When they had eaten the canned apricots with which the meal finished the Chink brought them a cup of tea.
The skipper lit a cigar and went on the upper deck.
The island now was only a darker mass against the night.
The stars were very bright.
The only sound was the ceaseless breaking of the surf.
The skipper sank into a deck-chair and smoked idly.
Presently three or four members of the crew came up and sat down.
One of them had a banjo and another a concertina.
They began to play, and one of them sang.
The native song sounded strange on these instruments.
Then to the singing a couple began to dance.
It was a barbaric dance, savage and primeval, rapid, with quick movements of the hands and feet and contortions of the body; it was sensual, sexual even, but sexual without passion.
It was very animal, direct, weird without mystery, natural in short, and one might almost say childlike.
At last they grew tired. They stretched themselves on the deck and slept, and all was silent.
The skipper lifted himself heavily out of his chair and clambered down the companion.
He went into his cabin and got out of his clothes. He climbed into his bunk and lay there.
He panted a little in the heat of the night.
But next morning, when the dawn crept over the tranquil sea, the opening in the reef which had eluded them the night before was seen a little to the east of where they lay.
The schooner entered the lagoon.
There was not a ripple on the surface of the water.
Deep down among the coral rocks you saw little coloured fish swim.
When he had anchored his ship the skipper ate his breakfast and went on deck.
The sun shone from an unclouded sky, but in the early morning the air was grateful and cool.
It was Sunday, and there was a feeling of quietness, a silence as though nature were at rest, which gave him a peculiar sense of comfort.
He sat, looking at the wooded coast, and felt lazy and well at case.
Presently a slow smile moved his lips and he threw the stump of his cigar into the water.
“I guess I’ll go ashore,” he said.
“Get the boat out.”
He climbed stiffly down the ladder and was rowed to a little cove.
The coconut trees came down to the water’s edge, not in rows, but spaced out with an ordered formality.
They were like a ballet of spinsters, elderly but flippant, standing in affected altitudes with the simpering graces of a bygone age.
He sauntered idly through them, along a path that could be just seen winding its tortuous way, and it led him presently to a broad creek.
There was a bridge across it, but a bridge constructed of single trunks of coconut trees, a dozen of them, placed end to end and supported where they met by a forked branch driven into the bed of the creek.
You walked on a smooth, round surface, narrow and slippery, and there was no support for the hand.
To cross such a bridge required sure feel and a stout heart.
The skipper hesitated.
But he saw on the other side, nestling among the trees, a white man’s house; he made up his mind and, rather gingerly, began to walk.
He watched his feet carefully, and where one, trunk joined on to the next and there was a difference of level, he tottered a little.
It was with a gasp of relief that he reached the last tree and finally set his feet on the firm ground of the other side.
He had been so intent on the difficult crossing that he never noticed anyone was watching him, and it was with surprise that he heard himself spoken to.
“It takes a bit of nerve to cross these bridges when you’re not used to them.”
He looked up and saw a man standing in front of him.
He had evidently come out of the house which he had seen.
“I saw you hesitate,” the man continued, with a smile on his lips, “and I was watching to see you fall in.”
“Not on your life,” said the captain, who had now recovered his confidence.
“I’ve fallen in myself before now.
I remember, one evening I came back from shooting, and I fell in, gun and all.
Now I get a boy to carry my gun for me.”
He was a man no longer young, with a small beard, now somewhat grey, and a thin face.
He was dressed in a singlet, without arms, and a pair of duck trousers. He wore neither shoes nor socks.