The Gates of Morning/Book 2/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
THE MAID OF AIOMA
Le Moan had left Karolin as a gull leaves the reef, unnoticed.
Not a soul had seen her go and it was not for some days that Aioma, busy with the tree felling, recollected her existence, and the fact that she had not followed him to the northern beach; then he sent a woman across and she had returned with news that there was no trace of the girl though her canoe was beached, also that there was no trace of food having been recently cooked, and that the girl must have been gone some days as there were no recent sand traces. The wind even when it is only moderately strong blurs and obliterates sand traces, and the woman judged that no one had been about on the southern beach for some days. She had found tracks, however, for which she could not account. The marks left by the boots of Peterson, also the footsteps of the kanakas who had carried the water casks disturbed her mind; they had nearly vanished, but it seemed to her that many people had been there, a statement that left Aioma cold.
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.
Aioma, like Le Moan, had no use for the past or the future, the burning present was everything.
Things that had been were to Aioma things floating alongside at a greater or less distance, not astern. It was not the memory of Uta Matu that walked the beach, but Uta Matu himself, untouchable, because of distance, and only able to talk as he had talked in life, but still there. Aioma had not to turn his head to look backwards at him as we have to turn our heads to see our dead, he had only to glance sideways, as it were. The things of yesterday, the day before yesterday and the day before that, were beside Aioma at greater or less distances, not behind him—all like surf riders on the same wave with him and carried forward by the same flowing, yet ever separating one from the other though keeping in line.
In the language of Karolin there was no word indicating our idea of the past except the word akuma (distance) which might mean the distance between a canoe and a canoe or between a happening of to-day and of yesterday, and to the woman who judged that Le Moan had not trod the beach for some days, “days” meant measures of distance, not of time. Le Moan had been travelling, moving away from the beach, not returning, whilst so many sunrises had occurred and so many sunsets. She had been away a long distance, not a long time.
The speed of a man running a mile on Karolin had nothing to do with the time occupied, it was a measure of his strength; the race was a struggle between the man and the mile, and of the runners the swiftest to a Karalonite was not the quickest but the strongest and most agile; this profound truth was revealed to their instinctive sight undimmed by the muscæ volitantes which we call minutes, seconds and hours, also the truth that when the race was over it was not extinct but merely removed to a distance—just as a canoe drifting from a canoe is not extinct though untouchable and out of hail, and fading at last from sight through distance.
A dead man on Karolin was a man who had drifted away; he was there, but at a distance, he might even return through the distance in a stronger way than memory sight could reveal him! Many had. Uta Matu himself had been seen in this way by several since he had drifted away—he had come back once to tell Nalia the wife of Oti where the sacred paddle was hid, the paddle which acted as the steer oar of the biggest war canoe. He had forgotten that the war canoe had been destroyed. Still he had returned. Though with a Melanesian strain in them, unlike the Melanesians the men of Karolin had no belief that the souls of ancestors become reincarnated in fish or birds, nor did they believe in the influence of Mana, that mysterious spiritual something believed in so widely by Polynesians and Melanesians alike.
Memory, to the Karolinite, was a sort of sight which enabled the living to look not over the past but the present, and see the people and things that floated, not behind in a far-off past, but to right and left in a far-off present.
Just as the surf rider sees his companions near and far, all borne on the same wave, though some might be beyond reach of voice, and some almost invisible through distance, the return of a spirit was an actual moving of a distant one towards the seer, as though a surf rider were to strike out and swim to a far-off fellow at right angles to the flow of the wave.
So Aioma, as he worked, saw Uta Matu and his warriors and the old canoe-builders, not as dead and gone figures, but as realities though beyond touch and hail of voice and sight of the eye of flesh.
Since the war, years ago, between the northern and southern tribes, a large proportion of the children born on the island had been boys, whilst most of the women had developed manly attributes in accordance with that natural law which rules in the remotest island as well as in the highest and broadest civilization.
Aioma had no need of helpers, leaving out the boys, some dozen or so, who could wield an ax as well as a man; but Aioma though his heart and soul were in his work was no mere canoe-builder. He had in him the making of a statesman. He would not let Dick work at the building or do any work at all except fishing and fish spearing.
“You are the chief (Ompalu),” said Aioma as he sat of an evening before the house of Uta Matu, now the house of Dick. “You are young and do not know all the ways of things, but I love you as a son; I do not know what is in you that is above us, but the sea I love is in your eyes. The sea, our father, sent you, but you have still to learn the ways of the land, where the chief does no work.” Then he would grunt to himself and rock as he sat, and then his voice rising to a whine, “Could the people raise their heads to one who labours with them, or would they bow their heads so that he might put his foot on their necks?” Then casting his eyes down he would talk to himself, the words so run together as to be indistinguishable; but always, Katafa noticed, his eyes would return again and again to the little ships in the shadow of the house, the model ships made by Kearney long ago—the vestiges of a civilization of which Dick and Aioma and Katafa knew nothing, or only that the ships, the big ships of which these were the likenesses, were dangerous and the men in them evil and to be avoided or destroyed if possible.
The Portsey of long ago that had fired a cannon shot and destroyed Katafa’s canoe, the schooner that had brought the Melanesians to Palm Tree, the Spanish ship that had been sunk in Karolin lagoon and the whaler that had come after her, all these had burnt into the minds of Dick, Aioma and Katafa the fact that something of which they did not know the name (but which was civilization), was out there beyond the sea line, something that, octopus-like, would at times thrust out a feeler in the form of a ship, an ayat destructive and, if possible, to be destroyed.
