her bath, came in and sat down on the mat, whilst fat Lucia combed and
dressed her glossy hair and placed therein scarlet hisbiscus flowers;
and to show her returned good temper, she took from her lips the
cigarette she was smoking, and offered it to the grim Pallou.

A month later we all three left Rotoava, and Pallou and Taloi went
ashore at one of the Hervey Group, where I gave him charge of a station
with a small stock of trade, and we sailed away east-ward to Pitcairn
and Easter Islands.

* * * * *

Pallou did a good business, and was well liked; and some seven months
afterwards, when we were at Maga Reva, in the Gambier Group, I got a
letter from him. "Business goes well," he wrote, "but Taloi is ill; I
think she will die. You will find everything square, though, when you
come."

But I was never to see that particular island again, as the firm sent
another vessel in place of ours to get Pallou's produce. When the
captain and the supercargo went ashore, a white trader met them, with a
roll of papers in his hand.

"Pallou's stock-list," he said.

"Why, where is he? gone away?"

"No, he's here still; planted alongside his missus."

"Dead!"

"Yes. A few months after he arrived here, that pretty little wife of
his died. He came to me, and asked if I would come and take stock with
him. I said he seemed in a bit of a hurry to start stocktaking before
the poor thing was buried; but anyhow, I went, and we took stock, and
he counted his cash, and asked me to lock the place up if anything
happened to him. Then we had a drink, and he bade me good-day, and said
he was going to sit with Taloi awhile, before they took her away. He
sent the native women out of the bedroom, and the next minute I heard a
shot. He'd done it, right enough. Right through his brain, poor chap. I
can tell you he thought a lot of that girl of his. There's the two
graves, over there by that FETAU tree. Here's his stock-list and bag of
cash and keys. Would you mind giving me that pair of rubber sea-boots
he left?"

A BASKET OF BREAD-FRUIT

It was in Steinberger's time [Colonel Steinberger, who in 1874 succeeded
in forming a government in Samoa]. A trader had come up to Apia in his
boat from the end of Savaii, the largest of the Samoan Group, and was on
his way home again, when the falling tide caused him to stop awhile at
Mulinu'u Point, about two miles from Apia. Here he designed to smoke and
talk, and drink kava at the great camp with some hospitable native
acquaintances, during the rising of the water. Soon he was taking his
ease on a soft mat, watching the bevy of AUA LUMA [The local girls] making
a bowl of kava.

Now this trader lived at Falealupo, at the extreme westerly end of
Savaii; but the Samoans, by reason of its isolation and extremity, have
for ages called it by another name--an unprintable one--and so some of
the people present began to jest with the trader for living in such a
place. He fell in with their humour, and said that if those present
would find for him a wife, a girl unseared by the breath of scandal, he
would leave Falealupo for Safune, where he had bought land.

"Malie!" said an old dame, with one eye and white hair, "the
PAPALAGI [foreigner] is inspired to speak wisdom to-night; for at Safune
grow the sweetest nuts and the biggest taro and bread-fruit; and lo! here
among the kava-chewers is a young maid from Safune--mine own
grand-daughter Salome. And against her name can no one in Samoa laugh in
the hollow of his hand," and the old creature, amid laughter and cries of
ISA! E LE MA LE LO MATUA (The old woman is without shame), crept over to
the trader, and, with one skinny hand on his knee, gazed steadily into his
face with her one eye.

* * * * *

The trader looked at the girl--at Salome. She had, at her grandmother's
speech, turned her head aside, and taking the "chaw" of kava-root from
her pretty mouth, dissolved into shame-faced tears. The trader was a
man of quick perceptions, and he made up his mind to do in earnest what
he had said in jest--this because of the tears of Salome. He quickly
whispered to the old woman, "Come to the boat before the full of the
tide, and we will talk."

When the kava was ready for drinking the others present had forgotten
all about the old woman and Salome, who had both crept away unobserved,
and an hour or two was passed in merriment, for the trader was a man
well liked. Then, when he rose and said TO FA, [good-bye] they begged him
not to attempt to pass down in his boat inside the reef, as he was sure to
be fired upon, for how were their people to tell a friend from an enemy in
the black night? But the white man smiled, and said his boat was too
heavily laden to face the ocean swell. So they bade him TO FA, and called
out MANUIA OE! [Bless you!] as he lifted the door of thatch and went.

