The sun touched the sea line, the blazing water leaping to meet him, and then in a west golden and desolate, in a sea whose water had turned to living light, he began to drown.
Dick watched as the golden brow, almost submerged, showed a lingering crescent of fire and then sank, carrying the day with it as Marua had sunk carrying with it his youth and the last visible threads connecting him with civilization.
He turned. Le Moan had taken the wheel.
The sails that had been golden were now ghost white and a topaz star had already pierced the pansy blue where in the west the new moon hung like a little tilted boat.
“To the south,” cried Aioma. “E Haya—to the south, Le Moan, to Karolin now that we have seen there is nothing to be seen, to the south; to the south, for I am weary of these waters.”
Le Moan, dumb and dim in the starlight now flooding the world, spun the wheel; on the rattle of the rudder chain came the thrashing of canvas and the schooner bowing to the swell lay over on the port tack—due east.
Aioma glanced towards the moon but Le Moan reassured him.
“The current is fighting us,” said she, “and I would get beyond it. Have patience, Aioma, the way is clear to me.”
He turned away satisfied and lay down on deck. Dick, who had brought up some blankets from below to serve as a sleeping mat, lay down by him, and the kanakas, all but Poni and Tahuku, went to their bunks in the foc’sle.
Aioma, lying on his face with his forehead on his arms, heard the rattle of the rudder chain and knew that Le Moan was edging now to the south. She would steer all night with the help of Poni, and sure of her and sure of Karolin showing before them at daybreak, he let his mind wander, now to the canoe-building, now to the spearing of great fish, till sleep took him as it had taken Dick.
Le Moan, steering, could see their bodies in the starlight, and beyond them Poni and Tahuku seated close to the galley, their heads together talking and smoking, heedless of everything but the eternal chatter about nothing which they could keep up for hours together, whilst the schooner under the hands of the steersman was heading again due east.
An hour after midnight the wind shifted, blowing from the west of south. Poni came aft to see if Le Moan wanted anything, food, water, a drinking nut—she wanted nothing; as she had steered all that night long ago towards Karolin, she steered now, tireless, wrapt in herself, without effort.
As the dawn showed in the eastern sky she altered the course to full south and handed the wheel to Poni.
She had done her work, e Haya, steered they for ever now they would never raise Karolin—so far to the west that even the lagoon light would be all but invisible.
The first sun ray brought Aioma to his feet, he saw Poni at the wheel and Le Moan lying near him fast asleep like a creature caught back into darkness now that her work was done. The sunrise to port told him that the ship was heading south, then he came forward and looked.
The southern sea showed no sign and the southern sky no hint of the great lagoon. Not a bird’s wing appeared.
He roused Dick, who came forward and they stood whilst the canoe-builder pointed to the south.
“There is nothing,” said Aioma—“yet we have come all the night and she is never wrong—not even the light in the sky. Yet by now the trees should have shown.”
Dick, gazing into the remote south at the blue and perfect and pitiless sky, unbroken at the sea line, unstained above it, drew in his breath; a cold hand seemed placed on his heart. Where then was Karolin?
“Who knows,” said Aioma, “it may show when the sun is higher. Let us wait.”
They waited and watched whilst the sun rose in the sky, but the sun revealed nothing that the dawn had not shown—nothing save away to the westward unseen by them and so faint as scarcely to be seen, a pale spot in the higher blue—the light of Karolin.
Aioma came running aft. He shook Le Moan and roused her from her sleep and she came forward and stood in the bow, sheltering her eyes against the light.
“It is not there,” said she; “I can see nothing with my eyes nor in my mind—the power has gone from me, Aioma, it has been taken from me in my sleep.”
Aioma struck his head with the flat of his hand, then he turned to her as she stood there with the lie on her lips, close to, almost touching Dick, who stood, his hand on the rail, scarcely breathing.
“Gone from you,” cried the canoe-builder, “taken in sleep, aie, what is this! We are adrift and astray, gone! And who could take it but Uta Matu. Taori, we are lost, we are in the hands of the viewless ones; their nets have taken us. I told you this, yet you would not put back. Never more shall we see Karolin.”
Dick did not move. He saw again the figure of Katafa as she stood on the beach when they were leaving, that loved figure from which he had parted with scarcely a thought, so full was he of the schooner and the dream of sailing her on the outer sea. Katafa who even then was watching for him away beneath that tiny stain on the western sky, grown so faint now as to be almost invisible.
Even last night when sure of return, his heart had longed for her, he had dreamed of her; by a thousand little threads, each living, she had joined herself to his very being, and he would never see her again!
“Never more shall we see Karolin.” He turned to the desolate south, to the west, to the east; then, heedless of the others, a savage in his grief, he cast himself on the deck, his face on his arms as if to hide himself from the hateful sun.
“Never more shall we see Karolin.”
The words of Aioma were repeated by the sky, by the sun, and the sea. Never more would he see Katafa, hear her voice, feel her arms about him. The hard hot deck beneath him, the sun beating on his back, the sounds of the sea on the planking and the groaning of the timbers all were part of his misery, of the awful hunger that fed on his heart.
He loved her as a man loves a woman, as a child loves a mother, as a mother loves a child. He who had killed men and dared death was, in fact, still a child; passionate, loving, ignorant of the terrors that life holds for the heart of man, of the grief that kills and the separation that annihilates. He had never met grief before.
Le Moan watched him as he lay. She knew. He was lying like that because of Katafa, she had lain like that on the coral because of him.
By declaring that vision had returned to her, by seizing the wheel and steering for Karolin, she could have brought him to his feet a well man—only to hand him over to Katafa.
She could not do that.
Her heart, pitiless to the world, was human only towards him; she had braved the unknown and she had braved death to save his life, but to save him from this suffering she could not speak three words.
Aioma watched him absolutely unmoved. If Dick had been wounded by a spear or club, it would have been different, but mental anguish was unknown to the canoe-builder and you cannot sympathize with the unknown.
Then as Dick struggled to his feet and stood with his hand on the rail, dazed and with his face turned again to the south, the old man recommenced his plaint with the insistency of a brute, whilst the wind blew and Poni at the wheel kept the ship on her course south, ever towards the hopeless south.
“No,” said Aioma, “never more shall we see Karolin. Uta has us in his net. Never more shall I shape my logs (he had dropped that business before leaving Karolin) or spear the big fish by night whilst the boys hold the torches (upoli), and the great eels will go through the water with none to catch them. It is this ayat that has brought us where we now are to confusion and a sea without measure, and this wind, which is the breath of Le Juan, and may her breath be accursed. Well, Taori, and so it stands, and what now? Shall we go before the wind or counter it—seek the south e Haya where nothing is, or the east e Hola where nothing is?”
Dick turned his face to the canoe builder. “I do not know, Aioma, I do not know. It is all darkness.” His eyes turned to Le Moan and passed her, falling on Poni at the wheel, and the sea beyond.
Aioma had told him that he was taking Le Moan as a pathfinder, but Dick had troubled little about that, scarcely believing in it. He had trusted to the current and the light of Karolin as a guide. They were gone, but it was the words of Aioma that removed the last vestige of hope.
