H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ The little island had two voices, the endless sound of the breakers and the unending complaint of the gulls; sometimes it would be just a voice or two, sometimes clamour—always indifference, voices from a world that knew nothing of man.
The dead women he had left lying on Karolin beach were not further beyond the pale of things than he who had slain them, and it came to Rantan as he lay there that he was shut out; no one knew of his fate, he was of no manner of interest to anything that surrounded him; to the wind, to the sunlight, to the trees, to the gulls. ”

“ One already had been partly shaped and hollowed, and resting on it for a moment, Le Moan followed its curves with her eyes, felt the ax marks with her hand, took in every detail of the work, saw it as, with outrigger affixed and sail spread to the wind, it would take the sea, sometime—sometime—sometime.
The ceaseless breakers casting their spindrift beneath the moon lulled her mind for a moment till trees, canoe, reef and sea all faded and dissolved in a world of sound, a voice-world through which came the chanting of stricken coral and, at last, pictures of the wind-blown southern beach. ”

“ Then where the whole village was waiting, she found herself on the sands, the lagoon before her and on the lagoon the schooner bravely sailing in the sunset blaze, the sails full and now shivering as, curving to her anchorage, the wind left them and the rumble of the anchor chain running out came across the water, rousing her to the fact that what she saw could not be, that what she saw was a ship, but not the ship that had taken Taori away, the ship she had watched and waited for till hope was all but dead and life all but darkness. ”

“ She saw a canoe paddling ashore and the canoe man now on the beach, his eyes crinkled against the sun—eyes coloured like the sea when the grey of the squall mixes with its blue. The sun was on his red-gold hair and he trod the sands lightly, not as the kanaka walks and moves; one might have fancied little wings upon his feet.
His naked body against the blazing lagoon showed like a flame of gold against a flame of blue. It was Taori. Taori as she had seen him first, on that day when he had come to bid Aioma to the canoe building. ”

“ So, Taori was going to die. And it was for this that she had taken him away from Katafa. She had taken him away to have him to herself and he was turning into a dead man. To save him from death she had given herself up to Peterson, to save him from death she had killed Carlin and risked being killed by Rantan, and yet he was going to die.
She could hear now the faint and far-away breathing of the surf on the reef ahead mixed with the words of Aioma to Poni; and now harsh and complaining and sudden and near came the call of a gull; a land gull, flying as if racing them. ”

“ He watched her till she was hull down, till her canvas showed like a midge dancing in the sea dazzle, till it vanished taken by the round world into the viewless.
Then he came back to the trees.
Just as the ship had gone from the sea, so had his dream ship gone from his mind, taking hope with her, leaving him to his utter nakedness. He went to the old canoe that he had abused and vilified in his hour of triumph; the sun had enlarged the crack, the forward outrigger pole had worked loose with the tossing in the swell, there was no paddle. ”

“ Far away in the remote past some man once stood, the father of this daring invention; little dreaming of the vast consequences of the work to which he had put his hand.
Dick at the steering paddle saw a figure on the northern beach as they drew near. It was Katafa, waiting for him, the wind blowing her girdle of dracæna leaves and her hand sheltering her eyes against the sun. Standing just as Le Moan was standing on the southern beach sheltering her eyes and watching the canoe that carried the first man who had ever made her turn her head. ”

“ Katafa listened, loathing the schooner. The cry went up from her heart.
Dick stood dumb. Dumb as a man hesitating before cutting away the very last strand connecting him with his past. Dumb as a man about to renounce his race, though of his race and of the civilized world from whence he had sprung he knew nothing—nothing save the fact of the cannon-shot of the Portsey long years ago, the white-led Melanesians of Palm Tree, the ruffianism of Carlin and Rantan and the rage in his own breast for adventure that had nearly separated him forever from Katafa. ”

“ Whip rays twenty feet broad and four feet thick, a school of them at play, flinging themselves ten feet in the air and falling back in a litter of foam and with a concussion striking the lagoon floor and the reef; circling, pursuing one another in their monstrous play, they would keep the echoes rolling beneath the stars, till, as if at a given signal, silence would fall and the great fleet put out to sea again bound for where no man could know.
Awakened from sleep one night, Dick came out on the beach with Katafa. ”

“ Then he turned away and walked aft leaving Carlin leaning on the rail.
Whatever Carlin’s start in life may have been, he was now beach-worn like one of the old cans you find tossing about the reef flung away by the kanakas—label gone, and nothing to indicate its past contents. The best men in the world would wilt on the beach, and that’s the truth; the beach, that is to say sun and little to do—the sun kills or demoralizes more men than whiskey; to be born to the sun, you must be born in the sun, like Katafa, like Dick, like Le Moan; you must never have worn clothes. ”

“ Le Moan could not understand pity, she had never come across it in others and she had never felt it for herself. Had she been able to pity herself, she would have flung herself on the deck weeping and wailing when the Kermadec turned her stern to the south and dropped Karolin beyond the horizon. She had sacrificed herself for the sake of the being who dominated her existence, she had dared the most terrible of all things, the unknown, yet she could not in the least understand why Peterson should do what he did not want to do for the sake of a being, a stranger whom he had never seen before. ”

“ Ona dashed for the canoe, maybe with some blind idea to get hold of the other paddle to defend herself with, but he had the speed of her and headed her off; she made for the rough coral of the outer beach but he headed her off; time and again he could have closed with her and killed her, but the sight of her frizzy head, her face, her figure, and the fact that she was a woman, filled him with a counter rage that spared her for the moment. He could have chased her for ever, killing her a thousand times in his mind, had his strength been equal to his hatred ”

