South of the Line/Sirjohnnie of the Green Houses
SOUTH OF THE LINE
Sirjohnnie of the Green Houses
THE launch swung gracefully into the cove, and, churning the indigo water into a white lather with its reversed propeller, came to rest like a great hurricane bird poised on the gently heaving bosom of the Pacific.
Out of the world it had come, the great world of Levuka, and perhaps beyond, into this little coral beach of Luana, for what purpose only the Great Spirit knew. Felisi squatted at the edge of the family taro patch, the handle of the heavy hoeing knife resting in her listless hand, watching wide-eyed.
"This is it," came a voice, clear as a bell, over the water. "Yes, I'm sure this is it; I marked it by the forked palm yonder."
Now, Felisi understood this, or, at any rate, the drift of it. Had she not sold imitation pink coral on the wharf at Levuka? And was not Levuka the centre of the world, where, when the steamer came in, people were so many that the wharf, the street, and the giant houses swarmed with them like fish in the rock pools at low tide? Strange people they were, especially the women, covered with unnecessary clothes and trailing brightly hued veils in their wake. They spoke in harsh, high-pitched voices, too, and seemed for ever restless; but their money—ah, their money flowed from them like a stream of quicksilver, that only needed diverting into the right channels, by means of pink coral or necklaces of seed, to make one wealthy beyond belief.
"What a darling!" one of these women had said on the wharf, catching sight of Felisi in her modest blue wrapper. "My dear, look at the child's hair! And such eyes!" Felisi had suffered the mauling that followed—the stroking of her hair and velvety skin with becoming modesty, but she had learnt that she was a "darling," that she possessed hair and eyes, and that they and a reed basket of worthless coral netted her matiquali (tribe) five shillings. Oh, it was wonderful what could be learnt in Levuka! After it, Luana was a tomb.
People had begun to move under the wide awning of the launch, and presently a native dived cleanly from the bows. The water was up to his neck, and he slowly dragged the launch nearer shore. When he had waded waist deep, he backed against the gunwale, and a man in white ducks, with his trousers rolled to the knee, climbed on his shoulders and was carried ashore. Another white man followed in like manner, and they both stood on the wet sand, directing the natives as they landed bundles of all shapes and sizes neatly sewn in green rot -proof canvas. It seemed to Felisi that the entire merchandise of Levuka had been shipped to Luana for some inscrutable reason.
"I think that's the lot," said the taller of the two visitors, a gaunt man with remarkably thin legs and large feet, and a kind though careworn face.
"Yes, Sir John, that is all," replied the other. He was short and pink, and perspiring freely.
"Then you may as well get on with it."
The tall man turned and strolled along the beach, stopping now and then to burrow into the wet sand with his toes, and unearth the queer live things that lived there. Every now and then, too, he would fling his arms wide above his head, and let them fall to his sides with a sigh of deep satisfaction. It was as though he had been cramped, and was now rejoicing in his freedom. He was doing just what Felisi had seen her brother do—the one who stole the canoe—when he came out of Levuka gaol into the sunlight. Her heart went out to the tall man with thin legs and big feet.
And the other? Undoubtedly he was mad. He trotted this way and that in the hot sand, until his pink face turned to red and then to purple. He was trying to make the natives hurry, which, of course, was not only impossible, but ridiculous. Were there not three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, each one of which was equally suitable for unpacking green bundles? Nevertheless, he continued to hurry himself, and to such purpose that, before the sun had sunk into the sea, a green village had sprung into being on the edge of the beach under the palms—nothing less. It appeared that each bundle contained a house, or something appertaining to a house, and now it was all in place.
The miracle-worker, mopping his solar topee as he went, crossed the beach to his companion, who was sitting dabbling his large feet in a rock pool.
"All is now ready, Sir John," he said.
"Ah, good!" answered the tall man, leaning forward and picking up a soldier crab between finger and thumb.
"I think you will find everything in order, Sir John," the other continued, standing in the sand with his fat calves pressed together, so that one bulged over the other. "The sparklets are{{bar|2}"
"You have shown Mandri where everything is?" interrupted the other, watching the soldier crab's ineffectual little pincer waving in the air.
