Читать книгу Never the Twain Shall Meet - Peter B. Kyne - Страница 3

Table of Contents

It was a song that never before had been sung; once sung, never again would it be heard. Such a song, indeed, as little girls croon to their dolls; half funeral chant, half hymn, sung in a minor key by a girl with a powerfully sweet lyric soprano. The last of the land breeze carried it aft to Gaston Larrieau, the master of the 200-ton auxiliary trading schooner Moorea, where he stood on the top step of the companion, his leonine head and tremendous shoulders showing above the deck-house, as he smoked his first after-breakfast pipe.

While he listened, a shadow passed over the man’s face, as when winds drive a dark cloud above a sunny plain. He removed his pipe thoughtfully to murmur:

“Ah, my poor Tamea! Dear child of the sun! Homesick already!” Then he came out on deck and stood by the weather rail, looking forward until he espied the figure of the singer stretched face downward, at full length, alongside the bowsprit, but snuggled comfortably in the belly of the jib. One arm enveloped the bowsprit; at each rise and fall of the Moorea’s long clipper bow, her feet, sandal-clad, beat the canvas in rhythm. And, because she was young and athrill with the music of the spheres, because the dark blue water purling under the schooner’s forefoot brought to her memories of the insistent, peaceful swish of the surf enveloping the outer reef at Riva, the girl Tamea sang:

“Behold! Tamea, Queen of Riva,

Has forsaken her mother’s people.

In her father’s great canoe called Moorea

After the mother of Tamea, who loved him,

Tamea sails over a cold sea

To the white man’s country.

Tamea is happy and curious.

But if the hearts in this new land

Are cold as the fog this morning,

Then will the heart of Tamea grow heavy.

Then will she weep for a sight of Riva.

Then will she yearn for love and pleasure,

For dancing and feasting; for the water

White on the reef where the fishermen stand ...”

“I must shake her out of that mood,” Larrieau muttered, and strode aft to the wheel. The Tahitian helmsman gave way to him and as the master put the helm down and the schooner came sharply up into the wind and hung there shivering her canvas until it cracked like pistol shots, Tamea rose briskly from her hammock in the belly of the jib and stood poised on the bowsprit, with one hand clasping the jib to steady her. The suddenness with which she had been disturbed and the air of regal hauteur she assumed as she faced aft for an explanation from the Tahitian helmsman, who had now resumed the wheel and was easing the Moorea away on her course once more, brought a bellow of Brobdingnagian laughter from Larrieau.

Tamea came aft with stately tread, pausing at the forward end of the deck-house. “So it was you, great, wicked Frenchman,” she cried in a Polynesian dialect. “Truly, my father forgets that he is but a wandering trader, while I am Tamea, Queen of Riva!” Simulating a royal fury she was far from feeling, Tamea grasped a bucket attached to a rope, dropped it overboard, drew it back filled with water and, poising it in position to hurl its contents, advanced to the assault.

“Tiens!” Gaston Larrieau chuckled. “I shall never succeed in making a Christian of you. It is written that even a queen shall honor her father and mother? nevertheless you, my own child, would dishonor me with sea water!” As she threatened him laughingly, he leaped for the opposite corner of the deck-house, and she saw that it was his humor to invite the deluge. Wherefore, with the perversity of her sex and royal blood, she deluged the helmsman, who stood grinning at her.

“Your eye belongs on the lubber’s mark, on the sails, on the horizon—anywhere but on me, Kahanaha,” she admonished the amazed fellow. And then, while Gaston Larrieau, momentarily off guard, stood roaring great gales of laughter at the discomfited Kahanaha, Queen Tamea of Riva dashed into his face fully a quart of water remaining in the bucket. She smiled upon Larrieau adorably.

“He laughs best who laughs last. Kahanaha, you may laugh.”

