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Coral Sands

Coral Sands

By H. De Vere Stacpoole

Author of “Cabin No. 5,” “The Tomb of the Elephants,” Etc.

Mr. Stacpoole proves in this splendid tale that a story of the South Seas, in order to be interesting, does not have to concern people stranded upon a desert island. He penetrates here to the heart of a tiny community hidden away in an obscure coral island, and builds, bit by bit, a beautiful and dramatic novel of that life.

I. A South Sea Parasite

CHAPTER I.

A SOUTH SEA PARASITE.

From where Yakoff was standing in the blaze of the sun the beach ran away like a white road—miles and miles and miles away, to be lost in the blue and haze of distance. To the left of the beach lay the calm waters of the lagoon, to the right the rough coral beaten by the outer sea.

Nowhere in the world except in the low islands could you find a beach like that—just a ring of coral—sand and rock inclosing a lake so big that in the great storms from the southwest it could build six-foot waves.

If Yakoff had started to follow the road before him, leaving the houses of the native village at whose entrance he stood, he would have passed the long line of coconut trees immediately to the west, the extraordinary little gardens where vegetables were grown, the fowl pens belonging to old Lipi, the net-maker, and the deep-cut water tanks made to receive the rains.

He would have passed canoe shelters and dozens of beached canoes, some old and broken and waiting to be destroyed or mended, some new and ready to take the sea, for here was the navy yard of Araffura and the docking place of the pearling fleet.

He would have passed the second coconut grove and then, leaving men and trees behind him, he would have gone on with the sea to the right, with the lagoon to the left through a world where there was nothing but sun blaze and blueness, the fume and thunder of the breakers and the crying of the gulls.

He would have gone on and on through the same changeless, singing, blinding vacancy, the gulls crying to him to get away and the waves calling to him, “There is nothing here,” and noon would have turned to afternoon and afternoon to night, and under Canopus and the Cross he would have gone on and on to the break of day and his journey far from finished. For from the break, the reef of Araffura Lagoon is forty miles round.

But Yakoff was fat and the most unlikely person in the world to start on a journey without an object. Fat and fifty years of age and with a face that did not inspire confidence even when half hidden by his sun helmet.

Yet it was a face with a smile that rarely came off, even when the mind of Yakoff was moving in the direction of wrath or revolving in the orbits of cunning.

A man to deal with cautiously in business, or, better, not at all. Born at Archangel, educated by an uncle in a large way of trade, Yakoff Abrahamovitch, always known as Yakoff, went to the East as his uncle's correspondent in Shanghai. Here he did a deal for himself that damaged his uncle, and the result was separation. He prospered for a while in Shanghai and then somehow he had to leave. This was the beginning of a long career which carried him in zigzags from Borneo to New York and New York to Samarkand, and during which he had met and dealt with many men and picked up an American accent.

During the last few years he had taken to the Pacific, and among other things had made a specialty of pearls.

He was one of the buyers who come from all quarters of the world when the Paumotan pearling season begins.

The Paumotas belong to the French, and French law gives the right of pearling to the natives and to no one else. You must have been born at Araffura if you want to fish there and take the pearls—you may be a pure Kanaka if there is such a thing left to-day, or a half-caste or quarter-caste or a pure white; it doesn't matter; right of birth alone gives you the right to take shell and pearls.

But French law does not stop white men like Yakoff or Chinese like Ah Sin from coming to the pearling ground and robbing the fishers—that is to say, trading with them.

Yakoff, who had landed a month ago, before the opening of the season, had brought ashore boxes and boxes of “trade,” that is to say, goods to swap for pearls or shell—and such trade! it would have made an old Pacific trader's eyes open could he have seen the contents of Yakoff's boxes. Cigarettes, and the very best cigarettes at that, striped silk pajamas, socks and what not, white flannels, tennis shoes, shirts, photographic apparatus, silver-plated safety razors, eau de Cologne.

