Chapter 10 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 clusters, 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 compass-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 aptitude 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 aptitude for teaching, and was governessing when Stuart fell in love with her. She had promised to marry him when his circumstances 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 assistants 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 space.

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 glass 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 cutlass 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 superstitions 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 God'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. God'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 cutlasses, 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 shells, 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 glasses 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 shore?" cried Blair, in the voice and manner of a jolly schoolboy offering treats.

They were all for the shore. 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 shorewards in one of the white whale-boats, and when Aunt Jannet Harvey cumbrously 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-

"Do try it, auntie! I'm sure you could manage it if you tried hard."

"And if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, Aunt Jannet!" laughed Blair.

They left her still gazing, and scattered, Jean and Mary Stuart and Alison Evans diving into the undergrowth after armfuls of greenery and trailing vines, and twittering like escaped birds when, now and again, they came on treasure-trove of scarlet hibiscus blooms glowing on the green like fiery stars-or splashes of blood.

The men pressed on at once up the ridge to get a general view of their surroundings, and Captain Cathie, with a couple of his men, pulled slowly down the lagoon in search of the village.

He heard the merry calls of the explorers, and wondered at the absence of any sign of life on the island. The very sight of an approaching ship used, in his time, to bring the population to the beach. But things had changed of course since then, and byways had become highways.

The white boat jerked slowly along round the bend, and the voices ashore grew less distinct. And suddenly his lips pinched and his brow crumpled, and he gazed ahead with a fixed, angry glare which set his men wondering what they were coming to, and carried their chins to their shoulders unconsciously.

A stretch of white beach, a bristle of black posts jutting out of the cleared ground above-that was all. But Cathie's experience read them like three-feet letters on a city hoarding.

He threw up one hand and jammed the tiller hard down with the other.

"Round with her, boys!" and they were swinging back up the lagoon to get the women aboard again. For there might be sights in the brush along that ridge to shock the souls of men.

Blair, Evans, and Stuart, with Matti, the Samoan, and the rest of the boat's crew, climbed the backbone of the island, whose highest point attained an altitude of perhaps thirty feet.

They were standing looking across the flawless mirror of the central lagoon, when the Samoan broke out suddenly, "Sirs, I presume advice. Return fortwit to ship. This place is not good," and when they all turned on him in surprise, they found his brown face strained and pallid with fear, his eyes starting, and his nose dilated like a startled stag's.

"Why, Matti, what's wrong?" said Blair.

The brown man shook his head.

"I know not, sirs," and his white teeth chattered so that his chin wagged visibly. "There is evil abroad. It is in the air, in the tree-tops."

They looked up for sign of the evil, but saw only the heavy plumes of the coco-palms nodding mournfully in the breeze. Down below the air seemed heavy and somewhat sickly, and so far they had seen no sign of life on the island.

"The place seems deserted," said Evans.

"We will go on along here a bit further," said Blair, "and if there is nothing more to be seen, we'll turn back I'm afraid it's a poor look-out for fruit and vegetables," and they tramped on in silence, Matti well in the rear, reluctant to go, still more reluctant to be left.

And presently the brush thinned, and they came out on the clearing, and Blair stopped abruptly with a face as strained as Matti's, but grimmer and whiter, and Matti, stumbling up to the rear, gave a groan as though to say, "I knew it."

"God help us!" said Blair through his teeth, for they had found what Cathie had feared.

The blackened posts of the houses stuck up starkly through the sand as though in mute and pitiful appeal. Beneath them were heaps of wind-blown ashes barely covering that which they had mercifully hidden. And among the mounds as they drew near was a sound of rustling and stealthy movement, and here and there monstrous crabs, too gorged to move almost, essayed escape into their temporary burrows.

The newcomers stared wide-eyed and horror-stricken. Blair had seen it all before, and the grim white of his face gave place to grim red and black as his heart drummed furiously with righteous indignation.

