Three Kanaka men, strangers to the island, sat cross-legged on the turf.
One had taken over a drum from a local musician. The other two had
instruments fashioned of dried gourds with fingering pieces of bamboo
and strings of gut--barbaric cousins to the mandolin. So, on this one
night in history, the music of another tribe had come to Taai. It just
escaped being an authentic "tune." How it escaped was indefinable. The
sophisticated ear would almost have it, and abruptly it had got away in
some provoking lapse, some sudden and bizarre disintegration of tone.
And the drumbeat, bringing it back, ran like a fever pulse in a man's
blood.
In the center of the sward, her back to the musicians, a solitary female
danced; a Kanaka woman, clothed in a single shift of the sheerest
crimson cotton, tied at one shoulder and falling to mid-thigh. Not from
Taai did this woman come; one saw that; not from any near island or
group. Her beauty was extraordinary, like that of the Marquesans, with
that peculiar straightness of all the lines, at once Grecian, austere,
and incalculably voluptuous.--
The dance, as I saw it for the first time that night, I will not speak
of. I have traded to many islands in many groups--even the Low
Archipelago--but the island where that dance was indigenous I am sure
I've never touched. Compared with any of the _hulas_, set and fixed in
each locality as the rites of Rome, it was sophisticated; it gave an
illusion of continuous invention and spontaneity; it was flesh swept by
a wind and shattered; it ravished the eyes.
I don't know how long I watched; how long all the immortal flame in me
lent itself to the histrionic purposes of that woman. But I shall never
forget it. Never! Never!
I looked away. I saw two faces. One of them hung over my shoulder. It
was the trader's. It was the face of a man who has lived a very long
while wielding power of life and death over unsatisfying satisfactions.
A man awakened! The toppling of a hundred centuries, indeed.
The other was Signet's. Scarred by leaf shadows, thrust like a swimmer's
from the meager sea of heads and naked shoulders, it held as still as a
death mask, minute by minute, except that, in the penumbra cast by the
veil of goat tuft on his chin, the Adam's apple was convulsed at
intervals, as if he were swallowing, as if the man were _drinking_!
The night grew. The torches were consumed, the "place" deserted.
Somewhere the amazing voyagers had taken themselves to rest. A half moon
mutilated the island--long stripes of palms, shadow scars of defiles,
mottles of bushes. It was like a sleeping animal, a tiger of deep blue
and blue-white, an enormous leopard.
We sat on the veranda at the Residence, the trader and I. By and by,
soft-footed, Signet was there, occupying the lowermost step.
The Dutchman talked. Like the able administrator he was, he had already
all the data to be procured. Into his ears had poured the whispered
trickles of a score of informants.
"You are right, my dear sir. Marquesan. You have been there?"
"No."
"She is called in Polynesian, 'Queen Daughter.' My people, who know
nothing as a rule, of course--but they tell me the woman is in actuality
the daughter of a queen. But what is a Kanaka queen? After all, Signet,
my dear sir, down there, what is one queen, out here?"
The trader was obviously in a good humor. He had not been excited for
years. The man was alive. I've said he was like a Spaniard in that he
could be diabolical without getting red in the face. Diabolically
devious and strategic! Before he resumed he blew three mouthfuls of
cigar smoke out into the moonlight, where they burst from the shadow
under the roof like mute cannon shots, round and silvery. Beneath them,
from the step, Signet's eyes were fixed upon the trader's face, dry,
rapt, glazed with some imperious preoccupation.
"But they tell me this woman has danced in a great many islands. She
will go from here to another island to dance. The three men are her
husbands. But she is no wife. A maid, that woman! They have the
hardihood to tell me that. Ha-ha-ha! But, then, she is daughter to a
queen. With those 'husbands' she crosses a hundred leagues of sea in her
sailing canoe. That royal canoe! To dance at another island.--"
As the Dutchman talked, blowing his smoke bursts into the moonlight, the
vision of that Marquesan woman came again before me. I perceived her,
under the heavy procession of his words, a figure of astounding romance,
an adventuress incomparable, a Polynesian bacchante. No, I saw her as
the missionary of a strange thing, crossing oceans, daring thirst and
gale and teeth of sharks, harrying deeper and deeper into the outseas
of mystery that small, devoted, polyandrous company of husbands, at once
her paddlers, cooks, flunkies, watchdogs, music makers. "Queen
Daughter!" Royal and self-anointed priestess of that unheard-of dance,
the tribal dance, no doubt, of some tiny principality rearing a cone in
the empty hugeness of the sea.--I couldn't get away from my time and
race. I found myself wondering what she got out of it--in some
jungle-bowered, torch-lit "high place," to feel again the toppling of
ten thousand years? Was it something to feel the voluptuous and
abominable beauty of that rhythm going out of her flesh, beat by beat,
and entering into the flesh of those astounded and half-hostile
watchers? Perhaps.--
"They tell me that she has also danced at Papeete--before the white men
of the steamships," the Dutchman was informing us.
