Coral Sands/Chapter 2

HIS was the strangest person in that home of strange people, Araffura Lagoon. Unclothed but for a loin cloth, straight as an arrow, beautiful as a god and young as the Indian Bacchus, Fernand Diaz showed not a trace of the Kanaka. The ruin of the Kanaka face is the spread nose. Fernand's nose was high-bridged, thin-nostriled, sensitive. He looked at you straight and right to the back of your skull and his eyes when roving the lagoon had in them a look of distance and daring born of the great sea spaces and battles with the Paumotan winds.

He was unclothed now for the fishing, but in his house away back there you would have found the clothes he had just put off.

Yakoff was his tailor and outfitter, and never did a tailor get such money as Yakoff, for Fernand paid with pearls and shell.

“Six silk shirts, a hundred and twenty dollars; two white-drill suits, two hundred dollars; one hundred dollars for them silk socks, thrown in at the price. Them two white pearls will make me dollars out of pocket. Throw in that baroque to make things even.”

And the Araffura dandy would throw in the baroque. He never haggled with Yakoff. There were other things, eau de Cologne, white shoes, cigarettes; he paid for all and never went in debt, whereas his diving partner Topi was always up to the eyes, for Topi drank in the off season and Topi took opium when he could get it and was always after the girls—a Polynesian with a Melanesian taint, wild as a kittiwake, yet at work honest and the best partner man could have.

Fernand never looked at a girl.

His Spanish ancestry—his father had been wrecked here twenty-two years ago—was strong in him. Maybe it was just coldness born of the sea and winds, but he never looked at a girl.

It wasn't religion. Seguer, the French missionary who had taught him French and English so that he could talk either language fluently, could not teach him religion.

“I can understand here,” said Fernand, putting his hand to his brow, “but not here,” putting his hand to his heart. “I have been too deep in the sea, driven too often by the winds, seen too many stars. Death has held me too often in the hollow of his hand. I cannot think as you think, or feel as you feel.”

Yet he had helped to build the tiny coral church and had given a twenty-grain pearl to the mission of St. Francis, and he loved Seguer and had once saved him from drowning at the risk of his own life.

“The best Christian in the islands, though an absolute pagan,” had said Seguer.

Fernand stopped now to speak to Yakoff.

“Yakoff,” said Fernand, speaking in English, “you have sold my partner Topi opium again, and at the beginning of the season.”

“I?” said Yakoff. “Never.”

“You have sold him the opium. I found the parcel; he confessed to me, and I flung it to the lagoon. There I will fling you also should you sell him it again.”

“You will have your jest,” said Yakoff, foolishly unable to stand the gaze of the other.

“Yakoff, a man who carries opium to the islands carries death; he is a brother of the tiger shark and should die. It is the same with the man who brings samshu, like the Chinaman, Ah Sin. You are a bad man, Yakoff, and no more goods will I take from you. No, never. Topi is in your debt. How much does he owe you?”

“But a few dollars, and that for goods supplied.”

“He owes you a thousand dollars, less fifty, and five hundred of those for the opium which I have flung away.”

Now Yakoff was in with the French commissioner of the island, he felt safe from personal violence. He knew men and he knew that he had lost Fernand as a customer, and his greasy soul hated the clean, bright spirit it was facing.

The face under the sun hat changed and he broke out, his voice suddenly taking the American tang:

“Aw, stand away from me—don't crowd me. You and your partner and be hanged to you both. Go on, take yourself off to your canoe, you damned Kanaka.”

Before this deadly insult Fernand drew slightly back. He would have killed Yakoff had he let himself loose. He just stood and looked, and Yakoff before that gaze lost his tongue and his assurance, shuffled his feet and went off.