“Where then is it gone?” went on the old fellow, “or how is it

hidden? Has Uta Matu cast a spell upon us or has Marua been washed

away?” Then turning as if from a suddenly glimpsed vision: “Taori—we

may sail till the days and the nights are left behind us with the

sun and the moon and the stars, but Marua we shall not see again.”

Dick still said nothing. He refused to believe that Uta Matu had the

power to put a spell on them and he refused to believe that Marua

had been washed away by those waves that did little more than smash

a few houses at Karolin. All the same he was disturbed. Where then

was Marua?

Poni, who was standing near them with Le Moan who had heard what

Aioma said, suddenly struck in, in his sing-song voice.

“Surely we passed an island when Pete’son commanded this ship and we

were running on this course, an island that would be about here, but

is not here any more—and you remember the great waves that came to

us at Karolin and the gulls who sought a home? All these things have

just come together in my head as it might be three persons meeting

and conversing. Well then, Aioma, it is clear to me now that this

island you seek is gone beneath the sea. At the time of the gulls

and those great waves, I said to Timan, that somewhere an island had

gone under just as Somaya which lay not far from Soma went under in

the time before I started to sail in the deep-sea ships. One day it

was there and the next day it was not, and there were the big waves

just like those that came to Karolin. Marua, you called this island;

well, Aioma, you may be sure that Marua has gone under the sea.”

And now strangely enough Aioma, so far from accepting the support of

this statement, turned upon the unfortunate Poni who had dared to

bring experience and common-sense with him to the bar.

“Gone under!” The scream of laughter with which Aioma received this

suggestion when it had percolated down into the basement of his

intelligence made the faces of the others turn as they stood about

near the foc’sle head discussing the same subject.

“Gone under!” What did Poni mean by such silly talk, did he not know

that it was impossible for an island to sink in the sea? Sink like a

drowning man! No, the great waves had knocked Marua to pieces,

either that or Uta Matu had veiled it from their sight ... and so

the talk went on and all the time the sun was falling towards the

west and Le Moan’s palms were itching to feel again the spokes of

the wheel and the kick of the rudder; for a plan had come into the

mind of Le Moan, a plan put there maybe by Uta Matu, who can tell;

or Passion, who can tell? But a perfectly definite plan to take the

wheel, steer through the night and put the schooner absolutely and

fatally astray: Put her away from Karolin so far and so much to the

east that the lagoon light would be no guide and a course to the

south no road of return.

The plan had come to her, fallen into her head, only just now; it

was indefinite, but cruelly straight like the flight of an arrow,

and in one direction—away from Karolin.

Great love is an energy that, born in mind, has little to do with

mind. It is a thing by itself, furiously alive, torturing the body

it feeds on and the mind that holds it. Hell is the place where

lovers live. Even when they escape from it to heaven as in the case

of Katafa, it is always waiting to receive them back, as also in her

case.

To Le Moan, dumbly suffering, the message of the cassi flowers

telling that Taori was hers by virtue of the power of her passion

for him, had suddenly lost all significance. He was here now by the

power of the wheel of the ship over the rudder. She could take him

away, now, to be always with him—take him away for ever from Katafa,

steer him into the unknown. And yet the knowledge of this physical

power and the determination to use it brought her no ease. She would

be close to him, but of what avail is it to a person suffering from

the tortures of thirst if he is close to water yet may not drink.

All the same she would be close to him.

As she watched the sun so near its setting she dwelt on this fact as

a bird on the egg it is hatching, and brooding, she listened whilst

Aioma urged that they should turn back at once, and Dick countered

the suggestion asking for more time. He had it in his mind to hold

on till sunset, till night came to cut them off in the quest. Well

knowing in his mind that Marua was no more, that the reef and lagoon

and hilltop, the tall trees and coloured birds had all vanished like

a picture withdrawn, either gone beneath the sea as Poni said or

devoured by the waves as Aioma held—well knowing this in his mind,

his heart refused to turn from the quest till turned by darkness.

He would never see Palm Tree again. Like grief for a person lost,

the grief of this thing came on him now. He knew now how he loved

the trees, the lagoon, the reef, and he recalled them as one recalls

the features of the dead. He could not turn till darkness dropped

the veil and said to him definitely, “Go back.”

He was standing with this feeling in his mind when a sound made him

turn to where Aioma had suddenly taken his seat on the edge of the

saloon skylight with body bent double and head protruding like the

head of a tortoise. He seemed choking. He was laughing.

Aioma, like Sru, had a sense of humour, and a joke, if it were

really a good joke, took him like the effect of a dose of

strychnine. Sure now that Marua had been swallowed by the sea, the

catastrophe, having made itself certain and obtained firm footing in

his mind, suddenly presented its humorous side. He had remembered

the “bad men.” They were swallowed with Marua, he could see them in

his imagination swimming like rats, screaming, bubbling—drowning—and

the humour of the thing skewered him like a spear in the stomach.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I—E HAYA

The sun touched the sea line, the blazing water leaping to meet him,

and then in a west golden and desolate, in a sea whose water had

turned to living light, he began to drown.

Dick watched as the golden brow, almost submerged, showed a

lingering crescent of fire and then sank, carrying the day with it

as Marua had sunk carrying with it his youth and the last visible

threads connecting him with civilization.

He turned. Le Moan had taken the wheel.

The sails that had been golden were now ghost white and a topaz star

had already pierced the pansy blue where in the west the new moon

hung like a little tilted boat.

“To the south,” cried Aioma. “_E Haya_—to the south, Le Moan, to

Karolin now that we have seen there is nothing to be seen, to the

south; to the south, for I am weary of these waters.”

Le Moan, dumb and dim in the starlight now flooding the world, spun

the wheel; on the rattle of the rudder chain came the thrashing of

canvas and the schooner bowing to the swell lay over on the port

tack—due east.

Aioma glanced towards the moon but Le Moan reassured him.

“The current is fighting us,” said she, “and I would get beyond it.

Have patience, Aioma, the way is clear to me.”

He turned away satisfied and lay down on deck. Dick, who had brought

up some blankets from below to serve as a sleeping mat, lay down by

him, and the kanakas, all but Poni and Tahuku, went to their bunks

in the foc’sle.

Aioma, lying on his face with his forehead on his arms, heard the

rattle of the rudder chain and knew that Le Moan was edging now to

the south. She would steer all night with the help of Poni, and sure

of her and sure of Karolin showing before them at daybreak, he let

his mind wander, now to the canoe-building, now to the spearing of

great fish, till sleep took him as it had taken Dick.

Le Moan, steering, could see their bodies in the starlight, and

beyond them Poni and Tahuku seated close to the galley, their heads

together talking and smoking, heedless of everything but the eternal

chatter about nothing which they could keep up for hours together,

whilst the schooner under the hands of the steersman was heading

again due east.

An hour after midnight the wind shifted, blowing from the west of

south. Poni came aft to see if Le Moan wanted anything, food, water,

a drinking nut—she wanted nothing; as she had steered all that night

long ago towards Karolin, she steered now, tireless, wrapt in

herself, without effort.

As the dawn showed in the eastern sky she altered the course to full

south and handed the wheel to Poni.

She had done her work, _e Haya_, steered they for ever now they

would never raise Karolin—so far to the west that even the lagoon

light would be all but invisible.

The first sun ray brought Aioma to his feet, he saw Poni at the

wheel and Le Moan lying near him fast asleep like a creature caught

back into darkness now that her work was done. The sunrise to port

told him that the ship was heading south, then he came forward and

looked.

The southern sea showed no sign and the southern sky no hint of the

great lagoon. Not a bird’s wing appeared.

He roused Dick, who came forward and they stood whilst the

canoe-builder pointed to the south.

“There is nothing,” said Aioma—“yet we have come all the night and

she is never wrong—not even the light in the sky. Yet by now the

trees should have shown.”

Dick, gazing into the remote south at the blue and perfect and

pitiless sky, unbroken at the sea line, unstained above it, drew in

his breath; a cold hand seemed placed on his heart. Where then was

Karolin?

“Who knows,” said Aioma, “it may show when the sun is higher. Let us

wait.”

They waited and watched whilst the sun rose in the sky, but the sun

revealed nothing that the dawn had not shown—nothing save away to

the westward unseen by them and so faint as scarcely to be seen, a

pale spot in the higher blue—the light of Karolin.

Aioma came running aft. He shook Le Moan and roused her from her

sleep and she came forward and stood in the bow, sheltering her eyes

against the light.

“It is not there,” said she; “I can see nothing with my eyes nor in

my mind—the power has gone from me, Aioma, it has been taken from me

in my sleep.”

Aioma struck his head with the flat of his hand, then he turned to

her as she stood there with the lie on her lips, close to, almost

touching Dick, who stood, his hand on the rail, scarcely breathing.

“Gone from you,” cried the canoe-builder, “taken in sleep, aie, what

is this! We are adrift and astray, gone! And who could take it but

Uta Matu. Taori, we are lost, we are in the hands of the viewless

ones; their nets have taken us. I told you this, yet you would not

put back. Never more shall we see Karolin.”