"This is the horror we have come to fight," he said hoarsely. "This is what I told you of. Now you see it with your own eyes. The place has been swept bare by kidnappers. These died in defence of their homes and wives and children. Let us get back. It is no sight for the women."

He waved them away, but something caught his eye, and he went forward and bent over it with tight-pinched face for a moment, and then turned abruptly and followed the others.

But, even as he turned, a shriek from the lower brush told that it was too late to save the women from some visible knowledge of what had taken place. They turned and ran back along the ridge.

Mary Stuart, reaching for a flower, saw at her feet what she took for a fallen coco-nut, and stooped to pick it up, and then screamed aloud and sat down suddenly with a sick, white face. The others hurried up, Alison Evans and Aunt Jannet Harvey reaching her first.

"What is it, dear?" asked Aunt Jannet, and then she saw, and sat down heavily beside her.

Alison had her nerves under better control. She had seen little dead bodies before, but the sight of a murdered child is a shock to any woman. Her face was white and rigid, but she had her wits about her also.

"Take them all away," she whispered fiercely to Aunt Jannet Harvey, and Aunt Jannet, just needing that spur, scrambled up and gripped Mary Stuart by the shoulder and dragged her away as Jean came running up, asking, "What is it? What's the matter?"

"Come away, child!-come away! It is a little murdered baby. Alison is seeing to it, but it is quite dead. Let us get away. Here is the boat and Captain Cathie."

Everything was changed as the white boat plunged back across the lagoon to the ship. The men's faces were hard and angry, the women's white and pitiful. Alison Evans wept silently now. She had seen more than the others, and that soft little head, crushed in by one murderous blow against the tree, would haunt her dreams for nights to come.

The sun shone as brightly as before, but there was something pitiless in his unwinking glare. The sea was as placid and sparkling as before, but there was a fawning treachery in its very smoothness. The palms behind waved their feathers just as before, but now they were funeral plumes. The very oars no longer chirped merrily in the rowlocks, but croaked in a way that got on the women's nerves. And not one of them spoke till they were safe aboard the ship.

"Yes," nodded Blair to Cathie's look of interrogation, "we will go on at once," and the anchor chain rattled up hoarsely, and they went slowly and silently on their way, and left the beautiful island to its dead.

"I saw it from the water," said Cathie later to Blair, "and turned to get the ladies away, but I was too late. Did you see anything to give you any hint as to who it was, sir?"

"Yes. Peruvians, I should say. There was one yellow man among the dead, and they recruit mostly from these outer islands. Before God, captain, I will put a stop to this kind of work, whatever the cost may be."

"We're with you, sir, every man of us. See those men's faces!"

And grim and determined enough were the men's faces as they went about their work. For those who had seen had told those who had not seen, and the impression was a deep one.

That night Blair called them all together, and spoke of the matter in a way that went home and confirmed the spirit that had been roused in them by that holocaust on the island.

"It is devil's work, men," he wound up, "and, please God, we'll stop it. Are you with me?"

"Ay, ay, sir!" "That we are, sir!" "All the way, sir!" and so on, in tones that left no mistake about it.

"You can understand the effect of that kind of work on these islanders. It is not often so clean a sweep is made as the one we saw this morning. And where part are taken and part are left, can you wonder that those who remain hate and fear the very sight of a white face? Have they not reason? It will be our endeavour to stop these raids, and, by protecting the islanders, gradually win them over to better ways. Once we can make them see that we care for them, and think of their welfare and not our own, half the battle is won. On the one side we may have to fight-not our own countrymen, I am glad to say. These raiders come mostly from the west coast of South America, and they go to lengths which the Queenslanders rarely do. And, on the other hand, in our dealings with the natives, we must remember what they have suffered, what reason they have to mistrust us, and we must be very forbearing and longsuffering. On the one side I want you-and I shall need the whole-hearted assistance of every man of you-I want you to be bold as lions, and on the other side as mild as milk. Only so can our work be done, and it is a mighty work."