Waylao leaves the Matafas in Apia—She drifts a Castaway at Sea—Her
Sufferings—The Canoe beaches on an Uninhabited Isle—The Natural
Guest of her Sorrow arrives—Death—Strange Visits to the Isle—The
Strangers tell Waylao of their Sufferings—Sympathy—Aiola the
Hawaiian and O Le Haiwa-oe, her Lover—Mrs Matafa’s Shawl as a
Distress Signal—Waylao’s Ruse—Castaways in Sorrow
WHEN Waylao decided to leave the Matafas in Samoa she had been in Apia
exactly one month.
The kind old Matafas had wished her good-night, as gently as though she
were their own daughter, and then retired to their sleeping compartment.
Although the half-caste girl had become quite attached to those old
Samoans since first they received her with open arms, the longing for
her native isle and the memory of those whom she had loved when a child
overcame all the trouble she felt at leaving her benefactors. She
resolved to steal one of the beach canoes on the shore by the Matafas’
homestead and put out to sea on her own account, trusting to luck. It
was a mad idea, full of peril, and yet as she told her tale bit by bit
quietly, and relentlessly, it seemed as though all that she had set out
to accomplish had come to her in the fullest measure.
Once out on those wide waters, adrift in that tiny craft, she knew she
would be at the mercy of the elements. The chances of being sighted by a
passing ship and taken to her native land were very remote, as one may
imagine.
But what cared Waylao? She troubled not whither the winds blew her, only
longed to drift away on those illimitable waters.
Without hesitation she jumped into the first canoe that she sighted,
lifted the paddle and pushed the tiny craft into deep water. The tide
was ebbing southward as she drifted away to sea. The dim, forest-clad
shore by Mulinuu faded from her sight like a dream of yesterday. She
seemed to be leaving reality for the realms of the great unreal as she
glided on the bosom of that mighty tide.
Away! Away! Anywhere away, she cared not whither.
The winds of heaven came down; they seemed to come to caress, to respond
to the vague wishes of the stricken girl. Their caressing, shifting
fingers touched her hair and fevered brow. Ineffable peace breathed
languor into her brain, and she slept. No mortal pen can tell the dreams
of that castaway girl as the sentinel night stared with a million
million eyes on to those waters of the Pacific.
A faint flush brightened the east—daybreak was coming. The stars took
hasty flight down the encircling sky-lines as Waylao awoke.
Dawn, like a mighty river’s multitudinous flood of infinite colour,
swept into that vast, hollow vault as the first pang of the new day’s
birth commenced. Crimson, splashed with lines of saffron and green,
climbed, glimmered, flickered and flamed as they touched and fired the
lines of mist on the eastern horizon, while far to the south-west the
last flock of stars took frightened flight.
The birth of that mighty splendour broadened till the gold-flashing eye
of day looked over the blue horizon. Nothing but the vast azure circle
of infinite water was in sight, only the frail castaway, a stricken girl
adrift, fleeing from wrath, the hatred of outraged virtue.
The very heavens seemed to assume a serious mood. The eye of day stared
with magnificent heat from its unlidded socket of all the sky. Old Mrs
Matafa’s hands had toiled divinely for the coming events of Time unborn,
for out of the measures of her weaving fingers happened that which her
soul had no hint of in her wildest dreams, as she knitted and knitted,
for lo! the perishing castaway ceased appealing to the dumb sky and drew
the laced folds of that old shawl over her sun-scorched head. But for
the protection of that old shawl the girl would certainly have perished
under the blaze of that brassy sky.
Thirst leapt into her frame with demon craving. The sun dropped like a
ball of blood into the ocean and glimmered fiercely in its fading light.
Like a goblet of boiling blood lifted on the sky-line, it appeared, then
suddenly disappeared.
Notwithstanding her sufferings, the girl still felt the cherished desire
of humanity to cling to life—though suffering the pangs of death. In
that tiny drifting craft on a world of torpid water, afloat beneath
illimitable space, she knelt in prayer to the great dumb sky. The
crowded stars at first seemed to mock her. Then, like far-off bright
thoughts of longing, they came to her, like flocks of her own
unattainable desires, and peeped up at her imaged in the vast, silent
waters.
