Now on board that ship there were three men set there by
circumstance as pawns in a game of which Taori was king, Katafa
queen, and Le Moan perhaps the hand of the player, and these men
were Rantan the mate, Carlin the beachcomber, and Sru, bo’sun and
chief of the kanakas.
Rantan, a narrow slip of a man, hard bitten and brown as a hickory
nut, was a mystery. Perfect in the art of handling a schooner, he
knew next to nothing of navigation. Peterson had picked him up as an
extra hand and, the mate dying of fever, Rantan had taken his place,
making up in general efficiency for his want of higher knowledge. He
had spent all his life amongst the islands and natives, he could
talk to Sru in his own tongue like a brother born, could pick up the
dialect of any island in a week, but had little to say in English. A
silent man who never drank, never smoked and never cursed.
Peterson disliked him for no apparent reason whatsoever; he could
have got rid of him, but he didn’t. Sobriety is a jewel in the
Pacific, especially when it is worn by schooner mates.
Carlin had come on board the ship just before she sailed from Soma.
He was a big red-headed man useless for anything but beachcombing,
he wanted to get up to “them Northern islands” and Peterson out of
the heart kindness that had made him take Le Moan on board, took
him. He made him work, yet gave him a bunk aft, thus constituting
him in a way one of the ship’s officers.
Carlin was one of the unfortunates born with a thirst, but in his
case it only broke out on land, on board ship he had no wish for
liquor but the beach felled him as if with a pole-ax.
Sru, the last of the three men, stood over six feet, stark naked
except for a gee-string. He was a man from the beginning of the
world. He could cast a spear and find his mark at fifty yards, his
nose was flattened, his cheek-bones broad and his face, especially
when his eyes were accommodated for distance, wore an expression of
ferocity that yet had nothing evil in it. Le Moan had no fear of
him. Indeed at the end of her second day on the schooner, she had no
fear of anyone on board. Instinct told her that whatever these men
might have done to Taori and the tribe, they would not hurt her.
Fortunately she never recognized how utterly useless had been her
sacrifice, never recognized the fact that Colin Peterson, so far
from hurting Dick, would have been his friend—otherwise she might
have cast herself overboard, for her sorrow was heavy on her and
wanted no extra weight.
Peterson had given her over to Sru to look after and Sru had made
her a shake-down in the long boat. She fed with the kanaka crew, who
took their meals on deck, and became part of their family and tribe,
but she would not go into the foc’sle, nor would she go into the
cabin; those holes in the deck leading down below were, for her,
mysterious and terrific; she had peeped down the saloon hatchway and
seen the steps going down as into a well and the polish of the
handrail and a light below shining on a mat. It was light reflected
from the saloon, yet none the less mysterious for that and the whole
thing struck her with the enchantment that quite commonplace things
sometimes possess for little children, but it was an enchantment
tinged with the shadow of dread.
She had no fear of the men on board yet she had a dread of the
saloon companionway, of the main boom, till it explained itself to
her, of the windlass with its iron teeth. The men, in spite of their
clothes and strange ways, shook down as human beings, but the wheel
that steered the schooner and the binnacle into which the steersman
gazed as he stood moving the spokes, forever moving the spokes of
the mysterious wheel, those things were mysterious and their mystery
was tinged with the shadow of dread. They were part of the unknown
that surrounded her: to the savage the thing unknown is a thing to
be feared.
One day when Sru was at the wheel and the deck was empty, she
ventured to peep into the binnacle and saw beneath the glittering
glass like a star-fish in a rock pool the compass cord trembling
like a living thing. Had not the deck been empty so that she dared
to speak to Sru on this matter and had not he been in a mood to
answer her, the whole life of Le Moan would have been altered and
never again might she have seen Taori.
“What is it,” asked she, glancing across her shoulder at the
steersman, “and why do you look at it so?”
“This,” said Sru, indicating the wheel for which he had no word in
the native, “moves the steering paddle (_e caya madyara_) and into
that I look to find my way.”
Now when Karolin had sunk beneath the sea rim the conviction had
come to Le Moan that never would she see Karolin again; her instinct
told her where it lay and, given a canoe, she could have found it
even at this great distance, but her knowledge of where it lay was
no comfort to her—she felt that the great hand that had seized her
would never let her go and that a door had closed forever between
this new world and the old where Taori dwelt safe owing to the
closing of the door.
She glanced again at the binnacle and then speaking like a person in
reverie she said: “Without that I could find my way though the sea
were dark and no stars shone, as I have found my way often in the
fishing canoes when the land was so far it could not be seen.”
Sru knew what she meant; at Soma in the Paumotus from where he had
come the directional instinct, shared more or less by all savages,
was especially marked in some of the children, and the deep-sea
canoes in those waters where the currents run in an unaccountable
manner and where the trade winds are not, depended on the instinct
of the steersman.
He bade her close her eyes and turn and turn. “Where now lies the
land we have left?” asked Sru. Without opening her eyes and not
knowing east from west or north from south, she pointed aft almost
dead south.
Sru laughed. She was right, the mysterious compass in her brain that
worked without error or deviation would have pointed to Karolin,
though a thousand miles away; then as he spun the wheel having let
the _Kermadec_ a point or two off her course, Le Moan went forward
and he forgot her, but he did not forget what she had told him. It
remained in his tenacious mind like a pebble in molasses, hidden,
but there till three days later when towards evening, the kanakas
were eating their supper on deck, Sru was brought face to face and
for the first time in his life with a great idea, an idea that
included tobacco not by the stick, but in cases, rum in casks,
women, barlow knives, chalk pipes and patent leather boots, also
canned salmon and seidlitz powders.
Sru, an old pearler, had been in the last of the pearling at Soma
before the banks gave out. He knew the value of pearls.