Going up the garden, Signet let me know that the woman was in love with
him. I might believe it or not. She would do anything for him.
"_Anything!_" he exclaimed, standing squarely still in the path. And in
his eyes I was somehow relieved to find a trace of wonder.
Obstacles! All his life had been a turning back from small,
insurmountable obstacles. Of a sudden he beheld really vast obstacles
tumbling down, verily at a touch. Here was just one more of them. By a
lucky chance this "Queen Daughter" did not know by whose hand she had
been made thrice a widow; it was the simplest thing to suppose it the
trader, the same big, blond, European man who had presently removed her
"for safety" to the summer house behind the Residence.--And from the
trader, by a gesture of melodramatic violence, the other and slighter
man had set her free.--Perhaps even that would not have intrigued her
essentially barbaric interest as much as it did had it not been for his
amazing attitude of, well, let's say, "refrainment." His almost absurdly
fastidious concern for what the West would call "the sanctity of her
person." You can imagine--to a Marquesan woman! That! She was not ugly!
As her gaze, from the platform, dwelt upon the shrewd, blade-sharp
features of the man beside me, the elementary problem in her eyes seemed
to redouble the peculiar, golden, Aryan beauty of her face. Let me tell
you I am human. Perhaps Signet was human, too. Standing there,
encompassed by the light of that royal and lovely woman's eyes, there
was surely about him a glow--and a glow not altogether, it seemed to me,
of "Smith's nickel and Jones's dime." I could have laughed. I could have
kicked him. The impostor! Even yet I had failed to measure the man.
Back on the veranda again, dinner eaten, and dusk come down, Signet
brought out an old guitar from among the Dutchman's effects (it had
belonged probably to that defunct nephew of the dress clothes), and as
he talked he picked at the thing with idle fingers. Not altogether idle,
though, I began to think. Something began to emerge by and by from the
random fingerings--a rhythm, a tonal theme.--Then I had it, and there
seemed to stand before me again the swarded "high place," with torches
flaring over upturned faces and mounting walls of green. Almost I sensed
again the beat in my blood, the eye-ravishing vision of that gold-brown
flame of motion, that voluptuous priestess.
"Oh, yes. That!" I murmured. "It's got something--something--that
tune.--But how can you remember it?"
"_She_ helps me out. I'm trying to put it in shape."
Indeed, when I left that night and before my oarsmen had got me a
cable's length from the beach I heard the strumming resumed, very
faintly, up in the dark behind the Residence; still tentatively, with,
now and then through the flawless hush of the night, the guiding note of
a woman's voice. (A woman profoundly mystified.)
A rehearsal? For what? For that almost mythical Broadway half around the
bulge of the world? Had the fool, then, not got beyond _that_? Yet?
Here he was, lord of the daughter of a queen, proprietor of a "gold
mine." For Signet was not to be hoodwinked about the commercial value of
Taai. All afternoon and evening, as through the two days following,
while my promised cargo was getting ferried out under the shining
authority of the pump gun, he scarcely let a minute go by without some
word or figure to impress upon me the extent of his "possessions." To
what end?
Well, it all came out in a burst on the third evening, my last there. He
even followed me to the beach; actually, regardless of the Dutchman's
nephew's boots and trouser legs, he pursued me out into the shadows.
"A gold mine! Don't be a damned boob, Dole. You can see for yourself, a
big proposition for a guy like you, with a ship and everything--"
Upon me he would heap all those priceless "possessions." Me! And in
exchange he would ask only cabin passage for two from Taai beach to the
Golden Gate. Only deck passage! Only anything!
"Set us down there, me and her, that's all. I'll give you a bill of
sale. Why, from where you look at it, it's a _find_! It's a lead-pipe
cinch! It's taking candy away from a baby, man!"
"Why don't you keep it, then?"
The soul of his city showed through. I saw him again as I had seen him
swimming in his cotton pants, with that low-comedy whisker and that
consuming little greedy nickel hope of paradise. Even the gestures.
