The Pacific has many industries but none more appealing to the imagination than the old sandalwood trade, a perfumed business that died when copra found its own, before the novelist and the soap boiler came to work the sea of romance, before the B. P. boats churned its swell or Honolulu learned to talk the language of San Francisco.
In those days Levua showed above the billowing green of the breadfruit, the seaward nodding palms, and the tossing fronds of the dracænas, a belt, visible from the sea, where the sandalwood trees grew and flourished. Trees like the myrtle, many branched and not more than a foot thick in the trunk, with a white deliciously perfumed wood deepening to yellow at the root.
Sanders, the trader of Levua who exported this timber, paid for it in trade goods, so many sticks of tobacco at five cents a stick, so many coloured beads or pieces of hoop iron wherewith to make knives, for a tree. He paid this price to Tahuku the chief of the tribe and he paid nothing for the work of tree felling, barking, and cutting the wood into billets. Tahuku arranged all that. He was the capitalist of Levua, though his only capital was his own ferocity and cunning, the trees rightfully belonged to all. The billets already cut and stored in go-downs were rafted across the lagoon in fragrant heaps to the Kermadec and shot on board from hand to hand, piled on deck and then stowed in the hold, a slow business watched by Le Moan with uncomprehending eyes. She knew nothing of trade. She only knew what Sru had promised her, that soon, very soon, the ship would turn and go south to find Karolin once again. She believed him because he spoke the truth and she had an instinct for the truth keen as her instinct for direction, so she waited and watched whilst the cargo came leisurely and day by day and week by week, the cargo bound for nowhere, never to be sold, never to be turned into incense, beads, fancy boxes and cabinets; the cargo only submitted to by the powers that had taken command of the Kermadec and her captain, because until the cargo was on board, the ship would not take on her water and her sea-going stores in the shape of bananas and taro.
Down through the paths where the great tree ferns grew on either side and the artu and Jack-fruit trees cast their shadows, came the men of Levua, naked, like polished mahogany, and bearing the white perfumed billets of sandalwood; as they rafted them across the diamond-clear emerald-green water to where the Kermadec stood in the sapphire blue of twelve fathoms their songs came and went on the wind, the singers unconscious that all the business of that beach was as futile as the labour of ants or the movement of shadows, made useless by the power of the pearl Le Moan carried behind her left ear.
The night before sailing, the water and fruit were brought on board and Peterson went ashore to have supper with Sanders taking Rantan with him. Carlin remained behind to look after the ship.
It was a lovely evening, the light of sunset rose-gold on the foam of the reefs and gilding the heights of Levua, the trees and the bursting torrent whose far-off voice filled the air with a mist of sound. Carlin, leaning on the rail, watched the boat row ashore, Sru at the stern oar, Peterson steering. He watched Peterson and the mate walk up the beach and disappear amongst the trees; they had evidently given orders that the boat was to wait for them on the beach, for, instead of returning, Sru and his men squatted on the sands, lit their pipes and fell to playing su-ken, tossing pebbles and bits of coral in the air and catching them on the backs of their hands.
Carlin lit his pipe. What he was watching was more interesting than any stage play, for he knew that the hour had struck, that the water and stores were on board and the ship due to raise her anchor at sunrise.
He stood with his eyes fixed on the beach. The trader’s house and store lay only a few hundred yards back among the trees and the native village quarter of a mile beyond and close to the beginning of the sandalwood groves; would any trouble in the trader’s house be heard by the people of the village? He put this question to himself in a general way and the answer came “No.” Not unless shots were fired; but then without shooting—how—how—how?
How what?
He did not enter into details with himself. He stood watching the men on the beach and then he saw Sru as if suddenly tired of the game they were playing, rise up, stretch himself and stroll towards the boat. Near the boat a fishing canoe was beached and Sru having contemplated the boat for a minute or so turned his attention to the canoe. He examined the outrigger, pressed his foot on it and then bending over the interior picked out something—it was a fish spear with a single barb. Carlin remembered that Rantan on landing had looked into the canoe, as though from curiosity or as if to make sure there was something in it. Who could tell?
The fish spear seemed to interest Sru. He poised it as if for a throw, examined the barb and then, spear in hand, came back to the fellows who were still playing their game and sat down. Carlin saw him exhibiting the spear to them, poised it, talking, telling no doubt old stories of fish he had killed on the reef at Soma; then, as if tired, he threw the thing on the sand beside him and lay back whilst the others continued their endless game.
Then came dark and the steadily increasing shower of starlight till the coal sack showed in the Milky Way like a hole punched in marble and the beach like a beach in ghost-land, the figures on it clearly defined and especially now the figure of Sru, who had suddenly risen as though alarmed and was standing spear in hand.
Then at a run he made for the trees and vanished.
Carlin turned away from the rail and spat. The palms of his hands were sweating and something went knock, knock, knock, in his ears with every beat of his heart. The kanakas on board were down in the foc’sle from which a thin island voice rose singing an endless song, the deck was clear only for the figure of Le Moan—and Carlin, half crazy with excitement, not daring to look towards the beach, walking like a drunken man up and down began to shout and talk to the girl.
“Hi, you kanaka girl,” cried Carlin, “something up on the beach—Lord God! she can’t talk, why can’t you talk, hey? Whacha staring at me dumb for? Rouse the chaps forward, we’ll be wantin’ the anchor up” ... He went to the foc’sle head and kicked—calling to the hands below to tumble up, tumble up, and to hell with their singing for there was something going on on the beach. Ruining everything, himself included, if they had been a white crew; then making a dash down to the saloon he beat and smashed at the store cupboard where he knew the whiskey was kept, beat with his naked fists till the panels gave and he tore them out, and breaking the neck of a whiskey bottle, drank with bleeding lips till a quarter of the bottle was gone.
Then he sat at the table still clutching the bottle by the neck but himself again. The nerve crisis had passed suddenly as it had come.
Yes, there was something going on upon the beach that night when, as Le Moan and the crew crowding to the port rail watched, the figure of Rantan suddenly broke from the trees and came running across the sands towards the boat followed by Sru.
She heard the voice of Sru shouting to the boat kanakas: “Tahuku has slain the white man, the trader and Pete’son have been slain.” She saw the boat rushed out into the starlit water and as it came along towards the ship, she saw some of the crew rush to the windlass and begin heaving the anchor chain short whilst others fought to get the gaskets off the jib and raise the mainsail. Already alarmed by Carlin the words of Sru completed the business. Tahuku was out for killing and as they laboured and shouted, Carlin hearing the uproar on deck, put the whiskey bottle upstanding in a bunk and came tumbling up the ladder and almost into the arms of Rantan who came tumbling over the rail.
Then from the shore you might have seen the Kermadec like a frightened bird unfolding her wings as the boat came on board and the anchor came home, mainsail, foresail and jib filling to the steady wind coming like an accomplice out of the west, the forefoot cutting a ripple in the starlit waters of the lagoon and the stern swinging slowly towards Levua, where two white men lay dead in the trader’s house and where in the village by the sandal grove Tahuku and his men lay asleep, unconscious of what civilization had done in their name.
Rantan, steering, brought the ship through the broad passage in the reefs where the starlight lit the spray of the breaking swell, the vessel lifting to the heave of the sea caught a stronger flow of wind and with the main boom swung to port headed due south.
Rantan handed the wheel to Sru and turned to a bundle lying in the port scuppers. It was Carlin sound asleep and snoring; the mate touched the beachcomber with his foot and then turning, went below.
He saw the locker smashed open and the whiskey bottle in the bunk, he opened a porthole and flung the bottle out and then turning to the locker, searched it. There were two more bottles in the locker and having sent them after the first, he closed the port and sat down at the table under the swinging lamp.
Kermadec, cargo, crew and ship’s money were his; the crew knew nothing except that Tahuku had killed Pete’son and the white trader; there was no man to speak except Sru, who dared not speak, and Carlin who knew nothing definite. In time and at a proper season it was possible that these might be rendered dumb and out of count, and this would be the story of the Kermadec.
Without her captain, murdered by the natives of Levua, and navigated by her mate, who knew little or nothing of navigation, she had attempted to make back to Soma; had missed Soma and found a big lagoon island, Karolin, which was not on the charts. There Sru, the bo’sun, and Carolin, a white man, had died of fish poisoning, and there she had lain for a year—doing what...?
“And what were you doing all that time, Mr. Rantan?” The question was being put to him before an imaginary Admiralty court, and the answer “Pearling” could not be given.
It was only now, with everything done and the ship his, that the final moves in the game were asking to be solved; up to this the first moves had claimed all his mental energy.
The Kermadec could be lost on some civilized coast quite easily, everything would be quite easy but the accounting for that infernal year—and it would take a year at least to make good in a pearl lagoon.
No, the Kermadec must never come within touch of civilization again, once he was sure of the pearl ground being worth working; the vessel must go; with the longboat he might get at last back to Soma or some of the Paumotuan islands—might.
The fact of his ignorance of navigation that had helped his story so far, hit him now on the other side, the fact so useful before a Board of Trade enquiry would help him little with the winds and tides and to the winds and tides he had committed himself in the long run.
He came on deck. The crew, all but the watch, had crowded down into the foc’sle where all danger over and well at sea, they had turned in. Sru was still at the wheel and Le Moan, who had been talking to him, vanished forward as the mate appeared in the starlight and stood watching for a moment the far-off loom of the land.
Carlin still slept. He had rolled over on his back and was lying, mouth open and one hand stretched out on the deck planking, his snores mixed with the sound of the bow wash and the creaking of the gaff jaws and cordage.
Rantan looked into the binnacle, then with a glance at Carlin he turned to Sru.
The Paumotuan did not speak, he did not seem to see the mate or recognize his presence on deck, the whites of his eyeballs showed in the starlight; and as he steered, true as a hair to the course, his lips kept working as he muttered to himself.
He looked like a man scared, and steering, alone, out of some imminent danger, that appearance of being isolated was the strangest thing. It made Rantan feel for a moment as though he were not there, as though the Kermadec were a ship deserted by all but the steersman.
