“Ye may picther me,” he went on, as he poured the beer, “jumpin’ out iv the p’isonous galley iv that wind-jammin’ man-killer, an’ fallin’, be the grace iv God, into a grove iv cocoanuts, wid roas’ pig, breadfruit, and oranges fur breakfus, deejunee, an’ dinner, to whistle low about a brown fairy that swung on the same branch wid me! The Emerald Isle the divil! ‘Tis Tahiti’s the Tir-na’n-Og! This beats the bogs an’ the peat an’ the stirabout, wid no peeler to move you on, an’ no soggarth to tell ye ye’re a sinner!”
Tomé was ten years in Penrhyn, the noted pearl island belonging to New Zealand, and known as Tongareva. Lying Bill, McHenry, and Eustace were fellow-traders in that lonely spot. “Fellow” in such relations meant the affectionate intercourse of wolves who united to chase the sheep and quarrel over the carcass. McHenry and Tomé had greeted each other with cold familiarity, each knowing the other through and through, wondering how the other would beat him, and yet not averse to an exchange of trade news and the gossip of Tahiti and the Group, as they called the Paumotus.
“How’s old Lovaina?” asked Tomé.
“Chargin’ as much as ever for her cheap scoffin’s,” replied McHenry, who had never eaten a better meal than that served at the Tiaré Hotel. Eustace, I doubted not, was a square and genial man, but among his business kind he had to fight bludgeon with bludgeon. He opened a fresh cocoanut and diverted the mouth of an infant from its natural fount to make it swallow a few drops. The mother, a handsome, young woman, proud of her armful, gestured smilingly that Tomé was its father.
“Mavourneen dheelish!” he called her, and the baby, “Molly.”
Cocoanuts differ in kind and quality as much as apples, and Eustace gave me a kaipoa, which at his direction I ate, husks and all, and found it delicious.
Leaving the two merchants to continue their armed banter, I stepped outside the store and struck off the road toward the center of the island, through fields of broken coral, mysterious in its oppositeness from all other terrestrial formations. There was no earth that one could see or feel, but a matted vegetation in spots showed that even in these whited sepulchers of the coral animals outlandish plants had found the substance of life. The flora, though desperate in its poverty, was heartening in that it could survive at all. The lofty cocoanut-palm, standing straight as a mast or curving in singular grace, grew luxuriantly—the evergreen banner of this giant fleet of anchored ships of stone. Through a few hundred yards of this weird desert-jungle, I reached the lagoon which the inner marge of the great coral reef inclosed.
No lake that I have seen approached this mere in simple beauty, nor had artist’s vision wrought a more startling, extravagant, yet perfect work of color. The lagoon of Niau was small enough to encompass with a glance from where I stood. I felt myself in an enchanted spot. Niau was not all wooded. For long stretches only the white coral lined the shores, with here and there the plumy palms refreshing the eyes—brilliant in contrast with the bare sheen of the coral, and softly rustling in the breeze.
The water of the lagoon was palest blue, verging to green, clear almost as the pure air, and the beach shelved rapidly into depths.
The beach was made up of tiny shells crumbling into sand, billions and billions of them in the twenty miles about the lagoon. In each of the legion coral isles this was repeated, so that the mind contemplating them was confused at the incalculable prodigality of the life expended to build them and the oddity of the problem arranged by the power planning them.