by Ruskin Bond
It was perhaps fortunate for Dolignan that he had the grace to be a friend of Major Hoskyns of his regiment, a veteran laughed at by the youngsters, for the major was too apt to look coldly upon billiard-balls and cigars; he had seen cannon-balls and linstocks. He had also, to tell the truth, swallowed a good bit of the mess-room poker, which made it impossible for Major Hoskyns to descend to an ungentleman-like word or action as to brush his own trousers below the knee.
Captain Dolignan told this gentleman his story in gleeful accents; but Major Hoskyns heard him coldly, and as coldly answered that he had known a man to lose his life for the same thing.
"That is nothing," continued the Major, "but unfortunately he deserved to lose it."
At this, blood mounted to the younger man's temples; and his senior added, "I mean to say he was thirty-five; you, I presume, are twenty-one!"
"Twenty-five."
"That is much the same thing; will you be advised by me?"
"If you will advise me."
"Speak to no one of this, and send White the £3, that he may think you have lost the bet."
"That is hard, when I won it."
"Do it for all that, sir."
Let the disbelievers in human perfectibility know that this dragoon capable of a blush did this virtuous action, albeit with violent reluctance; and this was his first damper. A week after these events he was at a ball. He was in that state of factious discontent which belongs to us amiable English. He was looking in vain for a lady, equal in personal attraction to the idea he had formed of George Dolignan as a man, when suddenly there glided past him a most delightful vision! A lady whose beauty and symmetry took him by the eyes—another look: "It can't be! Yes, it is!" Miss Haythorn! (not that he knew her name!) but what an apotheosis!
The duck had become a peahen—radiant, dazzling, she looked twice as beautiful and almost twice as large as before. He lost sight of her. He found her again. She was so lovely she made him ill—and he, alone, must not dance with her, speak to her. If he had been content to begin her acquaintance the usual way, it might have ended in kissing; it must end in nothing.
As she danced, sparks of beauty fell from her all around, but him—she did not see him; it was clear she never would see him—one gentleman was particularly assiduous; she smiled on his assiduity; he was ugly, but she smiled on him. Dolignan was surprised at his success, his ill-taste, his ugliness, his impertinence. Dolignan at last found himself injured: "Who was this man? And what right had he to go on so? He never kissed her, I suppose," said Dolle. Dolignan could not prove it, but he felt that somehow the rights of property were invaded.
He went home and dreamed of Miss Haythorn, and hated all the ugly successful. He spent a fortnight trying to find out who his beauty was—he never could encounter her again. At last, he heard of her in this way: A lawyer's clerk paid him a little visit and commenced a little action against him in the name of Miss Haythorn, for insulting her in a railway train.
The young gentleman was shocked; endeavoured to soften the lawyer's clerk; that machine did not thoroughly comprehend the meaning of the term. The lady's name, however, was at last revealed by this untoward incident; from her name to her address was but a short step; and the same day our crestfallen hero lay in wait at her door, and many a succeeding day, without effect.
But one fine afternoon she issued forth quite naturally, as if she did it every day, and walked briskly on the parade. Dolignan did the same, met and passed her many times on the parade, and searched for pity in her eyes, but found neither look nor recognition, nor any other sentiment; for all this she walked and walked; till all the other promenaders were tired and gone—then her culprit summoned resolution, and taking off his hat, with a voice for the first time tremulous, besought permission to address her.
She stopped, blushed, and neither acknowledged nor disowned his acquaintance. He blushed, stammered out how ashamed he was, how he deserved to be punished, how he was punished, how little she knew how unhappy he was, and concluded by begging her not to let all the world know the disgrace of a man who was already mortified enough by the loss of her acquaintance.
She asked an explanation; he told her of the action that had been commenced in her name; she gently shrugged her shoulders and said, "How stupid they are!" Emboldened by this, he begged to know whether or not a life of distant unpretending devotion would, after a lapse of years, erase the memory of his madness—his crime!
"She did not know!"
"She must now bid him adieu, as she had preparations to make for a ball in the Crescent, where everybody was to be."
They parted, and Dolignan determined to be at the ball, where everybody was to be. He was there, and after some time he obtained an introduction to Miss Haythorn, and he danced with her. Her manner was gracious. With the wonderful tact of her sex, she seemed to have commenced the acquaintance that evening.
That night, for the first time, Dolignan was in love. I will spare the reader all a lover's arts, by which he succeeded in dining where she dined, in dancing where she danced, in overtaking her by accident when she rode. His devotion followed her to church, where the dragoon was rewarded by learning there is a world where they neither polk nor smoke—the two capital abominations of this one.
He made an acquaintance with her uncle, who liked him, and he saw at last with joy that her eye loved to dwell upon him, when she thought he did not observe her. It was three months after the Box Tunnel that Captain Dolignan called one day upon Captain Haythorn, R.N., whom he had met twice in his life, and slightly propitiated by violently listening to a cutting-out expedition; he called, and in the usual way asked permission to pay his addresses to his daughter.
The worthy captain straightway began doing quarter-deck. When suddenly he was summoned from the apartment by a mysterious message. On his return he announced, with a total change of voice, that "It was all right, and his visitor might run alongside as soon as he chose." My reader has divined the truth; this nautical commander was in complete and happy subjugation to his daughter, our heroine.
As he was taking leave, Dolignan saw his divinity glide into the drawing-room. He followed her, observed a sweet consciousness deepen into confusion—she tried to laugh and cried instead, and then she smiled again; when he kissed her hand at the door it was "George" and "Marian" instead of "Captain" this and "Miss" the other.
A reasonable time after this (for my tale is merciful and skips formalities and torturing delays), these two were very happy; they were once more upon the railroad, going to enjoy their honeymoon all by themselves. Marian Dolignan was dressed just as before—duck-like and delicious; all bright except her clothes; but George sat beside her this time instead of opposite; and she drank him in gently from her long eyelashes.
"Marian," said George, "married people should tell each other all. Will you ever forgive me if I own to you; no—"
"Yes! Yes!"
"Well, then, you remember the Box Tunnel." (This was the first allusion he had ventured to it.) "I am ashamed to say I had £3 to £10 with White I would kiss one of you two lades." And George, pathetic externally, chuckled within.
"I know that, George; I overheard you," was the demure reply.
"Oh! You overheard me! Impossible."
"And did you not hear me whisper to my companion? I made a bet with her."
"You made a bet! How singular! What was it?"
"Only a pair of gloves, George."
"Yes, I know; but what about it?"
"That if you did, you should be my husband, dearest."
"Oh! But stay; then you could not have been so very angry with me, love. Why, dearest, then you brought that action against me."
Mrs. Dolignan looked down.
"I was afraid you were forgetting me! George, you will never forgive me!"
"Angel! why, here is the Box Tunnel!"
Now reader—fie! No! no such thing! You can't expect to be indulged in this way every time we come to a dark place. Besides, it is not the thin
g. Consider, two sensible married people. No scream in hopeless rivalry of the engine—this time!
Maru
BY H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
Henry de vere Stacpoole, an Irishman with a heritage of French blood, was a doctor until he felt the call to literature. He joined deep sea expeditions, founded a society for the protection of sea birds, and wove stories rich in colour and romance around his beloved South Sea Islands.
The night was filled with vanilla and frangipani odours, and the endless sound of the rollers on the reef. Somewhere away back amidst the trees a woman was singing; the tide was out, and from the verandah of Lygon's house, across the star-shot waters of the lagoon, moving yellow points of light caught the eye. They were spearing fish by torchlight in the reef pools.
It had been a shell lagoon once, and in the old days, men had come to Tokahoe for sandalwood; now there was only copra to be had, and just enough for one man to deal with. Tokahoe is only a little island, where one cannot make a fortune, but where you may live fortunately enough if your tastes are simple and beyond the lure of whisky and civilisation.
