The seeds of dissension

by H. de Vere Stacpoole

 

The Seeds of Dissension

By H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

ILLUSTRATED BY STEVEN SPURRIER

THE world north of the Spanish parallels is more sane and less extravagant than the world south of them, less wonderful, too, if indeed one thing can be less wonderful than another in this most extraordinary world.

Starting from the North Pole and coming along down the 100th meridian of longitude a traveller from Mars would notice the change from the cold sobriety of Siberia to the warmer desolation of the Mongolian plains, but it would be about 40° North, the parallel that cuts the great loop of the Hoang Ho, that Earth would begin to hint of her secrets and tell of her marvels; of the little Gobi, of the Prayer-Wheels of Tibet, the temple bells of Burmah, the mysteries of Siam and the sun-blaze of Sumatra wherein he might walk at noon without casting a shadow.

He would see the rose turn to the lotus and the pine to the palm and the scrub of the Kuku-Nor Mountains to the Shan Forests and the mangroves of Malaya, passing, in fact, from world to world and reaching a world at last where Magic sits dealing with song and fire and passion and poison, filling with the dreams of the opium-eater the blossom of a flower and with the powers of hatred and destruction the seed of a fruit, which latter fact was brought home to me by Captain Jimmy Lasker, met with in the "Old Ship," a house of call not far from Meigg's wharf, San Francisco. The place is gone, gone like Bones and Sullivan's oyster-bar and Players, and with them have gone a race of men that will never be replaced. For now the tanker ties up where the Island schooners used to abide between their six months' trips and the iron grain ships fill themselves with Californian wheat through hose pipes, where the old Cape Horners hung, emptying themselves, or full and ready for their crews of Shanghaied men.

Lasker was old enough to remember the Three Brothers, that hardest of hard ships, old enough to remember copra before the soap companies had organised the trade. His father, Hiram, dated back before the time of Bully Hayes and Steinberger, and had been in sandalwood and taken his whack out of black-birding; a Pacific family, one might say, whose memories, could they have been connected and strung out and put in print, would have furnished a book more interesting than any romance.

"The old man was a bit the other side of ordinary," said Captain Jimmy (he was talking of his father); "it wasn't so much cleverness as the way he had of seein' behind things, if you understand me. It wasn't scarcely natural. I reckon if he'd stuck to the land he'd have been President of the United States, for he could tell mostly what other chaps were thinking of, let alone doing behind his back, but he preferred Nature and God's good air, and the wharf rats and ship-chandlers and Port officers and Customs and such-like gave him all he wanted of mankind; and they never got the better of him—no, sir, they never got the better of him. When Juan—what's his name?—the President of one of them South American States, was howlin' for guns way back in the seventies to fight his neighbours with, dad took him the guns, Veterli rifles, worth their weight in Mexican dollars; took them out of 'Frisco harbour, contraband of war, right under the noses of the Customs and never paid a penny graft money. Dad was dead against bribery and corruption when he had to pay the bribes. Besides, it was a matter of intellect with him same as a game of chess, and when Juan diddled him of the dollars he done Juan in, in a way that'd take me half a day to tell you of. He didn't believe in Revenge and had no use for the word; he called it making his adjustments. He adjusted Bully Stevens in Omao with a bullet in his stomach for a black job Bully had done seven years before at Rapa down in the Paumotos; seven years was nothing to dad. He didn't believe in keeping wrath hot, believed in cold storage and always kept his adjustment gruel there, as many a man got to know who'd run crooked in dealings with dad.

"But what I've been telling you is rough stuff and doesn't show the workings of his mind, which was trickier than Billy Shakespeare's Puck, but what I'm going to tell you now is bearing on the point, and it's the frozen truth though it sounds a sight more like conjuring.

"Dad, away about the time I was born, was ramping about the Pacific hiving honey, as you might say, like a bumble-bee going round a garden. Those were the times when there was money in trade; you just think of it, Nauru hadn't been exploited nor the shell lagoons stripped, sandalwood was still a business proposition and copra was beginning to flower, so to speak, and it was all sail, not the chunk of a paddle or beat of a screw from Frigate to the Kermadecs. Dad owned his ship, a tops'l schooner of a hundred and twenty, the Penguin built by Mathesons and broke up only a year or two ago. He'd been running a cargo from New Zealand to Brisbane when he heard of business to be done in the Arafara Sea, and he clapped on and came through Torres Straits in the South-East Monsoon when Torres is clear of fog.

