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Jerry of the Islands-Part31_JACK LONDON(1876-1916)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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"My word, him bad fella boy any amount," Johnny finished his tale.



"Government House, Tulagi, damn glad give 'm twenty pounds along

that fella."



"You blessed Sing Song Silly," Villa, murmured in Jerry's ears. "If

it hadn't been for you--"



"Your head and mine would even now be galumping through the bush as

Makawao hit the high places for home," Harley concluded for her.



"My word, some fella dog that, any amount," he added lightly. "And

I gave him merry Ned just the other day for nigger-chasing, and he



knew his business better than I did all the time."

"If anybody tries to claim him--" Villa threatened.



Harley confirmed her muttered sentiment with a nod.

"Any way," he said, with a smile, "there would have been one



consolation if your head had gone up into the bush."

"Consolation!" she cried, throaty with indignation.



"Why, yes; because in that case my head would have gone along."

"You dear and blessed Husband-Man," she murmured, a quick cloudiness



of moisture in her eyes, as with her eyes she embraced him, her arms

still around Jerry, who, sensing the ecstasy of the moment, kissed



her fragrant cheek with his ribbon-tongue of love.

CHAPTER XXIV



When the Ariel cleared from Malu, on the north-west coast of

Malaita, Malaita sank down beneath the sea-rim astern and, so far as



Jerry's life was concerned, remained sunk for ever--another vanished

world, that, in his consciousness, partook of the ultimate



nothingness that had befallen Skipper. For all Jerry might have

known, though he pondered it not, Malaita was a universe, beheaded



and resting on the knees of some brooding lesser god, himself vastly

mightier than Bashti whose knees bore the brooding weight of



Skipper's sun-dried, smoke-cured head, this lesser god vexed and

questing, feeling and guessing at the dual twin-mysteries of time



and space and of motion and matter, above, beneath, around, and

beyond him.



Only, in Jerry's case, there was no pondering of the problem, no

awareness of the existence of such mysteries. He merely accepted



Malaita as another world that had ceased to be. He remembered it as

he remembered dreams. Himself a live thing, solid and substantial,



possessed of weight and dimension, a reality incontrovertible, he

moved through the space and place of being, concrete, hard, quick,



convincing, an absoluteness of something surrounded by the shades

and shadows of the fluxing phantasmagoria of nothing.



He took his worlds one by one. One by one his worlds evaporated,

rose beyond his vision as vapours in the hot alembic of the sun,



sank for ever beneath sea-levels, themselves unreal and passing as

the phantoms of a dream. The totality of the minute, simple world



of the humans, microscopic and negligible as it was in the siderial

universe, was as far beyond his guessing as is the siderial universe



beyond the starriest guesses and most abysmal imaginings of man.

Jerry was never to see the dark island of savagery again, although



often in his sleeping dreams it was to return to him in vivid

illusion, as he relived his days upon it, from the destruction of



the Arangi and the man-eating orgy on the beach to his flight from

the shell-scattered house and flesh of Nalasu. These dream episodes



constituted for him another land of Otherwhere, mysterious, unreal,

and evanescent as clouds drifting across the sky or bubbles taking



iridescent form and bursting on the surface of the sea. Froth and

foam it was, quick-vanishing as he awoke, non-existent as Skipper,



Skipper's head on the withered knees of Bashti in the lofty grass

house. Malaita the real, Malaita the concrete and ponderable,



vanished and vanished for ever, as Meringe had vanished, as Skipper

had vanished, into the nothingness.



From Malaita the Ariel steered west of north to Ongtong Java and to

Tasman--great atolls that sweltered under the Line not quite awash



in the vast waste of the West South Pacific. After Tasman was

another wide sea-stretch to the high island of Bougainville.



Thence, bearing generally south-east and making slow progress in the

dead beat to windward, the Ariel dropped anchor in nearly every



harbour of the Solomons, from Choiseul and Ronongo islands, to the

islands of Kulambangra, Vangunu, Pavuvu, and New Georgia. Even did



she ride to anchor, desolately lonely, in the Bay of a Thousand

Ships.



Last of all, so far as concerned the Solomons, her anchor rumbled

down and bit into the coral-sanded bottom of the harbour of Tulagi,



where, ashore on Florida Island, lived and ruled the Resident

Commissioner.






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