The Sin of Monsieur Pettipon Part 6

"My tribe hungry for long pig," growled Mealy-mealy. He seemed to be trembling with some powerful emotion. Hunger?

Mr. Pottle knew where his only chance for escape lay.

"My tribe velly, velly, velly hungry, too," he cried. "Velly, velly, velly near."

He thrust his fingers into his mouth and gave a piercing school-boy whistle. As if in answer to it there came a cras.h.i.+ng and floundering in the bushes. His bluff had worked only too well; it must be the fellow man-eaters of Mealy-mealy.

Mr. Pottle turned and ran for his life. Fifty yards he sped, and then realized that he did not hear the padding of bare feet on the sand behind him or feel hot breath on the back of his neck. He dared to cast a look over his shoulder. Far down the beach the moonlight showed him a flying brown figure against the silver-white sand. It was Mealy-mealy, and he was going in the opposite direction as fast as ever his legs would take him.

Surprise drove fear temporarily from Mr. Pottle's mind as he watched the big cannibal become a blur, then a speck, then nothing. As he watched Mealy-mealy recede, he saw another dark figure emerge from the bush where the noise had been, and move slowly out on the moon-strewn beach.

It was a baby wild pig. It sniffed at the ocean, squealed, and trotted back into the bush.

As he gnawed his morning cocoanut, Mr. Pottle was still puzzled. He was afraid of Mealy-mealy; that he admitted. But at the same time it was quite clear that Mealy-mealy was afraid of him. He was excited and more than a little gratified. What a book he could write! Should he call it "Cannibal-Bound on O-pip-ee," or, "Cannibals Who have almost Eaten Me"?

Tiki Tiu's schooner would be coming for him very soon now,--he'd lost track of the exact time,--and he would be almost reluctant to leave the isle. Almost.

Mr. Pottle had another glimpse of a cannibal next day. Toward evening he stole out to pick some supper from a breadfruit-tree not far from his cave, a tree which produced particularly palatable _mei_ (or breadfruit).

He drew his _pareu_ tight around him and slipped through the bushes; as he neared the tree he saw another figure approaching it with equal stealth from the opposite direction; the setting sun was reflected from the burnished brown of the savage's shoulders. At the same time Mr.

Pottle spied the man, the man spied him. The savage stopped short, wheeled about, and tore back in the direction from which he had come.

Mr. Pottle did not get a good look at his face, but he ran uncommonly like Mealy-mealy.

--6

Mr. Pottle thought it best not to climb the _mei_-tree that evening; he returned hastily to his cave, and finished up the breakfast cocoanut.

Over a pipe he thought. He was pleased, thrilled by his sight of a cannibal; but he was not wholly satisfied. He had thought it would be enough for him to get one fleeting glimpse of an undoubted man-eater in his native state, but it wasn't. Before he left the Isle of O-pip-ee he wanted to see the whole tribe in a wild dance about a bubbling pot.

Tiki Tiu's schooner might come on the morrow. He must act.

He crept out of the cave and stood in the moonlight, breathing the perfume of the jungle, feeling the cool night air, hearing the mellow notes of the Polynesian nightingale. Adventure beckoned to him. He started in the direction Mealy-mealy had run.

At first he progressed on tiptoes, then he sank to all fours, and crawled along slowly, pig-wise. On, on he went; he must have crept more than a mile when a sound stopped him--a sound he had heard before. It was faint, yet it seemed near: it was the sound of some primitive musical instrument blending with the low notes of a tribal chant. It seemed to come from a sheltered hollow not two dozen yards ahead.

He crouched down among the ferns and listened. The chant was crooned softly in a deep voice, and to the straining ears of Mr. Pottle it seemed vaguely familiar, like a song heard in dreams. The words came through the thick tangle of jungle weeds:

"Eeet slon ay a teep a ari."

Mr. Pottle, fascinated, wiggled forward to get a look at the tribe. Like a snake, he made his tortuous approach. The singing continued; he saw a faint glow through the foliage--the campfire. He eased himself to the crest of a little hummock, pushed aside a great fern leaf and looked.

