For Daughtry did not care to be seen on such dog-stealing enterprises and was planning how to get on board the steamer unobserved. He edged around outside the lantern shine and went on along the beach to the native village. As he had foreseen, all the able-bodied men were down at the boat-landing working cargo. The grass houses seemed lifeless, but at last, from one of them, came a challenge in the querulous, high-pitched tones of age:
“What name?”
“Me walk about plenty too much,” he replied in the bêche-de-mer English of the west South Pacific. “Me belong along steamer. Suppose ’m you take ’m me along canoe, washee-washee, me give ’m you fella boy two stick tobacco.”
“Suppose ’m you give ’m me ten stick, all right along me,” came the reply.
“Me give ’m five stick,” the six-quart steward4 bargained. “Suppose ’m you no like ’m five stick then you fella boy go to hell close up.”
There was a silence.
“You like ’m five stick?” Daughtry insisted of the dark interior.
“Me like ’m,” the darkness answered, and through the darkness the body that owned the voice approached with such strange sounds that the steward lighted a match to see.
A blear-eyed ancient stood before him, balancing on a single crutch5. His eyes were half-filmed over by a growth of morbid6 membrane7, and what was not yet covered shone red and irritated. His hair was mangy, standing8 out in isolated9 patches of wispy10 grey. His skin was scarred and wrinkled and mottled, and in colour was a purplish blue surfaced with a grey coating that might have been painted there had it not indubitably grown there and been part and parcel of him.
A blighted11 leper—was Daughtry’s thought as his quick eyes leapt from hands to feet in quest of missing toe- and finger-joints. But in those items the ancient was intact, although one leg ceased midway between knee and thigh12.
“My word! What place stop ’m that fella leg?” quoth Daughtry, pointing to the space which the member would have occupied had it not been absent.
“Big fella shark-fish, that fella leg stop ’m along him,” the ancient grinned, exposing a horrible aperture13 of toothlessness for a mouth.
“Me old fella boy too much,” the one-legged Methuselah quavered. “Long time too much no smoke ’m tobacco. Suppose ’m you big fella white marster give ’m me one fella stick, close up me washee-washee you that fella steamer.”
“Suppose ’m me no give?” the steward impatiently temporized14.
For reply, the old man half-turned, and, on his crutch, swinging his stump15 of leg in the air, began sidling hippity-hop into the grass hut.
“All right,” Daughtry cried hastily. “Me give ’m you smoke ’m quick fella.”
He dipped into a side coat-pocket for the mintage of the Solomons and stripped off a stick from the handful of pressed sticks. The old man was transfigured as he reached avidly16 for the stick and received it. He uttered little crooning noises, alternating with sharp cries akin17 to pain, half-ecstatic, half-petulant, as he drew a black clay pipe from a hole in his ear-lobe, and into the bowl of it, with trembling fingers, untwisted and crumbled18 the cheap leaf of spoiled Virginia crop.
Pressing down the contents of the full bowl with his thumb, he suddenly plumped upon the ground, the crutch beside him, the one limb under him so that he had the seeming of a legless torso. From a small bag of twisted coconut20 hanging from his neck upon his withered21 and sunken chest, he drew out flint and steel and tinder, and, even while the impatient steward was proffering22 him a box of matches, struck a spark, caught it in the tinder, blew it into strength and quantity, and lighted his pipe from it.
With the first full puff23 of the smoke he gave over his moans and yelps24, the agitation25 began to fade out of him, and Daughtry, appreciatively waiting, saw the trembling go out of his hands, the pendulous26 lip-quivering cease, the saliva27 stop flowing from the corners of his mouth, and placidity28 come into the fiery29 remnants of his eyes.
What the old man visioned in the silence that fell, Daughtry did not try to guess. He was too occupied with his own vision, and vividly30 burned before him the sordid31 barrenness of a poor-house ward3, where an ancient, very like what he himself would become, maundered and gibbered and drooled for a crumb19 of tobacco for his old clay pipe, and where, of all horrors, no sip32 of beer ever obtained, much less six quarts of it.