"Now you go through Torres and it's like shutting a door on the Pacific. You're inside a bit of old Asia and you hit all sorts of funny places and people and flowers and trees and fruit that's different from anywhere else.

"Dad had along with him a young chap by name of Fergus. Fergus died only five years ago. He worked for me just as he had worked for dad, stuck to the family as handy-man and agent and what-not, but in the days I'm telling you of he was only just a lad, a sort of apprentice berthing aft but pulling on the ropes the same as the hands; he was of an inquiring mind and dad used to take him ashore and show him things and talk to him just the same as if he was a son. Dad didn't know fear, and at Papua, where he took Fergus ashore exploring, he didn't mind the head hunters, and Fergus told me once when we were talking of old days that they struck a wigwam there where heads were hanging to dry and the heads weren't bigger than a tangerine orange. They have some dodge for shrinking a head that no one knows or ever will know, and they have poisons that'll kill if you smell them, let alone taste them, and witch doctors that'll raise evil spirits, which seems like bringing coals to Newcastle, seeing the sort of chaps they are in those parts.

"But the point I'm coming to is the pips the old man brought aboard. The devil's pips he called them.

"Fergus wasn't sure whether it was on the Papuan coast or at Floris the old man went ashore to stay with a trader called Lomax. It doesn't matter, anyhow, but he was clear about Lomax. This chap was a white man by birth, but a native by breeding. Fish-belly white his face was, and his hair, which was tow-coloured with the sun, hung in his eyes till he'd shake it back to look at you, and then he'd look at you under his eyebrows. Fergus said the sight of him was enough to give you the jimjams, and he came off in a canoe with nothing on him but a net undervest and a necklace of berries.

"Dad didn't mind. Dad liked him. He always had a taste for queer things, and he went ashore with him and stayed two days prospecting for gold and came back aboard with a bunch of precious coral and six pearls that Loffar of Market Street paid him six hundred dollars for. Six bottles of gin was the price he paid for the lot.

"He took them down to the cabin and, when he'd stowed them in a locker, he took three big fruit pips, the size of walnuts nearly, out of his pocket and showed them to Fergus.

"'Look at them,' said he, 'what do you make of them?'

"'Nuts,' said Fergus.

"'Nuts your eye,' says the dad. 'Bumbo shells more like. Plant one of them things in any place where there are niggers enough to make a fight and let it grow and you'll see the fun. Murder and slaughter let loose. Lomax grew them or got them, anyhow, and gave me his word for it.'

"Now Fergus was a hard-shell Scotsman, but he had his superstitions, and had taken such a down on Lomax that he was pushed into dislike enough for the things to wish them overboard. But dad laughed at him and stuck them in the locker, and they tramped the anchor out of the mud and put out, and the last thing they saw was Lomax on the beach witn a gin bottle in his hand.

"The ship was full up, they'd taken in cargo here and there, paying in dollars, and they'd done so well that dad reckoned his fortune was made. The deck cargo alone would have paid for the trip, and leaving that aside the old Penguin was over-loaded.

"Meantime the monsoon had changed and Torres had let down a curtain of fog, fog and dirty weather, almost sure death to face; but dad never bothered about death, he got through.

"He could smell reefs.

"In the middle of the smother Fergus remembered those pips. Three Jonahs he reckoned them, but the old man only laughed, saying there were no niggers on board, so they needn't bother.

"But bother came without needing it.

Illustration: "This chap was a white man by birth, but a native by breeding. Fish-belly white his face was, and his hair, which was tow-coloured with the sun, hung in his eyes till he'd shake it back to look at you, and then he'd look at you under his eyebrows."

