Читать книгу The Silent Reefs - Dorothy Cottrell - Страница 3

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How may men follow the path of a ship where there are no paths? How know the manner of disaster from its traces, two years late, when those seeking within short days had found no trace? How might two fishermen of Caribbee learn that which the navies, coast guards and air forces of five nations had failed to learn? Yet they, Henri Henri Christophe and Joseph Henri Christophe, great and bronzed French West Indians named for a mighty king, for Henri Christophe, King of the North, threadbare if honored sons of the Followers, must prove what had befallen or betray the women and the little ones, even the island itself. Almost the tangible weight of the island was upon their wide and young shoulders as they walked now gravely carrying the stretcher of their Aunt Caroline behind the coffin of their father to the cemetery under the sea-grape trees.

Henri would have liked to have been carrying the coffin, helped only by his brother, but Joseph had said no, because six of the old captains had wished to act as pallbearers. "We have already said farewell to our father," Joseph had said. "To the old ones, this is their farewell—to him and to the old years. He remembered the great days when the island fleets went north to the cold seas to bring the ice, and south in trade to the Amazon and the great deltas—and there were no captains like the captains of the island. Now he is dead and there is in the world one less who remembers, so that now there are only six instead of seven who may talk of those days. The old ones know that soon there will be less than six—and one day only one with none to whom he may say 'Do you remember . . . ?' And then in the world there will be none, for the last is dead, and with him the years die." He had put his hand on Henri's arm and the beauty of his slow smile touched his eyes. "We must let them have their wish!"

So now the coffin tottered slowly between the graybeards in their blue serge suits that were too large for the old frames, instead of moving with measured solemnity in the hands of Henri and Joseph whose worn cotton shirts and trousers bulged to the swell of their great muscles. But Henri knew that as usual Joseph had been right and that this was as their father would have wanted it.

Behind the brothers with Aunt Caroline, who was groaning on her stretcher but greatly enjoying herself, came the population of the island: Monsieur the Commissioner, perspiring in his full dress uniform of blue and gold with cocked hat, the good man having made the supreme sacrifice of donning it in memory of Captain Christophe and as comfort to the family; the spade-bearded Follower elders and the gray-clad women of the sect; the Negroes, led by giant Black Tobias; the lepers, to whom a kindly message had been rushed so that they might not miss the function, walking a little apart.

"Look where you're going!" Aunt Caroline shrilled.

"We are looking, Aunt Caroline," the brothers answered dutifully.

"Well look somewhere else! You're shaking my liver."

"Forgive us, Aunt Caroline," Joseph said.

The procession turned from the blindingly white road into the dappled shadows of the cemetery that was a very friendly place. For until recently it had been the island custom to bury the dead at the cottage doors, planting the brightest flowers above them, but when the government had forbidden this, the people had adopted the cemetery as the place of meeting for community singing and the stately picnics of the Followers, so that one member of a gathering might say to another, "We will gather this time at the grave of my husband, we sat with your wife as of last meeting," or "Today we are singing my brother's favorite songs, let us be near him." And in this way none of the dead were slighted or lonely. The people were particularly kind, too, to those who had only markers in the graveyard, for many of the beautifully polished and lettered slabs of mahogany bore such inscriptions as "Beloved husband of Martha, lost at sea in the Great Storm," or "Miriam and Able, aged five years, they blew away." And while sometimes the people at the gatherings might fail to decorate the graves beneath which dead islanders slept, it was a rare thing when flowers were not dropped beside the markers so that the doubly bereaved could know that those they loved were not forgotten.

One of the most recent of the markers read, "To the memory of Malcolm Henri Christophe, dear husband of Daphne, beloved eldest son of Henri Christophe sr. and brother of Henri and Joseph. Lost with the motorship Christophe and seven good men of Home Island under unknown circumstances." And to young Henri it seemed to symbolize the strangeness of the Caribbean whose pale jade shallows were so crystal clear that often it was hard to tell where air and water met and which when he had been a child he had believed to be so filled with treasure that he had expected to see glittering gold through the stir of every patch of brown seaweeds. He no longer hoped to find the salt gold, but apart from the finds and fancies of a boy, treasure was one with the Caribbean, so that every storm threw small quantities of Spanish silver on the island beaches along with the great pink conchs and the storm-wearied and irritated turtles; while the old captains now believed unshakably that the finding of a great treasure was responsible for the loss of the motorship. The marker stood also for the great sorrow that Henri and Joseph had been pearl fishing in the Pacific at the time of the disaster, that communications in the French Pacific are of a terrible slowness and that they had finally reached the Caribbean and their home only to find their father dying and almost two years after the Christophe had sailed on her final voyage that was the island's tragedy. For without a ship there was no transport for the little exports of lace or for the palm hats so marvelously patterned that they might take a week to weave. Orange and purple mangoes rotted beneath the trees. Copra was attacked by beetles. The people, who in prosperous times made purchases of half a cup of sugar or a needleful of thread or an ounce of coffee, could no longer buy from the stores. If another ship could not be bought, the people would grow ragged and walk hungry in the sun. And there could be no new ship until the great mystery of the Christophe was solved. For on a day as calm as a duck pond the beautifully built, two hundred and fifty ton motorship had left Main Town on Home Island on a routine voyage for Tampa via the Isle of Palms, and she had never completed the voyage.

