My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 4

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 childish bravado, but I was never the boy-girl type that courts an actual danger. As for Luke's horror of "being afraid" I saw it, and admired it, but I did not understand it.
In truth, I felt then, as I felt on the morning when we rushed down into the lagoon, that Luke was somehow or other getting away from me.