CHAPTER XIII—SOUTH

The stars faded, the east grew crimson and the sun arose to show

Levua gone; a sky without cloud, a sea without trace of sail or

gull.

Le Moan, crouching in the bow with the risen sun hot on her left

shoulder, saw the long levels of the marching swell as they came and

passed, the Kermadec bowing to them; saw the distant southern sea

line and beyond it the road to Karolin.

With her eyes shut and as the needle of the compass finds the north

magnetic pole, she could have pointed to where Karolin lay; and as

she gazed across the fields of the breeze-blown swell no trace of

cloud troubled her mind, all was bright ahead. Sru had made it clear

to her that no hurt would come to Taori, and with Peterson, had gone

any last lingering doubt that may have been in her mind. She trusted

Sru and she trusted Rantan, who had spoken kindly to her, Carlin,

and the kanaka crew; of Peterson, the man who had terrified her

first and the only trustable man on that ship, she had always had

her doubts, begotten by that first impression, by his beard, his

gruff voice and what Sru had said about Peterson and how he would

“swallow all”—that is to say the pearls of Karolin; those mysterious

pearls that the white men treasured and of which the charm hidden

behind her ear had spoken to Sru.

She had always worn it as a protection and she had not the least

doubt that it had spoken to Sru, just as a person might speak, and

told him of those other pearls which she had often seen and played

with when oysters were cast to rot on the beach for the sake of

their shells. She had not the least doubt that to the talisman

behind her ear was due this happy return and the elimination of

Peterson. Was she wrong?

As she crouched, the back draught from the head sails fanning her

hair, the ship and her crew, the sea and its waves, all vanished,

dissolved matter from which grew as by some process of

recrystallization the beach of Karolin. The long south beach where

the sand was whispering in the wind, the hot south beach where the

sun-stricken palms lifted their fronds to the brassy sky of noon and

the tender skies of dawn and evening, the beach above which the

stars stood at night all turning with the turning dome of sky.

She saw a canoe paddling ashore and the canoe man now on the beach,

his eyes crinkled against the sun—eyes coloured like the sea when

the grey of the squall mixes with its blue. The sun was on his

red-gold hair and he trod the sands lightly, not as the kanaka walks

and moves; one might have fancied little wings upon his feet.

His naked body against the blazing lagoon showed like a flame of

gold against a flame of blue. It was Taori. Taori as she had seen

him first, on that day when he had come to bid Aioma to the canoe

building.

It was as if Fate on that day had suddenly stripped away a veil

showing her the one thing to be desired, the only thing that would

ever matter to her in this life or the next.

As she leaned, the breeze in her hair and her mind like a bird

fleeting far ahead into the distance, flying fish like silver

shaftless arrow-heads passed and flittered into the blue water, and

now a turtle floating asleep and disturbed by the warble of the bow

wash and the creak of the onrushing schooner, sank quietly fathoms

deep leaving only a few bubbles on the swell.

Carlin had come on deck. Rantan had said not a word about the broken

open cupboard or the whiskey; the ship was cleared of drink and that

was enough for him; when he came on deck a few minutes after the

other, he found the beachcomber leaning on the after rail.

A shark was hanging in the wake of the schooner. A deep-sea ship

does not sail alone. She gives company and shelter to all sorts of

fish from the remora that hangs on for a whole voyage, to the bonito

that follows her maybe for a week. In front of the shark, moving and

glittering like spoon bait, a pilot fish showed in flashes of blue

and gold.

Carlin turned from contemplation of these things to find Rantan at

his side.

On going below for a wash after his night on deck, Carlin had found

the other at breakfast. Neither man had spoken of the events of the

night before, nor did they now.

“Following us steady, isn’t he?” said Carlin, turning again to

contemplate the monster in the wake—“don’t seem to be swimming

either and he’s going all of eight knots. What’s he after, following

us like that?”

“Haven’t you ever seen a shark before?” asked Rantan.

“Yes, and I’ve never seen good of them following a ship,” replied

Carlin, “and I’m not set on seeing them, ’specially now.”

“Why now?” asked the mate.

But Carlin shied from the subject that was in both their minds.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said he, “I was thinking of the traverse in

front of us.... Say, now we’re set and sailing for it, are you sure

of hitting that island?”

“Sure,” said the mate.

“Then you’re better at the navigating job than you pretended to be,”

said Carlin. “What I like about you is the way you keep things hid.”

“I’ve kept nothing hid,” replied the other. “I’m crazy bad on the

navigation, but I’ve got a navigator on board that’ll take us there

same as a bullet to a target.”

“Sru?”

“Sru nothing—the kanaka girl, she’s a Marayara. Ever heard of them?

You get them among the kanakas; every kanaka has a pretty good sense

of direction, but a Marayara, take him away from his island and

he’ll home back like a pigeon if he has a canoe and can paddle long

enough. That island we took the girl from is the pearl island. Born

and bred there she was, and it’s her centre of everything. Sru got

it all out of her and about the pearls and fixed up with her to take

us back. Don’t know what he’s promised her, I reckon a few beads is

all she wants and all she’ll get, but that’s how it lies: we’ve only

got to push along due south by the compass and she’ll correct us,

leeway or set of current or any tomfool tricks of the needle don’t

matter to her. She never bothers about the compass, she sees where

she wants to go straight before her nose, same’s when land’s in

sight you see it and steer for it.”

“Can she steer?” asked Carlin, who had not been on deck the day Sru

set her at the wheel.

Rantan turned to where the girl was standing in the bow, called her

aft and gave the wheel over to her. When she had felt the ship,

standing with her head slightly uptilted, she altered the course a

few points; the _Kermadec_ had been off her path by that amount

owing to leeway or set of current.

From that moment the ship was in the hands of Le Moan, tireless as

only a being can be who exists always in the open air. She lived at

the wheel with intervals for sleep and rest, always finding on her

return the ship off her course, still heading south, but no longer

on that exact and miraculous line drawn by instinct between herself

and Karolin.

Error in the form of leeway or the influence of swell or the set of

current could never push the vessel to east or west of that line,

for the line moved with the ship, and as the journey shortened, like

a steadily shortening string tied to a ball in centrifugal motion,

it would bring the _Kermadec_ at last to Karolin, no matter how far

she was swung out of her course—blown fifty, a hundred, two hundred

miles to east or west it would not matter, her head would turn to

Karolin. The only flaw in that curious navigational instrument, the

mind of Le Moan, was its blindness to distance from Karolin, the

pull being the same for any distance, and had the island risen

suddenly before them on some dark night, she would have piled the

craft upon it unless warned by the sound of the reef.

* * * * *

Rantan kept the log going, he had a rough idea of the distance

between Karolin and Levua, but he did not try to explain the log to

Le Moan. If he had done so, his labour would have been wasted. Le

Moan had no idea of time as we conceive it, cut up into hours,

minutes and seconds. Time for her was a thing, not an abstract idea;

a thing ever present yet shifting in appearance—energy.

The recognition of Time is simply the recognition of the rhythm of

energy by energy itself. Le Moan recognized the rhythm in the tides,

in the sunrises and sunsets, in the going and coming of the fish

shoals, in slumber and waking life, but of those figments of man’s

intellect, hours, minutes, years, she had no idea. Always in touch

with reality, she had come in vague touch with the truth that there

is no past, no future—nothing ever but rhythmic alternations of the

present.

But, though unable to grasp the division of the real day into

empirical fractions, the compass, that triumph of man’s intellect,

presented no difficulties to her. When Rantan explained its pointing

to her she understood, the needle pointed away from Karolin.

The fleur-de-lys on the card, which seemed to her vaguely like the

head of a fish spear, pointed away from Karolin, that is away from

the south.

The compass card moved, she did not know that the compass card was

absolutely steady, that this appearance of movement was a delusion

caused by the altered course of the ship, that the ship pivoted on

the card not the card on the ship.

If she let the ship off her course to the east, the card moved and

her sense of direction told her at once that the fleur-de-lys was

still pointing away from Karolin. She spoke on this matter to Sru.

Sru, who had made the two voyages on ships and who was yet a capable

steersman, had quite taken for granted his first captain’s

explanation to him of the compass; there was a god in it that held

it just so and if Sru let the card wobble from the course set down,

the god would most likely come out of the binnacle and kick Sru into

the middle of next week. He was a Yankee skipper and he had made an

excellent steersman of Sru.

Le Moan understood; she believed in gods, from Naniwa the

shark-toothed one to Nan the benign: believed in them, just as white

men believe in their Gods—with reservations; but this was different

from anything she had hitherto conceived of a deity. He must be very

small to be contained in the binnacle, very small and set of purpose

always pointing with the spear head away from Karolin. Why?

Rantan had pointed down to the spear head and away north and told

her it always pointed there, always away from the direction of

Karolin. Why?

She had not asked him why the card moved, or seemed to move, Sru

having already told her.

The feeling came to her that the little imprisoned something was

against going to Karolin, but no one seemed to mind it, yet they

were always consulting it, Rantan when he took the wheel and Sru and

Maru, who was also a good steersman.

Every day at noon Rantan would appear on deck and take an

observation of the sun with Peterson’s sextant, whilst Carlin, if he

were on deck, would cuff himself on the thigh and turn and lean over

the rail to laugh unobserved.

Rantan was only fooling—keeping up appearances, so that the crew

might fancy him as good as Peterson in finding his way on the sea.

Sru had never told the others that they depended entirely on Le

Moan, the fact that she was a way-finder was known to them, but it

is as well for the after guard to keep up appearances. Rantan might

as well have been looking at the sun through a beer bottle for all

he knew of the matter, but the crew could not tell that. So, as a

navigator, he held a place in their minds above the girl.