And had the ship disappeared in war or storm or on one of the great oceans, many explanations would have sprung to mind, but the loss in peace and in perfect weather and assumably within sight of a coast of the Greater Antilles had constituted a seeming impossibility for which the insurers had refused to pay, charging attempted fraud on the part of owners and crew. In which there was something of sadness, for it was because the Home Islanders make no written agreements and do not lie and because the ship had been operated as a loved and guarded family project that she had been insured as she was, orally and against only specific risks. It having been the Home Islanders custom to place their underwriting by word of mouth with Monsieur Chabrunn and his sons, wealthy merchants of the Windwards, omitting the vast and seemingly needless coverage of "perils of the sea." The Chabrunns were men of high honor but strict dealing, who would pay instantly when convinced that they were liable, but only when so convinced. And thus positive proof of the ship's fate was needed before the insurance could be collected. But at the end of two years of search begun by the navies, coast guards and air forces of five nations and continued when all others had ceased to search, by old Captain Christophe aided by Black Tobias, a search that was perhaps the most exhaustive in the history of the seas, the ship's loss was as utterly mysterious as on the day she had vanished.

Henri and Joseph had dug their father's grave last night, so deep that even hurricane could not disturb it, but with fine view of the brilliant harbor from beneath a giant sea-grape whose six-inch-wide, perfectly round leaves were thick as green cowhide veined in red and whose blue fruit sprays dropped berries in the white sand. And now the lowering of the coffin by the old captains was more than Henri could bear. He felt that he must do one more thing for his father, that if he did not he would always regret it. And he set down his end of Aunt Caroline rather hastily so that she squealed as he jumped forward to take hold of the mahogany casket. Having done it, he knew that, as with all things done for the dead, it was not enough. The ending between himself and his father was still as sharp, the ache in his own great chest, still as painful. His father's booming voice would never greet him again as he returned from a voyage. Never again in this world would he see the old man's pleasure at the tall can of tobacco that he, Henri, had brought.

He remained kneeling by the grave for a moment, the great column of his neck bent above it. Then he stood up suddenly. He could not throw in sand when his turn came, but shook his head and passed the shovel to Joseph. As the eulogies began he was fearful that he might weep publicly, and he tried to turn his mind from his grief for his father to the responsibility that had come to him and to Joseph. And to place the matter in perspective, he must think of the Christophes who were men of peace, yet the manner of whose naming was fiercely strange as the Caribbean's self, and of the island that through a hundred and fifty years had been a Christophe trust. For had not the responsibility come to them from the very sword of the Great Marquis, that young nobleman of France, who, having seen and revolted against the horror of the treatment of slaves in the French West Indies, had spoken passionately in the legislature, quarreled with his titled friends, fought duels past counting and, as the rebellion of 1790 broke, taken up arms for the slave? The same marquis who, escaping at the betrayal of Toussaint l'Ouverture to renounce his French citizenship and his title, to sever in wrath his last ties with a world that deemed itself civilized yet was capable of such treachery, had as final gesture of scorn and of defiance renamed his family in honor of Henri Christophe, black Emperor of Haiti, "For evil he may have been, but born the slave, he became the king! And 'Arms and the man, I sing! Arms and the man!'" Having written which, the self-named Christophe had bought Home Island and its people, only to set the people free, and had bequeathed to his descendants all his own precipitate enthusiasms if not his precise convictions. By reason of which his grandson had declared arms to be of the spirit, and, dividing the island amongst the islanders, had founded the gentle sect of the Followers, who turned the other cheek as ardently as the marquis had drawn the sword. And always the Christophe sons were handsomer and the Christophe daughters more beautiful and each sunburned generation was desperately poorer. And perhaps because the Christophe men had remained sufficiently French—despite the marquis' injunction against the speaking of the language—to be most excellent husbands, so that in a hundred and fifty years there had never been an unhappy wife beneath a Christophe roof, the clan had formed a laughing and most harmonious whole; a little pool of remarkable happiness in a largely sad world. To the Christophes all the island had ever looked in time of disaster.

And now as the deep sound of the last amen rolled about them and died to the soft murmur of the departing crowd, Henri and Joseph knelt briefly, touching their fingers to the sand. "If we fail, it will not be because we have ceased to try!" Henri said.

"Two things we have that the nations had not," Joseph said when they had carried Aunt Caroline the eight miles back to West Town and the plantation of Domremy and set their faces to the thorn forest. "Our promise to our father and much knowledge of the Caribbean!" He held aside a thorn branch from the cleftlike passage through the trees to let Henri pass and, striding on, regarded his own great palm that was calloused from the handling of ropes. "It is familiar to us almost as the palm of this hand."

"We have also the fact that there are now but our four hands for the feeding of thirty-one mouths of the family and that we must learn what befell or our hands may not accomplish it," Henri said. "And where men have said, 'We will leave nothing unlearned because it seems of no bearing, but will keep the heart open because we are very ignorant,' then often they have learned. Also, as when one seeks a pearl, one looks in every oyster, if we question not only those who should know of the Christophe, but all men everywhere whom we may meet, we may learn something that our father did not learn. Meantime, we will know at least a little more when we have talked with Black Tobias."

