He came back to the beach.

Schumer had left him two boats, the dinghy and the boat of the Cormorant. They were both on the beach, and as the dinghy was the easiest to launch single-handed, he used it and pushed off to the fishing ground.

The gulls started after him from the reef opening, and now their voices came singly, mewing and miauling, the very voice of desolation itself.

Looking back as he rowed, he could see the figure of Isbel; she was putting things straight about the house, and just at that moment, as if stirred by the loneliness and the voices of the gulls, his heart went out to her. She was the only live thing in all that place for him. There were living things—fish in the lagoon and Kanaka laborers on the reef—but Isbel was the only warm spot for his mind to cling to.

The child had differentiated herself from her surroundings. By some extraordinary magic she had, without effort and almost without speech, pushed the image of Schumer to one side, and the forms of the Kanakas to the other.

Schumer, despite his powerful personality, seemed[Pg 136] a dead thing beside Isbel, and the Kanakas, powerful and brawny as they were, seemed puppets—things of mechanism—fantoccini. What was the magic property that gave her the ascendency in the mind of Floyd?

For one thing, Isbel, despite her silence, her self-isolation, and the other-world atmosphere with which she surrounded herself, had always proved herself sterling.

Never had she failed them in any least particular, every humble duty that had fallen to her she had carried out honestly, and no paid servant could have worked more industriously in their interests.

Like Schumer, she had a strong personality that spoke in her actions and her movements. Unlike Schumer, her personality remained with one even in her absence. She was a good memory and a living memory. Schumer, in his absence—despite his wonderful personality—was only the recollection of a strong man absent.

That is all the difference between the mechanical and the vital, between the grip of iron and the grip of flesh.

Then she was a woman, or at least the germ of a woman; she was graceful, she was pretty as a wild flower, and, above all, she was an unknown factor, a hint of strangeness, the suggestion of a being from another star.

As he rowed, widening the distance between himself and the camping place, he was considering Isbel in all her aspects; the absence of Schumer and the loneliness and isolation of his own position had thrown her, so to speak, into the arms of his mind. He was consider[Pg 137]ing also the fatal effect that had followed on the sight of the hanging. She had never been the same since that. The deed had stricken division between them, had called up all the barriers of race which she had expressed in those memorable words: "I have no rest here. I wish to go back to my own people." When he reached the fishing ground, he found the work in full swing under the supervision of Sru.

That gentleman was seated on a coral lump, smoking, and the lagoon, close to the shore, was occupied by what might have seemed, at first sight, a bathing party.

They did not use a boat now; they had constructed a raft, and all round the raft bobbed the heads of the pearl fishers, while on the raft itself several more were stretched, sunning themselves and smoking. All were stark naked and seemed happy as children.

Sru alone was garbed, and his simple dress consisted of a G string.

Sru saluted Floyd as the boat approached, and left his seat to help in beaching her; then he stood by Floyd as the latter inspected the few shells that had been taken already that morning. Sru was the only one of the working party who could talk in English, and though his conversation was as scanty as his G string, he could make himself understood.

As Floyd conversed with this man, he experienced a new sensation. Schumer had done the overseeing of the overseer up to this; Floyd had never come closely in contact with the men, and now, as he stood on the burning beach, almost in touch with Sru, he felt as though he were standing in touch with some man of the stone age and the silurian beaches.

[Pg 138]The whites of Sru's eyes had a yellow tinge, and the glint of his teeth as he raised his lip was like a gleam of ivory reflected from a million years ago, the scars on his breast and arms, seen close to like this, had a deep significance, and the smell of him, hot, gorse-like, and faintly goatlike, was the smell of all fierce and savage things, hinted at and vaguely expressed. The John Tan plug he was smoking lent its fierce perfume to the natural scent of him, and he spat between his teeth and grumbled in his throat when he was not talking.

Sru was a revelation when you found yourself close to him like this, under the sun on a desolate beach, and with civilization thousands of miles away.

After a while Floyd ordered the raft to be brought to the beach edge, and, getting on to it, pushed out to inspect the work of the divers.

Oysters do not lie flat at the bottom of the sea; they lean with mouths agape at an angle of twenty to twenty-five degrees with the sea floor. The great clams do likewise. Floyd, looking down, could see the men who had just dived groping along the bottom, skylarking as they worked. One fellow who was in the act of rising with a couple of shells which he had secured, was caught by the foot by a companion. He dropped the shells and retaliated, the pair coming to the surface, bursting with want of air and suppressed laughter.

As Schumer said, they were like children, and their work had a large element of play in it. Still, they worked after their fashion, wet hands continually seizing the raft edge and depositing the dripping shells on it.

[Pg 139]Although the quickest way of dealing with oysters in the mass is by rotting them, the search for pearls can be conducted on oysters fresh from the sea, and Floyd, as he sat on the raft, amused himself by opening some of the shells with his pocketknife, choosing the largest for this purpose. He found no pearls, but plenty of surprises. Nearly every large oyster in the southern seas gives shelter to a "messmate." A little crab, a small lobster, a worm, or a shrimp, lives in the shell along with the host. In some fisheries, as down in Sooloo, lobsters are only found, but here............