Jerry of the Islands

J >> Jack London >> Jerry of the Islands


So quick was the occurrence of action, that the first shot from Tambi's
musket missed the Mary ere Borckman had quite melted to the deck. There
was no time for a second shot, for the Mary, dropping the tomahawk,
holding her child in both her hands and plunging to the rail, was in the
air and overboard, her fall capsizing the canoe which chanced to be
beneath her.

Scores of actions were simultaneous. From the canoes on both sides
uprose a glittering, glistening rain of mother-of-pearl-handled tomahawks
that descended into the waiting hands of the Somo men on deck, while the
Marys on deck crouched down and scrambled out of the fray. At the same
time that the Mary who had killed Borckman leapt the rail, Lerumie bent
for the tomahawk she had dropped, and Jerry, aware of red war, slashed
the hand that reached for the tomahawk. Lerumie stood upright and loosed
loudly, in a howl, all the pent rage and hatred, of months which he had
cherished against the puppy. Also, as he gained the perpendicular and as
Jerry flew at his legs, he launched a kick with all his might that caught
and lifted Jerry squarely under the middle.

And in the next second, or fraction of second, as Jerry lifted and soared
through the air, over the barbed wire of the rail and overboard, while
Sniders were being passed up overside from the canoes, Tambi fired his
next hasty shot. And Lerumie, the foot with which he had kicked not yet
returned to the deck as again he was in mid-action of stooping to pick up
the tomahawk, received the bullet squarely in the heart and pitched down
to melt with Borckman into the softness of death.

Ere Jerry struck the water, the glory of Tambi's marvellously lucky shot
was over for Tambi; for, at the moment he pressed trigger to the
successful shot, a tomahawk bit across his skull at the base of the brain
and darkened from his eyes for ever the bright vision of the sea-washed,
sun-blazoned tropic world. As swiftly, all occurring almost
simultaneously, did the rest of the boat's crew pass and the deck became
a shambles.

It was to the reports of the Sniders and the noises of the death scuffle
that Jerry's head emerged from the water. A man's hand reached over a
canoe-side and dragged him in by the scruff of the neck, and, although he
snarled and struggled to bite his rescuer, he was not so much enraged as
was he torn by the wildest solicitude for Skipper. He knew, without
thinking about it, that the _Arangi_ had been boarded by the hazily
sensed supreme disaster of life that all life intuitively apprehends and
that only man knows and calls by the name of "death." Borckman he had
seen struck down. Lerumie he had heard struck down. And now he was
hearing the explosions of rifles and the yells and screeches of triumph
and fear.

So it was, helpless, suspended in the air by the nape of the neck, that
he bawled and squalled and choked and coughed till the black, disgusted,
flung him down roughly in the canoe's bottom. He scrambled to his feet
and made two leaps: one upon the gunwale of the canoe; the next,
despairing and hopeless, without consideration of self, for the rail of
the _Arangi_.

His forefeet missed the rail by a yard, and he plunged down into the sea.
He came up, swimming frantically, swallowing and strangling salt water
because he still yelped and wailed and barked his yearning to be on board
with Skipper.

But a boy of twelve, in another canoe, having witnessed the first black's
adventure with Jerry, treated him without ceremony, laying, first the
flat, and next the edge, of a paddle upon his head while he still swam.
And the darkness of unconsciousness welled over his bright little love-
suffering brain, so that it was a limp and motionless puppy that the
black boy dragged into his canoe.

In the meantime, down below in the _Arangi's_ cabin, ere ever Jerry hit
the water from Lerumie's kick, even while he was in the air, Van Horn, in
one great flashing profound fraction of an instant, had known his death.
Not for nothing had old Bashti lived longest of any living man in his
tribe, and ruled wisest of all the long line of rulers since Somo's time.
Had he been placed more generously in earth space and time, he might well
have proved an Alexander, a Napoleon, or a swarthy Kahehameha. As it
was, he performed well, and splendidly well, in his limited little
kingdom on the leeward coast of the dark cannibal island of Malaita.

And such a performance! In cool good nature in rigid maintenance of his
chiefship rights, he had smiled at Van Horn, given royal permission to
his young men to sign on for three years of plantation slavery, and
exacted his share of each year's advance. Aora, who might be described
as his prime minister and treasurer, had received the tithes as fast as
they were paid over, and filled them into large, fine-netted bags of
coconut sennit. At Bashti's back, squatting on the bunk-boards, a slim
and smooth-skinned maid of thirteen had flapped the flies away from his
royal head with the royal fly-flapper. At his feet had squatted his
three old wives, the oldest of them, toothless and somewhat palsied, ever
presenting to his hand, at his head nod, a basket rough-woven of pandanus
leaf.

