CHAPTER XVI

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*THE SPEECH OF HIS FOREFATHERS*

The woman appeared suddenly before him from behind a clump of bushes. She was more surprised than he, for, having seen her before, he had hoped and expected to meet her. Nothing whatever had occurred to suggest to her his presence on the island. Besides, he had seen many women like her, and in the familiar dress of the south seas. She had never seen a man like him; never a white man; never a clothed man. She stopped and stared at him; not in any alarm, apparently, but in great surprise and astonishment. She made no movement to approach nearer, and he remained rooted to his place, as well. Each one had time to take in every detail of the other, and this is what he saw:

A young woman obviously just passing out of girlhood. Her abundant hair was beautifully golden, throwing back in daring brilliance the bright light of the morning sun. It was not dressed after the manner of the savage Polynesian, but was neatly plaited in thick braids which were twisted around her head like an aureate crown. He was near enough for the details, and he observed that her eyes were as blue as the tropic sea, and filled with light. Her slender figure, practically entirely revealed, for she wore nothing but a wide spreading petticoat of pandanus leaves which came just short of her knees, was the very perfection of native grace and beauty, albeit a trifle immature and, as yet, somewhat undeveloped. There flashed into his mind a remembrance of a day at the museum of the Capitol in Rome, and his first sight of the marble girl, which has a high place there and which is supposed to represent the very perfection of girlhood budding into womanhood. No marble had the rich softness of texture underneath firmness and strength that the skin of this wonderful girl-woman exhibited. Even the tropic sun had only slightly mellowed the clear translucence of her complexion. A great scarlet flower was placed behind her ear in her golden hair. Otherwise, she was absolutely unadorned. She was entirely unconscious of her inadequate attire, and he was unconscious of it, too. As an ancient nymph of Greece of old, she fitted into the soft beauty of the landscape so perfectly that in his eyes, as in her own, she lacked nothing. No apparel could have made more obvious the sweetness, the innocence, the youthful charm of this graceful, enchanting figure. That is what he saw on the heaven-kissing hill on that island.

In her turn, she saw a man who was dark where she was fair, whose thin and haggard face was covered with a short growth of new and thick beard and mustache which, nevertheless, did not hide its fineness; whose sodden, torn, blue denim clothing could not disguise the strong, vigorous lines of his well-knit figure; one who was whiter where his complexion showed, and taller and stronger than any man she had ever looked upon; whose clothes were as unfamiliar to her as her lack was unfamiliar to him; who stood erect, perhaps a head taller than she, and she was counted as a tall woman on that island, and stared at her with great interest and delight. She noticed that he carried a singular looking staff, the bright brass top of which shone in the light. He was like nothing she had ever seen. He had no advantage of her in that, except in so far as that charming girl of the Capitol was concerned. Obviously she found him distinctly pleasing.

Controlling his nerves as best he could, he stepped toward this radiant wood nymph, amicably extending his hands. Then he brought his palm up to his mouth, intending thus to convey to her that he was hungry. In return, she broke the silence by addressing him. There was something extraordinarily familiar in the language she used. He had been enough in the South Seas to have picked up a smattering of dialect, enough to pass; but her speech, while it was suggestive, was, nevertheless, unlike any native tongue he had ever heard before. He could not account for its familiarity, though he could not understand it. He only shook his head, put his hand to his mouth again, and moved his jaws. Obviously, she understood this simple sign language, for she at once nodded to him as she walked toward him.

She stretched out her hand to him, as she drew near, in a gesture that was somehow singularly European, and when his greater palm met her own daintier hand, to his great astonishment she shook it vigorously in a way totally different from that of any Polynesian of whom he had ever heard. Indeed, although the Polynesians are among the handsomest and best proportioned people on earth, there was nothing whatever that suggested a denizen of the South Sea about the girl, except her costume, or lack of it.

She said something more to him that sounded as familiar as her first address, but which was as puzzling and unintelligible as her other speech. Then she withdrew her hand, turned, and walked across the grass toward the clump of trees. She beckoned him to follow. Walk, of course, is the word that must be used to describe her progress; that monosyllable in this instance covers a multitude of graceful movements. To his fancy she seemed to dance across the sward; to float across it; her small, white feet skimming the grass; her slender, exquisitely proportioned limbs flashing in the very poetry of free and unhampered motion. He found her back view equally beautiful in its symmetry and slender grace as the face-to-face impression.

