Conn of the coral seas

Front matter

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Chapter I

I T was in the days of Edward, at Meliasi, capital of the New Cumberland Islands.

It was night, and Meliasi was quiet. Meliasi was usually quiet — forty-one nights out of every fortytwo to be explicit. On the forty-second night, the Brand Peters boat came in, and the capital to the end of its one and a half streets, and the last of its nineteen houses, burst into brief and vivid flower. Cocoanut torches flared; red-glassed hurricane lamps, unsteadily displayed by New Cumberland cannibals dancing the waves in canoes, warned the Brand Peters boat not to tear out her vitals on either end of a singularly vicious coral reef; bags of copra, of ivory nuts, fungus, pearl-shell, coffee, bush-vine rubber, were hurried down the wharf; everyone in the township recklessly asked everyone else to dinner, in view of the coming rare feast of fresh meats; the one hotel turned up its proprietorial sleeves, rolled out barrels of beer, brought forth cases of whisky, and set canvas stretchers, prudently, in the shades of the back verandah. ...

On the forty-one other nights, Meliasi went to bed at eight o’clock in the mosquito season and at half past nine in the “south-east.” If you and another gentleman, or several other gentlemen, happened to be playing poker, you might, of course, prefer to go on until daylight, with a “lay-off” of 1 an hour or so somewhere about twelve; or if you and yet another gentleman, French or English, happened to disagree, as gentlemen will over the cards or the dice, you might like to throw a knife at the other gentleman, or draw your Smith and Wesson to emphasize your views; and this might — as indeed it sometimes did — create such strong local interest, that Meliasi would get up from its beds and mosquito nets, and come out in its pajamas to argue about the result, and call for the cooky boys who, by common consent, were made to do all the burying.

But generally speaking, the town was quiet o’ nights. Wonderfully quiet, when you came to realize that the New Cumberlands by reason of the rivalries of two great European powers, were, in those days of Edward, the last, only spot upon ‘earth’s surface where nobody (except the cannibals, who, of course, were nobody, anyhow) owned anything at all, where there was no Government, no police, and consequently no law.

There was a British Commissioner perched on the top of a high hill, like St. Simeon Stylites on his tower (and not at all like any saint in any other way). There was a French Commissioner who ran a plantation on an island across the bay, and held, as did his brother of Great Britain, a watching brief for his country. They both watched — by asking each other to dinner, and making things pleasant for rare birds of steamer passengers. Also they ran in stray New Cumbe^rlandians who had shot white men (especially if the New Cumberlandian, imprudently, had eaten his game as well), and kept them for the next calling man-of-war, which promptly hanged them on general principles. Also they shut their eyes, as much as seemed good. . . .

The British Commissioner, on this quiet night, was engaged in watching his French confrere. His French confrere had watched him the last Sunday. (It was fresh turtle steak, dugong bacon, a salad and an omelette for which one would almost have sold one’s country.) Blackbury, not to be outdone, had provided a sea-slug soup which he was convinced Des Roseaux could not match if he were fifty times a Frenchman, and ten times over a “born artist in gastronomy” — as Des Roseaux, when warmed with imported wines, would claim to be.

They were not alone. Blackbury, some months before, had in a fit of boredom demanded a secretary from the Colonial Office authorities. He had as much use for a secretary as a frog has for feathers, but 'the Blackburys were well connected — what is better, usefully connected — so the Colonial Office, after asking only a few score questions and spending only a pound or two on printed forms, red tape and stamps, did what it knew it would do from the beginning, and despatched a clerk who had some sort of reason, apparently, for wanting to bury himself before he was dead. And Blackbury, thenceforward, had someone to play cards with every evening, and a decent bowler to lob him easy practice balls when he felt inclined to uphold British prestige in a good traditional way.

Up on the peaky top of the island, there was wind, though there was none below. In Meliasi harbour, there are many peaked islands, and houses are built on the top of almost every one, for that very benefit of the winds, also because the trade guns used by local chiefs do not carry to a hundred feet or more in height. Blackbury’s official island was so near to the township on the mainland that he could hear and see what was going on in the Avenue j Napoleon (where the four little stores and the one ] great bar were situated) and yet the Residency was ) often several degrees cooler than the town.

