Alma had questions, but Hiro had already dashed over to greet the canoes, as had the rest of the growing crowd. Alma had never before seen so many people on the beach. Caught up in the excitement, she, too, ran toward the boats. These were exceptionally fine, even majestic, canoes. The grandest must have been sixty feet, and in its bow stood a man of impressive height and build—clearly the leader of this expedition. He was Tahitian, but as she drew nearer, she could see that he was impeccably dressed in the suit of a European man. The villagers gathered around him, chanting songs of welcome, carrying him from the canoe like a king.
The people carried the stranger to the Reverend Welles. Alma pushed through the throng, drawing as near as she could. The man bent down over the Reverend Welles, and the two pressed their noses together in the customary greeting of deepest affection. She heard the Reverend Welles say, in a voice wet with tears, “Welcome back to your home, blessed son of God.”
The stranger pulled back from the embrace. He turned to smile at the crowd, and Alma caught her first direct look at his face. If she had not been propped up by the crush of so many people, she might have fallen over with the force of recognition.
The words tomorrow morning—which Ambrose had written on the backs of all the drawings of The Boy—had not been a code. “Tomorrow morning” was not some sort of dreamy wish for a utopian future, or an anagram, or any manner of occult concealment whatsoever. For once in his life, Ambrose Pike had been perfectly straightforward: Tomorrow Morning was simply a person’s name.
And now, indeed, Tomorrow Morning had arrived.
It enraged her.
That was her initial reaction. She felt—perhaps irrationally—that she had been tricked. Why, in all her months of search and privation, had she never heard mention of him—this regal figure, this adored visitant, this man who brought all of northern Tahiti running and cheering to the shoreline to greet him? How had his name or his existence never been alluded to, not even faintly? Nobody had once used the words tomorrow morning with Alma, unless in literal reference to something that was planned for the next day, and certainly nobody had ever mentioned the island’s universal adoration of some elusive, handsome native who might someday arrive out of nowhere and be worshipped. There had never even been a rumor of such a figure. How could someone of this much consequence simply appear?
While the rest of the crowd moved along toward the mission church in a cheering, chanting mass, Alma stood quietly on the beach, struggling to make sense of all this. New questions replaced old beliefs. Whatever certainties she had felt only last week were now breaking up, like an ice dam at the beginning of spring. The apparition she had come here to seek indeed existed, but he was not a Boy; rather, he appeared to be some sort of king. What business did Ambrose have with an island king? How had they met? Why had Ambrose depicted Tomorrow Morning as a simple fisherman, when clearly he was a man of considerable power?
Alma’s stubborn, relentless, internal-speculation engine began to spin once more. This sensation only angered her further. She was so weary of speculation. She could not bear anymore to invent new theories. All her life, she felt, she had lived in a state of speculation. All she had ever wanted was to know things, yet still and now—even after all these years of tireless questioning—all she did was ponder and wonder and guess.
No more speculation. No more of it. She would now need to know everything. She would insist on knowing.
Alma could hear the church before she reached it. The singing coming from within that humble building was like nothing she had ever heard. It was a roar of jubilation. There was no room inside the church for her; she stood outside with the jostling, chanting crowd, and listened. The hymns that Alma had heard in this church in the past—the voices of the eighteen congregants of the Reverend Welles’s mission—had been thin and reedy tunes compared to what she was hearing now. For the first time, she could understand what Tahitian music was truly meant to be, and why it needed hundreds of voices roaring and bellowing together in order to perform its function: to outsing the ocean. That’s what these people were doing now, in a crashing expression of veneration, both beautiful and dangerous.
At last it quieted, and Alma could hear a man speaking—clearly and powerfully—to the congregation. He spoke in Tahitian, in a disquisition that, at times, was almost a chant. She pushed closer to the door and peered in: it was Tomorrow Morning, tall and splendid, standing at the pulpit, arms raised, calling out to the congregation. Alma’s command of Tahitian was still too basic for her to follow the entire sermon, but she could comprehend that this man was offering up a passionate testament to the living Christ. But that was not all he was doing; he was also cavorting with this gathering of people, the same way Alma had many times watched the boys of the Hiro contingent cavort with the waves. His mettle and nerve were unwavering. He pulled laughter and tears from the congregation, as well as solemnity and riotous joy. She could feel her own emotions being tugged along by the timbre and intensity of his voice, even as his words themselves remained largely incomprehensible.
Tomorrow Morning’s performance went on for well over an hour. He had them singing; he had them praying; he had them prepared, it seemed, to attack at dawn. Alma thought, My mother would have despised this. Beatrix Whittaker had never gone in for evangelical passions; she’d believed that frenzied people were in danger of forgetting their manners and their reason, and then where would we be as a civilization? In any case, Tomorrow Morning’s riproarious soliloquy was unlike anything Alma had ever before heard at the Reverend Welles’s church—or anywhere, for that matter. This was not a Philadelphia minister, dutifully dispensing Lutheran teachings, or Sister Manu and her simple, monosyllabic homilies; this was oration. This was the drums of war. This was Demosthenes defending Ctesiphon. This was Pericles honoring the dead of Athens. This was Cicero rebuking Catiline.
What Tomorrow Morning’s speech most certainly did not bring to Alma’s mind was the humility and gentleness she had come to associate with this modest little mission by the sea. There was nothing humble or gentle about Tomorrow Morning. Indeed, she had never seen such an audacious, self-possessed figure. An adage of Cicero’s came to her in its original, mighty Latin (the only language, she felt, that could stand up to the thundering groundswell of native eloquence she was right now witnessing): “Nemo umquam neque poeta neque orator fuit, qui quemquam meliorem quam se arbitraretur.”
Never did there exist a poet or an orator who thought there was another better than himself.
The day became only more fervid from there.
Through the terrifically effective native telegraph system of Tahiti (fleet-footed boys with loud voices), word spread quickly that Tomorrow Morning had arrived, and the beach at Matavai Bay grew more crowded and exuberant by the hour. Alma wanted to find the Reverend Welles, to ask him many questions, but his tiny form kept disappearing into the mob, and she could only catch fleeting glimpses of him, his white hair flying in the breeze, beaming with happiness. She could not draw near Sister Manu, either, who was so electrified that she lost her giant flowered hat, and who was weeping like a schoolgirl in a crowd of chattering, euphoric women. The Hiro contingent was nowhere to be seen—or, rather, they were everywhere to be seen, but they moved far too quickly for Alma to catch and question them.