At night when the binnacle lamp was lit and she happened to be at

the wheel, her eyes would wander to the trembling card. She would

put the ship a bit off its course just to see it move, noticing that

it always moved in the same manner in a reverse direction to the

alteration in course. If the head of the schooner turned to

starboard, the card would rotate to port and vice versa. She studied

its doings as one studies the doings of a strange animal, but she

never caught it altering its mind or its action.

At night it always seemed to her that the thing in the binnacle,

whether god or devil, was inimical to her, or at all events warning

her not to take the ship back to Karolin; by day it did not matter.

So under the stars and over the phosphorescent sea the _Kermadec_

headed south, ever south, the blazing dawns leaping over the port

rail and the gigantic sunsets dying with the blood of Titans the

skies to starboard, till one morning Le Moan, handing the wheel to

Rantan, pointed ahead and then walked forward. Her work was done.

Far ahead, paling the sky, shone the lagoon blaze of Karolin.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I—THE MAID OF AIOMA

Le Moan had left Karolin as a gull leaves the reef, unnoticed.

Not a soul had seen her go and it was not for some days that Aioma,

busy with the tree felling, recollected her existence, and the fact

that she had not followed him to the northern beach; then he sent a

woman across and she had returned with news that there was no trace

of the girl though her canoe was beached, also that there was no

trace of food having been recently cooked, and that the girl must

have been gone some days as there were no recent sand traces. The

wind even when it is only moderately strong blurs and obliterates

sand traces, and the woman judged that no one had been about on the

southern beach for some days. She had found tracks, however, for

which she could not account. The marks left by the boots of

Peterson, also the footsteps of the kanakas who had carried the

water casks disturbed her mind; they had nearly vanished, but it

seemed to her that many people had been there, a statement that left

Aioma cold.

Aioma had no time for fancies. If the girl were alive, she would

come across in her canoe, if death had come to her in any of the

forms in which death walked the reef, there was no use in troubling.

The call to the canoe building, resented at first, had given him new

youth, the spirit of the sea sang in him and the perfume of the

new-felled trees brought Uta Matu walking on the beach, and his

warriors.

Aioma, like Le Moan, had no use for the past or the future, the

burning present was everything.

Things that had been were to Aioma things floating alongside at a

greater or less distance, not astern. It was not the memory of Uta

Matu that walked the beach, but Uta Matu himself, untouchable,

because of distance, and only able to talk as he had talked in life,

but still there. Aioma had not to turn his head to look backwards at

him as we have to turn our heads to see our dead, he had only to

glance sideways, as it were. The things of yesterday, the day before

yesterday and the day before that, were beside Aioma at greater or

less distances, not behind him—all like surf riders on the same wave

with him and carried forward by the same flowing, yet ever

separating one from the other though keeping in line.

In the language of Karolin there was no word indicating our idea of

the past except the word akuma (distance) which might mean the

distance between a canoe and a canoe or between a happening of

to-day and of yesterday, and to the woman who judged that Le Moan

had not trod the beach for some days, “days” meant measures of

distance, not of time. Le Moan had been travelling, moving away from

the beach, not returning, whilst so many sunrises had occurred and

so many sunsets. She had been away a long distance, not a long time.

The speed of a man running a mile on Karolin had nothing to do with

the time occupied, it was a measure of his strength; the race was a

struggle between the man and the mile, and of the runners the

swiftest to a Karalonite was not the quickest but the strongest and

most agile; this profound truth was revealed to their instinctive

sight undimmed by the _muscæ volitantes_ which we call minutes,

seconds and hours, also the truth that when the race was over it was

not extinct but merely removed to a distance—just as a canoe

drifting from a canoe is not extinct though untouchable and out of

hail, and fading at last from sight through distance.

A dead man on Karolin was a man who had drifted away; he was there,

but at a distance, he might even return through the distance in a

stronger way than memory sight could reveal him! Many had. Uta Matu

himself had been seen in this way by several since he had drifted

away—he had come back once to tell Nalia the wife of Oti where the

sacred paddle was hid, the paddle which acted as the steer oar of

the biggest war canoe. He had forgotten that the war canoe had been

destroyed. Still he had returned. Though with a Melanesian strain in

them, unlike the Melanesians the men of Karolin had no belief that

the souls of ancestors become reincarnated in fish or birds, nor did

they believe in the influence of _Mana_, that mysterious spiritual

something believed in so widely by Polynesians and Melanesians

alike.

Memory, to the Karolinite, was a sort of sight which enabled the

living to look not over the past but the present, and see the people

and things that floated, not behind in a far-off past, but to right

and left in a far-off present.

Just as the surf rider sees his companions near and far, all borne

on the same wave, though some might be beyond reach of voice, and

some almost invisible through distance, the return of a spirit was

an actual moving of a distant one towards the seer, as though a surf

rider were to strike out and swim to a far-off fellow at right

angles to the flow of the wave.

So Aioma, as he worked, saw Uta Matu and his warriors and the old

canoe-builders, not as dead and gone figures, but as realities

though beyond touch and hail of voice and sight of the eye of flesh.

* * * * *

Since the war, years ago, between the northern and southern tribes,

a large proportion of the children born on the island had been boys,

whilst most of the women had developed manly attributes in

accordance with that natural law which rules in the remotest island

as well as in the highest and broadest civilization.

Aioma had no need of helpers, leaving out the boys, some dozen or

so, who could wield an ax as well as a man; but Aioma though his

heart and soul were in his work was no mere canoe-builder. He had in

him the making of a statesman. He would not let Dick work at the

building or do any work at all except fishing and fish spearing.

“You are the chief (Ompalu),” said Aioma as he sat of an evening

before the house of Uta Matu, now the house of Dick. “You are young

and do not know all the ways of things, but I love you as a son; I

do not know what is in you that is above us, but the sea I love is

in your eyes. The sea, our father, sent you, but you have still to

learn the ways of the land, where the chief does no work.” Then he

would grunt to himself and rock as he sat, and then his voice rising

to a whine, “Could the people raise their heads to one who labours

with them, or would they bow their heads so that he might put his

foot on their necks?” Then casting his eyes down he would talk to

himself, the words so run together as to be indistinguishable; but

always, Katafa noticed, his eyes would return again and again to the

little ships in the shadow of the house, the model ships made by

Kearney long ago—the vestiges of a civilization of which Dick and

Aioma and Katafa knew nothing, or only that the ships, the big ships

of which these were the likenesses, were dangerous and the men in

them evil and to be avoided or destroyed if possible.

The _Portsey_ of long ago that had fired a cannon shot and destroyed

Katafa’s canoe, the schooner that had brought the Melanesians to

Palm Tree, the Spanish ship that had been sunk in Karolin lagoon and

the whaler that had come after her, all these had burnt into the

minds of Dick, Aioma and Katafa the fact that something of which

they did not know the name (but which was civilization), was out

there beyond the sea line, something that, octopus-like, would at

times thrust out a feeler in the form of a ship, an ayat destructive

and, if possible, to be destroyed.

_Ayat_ was the name given by Karolin to the great burgomaster gulls

that were to the small gulls what schooners are to canoes, and so

anything in the form of a ship was an _ayat_, that is to say, a

thing carrying with it all the propensities of a robber and a

murderer; for the great gulls would rob the lesser gulls of their

food and devour their chicks and fight and darken the sunshine of

the reef with their wings.

The comparison was not a compliment to the Pacific traders or their

ships or the civilization that had sent them forth to prey on the

world, but it was horribly apposite.

And yet the little _ayats_ in the shadow of the house had for Aioma

an attraction beyond words. They were as fascinating as sin. This

old child after a hard day’s work would sometimes dream of them in

his sleep; dream that he was helping to sail them on the big rock

pool, as he sometimes did in reality. The frigate, the full-rigged

ship, the schooner and the whale man, all had cruised in the rock

pool which seemed constructed by nature as a model testing tank;

indeed the first great public act of Dick as ruler of the

Karolinites had been a full review of this navy on the day after he

had fetched Aioma from the southern beach. Aioma, fascinated by the

sight of the schooner which Dick had shown him on his landing, had

insisted on seeing the others launched and the whole population had

stood round ten deep with the little children between the women’s

legs, all with their eyes fixed on the pretty sight. The strangest

sight—for Kearney the illiterate and ignorant had managed to

symbolize the two foundations of civilization, war and trade; and

here in little yet in essence lay the ships of Nelson and the ships

of Villeneuve: the great wool ships, the _Northumberland_ that had

brought Dick’s parents to Palm Tree, the whalers of Martha’s

Vineyard and the sandalwood schooners, those first carriers of the

disease of the white man.

To Aioma the schooner was the most fascinating. He knew the whaler

with her try works and her heavy davits and her squat build; he had

seen her before in the whaler whose brutal crew had landed and been

driven off. He knew the ship, he had seen its likeness in the

Spanish ship of long ago; the frigate intrigued him, but the

schooner took his heart—it was not only that he understood her rig

and way of sailing better than the rig and way of sailing of the

others, it was more than that. Aioma was an instinctive ship lover,

and to the lover of ships, the schooner has most appeal, for the

schooner is of all things that float the most graceful and the most

beautiful; and in contrast to her canvas, the canvas of your square

rigged ship becomes dishcloths hung out to dry.

He brooded on this thing over which Kearney had expended his most

loving care, and in which nothing was wanting. He understood the

topping lifts that supported the main boom, the foresail, the use of

the standing rigging. Kearney, through his work, was talking to him

and just as Kearney had explained this and that to Dick, so Dick was

explaining it to Aioma. Truly a man can speak though dead, even as

Kearney was speaking now.

The method of reefing a sail was unknown to Aioma; a canoe sail was

never reefed, reduction of canvas was made by tying the head of the

sail up to spill the wind. Fore canvas was unknown to Aioma, but he

understood.

