H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ Antagonism when Kearney tried to hit her with the whip of seaweed, hatred when he hit her with the tia wood ball, the longing for revenge which brought him death, the boundless irritation that had been born in her from Dick, the mad desire to destroy him, pity born in her at his cry for help, tenderness brought to her by the bird, passion full-grown in a moment and casting her to embrace the living tree, love that turned all other things to nothing, even the spell of taminan.
Who finds a soul finds sorrow, and who finds love finds death. ”

“ Kearney preferred the reef to the island. There was “more air” and, as a rule, out here he was lost to everything but the interests around him, pleased as the child with the ever-varying wonders of the place. There was always something new left by the tide. Last time in the biggest of the pools a chambered nautilus was sailing like a lost galleon, the most exquisite dream of Nature; a bit beyond they had come upon the skull of a whale, whose tongue had been torn out by orcas and whose body had been devoured by sharks. ”

“ Here, high above the world as the birds, they could see a thousand square leagues of the blue Pacific from the limitless north to the far pale sky trace that was Karolin, the world of the sea-gulls ever clanging and clanging about the reef, the lagoon, and, rising up towards them from the lagoon, the trees. Not a trunk, not a stem, nothing but the glory of the foliage; the dancing, feathery palm fronds, the still dark spread of the bread-fruits, the piercing green of the new-leaved artus, and here and there lords of the forest and the groves, the matamatas striking boldly to the sky. ”

“ The atoll island has never been adequately described by pen or brush—never will be. What brush or pen could paint the starlight on the great lagoons, the sunrises and sunsets, the vastness of the distances unbroken by any land but just the low ring of reef? Life on an atoll is like life on a raft: immensity on every side—and the sea.
Here the girl felt herself suddenly shut in, the groves rising to the hill-top fretted her spirit, the bit of lagoon was nothing, and even the reef was different from the reef of Karolin. ”

“ Nan had literally put the club of Ma into the hands of Dick; the blazing schooner, the dread white men, the revolt of the Melanesians, all these were part of the work of Nan, who seemed only a cocoanut, but was yet an idea. The fish, the bread-fruit, the water beaker, and all the odds and ends they had brought away were stowed some in the stern sheets and some amidships, whilst in the bow reposed the little ships, like the toys of these children who had never learned to play with toys, but with men and events and with Destiny itself.
The wind blew steady and strong from the north. ”

“ Past the piers of the break they were coming, the whole fleet of Karolin, sailing against the wind and with all the paddles flashing, gulls wheeling and crying above them, and the flood tide boiling in their wake.
Rising like a young man and swift as a boy, he ran where, curving inwards, they made to beach on the cream-white sand. Laminai, shouting his name, sprang on the outrigger gratings to meet him—and as he sprang on board and they grasped each other, the great canoe, turning, shot up into the eyes of the sun. ”

“ He had seen again Ma in the moonlight, and the spear of Laminai, the red-bearded man he had put to death, and, the black-bearded man chased through the woods, the burning schooner and the ape-men who still held the beach of Palm Tree; and as he looked on Katafa, on the women and helpless children, on the boys growing towards war age but still unripe, the great knowledge came to him, as it came to the earliest men who fronted the wolf, that strength is possession, and that without possession love is a mockery—that dreams based on unreality are dreams. ”

“ The tide was just at the slack after full, and on the long river of light from the moon the canoes came like dark drifting leaves; past the break, the paddles working with scarcely a sound, across the lagoon, moving ever more slowly, till again came an order from Laminai and, the stone anchors going over without a splash, the fleet rode at its moorings, silent as the moon that now stood above the reef.
They were brave with a courage that nothing could destroy but defeat or superstition, that nothing could dent but the unknown. ”

“ Dick was worth looking at as he came alongside, standing up in the dinghy, the boat hook in his hands. Nearly thirteen, yet tall and big as a boy of fourteen or more, naked but for a kilt of leaves, with the forthright gaze of an eagle and a face where decision met daring, a philosopher, looking at him, might have said, “Here is the making of the world’s finest man, here is the perfect human being, neither savage nor civilised, swift as a panther, graceful as a tree, yet endowed with mind, decision and character.” ”

“ Convulsions seized her, foam ran from her mouth and then, collapsing, she was carried off, whilst Ma seized the great lambai shell passed to him out of the king’s house by one of the wives, and filled the air with its howling.
The bellowing of the shell, echoing over beach and lagoon, roused the gulls; their cries came back like the echoes of the cries of the people. “Kara! Kara! Kara!” “War! War! War!” Then silence fell and the fighting men, the women and the very children set to work, marshalled by Laminai, on the great business that had suddenly entered their lives like a sword. ”

“ Whatever Le Juan’s means of tuition may have been—a hot iron was one of them—they had left all but no mark on the conscious mind of the grown girl. Otherwise her life would have been as impossible as the life of a person who has to think over each step he takes, each movement of the body and each respiration he makes. Le Juan had made the tabu not a direction to be obeyed, but a law of being, living like a watchdog in the dark chambers of the girl’s mind, a watchdog baring its teeth at Kearney. ”

