Island of destiny

Front matter

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Chapter I

T HE giant rollers were breaking with the sound of thunder on the glittering obsidian cliffs, and the air was heavy with the impending calamity of a great storm. An inky sky drooped low, and the waves leapt to meet it in a skirl of foam. Between the flat ex¬ panse above and the moving surface below the wind whirred with the noise of a million humming tops, and the water rushed to the horizon in a waste of raging grey.

Islands, mere barren rocks, were scattered in that deso¬ late sea like mushrooms in a meadow; an unstable meadow which covered the smaller islands with each turbulent rush. They disappeared and emerged glistening, then disap¬ peared again, while clouds of seabirds hovered, settled, and hovered once mere with loud cries.

The island with the glittering cliffs was the largest by far; a giant mushroom bursting from the sea to the height of a thousand feet. Above its cliffs of obsidian basaft rose hills clothed with trees and thick with undergrowth.

Around it desolation reigned supreme, and loneliness held sovereign sway. The breakers foamed in inchoate madness among the rocky islets, and seabirds screamed

mournfully above an empty sea which ran unchecked to the southern rim of the globe. It was a scene where a god, tired of solitude, might have brooded fresh schemes for peopling dead worlds, but the last spot where one would have expected his highest handiwork on this to be found.

Yet a man stood there; a motionless dark speck upon the brink of the glittering cliffs in the lowering dusk of that cheerless evening.

The clouds parted, and revealed a red sun hanging on the horizon like a distorted eye which seemed to stare at the solitary figure upon the cliffs. The man watched it earnestly. It plunged beneath the water as he looked, trailing a last gleam of light across the dark sea like a streak of blood, and the wings of night threw monstrous shadows across the sky. The islands and the birds van¬ ished from view in a bluish mist which began to spread over the surface of the waves. A large albatross swept rapidly overhead on snow-white pinions as though it feared the coming dark. The sea moaned uneasily. A drop of rain splashed warm and thick on the man’s hand. It was the presage of the coming storm. With a final glance around him, and another at the black sky, he turned his back on the cliffs and walked away.

He kept to the heights until the cliffs dwindled and declined into a sagging rocky extremity which disappeared beneath the sea. Where they started to fall away he turned into a path which dropped like a thread down the rocks to a strip of white beach below. Descending this path with care, he picked his way through the surf creaming on the beach until he reached a stone landing-place jutting into the sea. Behind the landing-place a green declivity stretched towards a high saddle of the hills, and in the open space was built a hut. As the man approached, the stillness of the dusk was broken by a sound incongruous yet homelike in the primeval solitude —the joyous, welcoming bark of a dog.

Inside the hut it was dark, but a handful of fire glowed on the dim outline of homely things and the frisking shape of the dog. The man lit a swinging lamp. The stronger light gushed upon a beamed interior, furnished roughly. A table, two chairs, a dresser with crockery and a dangling frying-pan, some lockers to stow away stores; things like these, with a few books on a shelf affixed to the wall, composed the interior and gave it an aspect of home. A small window with shutters looked out on the sea, and an aperture opposite showed a sleeping-place with a fixed berth, more lockers, a storm lantern hanging from the beam, and a candlestick and book upon a chair.

The man disappeared into the sleeping-place, reap¬ peared, and set about getting supper. The dog on the hearth thumped an expectant tail. The man fried bacon in the pan, and brought some ship’s biscuits from one of the lockers. Supper cooked, man and dog shared it to¬ gether—except the coffee which the man brewed in a little pot, and drank black and strong from a thick white cup. The meal finished, the dog stretched himself in blinking content before the fire. The man tidied up, threw more wood on the fire, and sat down with a book and pipe.

The book was Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads. It opened in his hands at “A Ballad of Burdens.” He read:

“The burden of dead faces. Out of sight

And out of love, beyond the reach of hands.”

