Jerry of the Islands | Page 7

what Jerry did not know was very much. He did not know the
size of the world. He did not know that this Meringe Lagoon, backed
by high, forested mountains and fronted and sheltered by the off- shore
coral islets, was anything else than the entire world. He did not know
that it was a mere fractional part of the great island of Ysabel, that was
again one island of a thousand, many of them greater, that composed
the Solomon Islands that men marked on charts as a group of specks in
the vastitude of the far-western South Pacific.
It was true, there was a somewhere else or a something beyond of
which he was dimly aware. But whatever it was, it was mystery. Out of
it, things that had not been, suddenly were. Chickens and puarkas and
cats, that he had never seen before, had a way of abruptly appearing on
Meringe Plantation. Once, even, had there been an eruption of strange
four-legged, horned and hairy creatures, the images of which,
registered in his brain, would have been identifiable in the brains of
humans with what humans worded "goats."
It was the same way with the blacks. Out of the unknown, from the
somewhere and something else, too unconditional for him to know any
of the conditions, instantly they appeared, full-statured, walking about
Meringe Plantation with loin-cloths about their middles and bone
bodkins through their noses, and being put to work by Mister Haggin,
Derby, and Bob. That their appearance was coincidental with the
arrival of the Arangi was an association that occurred as a matter of
course in Jerry's brain. Further, he did not bother, save that there was a
companion association, namely, that their occasional disappearances
into the beyond was likewise coincidental with the Arangi's departure.
Jerry did not query these appearances and disappearances. It never
entered his golden-sorrel head to be curious about the affair or to
attempt to solve it. He accepted it in much the way he accepted the
wetness of water and the heat of the sun. It was the way of life and of
the world he knew. His hazy awareness was no more than an awareness
of something--which, by the way, corresponds very fairly with the hazy
awareness of the average human of the mysteries of birth and death and
of the beyondness about which they have no definiteness of
comprehension.
For all that any man may gainsay, the ketch Arangi, trader and
blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry's mind

as much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two worlds, as, at
one time, the boat that Charon sculled across the Styx signified to the
human mind. Out of the nothingness men came. Into the nothingness
they went. And they came and went always on the Arangi.
And to the Arangi, this hot-white tropic morning, Jerry went on the
whaleboat under the arm of his Mister Haggin, while on the beach
Biddy moaned her woe, and Michael, not sophisticated, barked the
eternal challenge of youth to the Unknown.

CHAPTER II

From the whaleboat, up the low side of the Arangi, and over her six-
inch rail of teak to her teak deck, was but a step, and Tom Haggin made
it easily with Jerry still under his arm. The deck was cluttered with an
exciting crowd. Exciting the crowd would have been to untravelled
humans of civilization, and exciting it was to Jerry; although to Tom
Haggin and Captain Van Horn it was a mere commonplace of everyday
life.
The deck was small because the Arangi was small. Originally a teak-
built, gentleman's yacht, brass-fitted, copper-fastened, angle- ironed,
sheathed in man-of-war copper and with a fin-keel of bronze, she had
been sold into the Solomon Islands' trade for the purpose of
blackbirding or nigger-running. Under the law, however, this traffic
was dignified by being called "recruiting."
The Arangi was a labour-recruit ship that carried the new-caught,
cannibal blacks from remote islands to labour on the new plantations
where white men turned dank and pestilential swamp and jungle into
rich and stately cocoanut groves. The Arangi's two masts were of
Oregon cedar, so scraped and hot-paraffined that they shone like tan
opals in the glare of sun. Her excessive sail plan enabled her to sail like
a witch, and, on occasion, gave Captain Van Horn, his white mate, and
his fifteen black boat's crew as much as they could handle. She was
sixty feet over all, and the cross beams of her crown deck had not been
weakened by deck-houses. The only breaks-- and no beams had been
cut for them--were the main cabin skylight and companionway, the

booby hatch for'ard over the tiny forecastle, and the small hatch aft that
let down into the store-room.
And