For the island's uninhabited windward shore belonged to the trade winds, the silver thatch palms, the sea birds and Tobias, whose shack stood on piles in the Great Sound that Henri used to think was the loneliest place in the world. And it was to see Tobias at first star time that the brothers now traversed the path through the thorn forests whose matted crazy puzzle had withstood the hurricanes of centuries, so that the solitary way was a twisting, head-high tunnel under the fernlike, smoke-gray leaves. The scent of the thorn forest was of delicate mimosa flowers and curing hay, while its floor was clean with dry leaves. And it was said that within the forest the hidden men—criminals wanted in other lands for murder and worse crimes—lived out their lives safer than in any fortress. Here also when the moon was gray and silver, the ghosts of armored Spaniards were said to clank along the trail.

Nor were these old men's tales harder of belief than the mystery—inexplicable even for the Caribbean that is the strangest and most mysterious of the seas—that was heavy in the hearts of the brothers and that had bankrupted the island and beggared the Christophes; the most unanswerable mystery of the disappearance of the Christophe, a loss less heralded than the more famous mysteries of the sea, yet perhaps of them all the strangest. And true, the Caribbean's very history is written in disaster and death, violence and cruelty, so that the warmth of its crystal-clear waters might seem almost the warmth of blood, the flame of its sunsets, the reflections of burning cities, the eternal thunder, the echo of old cannon fire. For though the gentlest, it is also the most savage of the seas, so that it has smiled under soft trade clouds and boiled ash-veiled and flame-rent to the loosed hell of Mont Pelee while from it great fleets have sailed in pomp to be seen no more. But if at the end of so much mystery and loss, the loss of an island motorship was perhaps a small thing, it was still the least explicable.

Striding through the miles of the thick thorn forest in the flat heart of the island, the brothers were conscious of the vastness and menace of the all-embracing sea that they must challenge. Then the thorns threw up a last rampart and the path was amongst the mangroves of the sound's edge and on the brown pools the fallen leaves floated in autumnal colors, while overhead the sunset was shooting crimson sparks into the richness of the mangrove foliage. And at the end of the path, Tobias' calling-conch hung on a branch. Henri raised the shell to his lips and blew piercingly. Ten minutes later, Tobias' dinghy slid suddenly to their feet from a narrow channel. The great black man did not speak but stood haughtily, with the long sculling oar upright beside him.

"You were a good friend to our father, Tobias," Henri said. "We seek your aid in his name."

Tobias wore patched blue dungaree trousers that showed pale against the darkness of his skin that gleamed to the swell of muscles in his huge chest and shoulders. Staring past the brothers in silent pride, he seemed akin to the elemental passion of the hot air and the richly blazing sunset. "For Cap' Christophe it is ended, the long search," Tobias said. Tobias' hair was like thick soot on a blackened stump and his bowed face worked strangely, like midnight ripples in a dark tide. He said again, "It is ended!"

Joseph said, "Only for our father, it is ended."

Tobias' chest labored and his belly muscles quivered against his heavy shark belt and the clean blue dungarees that had been washed in sea water and sand. "Two years late, you and M'sieur Joseph will not look!" The words were an accusation that Henri and Joseph would have resented except that Tobias' only son, a great, gleaming black lad, had been lost with the Christophe.

Henri said gently, "Two years late through no fault of ours. We will search, Tobias!"

Tobias stood with the immobile majesty of a black king of Africa, but his eyes changed as if the sun bursting through storm had suddenly lighted a dark mangrove pool. He said with a different note to his deep voice, "You are welcomed to my house. We will have oysters as we did when you, Joseph and my son were high as my belt. Neither must you think, 'It is wrong to Cap' Christophe that the body hungers.' For Cap' Christophe you must say as I have said of my son, 'The body must be strong though the heart pains!'" He looked fiercely beyond them. "It was not as the underwriting men said that the men of the ship stole the ship away!" Tobias said and his deep voice shook rumblingly. "My son had gone with his hand in mine since he was high as my belt and he would have come home from the ends of the world! It was not as those said who believed that the ship met disaster of the sea. My boy would have reached the shores! He swam as other men walk, as far as he had need to go."

With the brothers aboard, he worked the boat along a leafy tunnel, under a final swish of branches, and suddenly all the space of the world and all the softly pouring air of the world seemed about them. Astern, the water widened in flame to the low, black line of the island, on either hand the vast sound spread in lilac and silver to the distant promontories where the thatch palms bent silver to the trades, and beyond the far line of the seaward reefs the night was coming up. Tobias' sculling oar made no whisper.

By looking directly down, Henri glimpsed through the sky-shine the bottle-green world of the turtle grass meadows and the great red starfish like satanic flowers. Where Tobias' shack perched on its piles half a mile from shore, the men climbed to the pier that extended from the seaward side of the building and at the end of which was a squared rock platform topped by a charcoal pit glowing with thin flames. Henri and Joseph seated themselves on the planks whose surface had been turned to fluffy, gray silk by the weather. Within the shack, Tobias' bed was covered with a red-squared, patchwork quilt and the bed Tobias' son had used was still neatly made with sailcloth sheets and pillow cases of flour sacking, while its quilt was white and blue.

Tobias took three well-washed oyster branches—yard-long sections of mangrove root to which the small, sweet oysters were clustered to the thickness of a man's arm—and laid them side-by-side across the coals. Over them, he threw a blanket of wet turtle grass and in a moment bursts and bubbles of salt and savory steam were rising in the still crimsoning light. As the oysters cooked, Tobias cut mangrove forks and handed Henri and Joseph small, tough-crusted loaves of potato bread and wooden bowls of coconut butter and smaller bowls of sea salt and freshly ground pepper. Then he raked back the seaweed and each man took an oyster branch, on which the shells were now open, revealing the oysters, curl-edged, juicy and plump. They forked the oysters from the china-like interiors of the shells, dipped the exquisite mouthfuls in coconut butter and sprinkled them with salt and pepper, then ate them with a scrap of potato bread. The clean, faint flutter of the wind, the small sounds of the fire and the whisper of water round the piles were part of the meal. And when the oysters were finished, Tobias brought pint fruit cans and filled them with black, Jamaican coffee, sweetened with honey.

