The Belted Seas Part 13

"I'm going to maintain it, Jessamine, maintain it."

"I say, I got the authority of the States of Missouri and California."

"I asks you, what authority they've got here? First place, you want extradition papers. You can't have 'em. I won't give 'em to you. Trouble with you, Jessamine, is you're narrow. You're small, there ain't any vastness about you, Jessamine."

"J. R.," says Jessamine, remonstrating, "this isn't right, and you know it."

"You don't expand, Jessamine," says Craney. "You don't permeate. You ain't got on to large ideas."

Craney here distributed cigars, lit a fat one himself, pushed back from the table, crossed his legs, stuck a thumb in the arm-hole of his plush vest, and went on unfolding his mind.

"It ain't the king's pleasure to leave this island, nor it ain't the ways of monarchs, as I take it, to apologise. But putting aside all that, and supposing you was expanded enough to take that in, I'm going on to state the way it appears. You says, 'J.R., how'd you come to take the cash of parties that trusted you?' I answers, 'It comes from being romantic.' You ain't romantic, Jessamine? That's too bad. You don't see it. You don't expand to my circ.u.mference. You don't permeate my orbit.

You don't get on to me. It was this way. I got up and looked out on the world. I says: 'J. R., it's clear you haven't enough cash for your ambitions. But you've got a opportunity. Throw it in. Be bold. If your conscience squirms, let it squirm. If it wriggles, let it wriggle.

Take the risk. Expand to large ideas.' I took it. Say, I made parties unwilling investors in me. Now, then, there they are, as delegated in you. Here's me, Julius R., monarch by purchase and election of the sovereign state of Lua. You asks, 'What next?' I says: 'This. I'll pay.

I'll settle the claims with interest on investment' But I've got to have time. Pay with what? Now there's the point. I've been investigating the produce of this island, the pearl-fishing, the coral, the hardwood. The pearl-fishing is good. As a business man, I tell you it can be done."

Jessamine shook his head. "I haven't any authority to settle the case.

I'm told to go and bring you. I've got to do it. It's a painful duty."

The king smoked a while silently, then said something to his warriors, who got up and marched away around the corner. "Mighty, Jessamine!" he says, "you're slow. Most mulish man I ever saw. Well, let it go. You can't do it. Recollect, attempting the person of the king is a capital crime. That's the law of this land. It's decided and it don't change.

We'll drop it."

So nothing more was said of the matter, and we talked agreeably. Whether Craney's account of his motives was accurate I couldn't say. It didn't seem likely he ever expected to settle, when he started, or he took all the chances that he never would. Maybe he cooked up the theory to suit things as they stood. Maybe not. I don't defend him, and I'm not clear where he lied or where he fancied. But it seemed to me if he'd made a long calculation, his luck was standing by him at that point.

When the king left us we went for a walk through the village, talking it over. Breen said they'd better take the offer, and I thought they'd have to, but Jessamine wasn't satisfied. He says:

"We haven't the authority. How do you know we wouldn't get into trouble at home? We've got to take him back. But you see, that isn't the point.

The point is, here's where we make a hit. It's professional with me.

It's reputation. It's the chance of a lifetime."

I say: "But where's the chance?"

"We'll see. But J. R.'s been the one white man so far. Now we're three to one. If he can usurp a crown, I don't see but what we can get up an insurrection."

The village was a long row of huts built of bamboo and big brown leaves, and stretched up and down the valley. There was a large hut with two doors opposite us, and sitting on mats in front was a fat man with little bones stuck at angles in his grizzled hair. He wore a pink shirt with studs and a pair of carpet slippers, and around his neck a lot of gla.s.s pendants from a chandelier, and he looked surly and sleepy. I says:

"You can leave me out. I think you ought to take the offer. If you slip up, the king'll hang you for treason. If he's the government here, he's got a right to say what the law is. I'm going back to the ship. You needn't ask me for backing, for you won't get it."

We stopped beside the fat man, and I asked him if he hadn't been one of the rival candidates, thinking it might be the old one with the chicken bones that spoke English; and he set to work swearing, so I knew it was; and I judged from the style he swore in he'd been intimate one time with seamen, and I judged; too, he felt dissatisfied. He said he was rightly chief of the island, and that man, all of whose grandfathers were low and disgusting, meaning Julius R., was living in his house, and, moreover, had given him only three pink shirts. Jessamine sat down by him, and said nothing, but listened, and I went and found some of the beach natives, and came back with them to the _Good Sister_.

That night pa.s.sed, and it came the morning of the next day, and I heard nothing from them. I went ash.o.r.e, but found no one about the huts there but children and a few old women. The old women jabbered at us excitedly.

