They were seated on the main deck near the galley, their coffee mugs
beside them and their plates on their knees and the _Kermadec_ on a
steady seven-knot clip was heeled slightly to starboard almost rigid
as a board, save for the sound of the sea as she dipped to the
swell.
For days she had run so with the port rail raised against the white
fringe of trade clouds on the far horizon, a steady list from a
steady breeze warm and winged with the silver fins of flying fish, a
tepid sea-scented wind such as the north can never know, less a wind
than a revelation such as men try to express when they speak of the
breath of the tropics.
The cook had served out the food, and as they ate he talked; he was
a big man with the voice of a child and he was talking of his native
village apropos of nothing and to nobody in particular, which is a
way kanakas have.
Of the world around them, save for Soma and the southern islands and
the island in the north which a few of them knew, Sru, Peroii and
the rest of them were as ignorant as Le Moan.
As they talked, the rosy light of sunset falling on them and
reflected by the fore canvas, Sru, who was seated by Peroii, saw the
wind lift Le Moan’s dark hair exposing the pearl charm she wore
behind the left ear—the double pearl, lustrous and beautiful, tied
in the hair so cunningly and betrayed by the wind.
Le Jennabon had given it to her daughter as a protection against
drowning and mischance. More than that it was a love amulet, making
sure for the girl a happy married life with a man who would not
misuse her. Love amulet or not Le Jennabon had given to her daughter
a talisman of extraordinary power. Exposed by the wind for a moment,
it had spoken to Sru. It said clearly as tongue could speak,
“Karolin is a pearl lagoon.” Then as Le Moan raised her hand and
tucked the hair back behind her ear, Sru, who had paused in his
eating, went on with his food, his dark eyes fixed beyond Peroii,
beyond the vision of deck and mast and standing rigging, beyond all
things visible, upon wealth: cases of tobacco and rum in many
bottles, girls, clay pipes, a gun, and boxes of Swedish matches to
strike at pleasure. Karolin lagoon held all these things, the pearl
behind Le Moan’s ear told him that for a certainty, but Karolin was
far astern and he would never see it again, that also was a
certainty and before it the heart of Sru became filled with
bitterness. A few minutes ago he had been happy and free of care,
now his soul was dark as the sea becomes dark with a squall suddenly
rising and blowing up out of a clear sky. He had discovered a pearl
lagoon—too late. Leaving the others to finish their meal, he rose up
and dropped below into the foc’sle, there curled up in his bunk in
the gloom he lay to consider this matter.
It was useless to speak of it to Peterson, he would never put the
ship back; even if he did he, Sru, would profit little by the
matter. He would maybe get a few sticks of tobacco for telling of
it, or a knife. Peterson, though kind-hearted enough to rescue Le
Moan, was a hard man where bargaining with natives was concerned.
Sru had an intimate knowledge of white men, or at least white
traders and their ways, and Peterson was a white man to the core.
Then as he lay facing this fact, the idea of Rantan came before him.
Rantan who could talk to him in his own tongue like a brother, who
was half a native as far as language and ideas went, and yet was a
white man.
Though Rantan had no power to put the ship back, it came into Sru’s
mind that somehow or in some way this man, clever as all the
papalagi were, might be able to do something in the matter. Eased by
this idea he turned out of the bunk and came on deck.
The sunset was just vanishing from the sky where in the pansy dusk
the constellations were sketching themselves above the vague violet
of the sea. Then, suddenly, like the closing of a door, the west
went dark and the stars blazed out and bloomed in full sight. The
wind, moist, and warm, blew steadily, and Sru, standing in the
draught from the head sails, looked about him, forward at the
bowsprit rising and falling against the sea stars and aft where the
white decks showed, the man at the wheel clearly visible and someone
leaning on the weather rail, Carlin to judge by his bulk.
Rantan was nowhere to be seen.
Close to Sru and hunched against some rope coiled by the windlass he
saw a figure. It was Le Moan. She was seated with her knees up and
her hands round her knees, and she seemed asleep—but she was not
asleep, for as Sru’s eyes fell on her, her face lifted and he saw
the glint of her eyes in the starlight. Those mournful eyes that
ever since her departure from Karolin seemed like the eyes of a
person in trance, of a dreamer who was yet conscious of some great
and real disaster.
Sru instantly forgot Rantan. It seemed that somewhere deep in his
shadowy mind something had linked Le Moan with the pearl lagoon and
any chance of success in finding it again, raiding it, and turning
milk-white chatoyant pearls into sticks of tobacco, bottles of rum,
clay pipes and beads to buy love with.
She had given him the indication of what was there, but it seemed to
him that she could do more than that.
He crumpled up and sat down beside her on the deck and spoke soft
words, asking her what ailed her that she looked so sorrowful.
