Dick standing on a ledge of coral cast his eyes to the South.
Behind him the breakers of the outer sea thundered and the spindrift scattered on the wind; before him stretched an ocean calm as a lake, infinite, blue, and flown about by the fishing gulls—the lagoon of Karolin.
Clipped by its forty-mile ring of coral this great pond was a sea in itself, a sea of storm in heavy winds, a lake of azure, in light airs—and it was his—he who had landed here only yesterday.
Women, children, youths, all the tribe to be seen busy along the beach in the blazing sun, fishing with nets, playing their games or working on the paraka patches, all were his people. His were the canoes drawn up on the sand and his the empty houses where the war canoes had once rested on their rollers.
Then as he cast his eyes from the lagoon to the canoe houses his brow contracted, and, turning his back to the lagoon he stood facing the breakers on the outer beach and the northern sea. Away there, beyond the sea line, invisible, lay Palm Tree, an island beautiful as a dream, yet swarming with devils.
Little Tari the son of Le Taioi the net maker, sitting on the coral close by, looked up at him. Tari knew little of life, but he knew that all the men of Karolin swept away by war had left the women and the boys and the children like himself defenceless and without a man or leader.
Then, yesterday, from the northern sea in a strange boat and with Katafa, the girl who had been blown to sea years ago when out fishing, this strange new figure had come, sent by the gods, so the women said, to be their chief and ruler.
The child knew nothing of whom the gods might be nor did he care, alone now with this wonderful new person, and out of earshot of his mother, he put the question direct with all the simplicity of childhood.
“Taori,” said little Tari, “who are you?” (é kamina tai)
Could Dick have answered, would the child have understood the strange words of the strange story Dick might have told him? “Tari, I come of people beyond the world you know. My name is Dick Lestrange, and when I was smaller than you, Tari, I was left alone with an old sailor man on that island you call Marua (Palm Tree), which lies beyond sight fifty miles to the north. There we lived and there I grew to be a boy and Kearney, that was his name, taught me to fish and spear fish, and he made for me things to play with, little ships unlike the canoes of the islands. And then, Tari, one day long ago came Katafa, the girl who was blown away from here in a storm. She lived with us till Kearney died and then we two were alone. She taught me her language, which is the language of Karolin. She named me Taori; we loved one another and might have lived forever at Marua had not a great ship come there filled with bad men, men from the eastern islands of Melanesia. They came to cut the trees. Then they rose and killed the white men with them and burned the ship and in our boat we escaped from them, taking with us everything we loved, even the little ships, and steering for Karolin, we came, led by the lagoon light in the sky.”
But he could not tell Tari this, or at least all of it, for the very name of Dick had passed from his memory, that and the language he had spoken as a child; Kearney, the sailor who had brought him up, was all but forgotten, all but lost sight of in the luminous haze that was his past.
The past, for men long shipwrecked and alone, becomes blurred and fogged, for Dick it began only with the coming of Katafa to Marua, behind and beyond that all was forgotten as though consumed in the great blaze of tropic light that bathed the island and the sea, the storms that swept the coconut groves, the mists of the rainy seasons. Kearney would have been quite forgotten but for the little ships he had made as playthings for the boy—who was now a man.
He looked down at the questioning child. “I am Taori, Tari tatu, why do you ask?”
“I do not know,” said the child. “I ask as I breathe but no big folk—madyana—will ever answer the questions of Tari— Ai, the fish!” His facile mind had already dropped the subject, attracted by the cries of some children, hauling in a net, and he rose and trotted away.
Dick turned his gaze again to the north. The question of the child had stirred his mind and he saw again the schooner that had put in to Palm Tree only to be burned by the Melanesian hands, he saw again Katafa and himself as they made their escape in the old dinghy that Kearney had taught him to handle as a boy. He saw their landing on this beach, yesterday, and the women and children swarming round him, he the man whom they considered sent by the gods to be their chief and leader.
Then as he gazed towards the north the memory of the men from whom he had escaped with the girl stained the beauty of sea and sky.
There was no immediate fear of the men who had taken possession of Palm Tree; the men of Palm Tree had no canoes, but they would build canoes—surely they would build canoes, and as surely they would see the far mirror blaze of Karolin lagoon in the sky, just as he had seen it, and they would come. It might be a very long time yet, but they would come.
Dick was an all but blook, a kanaka, a savage, and yet the white man was there. He could think forward, he could think round a subject and he could imagine.
That was why he had sent a canoe that morning across to the southern beach to fetch Aioma, Palia and Tafata, three old men, too old for war, but expert canoe-builders, that was why when gazing at the tribe in full congregation, his eyes had brightened to the fact that nearly a hundred of the youths were ripening to war age, but under all, lighting and animating his mind, raising daring to eagle heights, lay his passion for Katafa, his other self more dear to him than self, threatened, ever so vaguely, yet still threatened.
War canoes! Did he intend fighting any invaders in the lagoon or as they drew towards shore, or did he vaguely intend to be the attacker, destroying the danger at its source before it could develop? Who knows?
A hand fell upon his shoulder and turning, he found himself face to face with Katafa, a lock of her dark hair escaped from the thread of elastic vine that bound it, blew right back on the breeze like an eagle’s feather, and her eyes, luminous and dark instead of meeting his, were fixed towards the point where he had been gazing—the due-north sea line.
“Look!” said Katafa.
At big intervals and in certain conditions of weather Palm Tree, though far behind the sea line, became visible from Karolin through mirage. Last evening they had seen it and now again it was beginning to live, to bloom, to come to life, a mysterious stain low down in the southern sky, a dull spot in the sea dazzle, that deepened by degrees and hardened till as if sketched in by some unseen painter, the island showed beautiful as a dream, diaphanous, yet vivid.
With her hand upon his shoulder they stood without speaking, their minds untutored, knowing nothing of mirage, their eyes fixed on the place from which they had escaped and which was rising now so strangely beyond the far sea line as if to gaze at them.
They saw again the horde of savages on the beach, figures monstrous as the forms in a nightmare, they felt again the wind that filled the sail as the dinghy raced for safety and the open sea, and again they heard the yells of the Melanesians mad with rum stolen from the schooner they had brought in, and which they had burnt. And there, there before them lay the scene of the Tragedy, that lovely picture which showed nothing of the demons that still inhabited it.
Then as Dick gazed on this loveliness, which was yet a threat and a warning, his nostrils expanded and his eyes grew dark with hate. They had threatened him—that was nothing, they had threatened Katafa, that was everything—and they still threatened her.
Some day they would come. The vision of Palm Tree seemed to repeat what instinct told him. They would build canoes and seeing the lagoon mirror-light in the sky, they would come. They had no women, those men, and here were women, and instinct half whispered to him that just as he had been drawn to Katafa, so would these men be drawn to the women of Karolin. They would scan the horizon in search of some island whose tribe might be raided of its women and seeing the lagoon light they would come.
Ah, if he had known, danger lay not only to the north, but wherever greed or desire or hatred might roam on that azure sea, not only amongst savages, but the wolves of civilization.
To Dick there was no world beyond the world of water that ringed the two islands; no Europe, no America, no history but the history of his short life as the life of Katafa, and yet even in that life, short as it was, he had learned to dread men and he had envisaged the foundation of all history—man’s instinct for war, rapine and destruction.
Then gradually the vision of Palm Tree began to fade and pass, suddenly it vanished like a light blown out and as they turned from the sea to the lagoon, Katafa pointed across the lagoon water to a canoe approaching from the southern beach.
It was the canoe Dick has sent for the canoe builders and, leaving the coral, they came down to the white sand of the inner beach to meet it.
Two women were in it, and as they drove it ashore beaching it with the outrigger a-tilt, Dick, followed by Katafa, approached, and resting his hand on the mast stays attached to the outrigger gratings, he turned to the women, who, springing out, stood, paddles in hand, looking from him to Katafa.
“And the builders?” asked he, “where are they?”
The shorter woman clucked her tongue and turned her face away towards the lagoon, the taller one looked Dick straight in the face.
“They will not come,” said she. “They say Uta Matu alone was their king and he is dead, also they say they are too old. ‘A mataya ayana’—they are feeble and near past the fishing, even in the quiet water.”
The shorter woman choked as if over a laugh, then she turned straight to Dick.
“They will not come, Taori, all else is talk.”
She was right. The express order had gone to them to cross over and they refused; they would not acknowledge the newcomer as their chief, all else was talk.
Several villagers, seeing the canoe beaching, had run up and were listening, more were coming along. Already the subject was under whispered discussion amongst the group by the canoe, whilst Dick, his foot resting on the slightly tilted outrigger, stood, his eyes fixed on the sennit binding of the outrigger pole as if studying it profoundly.
The blaze of anger that had come into his eyes on hearing the news had passed; anger had given place to thought.
This was no ordinary business. Dick had never heard the word “revolt,” nor the word “authority,” but he could think quite well without them. The only men who could direct the building of the big war canoes refused to work, and from the tone and looks of the women who brought the message, he saw quite clearly that if something were not done to bring the canoe-builders to heel, his power to make the natives do things would be gone.
Dick never wasted much time in thought. He turned from the canoe, raced up to the house where the little ships were carefully stored and came racing back with a fish spear.
Then, calling to the women, he helped to run the canoe out, sprang on board and helped to raise the mat sail to the wind coming in from the break.
“I will soon return,” he cried to Katafa, his voice borne across the sparkling water on a slant of the wind; then the women crouched down to ballast the canoe, and with the steering paddle in his hand he steered.
The canoe that had brought Katafa drifting to Palm Tree years ago had been the first South Sea island craft that the boy had seen. The fascination of it had remained with him. This canoe was bigger, broader of beam and the long skate-shaped piece of wood that formed the outrigger was connected with it not by outrigger poles but by a bridge.
