Once outside the lagoon, the men bent to their paddles with a will, breaking into a melody that reminded me of some hymn tune. They gave it a foreign twist by ending each line on the octave.
“Wonderful pitch!” I said.
“What’s that?” asked Cartwright, jerking his head round. I repeated what I’d said. He glared at me wildly, then seemed to pull himself together, and muttered some sort of reply.
“Well, if a simple speech has that effect on you, my lad, I’ll sit silent,” I said to myself, and silent I did sit the rest of the trip.
About the middle of the morning a bunch of what looked like feather clusters rose out of the sea in front of us. Pretty soon I could see a pinky ridge below, then a line of white. The men put up a brown sail, and in another hour we slid between two lines of breakers into the tiniest lagoon I ever saw, lying in the arms of a crescent-shaped atoll. The whole thing could not have been more than four or five miles long and fifty feet high at the ridge. There was a group of native huts on the beach and a rambling house above, set in a grove of breadfruit and citron and scarlet flame trees. The rest of the island was bare except for a brush of pandanus along the crest and a group of coconut palms on the point, their trunks leaning seaward, as if they were looking for something on the horizon. A lonely spot, yet with a sharp, gemlike beauty of its own.
“Won’t you come up and rest a bit?” Cartwright asked. “You had an early start this morning.”
I said I’d rather go right to work. I hadn’t forgotten the way he glared at me in the boat, and I wasn’t going to put myself in the way of another look like that.
“Right, then; I’ll show you the piano,” he says. But he didn’t move, only stood staring at me with the look of a small boy that had got himself into some trouble, and was wondering if I could help him out.
Suddenly he started off almost on a run, and led me around the shore to the point below the coconut palms, where a pavilion stood in a thick clump of trees. The place looked as if it hadn’t been visited for years. The path was choked with undergrowth, and the doorway was almost hidden by twisted ropes of lianas, growing down serpent fashion from the branches overhead.
“A sweet place to keep a piano,” I thought to myself. I could hardly believe it was the piano he was bringing me to. But as we reached the door I saw it in its wrapping of tarpaulin, half hid under forest rubbish that had filtered through the broken thatch of the roof. As I lifted one corner of the cover, something jumped up with a rush of wings and went screaming past my head. It gave me a proper fright.