The Difference

by Marina Endicott

  * * *

  —

  The wharf at Suva was serious business, bustling and bright-hot. Draymen loading copra, tall women pushing barrows of brilliant fruit, freight of every kind. When they had made fast and Francis gave permission for them to go ashore, Kay and Thea walked down the street that led from the wharves to the Grand Hotel, and had tea with beautiful cakes on a white veranda overlooking the sea.

  That long street, with the sea to the right and its shambling line of dishevelled and crowded shops to the left, might have been an illustration: “A Town in the Tropics.” On their way back, a sudden burst of hot rain came down in sheets, pounding down as hard as a prairie rainstorm, and they stepped into a doorway to wait it out. The rain did not wash away the strong, exciting smell of the street, but strengthened it: sea and flowers, spice and dirt, all sweet, hot, close.

  The next day being Sunday, they went to the cathedral. A dull service. Kay kicked her heels very quietly beside the others, and almost did not go up for Communion, but Thea gave her an impatient look, so she kept herself in check and walked obediently up. She put her hands in place, but she did not close her eyes, and did not pray while she ate her bit of wafer-bread. Thea could not get at what went on inside her head.

  During the necessary days in Suva, Thea and Francis made a practice of going for short walks ashore—at first so that Thea could show Francis the handsome hotel veranda, and then on the way home from church. They went again next day, calling it a constitutional, but Francis had an itch for curio hunting, and often as not they came back weighed down with paper-wrapped parcels tied with red string. They went by themselves, not inviting Kay to go along, and seemed to enjoy these outings as a kind of courtship spree. It was only fair that they have some time to talk to each other without the constant accompaniment of a mere child; and in fact Kay found it a relief to be out of her sister’s searching eye for once, to stay at the deck table working even while the ship went into shore mode and the swarm ran to and fro, unloading and loading. Perfect freedom, to retire to her cabin and spend all afternoon in her bunk if she liked, training Pilot to do tricks.

  * * *

  —

  One night, in a great ruckus, a herd of cattle was loaded aboard the big steamer at the next mooring, a cattle boat bound for the islands farther on. It took all night. While the world slept, the wharves and the ships were wide awake with work. Voices shouted from the dark sheds, answered by shouts and loud laughter from the boat. Cows stamped and bellowed in the scows; Kay could not blame them, they must have been horrified and bewildered by all this turmoil. The winches screamed as they wound and groaned as they unwound, and the people on the steamer’s deck (where islanders bought cheap passage, sleeping in bedrolls in the open air) cheered as each poor creature came swinging over the side. Cheering for a future good dinner, Kay supposed.

  On one swing the rope slipped, so the cow hung head downward, dangling between sea and stars, and there was such a tangle of shouts from the hold when they tried to right her that Kay feared the poor thing’s neck had broken. She vowed she would not eat beef again, and was grateful for the comparative peace aboard the Morning Light, where only Mr. Best shouted—and only when required to by Francis or Mr. Wright.

  Francis found their own loading, by skilled longshoremen from the Indian contingent, very satisfactory. As they sailed away, he gave Kay and Thea a history lesson on Fiji’s Indian population, to which neither paid much mind. Thea was making a written list of the trinkets and surprises she had found in the stalls at Suva to send to the aunts at home; Kay wandered to the piano and began to play, in a dutiful and clumping way. Since she had not practised for days, or maybe weeks, she did not take offence when Thea called to her to put the soft pedal on, and to find some other tune than “Rondo alla Turca.” And please not to thump.

  * * *

  —

  Coming up one morning as they meandered along eastward, north of the Solomon Islands, Kay found seven giant gull-looking birds tied up under the bridge. Mollymawks, Mr. Best said they were, their wings six or seven feet in span; only a wandering albatross would be larger, as much as eleven feet, Mr. Wright said, from there to the mizzen-mast. Jiacheng had caught the mollymawks with a piece of pork on a hook, and was going to fry up their livers for tea.

