Without looking back, she turned the nose of her canoe straight for
the southern beach. To left of her as she paddled lay the sea gate
where the tide was flooding round the coral and the breeze blowing
the gulls like snowflakes against the blue; to right the limitless
expanse of the lagoon; ahead the desolate beach, the ruined village
and the wild tangle of pandanus trees, their limbs wide-spreading as
the limbs of an elm, their fronds tossing like ill-kempt hair.
She hauled the light canoe above tide mark, then, turning to the
right along the sands, she passed the trees and climbed the coral,
standing for a moment facing the south and the empty sea. Then,
turning, she gazed across the lagoon to where the far-away northern
beach showed its trees above the water dazzle.
It was near full flood and the lagoon was brimming, the outer sea
coming in great sheets of smoky blue, whirls of amethyst and streaks
of cobalt between the piers of the break. Le Moan could hear the
suck of the water through the gates as distinct from the sound of
the breakers on the coral, beyond the sound of the breakers the
voices of the gulls, beyond the gulls the silence reaching to the
white trade clouds on the rim of the purple sea.
She was alone, but for the matter of that, she had always been
alone, Aioma and the two old men and the women and children who
formed the last remnant of the southern tribe had never been her
companions; she had fished with them and helped in the cooking and
mat-making, talked with them, lived with them, yet in a way, dwelt
apart.
It was the race difference, perhaps, or some bent of soul owing to
the fusion of races in her that made her a being quite alone,
relying on no one but herself—a creature apart, almost a spirit. She
had the power to lose herself utterly when gazing down into clear
water as on the day when Dick first saw her gazing into the pond by
the trees. Great distances held her in the same way should she give
herself over to them, and that strange flair for direction which she
shared with the gulls was less perhaps instinctive than psychic, for
the mind of Le Moan, eternally in touch with the wind, the sea, the
sun and the stars, was clairvoyant to the coming of storm and the
sea changes that brought the great tiger sharks into the lagoon,
altered the course of the mullet or drove the palu far from the
fishing banks to northward of the reef.
Having stood for a while gazing to the north, she came back towards
the deserted houses and began to prepare herself some food; after
that there were lines to be mended and oap to be cleared from the
paraka patch and then came sunset and then the stars, and sleep
deeper than the great depths beyond the palu bank.
Had Le Moan looked back across her past, she would have seen a
succession of days coloured like the day just dead, brilliancy
stretching away into years and opalled by rainy seasons and storms,
nights when dreams were unhaunted by human form till to-night, when,
towards dawn, a ghostly canoe man showed in the mirror of sleep
paddling towards her across a shimmering lagoon.
Then as the dream broke up and the vision vanished, Le Moan awoke
beneath the last of the stars, awoke suddenly with fear clutching at
her heart and with eyes wide but still half-blinded with sleep.
She sat up. The dawn was breaking and the fishing gulls were putting
out to sea; she could hear their voices through the sound of the
breakers on the reef. Nothing more, yet she listened, listened with
her eyes fixed on the great fan of light showing in the eastern sky
against which the gulls showed like withered leaves tossed on the
wind.
Nothing. The sea breeze stirred the leaves of the breadfruit and the
branches of the pandamus palms and then fell flat, died out and
changed to the first stirring of a land breeze, the highest flying
gulls took colour and the ghostly lagoon took form.
The girl rising to her feet swept the lagoon water with her eyes.
Nothing. Then, turning, she passed between the trees to the coral of
the outer beach and there, out on the ghostly sea and touched by the
light of dawn, she saw a ship.
Years after the destruction of the Spanish ship, which had happened
before her birth, a whale man had put into the lagoon, cut wood,
taken on water, been attacked by Uta Matu, the chief of Karolin, and
escaped to the outer sea by a miracle.
Uta would have sent her to the bottom of the lagoon after the
Spaniard, for in the depth of his ignorant but instinctive heart lay
the knowledge that the black man’s burden is the white man and that
civilization to the savage means death.
Le Moan could still see as in a glass darkly the fight and the
escape of the whale man, and here again was a ship, different in
shape from the one of long ago, but arousing in her mind, from
association, an instinct of antagonism and dread.
The ship, which had been standing off and on all night, was a
schooner, and now as the great sun heaved himself higher and golden
ripples broke the sea line, Le Moan watched her take fire, sail
after sail catching the light till on the newborn blue of the sea a
golden ship lay heaving to the swell, flown round by golden gulls,
whose voices came chanting against the breeze like the voices of
ghostly sailormen hauling in chorus.