Dick did not move. He saw again the figure of Katafa as she stood on

the beach when they were leaving, that loved figure from which he

had parted with scarcely a thought, so full was he of the schooner

and the dream of sailing her on the outer sea. Katafa who even then

was watching for him away beneath that tiny stain on the western

sky, grown so faint now as to be almost invisible.

Even last night when sure of return, his heart had longed for her,

he had dreamed of her; by a thousand little threads, each living,

she had joined herself to his very being, and he would never see her

again!

“Never more shall we see Karolin.” He turned to the desolate south,

to the west, to the east; then, heedless of the others, a savage in

his grief, he cast himself on the deck, his face on his arms as if

to hide himself from the hateful sun.

CHAPTER II—AIOMA CURSES THE WIND

“Never more shall we see Karolin.”

The words of Aioma were repeated by the sky, by the sun, and the

sea. Never more would he see Katafa, hear her voice, feel her arms

about him. The hard hot deck beneath him, the sun beating on his

back, the sounds of the sea on the planking and the groaning of the

timbers all were part of his misery, of the awful hunger that fed on

his heart.

He loved her as a man loves a woman, as a child loves a mother, as a

mother loves a child. He who had killed men and dared death was, in

fact, still a child; passionate, loving, ignorant of the terrors

that life holds for the heart of man, of the grief that kills and

the separation that annihilates. He had never met grief before.

Le Moan watched him as he lay. She knew. He was lying like that

because of Katafa, she had lain like that on the coral because of

him.

By declaring that vision had returned to her, by seizing the wheel

and steering for Karolin, she could have brought him to his feet a

well man—only to hand him over to Katafa.

She could not do that.

Her heart, pitiless to the world, was human only towards him; she

had braved the unknown and she had braved death to save his life,

but to save him from this suffering she could not speak three words.

Aioma watched him absolutely unmoved. If Dick had been wounded by a

spear or club, it would have been different, but mental anguish was

unknown to the canoe-builder and you cannot sympathize with the

unknown.

Then as Dick struggled to his feet and stood with his hand on the

rail, dazed and with his face turned again to the south, the old man

recommenced his plaint with the insistency of a brute, whilst the

wind blew and Poni at the wheel kept the ship on her course south,

ever towards the hopeless south.

“No,” said Aioma, “never more shall we see Karolin. Uta has us in

his net. Never more shall I shape my logs (he had dropped that

business before leaving Karolin) or spear the big fish by night

whilst the boys hold the torches (_upoli_), and the great eels will

go through the water with none to catch them. It is this ayat that

has brought us where we now are to confusion and a sea without

measure, and this wind, which is the breath of Le Juan, and may her

breath be accursed. Well, Taori, and so it stands, and what now?

Shall we go before the wind or counter it—seek the south _e Haya_

where nothing is, or the east _e Hola_ where nothing is?”

Dick turned his face to the canoe builder. “I do not know, Aioma, I

do not know. It is all darkness.” His eyes turned to Le Moan and

passed her, falling on Poni at the wheel, and the sea beyond.

Aioma had told him that he was taking Le Moan as a pathfinder, but

Dick had troubled little about that, scarcely believing in it. He

had trusted to the current and the light of Karolin as a guide. They

were gone, but it was the words of Aioma that removed the last

vestige of hope.

He trusted Aioma in all sea matters and when Aioma said that they

were lost, they were lost indeed. Palm Tree vanished, Karolin gone,

nothing but the sea, the trackless hopeless sea and the words of

Aioma!

Urged by a blind instinct to get away from the sight of that sea,

that sky, that pitiless sun, he left the deck and came down the

steps to the saloon where he stood, a strange figure, almost nude,

against the commonplace surroundings; the table, the chairs, the

bunks with their still disordered bedding, the mirror let into the

forward bulkhead, a mirror so old and dim and spotted that it

scarcely cast a reflection.

He looked about him for a moment, moved towards the bunk where

Carlin had once slept, and, sitting down on the edge of it, leaned

forward, his arms resting on his knees, his head bowed; just as his

father had sat long, long years ago when Emmeline had vanished into

the woods to return bearing a child in her arms—bearing him, Taori.

Just as his father had sat all astray, crushed, helpless and lost,

so he sat now, and for the same reason.

Up on deck Poni at the wheel turned to the canoe-builder.

“And what now, Aioma,” said Poni, “since Le Moan knows not where to

go, where go we?” As he spoke the mainsail trembled, rippled, and

flattened again.

The canoe-builder turned aft. The breezed-up blue, beyond a certain

point, lay in meadows and a far glitter spoke of a great space where

there was no wind.

“The wind is losing its feathers,” said Poni with a backward glance

in the direction towards which the other was looking.

As he spoke the mainsail trembled again as though a shudder were

running up it and the boom shifted to the cordy creak of the topping

lifts.

Yes, the wind was losing its feathers, dying, jaded, exhausted;

again the mainsail flattened, shivered and filled only to flatten

again, the wabble of the bow wash began to die out and the schooner

to lose steerage way.

The breath of Le Juan was failing and Aioma who had cursed it saw

now the calm spreading towards them, passing them, taking the

southern sea.

Poni left the wheel.

There was nothing to steer. A ship is only a ship when she is

moving, and the schooner, now a hulk on the lift of the swell, lay

with a gentle roll on the glassy water—drawing vague figures upon

the sky with her trucks, complaining with the voice of block and

cordage whilst the canoe-builder standing with his eyes on the

north, felt the calm: felt it with a sixth sense gained from close

on a century of weather influence; measured it, and knew that it was

great. Great and enduring because of its extent, complete and

flawless as a block of crystal placed by the gods on the face of ten

thousand square miles of sea.

He remembered how he had cursed the wind, and turning to speak to Le

Moan, found her gone.

Le Moan following Dick to the saloon hatch had stood for a moment

listening.

Unable to hear anything below, she waited till Aioma’s back was

turned and then cautiously began to descend the steps of the

companion-way; cautiously, just as she had come down those steps

that night to attack the white men single-handed and save, at the

risk of her life, the life of Taori.

Reaching the door of the saloon, she saw him half seated on the

bunk’s edge, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands

whilst above him, now on the ceiling, now on the wall, glimmered and

glittered and danced the same water shimmer that had danced above

the sleeping Carlin. Only now it was a butterfly of gold.

The ripples sent out by the roll of the schooner on the sea surface

gave it its tremor, the roll its extent of flight, the sunlight its

gold.

It fluttered now, sweeping down as if to light on Dick, and now it

was flying on the ceiling above him. It seemed a portent, but of

what she could not tell, nor did she heed it after the first glance.

Crossing the floor, she came to him, sat down beside him, and rested

her hand on his shoulder.

Dick turned to her. Like the child that he was, he had shuddered and

sobbed himself into a state where thought scarcely existed above the

sense of despair. He turned to her, the touch of a woman’s sympathy

relaxing the numbing grip of Disaster, yet not for a moment

releasing him. Then casting his arms around her neck, he clung to

her for comfort as a child to its mother.

Clasping her arms around his naked body, her lips on his throat, her

eyes closed, in Paradise—heedless of life and death and dead to the

world, Le Moan held him, flesh to flesh, soul to soul, for one

supreme moment her own. That she was nothing to him was naught, that

grief not love had thrown him into her arms was naught, she held

him.

To Le Moan whose soul was, in a way, and as far as Taori was

concerned, greater than her body, marriage and its consummation

could have given little more—if as much. She held him.

Above them danced the golden butterfly that no man could catch or

brutalize; a thing born of light, of the sea, of chance; gold by day

that had been silver by moonlight, elusive as the dreams that had

led Carlin to his death and the love that had led Le Moan to destroy

him.

Then, little by little, the world broke in upon her, her arms

relaxed, and rising, half blind and groping her way, she found the

door, the steps, the deck, where Poni stood released from the wheel,

and Aioma by the rail.

CHAPTER III—HE HAS TURNED HIS FACE FROM THE SUN

The Ocean is a congregation of rivers, the drift currents and the

stream currents; rivers, some constant in their flow, some

intermittent and variable; some wide, as in the case of the Brazil

current which at its broadest covers four hundred and fifty miles;

some narrow as in the case of the Karolin-Marua drift, scarcely

twenty miles from east to west. The speed of these rivers varies

from five miles a day to fifteen or thirty, as in the case of the

Brazil current, or from ten to a hundred and twenty miles a day as

in the case of the Gulf Stream.

Sometimes these rivers, lying almost side by side, are flowing in

opposite directions, as in the case of the north running

Karolin-Marua current and the southerly drift that had now got the

schooner in its grasp; and each one of these streams of the sea,

from the Arctic to the Antarctic, has its own peculiar people, from

the Japanese swordfish of the _Kuro Shiwo_ to the Gambier turtles on

the Karolin-Marua.

Left without wind the schooner drifted, her sails casting vast

reflections on the glassy swell; sometimes, away out, a slight

disturbance on the water would show where a sleeping turtle had

suddenly submerged, and over-side in the ship’s shadow, fucus and

jelly-fish floating fathoms deep could be seen drifting with the

ship. Nothing else. Neither shark nor albacore nor palu nor gull

spoke of life across or beneath that glacial sea.

The sun sank in a west of solid gold and the stars took the night,

the sails showing black against the brilliant ceiling.