  When the dish arrived, Kay felt too sad to taste it, but Francis said they were splendid. “You cannot tell the difference from bullock’s liver!” he told Jiacheng, who bowed in the particular way he kept for Francis: measured, deliberate, not low.

  Kay had seen him bow lower for Thea, when they had one of their tussles over the way things should be done. Sometimes he bowed to admit defeat; sometimes he bowed even lower, in ironic acknowledgement that she was the boss-lady; he bowed lower still if he had won the right of it and appreciated her understanding of that fact.

  The mollymawks were splendid-looking birds. Seeing them hanging dead, spread out like that, wingtip to wingtip, Kay found a tear welling in the delicate niche of her eye, and touched it tenderly, so that it dropped down her cheek and slid into the corner of her mouth.

  Another day, an albatross flew round the mainmast, too wily to be lured by a lump of pork fat. Kay thought of Mr. Brimner, and of Coleridge, and felt herself to be quite erudite.

  While the ship wore on through warm, restive seas, the sailors fished from long lines to augment the dinner table. They caught a large shark, which Mr. Wright pronounced too old to eat even before Jiacheng could refuse it. It was a queer shape, like a clumsy drawing, rough and broken-skinned. Mr. Wright judged that it might be more than a hundred years old; Thea said it looked antediluvian. Mr. Best sent it overboard to feed the other fishes.

  All day long, schools of fish of many kinds passed round the ship, visible or invisible, or the ship passed through them, or both—two separate consciousnesses, Kay thought, staring over the side. They cannot see or know us, as anything but a large shadow; and we cannot know what moves them or goes through their minds, except perhaps danger! or food!

  Thea would say that the fish had no consciousness, no souls, but watching them dart, stagger, turn and sway in their schools, Kay could not believe that their eyes and brains were not as active as her own, or Pilot’s. They did less pondering, possibly—but then there was the Tu‘i Malila, who had had so many years to think, and moved so deliberately, exactly like Father caught on a thought, waiting between one leg and the next for it to formulate, and be considered, and to dissipate. If Kay ever broke in and interrupted that process, Father would be in a pet for the rest of the day. The thread of his consciousness was more delicate than the Tu‘i Malila’s.

  One afternoon Francis called Thea and Kay up from below to see a large scattering of whales—fifty or sixty of them. They passed right by the Morning Light, and one went off with Francis’s best hat. He had given the hat to Thea to shield her as she ran back to the stern to see them better, and a spit of wind tipped it right off her head onto the rising rush of a black, spouting back. Away it went—Thea cried out oh no! but Francis laughed and said not to mind, as it was the only thing he had yet lost on the voyage.

  Shanghai, four thousand nautical miles away, was the next port of call. The journey took on a strange pace, a slow, lingering sail through thick heat north of the Solomons, a place of myriad islands and low winds, and then north of Papua New Guinea. That pace suited Thea and Kay well enough, who had no reason to rush to Shanghai, and did not mind the days following one after another with no variation except what Jiacheng should find to feed them.

  After the noisy activity of Suva, Thea spent the long days doing nothing much at all, standing at the rail staring into the middle distance. With the aid of the noon sights for their latitude and the mileage chart for longitude, she helped Kay trace their route with drawing pins on the globe; once the scattered islands of the Solomons diminished, they had no land in sight for some time. They might not have seen land anyway, for low clou
ds filled the air, and then heavy rain squalls filled their water tanks. Francis was pleased to avoid sending sailors ashore to find and carry water; less pleased when, at a drop in the wind, they drifted back and lost all they had made for two days, the currents against them all the time. That drifting took them closer to Papua, the large island. Next afternoon Arthur Wetmore sighted Jayapura, and they passed within a mile of the harbour. The land was very high, just there. They could see the beach and the huts down along the shore. As it grew dark, they saw the fires all along.

  Prey to sudden primitive trepidation, Thea insisted that they retreat below decks as night came on, but before going below, they saw canoes in near the shore, and a small vessel. This land looked truly foreign to her—and wild, as the Cape and Auckland, and even Tonga and Fiji, had not.

