Coral Sands/Chapter 8

HEN she awoke in the morning the brooding sense of danger was gone, or, at least, had withdrawn.

It was seven o'clock, and she came on deck nearly an hour before breakfast to find a fresh wind blowing and sea gulls clanging and fishing, the coconut palms bending to the merry wind and the foam of the outer reef flashing high. The world seemed new made, new minted, youth everywhere hand in hand with morning.

The wind brought the smell of the beach. Some storm beyond the Marquesas was sending a heavy run of sea, strewing the outer beach with still-living seaweed, breaking the coral that would soon be renewed. The whole forty-mile ring of Araffura Lagoon is living; at least, it is protected from the sea by a living reef that grows again when broken.

June breathed in the scent of the reef. She was worth looking at as she stood all in white, her hand on the rail and her eyes on the shore where the early-morning life of the village had begun.

Children were playing by the waterside, and on the strip of canoe beach the pearl fishers were gathering, pushing off or tinkering at their canoes. The sound of a concertina came on the breeze—the concertina Yakoff had sold to Tipu for a pearl worth several hundred—and here and there, arising, twisted by the wind, could be seen the smoke from the fires of the cooking places where the fish caught overnight were being cooked.

She had almost forgotten Fernand and his promise of bringing the canoe.

At half past nine, however, just as Cyrus was lighting his first cigar of the day and the darky steward was clearing the breakfast things, a quartermaster dropped below to say that a canoe had come off, and could Miss June please to come up and look at it?

“That's him,” said June, forgetting her grammar, but remembering the canoe man of the night before. “I'll be up in a minute. Dad, I'm going to try and sail an outrigger.”

“Well, you can swim,” said Cyrus, “and there's no fear of sharks after what they've been doing to them, so the bos'n told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Oh, it's just done to frighten the others. At the beginning of the pearling season they catch half a dozen tiger sharks and cut off their fins and blind them and let them loose in the lagoon. They go cruising about, and that frightens the other sharks so that they keep clear of the place.”

“Oh, the cruel beasts!” cried June. “How can human beings do such things?”

“Well, I expect if you'd seen a human being after a tiger shark had taken a piece off him, you wouldn't be asking that,” said Cyrus, sitting down to his bureau and the letters which were due to be dispatched when the mail brigantine left for Papeete.

On deck June got a surprise. Wabbling in the swell beside the landing-stage gratings lay the canoe, but the canoeman was not the nearly unclad Apollo of the night before. Fernand was not diving to-day, and he had put on white flannels and a white shirt. He wore neither shoes nor stockings; all the same, the change was startling for a moment, but only for a moment; after that the canoe took all her attention.

“My partner is not well,” said Fernand, “so I brought her out alone.”

“Thanks,” said June.

In the full light of morning the canoe lay before her in all its strangeness. The body seemed cut from a single tree trunk, so narrow was it; the outrigger was just a long slip of wood and the rattan bridge between canoe and outrigger was so open-worked that she could see the water through it as she gazed down.

Fernand explained that nearly every other canoe was connected with the outrigger by two curved wooden rails, and that the broad bridge of rattan was the work of a canoe maker who had brought the idea from somewhere else.

“It is good to stand on,” said he, “and to tie things to.” He pointed with his bare right foot to some green coconuts in a net bag tied to the bridge. “Drinking nuts,” said Fernand, “if one is thirsty.”

“It's wonderful,” said June; “wonderful that it floats at all without upsetting. Have you brought a paddle for me?”

Fernand said that there were three paddles on board. He pointed them out, lying aft all in a bunch; but would she not prefer putting off the business till Topi was well and able to accompany them to help in the paddling? He would be well to-morrow.

No, June wanted to go then and there, and she guessed she could paddle as well as Topi; she was used to a Canadian canoe, and any one who could paddle a Canadian canoe could paddle anything.

Fernand, with a grave smile but without a word, brought the little craft close up to the gratings and held her there while the girl stepped in.

Woof! but this was different from a Canadian canoe or a Rob Roy. Why, this was crazy, plumb crazy.

She had forgotten the outrigger, whose weight kept the thing from turning turtle when she leaned to port, and whose resistance kept it from doing ditto when she leaned to starboard. Then, with a push, they were out on the glittering water, a river of looking-glass stretched between her and the California.

Fernand courteously handed her a paddle and showed her how to use it.

“When we get a bit farther away,” said he, “I will break out the sail. Would you care to see the pearling grounds?”