A puff of wind ruffled that mirror and swept the deep waters into reefs
of illusive radiance. Then came a wind like an infinite breath of pity,
and the dying, parched relic of humanity sucked in that cold sigh of
night—as one would drink water. Still she floated on. Slowly a silver
glimmer of ineffable wildness flushed the south-west horizon; its
broadening tide of radiance outrivalled the earnest splendour of the
stars. Higher and higher it climbed, till the full, haggard moon peered
like sorrow on that lost child, and stared, with sad surprise, on the
edge of the ocean. It lit that hollow vault of night with a ghostly
gleam, a gleam that revealed no movement but the tossing arms of the
delirious castaway.
Who can paint that scene? Who can describe one iota of the indescribable
misery and anguish ere the senses were numbed and the head drooped,
faint from its prayer to a heaven that listened not, in all the vastness
of that terrible silence?
Another day swept in like a mighty silence of breathing fire. It came
almost without warning across those silent, tropic seas. It was as
though from the tomb-like vault some mighty starry slab of night had
been suddenly uplifted, revealing a vast sepulchre and deep, deep below
one little corpse huddled in its shroud, a corpse that still drifted
across the silent, blazing seas—as Death, the grey-nosed shark, followed
silently.
But Waylao was not dead. It was not the hot furnace winds of heaven that
fluttered old Mrs Matafa’s shawl—(I have that shawl)—it was the
convulsed movement of death’s despair in one who still lived.
In the delirium of that unquenchable blaze of sunlight Benbow’s
misguided daughter lifted her head. It was an eternity of seconds ere
she could muster strength enough to hang her face over the rim of her
drifting world, then she drank, drank, drank!
Only the infinite powers know why she did not die as that liquid brine
stiffened her parched frame with frantic fits of madness.
On, on she drifted. Yet another day swept the skies, yet again Time
lifted that tremendous lid from the vault of reality. Just as Fate loves
to shatter the dreams, the aspirations, the hopes of men, it seemed to
delay the everlasting touch of sleep, the sleep that hovers like an
angel with beating wings, waiting to close all eyes.
For lo! that same night the heavens poured down their sparkling drops.
The showers of cool liquid drenched her face as she screamed in the
ecstasy of its cruel blessing.
With the refreshing fluid on her parched lips, and the cool breezes of
heaven, her senses awakened; but only dimly was her mental vision
restored. Phantoms danced across that world of water. Shadows of the
wrack of clouds, racing beneath the moon, fled away into the darkness of
the far-off, silent horizons, and it may have been those shadowy
contortions of the sky that peopled the ocean solitude with visions for
the girl whose eyes were glazed with insanity. The face of her Islamic
betrayer hung enframed beneath the stars. She lifted her hands and beat
the air, and cursed that visionary face of evil.
Then her mother came to her, and who knows what visions of those whom
she had loved, those who had watched over the innocence of her
childhood? Once more her senses were numbed and she fell huddled to the
bottom of the canoe.
On the third or fourth day Waylao lifted her death-stricken face and
wondered if she still lived. She stared around. Had she died, and was
she still travelling onward across some purgatorial ocean of death? As
she stared, she saw a tiny blot; it glimmered on the western horizon. At
first she thought it was a ship; then in her delirium she thought it was
the shores of Nuka Hiva in sight.
At such a possibility the love of life that is so strong in youth awoke
again, and her being thrilled with tremendous hope. She might yet live
to gaze into the eyes of those she loved.
As the setting sun broadened in the west, the dark spot glittered and
took definite shape. One by one tiny hills arose, then plumed palms
stuck out in bright relief, distinctly visible against the background of
the yet more distant sunset.
The strong, hot north wind still blew and laughed along the rippling
sea, yes, as though it knew that its unseen hands were fast drifting the
poor derelict to deliverance from the homeless ocean.
At the sight of the little isle with its palms and all the materialised
beauty of Nature’s handiwork blossoming forth flowers and ferns, the
stricken girl fell on her knees and thanked God, God who in His own
inscrutable way had answered her prayers.
Ere sunset faded down into ocean depth behind the solitude of that
small, uninhabited isle, Waylao could hear the murmuring of the deep
waters on the reefs, and saw the singing waves running up the shore,
tossing their hands with delight.
In the reaction from deepest despair to the renewed hope she struggled
to a sitting posture and laughed in the madness of delirium. Then she
slept.
The stars were crowding the heavens when the canoe suddenly beached
itself. The impact of the frail craft on the coral reefs tore the
bottom, and so the cooling waters crept in and swathed the fevered limbs
of the unconscious girl.
Waylao’s life was not yet closed, though Providence would have been more
merciful to have taken her soul away beyond the deepest sleep.