He trusted Aioma in all sea matters and when Aioma said that they were lost, they were lost indeed. Palm Tree vanished, Karolin gone, nothing but the sea, the trackless hopeless sea and the words of Aioma!
Urged by a blind instinct to get away from the sight of that sea, that sky, that pitiless sun, he left the deck and came down the steps to the saloon where he stood, a strange figure, almost nude, against the commonplace surroundings; the table, the chairs, the bunks with their still disordered bedding, the mirror let into the forward bulkhead, a mirror so old and dim and spotted that it scarcely cast a reflection.
He looked about him for a moment, moved towards the bunk where Carlin had once slept, and, sitting down on the edge of it, leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees, his head bowed; just as his father had sat long, long years ago when Emmeline had vanished into the woods to return bearing a child in her arms—bearing him, Taori.
Just as his father had sat all astray, crushed, helpless and lost, so he sat now, and for the same reason.
Up on deck Poni at the wheel turned to the canoe-builder.
“And what now, Aioma,” said Poni, “since Le Moan knows not where to go, where go we?” As he spoke the mainsail trembled, rippled, and flattened again.
The canoe-builder turned aft. The breezed-up blue, beyond a certain point, lay in meadows and a far glitter spoke of a great space where there was no wind.
“The wind is losing its feathers,” said Poni with a backward glance in the direction towards which the other was looking.
As he spoke the mainsail trembled again as though a shudder were running up it and the boom shifted to the cordy creak of the topping lifts.
Yes, the wind was losing its feathers, dying, jaded, exhausted; again the mainsail flattened, shivered and filled only to flatten again, the wabble of the bow wash began to die out and the schooner to lose steerage way.
The breath of Le Juan was failing and Aioma who had cursed it saw now the calm spreading towards them, passing them, taking the southern sea.
Poni left the wheel.
There was nothing to steer. A ship is only a ship when she is moving, and the schooner, now a hulk on the lift of the swell, lay with a gentle roll on the glassy water—drawing vague figures upon the sky with her trucks, complaining with the voice of block and cordage whilst the canoe-builder standing with his eyes on the north, felt the calm: felt it with a sixth sense gained from close on a century of weather influence; measured it, and knew that it was great. Great and enduring because of its extent, complete and flawless as a block of crystal placed by the gods on the face of ten thousand square miles of sea.
He remembered how he had cursed the wind, and turning to speak to Le Moan, found her gone.
Le Moan following Dick to the saloon hatch had stood for a moment listening.
Unable to hear anything below, she waited till Aioma’s back was turned and then cautiously began to descend the steps of the companion-way; cautiously, just as she had come down those steps that night to attack the white men single-handed and save, at the risk of her life, the life of Taori.
Reaching the door of the saloon, she saw him half seated on the bunk’s edge, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands whilst above him, now on the ceiling, now on the wall, glimmered and glittered and danced the same water shimmer that had danced above the sleeping Carlin. Only now it was a butterfly of gold.
The ripples sent out by the roll of the schooner on the sea surface gave it its tremor, the roll its extent of flight, the sunlight its gold.
It fluttered now, sweeping down as if to light on Dick, and now it was flying on the ceiling above him. It seemed a portent, but of what she could not tell, nor did she heed it after the first glance.
Crossing the floor, she came to him, sat down beside him, and rested her hand on his shoulder.
Dick turned to her. Like the child that he was, he had shuddered and sobbed himself into a state where thought scarcely existed above the sense of despair. He turned to her, the touch of a woman’s sympathy relaxing the numbing grip of Disaster, yet not for a moment releasing him. Then casting his arms around her neck, he clung to her for comfort as a child to its mother.
Clasping her arms around his naked body, her lips on his throat, her eyes closed, in Paradise—heedless of life and death and dead to the world, Le Moan held him, flesh to flesh, soul to soul, for one supreme moment her own. That she was nothing to him was naught, that grief not love had thrown him into her arms was naught, she held him.
To Le Moan whose soul was, in a way, and as far as Taori was concerned, greater than her body, marriage and its consummation could have given little more—if as much. She held him.
Above them danced the golden butterfly that no man could catch or brutalize; a thing born of light, of the sea, of chance; gold by day that had been silver by moonlight, elusive as the dreams that had led Carlin to his death and the love that had led Le Moan to destroy him.
Then, little by little, the world broke in upon her, her arms relaxed, and rising, half blind and groping her way, she found the door, the steps, the deck, where Poni stood released from the wheel, and Aioma by the rail.
The Ocean is a congregation of rivers, the drift currents and the stream currents; rivers, some constant in their flow, some intermittent and variable; some wide, as in the case of the Brazil current which at its broadest covers four hundred and fifty miles; some narrow as in the case of the Karolin-Marua drift, scarcely twenty miles from east to west. The speed of these rivers varies from five miles a day to fifteen or thirty, as in the case of the Brazil current, or from ten to a hundred and twenty miles a day as in the case of the Gulf Stream.
Sometimes these rivers, lying almost side by side, are flowing in opposite directions, as in the case of the north running Karolin-Marua current and the southerly drift that had now got the schooner in its grasp; and each one of these streams of the sea, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, has its own peculiar people, from the Japanese swordfish of the Kuro Shiwo to the Gambier turtles on the Karolin-Marua.
Left without wind the schooner drifted, her sails casting vast reflections on the glassy swell; sometimes, away out, a slight disturbance on the water would show where a sleeping turtle had suddenly submerged, and over-side in the ship’s shadow, fucus and jelly-fish floating fathoms deep could be seen drifting with the ship. Nothing else. Neither shark nor albacore nor palu nor gull spoke of life across or beneath that glacial sea.
The sun sank in a west of solid gold and the stars took the night, the sails showing black against the brilliant ceiling.
Dick, who had come on deck before sunset, stood by Aioma at the after rail. He seemed himself again, but he had not eaten that day; a fact that disturbed the canoe-builder, who had turned from dark thoughts and misgivings to a sort of cheery fatalism. Aioma was alive and there was food and water on board for a long time and the wind might blow soon or the drift—he sensed a drift—take them somewhere. He had a feeling also that his curses had closed the mouth of Le Juan; he had eaten well, and his belly was full of ship’s food and bananas, so his sturdy nature refused depression.
“Of what use,” he was saying, “is a man without food? A man is the paraka he eats and the fish.... Go and eat, Taori, for without food a man is not a man.”
“I will eat to-morrow,” said Taori, “I have no heart for eating now.”
Away forward crouching in her old place Le Moan listened to the creak of the ship as it moved to the swell and watched the stars that shone on Karolin.
The faithful unbreakable sense born with her as truly as the power of the water-finder is born in him, or the power of the swallow to find its southern nest, told her just where Karolin lay; away on the starboard beam to the north, now dead aft as the schooner turned to some gentle swirl of the current, now a bit to port, now back again to starboard.
She could see the figures of Taori and Aioma in the starlight and she could hear the voices of Poni and the others from the foc’sle, the creak of the timbers and the creak of the main boom as it moved to the rocking of the swell. She too had not eaten that day.