Sru was scared. Steering true as an automaton, his mind was far away in the land of vacancy and pursued by white feller Mas’r Pete’son. It had come on him like a stroke when Le Moan, approaching him, had asked where the bearded man was who had gone ashore and not returned. He had no fear of Le Moan or her question, but out of it Peterson had come, the white man whom he had always feared yet whom he had dared to kill. The appalling power that had strengthened his arm and mind, the power of the vision of tobacco unlimited, Swedish matches, knives, gin and seidlitz powders, was no longer with him—Peterson was on his back, worse than any black dog, and now he steered, his head began to toss from side to side and like a man exalted by drink he began to sing and chatter, whilst Rantan, who knew the Paumotuan mind and that in another minute the wheel would be dropped and the steersman loose and running amok, drew close.
Then suddenly, and with all the force of his body behind the blow, he struck and Sru fell like a poleaxed ox whilst the mate snapping at the spokes of the wheel steadied the vessel and stood, his eye on the binnacle cord holding the ship on her course.
Sru lay where he fell, just as Carlin lay where drink had struck him down; the fellows forward saw nothing, or if they did they made no movement, and the schooner, heeling deeper to the steadying breeze held on full south, whilst behind her the wake ran luminous with the gold of phosphorus and the silver of starlight.
Presently Sru sat up, then he rose to his feet. He remembered nothing, nothing of his terror or of the blow that had felled him; it seemed to him he must have fallen asleep at the wheel and that Rantan had relieved him.
The stars faded, the east grew crimson and the sun arose to show Levua gone; a sky without cloud, a sea without trace of sail or gull.
Le Moan, crouching in the bow with the risen sun hot on her left shoulder, saw the long levels of the marching swell as they came and passed, the Kermadec bowing to them; saw the distant southern sea line and beyond it the road to Karolin.
With her eyes shut and as the needle of the compass finds the north magnetic pole, she could have pointed to where Karolin lay; and as she gazed across the fields of the breeze-blown swell no trace of cloud troubled her mind, all was bright ahead. Sru had made it clear to her that no hurt would come to Taori, and with Peterson, had gone any last lingering doubt that may have been in her mind. She trusted Sru and she trusted Rantan, who had spoken kindly to her, Carlin, and the kanaka crew; of Peterson, the man who had terrified her first and the only trustable man on that ship, she had always had her doubts, begotten by that first impression, by his beard, his gruff voice and what Sru had said about Peterson and how he would “swallow all”—that is to say the pearls of Karolin; those mysterious pearls that the white men treasured and of which the charm hidden behind her ear had spoken to Sru.
She had always worn it as a protection and she had not the least doubt that it had spoken to Sru, just as a person might speak, and told him of those other pearls which she had often seen and played with when oysters were cast to rot on the beach for the sake of their shells. She had not the least doubt that to the talisman behind her ear was due this happy return and the elimination of Peterson. Was she wrong?
As she crouched, the back draught from the head sails fanning her hair, the ship and her crew, the sea and its waves, all vanished, dissolved matter from which grew as by some process of recrystallization the beach of Karolin. The long south beach where the sand was whispering in the wind, the hot south beach where the sun-stricken palms lifted their fronds to the brassy sky of noon and the tender skies of dawn and evening, the beach above which the stars stood at night all turning with the turning dome of sky.
She saw a canoe paddling ashore and the canoe man now on the beach, his eyes crinkled against the sun—eyes coloured like the sea when the grey of the squall mixes with its blue. The sun was on his red-gold hair and he trod the sands lightly, not as the kanaka walks and moves; one might have fancied little wings upon his feet.
His naked body against the blazing lagoon showed like a flame of gold against a flame of blue. It was Taori. Taori as she had seen him first, on that day when he had come to bid Aioma to the canoe building.
It was as if Fate on that day had suddenly stripped away a veil showing her the one thing to be desired, the only thing that would ever matter to her in this life or the next.
As she leaned, the breeze in her hair and her mind like a bird fleeting far ahead into the distance, flying fish like silver shaftless arrow-heads passed and flittered into the blue water, and now a turtle floating asleep and disturbed by the warble of the bow wash and the creak of the onrushing schooner, sank quietly fathoms deep leaving only a few bubbles on the swell.
Carlin had come on deck. Rantan had said not a word about the broken open cupboard or the whiskey; the ship was cleared of drink and that was enough for him; when he came on deck a few minutes after the other, he found the beachcomber leaning on the after rail.
A shark was hanging in the wake of the schooner. A deep-sea ship does not sail alone. She gives company and shelter to all sorts of fish from the remora that hangs on for a whole voyage, to the bonito that follows her maybe for a week. In front of the shark, moving and glittering like spoon bait, a pilot fish showed in flashes of blue and gold.
Carlin turned from contemplation of these things to find Rantan at his side.
On going below for a wash after his night on deck, Carlin had found the other at breakfast. Neither man had spoken of the events of the night before, nor did they now.
“Following us steady, isn’t he?” said Carlin, turning again to contemplate the monster in the wake—“don’t seem to be swimming either and he’s going all of eight knots. What’s he after, following us like that?”
“Haven’t you ever seen a shark before?” asked Rantan.
“Yes, and I’ve never seen good of them following a ship,” replied Carlin, “and I’m not set on seeing them, ’specially now.”
“Why now?” asked the mate.
But Carlin shied from the subject that was in both their minds.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said he, “I was thinking of the traverse in front of us.... Say, now we’re set and sailing for it, are you sure of hitting that island?”
“Sure,” said the mate.
“Then you’re better at the navigating job than you pretended to be,” said Carlin. “What I like about you is the way you keep things hid.”
“I’ve kept nothing hid,” replied the other. “I’m crazy bad on the navigation, but I’ve got a navigator on board that’ll take us there same as a bullet to a target.”
“Sru?”
“Sru nothing—the kanaka girl, she’s a Marayara. Ever heard of them? You get them among the kanakas; every kanaka has a pretty good sense of direction, but a Marayara, take him away from his island and he’ll home back like a pigeon if he has a canoe and can paddle long enough. That island we took the girl from is the pearl island. Born and bred there she was, and it’s her centre of everything. Sru got it all out of her and about the pearls and fixed up with her to take us back. Don’t know what he’s promised her, I reckon a few beads is all she wants and all she’ll get, but that’s how it lies: we’ve only got to push along due south by the compass and she’ll correct us, leeway or set of current or any tomfool tricks of the needle don’t matter to her. She never bothers about the compass, she sees where she wants to go straight before her nose, same’s when land’s in sight you see it and steer for it.”
“Can she steer?” asked Carlin, who had not been on deck the day Sru set her at the wheel.
Rantan turned to where the girl was standing in the bow, called her aft and gave the wheel over to her. When she had felt the ship, standing with her head slightly uptilted, she altered the course a few points; the Kermadec had been off her path by that amount owing to leeway or set of current.
From that moment the ship was in the hands of Le Moan, tireless as only a being can be who exists always in the open air. She lived at the wheel with intervals for sleep and rest, always finding on her return the ship off her course, still heading south, but no longer on that exact and miraculous line drawn by instinct between herself and Karolin.
Error in the form of leeway or the influence of swell or the set of current could never push the vessel to east or west of that line, for the line moved with the ship, and as the journey shortened, like a steadily shortening string tied to a ball in centrifugal motion, it would bring the Kermadec at last to Karolin, no matter how far she was swung out of her course—blown fifty, a hundred, two hundred miles to east or west it would not matter, her head would turn to Karolin. The only flaw in that curious navigational instrument, the mind of Le Moan, was its blindness to distance from Karolin, the pull being the same for any distance, and had the island risen suddenly before them on some dark night, she would have piled the craft upon it unless warned by the sound of the reef.
Rantan kept the log going, he had a rough idea of the distance between Karolin and Levua, but he did not try to explain the log to Le Moan. If he had done so, his labour would have been wasted. Le Moan had no idea of time as we conceive it, cut up into hours, minutes and seconds. Time for her was a thing, not an abstract idea; a thing ever present yet shifting in appearance—energy.
The recognition of Time is simply the recognition of the rhythm of energy by energy itself. Le Moan recognized the rhythm in the tides, in the sunrises and sunsets, in the going and coming of the fish shoals, in slumber and waking life, but of those figments of man’s intellect, hours, minutes, years, she had no idea. Always in touch with reality, she had come in vague touch with the truth that there is no past, no future—nothing ever but rhythmic alternations of the present.
But, though unable to grasp the division of the real day into empirical fractions, the compass, that triumph of man’s intellect, presented no difficulties to her. When Rantan explained its pointing to her she understood, the needle pointed away from Karolin.
The fleur-de-lys on the card, which seemed to her vaguely like the head of a fish spear, pointed away from Karolin, that is away from the south.
The compass card moved, she did not know that the compass card was absolutely steady, that this appearance of movement was a delusion caused by the altered course of the ship, that the ship pivoted on the card not the card on the ship.
If she let the ship off her course to the east, the card moved and her sense of direction told her at once that the fleur-de-lys was still pointing away from Karolin. She spoke on this matter to Sru. Sru, who had made the two voyages on ships and who was yet a capable steersman, had quite taken for granted his first captain’s explanation to him of the compass; there was a god in it that held it just so and if Sru let the card wobble from the course set down, the god would most likely come out of the binnacle and kick Sru into the middle of next week. He was a Yankee skipper and he had made an excellent steersman of Sru.
Le Moan understood; she believed in gods, from Naniwa the shark-toothed one to Nan the benign: believed in them, just as white men believe in their Gods—with reservations; but this was different from anything she had hitherto conceived of a deity. He must be very small to be contained in the binnacle, very small and set of purpose always pointing with the spear head away from Karolin. Why?
Rantan had pointed down to the spear head and away north and told her it always pointed there, always away from the direction of Karolin. Why?
She had not asked him why the card moved, or seemed to move, Sru having already told her.
The feeling came to her that the little imprisoned something was against going to Karolin, but no one seemed to mind it, yet they were always consulting it, Rantan when he took the wheel and Sru and Maru, who was also a good steersman.
Every day at noon Rantan would appear on deck and take an observation of the sun with Peterson’s sextant, whilst Carlin, if he were on deck, would cuff himself on the thigh and turn and lean over the rail to laugh unobserved.
Rantan was only fooling—keeping up appearances, so that the crew might fancy him as good as Peterson in finding his way on the sea. Sru had never told the others that they depended entirely on Le Moan, the fact that she was a way-finder was known to them, but it is as well for the after guard to keep up appearances. Rantan might as well have been looking at the sun through a beer bottle for all he knew of the matter, but the crew could not tell that. So, as a navigator, he held a place in their minds above the girl.
