South-Sea Idyls

by Charles Warren Stoddard

He soon told me who he had once been, but was no longer. Our little, unfortunate "Joe," my Lahaina charge. In his case the disease had spread with fearful rapidity: the keeper thought he could hardly survive the year. Many linger year after year, and cannot die; but Joe was more fortunate. His life had been brief and passionate, and death was now hastening him to his dissolution.

Joe was forbidden to come near me, so he crouched down by the fence, and pressing his hands between the pickets sifted the dust at my feet, while he wailed in a low voice, and called me, over and over, "dear friend," "good friend," and "master." I wish I had never seen him so humbled. To think of my disreputable little protégé, who was wont to lord it over me as though he had been a born chief,—to think of Joe as being there in his extremity, grovelling in the dust at my feet; forbidden to climb the great wall of flowers that towered between him and his beautiful world, while the rough sea lashed the coast about him, and his only companions were such hideous foes as would frighten one out of a dream!

How I wanted to get close to him! but I dared not; so we sat there with the slats of the fence between us, while we talked very long in the twilight; and I was glad when it grew so dark that I could no longer see his face,—his terrible face, that came to kill the memory of his former beauty.

And Joe wondered whether I still remembered how we used to walk in the night, and go home, at last, to our little house when Lahaina was as still as death, and you could almost hear the great stars throbbing in the clear sky! How well I remembered it, and the day when we went a long way down the beach, and, looking back, saw a wide curve of the land cutting the sea like a sickle, and turning up a white and shining swath! Then, in another place, a grove of cocoa-palms and a melancholy, monastic-looking building, with splendid palm-branches in its broad windows; for it was just after Palm Sunday, and the building belonged to a Sisterhood. And I remembered how the clouds fell and the rain drove us into a sudden shelter, and we ate tamarind-jam, spread thick on thin slices of bread, and were supremely happy. In this connection, I could not forget how Joe became very unruly about that time, and I got mortified, and found great difficulty in getting him home at all; and yet the memory of it would have been perfect but for this fate. O Joe! my poor, dear, terrible cobra! to think that I should ever be afraid to look into your face in my life!

Joe wanted to call to my mind one other reminiscence,—a night when we two walked to the old wharf, and went out to the end of it, and sat there looking inland, watching the inky waves slide up and down the beach, while the full moon rose over the superb mountains where the clouds were heaped like wool, and the very air seemed full of utterances that you could almost hear and understand but for something that made them all a mystery. I tried then, if ever I tried in my life, to make Joe a little less bad than he was naturally, and he seemed nearly inclined to be better, and would, I think, have been so, but for the thousand temptations that gravitated to him when we got on solid earth again. He forgot my precepts then, and I'm afraid I forgot them myself. Joe remembered that night vividly. I was touched to hear him confess it; and I pray earnestly that that one moment may plead for him in the last day, if, indeed, he needs any special plea other than that Nature has published for her own.

"Sing for me, Joe," said I; and Joe, still crouching on the other side of the lattice, sang some of his old songs. One of them, a popular melody, was echoed through the little settlement, where faint voices caught up the chorus, and the night was wildly and weirdly musical. We walked by the sea the next day, and the day following that, Joe taking pains to stay on the leeward side of me,—he was so careful to keep the knowledge of his fate uppermost in his mind: how could I dismiss it from my own, when it was branded in his countenance? The desolated beauty of his face plead for measureless pity, and I gave it, out of my prodigality, yet felt that I could not begin to give sufficient.

Link by link he was casting off his hold on life; he was no longer a complete being; his soul was prostrated in the miry clay, and waited, in agony, its long deliverance.

In leaving the leper village, I had concluded to say nothing to Joe, other than the usual "aloha" at night, when I could ride off, in the darkness, and, sleeping at the foot of the cliff, ascend it in the first light of morning, and get well on my journey before the heat of the day. We took a last walk by the rocks on the shore; heard the sea breathing its long breath under the hollow cones of lava, with a noise like a giant leper in his asthmatic agony. Joe heard it, and laughed a little, and then grew silent; and finally said he wanted to leave the place,—he hated it; he loved Lahaina dearly: how was everybody in Lahaina?—a question he had asked me hourly since my arrival.

When night came I asked Joe to sing, as usual; so he gathered his mates about him, and they sang the songs I liked best. The voices rang, sweeter than ever, up from the group of singers congregated a few rods off, in the darkness; and while they sang, my horse was saddled, and I quietly bade adieu to my dear friends, the keepers, and mounting, walked the horse slowly up the grass-grown road. I shall never see little Joe again, with his pitiful face, growing gradually as dreadful as a cobra's, and almost as fascinating in its hideousness. I waited, a little way off, in the darkness,—waited and listened, till the last song was ended, and I knew he would be looking for me, to say Good night. But he didn't find me; and he will never again find me in this life, for I left him sitting in the dark door of his sepulchre,—sitting and singing in the mouth of his grave,—clothed all in death.