At that, from the step, from the moon-blue huddle of the castaway, there
came a sound. With a singular clarity of divination I built up the
thought, the doubt, the bitter perturbation in the fellow's mind. The
woman had danced then at Papeete, the cross roads, the little Paris of
mid-seas. And before the white men from steamers--the white men that go
back!
Moved by projects deeper and more devious than ours, the Dutchman made
haste to cover up what seemed to have been an overshot. Frankly, he
turned his attention to the outcast.
"By the God, then, my dear Signet, have you considered?"
He knew well enough that Signet had "considered." He could see as well
as I that Signet was a changed man. But he must "pile it on."
"There, my dear sir, you have it. That 'hunch!' That 'sure fire!' Do you
think I do not know that New York of yours? Such a dance as that! You
must believe me. If you were but a man of energy, now--" With the utmost
deliberation he launched upon a tirade of abuse. "But, no, you are not a
man of energy, not a man to take things in your hands. The obstacles are
too big. Those three husbands! You might even take that woman, that
lovely, royal dancing woman--you, my dear sir, a common street snipe.
What would a woman like that, with that novel, impassioned, barbaric,
foreign dance, be worth to a man on your Broadway? Eh? But obstacles!
Obstacles! You have her not on Broadway. It is too many thousand miles,
and you have no money. But see, if you were a man to grasp things, a man
to 'hit the nail in the head,' to 'boost,' to 'go big'--then would not a
man like me, who turns everything to gold--would he not say to you
quickly enough, 'See here, my dear sir, but let me put so much money
into the undertaking myself?'"
Under the explosions of cigar smoke, Signet continued to hold the trader
with his eyes; seemed to consume him with the fixed, dry fire of his
gaze. Not fathoming, as with a singular intuition I had fathomed, the
profound purposes of the Dutchman, Signet saw only the implied promise
in his words.--The trader broke out once more with a sardonic and
calculated spleen:
"But, no! Obstacles! A sniveling little animal sees only obstacles. The
obstacle not to be mounted over--those three husbands. There they lie
tonight on Nakokai's platform--this beautiful, incredible 'Queen
Daughter'--this gold goddess of the 'Shame Dance'--and about her those
three husbands. Ah, my dear sir, but their big, lithe muscles! That is
too much! To imagine them leaping up at the alarm in the moonlight, the
overpowering and faithful husbands. No, he cannot put out his hand to
take the gift. _Pah!_ He is a criminal in nature, but he is afraid of
the police, even here. He is not a man for the big life in these
islands. He will never do anything. Those faithful, strong watch-dogs of
husbands! Those strong, destructive muscles! Dear, good God, that is too
much to think of--Look, my dear sir!"
He was speaking to me, as if Signet were less than the very pebbles at
the step. He got up, striking the floor heavily with his boots, and I
followed him into the house, where he took a lighted candle from a
stand. Buried in our shadows, silent footed, Signet pursued us as the
trader had meant him to do. I persist in saying that I perceived the
thing as a whole. From the first I had divined the maneuver of the
Dutchman.
"Look!" he repeated, flinging open a door and thrusting in the candle to
cast its light over ranks and ranges of metal. It was the gun room of
the Residence. Here dwelt the law. Shotguns, repeating rifles, old-style
revolvers, new, blue automatics. An arsenal!
"Big brown muscles!" he cried, with a ponderous disdain. "What are they?
What is the strongest brown man? _Puff!_ To a man of purpose and
indomitable will like me! Obstacles? Three husbands? _Puff-puff-puff!_
Like that!--But all that will never be of use to _him_. That Signet! No,
he is a street snipe who will steal a pocketbook and call it a crime. He
is afraid to grasp.--But it is close in here, is it not?"
It was too bald. He stepped across the floor, unlatched and threw open
the blind of the window, letting the candlelight stream forth upon a
mass of bougainvillaea vine without.
"I keep this door locked; you can imagine that," he laughed, returning
and shutting us out of the gun room. He twisted the key; put it in his
pocket. And there, at the back, that window blind stood open.
He stared at Signet, as if the beach comber were just discovered.
"You are hopeless, my dear sir."
"Let us have a drink," he shifted.
For Signet he poured out a tumblerful of raw gin. The fellow took it
like a man in a daze--the daze of a slowly and fiercely solidifying
resolution. It shivered in his hand. A habit of greed sucked his lips.
Into his mouth he took a gulp of the spirits. He held it there. His eyes
searched our faces with a kind of malignant defiance. Of a sudden he
spat the stuff out, right on the floor. He said nothing. It was as if he
said: "By God! if you think I need _that_! _No!_ You don't know me!"