Larrieau dashed the water from his bush of a beard. “Nom d’un chien! This is mutiny. Tamea, come here!” But Tamea merely wrinkled her nose at him, and when he charged at her she cried aloud, half delighted, half deliciously apprehensive, and started up the starboard main shrouds. Her father followed her, moving, despite his sixty years and his tremendous bulk, with something of the ease and swiftness of a bear.

At the masthead Tamea cowered, pretending to be frightened and cornered, until his hand reached for her slim ankle; when without the slightest hesitation she sprang for the backstay and went whizzing swiftly down to the deck. Here she threw him a peace offering, in the way of a kiss, but he ignored her. From the masthead he was looking out over the low-lying smear of fog that shrouded the coast of California, and the girl thrilled as his stentorian voice rang through the ship.

“Land, ho!”

Within a few minutes the Moorea had slipped through the cordon of fog into the sunshine. Off to starboard the red hull of the lightship loomed vividly against the blue of sea and sky; a white pilot schooner ratched lazily across their bows, while off to port three gasoline trawlers out of San Francisco coughed violently away toward the Cordelia banks, their hulls painted in bizarre effects of Mediterranean blue with yellow decks and upper works. Their Sicilian crews waved tassled, multicolored tam-o’-shanter caps at Tamea and when she threw kisses to them with both hands they shouted their approval in ringing fashion.

From Point San Pedro on the south to Point Reyes on the north fifty miles of green, mountainous shore line sweeping down abruptly to ocher-tinted bluffs lay outspread before Tamea. She viewed it with mixed feelings of awe, delight and a half sensed feeling of apprehension, for all that enthralling vision impressed her with the thought that beyond the indentation which her father called to her was the Golden Gate, lay another world of romance, of dreams, curiosity-compelling, palpitant with something of the same warmth that had nurtured Tamea in the little known, seldom visited and uncharted island kingdom under the Southern Cross. Following the fashion of her people when their emotions are profoundly stirred, again Tamea’s golden voice was lifted in a semi-chant, an improvised pæan of appreciation.

Down through the entrance the Moorea ramped, with Tamea standing far out on the bowsprit, as if she would be the first to arrive, the first to see the wonders she felt certain lurked just around the bend behind crumbling old Fort Winfield Scott. As she leaned against the jib stay and held on with her elbows she searched the shore line with her father’s marine glasses until, the Moorea having loafed up to the quarantine grounds, the crew disturbed the girl in order to take in the headsails.

They were scarcely snugged down before the Customs tug scraped alongside. While Gaston was down below in the cabin presenting his papers for the inspection of the port officer, a representative of the Public Health Service examined the crew on deck. Before Tamea he stood several moments in silent admiration. Then he asked:

“Miss, do you speak English?”

Tamea looked him over with frank admiration and approval. “You bet your sweet life I speak English,” she replied melodiously; and from her English the doctor knew that she also spoke French. Having heard her giving an order to the Kanaka steward in an alien tongue, he concluded she spoke Hawaiian and sought confirmation of that conclusion.

“No, mister, I do not speak Hawaiian,” said Tamea. “I can understand much of it, because all Polynesian languages are derived from the same Aryan source. The difference between the hundreds of languages in Polynesia is mostly one of dialect—phonetic differences, you know.”

He sighed. “I didn’t know, but I’m glad to find out—from you. Are you Venus or Juno or one of the Valkyries from some tropical Valhalla?”

“Now you grow very queer,” she retorted soberly. “You make the josh, and I do not like men who do that. I am Tamea Oluolu Larrieau. I am the Queen of Riva, and in Riva it is taboo to josh the Queen.”

“I think the Queen is a josher, however,” he replied gravely.

“Ah! You do not believe, then, that I am the Queen of Riva?”

“No, I do not. You’re the Queen of Hearts.”

Fortunately for Tamea she knew how to play casino and was, therefore, acquainted with the queen of hearts. Hence she could assimilate the compliment, and a ravishing smile was the reward of the daring doctor.

He bowed low.

“Will Tamea Oluolu Larrieau, Queen of Riva—wherever that may be, if it isn’t another name for Paradise, since an houri has come from Riva—oblige a mere mortal by opening her mouth, sticking out her tongue and saying, ‘Ah-h-h!’—like that.”

