Produced by Roger Frank and Sue Clark
The Garden of God
BY
H. De Vere Stacpoole
AUTHOR OF “THE BLUE LAGOON,” ETC.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1923
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1923,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY, NEW JERSEY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
BOOK I—ON THE ISLAND
I THE CORMORANT
II DAWN
III THE VISION
IV DICK EM
V THE GARDEN OF GOD
VI HERE ONCE THEY DWELT
VII THE KEEPER OF THE LAGOON
VIII SUNSET
IX THE ROLLERS
BOOK II—THE CHILDREN RETURN
I TIME PASSES
II THE RETURN OF THE CHILDREN
III IN THE GARDEN OF GOD THERE IS TRUTH
IV THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE DEMON
V OUT OF THE GLOOM
VI KATAFA
VII BLOWN TO SEA
VIII AT DAWN
IX OUT OF THE SEA
X A FIRE ON THE REEF
XI A FIRE ON THE REEF (Continued)
XII NANAWA SPEAKS
XIII THE WISH
XIV OUT OF THE GLOOM
XV NAN
XVI THE MONTHS PASS
XVII THE FIGHT ON THE BEACH
XVIII WAR
XIX DAYBREAK
XX THE TREE
XXI THE GREAT KILL
XXII THE CRISIS
XXIII THE PRISON OF THE TREES
XXIV KARA! KARA! KARA!
XXV SOUTH
XXVI THE PRIESTESS OF NANAWA
XXVII THE SHADOWS AND THE ECHOES
XXVIII IN THE NIGHT
XXIX THE BREAKING OF THE SPELL
XXX THE GREAT WIND
XXXI DEBACLE
XXXII AFTER THE BATTLE
XXXIII THE CALL OF KAROLIN
XXXIV THE MORNING LIGHT
XXXV THE DEATH OF A SEA KING
XXXVI THE CLUB OF MA
XXXVII THE CLUB OF MA (Continued)
XXXVIII THE FÊTE OF DEATH
XXXIX FROM GARDEN TO GARDEN LIKE SEEDS ON THE WIND
XL THE BIRTH OF A SEA KING
XLI HIS KINGDOM
CHAPTER THE LAST
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BOOK I
ON THE ISLAND
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CHAPTER I
THE CORMORANT
“No,” said Lestrange, “they are dead.”
The whale boat and the dinghy lay together, gunnels grinding as they
lifted to the swell. Two cable lengths away lay the schooner from which
the whale boat had come; beyond and around from sky-line to sky-line the
blue Pacific lay desolate beneath the day.
“They are dead.”
He was gazing at the forms on the dinghy, the form of a girl with a
child embraced in one arm, and a youth. Clasping one another, they
seemed asleep.
From where had they drifted? To where were they drifting? God and the
sea alone could tell.
A Farallone cormorant, far above, wheeling and slanting on the breeze,
had followed the dinghy for hours, held away by the awful and profound
knowledge, born of instinct, that one of the castaways was still alive.
But it still hung, waiting.
“The child is not dead,” said Stanistreet. He had reached forward and,
gently separating the forms, had taken the child from the mother’s arms.
It was warm, it moved, and as he handed it to the steersman, Lestrange,
almost upsetting the boat, stood up. He had glimpsed the faces of the
dead people. Clasping his head with both hands and staring at the forms
before him, mad, distracted by the blow that Fate had suddenly dealt
him, his voice rang out across the sea: “My children!”
Stanistreet, the captain of the schooner, Stanistreet, who knew the
story of the lost children so well, knelt aghast just in the position in
which he had handed the child to the sailor in the stern sheets.
The truth took him by the throat. It must be so. These were no Kanakas
drifted to sea; the dinghy alone might have told him that. These were
the children they had come in search of, grown, mated and—dead.
His quick sailor’s mind reckoned rapidly. The island they were making
for in hopes of finding the long-lost ones was close to them; the
northward running current would have brought the dinghy; some
inexplicable sea chance had drifted them from shore; they were here,
come to meet the man who had sought them for years—what a fatality!
Lestrange had sunk as if crushed down by some hand. Taking the girl’s
arm, he drew it towards him. “Look!” he cried, as if speaking to high
heaven. “And my boy—oh, look! Dick—Emmeline—oh, God! My God! Why? Why?
Why?”
He dashed his head on the gunnel. Far away above the cormorant watched.
It saw the whale boat making back from the schooner with the dinghy in
tow; it saw the forms it hungered for taken on board; it saw the
preparations on deck and the bodies of the lost ones committed to the
deep. Then, turning with a cry, it drifted on the wind and vanished,
like an evil spirit, from the blue.
CHAPTER II
DAWN
It was just on daybreak and the _Ranatonga_, running before an
eight-knot breeze, was boosting the star-shot water to snow.
Bowers, the bo’sun, an old British Navy quartermaster, was at the wheel
and Stanistreet, the captain, had just come on deck.
“Gentleman goin’ on all right, sir?” asked Bowers.
“Mr. Lestrange is still asleep, and thank God for it,” said Stanistreet,
“and the child’s well. It woke and I gave it a pannikin of condensed and
water and it’s in the starboard after-bunk asleep again.”
“I thought the gentleman was dead when you brought him back aboard,
sir,” said Bowers. “I never did see such a traverse, them pore young
things and all; we goin’ to hunt for them, as you may say, and them
comin’ off to meet us like that—why, that dinghy was swep’ clean down to
the bailer—no oars, nuthin—and what were they doin’ with that dinghy?
Where’d they get that dinghy from’s what I want to know.”
“Curse the dinghy,” said Stanistreet. “Only for her I wouldn’t believe
this thing true—but I’ve got to, there’s no getting away from it. I’ll
tell you about that dinghy. It’s just like this. It belonged to a hooker
that Mr. Lestrange was coming up to Frisco in long years ago. She got
burnt out way down here somewhere, the boats got separated in a fog that
came on them and the ship’s dinghy, with his two kids and an old sailor
man, was never seen again. He never believed them dead; he’s been
hunting all these years up and down the ports of the world on chance of
finding news of them. He had it in his head some chap had picked them
up—not a sign; then, a bit ago, a friend of mine, Captain Fountain,
struck one of his advertisements, and gave news of indications he’d
found on this island we’re seeking for; he’d picked up a child’s toy
box, but he hadn’t made a search of the place, being after whales and
knowing nothing of the story, so Mr. Lestrange, when he got the news,
put the _Ranatonga_ in commission. That’s what we started on this voyage
for, and now you know.”
“How far’s that island from here, sir?” asked Bowers.
“When we struck the dinghy yesterday it was a hundred and fifty south;
we’re not more than sixty from it now. We’ll reach it before noon.”
“And them pore things came driftin’, father, mother and child, a hundred
and fifty mile without bite or sup?”
“God knows,” said Stanistreet, “what food they had with them. There was
nothing in the boat but a bit of tree branch with a red berry on it.”
Bowers spun the wheel and shifted the quid in his mouth.
“And the child stood the batter of the business better than them,” said
he. “I’ve known that happen before; kids take a lot of killing as long
as the cold don’t get at them. They weren’t both his children, was they,
sir?”
“No,” said Stanistreet. “The young fellow was his son, the girl was his
niece.”
The old quartermaster lay silent for a moment, while in the east a line
of turbulent and travelling gold marked the horizon of the lonely sea.
The slash of the low wash and the creak of block and cordage remained
the only sounds in that world of dawn above which Canopus and the Cross
were fading.
There was no morning bank; nothing to mar the splendour of the sunburst
across the marching swell; far away a gull had caught it and showed
wings of rose and gold against the increasing azure.
Bowers saw nothing but the binnacle cord. Without letting her half a
point from her course, the mind of this perfect steersman was travelling
far afield. He had signed on not knowing and not caring whither the
_Ranatonga_ was bound. He thought Lestrange was taking a voyage for the
good of his health. He liked the thin, nervous man with grey eyes who
always had a good word for every one, and, now that he knew his story,
he pitied him. The whole business was plain before him: he could see the
burning ship of long years ago, the escape in the boats, the separation
in the fog, the children landed on some island, growing up together,
mating, and then in some unaccountable manner being drifted out to sea
with the child that had been born to them. Maybe they had been fishing
and caught in a storm—who could tell? It was easy to be seen that chance
had only half a hand in the meeting between the father and his dead
children, seeing that Captain Fountain’s information had brought him
right to the spot. All the same, the thing gripped the battered and
sea-stained and case-hardened mind of Bowers as ivy grips an old wall.
Bowers was close on seventy, British-born. Sixty years of sea and
tossing from ship to ship, from port to port, from hemisphere to
hemisphere, had left him just what he was, a man heavy with years, yet
in some extraordinary fashion young.
In all his time he had never risen to a command or found himself in the
after-guard, he was ignorant as the mainmast of literature and art,
politics and history, and he signed the pay sheet with a cross; all the
same the fate of the children had perhaps made a deeper impression on
this amphibian than it had on the more educated Stanistreet; the sight
of the girl and her companion brought on board, so young, beautiful—yet
dead, like stricken flowers, had given his simple mind a twist from
which it had not recovered.
Down in the fo’c’sle, when the matter had been turned over and turned
over and discussed, the dinghy had been talked of as much as its
occupants. Where had it come from? To what ship had it belonged, and
what ship could have set adrift two people like those with scarcely any
clothes on? A rum business, surely.
Bowers had contributed scarcely anything to the discussion. It did not
seem to interest him.
Stanistreet snuffed out the binnacle light; the day was now strong, the
wind tepid, yet fresh from a thousand miles of ocean, bellying the
sails, golden in the level sun blaze.
Before going below he came to the after-rail for a moment and stood
looking at the swirl of the wake.
The thought of Lestrange was troubling him. Lestrange, since yesterday,
had fallen into a sleep profound as though Nature had chloroformed him.
As a matter of fact she had, but the cruelty of Nature lies in the fact
that she uses her anæsthetics after instead of during the operations
performed by Fate. When man can endure no more she puts the sponge to
his nose, lest he should die and escape more suffering. Stanistreet was
thinking somewhat like that. He was a good-hearted man who had seen more
than enough of tragic happenings, and this last business seemed to him
beyond the limit. He was telling himself it would have been better to
have put a revolver to the head of the man below and have shot him as
one does a maimed animal. He frankly dreaded Lestrange’s awakening. What
would he do, what would he say? Would it be a repetition of the terrible
scene of yesterday?
