Читать книгу Seibert of the Island - Gordon Young - Страница 7

Old Tom Combe was a curiously humble fellow, with square-cut chin-whiskers and a round-shouldered slump. Almost everyone thought that he was half-drunk most of the time, but he hardly drank at all—a little rum now and then to warm his old bones, and that watered. He was a gentle, helpless sort of secretive old fellow, with a strange haze in his washed-out blue eyes. Life, after a hard drubbing, had surprised him with wealth and two daughters, to whom he gave everything that he had.

Years and years before—twenty-five or thirty—he and two other men known as Brundage and Waller had come to Pulotu. No one knew anything of them; not many people ever learned much, though in the course of furtive whisperings it was said that they were escaped convicts from Australia. Some fellow said that he had seen a scar on Waller's palm that was put only on the worst convicts. A peculiar scar had been on the inside of his hand.

Waller, a gaunt, bony giant of a man, set up as a trader. He had much luck, though some of it was said to be of questionable legality. He was a money-maker, with hard black eyes and a driving aggressiveness that enabled him to do things that were not finely scrupulous. Nobody could impose upon him, and he gave nothing to anybody—yet everything to Combe, who sat about idly, chewing tobacco and dozing in shady places.

Combe married. Some said that Waller picked the girl, a child of teasing sweetness, a native. Waller never married.

Waller built up a big plantation. He saw the increasing demand for copra, and put in groves of cocoanuts—nothing but cocoanuts. He was jealously determined to be the biggest planter on Pulotu, and he built the biggest house on the island—a big barn of a place—where he and the Combes lived together. Everyone with whom he came in contact was a little afraid of him, excepting Combe, who knew him best. But Waller's gaunt frame, his black eyes, the scar in his palm and what it was supposed to denote, together with his aggressive manner, that might easily be taken for menace, caused people to be uneasy about his anger.

For some reason Waller disliked the Germans. He, and everyone in the islands in those days, called them "Dutchmen"—usually "damned Dutchmen." The plantation that adjoined his on the north was owned by a German named Seibert—Adolph Seibert. Waller was reported to have said at some time or other—at any rate the remark was often credited to him—that he was honestly entitled to anything he could get by hook or crook out of a Dutchman; but as he was not the sort of man of whom personal questions were asked, nobody inquired what he meant, or if, indeed, he had said such a thing. The supposition among the Pulotu idlers, who endlessly discussed other people's affairs, was that at some time in his life Waller had been cheated by a German, and bore the race a grudge. Some sort of quarrel, over money or land—perhaps both—existed between Seibert and Waller.

Though Seibert was a large man, fleshy, of powerful body, he had an appearance of perpetual good-nature, even of heartiness, and seemed always trying to be agreeable. Waller had once called him "a white-livered thief" in the hearing of many people, and for a moment Seibert's big, full round face had been black with the rush of hot blood; then he had turned and walked off, and everybody said that he was a coward.

However, it was admitted that Seibert knew more about tropical agriculture than any other planter, and more persistently than any of the planters cleared out the jungle. Waller, with a sombre air of triumph, frequently said that he would live to see Seibert ruin himself because he raised flowers and shrubs, experimented with cotton, tried coffee, grapes, planted corn and cane, and much else besides cocoanuts, which Waller almost fiercely maintained was the only thing that the island was good for.

But Waller's prophecy tragically failed him. While riding on a slippery slope he had a fall that carried the horse and himself, beast over man, down a mountain-side.

Natives plaited a hammock between two poles and carried him along trails and through groves of his own planting to the barracks of a house (he thought it a mansion) where he and the Combes lived, in great rooms that seemed half empty because they were much too large for their furniture.

The only physician on the island, Dr. Lemaitre, expected Waller to die any minute. At the Pulotu Club, where idlers gathered to drink warm champagne, Dr. Lemaitre who was short and rather stout, vowed with excited emphasis that every bone between knees and neck was broken. Yet Waller lived on, day after day. Combe and his wife, the dainty, dark, and now sad Aiana, moved in helpless distress about his bedroom.

Waller would lie motionless, perhaps unconscious, for hours, even half-days at a time; then for a little while he would know clearly of what he talked of, but often he was out of his head and said strange things. Whenever this began Combe, with a kind of agitated insistence, a sort of fussy, nervous haste, would get out whoever was in the room and close the door on them. Through all those days and nights he hardly left Waller's bedside; and when Waller began muttering it was Combe who grew feverish, and in a way very unlike his usual hazy-eyed manner he would look about with startled anxiety, as if suspicious of what might be lurking in the shadows.

Waller was a big-boned man, one of the indestructible kind, tougher for the storms he had been through. When he appeared to know what he was saying he advised Combe about business matters, warning him to stick to cocoanuts, just cocoanuts, to plant more and more, and to remember how people had gone to ruin by meddling with cotton and other ventures.

At times when Waller was quiet, sleeping, or in a stupor, lying back half dead, old Combe would sit huddled, elbows on knees, and pathetically stare at the table, littered with papers, catalogues, bills, letters. A child among cuneiform tablets could not have known less of their meaning. Combe scarcely knew one letter of the alphabet from another.