_I am the sad composer of all time;
The ocean’s deep orchestral boom—my own!
The singing birds and winds of every clime
Without my ears would be as songless stone.
The stars will cease to sparkle at the last,
When fades my mem’ry of the ages past,
And God falls from pale reason’s shadow-throne._
THREE days had passed since Hawahee’s terrible appeal to the gods.
Sestrina stood in the shelter of her kitchen singing happily. The raft
was finished. She and Hawahee were about to embark, to seek the future
on the unknown seas around their island home. “Oh, how happy I feel! We
are going out to the seas; the gods will be—!”
She dropped her platter full of cooked fish—a terrible cry had reached
her ears! Whose cry was it? She stood trembling from head to feet.
Hawahee had gone a few moments before for his morning swim in the sea,
just behind the coral reefs where he would be hidden by the shore’s
palms. Why had he given so despairing a cry? Sestrina rushed from the
_palavana_. Her feet skimmed the sands without noise as she ran out to
the edge of the promontory. She stood perfectly still, as though death
had stricken her stiff with terror while in an attitude of upright
despair. Her face expressed terror in loneliness. Her outblown hair, and
lips apart, seemed to voice the wail of all unknown sorrows, her hands,
clasped tightly together, the symbol of all human appeal; her wide open
staring eyes all dire disaster beneath the sun! For, as she reached the
promontory’s edge, she had seen two hands toss up visible for a second
above the calm glassy surface of the sea, then swiftly disappear!
No thought came to her as to the cause of this calamity. Whether Hawahee
had been seized by a shark, or cramp, or had deliberately tied a lump of
coral stone to his feet ere he took his last dive off the promontory’s
edge, was something that never puzzled Sestrina. He had gone! that was
enough to know! Even the huge sea-birds seemed to hover near and gaze
with startled eyes as she stood there—immovable, staring in the awful
fascination of hopelessness at that spot!
All day long she rushed to and fro to the promontory’s edge calling
“Hawahee! Hawahee!” and weeping.
“’Tis coming, the night, the stars, the moon, I cannot stay!” she cried
as she spoke with pagan grief to the ocean, over which the first pale
stars were creeping.
She ran down to the raft. It was floating within the entrance of the
creek by the reefs. One push and it would go seaward.
Darkness swept over the seas. Sestrina stared in fright up the shore.
She was alone! Her half-demented mind peopled the shadows with unknown
terrors. Indescribable loneliness smote her heart like a blow. She gazed
up at the stars in anguished appeal. But the stars only seemed to gaze
in some immutable sorrow and hopeless silence that thundered
nightmare-sounds into her soul. Her grief-stricken mind magnified the
solitude—if that could be. She groped about the bamboo thickets and puli
ferns as she ran up the shore. Such was her loneliness, that she eagerly
sought the companionship of the lepers’ graves on the plateau. She ran
back to the shore and screamed for Hawahee again. The echoes of her
despairing voice awakened the roosting cockatoos and strange birds; up,
up they flew, shrieking discordantly in the darkness as they dashed
against each other in their blindness. The demented woman looked like a
wraith calling the dead as she wrung her hands and ran along the shore,
calling “Hawahee! Lupo! Rohana! Steno! come to me!” her mind so
distraught that she reverted to the companionship of the dead lepers.
The lagoons along the shore and the calm ocean before her shone with the
ethereal gleams of a thousand thousand stars. The trade winds that
commenced to blow every night, began to softly sigh. She had made up her
mind to go seaward on the raft.
Suddenly she thought of her own shape standing under the palms by the
shell temple. She turned round and stared inland, a startled gleam in
her eyes—she would seek its companionship! The impulse to gaze on that
shape which had been moulded from the dreams of the dead Hawahee, made
her stand breathless in some terrible ecstasy of despair. Her sad,
fallible mortal intellect, groping in its boundless dark, had clutched a
straw on the ocean of hopeless misery. In some vague, mad fancy of the
brain she had thought to crush, to outwit destiny’s cruel spite, to
still possess the companionship of Hawahee’s mortal conception of
herself in cold stone. The next second the impulse had vanished. She
realised that the shattered mirror of the past can never again reflect
the tender glance of loving eyes. She knew that Hawahee’s conception of
the sensuous beauty of her faultless form had vanished with the tossing
of his hands from his ocean grave.
