"Iriatai," my uncle began, "is an atoll in the Paumotus--a narrow ring
of land nowhere more than a few yards high, surrounding a lagoon ten or
twelve miles across. The island has a curious history, for its people
were the last to remain savages among all the eighty islands of the
group. It is a lonely place, far out to the eastward where
trading-schooners seldom pass, and long after the missionaries had
civilized the other atolls, Iriatai remained unknown--no white man had
landed on its beaches, or laid eyes on the wild people whose village
was screened by the dense bush along the shore.
"In those days there was a famous Catholic school on Mangareva in the
Gambier group, and one year, at Christmas time, a brig set sail from
Tahiti for the South, with a cargo of trade, and half a dozen children
of wealthy half-caste families, sent to be educated by the Church. A
week after the brig's departure, a gale came roaring down out of the
northwest--a storm so fierce and long-continued that old men speak of
it to this day. On Tahiti there was great anxiety for the vessel's
safety, and no one was surprised when many months later a schooner came
north from Mangareva, with word that the brig had never arrived. It
was an old story,--another ship lost somewhere in the lonely spaces of
the South Pacific,--but there was one woman on Tahiti who refused to
believe that the vessel was lost. She was a rich widow whose only
child, a flaxen-haired girl of eight, was missing with the others, and
she offered great rewards to anyone who could bring her news of the
ship.
"One day a trading skipper came to her with a clew. On his last trip
through the Paumotus he had been blown far out of his course, and while
hove-to in a heavy sea, he had raised an island only vaguely marked on
the charts. He ran in to take shelter in the lee, and as they stood
off and on, close to the leeward reef, the lookout had reported people
ashore. Taking up his glass, the captain made out a crowd of savages
standing on the beach. They brandished spears and were dressed in
girdles of pandanus leaf, but two or three of them wore about their
shoulders pieces of cloth which the skipper took to be of European
make. He was an old-timer in the islands, and he was certain that no
trader had ever visited the place.
"The widow lost no time in fitting up an expedition at her own expense.
The skipper who had seen the savages on Iriatai was given command; the
old man is living in Papeete to-day--I had the yarn from him. He
picked up half a dozen Rangiroa boys and armed them with rifles in case
of trouble, though they were instructed not to shoot unless attacked.
"After a fortnight of beating about, they raised the palms of Iriatai,
sailed in through the pass, dropped anchor a stone's throw off the
village, and went ashore. There were canoes hauled up on the beach,
fishing tackle lay about as it had been dropped in haste, and the
thatched huts seemed to have been inhabited within an hour past, but
saving a dog or two and a few half-wild pigs, no living creature was in
sight. The captain heard a shout from one of his men who was exploring
the far end of the village, and the others hastened to the place where
the Christian boy was pointing with horror to the ground. There, close
to the temple of the islanders,--a long platform of rude coral
blocks,--was the _umu tagata_: the oven in which human bodies were
roasted whole. The bones of men, clean-picked by the cannibals of
Iriatai, were scattered on all sides, and hundreds of Chilian silver
dollars--current throughout the Pacific in those days--were arranged in
neat patterns about the cooking-place. A few yards off, mounted on
sharpened stakes along the coral wall, a row of heads was drying in the
sun, and one of them--a small head from which hung wisps of long flaxen
hair--made the whole story clear. The widow's daughter had been found.
"The skipper was sickened--if he had caught the people then, he told
me, he would have slaughtered them like sheep. Calling to his men, he
set off recklessly through the bush, resolved to shoot down the savages
at sight. Hour after hour the searchers struggled through the dense
green bush, scratched by thorns, streaming with perspiration, stumbling
over the sharp coral underfoot. It was a hot still day, and the jungle
was lifeless and strangely quiet. No leaf stirred, no bird sang, and
the drooping fronds of palms hung motionless overhead. Nothing moved
anywhere saving the small white sea-birds which circled eerily, high
above the tree-tops. The oppression of the bush cooled the skipper's
anger and lowered the spirits of the searching-party; no word had been
spoken for half an hour when they sat down in silence to rest, close to
a pile of jagged coral blocks. Leaning against a tree-trunk, with his
rifle between his knees, the captain was in the act of filling a pipe
when one of the men touched his arm, signing him to make no sound. To
one side of them, in the bleached mass of coral, there was a faint
scratching noise, and presently, as they watched, a brown hand and arm
appeared for an instant in a crevice of the rocks.
