Where the Pavement Ends Part 9

It is difficult to find an excuse for Miss Matilda. She was a missionary's daughter, committed to the sacred cause of respectability in a far land. Motauri was a gentleman of sorts and a scholar after his own fashion, a high chief and a descendant of kings; but he was also a native and a pagan. Strictly, it should have been nothing to Miss Matilda that Motauri looked most distractingly like a young woodland G.o.d, with a skin the exact shade of new heather honey, the ringlets of a faun, the features of a Roman cameo and the build of a Greek athlete.

Being a chief in the flower valley of Wailoa meant that Motauri owned a stated number of cocoanut-trees and never had to do anything except to swim and to laugh, to chase the rainbow-fish a fathom deep and to play divinely on the nose-flute. But being as handsome as Motauri meant that many a maiden heart must sigh after him and flutter in strange, wild rhythm under the compelling of his gentle glance. This was all very well so long as the maidens were among his own people. It took a different aspect when he turned the said glance on Miss Matilda, who was white and slim and wore mitts to keep her hands from tanning and did crewelwork in the veranda of her father's house behind the splendid screen of the pa.s.sion-vine....

Now falling in love with a man of color is distinctly one of the things that are not done--that scarcely endure to be spoken of. We have it on the very highest authority that the East has a stubborn habit of never being the West. Where two eligible persons of opposite s.e.x are concerned the stark geographic, not to say ethnologic fact comes grimly into play, and never these twain shall meet: or anyway the world agrees they never ought.

Yet Miss Matilda had been meeting Motauri. Perhaps the pa.s.sion-vine was to blame. The pa.s.sion-vine is too exuberant to be altogether respectable. One cannot live in an atmosphere of pa.s.sion-vine--and that embraces all the heady scent and vivid tint and soft luxuriance of the islands where life goes as sweetly as a song; the warm caress of the trade-wind, the diamond dance of spray; the throbbing organ-pipe of the reef, the bridal-veiling of mountain streams, the flaunting of palm and plantain, the twinkling signal of fireflies at dusk--one cannot live with all this and confine one's emotions to a conventional pattern of gray and blue worsted yarns. At least one has trouble in so doing while the thrill and spring of youth remain.

They remained with Miss Matilda, though guarded by natural discretion.

Nothing could have been cooler than the gleam of her starched gingham, as she moved sedately down the mountain path to chapel of a Sunday morning. Nothing more demure than the droop of her lashes under the rim of the severe, Quakerish bonnet, as she smote the wheezy old melodeon for the dusky choir. In that flawless face, a little faded, a little wearied, you would have sought vainly for any hint of hard repression, for any ravaging of secret revolt--unless, like Hull Gregson, the trader, you had made a despairing study of it and had kept its image before your hot eyes throughout long, sleepless nights; unless, more particularly, like Motauri, you had been privileged to see it by the moonlight that sifts through the rifts of the pa.s.sion-vine. Then, perhaps....

Certainly her excellent father would have been the last unprompted and of his own motion, to develop any such suspicion. Pastor Spener had learned to fight shy of so many suspicions, so many discomfortable questions. And this was well. Otherwise he might have been led to wonder occasionally at his own presence and his own work; at the whole imposed and artificial shadow of a bleak civilization upon these sunny isles, these last remnants of an earthly paradise.

He seldom permitted himself to wonder about anything except the singular inadequacy of mission support and the rising cost per head of making converts, and keeping them. But there were times when he chanced to consider, perhaps, some drunken derelict outsprawled by a hospitable breadfruit, or again some lovely sea-born creature of his flock, stumbling past in all the naive absurdity of Mother Hubbard and brogans--these were moments that brought doubt to the good pastor; moments when he glimpsed the unanswered problem of commingled races, of white exile and brown host, of lonely invader and docile subject.

"We have our little trials--" he said, and smoothed them rather fretfully, and as speedily as might be, from his pink, bald brow and laid them with the well-ordered weft of ungrayed hair atop.