"He has arranged his own necessities himself, Sir John. The rest is as you ordered."
"Then that will do, thank you, Saunders."
"Next Wednesday, I think you said, Sir John?"
"Yes, yes." The tall man seemed irritable. He was obviously more interested in the soldier crab than his companion of the bulging calves. "Once a week will be enough. What's to-day?"
"Tuesday, the eighteenth of February, Sir John," the other answered, with extraordinary promptitude.
"Then Wednesday. Yes, each Wednesday will do admirably. And don't forget the spirits."
The tall man carefully replaced the soldier crab in the rock pool and stood up. The other backed away slightly.
"I thought I might mention, Sir John, that there will be green vegetables. I see a native girl in a small garden on the edge of the beach behind us. No doubt"
"Ah, to be sure, to be sure," muttered the tall man, strolling across the beach toward the launch, with the other following. "Mandri will see to all that. Good afternoon, Saunders! "
In a dignified but forceful way he herded the pink man and the natives into the launch, which was soon a glittering speck against the blue. For a while he stood with his thin legs apart and his hands behind his back, watching it go. Then he, too, went mad, or so it seemed to Felisi. He raised both skinny arms to the sunset, as though in worship, dropped them suddenly, and, turning, dashed along the beach through the ripple of a wave, sending the water flying in all directions, including over himself. Then he rolled in the sand like a dog, and rose, plastered and breathless and laughing.
"That's better," he bellowed, "much better! Ma-a-ndri!"
A gray-haired Tongan appeared in the doorway of the smallest green house.
"I want grilled saqa for dinner," shouted the tall man, "and grated cocoanut and pineapple-fool!"
The Tongan made a tama (obeisance) and withdrew.
Presently he came out and crossed the beach to Felisi.
"The Turaga (gentleman) wishes for saqa," he said. "Where are the fish-traps?"
Felisi rose from her heels as though propelled by some evenly working mechanism and led the way round the rocks at the end of the beach.
"Hi! Where are you going?" bawled the tall man.
"To get the saqa, saka (sir)."
"Good! I'm coming." The tall man walked behind, whistling.
Felisi, in her trim white sulu (kilt), swung on in front, with her natural grace of movement slightly enhanced by the knowledge that she was being noticed. At the fish-trap—a simple affair of volcanic rock boulders built in a square, so that, when the tide receded, fish were left behind—she picked up a spear from the rocks and waded waist-deep, holding it aloft. The tall man watched her, entranced, and Felisi knew it, and took care that the poise of her arms and head and shoulders were all that could be desired. Had she not the reputation of "a darling" to live up to?
Suddenly the spear flashed from her hand, there was a splash, a swirling of waters, and the long bamboo shaft sped round and round the trap, with Felisi splashing after it. She caught it and raised it aloft, with a two-foot saqa on its barbs flashing green in the waning light.
"Splendid!" roared the tall man. "I say"
The rest of whatever he was going to say was drowned by the splash that he made as he jumped down into the trap and waded over to Felisi.
"I must have a try," he mumbled excitedly, taking the spear from Felisi. "Vinaka (thank you), little girl." And he was off, stalking round the trap as though walking barefoot on broken glass. What followed caused Felisi to put her hand to her mouth and snatch it away whenever the tall man turned her way. One is not supposed to laugh at a white chief but, oh, it was funny! He kept jabbing at the water as though prodding a snake. Or he would throw the spear with tremendous force, so that it would stick into the sand. Then he would flounder after it and hold it up, with a piece of seaweed on the end and a look of pained surprise on his gaunt face that sent Felisi into silent hysterics. But best of all was when he caught his toe on a rock. Then he dropped the spear and sank into the water, hugging his foot and saying things that Felisi did not quite understand, but which she seemed to remember having heard in Levuka.
She went to him, but he brushed her aside and continued his stalking. "I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it," he kept muttering, as he wallowed round the trap. The determination of the man! "It's the reflection," he told himself aloud, "of course, it's the reflection. When you think a fish is there, it isn't. It'sLet me see, where's the light! Ah, yes, to the left—no, the right—er—or"
The spear left his hand. The shaft was racing round the trap. The tall man stood staring after it, spellbound. But only for a moment; the next he was after it, yelping like a dog after a rat.