And Bashti, his keen old ears pitched for the first untoward sound from
on deck, had continually nodded his head and dipped his hand into the
proffered basket--now for betel-nut, and lime-box, and the invariable
green leaf with which to wrap the mouthful; now for tobacco with which to
fill his short clay pipe; and, again, for matches with which to light the
pipe which seemed not to draw well and which frequently went out.

Toward the last the basket had hovered constantly close to his hand, and,
at the last, he made one final dip. It was at the moment when the Mary's
axe, on deck, had struck Borckman down and when Tambi loosed the first
shot at her from his Lee-Enfield. And Bashti's withered ancient hand,
the back of it netted with a complex of large up-standing veins from
which the flesh had shrunk away, dipped out a huge pistol of such remote
vintage that one of Cromwell's round-heads might well have carried it or
that it might well have voyaged with Quiros or La Perouse. It was a
flint-lock, as long as a man's forearm, and it had been loaded that
afternoon by no less a person than Bashti himself.

Quick as Bashti had been, Van Horn was almost as quick, but not quite
quick enough. Even as his hand leapt to the modern automatic lying out
of it's holster and loose on his knees, the pistol of the centuries went
off. Loaded with two slugs and a round bullet, its effect was that of a
sawed-off shotgun. And Van Horn knew the blaze and the black of death,
even as "Gott fer dang!" died unuttered on his lips and as his fingers
relaxed from the part-lifted automatic, dropping it to the floor.

Surcharged with black powder, the ancient weapon had other effect. It
burst in Bashti's hand. While Aora, with a knife produced apparently
from nowhere, proceeded to hack off the white master's head, Bashti
looked quizzically at his right forefinger dangling by a strip of skin.
He seized it with his left hand, with a quick pull and twist wrenched it
off, and grinningly tossed it, as a joke, into the pandanus basket which
still his wife with one hand held before him while with the other she
clutched her forehead bleeding from a flying fragment of pistol.

Collaterally with this, three of the young recruits, joined by their
fathers and uncles, had downed, and were finishing off the only one of
the boat's crew that was below. Bashti, who had lived so long that he
was a philosopher who minded pain little and the loss of a finger less,
chuckled and chirped his satisfaction and pride of achievement in the
outcome, while his three old wives, who lived only at the nod of his
head, fawned under him on the floor in the abjectness of servile
congratulation and worship. Long had they lived, and they had lived long
only by his kingly whim. They floundered and gibbered and mowed at his
feet, lord of life and death that he was, infinitely wise as he had so
often proved himself, as he had this time proved himself again.

And the lean, fear-stricken girl, like a frightened rabbit in the mouth
of its burrow, on hands and knees peered forth upon the scene from the
lazarette and knew that the cooking-pot and the end of time had come for
her.




CHAPTER XII


What happened aboard the _Arangi_ Jerry never knew. He did know that it
was a world destroyed, for he saw it destroyed. The boy who had knocked
him on the head with the paddle, tied his legs securely and tossed him
out on the beach ere he forgot him in the excitement of looting the
_Arangi_.

With great shouting and song, the pretty teak-built yacht was towed in by
the long canoes and beached close to where Jerry lay just beyond the
confines of the coral-stone walls. Fires blazed on the beach, lanterns
were lighted on board, and, amid a great feasting, the _Arangi_ was
gutted and stripped. Everything portable was taken ashore, from her pigs
of iron ballast to her running gear and sails. No one in Somo slept that
night. Even the tiniest of children toddled about the feasting fires or
sprawled surfeited on the sands. At two in the morning, at Bashti's
command, the shell of the boat was fired. And Jerry, thirsting for
water, having whimpered and wailed himself to exhaustion, lying helpless,
leg-tied, on his side, saw the floating world he had known so short a
time go up in flame and smoke.

And by the light of her burning, old Bashti apportioned the loot. No one
of the tribe was too mean to receive nothing. Even the wretched bush-
slaves, who had trembled through all the time of their captivity from
fear of being eaten, received each a clay pipe and several sticks of
tobacco. The main bulk of the trade goods, which was not distributed,
Bashti had carried up to his own large grass house. All the wealth of
gear was stored in the several canoe houses. While in the devil devil
houses the devil devil doctors set to work curing the many heads over
slow smudges; for, along with the boat's crew there were a round dozen of
No-ola return boys and several Malu boys which Van Horn had not yet
delivered.

