NAN
“Jim!” cried Dick. “Hai amonai—Jim—where you gone to?”
He was standing before the house in the early sunlight; he had just come
out and Kearney was nowhere to be seen. A breeze had broken the heat,
and the absolute loveliness of the morning found reflection in the soul
of the boy.
The far-off sea that would be purple at noon lay like smashed sapphires
beyond the reef. The lagoon, whipped by the breeze, showed colours
unimaginable by man, colours that seemed to live by their own intrinsic
brilliancy, stretching from the luminous blue of the near pools to the
purples and mauves of the submerged rotten coral beyond which lay the
dancing sapphire that washed the reef line.
Over all, the breeze, the flower-blue sky and the gulls.
But Kearney was nowhere to be seen.
Then, as Dick called again, the girl came out from the trees at the
opposite side of the sward, fresh from a dip in the lagoon beyond the
cape, and with a scarlet flower in her hair, which was tied back with a
bit of thread liana.
She crossed the sward, and the boy, seeing her, bothered himself no
longer about Kearney, and set to preparing for breakfast. Had he not
been so busy he might have noticed a difference in her. She walked
assuredly and with a carelessness and an ease that were new to her. In
ordinary times she would come for her food as an animal might come, an
animal not quite tamed, and vaguely distrustful, take her seat at a
little distance, and wait meekly, yet watchfully, for the dispensations
of Providence. It was different now. She came close up to Dick and,
without offering in the least to help, stood watching him, taking her
seat when the meal was ready as close as “Kea’ney” had sat, and helping
herself to the food without waiting to be helped.
Even Dick, satisfying his voracious appetite, noticed the change in her
now. He did not know what it was in the least and he didn’t bother to
think, yet in some curious way it disturbed him.
With Kearney there, he and Katafa had always been subordinates; between
subordinates there is always a bond, a league, however vague and
unwritten, against the master. Youth had helped, and the two had made a
little society of their own, with Dick as leader. This relationship had
been strangely disturbed this morning by the absence of Kearney and by
the actions of Katafa, who was doing things she had never done before,
sitting in a different attitude and speaking in a new tone of assurance
and indifference. Dick almost felt that something had happened to
himself—something had.
She had been accustomed to help in clearing away after meals, but this
morning she just sat and watched. There was not much clearing to be
done, but Kearney had always been particular that no scraps or fish
bones were left about to bring the robber crabs round scavenging or the
gulls. A dirty camp has always followers, so the scraps were shot into
the lagoon; then the plates had to be cleaned and put away on their
shelf in the house.
Dick, thinking she was maybe lazy or tired, did not bother. He finished
his business and stamped out the fire, reckoning that if Kearney wanted
food when he came back he could cook it for himself—but where had
Kearney gone to, and why was he so long away?
He had not taken the dinghy. The little boat was moored at its usual
place by the bank. He must have gone off in the woods.
“Katafa,” said Dick, after running to the boat to see if Kearney had
taken the fishing tackle, always kept in a little locker in the stern
sheets, “what makes Kearney so long away? He has not taken the lines to
fish with from the boat.”
“Perhaps,” said Katafa, “he is on the reef.”
“No,” replied the boy, “for he has not taken the boat.”
“Perhaps he is amongst the tall trees.”
Dick half shook his head as if in doubt. Then, raising his voice, he
cried again:
“Hai, amonai—Jim! Hai! Hai!”
A far-off echo in the trees caught the hail and sent it back. “Hai!
hai!”—faint, yet clear came the echo, dying off to a silence troubled
only by the sound of the reef.
“He answers,” said Katafa, “but he is too far away, he cannot come.”
There was a grove on the south beach of Karolin that had an echo; call
there and you would hear the spirits of the departed answering you,
jeering you in your own voice. She did not believe that the spirit of
Kearney was answering Dick; some old spirit of the grove, maybe, but not
Kearney. She knew that Kearney was not among the trees, and she spoke in
mockery.
Dick knew that it was only an echo. He gave another shout and then,
dropping the business as a bad job and Kearney from his mind, ran off to
the boat to overhaul the fishing tackle. When he had finished he came
back for her to go fishing and found her busy with a huge old
grandfather cocoanut and one of the Barlow knives salved from the wreck.
She must have gone into the house to get the knife, but Dick never
thought of that; the work she was on held him. She had frayed away the
brown husk into a sort of frill and was busy now on the face of it,
making eyes in it and the semblance of a nose and mouth.
A new idea had come to Katafa, a common-sensical idea, and it was this.
Nanawa was the active god of Karolin; frightful, capricious, striking
right and left when invoked, and sometimes hitting the invoker. She had
brought him to her twice, and the first time he had roared over the
lagoon and broken her canoe, angry no doubt at having been balked by the
god of the little ships; the second time, last night, he was much more
satisfactory in his behaviour. But Katafa had a dim suspicion that, had
he not found Kearney and taken him to himself, he would have found her,
and this suspicion was perfectly well founded—he would. She determined
not to deal with him again.
