Tales of the South Pacific (27 page)

As in a trance, Cable sucked in his breath audibly. The girl smiled, and at that moment Cable heard a hissing noise. He turned around, frightened. But it was only Bloody Mary. She had her peach-basket hat in her left hand. Stains of betel juice were drenching the ravines of her mouth, which was grinning, broadly. Her broken teeth showed through, black, black as night. She winked her right eye heavily and asked, "You like?" Then she turned and fled down the path.

Cable stood in complete embarrassment, looking at the little Tonkinese girl. He was pretty sure that Bloody Mary and her kinfolk would not return to the hut for a long time, and that bewildered him. The silent girl, standing straight against the wattled wall, confused him still more. But counteracting all of this uncertainty was a tremendous driving force, deep within him, that resolved all doubts and dispelled faint-heartedness.

"Hello!" he said, stepping toward the quiet, straight girl. She kept her hands pressed to her sides, but she was not afraid. She looked at the tall Marine, and had to raise her head slightly to do so. Standing thus, her fine breasts were outlined by her white smock. Through force of habit, she smiled at the stranger.

As she did so, her oval face looked exquisite against the dark hair and wattled wall. Her white teeth shone clearly. Her firm chin looked resolute. She was altogether delectable, and Cable knew it. From that moment there was no uncertainty.

With two long steps he was before the unfrightened girl. He smiled down at her, then enveloped her in his right arm and kissed her feverishly upon her thin, hard lips. She sighed, like a child, and the motion of her sighing thrust her breasts against Cable's hand. Eagerly he sought for them, and in a moment he had drawn the white smock over her head. In rare beauty she stood proudly against the wall, naked to the waist, incredibly feminine. It was then that she spoke to Cable, in French.

"You speak French?" he asked, mumbling as he removed his brown shirt and spread it on the clean, foot-hammered floor. Upon his own shirt he placed hers and then slowly pulled her down to rest upon it. Her bare feet left a reluctant trail along the coral sand, leading from the wall to her nuptial couch.

"So you speak French!" Cable whispered into her tiny, pellucid ear.

"The sisters taught me," she replied, quietly. "They would be angry with me now. They taught me not to do this." She did not smile as she spoke, nor did she turn away in modesty. She was merely informing Cable that in spite of what her mother, Bloody Mary, had advised her in hurried Tonkinese when Cable first entered the hut, she knew that she was doing wrong.

"You speak very good French," Cable whispered hoarsely, his hands seeking her slim, pliant ankles. Slowly he grasped the legs of the black sateen trousers and began to pull them from her frail body. As he did so, he could hear in his mind's recesses the warnings of the sisters, the old preachments of all who had instructed him. But as the sateen trousers pulled free, he clasped the little girl to him with a convulsive motion, and all preachments, old or new, died away.

Later, when the Tonkinese girl was crying softly to herself, Cable found incarnadine proof that he was the first who had loved her. The white smock would have to be washed. "What can you do?" he asked in broken French.

"I'll wash it," she said tearfully.

"Have you another?" he inquired.

"Oh, no!" she responded, as if that were the farthest impossibility in the world. "It will dry." And she proceeded to wash out both her smock and Cable's shirt. Then she placed them side by side on the roof of the red and white hut, on the slope of the roof longest hidden from the path. Cable, who helped her, one hand clasping her breast as he did so, felt the sun pull the water from the cloth.

"You speak well," he said.

"The sisters teach us fine, French," she said, demonstrating that her words were not false.

"You will be a beautiful woman," he ventured, but the manner in which he spoke clearly intimated that he was appraising a growth that he himself would never see. The girl sensed this at once, and tears came into her eyes.

"What is your name?" Cable asked, for he did not see the tears.

"Liat," she said. "That is how the French sisters pronounce my name."

"Like you, it's lovely," he replied, truthfully. "We sit under this tree. Then we see the path... if anybody comes."

He pulled the half-naked Liat to the earth beside him. Unafraid, and yet vastly unhappy, the girl nestled her black head against his tan bosom. Their skins were almost identical!

"Who is Mary?" he asked.

"Which Mary?" she countered.

"The woman that brought me," he replied.

"My mother," she answered.

"Your mother?" he repeated, his tone betraying his thoughts.