As they drank the marvelous coffee, Joseph said, "We come home almost as strangers, and while we know the outline of what befell, there is much in regard to the ship's last days that we do not know—all was well, was it not, at her last careening?"

Everything was dark now except where fish rose to make circled ripples that caught the last crimson of afterglow and where the firelight struck up on Tobias' bent face. "She was sound as on the day of her building," Tobias said rumblingly. "What befell was no fault of the ship or her engines nor of the men upon her!"

"She reached the Isle of Palms in safety?"

"She reached the Isle of Palms," Tobias said, but there was a darkness in his eyes. "For the rest, a hurricane had passed along the course a week before, but even the swell was gone. Perfect, purely perfect the weather was, as is weather after hurricane. Such days as those upon which one says of every day, 'There can have been no other day so blue as this!' Days too calm for sail, but for a motorship, most perfect. There was no weather that was not fair between the Island and Tampa. That was learned later from the men of weather and from the masters of ships. There were not even thunderstorms—not even the young showers!"

"Explosion could hardly be with diesel!" Henri said doubtfully. "Yet where there is machinery, it still might be . . ."

"With the Christophe, tended by my son, it could not be," Tobias said harshly. "My son must show me the engines and the bilges often, saying, 'See how clean they are!' I had no love for bilges, but I loved my son for thinking that I must."

Joseph spoke with troubled slowness. "There are many things that can befall a little ship—waterspout, collision with a derelict, fire . . ."

Tobias said, "There were fifteen people upon that little ship, and eight were islanders. There were good life belts and good lifeboats. Had explosion come—and there was no explosion—it were not likely that all were killed. If island men had but a board or their own arms to swim, they would have reached the land, and all men know it! If there were fire, they would have put it out, or if by miracle they could not, they would have launched the boats. In that fair calm a cockle-tub had reached the coasts of the Great Antilles or the Central Americas! Cap' Malcolm Christophe was no fool to sail into a waterspout—and there are no waterspouts without the storms! As for a derelict, island men do not sail blind through day or night. But had they, still the Christophe had strong bulkheads, thus had she struck a submerged hulk, she could not have sunk swiftly. I do not have the thought she would have sunk at all, but had she, still had someone reached the shore!" He stirred the shimmering fire. "Of greater meaning, no ship sinks without a trace in dead calm seas! Let there be explosion, there are fragments! Let there be collision, there is oil and those many things that do not sink! Let there be fire and there is charcoal and the trace of ash!" He raised fierce eyes to stare at them. "With hurricane or with time such signs will pass, but here there was great calm and here within short hours the swift air forces were seeking her. Within short suns, the ships of five countries sought for her. The little boats of all the coasts were seeking her, and in them, men who know the currents and the tides, who say, 'Let a ship sink here, the wreckage will be here!' Your father, Papa Christophe, offered high reward for any trace of wreckage, for any smallest thing that could be proved the Christophe's. Neither along the Cuban Counter Current nor the Gulf Stream was one small thing found—no board, no life belt, no little stick of wood!"

"It is the inexplicability of the thing that is worst," Joseph said after a silence. "One cannot even say, 'I do not know that it befell thus, but it could have befallen thus!' Instead one can only say, 'By all evidence it could not have befallen, but it did!'"

Leaning forward, Henri asked, "With the Christophe herself, was anything—any smallest thing—different from all other voyages?"

Tobias looked at him gravely. "One thing was different! She was two days late at the Isle of Palms!"

Neither brother raised the question of radio messages, for radio was frowned upon by the Follower elders and while its carrying was officially mandatory, no crew of Home Island would have sailed on a ship on which the devil's voice was not rendered irreparably silent.

"A small delay could be engine trouble," Joseph said.

"There was naught amiss with the good engines," Tobias said. "Naught was ever amiss with the good engines tended by my son! An engineer who came once, told me that my son had the genius of machinery. But it is hard for the black man to own or to create, hence my son was very happy keeping Cap' Malcolm's engines brighter than all the engines of Caribbee and saying to me, 'Father, see how beautifully this shines!' For myself I have thought little of my skin, but it was strange to me to look at the kind and wise hands of my son and think, 'They are still the young hands of a black man!'" He raised his glance from the fire. "The large and fair man, Webber, and the small and dark man with the great chest, Ashby—they who were passengers from Home Island to the Isle of Palms—said that Cap' Malcolm had delayed to seek survivors of the wreck that the hurricane had thrown upon the Purple Reefs. But one may not know if men from the world speak truth."

Suppressing a smile at Tobias' doubt of men from the world, Henri asked, "The Christophe herself stood off the Isle of Palms?" He knew that such a course had been in no way unusual.