The last trader had died in this paradise of whisky—or gin—I forget which, and his ghost was supposed to walk the beach on moonlit nights, and it was apropos of this that Lygon suddenly put the question to me, "Do you believe in ghosts?"
"Do you?" replied I.
"I don't know," said Lygon. "I almost think I do, because everyone does. Oh, I know a handful of hardheaded super-civilised people say they don't, but the mass of humanity does. The Polynesians and Micronesians do; go to Japan, go to Ireland, go anywhere and everywhere you will find ghost believers."
"Lombroso has written something like that," said I.
"Has he? Well, it's a fact, but all the same, it's not evidence; the universality of a belief seems to hint at reality in the thing believed in—yet what is more wanting in real reason than Tabu? Yet Tabu is universal. You find men here who daren't touch an artu tree because artu trees are Tabu to them; or eat turtle or touch a dead body. Well, look at the Jews; a dead body is Tabu to a Cohen; India is riddled with the business, so's English Society—it's all the same thing under different disguises.
"Funny that talking of ghosts we should have touched on this, for when I asked you, did you believe in ghosts, I had a ghost story in mind, and Tabu comes into it. This is it."
And this is the story somewhat as told by Lygon:
Some fifty years back, when Pease was a pirate bold, and Hayes in his bloom, and the top-sails of the Leonora a terror to all dusky beholders, Maru was a young man of twenty. He was son of Malemake, King of Fukariva, a kingdom the size of a soup plate, nearly as round and without a middle; an atoll island, in short; just a ring of coral, sea beaten and circling, like a bezel, a sapphire lagoon.
Fukariva lies in the Paumotus or Dangerous Archipelago, where the currents run every way, and the winds are unaccountable. The underwriters to this day fight shy of a Paumotus trader, and in the 1860s few ships came here, and the few that came were on questionable business. Maru, up to the time he was twenty years of age, only remembered three.
There was the Spanish ship that came into the lagoon when he was only seven. The picture of her remained with him, burning and brilliant, yet tinged with the atmosphere of nightmare; a big top-sail schooner, that lay for a week mirroring herself on the lagoon water whilst she refitted; fellows with red handkerchiefs tied round their heads crawling aloft, and laying out on the spars. They came ashore for water, and what they could find in the way of taro and nuts, and made hay on the beach, insulting the island women till the men drove them off. Then, when she was clearing the lagoon, a brass gun was run out and fired, leaving a score of dead and wounded on that salt white beach.
That was the Spaniard. Then came a whaler, who took what she wanted, and cut down trees for fuel and departed, leaving behind the smell of her as an enduring recollection; and lastly, when Maru was about eighteen, a little old schooner slank in one early morning.
She lay in the lagoon like a mangy dog, a humble ship, very unlike the Spaniard or the blustering whale-man; she only wanted water and a few vegetables, and her men gave no trouble; then, one evening, she slank out again with the ebb, but she left something behind her—small-pox. It cleared the island, and of the hundred and fifty subjects of King Malemake, only ten were left—twelve people in all, counting the king and Maru.
The king died of a broken heart and age, and of the eleven people left, three were women, widows of men who had died of the small-pox.
Maru was unmarried, and as king of the community he might have collected the women for his own household. But he had no thought of anything but grief; grief for his father and the people who were gone. He drew apart from the others, and the seven widowers began to arrange matters as to the distribution of the three widows. They began with arguments and ended with clubs; three men were killed, and one of the women killed another man because he had brained the man of her fancy.
Then the dead were buried in the lagoon—Maru refusing to help because of his Tabu—and the three newly-married couples settled down to live their lives, leaving Maru out in the cold. He was no longer king. The women despised him because he hadn't fought for one of them, and the men because he had failed in brutality and leadership. They were a hard lot, true survivors of the fittest, and Maru, straight as a palm tree, dark-eyed, gentle, and a dreamer, seemed, amongst them, like a man of another tribe and time.
