# The Gates of Morning/Book 3/Chapter 1

CHAPTER I
LE MOAN WILL KNOW
THE dawn that showed Rantan the tiny atoll awakened Aioma who had fallen asleep thinking of the schooner.
Dick had promised that to-day they would board her and the canoe-builder in him craved to get to work, and the boy—the boy wanted to sail her, to feel the wind settling in the great spaces of her canvas, to feel her heeling to it like a tilted world, to feel her answering the helm; the canoe-builder wanted to explore her above and below, examine the fastenings of her timbers; her masts and rigging.
Aioma was very old. He might have been a hundred. No man could tell, for Karolin the clockless kept no account of years. He was too old for fighting, having lost the quickness without which a spear- or club-man is of no account as a fighter; but he was not too old for fun.
Whip-ray fishing was fun to Aioma—a sport that, next to conger killing, is the nearest approach to fighting with devils; so also was shaping heavy logs to the form of his dream, for Aioma dreamt his canoes before he shaped them, the breaking of Rantan's joints and the staking him on the reef for sharks to devour would ​also have been fun had not the women claimed the victim to torture him as they pleased.
Aioma, in fact, was as young as he ever had been and as potent in all fields except those of war and love. He came to the water's edge and stood looking at the schooner. He had dreamt that, walking on the sands of the beach with Taori they had looked for the schooner and found her gone. But she was there right enough, her spars showing against the blaze in the east.
The gulls knew that she was deserted, they flew above her in the golden morning and lighted on her rails and spars whilst the ripple of the tide past her anchor chain showed the living brilliancy of light on moving water.
The canoes and dinghy being destroyed they would have to get off to her in the boat.
For a moment the old man stood looking at the bones of the broken canoes and the planks of the poor old dinghy; the fishing fleet of Karolin had gone just as the fighting fleet had gone, yet the gods had made compensation, for there lay the schooner, a thing more potent than all the fleets of Karolin combined, and there lay her boat, a fine four-oared double-ender, carvel built, white painted, a joy to the eye.
Yesterday at odd times he had examined her outside and in; this morning as his eyes swept over her again, new thoughts came to him and a new vision.
Canoes, what were they beside these things, and why build canoes any more, why hollow and shape those ​vast tree-trunks over which they had been labouring for long weeks when here to their hands lay something better than any fleet of canoes? If Taori wished to attack those men on the northern island, why not attack with the schooner, a whole fleet in one piece, so to speak?
As he stood pondering over this new idea, Dick, who had awakened early, came towards him from the trees accompanied by Katafa.
“Taori,” said the canoe-builder, “we will go to her (the schooner) you and I; she is ours and I want no other hand to touch her or foot to rest on her till we alone have been with her for a space. Help me.” He laid his hand in the gunnels of the boat as he spoke and Dick, as eager as the other, calling to Katafa to help them, went to the opposite side; between them they got her afloat and tumbled in.
Aioma had learned to handle an oar in the dinghy; the heavy ash sweep was nothing to him and as the boat made across the glitter of the lagoon, Katafa, her feet washed by the little waves on the sand, stood watching them.
Dick had not asked her to accompany him. It was as though the schooner had come between them as a rival—a thing, for the moment, more desirable than her.
She was feeling now what she had felt before only more vaguely. She had always distrusted the little ships, those models born of the pocket knife and ingenuity of Kearney, those hints of an outside world, a ​vague outside world that might some day break into their environment and separate her from Dick.
This distrust had been built up from the cannon shot of the Portsey that had smashed her canoe, from the schooner that had come into Palm Tree lagoon with its cargo of Melanesians and it joined with a vague antagonism born of jealousy.
When Dick fell into contemplation of the ship models and especially that of the schooner, he seemed to forget her more completely than even when he was fishing.
Fishing, his mind would be away from her no doubt, but it would still be close; brooding over the little ships and especially the schooner, his mind would be far away. She could tell it by the look in his eyes, by his expression, by his attitude.
And now that this apotheosis of the model schooner was handed to him by the fates as a plaything, the distrust and antagonism in the mind of the girl became acute.
It was almost as though another woman had put a spell upon him alienating him from her. As a matter of fact this was the case, for the schooner was the gift of Le Moan.
As the boat came alongside the Kermadec, the gulls left her, drifting off on the wind. Swinging with the tide, her stem was towards the break, the water rippling on the anchor chain which could be followed by the eye through the crystal clear water to where ​the anchor held in the lagoon floor. The copper sheathing was clearly visible with a few weeds waving from it, fish hung round the stern post and the secret green, the ship-shadow green—the green that is nowhere but in sea water alongside a moored ship—went to Dick's heart as something new, yet old in memory, a last touch to the wonder and enchantment of the hull, the towering masts, the rigging outlined against the diamond-bright blue of the sky.
Tying the boat to the chain plates he scrambled on board followed by the other. Then he stood and looked about him.