Leaning on the rail, he spat at the gold-tinged foam as though to get
some bitter taste from his mouth.
Then came the thought, had he done right in holding on south for the
island since yesterday? What would be the effect on Lestrange of the
traces surely left there by the children?
He was thinking this when from below came a sound, some one was moving
about in the saloon, and Stanistreet, taking his courage in both hands,
turned to the cabin hatch and went below.
CHAPTER III
THE VISION
He entered the saloon.
The place was gay with the morning beams shining through the ports and
skylight. Lestrange, who had been looking into the starboard after-bunk,
turned, and as the two men came face to face, Stanistreet saw at once
that his fears were groundless. Lestrange had quite recovered himself.
That was the first impression; then came another—the thin, nervous
Lestrange, always brooding and dreaming as with the air of one possessed
by some pressing anxiety, had become altered. He looked cheerful,
younger, no longer anxious.
Stanistreet felt almost shocked for a moment, contrasting the vision of
the distraught man of yesterday with the figure before him; but a weight
was taken from his mind and the next moment, impulsively, his hand went
out to grip the hand of the other.
“We are still keeping south?” said Lestrange.
“Yes,” said the captain. “I carried on. I thought it best, but what’s
your wishes in the matter?”
“South,” said Lestrange. “Come up on deck, I want to talk to you.”
Stanistreet followed, wondering what was to happen next. There was a
contained vivacity in the voice and manner of the other that, to the
logical and matter-of-fact mind of the sailor, seemed a portent of
troubles to come.
He followed closely, and when Lestrange walked to the port rail and
stood with his hands upon it fronting the blazing east, the captain of
the _Ranatonga_ came and stood beside him, elbow touching elbow, and
ready for any emergency. But his mind was soon put at rest. Lestrange,
quite calm and cheerful in manner, stood contemplating the splendour
before him and breathing in the fresh sea air with evident delight.
Then he turned and glanced along the deck to where Peterson, one of the
hands, had succeeded Bowers at the wheel.
“What is she doing?” asked he.
“Ten knots,” replied Stanistreet.
“And the island?”
“Less than sixty miles from here.”
“Good,” said Lestrange. He turned again to the rail. A land gull passed
them flying topmast high, drifted a bit on the wind, lit on the water
and rose again, making north.
Lestrange watched it for a moment. Then he spoke.
“Stanistreet, I said down below I had something to tell you. It’s
difficult, and I would not say it to any other man. It’s just this. I am
happy—for the first time in twelve years I am happy.”
The captain made no reply.
“That sounds strange, does it not?” went on the other; “and maybe you
will think my mind has been unhinged by all that has occurred,
especially when you hear me out. It has not, and I will just tell you
why I am happy. Happy! that is no name for it. I am joyful, jubilant,
praising God, who knows all things and does all things right! You
believe in God, Stanistreet?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the sailor, not at all happy at the turn things were
taking. “I believe in God; ought to, anyway, seeing what I’ve seen.”
“Well, then, listen,” said the other. “For twelve long years, as you
know, I sought for the children I loved, always sure that they were
alive, always uncertain as to their fate. It is the uncertainty that
kills. I suppose I am more imaginative than most people. I conjured up
visions of them falling into the hands of Chinese, falling into the
hands of the ruffians that infest these seas, finding sin and misery as
their portion in life; but worse than that were the things I could not
conjure up. There were times when I said to myself, ‘There is surely no
God,’ but always I was driven back to prayer, which was my only hope. I
prayed that I might meet the children again. I prayed and prayed, and
searched and sought, and yesterday my prayer was granted.
“My children were handed back to me by a merciful God—but they were
dead! What a mockery! What an answer to the humble and heartfelt prayer
of one of His poor creatures! Yesterday as I lay broken in the cabin
below whilst you were committing them to the deep, I blasphemed His
name, whilst He sat smiling in the Infinite—He who knows all things and
does all things right.
“Listen. Grief, when it rises to its true stature, is a magician. I fell
asleep and grief drove me beyond sleep into a world of visions where I
met the children. It was no dream. I saw them as I see you. Dick and
Emmeline, just as they were long years ago, pure and sweet and happy and
childlike, but knowing all things. Stanistreet, as sure as there is a
God in heaven, what I am telling you is no fiction of the imagination. I
have seen the children and I am to see them again, for they are about to
return.”
“Return!”
“Yes, return. They have told me the place, but not the time. I am to go
to the island and they will come to me. I am to wait for them and they
will come to me.”
“But how, sir?” said Stanistreet, for a moment almost believing what the
other said, so intense was the conviction in Lestrange’s manner and
voice.
“How, I do not know, but they will come to me. It is permitted them for
my sake and to save my reason, for otherwise I would have gone mad; also
for some other purpose they would not say.—Do you not believe me?”
“Yes, yes,” said the other soothingly. “It’s strange, but there’s no
telling—no telling.” He felt that Providence or Nature had possibly used
the dream device to save the poor gentleman from, at all events, violent
insanity, but he doubted if he had gained much by the exchange.
“No telling,” said Lestrange. “We know as little of this life as our
shadows know of us, but there it is, and now you know why I am happy. My
mind is free from all care and my loved ones are coming to meet me.”
He turned from the rail and went below. Stanistreet saw the steward come
along with breakfast things—the _Ranatonga_ had a deck galley—and vanish
down the cabin hatch. Then he heard the voice of a child and the voice
of the steward as if talking to it.
Then Bowers rose like a sea elephant from the fo’c’sle and came along
the deck. Bowers had handed over the wheel to Peterson just before
Lestrange came up. He had dodged below to light a pipe, risen to see
Lestrange and Stanistreet in confabulation and then lain doggo, waiting.
“How’s the gentleman taking it now, sir?” asked Bowers, speaking in a
lowered voice. “I popped my head up when you was talkin’ and he looked
to have got back to his self.”
“God help me, I don’t know,” said Stanistreet; “but if there’s any sense
in the world he’s gone crazy, plain crazy—but he’s happy.”
“Well, thank the Lord he’s gone the laughin’, not the howlin’ kind,”
said Bowers. “Happy, is he? Well, it’s fortunit for him. That’s all I
have to say.”
“Maybe. Anyhow, dodge down, will you, and bring up that kid. The
steward’s fooling with it and wasting his time, and I want to see it on
deck—after-bunk you’ll find it.”
Bowers dived.
A minute later he reappeared with the “kid” wrapped in a bunk blanket
and clasped in one huge arm.
Plump, brown as a berry, auburn-haired and laughing, it was a very
different child from the child that had come aboard yesterday.
“It pulled me beard,” said Bowers. “It’s as strong as Ham,
b’gosh.—There, out you get and play in the sun, where you used to.”
He turned the naked child out of the blanket on to the deck. “Called me
Dick as I was comin’ up with him,” said Bowers, now on his knees beside
it, tickling it and rolling it over with his huge hand. “Called me Dick,
did you—where’s your pants? Eh? Where’s your pants, you little devil,
sold them, did you?—Hand’s a belaying pin, sir, till I knock the brains
out of him.”
Stanistreet handed the pin.
“Now,” said Bowers, putting it in the two hands of the child, “bang the
deck and be happy.”
He had no need to give directions.
“Well, sir, what do you think of that?” said the sailor, rising to his
feet. “Looked like dying of wantin’ to go to sleep yesterday afternoon,
and hark at it now!”
“It’s a fine kid,” said Stanistreet, contemplating it. “I’d make it to
be getting on for two years, but I’m no judge of children. But I’ll tell
you what, Bowers; it’s my opinion it wasn’t so much asleep when we got
it aboard as doped. Did you see that sprig of a tree lying in the
dinghy? Well, I’ll bet my hat that was arita. I’ve seen the stuff
growing in some of the islands and it’s more poisonous than oap; a
couple of berries will do for any man. I believe those two ate some of
the berries, not knowing what they were, maybe, and maybe the child took
the poison through the mother’s milk. I’m dead sure that’s how the thing
went, for them two showed no signs of dying of starvation or thirst and
they’d come a long way.”
“Maybe,” said Bowers, his eyes on the child. “Now then, now then, where
are you rollin’ that pin to?—Come out of it or you’ll be tumblin’ down
the hatch—God’s truth, I’ll have to hobble you before I’ve done with
you.”
He was leading the child away from the companion hatch, when Lestrange
reappeared and joined Stanistreet near the wheel. Lestrange glanced at
the sailor and his charge but seemed to take little interest in it, or
only that benign interest which he seemed, now, to bestow on everything
animate and inanimate; it might have been the child of Bowers for all he
seemed to care. Stanistreet tried to draw the conversation to it, and
the other did not resist, but he let the subject drop as though it was
of little account, and then, the steward announcing breakfast, they went
below.
CHAPTER IV
DICK EM
Meanwhile the fo’c’sle had got wind of happenings on deck and even the
watch that had turned in, turned out. Eight men, all told, schooner men
of the old South Sea type, hard-bitten, berry-brown, and, save for their
pants, as naked to the hot morning as the “kid.”
The _Ranatonga_ had sailed without a mate; drink and the police combined
had seized him the night before she sailed. There was no one of the
afterguard on deck to keep order, and the criticism was free.
“Lord save us and love us,” cried one of the ruffians, “look at Bob
playin’ nursery-maid!—Where’s your apron, Bob?”
“He’s stole the pore infant’s clothes,” put in another, “and pawned the
p’rambulator. Len’s a dollar, Bob, if you haven’t bust it on drink.”
A gentleman peeling a banana offered part of it to the charge and was
repulsed.
“Now then, now then,” cried Mr. Bowers, “scatter off an’ clean
yourselves—take your damn bananas where they’re wanted! Jim, fetch me
that old tin butt tub outa the galley, the one the doctor sticks his
’tatoes in, and there’s an old sponge in the locker behind the door.
Grease yourself and then b—r off down and tell Jenkins to send’s a
tow’l.”
He filled the bath with sea water dipped up in a bucket, and began the
scrubbing and sponging, Jim, a long wall-eyed son of perdition, standing
by with the towel, and the others looking on.
“What’s his name?” asked Jim.
“Name!” cried Bowers. “How the blazes do you think I know what his name
is?—Hasn’t got one—” Then as an afterthought, “Dick’s his name, ain’t
it, bo? Dick—hey! Dick, ain’t that your name, hey?”
“Dick,” repeated the laughing child, splashing the water. “Dick! Dick!”
