Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set - James Norman Hall - Страница 57

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A path, growing daily more distinct, and winding picturesquely among the trees, led from Bounty Bay along the crest of the seaward slopes as far as Christian’s house, at the western extremity of the settlement. Close to his dwelling a second path branched inland, along the side of a small valley. This led to Brown’s Well, a tiny, spring-fed stream which descended in a succession of pools and slender cascades, shaded by great trees and the fern-covered walls of the ravine itself. The uppermost pool had been transformed into a rock cistern where the drinking water for the settlement was obtained. A larger one, below, was used for bathing, and during the late afternoon was reserved for the exclusive use of the women. This was the happiest hour of the day for them.

At the bathing pool they cast off, with the strange English names bestowed on some of them by the mutineers, the constraint they felt in the presence of the white men. But in the midst of their laughter and cheerful talk there were moments when a chance remark concerning Tahiti, or a passing reference to something connected with their old life there, would cast a shadow on their spirits, passing slowly, like the shadow of a cloud on the high slopes of the valley.

One afternoon several of the women were sunning themselves on a great rock which stood at the brink of the pool. Their bath was over and they were combing and drying their hair, while some of them twined wreaths of sweet fern. Moetua had spoken of the tiare maohi, the white, fragrant Tahitian gardenia.

“Say no more!” said Sarah, her eyes glistening with tears. “We know that we shall never see it again. Alas! I can close my eyes and smell its perfume now!”

“Tell me, Moetua, if all were to do again, would you leave Tahiti?” Susannah asked.

“Yes. Minarii is here, and am I not his wife? This is a good land, and it pleases him, so I must be content. Already I think less often than I did of Tahiti. Do not you others find it so?”

“Not I!” exclaimed Susannah bitterly. “I would never come again. Never! Never!”

“But we were told before we left that the ship was not to return,” remarked Balhadi quietly. “Christian made that known to all of us.”

“Who could have believed it!” said Sarah. “And Mills and the others said it was not so, that we would surely return. ... Do you remember, you others, the morning after we set sail from Matavai, when the wind changed and the ship was steered to the westward?”

“And we passed so close to the reefs of Eimeo?” Susannah put in. “Do I not remember! Martin stood with me by the rail with his arm tight around me. He knew that I would leap into the sea and swim ashore if given the chance!”

“Quintal held me by the two hands,” remarked Sarah, “else I should have done the same.”

“Why did the ship leave so quickly?” asked Nanai. “No one in Matavai knew that she was to sail that night.”

“They feared that you would change your minds at the last moment,” Moetua replied.

“That is how I was caught,” said Prudence. “Mills went to my uncle with his pockets filled with nails, the largest kind; he must have had a score of them. My uncle’s eyes were hungry when he saw them. ‘You shall spend the night on the ship, with the white man,’ he told me. So he was given the nails and I went with Mills. When I awoke at daybreak, the vessel was at sea.”

“And you like him now, your man?” Hutia asked.

Prudence shrugged her shoulders. “He is well enough.”

“He is mad about you,” said Susannah. “That is plain.”

“He is like a father and a lover in one,” the girl replied. “I can do as I please with him.”

“For my part,” observed Moetua, “I would not change places with any of you. I prefer a husband of our own race. These white men are strange; their thoughts are not like ours. We can never understand them.”

“I do not find it so,” said Balhadi. “My man, Smith, might almost be one of us. I can read his thoughts even when his speech is not clear to me. White men are not very different from those of our blood.”

“It may be so,” replied Moetua, doubtfully. “Maimiti says the same. She seems happy with Christian.”

“It is different with Maimiti,” Sarah put in. “Christian speaks our tongue like one of us. The others learn more slowly.”

Prudence had finished combing her hair and was beginning to plait it rapidly, with skillful fingers. She glanced up at Sarah: “How is it with you and Quintal?” she asked.

“How is he as a lover, you mean?”

“Yes, tell us that.”

Sarah glanced at the others with a wry smile. “Night comes. He sits with his chin on his great fists. What are his thoughts? I do not know. Perhaps he has none. He is silent. How could it be otherwise when he is only beginning to learn our speech? He pays no heed to me. I wait, well knowing what is to come. At last it comes. When he is wearied, he rolls on his back and snores. Atira! There is no more to tell.”