“For,” said Sru, “the storm that took your people has without doubt
taken many more in the island and will not give them back, not
though men weep forever—it is so, and it is so, and ever will be so,
and to eat the heart out for that which has been, is to feed
foolishly, for,” said Sru, “the coral waxes, the palm grows, but man
departs.” He was repeating the old Island proverb and for a moment
he had forgotten Karolin, pearls, gin bottles and the glory of
seidlitz powders in effervescence like the foam on the reef; he had
forgotten all little things and his words and voice broke up the
depths of Le Moan and the cause of her grief came forth. Otherwise
and soon she might have died of it. Conscious that Karolin was so
far in the past that it was safe to speak, she told Sru that no
storm had overtaken her people, that she had lied to Peterson so
that he might not discover and perhaps kill the being she loved; and
there, sitting in the showering starlight, she did that which she
had never done before even for her own inspection, opened her heart,
told, as a sleeper might tell in sleep, of her love for Taori and of
his beauty and strength and swiftness and of everything except that
which she did not know—the fact that Taori had a lover already,
Katafa.
She spoke and Sru listened, absorbing her words and her story as a
kanaka will absorb any sort of tale he can understand. Then this
amazing savage who had spoken so poetically about the waxing of the
coral and the passing of man, this sympathizer who had spoken so
softly in addressing grief, leaning on his elbow began to shake with
laughter.
He knew that big feller Mas’r Peterson would not have hurt a hair of
Taori’s head, that he did not want to take Le Moan off the beach and
had only done so because he imagined her unable to fend for herself.
He saw that Le Moan, trying to protect her lover against imaginary
perils had allowed herself to be sacrificed and snatched away from
everything she loved and cared for, that she had prepared for
herself the trap into which she had fallen—and all this to the mind
of Sru seemed a huge joke, almost as good as the joke of the drunken
man he had once seen, who, trying to cut wood with his foot on a log
had cut off his foot with the axe he was wielding.
Sru giggled like a girl being tickled, then he burst out in snorts
like a buffalo in a temper, choked as though he had swallowed a
fish-bone and then began to explain.
Began to explain and failed to hit the mark simply because Le Moan
could not understand why big feller Mas’r Peterson had taken her
away from Karolin. He did not want to take her away yet he had taken
her away. Le Moan could not understand that in the least.
Le Moan could not understand pity, she had never come across it in
others and she had never felt it for herself. Had she been able to
pity herself, she would have flung herself on the deck weeping and
wailing when the _Kermadec_ turned her stern to the south and
dropped Karolin beyond the horizon. She had sacrificed herself for
the sake of the being who dominated her existence, she had dared the
most terrible of all things, the unknown, yet she could not in the
least understand why Peterson should do what he did not want to do
for the sake of a being, a stranger whom he had never seen before.
To tell the truth Sru did not quite comprehend it either, he knew it
was so and he left it at that. It was one of the strange and
unaccountable things that white men were always doing. What
intrigued him was the fact that Le Moan had fooled herself in
fancying Peterson a dangerous man capable of injuring her lover and
that Peterson had fooled himself in believing her story.
So he talked till Le Moan at last understood the fact that, whatever
Peterson’s object in taking her away may have been, he would not
have injured Taori, that if she had said nothing he would have gone
off after having filled the water breakers at the well, and as he
talked and as she listened dumb before the great truth that she had
sacrificed everything for nothing, slowly up from the subconscious
mind of Sru and urged by his talk, came an idea.
“You will go back,” said Sru. “Listen, it is I, Sru, who am
talking—we will go back, you and I, and what tells me is that which
lies behind thy left ear.”
Le Moan put her hand up to the amulet hidden beneath her hair.
“We will go back,” went on Sru, “you and I and another man, and
perhaps more, all good men who will not hurt Taori—but Pete’son,
no—no,” he murmured as if communing with some dark spirit. “He would
swallow all. He alone knows the way across the sea, so that setting
the steering paddle this way or that he can go straight as the
frigate bird to Soma or to Nalauka or to what island or land he
chooses, he alone of the men on board this ship. But thou art wise
as he. Wise as the frigate bird that leaves the land far from sight
yet can return. You will guide us to Karolin. Can your eyes still
see that beach and where it lies?”
Le Moan threw out her arms.
“Though I were blind as the sand worm, I could find it,” said Le
Moan, “through night and storm—but when?”
“No man can hurry the rising of the day,” said Sru, “but soon it
will come and soon your eyes shall fall upon Taori—that which lies
behind your left ear has told me, and it has told me more. Answer so
that I may know if it speak the truth. It has told me that thick in
that lagoon lie the shells of the _iyama_ (oyster) from whence it
came—is that true talk?”
“Thick and far they lie,” said Le Moan, “from the _kaaka_ far as one
can paddle from the coming in to the middle of the tide.”
“So,” said Sru, “it spoke the truth. When we make our return you
will go to meet Taori and we to find the _iyama_ for the sake of the
stones they hold, brethren of that which lies ... there.”
He touched her hair behind her left ear and rose gliding off aft,
whilst Le Moan, whose life had suddenly come back to her, sat gazing
through night and beyond the stars at a sunlit beach where spear in
hand and lovely as the morning stood Taori.
Taori who at that moment tired out with the labour of canoe-building
was lying asleep with his arm across the warm body of Katafa.