Kadjaman

By H. de Vere Stacpoole Author of “‘Glued,’” “‘It Is Paris,’” etc.

Tuan Marop, down there in Borneo, was capable of cutting out more than his right eye if it offended him. Perhaps Kray was right in guessing that Tuan was akin to those who have saved us in the past from backsliding into beasts.

Kray’s little son was playing with the big Siberian pup in the doorway. From where I sat I could see the child and the dog, and beyond them and framed by the door opening the pine-clad mountains cutting the blue sky of summer, and beyond these Omstjall, the snow peak and grandfather of the glacier that takes its name.

Kray has given up hunting these five years and is now manager of the Sellagman Salmon Canning Company, at least he looks after the fishing and the canning and gets two thousand dollars a year for the job, while I expect the real manager, the man who looks after the New York office and the prospectuses and so forth, gets ten—maybe more. I don’t know, neither does Kray, neither does he care. He says he has hunted everything in his time but the dollar, and that a free life in the open air is all he wants now that he has done with hunting and got married. He was sixty-seven years old when he married and didn’t look more than fifty, so he says; he doesn’t look more than fifty to-day, at a little distance.

He has hunted everywhere and shot everything and he started his business at twenty so that when he married he had been at the job nearly fifty years. That is a long time, for a year in the wilds is longer than a year in a city and the risks are greater.

Said Kray, looking at the child and the pup: “Olaff takes after his mother, don’t he? Same flax-colored hair coming. First I thought he was going to be darker, but it’s coming true enough. Scandinavian flax, there’s no other color like it. Gets on with the pup, don’t he? I saw the old dog lickin’ them both yesterday same as if Olaff was hers, too. I’ve sent her off to the Skagga fjord till the autumn.”

“The big Siberian dog I saw here last?”

“Yes, the mother of that pup. I’ve sent her off till the autumn. Olaff will be bigger then.”

“But why did you send her off—because she was treating Olaff as if he were her pup?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Kray, “and yet maybe that was a bit of the reason. But mainly I expect it was something that happened years ago that rattled me; thirty years ago it was when I was with Becconi in Borneo on the exploring job. He was after minerals and if he’d stuck to them in his drinks as well as his prospectin’ he’d have pulled through; but the whisky did him. I’d been out East with a chap called Milner hunting, and we struck Sarawak coast. Milner was going home from there, and I was paid off with a bonus. I could have gone back with him to England, and maybe would only for this chap Becconi who happened along while we were waiting at Bintulu for a boat.

“Boats in those days weren’t plentiful along the coast, and you didn’t often know where they were going when they came, but as long as they took you somewhere else it didn’t much matter. That’s how we were placed at Bintulu when out of the sea haze one day a little paddle-wheel boat came snortin’ and tied up to the rotten old wharf where the Sea Dyak children used to sit fishing when they weren’t playing headhunting with wooden parangs.

“The Tanjong Data was the name of the boat, and she was bound for Rejang and Kuching and ports beyond with a mixed cargo and a big monkey for the Dutch government that had been caught somewheres to the north of the Tubao River. The Tanjong had blown a cylinder cover off or something, and she lay at Bintulu a week for repairs and while she was repairing and taking more cargo I was often on board talking to the captain and Becconi, who had come by her and was sticking on board till the last minute, seeing that his cabin was a sight more comfortable than shore quarters. The monkey interested me a lot, for in all my shooting I’d never come across the big monkeys much, and this chap was big. He must have weighed all of two hundred pounds, and he was turning gray with age. He was what the Dyaks call a Mayas Kassa, which means an orang-utan, with a face like a full moon. I’m not joking. There are three kinds of orang-utans; the Mayas Kassa, the Mayas Rabei, and the Mayas Tjaping, but the Kassa takes the bun for beauty. I never did see such a face. It was like nothing so much as a full moon broadened out, same as you see it when the moon’s rising through a bank of mist and in the middle of it two eyes and a nose, to say nothing of the mouth. That was what the monkey was like, and they had him in a cage close to the engine-room hatch, and he’d sit there the day long, scratching himself and talking to himself, his eyes traveling about round the decks as if he was watching something passing, and sometimes he’d look up at you, but he’d never meet your eye square, at least not for longer than the flick of a snapshot shutter.

“Taking him altogether he was near five feet in height and his chest looked as thick as a tree as he sat there scratching the fur on it, his hands were as big as hams; and I reckon he could have taken two ordinary men and knocked their heads together same as if they’d been two rag dolls.

“Becconi took a lot of interest in the chap, too, and we’d sit under the double awning they’d rigged aft of the funnel and have our drinks and watch Kadjaman, for that was his name, given him because he was caught at Kadjaman, which is north of Fort Bellaja near the Tubao River. Becconi, when he had the whisky in him, would stand up for Kadjaman having a soul of his own, same as a man; but if the whisky was out, and maybe a touch of liver on him, he’d be the other way about. I used to use the monkey on him for fun, or to see the state of his health, and then Kadjaman would sit watching us and pretending not to.

