Michael, Brother of Jerry

J >> Jack London >> Michael, Brother of Jerry


Michael remained on the beach, waiting invitation, his mind not quite
made up, but so nearly so that all that was required was that lip-noise.
Dag Daughtry made the lip-noise so low that the old man did not hear, and
Michael, springing clear from sand to canoe, was on board without wetting
his feet. Using Daughtry's shoulder for a stepping-place, he passed over
him and down into the bottom of the canoe. Daughtry kissed with his lips
again, and Michael turned around so as to face him, sat down, and rested
his head on the steward's knees.

"I reckon I can take my affydavy on a stack of Bibles that the dog just
up an' followed me," he grinned in Michael's ear.

"Washee-washee quick fella," he commanded.

The ancient obediently dipped his paddle and started pottering an erratic
course in the general direction of the cluster of lights that marked the
_Makambo_. But he was too feeble, panting and wheezing continually from
the exertion and pausing to rest off strokes between strokes. The
steward impatiently took the paddle away from him and bent to the work.

Half-way to the steamer the ancient ceased wheezing and spoke, nodding
his head at Michael.

"That fella dog he belong big white marster along schooner . . . You give
'm me ten stick tobacco," he added after due pause to let the information
sink in.

"I give 'm you bang alongside head," Daughtry assured him cheerfully.
"White marster along schooner plenty friend along me too much. Just now
he stop 'm along _Makambo_. Me take 'm dog along him along _Makambo_."

There was no further conversation from the ancient, and though he lived
long years after, he never mentioned the midnight passenger in the canoe
who carried Michael away with him. When he saw and heard the confusion
and uproar on the beach later that night when Captain Kellar turned
Tulagi upside-down in his search for Michael, the old one-legged one
remained discreetly silent. Who was he to seek trouble with the strange
ones, the white masters who came and went and roved and ruled?

In this the ancient was in nowise unlike the rest of his dark-skinned
Melanesian race. The whites were possessed of unguessed and unthinkable
ways and purposes. They constituted another world and were as a play of
superior beings on an exalted stage where was no reality such as black
men might know as reality, where, like the phantoms of a dream, the white
men moved and were as shadows cast upon the vast and mysterious curtain
of the Cosmos.

The gang-plank being on the port side, Dag Daughtry paddled around to the
starboard and brought the canoe to a stop under a certain open port.

"Kwaque!" he called softly, once, and twice.

At the second call the light of the port was obscured apparently by a
head that piped down in a thin squeak.

"Me stop 'm, marster."

"One fella dog stop 'm along you," the steward whispered up. "Keep 'm
door shut. You wait along me. Stand by! Now!"

With a quick catch and lift, he passed Michael up and into unseen hands
outstretched from the iron wall of the ship, and paddled ahead to an open
cargo port. Dipping into his tobacco pocket, he thrust a loose handful
of sticks into the ancient's hand and shoved the canoe adrift with no
thought of how its helpless occupant would ever reach shore.

The old man did not touch the paddle, and he was unregardless of the
lofty-sided steamer as the canoe slipped down the length of it into the
darkness astern. He was too occupied in counting the wealth of tobacco
showered upon him. No easy task, his counting. Five was the limit of
his numerals. When he had counted five, he began over again and counted
a second five. Three fives he found in all, and two sticks over; and
thus, at the end of it, he possessed as definite a knowledge of the
number of sticks as would be possessed by the average white man by means
of the single number _seventeen_.

More it was, far more, than his avarice had demanded. Yet he was
unsurprised. Nothing white men did could surprise. Had it been two
sticks instead of seventeen, he would have been equally unsurprised.
Since all acts of white men were surprises, the only surprise of action
they could achieve for a black man would be the doing of an unsurprising
thing.

Paddling, wheezing, resting, oblivious of the shadow-world of the white
men, knowing only the reality of Tulagi Mountain cutting its crest-line
blackly across the dim radiance of the star-sprinkled sky, the reality of
the sea and of the canoe he so feebly urged across it, and the reality of
his fading strength and of the death into which he would surely end, the
ancient black man slowly made his shoreward way.




CHAPTER III


In the meanwhile, Michael. Lifted through the air, exchanged into
invisible hands that drew him through a narrow diameter of brass into a
lighted room, Michael looked about him in expectancy of Jerry. But
Jerry, at that moment, lay cuddled beside Villa Kennan's sleeping-cot on
the slant deck of the _Ariel_, as that trim craft, the Shortlands astern
and New Guinea dead ahead, heeled her scuppers a-whisper and garrulous to
the sea-welter alongside as she logged her eleven knots under the press
of the freshening trades. Instead of Jerry, from whom he had last parted
on board a boat, Michael saw Kwaque.