“And Dick you’ll be,” said Bowers, with a last squeeze of the sponge,
baptismal in its significance, though such a thought was far from the
mind of the baptiser. “Now, hold me the tow’l—and there you are.”
He finished off the drying and released the child, who at once made for
Jim, of all people in the world, clasped him round the legs with his
chubby little arms, and looked up in his face. Innocence adoring the
biggest blackguard that ever footed Long Wharf.
Then Stanistreet appeared from the saloon hatch and the fo’c’sle crowd
melted, all but Jim.
“Bowers!” cried Stanistreet.
“Comin’, sir,” replied the bo’sun. He shoved the bath away, shot the
sponge into the locker, and came forward.
“So Dick’s your name, is it?” said Jim, unclasping the tiny hands and
lifting the “kid” in his arms. “And what’s your other name? Tell’s your
other name, or up ye go over the rail, up ye go over the rail!” He
danced the child in his arms, making pretence to throw it overboard.
“Em,” cried Dick, the warm arms of Jim maybe waking in his misty mind
the name of Emmeline, who had danced him so often. “Em—Em.”
“Here, drop the child,” said Bowers, coming forward again. “What are you
foolin’ like that with him for? Sick you’ll make him before he’s had his
breakfast.—What’s he sayin’?”
“Says his other name’s M,” replied Jim. “Sure as there’s hair on his
head, he’s been tellin’ me. Dick M’s his name. Ain’t it, bo?”
“Em—Em,” cried Dick, stretching out his arms to Bowers.
“And Dick M you’ll be if you wants to,” said that worthy as he hoisted
him on his shoulder and went aft in search of Jenkins the steward and
condensed milk.
Seven bells had struck, when along the blazing deck came the voice of
the look-out, plaintive as the voice of a gull.
“Land ho-o-o.”
It was Ericsson the Swede who gave the cry, and Stanistreet, pacing the
deck, hands behind his back, suddenly became galvanised into activity.
He sprang with one foot on the port bulwarks and a hand clutching the
main ratlins, then, shading his eyes with the other hand, he looked.
Yes, far away ahead, danced void by the sea shimmer, vague,
indeterminate, lay something that was not sea and was not sky. The
swell, building higher with the flood just setting in, now wiped it
away, now showed it again.
Yes, it was the island, far, far away, but surely there, the thing
unmapped, uncharted, known only to the gulls and the whale men, and even
to the whale men scarcely known.
Away down in Stanistreet’s mind had always lain the shadow of a doubt, a
doubt removed by the finding of the dinghy, but somehow illogically
returning and lingering. Was the island a figment of old Captain
Fountain’s imagination? a vision of the mind, useful only to shipwreck
Hope? No, it was there, right before his eyes and true to place.
He dropped on deck. Lestrange was still below and the port watch was
forward lazing in the sun. One fellow was standing looking with shaded
eyes to get a sight of the land-fall, but the rest seemed indifferent.
Then Bowers, rising from the fo’c’sle, broke up their talk, setting them
to work on the fore planking with a deck beam. Having seen them busy, he
took a glance forward, and then came aft to the captain.
“It’s liftin’, sir,” said Bowers. “You haven’t a chart of the soundin’s
by any chance?”
“Oh, Lord, no,” said Stanistreet; “it’s mile-deep water off the reef all
round and there’s a clear run through the break. That’s all Fountain
said and we’ve got to take his word. Where’s the kid?”
“I’ve give him his breakfast and he’s in the bunk asleep,” said Bowers.
“The gentleman was down there reading a book, but he didn’t seem to be
takin’ much notice, not of the kid or anything.”
“No,” said the other, “everything’s nothing to him now but just what’s
on his mind. You’d have thought their child would have been more to him
than them, even, seeing they are dead—but he’s got them fixed in his
head—he’s got it screwed down in his nut that he’s going to meet them on
that island.”
“Good Lord, sir!” said Bowers. “D’ye mean to say he’s thinkin’ to meet
them, knowin’ they’re dead an’ all?”
“I can’t say what he thinks,” replied the other. “He’s had a dream or
something, and he’s got it in his head they’re going to meet him on that
island. Maybe if you and me had been through the mill he’s been through
we’d be just as crazy, but I wish to the Lord he’d chosen some other
skipper for this cruise. It’s a heavy responsibility. If he was fighting
mad, I could clap him in his cabin and put about for Frisco; but there
you are, he’s mild as milk and sensible as Sam on everything but that
point, and what’s going to happen when he gets to that infernal island
and maybe finds traces of them I don’t know. Bowers, what would you do
if you were in my place?”
“I’d carry on, sir,” said Bowers. “Crazy folk are like children. I
remember old Sam Hatch; he used to be sittin’ all day watching Sydney
Harbour, sittin’ on Circular Wharf waitin’ for his son’s ship to come
in, and she lost beyond the Heads and he knowing it. Cross him in his
ideas and he’d be the devil, but leave him be and he’d make no trouble.
Carry on, sir—there he is.”
Lestrange had come on deck. He took the news from Stanistreet, walked
forward a bit, and then, with arm upon the starboard rail, he stood and
watched.
The wind had shifted almost dead aft, came stronger and the vast
trapezium of the mainsail loomed out, stood rigid against the blue,
whilst the _Ranatonga_, running with swell and wind, laid the knots
behind her, swift, gracile, and silent as the gulls that followed on the
wind, land gulls that seemed escorting her like spirits white as snow.
And now, minute by minute, rising like Aphrodite from the sea, the
island before them bloomed to life. With every lift of the swell, the
gull-strewn barrier reef showed its foam, whilst ever more distinctly
beyond the reef, green and fair, grew the foliage, changing in depth of
emerald to the touch of the wind.
Stanistreet had taken the wheel, Bowers the lookout, and the
_Ranatonga_, no longer dead before the wind, was travelling on a bow
line that would take her a mile to eastward of the land. The break in
the reef lay to the east.
They held on. The breeze still freshened, and the splendour of the day
and the blueness of the sea took on an extraordinary freshness and
gaiety. Under the lash of the wind and the sun, the diamond dash and
sparkle of northern summer seas lent a heart-catching subtlety to the
vision of the island with its coral reef and far trembling palms; and
now, across the foam-broken swell, came a sound like the voices of
voyage-weary sailor men howling in chorus—it was the gulls of the reef,
and another sound like the hush of a mother to her child—the voice of
the reef itself.
It was near high tide and the sleeting foam could be seen racing on the
coral, as now, with the island almost on the starboard beam, the break
came slowly to view, with the palm tree on its northern pier.
A moment more the _Ranatonga_ held on, then, as the wheel went over to
the rattle of the rudder chains, the main boom swung, hung for a moment
supported by the topping lifts, and then lashed out to port, the
bowsprit pointing straight for the break.
Lestrange, his hand on the starboard rail, stood with his eyes fixed on
the vision before him—the home of his children. He had never dreamed of
anything like this, all his visions of paradise fell to dust before what
he saw, what he heard, what he felt, as the schooner, heeling to the
wind, made like an arrow for the break.
Gulls raced them and the foam roared aft, rail-high and dashing the
decks with spray. Wind, flood, sun and sea, gulls and the waving palm
trees—all, with the shifting of the helm, had broken into new life. The
glass-green rollers on the outer beach were breaking now to port and
starboard, and now, in one miraculous moment, the break was passed and
the great sea was gone—transformed into a silent lake of azure.
CHAPTER V
THE GARDEN OF GOD
The _Ranatonga_ on a level keel, and spilling the wind from her sails,
came round in a great curve on the dazzling water, her great shadow
following her across the coral gardens of the lagoon floor. Then the
rumble of the anchor chain echoed and passed away in the woods, and ship
and shadow swung slowly to the tide and came to rest.
To port lay the reef booming to the blue and to starboard the island
beach of white coral sand, answering the reef with a thudding song,
whilst north and south the two arms of the lagoon, curving, lost
themselves beyond capes where the banyans and palms trooped to the very
water.
“Its emerald shallows calling to the deep
Blue soundings where the soul of Man might sleep
For ever undisturbed but for the song
Of reef and sea—”
Away beyond the hill-borne trees of the island a flight of coloured
birds passed like a scarf across the brilliant sky and vanished. Other
sign of life there was none.
Stanistreet, having given his last orders, stood for a moment looking
around him, the men, grouped forward, stood without a word, some gazing
overside at the coral gardens and flights of fish, others with their
faces turned shorewards to the groves of cocoanuts and the coloured
gloom where the great bread-fruit leaves waved to the wind and the
yellow of cassia and scarlet of hibiscus fought for the eye through the
foliage shadows.
The schooner and all on board her seemed for a moment waiting, silent,
expectant. Lestrange, leaning on the rail, had not turned his head; one
might have fancied them waiting for the shore people to put off,
watching the canoes taking to the water. But shore people there were
none, nor canoes; neither voices of men nor the forms of women, nor the
laughter of children; nothing but the untrodden sands and the foliage,
fresh as when the world was young.
Stanistreet moved beside Lestrange, who turned, his face lit as if with
the reflection of all the beauty around.
“Well, sir,” said the captain, “we’re in harbour at last. Shall I order
the shore boat out?”
“Yes,” said the other, turning again to the rail. “Yes—but look,
Stanistreet, look!”
“It’s fine,” said the sailor. “I never struck a prettier bit of
beach—ay, it’s grand!”
“It is the Garden of God,” said Lestrange. “He made it and He has kept
it, in all the wide world the one spot undefiled. He made it and He kept
it for my children, and now He has led me to it that I should meet them
once again and, dying, praise His name.”
The idea that the God who made the great world to receive man should
make a tiny island to receive and protect two innocent children, should
furnish it with beauty and hide it with sea, might not seem strange to a
true believer in the omniscience of a benevolent deity, but to
Stanistreet the words of Lestrange brought back the dread of a few hours
ago—what would happen on landing?
He went forward a bit and gave Bowers the order for the boat. The whaler
was dropped and, leaving Bowers in charge of the deck, Stanistreet got
in, following Lestrange.
Lestrange was of the nervous type that does not show its age. Dying of
consumption years ago, his spirit had triumphed over disease; he had
said to himself, “I will not die till I have found my children.” The
mental strength that had defied disease refused age. Though well over
sixty, he did not look it, and since yesterday a decade seemed to have
fallen from his shoulders.