As the cool waters swished about her body, her eyelids quivered; she
moved, then sat up and looked around.
Who knows what terrible thoughts haunted her delirious brain as she
tried to fathom the loneliness, the deep silence of the small world
whereon she had drifted? The pangs of thirst stupefied her faculties.
The moaning of the winds in the belt of palms just up the shore inspired
her heart with terror, and seemed to mock her misery.
Too weak to stand, she crawled up the little patch of soft sand to the
lagoon that glimmered in the hollows by the shore. She almost screamed
with delight as the life-giving crystal fluid crept between her cracked
lips, moistening her parched throat. It was fresh water. Dimly realising
that she was safe from the desolation of the trackless ocean, she crept
into the shadow of the bamboo thickets and, quite exhausted, fell
asleep.
There she lay, alone beneath the infinite skies. The great world, with
its cities and histories, did not exist so far as she was concerned.
Awakening with the gilding of the eastern horizon, she gazed around and
at once realised her awful position. Terror seized her. She lifted her
face and screamed, then listened. No answer came; only the weird screech
of the frightened parrots that had rested, on their migrating flight, in
the trees over her head. They rose in glittering flocks and hovered a
long time just over the isle ere they once more settled down.
With the rising of the kind sun her terror decreased. But the horror of
the loneliness on that silent world still remained. All that she had
suffered (only a part of which my pen can attempt to tell) had destroyed
her natural pluck. She was as weak as a child.
So great was her grief, and so vividly was the scene burnt in her brain
as she stared about her, that she told us how the tiny waves came up the
shore to her feet singing a song of tender fellowship.
Then how she ran about the isle calling aloud, in the hope that some
human being might exist in that loneliest spot in creation.
But when only the echoes of her own voice answered her despairing cries,
the awful desolation overwhelmed her, and she rushed back with terrified
eyes to the singing shore waves, and huddled near their presence, just
as a child might run from danger back to the security of its little
comrades.
The day passed with renewed tropical vigour. The sun seemed to hiss as
its molten mass of splendour dropped splash into the sea.
The sea-birds muttered. The migrating cockatoos sat on the topmost
branches of the four solitary bread-fruit trees. They looked like big
yellow and crimson blossoms that had whistling, chuckling beaks as they
all started off on their flight across the trackless seas. Waylao saw
them fade like a group of distant caravans on the silent desert blue of
the sky-line—leaving her alone in the vast Pacific.
Night came with its terror of darkness and the immutable stars. The
girl’s mind, like that of a child, flew back to the nearest bonds of her
existence.
“Mother! Mother! Father!” she wailed, staring first at the stars across
the sea, then behind her, with fright.
Strange pangs commenced to convulse her being. The critical moment of
her sorrow had arrived. The pangs of our first mother, Eve. But she was
alone—not even the devil to comfort her.
In the first instincts of approaching motherhood she looked behind her;
the terror of the gloom had vanished. She turned and crept into the
harbouring thicket of bamboos and tall ferns beneath the plumed palms.
In that silent, loneliest spot on earth she huddled, couched and
trembling. She forgot her desolation. The torturing memory of the past
vanished. A feeling of fierce joy thrilled her. She began to feel the
helpless, tender companionship of the unborn.
Wild delirium, intense longing, half anguish, half joy came to her
memory as she remembered the man who had brought the pangs of hell upon
her.
A gleam of cruel reality crept into her brain: she remembered the truth.
Struggling to her feet, she screamed: “Abduh! Abduh! I curse you! I
curse you and your Mohammed! I curse him!”
She clutched the figure of the Virgin that was at her breast and cried:
“O Mary! Mother! O Christ, I have forsaken you!”
In the anguish of her soul’s remorse she crossed herself and fell on her
knees. She called the name of Father O’Leary, he who had taught her from
childhood.
“Father, Father, I had doubted you, and all the beauty of my childhood’s
dreams.”
As Waylao reached this point in her terrible narrative the old priest
looked into the half-blind eyes of the girl, and touched her brow with
his lips. I saw his hot tears fall on to her face, and half fancied that
we stood before the dead who had inherited heaven, so beautiful was the
look in the stricken eyes of the girl as the old priest blessed her.
Outside the homestead mission-room the stars were shining, and the seas
were beating over the barrier reefs. Still the lips of her who was as
one dead spoke on.