At night when the binnacle lamp was lit and she happened to be at the wheel, her eyes would wander to the trembling card. She would put the ship a bit off its course just to see it move, noticing that it always moved in the same manner in a reverse direction to the alteration in course. If the head of the schooner turned to starboard, the card would rotate to port and vice versa. She studied its doings as one studies the doings of a strange animal, but she never caught it altering its mind or its action.
At night it always seemed to her that the thing in the binnacle, whether god or devil, was inimical to her, or at all events warning her not to take the ship back to Karolin; by day it did not matter.
So under the stars and over the phosphorescent sea the Kermadec headed south, ever south, the blazing dawns leaping over the port rail and the gigantic sunsets dying with the blood of Titans the skies to starboard, till one morning Le Moan, handing the wheel to Rantan, pointed ahead and then walked forward. Her work was done. Far ahead, paling the sky, shone the lagoon blaze of Karolin.
Le Moan had left Karolin as a gull leaves the reef, unnoticed.
Not a soul had seen her go and it was not for some days that Aioma, busy with the tree felling, recollected her existence, and the fact that she had not followed him to the northern beach; then he sent a woman across and she had returned with news that there was no trace of the girl though her canoe was beached, also that there was no trace of food having been recently cooked, and that the girl must have been gone some days as there were no recent sand traces. The wind even when it is only moderately strong blurs and obliterates sand traces, and the woman judged that no one had been about on the southern beach for some days. She had found tracks, however, for which she could not account. The marks left by the boots of Peterson, also the footsteps of the kanakas who had carried the water casks disturbed her mind; they had nearly vanished, but it seemed to her that many people had been there, a statement that left Aioma cold.
Aioma had no time for fancies. If the girl were alive, she would come across in her canoe, if death had come to her in any of the forms in which death walked the reef, there was no use in troubling. The call to the canoe building, resented at first, had given him new youth, the spirit of the sea sang in him and the perfume of the new-felled trees brought Uta Matu walking on the beach, and his warriors.
Aioma, like Le Moan, had no use for the past or the future, the burning present was everything.
Things that had been were to Aioma things floating alongside at a greater or less distance, not astern. It was not the memory of Uta Matu that walked the beach, but Uta Matu himself, untouchable, because of distance, and only able to talk as he had talked in life, but still there. Aioma had not to turn his head to look backwards at him as we have to turn our heads to see our dead, he had only to glance sideways, as it were. The things of yesterday, the day before yesterday and the day before that, were beside Aioma at greater or less distances, not behind him—all like surf riders on the same wave with him and carried forward by the same flowing, yet ever separating one from the other though keeping in line.
In the language of Karolin there was no word indicating our idea of the past except the word akuma (distance) which might mean the distance between a canoe and a canoe or between a happening of to-day and of yesterday, and to the woman who judged that Le Moan had not trod the beach for some days, “days” meant measures of distance, not of time. Le Moan had been travelling, moving away from the beach, not returning, whilst so many sunrises had occurred and so many sunsets. She had been away a long distance, not a long time.
The speed of a man running a mile on Karolin had nothing to do with the time occupied, it was a measure of his strength; the race was a struggle between the man and the mile, and of the runners the swiftest to a Karalonite was not the quickest but the strongest and most agile; this profound truth was revealed to their instinctive sight undimmed by the muscæ volitantes which we call minutes, seconds and hours, also the truth that when the race was over it was not extinct but merely removed to a distance—just as a canoe drifting from a canoe is not extinct though untouchable and out of hail, and fading at last from sight through distance.
A dead man on Karolin was a man who had drifted away; he was there, but at a distance, he might even return through the distance in a stronger way than memory sight could reveal him! Many had. Uta Matu himself had been seen in this way by several since he had drifted away—he had come back once to tell Nalia the wife of Oti where the sacred paddle was hid, the paddle which acted as the steer oar of the biggest war canoe. He had forgotten that the war canoe had been destroyed. Still he had returned. Though with a Melanesian strain in them, unlike the Melanesians the men of Karolin had no belief that the souls of ancestors become reincarnated in fish or birds, nor did they believe in the influence of Mana, that mysterious spiritual something believed in so widely by Polynesians and Melanesians alike.
Memory, to the Karolinite, was a sort of sight which enabled the living to look not over the past but the present, and see the people and things that floated, not behind in a far-off past, but to right and left in a far-off present.
Just as the surf rider sees his companions near and far, all borne on the same wave, though some might be beyond reach of voice, and some almost invisible through distance, the return of a spirit was an actual moving of a distant one towards the seer, as though a surf rider were to strike out and swim to a far-off fellow at right angles to the flow of the wave.
So Aioma, as he worked, saw Uta Matu and his warriors and the old canoe-builders, not as dead and gone figures, but as realities though beyond touch and hail of voice and sight of the eye of flesh.
Since the war, years ago, between the northern and southern tribes, a large proportion of the children born on the island had been boys, whilst most of the women had developed manly attributes in accordance with that natural law which rules in the remotest island as well as in the highest and broadest civilization.
Aioma had no need of helpers, leaving out the boys, some dozen or so, who could wield an ax as well as a man; but Aioma though his heart and soul were in his work was no mere canoe-builder. He had in him the making of a statesman. He would not let Dick work at the building or do any work at all except fishing and fish spearing.
“You are the chief (Ompalu),” said Aioma as he sat of an evening before the house of Uta Matu, now the house of Dick. “You are young and do not know all the ways of things, but I love you as a son; I do not know what is in you that is above us, but the sea I love is in your eyes. The sea, our father, sent you, but you have still to learn the ways of the land, where the chief does no work.” Then he would grunt to himself and rock as he sat, and then his voice rising to a whine, “Could the people raise their heads to one who labours with them, or would they bow their heads so that he might put his foot on their necks?” Then casting his eyes down he would talk to himself, the words so run together as to be indistinguishable; but always, Katafa noticed, his eyes would return again and again to the little ships in the shadow of the house, the model ships made by Kearney long ago—the vestiges of a civilization of which Dick and Aioma and Katafa knew nothing, or only that the ships, the big ships of which these were the likenesses, were dangerous and the men in them evil and to be avoided or destroyed if possible.
The Portsey of long ago that had fired a cannon shot and destroyed Katafa’s canoe, the schooner that had brought the Melanesians to Palm Tree, the Spanish ship that had been sunk in Karolin lagoon and the whaler that had come after her, all these had burnt into the minds of Dick, Aioma and Katafa the fact that something of which they did not know the name (but which was civilization), was out there beyond the sea line, something that, octopus-like, would at times thrust out a feeler in the form of a ship, an ayat destructive and, if possible, to be destroyed.
Ayat was the name given by Karolin to the great burgomaster gulls that were to the small gulls what schooners are to canoes, and so anything in the form of a ship was an ayat, that is to say, a thing carrying with it all the propensities of a robber and a murderer; for the great gulls would rob the lesser gulls of their food and devour their chicks and fight and darken the sunshine of the reef with their wings.
The comparison was not a compliment to the Pacific traders or their ships or the civilization that had sent them forth to prey on the world, but it was horribly apposite.
And yet the little ayats in the shadow of the house had for Aioma an attraction beyond words. They were as fascinating as sin. This old child after a hard day’s work would sometimes dream of them in his sleep; dream that he was helping to sail them on the big rock pool, as he sometimes did in reality. The frigate, the full-rigged ship, the schooner and the whale man, all had cruised in the rock pool which seemed constructed by nature as a model testing tank; indeed the first great public act of Dick as ruler of the Karolinites had been a full review of this navy on the day after he had fetched Aioma from the southern beach. Aioma, fascinated by the sight of the schooner which Dick had shown him on his landing, had insisted on seeing the others launched and the whole population had stood round ten deep with the little children between the women’s legs, all with their eyes fixed on the pretty sight. The strangest sight—for Kearney the illiterate and ignorant had managed to symbolize the two foundations of civilization, war and trade; and here in little yet in essence lay the ships of Nelson and the ships of Villeneuve: the great wool ships, the Northumberland that had brought Dick’s parents to Palm Tree, the whalers of Martha’s Vineyard and the sandalwood schooners, those first carriers of the disease of the white man.
To Aioma the schooner was the most fascinating. He knew the whaler with her try works and her heavy davits and her squat build; he had seen her before in the whaler whose brutal crew had landed and been driven off. He knew the ship, he had seen its likeness in the Spanish ship of long ago; the frigate intrigued him, but the schooner took his heart—it was not only that he understood her rig and way of sailing better than the rig and way of sailing of the others, it was more than that. Aioma was an instinctive ship lover, and to the lover of ships, the schooner has most appeal, for the schooner is of all things that float the most graceful and the most beautiful; and in contrast to her canvas, the canvas of your square rigged ship becomes dishcloths hung out to dry.
He brooded on this thing over which Kearney had expended his most loving care, and in which nothing was wanting. He understood the topping lifts that supported the main boom, the foresail, the use of the standing rigging. Kearney, through his work, was talking to him and just as Kearney had explained this and that to Dick, so Dick was explaining it to Aioma. Truly a man can speak though dead, even as Kearney was speaking now.
The method of reefing a sail was unknown to Aioma; a canoe sail was never reefed, reduction of canvas was made by tying the head of the sail up to spill the wind. Fore canvas was unknown to Aioma, but he understood.
The subconscious mathematician in him that made him able to build great canoes capable of standing heavy weather and carrying forty or fifty men apiece, understood all about the practice of the business, though he had never heard of centres of rotation, absolute or relative velocities, of impelling powers, or the laws of the collision of bodies; of inertia or pressures of resistance or squares of velocity or series of inclinations.
Squatting on his hams before the little model of the Rarotanga, he knew nothing of these things and yet he knew that the schooner was good, that she would sail close to the wind with little leeway when the wind was on the beam, that the rudder was better than the steering paddle, that the sail area though great would not capsize her, that she was miles ahead of anything he had ever made in the form of a ship. That the maker of the ayat was a genius beside whom he was a duffer, unknowing that Kearney was absolutely without inventive genius, and that the schooner was the work of a million men extending over three thousand years.
Katafa sitting beside Dick would watch Aioma as he brooded and played with the thing. It had no fascination for her. The little ships had always repelled her if anything. They were the only dividing point between her and Dick—she could not feel his pleasure or interest in them, and from this fact possibly arose a vague foreboding that perhaps some day in some way the little ships might separate them. When a woman loves, she can become jealous of a man’s pipe, of his tennis racket, of his best friend, of anything that she can’t share and which occupies his attention at times more than she does.
