Island honor

Quite miraculously, there was an opening in the mangrove swamps and what looked like a river or harbor beyond. Such things are not to be expected when you have been very much bored by two days of unvaried contemplation of mangrove swamps on the one hand, and totally empty sea on the other. So we on the _Shikar_--most promising name for a devilish slow and unexciting tub--tacked in. There were three of us and two native boys and we thought we were being very daring and reckless, coasting down the China Sea in a fifty-footer.

The miracle continued. We did not ground on a bar. It was a river of sorts. A kite rose heavily from something unpleasant on a sand-bank and soared away. And then we saw a white man’s house with a flag floating from a flagpole before it, which was most miraculous of all. And that was where we found Vetter.

I don’t know what nationality he was, though this part of the world was French. He wasn’t that, I’m sure. We went ashore and met him and found that he considered himself lord of all creation, and wasn’t at all averse to converting us to his own belief. Technically, he was political agent for Kuramonga. None of us envied him the job. Neither did we feel called upon to console him with an extended visit. But the hunting looked promising and we dropped anchor for the night at least. And then when the soft tropic night had fallen we were too lazy to be polite and call on him.

“I want to kick him,” said Cary, puffing smoke at the stars. “I haven’t any reason, but I want to kick him. So for my manner’s sake, if you chaps go ashore tell him I’m dead or something and couldn’t come.”

There was a jungle off to the right somewhere and we could hear the night noises coming from it over the water. Little squeakings, and once a scream like a human being’s, which was probably a monkey, and once, very far away indeed, a snarl that would have made your blood run cold if it hadn’t been muted by the distance.

“Tiger, that,” said Cary hopefully. “Maybe we can get Vetter to let us have some beaters tomorrow and take a shot at him.”

The doctor grunted.

“Breeding season,” he said. “Why not play leap-frog with a locomotive? More healthy. And no beaters will tackle them now.”

“If Vetter tells them to go, they will,” insisted Cary. “He’s got those natives under his thumb. They’re scared to death of him.”

“Paranoiac,” grunted the doctor. “He thinks he’s lord of creation.”

It was curious. You saw that about Vetter the minute you met him. Perhaps he was a little mad on the subject of himself. Perhaps it was Kuramonga that did it, because Kuramonga is the last place on earth that God made, and it was finished up with swamps and malaria and jungles and bad water that couldn’t be worked in anywhere else. They used to send men somebody had a grudge against, to Kuramonga, to drink themselves to death for the glory of la belle France. But Vetter liked it. He was the only white man in a hundred miles, and he had twenty little Annamite soldiers to keep his district in order with. He’d seemed much more anxious to impress us with his wonderful hold over the natives than to talk about anything else. He had said more or less flatly that he was the law and the prophets and most of the religion in Kuramonga. And he gloried in it.

Cary, in white duck trousers and nothing else, reached out of his hammock and gave himself a push to swing a little for a breeze.

“Damned luxurious beggar,” said the doctor enviously. “Get out of that hammock and let somebody else have a chance.”

I rose to tilt him amiably on the deck when I heard a little noise above the lapping of the river waves. Somehow, it sounded furtive, and so it wasn’t a time for fooling.

“Listen!” I said sharply. There was a splash of a paddle.

“Dacoits?” asked Cary hopefully. “Thinking maybe they can slip over the side and rush us?”

He beamed and slung his feet out of the hammock, to get some guns from below. Cary was always hopeful of trouble.

“We’re right in front of the Residency,” said the doctor dryly, “and Vetter has a steam launch. They know it. Don’t be an ass. Dacoits? No!”

Cary hesitated. Then somebody called to us across the water. Very softly, in Malay, as if they didn’t want to be heard on shore.

“They want to come aboard,” grunted the doctor. “Get your guns if you like, Cary, but you might want to put on a shirt, too. There’s a girl with them.”