* * * * *

The old woman awaited him, holding the girl by the hand. On the ground
lay a basket strongly tied up. Salome still wept, but the old woman
angrily bade her cease and enter the boat, which the crew had now
pushed bow-on to the beach. The old woman lifted the basket and
carefully put it on board.

"Be sure," she said to the crew, "not to sit on it for it is very ripe
bread-fruit that I am taking to my people in Manono."

"Give them here to me," said the trader, and he put the basket in the
stern out of the way. The old woman came aft, too, and crouched at his
feet and smoked a SULUI [a cigarette rolled in dried banana leaf]. The
cool land-breeze freshened as the sail was hoisted, and then
the crew besought the trader not to run down inside the reef. Bullets,
they said, if fired in plenty, always hit something, and the sea was
fairly smooth outside the reef. And old Lupetea grasped his hand and
muttered in his ear, "For the sake of this my little daughter go
outside. See, now, I am old, and to lie when so near death as I am is
foolish. Be warned by me and be wise; sail out into the ocean, and at
daylight we shall be at Salua in Manono. Then thou canst set my feet on
the shore--I and the basket. But the girl shall go with thee. Thou
canst marry her, if that be to thy mind, in the fashion of the
PAPALAGI, or take her FA'A SAMOA [Samoan fashion]. Thus will I keep faith
with thee. If the girl be false, her neck is but little and thy fingers
strong."

Now the trader thought in this wise: "This is well for me, for if I get
the girl away thus quietly from all her relations I shall save much in
presents," and his heart rejoiced, for although not mean he was a
careful man. So he steered his boat seaward, between the seething surf
that boiled and hissed on both sides of the boat passage.

* * * * *

As the boat sailed past the misty line of cloud-capped Upolu, the
trader lifted the girl up beside him and spoke to her. She was not
afraid of him, she said, for many had told her he was a good man, and
not an ULA VALE (scamp), but she wept because now, save her old
grandmother, all her kinsfolk were dead. Even but a day and a half ago
her one brother was killed with her cousin. They were strong men, but
the bullets were swift, and so they died. And their heads had been
shown at Matautu. For that she had grieved and wept and eaten nothing,
and the world was cold and dark to her.

"Poor little devil!" said the trader to himself--"hungry." Then he
opened a locker and found a tin of sardines. Not a scrap of biscuit.
There was plenty of biscuit, though, in the boat, in fifty-pound tins,
but on these mats were spread, where-on his crew were sleeping. He was
about to rouse them when he remembered the old dame's basket of ripe
bread-fruit. He laughed and looked at her. She, too, slept, coiled up
at his feet. But first he opened the sardines and placed them beside
the girl, and motioned her to steer. Her eyes gleamed like diamonds in
the darkness as she answered his glance, and her soft fingers grasped
the tiller. Very quickly, then, he felt among the packages aft till he
came to the basket.

A quick stroke of his knife cut the cinnet that lashed the sides
together. He felt inside. "Only two, after all, but big ones, and no
mistake. Wrapped in cloth, too! I wonder--Hell and Furies! what's
this?"--as his fingers came in contact with something that felt like a
human eye. Drawing his hand quickly back, he fumbled in his pockets for
a match, and struck it. Bread-fruit! No. Two heads with closed eyes and
livid lips blue with the pallor of death, showing their white teeth.
And Salome covered her face and slid down in the bottom of the boat
again, and wept afresh for her cousin and brother, and the boat came up
in the wind, but no one awoke.

* * * * *

The trader was angry. But after he had tied up the basket again he put
the boat on her course once more and called to the girl. She crept
close to him and nestled under his overcoat, for the morning air came
across the sea from the dew-laden forests, and she was chilled. Then
she told the story of how her granddam had begged the heads from those
of Malietoa's troops who had taken them at Matautu, and then gone to
the camp at Mulinu'u in the hope of getting a passage in some boat to
Manono, her country, where she would fain bury them. And that night he
had come, and old Lupetea had rejoiced, and sworn her to secrecy about
the heads in the basket. And that also was why Lupetea was afraid of
the boat going down inside the passage, for there were many enemies to
be met with, and they would have shot old Lupetea because she was of
Manono. That was all. Then she ate the sardines, and, leaning her head
against the trader's bosom, fell asleep.

