A problem of the sea

by H. de Vere Stacpoole

A PROBLEM OF
THE SEA

By H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

IN the old Pacific days, before sandalwood had quite failed and before copra was king, the schooner Calumet, trading on a private venture to Raratonga, was lost by fire some four hundred miles from her destination.

The loss of a trading schooner excites little interest, yet the loss of the Calumet made a great stir in the Pacific world, owing to the mystery attached to one of the survivors, Pariseault by name, a Canadian.

The fire broke out on the 18th of May, 18—. It was occasioned by a member of the crew disobeying orders and taking a light into the room where paint and varnish were stored. It took the vessel as a spark takes a resin torch, and, as a result, the boats, though lowered safely, were not victualled properly.

There were two boats, a whale-boat and a sailing dinghy. Pariseault found himself in the dinghy with two Kanakas; the rest of the crew crowded the whale-boat. Now, the fact that created such a stir was briefly as follows: The dinghy and the whale-boat parted company on the 20th of May. The whale-boat made Raratonga about a fortnight later, but the dinghy was not picked up by the brig Alsatian till the 1st of September, nearly four months later. She was found drifting with the mast stepped and the sail flapping, and Pariseault lying in the stern of her, senseless but alive. There was not a scrap of food in her, not a drop of water, not a sign of the two Kanakas, and the spot on the ocean where she was met with lay only a hundred and fifty miles south of the spot where the Calumet was lost.

When the boats parted company, they had each provisions only for ten days and water for about the same length of time. Captain Halifax, the master and owner of the Calumet, made this quite clear in the written statement of the occurrence which he drew up. Yet the dinghy had been adrift for four months, and Pariseault, when rescued, was alive. What had he lived on?

When picked up, his mind was a blank to all things that had happened since the burning of the schooner, and it was not till long years after that remembrance of the whole event came to him, following upon a severe illness, and the riddle was solved—too late, however, to serve the interest of the sailor-men who had speculated so deeply on the matter at the time of the occurrence, and whose solutions of the mystery included the theory that Pariseault had eaten the two Kanakas, and the more probable supposition that he had been picked up by a ship that had in her turn come to grief. Both of these solutions were wrong. The real key to the matter lay in the mentality of Pariseault, in his strength and in his weakness.

This is the story.

On the 20th of May the boats, that had been keeping company about a mile apart, were separated by a still greater distance, the sail of the captain's boat being now glimpsed like a gull's wing, now lost in the sun-blaze and the glitter of the sea. Pariseault, though he had a compass and a chart giving him the lie of Raratonga, steered by the captain's boat, which was much better off in this respect. It was also faster. It was also bound to prove its speed, for it was crammed with living men, and it was racing against death.

At sunset it was still visible, far away across the moving meadows of swell; at sunrise it had vanished as though the warm, steady blow of the "trades" had wiped it out of existence. Pariseault was of the type that knows not fear. He had run away to sea, urged by the love of adventure, and he was by no means an uneducated man. Though only eighteen, he had thoughts about things eternal, and a naive philosophy of his own which told him that death was not to be dreaded, for the simple fact that it is universal. He was a disciple of Goethe, though he had never heard his name nor read a line of his works.

He also had a belief in the reliability of the boat's compass, which, as a matter of fact, was absolutely untrustworthy.

But the two Kanakas, who were brothers, had neither a philosophy nor even an ill-founded belief to stay their minds. The vanishing of the whale-boat filled them with gloom; they had friends and relations in her, and, as far as Pariseault could gather, the idea had come to them that they would never, never see those friends and relations again.

The younger of the two men had been ailing for a long time past, smitten by the disease which civilisation introduced to Polynesia—consumption.

When the whale-boat vanished, this man laid himself down in the bow of the dinghy and refused food. He seemed to have made up his mind to die. Kanakas can die when they please, or, at least, in those days they could. It is an art that is becoming lost. In this case the man who wished to die was materially assisted by the disease that had him in its grip.

He died on the evening of the third day after the boats had parted company.

Pariseault did what he could in the way of saying a prayer, and then, in the light of the full moon that was breaking over the eastern sea-line, they cast the body adrift. Weight they had none, and it floated.