Not all these had been slain, however. Bashti had issued stern
injunctions against wholesale slaughter. But this was not because his
heart was kind. Rather was it because his head was shrewd. Slain they
would all be in the end. Bashti had never seen ice, did not know it
existed, and was unversed in the science of refrigeration. The only way
he knew to keep meat was to keep it alive. And in the biggest canoe
house, the club house of the stags, where no Mary might come under
penalty of death by torture, the captives were stored.

Tied or trussed like fowls or pigs, they were tumbled on the hard-packed
earthen floor, beneath which, shallowly buried, lay the remains of
ancient chiefs, while, overhead, in wrappings of grass mats, swung all
that was left of several of Bashti's immediate predecessors, his father
latest among them and so swinging for two full generations. Here, too,
since she was to be eaten and since the taboo had no bearing upon one
condemned to be cooked, the thin little Mary from the lazarette was
tumbled trussed upon the floor among the many blacks who had teased and
mocked her for being fattened by Van Horn for the eating.

And to this canoe house Jerry was also brought to join the others on the
floor. Agno, chief of the devil devil doctors, had stumbled across him
on the beach, and, despite the protestations of the boy who claimed him
as personal trove, had ordered him to the canoe house. Carried past the
fires of the feasting, his keen nostrils had told him of what the feast
consisted. And, new as the experience was, he had bristled and snarled
and struggled against his bonds to be free. Likewise, at first, tossed
down in the canoe house, he had bristled and snarled at his fellow
captives, not realizing their plight, and, since always he had been
trained to look upon niggers as the eternal enemy, considering them
responsible for the catastrophe to the _Arangi_ and to Skipper.

For Jerry was only a little dog, with a dog's limitations, and very young
in the world. But not for long did he throat his rage at them. In vague
ways it was borne in upon him that they, too, were not happy. Some had
been cruelly wounded, and kept up a moaning and groaning. Without any
clearness of concept, nevertheless Jerry had a realization that they were
as painfully circumstanced as himself. And painful indeed was his own
circumstance. He lay on his side, the cords that bound his legs so tight
as to bite into his tender flesh and shut off the circulation. Also, he
was perishing for water, and panted, dry-tongued, dry-mouthed, in the
stagnant heat.

A dolorous place it was, this canoe house, filled with groans and sighs,
corpses beneath the floor and composing the floor, creatures soon to be
corpses upon the floor, corpses swinging in aerial sepulchre overhead,
long black canoes, high-ended like beaked predatory monsters, dimly
looming in the light of a slow fire where sat an ancient of the tribe of
Somo at his interminable task of smoke-curing a bushman's head. He was
withered, and blind, and senile, gibbering and mowing like some huge ape
as ever he turned and twisted, and twisted back again, the suspended head
in the pungent smoke, and handful by handful added rotten punk of wood to
the smudge fire.

Sixty feet in the clear, the dim fire occasionally lighted, through
shadowy cross-beams, the ridge-pole that was covered with sennit of
coconut that was braided in barbaric designs of black and white and that
was stained by the smoke of years almost to a monochrome of dirty brown.
From the lofty cross-beams, on long sennit strings, hung the heads of
enemies taken aforetime in jungle raid and sea foray. The place breathed
the very atmosphere of decay and death, and the imbecile ancient, curing
in the smoke the token of death, was himself palsiedly shaking into the
disintegration of the grave.

Toward daylight, with great shouting and heaving and pull and haul,
scores of Somo men brought in another of the big war canoes. They made
way with foot and hand, kicking and thrusting dragging and shoving, the
bound captives to either side of the space which the canoe was to occupy.
They were anything but gentle to the meat with which they had been
favoured by good fortune and the wisdom of Bashti.

For a time they sat about, all pulling at clay pipes and chirruping and
laughing in queer thin falsettos at the events of the night and the
previous afternoon. Now one and now another stretched out and slept
without covering; for so, directly under the path of the sun, had they
slept nakedly from the time they were born.