Prudence threw back her head and burst into laughter. The others joined in and the glade rang with their mirth. Sarah’s smile broadened; a moment later she was laughing no less heartily than the rest.

“What a strange man!” said Nanai, wiping the tears of mirth from her eyes.

Sarah nodded. “He thinks only of himself. I shall never understand his ways.”

“What of the men who have no wives?” asked Moetua, presently.

“How miserable they are!” said Hutia, laughing. “Who is to comfort them?”

“Not I,” remarked Balhadi. “I am content with my man, and will do nothing to cause him pain or anger.”

“Why should he be angry for so small a thing?” asked Nanai.

“You know nothing of white men,” said Prudence. “They consider it a shameful thing for the woman of one man to give herself to another. Nevertheless, I will be one of those to be kind to the wifeless men.”

“And I!” exclaimed Susannah. “I fear Martin as much as I hate him, but I shall find courage to deceive him. To make a fool of him will comfort me.”

“This matter can be kept among ourselves,” said Moetua. “The white men need never know of it.”

“Christian would be angry, if he knew,” remarked Balhadi gravely. “It is as Prudence says: the white men regard their women as theirs alone. Trouble may easily come of this.”

“Then Christian should have brought more women, one for each,” replied Moetua. “He must know that no man can be deprived of a woman his life long.”

“He knows,” said Susannah. “He is a chief, like Minarii, and would protect me from Martin, if it came to that.”

“And it will come to that,” observed Prudence.

“Yes,” put in Nanai. “You should go to Christian now, and tell him how you are treated. Martin is a nohu.”

“He is worse than one,” Susannah replied gloomily. “I believe that he has not once bathed since we came here. I can endure his cruelty better than his filth.... Alas! Let us speak of something more pleasant. I try to forget Martin when here with you.”

All of these women were young, with the buoyant and happy dispositions common to their race. A moment later they were chatting and laughing as gaily as though they had not a care in the world.

The garden was now in a flourishing condition. The red, volcanic soil was exceedingly rich, and the beds of yams, sweet potatoes, and the dry-land taro called tarua gave promise of an early and abundant harvest. The pale green shoots of the sugar cane were beginning to appear, and young suckers of the banana plants were opening in the sun. An abundance of huge old breadfruit trees had been found in the main valley, but Brown had, nevertheless, carefully planted the young trees brought from Tahiti, clearing a few yards of land here and there in favoured spots.

Like the plants, the livestock loosed on the island throve well. The hogs grew fat on the long tubers of the wild yam, and the place was a paradise for the fowls, with neither bird nor beast of prey to molest them, and food everywhere to be had for the picking. The small, brown, native rat had, as yet, no taste for eggs and did not harm the young chicks. The fowls began to increase rapidly, and the cheerful crowing of the cocks was a welcome sound, relieving the profound silence which had been so oppressive to all during the first days on shore. On the further side of the high peak, to the west of the settlement, a house and a pen had been made for the goats, where they were fed and watered each day.

From the main ridge of the island to the cliffs on the southern side the land sloped gently, forming an outer valley as rich as that on the northern side. This was named the Auté Valley, from the circumstance that the first gardens of the auté, or cloth-plant, fetched from Tahiti, were set out here.

Brown had chosen to live on this southern slope, remote from the others; his little thatched house stood in a sunny glade, embowered in the foliage of lofty trees and near a trickle of water sufficient for one family’s needs. He and Jenny had cleared a path through the thickets behind and above them, over the ridge and down to join another path which led through the heart of the Main Valley to the settlement.

Jenny, Brown’s girl, though small and comely, had all the resolution the gardener lacked. They had lived together on shore during the long months at Tahiti while Captain Bligh was collecting his cargo of breadfruit plants, and the thought of returning to her had been Brown’s only solace after his involuntary part in the mutiny. Her feeling toward him was that of a mother and protectress, for Jenny was one of those women of exceptionally strong character who choose as husbands small, mild men, in need of sterner mates.

Like Brown, Minarii had a deep love of nature and of growing things. Nearly every evening he came to exchange a word with Jenny and to mark the growth of the young plants; little by little, a curious friendship sprang up between the stern war-chief and the lonely English gardener. A man of few words in his own tongue, Brown was incapable of learning any other, but Jenny spoke English by this time, and with her as interpreter he spent many an evening listening to Minarii’s tales of old wars on Tahiti, and of how he had received this wound or that.