“Why?” There was suspicion in Tamea’s glance now.

“It is a ceremonial peculiar to this country, Your Majesty. It is required of all visitors, of whatever rank. An Indian prince did it yesterday and a dato from Java will do it this afternoon.”

Tamea shrugged—a Gallic shrug—and complied.

“What a lovely death it would be to be fatally bitten by those teeth! Now, just one more ceremonial, if you please. It is required that I shall look into your eyes very closely. You may have trachoma, but if you have I’ll never survive the shock of having to deport you.”

Again Tamea shrugged. A peculiar custom, she thought, but one that was not difficult to comply with.

“Well, if you’re a fair sample of the womanhood of Riva, O Tamea Oluolu Larrieau, I’m mighty glad that I’m not a practicing physician there. I should never earn a fee.”

“And if you should earn a fee nobody would think of paying it,” she laughed. “Perhaps, if you liked bananas or coconuts——” And her shoulders came up in collaboration, as it were, with an adorable little moue. The young doctor laughed happily.

“Alas! God help the poor missionaries with sirens like her on every hand,” he thought as he descended into the cabin, where Larrieau was in conference with an immigration official touching his daughter’s right to land. This detail was, happily, quickly passed and the health officer tapped Gaston Larrieau on the arm.

“Captain, it will be necessary for me to give you a physical examination before I can issue your vessel a clean bill of health.”

“Open your mouth and say, ‘Ah-h-h!’ ” commanded Tamea, who had followed the doctor below. “Then open your eyes and look wise. Is my father not a frail little man, eh?” she demanded of the doctor.

“The examination of this physical wreck is merely a matter of routine, Your Majesty.”

Gaston Larrieau; came close to the doctor and opened his cavernous mouth.

“Ah-h-h!” he said.

“Ah!” the doctor repeated softly—and touched lightly, in succession, a slightly puffed spot high up on each of the captain’s cheeks. As he pressed the color fled, leaving a somewhat sickly whitish spot that stood out prominently in an otherwise ruddy face. A moment later the spots in question had regained their original color, which had been a ruddiness somewhat less pronounced than the surrounding tissue.

Perhaps only a doctor’s eye—an eye especially alert for such spots—would have detected them.

“Is this not a fine doctor, father Larrieau!” Tamea exclaimed almost breathlessly. “You open your mouth—and he looks at your eyes!”

The health officer glanced at her. A minute before he had noted particularly the glory of her complexion—pale gold, with an old-rose tint, very faintly diffused through the clear skin, like a yellow light masked by a pale pink silk cloth. Now the rose tint was gone and old ivory had replaced the pale gold. There was a gleam of excitement, of fear, in her smoky eyes, and the smile which accompanied her attempted badinage was just a bit forced. As the glances of the two met each realized that the other knew!

“I cannot help it; I must do my duty,” the doctor murmured helplessly, and turned to look down Gaston Larrieau’s open throat. “Any soreness in the nose, Captain?”

“A little, of late, Doctor.”

“Any other pain?”

“Well, for a couple of months I’ve had a small, steady pain in my right shoulder—like rheumatism.”

“No. It is neuritis.” He picked up the captain’s ham-like hand and noted on the back of it, close to the knuckles, the same faintly white, puffy spots. “Now please remove your shirt.”

Tamea’s eyes closed in momentary pain before she retired to a stateroom adjoining the main cabin. Larrieau removed his shirt and the doctor examined his torso critically. On his back, partially covering the right scapula, he found that which he sought. “That will be all,” he informed Larrieau. “Replace your garments.”

An assistant poured some disinfectant on his hands and he washed them vigorously in it, wiping them on a handkerchief which he tossed overboard through a porthole. At a sign from the doctor the others went on deck.

He lighted a cigarette and when Larrieau faced him inquiringly he said:

“Now, regarding your daughter, Captain. What are your plans for her?”