They could see it far behind them, as the wind took them further and further away. Yet always it seemed following them, and when at last nothing showed but the moonlight on the moving wastes of water, it was as though the dead man had given up in despair the attempt to follow them any longer.

When Pariseault awoke at sunrise, after a sleep lasting some hours, he found himself alone. His companion had vanished. No doubt his mind had become unhinged by the tragedy of the night, and he had gone to join his brother. Pariseault was not unprepared for the happening, for he had seen signs of coming trouble in the Kanaka's manner, and had dreaded an outbreak of madness. He had fallen asleep on the idea that this darkly brooding man might attempt to kill him, and, when he awoke to find himself alone, it was with a feeling of danger passed.

In situations like this the mind becomes very rigid and simple and primitive; it discards convention, and even what we call decency, it has little room for the finer emotions. It is like an animal in a trap, whose one idea is to get out.

Pariseault made an examination of the provisions and water. He reckoned that, now he was alone, he had sufficient for twenty days, perhaps more, and now, for the first time since the parting of the boats, a sure conviction came to him that he would be saved.

His brave soul had never despaired, but it had reasoned on the desperate nature of his position and made count of the chances. It did not reason now. It took assurance from some unknown source that all was well, and it was not deceived.

At the dawn on the following day an island showed itself in sight; at noon it stood close up to him, wonderful, luminous, green, bleaching the sky with its vivid colour, silent as a phantom from its hill-top to the white foam ring of its barrier reef.

Nothing could be more extraordinary than this unknown land, this haven of refuge growing before him steadily as if materialising itself from the wastes of ocean.

The song of the surf came now, and white gulls fled out to meet him. A frigate bird passed over the boat, and against the wind came the perfume of the trees, the perfume of the flowers, and, vaguely mixed with these, the faint, faint perfume of the soil.

The swell at the break of the reef lifted the keel with a motion buoyant and balloon-like, and the following wind, broken by the reef and the near presence of the land, died away into light airs. Pariseault had no need to take to the sculls; the boat had way enough on to reach the strip of sandy beach lying before her across the diamond-bright lagoon water, and, as her nose touched the sand, the wind died away utterly.

It was as though, its work finished, it had departed.

It was high tide, or, rather, the tide was just on the turn. He pulled the little boat up as far as possible, then, with the feel of the hot sand under his naked feet, he shaded his eyes and looked around him.

His first impression was one of absolute loneliness. One might have fancied that loneliness would have deserted him on landing, but, as a matter of fact, she had never been in the boat with him; she had been a dim figure on the sea-line, she had spoken vaguely of the absence of ships, but there was no room for her in the homely little boat.

Here she was everywhere—amidst the silent trees of the woods that came, palm-fronded and vine-tendrilled, down to the sandy beach, on the beach itself, and on the barrier reef, from where the boom of the surf came like the bourdon note of an organ. The island, despite its beauty, was desolate; the spirit of the place seemed antagonistic to man. The loneliness was nothing; it was the spirit haunting the loneliness that daunted one's imagination. Nowhere does the Spirit of Place appear more evidently than in the islands of the Pacific—islands that may almost be divided under the headings evil and good.

It was his first impression of the island.

He judged the place at once to be uninhabited, and he was right.

Having made sure that the boat was far enough up, he began to unlade her of her stores. There was not much, and there was promise of food in abundance in the woods and lagoon. All the same, he carried the bag of ship's bread and the rest of the things to the shade of the foliage, caching them under a cover of leaves beneath one of the diamonded artu trees.

The dinghy had often been used for fishing, and in the locker were a couple of deep-sea lines and half a dozen spare hooks, an old knife with half a blade, and a bait tin, all of which were more valuable than pearls. He left them in the locker, judging them to be as safe there as anywhere else, and then he started of to hunt for water, led by a depression in the beach that would without doubt have been the bed of a torrent in the rainy season. A hundred yards up among the trees he found what he sought.

The break in the reef faced towards the west, and that evening, as he lay on the beach close to the boat, left high and dry by the fallen tide, he could see the sun dropping into the ocean, whilst the lagoon became a mirror of gold, and the white gulls golden birds flying in the azure and amethyst of the sky. He watched the conflagration spreading till the whole sky seemed the cup of a vast inverted golden flower, and then he saw the flower fading in the dusky hand of night.