One evening late in February, Minarii and Moetua, his wife, came to Brown’s house. The native set down a heavy basket, and his grim face relaxed as he took Brown’s hand.

“We have been down over the southern cliffs,” Moetua told Jenny. “The birds are beginning to lay. Here are eggs of the kaveka and oio, which nest on the face of the cliff. You will find them good. Minarii made a rope fast at the top and we clambered down. Fasto came as well.”

“Thank them,” Brown put in to Jenny. “I shudder to think of any man, to say nothing of women, taking such risks!”

Minarii turned to his wife. “Go and eat, you two, while I prepare our part.”

While Brown went to fetch some wild yams, Minarii kindled a fire, heated several stones, and dropped them into a calabash of water, which began to boil at once. Eggs were then dropped in till the calabash was full, and the yams hastily scraped and roasted on the coals. The two men made a hearty meal.

The moon came up presently and the visitors rose to leave. When they were gone, Jenny spread a mat before the doorstep and sat down to enjoy the beauty of the night. She patted the mat beside her, and Brown stretched himself out, with his head on her knee. The night was windless; the moonlight softened the outlines of the house and lay in pools of silver on the little clearing. Smoothing Brown’s hair absently, Jenny recounted the gossip of the settlement.

“I have been talking with Moetua,” she said. “There is trouble coming, and Williams is the cause of it. Do you know why he sent Fasto with them to-day?”

“I suppose he wanted some eggs,” said the gardener, drowsily.

“Perhaps he likes eggs, but he likes Hutia better. He meets her in the bush each time he can get Fasto out of the way. And Tararu is a jealous husband, though a fool. Jealous! Yet he would like to be the lover of Mills’s girl!”

“Of Prudence? That child?”

“Child!” Jenny gazed down at him, shaking her head wonderingly. “You yourself are only a child,” she said. “You understand only your plants and trees.”

John Williams was working alone on his house, while Martin and Mills carried plank up the path from Bounty Bay. The framing of the two-story dwelling was now finished, and he was sawing and notching the rafters. The three women had worked well in preparing the thatch, and he planned to finish the roof before beginning on the walls and floor. It was close to midday and the sun was hot in the clearing. Williams was naked to the waist; the sweat streamed down his chest, matted with coarse black hair. He put down his saw and dashed the perspiration from his eyes.

“Fasto!” he called.

A short, dark, sturdy woman stepped out of the shed where their cooking was done. She was of humble birth, silent, docile, and industrious. Williams appreciated to the full her devotion to him, as well as her skill in every native pursuit.

“Dinner ready?” he asked. “Fetch me a pail of water.”

She dashed the water over his head and shoulders, while he scrubbed the grime from his face. Then she brought his dinner of roasted breadfruit, yams, and a dozen terns’ eggs, spreading broad green leaves for a tablecloth beside him on the ground. He squeezed her arm as she leaned over him. “Hard as nails! Sit ye down and eat with me, old girl.” She shook her head. “Oh, damn yer heathen notions! ... Any more eggs? No?”

Ignorant of the native tongue, which he held in contempt, Williams had forced the woman to learn a few words of English. Tears came into her eyes, for she felt that she had been remiss in her wifely duty. Struggling to express herself, she murmured: “Fetch more eggs, supper.”

“Aye. There’s a good lass. Work hard and eat hearty, that’s Jack Williams.”

As he rose, he gave her a kiss and a pat on the back. Fasto smiled with pleasure as she went off to the cookhouse with the remnants of the meal.

Toward mid-afternoon, when he paused once more in his work, the blacksmith had put in nine hours on the house and accomplished much. Fasto had gone off an hour earlier with her basket, toward the cliffs on the south side of the island. Martin and Mills were still engaged in their task at the cove. Scrubbing himself clean, Williams hitched up the kilt of tapa around his waist and glanced quickly up and down the path. Sounds of hammering came from McCoy’s house, but no one was in sight. Crossing the path, he disappeared into the bush.

