“Well, yes; but I can easily see you again, can’t I?” Hillary L—— made no articulate response. “And this is the Solomon Isles, remote from civilisation, far away in the cannibalistic South Seas!” he murmured deep within his happy soul.
But mad as Hillary was, he half realised that the girl before him was more of a child than a woman. She laughed, even giggled a little, like a happy child. Only five years had passed since she had played with the native kiddies, who many times had persuaded her to dance and sing their heathen songs as they pretended to be heathen chiefs and chiefesses performing on a toy pae pae. She had revelled in those dances. But no one would have dreamed by looking at her that she was not a pure-blooded white girl. Her father had married a beautiful three-quarter caste girl in Honolulu, so Gabrielle had a strain of dark blood in her veins!
The young apprentice couldn’t fathom the look in her eyes as he stared. Passion was just awakening in her soul, stealing like a tropical sunrise over the hills of childhood. To him she appeared like some spirit-creation that might at any moment take wings and fly away; so when she turned the prow of her canoe dead on to the soft sand and jumped ashore, he made a frantic dash and jumped, landing just behind her. He was determined to know when and where she would meet him again. But he had no need to fear; she did not fly away. She simply tied her canoe to a bamboo stem and, turning round, looked him full in the face with those glorious eyes that were to be for him two stars of the first magnitude. Then she placed her fingers in the folds of her hair and taking out one of the hibiscus blossoms, handed it to him, much to his surprise. He realised that it was more the act of a child than a woman of the world.
“I’ve read in books that girls give men flowers that have been fastened in their hair,” she said. This remark and act of the girl’s, and the look in her eyes, had a strange effect on Hillary’s susceptible mind. He almost felt the tears well into his eyes. It was all so unexpected, and told him in some great poetry of silence what the girl’s heart was made of, the utter loneliness of her existence and the way her childish dreams were flowing out to the great realities of life. He placed the flower in his buttonhole, then gazed on the girl as only an infatuated youth can gaze, and said: “Will you meet me here again, by this lagoon? Any day and time will do for me.”
“I’m sure to be this way again,” she said, and before the young apprentice could stop her she had flitted away under the coco-palms.
Before she got out of sight she turned and waved her hand. In his excitement he responded by waving his cap. Then she disappeared under the thick belt of dark mangroves by the swamp track that led inland in the direction of her father’s bungalow.
“What a girl!” That was the only audible comment he made as the girl went out of sight. And where did she go? She ran away over the slopes that lay just behind the township of Rokeville, back to her home and her trader father.
Old Everard, her parent, was a kind of freak too. He was a tall, clean-shaved, thin-faced man, with blue-grey eyes and a beaked nose; his mouth had a melancholy droop about it; the face in repose looked strong at times, but when he grinned and revealed his tobacco-blackened teeth it looked characterless, almost weak. At times he was extremely garrulous, at other times either reticent or insulting to anyone who might be unfortunate enough to come near him. Gabrielle seemed to be the only person in Bougainville who understood him. He didn’t take much interest in his daughter, though she might have done so in him. All he did was religiously to exercise his parental control by sending the girl on his selfish errands, mostly for rum and whisky. At other times he demanded that she should attend to his comforts when delirium tremens shook his spine. He was an ex-sailor. Trailing from the mainyard of his ship whilst anchored off the Solomon Group, he had lost a leg, and during his convalescence in Honolulu had married, finally settling down in Bougainville.
His homestead was a three-roomed bungalow, and he kept things going by the money he had saved during his seafaring life; he was also interested in copra plantations at Bougainville and at Ysabel. His temperament was choleric. He was known in the vicinity by the nickname “Shiver-me-timbers.” This cognomen was derived from the fact that he always stamped his wooden leg, making it shiver in his impatience, when he wanted a drink, consequently his wooden leg was never at rest. He looked like some wooden-legged Nemesis as he sat there that evening; and if any glamour still lingered in Gabrielle’s brain from her chance meeting with the young apprentice, it was swiftly dispelled by the stumping of that wooden member as she rushed indoors.
Even a wooden leg would seem to have its part to play in the universe: there was something imperative about its tapping voice. That fate-like tapping had smashed up many of Gabrielle’s young dreams; possibly that wooden leg was a soulless agent of the devil.