She had done her work and she had received her reward. With his body in her arms and her lips on his neck, she had drunk him as a creature dying of thirst might drink long delicious draughts from a poisoned well; for he had clung to her not in the passion of love, but of misery, and he had let her hold him as a comforter not as a lover, and she knew that till the stars fell dead and the sun ceased to shine that never would he be closer to her than that.
This knowledge had come to her from the very contact with his body, from the clasp of his arms about her neck. He had told her unconsciously and without speech more than he could have ever have told her in words. He was Katafa’s.
He was for ever out of her reach, sure and certain instinct told her that, yet he was near her and she could see him—they were together.
Only a little before sundown Aioma had said to her, “Le Moan, maybe since the wind has gone the spell of Uta Matu has ceased to work. Shut your eyes, turn, and see if you cannot get a view again of where Karolin lies; is the sight of it still gone from you, Le Moan?”
“It is still gone,” she had answered him, “and even if it were with me, of what use, for there is no wind?”
She had told the lie looking him in the face and seeing only Taori.
It was no little jealousy that made her lie; she had no jealousy towards Katafa whom Fate had bound to Taori before she had seen him. He had not chosen Katafa in preference to her; perhaps that was why her heart held no jealousy. All the same to bring him back, to take the wheel and steer him into the arms of Katafa—she could not.
To save his life she could easily have died for him, to give him back to joy and love was impossible.
The night passed and the sun rose on another day of calm, and still the schooner drifted, the variable current setting her back sometimes, sometimes leading her a bit more south. Truly it was a great calm as Aioma had predicted and it fell on Taori, as on the sea, like the hand of death. He scarcely ate at all; he had fallen away from himself, his mind seemed far away, he scarcely spoke.
As men who have never met the microbes of disease fall easily victims and die when other men only fall ill, Taori, who had never before known grief, in the language of Aioma, turned his face from the sun.
On Karolin men had often died like that, of no disease—because of insult, because of a woman, sometimes just for some reason that seemed trivial. It is one of the strangest attributes of the kanaka, this power of departing from the world when life becomes unendurable, too heavy or even just wearisome.
“He has turned his face from the sun,” said Aioma to Poni one morning—the fourth morning of the calm—and Le Moan who was nearby heard the words.
It was on that same morning that the breeze came, a light air from the north strengthening to a steady sailing wind, and almost on the breeze came the call of the lookout who had climbed to the crosstrees.
“Land!”
Just a few palm tree tops to the southeast, the trees of a tiny atoll, so small that it cast no lagoon reflection; and Aioma who had climbed to see came down again whilst Poni, who had taken the wheel, put the ship to the southeast taking his position from the sun not far above the eastern skyline.
Presently the far-off treetops could be seen from the deck, but Dick as Poni steered, and after a glance at the distant trees, lost interest.
He had turned his face from the sun.
When Rantan awoke from sleep it was morning. He had slept the clock round. He awoke hungry and full of vigour, and coming out from amongst the trees he stood for a moment by the edge of the little lagoon above whose sapphire waters the white gulls were flighting against a sky newborn and lovely and filled with distance and light.
The canoe lay where he had left it, high-beached now, for the tide was out. The bodies that had been tied to the gratings were gone, the gulls had done their work, and nothing showed but the coconut sennit bindings hanging brown like rags and moving to the breeze.
Close to the northernmost of the trees lay a little pond from which he had drunk before lying down; the trees stretching from the pool ran in a dense line for a quarter of a mile, pandanus, coconut palm, bread fruit, and a dense growth of mammee apple, shading beach and reef to a spot where the naked reef took charge. The rest of the ring of the atoll showed few trees, just a small clump or two of fifty-foot palms, wand-like and feathery against the blazing blue.
There was food here, enough of a sort, but he had neither knife nor fire nor fishing line. He was naked.
When they had bound him and kept him and flung him in the canoe to take him to the southern beach of Karolin, he had not bothered about the fact that he was naked—it had not troubled him at all till now. Now that sleep had restored him to himself, the fact of his nakedness came to him as a sudden trouble making him forget for the moment everything else, even food.
The trouble was entirely psychical. The climate of the beach was so warm that he did not require clothing as a protection, and there was shade enough to shelter him from the sun if he were too warm. All the same, his nakedness lay on him like a curse. He felt helpless, part of his environment that had clung to him for forty years was gone from him and without it he was all astray; naked as a worm he felt useless as a worm, ready to flinch at anything, without initiative, without power.
Dick had never known the need of clothes, he had never worn them. It was different with Rantan.
The absence of shoes he felt less, though without them he was condemned to keep off the rough coral and keep to the beach sands.
He came along the sands towards the canoe. Had you been watching him and had he been clothed in purple and fine linen you still would have said to yourself “There is something wrong about that man, why does he walk like that?”
When he reached the canoe he looked in at the remains of the fruit all squashed and gone bad from the sun; then, turning to the gratings he began to unfasten the strips of coconut sennit that had tied the bodies of the children.
The birds had pulled the bodies to pieces, not even the little bones were left and the bindings hung lax; his fingers were not trembling now as they had trembled on Karolin when trying to untie the knots; he had plenty of time to work in and bit by bit the fastenings came undone.
Then the gulls, if they had bothered to look, might have seen a strange sight: Rantan trying to make himself a loin cloth.
Why?
He had neither real decency nor shame in his composition, there was no one to see him in his nakedness but the gulls. Why then did he trouble?
Trouble he did and the result was scarcely worth his trouble. Then, and still without eating, he turned to and cleared the rotting pandanus and other fruit out of the canoe—he could not swill her out as he had nothing with which to hold water, but she had brought in a long piece of weed tangled on the outrigger; the sun had dried it, but he wet it again in the lagoon water and used it as a sort of mop.
Having cleaned her and seen that the mast, sail and paddles were all right, he came back to the trees, plucked some pandanus drupes and began to eat.
As he sat down to the food, he made to hitch up his left trousers leg, a habit he had. Before leaving the canoe to come back to the trees he had tried to put his hand in his pocket. In this way and in other ways and incessantly his vanished clothes spoke to him, reminding him that he was naked, worm-naked on the face of the world.
He ate, staring at the lagoon as if hypnotized by its blueness, and as he ate, pictures travelled before his mind’s eye, pictures of Karolin lagoon and the two dead women he had left on the southern beach, and then, as a bird hops from one branch to another, his mind left Karolin and lit on the deck of the Kermadec and from that on to the sands of Levua in whose woods he had slain Peterson.
All his troubles had started from the killing of Peterson. It was just as though Peterson had been following him, stripping him steadily and bit by bit of everything down to his very clothes: of the schooner, of the pearl lagoon, of his sea chest, of the few dollars he had saved, of his hat, his shoes, his trousers, his shirt, his coat—everything. He tried to put away this idea but failed.
It was now only nine o’clock in the morning of a day that would not end at sunset, of a blue and blazing day that, with night intermissions, would last for months and months—for the rainy season was far off. And he was out of trade tracks.
He stood up, looked about him, and then walking carefully, picked his way on to the rough coral above the outer beach. Here on a smooth spot he stood looking over the sea to the northeast.
Nothing.
Karolin, with fabulous treasure in its blue heart, lay somewhere over there, lost, so far that even the lagoon light did not show.