And the contents of the old Pacific schooners' trade room in the old days, what were they? Tin looking-glasses, bolts of gaudily printed cotton, dud Barlow knives and clay tobacco pipes, not to mention twist.

All the same, in a compartment of one of Yakoff's boxes there were some articles akin to these—mouth organs, a five-dollar phonograph, chewing gum and so forth, for Yakoff had learned from experience that the native mind refuses sometimes the most expensive lure and jumps to the cheapest, though it is never the cheapest for the native.

In this way, for a concertina with asthma but silvered and varnished to shine with the best, he had got a four-hundred-pound golden pearl from Tipu, the son of Lipi. Tipu had refused a twenty-dollar kodak, also a suit of flannels with a dollar watch thrown in, but the concertina got him.

Yakoff, standing now by the last of the native houses that lined the beach, saw Tipu going toward a beached canoe that lay near by. He pushed off and then, coming along also to take to his canoe, Yakoff saw Fernand Diaz.

II. The Deadly Insult

CHAPTER II.

THE DEADLY INSULT.

This 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.

III. An Unknown Schooner

CHAPTER III.

AN UNKNOWN SCHOONER

The 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.

IV. June

CHAPTER IV.

JUNE.

This boat, the California, whose anchor had just fallen in fourteen fathoms by the north beach of Araffura was the last word in sea-going yachts. Built by Simons of Benicia and engined by Dowsett, she could stand a hurricane and make fun of a dead calm. She had a thousand miles of petrol in her and had only used two hundred since leaving the Golden Gate, for Cyrus Hardanger, who had made ten million dollars five years ago at a stroke, as you may say, in one vast deal, was a sailor at heart and by origin.

He had worked before the mast as a young man, he had got a mate's certificate and then a master's, all of which implied brains, and he had educated himself by book reading. One thing only had pulled him back at times, the tendency to be violent if he took drink. But he had overcome that.

He had been captain of a Seattle boat when the great phosphate deal which made his fortune came along, and he had celebrated his acquisition of wealth by marrying a widow, Mrs. Mallory of Oakland, an amazingly good-looking woman with an amazingly pretty daughter of fourteen years. June was the name of this child “taken over” by Hardanger with his wife and the name suited her.

She was the apple of his eye, and when Mrs. Hardanger died two years after marriage, it was June who saved him from flying to drink or taking a dive into Frisco harbor.

Hardanger, six foot two and with a fighting jaw, looked like a strong man. June, slight, graceful and without a trace of the masculine in her composition, was stronger. This girl with gray eyes and phosphor-bronze hair descended from the Mallorys who, in the old days of the covered wagon, had literally fought their way across the plains and the Rockies. She had in her something of the spirit of the pioneers, something of the daring and dash of the eagle.

When Hardanger, wanting a holiday in a hurry, had bought the California off the slips at Simons' and literally shoved her to sea with the fitters and riggers clinging to her till the last moment, June had been hand and fist with the dockyard mateys. This feminine creature had little use for women; she preferred the stancher companionship of men. Railway men, boatmen, the ferrymen of Frisco harbor, where she owned and ran a little power boat of her own—they all knew Cy Hardanger's daughter. She was a character in her way but without a trace of pose.

On board the California she found herself for the first time under the magic of sticks and sails. She was one of the crew and discovered in herself the properties of a faultless steersman. The steersman is born, not made. To hold the California on her course without a tremble of the canvas was a business without any effort on her part.

It had been her privilege to bring the schooner in through the break, handing over the wheel to Sellers, the bos'n, only when the auxiliary was taking charge.

She came forward to the bow when the fellows were getting ready to lower the anchor and stood looking for the first time in her life at the wonders of an atoll island.

The wind that had brought them through the break had fallen to a gentle breathing that made cat's-paws on the mirror of the lagoon; across the still water in the sunset light lay the pearling fleet, some still anchored, some beating up against the dying wind to inspect the newcomer.