But the essence of jealousy is concentration, and Katafa’s green eye was cast not so much on the whole fleet as on the little schooner. This was Dick’s favourite, as it was Aioma’s.
One night, long after the vanishing of Le Moan, so long that every one had nearly forgotten her, Aioma had a delightful dream.
He dreamt that he was only an inch high and standing on the schooner’s deck. Dick reduced to the same stature was with him, and half a dozen others, and the schooner was in the rock pool that had spread to the size of Karolin lagoon. Oh, the joy of that business! They were hauling up the mainsail and up it went to the pull of the halyards just as he had often hauled it with the pull of his finger and thumb on the tiny halyards of the model; but this was a real great sail and men had to pull hard to raise it and there it was set. Then the foresail went up and the jib was cast loose and Aioma, mad with joy, was at the tiller, the tiller that he had often moved with his finger and thumb.
Then pressed by the wind she began to heel over and the outrigger—she had taken on an outrigger—went into the air; he could see the outrigger gratings with drinking-nuts and bundles of food tied to it after the fashion of sea-going canoes, and he shouted to his companions to climb on to it and bring it down. Then he awoke, sweating but dazzled by the first part of the dream.
Two days later a boy came running and shouting to him as he was at work; and turning, Aioma saw the fulfilment of his vision. Borne by the flooding tide with all sails drawing and a bone in her teeth, the little schooner swelled to a thousand times her size, was gaily entering the lagoon. It was the Kermadec.
Rantan was at the wheel, and Le Moan forward, with swelling heart, stood watching as they passed the break, the Gates of Morning, through which the tide was flooding like a mill-race. She saw the southern beach still deserted and the northern beach where the trees sheltered the village from sight. Not a sign of life was to be seen in all that vast prospect of locked lagoon and far-running reefs till from the distant trees a form appeared—Aioma.
After him came others till the beach close to the trees was thronged by a crowd even in movement like a colony of ants disturbed and showing now against the background of the trees the glint of spears. Le Moan’s heart sank under a sudden premonition of evil. She turned and glanced to where Rantan at the wheel was staring ahead and Carlin close by him was shading his eyes.
Rantan had not expected this. He had fancied Karolin deserted. Sru had said nothing of what Le Moan had told him about Taori and he said nothing now as he stood with eyes wrinkled against the sun blaze from the lagoon. Taori, he had gathered to be some kanaka boy, a love of Le Moan’s who, so far from giving trouble, would welcome her back—but that crowd, its movements and the flash of the thready spears! He made vague answers to the questions flung at him by the mate, then at the order to let go the anchor he ran forward whilst Carlin dived below, returning with two of the Vetirli rifles and ammunition. Then as the anchor fell and the Kermadec swung to her moorings on the flood, nose to the break, Rantan, leaving the wheel and standing with compressed lips, his hand on the after rail and his eyes on the crowd, suddenly broke silence and turned to Carlin.
“We don’t want any fighting,” said he. “We’ve got to palaver them. It’s a jolt. Peterson said the place was empty, and I reckon he lied or else he didn’t keep his eyes skinned, but whether or no we’ve got to swallow it. Worst is we’ve no trade to speak of, nothing but sandalwood. No matter—we don’t want nothing but to be left alone. Order out the boat and we’ll row off to them, and keep those guns hid.”
He went below for Peterson’s revolver which Carlin had forgotten, and when he returned, the boat was down with four kanakas for crew and Carlin in the stern sheets; he followed and took his place by the beachcomber and the boat pushed off.
He had made a great blunder, absolutely forgotten the existence of Le Moan and her use as an ambassador, but the mind of Rantan was working against odds.
He had never consciously worried about Peterson. The dead Peterson was done with out of count, and yet away in the back of his mind Peterson existed, not as a form, not even as a shadow, but as the vaguest, vaguest hint of possible trouble, some day. Steering, or smoking below, or enjoying in prospect the profits to be got out of the venture, Rantan would be conscious of a something that was marring his view of things; something that, seizing it with his mind, would prove to be nothing more than just a feeling that trouble might come some day owing to Peterson.
On sailing into the lagoon, the wind across that great blue pearl garden had swept his mind clear of all trace of worry. Here was success at last, wealth for the taking and no one to watch the taker or interfere with his doings. No one but the gulls. A child on that beach would have shattered the desolation and destroyed the feeling of security and detachment from the world.
Then the trees had given up their people and to Rantan it was almost as though Peterson himself had reappeared.
He had reckoned to get rid of the crew of the Kermadec in his own given time after he had worked them for his profit, to get rid of Carlin, of his own name, of everything and anything that could associate him with this venture, and here were hundreds of witnesses where he had expected to find none but the gull that cannot talk.
Truly it was a jolt! As the boat drew on for the shore, the crowd on the beach moved and spread and contracted and then became still, the spears all in one clump.
There were at least thirty of the boys of Karolin able to hurl a spear with the precision of a man, and when Aioma had sighted the schooner and given the alarm, Dick, who had been on the outer beach, had called them together. Taiepa, the son of Aioma, had distributed the spears and Aioma himself in a few rapid words had fired the hearts of the tribe.
The strangers must not be allowed to land. For a moment, but only a moment, he took the command of things from Dick’s hands. “They came before,” said Aioma, “when I was a young man, and the great Uta knowing them to be men full of evil would not allow them to land but drove them off, and yet again they came in a canoe bigger than the first (the Spanish ship), and they landed and fought with Uta and he killed them and burnt their great canoe—and yet again they have come and yet again we must fight. We are few, but Taori in himself is many.”
“They shall not land,” said Dick, “even if I face them alone.”
That was the temper of Karolin and it voiced itself as the boat drew closer to the beach in a cry that rang across the water, harsh and sudden, making the kanaka rowers pause and turn their heads.
“They mean fighting,” said Carlin, bending towards one of the rifles lying on the bottom boards.
“Leave that gun alone,” said Rantan. He ordered the rowers to pull a bit closer, rising up and standing in the stern sheets and waving his hand to the beach crowd as though intimating that he wished to speak to them.
The only answer was a spear flung by Taiepa that came like a flash of light and fell into the water true of aim but short by a few yards. The rowers stopped again and backed water. Whilst Carlin picked up the floating spear as a trophy and put it with the rifles, Rantan sat down. Then he ordered them to pull ahead altering the helm so that the bow turned away from the shore and to the west.
As they moved along the beach the distant crowd followed, but the mate did not heed it; he was busy taking notes of the lie of the land, and the position of the trees. The trees, though deep enough to hide the village from the break, were nowhere dense enough to give efficient cover; the reef just here was very broad but very low. A man would be a target—the head and shoulders of him at least—even if he were on the outer coral.
Rantan having obtained all the information he required on these matters altered the course of the boat and made back for the ship.
“Aren’t you going to have one single shot at them?” asked the disgusted Carlin.
“You wait a while,” replied the other.
When they reached the Kermadec he ordered the men to remain in the boat, and going on board dropped down below with his companion. He went to the locker where the ammunition was stored and counted the boxes. There were two thousand rounds.
“I reckon that will do,” said Rantan. “You said you were a good shot. Well, you’ve got a chance to prove your words. I’m going to shoot up this lagoon.”
“From the ship?”
“Ship, no, the boat’s good enough; they have no cover worth anything and only a few old fishing canoes that aren’t good enough to attack us in.”
“Well, I’m not saying you’re wrong,” said Carlin, “but seems to me it will be more than a one-day job.”
“We aren’t hustled for time,” replied the other, “not if it took weeks.”
They came on deck, each carrying a box of ammunition. the spear salved by Carlin had been brought on board by him and stood against the rail. Neither man noticed it, nor did they notice Le Moan crouched in the doorway of the galley and seeming to take shelter from the sun.
Carlin who had ordered a water breaker to be filled, lowered it himself into the boat, then getting in followed by the mate the boat pushed off, Sru rowing stern oar and Rantan at the yoke lines.
It was close on midday and the great sun directly overhead poured his light on the lagoon; beyond the crowd and the trees on the northern beach the coral ran like a white road for miles and miles, to be lost in a smoky shimmer, and from the reef came the near and far voice of the breakers on the outer beach.
The crew left on board, some six in number, had dropped into the foc’sle to smoke and talk. Le Moan could hear their voices as she rose and stood at the rail, her eyes fixed on the boat and her mind divided between the desire to cast herself into the water and swim to the reef and the instinct which told her to stay and watch and wait.
She knew what a rifle was. She had seen Peterson practising with one of the Viterlis at a floating bottle. There were rifles in the boat, but it was not the rifles that filled her mind with a foreboding amounting to terror, it was Rantan’s face as he returned and as he left again. And she could do nothing.
Carlin, before lowering the water breaker had handed an ax into the boat. Why? She could not tell, nor why the water breaker had been taken. It was all part of something that she could not understand, something that was yet evil and threatening to Taori.
She could not make his figure out amongst the crowd, it was too far, and yet he was surely there.
She watched.
The boat drew on towards the beach. Then at the distance of a couple of hundred yards the oarsmen ceased rowing and she floated idly and scarcely drifting—for it was slack water, the flood having ceased. One might have thought the men on board of her were fishing or just lazing in the sun—anything but the truth.
Then Le Moan saw a tiny puff of smoke from the boat’s side, a figure amongst the crowd on the beach sprang into the air and fell, and on the still air came the far-off crack of a rifle.
Carlin had got his man. He was an indifferent shot but he could scarcely have missed as he fired into the brown of the crowd. Rantan, no better a shot, fired immediately after and by some miracle nobody was hit.
Then as Le Moan watched, she saw the crowd break to pieces and vanish amongst the trees, leaving only two figures on the beach, one lying on the sands and one standing erect and seeming to threaten the boat with upflung arm. It was Taori. Her sight as though it had gained telescopic power told her at once that it was Taori.
She saw him bend and catch up the fallen figure in his arms and as he turned to the trees with it, the boat fired again, but missed him. Another shot rang out before he reached the trees, but he vanished unscathed, and quiet fell on the beach and lagoon, broken only by the clamour of gulls disturbed by the firing.
Le Moan changed her place, the ebb was beginning to run and the schooner to swing with it. She came forward and took her position near the foc’sle head, her eyes still fixed on the boat and beach. From the foc’sle came the sound of an occasional snore from the kanakas who had turned in and were sleeping like dogs.