Forgetful of his needs for the moment in his surprise and pleasure, in the sheer joy of contemplating a thing so beautiful--a purely esthetic pleasure, without thought of anything but the sweet innocence and purity of the girl, which made it impossible to entertain any profaning thoughts, at least for a clean, decent, young man like Beekman--he followed her gladly. Behind the clump of palm trees ran a path through thick growths of tropic fern and cane and blooming leafage. She turned into it, and he had some difficulty in keeping up with her rapid progress. She looked back from time to time to see that he was following, but otherwise pursued her way without stopping.

After a walk of perhaps a mile, which led through groves of palm or thickets of undergrowth, or across opens in which he noticed plants under cultivation that had a singularly familiar look, although he could not stop to examine them in that rapid progress, they reached the settlement which he had observed when he came out of the cleft where the brook pierced the wall. Their approach had been marked for some time, and the whole population apparently had assembled to welcome them.

There were perhaps forty souls gathered under the palm trees in front of the curious houses. As near as he could estimate, one-third of them were men, mainly old; one-third of them were women, the most of them past their youth; and the rest were small, quiet, anaemic looking children. The women were clad like his guide. The men wore breech clouts or loin cloths. They ranged in color from a whiteness that nearly but not quite matched that of the girl to the rich, golden brown of the Polynesian. Most of them were distinctly undersized, not to say stunted. Old men and women predominated. The children were weak looking, decadent. There was a listlessness about them; a languor greater than that ordinarily to be found in the tropics. Even to his first superficial investigation they presented the appearance of a degenerate race of people that was dying out. There was no look of vigor even about the young, but in nearly every face a physical and a mental indifference. Surely here was an arrival to have raised the wildest excitement in normal people, but these islanders were almost passive in their scrutiny, albeit they were deeply interested.

Two figures detached themselves from the group as they approached, and stood forth prominently. The first was a man of great age, venerable, white bearded, white haired, hoary, wrinkled, bent with many years and the infirmities consequent thereon. He walked with difficulty, leaning upon a staff. His fellow was the tallest and most vigorous of the rest of the men. He appeared to be the most intelligent of them all. This is not saying that his intelligence would have been marked to a European, or that his vigor would have been noticed elsewhere in the world, but in that assemblage there was enough difference between him and the rest to awaken instant attention. The others were quite hopeless. The old man would have aroused interest and curiosity anywhere. The young man would have passed in a crowd of Europeans without notice one way or the other.

As they approached, Beekman's glance went from the girl who led him to the young man. The two, he observed, looked at each other with a certain familiarity which bespoke some sort of relationship. They exchanged eloquent glances. He noted that the young man was as much ahead of the rest of the islanders as he was below the girl. The old man who had stepped to the front and stood leaning upon a twisted sort of staff was the first to speak.

Again Beekman had that strange sense of familiarity with the words in spite of the fact that he could make nothing of them. The girl answered briefly. The young man joined in the conversation. The rest, slowly drawing nearer, spoke in brief ejaculations from time to time. Finally, the gentle tumult subsided, and the old man turned to Beekman and addressed him directly. The American shook his head. The old man, whose eyes were wonderfully bright and piercing, stared at him, evidently nonplussed by the situation. Beekman made the same sign as before, putting his hand to his mouth and moving his jaws, stretching out his arms, and then, as an after-thought, he patted his lean and empty stomach. It was obvious to the most backward that he was hungry. The old man nodded his head vigorously. He turned and spoke a few words. Some of the younger women walked off in the direction of the huts. Meanwhile, with a gesture singularly graceful, the old man beckoned to Beekman to sit down upon a rude rock bench under a giant palm.

Beekman was a man of great intrepidity, but even if he had been an arrant coward, there was nothing to cause him the least alarm. For one thing, not a single one of the group had a weapon of any sort, so far as he could see. He divined that they had gone to get him something to eat, and he took his seat readily. The old man squatted on the grass at his feet, and the others disposed themselves comfortably farther away. Only the young girl and the young man remained standing near him, and side by side.

Evidently something had seriously displeased the young man, for he spoke sharply and shortly to the amazed girl, who waved him away with a look of haughty disdain. When the women appeared bearing wooden platters upon which food was piled, the young woman, who seemed a person in authority among them, took the first platter and, approaching Beekman, dropped on one knee with a singularly graceful movement and extended it to him. He took it without hesitation, examined it quickly, discovered it to be some kind of roast meat, tasted it, striving to remember that he was a gentleman and must eat as such in the presence of these people who, whatever their origin, were obviously so gentle themselves.