The boat pushed off and again, just as on passing the break, dreamland
cast its magic upon them. The _Ranatonga_ on whose solid decks they had
trod a moment ago, showed now as a ship floating on air, air liquid and
tinted with emerald and aquamarine. So clear was the lagoon water, they
could see her copper and the weeds upon it and the anchor chain, now
slack with the turn of the tide and lying like a conger on the coral. As
the oars drove them shoreward the illusion held, for, glancing
over-side, the brains of coral and sand patches, though fathoms deep,
seemed likely to scrape the keel.
The boat touched the sand where wavelets were breaking scarce a foot
high, and Stanistreet, getting out, helped Lestrange over the gunnel.
“Take her back,” said the captain to the fellow who had been rowing
stern oar. “You can stream her on a line. I’ll signal when I want you.”
The boat put back and the two men stood watching it.
Here on the beach was a new prospect and a new enchantment. Fair as the
vision of the island seemed from the water, who could say that this was
not fairer? For distance stood on the far reef beyond the lonely and
unutterable blue of the broad lagoon, and beyond the reef break distance
led the eye to the rim of an almost purple sea. There was nothing to
break the charm or fetter the eye, not even the _Ranatonga_ mirroring
herself near the reef, nor the boat, the creak of whose oars came lazily
across the water; they had become, in some way, part and parcel of the
desolation.
Stanistreet, turning from the sea, cast his eyes about. The
extraordinary thing was that the mind of the sailor was perturbed,
anxious, eager for any traces of the children, whilst the mind of
Lestrange seemed absolutely at peace. Stanistreet had dreaded some
outbreak on landing, he had dreaded trouble should they discover traces,
some instinct told him that this quietude might mean something graver
than any outburst could foreshadow.
But Lestrange, despite his placidity and brightness of eye, showed no
sign of alienation from the normal. Having gazed his fill, he turned and
took his companion’s arm as one might take the arm of a brother. They
walked towards the trees.
CHAPTER VI
HERE ONCE THEY DWELT
The wind had died to a fitful breeze that tossed the foliage to the
rainy patter of the palm fronds.
Just before entering the shadow of the trees, Stanistreet paused. His
quick eye had noticed something lying on the sand a little to the left.
A great banana bunch half eaten by the birds, half ruined by the sun,
something that must have lain there for days and got there—how?
There were no banana trees in sight, nothing but the level line of the
coco-palms, like the first ranks of an army suddenly halted.
He bent to examine it. The stalk had been cut with a knife.
Straightening himself, he found that Lestrange had noticed the fact.
“Look,” said Lestrange, “it has been cut. Dick must have cut it from the
tree, but there are no banana trees round here. Let us go on.” He was as
much unconcerned by this, the first trace of the lost ones, as though
Dick and Emmeline were alive out there, fishing in the lagoon and due to
return any moment, out there on the lagoon where the blue beyond blue of
the distant sea spoke at the reef break through a silence troubled only
by the lamentation of the gulls.
It was a living fact that the eyes of Stanistreet were blurred and
dimmed by this first find, whilst the eyes of Lestrange remained clear
of sight. He followed the other, who had suddenly taken the lead, and as
they passed into the shadow of the trees the whole business for
Stanistreet took a new complexion, and the island a tinge of romance
beyond the power of words to express.
Just that bunch of cut bananas had linked in some strange way in his
mind the forms of the lost ones with the trees they had left and the
ground they had trodden on. Haunted! Oh, yes, the island was haunted, if
only in the imagination of the sailor man who, disbelieving in ghosts,
heard voices in the wind that stirred the foliage and fancied forms
moving in the coloured gloom of the groves.
Lestrange was following a path that led uphill, less a path than a
trail; to right and left the narrow pillars of the coco-palms showed
alleys broken by vast bread-fruits and bays of shadow, and now the voice
of a little rivulet came tinkling and lisping and the palms broke,
disclosing a glade, fern-haunted and showered with light from the moving
leaves.
Here, over the face of an age-worn rock, a little cascade flashed to
lose itself amidst the ferns, and above, like great candelabra, stood
the banana trees, holding their full-ripe fruit to the sky.
“Look!” said Lestrange. He was pointing to a bunch of the fruit that had
been cut and thrown down and was lying close to the ferns. Then he
pointed to a diamond-trunked artu close to them on the left. A knife was
sticking in the tree, left there by the banana-cutter—till his return.
Lestrange walked up close to the tree, glanced at the knife, and,
without touching it, led the way on, past the waterfall, uphill and as
if sure of his ground.
The trees fell away and past a coco grove, whispering in the wind, the
hill-top broke to view, a sun-lit space, dome-like and surmounted by a
great rock, broken and worn by a thousand years of weather.
They climbed the rock, warm as a living thing from the sun, and, resting
on its upper face, looked.
The wind had freshened again from the nor’west, billowing the foliage
far below and breezing the sea beyond the reef, and from here the whole
island world lay beneath them alive with the wind in changing hues of
emerald.
They could trace the azure-amethyst ring of the lagoon, here broad, here
narrow, and the reef with its blinding outer beach bombarded by the
swell of a sea consumed with light.
Sometimes a smoke of gulls would burst from the reef spurs to northward
of the break and the wind would bring a chanting sound mixed with the
faint murmur of the surf, a murmur ceaseless as the whisper of a shell.
Lestrange, leaning on his elbow, gazed far and wide. Just at this hour
of the westering sun the shadow of the island was beginning to steal
seaward, venturing timidly across the lagoon to pass the reef and lose
itself in the evening sea.
Stanistreet was watching the spreading shadow that had touched the
_Ranatonga_ lying far below like a toy ship, when his companion roused
him.
“Look!” said Lestrange. He was pointing to the west, to a place where
the trees broke towards the lagoon bank, leaving an open space green to
the water.
“Look!” said Lestrange. “Can you not see their house?”
“I see nothing,” replied the sailor, shading his eyes against the sun.
“House! No, sir, I can see nothing.”
“There by the clearing, the shadow of the trees has taken it, not far
from the water’s edge, close to that tree cluster that stands out a bit
into the open.”
The sailor gazed again in the direction pointed out. Ah, yes, now that
it was pointed out he could see something that was neither rock nor bush
nor tree. Even at full moon it would not have attracted the eye of a
casual gazer, small as it was and elusive, like a nest in a branch.
Yes, it was a structure of some sort, and even at this distance he
thought he could make out a roof, but why, if it was a house, had the
builders chosen their habitation in a spot so remote, so far from the
break? The wind could not say, nor the untroubled sea, nor the great sun
that builds everything from his habitation to the dreams of men.
“Come!” said Lestrange. He rose from his half recumbent position and
began to descend from the rock. On the sward, where the rock’s shadow
was lengthening itself, he stood for a moment with head bowed and eyes
half closed; then, turning, he led the way downhill towards the west.
For quarter of a mile the cocoanut groves held, then came a great belt
of mammee-apple, pandanus trees and bread-fruit, through which they
passed to find a valley where the ferns grew high—the strangest
surprise—for here great blocks of hewn stone lay cast about and terraces
of stone stood in ruin, disrupted by the rains of the ages and the roots
of screw pines working beneath them.
Fallen from its place, half prone amidst the ferns, lay a great stone
idol, an island god of the long ago. The heat of the day lingered here
where no wind came and where the ferns stood in stereoscopic stillness
in a silence broken only by the faint hum of insects.
Stanistreet had seen temple places like this amongst the islands, but
the sight was new to Lestrange. He stood for a moment gazing at the
fallen god, the blocks strewn about, the terraces lit by the amber light
of evening. Then he passed on down the valley and beyond, where a
trodden path showed them the way past a grove of hootoo trees to the
sward they had seen from the hill-top and where stood the house.
Close to the left-hand belt of trees and with a little garden beside it
where toro grew, it stood, leaf-thatched and built of cane. It had no
door. The light of evening entered, exposing all the simple contents,
mats carefully and neatly rolled up, a shelf where stood bowls cut from
cocoanut shell, a ball of twine, an old pair of scissors—all arranged
neatly and in order. Some fish spears stood, leaning against a corner,
and in a small bowl at the extreme end of the shelf some flowers, once
bright but now withered. Yet for all the cunning of the construction the
house had an unfinished look, as though the builders had been called
away before its full completion.
Lestrange stood before the open door of the house, so trustful, so
naive, so like a nest, this house built by the lost children whose forms
he had seen but a day ago, whose voices he had not heard for so many
years. It was the sight of the neatly rolled mats, the bowl of withered
flowers and the carefully arranged things on the shelf that shattered
for a moment the great contentment born of his vision and the surety
that he was to meet the children soon. These things said “Emmeline” as
plainly as a voice—Emmeline so neat, so careful of things, so fond of
flowers.
The ghost child came running to him across the sands of memory, those
sunlit sands that swallow so many and such great things.
He broke down and, leaning his arm against the door-post, hid his face.
Stanistreet turned on his heel and walked rapidly down to the lagoon
edge, he was hit nearly as badly as the other. That house, coming after
all the other things, would have moved the most callous heart.
He stood with his arms folded, looking across the lagoon water to the
reef. The lagoon here was broad and shallow, corallised here and there
by ridges of coral, the reef so low and far that he could see the
evening light on the Pacific, the sound of whose surf on the far outer
beach came like the voice of sleep.
Ah, well, it was the fate of everything and they had lived their day and
been happy; there was no use in a man letting his feelings get the
better of him—no use in snivelling; just as well they had come on the
house: it would cure Lestrange of that madness about meeting them, it
had broken down that terrible contentment—a bitter medicine, but better
than the disease that threatened him.
He stood for a long while to give the other time to recover, then he
turned.
Lestrange had recovered. He was standing before the house with one of
the fish spears in his hand, examining it. Stanistreet walked up to him.
“Look,” said Lestrange, “how cleverly he has made the barbs; he was
always clever with his hands.”
He placed the spear back where he had found it and then, with a last
look at the house, turned away.
“Come,” said he, “we must get back to the ship, for there is much to be
done before she sails, and I want her to sail to-morrow. I will go to
her with you now and return in the morning.”
“Return?” said Stanistreet. “Are you not going with us?”
“I will never see San Francisco again,” replied Lestrange. “My home is
here with my children who are coming to meet me, who have met me, for I
feel them on either side of me. I cannot see them yet, but they will
show themselves to me in time.”
Stanistreet made no reply for a moment. He stood looking round him at
the fading lagoon soon to be showered with starlight, and the trees
stirring to the wind in the ghostly light of evening.
