Chapter 3 No.3

Three years passed. Jack rubbed his eyes and wondered what had become of them; and he read the answer to his question in his coffee bushes, now breast high and crimson with fruit, in his trellised vanilla already so exacting and so profitable, in his sturdy breadfruit trees thickening with every rain, in the patches of bananas, taro, yams, 'ava, egg-plant, sweet potatoes, pineapples, and sour-sops that were set out so trimly in the plantation his ax had won from the primeval forest.

His house, too, had drawn not a little on his capital-his capital of strength, skill, and perseverance-but he grudged neither time nor labor in making it the best in Oa. For a house is an important matter to a family man, even if it weren't a paying thing like vanillar, nor capable of helping a fellar along like a cow or a boat. It paid you back in its own way-a mighty good way, too-and it grew to be a part of you, like your wife, if you weren't a poor, lone, seafaring slob without one.

Of course, it wasn't much of a house, being a sort of beehive-shaped concern with a thatched roof a foot thick and open all round the sides when the cocoanut curtains was hysted. But when these were pulled down at night, and you were a-setting in one of your own home-made chairs with your wife on your knee, the night breeze rustling overhead and the breakers moaning a mile away on the outer reef, it made you sort of feel like things had come right at last, and that for two cents you'd plank right down on your knees, then and there, and thank God, by God!

All this had not been accomplished without work, but then it was work for himself, and not for others. Jack had never known before what it was to enjoy the fruit of his own labor; he had always been a cog in the blind machinery of other people, exchanging so much toil for so much money. Now that he could see his little plantation grow and prosper beneath his hands, every hour repaid with nature's usury, he began to feel the elation that a man finds in independence. At first Fetuao had entered but half-heartedly into his plans; she would sit on a log and watch him with mirthful wonder as he swung his ax on the land Faalelei had given them; and when, for a spell, he took a place beside her she would tenderly wipe the sweat from his forehead and look at him with perplexity. Work, yes, that, as the preacher said, was the curse of Adam; but this daily persistency was not understandable. Had not Faalelei plenty for them both? And if one taro sufficed, why be at the pains to plant two?

But little by little it began to dawn on her that there was another side to this feverish devotion to work. Jack took a load of yams to Apia, and came back with fifteen silver dollars and a bolt of print for a dress. He went again, and returned with a sewing machine, a pack of cards, and a bottle of trade scent; still another trip, and lo! he towed behind him a fine new boat with Fetuao painted on the stern. Then she at last succumbed to the fascination of the white way. Paga! There were dollars in the ground, and for the asking they could be made to grow. This lesson learned, Fetuao threw off her indifference and became as ardent a planter as her unwearied husband. Lying in his arms at night, her talk ran continually on the theme of which neither ever tired. Not a dollar was earned but was thus laid out in advance, with eager questioning and debate. The cow was bought, the horse, the chickens, the wire for fencing. It was a game in which each played a part with enduring zest; a game with a constant round of prizes and enjoyment; a game in which green nature was the board and every plant and tree a piece. At sundown they knew no pleasure like that of wandering hand in hand through the paths of their little estate, two poetic peasants, filled with love for each other and immeasurably content.

Thus the days passed in increasing satisfaction and prosperity, days so rare in the life of any man when he says to himself, "I am happy." To Jack, these three words, never spoken, but somewhere within him articulate and peremptory, these three words almost overwhelmed him with their significance. He trembled for this treasure, so elusive, so transitory, perhaps, so surely ill deserved; he grew humble with the thought of his own unworthiness, and, though no believer in the ordinary sense, he began to feel the first stirring of religion. When Fetuao, with sweet shame, laid her head against his shoulder and told him of her impending motherhood, he kissed her, comforted her, and then, rising to his feet, he sought the solitude that at such a moment he felt he could not share even with her. In one of the unfrequented corners of the bay, a narrow beach shadowed by the forest and faced by the open sea, he threw himself upon his knees with a passionate thankfulness that seemed to find its expression in this act. Knowing no prayer, addressing no God, he simply gazed above him in the sky, in a rapt, dumb gratitude.