Dick, who had come on deck before sunset, stood by Aioma at the

after rail. He seemed himself again, but he had not eaten that day;

a fact that disturbed the canoe-builder, who had turned from dark

thoughts and misgivings to a sort of cheery fatalism. Aioma was

alive and there was food and water on board for a long time and the

wind might blow soon or the drift—he sensed a drift—take them

somewhere. He had a feeling also that his curses had closed the

mouth of Le Juan; he had eaten well, and his belly was full of

ship’s food and bananas, so his sturdy nature refused depression.

“Of what use,” he was saying, “is a man without food? A man is the

paraka he eats and the fish.... Go and eat, Taori, for without food

a man is not a man.”

“I will eat to-morrow,” said Taori, “I have no heart for eating

now.”

Away forward crouching in her old place Le Moan listened to the

creak of the ship as it moved to the swell and watched the stars

that shone on Karolin.

The faithful unbreakable sense born with her as truly as the power

of the water-finder is born in him, or the power of the swallow to

find its southern nest, told her just where Karolin lay; away on the

starboard beam to the north, now dead aft as the schooner turned to

some gentle swirl of the current, now a bit to port, now back again

to starboard.

She could see the figures of Taori and Aioma in the starlight and

she could hear the voices of Poni and the others from the foc’sle,

the creak of the timbers and the creak of the main boom as it moved

to the rocking of the swell. She too had not eaten that day.

She had done her work and she had received her reward. With his body

in her arms and her lips on his neck, she had drunk him as a

creature dying of thirst might drink long delicious draughts from a

poisoned well; for he had clung to her not in the passion of love,

but of misery, and he had let her hold him as a comforter not as a

lover, and she knew that till the stars fell dead and the sun ceased

to shine that never would he be closer to her than that.

This knowledge had come to her from the very contact with his body,

from the clasp of his arms about her neck. He had told her

unconsciously and without speech more than he could have ever have

told her in words. He was Katafa’s.

He was for ever out of her reach, sure and certain instinct told her

that, yet he was near her and she could see him—they were together.

Only a little before sundown Aioma had said to her, “Le Moan, maybe

since the wind has gone the spell of Uta Matu has ceased to work.

Shut your eyes, turn, and see if you cannot get a view again of

where Karolin lies; is the sight of it still gone from you, Le

Moan?”

“It is still gone,” she had answered him, “and even if it were with

me, of what use, for there is no wind?”

She had told the lie looking him in the face and seeing only Taori.

It was no little jealousy that made her lie; she had no jealousy

towards Katafa whom Fate had bound to Taori before she had seen him.

He had not chosen Katafa in preference to her; perhaps that was why

her heart held no jealousy. All the same to bring him back, to take

the wheel and steer him into the arms of Katafa—she could not.

To save his life she could easily have died for him, to give him

back to joy and love was impossible.

The night passed and the sun rose on another day of calm, and still

the schooner drifted, the variable current setting her back

sometimes, sometimes leading her a bit more south. Truly it was a

great calm as Aioma had predicted and it fell on Taori, as on the

sea, like the hand of death. He scarcely ate at all; he had fallen

away from himself, his mind seemed far away, he scarcely spoke.

As men who have never met the microbes of disease fall easily

victims and die when other men only fall ill, Taori, who had never

before known grief, in the language of Aioma, turned his face from

the sun.

On Karolin men had often died like that, of no disease—because of

insult, because of a woman, sometimes just for some reason that

seemed trivial. It is one of the strangest attributes of the kanaka,

this power of departing from the world when life becomes

unendurable, too heavy or even just wearisome.

“He has turned his face from the sun,” said Aioma to Poni one

morning—the fourth morning of the calm—and Le Moan who was nearby

heard the words.

It was on that same morning that the breeze came, a light air from

the north strengthening to a steady sailing wind, and almost on the

breeze came the call of the lookout who had climbed to the

crosstrees.

“Land!”

Just a few palm tree tops to the southeast, the trees of a tiny

atoll, so small that it cast no lagoon reflection; and Aioma who had

climbed to see came down again whilst Poni, who had taken the wheel,

put the ship to the southeast taking his position from the sun not

far above the eastern skyline.

Presently the far-off treetops could be seen from the deck, but Dick

as Poni steered, and after a glance at the distant trees, lost

interest.

He had turned his face from the sun.

CHAPTER IV—WHAT HAPPENED TO RANTAN

When Rantan awoke from sleep it was morning. He had slept the clock

round. He awoke hungry and full of vigour, and coming out from

amongst the trees he stood for a moment by the edge of the little

lagoon above whose sapphire waters the white gulls were flighting

against a sky newborn and lovely and filled with distance and light.

The canoe lay where he had left it, high-beached now, for the tide

was out. The bodies that had been tied to the gratings were gone,

the gulls had done their work, and nothing showed but the coconut

sennit bindings hanging brown like rags and moving to the breeze.

Close to the northernmost of the trees lay a little pond from which

he had drunk before lying down; the trees stretching from the pool

ran in a dense line for a quarter of a mile, pandanus, coconut palm,

bread fruit, and a dense growth of mammee apple, shading beach and

reef to a spot where the naked reef took charge. The rest of the

ring of the atoll showed few trees, just a small clump or two of

fifty-foot palms, wand-like and feathery against the blazing blue.

There was food here, enough of a sort, but he had neither knife nor

fire nor fishing line. He was naked.

When they had bound him and kept him and flung him in the canoe to

take him to the southern beach of Karolin, he had not bothered about

the fact that he was naked—it had not troubled him at all till now.

Now that sleep had restored him to himself, the fact of his

nakedness came to him as a sudden trouble making him forget for the

moment everything else, even food.

The trouble was entirely psychical. The climate of the beach was so

warm that he did not require clothing as a protection, and there was

shade enough to shelter him from the sun if he were too warm. All

the same, his nakedness lay on him like a curse. He felt helpless,

part of his environment that had clung to him for forty years was

gone from him and without it he was all astray; naked as a worm he

felt useless as a worm, ready to flinch at anything, without

initiative, without power.

Dick had never known the need of clothes, he had never worn them. It

was different with Rantan.

The absence of shoes he felt less, though without them he was

condemned to keep off the rough coral and keep to the beach sands.

He came along the sands towards the canoe. Had you been watching him

and had he been clothed in purple and fine linen you still would

have said to yourself “There is something wrong about that man, why

does he walk like that?”

When he reached the canoe he looked in at the remains of the fruit

all squashed and gone bad from the sun; then, turning to the

gratings he began to unfasten the strips of coconut sennit that had

tied the bodies of the children.

The birds had pulled the bodies to pieces, not even the little bones

were left and the bindings hung lax; his fingers were not trembling

now as they had trembled on Karolin when trying to untie the knots;

he had plenty of time to work in and bit by bit the fastenings came

undone.

Then the gulls, if they had bothered to look, might have seen a

strange sight: Rantan trying to make himself a loin cloth.

Why?

He had neither real decency nor shame in his composition, there was

no one to see him in his nakedness but the gulls. Why then did he

trouble?

Trouble he did and the result was scarcely worth his trouble. Then,

and still without eating, he turned to and cleared the rotting

pandanus and other fruit out of the canoe—he could not swill her out

as he had nothing with which to hold water, but she had brought in a

long piece of weed tangled on the outrigger; the sun had dried it,

but he wet it again in the lagoon water and used it as a sort of

mop.

Having cleaned her and seen that the mast, sail and paddles were all

right, he came back to the trees, plucked some pandanus drupes and

began to eat.

As he sat down to the food, he made to hitch up his left trousers

leg, a habit he had. Before leaving the canoe to come back to the

trees he had tried to put his hand in his pocket. In this way and in

other ways and incessantly his vanished clothes spoke to him,

reminding him that he was naked, worm-naked on the face of the

world.

He ate, staring at the lagoon as if hypnotized by its blueness, and

as he ate, pictures travelled before his mind’s eye, pictures of

Karolin lagoon and the two dead women he had left on the southern

beach, and then, as a bird hops from one branch to another, his mind

left Karolin and lit on the deck of the _Kermadec_ and from that on

to the sands of Levua in whose woods he had slain Peterson.

All his troubles had started from the killing of Peterson. It was

just as though Peterson had been following him, stripping him

steadily and bit by bit of everything down to his very clothes: of

the schooner, of the pearl lagoon, of his sea chest, of the few

dollars he had saved, of his hat, his shoes, his trousers, his

shirt, his coat—everything. He tried to put away this idea but

failed.

It was now only nine o’clock in the morning of a day that would not

end at sunset, of a blue and blazing day that, with night

intermissions, would last for months and months—for the rainy season

was far off. And he was out of trade tracks.

He stood up, looked about him, and then walking carefully, picked

his way on to the rough coral above the outer beach. Here on a

smooth spot he stood looking over the sea to the northeast.

Nothing.

Karolin, with fabulous treasure in its blue heart, lay somewhere

over there, lost, so far that even the lagoon light did not show.

He turned to the southeast. Somewhere there lay the Paumotus.

Should he push off in the canoe and try to reach them?