The first bite told him what it was. A piece of roast pig on an island in the South Seas! And the next platter was heaped with such vegetables of Europe as would grow in tropic lands. How could these things be there? The oasis cup in which he was, like the enclosed bay whence he had climbed, was more convincingly than ever of volcanic origin. Shut off for how many years God only knew from all connection with the rest of the world, peopled by a nondescript race whose course was almost run--the girl and the young man evidently throw-backs or freaks of nature which had reproduced types of the past, much more perfect in the girl than in the man--what was the explanation of these mysteries? Pork--how came it there? And whence these vegetables of Europe? those cakes of wheat? This white girl, these half- and quarter-breeds--how came they to be? It was amazing. In spite of his hunger, he could hardly eat at first confronted by such a problem.

A little clicking sound suddenly attracted his attention from the food as the last bearer presented herself, her hands full of fruits. He looked down and discovered that the noise was made by a pair of wooden shoes which she was wearing, which had struck against a stone. A white woman, wooden shoes, the food of Europe! He almost stopped eating, and might have done so had he not been so desperately hungry. Well, the mystery would add zest to the monotonous life of the tropics. He would solve it somehow; the key must be somewhere on the island; meanwhile there was breakfast. The food was delicious. It was somewhat embarrassing to eat with his fingers; he could cut the meat with his sheath knife, but he made unpleasant weather of it, as a sailor would say.

When he had finished, and he played the dual part of Jack Sprat and his wife, so far as the meat was concerned, for he cleaned the platter, the old man produced a rudely fashioned pipe made from some wood unfamiliar to him. With the pipe came a wooden box filled with tobacco, and one of the children, at a word, brought him a stick, the end of which was a glowing ember, from a fire in some kind of a stone and clay furnace or oven before the circle of houses. He could not believe his eyes at first, and not until he had lighted the pipe and inhaled the fragrant contents did he know that it was very good tobacco--the last miracle of that morning, he thought, but no. As he leaned back against the palm tree, smoking in perfect content, the girl herself handed him a cocoanut shell filled with, very tolerable native wine. All he needed for absolute happiness was a book of verses, her presence, and the withdrawal of the rest of the crowd, he reflected whimsically, remembering Omar Khayyam. And in all this he had not once thought of Stephanie Maynard.

His material wants having been thus attended to, the old man spoke to the rest, and they slowly withdrew, going about their several vocations. It was yet early in the morning, and he noticed that some of the men and women proceeded in various directions, carrying what seemed to him to be rude primitive agricultural implements. It flashed upon Beekman that they were going to till the fields, which were, after all, only garden patches. No great area under cultivation was required to support that little handful. The dogs, whose bark he had heard, were as friendly as the rest. Such a thing as passion or anger or hatred seemed out of place and as foreign to the spot as they might have seemed in Eden before Eve ate the apple.

The old man, the young girl, and the young man alone remained with him. They spoke to one another now and then, but conversation with him was impossible. They could only express their interest by eager and intense staring. The old man finally came close to him and examined him. He felt of the cloth of his shirt and trousers, looked critically at his stout leather shoes, expressed great interest in the sheath knife, broad-bladed and sharp, which he handed to the young man, who also examined it and who was also much taken with the bright, brass-headed boat hook. Beekman wished that he had some trinket or jewel, something which he could have given to the girl, but, alas, he had nothing; not even a finger ring.

While they were examining him, his eyes were roving about the settlement. In the first place, he noticed that instead of being houses of wood, the dwellings were built of stone, obviously the volcanic rock of the island. There were more houses than such a number of people would require. He counted a score of huts placed in an irregular way under the trees. They were different from any South Sea island houses he had ever seen or heard of, their only point of resemblance being the roofs thatched with palm leaves. One house in the center of the settlement was much larger than any of the rest. Its gable of stone was surmounted by what appeared to him to be the remains of a tower. It was a perfect parallelogram. He recalled, as he looked at it lazily, that it was like the Noah's Ark toys of his childhood. In the front was a doorway, closed by a worm-eaten wooden door. This building, like many of the others, was overgrown with vines, creepers of which he did not know the name, some of them brilliant with gorgeous blossoms. The doorways of all the other buildings held no doors. Woven-grass curtains depended from some of them, but even they were generally drawn back. Each house was provided with a small, roofless, stone porch, a stoop, he called it, in default of a better name, and there was a singular European look about them, but a European look of the past.