“ Conscious that Karolin was so far in the past that it was safe to speak, she told Sru that no storm had overtaken her people, that she had lied to Peterson so that he might not discover and perhaps kill the being she loved; and there, sitting in the showering starlight, she did that which she had never done before even for her own inspection, opened her heart, told, as a sleeper might tell in sleep, of her love for Taori and of his beauty and strength and swiftness and of everything except that which she did not know—the fact that Taori had a lover already, Katafa. ”

“ Then from the shore you might have seen the Kermadec like a frightened bird unfolding her wings as the boat came on board and the anchor came home, mainsail, foresail and jib filling to the steady wind coming like an accomplice out of the west, the forefoot cutting a ripple in the starlit waters of the lagoon and the stern swinging slowly towards Levua, where two white men lay dead in the trader’s house and where in the village by the sandal grove Tahuku and his men lay asleep, unconscious of what civilization had done in their name. ”

“ But a perfectly definite plan to take the wheel, steer through the night and put the schooner absolutely and fatally astray: Put her away from Karolin so far and so much to the east that the lagoon light would be no guide and a course to the south no road of return.
The plan had come to her, fallen into her head, only just now; it was indefinite, but cruelly straight like the flight of an arrow, and in one direction—away from Karolin.
Great love is an energy that, born in mind, has little to do with mind. ”

“ The breath of Le Juan was failing and Aioma who had cursed it saw now the calm spreading towards them, passing them, taking the southern sea.
Poni left the wheel.
There was nothing to steer. A ship is only a ship when she is moving, and the schooner, now a hulk on the lift of the swell, lay with a gentle roll on the glassy water—drawing vague figures upon the sky with her trucks, complaining with the voice of block and cordage whilst the canoe-builder standing with his eyes on the north, felt the calm: felt it with a sixth sense gained from close on a century of weather influence ”

“ Sight, that bird of the soul, could roam here unchecked through the vast distances of sky or rest on a coral branch in the emerald shallows of sea, pursue the frigate mackerel in its rush or the frigate bird in its flight. Out on the lagoon he would crouch sometimes with the paddle across his knees, drifting, idle, without connected thought, environment pressing in upon him till his mind became part of the brilliancy of sea and sky, of the current drift and the wind that blew. ”

“ Who moreover, above most other mortals, stood apart in a world there was no room for little things—where the sky was their roof and the ocean their floor and storm and war and cataclysm, halcyon weather, and the blaze of a tropic sun their environment, where the love that bound them together had, woven into it—after the fashion of the rope of Rantan—their past. ”

“ As a woman weaves into her knitting her household affairs and so on, the busy fingers of Rantan wove into his rope visions of ripping the pearls out of Karolin lagoon, of hunting the kanakas to death, of drinking bars and loose pleasures to be had with the pearl money—truly, if an inanimate thing could be evil, it was evil, for it held Rantan’s past. ”

“ He who had killed men and dared death was, in fact, still a child; passionate, loving, ignorant of the terrors that life holds for the heart of man, of the grief that kills and the separation that annihilates. He had never met grief before.
Le Moan watched him as he lay. She knew. He was lying like that because of Katafa, she had lain like that on the coral because of him.
By declaring that vision had returned to her, by seizing the wheel and steering for Karolin, she could have brought him to his feet a well man—only to hand him over to Katafa. ”

“ Aioma had no time for fancies. If the girl were alive, she would come across in her canoe, if death had come to her in any of the forms in which death walked the reef, there was no use in troubling. The call to the canoe building, resented at first, had given him new youth, the spirit of the sea sang in him and the perfume of the new-felled trees brought Uta Matu walking on the beach, and his warriors. ”

“ Le Moan, dumb and dim in the starlight now flooding the world, spun the wheel; on the rattle of the rudder chain came the thrashing of canvas and the schooner bowing to the swell lay over on the port tack—due east.
Aioma glanced towards the moon but Le Moan reassured him.
“The current is fighting us,” said she, “and I would get beyond it. Have patience, Aioma, the way is clear to me.” ”

“ That was why he had sent a canoe that morning across to the southern beach to fetch Aioma, Palia and Tafata, three old men, too old for war, but expert canoe-builders, that was why when gazing at the tribe in full congregation, his eyes had brightened to the fact that nearly a hundred of the youths were ripening to war age, but under all, lighting and animating his mind, raising daring to eagle heights, lay his passion for Katafa, his other self more dear to him than self, threatened, ever so vaguely, yet still threatened. ”

“ Sometimes a white man is sun proof inside and out, but rarely. Carlin was sun proof on the outside, his skin stood the pelting of the terrible invisible rays; he throve on it; but internally he had gone to pieces.
He had one ambition, whiskey—or rum, or gin, or even samshu, but whiskey for choice.
There was whiskey on the Kermadec, but not for Carlin. Peterson, as sober a man as Rantan, kept it, just as he kept the Viterli rifles in the arms rack, for use in an emergency. It was under lock and key, but Carlin had smelt it out. ”

“ Aioma wanted to have nothing more to do with ships; this traverse in the schooner had turned him clean back towards canoes; for days past, though he had said no word on the matter, all his ancestors had been hammering at the door of his mind shouting, “Aioma, you are a fool, you have forsaken the canoes of your forefathers for this ayat, and see how it has betrayed you, and why? Because it is the invention of the white men, the cursed papalagi who have always brought trouble to Karolin. If we could get at you, Aioma, we would stake you out on the reef for the sharks to eat. You deserve it.” ”