“I have brought her up to San Francisco to place her in a convent to complete her education. As you have observed, she speaks English very well, but with a very slight French accent. She has had some schooling in English, but not very much.”

“Her mother, I take it, is a Polynesian.”

“Pure-bred Polynesian. She died a year ago, during the influenza epidemic.”

“Forgive me, Captain, if my questions appear impertinent. They are not, strictly speaking, questions which I should ask you, but under the circumstances the immigration officer has left the asking of them to me. Have you or your daughter any friends or relatives in this country?”

“We have no relatives, Monsieur Doctor, and the only friends I have in this country are my owners.”

“Is your financial situation such that, should you be taken away from your daughter, she would be provided for to the extent that she would not be likely to become a public charge?”

Gaston Larrieau smiled. “And you ask that of a Frenchman, to whom thrift is a virtue? I have not traded among the South Pacific islands more than thirty-five years to come away without the price of a peaceful old age. I am worth a quarter of a million dollars, and with the exception of a few pearls and a quarter interest in this vessel, all of my fortune is in cash.”

“Did you plan to return to the Islands after placing your child in school here?”

“Parbleu, no! No one could manage Tamea without my help. I am finished with the sea. All of my interests and those of Tamea in the South have been sold. Two years hence, when Tamea has grown used to civilized customs, we will return to France—to Brittany, where I was born.”

“Tamea will probably marry well in France,” the doctor suggested.

“Yes. We Frenchmen are more democratic than Americans or the English in our choice of wives. The fact that my Tamea is half Polynesian—ah, they would not forget that, though she is more wonderful than a white girl! I was married to her mother,” he added, as if he suspected the doctor might secretly be questioning that point. “We were married by the mission priest in Nukahiva.”

The doctor finished his cigarette and suddenly hurled the butt through the porthole. “Lord!” he growled. “I’m so tired of breaking people’s hearts and shattering their hopes.”

“Eh? What is that? Have you, then, unpleasant news for me?”

The doctor nodded gravely. “Captain, I have very unpleasant news for you. Dreadful news, in fact. While I hesitate to state so absolutely until a microscopic examination has been made and the presence of the bacillus in your body determined beyond question, I am morally certain that you have contracted—leprosy!”

The master of the Moorea met the terrible blow as a ship meets an unexpected squall. He flinched and trembled for a moment, then righted himself. His wind-and-sun-bitten face and neck went greenish white; his eyes closed for perhaps ten seconds; his shoulders sagged and his great breast heaved with a single sigh. In those ten seconds old age appeared to have touched him for the first time. When his eyes opened again he was the same calm, good-natured, almost boyish man who had romped through the rigging of the Moorea with his child that morning. He smiled a little sadly—and shrugged.

“Well, that’s over,” he murmured. “I am very sorry for you, Doctor. These things are very unpleasant. However, I have no regrets. I have enjoyed my life—down yonder—because nothing matters. There are not many rules and regulations—and we ignore them.”

“It is different here.”

“Alas, yes!”

“You are a naturalized citizen of the United States?”

“Yes, Monsieur Doctor.”

“It is my duty to remove you from this schooner to the quarantine station at Angel Island. You will be held there for observation, and when the fact that you are a leper is officially determined, you will be removed to the Isolation Hospital in San Francisco. However, it might be arranged to have you sent to the colony at Molokai. If you were not a citizen of the United States you would be deported to the country of which you are a subject.”

“We have said good-by to Riva and the South, and we are not going back. The white blood predominates in my girl; I want her to live her life among white men and women. Besides, she can afford it. She may marry some fine fellow here. Who knows? I had picked on Brittany for my old age—so Molokai will not do. Bon dieu! I should have such ennui in Molokai. I could not stand that.”

“Rules and regulations, Captain,” the doctor reminded him sympathetically.

Gaston Larrieau shook his head. “Old Gaston of the Beard caged like a pet monkey, eh? I think not.” He sat down and tugged at his beard thoughtfully. “Well, one thing is certain,” he continued. “It is more than seventeen years since I begot Tamea. I was clean then and for all the years since until this morning.”

