Where the Pavement Ends Part 12

They paused by the outskirts of the village and peered toward its cl.u.s.tered, ruddy firelights flickering out upon the sh.o.r.e. There was no one abroad on that empty, nebulous expanse, but they could hear stir and laughter among the huts and the shrill wailing of a child.

"It is still too early," he murmured, and led her back to the cover of a thicket.

Miss Matilda was aware of a slackening from the keen excitement and zested peril of their escape. She had a vague feeling that the boat should have been ready to waft them miraculously over star-lit seas.

"How are you going to get one?" she asked.

"Any of these people would lend me a dugout, but I thought merely to take the first at hand."

"I see none."

"No--they are gone. Perhaps the men are fis.h.i.+ng on the reef to-night....

But that would be strange too," he added, perplexed.

Somehow the delay, the uncertainty, began to weigh upon her like an affront. She missed their wild communion, the high, buoying sense of romance and emprise and impossibilities trampled under foot. She missed the single complicity of the stream and its turbulent heartening. Here were voices too, but these were harsh and displeasing, common human voices. An odor of cookery and unclean hearths stole greasily down the air. The fretful child began screaming again and went suddenly silent at a brusque clap. Somebody fell to quarreling in a muttered monotone.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded.

"It will be better if I go search."

"You will not leave me--!"

"Only for a time. I must find someone who has a boat and borrow it. If there are no others, the trader will lend me his."

"Gregson--?"

"He cannot know what I want of it."

"Motauri--" she cried, appalled, "keep away from that man!"

"I have used his boat before," he soothed. "It will be all right. And we must--we must have a boat. Remember where we are."...

She had caught his wrist unwittingly, but now she released it. They stood so for a moment. She was remembering.

"Very well," she said, subdued.

"You will be safe here," he a.s.sured her. "Stay close in the brush.

n.o.body pa.s.ses this last house. And when I come I will sing a little, very quietly, to let you know. Good-bye, Hokoolele--!"

"Good-bye," she said, with a catch at her throat and a strange foreboding.

Abruptly he had vanished....

How long Miss Matilda crouched in her thicket by the beach of Wailoa she could not have told. It seemed an eternity. The night clouded down, even the stars were veiled. An on-sh.o.r.e breeze whined forlornly across the sands. Her fever had pa.s.sed. She was damp, bedraggled, bruised and aching, soiled with mud. The wind sought her out, cut through her limp garments.... She waited, s.h.i.+vering.

She was very much alone. She felt helpless beyond anything she had ever experienced, as if the props of life were fallen away. And so they were, for those she had known she had thrust behind and Motauri's magic no longer sustained her. Worse than all was the pressure gathering in her mind, a tide of doubt that she had to deny, like the rising fill in a lock. She dared not let herself think. Still no Motauri.

Benumbed, exhausted, sunk in hebetude, she waited until she could wait no more, until intolerable suspense drove her blindly. She crept through the bush and so came suddenly to the edge of a clearing by a native hut--to see what it was written she should see at that particular moment....

Before the door burned a blink of fire that revealed the dwelling and its tattered alcove of sewn leaves, as if the scene had been set with footlights. It was a very simple little domestic scene. On a fibre mat sprawled a woman. She might have been young, but she was old in the native way, flabby, coa.r.s.e-grained, with sagging wrinkles, with l.u.s.terless hair streaming about her face. A ragged, sleeveless wrapper rendered her precarious service, bulging with flesh. At her side squatted a youngster, an imp of seven it might be, who noisily chewed a stick of sugarcane and spat wide the pith. The woman kept one hand free to admonish him--by his beady eye he required it--and to tend a simmering pot. With the other, tranquilly, she nursed a naked babe.

There was no reticence about that firelight, no possible illusion--and certainly no romance. In grim fidelity it threw up each bald detail, the cheerful dirt and squalor, the easy poverty, the clutter--the plain, animal, every-day facts of a savage home. It touched the bronze skins with splashes of copper, shone in the woman's vacant, bovine stare and gleamed along the generous swell of her breast. And just there it made a wholly candid display of the central figure in this pantomime--the brown babe. Not so brown as he would be some day, indeed quite softly tinted, but unmistakably Polynesian. A most elemental mite of humanity. A most eloquent interpreter of primordial delights. A fat little rascal, with a bobbing fuzzy poll and squirming limbs. And hungry--so very frankly, so very boisterously hungry--!

Miss Matilda went away from that place.

She had a confused idea of flight, but her feet were rebellious, and before she had taken twenty steps she was lost. Without direction, groping in the darkness, even then by some intuition she kept to the trees and the undergrowth for hiding. That was her only effective impulse--to hide. She could not go on. Under heaven there was no going back. People were awake all about her in the huts. More people would be strolling and skylarking along the chapel path, supposing she could have found it. She had the sole, miserable craving that the earth might open to receive her.

And thus it was chance alone that guided her course through the fringe of the village, through garden and sand strip, and that brought her finally, all unseen, to the wall of a large house, to a post, to a slatted gallery aglow inside with lamps, and to her second discovery....

"Curse your black soul!" a voice was saying, with heavy, slow brutality, "when I tell you to drink--you drink! D'y' hear?"

"No can do, Mahrster," came the faltering response, in the broken _beche de mer_ that is the token of the white man's domination in the islands.

"That fella rum taboo 'long me altogether."

"What do I care for your taboo? _Drink!_"

Fell an interval of silence.

"Drink again--drink hearty!"

Captain Hull Gregson sat leaning forward by the side of his living-room table, shoving down the length of it a gla.s.s that brimmed and sparkled redly. On his knee, in a fist like a ham, he balanced a black bottle.

His jutted jaw took a line with the outthrust arm, with the lowering brow, as if the whole implacable force and will of the man were so projected.

And at the end, facing him, stood Motauri--a different, a sadly different Motauri. A Motauri not in the least the joyous woodland faun in his att.i.tude now. His proud crest was lowered, stripped of its wreath; his magnificent muscles drooped. He stood humbly, with chest collapsed, on shuffling feet, as became an inferior. He drew the back of his hand across his lips and eyed the white man furtively....

"That's better," grunted Gregson, and leaned back to set the bottle on the table amid a litter of odds and ends, books, papers, a revolver, a tarred tiller-rope with a roseknot. "Perhaps that'll loosen your tongue. First time I ever seen your breed hold off the stuff. But then, you're one of these independent lads, ain't you? Old chief stock, you call yourself. Plenty wild Kanaka, you.... Plenty bold, bad fella you--hey?"

"No, Mahrster," said Motauri, deprecating.

Gregson regarded him with a hard smile.

"And now you're going to tell me why you tried to sneak a boat at this hour o' night."

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

"You've said that a dozen times, and it's no better. It don't pa.s.s. Go fish? Go soak your black head! What are you up to, hey? Come now--tell."

Motauri made no answer, and the other controlled himself. Behind his dark mask the big trader was under the empire of some powerful emotion.

His hands clenched and opened again, trembling a little. His face shone like wet leather. But it was in a tone oddly detached, musing, that he went on.

"You're smart. I don't say a Kanaka can't be smart when he wants to hide anything. He can. I ain't figgered you yet. And that's a mighty healthy thing for you, my boy, d'y' see? Because, if I could once make sure it was you I saw slipping away by the chapel hedge two nights ago, I'd--" A purplish haze suffused his cheek. "I'd dig the heart out of your carca.s.s with my two hands," he ended, very quietly, and hit the table so that it jumped. "Was it?" he roared.

"No-o, Mahrster," said Motauri.

"You lie--blast you--it was!"

"No, Mahrster."