Kwaque? Well, Kwaque was Kwaque, an individual, more unlike all other
men than most men are unlike one another. No queerer estray ever drifted
along the stream of life. Seventeen years old he was, as men measure
time; but a century was measured in his lean-lined face, his wrinkled
forehead, his hollowed temples, and his deep-sunk eyes. From his thin
legs, fragile-looking as windstraws, the bones of which were sheathed in
withered skin with apparently no muscle padding in between--from such
frail stems sprouted the torso of a fat man. The huge and protuberant
stomach was amply supported by wide and massive hips, and the shoulders
were broad as those of a Hercules. But, beheld sidewise, there was no
depth to those shoulders and the top of the chest. Almost, at that part
of his anatomy, he seemed builded in two dimensions. Thin his arms were
as his legs, and, as Michael first beheld him, he had all the seeming of
a big-bellied black spider.

He proceeded to dress, a matter of moments, slipping into duck trousers
and blouse, dirty and frayed from long usage. Two fingers of his left
hand were doubled into a permanent bend, and, to an expert, would have
advertised that he was a leper. Although he belonged to Dag Daughtry
just as much as if the steward possessed a chattel bill of sale of him,
his owner did not know that his anaesthetic twist of ravaged nerves
tokened the dread disease.

The manner of the ownership was simple. At King William Island, in the
Admiralties, Kwaque had made, in the parlance of the South Pacific, a
pier-head jump. So to speak, leprosy and all, he had jumped into Dag
Daughtry's arms. Strolling along the native runways in the fringe of
jungle just beyond the beach, as was his custom, to see whatever he might
pick up, the steward had picked up Kwaque. And he had picked him up in
extremity.

Pursued by two very active young men armed with fire-hardened spears,
tottering along with incredible swiftness on his two spindle legs, Kwaque
had fallen exhausted at Daughtry's feet and looked up at him with the
beseeching eyes of a deer fleeing from the hounds. Daughtry had inquired
into the matter, and the inquiry was violent; for he had a wholesome fear
of germs and bacilli, and when the two active young men tried to run him
through with their filth-corroded spears, he caught the spear of one
young man under his arm and put the other young man to sleep with a left
hook to the jaw. A moment later the young man whose spear he held had
joined the other in slumber.

The elderly steward was not satisfied with the mere spears. While the
rescued Kwaque continued to moan and slubber thankfulness at his feet, he
proceeded to strip them that were naked. Nothing they wore in the way of
clothing, but from around each of their necks he removed a necklace of
porpoise teeth that was worth a gold sovereign in mere exchange value.
From the kinky locks of one of the naked young men he drew a hand-carved,
fine-toothed comb, the lofty back of which was inlaid with
mother-of-pearl, which he later sold in Sydney to a curio shop for eight
shillings. Nose and ear ornaments of bone and turtle-shell he also
rifled, as well as a chest-crescent of pearl shell, fourteen inches
across, worth fifteen shillings anywhere. The two spears ultimately
fetched him five shillings each from the tourists at Port Moresby. Not
lightly may a ship steward undertake to maintain a six-quart reputation.

When he turned to depart from the active young men, who, back to
consciousness, were observing him with bright, quick, wild-animal eyes,
Kwaque followed so close at his heels as to step upon them and make him
stumble. Whereupon he loaded Kwaque with his trove and put him in front
to lead along the runway to the beach. And for the rest of the way to
the steamer, Dag Daughtry grinned and chuckled at sight of his plunder
and at sight of Kwaque, who fantastically titubated and ambled along,
barrel-like, on his pipe-stems.

On board the steamer, which happened to be the _Cockspur_, Daughtry
persuaded the captain to enter Kwaque on the ship's articles as steward's
helper with a rating of ten shillings a month. Also, he learned Kwaque's
story.

It was all an account of a pig. The two active young men were brothers
who lived in the next village to his, and the pig had been theirs--so
Kwaque narrated in atrocious beche-de-mer English. He, Kwaque, had never
seen the pig. He had never known of its existence until after it was
dead. The two young men had loved the pig. But what of that? It did
not concern Kwaque, who was as unaware of their love for the pig as he
was unaware of the pig itself.