“Non-leprous children are born of leprous parents, Captain. Tamea is clean.”

“She must not know that I am not.”

“Ah, but she does know it.”

Larrieau sprang erect, terrible. “You dared to tell her——” he roared, and advanced with upraised hand.

“Sit down. The girl has eyes, and in Riva she has, doubtless, seen more than one leper. I told her nothing. Listen, Captain.”

From the stateroom came the sound of a muffled sob.

Larrieau sat down, dumb and distressed. “Yes, there is leprosy in Riva. And tuberculosis and worse. The scourges of our white civilization are creeping in and where they strike there is no hope. So I brought Tamea away—only to be stricken—— Well, I knew that was one of the risks I had to take, and a life without risks is as an egg without salt. In my day I have adventured in strange and terrible places, and while this is the very devil of a joke to have fate play on me, still”—he shrugged again—“I have lived my life and I have loved my love, and by the blood of the devil, life owes me nothing. I am ready! Voilà!” And the Triton snapped his fingers. “I am no mealy-mouthed clerk to go whimpering to my finish, protesting at the last that my heart is breaking with sorrow for my sins.” He laughed his mellow, resonant, roaring laugh.

“No, no. Old Gaston of the Beard has enjoyed his sins. They were not many, for I was ever a simple man, but such sins as I had—ah, they were magnificent! I have children in a hundred islands. But Tamea is the child of my love, and like her mother she is a glorious pagan.”

“You say her mother is dead.”

Gaston of the Beard nodded. “She was a queen and believed herself descended from her Polynesian gods. Damnation! She had every right to, for she was a goddess. Tall, Monsieur Doctor—six feet, for she came of a race of hereditary rulers and in Polynesia before the white men came to ruin and degenerate these children of nature, a king was not a king in very truth unless, standing among his people, he could gaze over their heads as one gazes over a wheat field from the top rail of a fence. Tamea’s great-great-grandfather was deposed and exiled to an island five hundred miles to the west, where his enemies enslaved him. In his old age his people rescued him and offered him the scepter he had lost in his youth. But he would not accept, for age and toil had crooked his back and he could no longer stand head and shoulders over his people.”

“What a magnificent old chap he must have been, Captain!” said the doctor.

Larrieau nodded. “Tamea’s mother, Moorea, could walk! You, my young friend, have never seen a woman walk; it is a lost art; our women mince or hop or strut. Moorea was a beautiful woman in point of features. Her hair was a wonderful seal-brown and her skin—well, her skin——”

“Was Tamea’s,” the doctor interrupted.

Gaston of the Beard smiled and nodded. “She was regal of bearing and regal of soul—and the missionaries called her a heathen. For years I kept them out of Riva, with their mummery of morals and religion. Why, there was no sin in Riva until I came—and then it wasn’t recognized until the missionaries gave it a name. Monsieur Doctor, behold a man who dwelt in Eden until the serpents drove him out.”

The doctor chuckled quietly.

“Tamea’s mother,” the sailor resumed, “had features as fine and regular as any white woman. But then, why should she not? Her blood was pure, because it was a chief’s blood. The dark skin, the flat nose and the crinkly hair are souvenirs, in the Polynesian race, of their sojourn in the Fijis before they resumed their age-old hegira that started in Asia Minor. In the common people we find evidences of Papuan blood, and that is negroid, Monsieur Doctor. But the pure-bred Polynesian is not a nigger, as ignorant and stupid people might have you believe. They are a lost fragment of the Caucasian race, and any ethnologist who has studied them carefully and sympathetically knows this. Monsieur Doctor, they are not of Malayan origin, but Cushite, and the Cushites were an Aryan people, as doubtless you know.”

“My knowledge of ethnology is very meager, Captain Larrieau,” said the doctor.

