The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 57

"No, my dear sir, but that is a new thing."

He started forward. He stopped again. I heard it now. Out of the familiar, hollow tautophony of drumbeats there began to emerge a thread of actual melody--an untraditional rise and fall of notes--a tentative attack as it were, on the chromatic scale of the west. No he-goat's skin stretched on bamboo would do that.

We pushed on, curious. We came out into the "place." The scene under the candlenut torches was as familiar to us as the Ohio River of Uncle Tom to the small-town schoolboy; the meager rows of three-quarter naked Kanakas, yellow with saffron and blue with tattooer's ink; the old women in the background of sultry lights and enormous shadows compounding endless b.a.l.l.s of _popoi_ for the feast; the local and desceptered chieftain squatting on his hams and guarding the vanished gallon between his knees; this was all as it should have been. This was the convention.--But what was really happening on that sylvan, torchlit stage that night was something as new as anything can be under the sun, because it was something that had not happened for ten thousand years.--

We who are worn with novelty can never reconquer for ourselves the thrill of an unmitigated wonder. We have sold the birthright. But imagine the toppling of a hundred centuries! You could have seen it in the eyes of those watchers, in their rapt, rapacious attention, in the conflict that went on within them visibly; traitorous applause pent and pitted against all the instinctive protest of an established art.--

"Yes, but this isn't _dancing_!"

Yet their bodies, one here, one there, would begin to sway--

Three Kanaka men, strangers to the island, sat cross-legged on the turf.

One had taken over a drum from a local musician. The other two had instruments fas.h.i.+oned of dried gourds with fingering pieces of bamboo and strings of gut--barbaric cousins to the mandolin. So, on this one night in history, the music of another tribe had come to Taai. It just escaped being an authentic "tune." How it escaped was indefinable. The sophisticated ear would almost have it, and abruptly it had got away in some provoking lapse, some sudden and bizarre disintegration of tone.

And the drumbeat, bringing it back, ran like a fever pulse in a man's blood.

In the center of the sward, her back to the musicians, a solitary female danced; a Kanaka woman, clothed in a single s.h.i.+ft of the sheerest crimson cotton, tied at one shoulder and falling to mid-thigh. Not from Taai did this woman come; one saw that; not from any near island or group. Her beauty was extraordinary, like that of the Marquesans, with that peculiar straightness of all the lines, at once Grecian, austere, and incalculably voluptuous.--

The dance, as I saw it for the first time that night, I will not speak of. I have traded to many islands in many groups--even the Low Archipelago--but the island where that dance was indigenous I am sure I've never touched. Compared with any of the _hulas_, set and fixed in each locality as the rites of Rome, it was sophisticated; it gave an illusion of continuous invention and spontaneity; it was flesh swept by a wind and shattered; it ravished the eyes.

I don't know how long I watched; how long all the immortal flame in me lent itself to the histrionic purposes of that woman. But I shall never forget it. Never! Never!

I looked away. I saw two faces. One of them hung over my shoulder. It was the trader's. It was the face of a man who has lived a very long while wielding power of life and death over unsatisfying satisfactions.

A man awakened! The toppling of a hundred centuries, indeed.

The other was Signet's. Scarred by leaf shadows, thrust like a swimmer's from the meager sea of heads and naked shoulders, it held as still as a death mask, minute by minute, except that, in the penumbra cast by the veil of goat tuft on his chin, the Adam's apple was convulsed at intervals, as if he were swallowing, as if the man were _drinking_!

The night grew. The torches were consumed, the "place" deserted.

Somewhere the amazing voyagers had taken themselves to rest. A half moon mutilated the island--long stripes of palms, shadow scars of defiles, mottles of bushes. It was like a sleeping animal, a tiger of deep blue and blue-white, an enormous leopard.

We sat on the veranda at the Residence, the trader and I. By and by, soft-footed, Signet was there, occupying the lowermost step.

The Dutchman talked. Like the able administrator he was, he had already all the data to be procured. Into his ears had poured the whispered trickles of a score of informants.

"You are right, my dear sir. Marquesan. You have been there?"

"No."

"She is called in Polynesian, 'Queen Daughter.' My people, who know nothing as a rule, of course--but they tell me the woman is in actuality the daughter of a queen. But what is a Kanaka queen? After all, Signet, my dear sir, down there, what is one queen, out here?"

