Joan of the Island/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII
ON THE BEACH
"D'YOU know, Miss Trent, I always had a kind of notion that when I died if ever I went to Paradise it would cloy after a while," Keith said. "But since I've lived on Tao Tao I've changed my opinion. I think I've been happier here than I ever was."
He was lying full length on the sand not far from the bungalow, his head propped up on his elbows and his eyes gazing out on the sea he loved. The girl was sitting idly, within a few feet of him. The day had been ideal, a refreshing breeze tempering the heat. The atmosphere was so clear that one could almost have discerned the bare topmast of a vessel vanishing beneath the horizon. The sun, glinting among the light ripples, had changed the water to a mass of glittering diamonds that dazzled the eyes. Three miles off lay the ketch near the reef, where Chester was busy, as usual. Keith could distinguish figures moving about her deck. Just visible above the edge of the sea, was the island of Tamba, mysterious but robbed of its threatening memories in the golden sunlight. And, like the most perfect spot in the South Seas, Tao Tao nestled amid the glistening ocean. Far away, on the west side of the island, the surf was singing its perpetual song, a never-ending, sonorous boom which, though those who heard it hardly noticed the sound after a while, was nevertheless music in their ears that they would have missed.
"It certainly is peaceful here, if nothing else," replied Joan. "I am so glad for your sake that you have not found it too monotonous."
Keith smiled, and picking up a pebble, threw it into the sea.
"I s'pose, like when the elevator cable breaks, it all depends what sort of a life you have been leading," he said. "I'm twenty-seven years old now, Miss Trent. I ran away to sea when I was sixteen, and there has been mighty little of the placid side of life squeezed into those eleven years. That—that makes it all the more enjoyable now, you see."
The girl looked around, interested. It was the first time he had mentioned his age; she had taken him for a year or two older, partly because of the tinge of grey over his temples. Nor, indeed, had he ever spoken, except vaguely, of his early days.
"Sixteen!" she said. "At that time I had arrived at the age when I first insisted on having my hair up. I was twelve. Why, you began the battle of life when I was almost a baby. Did you stick to the sea after that?"
"On and off, yes," Keith replied. "Mostly on, though. But I very nearly quit as soon as my first ship touched port. She was an old-fashioned square-rigger—you didn't see many like her in those days, and they're a curiosity now. She was bound from Boston to Galveston, and the Lord only knew where else. I'd been living with an old uncle on the Massachusetts coast, and when he died suddenly it left me stranded. His wife was an unamiable shrew, and I guessed it couldn't be worse anywhere than being left with her, so I made up a bundle and started looking for a ship. But they seemed to have all the boys they wanted. While I was on the wharf I ran into a chap about my age who had signed on the Mary S. Billings, and when I told him about my difficulties he helped me to stow away. I went aboard at night and hid among some stores until we were at sea. When they found me I got such a leathering that I knew my aunt didn't even know the rudiments of hitting a fellow. Then they put me to work. It was a hard school, and the Yankee skipper was a brute, but I learned discipline among other things, and after all I don't know that the experience did me any harm, though I wished I was dead many a time then. The other boy told me he was going to skip the ship at Galveston, and so I stayed on and took his job. We went as far as New Zealand and Yokohama before returning to Boston, and by the time I left the ship I was pretty well big enough to stand up for myself. As that was the only trade I knew anything about I remained a shellback."
"And you don't regret it?"
"Why, no, Miss Trent. It isn't the life I'd bring a son of mine up to, but it helps you to see something of the world, and it has a fascination all its own. Two or three times I've tried to break away from the sea, but I always drifted back to it. Once I was a conductor on a trolley car in New York, and I did some rough work on railroad construction in Vancouver for a while. I nearly made good once about six years ago, after being wrecked on the coast of South Africa, near Durban. I met a man from New Hampshire who wanted me to go into partnership with him in a store up in Zululand. He knew something of the country and could palaver with the niggers there a good bit, and as I had a little money I went in with him. We got a lot of stuff, such as red flannel and magenta shirtwaists, and trekked into the interior, where we built a shack and did a thriving trade. At the end of six months I could see that a few years of it would put me on velvet for the rest of my days, but one night a Kaffir set fire to the place, and we lost every blessed thing we possessed, so I went back to the sea."
"Couldn't you have started the store again?" the girl asked.
Keith shook his head.
"It's the same thing in every place, whether Zululand or Broadway—you can't do business without capital. Anyway, I was only about twenty-one, and you can't see very far beyond your nose at that age. Besides, there are lots of things I'd have missed if I had stayed in Africa—being here, for instance," he said smiling.
"Then really we owe your Kaffir a debt of gratitude," she replied with a twinkle in her eyes.
"I do, though I never knew it before," observed Keith. "The last I saw of him he was running across the veldt as though the devil himself was after him. It's queer on what little things our whole lives hinge sometimes. Ridiculous though it sounds, I don't suppose I should be here now but for the fact that one of that nigger's goats fell sick. He went to an umtakati—that's a Zulu witch-doctor—and asked him to cure the animal. The witch-doctor had his knife into us because we had put some of the natives wise to the fact that he was an old fraud, so he told the nigger the only way to remove the curse from the goat was to burn our store down. The funny part was that the umtakati, tickled to death about it, sent us a message telling how he'd worked the thing. And I'm blessed if the Kaffir's goat wasn't as fit as a fiddle immediately afterwards."