Tonight, the south-east trade, well established, i since it was July, and full mid-winter, crashed among] the palm-tree tops below the official verandah ; the ! surf, plainly to be seen in the flaring tropic moonlight at a distance of a mile or two away, sang aloud on the coral reef. It was cool — not more than sixtynine or seventy, here on the top of the island — and it was somehow, with the crash of the wind, and the song of the beating seas, and the racing of the moon among wild clouds, inspiriting. A night when things might happen. A night when one would not be sorry if they did.

Blackbury and Des Roseaux had finished the sea-slug soup — the Secretary refused it with one of his silent gestures — had fed upon viands cunningly disguised, upon salad and sweets, l^ad accepted coffee — such coffee as no one outside the plantation ji countries dreams of — from the hands of a Newr Cumberlandian dressed in a red rag and several! boar’s tusk’s bracelets — had strolled out to the verandah, and were leaning on the rail, smoking. Strong upon both, though they were old inhabitants of the islands, was the feeling of far-awayness, of having slipped across the utmost rim of the world, i that is known to most white dwellers of Melanesia. Stronger still was the instinct of silence, that hides ) the thought before it is uttered. j

It was nearly ten o’clock, and Meliasi, this being no steamer night, had largely gone to bed. The Frenchman and the Englishman, looking down across the tops of the wind-thrashed, moonlit palms, and over the narrow strait, saw a street that seemed to be paved with snow, so white was its coral sand surface under the moon; roofs made of unpainted iron that took the same moon so vividly as to look like the typical snowy roofs of an English Christmas card; furry-black shadows under verandah posts; windows invisible, dark as blinded eyes. No lights, save in front of the bar entrance, now closed down to a narrow side door. No people walking the coral sand. Once in a way a dance of shadows across the bright oblong that the bar-room doorway threw upon the road; a Pierrot play of arms and heads

and bottles Not quite all Meliasi was asleep,

it seemed, this windy-silver night.

Des Roseaux leaned his arms upon the rail, and sighed, partly because his France was very far away, and partly because the good wines liberally poured by Blackbury were getting in an after affect, and making him feel sad. He was a thin, bearded man with large eyes, and the look of one who carries a romantic story. He had none whatever, and could not have told anyone how, exactly, he had drifted to his present post in the New Cumberlands, or why he did not go away. Blackbury always startled strangers, and caused them to distrust, momentarily, the evidence of their own eyes, by his amazing resemblance to Tenniel’s portraits of John Bull — a resemblance which he did his best to keep up by wearing narrow whiskers, longish curling hair, w^hite waistcoats, and coats of dark cotton; besides a white-toothed, genial smile that was as much a part of his daily attire as his collar or his boots. He was a hearty man. They would, in Tenniel’s day, have described him as being “of a full habit of body.” He roared like a bull when he laughed, ate like an ostrich, had a flat taste in jokes, and not the slightest appearance of romance, within or without. He knew quite well why he had come to the World’s End of the New Cum'berlands, fifteen years ago, and why he proposed to stay there ; she was most beautiful, and very highly placed, and you are not to be told the story, because it is not credible.

Reginald Blackbury, having had his life, did not approve of ghosts who went back, when they were dead, and haunted the living. So he stayed in the New Cumberlands, and “watched” Great Britian’s interests.

Like many bluff, stupid-seeming English of his type, he had keen instincts scarcely recognized by himself. It was he, the gross John Bull, and not the keen Latin by his side, who first noticed that something unusual was afoot down in that quiet main street of Meliasi, where the bar-room shed its light upon the mimic coral snow. One could not see in, but One could see the shadow-play in the vivid glare cast by the naphtha lights, and things were undoubtedly becoming livelier.

Blackbury smoked quietly, and watched. Was not he watching his job?

