The group seated on the deck, after a momentary movement, resumed their positions. There is something so distinctive in the voice of a sleep-talker that the sound, after the first momentary flutter caused by it, brought assurance. Then, prepared at any moment to make a dash for the boat, they sat, the palms of their hands flat on the deck and their eyes following Le Moan, now gliding towards the hatch, the spear head in her left hand, her right hand touching the port rail as she went.
At the hatch she paused to listen. She could hear the reef, and on its sonorous murmur like a tiny silver thread of sound the trickle of the tide on the planking of the schooner, and from the dark pit of the stairway leading to the saloon another sound, the breathing of men asleep.
She had never been below. That stairway, even in daylight, had always filled her with fear, the fear of the unknown, the dread of a trap, the claustrophobia of one always used to open spaces.
Lit by the day it frightened her, in its black darkness it appalled her; yet she had to go down, for the life of Taori lay at the bottom of that pit to be saved by her hands and hers alone.
Kanoa, amongst the others, sat watching. The mind of Kanoa so filled with fear when she told him that his death was imminent, the mind of Kanoa that had lusted for her, the mind of this child of eighteen to whom light and laughter had been life and thought, a thing of the moment, was no longer the same mind.
The great heroism he was watching, this attempt to save him and the others, had awakened in him something perhaps of the past, ancestors who had fought, done great deeds and suffered—who knows—but there came to him an elation such as he had felt in the movements of the dance and at the sound of music. Rising and evading Poni who clutched at his leg to hold him back, he came to the rail, stood for a moment as Le Moan vanished from sight and then swift-footed but silent as a shadow, glided to the saloon hatch and stood listening.
Holding the polished banister rail, and moving cautiously, step by step, Le Moan descended, the spear head in her left hand. As she came, a waft from the cabin rose to meet her in the darkness—an odour of humanity and stale tobacco smoke, bunk-bedding and bilge.
It met her like an evil ghost, it grappled with her and tried to drive her back; used as she was to the fresh sea air, able to scent rain on the wind and change of weather, this odour checked her for a moment, repelled her, held her and then lost its power; her will had conquered it. She reached the foot of the stairs and before her now lay the open doorway of the cabin, a pale oblong beyond which lay a picture.
The table with the swinging lamp above it, the bunks on either side where the sleeping men lay, clothes cast on the floor, all lit by the moon-gleams through the skylight and portholes.
From the bunk on the right hung an arm. It was Carlin’s; she knew it by its size. She moved towards it, paused, looked up and stood rigid.