Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

Chapter VII tailpiece

CHAPTER VIII

An Adventure in Solitude

I awoke sometime during the latter part of the night with the bemused presentiment that a longed-for event was approaching or in the process of happening. Hands had passed lightly over my face—either that or I had dreamed it—and I heard a faint shout coming from the borderland between sleeping and waking. Puarei's guest bed, with its billowy mattress of kapok, seemed strangely hard, which led to the discovery that I was not lying on a bed, but on a mat in the corner of an empty room. The floor was covered with crushed krora shell which made a faint radiance in the gloom, and a roof of green thatch was alight with the reflections of moving water. I was trying to puzzle out whose house this could be when I heard the shout again, clearly this time, in a pause of silence between deafening claps of thunder. From nearer at hand came the sound of subdued laughter. Something elfish, light-hearted in the quality of it, stirred a dim memory and there flashed into mind the lines of an old poem:

Come, dear children, come out and play.

The moon is shining as bright as day,

Up the ladder and over the wall—

Raising my head quickly, I saw through the open doorway their perfect illustration. The wall was the smooth wall of the sea, with a waning moon rising just clear of it, sending a path of light to the strip of white beach in front of the house. The palm trees bordering the shore swarmed with children who were throwing down nuts. One ancient tree, its stem a fantastic curve, held its foliage far out over the water at a point where the floor of the narrow outer lagoon shelved steeply toward the reef some fifty yards distant. Both boys and girls were shinning up the trunk, one after the other, diving from the plumed top, dropping feet foremost, jumping with their hands clasped around their knees into the foaming water—the wreckage of huge combers which broke on the reef pouring across it into the inner shallows. A second group had gathered in the moonlit area just before the doorway. Several youngsters were peering intently in my direction. Others were playing a sort of handclapping game to the accompaniment of an odd little singsong. A small girl, with a baby riding astride her hip, walked past, and I saw another, of ten or twelve, standing at the edge of the track of shimmering light, holding a coconut to her lips with both hands. Her head was bent far back and her hair hung free from her shoulders as she drained the cool liquid to the last drop.

Imagine coming out of the depths of sleep to the consciousness of such a scene! I was hardly more sure of the reality of it than I had been of the shout, the touch of hands. It was like a picture out of a book of fairy tales, but one quick with life, the figures coming and going against a background of empty sea where the long swell broke in lines of white fire on a ledge of coral. I remembered where I was, of course: in my own house, which stood on the ocean side of a small motu known in the Paumotuan legend as "The island where the souls were eaten." The house had been built for me only the day before by the order of Puarei, chief of the atoll of Rutiaro; and the motu was one of a dozen uninhabited islands which lay on the thirty-mile circumference to the lagoons.

It was ordered—by chance, which took me there, perhaps—that I was never to see the place in the clear light of usual experience, but rather through a glamour like that of remembered dreams—a long succession of dreams in which, night after night, events shape themselves according to the heart's desire, or even more fantastically, with an airy disregard for any semblance to reality. So it was, waking from sleep on the first night which I spent under my own roof. I was almost ready to believe that my presence there was not the result of chance. Waywardness of fancy is one of the most godlike of the attributes of that divinity, but the display of it is as likely as not to be unfriendly. Here there seemed to be reasoned kindly action. "Providence," I said to myself—"Providence without a doubt; a little repentant, perhaps, because of questionable gifts in the past." A whimsical Providence, too, which delighted in shocking my sense of probability. What could those children be doing on Soul-Eaters' Island in the middle of the night? I, myself, had left the village island, four miles distant, only a few hours earlier, and at that time everyone was asleep. There was not a sound of human activity in the settlement; not a glimmer of light to be seen anywhere excepting in Moy Ling's, the Chinaman's, shop, and on the surface of the lagoon where lay the misty reflections of the stars. "Perhaps," I thought, "these are not earthly children. Maybe they are the ghosts of those whose souls were eaten here so many years ago." I was more than half serious in thinking of that possibility. Stranger things had happened on islands not so far removed from the world of men.

I dressed very quietly and went to the door, taking care to keep well in the shadow so that I might look on for a moment without being seen. My doubts vanished at once. Not only the children had come out to play; fathers and mothers, as well. Tamitanga was there and Rikitia and Nahea and Pohu and Tahere and Hunga; Nui-Tane and Nui-Vahine, Tamataha, Manono, Havaiki; and I saw old Rangituki, who was at least seventy and a grandmother several times over, clapping her hands with others of her generation and swaying from side to side in time to the music of Kaupia's accordion. All the older people were grouped around Puarei, who was seated in an old deck chair, a sort of throne which was carried about for him wherever he went. Poura, his wife, lay on a mat beside him, her chin propped on her hands. Both greeted me cordially, but offered no explanation for the reason of the midnight visit. I was glad that they didn't. I liked the casualness of it, which was quite in keeping with habits of life at Rutiaro. But I couldn't help smiling, remembering my reflections earlier in the evening. I believed then that I was crossing the threshold of what was to be an adventure in solitude, and was in a mood of absurdly youthful elation at the prospect. "I was to delve deeply, for the first time, into my own resources against loneliness. I had known the solitude of cities, but there one has the comfortable sense of nearness to others; the refuge of books, pictures, music—all the distractions which prevent any very searching examination of one's capacity for a life of retirement. At Soul-Eaters' Island I would have no books, no pictures, excepting a colored post card of the Woolworth Building which had won me this opportunity; and for music I was limited to what I could make for myself with my ocharina, my sweet-potato whistle which had a range of one octave. Thus scantly provided with diversions, I was to learn how far my own thoughts would serve to make a solitary life not only endurable, but pleasant."

So I had dreamed as I paddled down the lagoon, with my island taking form against the starlit sky to the eastward. It was one of those places which set one to dreaming, which seem fashioned by nature for the enjoyment of a definite kind of experience. Seeing it, whether by day or by night, the most gregarious of men, I am sure, would have become suddenly enamored of his own companionship and the most prosaic would have discovered a second, meditative self which pleads for indulgence with gentle obstinacy. But, alas! my own unsocial nature gained but a barren victory, being robbed, at the outset, of the fruits of it, by the seventy-five convivial inhabitants of Rutiaro. Here within six hours was half the village at my door, and Puarei told me that the rest of it, or as many as were provided with canoes, was following. Evidently he had suggested the invasion. My new house needed warming—or the Paumotuan equivalent to that festival—so they had come to warm it.