safe hidden amongst the bushes he listened. it would take a full hour yet before the schooner could make the break, yet he listened as he lay, his rope beside him, his mind active as a squirrel in its cage.
they would search the atoll, they would hunt amongst the bushes—yet they might miss him.
should they find him! his dark mind took fire at the thought, wild ideas came to him of escaping into the lagoon, boarding the schooner, seizing a rifle and turning the situation. he was a white man, a match for a hundred kanakas if only he could get a foothold above them, a rifle in his hands. in this he was right, as he had slain the women who had him safely bound, so had he the possibility in him to meet this last attack of fate, free himself, and dominating and destroying, make good at last.
time passed, the reef spoke and the wind in the trees, but from the outer sea came nothing. he peeped through the bushes, getting a view of the reef line to northward. by now surely the topmasts of the schooner ought to show close in as she must be, yet there was nothing.
he came out of the bushes like a lizard, stood erect and then came cautiously towards the higher coral where his outlook post was; literally on hands and feet he crawled, inch by inch, till the sea came in view and then he crawled no longer. he stood erect.
far off on the breezed-up sea the schooner close-hauled was standing away from the island.
rantan could scarcely grasp the fact before his eyes. she had been making for him and now she was standing away.
she had not been searching for him, then. was she after all the kermadec or had he been mistaken?
her shape, her personality, that patch on the sail—well what of that? other ships had patched canvas besides his schooner. he had surely been mistaken.
as she dwindled dissolving in the wind, his hungry eyes followed her.
how fast she was going, faster than the kermadec could sail close-hauled.
he watched her till she was hull down, till her canvas showed like a midge dancing in the sea dazzle, till it vanished taken by the round world into the viewless.
then he came back to the trees.
just as the ship had gone from the sea, so had his dream ship gone from his mind, taking hope with her, leaving him to his utter nakedness. he went to the old canoe that he had abused and vilified in his hour of triumph; the sun had enlarged the crack, the forward outrigger pole had worked loose with the tossing in the swell, there was no paddle.
yet she could talk to him, telling him of nanu and ona and their dead children, and of carlin and peterson, and beyond that of soma and chile and many a traverse to the beginning of that great traverse of his life.
he wished to be done with it all.
with the going of hope, the fact of his nakedness had seized him again.
it had never quite left him; the feeling of being without clothes had tinged even his dreams, he had fought against it and put it by, but it always returned, and now that hope had departed it was back and in a worse form. for now if he did not fight it hard, it was taking the form, not of discomfort and a sense of want, but of uneasiness, the terrible excitable uneasiness that the stomach can produce when disarranged—stomach fear.
he fought it down, returned to the trees and found that his worry about the ship and his own position had quite gone; he was worrying about nothing, for he was at grips with something new, something born of his naked skin and his stomach that had been feeding on uncooked food for so long, something that had been making for him for weeks, something that threatened to rise to a crisis and make him run—run—run.
dropping to sleep that night he was brought awake by something that hit him a blow on the soles of his feet; twice this happened and when he slept he was hunting for his clothes, and when he awoke it was to face another blue day, a day lovely but implacable as a sworn tormentor.
he walked the beach in his nakedness.
the gulls had begun to jeer at him now. up to this they had left him severely alone, treating him with absolute indifference, but they had found him out at last; they were laughing at him all along the reef, talking about him and every now and then rising above the trees to look at him.
this idea held for a little and then passed, and he knew that he had been the victim of a delusion.
the gulls were quite indifferent to his presence.
now amongst the trees and close to the waterside stood a gigantic soa with rail-like branches projecting like limbs across the sand and one big branch standing at right angles from the trunk some fifteen feet up.
lying now amongst the tree shadows, and listening to the gulls’ voices that had become normal, and the long roll of the unending breakers and the whispering movements of the robber crabs, rantan fixed his eyes on this branch and saw himself in fancy swinging from it at the end of a rope, free of all his trouble, naked no longer. the rope he had woven and which was lying amongst the bushes had tied itself to the branch in his imagination.
he saw himself rising, hunting amidst the bushes and coming out of them with the rope in his hand; climbing the tree, fixing the rope to the limb, making the noose in the free end, placing the noose round his neck, dropping—kicking the air—dangling.
at noon a great gull sweeping across the lagoon from the leeward to the windward beach, seeing the dangling figure, altered its line of flight as if deflected by a blow, and a high-going burgomaster, seeing the deflected flight of his brother in hunger, circled and dropped like a stone to where rantan was dangling and dancing on the wind. a naked figure yet capable, had the schooner put in, of boarding it by night, seizing command by treachery, sailing north and sweeping karolin, for such is the power of the white man. but rantan was dead, slain by the action of le moan in putting the schooner about. this was the third time she had sacrificed herself for the sake of taori, the third time that she had countered danger and death with love.
