They say that happy people have no history, and certainly a happy love has none.
They did nothing all day long and yet the days seemed all too short.
The girl had a native name, but Red called her Sally.
He picked up the easy language very quickly, and he used to lie on the mat for hours while she chattered gaily to him.
He was a silent fellow, and perhaps his mind was lethargic. He smoked incessantly the cigarettes which she made him out of the native tobacco and pandanus leaf, and he watched her while with deft fingers she made grass mats.
Often natives would come in and tell long stories of the old days when the island was disturbed by tribal wars.
Sometimes he would go fishing on the reef, and bring home a basket full of coloured fish.
Sometimes at night he would go out with a lantern to catch lobster.
There were plantains round the hut and Sally would roast them for their frugal meal.
She knew how to make delicious messes from coconuts, and the breadfruit tree by the side of the creek gave them its fruit.
On feast-days they killed a little pig and cooked it on hot stones.
They bathed together in the creek; and in the evening they went down to the lagoon and paddled about in a dug-out, with its great outrigger.
The sea was deep blue, wine-coloured at sundown, like the sea of Homeric Greece; but in the lagoon the colour had an infinite variety, aquamarine and amethyst and emerald; and the setting sun turned it for a short moment to liquid gold.
Then there was the colour of the coral, brown, while, pink, red, purple; and the shapes it took were marvellous.
It was like a magic garden, and the hurrying fish were like butterflies.
It strangely lacked reality.
Among the coral were pools with a floor of while sand and here, where the water was dazzling clear, it was very good to bathe.
Then, cool and happy, they wandered back in the gleaming over the soft grass road to the creek, walking hand in hand, and now the mynah birds filled the coconut trees with their clamour.
And then the night, with that great sky shining with gold, that seemed to stretch more widely than the skies of Europe, and the soft airs that blew gently through the open hut, the long night again was all too short.
She was sixteen and he was barely twenty.
The dawn crept in among the wooden pillars of the hut and looked at those lovely children sleeping in one another’s arms.
The sun hid behind the great tattered leaves of the plantains so that it might not disturb them, and then, with playful malice, shot a golden ray, like the outstretched paw of a Persian cat, on their faces.
They opened their sleepy eyes and they smiled to welcome another day.
The weeks lengthened into months, and a year passed.
They seemed to love one another as - I hesitate to say passionately, for passion has in it always a shade of sadness, a touch of bitterness or anguish, but as wholeheartedly, as simply and naturally as on that first day on which, meeting, they had recognised that a god was in them.
If you had asked them I have no doubt that they would have thought it impossible to suppose their love could ever cease.
Do we not know that the essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity?
And yet perhaps in Red there was already a very little seed, unknown to himself and unsuspected by the girl, which would in time have grown to weariness. For one day one of the natives from the cove told them that some way down the coast al the anchorage was a British whaling-ship.
“Gee,” he said,
“I wonder if I could make a trade of some nuts and plantains for a pound or two of tobacco.”
“The pandanus cigarettes that Sally made him with untiring hands were strong and pleasant enough to smoke, but they left him unsatisfied; and he earned on a sudden for real tobacco, hard, rank, and pungent.
He had not smoked a pipe for many months. His mouth watered at the thought of it.
One would have thought some premonition of harm would have made Sally seek to dissuade him, but love possessed her so completely that it never occurred to her any power on earth could take him from her.
They went up into the hills together and gathered a great basket of wild oranges, green, but sweet and juicy; and they picked plantains from around the hut, and coconuts from their trees, and breadfruit and mangoes; and they carried them down to the cove.
They loaded the unstable canoe with them, and Red and the native boy who had brought them the news of the ship paddled along outside the reef.
“It was the last time she ever saw him.
“Next day the boy came back alone. He was all in tears.
This is the story he told. When after their long paddle they reached the ship and Red hailed it, a white man looked over the side and told them to come on board.
They took the fruit they had brought with them and Red piled it up on the deck.
The white man and he began to talk, and they seemed to come to some agreement.
One of them went below and brought up tobacco.
Red took some at once and lit a pipe.
The boy imitated the zest with which he blew a great cloud of smoke from his mouth.
Then they said something to him and he went into the cabin.
Through the open door the boy, watching curiously, saw a bottle brought out and glasses.
Red drank and smoked.
They seemed to ask him something, for he shook his head and laughed.
The man, the first man who had spoken to them, laughed too, and he filled Red’s glass once more.
They went on talking and drinking, and presently, growing tired of watching a sight that meant nothing to him, the boy curled himself up on the deck and slept.
He was awakened by a kick; and jumping to his feet, he saw that the ship was slowly sailing out of the lagoon.