Sru knew what she meant; at Soma in the Paumotus from where he had come the directional instinct, shared more or less by all savages, was especially marked in some of the children, and the deep-sea canoes in those waters where the currents run in an unaccountable manner and where the trade winds are not, depended on the instinct of the steersman.
He bade her close her eyes and turn and turn. “Where now lies the land we have left?” asked Sru. Without opening her eyes and not knowing east from west or north from south, she pointed aft almost dead south.
Sru laughed. She was right, the mysterious compass in her brain that worked without error or deviation would have pointed to Karolin, though a thousand miles away; then as he spun the wheel having let the Kermadec a point or two off her course, Le Moan went forward and he forgot her, but he did not forget what she had told him. It remained in his tenacious mind like a pebble in molasses, hidden, but there till three days later when towards evening, the kanakas were eating their supper on deck, Sru was brought face to face and for the first time in his life with a great idea, an idea that included tobacco not by the stick, but in cases, rum in casks, women, barlow knives, chalk pipes and patent leather boots, also canned salmon and seidlitz powders.
Sru, an old pearler, had been in the last of the pearling at Soma before the banks gave out. He knew the value of pearls.
CHAPTER VII—THE PEARL
They were seated on the main deck near the galley, their coffee mugs beside them and their plates on their knees and the Kermadec on a steady seven-knot clip was heeled slightly to starboard almost rigid as a board, save for the sound of the sea as she dipped to the swell.
For days she had run so with the port rail raised against the white fringe of trade clouds on the far horizon, a steady list from a steady breeze warm and winged with the silver fins of flying fish, a tepid sea-scented wind such as the north can never know, less a wind than a revelation such as men try to express when they speak of the breath of the tropics.
The cook had served out the food, and as they ate he talked; he was a big man with the voice of a child and he was talking of his native village apropos of nothing and to nobody in particular, which is a way kanakas have.
Of the world around them, save for Soma and the southern islands and the island in the north which a few of them knew, Sru, Peroii and the rest of them were as ignorant as Le Moan.
As they talked, the rosy light of sunset falling on them and reflected by the fore canvas, Sru, who was seated by Peroii, saw the wind lift Le Moan’s dark hair exposing the pearl charm she wore behind the left ear—the double pearl, lustrous and beautiful, tied in the hair so cunningly and betrayed by the wind.