OUT OF THE SEA
That morning, three hours after sun-up and half an hour after breakfast,
Fate and Mr. Kearney had a difference of opinion.
The bananas were ripe on the eastern side of the island and he had
arranged in his mind to go and fetch a bunch, taking the quickest
way—that is to say, right over the hill-top instead of round by the
lagoon edge—but he was lazy and disposed to put the business off to a
more convenient time. He would have made Dick row him round in the
dinghy, only that Dick wanted the boat for purposes of his own beyond on
the reef.
Sitting with his back against a tree bole, he could see the figure of
the boy away out on the coral; the amethyst and azure lagoon, the reef
with the moving figure upon it and a touch of purple sea beyond, all
made a picture as soothing as it was lovely on that perfect and almost
windless morning.
But Kearney was not thinking of the beauty of the scene. Bananas were
bothering him; he did not want to move, and they were calling on him to
get on his legs, cross the island, cut them and fetch them.
Ten years of island life had altered Kearney almost as much as they had
altered Dick. Always on the look-out for a ship during the first three
years, he would not have left the island to-day unless shifted with a
derrick. He had grown into the life, grown lazy and stout and
grizzled—and moral. A most extraordinary type of beach-comber. The child
and the island, the sun and the easy way of life, had all conspired in
this work upon him. He had no hankerings now after bar-rooms; without
tobacco for years, he had taken to chewing gum, finding plenty of it in
the woods, and he had devised several innocent and non-laborious
amusements for himself and the child, among others, ship building. The
very first act of Kearney when they had landed on the island had been
the cutting of a little boat for Dick from a bit of wood. He could do
anything with a knife and one day, some six years ago, when time was
hanging heavy, the saving idea came to him of constructing a model of
the lost _Ranatonga_. It took him nearly eight months to accomplish, but
it was a beauty when finished, with sails of silk made from an old shirt
of Lestrange’s and a leaden keel constructed from the lead wrappings of
a tea chest which he managed to melt down.
They took it over and sailed it on the reef pool where the nautilus
fleet had once floated, and next day he set to work on another, a
frigate this time. Four ships altogether had left the stocks of the
Kearney-Dick combination, and meanwhile three real ships had touched the
island, two whalers and a sandalwood schooner. The whalers Kearney had
carefully avoided; the sandalwood schooner had come up in the arms of a
hurricane, smashed herself to pieces on the reef, drowned every soul on
board of her and left the coral littered with trade goods, bolts of
cloth enough to clothe a village, boxes of beads, cheap looking-glasses,
dull Barlow knives—everything but tobacco.
Having contemplated the lagoon, the reef and the moving figure of Dick
for a while, Kearney suddenly shifted his position, rose, stretched
himself and, fetching a case knife from the shelf in the house, turned
towards the trees. The bananas had conquered. Passing through the woods,
he struck uphill till he reached the summit, where he paused for a
moment to rest, a figure not unlike that of Robinson Crusoe, standing
with his hand on the great summit rock and gazing far and wide across
the ocean.
Then he shaded his eyes. Far off on the dead calm sea a canoe was
drifting; two miles away it might have been to the south and perhaps
half a mile to the east. The land wind had died off completely and the
tiny sail hung without a stir. He could not tell at that distance
whether it had any occupants. Brown, like a withered leaf on the water,
it lay drifting with the current that would take it past the island just
as it had taken the dinghy with the lost children of Lestrange.
Kearney gazed for a full minute, then, turning, he came running downhill
and back through the trees to the lagoon edge. Dick was still in view;
Kearney hailed him, waving his arms, and the boy, understanding that he
was wanted, left the business he was on, ran to the dinghy and, untying
her, pushed across.
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.”
Kearney saw only the red-headed boy whom he had watched growing up, and
who had been a handful in his way ever since he had been big enough to
row the dinghy.
“There’s a boat beyond the reef,” cried Kearney, stepping into the
dinghy. “Now get aft with you and give me the sculls. I’m go’n’ to try
’n’ fetch it in.”
“A boat—where y’ say?” asked the boy.
“Out beyond the reef,” replied the other, pushing off. “Ship the tiller
an’ keep us close to the bank. I’ve not time for talkin’!”
Dick shipped the tiller and steered whilst the other put all his
strength into his stroke. They passed the little cape, nearly brushing
the trees, and then down the long arm of the lagoon stretching to the
east. It was slack tide, just before the flood, and the water was calm
at the break. They shot through, taking the heave of the glassy swell,
and there, drifted now quarter of a mile to the north, was the canoe,
the sail still hanging without a stir.
“There’s someun in her,” cried Dick.