Then as she altered her helm and the wind shivered out of her
canvas, a boat was dropped, it ran up a sail and Le Moan, her eyes
shaded against the risen sun, saw the boat heading for the break.
She ran back amongst the trees and stood for a moment, her hand
pressed against her forehead, her mind in confusion, with one idea
only fixed and steadfast—Taori.
Here was danger, recollection backed instinct, the powerful instinct
of a mind that could tell the north from the south without star or
compass, the coming changes of weather, the movement of the fish
shoals—the instinct that had awakened her with fear clutching at her
heart.
Here was danger to Taori, and now as she stood her hand clasped on
her forehead, came the recollection, not only of Uta Matu’s fight
against the whale man, but of Taori’s words to Aioma about the bad
men on Marua and the necessity of building the war canoes and of how
the young men of Karolin would soon be ripe for war.
But the canoes were not built and the warriors were not ready, and
here, suddenly from out of nowhere, had come this great canoe with
sails spreading to the sky. Uta Matu and his warriors and fleet were
vanished and Taori was unprepared. Then came the thought that the
boat making for the break was like the pilot fish that scouts ahead
of the tiger shark, it would come into the lagoon and if it found
food worth devouring, the tiger shark would follow.
The village on the northern beach was invisible from the break,
owing to the trees and the crafty way Uta Matu had set it amongst
the trees. She remembered that.
Then her heart suddenly took flame. She would save Taori.
She left the trees and, taking the sand of the inner beach, she
began running towards the break. She would attract the boat to her.
You have seen a bird attracting a man away from its nest, heedless
of its own fate, thinking only of the thing it loved; just so Le
Moan, facing the unknown, which was more terrible than the terrible,
sought now to save the being she loved with the love that casts out
fear.
She had not run a hundred yards when the boat entered the lagoon,
heeling to the breeze and carried by the first of the flood, she
flung up her arms to it, then she stood watching as it changed its
course making straight towards her.
It was an ordinary ship’s quarter boat, painted white, fitted with a
mast and lug sail, and Le Moan as she stood watching paralysed and
waiting for her fate, saw that she held four men, three kanakas,
whose naked shoulders showed above the gunnel, and a huge man, black
bearded and wearing a broad-brimmed white straw hat beneath which
his face showed dark and terrible as the face of the King of
Terrors.
He wore a shirt open at the throat and his shirt sleeves were rolled
up showing arms white yet covered with black hair. As the boat
grounded and the kanakas sprang out Le Moan scarcely saw them; her
eyes were fixed on the great man now standing on the beach, Colin
Peterson, no less, one of the last of the sandalwood traders, master
and owner of the _Kermadec_—Black Peterson, terrible to look at,
swift to strike when roused, yet a man with kindness in his heart
and straightness in his soul.
Poor Le Moan, had she only known!
Peterson, sweeping his eyes over the empty and ruined houses and the
desolate beach, fixed them on the girl, spoke to her in a tongue she
did not understand and then called out:
“Sru!”
A kanaka stepped forward. He was a Paumotuan, a yellow man, and half
Malanesian, fierce of face, frizzy headed and wearing a necklace of
little shells. After a word with Peterson, he turned to Le Moan and
spoke to her and she understood. The language of Karolin was the
language of the Paumotas; those far-off islands in the distant days
had raided and fought with Karolin, in days still further removed
the first inhabitants of Karolin had drifted from the Paumotas but
neither Le Moan nor Sru knew aught of this nor of the common
ancestry which gave them power of speech.
“I am here alone,” said Le Moan answering Sru. “My people are gone—a
storm took them all. There is no one here.” As she spoke her eyes
left Sru and wandered northward to the far trace of the northern
beach, the dread at her heart was lest Taori might, by some
ill-chance, put out fishing, show himself and be lost, but nothing
appeared, nothing but the far-distant trees above the sun blaze on
the water.
She knew that the schooner was too far off and too much sheltered by
the southern reef for the people on the north beach to see her, that
Taori would be busy with the canoe building, yet the dread at her
heart drove her to repeat the words automatically like a parrot.
“There is no one here but me—my people are gone; a storm took them—I
am here alone.” As she spoke, she watched Peterson with side
glances. She had never seen a bearded man before, and this man with
the black curling hair reaching almost to his eyes seemed a monster.
