By the World Forgot: A Double Romance of the East and West

by Cyrus Townsend Brady

Again Beekman had that strange sense of familiarity with the words in spite of the fact that he could make nothing of them. The girl answered briefly. The young man joined in the conversation. The rest, slowly drawing nearer, spoke in brief ejaculations from time to time. Finally, the gentle tumult subsided, and the old man turned to Beekman and addressed him directly. The American shook his head. The old man, whose eyes were wonderfully bright and piercing, stared at him, evidently nonplussed by the situation. Beekman made the same sign as before, putting his hand to his mouth and moving his jaws, stretching out his arms, and then, as an after-thought, he patted his lean and empty stomach. It was obvious to the most backward that he was hungry. The old man nodded his head vigorously. He turned and spoke a few words. Some of the younger women walked off in the direction of the huts. Meanwhile, with a gesture singularly graceful, the old man beckoned to Beekman to sit down upon a rude rock bench under a giant palm.

Beekman was a man of great intrepidity, but even if he had been an arrant coward, there was nothing to cause him the least alarm. For one thing, not a single one of the group had a weapon of any sort, so far as he could see. He divined that they had gone to get him something to eat, and he took his seat readily. The old man squatted on the grass at his feet, and the others disposed themselves comfortably farther away. Only the young girl and the young man remained standing near him, and side by side.

Evidently something had seriously displeased the young man, for he spoke sharply and shortly to the amazed girl, who waved him away with a look of haughty disdain. When the women appeared bearing wooden platters upon which food was piled, the young woman, who seemed a person in authority among them, took the first platter and, approaching Beekman, dropped on one knee with a singularly graceful movement and extended it to him. He took it without hesitation, examined it quickly, discovered it to be some kind of roast meat, tasted it, striving to remember that he was a gentleman and must eat as such in the presence of these people who, whatever their origin, were obviously so gentle themselves.

The first bite told him what it was. A piece of roast pig on an island in the South Seas! And the next platter was heaped with such vegetables of Europe as would grow in tropic lands. How could these things be there? The oasis cup in which he was, like the enclosed bay whence he had climbed, was more convincingly than ever of volcanic origin. Shut off for how many years God only knew from all connection with the rest of the world, peopled by a nondescript race whose course was almost run--the girl and the young man evidently throw-backs or freaks of nature which had reproduced types of the past, much more perfect in the girl than in the man--what was the explanation of these mysteries? Pork--how came it there? And whence these vegetables of Europe? those cakes of wheat? This white girl, these half- and quarter-breeds--how came they to be? It was amazing. In spite of his hunger, he could hardly eat at first confronted by such a problem.

A little clicking sound suddenly attracted his attention from the food as the last bearer presented herself, her hands full of fruits. He looked down and discovered that the noise was made by a pair of wooden shoes which she was wearing, which had struck against a stone. A white woman, wooden shoes, the food of Europe! He almost stopped eating, and might have done so had he not been so desperately hungry. Well, the mystery would add zest to the monotonous life of the tropics. He would solve it somehow; the key must be somewhere on the island; meanwhile there was breakfast. The food was delicious. It was somewhat embarrassing to eat with his fingers; he could cut the meat with his sheath knife, but he made unpleasant weather of it, as a sailor would say.

When he had finished, and he played the dual part of Jack Sprat and his wife, so far as the meat was concerned, for he cleaned the platter, the old man produced a rudely fashioned pipe made from some wood unfamiliar to him. With the pipe came a wooden box filled with tobacco, and one of the children, at a word, brought him a stick, the end of which was a glowing ember, from a fire in some kind of a stone and clay furnace or oven before the circle of houses. He could not believe his eyes at first, and not until he had lighted the pipe and inhaled the fragrant contents did he know that it was very good tobacco--the last miracle of that morning, he thought, but no. As he leaned back against the palm tree, smoking in perfect content, the girl herself handed him a cocoanut shell filled with, very tolerable native wine. All he needed for absolute happiness was a book of verses, her presence, and the withdrawal of the rest of the crowd, he reflected whimsically, remembering Omar Khayyam. And in all this he had not once thought of Stephanie Maynard.

His material wants having been thus attended to, the old man spoke to the rest, and they slowly withdrew, going about their several vocations. It was yet early in the morning, and he noticed that some of the men and women proceeded in various directions, carrying what seemed to him to be rude primitive agricultural implements. It flashed upon Beekman that they were going to till the fields, which were, after all, only garden patches. No great area under cultivation was required to support that little handful. The dogs, whose bark he had heard, were as friendly as the rest. Such a thing as passion or anger or hatred seemed out of place and as foreign to the spot as they might have seemed in Eden before Eve ate the apple.

The old man, the young girl, and the young man alone remained with him. They spoke to one another now and then, but conversation with him was impossible. They could only express their interest by eager and intense staring. The old man finally came close to him and examined him. He felt of the cloth of his shirt and trousers, looked critically at his stout leather shoes, expressed great interest in the sheath knife, broad-bladed and sharp, which he handed to the young man, who also examined it and who was also much taken with the bright, brass-headed boat hook. Beekman wished that he had some trinket or jewel, something which he could have given to the girl, but, alas, he had nothing; not even a finger ring.

While they were examining him, his eyes were roving about the settlement. In the first place, he noticed that instead of being houses of wood, the dwellings were built of stone, obviously the volcanic rock of the island. There were more houses than such a number of people would require. He counted a score of huts placed in an irregular way under the trees. They were different from any South Sea island houses he had ever seen or heard of, their only point of resemblance being the roofs thatched with palm leaves. One house in the center of the settlement was much larger than any of the rest. Its gable of stone was surmounted by what appeared to him to be the remains of a tower. It was a perfect parallelogram. He recalled, as he looked at it lazily, that it was like the Noah's Ark toys of his childhood. In the front was a doorway, closed by a worm-eaten wooden door. This building, like many of the others, was overgrown with vines, creepers of which he did not know the name, some of them brilliant with gorgeous blossoms. The doorways of all the other buildings held no doors. Woven-grass curtains depended from some of them, but even they were generally drawn back. Each house was provided with a small, roofless, stone porch, a stoop, he called it, in default of a better name, and there was a singular European look about them, but a European look of the past.

Refreshed by his meal and his smoke, and tired of sitting, he rose to his feet and, followed by the trio, he strolled off in the direction of the nearest house. When he would have entered it, the old man interposed, shook his head gently, took him by the hand and led him through the village to a house exactly like the others, but on the outskirts of the settlement. He pointed inward, and Beekman divined that here was the place allotted to him. He entered. Plenty of light came through the windows on either side, although, they were screened with creepers. The place was stone floored, the flooring covered with sand. It was absolutely bare of furniture and spotlessly clean. There was nothing to be seen, and so he tarried not at all therein.