The subconscious mathematician in him that made him able to build

great canoes capable of standing heavy weather and carrying forty or

fifty men apiece, understood all about the practice of the business,

though he had never heard of centres of rotation, absolute or

relative velocities, of impelling powers, or the laws of the

collision of bodies; of inertia or pressures of resistance or

squares of velocity or series of inclinations.

Squatting on his hams before the little model of the _Rarotanga_, he

knew nothing of these things and yet he knew that the schooner was

good, that she would sail close to the wind with little leeway when

the wind was on the beam, that the rudder was better than the

steering paddle, that the sail area though great would not capsize

her, that she was miles ahead of anything he had ever made in the

form of a ship. That the maker of the _ayat_ was a genius beside

whom he was a duffer, unknowing that Kearney was absolutely without

inventive genius, and that the schooner was the work of a million

men extending over three thousand years.

Katafa sitting beside Dick would watch Aioma as he brooded and

played with the thing. It had no fascination for her. The little

ships had always repelled her if anything. They were the only

dividing point between her and Dick—she could not feel his pleasure

or interest in them, and from this fact possibly arose a vague

foreboding that perhaps some day in some way the little ships might

separate them. When a woman loves, she can become jealous of a man’s

pipe, of his tennis racket, of his best friend, of anything that she

can’t share and which occupies his attention at times more than she

does.

But the essence of jealousy is concentration, and Katafa’s green eye

was cast not so much on the whole fleet as on the little schooner.

This was Dick’s favourite, as it was Aioma’s.

* * * * *

One night, long after the vanishing of Le Moan, so long that every

one had nearly forgotten her, Aioma had a delightful dream.

He dreamt that he was only an inch high and standing on the

schooner’s deck. Dick reduced to the same stature was with him, and

half a dozen others, and the schooner was in the rock pool that had

spread to the size of Karolin lagoon. Oh, the joy of that business!

They were hauling up the mainsail and up it went to the pull of the

halyards just as he had often hauled it with the pull of his finger

and thumb on the tiny halyards of the model; but this was a real

great sail and men had to pull hard to raise it and there it was

set. Then the foresail went up and the jib was cast loose and Aioma,

mad with joy, was at the tiller, the tiller that he had often moved

with his finger and thumb.

Then pressed by the wind she began to heel over and the

outrigger—she had taken on an outrigger—went into the air; he could

see the outrigger gratings with drinking-nuts and bundles of food

tied to it after the fashion of sea-going canoes, and he shouted to

his companions to climb on to it and bring it down. Then he awoke,

sweating but dazzled by the first part of the dream.

Two days later a boy came running and shouting to him as he was at

work; and turning, Aioma saw the fulfilment of his vision. Borne by

the flooding tide with all sails drawing and a bone in her teeth,

the little schooner swelled to a thousand times her size, was gaily

entering the lagoon. It was the _Kermadec_.

CHAPTER II—WAR

Rantan was at the wheel, and Le Moan forward, with swelling heart,

stood watching as they passed the break, the Gates of Morning,

through which the tide was flooding like a mill-race. She saw the

southern beach still deserted and the northern beach where the trees

sheltered the village from sight. Not a sign of life was to be seen

in all that vast prospect of locked lagoon and far-running reefs

till from the distant trees a form appeared—Aioma.

After him came others till the beach close to the trees was thronged

by a crowd even in movement like a colony of ants disturbed and

showing now against the background of the trees the glint of spears.

Le Moan’s heart sank under a sudden premonition of evil. She turned

and glanced to where Rantan at the wheel was staring ahead and

Carlin close by him was shading his eyes.

Rantan had not expected this. He had fancied Karolin deserted. Sru

had said nothing of what Le Moan had told him about Taori and he

said nothing now as he stood with eyes wrinkled against the sun

blaze from the lagoon. Taori, he had gathered to be some kanaka boy,

a love of Le Moan’s who, so far from giving trouble, would welcome

her back—but that crowd, its movements and the flash of the thready

spears! He made vague answers to the questions flung at him by the

mate, then at the order to let go the anchor he ran forward whilst

Carlin dived below, returning with two of the Vetirli rifles and

ammunition. Then as the anchor fell and the _Kermadec_ swung to her

moorings on the flood, nose to the break, Rantan, leaving the wheel

and standing with compressed lips, his hand on the after rail and

his eyes on the crowd, suddenly broke silence and turned to Carlin.

“We don’t want any fighting,” said he. “We’ve got to palaver them.

It’s a jolt. Peterson said the place was empty, and I reckon he lied

or else he didn’t keep his eyes skinned, but whether or no we’ve got

to swallow it. Worst is we’ve no trade to speak of, nothing but

sandalwood. No matter—we don’t want nothing but to be left alone.

Order out the boat and we’ll row off to them, and keep those guns

hid.”

He went below for Peterson’s revolver which Carlin had forgotten,

and when he returned, the boat was down with four kanakas for crew

and Carlin in the stern sheets; he followed and took his place by

the beachcomber and the boat pushed off.

He had made a great blunder, absolutely forgotten the existence of

Le Moan and her use as an ambassador, but the mind of Rantan was

working against odds.

He had never consciously worried about Peterson. The dead Peterson

was done with out of count, and yet away in the back of his mind

Peterson existed, not as a form, not even as a shadow, but as the

vaguest, vaguest hint of possible trouble, some day. Steering, or

smoking below, or enjoying in prospect the profits to be got out of

the venture, Rantan would be conscious of a something that was

marring his view of things; something that, seizing it with his

mind, would prove to be nothing more than just a feeling that

trouble might come some day owing to Peterson.

On sailing into the lagoon, the wind across that great blue pearl

garden had swept his mind clear of all trace of worry. Here was

success at last, wealth for the taking and no one to watch the taker

or interfere with his doings. No one but the gulls. A child on that

beach would have shattered the desolation and destroyed the feeling

of security and detachment from the world.

Then the trees had given up their people and to Rantan it was almost

as though Peterson himself had reappeared.

He had reckoned to get rid of the crew of the _Kermadec_ in his own

given time after he had worked them for his profit, to get rid of

Carlin, of his own name, of everything and anything that could

associate him with this venture, and here were hundreds of witnesses

where he had expected to find none but the gull that cannot talk.

Truly it was a jolt! As the boat drew on for the shore, the crowd on

the beach moved and spread and contracted and then became still, the

spears all in one clump.

There were at least thirty of the boys of Karolin able to hurl a

spear with the precision of a man, and when Aioma had sighted the

schooner and given the alarm, Dick, who had been on the outer beach,

had called them together. Taiepa, the son of Aioma, had distributed

the spears and Aioma himself in a few rapid words had fired the

hearts of the tribe.

The strangers must not be allowed to land. For a moment, but only a

moment, he took the command of things from Dick’s hands. “They came

before,” said Aioma, “when I was a young man, and the great Uta

knowing them to be men full of evil would not allow them to land but

drove them off, and yet again they came in a canoe bigger than the

first (the Spanish ship), and they landed and fought with Uta and he

killed them and burnt their great canoe—and yet again they have come

and yet again we must fight. We are few, but Taori in himself is

many.”

“They shall not land,” said Dick, “even if I face them alone.”

That was the temper of Karolin and it voiced itself as the boat drew

closer to the beach in a cry that rang across the water, harsh and

sudden, making the kanaka rowers pause and turn their heads.

“They mean fighting,” said Carlin, bending towards one of the rifles

lying on the bottom boards.

“Leave that gun alone,” said Rantan. He ordered the rowers to pull a

bit closer, rising up and standing in the stern sheets and waving

his hand to the beach crowd as though intimating that he wished to

speak to them.

The only answer was a spear flung by Taiepa that came like a flash

of light and fell into the water true of aim but short by a few

yards. The rowers stopped again and backed water. Whilst Carlin

picked up the floating spear as a trophy and put it with the rifles,

Rantan sat down. Then he ordered them to pull ahead altering the

helm so that the bow turned away from the shore and to the west.

As they moved along the beach the distant crowd followed, but the

mate did not heed it; he was busy taking notes of the lie of the

land, and the position of the trees. The trees, though deep enough

to hide the village from the break, were nowhere dense enough to

give efficient cover; the reef just here was very broad but very

low. A man would be a target—the head and shoulders of him at

least—even if he were on the outer coral.

Rantan having obtained all the information he required on these

matters altered the course of the boat and made back for the ship.

“Aren’t you going to have one single shot at them?” asked the

disgusted Carlin.

“You wait a while,” replied the other.

When they reached the _Kermadec_ he ordered the men to remain in the

boat, and going on board dropped down below with his companion. He

went to the locker where the ammunition was stored and counted the

boxes. There were two thousand rounds.

“I reckon that will do,” said Rantan. “You said you were a good

shot. Well, you’ve got a chance to prove your words. I’m going to

shoot up this lagoon.”

“From the ship?”

“Ship, no, the boat’s good enough; they have no cover worth anything

and only a few old fishing canoes that aren’t good enough to attack

us in.”

“Well, I’m not saying you’re wrong,” said Carlin, “but seems to me

it will be more than a one-day job.”

“We aren’t hustled for time,” replied the other, “not if it took

weeks.”

They came on deck, each carrying a box of ammunition. the spear

salved by Carlin had been brought on board by him and stood against

the rail. Neither man noticed it, nor did they notice Le Moan

crouched in the doorway of the galley and seeming to take shelter

from the sun.

Carlin who had ordered a water breaker to be filled, lowered it

himself into the boat, then getting in followed by the mate the boat

pushed off, Sru rowing stern oar and Rantan at the yoke lines.

It was close on midday and the great sun directly overhead poured

his light on the lagoon; beyond the crowd and the trees on the

northern beach the coral ran like a white road for miles and miles,

to be lost in a smoky shimmer, and from the reef came the near and

far voice of the breakers on the outer beach.