"'That is their hiding-place,' the native breathed into the skipper's
ear; 'I have heard my own people speak of such caverns, where they took
refuge in the old wars.'
"The captain thought for a moment before he spoke. 'Go alone to the
mouth of the cave,' he whispered to the boy beside him; 'our rifles
will protect you. See if you can talk to the savages. and if they
understand you, try to persuade one or two of the men to come out.'
"The native rose and stole away, and soon they heard his voice calling
softly in the Paumotan tongue. He seemed to be in conversation with
the people underground. When he returned there was an odd smile on his
lips. 'It is strange,' he said, 'those people speak a tongue such as
our old men use. They are like beasts or cruel children, killing
because they know no better, or are afraid. I do not believe that they
are evil men. There is no entrance to the cave--only a little hole in
the rock, through which a man may thrust his hand and arm. The place
is sacred in these people's eyes and on the ground close to the hole
there is an offering of food. They feared it might betray their
hiding-place; the man we saw was trying to reach it from within. There
is another way out, they said, knowing that I could never find the
place. To reach it, they swim beneath the water of the lagoon. We
cannot get in from above; all our strength would not suffice to move
the rocks. They are afraid to come out, but perhaps I might persuade
them if I could show gifts such as they have never seen.'
"The captain collected a few bright trifles among his men: a mirror or
two, a gaudy bandanna handkerchief, a clasp knife with a glittering
blade. The native returned to parley with the savages, and while he
was gone the skipper gave instructions to his men--they were to scatter
a little and lie hidden; if the wild people found courage to leave
their cave, and they were not too many, they were to be seized and
bound at once.
"An hour passed. Then, without the warning crackle of a twig, two
savages stepped from the bush and came toward the native who awaited
them, holding out gifts and speaking encouragingly. They were naked
save for light girdles of grass, and their shocks of hair were tied in
high knots upon their heads. The captain whistled, and a moment later
the two men of Iriatai lay triced and helpless on the ground.
"The schooner sailed for Tahiti the same night, carrying the prisoners,
whose evidence--the story, freely told, of how the wrecked brig had
been plundered before she broke up, and how every soul aboard had been
massacred--was placed before the French authorities. A few months
later a man-of-war was sent to Iriatai, with one of the prisoners as
interpreter, and the people of the island were carried off to Tahiti to
be civilized. In the end, the chief was executed in reprisal for the
island's crime, and his people were taken away to distant atolls of the
group.
"Only one of them, so far as I know, ever returned to Iriatai--Turia,
the chief's daughter, a girl of eleven or twelve when she was carried
off aboard the man-of-war. Her beauty and intelligence attracted the
notice of a half-caste Tahitian, who adopted her and gave her an
education at the Sisters' School. At seventeen she married the Baron
von Tesmar--an Austrian nobleman, a man of wealth and taste, brought up
among the capitals of the Old World. He was well known in all the
outlandish ports of the Pacific; for reasons of his own, of which he
never spoke, he had chosen to shut the door on the past. He traveled
on his own yacht with a Kanaka crew, and during a visit to Tahiti he
ran across Turia, the girl from Iriatai. A month later she sailed away
with him, with a marriage certificate, all legal and shipshape, stowed
away in her camphorwood box. I suppose she must have been the Baroness
von Tesmar--By Jove, a funny world!
"The natives have a quality I like: each one of them loves his own
island in a way that we can scarcely understand. Turia was no
exception, but unlike the rest of her people, she ended her days on
Iriatai. A short time after he married her the Baron became interested
in pearl-culture and--at her suggestion, no doubt--they settled on the
island where her savage forefathers had lived and died.
"To give you an understanding of the story from now on, I must tell you
one or two things about pearl-shell, which furnishes the
mother-of-pearl used all over the world for buttons and ornaments and
the handles of knives. In the Paumotus where I trade, the
pearl-oysters are of a kind called 'black-lipped,' valuable as
mother-of-pearl but rather barren so far as real pearls are concerned.