Dick, as he steered, took in every little detail, the rattans of the grating, the way the mast stays were fixed to the grating and how the mast itself was stepped, the outrigger and the curve of its ends, the mat sail and the way it was fastened to the yard.
Though he had never steered a canoe before, the sea-craft inborn in him carried him through, and the women crouching and watching and noting every detail saw nothing indicative of indecision.
Now there are two ways in which one may upset a canoe of this sort by bad handling, one is to let the outrigger leave the water and tilt too high in the air, the other is to let the outrigger dip too deep in the water.
Dick seemed to know, and as they crossed the big lift of sea coming in with the flood from the break, he avoided both dangers.
The beach where the remnants of the southern tribe lived, was exactly opposite to the beach of the northern tribe, and as both beaches were close to the break in the reef, the distance from one to the other was little over a mile. Then as they drew close, Dick could see more distinctly the few remaining huts under the shelter of a grove of Jack-fruit trees; beyond the Jack-fruit stood pandanus palms bending lagoonward, and three tall coconut palms sharp against the white up-flaring horizon.
As the canoe beached, Dick saw the rebels. They were seated on the sand close to the most easterly of the huts, seated in the shadow of the Jack-fruit leaves; three old men seated, two with their knees up and one tailor fashion, whilst close to them by the edge of a little pool lay a girl.
As Dick drew near followed by the taller of the boat women, the girl, who had been gazing into the waters of the pool, looked up.
She was Le Moan, granddaughter of Le Juan, the witch woman of Karolin now dead and gone to meet judgment for the destruction she had caused. Le Moan was only fourteen. She had heard of the coming of the new ruler to Karolin and of his bringing with him Katafa, the girl long thought to be dead. She had heard the order given to her grandfather Aioma that morning to come at once to the northern beach as the new chief required canoes to be built, and she had heard the old man’s refusal. Le Moan had wondered what this new chief might be like. The monstrous great figure of Uta Matu, last king of Karolin, had come up in memory at the word “chief,” and now, as the canoe was hauled up and the women cried out “He comes,” she saw Dick.
Dick with the sun on his face and on his red-gold hair, Dick naked and honey-coloured, lithe as a panther and straight as a stabbing spear. Dick with his eyes fixed on the three old men of Karolin who had turned their heads to gaze on Dick.
Le Moan drew in her breath, then she seemed to cease breathing as the vision approached, passed her without a word and stood facing Aioma, the eldest and the greatest of the canoe-builders.
Le Moan was only fourteen, yet she was tall almost as Katafa, she was not a true Polynesian; though her mother had been a native of Karolin, her father, a sailor from a Spanish ship destroyed years ago by Uta Matu, had given the girl European characteristics so strong that she stood apart from the other islanders as a pine might stand amongst palm trees.
She was beautiful, with a dark beauty just beginning to unfold from the bud and she was strange as the sea depths themselves. Sometimes seated alone beneath the towering Jack-fruits her head would poise as though she were listening, as though some voice were calling through the sound of the surf on the reef, some voice whose words she could not quite catch; and sometimes she would sit above the reef pools gazing deep down into the water, the crystal water where coralline growths bloomed and fish swam, but where she seemed to see more things than fish.
The sharp mixture of two utterly alien races sometimes produces strange results—it was almost at times as if Le Moan were confused by voices or visions from lands of ancestry worlds apart.
She would go with Aioma fishing, and with her on board, Aioma never dreaded losing sight of land, for Le Moan was a pathfinder.
Blindfold her on the coral and she would yet find her way on foot, take her beyond the sea-line and she would return like a homing pigeon. Like the pigeon she had the compass in her brain.
This was the only gift she had received from her mother, La Jennabon, who had received it from seafaring ancestors of the remote past.
Crouching by the well she saw now Dick standing before Aioma and she heard his voice.
“You are Aioma?” said Dick, who had singled the chief of the three out by instinct.
The three old men rose to their feet. The sight of the newcomer helped, but it was the singling out of Aioma with such success by one who had never seen him that produced the effect. Surely here was a chief.
“I am Aioma,” replied the other. “What want you with me?”
“That which the woman had already told you,” replied Dick, who hated waste of words or repeating himself.
“They told me of the new chief who had come to the northern beach—e uma kaio tau, and of how he had ordered canoes to be built,” said Aioma, “and I said, ‘I am too old, and Uta is dead, and I know no chief but Uta; also in the last war on that Island in the north all the men of Karolin fell and they have never returned, they nor their canoes.’ So what is the use of building more canoes when there are no men to fill them?”
“The men are growing,” said Dick.
“Ay, they are growing,” grumbled Aioma, “but it will be many moons before they are ready to take the paddle and the spear—and even so, where is the enemy? The sea is clear.”
“Aioma,” said Dick, “I have come from there,” pointing to the north; “the sea is not clear.”
“You have come from Marua (Palm Tree)?”
“I have come from Marua, where one day Katafa came, drifted from here in her canoe; there we lived till a little while ago when men landed, killing and breaking and burning—burning even the big canoe they had come in. Then Katafa and I set sail for Karolin, for Karolin called me to rule her people.”
“And the men who landed to kill and burn?” asked Aioma.
“They are still on Marua; they have no canoes but they will build them, and surely they will come.”
Neither of Aioma’s companions said a word whilst Aioma stood looking at the ground as if consulting it, then his eyes rose to Dick’s face. Age and war had made Aioma wise, he knew men and he knew Truth when he saw her.
“I will do your bidding, Taori,” said he quite simply, then he turned to the others, spoke some words to them, giving directions what to do till his return, and led the way to the canoe.
Le Moan, still crouching by the well, said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on Dick, this creature so new, so different from any one she had ever seen. Perhaps the race spirit was telling her that here was a being of her father’s race miraculously come to Karolin, perhaps she was held simply by the grace and youth of the newcomer—who knows?
Dick, as he turned, noticed her fully for the first time and as their eyes met, he paused, held by her gaze and the strangeness of her appearance, so different from that of the other natives. For a moment his mind seemed trapped, then as his eyes fell he passed on and taking the steering paddle pushed off, the wind from the reef-break filling the sail of the canoe.
Le Moan, rising and shading her eyes, stood watching as the sail grew less across the sparkling water, watching as the canoe rose and fell on the swell setting in from the break, watching as it reached the far white line of the northern beach where Katafa was waiting for the return of her lover.
The primitive canoe of the Pacific is a dugout—the trunk of a tree hollowed and shaped into the form of a boat, so narrow in proportion to its length as to be absolutely unstable but for the outrigger.
The outrigger, a long skate-shaped piece of wood fixed to port—always to port—by poles on a central bridge, is an apology to the sea for want of beam, and the sea accepts it—on conditions. But for the outrigger, no canoe of any size would dare the sea, but for it the islands would have been sealed as between themselves, war made impossible, and the drift of people between island and island and between island and continent.
Far away in the remote past some man once stood, the father of this daring invention; little dreaming of the vast consequences of the work to which he had put his hand.
Dick at the steering paddle saw a figure on the northern beach as they drew near. It was Katafa, waiting for him, the wind blowing her girdle of dracæna leaves and her hand sheltering her eyes against the sun. Standing just as Le Moan was standing on the southern beach sheltering her eyes and watching the canoe that carried the first man who had ever made her turn her head.
Some children were playing near Katafa and a fishing canoe was putting out near by, but he saw only Katafa.
“Katafa,” said Aioma, who was crouched by the after outrigger pole. “It is she sure enough, and they said she was dead and that her ghost had returned bringing you with her, Taori, but the dead do not return. Katafa, she was the girl under the taboo of Taminan, the girl no man or woman might touch, and then one day she went fishing beyond the reef and a storm took her and she was drowned, so they said.”
“She was not drowned,” replied Dick. “The wind blew her to Marua where I was—I and another whose face I have near forgotten, Kearney, he was called, and he made canoes but not like these, then one day he went among the trees and did not return. Then the god Nan came to the island and after him the men of Karolin who fought together so that all were killed, and then came the bad men as I have told you and would have killed us but we left Marua in the night.... Look, there is the canoe we came in.” He pointed to the dinghy hauled up on the beach.
“O he! Taori!” It was Katafa’s voice hailing them from the shore, glad, sweet, clear as a bell, yet far-carrying as the voice of a gull.
As Dick sprang out on the sands he seized her in his arms; parted only a few hours, it seemed to them that they had been weeks apart.
In the old days, even before he was born, his mother Emmeline had never been at ease when separated from his father even by the breadth of the lagoon, the demon that hints of mischance seemed always at her ear.
Dick seemed to have inherited with his power of love for Katafa, something of the dread of mischance for the beloved.
He embraced her, heedless of onlookers, though the only eyes to see were the eyes of the children and of Aioma who had eyes for nothing but the dinghy.
As soon as his foot touched sand, the canoe-builder made for it running like a boy, clapped his hand on the gunnel and then ran it over the planking.
The boats of the Spanish ship of long ago had been clinker-built and had been destroyed in the fight, but he had seen bits of them washed ashore on the southern beach. The dinghy was carvel-built and entire, a perfect specimen of eastern boat-building over which the canoe designer brooded forgetful of Dick and Katafa, the beach he stood on and the sun that lit it.
The idea of a boat built of planking and not hollowed out of a tree trunk had been presented to him by the charred and shattered fragments of the Spanish boats, but how to get planking and how to bend it to the form he desired was beyond his imagination and beyond his means. He saw vaguely that these boats of the papalagi were made somewhat after the fashion of a man, with a backbone and ribs and a covering for the ribs, he saw that by this means enough beam could be obtained to enable the builder to dispense with the outrigger—but then speed, where was there sign of speed in this thing squat and ugly?
In the early ages of the world in which Aioma still dwelt, ugliness had only two expressions, the lines that indicated want of speed and the lines that indicated want of strength.
