A. Safroni-Middleton

“ Only the far-away sigh of the winds reached her, the voices of the shell-gods were silent at last! Again she listened—a startled look leaped into her eyes, for she could hear the distant voice of Pelé rumbling across the pine and palm tracks. It was a noiseless sound, just as one hears when placing the ear against the pearly entrance of a large sea-shell. As though she was haunted by the presence of some unfathomable terror, she wrung her hands, and began to creep tiptoe up the slopes.
“Hawahee! Hawahee! save me! I am a woman, I am weak, and you are strong,” she cried. ”

“ Sestrina saw Clensy as some wonderful apostle of her own simple faith, the religion which was Père Chaco’s, the Catholic priest, the one who had encouraged the girl’s spiritual dreams since she was a toddling child. It was a pure woman’s faith, and was destined to expand, to grow like a lovely tree on the lonely desert isle—the soul which is in all of us—set in the boundless seas encircled by the dim starlit horizons of mortal imagination. ”

“ A ship may pass, and were the flag seen, men would surely take me away,” said Sestrina, as she dashed her coco-nut goblet at Hawahee’s feet.
“Attend to thy dreams, and not to the flag!” said Hawahee, as he kicked the coco-nut goblet, and behaved like an angry schoolboy. Then seeing how foolishly they were behaving, the Hawaiian forced a smile to his lips, and with a bitter note trembling in his voice, said: “Sestrina, should you be taken away on a ship I could easily die. One thrust with this knife into the heart that worries about you, and I would be at rest.” ”

“ He had placed a withered flower that had faded in the statue’s reality—in Sestrina’s hair—in the small, cold hand’s palm.
“O Atua, O Pelé, goddess of beauty and innocence, why is my heart afflicted? Why are the visionary shadows of my unhappy soul when shaped into cold stone, sweeter than the realities I touch with living desire, sweeter than the wines of love, sweeter than the touch of passionate lips?” ”

“ By the side of this raft stood the more helpless lepers waiting to be lashed on to it so that they would not be washed away when the final crash came. It was strange how those afflicted men clung to each other and went to an infinite amount of trouble to help their more helpless fellows. But still, they did go to the trouble, and it must be supposed that the love of men for one another is a greater virtue in sorrow than in the flush of perfect joy and health.
“All is ready, Wahine; do not fear,” whispered Hawahee as he approached Sestrina, and then crept back into the shadows to watch. ”

“ And it was this weird, mournful chime which came to Hawahee’s and Sestrina’s ears as they crept under the tall breadfruit trees, so that they might kneel in prayer before the altar of the shell-gods!
It was a grand, masterly fashioned work, a temple of the highest art attainable by mortal man. With the infinite patience of religious fervour, and a deep insight and belief in the divine omnipotence of his pagan gods, Hawahee had scraped and cut, through years of toil, three of the larger shells till they resembled the faces of the goddess Pelé and the gods Kauhilo and Atua. ”

“ He lay for quite an hour in his humble bed in the lodging-house at Port-au-Prince, thinking and thinking. His mind roamed far away into the realms of romance as he stared through the window at the stars, a bright constellation that shone just over the mountains, inland from Gonaives. And as he reflected on Sestrina’s beauty and the deep impression she had made on his mind, he began to realise what it all meant to him. His thoughts eventually became entangled in dire confusion as the possibilities of the future presented themselves to his mind. Would she really accept his hand in marriage? ”

“ Just before sunset on that same day, Sestrina came back from her swim in the lagoon and stood before Hawahee, who at once stopped chopping firewood and gazed upon her. A deep light shone in Sestrina’s eyes as she stood before the Hawaiian arrayed in the tappa bodice, rami and sandals.
On seeing the light in the girl’s eyes Hawahee’s eyes also brightened, the lines of care at once smoothed from his brow. The next moment Sestrina blushed deeply and realised, for the first time, that, however hard a woman strives to conceal the secret thoughts of her heart, her eyes must give her away. ”

“ All the visionary beauty of woman shone on her brow and in the fear of her parted lips as she called his name.
Slowly, as though in some terror of the fascination and dread over which her soul had no control, her pale hands clung, pulled at the canvas folds of the doorway’s old curtain. Again and again she pushed and pulled till slowly that fragile curtain, which divided the wandering Sestrina from the sleeper, was swept aside, revealing Hawahee’s handsome form and sleeping face. He tried to rise. He knew that he dreamed, and yet he knew that his dream was the unseen reality of the truth! ”

