The Gates of Morning

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

The Portsey of long ago that had fired a cannon shot and destroyed Katafa’s canoe, the schooner that had brought the Melanesians to Palm Tree, the Spanish ship that had been sunk in Karolin lagoon and the whaler that had come after her, all these had burnt into the minds of Dick, Aioma and Katafa the fact that something of which they did not know the name (but which was civilization), was out there beyond the sea line, something that, octopus-like, would at times thrust out a feeler in the form of a ship, an ayat destructive and, if possible, to be destroyed.

Ayat was the name given by Karolin to the great burgomaster gulls that were to the small gulls what schooners are to canoes, and so anything in the form of a ship was an ayat, that is to say, a thing carrying with it all the propensities of a robber and a murderer; for the great gulls would rob the lesser gulls of their food and devour their chicks and fight and darken the sunshine of the reef with their wings.

The comparison was not a compliment to the Pacific traders or their ships or the civilization that had sent them forth to prey on the world, but it was horribly apposite.

And yet the little ayats in the shadow of the house had for Aioma an attraction beyond words. They were as fascinating as sin. This old child after a hard day’s work would sometimes dream of them in his sleep; dream that he was helping to sail them on the big rock pool, as he sometimes did in reality. The frigate, the full-rigged ship, the schooner and the whale man, all had cruised in the rock pool which seemed constructed by nature as a model testing tank; indeed the first great public act of Dick as ruler of the Karolinites had been a full review of this navy on the day after he had fetched Aioma from the southern beach. Aioma, fascinated by the sight of the schooner which Dick had shown him on his landing, had insisted on seeing the others launched and the whole population had stood round ten deep with the little children between the women’s legs, all with their eyes fixed on the pretty sight. The strangest sight—for Kearney the illiterate and ignorant had managed to symbolize the two foundations of civilization, war and trade; and here in little yet in essence lay the ships of Nelson and the ships of Villeneuve: the great wool ships, the Northumberland that had brought Dick’s parents to Palm Tree, the whalers of Martha’s Vineyard and the sandalwood schooners, those first carriers of the disease of the white man.

To Aioma the schooner was the most fascinating. He knew the whaler with her try works and her heavy davits and her squat build; he had seen her before in the whaler whose brutal crew had landed and been driven off. He knew the ship, he had seen its likeness in the Spanish ship of long ago; the frigate intrigued him, but the schooner took his heart—it was not only that he understood her rig and way of sailing better than the rig and way of sailing of the others, it was more than that. Aioma was an instinctive ship lover, and to the lover of ships, the schooner has most appeal, for the schooner is of all things that float the most graceful and the most beautiful; and in contrast to her canvas, the canvas of your square rigged ship becomes dishcloths hung out to dry.

He brooded on this thing over which Kearney had expended his most loving care, and in which nothing was wanting. He understood the topping lifts that supported the main boom, the foresail, the use of the standing rigging. Kearney, through his work, was talking to him and just as Kearney had explained this and that to Dick, so Dick was explaining it to Aioma. Truly a man can speak though dead, even as Kearney was speaking now.

The method of reefing a sail was unknown to Aioma; a canoe sail was never reefed, reduction of canvas was made by tying the head of the sail up to spill the wind. Fore canvas was unknown to Aioma, but he understood.

The subconscious mathematician in him that made him able to build great canoes capable of standing heavy weather and carrying forty or fifty men apiece, understood all about the practice of the business, though he had never heard of centres of rotation, absolute or relative velocities, of impelling powers, or the laws of the collision of bodies; of inertia or pressures of resistance or squares of velocity or series of inclinations.

Squatting on his hams before the little model of the Rarotanga, he knew nothing of these things and yet he knew that the schooner was good, that she would sail close to the wind with little leeway when the wind was on the beam, that the rudder was better than the steering paddle, that the sail area though great would not capsize her, that she was miles ahead of anything he had ever made in the form of a ship. That the maker of the ayat was a genius beside whom he was a duffer, unknowing that Kearney was absolutely without inventive genius, and that the schooner was the work of a million men extending over three thousand years.

Katafa sitting beside Dick would watch Aioma as he brooded and played with the thing. It had no fascination for her. The little ships had always repelled her if anything. They were the only dividing point between her and Dick—she could not feel his pleasure or interest in them, and from this fact possibly arose a vague foreboding that perhaps some day in some way the little ships might separate them. When a woman loves, she can become jealous of a man’s pipe, of his tennis racket, of his best friend, of anything that she can’t share and which occupies his attention at times more than she does.