I took six of the men and started inland through the hot woods, where the green and red parrots screamed overhead. When we came out to look up the valley to the open country, we saw no signs of fighting, nor any one moving about. Through the valley, as we went up it, there was no smoke from the huts, no women bruising nuts and ground roots into meal, no fat man before the hut with two doors sitting on his mats, not a soul in the village.

But coming near the palace we could see all the red flower shrubs were trampled and smashed. Then we came on a dead body by the path; then more bodies, b.l.o.o.d.y and spitted with spears; and one man, who was wounded, lifted himself, and glared, and dropped again among the red flowers.

Through the palm stems we saw the roofs of the palace, and the piazza with the bamboo pillars. The line of the bodyguard was squatted on the piazza, with their spears upright before them. Everything was still.

Then we heard a cry behind us, and looked, and saw Jessamine and Breen, but no others with them, running through the village towards us. They came up to us, and said they had been in the woods hunting for the villagers who had run away, but found none. We sat down not far from the wounded man. Jessamine had his arm in a sling, and he told what had happened, so far as he made it out.

"It was the way I fancied," he says; "J. R. wasn't so solid with his army as he thought, except the bodyguard, but I'd no idea they'd go off like a bunch of fireworks. The old fat one sent messengers around in the afternoon, and at night we went with him over back of that hill, and met a crowd who had a few torches, but it was pretty dark, and I couldn't see how many there were along the hillside. I made them a speech: how J.

R. had run away from his land, and was ruling them here when he had no right, and they oughtn't to stand it; but I don't know that the fat one interpreted it. I guess he made a speech of his own. All I know is they went off like gunpowder. Whether all of them yelled for battle and rebellion I don't know; some of them might have been yelling against it. They all yelled, and pretty soon they started hot-foot across the country for the palace, fighting some with each other, so I gathered they disagreed. There are corpses all along between here and the hill, and it was there I caught a cut in the arm. Breen and I agreed to slide out of it. We went and sat on the hillside and watched. Maybe J. R. had word of what was coming. He seemed to be ready for them. I judged the bodyguard met them just above here, and there was a grand mix-up, but we couldn't see well at the distance. It was an awful noise. And suddenly it died out. Not a sound for a while. By-and-by a gang of forty or more ran by us a hundred yards away, and into the woods before we'd decided what to do; and later, after a long time, there was a sort of chanting like a ceremony over here at J. R.'s palace, and this came at intervals all night. This morning we came and found the village empty, and came up a little beyond here, till some one threw a spear past Breen's head, and we went away to look for the villagers. I don't know what J. R. is up to. He appears to be laying low with his wild-cats around him."

While we were speaking there came someone past the bodyguards, and down to meet us, and it was Kamelillo. Kamelillo didn't have much to say, except that the king wanted to see us, but he answered some questions.

He thought that in the attack on the palace the other two candidates and the fat one fell to quarrelling, and their followers joined, and it might be the first two had been inclined to stand by the king, only they thought it was time to have some fighting. But they weren't going to put up with the fat one. Instead of having it out then, they had all gone off to different corners of the island, the same as they used to do, and that suddenly. Kamelillo didn't know how it came about, and doubted if the candidates knew either. He said they were a "fool lot," and the king could settle them, give him time to hang the fat one. But it was no use now--"Too d.a.m.n quick," he said. The women and children had all run to the woods in the beginning. Being asked about King Julius, Kamelillo only grunted, and not having any expression of face, you couldn't gather much from that. But when we came to the piazza, where the bodyguard squatted, what was left of it, with reddened spears, ghastly to make you sick, Kamelillo grunted again and said, "He gone die," and pa.s.sed in.

The guard broke out wailing and chanting, and rocked to and fro, but only a moment, after which they held their spears up stiff, as the king had taught them, and sat still.

Now we followed Kamelillo to a great room, where it seemed the king held audiences and gave out laws and justice. The red plush chair was on a raised platform at the far end, and over and on three sides were heavy red curtains, and gla.s.s chandeliers hung from the rafters of the roof, and a row of mattresses covered with carpet was laid in front, maybe so that subjects could prostrate themselves comfortable. But the room was dusky, and still. It seemed to be empty. But we pa.s.sed up it and stopped, for on the carpeted mattresses before the throne lay Craney, all alone.

His coat and vest were put back, his shirt torn open, and his breastbone split by a spear or hatchet, and it was clear he hadn't long to live.

A ribby chest he had, and a dry, leathery skin. The blood soaked out from under the cloth he held there against it, and ran down the little gullies between the ribs. Jessamine sat down and acted nervous. He says:

"I'm downright sorry for this, J. R.," but Craney didn't seem to hear, but motioned with his hand and says softly:

"You'd better clear out."