Four fishing canoes lay on the sands near the trees, and now as she watched, she saw the boat under way again pulling in to the beach. The rowers tumbled out and the boat pushed off a few yards with only the two white men in her whilst the landing party made for the canoes and began to smash them up.
Sru—she could tell him by his size—wielded the ax, two others helped in the business with great lumps of loose coral, whilst the fourth stood watch.
It took time, for they did their work thoroughly, breaking the outriggers, breaking the outrigger poles, breaking the canoe bodies, working with the delight that children take in sheer destruction.
The god Destruction was abroad on Karolin beach and lagoon. Though without a temple or a place in mythology of all the gods, he is the most powerful, the most agile and quick of eye, and the swiftest to come when called.
Le Moan watching, saw the four men on the beach stand contemplating their work before returning to the boat.
Then she saw one of them throw up his hands and fall as if felled by an ax. The others turned to run and the foremost of them tripped as a man trips on a kink in a carpet and fell; of the two others one pitched and turned a complete somersault as though some unseen jiu-jitsu player had dealt with him, and the fourth crumpled like a suddenly closed concertina.
Le Moan’s heart sprang alive in her. She knew. The terrible arrows of Karolin poisoned with argora that kills with the swiftness and more than certainty of a bullet had, fired from the trees, done their work.
The spear was the favourite weapon of Karolin, not the bow. The bow was used only on occasions and at long distances. When they came down to resist the landing of Rantan, they had come armed with spears; driven to the shelter of the trees, Aioma, the artful one, had remembered the bows stowed in one of the canoe houses. It was years since the arrows had been poisoned, but the poison of argora never dies, nor does it weaken with time.
In four swings of a pendulum the arrows had done their work, and four upstanding men lay stretched on the beach, motionless, for this terrible poison striking at the nerve centres kills in two beats of the pulse.
Rantan and Carlin, close enough to see the flight of the arrows, put wildly out, tugging at the heavy oars and rowing for their lives; a few hundred yards off shore they paused, rested on their oars and took counsel.
It was a bad business.
Armed with rifles and with easy range they had only managed to bag one of the enemy, whereas...!
“Hell,” said Carlin.
The sweat was running down his broad face. Rantan, brooding, said nothing for a moment. Then suddenly he broke silence.
“We’ve dished their canoes, they can’t come out and attack us; we’ve got the range over them, those arrows are no use at any distance; they live mostly on fish, those chaps, and they can’t come out and fish, having no canoes, and we aren’t hurried for time.” He seemed talking to himself, adding up accounts, whilst Carlin, who had picked up one of the rifles, sat with it across his knees, his face turned shoreward where on the beach lay the four dead men, and save for the gulls not a sign of life. The boat on the ebb tide was drifting slowly back in the direction of the schooner.
“We’ve just got to row up along,” went on Rantan, “and get level with the trees. Those trees don’t give much shelter across the reef. Their houses wouldn’t stop a bullet from a popgun. Take your oar, when we’ve got our position we can anchor and take things quiet.”
Carlin, putting his gun down, took his oar and they began pulling the heavy boat against the current till they got opposite the village and the trees.
Then within rifle shot, but beyond the reach of arrow flight, they dropped the anchor and the boat swung to the current and broadside to the shore.
Rantan was right—the trees though dense enough in patches were not a sufficient cover for a crowd of people, and the houses were death traps. From where they lay they could see the little houses clear marked against the sky beyond and the house of Uta Matu with the post beside it on top of which was the head of Nan, god of the coconut trees, Nan the benign watching over his people, the puraka beds and the pandanus palms.
Of old there had been two gods of Karolin, Nan the benign and Naniwa the ferocious.
Le Moan’s mother had been Le Jennabon, daughter of Le Juan, priestess of Naniwa the shark-toothed god. On the death of Le Juan, Naniwa had seemed to depart, for Karolin. Had he? Do the gods ever die whilst there is a human heart to give them sanctuary?
Nan the benign, grinning on his post—he was carved from a coconut—was set in such a way that his face was turned to the east, that is to say towards the gates of morning. He was placed in that way according to ritual. Chance had anchored the schooner in his line of vision. Hand helpless, as are most benign things, poor old Nan could do nothing to protect the people he no doubt loved. He could keep the weazle-teazle worms away from the puraka plants and he could help a bit in bringing up rain, and it was considered that he could even protect the canoes from the cobra worms that devour planking; but against the wickedness of man and Viterli rifles he was useless.
And yet to-day as he gazed across at the schooner, his grin was in no way diminished, and as the wind stirred the cane post he waggled his head jauntily, perhaps because on the deck of the schooner he saw the granddaughter of the priestess of the shark-toothed god and said to himself with a thrill and a shudder: “Naniwa has returned.”
In the old days when a man revenged himself for some wrong, or, going mad, dashed out the brains of another with a club, he was supposed to be possessed by Naniwa, for just as Nan was the minister of agriculture, the shark-toothed one was the minister of justice. He was in a way the law executing criminals and also making criminals for execution, just as the law does with us.
Anyhow and at all events and bad as he may have been, he was the sworn enemy of foreigners; he had inspired Uta Matu to attack the whaler and he had inspired Le Juan in calling for the attack on the Spanish ship of long ago and to-day perhaps he had inspired Aioma in resisting the landing of these newcomers. The battle was still in the balance, but there on the deck of the anchored schooner stood the granddaughter of his priestess darkly brooding, helpless for the moment, but watching and waiting to strike.
No wonder that Nan grinned and waggled his head at her with a click-clocking noise, for the coconut had worked a bit loose on its stick.
Rantan took his seat on the bottom boards in the stern, resting his rifle comfortably on the gunnel; Carlin, going forward, did the same. The wind which had risen and which was moving Nan on his post, stirred the foliage, and between the boles and over the bushes of mammee apple the shifting shadows danced and the shafts of light showered, but sign of human being there was none.
The crafty Aioma, through the mouth of Dick, had ordered all the children and young people into the mammee apple and the women into the houses whilst he and Dick had taken shelter behind trees, two vast trees that stood like giants amidst the coconuts and pandanas palms, brothers of the trees growing further along the reef that were being used for canoe building.
Aioma knew from old experience what white men could do with guns, but he did not know that a house wall capable of stopping an arrow was incapable of stopping a rifle bullet.
Rantan seeing nothing else to fire at aimed at one of the houses, fired, and as the smoke cleared saw, literally, the house burst open.
The women poured out through the broken canes, made as if to run along the reef to the west and were suddenly headed back by a figure armed with a canoe paddle. It was Dick. He drove them into the mammee apple, where they took cover with the others, then running to the second house of refuge, whilst the bullets whizzed around him, he bade the women in it lie down, calling to the other hidden women to do the same, and then taking shelter himself.
But the blunder of Aioma was fatal. The men in the boat knew now for certain that the mammee apple thickets were packed, that there were no pot holes or crevasses of any account on the seaward side of the reef, that they had the population of Karolin corralled.
Resting his rifle carefully on the gunnel, Rantan led off. He couldn’t well miss, and the deafening explosion of the rifle was followed by a shriek and a movement in the distant bushes where some unfortunate had been hit, and, striving to rise, had been pulled down by his or her companions.
Carlin laughed and fired and evidently missed, to judge by the silence that followed the shot.
Rantan had some trouble with a cartridge. His face had quite changed within the last few minutes and since the corralling of the natives was assured. It was like a mask and the upper lip projected as though suddenly swollen by some injury. He flung the defective cartridge away, loaded with another and fired.
The shot was followed by the cry of a woman and the wailing of a child. One could guess that the child had been hit, not the woman it belonged to, for the wailing kept on and on, a sound shocking in that solitude where nothing was to be seen but the empty beach, the line of mammee apple and the glimpse of empty sea beyond and through the trees.
Carlin, more brutal but less terrible than Rantan, laughed. He was about to fire when a form suddenly moving and breaking from the trees took his eye and stayed his hand.
It was Dick. In his left hand he held a bow and in his right a sheaf of arrows. Aioma had directed that before taking cover the bows and arrows should be laid by the westermost of the two big trees that he and Dick had chosen for shelter. Dick had only to stretch out his arm to seize the weapons and armed with them he came, leaving shelter behind him, right into the open and on to the sands.
At the cry of the first victim, he had started and shivered all over like a dog; at the voice of the child thought left him, or only the thought that there, amongst the bushes with the children and the women, was Katafa; seizing a bow and a handful of the arrows, he left the tree and came out on to the beach and right down to the waterside.
There were seven arrows. He cast them on the sand, picked up one and fixed it with the notch in the bow-string; as he did so Carlin, altering his aim from the bushes to this new target, fired. The sand spurted a yard to the right of the bowman, who, drawing the arrow till the barb nearly touched the bow shaft, loosed it.
It fell true in line but yards short, and as it flicked the water, Rantan’s bullet came plung into the sand and only three inches from Dick’s right foot.
Dick laughed. Like Rantan’s, his face was transfigured.
He had come with no instinct but to draw the fire away from the bushes to himself. Now, in a moment, he had forgotten everything but the boat and the men in the boat and the burning hatred that, could it have been loosed, would have destroyed them like a thunderbolt.
Bending and picking up another arrow he loosed it, increasing the elevation. This time it did not fall short, it went over the boat, zipping down and into the water from the blue several yards away in the lagoon side.
“Hell,” said Carlin.
He dropped the rifle in his hands and seized on the anchor rope, dragging up the anchor, whilst Rantan, firing hurriedly and without effect, seized an oar.
Poisoned arrows even when shot wildly and at random are not things to be played with, and as they rowed, the fear of death in their hearts, came another arrow—wide but only a yard to starboard; then came another short and astern.
“We’re out of range,” said Carlin. They let the boat drift a moment. Another arrow came, but well astern.
Then with a yell as if the silent devil in the soul of him had spoken at last, Rantan sprang to his feet and shook his fist at the figure on the beach.
Then they dropped the anchor and took up the rifles. The boat was out of arrow range, but the bushes were still a clear target for the rifles.
Like artists who know their limitations, the two gunmen turned their attention from the single figure on the beach to the greater target, and Dick, who on seeing the boat draw off beyond range, stood without shooting any more, victorious for the moment but waiting.
He saw the anchor cast over, he saw the boatmen taking up their positions again, he saw the thready tubes of the guns and knew that the firing was about to recommence, then, bending, he seized an arrow and clasping it with the bow in his left hand, rushed into the water. Swimming with his right arm, he headed straight for the boat.
