A primal woman

by H. de Vere Stacpoole

A Primal Woman

 

By H. de Vere Stacpoole
Author of The Beach of Dreams, Etc.

 

Something about the female of the species which most of us appreciate but seldom realize. It is a tragedy of first principles, but a tragedy that leaves us satisfied

 

UTARA lies northeast of Clermont Tonnerre, a high island out of trade tracks and the most lonely and beautiful in the Pacific.

Lygon sighted it first at dawn one clear, almost windless morning and from the deck of the Sarah Dodsley, a whaler, a year out from New Bedford.

They had taken the westward trail by Cape Verde round the Horn to New Zealand and up by the Kermadecs and then between the Gambiers and Low Achipelago. They were half full of oil, and an offense to the freshness of the morning, and Lygon, as he stood on the greasy deck with the perfumed land wind blowing on his face and the first rays of the sun touching the twin peaks of Utara, thought he saw paradise.

He was a gentleman, and whatever crime or foolishness had pursued him to New Bedford and chased him aboard the Sarah Dodsley had been paid for during the last year. The smoke of the try works, the hazing of the Yankee captain—no honest old whaling captain, but a slim, dried, sandy-haired east coaster—the clank of the cutting tackles, the very voices of his companions, had embittered his soul.

The Sarah Dodsley had run out of wood, that was why Captain Sellers had brought her up to Utara, but he had no intention of entering the lagoon. He hove to outside the reef and ordered three boats away, under the direction of the first mate.

Lygon was in the mate’s boat.

They found the break in the reef and entered the lagoon on the swell of the incoming tide. The level rays of the newly risen sun lit the white beach down to which trooped the trees—breadfruit and pendanus, artus and cocoa palms—overshot with flights of colored birds and whispered to by the morning wind.

On the beach where ten-inch waves were falling, half a dozen natives stood watching the oncoming boats, and now from a frame house half hidden in the grove to the right came the figure of a tall old man, a European, dressed in white clothes and carryping a gun resting on the crook of his arm.

The people of the island showed no sign of welcome to the newcomers, and as the boats beached they drew off to the right and stood silent, observant, and without motion in the shade of the trees.

“Friendly crowd,” said the mate. “Guess they don’t like whalers. Now, boys, out with the axes and look lively. Follow me, and you, Brown, stick to the boats and see those Kanakas don’t get handling the gear. If you have any trouble give a blow on this whistle.”

He handed over the whistle and, leading the axmen, walked up the beach and vanished in the woods.

Brown was the name Lygon was known by on the Sarah Dodsley.

Lygon had made his plan even as they were crossing the lagoon. He had expected to be among the woodcutters and he had planned to escape the moment they were among the trees. The post of boat tender made the thing more difficult, for the island crowd, headed by the old man with the gun, were watching him and seemingly with no friendly eyes.

He was not a moment in making up his mind. Leaving the boats to look after themselves, he walked up the burning white beach toward the Kanakas. As he came he noticed that the old man shifted his hold on the gun.

Within speaking distance he halted.

“What is it you want?” asked the man with the gun. He spoke with a French accent and Lygon, close to him, now took heart. Here was a man of his own class, a fine type of Frenchman, upstanding for all his years, and with a level, open gaze that compelled trust from all but the untrustworthy.

“I want to escape,” said he, speaking in French. “That ship is a whaler. I have been on her a year, and it’s either escape or death for me.”

“You are English,” said the other, “though you speak my language well, and a gentleman. What brought you on board her?”

“Foolishness,” said Lygon.

The old man was silent for a moment, gazing at him as if he would read his very soul. Then he spoke.

“We have had two whalers here,” said he, “and we want no more.”

“i can well understand that,” said Lygon.

“Those men are even now cutting down our trees without permission,” said the other. “Let them go beyond that——” He slipped his hand on the gun stock. It was a Winchester repeater.

Lygon nodded.

“They take even the lives and liberty of men,” said he, “just as they are taking your trees. You can understand why I want to escape.”

“My name is Captain Charles Jourdain,” said the old man, “and yours?”

“George Lygon—that is my real name—on board that ship of the infernal regions I was known by the name of Brown.”

The old man looked at him again long and thoughtfully.

Then he turned on his heel. “Follow me,” said he.

Lygon followed him among the trees toward the house. As they passed the house door a little girl came out, the prettiest child in the world, a half-caste, with a flower of the scarlet hibiscus showing in the dusk of her hair.

“My little daughter,” said Captain Jourdain. Then to the child; “Kineia, the bad white men are still here. Listen, they are cutting our trees. Here is one we must hide from them. Should they come here you will say nothing of him.”

“Nothing, father,” said Kineia, gazing at the stranger with wide-pupiled eyes.

The captain led the way round to the storehouses. He was the sole trader on this island, working the business with his own schooner and through an agent in San Francisco. He passed the go-downs where copra was stored and led the way to a building behind them where he kept trade goods.

“You will be safe here,” said the captain, unlocking the door, “and Kineia will bring you some food. You could, of course, hide in the woods, but it is safer here—with the key in my pocket.”

Lygon went in and the captain turned the key on him.

Just at that moment the Yankee mate, coming out on the beach from among the trees, found Lygon gone. He was about to raise a hue and cry and call off the wood parties for a search, then he got command of himself. To search these woods would take a week, and if Lygon’s escape were known it might set an example to the others and half a dozen men might be lost. So instead of making a fuss, he told the others that “Brown” had been sent off to try and get fruit.

They did not know the truth of the matter till the wood was aboard and the Sarah Dodsley’s stern was turned to Utara, dark against a blazing sunset.

II.

Never did a man fall on his feet more surely than Lygon.

Captain Jourdain had lost his wife only the year before and he was in need of a friend. He had married a native woman fourteen years ago and being a straight, simple-minded man with an idea, somehow, that Kanakas have souls just the same as Christians, and that love once found is the only thing worth finding, and the only thing worth guarding, he had stuck to her faithfully as she to him.

Now when a white man marries an island woman he marries a woman with a past, a being with an ancestry as remote from his as Sirius from Rigel. Nalia, the wife of Captain Jourdain, and the mother of Kineia, a tender-eyed, gentle, soft-voiced woman, had exhibited this fact once in a flash. A ruffian named Havermuth, who had been fired off a ship and had become at once the beach comber and terror of the island, had gone for Jourdain with intent to kill. He had got the captain down and was trying to gouge when a tiger cat intervened. It was Nalia, and she was armed with Havermuth’s knife that had been dropped in the struggle, and the feel of the knife dividing his lumbar muscles and abdominal aorta was the last thing Havermuth knew.

Jourdain often thought of that and of how a European woman would have acted in the same situation—screamed, most likely, and run for help that would have been too late in coming. He had loved Nalia before, but after that he worshiped her, and when she died his worship was transferred in part to Kineia.

Kineia took after her mother, the same hair, the same eyes, the same soft voice, the same mysterious charm, heightened, in some curious way, by the touch of European in her. She had the direct gaze of her father, and she spoke French without any clipping of the words, and like her father she seemed to take to the newcomer from the first, so that in a few months they were like one family, Lygon helping in the work of superintending the copra getting and sharing Jourdain’s house.

“It is good you have come,” said the old man one evening, as they sat on the veranda watching a canoe putting out for fishing, “but the hard work will not begin till my ship comes in. Then we will all be busy—I do not know how you will like it, but you shall be paid.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of work,” said Lygon, “and I’m not thinking of payment. It seems to me that I have a big debt to wipe off before I talk of payment.”

“We will see,” said Captain Jourdain.

In the long run payment was not talked of; the captain gave Lygon a fourth share in the business and Lygon earned it. There was plenty to do. The Haliotis was the name of Jourdain’s schooner, and every time she called there was endless work writing letters to the San Francisco agent, taking tally of trade goods, going over accounts as to payments of crew, and so forth, to say nothing of the business of getting the copra on board.

At the end of a year Jourdain had proved Lygon and found him trustworthy, and he raised his position to an equal partnership with an equal share in the business.

“I have no relations,” said Jourdain, “no one but Kineia and you. Captain Morris of my schooner is a good man, but he is almost a stranger to me, though I have known him some years—some men are like that; one never gets to know them beyond a certain point. You have become to me almost as a relation. When I am dead, if we go on as we are going, perhaps you will have the whole business.”

“I hope that will never be,” said Lygon, and he meant it.

One day at the end of the second year the old man took Lygon by the arm and walked him off into the woods till they reached a charming spot, where a seat had been placed under a breadfruit tree, and with a view of a little leaping Cascade and a glen wonderful with ferns.

“I want to speak to you about Kineia,” said the captain.

Lygon’s color rose.

“You have made her love you.”

“I love her,” said Lygon.

“That goes without saying,” replied the other. “What is on my mind is this—are you worthy of her? She is all to me, more than life, and I shall die soon. I have known you two years and I would trust you with my last sou. Can I trust you with Kineia? It is a father that is speaking, and I ask myself, are you worthy of her?”

“No,” said Lygon, “I am not. But she is worthy of the love I have for her. For her I would let myself be cut in pieces.”

Jourdain nodded as though to say, “I hear—and I believe.”

Then Lygon went on.

“I want to tell you everything. You asked me the first day I met you what brought me on board that whaler, and I answered, ‘Foolishness.’ I did not lie, but my foolishness led me further than most men go. I killed a man in a fight in a gambling den of New York. He was a German Jew. The quarrel was about money, and I was excited with drink and he struck me, then I struck him. I am a powerful man, and the blow took him on the point of the chin and broke his neck. I can see him still as a man held him up on one knee. He was quite dead. Then before they could seize me I jumped from a window. It was a hot night and the window was open and the room on the ground floor. I reached a yard and then a street. It was on the East Side. I had luck and got clear away on board a ship bound for New Orleans. I kept to the sea for a year and then found myself in New Bedford, where I joined that whaler. I tell you this because I love Kineia. It is the only thing the world has against me.”

Jourdain was silent for a moment. Then he spoke: “You did not mean to kill.”

“I did not, but if they had caught me I might have paid the penalty, for that crowd would have sworn anything.”

“Are you a gambler?”

“No. I have gambled, but I am not a gambler.”

“And you do not drink?”

“No. I hate drink.”

Again the old man was silent, his eyes resting on the little cascade and his thoughts far away.

“That was four years ago,” said he at last.

“Yes.”

“And in New York. They will not be looking for you now, and if they were they would not find you—the Pacific is wide, the islands are many. Ah, well, many a man has done worse, but I am glad you told me. I believe in you and I trust you. You shall marry Kineia. For the last year the thing has been growing in my mind. I have said to myself; ‘Your end is approaching, and here is a man who will take care of Kineia if he only learns to love her and if he proves worthy of her.’ That is what I have said. And I have said to myself: ‘You will make a will and every sou you possess they shall possess—schooner and all.’ I made that will last night. It was attested by Ramura and Tonga. It is in my bureau. Had this interview not been satisfactory, I would have torn it up and I would have said to you: ‘Lygon, my friend, take half I possess, if you will, but leave this island.’ There remains only one thing. You love Kineia, does she love you?”

“She does,” said Lygon.

The Haliotis was due to call in a week’s time, and when she put into the lagoon Captain Morris found some business awaiting him other than discharging cargo. He was called upon to officiate at the marriage of Lygon and Kineia.

A month later Jourdain, who had prophesied his own end, died. He died of no special disease. He had lived long enough and he wanted to rejoin Nalia and his mind was at ease about Kineia. His business in life was over. He lost clutch of things—and retired.

Had he not been happy and sure about Kineia’s future, he might have gone on living for a considerable time just for her sake.

III.

One day, a year after his marriage, Lygon found himself alone out on the reef. He had paddled over in a canoe and, leaving her tied up, had taken his seat on a lump of coral. Pipe in mouth, he was watching the breakers coming in, great green rollers filled with the movement of life and the perfume of the heart of the sea.

In contrast with the quiet island beach here, there was uproarious life. The coral shook with the thunder of the breakers and the gulls cried and the wind blew, bringing the spindrift of the ocean, and mixing the voice of the undertow with the bourdon note of the waves.

Lygon who had landed on the island a penniless outcast was to-day rich. Jourdain’s invested money came to nearly ten thousand pounds. There was, besides that, the schooner, the pitch, and a going business. He had for wife one of the most beautiful women in the world, and the island was a paradise.

Was he happy? He was happy, but not quite contented. The call of civilization had come to him. He had begun to hear the roar of streets in the roar of the reef, and to wish for a change. Just a few months’ change. The Haliotis was due—overdue by some days—and he had determined to take Kineia with him when the schooner sailed next and, leaving the place in charge of Taro, make the run to San Francisco.

They would only be a few months away, so he told himself,

Kineia had agreed. She showed no enthusiasm over the business. At heart she disliked it, but his wish was her law.

Suddenly Lygon rose to his feet and shaded his eyes. Away, far away against the sky line lay a fleck, spar-white in the sun dazzle, now almost invisible, now clear. It was the top canvas of a ship. It was the Haliotis. He knew that instinctively and at once. He watched, but the speck did not change. He turned away and, walking along the coral, did not look again for five minutes, then when he looked it had grown larger. She was coming with the wind that was breezing up fresh from the nor’east, and leaving the reef he paddled over to the island beach in search of Kineia.

She was seated in the veranda of their house engaged in needlework, and telling her that the schooner was in sight he went off to smarten himself.

He always put on his best clothes to receive the Haliotis. It was part of the ritual which included Californian champagne and palm salad at the dinner given to the captain.

It was after four when the Haliotis entered the lagoon, and spilling the wind from her sails dropped anchor a few cable lengths from the beach.

Then a boat put off.

Lygon, standing beside Kineia, shaded his eyes. He was looking at the man in the stern sheets of the boat.

“That's not Captain Morris,” said he. “What on earth has happened to the cap?”

The man in the stern sheets was certainly not Morris. He showed a sick, white face under his sun helmet, and as the boat beached and he scrambled out, Kineia instinctively drew back a step. The appearance of the stranger did not please her.

As for Lygon, he stood as if turned to stone. The man before him was Packard, the one man in all the world he dreaded, the man with whom he had gone that night to the gambling house in New York.

He had often wondered what had become of Packard.

The recognition was mutual.

“Hello!” said Packard. “Why, it’s you.”

“This is a surprise,” said Lygon.

Packard glanced round at the trees, at the beach, at Kineia. Then he laughed.

“Well, this is a start,” said he. “I’m your new captain. Morris is down with a dropsy—won’t be any more use for the sea, and I took on the job for one voyage. Never recognized you in the name, though it’s not a common one. Your agents gave me the job. How on earth did you come here?”

“It’s a long story,” said Lygon. “I’ll tell you some time. This is my wife. Kineia, this is Captain Packard.”

Then Lygon led the way up to the house, where the two men sat in basket chairs and talked while Palu, the maid, served them with drinks and Kineia went off to see about preparations for dinner.

IV.

That night, as Kineia lay awake, she heard them talking in the room below and once or twice she heard her husband’s voice raised sharply, as if in anger.

Then he came to bed, but not to sleep, and in the morning he was a different man from the man she had always known, heavy-eyed, depressed, and listless.

Packard, on the contrary, seemed more fresh of color and more bright of eye than when he had landed.

He got off immediately after breakfast to see about unloading and taking in cargo, and Lygon sat in the veranda smoking.

Kineia’s heart was heavy. It seemed to her that some blight had come to the island with this stranger, but she said nothing, and for the three succeeding days she said nothing, watching her lord as she might have watch him wilting under the hand of some fatal disease.

Then on the fourth day, when they were alone in the veranda, Kineia, who was at work on some embroidery, suddenly put it aside, got up, and knelt down beside her husband.

“What has that man done to you that you should be like this?” asked Kineia.

Lygon was silent for a moment. Then he spoke.

“Kineia, I am ruined. All this around us is as a dream that must go. Kineia, I killed a man once, in anger. I escaped, but that man Packard was present, and now I have to give him everything or he will tell.”

“Everything?” said Kineia.

“I offered him half I possess—as well offer the gray shark half your body when he can get the whole—no not everything. He will leave me a thousand dollars to begin the world again with.”

Kineia was silent.

“He is going back to San Francisco on the schooner to tell—unless——”

“Unless?”

“Unless we go with him. In San Francisco I am to sell him everything, schooner and all, for the thousand dollars he will give me.”

“And your money?”

“That, too, will be his.”

“Truly,” said Kineia, “his stomach is great.”

“I am bound and helpless,” said Lygon.

The weakness in his character, which prosperity had hidden, was beginning to appear, and Kineia seemed to see it as she brooded on him now long and fatefully.

He who had been everything was now nothing. The other man was all-powerful.

The other man was now the possessor of all.

“Tell me how you killed that man,” said she.

Lygon told, going over the old, sordid story and emphasizing the fact that it was really an accident.

“You did not mean to kill?” said Kineia.

“Never. It was an accident,”

“Where, then, is the harm?”

“His friends would swear that it was not, and I ran away, and even killing by accident is what they call manslaughter over there. I would be put in prison—for years, maybe.”

“I will think about it,” said Kineia. Her manner had grown distant and chill, as though her mind were repelled by the weakness of Lygon.

Next morning, Packard, the dominant man, thought he noticed a change in the manner of Kineia. Lygon’s wife up to this had held aloof from him; her manner seemed more friendly and inviting this morning. Then he felt sure. He knew himself to be the better man, and Kineia had recognized the fact.

He almost forgot Lygon and all his plans about him in this new interest that had suddenly come into his life.

He had never seen any one so beautiful as Kineia, and his evil mind was not a whit less evil because of the æsthetic strain in it. He could admire beauty, this man, the beauty of a sunrise or the beauty of a woman—anything but the beauty of goodness.

He went off to his work that morning carrying the picture of Kineia with him, and it held him while he superintended the business of loading the copra on board.

Brown, the mate, who was helping in the work, wondered what had come to Packard making him so silent and abstracted, he who had been so full of life and energy the day before.

If you had told him that Packard was thinking of Kineia, he would have laughed with a certain amount of joy at the cold douche surely being prepared for him by that beauty.

But Brown knew nothing of the tangle of affairs or what native blood can do under certain temptations.

Packard returning next evening found Lygon incapable of coming to dinner. During the last few days Lygon had been taking gin to soothe his mind; to-night he was tipsy, and as he and Kineia dined opposite one another his snoring came distinctly from the room above.

“My husband is ill,” said Kineia, with a little movement of disgust. They talked in low tones during the meal and when dinner was over, Packard, lighting a cigar in the veranda, saw Kineia in the lamplit room going to a box that stood on a little table by the lamp stand. She took something from it and placed whatever it was in her pocket. Then she came out in the veranda. There was in her face something reckless, crafty, and subtle, as though the evil spirit of the gin that had poisoned Lygon were poisoning her, too.

“What was that you put in your pocket?” asked Packard, for want of something better to say.

“A present for you,” said Kineia tenderly and with a little laugh.

He took her hand and she let him hold it. Lygon, whose snoring had ceased for a moment, could be heard turning on his creaking bed, then the snores recommenced.

A little shudder of disgust ran through Kineia.

“Come,” she whispered, “let us get away from that.”

She led the way from the veranda amid the trees. A full moon was shining and the woods were full of light, a light green as the light of a sea cave.

He had released her hand, and now he turned to take it again, but she evaded him.

“I have come here to speak with you alone, not to hold your hand,” said Kineia. “Follow me, for what I have to say must be said far away from men and in the place where my mother’s people once worshiped their gods. You, who say that you love me, must obey me in this.”

“Lead on,” said Packard.

He followed as she went before him like a wraith through the green gloom. Now a shaft of moonlight struck her and now in a denser shadow she was almost invisible. Then came a break in the trees and Packard saw before him an amphitheater where, in the moonlight, great blocks of stone lay tumbled and where the steplike tiers of seats were burst apart by tree roots.

Here Kineia stopped and turned, where the ferns grew high amid the bowlders. This was the spot toward which she had been luring Packard for the last two days.

“Once,” said she to Packard in a low voice, “you saw my husband kill a man.”

Packard started. Then he laughed.

“So he has told you?” said he.

“Is it true?”

“As sure as he’s lying there drunk in the house, now, it is true.”

Kineia pondered for a moment.

“What brought you here across the sea to this island to tell me that?” said she mournfully.

“Luck,” said Packard.

“No,” said Kineia with a sudden laugh. “Death!” And she plunged the knife in his throat, the knife that had saved her father, in the hand of Nalia.

He did not die immediately and she waited to make sure, absolutely sure, and as she waited she wept for the man she loved lying there in the house in the grasp of gin. Then when all was over she came back, running like a mother to her child.

Lygon was sleeping peacefully now, with his face buried on his arm. She kissed his hair, left the room, and leaving the house sought the house of Taro.

“Taro,” said Kineia, “the strange captain sat up at our house drinking gin. He wished to go on board his ship. I went to the beach with him and he said he would swim. He was drunk. I tried to stop him, but it was no use. He had not gone more than a few canoe lengths from the shore when a shark took him. He cried once and went down.”

“Waugh,” said Taro, rubbing his eyes. “When the belly of a shark has taken a man there is no use in searching for him late at night. He was a stranger, anyway.”

It was a temperance story that explained a lot of things, among others the prohibition of alcohol on that island by order of Kineia. Lygon, returned to freedom and sobriety and happiness, never knew. Kineia, happy again like a joyous child, never told, and the ferns where the old gods of Utara once held their revels are safe to keep their secret forever.