The Navigator

On the white beach of Hiva Oa, which looked towards the moonrise and the breakers on the outer reef, Kaloni Kienga, the navigator, squatted under a palm-tree and drew pictures in the sand. He was an old man and sacred – more sacred even than the chief – because he knew all the secrets of the sea; how the wind whispered before a big blow, how the currents bent when they passed this atoll or that, how the te lapa, the underwater lightning, shone, ten fathoms down, even when the sky was black and starless at midnight.

The pictures which Kaloni drew in the sand were mystic signs like those tattooed on his arms and his breast. Their names were spoken only in the ritual language of the ancestors. The rising tide would wash them away. The wind would jumble their syllables, so that none but the sacred men would ever comprehend them.

For Kaloni Kienga the drawing of the pictures was no mere idleness. It was an act of making, a creation of that which had been destined, dreamed, called to happen long, long before the seed of himself had been planted in his mother’s belly. The events which he traced in symbol must be, would be; and he could no more change them than he could lift his finger from the sand until the whole design was complete.

The moon which rose this night would be a dying moon. One day, when it rose new and young, the ship would come with it, ghosting through the channel, sails spread like a sea-bird’s wings, running before the night wind. He would hear the clout of her canvas as she came up into the breeze, the rattle of her hawser as she dropped anchor in the lagoon. He would see her, stripped black and bare against the sickle moon, as she lay back on her anchor, her lights yellow on the slack water. He would hear the voices of her crew and the silence afterwards as they settled to rest from the long swing of the ocean. Then, out of the silence, out of the water, sleek as a silver fish, a man would come to him: the promised one, the fellow-voyager who would lead him on the last seaway, to the last landfall, the home-of-the-tradewinds.

His coming was as certain as the rising of the moon. The landfall was certain too: the haven of all navigators, the homing-place which lay below the orbit of the dog-star, below the shining black path of the God, Kanaloa. Kaloni Kienga drew the last symbol in the sand, the symbol of the guardian spirit who would greet him on his arrival, and hold him forever safe against invasion. Then he bowed his head on his knees and slept until the incoming tide lapped about his footsoles.

On the same night, two thousand five hundred miles to the north-east, James Neal Anderson, Dean of Oceanic Studies at the University of Hawaii, stood in his garden and watched the same dying moon rise over the Wahila ridge. The soft damp air was heavy with the scent of ginger-flowers and jasmine and frangipani. There was a gleam of green and gold and scarlet where the light fell among the leaves and the trailing orchids. Once he had loved this place, the cloying sweetness of it, the profusion and the privacy it afforded from the bustle of the campus, and the politics of a large, polyglot university. Then it had become a lonely place, dangerous to a man suddenly widowed after twenty years of contented marriage. Tonight it would be a place of execution.

It was a mistake to have invited Thorkild here. There were matters best despatched formally, in the Dean’s office, close to the merciful distractions of telephones and secretaries, and student visitors. But Gunnar Thorkild merited something better than a curt delivery of the warrant and a swift bloodless killing. He was too big a man to be dismissed with brief regrets and barren courtesies.

True he was thorny, and contentious, too loud in argument, too impatient of the opinions of his elders, too little versed in the diplomacies of a large and sensitive institution of learning at the crossroads between Asia and the West. He had risen too fast and too young. He had too much charm for women students, and faculty wives, and too little thought for their consorts who were less free, less handsome, and less brilliant than himself. None the less, he merited respect and from James Neal Anderson he would have it.

Tanaka the houseman came into the garden with a tray of drinks, and set them down on the wicker table beside the folder in which was recorded the past and the present of Gunnar Thorkild Ph.D. and the publications which bore his name: Phonic Variables in Polynesian Dialects, a Comparative Study of the Myths and Legends of Oceania, a Handbook of Polynesian Navigation with an Appendix on the Cult of the Navigator.

Waiting for Gunnar Thorkild was no new matter. He was late for lectures, staff meetings, parties, campus ceremonies; and when he did arrive it was always in turmoil and disarray with a lopsided grin and a toss of his blond mane and a booming apology that set everyone’s nerves on edge. As the Chancellor had once commented dryly:

They might have been more generous to him, Anderson reflected wryly, had the record been less specific about his origins. He was the son of Thor Thorkild, a Norwegian master mariner and a Marquesan woman called Kawena Kienga who had died giving him birth in the general hospital in Honolulu a week before Pearl Harbour. His father had handed himself and his ship to the United States Navy and his child to the Sisters of St Joseph with a sackful of silver dollars to pay for his Christian upbringing. When neither the father nor his ship returned, the Sisters and the Government of the United States financed the boy’s nurture and education. They found to their mutual surprise that they had on their hands a prodigy who devoured learning faster than it could be fed to him.