Refreshed by his meal and his smoke, and tired of sitting, he rose to his feet and, followed by the trio, he strolled off in the direction of the nearest house. When he would have entered it, the old man interposed, shook his head gently, took him by the hand and led him through the village to a house exactly like the others, but on the outskirts of the settlement. He pointed inward, and Beekman divined that here was the place allotted to him. He entered. Plenty of light came through the windows on either side, although, they were screened with creepers. The place was stone floored, the flooring covered with sand. It was absolutely bare of furniture and spotlessly clean. There was nothing to be seen, and so he tarried not at all therein.

He turned and, no one opposing, retraced his steps, the others still following until he reached the little platform in front of the largest house with the wooden door. They were all watching him keenly, and when he stepped up on the platform and laid his hand on the door, the old man, with astonishing agility, climbed up beside him, thrust himself between Beekman and the door, and with rapid speech and almost fierce gesticulation barred the way. The young man joined him also, and, frowning angrily, in spite of a cry of protest from the girl, who watched them with alarm, he thrust Beekman back rather violently. The American could have handled them both without difficulty; indeed, given back his strength and vigor, he almost felt he could handle the whole village, but he had no desire to incur the animosity of his kindly hosts, and so he stepped back at once, smiling and bowing as if to apologize for the mistake.

The little outbreak or struggle was over almost as soon as it had begun. The only person who seemed very much annoyed by it was the girl. Obviously, to the surprise of the young man, she appeared to be scolding him vehemently, and in her reprehension the old man was also included. Of course, Beekman decided that he would get into that building as soon as possible. He was growing more intensely curious as to the whole situation with every moment, and it flashed upon him that perhaps the solution of the mystery was to be found therein.

In the course of the day, during which he was left entirely to his own devices by the rest of the people, although vigilantly accompanied everywhere by the three, he tried his smattering of South Sea _lingua franca_, but without making himself understood at all. At noon he was fed again, and in the afternoon he was glad to go to his own house to take a siesta, where he now found grass and leaves piled in the corner with native cloth robes thrown over them. He slept until he was awakened by a touch.

The girl bending over him in the faint light of the evening seemed like an angel or vision. He rose and followed her without, discovering that the sun had set and that the community was about to partake of its evening meal, which apparently they had in common. They were standing around platters of food when he came, and what was his surprise to see the old man straighten up, stretch out his hands, and say something which sounded like an appeal to God, or the gods, while the rest stood with bowed heads.

In the old man's words there was something more familiar than in any others which had been employed, and as he stared at the strange scene, the clue to the speech of the people flashed into his mind. Among other things in which old Derrick Beekman had caused his son to be well instructed had been the language of his forebears. He had been thoroughly taught to read and speak Dutch, and, although it was an accomplishment of which he had made little use, he had been too well grounded to have lost much of his acquired facility in the years since he had left college.

The old man was certainly saying some sort of grace-before-meat in a language which sounded like Dutch, or as Dutch might have sounded two hundred years ago, and which bore the same relation to the modern language that English of that period might have borne to current speech. No, it bore less relation, because it was debased by an admixture of some other language which he did not know, but he was certain that Dutch was at the basis of the speech. Never imagining such a thing, he had not made the discovery until that prayer. He at once sought to avail himself of his new discovery. Carefully choosing his words, he turned to the girl, who hovered very near him, to the growing disquiet of the young man, and thus addressed her:

"I know your speech. It is that my fathers spoke long ago."

He spoke slowly and with the utmost precision. At the first word the girl clapped her hands, broke into a smile that was as beautiful as the features that formed it. He saw the flash of her white teeth behind her red lips in the twilight and her eyes shone brighter than ever. She clasped his hand and drew it to her breast in her rapture.

"It is wonderful," she cried. "You speak as I."

As his hand touched her, as he felt the quickened beat of her heart, he was thrilled as he had never been thrilled before. It needed but the rough gesture of the jealous young man who tore his hand from hers to complete a thralldom and an enchantment which had begun, although he knew it not, when he had seen her poised upon the cliff above him in the light of the morning.

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