"South of Entrecasteaux Island in the Solomons it began to blow from the north with a cross sea owing to the current that runs there at a three-knot clip. Fergus said that the sea was more like the sea in the dead centre of a cyclone than anything else he'd ever seen, the waves were more like little waterspouts or big shell splashes than ordinary decent waves, and every now and then a ton of water would come down on the deck like a ton of clay. The lashings of the deck cargo, which was mostly sandalwood billets, began to give, and then went the cargo after them, the long boat was stove and sent galley west and the hens and pig that made the live-stock went with the long boat; there was two foot of water in the fo'c'sle.

"'There you are,' said Fergus, 'look at that sea, all our deck cargo gone, not to mention the live-stock. Get down and heave those pips over before we get it worse'; but the dad, clinging with his teeth to the weather rail, as you might say, only laughed. He wasn't going to give in to any superstition, and an hour or two after the wind dropped as if it knew it couldn't beat him, and next day with a full sailing breeze from the westward they came through between Malaita and Christoval into clean open sea. 'And now for 'Frisco,' says dad. 'Deck cargo or not, we've got a full hold and the pump shows we're tight, and we'll call maybe at one of the Ellices and pick up some more live-stock, seeing you're so fond of chickens,' and he laughed as if he'd made a good joke; but he didn't laugh long, for two days after the wind fell dead like a shot bird, and the old Penguin lay in her own shadow with the Santa Cruz Islands three hundred miles away to southward and nothing to north or east or west of her but the blue, blue sea.

"It was flat as a plate-glass window only for the swell running up from the south, the deadest of calms ship ever struck; and the water casks weren't none too full. They were close on to the Equator, so the weather wasn't cold. Fergus told me he used to lie awake at night dreading to see the sun rise. He said the sun would come up as if he was pushing his head through the water. He said the sea seemed to stick to the sun even after he was free and then fall back with a big plop and a shiver and show itself as the same old plate-glass sea. He said the cockroaches used to come on deck to cool themselves at sun-up and before they could get back below they'd be stuck by the hot pitch between the deck planking; he said they got so cute after a while that they only made their excursions fore and aft so's to be able to come back along the planks without crossing the pitch lines—which was a lie.

"I've always held to the truth; once a chap gets to embroiderin' on the truth, there's no knowing where his fancy-work will take him to; but leaving the cockroaches out and his statement that the flying fish came aboard fried and ready for table, there's no doubt it was a big calm.

"It lasted five days and the current had been carrying them all the time, so that when a breeze sprung up an island showed itself away to the south-east and there was nothing to do but steer for it.

"The water was all but out and the island showed itself big and promising; it was a high island, and after the rains the glass showed a waterfall like a white horse's tail coming down the cliffs.

"'There you are,' said dad, 'you and your pips and bad luck—where's the bad luck now?'

"'We ain't at 'Frisco yet,' replied the other,—which taking it by and large wasn't more than the truth.

"They hauled in close. There were reefs, but big breaks showed with the blue water running in, and the Penguin nosed her way through without a scratch and dropped the hook in twelve-fathom water before as pretty a beach as you'd wish to see, with the waterfall cascading down to it and making a trough at the foot of the cliff that stood at the north end.

"The north end of that island is all high; southward it runs pretty flat and thickly wooded. But you can see the place for yourself any time you wish to go there; Eromaya is its name and it does a big trade now in copra, but in those days it was wild.

"Three or four fishing canoes were lying on the beach, but not a sign of a native.

"Jackson, the mate, didn't like the look of that, but dad didn't bother. He took off a boat's crew well armed and floated the water casks on shore and began to fill up.

"He'd done this business and the casks were all ready to be towed off when out of the trees without word or warning came a flight of arrows. Most fell short, but one of them hit Jackson in the arm.

"The boat crew had their Veterli rifles handy and let fly into the trees, doing good work, to judge by the yells that followed.

"'That'll learn them,' said dad. Then he broke up the canoes on the sand to learn them some more, and the casks were got on board, and Jackson.

"The arrow was still sticking in his arm. Dad cut off the barb and drew the thing out, and Jackson didn't mind. He was as tough as a hickory nut and went about his work getting the casks stowed, and then, all of a sudden, he went groggy and dropped on the deck, and half an hour after he was dead of convulsions. The thing had been poisoned.