He stalked out of the door. When we followed as far as the veranda we
saw him making off into the striped light to the left.--
"Why did you call it the 'Shame Dance,' Mynheer?" We were seated again.
"Of course, my dear sir, it is not that, but it has a sound so when the
Kanakas speak it. The woman spoke the name. If it is a Polynesian word
I have not heard it before. 'Shemdance.' Like that."
"A good name, though. By jingo! a darn good name. Eh, Mynheer?"
But the trader's head was turned in an attitude of listening. Triumphant
listening--at the keyhole of the striped, moonlit night. I heard it,
too--a faint disturbance of bougainvillaea foliage around two sides of
the house, near the window standing open to the gun room.
Of course the amazing thing was that the man fooled us. In the
Dutchman's heart, I believe, there was nothing but astonishment at his
own success. Signet, on the face of it, was the typical big talker and
little doer; a flaw in character which one tends to think imperishable.
He fitted so precisely into a certain pigeonhole of human kind.--What we
had not counted on was the fierceness of the stimulus--like the taste of
blood to a carnivore or, to the true knight, a glimpse of the veritable
Grail.
All the following day I spent on board, overseeing the hundred minor
patchings and calkings a South Sea trader will want in port. When I went
ashore that evening, after sundown, I found the Dutchman sitting in the
same chair on the veranda, blowing smoke out into the afterglow. There
was the illusion of perfect continuity with the past. Yesterday, today,
tomorrow. Life flowed like a sleeping river, it would seem.
But this was the status of affairs. The three brown music makers,
sons-in-law to an island queen, lay on a platform somewhere within the
edge of the bush, heavier by ounces with thirty-two caliber slugs,
awaiting burial. And Signet, guttersnipe, beach comber, and midnight
assassin, was lodged in the "calaboose," built stoutly in a corner of
the biggest and reddest of the Dutchman's godowns. As for the royal
dancing woman, I was presently in the trader's phrase, to "have a look
at her."
At his solicitation I followed around the house, past the gun-room
window (locked fast enough now, you may be sure), and up steeply through
a hedged, immaculate garden, which witnessed to the ordered quality of
the owner's mind. At the upper end, under a wall of volcanic tufa, we
came to a summerhouse done in the native style, stilts below, palmite
thatch above, and walled on three sides only with hanging screens of
bamboo. Striking through this screen from the west, the rose and green
of the afterglow showed the woman as in a semi-luminous cavern, seated
cross-legged in the center of the platform, her hands drooped between
her knees, and her large, dark eyes fixed upon the sea beyond the roof
of the Residence below.
Was it the perfect immobility of defiance and disdain? Not once did her
transfixed gaze take us in. Was it the quiescence of defeat and
despair--that level brooding over the ocean which had been to her, first
and last, a cradle and roadway for her far, adventurious pilgrimages?
She sat there before our peering eyes, the sudden widow, the daughter of
potentates brought low, the goddess of an exuberant and passionate
vitality struck with quietude; mute, astounded by catastrophe, yet
unbowed. The beauty of that golden-skinned woman abashed me.
It did not abash the Dutchman. His was another and more indomitable
fiber. It is fine to succeed, beyond expectation, detail by detail of
strategy. His hands were clean. He remained the perfect administrator.
Had there been no other way, he would not have flinched at any necessary
lengths of wholesale or retail butchery. Still, it was nice to think
that his hands were spotless. For instance, if that gunboat, with its
purple-whiskered Amsterdammer of a captain, should just now happen in.
His face glowed in the dusk. His eyes shone with frank calculations.
Fists on hips, head thrust out, one saw him casting up the sum of his
treasure-trove.--But he was an epicure. He could wait. It was even
delightful to wait. When I turned away he came down with me, his hands
still on his hips and his eyes on the gently emerging stars.
The man was extraordinary. Sitting on the veranda, bombarding the
direction of the foreshore with that huge deliberate fusillade of cigar
smoke, he talked of home, of his boyhood on the dike at Volendam, and of
his mother, who, bless her! was still alive to send him cheeses at
Christmas-time.
It was midnight and the moon was rising when I got away and moved down
toward the beach where the dinghy waited. The horizontal ray struck
through the grating of the "calaboose" at the corner of the godown I was
skirting. I saw the prisoner. The upright shadow of an iron bar cut his
face in two, separating the high, soiled cheeks, each with an eye.
"You mustn't leave him get at her!"
I tell you it was not the same man that had come swimming and sniveling
out to the schooner less than forty hours before. Here was a fierce one,
a zealot, a flame, the very thin blade of a fine sword.
"Listen, Dole, if you leave that devil get at her--"
His eyes burned through me. He failed completely to accept the fact that
he was done. His mind, ignoring the present, ran months ahead. With a
flair of understanding, thinking of those three travesties of husbands
and the wife who was no wife, I perceived what he meant.
