Roo of the Atolls
A MINUTE passed—two minutes.
Down there Roo's sleek bronze body was no more than a flickering shadow on the pale green floor of the lagoon. He had gone deep, for it is in the depths and the less accessible crevices of the coral that the old shell is to be found, bigger than soup plates, gnarled and barnacle-encrusted without, but containing a lustre incomparable, and perhaps But one must not speculate. It is not done in the Paumotus, nor any other pearling grounds in the Pacific. Things happen or do not happen, according to one's own particular beliefs, and to think too much about them brings ill-fortune in its wake as surely as preparing the basket before the fish is caught.
Three minutes came and went. The canoe rode empty and inert on the silken surface of the lagoon. A bo'sun bird swooped out of the brazen sky and, alighting on an outrigger pole, preened himself undisturbed. The shadow on the sloping floor of the lagoon was no longer visible. Roo had gone still deeper, to fifteen fathoms, perhaps, and into a world of his own, where none but his kind could follow. Bubbles rose, tiny globules of light that flicked upward and were gone, followed at last by a dark form that shot from the depths like a meteor.
Roo shook the water from his hair, pushed the goggles from his eyes on to his forehead, and wallowed to the canoe. About his neck hung a string bag filled with shell. This he flung aboard, and clambering after it, commenced opening operations with the same leisurely deliberation that marked all his movements.
His was killing work, and there is no object in hurrying over suicide. Already his eyes protruded ominously, a perpetual dirge resounded in one ear, and on occasion he had caught himself stumbling over an obstacle that did not exist. Inevitably he would go the way of all pearl-divers in the end unless Something fell from the half-opened shell in his hand, tinkled against the knife-blade and dropped between his feet.
In the breathless moments that followed he knew that the unmentioned dream haunting the thoughts of every diver had in his own case come true.
Unlike most people of the atolls, Roo was a man of set purpose—the gaining of the world for the most beautiful woman in it, nothing less. It was for this that his eyes bulged, his ear sang, and he stumbled as he walked. He placed the pearl reverently in his mouth, caressing it with his tongue, and paddled unhurriedly for the beach.
The omnivorous buyer, seated on his spine in a wicker chair, glowered contemptuously at Roo's meagre offering of shell.
"And they are piqué at that," he complained languidly in native parlance. "You must do better than this, or there will be trouble."
Roo appeared unimpressed, and shifted his weight from one enormous foot to the other, whereat the buyer sighed, levered himself out of the chair, and went into the store, returning presently with a formidable-looking ledger.
"You now owe the Compagnie Maritime two thousand francs," he droned, "and we can allow you nothing more until at least half this amount is paid in shell. If you dispose of it elsewhere, the Compagnie will take action."
The tone was that of one who repeats a set piece. It was a set piece, composed by one of the bewhiskered directors of the Compagnie in Paris. The buyer recited it, according to instructions, not less than five times daily, and had long since ceased to derive amusement from the naïve idea of "taking action" against a grinning, mother-naked savage of the Paumotus.
"It shall be paid," said Roo, still unmoved. "In the meantime, I desire a pareu and a silk shirt."
"Take them, then," snapped the buyer, subsiding hopelessly on to his spine, "but bring us shell."
It was on the tip of Roo's tongue to say that he had done with shell, and done with the Compagnie Maritime—a man is prone to such foolishness in the hour of triumph—but there was something of vastly more importance on the tip of his tongue at the moment, and he refrained.
Resplendent in his new pareu and silk shirt, he sought the most beautiful woman in the world, and found her ensconced in her superlative parlour, powdering her nose. Mata was beautiful—there was no denying that—and, what was perhaps equally desirable, she was the last word in Tahitian culture to reach the Paumotus. Though merely the daughter of a local shell sorter afflicted with elephantiasis, she had stayed for more than a month with distant half-caste relatives in Papeete. Consequently, she knew precisely what to do and how to do it. Her surroundings reflected this knowledge. Externally her father's house might be no more than a battered and rusty corrugated iron shed set on a blazing strip of coral sand, but somewhere enshrined within that unworthy structure was Mata's parlour.
Here one sat on chairs instead of mats. The lamp was an intricate affair of dangling prisms and painted flowers. There were spindle-legged "occasional" tables supporting nothing of any practical use, a heavy pile carpet, a gramophone, framed photographs of wedding groups, and an overpowering stench of scent.