It was not an ordinary bar-room row; if it had been, it would scarcely have interested him. Riley’s, for years, had been the spring and origin of almost every fight in Meliasi. This was something different. Men seemed to be moving about excitedly, talking with waved hands and emphatic gestures ; snatching hats, at last, and cramming them on heads. A trader appeared at the door of the bar, forcing a bottle into his pocket; he had bread in his hands, he vas hurriedly stowing it away about his person.

“Bread — provisions — at ten o’clock at night,” remarked Blackbury’s subconscious self, taking notes. His other self, at the same time, cut the end off a cigar, lighted it, and listened, more or less, to what Des Roseaux was saying about the next steamer. It seemed that a rumor had drifted up, through the “wireless” of a man-of-war, to the effect that there was a lady passenger on board, someone bound to the Mission as a guest, but nobody knew if it was true. The Mission rather thought not; they had not had any intimation by the previous steamer. Des Roseaux, nevertheless, excited by the ‘possibility, had hypnotized himself into the belief that she certainly was coming and that she was young and very fair.

“I feel it, I do not know how,” he explained. “I think she is going to come, she is going to -be beautiful, she will give some of us the occasion again to fall in love. . . .”

Another trader appeared in Riley’s doorway, a stocky man who cast a short thick shadow. This man wasted no time, as the first had done, disposing packages and talking. He crammed his hat -on his head, and made a straight bolt for the street. He was followed by others; Riley’s seemed vomiting forth every customer. Up on the top of the hill, in the roar of the trade, one could of course hear nothing, but one could almost see the shouting and talking. ...

“Not a white woman in this cursed island under thirty-five, I swear you,” went on Des Roseaux. “And for looks — ^bah! But this one, she will be new from the winds and snows of the south, that make beauty as they make spring flowers ; she will — ”

“By Gad!” cried Blackbury, interrupting without ceremony. “It’s Steve Conn again!’’

“Hurroo!” said the Frenchman, jumping up and beginning what he imagined to be a jig. “Begora, my spalpeen, are*they there again, sure? Jabers me, but I will back the wild Irishman against all the other whillaloos. Hurroo!” He waved his arms above his head.

Nobody noticed him. Blackbury was craning out to watch -the crowd below; the Secretary in the background w^as looking at his chief with an air of inquiry. He was new to the Cumberlands. He did not, apparently, understand them, nor did the Cumberlands, for the matter of that, understand him, save for a certain perception of social values that caused them to describe him, scornfully, as “one of the yaw-haws.”

“Gad,” said Blackbury again, “it’s that right enough. Well, they haven’t had a Conn hunt for a year now. Wish them joy of it.”

Des Roseaux evidently understood, for he uttered joyful little cries, and feigned to be a fox-hunter taking fences. “Tally-ho,” said the versatile Des Roseaux, quite unaffected by his audience’s neglect. “Tally-ho. Gone — gone off!” He hung over the verandah and waved.

In the moonlight, over the coral snow, Riley’s customers went scuttering down the street. One or two had horses, those mounted galloped madly off. A man who was walking and running alternately stopped a wandering native, made him uncock the gun he carried over his shoulder (a common preliminary to any talk with New Cumberland cannibals) and appeared to question him. The native pointed negligently, with the butt of his rifle, towards the forest that lay close-furred up the hills behind Meliasi. The white man nodded and ran on. He, too, had a lump of bread, and was stuffing it into his shirt as he ran. He had a tin as well; it lumped out big and square from the pocket on one hip.

“Bet you a sovereign even, he wins again,’’ said Black'bury suddenly.

“I won’t take it; not enough good,” was Des Roseaux’s reply. “I take you five to one.”

“No fear,” answered the representative of Britain’s Majesty. “Some day, they’ll get'him, sure as eggs.” ^

“What is it about?” asked the Secretary, coming forward a step. He had evidently had a struggle with himself before giving way so far.

“Conn,” replied Blackbury, putting back his cigar and speaking from one corner of his mouth. “Conn the Hundred Fighter.”

“Really?” was the Secretary’s comment. You would have thought ‘he understood.

Blackbury, of course, knew that he did not; that he was merely playing secretary.

“There was ‘an Irish King,” he condescended to explain, “a couple of thousand years ago. That was what they called him. Conn thinks he’s descended from him.”