Kearney took a glance over his shoulder and saw the figure of the girl,
who had tried to make the break with her single paddle and failed. She
was standing, holding on to the mast and looking towards them, a form
graceful as the new moon, naked but for her girdle of dracæna leaves and
with her free hand sheltering her eyes against the sun.
As they drew closer her voice came across the water clear as a bell and
hailing them in some unknown language.
“It’s a girl!” cried Kearney.
“What’s a girl?” asked Dick, so filled with excitement over this new
find that he was forgetting to steer.
“It’s a female—mind your steerin’—you’re a mile to starboard—there, let
it be and I’ll manage meself.”
The girl, as they drew close, ran forward and seized the anchor rope; it
had parted a good way from its fastening and there were some four
fathoms of it left. She stood with it coiled in her hand and as the
dinghy approached, she sent the coil flying towards them, straight and
sure. Then, as Kearney caught it, she darted aft and seized the steering
paddle, crying out in answer to the sailor’s questions in the same
strange bell-like voice, but in a tongue dark to her saviours as Hebrew.
“Kanaka,” said Kearney, “but she knows her business. Dick, leave that
boat huk down—we aren’t boardin’ her. We’ll tow her in—catch hold of the
rope.”
He got the sculls in, fastened the rope end to the after-thwart, and
then started to work towing the canoe’s head round.
Though Dick had asked Kearney what a girl was, it was the word he was
enquiring about, not the thing. The stupid old story of the boy who saw
girls for the first time at a fair, was told that they were ducks, and
then expressed his desire for a duck, has no foundation in psychology.
Life is cleverer than that. Dick saw in Katafa a young creature
something like himself. Descended from a thousand generations of people
who knew all about girls, his subconscious mind accepted Katafa’s
structural differences without question; she was far less strange to him
than the canoe. His ancestors had never seen a South Sea canoe. This
strange, savage, mosquito-like structure, with its bindings of cocoanut
sennit and its mat-sail, fascinated the boy far more than its occupant.
To him, truly, it was like nothing earthly; the outrigger alone was a
mystery and the whole thing a joy, a joy delightfully tinged with
uneasiness, for the absolutely new is disturbing to the soul of man or
beast. As he rowed, Kearney noticed that the girl was chewing something
in the way of food, and once he saw her bend and take up a drinking
cocoanut and put it to her mouth, a fact that eased his mind, bothered
by the idea that she might be starving. The tide was beginning to flood.
It swept them through the break and as the dinghy turned up the right
arm of the lagoon, the tow rope now tautening, now smacking the water,
it was the girl’s turn to be astonished. The tall trees from outside the
reef had seemed monstrous to her eyes, accustomed only to the flat
circle of the atoll, but here, inside the reef, the density of the
foliage, the unknown plants, the unknown smells, the trees sweeping up
to heaven almost terrified her, brave though she was; the only familiar
and comforting thing was the reef and its voice—but those trees in their
hundreds and thousands, climbing on each other’s shoulders!
Steering with her paddle, she kept the canoe in line with the dinghy,
the wild cocoanut almost brushing her as they turned the little cape;
then, as they came alongside the bank, she sprang out and stood, her
arms crossed and a hand on each shoulder, watching, whilst the others
landed and Kearney tied the boats up.
“Now then, Kanaka girl,” said Mr. Kearney, as he rose from this business
and approached her, followed cautiously by the boy, “what’s yer
name?—Jim,” pointing to his breast with his thumb. “I’m Jim—Jim.—What’s
yourn, eh?”
She understood at once.
“Katafa,” came the reply; then, swift as a rippling stream, “Te tataga
Karolin po uli agotoimoana—Katafa.”
“Ain’t no use,” replied Mr. Kearney. “Tie a clove hitch in it and we’ll
call you Jimmy. Want some food? God bless my soul, where’s the use in
talkin’ to her? Here you, Dick, come along an’ get the fire goin’. Come
along, Kanaka girl.” He clapped her on the shoulder—made to do so, but
his hand touched nothing but empty air.
“Well, I’m damned,” said Kearney. He had got the shock of his life. It
was not the fact that she had evaded him, but the manner of the evasion.
His hand had missed the shoulder, driven it away, seemingly, as wind
moves a curtain; yet she had scarcely moved and her face and attitude
had not altered in the least. She seemed quite unconscious of what had
happened, and the man who has ever tried to touch a taminanite will know
exactly the feeling of Mr. Kearney as he turned to make the fire,
followed by Dick.
Katafa drew closer; then, at a certain distance, she squatted down and
watched them at work. She had no fear of men or ghosts. Human beings and
ghosts were things equally remote to Katafa, who could touch or be
touched by neither.