“ For a moment she had felt it on that night when the point of Laminai’s spear killed taminan and self in her and she had flung passion away only to be seized by it again in the arms of Taori.
Since then life had been a dream almost without thought, a happiness whose only stain was the far-off vision of Karolin.
Now alone, with the branches moving above her in the wind, she knew what love really was, the crudest gift the gods ever gave to man, and the most beautiful; the most terrible, and yet the most benign. ”

“ It is the one unnatural thing in Nature whose soul is movement, stress, storm.
The groves stood in stereoscopic stillness and the great sea beyond the reef had lowered its song. The rumour of the surf seemed far away, yet in reality was only diminished.
Lestrange, before going to bed, was sitting having a talk with the sailor.
Kearney, well fed, with a pipe in his mouth and his back to a tree, was in the mood for talk, unknowing of the things that might come, released from that fear of life and the future which is the birthright of every man who changes a dollar. ”

“ During the first few months his mind was so busy, so intrigued with the new surroundings, so intent on completing the house, clearing the yam patch of weeds and finishing what the lost children had left undone, that time passed as it passed for Kearney. Then, gradually, and as though time were losing the feathers of his wings one by one, the days began to lengthen for Lestrange.
The glorious vision that had brought him such assurance and comfort, had it been born after all of dementia, of that compensating madness which turns grief sometimes into indifference or laughter? ”

“ It was nine o’clock in the morning, and when they reached the reef and tied up, the sea was half out and the pools showed, flashing like shields in the morning sun.
Spray and the fume of beach filled the air, and the crying of gulls, and the everlasting murmur of the surf. Out here one’s environment was completely altered: the still lagoon, the mirrored trees, the foliage and earth scents changing to thunderous sea, blinding coral and sea breeze scented by beach and wave. There the coloured birds passed softly across the groves, here the sea gulls charged down the wind. ”

“ And now, minute by minute, rising like Aphrodite from the sea, the island before them bloomed to life. With every lift of the swell, the gull-strewn barrier reef showed its foam, whilst ever more distinctly beyond the reef, green and fair, grew the foliage, changing in depth of emerald to the touch of the wind.
Stanistreet had taken the wheel, Bowers the lookout, and the Ranatonga, no longer dead before the wind, was travelling on a bow line that would take her a mile to eastward of the land. The break in the reef lay to the east. ”

“ It was near here that she had anchored when the squall struck the canoe, driving her from Karolin, but to-night there was no danger of squalls. The wind had sunk to a steady breathing from the north, and the swell had fallen to a gentle heave that rocked the little boat like a cradle to the lullaby of the surf.
Dick, tired out, had fallen asleep lying in the bottom of the boat, clasped by the girl, just as his father had fallen asleep long years ago clasped by Emmeline and death. ”

“ Karolin had drawn close to her and drawn away again, perhaps for ever, but Karolin was only a thought. Something deeper than thought had her in its grip, something that had risen in her mind to destroy Dick just as Nanawa had risen from the sea to destroy Kearney.
Once a law becomes part of the human mind, it becomes a living thing capable of good and evil, and the law of taminan implanted in the mind of Katafa, though simple as the law of gravity, became capable of profound effects—became, in fact, a beast of prey.
Thou shalt not touch another nor be touched. ”

“ The dinghy turned the last cape into a world of light. The schooner, fired by accident or design and straining at her anchor chain, was blazing against the night like a bonfire. Lagoon, reef and woods were lit broad as by day and, crossing the roar of the flames, the shouting of the reef gulls came mixing with the yelling from the beach, where a hundred black forms danced and sang and screeched, mad with the black joy of rum and destruction. ”

“ At night, especially when the moon was away, you could see the lagoon fish, like ghostly shadows, beneath the water. The phosphorescence varied. To-night it was intense, and as the pala vanished, a garfish flashed along, chased by a bream thrice its size. The bream seized the garfish in a whirl of phosphorescent light.
It was like a fight between fireworks, fading off in a luminous mist. As the attacked and attacker drove farther up the pool, the mist remained for a moment, slowly fading and dispersing. It was blood. ”

“ Lestrange, with a piece of crab on his hook, leaned over the gunnel, gazing at the painted world below; just as the child was occupied with its play, so was he and so was Jim Kearney with their fishing. A shoal of tiny fish, the whole school not bigger than one’s hand, would pass like a silver cloud, its shadow following across the coral and sand patches; then a scarus with moving gills would circle, nose the bait and pass, fish and shadow suddenly and utterly dissolved from sight. ”

“ Stepping the mast with the sail lightly brailed and ready to break out, he took the sculls, and the moonlit glade and the cape of wild cocoanuts passed behind them out of sight for ever.
And now as they moved swiftly, great ripples running out from the divided water and spreading towards bank and reef, Katafa, who was steering, saw something beyond the tree-tops, a rose-red, pulsating light that seemed fighting the light of the moon, and, above the light, smoke like blown hair streaming on the wind towards the south ”