“And is he?”

“Well, you know, all Irish are descended from kings; you may have noticed it — ”

“I think I have.” There might or might not have been a slight flavour of acid in the reply.

“But perhaps Conn is a little more so than most. At any rate, he’s a damned useful sort with his fists, and some of the pearling crowd who have an O’ before their names pinned the label on, just for fun. That was before they got to know about this hidden treasure business, but since then he’s fairly earned the name, for he’s fought all Meliasi about it, in a way.

lO and won, in a way. There’s nothing absolute about that sort of a win.”

The Secretary waited till Blackbury had quite done, and then asked:

“What is the hidden treasure business?”

“Should have thought you knew — but you don’t seem much of a mixer, my*boy. Now, I — but about the treasure. I can’t tell you because I don’t know. Nobody knows. We all know Conn is simply rolling in riches, and gets them here, but that’s all.”

“Here? In the New Cumberlands ?”

“Here, on this very island of the New Cumberlands, perhaps quite close to Meliasi. Nobody knows. He disappears sometimes for a while, and usually no one is aware of it till he’s back, but once in a way he’s missed, and then the whole town does as you see tonight, and gets on the hunt after him.”

“But that,” said the Secretary, “is very remarkable.”

“My friend,” observed the French Commissioner, “it is more than remarkable, it is a miracle. There is nothing that excites every passion of humanity as the thirst of gold; it makes the lazy one industrious, the stupid cunning, the coward it makes a brave man, and yet, bless my soul, with all the New Cumberlands unnaturally stimulated, until up to its very best to fight him, there is that Conn who v/ins !”

The Secretary listened with his usual patience to the end, and then asked: “Is it gold, then?”

“Flute ! What does*one know ? Something that’s worth gold. They say there is none in the New Cumberlands — ^but most of them are unexplored. Me, I think it is gold, but John Bull here, he’ll not have it.”

II

Blackbury, smiling all over his wide, whiskered face, shook his head.

“No, my boy,” he said. “There’s too much mess about gold. You can’t hide the workings.”

“In the mountains, unexplored, why not?”

“Maybe — if they weren’t unexplored. But they are, and likely to ‘Stop so, until there’s law to disarm these beggars of natives. I don’t believe Conn gets away in there. They’d eat him.”

“Perhaps,” suggested the Secretary, a spark showing in his eyes — they were dark, uncommon eyes with a boring strength behind them, ill suited to his white, inexpressive face — “Perhaps this Mr. Conn has an unusual influence over the natives. Such things have been known.”

“By Gad, they have,” agreed Blackbury musingly. “Pendragon — not so many years ago, with his crew of fighting cannibals — if anyone ever was King of the Cumberlands, it was he, till they got him and tied him to his mast, and cut him up alive, to feed the fishes. And there was a woman once — dead now — she was an ex-convict, who’d some grudge against the world; a Frenchwoman — ”

“I remember,” from Des Roseaux. “It was the year before I came; she died of fever, nothing more. She was the veritable queen of Aolani; half a lifetime. An island, I give you my word, where the man-of-war crews scarcely dare arrive today. Of other people, no one. But she was their queen. Yes, these islands of the West have such histories.”

The Secretary listened, motionless.

“But about Conn,” burst in the British Commissioner’s rich voice — a voice to match his person, and the good English port stored in his hurricane cellar — “he’s something more than king of a pack of natives, because he’s rich, where all of us are damned poor. Conn runs my islands for me, more or less, the dashed — ”

Des Roseaux patted Blackbury’s sleeve gently.

“My islands, John Bull, if you please; the islands of my country.”

Blackbury laughed. The two were excellent friends, especially when they disagreed.

“Our islands. Rosy, if you like. Well, Conn runs them. Deny it if you can.”

“He has not,” said the Frenchman scornfully, “any intellectual influence. And where it is a question of France, and the sons of France, the intellect — ”

“I believe the beggar has a T. C. D. degree,” allowed Blackbury.

“Really,” was the Secretary’s remark.

“Don’t be a scornful little dog,” warned Blackbury humorously. “You are only ‘Londiniensis’ yourself, and one’s as good as another.”