Dick in the water was a fish. To get close to the boat, and, treading water or even floating, loose the arrow at short range, was his object. He was no longer a man nor a human being, but implacable enmity, reasonless energy directed by hate.
Rantan and Carlin had fired before they saw what was coming, a head, an arm half submerged and a bow skittering along the water. Carlin’s jaws snapped together, he tried to extract the cartridge case from his gun, fumbled and failed.
Rantan, less rattled and quicker with his fingers, extracted and reloaded, aimed and fired and missed.
“Fire, you damned fool,” he said to the other, but the game was lost—Carlin was at the anchor rope, the memory of the four dead men on the beach slain by the poisoned arrows of Karolin had him in its grip as it had the other, who with one last glance at the coming terror dropped his gun and seized an oar.
They were beaten, put to flight—if only for the moment.
As they rowed making for the schooner with the light of the westering sun in their eyes, they could see the head of the swimmer as he made back for the shore, and away on the beach near the trees they could see the great gulls congregated around the forms of the four dead men, a boiling of wings above the reef line and against the evening blue of the sky.
Predatory gulls when feeding on a carcase do not sit and gorge, they are always in motion more or less, especially when they are in great numbers as now. Far at sea and maybe from a hundred miles away guests were still arriving for the banquet spread by death—late comers whose voices went before them sharp on the evening wind, or came up against it weak, remote and filled with suggestions of hunger and melancholy.
“God’s truth,” said the beachcomber, spitting as he rowed.
They were coming on towards the ship and it was the first word spoken.
They had defeat behind them, and even if it were only momentary defeat, ahead of them lay explanations. How would the remainder of the crew take the killing of Sru and his companions? There was also the fact that they had lost four divers.
The Kermadec was close to them now but not a soul showed on her deck, not even Le Moan, who on sighting the returning boat had slipped into the galley where she sat crouched in a corner by the copper with eyes closed as if asleep.
She had told the fellows below that she would warn them on the return of the boat. She had forgotten her promise, her mind was far away, travelling, circling in a nebulous world like a bird lost in a fog, questing for a point to rest on. She knew well that though the boat was returning, this was not the end of things. To-morrow it would all begin again, the destroyed canoes, the implacable firing from the boat; the face of Rantan as he pushed off all told her this. Crouching, with closed eyes, she heard the oars, the slight grinding of the boat as it came alongside and the thud of bare feet as Carlin came over the side on to the deck. No voices.
The beachcomber had taken in the situation at a glance, the crew were down below, smoking or sleeping, leaving the schooner to look after herself. It was just as well—down there they would have heard nothing of the distant firing, seen nothing of the killing. He knew kanakas, knew as well as though he had been told that as soon as he and Rantan had pushed off, the crew had taken charge of the foc’sle.
Leaving Rantan to tie up, he went below to the cabin for some food, where, a moment later, the mate joined him.
In a few minutes, their hunger satisfied, they began to speak and almost at once they were wrangling.
“Shooting up the lagoon—well, you’ve shot it up and much good it has done us,” said Carlin. “I’m not against killing, but seems to me the killing has been most on their side. What’s the use of talking? It will take a year at this game to do any good and how are you to manage it from the boat?”
“To-morrow,” said Rantan, “I’ll move the ship up, anchor her off that village and then we’ll see. Chaps won’t come swimming out to attack a ship, and we can pot them from the deck till they put their hands up. We’ve no time to wipe them all off, but I reckon a few days of the business will break them up and once a kanaka is broken, he’s broken.”
Carlin without replying got into his bunk and stretching at full length, lit his pipe; as he flung the Swedish match box to Rantan, a sound from the deck above like the snap of a broken stick, made him raise his eyes towards the skylight. Rantan, the box in his hand paused for a moment, then the sound not being repeated, he lit his pipe.
Throwing the box back to the other he came on deck.
The deck was still empty, but the spear that had been leaning against the rail was gone. Rantan did not notice this, he came forward passing the galley without looking in and stopped at the foc’sle hatch to listen.
One of the strange things about sea-going kanakas is their instinct to get together in any old hole or corner out of sight of the deck, the sea, the land and the sky, and in an atmosphere that would choke a European, frowst.
The fellows below were just waking up after a catnap and the fume of Blue Bird, the old tobacco of the old Pacific days sold at two cents a stick, was rising from the hatch mixed with the sound of voices engaged in talk; they had heard nothing of the firing, if they had they would not have bothered; they had no idea of the fate of Sru and his companions, if they had they would not have much cared. Time was, for these men, the moment; unspeculative as birds they took life with a terrible light-heartedness scarcely human in its acceptance of all things: blows or bananas, the righteousness or the rascality of the white man.
Rantan rapped on the hatch and called on them to tumble up. Then when he had them all on deck, the sunset on their faces and fear of what he might say to them for leaving the schooner to take charge of herself in their hearts, he began to talk to them as only he knew how.
Not a word of abuse. The natives of this island were bad men who had treacherously killed Sru and his companions who had landed to talk with them. In return, he, Rantan, had killed many of them and destroyed their canoes. To-morrow he intended to bring the ship further up towards the village, and with the speak-sticks kill more of them. Meanwhile the crew could go below and enjoy themselves as they liked, leaving one on deck to keep watch on the weather. There was no danger from the beach as all the canoes had been destroyed. Then he dismissed them and went aft.
The crew, numbering now only six, and deprived of the leadership of Sru, watched Rantan go aft and disappear down the saloon hatch, then they fell to discussing the fate of Sru and his companions. The lost men were from Soma, of the remainder two were from Nanuti in the Gilberts, the rest were Paumotuans hailing from Vana Vana and Haraikai. The loss of the others did not affect them much, nor did they speculate as to the possibility of their own destruction at the hands of the natives of Karolin; they had little imagination and big belief in Rantan, and, having talked for a while and chosen a man to keep watch, they dived below. Then dark came and the stars.
Kanoa was the man chosen, a pure Polynesian from Vana Vana, not more than eighteen, slim and straight as a dart, and with lustrous eyes that shone now in the dusk as he turned them on Le Moan, the only living creature on deck beside himself.
He had been watching Le Moan for days, for weeks, with an ever-increasing interest. She had repelled him at first despite her beauty, and owing to her strange ways. He had never seen a girl like her at Vana Vana nor at Tuta Kotu, and to his simple mind, she was something more than a girl, maybe something less, a creature that loved to brood alone and live alone, perchance spirit; who could tell, for it was well known at Vana Vana that spirits of men and women were sometimes met with at sea on desolate reefs and atolls, ghosts of drowned people who would even light fires to attract ships and canoes and be taken off just as Le Moan had been taken off by Pete’son, and who always brought disaster to the ship or canoe foolish enough to rescue them.
Sru had kicked him for speaking like this in the foc’sle. After Pete’son had been left behind at Levua, supposedly killed by Tahuku and his followers, Kanoa, leaning on his side in his bunk and pipe in mouth had said: “It is the girl or she that looks like a girl but is maybe the spirit of some woman lost at sea. She was alone on that island and Pete’son brought her on board and now, look—what has become of Pete’son?” Upon which Sru had pulled him out of his bunk and kicked him. All the same Kanoa’s mind did not leave hold of the idea. He was convinced that there was more to come in the way of disaster, and now, look, Sru gone and three men with him!
But Kanoa was only eighteen and Le Moan for all her dark beauty and brooding ways and mysterious habits was, at all events, fashioned in the form of a girl, and once in a roll of the ship Le Moan slipping on the spray-wet deck would have fallen, only for Kanoa who caught her, almost naked as she was, in his arms, and she was delicious.
Ghost or not there began to grow in him a desire for her that was held in check only by his fear of her. A strange condition of mind brought about by the conflict of two passions.
To-night close to her on the deserted deck, the warm air bringing her perfume to him and her body outlined against the starlit lagoon, he was only prevented from seizing her in his arms by the thought of Sru and his companions dead on the reef over there; dead as Pete’son, dead as he—Kanoa—might be to-morrow, and through the wiles of this girl so like a spirit, this spirit so like a girl.
He felt like a man swimming against the warm current that sweeps round the shoulder of Haraikai, swimming bravely and seeming to make good way, yet all the time being swept steadily out to sea to drown and die.
Suddenly—and just as he was about to fling out his hands, seize her and capture her in a burning embrace, mouth to mouth, breast to breast, and arms locked round her body—suddenly the initiative was taken from him and Le Moan, gliding up to him, placed a hand upon his shoulder.
Next moment she had pressed him down to the deck and he was squatting opposite to her, almost knee to knee, love for the moment forgotten.
Forgotten even though, leaning forward and placing her hand on his shoulder, she brought her face almost in touch with his.
“Kanoa,” said Le Moan, in a voice just audible to him above the rumble of the reef, “Sru and the men who were with him have been slain by Rantan, and the big red man, not by the men of Karolin. To-morrow you will die, I heard him say so to the big man, you and Timau and Tahuku and Poni and Nauta and Tirai.” She told this lie with steady eyes fixed upon him, eyes that saw nothing but Taori, the man whose life she was trying to save. No wonder that love dropped out of the heart of Kanoa and that the sweat showed on his face in the starlight. It was the first time that she had spoken to him more than a word or two, and what she said in that swift clear whisper passed through him like a sword. He believed her. His fear of her was the basis of his belief. He was listening to the voice of a spirit, not the voice of a girl.
He who a moment ago had been filled with passionate desire, felt now that he was sitting knee to knee with Death.
Such was the conviction carried by her words and voice that he would have risen up and run away and hidden, only that he could not move.
“Unless,” said Le Moan, “we strike them to-night, to-morrow we will all be killed.”
Kanoa’s teeth began to chatter. His frightened mind flew back to Vana Vana and the happy days of his youth. He wished that he had never embarked on this voyage that had led him to so many strange passes. Strike them! It was easy to say that, but who would dare to strike Ra’tan?
He was seated facing aft and he could see the vague glow of the saloon skylight golden in the silver of the star-shine. Down below there in the lamplight Ra’tan and the red bearded one were no doubt talking and making their plans. Strike them! That was easily said.
Then, all at once, he stopped shivering and his teeth came together with a click. The light from the saloon had gone out.
He touched Le Moan and told her and she turned her head to the long sweep of the deck, empty, and deserted by the vanished light. It was as though the power of the after guard had suffered eclipse. Rantan and the other would be soon asleep, if they were not asleep now, helpless and at the mercy of the man who would be brave enough to strike.
