Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [94]
Cable stood in complete embarrassment, looking at the little Tonkinese girl. He was pretty sure that Bloody Mary and her kinfolk would not return to the hut for a long time, and that bewildered him. The silent girl, standing straight against the wattled wall, confused him still more. But counteracting all of this uncertainty was a tremendous driving force, deep within him, that resolved all doubts and dispelled faint-heartedness.
"Hello!" he said, stepping toward the quiet, straight girl. She kept her hands pressed to her sides, but she was not afraid. She looked at the tall Marine, and had to raise her head slightly to do so. Standing thus, her fine breasts were outlined by her white smock. Through force of habit, she smiled at the stranger.
As she did so, her oval face looked exquisite against the dark hair and wattled wall. Her white teeth shone clearly. Her firm chin looked resolute. She was altogether delectable, and Cable knew it. From that moment there was no uncertainty.
With two long steps he was before the unfrightened girl. He smiled down at her, then enveloped her in his right arm and kissed her feverishly upon her thin, hard lips. She sighed, like a child, and the motion of her sighing thrust her breasts against Cable's hand. Eagerly he sought for them, and in a moment he had drawn the white smock over her head. In rare beauty she stood proudly against the wall, naked to the waist, incredibly feminine. It was then that she spoke to Cable, in French.
"You speak French?" he asked, mumbling as he removed his brown shirt and spread it on the clean, foot-hammered floor. Upon his own shirt he placed hers and then slowly pulled her down to rest upon it. Her bare feet left a reluctant trail along the coral sand, leading from the wall to her nuptial couch.
"So you speak French!" Cable whispered into her tiny, pellucid ear.
"The sisters taught me," she replied, quietly. "They would be angry with me now. They taught me not to do this." She did not smile as she spoke, nor did she turn away in modesty. She was merely informing Cable that in spite of what her mother, Bloody Mary, had advised her in hurried Tonkinese when Cable first entered the hut, she knew that she was doing wrong.
"You speak very good French," Cable whispered hoarsely, his hands seeking her slim, pliant ankles. Slowly he grasped the legs of the black sateen trousers and began to pull them from her frail body. As he did so, he could hear in his mind's recesses the warnings of the sisters, the old preachments of all who had instructed him. But as the sateen trousers pulled free, he clasped the little girl to him with a convulsive motion, and all preachments, old or new, died away.
Later, when the Tonkinese girl was crying softly to herself, Cable found incarnadine proof that he was the first who had loved her. The white smock would have to be washed. "What can you do?" he asked in broken French.
"I'll wash it," she said tearfully.
"Have you another?" he inquired.
"Oh, no!" she responded, as if that were the farthest impossibility in the world. "It will dry." And she proceeded to wash out both her smock and Cable's shirt. Then she placed them side by side on the roof of the red and white hut, on the slope of the roof longest hidden from the path. Cable, who helped her, one hand clasping her breast as he did so, felt the sun pull the water from the cloth.
"You speak well," he said.
"The sisters teach us fine, French," she said, demonstrating that her words were not false.
"You will be a beautiful woman," he ventured, but the manner in which he spoke clearly intimated that he was appraising a growth that he himself would never see. The girl sensed this at once, and tears came into her eyes.
"What is your name?" Cable asked, for he did not see the tears.
"Liat," she said. "That is how the French sisters pronounce my name."
"Like you, it's lovely," he replied, truthfully. "We sit under this tree. Then we see the path... if anybody comes."
He pulled the half-naked Liat to the earth beside him.