Coral Sands/Chapter 12

ERNAND, when he left the girl that afternoon, did not row directly ashore; he paddled a bit to the west and grounded the canoe on the canoe beach near the spot from which he had started that morning.

It was a bad day's work for himself and his partner. Canoe and gear, including an anchor and twenty fathoms of manila rope, were gone. These things not only cost money, but were hard to replace, especially in the pearling season when every craft was in commission and no man willing to hire or sell. The canoe he had brought back was sure to be claimed by some one either here or over on the other beach.

Fernand was hungry and thirsty, but he did not want to go to his house. He got some water from the wife of Lipi, also some bananas and a piece of cold fried palu, and, going off to the outer beach, took his seat in the shade of a huge overjetting lump of coral.

The last great storm had smashed the reef here like a hammer; great slabs of living coral with the worms hanging from the fractured surfaces had been tossed here and there and piled to die and dry in the sun, and the reef had gone on, rebuilding, remaking itself just as flesh remakes itself after a wound.

Fernand, when he had finished the food he had brought with him, rested, contemplating the sea.

Here on the outer reef the world was a different world from that of the lagoon beach.

Near and far the breakers were coming in, and above the breakers the spray hung in the wind and the spume drifted.

A frigate bird passing high overhead hailed the reef with a cry, and from far and near came the voices of gulls, creaking, complaining, lamenting like the souls of lost sailormen.

A huge crab, lifting itself from a pothole of the coral, rustled and clicked away, to be lost to sight behind a boulder. It was as though the reef had spoken and said: “Look, I am full of life. My very rocks are the homes of worms; the bass and schrapper lurk in my low-tide pools with the great eels and worse. The lagoon has its sharks, but the safe and solid reef has its tigers and jackals. Beware!”

But Fernand was used to the reef and deaf to its voices, and he was thinking of something far remote from death.

He who never looked at a girl was gazing at the vision of one now. Woman had taken her revenge.

It seemed to Fernand that this woman who had suddenly come into his life had always been part of his life. His love for her, newly grown and of tropical growth, had obscured memory, or doped it or done something to it in a magical way, for she lent a tinge to his past as well as a light to his present.

And yesterday morning he had known nothing about her. Yesterday morning he had been pearling with Topi and the California had not even entered the lagoon.

The California had brought him a terrible gift. Should this woman go away and leave him, he would die. She was the only thing in the whole world desirable; she was the only thing in the world; she was the world. All else, singing reef and speaking sea and colored coral—what were they? Nothing—only a sound and a picture. All else, pearls and money and clothes and cigarettes—what were they? Nothing—everything but her was dead, or, at least, would be dead if she were to go away. And he had no means of keeping her and he knew in his heart that a great gulf lay between them, the gulf of wealth no less than of race and station.

He was only a pearl fisher, a man absolutely without hold on the world. He knew nothing. It was true he could read and he had read books, but of the life of the world he knew nothing. She had tried to explain San Francisco to him as though he were a child. That is really what he was, a child without station or money or power in the world and marked forever with the stain of caste.

All the same, and despite all this, there was in the mind of Fernand a fixed determination away behind everything, a determination that belonged perhaps more to his subconscious than to his conscious mind. She would be his. Let her come or let her go, let him live or let him die, she would be his.

He watched the sun setting away along the reef and the gulls turning golden against the blue of twilight and the sudden passing of twilight to dark and a sky all spangled with stars.

Then he rose up and went toward the village. He wanted to find Topi and see how he was doing after his opium debauch. He went along to the house of Jalu and found the latter sitting outside just as he had sat on the preceding evening.

“Jalu,” said Fernand, “how is Topi?”

“Topi is still unwell,” replied the other, speaking in the native tongue. “No good for anything more.”

Fernand pushed his way into the shack and there lay Topi. He was unconscious. Either he had got at more opium, or he had gorged an overdose yesterday. It didn't matter which; he had taken too much. He was no good for anything more, to judge by the look of him, and there was no doctor on Araffura nor on board the California. The missionary was the only doctor now and he was away.

Growing anger filled the mind of Fernand as he looked at his unfortunate pearling mate and thought of Yakoff. This was Yakoff's work, done for a few dollars. Even in this lonely bit of the world the truth of that saying, “The love of money is the root of all evil,” stood out in big letters.

It was always standing out here in big letters, above the Chinese who sold samshu or dope, and the whites who sold whisky and gin faked from potato spirit, and the half-breeds who come, as they would come later that season, to tun gambling shops; it was always standing out and Fernand was sick of reading it.

He wanted now to find Yakoff and face him with his work. Wring his neck, law or no law. The Spanish blood at the heart of Fernand was hot and boiling, yet his mind had not lost control.

Yakoff was a pest and a danger. Yakoff had insulted him by calling him a Kanaka and had all but killed his partner by selling him or giving him dope. All the same, Yakoff must not be killed.

A thrashing—that was it. He turned away and, picking from the beach a piece of stick seaweed three feet long, an inch thick at the base and flexible as rubber, he made for Yakoff's house.