Felisi could contain herself no longer—she was after it, too. The white chief's first saqa! It must be caught and, unless he knew the way, he might flounder round the trap until he dropped.
"Go away—vamose! Savvy?" he bellowed savagely as she came near him. He floundered on like a grampus, but always the shaft of the spear avoided his snatching fingers. Then Felisi dived. She held the saqa just long enough under water for the tall man to catch the spear shaft on the surface, then she stood before him, dripping and triumphant as he.
"You catch him, Sir Johnnie!" she panted, in an access of enthusiasm.
The tall man took an abrupt seat in the water, and remained there gasping. His head was just clear of the surface, and his mouth opened and shut precisely like the saqa's.
"Good heavens!" he panted at last. Then: "What did you say?"
"I say you catch him," repeated Felisi diffidently.
The tall man seemed to have thoroughly noticed her for the first time.
"But what else? You said something else."
"I say Sirjohnnie," said Felisi, giggling.
The tall man flung back his head, so that it was half submerged, and laughed. By the Great Spirit, what a laugh he had!
"Oh, that's great!" he roared, then looked at Felisi again. He had the kindest gray eyes imaginable. "But how did you come to know my name?"
"I hear 'em talk him ongo (over there)," Felisi explained, pointing toward the beach.
"Sirjohnnie!" repeated the tall man, and burst into another hurricane of laughter.
"Who are you?" he asked, when it had subsided into occasional chuckles.
"Felisi," answered that individual, leaning gracefully on the spear.
"And you talk English?"
"Some." Felisi had learnt this remarkably useful word from a woman who she had afterward heard came from Americania, wherever that might be.
Sirjohnnie laughed again and scrambled to his feet.
"Some, eh?" he repeated, as though it were a great joke. "Well, Felisi, you've given me the best afternoon's sport I've had in years." He felt in his soaking duck trousers pocket and brought out a handful of silver. "What's your saqa worth?"
Felisi shook her head.
"You catch him, Sirjohnnie," she insisted.
Sirjohnnie regarded her quizzically for a moment, then smiled and returned the money to his pocket.
"Very well," he said, "you must come and help me eat it, that's all."
Nothing could have pleased Felisi more. She was longing, with a child's curiosity, to see the interior of the green houses. Moreover, she felt toward Sirjohnnie as she had never felt toward a Turaga in her life. What was he but a great child? She, Felisi, had taught him how to spear saqa. She could teach him many things. Principally owing to Sir Johnnie's ludicrous performance of the afternoon, Felisi took a motherly as well as a childlike interest in him. They are not incompatible.
They waded ashore together, the saqa suspended by the gills from the spear held between them. The Tongan squatted on the rocks, smoking a saluka, as he had squatted and smoked since the beginning of the performance. If a Turaga chose to catch his own dinner in the presence of his servant and a native girl, who was he, Mandri, to interfere? There was never any telling what they might do.
At the door of the largest of the green houses the party broke up. Sirjohnnie, who seemed to have gone into a trance—he had a knack of doing this, Felisi noticed—turned aside and disappeared into the dim interior. Felisi followed Mandri to the kitchen, and squatted outside, as a woman should. The Tongan naturally treated her as non-existent. Nevertheless, a scullery maid has her uses, and he allowed Felisi to cook the saqa, wrapped in banana leaf, Island fashion. For one thing, he knew that it would be cooked better that way than in the Turaga's elaborate stove, and, for another, that it gave him the opportunity of sitting in the doorway and smoking one of Sirjohnnie's superlative cigars. The only fly in the ointment was that the pest spoke English with uncanny glibness.
"Mandri," said Sirjohnnie, an hour later—he had begun dinner with a book propped against the lamp, but in the end the dinner claimed most of his attention—"I must congratulate you on the saqa. Perhaps it's because I caught it myself, but it certainly tastes remarkably good."
"Eo, saka," grunted Mandri, with a self-satisfied smile.
"The new stove is a success, then?"
"The new stove is a success, saka." Mandri shuffled his horny feet on the matting of the floor.