Since waking this morning there had fallen upon Rantan a double

obsession, the paralysing sense of his nakedness and now the feeling

that somehow in some way Peterson was following him—following him

wearing the seven-league boots of bad luck. He believed neither in

God nor in ghosts, but he believed in luck—and his luck had been

frightful and it had dated from the killing of Peterson.

This double obsession cut the ground from under the feet of his

energy, so that the idea of escape in the canoe entered his mind

only to leave it again. He came back to the trees, lay down in their

shadow and now the gulls began to talk to him.

The little island had two voices, the endless sound of the breakers

and the unending complaint of the gulls; sometimes it would be just

a voice or two, sometimes clamour—always indifference, voices from a

world that knew nothing of man.

The dead women he had left lying on Karolin beach were not further

beyond the pale of things than he who had slain them, and it came to

Rantan as he lay there that he was shut out; no one knew of his

fate, he was of no manner of interest to anything that surrounded

him; to the wind, to the sunlight, to the trees, to the gulls. If he

were to drop dead on the sands, he would become an object of

interest to the predatory gulls, but alive he was of interest to

nothing.

This was not a passing thought; it was kept alive in his mind by his

nakedness. His mind had been stripped of its clothes in the form of

living beings and accustomed surroundings, just as his body had been

stripped of its clothes in the form of shirt, coat and trousers. The

two nakednesses were as two voices perpetually talking together,

answering each other, echoing one another.

Then, hypnotized by the murmur of the reef, he drifted off into

sleep.

He was on the schooner. She was anchored in Karolin lagoon and the

crew were diving for pearls, the deck was strewn with heaps of

shells and Carlin was showing him a huge pearl in the palm of his

hand. It was the last, they had stripped the lagoon clean, and now

it was mainsail haul for ’Frisco, wealth, wine and women. He was

down in the cabin, pearls all over the floor and pearls in the

bunks, and as the ship rolled, the pearls ran and he chased them

about the floor on his hands and knees, and they turned into pebbles

as he caught them. Some turned into white mice and ran over Carlin

who was lying dead by his bunk, and then Poni shoved his head

through the skylight and called down at him: “Caa—caa—caa,” and he

awoke beneath the trees to the call of a passing gull.

CHAPTER V—WHAT HAPPENED TO RANTAN (CONTINUED)

He sprang to his feet and came running out on to the sands. For a

moment he could not tell where he was, then he remembered. It was

past noon and the tide was beginning to ebb. He saw the canoe and he

stood, stood for a full minute without moving a single muscle—his

mind working furiously, no longer diffident, no longer helpless, as

though the dream in restoring his old environment had given him

strength, renewed courage and daring.

He must clear out of this place, get to the open sea. The Paumotus

were possible, ships were possible, death was possible, but better

than this place where nothing was possible, where nothing was but a

beach to walk on, blazing sun and jeering gulls.

The ebb was beginning to run, it would take him through the break,

he must act at once.

He ran towards the trees and began collecting pandanus drupes and

carrying them to the canoe. He climbed like a monkey for drinking

nuts, and just as on the Karolin beach he ran, sweating as he came

piling the fruit on board; drinking nuts, drinking nuts—he never

could have enough of them. Then the last of his frantically

collected cargo on board he did what he had also done on the beach

of Karolin, flung himself down by the little pool and drank till he

nearly burst.

It was all a repetition of that business and only wanted the dead

bodies of the women to make the picture complete. Then he came to

the canoe.

Here it was the same again. He could not get her off. The dead

children no longer weighed down the outrigger, but he had stowed his

cargo badly and that did the business; the outrigger was bedded in

the sand. He laboured and sweat rearranging the fruit, then at last

she began to move; he pushed and drove, the lagoon water took her to

amidships—another effort and she was waterborne and he was on board

working with a single paddle and getting her farther out.

He was free.

A weight seemed gone from his soul, he no longer felt his nakedness;

the power of movement, the escape from the beach and the new hope

that lay in the open sea, were like wine to his spirit. It was a

move in a new game and daring whispered to him that he would yet

beat Peterson.

Working with the paddle from side to side, he got her farther and

farther out, and the break lay before him now and beyond the break

beckoned the sea.

He had turned sideways to take a last derisive look at the prison

house of the trees and beach when—aye, what was that? Water ran over

his knees as he knelt to the paddling, water that moved with a

slobber and chuckle beneath the nuts.

The canoe was leaking. The sun must have done this business

yesterday, craftily, whilst he was asleep. She had been bone dry

when he stowed the fruit and now the stuff was awash or nearly so.

The mat sail was brailed ready to be broken out when clear of the

lagoon. He looked at it, then his eyes fell again to the interior of

the canoe—the water had risen higher still: this was no ordinary

leak that immersion would caulk, there was nothing to be done but to

return and try to mend it on the beach.

He began to paddle, making frantic efforts to turn the canoe’s head

and bring her ashore. He was too late, the ebb had her like a leaf

and though he turned her head, it was only to make her float

broadside to the spate of the tide.

The only chance was to try and hit the beach near the break.

He worked like a giant.

Only a few minutes before his heart had rejoiced at his escape, now,

with the prospect of certain death from drowning in the outer sea,

the beach seemed to him the most delectable place in the world.

But he could not reach it. The nearer the break the swifter the ebb;

the lagoon water had him like a swiftly running river; the canoe

twisted and turned to his efforts but he could not alter the line of

its travel sufficiently to hit the beach.

Then, flinging the paddle away he rose, held on to the mast, plunged

over the side and struck out for the shore.

When he reached it and stood up, the canoe was gone, swept to sea to

be submerged and tossed on the swell.

His last possession had been taken from him. Schooner, money,

pearls, clothes and lastly the canoe, all were gone; he had nothing

in the world—save the loin cloth made from the bindings of the dead

children.

But he was not thinking of that. His life had been saved. He had

almost touched death and now as he looked on the boiling current, he

saw a shark fin shearing along as though the shark that had missed

him was blindly hunting for him.

He came back to the trees, hugging the life that had been spared to

him and sat down to rest, Death sitting opposite to him—cheated.

This business brought things to a crisis with Rantan; though robbing

him of his last possession, it still had given him a sense of

winning a move, and truly, though his luck had been dreadful, there

had been an under-current of good luck. He had escaped from Le Moan

that night, he had escaped from Nanu and Ona who had him bound hand

and foot, he had escaped from the sea coming to this atoll, and he

had escaped from the leaking canoe and the shark. His mind took a

turn. He felt that he was meant to live, he was sure that now he

would be rescued. A ship would come.

And at this thought that seemed clothed in surety, the man’s soul

blazed up against Karolin. If she were only a ship with the right

sort of people on board, he would find Karolin for them and they

would rip the floor out of that lagoon and the hearts out of the

kanakas that lived by it.

And the right sort of people would be on that ship and she would

come—she would come. He knew it.

CHAPTER VI—WHAT HAPPENED TO RANTAN (CONTINUED)

He fell asleep on the thought and for days and days he hugged it,

and every day a dozen times he would go to the flat space on the

coral and look over the sea for the ship.

One morning he saw something dark on the beach near the break; it

was the canoe, the tide had taken her out only a little way and the

sea had played with her, submerged as she was, returning her to the

lagoon where the full flood had beached her. The water had drained

out of her with the ebb and there she was and there he found her,

pulling her up higher just for something to do. He found the crack

that made the leak, it was quite small and he might have plugged it,

but there was no paddle and anyway he would not have used her—he was

waiting for the ship that was sure to come.

Rantan had, like most sailors, the full use of his hands, and he

longed to use them, but he had no tools or anything to work on; near

the trees and close to the mammee apple there was a patch of coarse

grass and the idea came to him to make something out of it. Once in

Chile he had escaped from prison by making a grass rope and the idea

came to him now to make another; anything was better than sitting in

idleness, and it seemed a lucky thing to do, for not only had he

escaped from the Chilean prison by means of the rope, but he had

come on a streak of good luck when free. So, gathering grass, he sat

down to weave his rope.

The business was a godsend to him.

He limited the work to a few hours a day so as not to cloy himself,

and he would look forward to the work, hours as men look forward to

a smoke.

Whilst he worked at it, he wove his thoughts into the rope, his

desires, dreams and ambitions all were woven into it, the killing of

Peterson went in, and the memory of the dead women on Karolin beach,

his hatred of the kanakas and of the red-headed one who had come and

looked at him, Dick.

As a woman weaves into her knitting her household affairs and so on,

the busy fingers of Rantan wove into his rope visions of ripping the

pearls out of Karolin lagoon, of hunting the kanakas to death, of

drinking bars and loose pleasures to be had with the pearl

money—truly, if an inanimate thing could be evil, it was evil, for

it held Rantan’s past. The amount of grass being limited, he

sometimes knocked off work for a couple of days; and the days became

weeks and the weeks went on and on till one morning, when the grass

being nearly finished and the rope almost long enough to hang a man

with a six-foot drop, Rantan, coming to his lookout, sighted a ship.

Away towards the north she lay so far that he could only tell she

was of fore and aft rig and making either for or away from the

atoll. Ten minutes showed her bigger—she was coming for the atoll.

She was The Ship.