He turned to the southeast. Somewhere there lay the Paumotus.
Should he push off in the canoe and try to reach them?
Since waking this morning there had fallen upon Rantan a double obsession, the paralysing sense of his nakedness and now the feeling that somehow in some way Peterson was following him—following him wearing the seven-league boots of bad luck. He believed neither in God nor in ghosts, but he believed in luck—and his luck had been frightful and it had dated from the killing of Peterson.
This double obsession cut the ground from under the feet of his energy, so that the idea of escape in the canoe entered his mind only to leave it again. He came back to the trees, lay down in their shadow and now the gulls began to talk to him.
The little island had two voices, the endless sound of the breakers and the unending complaint of the gulls; sometimes it would be just a voice or two, sometimes clamour—always indifference, voices from a world that knew nothing of man.
The dead women he had left lying on Karolin beach were not further beyond the pale of things than he who had slain them, and it came to Rantan as he lay there that he was shut out; no one knew of his fate, he was of no manner of interest to anything that surrounded him; to the wind, to the sunlight, to the trees, to the gulls. If he were to drop dead on the sands, he would become an object of interest to the predatory gulls, but alive he was of interest to nothing.
This was not a passing thought; it was kept alive in his mind by his nakedness. His mind had been stripped of its clothes in the form of living beings and accustomed surroundings, just as his body had been stripped of its clothes in the form of shirt, coat and trousers. The two nakednesses were as two voices perpetually talking together, answering each other, echoing one another.
Then, hypnotized by the murmur of the reef, he drifted off into sleep.
He was on the schooner. She was anchored in Karolin lagoon and the crew were diving for pearls, the deck was strewn with heaps of shells and Carlin was showing him a huge pearl in the palm of his hand. It was the last, they had stripped the lagoon clean, and now it was mainsail haul for ’Frisco, wealth, wine and women. He was down in the cabin, pearls all over the floor and pearls in the bunks, and as the ship rolled, the pearls ran and he chased them about the floor on his hands and knees, and they turned into pebbles as he caught them. Some turned into white mice and ran over Carlin who was lying dead by his bunk, and then Poni shoved his head through the skylight and called down at him: “Caa—caa—caa,” and he awoke beneath the trees to the call of a passing gull.
He sprang to his feet and came running out on to the sands. For a moment he could not tell where he was, then he remembered. It was past noon and the tide was beginning to ebb. He saw the canoe and he stood, stood for a full minute without moving a single muscle—his mind working furiously, no longer diffident, no longer helpless, as though the dream in restoring his old environment had given him strength, renewed courage and daring.
He must clear out of this place, get to the open sea. The Paumotus were possible, ships were possible, death was possible, but better than this place where nothing was possible, where nothing was but a beach to walk on, blazing sun and jeering gulls.
The ebb was beginning to run, it would take him through the break, he must act at once.
He ran towards the trees and began collecting pandanus drupes and carrying them to the canoe. He climbed like a monkey for drinking nuts, and just as on the Karolin beach he ran, sweating as he came piling the fruit on board; drinking nuts, drinking nuts—he never could have enough of them. Then the last of his frantically collected cargo on board he did what he had also done on the beach of Karolin, flung himself down by the little pool and drank till he nearly burst.
It was all a repetition of that business and only wanted the dead bodies of the women to make the picture complete. Then he came to the canoe.
Here it was the same again. He could not get her off. The dead children no longer weighed down the outrigger, but he had stowed his cargo badly and that did the business; the outrigger was bedded in the sand. He laboured and sweat rearranging the fruit, then at last she began to move; he pushed and drove, the lagoon water took her to amidships—another effort and she was waterborne and he was on board working with a single paddle and getting her farther out.
He was free.
A weight seemed gone from his soul, he no longer felt his nakedness; the power of movement, the escape from the beach and the new hope that lay in the open sea, were like wine to his spirit. It was a move in a new game and daring whispered to him that he would yet beat Peterson.
Working with the paddle from side to side, he got her farther and farther out, and the break lay before him now and beyond the break beckoned the sea.
He had turned sideways to take a last derisive look at the prison house of the trees and beach when—aye, what was that? Water ran over his knees as he knelt to the paddling, water that moved with a slobber and chuckle beneath the nuts.
The canoe was leaking. The sun must have done this business yesterday, craftily, whilst he was asleep. She had been bone dry when he stowed the fruit and now the stuff was awash or nearly so.
The mat sail was brailed ready to be broken out when clear of the lagoon. He looked at it, then his eyes fell again to the interior of the canoe—the water had risen higher still: this was no ordinary leak that immersion would caulk, there was nothing to be done but to return and try to mend it on the beach.
He began to paddle, making frantic efforts to turn the canoe’s head and bring her ashore. He was too late, the ebb had her like a leaf and though he turned her head, it was only to make her float broadside to the spate of the tide.
The only chance was to try and hit the beach near the break.
He worked like a giant.
Only a few minutes before his heart had rejoiced at his escape, now, with the prospect of certain death from drowning in the outer sea, the beach seemed to him the most delectable place in the world.
But he could not reach it. The nearer the break the swifter the ebb; the lagoon water had him like a swiftly running river; the canoe twisted and turned to his efforts but he could not alter the line of its travel sufficiently to hit the beach.
Then, flinging the paddle away he rose, held on to the mast, plunged over the side and struck out for the shore.
When he reached it and stood up, the canoe was gone, swept to sea to be submerged and tossed on the swell.
His last possession had been taken from him. Schooner, money, pearls, clothes and lastly the canoe, all were gone; he had nothing in the world—save the loin cloth made from the bindings of the dead children.
But he was not thinking of that. His life had been saved. He had almost touched death and now as he looked on the boiling current, he saw a shark fin shearing along as though the shark that had missed him was blindly hunting for him.
He came back to the trees, hugging the life that had been spared to him and sat down to rest, Death sitting opposite to him—cheated.
This business brought things to a crisis with Rantan; though robbing him of his last possession, it still had given him a sense of winning a move, and truly, though his luck had been dreadful, there had been an under-current of good luck. He had escaped from Le Moan that night, he had escaped from Nanu and Ona who had him bound hand and foot, he had escaped from the sea coming to this atoll, and he had escaped from the leaking canoe and the shark. His mind took a turn. He felt that he was meant to live, he was sure that now he would be rescued. A ship would come.
And at this thought that seemed clothed in surety, the man’s soul blazed up against Karolin. If she were only a ship with the right sort of people on board, he would find Karolin for them and they would rip the floor out of that lagoon and the hearts out of the kanakas that lived by it.
And the right sort of people would be on that ship and she would come—she would come. He knew it.
He fell asleep on the thought and for days and days he hugged it, and every day a dozen times he would go to the flat space on the coral and look over the sea for the ship.
One morning he saw something dark on the beach near the break; it was the canoe, the tide had taken her out only a little way and the sea had played with her, submerged as she was, returning her to the lagoon where the full flood had beached her. The water had drained out of her with the ebb and there she was and there he found her, pulling her up higher just for something to do. He found the crack that made the leak, it was quite small and he might have plugged it, but there was no paddle and anyway he would not have used her—he was waiting for the ship that was sure to come.