"By the way"—Sirjohnnie was leaning back, smoking one of the excellent cigars—"where is that little native girl—Felisi, that's it?" He actually remembered the name, Mandri noticed.
"She is outside, saka."
"Outside? Then send her in, will you?"
"The Turaga wishes to see you," Mandri told Felisi, and gave her a warning scowl as she slipped past him into the living room.
She sank on to the mats inside the doorway. From somewhere she had secured a red hibiscus blossom, and it now flamed against her blue-black hair.
"Well, Felisi," said Sirjohnnie, tilting back his camp chair, "the saqa was a huge success."
"Sucthess," lisped Felisi.
"Yes. What do you think of our new stove?"
Much clearing of the throat and clashing of pans proceeded from the kitchen.
Felisi allowed an agonized pause to ensue. Mandri needed a lesson.
"Stove—him all right," she conceded at last. "By an' by plenty more saqa?"
Sirjohnnie shook his head. "Not for me, I'm afraid. By an' by plenty work."
"Work?"
"Yes. I've got so much work to do, and so little time to do it in, that it almost frightens me."
Felisi found herself on the verge of solving a problem that had always puzzled her.
"Plenty work, plenty time?" she suggested.
"Yes, for you lucky people," sighed Sirjohnnie.
"Why no plenty time for-you-lucky-people?" mimicked Felisi.
"We have other things that must be done. We're not lucky. We can't do what we want to do always, you know."
"Why?"
Sirjohnnie chuckled, then frowned.
"Oh, just because."
"Jus' becos."
"Yes. I admit it's not much of a reason, Felisi, but" He smiled whimsically and crossed one thin leg over the other. "We've gone past ourselves 'over there'—that's about the truth of the matter." He was speaking more to himself than Felisi. "We want to progress."
"Pro-gress," repeated Felisi solemnly.
"Yes, go ahead—improve, know more and live more comfortably." Suddenly Sirjohnnie laughed. "Anyway, we call it progress. So we make law, plenty law—law written down for us by other people, and law we make for ourselves—and sometimes we obey it, because we think that is the way to progress, and sometimes we disobey it so that we can get ahead of the other fellah. That's our life. Funny, Felisi, isn't it?"
Felisi admitted that it was.
"Law," she echoed. "Law make no plenty by an' by?"
Sirjohnnie changed the position of his legs.
"Yes," he said, "it does rather limit one's time. It is made to make us do things that we don't want to. And even you have your law, Felisi," he added quickly. "You know that you mustn't steal"
"A canoe," supplied Felisi.
"Yes, a canoe or anything. That you must work in the taro patch, and—marry some day."
He did not add that these were natural laws, although it occurred to him that they were.
"Law for no plenty by an' by, no good," pronounced Felisi firmly.
Sir Johnnie laughed.
"Perhaps you're right," he said, and fell idly to turning the pages of the book that had been propped against the lamp during dinner.
"Look here, you're something of an ichthyologist, Felisi," he said suddenly. "Do you recognize any of these fellahs?"
She was at his side in an instant, clucking with wonder at the brightly coloured picture of fish—fish of all shapes and sizes and colours. They hung there on the white paper as though in some clear pool.
Suddenly a brown finger descended on the page.
"Eo," she cried excitedly, "him, an' him, an' him!"
"A compliment for the lithographer," muttered Sirjohnnie, smiling. "Wilkinson and Pratt are good people."
"An' him, an' him," continued Felisi. "Him no good," she added with a pout, indicating a rather washy representation of sea and coral at the foot of the page.
Sirjohnnie laughed.
"You're right," he said; "that part of it is very, very poor. But, you see, the people who made these pictures have never been here. They don't know, poor devils."
"Poor devils," repeated Felisi, with faithful intonation.
At this point Mandri entered with the coffee. Apparently he saw nothing, and placed the cup on the camp-table and withdrew. But he carried into the kitchen a mental picture of Sir John Truscott, R. Z. S., leaning over a lamp-lit table, his grizzled head close to a cascade of blue-black hair relieved by a flaming hibiscus blossom.
He clucked loudly twice and helped himself from the whisky tantalus.