Then there was Mata herself, usually in pink silk, a gold bangle above the elbow of one shapely arm, a pear-shaped pipi dangling from either of her incomparable ears, and a pair of languorous but all-seeing brown eyes rolling assiduously in her well-poised little head.
Usually Roo entered the precincts with a considerable amount of trepidation, in spite of the fact that he had supplied the gramophone and the bangle, which, by the way, where the sole reasons that Mata suffered him. But to-day he was filled with the courage of achievement. He found it possible to look his awe-inspiring surroundings in the eye, to sit squarely on unaccustomed furniture, and even dispose of the eternal encumbrance of his feet.
Mata noticed the change in his demeanour and wondered vaguely, but held her peace. She knew that whatever caused it was bound to come to the surface in a child-like nature such as Roo's. And she was not mistaken.
"Mata," he boomed in his deep chest voice, "the time has come for us to marry."
"So?" she questioned with charming insouciance.
"It is so," chanted Roo. "You wish for Papeete, for a house, for many stockings of silk, for a piano—for the world. It is yours. I can give it you, I!" He thumped his massive chest dramatically. "For two years I have worked alone in the deep waters—for you. For two years I have faced the perils of shark and devil-fish...."
He said a great deal more—the people of the atolls are not addicted to mock modesty—and long before he had done Mata was leaning forward with parted lips and shining eyes.
"Show it me," she whispered. "Roo, you must show it me!"
Roo did as he was bid. He was incapable of doing anything else where Mata was concerned. She took the pearl from between his clumsy fingers and devoured it with her eyes. There was not a doubt that all Roo had said was true. Mata was a judge. Her only regret was that out of her many and varied suitors success had fallen to this man of bulging eyes and incipient paralysis. She studied him furtively and for the first time thoroughly. Could anything be done with him? Was there the slightest hope of rendering him passable before the critical tribunal of her distant half-caste relatives in Papeete? She was afraid not. And yet Her glance fell again to the pearl, appraising its value to the last franc. The computation made almost anything possible.
"You will sell to André?" she suggested.
Roo shook his head.
"We will go to Papeete," he said with unusual firmness, "and I will sell to the Chinaman. He is honest."
Mata allowed a low, rippling laugh to escape her. She knew well Roo's opinion of his rival André.
"I was but teasing, my Roo," she said.
"Then we sail on the Miri in three days' time," boomed Roo.
"Three days!" wailed Mata in simulated alarm. "Only three days?"
"That is all, my Mata, and in the meantime no one shall know?"
"Need you ask? And you will take care"
Roo tapped his belt significantly. A man is prone to such foolishness in the hour of triumph. On one side was a small pouch, on the other a sheathed knife. Then he passed out into the sunshine, stumbling over nothing whatever in the doorway.
There was little time and much to be done. Two days Roo spent shelling with the others, thereby convincing the weary buyer for the Compagnie Maritime that his advice had been taken. So much so that Roo succeeded in extracting from him a Prince Albert suit and its appurtenances. This he donned at noon of the third day, and, in a bath of perspiration such as only these atrocities in raiment can produce, was striding into the settlement when he met André.
"Where now?" queried this half-caste pearl expert, with his ingratiating smile.
"To my business," boomed Roo.
"And that?"
"Is my business," returned Roo, and instantly wished that he had not said it. It was his to allay suspicion, not arouse it, especially at this, the eleventh hour.
André's ferret eyes rested on Roo with a drunkard's fatuous solemnity.
"And you have no time, not even for one small drink with a friend?"
"There is always time for that," said Roo, with what for him was supreme cunning.
André drew a glass flask from his hip pocket.
"The best out of Papeete!" he chanted, holding it up to the light and swaying gently. "To good-will between rivals, eh?"
And at that hour Roo found it in his heart to pity André. There is no solicitude so genuine as that of the successful suitor for his less fortunate rival. Roo drank, and in less than two minutes was lying prone on the beach, with the attenuated fingers of André the expert at his belt.
He opened his eyes on a canopy of stars. It was night, and the dirge in his ear had swelled to a roar, and there was a band of fire about his head. Also the pearl was gone.