“You have a degree of Oxford,” said the Frenchman. He had none himself, but he was prepared to uphold the prestige of all Commissioners in front of all secretaries at any time.

“Would have had, if I hadn’t got sent down for a row about a girl three weeks too soon,” corrected the Briton. “What does it all matter to dead men?”

No one seemed able to answer. The Frenchman politely choked back a yawn. It was getting slow. Riley’s was shut for the night. Down in the street below, the Conn hunters had disappeared. The moon, not yet at full, was climbing down the sky. If one did not wish to get back to one’s island in the dark.

The Commissioner who “watched” for France rose to his feet, bowed from his waist, and took formal leave.

“That pearlers’ island, they are very drunk this two days and nights,” he explained. “Hopkins and Fursey I have seen down in the street, who went off on the Conn hunt. Sometimes when they have drunk, I have known them who fired at me from their beach as I went in my whaleboat. It is best I should get back before they find that Mr. Conn is not to be found, and return.”

“Fursey is the worst,” stated Blackbury. “I’ve half a mind to set the man-of-war on him when she comes along again — ^though God knows when that will be.”

“He’s the pearler who made that trouble about the three native girls, isn’t he, sir?” asked the Secretary.

“Yes. He’ll have us all in the cooking pots one of these days, with his dashed nonsense. It doesn’t pay to meddle with the New Cumberland women; nothing so likely to raise a general insurrection. And Fursey is a poisonous nuisance with women, black, white and tan. You remember Guilbert’s wife, and the scandal over the nurse who came up for the round trip on the boat? And — well, I don’t know how it is that none of you duelling fire-eaters of French have never shot him, yet.”

“It would be a good work,” agreed Des Roseaux, with calmness. “But in the meantime, I must hurry myself, to get myself home before he is back. Goodnight, Your Excellency. I thank you for a most agreeable evening. No, do not take .the trouble — ” to the Secretary, who was silently seeing him out. “If you will — well, good-night, Mr. — I am sorry, I forget your name again.”

“Gatehouse,” supplied the young man. He was already familiar with the notorious “New Cumberland memory.”

“I am sorry, never can I think of anything but Lodge. It is my fault. Good-night, Mr. Gatehouse, take good care of His Excellency for me.”

“He and you are not really Excellencies, are you?” demanded Gatehouse. The point seemed to interest him.

Des Roseaux made an inexpressible gesture with his fine French hands.

“We are bluff, dear Mr. Gatehouse — bluff, both two. We name ourselves Excellent, if we like. It is only another bluff. Yet, nevertheless, no one can call our bluff for us — that is as the Americans say. Behind, there is our mans-of-war, and they are not bluff. No, we are more kings than it would seem.”

“Good-night,” bowed Gatehouse, on the steps. His eyes were bright. They dulled as he went back to the verandah, where Blackbury, looking more like John Bull than ever, so that^one really missed the top-boots, was already shuffling a pack of cards for his nightly game.

Some two hours later, the Commissioner, having won a rubber of whist and taken a lesson, besides, in the new game of “bridge” that Gatehouse had brought out with him from Home, poured himself a final whisky, and began thinking of bed. The Secretary had gone off as soon as released. It was late now; the moon was down, the wind had fallen, and the waters of Meliasi’s matchless harbour, islandstrewn, were like a shield of grey steel set with dark bosses of marble and moss-agate. The breath of the night, filled as all midnight airs are filled, with things mysterious, dark hopes ; fragments and sparks of dreams that belong, in their entirety, to no one soul, but to the souls of all the present and the past; the call that most men hear, and many follow, and no man understands, crept upwards from the bush. What breeze there was, was land-breeze now; it is so, when the small hours dawn.

Blackbury, slowly drinking his whisky, and looking out at nowhere with his John Bull face, may have heard these things, or only felt them, or perhaps not even felt them. With the John Bulls, one does not know.

There came a sound at the verandah entrance. The Commissioner’s face was unmoved as he turned his head to listen, but there was nothing slow about the way he reached for the sawed-off shotgun that stood in a corner near his chair, and slung it to his shoulder. In the New Cumberlands, you never can tell. ...