But the next day Sir Johnnie was a changed man. He wore nothing but a sulu, a shirt, and pith helmet. He carried an extremely fine-meshed shrimp net and a tin creel of water, and wandered from rock pool to rock pool in a trance that effectually excluded Felisi. She spoke to him twice, but he took not the faintest notice.
He would kneel over a pool by the hour, with his shrimp net lying on the bottom, while the fish—some of them not more than half an inch long, but striped or mottled with every imaginable colour and shade of colour—hovered in the crystal-clear water like butterflies suspended on invisible wire, or darted in and out of their homes in the coral.
Each pool was a marine garden, great or small, but complete with swaying trees of tinted weed, coral bridges, and paths of sand, and Sirjohnnie's soul lived in them, that was plain. Then would come an upward jerk of the net, a hasty examination of its contents, and a slip-slop as the fish were dropped into the creel of water.
This went on all day, and Felisi found it boring. She had ideas of her own on the subject, and presently proceeded to put them into execution. Some time in the afternoon—Sirjohnnie had had no lunch, in spite of Mandri's importunities—she went to the bush and returned to one of the pools with an armful of green vine. This she tossed into the water and squatted back on the sand. Presently a fish appeared, then another and another, until the pool was alive with scintillating colour; but there was no movement—every fish in that pool, from the remotest cranny of coral, floated inert close to the surface.
Sirjohnnie, when at last Felisi succeeded in enticing him away from the net for an inspection, was overcome. He uttered little yelps of excitement as he pounced on fish that he knew to be rare specimens, and some that he had never seen before.
"But this is wonderful!" he cried. "Some more of that vine, Felisi, quick!"
Felisi obeyed instructions in every respect except speed. Sirjohnnie was capering round the pool like a madman when she returned.
"This is nothing short of a discovery," he told her, in a shaking voice. "What is it, Felisi? But of course, you don't know." He clucked impatiently.
And that was where he was wrong, Felisi told herself, squatting in the sand, triumphant. She knew—the whole of Luana knew—that it was a vine that grew in the bush, and when flung into a pool, stupefied fish. What more did any one want to know? The ignorance of these white chiefs was beyond belief.
Sirjohnnie was breaking the vine into lengths now, and carefully wrapping them in a square of oiled silk.
"Crothers must see this," he muttered aloud, even as he had muttered in the fish- trap.
The evening was undoubtedly the most pleasant time for Felisi. Mandri had come to regard her as a harmless, and occasionally useful, adjunct to the green houses; and Sirjohnnie, when he was not in a trance, seemed to derive considerable amusement from talking with, or rather at, her on a variety of subjects, ranging from ichthyology to theosophy. Also, and what was far more important, he had discovered that the girl had extraordinarily nimble fingers. As she had threaded seeds for sale on Levuka wharf, so she mounted and varnished the minutest fish. Some were delicately stuffed with preservative cotton-wool and packed carefully in labelled departments of tin-lined chests. Others were preserved in jars of spirit. But whatever was done with them, Sirjohnnie knew that he was on the way to making the finest collection of tropical fish in existence.
Why the girl did all this, he never stopped to ask himself. He was too busy. He had come to accept her as part of the furniture of the green houses—a very essential part. If he had ever guessed the true reason, he would have received the shock of his life.
On one Wednesday visitation of the launch, the pink man brought Sirjohnnie a letter. It lay on the table until evening, unopened, and when at last he had read it, he sat staring straight before him for so long that Felisi thought the trance had taken hold of him for good. But there was trouble in his eyes, and there was never that when he was in a trance. Felisi knew the cause by instinct.
"You go ongo" (over there) she said, nodding her head seaward.
Sirjohnnie looked down at her with unseeing eyes. Then suddenly he laughed.
"How the mischief did you know that?" he said.
Felisi wagged her head sagely.
"Law?" she suggested presently.
Again Sirjohnnie laughed, a short laugh this time, and looked at her with his whimsical smile puckering the corners of his eyes.
"I believe you know a lot more than you pretend, Felisi," he said. "You're right. It's a law that takes me away from Luana. One of our self-imposed laws, but an uncommonly strict one." He sighed. "What a time I've had!" And again, presently: "Was there ever such a time?"