The white sea moon crept over the silent sea. Its reflected light bathed
with silver the palms of that solitary isle. Only a breath of wind came
up the shore and stirred the dark-fingered leaves as at last Waylao
slept.
The sleeping girl’s bosom moved to the sad music of mortality’s soothing
kindness: two small hands were pressing vigorously and a tiny mouth was
toiling away for all it was worth at those soft, warm wells of
nourishing sorrow.
Dawn struck the east. The day broadened. Waylao lifted her baby up in
her arms. It blinked at the light of its first mortal day—and wailed.
Did she, in the ecstasy of a mother’s first inquisitiveness, peer
closely at the small face of that little stranger, the stranger who had
come as the natural guest of her sorrow—and sin?
She looked fiercely at it as it wailed as though it pleaded forgiveness
for that which was not its fault.
A mad desire to live came to her. She rushed down to the shore. Nothing
but the blue encircling sky-lines met her hopeless gaze. Her only chance
of being rescued was by some schooner being blown out of its course by
the terrific typhoons that sometimes swept those hot, unruffled seas.
She found a large cave by the shore, not far from the small promontory.
Near its gloomy entrance stood a belt of screw-pines and a clump of
coco-palms. By the time sunset had once more blazed the western seas she
had piled up a barrier of hard coral and rock at the cavern’s low
doorway. For in there the wind rushed from the sea, gave a hollow moan
and ran out again.
At the far end of this cavern the wretched girl made a soft couch of
fern-moss and ti-leaves. It was on this bed that she crept with her
child to sleep.
All night long the waves ran up the shores, tossed their wild arms and
wailed by the entrance, in wonder that the silence of the old cavern,
whereat they had knocked and knocked for ages, should be broken by the
wail of a human child.
In imagination Father O’Leary and I saw that cave, and distinctly heard
that pitiful wail. We saw the stricken girl mother creep like a wraith
beneath the stars of that solitary island world of the trackless
Pacific. We saw the tawny mass of ripe coco-nuts hanging as though from
the kind hands of Providence. They fell at her feet, so that she might
give the child nourishing milk, for grief and illness had stayed its
natural food.
Day by day the child sickened. One night the flocks of parrots and
strange birds—that none had ever named—suddenly rose in a screeching
drove above the palms of that lonely isle. Up, up they rose, fluttering
beneath the white South Sea moon. They had been disturbed from their
roosts by the agonised scream of the demented human being who had so
mysteriously arrived on their little world. It was Waylao’s screech that
had disturbed them. Humanity had come with its manifold woes and terrors
to their world, and so the very birds of the air groped and fluttered
blindly with fright up in the moonlit sky.
Waylao’s child lay on the moss at the end of the cavern, its face
resting on one small hand. It had turned waxen white. A wonderful
expression seemed to sleep on its face. Only the still, open eyes told
the girl of the indefinable something that had happened. She rushed to
the shore and dipped its warm body in the sea. The limpness of the limbs
and the head struck terror into her heart. She had never seen death like
that before. The wandering sea-gulls hovered, came near the shore
swiftly and silently, as though with curiosity, then they swerved
upward, up over the island’s palms, leaving her sitting alone with the
dead infant clutched to her breast.
The moon which flooded the ocean with brilliant light as it gazed on
that tragic drama, that scene of the lonely seas, had also shone upon
the dark-walled shadow cities of the far, far north-west, the remote
wilds of advanced civilisation. It shone on the huddled masses of
humanity on the streets of London, New York and Paris—lines and lines of
serried dark walls and dirty, ghostly windows. Its beams had streamed
into the dim hollows of how many thousands of dungeons wherein slept the
huddled forms of breathing humanity, and upon the enchanted castles of
happiness, on happy faces of men, women and laughing maidens. And still
it shone down on that silent isle set in a silent sea, where one frail
girl looked down on a dead child’s face.
But on that night Providence sent other strange beings out of those seas
of mystery.
As Waylao sat motionless, paralysed with loneliness and pain, staring
vacantly seaward, her heart leapt as she saw what looked like a phantom
ship on the dim horizon. She almost screamed with joy as the rigging of
that distant craft took definite form. The midnight breeze was hurrying
in with the incoming tide, the tide that hurried the small breakers up
the white beach.
Like one demented she ran about in her excitement, as nearer and nearer
crept the tiny craft.
Though it was still afar off, she held the dead child above her head and
screamed. Only the echoes of her own voice responded from the rocky
silence of her island world.
