South of the Line/The Laugh
The Laugh
CROWTHER was waiting. He had no notion of it. He thought he was enjoying the cool of the morning with a pipe on the veranda, as he had been in the habit of doing for seven years past. But in reality he was waiting.
And presently it appeared—the peak of a lugsail gliding slowly along the far side of the reef. He picked up a battered telescope and trained it on the moving scrap of canvas. Nothing more could be seen until of a sudden, and with surprising completeness, the rest of the sail burst into view, together with the dark bulk of an outrigger canoe. It had turned into the boat passage, and was now scudding through it on the eight-knot current that converted Rahiti pass into a mill race at the turn of the tide.
Here there were pale green shallows beset with coral fangs, and rocks rearing a vicious head out of the swirl in midchannel, yet through them the canoe threaded a headlong course, steered with unerring skill by the quick eye and practised hand of a slight figure in a fluttering blue wrapper that crouched alert in the stern.
With the telescope resting on the veranda rail, Crowther punctuated the performance with grunts of approval: "Ah! Good! Umph! Now" He had taught Mata how to take Rahiti pass at the turn of the tide, as he had taught her all that she knew, and his was the intense pride of the tutor in an accomplished pupil. It was natural.
The canoe had now reached the untroubled waters of the lagoon, and before its prow had slid to rest on the beach in front of the bungalow the girl leapt into the knee-deep water and held aloft a gleaming fish.
"Sanqua!" she cried, and hurried up the coral pathway to the house.
A discreet clapping of hands proceeded from the veranda where Crowther sprawled in a cane chair.
"Is that all?" she demanded, standing before him like a crestfallen child. "And for a sanqua, too?"
"What more do you want?" grinned Crowther.
For answer she bent down and kissed him, then sank to the mats native fashion and launched into a detailed account of the capture of Crowther's favourite fish.
"He was lying half under the reef—for shade, I suppose—with his tail and a bit sticking out. For a long time I couldn't make up my mind what to do"
"And the tail and a bit waited while you did it?" interpolated Crowther.
"Yes. He must have been asleep. Do fish sleep, Uncle?"
"No," said Crowther at a hazard.
"Well, then, I must have kept very still—I did keep very still—and thought and thought. The line would have been the safest, but somehow the spear seemed more—more"
"Sporting," suggested Crowther.
"Yes. So I tried to remember what you told me about—illusory reflection and all that, and it came out right."
Crowther inclined his head in mock recognition of the doubtful compliment, but it passed unheeded. Mata babbled on in growing excitement, using indescribable little gestures to illustrate her meaning.
"I aimed a good three inches to the left of him, and it was queer to feel the spear stick into something that didn't look as if it was there. But it was there, and didn't he wriggle! And here he is, and—and it's my birthday, Uncle."
"Really?" said Crowther, with studied unconcern. "Well, if you'll run along and get into something dry, we'll have breakfast."
While she was gone, he took his seat at the head of the table, laid as usual on the veranda, and pretended to read a book propped against the milk jug. But again he was waiting, and not for long. Mata slipped into her customary chair, and was in the act of adding the three well-known lumps of sugar to his comprehensive cup of tea, when the exclamation came, half word, half gasp: "Uncle!"
A moment later she was on his knee, one hand at his shoulder, the other upheld, the better to display a pretty little pearl necklace.
"But they're real," she cried, with dancing eyes, "really real!"
"Oh, no," muttered Crowther. "I went to great trouble about that necklet—chartered a schooner to bring the dud article all the way from Sydney."
But she was not listening to his heavy badinage that she knew so well. Her head sank to his shoulder, and there was the hint of a woman's inexplicable tears in her eyes.
"Uncle," she said, playing with the middle button of his drill jacket, "you're too good to me."
"Much," he admitted promptly. "I often marvel at my own generosity, forbearance, and all the rest of it. It would be different if you gave any cause for it—if you were a good girl, for instance—but as it is" He sighed heavily and lapsed into silence.
Mata slid from his knee and contemplated him gravely.
"You're laughing at me," she accused. "You're always laughing at me. I wonder if you ever won't?"