There was no need for him to say any more. "Laws are made to make us do things that we don't want to." Felisi had been at some pains to understand those words, but their meaning was quite clear to her now. Sirjohnnie did not want to leave Luana! She hugged her feet closer under her small body, and rearranged the hibiscus blossom in her hair.
That evening, when work was done, she danced a w:meke for him. It was the history of a great war with Tonga, done in pose and gesture to a droned accompaniment, and Sirjohnnie smoked and watched with evident pleasure.
"Vinaka (very good)!" he cried, when she had done. "I wonder how you would take at—at the Hippodrome, Felisi?" he suggested, and fell silent again, with the same troubled look in his eyes. So Felisi danced him the love-story of the two wood-pigeons.
Then came the evening of the Emerald Drop. Felisi half suspected it from the utter stillness and stifling heat. The glow on the western horizon—a green glow with angry slashes of black cloud across it—increased her suspicions. And as the sun sank, blood red, into the sea—just as its upper edge came level with the horizon—an emerald green ball of light shone for a moment and was gone.
Sirjohnnie was away up the coast, fishing by torchlight. Mandri was in the kitchen, quietly drunk and smoking one of Sirjohnnie's cigars. Felisi pondered what she should do. There might be time, and there might be none. It might strike the beach of the green houses, and it might not. She rose without haste.
The task that she had set herself took, perhaps, an hour. Then she squatted on the edge of the cliff overlooking the beach and waited as only an Islander can wait.
Darkness closed down, and such darkness! One half of the sky was star-pricked, the other black and substantial as a pall. And the pall slowly encroached on the stars. Nearer and nearer it crept. There was a puff of wind, hot as the night, then another. Felisi held her breath.
Somewhere in the distance there was a mighty roaring; the whole world seemed full of it, trembling with it. The boom of the surf on the reef, changing to thunder, joined the demoniac chorus. Then the hurricane burst on Luana with the force of a giant sledge-hammer.
Something flew at Felisi out of the turmoil and wrapped itself about her as she clung to a rock. It was one of the green houses from the beach a hundred feet below. She tore it from her, and it whirled off into the night. Palms were snapping like muffled pistol-shots, and crashing to ground with the dull thud of a falling body. The very turf was ripped from the earth and rolled into balls.
Yet it was not a really bad hurricane. It lasted half an hour at most, and cut a half-mile swathe through Luana as cleanly as a mower cuts wheat. Felisi listened to it charging madly into the distance, then leapt to her feet and ran along the edge of the cliff.
The pall had passed on, and the stars shone again. The night was cooler now, and the wind came only in gusts. Felisi ran. It was the first time she had hurried in her life. She called, and kept calling: "Sirjohnnie! Sirjohnnie!" And presently there was an answer. Sirjohnnie was snugly ensconced with his back to a rock, the tin creel carefully guarded in his lap.
Felisi flung herself on the ground beside him and buried her face in her arms.
"Poor little girl!" murmured Sirjohnnie, putting his hand on her hair. "Frightened, eh?"
Felisi had been frightened, but not in the way Sirjohnnie thought.
"Never mind; it's all over now," he went on cheerfully. "Whew! Come along—let's go back."
It was Sirjohnnie's first hurricane, that was clear. Go back! To what? Felisi led the way along the edge of the cliff.
"Gad!" said Sirjohnnie, looking over at the starlit water thrashing the foot of the cliff. "It's driven the sea clean over the beach. I wonder"
His voice trailed away, and he hurried on in silence.
At the edge of the cove they stopped and stood side by side, looking down on where the beach had been. There was none. The green village had been wiped from the face of Luana as cleanly as a drawing from a slate. The beach was now a bay of foaming water.
Sirjohnnie sat down on the edge of the cliff, still with the tin creel clasped in his hands, and stared stonily before him.
"Village, him go pouf!" Felisi explained, squatting at his side.
"Village? What do I care about a village?" he muttered, after a pause.
"Fish, him all right," said Felisi, looking anxiously into his face. She hated to see that troubled look in his eyes.
Sirjohnnie did not hear. He still sat staring before him.
"And only a week more!" came from him in a sort of groan.
"Fish, him all right," repeated Felisi eagerly, searching for an answering light in his face.