The crew left on board, some six in number, had dropped into the

foc’sle to smoke and talk. Le Moan could hear their voices as she

rose and stood at the rail, her eyes fixed on the boat and her mind

divided between the desire to cast herself into the water and swim

to the reef and the instinct which told her to stay and watch and

wait.

She knew what a rifle was. She had seen Peterson practising with one

of the Viterlis at a floating bottle. There were rifles in the boat,

but it was not the rifles that filled her mind with a foreboding

amounting to terror, it was Rantan’s face as he returned and as he

left again. And she could do nothing.

Carlin, before lowering the water breaker had handed an ax into the

boat. Why? She could not tell, nor why the water breaker had been

taken. It was all part of something that she could not understand,

something that was yet evil and threatening to Taori.

She could not make his figure out amongst the crowd, it was too far,

and yet he was surely there.

She watched.

The boat drew on towards the beach. Then at the distance of a couple

of hundred yards the oarsmen ceased rowing and she floated idly and

scarcely drifting—for it was slack water, the flood having ceased.

One might have thought the men on board of her were fishing or just

lazing in the sun—anything but the truth.

Then Le Moan saw a tiny puff of smoke from the boat’s side, a figure

amongst the crowd on the beach sprang into the air and fell, and on

the still air came the far-off crack of a rifle.

Carlin had got his man. He was an indifferent shot but he could

scarcely have missed as he fired into the brown of the crowd.

Rantan, no better a shot, fired immediately after and by some

miracle nobody was hit.

Then as Le Moan watched, she saw the crowd break to pieces and

vanish amongst the trees, leaving only two figures on the beach, one

lying on the sands and one standing erect and seeming to threaten

the boat with upflung arm. It was Taori. Her sight as though it had

gained telescopic power told her at once that it was Taori.

She saw him bend and catch up the fallen figure in his arms and as

he turned to the trees with it, the boat fired again, but missed

him. Another shot rang out before he reached the trees, but he

vanished unscathed, and quiet fell on the beach and lagoon, broken

only by the clamour of gulls disturbed by the firing.

Le Moan changed her place, the ebb was beginning to run and the

schooner to swing with it. She came forward and took her position

near the foc’sle head, her eyes still fixed on the boat and beach.

From the foc’sle came the sound of an occasional snore from the

kanakas who had turned in and were sleeping like dogs.

Four fishing canoes lay on the sands near the trees, and now as she

watched, she saw the boat under way again pulling in to the beach.

The rowers tumbled out and the boat pushed off a few yards with only

the two white men in her whilst the landing party made for the

canoes and began to smash them up.

Sru—she could tell him by his size—wielded the ax, two others helped

in the business with great lumps of loose coral, whilst the fourth

stood watch.

It took time, for they did their work thoroughly, breaking the

outriggers, breaking the outrigger poles, breaking the canoe bodies,

working with the delight that children take in sheer destruction.

The god Destruction was abroad on Karolin beach and lagoon. Though

without a temple or a place in mythology of all the gods, he is the

most powerful, the most agile and quick of eye, and the swiftest to

come when called.

Le Moan watching, saw the four men on the beach stand contemplating

their work before returning to the boat.

Then she saw one of them throw up his hands and fall as if felled by

an ax. The others turned to run and the foremost of them tripped as

a man trips on a kink in a carpet and fell; of the two others one

pitched and turned a complete somersault as though some unseen

jiu-jitsu player had dealt with him, and the fourth crumpled like a

suddenly closed concertina.

Le Moan’s heart sprang alive in her. She knew. The terrible arrows

of Karolin poisoned with argora that kills with the swiftness and

more than certainty of a bullet had, fired from the trees, done

their work.

The spear was the favourite weapon of Karolin, not the bow. The bow

was used only on occasions and at long distances. When they came

down to resist the landing of Rantan, they had come armed with

spears; driven to the shelter of the trees, Aioma, the artful one,

had remembered the bows stowed in one of the canoe houses. It was

years since the arrows had been poisoned, but the poison of argora

never dies, nor does it weaken with time.

In four swings of a pendulum the arrows had done their work, and

four upstanding men lay stretched on the beach, motionless, for this

terrible poison striking at the nerve centres kills in two beats of

the pulse.

Rantan and Carlin, close enough to see the flight of the arrows, put

wildly out, tugging at the heavy oars and rowing for their lives; a

few hundred yards off shore they paused, rested on their oars and

took counsel.

It was a bad business.

Armed with rifles and with easy range they had only managed to bag

one of the enemy, whereas...!

“Hell,” said Carlin.

The sweat was running down his broad face. Rantan, brooding, said

nothing for a moment. Then suddenly he broke silence.

“We’ve dished their canoes, they can’t come out and attack us; we’ve

got the range over them, those arrows are no use at any distance;

they live mostly on fish, those chaps, and they can’t come out and

fish, having no canoes, and we aren’t hurried for time.” He seemed

talking to himself, adding up accounts, whilst Carlin, who had

picked up one of the rifles, sat with it across his knees, his face

turned shoreward where on the beach lay the four dead men, and save

for the gulls not a sign of life. The boat on the ebb tide was

drifting slowly back in the direction of the schooner.

“We’ve just got to row up along,” went on Rantan, “and get level

with the trees. Those trees don’t give much shelter across the reef.

Their houses wouldn’t stop a bullet from a popgun. Take your oar,

when we’ve got our position we can anchor and take things quiet.”

Carlin, putting his gun down, took his oar and they began pulling

the heavy boat against the current till they got opposite the

village and the trees.

Then within rifle shot, but beyond the reach of arrow flight, they

dropped the anchor and the boat swung to the current and broadside

to the shore.

Rantan was right—the trees though dense enough in patches were not a

sufficient cover for a crowd of people, and the houses were death

traps. From where they lay they could see the little houses clear

marked against the sky beyond and the house of Uta Matu with the

post beside it on top of which was the head of Nan, god of the

coconut trees, Nan the benign watching over his people, the puraka

beds and the pandanus palms.

Of old there had been two gods of Karolin, Nan the benign and Naniwa

the ferocious.

Le Moan’s mother had been Le Jennabon, daughter of Le Juan,

priestess of Naniwa the shark-toothed god. On the death of Le Juan,

Naniwa had seemed to depart, for Karolin. Had he? Do the gods ever

die whilst there is a human heart to give them sanctuary?

Nan the benign, grinning on his post—he was carved from a

coconut—was set in such a way that his face was turned to the east,

that is to say towards the gates of morning. He was placed in that

way according to ritual. Chance had anchored the schooner in his

line of vision. Hand helpless, as are most benign things, poor old

Nan could do nothing to protect the people he no doubt loved. He

could keep the weazle-teazle worms away from the puraka plants and

he could help a bit in bringing up rain, and it was considered that

he could even protect the canoes from the cobra worms that devour

planking; but against the wickedness of man and Viterli rifles he

was useless.

And yet to-day as he gazed across at the schooner, his grin was in

no way diminished, and as the wind stirred the cane post he waggled

his head jauntily, perhaps because on the deck of the schooner he

saw the granddaughter of the priestess of the shark-toothed god and

said to himself with a thrill and a shudder: “Naniwa has returned.”

In the old days when a man revenged himself for some wrong, or,

going mad, dashed out the brains of another with a club, he was

supposed to be possessed by Naniwa, for just as Nan was the minister

of agriculture, the shark-toothed one was the minister of justice.

He was in a way the law executing criminals and also making

criminals for execution, just as the law does with us.

Anyhow and at all events and bad as he may have been, he was the

sworn enemy of foreigners; he had inspired Uta Matu to attack the

whaler and he had inspired Le Juan in calling for the attack on the

Spanish ship of long ago and to-day perhaps he had inspired Aioma in

resisting the landing of these newcomers. The battle was still in

the balance, but there on the deck of the anchored schooner stood

the granddaughter of his priestess darkly brooding, helpless for the

moment, but watching and waiting to strike.

No wonder that Nan grinned and waggled his head at her with a

click-clocking noise, for the coconut had worked a bit loose on its

stick.

* * * * *

Rantan took his seat on the bottom boards in the stern, resting his

rifle comfortably on the gunnel; Carlin, going forward, did the

same. The wind which had risen and which was moving Nan on his post,

stirred the foliage, and between the boles and over the bushes of

mammee apple the shifting shadows danced and the shafts of light

showered, but sign of human being there was none.

The crafty Aioma, through the mouth of Dick, had ordered all the

children and young people into the mammee apple and the women into

the houses whilst he and Dick had taken shelter behind trees, two

vast trees that stood like giants amidst the coconuts and pandanas

palms, brothers of the trees growing further along the reef that

were being used for canoe building.

Aioma knew from old experience what white men could do with guns,

but he did not know that a house wall capable of stopping an arrow

was incapable of stopping a rifle bullet.

Rantan seeing nothing else to fire at aimed at one of the houses,

fired, and as the smoke cleared saw, literally, the house burst

open.

The women poured out through the broken canes, made as if to run

along the reef to the west and were suddenly headed back by a figure

armed with a canoe paddle. It was Dick. He drove them into the

mammee apple, where they took cover with the others, then running to

the second house of refuge, whilst the bullets whizzed around him,

he bade the women in it lie down, calling to the other hidden women

to do the same, and then taking shelter himself.

But the blunder of Aioma was fatal. The men in the boat knew now for

certain that the mammee apple thickets were packed, that there were

no pot holes or crevasses of any account on the seaward side of the

reef, that they had the population of Karolin corralled.

Resting his rifle carefully on the gunnel, Rantan led off. He

couldn’t well miss, and the deafening explosion of the rifle was

followed by a shriek and a movement in the distant bushes where some

unfortunate had been hit, and, striving to rise, had been pulled

down by his or her companions.