Ayat was the name given by Karolin to the great burgomaster gulls that were to the small gulls what schooners are to canoes, and so anything in the form of a ship was an ayat, that is to say, a thing carrying with it all the propensities of a robber and a murderer; for the great gulls would rob the lesser gulls of their food and devour their chicks and fight and darken the sunshine of the reef with their wings.
The comparison was not a compliment to the Pacific traders or their ships or the civilization that had sent them forth to prey on the world, but it was horribly apposite.
And yet the little ayats in the shadow of the house had for Aioma an attraction beyond words. They were as fascinating as sin. This old child after a hard day’s work would sometimes dream of them in his sleep; dream that he was helping to sail them on the big rock pool, as he sometimes did in reality. The frigate, the full-rigged ship, the schooner and the whale man, all had cruised in the rock pool which seemed constructed by nature as a model testing tank; indeed the first great public act of Dick as ruler of the Karolinites had been a full review of this navy on the day after he had fetched Aioma from the southern beach. Aioma, fascinated by the sight of the schooner which Dick had shown him on his landing, had insisted on seeing the others launched and the whole population had stood round ten deep with the little children between the women’s legs, all with their eyes fixed on the pretty sight. The strangest sight—for Kearney the illiterate and ignorant had managed to symbolize the two foundations of civilization, war and trade; and here in little yet in essence lay the ships of Nelson and the ships of Villeneuve: the great wool ships, the Northumberland that had brought Dick’s parents to Palm Tree, the whalers of Martha’s Vineyard and the sandalwood schooners, those first carriers of the disease of the white man.
To Aioma the schooner was the most fascinating. He knew the whaler with her try works and her heavy davits and her squat build; he had seen her before in the whaler whose brutal crew had landed and been driven off. He knew the ship, he had seen its likeness in the Spanish ship of long ago; the frigate intrigued him, but the schooner took his heart—it was not only that he understood her rig and way of sailing better than the rig and way of sailing of the others, it was more than that. Aioma was an instinctive ship lover, and to the lover of ships, the schooner has most appeal, for the schooner is of all things that float the most graceful and the most beautiful; and in contrast to her canvas, the canvas of your square rigged ship becomes dishcloths hung out to dry.
He brooded on this thing over which Kearney had expended his most loving care, and in which nothing was wanting. He understood the topping lifts that supported the main boom, the foresail, the use of the standing rigging. Kearney, through his work, was talking to him and just as Kearney had explained this and that to Dick, so Dick was explaining it to Aioma. Truly a man can speak though dead, even as Kearney was speaking now.
The method of reefing a sail was unknown to Aioma; a canoe sail was never reefed, reduction of canvas was made by tying the head of the sail up to spill the wind. Fore canvas was unknown to Aioma, but he understood.
The subconscious mathematician in him that made him able to build great canoes capable of standing heavy weather and carrying forty or fifty men apiece, understood all about the practice of the business, though he had never heard of centres of rotation, absolute or relative velocities, of impelling powers, or the laws of the collision of bodies; of inertia or pressures of resistance or squares of velocity or series of inclinations.
Squatting on his hams before the little model of the Rarotanga, he knew nothing of these things and yet he knew that the schooner was good, that she would sail close to the wind with little leeway when the wind was on the beam, that the rudder was better than the steering paddle, that the sail area though great would not capsize her, that she was miles ahead of anything he had ever made in the form of a ship. That the maker of the ayat was a genius beside whom he was a duffer, unknowing that Kearney was absolutely without inventive genius, and that the schooner was the work of a million men extending over three thousand years.
Katafa sitting beside Dick would watch Aioma as he brooded and played with the thing. It had no fascination for her. The little ships had always repelled her if anything. They were the only dividing point between her and Dick—she could not feel his pleasure or interest in them, and from this fact possibly arose a vague foreboding that perhaps some day in some way the little ships might separate them. When a woman loves, she can become jealous of a man’s pipe, of his tennis racket, of his best friend, of anything that she can’t share and which occupies his attention at times more than she does.
But the essence of jealousy is concentration, and Katafa’s green eye was cast not so much on the whole fleet as on the little schooner. This was Dick’s favourite, as it was Aioma’s.
One night, long after the vanishing of Le Moan, so long that every one had nearly forgotten her, Aioma had a delightful dream.
He dreamt that he was only an inch high and standing on the schooner’s deck. Dick reduced to the same stature was with him, and half a dozen others, and the schooner was in the rock pool that had spread to the size of Karolin lagoon. Oh, the joy of that business! They were hauling up the mainsail and up it went to the pull of the halyards just as he had often hauled it with the pull of his finger and thumb on the tiny halyards of the model; but this was a real great sail and men had to pull hard to raise it and there it was set. Then the foresail went up and the jib was cast loose and Aioma, mad with joy, was at the tiller, the tiller that he had often moved with his finger and thumb.
Then pressed by the wind she began to heel over and the outrigger—she had taken on an outrigger—went into the air; he could see the outrigger gratings with drinking-nuts and bundles of food tied to it after the fashion of sea-going canoes, and he shouted to his companions to climb on to it and bring it down. Then he awoke, sweating but dazzled by the first part of the dream.
Two days later a boy came running and shouting to him as he was at work; and turning, Aioma saw the fulfilment of his vision. Borne by the flooding tide with all sails drawing and a bone in her teeth, the little schooner swelled to a thousand times her size, was gaily entering the lagoon. It was the Kermadec.