After the Sisters, the Jesuits took him, and he graduated magna cum laude six months before his eighteenth birthday. The day after graduation he shipped out as a deck-hand on a French freighter bound for the Marquesas, and came back five years later to matriculate to the School of Oceanic Studies. At twenty-eight he was appointed junior lecturer in Pacific Ethnography. At thirty-three he was an assistant professor. Now, he presented himself as one of five candidates for tenure, and the Chair. It was Anderson’s job to tell him that his candidacy had been rejected…

‘Why James? Why?’ Gunnar Thorkild sat slumped in his chair, a six-foot hulk of anger and misery, with a glass of whisky clamped in his fist, while Anderson sat a safe distance away with the folder open on his knees. ‘Goddammit man! By what norms do they judge me? If it’s academic record, you know mine’s twice as good as Holroyd’s and ten times better than that bloodless bitch Auerbach’s. As for Luton and Samuels, they’re good men sure! But their field work is weak. They’re theorists, pure and simple. I’ve been there James – from the Tuamotus to the Gilberts! I’ve lived what I teach. You, of all people, must know that!’

‘I do know it Gunnar. You were my candidate! But you know how these appointments are made – by consensus of the faculty with all the Civil Liberties Groups looking over our shoulders. The sad fact is that the consensus is against you.’

‘You know I can’t tell you that. But I’ll give you the words, without the names. Before I do, are you sure you want to hear them?’

Gunnar Thorkild splashed liquor into his glass. Dean Anderson opened the folder and read in neutral monotone:

‘…Mr Gunnar Thorkild is a stimulating lecturer, popular – perhaps a little too popular – with his students and with junior colleagues. His theories are often brilliant; his conclusions, too hastily published, are less than reliable. He is more poet than scholar, an inspired dreamer perhaps, but certainly a flawed scholar.

‘He is a passionate collector and a skilful editor of island legends; but when he founds upon these legends a new land, a kind of Polynesian Hy-Brasil, he lapses into bathos and absurdity. What all the great cartographers have missed, what even the satellites have not recorded, Mr Thorkild posits as fact; an undiscovered island, a graveyard for chieftains and navigators, somewhere between Pitcairn and New Zealand.

‘He is still young, so there is hope that time and experience may mellow his judgement. We should therefore be prepared to accept him as an associate professor for a trial period of three years. However, we are not prepared to endorse him at this stage as a candidate for tenure in the Chair of Pacific Ethnography…’

The Dean closed the folder. Gunnar Thorkild sat a long time, staring into the lees of the liquor. Then he asked quietly:

‘I’m afraid not. You’d betray me if you even hinted that you’d heard it.’

‘I wouldn’t do that James. But, Christ! Did they have to be so rough? “Bathos and absurdity…a flawed scholar…” With that in the record I’m a dead man!’

‘The hell they do! They cut my balls off and then ask me to eat them for dinner! No way James! No way in the wide world! You’ll have my resignation in the morning.’

‘Just this. It’s only a month to the end of this semester. You can’t quit before then, without making a fool of yourself and a scandal for the whole campus. Then there’s three-four months of the summer vacation. No appointments will be published until the end of August. That’s a breathing space. Use it! To set your thinking straight, add up whether it’s worth throwing away your whole career for one first rejection – no matter how roughly it’s been phrased…No! Sit down! You owe me some courtesies Gunnar. That last monograph of yours on the Polynesian navigators – I read it. It was good. It was clear, logical, beautifully documented. But you fouled it up in the appendix. You lapsed out of scholarship and into speculation. You claimed for fact that a place exists which is only, could only be a theory. You say your colleagues cut your balls off – but you handed them the knife. Why man? Why?’

‘The man who told me is my grandfather, Kaloni Kienga. Everything else in that paper, he taught me.’

‘But he didn’t prove this – or if he did, you didn’t prove it in publication. You flung it in the face of the scholarly public and said “That’s it! Take it or leave it, because I say it!” Once again, why?’

‘Because – can’t you see? – somewhere, sometime, something has to be taken on faith. Kaloni Kienga is a great man. He has a thousand years of knowledge and tradition locked in his head. I believed him. I still do. Isn’t every man entitled to his act of faith?’

‘He is. But he can’t complain when other people ask for proof and crucify him because he can’t or won’t produce it. I’m sorry, Gunnar, but I’m a lot older than you are and that’s the way I read what’s happened to you. Now, what are you going to do? Blaspheme or give witness?’

Gunnar Thorkild set down his glass carefully, wiped his hands and his lips, and gave a long whistle of amusement.

‘Oh, James! James Neal Anderson! You’re a rough man! Blaspheme or give witness. That’s good! That’s thunder from the pulpit. Now tell me how you think I should give witness. The truth now! No hedging.’

‘Two ways, and I’ll accept either one. The first: you accept the verdict of your peers, take the appointment they offer and thereby admit a defect – a remediable defect – in your scholarship. The second: ask for six months’ study leave, which I’ll guarantee will be granted, and go prove your point. Find your island. Bring the bearings, map the contours and photograph the features. Then you’ll have your Chair and your tenure – even if we have to subsidize a new one to accommodate you.’

Thorkild sat a long moment, sunk in a brooding silence, then abruptly he heaved himself to his feet.

‘Because,’ said James Neal Anderson, ‘I believe you’re a sounder scholar than the others; and a bigger man than you’ve shown yourself so far.’

