id="pgepubid00004">CHAPTER III
THE GIRL HERSELF

As for the girl herself, words fail me in trying to picture her, just as my brush and pencil (save perhaps for that one rough memory sketch, done at white heat while still gripped in the exaltation that first glimpse of her splashing inside the reef had thrown me into) have always failed. This is, I fancy, because, unbelievably beautiful though she was, there was still so much of her appeal that was of the spirit rather than the flesh—something intangible which had to be sensed rather than seen. She was compact of contradictions, physical as well as mental. So slender as almost to suggest fragility at a first glance, there was still not a straight line, nor an angle, nor a hint of boniness, from the arch of her instep to the tips of her ears. Again, pixie-like as she was in the dainty perfection of her modelling, there was yet a fairly feral suggestion of suppleness and strength underrunning the soft fluency of contour. The strength was there, too, held in reserve in the flexible frame like the power of a coiled spring. I saw her unleash it one morning when, impatient of the slowness of a clumsy Fijian who was launching a very sizable dugout for her, she yanked him aside by the hair of his fuzzy head and did the job herself. I can still see the run of muscles under the olive-silk skin of arm and ankle, and the bent-bow arch of her slender back, as she gave a last push to the cranky outrigger. Indeed, my mind is full of pictures like that—paddling, swimming, leaning hard against the buffets of a passing squall, with a lock of wet hair streaking across her glowing face and her drenched garments clinging to her lithe limbs; and yet, as I have said, the buoyant, flaming spirit of her always escaped my brush and pencil as it now eludes portrayal by my pen.

But the most baffling, as it was also the most fascinating, of Rona's contradictions was the combination she presented of inward intensity and outward calm. The fire of her was, perhaps, the first thing one was conscious of. Even I, with my blood thinned and cooled with the ice of absinthe, could never watch her movements without a quickening of my jaded pulses; to the sanguine combers of Kai the sight of her (whether the rippling undulations of arms and shoulders as she drove a canoe through the water, or the hawk-like immobility of her as she poised on a pinnacle of reef waiting for a chance to cast her little Dyak purse-net) was palpably maddening.

So much for the flaming appeal of the girl in action, or suspended action, which was, of course, about the only way in which she was ever revealed to the "beach." Now picture the same creature (as Bell—and occasionally myself, his only intimate friend on the island—so often saw her) seated cross-legged on a mat, her sloe-eyes, set slightly slant, fixed dreamily on nothingness, like a sort of reincarnated girl-Buddha. The sight of her thus never failed to awaken in my nostrils the smell of smouldering yakka sticks, and to set my ears ringing with the throb of temple bells.

To my hyper-sophisticated (I will not say degenerate) senses this Oriental side of the girl made a subtle appeal that was like an enchantment. The passion to paint her—always burning within me when I saw her in action—never assailed me when she fell into one of those contemplative calms. Rather the peace of her soothed me like an opiate and made me content to sit and dream myself. It was the one thing (until I got the habit by the throat years afterward) that ever held my nerves steady when the "absinthe hour" drew near at the end of the afternoon. As long as Rona would continue to "sit Buddha" I had myself completely in hand, even till well on after sunset. But if she moved, or spoke, or even showed by her eyes that she was following Bell's words (it was he—less sensitive to this phase of her than I—who did most of the talking at these times), the spell was broken. The haste of my bolt for home was almost indecent. I have sometimes thought that a few months alone with Rona at this time might have effected very near to a complete cure in me—by a sort of involuntary mental therapeutic treatment on her part, I mean. But perhaps the other side of her—the "unreposeful" one—might have complicated the case.

Both the fire and the repose of Rona—the passion and the peace of her—were reflected in the olive oval of her face, the one by the full, sensuous lips and the sensitive nostrils, and the other by the smooth, low brow. The low-lidded blue-black eyes were "debatable territory," now in the hands of one, now the other. So, too, that infallible "gauge of temperament," whose dial is the pucker between the eyebrows. With Rona, this "passion-pressure index" was a corrugated knot of intensity or an olive blank according as to whether her inner fires were flaming or banked.

Bell knew little of the girl's origin and said less. "Rona's trousseau consisted of huh peacock sca'f an' this heah baby bolo," he said in his slow drawl one afternoon when he had borrowed the exquisite little dagger to show me how the Jolo juramentado executed his favourite belly-ripping stroke; "an' I reckon they'll comprise 'bout the sum total of huh mo'nin' at mah fun'ral." That, and "I guess Rona knows no mo' 'bout mah past reco'd than I do 'bout huhs," was all I recollect his ever having said on the subject. He was content to let it rest at that.

It was old Jackson who told me that he had seen the girl at Ponape, where she had been brought by an "owl-eyed" (referring to horn-spectacles rather than to the almond orbs themselves, I took it) "chink" when he came back to the Carolines after buying bird-of-paradise skins down New Guinea-way. She was dressed "Java-style" at the time, and was said to have been picked up at Ternate or Ambon in the Moluccas. Although the wily old Celestial kept the girl practically under lock and key from the first, customers of his shop occasionally glimpsed her, and she them, it would seem. Among these was the Yankee skipper of the trading schooner, Flying Scud. The coming together of those two must have been like the touching off of a ku-kui-nut torch, Jackson opined, adding that he supposed I "twigged that thar was no snuffin' uv ku-kui, onst aflar."

Just how the sequel eventuated no one in Ponape save the old Chinaman knew, and he never told. With only half her copra discharged, the Scud was heard getting under way at midnight, shortly after which the silhouette of her, close-reefed, was observed to blot out the moon three or four times as she beat out of that "hell's craw" of a passage in the teeth of a rising sou'wester. The girl was never seen in the Carolines again. Neither was Bell nor the Scud, for that matter, as it was but a few days later that he attempted his disastrous short-cut across Tuka-tuva Reef.

The next morning the Chinaman waited on his customers with his neck heavily, obscuringly swathed in bandages. He kept these on for a fortnight or more, and when they were finally dispensed with replaced his loose shirt with a close-buttoned jacket having an unusually high-cut neck. Even the latter, however, could not entirely conceal a number of parallel red cicatrices which, beginning on his fat jowls, ran down, slightly converging, onto his puffy yellow throat. Jackson felt sure that the point where those red furrows came to a focus must have been "fairish messed up."

On the beach of Ponape opinion was fairly divided as to whether the big, close-mouthed Yank had "strong-armed" the Chinaman and carried off the girl bodily, perhaps