Rantan had, like most sailors, the full use of his hands, and he longed to use them, but he had no tools or anything to work on; near the trees and close to the mammee apple there was a patch of coarse grass and the idea came to him to make something out of it. Once in Chile he had escaped from prison by making a grass rope and the idea came to him now to make another; anything was better than sitting in idleness, and it seemed a lucky thing to do, for not only had he escaped from the Chilean prison by means of the rope, but he had come on a streak of good luck when free. So, gathering grass, he sat down to weave his rope.
The business was a godsend to him.
He limited the work to a few hours a day so as not to cloy himself, and he would look forward to the work, hours as men look forward to a smoke.
Whilst he worked at it, he wove his thoughts into the rope, his desires, dreams and ambitions all were woven into it, the killing of Peterson went in, and the memory of the dead women on Karolin beach, his hatred of the kanakas and of the red-headed one who had come and looked at him, Dick.
As a woman weaves into her knitting her household affairs and so on, the busy fingers of Rantan wove into his rope visions of ripping the pearls out of Karolin lagoon, of hunting the kanakas to death, of drinking bars and loose pleasures to be had with the pearl money—truly, if an inanimate thing could be evil, it was evil, for it held Rantan’s past. The amount of grass being limited, he sometimes knocked off work for a couple of days; and the days became weeks and the weeks went on and on till one morning, when the grass being nearly finished and the rope almost long enough to hang a man with a six-foot drop, Rantan, coming to his lookout, sighted a ship.
Away towards the north she lay so far that he could only tell she was of fore and aft rig and making either for or away from the atoll. Ten minutes showed her bigger—she was coming for the atoll. She was The Ship.
Then Rantan danced and sang on the smooth bit of coral and shouted to the gulls, and he came down to the sands and ran about on them like a dog in high spirits; he shouted to the canoe and abused her and called her filthy names, then back again to see how the ship was growing and back again to the sands to cut more capers.
She grew.
Returning to his lookout post for the fourth time, she seemed to have suddenly shot up in size as if by magic. Now he could see her clearly, her make and size and the patch on her foresail. He took a breath so deep that his chest stood out above his lean belly like a barrel. God! she was the Kermadec! The Kermadec or a sister ship, her twin image; the eye of a sailor told him that, the patch on the foresail he knew—he had helped to put it there.
He turned and came running on to the sands.
White men must have come into Karolin lagoon and made friends of the kanakas—the women would have been found dead on the beach, the canoe gone. It was all plain.
They would know that with the wind blowing at that time the canoe would have come in this direction; he was being searched for, either to be clubbed to death, by kanakas or hanged by whites.
There lay the canoe on the beach and his footsteps on the sand.
He looked round. There was no mark of a campfire to give him away, nothing but the canoe, the footsteps, the fruit skins and coconut shells he had left lying about, and the rope.
He started to clear up, casting the skins and shells amongst the bushes. Then, diving into the bushes he hid there listening—waiting, sweating, the rope coiled by his side.
The island grew.
Poni at the wheel, his eyes wrinkled against the sun, steered; Aioma beside him, Le Moan near Aioma and Dick forward near the galley. Dick had taken his seat on the deck in a patch of shadow and now he was leaning on his side supporting himself with his elbow. The sight of this island that was not Karolin had completed the business for Dick.
For four days he had scarcely touched food and for four days Le Moan had watched him falling away from himself. It was like watching a tree wither.
There was a vine on Karolin that would sometimes take a tree in its embrace just as ivy does, grow up it and round it and cling without doing the tree any injury; but if the vine were cut away from the tree, the tree would die.
It seemed to Le Moan that Taori was like the tree and Katafa the vine.
She was right.
Seldom enough, yet every now and then you find in this wilderness of a world, amidst the thorns of hate and the poison berries of passion and the dung of beasts and the toadstools of conjugal love, a passion pure and unselfish like the love of Katafa and Taori. Who moreover, above most other mortals, stood apart in a world there was no room for little things—where the sky was their roof and the ocean their floor and storm and war and cataclysm, halcyon weather, and the blaze of a tropic sun their environment, where the love that bound them together had, woven into it—after the fashion of the rope of Rantan—their past.
The thousand little and great and beautiful and terrific things that made up their past, all these were woven into the passion that bound them together.
To cut this bond, to separate them forcibly one from the other, was death.
In hot climates, in the tropics where the convolvulus grows so rapidly that the eye can all but see it grow, people can die quickly of love. Death grows when released with the fountain speed of the rocketing datura and the disruptive fury of corruption.
Dick cut away from Katafa was going to die. It was not only the cutting away, but the manner of it, that made his case hopeless.
Not only was he cut away from Katafa, but he was also divorced from his environment. His universe had consisted of Palm Tree and Karolin, the sea that held them, the sky above them: Katafa—nothing more.
Then Palm Tree had vanished and Karolin had been taken from him and nothing was left but the great vacant world of the sea, that and the grief for the loss of Katafa.
He was going to die. He was dying. His very strength was killing him.
You sometimes find that—find that the power of a powerful man can be turned in against itself by grief or by disaster or disease.
He was going to die, as Aioma said, and Le Moan knew it.
He was dying because Katafa had been cut away from him.
The sound of the bow-wash and the sound of the sea as it washed past the counter, and the creak of rope and spar, kept saying all this.
“Taori is dying because Katafa is no more with him—no more with him....”
Meanwhile the island grew.
And now Aioma, cheered by the sight of this bit of land, began talking to Poni in a high-pitched voice. But Le Moan did not hear or heed what he said.
So, Taori was going to die. And it was for this that she had taken him away from Katafa. She had taken him away to have him to herself and he was turning into a dead man. To save him from death she had given herself up to Peterson, to save him from death she had killed Carlin and risked being killed by Rantan, and yet he was going to die.
She could hear now the faint and far-away breathing of the surf on the reef ahead mixed with the words of Aioma to Poni; and now harsh and complaining and sudden and near came the call of a gull; a land gull, flying as if racing them.
“Taori is dying because of Katafa—Katafa—Katafa,” cried the gull, and Le Moan following the bird with her eyes let her gaze sweep back to the deck where Taori was lying, half leaning, the sun upon his bare back where the vertabræ showed and the ribs.
And louder now came the breathing of the surf on the reef, heavy like the breathing of a weary man.
“All life is weary and full of labour,” sighed the surf, “and there is no more joy in the sun—and Taori is going to die because of Katafa.”
“Katafa,” creaked the cordage to the foam that went sighing aft.
The wind freshened and the main sheet tautened and the great sail bellied hard against the blue, the schooner lifting to the swell crushed into it with great sighs and long shudders like the sighing and shuddering of a dying man, and the atoll leaped larger to view, the palm trees standing clear of the water above the coral and the visible foam.
