PAGE 8
The Renegade
by
Thus the days passed in increasing satisfaction and prosperity, days so rare in the life of any man when he says to himself, “I am happy.” To Jack, these three words, never spoken, but somewhere within him articulate and peremptory, these three words almost overwhelmed him with their significance. He trembled for this treasure, so elusive, so transitory, perhaps, so surely ill deserved; he grew humble with the thought of his own unworthiness, and, though no believer in the ordinary sense, he began to feel the first stirring of religion. When Fetuao, with sweet shame, laid her head against his shoulder and told him of her impending motherhood, he kissed her, comforted her, and then, rising to his feet, he sought the solitude that at such a moment he felt he could not share even with her. In one of the unfrequented corners of the bay, a narrow beach shadowed by the forest and faced by the open sea, he threw himself upon his knees with a passionate thankfulness that seemed to find its expression in this act. Knowing no prayer, addressing no God, he simply gazed above him in the sky, in a rapt, dumb gratitude.
As he walked home he thought of his own parents, long since dead; of their hopes, their cares, their humble unfulfilled ambitions, now dead with them. He perceived himself, now for the first time, a link between the past and the future, the heir of bygone generations, generations that had loved, and suffered, and struggled, to no other end than that he might live–he, and the sister he had neither seen nor heard from in fourteen years. Hell! he ought to write to Amandar. Families oughtn’t to drift apart like that. It was a shame, a durned shame, and it came over him with a shock that she, too, might be dead. He took a sheet of paper and a pencil, and with heaving breast and overflowing heart thus broke the silence of those long years:
OA BAY, SAMOA, May 14, 1899.
DEAR SIS, You will be surprised to get a letter from me after all this time. I am well and hope you are enjoying a simillar blessing. I am married now and left the sea. I suppose Joe is a man along in middle life now and you a handsome mattron with a family. This is a good country but hot.
Ever your affectionate brother JACK WILSON.
P. S.–I often think of Pa and Ma and the old days.
Not long after, Jack sailed into Apia with a load of copra and his letter for the outgoing mail. The town was in an uproar, and cracking like the Fourth of July. Jack wondered what in thunder it was about, as he landed at Leicester’s wharf and discovered the postmaster lying underneath the post office in a nest of sand bags. Crawling in after the functionary, Jack handed him the letter.
“That’s for America,” said Jack.
“Five cents,” said Leicester.
“What’s all this corrobborree?” asked Jack.
“It’s war, that’s what it is,” said Leicester, weighing the letter in a tin scale.
Jack’s jaw fell. For a month past he had heard rumors of a native war, but he had resolutely closed his ears to all that Fetuao was so insistent to tell him. It was none of his business, he had said to her uneasily. He wasn’t no politician, and all he asked of anybody was to be let alone; and with that he had tried to put the matter by as something imaginary and disquieting, which, if boldly ignored, would disappear of itself.
“Say, Mr. Leicester, what in hell is it about?” he inquired.
“If you went to the bottom of it you would find Dutchmen,” said Leicester grimly.
Jack cursed the meddling scoundrels.
“They want Mataafa for king, just because he has a majority of two thousand votes,” said Leicester.
“There sounds to be something in that,” said Jack faintly.
“Nothing at all!” exclaimed Leicester. “Just speciousness, that’s what I call it. The other fellow, Tanumafili, is a nice-appearing boy from the missionary college, and being above wire-pulling and promising everything to everybody, he hasn’t any following to speak of. But he’s a good, decent Protestant boy, and will make a fine king.”