With the gun ready, and his half-finished glass at his elbow, he listened a moment longer. The sound of a shod heel — rubber shod — came to his ear. He lowered the gun, replaced it, and took up his glass again. Through the bottom of it, as he finished, he saw a white man advancing towards his chair. He nodded, and drank the last mouthful.

“Well,” he said, setting down the glass, “you’re a nice kind of young man to come calling here in the middle of the night, I don’t think, — after setting the town by the ears. Do you know all Meliasi, and Dan Fursey, are out hunting you?”

The caller, without making any reply, came forward to a tray-laden table that stood at the Commissioner’s elbow, poured himself a drink, and threw it down his throat. Blackbury looked at him through narrowed eyelids. He was yellow, as white men

In the tropics are when they turn pale, and there were marks beneath his eyes. His clothes were extremely dirty, and his shoes cut about. It did not take much to see that he had been having a strenuous time, somehow, somewhere or other, and that not long ago. The man was tall, and looked taller; he might have been thirty to thirty-five. He had fair dry hair, sticking up about the parting; a shaven face that had not been shaved for two days ; grey, rather insolent eyes as hard as glass. You felt, looking at him, that he did not care a little curse what you thought of him. You liked him for it, rather. When you had been taking stock of him for some time, you discovered that he was good looking, and then you forgot it again, because that seemed a little thing. When he went away, things seemed to slacken down, one stretched one’s feet, and yawned, with a sense of ease, that was somehow, at the same time, a sense of emptiness. His name was Stephen Conn.

Blackbury seemed to know his visitor. He waited till Conn had swallowed a temperate drink, and then handed him a plate of sandwiches. Conn ate a few, quietly and not in any hurry. The Commissioner waited for him to speak, which he did presently, wiping his fingers on a napkin, and not looking up.

“I’d as soon you could get Fursey deported on some pretext or other.”

“May one ask why?”

“Certainly. He has shot at me once or twice too often, and you know I don’t like killing people.”

“I know It’s not one of your habits, as Denys In ‘The Cloister and the Hearth,’ said about marriage. W^hy does the excellent Fursey try to kill the gander that has the golden eggs, and won’t tell where they are? It’d seem to be foolish of Fursey.”

“He is foolish. He thinks I’ve got the natives terrorized, and that if I were out of the way, he could make them talk.” Conn looked up now. There was something good in that glass-hard glance of his. Blackbury thought, as he had often thought before — “The chap is no liar.”

“Well,” he said aloud, “I’ll see if I can’t stick him with some of his crimes by the time we have the next man-of-war. They could take him down to jail in Fiji. I can swear he’s a danger to British interests here, with his ‘dashed inconsiderate ways about the native women. That’ll make them sit up.”

“Thanks,” said Conn, rising to his feet.

“Off home?”

“Yes, I had” — with a little break of laughter that lit up the hard face into sudden boyishness, — “I had a run for it.”

“What, they nearly caught you?”

“Oh, no. They don’t do that. But I had a mind to let them go off on a wild-goose chase, and so I had to show myself, and double. They’re half across the island by now. Fursey,” he added inconsequently, “Fursey is a rotten bad shot, for one of the pearling crowd.”

“Did he—?”

“Twice.”

“Oh, you know, that’s too bad altogether. I don’t mind rows among the pearlers’ island crew, but when they get to potting my friends — he’ll get his medicine, and as soon as possible. I’ll try and stick him with something. I wish they would get ahead with this wireless business they keep talking so much of. Handy in places like Meliasi. You pass Fursey’s i8 island on your way? Well, theyVe all off tonight. Des Roseaux has been annoyed by them lately, he says. They pick up that habit of miscellaneous potting from the natives — and a good deal more. I’d like to get the Admiralty to buy Punnett for a gun target, as they bought Five Stick. Night-night. I ought to have won a pound on you this time, but Des Roseaux said — oh, he’s gone, uncivil beggar. . . . Time for bed, Reginald, my boy. Reg, you’re gettin’ old.”