James Norman Hall - The Hurricane (Charles Bernard Nordhoff, James Norman Hall) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

Although he felt keenly the injustice of his first imprisonment, he was too much of a man to hoard up bitterness. He knew that his captors were doing no more than their duty and nursed no resentment toward them. But he had to be free, whatever the cost.

On each of Captain Nagle’s infrequent visits to Tahiti, he had gone at once to the jail in the hope of seeing Terangi; but what with escapes to the mountains and the fact that visitors were not permitted to see those in solitary confinement, three years passed without his having so much as a glimpse of the prisoner. Meanwhile, a new warden had arrived from France, one of those just men, as coldly impersonal as the Law itself. At last, more than four years after the affair in Duval’s bar, Nagle learned, at the wharf, that Terangi, after his latest escape, was once more in custody. Nagle went straight to the Governor, over the warden’s head, and was granted permission to see him.

His reception at the prison, under these circumstances, was a chilly one. It was clear from the warden’s manner that there was to be no more nonsense about this Terangi matter; no more making a mock of authority. He took the Governor’s note, glanced at it, bowed coldly, and led the way to Terangi’s cell. There was a new iron-studded door of hardwood, four inches thick, equipped with a formidable series of locks.

The cell was about eight feet square and lighted by a single small window, high in the wall. Terangi was tethered by one leg, the chain attached to his ankle, shackled to a heavy ringbolt set into the floor of stone. He had altered little, outwardly, save that he was now a man, fully matured, but Nagle was conscious of a profound inward change. All the joy of life had gone out of him, and there was a sombre look in his eyes. Nagle scarcely trusted himself to speak; he took Terangi’s hand and held it between his own. The warden stood in the doorway, looking on.

If Terangi was moved, he showed no sign of it. He had himself well in hand. When the silence was broken, he asked for news of his wife and mother, and of the little daughter he had never seen. Nagle pulled himself together and contrived to answer with some show of cheerfulness, but he was soon aware that Terangi was as eager to close the interview as the warden himself. Nagle left the prison in a gloomy frame of mind.

There was a stir on Tahiti when Terangi escaped once more. It happened about three months after Nagle’s visit. The new warden had been over-sanguine about breaking Terangi’s spirit. He kept him in solitary confinement until he seemed thoroughly subdued, and then gave him tastes of liberty when traps were laid: apparent chances to escape which the prisoner was too wary to take advantage of. At last he was permitted to have his hour of exercise without shackles, in the prison yard.

He was enjoying his brief walk up and down the yard late one afternoon when the road gang was brought in. There were two guards inside and two others came in with the prisoners. The gatekeeper had unlocked the heavy door and the last of the prisoners had been checked in when Terangi made his dash. For a moment the guards were numb with astonishment, and five seconds leeway was all that Terangi required. The man at the gate jerked out his revolver and fired as Terangi seized his wrist. The others were coming on the run, afraid to shoot. A heavy blow over the heart knocked the gatekeeper out, and before another shot could be fired, Terangi was outside.

Papeete cemetery lies in a valley on the opposite side of the road a little beyond the prison. He sprinted among the gravestones with half a dozen men in chase, firing as they ran, plunged into the bush at one side of the valley, and was gone. It was a most sensational escape, in broad daylight, but this final break was accompanied by tragedy. When they picked up the gateman he was dead; it seems that he had a weak heart. Once again, Terangi had struck too hard.

Capturing him, after his repeated escapes in the past, had become a kind of grim sport to the police, a game they played with ever-increasing skill, and they had no doubt that they would soon have him in their hands again. Tahiti, as you may know, is made up of a large peninsula and a small one, connected by the low narrow isthmus of Taravao. They hunted him like a hare on Tahiti-Nui, raising the villages with offers of reward. As a matter of policy, for the benefit of the native population, the government let its intentions with respect to the fugitive be known. As soon as he was caught, he was to be sent to the penal colony at Cayenne, in French Guiana, and there would be no more escaping for Terangi, ever.

Keen-eyed men were posted on the ridges, the valleys were scoured by boar hunters with their dogs, and on one occasion, at long range across the valley of Vairaharaha, he bounded through the fern in plain view for more than a hundred yards, under a heavy fire. Slowly and relentlessly he was hunted from one refuge to another and driven toward the Taravao Isthmus. There they made certain of taking him, and a large posse of trackers was stationed to seize him when he attempted to cross to the smaller peninsula. But once more he eluded them. Choosing a black, rainy night, he managed to slip through the chain of pursuers to conceal himself among the wooded ridges and untrodden peaks beyond Teahaupoo, the wildest, most inaccessible region of all Tahiti. But he could flee no farther. He was hemmed in on three sides by the sea, and approaching from the northwest came a small army of pursuers led by the police. It was a hard search but a thorough one; no coign of the rocks was left unexplored. The net was drawn closer and closer, but when at last it was closed at the extremity of the island, the quarry was not in it. Terangi had vanished as though he had melted into the mists that hang over those wild and gloomy mountains. No one had seen him nor had a sign of him been found.

There were four European residents on Manukura at this time: de Laage, the Administrator, and his wife; Father Paul, and myself. The first, in point of length of residence, was Father Paul. He had come out to the Tuamotu as a youth fresh from the seminary and had spent more than fifty years in the Group without ever having returned to France. He was one of those transparently good old men, so often found in the service of the Roman Catholic Church, whose obscure and devoted lives the world never hears of, but which mean so much to the little flocks they serve. He came from peasant stock in a mountain village near the Spanish border, and his education had been strictly clerical. In his childhood he had been taught to believe in all sorts of ghosts and devils. He found hierarchies of these awaiting him on Manukura, where the natives were nothing if not superstitious. They were very close to being heathen in those days; in fact, they had never before had a missionary stationed amongst them. Father Paul met this situation in a characteristic way. He developed a curious sort of worship, Christian, to be sure, but with a generous mixture of paganism in it. This had nothing to do with basic doctrines, of course. Those he held fast to and taught his people to do the same. They had the deepest love and veneration for him, and he was worthy of it. He accepted the teachings of the Church with the unquestioning simplicity of a child. It is common, in our day, to speak slightingly of these devoted souls. Bigots they may be, in the sense of adhering to one system of belief and excluding all others; but their lives will not suffer in comparison with those of men who believe in nothing, not even in themselves. The world does well to make room for its Father Pauls.

His church, which he had planned and built, largely with his own hands, stood midway in the village. There had gone into it the simplicity of his own nature and the beauty inherent in his faith. It was a coral-lime structure, capable of holding the entire population of one hundred and fifty, with narrow Gothic windows and a little bell tower, all so perfectly proportioned that I doubt whether the best ecclesiastical architect in Europe would have found anything to criticize. It was truly astonishing that an old peasant priest should have worked with such rightness of instinct.