Carlin laughed and fired and evidently missed, to judge by the

silence that followed the shot.

Rantan had some trouble with a cartridge. His face had quite changed

within the last few minutes and since the corralling of the natives

was assured. It was like a mask and the upper lip projected as

though suddenly swollen by some injury. He flung the defective

cartridge away, loaded with another and fired.

The shot was followed by the cry of a woman and the wailing of a

child. One could guess that the child had been hit, not the woman it

belonged to, for the wailing kept on and on, a sound shocking in

that solitude where nothing was to be seen but the empty beach, the

line of mammee apple and the glimpse of empty sea beyond and through

the trees.

Carlin, more brutal but less terrible than Rantan, laughed. He was

about to fire when a form suddenly moving and breaking from the

trees took his eye and stayed his hand.

It was Dick. In his left hand he held a bow and in his right a sheaf

of arrows. Aioma had directed that before taking cover the bows and

arrows should be laid by the westermost of the two big trees that he

and Dick had chosen for shelter. Dick had only to stretch out his

arm to seize the weapons and armed with them he came, leaving

shelter behind him, right into the open and on to the sands.

At the cry of the first victim, he had started and shivered all over

like a dog; at the voice of the child thought left him, or only the

thought that there, amongst the bushes with the children and the

women, was Katafa; seizing a bow and a handful of the arrows, he

left the tree and came out on to the beach and right down to the

waterside.

There were seven arrows. He cast them on the sand, picked up one and

fixed it with the notch in the bow-string; as he did so Carlin,

altering his aim from the bushes to this new target, fired. The sand

spurted a yard to the right of the bowman, who, drawing the arrow

till the barb nearly touched the bow shaft, loosed it.

It fell true in line but yards short, and as it flicked the water,

Rantan’s bullet came plung into the sand and only three inches from

Dick’s right foot.

Dick laughed. Like Rantan’s, his face was transfigured.

He had come with no instinct but to draw the fire away from the

bushes to himself. Now, in a moment, he had forgotten everything but

the boat and the men in the boat and the burning hatred that, could

it have been loosed, would have destroyed them like a thunderbolt.

Bending and picking up another arrow he loosed it, increasing the

elevation. This time it did not fall short, it went over the boat,

zipping down and into the water from the blue several yards away in

the lagoon side.

“Hell,” said Carlin.

He dropped the rifle in his hands and seized on the anchor rope,

dragging up the anchor, whilst Rantan, firing hurriedly and without

effect, seized an oar.

Poisoned arrows even when shot wildly and at random are not things

to be played with, and as they rowed, the fear of death in their

hearts, came another arrow—wide but only a yard to starboard; then

came another short and astern.

“We’re out of range,” said Carlin. They let the boat drift a moment.

Another arrow came, but well astern.

Then with a yell as if the silent devil in the soul of him had

spoken at last, Rantan sprang to his feet and shook his fist at the

figure on the beach.

Then they dropped the anchor and took up the rifles. The boat was

out of arrow range, but the bushes were still a clear target for the

rifles.

Like artists who know their limitations, the two gunmen turned their

attention from the single figure on the beach to the greater target,

and Dick, who on seeing the boat draw off beyond range, stood

without shooting any more, victorious for the moment but waiting.

He saw the anchor cast over, he saw the boatmen taking up their

positions again, he saw the thready tubes of the guns and knew that

the firing was about to recommence, then, bending, he seized an

arrow and clasping it with the bow in his left hand, rushed into the

water. Swimming with his right arm, he headed straight for the boat.

Dick in the water was a fish. To get close to the boat, and,

treading water or even floating, loose the arrow at short range, was

his object. He was no longer a man nor a human being, but implacable

enmity, reasonless energy directed by hate.

Rantan and Carlin had fired before they saw what was coming, a head,

an arm half submerged and a bow skittering along the water. Carlin’s

jaws snapped together, he tried to extract the cartridge case from

his gun, fumbled and failed.

Rantan, less rattled and quicker with his fingers, extracted and

reloaded, aimed and fired and missed.

“Fire, you damned fool,” he said to the other, but the game was

lost—Carlin was at the anchor rope, the memory of the four dead men

on the beach slain by the poisoned arrows of Karolin had him in its

grip as it had the other, who with one last glance at the coming

terror dropped his gun and seized an oar.

They were beaten, put to flight—if only for the moment.

CHAPTER III—THE RETURN TO THE _KERMADEC_

As they rowed making for the schooner with the light of the

westering sun in their eyes, they could see the head of the swimmer

as he made back for the shore, and away on the beach near the trees

they could see the great gulls congregated around the forms of the

four dead men, a boiling of wings above the reef line and against

the evening blue of the sky.

Predatory gulls when feeding on a carcase do not sit and gorge, they

are always in motion more or less, especially when they are in great

numbers as now. Far at sea and maybe from a hundred miles away

guests were still arriving for the banquet spread by death—late

comers whose voices went before them sharp on the evening wind, or

came up against it weak, remote and filled with suggestions of

hunger and melancholy.

“God’s truth,” said the beachcomber, spitting as he rowed.

They were coming on towards the ship and it was the first word

spoken.

They had defeat behind them, and even if it were only momentary

defeat, ahead of them lay explanations. How would the remainder of

the crew take the killing of Sru and his companions? There was also

the fact that they had lost four divers.

The _Kermadec_ was close to them now but not a soul showed on her

deck, not even Le Moan, who on sighting the returning boat had

slipped into the galley where she sat crouched in a corner by the

copper with eyes closed as if asleep.

She had told the fellows below that she would warn them on the

return of the boat. She had forgotten her promise, her mind was far

away, travelling, circling in a nebulous world like a bird lost in a

fog, questing for a point to rest on. She knew well that though the

boat was returning, this was not the end of things. To-morrow it

would all begin again, the destroyed canoes, the implacable firing

from the boat; the face of Rantan as he pushed off all told her

this. Crouching, with closed eyes, she heard the oars, the slight

grinding of the boat as it came alongside and the thud of bare feet

as Carlin came over the side on to the deck. No voices.

The beachcomber had taken in the situation at a glance, the crew

were down below, smoking or sleeping, leaving the schooner to look

after herself. It was just as well—down there they would have heard

nothing of the distant firing, seen nothing of the killing. He knew

kanakas, knew as well as though he had been told that as soon as he

and Rantan had pushed off, the crew had taken charge of the foc’sle.

Leaving Rantan to tie up, he went below to the cabin for some food,

where, a moment later, the mate joined him.

In a few minutes, their hunger satisfied, they began to speak and

almost at once they were wrangling.

“Shooting up the lagoon—well, you’ve shot it up and much good it has

done us,” said Carlin. “I’m not against killing, but seems to me the

killing has been most on their side. What’s the use of talking? It

will take a year at this game to do any good and how are you to

manage it from the boat?”

“To-morrow,” said Rantan, “I’ll move the ship up, anchor her off

that village and then we’ll see. Chaps won’t come swimming out to

attack a ship, and we can pot them from the deck till they put their

hands up. We’ve no time to wipe them all off, but I reckon a few

days of the business will break them up and once a kanaka is broken,

he’s broken.”

Carlin without replying got into his bunk and stretching at full

length, lit his pipe; as he flung the Swedish match box to Rantan, a

sound from the deck above like the snap of a broken stick, made him

raise his eyes towards the skylight. Rantan, the box in his hand

paused for a moment, then the sound not being repeated, he lit his

pipe.

Throwing the box back to the other he came on deck.

The deck was still empty, but the spear that had been leaning

against the rail was gone. Rantan did not notice this, he came

forward passing the galley without looking in and stopped at the

foc’sle hatch to listen.

One of the strange things about sea-going kanakas is their instinct

to get together in any old hole or corner out of sight of the deck,

the sea, the land and the sky, and in an atmosphere that would choke

a European, frowst.

The fellows below were just waking up after a catnap and the fume of

Blue Bird, the old tobacco of the old Pacific days sold at two cents

a stick, was rising from the hatch mixed with the sound of voices

engaged in talk; they had heard nothing of the firing, if they had

they would not have bothered; they had no idea of the fate of Sru

and his companions, if they had they would not have much cared. Time

was, for these men, the moment; unspeculative as birds they took

life with a terrible light-heartedness scarcely human in its

acceptance of all things: blows or bananas, the righteousness or the

rascality of the white man.

Rantan rapped on the hatch and called on them to tumble up. Then

when he had them all on deck, the sunset on their faces and fear of

what he might say to them for leaving the schooner to take charge of

herself in their hearts, he began to talk to them as only he knew

how.

Not a word of abuse. The natives of this island were bad men who had

treacherously killed Sru and his companions who had landed to talk

with them. In return, he, Rantan, had killed many of them and

destroyed their canoes. To-morrow he intended to bring the ship

further up towards the village, and with the speak-sticks kill more

of them. Meanwhile the crew could go below and enjoy themselves as

they liked, leaving one on deck to keep watch on the weather. There

was no danger from the beach as all the canoes had been destroyed.

Then he dismissed them and went aft.

CHAPTER IV—THE MIND OF KANOA AND THE RISING MOON

The crew, numbering now only six, and deprived of the leadership of

Sru, watched Rantan go aft and disappear down the saloon hatch, then

they fell to discussing the fate of Sru and his companions. The lost

men were from Soma, of the remainder two were from Nanuti in the

Gilberts, the rest were Paumotuans hailing from Vana Vana and

Haraikai. The loss of the others did not affect them much, nor did

they speculate as to the possibility of their own destruction at the

hands of the natives of Karolin; they had little imagination and big

belief in Rantan, and, having talked for a while and chosen a man to

keep watch, they dived below. Then dark came and the stars.