The reef ran away into the golden west and the voice of the outer sea beating on it came loud from the near stretches, low from the far, while great flights of birds that had pursued the pearling fleet all day showed like a strew of rosy-and-golden spangles blown on the evening wind.

Now and again their voices came, challenging, and were answered by the voices of the reef birds. Nothing more. Nothing but the sense of vast sea spaces and a silence scarcely broken by the murmur of the reef.

Now as the anchor fell and the California, swinging to her moorings, turned her nose to the reef against the tide, the girl left the bow and came aft to the landing stage.

Several canoes had put off from the shore and were paddling about, holding off and on, the fellows in them holding up drinking nuts for sale and ornaments made of shell, whip-ray walking sticks, coral lumps and conches, all the dust traps in fact that the low islands vie with the high islands in producing. But they couldn't trade till Porges, the French superintendent of the fisheries, had come on board to give a clean bill of health.

June, standing by her father, looked over the side, watching the canoe men. Then, when the stage was lowered and Porges had come aboard and gone down to the cabin, she continued watching, wondering at this new life which she had never seen before.

In one of the canoes that had put off from the beach she saw a stout white man. It was Yakoff, who had been rowed off to inspect the newcomer.

Yakoff looked at the girl and took in the yacht. He saw at once that there was no business for him to do there, nothing to buy, nothing to sell, as yet. He gave orders to the paddle men of his canoe to take him right round the California and then back to shore. In his tour of inspection he noted everything—the large ports, some with silk curtains drawn against the last rays of the sun; the steam pinnace swung at the davits; the crew still busy on deck and aloft, and a large French cook in white and wearing a white paper cap, who had come up for a moment's breath of air.

Dollars, dollars, dollars, millions of dollars—that is what the yacht said to Yakoff as he rowed round it, and the soul of Yakoff revolted.

All his life he had been after the dollars, all his life he had dreamed of wealth like this, and he had never succeeded. He had made out, that was all.

Here he was, fifty years of age and more, in this rotten place, selling shirts and concertinas to Kanakas, making a bit, it is true, but less than many a small tradesman makes in Frisco or New Orleans—and here was this man rolling in the stuff. Inherited, most likely, won without a turn of the wrist.

Yakoff, as he stepped onto the beach, felt bitter; he could have wrecked the California and drowned the unknown man who owned her. Fortunately, he had not the powers of Prospero, but he had a thirst which took him off a way down the beach to Carlon's shack, where the best beer from Papeete could be had at a dollar a bottle.

Meanwhile the girl, leaning on the rail above the boat stake, looked at the canoes as they came and went.

Some of the pearling fleet had turned toward the California and she saw Taori, the son of Lipi, and his partner, Tapu, the laziest pair of scamps in Araffura, who had been only too glad to break away from the pearling ground on any pretense.

They had spent the day mostly smoking cigarettes, playing knucklebones, diving only when the spirit moved them, but like most idlers they were pleasant people, and Taori, having sighted June, waved his paddle as to an old acquaintance, and smiled. June did ditto, waving her hand, and the canoe passed on.

Taori and Tapu might be idlers, but they were gentlefolk and they would not hang about staring at the girl.

Then came along another canoe.

It was Fernand's.

V. The World of Dreams

CHAPTER V.

THE WORLD OF DREAMS.

The sail was brailed up and Topi was paddling while Fernand stood, one foot on the bridge, one hand on the mast, his eyes fixed on the California.

Then, as he came close, his eyes rested on the girl.

June drew slightly back. The fact that he was not a native and the sudden statuesque picture of him there in the last rays of the sun came together to her as a surprise. But June was not the person to be long surprised or to refrain from questions, even had the great god Pan risen from the sea to greet the California.

She watched the canoe come closer and then she went right down the steps and stood on the grating of the landing stage.

