CHAPTER VI
SAILS UPON THE SEA
Dick put the hook away and took to the sculls. He had a three-mile rowbefore him, and the tide was coming in, which did not make it any theeasier. As he rowed, he talked and grumbled to himself. He had been ina grumbling mood for some time past: the chief cause, Emmeline.
In the last few months she had changed; even her face had changed. Anew person had come upon the island, it seemed to him, and taken theplace of the Emmeline he had known from earliest childhood. This onelooked different. He did not know that she had grown beautiful, he justknew that she looked different; also she had developed new ways thatdispleased him—she would go off and bathe by herself, for instance.
Up to six months or so ago he had been quite contented; sleeping andeating, and hunting for food and cooking it, building and rebuildingthe house, exploring the woods and the reef. But lately a spirit ofrestlessness had come upon him; he did not know exactly what he wanted.He had a vague feeling that he wanted to go away from the place wherehe was; not from the island, but from the place where they had pitchedtheir tent, or rather built their house.
It may have been the spirit of civilisation crying out in him, tellinghim of all he was missing. Of the cities, and the streets, and thehouses, and the businesses, and the striving after gold, the strivingafter power. It may have been simply the man in him crying out forLove, and not knowing yet that Love was at his elbow.
The dinghy glided along, hugging the shore, past the little glades offern and the cathedral gloom of the breadfruit; then, rounding apromontory, she opened the view of the break in the reef. A little bitof the white strand was visible, but he was not looking that way—hewas looking towards the reef at a tiny, dark spot, not noticeableunless searched for by the eye. Always when he came on theseexpeditions, just here, he would hang on his oars and gaze over there,where the gulls were flying and the breakers thundering.
A few years ago the spot filled him with dread as well as curiosity,but from familiarity and the dullness that time casts on everything,the dread had almost vanished, but the curiosity remained: thecuriosity that makes a child look on at the slaughter of an animal eventhough his soul revolts at it. He gazed for a while, then he went onpulling, and the dinghy approached the beach.
Something had happened on the beach. The sand was all trampled, andstained red here and there; in the centre lay the remains of a greatfire still smouldering, and just where the water lapped the sand, laytwo deep grooves as if two heavy boats had been beached there. A SouthSea man would have told from the shape of the grooves, and the littlemarks of the out-riggers, that two heavy canoes had been beached there.And they had.
The day before, early in the afternoon, two canoes, possibly from thatfar-away island which cast a stain on the horizon to thesou’-sou’-west, had entered the lagoon, one in pursuit of the other.
What happened then had better be left veiled. A war drum with ashark-skin head had set the woods throbbing; the victory was celebratedall night, and at dawn the victors manned the two canoes and set sailfor the home, or the hell, they had come from. Had you examined thestrand you would have found that a line had been drawn across thebeach, beyond which there were no footmarks: that meant that the restof the island was for some reason _tabu_.
Dick pulled the nose of the boat up a bit on the strand, then he lookedaround him. He picked up a broken spear that had been cast away orforgotten; it was made of some hard wood and barbed with iron. On theright-hand side of the beach something lay between the cocoa-nut trees.He approached; it was a mass of offal; the entrails of a dozen sheepseemed cast here in one mound, yet there were no sheep on the island,and sheep are not carried as a rule in war canoes.
The sand on the beach was eloquent. The foot pursuing and the footpursued; the knee of the fallen one, and then the forehead andoutspread hands; the heel of the chief who has slain his enemy, beatenthe body flat, burst a hole through it through which he has put hishead, and who stands absolutely wearing his enemy as a cloak; the headof the man dragged on his back to be butchered like a sheep—of thesethings spoke the sand.
As far as the sand traces could speak, the story of the battle wasstill being told; the screams and the shouting, the clashing of clubsand spears were gone, yet the ghost of the fight remained.
If the sand could bear such traces, and tell such tales, who shall saythat the plastic æther was destitute of the story of the fight and thebutchery?
However that may have been, Dick, looking around him, had the shiveringsense of having just escaped from danger. Whoever had been, hadgone—he could tell that by the canoe traces. Gone either out to sea,or up the right stretch of the lagoon. It was important to determinethis.
He climbed to the hill-top and swept the sea with his eyes. There, awayto the south-west, far away on the sea, he could distinguish the brownsails of two canoes. There was something indescribably mournful andlonely in their appearance; they looked like withered leaves—brownmoths blown to sea—derelicts of autumn. Then, remembering the beach,these things became freighted with the most sinister thoughts for themind of the gazer. They were hurrying away, having done their work.That they looked lonely and old and mournful, and like withered leavesblown across the sea, only heightened the horror.
Dick had never seen canoes before, but he knew that these things wereboats of some sort holding people, and that the people had left allthose traces on the beach. How much of the horror of the thing wasrevealed to his subconscious intelligence, who can say?