  That night Kay could not sleep. The moon had come into her port window, and the air was radiant and strange. She pulled her middy over her nightgown and slipped up to breathe for a moment in the luminous night air, warm and heavy even well off from the land.

  Someone came aft, walking along the rail in his bare feet. It was Seaton, who Francis had told them was often taken with madness at the full of the moon. He stood clasping and unclasping his hands in ecstasy, carrying on a one-sided conversation in a confidential undertone, nodding his head at intervals in vigorous confirmation of some eerie confidence. He would smile and then grow serious, gazing with rapt, listening attention at the streaming road of pure light the moon set over the sea. After a few moments of this communion he turned on the rail and walked away in perfect balance, receding and blurring so that he took on the quality of the moonlight, and Kay went down to her bunk.

  * * *

  —

  Early in the morning, Kay was back on watch, hoping they might sail close enough to see the islanders. The trees were giant, surprising, rising from the low islands in great formations. About noon they saw what looked like boats coming off an island that Francis said was Bras Island, or Berasi, but they had been disappointed many times before—but in half an hour they had three canoes alongside. Thea said it was worth the voyage to see “true native boats.”

  The people came to trade, their canoes loaded with pyramids of coconuts, bananas, sweet potatoes, even a basket of lemons. Thea said fruit must be out of season, because everything they had was small and greenish. They had trinkets to sell too—shells, braided and woven mats, boxes, hats—great lumps of coral, and a red parrot who squawked louder than Kay expected and made her jump. Its beak was a sharp scimitar, and its black eye looked at her so assessingly that she hoped Francis would not take a fancy to it.

  The man pointed at the lace handkerchief tucked in Thea’s waistband and offered her the red parrot in exchange, but to Kay’s relief Francis said, “No, no, no birds, thankee, unless you have brought chickens!”

  They wanted anything, anything: shirts, trousers (even though none of them wore any), blankets, tobacco—they were loud in asking for that—knives, iron, wire to make fish hooks. The head man spoke a trade pidgin Kay could almost make out, with six or seven English words salted through it. He called himself Cap Paul. He was tattooed even more thoroughly than Seaton, every inch of him painted in shapes and marks, all seeming full of meaning, though Kay’s unaccustomed eyes could fathom none of it. They all had long, bushy hair, and though small in stature looked strong and clever.

  In one of these boats there were six or seven children, one a small boy about the size of Lisia Fifita’s little dimpled daughter in Tonga. Thea said he was far too young to be out without his mother. The men brought the children up on deck and let them run about. Francis said these people must be accustomed to trading with passing ships. The boys ran up and down the ropes in swarms like monkeys and made an awful noise, all shouting together, so loud, until with loud cries of goodbye they put off again in the boats.

  The Morning Light sailed on, keeping the breeze just long enough to get out of sight of land—when it left them semi-becalmed again.

  “We are just two thousand nautical miles from port now!” Francis said at supper, after his evening calculations.

  They had turned north, to strike up around the Philippines for Shanghai. When he predicted it would be cooler soon, Thea said, “I will never complain of the cold again!”

  In her well-washed white muslin (stockings and shoes left off, as they had been since Fiji, now that Thea had forgotten to scold), Kay did not feel hot at all. She leaned out to catch the last of that receding wind.

  About four in the afternoon, Thea was walking with Francis along the port side when he sighted a small island that on inspection of the map turned out to be Pulo Anna, or Anna Island, half a mile in circumference. She never wearied of seeing an island on a map and looking up to see it in reality, lying before them.

  While the Morning Light was still about ten miles out, they saw two boats coming off. Large boats, so big that Mr. Wright thought they might be ship-boats which had been wrecked there, and Francis ordered him to reef sail so they might linger—but as they came nearer, it was clear that they were natives.

