The Greatest Adventures Boxed Set: Jack London Edition. Jack London

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      I

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      Of his many schooners, ketches and cutters that nosed about among the coral isles of the South Seas, David Grief loved most the Rattler—a yacht-like schooner of ninety tons with so swift a pair of heels that she had made herself famous, in the old days, opium-smuggling from San Diego to Puget Sound, raiding the seal-rookeries of Bering Sea, and running arms in the Far East. A stench and an abomination to government officials, she had been the joy of all sailormen, and the pride of the shipwrights who built her. Even now, after forty years of driving, she was still the same old Rattler, fore-reaching in the same marvellous manner that compelled sailors to see in order to believe and that punctuated many an angry discussion with words and blows on the beaches of all the ports from Valparaiso to Manila Bay.

      On this night, close-hauled, her big mainsail preposterously flattened down, her luffs pulsing emptily on the lift of each smooth swell, she was sliding an easy four knots through the water on the veriest whisper of a breeze. For an hour David Grief had been leaning on the rail at the lee fore-rigging, gazing overside at the steady phosphorescence of her gait. The faint back-draught from the headsails fanned his cheek and chest with a wine of coolness, and he was in an ecstasy of appreciation of the schooner’s qualities.

      “Eh!—She’s a beauty, Taute, a beauty,” he said to the Kanaka lookout, at the same time stroking the teak of the rail with an affectionate hand.

      “Ay, skipper,” the Kanaka answered in the rich, big-chested tones of Polynesia. “Thirty years I know ships, but never like ‘this. On Raiatea we call her Fanauao.”

      “The Dayborn,” Grief translated the love-phrase. “Who named her so?”

      About to answer, Taute peered ahead with sudden intensity. Grief joined him in the gaze.

      “Land,” said Taute.

      “Yes; Fuatino,” Grief agreed, his eyes still fixed on the spot where the star-luminous horizon was gouged by a blot of blackness. “It’s all right. I’ll tell the captain.”

      The Rattler slid along until the loom of the island could be seen as well as sensed, until the sleepy roar of breakers and the blatting of goats could be heard, until the wind, off the land, was flower-drenched with perfume.

      “If it wasn’t a crevice, she could run the passage a night like this,” Captain Glass remarked regretfully, as he watched the wheel lashed hard down by the steersman.

      The Rattler, run off shore a mile, had been hove to to wait until daylight ere she attempted the perilous entrance to Fuatino. It was a perfect tropic night, with no hint of rain or squall. For’ard, wherever their tasks left them, the Raiatea sailors sank down to sleep on deck. Aft, the captain and mate and Grief spread their beds with similar languid unconcern. They lay on their blankets, smoking and murmuring sleepy conjectures about Mataara, the Queen of Fuatino, and about the love affair between her daughter, Naumoo, and Motuaro.

      “They’re certainly a romantic lot,” Brown, the mate, said. “As romantic as we whites.”

      “As romantic as Pilsach,” Grief laughed, “and that is going some. How long ago was it, Captain, that he jumped you?”

      “Eleven years,” Captain Glass grunted resentfully.

      “Tell me about it,” Brown pleaded. “They say he’s never left Fuatino since. Is that right?”

      “Right O,” the captain rumbled. “He’s in love with his wife—the little hussy! Stole him from me, and as good a sailorman as the trade has ever seen—if he is a Dutchman.”

      “German,” Grief corrected.

      “It’s all the same,” was the retort. “The sea was robbed of a good man that night he went ashore and Notutu took one look at him. I reckon they looked good to each other. Before you could say skat, she’d put a wreath of some kind of white flowers on his head, and in five minutes they were off down the beach, like a couple of kids, holding hands and laughing. I hope he’s blown that big coral patch out of the channel. I always start a sheet or two of copper warping past.”

      “Go on with the story,” Brown urged.

      “That’s all. He was finished right there. Got married that night. Never came on board again. I looked him up next day. Found him in a straw house in the bush, barelegged, a white savage, all mixed up with flowers and things and playing a guitar. Looked like a bally ass. Told me to send his things ashore. I told him I’d see him damned first. And that’s all. You’ll see her to-morrow. They’ve got three kiddies now—wonderful little rascals. I’ve a phonograph down below for him, and about a million records.”

      “And then you made him trader?” the mate inquired of Grief.

      “What else could I do? Fuatino is a love island, and Filsach is a lover. He knows the native, too—one of the best traders I’ve got, or ever had. He’s responsible. You’ll see him to-morrow.”

      “Look here, young man,” Captain Glass rumbled threateningly at his mate. “Are you romantic? Because if you are, on board you stay. Fuatino’s the island of romantic insanity. Everybody’s in love with somebody. They live on love. It’s in the milk of the cocoa-nuts, or the air, or the sea. The history of the island for the last ten thousand years is nothing but love affairs. I know. I’ve talked with the old men. And if I catch you starting down the beach hand in hand—”

      His sudden cessation caused both the other men to look at him. They followed his gaze, which passed across them to the main rigging, and saw what he saw, a brown hand and arm, muscular and wet, being joined from overside by a second brown hand and arm. A head followed, thatched with long elfin locks, and then a face, with roguish black eyes, lined with the marks of wildwood’s laughter.

      “My God!” Brown breathed. “It’s a faun—a sea-faun.”

      “It’s the Goat Man,” said Glass.

      “It is Mauriri,” said Grief. “He is my own blood brother by sacred plight of native custom. His name is mine, and mine is his.”

      Broad СКАЧАТЬ