‘Better not,’ said Gunnar Thorkild ruefully. ‘One more driving offence and I lose my licence.’

He walked away, a shambling puzzled giant, his blond head brushing the plumeria tree, his shoulders flecked with yellow blossoms, leaving James Neal Anderson to finish his drink alone, in the scented garden under a ragged dying moon…

For all the disorder of his personal appearance, and the occasional uncouthness of his manners, Gunnar Thorkild’s apartment on South Beretania was spartan in its simplicity and order. He had taken an old clapboard house and divided it into two separate areas, one containing a kitchen and huge living area, the other a study and sleeping quarters. The first was open to all comers, students, friends, lovers casual or constant. The second was reserved to himself alone, an open space lined with books and box-files in which the only furnishings were a bed, a chair and a desk meticulously ordered. Here no one intruded but old Molly Kaapu who lived two doors away and came in daily to clean and cook for him. The windows were shuttered, the ceiling and the floor were sound-proofed so that he could work with no other sound than the low hum of the air-conditioner. It was his boast, but a truth as well, that he never came here drunk or in heat, and that if he slept with his boots on or a woman beside him, he slept downstairs in the living-room. Even there, however, the same order prevailed. His visitors could lounge where they wished, sing, shout or dance – but if they fouled the place with spilt liquor or scattered ash or neglected the courtesies of cleaning before they left, they were never asked again. ‘I’ve lived on ships,’ he would explain in gentler moments. ‘If you didn’t keep your bunk tidy and your cabin clear, it became unlivable in a week.’

Molly Kaapu was devoted to him, because he talked the old language and made her laugh till her sides ached with his scandalous tales. When he was sick of his own or others’ company he would call her over, and they would sit for an hour gossiping over a glass of tea, and then she would roll up her sleeves and massage the muscles of his back and neck before he went upstairs to his books and his students’ themes. She was the only one who knew and used his native name, Kaloni, the only one to whom he cared to tell the tales of his wandering years in the islands. When he came home from Anderson’s house, she was waiting for him, clucking and frowning:

‘Ah-Ah. I know it. Something bad? Take off your shirt Kaloni. Let Molly give you lomi-lomi. Then you tell me, eh?’

As she kneaded and pounded at the tense, balled muscles, he told her, fumbling sometimes for the words to compass the alien thoughts of the haole in the language of a simpler, older people. To Molly it was all a madness. The haole complicated everything. If a thing was, it was. Why did they have to prove it? The old ones knew. They sailed the oceans by the stars and the shape of the clouds and the flight of birds. They didn’t write things down, they remembered and told them or sang them. Why worry about the haole at all? Why not go back to his mother’s people?

Why not, indeed – except that he could never go, all of him in one piece; because he was split in two and split again by knowing and again by dreaming and wishing, until there was no self at all but only scraps and fragments blown like dead leaves in the tradewinds. Old Molly understood that too, but she still believed she could put him together again; kneading him like dough in her big hands, crooning old songs out of a forgotten time.

When he slept at last, she drew the covers over him, switched off the light and left him. When she reached her own house, she found her daughter, Dulcie, drowsing by the television. She handed her the keys to Thorkild’s house and admonished her gently:

‘Kaloni has a black cloud on him tonight. Go to him, girl. Make him forget what the haole have done to him. Make him remember that he is still a man.’

When the girl slid into bed, naked beside him, Gunnar Thorkild stirred and smiled and drew her to him, murmuring a single sleepy word, Ka’u – ‘O breast that comforts me.’

However he came by it – and it was not in his nature to ask – there was a piety in him, a sense of dependence and of duty. He did not feel it a burden, he accepted it as simply as he accepted the ministrations of Old Molly and her daughter and the casual friendships of bar and waterfront.

On the last Sunday of each month, punctually at eleven he drove up to the door of the Jesuit Centre on East Moana to collect what they had agreed to call the corpus delicti, being the body of Michael Aloysius Flanagan S.J., one-time mentor of Gunnar Thorkild, one-time Roman Catholic Chaplain of the Faculty of Oceanic Studies, and now a wasting marmoset in a wheelchair with a pair of useless legs and a perennial taste for intrigue and the lower roads to salvation. The body once stowed, they drove down to the old Moana hotel, to sit under the banyan tree and drink planter’s punch and eat grilled mahi-mahi and set the world to rights, or on its ear, no matter which.

For Michael Aloysius Flanagan, sixty-five years old, twenty years in the Islands, five in a wheelchair, creation was a bloody mess and God a puzzled architect trying to make the best of a botched job. For Gunnar Thorkild, Flanagan S.J. was the man who came nearest to the father he had never known, the man who had boxed his ears and wiped his snotty nose and stood between him and the bullies, and taught him the beauties of logic and the concordance of even the most contradictory notions. Flanagan had long since come to a confused conclusion; that you couldn’t save the world, you could only love it. So, being a celibate in a barren cause, he had centred the last of his loving on Gunnar Thorkild. Which love, he averred, gave him a certain large freedom of speech, which he used without restraint.