I left him. He was a wild man, but the quality of his wildness showed
itself in the fact that he squandered none of it in shaking the bars,
shouting, or flinging about. His voice to the last, trailing me around
the next corner, held to the same key, almost subdued.
"By God! if that--gets at her, I'll--I'll--"
"You'll what?" I mused. You see, even now I couldn't get rid of him as
the drifter, the gutter Hamlet, the congenital howler against fate.
"You'll what?" I repeated under my breath, and I had to laugh.
I got the vessel under way as soon as I came aboard. The Dutchman's
shipment of copra was arranged for--a week, two, three weeks (as the
wind allowed)--and I was to return from the lower islands, where my
present cargo was assigned, and take it on.
As we stood offshore under the waxing moonlight, as I watched the
island, gathering itself in from either extremity, grow small and
smaller on the measureless glass of the sea, the whole episode seemed to
swell up in my mind, explode, and vanish. It was too preposterous.
Thirty-eight hours chosen at random out of ten thousand empty Polynesian
years--that in that wink of eternity five human lives should have gone
to pot simultaneously--a man wasn't to be taken in by that sort of
thing.--
Through twelve days it remained at that. Discharging cargo in the
furnace of Coco Inlet, if my thoughts went back to Taai, it was almost
with the deprecating amusement a man will feel who has been had by a
hoax. If those minstrel husbands were murdered and buried; if that
Broadway imp sweated under the red-hot roof of the godown; if that
incomparable, golden-skinned heiress of cannibal emperors sat staring
seaward from the gilded cage of the Dutchman, awaiting (or no longer
waiting) the whim of the epicure--if indeed any one of them all had ever
so much as set foot upon that microscopic strand lost under the blue
equator--then it was simply because some one had made it up in his head
to while me away an empty hour. I give you my word, when at noon of the
thirteenth day the mountain of Taai stood up once more beyond the bows,
I was weary of the fantasy. I should have been amazed, really, to find a
fellow named Signet housed in the Dutchman's private jail.
As a matter of fact, Signet was not in the jail.
When I went ashore in mid afternoon, wondering a little why no naked
biscuit-beggars or gin swallowers had swum out to bother me that day, I
found the trader of Taai sitting on his veranda, blowing puffs of smoke
from those fine Manila Club perfectos out into the sunshine. Beside him
leaned a shiny, twelve-gauge pump gun which he jostled with an elbow as
he bade me by word and gesture to make myself at home.
I'm quite certain I looked the fool. My eyes must have stuck out. Half a
dozen times I started to speak. With some vacant, fatuous syllable I
tried to break the ice. Strange as it sounds, I was never so embarrassed
in my life.--For the trader of Taai, the blatantly obvious proprietor of
the island's industry and overlord of its destinies--sitting there
before me now with a pump gun touching his elbow--was this fellow
Signet.
Till now I don't know precisely what had happened; that is to say, none
of the details of the act, horrid or heroic as they may have been. All I
seemed to have was a memory of the Dutchman's voice: "Why do you not
kill _me_? Ha-ha-ha! Then you could take my property." And again an echo
of his disdainful laughter at that fool, "Ha-ha-ha!" as, on some
midnight, he had kicked his dinner guest and his "coolie cotton pants"
out into the rain.--Why not, indeed? But who now was the "fool?"
Signet, in the course of the afternoon, brought forth gravely a bill of
sale, making over in an orderly fashion to B.R. Signet, New York,
U.S.A., the real and personal property of the trading station at Taai,
and "signed" in the identical, upright, Fourteenth Street grammar-school
script, by "the Dutchman."--I understood Signet. Signet understood me.
The thing was not even an attempt at forgery. It was something solely
formal--as much as to say: "This is understood to be the basis of our
mutual dealings. You will see I am owner of this place."
As for the Dutchman:
"Oh, the Dutchman? Well, he decided to go away. Go home."
Before the incalculable sang-froid of this rail bird, movie usher, alley
dodger, and hanger-on at dancing academies, I could not so much as
summon up the cheek to ask what he had done with the body. You'll say I
ought to have acted; that I ought at least to have got up and left him.
That shows two things--first, that you've never been a trader in the
islands; second, that you cannot at all comprehend how--well, how
_stunning_ he was. Sitting there, a single fortnight removed from cotton
pants and the beach, crime-stained, imperturbable, magnificent! Spawn of
the White Lights! Emperor of an island! How's that?
"It's a rich island," he impressed upon me with an intention I was yet
to plumb. "Dole," he exclaimed, "it's a gold mine!"
"Is--is _she_ here?" I ventured to demand at last.
"_Is_ she? Say! Come and have a look."