Sirjohnnie turned his head and laughed in her face, a bitter, mirthless laugh.
"Fish, him all right," he mimicked, with ironic cheerfulness. "They're back where they belong now, aren't they, Felisi?"
It was some time before Sirjohnnie suffered himself to be led farther along the cliff. Never had Felisi found him so hard of understanding. Presently, however, he stood looking down on a hole in the volcanic rock, where were neatly packed the tin-lined cases and the glass jars—every one of them—and unscathed.
He stared at them in dumb wonderment for a moment, then turned to Felisi, who stood looking up into his face with anxious inquiry.
"Felisi," he said gravely, "you're a wonder, child!" He lifted her off her feet and hugged her.
The next day the beach of Luana reappeared. Save for the fallen palms, torn earth, and battered reed brakes, it was as it had been before the advent of the green houses.
"It just didn't like me, that's all," Sirjohnnie told Felisi, with one of his old-time laughs. "But I'm still here." He shook his fist at the Pacific.
About noon the launch arrived, and there was unusual commotion in the landing. The pink man seemed exercised, and the cause of it all was soon apparent when a stalwart native waded ashore, bearing very gingerly the slight form of a woman. She wore the same streaming coloured veil and carried the same kind of sunshade as those on the wharf at Levuka.
"Great Scott!" cried Sirjohnnie, and hurried across the beach. He was hatless, unshaven, and his ducks were bespattered with the good red earth of Luana.
"My dear John," wailed the woman, when she had been set on her feet, "what are you doing?"
Sirjohnnie proceeded to explain, with many gestures and pointings in the direction of where the green houses had stood.
Presently another white man joined them.
"Crothers," bellowed Sirjohnnie, "I've got something for you!"
"We arrived last Tuesday," the woman continued wearily. "Another week of Levuka is simply impossible."
"But you gave me until the twentieth," protested Sirjohnnie. "This place is a perfect Mecca. I've got every species"
"And this is the twenty-fifth," sighed the woman.
"Good gracious, no, is it? Half a minute, Crothers!" Sirjohnnie was looking from one to the other of his visitors in the same nervous way that he had speared fish in the trap.
"Look here, my dear"
"What I came to find out definitely," proceeded the inexorable woman, "was if you are coming home on the Moultan in time for the season, or if you intend to stay here for the rest of your life."
Felisi, lying prone in the sand, buried her face in her hair. Through it she heard Sirjohnnie's answer.
"Why, of course, yes—that is—yes. Just one moment, my dear. Crothers!"
Still through her hair Felisi saw him lead the white man to a tiny pool, unwrap the square of oiled silk, and toss in a piece of vine. She heard the distant murmur of Sirjohnnie's voice discoursing gleefully on the result, and saw the white man examining the vine through a glass. The natives and the pink man were already carrying the tin-lined cases and the jars down from the cliff to the launch. Then she became aware that the woman had taken a seat on a rock, and was beckoning to her.
Felisi went and squatted in the sand before her. She very much wanted to see the woman at close quarters.
"Well, my dear," she said pleasantly, "do you speak any English?"
Felisi shook her head.
The woman was extraordinarily beautiful. Her skin was like milk, and her hair was the colour of gold. Could anything be more alluring? Yet Sir Johnnie did not want to leave Luana! Felisi knew it as surely as that the sun shone, and Lady Truscott wondered what made the child smile.
To Felisi this woman represented "law"—"the law that makes people do what they don't want to." Looking into the woman's face, she recalled to mind a fish—a fish which may be handled in a certain way, but which, if applied roughly to human flesh, caused the victim to die in agony within an hour. What if she flung such a fish in the face of this "law" and freed Sirjohnnie for ever?
This was what Felisi was thinking as she squatted in the sand before Lady Truscott. So perhaps it was as well that at that moment Sirjohnnie returned to escort her to the launch, thus sparing to Society a charming hostess and the much-tried wife of a truly exasperating man. Sir Johnnie obeyed his "law" with commendable fortitude. He forgot to say good-bye to Felisi, and was borne out to the launch, expostulating wildly with a native who had inadvertently stepped on one of the tin-lined cases. But Felisi has never forgotten him.