The Gates of Morning

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

He crumpled up and sat down beside her on the deck and spoke soft words, asking her what ailed her that she looked so sorrowful. “For,” said Sru, “the storm that took your people has without doubt taken many more in the island and will not give them back, not though men weep forever—it is so, and it is so, and ever will be so, and to eat the heart out for that which has been, is to feed foolishly, for,” said Sru, “the coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs.” He was repeating the old Island proverb and for a moment he had forgotten Karolin, pearls, gin bottles and the glory of seidlitz powders in effervescence like the foam on the reef; he had forgotten all little things and his words and voice broke up the depths of Le Moan and the cause of her grief came forth. Otherwise and soon she might have died of it. Conscious that Karolin was so far in the past that it was safe to speak, she told Sru that no storm had overtaken her people, that she had lied to Peterson so that he might not discover and perhaps kill the being she loved; and there, sitting in the showering starlight, she did that which she had never done before even for her own inspection, opened her heart, told, as a sleeper might tell in sleep, of her love for Taori and of his beauty and strength and swiftness and of everything except that which she did not know—the fact that Taori had a lover already, Katafa.

She spoke and Sru listened, absorbing her words and her story as a kanaka will absorb any sort of tale he can understand. Then this amazing savage who had spoken so poetically about the waxing of the coral and the passing of man, this sympathizer who had spoken so softly in addressing grief, leaning on his elbow began to shake with laughter.

He knew that big feller Mas’r Peterson would not have hurt a hair of Taori’s head, that he did not want to take Le Moan off the beach and had only done so because he imagined her unable to fend for herself. He saw that Le Moan, trying to protect her lover against imaginary perils had allowed herself to be sacrificed and snatched away from everything she loved and cared for, that she had prepared for herself the trap into which she had fallen—and all this to the mind of Sru seemed a huge joke, almost as good as the joke of the drunken man he had once seen, who, trying to cut wood with his foot on a log had cut off his foot with the axe he was wielding.

Sru giggled like a girl being tickled, then he burst out in snorts like a buffalo in a temper, choked as though he had swallowed a fish-bone and then began to explain.

Began to explain and failed to hit the mark simply because Le Moan could not understand why big feller Mas’r Peterson had taken her away from Karolin. He did not want to take her away yet he had taken her away. Le Moan could not understand that in the least.

Le Moan could not understand pity, she had never come across it in others and she had never felt it for herself. Had she been able to pity herself, she would have flung herself on the deck weeping and wailing when the Kermadec turned her stern to the south and dropped Karolin beyond the horizon. She had sacrificed herself for the sake of the being who dominated her existence, she had dared the most terrible of all things, the unknown, yet she could not in the least understand why Peterson should do what he did not want to do for the sake of a being, a stranger whom he had never seen before.

To tell the truth Sru did not quite comprehend it either, he knew it was so and he left it at that. It was one of the strange and unaccountable things that white men were always doing. What intrigued him was the fact that Le Moan had fooled herself in fancying Peterson a dangerous man capable of injuring her lover and that Peterson had fooled himself in believing her story.

So he talked till Le Moan at last understood the fact that, whatever Peterson’s object in taking her away may have been, he would not have injured Taori, that if she had said nothing he would have gone off after having filled the water breakers at the well, and as he talked and as she listened dumb before the great truth that she had sacrificed everything for nothing, slowly up from the subconscious mind of Sru and urged by his talk, came an idea.

“You will go back,” said Sru. “Listen, it is I, Sru, who am talking—we will go back, you and I, and what tells me is that which lies behind thy left ear.”

Le Moan put her hand up to the amulet hidden beneath her hair.