Читать книгу The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - Becke Louis - Страница 2

‘Reo was a short, squat Malayan, with a face like a skate, barring his eyes, which were long, narrow slits, apparently expressing nothing but supreme indifference to the world in general. But they would light up sometimes with a merry twinkle when the old rogue would narrate some of his past villainies.

He came to Samoa in the old, old days—long before Treaties, and Imperial Commissioners, and other gilded vanities were dreamt of by us poor, hard-working traders. He seemed to have dropped from the sky when one afternoon, as Tom Denison, the supercargo, and some of his friends sat on Charley the Russian’s verandah, drinking lager, he marched up to them, sat down on the steps, and said, “Good evening.”

“Hallo,” said Schlüter, the skipper of the Anna Godeffrey. “Who are you? Where do you come from?”

‘Reo waved a short, stumpy and black clay pipe to and fro, and replied vaguely—

“Oh, from somewhere.”

Some one laughed, surmising correctly enough that he had run away from a ship; then they remembered that no vessel had even touched at Apia for a month. (Later on he told Denison that he had jumped overboard from a Baker’s Island guano-man, as she was running down the coast, and swum ashore, landing at a point twenty miles distant from Apia. The natives in the various villages had given him food, so when he reached the town he was not hungry.)

“What do you want, anyway?” asked Schlüter.

“Some tobacco, please. And a dollar or two. I can pay you back.”

“When?” said Hamilton the pilot incredulously.

The pipe described a semicircle. “Oh, to-morrow night—before, perhaps.”

They gave him some tobacco and matches, and four Bolivian “iron” half-dollars. He got up and went across to Volkner’s combined store and grog shanty, over the way.

“He’s gone to buy a bottle of square-face,” said Hamilton.

“He deserves it,” said Denison gloomily. “A man of his age who could jump overboard and swim ashore to this rotten country should be presented with a case of gin—and a knife to cut his throat with after he has finished it.”

In about ten minutes the old fellow came out of Volkner’s store, carrying two or three stout fishing-lines, several packets of hooks, and half a dozen ship biscuits. He grinned as he passed the group on the verandah, and then squatting down on the sward near by began to uncoil the lines and bend on the hooks.

Denison was interested, went over to him, and watched the swift, skilful manner in which the thin brown fingers worked.

“Where are you going to fish?” he inquired.

The broad, flat face lit up. “Outside in the dam deep water—sixty, eighty fa’am.”

Denison left him and went aboard the ancient, cockroach-infested craft of which he was the heartbroken supercargo. Half an hour later ‘Reo paddled past the schooner in a wretched old canoe, whose outrigger was so insecurely fastened that it threatened to come adrift every instant. The old man grinned as he recognised Denison; then, pipe in mouth, he went boldly out through the passage between the lines of roaring surf into the tumbling blue beyond.