He read no further. The volume dropped unheeded from his hands as he sat there, staring sombrely into the flames. Thought is one of the few things which is free to all and can be pursued anywhere. This man had special facilities for it. His meditations were never interrupted. He had no companion save his dog, to whom speech had been denied, and he was cut off from all human compan¬ ionship by three hundred miles of ocean now lashing and roaring in fury against the obsidian cliffs of the island where he lived alone.

The chain of circumstances which brought him there stretched nine months back to a colonial city of wooden houses perched in crazy tiers around the steep slopes of a circular bay. Destiny’s agent w r as a spectacled clerical cog in the Colonial Government’s official machinery; head clerk in the Conservations Department which administered the barren islands marked on official maps as portion of the Colonial Government’s “dominions.” In the depart¬ ment’s gift was the vacant curatorship of Bird Sanctuary Island, with such advantages as £100 per annum, quarters, rations, and a free life bestowed. In spite of these benefits and a deplorable increase in local unemploy¬ ment, there was not a rush of applicants for the job. To be quite accurate, there was none at all until James Ray¬ mond applied. The official cog regarded him dubiously. The applicant had a dubious and reckless air. He ap¬ peared to be of a gentlemanly derelict type which unfortu¬ nately found its way to the Utopia of Colonial Govern¬ ments from the islands or heaven knew where by every incoming boat. The official mind considered. The man looked hard up, but he was young, with a strong frame. The post had to be filled. The Leader of the Opposition had blandly interrogated the Government about it. Yes; he would have to do. There was no one else. The place was hundreds of miles from anywhere, and the periodical calls of the lighthouse steamer were irregular. The last curator had gone mad in the solitudes—was found hop¬ ping about the cliffs, suffering from the hallucination that he was an albatross. With this episode in his mind the head clerk felt it expedient to explain to the new applicant that the post was in the nature of a lonely one. There had been an assistant curator at one time, but the assistant had been abolished in response to public demand for national retrenchment.

“But there’ll be a dog,” the head clerk proceeded to explain, “and a dog is such company. The Government steamer calls every four months with stores. The curator is absolutely his own master, subject to the preparation of periodical reports to this department. The duties are light, but sufficient to keep the mind occupied. On the whole, a healthy, open-air life, if you do not mind a little loneliness—to which, no doubt, one soon becomes accustomed.”

“I’m not afraid of solitude,” the applicant replied. “I prefer it to humanity. I’ll go, if you’ll have me.”

The head clerk rolled up a large scale map on whose glittering surface the group of islands appeared like specks dusted from a pepper-pot.

“The Department may be disposed to consider your application. Your name is-”

“Raymond—James Raymond.”

“Very well, Mr. Raymond. Would you be prepared to go to the island by the lighthouse steamer leaving on Thursday?”

“Yes.”

Six days later the Ascanius crept cautiously through the sea of tombstone rocks towards the wooded eminence which showed like the brown back of a squatting camel above the glittering cliffs of Sanctuary Island. The steamer anchored well out, dark smoke floating sullenly from her white funnel, while a boat conveyed James Ray¬ mond, a dog, and four months’ stores through the treach¬ erous reefs to the island’s one landing-place. Captain Marquet was glad when the task was accomplished and his boat safely back from that place of fearful currents, whirlpools, and implacable cliffs on which the sea broke with menacing roar. The steamer’s head swung round to the south. She went on her way, leaving the new curator to the solitude of the South Pacific, his stores scattered about the rocks above w’hich seabirds circled in screaming flocks. Captain Marquet carried away with him, as a last impression of his passenger, the memory of a tall figure standing motionless on the shingle beach, the dog at his side, watching the departing ship.

