Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

Chapter I tailpiece

CHAPTER II

In the Cloud of Islands

Ruau, the old Paumotuan woman, and the owner of Tanao, was the last of her family. There were relatives by marriage, but none of them would consent to live on so poor an atoll; and the original population, never large, had diminished, through death and migration, until at last she was left alone, living in her memories of other days, awed by the companionship of spirits present to her in strange and terrible shapes. At last she felt that she could endure it no longer; but it was many months before the smoke of one of her signal fires was seen by a passing schooner. She returned with it to Tahiti, and if she had been lonely before, she was tenfold lonelier there, so far from the graves of her husband and children. It was at this time that Crichton met her. He had been living at Tahiti for more than a year, on the lookout for just such an opportunity as Ruau offered him. Although only twenty-eight, he was in the tenth year of his wanderings, and had almost despaired of finding the place he had so long dreamed of and searched for. During that period he had been moving slowly eastward, through Borneo, New Guinea, the Solomons, the New Hebrides, the Tongas, the Cook Group. In some of these islands the climate was too powerful an enemy for a white man to contend with; in others there was no land available, or they lacked the solitude he wanted. This latter embarrassment was the one he had met at Tahiti. The fact is an illuminating commentary on his character. Most men would find exceptional opportunities for seclusion there; not on the seaboard but in the mountains; in the valleys winding deeply among them, where no one goes from year's end to year's end. Even those leading out to the sea are but little frequented in their upward reaches. But Crichton was very exacting in his requirements in this respect. He was one of those men who make few or no friends—one of those lonely spirits without the ties or the kindly human associations which make life pleasant to most of us. They wander the thinly peopled places of the earth, interested in a large way at what they see from afar or faintly hear, but looking on with quiet eyes; taking no part, being blessed or cursed by nature with a love of silence, of the unchanging peace of great solitudes. One reads of them now and then in fiction, and if they live in fiction it is because of men like Crichton, their prototypes in reality, seen for a moment as they slip apprehensively across some by-path leading from the outside world.

He had a little place at Tahiti, a walk of two hours and a quarter, he said, from the government offices in the port. He had to go there sometimes to attend to the usual formalities, and I have no doubt that he knew within ten seconds the length of the journey which would be a very distasteful one to him. I can imagine his uneasiness at what he saw and heard on those infrequent visits. An after-the-war renewal of activity, talk of trade, development, progress, would startle him into a waiting, listening attitude. Returning home, maps and charts would be got out and plans made against the day when it would be necessary for him to move on. He told me of his accidental meeting with Ruau, as he called the old Paumotuan woman. It came only a few days after the arrival from San Francisco of one of the monthly steamers. A crowd of tourists—stop-over passengers of a day—had somehow discovered the dim trail leading to his house. "They were much pleased with it," he said, adding, with restraint: "They took a good many pictures. I was rather annoyed at this, although, of course, I said nothing." No doubt they made the usual remarks: "Charming! So quaint!" etc.

It was the last straw for Crichton. So he made another visit to the government offices where he had his passport viséed. He meant to go to Maketea, a high phosphate island which stands like a gateway at the northwestern approach to the Low Archipelago. The phosphate would be worked out in time and the place abandoned, as other islands of that nature had been, to the seabirds. But on that same evening, while he was having dinner at a Chinaman's shop in town, he overheard Ruau trying to persuade some of her relatives to return with her to Tanao. He knew of the island. He is one of the few men who would know of it. He had often looked at it on his charts, being attracted by its isolated position. The very place for him! And the old woman, he said, when she learned that he wanted to go there, that he wanted to stay always—all his life—gripped his hands in both of hers and held them, crying softly, without saying anything more. The relatives made some objections to the arrangement at first. But the island being remote, poverty-stricken, haunted, they were soon persuaded to consent to a ten years' lease, with the option of renewal. Crichton promised, of course, to take care of Ruau as long as she lived, and at her death to bury her decently beside her husband.

He proceeded at once with his altered plans. There were government regulations to be complied with and these had taken some time. On the day when he was at last free to start he learned that the Caleb S. Winship was about to sail on a three months' voyage in the Low Archipelago. He had no time to ask for passage beforehand. He had to chance the possibility of getting it at the last moment. It is not to be supposed that either the manager of the Inter-Island Trading Company or the supercargo of the Winship would have consented to carry him to such an out-of-the-way destination had they known his reason for wanting to be set down there. It amuses me now to think of those two hard-headed traders, men without a trace of sentiment, going one hundred and fifty miles off their course merely to carry the least gregarious of wanderers on the last leg of his long journey to an ideal solitude. It was their curiosity which gained him his end. They believed he had some secret purpose, some reason of purely material self-interest in view. They had both seen Tanao from a distance and knew that it had never been worth visiting either for pearl shell or copra. It is hard to understand what miracle they believed might have taken place in the meantime. During the voyage I often heard them talking about the atoll, about Crichton—wondering, conjecturing, and always miles off the track. It was plain that he was a good deal disturbed by their hints and furtive questionings. He seemed to be afraid that mere talk about Tanao on the part of an outsider might sully the purity of its loneliness. He may have been a little selfish in his attitude, but if that is a fault in a man of his temperament it is one easily forgiven. And what could he have said to those traders? It was much better to keep silent and let them believe what they liked.

It must not be thought that Crichton poured out his confidences to me like a schoolgirl. On the contrary, he had a very likable reserve, although a good half of it, I should say, was shyness. Then, too, he had almost forgotten how to talk except in the native dialects of several groups of widely scattered islands. In English he had a tendency to prolong his vowels and to omit consonants, which gave his speech a peculiar exotic sound. He made no advances for some time. Neither did I. For more than three weeks we lived together on shipboard, went ashore together at islands where we had put in for copra, and all that while we did not exchange above two hundred words in conversation. There was so little talk that I can remember the whole of it, almost word for word. Once while we were walking on the outer beach at Raraka, an atoll of thirty-five inhabitants, he said to me:

"I wish I had come out here years ago. They appeal to the imagination, don't you think, all these islands?"