* * * * *

As the first note of the great grey pigeon sounded the dawn, the
trader's boat sailed softly up to the Salua beach, and old Lupetea
rose, and, bidding the crew good-bye, and calling down blessings on the
head of the good and clever white man, as she rubbed his and the girl's
noses against her own, she grasped her Basket of Bread-fruit and went
ashore. Then the trader, with Salome nestling to his side, sailed out
again into the ocean towards his home.

ENDERBY'S COURTSHIP

The two ghastly creatures sat facing each other in their wordless
misery as the wind died away and the tattered remnants of the sail hung
motionless after a last faint flutter. The Thing that sat aft--for
surely so grotesquely horrible a vision could not be a Man--pointed
with hands like the talons of a bird of prey to the purple outline of
the island in the west, and his black, blood-baked lips moved, opened,
and essayed to speak. The other being that, with bare and skinny arms
clasped around its bony knees, sat crouched in the bottom of the boat,
leaned forward to listen.

"Ducie Island, Enderby," said the first in a hoarse, rattling whisper;
"no one on it; but water is there . . . and plenty of birds and turtle,
and a few coconuts."

At the word "water" the listener gave a curious gibbering chuckle,
unclasped his hands from his knees, and crept further towards the
speaker.

"And the current is setting us down to it, wind or no wind. I believe
we'll see this pleasure-trip through, after all"--and the black lips
parted in a hideous grimace.

The man whom he called Enderby sank his head again upon his knees, and
his dulled and bloodshot eyes rested on something that lay at the
captain's feet--the figure of a woman enveloped from her shoulders down
in a ragged native mat. For some hours past she had lain thus, with the
grey shadows of coming dissolution hovering about her pallid face, and
only the faintest movement of lips and eyelids to show that she still
lived.

* * * * *

The black-whiskered man who steered looked down for a second upon the
face beneath him with the unconcern for others born of the agony of
thirst and despair, and again his gaunt face turned to the land. Yet
she was his wife, and not six weeks back he had experienced a cold sort
of satisfaction in the possession of so much beauty.

He remembered that day now. Enderby, the passenger from Sydney, and he
were walking the poop; his wife was asleep in a deck-chair on the other
side. An open book lay in her lap. As the two men passed and re-passed
her, the one noted that the other would glance in undisguised and
honest admiration at the figure in the chair. And Enderby, who was as
open as the day, had said to him, Langton, that the sleeping Mrs
Langton made as beautiful a picture as he had ever seen.

* * * * *

The sail stirred, filled out, and then drooped again, and the two
spectres, with the sleeping woman between, still sat with their hungry
eyes gazing over toward the land. As the sun sank, the outlines of the
verdure-clad summits and beetling cliffs stood forth clearly for a
short minute or two, as if to mock them with hope, and then became
enshrouded in the tenebrous night.

* * * * *

Another hour, and a faint sigh came from the ragged mat. Enderby, for
ever on the watch, had first seen a white hand silhouetted against the
blackness of the covering, and knew that she was still alive. And as he
was about to call Langton, who lay in the stern-sheets muttering in
hideous dreams, he heard the woman's voice calling HIM. With panting
breath and trembling limbs he crawled over beside her and gently
touched her hand.

"Thank God, you are alive, Mrs Langton. Shall I wake Captain Langton?
We must be nearing the land."

"No, don't. Let him sleep. But I called you, Mr Enderby, to lift me up.
I want to see where the rain is coming from."

Enderby groaned in anguish of spirit. "Rain? God has forgotten us, I
----," and then he stopped in shame at betraying his weakness before a
woman.

The soft, tender tones again--"Ah, do help me up, please, I can FEEL
the rain is near." Then the man, with hot tears of mingled weakness and
pity coursing down his cheeks, raised her up.

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