“Mine is not. Gaston of the Beard they call me down under the Line, but I have a head to hold up my beard. How do you account for the fact that the Polynesian priesthood in Hawaii was possessed of the story of the Hebrew Genesis as early as the sixth century, and that, in many respects, this version is more complete than the Jewish?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” the doctor protested. He had the feeling that to argue with Larrieau was to argue with an encyclopedia.

“Well, they acquired the story while drifting eastward from the land of their origin and establishing contact with the Israelites, although on the other hand it may be an independent and original version of legends common to the Semite and Aryan tribes of the remote past and handed down to posterity quite as accurately as the Jewish version before the latter became a part of the literature of that race.”

The doctor glanced at his watch. “Captain, it would be most delightful to linger and receive instruction in so interesting a subject, but we have a Japanese liner to clear before noon, so I must be off.”

“But,” persisted the sailor, “have I convinced you that, if this brutal and iconoclastic world but knew it, my little Tamea is all Caucasian, not merely half?”

“Captain, your daughter is the most dazzling, the most glorious woman I have ever seen.”

“Would you care to marry her, Monsieur Doctor?” The words shot out from the man who had been condemned to a living death with calm but deadly earnestness. “That is,” Larrieau continued, “provided you are not already married.”

“I am engaged to be married, Captain.”

“You have seen Tamea. It will not be hard to forget the other woman. Come, come, my boy! How does the proposition strike you?”

“It doesn’t strike me at all. One does not accept such a proposition for consideration quite so abruptly, my friend.”

“Ah, why not? Why not, indeed? Because others do not? Blood of the devil, what a horrible thing is tradition! If it were not a tradition that a woman shall accept from her fiancé a diamond ring which the idiot cannot, in all probability, afford to give her—well, women would not accept them. If it were the custom, they would accept a blow or a brass ring through the nose or a brand, with equal eagerness. Monsieur Doctor, he who has not learned to accept both good and evil, the usual and the unusual, abruptly and without mature consideration, has not learned to live. Life has not given him of its richness and fulness. Why be afraid? Why shrink from the silly comment of silly people who do not understand when you have a woman with a glorious body, a glorious soul and a glorious mind, to compensate you?”

“I am not free to marry her——”

Gaston of the Beard brushed aside this feeble excuse with a quotation from Epictetus: “ ‘He only is free who does as he pleases.’ ”

But the young doctor was not to be persuaded by such philosophical considerations.

“Has your fiancée a dot of a quarter of a million dollars?” Larrieau shot at him.

“It is quite useless to discuss the matter, Captain.”

The latter hung his head, disappointed. “You realize why I asked you, of course,” he said presently.

“I do, Captain. You must see her provided for. You were at some pains to prove to me that her blood was the equal of mine——”

“I spoke of her mother’s people. But I am not a common man. There is blood and breeding back of me—yes, far back, but I can trace it.”

“You pay me a tremendous compliment, Captain.”

“You are young, you have education, intelligence. You are a doctor, a man of broad human sympathy and understanding. It is too bad your spirit is not free. Too bad!”

“I will return for you this afternoon, about six o’clock, Captain. You will not attempt to leave the Moorea, will you?”

“I told you I was a thrifty man, but I did not tell you, also, that I am generous.”

“I am rebuked, Captain Larrieau. Forgive me.”

“On one condition. Give my vessel pratique—now.”

“I dare say we can risk that. But why do you ask it?”

“So that young Mr. Pritchard, of Casson and Pritchard, my owners, may be permitted to come aboard, with an attorney. I have some business details to attend to before I accompany you to the quarantine shed at Angel Island. There is the business of the Moorea, and the financial future of my Tamea must be provided for.”

“Do you wish me to return to the dock and telephone Mr. Pritchard?”

“If you will be so kind. And ask Mr. Pritchard to bring flowers—a great many beautiful flowers. We sons of Cush are childishly fond of flowers.”

The health officer nodded and went over the side into the Customs tug with a constricted feeling in his throat. Had he not gone then he would have remained to weep, with Tamea, for old Gaston of the Beard!