The thought of her stone-shape standing under the island’s trees,
suddenly filled her soul with boundless misery. She detested it! In her
terror-stricken imagination she could see the full, perfect lips, the
lovely lines of the bosom and the passion-charmed curves and pose of the
whole form, clearer than had she run into the valley and stood before
it. She remembered Hawahee’s embrace of that unresponsive shape, and how
he had breathed thrilling words when he had clasped her form and found
it warm and impassioned as his own. Standing there, she tore her tappa
blouse apart, and, gazing down on her bosom, longed for a knife to stab;
then thumped and bruised the flesh in some agony!
“Jesu! God, Pelé! Père Chaco, forgive me!” Her voice echoed to the
distant valley, coming faintly back as though vast night in sympathy
repeated her despairing cries. Again she cried, “Save the soul of my
last girlhood and bury my womanhood for ever deep in these everlasting
seas!” That was Sestrina’s last appeal to the hollow seabound-night,
whereof she was the lone mortality, lonely as God before creation.
Standing there, trembling in fright, she stared seaward, afraid to
glance behind her. Her hands were outstretched, her face slightly raised
so that her eyes could stare on the horizon’s stars. She resembled some
emblematical figure of mortal despair, with lips apart, breathing a
prayer to the winds of the universe. The religious emotion, the
spiritual fervour of her soul had brought to her mind the magic flash
which so often had inspired Hawahee and herself with the wonderful
compelling power that had enabled them to send their thoughts roaming
the universe. Again and again she felt the visionary beauty of that
higher life which feeds the soul of sorrow and brings the light divine
which enables humanity to become conscious of God and elevates the human
mind. Again and again she appealed to the heavens, asking that her
thoughts might fly back to the memory of her girlhood—that _he_ might
know she had been faithful in her soul to him through the years of
sorrow. She inclined her head and listened. No answer came. Only the
restless moaning of the ocean and the melancholy sighing of the bending
shore palms whispered to her ears. And as she stood there with wide open
eyes, her hair outblown, she might easily have been some terrible, but
lovely representation, some symbol of all mortal sorrow, all broken
hopes, all shattered dreams and blighted simple faith; some perfect
chiselled goddess face telling of woman’s perfect trust and love
immortal, staring with cold, bright eyes across the infinite seas! Her
head fell forward; her arms dropped to her sides.
Without a cry she jumped on the raft. She cast it adrift—away, away,
anywhere from that despairing loneliness! Every tree, every reef and
familiar spot filled her heart with a sickening terror as she gazed
shoreward for the last time. Slowly the raft drifted, and slowly the
shadows of the shoreline receded. Suddenly she struggled to drift
shoreward again. She beat the water with her hands for she had no
paddles—she had heard a faint, sepulchral voice, coming from the deep
shadows up the shore, from the direction of her silent dwelling. “O
Atua, O Pelé!” it had cried—it was the aged cockatoo, Rohana, calling
for his evening meal. But still the raft drifted out on the relentless
tide of unchangeful circumstance. For a moment she lay prostrate in
grief over her deserted bird. The next minute she had jumped to her
feet, wringing her hands in despair. She placed her fingers to her ears,
as slowly and mournfully came those sounds, stealing over the silence of
the ocean—the temple gods had moaned aloud! The terror-stricken woman
heard those solemn shell-mouths calling her; she heard some appeal in
their deep, moaning voices, asking her not to desert them, leave them
alone in the great solitude of the valley of the island’s lonely hills,
set in endless oceans. As the raft drifted out to the silent, starlit
seas, the meaning voices became fainter and fainter.