Now, on Karolin there was another god, Nan, very old, amiable, the
president of the cocoanut groves, the puraka patches and the pandanus
trees; a sort of minister of agriculture, but much beloved, honoured and
fêted. Nan, in fact, was more than a god; he was the symbol of Karolin,
just as the British flag is the symbol of Britain. His old
carved-cocoanut face was to be found in all the houses, and the sight of
it to a Karolinite was as the sight of the Union Jack to an Englishman.
Katafa’s idea was to make a symbol of Nan and stick it up on the
southern reef. The common-sensical part of the business was the idea of
using the deity as a signal. If any fishing canoe from Karolin were to
sight that effigy erected on the reef, it would come in to explore, and,
if Katafa knew anything of the Karolinites, it would not leave till the
whole place had been searched for the persons who had dared to erect the
image of the cocoanut god on an alien shore. For not only would they
consider that the god had been trifled with, which was bad, but that his
virtue had been diluted, which was worse. He belonged exclusively to
Karolin, and if he went spending his powers on other islands it would be
all the worse for Karolin.
Dick watched the girl as she sat working away on a business as bloody
and desperate as that of filling a shell with high explosive. Any little
trifling thing beyond the routine of daily life would interest Dick, and
now, squatting on his heels, the fishing utterly forgotten, he followed
every movement of the knife as it worked away at the mouth of the deity,
which was anything but an imitation of a rosebud.
“What are you doing that for?” asked he.
“You were saying but yesterday that the fish were growing smaller in the
lagoon,” replied she, glancing with head aside at the progress of her
work, as a woman might glance at a picture she is painting.
“I know,” he replied, “but what are you doing that for?”
“This will bring big fish to the lagoon,” replied she darkly.
She saw, as she spoke, not the grotesque ju-ju she was gazing at, but
the sun-blaze on the waters of Karolin, the azure and chatoyancy of
those depths where the gulls were always fishing, the great distances,
where a mind could soar in freedom, resting on nothing, caring for
nothing, heedless of everything. She saw the wind and the sun and the
breakers falling on the coral. For the people there she had no more
feeling than she had for Dick or the departed Kearney; they were to her
only as shadows or ghosts. The place was everything.
Perhaps the old Egyptians knew how to practise the _taminan_ tabu and
used it on cats with partial effect or an effect that has worn out
through the ages—cats, for whom places are more real than people, who
live in so strange a world of their own, almost beyond human touch.
She could see, as she worked, the big canoes landing and taking her
back. As for what they might do to Dick, she neither thought nor cared.
“But how?” asked Dick.
“I will show you,” said she; “but first get me what I want.”
She gave him some directions and off he went to the groves, taking the
axe with him, returning in half an hour or so dragging after him an
eight-foot sapling, straight as a fishing rod, four inches thick at the
base and tapering gradually to its extremity.
She examined the point of the sapling. Then, making a hole at the base
of the cocoanut, she drove the point in so that the thing was fixed on
tight. Then between them they carried the affair to the dinghy, placed
it long-ways with the frightful face staring down at the water over the
stern, got in, and pushed off.
Dick sculled under her direction, using the oars with a will, and,
vastly intrigued with this new game of attracting big fish, he half
expected to see them coming after the boat or coming up the lagoon,
lured by this strange bait. Nothing appeared, however; the dinghy passed
unfollowed down the long arm of the lagoon, passed the break and the
vision of blazing sea beyond, reached the southern part of the reef, and
tied up.
The wind was fresh this morning and the waves on the outer beach of the
reef came in curving and clear as if cut from aquamarine, bursting in
snow and thunder, sheeting over the coral and sucking back only to form
and burst again. The breeze brought the spray and the mewing of the
gulls and the scent of a thousand square leagues of sea. Katafa, her
hair blowing in the wind, stood for a moment looking south—south, where
Karolin lay—the great lagoon, in its forty-mile clip of reef, sending
its fume and song to the sky, and the sun making haze of the distances.
Then she turned to Dick, who was standing beside her, supporting Nan.
He could not tell yet how the bait was to be used. With the common sense
born in him from his father, he was beginning to suspect the whole
business as being unpractical. However, he said nothing, and when she
began to search about for a crack in the coral or some convenient hole
to take the base of the sapling, he helped. They found one some three
feet deep, erected the pole, secured it from rocking with lumps of loose
coral and sand, and then stood to look at their work. The thing was
hideous, fantastic and stamped with the seal of the South Seas. The
breeze blew the frill on the thing’s head and, as the sapling swayed
slightly in the wind, the grotesque and grinning head seemed nodding
towards Karolin.
“Ehu!” cried Dick. “But how will that bring the big fish?”
“They will come from there,” said Katafa, pointing south.
Dick looked towards the south. He saw nothing but sea, gulls and sky.
Then he turned to the dinghy, the girl following him.