What was that strange-looking craft floating into that silent bay? As it
came into full view, it looked like some spectral hulk. Waylao stared.
She felt afraid. Was it some phantom derelict that was silently
approaching that unknown isle? The deck was nearly level with the sea,
and all awash with the waves. An old spanker swayed to and fro. The
tattered canvas sail still hung just over the broken deck-house, and the
jib flapped in the moonlight. But no one was at the helm.
As that strange derelict swerved with the tide, it heaved and came round
the edge of the promontory into full view. A gleam of moonlight streamed
through the palms, as it hugged the shore and fell slantwise across the
deck.
Waylao crept out on to the promontory, then stopped, petrified with
fright.
A terrible spectacle met her gaze, and the thought flew into her
demented mind that this was some ghostly craft with a crew of devils
aboard, who had come to take her dead child, and her, too, away to
purgatory.
No wonder she shrieked with horror.
Even in the security of that little mission-room the old priest and I
trembled and gasped at what we heard. No wonder Waylao’s scream broke
the terrible silence of that awful scene, and at the sound the crew of
huddled, ghostly shadows on the hulk’s deck moved.
Slowly one rose to its feet; then two more figures followed. The heads
seemed to waver as though the eyes sought the four points of the compass
with helpless indecision.
What were they? Devils or human beings? I will tell you. Those figures
lifted their heads and turned their faces to the shore. They heard by
instinct the direction of Waylao’s terrified call. They stared at her
with shining, bulged eyes; they tried to open their gaping, fleshless
mouths in ghastly efforts for speech. They were rotting, hideous
skeletons.
By the remnant of that hulk’s deck-house stood a tall native chief. He
and a beautiful native girl who clung to him alone looked human. They
both stared with fright, first at Waylao, and then across the silent
isle.
Waylao watched, paralysed with fear. Then from the deck arose two more
skeleton figures—revealing their hideous, noseless faces.
They lifted their heads as though with terrible effort. Their mouths
gave forth hollow moans as they slowly sank down again, out of sight,
among the wreckage of the deck.
One diseased, eaten face stared through the grating which had been fixed
up as an extemporised bulwark on the port side.
Waylao gave a terrified cry and turned to flee inland.
As she did so a hollow voice called out in a strange tongue:
“Aloha! Aloha! Wai! Wai! [water].”
The cry so resembled some distressed call of humanity that Waylao’s
fright was slightly subdued. She turned and swiftly glanced over her
shoulder, her heart beating with strange fear—a wild hope came that the
awful visitants might, after all, be friendly spirits in evil disguise.
She stared with terrified wonder. Three stricken forms stood on the
deck. In the dim light she saw them waving their skeleton hands; but
they were calling with beseeching voices, voices that thrilled Waylao’s
heart with joy, horror and hope.
She lifted the lifeless infant above her head again. In her delirium she
still thought that the direct cause of their visit was—her sorrow.
In response to her cry, a terrible form arose from the deck and stared
at her as she held the dead child. That figure from out of the mystery
of the silent seas lifted its hands and cried out:
“E ko mako Makua i-loko O ka Lani” (“Our Father which art in Heaven”).
Waylao heard that word Lani. She knew that it meant heaven. Her first
great fright vanished. “They are the dead from heaven,” she thought.
Suddenly the hulk crashed against the reefs by the shore, swerved round
and stopped still.
The stricken forms rose from the deck, lifted their skeleton faces and
for a moment stood terribly visible as they swayed helplessly by the
broken mast.
The moonlight brightened the tattered sails. It streamed down through
the branches of the surf palms that grew on the edge of the promontory.
Once again those gaping mouths moaned forth: “Wai! Wai!”
As the hulk swerved and listed towards the rocks, the handsome chief
leapt ashore, and the woman who had clung to him immediately followed.
For a moment that handsome stranger stood and gazed at Waylao like one
in a dream, as she looked up into his fevered, bright eyes.
Staring hurriedly around, he suddenly rushed forward and prostrated
himself at the edge of the lagoon. Placing his mouth into the crystal
liquid, he breathed like an animal, and drank, drank, drank! His
companion, the native girl, likewise prostrated herself and drank beside
him.
As Waylao watched, her fright subsided. They were human. For who but
mortals could be so maddened by thirst? Her heart was touched with
sorrow.
The chief rose to his feet, filled a large calabash with water and
returned to the derelict.