Le Moan turned again and seizing Kanoa by the shoulder whispered close to his ear.
“Go,” said she; “tell the others what I have said, bring them up, softly, Mayana, softly so that they may not hear, they need lift no hand in the business. I will strike; go!”
He rose up and passed towards the foc’sle hatch whilst Le Moan, going into the galley, fetched something she had hidden there—the head of the spear which she had broken off from the shaft, the spear Carlin had brought on board as a trophy, and the snap of which he had heard as he lay in his bunk whilst Rantan had been lighting his pipe.
She sat down on the deck with the deadly thing on her knee, poisoned with argora. A scratch from it would be sufficient to destroy life almost instantaneously, and as she sat brooding and waiting, her eyes saw neither the deck nor the starlight, but the vision of a sunlit beach and a form, Taori. Taori for whom she would have destroyed the world.
The sea spoke on the great reef loud to windward, low to leeward; you could hear within the long rumble and roar of the nearby breakers the diminuendo of the rollers that smoked beneath the stars, ringing with a forty-mile mist the placid ocean of the lagoon.
The moon was rising. She could see the gleam of its light on the binnacle where the Godling lived that had always pointed away from Karolin, on the port rail and on the brass-work of the skylight. Then, roused by a sound soft as the sifting of leaves on a lawn, she turned and behind her the deck was crowded.
The crew had come on deck led by Kanoa, and the stern of the schooner swinging towards the break with the tide, the level light of the moon was on their faces.
She made them sit down and they sat in a ring on the deck, she taking her place in the middle.
Then she talked to them respecting what she had already told to Kanoa, telling them also that the men of Karolin were not enemies but friends, that Rantan and the red-bearded man though fair-spoken were indeed devils in disguise, that they had killed many of the men of Karolin, killed Sru and his companions and intended on the morrow to kill Kanoa and the rest. And they sat listening to her as children listen to the tales about ogres—believing, bewildered, terrified, not knowing what to do.
These men were not cowards; under circumstances known and understood they were brave, weather could not frighten them nor war against kindred races, but the white man was a different thing and Rantan they feared even more than Carlin.
They would not move a hand in this matter of striking at them. It would be better to take the boat and land on the reef and trust to the men of Karolin if they were trustworthy as Le Moan had reported.
Poni, the biggest and strongest of them, said this and the others nodded their heads in approval, and Le Moan laughed; she knew them and told them so, told them that as she had saved them by overhearing Rantan’s plans, she would save them now, that they had nothing to do but wait and watch and prepare their minds for friendship with her people when she had finished what she intended to do.
Then she rose up.
As she stood with the moonlight full on her, a voice broke the silence of the night. It came from the saloon hatchway, a voice sudden, chattering, complaining and ceasing all at once as if cut off by a closed door. They knew what it was, the voice of a man talking in his sleep. Carlin on his back and seized by nightmare had cried out, half awakened, turned and fallen asleep again.
The group seated on the deck, after a momentary movement, resumed their positions. There is something so distinctive in the voice of a sleep-talker that the sound, after the first momentary flutter caused by it, brought assurance. Then, prepared at any moment to make a dash for the boat, they sat, the palms of their hands flat on the deck and their eyes following Le Moan, now gliding towards the hatch, the spear head in her left hand, her right hand touching the port rail as she went.
At the hatch she paused to listen. She could hear the reef, and on its sonorous murmur like a tiny silver thread of sound the trickle of the tide on the planking of the schooner, and from the dark pit of the stairway leading to the saloon another sound, the breathing of men asleep.
She had never been below. That stairway, even in daylight, had always filled her with fear, the fear of the unknown, the dread of a trap, the claustrophobia of one always used to open spaces.
Lit by the day it frightened her, in its black darkness it appalled her; yet she had to go down, for the life of Taori lay at the bottom of that pit to be saved by her hands and hers alone.
Kanoa, amongst the others, sat watching. The mind of Kanoa so filled with fear when she told him that his death was imminent, the mind of Kanoa that had lusted for her, the mind of this child of eighteen to whom light and laughter had been life and thought, a thing of the moment, was no longer the same mind.
The great heroism he was watching, this attempt to save him and the others, had awakened in him something perhaps of the past, ancestors who had fought, done great deeds and suffered—who knows—but there came to him an elation such as he had felt in the movements of the dance and at the sound of music. Rising and evading Poni who clutched at his leg to hold him back, he came to the rail, stood for a moment as Le Moan vanished from sight and then swift-footed but silent as a shadow, glided to the saloon hatch and stood listening.
Holding the polished banister rail, and moving cautiously, step by step, Le Moan descended, the spear head in her left hand. As she came, a waft from the cabin rose to meet her in the darkness—an odour of humanity and stale tobacco smoke, bunk-bedding and bilge.
It met her like an evil ghost, it grappled with her and tried to drive her back; used as she was to the fresh sea air, able to scent rain on the wind and change of weather, this odour checked her for a moment, repelled her, held her and then lost its power; her will had conquered it. She reached the foot of the stairs and before her now lay the open doorway of the cabin, a pale oblong beyond which lay a picture.
The table with the swinging lamp above it, the bunks on either side where the sleeping men lay, clothes cast on the floor, all lit by the moon-gleams through the skylight and portholes.
From the bunk on the right hung an arm. It was Carlin’s; she knew it by its size. She moved towards it, paused, looked up and stood rigid.
Above Carlin, now on the ceiling, now on the wall, something moved and danced; a great silver butterfly, now at rest, now in flight, shifting here and there, poising with tremulous wings.
It was a water shimmer from the moonlit lagoon entering through a porthole, a ghost of light; it held her only for a moment, the next she had seized the hand of the sleeper and driven the spear point into the arm. Almost on the cry of the stricken man, something sprang across the table of the cabin, seized Le Moan by the throat and flung her on her side. It was Rantan.
Up above Kanoa, standing by the opening of the hatch, listening. The reef spoke and the water trickled on the planking, but from below there came no sound. Moments passed and then, sharp and cutting the silence like a knife came a cry, a shout, and the sound of a furious struggle. Then, fear flown and filled with a fury new as life to the newborn, Kanoa plunged down into the darkness, missed his footing, fell, rose half stunned and dashed into the cabin.
Carlin, naked, was lying on his face on the floor, dead or dying; Rantan, naked, was at death grips with Le Moan. She had risen by a supreme effort, but he had got her against the table, flung her on it and was now holding her down, his knee on her thigh, his hands on her throat, his head flung back, the flexor muscles of his forearms rigid, crushing her, breaking her, choking the life out of her, till Kanoa sprang.
Sprang like a tiger, lighting on the table and then in a flash on to Rantan’s back, breaking his grip with the impact and freeing Le Moan. He had got the throat hold from behind, his knees had seized Rantan’s body and he was riding him like a horse. The attacked man, whooping and choking, tried to hit backwards, flung up his arms, rose straight, tottered and crashed, but still the attacker clung, clung as they rolled on the floor, clung till all movement ceased.
It was over.
The silver butterfly still danced merrily on the ceiling and the sound of the reef came through the skylight, slumbrous and indifferent, but other sound or movement there was none till Le Moan, stretched still on the table, turned, raised herself on her elbow and understood. Then she dropped on to the floor. Rantan lay half on top of Carlin and Kanoa lay by Rantan.
Kanoa’s grip had relaxed and he seemed asleep. He roused as the girl touched him; the fury and wild excitement had passed, he seemed dazed; then recovering himself he sat up, then he rose to his feet. As he rose Rantan moved slightly, he was not dead and Le Moan kneeling on the body of Carlin seized the sheet that was hanging from the bunk, dragged it towards her and handed it to Kanoa.
“Bind him,” said Le Moan, “he is not dead, let him be for my people to deal with him as they deal with the dog-fish.”
As they bound him from the shoulders to the hands a voice came from above. It was the voice of Poni who had come to listen and who heard Le Moan’s voice and words.
“Kanoa,” cried Poni, “what is going on below there?”
“Coward!” cried Le Moan, “come and see. Come and help now that the work is done.”
“Ay,” said Kanoa the valorous, “come and help now that the work is done.”
Then, kneeling by the bound figure of Rantan, he gazed on the girl, consuming her with his eyes, rapturous, and unknowing that the work had been done for Taori.
Taori, beside whom, for Le Moan, all other men were shadows, moving yet lifeless as the moon-born butterfly still dancing above the corpse of Carlin.
When the firing had ceased and the boat had returned to the ship the wretched people hiding amongst the mammee apple had come out and grouped themselves around Aioma and Taori. Taori had saved them for the moment by his act in swimming out to attack the boat; he was no longer their chief, but their god, and yet some instinctive knowledge of the wickedness of man and of the tenacity and power of the white men told them that all was not over.
Amongst them as they waited whilst Aioma and Katafa distributed food, sat two women, Nanu and Ona, each with a dead child clasped in her arms. The child of Nanu had been killed instantaneously by a bullet that had pierced its neck and the arm of its mother. Ona’s child, pierced in its body, had died slowly, bleeding its life away and wailing as it bled.
These two women, high cheeked, frizzy-headed and of the old fierce Melanesian stock which formed the backbone and hitting force of Karolin, were strange to watch as they sat nursing their dead, speechless, passionless, heedless of food or drink or what might happen. The others ate, too paralysed by the events of the day to prepare food for themselves, they yet took what was given to them with avidity, then, when dark came, they crept back into the bushes to sleep, whilst Dick, leaving Katafa in charge of Aioma, left the trees and under cover of the darkness came along the beach past the bodies, over which the birds were still at work, until he was level with the schooner.
She showed no lights on deck, no sign of life but the two tiny dim golden discs of the cabin portholes.
Taking his seat on a weather-worn piece of coral, he sat watching her. Forward, close to the foc’sle head, he saw now two forms, Le Moan and Kanoa; they drew together, then they vanished, the deck now seemed deserted, but he continued to watch. Already in his mind he foresaw vaguely the plan of Rantan. To-morrow they would not use the boat, they would move the schooner, bring her opposite the village and then with those terrible things that could speak so loudly and hit so far they would begin again—and where could the people go? The forty-mile reef would be no protection; away from the trees and the puraka patches the people would starve, they would have no water. The people were tied to the village.
He sat with his chin on his clenched fists staring at the schooner and the two evil golden eyes that were staring him back like the eyes of a beast.
If only a single canoe had been left he would have paddled off and, with Aioma and maybe another for help, would have attacked, but the canoes were gone— and the dinghy.