"Yes," the girl explained. "She said that you were very fine. She wanted me to love you."

"Did... she want you... to...?" Cable pointed nervously at the two shirts.

"I don't know," the girl said. Then she looked up at the Marine's dark face. "I wanted to, I think," she said simply.

Lt. Joe Cable could say nothing. As he tried to think, words eluded him. He knew that he was very happy. He knew that almost any of the officers of his unit would have envied him that moment on the hillside at Bali-ha'i. The regrets and moral questionings would come later. For the moment, with Liat upon his bare arms, he could defeat any incipient doubts.

Within an hour the shirts were dry. Cable put his on and then helped Liat into hers. Reluctantly he held the bundled smock over her head while she stretched her firm and lovely arms toward the sky. Hers was a motion and a picture he would never forget. At that moment, reaching toward the tall trees and the high peaks of Vanicoro, Liat was the very spirit of Bali-ha'i. In days to come that lovely statuette in brown marble was to be the magnet which would draw him back to the island time after time after time. Liat and the tall peaks of Vanicoro would become great, indefatigable beacons in the jungle night and cool mirrors in the jungle heat. Liat and the peaks were engraved upon his heart. He was aware of this fact as he allowed the smock to slip down her arms and hide her exquisite body. It is not certain that Liat was aware of what had transpired in the Marine's heart and mind and imagery, but she knew that for herself the wonder and the waiting were over.

As they walked down the gently sloping path toward the hospital, they met old Bloody Mary waddling up to meet them. She was perspiring slightly, and her breath was uneven, but as she met them she smiled very broadly, and with great happiness in her wrinkled face. "You like?" she asked, in English. Cable grinned at her, and Liat, seeing him happy, likewise smiled. Together the three conspirators, none knowing exactly what the other thought, but all equally involved, entered the small, barren, white hospital.

There Sister Marie Clement, from Bordeaux, had a small repast awaiting them. Atabrine Benny was there, as were two French ladies and a native medical practitioner who had studied with Dr. Lambert in Fiji. Talk was in French, in English, and occasionally in Pidgin when some native came to the door with his excited problems.

The hospital room was small, like a doctor's reception room in Southern France. It was very white, and had no furniture. Those who wished to sit used built-in benches along the wall, where patients waited for the doctor. A hospital go-cart with a piece of glass for a top was wheeled in with wine, cake, much tropical fruit, and thick cheese sandwiches.

"I am very pleased to see you, lieutenant," Sister Marie Clement said in low, sweet French.

Lt. Cable, vastly ill at ease, bowed low and acknowledged her welcome. Then he spoke to the French ladies, each of which wondered why she had not brought her daughter to the hospital. Benny, sensing nothing, moved toward Liat and grinned at her, saying in his barbarous French, "A fine morning." Liat bowed slightly and agreed.

Bloody Mary was definitely unwelcome in the salon of the hospital, but it was she who had brought the handsome Marine, so she and her daughter had to be tolerated. The old harridan made the most of her visit, ate heartily, beamed at her hosts, showed her funereal teeth to the French women at every opportunity, and felt just wonderful.

After luncheon everyone inspected the other room of the hospital, a barren place with beds for Tonkinese patients, who, in the manner of their country, slept upon bare boards. Upon one such bed, worn shiny from long use, lay an old Tonkinese man with a broken leg. Not understanding a word that was said to him, he smiled and smiled. But when Bloody Mary saw him she loosed a stream of consoling Tonkinese and betel juice, and the old man grinned happily. "Mary," thought Cable, "has a way of making everyone happy. It's a great gift-"

At three the entire assembly walked slowly down the path to the white sands. Again the gardens were more lovely than a dream of the imagination. The coconut trees alternately stood straight toward the peaks of Vanicoro or inclined at crazy angles toward the sea. A row of papaya trees, newly planted, lifted their snakelike trunks into the air as if to hand each wayfarer a cluster of their delicious melons. It was midafternoon in the tropics, and everywhere the great heat flooded down, but nowhere more torrentially than in the hearts of Lt. Cable and Liat.

Unable to clasp one another fervently as they stood side by side on the rickety pier, they were also not free to indulge in the orgy of gazing that each had to fight against. Liat held out her hand as Cable stepped into the boat.

"Au revoir," she said quietly.

"I will return," Cable whispered.