Dick, though brown as the canoe-builder and almost to be mistaken for a true islander, was perhaps a million years younger than Aioma, just as the dinghy was a million years younger than the fishing canoe that had just brought him across the lagoon. In Dick, Aioma saw the lines that indicated speed and strength, nothing more—he was blind to the nobility of type expressed by that daring face, to the far sight of the eyes and the breadth of the brow; in the dinghy Aioma saw want of speed—he was blind to the nobility of type that made this bud the sister of a battleship, made it a vertebrate as against the dugout which has neither keel nor ribs.
Then Aioma, standing in the sun, a plain canoe-builder and workman in the sight of God and a critic as every true workman is, began to deride the dinghy, at first with chuckles deep down in his throat, then with a sound like the clacking of a hen, then with laughter long and loud and words of derision.
“Which end is which of this pig fish?” inquired Aioma of heaven and Dick, “and he who made her, how many more did he make like her?”
Dick, who had always connected the dinghy with Kearney, and who had a sort of faith that Kearney had made her just as he had made the little model ships, winced at the laughter of the old man. Perhaps it was the white man in him revolting at the derision of a savage over the works of the white man. However that may be, he turned and ran up the beach to the house of Uta Matu which he and Katafa had made their own. There in the shadow, on a hastily constructed shelf stood the little model ships he had so carefully salved from Palm Tree: the frigate, the schooner, the full-rigged ship and the whale man, the last thread connecting him with civilization; toys of the long ago, but no longer toys—fetiches from a world whose very language he had lost, a world of sun and tall trees where like a ghost in the sun dazzle moved a memory that was once a man—Kearney.
He took the schooner from its rest and coming out with it, ran to a great pool in the coral, calling Aioma to come and see what he who made the dinghy had also made.
The pool thirty feet long by twenty broad was ruffled by the breeze from the sea, it was clear as crystal, coral floored—and a trapped school of tiny fish no larger than needles, passed like a silver cloud here and there. Dick on his knees launched the schooner and Aioma standing bent with a hand on each knee watched her as she floated on an even keel. Then on the merry west wind with helm properly set and main boom guyed out she went sailing down the pool to the east where Katafa had run to receive her.
Aioma watched, then Dick running to the other end showed him how she could sail almost against the wind. Dick knew every stick and string of her, how to hoist and lower main and fore and how to set the head sails,—had you placed him on a real schooner, he could have worked her from his knowledge of the model, and Aioma watched vastly intrigued; then, taking a hand, he got on his knees and the great sun saw the builders of the future fleet of Karolin playing like children, whilst the little schooner on its imitation sea sailed from port to port, bowing to the ripples of the pool as the lost Raratonga, of which it was the model, had bowed to the swell of the great Pacific.
The break on the reef of Karolin faced due east. Like a harbour mouth it stood, the only entrance to the lagoon, and through it at ebb and flood the sea raced dancing round the coral piers, pouring in and out swift as a river in spate.
When the sun rose he looked straight through the break, and the river of gold from him came level across the dancing waves of the outer sea, rose at the break, as a river rises to flood the coral piers and palms, passed through and spread on the quiet waters of the lagoon.
Mayay amyana—(the way—or the gates—of morning). Ages ago the name had been given to the break and the people who gave it were not speaking in the language of poetry, but of truth, for the one great thing that entered these gates was not the moon, now shrivelled, now full, now absent; nor the tides that altered in time and size; but the morning, eternal, changeless and triumphant.
This great sea gate was more to the people of Karolin than a way of ingress and outgoing; it had a significance deep, almost religious, and based on the experiences of a thousand years, for it was the way to an outer world of which they knew little or nothing, and through it came not only the tides of the sea and the first light of the sun, but also whatever they knew or had known of the world beyond.
The Spanish ship had come in, strange beyond belief, and canoes from the Paumotus had brought war through it—trouble came through the gates of morning no less than joy, and all the dead who had died at sea had passed through them never to return.
To Le Moan just as to Aioma and the others, the sea gate of Karolin was a way and a mystery, a road, yet almost a temple.
But through the gates of morning came other things than ships and men.
Sometimes on a dead calm night and generally at full of moon Karolin lagoon would wake to the sound of thunder, thunder shaking the coral and rolling back in echoes from the far reef, not the thunder of nature, but the thunder of big guns as though fleets were at war on the outer sea.
Then if you came out on the beach you would see the shells bursting in the lagoon, columns of spray rising ghostlike and dissolving in the moonlight whilst the gulls, absolutely indifferent and roosting, stirred never a feather, and the pirate crabs, white as ivory, stood like carved things or went on their business undisturbed.
Natives waking from their sleep, if they woke at all, would turn on the other side and close their eyes again. It was only the Matura.
Whip rays twenty feet broad and four feet thick, a school of them at play, flinging themselves ten feet in the air and falling back in a litter of foam and with a concussion striking the lagoon floor and the reef; circling, pursuing one another in their monstrous play, they would keep the echoes rolling beneath the stars, till, as if at a given signal, silence would fall and the great fleet put out to sea again bound for where no man could know.
Awakened from sleep one night, Dick came out on the beach with Katafa. Used to the Matura from childhood, she knew and told him, and standing there beside her he had to believe that all this thunder and disturbance was caused by fish.
It was his first real initiation into the wonders of Karolin and the possibilities of the lagoon water. Then, as time went on, in the intervals of the tree-felling, a business in which nearly all the women and boys took part, he would put out by himself to explore the depths and shallows of this great lake that was yet a sea in itself.
On the mind of Dick, almost unstained by the touch of civilization, yet vigorous and developed owing to his civilized ancestry, the world of Karolin exercised a fascination impossible to describe.
Sight, that bird of the soul, could roam here unchecked through the vast distances of sky or rest on a coral branch in the emerald shallows of sea, pursue the frigate mackerel in its rush or the frigate bird in its flight. Out on the lagoon he would crouch sometimes with the paddle across his knees, drifting, idle, without connected thought, environment pressing in upon him till his mind became part of the brilliancy of sea and sky, of the current drift and the wind that blew.
All to the west of a line drawn from mid-reef to mid-reef lay oyster beds, acres in extent and separated by great streaks of hard sand where the fish cast black shadows as they swam, and the crabs scuttered away from the drifting shadow of the canoe; near the northern beach, in ten-fathom water lay the Spanish ship of long ago, coral crusted, with the sea fans waving in the green and the mullet flitting in the shadow of her stern, a thing almost formless, yet with a trace of man’s handiwork despite all the work of the coral builders, and still as death in a world where everything was adrift and moving, from the fish sharks that lurked in her shadows to the fucus blown as if by some submarine wind. But the strangest thing in this world of water was the circular current which the outflowing and incoming tides established in its centre, a lazy drift of not more than two knots which was yet sufficient to trap any floating thing and keep it prisoner till a storm broke the spell.
One day Dick ventured so far out that he lost sight of land. Sure of his sense of direction this did not trouble him; he kept on allured by clumps and masses of fucus torn loose by the last storm, and drifting with the current, weed alive with sea creatures, tiny crabs, ribbon fish and starry sea-growths brilliant with colour.
Then he put back. But an hour’s paddling did not raise the reef; the current was just sufficient to turn the nose of the canoe and he was moving in that fatal circle in which all blind things and things without sense of direction move.
It was noon and the position of the sun gave him no help; sunset or starlight would have put him all right but he had not to wait for these. Then away off beyond a great patch of floating kelp and on his port bow he suddenly saw a dark spot in the sea dazzle. It was a canoe.
Le Moan, as fearless as himself and with a far greater knowledge of these waters, had been fishing along the bank that ran like a spar from the southern beach straight out, shoaling the lagoon water to four fathoms and at some places three. The Karaka bank it was called, and in great storms the lagoon waves broke on it and it showed like a pillow of snow. In ordinary weather nothing marked it but a slight change of colour in the water indicating want of depth.
Away beyond the spur of the Karaka bank, Le Moan saw a canoe adrift and put towards it, guessing from its position and the fact that the paddle was not at work that it was in the grip of the central current.
As she drew near she saw that the canoe man was Taori. She hailed him and he told her that he had lost direction, then, telling him to follow, she put her canoe about and struck the water with the paddle. Though from the elevation of a canoe the horizon showed nothing of the girding reef, her instinct for direction told her exactly how they lay with regard to all the reef points. The marvellous compass in her brain that never failed, and could have steered a ship on the high seas as well as a canoe in Karolin lagoon, told her that the village on the north beach lay over there, and over there her home on the south beach, that the matamata trees lay in such a position and the great palm clump just there.
But as she steered she made not for the north beach where Dick had launched forth and where he lived, but for the south beach where her own home was situated. She said no word but steered, and presently Dick following her saw across the narrowing lagoon the far off Jack-fruit trees showing across the water. He knew them and that this was the south beach and anxious to get back to Katafa, he would have turned and made for the northern village where trees were also vaguely, visible, but he felt tired, the paddle was heavy in his hands—he wanted food and he was being led.
Just as the circular current of the lagoon had been sufficient to steer the canoe into a circular course, so was the leading of Le Moan sufficient to bring him to the south beach. A canoe was lying on the south beach and as Dick drew nearer he saw Palia and Tafuta, the two old men companions of Aioma and fellow craftsmen in the art of canoe building.
They were standing by the canoe, in which a woman was seated, and behind them stood the last habitable houses of the village, and behind the houses three coconut trees, hard against the dazzling pale blue of a sky that swept up to burning cobalt. Not a soul was to be seen on all that beach but the two old men.
Then came Le Moan’s voice as she hailed them. “O he, Palia, where are the people, and what are you doing with that canoe?”
And Palia’s voice answering.