"That is truth. The hour was dark. The strangers had with them the powerboat in which they had reached Home Island. Cap' Malcolm held no contract at the Isle of Palms for outgoing mail, that going by faster ships via Miami or Tampa. Thus Cap' Malcolm swung the strangers off in the powerboat and they took in the mails as they went ashore. The men of the port watched the Christophe's lights pass onward and reported her sailing to the keepers of the lighthouse on the Cape. She never passed the light. Somewhere in that hundred and forty miles she ceased to be. Yet within that hundred and forty miles, unless Cap' Malcolm for unknown reason went seaward, she was within sight of land, she was amongst the snapper cutters and the sponge boats, and upon the shores are the shacks of old men who sleep little because the past is too much with them. Yet after the Isle of Palms, none saw the ship." The organ note of his deep voice vibrated. "The men of the ship were good men. And for the ship herself, she harmed no man alive! She was of service where service was much needed and she injured no man!"

After a silence, Henri said, "There have in the world been meteorites that blasted all things where they struck—it is barely possible . . ."

Tobias answered fiercely, "The chance that anything upon the world be stricken by a great meteorite is one in many million billions. I asked the men of science from the museum. Also the Caribbean is filled with the eyes of helmsmen watching the tall skies and none saw even a shooting star." He gazed into the fire, then beyond it into the night where otherwise invisible thunderheads were revealed by the glow of inward lightning. "Jaques and Christian of the island—who went to sponge hook off Gracias a Dios three weeks ere the Christophe sailed—did not return and men say they were overtaken by hurricane. But Jaques and Christian were men of wisdom in the ways of storms. The Christophe did not return and men speak of meteorites. But neither hurricanes nor meteorites take account of the two unaccounted days on the Christophe's way to the Isle of Palms!"

Joseph said gently, "What is your thought for those two days, Tobias?"

"It is my thought that in them some thing befell that never befell before and should I know its nature I would also know what befell the ship! And I know that you say, 'Tobias is stranged!'"

Henri asked, "Is there record of the course our brother would have followed from the Isle of Palms? I have been the way many times with sail, but using motor power he would have gone more directly."

"There is record. But the course was followed by the men of five countries and a hundred ships. Nothing they found. For there was nothing along that course or beside that course. No little slick of oil. No broken board or floating rope. Nothing in the Caribbean, in the Channel of Yucatan, in the Straits of Florida, on the Ten Thousand Islands, on the beaches of the Gulf. The navies and the coast guards and the swift air forces searched. The men in small boats searched and the men upon the beaches; for love and for reward they searched each meadow of the Gulf-weed, every drift of flotsam, every rick of stranded rubbish on two thousand miles of coast—even in the Bahamas and on the Atlantic coast of Florida, they made search—nor were they searching in wild seas, but with seas like a painted picture. There was nothing."

Neither brother commented upon this. But before their minds there spread the Caribbean as it dreamed in its hours of rest, transparent as glass, celestially serene as might be the mind of God. They visualized also the nature of the search spurred both by the fierce love of the Caribbean and the fierce poverty of the Caribbean. Before them at the end stood two possibilities equally improbable; some unknown and unimaginable catastrophe of nature or some equally unimaginable act of man. And if an act of man, for what purpose? For what unimagined reason could a busy and inoffensive little ship have become of such value or menace to men that they would cause her to vanish without trace? And to what men? Certainly not to the men who worked her. No reward or threat of earth would induce men of the islands to cut themselves off from their islands. No inducement of life would have taken grave Malcolm from Daphne, his young wife, nor any Christophe from Domremy in whose silver weathered walls the wild bees built so that honey ran through the siding and whose pink cabbage roses, blue-fruited sea-grape trees and coral-walled fields were the fairest in Caribbee.

If deliberate human motive and action had induced the thing, it had come from without. And even as the motive must have been very strong, the nature of the action remained unimaginable. And almost the mind, baffled to credulity, went back to the ancient legends of whirlpool and of monster, of ships seen at one moment and in the next nonexistent.

Henri said angrily, "Tobias is right! A ship does not sink without trace! Where it has been said to happen, weeks or months have passed before the loss was known, unknown storms might have crossed the ship's path alone in the great oceans, or swept her a thousand miles from the course she was thought to follow. But here the loss was known within brief hours and the Caribbean is the dooryard of the seas!" He shook his head fiercely.

Tobias stirred the coals round and round, and the red-gold light beating up on his face and upon the hugeness of his extended arm made the breathing darkness of the sea the greater and the older and gave him the semblance of some vast and darkly brooding god of fire lifting the West Indian islands in the passion of their own volcanic heat.

"Cap' Henri laughed at this," Tobias said slowly, "saying, 'Do not grow stranged with the sea, Tobias! We must look for facts not demons!'" He rose suddenly to his majestic height, standing with folded arms as he gazed at the brothers. "You too will laugh, saying, 'Tobias is stranged!' But it is not truth when men say the ship reached the Isle of Palms in safety! The evil was with her then! It had boarded her at the Purple Reefs—from the White Dunes of the Purple Reefs! It is there still! I have seen it as I see this fire, I have touched it as I touch this staff! The footsteps upon the dunes, I saw and touched! Fresh footsteps where there were no men—and with them, the footsteps of a giant! Twice I saw—once four months after the losing of the Christophe, once three weeks ago!"

Joseph felt a sharp and terrible shock of pity. After a moment he said gently, "Our father did not see this, Tobias?"