‘At a critical time in your career you’ve exposed yourself naked to the ungodly.’

‘So there you stand, bitched, buggered and bewildered, and what do you expect me to do about it?’

‘Hold your tongue, boy, and let me talk. James Neal Anderson is a good man and he had you to rights – for all that he’s a Methodist with no joy in him at all. So now what are you going to do?’

‘You could put your money where your big mouth is and go out and prove what you wrote. How much money have you got, by the way?’

‘Because I do my homework – which you had to be driven to do Gunnar Thorkild. If I were you – and thank God I’m not, because you’ve got a load of grief coming to you! – I’d buy me an old island trader, I’d refit it and stock it and crew it, and I’d put some guests on board to pay the bills and be witnesses to my exploits, I’d pick up my old grandfather, and sail away, and I wouldn’t come back until I’d found my island.’

‘I’d look at it; and if I found it good I’d scuttle the ship and stay there! The world’s gone mad, boy! Bombs in the streets and terror in the sky, and politics a gibbering bedlam! So, I’d stay there!’

‘Two more drinks,’ said Gunnar Thorkild to the hovering waiter. ‘And hold the fish. I’ll tell you when we’re ready.’

‘I am not about to get drunk,’ said Michael Aloysius Flanagan. ‘I am about to instruct you in the black art of patronage.’

‘Sam Johnson was a pompous old ass and a protestant to boot! Any shave-tail novice in the Jesuits could run rings around him. Now hear me, and hear me well. You need a ship. For a ship you need money and on these sweet islands there are people with money running out of their backsides…’

‘No reason why it should. You get an adequate salary and enough leisure to enjoy it. Nobody owes you a dime.’ ‘So why raise the question?’

‘Because my boy, if you put your imagination to work, you could find yourself a sponsor for any sort of madness – from pole-sitting to the conversion of the penguins. Now hold your tongue; because I am about to make a sermon about money and the people who make it…’

…From which sermon and much scribbling on paper napkins, it emerged that Michael Aloysius Flanagan S.J. had several friends, any one of whom might, for certain commercial advantages like world-wide publication rights and television rights and film rights, be prepared to sponsor a new voyage of discovery in the South Seas. If Gunnar Thorkild had an ounce of faith left, which at three o’clock on this bibulous Sunday he obviously had not, he would begin a novena to the Blessed Virgin and leave the rest of it to his old friend Flanagan who had a lot of time on his hands, and a list of donors he hadn’t tapped for at least five years.

It was a generous thought and the old man was as elated as if he had the money in his pocket. Gunnar Thorkild was a mite more sceptical. In his day Flanagan S.J. had raised millions. He had built two churches, an orphanage and a house of studies; but in the autumn of his days he still had to wait for Gunnar Thorkild to take him out to dinner.

When he had delivered the old man safe to the Jesuit house, and settled him to doze in the garden, Thorkild drove out to Sunset Beach where the young bloods went to ride the big surf that came rolling in from the North Pacific. He was too old for the game now, a first-class candidate for a broken back or a split skull; but he loved to watch it, understanding it as a ritual thing, like bull-leaping or swinging from tree-tops by an ankle thong, with big risks and no rewards but the rhythm of the act itself, the explosive orgasm of accomplishment, and the afterglow of acclaim from the initiates.

There was a sullen majesty in the great waves, fetched all the way from the Kuriles and the Aleutians, curling slowly, folding in upon themselves and toppling in a ruin of foam at the surf-line. There was a heart-stopping beauty in the sight of a man-figure, balanced on a spear-blade of wood, riding down the slope with a wall of water collapsing behind him. There was terror when he was tossed like a fleck of foam high in the air, with his board flying an inch from his brain-box, and then buried in a welter of foam and shingles. Girls and boys, they looked like sea-gods out of some ancient fable, happy and proud and yet somehow cruel, because they were so private and so heedless.

A girl, in a shapeless muu-muu, with the colours almost bleached out of it, trudged down the beach and flopped on the sand beside Thorkild. Her blonde hair was a tangled mess, her childish face puffy, her lips cracked with sun and wind-burn.

‘Enough for two – or hadn’t you noticed?’ She moulded the muu-muu round her swollen belly. ‘Pretty eh? Five months of it.’

‘You used to. Billy-Jo Spaulding. He split as soon as he found out. Big Daddy shot him off to New York. He sent me a thousand dollars and the address of a doctor who would do a nice clean job.’

‘Oh, you know…My father still thinks I’m attending courses. He sends me the money for that. I do things, run errands, baby-sit…Gopher Jenny that’s me.’

He hauled her to her feet and they walked slowly back to the car, hand in hand. Before they were half-way there, he was sure he had made a mistake. He had never been attracted to her, as he had to other girls in his classes. She had always been a lumpish one, laconic, vague, irritating but somehow pathetic in her compliance with anyone who paid her the simplest attentions. As a student she had been an eager, but indifferent performer, one of those for whom learning, like life, was always a jigsaw with pieces missing. He asked her:

‘Hell no! They’ve got their own troubles. Mother’s just divorced my father and he’s married his secretary who’s going to have a baby by him. It’s too complicated.’

