by Talbot Mundy
“Why not?”
‘Tain’t right and proper! I’ve got this light to watch! I keep fit to watch it! See those lights yonder?”
The fishing lights were still bobbing up and down upon the water, and Jim Bates stood and gazed at them for three or four minutes before he spoke again. “If this light wasn’t here,” he said presently, “them pirates ‘ud quit fishing. They’d hang around this rock. There’d be a steamer — maybe two or three of ’em — pile up here in half no time, an’ dirty work done. If I weren’t fit an’ well to run the light, it ‘ud mean the same thing. An’ if you soldiers weren’t here to hoist that flag in the morning an’ guard me, this light ‘ud be here just as long as it took them pirates to get here! D’you begin to understand?” This time it was Stanley who did not answer for a full five minutes.
“How about when the light goes wrong?” he asked then. “What if the engine gives out? What then?”
“I sweat her round by hand, son, with one eye on the indicator! I sweated her round once fourteen nights hand running until the relief-boat came — me and the Somalis takin’ turns!”
“An’ you did that for a lot o’ foreigners that can’t even take the trouble to dip an ensign when they pass?”
“No. Nor yet for the pay, neither!”
“What did you do it for, then?” Bates looked hard at him “Struck me it was the game!” he answered. “There’s a crank there for that purpose.”
The oily waves swished up against the rock below; the phosphorescent glow danced interminably through the darkness. Down the middle of the narrow sea, from six to ten miles wary of the twelve night-hidden rocks, the liners and the tramps plowed busily with swaying masthead lights. Round and round purred the tireless lantern, blinking warning of the danger to every point in turn; and the yellow lights to the eastward of the sea-line bobbed and dipped and rolled. From somewhere in the blackness came a human voice, high pitched in a sing-song cadence.
“Hark!” said the lighthouse-keeper; and Stanley pricked his ears for what he knew was coming.
Then, from down below him, where the big up-ended crag protruded seaward, deep-throated and resonant rose the voice of the sentry whom he could not see:
“Num-ber ... Five ... A-l-l-’s w-e-l-l!”
“Hum dekta hai!” hummed the lighthouse-keeper without looking at Stanley.
“A-a-a-a-l-l’s ... w-e-l-l!” came another distant voice. And silence followed, broken only by the purring of the lamp and the swishing of the waves below, which seemed part and parcel of the silence.
Stanley swallowed a lump in his throat and shifted his position restlessly. The lighthouse-keeper nodded, and went below again.
Stanley laid his chin on the iron rail and stared at the distant moving lights, with eyes that took in nothing. He was thinking of the past - Houndsditch and the cold, wind-swept street-corners where the newsboys stood; bustle and clamor and dirt, and nothing in the world to fight for but elbow- room and bread — begrudged pittance of the starveling underdog; suspicion; sometimes the cold, uncomfortable hand of charity and always the everlasting, haunting fear of hunger. Home, sweet home, in fact! What did he owe the Empire, or the world at large?
The lighthouse-keeper brushed past him on his way around the platform. Stanley held out a hand and stopped him.
“Where was you born?” he demanded.
“Bermondsey — Long Lane. In the rookeries back o’ the big glue factory.”
“Well — you had a chance, didn’t you? You lived — you didn’t have to fight?”
“I begged, son, until the truant-officers got hold of me. When they were through with me I sold papers, and blacked boots, and carried bags for a living: d’you know what that means?”
Stanley did not answer. He laid his chin on the rail again and gazed out into the night. The lighthouse-keeper checked the revolutions, and went below; the dancing yellow lights moved off to the eastward; the red and green and white lights came and went along the sea-lane; but Stanley never moved. The breeze fell, and the heat and the humidity intensified. Away over to the eastward the faintest fore flickering of yellow light began to play on the horizon, and from below him came the deep-throated sentry-call:
“A-a-l-l-’s — w-e-l-l!”
Then the light went out with a suddenness that hurt, and the purring of the engine ceased. Stanley stood up with a jerk and rubbed his eyes.
“Had a bad dream, son?” asked the lighthouse-keeper, emerging through the door on to the platform. “It’s time to turn the guard.”
