Читать книгу The Sin of Monsieur Pettipon, and other humorous tales - Richard Edward Connell - Страница 6

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That night Mr. Pottle finished the book, and dreamed, as he had dreamed on many a night since the lure of the South Seas first cast a spell on him, that in a distant, sun-loved isle, bright with greens and purples, he reclined beneath the mana-mana-hine (or umbrella fern) on his own paepae (or platform), a scarlet pareu (or breech-clout) about his middle, a yellow hibiscus flower in his hair, while the kukus (or small green turtle-doves) cooed in the branches of the pevatvii (or banana-tree), and Bunnidori (that is, she, with the Lips of Love), a tawny maid of wondrous beauty, played softly to him on the ukulele. The tantalizing fragrance of a bowl of popoi (or pudding) mingled in his nostrils with the more delicate perfume of the golden blossoms of the puu-epu (or mulberry-tree). A sound in the jungle, a deep boom! boom! boom! roused him from this reverie.

"What is it, O Bunnidori?" he asked.

"'Tis a feast, O my Pottle, Lord of the Menikes (that is, white men)," lisped his companion.

"Upon what do the men in the jungle feast, O plump and pleasing daughter of delight?" inquired Mr. Pottle, who was up on Polynesian etiquette.

She lowered her already low voice still lower.

"Upon the long pig that speaks," she whispered.

A delicious shudder ran down the spine of the sleeping Mr. Pottle, for from his reading he knew that "the long pig that speaks" means—man!

For Mr. Pottle had one big ambition, one great suppressed desire. It was the dearest wish of his thirty-six years of life to meet a cannibal, a real cannibal, face to face, eye to eye.

Next day he sold his barber's shop. Two months and seventeen days later he was unpacking his trunk in the tiny settlement of Vait-hua, in the Marquesas Islands, in the heart of the South Seas.

The air was balmy, the sea deep purple, the nodding palms and giant ferns of the greenest green were exactly as advertised; but when the first week or two of enchantment had worn off, Mr. Pottle owned to a certain feeling of disappointment.

He tasted popoi and found it rather nasty; the hotel in which he stayed—the only one—was deficient in plumbing, but not in fauna. The natives—he had expected great things of the natives—were remarkably like underdone Pullman porters wrapped in bandana handkerchiefs. They were not exciting, they exhibited no inclination to eat Mr. Pottle or one another, they coveted his pink shirt, and begged for a drink from his bottle of Sweet Lilac Tonic.

He mentioned his disappointment at these evidences of civilization to Tiki Tiu, the astute native who kept the general store.

Mr. Pottle's mode of conversation was his own invention. From the books he had read he improvised a language. It was simple. He gave English words a barbaric sound, usually by suffixing "um" or "ee," shouted them at the top of his voice into the ear of the person with whom he was conversing, and repeated them in various permutations. He addressed Tiki Tiu with brisk and confident familiarity.

"Helloee, Tiki Tiu. Me wantum see can-balls. Can-balls me wantum see. Me see can-balls wantum."

The venerable native, who spoke seventeen island dialects and tongues, and dabbled in English, Spanish, and French, appeared to apprehend his meaning; indeed, one might almost have thought he had heard this question before, for he answered promptly:

"No more can-balls here. All Baptists."

"Where are can-balls? Can-balls where are? Where can-balls are?" demanded Mr. Pottle.

Tiki Tiu closed his eyes and let blue smoke filter through his nostrils. Finally he said:

"Isle of O-pip-ee."

"Isle of O-pip-ee?" Mr. Pottle grew excited. "Where is? Is where?"

"Two hundred miles south," answered Tiki Tiu.

Mr. Pottle's eyes sparkled. He was on the trail.

"How go there? Go there how? There go how?" he asked.

Tiki Tiu considered. Then he said:

"I take. Nice li'l' schooner."

"How much?" asked Mr. Pottle. "Much how?"

Tiki Tiu considered again.

"Ninety-three dol's," he said.

"Goodum!" cried Mr. Pottle, and counted the proceeds of 186 hair-cuts into the hand of Tiki Tiu.

"You take me to-mollow? To-mollow you take me? Me you take to-mollow? To-mollow? To-mollow? To-mollow?" asked Mr. Pottle.

"Yes," promised Tiki Tiu; "to-mollow."

Mr. Pottle stayed up all night packing; from time to time he referred to much-thumbed copies of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Green Isles, Brown Man-Eaters, and a White Man."

Tiki Tiu's nice li'l' schooner deposited Mr. Pottle and his impedimenta on the small, remote Isle of O-pip-ee; Tiki Tiu agreed to return for him in a month.

"This is something like it," exclaimed Mr. Pottle as he unpacked his camera, his ukulele, his razors, his canned soup, his heating outfit, and his bathing-suit. Only the wild parrakeets heard him; save for their calls, an ominous silence hung over the thick foliage of O-pip-ee. There was not the ghost of a sign of human habitation.

Mr. Pottle, vaguely apprehensive of sharks, pitched his pup-tent far up on the beach; to-morrow would be time enough to look for cannibals.

He lay smoking and thinking. He was happy. The realization of a life's ambition lay, so to speak, just around the corner. To-morrow he could turn that corner—if he wished.

He squirmed as something small nibbled at his hip-bone, and he wondered why writers of books on the South Seas make such scant mention of the insects. Surely they must have noticed the little creatures, which had, he discovered, a way of making their presence felt.

He wondered, too, now that he came to think of it, if he hadn't been a little rash in coming alone to a cannibal-infested isle with no weapons of defense but a shot-gun, picked up at a bargain at the last minute, and his case of razors. True, in all the books by explorers he had read, the explorer never once had actually been eaten; he always lived to write the book. But what about the explorers who had not written books? What had happened to them?

He flipped a centipede off his ankle, and wondered if he hadn't been just a little too impulsive to sell his profitable barber-shop, to come many thousand miles over strange waters, to maroon himself on the lonely Isle of O-pip-ee. At Vait-hua he had heard that cannibals do not fancy white men for culinary purposes. He gave a little start as he looked down at his own bare legs and saw that the tropic sun had already tinted them a coffee hue.

Mr. Pottle did not sleep well that night; strange sounds made his eyes fly open. Once it was a curious scuttling along the beach. Peeping out from his pup-tent, he saw half a dozen tupa (or giant tree-climbing crabs) on a nocturnal raid on a cocoanut-grove. Later he heard the big nuts come crashing down. The day shift of insects had quit, and the night shift, fresh and hungry, came to work; inquisitive vampire bats butted their soft heads against his tent.

At dawn he set about finding a permanent abode. He followed a small fresh-water stream two hundred yards inland, and came to a coral cave by a pool, a ready-made home, cool and, more important, well concealed. He spent the day settling down, chasing out the bats, putting up mosquito-netting, tidying up. He dined well off cocoanut milk and canned sardines, and was so tired that he fell asleep before he could change his bathing-suit for pajamas. He slept fairly well, albeit he dreamed that two cannibal kings were disputing over his prostrate form whether he would be better as a ragout or stuffed with chestnuts.

Waking, he decided to lie low and wait for the savages to show themselves, for he knew from Tiki Tiu that the Isle of O-pip-ee was not more than seven miles long and three or four miles wide; sooner or later they must pass near him. He figured that there was logic in this plan, for no cannibal had seen him land; therefore he knew that the cannibals were on the isle, but they did not know that he was. The advantage was his.