‘To see a friend of mine. We’ll stop at a supermarket on the way and pick up some things for supper. Leibermans is open on Sunday I think.’

‘Oh Professor! You know what they used to say. “Gunnar Thorkild has the biggest gun on the island and he shoots on sight.” You must have heard it. That’s why you got so many women in your classes. That’s why I signed on.’

‘No. I just wonder what else they said, whether they learned anything except the details of my sex life. Did you ever learn anything Jenny?’

‘You mean about the Polynesians and their voyages and their life and all that stuff? I learned something I guess. But I could never see the point of it.’

‘Well, you know…What did they do that amounted to a row of beans? What are they now? They don’t even own the islands they live on. There’s us here and in Samoa and the French in Tahiti…Here in Hawaii they’re nothing – waiters and beach boys…’

‘Well I mean, at least we’re civilized. We’ve made progress. We…Oh Christ! I really walked into that one, didn’t I?’

‘You did baby. You opened your mouth and shut your mind. Try it the other way some time.’

She was silent then, as they drove down-town. She would not go into the market but sat huddled in the car, tousle-haired and shapeless like a rag doll. Gunnar Thorkild shopped angrily and recklessly – plank steaks and salads and fruit and wine and pate and frozen desserts. He was a big-mouthed idiot who couldn’t mind his own business. Why he had to pick this particular lame duck he would never know; and what would Martha Gilman say when it waddled into her kitchen on this Sunday evening?…As if she didn’t have enough problems of her own: a husband who had killed himself with Chinese heroin in Saigon, a tow-headed hellion of eleven who had to be fed and educated, a thirty-year-old figure that was no man’s dream of delight, stringy brown hair, a gamin face that was always smudged with poster-paint and printer’s ink, a studio full of work in progress – wahines on black velvet for the tourist shops, picture maps for the land developers, silk-screen prints, wood-blocks and charcoal sketches – and a string of customers shouting down the telephone for undelivered work…Oh yes, she would adore to have lumpish, pregnant Jenny dumped on her door-mat!

When they arrived at the old frame house, in an unfashionable street off Nuuanu Avenue, Thorkild marched ahead like a tribal legate loaded with gifts for a threatening chieftain. The door was opened by Mark, the hellion, who ran, shouting, to announce him.

Martha Gilman, her hair a mess of snakes, her smock stained as if with spilt blood, appeared at the end of the hall. She was armed with a palette and a paint knife and she demanded ominously:

‘Gunnar Thorkild, what the hell is this? I work weekends like every other day! If you want to come visiting, you telephone. I can’t afford the time to…’

‘I know, my sweet.’ Thorkild smiled at her gorgon image over the celery tops. ‘So I’ve come to make your supper. Martha this is Jenny. As you see she’s pregnant.’

‘Not this time. But she needs a job and a place to sleep, and you need some one to baby-sit that monster and clean up the mess you live in. So why don’t you both sit down and discuss it, while I start supper?’

Holding the packages before him like a breastwork he marched into the kitchen and barricaded himself with a chair shoved under the door handle. He spread the preparations over an hour with another twenty minutes added for safety, wondering at the silence outside, bracing himself against the whirlwind that must surely hit him when he emerged from his sanctuary. When finally he got up enough courage to announce the meal, he found the table laid, Jenny dressed in a fresh muu-muu with a ribbon in her hair, playing checkers with the hellion, and Martha Gilman in house-gown and gold slippers, lighting the candles. As he stood gaping, with the wine-bottles clutched in his fists, Martha said sweetly:

He had never been noted for discretion, but this time he had the grace to keep his mouth shut and be grateful in silence. It was only after the meal was over and – miracle upon miracle! – Jenny and Mark were washing dishes in the kitchen that Martha Gilman said the words of absolution:

‘You’re a clown, Gunnar. But a sweet clown. If she wants to stay I’ll keep her. I could use some help and God knows she needs somewhere to nest for a while. So, we’ll see…Now, what’s this I hear about your appointment?’

‘They’ve offered me a three-year appointment as associate professor. But tenure and the Chair – No! Anderson’s offered me six months’ study leave to prove my thesis – which is great; except nobody’s come up with the money to finance the kind of expedition it needs.’

‘It isn’t meant to be. I read your thesis, remember. I drew the maps and the illustrations. I believed what I read about your ancestors: how they paddled and sailed without lodestone, without charts; how they lived on island fruits and ocean fish and made landfalls on tiny atolls and big islands like this one. I believed the voyages you yourself had made on the luggers and copra-boats and alone with your grandfather. Now I hear you talking about sponsorships and expeditions and all the dreck that goes with them. You weren’t sponsored then. Why do you need it now? Or have you lost your nerve?…You’ve sat here in this room and I’ve seen dreams in a small boy’s eyes when you talked. I’ve heard your students – even that poor dumb chick in there – tell how you’ve opened up horizons they had never dreamed in their lives before. Now – what are you? Some kind of sophomore sex symbol, talking high and acting low and playing out your little games of benevolence like this one today! Where has the big man gone – the son of the daughter of Kaloni Kienga, the sacred navigator? Will he go home to prepare his grandfather for his voyage to the island of the tradewinds?’