The trader was obviously in a good humor. He had not been excited for years. The man was alive. I've said he was like a Spaniard in that he could be diabolical without getting red in the face. Diabolically devious and strategic! Before he resumed he blew three mouthfuls of cigar smoke out into the moonlight, where they burst from the shadow under the roof like mute cannon shots, round and silvery. Beneath them, from the step, Signet's eyes were fixed upon the trader's face, dry, rapt, glazed with some imperious preoccupation.

"But they tell me this woman has danced in a great many islands. She will go from here to another island to dance. The three men are her husbands. But she is no wife. A maid, that woman! They have the hardihood to tell me that. Ha-ha-ha! But, then, she is daughter to a queen. With those 'husbands' she crosses a hundred leagues of sea in her sailing canoe. That royal canoe! To dance at another island.--"

As the Dutchman talked, blowing his smoke bursts into the moonlight, the vision of that Marquesan woman came again before me. I perceived her, under the heavy procession of his words, a figure of astounding romance, an adventuress incomparable, a Polynesian bacchante. No, I saw her as the missionary of a strange thing, crossing oceans, daring thirst and gale and teeth of sharks, harrying deeper and deeper into the outseas of mystery that small, devoted, polyandrous company of husbands, at once her paddlers, cooks, flunkies, watchdogs, music makers. "Queen Daughter!" Royal and self-anointed priestess of that unheard-of dance, the tribal dance, no doubt, of some tiny princ.i.p.ality rearing a cone in the empty hugeness of the sea.--I couldn't get away from my time and race. I found myself wondering what she got out of it--in some jungle-bowered, torch-lit "high place," to feel again the toppling of ten thousand years? Was it something to feel the voluptuous and abominable beauty of that rhythm going out of her flesh, beat by beat, and entering into the flesh of those astounded and half-hostile watchers? Perhaps.--

"They tell me that she has also danced at Papeete--before the white men of the steams.h.i.+ps," the Dutchman was informing us.

At that, from the step, from the moon-blue huddle of the castaway, there came a sound. With a singular clarity of divination I built up the thought, the doubt, the bitter perturbation in the fellow's mind. The woman had danced then at Papeete, the cross roads, the little Paris of mid-seas. And before the white men from steamers--the white men that go back!

Moved by projects deeper and more devious than ours, the Dutchman made haste to cover up what seemed to have been an overshot. Frankly, he turned his attention to the outcast.

"By the G.o.d, then, my dear Signet, have you considered?"

He knew well enough that Signet had "considered." He could see as well as I that Signet was a changed man. But he must "pile it on."

"There, my dear sir, you have it. That 'hunch!' That 'sure fire!' Do you think I do not know that New York of yours? Such a dance as that! You must believe me. If you were but a man of energy, now--" With the utmost deliberation he launched upon a tirade of abuse. "But, no, you are not a man of energy, not a man to take things in your hands. The obstacles are too big. Those three husbands! You might even take that woman, that lovely, royal dancing woman--you, my dear sir, a common street snipe.

What would a woman like that, with that novel, impa.s.sioned, barbaric, foreign dance, be worth to a man on your Broadway? Eh? But obstacles!

Obstacles! You have her not on Broadway. It is too many thousand miles, and you have no money. But see, if you were a man to grasp things, a man to 'hit the nail in the head,' to 'boost,' to 'go big'--then would not a man like me, who turns everything to gold--would he not say to you quickly enough, 'See here, my dear sir, but let me put so much money into the undertaking myself?'"

Under the explosions of cigar smoke, Signet continued to hold the trader with his eyes; seemed to consume him with the fixed, dry fire of his gaze. Not fathoming, as with a singular intuition I had fathomed, the profound purposes of the Dutchman, Signet saw only the implied promise in his words.--The trader broke out once more with a sardonic and calculated spleen:

"But, no! Obstacles! A sniveling little animal sees only obstacles. The obstacle not to be mounted over--those three husbands. There they lie tonight on Nakokai's platform--this beautiful, incredible 'Queen Daughter'--this gold G.o.ddess of the 'Shame Dance'--and about her those three husbands. Ah, my dear sir, but their big, lithe muscles! That is too much! To imagine them leaping up at the alarm in the moonlight, the overpowering and faithful husbands. No, he cannot put out his hand to take the gift. _Pah!_ He is a criminal in nature, but he is afraid of the police, even here. He is not a man for the big life in these islands. He will never do anything. Those faithful, strong watch-dogs of husbands! Those strong, destructive muscles! Dear, good G.o.d, that is too much to think of--Look, my dear sir!"

