My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 4

dreams, I wondered
What was I that I did not know? After the five years, what should come
to me?
CHAPTER II
AS soon as there was light to tell gray sea from gray sand, Luke and I
were out upon the beach. We always began the day with a swim, and as
we were dressed practically alike, in a loose short smock and knickers
of blue linen, there was not much undressing to do. Luke threw off his
smock, I kept mine on, and we both changed afterwards.
The routine of the bath was always the same. We ran out of our cave
rooms, met in the main hall, and raced together down the slope of
clinking coral that led to the lagoon. We shrieked and leaped as we ran,
because it was very cold in the gray of the morning, and the night had
been hot, and our bodies were aching for the kiss of the green salt sea.
There was a shallow space to run through first of all, kicking up the
water as we went, and throwing aside great carven shells that a
collector would have knelt to save. Then came the deep, with gold
chainwork of sunrise already knitting over and over it, and dazzling us
as we lifted our heads from the ripples we had made in our
lemming-like rush for the full sea. Then the outer coral reef, sharp and
spear-pointed, not to be mounted without care.... There was always the
temptation to stand on its farther edge and look and long for the
tumbling white and blue waves outside, where we were forbidden to go.
Luke had caught a thrashing or two from old Ivory, and I had been shut
up in my cave for a day, more than once, before we had given in to the
hard law. I don't know that we should have done so, even then for it
was so invigorating to breast those huge breakers, and ride, shouting, in
a chariot of foam, over the reef into the lagoon had not an ugly thing
frightened me one morning. We were used to the sight of shark fins
riving through the deep, and like most Pacific folk, had little fear of
them (indeed the shark is not so black as he is painted), but what we

saw that day was different. It was just a flash in the sun, a whipping up
of something long and black, and very thin more like a thirty-foot
length of rope than anything else, except for the oily glitter. It wasn't an
octopus feeler; that is thick. It wasn't the whip-like, dagger-armed tail
of a giant stingaree ; we knew the look and the lash of that, as well as
we knew the look of its brown-marbled fin, big as a dining table,
heaving up into sight and sinking again before you had time to take a
real look. I do not know what it was I never did; and no naturalist has
been able to tell me. But one of the great gulfs of the Pacific, a chasm
five miles deep, lies near the outer reef of Hiliwa Dara Islands, and the
devil of the deep seas alone knows what horrors may be hidden there....
I never wanted to swim "outside" again. Luke not only wanted to, but
did it, not a minute after we had seen the awful thing, while I stood
staggering about in the midst of the foam and thunder of the reef, sick
at heart, and crying to him to come back. He did come back, a little
pale, but with a wonderful light in his blue eyes.
"Grandfather can lick me if he likes now," was his only remark,
shouted through the pounding surf. "I've proved it to myself."
By the freemasonry that lived between us two, I knew that he meant he
had proved his courage. I knew that he had doubted it; I knew that Luke,
made as he was, could not have endured that doubt, and endured to
live.
Running up to the great hall of the cave house, all wet, with my
mermaid hair streaming down, I had shown my courage then by
fearlessly bearding the formidable Ivory, and telling him why Luke had,
once more, broken his rule. I could not endure my boy mate should
suffer punishment for such a noble fault.
Ivory heard me in silence, and then told Lorraine to take me to dry
myself. I don't know what he said to Luke. Luke only told me that
"grandad was very decent to him." He did not go beyond the reef again.
For myself, not all the treasures of all the world poured out at my feet
would have tempted me to venture. I might break sensible rules through