Island Honor

A DREADFUL CHOICE WAS PUT UP TO THIS AGED RULER OF AN ISLAND PEOPLE; A CHOICE FEW MEN WOULD CARE TO FACE, AND UNDER THE TROPIC STARS A WHITE MAN OR SO HELPED HIM TO DECIDE—IN TRUE AMERICAN FASHION

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.

“Would you, then,” asked Buro Sitt woodenly, “point out to him that he should send away this other woman when my daughter comes to him?”

The doctor held up his hand. He looked grim, all of a sudden.

“Buro Sitt,” he said quietly, “you are lying.”

Buro Sitt’s hand dropped to his sash with a sudden movement. Then he bit his lip.

“Royal blood,” said the doctor, “does not speak as you are speaking. Royal blood does not send royal blood to be a white man’s mistress. And especially, royal blood does not speak of its disgraces. What’s back of this, Buro Sitt?”

There was sheer agony in Buro Sitt’s eyes.

“Tuan,” he said, as if the words were wrenched from him, “if you were a man and a raja, and your honor as a man were against your honor as a king, what could you do?”

It might seem funny to think of a petty princeling—Buro Sitt could not be more—speaking of his honor as a king, but it wasn’t funny then.

“Once,” he said fiercely, “I led a thousand fighting men. I fought against the French. When it was ended, there were fifty left. Now there are six hundred men again who follow me. Their lives are in my hands, and their women, and their children also. And the Tuan Vetter has demanded my daughter.”

He was telling the truth this time.

“You’re going to fight?” demanded the doctor. “It’s folly; suicide!”

Buro Sitt’s hands clenched.

“Suicide?” he echoed bitterly. “If that were all! I am raja of my people. If I die, they fight—and are killed. All of them. And enough men have died for me before, Allah knoweth. Speak to him,”—he pointed to the young chap who was caressing his kris. “My daughter was to have been his wife. There are two hundred swords that follow him. And yet, if we rise⸺”

He was shaking all over.

“If we rise—ruin,” he said bitterly. “My people slain, my villages burned, my children slaughtered! That is the price of the honor of a man, Tuan. And for their lives, Vetter demands my daughter. Which”—he clenched his teeth in the quintessence of bitterness—“is the price of the honor of a king.”

Cary moved. He was listening to the old chap now, looking from him to the girl and back again.

“You mean,” said the doctor slowly, “Vetter will set a gunboat on your people if you keep your daughter from him, no matter how?”

“If she stabs herself!” said Buro Sitt, his voice breaking. He looked swiftly at the younger Malay and then his eyes went suddenly blank again as he got control of himself once more. “So she will go to him, Tuan. As the ransom for my villages, and the ransom for my people’s lives.”

Cary began to talk angrily, spouting what Malay he knew with his whole vocabulary of Chinese thrown in to make his meaning clear. The main point of his speech was that he’d like to wring Vetter’s neck and would do so at the first favorable opportunity. Buro Sitt listened without a flicker of expression on his face. He had himself in hand again.

“Tuan,” he said evenly, to the doctor, “will you speak to him, and urge that he sends away this other woman? It will not even be safe for my daughter. There is always poison⸺”

“I’ll remember,” said the doctor, not quite directly.

“The blessing of Allah be upon you,” said Buro Sitt evenly.

He swung down into the canoe. The girl and the young man followed him. They drifted off into the darkness, where the jungle noises began at the water’s edge. For a little while there was no sound but the lapping of the river waves and the furtive noises that came out of the squirming mass of vegetation.

Then the doctor said thoughtfully, “I wonder what he’s really up to.”

“It isn’t what he’s going to do,” said Cary angrily. “It’s what I’m⸺”

“You’re going to do nothing,” said the doctor calmly. “Vetter thinks he is lord of creation, which he isn’t, but he is the lord of Kuramonga. Also he has some little tin soldiers. You can’t do anything direct, and as for reporting him—Well, we’re civilians and foreigners to boot. The powers that be would pay absolutely no attention to us. We’d better leave it up to Buro Sitt.”

“But he can’t do anything,” protested Cary angrily, “and I can kick Vetter, anyhow.”