“And the child?” said he at length.
“Their child will remain with me,” said Lestrange.
CHAPTER VII
THE KEEPER OF THE LAGOON
When Lestrange and Stanistreet had been rowed ashore, Bowers set the
lads to work clearing up and putting things straight.
The _Ranatonga_ was a schooner of the old Pacific type built at Velego
and for the sandalwood trade by men who recognised that speed and cargo
space are almost synonymous terms. Her lines were lovely, and her
character; never would she play a man false and, to use Bowers’ words, a
child might have steered her. He had fallen in love with her and the
fo’c’sle hands cursed his passion, which kept them Flemish-coiling,
polishing and deck-scrubbing—all but Jim, bo’sun’s mate and second in
importance after Bowers.
Kearney was his other name, but it was never used. He had no letters;
like Bowers, he could not write his name, but he was great with his
fists in an emergency, and he could do anything with his hands.
Jim had been in the gold rush—there were dead men lying in One Horse
Gulch and on Dows Flat that had known him, and the scars on his hide
were many—but he had made no profit out of the business. Then the sea
took him, and drink, and the sandalwood traders used him, so that he was
never out of employment one way or another—always in schooner work and
escaping by some miracle the whalemen’s crimps at a time when shanghaied
men were bringing thirty dollars a head.
When Bowers had bathed and dried off Dick, the child had run to this
scamp, clasped him round the legs and looked up into his hard-bitten
face laughing and with evident approval.
It was a new moment in the life of Jim and the start of what almost
amounted to a quarrel between him and Bowers, for Jim had danced the
child in his arms, to say nothing of the fact that the child had shown a
predilection for Jim.
Jealousy! No man would ever have suspected such a thing in connection
with a leathery old salt like Bowers, yet there it was, the jealousy of
a nursery-maid, patent and plain and exhibiting itself now in words.
Work had knocked off, darkness was stealing over the lagoon and the lads
were lying on deck, down below, the child was asleep in its bunk, and
with his back against the rail, filling a pipe, Bowers was telling off
Jim.
“I didn’t say nuthin’ of the sort,” said Jim. “I said Gord A’mighty had
given it teeth to chaw with, and you fillin’ it up with pap like that,
that’s what I said and that’s what I sticks to.”
“Then what were you sayin’ about goats?” fired Bowers. “Where’s the
chawin’ to be done with goat’s milk—”
“Goats, nuthin’! I was talkin’ of Kanakas feedin’ their young uns on
goat’s milk. Can’t a man talk without bein’ took up and havin’ his words
shoved down his throat?”
“I ain’t shovin’ no words down no throats,” replied the bo’sun, lighting
his pipe, “and we’ll leave it there. Bill, ain’t you goin’ to get that
ridin’ light fixed?” He stumped forward and the discussion dropped, but
the tension remained. Then, as the anchor light cast its amber on the
waving lagoon water and the moon was raising her forehead across the
reef, a hail came from the shore.
Lestrange and Stanistreet had returned, taking their way along the
lagoon bank. The boat put off to their hail, and they came on board.
After supper, and on the moonlit deck, the captain of the _Ranatonga_
went back to the subject they had been discussing on their way to the
ship.
“No, sir,” said he. “I don’t like it and nothing will make me like it,
sailing off like that and leaving you here. I’m talking as man to man,
and you’re not as young as you were. Well, I’ve said my say, and as I
was saying on the beach there, I’m willing to take your orders up to a
point, and that point is leaving some one with you. Bowers I can’t part
with, so it must be one of the others. Question is, which?”
“But what is to harm me?” said Lestrange. “You see a man who only craves
for solitude. It is true I am not as young as I was, but I am active
and, as you know, I have the simplest tastes. I can get my food without
trouble here where there is food on every hand. Before going on that
voyage years ago, when the consumption first threatened me, I camped out
all alone away in the Adirondacks and kept myself with a gun and a rod.
I am more vigorous now than then.”
“Well, sir,” said the sailor, “it’s just myself I’m thinking of. You say
I’m to come back in a year, but I wouldn’t have any peace of mind till
then, and a year’s a long time.”
“Well, be it so,” said the other, “leave me one of your sailors; after
all, these honest fellows are more like children than men, and I would
prefer one of them to any other companion—if companion I must have.”
Stanistreet smiled as he mentally reviewed “those honest fellows.” All
the same, it was a fo’c’sle tough or nothing, and he had gained his
point. Besides, in the depths of his mind he felt that the innocence of
Lestrange had touched something of the truth; the worst of those rascals
had the salt of the sea on him, and the question was, would any of them
remain? Bowers would—he felt that—but he could not run the schooner
without him.
He let the question be whilst they discussed other matters. Lestrange,
knowing his man and trusting him implicitly, was giving him very wide
powers over his affairs. Most of his money was in real estate, and his
bankers and lawyers had things in hand, but Stanistreet would have power
to draw what money he wanted for the return trip, and he was to receive
a salary for the year, or until he left Lestrange’s service, twice the
amount of what he was now receiving.
They talked till the moon far above them was preparing to cross the
hill-top. The wind had fallen dead and the lagoon water lay still as
glass. Under the moonlight the trooping trees, the salt-white beach and
the far reef lay clearly visible, as by day, yet ghostly, bathed in the
light of dreamland—which is the light of memory.
Stanistreet, when the other had gone below, leaned on the rail, looking
at the picture before him. The Garden of God. Yes, if any spot on earth
deserved that sacred name, it was this, where sin was not, nor cruelty,
nor visible sign of death.
As he gazed, his eyes were drawn to something pale and phosphorescent
moving swiftly through the water astern; it vanished, and then across
the moon track hinted of itself again in the form of something dark and
rapidly moving that passed, leaving a ripple on the glittering surface.
CHAPTER VIII
SUNSET
Morning was coming into the lagoon, where a nautilus fleet was putting
out on the land wind that breezed the sea to broken gold.
The tide was at half-full and the _Ranatonga_, swinging to it, showed a
ripple at her stern and a ripple where the anchor chain broke the
luminous blue of the water.
On the sunlit deck Stanistreet, with his back to some fellows who were
cleaning brass-work, was talking to Bowers. He had explained the
position, and the bo’sun, as he had expected, was ready, though not very
willing, to stay.
“I’m not botherin’ about myself so much as the gentleman,” said Bowers.
“If he’s fixed on staying, well, there’s no more to be said, but
supposin’ he took sick—and it isn’t as if his mind was as right as it
might be—then there’s the kid.”
“I know—I know—” replied the other. “It’s crazy—but there’s some sense
in it all the same. His mind is sick, but he’s happy here; if he went
back to Frisco wouldn’t he always be troubling over these children? He
doesn’t trouble here—I’ve lain awake half the night thinking it out. I
can’t leave you, can’t run the old hooker without you, unless”—he paused
for a moment and looked over the water—“unless none of the others will
take the job on—which is the most likely of them, do you think?”
“Well, sir,” said the bo’sun, “they’re a tough lot, but there’s no harm
among them. Jim’s the ablest and he’s took a fancy to the kid, but God
help it if he ever had the handlin’ of it; wanted to give it a chunk of
beef when you were off the ship yesterday—no sense in his head. But,
whether or no, he wouldn’t stop, he’s a long sight too fond of his
pleasures ashore.”
“Well, I’ll get the chaps aft and put it to them,” said Stanistreet.
“Tell Jenkins to hurry along with the breakfast, and we’ll muster them
then.”
An hour later, led by Bowers, they came trooping aft, a coloured crowd
in striped shirts or plain, open at the chest, canvas breeches, and not
a shoe amongst them. One fellow had a red handkerchief tied round his
head, Spanish fashion, and several wore the big buckled belts seen now
only in the pictures adorning pirate stories and in melodrama.
They shuffled along, halted, swayed uneasily and then stood whilst
Bowers ran them over with his eye as if counting them.
The fellow by the starboard rail sent a squirt of tobacco juice overside
and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand apologetically whilst
Stanistreet, who had been standing talking to Lestrange, wheeled on
them.
“Got them all here, Bowers?” said the captain of the _Ranatonga_. “Good.
Now, you chaps, I’ve called you aft just to have a word with you. It’s
soon said. Mr. Lestrange here is staying behind on the island for his
health, him and the child. I’m taking the ship back to port, and I want
a man to stick here with him till my return.
“I want a chap to sign up for a year on this job, double pay and fifty
dollars bonus when the time’s up. That’s good pay, but I’m not deceiving
you; there’ll be no drink or strikes for the fellow that takes the job
on, but he’ll have a good time. You all know Mr. Lestrange, and you can
see for yourself what the island is like, plenty of grub, fishing, and
nothing to do. Now then, step aft, one of you.”
Dead silence, and eyes cast everywhere but at the after-guard.
“Lots of time,” said Stanistreet. “Get a bit more forward and talk it
over together.”
He turned and paced the deck with his hands behind his back, whilst the
crowd shifted forward and broke into several groups, the grumble of
their voices coming on the wind.
The fellow with the red handkerchief broke away from the others and came
aft touching his forehead.
“Ax your pardon, sir,” said he, “but the chaps wants to know what’s a
bolus?”
“A present,” said Stanistreet, “fifty dollars for nothing into the hand
of the chap that stays.”
The meeting resumed, but, it was plain to be seen, without enthusiasm.
Then, at last, all in one group they came aft and halted, whilst the
spokesman gave their decision to the skipper.
“The chaps ain’t unwillin’ to oblige you or the gentleman, sir, but it’s
the lonesomeness.”
“None of you will stay?”
“Well, sir, it’s not the stayin’, but the keepin’ here.”
“Of course you’d have to keep here—but that’s enough—get forward.”
Then, suddenly, came a voice of mockery, the voice of Jim. Jim had taken
little part in the discussion, leaving to abler speakers the handling of
the affair, but he had made no objection to the general verdict. It was
a characteristic that, whilst one with the others, he was always a bit
apart; illiterate as any of them, his mind was of a different stamp.
“Lonesomeness be sugared, it’s the booze they’re thinkin’ of, sir.”
For a moment the presence of the after-guard was forgotten and voices
were raised.
“You’re thinkin’ of, you mean, or why don’t you stay yourself?” enquired
the man with the red handkerchief.
“And who says I won’t?” asked Jim.
That is how it happened, all of a sudden. I doubt if a moment before he
had made up his mind or whether the necessity of answering back smart
had done the business. At all events it was done, and Jim Kearney, long,
red-headed, lantern-jawed and trailing behind him his tattered past, was
enlisted the third inhabitant of the Garden of God.
