My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 9

it belonged. My
father could not raise capital enough to buy it, and to live there as well.
And yet his very soul, by now, was set on owning it.

Here old Ivory came to the rescue. He had saved money himself, and he
had a curious plan in which my father, and no one else, could help him.
He proposed a partnership. Lorraine, my aunt, at that time a widowed
bride (for her fiance had died in a railway accident on the morning of
their marriage day) , came as companion to father and future
instructress to me. And father, who had neglected my christening
hitherto, much to the horror of old Ivory, when he found it out, had me
named "Dara--" after the island. And Hiliwa Dara was bought, and the
poet realized his dream.
If you had seen Hiliwa Dara, you would have envied him; it was, in
every way, the island of a dream....
Many Pacific islands are nothing of the kind. The "low" island, lovely
though it is, is no one's dream. People do not know enough about it to
dream of it although its coloring, as a rule, is superb, unmatchable, its
palm trees the best of all island palms. Hiliwa Dara was not one of
these. It was "high" island, with just the tall purple peak standing up in
the middle, the drooping veils of stream and cataract, the bright green
climbing woods, and lawny bays, and the white, white coral shore that
you have pictured so often to yourself.
It had palms in plenty what is a South Sea island without its palms?
leaning over the green, still water of the lagoon within the reef,
pluming the slopes of "Parnassus," standing out on the ends of
seaward-running points, as palms do stand, just as if they had been
planted there for sheer beauty. We planted a good many ourselves after
coming to the island, but no one would have noticed them, since they
were all set out on a rather ugly but convenient flat away at the back of
the island.
Yes, it was lovely, very, very lovely. It lay in the central belt of the
Pacific, where hurricanes never come, and there is so little difference
between the seasons that one may well call life one long, unending
summer.... There were rainy days, of course, sometimes day after day
of rain for quite a good while; there were equinoctial gales of a kind;
there were "cold" nights when the thermometer went down to
sixty-nine, and everybody said that the climate must be changing, and

nothing had ever been seen like it. There were hot days, plenty, when
the instruments in our little thatched hut stood well over ninety at high
noon, but there was never cold nor tempest, nor destroying heat; always
there was a core of life and coolness in the air from the breath of the
great seas; almost always there was sun, and flowers that marked two
summers in the year with a double gift of bloom. Our fruits, too, came
twice a year, not once, as in less generous climes. There were two
seasons, marked by the changing of the winds from sluggish,
sometimes stormy northwest, to the cool, clear river of the flowing
southeast "trades" that ran for nearly seven months of the year without
a break, through our high pale blue heavens. Some of our flowers kept
no season, but bloomed endlessly. Always there were secretive orchid
blooms hiding in the great bush flower-butterflies and moths of white
and pink and yellow, of orange spotted with brown, of flesh-red tipped
with color of new blood. Always the faithful frangipanrii bore white,
bold-centered stars, sometimes many, ^sometimes few, that loaded
every breeze with floating honey, and the hibiscus burned red at the
edges of the bush, and the paw-paw hung out waving streams of
greenwhite blossoms, almost too cloyingly sweet. The orange trees that
stood about the cave house were young, but they flowered most of the
time, and fruited twice yearly, so that the stabbing scent of orange
bloom blown down the entrance archway was never absent from our
rooms and the golden fruit was almost always piled upon our tables.
Season melted into season on Hiliwa Dara, with not so much change as
comes of morning melting into afternoon. It was always lovely, it was
always summer. And it was always peace.
Until the day when Dinah said there was ill luck about.
It would be absurd to say that Luke and I did not feel it, when we
started on our climb of Parnassus, that splendid Saturday morning.
Children are as sensitive as sea anemones to currents and movements of
the minds about them. We had both felt that change was afoot, and
Dinah's remarks