The castaway soon prayed for death. But death does not come easily to
those who dwell in its shadow. She had neither food nor water on the
raft. She had cast herself adrift, caring not where the mighty tides
might take her.
Day came. The hot sunlight swept the silent tropic seas. Nothing but
illimitable skylines surrounded the raft as it floated adrift on the
burning waters—a tiny world of floating grief and misery unutterable,
its whole humanity a fragile form, speechless with thirst, its whole
breath of life and creed, tossing hands appealing to the great dumb,
blind, earless tropic sky!
Night came. The vast tomb whereon the living dead moaned and tossed, no
longer had the brassy glare of the day over it, but was covered with a
mighty slab, bright with a million stars. Then the first great shadow of
death crept over her brain. It came like a lovely dream, devoid of pain
and anguish, a dream full of infinite hope. She even smiled as she
dreamed on and thought she heard some one climbing up the grape-vine
below her casement in Port-au-Prince. And as she murmured the old names,
memories brought ineffable peace to her soul as the raft drifted away
for ever, fading into the vastnesses of the unknown seas.
* * * * *
Sunset still lingered on the skyline across the English hills, as a man
gazed from the latticed window of his study that faced the Channel
cliffs. He was watching the idly flapping crows fade away into the
crimson-streaked western glow. Why did the sight of the distant firs and
dark pines and the undulating grey hills so strangely influence him?
Some one softly opened the door and said, “Would you like to see her?”
“Yes,” he responded as he turned his head and gazed on the speaker, who
thereupon closed the door and departed. Then a pale-faced woman softly
entered the room. She carried a swaddled child in her arms. It was Royal
Clensy’s first-born.
“Why call her Sestrina? It is a strange name; what made you think of
it,” said the woman as she gazed in wonder up at the earnest face of the
man.
“Oh, nothing, it’s the name of some one I knew abroad, years ago.”
The man’s voice had become strangely soft and tender. Why did his senses
swim as a great sorrow crept over his heart? He tried to calm himself;
then gazed in surprise at the child’s eyes. They had suddenly opened
wide, had looked straight into his own.
“She has dark eyes,” he stammered as the woman stared. His voice shook.
Was it imagination? Why did the child’s gaze and his own meet as though
in the surprised light of swift recognition?
The woman crept from the room, softly closing the door behind her.
Royal Clensy stared like one in a dream through the window-pane,
apparently gazing out towards the distant seas. “Well, of all the world
of women the child reminds me of her—Sestrina!” he muttered. And as he
gazed, the pale hands of half-forgotten romance seemed to scrape up and
down the window-pane. He threw the lattice wide open. Was it the winds
that caressed his brow as the rich scent of the wistaria drifted to his
nostrils, coming like the scented odours from orange groves?
“Sestrina, you—after all these years!” he murmured.
Then he sadly smiled as he stared again at the image of the two stars
that seemed to stare up from the bowl where the goldfish swam, as, like
outblown hair, the leaves of the wistaria touched his face. His mind
wandered, went far away. It was not the Channel cliffs by the English
seas that he saw; he was gazing on the vast solitude of tropic seas, and
knew that the voice that called his name was no foolish sound, no freak
of the imagination. He felt the hot tropic wind touch his face. He saw
the castaway’s raft as it drifted on—on towards the skylines of
infinity. The great blinding sun shone over a phantom day. He saw the
silent, huddled form, and the fluttering rags as the hot wind blew,
revealing the bleached, whitened skeleton—the relic that had called to
him; the call which had roamed, how far across the universe before he
heard? He knew the truth. Even the waves seemed to put forth their hands
and pluck in sorrow, as they gently tossed against the craft which bore
that sad burden of all his soul’s conceptions of the beautiful on the
drought-swept depths of the past. It was as though the ocean felt the
sorrow of it all, had sent her children, the waves, that they might push
the fragile freight of that lone argosy into the deep calm of her bosom
for rest.