Whilst she was speaking, the other kanakas taking two large water
breakers from the boat began to fill them at the well, the well into
which she had been looking on the day on which she had first seen
Taori.
Colin Peterson stood looking at them, he had half turned from Le
Moan and seemed to have forgotten her existence; then, shading his
eyes, he looked across and about the lagoon, but he was thinking
neither of the kanakas nor the lagoon. He was cursing Le Moan.
He had no use for this girl. He had come ashore for water at this
uncharted island thinking maybe to find natives, never dreaming that
he would be faced by a problem like this. It was impossible to leave
the forlorn creature to her fate, yet what was he to do with her on
board of the _Kermadec_? Had it been a man or a boy the matter would
have been simple enough, but a girl? If he took her off he would
have to find her a home somewhere among the kanakas on one of the
northern islands. He was bound for Amao but he reckoned that place
was of no use—the kanakas were a bad lot.
As he stood like this thinking and staring about her, Le Moan still
watched him, this terrific man who seemed searching with his eyes
for Taori.
Would he believe her story—would he kill her? Old tales of the
terrible _papalagi_ chased through her mind like bats in the dusk
that had fallen upon her powers of thought—she did not know. She
only knew that she did not care whether he killed her or not as long
as he believed her story and departed without hurting Taori.
Then, suddenly, the last breaker of water in the boat, Peterson
turned on Sru and shouted to him to fetch her on board. Perplexity
in Peterson generally expressed itself in blasphemy, and when Big
Feller Mass’r Peterson began to talk like that, Sru never waited for
the toe of the boot that was sure to follow.
He seized Le Moan by the arm and pushed her to the boat; for a
moment she resisted, then she gave up, tumbled in and squatting
forward of the mast saw as one sees in a dream the straining
shoulders and tense arms of the kanakas, as, bending and clutching
the port and starboard gunnels, they ran the boat out; she saw them
tumble on board, felt the grating of the sand and then the
balloon-like lift of the waterborne keel; she saw the sail above her
take the wind and bulge hard against the blue of the sky; she saw
the flying gulls and the wheeling lagoon and the trees of the
southern beach vanishing to starboard as the boat headed for the
break, but always and above everything she saw the massive hand of
Peterson as he sat in the stern sheets with the tiller in the crook
of his elbow and his eyes fixed towards her and beyond.
* * * * *
Ai, the sea! What tragedies has it not been partner in? The sea of
storms, the blue laughing sea, the sea that now, lovely in the light
of morning was flooding gently with the first of the flood through
the gates of Karolin, lifting the boat to the outer swell as it
passed the coral piers where the gulls cried above the foam of the
breakers and the breakers answered to the crying gulls.
If Peterson had killed Le Moan on the beach, she would have met her
death without flinching. Seated now watching Karolin drop astern,
her eyes never wavered nor softened—even her fear of Peterson had
vanished. It was as though she had died on passing the gates of the
great atoll and entered a land where personality was not, only
perception. A land of pictures that had no relationship to herself
or anything she had ever known. She saw as they came alongside the
white painted side of the _Kermadec_ with the ladder cast down, the
rail, and above the rail the great white sail spaces all a-shiver in
the wind. The faces of men looking down at the boat, the face of
Rantan the mate, and Carlin, a beachcomber picked up at Soma and
working his passage north.
Then she was on the deck, which seemed to her broad and white as a
beach, and the extraordinary newness of this strange place took on a
cutting edge which pierced the deadness that had fallen upon
her—this place so vast to her mind that it seemed land of a sort. A
moment before, in the boat, the sea had been around her, but here
the sea was nothing, this place was everything. Taori, Karolin, the
reef, the ocean itself, all for a moment vanished, consumed by the
_Kermadec_ as by a flame.
And not a soul took notice of her after the first few words of
Peterson to the Mate. They were busy getting in the boat and now as
the rumbling and threshing of the canvas above died out and the
sails filled hard against the blue came the voices of gulls, gulls
from the reef and deep-sea gulls flitting in the wake of the
_Kermadec_ that was now under way.
Le Moan, feeling herself unnoticed, and moving cautiously, came to
the weather rail. She saw the reef and the distant trees of Karolin
and the following gulls now flying north and south as if giving up
the chase. Then the reef line passed from sight beneath the sea
dazzle and the voice of the reef and the crying of the gulls died
far off, whilst the treetops vainly fought with the ever-growing
distance, now clinging to the sight, now washed utterly away.