He had climbed the boulder, and he now sat down with his knees drawnup, and his hands clasped round them. Whenever he came round to thisside of the island, something happened of a fateful or sinister nature.The last time he had nearly lost the dinghy; he had beached the littleboat in such a way that she floated off, and the tide was just in theact of stealing her, and sweeping her from the lagoon out to sea, whenhe returned laden with his bananas, and, rushing into the water up tohis waist, saved her. Another time he had fallen out of a tree, andjust by a miracle escaped death. Another time a hurricane had broken,lashing the lagoon into snow, and sending the cocoa-nuts bounding andflying like tennis balls across the strand. This time he had justescaped something, he knew not exactly what. It was almost as ifProvidence were saying to him, “Don’t come here.”
He watched the brown sails as they dwindled in the wind-blown blue,then he came down from the hill-top and cut his bananas. He cut fourlarge bunches, which caused him to make two journeys to the boat. Whenthe bananas were stowed he pushed off.
For a long time a great curiosity had been pulling at hisheart-strings: a curiosity of which he was dimly ashamed. Fear hadgiven it birth, and Fear still clung to it. It was, perhaps, theelement of fear and the awful delight of daring the unknown that madehim give way to it.
He had rowed, perhaps, a hundred yards when he turned the boat’s headand made for the reef. It was more than five years since that day whenhe rowed across the lagoon, Emmeline sitting in the stern, with herwreath of flowers in her hand. It might have been only yesterday, foreverything seemed just the same. The thunderous surf and the flyinggulls, the blinding sunlight, and the salt, fresh smell of the sea. Thepalm tree at the entrance of the lagoon still bent gazing into thewater, and round the projection of coral to which he had last mooredthe boat still lay a fragment of the rope which he had cut in his hurryto escape.
Ships had come into the lagoon, perhaps, during the five years, but noone had noticed anything on the reef, for it was only from the hill-topthat a full view of what was there could be seen, and then only by eyesknowing where to look. From the beach there was visible just a speck.It might have been, perhaps, a bit of old wreckage flung there by awave in some big storm. A piece of old wreckage that had been tossedhither and thither for years, and had at last found a place of rest.
Dick tied the boat up, and stepped on to the reef. It was high tidejust as before; the breeze was blowing strongly, and overhead aman-of-war’s bird, black as ebony, with a blood-r
ed bill, came sailing,the wind doming out his wings. He circled in the air, and cried outfiercely, as if resenting the presence of the intruder, then he passedaway, let himself be blown away, as it were, across the lagoon,wheeled, circled, and passed out to sea.
Dick approached the place he knew, and there lay the little old barrelall warped by the powerful sun; the staves stood apart, and the hoopingwas rusted and broken, and whatever it had contained in the way ofspirit and conviviality had long ago drained away.
Beside the barrel lay a skeleton, round which lay a few rags of cloth.The skull had fallen to one side, and the lower jaw had fallen from theskull; the bones of the hands and feet were still articulated, and theribs had not fallen in. It was all white and bleached, and the sunshone on it as indifferently as on the coral, this shell and frameworkthat had once been a man. There was nothing dreadful about it, but awhole world of wonder.
To Dick, who had not been broken into the idea of death, who had notlearned to associate it with graves and funerals, sorrow, eternity, andhell, the thing spoke as it never could have spoken to you or me.
Looking at it, things linked themselves together in his mind: theskeletons of birds he had found in the woods, the fish he had slain,even trees lying dead and rotten—even the shells of crabs.
If you had asked him what lay before him, and if he could haveexpressed the thought in his mind, he would have answered you “change.”
All the philosophy in the world could not have told him more than heknew just then about death—he, who even did not know its name.
He was held spellbound by the marvel and miracle of the thing and thethoughts that suddenly crowded his mind like a host of spectres forwhom a door has just been opened.
Just as a child by unanswerable logic knows that a fire which hasburned him once will burn him again, or will burn another person, heknew that just as the form before him was, his form would be someday—and Emmeline’s.
Then came the vague question which is born not of the brain, but theheart, and which is the basis of all religions—where shall I be then?His mind was not of an introspective nature, and the question juststrayed across it and was gone. And still the wonder of the thing heldhim. He was for the first time in his life in a reverie; the corpsethat had shocked and terrified him five years ago had cast seeds ofthought with its dead fingers upon his mind, the skeleton had broughtthem to maturity. The full fact of universal death suddenly appearedbefore him, and he recognised it.
He stood for a long time motionless, and then with a deep sigh turnedto the boat and pushed off without once looking back at the reef. Hecrossed the lagoon and rowed slowly homewards, keeping in the shelterof the tree shadows as much as possible.
Even looking at him from the shore you might have noticed a differencein him. Your savage paddles his canoe, or sculls his boat, alert,glancing about him, at touch with nature at all points; though he belazy as a cat and sleeps half the day, awake he is all ears and eyes—acreature reacting to the least external impression.
Dick, as he rowed back, did not look about him: he was thinking orretrospecting. The savage in him had received a check. As he turned thelittle cape where the wild cocoa-nut blazed, he looked over hisshoulder. A figure was standing on the sward by the edge of the water.It was Emmeline.