For had he not also his mission, his infant cla.s.s, his home, his books, his reports?--a whole solid and established inst.i.tution from which to draw the protective formulae of respectability. Even in the lands of the pa.s.sion-vine, the Pastor Speners will inevitably gather such formulae about them as a snail secretes its sh.e.l.l....

"Undeniably," he said, abstractedly, "we have our perplexities. Guidance is not always forthcoming in these matters. Would you take the little money we have put by--you remember we were going to purchase a new oil lamp for the chapel--would you take that money to buy yellow ribbons for Jeremiah's Loo?"

"Why does Jeremiah's Loo need ribbons?" asked Miss Matilda.

"She is going to marry that tramp sh.e.l.l-buyer from Papeete. At least she consents to a ceremony, if she can have the ribbons. A wild girl. I've never had much hold over her.... It would be in some sort a bribe, I admit--"

Father and daughter were seated in the arbored veranda at the daily solemn rite of tea. For many years Pastor Spener had been used to hold forth on sins and vanities at this hour before twilight. For many years the meek partner of his joys and sorrows had a.s.sisted there, dispensing the scant manna of dry toast and tapping the prim bulk of the tea-urn--that sure rock of respectability the world around. And since she had pa.s.sed to the tiny cemetery on the hillside, it had not been easy to alter the patriarchal custom; not easy always to remember that the place across from him was now filled by another, a younger, and in the ways of the world and the flesh, a wholly innocent auditor.

Ordinarily Miss Matilda did little to remind him. Ordinarily she listened with the same meek deference. But Miss Matilda's state of mind for some time past had been very far from ordinary; it chanced that on this particular afternoon the private, the very private, affairs of Miss Matilda had brought her to a condition altogether extraordinary--almost reckless.

"You don't know the man," she suggested, "or anything about him."

He blinked.

"I don't--no. Nothing good."

"Still you are willing to marry them."

Now this was a clear departure, and a daring one, but considering all things perhaps not strange.

For the last thirty minutes, since the pastor's return from the village below, Miss Matilda had been conscious of a tension in the domestic air.

Up to his mention of Jeremiah's Loo an oppressive silence had brooded, and from his manner of eyeing her over his teacup there was reason to fear that something more troublous than yellow ribbons had ruffled his pink serenity. If Miss Matilda had been the trembling kind she would have trembled now at her own temerity--the result of indefinable impulse. And yet when his answer came it was no rebuke, rather it was eager, with an unwonted touch of embarra.s.sment.

"What would you have me do, my dear?" he said. "I can't pa.s.s judgment on these people. Our society is limited--largely primitive. How many months is it since you saw another white woman here in Wailoa, for instance?

They wish to wed--that's enough."

"The man is white and the girl is a native, and you would marry them so readily?"

Miss Matilda put the query with perfect outward calm. The Reverend Spener himself was the one to clatter his cup.

"What would you have?" he repeated. "I marry them; yes. I will marry any that ask--barring known criminals--and only too thankful to lend religious sanction. Because--don't you see?--they are bound to marry anyhow. Matilda--" He brought up short and regarded her with sharpened concern, very curious for a man who was commonly so sure of himself. "My dear daughter, I don't believe I've ever explained this point to you before. It's not--er--it's a subject rather awkward to discuss. But since we've reached it, there is a need why I should intrude briefly upon your delicacy.... A very definite need."

If she gave a quick movement, it was only to set the tea-cozy in place.

If there came a flush athwart her pale cheek, it might have been a chance ray of the deep western sun, filtering through the trellis.

"Yes?" she said.

"I am quite clear about these marriages. Quite clear. I cannot say I advocate them, but in any such community as ours they have always been inevitable. The missionary merely provides the service of the church, as in duty bound. Who shall deny that he does the Lord's work toward unifying the island type?" He blinked nervously, balked at his own lead and started again.

"As to any stigma that may attach to such a union--really, you know, it's not as if our natives had the least negroid taint. They are Caucasians. Yes, my dear, that is scientifically true. The Polynesian people are an early migration of the great Caucasian race. Besides which, they are very fair to look upon--undeniably--very fair indeed."