For a moment the one desire of June was to get back to the yacht and safety. She had been utterly fearless up to this; canoes, motor boats, yachts of all sizes, she was used to them, perhaps through heredity, but this thing was perfectly new; there was no ancestral experience to meet it. But she would far rather have drowned than confessed to this.

“Yes, certainly,” she said. “I am longing to see the pearling grounds.”

Fernand turned the canoe's head to the west. Then he broke out the sail. The run was short; he dropped the anchor, and June, used to the business now and unafraid, looked round her at the pearling fleet. Far and wide it lay spread, the pearlers idling and smoking or busy as beavers in the water. The pearler takes his own time and will not be hurried; he may idle half a day or a whole day or he may nearly kill himself with work.

Fernand explained this to the girl.

“Do you dive?” she asked.

“I am a diver,” he replied. “I was born here, and there is nothing else to do, but I am not of these people.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “of course not. I could see that at once.”

“My father was wrecked here many years ago,” said Fernand. “His name was the same as mine, Fernand Diaz. He was from Seville. He married my mother, who was not pure white. Both my father and mother are dead. My mother was half French.” He stopped.

June guessed what was at his heart. He did not say what the other half of his mother was. Native, of course, and he was ashamed of it. Though he showed nothing of this fact outwardly, she knew, just as though she were reading his thoughts.

“I would never have thought you anything but English or French,” said she.

“Yet it remains,” said Fernand. “It is a barrier between me and you people.”

“Only a barrier for fools,” said she indignantly, and infinitely touched by the way he had said, “you people,” as though he were cut out, a lost sheep through no fault of his own. “Only a barrier for fools. Forget it, or, at least, don't let the remembrance of it worry you. Now, tell me. How is it that you come to speak English so well, seeing that you were Spanish?”

“Oh, I talk French as well as English,” said he. “It was our missionary who taught me, and I am one of those who pick up languages easily.”

He was looking away toward the California.

A canoe was putting off from the shore for the yacht, and even at that great distance Fernand recognized it as the canoe of Yakoff, or, rather, the canoe that Yakoff always hired for the season.

Fernand's sight was keen as that of the sea hawks; besides, Yakoff, out of some whim, always fixed a dugong skull at the bow of his canoe as a mascot.

“What are you looking at?” asked the girl.

“Oh, it is only a canoe putting out to your boat,” he replied. “Yakoff, the trader. A bad man.”

“How, bad?”

“He sells the men opium. My partner is ill to-day because of the opium Yakoff sold him or gave him, and now he is going to your boat.”

“I will tell father when I get back,” said she.

“Yes,” said Fernand; “it would be well.”

The sight of Yakoff's boat putting out to the yacht had touched him in a strange manner; it was as though he sensed some danger to June and her father. Perhaps it was just his knowledge that the trader was an eighteen-carat bad man, joined with a suddenly awakened feeling for this girl who was the first person who had ever sympathized with him. Be that as it may, the premonition remained.

June, leaning on the canoe gunwale, was looking overboard. She had forgotten Yakoff and everything else. A huge sea bream was passing beneath the boat, moving without swiftness and without effort; it vanished and another appeared, passed and vanished. Then another, which suddenly bent on itself and flicked away while a gray, rushing shape, that had aimed at the bream and missed, passed with a trail of bubbles.

“It is a fish shark,” said Fernand. “Not dangerous—or only to the fish. See, there are oysters.”

The girl, looking down through the water now clear and undisturbed, saw the huge shells half tilted on their sides; amid the long, conch whip-oyster fucus a little to the right and almost out of the line of vision, she saw another shell pile, enormous, looking at least four feet in breadth.

“That,” said Fernand, “is something worse than any shark. 'Mayama,' we call it. But the Americans call it a clam. See, it is open. Should a diver put his foot into it or a hand, it would close. He would never escape.”

The girl shuddered. Under and through all this beauty Death showed himself lurking, as in that picture of Albrecht Dürer's. Last night the Frenchman who came on board had warned the yacht not to fish, as the lagoon fish just at that season were poisonous. She mentioned this fact now and Fernand nodded.

“Yes,” cried Fernand; “one can easily die at Araffura if one is not careful.”

He stood up and unbrailed the sail; then he pulled in the anchor.

“But you have not yet seen the lagoon,” said he.

She looked up at him, wondering what he meant; the lagoon was all around them, yet she had not seen it. He guessed by her look what was in her mind.

“I will show you,” said he.

He gave her the sheet to hold and took the steering paddle.