"Fergus said dad nearly went off his rocker. He cursed and swore, wanted to land and sweep the woods, but not a man of the crew would follow him—and no wonder. They did Jackson up in a hammock ready to take him out and drop him in blue water, and down below, when the old man had cooled off a bit, Fergus tackled him.

"Those devil's pips had been growing in Fergus's head as if they'd been planted there; all his superstitions were working overtime and he was in that state of mind he didn't care what he said. So he up and said to the old man:

"'I told you,' said he, 'I told you to chuck the things overboard. First thing we run into fog and dirt, next our deck cargo went, next we were near fried alive, now Jackson's dished, and he was the only man on board beside you could work a reckoning; next will be taken is yourself, and where'll we be? That's what I want to know, where'll we be? I'm thinking of my own skin,' he says, 'if you won't think of yours —chuck them things overboard and own up you were wrong.'

"Now, as Fergus told me after, he could see the old man had come to the same belief as himself but was too proud to own up.

"He was dying to get rid of the things but his pride wouldn't let him give in and chuck them overboard.

"Then a bright idea seemed to hit him on the head.

"'You're talking bilge,' said he, 'there's no harm in these things to a white man. Niggers—I'm not saying, since they're full of superstitions and fetishes and such, and anyhow Lomax said they'd play the cat and racket with niggers—so for the fun of the thing,' he says, 'and hoping for the best, I'll plant them on these chaps here.'

"'But you're not going ashore,' said Fergus.

"'Aren't I?' says the old man.

"He went to the locker and fetched the things out and put them in his pocket, and up he came on deck; not one of the crew would put hand to an oar, so he went ashore in the dinghy, sculling himself, but before he started he made the chaps let fly a couple of volleys into the trees.

"'That'll keep them down,' said he, 'if they're still about.'

"Fergus said the old man went as matter-of-fact as if he'd been going ashore to post letters; he'd gone to the galley and got a spoon to do the digging with, and it was sticking out of his pocket as he stood on the beach before turning to the trees.

"He was twenty minutes out of sight before he came from the trees on to the beach again."

II.

Captain Jim halted for refreshments and then resumed.

"Now a minute is a mighty long time, you measure it and see, and twenty minutes is twenty times as long, and the old man all that while had been grubbing about in a wood full of devils armed with poison arrows and shark-tooth spears looking for suitable places to plant his nuts. That shows his character better'n books could give it. Didn't know fear, only fear of being made small of and put in the wrong, always did his job thorough even if it was only the job of trying to put poison in the way of a lot of ballyhoos that were safe bound for perdition, anyway.

"Then he came on board and they got the hook up and put out. 'And that's done, anyway,' says the old man, which it certainly was.

"They got back to 'Frisco safe and sound and got good prices, and dad he continued on his ways till fifteen years later he died off the Australs of blackwater fever come back on him owing to a row he'd had with the French. I was on board. There was a will at the lawyers' in 'Frisco leaving the Penguin and all its property to me, with Fergus in charge as a sort of guardian and boss of the show till I was twenty-one, which wouldn't be for some years yet, and Fergus he stuck to his job treating me as man to man with no flapdoodle like elders serve out to youngsters, and we got knit together into sort of working partners and we didn't let the show down. We made money. There was money to be made then. In those days there were newseys running about Market Street selling the evening papers that are now millionaires, the Paumotos hadn't been properly opened, nor the phosphates islands properly worked. Louis Becke, the best gentleman that ever trod a plank, was in the land of the living, and Bishop Selwyn was showing the kanakas that white men weren't all of the same stamp as a few holy horrors notwithstandin' whom the Pacific was better in those days than 'tis now. The Chink and the low white hadn't made good and the kanakas hadn't taken to civilisation of low sorts. We did good business and kept sober. It wasn't that the money we made was so much as the fact that it was all coming in and little going out. Stop spending and you start saving was our motto, and it carried us along. We made voyages right down to New Zealand and right up to the Marshalls, and the years went on, till one day coming up to the Ellices we sighted an island and Fergus says, 'There's Eromaya.'