“Buro Sitt,” said the doctor, “can’t kill Vetter, because Vetter’s doubtless arranged that if he’s scragged Buro Sitt will get the blame. And he can’t kill the girl, because Vetter would trump up a rebellion on him if he did, and his record is bad. His villages would be wiped out at once. But⸺”

“Do you mean you’re going to stand by and watch?” demanded Cary furiously. “Let that beast Vetter⸺”

“I’m going to do what Buro Sitt wants me to do,” said the doctor. “I’m going to do nothing whatever but sit still and look on. And, of course, remember what Buro Sitt told us. I don’t like Vetter. He’s a paranoiac. And it’s always unhealthy to have even an ordinary swelled head. Anywhere, Cary,” he added kindly, “Anywhere at all. So I just wonder what Buro Sitt is going to do.”

Cary and I wrangled for an hour about it. The thing did look cold-blooded. A white man in a position where he could demand Buro Sitt’s daughter—which would cost him his honor as a man—on penalty of ravaging his people and destroying them—which would certainly compromise his honor as a king. A raja counts himself the equal of any king, anywhere. And Buro Sitt had led his people to disaster once before. He’d taken out a thousand men and brought back just fifty. He’d feel now as if he had to make up for that.

Then the doctor shut us up and turned in. Cary woke everybody up in the middle of the night to suggest that we kidnap the girl by arrangement and let the young chap who wanted to marry her know where to find her. The doctor threw a shoe at him and went back to sleep.

“Son,” he told Cary, “you forget two things. Buro Sitt did not come out here to ask us to lecture Vetter. He did have a reason for coming out here. And Vetter has a swelled head. Go to sleep.”

A minute later he was snoring.

I woke at sunrise, listening to noise of the surf down at the sea splashing and roaring among the mangrove roots. It’s always strangely loud at daybreak. And the jungle was making noises as the night things went to their hiding places and the day things came out again. And presently a boat came out from Vetter, asking us not to go away because he’d have something amusing to show us that night.

We guessed more or less what it was, from our opinion of Vetter and Buro Sitt’s call. But we didn’t leave. We loafed on the boat all day and Cary talked morosely about how pretty the girl was and wondered what her name was and how old she was. And the doctor fished.

Meanwhile I wondered how Buro Sitt, who was obviously Malay, could be a raja up on the China Sea, and learned that about one in four people up there are Malays, the other three-fourths being Chinese and so on.

And then night came on and the jungle that had looked very tropic and pleasant during the day began to make unpleasant noises. And Vetter sent his steam launch for us to come and see what he had to show.

The doctor had it right when he said Vetter thought he was lord of creation. Political agent over a district nobody else wanted, with a gunboat coming in every six months or so. Twenty little soldiers to back him up. Not even a telegraph line to connect him with the outside world. But in his own district he was the Almighty.

Vetter’s soldiers were stiff as ramrods. They saluted when we came ashore and took us into a room to wait for him. He kept us waiting, like an emperor. When he came in he was strutting. Oh, he thought he was the great old Bhud, all right. He clapped his hands for drinks, and his servants served him with exquisite haste. Then he flung himself into a chair and grinned at us.

“You’ve come from the north,” he reminded us. “Japan, and China, and so on. Not very respectful to white men, these Asiatics, eh?”

We agreed politely.

“I will show you,” he said, showing his teeth in a grin, “how a strong man treats these swine. I keep them under.”

He held out his open hand and clenched it like he was crushing something. He didn’t wait for us to say anything. We weren’t important except as an audience. But he wasn’t crazy. He just had a case of swelled head that had been aggravated by authority, and he wanted to show off. He was feverishly anxious to show off. He believed he was lord of creation, and some people with that belief are pitiful, and some are amusing, but Vetter managed to be unpleasant.

“There’s a raja here,” he told us, grinning, “traces back his ancestry to the rajas of Malacca, in the thirteenth century. Proud as hell. Royal to his fingertips. Now watch!”

Big, and beefy, and dark, with the close-shaved hairs showing through his skin. He lay back in his chair and grinned at us.

“I’m a white man,” said Vetter, “so I demand royal honors, no less. Once Buro Sitt—this raja—refused his taxes. He said he would appeal to Saigon. And the gunboat came in the harbor two days later. Buro Sitt came down with his retinue to meet it. Very much armed. He was going to complain of me. Of me! Only the marines from the gunboat and my men were on their way to his village. My men opened fire at sight of the guns his men carried. Like any Malays, they fired back. He lost fifteen men and we burned one of his villages.”

He winked at us, and laughed. I don’t think he was French. Not all French, anyway.

“The gunboat capitaine, he reported Buro Sitt in a revolt, and that I had him well under control. Buro Sitt paid the tax—twice over,” he added significantly. “That’s the way to treat these swine.”