Remained awake, as dawn paled the dark, only the grievously wounded or
the too-tightly bound, and the decrepit ancient who was not so old as
Bashti. When the boy who had stunned Jerry with his paddle-blade and who
claimed him as his own stole into the canoe house, the ancient did not
hear him. Being blind, he did not see him. He continued gibbering and
chuckling dementedly, to twist the bushman's head back and forth and to
feed the smudge with punk-wood. This was no night-task for any man, nor
even for him who had forgotten how to do aught else. But the excitement
of cutting out the _Arangi_ had been communicated to his addled brain,
and, with vague reminiscent flashes of the strength of life triumphant,
he shared deliriously in this triumph of Somo by applying himself to the
curing of the head that was in itself the concrete expression of triumph.

But the twelve-year-old lad who stole in and cautiously stepped over the
sleepers and threaded his way among the captives, did so with his heart
in his mouth. He knew what taboos he was violating. Not old enough even
to leave his father's grass roof and sleep in the youths' canoe house,
much less to sleep with the young bachelors in their canoe house, he knew
that he took his life, with all of its dimly guessed mysteries and
arrogances, in his hand thus to trespass into the sacred precinct of the
full-made, full-realized, full-statured men of Somo.

But he wanted Jerry and he got him. Only the lean little Mary, trussed
for the cooking, staring through her wide eyes of fear, saw the boy pick
Jerry up by his tied legs and carry him out and away from the booty of
meat of which she was part. Jerry's heroic little heart of courage would
have made him snarl and resent such treatment of handling had he not been
too exhausted and had not his mouth and throat been too dry for sound. As
it was, miserably and helplessly, not half himself, a puppet dreamer in a
half-nightmare, he knew, as a restless sleeper awakening between vexing
dreams, that he was being transported head-downward out of the canoe
house that stank of death, through the village that was only less
noisome, and up a path under lofty, wide-spreading trees that were
beginning languidly to stir with the first breathings of the morning
wind.




CHAPTER XIII


The boy's name, as Jerry was to learn, was Lamai, and to Lamai's house
Jerry was carried. It was not much of a house, even as cannibal grass-
houses go. On an earthen floor, hard-packed of the filth of years, lived
Lamai's father and mother and a spawn of four younger brothers and
sisters. A thatched roof that leaked in every heavy shower leaned to a
wabbly ridge-pole over the floor. The walls were even more pervious to a
driving rain. In fact, the house of Lamai, who was the father of Lumai,
was the most miserable house in all Somo.

Lumai, the house-master and family head, unlike most Malaitans, was fat.
And of his fatness it would seem had been begotten his good nature with
its allied laziness. But as the fly in his ointment of jovial
irresponsibility was his wife, Lenerengo--the prize shrew of Somo, who
was as lean about the middle and all the rest of her as her husband was
rotund; who was as remarkably sharp-spoken as he was soft-spoken; who was
as ceaselessly energetic as he was unceasingly idle; and who had been
born with a taste for the world as sour in her mouth as it was sweet in
his.

The boy merely peered into the house as he passed around it to the rear,
and he saw his father and mother, at opposite corners, sleeping without
covering, and, in the middle of the floor, his four naked brothers and
sisters curled together in a tangle like a litter of puppies. All about
the house, which in truth was scarcely more than an animal lair, was an
earthly paradise. The air was spicily and sweetly heavy with the scents
of wild aromatic plants and gorgeous tropic blooms. Overhead three
breadfruit trees interlaced their noble branches. Banana and plantain
trees were burdened with great bunches of ripening fruit. And huge,
golden melons of the papaia, ready for the eating, globuled directly from
the slender-trunked trees not one-tenth the girth of the fruits they
bore. And, for Jerry, most delightful of all, there was the gurgle and
plash of a brooklet that pursued its invisible way over mossy stones
under a garmenture of tender and delicate ferns. No conservatory of a
king could compare with this wild wantonness of sun-generous vegetation.

Maddened by the sound of the water, Jerry had first to endure an
embracing and hugging from the boy, who, squatted on his hams, rocked
back and forth and mumbled a strange little crooning song. And Jerry,
lacking articulate speech, had no way of telling him of the thirst of
which he was perishing.

Next, Lamai tied him securely with a sennit cord about the neck and
untied the cords that bit into his legs. So numb was Jerry from lack of
circulation, and so weak from lack of water through part of a tropic day
and all of a tropic night, that he stood up, tottered and fell, and, time
and again, essaying to stand, floundered and fell. And Lamai understood,
or tentatively guessed. He caught up a coconut calabash attached to the
end of a stick of bamboo, dipped into the greenery of ferns, and
presented to Jerry the calabash brimming with the precious water.