The whimsical smile died of a sudden from Crowther's face. He leant forward and, taking her two small arms in his hands, stood her before him like a doll.
"You mustn't mind, Mata," he said in a voice that was new to her. "I have to laugh. If I didn't I should do something that you wouldn't like half as much. You understand? I must laugh."
Mata stared at him wide-eyed, and nodded, though she did not understand in the least.
"Many, many happy returns of the day, little girl," his strange, almost frightening voice went on, "and don't ever again dare to remind me when it's your birthday. There, run along—my tea's getting cold."
For once Mata failed to obey. She did not run, but walked, very slowly for her, down the veranda steps and along the beach, with the pearl necklet forgotten in her hand. Against the bole of a wind-bent palm she leant at last, staring over the sea. She was trying to understand. But out of her groping thoughts only the old, immutable truths emerged. This large man with the kindly eyes and tickling moustache was the most wonderful being in the world, the only being in the world. He knew everything and could do anything. What else was there to understand? She answered the question by turning her attention to the necklace, and in rather less than five minutes was flaunting its glories before the goggling eyes of her brown-skinned playmates of the beach. Mata was sixteen.
On the veranda, with his chair pushed back from the débris of breakfast, Crowther was engaged in the rather more protracted and infinitely less accommodating reflections of middle age. Mata was sixteen. Sixteen was a fairly advanced age for a child, wasn't it? And what was it that he had sworn to himself should occur on her sixteenth birthday—and on her fifteenth, and fourteenth, for the matter of that? He pretended that it was an effort to remember, though, as a fact the thing had hovered over him like a cloud for some time past. It was a pretty little game for a grown man to be playing with himself, this juggling with an evil hour by putting back the clock. It is popular, too, but, like most games, it comes to an end. Mata was sixteen. Mata must go "outside."
Having decided so much, irrefutably this time, Crowther's musings led him back to the beginning of it all—that awful dawn ten years ago, when, on the tail end of a hurricane, a fine three-masted schooner loomed out of the murk to wind'ard, running under bare poles and head-on for Rahiti. The thing was clear to him now—it always would be clear—as on the day that it happened. He remembered summoning the "boys" and buffeting his way along the wind-whipped beach shouting—shouting a warning to a ship in a hurricane a cable's length from the rocks! It was a sample of the inane things one is apt to do on occasion. Then the crash, almost drowned in the roar of surf, yet sickeningly distinct, and the hurtling of fragments across the beach. A splintered spar, he remembered, missed his head by a few feet; a strip of canvas encircled his legs, almost lifting him from his feet. Something tinkled on the rocks behind him, probably metal. Something else was swept into a rock pool and left there by the receding wave, a bundle by the look of it, that spun like a top in the swirl. But it was a movement of its own that claimed Crowther's sudden attention. Either it was alive, or he had gone mad. In any case, he clambered down to the pool, despite the warning cries of the "boys," and made his escape with the bundle under one arm and a breaker seething about his waist.
It was alive. It was Mata, and a "boy" bore her, howling lustily, to the house.
Crowther stayed. He saw the schooner pounded into the semblance of a broken eggshell against the reef and the battered remains sucked back into the turmoil, only to be hurled aloft on a mighty comber and pitched headlong into unknown depths. Nothing was left—nothing but the eternal surf breaking on Rahiti—so Crowther went home.
He found the living room, his sacred living room, in the possession of a minute person attired in a blanket, meditatively munching a banana.
"Take it away," he told his Kanaka cook, and, going into his bedroom, shut the door. He could not wrench from his mind the awful picture of that ship, a home of warmth and light, buried—buried alive.
It was not until the evening that he could bring himself to endure an interview with the sole survivor, who stared at him with wide, inquiring eyes, and answered his questions, or failed to answer them, according to the whim of the moment. Crowther elicited the following: it was a female child of six. It rather wanted its father, though it seemed more perturbed over the loss of a kitten named Zip, or something like it. It could not remember its mother. It had no notion how it came to be in a rock pool on Rahiti, but, by the miracle of hurricanes that can pulverize an iron winch into a thousand fragments and leave a lamp chimney intact, it was unscathed. It had come a long way, from a big house in an immense city by the sea, probably one of the Pacific Coast towns, where it had a dog called Peter, and a horse that bucked when you squeezed a ball on the end of a string. Oh, and its name was Mata, which, being interpreted, undoubtedly meant Martha. That was all.