“We didn’t know that he’d been at work of nights, when the whole of Bintulu and the chaps on board were snoring. He’d worked on the cage bars, loosening them by degrees and little by little, so that the time might come when one big pluck could rip them out.

“No, sir, we didn’t know that or we couldn’t have sat there sucking our cheroots and bug juice and talking about monkeys having souls.

II.

“Now I must tell you that Milner had a servant, Tuan Marop by name, and Tuan had his child with him, a little chap of six or so, named Ting. Mrs. Tuan had been dead over a year, and he’d brought Ting down to Bintulu to leave him there while he accompanied Milner on his expedition. Ting and Kadjaman had struck up a friendship of sorts. The child would talk to the brute in the Dyak lingo and Kadjaman would scratch himself and talk back in orang-utan. I tell you it was talking.

“You’ve seen a child talking to a dog—you’ve heard Olaff talking to that pup; well that was the sort of thing, only Ting wasn’t a soft little chap like Olaff. Ting was a Dyak, Sarabas Dyak, with a hundred generations of head hunters behind him, and what he was saying to Kadjaman didn’t seem a popsy-wopsy talk from what I could gather, though I didn’t know a word of his lingo.

“I asked Becconi to ask Tuan to listen and report, and Tuan said Ting wasn’t talking Dyak, but the monkey language. Seemed to think it a joke, but he was in dead earnest all the same. There is a monkey language as sure as there’s anything else in this world, and what they say to each other, Lord only knows, but they say a lot, and Ting seemed to have picked it up same as children do with foreign languages. Tuan said that the Dyak children, now and again and once in a hundred years, so to speak, could pick out what the monkeys were saying when they held their jamborees in the forest, but he’d never seen or heard of a child talking to a monkey before like Ting did, for the reason that the Dyaks didn’t keep monkeys in cages and so the children hadn’t a chance. He seemed proud of the fact, same as if Ting had taken a prize at college.

“So things went on like that till the Tanjong Data had done tinkering at her cylinder covers, and the day before leaving came, with the docks all of a clatter with fruit cases for down coast and rolls of matting and boxes of tobacco and Lord knows what else and the niggers all bug house with being driven and getting in each other’s way.

“Then, coming along four o’clock in the evening, when things had settled down and the breeze was rising, Becconi and I were sitting in deck chairs talking and saying good-by to Milner and the captain. Tuan had brought us up some tea which the steward had made for us, and Ting was playing near the gangway by himself. All of a sudden, swish! the bars of the cage went, and Kadjaman was out.

“I was sitting with my back to the cage, and when I turned I saw Kadjaman on the deck, a cage bar in his fist, and the bar was in the act of dashing a nigger’s brains out. It was all as sudden as that. I didn’t wait to see more. It was every man for himself, and I had no charter to clear the decks of the Tanjong Data of orang-utans armed with five-foot iron bars; besides I hadn’t my gun with me. I guess if I’d had a popgun even, I wouldn’t have taken a nose dive into the Bintulu River like I did. A man’s courage lies in his gun often enough—unless he’s fronting a moral duty, which I wasn’t. I just dived and got to the other bank and watched.

“Every one had skipped from that deck either overboard or through the saloon hatch and there was Kadjaman with his bar in his fist, a free man, so to say, soul or no soul. He was pretty busy, too. He wanted more blood, it seemed, but he was afraid of going below for it, afraid of traps, so he smashed away at the saloon skylight cover, beating the brass rods of it to knots. Then he beat the starboard rail; in fact, he gave that steamer the biggest thrashing of her life. Maybe it was his having been kept in a cage six months that was coming out, or maybe it was just his own nature; but he did take it out of that old hooker. He near beat the cockroaches out of her, and you can fancy that the chaps hidden in the cabin had a lively time expecting him down the saloon companionway.

“However, all of a sudden, he let up. I could see him standing sniffing the air as if he smelt danger. He stood like that for half a tick and then he stooped down and picked up something from the deck and threw it over his arm like a sack. Same moment he made a jump for the gangway and next he was on the bank.

“I saw now what he was carrying—and heard it, too—it was Ting. The child had been playing on the deck as I told you and hadn’t got below with the others. Maybe he’d sat admiring the ways of his friend, but that’s as may be; the fact was he was now shouting murder or what sounded like it in Dyak and Tuan was responding.

“Tuan had found a creese down below, and, before the monkey had made twenty yards, he was on deck and after him to recover his property. Becconi and Milner, who’d armed themselves, were after Tuan to lend a hand, and there was I stuck on the opposite bank only able to look on.