Kanoa was the man chosen, a pure Polynesian from Vana Vana, not more

than eighteen, slim and straight as a dart, and with lustrous eyes

that shone now in the dusk as he turned them on Le Moan, the only

living creature on deck beside himself.

He had been watching Le Moan for days, for weeks, with an

ever-increasing interest. She had repelled him at first despite her

beauty, and owing to her strange ways. He had never seen a girl like

her at Vana Vana nor at Tuta Kotu, and to his simple mind, she was

something more than a girl, maybe something less, a creature that

loved to brood alone and live alone, perchance spirit; who could

tell, for it was well known at Vana Vana that spirits of men and

women were sometimes met with at sea on desolate reefs and atolls,

ghosts of drowned people who would even light fires to attract ships

and canoes and be taken off just as Le Moan had been taken off by

Pete’son, and who always brought disaster to the ship or canoe

foolish enough to rescue them.

Sru had kicked him for speaking like this in the foc’sle. After

Pete’son had been left behind at Levua, supposedly killed by Tahuku

and his followers, Kanoa, leaning on his side in his bunk and pipe

in mouth had said: “It is the girl or she that looks like a girl but

is maybe the spirit of some woman lost at sea. She was alone on that

island and Pete’son brought her on board and now, look—what has

become of Pete’son?” Upon which Sru had pulled him out of his bunk

and kicked him. All the same Kanoa’s mind did not leave hold of the

idea. He was convinced that there was more to come in the way of

disaster, and now, look, Sru gone and three men with him!

But Kanoa was only eighteen and Le Moan for all her dark beauty and

brooding ways and mysterious habits was, at all events, fashioned in

the form of a girl, and once in a roll of the ship Le Moan slipping

on the spray-wet deck would have fallen, only for Kanoa who caught

her, almost naked as she was, in his arms, and she was delicious.

Ghost or not there began to grow in him a desire for her that was

held in check only by his fear of her. A strange condition of mind

brought about by the conflict of two passions.

To-night close to her on the deserted deck, the warm air bringing

her perfume to him and her body outlined against the starlit lagoon,

he was only prevented from seizing her in his arms by the thought of

Sru and his companions dead on the reef over there; dead as

Pete’son, dead as he—Kanoa—might be to-morrow, and through the wiles

of this girl so like a spirit, this spirit so like a girl.

He felt like a man swimming against the warm current that sweeps

round the shoulder of Haraikai, swimming bravely and seeming to make

good way, yet all the time being swept steadily out to sea to drown

and die.

Suddenly—and just as he was about to fling out his hands, seize her

and capture her in a burning embrace, mouth to mouth, breast to

breast, and arms locked round her body—suddenly the initiative was

taken from him and Le Moan, gliding up to him, placed a hand upon

his shoulder.

Next moment she had pressed him down to the deck and he was

squatting opposite to her, almost knee to knee, love for the moment

forgotten.

Forgotten even though, leaning forward and placing her hand on his

shoulder, she brought her face almost in touch with his.

“Kanoa,” said Le Moan, in a voice just audible to him above the

rumble of the reef, “Sru and the men who were with him have been

slain by Rantan, and the big red man, not by the men of Karolin.

To-morrow you will die, I heard him say so to the big man, you and

Timau and Tahuku and Poni and Nauta and Tirai.” She told this lie

with steady eyes fixed upon him, eyes that saw nothing but Taori,

the man whose life she was trying to save. No wonder that love

dropped out of the heart of Kanoa and that the sweat showed on his

face in the starlight. It was the first time that she had spoken to

him more than a word or two, and what she said in that swift clear

whisper passed through him like a sword. He believed her. His fear

of her was the basis of his belief. He was listening to the voice of

a spirit, not the voice of a girl.

He who a moment ago had been filled with passionate desire, felt now

that he was sitting knee to knee with Death.

Such was the conviction carried by her words and voice that he would

have risen up and run away and hidden, only that he could not move.

“Unless,” said Le Moan, “we strike them to-night, to-morrow we will

all be killed.”

Kanoa’s teeth began to chatter. His frightened mind flew back to

Vana Vana and the happy days of his youth. He wished that he had

never embarked on this voyage that had led him to so many strange

passes. Strike them! It was easy to say that, but who would dare to

strike Ra’tan?

He was seated facing aft and he could see the vague glow of the

saloon skylight golden in the silver of the star-shine. Down below

there in the lamplight Ra’tan and the red bearded one were no doubt

talking and making their plans. Strike them! That was easily said.

Then, all at once, he stopped shivering and his teeth came together

with a click. The light from the saloon had gone out.

He touched Le Moan and told her and she turned her head to the long

sweep of the deck, empty, and deserted by the vanished light. It was

as though the power of the after guard had suffered eclipse. Rantan

and the other would be soon asleep, if they were not asleep now,

helpless and at the mercy of the man who would be brave enough to

strike.

Le Moan turned again and seizing Kanoa by the shoulder whispered

close to his ear.

“Go,” said she; “tell the others what I have said, bring them up,

softly, Mayana, softly so that they may not hear, they need lift no

hand in the business. I will strike; go!”

He rose up and passed towards the foc’sle hatch whilst Le Moan,

going into the galley, fetched something she had hidden there—the

head of the spear which she had broken off from the shaft, the spear

Carlin had brought on board as a trophy, and the snap of which he

had heard as he lay in his bunk whilst Rantan had been lighting his

pipe.

She sat down on the deck with the deadly thing on her knee, poisoned

with argora. A scratch from it would be sufficient to destroy life

almost instantaneously, and as she sat brooding and waiting, her

eyes saw neither the deck nor the starlight, but the vision of a

sunlit beach and a form, Taori. Taori for whom she would have

destroyed the world.

The sea spoke on the great reef loud to windward, low to leeward;

you could hear within the long rumble and roar of the nearby

breakers the diminuendo of the rollers that smoked beneath the

stars, ringing with a forty-mile mist the placid ocean of the

lagoon.

The moon was rising. She could see the gleam of its light on the

binnacle where the Godling lived that had always pointed away from

Karolin, on the port rail and on the brass-work of the skylight.

Then, roused by a sound soft as the sifting of leaves on a lawn, she

turned and behind her the deck was crowded.

The crew had come on deck led by Kanoa, and the stern of the

schooner swinging towards the break with the tide, the level light

of the moon was on their faces.

CHAPTER V—NIGHT, DEATH AND PASSION

She made them sit down and they sat in a ring on the deck, she

taking her place in the middle.

Then she talked to them respecting what she had already told to

Kanoa, telling them also that the men of Karolin were not enemies

but friends, that Rantan and the red-bearded man though fair-spoken

were indeed devils in disguise, that they had killed many of the men

of Karolin, killed Sru and his companions and intended on the morrow

to kill Kanoa and the rest. And they sat listening to her as

children listen to the tales about ogres—believing, bewildered,

terrified, not knowing what to do.

These men were not cowards; under circumstances known and understood

they were brave, weather could not frighten them nor war against

kindred races, but the white man was a different thing and Rantan

they feared even more than Carlin.

They would not move a hand in this matter of striking at them. It

would be better to take the boat and land on the reef and trust to

the men of Karolin if they were trustworthy as Le Moan had reported.

Poni, the biggest and strongest of them, said this and the others

nodded their heads in approval, and Le Moan laughed; she knew them

and told them so, told them that as she had saved them by

overhearing Rantan’s plans, she would save them now, that they had

nothing to do but wait and watch and prepare their minds for

friendship with her people when she had finished what she intended

to do.

Then she rose up.

As she stood with the moonlight full on her, a voice broke the

silence of the night. It came from the saloon hatchway, a voice

sudden, chattering, complaining and ceasing all at once as if cut

off by a closed door. They knew what it was, the voice of a man

talking in his sleep. Carlin on his back and seized by nightmare had

cried out, half awakened, turned and fallen asleep again.

The group seated on the deck, after a momentary movement, resumed

their positions. There is something so distinctive in the voice of a

sleep-talker that the sound, after the first momentary flutter

caused by it, brought assurance. Then, prepared at any moment to

make a dash for the boat, they sat, the palms of their hands flat on

the deck and their eyes following Le Moan, now gliding towards the

hatch, the spear head in her left hand, her right hand touching the

port rail as she went.

At the hatch she paused to listen. She could hear the reef, and on

its sonorous murmur like a tiny silver thread of sound the trickle

of the tide on the planking of the schooner, and from the dark pit

of the stairway leading to the saloon another sound, the breathing

of men asleep.

She had never been below. That stairway, even in daylight, had

always filled her with fear, the fear of the unknown, the dread of a

trap, the claustrophobia of one always used to open spaces.

Lit by the day it frightened her, in its black darkness it appalled

her; yet she had to go down, for the life of Taori lay at the bottom

of that pit to be saved by her hands and hers alone.

Kanoa, amongst the others, sat watching. The mind of Kanoa so filled

with fear when she told him that his death was imminent, the mind of

Kanoa that had lusted for her, the mind of this child of eighteen to

whom light and laughter had been life and thought, a thing of the

moment, was no longer the same mind.

The great heroism he was watching, this attempt to save him and the

others, had awakened in him something perhaps of the past, ancestors

who had fought, done great deeds and suffered—who knows—but there

came to him an elation such as he had felt in the movements of the

dance and at the sound of music. Rising and evading Poni who

clutched at his leg to hold him back, he came to the rail, stood for

a moment as Le Moan vanished from sight and then swift-footed but

silent as a shadow, glided to the saloon hatch and stood listening.

Holding the polished banister rail, and moving cautiously, step by

step, Le Moan descended, the spear head in her left hand. As she

came, a waft from the cabin rose to meet her in the darkness—an

odour of humanity and stale tobacco smoke, bunk-bedding and bilge.