Stanistreet had pointed out to Lestrange the impossibility of the
schooner putting out that day: stores had to be landed, and not only
landed, but brought round to the house away at the other side of the
lagoon.
Lestrange did not want stores, and Jim Kearney, who was a small eater
for all his size and strength, and who in these latitudes was
indifferent to meat, despite his advocacy of beef as a food for
children, only wanted tobacco. All the same, the captain of the
_Ranatonga_ had his own ideas on the subject. A cask of flour was broken
out of the hold, the medicine chest was ransacked of pain-killer, opium
and Epsom salts; needles, thread, scissors, carpenter’s tools, lines and
fish-hooks—nothing was forgotten.
A shack had to be run up in the trees behind the house to hold the
stores, and it was not till the morning of the third day that all was
finished.
The old dinghy was overhauled and condemned, but Lestrange wished to
keep it, so it was left, together with the dinghy of the _Ranatonga_,
for practical purposes, and they were towed round by the whale boat to
the sward by the house and tied up to the bank.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning when all was finished. Dick was
playing about in the sun under the eye of Kearney, pipe in mouth and
hands in pockets, and Lestrange was saying good-bye to his skipper.
Stanistreet was downcast. The very beauty of the morning, the loveliness
of the sward with its protecting trees, the lagoon with its coloured
shadows and depths, the remote reef and the perfect sky above it, all
this only served to deepen the depression that had come upon him.
Now, at the moment of parting, the feeling came to him that he would
never see Lestrange again, that on the child playing on the sward,
Kearney, and the grey-haired man with those strange eyes that seemed
fixed upon another world, Fate was preparing to drop a curtain that it
would never be his part to lift.
For a moment and to his plain, simple mind the tragedy of the lost
children seemed part of this new happening and the hand that had shaped
their fate not yet finished with its work.
The fellows in the whale boat that was hanging onto the bank ready to
take him round the lagoon back to the ship, seemed under the same
blanket; Jim, for all his rating them over the drink business, had been
a favourite, and here they were leaving him, marooned, so to speak.
Bowers, who had left the boat to give some last instructions to Jim,
returned to his place in the stern sheets, and Stanistreet cast his eye
over the house with its open doorway, over the child, over Jim.
“Well, sir,” said he, “I don’t think we’ve forgotten anything, and I’ve
got your orders safe in mind and pocket—and—” He held out his hand and
gripped that of the other.
“Good luck,” said Lestrange.
The boat shoved off, some of the fellows shouting, “Bye, Jim!” others
nodding their heads at him.
Then, just before rounding the cape to the right, the oars came in and
the crew, scrambling to their feet, gave a cheer that roused the echoes
in the trees. Then the boat passed away for ever beyond the cape.
“Kearney,” said Lestrange, “those are good men—would that there were
more like them in this strange world.”
“Yes, sir,” said Kearney. “They ain’t bad—off the wharfside.”
But Lestrange, fallen into a dream, scarce heard, and hearing would not
have understood this profound and comprehensive summary of the ethical
condition of the departed ones.
He cared for nothing. He was at peace. The presence of Stanistreet, the
very decks of the _Ranatonga_ were ties connecting him with the misery
of the last twelve years, things disturbing that perfect new mood of
mind, born of his vision and the surety that here in this paradise, at
their own good time, his children would come to him, be with him.
Leaving the child to Kearney, he turned to the house and began to put
things in order. This dreamer was no idler; he had brought all his books
with him, some dozen volumes or so, and he arranged them on the shelf
already prepared for him by the children, taking care that none of the
other objects were disturbed.
He examined the walls, still incomplete in parts, and the roof all but
finished, but not quite; the thought that the children had left it for
him to complete came to him suddenly and made him pause in his work. It
was only a fancy, yet his mind held it and dwelt on it as though it had
been a fact of the first importance. It was to be his house as well as
theirs.
As he stood like this, idle for a moment and gazing out across the
sunlit sward, his eyes fell on Kearney and the child. The sailor’s hands
were out of his pockets and he was standing, knife in one hand and a bit
of stick in the other, whittling away and evidently making some sort of
toy. Dick, seated on the ground, naked as the sun, was looking up at the
work in progress.
Bowers had decided not to force clothes upon the child, firstly, because
Dick, like some form of insane people, fought against any covering, even
a blanket; secondly, because the child’s skin was already clothed,
covered with a lovely golden brown tinge, a suit given him by the sea.
He didn’t look naked, and the simple and logical mind of the sailor
decided to let him be, and there he sat, perhaps the most beautiful
object on earth, whilst above him stood Kearney whittling his stick—and
Lestrange, casting his benevolent eye upon them, saw nothing but a
little child waiting for a toy at the hands of a sailor man.
For Dick was almost nothing to Lestrange, he had no part in his
obsession. Stanistreet had reckoned him half crazy partly because of his
indifference to this grandchild—but he had forgotten that the forms for
ever in the mind of the “poor gentleman” were the forms of the children
of the past, that the vision that had brought him what seemed the peace
of madness was the vision of two little children of six and seven. “Dick
and Emmeline, just as they were long years ago, pure and sweet and happy
and childlike, but knowing all things.” The fact that they had mated in
life, the very fact of Dick, were alien to the consuming dream that here
at their own chosen time little hands would push the leaves aside and
that in some twilight he would see again the forms of the lost ones.
Poor gentleman!
“There you are and play about,” said Mr. Kearney, delivering up the
finished article to the chubby hand reaching for it. “Yes, sir.” He came
to Lestrange, who had called him, and between them they set about the
work of making things shipshape. Some bunk bedding had been brought
ashore, and Jim’s scanty wardrobe that had never been increased out of
the slop chest lay in a bundle by the shack amongst the trees.
Stanistreet had wanted to leave a tent, but Jim said the shack was good
enough for him. There was lots of room for him besides the stores;
Lestrange and the child would have the house.
They worked away at the little jobs to be finished and then came dinner,
a sort of picnic on cold stuff brought from the _Ranatonga_ and eaten
seated on the sward, Dick sharing with them in the way of bananas and
scraps just as a dog might have done.
In some extraordinary way the common sailor and the sensitive,
super-civilised Lestrange had almost at once become companions, yet
without any alteration in status.
It was always “Yes, sir,” with Jim, with Lestrange it was always
“Kearney,” and the power of little things was never more evidenced than
in the case of Jim relabelled by the gentle-voiced Lestrange in the
first hours of this island life. He had always been “Jim” to himself and
others. “Jim” had placer-mined on the hills of California, drunk himself
blind, killed a “Chink” in a tong dust-up he had joined in for the fun
of the thing, worked for the sandalwood traders and always had come out,
to use his own expression, at the little end of the horn. There were
rare moments of heart-searching with Jim when he accused himself not of
crimes committed but of opportunities let slip, opportunities with women
and with Fortune. In those rare moments which yet tinged in some manner
his conscious life, the man he knew was “Jim”; the inconsiderable name
summoned up his failures. “Kearney” was something new, didn’t seem to
fit, yet in some way was not distasteful—almost a title.
Towards evening that day Kearney, who had been prospecting about in the
woods and who with his island-trained eye had discovered and noted the
places of all sorts of fruit-bearing trees, to say nothing of a patch of
yams that showed evidence of cultivation—Kearney, chewing a long straw
of maya grass, appeared before Lestrange, who was seated in front of the
house reading a book.
“The old hooker was due out at the half ebb, sir,” said he. “She’ll be
well to sea by this and bearing north, and I was thinking you’d maybe
like to go over to the reefs to have a last look at her.”
“The schooner?” said Lestrange, closing his book. “Yes, I would like to
see her on her way. Can you row me over?”
“Yes, sir,” said Kearney, with a half smile, “I can row you all right.”
He took a glance into the house where Dick in a corner was asleep under
a half kicked off blanket. “And the kid won’t take no harm, he’s
sleepin’ like a Dutchman. Ain’t you goin’ to take your coat, sir? It’s
breezin’ up out there an’ fresher than here.”
“Yes, Kearney,” replied Lestrange, putting the book and his reading
glasses away on a little shelf by the door, a quaint little shelf that
the lost ones had put up for who knows what purpose. “Yes, perhaps I had
better take my coat.” He put it on and they went down to the water’s
edge, where Kearney pulled the new dinghy close up whilst he got in.
Then they pushed off, the sailor sculling with his eye over his shoulder
for the reefs.
As I have said, the lagoon here was very broad and broken by coral
ridges that made navigation difficult; great ponds and narrow passages
of diamond-bright water showed a floor ablaze with live or dingy dead
and rotten coral. Coloured fish, haliotis shells, crabs and jellyfish
showed as clearly as seen through air, and as they rowed, Lestrange,
leaning over, gazed as interested as a child.
“Oh, them,” said Jim, his attention being called to a school of
jellyfish, disc-shaped, adorned with purple buttons and projecting
themselves through the water by the simple act of opening and closing
like umbrellas. “Them’s pikers, seen ’em as big as a ship’s tops’l in
the waters over by Howland—Howland, sir, it’s one of them line islands,
east of the Gilberts.—Yes, sir, there’s fish to feed the fleet in this
lagoon and I’ll be getting busy with the lines to-morrow. Fond o’
fishin’, are you, sir? Well, you’ll have your choice and plenty when we
get the lines rigged. Step careful.”
He held the boat up to the reef coral whilst Lestrange got out. Then,
having fastened her by tying the painter to a spike of rock, they stood
looking.
The sound of the surf had been loudening as they crossed from the land.
Here, facing the fresh sea breeze, the full roar of the breakers came to
them, whilst to right and left the great low-tide outer beach lay
bombarded by the ocean, flown across by gulls and showing in the golden
light of early evening the rock pools left like bits of mirror by the
retreating sea. Coral sings, and mixed with the voices of the waves the
inner voice of the reef could be heard, a vague, chanting sound, remote
and bell-like.
Here, standing with the sound of the sea and the reef in one’s ears, the
island world took a new colour and a new atmosphere, altering according
to the time of day from the gaiety of morning to the loneliness of
evening.
“Look!” cried the sailor. “That’s her.”
He pointed away to where far at sea the white sails of the _Ranatonga_
showed the sun full on them. There was a lump of coral worn smooth by
weather just here. Lestrange took his seat on it and whilst Kearney
pottered about examining the contents of the rock pools, the cuttle-fish
bones and reef debris, he sat, his eyes fixed on the distant sail and
his thoughts travelling far beyond.
