I
Hagen’s island—a tiny realm of wonder and suspense.... There it lay,
lost in a warm and dreaming sea, a blue on all sides of uncompromising
intensity. Yes, the island, saturated with sunshine, often richly agleam
with pearls from a swift, brief downpour of rain, appeals to the eye
as not quite real, with its murmurs of palm and giant fern, its ruined
docks, its broken derrick once painted red and standing now against the
lush bloom like a spectre ruling in an empire of everlasting silence.
“Quite capable once—h’m?—of bringing on a war somewhere”—yet now such a
spot of smiling, dreaming quiet. (“Oh, the laughter behind it all....”)
Except when tempest sweeps, furious and black, across the world, whipping
the sea into a churning fury and tearing through the close fabric of the
jungle like an offended offspring of Cerberus, the island sleeps and
broods under a sky tenderly blue and lofty; while restless along the comb
of the inner reefs is ever a rustling fringe of white, “a necklace with
conscience of lead....” There is foam on the lap of the yellow beach. A
place—yes, a place not unhaunted, and bringing sometimes, by the sheer
charm of its drowsy hush, a little throb to the throat. And silence—so
white and enthralling, whether at noon or lighted by luminous spheres of
southern midnight: a silence such as one may encounter in some little
lonely church among the hills of Italy....
But all suddenly, within a house cleverly constructed of palm trunks, the
silence was broken; a woman stood tacking something against the wall. A
man in riding breeches, pongee coat, and white shirt open at the throat,
was just in the act of draining a little glass of amber coloured liquor
in an adjoining room. He sang out to her:
“Stella! What are you up to? You sound like a whole army of carpenters!”
She laughed with an effect of coyness and stepped back. “You’d never
guess, Ferd!”
“What is it?”
“No, you’ll have to come in and see.”
He came, his handsome face a little more flushed than usual, perhaps, and
his eyes supremely blue and round.
“Aha!” he exclaimed in the doorway of the room they humorously called
their parlour.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” laughed the girl, “till I came across
it at the very bottom of the trunk. I certainly would never have thought
of bringing a calendar! Maud must have slipped it in—she was always
raving about that picture—isn’t it beautiful?” Stella laughed derisively,
though without bitterness, for the past was all behind her. “It used to
hang in the dining room,” she explained. “I guess Maud thought it might
look cheerful to us a long way from home. It gives you a sort of feeling
of being still in touch with the world, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” he agreed, and, with a faint smile, beheld a large mercantile
calendar, a bright-coloured print filling the upper half. The picture
showed a sailor just returned to his little home nest after hazardous
voyages. All the colours were too gaudy, and the sailor’s dog was
absurdly foreshortened; but it was a joyous tableau, within its frame of
coiled and knotted ropes; and across the hearthrug, in energetic gold,
one read: