H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ The hatch cover was sweeping with a four-knot current, moving with a whole world of things concealed or half-seen or hinted at. A sea current is a street, it is more, it is a moving pavement for the people of the sea; jelly fish were being carried with Maru on the great swell running with the current, a turtle broke the water close to him and plunged again, and once a white roaring reef passed by only a few cable lengths. ”

“ For a day and a night and a day and a night the voyage continued, the swell falling to a gentle heave, and then in the dawn came a sail, the mat sail of a canoe like a brown wing cut against the haliotis-shell coloured sky.
In the canoe was a girl, naked as the new moon. Paddle in hand and half crouching, she drove the canoe towards him, the sail loose and flapping in the wind. Then he was on board the canoe, but how he got there he scarcely knew, the whole thing was like a dream within a dream. ”

“ She lay in the lagoon like a mangy dog, a humble ship, very unlike the Spaniard or the blustering whaleman. She only wanted water and a few vegetables, and her men gave no trouble; then, one evening, she slank out again with the ebb, but she left something behind her—smallpox. It cleared the island, and of the hundred and fifty subjects of King Malemake only ten were left—twelve people in all, counting the king and Maru.
The king died of a broken heart and age, and of the eleven people left three were women, widows of men who had died of the smallpox. ”

“ Then he told of the ship with the little wheel—he drew it on the sand—and the little fish god, of the centre of the cyclone where the waves were like white dancing men, and of his journey on the hatch cover across the blue heaving sea. ”

“ He picked fruits and ate them like an animal and without knowing that he ate, torn towards the beach by the passionate desire to embrace once more the form that he loved, but held from the act by a grip ten thousand years old and immutable as gravity or the spirit that lives in religions.
He must not handle the dead. Through all his grief came a weird touch of comfort, she had not been dead when he carried her ashore. He had not touched the dead.
Then terrible thoughts came to him of what would happen to Talia if he left her lying there. Of what predatory gulls might do. ”

“ It blew everything away and then took them into its calm heart, where, dancing like giants in dead still air, and with the sea for a ballroom floor, the hundred-foot-high waves broke the Portsoy to pieces. ”

“ Talia for him had become two things, the body he had left lying on the sand under the trees and the ghost he had seen walking on the beach; the real Talia no longer existed for him except as the vaguest wraith. He lay in the bushes facing the fact that so long as the body lay unburied the ghost would walk. It might even leave the beach and come to him. ”

“ She had come to life and had been walking by the sea wringing her hands for him thinking him drowned. For the form he had seen walking on the sands had cast a shadow. He remembered that now. Ghosts do not cast shadows. ”

“ Yet tabu is universal. You find men here who daren’t touch an artu tree because artu trees are tabu to them, or eat turtle or touch a dead body. Well, look at the Jews; a dead body is tabu to a Cohen. India is riddled with the business, so’s English society—it’s all the same thing under different disguises.
“Funny that talking of ghosts we should have touched on this, for when I asked you did you believe in ghosts I had a ghost story in mind and tabu comes into it. ”

“ They began with arguments and ended with clubs: three men were killed, and one of the women killed another man because he had brained the man of her fancy.
Then the dead were buried in the lagoon—Maru refusing to help because of his tabu—and the three newly married couples settled down to live their lives, leaving Maru out in the cold. ”