Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

"During the early years of his life on Rimarutu, Varana had enough to do with his store, his occasional trips for supplies, and his work for the betterment of the island people. He found them living on fish and coconuts, depending for all their luxuries on a dwindling production of copra. He showed them how to thin their palms, how to select nuts for new plantings, how to dry their copra with a minimum of effort. The shell in the lagoon was nearly exhausted; he persuaded the chiefs of the two villages to forbid diving for a term of years. After experiments conducted with Tupuna's aid he set the men to catching flying fish, which swarmed in the waters about the island, and taught the women to split them, rub in salt, and dry them on lines in the sun. Rimarutu is high, as atolls go—five or six yards above the sea in spots; he laid out beds of puraka taro, and had pits dug on the high portions of the island, lined the bottoms with rock to keep the taproots from salt water, filled them with humus and topsoil—scraped up in handfuls—and planted breadfruit, mango, and lime, brought from the high islands to the north. At long intervals, when in need of something that only civilization could supply—paint, rigging, or a new set of sails—he went north with a cargo of copra and dried fish and took on a brief charter with Jackson. On these trips he visited scores of islands, and came to know the people of a thousand miles of ocean.

"It was not until his son was born that Varana began to think seriously of money. His daughters had given him no concern; he explained to me once his peculiar philosophy as to their future. Perhaps he was right. With their happiness in mind, he preferred to bring them up as island girls—without education or knowledge of the outside world and no greater prospects than those of their full-blooded playmates—rather than give them the chances of the usual half-caste: half-educated and partially Europeanized, whose most brilliant hope is marriage with a white man of the inferior sort. But the birth of Terii set the father to thinking.

"The child was about ten when I saw him first, a fine strong boy, very fair for a half-caste, with his father's eyes, a high carriage of the head, and skin touched with a faint bloom of the sun. Tupuna was immensely proud of him. I was a youngster then and new to the islands, but I had heard of Varana before Jackson introduced me to him. It was at Jackson's place, on the upper veranda, that he told me how he had leased Fatuhina; some one had spoken of my work. I had operated diving machines? He needed a man familiar with them, for he had leased an atoll with some big shell patches in the lagoon, and machines would be necessary to work the deeper portions. I was doing nothing at the time. I liked what I had heard of Varana, and I liked the man better still. In an hour we had come to an understanding. I worked with him, off and on, from that time until the beginning of the war.

"Without caring in the least for wealth, Varana had set out to make himself rich. Long before I knew him he had decided the question of his son: Terii was to have the same chances that his father had had before nim—was to see both sides and choose for himself.

"Even Varana's friends spoke of his luck; to my mind his success was inevitable. Regarded with an almost superstitious affection by the people of widely scattered groups, he possessed channels of information closed forever to the ordinary man. It was in this way that he learned of the shell in Fatuhina lagoon; perhaps he did not know that the native who approached him, one evening on a distant atoll, to speak casually of the matter and stroll away, had paddled across twelve miles of sea with no other object than to bring the news to Varana. When the Gaviota was beached he was the first to learn of it—that affair alone brought him a neat fortune; and when men had fine pearls to sell they saw him before they went to the Jews. By the time his son was twelve Varana was a rich man.

"I was on Rimarutu when he left to take the boy to England. Tupuna shed a few tears, but there was no scene—she knew he would return. 'I go to take our son to my own land,' he told her; 'there will be six moons before I come.' Five months later I was waiting with the schooner when he stepped off the mail boat. That night, as he lay on a mat on the afterdeck, dressed in a pareu and a pair of slippers, he spoke of England briefly in the midst of our talk on island matters. 'Damned senseless treadmill,' he remarked; 'I can't think how I stood it so many years.' The ordinary man, who had left home under a cloud of misfortune to return twenty years later, after wanderings in distant lands, with a fortune and a beautiful child, would have lingered not without a certain relish. But Varana was different; he grudged every moment spent in civilization and lived only for the day when he would again take the wheel of his schooner and watch the ridges of Tahiti sink beneath the horizon.

"The years passed rapidly and tranquilly on Rimarutu. The days of Varana's activity were over; he was no longer young, though he kept his store and took the schooner out at long intervals for supplies. Then came the outbreak of the war.

"I was in Gallipoli when the letter reached me, written in the native language by Varana's old mate. It told a story fantastically unreal—incredible from the viewpoint of everyday life—and yet to me who knew him, as to the people of his island, the end of Varana seemed a natural thing, in keeping with what had gone before. Tupuna had fallen ill (the old man wrote) and had died suddenly and peacefully, as natives do. Varana stood beside her grave with no great display of grief, returned to his house and spent three days putting his affairs in order. On the fourth day he gave the mate a thick envelope of documents, called together the people of the island and bade each one of them farewell. When he turned to leave they did not disperse; the women had begun to sob—they felt already the desolation of a final parting. It was the hour of sunset, when the trade wind dies away and the lagoon lies like a mirror under an opalescent sky.... I can see in imagination those simple and friendly islanders, standing in little groups before the settlement—raising no voice in protest, moving no hand in restraint—while the man they loved walked to the ocean beach, launched a tiny canoe in the surf, and paddled out to the west. The nearest land in that direction is distant six hundred miles. When he had passed the breakers—they say—Varana did not once turn his head; the watchers stood motionless while the sky faded, their eyes fixed on the dot that was his canoe—a dwindling dot, swallowed up at last in the night."

Tari ceased to speak. He was sitting propped on the lounge, arms folded, legs stretched out, eyes staring at the table. Without seeming aware of what he did, he filled his glass, raised it to his lips, and drank. Presently he emerged from his revery to light a pipe.

"In due time," he went on, "I had word from the lawyers, inclosing a copy of the will and informing me that I had been named executor with old Jackson, who seemed to have discovered the secret of eternal life. There was also a letter from Varana, written after Tupuna's death—a friendly and casual note, with a mere line at the end, asking me to do what I could for his boy. The land Tupuna had brought him was to be divided equally among his daughters; all the rest was for Terii, saving his parting gift to me. Only one condition was attached—Terii must visit Rimarutu before inheriting the property of his father; once he had set foot on the island, he would be his own master, free to choose his path in life.