That was nine months ago. The Ascanius had paid two of her periodic visits to the island since. She had delivered stores, but no letters. Apparently James Ray¬ mond had no friends; no one in the world who cared whether he lived or died. Captain Marquet, a sociable gossiping soul, was worried over a man who had nobody to write to him: neither friends, relations, chick nor child. He regarded such an existence as rather sinister. It even excited his indignation. He retailed it as a piece of remarkable news to the lighthouse keepers on his southern circuit. “Not so much as a newspaper,” he added em¬ phatically, in fitting climax. The grave bearded faces of the lighthouse men reflected his own astonishment, as in a mirror. They received letters and newspapers—w T hole bundles of them—by every visit of the Ascanius. Friends who had not perhaps mastered all the grades of penman¬ ship could at least manage to address a newspaper. To their simple way of thinking such a state of affairs was insupportable. The keeper of Cape Bleak Lighthouse, the southernmost fingerpost to the Ice Barrier, expressed the view that the island caretaker must be as lonely as a skua gull. His eye rested on one of those Antarctic har¬ bingers as he spoke. Captain Marquet’s glance followed the flight of the bird. “He’s a damned queer lot,” he said, referring to Raymond. “I took him out there, and I ought to know. An Englishman, I should say with a re¬ served and superior air—this damned keeper of a bird preserve. I told my chaps when they landed his stores to bring him back in the boat for a final taste, but he sent back word that he preferred to stay ashore. He’ll wait a long time before I ask him again. Mark my words, he’s a queer lot. Never a letter, never a newspaper! It might mean—lots of things.”

His listeners concurred, and Captain Marquet and the Ascanius went on to the next lighthouse to tell the story anew. He w r as a welcome visitor among the keepers. They, at least, did not decline his offer to have a taste.

James Raymond lived his solitary life on the island unaware that he was the cause of gossip among southern lighthouses. He had his duties: birds to look after dur¬ ing the day, reports and maps to prepare at night. The island had not been proclaimed a sanctuary for the seafowl which swooped and cried around its shining cliffs. They needed no sanctuary, no help from man. Their screams mockingly derided that idea. By proclamation and adoption it was a home for softer inland species of rare plumage, officially protected from the rapacity of collectors and agents of the plumage trade. It was an ingenious method of preserving such birds from extinc¬ tion, and one worthy of the paternal instincts of a Co¬ lonial Government. The island was too far away for agents, and so difficult to land upon that any collector tempted thither for specimens was more likely to add himself to Death’s unrivalled collection than enrich his own.

The island showed glittering teeth to the sea, but the eminence above the cliffs was seamed with sheltered and wooded ravines where these birds from the mainland ac¬ climatised and increased. Nature had made a sanctuary of the island before the Colonial and paternal Govern¬ ment hit upon the idea. Birds were sometimes blown there by the winds, and deposited—soaked and flustered bun¬ dles of feathers—in this haven of refuge where abun¬ dance awaited them. They never attempted to leave the island again. They knew the difficulties of that journey. Brought there on the wings of the wind, they stayed and multiplied, in the care of the curator. The rare birds— those specially protected by Act of Parliament—were his chief solicitude. He fed them and guarded their nests, restored impulsive nestlings to anxious parents, and shot the wild cats which stalked them. The dog had been trained to warn him when these sly creatures with yel¬ low eyes were prowling after his charges, and tracks he had made from his hut took him quickly to every part of the island.

The birds repaid his care by singing to him, or it may be their song was an outpouring of gratitude for their safe journey to that spot. They sang of mornings, in a grove at the back of the hut, starting the new day with a tremulous fluted chorus which awakened their custodian from sleep. They had learnt to know and trust him, and they watched for his coming with fearless bright eyes, hopping and fluttering around him for the breakfast he scattered at his feet. There were birds with most gor¬ geous plumage, of a kind he had never seen, and smaller homelier sorts which reminded him of English songsters, but they were all happy together in their island home, and preserved the amenities of bird life with an innocent decorum. They had nothing to fear except the wild cats, and James Raymond hunted them remorselessly.

He had other duties to perform besides looking after his birds of song and bright plumage. The neighbouring islands had to be visited in the boat which was moored to the landing-place. He might have felt justified in disregarding an order which seemed merely to demon¬ strate the futility of the official mind which had framed his duties (as set out in the official White Paper which the chief clerk of the Conservations Department had given him), but he never did. He conscientiously performed all the tasks scheduled in the White Paper, and therein Duty XXI was set out as follows: “Once in every four¬ teen days the curator shall inspect and report upon the well-being of the seabirds on the surrounding islands, and shall take any measures which may be deemed advisable.” The official mind had not indicated the na¬ ture of these measures, nor when the necessity for them was supposed to arise, James Raymond did not know either. But the order was clear, so once a fortnight he gravely “inspected” the rookeries (as he called them) of penguin and albatross on the rocks which rose from the sea around Sanctuary Island like monuments of some graveyard of the deep.