SAM BAGG OF THE GABRIEL GROUP
SAM BAGG stood on the highest point of the Thumbmark’s upper ridge, staring through his binoculars. He did not see what he looked for; so he put them in their case and stood still, thinking. He had stood on that spot, thinking, most mornings for eighteen years, soaking into himself whatever it is that good men get on the very verge of things.
He was an even-tempered man, but it was not considered wise to approach him when he stood in that place, in just that attitude; and Luther, the imported half-breed missionary, hid himself among the plantains that formed the outer fringe of Bagg’s little garden, round the thatched bungalow.
“I wish — oh, I do wish I could tell what will happen!” Luther sighed, watching between the thick stems.
But Bagg was thinking of what had happened, since in that way only can a man judge whether he has earned his salt. He was thinking right back to the beginning — eighteen years ago — when nobody knew very much about the six-and-fifty little islands that make up the Gabriel Group.
Greater and Lesser Gabriel, Inner and Outer Islands, and The Crown are named on the charts — the remainder are shown as black dots; but each one in reality is a red-and-green-and-yellow jewel set in a purple sea, with dazzling white edges to mark the setting. And in the beginning Bill Hill had been king.
Bill Hill did as he chose in those days, and that was always beastly; but Bagg, aged thirty, stepped out of a man-of-war’s boat, in a clean white civilian uniform, and the man-of-war hung about in the offing for fourteen days, to give him moral backing. After that Bagg managed without assistance.
Bill Hill — he was called Chief after Bagg came — was the quarter-breed son of a half-breed trader of the bad old days and spoke English fairly well, though he could not sign his name. He lived in a big thatched hut, in a compound with a high palisade round it, at the other end of the island, and cultivated that brand of secretiveness which he thought was privacy.
Bagg’s ideas of privacy had been learned at Rugby, where he fagged for a tradesman’s son and slept in a dormitory with nineteen other boys. He had some experience of minor consulates and rather more of famine-relief work in Baroda and Guzerat — that is to say, he had a fund of patience to begin with; but the speed with which he induced Bill Hill to have a house built for him out in the open was surprising.
The house was nearly all veranda, wind-swept from three sides; and Bagg lived on the veranda most of the time, in full view of anyone who cared to look, apparently cultivating no privacy at all. But nobody ever seemed able to guess what he was thinking about, whereas Bagg guessed Bill Hill’s next move in advance nine times out of ten.
Luther, who was trying hard to do so, could not guess Bagg’s thoughts now, though the snuff-and-butter-colored man was supposed to be more intimate with him than any other person on the islands.
“If only one might guess how far Bill Hill dares go!” thought Luther, with fear stamped on his not uninteresting face.
Up on the natural parapet facing the sea Bagg was thinking just that same thing — only with the difference that he did not show it.
“It looks like a show-down,” he told himself.
Very early in the game things had settled down into a warfare of sap, pin prick and attrition in which Bagg was the defender and Bill Hill all the other things. Bagg had grown gray-haired and gray-bearded at the game; but Bill Hill, whose revenues under Bagg’s supervision were treble what they had been, was fa
t and had grown ambitious, even to the point of being carried in a hammock when he took the air. He was in a mood by now to take advantage of an opportunity; and to him — and to Bagg — and to Luther — and to the islanders, who had known the real Bill Hill before Bagg came — the opportunity looked ripe, though, of course, each saw it from a different angle.
Bagg quartered the sea again and the horizon with his old-fashioned glass, balancing himself against a gaining wind that stirred the shore — line palms already to a crazy dance. His white drill suit, of the fashion of twenty years ago — for he sends his worn-out suits to Calcutta to be copied — was clean and well pressed; but perhaps his trimmed beard and his finger nails were the best surface indications that he had kept his ideals bright all these years. There are few men who can do that in the islands.
“Dashed if I see a sign!” he told himself. “That’s haze over there.”
A very ugly, dark-copper-colored native, in a white trade suit of much later pattern than Bagg’s, approached him at a dog run along the track Bagg’s feet had made on his daily morning walk.