“The word came after you put out this morning calling us to the northern beach for the building. We go. The rest have gone already in the big canoe that brought the word.”
Dick at once knew. Aioma yesterday had declared the work far enough advanced to call in all hands including Palia and Tafuta, and the remaining people of the southern tribe.
“Then go,” came Le Moan’s voice as her canoe stranded on the shelving sand, “but leave me those things and a knife.” She went to the canoe and took out some matting, a basket made of coconut sennit and a knife; as Dick brought his canoe ashore Palia and the others were putting off.
“You will follow us?” cried Palia as the paddles struck the water.
“Some time,” replied Le Moan. She turned and began to build a fire to cook the fish she had caught and a breadfruit. Dick, seated on the sand with his knees up and his eyes following the far-off canoe, scarcely noticed her. She was one of the island girls, and though different from the others, of no account to him. An ordinary man would have been struck by her beauty, by her grace, and the fact that she was different from the others, but Katafa had blinded him to other women; it was as though she had put a charm round him, a ring rendering him inviolate to all female approach.
Le Moan, building the fire and preparing the fish and putting the breadfruit to bake, never glanced at him. He was there. The being who had in some extraordinary way suddenly become part of her life was there. This was no ordinary passion of a girl for a man, but something far more recondite and rare; perhaps something half evolved from the yearning of the civilization hidden in her for the civilization in him, perhaps the recognition of race, and that he and she were apart from the island people, those animals man and woman shaped, but destitute of the something that moved like a flame in her mind, lighting nothing—till now.
He was hers just as the sun was hers.
In this first dawn of a love that was to consume her being, she would have died rather than tell him by glance or word the something that filled her mind.
The smoke of the little cooking fire went up like the smoke of an altar.
Who knows but perhaps woman cooking for man was the first priest, the camp fire the first altar, man the first god, his food—the first burnt offering.
An hour later Dick fed, and rested, was pushing his canoe into the water helped by his worshipper.
Then she got into her canoe and accompanied him till the northern beach showed clear before them, the village, and to right of the village the great clump of matamatas, less by three than on the day she had sighted them last.
Here they parted company with the wave of a paddle, Le Moan returning to the desolation of the southern beach, Dick not knowing and not caring whither she went.
Without looking back, she turned the nose of her canoe straight for the southern beach. To left of her as she paddled lay the sea gate where the tide was flooding round the coral and the breeze blowing the gulls like snowflakes against the blue; to right the limitless expanse of the lagoon; ahead the desolate beach, the ruined village and the wild tangle of pandanus trees, their limbs wide-spreading as the limbs of an elm, their fronds tossing like ill-kempt hair.
She hauled the light canoe above tide mark, then, turning to the right along the sands, she passed the trees and climbed the coral, standing for a moment facing the south and the empty sea. Then, turning, she gazed across the lagoon to where the far-away northern beach showed its trees above the water dazzle.
It was near full flood and the lagoon was brimming, the outer sea coming in great sheets of smoky blue, whirls of amethyst and streaks of cobalt between the piers of the break. Le Moan could hear the suck of the water through the gates as distinct from the sound of the breakers on the coral, beyond the sound of the breakers the voices of the gulls, beyond the gulls the silence reaching to the white trade clouds on the rim of the purple sea.
She was alone, but for the matter of that, she had always been alone, Aioma and the two old men and the women and children who formed the last remnant of the southern tribe had never been her companions; she had fished with them and helped in the cooking and mat-making, talked with them, lived with them, yet in a way, dwelt apart.
It was the race difference, perhaps, or some bent of soul owing to the fusion of races in her that made her a being quite alone, relying on no one but herself—a creature apart, almost a spirit. She had the power to lose herself utterly when gazing down into clear water as on the day when Dick first saw her gazing into the pond by the trees. Great distances held her in the same way should she give herself over to them, and that strange flair for direction which she shared with the gulls was less perhaps instinctive than psychic, for the mind of Le Moan, eternally in touch with the wind, the sea, the sun and the stars, was clairvoyant to the coming of storm and the sea changes that brought the great tiger sharks into the lagoon, altered the course of the mullet or drove the palu far from the fishing banks to northward of the reef.
Having stood for a while gazing to the north, she came back towards the deserted houses and began to prepare herself some food; after that there were lines to be mended and oap to be cleared from the paraka patch and then came sunset and then the stars, and sleep deeper than the great depths beyond the palu bank.
Had Le Moan looked back across her past, she would have seen a succession of days coloured like the day just dead, brilliancy stretching away into years and opalled by rainy seasons and storms, nights when dreams were unhaunted by human form till to-night, when, towards dawn, a ghostly canoe man showed in the mirror of sleep paddling towards her across a shimmering lagoon.
Then as the dream broke up and the vision vanished, Le Moan awoke beneath the last of the stars, awoke suddenly with fear clutching at her heart and with eyes wide but still half-blinded with sleep.
She sat up. The dawn was breaking and the fishing gulls were putting out to sea; she could hear their voices through the sound of the breakers on the reef. Nothing more, yet she listened, listened with her eyes fixed on the great fan of light showing in the eastern sky against which the gulls showed like withered leaves tossed on the wind.
Nothing. The sea breeze stirred the leaves of the breadfruit and the branches of the pandamus palms and then fell flat, died out and changed to the first stirring of a land breeze, the highest flying gulls took colour and the ghostly lagoon took form.
The girl rising to her feet swept the lagoon water with her eyes. Nothing. Then, turning, she passed between the trees to the coral of the outer beach and there, out on the ghostly sea and touched by the light of dawn, she saw a ship.
Years after the destruction of the Spanish ship, which had happened before her birth, a whale man had put into the lagoon, cut wood, taken on water, been attacked by Uta Matu, the chief of Karolin, and escaped to the outer sea by a miracle.
Uta would have sent her to the bottom of the lagoon after the Spaniard, for in the depth of his ignorant but instinctive heart lay the knowledge that the black man’s burden is the white man and that civilization to the savage means death.
Le Moan could still see as in a glass darkly the fight and the escape of the whale man, and here again was a ship, different in shape from the one of long ago, but arousing in her mind, from association, an instinct of antagonism and dread.
The ship, which had been standing off and on all night, was a schooner, and now as the great sun heaved himself higher and golden ripples broke the sea line, Le Moan watched her take fire, sail after sail catching the light till on the newborn blue of the sea a golden ship lay heaving to the swell, flown round by golden gulls, whose voices came chanting against the breeze like the voices of ghostly sailormen hauling in chorus.
Then as she altered her helm and the wind shivered out of her canvas, a boat was dropped, it ran up a sail and Le Moan, her eyes shaded against the risen sun, saw the boat heading for the break. She ran back amongst the trees and stood for a moment, her hand pressed against her forehead, her mind in confusion, with one idea only fixed and steadfast—Taori.
Here was danger, recollection backed instinct, the powerful instinct of a mind that could tell the north from the south without star or compass, the coming changes of weather, the movement of the fish shoals—the instinct that had awakened her with fear clutching at her heart.
Here was danger to Taori, and now as she stood her hand clasped on her forehead, came the recollection, not only of Uta Matu’s fight against the whale man, but of Taori’s words to Aioma about the bad men on Marua and the necessity of building the war canoes and of how the young men of Karolin would soon be ripe for war.
But the canoes were not built and the warriors were not ready, and here, suddenly from out of nowhere, had come this great canoe with sails spreading to the sky. Uta Matu and his warriors and fleet were vanished and Taori was unprepared. Then came the thought that the boat making for the break was like the pilot fish that scouts ahead of the tiger shark, it would come into the lagoon and if it found food worth devouring, the tiger shark would follow.
The village on the northern beach was invisible from the break, owing to the trees and the crafty way Uta Matu had set it amongst the trees. She remembered that.
Then her heart suddenly took flame. She would save Taori.
She left the trees and, taking the sand of the inner beach, she began running towards the break. She would attract the boat to her.
You have seen a bird attracting a man away from its nest, heedless of its own fate, thinking only of the thing it loved; just so Le Moan, facing the unknown, which was more terrible than the terrible, sought now to save the being she loved with the love that casts out fear.
She had not run a hundred yards when the boat entered the lagoon, heeling to the breeze and carried by the first of the flood, she flung up her arms to it, then she stood watching as it changed its course making straight towards her.
It was an ordinary ship’s quarter boat, painted white, fitted with a mast and lug sail, and Le Moan as she stood watching paralysed and waiting for her fate, saw that she held four men, three kanakas, whose naked shoulders showed above the gunnel, and a huge man, black bearded and wearing a broad-brimmed white straw hat beneath which his face showed dark and terrible as the face of the King of Terrors.
He wore a shirt open at the throat and his shirt sleeves were rolled up showing arms white yet covered with black hair. As the boat grounded and the kanakas sprang out Le Moan scarcely saw them; her eyes were fixed on the great man now standing on the beach, Colin Peterson, no less, one of the last of the sandalwood traders, master and owner of the Kermadec—Black Peterson, terrible to look at, swift to strike when roused, yet a man with kindness in his heart and straightness in his soul.
Poor Le Moan, had she only known!
Peterson, sweeping his eyes over the empty and ruined houses and the desolate beach, fixed them on the girl, spoke to her in a tongue she did not understand and then called out:
“Sru!”
A kanaka stepped forward. He was a Paumotuan, a yellow man, and half Malanesian, fierce of face, frizzy headed and wearing a necklace of little shells. After a word with Peterson, he turned to Le Moan and spoke to her and she understood. The language of Karolin was the language of the Paumotas; those far-off islands in the distant days had raided and fought with Karolin, in days still further removed the first inhabitants of Karolin had drifted from the Paumotas but neither Le Moan nor Sru knew aught of this nor of the common ancestry which gave them power of speech.