Then Rantan danced and sang on the smooth bit of coral and shouted

to the gulls, and he came down to the sands and ran about on them

like a dog in high spirits; he shouted to the canoe and abused her

and called her filthy names, then back again to see how the ship was

growing and back again to the sands to cut more capers.

She grew.

Returning to his lookout post for the fourth time, she seemed to

have suddenly shot up in size as if by magic. Now he could see her

clearly, her make and size and the patch on her foresail. He took a

breath so deep that his chest stood out above his lean belly like a

barrel. God! she was the _Kermadec_! The _Kermadec_ or a sister

ship, her twin image; the eye of a sailor told him that, the patch

on the foresail he knew—he had helped to put it there.

He turned and came running on to the sands.

White men must have come into Karolin lagoon and made friends of the

kanakas—the women would have been found dead on the beach, the canoe

gone. It was all plain.

They would know that with the wind blowing at that time the canoe

would have come in this direction; he was being searched for, either

to be clubbed to death, by kanakas or hanged by whites.

There lay the canoe on the beach and his footsteps on the sand.

He looked round. There was no mark of a campfire to give him away,

nothing but the canoe, the footsteps, the fruit skins and coconut

shells he had left lying about, and the rope.

He started to clear up, casting the skins and shells amongst the

bushes. Then, diving into the bushes he hid there listening—waiting,

sweating, the rope coiled by his side.

CHAPTER VII—THE BATTLE AND THE VICTORY

The island grew.

Poni at the wheel, his eyes wrinkled against the sun, steered; Aioma

beside him, Le Moan near Aioma and Dick forward near the galley.

Dick had taken his seat on the deck in a patch of shadow and now he

was leaning on his side supporting himself with his elbow. The sight

of this island that was not Karolin had completed the business for

Dick.

For four days he had scarcely touched food and for four days Le Moan

had watched him falling away from himself. It was like watching a

tree wither.

There was a vine on Karolin that would sometimes take a tree in its

embrace just as ivy does, grow up it and round it and cling without

doing the tree any injury; but if the vine were cut away from the

tree, the tree would die.

It seemed to Le Moan that Taori was like the tree and Katafa the

vine.

She was right.

Seldom enough, yet every now and then you find in this wilderness of

a world, amidst the thorns of hate and the poison berries of passion

and the dung of beasts and the toadstools of conjugal love, a

passion pure and unselfish like the love of Katafa and Taori. Who

moreover, above most other mortals, stood apart in a world there was

no room for little things—where the sky was their roof and the ocean

their floor and storm and war and cataclysm, halcyon weather, and

the blaze of a tropic sun their environment, where the love that

bound them together had, woven into it—after the fashion of the rope

of Rantan—their past.

The thousand little and great and beautiful and terrific things that

made up their past, all these were woven into the passion that bound

them together.

To cut this bond, to separate them forcibly one from the other, was

death.

In hot climates, in the tropics where the convolvulus grows so

rapidly that the eye can all but see it grow, people can die quickly

of love. Death grows when released with the fountain speed of the

rocketing datura and the disruptive fury of corruption.

Dick cut away from Katafa was going to die. It was not only the

cutting away, but the manner of it, that made his case hopeless.

Not only was he cut away from Katafa, but he was also divorced from

his environment. His universe had consisted of Palm Tree and

Karolin, the sea that held them, the sky above them: Katafa—nothing

more.

Then Palm Tree had vanished and Karolin had been taken from him and

nothing was left but the great vacant world of the sea, that and the

grief for the loss of Katafa.

He was going to die. He was dying. His very strength was killing

him.

You sometimes find that—find that the power of a powerful man can be

turned in against itself by grief or by disaster or disease.

He was going to die, as Aioma said, and Le Moan knew it.

He was dying because Katafa had been cut away from him.

The sound of the bow-wash and the sound of the sea as it washed past

the counter, and the creak of rope and spar, kept saying all this.

“Taori is dying because Katafa is no more with him—no more with

him....”

Meanwhile the island grew.

And now Aioma, cheered by the sight of this bit of land, began

talking to Poni in a high-pitched voice. But Le Moan did not hear or

heed what he said.

So, Taori was going to die. And it was for this that she had taken

him away from Katafa. She had taken him away to have him to herself

and he was turning into a dead man. To save him from death she had

given herself up to Peterson, to save him from death she had killed

Carlin and risked being killed by Rantan, and yet he was going to

die.

She could hear now the faint and far-away breathing of the surf on

the reef ahead mixed with the words of Aioma to Poni; and now harsh

and complaining and sudden and near came the call of a gull; a land

gull, flying as if racing them.

“Taori is dying because of Katafa—Katafa—Katafa,” cried the gull,

and Le Moan following the bird with her eyes let her gaze sweep back

to the deck where Taori was lying, half leaning, the sun upon his

bare back where the vertabræ showed and the ribs.

And louder now came the breathing of the surf on the reef, heavy

like the breathing of a weary man.

“All life is weary and full of labour,” sighed the surf, “and there

is no more joy in the sun—and Taori is going to die because of

Katafa.”

“Katafa,” creaked the cordage to the foam that went sighing aft.

The wind freshened and the main sheet tautened and the great sail

bellied hard against the blue, the schooner lifting to the swell

crushed into it with great sighs and long shudders like the sighing

and shuddering of a dying man, and the atoll leaped larger to view,

the palm trees standing clear of the water above the coral and the

visible foam.

“The palm grows, the coral waxes, but man departs,” whispered the

wind, repeating the old rede of the islands; and now the lagoon

showed through the break and Le Moan, watching and knowing that

there, should they enter that lagoon, Taori would find his last home

beneath the palm trees, scarcely knew of the terrible battle raging

in the darkness of her mind—knew only that she was all astray,

helpless, useless, pulled this way and that between two opposing

forces great as the powers of life and death; whilst louder now came

the sound of the surf, louder and deeper and more solemn, till once

again she was on the beach of Karolin, the stars were shining, the

little conch shells whispering and chirruping to keep the evil

spirits away, for Uta Matu the king was dying and his breathing came

from the house like that.

Then, suddenly, with the cry of a dreamer awakened from some

terrible dream, flinging out her arms to thrust away the dark spirit

that had all but seized her soul and the body of Taori, Le Moan

flung Poni from the wheel, seized the spokes and the schooner,

checking, turned, her canvas thrashing and clawing at the wind.

Turned—the island wheeling to the port quarter and the main boom

flogging out with Aioma and Poni hauling at the sheet; turned and

held, close hauled and steering for the west of north.

“Karolin,” cried Le Moan, “Aioma, the sight has come to me—the path

is plain.”

“Karolin!” cried Aioma. “Taori, the spell is broken, we are free and

the net of Le Juan torn asunder and the spears of Uta blunted.”

CHAPTER VIII—WHAT HAPPENED TO RANTAN (CONCLUSION)

Safe hidden amongst the bushes he listened. It would take a full

hour yet before the schooner could make the break, yet he listened

as he lay, his rope beside him, his mind active as a squirrel in its

cage.

They would search the atoll, they would hunt amongst the bushes—yet

they might miss him.

Should they find him! His dark mind took fire at the thought, wild

ideas came to him of escaping into the lagoon, boarding the

schooner, seizing a rifle and turning the situation. He was a white

man, a match for a hundred kanakas if only he could get a foothold

above them, a rifle in his hands. In this he was right, as he had

slain the women who had him safely bound, so had he the possibility

in him to meet this last attack of fate, free himself, and

dominating and destroying, make good at last.

Time passed, the reef spoke and the wind in the trees, but from the

outer sea came nothing. He peeped through the bushes, getting a view

of the reef line to northward. By now surely the topmasts of the

schooner ought to show close in as she must be, yet there was

nothing.

He came out of the bushes like a lizard, stood erect and then came

cautiously towards the higher coral where his outlook post was;

literally on hands and feet he crawled, inch by inch, till the sea

came in view and then he crawled no longer. He stood erect.

Far off on the breezed-up sea the schooner close-hauled was standing

away from the island.

Rantan could scarcely grasp the fact before his eyes. She had been

making for him and now she was standing away.

She had not been searching for him, then. Was she after all the

_Kermadec_ or had he been mistaken?

Her shape, her personality, that patch on the sail—well what of

that? Other ships had patched canvas besides his schooner. He had

surely been mistaken.

As she dwindled dissolving in the wind, his hungry eyes followed

her.

How fast she was going, faster than the _Kermadec_ could sail

close-hauled.

He watched her till she was hull down, till her canvas showed like a

midge dancing in the sea dazzle, till it vanished taken by the round

world into the viewless.

Then he came back to the trees.

Just as the ship had gone from the sea, so had his dream ship gone

from his mind, taking hope with her, leaving him to his utter

nakedness. He went to the old canoe that he had abused and vilified

in his hour of triumph; the sun had enlarged the crack, the forward

outrigger pole had worked loose with the tossing in the swell, there

was no paddle.

Yet she could talk to him, telling him of Nanu and Ona and their

dead children, and of Carlin and Peterson, and beyond that of Soma

and Chile and many a traverse to the beginning of that great

traverse of his life.

He wished to be done with it all.

With the going of hope, the fact of his nakedness had seized him

again.