Then the same improvisator of the morning began to ring the bell up in the school. Thus inspired, Benny grasped his once more and together the two carillonneurs pealed out their fine, lilting, inspired farewell. Again music swept through the narrow channel. Again little boys and old men pushed their outriggers over white sands. Blue water lapped the prow of the small boat, and suddenly the engine exploded! There was a noisy sputtering. The engine coughed like an old man confused by chattering, then caught its breath and hammered out a steady rhythm.

"Cast her loose!" the coxswain cried, and the boat stood out from the pier. The boat's bell rang clearly, conservatively now, for each sound meant a message. But far up on the hillside the native boy pealed his unrestricted bell as if his heart were breaking. And the sound sped down the hillside, over the waters, even up to the peaks of Vanicoro, until everyone's heart was filled with music.

"Goodbye, goodbye!" shouted Benny to all his friends.

"Au revoir!" cried the French women and their daughters.

"Goo'bye!" cried the native girls, and the native boys threw rocks at the wake left by the disappearing boat.

Liat, on the pier, watched her mother and Lt. Cable sail away. Then she turned slowly and walked back to the beach where her father and his nephew and wife waited, each wondering what had happened that morning, up in the red and white hut.

On Vanicoro the silent watchers followed the boat far out to sea. To do so, they had to look directly toward the setting sun, but since the setting sun was holy, they had no mind to consider their own discomfort. Long before these savages left their posts among the shadows of the great volcanoes, each person on Bali-ha'i had forgotten the frail craft. That is, each person but Liat.

Next morning Lt. Cable rose from his sack and stepped out upon the beach as he had done every morning since he arrived on the island. But this morning he stopped sharply. There on the eastern horizon was Vanicoro in complete outline! Down the beach a friend cried out, "Look at that damned island! I've never seen it so bright before. It's like a mirage!"

From their huts other Marines appeared to study the peaks of the mysterious island. All agreed that never before had Vanicoro been so clearly defined. It is a miracle of the South Pacific that islands which are relatively only a few miles away are rarely seen. Hot air, rising constantly from steaming jungles, makes omnipresent clouds hover above each island. So dense are they that usually they obscure and often completely hide the islands they attend. So it is that an island like Vanicoro, only sixteen miles away, might rarely be seen, and then only after torrential rains had swept the sky clear of all but high rain clouds, equalizing temperatures over the entire vast sea. Then, for a few hours, islands far distant might be seen. At times land ninety miles away could be detected by a clear eye. But whenever such distances could be seen, it was always because there had been a great rain, and one could look for ninety or a hundred miles beneath menacing, fast-scudding clouds.

"It must have rained last night," an officer observed. "It must have. Look at the island." There was further discussion of when and for how long it rained, but Cable took no part in this. All that he knew was that Vanicoro, which he had never before seen from his hut, was strangely visible. It was so clear upon the waters that one might even... No, that was impossible. Bali-ha'i, at this distance, was merely a part of Vanicoro.

The thought startled him! Was that, after all, true? Were Bali-ha'i and all its people merely a part of the grim and brooding old cannibal island? Were Liat and her unfathomable mother merely descendants from the elder savages? No! The idea was preposterous. Tonkinese were in reality Chinese, sort of the way Canadians were Americans, only a little different. And Chinese were the oldest civilized people on earth. He thought of Liat. She was clean, immaculately so. Her teeth were white. Her ankles were delicate, like those of a girl of family in Philadelphia.

As he said that word, a thousand fears assailed him. That afternoon he would write to his mother... and to the junior at Bryn Mawr. The letter to his mother was difficult, but not impossible. He told her of the islands, of the mission, of the school bell, and of the hospital. He dwelt upon Sister Marie Clement but made no mention of Bloody Mary... nor of her daughter.

But writing to his sweetheart was another thing! On the one hand he could not do as he did with his mother, write in the placid assumption that even if she knew she would forgive him. And on the other hand he dared not even hint at what had happened. He could make no admissions of any sort. In fact, when he postponed writing to Bryn Mawr at all that day, Lt. Cable acknowledged that he had reached a great impasse in his life. At that time he did not know that never again, as long as he lived, would he write to that girl in Philadelphia. He would try several times thereafter, but false words would not come, and true words he dared not write.