“The palm grows, the coral waxes, but man departs,” whispered the wind, repeating the old rede of the islands; and now the lagoon showed through the break and Le Moan, watching and knowing that there, should they enter that lagoon, Taori would find his last home beneath the palm trees, scarcely knew of the terrible battle raging in the darkness of her mind—knew only that she was all astray, helpless, useless, pulled this way and that between two opposing forces great as the powers of life and death; whilst louder now came the sound of the surf, louder and deeper and more solemn, till once again she was on the beach of Karolin, the stars were shining, the little conch shells whispering and chirruping to keep the evil spirits away, for Uta Matu the king was dying and his breathing came from the house like that.
Then, suddenly, with the cry of a dreamer awakened from some terrible dream, flinging out her arms to thrust away the dark spirit that had all but seized her soul and the body of Taori, Le Moan flung Poni from the wheel, seized the spokes and the schooner, checking, turned, her canvas thrashing and clawing at the wind.
Turned—the island wheeling to the port quarter and the main boom flogging out with Aioma and Poni hauling at the sheet; turned and held, close hauled and steering for the west of north.
“Karolin,” cried Le Moan, “Aioma, the sight has come to me—the path is plain.”
“Karolin!” cried Aioma. “Taori, the spell is broken, we are free and the net of Le Juan torn asunder and the spears of Uta blunted.”
Safe hidden amongst the bushes he listened. It would take a full hour yet before the schooner could make the break, yet he listened as he lay, his rope beside him, his mind active as a squirrel in its cage.
They would search the atoll, they would hunt amongst the bushes—yet they might miss him.
Should they find him! His dark mind took fire at the thought, wild ideas came to him of escaping into the lagoon, boarding the schooner, seizing a rifle and turning the situation. He was a white man, a match for a hundred kanakas if only he could get a foothold above them, a rifle in his hands. In this he was right, as he had slain the women who had him safely bound, so had he the possibility in him to meet this last attack of fate, free himself, and dominating and destroying, make good at last.
Time passed, the reef spoke and the wind in the trees, but from the outer sea came nothing. He peeped through the bushes, getting a view of the reef line to northward. By now surely the topmasts of the schooner ought to show close in as she must be, yet there was nothing.
He came out of the bushes like a lizard, stood erect and then came cautiously towards the higher coral where his outlook post was; literally on hands and feet he crawled, inch by inch, till the sea came in view and then he crawled no longer. He stood erect.
Far off on the breezed-up sea the schooner close-hauled was standing away from the island.
Rantan could scarcely grasp the fact before his eyes. She had been making for him and now she was standing away.
She had not been searching for him, then. Was she after all the Kermadec or had he been mistaken?
Her shape, her personality, that patch on the sail—well what of that? Other ships had patched canvas besides his schooner. He had surely been mistaken.
As she dwindled dissolving in the wind, his hungry eyes followed her.
How fast she was going, faster than the Kermadec could sail close-hauled.
He watched her till she was hull down, till her canvas showed like a midge dancing in the sea dazzle, till it vanished taken by the round world into the viewless.
Then he came back to the trees.
Just as the ship had gone from the sea, so had his dream ship gone from his mind, taking hope with her, leaving him to his utter nakedness. He went to the old canoe that he had abused and vilified in his hour of triumph; the sun had enlarged the crack, the forward outrigger pole had worked loose with the tossing in the swell, there was no paddle.
Yet she could talk to him, telling him of Nanu and Ona and their dead children, and of Carlin and Peterson, and beyond that of Soma and Chile and many a traverse to the beginning of that great traverse of his life.
He wished to be done with it all.
With the going of hope, the fact of his nakedness had seized him again.
It had never quite left him; the feeling of being without clothes had tinged even his dreams, he had fought against it and put it by, but it always returned, and now that hope had departed it was back and in a worse form. For now if he did not fight it hard, it was taking the form, not of discomfort and a sense of want, but of uneasiness, the terrible excitable uneasiness that the stomach can produce when disarranged—stomach fear.
He fought it down, returned to the trees and found that his worry about the ship and his own position had quite gone; he was worrying about nothing, for he was at grips with something new, something born of his naked skin and his stomach that had been feeding on uncooked food for so long, something that had been making for him for weeks, something that threatened to rise to a crisis and make him run—run—run.
Dropping to sleep that night he was brought awake by something that hit him a blow on the soles of his feet; twice this happened and when he slept he was hunting for his clothes, and when he awoke it was to face another blue day, a day lovely but implacable as a sworn tormentor.
He walked the beach in his nakedness.
The gulls had begun to jeer at him now. Up to this they had left him severely alone, treating him with absolute indifference, but they had found him out at last; they were laughing at him all along the reef, talking about him and every now and then rising above the trees to look at him.
This idea held for a little and then passed, and he knew that he had been the victim of a delusion.
The gulls were quite indifferent to his presence.
Now amongst the trees and close to the waterside stood a gigantic soa with rail-like branches projecting like limbs across the sand and one big branch standing at right angles from the trunk some fifteen feet up.
Lying now amongst the tree shadows, and listening to the gulls’ voices that had become normal, and the long roll of the unending breakers and the whispering movements of the robber crabs, Rantan fixed his eyes on this branch and saw himself in fancy swinging from it at the end of a rope, free of all his trouble, naked no longer. The rope he had woven and which was lying amongst the bushes had tied itself to the branch in his imagination.
He saw himself rising, hunting amidst the bushes and coming out of them with the rope in his hand; climbing the tree, fixing the rope to the limb, making the noose in the free end, placing the noose round his neck, dropping—kicking the air—dangling.
At noon a great gull sweeping across the lagoon from the leeward to the windward beach, seeing the dangling figure, altered its line of flight as if deflected by a blow, and a high-going burgomaster, seeing the deflected flight of his brother in hunger, circled and dropped like a stone to where Rantan was dangling and dancing on the wind. A naked figure yet capable, had the schooner put in, of boarding it by night, seizing command by treachery, sailing north and sweeping Karolin, for such is the power of the White Man. But Rantan was dead, slain by the action of Le Moan in putting the schooner about. This was the third time she had sacrificed herself for the sake of Taori, the third time that she had countered danger and death with love.
Le Moan steered. Tireless and heedless of time as when she had brought the schooner first to Karolin, she kept the wheel all that day and through the night, giving it over to Poni for short intervals, whilst Dick slept.
She had given life back to him and it was almost as though she had given him her own life, for the world around her had become as the world wherein ghosts move; disembodied spirits, not dead but no longer connected with earth.
Before setting eyes on Taori, she had lived on the southern beach of Karolin, lonely, cut off with Aioma and the others who had no interests beyond the interests of the moment; as she lived so might she have died neither happy nor unhappy, without pity and without love or care for the morrow or thought of the past.
Then Taori had come, not as a man but as a light greater than the sun, a light that struck through the darkness of her being, bringing to birth a new self that was his—that was he.
She had braved death and the unknown—everything—only to find herself at the end face to face with death, and death saying to her “He is mine—or Katafa’s.”
Like the woman who stood before Solomon, she had to choose between the destruction of the thing she loved and the handing of it to a rival to be lost to her forever, to see its arms clinging to another, and its love given to another, and its life becoming part of the life of another; and she chose the greater sacrifice, not because she was Le Moan, a creature extraordinary or supernormal, but just because at heart she was a woman.
