The Gates of Morning/Book 4/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
THE GREEN SHIP
LE MOAN steered. Tireless and heedless of time as when she had brought the schooner first to Karolin, she kept the wheel all that day and through the night, giving it over to Poni for short intervals, whilst Dick slept.
She had given life back to him and it was almost as though she had given him her own life, for the world around her had become as the world wherein ghosts move; disembodied spirits, not dead but no longer connected with earth.
Before setting eyes on Taori, she had lived on the southern beach of Karolin, lonely, cut off with Aioma and the others who had no interests beyond the interests of the moment; as she lived so might she have died neither happy nor unhappy, without pity and without love or care for the morrow or thought of the past.
Then Taori had come, not as a man but as a light greater than the sun, a light that struck through the darkness of her being, bringing to birth a new self that was his—that was he.
She had braved death and the unknown—everything—only to find herself at the end face to face with death, and death saying to her “He is mine—or Katafa's.”
Like the woman who stood before Solomon, she had to choose between the destruction of the thing she loved and the handing of it to a rival to be lost to her forever, to see its arms clinging to another, and its love given to another, and its life becoming part of the life of another; and she chose the greater sacrifice, not because she was Le Moan, a creature extraordinary or supernormal, but just because at heart she was a woman.
A woman, acting, when brought to the great test, less as an individual than as a part of the spirit of womanhood. The spirit changeless through the ages and unalterable. The spirit so often hidden by the littleness of the flesh, so seldom put to the heroic test, so absolutely certain in its answer to it. For when a woman really loves she becomes a mother even though she never may conceive or produce a child.
Aioma, who had slept through the night on his belly on the deck, spread like a starfish, awoke as the sun was rising.
Poni was at the wheel—Le Moan had gone below. The cabin had no fears for her now, and she had said to Poni, just as the sun was rising and pointing into the west of north, “You will see the lagoon light there.”
Dick, by the galley, was still sleeping, Tahuku and Tirai were the watch.
The beauty of that sunrise on that blue and lonely sea, beyond word or brush, was unseen by Aioma.
“It will be over there,” said Poni, pointing ahead. “It does not show yet.” Aioma went forward and stood looking into the northwest. No, it did not show yet nor would it show till the sun was twice its diameter above the horizon. Aioma, listening to the slash of the bow breaking the water and fanned by the draught from the head sails, having swept the sky found his eye caught by something far across the sea and right in their course. It looked at first glance like a rock but at once his bird-like eyes resolved it into what it was—a ship, an ayat, but with no sail set.
The canoe-builder glanced back along the deck past the sleeping figure of Dick to the figure of Poni at the wheel, then he turned his eyes again upon the far-off ship, and now in the sky to the north above and beyond the ship lay something for which he had been on the lookout—the lagoon light of Karolin, almost imperceptible, but there just in the position where Le Moan had said it would be.
The something he had waited and longed for, but spoiled, almost threatened, by this apparition of a ship.
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.”
He had said nothing of this because Aioma never confessed to a fault.
Well there was another ayat, blocking the way to Karolin and sure to bring trouble.
Civilization and trouble had come to be convertible ideas in the mind of this old gentleman who although he did not know the English word that represents greed, brutality, disease, drink, and robbery dressed in self-righteousness, had sensed the fact that the white man always brought trouble.
Well, there it was straight before him heading her off from Karolin. What should he do? Turn and run away from it? Oh, no. Aioma, who had fought the big rays and who was never happier than when at grips with a conger, was not the person to turn his back on danger or threat, especially now with Karolin in view.
This thing lay straight in his path, as if daring him, and he accepted the challenge; they had the speak sticks, there were eight of them not including Le Moan and if it came to a fight—well, he was ready.
Without rousing Dick, he called the fellows up from below, pointed out the ship and then stood watching as she grew.
Now she stood on the water plainly to be seen, a brig with canvas stowed as if in preparation for a blow. If any canvas had been set it must have been blown away by the wind, for she showed nothing but her sticks as she lay rolling gently to the swell.
Tahuku, who had the instinct of a predatory gull coupled with the eye of a hawk, suddenly laughed:
“She is empty,” said Tahuku, “she has no men on her. It is a dead turtle, Aioma, you have called on us to spear.”
Aioma hit by the same truth ran and roused Dick, who on waking sprang to his feet. He was renewed by sleep and hope, a creature reborn and as he stood with the others he scarcely noticed the ship, his eyes fixed on the light of Karolin.
Poni at the wheel called Le Moan and she came up from below and stood watching whilst the brig, now close to them, showed her nakedness and desolation beneath the burning light of morning.