Out to the west, about Celebes and in the Sulu Sea, there is another
variety, richer in pearls and far more valuable as shell, called
'gold-lipped,' because the edges of the shell are golden-tinted. Von
Tesmar was a man of some scientific attainments, and he suspected, far
ahead of his time, that the growth of a pearl in the oyster was caused
by a parasite, which it might be possible to transmit by artificial
means. In order to carry out his experiments, he had his schooner
fitted with a kind of well, through which the sea water was allowed to
circulate, and brought shipments of live oysters from distant parts, to
be transplanted in Iriatai Lagoon. He may have had an idea that the
gold-lipped oysters, in this new environment, would prove more
susceptible to infection--to the little-known parasite believed to
cause the pearl.
"The Baron's career, his studies of the pearl, and his new settlement
on Iriatai were all ended by the hurricane of 1881. The island had
been one of the finest of the Paumotus, with dense groves of coconuts
and a deep soil on the higher spots, but when I first landed there, in
ninety-six, it was a waste of sand and tumbled coral-blocks,
clean-swept from end to end by breaching seas. On an islet, far down
the lagoon, a small clump of palms remained--the only living things,
save Turia and her child, to survive the fury of the sea.
"The settlement was at the weather end, and when the seas began to
breach across into the lagoon, von Tesmar's schooner was anchored fifty
yards offshore. Both cables snapped and she disappeared in an instant
among the driving clouds downwind. She must have piled up at the
leeward end, or perhaps she was carried clean over into the open sea
beyond. At any rate, no man of her crew was ever seen again. The
people of the settlement--a dozen natives with their wives, brought by
von Tesmar to labor in the oyster-beds--had no time to chop off the
tops of the palms in which they took refuge. A pair of old palms,
eighty feet high, flexible and tough as whalebone, stood close beside
the house. High up on the bole of one, the Baron tied himself, and
Turia swarmed up the other, her three-year-old boy lashed to her back.
"It is useless to try to describe a South Sea hurricane. One after
another, the houses were carried away. Each frothing comber seemed to
rush over the land more fiercely than the last; the wind came in gusts
that bent the palms like reeds. With a sound audible above the uproar
of the hurricane, a palm-bole snapped, and its top, with two human
beings clinging among the fronds, sped off to vanish in the wrack.
Turia's was the last to withstand the wind; she watched the others
go,--men, women, and babies at their mothers' breasts,--and finally a
faint, splitting report close by told her that von Tesmar's palm had
given way. Next moment her own refuge went, and still clinging to the
upper bole, she was sailing above the torn white surface of the lagoon.
How she survived the impact, disentangled herself from the wreckage,
and lived through miles of angry water is a thing that I have never
understood. When she struggled ashore on the islet which was the only
land above the sea, her child was still alive. No one but a Paumotan
could have done it, and no woman of any other race could have lived and
supported her child--as Turia did for many weeks--on coconuts and the
fish she was able to catch with her bare hands. In the end, the
lookout of a passing schooner saw her signal-smoke."
My uncle's cigar had gone out and he rose for a moment to scratch a
match against the fireplace. The lamp was turned low; the glowing logs
on the andirons sent waves of light flickering among the shadows of the
room. My father stood up to stretch his legs. Standing with hands
clasped behind his back, he gazed quizzically at his brother, seated in
the deep old leather chair.
"That's a good story of yours, as far as it goes," he observed; "but
what has all this to do with you, or with the fact that you can spend
only one day with us?"
"No wonder you're growing impatient," said Uncle Harry, with a smile;
"it must seem an interminable yarn, but it's all linked together, as
you will see. I came into it about ten years ago, when I took a lease
on Iriatai. It was just after my last visit here. A friend suggested
that I have a look at the island with a view to planting coconuts--they
thrive wonderfully in the coral of the atolls. I had heard
half-legendary accounts of von Tesmar and his pearls, but such
experiments are not taken seriously in the islands, where so many
cranks have tried this scheme or that, and failed. The lagoon had
never been a place for shell.
"I met Turia when I landed there. Von Tesmar had left her a little
money in the Papeete bank, and after a year of civilization, she had
been overpowered by the homing instinct of her race. Her husband had
relatives in German Samoa--the directors of a great Apia
trading-house--and she took her child to them before she set out to end
her days on Iriatai. Then she chartered a small schooner and sailed
away with a couple of poor native families and a stock of provisions
and seed-coconuts. I found her happy in a lonely sort of life, settled
in a one-room cottage, surrounded by groves of fine twelve-year-old
palms. The place was furnished with a bed, an accordion, and a chest
of camphorwood; a portrait of von Tesmar, in the uniform of an officer
of dragoons, hung on the wall. There must have been a human side of
this man's character, for his widow remembered him with a devotion hard
to match.