The first he knew, he averred, was the gossip of the village that the pig
was dead, and that somebody would have to die for it. It was all right,
he said, in reply to a query from the steward. It was the custom.
Whenever a loved pig died its owners were in custom bound to go out and
kill somebody, anybody. Of course, it was better if they killed the one
whose magic had made the pig sick. But, failing that one, any one would
do. Hence Kwaque was selected for the blood-atonement.

Dag Daughtry drank a seventh quart as he listened, so carried away was he
by the sombre sense of romance of this dark jungle event wherein men
killed even strangers because a pig was dead.

Scouts out on the runways, Kwaque continued, brought word of the coming
of the two bereaved pig-owners, and the village had fled into the jungle
and climbed trees--all except Kwaque, who was unable to climb trees.

"My word," Kwaque concluded, "me no make 'm that fella pig sick."

"My word," quoth Dag Daughtry, "you devil-devil along that fella pig too
much. You look 'm like hell. You make 'm any fella thing sick look
along you. You make 'm me sick too much."

It became quite a custom for the steward, as he finished his sixth bottle
before turning in, to call upon Kwaque for his story. It carried him
back to his boyhood when he had been excited by tales of wild cannibals
in far lands and dreamed some day to see them for himself. And here he
was, he would chuckle to himself, with a real true cannibal for a slave.

A slave Kwaque was, as much as if Daughtry had bought him on the auction-
block. Whenever the steward transferred from ship to ship of the Burns
Philp fleet, he always stipulated that Kwaque should accompany him and be
duly rated at ten shillings. Kwaque had no say in the matter. Even had
he desired to escape in Australian ports, there was no need for Daughtry
to watch him. Australia, with her "all-white" policy, attended to that.
No dark-skinned human, whether Malay, Japanese, or Polynesian, could land
on her shore without putting into the Government's hand a cash security
of one hundred pounds.

Nor at the other islands visited by the _Makambo_ had Kwaque any desire
to cut and run for it. King William Island, which was the only land he
had ever trod, was his yard-stick by which he measured all other islands.
And since King William Island was cannibalistic, he could only conclude
that the other islands were given to similar dietary practice.

As for King William Island, the _Makambo_, on the former run of the
_Cockspur_, stopped there every ten weeks; but the direst threat Daughtry
ever held over him was the putting ashore of him at the place where the
two active young men still mourned their pig. In fact, it was their
regular programme, each trip, to paddle out and around the _Makambo_ and
make ferocious grimaces up at Kwaque, who grimaced back at them from over
the rail. Daughtry even encouraged this exchange of facial amenities for
the purpose of deterring him from ever hoping to win ashore to the
village of his birth.

For that matter, Kwaque had little desire to leave his master, who, after
all, was kindly and just, and never lifted a hand to him. Having
survived sea-sickness at the first, and never setting foot upon the land
so that he never again knew sea-sickness, Kwaque was certain he lived in
an earthly paradise. He never had to regret his inability to climb
trees, because danger never threatened him. He had food regularly, and
all he wanted, and it was such food! No one in his village could have
dreamed of any delicacy of the many delicacies which he consumed all the
time. Because of these matters he even pulled through a light attack of
home-sickness, and was as contented a human as ever sailed the seas.

And Kwaque it was who pulled Michael through the port-hole into Dag
Daughtry's stateroom and waited for that worthy to arrive by the
roundabout way of the door. After a quick look around the room and a
sniff of the bunk and under the bunk which informed him that Jerry was
not present, Michael turned his attention to Kwaque.

Kwaque tried to be friendly. He uttered a clucking noise in
advertisement of his friendliness, and Michael snarled at this black who
had dared to lay hands upon him--a contamination, according to Michael's
training--and who now dared to address him who associated only with white
gods.

Kwaque passed off the rebuff with a silly gibbering laugh and started to
step nearer the door to be in readiness to open it at his master's
coming. But at first lift of his leg, Michael flew at it. Kwaque
immediately put it down, and Michael subsided, though he kept a watchful
guard. What did he know of this strange black, save that he was a black
and that, in the absence of a white master, all blacks required watching?
Kwaque tried slowly sliding his foot along the floor, but Michael knew
the trick and with bristle and growl put a stop to it.

It was upon this tableau that Daughtry entered, and, while he admired
Michael much under the bright electric light, he realized the situation.

"Kwaque, you make 'm walk about leg belong you," he commanded, in order
to make sure.

Kwaque's glance of apprehension at Michael was convincing enough, but the
steward insisted. Kwaque gingerly obeyed, but scarcely had his foot
moved an inch when Michael's was upon him. The foot and leg petrified,
while Michael stiff-leggedly drew a half-circle of intimidation about
him.