"He did not see it because we sought separately, each in our own boat, meeting at places named," Tobias said. And again Joseph felt terrible compassion in picturing an old white man and a great Negro seeking on when all others had ceased to seek, searching in wild weather and fair, each for a lost son. Tobias' voice rumbled with its own depth. "Though he did not believe, when first I saw them he went with me, but a great rain had washed all away. Then came men of a navy making observations of weather and would let none go to the Reefs, since military men are of a great importance. Only a month ago they went away. Three weeks ago, there were the steps again, but I was alone—for Cap' Henri was dying. I was seeking greatly, for it was my hope to go to him and say, 'My friend, at the last we have learned something!' But when I returned, he could no longer ask, 'What have you learned, Tobias?'"

Henri said, "We thank you for telling us, Tobias."

"I will not tell of it again," Tobias said softly yet terribly. "And you do not believe it and M'sieur Joseph does not believe. But there was that in the Christophe's losing that was not of wind or sea or the common fate of ships. Evil touched the Christophe in the two days and went with her. Evil out of the sea, taking good men, taking my son. But if it were of men, someday I will find the men! And if it were a devil, someday I will find the devil—and if it were many devils, someday I will find the devils! One day my hands will be upon a throat—if it be after death, if it be in the dark of the sea where the red lights burn!"

Blue-white fire of lightning was turning the upper leaves of the thorns to the semblance of silver flowers as Henri and Joseph started for home and they quickened their pace to avoid having the balsa wood and fish oil torch rained out while they were still amongst the thorns.

"Poor Tobias," Joseph said as they passed from the thorns into the true jungle, where, while the tree-roof roared angrily, little rain came through. "He does not say it, but he plainly thinks the same evil that befell the Christophe took Jaques and Christian though they were a sea away!"

"Two men in a cockleshell are vulnerable as a ship is not. Yet they were very experienced men," Henri said, puzzled.

Popeyed, pale blue land crabs scuttered ghostlike in the torch-light before them. "If we are to have hope of learning what befell, we must keep in mind that there must be simple explanation," Joseph said, stepping round a clashing, twelve-inch crab. "That it but seems so strange because we do not know." They plunged into the vertically falling wall of warm rain where the jungle gave place to the plantations of the village of West Town.

Alone, Tobias loaded his seagoing catboat and considered the problem of his own strangedness. Strangedness was very common and took strange forms. But after weighing the matter he did not think that he could be as stranged as he must be if he was stranged at all. He did not wish to play into the hands of the unknown evil by being stranged and not knowing it. But he believed he was right in believing that he had seen what he had seen. He had seen it so clearly! In the giant's steps the little sea snails had been crushed so that Tobias' hand had ended the suffering of one little mollusk by snapping it between thumb and finger. Surely strangedness would not have seen the little snail?

Letting the reefed sail of the catboat snap full to the black storm wind as the first big drops pitted the sound, he was sorry that shyness had stopped him telling M'sieur Henri of the boat that had come to the Great Sound in the night—when with morning there was no boat. Surely, there too, he had not been stranged for he had heard the engine miss?

As a great sheet of lightning revealed the bending silver shapes of the thatch palms, he sent the catboat through the single passage of the reef and set his course for the coast of Nicaragua, four hundred miles away. It was his hope that he could prove the existence of the unknown thing if he could prove that Jaques and Christian had not been killed by hurricane. Somewhere might be a man who would say, "Jaques and Christian of Home Island sheltered here through the storm."

Only when he was well at sea did he remember that he had forgotten to bring food. But there had been many times when Cap' Henri and he had forgotten it when a new thought had come to them. All that mattered was that his friend, Cap' Henri, did not need food any more.

Midnight had stilled the amiable pandemonium of the plantation of Domremy—the sole piece of real estate reserved by Henri's and Joseph's grandfather in his moment of largess—but Daphne Christophe came with a candle from the great kitchen as Henri and Joseph entered.

She said, "Put on dry clothes while I bring you hot chocolate!" The gray, homespun dress and muslin collar of the women of the Followers were beautiful when she wore them, and the candle lit the bright brown of her eyes and threw the shadows of her lashes on her smooth forehead, then touched her dark hair as she gestured with the light. "Hurry for the chocolate is good!"

"We are rough fishermen and unused to such spoiling, but it is very pleasant," Henri said.

Moving with the lithely graceful, dark and golden quickness of the French women of her native Martinique, she set down the candle and stood before them with a hand on the shoulder of each. "Oh, my dears! I am so sorry that you have come home but to anxiety and debts!" Reaching up she kissed them upon either cheek while Henri smiled at her and Joseph blushed to his black hair. "Poor lambs who have already done so much!"

"Beautiful Sister, the financial situation is most desperate, is it not?" Henri asked, placing a packing case as a chair for her beside the hatch-cover table as they rejoined her in the once splendid drawing room. "We do not doubt that it is bad, but we have been gone so long that we are strangers to the full position."

"It is desperate—even for the Christophes," Daphne said, and her eyes smiled with the beautiful tolerance that caused the Christophes—all of whom adored her—to use the French term for sister-in-law even when speaking to her in English. "To be strangers to the position is a tempering of the wind!" She indicated the packing cases. "For the search and for Papa Christophe's advertisements all things that were movable were sold and all things that could not be moved were mortgaged. We have tried very hard to keep expenses down, but the family is so vast and there are so many little ones that we are a millstone about your necks."

The brothers took her hands. "The family has told us of all that you have done to keep the family cared for in the bad time," Joseph said. "We are sorry that you have had to struggle so and we not here to help you!"