“ Not quite a man, he was greater than a man. Fresh from the hand of Nature that had moulded and wrought on his father and mother, not quite civilized, not quite a savage, a poet might have seen in him the youth of the world, the dawn of man before cities arose to cast their shadows on him, before civilisation created savages.
Neither of them saw the long years of companionship during which they had worked as shipbuilders together, the storms and incidents by shore and reef—it was all as nought. Katafa had brought a new interest to Dick. Age and laziness had done their work with Kearney. ”

“ The natural law of compensation gave to the isolated one fearlessness and the power to stand alone, and to the one who had no use for a soul the lightness of spirit and waywardness of a bird, the irresponsibility of the flower moved by the wind. Katafa—well was she named as she stood there, her mind roving with the frigate birds across the sunset-tinged waters of the lagoon. ”

“ The first chill touch, perhaps, of that sanity whose home is the commonplace, the sanity that knows nothing of visions, that questions, turns over and doubts. Who knows? But as time went on, expectancy began to take on the tinge of doubt.
Sitting reading by the house you might have seen Lestrange pause in his reading and glance round—a step—no, only a leaf blown by the wind. Sometimes at night Kearney would see him wandering by the lagoon side, a figure clearly defined in the starlight, walking with head bowed and hands behind its back, not a happy figure. ”

“ Dick, coming on the body, disengaged the spear and, carrying it slanted over his shoulder, came along down, taking the track that Manua, Leopa and Talia had taken the night before as they raced howling with terror and driven by imagination to their death.
Nothing could be more peaceful than the woods this morning. The great wind, broken by the hill, had left scarcely a trace, the morning breeze left scarcely a sound louder than the rainy patter of leaf on leaf. Bursting from beneath the great apron leaves of a bread-fruit, Dick suddenly found his path barred by a brown, naked man on all fours. ”

“ A great sea current is a world of its own and, like the Kuro Shiwo, this northern drift carried with it its own peculiar people. Jellyfish from the far south, albacores from the Gambier grounds, turtle drowsing or asleep on its surface, sometimes a shoal of flying fish, like shaftless arrow-heads of silver shot by invisible marksmen, would pass, flittering into the water ahead; once, uprunning a steeper wall of the swell, she glimpsed a shark cradled in the glossy green like a fish in ice or a faun in amber. ”

“ The silent woods stood firm; the reef beyond the lagoon sent the selfsame whisper; the wind lifting the foliage failed and died. Nature, before the terrific threat of Karolin, seemed to have fallen asleep till Ma, like the knight before the enchanted castle, seizing the great conch, blew the signal for war, blew with one mighty and prolonged breath till the whorls of the conch nearly split asunder, till the howling, bubbling echoes came back from strand and hill-top and wind and sea. ”

“ Never had the lagoon looked more beautiful, glass-smooth, except where the vast bulk moved half submerged, escorted by the gulls whose reflection flew white on the surface, and whose shadows on the floor seemed phantom birds circling amidst the shark shadows and the shadows of the dogfish.
Then, as Dick watched, little by little the dying cachalot gained speed; rising on the water as the momentum increased, the great bulk showed clear, moving in the circle that Nature has prescribed for all creatures dazed or confused. ”

“ A world lies around you of which you know nothing. It belongs to Taori; never shall you enter it.”
She looked up at the birds, happy and building, heedless of the terror that had just passed and vanished. She looked at the pool, still murky, its surface spangled with prismatic colours where streaks of oil had spread. She looked at the far-off reef and the sea beyond, and she saw nothing but Taori, that beautiful lithe form, that face, fearless and ever seeming to look upwards, those eyes full of sight for all things but her. ”

“ Here on the beach was a new prospect and a new enchantment. Fair as the vision of the island seemed from the water, who could say that this was not fairer? For distance stood on the far reef beyond the lonely and unutterable blue of the broad lagoon, and beyond the reef break distance led the eye to the rim of an almost purple sea. There was nothing to break the charm or fetter the eye, not even the Ranatonga mirroring herself near the reef, nor the boat, the creak of whose oars came lazily across the water ”

“ Weeks vanished, the days flighting from east to west like gorgeous birds, born in purple dawns and vanishing in amber sunsets, but no word came—nothing but the voice of the bearded sea mumbling on the reef, and the wind in the coco-palms, and the challenge of the gulls.
Uta lost touch with life. For days he would neither speak nor eat. Then, one morning, he called for Le Juan, and she came, her knees knocking together.
“Well,” said Uta in a voice suddenly grown strong again, “what have you done with my men? What have you done with Laminai, my son, with his son and the men who went with him? ”

“ He almost forgot Katafa; love and passion were nothing for a moment as the blaze of anger broke up again in his mind—the fury of the man who has been attacked and who has killed his attacker, the rage of the defenceless man who, being unarmed, has had to run.
Telling Katafa not to move from the hill-top till his return, he slipped down from the rock and ran towards the groves. Laminai, spear and all, had been blown by a last gust of the great wind in amongst the trees. ”