Louis Becke - Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories

“Let me speak,” he said.

“No,” shouted the teacher. “Who are you? You are a bad man, you are–”

Packenham made two strides over to Lilo and placed his heavy hand on his shoulder—“Sit down, you damned little psalm-singing kanaka hog, or I’ll knock your eye out. He shall speak.”

“Get thee hence, thou shielder of the devil’s children,” said a young, fat deacon, walking up to the trader and spitting contemptuously at his feet. “We want no such white men as thee among us here in Mâdurô.” In an instant Macpherson struck him between the eyes and sent him flying backwards among his fellow-deacons. Then came an angry roar from the people.

The trader turned to Packenham with a groan, “I’m a ruined man now, Captain Packenham, and all through this auld fule of a Papist.” Then he again tried to speak amidst the uproar.

“Sit down, damn you,” said Denison, the supercargo, “and don’t excite them any more. They’re ready for any mischief now. Oh, you she-devil,” and he darted into the middle of the room towards Rimé and his grand-daughter. A stout muscular girl had torn the child’s arms from the old man’s waist, and was beating her savagely in the face with clenched fists. Denison gave her an under-clip on the jaw and sent her down, and in a few seconds the old man and child were the centre of a struggling group—the white men hitting out right and left to save them from being murdered. The teacher’s wife, a tall, graceful young woman—with whom Denison had been exchanging surreptitious glances a few minutes before—weeping copiously the while, aided them by belabouring the backs of the women who were endeavouring to get at the prostrate figure of the little girl. But Packenham, Macpherson, and the supercargo were too much for the natives, and soon cleared a space around them.

“Take them to the ship, Captain Packenham,” said the teacher’s wife pantingly, in English. “These people are mad now. Go—go at once.”

Picking up the frail figure of the old man, the captain, followed by Macpherson and the supercargo, soon gained the boat through a shower of stones and other missiles. Ten minutes later they were on board the Palestine.

“What a devil of a row!” said Packenham, as he clinked his glass against that of Macpherson, who, after the exciting events of the past hour, had been induced to take a nip to steady his nerves; “you ought to be d–d well ashamed of yourself, Mac, to be mixed up in a fight over a Papist. What would Mr. MacBain say, eh?”

“It’s a verra bad business for me,” said Macpherson ruefully. “Ye’ll have to come back for me next month and tak’ me awa’ from Mâdurô. I’ll do no more business here, I can see.”

“Right you are, Mac,” and Packenham grasped his hand. “I will come back for you, if it takes me a month of Sundays to beat against the trades. And you’re a white man, Mac; and I’ll never laugh at MacBain nor Aberdeen theology any more.”

That night, as the captain of the Palestine slept upon the skylight, old Rimé, who, with the child, lay upon the deck just beneath Packenham, rose softly to his knees and peered into the white man’s face. He was sleeping soundly. Rimé touched his grandchild with his foot. She awoke, and together they pressed their lips to the skipper’s hand. Then, without a sound, they stole along the deck, clambered over the brig’s low side, dropped into the water and swam ashore.

When daylight came the Palestine was rolling heavily to a sweeping westerly swell, with the wind piping hard through her cordage as she strained at her cable. The absence of old Rimé and the child was not discovered till coffee time; the mate thought they had gone to sleep in the hold.

“They’ve swum ashore in the night, Pack,” said the supercargo to Packenham. “I believe the old fellow will be content to die of starvation—hallo, here’s Mac coming off in his boat!”

In less than ten minutes the trader’s boat was close to the ship, and Macpherson, bringing her up to the wind close under the brig’s stern, hailed Packenham.

“Hae ye seen anything of the old man Rimé?”

“No,” answered the captain; “the old fool cleared out last night. Isn’t he on shore?”

“No. And there’s a canoe missing from the beach, and I believe the auld Papist fule has taken the wee bit lassie wi’ him, and thinks he can get to Ponape, whaur there’s ‘Katolikos’ in plenty. And Ponape is sax hundred miles awa’.”

“Well, come aboard and get some breakfast.”

“Man, I’m going after the old fule! He’s got no sail and canna be twenty mile awa’. I’ll pick him up before he gets to Milli Lagoon, which is only saxty miles from here.”

Packenham swore. “You infernal ass! Are you going to sea in a breeze like this by yourself? Where’s your crew?”

“The deevils wadna’ come wi’ me to look for a Papist. And I’m not going to let the auld fule perish.”

“Then come alongside and take a couple of our Savage Island boys. I can spare them.”

“No, no, captain. I’m not going tae delay ye when ye’re bound to the eastward and I’m going the ither way. Ye’ll find me here safe enough when ye come back in anither month. And I’ll pick up the auld deevil and the wee bit lassie before mid-day.”

And then, with his red beard spreading out across his shoulders, Macpherson let his boat pay off before the wind. In an hour he was out of sight.

Three weeks afterwards the Sadie Perkins sperm whaler of New Bedford, came across a boat, five hundred miles west of Mâdurô. In the stern sheets lay that which had once been Macpherson, the “auld fule Papist, and the wee bit lassie.”

Blackett, the new trader at Guadalcanar in the Solomons, was entertaining a visitor, an old fellow from a station fifty miles distant, who had sailed over in his cutter to “have a pitch” with his nearest white neighbour. And the new man—new to this particular island—made much of his grizzled visitor and listened politely to the veteran’s advice on many subjects, ranging from “doctoring” of perished tobacco with molasses to the barter of a Tower musket for a “werry nice gal.”

The new trader’s house looked “snugger’n anything he’d ever seed,” so the old trader had told him; and Blackett was pleased and very liberal with the liquor. He had been but a few months on the island, and already his house was furnished, in a rude fashion, better than that of any other trader in the region. He was a good host; and the captains of the Fiji, Queensland, and Samoan “blackbirders” liked to visit him and loll about the spacious sitting-room and drink his grog and play cards—and tell him that his wife was “the smartest and prettiest woman in the group.”

Blackett was especially vain of the young Bonin Island half-caste wife who had followed his varying fortunes from her home in the far north-west Pacific to the solitary, ghostly outlier of Polynesia—lonely Easter Island, and thence to and fro amongst a hundred other islands. He was vain of her beauty—the beauty that had led him to almost abandon any intention of returning to civilisation; he was vain of the dark, passionate eyes, the soft, wavy hair, and the proud little mouth inherited from her Lusitanian father. Of this latter person, however, neither Blackett nor Cerita, his wife, were over-proud—he was a notorious old scamp and ex-pirate, even for that part of the Pacific, and Cerita knew that Blackett had simply bought her from him as he would buy a boat, or a bolt of canvas.

Blackett, finding it impossible to make old Hutton drunk or get him to turn in, resigned himself entirely to the old pirate, who, glancing to the far end of the room, to where Cerita and his own wife, a tall, lithe-limbed Aoba woman, were lying together on a mat smoking cigarettes, proceeded to pour out the story of his countless murders and minor villainies.