  The boats were full of men. Looking up from his map, Francis told Thea they must want something pretty badly, because it was already growing dark and looked like squalls. The boats came up alongside and hailed. After taking a look at the men, and exchanging a few words, Francis let them come on board. They all came, perhaps twenty of them.

  The poor things looked to be almost starving. They didn’t have a morsel of food in their boats to sell—nothing but mats, and splendid fishing lines, and shells. The men said they were “poor, poor,” and repeated it, pointing to their stomachs.

  Among them was a young boy, seven or eight, or perhaps older, but not large. He stood bravely on the deck, a little man already, with a clear interested eye to all about him. When he raised his hand to Thea she caught it, and their hands clasped, neither larger than the other—he was truly very thin.

  She turned the little hand over in her own, touching the strong knuckle-bones, and looked into his eyes. He looked back into her own, and seemed to find pleasure in the exchange, for he smiled with affectionate welcome.

  She sent Jacky Judge down to ask Liu Jiacheng to bring up bread. When he did so, the men ate and ate, and more was brought up, until they had downed a bushel of bread among them.

  Thea took the boy on her lap to feed him, since he did not push forward to ask for a piece and she feared there might be none remaining. His knees were too large on his skinny legs, and the fine skin stretched taut over them. So young, but wide awake to the world too. Sitting tranquil on her knee, he ate the bread neatly, and when she smiled to reassure him, he smiled in companionship again. Not a baby anymore, but a person already. He had a quality of stillness, of attention, that surprised and touched her. She touched his forehead, and he laid his head back to rest on her shoulder.

  The men spread out their wares before her, and showed fine shells to tempt Kay, too. They would take nothing for their mats but tobacco—the other word they all knew, besides poor. Mr. Best brought up what they had to trade, setting up the tins in a short pyramid that made the men shout appreciation.

  “Tobacco, tobacco,” repeated the thin-legged man who was the leader, whom the others, when he shouted to them to back him up, called the king.

  They were crazy for tobacco—mad for it. Several of them spoke to the king, and he turned to Thea and pointed at the boy on her knee, and then with four fingers at the tins of tobacco, and then to the boy again.

  Francis said, “He’s offering to sell you the boy, my love.”

  Thea looked at him, and then at the king. Ask and you shall have: seek and you shall find.

  Everyone was quiet.

  “Four pounds of tobacco for this boy?” she asked the king.

  He nodded, and the men beside him nodded too. The other men rustled among themselves and pushed forward a couple of other younger fellow
s, but Francis waved them back. “No, no,” he said. “I have no need of crewmen.”

  It seemed to Thea that all the men would have stayed on board if they could have. They must have been near the end of their resources—so many of them, and such a small island to support them. What could their lives be like? She looked at Francis again, one arm still around the boy on her knee.

  “I can probably get them down to two pounds of tobacco,” he murmured.

  She shook her head.

  “Four it is, then,” Francis said. He pushed the cans across the deck with his foot.

  Kay had backed away from the shell-sellers, a little afraid of their hunger. She watched this bargaining unfold from the shadow of Seaton’s lifeboat. It did not feel— She thought that there was something wrong here, some misunderstanding from the lack of common language. It gave her a dizzy feeling to hear Thea say that, “Four pounds of tobacco for this boy.” Confused, Kay watched the men agreeing, and she watched the boy. What would Mr. Brimner say to this?

  From his canvas nest above her, Seaton muttered, “There’s many worse lives than boy on a decent ship.”

  The boy slid from Thea’s knee and stood patiently on the white-clean deck, waiting to go home. He was so young, looking about him. Not knowing.

  11

  Aren

  Once the deal was done, the men left the ship, going past the boy one by one, rubbing noses with him. Kay had heard it called that, but it was a wrong expression, for what they did was press their faces to his face, soft and deep. Forehead to forehead, they looked into the boy’s eyes and clasped his arms. The last of the men pressed his face into the boy’s face over and over, not wanting to go, so that Kay thought he must be the boy’s father, or perhaps his elder brother—it was hard to tell how old the people were.