The vision slowly passed. The castaway’s raft became as shadowy as those
whitened bones of old trust, love and simple faith, as it faded away
into the great dusk of the starlit tropic seas—with all that had once
been the beautiful Sestrina.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EPILOGUE
NOT many years ago, a strangely rigged, rakish-looking brigantine hugged
the shore of a lonely isle of the remote South Pacific Ocean. The
skipper had sighted a ragged distress signal flag flying from the top of
a dead palm tree close to the shore.
“_Manana!_” exclaimed the half-caste, sun-tanned boatswain as the
yellow-skinned, mixed crew of Spanish-Mexicans, Yaquis, and Yucatan
sailors walked up the shore and stumbled across the old kitchen.
They held their strange, red-striped tasselled caps reverentially in
their hands as they gazed on the rotting mats and calabashes, the mouldy
remnants of an artistically weaved tappa-skirt and torn bodice that lay
by the little bunk bed in a hut just by. On a small post’s crosswise
placed rod swung a tiny bunch of feathers and bone, swinging to and fro
to the sea winds, like some sad relic of Hope’s once radiant wings—it
was Rohana, still chained to his perch! Then the wild-looking sailormen
strode down the incline.
“_Sapristi!_” cried one of those tawny, sunburnt men from the seas in a
startled voice.
The huddled crew stood just within the portals of the pagan
cathedral-cavern, gazing on the wondrous fashioned moaning shell-organ
and on the three giant, clay figures: Atua, with four arms, stood on the
left, the extreme right arm still faithfully reclining on Pelé’s left
shoulder; Kauhilo, with the human skull on his shoulder, stood on the
right of the goddess, whose uncrumbling hand of the extreme right arm
still gripped the ivory idol. Their sombre faces were overgrown with
hirsute-like moss, the ears sprouting delicate hair-fern; but the big
curved-lipped mouths were smooth and perfect. It seemed as though Time’s
hand had, in some melancholy sympathy, toiled on after Hawahee. For, as
they stood there in the sombre solitude of that cavern’s aisles,
mysteriously expressing in wondrous carven beauty the grandeur of
paganism and soulful belief in a merciful omnipotence, they looked more
god-like than ever!
“_Quien sabe?_” said one of the crew as they stood staring at each
other.
“_Dell ’anima!_” exclaimed another in an awestruck voice, as two of the
sailors walked into the shadows by the altar cavern and found themselves
before a wonderfully carven figure of a woman!
The exquisitely chiselled face was strangely untouched by the hand of
time. The wide-open eyelids still mystically expressed the old
half-divine sensuous charm that had fed the hungry, noble soul of a long
dead pagan. It was Sestrina’s shape, Hawahee’s faith, hope, art and love
of woman, expressed in stone. A tiny blue-winged bird fluttered from the
hollow of the figure’s bosom; it had built its nest within. There, under
the bosom’s polished fullness, nestled four red-specked eggs, nestling
in the silent eternity that was to awaken and thrill to-morrow’s leafy
boughs with music.
As the astounded, red-shirted sailormen crept down the shore sands,
going back to their boat, they glanced swiftly over their shoulders,
half in fright—they could hear the calling deep bass moans of the
deserted gods. Just as time enriches the music of a violin, age had
mellowed the voices of the gods till they gave forth sounds that echoed
as though from eternity. Even that rough, piratical-looking crew of the
brigantine _Cruz_ were affected as they heard the wailful, soulful music
of the stone figure, of the lovely shaped sculptured woman crying in the
isle’s solitude, as though she would tell their ears that sorrow is the
soul of infinity. Those wondering sailormen could still hear her voice
calling as they stood on deck, and the melancholy sounds came drifting
across the lagoons and out over the calm, deep-moving waters of the
tropic sea. They stared in each other’s eyes in wonder. The skipper
opened his bearded mouth and yelled a great oath. Then the yellowish
canvas sails, bellying to the night winds, sighed sorrowfully as they
faded away, flying south-west under the stars of the Pacific.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]