A woman, acting, when brought to the great test, less as an individual than as a part of the spirit of womanhood. The spirit changeless through the ages and unalterable. The spirit so often hidden by the littleness of the flesh, so seldom put to the heroic test, so absolutely certain in its answer to it. For when a woman really loves she becomes a mother even though she never may conceive or produce a child.
Aioma, who had slept through the night on his belly on the deck, spread like a starfish, awoke as the sun was rising.
Poni was at the wheel—Le Moan had gone below. The cabin had no fears for her now, and she had said to Poni, just as the sun was rising and pointing into the west of north, “You will see the lagoon light there.”
Dick, by the galley, was still sleeping, Tahuku and Tirai were the watch.
The beauty of that sunrise on that blue and lonely sea, beyond word or brush, was unseen by Aioma.
“It will be over there,” said Poni, pointing ahead. “It does not show yet.” Aioma went forward and stood looking into the northwest. No, it did not show yet nor would it show till the sun was twice its diameter above the horizon. Aioma, listening to the slash of the bow breaking the water and fanned by the draught from the head sails, having swept the sky found his eye caught by something far across the sea and right in their course. It looked at first glance like a rock but at once his bird-like eyes resolved it into what it was—a ship, an ayat, but with no sail set.
The canoe-builder glanced back along the deck past the sleeping figure of Dick to the figure of Poni at the wheel, then he turned his eyes again upon the far-off ship, and now in the sky to the north above and beyond the ship lay something for which he had been on the lookout—the lagoon light of Karolin, almost imperceptible, but there just in the position where Le Moan had said it would be.
The something he had waited and longed for, but spoiled, almost threatened, by this apparition of a ship.
Aioma wanted to have nothing more to do with ships; this traverse in the schooner had turned him clean back towards canoes; for days past, though he had said no word on the matter, all his ancestors had been hammering at the door of his mind shouting, “Aioma, you are a fool, you have forsaken the canoes of your forefathers for this ayat, and see how it has betrayed you, and why? Because it is the invention of the white men, the cursed papalagi who have always brought trouble to Karolin. If we could get at you, Aioma, we would stake you out on the reef for the sharks to eat. You deserve it.”
He had said nothing of this because Aioma never confessed to a fault.
Well there was another ayat, blocking the way to Karolin and sure to bring trouble.
Civilization and trouble had come to be convertible ideas in the mind of this old gentleman who although he did not know the English word that represents greed, brutality, disease, drink, and robbery dressed in self-righteousness, had sensed the fact that the white man always brought trouble.
Well, there it was straight before him heading her off from Karolin. What should he do? Turn and run away from it? Oh, no. Aioma, who had fought the big rays and who was never happier than when at grips with a conger, was not the person to turn his back on danger or threat, especially now with Karolin in view.
This thing lay straight in his path, as if daring him, and he accepted the challenge; they had the speak sticks, there were eight of them not including Le Moan and if it came to a fight—well, he was ready.
Without rousing Dick, he called the fellows up from below, pointed out the ship and then stood watching as she grew.
Now she stood on the water plainly to be seen, a brig with canvas stowed as if in preparation for a blow. If any canvas had been set it must have been blown away by the wind, for she showed nothing but her sticks as she lay rolling gently to the swell.
Tahuku, who had the instinct of a predatory gull coupled with the eye of a hawk, suddenly laughed:
“She is empty,” said Tahuku, “she has no men on her. It is a dead turtle, Aioma, you have called on us to spear.”
Aioma hit by the same truth ran and roused Dick, who on waking sprang to his feet. He was renewed by sleep and hope, a creature reborn and as he stood with the others he scarcely noticed the ship, his eyes fixed on the light of Karolin.
Poni at the wheel called Le Moan and she came up from below and stood watching whilst the brig, now close to them, showed her nakedness and desolation beneath the burning light of morning.
Old-fashioned, even for these days, high-pooped, heavily sparred and with an up-jutting bowsprit, her hull of a ghastly faded green rolled with a weary movement to the undulations of the swell, revealing now the weed-grown copper of her sheathing, now a glimpse of the deserted deck. There were no boats at the davits and as the current altered her position, giving her a gentle pitch, came a sound faint against the wind, the clapping of her deck-house door.
Aioma turning, ran aft and stood beside Poni at the wheel giving him directions. The canoe-builder, urged by his ancestors and his hatred of the papalagi, had evolved an idea from his active brain and Dick, who had let his eyes wander from the brig to the far-off light of Karolin, heard suddenly the thrashing of canvas as the steersman brought the schooner up into the wind.
Aioma was going to board the ayat. He was shouting directions to Tahuku and the others—they ran to the falls, the boat was lowered, and in a moment he was away, shouting like a boy; scrambling like a monkey when they hitched on to the broad channel plates he gained the deck and stood looking round him.
Aye, that was a place! Bones of dead men picked clean by the birds lay here and there, and a skull polished like a marble rolled and moved and rotated on the planking to the pitch of the hull, the clicking of the lax rudder chain, and the clapping of the deck-house door.
He had brought his fire-stick with him and its little bow, from the deck of the schooner. They watched him as he stood looking about him. Then turning, he darted into the deck-house.
He was there a long time, perhaps ten minutes, and when he came out a puff of smoke came after him. Holding the door open, he looked in till another puff of smoke garnished with sparks, hit him in the face, then having done a little dance on the deck and kicked the skull into the starboard scupper, he dropped into the boat and came back to the schooner, singing.
The boat was hoisted in, the schooner put on her course and the smoking brig dropped far astern, but Aioma, still flushed with his work and victory, heeded nothing.
He sat on the coaming of the saloon skylight singing.
He sang of the bones of the dead men and the skull he had kicked and the ayat he had fired and the cursed papalagi whose work he had destroyed; then, with a great whoop he curled up and went asleep, undreaming that the papalagi might yet have their revenge, and Dick, to whom Aioma and the ship astern flaring horribly in the sunlight were as nothing, watched from the bow the steady growing beacon of Karolin in the sky.
There was Katafa.
His soul flew ahead of the schooner like a bird, flew back and flew forward again calling on the wind, and the wind, nearing, strengthened, so that a little after midday the far treetops of the southern beach came to view and now, faint and far away, the song of the great atoll.
Birds flew to meet them and birds passed them flying towards the land and as the sun began its downward climb to the water, the break began to show away on the port bow and Le Moan, pushing Tahuku, who was at the wheel, aside, prepared to take them in.
For only Le Moan knew the danger of the break when the tide was ebbing as now.
The waters were against them. It seemed the last feeble effort of fate to separate Dick from the being he loved.
The vast lagoon was pouring out like a river, it was past full spate, but the swirl was enough, if the helmsman failed to drive them on the coral. Now they were in the grip of it, the schooner bucking like a restive horse, now steady, now making frantic efforts to turn and dash out to sea again—Aioma in the bow crying directions, Le Moan heeding him as little as she heeded the crying of the gulls.
Now they had stolen between the piers. The break on either side of them seemed immensely broad and the grand sweep of the outgoing water lit by the westering sun showed with scarcely a ripple to where it boiled against the piers: gulls in flight above it showed as in a mirror, yet it was flowing at a six-knot clip.