She sat transfixed, but the most amazing part was to come....

"Consider, moreover," he pleaded--actually it was as if he pleaded--"considered the position of the resident white in these isles, far from the restraints and manifold affairs of his own world.

Life is apt to become very dreary, very monotonous for him. Ah, yes, Matilda, you could scarce imagine, but it palls--it palls. He requires--er--diversion, as it were, companionship, a personal share in such charm and--er--sensuous appeal as flourish so richly on all sides of him. Have you ever thought of the question in that light? You haven't, of course, my dear. But consider the temptation."

He ended by retreating hastily behind his teacup, quite unnecessarily, as it proved. Miss Matilda was in no condition just then to deploy the expected maidenly emotions. "Consider!" Had she not? Had she been thinking of anything else these past feverish weeks? What other exile could have taught any secrets of monotony or dreariness to the daughter of a lone missionary?

Chapel, school, home and chapel again, and in this round each daily move foreseen and prescribed. An hour for getting up and an hour for lying down; an hour for eating and an hour for praying; for turning a page and for threading a needle. No escape from the small formal proprieties in which her father had molded their lives. No friend, no neighbor, no acquaintance except native pupils and servants. No stimulus except the moral discourse of a reverend tyrant. No interests except the same petty worries and the same money needs....

From where she sat in the veranda she could see no single object to break the deadly sameness of it. There were the same sticks of unsuitable furniture in the same immutable order, the same rugs at the same angles; the same dishes, the same books, the same pictures on the walls--"The Prodigal's Return," chromolithograph, in a South Pacific isle! And all this not merely happening so, as it might very well happen elsewhere. Here it was laboriously achieved, a triumph of formulated rect.i.tude, transplanted bodily for a reproof and an example to the heart of the riotous tropics....

"Why did you say there was need to explain to me, father?" she managed to ask at last.

But the pastor had had time to reform his lines.

"I spoke somewhat at large," he said, with a wave. "My specific purpose was to define an att.i.tude which perhaps you may have mistaken--to warn you against undue intolerance, my dear. You see, as a matter of fact, I had a talk to-day on this same head--quite a helpful talk--with Captain Gregson."

For all her preoccupation with her own problems the name caught her with new astonishment.

"Gregson! The trader?"

"Captain," he repeated, significantly. "Captain Gregson."

"You talked with him?" she exclaimed. "But he--but you--I've heard you say--"

Thereupon Pastor Spener took the upper hand decisively, like one who has come off well in an anxious skirmish over difficult ground.

"Never mind what you have heard, my dear. Many things have been said of him--idle chatter of the beaches. He has been sadly misjudged. Captain Gregson is a very remarkable man, besides being the wealthiest in the islands--undeniably, quite the wealthiest.... He intends joining our church."

Miss Matilda rose from the table and moved away to the open side of the veranda, looking off to seaward. Tall, erect, with her hands resting on the high rail, she made a decorous and restful figure against the sunset sky. But those hands, so casual seeming, were driving their nails into the wood. For within the maiden breast of Miss Matilda, behind that obtrusive composure, there seethed a tumult of question, alarm, bewilderment....

This startling dissertation of her father's--she could not begin to think what it meant. Was it possible, in spite of all a.s.surance, was it possible that he knew, had heard or guessed--about Motauri? And if he had, was it conceivable that he should speak so--to state, as it might be, the very terms of her guilt, an actual plea for that unnameable temptation to which she had been drifting? It was mad. She could no longer be sure of anything, of her safety, her purpose, her father, herself--truly, of herself. And Gregson! An evil presentiment had pierced her at his mention of the gross, dark, enigmatic trader, whose intent regard she had felt fixed upon her so often--whenever she met him on the village path or pa.s.sed his broad-eaved house by the beach. What did it mean?

Through a gap in the pa.s.sion-vine she gazed out and over the whole side of the mountain into the wide glory of the sunset. There was nothing to interrupt that full outward sweep, nothing between her and the horizon.