"Got you nailed to the floor, eh?" Daughtry chuckled. "Some
nigger-chaser, my word, any amount."

"Hey, you, Kwaque, go fetch 'm two fella bottle of beer stop 'm along
icey-chestis," he commanded in his most peremptory manner.

Kwaque looked beseechingly, but did not stir. Nor did he stir at a
harsher repetition of the order.

"My word!" the steward bullied. "Suppose 'm you no fetch 'm beer close
up, I knock 'm eight bells 'n 'a dog-watch onta you. Suppose 'm you no
fetch 'm close up, me make 'm you go ashore 'n' walk about along King
William Island."

"No can," Kwaque murmured timidly. "Eye belong dog look along me too
much. Me no like 'm dog kai-kai along me."

"You fright along dog?" his master demanded.

"My word, me fright along dog any amount."

Dag Daughtry was delighted. Also, he was thirsty from his trip ashore
and did not prolong the situation.

"Hey, you, dog," he addressed Michael. "This fella boy he all right.
Savvee? He all right."

Michael bobbed his tail and flattened his ears in token that he was
trying to understand. When the steward patted the black on the shoulder,
Michael advanced and sniffed both the legs he had kept nailed to the
floor.

"Walk about," Daughtry commanded. "Walk about slow fella," he cautioned,
though there was little need.

Michael bristled, but permitted the first timid step. At the second he
glanced up at Daughtry to make certain.

"That's right," he was reassured. "That fella boy belong me. He all
right, you bet."

Michael smiled with his eyes that he understood, and turned casually
aside to investigate an open box on the floor which contained plates of
turtle-shell, hack-saws, and emery paper.

* * * * *

"And now," Dag Daughtry muttered weightily aloud, as, bottle in hand, he
leaned back in his arm-chair while Kwaque knelt at his feet to unlace his
shoes, "now to consider a name for you, Mister Dog, that will be just to
your breeding and fair to my powers of invention."




CHAPTER IV


Irish terriers, when they have gained maturity, are notable, not alone
for their courage, fidelity, and capacity for love, but for their cool-
headedness and power of self-control and restraint. They are less easily
excited off their balance; they can recognize and obey their master's
voice in the scuffle and rage of battle; and they never fly into nervous
hysterics such as are common, say, with fox-terriers.

Michael possessed no trace of hysteria, though he was more
temperamentally excitable and explosive than his blood-brother Jerry,
while his father and mother were a sedate old couple indeed compared with
him. Far more than mature Jerry, was mature Michael playful and
rowdyish. His ebullient spirits were always on tap to spill over on the
slightest provocation, and, as he was afterwards to demonstrate, he could
weary a puppy with play. In short, Michael was a merry soul.

"Soul" is used advisedly. Whatever the human soul may be--informing
spirit, identity, personality, consciousness--that intangible thing
Michael certainly possessed. His soul, differing only in degree, partook
of the same attributes as the human soul. He knew love, sorrow, joy,
wrath, pride, self-consciousness, humour. Three cardinal attributes of
the human soul are memory, will, and understanding; and memory, will, and
understanding were Michael's.

Just like a human, with his five senses he contacted with the world
exterior to him. Just like a human, the results to him of these contacts
were sensations. Just like a human, these sensations on occasion
culminated in emotions. Still further, like a human, he could and did
perceive, and such perceptions did flower in his brain as concepts,
certainly not so wide and deep and recondite as those of humans, but
concepts nevertheless.

Perhaps, to let the human down a trifle from such disgraceful identity of
the highest life-attributes, it would be well to admit that Michael's
sensations were not quite so poignant, say in the matter of a
needle-thrust through his foot as compared with a needle-thrust through
the palm of a hand. Also, it is admitted, when consciousness suffused
his brain with a thought, that the thought was dimmer, vaguer than a
similar thought in a human brain. Furthermore, it is admitted that
never, never, in a million lifetimes, could Michael have demonstrated a
proposition in Euclid or solved a quadratic equation. Yet he was capable
of knowing beyond all peradventure of a doubt that three bones are more
than two bones, and that ten dogs compose a more redoubtable host than do
two dogs.

One admission, however, will not be made, namely, that Michael could not
love as devotedly, as wholeheartedly, unselfishly, madly,
self-sacrificingly as a human. He did so love--not because he was
Michael, but because he was a dog.

