Now at Tilafeaa the day was always cut out in pieces, with things to do
in each piece, and on board the brig it was the same, but here the day
was all one, with nothing to do but walk from street to street, among
people blind to one another and always hurrying like leaves blown by a
wind.
Uliami stood a while at a corner and watched these people, and it seemed
to him, now, that they were each, like the cars that went without
horses, or the boats in the bay that went without stern or side wheels,
driven by some purpose that no man could see.
He felt that it was no good purpose that made men disregard one another
and push one another aside and be blind to a stranger as though he were
a ghost they could not see. He felt sick at heart, for even the sun had
changed and here its light fell on nothing good. The great buildings and
the little, it was all the same, they were equally hard with the
hardness that lay in the faces of the people.
It was on noon when, wandering like a lost dog, he found himself in a
most dismal place passing along by a great wall. Beyond the wall lay a
building reaching the skies with chimneys that smoked and fumed, and
here in the lane lay refuse and old empty tins and such truck with the
sun shining on them and the light of it turned to mournfulness and
desolation. Turning a corner of this lane he came face to face with
Tauti, whose ship had come in to the bay only the morning before, and
who, like Uliami, had been wandering hither and thither, like a lost
dog.
Each man had still his knife in his girdle, and thus they stood facing
one another, as they had stood when they parted last, in the woods of
Tilafeaa. And surely, for a killing, no place was better suited than
this, where there was no one to watch or take notice or care except the
devil of desolation lurking in that lane, which of all places in the
city seemed his truest home.
For a moment, as they stood, all things were shattered around them;
everything wiped away but themselves, and their minds sprang back to the
point of anger as a bow springs back to the straight, and who knows what
might have happened between these two, but at that moment from the great
building there came a howl like the voice of the whole city howling out
in pain because of its own desolation.
It was the voice of the horn that is blown at midday for the work
people, and as Tauti and Uliami looked round them in fear and wonder it
seemed to them the voice of the dust, and the high walls and the
streets, and the rubbish on the ground, and the hard-faced people on the
foot walks. When it ceased, and they faced one another again, they were
no longer alone, for that voice had reached Tilafeaa, and the high woods
had come trooping to its call right across the sea, and they were
standing as they had stood when they parted last in the company of the
trees and amid the beauty of the flowers, and all anger had passed from
their hearts where there was nothing now but the grief of exile and
love.
Surely that was magic greater than the magic of the pictures that move,
or the machines that speak, and surely places are the true gods that
rule over man, for the voice of the city had brought an island from a
thousand leagues away, and the island had brought love to Tauti and
Uliami.
No man could have reconciled these two.
But Tauti died. Before ever he could get back to Tilafeaa a fever took
him. It was many years ago.