Cary scowled. I began to understand that Buro Sitt was right when he said Vetter would ruin his people if he weren’t obeyed. I began to get very unfond of Vetter.

“Indeed?” the doctor grunted.

Vetter took it for admiration. He was crazy with self-applause anyhow. Ordinarily, admiration of one’s self isn’t a very healthy occupation, but Vetter thrived on it. He went on to explain further.

“Royal honors I demand,” he grinned. “I am a white man, and a white man is royal, while I’m the white man. You’d think Buro Sitt had had enough of a lesson, eh? But no. Two weeks ago I marched through his chief village. I looked for royal honors. He did not offer them. I was patient. I asked him why he did not receive me as a raja—a sultan and his overlord. He said I was only a Frenchman, so⸺”

A sort of hubbub started off in the jungle somewhere. Vetter grinned nastily.

“This is the result.” He waved toward the window. “I thought I’d show you how I treat these swine. I told Buro Sitt his impertinence meant he meant to revolt. He’d have to give me a hostage for good behavior. His daughter.” Vetter laughed exuberantly. “A hostage, you understand. And she will taste every particle of food I eat, so Buro Sitt will not dare poison me.”

The doctor grunted again.

“He won’t?”

“Not he,” Vetter nodded wisely, and grinned again. “I shall make love to her, of course. One does. I shall be to her as a god—a kindly god. But to her father I⸺”

The noise in the jungle drew nearer and louder. Then one of the sentries challenged sharply. There was an answer, and then the shrill and nasal reply of the sentry to the corporal of the guard.

Vetter waited, grinning. Presently two soldiers escorted Buro Sitt and the girl into the room. The young chap with the hawk-like eyes was nowhere about. Buro Sitt looked absolutely impassive, though his nostrils were distended a little. The girl—well, she was white and queerly silent.

Vetter looked Buro Sitt up and down.

“Since when,” he asked in Malay, without any polite prefix, “are you permitted to wear arms into my presence?”

Buro Sitt, without a word, handed over his kris to one of the soldiers. His antiquated pistol followed. Vetter snapped at his soldiers and they went out. Buro Sitt was like a stone image. Vetter looked at us out of the corner of his eye. Then he laughed.

“Your daughter,” he said insolently to Buro Sitt, “will taste all my food hereafter, lest there be poison in it.”

“I understand, Tuan,” said Buro Sitt evenly.

“And she will share my room,” added Vetter grinning, “lest a snake be placed in that.”

“I understand, Tuan,” said Buro Sitt.

His nostrils looked white, somehow. It was a pretty horrible thing to watch, Buro Sitt handing over his daughter—sacrificing his honor as a man to keep faith with his people as a king.

“Then,” said Vetter insolently, “you may go.”

Buro Sitt bowed. Then he said, “But I beg, Tuan, that you send away that other woman, lest she poison both you and my daughter. Women are jealous, Tuan.”

Vetter looked at him for an instant through half-closed eyes.

“I’ll have a drink.” He clapped his hands and ordered a siphon and a glass. When the servant brought it in he ordered the girl to mix him a drink.

Then he got up and walked over to Buro Sitt and laughed in his face. It was just showing off, you know, making a raja of the best blood in the East watch his daughter perform a servant’s work for a white.

She brought the glass, deathly white and with flaming eyes. Vetter took it, then laughed.

“She will taste all I eat and drink,” he reminded Buro Sitt. He motioned to her to taste it.

Staring at him defiantly, she raised it to her lips, and Vetter snatched it away and threw it on the floor.

“So soon?” he laughed. “And willing to drink too! But there is a mirror on the wall, my dear. I saw you drop a little white powder in it. We would have died together, eh? But it is much better to live.”

He sat down and laughed while I saw Buro Sitt quivering and almost—almost leaping for him. But two soldiers came rushing in. They’d heard the crashing glass. And they led Buro Sitt away, with more despair on his face than I thought any human being could show.

I waited for a signal from the doctor, but he looked on composedly. Vetter turned to us, laughing.

“One needs to be omniscient, eh? To know their secret thoughts. There is no other woman. That was for you. So that when I died of poison you would report that I and—she”—he jerked his thumb negligently at the white-faced girl—“were poisoned by a jealous woman.”

“I see,” said the doctor dryly. So did I. It fitted in nicely. Buro Sitt’s call of the night before and his talk of another woman would make us into witnesses that Vetter had been poisoned through jealousy. And it was quite clear that Buro Sitt was ready to see his daughter die too if it were any way necessary.

