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Never the Twain Shall Meet

9781465676559
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
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Overview
It was a song that never before had been sung; once sung, never again would it be heard. Such a song, indeed, as little girls croon to their dolls; half funeral chant, half hymn, sung in a minor key by a girl with a powerfully sweet lyric soprano. The last of the land breeze carried it aft to Gaston Larrieau, the master of the 200-ton auxiliary trading schooner Moorea, where he stood on the top step of the companion, his leonine head and tremendous shoulders showing above the deck-house, as he smoked his first after-breakfast pipe. While he listened, a shadow passed over the man’s face, as when winds drive a dark cloud above a sunny plain. He removed his pipe thoughtfully to murmur: “Ah, my poor Tamea! Dear child of the sun! Homesick already!” Then he came out on deck and stood by the weather rail, looking forward until he espied the figure of the singer stretched face downward, at full length, alongside the bowsprit, but snuggled comfortably in the belly of the jib. One arm enveloped the bowsprit; at each rise and fall of the Moorea’s long clipper bow, her feet, sandal-clad, beat the canvas in rhythm. And, because she was young and athrill with the music of the spheres, because the dark blue water purling under the schooner’s forefoot brought to her memories of the insistent, peaceful swish of the surf enveloping the outer reef at Riva.

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