For several days Crowther wondered what he ought to do about it, and ended, as usual in the Islands, by doing nothing—nothing, that is, but letting the child play in the sun and sea with the other juveniles of its species, that appeared to emanate from the labour lines in ever-increasing swarms.
It was a visit to the scene of the wreck that brought Crowther up with a round turn. He stood looking down into the unfathomable depths, thinking of the ship—the ship down there—and suddenly he said: "I promise." He became aware that he had spoken aloud, that he had given his word to someone or something. It frightened him. From that hour his attitude toward the child changed. It seemed to dawn on him that she was something more than a diverting pet.
So, out of the ensuing years and his own efforts, had emerged the wondrous product that was Mata of the present day. She was tall, lithe like a boy, and amazingly beautiful. She knew all that Crowther could teach her—how to handle a boat, swim without effort, look upon deceit of any sort as a species of cowardice and therefore beneath her, read a book, and have ideas of her own on a subject. Crowther looked upon her as the work of his hands, and never ceased to marvel at its excellence.
Yes, it might be said that he had kept his promise—so far. But what of the future? There were things that he could not teach her, things that she must know. Of late he had stumbled on the distressing truth that he had brought her up as a boy, and, in spite of him, she had grown into a woman—an annoying trick of Nature. He approached the painful subject with characteristic bluntness that evening of her sixteenth birthday, as they sat reading by lamplight.
"Mata," he said, "you know these advertisements of schools in the magazines—academies, they seem to call 'em—with pictures of girls dancing, and paddling canoes, and camping out, and what not?"
Mata looked up and nodded.
"Well, how would you like to go to one?"
"Not a bit, thanks, Uncle," said Mata.
"They learn other things, you know," he struggled on—"things I can't teach you."
Mata's frank gray eyes conveyed her disbelief.
So through endless ramifications the discussion waxed and waned.
"You mean," said Mata at last, closing her book with a snap of finality—"you mean you want me to go, Uncle?"
And Crowther stared up at the ceiling before answering, and down at the mat-strewn floor.
"Yes," he lied.
She went to her room, and Crowther, feeling nothing short of despicable, listened outside her door. She was weeping. Something swept over him like a wave. He knocked and entered. She was lying face downward on the counterpane.
"Mata—Mata!" he muttered stupidly.
She turned and drew him toward her.
"Uncle, you'll come, too, won't you?" she pleaded.
Crowther took a grip of himself and sat on the edge of the bed.
"Why, of course," he said huskily. "I'll come disguised as a gargoyle or something. And we'll have a miniature Rahiti in the playground—I beg its pardon, 'campus'—and at night I'll climb down from my perch on the imitation battlements and we'll spear goldfish with a pickle fork by candlelight, and"
And again Crowther had contrived to laugh.
So Mata went "outside" to acquire such additional frills as an enlightened age deems indispensable to budding womanhood, and Crowther settled down to wait once more, this time for two mortal years.
It was a dreary business, as dreary as Mata appeared to find her end of the contract. Crowther had been under the impression that no feminine mind was proof against the lures of "outside," yet after eighteen months of them, and with only another six to go, she was still, according to her unfailing letters, "longing for home," which meant Rahiti, and yes—himself. The thought sent the blood to his head. He tried to laugh at it, but found the process increasingly difficult as time passed. Why should he always have to laugh? By heavens, he would laugh no more! He would make of Rahiti a home—a real home—worth "longing for"! He would—
As a matter of fact, what Crowther did the next morning was to subject his reflection in the looking glass to an unsmiling survey, and with equal gravity extract four gray hairs from his head. After which he set to work with newborn zest, planning certain additions to the bungalow.
It was about this time that the monthly schooner brought a youth named Owen to Rahiti seeking employment. Crowther gave it him, partly for company and partly because there was plenty to be done. He was of the reserved, earnest type, with a shock of blond hair, unbelievably pink cheeks, and a habit of blushing which in itself is a refreshing phenomenon south of the Line. Crowther took to him on the instant.
