Coral Sands/Chapter 7

ND meanwhile, on board the California, dinner had been served. Nothing could be more striking than the difference between the desolation and half savagery of the island beach and the saloon of the yacht—the table sparkling with crystal and silver, the darky steward, all in white, assisted by the second steward, a Javanese, turbaned and sandaled, the girl in evening clothes, and the man, the owner of this floating mansion, also in evening dress.

It might have been Delmonico's before the prohibition era, or Sherry's, and yet through the open ports and half-open skylight came, like the sound of a distant train, the roar of the reef to the breakers, a ceaseless sound that had filled the air before the Conqueror had landed on English soil, before Moses had given laws to the Israelites, before the Pharaohs ruled.

“Such a lovely boatman,” said June. “He's like a picture and he's promised to bring his canoe to-morrow morning for me to try.”

“Well, mind the sharks,” said her father. “Those outriggers will spill you like quicksilver if you're not careful with them. I remember”

He checked himself.

“Yes?” said June.

“Oh, it was nothing—only a business out in the East and it was a catamaran that capsized.”

“What was the business?” asked she.

Cyrus had an irritating habit of beginning a story, intriguing the imagination and then drying up. He would start a yarn about his past experiences and then suddenly the story would wilt. It was as though there were something in his past life that had a chilling effect when remembered.

June knew next to nothing about her stepfather's past. He had been a sailor, he had made his money in phosphates, he had been good to her mother, he was himself, the great, burly, four-square Cyrus Hardanger, that was all she knew and all she wanted to know. Yet her instinct for a story prompted her now to try and make him talk.

“What was the business?” she asked.

Cyrus laughed. Perhaps it was the wildness of the place outside and the sense of the distance of civilization that loosened his tongue, perhaps the champagne.

“What was the business? Smuggling. Yes, you'd never think your old stepdad had been a smuggler. It was guns.”

“What sort of guns?” asked June, vastly interested and quite unshocked.

“Rifles. Remington rifles. Automatics and the ammunition for them.”

“And where were you smuggling them to?” asked June.

“It was this way,” said he. “A little tin-pot South American state was due to have a revolution; they hadn't had one for five years. So my partner went nosing down, looking for the head of the revolutionaries, and found him and contracted to land ten thousand Winchesters with ammunition for fifty thousand American dollars, gold coin. We did. But while prospecting in the business, I had a spill from that boat I've called a catamaran. It was three logs with a mast to it.”

“What became of your partner?”

Cyrus, who had been toying with his wineglass, gazing at the tablecloth with a far-away look as he talked, turned his eyes on June.

The question seemed to have startled him out of himself and thrown him off his balance.

“What became of who? Oh, him? I don't know. We went to Australia and had a quarrel and parted.”

He pushed the glass away and took the box of cigars that had been placed by his side, selected one and lit it.

Then he went up on deck to smoke.

June noticed that he had not taken the band off the cigar, an invariable act never omitted, to her knowledge, till now.

The girl felt disturbed. She was absolutely without care for convention, and still it came to her with an after shock, this fact that Cyrus had been running once outside the law. She had not minded while he was telling the story, but now he was gone the after taste came.

Smuggling guns to revolutionaries. And his partner—why had the question disturbed him so?

June loved Cyrus. He was everything and everybody to her—mother, father, brother and sister, all rolled into one. She loved him like that, and she loved him also as a protector. Anything threatening him, anything derogatory to him, touched her soul.

She wished now that she had not asked that question. A man must have many things in his life, not all of them admirable. Why had she asked? Why had he told her? It was nothing, yet somehow it seemed a stain.

She went up on deck.

June had a highly strung temperament; she was hypersensitive to the personality of others and she was instinctive. On deck, she could not see her father; he was in the deck house which was used as a smoking room, smoking. Having ascertained this by looking through the deck-house porthole, she went to the starboard rail and leaned on it looking at the shore.

The California swinging to the tide was broadside onto the reef, and she could see the lights of the little houses, and far away to the west the torches of the fish spearers on the outer coral.

The moon which had risen showed the beached canoes on the inner beach and the flare where Lipi, the netmaker and canoe mender, was at work melting pitch.

From the village came the tangling of a banjo and a harsh, raucous voice singing an American darky song.

It was just in this moment, as though winged by the banjo notes, that a sense of impending danger came to June. Not danger to herself but to Cyrus.

Suddenly and all at once Araffura Lagoon became for her malignant; there was something here crouching in the darkness and ready to spring, something that frightened her. The sound of the reef seemed its voice and those twinkling lights its eyes. Absurd! She tried to fight against it, and, turning, came to the deck-house door. She came into the house and closed the door.

Cyrus, in an armchair, was reading a book. The steward had just put coffee by his side.

“No, thanks,” said June. “I don't feel I want coffee to-night. Dad, I don't like this place.”

“Why, what on earth is wrong with the place?” asked Cyrus. “You mean the island, of course.”

“Yes. I don't like it. Will you come right away from it to-morrow?”

Cyrus laughed.

“I've got to wait here till the mail brigantine is in from Papeete, and there's a cable coming by her and letters and stores. MacAlister fixed it all up in Frisco for me. Then, the auxiliary has to be taken down and cleaned and tinkered, and one of the spars is sprung. No, Ju, I can't take her out to-morrow. Nor next day, nor for a full week. Now what ails yon, little girl?”

“Oh, it's nothing,” said June. “Only—only—as I was standing on deck just now a feeling came to me that danger was here and coming to us—to you.”

“Lord bless your soul,” said Cyrus. “Danger has been coming to me all my life, and, what's more, it has arrived time and again, and I've met it. I reckon danger is everywhere, and if it don't hit you with a tornado it's just as likely to hit you with a slate on your head coming down Market Street. Danger don't trouble me; don't let it trouble you.”

“I couldn't help speaking,” said June. “Maybe it's all foolishness. I hope so, anyway.”

She went off after having kissed him good night.