It had never quite left him; the feeling of being without clothes

had tinged even his dreams, he had fought against it and put it by,

but it always returned, and now that hope had departed it was back

and in a worse form. For now if he did not fight it hard, it was

taking the form, not of discomfort and a sense of want, but of

uneasiness, the terrible excitable uneasiness that the stomach can

produce when disarranged—stomach fear.

He fought it down, returned to the trees and found that his worry

about the ship and his own position had quite gone; he was worrying

about nothing, for he was at grips with something new, something

born of his naked skin and his stomach that had been feeding on

uncooked food for so long, something that had been making for him

for weeks, something that threatened to rise to a crisis and make

him run—run—run.

Dropping to sleep that night he was brought awake by something that

hit him a blow on the soles of his feet; twice this happened and

when he slept he was hunting for his clothes, and when he awoke it

was to face another blue day, a day lovely but implacable as a sworn

tormentor.

He walked the beach in his nakedness.

The gulls had begun to jeer at him now. Up to this they had left him

severely alone, treating him with absolute indifference, but they

had found him out at last; they were laughing at him all along the

reef, talking about him and every now and then rising above the

trees to look at him.

This idea held for a little and then passed, and he knew that he had

been the victim of a delusion.

The gulls were quite indifferent to his presence.

Now amongst the trees and close to the waterside stood a gigantic

soa with rail-like branches projecting like limbs across the sand

and one big branch standing at right angles from the trunk some

fifteen feet up.

Lying now amongst the tree shadows, and listening to the gulls’

voices that had become normal, and the long roll of the unending

breakers and the whispering movements of the robber crabs, Rantan

fixed his eyes on this branch and saw himself in fancy swinging from

it at the end of a rope, free of all his trouble, naked no longer.

The rope he had woven and which was lying amongst the bushes had

tied itself to the branch in his imagination.

He saw himself rising, hunting amidst the bushes and coming out of

them with the rope in his hand; climbing the tree, fixing the rope

to the limb, making the noose in the free end, placing the noose

round his neck, dropping—kicking the air—dangling.

At noon a great gull sweeping across the lagoon from the leeward to

the windward beach, seeing the dangling figure, altered its line of

flight as if deflected by a blow, and a high-going burgomaster,

seeing the deflected flight of his brother in hunger, circled and

dropped like a stone to where Rantan was dangling and dancing on the

wind. A naked figure yet capable, had the schooner put in, of

boarding it by night, seizing command by treachery, sailing north

and sweeping Karolin, for such is the power of the White Man. But

Rantan was dead, slain by the action of Le Moan in putting the

schooner about. This was the third time she had sacrificed herself

for the sake of Taori, the third time that she had countered danger

and death with love.

CHAPTER IX—THE GREEN SHIP

Le Moan steered. Tireless and heedless of time as when she had

brought the schooner first to Karolin, she kept the wheel all that

day and through the night, giving it over to Poni for short

intervals, whilst Dick slept.

She had given life back to him and it was almost as though she had

given him her own life, for the world around her had become as the

world wherein ghosts move; disembodied spirits, not dead but no

longer connected with earth.

Before setting eyes on Taori, she had lived on the southern beach of

Karolin, lonely, cut off with Aioma and the others who had no

interests beyond the interests of the moment; as she lived so might

she have died neither happy nor unhappy, without pity and without

love or care for the morrow or thought of the past.

Then Taori had come, not as a man but as a light greater than the

sun, a light that struck through the darkness of her being, bringing

to birth a new self that was his—that was he.

She had braved death and the unknown—everything—only to find herself

at the end face to face with death, and death saying to her “He is

mine—or Katafa’s.”

Like the woman who stood before Solomon, she had to choose between

the destruction of the thing she loved and the handing of it to a

rival to be lost to her forever, to see its arms clinging to

another, and its love given to another, and its life becoming part

of the life of another; and she chose the greater sacrifice, not

because she was Le Moan, a creature extraordinary or supernormal,

but just because at heart she was a woman.

A woman, acting, when brought to the great test, less as an

individual than as a part of the spirit of womanhood. The spirit

changeless through the ages and unalterable. The spirit so often

hidden by the littleness of the flesh, so seldom put to the heroic

test, so absolutely certain in its answer to it. For when a woman

really loves she becomes a mother even though she never may conceive

or produce a child.

Aioma, who had slept through the night on his belly on the deck,

spread like a starfish, awoke as the sun was rising.

Poni was at the wheel—Le Moan had gone below. The cabin had no fears

for her now, and she had said to Poni, just as the sun was rising

and pointing into the west of north, “You will see the lagoon light

there.”

Dick, by the galley, was still sleeping, Tahuku and Tirai were the

watch.

The beauty of that sunrise on that blue and lonely sea, beyond word

or brush, was unseen by Aioma.

“It will be over there,” said Poni, pointing ahead. “It does not

show yet.” Aioma went forward and stood looking into the northwest.

No, it did not show yet nor would it show till the sun was twice its

diameter above the horizon. Aioma, listening to the slash of the bow

breaking the water and fanned by the draught from the head sails,

having swept the sky found his eye caught by something far across

the sea and right in their course. It looked at first glance like a

rock but at once his bird-like eyes resolved it into what it was—a

ship, an _ayat_, but with no sail set.

The canoe-builder glanced back along the deck past the sleeping

figure of Dick to the figure of Poni at the wheel, then he turned

his eyes again upon the far-off ship, and now in the sky to the

north above and beyond the ship lay something for which he had been

on the lookout—the lagoon light of Karolin, almost imperceptible,

but there just in the position where Le Moan had said it would be.

The something he had waited and longed for, but spoiled, almost

threatened, by this apparition of a ship.

Aioma wanted to have nothing more to do with ships; this traverse in

the schooner had turned him clean back towards canoes; for days

past, though he had said no word on the matter, all his ancestors

had been hammering at the door of his mind shouting, “Aioma, you are

a fool, you have forsaken the canoes of your forefathers for this

_ayat_, and see how it has betrayed you, and why? Because it is the

invention of the white men, the cursed _papalagi_ who have always

brought trouble to Karolin. If we could get at you, Aioma, we would

stake you out on the reef for the sharks to eat. You deserve it.”

He had said nothing of this because Aioma never confessed to a

fault.

Well there was another _ayat_, blocking the way to Karolin and sure

to bring trouble.

Civilization and trouble had come to be convertible ideas in the

mind of this old gentleman who although he did not know the English

word that represents greed, brutality, disease, drink, and robbery

dressed in self-righteousness, had sensed the fact that the white

man always brought trouble.

Well, there it was straight before him heading her off from Karolin.

What should he do? Turn and run away from it? Oh, no. Aioma, who had

fought the big rays and who was never happier than when at grips

with a conger, was not the person to turn his back on danger or

threat, especially now with Karolin in view.

This thing lay straight in his path, as if daring him, and he

accepted the challenge; they had the speak sticks, there were eight

of them not including Le Moan and if it came to a fight—well, he was

ready.

Without rousing Dick, he called the fellows up from below, pointed

out the ship and then stood watching as she grew.

Now she stood on the water plainly to be seen, a brig with canvas

stowed as if in preparation for a blow. If any canvas had been set

it must have been blown away by the wind, for she showed nothing but

her sticks as she lay rolling gently to the swell.

Tahuku, who had the instinct of a predatory gull coupled with the

eye of a hawk, suddenly laughed:

“She is empty,” said Tahuku, “she has no men on her. It is a dead

turtle, Aioma, you have called on us to spear.”

Aioma hit by the same truth ran and roused Dick, who on waking

sprang to his feet. He was renewed by sleep and hope, a creature

reborn and as he stood with the others he scarcely noticed the ship,

his eyes fixed on the light of Karolin.

Poni at the wheel called Le Moan and she came up from below and

stood watching whilst the brig, now close to them, showed her

nakedness and desolation beneath the burning light of morning.

Old-fashioned, even for these days, high-pooped, heavily sparred and

with an up-jutting bowsprit, her hull of a ghastly faded green

rolled with a weary movement to the undulations of the swell,

revealing now the weed-grown copper of her sheathing, now a glimpse

of the deserted deck. There were no boats at the davits and as the

current altered her position, giving her a gentle pitch, came a

sound faint against the wind, the clapping of her deck-house door.

Aioma turning, ran aft and stood beside Poni at the wheel giving him

directions. The canoe-builder, urged by his ancestors and his hatred

of the _papalagi_, had evolved an idea from his active brain and

Dick, who had let his eyes wander from the brig to the far-off light

of Karolin, heard suddenly the thrashing of canvas as the steersman

brought the schooner up into the wind.

Aioma was going to board the _ayat_. He was shouting directions to

Tahuku and the others—they ran to the falls, the boat was lowered,

and in a moment he was away, shouting like a boy; scrambling like a

monkey when they hitched on to the broad channel plates he gained

the deck and stood looking round him.

Aye, that was a place! Bones of dead men picked clean by the birds

lay here and there, and a skull polished like a marble rolled and

moved and rotated on the planking to the pitch of the hull, the

clicking of the lax rudder chain, and the clapping of the deck-house

door.

He had brought his fire-stick with him and its little bow, from the

deck of the schooner. They watched him as he stood looking about

him. Then turning, he darted into the deck-house.