He spoke of his ups and downs lightly enough, as though he were relating the experiences of someone else, whose cares were nothing to him. Indeed, Joan had noticed, ever since Keith arrived at Tao Tao, that there had been a gradual change creeping over him. At first he was preternaturally serious, and there was a hard look about his mouth which only relaxed in rare moments of merriment. Nowadays he was becoming more human. The careworn expression flitted across his face like a shadow at odd moments, as when he was gazing out into the unknown, over and beyond the horizon, but it vanished as quickly as it came. Joan never tried to peer under that mask of gloom which dropped over his face at times. His thoughts were his exclusive property, even as hers were her own. There were times when she wondered vaguely what memories of the past conjured such dark thoughts up in this strong man's brain. At first it had crossed her mind that some separation, enforced by his remaining on the island, had something to do with it, but that seemed less likely when he settled down there in apparent contentment. He never even expressed a desire to go to Tamba, there to wait for the possible appearance of a vessel, which was more likely than at Tao Tao, for there were several plantations on Tamba, and half a dozen schooners dropped anchor there in the course of a year, on the lookout for cargo. Joan felt instinctively, moreover, that if it were a girl his thoughts wandered to, a man of Keith's type would have said something about her.
He fished in his pocket for a pipe and filled it slowly, as though his mind was not on the task.
"It's a funny thing," he said at length, applying a match to the bowl, "but though some of us go chasing all over the world for money, we rarely have any very clear idea what we want that money for. I don't mean the money we earn for the common necessities of existence, such as shoe-leather and food. We all have to think of that, more or less. But most of us cherish a hope at the back of our brain that somehow, somewhere, we shall run into a fortune. I suppose pleasures such as automobiles and theatres are the dominating motive in the majority of people who are looking for a pile, and such things are all right as far as they go, but they're an intangible sort of happiness to be aiming at. It seems to me that during the last month or two I've been developing more settled convictions on the subject of worldly possessions than I ever had before. Of course I'd like to make a fortune. Any sensible fellow would. But for the first time in my life I'm beginning to see that it isn't the fortune itself that counts so much as the idea of having a definite object in front of one all the time."
"It must be very much more satisfactory to have something to aim at," Joan observed, "because after all money is only a means to an end."
"Exactly. Now, I don't in the least anticipate that the heavens will ever open and shower gold down on me," said Keith, "but if they do I shall settle down and finish with roving."
"But I do not think inactivity would appeal to a man of your kind long."
"Good heavens, no!" Keith declared. "I'd go crazy if all I had to do was to count my fingers and read novels. No, my mind is made up on that point. I should buy a farm somewhere back in Maryland, and keep dogs and horses and chickens and pigs. Maybe a practical farmer who had to make a living at the same game would have a fit if he knew how much my farm was costing me every year, but I should be working for pleasure and not for profit, and my object would be to improve the breed of pigs and horses and chickens. I was down in Maryland about eighteen months ago and I saw a place being run by a chap on those very lines. He told me he'd spent twenty years making his fortune by selling pills to relieve a pain in the back, and now his own back ached every day in the week excepting Sundays, with honest farm work, which seemed to tickle his sense of humour."
"You would have a longing at times to feel a deck heaving under you, and smell tarred rope once more," said Joan.
"Maybe," the man agreed, smiling as he puffed contentedly at his pipe. "And when I felt that way I'd step on to a heaving deck and smell the tarred rope, but there's a mighty big difference between doing it for pleasure and doing it for a living in all kinds of weather. Make no mistake about it, Miss Trent, the fascination of the sea comes from the sea itself, and God's fresh air, and not from shinning up the rigging when the thermometer says ten below zero, and tearing at frozen canvas till your fingers bleed, or having to drive a bunch of dago land-lubbers, that don't know a cleat from a cathead, when something has gone wrong and you're drifting straight on to the rocks."
"But surely, Mr. Keith, there is something fine in having done those things. The magnificent traditions of the sea which have been handed down to us would never have been magnificent unless there were great obstacles to overcome in the creation of them."
"Aye, the sea makes or breaks a man, and she doesn't care which. And if you have red blood in your veins, the worse she treats you the more you love her, so long as you have two arms and two legs to carry on with. It is fine, beyond a doubt, but that isn't going to make me say I wouldn't settle down on my farm if ever I was lucky enough to get the chance."
He was looking at her profile as he spoke—looking hungrily, and wondering all the time whether heaven itself could contain such joy as would be his if, having fought for, and won a fortune, he could share it with her as his wife. His love for her, or rather the stern repression of it, was becoming almost more than he could bear; and sometimes he wondered gloomily whether it would not be best if he went away. He had the strength of will even to do that, though it would be a wrench greater than he liked to think about; he had wrestled with that problem in the silent watches of the night, however, and decided that it would be foolish, at any rate for the present, to run away from such happiness as the gods had strewn in his path.
A hat of white canvas shaded her head, but her hair hung over her shoulders in the two thick ropes in which she generally wore it, and the sun burnished its coppery hue. Her waist, turned in at the throat, allowed a glimpse of a neck of marble whiteness below the warm tan. Her lips were slightly parted, and her slender fingers were toying idly with the sand.
There was silence, save for the murmur of breakers, while the picture of Joan held the man spellbound. The clock of eternity ticked off something like sixty seconds, but for these two time stood still.
Keith tried to speak, cleared his throat, moistened his lips and tried again.
"Well?" he said in a voice that he hardly recognized.
Joan glanced up at him with a secret smile, and then lowered her eyes as a faint flush mounted to her smooth cheeks.
"I, too, was counting my chickens," she replied lightly and yet shyly. And then: "Come," she continued, rising. "The Kestrel is nearly at her moorings, and Chester will be grumbling if his tea isn't ready in another five minutes."