The vigour and the venom of her attack stunned him for a moment. He had known her in tempers and tantrums, and had always found words to coax her out of them; but this was cold anger, contemptuous and lethal. She was thrusting for the kill at crotch and heart and jugular; but he would not give her the satisfaction of engaging in the duel. He said curtly:

‘Shut up Martha! If you’re in the dog-days I’m sorry. If you’re in trouble I’ll try to help. But don’t play bitch-games with me.’

‘You’re so damn prodigal. You waste so much that other people would give their eyes for – talent, opportunity, freedom.’

‘Because you are accountable…that’s just the point. Today, on an impulse you’ve changed three lives, Jenny’s, mine and Mark’s…I’m not grudging what I’ve done. I think it will turn out fine. My point is that you made the change without asking. You’ve imposed a situation on us all; yet when you’ve finished here tonight you’ll walk away whistling Dixie as though nothing has happened. It’s the same in your lecture-room. Every lesson you teach is consequential for someone. Every time you cock your hat at some new girl there’s a consequence for her. But you don’t seem to care. You’re…I don’t know…You’re …’

‘Haphaole,’ said Gunnar Thorkild quietly. ‘Half-white, and all adrift. That’s really what you’re trying to say.’

‘Yes, Martha. Yes!…Oh, I know it isn’t a colour thing or a race-prejudice. But it does have to do with what I am, and what seems to you a lack of – what’s the fashionable word? – commitment. I’m a tribal man, not a group man. In a tribe you don’t make commitments, you are committed, from birth to death, to sharing and loving and suffering and relationships that go back to the old gods. You fish together and you share the catch. Families exchange their children with no loss to the child and no shock to the order of things. In a haole group it’s different. The family’s destroyed or wilted. You have to insist on what you are, prove your identity and then dedicate all of it or part of it as the price of admission to the group. I’m not a team man, a faculty man, a company man. I refuse to work at conformity. I’m just me…You’re hating me because I seem to have a freedom that is denied to you. But you let me come and go because I don’t make demands on you, and you can shut the door in my face. My colleagues damn me because they say I’m uncomfortable to work with. The truth is I have no past they are interested to share and no future I’m prepared to mortgage to their demands. So, I’m an oddity…like a man who’s lost his shadow. Nothing will change that. Not even if I strip mother-naked and walk like Christ on the water from Diamond Head to Puka-Puka!…’

She was near to tears, but she would not be silenced. She pleaded with him desperately.

‘I understand what you’re saying. You can’t let your personal peace reside in other men’s mouths – in their gossip and hearsay. But this is different. Your integrity as a scholar is in question. Your authority as a teacher is under challenge. You must answer the challenge, or abdicate!’

‘I think you must, otherwise the record stands against you. You’re finished as a teacher and a scholar; and you will have discredited your mother’s people.’

‘Because I’m fond of you and Mark adores you – and I’d like to know there was one man in a dog’s world we could both respect!…Now will you please go home. I don’t think I can take any more tonight.’

He woke next morning, red-eyed and unrested, at his desk in the sound-proof room, with a note pad full of scrawled figures under his hand. The figures showed that if he borrowed against his assets, he could come up with forty thousand dollars in cash and it would take him ten years of bone-poor living to pay off the loan. His first lecture did not begin until eleven, so he shaved and showered, drank half-a-pint of orange-juice and drove down to Red Mulligan’s boat-yard at Ala Moana.

Red was an ex-marine with a beer-belly and a blasphemous tongue and a shrewd eye for a sucker, who ran the best yard and the soundest brokerage business in the islands. His wife was a bustling, roly-poly woman who looked after the office and chivvied the painters and riggers and carpenters and kept Red sober during working hours. They were an ill-assorted couple, but good friends, pawky and generous and full of the salty gossip of the waterfront. Over a mug of coffee in the carpenter’s shop Gunnar Thorkild laid out his first tentative plans:

‘… I know what I want Red: something like a Baltic trader or an island lugger, three hundred tons, a hundred feet over-all, three masted with one squaresail for the trades. I want a slow-revving engine, one of those old thumpers that will keep going even under water! I want basic accommodation for thirty people, students and crew. And I want you to sign in blood that her hull’s got no worms and her spars and rigging are sound.’

‘You’re talking about an antique,’ said Red Mulligan. ‘And if you want one that’s safe for the big seas out there, you’re going to have to pay for it. How much can you afford?’

Red Mulligan looked at him with the pity which the Irish keep for drunks and spoiled priests and congenital idiots. He shook his head slowly from side to side while his belly gurgled in protest at the insanity. Finally he stretched out two arms like tree-trunks and laid his hands on Thorkild’s shoulders. There were genuine tears in his voice:

‘Doc! For thirty thousand here’s what you can do. You can go to any travel agent, pick up two first-class tickets for a round-the-world tour. You can phone up Helen’s Dating Service and she’ll give you a choice of fifty broads to take along. You can have yourself lodged, laid and liquored for six months and still come home with money in your jeans. But a Baltic trader – forget it! You know what a boat like that is, Doc? It’s nothin’ but a big hole in the sea for suckers to pour money into and smart guys like me to take money out of. Do you read me Doc? Do you read me?’

‘Loud and clear,’ said Gunnar Thorkild. ‘But you’ve told me yourself that boats change hands like used cars. People find they can’t afford the upkeep, so sometimes the yards attach them for unpaid bills. Why don’t you see what you can find?’

‘It’s not a question of finding her,’ said Red Mulligan slowly. ‘I know where she is right now.’

‘The cannery man, the freight-line man, the you-name-it-he’s-in-it man, the God-us-and-the-Dillinghams man…Yeah, that Magnusson.’

‘Do me a favour, eh Doc. Make like you’ve got the money and you’re just being careful about spending it. Mort and I do a lot of business together and I don’t want to spoil a beautiful friendship …’

Fifteen minutes later Gunnar Thorkild was standing on the deck of the Frigate Bird – three hundred tons of Baltic trader, barquentine rigged, powered by twin MAN diesels, converted from North Sea freighter to a cadet training ship and finally to a rich man’s yacht, with teak decks and gleaming bright work and sails immaculate as table-linen and cordage white as the day it was bought. The engine-room was like a surgical theatre and the wheelhouse was a navigator’s heaven. For Gunnar Thorkild it was love at first sight – and despair the instant afterwards.

At the price – if one had the price – the vessel was a gift. But to man and maintain her in this pristine splendour would require another fortune. Mort Faraday, the broker, commented hopefully:

‘Skippers her himself – at least he did before his illness – and crews her with island boys from his place on Kauai.’

‘Never and nohow! We’ve had big offers from big names. Magnusson would as lief rent you his wife as this beauty.’

‘Like I said, he had an illness last year – a stroke. He’s recovered, but it’s left him with one gimpy leg and an arm that’s not as good as it used to be. I guess he’s just decided the Frigate Bird’s one thing too many.’

‘Tell you what though. At this price, which is a steal, our finance company would come through with a seventy-five per cent loan, over a five year term. If you bought her and exploited her for charter, you could manage that easily.’

‘Far as I know. He doesn’t go far from home these days. But if you’re thinking of a private haggle, forget it. He’ll chew you up like pop-corn – if you ever got to see him, which isn’t too easy.’

‘Man! As long as it takes you to buy fresh stores and load ’em. Her tanks are full, there’s dry goods and a deep-freeze full of meat and a full inventory of spares and duplicate systems. All you have to do is press the starter and motor off the mooring. I swear to you, you’ll never find another buy like this one …’

‘I believe you Mort,’ said Gunnar Thorkild amiably. ‘I’ll be back. Take care now.’

As he drove slowly out to the University through the press of morning traffic, Gunnar Thorkild was already composing the letter which would be delivered by messenger that same evening to Carl Magnusson.

The house of Carl Magnusson was like the man himself, separate, discreet, privileged, a low-built bungalow of teakwood and volcanic stone, set in a tropic garden where lawns and shrubberies rolled down to the water’s edge. There were wrought iron gates and a guardian to open them. Who came here came by grant and never by right; and high secrets of state and of commerce had been talked in the drawing-room and on the lanai that looked out over the pool and the horizon beyond the reef.

Carl Magnusson himself was a character of forbidding reputation, and singular personal charm. He was a big man, sturdy as a tree, white-haired and ruddy, with a soft voice, and an air of rapt interest in the most banal talk of his guests. His angers were formidable and on occasions destructive, but they were never raucous or violent. It was a matter of public record that he had married four times and begotten six children. All the children were grown and gone away. Since his illness, he had lived in seclusion with a Filipino staff, his fourth wife and a resident secretary.

He received Gunnar Thorkild on the lanai, seated him at a table on which were laid his letter and a complete set of his publications, waited until coffee was served and then put him to the question:

‘Thorkild, I’ve read your letter and your publications. I’ve also informed myself of your personal and academic background. I’m impressed. I’m also puzzled.’

‘It wasn’t a mistake. It was an act of faith in a great man, my grandfather.’

‘An act of faith – that’s an interesting point of view. One of your colleagues, to whom I spoke yesterday, described it as a surrender to a fairy-tale, a dream out of folk-lore.’

‘It is a dream, Mr Magnusson; but it’s the dream of a whole people. You hear it in one form or another all over the Pacific, from the Gambiers to the Gilberts. The substance of it is always the same: that there is an island, a sacred place where the Alii, the great chiefs and the great navigators go to die…Now this is not the small dreaming of one man. It is what Jung called the great dreaming: the mythos of a whole race dispersed over the biggest ocean on the planet. Behind every great dreaming is a great truth – or even a small one that has assumed a fundamental importance.’

‘My grandfather will tell me. The knowledge must pass to me and he must pass it. That is the way things are.’