And Michael, by the dim glows of the pipe surveying the scene of the two old men, one squatted33 in the dark, the other standing, knew naught34 of the tragedy of age, and was only aware, and overwhelmingly aware, of the immense likableness of this two-legged white god, who, with fingers of magic, through ear-roots and tail-roots and spinal35 column, had won to the heart of him.
The clay pipe smoked utterly36 out, the old black, by aid of the crutch, with amazing celerity raised himself upstanding on his one leg and hobbled, with his hippity-hop, to the beach. Daughtry was compelled to lend his strength to the hauling down from the sand into the water of the tiny canoe. It was a dug-out, as ancient and dilapidated as its owner, and, in order to get into it without capsizing, Daughtry wet one leg to the ankle and the other leg to the knee. The old man contorted himself aboard, rolling his body across the gunwale so quickly, that, even while it started to capsize, his weight was across the danger-point and counterbalancing the canoe to its proper equilibrium37.
Michael remained on the beach, waiting invitation, his mind not quite made up, but so nearly so that all that was required was that lip-noise. Dag Daughtry made the lip-noise so low that the old man did not hear, and Michael, springing clear from sand to canoe, was on board without wetting his feet. Using Daughtry’s shoulder for a stepping-place, he passed over him and down into the bottom of the canoe. Daughtry kissed with his lips again, and Michael turned around so as to face him, sat down, and rested his head on the steward’s knees.
“I reckon I can take my affydavy on a stack of Bibles that the dog just up an’ followed me,” he grinned in Michael’s ear.
“Washee-washee quick fella,” he commanded.
The ancient obediently dipped his paddle and started pottering an erratic38 course in the general direction of the cluster of lights that marked the Makambo. But he was too feeble, panting and wheezing39 continually from the exertion40 and pausing to rest off strokes between strokes. The steward impatiently took the paddle away from him and bent41 to the work.
“That fella dog he belong big white marster along schooner43 . . . You give ’m me ten stick tobacco,” he added after due pause to let the information sink in.
“I give ’m you bang alongside head,” Daughtry assured him cheerfully. “White marster along schooner plenty friend along me too much. Just now he stop ’m along Makambo. Me take ’m dog along him along Makambo.”
There was no further conversation from the ancient, and though he lived long years after, he never mentioned the midnight passenger in the canoe who carried Michael away with him. When he saw and heard the confusion and uproar44 on the beach later that night when Captain Kellar turned Tulagi upside-down in his search for Michael, the old one-legged one remained discreetly45 silent. Who was he to seek trouble with the strange ones, the white masters who came and went and roved and ruled?
In this the ancient was in nowise unlike the rest of his dark-skinned Melanesian race. The whites were possessed46 of unguessed and unthinkable ways and purposes. They constituted another world and were as a play of superior beings on an exalted47 stage where was no reality such as black men might know as reality, where, like the phantoms48 of a dream, the white men moved and were as shadows cast upon the vast and mysterious curtain of the Cosmos49.
The gang-plank being on the port side, Dag Daughtry paddled around to the starboard and brought the canoe to a stop under a certain open port.
“Kwaque!” he called softly, once, and twice.
At the second call the light of the port was obscured apparently50 by a head that piped down in a thin squeak51.
“Me stop ’m, marster.”
“One fella dog stop ’m along you,” the steward whispered up. “Keep ’m door shut. You wait along me. Stand by! Now!”
With a quick catch and lift, he passed Michael up and into unseen hands outstretched from the iron wall of the ship, and paddled ahead to an open cargo port. Dipping into his tobacco pocket, he thrust a loose handful of sticks into the ancient’s hand and shoved the canoe adrift with no thought of how its helpless occupant would ever reach shore.
The old man did not touch the paddle, and he was unregardless of the lofty-sided steamer as the canoe slipped down the length of it into the darkness astern. He was too occupied in counting the wealth of tobacco showered upon him. No easy task, his counting. Five was the limit of his numerals. When he had counted five, he began over again and counted a second five. Three fives he found in all, and two sticks over; and thus, at the end of it, he possessed as definite a knowledge of the number of sticks as would be possessed by the average white man by means of the single number seventeen.