“ From those things which Hawahee said to her at times, she knew he had such power, but it was a revelation to her to find that she too possessed so wonderful a gift. It had worried her mind at first. She put the cause down to her own religious fervour and the long years of listening to the murmuring shells of the ocean and the deep bass voices of Kauhilo, Atua and Pelé. Sometimes she would stand on the shore and dream till a strange feeling seemed to exalt her soul, some ecstasy of melancholy that made her feel a wondrous kinship with the universe around her. ”

“ Be brave and strong, Sestra, and desert not the gods. Pelé’s voice was deep with sorrow this night when I knelt before her.” Then Hawahee lifted his hand and said: “The shell-altars and the gods are speaking, listen!”
And as they both listened, they heard the night wind drifting the solemn chant-chimes of Atua, Kauhilo, and Pelé across the slopes. The voices sounded deep and solemn, and strangely in harmony with the low monotone of the seas that answered along the shore. Again they kissed, and again they heard the god-voices moan as the wind swept down the breadfruit valley. ”

“ Every hanging bough sparkled with the steady lights of the hundreds of hanging garden lamps. The mystery of night and the stars and the dark orange groves was in perfect harmony with Sestrina’s type of beauty. Perhaps Sestrina knew this, for she stood perfectly still under the mahogany tree’s branches, staring earnestly at Clensy as the warm scented winds drifted her tresses in confusion over her shoulder. The young Englishman could hardly believe his luck as the girl took his arm and walked away with him into the shadows as though he was a very, very old acquaintance! ”

“ Might stand astonished staring at the stars! EIGHT years had passed since the winds had drifted Sestrina and the lepers into the vast solitude of that isle in the Pacific Ocean. Even on that lonely island world, Time’s flight had wrought wondrous changes.
On the elevation, just above the shore reefs by the lagoons, stood five lumps of coral stone which had been fashioned so as to resemble crosses. It was the tiny necropolis where the lepers, Lupo, Rohana, Steno and their two blind comrades lay asleep with all their mortal desires and sins in the dust under the waving palms. ”

“ While Hawahee’s soul was plunged in misery, Sestrina calmly went about her domestic duties, her lips singing an old song. It was a song that reminded her of a world somewhere far beyond that vast solitude, of an isle which gave shelter to its castaway mortality that consisted of a pagan’s noble soul fighting against fate, a moulting cockatoo, and Sestrina’s own soul’s budding hopes. It was only the falling shadow of approaching night that awakened her sorrow; opened her eyes to the beauty and wonder of her existence. ”

“ When the sun had set and the shadows were thickening the stars over the seas, Sestrina stole from her chamber. She knew that Hawahee had gone down to the shell-temple to pray to his beloved gods. As she passed by the bamboos on the ridge of the little hill to the right of the valley she looked seaward. Even the big, calm, bright moon seemed to stare with curiosity as it peered gently over the sea’s horizon, its lovely eye sending a searchlight stream of ethereal beams over the dark palms of the isle. Away she ran! ”

“ I, Hawahee the leper, might make thee unclean. I, who love thy shape, might cast the reality of your loveliness as a loathsome object into the grave by the side of Rohana, Steno and the rest.” In the terror of his thoughts and the possibility that he had lost Sestrina for ever, he leaned forward to embrace the passionless grace of that symbolical form which his imagination had incarnated, endowed with his soul’s ideas. In the agony of his unsatisfied imagination, he embraced the air. The winds wafted the rich odours of the breadfruits to his nostrils. ”

“ The flush of health, the oval, dimpled face, the coral red lips and lustrous eyes might well have brought the light of admiration to the eyes of men placed in less loneliness than that which passed over the Hawaiian’s solitary days. Perhaps it was the glory of Sestrina’s mass of hair that made her look like some wonderful picture that represented the zenith of woman’s physical loveliness. But the perfect beauty of Sestrina gleamed in the earnest, spiritual light of her eyes, the expression on the tremulous mouth, and the calm pure brow. ”

“ And often, when Hawahee had crossed the hollow and entered his hut for sleep, the imaginative castaway girl would lie in her own chamber and fancy she could hear the dead laughter of children and the calling voices of the dying lepers, shrieking and calling somewhere out in the wind swept palms, that sighed fitfully on the valley’s ridge by her homestead. In these dreams Sestrina fully realised that, to the lepers at least, her lonely desert isle was a haven of refuge, an oasis in the desert of their life’s misery. ”