Coral Sands/Chapter 15

OW yesterday, when June stepped on board the yacht, having parted from Fernand, she found her stepfather seated in a cane chair under the shadow of the awning, an iced drink at his elbow, a cigar in his mouth and The Pacific Magazine in his hand.

“Been having a good time?” asked Cyrus.

“Rather,” said she. “Been wrecked, nearly drowned—look at my shoes; they'll never be right again—and only escaped from death by thirst and starvation though the narrowest squeak.”

He thought she spoke in jest. Her long absence had not alarmed him, for he was used to her going off for days alone, either in the bay or at Santa Barbara or Santa Catalina, where he sometimes went for the tuna fishing.

At Santa Catalina she had once been away for a whole night with old Jake Tranter, the boatman, on the west side where the kelp forests are. Their engine had broken down. Cyrus never worried; the weather was good like to-day, and he knew her capacity for taking care of herself.

“Sit down,” said he, “and tell us of it. But aren't you hungry? You've missed your luncheon.”

“No, I'm not hungry.” She dropped into a chair beside him as she spoke. “But I'm thirsty.”

He called the steward for another glass, and she went on:

“You saw us start off this morning. Fernand”

“That young Kanaka boatman chap in flannels?”

“He's not a Kanaka—he's Spanish. And he's not a boatman—he's a gentleman.”

“Oh, is he?” said Cyrus, amused at the tone of the other. “But I don't see why he couldn't be both; some of the Avalon longshore crowd are the best gentlemen I know.”

“I meant,” said June, “that he is not a common man. Of course, you are right; Arkansas Joe and old Jake Tranter, for instance, are gentlemen, but they are rough diamonds.”

“And this one is polished. Go ahead!”

“No, thank goodness, he's not polished. I loathe polished men. He's just himself with a mind and a personality of his own, not an imitation mind and an imitation personality got from college and society. Well, anyhow, we went first to see the pearling grounds and then we pushed off to see the 1agoon. We went so far out there toward the center that we lost sight of the shore. There was a sand bank near us. Out there in the middle there is a sort of circular current, and driftwood and stuff that gets caught in it; can't get out. He was telling me this when a blind shark ran into us and smashed the canoe.”

“A blind what?”

“Shark. They mutilate sharks here so as to frighten the others away when pearling is going on. Why, you remember; you first told me about them. Well, we had to swim to the sand bank, and there we were without food or water, out of sight of shore, and we might have been there still only an old derelict canoe that was trapped in the current came along, and Fernand swam out to it at the risk of his life and brought it ashore.”

“Risk of his life, confound the chap! He risked yours.”

“How?”

“Taking you to such a place in a damn dugout. Blind shark, rot! He ran you on a reef.”

“No,” said June, “he didn't. I saw the shark.”

“Shark or no shark, there's always the chance of squalls. These islands are the most treacherous in the whole Pacific.”

“But you didn't bother about that when we started.”

“No, for I thought a native boatman would have savvy enough to keep out of danger.”

June was silent for a moment. She sensed the fact that Cyrus was less up against the supposed dangers of the place than against Fernand. She had managed to put him in some way against Fernand.

“Well, anyhow,” she said, “he did what he could and he risked his life by swimming off when there were sharks about and bringing the canoe ashore.”

“I'm not saying anything against the fellow but that he was a fool to get out so far with you in that dough dish of an outrigger,” replied Cyrus. “Let's talk sense, and don't make heroes out of nothing. He'd got to get away himself from that sand bank, hadn't he? Well, there you are. Anyhow, you're back safe and there's an end of the business.”

He took to his magazine again while she rose and went below.

“An end of the business!” Those words came to her strangely. No, indeed, it was not the end of the business.

It seemed to her as though she had started from the old track of life onto a line leading her into an entirely new country. Nothing was the same, nothing would ever be the same, since—when? Was it last night at almost first sight, or away there out on the lagoon, or just now when he had looked up at her before pushing off back to shore in the canoe?

She could not tell.

Just as Fernand had never looked at a woman before seeing her, so she had never looked at a man before seeing Fernand.

Men had been companions or just society figures. The young men of Pacific Avenue and the clubs had been different from the men of the bay, the sailors, boatmen and oyster fishers. She preferred the latter, that was all.

Fernand had come upon her as something absolutely and entirely new, yet all the same it was as though she had been waiting for him ever since she was born—aye, and before that.

Dressing for dinner that night it seemed extraordinary to her that he should be there on the beach, maybe cooking his own food, living in one of those little hutlike houses; and at dinner the glitter of glass and silver, the white-coated stewards, the elegance of the surroundings, all struck her strangely, seeming to demarcate her position in the scheme of things, a position separated by a deep gulf from that of the man whose image had become part of her mind.

There is no barrier more severe than that of class distinction, none more absurd if the separated people match in mind—and as for class, what difference was there really between herself and this man? What had Cyrus been? Just a sailor before he had made his pile, a rover about the world who, according to his own laughing confession, had sometimes run very close to windward of the law.

Fernand was a pearler, a worker, it is true, but perhaps of a nobler type than even Cyrus.

These thoughts came through her head with no trace of disloyalty toward the man she had loved best in the world up to this, and she showed nothing of them.

She did not mention Fernand any more; she knew instinctively that her stepfather had a dislike to the new man who had suddenly entered their world, a dislike based, perhaps, on some vague subconscious suspicion that here was the man who would take June away from him.

Her talk that afternoon had, perhaps, betrayed her mind.

Next morning, as we have seen, up soon after sunrise, the girl went to the taffrail to watch the pearlers put out. She was sweeping the canoe beach with the glasses when, seeing Fernand standing on the beach, she waved her hand in recognition, and he returned the greeting.