"'There's Eromaya,' he says, 'the place where they did in Jackson and where your dad landed to plant them things he reckoned would put a spell on the niggers—twenty years ago—twenty years ago—how time does run!'

"'Let's put in and have a look,' says I.

"He hung off, said he didn't want to shove his nose into no hornet's nest, but seeing that we were armed with Winchester repeaters, and me being young and with a taste for a scrap, he gave in and we altered the course and ran for the island.

"I wanted to see the place, same as people always want to see where murders have happened; besides, there was the memory of the old dad.

"There was a six-knot breeze and the reefs were easy, and Fergus, who never forgot anything with a sounding to it or a rock to be avoided, remembered at sight the passage they'd used those long years ago.

"We'd had the Winchesters and ammunition on deck all ready for trouble.

"Winchesters! Why, when we raised the beach, there before us was a little white village half hid by the trees and a little tin church near the village, and a white man in white drill and a sun helmet waiting on the sand, and the kanakas were in shirts and pants. We'd forgot what twenty years could do.

"Then I remembered the yarn about the pips, and I said to Fergus, 'Well, what about those pips? Seems to me the old dad planted the wrong stuff, for if this isn't peace and prosperity, then there aren't no white bears in Alaska. Look at the church.'

"'Something seems to have fetched loose,' said Fergus. 'I reckon missionaries have been tangling things up. Anyhow, we'll see.'

Illustration: "'He'd done this business and the casks were all ready to be towed off when out of the trees without word or warning came a flight of arrows. Most fell short, but one of them hit Jackson in the arm.'"

"We dropped the hook and came ashore. The white man's name was Leeson. He was a trader, been there four years, said the place was civilised when he came and Adams the missionary visited every three months or so and there was a native pastor. Nice chap Leeson was, nothing against him but a squint which he couldn't help, being a natural infirmity. We dined with him and talked trade. He'd got some bearer bonds in a silver smelting company. He wanted trade goods and said he couldn't pay us in copra as his copra was bespoke, but he'd let us have the bonds; they stood at twenty dollars, and he produced a year-old San Francisco Herald and showed the market quotation, which was twenty, said the company was firm as the Alleghany Mountains, and the stock was sure risen by this, but he'd risk it and let us have a thousand dollars worth of bonds for a thousand dollars worth of trade. We agreed, and the bargain was struck.

"We told him of the happenings of years ago and Jackson's death, and he laughed and said that was old times and things were different now, which was the truth.

"Next morning I said to Fergus whilst the chaps were breaking cargo, 'Let's have a look at the woods.' We were on the beach, and we turned into the trees with Namu, the kanaka pastor, who'd stuck himself on to us. There were palms and a few breadfruit, hibiscus bushes here and there, and pandanus and such. One South Seas wood is as like another as two kanakas—always the same old trees, and here of a sudden we struck a stranger. A great big brute of a tree forty foot high with big leaves and fruit the size of a chap's head hanging high up. 'Hello,' says I, 'what's this?'

Illustration: "'The boat crew had their Veterli rifles handy and let fly into the trees, doing good work, to judge by the yells that followed. "That'll learn them," said dad.'"

"'Search me,' says Fergus, 'but here's one of the melons.'

"He picked up a fruit that had dropped big as a green melon and covered with big prickles.

"Namu couldn't tell us what it was, said the tree had only just come into fruit, and we made a cut in it with Fergus's knife and mushy stuff came out and a smell like Chinatown after the rains. We dropped it and came back to the beach.

"It wasn't till next day that the idea came to me and I said to Fergus, 'Say—that tree couldn't have come from dad's planting, could it?'

"He only laughed. 'Look at the size of it,' says he.

"'Well, it's had over twenty years to grow,' said I, 'and the thing smelt like the devil anyhow.'

"'Well, he planted three of those things,' said Fergus. 'Where's the other two?'

"'Maybe only one came up,' I says, and then we dropped it.

"We put out two days after, got to 'Frisco 'and found the silver smelting company's bonds snyde. At least the thing was wild-cat anyhow and had gone bust nine months before.

"Fergus tore up his hair—what he had of it—by the handful, swearing to skin Leeson alive, which wasn't much good seeing Leeson was three thousand miles away and Eromaya out of trade tracks.