“Breakfus’, master!” he said with emphasis, stopping below the ridge of rock. But Bagg did not turn his head; he looked down, on his left, at the whaleboat beached on the sand of a tiny cove, and again seaward, where the waves raced, white-topped, between him and Lesser Gabriel, two miles away, and the sea birds beat up against the wind in hundreds.
Nobody molests the sea birds, because somebody has told the natives that they are loving thoughts, which will turn into devils if they are killed. Luther has tried hard to undermine the superstition and has even asked Bagg’s help; and in the evenings, when the low stars swing almost within reach, Bagg has let the more inquisitive natives sit on his steps and talk to him. But they never come when Luther is there, and they are a shy, uncommunicative people. The superstition remains, and Luther cannot tell why, any more than he can guess why Bagg should think so much of sea birds. And Bagg does not care to explain that they remind him of springtime at home.
“Guzzling their fill before the storm,” said Bagg aloud; for he knows all the weather signs. “Now — was that smoke, I wonder?”
“Breakfus’, master!” said the servant’s voice again.
“Has nobody seen the steamer from the North End?”
Bagg asked without troubling to turn his head. The wind blew the words back:
“No, sah. No word dis mawnin’, master.”
“Get up here and look!” Bagg ordered; for the natives have keen eyes. “Is that smoke on the sky line over there?”
The native stared long, under a flat hand, but shook his head at last.
“No, sah. Steamer not comin’ datway. Steamer comin’ always by North End, sah. Breakfus’ now, master — breakfus,’ him ready long time!”
Bagg swept the sea with his glasses again, but the servant protested.
“Send oowhaleboat over Lesser Gabr’el, sah. Bimeby some feller maybe see from dar.”
“No,” said Bagg.
“Oowhaleboat feller, he all ready by-handy, sah.”
“No,” repeated Bagg. “It’s blowing up for a gale. They’d be swamped in the narrows, without a helmsman! I’ll go to breakfast.” It is one of Bagg’s obsessions that he, and only he, can steer the whaleboat through those waters in a blow, though in the dim, unwritten dawn of history there were war canoes among the Gabriels and have been ever since. But a man is entitled to his own opinion; and at least Bagg has not drowned himself nor anybody else, though from the whaleboat he has explored every nook and cranny of the islands and knows them as some men know other people’s business.
Bagg jumped from the parapet and started for his bungalow at a pace that made the native shuffle to keep up, hurrying by without looking up at the flag, which snapped and rippled from its pole on a high mound between the bungalow and the sea. The native, who perhaps was half his age, looked older the moment they were in action, in spite of Bagg’s pointed gray beard.
“Who’s that?” he asked, stopping when he reached the steps, for he had caught sight of colored cotton between the plantain stems.
“Mishnary feller — Luther, sah.”
Bagg continued up the steps and took his place before a table that was white with washed linen and fragrant with coffee, grown as well as ground close by. He ate and slept and wrote his letters all on the veranda.
“Put a chair for him at the table and tell him to come.”
The native hurried to obey, while Bagg poured coffee for himself with the manners of a town-bred man.
He sat straight at table. There was no hint about him of the man who has even dealt with beach combers.
In a minute Luther came up the steps, spectacled and nervous, his thin legs seeming yet thinner in red-check cotton trousers. A black cotton shirt under his white jacket was the only attempt at clerical attire, except the sun hat; he removed a huge white topee as he came.
“Take a seat,” said Bagg cheerily. “Have breakfast?”
“No; thank you, sir; I have eaten.”
“Take a seat then.”
Bagg helped himself to fish that would have made an epicure’s mouth water; but in the islands one is either hungry or one is not. Luther drew a chair back from the table and a little on one side, and sat on the front edge of it, as though the back part were on fire. He is never quite sure of himself in Bagg’s presence. It had been Bagg who wrote to the missionary society for him, and guaranteed him enough to live on; Bagg had ordered the little schoolhouse built, and Bagg had appointed him secretary to the Legislative Council. Yet he admits, even to the natives, that he does not understand Bagg.