"I want you to take the copra entirely off my hands," he told him in the mosquito-proof office with its battered, ill-kept ledger and litter of island specimens.
"I'm sick of the sight and smell and feel of it. I—er—have other things to do."
Owen gravely inclined his head.
"Sit down," said Crowther; "have a cigar. We'd better try and understand one another as soon as possible. What brought you to these outrageous parts?"
Owen seated himself, and blushed.
"Don't tell me if you don't want to," Crowther added. "It's only vulgar curiosity on my part."
"I was in a bank," blurted Owen.
"Good," said Crowther, and pushed the disreputable ledger across the writing table. "You'd better take this over as well."
"I have been going through it," said Owen with professional gravity. "The system is bad, if you don't mind my saying so."
"Haven't a doubt of it," beamed Crowther, "and if you can put it right, and keep up the level of production
"Don't you mean increase production?" corrected Owen.
Crowther laughed.
"I suppose so," he admitted, "though, as a business, I'm afraid I've lost my enthusiasm for Rahiti. I look upon it more in the light of a home."
"Quite," agreed Owen, with his quaint air of punctiliousness. "A very beautiful home," he added thoughtfully.
Crowther's glance wandered to the window with its sectional view, like a framed and glowing water colour, of beach and palm and sea.
"Not bad," he muttered. "But nothing to what I'm going to make it" He turned in his chair with an abrupt reversion to the subject in hand. "So if you'll look after your end of things, Mr.—er—Owen, I'll look after mine, and we'll see what happens."
What happened during the next few months was considerable. A wing was added to the bungalow containing rooms such rooms! There were yakawood panelling, a standard lamp, mats as finely woven as a Panama hat, and imported furniture of unsurpassed luxury and elegance. Crowther was in the habit of musing amidst these splendours as in a palace of dreams. There was only a month now—only a month
As for Owen, he appeared incapable of anything but work. A day with copra, followed by an evening with a new and immaculate ledger, seemed the acme of his desires. Undoubtedly there was some powerful incentive behind the boy's efforts. His innate earnestness had developed into a fervour that Crowther welcomed as unique in his experience of overseers but was at a loss, to understand.
At a loss, that is, until late one evening he visited the boy's quarters and found him, head on arms, and arms on open ledger, sound asleep.
Crowther shook him gently.
"Hi, this won't do," he said. "Sling that thing in the corner, and turn in, and be a bit late to-morrow if you can manage it. I'm not going to have overseers killing themselves on the premises."
Owen looked up, the habitual flush mounting to his cheeks. His folded arms slid from the ledger, and with them a square of pasteboard that fluttered to the floor at Crowther's feet. He picked it up mechanically, and was returning to the table when the action was arrested in mid air. For a moment he stood motionless, staring slack-jawed at a photograph of Mata, then placed it on the table and drew back into the shadow.
"So you know my niece," he said evenly, yet in a voice that he failed to recognize as his own.
Owen pushed back his chair and stood before Crowther. There was no confusion in the movement, only the supreme self-consciousness of youth.
"I've been meaning to tell you," he began.
"But you didn't," Crowther interpolated sweetly, "so why should you now? Because I happen to have blundered on to your secret?"
"There should have been no secret—there is no secret," Owen corrected himself; "We met at a friend's house during the holidays. I—we"
"You can cut the details, if you don't mind," said Crowther.
"Very well, then," Owen's head went up as though in answer to a challenge. "I love her."
"Naturally," said Crowther. "And as you're so bent on unburdening yourself, what then?"
"I am working—for her," answered the boy simply. "I came here because I knew it was her home, and that she would be returning soon. I was afraid, if I told you of our—acquaintance, it might influence you against me."
"Why?"
"I knew how fond you must be of her."
"How?"
"Naturally," mimicked Owen, with a hint of apology.