A long time passed till footsteps roused him from his reverie. It was
Kearney, a vast and edible crab—its claws bound with seaweed—in one
hand, a crawfish in the other.
“Look!” said Lestrange, as he rose to his feet. “She is nearly gone.”
The sailor looked. Hull down, almost washed from sight by evening and
distance, the _Ranatonga_ showed her canvas to the sunset like a flake
of golden spar. Less and less it grew, till at last the eye that chanced
to lose it failed to find it again.
“Kearney,” said Lestrange, as he turned to the boat, and speaking
without any sadness in his tone, “I may be wrong, but it has just come
to me that I will never see that ship any more.”
The sailor, taking advantage of the fact that the dinghy had slipped her
moorings in the last few minutes and had to be captured where she had
grounded against a spur further along, made no reply.
Bowers, instructed by Stanistreet, had given him the hint that
Lestrange’s compasses wanted correcting, and that he wasn’t to be
“crossed” if he put up strange ideas about things, more especially if
those ideas had anything to do with his lost children.
“Which children are you meanin’?” had asked Kearney.
“Them two in the boat we found,” replied Bowers.
“Children! What are you talkin’ about?” had asked the other.
“Maybe you’ll get it into your thick head he’s always seein’ them same
as when they were little,” replied Bowers, “and he’s got it fixed in his
nut he’s to find them again, that they’re somewhere hid on the island,
not them but their sperrits; that’s how the land lays with him, and now
you know.”
Kearney had thought a good deal on this matter. He had a fair charge of
superstition in his make-up and no wish to increase his education in
psychic affairs, reckoning bad luck, ghosts, omens, and all such things
on the same string and to be avoided.
CHAPTER IX
THE ROLLERS
Next morning Lestrange, asleep in the house, was awakened by a child’s
laughter.
Dick had vanished from the corner where he slept, fetched out by
Kearney, whose voice could be heard in admonition.
“Now then, Dick M, now then lave that down or I’ll put you back in the
house. Lave that down, I tell you.” Silence.
Lestrange peeped out and saw the man and the child.
Kearney must have been up a good while, for a fire was alight in a
little slip to the right where there was evidence that the old occupants
of the place had often done their cooking, a kettle was on the fire and
crockery-ware from the _Ranatonga_ graced the sward close by, and a
coffee pot. Kearney was getting breakfast ready whilst the child stood
by him; on the sward, a bit away, hopping about and watching the
preparations with bright eyes, was a newcomer, a bird with brilliant
plumage.
Lestrange dressed himself and came out whilst the coffee was being made,
filling the air with its perfume.
“Why do you call him Dick M?” asked Lestrange, taking his seat on the
sward as the other went on with his preparations, whilst the child, who
had lost interest in the business, was stalking the bird.
“Well, sir,” said Kearney, “it’s just a name he give himself on board
the ship. Bowers labelled him Dick and I says to him, ‘What’s your
name?’ I says, and ‘Dick M,’ says he, and then he closed up. He’s the
silentest kid I’ve ever struck—and I’m thinking those that brought him
up mustn’t have had much use for their tongues.” Mr. Kearney, led away
by his own tongue, suddenly closed up himself, but Lestrange did not
notice; his mind was on other matters. He had taken his seat with his
face to the house, and as the meal progressed his thoughts showed
themselves.
“Kearney,” said he, “look at that roof and those walls. Can you cut me
some canes and get me some of those leaves for thatching? I have been
examining the thatch from the inside and it is quite simple. The leaves
seem stitched to the big canes that form the beams.”
“Lord, sir,” said Kearney, “you needn’t trouble about that. I’ll do the
job when I get things a bit more ship-shape; canvas would be better than
them leaves, and there’s a big roll of spare canvas Captain Stanistreet
left, thinkin’ I’d like to make a tent.”
“No,” said Lestrange. “I want to do this business myself. There is no
hurry about it, but I would like to do it myself. You know, Kearney, all
about my children and how they lived here.”
“Yes, sir,” said Kearney. “I’ve heard it from Bowers.”
“They lived here and grew up together,” went on Lestrange, “lived here
in the open and in the woods the happy life that people knew before
cities were built. I do not know, but I some day shall know, what
fatality carried them out to sea; but I do know that shortly before it
occurred they began to build that house. Why?”
Kearney, who knew the tropics better than Lestrange, had an answer on
his tongue, pat, the sensible answer that maybe a storm had destroyed
their first house, but he said nothing, wishing to keep clear of the
subject of the children as much as possible, and Lestrange went on:
“Well, it is just my fancy, but it has come to me that they built it
unconsciously, instinctively knowing that I was coming, knowing that
death was approaching them, leaving it unfinished for me to finish—to
complete for them—”
Kearney, distinctly uncomfortable at the turn the talk was taking, still
remained mute. From what Bowers had said, and from his own observation,
he knew that Lestrange was sane on every point but this. Instinct told
him, or hinted to him, that craziness covered with sanity in this
fashion might be a worse proposition if it burst loose than the open and
general sort of craziness—like that of old Sam Fisher, with whom he had
sailed years ago, a man clean cracked, yet harmless and able to do his
duty. He had no fear of violence from Lestrange, but visions of the poor
gentleman “dashing into the lagoon,” if crossed, made him hold his
tongue.
Just at that moment the bird that Dick had been stalking rose in the air
and passed over their heads and lit on the roof edge of the house. The
child came running after it and, standing beneath, held up his hand.
“Koko!” cried Dick.
But the bird, evidently disturbed and puzzled by the newcomers, resisted
all blandishments and after a moment of indecision rose into the air and
passed away across the trees.
Lestrange did not notice, he had risen and walked down to the lagoon
edge, where the dinghies were moored, the old battered dinghy of the
_Northumberland_ and the dinghy of the _Ranatonga_.
He seemed to have forgotten all about the house-building, a fact
comforting to the mind of Mr. Kearney, who didn’t want to cut canes and
hunt for palmetto leaves, but to fish.
Lighting his pipe, he followed down to the water’s edge and ten minutes
later he had his charge safe out on the lagoon, anchored over a vast
deep pool and within eyeshot of Dick.
The child was busy. He had toys of his own hidden in some hole behind
the house and which he had unearthed: stones and lumps of coloured coral
and oyster shells, with which he was making patterns on the sward. He
seemed quite happy and content.
Just at first, on board the _Ranatonga_, on awakening from that strange
dead sleep induced, perhaps, as Stanistreet had suggested, by the poison
of the berries, he had seemed to miss his parents, calling out “Daddy”
and stretching out his arms to some imaginary person; but whether the
drug had drawn some curtain or whether he had been used to long absences
of his parents in their wild life on the island, who can say?—but,
content with the moment, he seemed soon to forget the burning interest
of the decks of the schooner, the masts and sails and crew occupying his
mind.
Lestrange, with a piece of crab on his hook, leaned over the gunnel,
gazing at the painted world below; just as the child was occupied with
its play, so was he and so was Jim Kearney with their fishing. A shoal
of tiny fish, the whole school not bigger than one’s hand, would pass
like a silver cloud, its shadow following across the coral and sand
patches; then a scarus with moving gills would circle, nose the bait and
pass, fish and shadow suddenly and utterly dissolved from sight.
Everything that moved within a certain distance of the lagoon floor had
its shadow, a thing inseparable, blind, yet endowed with movement and
duplicating the object that cast it in all things but solidity and
colour. These fish shadows seen through water were things quite new to
Lestrange, different in some subtle way from terrestrial shadows seen
through air. He remarked on them to Kearney, who agreed that they looked
rum when you weren’t used to them.
“And who knows,” said Lestrange, remembering a conversation he had had
with Stanistreet, “whether we aren’t the shadows of our real selves,
Kearney? Knowing nothing, and just following the movements and the
dictates of our souls; have you ever thought of these matters, Kearney?”
“No, sir,” replied the sailor. “I was never any good at l’arnin’.”
Lestrange was about to reply when a fish took his bait, a thing like a
rock cod with a bright red band across its back, weighing four or five
pounds, and beating the water to spray as it was hauled up.
Lestrange, as he brought this “soul” on board, to Kearney’s relief,
seemed to have cast speculative philosophy over the other gunnel.
Excited as a boy with his catch, he rebaited and the fishing resumed.
Here on this island there was one thing steadfast as the sun, insistent
as hunger and merciful as death—sleep. Sleep with no bad taste in its
mouth, no feverish dreams in its hand. Sleep as God made it and before
man spoiled it.
Dick on board the _Ranatonga_ had astonished Bowers by his capacity for
slumber and his facility in “dropping off” even in the midst of play.
Here it was the same. This afternoon, dinner over, there was not a
conscious soul on the island. Lestrange had retired with a book, and a
half a page had drowned him in oblivion; Kearney, under a tree, was lost
to the world, and Dick, curled like a leaf, was gripping in oblivion the
toy the sailor had cut for him, a tiny boat no bigger than a forefinger,
rough-hewn in a few minutes, but still a boat.
Just before sunset that evening the wind fell to a dead calm. Living in
the open the faintest breathing of wind makes itself felt; there is no
anemometer like the sense of man, and a dead calm affects not only the
sense of man, but his soul.
You feel it below decks just as you feel it above. It is the one
unnatural thing in Nature whose soul is movement, stress, storm.
The groves stood in stereoscopic stillness and the great sea beyond the
reef had lowered its song. The rumour of the surf seemed far away, yet
in reality was only diminished.
Lestrange, before going to bed, was sitting having a talk with the
sailor.
Kearney, well fed, with a pipe in his mouth and his back to a tree, was
in the mood for talk, unknowing of the things that might come, released
from that fear of life and the future which is the birthright of every
man who changes a dollar. Released from the drudgery of shipboard life,
Jim Kearney was as communicative as though he had been in a bar on the
Bombay coast. The push of whisky was absent, but—and as this is a story
which would fall to pieces at once if truth were absent—the push of
Lestrange was present. Lestrange to Kearney was not only a poor
gentleman who had to be looked after, but “a wonderful rich man.” A man
who could commission a schooner like the _Ranatonga_ was in himself a
person to command respect, but the fo’c’sle had embroidered on this,
true to the instincts of the mass that will debase an individual or
exalt him beyond fact and truth. The fo’c’sle of the _Ranatonga_ had
elevated Lestrange to the height of Nobs Hill. He wasn’t as high as
this, and—give Kearney his due—the height of Lestrange in the financial
world had had nothing to do with his decision to remain with him. That
decision had been born in a moment, and maybe sickness of the sea and
love of Dick had been the core. All the same, the “richness” of
Lestrange was a powerful underlying factor in his present contentment
with his surroundings.