“I am here alone,” said Le Moan answering Sru. “My people are gone—a storm took them all. There is no one here.” As she spoke her eyes left Sru and wandered northward to the far trace of the northern beach, the dread at her heart was lest Taori might, by some ill-chance, put out fishing, show himself and be lost, but nothing appeared, nothing but the far-distant trees above the sun blaze on the water.
She knew that the schooner was too far off and too much sheltered by the southern reef for the people on the north beach to see her, that Taori would be busy with the canoe building, yet the dread at her heart drove her to repeat the words automatically like a parrot. “There is no one here but me—my people are gone; a storm took them—I am here alone.” As she spoke, she watched Peterson with side glances. She had never seen a bearded man before, and this man with the black curling hair reaching almost to his eyes seemed a monster.
Whilst she was speaking, the other kanakas taking two large water breakers from the boat began to fill them at the well, the well into which she had been looking on the day on which she had first seen Taori.
Colin Peterson stood looking at them, he had half turned from Le Moan and seemed to have forgotten her existence; then, shading his eyes, he looked across and about the lagoon, but he was thinking neither of the kanakas nor the lagoon. He was cursing Le Moan.
He had no use for this girl. He had come ashore for water at this uncharted island thinking maybe to find natives, never dreaming that he would be faced by a problem like this. It was impossible to leave the forlorn creature to her fate, yet what was he to do with her on board of the Kermadec? Had it been a man or a boy the matter would have been simple enough, but a girl? If he took her off he would have to find her a home somewhere among the kanakas on one of the northern islands. He was bound for Amao but he reckoned that place was of no use—the kanakas were a bad lot.
As he stood like this thinking and staring about her, Le Moan still watched him, this terrific man who seemed searching with his eyes for Taori.
Would he believe her story—would he kill her? Old tales of the terrible papalagi chased through her mind like bats in the dusk that had fallen upon her powers of thought—she did not know. She only knew that she did not care whether he killed her or not as long as he believed her story and departed without hurting Taori.
Then, suddenly, the last breaker of water in the boat, Peterson turned on Sru and shouted to him to fetch her on board. Perplexity in Peterson generally expressed itself in blasphemy, and when Big Feller Mass’r Peterson began to talk like that, Sru never waited for the toe of the boot that was sure to follow.
He seized Le Moan by the arm and pushed her to the boat; for a moment she resisted, then she gave up, tumbled in and squatting forward of the mast saw as one sees in a dream the straining shoulders and tense arms of the kanakas, as, bending and clutching the port and starboard gunnels, they ran the boat out; she saw them tumble on board, felt the grating of the sand and then the balloon-like lift of the waterborne keel; she saw the sail above her take the wind and bulge hard against the blue of the sky; she saw the flying gulls and the wheeling lagoon and the trees of the southern beach vanishing to starboard as the boat headed for the break, but always and above everything she saw the massive hand of Peterson as he sat in the stern sheets with the tiller in the crook of his elbow and his eyes fixed towards her and beyond.
Ai, the sea! What tragedies has it not been partner in? The sea of storms, the blue laughing sea, the sea that now, lovely in the light of morning was flooding gently with the first of the flood through the gates of Karolin, lifting the boat to the outer swell as it passed the coral piers where the gulls cried above the foam of the breakers and the breakers answered to the crying gulls.
If Peterson had killed Le Moan on the beach, she would have met her death without flinching. Seated now watching Karolin drop astern, her eyes never wavered nor softened—even her fear of Peterson had vanished. It was as though she had died on passing the gates of the great atoll and entered a land where personality was not, only perception. A land of pictures that had no relationship to herself or anything she had ever known. She saw as they came alongside the white painted side of the Kermadec with the ladder cast down, the rail, and above the rail the great white sail spaces all a-shiver in the wind. The faces of men looking down at the boat, the face of Rantan the mate, and Carlin, a beachcomber picked up at Soma and working his passage north.
Then she was on the deck, which seemed to her broad and white as a beach, and the extraordinary newness of this strange place took on a cutting edge which pierced the deadness that had fallen upon her—this place so vast to her mind that it seemed land of a sort. A moment before, in the boat, the sea had been around her, but here the sea was nothing, this place was everything. Taori, Karolin, the reef, the ocean itself, all for a moment vanished, consumed by the Kermadec as by a flame.
And not a soul took notice of her after the first few words of Peterson to the Mate. They were busy getting in the boat and now as the rumbling and threshing of the canvas above died out and the sails filled hard against the blue came the voices of gulls, gulls from the reef and deep-sea gulls flitting in the wake of the Kermadec that was now under way.
Le Moan, feeling herself unnoticed, and moving cautiously, came to the weather rail. She saw the reef and the distant trees of Karolin and the following gulls now flying north and south as if giving up the chase. Then the reef line passed from sight beneath the sea dazzle and the voice of the reef and the crying of the gulls died far off, whilst the treetops vainly fought with the ever-growing distance, now clinging to the sight, now washed utterly away.
Now on board that ship there were three men set there by circumstance as pawns in a game of which Taori was king, Katafa queen, and Le Moan perhaps the hand of the player, and these men were Rantan the mate, Carlin the beachcomber, and Sru, bo’sun and chief of the kanakas.
Rantan, a narrow slip of a man, hard bitten and brown as a hickory nut, was a mystery. Perfect in the art of handling a schooner, he knew next to nothing of navigation. Peterson had picked him up as an extra hand and, the mate dying of fever, Rantan had taken his place, making up in general efficiency for his want of higher knowledge. He had spent all his life amongst the islands and natives, he could talk to Sru in his own tongue like a brother born, could pick up the dialect of any island in a week, but had little to say in English. A silent man who never drank, never smoked and never cursed.
Peterson disliked him for no apparent reason whatsoever; he could have got rid of him, but he didn’t. Sobriety is a jewel in the Pacific, especially when it is worn by schooner mates.
Carlin had come on board the ship just before she sailed from Soma. He was a big red-headed man useless for anything but beachcombing, he wanted to get up to “them Northern islands” and Peterson out of the heart kindness that had made him take Le Moan on board, took him. He made him work, yet gave him a bunk aft, thus constituting him in a way one of the ship’s officers.
Carlin was one of the unfortunates born with a thirst, but in his case it only broke out on land, on board ship he had no wish for liquor but the beach felled him as if with a pole-ax.
Sru, the last of the three men, stood over six feet, stark naked except for a gee-string. He was a man from the beginning of the world. He could cast a spear and find his mark at fifty yards, his nose was flattened, his cheek-bones broad and his face, especially when his eyes were accommodated for distance, wore an expression of ferocity that yet had nothing evil in it. Le Moan had no fear of him. Indeed at the end of her second day on the schooner, she had no fear of anyone on board. Instinct told her that whatever these men might have done to Taori and the tribe, they would not hurt her. Fortunately she never recognized how utterly useless had been her sacrifice, never recognized the fact that Colin Peterson, so far from hurting Dick, would have been his friend—otherwise she might have cast herself overboard, for her sorrow was heavy on her and wanted no extra weight.
Peterson had given her over to Sru to look after and Sru had made her a shake-down in the long boat. She fed with the kanaka crew, who took their meals on deck, and became part of their family and tribe, but she would not go into the foc’sle, nor would she go into the cabin; those holes in the deck leading down below were, for her, mysterious and terrific; she had peeped down the saloon hatchway and seen the steps going down as into a well and the polish of the handrail and a light below shining on a mat. It was light reflected from the saloon, yet none the less mysterious for that and the whole thing struck her with the enchantment that quite commonplace things sometimes possess for little children, but it was an enchantment tinged with the shadow of dread.
She had no fear of the men on board yet she had a dread of the saloon companionway, of the main boom, till it explained itself to her, of the windlass with its iron teeth. The men, in spite of their clothes and strange ways, shook down as human beings, but the wheel that steered the schooner and the binnacle into which the steersman gazed as he stood moving the spokes, forever moving the spokes of the mysterious wheel, those things were mysterious and their mystery was tinged with the shadow of dread. They were part of the unknown that surrounded her: to the savage the thing unknown is a thing to be feared.
One day when Sru was at the wheel and the deck was empty, she ventured to peep into the binnacle and saw beneath the glittering glass like a star-fish in a rock pool the compass cord trembling like a living thing. Had not the deck been empty so that she dared to speak to Sru on this matter and had not he been in a mood to answer her, the whole life of Le Moan would have been altered and never again might she have seen Taori.
“What is it,” asked she, glancing across her shoulder at the steersman, “and why do you look at it so?”
“This,” said Sru, indicating the wheel for which he had no word in the native, “moves the steering paddle (e caya madyara) and into that I look to find my way.”
Now when Karolin had sunk beneath the sea rim the conviction had come to Le Moan that never would she see Karolin again; her instinct told her where it lay and, given a canoe, she could have found it even at this great distance, but her knowledge of where it lay was no comfort to her—she felt that the great hand that had seized her would never let her go and that a door had closed forever between this new world and the old where Taori dwelt safe owing to the closing of the door.
She glanced again at the binnacle and then speaking like a person in reverie she said: “Without that I could find my way though the sea were dark and no stars shone, as I have found my way often in the fishing canoes when the land was so far it could not be seen.”
Sru knew what she meant; at Soma in the Paumotus from where he had come the directional instinct, shared more or less by all savages, was especially marked in some of the children, and the deep-sea canoes in those waters where the currents run in an unaccountable manner and where the trade winds are not, depended on the instinct of the steersman.
He bade her close her eyes and turn and turn. “Where now lies the land we have left?” asked Sru. Without opening her eyes and not knowing east from west or north from south, she pointed aft almost dead south.