Sitting comfortably in a steamer-chair was Mealy-mealy. In his big brown hands was a s.h.i.+ny banjo at which he plucked gently. Near his elbow food with a familiar smell bubbled in an aluminum dish over a trim canned-heat outfit; an empty baked-bean can with a gaudy label lay beside it. From time to time Mealy-mealy glanced idly at a pink periodical popular in American barber-shops. The song he sang to himself burst intelligibly on Mr. Pottle's ears--

"It's a long way to Tipperary."

Mealy-mealy stopped; his eye had fallen on the staring eyes of Mr.

Pottle. He caught up his ax and was about to swing it when Mr. Pottle stood up, stepped into the circle of light, pointed an accusing finger at Mealy-mealy and said:

"Are you a cannibal?"

Mealy-mealy's ax and jaw dropped.

"What the devil are you?" he sputtered in perfect American.

"I'm a barber from Ohio," said Mr. Pottle.

Mealy-mealy emitted a sudden whooping roar of laughter.

"So am I," he said.

Mr. Pottle collapsed limply into the steamer-chair.

"What's your name?" he asked in a weak voice.

"Bert Lee, head barber at the Schmidt House, Bucyrus, Ohio," said the big man. He slapped his fat, bare chest. "Me--Lee," he said, and laughed till the jungle echoed.

"Did you read 'Green Isles, Brown Man-Eaters, and a White Man'?" asked Mr. Pottle, feebly.

"Yes."

"I'd like to meet the man who wrote it," said Mr. Pottle.

III: _Mr. Pottle and Culture_

Out of the bathtub, rubicund and rotund, stepped Mr. Ambrose Pottle. He anointed his hair with sweet spirits of lilac and dusted his anatomy with crushed rosebud talc.u.m. He donned a virgin union suit; a pair of socks, silk where it showed; ultra low shoes; white-flannel trousers, warm from the tailor's goose; a creamy silk s.h.i.+rt; an impeccable blue coat; a gala tie, perfect after five tyings; and then went forth into the spring-scented eventide to pay a call on Mrs. Blossom Gallup.

He approached her new-art bungalow as one might a shrine, with diffident steps and hesitant heart, but with delicious tinglings radiating from his spinal cord. Only the ballast of a three-pound box of Choc-O-late Nutties under his arm kept him on earth. He was in love.

To be in love for the first time at twenty is pa.s.sably thrilling; but to be in love for the first time at thirty-six is exquisitely excruciating.

Mr. Pottle found Mrs. Gallup in her living room, a basket of undarned stockings on her lap. With a pretty show of confusion and many embarra.s.sed murmurings she thrust them behind the piano, he protesting that this intimate domesticity delighted him.

She sank back with a little sigh into a gay-chintzed wicker chair, and the rosy light from a tall piano lamp fell gently on her high-piled golden hair, her surprised blue eyes, and the ripe, generous outlines of her figure. To Mr. Pottle she was a dream of loveliness, a poem, an idyl. He would have given worlds, solar systems to have been able to tell her so. But he couldn't. He couldn't find the words, for, like many another sterling character in the barbers' supply business, he was not eloquent; he did not speak with the fluent ease, the masterful flow that comes, one sees it often said, from twenty-one minutes a day of communion with the great minds of all time. His communings had been largely with boss barbers; with them he was cheery and chatty. But Mrs.

Gallup and her intellectual interests were a world removed from things tonsorial; in her presence he was tongue-tied as an oyster.

Mr. Pottle's wors.h.i.+ping eye roved from the lady to her library, and his good-hearted face showed tiny furrows of despair; an array of fat crisp books in s.h.i.+ny new bindings stared at him: Twenty-one Minutes' Daily Communion With the Master Minds; Capsule Chats on Poets, Philosophers, Painters, Novelists, Interior Decorators; Culture for the Busy Man, six volumes, half calf; How to Build Up a Background; Talk Tips; YOU, Too, Can Be Interesting; Sixty Square Feet of Self-Culture--and a score more.

"Culture"--always that wretched word!

"Are you fond of reading, Mr. Pottle?" asked Mrs. Gallup, popping a Choc-O-late Nuttie into her demure mouth with a daintiness almost ethereal.

"Love it," he answered promptly.

"Who is your favorite poet?"