Waylao watched, with her heart in her mouth. The sorrow of others
overshadowed her own, as she saw the huddled, loathsome forms on that
hulk’s deck struggling for the water, their poor heads wobbling as they
sought with their blind eyes to locate the calabash.
The Hawaiian maid on the shore, standing by Waylao, forced a smile to
her lips, as she, too, watched. It was an unselfish attempt to reassure
her companion, to let her know whatever sight met her eyes was a sight
of deepest sorrow and nothing that could harm her.
When the chief returned to his comrade’s side, they both whispered
together and glanced at Waylao. Then the strange girl took the dead
child from the exile’s arms and laid it gently in the fern grass by the
lagoon. They spoke to Waylao in soft, musical speech. Seeing she did not
understand their language, they said:
“Wahine, you lone? No ones else belonga here?”
The Hawaiian girl clutched the chief’s arm with fright as they both
awaited Waylao’s reply. But when she answered, “I am quite alone, no one
else is on this island but me,” those silent listeners seemed endowed
with renewed life.
They gazed at each other with delight streaming from their eyes. The
chief lifted his hand to heaven and shouted some deep thanksgiving to
Lani. The intense misery of the woman’s eyes vanished. She turned to
Waylao, took her hand and pressed it impulsively. Suddenly she withdrew
it and gave a start of terror. For the chief had looked on the Hawaiian
girl and reminded her of the curse that lay upon them. But Waylao, who
had never thought to hear the music of human voices again, forgot her
own grief.
But who were they? What were those terrible figures huddled on the deck
of the hulk? Instinct told her that some terrible sorrow had drifted
across the sea, some sorrow that was tragically human. That stricken
crew had not come to hurt the girl. They would not wilfully harm a hair
of her head. They had drifted out of the hells of misery. They were the
stricken of the earth. They had escaped from the tomb where the buried
still have memories of lovers, husbands, wives and children—yes, the
tomb of God’s utterest pestilential misery, where the dead still curse,
still dream that they hear the laughter of other days moaning in the
wind-swept pines, on the shores of beetling, wave-washed crags.
They came from where the dead lay in their shrouds and could hear, with
envy, these toiling spades as their comrades were buried by
night—comrades, twice dead, released, at last, from their loathsome,
rotting corpse, life’s hideous, bloated face, gaping, fleshless mouth
and bulged, half-blind eyes.
O tragical truth! The handsome chief, the beautiful, clinging woman and
the stricken crew of the hulk were escapes—fugitives from the dreadful
lazaretto on Molokai, the leper isle.
The Hawaiian chief and his lover—for such they were, though stricken
with the scourge—had no sign as yet visible on their faces.
The sympathetic look that Waylao gave them, the pleasure she revealed at
their presence, touched their hearts. It was long, long ago since human
beings had welcomed _their_ presence.
The Hawaiian girl plucked some palm leaves and gently covered Waylao’s
dead child.
Then the Hawaiian chief and his tender comrade went back to the hulk and
proceeded to bring their leper comrades ashore. In a few moments they
both appeared by the hulk’s broken bulwarks and threw some planks that
made a gangway down to the wet sands, and began to carry their stricken
comrades, one by one, on a deck grating, down to the shore.
There were five all told. One was a flaxen-headed little boy of about
six years of age. As they laid the little form beneath the palms, the
child lifted its head and moaned.
Waylao, touched with intense pity, disobeyed the order of the chief,
went towards the figures of the stricken and attempted to soothe them.
She had no thought of the chances she took of catching the terrible
malady, but she gave a cry of horror at the sight that met her eyes.
It seemed impossible that such advanced dissolution should still live;
the fleshless, skull-like heads wobbled and lifted, the bulged,
glass-like eyes stared at her like hideous misery. The stricken beings
discerned the look of sympathy on Waylao’s face. The fleshless mouths
smiled. The girl half drew back, for the look in those eyes, the
movement of those lips resembled some grin of hate, rather than the
intense gratitude that they _yearned_ to express.
As Waylao watched, she heard splashes in the sea, and, looking in the
direction of the hulk, saw the Hawaiian chief in the act of throwing the
last body into the ocean depths. These were the bodies of the crew who
had died ere they reached the isles, and three corpses of those who had
drank too quickly of the water on deck, and so had died at once in
agony. It appeared that when the hulk sailed away from the leper isle
there were fourteen on board. After a week of drifting across the ocean
the number was reduced to nine. Another few days without water and
scorched by the blazing tropical sun had finished off three more, till
only five arrived ashore alive.