He was there a long time, perhaps ten minutes, and when he came out

a puff of smoke came after him. Holding the door open, he looked in

till another puff of smoke garnished with sparks, hit him in the

face, then having done a little dance on the deck and kicked the

skull into the starboard scupper, he dropped into the boat and came

back to the schooner, singing.

The boat was hoisted in, the schooner put on her course and the

smoking brig dropped far astern, but Aioma, still flushed with his

work and victory, heeded nothing.

He sat on the coaming of the saloon skylight singing.

He sang of the bones of the dead men and the skull he had kicked and

the ayat he had fired and the cursed _papalagi_ whose work he had

destroyed; then, with a great whoop he curled up and went asleep,

undreaming that the _papalagi_ might yet have their revenge, and

Dick, to whom Aioma and the ship astern flaring horribly in the

sunlight were as nothing, watched from the bow the steady growing

beacon of Karolin in the sky.

There was Katafa.

His soul flew ahead of the schooner like a bird, flew back and flew

forward again calling on the wind, and the wind, nearing,

strengthened, so that a little after midday the far treetops of the

southern beach came to view and now, faint and far away, the song of

the great atoll.

Birds flew to meet them and birds passed them flying towards the

land and as the sun began its downward climb to the water, the break

began to show away on the port bow and Le Moan, pushing Tahuku, who

was at the wheel, aside, prepared to take them in.

For only Le Moan knew the danger of the break when the tide was

ebbing as now.

The waters were against them. It seemed the last feeble effort of

fate to separate Dick from the being he loved.

The vast lagoon was pouring out like a river, it was past full

spate, but the swirl was enough, if the helmsman failed to drive

them on the coral. Now they were in the grip of it, the schooner

bucking like a restive horse, now steady, now making frantic efforts

to turn and dash out to sea again—Aioma in the bow crying

directions, Le Moan heeding him as little as she heeded the crying

of the gulls.

Now they had stolen between the piers. The break on either side of

them seemed immensely broad and the grand sweep of the outgoing

water lit by the westering sun showed with scarcely a ripple to

where it boiled against the piers: gulls in flight above it showed

as in a mirror, yet it was flowing at a six-knot clip.

The schooner with every sail drawing seemed not to move, yet she

moved, turning the mirror to a feather of foam at her cut water and

a river of beaten gold in her wake. The piers dropped astern, the

current slackened, the lagoon was conquered and lay before them a

blaze of light from the beach sands to its northern viewless

barrier.

Katafa was sleeping. She who slept scarcely at all by night and

whose eyes by day were always fixed towards the sea, was sleeping

when the voice of Kanoa roused her:

“They come, Katafa, they come!”

Raising herself on one hand, she saw the sunset light through the

trees and the form of Kanoa making off again to the beach his voice

drifting back to her as he ran:

“They come, Katafa, they come!”

Then where the whole village was waiting, she found herself on the

sands, the lagoon before her and on the lagoon the schooner bravely

sailing in the sunset blaze, the sails full and now shivering as,

curving to her anchorage, the wind left them and the rumble of the

anchor chain running out came across the water, rousing her to the

fact that what she saw could not be, that what she saw was a ship,

but not the ship that had taken Taori away, the ship she had watched

and waited for till hope was all but dead and life all but darkness.

It could not be. It could not be that she should return like this,

so sure, so quietly, so real, the dream ship that held her heart and

soul, her love, her very life.

The boat putting off now was a phantom, surely, and Taori as he

sprang on the sands and seized her in his embrace was unreal as the

world fading around her, till his lips seized her up from twilight

to the heaven of assurance.

“Taori has come back,” cried the women, forgetting him as they

turned to the men who were standing by the boat—unheeding Le Moan

who stood, her work done, a being uncaring, seeing nothing, not even

Kanoa, crouched on the sands half dead with the beatitude of the

vision before him.

CHAPTER X—ARIPA! ARIPA!

“Listen!” said the wind.

From her place amidst the trees where Le Moan had settled herself

like a hare in its forme she heard the silky whisper of the sands

and the voice of the beach and the wind in the leaves above bidding

her to listen.

Far-away voices came from the mammee apple where the men of the

schooner and their wives were making merry, and now and then, the

faintest thing in the world of sound, a click and creak from Nan on

his post above the house where Taori lay in the arms of Katafa.

To Le Moan all that was nothing. She had banded death in exchange

for Taori, all her interest in life, all her desires. She had not

even the desire to destroy herself. The fire that had been her life

burned low and smouldered; it would never blaze again.

“Listen!” said the wind.

Something moved amidst the trees—it was Kanoa: Kanoa, his heart

beating against his ribs, his hands outstretched touching the tree

boles.

She saw him now as he came towards her like a phantom from the

star-showered night, and she knew why he came, nor did she move as

he dropped on his knees beside her—all that was nothing now to Le

Moan.

Since the night when he had saved her from Rantan, he had been

closer to her than the other men of the schooner, but still only a

figure, almost an abstraction.

To-night, now, he was a little more than that, as a dog might be to

a lonely person, and as he poured out his heart in whispers she

listened without replying, let him put his arm around her and take

her lips; all that was nothing now to her whose heart would never

quicken again.

* * * * *

The wind died, day broke, and the wind of morning blew.

Joy and the sun leapt on Karolin. Joy for Katafa who came from the

house to look at a world renewed, for the women whose husbands had

returned, for the men, for the children. Joy for Kanoa, his soul

shouting in him, “She is mine, she is mine,” and for Aioma, the lust

of revenge and destruction alive and dancing in his heart.

He had killed the green ship; this morning he would kill the

schooner; the cursed _ayat_, that he had yet loved so dearly only a

week ago, was doomed to die.

He hated it now with an entirely new and delicious brand of hatred

and if he could have staked it out on the reef for the sharks to

devour, so would he have done.

It had given him the scare of his life, it had all but snapped him

away from Karolin, it had caused ancestral voices to rise cursing

him for his folly and treachery towards his race; it had brought up

visions of the Spanish ship, the brutal whale men, Carlin, Rantan,

and the whole tribe of the _papalagi_, it was theirs and it had got

to die.

Besides, it was going to give him the chance to set fire to things.

He was still licking his chops over the firing of the green ship and

the joy of incendiarism was about to be recaptured.

It was the last blaze up of youth in him. He called the village

together and explained matters.

The _ayat_ was accursed. His father, Amatu, had explained it all in

a dream, commanding him, Aioma, to attend to this matter. The thing

had to burn; if it did not burn worse would befall Karolin.

“Burn, burn, aripa, aripa!” cried the boys.

“Aripa!” shrieked the women, the men took tongue and the cry went up

like the crackle of flame.

Katafa listened, loathing the schooner. The cry went up from her

heart.

Dick stood dumb. Dumb as a man hesitating before cutting away the

very last strand connecting him with his past. Dumb as a man about

to renounce his race, though of his race and of the civilized world

from whence he had sprung he knew nothing—nothing save the fact of

the cannon-shot of the _Portsey_ long years ago, the white-led

Melanesians of Palm Tree, the ruffianism of Carlin and Rantan and

the rage in his own breast for adventure that had nearly separated

him forever from Katafa.

Then, suddenly, he joined in the shout.

“Aripa! aripa! aripa!”

Forgetting his chieftainship, he raced with the others to help to

push off the boat bearing Aioma to his work.

Then he stood with Katafa watching. Near them and beside Kanoa stood

Le Moan.

They watched the canoe-builder clamber on board like a monkey, they

saw him dancing on the deck like a maniac insulting the ropes and

spars, then they heard the ship’s bell go clang-clang, as he made

her talk for the last time.

He vanished down the foc’sle and came out escorted by a cloud of

smoke, down the hatch of the saloon from whose skylight presently a

blue-grey wreath uprose and circled on the faint breeze.

Then he was on deck again and away in the boat, and the schooner was

burning fore and aft.

Wreathing herself in mist that cleared now to show two tall columns

of smoke rising and spreading and forming spirals on the wind, red

flames like the tongues of hounds licking out of the portholes,

flames that ran spirit-like about the old tinder-dry deck. The main

boom was burning now, the topping lofts were snapped, flames curling

round the masts like climbing snakes, and now, like the rumble of a

boiler, came the rumble of the fire as it spread in her, breaking

through bulkheads, seizing the cargo and splitting the decks.

The sandalwood was burning and the incense of it spread across the

lagoon to the white-robed congregation of the gulls wheeling and

giving tongue above the reef; burning and blazing till the decks

gave utterly and the crashing masts full sheeted in flame like tall

men tumbling to their ruin amidst the roar of a burning city.

The flames devoured the smoke and the sun devoured the flames,

forty-foot jets that leaped tongue-like sunwards, fell and leapt

again. The great conflagration gave no light; it roared, and the

consuming wood, pine and deal, teak and sandal filled the air with

the sound of bursting shells and the rattle of musketry, but the sun

of that blazing day ate the light of the flames so that they showed

stripped of effulgence, stark naked; ghosts, cairngorm coloured,

wine coloured, spark spangled, illuminating nothing.

