"Iriatai," my uncle began, "is an atoll in the Paumotus—a narrow ring of land nowhere more than a few yards high, surrounding a lagoon ten or twelve miles across. The island has a curious history, for its people were the last to remain savages among all the eighty islands of the group. It is a lonely place, far out to the eastward where trading-schooners seldom pass, and long after the missionaries had civilized the other atolls, Iriatai remained unknown—no white man had landed on its beaches, or laid eyes on the wild people whose village was screened by the dense bush along the shore.
"In those days there was a famous Catholic school on Mangareva in the Gambier group, and one year, at Christmas time, a brig set sail from Tahiti for the South, with a cargo of trade, and half a dozen children of wealthy half-caste families, sent to be educated by the Church. A week after the brig's departure, a gale came roaring down out of the northwest—a storm so fierce and long-continued that old men speak of it to this day. On Tahiti there was great anxiety for the vessel's safety, and no one was surprised when many months later a schooner came north from Mangareva, with word that the brig had never arrived. It was an old story,—another ship lost somewhere in the lonely spaces of the South Pacific,—but there was one woman on Tahiti who refused to believe that the vessel was lost. She was a rich widow whose only child, a flaxen-haired girl of eight, was missing with the others, and she offered great rewards to anyone who could bring her news of the ship.
"One day a trading skipper came to her with a clew. On his last trip through the Paumotus he had been blown far out of his course, and while hove-to in a heavy sea, he had raised an island only vaguely marked on the charts. He ran in to take shelter in the lee, and as they stood off and on, close to the leeward reef, the lookout had reported people ashore. Taking up his glass, the captain made out a crowd of savages standing on the beach. They brandished spears and were dressed in girdles of pandanus leaf, but two or three of them wore about their shoulders pieces of cloth which the skipper took to be of European make. He was an old-timer in the islands, and he was certain that no trader had ever visited the place.
"The widow lost no time in fitting up an expedition at her own expense. The skipper who had seen the savages on Iriatai was given command; the old man is living in Papeete to-day—I had the yarn from him. He picked up half a dozen Rangiroa boys and armed them with rifles in case of trouble, though they were instructed not to shoot unless attacked.
"After a fortnight of beating about, they raised the palms of Iriatai, sailed in through the pass, dropped anchor a stone's throw off the village, and went ashore. There were canoes hauled up on the beach, fishing tackle lay about as it had been dropped in haste, and the thatched huts seemed to have been inhabited within an hour past, but saving a dog or two and a few half-wild pigs, no living creature was in sight. The captain heard a shout from one of his men who was exploring the far end of the village, and the others hastened to the place where the Christian boy was pointing with horror to the ground. There, close to the temple of the islanders,—a long platform of rude coral blocks,—was the umu tagata: the oven in which human bodies were roasted whole. The bones of men, clean-picked by the cannibals of Iriatai, were scattered on all sides, and hundreds of Chilian silver dollars—current throughout the Pacific in those days—were arranged in neat patterns about the cooking-place. A few yards off, mounted on sharpened stakes along the coral wall, a row of heads was drying in the sun, and one of them—a small head from which hung wisps of long flaxen hair—made the whole story clear. The widow's daughter had been found.
"The skipper was sickened—if he had caught the people then, he told me, he would have slaughtered them like sheep. Calling to his men, he set off recklessly through the bush, resolved to shoot down the savages at sight. Hour after hour the searchers struggled through the dense green bush, scratched by thorns, streaming with perspiration, stumbling over the sharp coral underfoot. It was a hot still day, and the jungle was lifeless and strangely quiet. No leaf stirred, no bird sang, and the drooping fronds of palms hung motionless overhead. Nothing moved anywhere saving the small white sea-birds which circled eerily, high above the tree-tops. The oppression of the bush cooled the skipper's anger and lowered the spirits of the searching-party; no word had been spoken for half an hour when they sat down in silence to rest, close to a pile of jagged coral blocks. Leaning against a tree-trunk, with his rifle between his knees, the captain was in the act of filling a pipe when one of the men touched his arm, signing him to make no sound. To one side of them, in the bleached mass of coral, there was a faint scratching noise, and presently, as they watched, a brown hand and arm appeared for an instant in a crevice of the rocks.
"'That is their hiding-place,' the native breathed into the skipper's ear; 'I have heard my own people speak of such caverns, where they took refuge in the old wars.'
"The captain thought for a moment before he spoke. 'Go alone to the mouth of the cave,' he whispered to the boy beside him; 'our rifles will protect you. See if you can talk to the savages. and if they understand you, try to persuade one or two of the men to come out.'
"The native rose and stole away, and soon they heard his voice calling softly in the Paumotan tongue. He seemed to be in conversation with the people underground. When he returned there was an odd smile on his lips. 'It is strange,' he said, 'those people speak a tongue such as our old men use. They are like beasts or cruel children, killing because they know no better, or are afraid. I do not believe that they are evil men. There is no entrance to the cave—only a little hole in the rock, through which a man may thrust his hand and arm. The place is sacred in these people's eyes and on the ground close to the hole there is an offering of food. They feared it might betray their hiding-place; the man we saw was trying to reach it from within. There is another way out, they said, knowing that I could never find the place. To reach it, they swim beneath the water of the lagoon. We cannot get in from above; all our strength would not suffice to move the rocks. They are afraid to come out, but perhaps I might persuade them if I could show gifts such as they have never seen.'
"The captain collected a few bright trifles among his men: a mirror or two, a gaudy bandanna handkerchief, a clasp knife with a glittering blade. The native returned to parley with the savages, and while he was gone the skipper gave instructions to his men—they were to scatter a little and lie hidden; if the wild people found courage to leave their cave, and they were not too many, they were to be seized and bound at once.
"An hour passed. Then, without the warning crackle of a twig, two savages stepped from the bush and came toward the native who awaited them, holding out gifts and speaking encouragingly. They were naked save for light girdles of grass, and their shocks of hair were tied in high knots upon their heads. The captain whistled, and a moment later the two men of Iriatai lay triced and helpless on the ground.
"The schooner sailed for Tahiti the same night, carrying the prisoners, whose evidence—the story, freely told, of how the wrecked brig had been plundered before she broke up, and how every soul aboard had been massacred—was placed before the French authorities. A few months later a man-of-war was sent to Iriatai, with one of the prisoners as interpreter, and the people of the island were carried off to Tahiti to be civilized. In the end, the chief was executed in reprisal for the island's crime, and his people were taken away to distant atolls of the group.
"Only one of them, so far as I know, ever returned to Iriatai—Turia, the chief's daughter, a girl of eleven or twelve when she was carried off aboard the man-of-war. Her beauty and intelligence attracted the notice of a half-caste Tahitian, who adopted her and gave her an education at the Sisters' School. At seventeen she married the Baron von Tesmar—an Austrian nobleman, a man of wealth and taste, brought up among the capitals of the Old World. He was well known in all the outlandish ports of the Pacific; for reasons of his own, of which he never spoke, he had chosen to shut the door on the past. He traveled on his own yacht with a Kanaka crew, and during a visit to Tahiti he ran across Turia, the girl from Iriatai. A month later she sailed away with him, with a marriage certificate, all legal and shipshape, stowed away in her camphorwood box. I suppose she must have been the Baroness von Tesmar—By Jove, a funny world!
"The natives have a quality I like: each one of them loves his own island in a way that we can scarcely understand. Turia was no exception, but unlike the rest of her people, she ended her days on Iriatai. A short time after he married her the Baron became interested in pearl-culture and—at her suggestion, no doubt—they settled on the island where her savage forefathers had lived and died.
"To give you an understanding of the story from now on, I must tell you one or two things about pearl-shell, which furnishes the mother-of-pearl used all over the world for buttons and ornaments and the handles of knives. In the Paumotus where I trade, the pearl-oysters are of a kind called 'black-lipped,' valuable as mother-of-pearl but rather barren so far as real pearls are concerned. Out to the west, about Celebes and in the Sulu Sea, there is another variety, richer in pearls and far more valuable as shell, called 'gold-lipped,' because the edges of the shell are golden-tinted. Von Tesmar was a man of some scientific attainments, and he suspected, far ahead of his time, that the growth of a pearl in the oyster was caused by a parasite, which it might be possible to transmit by artificial means. In order to carry out his experiments, he had his schooner fitted with a kind of well, through which the sea water was allowed to circulate, and brought shipments of live oysters from distant parts, to be transplanted in Iriatai Lagoon. He may have had an idea that the gold-lipped oysters, in this new environment, would prove more susceptible to infection—to the little-known parasite believed to cause the pearl.
"The Baron's career, his studies of the pearl, and his new settlement on Iriatai were all ended by the hurricane of 1881. The island had been one of the finest of the Paumotus, with dense groves of coconuts and a deep soil on the higher spots, but when I first landed there, in ninety-six, it was a waste of sand and tumbled coral-blocks, clean-swept from end to end by breaching seas. On an islet, far down the lagoon, a small clump of palms remained—the only living things, save Turia and her child, to survive the fury of the sea.
"The settlement was at the weather end, and when the seas began to breach across into the lagoon, von Tesmar's schooner was anchored fifty yards offshore. Both cables snapped and she disappeared in an instant among the driving clouds downwind. She must have piled up at the leeward end, or perhaps she was carried clean over into the open sea beyond. At any rate, no man of her crew was ever seen again. The people of the settlement—a dozen natives with their wives, brought by von Tesmar to labor in the oyster-beds—had no time to chop off the tops of the palms in which they took refuge. A pair of old palms, eighty feet high, flexible and tough as whalebone, stood close beside the house. High up on the bole of one, the Baron tied himself, and Turia swarmed up the other, her three-year-old boy lashed to her back.
"It is useless to try to describe a South Sea hurricane. One after another, the houses were carried away. Each frothing comber seemed to rush over the land more fiercely than the last; the wind came in gusts that bent the palms like reeds. With a sound audible above the uproar of the hurricane, a palm-bole snapped, and its top, with two human beings clinging among the fronds, sped off to vanish in the wrack. Turia's was the last to withstand the wind; she watched the others go,—men, women, and babies at their mothers' breasts,—and finally a faint, splitting report close by told her that von Tesmar's palm had given way. Next moment her own refuge went, and still clinging to the upper bole, she was sailing above the torn white surface of the lagoon. How she survived the impact, disentangled herself from the wreckage, and lived through miles of angry water is a thing that I have never understood. When she struggled ashore on the islet which was the only land above the sea, her child was still alive. No one but a Paumotan could have done it, and no woman of any other race could have lived and supported her child—as Turia did for many weeks—on coconuts and the fish she was able to catch with her bare hands. In the end, the lookout of a passing schooner saw her signal-smoke."
My uncle's cigar had gone out and he rose for a moment to scratch a match against the fireplace. The lamp was turned low; the glowing logs on the andirons sent waves of light flickering among the shadows of the room. My father stood up to stretch his legs. Standing with hands clasped behind his back, he gazed quizzically at his brother, seated in the deep old leather chair.
"That's a good story of yours, as far as it goes," he observed; "but what has all this to do with you, or with the fact that you can spend only one day with us?"
"No wonder you're growing impatient," said Uncle Harry, with a smile; "it must seem an interminable yarn, but it's all linked together, as you will see. I came into it about ten years ago, when I took a lease on Iriatai. It was just after my last visit here. A friend suggested that I have a look at the island with a view to planting coconuts—they thrive wonderfully in the coral of the atolls. I had heard half-legendary accounts of von Tesmar and his pearls, but such experiments are not taken seriously in the islands, where so many cranks have tried this scheme or that, and failed. The lagoon had never been a place for shell.
"I met Turia when I landed there. Von Tesmar had left her a little money in the Papeete bank, and after a year of civilization, she had been overpowered by the homing instinct of her race. Her husband had relatives in German Samoa—the directors of a great Apia trading-house—and she took her child to them before she set out to end her days on Iriatai. Then she chartered a small schooner and sailed away with a couple of poor native families and a stock of provisions and seed-coconuts. I found her happy in a lonely sort of life, settled in a one-room cottage, surrounded by groves of fine twelve-year-old palms. The place was furnished with a bed, an accordion, and a chest of camphorwood; a portrait of von Tesmar, in the uniform of an officer of dragoons, hung on the wall. There must have been a human side of this man's character, for his widow remembered him with a devotion hard to match.