Old-fashioned, even for these days, high-pooped, heavily sparred and with an up-jutting bowsprit, her hull of a ghastly faded green rolled with a weary movement to the undulations of the swell, revealing now the weed-grown copper of her sheathing, now a glimpse of the deserted deck. There were no boats at the davits and as the current altered her position, giving her a gentle pitch, came a sound faint against the wind, the clapping of her deck-house door.
Aioma turning, ran aft and stood beside Poni at the wheel giving him directions. The canoe-builder, urged by his ancestors and his hatred of the papalagi, had evolved an idea from his active brain and Dick, who had let his eyes wander from the brig to the far-off light of Karolin, heard suddenly the thrashing of canvas as the steersman brought the schooner up into the wind.
Aioma was going to board the ayat. He was shouting directions to Tahuku and the others—they ran to the falls, the boat was lowered, and in a moment he was away, shouting like a boy; scrambling like a monkey when they hitched on to the broad channel plates he gained the deck and stood looking round him.
Aye, that was a place! Bones of dead men picked clean by the birds lay here and there, and a skull polished like a marble rolled and moved and rotated on the planking to the pitch of the hull, the clicking of the lax rudder chain, and the clapping of the deck-house door.
He had brought his fire-stick with him and its little bow, from the deck of the schooner. They watched him as he stood looking about him. Then turning, he darted into the deck-house.
He was there a long time, perhaps ten minutes, and when he came out a puff of smoke came after him. Holding the door open, he looked in till another puff of smoke garnished with sparks, hit him in the face, then having done a little dance on the deck and kicked the skull into the starboard scupper, he dropped into the boat and came back to the schooner, singing.
The boat was hoisted in, the schooner put on her course and the smoking brig dropped far astern, but Aioma, still flushed with his work and victory, heeded nothing.
He sat on the coaming of the saloon skylight singing.
He sang of the bones of the dead men and the skull he had kicked and the ayat he had fired and the cursed papalagi whose work he had destroyed; then, with a great whoop he curled up and went asleep, undreaming that the papalagi might yet have their revenge, and Dick, to whom Aioma and the ship astern flaring horribly in the sunlight were as nothing, watched from the bow the steady growing beacon of Karolin in the sky.
There was Katafa.
His soul flew ahead of the schooner like a bird, flew back and flew forward again calling on the wind, and the wind, nearing, strengthened, so that a little after midday the far treetops of the southern beach came to view and now, faint and far away, the song of the great atoll.
Birds flew to meet them and birds passed them flying towards the land and as the sun began its downward climb to the water, the break began to show away on the port bow and Le Moan, pushing Tahuku, who was at the wheel, aside, prepared to take them in.
For only Le Moan knew the danger of the break when the tide was ebbing as now.
The waters were against them. It seemed the last feeble effort of fate to separate Dick from the being he loved.
The vast lagoon was pouring out like a river, it was past full spate, but the swirl was enough, if the helmsman failed to drive them on the coral.
Now they were in the grip of it, the schooner bucking like a restive horse, now steady, now making frantic efforts to turn and dash out to sea again—Aioma in the bow crying directions, Le Moan heeding him as little as she heeded the crying of the gulls.
Now they had stolen between the piers. The break on either side of them seemed immensely broad and the grand sweep of the outgoing water lit by the westering sun showed with scarcely a ripple to where it boiled against the piers: gulls in flight above it showed as in a mirror, yet it was flowing at a six-knot clip.
The schooner with every sail drawing seemed not to move, yet she moved, turning the mirror to a feather of foam at her cut water and a river of beaten gold in her wake. The piers dropped astern, the current slackened, the lagoon was conquered and lay before them a blaze of light from the beach sands to its northern viewless barrier.
Katafa was sleeping. She who slept scarcely at all by night and whose eyes by day were always fixed towards the sea, was sleeping when the voice of Kanoa roused her:
“They come, Katafa, they come!”
Raising herself on one hand, she saw the sunset light through the trees and the form of Kanoa making off again to the beach his voice drifting back to her as he ran:
“They come, Katafa, they come!”
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. It could not be. It could not be that she should return like this, so sure, so quietly, so real, the dream ship that held her heart and soul, her love, her very life.
The boat putting off now was a phantom, surely, and Taori as he sprang on the sands and seized her in his embrace was unreal as the world fading around her, till his lips seized her up from twilight to the heaven of assurance.
“Taori has come back,” cried the women, forgetting him as they turned to the men who were standing by the boat—unheeding Le Moan who stood, her work done, a being uncaring, seeing nothing, not even Kanoa, crouched on the sands half dead with the beatitude of the vision before him.