Jerry of the Islands | Page 5

dare to chase only with due precaution.
Because then, beyond the white lord's eyes, the niggers had a way, not
merely of scowling and muttering, but of attacking four-legged dogs
with stones and clubs. Jerry had seen his mother so mishandled, and,
ere he had learned discretion, alone in the high grass had been himself
club-mauled by Godarmy, the black who wore a china door-knob
suspended on his chest from his neck on a string of sennit braided from
cocoanut fibre. More. Jerry remembered another high-grass adventure,
when he and his brother Michael had fought Owmi, another black
distinguishable for the cogged wheels of an alarm clock on his chest.
Michael had been so severely struck on his head that for ever after his
left ear had remained sore and had withered into a peculiar wilted and
twisted upward cock.
Still more. There had been his brother Patsy, and his sister Kathleen,
who had disappeared two months before, who had ceased and no longer
were. The great god, Mister Haggin, had raged up and down the
plantation. The bush had been searched. Half a dozen niggers had been
whipped. And Mister Haggin had failed to solve the mystery of Patsy's
and Kathleen's disappearance. But Biddy and Terrence knew. So did
Michael and Jerry. The four-months' old Patsy and Kathleen had gone
into the cooking-pot at the barracks, and their puppy-soft skins had
been destroyed in the fire. Jerry knew this, as did his father and mother
and brother, for they had smelled the unmistakable burnt-meat smell,
and Terrence, in his rage of knowledge, had even attacked Mogom the
house-boy, and been reprimanded and cuffed by Mister Haggin, who
had not smelled and did not understand, and who had always to impress
discipline on all creatures under his roof-tree.
But on the beach, when the blacks, whose terms of service were up
came down with their trade-boxes on their heads to depart on the
Arangi, was the time when nigger-chasing was not dangerous. Old

scores could be settled, and it was the last chance, for the blacks who
departed on the Arangi never came back. As an instance, this very
morning Biddy, remembering a secret mauling at the hands of Lerumie,
laid teeth into his naked calf and threw him sprawling into the water,
trade-box, earthly possessions and all, and then laughed at him, sure in
the protection of Mister Haggin who grinned at the episode.
Then, too, there was usually at least one bush-dog on the Arangi at
which Jerry and Michael, from the beach, could bark their heads off.
Once, Terrence, who was nearly as large as an Airedale and fully as
lion-hearted--Terrence the Magnificent, as Tom Haggin called him--
had caught such a bush-dog trespassing on the beach and given him a
delightful thrashing, in which Jerry and Michael, and Patsy and
Kathleen, who were at the time alive, had joined with many shrill yelps
and sharp nips. Jerry had never forgotten the ecstasy of the hair,
unmistakably doggy in scent, which had filled his mouth at his one
successful nip. Bush-dogs were dogs--he recognized them as his kind;
but they were somehow different from his own lordly breed, different
and lesser, just as the blacks were compared with Mister Haggin, Derby,
and Bob.
But Jerry did not continue to gaze at the nearing Arangi. Biddy, wise
with previous bitter bereavements, had sat down on the edge of the
sand, her fore-feet in the water, and was mouthing her woe. That this
concerned him, Jerry knew, for her grief tore sharply, albeit vaguely, at
his sensitive, passionate heart. What it presaged he knew not, save that
it was disaster and catastrophe connected with him. As he looked back
at her, rough-coated and grief-stricken, he could see Terrence hovering
solicitously near her. He, too, was rough-coated, as was Michael, and
as Patsy and Kathleen had been, Jerry being the one smooth-coated
member of the family.
Further, although Jerry did not know it and Tom Haggin did, Terrence
was a royal lover and a devoted spouse. Jerry, from his earliest
impressions, could remember the way Terrence had of running with
Biddy, miles and miles along the beaches or through the avenues of
cocoanuts, side by side with her, both with laughing mouths of sheer
delight. As these were the only dogs, besides his brothers and sisters
and the several eruptions of strange bush-dogs that Jerry knew, it did
not enter his head otherwise than that this was the way of dogs, male

and female, wedded and faithful. But Tom Haggin knew its
unusualness. "Proper affinities," he declared, and repeatedly declared,
with warm voice and moist eyes of appreciation. "A gentleman, that
Terrence, and a four-legged proper man. A man-dog, if there ever was
one, four-square as the legs on the four corners