White Fire Part 13

"I feel as if I'd been a trip on the sea, or up on a mountain top. I wish we could swop B---- for him. Half a dozen of him in a Cabinet now--eh?"

"My dear fellow, don't! The contrast is too painful."

CHAPTER X

A BLACK OBJECT-LESSON

"It's a wonderful world!" said Aunt Jannet Harvey, for the four hundred and fourteenth time since, one by one, the Forelands and Dungeness and Beachy Head faded over the quarter as they ran down Channel. "And it gets more and more wonderful the further you go. Jean, my dear, have you ever in your dreams seen anything equal to that?"

"Never!" murmured Jean, wide-eyed and breathless, lest the smallest display of the ordinary functions of living should resolve into its natural elements the ethereal vision before them.

And yet it was only a tiny South Sea atoll, one of the myriad gleaming gems that deck the bosom of the great southern ocean in cl.u.s.ters, and strings, and ropes, and solitaires, from the Pelews to Pitcairn, of visible beauty indescribable, and in some cases possessed of natural latent treacherousness hardly second thereto.

It was still dusky twilight when they three climbed the companion, to taste the sweet of the dawn and watch the perpetual wonder of the coming day. They had learned already to rejoice in the dawnings as the purest and fullest revelations of Nature's exuberant largesse. The sunsets were gorgeous and magnificent beyond compare, but they had in them the elements of dissolution and decay, whereas the pure pearl splendours of the dawn sang full and true of new birth, new hopes, and the deep springs of life and joy.

Anxious as he was to get to his life's work, and grudging every moment and every league that lay between it and him, Blair had still felt it a duty to afford Jean every possible enjoyment of travel which the voyage could offer her. She was giving up much, she was going into outer exile for his sake; the chance might never come again. She should see all that was possible before the fringes fell behind them. And so they had come by way of Suez, and touched at Bombay and Ceylon, and then away to Australia and New Zealand, and then a great stretch round the outer skirts of the Australs and Paumotus, with only such stoppages as were absolutely necessary, and then straight for the work that awaited them.

"The rest of the Islands we can take by degrees," he said. "They will be our holiday grounds in the years to come. But now I am anxious to know what is going on in the Dark Islands. So very much may be happening behind that black curtain."

They were a gay and gallant company on board, not a long face among them. They were going to whatever might await them of strenuous life and heroic endeavour. No single one of them but was ready to lay down his or her life in the cause that lay so close to their hearts, and they found therein reason, not for doubts or fears, but wholly of exaltation. It was a mighty work, and they rejoiced in being chosen for it.

Blair had selected for his fellow-workers, from among a host of applicants, two young fellows whose qualifications satisfied him in every respect, and whose special training supplemented the deficiencies in his own. He is the wisest man who best knows what he knows least.

The man who knows everything is generally useless at a pinch.

Well-equipped as he was in most respects--perfect, indeed, in the eyes of his wife, as was only right and proper--no man had a deeper appreciation of his own limitations than Blair himself. He had the fiery heart for the righting of wrongs, and the clear head and strong hand. But there were things beyond his ken--that is, in their very fullest compa.s.s--and in choosing his co-workers he kept these steadily in view.

For instance, he had a fair knowledge himself of medicine and rough-and-ready surgery. But he wanted very much more. And so Charles Evans, a Devonshire man, and M.D. and M.S. of London, became his medical right hand.

Then he had himself a certain apt.i.tude for languages and dialects. He had picked up the _lingua franca_ of the islands rapidly. But he wanted very much more. Charles Stuart, M.A., of Edinburgh, had made languages the congenial study of a lifetime which ran to nearly twenty-eight years. If any man could reduce phonetic elisions and hiatuses to written and printed symbols, Stuart was that man.

Then they were both big athletic fellows, runners and swimmers, great at games of all kinds, and handy with their hands, and they were as keen on letting light into the dark places of the earth as Blair himself. And they had both got married, at Blair's suggestion, and to the great satisfaction of the four people most immediately concerned--Evans, the Devonshire man, marrying Alison Carmichael, daughter of Dr. Carmichael of Edinburgh, and herself a medical student of no mean pretensions, and withal a good-looking, hearty girl, full of energy and spirits; and Stuart, the Scot, had married Mary Coventry, an English girl, daughter of a professor in a Lancashire theological college. She had a great natural apt.i.tude for teaching, and was governessing when Stuart fell in love with her. She had promised to marry him when his circ.u.mstances should permit, and was cheerfully facing that very indefinite future when Blair's offer of the coveted post swept all the clouds away, and lifted her to a pinnacle of happiness which she was only becoming accustomed to by degrees.