The amber glow of the sunset had faded as these two people, drawn from
poles apart, sat towards one side of the little house, Kearney with his
back to a bread-fruit, Lestrange more in the open, leaning on his side,
plucking at the grass, talking.
“Ain’t you ever used tobacco, sir?” said Kearney, apropos of some remark
of the other.
“No, Kearney,” replied Lestrange. “I tried it once, many years ago, and
it didn’t suit. I like the smell of it, but I can’t smoke. It’s the same
with whisky. I’ve tried whisky. I tried it once. I said to myself, ‘I’ll
forget things,’ and I went into the Palace at San Francisco—you know
that big hotel they have built—and I drank.”
“Yes, sir,” said the interested Kearney.
“I did not mean to get tipsy,” went on the other, “but I drank in
company with other men, and I forgot. Yes, whisky is a wonderful thing
to make you forget for the moment. I remember quite well and quite
distinctly the whole of that evening, up to a point. We talked of horse
racing—and I knew nothing of horse racing, but it was just as though I
knew. It interested me. We talked of other things far worse. I found
myself in a billiard room and I was talking to two men and making bets
on players and waging money, and then, Kearney, I awoke next morning—I
awoke—and there was nothing but a filthy taste on my tongue and the
feeling that I had betrayed those I loved—in having forgotten them, if
even for a moment.”
“Well, sir, it ain’t much use to a man, and that’s the truth,” said the
sailor, tapping the dottle from his pipe.
Then the meeting adjourned, leaving the rising moon to rule the
unrippled sea.
The moon was full up when Lestrange, who was asleep in the house, was
awakened by a booming sound, measured and rhythmical, that filled the
night like the solemn beating of a great drum.
He rose and, passing the sleeping child, came out on the sward.
Kearney was out and standing in the moonlight, shading his eyes and
staring towards the sea.
“It’s breakers on the reef, sir!” cried the sailor. “Lord! Look at it!”
Away over the reef the spray was flying to the even-spaced and ever
loudening thunder of the great rollers. The reef seemed on fire and
fuming under the moon, whilst jets of spume-drift rose like sheeted
ghosts from the hurricane seas bursting on the outer beach—rose and
dissolved and vanished in an atmosphere windless and still as crystal.
It was the dead calm of the night that made the vision appalling,
together with the fact that the anger of the sea was still rising. Above
the sheeting spray the gulls were flying wildly in the moonlight, and
above their voices louder and louder came the thunder of the breakers.
The woods were now echoing to the sound of it, and now, like a line of
crystal above the reef, showed the head of the first beaching wave.
It broke in snow and smoke, sheeting into the lagoon, and was followed
by two others. That was the climax. As the terror came, so it went,
dying gradually down, till at last nothing was left but the old eternal
murmur of the surf.
“Well,” said Kearney, “that beats all.—Earthquake?—No, sir. I’m thinking
there’s been some big storm up north there, one of them cyclones, and
the push of it has come down pilin’ up against tide an’ current. Lord
help the schooner if she’s met it. The sea’s big still; listen to that
surf. Shall us run over to the reef, sir, and have a look?”
They took the dinghy. The passage was easy in the moonlight, and on the
reef, when they reached it, the coral was still drenched and the rock
pools over-flooded.
On the outer beach the rollers were still coming in, no longer gigantic,
yet great, marching beneath the moon to break in thunderbursts that
seemed ruled by the beat of a metronome; marching from the north, where,
against the sunset of the day before, the sails of the _Ranatonga_ had
passed from sight beyond the sea-line.
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BOOK II
THE CHILDREN RETURN
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CHAPTER I
TIME PASSES
For weeks after that night Kearney, though busy and contented enough,
was possessed by the uneasy feeling that maybe they were marooned for
good and all. If the _Ranatonga_ never came back, why, then God help
them, it might be years before a ship came along.
Working in the patch of yams, fishing, or what not, he worried over this
business in private. Not caring to speak of it to Lestrange, he
sometimes spoke of it to Dick. Dick, almost as dumb as a dog, had words,
but no use for connected speech as yet; sometimes thoughtful, nearly
always busy, the child seemed to live a life of his own and, though fast
friends with the man, was quite happy when left by himself. All the
same, Mr. Kearney would talk to the child sometimes as if he understood,
and it was a relief to give voice to his doubts if it was only to Dick.
Sometimes the man would take him out in the dinghy when he went fishing
and Lestrange was otherwise employed, and the child with its chin over
the gunnel would watch without a word, or crooning to itself, while the
bright-coloured fish passed or nosed the bait.
“Ay, them’s big fish,” said Mr. Kearney one morning as three grampuses
went by in line of battle and vanished into the world of crystal beyond.
“Hullo!” A rock cod had taken the bait; he hauled it, fighting, on board
and as it foundered on the bottom boards Dick caught it in his chubby
hands.
“Fish!” said Dick.
“Ay, now you’re talking,” said the other, pleased to hear the word he
had uttered repeated back to him, and holding up the fish with a finger
through the gills. “What’ll you give me for ’m, answer up now, eh?
What’ll you give me for ’m, or I’ll chuck him overboard? Answer up now.”
“Sivim!” cried Dick. He had risen and was standing, balancing himself,
and holding up his hands for the coloured fish.
Mr. Kearney roared with laughter, so that Lestrange, who was weeding in
the taro patch, heard the sound borne to him across the water.
He handed the fish to the child, who, clutching it by the tail and
through the gills, placed it carefully in the shadow of the thwart,
where the sun could not get at it.
“Well, I’m damned,” said Kearney to himself. If Dick had suddenly made a
long oration in Latin the sailor would not have been very much more
surprised than he was at this revelation of care and free thought. It
was like a flash of light revealing the child’s upbringing and the fact
that the people of the wild begin their education in the school of
necessity, which is not a school of languages.
He rebaited and dropped his hook, talking to the child as he did so.
“Did your daddy teach you that, eh? Well, you’re a cleverer chap than I
thought—don’t be tanglin’ the line; there, you can hold it if you want.”
He let the little hand clutch the line without letting go of it himself
and they fished in partnership, Dick between his knees and helping to
haul in the catches. But from that day he began to take a different and
more lively interest in the child, and as the weeks passed the bother
about the _Ranatonga_ began to fade. There was no use in bothering, for
one thing, and for another the island life was beginning to clutch him.
Time measured by the shadow of a palm tree, days so like that they
slipped by uncounted, no watches to be kept, no worry, and food which
was just a pleasant exercise to collect, no home to regret—in a month
the thought of the _Ranatonga_ had passed away even as the ship herself
had passed beyond the sea-line. In two months the fo’c’sle had receded,
a dark vision that seemed separated from him by years.
Then, as time went on, the sprouting of Dick became for this common
sailor man an interest that beat fishing, spearing grampus on the reef,
beating the woods for new fruit patches or speculating on the rumness of
Lestrange, whose mild peculiarities seemed spreading in a new direction,
to be noted presently.
He heard his own words repeated by the child. It was like teaching a
parrot to talk, only with a difference, for under the influence of
this conversationalist Dick was beginning to string his words
together. He had a little stock of old words collected in his past
life—“Dick”—“Em”—“Koko”—“Daddy”—but, whether the strange, new
experience of waking to find himself on the schooner had broken the
threads or whether his parents had almost forgotten language, he had
nothing of connected speech.
The man who takes an interest in a thing has two sets of eyes, and
Kearney’s interest in Dick made him see things lost to Lestrange, whose
indifference to the child, so far from diminishing, seemed to increase
as time went on; one might say that it almost amounted to a dislike—as
though the presence of a living child here was distasteful to him who
was waiting for the children who were dead.
During the first few months his mind was so busy, so intrigued with the
new surroundings, so intent on completing the house, clearing the yam
patch of weeds and finishing what the lost children had left undone,
that time passed as it passed for Kearney. Then, gradually, and as
though time were losing the feathers of his wings one by one, the days
began to lengthen for Lestrange.
The glorious vision that had brought him such assurance and comfort, had
it been born after all of dementia, of that compensating madness which
turns grief sometimes into indifference or laughter? Was it a toy
produced by Nature to soothe his mind? He did not ask himself this, he
questioned nothing, but fishing began to lose its interest for him and,
now that the house was finished, there seemed nothing more to do.
How the children were to come to him he had never tried clearly to
imagine—perhaps in dreams—perhaps in a vision or stealing to him as
ghosts. Perhaps he would die and they would come to lead him into that
glorious country where he had met them—he could not tell, he had only
been sure that they would come.
But now, as time went on, it was as though the vaguest tinge of darkness
had come upon the blessed assurance—a tinge so vague at first that it
only changed contentment into expectancy. The first chill touch,
perhaps, of that sanity whose home is the commonplace, the sanity that
knows nothing of visions, that questions, turns over and doubts. Who
knows? But as time went on, expectancy began to take on the tinge of
doubt.
Sitting reading by the house you might have seen Lestrange pause in his
reading and glance round—a step—no, only a leaf blown by the wind.
Sometimes at night Kearney would see him wandering by the lagoon side, a
figure clearly defined in the starlight, walking with head bowed and
hands behind its back, not a happy figure.
He talked little nowadays and his face had lost something of that
other-world look, but what he said was always definite and to the point,
his manner was more normal, and if the sailor had been questioned as to
his condition, he would have given it as his opinion that the gentleman
was “coming round.”
All the same, this coming-round business made it a dull time for Mr.
Kearney, and only for Dick he might have grumbled. As I have said, his
interest in the child made him see things lost to Lestrange.
Dick had a hole behind the house where he used to hide his toys, just as
a dog hides bones. He was very secretive about this business, putting
the things away when no one was looking. Kearney found the cache one day
and must have left some marks behind him, for next day the hiding-place
was changed. Another queer thing about Dick was the way, changing from
one mood to another, he would alter.
Sometimes he would be racing along the lagoon bank or trying to climb
trees, full of life and energy. Again, sometimes he would be seated,
quiet and brooding, often with his hands folded, as if contemplating
some abstract matter—day-dreaming.
A rum child.