Then as he sat helpless, with hatred and the fury of hell in his heart, the golden eyes vanished. Rantan had put out the light.
With the rising moon he saw as in a glass, darkly, little by little and bit by bit, the tragedy we have seen in full. He saw the grouping of the foc’sle hands as they came up from below, he saw them disappear as they sat on deck. Then he saw the figure of Le Moan, her halt at the saloon hatch and the following of Kanoa, he heard the scream of the stricken Carlin.
Lastly he saw the crowding of the hands aft, Carlin’s body being dragged on deck and cast overboard into a lather of moonshine and phosphorus, and something white carried shoulder high to forward of the galley where it was laid on deck.
Then after a few moments lights began to break out, lanterns moved on the deck, the portholes broke alive again and again were blotted out as the cabin lamp lit and taken from its attachments was carried on deck and swung from the ratlins of the main for decorative purposes. The moon gave all the light that any man in his sober senses could want, but the crew of the schooner were not sober, they were drunk with the excitement of the business, and though nominally free men they felt as slaves feel when their bonds are removed. Besides, Rantan and Carlin had plotted to kill them as they had killed Sru and the others. On top of that there was a bottle of ginger wine. It had been stored in the medicine locker—Peterson, like many other seamen, had medical fancies of his own and he believed this stuff to be a specific for the colic. It had escaped Carlin’s attention, but Poni, who acted as steward, had sniffed at it, tasted it and found it good.
It was served out in a tin cup.
Then, across the water came the sound of voices, the twanging of a native fiddle, and now the whoop-whoop of dancers in the hula dance songs, laughter against which came the thunder of the moonlit sea on the outer beach and an occasional cry from the gulls at their food.
Dick, rising, made back towards the trees; his heart felt easier. Without knowing what had occurred, he still knew that something had happened to divide his enemies, that they had quarrelled, and that one had been killed; that, with Sru and his companions, made five gone since the schooner had dropped anchor.
Lying down beside Katafa, whilst Taiepu kept watch, he fell asleep.
At dawn Taiepu, shouting like a gull, came racing through the trees whilst the bushes gave up their people. They came crowding out on the beach to eastward of the trees and there, sure enough, was Le Moan, the schooner against the blaze at the Gates of Morning, and the boat hanging a hundred yards off shore.
Kneeling on the sands before Taori, glancing sometimes up into his face, swiftly, as one glances at the sun, Le Moan told her tale whilst the sun itself now fully risen blazed upon the man before her.
Dick listened, gathered from the artless story the sacrifices she had made at first, the heroism she had shown to the last, but nothing of her real motive, nothing of the passion that came nigh to crushing her as Katafa, catching her in her arms, and, pressing her lips on her forehead, led her away tenderly as a sister to the shelter of the trees.
Then the mob, true to itself and forgetting their saviour, turning, raced along the sands, boys, women and children, till they got level with the waiting boat shouting welcome to the newcomers.
Poni in the stern sheets rose and waved his arms, the boat driven by a few strokes reached the beach and next moment the crew of the Kermadec and the people of Karolin were fraternizing—embracing one another like long-lost relatives.
And now a strange thing happened.
Dick, who stood watching all this, deposed for a moment as chief men are sometimes temporarily deposed and forgotten in moments of great national heart movements, saw in the boat, the naked, bound figure of Rantan lying on the bottom boards.
He came closer and the eyes of Rantan, which were open, met the eyes of Taori.
Rantan was a white man.
There was no appeal in the eyes of Rantan—he who knew the Islands so well knew that his number was up; he gazed at the golden brown figure of Taori, gazed at that face so strange for a kanaka, yet so truly the face of an islander, gazed as a white man upon a native.
For a moment it was as though race gazed upon kindred race disowning it, not seeing it, mistaking it for an alien and lower race and from deep in the mind of Dick vague and phantom-like rose trouble.
He did not know that he himself was a white man, blood brother of the man in the boat. He knew nothing, yet he felt trouble. He turned to Aioma.
“Will he die?”
“Ay, most surely will he die,” said the old fellow with a chuckle. “Will the dog-fish not die when he is caught? He who killed the canoes, the children, is it not just that he should die?”
Dick inclined his head without speaking. He turned to where Nanu and the other woman were standing, waiting, terrible, with their dead children still clasped in their arms.
“It is just,” said he, “see to it, Aioma,” and turning without another glance at the boat he walked away, past the shattered canoes, past the half-picked bones, through the sunlight, towards the trees.
Aioma, no longer himself, but something more evil, came towards the boat making little bird-like noises, rubbing his shrivelled hands together, stroking his thighs.
The tide was just at full ebb, the old ledge where the victims of Nanawa were staked out in past times for the sharks to eat was uncovered and only waiting for a victim. It lay halfway between the village and the reef break and in old times one might have known when an execution was to take place by the fins of the tiger sharks cruising around it. This morning there were no sharks visible.
Rantan was reserved for a worse fate; for, as Aioma, standing by the boat, called on the people to take their vengeance, the woman Nanu, still holding her dead child in her arms stepped up to him followed by Ona.
“He is ours,” said Nanu.
Aioma turned on her like a savage old dog—he was about to push her back amongst the crowd when Ona advanced a step.
“He is ours,” said Ona, glancing at the form in the boat as though it were a parcel she was claiming, whilst the crowd, reaching to the woods, broke in, speaking almost with one voice.
“He is theirs, he has slain their children, let them have him for a child.”
“So be it,” said Aioma, too much of a diplomat to oppose the mob on a matter of sentiment, and curious as to what gory form of vengeance the women would adopt. “So be it, and now what will you do with him?”
“We will take him to the southern beach with us. We alone,” said Nanu.
“We would be alone with him,” said Ona, shifting her dead child from her right to her left arm as one might shift a parcel.
“But how will you take him?” asked the old man.
“In a canoe,” said Nanu.
“Then go and build it,” said the canoe-builder. “What foolishness is this, for well you know the canoes are broken.”
“Aioma,” said Nanu, “there is one little canoe which is yet whole, it lies in the further canoe-house, so far in that it has been forgotten; it belonged to my man, the father of my child, he who went with the others but did not return. I have never spoken of it and no one has seen it, for no one goes into the canoe-houses now that the great canoes are gone.”
“Then let it be fetched,” said Aioma. He stood whilst a dozen of the crowd broke away and racing towards the trees disappeared in the direction of the canoe-houses. Presently the canoe, a fishing outrigger, showed on the water of the lagoon, two boys at the paddles. They beached it close to the boat, the dead children were lashed to the gratings with strips of coconut sennit, Rantan, raised by half a dozen pairs of hands, was lifted and placed in the bottom of the little craft, and the women, pushing off, got on board, and raised the sail.
The steering paddle flashed and the crowd stood watching as the canoe grew less on the surface of the water, less and less, making for the southern beach, till now it was no larger than a midge in the lagoon dazzle that, striking back at the sun, roofed Karolin with a forty-mile dome of radiance.
Now when Katafa led Le Moan away into the shelter of the trees, Le Moan, with the kiss of Katafa warm upon her forehead, knew nothing, nothing of the fact that Katafa was Taori’s, the dream and treasure of his life, beside whom all other living things were shadows.
And Katafa knew nothing, nothing of the fact that Taori was Le Moan’s—was Le Moan; for Le Moan had so dreamed him into herself that the vision of him had become part of herself inseparable for ever.
Ringed and ringed with ignorance, ignorance of their own race, and the affinity between them, of the fact that they and Taori formed amongst the people of Karolin a little colony alien in blood and soul, of the fact that Taori was their common desire, they went between the trees, Katafa leading the way towards the house of Uta Matu, above which Nan on his pole still grinned towards the schooner, grinned without nodding, maybe because the wind that had moved him had ceased.
Katafa, taking the sleeping mat used by her and Taori, spread it on the floor of the house, then she offered food, but Le Moan refused, she only wanted sleep. For nights she had not slept and the kiss that Katafa again pressed upon her brow seemed to her the kiss of a phantom in a dream as she sank down and died to the world on the bed of the lover who knew nothing of her love.
It was still morning.
Outside in the blazing sun the people of Karolin went about their business, mending the wall of the house that had been broken, preparing food for the newcomers, rejoicing in the new life that had come back to them. Whilst in the lagoon the anchored schooner swung to her moorings, deserted and without sign of life, for Dick had decided that no one should board her till he and Aioma led the way, that is till the morrow, for there were many things to be attended to first.
Le Moan had brought him not only a ship, but six full-grown men, a priceless gift if the men were to be trusted.
Aioma, who had held off from the business of fraternizing, watching the newcomers with a critical eye, believed that they were good men. “But wait,” said Aioma, “till they are fed, till they have rested and slept amongst us; a good-looking coconut is sometimes rotten at the core, but these I believe to be good men even as Le Moan has said; but to-night will tell.”
At dusk he came to Taori, happy. Each of the new men had taken a wife; incidentally, in the next few days each of the newcomers, with one exception, had taken from four to six wives.
“Each has a woman,” said the direct Aioma. “We are sure of them now, they are in the mammee apple, all except one who is very young and who says that he has no heart for women.”
He spoke of Kanoa. Kanoa brooding alone by the water’s edge, sick with love and desire. Love that was even greater than desire, for the deed of Le Moan that had stirred in him the ghosts of his ancestors, had raised the soul of Kanoa beyond the flesh where hitherto it had been tangled and blind.
Meanwhile Le Moan slept. Slept whilst the dusk rose and the stars came out, slept till the moon high against the milky way pierced the house of Uta Matu with her shafts.
Then sleep fell from her gradually and turning on her elbow she saw the moon rays shining through the canes of the wall, the little ships ghostly on their shelves and through the doorway the wonderful world of moonlit reef and sea.
Nothing broke the stillness of the night but the surf of the reef and a gentle wind that stirred the palm fronds with a faint pattering rainy sound and passed away across the mammee apple where men and women lay embraced, who the night before had not known even of each other’s existence.
Before the doorway, sheltered from the moon by a tree shadow, all but their feet that showed fully in the light, two forms lay stretched on a mat—Taori and Katafa. They had given up their house to the saviour of Karolin, taken a mat from one of the women’s houses, and fallen asleep with only the tree for shelter. Le Moan, not recognizing them, still dazed with sleep, rose, came to the doorway and looked down.
Then she knew.
Taori’s head was pillowed on Katafa’s shoulder, her arm was around his neck, his arm across her body.