Dick had promised that to-day they would board her and the canoe-builder in him craved4 to get to work, and the boy—the boy wanted to sail her, to feel the wind settling in the great spaces of her canvas, to feel her heeling to it like a tilted5 world, to feel her answering the helm; the canoe-builder wanted to explore her above and below, examine the fastenings of her timbers; her masts and rigging.
Aioma was very old. He might have been a hundred. No man could tell, for Karolin the clockless kept no account of years. He was too old for fighting, having lost the quickness without which a spear- or club-man is of no account as a fighter; but he was not too old for fun.
Whip-ray fishing was fun to Aioma—a sport that, next to conger killing6, is the nearest approach to fighting with devils; so also was shaping heavy logs to the form of his dream, for Aioma dreamt his canoes before he shaped them, the breaking of Rantan’s joints7 and the staking him on the reef for sharks to devour8 would also have been fun had not the women claimed the victim to torture him as they pleased.
Aioma, in fact, was as young as he ever had been and as potent9 in all fields except those of war and love. He came to the water’s edge and stood looking at the schooner. He had dreamt that, walking on the sands of the beach with Taori they had looked for the schooner and found her gone. But she was there right enough, her spars showing against the blaze in the east.
The gulls10 knew that she was deserted11, they flew above her in the golden morning and lighted on her rails and spars whilst the ripple12 of the tide past her anchor chain showed the living brilliancy of light on moving water.
The canoes and dinghy being destroyed they would have to get off to her in the boat.
For a moment the old man stood looking at the bones of the broken canoes and the planks13 of the poor old dinghy; the fishing fleet of Karolin had gone just as the fighting fleet had gone, yet the gods had made compensation, for there lay the schooner, a thing more potent than all the fleets of Karolin combined, and there lay her boat, a fine four-oared double-ender, carvel built, white painted, a joy to the eye.
Yesterday at odd times he had examined her outside and in; this morning as his eyes swept over her again, new thoughts came to him and a new vision.
Canoes, what were they beside these things, and why build canoes any more, why hollow and shape those vast tree-trunks over which they had been labouring for long weeks when here to their hands lay something better than any fleet of canoes? If Taori wished to attack those men on the northern island, why not attack with the schooner, a whole fleet in one piece, so to speak?
As he stood pondering over this new idea, Dick, who had awakened early, came towards him from the trees accompanied by Katafa.
“Taori,” said the canoe-builder, “we will go to her (the schooner) you and I; she is ours and I want no other hand to touch her or foot to rest on her till we alone have been with her for a space. Help me.” He laid his hand in the gunnels of the boat as he spoke14 and Dick, as eager as the other, calling to Katafa to help them, went to the opposite side; between them they got her afloat and tumbled in.
Aioma had learned to handle an oar3 in the dinghy; the heavy ash sweep was nothing to him and as the boat made across the glitter of the lagoon15, Katafa, her feet washed by the little waves on the sand, stood watching them.
Dick had not asked her to accompany him. It was as though the schooner had come between them as a rival—a thing, for the moment, more desirable than her.
She was feeling now what she had felt before only more vaguely16. She had always distrusted the little ships, those models born of the pocket knife and ingenuity17 of Kearney, those hints of an outside world, a vague outside world that might some day break into their environment and separate her from Dick.
This distrust had been built up from the cannon18 shot of the Portsey that had smashed her canoe, from the schooner that had come into Palm Tree lagoon with its cargo19 of Melanesians and it joined with a vague antagonism20 born of jealousy21.
When Dick fell into contemplation of the ship models and especially that of the schooner, he seemed to forget her more completely than even when he was fishing.
Fishing, his mind would be away from her no doubt, but it would still be close; brooding over the little ships and especially the schooner, his mind would be far away. She could tell it by the look in his eyes, by his expression, by his attitude.
And now that this apotheosis22 of the model schooner was handed to him by the fates as a plaything, the distrust and antagonism in the mind of the girl became acute.
It was almost as though another woman had put a spell upon him alienating23 him from her. As a matter of fact this was the case, for the schooner was the gift of Le Moan.
As the boat came alongside the Kermadec, the gulls left her, drifting off on the wind. Swinging with the tide, her stem was towards the break, the water rippling24 on the anchor chain which could be followed by the eye through the crystal clear water to where the anchor held in the lagoon floor. The copper25 sheathing26 was clearly visible with a few weeds waving from it, fish hung round the stern post and the secret green, the ship-shadow green—the green that is nowhere but in sea water alongside a moored27 ship—went to Dick’s heart as something new, yet old in memory, a last touch to the wonder and enchantment28 of the
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CHAPTER IX—VENGEANCE
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CHAPTER II—THE THREE GREAT WAVES
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