The chief had finished his terrible task on the hulk, and as Waylao
watched the dark spots bobbing about on the moonlit waters, she saw them
drifting round by the promontory’s edge, then, with the tide, go
seaward.
The Hawaiian girl clung tightly to her companion’s tall, handsome figure
and moaned. The reaction had set in.
“Aiola, Aiola!” he murmured in the tenderest way as he looked down into
her uplifted eyes. He was robed in the picturesque Hawaiian costume—a
broad-fringed lava-lava to his tawny knees, round his waist a tappa robe
swathed in a row of knots of ornamental design.
Aiola, for that was the girl’s name, looked with the deepest affection
up into his eyes, then kissed his tattooed, brown, shapely shoulders.
Waylao no longer attempted to shrink from the afflicted. She helped
gather soft mosses and leaves. The stricken lepers opened their terrible
eyes and regarded her with deep tenderness as she helped to make their
couches.
“No touch! No touch! Unclean! Unclean! Mai Pake! Mai Pake!”[6] they
moaned as she pushed their limp, helpless limbs into more comfortable
positions.
Footnote 6:
Leprosy.
“Ora, loa, ia Jesu,” breathed one as she closed her eyelids and died—on
the shore.
Ere the night passed they had all died; only the Hawaiian chief and his
mistress lived.
As the dawn brightened the east they were still sitting huddled beneath
the screw-pines. As the sun streamed across the seas, Waylao, the chief
and the Hawaiian girl crept beneath the shade of the palms and slept.
So did sorrow in its most terrible form come across the seas to bring
balm and true comradeship to the friendless Waylao.
That same day the chief brought old sails and gratings ashore. Ere
sunset had faded he had fixed up the cavern’s hollow into two
compartments, one for himself and the other for Waylao and Aiola.
The beautiful Hawaiian girl sat by her lover’s side and sang songs to
him, looking up into his face all the while she sang—yes, in a way that
was like one sees in glorious pictures of tender romance, only it was
beautifully, terribly real.
The chief told Waylao how he had loved the maid since she was a little
child; how before she had reached womanhood the leprosy spot had
appeared on her body. Then came the terrible edict that condemned all
lepers to life exile on the Isle of Molokai. He told Waylao how he had
hidden the Hawaiian girl in a cave by the shores of his native isle. But
notwithstanding all his precautions they had discovered that he had a
lover hidden somewhere, a lover who had the dreaded leper spot, and was
striving to elude the clutch of the leper-hunters.
One night a terrified scream broke the silence of the shore caves, and
Aiola was taken away across the seas to the dread lazaretto. Then, to
the chief’s delight, he discovered the dread Mai Pake—the leper spot—on
his own body. He, too, was sent to the leper lazaretto, and so met Aiola
again.
They had clung to each other with the arms of love, but, still, the
loathsome sights, ever haunting their eyes, had made them yearn to
escape, anywhere, anywhere across the seas, from that living tomb.
Pointing to the hulk that lay high on the sands, for the tide had left
it dry, he said:
“That hulk was the means of our deliverance; it was washed ashore on the
Isle of Molokai through a hurricane. One night, under the cover of great
darkness, we did creep down to the shore. When we got on to the hulk and
stowed away in the dark hold, awaiting to push it into deep water as the
tide rose, we discovered that another lot of lepers had also stowed
away, ready for the outgoing tide. At first we were sorry, then we
became exceedingly glad, for it was only by their help that we were
enabled to push the hulk with bamboo rods into deep water.
“So did we drift away to sea. A great storm was blowing from the
north-west. The _matagia_ [gale] blew for five days. We all hid in the
hold, for we were frightened that some ship might sight the drifting
hulk and search and find us. But the great white God heard our prayers,
and so we were not discovered!”[7]
Footnote 7:
It was a common thing in those days for travellers to find skeletons
in the coast caves and the forests of the Hawaiian Isles, and in many
of the surrounding isles of the North Pacific. Some, maybe, were the
skeletons of shipwrecked white men and natives, or escapes from the
convict settlements of Noumea. More often they were the remains of the
stricken, who had fled from the leper-hunters, preferring to cast
themselves adrift in a canoe or raft, and risk the terrors of the
ocean to the dreadful exile to the lazaretto on Molokai. Often the
fugitives were accompanied by a wife, husband, child or lover. And
often those who shared their sorrows died by their own hand when the
tragedy had ended in the death of the afflicted. It may be some will
think that I have overdrawn the horrors of leprosy and its effects
physically and mentally. I can assure my readers that, in my attempt
to depict the scenes of leprosy and its consequences in those times, I
am obliged to leave out a good deal. The full truth were too terrible
to write about in a book that only touches on the matter so far as it
concerns Waylao.