"'Well, he'll get it some day,' he says, turning down the gas-jet at last and putting the lid on the pot; 'he'll get it some day,' says he, 'from yours truly, and what he'll get won't be a booky of roses.'

"Then he said no more, cut off the juice and seemed to have forgotten Leeson. We'd got our living to make and our old ages to put by for, and strange enough after that streak of bad luck came a streak of good, for we hit a good line in short trips to Honolulu, which was just beginning to open its eyes in those days; now it's a cross between a bathing beach and a pineapple canning factory; it was different then.

"A year and a half we were on that line and then we were on the coast between 'Frisco and the Gulf of California and s'uth'ard of that; then business took us to the Santa Cruz Islands, and lo and behold! as the story-books say, we found ourselves within reach of Eromaya again three years and a few months from the time we were there last.

"'And now,' says Fergus, 'I'm going to skin that chap Leeson.'

"I was none too willing. There was no law running in Eromaya those days and I foresaw fights and disturbances. However, I fell in with him and we put the helm to starboard and ran south-west till the island showed, and when we got in there on the beach we saw a white man. But there were no houses, all the little white houses were gone, including Leeson's bungalow, and the white man wasn't Leeson.

"He was Adams the missionary, whose schooner had dropped him here for a few days whilst she ran on to Papeetong—a hundred miles south.

"'What's this I'm seeing?' asks Fergus, when we'd introduced ourselves and shook hands.

"'War and the wickedness of man,' says Adams, 'backed and assisted by Nature in one of her wicked moods and some blankety—excuse me—blankety blank fool who must have planted a Durian tree on this once smiling island.'

"'Tell us about it,' says Fergus, giving me a nudge, and leading the way up to a fallen palm lying in the shade where we sat down, 'give us the happenings.'

"'Three years ago,' said Adams, 'when I landed here I found two of the natives quarrelling over something; a big fruit it was, and I recognised at once it was a Durian.

"'I'd had experience of this thing, for I'd been several years in Papua and I'd seen two villages wiped out owing to fights over the possession of a Durian tree. The very bush-pigs fight for the fruit. One scarcely wonders—it tastes like chocolate creams and garlic and smells like a billy-goat, but once you've eaten it you long for it more and more. It's a stimulant, it's all sorts of things, and knowing this I ought to have had the tree cut down. I found it; it had evidently only just come into fruit, and I ought to have had it cut down. Instead, I told the trader Leeson to do it, and he only laughed. He was always against me, said it was grandmother's talk and told me to mind my own business—which wasn't tree-cutting.

"'Now I'll tell you what that tree did to this island, and it has only fruited three times. First time it only made individuals fight for possession of its unholy products; the second time they quarrelled worse; and the third time, only a few months ago, it split the island into its two old tribes that had become fused, brought to life again clubs and poisoned arrows and let loose battle, murder and sudden death. Leeson, seeing his copra houses being fired, tried to stop it, he was killed, everything was destroyed, even my little church, and of all the people of Eromaya only thirty are left, mostly women, still hiding in the woods.'

"I couldn't help cutting in. 'My old dad,' said I, 'planted that tree, and he did it on purpose.'

"'Then he did a wicked act,' says Adams.

"'He did it,' I said, 'because they killed his mate. I reckon it was Providence punishing them for their sins.'

"'And how about Leeson?' asks Adams. 'Why should Providence punish him?'

"Fergus had a word to say on that matter, but he didn't convince Adams—you see the missionary hadn't lost a thousand dollars—but he took us to where the tree was lying, he'd cut it down himself, and grubbing about we found one of the fruit that had gone rotten and was lying bust open showing the pips. I took one and I've kept it ever since as a remembrance of dad and his ways."

He took something from his pocket and handed it to me; it was a pip, rough, and nearly the size of a walnut.

A strange thing to handle, and stranger to think what Nature in her tropical mood can compress into a small space.

Dissension, War and Destruction——

And you could have put the thing in your waistcoat pocket.

Copyright, 1927, by H. de Vere Stacpoole, in the United States of America.