As he walked home he thought of his own parents, long since dead; of their hopes, their cares, their humble unfulfilled ambitions, now dead with them. He perceived himself, now for the first time, a link between the past and the future, the heir of bygone generations, generations that had loved, and suffered, and struggled, to no other end than that he might live-he, and the sister he had neither seen nor heard from in fourteen years. Hell! he ought to write to Amandar. Families oughtn't to drift apart like that. It was a shame, a durned shame, and it came over him with a shock that she, too, might be dead. He took a sheet of paper and a pencil, and with heaving breast and overflowing heart thus broke the silence of those long years:

Oa Bay, Samoa, May 14, 1899.

Dear Sis, You will be surprised to get a letter from me after all this time. I am well and hope you are enjoying a simillar blessing. I am married now and left the sea. I suppose Joe is a man along in middle life now and you a handsome mattron with a family. This is a good country but hot.

Ever your affectionate brother

Jack Wilson.

P. S.-I often think of Pa and Ma and the old days.

Not long after, Jack sailed into Apia with a load of copra and his letter for the outgoing mail. The town was in an uproar, and cracking like the Fourth of July. Jack wondered what in thunder it was about, as he landed at Leicester's wharf and discovered the postmaster lying underneath the post office in a nest of sand bags. Crawling in after the functionary, Jack handed him the letter.

"That's for America," said Jack.

"Five cents," said Leicester.

"What's all this corrobborree?" asked Jack.

"It's war, that's what it is," said Leicester, weighing the letter in a tin scale.

Jack's jaw fell. For a month past he had heard rumors of a native war, but he had resolutely closed his ears to all that Fetuao was so insistent to tell him. It was none of his business, he had said to her uneasily. He wasn't no politician, and all he asked of anybody was to be let alone; and with that he had tried to put the matter by as something imaginary and disquieting, which, if boldly ignored, would disappear of itself.

"Say, Mr. Leicester, what in hell is it about?" he inquired.

"If you went to the bottom of it you would find Dutchmen," said Leicester grimly.

Jack cursed the meddling scoundrels.

"They want Mataafa for king, just because he has a majority of two thousand votes," said Leicester.

"There sounds to be something in that," said Jack faintly.

"Nothing at all!" exclaimed Leicester. "Just speciousness, that's what I call it. The other fellow, Tanumafili, is a nice-appearing boy from the missionary college, and being above wire-pulling and promising everything to everybody, he hasn't any following to speak of. But he's a good, decent Protestant boy, and will make a fine king."

"Oh, ho!" said Jack, beginning to see how the wind lay, "and so the other dodger's a Catholic?"

"A rank, bigoted Catholic," said Leicester hotly. "That's what makes the missionaries so wild against him, and likewise the British and American officials."

"They won't let him be king, then?" asked Jack.

"He's a rebel," said Leicester, "and they've posted proclamations against him on every cocoanut tree around the beach."

"And the natives, they won't let Tanumafili be king neither?" said Jack.

"That's him they're chasing into the sea this minute," explained Leicester.

Jack looked perplexed. "I don't see why the Kanakas shouldn't have the king they fancy," he remarked.

"To hear you talk, one would think you was a bloody Dutchman yourself," said Leicester.

"But the majority-" said Jack, "them two thousand--"

"The Chief Justice ruled them out on a technicality," said Leicester, "and if the Supreme Court ain't right, who is? Do you think he's going to give over this country to a papist? No, the only king here is Tanumafili, and the men-of-war will reinstate him at the muzzle of their guns. Then we'll see who's who in Samoar!"

Jack made his way across the street to the store where he usually sold his copra. Bullets were pattering on the roof, and the trader himself, a portly German in gold spectacles, was palpitating in a bomb-proof.

"I hope Mrs. Meyerfeld is well," said Jack, who in Samoa had grown punctilious.

"Oh, mein Gott!" exclaimed Meyerfeld.

"And the children?-" inquired Jack, "Miss Hilda and Miss Theresa?"

"Oh, mein Gott!" said Meyerfeld.

"I have brought you forty bags of copra," said Jack.