As the Father and I listened to the girl’s story, we marvelled with
astonishment, so evident was the intense interest the exiled girl had
taken in those stricken people, completely forgetting her own troubles.
The Father’s eyes were blind with tears, and so were mine.
Waylao came to love those Hawaiian exiled lepers. She also would kneel
beside the castaways and pray and sing with them.
Though they were both cursed with the plague, no spot had, as yet,
commenced to show its hideous presence on either of their faces.
The Hawaiian girl had contracted the malady years before her companion,
so the signs of the scourge were considerably advanced on her body; but
still her shoulders and breast were smooth and beautiful, and still the
Hawaiian chief, O Le Haiwa-oe, sang to the beauty of Aiola’s eyes. But
one day he noticed that those eyes he loved had begun to look dull and
shiny-looking. His heart beat as though it would burst, so deep was his
sorrow over what he knew was inevitable.
The leper girl’s swift instinct saw that look on her lover’s face. She
blushed deeply and trembled with fright at the thought of the hideous
rot, which at last had commenced to show itself on her features.
O Le Haiwa-oe looked at her and said: “Beloved, thou art as lovely as of
yore, ’twas the beauty of your eyes that made me gaze into them.”
But Aiola was not to be deceived.
As the days went on, Waylao resolved to stay in exile with those sad
fugitives.
So, without telling them, she went out to the dead screw-pine that stood
on the edge of the promontory, piled up the rocks one by one, then,
standing on them, took down the large bit of canvas sail, fastened there
as a signal of distress. She had only allowed it to be placed there
through the pleadings of the poor Hawaiians. They knew that the
inevitable hour was drawing near when life would be more than a living
death, for would they not see their own dissolution? They cared not for
the risk of a schooner sighting that signal. It would take Waylao away
to safety, but it would not take them. No; the Hawaiians had resolved to
go on a longer journey should their hiding-place be discovered. When O
Le Haiwa-oe saw Waylao take the signal down, his eyes filled with tears,
and in a moment he had run out to the edge of the promontory and placed
the canvas sail fluttering to the breeze.
At last a ship was sighted on the horizon. It was beating its lonely way
to the north-west. Waylao looked at it with longing eyes. Her heart went
out to the white sails that could so easily bear her homeward. She
dreamed that she heard the voices of the sailors on deck, and saw the
tenderness in their eyes as they carried her on board; then she turned
and looked at the stalwart Hawaiian leper chief, and the clinging maid.
They, too, were staring seaward, but their eyes were fevered-looking,
they were both silent with fear.
“Go and hide in the cave,” said Waylao. “If they should see the signal
and come, I will say there are no more here!”
For a moment both the stricken leper lovers looked at her with deep
gratitude. A look was in their eyes like the look in the eyes of hunted
animals, as they crept into the cave and hid.
When they had both crept away into the dark, they wondered why Waylao
had not wished them good-bye, for would she not be taken away on the
ship for ever? Aiola, at the thought, sobbed in her lover’s arms.
The schooner was now distinctly visible. Waylao saw the light of the
sunset gleaming on the flying sails. Though a tremendous longing
thrilled her heart, she crept out on the promontory. She thought of her
mother and father and the kind priest. But though her heart cried within
her, still she did not hesitate. Standing beneath the dead tree, she
piled the stones up as swiftly as possible, took down the distress
signal and waited till the schooner had passed before she replaced it.
Then she rushed back to the cave, and called softly:
“Aiola! O Le Zeno! Come, come! The ship has passed, and you are safe!”
The lepers came forth with a look of half-wild delight on their faces,
though still trembling, for life is sweet, however sad.
In a moment the Hawaiian chief glanced at the distress signal, “Aiola!”
he said, and the leper maid also looked. For a while the two stricken
Hawaiians gazed into each other’s eyes, their hearts too full to
speak—Waylao had in her hurry put the signal flag back upside down.
In a moment they had seen through the self-sacrifice of their little
comrade. Without saying a word, they looked into each other’s eyes, the
three of them, and then burst into tears—and far away, on the dim
horizon, the schooner’s sails faded like the wings of a grey sea-bird.
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