Michael had loved Captain Kellar more than he loved his own life. No
more than Jerry for Skipper, would he have hesitated to risk his life for
Captain Kellar. And he was destined, as time went by and the conviction
that Captain Kellar had passed into the inevitable nothingness along with
Meringe and the Solomons, to love just as absolutely this six-quart
steward with the understanding ways and the fascinating lip-caress.
Kwaque, no; for Kwaque was black. Kwaque he merely accepted, as an
appurtenance, as a part of the human landscape, as a chattel of Dag
Daughtry.

But he did not know this new god as Dag Daughtry. Kwaque called him
"marster"; but Michael heard other white men so addressed by the blacks.
Many blacks had he heard call Captain Kellar "marster." It was Captain
Duncan who called the steward "Steward." Michael came to hear him, and
his officers, and all the passengers, so call him; and thus, to Michael,
his god's name was Steward, and for ever after he was to know him and
think of him as Steward.

There was the question of his own name. The next evening after he came
on board, Dag Daughtry talked it over with him. Michael sat on his
haunches, the length of his lower jaw resting on Daughtry's knee, the
while his eyes dilated, contracted and glowed, his ears ever pricking and
repricking to listen, his stump tail thumping ecstatically on the floor.

"It's this way, son," the steward told him. "Your father and mother were
Irish. Now don't be denying it, you rascal--"

This, as Michael, encouraged by the unmistakable geniality and kindness
in the voice, wriggled his whole body and thumped double knocks of
delight with his tail. Not that he understood a word of it, but that he
did understand the something behind the speech that informed the string
of sounds with all the mysterious likeableness that white gods possessed.

"Never be ashamed of your ancestry. An' remember, God loves the
Irish--Kwaque! Go fetch 'm two bottle beer fella stop 'm along
icey-chestis!--Why, the very mug of you, my lad, sticks out Irish all
over it." (Michael's tail beat a tattoo.) "Now don't be blarneyin' me.
'Tis well I'm wise to your insidyous, snugglin', heart-stealin' ways.
I'll have ye know my heart's impervious. 'Tis soaked too long this many
a day in beer. I stole you to sell you, not to be lovin' you. I
could've loved you once; but that was before me and beer was introduced.
I'd sell you for twenty quid right now, coin down, if the chance offered.
An' I ain't goin' to love you, so you can put that in your pipe 'n' smoke
it."

"But as I was about to say when so rudely interrupted by your 'fectionate
ways--"

Here he broke off to tilt to his mouth the opened bottle Kwaque handed
him. He sighed, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and proceeded.

"'Tis a strange thing, son, this silly matter of beer. Kwaque, the
Methusalem-faced ape grinnin' there, belongs to me. But by my faith do I
belong to beer, bottles 'n' bottles of it 'n' mountains of bottles of it
enough to sink the ship. Dog, truly I envy you, settin' there
comfortable-like inside your body that's untainted of alcohol. I may own
you, and the man that gives me twenty quid will own you, but never will a
mountain of bottles own you. You're a freer man than I am, Mister Dog,
though I don't know your name. Which reminds me--"

He drained the bottle, tossed it to Kwaque, and made signs for him to
open the remaining one.

"The namin' of you, son, is not lightly to be considered. Irish, of
course, but what shall it be? Paddy? Well may you shake your head.
There's no smack of distinction to it. Who'd mistake you for a
hod-carrier? Ballymena might do, but it sounds much like a lady, my boy.
Ay, boy you are. 'Tis an idea. Boy! Let's see. Banshee Boy? Rotten.
Lad of Erin!"

He nodded approbation and reached for the second bottle. He drank and
meditated, and drank again.

"I've got you," he announced solemnly. "Killeny is a lovely name, and
it's Killeny Boy for you. How's that strike your honourableness?--high-
soundin', dignified as a earl or . . . or a retired brewer. Many's the
one of that gentry I've helped to retire in my day."

He finished his bottle, caught Michael suddenly by both jowls, and,
leaning forward, rubbed noses with him. As suddenly released, with
thumping tail and dancing eyes, Michael gazed up into the god's face. A
definite soul, or entity, or spirit-thing glimmered behind his dog's
eyes, already fond with affection for this hair-grizzled god who talked
with him he knew not what, but whose very talking carried delicious and
unguessable messages to his heart.

"Hey! Kwaque, you!"

Kwaque, squatted on the floor, his hams on his heels, paused from the
rough-polishing of a shell comb designed and cut out by his master, and
looked up, eager to receive command and serve.