The thud of a cocoanut beside me stirred me from my reverie. I was wet with the wading ashore and the sweat of my walk, and so I removed my few garments and plunged into the lagoon. Going down to test the declivity a yard or so from the water’s edge I dropped twenty feet and touched no bottom. The water was limpid, delicious, and I could see the giant coral fans waving fifty feet below me.
As I loitered on my back in the water, and looked down into the crystal depths and at the cloudless sky, I had a moment’s phantasm of a great city, its lofty trade battlements, its crowded streets, the pale, set faces of its people, the splendor of the rich houses, the squalor of the tenements, the police with clubs and guns, and the shrieking traffic. Here was the sweetest contrast, where man had hardly touched the primitive work of nature. It was long from Sumer, and far from Gotham.
I was floating at ease when I heard a voice. It seemed to come out of the water. It was soft and almost etheric.
“Maitai!” it said, which meant, “You’re all right.”
I turned on my side, and by my garments was a long, gaunt Niauan, with a loose mouth, loafing there, with his eyes fawning upon me. He smiled sweetly, and said, “Goodanighta!”
As it was hardly seven o’clock in the morning, the sun a ball of fire, and the glare of the reef like the shine of a boy’s mirror in one’s eyes, I argued against his English education. But courtesy is not correction. I said in kind, “Goodanighta!” He came into the water and repaid me by shaking my hand, and with a movement toward the beach, said, “Damafina!”
“Maitai!” I corroborated his opinion, and then he beckoned to me to leave the lagoon and follow him. I dressed, all moist as I was, and we returned toward the village, I wondering what design on me he had.
“She canna fik (fix) you show Niau,” my cicerone explained, as he waved toward the island.
“All right, good, number one,” I assented.
He laughed with pleased vanity at his success in conversing with me in my tongue and at the envious looks of the people on their tiny porches as we passed them, and I saluted them.