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Jerry of the Islands
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pubOne.info thank you for your continued support and wish to present you this new edition. It is a misfortune to some fiction-writers that fiction and unveracity in the average person's mind mean one and the same thing. Several years ago I published a South Sea novel. The action was placed in the Solomon Islands. The action was praised by the critics and reviewers as a highly creditable effort of the imagination. As regards reality- they said there wasn't any. Of course, as every one knew, kinky-haired cannibals no longer obtained on the earth's surface, much less ran around with nothing on, chopping off one another's heads, and, on occasion, a white man's head as well.
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CHAPTER I
  Not until Mister Haggin abruptly picked him
up under one arm and stepped into the sternsheets of the waiting
whaleboat, did Jerry dream that anything untoward was to happen to
him. Mister Haggin was Jerryâs beloved master, and had been
his beloved master for the six months of Jerryâs life. Jerry did
not know Mister Haggin as âmaster, â for âmasterâ had no
place in Jerryâs vocabulary, Jerry being a smooth-coated,
golden-sorrel Irish terrier.
  But in Jerryâs vocabulary, âMister Hagginâ
possessed all the definiteness of sound and meaning that the word
âmasterâ possesses in the vocabularies of humans in relation to
their dogs. âMister Hagginâ was the sound Jerry had always
heard uttered by Bob, the clerk, and by Derby, the foreman on the
plantation, when they addressed his master. Also, Jerry had always
heard the rare visiting two-legged man-creatures such as came on
the Arangi, address his master as Mister Haggin.
  But dogs being dogs, in their dim, inarticulate,
brilliant, and heroic-worshipping ways misappraising humans, dogs
think of their masters, and love their masters, more than the facts
warrant. âMasterâ means to them, as âMisterâ Haggin meant to
Jerry, a deal more, and a great deal more, than it means to humans.
The human considers himself as âmasterâ to his dog, but the dog
considers his master âGod. â
  Now âGodâ was no word in Jerryâs vocabulary, despite
the fact that he already possessed a definite and fairly large
vocabulary. âMister Hagginâ was the sound that meant âGod. â
In Jerryâs heart and head, in the mysterious centre of all his
activities that is called consciousness, the sound, âMister
Haggin, â occupied the same place that âGodâ occupies in human
consciousness. By word and sound, to Jerry, âMister Hagginâ
had the same connotation that âGodâ has to God-worshipping humans.
In short, Mister Haggin was Jerryâs God.
  And so, when Mister Haggin, or God, or call
it what one will with the limitations of language, picked Jerry up
with imperative abruptness, tucked him under his arm, and stepped
into the whaleboat, whose black crew immediately bent to the oars,
Jerry was instantly and nervously aware that the unusual had begun
to happen. Never before had he gone out on board the Arangi,
which he could see growing larger and closer to each lip-hissing
stroke of the oars of the blacks.
  Only an hour before, Jerry had come down from the
plantation house to the beach to see the Arangi depart.
Twice before, in his half-year of life, had he had this delectable
experience. Delectable it truly was, running up and down the white
beach of sand-pounded coral, and, under the wise guidance of Biddy
and Terrence, taking part in the excitement of the beach and even
adding to it.
  There was the nigger-chasing. Jerry had been born to
hate niggers. His first experiences in the world as a puling puppy,
had taught him that Biddy, his mother, and his father Terrence,
hated niggers. A nigger was something to be snarled at. A nigger,
unless he were a house-boy, was something to be attacked and bitten
and torn if he invaded the compound. Biddy did it. Terrence did it.
In doing it, they served their Godâ Mister Haggin. Niggers
were two-legged lesser creatures who toiled and slaved for their
two-legged white lords, who lived in the labour barracks afar off,
and who were so much lesser and lower that they must not dare come
near the habitation of their lords.
  And nigger-chasing was adventure. Not long after he
had learned to sprawl, Jerry had learned that. One took his
chances. As long as Mister Haggin, or Derby, or Bob, was
about, the niggers took their chasing. But there were times when
the white lords were not about. Then it was ââWare niggers! â One
must dare to chase only with due precaution. Because then, beyond
the white lordâs 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 Patsyâs and Kathleenâs
disappearance. But Biddy and Terrence knew. So did Michael and
Jerry. The four-monthsâ 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-heartedâ Terrence the Magnificent,
as Tom Haggin called himâ 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 dogsâ 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. âProper affinities, â he declared, and
repeatedly declared, with warm voice and moist eyes of
appreciation. âA 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 of him. And prepotent! My word! His bloodâd breed
true for a thousand generations, and the cool head and the kindly
brave heart of him. â
  Terrence did not voice his sorrow, if sorrow he had;
but his hovering about Biddy tokened his anxiety for her. Michael,
however, yielding to the contagion, sat beside his mother and
barked angrily out across the increasing stretch of water as he
would have barked at any danger that crept and rustled in the
jungle. This, too, sank to Jerryâs heart, adding weight to his sure
intuition that dire fate, he knew not what, was upon him.
