Island Nights' EntertainmentsStevenson, Robert Louis
General
Island Nights' Entertainments
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Short stories
drenched with sweat and cold sea-water; and none heeded him. Against
all expectation, they came safe in a dreadful tempest to Papa-malulu,
where the palms were singing out, and the cocoa-nuts flying like
cannon-balls about the village green; and the same night the five young
gentlemen sickened, and spoke never a reasonable word until they died.
“And do you mean to tell me you can swallow a yarn like that?” I asked.
She told me the thing was well known, and with handsome young men alone
it was even common; but this was the only case where five had been
slain the same day and in a company by the love of the women-devils;
and it had made a great stir in the island, and she would be crazy if
she doubted.
“Well, anyway,” says I, “you needn’t be frightened about me. I’ve no
use for the women-devils. You’re all the women I want, and all the
devil too, old lady.”
To this she answered there were other sorts, and she had seen one with
her own eyes. She had gone one day alone to the next bay, and, perhaps,
got too near the margin of the bad place. The boughs of the high bush
overshadowed her from the cant of the hill, but she herself was outside
on a flat place, very stony and growing full of young mummy-apples four
and five feet high. It was a dark day in the rainy season, and now
there came squalls that tore off the leaves and sent them flying, and
now it was all still as in a house. It was in one of these still times
that a whole gang of birds and flying foxes came pegging out of the
bush like creatures frightened. Presently after she heard a rustle
nearer hand, and saw, coming out of the margin of the trees, among the
mummy-apples, the appearance of a lean grey old boar. It seemed to
think as it came, like a person; and all of a sudden, as she looked at
it coming, she was aware it was no boar but a thing that was a man with
a man’s thoughts. At that she ran, and the pig after her, and as the
pig ran it holla’d aloud, so that the place rang with it.
“I wish I had been there with my gun,” said I. “I guess that pig would
have holla’d so as to surprise himself.”
But she told me a gun was of no use with the like of these, which were
the spirits of the dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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