Sru laughed. She was right, the mysterious compass in her brain that worked without error or deviation would have pointed to Karolin, though a thousand miles away; then as he spun the wheel having let the Kermadec a point or two off her course, Le Moan went forward and he forgot her, but he did not forget what she had told him. It remained in his tenacious mind like a pebble in molasses, hidden, but there till three days later when towards evening, the kanakas were eating their supper on deck, Sru was brought face to face and for the first time in his life with a great idea, an idea that included tobacco not by the stick, but in cases, rum in casks, women, barlow knives, chalk pipes and patent leather boots, also canned salmon and seidlitz powders.
Sru, an old pearler, had been in the last of the pearling at Soma before the banks gave out. He knew the value of pearls.
They were seated on the main deck near the galley, their coffee mugs beside them and their plates on their knees and the Kermadec on a steady seven-knot clip was heeled slightly to starboard almost rigid as a board, save for the sound of the sea as she dipped to the swell.
For days she had run so with the port rail raised against the white fringe of trade clouds on the far horizon, a steady list from a steady breeze warm and winged with the silver fins of flying fish, a tepid sea-scented wind such as the north can never know, less a wind than a revelation such as men try to express when they speak of the breath of the tropics.
The cook had served out the food, and as they ate he talked; he was a big man with the voice of a child and he was talking of his native village apropos of nothing and to nobody in particular, which is a way kanakas have.
Of the world around them, save for Soma and the southern islands and the island in the north which a few of them knew, Sru, Peroii and the rest of them were as ignorant as Le Moan.
As they talked, the rosy light of sunset falling on them and reflected by the fore canvas, Sru, who was seated by Peroii, saw the wind lift Le Moan’s dark hair exposing the pearl charm she wore behind the left ear—the double pearl, lustrous and beautiful, tied in the hair so cunningly and betrayed by the wind.
Le Jennabon had given it to her daughter as a protection against drowning and mischance. More than that it was a love amulet, making sure for the girl a happy married life with a man who would not misuse her. Love amulet or not Le Jennabon had given to her daughter a talisman of extraordinary power. Exposed by the wind for a moment, it had spoken to Sru. It said clearly as tongue could speak, “Karolin is a pearl lagoon.” Then as Le Moan raised her hand and tucked the hair back behind her ear, Sru, who had paused in his eating, went on with his food, his dark eyes fixed beyond Peroii, beyond the vision of deck and mast and standing rigging, beyond all things visible, upon wealth: cases of tobacco and rum in many bottles, girls, clay pipes, a gun, and boxes of Swedish matches to strike at pleasure. Karolin lagoon held all these things, the pearl behind Le Moan’s ear told him that for a certainty, but Karolin was far astern and he would never see it again, that also was a certainty and before it the heart of Sru became filled with bitterness. A few minutes ago he had been happy and free of care, now his soul was dark as the sea becomes dark with a squall suddenly rising and blowing up out of a clear sky. He had discovered a pearl lagoon—too late. Leaving the others to finish their meal, he rose up and dropped below into the foc’sle, there curled up in his bunk in the gloom he lay to consider this matter.
It was useless to speak of it to Peterson, he would never put the ship back; even if he did he, Sru, would profit little by the matter. He would maybe get a few sticks of tobacco for telling of it, or a knife. Peterson, though kind-hearted enough to rescue Le Moan, was a hard man where bargaining with natives was concerned. Sru had an intimate knowledge of white men, or at least white traders and their ways, and Peterson was a white man to the core.
Then as he lay facing this fact, the idea of Rantan came before him.
Rantan who could talk to him in his own tongue like a brother, who was half a native as far as language and ideas went, and yet was a white man.
Though Rantan had no power to put the ship back, it came into Sru’s mind that somehow or in some way this man, clever as all the papalagi were, might be able to do something in the matter. Eased by this idea he turned out of the bunk and came on deck.
The sunset was just vanishing from the sky where in the pansy dusk the constellations were sketching themselves above the vague violet of the sea. Then, suddenly, like the closing of a door, the west went dark and the stars blazed out and bloomed in full sight. The wind, moist, and warm, blew steadily, and Sru, standing in the draught from the head sails, looked about him, forward at the bowsprit rising and falling against the sea stars and aft where the white decks showed, the man at the wheel clearly visible and someone leaning on the weather rail, Carlin to judge by his bulk.
Rantan was nowhere to be seen.
Close to Sru and hunched against some rope coiled by the windlass he saw a figure. It was Le Moan. She was seated with her knees up and her hands round her knees, and she seemed asleep—but she was not asleep, for as Sru’s eyes fell on her, her face lifted and he saw the glint of her eyes in the starlight. Those mournful eyes that ever since her departure from Karolin seemed like the eyes of a person in trance, of a dreamer who was yet conscious of some great and real disaster.
Sru instantly forgot Rantan. It seemed that somewhere deep in his shadowy mind something had linked Le Moan with the pearl lagoon and any chance of success in finding it again, raiding it, and turning milk-white chatoyant pearls into sticks of tobacco, bottles of rum, clay pipes and beads to buy love with.
She had given him the indication of what was there, but it seemed to him that she could do more than that.
He crumpled up and sat down beside her on the deck and spoke soft words, asking her what ailed her that she looked so sorrowful. “For,” said Sru, “the storm that took your people has without doubt taken many more in the island and will not give them back, not though men weep forever—it is so, and it is so, and ever will be so, and to eat the heart out for that which has been, is to feed foolishly, for,” said Sru, “the coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs.” He was repeating the old Island proverb and for a moment he had forgotten Karolin, pearls, gin bottles and the glory of seidlitz powders in effervescence like the foam on the reef; he had forgotten all little things and his words and voice broke up the depths of Le Moan and the cause of her grief came forth. Otherwise and soon she might have died of it. Conscious that Karolin was so far in the past that it was safe to speak, she told Sru that no storm had overtaken her people, that she had lied to Peterson so that he might not discover and perhaps kill the being she loved; and there, sitting in the showering starlight, she did that which she had never done before even for her own inspection, opened her heart, told, as a sleeper might tell in sleep, of her love for Taori and of his beauty and strength and swiftness and of everything except that which she did not know—the fact that Taori had a lover already, Katafa.
She spoke and Sru listened, absorbing her words and her story as a kanaka will absorb any sort of tale he can understand. Then this amazing savage who had spoken so poetically about the waxing of the coral and the passing of man, this sympathizer who had spoken so softly in addressing grief, leaning on his elbow began to shake with laughter.
He knew that big feller Mas’r Peterson would not have hurt a hair of Taori’s head, that he did not want to take Le Moan off the beach and had only done so because he imagined her unable to fend for herself. He saw that Le Moan, trying to protect her lover against imaginary perils had allowed herself to be sacrificed and snatched away from everything she loved and cared for, that she had prepared for herself the trap into which she had fallen—and all this to the mind of Sru seemed a huge joke, almost as good as the joke of the drunken man he had once seen, who, trying to cut wood with his foot on a log had cut off his foot with the axe he was wielding.
Sru giggled like a girl being tickled, then he burst out in snorts like a buffalo in a temper, choked as though he had swallowed a fish-bone and then began to explain.
Began to explain and failed to hit the mark simply because Le Moan could not understand why big feller Mas’r Peterson had taken her away from Karolin. He did not want to take her away yet he had taken her away. Le Moan could not understand that in the least.
Le Moan could not understand pity, she had never come across it in others and she had never felt it for herself. Had she been able to pity herself, she would have flung herself on the deck weeping and wailing when the Kermadec turned her stern to the south and dropped Karolin beyond the horizon. She had sacrificed herself for the sake of the being who dominated her existence, she had dared the most terrible of all things, the unknown, yet she could not in the least understand why Peterson should do what he did not want to do for the sake of a being, a stranger whom he had never seen before.
To tell the truth Sru did not quite comprehend it either, he knew it was so and he left it at that. It was one of the strange and unaccountable things that white men were always doing. What intrigued him was the fact that Le Moan had fooled herself in fancying Peterson a dangerous man capable of injuring her lover and that Peterson had fooled himself in believing her story.
So he talked till Le Moan at last understood the fact that, whatever Peterson’s object in taking her away may have been, he would not have injured Taori, that if she had said nothing he would have gone off after having filled the water breakers at the well, and as he talked and as she listened dumb before the great truth that she had sacrificed everything for nothing, slowly up from the subconscious mind of Sru and urged by his talk, came an idea.
“You will go back,” said Sru. “Listen, it is I, Sru, who am talking—we will go back, you and I, and what tells me is that which lies behind thy left ear.”
Le Moan put her hand up to the amulet hidden beneath her hair.
“We will go back,” went on Sru, “you and I and another man, and perhaps more, all good men who will not hurt Taori—but Pete’son, no—no,” he murmured as if communing with some dark spirit. “He would swallow all. He alone knows the way across the sea, so that setting the steering paddle this way or that he can go straight as the frigate bird to Soma or to Nalauka or to what island or land he chooses, he alone of the men on board this ship. But thou art wise as he. Wise as the frigate bird that leaves the land far from sight yet can return. You will guide us to Karolin. Can your eyes still see that beach and where it lies?”
Le Moan threw out her arms.
“Though I were blind as the sand worm, I could find it,” said Le Moan, “through night and storm—but when?”
“No man can hurry the rising of the day,” said Sru, “but soon it will come and soon your eyes shall fall upon Taori—that which lies behind your left ear has told me, and it has told me more. Answer so that I may know if it speak the truth. It has told me that thick in that lagoon lie the shells of the iyama (oyster) from whence it came—is that true talk?”
“Thick and far they lie,” said Le Moan, “from the kaaka far as one can paddle from the coming in to the middle of the tide.”
“So,” said Sru, “it spoke the truth. When we make our return you will go to meet Taori and we to find the iyama for the sake of the stones they hold, brethren of that which lies ... there.”