"She was the only claimant to rights in the island, and I had no difficulty in gaining her consent. Within a year I obtained from the French Government a long lease on Iriatai and now there are sixty thousand young palms on the island, some of them already beginning to bear. Another hurricane? We can't afford to think of that—they strike an island not more than once in every hundred years. During the visits when I carried labor and supplies to Iriatai, Turia used to spin me yarns about the hurricane. She was an interesting woman, as those of the pure old blood are apt to be. When I knew her she was straight and handsome still—no darker than a woman of southern Spain. Sometimes she showed me letters from her boy, growing up in far-off Samoa with his relatives. I did not meet him till after she was dead.
"I needed a rest last year, and as I didn't have time for a run up to see you all, I decided to take a vacation among the islands—a short cruise through the Tongan and Samoan groups. One night in Apia, the German port, I had been dining at the consulate, and as I walked along the moonlit beach to where my boat's crew awaited me, I was stopped by a young half-caste, dressed in soiled white duck. He spoke English, and he looked so miserable, so poor and ill that it needed a thicker skin than mine to pass him without a word. His body was no more than skin and bones, and when he turned in the moonlight, I saw the wreck of what had been a handsome face, ravaged by quick tropical tuberculosis. He spoke in abrupt sentences, gasping for breath and stopping at intervals to cough.
"'You English?' he asked. 'No? American, eh? I speak German, French—not much English. That Tara your schooner? They tell me you go Tahiti to-morrow. Give me passage, eh? I cook—wash dishes—cabin boy—anything! I want go Tahiti too much!'
"He turned away from me and leaned over with a hand to his chest, coughing frightfully; when the paroxysm had passed he stood gasping and unable to speak. It was impossible not to be sorry for the poor devil.
"'I'll let you know to-morrow,' I told him. 'I'm sailing at sundown. Come to the beach at four or five o'clock.'
"Next morning, strolling with the American consul, I pointed out the half-caste, asleep in the shade of a beached canoe. 'Oh, that fellow,' said the consul; 'Yes, I know him; von Tesmar's his name. Doesn't look much like a nobleman, does he? As a matter of fact, he's a baron of the Austrian Empire—when he's drunk enough he'll show you the papers to prove it! Odd story. His father married a Paumotu woman years ago and was lost in a hurricane, back in the eighties. The mother brought her child out here—old Madame Lichtenstein, of the Hamburg Concession, was the youngster's aunt. The old lady was good to him, sent him to the Protestant school and finally shipped him off to Europe with plenty of money to spend. But the cold winters were too much for his native blood, I guess; t.b. got him after the second year, and as happens so often in the islands, consumption led to drink. Then one day he turned up here, a yellow skeleton with a craving for alcohol. The Germans took pity on him and pensioned him off for a time, but he was sinking rather low, and finally they cut off the money and ceased to recognize him at all. One can't really blame them much!'
"I didn't say anything, but I was interested, I'll admit. So this was Turia's son—the child of the hurricane on Iriatai! He had traveled a long road since those days; but I suspected that the end was near. Why should he want to go to the eastern islands? The old instinct of his mother's blood, perhaps, calling the wanderer home at last to die.
"I gave him a passage, at any rate. He was willing enough, but it was absurd to talk of working his way—when we'd been out three days I knew that his eyes would never see another landfall. I put him in a berth in the spare stateroom. He'd picked up his English on the beach, but in French you'd have been surprised to hear the fellow talk. With the interest one cannot help feeling in a dying man, I spent a good deal of time yarning with him, and finally told him that I had heard something of his story and had known Turia on Iriatai. He was in a steady low fever by this time, and our talks seemed to excite him; he asked endless questions about his mother and her life—the island—the lagoon.