A quarter of a mile south of the settlement, in the midst of the forest, an old pandanus tree spread its thorny leaves to the sun. Its trunk, supported on a pyramid of aerial roots, rose twenty feet without a branch. Hutia was descending cautiously, taking advantage of every roughness of the bark. The ground was littered with the leaves she had plucked for thatch. She sprang down lightly from the tree and began to gather up her leaves in bundles, working mechanically as she glanced this way and that and stopped to listen from time to time. Then suddenly she dropped her work and stepped into the shadow of a thick-spreading purau tree close by. Williams appeared, walking softly through the bush. He glanced aloft at the pandanus tree and down at the bundles of leaves on the ground. Peering about uncertainly, he heard the sound of soft laughter. Next moment the girl was in his arms.

“Where is Fasto?” she asked apprehensively.

“Never ye mind about her; she’ll not be back till dark.”

While Williams lingered in the bush and his mates toiled up from the cove with the day’s last load of plank, Prudence sat by the house, stripping thorns from a heap of pandanus leaves beside her. She was scarcely sixteen, small of stature and delicately formed, with a pale golden skin and copper-red hair.

She turned her head as she heard the sound of a footfall on the path. From the corner of her eye she saw Tararu approaching. Bending over her work as if unaware of his coming, she gave a little start when he spoke.

“Where are the others?” he asked.

“Aué! You frightened me!”

Tararu smiled, seating himself at her side. “Afraid of me? I must teach you better, some day when Mills is not so close.... Where are the other women?”

“Collecting leaves.”

“You have worked well. How many reeds of raufara are needed?”

“Two thousand,” said Prudence. “One thousand eight hundred and seventy are done.”

With eyes cast down upon her work, she began to sing softly, a rhythmic and monotonous little melody sung in Tahiti by the strolling players of the arioi society. Tararu bent his head to listen, chuckling silently at the broad double-meaning in the first verse. She began the second verse, and as he listened to the soft, childish voice, the man regarded her intently.

“A bird climbs the cliffs,

Robbing the nests of other birds,

Seeking eggs to feed her mate.

But the mate is not building a nest. No!

He is hiding in a thicket with another bird.”

Prudence sang on as if unaware that she had a listener, making no further mention of the doings of birds. After a futile attempt to catch her eye, Tararu rose and walked away inland. Like many philanderers, he felt the most tender solicitude concerning the virtue of his own wife.

Hutia was making her way down to the settlement with a heavy bundle of leaves on her back. She moved silently through the bush, with eyes alert, and was aware of her husband a full ten seconds before he knew of her approach. Her gait and posture changed at once, and she looked up wearily as the man drew near.

“Lay down your burden,” Tararu ordered.

She dropped the bundle of leaves with a sigh. “It was good of you to come.”

Tararu gazed down at her without a smile, but she returned his glance so calmly that his suspicions were shaken. He was deeply enamoured of her, though always ready for a flirtation with another girl, and he desired nothing more than to be convinced of her innocence. No guilty wife, he thought, could meet her husband so fearlessly. He smiled at last, took up the bundle, and led the way to the settlement.

One evening in early March, Hutia was making her way to the bathing pool. She had had words with Tararu, who had knocked her down while two of the native men stood by, and, wishing to nurse her anger alone, she had delayed her bath until an hour when the other women should have returned to the settlement.

She had no eyes for the beauty of the glade. Hedged in by thick bush, which made a green twilight at this hour, the place was deserted save for Prudence at her bath. The girl stood knee-deep in the water, her back to Hutia and enveloped to the waist in her unbounded hair. She had a small calabash in her hand and was bending to take up water when Hutia spoke.

“Make haste!” she said harshly. “I wish to bathe by myself.”

Prudence glanced coolly at the other girl. “Who are you? Queen of this island? Am I your servant, me, with a white man for husband?”

“Husband!” exclaimed Hutia angrily. “Aye, and you’d like to have mine as well. Take care! I have seen you looking at him with soft eyes!”

“Keep him!” Prudence said jeeringly, turning to face the other. “Keep him if you can!”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say!” Prudence laughed softly. “You keep him! A black-haired loose woman like you!”

She was of the ehu, or fair Maoris, and her words stung Hutia to the quick. “Red dog!”

“Sow!”

Hutia sprang on the smaller girl fiercely, seized her by the hair, and after a short tussle succeeded in throwing her down in the pool. There, astride of her enemy’s back and with hands buried in her hair, she held her under water, jerking at her head savagely till the younger girl was half drowned. At last she was satisfied. She stood up, turned her back scornfully, and began to bathe.