"Oh, mein Gott!" said Meyerfeld.

"Don't you want it, then?" inquired Jack.

"Hear the pullets," quavered Meyerfeld.

"But forty bags," said Jack.

"I've no man, no noding," groaned the trader.

"Gome again negst week. Gome again after de war."

"I'll put it in the shed myself," said Jack.

He went out into the empty street and looked about him. The firing was going on as hotly as ever, but except for a single limp figure, face down in the dust, he failed to see the least sign of the contending parties. From the direction of the Mulivai bridge he heard bursts of cheering, with intermittent lulls and explosions as the battle rolled to and fro. War on so small a scale is startlingly like murder, and Jack shuddered as he went up to the corpse and turned it over. He returned to his boat, and in a fever of activity unloaded his forty bags and trundled them in batches into Meyerfeld's copra shed across the road. It took half a dozen trips of the little flat-car to accomplish this task single-handed, and then there was the further delay in weighing each bag and checking off the contents on a bit of paper. Nor was this all, for he had to make a copy, besides, and tack it on the warehouse door with the inscription, "Taly and find correct John Wilson."

This done, he dropped into his boat and hoisted the sails, weary, heartsick, and anxious for what the future might have in store for him. Passing to leeward of the British man-of-war, he saw her decks swarming with refugees, her crew grouped about the guns, and an officer in the fore-crosstrees sweeping the town with his glass. A gust of wind carried down to him the sound of children crying, and with it an indistinguishable humming, at once menacing and dejected, like the sigh of an impending gale. It echoed in his ears long afterwards, the most poignant note in war, the voice of the herded, helpless multitude.

He reached Oa in the gray of the morning, and the grating of his boat's keel in the sand brought out Fetuao to meet him. She could not restrain her joy at the sight of him, kissing his hands and clinging to him as he took out the sails and oars and carried them up to the house. She never seemed so sweet to him, never so girlish and charming in her fresh young womanhood as in that dawn of his home-coming. To hear her laugh, to see her eyes sparkle, to feel her warm breath against his cheek, all transported him into a state of unreasoning security. Apia and its blood-stained streets faded into the immeasurable distance; the war, and all the attendant horrors that had haunted him, now seemed for a moment too remote to even think of. What had he to fear, here on his own hearthstone, with his dear wife beside him, in another world from that he had so lately quitted? If there was trouble, wouldn't the consuls settle it, them and the treaty officials whose job it was to run the blessed group? He had never been no politician himself, and he wasn't agoing to begin now. Let them worry as was paid to worry.

"Fetuao," he said, "where is the flag the faamasino gave us when we were married in Apia?"

"O i ai pea i le pusa," she returned.

"Get it out, my pigeon," he said, "for I mean to hoist it above the house for a protection. And tell me, Fetuao," he went on, "what before I have never asked thee: on what side are thy people in this misa of Mataafa and Tanumafili?"

"For Mataafa," she returned. "Dost thou think that Samoa wants this untattooed boy from the missionary college? Why else did Faalelei and the young men go last month to Apia to be numbered for Mataafa, the whites promising that he who had most voices should be king? And when all Samoa cried out 'Mataafa!' at the numbering place (all except the little handful of the Tuamasanga), lo! the word was given that Tanumafili was appointed after all, and that the white manner of choice was to be disregarded!"

Jack sighed as he took the flag and went out with it. He realized that his old life was at an end, and that a new one, full of uncertainty and danger, was to date from the time he hoisted this bit of bunting. He trimmed a straight piece of fuafua for a staff, and as he did so he cursed the missionaries for meddlers and the treaty officials for crazy fools. When the flag was at last in place, Fetuao and he drew away to get a better view of it from the beach. Standing there, in silence they watched the vivid colors flaunt and flutter against the wooded hills behind, while Jack, with a seaman's instinctive reverence for the flag, bared his head, and Fetuao clapped her hands with delight.

"Is it not beautiful!-" she cried, "as starry as the nights before we were married, Jack, when we used to walk together, here and there, like uncaring children."

Her husband did not answer; and as she turned and looked up into his face she saw that his eyes were wet with tears.