It met her like an evil ghost, it grappled with her and tried to

drive her back; used as she was to the fresh sea air, able to scent

rain on the wind and change of weather, this odour checked her for a

moment, repelled her, held her and then lost its power; her will had

conquered it. She reached the foot of the stairs and before her now

lay the open doorway of the cabin, a pale oblong beyond which lay a

picture.

The table with the swinging lamp above it, the bunks on either side

where the sleeping men lay, clothes cast on the floor, all lit by

the moon-gleams through the skylight and portholes.

From the bunk on the right hung an arm. It was Carlin’s; she knew it

by its size. She moved towards it, paused, looked up and stood

rigid.

Above Carlin, now on the ceiling, now on the wall, something moved

and danced; a great silver butterfly, now at rest, now in flight,

shifting here and there, poising with tremulous wings.

It was a water shimmer from the moonlit lagoon entering through a

porthole, a ghost of light; it held her only for a moment, the next

she had seized the hand of the sleeper and driven the spear point

into the arm. Almost on the cry of the stricken man, something

sprang across the table of the cabin, seized Le Moan by the throat

and flung her on her side. It was Rantan.

Up above Kanoa, standing by the opening of the hatch, listening. The

reef spoke and the water trickled on the planking, but from below

there came no sound. Moments passed and then, sharp and cutting the

silence like a knife came a cry, a shout, and the sound of a furious

struggle. Then, fear flown and filled with a fury new as life to the

newborn, Kanoa plunged down into the darkness, missed his footing,

fell, rose half stunned and dashed into the cabin.

Carlin, naked, was lying on his face on the floor, dead or dying;

Rantan, naked, was at death grips with Le Moan. She had risen by a

supreme effort, but he had got her against the table, flung her on

it and was now holding her down, his knee on her thigh, his hands on

her throat, his head flung back, the flexor muscles of his forearms

rigid, crushing her, breaking her, choking the life out of her, till

Kanoa sprang.

Sprang like a tiger, lighting on the table and then in a flash on to

Rantan’s back, breaking his grip with the impact and freeing Le

Moan. He had got the throat hold from behind, his knees had seized

Rantan’s body and he was riding him like a horse. The attacked man,

whooping and choking, tried to hit backwards, flung up his arms,

rose straight, tottered and crashed, but still the attacker clung,

clung as they rolled on the floor, clung till all movement ceased.

It was over.

The silver butterfly still danced merrily on the ceiling and the

sound of the reef came through the skylight, slumbrous and

indifferent, but other sound or movement there was none till Le

Moan, stretched still on the table, turned, raised herself on her

elbow and understood. Then she dropped on to the floor. Rantan lay

half on top of Carlin and Kanoa lay by Rantan.

Kanoa’s grip had relaxed and he seemed asleep. He roused as the girl

touched him; the fury and wild excitement had passed, he seemed

dazed; then recovering himself he sat up, then he rose to his feet.

As he rose Rantan moved slightly, he was not dead and Le Moan

kneeling on the body of Carlin seized the sheet that was hanging

from the bunk, dragged it towards her and handed it to Kanoa.

“Bind him,” said Le Moan, “he is not dead, let him be for my people

to deal with him as they deal with the dog-fish.”

As they bound him from the shoulders to the hands a voice came from

above. It was the voice of Poni who had come to listen and who heard

Le Moan’s voice and words.

“Kanoa,” cried Poni, “what is going on below there?”

“Coward!” cried Le Moan, “come and see. Come and help now that the

work is done.”

“Ay,” said Kanoa the valorous, “come and help now that the work is

done.”

Then, kneeling by the bound figure of Rantan, he gazed on the girl,

consuming her with his eyes, rapturous, and unknowing that the work

had been done for Taori.

Taori, beside whom, for Le Moan, all other men were shadows, moving

yet lifeless as the moon-born butterfly still dancing above the

corpse of Carlin.

CHAPTER VI—MORNING

When the firing had ceased and the boat had returned to the ship the

wretched people hiding amongst the mammee apple had come out and

grouped themselves around Aioma and Taori. Taori had saved them for

the moment by his act in swimming out to attack the boat; he was no

longer their chief, but their god, and yet some instinctive

knowledge of the wickedness of man and of the tenacity and power of

the white men told them that all was not over.

Amongst them as they waited whilst Aioma and Katafa distributed

food, sat two women, Nanu and Ona, each with a dead child clasped in

her arms. The child of Nanu had been killed instantaneously by a

bullet that had pierced its neck and the arm of its mother. Ona’s

child, pierced in its body, had died slowly, bleeding its life away

and wailing as it bled.

These two women, high cheeked, frizzy-headed and of the old fierce

Melanesian stock which formed the backbone and hitting force of

Karolin, were strange to watch as they sat nursing their dead,

speechless, passionless, heedless of food or drink or what might

happen. The others ate, too paralysed by the events of the day to

prepare food for themselves, they yet took what was given to them

with avidity, then, when dark came, they crept back into the bushes

to sleep, whilst Dick, leaving Katafa in charge of Aioma, left the

trees and under cover of the darkness came along the beach past the

bodies, over which the birds were still at work, until he was level

with the schooner.

She showed no lights on deck, no sign of life but the two tiny dim

golden discs of the cabin portholes.

Taking his seat on a weather-worn piece of coral, he sat watching

her. Forward, close to the foc’sle head, he saw now two forms, Le

Moan and Kanoa; they drew together, then they vanished, the deck now

seemed deserted, but he continued to watch. Already in his mind he

foresaw vaguely the plan of Rantan. To-morrow they would not use the

boat, they would move the schooner, bring her opposite the village

and then with those terrible things that could speak so loudly and

hit so far they would begin again—and where could the people go? The

forty-mile reef would be no protection; away from the trees and the

puraka patches the people would starve, they would have no water.

The people were tied to the village.

He sat with his chin on his clenched fists staring at the schooner

and the two evil golden eyes that were staring him back like the

eyes of a beast.

If only a single canoe had been left he would have paddled off and,

with Aioma and maybe another for help, would have attacked, but the

canoes were gone— and the dinghy.

Then as he sat helpless, with hatred and the fury of hell in his

heart, the golden eyes vanished. Rantan had put out the light.

With the rising moon he saw as in a glass, darkly, little by little

and bit by bit, the tragedy we have seen in full. He saw the

grouping of the foc’sle hands as they came up from below, he saw

them disappear as they sat on deck. Then he saw the figure of Le

Moan, her halt at the saloon hatch and the following of Kanoa, he

heard the scream of the stricken Carlin.

Lastly he saw the crowding of the hands aft, Carlin’s body being

dragged on deck and cast overboard into a lather of moonshine and

phosphorus, and something white carried shoulder high to forward of

the galley where it was laid on deck.

Then after a few moments lights began to break out, lanterns moved

on the deck, the portholes broke alive again and again were blotted

out as the cabin lamp lit and taken from its attachments was carried

on deck and swung from the ratlins of the main for decorative

purposes. The moon gave all the light that any man in his sober

senses could want, but the crew of the schooner were not sober, they

were drunk with the excitement of the business, and though nominally

free men they felt as slaves feel when their bonds are removed.

Besides, Rantan and Carlin had plotted to kill them as they had

killed Sru and the others. On top of that there was a bottle of

ginger wine. It had been stored in the medicine locker—Peterson,

like many other seamen, had medical fancies of his own and he

believed this stuff to be a specific for the colic. It had escaped

Carlin’s attention, but Poni, who acted as steward, had sniffed at

it, tasted it and found it good.

It was served out in a tin cup.

Then, across the water came the sound of voices, the twanging of a

native fiddle, and now the whoop-whoop of dancers in the hula dance

songs, laughter against which came the thunder of the moonlit sea on

the outer beach and an occasional cry from the gulls at their food.

Dick, rising, made back towards the trees; his heart felt easier.

Without knowing what had occurred, he still knew that something had

happened to divide his enemies, that they had quarrelled, and that

one had been killed; that, with Sru and his companions, made five

gone since the schooner had dropped anchor.

Lying down beside Katafa, whilst Taiepu kept watch, he fell asleep.

At dawn Taiepu, shouting like a gull, came racing through the trees

whilst the bushes gave up their people. They came crowding out on

the beach to eastward of the trees and there, sure enough, was Le

Moan, the schooner against the blaze at the Gates of Morning, and

the boat hanging a hundred yards off shore.

Kneeling on the sands before Taori, glancing sometimes up into his

face, swiftly, as one glances at the sun, Le Moan told her tale

whilst the sun itself now fully risen blazed upon the man before

her.

Dick listened, gathered from the artless story the sacrifices she

had made at first, the heroism she had shown to the last, but

nothing of her real motive, nothing of the passion that came nigh to

crushing her as Katafa, catching her in her arms, and, pressing her

lips on her forehead, led her away tenderly as a sister to the

shelter of the trees.

Then the mob, true to itself and forgetting their saviour, turning,

raced along the sands, boys, women and children, till they got level

with the waiting boat shouting welcome to the newcomers.

Poni in the stern sheets rose and waved his arms, the boat driven by

a few strokes reached the beach and next moment the crew of the

_Kermadec_ and the people of Karolin were fraternizing—embracing one

another like long-lost relatives.

And now a strange thing happened.

Dick, who stood watching all this, deposed for a moment as chief men

are sometimes temporarily deposed and forgotten in moments of great

national heart movements, saw in the boat, the naked, bound figure

of Rantan lying on the bottom boards.

He came closer and the eyes of Rantan, which were open, met the eyes

of Taori.

Rantan was a white man.

There was no appeal in the eyes of Rantan—he who knew the Islands so

well knew that his number was up; he gazed at the golden brown

figure of Taori, gazed at that face so strange for a kanaka, yet so

truly the face of an islander, gazed as a white man upon a native.

For a moment it was as though race gazed upon kindred race disowning

it, not seeing it, mistaking it for an alien and lower race and from

deep in the mind of Dick vague and phantom-like rose trouble.