Prudence rose from the pool, donned her kilt and mantle with trembling hands, took up her calabash, and disappeared into the bush. Stopping to compose herself and to arrange her hair before she reached the settlement, she went straight to the cookhouse where she knew that Fasto would be at work.

“There is something I must tell you,” she said to the elder woman, who sat on a little three-legged stool as she grated a coconut for her fowls. “You have been kind to me. I am young and you have been like a mother. Now I must tell you, before the others begin to mock.”

“Aye, child, what is it?” said Fasto.

This simple and industrious woman had a soft heart, and the girl’s youth appealed to the mother in her. She took her hand and stroked it. “What is it, child?” she repeated.

Prudence hesitated before she spoke. “It is hard to tell, but will come best from one who loves you. Open your eyes! Williams is a good man and loves you, but all men are weak before women’s eyes. Hutia has desired him long. Now they meet each day in the bush, while you and Tararu are blind.... You do not believe me? Then go and see for yourself. Hide yourself near the great pandanus tree at the hour when Williams goes inland to bathe. Your man will come, and Hutia will steal through the bush to meet him.”

Fasto sat in silence, with bowed head and eyes filling with tears as she continued to stroke the girl’s hand.

“I cannot believe it, child, but I will do as you say. Should I find my husband with that woman ... There will be no sleep for me this night.”

When the moon rose on the following evening, Williams was striding along the path that led to McCoy’s house. Most of the inmates were already in bed, but Mary sat cross-legged on the floor, plaiting a mat of pandanus by the light of a taper of candlenuts. She was a woman of twenty-five, desperately homesick for Tahiti. Williams called to her softly.

“Mary! Eh, Mary! Is Will asleep?”

McCoy rose from his bed of tapa and crossed the dim-lit room to the door. “Jack? I was only resting. We’re dead beat, Matt and me.”

“Come outside.... Have ’ee seen Fasto?”

“No. What’s up?”

“She went off to fetch eggs; before I had my bath, that was, and not a sign o’ her since. I was cursing her for a lazy slut at supper time, but, by God, I’m afeared for her now! Her lazy! The best wench on the island, pretty or not!”

“I’ve seen naught of her,” said McCoy. “Wait, I’ll ask Mary.”

He went into the house, and Williams heard them whispering together. Presently he returned. “Aye, Mary’s seen her; she passed this way late in the afternoon. Mary gave her a hail, but she never turned her head. She’d her egging basket. Like enough she was making for the Rope.”

The blacksmith stood irresolute for some time before he spoke. “Thank ’ee, Will. I’ll be getting home. If she’s not back by morning, I’ll make a search.”

His heart was heavy and his thoughts sombre as he trudged home through the moonlit bush. Though he lay down on his sheets of clean tapa, smoothed by Fasto’s hands, he could not sleep.

At daybreak he set out with Martin and one of the native men. They launched the smaller canoe and ran her out through the breakers. The morning was calm, with a light air from the west, and as they paddled around Ship-Landing Point, they scanned the declivities above. Beyond the easternmost cape of the island, flanked by jagged rocks offshore, they entered the half-moon cove at the foot of the Rope. As the canoe rose high on a swell, the native gave an exclamation and pointed to the beach of sand at the base of the cliffs, where something lay huddled beneath a small pandanus tree.

“Steer for the shore!” the blacksmith ordered gruffly.

They had a near thing as a feathering sea swept them between two boulders, but Williams paddled mechanically, face set and eyes staring at the beach ahead. He was out of the canoe before it grounded; while the others held it against the backwash, he hastened across the narrow beach to the pandanus tree.

The cove was a lonely, eerie place, hemmed in by precipices many hundreds of feet in height. The western curve of the cliffs lay in full sunlight, which glinted on the plumage of a thousand sea fowl, sailing back and forth at a great height. Williams came trudging back, took from the canoe a mantle of native cloth, and returned to spread it gently over the bruised and bloodstained body of Fasto. He knelt down on the sand beside her. Hearing Martin’s step behind him, he motioned him away.

The others stared in silence for a moment, then walked quickly away along the foot of the cliffs. After a long interval, Williams hailed them. He was standing by the canoe with Fasto’s body, wrapped in tapa, in his arms. He laid her gently in the bilges; at a word from the native steersman, the little vessel shot out through the surf. Williams dropped his paddle and sat with shoulders bowed, silent and brooding, while the canoe rounded the cape and headed northwest for Bounty Bay.