His feet had not rested on the deck of a ship since that time when as a tiny child he stood on the deck of the Rarotonga, Kearney about to hand him into the shore boat, Lestrange waiting to receive him. So many years ago that time had taken away everything from memory, everything but a vague something that was partly a perfume: the smell of a ship in tropical waters, tar, wood, cordage, all intensified by the tropical sun and mixed with sea scents in one unforgettable bouquet.
He swept the deck with his eyes and then looked aloft. The strange thing was that not only did he know all the important parts of the standing and running rigging, but he knew each part by its name, and by its English name; the only remnants of the language of his childhood were here, attached to the down-hauls, the topping lifts, the halyards, the blocks, taught by Kearney and held tightly to his mind by ​the model; and Aioma, the old child, voracious in sea matters as the child that once was Dick, knew them too, nearly all, taught to him on the model by Dick.
Master and pupil stood for a moment in silence, looking here, looking there, absorbed, taking possession of her with their minds. Then the pupil suddenly clapping his hands began to run about swinging on to ropes, poking his head here and there, now into the galley, now down the foc'sle hatch.
“It is even as it was in my dream,” cried he, “but greater and more beautiful, and she is ours, Taori, and we will take her beyond the reef—e manta Tia kau—and we will fill her sails with the wind; she will eat the wind, there will be no wind left for canoes in all the islands.” As he chattered and ran about, every now and then his face would turn to port as though he were looking for something. It was the obsession of the outrigger. You will remember that even in his dream when half an inch high he had helped to work the model across the rock pool, the dream ship had developed an outrigger; it was so now. The outrigger had so fixed itself in his mind, owing to ancestral and personal experience, as part of the make-up of a sailing craft that Aioma could not escape from the idea of it.
There was something wanting. Reason told him that there was nothing wanting, that the schooner had beam and depth enough to stand up to the wind and sea without capsizing—all the same every now and then, when facing the bow, he was conscious that on ​his left-hand side there was something wanting, something the absence of which as a stabilizer made him feel insecure.
Dick, having glanced at the compass in the binnacle, of which he could make nothing, turned his attention to the wheel. He had never seen a wheel of any sort before and he had no idea of the use of this strange contrivance. Kearney's ships were all rigged with tillers. Aioma was equally mystified.
“Le Moan will know,” said he, “and the men she brought with her. But look, Taori.”
He was standing by the saloon hatch and pointing down. He was brave enough on deck, but, like Le Moan, the interior of the schooner daunted him. He had never gone down stairs in his life, nor seen a step, neither had Dick.
The peep down the stairway, the mat below, the vague light through the saloon doorway fascinated Dick without frightening him, and, leaving the other to keep the deck, he came down cautiously, step by step, pausing now and then to listen.
In the saloon he stood looking about him at the handiwork of a civilization of which he knew nothing. The place was in disorder, nothing had been put straight since the fight that still existed in evidence. Bunk-bedding was tossed about, a water bottle lay smashed on the floor by the clothes that once had belonged to Rantan and Carlin. He noticed the telltale compass and the attachments of the swinging lamp, that had been brought on deck, the chairs, the ​door of the after cabin, the glass of the skylight and portholes, the table on which Rantan had held down Le Moan, the rifles in the rack and the two rifles used by the beachcomber and his companion standing in a corner cleaned and waiting for the deadly work which Le Moan had frustrated.
The smell of the place came to him. The vague odour of sandalwood from the cargo piercing bulkheads and planking, the smell of stale tobacco smoke, fusty bunk-bedding and the trade schooner smell that hinted of cockroaches and coconut oil gone rancid. It seemed part of the place and the place after the first few moments began to repel him.
What came to him through the sense of smell and sight was in fact a waft from the closed spaces of the cities of which he knew nothing, from the men who labour and construct and live and trade crowded like ants under roofs, shut out from the sun and stars and winds of God.
He drew slowly back as though the environment were clinging to him and holding him—but in his hand there was a rifle. Close to him, in the corner by the door, he had seized hold of it. His piercing sight had taken in the shape of the thing used by Rantan in the boat, the thing that spoke so loud and killed at such a distance, and now, seeing the death-dealer so close to his hand, he could not resist it.
He brought it on deck where Aioma was waiting for him and they examined it, but could make nothing of it.
​“Let it be,” said the canoe-builder, resting it against the coaming of the skylight. “Le Moan will know, or some of those men she has brought with her.”
He looked round. Something was troubling his mind. Knowing nothing of the use of the steering wheel he was looking for the tiller.
Dick looked about also. On boarding the schooner he had noticed the absence of a tiller, the most striking object on the deck of the model, but other things had so seized him that he put the question by for the moment.
“No matter,” said Aioma, “I know not how we will steer (accoumi) when the sails are given to the wind, but Le Moan, she will know.”
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