With these four we have not very much to do. They proved most devoted a.s.sistants and pleasant and helpful companions throughout. But this is the story of Kenneth and Jean Blair, and if these others receive but slight mention, it is not because their hearts lacked fire or their lives incident, but simply through limitations of s.p.a.ce.

So the _Torch_ held three happy couples on their honeymoons, and Aunt Jannet Harvey played mother-in-law to them all, and kept the whole ship in high good-humour by her own energetic enjoyment of every smallest item of the day's doings.

Captain Cathie, by means of diligent search and stringent inquiry, had secured a crew after his own heart, every man a Clydesman, and some of them he had known since they were boys.

They carried a full complement. Besides himself and the mate, there were twenty men all told, stalwarts all, and Blair expected to find use for every man of them. Besides the big white whale-boats at the davits, there were two extra steam-launches in sections in the hold for inter-island work, and there were other reasons why he wanted behind him a thoroughly dependable band of tried white men instead of the usual mixture of Kanakas.

Forecasted shadows of those other reasons might have been found in the way in which he set to work, during the long weeks that lay between New Zealand and the Australs, to make marksmen of his peaceful crew.

Bottles, hung from the yards, or set afloat on the sea, were their targets, and they most of them became fair shots. And one day Captain Cathie turned a cask overboard and stuck a white flag in it, and when it had floated almost out of sight he trained the long brown steel gun amidships on it, and bent and squinted carefully, and kept them so long in suspense, that the ladies screamed aloud when the gun did at last go off, and the white water flashed up close alongside the white flag.

"Within three feet, I should say, captain," said Blair, with the captain's gla.s.s at his eye. "Your hand and eye have not lost their cunning." And again and again the smiling captain displayed his prowess.

Another day he had the Maxim up and showed the men how to handle it.

And cutla.s.s drill became as regular a part of the daily routine as the fifteen-minute service that opened and closed the day.

Strange traffic indeed for a ship dedicated to peace and the spreading of the Light! But they all understood the meaning of these things, and the necessities that might arise, and the advisability of being prepared. For the very first Sunday night out from New Zealand, Blair, in that quiet, masterful fashion of his, which carried conviction once and for all into his hearers' souls and admitted of no shadow of a doubt, had taken occasion to explain the why and the wherefore of these apparent incongruities, and none of them ever forgot it.

It was a windless evening after a blistering day. The sea was like oil, with a long, slow, unbroken swell that set the little ship rolling in solemn rhythmical fashion which Stuart, the man of tongues, had long since dubbed heroic hexameters. And there, to the little company sitting facing him on deck in the gathering darkness, with an occasional sleepy "moo" from the farmyard in the bows, or the shrill squeakings of discontented piglets, and an admonitory grunt from their over-taxed mother, Blair described some of the things he had seen with his own eyes, and others which he had had direct from his dear old friend and leader, John Gerson, whose experience had been so much vaster than his own. Their hearts boiled at the mere recounting of the things he told them, and not a man or woman of them all but was ready to answer his utmost bidding in the effort to put them down.

"Ignorant these islanders are, and degraded, and the victims of horrible superst.i.tions and practices unspeakable," he said, in closing; "but they have common living rights with the rest of us. Until those rights are secured to them, and until they learn that a white face is not necessarily the mask for a black heart, our work is futile. That security, by G.o.d's help, we intend to bring to them. If we can do it peacefully, I shall be grateful. If force is necessary, force we shall apply. But remember--we are going, not to punish, but to protect.

Christ in righteous anger drove the defilers out of the Temple so that the Temple might be clean. G.o.d's Temple is here also. To the extent of our power and opportunity we will cleanse it, and by freeing these simple folk from bodily perils, we will give them the chance to redeem their souls alive."

They had swept along on the steady west wind for weeks. Now and again it dropped and left them rolling idly, with listless sails and jerking masts. But it always blew up again in time, and sent them swinging once more on their way, and at times it blew up so strong, and set up such an awkward sea, that their lives were almost battered out of them.

Blair, Evans, and Stuart apprenticed themselves to carpenter and engineers, and learned many things they did not know before. The men grew intimate with their rifles and cutla.s.ses, the ladies talked much, read much, and they all took regular lessons in Samoan, as a foundation for the Polynesian tongues generally, from a native teacher who had been sent over to Sydney to meet them at Blair's request. His name was Matti, and he was a pleasing specimen of his kind, intelligent, painstaking, and of infinite good temper, but of a most peaceful, not to say lamb-like, disposition.