"She was the only claimant to rights in the island, and I had no
difficulty in gaining her consent. Within a year I obtained from the
French Government a long lease on Iriatai and now there are sixty
thousand young palms on the island, some of them already beginning to
bear. Another hurricane? We can't afford to think of that--they
strike an island not more than once in every hundred years. During the
visits when I carried labor and supplies to Iriatai, Turia used to spin
me yarns about the hurricane. She was an interesting woman, as those
of the pure old blood are apt to be. When I knew her she was straight
and handsome still--no darker than a woman of southern Spain.
Sometimes she showed me letters from her boy, growing up in far-off
Samoa with his relatives. I did not meet him till after she was dead.
"I needed a rest last year, and as I didn't have time for a run up to
see you all, I decided to take a vacation among the islands--a short
cruise through the Tongan and Samoan groups. One night in Apia, the
German port, I had been dining at the consulate, and as I walked along
the moonlit beach to where my boat's crew awaited me, I was stopped by
a young half-caste, dressed in soiled white duck. He spoke English,
and he looked so miserable, so poor and ill that it needed a thicker
skin than mine to pass him without a word. His body was no more than
skin and bones, and when he turned in the moonlight, I saw the wreck of
what had been a handsome face, ravaged by quick tropical tuberculosis.
He spoke in abrupt sentences, gasping for breath and stopping at
intervals to cough.
"'You English?' he asked. 'No? American, eh? I speak German,
French--not much English. That Tara your schooner? They tell me you
go Tahiti to-morrow. Give me passage, eh? I cook--wash dishes--cabin
boy--anything! I want go Tahiti too much!'
"He turned away from me and leaned over with a hand to his chest,
coughing frightfully; when the paroxysm had passed he stood gasping and
unable to speak. It was impossible not to be sorry for the poor devil.
"'I'll let you know to-morrow,' I told him. 'I'm sailing at sundown.
Come to the beach at four or five o'clock.'
"Next morning, strolling with the American consul, I pointed out the
half-caste, asleep in the shade of a beached canoe. 'Oh, that fellow,'
said the consul; 'Yes, I know him; von Tesmar's his name. Doesn't look
much like a nobleman, does he? As a matter of fact, he's a baron of
the Austrian Empire--when he's drunk enough he'll show you the papers
to prove it! Odd story. His father married a Paumotu woman years ago
and was lost in a hurricane, back in the eighties. The mother brought
her child out here--old Madame Lichtenstein, of the Hamburg Concession,
was the youngster's aunt. The old lady was good to him, sent him to
the Protestant school and finally shipped him off to Europe with plenty
of money to spend. But the cold winters were too much for his native
blood, I guess; t.b. got him after the second year, and as happens so
often in the islands, consumption led to drink. Then one day he turned
up here, a yellow skeleton with a craving for alcohol. The Germans
took pity on him and pensioned him off for a time, but he was sinking
rather low, and finally they cut off the money and ceased to recognize
him at all. One can't really blame them much!'
"I didn't say anything, but I was interested, I'll admit. So this was
Turia's son--the child of the hurricane on Iriatai! He had traveled a
long road since those days; but I suspected that the end was near. Why
should he want to go to the eastern islands? The old instinct of his
mother's blood, perhaps, calling the wanderer home at last to die.
"I gave him a passage, at any rate. He was willing enough, but it was
absurd to talk of working his way--when we'd been out three days I knew
that his eyes would never see another landfall. I put him in a berth
in the spare stateroom. He'd picked up his English on the beach, but
in French you'd have been surprised to hear the fellow talk. With the
interest one cannot help feeling in a dying man, I spent a good deal of
time yarning with him, and finally told him that I had heard something
of his story and had known Turia on Iriatai. He was in a steady low
fever by this time, and our talks seemed to excite him; he asked
endless questions about his mother and her life--the island--the lagoon.
"One night, when I was at the wheel, the cabin boy came on deck,
rubbing the sleep from his eyes, to say that von Tesmar wanted to see
me at once. There was something of great importance to tell me, it
seemed. We were in the middle of the wide, lonely reach of sea that
stretches from Rose Island to the Leeward group. The moon had risen
about eleven o'clock; there was not a cloud in the sky, and a steady
breeze blew warm and fair from the northwest. I had taken the wheel at
moonrise and I hated to go below, but the half-caste's message seemed
so urgent that I called the man on watch to take my place.