‘Come now Mr Thorkild!… It must happen because that’s the way things are! From a scholar, that’s too much!’

‘Then you shouldn’t mock “the way things are” and the things that are handed down. A few miles off the Pali pass there are sacred places, lost for centuries, but if you stumble across them, you will find yourself surrounded and warned away by the guardian families. You know that the trust and the meaning is still transmitted – and if you don’t you should!’

‘I know,’ Carl Magnusson grinned. ‘I just wondered if you did. For a fellow who wants a favour you’re damned prickly.’

‘I understand the loving,’ said Gunnar Thorkild wryly. ‘I fell in love with her myself. There’s no use pretending I can afford her.’

‘I’d skipper her myself, I’d get a good crew, and a bunch of boys and girls and sail her down to Hiva Oa. I’d put my grandfather and his canoe on board and let him navigate me as far as he was willing. Then I’d put him overside in his own craft and say good-bye to him. After that I would have a choice to make…’

‘A hard one. I would know by then how to reach the island. I could turn back, and keep the knowledge to myself. Or sail on, find the place, chart it and then come home and vindicate my reputation as a scholar.’

‘I’ve thought of that too,’ said Gunnar Thorkild. ‘Find the one secret place left on the planet and stay there. It’s a tempting thought.’

‘Let me tell you something, Thorkild. When you’re flat on your back and you can’t move and you can’t talk, and the vultures are waiting in the board-room to pick your bones clean, you get a new slant on living …’ He broke off and sat, a long moment, staring at the liver-spots on the back of his hands. Then he said flatly:

‘It’s an interesting idea; but you’re snookered aren’t you? I won’t charter. You can’t afford to buy. What do you do now?’

‘I keep looking for a vessel I can afford. If I don’t find it by the end of the month I leave and go to my grandfather on Hiva Oa. I have the feeling his time is running out. I must be there to prepare him for his last journey.’

‘I wonder,’ said Carl Magnusson sourly, ‘I wonder if our grandchildren will have the same thought? …’

‘You’re embarrassed? Why? A family like ours – we build empires and dynasties and then have to call in the mercenaries to protect us. When I die the mercenaries will take over – trustees, bankers, boards of directors, lawyers. What do they know or care about the old pieties …’ He broke off and thrust a long thick forefinger at Thorkild’s breastbone. ‘As I said, you’re snookered! So I’m going to make you an offer. I’ll finance your expedition: yourself and ten bodies of your choice – the rest I’ll choose. I’ll sail the Frigate Bird with my crew, and you direct the operation from the time we pick up your grandfather, until we mutually agree to break off and come home. I pay all bills and you assign to me all rights of publication and other exploitation of all records and discoveries, financial rewards therefrom to be split sixty to me, forty to you. One more thing. It’s a take-or-leave-it deal. No haggling. No whys or wherefores. And you decide now! – Well, Thorkild, what do you say?’

‘Because if it’s a good deal, it will stand reflection and discussion. If it’s a bad one it won’t; and besides, there are things I can’t trade, Mr Magnusson, because they don’t belong to me, but to my mother’s people. You’re being very generous. I know I’ll never get an offer like this again. If you’ll excuse me, I won’t waste any more of your time.’

‘Sit down!’ said Carl Magnusson harshly. ‘Let’s start again! Even before I had your letter, I’d heard about you – from your Jesuit friend Flanagan. I trust him because, like me, he’s living on borrowed time…’

On the white beach of Hiva Oa, Kaloni the navigator sat and watched the rising of the new-born moon He was not alone now, because this was a night of feasting, when he took his rightful place beside the chief, and called alternately with him the genealogies that linked them to the old high gods; Kane the supreme, Lono the fruitful, Ku the powerful and Kanaloa, Lord of the deep sea. Alone, he intoned the hymn to Kanaloa, and all the guardian spirits beneath him Then, when the dancing was done the chief called for silence, and Kaloni stepped forward to pronounce his own obit:

‘The high gods have told me,

One moon more,

I shall stay with you

When Hina shows herself again

I shall go,

Like the white sea-bird.

Kaloni Kienga the Navigator

Will make his last voyage.

You will not follow me,

But when I go,

You will throw flowers into the sea,

The waves will carry them to me,

Beyond the path of the shining one,

Beyond the black path of the God Kanaloa.’

When he had finished there was silence again, and out of the silence the maidens came one by one to hang leis about his neck, and the young men, after them, to pile fruit at his feet. Then, when they retired the chief himself came, carrying a paddle, carved with the symbol of the god Kanaloa and gave it into his hands and blessed him:

‘May Kanaloa protect you,

And Hina shine on your passage,

And may the high chiefs and the navigators receive you,

In peace and with joy.’

Kaloni closed his eyes and let the blessing flow over him. When he opened them again the beach was empty. There were only the flowers and the fruit and the cook-fires, for a memory of what had happened: he was dispensed now from human commerce. He was consigned to the ancestors. He was ritually dead. He had only to wait for the next new moon, when the black ship would come to carry him to the home of the navigators, the island-of-the-tradewinds.

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