Among the many other diversions of their long voyage, Evans one day suggested that they should all be vaccinated, and was unmercifully chaffed for the idea.

"Isn't that like a young sawbones?" laughed Captain Cathie. "Just because we've got a clean bill, and he's got nothing to do, he's after making work just to keep his hand in."

But Evans persisted that they were going they knew not where, and no precautions ought to be omitted. And he talked so learnedly, and with so grave a foreboding, that by degrees they came to think he was perhaps right, and that it might be as well to be on the safe side of possibility. So, one after another, they meekly submitted their arms to the needle, and time came when they were glad of his persistence.

"Wonderful!--wonderful!" said Aunt Jannet Harvey once more that morning, in a whisper of concentrated rapture, and the others gazed at the tiny atoll without speaking, lest a breath should destroy it.

They had sighted the island the evening before, just a feathery fringe on the rim of the sea; but Captain Cathie was a devout believer in the enchantment of distance till full light of day should disclose possible pitfalls. For in these Southern Seas Nature sometimes gets ahead of the cartographers, and he had no desire to mark new reefs for the next comers with the stark ribs of his ship.

But now, in the dim of the dawn, they were wafting slowly towards it, with intent to land there for vegetables and fruit and water, and it grew visibly on their sight like a new-created thing.

Until a moment ago it had lain in the shadows. Then the eastern dimness softened, a mere quickening of hidden life, almost imperceptible, felt rather than seen. Then a soft pulsation, a throb from the heart of the coming day. The dimness trembled, a rosy softness diffused itself, and suddenly the background of the sky was filled with colour, palest green and tenderest rose and amber. And these grew and grew and deepened into crimson and gold, with swathes of diaphanous purple as the soft greens strengthened slowly into blue.

And as it was above, so it was below, all duplicated in the flawless mirror of the sea. And there, between the upper and the lower glory, lay the enchanted isle gleaming darkly in the broken lights--a ring of feathery coco-palms and bosky undergrowth round an inner lagoon, a placid lake outside it, and outside that, still another protecting ring of reef dotted here and there with tiny feathered islets. A most wonderful and entrancing sight, so fairy-like and fragile that Jean felt it almost dangerous to breathe aloud.

Then the sun soared up above the sea-rim, and the atoll solidified and came out in its natural colours of dazzling white beach, and blue lagoons, and greens of every shade, from the tender tints of the budding palms to the cast-iron crests of the grey-boled giants, and the huddled mixture of the undergrowth. It lost in beauty as it gained in strength, but it looked more like solid land and less like a fairy vision, more like possible fruit and vegetables and less like a dissolving view.

All the company was on deck by this time, and all eyes were fixed on the island, as Captain Cathie in the bows conned the little ship slowly towards a wide opening in the outer reef, with a vigilant eye for hidden perils.

He had told them from the chart that it was the Three-Ringed Island of Atoa, but he had never been there himself and one could not be too cautious.

Then in the clear depths below them, as they crept slowly through the water-gate, they could see the wonderful forestry of the branching coral and the gleam of many-coloured sh.e.l.ls, and the place was all alive with fishes of every tint and hue, sailing and darting like fragmentary rainbows.

But Captain Cathie was staring through his gla.s.ses at the distant white beach for signs of occupation, and found none. It was still early, however, and the village might be round the bend of the island. He carried the _Torch_ in as far as he deemed safe, and then, at the word, the anchor plunged and the chain ran merrily out, and the little ship rode at rest for the first time in many days.

"Who is for the sh.o.r.e?" cried Blair, in the voice and manner of a jolly schoolboy offering treats.

They were all for the sh.o.r.e. After three weeks of continuous sailing the feel of solid ground under one's feet would be a novelty.

"Though I expect," said Aunt Jannet Harvey, "it'll be as hard to walk straight at first as it was not to walk crooked on the ship. I've got so used to walking on the sides of my feet, and balancing to the rolling, that I've almost forgotten what it feels like to walk any other way."

In ten minutes they were all speeding sh.o.r.ewards in one of the white whale-boats, and when Aunt Jannet Harvey c.u.mbrously made the close acquaintance of the white beach, she found her feet no whit behind those of her younger companions in their eager activity.

They all stamped up the crunching coral with merry talk and laughter.

Aunt Jannet Harvey stood at the foot of her first really intimate coco-nut tree, and gazed up the slim spire to the great benignant fronds and hanging fruit, with such intention of longing, that Jean, in a convulsion of laughter, cried--