Infected by Le Juan and filled with wild fancies, or maybe endowed with
psychic powers, she had seen the “men who leave no footprints” walking
in the sun-blaze of Karolin. There was a sandy cove eight or nine miles
from the break and here with Taori, the second son of Laminai, she had
watched them walking like people astray and bewildered.
She had flung stones through them, Taori wondering and seeing nothing.
At night, had you possessed the eyes of the Spanish girl, you would have
seen in the dark of the moon, and at a certain hour, a man swimming in
the starlight from the old anchorage of the Pablo Poirez towards the
break, leaving a trail in the starlight, always at the same hour and
always in the same direction; and sometimes on these nights fires would
spring up on the reef where it trended to the west, lit by no man’s
hand, for no man was there.
But Palm Tree to her eyes seemed free of anything like this. Amongst the
gifts presented by the wreck were three or four tin cases of Swedish
matches, enough to last for years. Kearney had discarded the tinder-box
and he was lighting the fire with a box of matches, a fact more
interesting than bonnets to Katafa as she squatted, watching his every
movement.
Then, when the food was ready and Dick had fetched some water from the
little spring at the back of the yam patch, Kearney called to the
“Kanaka girl” to pull in her chair.
She came within a couple of yards, but would come no further, squatting
on her heels in an attitude that gave her freedom to spring away at a
moment’s notice. Kearney stretched over with some food on a plate for
her, then he handed a cocoanut bowl with some water in it. Then he began
on his own meal. He seemed put out.
“She ain’t right,” said Mr. Kearney, as though communing with himself.
“What ain’t right, Jim?” asked the boy, a fish in his fingers. “Why
ain’t she right, Jim? What’s the matter she can’t talk?”
The only things he had ever heard Kearney address as “she” were the
ships they made. Katafa had in some way taken in his mind a tinge from
those delightful ships; she was a “she.” The canoe helped; it was hers.
Now that the canoe was half out of sight, hidden by the bank, and Katafa
sitting there close to him, she fascinated him. His passionate love of
the sea, of the dinghy, of the little ships, of everything connected
with the water, all lent colour to this strange new being who had come
up out of the sea in that thing—it was almost as if she had a keel on
her. He would have loved to make friends, but he was too shy as yet and
she couldn’t talk so that he could understand.
He set his teeth in the fish.
“Lord, I dunno,” said Kearney, his recent experience hot in his mind,
yet unable to explain it in speech. “She ain’t like other folk. There,
don’t be askin’ questions, but get on with your dinner. Maybe it’s just
she’s a Kanaka.”
“What’s a Kanaka, Jim?”
“You get on with your dinner and don’t be askin’ questions.”
The sociable meal proceeded, Katafa “tuckin’ into the food” with a good
appetite, but with an eye ever on Kearney. Kearney, by his attempts to
clap her on the shoulder, had laid the foundation of a lot of trouble
for himself. He had raised against him the something that Le Juan had
bred in the subconscious mind of the girl.
No man, woman or child on Karolin had ever tried to touch her. She was
tabu to them, as they to her. The art of avoidance, which was as natural
and unconscious to her as the art of walking, had always been exercised
against an accidental touch. Kearney had done what no one else had ever
done, tried to touch her.
But if you think that she reasoned this out in her mind, you would be
far from the truth. 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.
Katafa had evaded the friendly blow of Kearney just as on Karolin she
had often evaded the touch of hands in the pulling in of a fishing net,
instantaneously and all but unconsciously, but the difference was vast.
Kearney had placed himself among a new order of beings by his act. His
clothes helped. She had never seen any one in trousers and shirt before.
Decidedly this strange bearded man required watching.
Dick was different. For all his red head and straight nose and
strange-coloured eyes he might have been a boy of Karolin.
She finished her food. Kearney had given her a plate, one of the few
unbroken of those Stanistreet had left behind for them. It had flowers
painted on it and the thing intrigued her vastly. It seemed to her a new
sort of shell, and when the sailor rose, replete and drowsy, and went
off for his siesta in a comfortable spot amidst the trees, Dick, who had
received instructions to “clear up them things an’ give’s a call if she
tries to meddle with the boats,” saw Katafa furtively trying to scratch
one of the flowers off the plate.
“They’re painted on,” said Dick, suddenly losing his shyness. “You can’t
get them things off.” Finding his voice gave him courage, and getting on
his legs, he ran off to the house, returning in a minute with one of the
ships, a frigate. Kearney had made rests for each one to stand on, and
he carried the frigate, rest and all, and placed it close by her on the
ground.
“Ain’t like yours,” said Dick, reclining beside it and handling the tiny
spars so that she might see how they swung. “It’s a fridgit.”