  For his six months of life, Jerry knew a great deal
and knew very little. He knew, without thinking about it, without
knowing that he knew, why Biddy, the wise as well as the brave, did
not act upon all the message that her heart voiced to him, and
spring into the water and swim after him. She had protected him
like a lioness when the big puarka (which, in Jerryâs
vocabulary, along with grunts and squeals, was the combination of
sound, or word, for âpigâ) had tried to devour him where he was
cornered under the high-piled plantation house. Like a lioness,
when the cook-boy had struck him with a stick to drive him out of
the kitchen, had Biddy sprung upon the black, receiving without
wince or whimper one straight blow from the stick, and then downing
him and mauling him among his pots and pans until dragged (for the
first time snarling) away by the unchiding Mister Haggin,
who; however, administered sharp words to the cook-boy for daring
to lift hand against a four-legged dog belonging to a god.
  Jerry knew why his mother did not plunge into the
water after him. The salt sea, as well as the lagoons that led out
of the salt sea, were taboo. âTaboo, â as word or sound, had no
place in Jerryâs vocabulary. But its definition, or significance,
was there in the quickest part of his consciousness. He possessed a
dim, vague, imperative knowingness that it was not merely not good,
but supremely disastrous, leading to the mistily glimpsed sense of
utter endingness for a dog, for any dog, to go into the water where
slipped and slid and noiselessly paddled, sometimes on top,
sometimes emerging from the depths, great scaly monsters,
huge-jawed and horribly-toothed, that snapped down and engulfed a
dog in an instant just as the fowls of Mister Haggin snapped
and engulfed grains of corn.
  Often he had heard his father and mother, on the
safety of the sand, bark and rage their hatred of those terrible
sea-dwellers, when, close to the beach, they appeared on the
surface like logs awash. âCrocodileâ was no word in Jerryâs
vocabulary. It was an image, an image of a log awash that was
different from any log in that it was alive. Jerry, who heard,
registered, and recognized many words that were as truly tools of
thought to him as they were to humans, but who, by inarticulateness
of birth and breed, could not utter these many words, nevertheless
in his mental processes, used images just as articulate men use
words in their own mental processes. And after all, articulate men,
in the act of thinking, willy nilly use images that correspond to
words and that amplify words.
  Perhaps, in Jerryâs brain, the rising into the
foreground of consciousness of an image of a log awash connoted
more intimate and fuller comprehension of the thing being thought
about, than did the word âcrocodile, â and its accompanying image,
in the foreground of a humanâs consciousness. For Jerry really did
know more about crocodiles than the average human. He could smell a
crocodile farther off and more differentiatingly than could any
man, than could even a salt-water black or a bushman smell one. He
could tell when a crocodile, hauled up from the lagoon, lay without
sound or movement, and perhaps asleep, a hundred feet away on the
floor mat of jungle.
  He knew more of the language of crocodiles than did
any man. He had better means and opportunities of knowing. He knew
their many noises that were as grunts and slubbers. He knew their
anger noises, their fear noises, their food noises, their love
noises. And these noises were as definitely words in his vocabulary
as are words in a humanâs vocabulary. And these crocodile noises
were tools of thought. By them he weighed and judged and determined
his own consequent courses of action, just like any human; or, just
like any human, lazily resolved upon no course of action, but
merely noted and registered a clear comprehension of something that
was going on about him that did not require a correspondence of
action on his part.
  And yet, 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
âgoats. â
  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 Jerryâs
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 Arangiâs
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 somethingâ 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 Jerryâs 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, gentlemanâs 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 Islandsâ trade for the purpose of blackbirding or nigger-running. Under the law, however, this traffic was dignified by being called ârecruiting. â
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 Arangiâs 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 boatâs 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 breaksâ and no beams had been cut for themâ were the main cabin skylight and companionway, the booby hatch forâard over the tiny forecastle, and the small hatch aft that let down into the store-room.
And on this small deck, in addition to the crew, were the âreturnâ niggers from three far-flung plantations. By âreturnâ was meant that their three years of contract labour was up, and that, according to contract, they were being returned to their home villages on the wild island of Malaita. Twenty of themâ familiar, all, to Jerryâ were from Meringe; thirty of them came from the Bay of a Thousand Ships, in the Russell Isles; and the remaining twelve were from Pennduffryn on the east coast of Guadalcanar. In addition to theseâ and they were all on deck, chattering and piping in queer, almost elfish, falsetto voicesâ were the two white men, Captain Van Horn and his Danish mate, Borckman, making a total of seventy-nine souls.
âThought your heart âd failed you at the last moment, â was Captain Van Hornâs greeting, a quick pleasure light glowing into his eyes as they noted Jerry.
âIt was sure near to doinâ it, â Tom Haggin answered. âItâs only for you Iâd a done it, annyways. Jerryâs the best of the litter, barrinâ Michael, of course, the two of them beinâ all thatâs left and no better than them that was lost. Now that Kathleen was a sweet dog, the spit of Biddy if sheâd lived. â Here, take âm....
Table of contents
- JERRY OF THE ISLANDS
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X
- CHAPTER XI
- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XIV
- CHAPTER XV
- CHAPTER XVI
- CHAPTER XVII
- CHAPTER XVIII
- CHAPTER XIX
- CHAPTER XX
- CHAPTER XXI
- CHAPTER XXII
- CHAPTER XXIII
- CHAPTER XXIV
- Copyright