He did not know that he himself was a white man, blood brother of

the man in the boat. He knew nothing, yet he felt trouble. He turned

to Aioma.

“Will he die?”

“Ay, most surely will he die,” said the old fellow with a chuckle.

“Will the dog-fish not die when he is caught? He who killed the

canoes, the children, is it not just that he should die?”

Dick inclined his head without speaking. He turned to where Nanu and

the other woman were standing, waiting, terrible, with their dead

children still clasped in their arms.

“It is just,” said he, “see to it, Aioma,” and turning without

another glance at the boat he walked away, past the shattered

canoes, past the half-picked bones, through the sunlight, towards

the trees.

Aioma, no longer himself, but something more evil, came towards the

boat making little bird-like noises, rubbing his shrivelled hands

together, stroking his thighs.

The tide was just at full ebb, the old ledge where the victims of

Nanawa were staked out in past times for the sharks to eat was

uncovered and only waiting for a victim. It lay halfway between the

village and the reef break and in old times one might have known

when an execution was to take place by the fins of the tiger sharks

cruising around it. This morning there were no sharks visible.

Rantan was reserved for a worse fate; for, as Aioma, standing by the

boat, called on the people to take their vengeance, the woman Nanu,

still holding her dead child in her arms stepped up to him followed

by Ona.

“He is ours,” said Nanu.

Aioma turned on her like a savage old dog—he was about to push her

back amongst the crowd when Ona advanced a step.

“He is ours,” said Ona, glancing at the form in the boat as though

it were a parcel she was claiming, whilst the crowd, reaching to the

woods, broke in, speaking almost with one voice.

“He is theirs, he has slain their children, let them have him for a

child.”

“So be it,” said Aioma, too much of a diplomat to oppose the mob on

a matter of sentiment, and curious as to what gory form of vengeance

the women would adopt. “So be it, and now what will you do with

him?”

“We will take him to the southern beach with us. We alone,” said

Nanu.

“We would be alone with him,” said Ona, shifting her dead child from

her right to her left arm as one might shift a parcel.

“But how will you take him?” asked the old man.

“In a canoe,” said Nanu.

“Then go and build it,” said the canoe-builder. “What foolishness is

this, for well you know the canoes are broken.”

“Aioma,” said Nanu, “there is one little canoe which is yet whole,

it lies in the further canoe-house, so far in that it has been

forgotten; it belonged to my man, the father of my child, he who

went with the others but did not return. I have never spoken of it

and no one has seen it, for no one goes into the canoe-houses now

that the great canoes are gone.”

“Then let it be fetched,” said Aioma. He stood whilst a dozen of the

crowd broke away and racing towards the trees disappeared in the

direction of the canoe-houses. Presently the canoe, a fishing

outrigger, showed on the water of the lagoon, two boys at the

paddles. They beached it close to the boat, the dead children were

lashed to the gratings with strips of coconut sennit, Rantan, raised

by half a dozen pairs of hands, was lifted and placed in the bottom

of the little craft, and the women, pushing off, got on board, and

raised the sail.

The steering paddle flashed and the crowd stood watching as the

canoe grew less on the surface of the water, less and less, making

for the southern beach, till now it was no larger than a midge in

the lagoon dazzle that, striking back at the sun, roofed Karolin

with a forty-mile dome of radiance.

CHAPTER VII—THE VISION

Now when Katafa led Le Moan away into the shelter of the trees, Le

Moan, with the kiss of Katafa warm upon her forehead, knew nothing,

nothing of the fact that Katafa was Taori’s, the dream and treasure

of his life, beside whom all other living things were shadows.

And Katafa knew nothing, nothing of the fact that Taori was Le

Moan’s—was Le Moan; for Le Moan had so dreamed him into herself that

the vision of him had become part of herself inseparable for ever.

Ringed and ringed with ignorance, ignorance of their own race, and

the affinity between them, of the fact that they and Taori formed

amongst the people of Karolin a little colony alien in blood and

soul, of the fact that Taori was their common desire, they went

between the trees, Katafa leading the way towards the house of Uta

Matu, above which Nan on his pole still grinned towards the

schooner, grinned without nodding, maybe because the wind that had

moved him had ceased.

Katafa, taking the sleeping mat used by her and Taori, spread it on

the floor of the house, then she offered food, but Le Moan refused,

she only wanted sleep. For nights she had not slept and the kiss

that Katafa again pressed upon her brow seemed to her the kiss of a

phantom in a dream as she sank down and died to the world on the bed

of the lover who knew nothing of her love.

It was still morning.

Outside in the blazing sun the people of Karolin went about their

business, mending the wall of the house that had been broken,

preparing food for the newcomers, rejoicing in the new life that had

come back to them. Whilst in the lagoon the anchored schooner swung

to her moorings, deserted and without sign of life, for Dick had

decided that no one should board her till he and Aioma led the way,

that is till the morrow, for there were many things to be attended

to first.

Le Moan had brought him not only a ship, but six full-grown men, a

priceless gift if the men were to be trusted.

Aioma, who had held off from the business of fraternizing, watching

the newcomers with a critical eye, believed that they were good men.

“But wait,” said Aioma, “till they are fed, till they have rested

and slept amongst us; a good-looking coconut is sometimes rotten at

the core, but these I believe to be good men even as Le Moan has

said; but to-night will tell.”

At dusk he came to Taori, happy. Each of the new men had taken a

wife; incidentally, in the next few days each of the newcomers, with

one exception, had taken from four to six wives.

“Each has a woman,” said the direct Aioma. “We are sure of them now,

they are in the mammee apple, all except one who is very young and

who says that he has no heart for women.”

He spoke of Kanoa. Kanoa brooding alone by the water’s edge, sick

with love and desire. Love that was even greater than desire, for

the deed of Le Moan that had stirred in him the ghosts of his

ancestors, had raised the soul of Kanoa beyond the flesh where

hitherto it had been tangled and blind.

Meanwhile Le Moan slept. Slept whilst the dusk rose and the stars

came out, slept till the moon high against the milky way pierced the

house of Uta Matu with her shafts.

Then sleep fell from her gradually and turning on her elbow she saw

the moon rays shining through the canes of the wall, the little

ships ghostly on their shelves and through the doorway the wonderful

world of moonlit reef and sea.

Nothing broke the stillness of the night but the surf of the reef

and a gentle wind that stirred the palm fronds with a faint

pattering rainy sound and passed away across the mammee apple where

men and women lay embraced, who the night before had not known even

of each other’s existence.

Before the doorway, sheltered from the moon by a tree shadow, all

but their feet that showed fully in the light, two forms lay

stretched on a mat—Taori and Katafa. They had given up their house

to the saviour of Karolin, taken a mat from one of the women’s

houses, and fallen asleep with only the tree for shelter. Le Moan,

not recognizing them, still dazed with sleep, rose, came to the

doorway and looked down.

Then she knew.

Taori’s head was pillowed on Katafa’s shoulder, her arm was around

his neck, his arm across her body.

CHAPTER VIII—THE CASSI FLOWERS

If the sea had risen above the reef destroying the village and

sweeping the population of Karolin to ruin whilst leaving her

untouched, Le Moan would have stood as she stood now, unmoved before

the inevitable and the accomplished.

Her world lay around her in ruins and the destroyers lay before her

asleep.

She had feared death and dreaded separation, but she had never

dreamed of this—for Taori, in her mind, had always stood alone as

the sun stands alone in the sky.

A spear stood against the tree bole and the pitiless hand that had

killed Carlin could have seized it and plunged it into the heart of

Katafa, but if the sea had destroyed her world as this girl had

destroyed it, would she have cast a spear at the sea? The thing was

done, accomplished, of old time. Her woman’s instinct told her that.

Done and accomplished, without any knowledge of her, in a world from

which she had been excluded by fate.

Moving from the doorway she passed them, almost touching their feet.

To right and left of her lay the tumbling sea and the lit lagoon,

before her the great white road of the beaches and the reef. She

followed the leading of this road with little more volition than the

wind-blown leaf or the drifting weed; with only one desire, to be

alone.

It led to the great trees where the canoe-builders had been at work.

Here across the coral lay the trunks felled by Aioma, filling the

air with the fragrance of new-cut wood. One already had been partly

shaped and hollowed, and resting on it for a moment, Le Moan

followed its curves with her eyes, felt the ax marks with her hand,

took in every detail of the work, saw it as, with outrigger affixed

and sail spread to the wind, it would take the sea,

sometime—sometime—sometime.

The ceaseless breakers casting their spindrift beneath the moon

lulled her mind for a moment till trees, canoe, reef and sea all

faded and dissolved in a world of sound, a voice-world through which

came the chanting of stricken coral and, at last, pictures of the

wind-blown southern beach.

The southern beach, sunlit and gull-flown, a beached canoe, a

form—Taori.

It was now and now only that the pain came, piercing soul and

rending body, crushing her and breaking her till she fell on the

coral, her face buried in her arms, as though cast there by the sea

whose eternal thunder filled the night.

The night wind moved her hair. It was blowing from the village and

as it came it brought with it a vague whisper from the bushes and

trees and now and again a faint perfume of cassi. Perfume, like

music, is a voice speaking a language we have forgotten, telling

tales we half understand, soothing us now with dreams, raising us

now to action.

The cassi flowers were speaking to Le Moan. After a long, long while

she moved, raised her head and, leaning on her elbow, seemed to

listen.

Close to her was a pond in the coral—a rock pool filled with fresh

water such as existed on the southern beach and a fellow of which

lay in the village close to the house of Uta Matu.

Dragging herself towards it she leaned on her arms and looked deep

down into the water just as she had been looking into the pool that

day when raising her eyes she found herself first face to face with

Taori.