The girl, appealed to in the language of ships and sitting on her heels,
regarded the little vessel with interest. In Karolin lagoon, two miles
beyond the break and in ten-fathom water, lay the hull of a sunk ship
that the Kanakas had burnt. She had knocked a hole in herself by
drifting on a reef, and the flames had only time to bring the masts down
before she sunk, and there she lay on an even keel, clear to be seen in
the crystal water and with the fish playing round her stern post.
The Karolin boys called her the big canoe of the papalagi. Katafa knew
nothing of her history or of its connection with herself, but the shape
was the same as the shape of the “fridgit”; only the masts were wanting.
“Look!” said Dick, showing how the yards were swung. “She’s
square-sailed, all but the mizzen, same’s your boat. You could reef ’em
up, only there ain’t any reef points; she’s too small, Jim says. This is
the rudder an’ tiller. You ain’t got no rudder to yours.” He looked up
at her. From her face and the interest in it, she seemed to understand.
She leaned forward and moved the tiny tiller with her finger tip. A
wheel was beyond Kearney’s art and the steering gear of Sir Cloudesley
Shovel’s ships had to suffice. Then she leaned further forward and blew
hard at the tiny main topsail, slinging the yard round.
“Matagi,” cried she, “O he amorai—Matagi.”
“That’s the way it goes!” cried Dick, pleased to find her so apt, and
talking just as though she were able to understand every word. “And when
you’re sailin’ close to the wind you haul it that way. That square
rig—wait a minit.”
He rushed off to the house and returned with the schooner, dumping it
before her.
“That’s fore ’n’ aft.”
Katafa looked at the model of the _Ranatonga_; with her head slightly on
one side, she seemed admiring it. Dick, watching her, felt pleased. Many
a grown-up English person, able to talk, would have failed in this
business or blundered in their appreciation of these important things,
but Katafa was one of the craft—seemed so, anyway—and Dick, old friends
with her now and free and easy as though she were Kearney, proceeded to
demonstrate the action of the throat and peak halyards in raising the
gaff, the topping lifts in supporting the boom, and how the head canvas
was set. Then, suddenly remembering duty, he ran back to the house with
the ships and set to work to clear away the remains of the food and the
three plates.
He did not wash the plates; he was too anxious to get busy again with
Katafa.
She had become all of a sudden the first great event of his life. She
could neither speak in ordinary language to him nor he to her—but she
was youth.
Though he had lived ten years with Kearney and though Kearney had
practically taught him to talk, the sailor had never got so close to him
as this creature of his own age who had suddenly appeared as if at the
lift of a curtain.
The instant Kearney had withdrawn, the spell had begun to work. It might
have been weeks before Dick would have shown those treasured ships to a
grown person.
As he bustled about, filled with a new energy and interest, Katafa, who
had risen to her feet, watched him. Light-minded and irresponsible as
the boy, there still lay between her and him an abyss that even youth
could not cross, the abyss that had lain between her and the children of
Karolin, with whom, yet, she had played, but as a person might play with
shadows. All the same, youth could gaze across the abyss, over which,
despite everything, the little ships had sailed. These things had
fascinated her; she could see more of them in the house, attractive as
toys, yet mysterious as fetishes—maybe having something to do with the
gods of Dick and Kearney.
Dick knew nothing of this. Duty done with, he made another dash for the
house, producing no ship this time, but a stick three feet long and a
ball made of tia wood.
Kearney had invented a game for him, a sort of cross between baseball
and cricket. The trunk of a jack-fruit tree on the grove edge did for
wickets, and the run was from this to an artu trunk and back.
Kearney, since he had grown lazy, had held off from this game, saying it
was “too much of a bother.”
“Catch!” cried Dick, throwing the ball to Katafa. She caught it, and he
held out his hands, and she flung it back hard and swift and sure. She
could throw a stone a hundred yards and throw it like a man.
He showed her the stick and, tossing the ball back to her, ran to the
tree, pointed to it, and then stood with the stick, ready to defend it.
She understood at once.
When Kearney came forth from his afternoon rest he found Dick tired out,
sitting by the house, and the girl by the lagoon bank, dabbling her feet
in the water. It looked almost as though they had quarrelled, but they
had not in the least. One of Dick’s moody fits had come on him, as they
often did after excitement or strenuous exertion. He was a different
creature from the Dick of only a moment ago, and when these fits took
him, it was always the same; he seemed caught away to another world, and
liked to sit by himself.
If ever a mother “came out” in a child, the lost Emmeline came out in
Dick during these moods. It was almost as though he had changed sex.
“What have you been doin’ with the stick?” asked Kearney.
“Playin’,” said Dick, waking from his reverie.