The schooner with every sail drawing seemed not to move, yet she moved, turning the mirror to a feather of foam at her cut water and a river of beaten gold in her wake. The piers dropped astern, the current slackened, the lagoon was conquered and lay before them a blaze of light from the beach sands to its northern viewless barrier.
Katafa was sleeping. She who slept scarcely at all by night and whose eyes by day were always fixed towards the sea, was sleeping when the voice of Kanoa roused her:
“They come, Katafa, they come!”
Raising herself on one hand, she saw the sunset light through the trees and the form of Kanoa making off again to the beach his voice drifting back to her as he ran:
“They come, Katafa, they come!”
Then where the whole village was waiting, she found herself on the sands, the lagoon before her and on the lagoon the schooner bravely sailing in the sunset blaze, the sails full and now shivering as, curving to her anchorage, the wind left them and the rumble of the anchor chain running out came across the water, rousing her to the fact that what she saw could not be, that what she saw was a ship, but not the ship that had taken Taori away, the ship she had watched and waited for till hope was all but dead and life all but darkness. It could not be. It could not be that she should return like this, so sure, so quietly, so real, the dream ship that held her heart and soul, her love, her very life.
The boat putting off now was a phantom, surely, and Taori as he sprang on the sands and seized her in his embrace was unreal as the world fading around her, till his lips seized her up from twilight to the heaven of assurance.
“Taori has come back,” cried the women, forgetting him as they turned to the men who were standing by the boat—unheeding Le Moan who stood, her work done, a being uncaring, seeing nothing, not even Kanoa, crouched on the sands half dead with the beatitude of the vision before him.
“Listen!” said the wind.
From her place amidst the trees where Le Moan had settled herself like a hare in its forme she heard the silky whisper of the sands and the voice of the beach and the wind in the leaves above bidding her to listen.
Far-away voices came from the mammee apple where the men of the schooner and their wives were making merry, and now and then, the faintest thing in the world of sound, a click and creak from Nan on his post above the house where Taori lay in the arms of Katafa.
To Le Moan all that was nothing. She had banded death in exchange for Taori, all her interest in life, all her desires. She had not even the desire to destroy herself. The fire that had been her life burned low and smouldered; it would never blaze again.
“Listen!” said the wind.
Something moved amidst the trees—it was Kanoa: Kanoa, his heart beating against his ribs, his hands outstretched touching the tree boles.
She saw him now as he came towards her like a phantom from the star-showered night, and she knew why he came, nor did she move as he dropped on his knees beside her—all that was nothing now to Le Moan.
Since the night when he had saved her from Rantan, he had been closer to her than the other men of the schooner, but still only a figure, almost an abstraction.
To-night, now, he was a little more than that, as a dog might be to a lonely person, and as he poured out his heart in whispers she listened without replying, let him put his arm around her and take her lips; all that was nothing now to her whose heart would never quicken again.
The wind died, day broke, and the wind of morning blew.
Joy and the sun leapt on Karolin. Joy for Katafa who came from the house to look at a world renewed, for the women whose husbands had returned, for the men, for the children. Joy for Kanoa, his soul shouting in him, “She is mine, she is mine,” and for Aioma, the lust of revenge and destruction alive and dancing in his heart.
He had killed the green ship; this morning he would kill the schooner; the cursed ayat, that he had yet loved so dearly only a week ago, was doomed to die.
He hated it now with an entirely new and delicious brand of hatred and if he could have staked it out on the reef for the sharks to devour, so would he have done.
It had given him the scare of his life, it had all but snapped him away from Karolin, it had caused ancestral voices to rise cursing him for his folly and treachery towards his race; it had brought up visions of the Spanish ship, the brutal whale men, Carlin, Rantan, and the whole tribe of the papalagi, it was theirs and it had got to die.
Besides, it was going to give him the chance to set fire to things. He was still licking his chops over the firing of the green ship and the joy of incendiarism was about to be recaptured.
It was the last blaze up of youth in him. He called the village together and explained matters.
The ayat was accursed. His father, Amatu, had explained it all in a dream, commanding him, Aioma, to attend to this matter. The thing had to burn; if it did not burn worse would befall Karolin.
“Burn, burn, aripa, aripa!” cried the boys.
“Aripa!” shrieked the women, the men took tongue and the cry went up like the crackle of flame.
Katafa listened, loathing the schooner. The cry went up from her heart.
Dick stood dumb. Dumb as a man hesitating before cutting away the very last strand connecting him with his past. Dumb as a man about to renounce his race, though of his race and of the civilized world from whence he had sprung he knew nothing—nothing save the fact of the cannon-shot of the Portsey long years ago, the white-led Melanesians of Palm Tree, the ruffianism of Carlin and Rantan and the rage in his own breast for adventure that had nearly separated him forever from Katafa.
Then, suddenly, he joined in the shout.
“Aripa! aripa! aripa!”
Forgetting his chieftianship, he raced with the others to help to push off the boat bearing Aioma to his work.
Then he stood with Katafa watching. Near them and beside Kanoa stood Le Moan.
They watched the canoe-builder clamber on board like a monkey, they saw him dancing on the deck like a maniac insulting the ropes and spars, then they heard the ship’s bell go clang-clang, as he made her talk for the last time.
He vanished down the foc’sle and came out escorted by a cloud of smoke, down the hatch of the saloon from whose skylight presently a blue-grey wreath uprose and circled on the faint breeze.
Then he was on deck again and away in the boat, and the schooner was burning fore and aft.
Wreathing herself in mist that cleared now to show two tall columns of smoke rising and spreading and forming spirals on the wind, red flames like the tongues of hounds licking out of the portholes, flames that ran spirit-like about the old tinder-dry deck. The main boom was burning now, the topping lofts were snapped, flames curling round the masts like climbing snakes, and now, like the rumble of a boiler, came the rumble of the fire as it spread in her, breaking through bulkheads, seizing the cargo and splitting the decks.
The sandalwood was burning and the incense of it spread across the lagoon to the white-robed congregation of the gulls wheeling and giving tongue above the reef; burning and blazing till the decks gave utterly and the crashing masts full sheeted in flame like tall men tumbling to their ruin amidst the roar of a burning city.
The flames devoured the smoke and the sun devoured the flames, forty-foot jets that leaped tongue-like sunwards, fell and leapt again. The great conflagration gave no light; it roared, and the consuming wood, pine and deal, teak and sandal filled the air with the sound of bursting shells and the rattle of musketry, but the sun of that blazing day ate the light of the flames so that they showed stripped of effulgence, stark naked; ghosts, cairngorm coloured, wine coloured, spark spangled, illuminating nothing.
And now the port bulwarks, breaking in one piece from the stern to amidships, fell in a blaze and the anchor chain, running out, broke from its attachments and she was adrift miraculously on the flood, now low to the break, now broadside, as the current took her—blazing as she drifted, pieces of her ever going, dipping now by the bow, slipping from sight in a veil of steam as the water rushing in fought the fire and the fire fought the water and was killed. And now there was nothing but driftwood so far out as scarcely to be seen, and a tiny cloud that vanished and a perfume of sandalwood that lingered in the air, ghost-like ... gone.