Her young face showed the strain of anxiety and responsibility beyond her years, but her eyes were tearless. She said, "Uncertainty is the bad thing for it begets hope. It was hope that killed Papa Christophe. I know that after these years hope is folly, yet I say, 'Lost men have returned after many years!' and I hope again. Crazed people write as they do after mysteries of the sea, saying that men of the Christophe have been seen in this port and that, that the Christophe has been seen in this ocean and that, and I know that what they write is nonsense, but I hope." Her face held the same stillness that had been in Tobias' face. "If men were responsible for the Christophe, I would know what men, and I would not have them go unpunished!"

Henri said, "If it was an accident of nature, we may not find out. If it was an act of men and somewhere there are men living who know what befell, we will find them!"

Moving round the hatch-cover to touch her shyly as he looked down into her pale face, Joseph said tenderly, "If it can be learned, we will learn. But you must not hope and you must not hate! You are too beautiful for hate."

Henri's hands clenched as if he was suddenly infinitely older than Joseph and must protect Joseph and the rest of the Followers as one would guard trustful children from the cruelty of the world. His heart beat with such love for Joseph that he could see its thumping through the blue cotton of his shirt. And for a moment he could not speak, then, meeting Daphne's eyes, he said softly, "If I can ever say, 'These men harmed Malcolm, my brother, and broke the kind heart of my father!' I can hate for both of us, beautiful Sister! Or if I should say, 'This man harmed Joseph, who has little sense but holds our affections and is very good!' then I would want my hands on a throat as Black Tobias does!"

There was no more valiant man than Joseph in the turtle, shark or pearl fleets of the Caribbean or the French Pacific, either with the bright valor of daring or the quiet courage of cheerful endurance under hardship, but the belief in violence troubled him. And he flushed now in part from pleasure at Henri's love for him, in part because he knew that Henri did not share his deepest beliefs.

"I am not good," Joseph said gravely. "But men have lived by the law of vengeance from the beginning of laws, and it seems that but little has come of it save ever greater hate and death. And when half a world was wet with blood and tears, the chain was broken only by what might have been at the beginning, and that was to forgive."

Aunt Caroline's distant voice shrieked for her medicine, and Daphne rose. "The terrible documents which are our bills and the few which are our receipts are in the crawfish pot on the wall. Now that there is no desk, I have to keep them there so the little ones will not get them. No! I can manage the door." But Joseph was opening one half of the double doors and Henri the other. Turning, she looked back at the great room against whose tremendous windows the storm was dying. "Even with packing cases, it is still the most beautiful room in the world! As Domremy is the most beautiful place in the world!"

Joseph said, "One thinks of it when one is away."

Moving quickly across the room to pick up a gray parrot that was straddling down the stair with confiding nods of its head and obvious anticipation of welcome, Henri touched his fist against the stair rail that was carved in patterns of fruit and cupids, saying fiercely, "Domremy cannot go for any mortgage!"

"No," Daphne said. "There would be something profane in anyone but Christophes being here. Those to whom it might go might even be people so unlike Christophes that they would not borrow to give—because they could not give without borrowing—and who would not know that they could not eat the fowls because all the fowls had pet names such as Mrs. Cluck or Old Scratch, and so unlike certain young men whom I see before me that, happening to see a parrot in a far city, they would not do without waterproof coats they needed so that they might buy the parrot because they maintained that it had told them it did not like its cage and wished to go to Domremy."

"He did say so," Henri said, laughing. "He said, 'I have been hoping for many years to go to Domremy, but there has been a little difficulty when I tried to arrange my passage. Perhaps you gentlemen could be kind enough to assist?' At least if that was not quite what he said, his cage was terribly small and he was very sad." He went up to his sister-in-law and put his hands about her face. "You are right that we are impractical and it is a wonder you have put up with us, Daphne!"

"It is more than should be expected of any woman—and it has been my best experience," Daphne said.

Alone together, the brothers mentally contemplated the Christophe household, which was a village in itself and, unfortunately, a village of dependents; including Aunt Caroline, of great age and many exactions; three distantly related widows with respectively, five, eight and seven children, and one unrelated group of four children whom Captain Christophe had taken in when their parents were killed in the Great Storm. And while Daphne was the household's greatest asset, even she had some small needs. "We need pen and paper!" Joseph said. Henri found them in the crawfish pot.

"It seems that beyond the utmost we have made in the past we must have an additional thousand dollars a year," Joseph said, figuring with the pen that almost disappeared in the largeness of his hand as the normal morning heat drowsed over the old house and the familiar scents of gardenias and roses and of crawfish tails cooking in garlic sauce filled the great room. On the polished mahogany of the ceiling, big gray velvet spiders dozed as pale jade chameleons puffed pink throats in and out on the jalousies. From without the golden buzzing of bees and the clucking of guinea fowl sounded from amongst the milk-and-wine lilies that stood tall as a man. In the courtyard, the Christophes' pet donkey slept against the sundial with a half-eaten cabbage rose sticking to a rubbery lip, and a file of Muscovy ducks waddled past complaining of the heat of the flagstones. "At least none could be more helpful than almost all try to be!" Joseph said of the family.

"But with the exception of Daphne, it were usually better that they did not," Henri said with truthful affection.

Overwhelmed until he confused the small with the great, Joseph added, "Also Aunt Caroline desires a wheeled-chair, having seen one in the wish book."

Henri's mouth curled to a smile. "Aunt Caroline causes so much trouble for so many persons as it is, might it not be a poor deed to make her more active?"