"One night, when I was at the wheel, the cabin boy came on deck, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, to say that von Tesmar wanted to see me at once. There was something of great importance to tell me, it seemed. We were in the middle of the wide, lonely reach of sea that stretches from Rose Island to the Leeward group. The moon had risen about eleven o'clock; there was not a cloud in the sky, and a steady breeze blew warm and fair from the northwest. I had taken the wheel at moonrise and I hated to go below, but the half-caste's message seemed so urgent that I called the man on watch to take my place.
"I found von Tesmar gasping in his berth. He had gotten up to undo a bundle he carried with him, wrapped in a piece of native cloth, and when I pulled the curtain aside, he held out to me a tattered sheet of cheap ruled notepaper.
"'For you,' he whispered breathlessly, in the French he had picked up during an edifying year in Paris. 'Ah, mon ami, this is the end—now I must die, and a glass of your excellent rum would help me to die gracefully. Merci bien—you are kindness personified! I wonder why: there is so little, in your eyes, that I can do. Yes, this is the end. I cannot complain—I have had my fun and paid for some of it, at least. Never again shall I watch the faces passing my table on the boulevard, nor sit with the brown people in a bush-clearing far from the church, while the drums throb and the sleek young girls twist and flutter their hands in the torchlight. No doubt you are thinking that I am a drôle de type, and so I am, by training and by birth—half savage, half boulevardier. But the time is short and I weary you with idle reflections; allons, to business! You can read the native Tahitian, eh? It is difficult for one who knows only the Samoan dialect. I had hoped to keep that paper to myself; the doctors say that men with my malady are always optimists. But you have treated me as one white man treats another—keep it, read it, and do as you please. Perhaps it is worth another glass of rum, n'est-ce pas? Another rum for Monsieur le Baron! They called me that in Paris, at the Grand Hotel—Ha, ha! Noble on both sides, bon Dieu!—my mother a cannibal Princess—Monsieur le Baron von Tesmar, Prince of Iriatai! How's that for a title, hein?'
"At five o'clock, when the moonlight paled before the first flush of dawn, he turned his face away from me and died. I blew out the light and went on deck to give orders for his burial. Then, when I had my coffee, I lay down in my berth and unfolded the paper he had given me. It proved a quaint document—a letter in the native language from Turia to her son, written a few days before her death. Here it is—it is worth translating for your benefit:—
This from your dear mother, who loves you and prays that God's blessing may bring you prosperity and health. Amen. I am ill, and though the woman who tends me has made medicine, I think that I shall soon die. Do not weep for me—I shall be happy to be again with your father, whom I have always loved. Now pay attention, for there is a thing that I must tell you. Your father was a wise man, and his work was to bring pearl oysters from foreign seas to this lagoon. After the hurricane, when I swam so far with you clinging to my back, I believed for many years that the oysters must all be dead, but that was not true. In the far end of the lagoon, where no one goes to-day, I have found where the strange shells with edges like gold lie on the coral in thousands, not more than fifteen fathoms deep. Many times I have gone alone in my canoe to dive for them, and I have found fine pearls, great and small. These are true words. The white man called Seroni, who brings people to plant coconuts on Iriatai, is a good man and my friend, but I have said nothing of the pearls to him. They were your father's work, and you will want them, since you live in the white man's land. The oysters are on coral bottom, midway between the islet and the reef. Beware of a great brown shark when you come here to dive; he comes sometimes to that end of the lagoon, and twice he has nearly had me when I was intent upon my work. I think he is the old god of my people, worshiped when I was a child. Farewell, my dear son—I shall not see you again.
On Iriatai, from Turia, to her son, Arno von Tesmar
"Somehow, as I read this letter, I was convinced that what the woman said was true. There are nearly a hundred square miles in Iriatai Lagoon, and though my men did a good deal of fishing, a shell-patch of the largest size might have escaped their notice for years. No one in the Eastern Pacific had ever succeeded in acclimatizing the gold-lipped shell, but that did not prove that it could not be done. If Turia's words were true, von Tesmar's eagerness to reach the group was justified. It might prove a rare chance, and I resolved to investigate at once.
"Fatu, my big mate, is a man that I can always trust. He is a first-class diver, and when the Tara was anchored at Iriatai, I told him the story and explained that he must hold his tongue. We took a big canoe and made camp on the islet at the far end of the lagoon. Even with Turia's directions, it took us four days to find the shell, but when Fatu began to bring up the gold-lipped oysters in both hands, I saw that the dead half-caste had paid his passage a thousandfold.
"My man reported the bottom covered with shell for acres on either side—a little fortune in mother-of-pearl alone. And pearls—By Jove, I could scarcely drag Fatu away!
"I didn't dare to linger—there was danger of causing talk. It would need a dozen or fifteen divers to work the patch properly; the news would travel like a whirlwind, and I hadn't the shadow of a claim on the shell. The open lagoons—I must explain—with passes through which a vessel can enter from the sea are Government property, and during the legal season any native may dive and keep what he obtains. Unless I did some careful planning, half the schooners in the South Pacific would soon be anchored at Iriatai. Well, I headed for Tahiti and did my thinking on the way. The Governor of French Oceania is a friend of mine. When we reached Papeete my plans were made and I put the matter up to his common-sense: By pure chance, in one of the atolls under his administration I had discovered a brand-new patch of shell. (I said nothing, of course, about von Tesmar, or the fact that the shell was golden-lipped.) If properly preserved and worked, this patch might in the future prove a valuable asset to the Government. As things were, I could not legally profit by my discovery—any Kanaka diver had as much right as I to exploit the new lagoon. If I held my tongue, a hundred years might pass before another man stumbled on the place. In view of all this, therefore, wouldn't it be fair to give me one season's exclusive rights, in return for adding a new pearl-lagoon to the five or six already under French control?
"It struck me as a fair thing to ask, and I had little difficulty with the Governor. Within a month the papers were delivered to me all signed and sealed: a year's rights to the shell and pearls of Iriatai. I had always wanted an engine for the Tara and now I felt that I could afford one. In the Paumotus, with reefs and five-knot currents and frequent calms, a motor is better than a dozen insurance policies. Now the engine's installed and I am heading back without a day to waste. It will take time to find the men, to build canoes, and get the diving under way."
As he finished his story, my uncle rose and began to pace back and forth before the fireplace. My father lay in his chair, smoking and making no comment; I fancy that the glimpse of an adventurous life on the other side of the world had set his thoughts to wandering. Though it was long past midnight, I was wide awake.
All at once my uncle stopped beside his brother's chair and stood looking down at him, with a half-apologetic smile.
"See here, Ben," he said, "I want you to let Charlie come along. A few months out of school will do no harm and I'll give you my word to have him back in the fall. I've come to the age when a man feels the need of youngsters, and yours are all I have. There'll be plenty of work—I need someone I can really trust. He'll have his share in what we get, of course, and he'll earn it—I'll see to that. Be a good fellow, and let him come!"
My father looked up and sighed before he spoke. "Ah, Harry," he remarked, "you're a lucky man! All your life you've been a rainbow-chaser and now you seem to have caught up with one at last. It's hard not to envy you when I hear a story like the one you've told! I didn't realize what a dull old stay-at-home I had become. As for the boy, I'm tempted to let him go; but you're asking a good deal! You live in a rough part of the world, if the stories one hears are true. There must be men down there who would make it hot for you if the news of your pearl-lagoon leaked out. Even in California we used to hear of the exploits of Bully Hayes."
My uncle smiled and shook his head.
"Those days are past," he said. "Pease and Hayes are dead, and they've left no successors in the Eastern Pacific. So far as I know, there's only one scoundrel of that type left in Polynesia and he operates far out to the west: 'Thursday Island Schmidt'—ever hear of him? I don't know him myself, and I'm not hankering to make his acquaintance until this job is done. But he's never been east of Samoa, and even old Thursday Island would hesitate to tackle a barefaced hold-up nowadays. Warships and the wireless have ended all that. Let the boy come—I'd be the last man to drag him into any scrapes."
"He can go, then," said my father, rising from his chair. "I only wish I'd had such a chance when I was a youngster. But you'll have to talk his mother around—I wash my hands of that! We'll leave that for tomorrow, eh? Come, you must be tired; we'd better turn in, all three of us."
And so the matter was left, while I wandered in a daze to my room and lay down to spend a night made sleepless by mingled anxiety and happiness.