He touched her hair behind her left ear and rose gliding off aft, whilst Le Moan, whose life had suddenly come back to her, sat gazing through night and beyond the stars at a sunlit beach where spear in hand and lovely as the morning stood Taori.
Taori who at that moment tired out with the labour of canoe-building was lying asleep with his arm across the warm body of Katafa.
Now the mind of Sru had sat down to talk with Le Moan, having in it no plan—nothing but a desire for pearls and what pearls would bring, and the knowledge sure and instinctive that Karolin was a pearl lagoon. It had risen up armed with a plan.
This plan had come to him from his close contact and talk with Le Moan. Brooding alone with nothing for his mind to cling to, it is doubtful if Sru could have evolved a plan; the presence of the girl, her connection with Karolin, her story, her wish to get back, the fact that she was a pathfinder and the fact that Peterson, even if he took the Kermadec back, would take all the profit of the business for himself—all these thoughts and considerations came together in Sru’s mind and held together like a cluster of bees, owing to the presence of the girl who was the core and centre of everything. He would speak of the matter to Rantan. Sru understood that Karolin was not on the charts, those mysterious pieces of paper that enabled Peterson to find his way about, he understood that Rantan had little knowledge of navigation, he only knew that were they to steer south for as many days as they had steered north and then hand the steering over to Le Moan, she would bring them to the place desired.
Give her the wheel right away and she would steer them back, but she could not stand at the wheel for days and days; no, it would be enough to steer south by the compass and then when close on the latitude hand the wheel to her. The instinct that led the birds over unmarked sea spaces and the palu from hundreds of miles away to the self-same breeding grounds, that would be sufficient.
Going aft he hung about for a while close to the fellow at the wheel, but there was no sign of Rantan and Peterson coming on deck. Sru went forward again and dropped below to the foc’sle. It was in the morning watch that he found his opportunity, only Rantan and the steersman were aft and Sru coming along, stood with the mate by the rail.
The dawn was full on the sea.
They spoke for a minute on the prospect of the wind holding, and then Sru, with a glance at the steersman to make sure he was out of hearing, came to his subject.
“That land we have left,” said Sru, “is Karolin—the girl has told me the name, but much more as well. That lagoon is a pearl lagoon. This is a private matter between us. I tell you because I could not tell any one else and because I think we may profit by it.”
“A pearl lagoon,” said Rantan. “Is she speaking the truth?”
“The truth. She wears behind her ear two pearls in one, so,” said Sru, joining his closed fists in the dawn light, “they are tied in her hair and the wind lifting her hair I saw them; then I spoke and she told me. Now listen, Ra’tan, we know of this matter, you and I, we two alone will get those pearls—Pete’son, no. He would swallow them all and give us the shells to eat, but how we are to go has not been shown to me, it is for you to see to that matter.”
All this he said in the native and Rantan, listening, tapped out the ashes from his pipe against his heel, and then, pipe in hand, leaned against the rail, his eyes fixed on the deck.
In the increasing light he could see the deck planking clearly even to the dowels. Plunged fathoms deep in thought he said nothing for a while, then raising his eyes he spoke.
“What you say is true, but Pete’son is the wisest of us. How can we find that island again without him? As you know, my life has been spent mostly among the islands—shore along and between island and island as they lie in the Paumotas ten to a space as broad as your palm. I can handle this ship or any ship like this or any canoe, as you know, but to look at the sun at noon as Pete’son looks, and to say ‘I am here, or here,’ that art has not been given me. I have not lived my life on the deep sea, but only in shallow waters. Then again Pete’son is not the full owner of this ship, there is another man who owns a part and without talking to him he cannot break a voyage, he cannot say, I will go here or here without the other man saying yes.”
“That is the more reason,” said Sru, “that we must go without him.”
“And without him we cannot find our way,” replied Rantan.
Then Sru told of Le Moan’s power of direction finding. Rantan understood at once, he had seen the thing often amongst the natives of Soma and other islands and the fact came suddenly on his mind like the blow of a hammer riveting things together.
But he said nothing to show exactly what was in his mind, he heard Sru out, and told him to go forward and not speak of the matter to any one. “For,” said Rantan, “there may be something in what you say. I do not know yet, but I will think the matter over.”
Left alone he stood, his eyes on the sun blaze creeping upon the eastern horizon. He was a quick thinker. The thing was possible, and if Karolin lagoon was a true pearl lagoon the thing was a fortune.
By taking the Kermadec there with the kanaka crew for divers, eight months or a year’s work would give the profit of twenty voyages. Well he knew that if Colin Peterson were the chief of that expedition, there would be little profit for any one but Peterson and his partner. Peterson would have to be eliminated if there was any work to be done in this business.
Sru had not said a word about Taori or Le Moan’s untruth as to Karolin being uninhabited.
It would have tangled the story for one thing, and for another might not Ra’tan say to himself. “If this girl has lied on one matter, may she not be lying about the pearls?” Sru knew instinctively that she spoke the truth, and he left it at that, and Rantan watching now the glory of the rising sun, stood, his plan crystallizing into full shape, his eyes gazing not on the sunlit sea, but on Karolin, a desolate atoll, uninhabited, with no eyes to watch what might be done there but the eyes of the seagulls.
Le Moan had never known pity. She had lived amongst the pitiless, and if any seed of the divine flower lay in her heart it had never grown nor come to blossom. She had seen her tribe raided and destroyed and the remnants chased to sea by the northern tribe under Uta Matu, she had seen battle and murder and sudden death, storm and destruction; she had seen swordfish at war and the madness and blood-lust of fish, bow-head whales destroyed by orcas and tiger sharks taking men—all these things had left her unmoved by pity as they would have left Rantan. Yet between these two pitiless ones lay a distance greater than that between star and star.
Le Moan had sacrificed herself for the sake of Taori; had faced what was more terrible than death—the unknown, for the sake of the man who had inspired her with passion; and had found what was more terrible than death—separation.
To return and find Taori she would, if necessary, have destroyed the Kermadec and her crew without a second thought, just as to save him she would have destroyed herself. Rantan could not have understood this, even if it had been carefully explained to him with diagrams exhibiting the savage soul of Le Moan, all dark, save where at a point it blazed into flame.
All that day working out his black plan he reviewed his instruments, Sru, Carlin, the crew, the ship, and last and least the kanaka girl who would act as a compass and a navigator. A creature of no account save the instinct she shared with the fish and the birds, so he fancied.
The Kermadec had loaded some turtle shell at Soma and at Levua she was to pick up a cargo of sandalwood. San Francisco was the next port of call, but to Rantan’s mind it did not seem probable that she would ever reach San Francisco. It all depended on Carlin. Rantan could not do the business alone even with the help of Sru; Carlin was a beachcomber and to leave him with a full whiskey bottle would have been fatal for the whiskey bottle, but he was a white man; he would have been fired off any ship but the Kermadec, but he was a white man. Rantan felt the necessity of having a white man with him on the desperate venture which he had planned, and taking Carlin aside that night he began to sound him.
“We’re due at Levua to-morrow,” said Rantan. “Ever been to Levua?”
“Don’t know it,” replied the other, “don’t want to neither; by all accounts, listening to the old man, there’s nothing there but one dam’ sandalwood trader and the kanakas he uses for cutting the wood. I want to beach at Tahiti, that’s where I’m nosing for when I get to ’Frisco; there’s boats in plenty running down from ’Frisco to Tahiti.”
“Maybe,” said Rantan, “but seems to me there’s not much doing at Tahiti. Hasn’t it ever hit you that there’s money to be made in the islands and better work to be done than bumming about on the beach? I don’t mean hard work, handling cargo or running a ship—I mean money to be picked up, easy money and plenty of it.”
The big red man laughed and spat over the rail.
“Not much,” said he, “not by the likes of me or you; clam shells is all there’s to be picked up by the likes of me and you when the other chaps have eaten the chowder.”
“How’d you like ten thousand dollars in your fist?” asked Rantan, “twenty—thirty—there’s no knowing what it might come to, and all for no work at all but just watching kanakas diving for pearls.”
Carlin glanced sideways at his companion.
“What are you getting at?” asked he.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Rantan, “I know of a pearl island and it’s not far from here. It’s a sealed lagoon, never been worked, and there’s enough there to make a dozen men rich, but to get there I’d want a ship, but I haven’t got one nor the money to charter one; I’m like you, see?”
“What are you getting at?” asked Carlin again, a new tone in his voice.
“I’m just saying I haven’t a ship,” replied the other, “but I know where to get one if I could find a chap to help me in the taking of her.”
Carlin leaned further over the rail and spat again into the sea. With terrible instinct he had taken up the full meaning of the other.
“And how about the kanakas?” asked he, “kanakas are dam’ fools, but get them into a court of law and they’re bilge pumps for turning up the evidence. I’ve seen it,” he finished, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “A sinking job it was, and the chap that did it got ten years, on kanaka evidence.”
Rantan laughed. “Leave the kanakas to me,” said he, “I’m putting it to you—if I’ve the sand to do the job, would you help?”
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t,” said Carlin, “but what about the navigating? You aren’t much good on that job ... or are you? I’m thinking maybe you’ve been holding it up your sleeve.”
“I’m good enough to get there,” replied Rantan. “Well, think it over, we’ve time in our hands and no need to hurry. But remember there’s no knowing the money in the business, and if it comes to doing it, don’t you worry about risks; I’m not a man to take more than ordinary risks and I’ll fix everything.”
Then he turned away and walked aft leaving Carlin leaning on the rail.
Whatever Carlin’s start in life may have been, he was now beach-worn like one of the old cans you find tossing about the reef flung away by the kanakas—label gone, and nothing to indicate its past contents. The best men in the world would wilt on the beach, and that’s the truth; the beach, that is to say sun and little to do—the sun kills or demoralizes more men than whiskey; to be born to the sun, you must be born in the sun, like Katafa, like Dick, like Le Moan; you must never have worn clothes.