More it was, far more, than his avarice52 had demanded. Yet he was unsurprised. Nothing white men did could surprise. Had it been two sticks instead of seventeen, he would have been equally unsurprised. Since all acts of white men were surprises, the only surprise of action they could achieve for a black man would be the doing of an unsurprising thing.
Paddling, wheezing, resting, oblivious53 of the shadow-world of the white men, knowing only the reality of Tulagi Mountain cutting its crest-line blackly across the dim radiance of the star-sprinkled sky, the reality of the sea and of the canoe he so feebly urged across it, and the reality of his fading strength and of the death into which he would surely end, the ancient black man slowly made his shoreward way.
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1
cargo
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| n.(一只船或一架飞机运载的)货物 | |
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wrangled
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| v.争吵，争论，口角( wrangle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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ward
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| n.守卫，监护，病房，行政区，由监护人或法院保护的人（尤指儿童）；vt.守护，躲开 | |
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steward
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| n.乘务员，服务员；看管人；膳食管理员 | |
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crutch
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| n.T字形拐杖；支持，依靠，精神支柱 | |
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morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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membrane
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| n.薄膜，膜皮，羊皮纸 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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isolated
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| adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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wispy
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| adj.模糊的；纤细的 | |
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blighted
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| adj.枯萎的，摧毁的 | |
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thigh
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| n.大腿；股骨 | |
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aperture
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| n.孔，隙，窄的缺口 | |
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14
temporized
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| v.敷衍( temporize的过去式和过去分词 )；拖延；顺应时势；暂时同意 | |
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15
stump
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| n.残株，烟蒂，讲演台；v.砍断，蹒跚而走 | |
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avidly
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| adv.渴望地，热心地 | |
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akin
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| adj.同族的，类似的 | |
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crumbled
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| （把…）弄碎， （使）碎成细屑( crumble的过去式和过去分词 )； 衰落； 坍塌； 损坏 | |
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crumb
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| n.饼屑，面包屑，小量 | |
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coconut
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| n.椰子 | |
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withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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proffering
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| v.提供，贡献，提出( proffer的现在分词 ) | |
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puff
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| n.一口(气)；一阵(风)；v.喷气，喘气 | |
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24
yelps
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| n.（因痛苦、气愤、兴奋等的）短而尖的叫声( yelp的名词复数 )v.发出短而尖的叫声( yelp的第三人称单数 ) | |
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agitation
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| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
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pendulous
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| adj.下垂的；摆动的 | |
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saliva
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| n.唾液，口水 | |
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placidity
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| n.平静，安静，温和 | |
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fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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sip
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| v.小口地喝，抿，呷；n.一小口的量 | |
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33
squatted
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| v.像动物一样蹲下( squat的过去式和过去分词 )；非法擅自占用（土地或房屋）；为获得其所有权；而占用某片公共用地。 | |
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naught
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| n.无，零 [=nought] | |
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spinal
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| adj.针的，尖刺的，尖刺状突起的；adj.脊骨的，脊髓的 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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equilibrium
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| n.平衡，均衡，相称，均势，平静 | |
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erratic
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| adj.古怪的，反复无常的，不稳定的 | |
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39
wheezing
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| v.喘息，发出呼哧呼哧的喘息声( wheeze的现在分词 )；哮鸣 | |
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40
exertion
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| n.尽力，努力 | |
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41
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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42
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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43
schooner
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| n.纵帆船 | |
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44
uproar
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| n.骚动，喧嚣，鼎沸 | |
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45
discreetly
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| ad.(言行)审慎地，慎重地 | |
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46
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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47
exalted
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| adj.(地位等)高的，崇高的；尊贵的，高尚的 | |
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48
phantoms
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| n.鬼怪，幽灵( phantom的名词复数 ) | |
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49
cosmos
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| n.宇宙；秩序，和谐 | |
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50
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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51
squeak
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| n.吱吱声，逃脱；v.（发出）吱吱叫，侥幸通过；（俚）告密 | |
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52
avarice
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| n.贪婪；贪心 | |
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oblivious
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| adj.易忘的，遗忘的，忘却的，健忘的 | |
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