It was a strange sight if anyone could have seen it, this tour of inspection of these southern solitudes made by a small motor-boat with a solitary figure steering, and a barking dog in the bow, darting perilously among the sounds and currents of those barren islets covered with hordes of shrieking and staring seabirds. There were gulls, albatrosses, penguins, nellies, mollyhawks, whalebirds, shags, petrels: every kind and species of seabird inhabited this mysterious region of deep waters and empty islands, which stretched, big and little, to the dis¬ tant horizon that concealed the southern ice. It was their home.

The clouds of seabirds which returned to the islands at night from afar imposed on the senses as an event mon¬ strous and incredible. James Raymond scaled the ob¬ sidian cliffs of his island every evening to watch the sight. It seemed impossible that the world could harbour so many birds. The air was dark with them, the sea swarmed with them. There was something vaguely dis¬ turbing to the imagination in the contemplation of that feathered multitude. The desolate sea of rocky islets might have been the assembling place of every seabird on earth, a place beyond humanity’s ken, whether they re¬ paired nightly for some secret purpose of their own. From dusk to dark they kept arriving as though in obedience to an imperative command. From unknown parts they dropped from the sky or came from the ocean to form motionless roosting platoons upon the glistening rocks or dreary stretches of dark sand, and their unend¬ ing cries were borne to the dweller on the obsidian island like the chirping of a great host of cicadae, rising and falling with the melancholy cadence of a goblin choir in¬ toning a liturgy of woe.

It was a strange life for a human soul, with nothing to break the eternal round of solitude save the rare visits of the Ascanius , bringing rations—but no letters. Cap¬ tain Marquet had been known to express the opinion that the man who called himself James Raymond had sought this remote spot to hide himself from justice under an assumed name. Captain Marquet’s imagination could not conceive of a man preferring to live alone, sufficient unto himself, like a god. Yet this world holds such men. Or it may have been that nobody was interested enough in James Raymond to care whether he was alive or dead. Again, the world holds many such men. But, whatever the reason, the curator of Sanctuary Island was revealed by his own act as one cut off from his kind, holding no further communion with them.

It was a strange life, but the man who now sat staring into the glowing fire had not found it an unhappy one. He had gained a measure of peace—of respite. Nature had done much for him since he had been set down with his stores on the landing-place nine months before. She had redeemed the good body she had given him at birth. Like a stern and righteous mother she had taken him in hand. He came to her a wreck, and she had made him a man again: at least in outward seeming. The sea and wind had buffeted out of him the physical deterioration of twelve wandering years. The rough, open-air life had hardened his muscles, braced his nerves, made keen and clear the English blue of his eyes, and tanned his fair English skin into the deep brown of perfect health.

He had sought sanctuary in this distant island with the birds, and he had found it. But who shall say where man gains peace? There were none to know if this man’s spirit was at rest. The flickering light in the hut cast gleams on his moody and weary face. Without was blackness and solitude. The dog, muzzle thrust out on crossed paws, slept at his feet. Outside the storm reached its height, sweeping over the island in the darkness with the inarticulate roar of elemental rage, a shriek run¬ ning through the uproar as if lost souls were being tortured aloft without respite. The hut shook in the terri¬ ble violence of the gale, and the swinging lamp oscillated in sympathy. Even the sea-birds might well have hugged their roosts on such a night.

The man by the fire nodded. He had spent the day making a new track to the top of the island, and he was wearier than he knew. Slumber, deep and profound, overcame him as he sat there. He slept the sleep of com¬ plete exhaustion—slept undisturbed throughout the storm.

The hours slipped past. The hut fire smouldered down to a faint glimmer, then expired in black dissolution. The storm outside began to abate, with moments of un¬ natural stillness in the midst of its strife, as though mys¬ teriously pausing to listen.