A giant figure in a dishevelled Prince Albert suit staggered to its feet and stumbled through the sand in the starlight. It came to a halt before the home of the most beautiful woman in the world. The superlative parlour was deserted. Only the outhouse showed any signs of life in the form of a flickering yellow light and on the mats beside it Mata's father nursing his mammoth leg, and swaying and moaning in anguish as befits the bereaved.
Roo took a stride toward the squatting figure, his hand outstretched, the fingers awork, then turned aside and passed down the beach. For a moment he stood staring over the starlit sea, then with quick, ferocious movements he tore the Prince Albert suit from his body and flung it on the sand.
When the moon rose, it found him squatting at the water's edge, still staring seaward. Roo was thinking.
And the schooner Miri was plowing a phosphorescent furrow through the night.
"But it was so simple, my pearl, that I hardly like to speak of it. They are big, but they are soft, these Paumotan savages. One tap, in fair fight, too, and the thing was done."
Thus André at the ship's rail, with Mata at his side asking a woman's unnecessary questions.
"I do not like it, André," she said. "That man is different to the others. He will not forget."
André turned and studied the alluring profile at his elbow.
"Then you would have had me make it impossible for him to remember?" he suggested.
Mata did not answer, but her meaning was none the less clear.
"Little savage!" laughed André, and stroked her hand as it lay on the rail. "Have no fear. Papeete is not the Paumotus. There are gendarmes to protect life and property. Besides, how is he to prove he ever had a pearl?"
"That is so," mused Mata. But she shivered, and André fetched her bedizened wrap from the cabin.
On arrival in Papeete, where André sold the pearl for thirty thousand francs, the sequence of events was as inevitable as may be supposed. From mere neglect, André's treatment of Mata descended by rapid stages to vicious brutality, and within the month she was a broken woman.
Of an evening she would escape from the house that was her torture chamber, and walk aimlessly in a dowdy wrapper along the coral wall that formed the beach. Here the water was deep, and clear and clean. Mata loved to look down—down. It reminded her of a Paumotan lagoon.
And here it was that on a night of dazzling moonlight a head clove the water at her feet. With a curious lack of surprise or alarm she saw that it was Roo's. He had died, then.
Presently it spoke, with the booming intonation of old.
"You are not happy, then, my Mata?"
She did not answer. She could not. But her head was bowed until it rested on her knees. Her body commenced to sway, and the moan of the bereaved floated out on the water.
When she looked up, the head was gone.
André had bought his election to the club that overlooks the harbour. Here on the wide balcony, and over countless absinthes at the little round tables, he could mix on equal terms with the elect of Papeete, win or lose prodigious sums at cards, roulette, or billiards, and dabble in pearls on quite an imposing scale.
The life suited him. It presented possibilities of a chicanery that was second nature to André. He became famous in the Island underworld as a "fence." No matter how a stone had been acquired, André would buy it without question—for less than half its value. Often he would be sitting at cards when one of his runners whispered in his ear, and he would excuse himself to interview some quaking thief or murderer, or both, in the deeper shadows of the beach. It paid. Such people are more tractable than most.
That was why on a certain night he deserted an unprecedented run of luck to plunge into the velvet darkness of the beach road.
He found his man, as the runner had said, under the flamboyants at the end of the coral wall. André did not speak. He was in the habit of letting others do that. But this fellow, a hulking savage, by the loom of his half-naked body in the shadows, was strangely silent.
"Well?" snapped André impatiently.
A hand was outstretched, an immense hand, and André's went to meet it. But the other proved to be empty, and its fingers closed on his like a steel trap. Another shot from the darkness, enveloping his face as in a mask.
"Greetings, my friend!" boomed the voice of Roo. "We will make it a long one, of Papeete's best, eh?"
The entwined and writhing bodies struck the water as one. The inky waters parted and closed. A minute passed—two minutes. Roo had gone deep, to fifteen fathoms, perhaps, and into a world of his own, where none but his kind could follow. The ripples expanded in ever-widening circles, and were still. Three—four minutes came and went. Roo was surpassing his own record, and it was not before the end of the fifth that his head broke water and he clambered gasping up the coral wall.
Mata was tossing sleeplessly on her mats, waiting for she knew not what. She was always waiting now, and never did she know what for until André made it clear.
At the sound of a naked footfall on the veranda steps she started as though stung.
"Where is André?" she demanded of the giant figure that loomed in the doorway.
"He sleeps," boomed Roo. "We have been drinking, André and I. Come, my Mata!"