There was neither question nor answer to that. Crowther remained silent, his face mercifully in shadow, watching the antics of this pink-cheeked destroyer of dreams. They had "met at a friend's house ... during the holidays!" What more was needed? What could be more natural, in the most natural of worlds? Crowther asked himself this assiduously as a curb to the insane desire to take this same pink-cheeked head and dash it against the wall. It was still saying something....
"I wanted you to form an unbiassed opinion of me, Mr. Crowther. Are you satisfied?"
"I?" Crowther advanced out of the gloom. The mask of a smile was on this face. "Satisfied?" He had intended to say something else—heaven knew what!—but instead he laughed.
"You find it amusing," Owen accused, with a ludicrous air of offended dignity.
"You must excuse me," Crowther apologized. "It's an unfortunate habit of mine. No, I don't find it in the least amusing, only satisfactory—entirely satisfactory, Mr.—er—Owen. Good-night."
The next morning Owen was down with his first bout of fever, and three days later Mata arrived.
Crowther saw the schooner creeping down from the horizon, and Mata, a slim, unmistakable figure in the bows, waving a handkerchief far out to sea because she knew that he would be watching for her through the telescope.
It seemed to Crowther that the "outside" had made surprisingly little difference, or was it the fashion of the moment for young ladies in bewilderingly dainty muslins, and their hair "up," to welcome their alleged uncles by nearly strangling them? He did not know. He did not care.
"Oh, it's good—good!" she cried, clinging to his arm and glancing bright-eyed about her as they passed along the landing and up the powdered coral pathway to the house.
With the mock ceremony of a flunkey, Crowther bowed her into the palace of dreams. She sampled its splendours, from the white-enamelled bedstead to the standard lamp, with little gasps of delight.
"Tea will be served on the veranda in ten minutes, your ladyship," Crowther announced, and withdrew.
Whereupon Mata took a step toward the door, and paused. Something seemed to have come upon her of a sudden, out of nowhere, a mantle of thought that enveloped her until she found herself pouring out tea—from the same old pot, into the same comprehensive cup with its three lumps of sugar. They talked, talked and listened, each to the beloved voice of the other, until Crowther consulted his watch.
"Time!" he called. "I've had you for the first hour, my lady. More than my share. What about him?"
"Him?" Mata looked up in frank perplexity.
"Thought that would fetch you," beamed Crowther.
"More surprises?" she questioned.
For answer, he took her by the arm, across the compound to Owen's quarters, and, thrusting her gently inside, closed the door.
Then he went down to the beach, and walked and walked until he came to the scene of the wreck, where he sat staring into the depths.
There was nothing he desired so much as solitude during that hour, yet presently he became aware of a figure flitting swiftly along the beach. It wore a faded blue wrapper, and its hair streamed in the wind. It sank at Crowther's side.
"Uncle," it panted, "help me!"
"All I can," said Crowther, "but it's quite simple. He's the best overseer I ever had. He gets more out of Rahiti in six months than I used to in a year, and it's about my turn for the 'outside.' I'm going to live with a capital L. I'm going to"
Mata was not listening, or failed to understand.
"He made a mistake," she said dully, "a terrible, terrible mistake."
"Impossible," said Crowther. "I'm certain he never made a mistake in his life."
"He did," Mata persisted. "Oh, Uncle, if you laugh at me, I think I shall die. We met"
"At a friend's house during the holidays," prompted Crowther.
"And he thought—I don't know what he thought, but I never gave him any cause to think it."
"You'd better cut that part out," advised Crowther. "He had some difficulty over it himself. He polished it off in the end by telling me that he loved you. Why not try that way, Mata?"
Mata sighed.
"Did he tell you that I loved him?"
"No, but"
"Well, then" said Mata.
Crowther turned slowly and looked at her.
"You see," she went on, staring out to sea, "there happens to be someone else."
"That's unfortunate," admitted Crowther, "but he can be imported by the next schooner."
"He doesn't need importing," said Mata, her eyes still turned toward the crimsoning horizon.
There was silence for a space.
"I tell you what it is, little girl," said Crowther unsteadily. "We'd better defeat all these complications by marrying each other. Not such a bad idea when you come to think of it, eh?"
Mata looked at him with the eyes of understanding.
"Then you have come to think of it," she said, "without—without the laugh?"