But Vetter believed he was all powerful, and the events of the last five minutes had given him extra proof. So he grinned and nodded a farewell and pushed the girl—shaken and shivering now—before him and left us. For all the world it was like a king or something dismissing his attendants. Vetter’d only wanted us for an audience, and now the show was over.

But Cary was raving. He turned to the doctor, his fists doubled, wanting to go and half kill Vetter. And I wasn’t any too peaceable myself. Not heroism, you know. Just ingrowing dislike of Vetter. He didn’t act like a white man should.

“We can’t interfere,” said the doctor coolly, “only when we’ve got proof that will stick in the teeth of Vetter’s say-so. And we haven’t.”

There was a little noise. A queer little noise, like a sick man coughing. Then a little thud. Then nothing. The doctor looked grim.

“I think we’ve got it now,” he said, with his mouth twisted wryly.

He put his hand in his pocket and went streaking to where Vetter had gone. I thought I heard the murmur of his voice. Then he came back. He was smiling, but most unpleasantly.

“You were mistaken,” he said pleasantly, “if you thought you heard me talking to anybody. Vetter is sick. Very sick. Cary, go to the boat and get my medicine-case. And you,” he said to me, “you tell the sergeant in command of the soldiers that Vetter is sick with fever brought on by excitement, and there mustn’t be any noise. Not even challenges. And certainly no shooting. Not under any circumstances.”

We went. The doctor’s face was curious; grim and queerly amused. But I knew he hadn’t found exactly what he expected when he chased Vetter. I knew just what had happened the minute he let me in the room. There was nobody in the room but Vetter. The girl had disappeared. The doctor made me help him, and it was an unpleasant job.

When Cary came back, the doctor kept him busy on errands to the soldiers. He kept the soldiers busy, getting hot water hotter and cold water colder and generally occupied with duties that certainly weren’t guard-duty. And bringing sheets and pillows and one thing and another. Cary, at the door, always growled that he’d no taste for trying to keep Vetter alive. Cary was sentimental about a pretty girl.

The sun had just risen when the doctor stopped. We came out of the sick-room and he told me to tell the sergeant the news. I went and broke it as positively as I knew how. Vetter was dead, of fever with complications. And the sergeant shuffled uneasily and said that the gunboat would be due in a week more.

I went back, and Cary was staring at the figure on the bed that we’d drawn a sheet over. There were one or two suspiciously wet spots on the floor, but Cary didn’t notice them, or think that they looked as if we had been scrubbing there.

He stared at the figure. Then he tiptoed over and drew back the sheet from the face. Curious to look at a man you cordially disliked, when he’s past being disliked any more.

“What was the matter with him?” asked Cary.

“Fever,” said the doctor.

I felt very weak and sick from the reaction from what we’d had to do, but I grinned feebly.

The doctor handed Cary a package that was wrapped up in part of a sheet; he wanted it dropped overboard in deep water. The handle stuck out of it, and the handle was that of the kris the young Malay with the hawk-like eyes had been caressing while he sat with Buro Sitt on our boat deck.

“M-my God!” said Cary, shaken and sick. “He—he⸺”

“He died,” said the doctor firmly, “of fever. A special sort that always follows paranoia. I’m a doctor and my report will stand, if we get him buried before the gunboat gets here. Fever, Cary, fever.”

And his report did stand. I heard later that the next Political to take Vetter’s post made shocked reports of how Vetter had been mistreating the natives. He had Grossly Exceeded his Authority, and all that sort of thing. Every effort would have to be made to restore the loyalty to la belle France that Vetter’s actions would have undermined. That meant, of course, scrupulously fair treatment thereafter.

But it struck me as rather humorous that the doctor met Vetter’s successor later on and listened for half an hour to hair-raising accounts of the evil deeds Vetter had done.

“M’sieur,” said the new Political, excitedly, “it is incredible that he was not assassiné! That he died naturally, of fever, c’est incroyable!”

“Oh, not at all,” said the doctor. “That’s the price one pays for not taking things in time. Vetter had paranoia, and he didn’t do anything to cure himself. His ‘fever’ was the inevitable price of his neglect.”

In my mind I was contrasting Buro Sitt, with the price that had been set on his honor as a man, and the greater price set on his faith with his people. But just then a young doctor laughed at the doctor’s ignorance in speaking of Vetter’s death as the price he paid for not trying to cure his paranoia—which is usually nothing more or less than a swelled head, or the belief that one is lord of creation.