For instance, in the matter of geography: Bagg ordered him, when he first came, to teach it to the natives. So, after he had given them their lesson in religion he would tell them about Gabriel Mendoza, the Portuguese, who discovered the islands and gave his name to them. Surely Bagg approved of that, because the information was in the textbook Bagg provided.
Yet the natives insist that when God made the world He left one place in the ocean incomplete, and ordered the Archangel Gabriel to try a hand. So Gabriel, who had sighed for just such an opportunity, wrought his very craftsmanliest; but, being lesser than the Master Craftsman, he pinched the finished jewels a mite too hard when he came to set them in the sea.
Luther is sure that sort of heresy leads straight to hell, and he said so from the first; but Bagg’s boat crew took him in the whaleboat and showed him the marks of thumb and forefinger on every one of the islands. Yet, before he began to teach, Luther and Bagg were the only two people thereabout who knew anything concerning either God or Gabriel.
Legends have strange ways of springing up. Once, at breakfast, as it might have been now, Luther asked Bagg to help root out the superstition; but Bagg smiled at him.
“One thing at a time, Luther,” he said. “Mustn’t go too fast. Be gentle with ’em. There hasn’t been a head-hunt since either of us came here — now has there? Besides,” he added, “why is that rock called the Thumbmark on the chart if the story isn’t true?” And Luther could not answer that.
It was all very disconcerting; so that, though Bagg was invariably kind to him and treated him to many confidences, he never felt at ease on Bagg’s veranda. He is not always sure that he is not being laughed at.
“What is it, Luther?” Bagg asked him now between two drinks of coffee; and he fidgeted before he answered.
“A Council meeting, sir. I am sorry to say, sir, it is a meeting of the Legislative Council.” He pronounced his English very well, except that he minced it a little. “Bill Hill — I mean the Chief, sir — sent to me this morning and demanded that I call a Council meeting. I replied, of course, that hitherto I have always called meetings at your direction, and not at his.”
“Well?” asked Bagg, eating leisurely and not showing any particular emotion, though Luther trembled.
“He came to me, sir, carried in his hammock. Sir, he abused me frightfully! Sir, he called me names
— abominable names that I will not repeat to you! Sir, in the end he told me I am secretary by your orders and my job is to call meetings; so, unless I call a meeting, he will act on his own account, without one! I am sorry, sir, to have such a tale to bring to you; but it is the truth.”
“He has a perfect right to summon the Council.”
“But not to act on his own account unless it is called.”
“Call a meeting, then,” said Bagg.
“Sir, there never should have been a Council — it is a foolishness!”
But Bagg begged to differ and signified as much by resuming his breakfast. That Council had been his first studied effort to curb Bill Hill’s tyranny. It was his child, just as the road round the island was his trade-mark, and the twenty-one police were the beginning of what should be some day.
It had taken him six years of written effort, with three-month intervals between replies, to get the Foreign Office to consent to the Council; but now, even though Bill Hill were to force a vote by means of threats or bribes, Bagg had the veto and could curb him. Bagg nominated half the members, and the Council itself the other half; so that the membership was more or less permanent. And in course of time they had learned a little of self- government.
“Sir,” said Luther, too afraid to be diffident as usual, “you do not understand. You are not behind the scenes as I am. Let me explain.”
“Glad to listen,” Bagg assured him.
“Bill Hill no longer coaxes and persuades — he threatens, and at last the Council members are afraid. There are some who actually want the old times back. Bill Hill says there is no steamer any more — and where is the steamer? What can anybody answer him?”
“Oh, it’s late — that’s all,” said Bagg, more hopefully than Luther quite believed he felt.
“Sir, it is two months overdue!”
“Seven weeks,” corrected Bagg. “Broken down, I suppose. Once before it broke down and they sent our mail on a cruiser.”
“Yes, sir; but even the cruiser was not ten days overdue. Now this is seven weeks; and Bill Hill says the Protectorate is a thing of the past and you have no authority. He asks where is the promised steamer that should come every month and take away his copra. He says there is nothing with which to pay the police. He says he is rightful king, and you are a — I will not repeat what he says you are, sir.”