It was at such a moment that some shadowy perception reached the inner consciousness of the sleeper, and awakened him with a start.

Chapter II

H E awoke with a beating heart and a sense of fear. It seemed to him that he had been brought out of that profound sleep by a terrible cry. A dream of course, but how vivid! The scream was still echoing and ringing in his ears. He looked around him, and encoun¬ tered the gleaming eyes of the dog, staring at him in terror. The door flew open, as at a push from an unseen hand, and the hut was filled with rushing air. In the gulf of darkness beyond the open door a violet arc suddenly appeared, flashed and curved across the sky, hung sus¬ pended for a moment, and then as swiftly died away. Raymond sprang to his feet with a quick perception of the truth. A ship was in distress among the rocks of Sanctuary Island.

He lit a lantern and went out, followed by the dog. A late moon, scudding low, shone faintly on waves leaping like grey wolves at the throat of the sky. Raymond made his way to the landing-place. The sea was dashing over it and breaking with a hollow roar far up the shingle beach.

His eye discerned nothing but a dishevelled expanse of

water pierced by naked rocks. There were no more

rockets and no further cries, if, indeed, he had been

awakened by a cry. Once he thought he saw a dark mass

in the boiling surf at the foot of the cliffs, but before he

could be sure it was gone, sucked into one of the caverns at the base. Wreckage? It was possible. No ship could live long among those rocks, in that sea.

Raymond held his watch to the lantern. Four o’clock! Nearly dawn. Fie stood there, waiting for day to come.

Daybreak revealed a subsiding sea still running high. No more—at first; only the familiar spectacle of an end¬ less grey immobility, islets, and crying birds. Then Raymond’s eyes, dwelling far out, fell upon something floating in the distant water with seabirds sailing over¬ head. A mere black speck at first, it gradually grew larger, pointing a course direct for the island, at one moment poised high on the white crest of a wave, then slipping smoothly down into a polished green hollow. Nearer it came, until it disclosed itself to the watcher on the shore as a piece of wreckage supporting the body of a drowned man. Merely a few planks bound together, with an upright spar flying a fluttering strip of canvas as a signal for one beyond all aid. The drowned man had lashed himself to the spar, and seemed in the act of guid¬ ing his flimsy raft towards the landing-place. The sea¬ birds circled the wreckage with loud screams, and in the unstable water the corpse bowed gravely and repeat¬ edly to the man on the beach, as though soliciting the honour of his further acquaintance.

The strange cortege swept inward, bobbed through the broken water of the reef, and entered the narrow channel which led to the landing-place, as if steered by a hand which had not lost its seaman’s cunning. But it was a long while making harbour. Again and again it was washed back into the outer water. Whenever this hap¬ pened the corpse bowed deeply, almost apologetically, to the waiting figure on the brink, and the gulls screamed in wild mockery at the dead man’s inability to steer a course over a sea which they rode with such effortless ease. But with dogged pertinacity the wreckage always returned, tossing in the angry foam, advancing, retreating, the corpse bowing, the birds screaming. At length a great wave swept it almost to the landing-place, and Raymond dashed into the water and hauled it ashore.

On the oozing beach he bent over the wreckage and dis¬ entangled the body of a man w T ith brown skin, dark hair, and glazed dark eyes which now reproached an indifferent sky. The dungarees and blackened hands suggested he had been a fireman on the lost ship. On his naked and hairy breast was tattooed a woman’s face and the words “Good Luck.”

“ ‘Good Luck’! That was a talisman which failed,” murmured Raymond.

The dog sniffed the body timidly, looked up at Ray¬ mond, and whined.

One dead hand clutched a ship’s mail-bag; clutched it tightly, as if the sentiment of duty persisted in that simple mind after death; was, indeed, stronger than death. The dead eyes stared awfully at Raymond as he wrested the bag from his grasp, as though warning him to desist.

