THE crusader who entered Jerusalem had no deeper feeling of realization of a long-cherished hope than I when my foot imprinted its mold in the glistening sand of the atoll of Niau. I stood in my track and scanned it, as Crusoe the first human mark other than his own he saw on his lonely island. Not with his dismay, but yet with a slight panic, a pleasant but alarmed perturbation, an awe at the wonder of the scene. The moment had the tenseness of that when I saw my first cocoanut-palm; it mingled a fear that I had passed one of the great climacterics of visual emotion.
Here was I in the arcanum of romance, the promised land of chimera, after years of faint expectation. I was almost stunned by the reality, and I felt sensibly the need of some one to share the pathos that oppressed me. I did not forsake my love for Tahiti. That was fixed, but this atoll was not the same. Tahiti was an adored mistress, this a light o’ love, a dazzling, alien siren, with whom one could not rest in safety; a fanciful abode for a brief period, as incomparable to Tahiti as an ice-field to a garden.
“What the bloody hell’s eatin’ on you?” exclaimed the irked McHenry, questioningly as he glared at me. “Aren’t your feet mates? Let’s see Tommy Eustace! He might have a bottle o’ beer buried in a cool place.”
Moet was shaking the salt water from his long, inky hair. He had stumbled and dipped his head in the brine.
“’Sus-Maria!” he swore. “Virginie she say Jean been drink.”
A shed-like building of rough boards, with unpainted corrugated iron roof, was a hundred steps from the water, the store and warehouse of the single trader, who supplied the wants and ambitions of the hundred inhabitants of Niau and endeavored to monopolize a meager output of copra and pearl-shell. It was on a rude road, which stretched along the beach, edged by a dozen houses, small, wooden huts, or thatched straw shanties, much more primitive and poor than in Tahiti. All the remainder of Niau was coral, water, and cocoanut-trees, except a scanty vegetation.
Thomas Eustace, the trader, or Tomé, as the natives called him, was in the doorway of his establishment, awaiting the sailors who had begun at once to carry the Marara’s freight from the boat through the moat. A quarter of a century ago, a broth of a boy from Ireland, he had stepped off a ship alongside the Papeete quay, and had never left the South Seas since.
“Faix, I had the divil’s own toime to shtay,” say Tomé, as we four sat by an empty barrel head and drank the warmish beer he had offered us with instant hospitality.
“I waz that atthracted by the purty gir-ruls, the threes, and the foine-shmellin’ flowers that the ould man of the ship nivir could dhraw me back to the pots an’ pans iv the galley. I waz the flunky in the kitchin iv a wind-jammin’ Sassenach bark, peelin’ praties, an’ waitin’ on sailormin. The father iv a darlin’ hid me out be Fautaua falls, an’ the jondarmy hunted an’ hunted, wid nothin’ for their thrubble.”
A stoutish, quizzical man was Tomé, with brown face and throat and hands, a stubby, chewed mustache and sleepy, laughing eyes. By the purling steam of Fautaua, where Loti had lived his idyl with Rarahu and I had walked with a princess, Thomas Eustace became Tomé forever and ever. He was well satisfied to be bashaw of an atoll, unused to greater comfort as he was, and enamored of reef and palm, and the lazy, unstandardized life of the South Seas.