"I found von Tesmar gasping in his berth. He had gotten up to undo a
bundle he carried with him, wrapped in a piece of native cloth, and
when I pulled the curtain aside, he held out to me a tattered sheet of
cheap ruled notepaper.
"'For you,' he whispered breathlessly, in the French he had picked up
during an edifying year in Paris. 'Ah, _mon ami_, this is the end--now
I must die, and a glass of your excellent rum would help me to die
gracefully. _Merci bien_--you are kindness personified! I wonder why:
there is so little, in your eyes, that I can do. Yes, this is the end.
I cannot complain--I have had my fun and paid for some of it, at least.
Never again shall I watch the faces passing my table on the boulevard,
nor sit with the brown people in a bush-clearing far from the church,
while the drums throb and the sleek young girls twist and flutter their
hands in the torchlight. No doubt you are thinking that I am a _drôle
de type_, and so I am, by training and by birth--half savage, half
_boulevardier_. But the time is short and I weary you with idle
reflections; _allons_, to business! You can read the native Tahitian,
eh? It is difficult for one who knows only the Samoan dialect. I had
hoped to keep that paper to myself; the doctors say that men with my
malady are always optimists. But you have treated me as one white man
treats another--keep it, read it, and do as you please. Perhaps it is
worth another glass of rum, _n'est-ce pas_? Another rum for Monsieur
le Baron! They called me that in Paris, at the Grand Hotel--Ha, ha!
Noble on both sides, _bon Dieu_!--my mother a cannibal
Princess--Monsieur le Baron von Tesmar, Prince of Iriatai! How's that
for a title, _hein_?'
"At five o'clock, when the moonlight paled before the first flush of
dawn, he turned his face away from me and died. I blew out the light
and went on deck to give orders for his burial. Then, when I had my
coffee, I lay down in my berth and unfolded the paper he had given me.
It proved a quaint document--a letter in the native language from Turia
to her son, written a few days before her death. Here it is--it is
worth translating for your benefit:--
This from your dear mother, who loves you and prays that God's blessing
may bring you prosperity and health. _Amen_. I am ill, and though the
woman who tends me has made medicine, I think that I shall soon die.
Do not weep for me--I shall be happy to be again with your father, whom
I have always loved. Now pay attention, for there is a thing that I
must tell you. Your father was a wise man, and his work was to bring
pearl oysters from foreign seas to this lagoon. After the hurricane,
when I swam so far with you clinging to my back, I believed for many
years that the oysters must all be dead, but that was not true. In the
far end of the lagoon, where no one goes to-day, I have found where the
strange shells with edges like gold lie on the coral in thousands, not
more than fifteen fathoms deep. Many times I have gone alone in my
canoe to dive for them, and I have found fine pearls, great and small.
These are true words. The white man called Seroni, who brings people
to plant coconuts on Iriatai, is a good man and my friend, but I have
said nothing of the pearls to him. They were your father's work, and
you will want them, since you live in the white man's land. The
oysters are on coral bottom, midway between the islet and the reef.
Beware of a great brown shark when you come here to dive; he comes
sometimes to that end of the lagoon, and twice he has nearly had me
when I was intent upon my work. I think he is the old god of my
people, worshiped when I was a child. Farewell, my dear son--I shall
not see you again.
_On Iriatai, from Turia, to her son, Arno von Tesmar_
"Somehow, as I read this letter, I was convinced that what the woman
said was true. There are nearly a hundred square miles in Iriatai
Lagoon, and though my men did a good deal of fishing, a shell-patch of
the largest size might have escaped their notice for years. No one in
the Eastern Pacific had ever succeeded in acclimatizing the gold-lipped
shell, but that did not prove that it could not be done. If Turia's
words were true, von Tesmar's eagerness to reach the group was
justified. It might prove a rare chance, and I resolved to investigate
at once.
"Fatu, my big mate, is a man that I can always trust. He is a
first-class diver, and when the Tara was anchored at Iriatai, I told
him the story and explained that he must hold his tongue. We took a
big canoe and made camp on the islet at the far end of the lagoon.