"That is true," Joseph said seriously. "But she wants it so." He too smiled.

Henri grinned. "She does so much enjoy persecuting the women as they cook or wash, and it is a small pleasure for her! We had better try to get the wheeled-chair. If we make a path, she might even be able to render the women's meetings miserable as she used to." The brothers smiled at each other, thinking of the consternation of the Ladies' Gatherings in His Name as they beheld the horrible sight of Aunt Caroline rendered mobile.

"The question is how?" Joseph said.

There indeed seemed little more that they could do that they had not already done. Even before the loss of the Christophe, both young men had accepted the fact that marriage was impossible for them until they could restore the family fortunes. And with the exception of withholding five dollars' spending money per voyage, which usually ended up by buying presents for the smaller Christophes, both had turned over to the family fund all that they had earned in all their adult lives. They owned no clothing that was not patched and repatched until its original nature was obscure. And, when on the island, on Sunday evenings each withdrew six cents from the money jar to place in the collection plate, while they economized in matches during the week so that the ladies might be "fired" at the proper time; this seemingly strange practice being rendered necessary by the fact that the chapel was unscreened and thus small cans of Black Flag insect killer were set beneath the seat of each female worshipper and ignited as the service began, the resulting smoke and flame giving a faintly infernal effect to the assemblies.

It did not for a moment occur to either brother that the responsibility for any part of the present household was not theirs. Christophes had never accepted charity or denied a debt and while a Christophe could earn, no Christophe needed to ask him to share. The four unrelated children were even particularly favored so that they might not feel their lack of blood kinship. But the astronomical sum of an additional thousand a year could come from no two men's catch-shares or wages of Caribbee or the Pacific; yet it must come and continue to come until the younger Christophes matured. And the smaller Christophes had appeared discouragingly small as the brothers had driven them from the doors to continue the present conference.

"It would seem we have three things to do: to prove what befell the Christophe—which would solve all—and meantime to pay the interest upon the mortgage and fill the mouths," Joseph said, raising troubled gaze from his figuring.

"And find the Three Galleons, Joseph!" little Timothy Christophe shouted through a gap in the louvers. "M'sieur the Commissioner has pieces of gold from the Three Galleons."

"We have need to find a galleon's treasure, but meantime be quiet, little Cousin!" Henri said. He added thoughtfully, "And all might be done if we had but a boat—and none can be done if we have not!"

"A launch to run the mail routes?" Joseph asked. "One good enough would cost all of two thousand dollars, though we cut her ourselves. And how could we pay the storemen while she was building?"

"It would be hard to have to ask him, but Monsieur Latour would carry us," Henri said, flushing. "For the rest, let us consult the family! And who knows?"

Consulting the family had a special meaning for the Christophes, since it involved seeing what, if anything, each member could chip in toward a common cause, and in this not merely their unity but even their vast numbers had proved helpful in the past. There had never been a mean Christophe and the quality of generosity appeared to be contagious since it always transferred itself to Christophes-by-marriage. Hence the present concourse listened gravely, Aunt Caroline on her stretcher, adult Christophes on packing cases, medium-sized Christophes on the floor and tiny Christophes on the knees of mothers or sisters. Henri acted as spokesman, concluding, "As you will see, it is in the nature of a venture, but the situation is in the nature of a difficulty."

"It's cockeyed!" Aunt Caroline said, shocking the family by her choice of words.

Daphne went to Henri and smiled up at him. "For myself, I owe a great debt to the House of Christophe. It gave me my husband and such happiness as few women know. It has given me my home and never a moment's sense that I was not welcomed . . ." A chorus of assurance from assorted Christophes interrupted her. She was their treasure and their joy. All that they had was hers. "I know that, you dear, impractical darlings," Daphne said. "But since you have never permitted me to pay for anything, I have almost two hundred dollars saved from my embroideries and if you will use it now it will give me more pleasure than anything upon which I could spend it. I have also these two rings that came from my great-grandmother. They are not very valuable, but they should be worth five hundred more."

"More fool you!" Aunt Caroline said.

Other Christophes contributed personal items and odd sums until the astonishing total of an estimated nine hundred dollars was reached. A groaning which even surpassed her normal efforts was now heard from Aunt Caroline, combined with a vicious, snipping sound which had been dimly registering itself on the family consciousness for some time. The Christophes looked at her, to be appalled by what they saw, for as they gazed, she appeared to lose her scalp, the superb mass of her snowy locks coming away in toto, to be gathered into a ball in her aged hands and flung at Henri.

"I hope you're satisfied!" she said. "There's my hair. White hair is worth six dollars an ounce, eight dollars if it's long and wavy. The hair dealer tried to buy it last time his boat was in. Now take me to bed!"

The magnitude of Aunt Caroline's sacrifice inspired the other women and even the little girls. And soon, Daphne's dark tresses lay shining on top of the varied pile on the table, while the brothers, a little alarmed by the response they had got, were staring at crop-headed women and children who in turn stared at each other while all the Christophes laughed softly and helplessly. "But Aunt Caroline's gift was the best of all," Daphne said, "for she thought of it."

"We are poor men if we cannot manage the rest with forge and axe!" Joseph said joyfully. He turned to his brother. "Henri, you are the better 'dealing man.' While the family and I start the boat, you must check mail routes and chances of contracts and arrange passage to Jamaica to buy the engines. Now who comes with me to the forest to cut frames?"

"We do!" shouted the family. "Who last lost the axes?"