"Have you ever been to Tonga?" he asked.
"The Friendly Islands?" responded the Captain, with an oath or two by way of emphasis. "How many times I don't know!"
"What's the place like?" pursued Mark. Now he'd started, he might as well finish, he decided.
"Cannibal islands," answered I Korff, "or were once. Taulanga, on Vavau, is the best harbor, and that's not much. A hard town, lad; one of these places where South Seas scum gathers. Then there's Hapei island, I and there's Nukualofa port on Tongatabu, that sea men call Nuku. I've picked up copra and pineapples there."
"What would happen," pursued Mark remorselessly, as if to punish himself for asking, "to a girl who danced there?"
"What would happen to her at any port in the Coral Sea?" said the Captain by way of answer. "She wouldn't be there unless she expected it to happen."
The reply added nothing to Mark's peace of mind.
"Serves me right for asking!" he told himself. "Only a fool deliberately asks for a kick. Well, the Friendly Islands are one place I'll steer clear of. Too bad, at that; I'd sort of like to see some ex-cannibals in their natural state."
To the Captain he said, "So the Tongans were cannibals."
"So I've heard," was the reply, "like the Fiji islanders, and, for that matter, the Samoans. Which reminds me of a story."
Korff launched into a harrowing tale of a missionary whose gold ring had appeared in the bowl of stew served a visiting British official by some Fijian tribal chieftain.
"They hadn't the proper meat for a feast," chuckled Korff, "but they had a missionary they'd been fattening for just such an occasion!"
Mark uttered the polite laugh the Captain seemed to expect, but his evening had been spoiled by his own act. He excused himself and retired 'to his bunk.
Not, however, to sleep. He lay idly dreaming of misty ocean isles and palm-crowned coral atolls—at least, those are the things he intended to dream of. But as often as he evoked a vision by the murmur of one of the Magic names he had heard in the Captain's tales, as often as he called out of memory the syllables of the Solomon Islands, the Carolines, or the Coral Sea, just as often he found himself staring through the darkness at the image of a lovely, troubled face ringed with blue-black hair.
He gave up finally, and swung his feet to the floor, sitting on the edge of his bunk with his chin on his hands.
CHAPTER VIII
"For thirty cents or less," he told himself, "I'd go on to China. There's always a revolution or two to be found there, and I should be able to work myself into the excitement, on one side or the other. Besides, it's a long way from Tonga."
He kicked the edge of his bunk with his heel.
"There doesn't seem to be room in the same hemisphere for Vanya and me!" he muttered savagely. "Tonga's one place I'll never visit."
He felt much relieved the next morning, when they raised the Radaek Chain of the Marshall Islands. He watched the shipping of cargo on Button Island, on New Year Island, on little islands with unpronounceable names. When it was finished, he said a regretful farewell to the Colin, and watched it steam over the horizon for San Francisco.
Mark found a pearler bound for the Carolines. He entered a new phase of his travels; week after week slipped away and he was happy. He was like a small boy on summer vacation; he reveled in his freedom, he learned avidly the exotic customs and queer conditions of the tropic seas.
He stood in curious ruined buildings on remote coral atolls, temples raised by dead races of which history knows nothing. He watched divers descend to mysterious blue-green depths populated by unknown dangers; he worked the pumps for them; he shared the thrill when an opened shell surrendered a glowing pink gem.
In water-front saloons he talked with adventurous traders, or pearlers from unnamed coral islets, and heard stories of the finding of marvelous pearls, of the dangers the divers faced in octopus and devil fish, in giant man-catching clams.
Sometimes the conversation turned on the bunyip, the strange sea-monster of island legend, tales similar, as nearly as Mark could gather, to the stories of sea-serpents in the Atlantic. He heard it described as man-like and hideous, as spider-like, with many limbs, as a shell-encrusted serpent as long and massive as an express train. And in the smoky light of island taverns, the stories seemed almost probable.
At first Mark loved the life he was leading. He met and drank with men of adventures, strange characters that might have stepped from the pages of some novel. He felt sympathy for them, as if he belonged to their world; and he had, he convinced himself, forgotten Vanya.
Then the thing began to pall.
"I'm not really living this life," he admitted to himself. "I'm merely an onlooker, a good audience for yarns and tall stories. I'm accepted with reservations—good company as long as I buy the drinks."
That wasn't at all what he wanted; he wanted to live the adventures he heard in stories. He walked out of a saloon one night in Suva, on the Fiji Islands, and stared moodily south at the harbor. Eight or ten ships lay there at anchor, their lights gleaming an invitation. The warm waters of the Coral Sea swung them gently to and fro; he could see the lights moving slowly as the vessels swung on their cables.
Off to his left, he knew, just a few hundred miles beyond the low hills of Viti Levu, lay Tonga.
"Not for me!" he told himself angrily. "If I'm anxious for feminine companionship, there's plenty to be had right here in Suva."
He spat into the waters of the bay.
I guess any one of the girls dancing back there," he muttered, glancing at the lighted windows of the saloon, "could tell a hard-luck story just as well as Vanya, and about as much chance of its being true."
He turned on his heel and re-entered the saloon. The girls were still dancing in a curious South Sea version of an American chorus, three of the girls white, and two, to Mark's newly experienced eye, doubtful.
He looked at them critically. Not one aroused the slightest interest in his mind; they appeared to him frowzy, unkempt, and unbeautiful. Most of them were too fat for his civilized perceptions, and all of them were awkward. Yet they obviously met the approval of his companions; no sooner was their dance concluded than a burst of enthusiastic applause, and a chorus of shouted invitations greeted: them. They moved among the tables, choosing their hosts amid taunts and jeers for the rejected ones.
"To suit all tastes," thought Mark, "except mine."
He thought of Vanya again. "Say, this is bad!" he reflected. "I've had a couple of months of freedom from this doggone obsession, and here it pops up at me once more. Well, five hundred miles is a safe distance, and I'm promising myself right now that five hundred miles is as close to Tonga as I'll ever get!"
Nevertheless, he was not in the least surprised when, one week later, he stepped out of a native I canoe in Taulanga harbor, and surveyed the chief city of the Tonga Islands—still in quest of the vanished Vanya.
TAULANGA
"So these are the Friendly Islands," said Mark to his uncomprehending native paddlers as he stepped from the outrigged canoe to the beach. Tonga!
After all his self-given promises, here he was, and, by the Lord, he was feeling happy about it! But he felt in duty bound to give himself a mental lashing for his weakness.
"A fine mess I turned out!" he told himself as he paid off his native boatmen. His eyes turned to the mail packet in the harbor, on which he had arrived from Suva.
"If I had any sense at all," he continued, "I'd turn around right now, and go along with the ship to Samoa. But, of course, I haven't that much intelligence, otherwise, I'd never have come here in the first place."
He watched the canoe sliding smoothly toward the waiting ship, carrying the town's mail to be scattered around the world.
"Of course, I don't really know that Vanya's actually here," he consoled himself. "Just because she left Honolulu in a ship owned by a man whose home is in Tonga is a pretty slim reason for thinking she's here,"
A native boy scampered across
the sandy beach to carry Mark's bags, and Mark followed him toward the two story white frame building whose sign proclaimed it to be the Friendly House.
"There's another way of looking at this mess," thought Mark, now bent on excusing his actions to himself. "After all, the girl hasn't spoken more than two sentences to me, and I've seen her"—he counted to himself—"exactly four times, and never more than a couple of minutes each time."
He brightened as he pursued his train of thought.
"I shouldn't be surprised if half an hour of her company wouldn't cure me of this damned obsession for good and all. Probably plenty of flaws, aside from the question of her morals; most likely she'll turn out so dumb she can't carry on a conversation; that'd explain her silence all right."
He began to enlarge on his fancies.
"Probably, on closer examination, she won't even be pretty. I never noticed her teeth, for instance— they're probably ugly! And her legs; most dancers are a little over-developed in the calves for my tastes."
Mark followed the boy into the Friendly House well satisfied with his elaborate self-given excuses. He was convinced that a psychiatrist couldn't have diagnosed his case any better, nor prescribed a more certain cure.
"Most likely the reason she never talks is that her teeth are ugly," he concluded, "and it's just as probable that they deported her on the grounds of mental incompetence! That or moral turpitude—it's bound to be one or the other."
He approached the massive individual at the desk, and asked for, and secured, a room to himself, a luxury not always procurable in Polynesia, as he had discovered in previous instances. After depositing his bags in the room, which was quite as livable as Mark could expect, he sat down on the edge of his bed to consider his next move. Now that he had definitely committed himself to the search, he felt an unexpected lightness of heart; a weight had been lifted from his mind, and he was definitely convinced that he had found the way to relieve himself of his obsession. All he had to do, he repeated, was to find Vanya and watch her in her dance-hall environment, see her make her play for the men with money to spend, pick out the flaws in her beauty, and in general disgust himself thoroughly with her.
It seemed logical and easy enough, once he found her. All that remained was to locate her, and that, if she happened to be in Taulanga, or even elsewhere on the island of Vavau, should be a simple matter.
"The logical thing is to try the sailor's places," Mark decided. "Can't be more than one or two in a town this size."
There was one, as he discovered on inquiry at the hotel desk—Sailor Jane's Place, He found it without difficulty, a weather-beaten, single-storied frame building at the end of the street, fronting the harbor.
Sailor Jane, somewhat to Mark's surprise, turned out to be a burly, black—mustached, heavy-set gentleman of uncertain race; his name, set prominently on a card pasted to the mirror behind the bar, was Harry Jane. Mark ordered a drink —"gin and it"—in the jargon he had acquired on his wanderings. He gulped a swallow of the concoction, and looked around him.
A typical island rendezvous—the bar with its mirror, the rows of ambitiously labeled bottles, the round tables, the battered radio that seldom seemed to work; this place boasted a three-penny automatic piano on the far wall.
Mark's pulse quickened; at one of the tables sat a black-haired girl, her back to him, dealing cards methodically in a game of Canfield solitaire. She must have been sitting there when he entered, but playing so quietly that he had thought the room empty save for himself and Jane. Then the girl looked up; a dusky half-caste, with no other resemblance to Vanya than the color of her hair.
CHAPTER IX
Mark turned back to the bar, and tried to strike up a conversation with Jane.
"Business good?"
The burly bartender looked him over deliberately before replying. Though Mark was bronzed by his months in the tropics, dressed in the conventional dirty white breeches and boots, something in his manner, his walk or carriage, still differentiated him from the seamen of the Coral Seas. Finally, however, Jane decided that he must be a planter or rubber-man from one of the other islands, Hapei, perhaps, or Tongatabu.
"Middlin'," he drawled. "Better when the rains come, and the pearlers can't work."
"Three months to the rains," Mark said.
The other nodded, and went on silently with his work of polishing glasses on a dirty towel.
"Say," Mark said, leaning toward Jane in a confidential manner, "I knew a lady once that worked somewhere her in Tonga—danced. Name is Vanya Prokovna. I was just wondering if you knew her." Jane shook his head.
"If she danced in Taulanga, it was right here—only place in town. And she didn't—anyway, not by that name. And besides," he grinned, "the only ladies in Taulenge live up by the Residency."
"Well, I just wondered," said Mark. He was keenly disappointed.
"Was she pretty?" asked the bartender with a humorous leer.
"Offhand I'd say so," said Mark.
"That settles it, then! She never danced in Taulanga, or anywhere else on Vavau. All we ever get is bats like her!"
He waved a heavy paw at the half-caste girl, who continued playing her game without a single gesture to indicate that she'd heard the remark.
Mark wasn't quite ready to give up, however.
"What about the other islands?" he asked. "Couldn't she be in Nukualofa, over on Tongatabu? Or on Hapei?"
"Might be in Nuku. No place on Hapei."
"Well," said Mark, "that's no great help!"
"If you ask about a man, now," said Jane, "I could likely tell you. They're permanent, more or less; and when they do leave, you hear about it. But dance-hall women—" he spat. "They come and go; some of 'em last and some of 'em don't, and," he grinned, "as a general rule, the prettier they are, the less they last!"
"Well, that's that," said Mark. "Thanks."
He walked out of the door into the sun-baked street, and turned toward the hotel.
"I ought to be darned glad," he thought. "Not finding her is a break for me, and I'm just stubborn to refuse to recognize it. The Talbot dumbness finds its culmination in me, I guess."
Yet he was decidedly not glad. The picture of Vanya's face, pale, unhappy, and breathtakingly beautiful, rose out of his memory to shatter his elaborate structure of defense. He saw her as he had seen her in his final glimpse, that moment back in distant Honolulu when the schooner had carried her slowly past the dock where he stood. "That stevedore did say Tonga," he muttered. "No question about that! But he probably didn't know what he was talking about."
But he had mentioned a name. He had mentioned the name of the schooner—what was the ship's name, anyway? And he had mentioned the name of the owner, as well.
Mark cudgeled his memory.
Irish name, he thought—or was it? Peculiar nick-name, too, but peculiar sobriquets were as common in the South Seas as cocoanut palms. He frowned in the intensity of his concentration.
Shields, Shane, Sheehan—a dim recollection of the sound of the name plagued him. And then, in a flash he had it.
Pearly Shene! Pearly Shene's Porpoise! That was what the dockhand had said, and that, perhaps, was the clue he lacked!
He quickened his pace, regardless of the blazing tropical sun. Perspiration was running down his face when he entered the dingy lobby of the Friendly House. He looked at once to see if the clerk were present, and saw him sitting lethargically behind the desk.
"Did you find the lady?" asked the clerk with a grin as Mark approached.
How in the name of seven devils did gossip travel like that in this town? Mark wondered irritably, but ignored the question.
"Did you ever hear of a man named Pearly Shene?" he asked brusquely.
The clerk nodded.
"I've heard plenty of him!"
"D'you know where he is?"
"Right! He lives at Shene's Cove, over on Tongatabu."
Mark felt a sudden surge of elation. Perhaps his tortuous search was ended. He t
urned toward the stairway to his room, when the voice of the clerk halted him.
"If you're looking for a tatty, you won't find her at Pearly Shene's place!"
TONGATABU
Mark entered the native prau with misgivings; this outrigger canoe had been the only transportation he had been able to secure. The craft seemed at first glance woefully unstable, with its curious outrigger, to breast the open seas of the mighty Pacific.
He knew, of course, that the natives themselves traveled often through the island world for hundreds of miles; in the old brave legendary days, they must have traveled thousands.
But the four sturdy, brown-skinned, paddlers seemed thoroughly confident. The prau skimmed easily out of Taulanga harbor; the outrigger really did hold the light craft steady. It rode up to the crest of great green rollers and slid smoothly down their far slopes, as gracefully as a roller-coaster at Coney Island.
Hapei Island dropped steadily behind him; just as steadily the low green hills of Tongatabu rose before him. The natives seemed tireless, chattering among themselves. Mark gave himself over to his meditations, which somehow had taken on a rosier tinge than had been his recent wont.
He was, at long last, approaching the end of his search. At the very least, this Shene individual could certainly tell him at what port Vanya had disembarked. Quite probably he knew exactly where she was; and just possibly, she was on Tongatabu itself. He lay comfortably back in the prau's center, and half-dozed to the lulling "chunk" of the paddles and the slur of the water.
Half-a-day, and not even a pause for a breathing space. Those natives were certainly tireless!
He opened his eyes. Tongatabu lay less than a mile ahead, and the port of Nukualofa dotted the curve of the bay to his right, three or four sailing craft lying at anchor. The natives were veering to the left, away from Nuku; as the prau paralleled the shore, Mark saw the cleared squares of pineapple plantations, and the white frame houses of the planters. The cry of beach birds, so incessant by day, and so strangely silent by night, drifted out to him, and gulls, bent on devouring small surface fish, swooped close about him. He was lazily content and strangely happy, considering the picture he had drawn to himself of Vanya.
The Lost Master - The Collected Works Page 92