Even with Turia's directions, it took us four days to find the shell,
but when Fatu began to bring up the gold-lipped oysters in both hands,
I saw that the dead half-caste had paid his passage a thousandfold.
"My man reported the bottom covered with shell for acres on either
side--a little fortune in mother-of-pearl alone. And pearls--By Jove,
I could scarcely drag Fatu away!
"I didn't dare to linger--there was danger of causing talk. It would
need a dozen or fifteen divers to work the patch properly; the news
would travel like a whirlwind, and I hadn't the shadow of a claim on
the shell. The open lagoons--I must explain--with passes through which
a vessel can enter from the sea are Government property, and during the
legal season any native may dive and keep what he obtains. Unless I
did some careful planning, half the schooners in the South Pacific
would soon be anchored at Iriatai. Well, I headed for Tahiti and did
my thinking on the way. The Governor of French Oceania is a friend of
mine. When we reached Papeete my plans were made and I put the matter
up to his common-sense: By pure chance, in one of the atolls under his
administration I had discovered a brand-new patch of shell. (I said
nothing, of course, about von Tesmar, or the fact that the shell was
golden-lipped.) If properly preserved and worked, this patch might in
the future prove a valuable asset to the Government. As things were, I
could not legally profit by my discovery--any Kanaka diver had as much
right as I to exploit the new lagoon. If I held my tongue, a hundred
years might pass before another man stumbled on the place. In view of
all this, therefore, wouldn't it be fair to give me one season's
exclusive rights, in return for adding a new pearl-lagoon to the five
or six already under French control?
"It struck me as a fair thing to ask, and I had little difficulty with
the Governor. Within a month the papers were delivered to me all
signed and sealed: a year's rights to the shell and pearls of Iriatai.
I had always wanted an engine for the Tara and now I felt that I could
afford one. In the Paumotus, with reefs and five-knot currents and
frequent calms, a motor is better than a dozen insurance policies. Now
the engine's installed and I am heading back without a day to waste.
It will take time to find the men, to build canoes, and get the diving
under way."
As he finished his story, my uncle rose and began to pace back and
forth before the fireplace. My father lay in his chair, smoking and
making no comment; I fancy that the glimpse of an adventurous life on
the other side of the world had set his thoughts to wandering. Though
it was long past midnight, I was wide awake.
All at once my uncle stopped beside his brother's chair and stood
looking down at him, with a half-apologetic smile.
"See here, Ben," he said, "I want you to let Charlie come along. A few
months out of school will do no harm and I'll give you my word to have
him back in the fall. I've come to the age when a man feels the need
of youngsters, and yours are all I have. There'll be plenty of work--I
need someone I can really trust. He'll have his share in what we get,
of course, and he'll earn it--I'll see to that. Be a good fellow, and
let him come!"
My father looked up and sighed before he spoke. "Ah, Harry," he
remarked, "you're a lucky man! All your life you've been a
rainbow-chaser and now you seem to have caught up with one at last.
It's hard not to envy you when I hear a story like the one you've told!
I didn't realize what a dull old stay-at-home I had become. As for the
boy, I'm tempted to let him go; but you're asking a good deal! You
live in a rough part of the world, if the stories one hears are true.
There must be men down there who would make it hot for you if the news
of your pearl-lagoon leaked out. Even in California we used to hear of
the exploits of Bully Hayes."
My uncle smiled and shook his head.
"Those days are past," he said. "Pease and Hayes are dead, and they've
left no successors in the Eastern Pacific. So far as I know, there's
only one scoundrel of that type left in Polynesia and he operates far
out to the west: 'Thursday Island Schmidt'--ever hear of him? I don't
know him myself, and I'm not hankering to make his acquaintance until
this job is done. But he's never been east of Samoa, and even old
Thursday Island would hesitate to tackle a barefaced hold-up nowadays.
Warships and the wireless have ended all that. Let the boy come--I'd
be the last man to drag him into any scrapes."
"He can go, then," said my father, rising from his chair. "I only wish
I'd had such a chance when I was a youngster. But you'll have to talk
his mother around--I wash my hands of that! We'll leave that for
tomorrow, eh? Come, you must be tired; we'd better turn in, all three
of us."
And so the matter was left, while I wandered in a daze to my room and
lay down to spend a night made sleepless by mingled anxiety and
happiness.