My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 3

be
trifled with, on any question of lying or trickery.
So I bade them good night in proper order father first, then Lorraine,
then old Mr. Ivory and went off to my room, leaving them sitting there
round the great driftwood fire, with the smoke springing up into the
dark arch of the roof, and the sea sounding on outside.
When I look back, across the seas and the years, to those island days, I
think always of the long sound of waves, the fresh, weedy smell of
sands at low water, the silver shining of a full tide after rain. I can see,
on a still afternoon, the oyster gray of the sky meet the oyster gray of
the sea, with just so much division as might mark the hinge of a giant
shell. I can see, on northwest mornings, the wide lagoon lie smooth and
green as emerald, silver-set in the ring of white tumbling surf that
barred it away from the blue thunderous seas outside.... Sea, always sea
the sounds, the sights, the scents of the great South Seas these were my
picture books, my library, my school.... We had books and pictures of
the common kind in plenty, and I got plenty of schooling, too, from my
father and Lorraine. But I think it was the sea that taught and made me,
most of all.
My room was at the end of a long cave passage, some way from the
main hall. It was by no means the damp, rough cell that the nature of
our dwelling might have led one to expect. Father and old Ivory, on our
coming to the island, had chosen to leave the main hall just as it was,
sand-floored, limestoneroofed, with rough arches leading away in all
directions, and a low, wide tunnel running out towards the beach and
the sea. But the rest of the place was fitted up almost with luxury.

Have you not thought, when you were a boy, and spent long summer
holidays wandering through the sea-scented, echoing halls of some
little city of caves, how you could, if only you might, make a splendid
residence of such a place, given time and labor and the delightful
possibility that never, never came about? You never even dared to
speak to your elders of such a dream. You knew how they would laugh,
and tell you it was impossible....
Well, let me tell you now that it is not. Many men have made such
homes, in many parts of the world. Father and old Ivory were not
blazing the trail of inventors when they turned the caves of Hiliwa Dara
into a house good to look at, and very fit to live in. They had heard of
such things, and seen them, so they knew how to go about it. They
made coral concrete by the ton, burning masses of white coral down on
the shore into heaps of flourlike lime; mixing it with sand and gravel,
puddling it with water. They concreted the floors of the caves meant for
living rooms, and the floors of the passageways. They stopped the
cracks through which water trickled. They blasted openings to the outer
air, and put shutters in them to keep out rains and tempests. They made,
in fine, a sound, tight, airy, beautiful house out of the dark and muddy
caves of Hiliwa Dara, and they did it in a fourth of the time that would
have been needed to build any other kind of house. Our cave ancestors
even yet can teach us a thing or two worth learning.
I carried a brand from the fire with me to my room, and lit with it the
lamp that hung from the roof a great "baler" shell, cream-lined,
crimsonlipped, filled with cocoanut oil, and floating a wick of cotton.
We had kerosene, matches, and most other civilized necessities, in store.
But since communication was always uncertain, it was the inviolable
rule of Hiliwa Dara to use native material as much as possible. And I
do not think more beautiful pure light ever fell from a more beautifully
shaped vessel than fell upon my little drift-timber bed, and on the cedar
chest that held my clothes, and on the gleaming frieze of pearl shell set
about the roof of the room, from the lamp made in the depths of the
great sea.
On my mattress of dried sea wrack I slept well. But all through the

night, and all through the long sounding of the sea that penetrated even
to the depths of my sheltered little chamber, ran through my dreams the
echo of the words I had heard in the great hall: "There are five years to
look round in" " You are right; she is." And in my