Jessamine says, "Now, we can't leave you this way."

But Craney didn't hear and says, "Call in the guard." The spearmen came filing in, barefooted, stepping like cats, and took position on each side, so that you could see it was according to discipline, and maybe they'd done it every day when he'd held a court or something. We slid back, feeling shy of the spears, and J. R. looked pleased, and he says:

"You're narrow, Jessamine. You don't permeate. You don't expand. You don't rise to large--Oh, Jessamine! I'm dying, and I'm sick of your face. Tommy,"--he says, speaking hoa.r.s.e and low--"you'd better go." His eyes wandered absent-minded to the plush chair with the curtains and chandeliers and the spearmen standing around it, and down the long room, like he was taking his leave of things he'd thought of, and things he'd been fond of, and things he'd hoped for, and things he'd meant to do. He muttered and talked to himself: "I sat there," he said, "and I did the right thing by the people. Gentlemen, these black idjits are friends of mine. If you don't mind, I'd rather you'd go. But you can stay, Tommy, if you want to."

So I stayed until he was gone. When I came away I left the spearmen chanting over him.

That was Julius R. Craney. Why, I don't praise him, nor put blame on him. Kamelillo said he was "old boy all right," but Kamelillo's notions of what was virtuous weren't civilised notions. A man ought to be honest. I've known thieves that were singular human. He was mighty happy when he was a king, was Julius R.

CHAPTER X.

THE KIYI PROPOSITION--SADLER CONCLUDED.

It happened in the year '84 that I took in sailing orders at Hong-Kong to go round to Rangoon for a cargo of teak wood. It's a hard wood that's used in shipbuilding. That was a new port to me, and it wasn't a port-of-call at all till the English took it. You go some thirty miles up the Rangoon River, which is one of the mouths of the Irrawaddy, which is the main river of Burmah; and the first you see of the town is the Shway Dagohn PaG.o.da, the gilded cone above the trees. Rangoon had already a good deal that was European about it, hotels and shops, stone blocks of buildings, the custom house, offices of the Indian Empire, and houses of English residents. The gilded paG.o.da looks over everything from a hill. The crowds in the streets are Eastern, Chinamen, Malays, and Bengalees, and mainly the Burman of the Irrawaddy. I was anch.o.r.ed over against the timber yards. I says to myself:

"Rangoon! PaG.o.da! Why, Green Dragons and Kid Sadler!" I wondered if he was there to be asked, "How's business? How's the dyspeptic soul?" and whether he had an office maybe near the custom house, and exported gold leaf and bronze images of Buddha. I started to find the temple of Green Dragons, and followed a broad street, leading to the right, for nearly a mile. Then it grew wooded on each side. Gateways with carved stone posts and plaster griffins, took the place of shops, and behind them you could see the slanting roofs of the monasteries, and their towers, strung to the top with rows of little roofs. A stream of people moved drowsy in the road, monks in yellow robes with their right shoulders bare, women with embroidered skirts, men with similar skirts, men with tattooed legs, and men in straw hats with dangling brims. There were covered carts looking like sun-bonnets on wheels and pulled by humped-necked oxen. There were little skylarking children, and Chinamen, and black-bearded Hindoos.

Then I saw a stone stairway going up the side of the hill. I went on, staring ahead at the cone that shone in the air, and getting bewildered to see so near by the quant.i.ty of dancing statues on the roofs of the temples that crowded the hill, and those acres of tangled-up carving. So I came to the foot of the stairs.

Close to the right was a gateway in a white wall, and on each side was a green lacquer dragon, that had enamelled goggle eyes and a size that called for respect. The gateway led under a row of roofs held up by shiny pillars. Over the wall you could see a gilded cone paG.o.da with a bell on top.

It looked pretty inside of the gate, with flowers and trees and little white and gold buildings. A yellow-robed man sat under a roof near the gate with some children squatted around. He wasn't Sadler. He didn't look as if an inquiry for Sadler would start anything going in his mind.

There was a faint tinkle of bells, and the far-off mutter of a gong.

Anyway there were green dragons. I went in, thinking of the years gone, of Fu Shan, who used to sit, sucking his porcelain pipe on Sadler's porch, and looking down on the creek where the boys were rowing with his countrymen, and looking down on Saleratus that was a pretty unkempt community, and saying, "Vely good joss house, gleen dlagon joss house by Langoon;" and then of Sadler saying: "Stuck-up little cast-eyed ghost!

Speak up, Asia, if you've got any medicine for me."