The canoe came boldly alongside, Fernand raising his hand to the girl in salutation. Then, with a touch of the paddle on the gratings of the stage, he kept it in position.

“That is an outrigger,” said June.

She had seen an outrigger in a drawing, but never in reality till she saw the pearling fleet, for the California in coming down had touched at no islands, her course being from San Francisco to Lima and from Lima west by south to Araffura.

“Yes,” said Fernand, answering in English. “She is outrigger. She belongs to me and my partner here; we are pearlers.” He touched with his naked foot the heap of shell—and June, standing on the landing grating, her eyes on the heaving canoe, Fernand, the heap of shell and the dripping paddle, the whole picture was caught away for the fraction of a moment into a world absolutely beyond the world of civilization—at least of ours. She might have been on the sea steps of the Piræus in the days of the triremes two thousand years away from the world that holds New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

But this eminently practical person ungiven to dream states was not long in returning to reality.

“Yours is not the same as those little canoes from the beach,” said she. “Yours is bigger and has a mast; is that because she is a pearler?”

“Yes,” said Fernand.

“And the one that has just passed and waved to me, that also is a pearler?”

“Yes,” said Fernand. “She belongs to Lipi, the one who waved his paddle to you.”

“I like yours the best,” said June. “It is better found, better altogether.”

She did not speak in the spirit of compliment; her eyes had taken in the differences between the two craft, between the slack and slovenly and the clean and taut and trim.

Fernand smiled. He understood. Topi, crouching near the mast, smiled too; he did not understand, but he sensed the friendliness of the strange woman who was talking to his pearling mate.

The three of them were at ease at once, and to June, after the first moment, there was no young Greek god, no crouching savage by the shell in the canoe, but two sea workers capable and surely full of lore of which she knew nothing, and there was the canoe, a dream and a wonder to look upon.

The canoe appealed to her more than its occupants. She had fallen in love with it at first sight. She determined to know it better, to sail it and feel its response under the steering paddle.

“To-morrow,” said she, “I would like to see how your canoe sails and I would like to see the pearling beds in her. Will you take me?”

“Oh, yes,” said Fernand. “I will have her cleaned to-night, and to-morrow—at what time?”

“In the morning, any time,” said she, and as she spoke a violet fan of shadow swept across the lagoon. The sun had set.

“When you are ready will be our time,” said Fernand, and as he spoke the rising dusk took the reef and the sea.

“Good night.”

“Good night,” replied Fernand. The canoe was away. She heard the splash of paddles and saw the receding craft vanishing as the sail rose to the wind that had freshened with the coming of night.

Fernand steered for the shore and beached the canoe, helped by Topi.

It was just before the rising of the moon, and the sky, one living mass of stars, showed the palm trees at the break and, farther in, the masts of the yacht whose anchor light had been raised.

Through the warm, sea-perfumed night the outer beach spoke, miles and miles of it answering to the eternal thunder of the breakers, and on the reef against the sea line lights showed—the torches of the fish spearers searching the pools.

Topi went off, but Fernand hung by the canoe. The moon would be up in a minute and give him all the light he wanted for the cleaning of his craft.

In the ordinary way he would have made Topi stop to help, but somehow, in this particular matter, he preferred to work single-handed.

He lit a cigarette.

I have said that in all his life Fernand had never looked at a girl. Well, he had looked at one that evening and, as he stood now smoking and waiting for the moon to rise, he was looking at her again.

VI. Kanaka

CHAPTER VI.

KANAKA.

He had never before come across a white woman of this kind. There was Autonna, the wife of Tari, three parts white, and Le Paru, the half-Portuguese; all sorts of others, some half Chinese, some nearly English, but never before had he come across the white woman of high civilization.

The effect of the vision on Fernand was curious in the extreme. He was attracted yet repelled.

The attraction came from June—lithe, young, good to look upon, dressed by Roberts of Frisco. The repulsion came from the sore that Yakoff had hit that afternoon: