“listen!” said the wind.
from her place amidst the trees where le moan had settled herself like a hare in its forme she heard the silky whisper of the sands and the voice of the beach and the wind in the leaves above bidding her to listen.
far-away voices came from the mammee apple where the men of the schooner and their wives were making merry, and now and then, the faintest thing in the world of sound, a click and creak from nan on his post above the house where taori lay in the arms of katafa.
to le moan all that was nothing. she had banded death in exchange for taori, all her interest in life, all her desires. she had not even the desire to destroy herself. the fire that had been her life burned low and smouldered; it would never blaze again.
“listen!” said the wind.
something moved amidst the trees—it was kanoa: kanoa, his heart beating against his ribs, his hands outstretched touching the tree boles.
she saw him now as he came towards her like a phantom from the star-showered night, and she knew why he came, nor did she move as he dropped on his knees beside her—all that was nothing now to le moan.
since the night when he had saved her from rantan, he had been closer to her than the other men of the schooner, but still only a figure, almost an abstraction.
to-night, now, he was a little more than that, as a dog might be to a lonely person, and as he poured out his heart in whispers she listened without replying, let him put his arm around her and take her lips; all that was nothing now to her whose heart would never quicken again.
the wind died, day broke, and the wind of morning blew.
joy and the sun leapt on karolin. joy for katafa who came from the house to look at a world renewed, for the women whose husbands had returned, for the men, for the children. joy for kanoa, his soul shouting in him, “she is mine, she is mine,” and for aioma, the lust of revenge and destruction alive and dancing in his heart.
he had killed the green ship; this morning he would kill the schooner; the cursed ayat, that he had yet loved so dearly only a week ago, was doomed to die.
he hated it now with an entirely new and delicious brand of hatred and if he could have staked it out on the reef for the sharks to devour, so would he have done.
it had given him the scare of his life, it had all but snapped him away from karolin, it had caused ancestral voices to rise cursing him for his folly and treachery towards his race; it had brought up visions of the spanish ship, the brutal whale men, carlin, rantan, and the whole tribe of the papalagi, it was theirs and it had got to die.
besides, it was going to give him the chance to set fire to things. he was still licking his chops over the firing of the green ship and the joy of incendiarism was about to be recaptured.
it was the last blaze up of youth in him. he called the village together and explained matters.
the ayat was accursed. his father, amatu, had explained it all in a dream, commanding him, aioma, to attend to this matter. the thing had to burn; if it did not burn worse would befall karolin.
“burn, burn, aripa, aripa!” cried the boys.
“aripa!” shrieked the women, the men took tongue and the cry went up like the crackle of flame.
katafa listened, loathing the schooner. the cry went up from her heart.
dick stood dumb. dumb as a man hesitating before cutting away the very last strand connecting him with his past. dumb as a man about to renounce his race, though of his race and of the civilized world from whence he had sprung he knew nothing—nothing save the fact of the cannon-shot of the portsey long years ago, the white-led melanesians of palm tree, the ruffianism of carlin and rantan and the rage in his own breast for adventure that had nearly separated him forever from katafa.
then, suddenly, he joined in the shout.
“aripa! aripa! aripa!”
forgetting his chieftianship, he raced with the others to help to push off the boat bearing aioma to his work.
then he stood with katafa watching. near them and beside kanoa stood le moan.
they watched the canoe-builder clamber on board like a monkey, they saw him dancing on the deck like a maniac insulting the ropes and spars, then they heard the ship’s bell go clang-clang, as he made her talk for the last time.
he vanished down the foc’sle and came out escorted by a cloud of smoke, down the hatch of the saloon from whose skylight presently a blue-grey wreath uprose and circled on the faint breeze.
then he was on deck again and away in the boat, and the schooner was burning fore and aft.
wreathing herself in mist that cleared now to show two tall columns of smoke rising and spreading and forming spirals on the wind, red flames like the tongues of hounds licking out of the portholes, flames that ran spirit-like about the old tinder-dry deck. the main boom was burning now, the topping lofts were snapped, flames curling round the masts like climbing snakes, and now, like the rumble of a boiler, came the rumble of the fire as it spread in her, breaking through bulkheads, seizing the cargo and splitting the decks.
the sandalwood was burning and the incense of it spread across the lagoon to the white-robed congregation of the gulls wheeling and giving tongue above the reef; burning and blazing till the decks gave utterly and the crashing masts full sheeted in flame like tall men tumbling to their ruin amidst the roar of a burning city.
the flames devoured the smoke and the sun devoured the flames, forty-foot jets that leaped tongue-like sunwards, fell and leapt again. the great conflagration gave no light; it roared, and the consuming wood, pine and deal, teak and sandal filled the air with the sound of bursting shells and the rattle of musketry, but the sun of that blazing day ate the light of the flames so that they showed stripped of effulgence, stark naked; ghosts, cairngorm coloured, wine coloured, spark spangled, illuminating nothing.
and now the port bulwarks, breaking in one piece from the stern to amidships, fell in a blaze and the anchor chain, running out, broke from its attachments and she was adrift miraculously on the flood, now low to the break, now broadside, as the current took her—blazing as she drifted, pieces of her ever going, dipping now by the bow, slipping from sight in a veil of steam as the water rushing in fought the fire and the fire fought the water and was killed. and now there was nothing but driftwood so far out as scarcely to be seen, and a tiny cloud that vanished and a perfume of sandalwood that lingered in the air, ghost-like ... gone.