Jerry lay on his side at first as he drank, until, with the moisture,
life flowed back into the parched channels of him, so that, soon, still
weak and shaky, he was up and braced on all his four wide-spread legs and
still eagerly lapping. The boy chuckled and chirped his delight in the
spectacle, and Jerry found surcease and easement sufficient to enable him
to speak with his tongue after the heart-eloquent manner of dogs. He
took his nose out of the calabash and with his rose-ribbon strip of
tongue licked Lamai's hand. And Lamai, in ecstasy over this
establishment of common speech, urged the calabash back under Jerry's
nose, and Jerry drank again.

He continued to drink. He drank until his sun-shrunken sides stood out
like the walls of a balloon, although longer were the intervals from the
drinking in which, with his tongue of gratefulness, he spoke against the
black skin of Lamai's hand. And all went well, and would have continued
to go well, had not Lamai's mother, Lenerengo, just awakened, stepped
across her black litter of progeny and raised her voice in shrill protest
against her eldest born's introducing of one more mouth and much more
nuisance into the household.

A squabble of human speech followed, of which Jerry knew no word but of
which he sensed the significance. Lamai was with him and for him.
Lamai's mother was against him. She shrilled and shrewed her firm
conviction that her son was a fool and worse because he had neither the
consideration nor the silly sense of a fool's solicitude for a
hard-worked mother. She appealed to the sleeping Lumai, who awoke
heavily and fatly, who muttered and mumbled easy terms of Somo dialect to
the effect that it was a most decent world, that all puppy dogs and
eldest-born sons were right delightful things to possess, that he had
never yet starved to death, and that peace and sleep were the finest
things that ever befell the lot of mortal man--and, in token thereof,
back into the peace of sleep, he snuggled his nose into the biceps of his
arm for a pillow and proceeded to snore.

But Lamai, eyes stubbornly sullen, with mutinous foot-stampings and a
perfect knowledge that all was clear behind him to leap and flee away if
his mother rushed upon him, persisted in retaining his puppy dog. In the
end, after an harangue upon the worthlessness of Lamai's father, she went
back to sleep.

Ideas beget ideas. Lamai had learned how astonishingly thirsty Jerry had
been. This engendered the idea that he might be equally hungry. So he
applied dry branches of wood to the smouldering coals he dug out of the
ashes of the cooking-fire, and builded a large fire. Into this, as it
gained strength, he placed many stones from a convenient pile, each fire-
blackened in token that it had been similarly used many times. Next,
hidden under the water of the brook in a netted hand-bag, he brought to
light the carcass of a fat wood-pigeon he had snared the previous day. He
wrapped the pigeon in green leaves, and, surrounding it with the hot
stones from the fire, covered pigeon and stones with earth.

When, after a time, he removed the pigeon and stripped from it the
scorched wrappings of leaves, it gave forth a scent so savoury as to
prick up Jerry's ears and set his nostrils to quivering. When the boy
had torn the steaming carcass across and cooled it, Jerry's meal began;
nor did the meal cease till the last sliver of meat had been stripped and
tongued from the bones and the bones crunched and crackled to fragments
and swallowed. And throughout the meal Lamai made love to Jerry,
crooning over and over his little song, and patting and caressing him.

On the other hand, refreshed by the water and the meat, Jerry did not
reciprocate so heartily in the love-making. He was polite, and received
his petting with soft-shining eyes, tail-waggings and the customary body-
wrigglings; but he was restless, and continually listened to distant
sounds and yearned away to be gone. This was not lost upon the boy, who,
before he curled himself down to sleep, securely tied to a tree the end
of the cord that was about Jerry's neck.

After straining against the cord for a time, Jerry surrendered and slept.
But not for long. Skipper was too much with him. He knew, and yet he
did not know, the irretrievable ultimate disaster to Skipper. So it was,
after low whinings and whimperings, that he applied his sharp first-teeth
to the sennit cord and chewed upon it till it parted.

Free, like a homing pigeon, he headed blindly and directly for the beach
and the salt sea over which had floated the _Arangi_, on her deck Skipper
in command. Somo was largely deserted, and those that were in it were
sunk in sleep. So no one vexed him as he trotted through the winding
pathways between the many houses and past the obscene kingposts of
totemic heraldry, where the forms of men, carved from single tree trunks,
were seated in the gaping jaws of carved sharks. For Somo, tracing back
to Somo its founder, worshipped the shark-god and the salt-water deities
as well as the deities of the bush and swamp and mountain.