He lived alone, and sometimes in the sun blaze on that great ring of coral, he fancied he saw the spirits of the departed walking as they had walked in life, and sometimes it might be thought he heard the voice of his father chiding him.
When the old man died Maru had refused to touch the body or help in its burial. Filial love, his own salvation, nothing would have induced Maru to break his Tabu, which barred him from touching a dead body.
It was part of him, an iron reef in his character beyond the influence of will.
II
One morning, some six weeks after all this marrying and settling down, a brig came into the lagoon. She was a Blackbirder, the Portsoy, owned and captained by Colin Robertson, a Banffshire man, hence the name of his brig. Robertson and his men landed, took off water, coconuts, bananas, and everything else they could find worth taking. Then they turned their attention to the population. Four men were not a great find, but Robertson was not above trifles; he recruited them; that is to say, he kicked them into his boat and took them on board the Portsoy, leaving the three widows, grass widows now—wailing on the shore. He had no finer feelings about the marriage tie, and he reckoned they would make out somehow. They were no use to him as labour, and they were ill-favoured; all the same, being a man of gallantry and some humour, he dipped his flag to them as the Portsoy cleared the lagoon and breasted the tumble at the break.
Maru, standing aft, saw the island with the white foam fighting the coral and the gulls threshing around the break; saw the palms cut against the pale aquamarine of the skyline that swept up into the burning blue of noon; heard the long rumble and boom of the surf on the following wind, and watched and listened till the sound of the surf died to nothingness, and of the island nothing remained but the palm tops, like pin-heads above the sea dazzle.
He felt no grief. But there came to him a new and strange thing, a silence, that the ship-board sounds could not break. Since birth the eternal boom of the waves on coral had been in his ears, night and day, and day and night, louder in storms, but always there. It was gone. That was why, despite the sound of the bow wash, and boost of the waves, and the creak of cordage and block, the brig seemed to have carried Maru into the silence of a new world.
They worked free of the Paumotus into the region of settled winds and accountable currents passing atolls, and reefs that showed like the threshing of a shark's tail in the blue, heading north-west in a world of wind and waves and sky, desolate of life, and, for Maru, the land of Nowhere.
So it went on from week to week, an
d, as far as he was concerned, so it might have gone on forever. He knew nothing of the world into which he had been suddenly snatched, and land, which was not a ring of coral surrounding a lagoon, was for him unthinkable.
He knew nothing of navigation, and the brass-bound wheel, at which a sailor was always standing with his hands on the spokes, now twirling it this way, now that, had for him a fascination beyond words, the fascination of a strange toy for a little child, and something more. It was the first wheel he had ever seen, and its movements about its axis seemed magical, and it was never left without someone to hold it and move it—why? The mystery of the binnacle into which the wheel-mover was always staring, as a man stares into a rock pool after fish, was almost as fascinating.
Maru peeped into the binnacle one day, and saw the fish, something like a star fish, that still moved and trembled. Then someone kicked him away, and he ran forward and hid, feeling that he had pried into the secrets of the white men's gods, and fearing the consequences.
But the white men's gods were not confined to the wheel and binnacle; down below they had a god that could warn them of the weather, for that day at noon, and for no apparent reason, the sailors began to strip the brig of her canvas. Then the sea rose, and two hours later the cyclone seized them. It blew everything away, and then took them into its calm heart, where, dancing like giants in dead still air, and with the sea for a ballroom floor, the hundred foot-high waves broke the Portsoy to pieces.
Maru alone was saved, clinging to a piece of hatch cover, half-stunned, confused, yet unafraid and feeling vaguely that the magic wheel and little trembling fish god had somehow betrayed the white men. He knew that he was not to die, because this strange world that had taken him from his island had not done with him yet, and the sea, in touch with him like this and half washing over him at times, had no terror for him, for he had learned to swim before he had learned to walk. Also his stomach was full; he had been eating biscuits whilst the Portsoy's canvas was being stripped away, and though the wind was strong enough almost to whip the food from his hands.