And now the port bulwarks, breaking in one piece from the stern to

amidships, fell in a blaze and the anchor chain, running out, broke

from its attachments and she was adrift miraculously on the flood,

now low to the break, now broadside, as the current took her—blazing

as she drifted, pieces of her ever going, dipping now by the bow,

slipping from sight in a veil of steam as the water rushing in

fought the fire and the fire fought the water and was killed. And

now there was nothing but driftwood so far out as scarcely to be

seen, and a tiny cloud that vanished and a perfume of sandalwood

that lingered in the air, ghost-like ... gone.

CHAPTER XI—THE GREEN SICKNESS

All that remained of her was the boat, the lesser of the two boats

which Aioma had saved for the moment.

The island was without a single canoe, and he intended to build one

as swiftly as might be for the fishing; that being done he would

destroy the boat and so obliterate the last trace of the cursed

_papalagi_.

So he set to work and the work progressed, Le Moan helping with the

others. She worked at the making of the sail, Kanoa helping her,

happy, ignorant of her utter deadness to all things, yet sometimes

wondering.

Sometimes this woman he had taken to his heart seemed indeed a

spirit or a lost soul as she had seemed to him that time before the

killing of Carlin; always she was remote from him in mind,

untouchable as the gulls he had chased as a child on Soma. Yet she

was his and she let him love her,—and “Time,” said the heart of

Kanoa, “will bring her arms around me.”

Her strangeness and indifference increased his passion. A child and

yet a man, he moved now in a wonder world, he was always singing

when alone and there was something in his voice that made it

different from the voices of the others, so that when the women

heard him singing in the groves they said “That is Kanoa.”

And despite his happiness in her and his love for her and his

embraces, despite the joy of new life that filled Karolin and the

beauty of the nights in which Taori and Katafa walked together on

the reef, never once did the desire come to Le Moan to destroy

herself—all that was nothing to her now.

She had torn out her heart and nothing else mattered, even life.

“And to-morrow or next day,” one morning said Aioma, “the canoe will

be ready and we will burn the lesser _ayat_ as we burned the

greater. Ah hai, what is this, the reef is lifting before my

eyes—Look you, Tahuku!”

But Tahuku saw nothing. The reef was solid as of old and the sun was

shining on it and he said so.

The canoe-builder shut his eyes and when he opened them again the

reef had ceased to lift, but he was weary. Bells rang in his ears

and his hands were hot and dry and now after a while and towards

midday one of the _papalagi_—so it seemed to him—had seized him from

behind and tied a band round his head, screwing it so tight that he

would have screamed had he been an ordinary man.

He lay on the ground, and as he lay a woman, one of the wives of

Poni, came running, panting as she ran.

“I burn, I burn!” cried the woman. “Aioma, my sight is going from

me; I burn, I burn!” She fell on the ground and Katafa running to

her raised her head.

Aioma turning on his side tried to rise but could not, then he

laughed.

Then he began to sing. He was fighting the _papalagi_ and killing

them, the Spaniards of long ago and the whale men and Carlin and

Rantan; his song was a song of victory, yet he was defeated. The

white men had got him with the white man’s disease. Measles stood on

the beach of Karolin, for the green ship with its cargo of labour

had fallen to measles and Aioma in boarding it had sealed his doom.

It was Poni who guessed the truth. He had seen measles before—and

now, remembering the ship, he cried out that they were undone, that

the devils from the green ship had seized them and that they must

die.

He had no need to say that.

Aioma lasted only a day, and the lagoon took him; by then the whole

population was down, all but Taori, Katafa, Le Moan and Kanoa.

Kanoa had taken the disease at Vana Vana many years ago and was

immune; the others, saved, perhaps, by the European blood in their

veins, still resisted the disease.

The people died on the coral or cast themselves burning into the

lagoon and were seized by the sharks, who knew.

And to Le Moan as she watched them, it was not the green sickness

that did the work, but she herself.

She had brought this curse on Karolin. She had brought the schooner

and the white men, she had taken the schooner to meet the green

ship; it was the mother of her mother, Le Juan, who was reaching

through her to slay and slay. Aioma in a lucid interval before he

died had seized her by the hands and told her this, but she had no

need of the telling of Aioma. She knew. And she watched, helpless

and uncaring. She could do nothing, and the people passed, vanished

like ghosts, died like flies, whilst the wind blew gently and the

sun shone and the gulls fished and dawn came ever beautiful as of

old through the Gates of Morning.

CHAPTER XII—THE RELEASE OF LE MOAN

One night, when the disease seemed past and only ten people were

left of all those who had watched the burning of the schooner, Le

Moan, sleeping by Kanoa, was awakened by Katafa.

Katafa was weeping.

She seized Le Moan by the hands and raising her without waking

Kanoa, led her to the house above which Nan still stood

frizzy-headed in the moonlight.

In the house on a mat Dick was lying tossing his head from side to

side and talking in a strange tongue.

Talking the language of his early childhood, calling out to Kearney

whom he had long forgotten, but whom he remembered now.

The green sickness had seized Dick—resisted for days and days it had

him at last.

Le Moan stood in the doorway and the moon looking over her shoulder

lit the form on the mat, the reef spoke and the wind in the trees,

but she heard nothing, saw nothing and for a moment felt nothing.

Taori was lying on the mat talking in a strange tongue, turning his

head from side to side.

Then, as a person all but drowned, all but dead, comes slowly back

to life and comes in agony, Le Moan began to feel the world come

round her once more, the world she had known before she tore her

heart out.

Taori was going to die. And the heart she had torn out was back

again and the love that had filled it.

Taori was going to die—to die as the others had died and as surely,

and as certainly through her who had brought this curse on Karolin

and through whom the hand of Le Juan was still striking.

So great was the power of this thought that it fought with and

overcame the passionate desire to fling herself on her knees beside

him and take him in her arms; so great was its power that it almost

drove the thought of him away before the crowding recollections it

brought up of her own disastrous history in which she had brought

evil to everyone. To Peterson, to Rantan, to Carlin, to Poni, to

Tahuku—Tirai, all whom she had touched or come in contact with. To

Aioma—and lastly to Taori.

Taori is going to die—_Ai amasu Taori_—the wind sighed it above him,

it came mixed with the sobbing of Katafa and the voice of the beach

with the rumbling voice of Taori himself, talking, talking, talking,

as he wandered on the reef of memory with Kearney in a land that

knew not Katafa.

_Ai amasu Taori_—and she dared not bid him goodbye; to save him she

must go, leave him untouched, for the net of Le Juan was not yet

torn, nor the spears of Uta blunted.

Even to look at him was fatal, yet she could not tear her eyes away.

_Ai amusu Taori_—a great breaker on the coral cried it to the night

and broke the spell and turned her towards the weeping Katafa.

“Oh, Katafa,” said Le Moan, speaking in a voice clear but scarcely

above a whisper, “Taori will not die—I go to save him; the nets are

spread for him but I will break them, I the daughter of Le Jennibon,

the daughter of Le Juan”

Even as she spoke the voice from the house quieted.

“I who have brought this evil.” Katafa heard her voice, not knowing

what she said, for the change in the voice of the sick man was

speaking to her.

Gliding into the house she lay down beside him, her cool hand upon

his brow.

Le Moan turned to the beach through the trees. Night rested on

Karolin and the moon showed the sands far stretching and filled with

the silky whisper of the wind.

Far to the right lay the canoe all but completed, to the left the

boat of the schooner. Le Moan came to the boat.

The tide was full, almost touching the keel, it was a light boat,

the sands were firm, and evil though it was, it could not resist

her. Afloat, with an oar, she drove it out, and raising the sail

shipping the rudder, gave the sail to the wind.

The wind was favourable for the break, the ebb was beginning to run,

all things were helping her now because she had conquered. Death

could do no more against her for she was his.

To the right lay the moonlit sands of the southern beach from which

she had sailed that morning with Peterson and with a dread in her

heart that she did not feel now; before her lay the widening break

with the first ebb racing through it to the sea, a night-flying gull

cried above her as the breakers loudened on the outer beach and fell

behind her as the wind and tide swept her out to the sea.

Far out, beyond return by drift or chance, she brailed the little

sail, unstepped the mast and cast mast and sail to the water, cast

the oars to the water, and lying down gave her soul into the hands

of that Power through which her mother’s people had gained release

when, weary of the world, they chose to turn their faces from the

sun.

* * * * *

Northwest of the Paumotas men talk of a vast atoll island half

fabulous, half believed in. Ship masters have sighted a palm line by

day reefless because, steer as they will, some sort of current has

never allowed them to raise the reef and by night the pearling

schooners have heard the breathing of a beach uncharted, and always

on the sound a wind has followed blowing them away from the

mysterious land.

Karolin—who knows?—the island of dreams, sealed by the soul of Le

Moan to the civilization that the children of Lestrange and their

child escaped from; a beach that the pleasant sunshine alone lights

for me; where Aioma shapes his logs and where I watch, undisturbed

by the noise of cities, the freshness we have lost and the light

that comes alone through the Gates of Morning.

THE END

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Transcriber’s Notes

1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations

in spelling.

2. Retained other archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as

printed.

3. Words or phrases printed in italics in the original text are

surrounded by underscores, _like this_.