Cary swung down the companionway and the doctor stretched himself luxuriously in the hammock. A dark shape took form in the moonlight. It was a regular Malay dugout with three natives in it. A man in the bow and another in the stern, with a girl between them. They came on the Shikar’s deck as Cary reappeared with both arms full of guns.

Cary got the first look at the girl, and he dropped the guns and looked foolish. The doctor grunted and offered to get lights, but the two men protested politely but very sincerely against it. They sat down and exchanged polite phrases with the doctor, who was the only one of us who could talk decent Malay.

I sat back and wondered, feasting my eyes on the girl. Sixteen--seventeen--eighteen? I don’t know. I do know she was at the prettiest age any girl could be. Malay all through, yes. But her skin was fair as mine and her eyes were wonders. There was grace and pride and blood and breeding in every move she made. She looked at the doctor mostly, quietly and composedly, but her eyes alternately flamed and brooded. Now and then she glanced at the two men.

And one of them was an old chap, white haired and stately, with a ceremonious looking kris on one side of his sash and an old percussion pistol on the other side. In the moonlight you could see his clothes were all of silk, and mighty fine quality, too. Not at all the sort of thing a man would wear who made a habit of paddling himself around. The other man was a well-set-up young chap with eyes like a hawk who looked like a young prince out of the Arabian nights. Somehow, you’d take to those two.

You just imagine it. Us three white men, disheveled and half-dressed, on the deck of a fifty-foot schooner in an unmapped harbor with the furtive jungle noises a hundred yards away. Talking to these three who’d come out of nowhere, dressed like princes and a princess in a dream. Off on the other side of the river there was Vetter’s house with a light burning somewhere and his toy soldiers standing guard while he slept. And those three silk-clad figures sitting on our deck, regarding us with a poise and courtesy that made me feel like a clumsy fool.

The old chap twisted his mustache gently and looked at us. He was the picture of an honorable gentleman, somehow. Brown skinned, but you liked him. He asked quietly if he might ask advice for his daughter, without Vetter hearing that he had asked.

“You understand,” said the doctor, “if there’s anything we ought to repeat to him--anything political----”

“No, Tuan,” said the old chap gravely. “I am Buro Sitt.”

The doctor sat up at that, and so did I. I’d heard a yarn or so about him. He’d fought the French to a standstill, years back, and he’d been licked. But he’d fought like a gentleman and when it was over he took his medicine like a man. One or two old-time Colonials had yarned to us in Saigon about the fighting in times past and an ancient colonel had sworn that Buro Sitt was the finest fighter and the most chivalrous opponent that ever gladdened the heart of his enemy.

“Go ahead,” said the doctor. “I know you. I’d like to shake hands.”

Buro Sitt did not move, but he bowed very politely.

“It may be, Tuan,” he said, “that you understand the ways of we Orang Malagi.” He talked quite impersonally. “You know that our ways are not as your ways. But you know that we have our honor, also.”

“Yes,” grunted the doctor. “Especially Buro Sitt.”

Buro Sitt’s face did not change.

“My daughter desires to go to the house of the Tuan Vetter,” he said without an inflection in his voice. “She loves him. But I would ask your advice before she goes.”

Cary moved abruptly. The younger of our two visitors caressed the handle of his kris with fingers that quivered suddenly. The girl stared at us defiantly--and then her eyes clouded with abysmal shame. But a moment later they were flaming.

“Well?” asked the doctor. His face did not even move a muscle.

“There is another woman in the Tuan Vetter’s house,” said Buro Sitt. “Who also loves him. Will it be the custom of the white men to send her away when my daughter goes to him?”

“He might,” said the doctor tonelessly, “and he might not. It would be considered disgraceful to him among other white men to have one woman living in his house if he were not married to her. It would be doubly disgraceful to have two. And of course it would be called disgraceful in the women. They would be scorned by all white men. Not scorned--despised.”

The girl’s face did not change. She was staring defiantly at the three of us. The younger man caressed the handle of his kris.