Raymond shook the contents of the bag on the sand. Letters and newspapers scattered at his feet. They were soaked with sea-w r ater, which had loosened envelopes and wrappers and blurred the writing. Listlessly he turned over these human docmnents which had gone to wreck with the ship. Most of them were mere pulp, but here and there some loving message or homely phrase started out from the soaked sheets. A spongy bank-note pledged the Governor and Company of the Bank of England to pay the bearer on demand the sum of Five Pounds. A shining lock of baby hair stirred wistfully in the breeze. Remittance and token—never to be delivered.

There was one packet of newspapers, tightly bound, which had partly escaped the effect of the sea. Raymond picked up the bundle and turned it over. English news¬ papers ! He cut the string which held them together. They fell apart, and from their midst a letter fluttered down on the wet rocks. It dropped with the superscrip¬ tion uppermost.

At the sight of the address Raymond uttered a sharp cry, staring down at the letter with features whitening rapidly into semblance of the dead man’s. Motionless as a figure in stone he stood, his eyes fixed upon the fallen envelope at his feet, one hand outstretched before him with the unconscious gesture of a sleeper trying to ward off an incredible vision. His face bore the stamp of amazement, agony, and a certain terror.

The dog whimpered anxiously and a gull near the corpse gave him a beady glance, but he did not stir. Once his eye wandered from the letter to the dead mes¬ senger who had borne it to the island, but immediately returned to the white packet at his feet.

At length he came to himself and regained something of his former composure. With the dazed effort of a man emerging from oblivion, he stooped and picked the letter up. He turned it over with a troubled air, like one who still doubted its reality. His hands shook a little, but his eyes shone with some deeper feeling than mere excitement. The envelope he held bore signs of much travelling, and had been sent on and re-addressed from distant parts of the world. “Try Johannesburg”; “Try Singapore”; “Try Hong-Kong”; “Try Port Moresby”; “Try Honolulu”; “Try Papeete”; “Try Sydney”; “Try Auckland.” These places started out like landmarks from shoals of directions to obscurer parts, where ad¬ venture quests romance afar from tourists’ tracks, seeking her vanishing footfalls with stout and eager heart. Addresses like these covered the letter back and front, weaving a fantastic border around the original direction in a female hand to “Robert Lynngarth, Esq., Poste Restante, Durban, Natal. Or Please Forward.”

“Please Forward!” “Priere de faire suivre!” That was an injunction which had been well obeyed since the distant day when the letter was first posted in England. The postal authorities of many countries had done their best to carry out the behest. They had searched for Robert Lynngarth with a zeal which was an everlasting rebuke to all who sneer at the efficiency of Government service. Postal departments had pursued the wandering figure of Robert Lynngarth through the East and the Southern Hemisphere for years. They had stamped and franked his letter on from Africa, Asia, the East, and the Islands. It had sought him in places far apart: Bang¬ kok, the Solomons, Broome, Invercargill; been rejected, and gone on its weary way again, the Flying Dutchman of the post offices of the world.

The ocean had sought to destroy it, but it had sur¬ vived shipwreck. Then the sea had relented, and had suc¬ ceeded where the postal systems had failed. The sea’s dead messenger, riding ashore on his raft, had delivered the letter to one who had a better right to open it than anyone else.

This the man known as James Raymond seemed re¬ luctant to do. Twice he essayed the task; hesitated, de¬ sisted, and finally placed the letter in the breast of his shirt. He then took off his coat and spread it over the prone form on the sand. The shrouding accomplished and the corpse decently covered, he turned away in the direction of the hut, the dog trotting behind.

Inside the hut his hesitation disappeared. He drew out the letter and laid it and the newspapers on the table before him. He examined the journals first. There were copies of the Times and Morning Post nearly nine years old. A blurred ink-mark around the “Personal” column of the Times caught his eye. It indicated an advertise¬ ment seeking news of Robert Lynngarth, who had left England three years before, and it offered a handsome reward for any information concerning him. Any infor¬ mation (which would be treated as confidential) was to be sent to a firm of London solicitors at Gray’s Inn. A similar announcement appeared in the Morning Post, also marked.