He slept beneath the artu where the food was stored, and awoke at dawn with a sense of new life in a world of glorious colour.

Like most sailors in those days, he carried a tinder box with flint and steel, so had the means of making fire against the time when a fire would be necessary to cook food. At present he had food in abundance, in the form of the provisions he had brought ashore, in the cocoanuts of the beach palms and the plantains growing by the well.

In the woods there were, doubtless, unlimited possibilities in the way of food, but he did not care to explore the woods. Among the trees, and out of sight of the beach, a vaguely unpleasant feeling came to him a feeling as though he were not alone, as though he were possibly being watched, as though—— Ah, it would be impossible to put in words that subtle, indefinable atmosphere of secretiveness, watchfulness, and almost antagonism to the intruder which these island woods held in their depths and in their silence.

He kept to the beach and the lagoon. Here all was free and open. Here was loneliness, indeed, but he had the company of the gulls and the wind and the sea and the sun.

Days passed and weeks, and they did not pass slowly. Fishing, cooking his food, bathing, and watching the teeming life of the lagoon and the bird life of the reef were his main occupations.

The boat had become for him far more than a boat—it had developed a personality almost human. It had become his companion, and was the only tie between him and the world he knew in this world, so beautiful, yet so absolutely strange.

On the right and left of the sandy strip of beach, bushes of the maramee apple grew down to the water, overshadowing it. To protect the boat from the sun, he moored her amidst the bushes. He would row sometimes to the reef, but he could never land on it, for there was nothing to tie the boat up to. Floating in her, he would lie with his arm upon the thwart and his chin resting on his arm, watching the coral floor of the lagoon, the moving shells, the crabs flittering along sideways, the flights of coloured fish—a whole world in crystal, silent, coloured, vivid with life and always new. He watched the silvery garfish pursued by the laheu, the lordly albacore, the red rock cod, the squid—that horrid rag with the soul of a demon—and once, rarest of all sights in shallow waters, a great pālon six feet long, crescent-tailed, narrow as a sword, and dressed in blue and silver.

Nearly three months passed, and one day Pariseault found himself deep in the woods. A restlessness begotten of monotony had led him to explore them, and also an attraction that had some sort of root in the vague repulsion with which they filled him.

He had passed the plantain patch and pierced a grove of artus, where the gloom was festooned with the tendrils of the wild convolvulus, when he reached a denser part of the woods, where great trees like sand-box trees kept guard on what was truly a battle to the death in this kingdom of the silent ones. Here the weed fought the vine and the vine the weed, and the tree the vine. The tendrils of the liantasse hung like the cables of a ship, whilst to the liantasse clung orchids like gorgeous but ruined birds.

Pariseault was pushing his way through the gloom of this place, and was passing the edge of a little clearing, when all at once he perceived that he was not alone. Something was looking at him—something neither animal nor human, but carved from stone.

It was one of the old gods of the islands, the things that stand watching the sea in Easter Island, in Ponapé, in Huanine. It was little more than a slab of stone twice the height of a man, and the great face, with its deep-sunken eyes, was cut as if by a child wielding the chisel of a giant.

Here had once been a temple or a sacred grove, but everything had vanished save the god, standing crookedly, as if listening amidst the gloom of the trees.

Pariseault saw at once that the thing was made of stone, and so old that the makers must have long vanished. Yet he did not approach to touch and examine it. He did not look at it for more than twenty seconds; he turned and sought his way back as quickly as possible. Once or twice he stopped to listen, and when he had reached the plantain patch and the well, he glanced once behind him, and then hurried on.

When he reached the beach, he felt as a person feels who steps from some gloomy and undesirable house into the sunshine and the honest light of day, and he set about some small business which he found to hand in connection with the boat, forgetting for a while the woods and what he had seen there.

It was not till after supper, when he was lying on the beach, making a pattern of some coloured shells he had collected, that the voice of the gulls came to him as though freighted with a new meaning. They were crying and wheeling about the reef as usual, yet their voices now were no longer mechanical and meaningless—they seemed personal to him. It was as though he had suddenly discovered that they were discussing him. Solitude had long been preparing his mind for dreams and fears to enter in, and this vague fancy was one of the first tenants.

