Coral Sands/Chapter 3

HE boy turned to the lagoon side where his partner Topi was waiting by their beached canoe. It was an outrigger. Far too narrow to sit the water, it was stabilized by a long skate-shaped piece of wood connected to the body of the canoe by a bridge of rattan. This bridge served also as a deck on which to stand. A mast-and-mat sail completed the outfit, and when they had pushed off Topi ran up the sail and the east wind blowing from the lagoon mouth took them like a feather.

The push-off, the outflung sail and the drive toward the west were beautiful to watch. It was like a water bird taking to the water, or a dragon fly to the air. Heading now for the pearling grounds, steering paddle in hand, Fernand kept the canoe on her course, mechanically, without thought, all his mind centered on one red spot round the insult of Yakoff.

“You damned Kanaka.”

It was the grain of truth that hit. His mother had been half Kanaka. He, Fernand, was all white in soul only for just that.

And he couldn't kill Yakoff.

Deep in his heart the craving to kill Yakoff was like the desire of the drunkard for drink, but he could not kill him. He was too mean, too contemptible, and the insult would remain unkilled—yet some day, some way, he would satisfy his hatred of the trader. Yes, some day.

He flung the steering paddle down. Topi was brailing up the sail; they had reached the pearling ground and the pearling fleet lay all around and beyond.

All across the blue, wind-dusked water it lay anchored, canoe on canoe, with the brown divers dripping in the sun or dropping like stones to the depths.

Topi let the anchor fall, glanced over and then, taking the net bag, fastened it round him. Then he slipped into the water like a seal and sank.

Fernand, looking over, watched his diving mate wandering about like a brown shadow amid the long coach-whip oyster fucus, picking the oysters here and there and filling the bag, unhurried as a man ashore picking mushrooms.

Colored fish cut across the vision and a great globed jellyfish went rolling by a fathom deep like a crystal ball, followed by a young whip ray no bigger than a saucer and a shoal of tiny silver fry. Then Topi rose and, with hand on gunnel, gave over the bag to be emptied. He had been down nearly three minutes.

Now the law of Araffura Lagoon—as, indeed, of all the Paumotan lagoons—is that no oysters may be rotted out on the beaches; all shells must be opened in the canoes and the meat, having been searched for pearls, flung overboard.

Fernand did the opening and searching to-day, stacking the empty shells, big as soup plates, in the bottom of the canoe. Not a pearl, nothing but a few seeds. He worked with an appearance of absolute indifference. He was used to the business, this business that seems to the uninitiated so romantic, so filled with the excitement of the treasure hunt, yet which in reality and with the novelty gone is monotonous as bottle washing.

For you may open a thousand oysters without finding a pearl, and a thousand more may only give you a bouton, yet in the very first oyster of the day's catch you may feel something round and hard in the flesh of the mantle, and gently working may squeeze to light a beautiful milky bubble, a perfect round worth maybe a thousand dollars or maybe five.

There was nothing to-day—only the shell worth a few dollars and carefully cleaned and stacked.

But there were cigarettes to be smoked as they were drying off in the almost setting sun, while the canoe strained gently to its rope against the swell of the incoming tide.

Topi, who was forward and about to haul in the anchor, suddenly paused in that business and called out to Fernand who turned, shaded his eyes and looked away toward the reef break.

Between the piers of coral the sheeting azure of the outer sea was rumpling toward the lagoon waters and lifting against the coral piers in foam,

The tide was coming in strong now, preceded by a bore like a ruler running under silk, and with the tide was coming a ship.

A topsail schooner, wind and tide with her, white hull, white sails, hard against the blue as though cut from Pentelic marble.

A ship, but unlike any other ship they had ever seen. This was no frowzy trader, no mail brigantine, no cockroach trap laden with pearl buyers from Papeete, this white ghost from the sea.

Fernand, gazing, fell into a rapture of mind; all his sea instincts stood abashed and worshiping before this vision of whiteness and grace undreamed of and suddenly revealed. It was as though he were gazing at a spirit, a spirit that was nothing more than the million-dollar, two-hundred-ton auxiliary schooner yacht California, the property of Cyrus Hardanger of San Francisco.

They watched the sails shrivel off her and the white hull turning broadside toward them as she swung toward the northern beach. They heard the rumble of the anchor chain.

Then Topi hauled in the killick and they broke out the sail and steered to inspect the stranger.