"No, but can't you see, Dole? I got a bigger thing up my sleeve.
God'l'mighty, d'you think I'm a _farmer_? You could go big here; _I_
don't go at all. I ain't that kind. But put me down in New York with
that woman there and that there dance--and that tune--Say! You don't
understand. You can't imagine. Money? Say! And not only money. Say! I
could take that up to Glauber's Academy, and I could say to Glauber,
'Glauber,' I could say--"
I had to leave him standing there, up to his knees in the inky water,
heaping me frankly with curses. I shall not repeat the curses. At the
end of them he bawled after me:
"But I'll get there! You watch me all the same, all the same, you
damn--"
The reason I didn't up-anchor and get out that night was that, when I
came aboard I discovered not far from my berth the unobtrusive loom of
that Dutch gunboat, arrived for a "look-in" at last.
The only thing for me to do was to sit tight. If, when the state of the
island's affairs had been discovered, there should be want of
explanation or corroboration, it would be altogether best for me to give
it. I wasn't yet through trading in those waters, you understand.
But Signet was no fool. He, too, must have seen the discreet shade of
the visitor. When the morning dawned, neither he nor the royal dancer
from the Marquesas was to be found. Some time in that night, from the
windward beach, ill-manned and desperate, the royal sailing canoe must
have set forth tumultuously upon its pilgrimage again.
I sat in a place in Honolulu. Soft drinks were served, and somewhere
beyond a tidy screen of palm fronds a band of strings was playing. Even
with soft drinks, the old instinct of wanderers and lone men to herd
together had put four of us down at the same table. Two remain vague--a
fattish, holiday-making banker and a consumptive from Barre, Vermont.
For reasons to appear, I recall the third more in detail.
He let me know somewhere in the give-and-take of talk that he was a
railway telegraph operator, and that, given his first long vacation, an
old impulse, come down from the days of the Hawaiian _hula_ phonograph
records, had brought him to the isle of delight. He was disappointed in
it. One could see in his candid eyes that he felt himself done out of an
illusion, an illusion of continuous dancing by girls in rope skirts on
moonlit beaches. It was an intolerable waste of money. Here, come so far
and so expensively to the romantic goal, he was disturbed to find his
imagination fleeing back to the incredible adventure of a Rock Island
station, an iron-red dot on the bald, high plain of eastern Colorado--to
the blind sun flare of the desert--to the immensity of loneliness--to
the thundering nightly crisis of the "Eleven-ten," sweeping monstrous
and one-eyed out of the cavern of the West, grating, halting,
glittering, gossiping, yawning, drinking with a rush and gurgle from the
red tank--and on again with an abrupt and always startling clangor into
the remote night of the East.
He shifted impatiently in his chair and made a dreary face at the
screening fronds.
"For the love o' Mike! Even the rags they play here are old."
The consumptive was telling the banker about the new coöperative scheme
in Barre, Vermont.
"For the love o' Mike!" my friend repeated. "That ain't a band; it's a
historical s'ciety. Dead and buried! Next they'll strike up that latest
novelty rage, 'In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree!'--Now will you listen
to that. Robbin' the cemetery!"
He needn't have asked me to listen. As a matter of fact I had been
listening for perhaps a hundred seconds; listening, not as if with the
ears, but with the deeper sensatory nerves. And without consciously
grasping what the air was I had suffered an abrupt voyage through space.
I saw a torch-lit sward, ringed with blue and saffron faces and high
forest walls; I saw the half-nude, golden loveliness of a Polynesian
woman shaken like a windy leaf. And the beat of a goat-hide drum was the
beat of my blood. I felt my shoulders swaying.
I looked at the young man. His face expressed a facetious weariness, but
his shoulders, too, were swaying.
"What tune is that?" I asked, in a level tone.
His contemptuous amazement was unfeigned.
"Holy Moses! man. Where you been?"