Sometimes a white man is sun proof inside and out, but rarely. Carlin was sun proof on the outside, his skin stood the pelting of the terrible invisible rays; he throve on it; but internally he had gone to pieces.
He had one ambition, whiskey—or rum, or gin, or even samshu, but whiskey for choice.
There was whiskey on the Kermadec, but not for Carlin. Peterson, as sober a man as Rantan, kept it, just as he kept the Viterli rifles in the arms rack, for use in an emergency. It was under lock and key, but Carlin had smelt it out.
Its presence on board was like the presence of an evil genius, invisible, but there and exercising its power; it kept reminding him of Rantan’s words at supper that night, and when he turned in and even in his sleep its work went on; he saw in his dreams the vessel heading for the unknown pearl island towards the golden light of fortune and unlimited whiskey, he was on her deck with Rantan in command and Peterson was not there.
The dream said nothing about Peterson, totally ignored him, and Peterson, on deck at that moment, had no idea that the beachcomber was dreaming of the Kermadec off her course and without her skipper.
Next day in the morning watch, Sru was at the wheel and Rantan, a pipe in his mouth, stood by the weather rail, the sun had just risen shattering the night and spreading gold across the breezed up blue of the swell.
The sunrise came to the Kermadec like the sudden clap of a hot hand: Sru felt it on his back and Rantan on his cheek. From away to windward came the cry of a gull, a gull passed overhead with domed wings circled as if inspecting the schooner and drifted off on the wind. Almost at the same moment, came the cry of the kanaka lookout. “Land!”
Rantan walked forward. Right ahead, rosy above the brimming sea, lay the cloud scarf of Levua.
Still a great way off, facing the blazing east, the island, clear of any trace of morning bank, seemed to float between the blue of sea and sky, remote, more lovely than any dream.
When Rantan turned aft again he found Le Moan standing by Sru at the wheel. Sru was explaining to her how the wheel worked the “steering paddle” in the stern. The Kermadec was close hauled, every sail drawing. Sru was explaining this matter and showing how the least bit closer to the wind would set the sails shivering and take the way off the ship. Le Moan understood. Sea craft was born in her, and used now to the vast sail spaces of the schooner, she felt no fear—the Kermadec was only a canoe after all, of a larger build and different make.
He let her hold the spokes for a moment, governing the wheel with a guiding hand, then at the risk of the schooner being taken aback, he stood aside and the girl had the helm.
The Kermadec for a moment showed no sign that the wheel had changed hands, then, suddenly, a little warning flutter passed through the canvas from the luff of the mainsail, passed and ceased and the sail became hard again. Le Moan had understood, understood instinctively, that ceaseless pressure against the lee bow which tends to push a vessel’s head up into the wind.
For a moment Taori, Karolin, the very presence of Sru were forgotten, the words that Sru had spoken to her only a little while before, “You will soon see Taori, little one, but first you must learn to use the steering paddle.” Everything was forgotten in the first new grip of the power that was in her to hold all those great sail spaces filling, to play such a great game with the wind and the sea.
Aioma had taught her to steer her fishing canoe, but so long ago that she could not remember the first time she had the paddle to herself; but this was different, different as the kiss of a lover from the kiss of a friend—something that reached her soul; it was different as the sight of Taori from the sight of other men, great, thrilling, lifting her above herself, creative.
Utterly ignorant of the mechanism that moved the rudder as a man is ignorant of the mechanism that moves his arm, after the first few minutes of the great new experience she could not do wrong. She knew nothing of the compass, she only knew that she was to keep the ship close hauled as Sru had been keeping her, so close that a fraction nearer the wind would spill the sails. Sru watched her and Rantan, forgetting his pipe, stood with his eyes fixed on her. Both men recognized that the ship was safe for the moment. One might have thought them admiring the picture that she made against the blue sky and the glory of morning, but the interest in their eyes was neither the interest of the roused æsthetic sense, nor of love, nor of passion, nor of seamanship.
As they stood, suddenly, and as though Tragedy had staged the scene for some viewless audience, the head and shoulders of Peterson appeared at the saloon hatch opening.
Rantan, his face mottled with white, stared at Peterson, Sru drawing the back of his hand across his nose as if wiping it, stood on one foot, then on the other, confused, looking like a dog that has been misbehaving itself. Le Moan saw nothing.
Without losing its alertness on the touch of the wheel her mind had gone off for a momentary flight. She saw herself steering the Kermadec towards Karolin, she saw in imagination the distant reef, the gulls and the thrilling blue of the great lagoon beyond the reef opening.
Peterson, without coming further on deck, watched her for a moment without comprehending anything but the fact that the girl had been allowed to take the wheel. Then as Sru took the spokes from her and pushed her forward, the captain of the Kermadec turned on Rantan, but the abuse on his lips was half shrivelled by the face of the mate.
“Don’t you never do a thing like that again,” said Peterson. “Dam’ tomfoolery.” He snorted and went forward, kicked a kanaka out of his way and then stood, his eyes fixed on the distant vision of Levua opal tinted in the blue, blue north.
They came in on a dying wind, the outlying reefs creaming to the swell and the great high island opening its cañons and mountain glades as they drew towards it pursued by the chanting gulls.
Le Moan, who had never seen a high island or only the vision of Palm Tree uplifted by mirage, stood with her eyes fixed on the multitude of the trees. Palms, breadfruit, tree ferns, aoas, sandalwood groves, trees mounting towards the skies, reaching ever upwards, changing in form and misted by the smoke of torrents.
Here there was no freedom, the great spaces of the sea had vanished, Levua like an ogre had seized her mind and made it a prisoner.
For the first time in her life something came to her heart, terrible as her grief for the loss of Taori, yet even more far searching and taking its bitterness from the remote past as well as the present. It was the homesickness of the atoll-bred islander encompassed by the new world of the high island; of the caged gull taken from the freedom of the wind and the sea.
At Karolin you could see the sun from his rising to his setting, and the stars from sea line to sea line; the reef rose nowhere to more than twice the height of a man, the sea was a glittering plain of freedom and a sound and a scent.
Worse even than the monstrous height of Levua, its strange cañons and gloomy woods, was the scent of the foliage, cossi and vanilla and sandalwood, unknown flowers, unknown plants, all mixed with the smell of earth and breathing from the glasshouse atmosphere of the groves.
An extraordinary thing was the way in which the forms and perfumes of Levua permeated the Kermadec itself, so that, turning her eyes away from the land, the deck of the schooner, the rails, masts and spars, all seemed hostile to her as the land itself. Sru alone gave her comfort as she watched him superintending the fellows busy with the anchor—Sru, who had promised that she would return.
The anchor fell in twelve-fathom water and as the rumble-tumble of the anchor chain came back in echoes from the moist-throated woods, a boat put out from the beach. It was Sanders the white trader, the man who lived here alone year in, year out, taking toll of the sandalwood trees, paying the natives for their labour in trade goods; cut off from the world, without books, without friends, and with no interest beyond the zone of sea encircling the island, except the interest of his steadily accumulating money in the hands of his agents—the Bank of California.
The face of the white man showed thin and expressionless as a wedge of ice as he came over the rail like a ghost and slipped down to the cabin with Peterson to talk business.
Rantan and Carlin leaned over the side and watched the kanakas in the boat pulling forward to talk to the schooner crew congregated at the rail by the foc’sle head.
The beach lay only a cable length or two away, empty except for a couple of fishing canoes drawn up beyond tide mark; no house was to be seen, the village lying back among the trees, and no sound came from all that incredible wealth of verdure—nothing, but the far voice of a torrent, raving yet slumbrous and mixed with the hush of the surf on the reefs and beach.
“Notice that chap,” said Carlin, “didn’t look to right or left of him, same’s if he’d been doped. Reckon he’s full of money too if he’s the only trader here—notice his white ducks and his dandy hat and the mug under it? I know the sort. Drink turns to vinegar in a chap like that and that’s the sort that makes money in the islands.”
“Or the fellows that aren’t afraid to put their hands on the stuff when they see it,” replied Rantan. “Well, what about that pearl island I was speaking of?”
“And that hooker you were going to take to get there,” cut in Carlin. “Put me on her deck and I’m with you.”
“You’re on it,” replied Rantan.
Carlin laughed. He had known Rantan’s meaning all along and this strange game of evasion between the two had nothing to do with the Kermadec, but with something neither dared to discuss one with the other: Peterson, and what was to be done with Peterson.
“You’re on it,” continued Rantan, “and now what do you say?”
“I’m with you,” replied Carlin, “but I don’t see how you’re to do it. I’ll have no hand in doing it.”
“Leave that to me,” said the other, “you’ve only to help work the ship when I’ve taken her.”
“You say Sanders is the only white man here,” said Carlin.
“So Peterson tells me,” replied Rantan.
“Well, one white man is enough to turn on us,” said Carlin.
“He won’t turn on us,” replied Rantan grimly, and Carlin glancing at him sideways wondered for a moment if he hadn’t the devil in tow with Rantan. But Carlin was of the type that will take profit and not care so long as its own hands are clean. I wonder how many of us would eat meat if we had to do the killing ourselves or make money from poisonous industries if we had ourselves to face the poison. What Rantan chose to do was nothing to Carlin so long as he himself had not to do it or to plan it, but he was cautious.
“How about that chap Sru?” he asked. “He’s boss of the crew and the only thinking one of them—suppose....”
“Nothing,” replied the other. “He’s with me.”
Fell a silence filled with the voice of the far torrent and the murmur of the sea, a hush-a-bye sound through which vaguely came the murmur of voices through the skylight of the saloon where Peterson and the trader were discussing prices and freights, each absorbed by the one sole idea, profit at the expense of the other.