He was speaking to me, as if Signet were less than the very pebbles at the step. He got up, striking the floor heavily with his boots, and I followed him into the house, where he took a lighted candle from a stand. Buried in our shadows, silent footed, Signet pursued us as the trader had meant him to do. I persist in saying that I perceived the thing as a whole. From the first I had divined the maneuver of the Dutchman.

"Look!" he repeated, flinging open a door and thrusting in the candle to cast its light over ranks and ranges of metal. It was the gun room of the Residence. Here dwelt the law. Shotguns, repeating rifles, old-style revolvers, new, blue automatics. An a.r.s.enal!

"Big brown muscles!" he cried, with a ponderous disdain. "What are they?

What is the strongest brown man? _Puff!_ To a man of purpose and indomitable will like me! Obstacles? Three husbands? _Puff-puff-puff!_ Like that!--But all that will never be of use to _him_. That Signet! No, he is a street snipe who will steal a pocketbook and call it a crime. He is afraid to grasp.--But it is close in here, is it not?"

It was too bald. He stepped across the floor, unlatched and threw open the blind of the window, letting the candlelight stream forth upon a ma.s.s of bougainvillaea vine without.

"I keep this door locked; you can imagine that," he laughed, returning and shutting us out of the gun room. He twisted the key; put it in his pocket. And there, at the back, that window blind stood open.

He stared at Signet, as if the beach comber were just discovered.

"You are hopeless, my dear sir."

"Let us have a drink," he s.h.i.+fted.

For Signet he poured out a tumblerful of raw gin. The fellow took it like a man in a daze--the daze of a slowly and fiercely solidifying resolution. It s.h.i.+vered in his hand. A habit of greed sucked his lips.

Into his mouth he took a gulp of the spirits. He held it there. His eyes searched our faces with a kind of malignant defiance. Of a sudden he spat the stuff out, right on the floor. He said nothing. It was as if he said: "By G.o.d! if you think I need _that_! _No!_ You don't know me!"

He stalked out of the door. When we followed as far as the veranda we saw him making off into the striped light to the left.--

"Why did you call it the 'Shame Dance,' Mynheer?" We were seated again.

"Of course, my dear sir, it is not that, but it has a sound so when the Kanakas speak it. The woman spoke the name. If it is a Polynesian word I have not heard it before. 'Shemdance.' Like that."

"A good name, though. By jingo! a darn good name. Eh, Mynheer?"

But the trader's head was turned in an att.i.tude of listening. Triumphant listening--at the keyhole of the striped, moonlit night. I heard it, too--a faint disturbance of bougainvillaea foliage around two sides of the house, near the window standing open to the gun room.

Of course the amazing thing was that the man fooled us. In the Dutchman's heart, I believe, there was nothing but astonishment at his own success. Signet, on the face of it, was the typical big talker and little doer; a flaw in character which one tends to think imperishable.

He fitted so precisely into a certain pigeonhole of human kind.--What we had not counted on was the fierceness of the stimulus--like the taste of blood to a carnivore or, to the true knight, a glimpse of the veritable Grail.

All the following day I spent on board, overseeing the hundred minor patchings and calkings a South Sea trader will want in port. When I went ash.o.r.e that evening, after sundown, I found the Dutchman sitting in the same chair on the veranda, blowing smoke out into the afterglow. There was the illusion of perfect continuity with the past. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Life flowed like a sleeping river, it would seem.

But this was the status of affairs. The three brown music makers, sons-in-law to an island queen, lay on a platform somewhere within the edge of the bush, heavier by ounces with thirty-two caliber slugs, awaiting burial. And Signet, guttersnipe, beach comber, and midnight a.s.sa.s.sin, was lodged in the "calaboose," built stoutly in a corner of the biggest and reddest of the Dutchman's G.o.downs. As for the royal dancing woman, I was presently in the trader's phrase, to "have a look at her."