when rantan awoke from sleep it was morning. he had slept the clock round. he awoke hungry and full of vigour, and coming out from amongst the trees he stood for a moment by the edge of the little lagoon above whose sapphire waters the white gulls were flighting against a sky newborn and lovely and filled with distance and light.
the canoe lay where he had left it, high-beached now, for the tide was out. the bodies that had been tied to the gratings were gone, the gulls had done their work, and nothing showed but the coconut sennit bindings hanging brown like rags and moving to the breeze.
close to the northernmost of the trees lay a little pond from which he had drunk before lying down; the trees stretching from the pool ran in a dense line for a quarter of a mile, pandanus, coconut palm, bread fruit, and a dense growth of mammee apple, shading beach and reef to a spot where the naked reef took charge. the rest of the ring of the atoll showed few trees, just a small clump or two of fifty-foot palms, wand-like and feathery against the blazing blue.
there was food here, enough of a sort, but he had neither knife nor fire nor fishing line. he was naked.
when they had bound him and kept him and flung him in the canoe to take him to the southern beach of karolin, he had not bothered about the fact that he was naked—it had not troubled him at all till now. now that sleep had restored him to himself, the fact of his nakedness came to him as a sudden trouble making him forget for the moment everything else, even food.
the trouble was entirely psychical. the climate of the beach was so warm that he did not require clothing as a protection, and there was shade enough to shelter him from the sun if he were too warm. all the same, his nakedness lay on him like a curse. he felt helpless, part of his environment that had clung to him for forty years was gone from him and without it he was all astray; naked as a worm he felt useless as a worm, ready to flinch at anything, without initiative, without power.
dick had never known the need of clothes, he had never worn them. it was different with rantan.
the absence of shoes he felt less, though without them he was condemned to keep off the rough coral and keep to the beach sands.
he came along the sands towards the canoe. had you been watching him and had he been clothed in purple and fine linen you still would have said to yourself “there is something wrong about that man, why does he walk like that?”
when he reached the canoe he looked in at the remains of the fruit all squashed and gone bad from the sun; then, turning to the gratings he began to unfasten the strips of coconut sennit that had tied the bodies of the children.
the birds had pulled the bodies to pieces, not even the little bones were left and the bindings hung lax; his fingers were not trembling now as they had trembled on karolin when trying to untie the knots; he had plenty of time to work in and bit by bit the fastenings came undone.
then the gulls, if they had bothered to look, might have seen a strange sight: rantan trying to make himself a loin cloth.
why?
he had neither real decency nor shame in his composition, there was no one to see him in his nakedness but the gulls. why then did he trouble?
trouble he did and the result was scarcely worth his trouble. then, and still without eating, he turned to and cleared the rotting pandanus and other fruit out of the canoe—he could not swill her out as he had nothing with which to hold water, but she had brought in a long piece of weed tangled on the outrigger; the sun had dried it, but he wet it again in the lagoon water and used it as a sort of mop.
having cleaned her and seen that the mast, sail and paddles were all right, he came back to the trees, plucked some pandanus drupes and began to eat.
as he sat down to the food, he made to hitch up his left trousers leg, a habit he had. before leaving the canoe to come back to the trees he had tried to put his hand in his pocket. in this way and in other ways and incessantly his vanished clothes spoke to him, reminding him that he was naked, worm-naked on the face of the world.
he ate, staring at the lagoon as if hypnotized by its blueness, and as he ate, pictures travelled before his mind’s eye, pictures of karolin lagoon and the two dead women he had left on the southern beach, and then, as a bird hops from one branch to another, his mind left karolin and lit on the deck of the kermadec and from that on to the sands of levua in whose woods he had slain peterson.
all his troubles had started from the killing of peterson. it was just as though peterson had been following him, stripping him steadily and bit by bit of everything down to his very clothes: of the schooner, of the pearl lagoon, of his sea chest, of the few dollars he had saved, of his hat, his shoes, his trousers, his shirt, his coat—everything. he tried to put away this idea but failed.
it was now only nine o’clock in the morning of a day that would not end at sunset, of a blue and blazing day that, with night intermissions, would last for months and months—for the rainy season was far off. and he was out of trade tracks.
he stood up, looked about him, and then walking carefully, picked his way on to the rough coral above the outer beach. here on a smooth spot he stood looking over the sea to the northeast.
nothing.
karolin, with fabulous treasure in its blue heart, lay somewhere over there, lost, so far that even the lagoon light did not show.
he turned to the southeast. somewhere there lay the paumotus.
should he push off in the canoe and try to reach them?
since waking this morning there had fallen upon rantan a double obsession, the paralysing sense of his nakedness and now the feeling that somehow in some way peterson was following him—following him wearing the seven-league boots of bad luck. he believed neither in god nor in ghosts, but he believed in luck—and his luck had been frightful and it had dated from the killing of peterson.
this double obsession cut the ground from under the feet of his energy, so that the idea of escape in the canoe entered his mind only to leave it again. he came back to the trees, lay down in their shadow and now the gulls began to talk to him.
the little island had two voices, the endless sound of the breakers and the unending complaint of the gulls; sometimes it would be just a voice or two, sometimes clamour—always indifference, voices from a world that knew nothing of man.
the dead women he had left lying on karolin beach were not further beyond the pale of things than he who had slain them, and it came to rantan as he lay there that he was shut out; no one knew of his fate, he was of no manner of interest to anything that surrounded him; to the wind, to the sunlight, to the trees, to the gulls. if he were to drop dead on the sands, he would become an object of interest to the predatory gulls, but alive he was of interest to nothing.
this was not a passing thought; it was kept alive in his mind by his nakedness. his mind had been stripped of its clothes in the form of living beings and accustomed surroundings, just as his body had been stripped of its clothes in the form of shirt, coat and trousers. the two nakednesses were as two voices perpetually talking together, answering each other, echoing one another.
then, hypnotized by the murmur of the reef, he drifted off into sleep.
he was on the schooner. she was anchored in karolin lagoon and the crew were diving for pearls, the deck was strewn with heaps of shells and carlin was showing him a huge pearl in the palm of his hand. it was the last, they had stripped the lagoon clean, and now it was mainsail haul for ’frisco, wealth, wine and women. he was down in the cabin, pearls all over the floor and pearls in the bunks, and as the ship rolled, the pearls ran and he chased them about the floor on his hands and knees, and they turned into pebbles as he caught them. some turned into white mice and ran over carlin who was lying dead by his bunk, and then poni shoved his head through the skylight and called down at him: “caa—caa—caa,” and he awoke beneath the trees to the call of a passing gull.