Leaving the shells on the sand, he went out on the lagoon in the boat and dropped a fishing-line. The gulls were still calling, but the personal note in their voices was gone. Here in the boat everything was right, and he felt at ease; but when he had finished and drawn in his line, a new experience came to him. He did not want to row ashore. It was not that he actively disliked the idea of landing, but simply that he felt more comfortable in his mind where he was, more free, and—this was the merest suspicion of a thought—more easily able to escape should he have need to escape from anything unpleasant.

He rowed ashore, and this feeling vanished as the boat's prow touched the sand. He moored her among the bushes, and then he sat watching the sunset; and when the darkness came and the stars looked out, he prepared to turn in, only to find that his bed had been taken from him. It was impossible to lie down under the artu tree, for the artu tree was at the border of the wood, and the wood was the place where that thing was.

He took refuge in the boat among the bushes, and then the great moon rose, silvering the lagoon, and the night wind stirred the branches of the mammee apple, whilst Pariseault, curled up and lying on his side, listened.

The night was full of voices and noises—the boom of the surf on the reef, and the sound of the wind in the trees, and now, making him sit up erect, came a loud splash close to the boat, as though someone had taken a header from the shore. It was only a big fish jumping. He saw the splash-circle widening and spreading, and lay down again, closing his eyes and trying not to think.

He was, for the first time in his life, in the grasp of fear. He sweated at the thought that someone or something might be standing close to him among the bushes, that some hand might push the branches aside.

He endured this for some minutes, then with feverish haste he untied the painter and pushed out into the lagoon.

Ah, the relief, the sense of freedom, the knowledge that he could escape! He was easy in his mind now, and his old brave self—as long as he remained afloat. Not for worlds would he have beached the boat again whilst night lasted, yet, as he could not let her drift, he could not sleep, so he sat, now sculling gently, now with the scull handles beneath his knees, whilst the night wore away and the day broke, and the sun rose viewless behind the woods, yet dispelling with his light the terrors of darkness.

Pariseault berthed the boat among the bushes, and, not feeling any need for food, lay down in her and fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was afternoon. He was hungry, and, leaving the boat, he came along the beach to his cooking-place, where he lit a fire and toasted one of the fish which he had caught the previous evening. All his movements were hurried, and like those of a person who has to perform some simple and well-known business whilst suffering from disturbance of the mind. The water breaker belonging to the boat was lying empty on the beach. He carried it to the well, filled it, and returned sweating as though after some vigorous exercise, then he carried it to the boat and placed it in her. He wanted to place all his provisions in the boat, so that he might have them to hand in case he chose to live in her—that was his vague idea. He took the bag of ship's biscuit along, and all the other provisions. The biscuit he had scarcely touched, so abundant had been other food.

As he worked, lading the boat, the sun was sinking towards the sea. Darkness, he thought, would soon be upon him, and well he knew that, with darkness, the Terror would again exercise its powers to the full.

As he worked, a loathing unspeakable, a loathing born of his past terrors and twining with them as the liantasse twined with the trees of the wood, a loathing of the island, the beach, the reef, the voices of the surf and the gulls, rose in his mind, and a longing for freedom such as the caged seagull may know.

Among the mammee apples grew a great plantain with heavy bunches of nearly ripe fruit. He cut one of these bunches with the old knife, cast it into the boat, and pushed off.

He was going away.

An hour ago he had no idea of leaving, only of living in the boat, making short journeys to the wood for water. That idea had been the lift of the wing. He was now in flight.

The sail, spreading to the breeze, filled, pressing the little boat gently over. Like a gull she passed the opening in the reef to the far fair freedom of the Pacific, like a gull she showed in the light of the sunset, and like a gull she vanished in the gloom of night, leaving the island to the viewless ones who preside over the silent places of the earth.

Like a gull, broken-winged and drifting, the little boat was picked up three weeks later by the brig Alsatian, and in her lay Pariseault, brown and dried like a withered tree, and raving about lakes of water.