THE MONTHS PASS
Under the sea surface lies a world ruled by laws of which we know little
or nothing. We know that the shoals have roads that they follow, and
that some master law keeps the balance so that the ocean’s population is
checked and restrained to certain limits; that the palu change their
feeding ground for some mysterious reason, and that for some other
reason equally mysterious the lagoons are poisoned periodically so that
the fish become uneatable; but no man knows how or why the poisoner uses
his art, or why, as in the instance of Palm Tree, some lagoons are
immune.
No one can tell why the fish run small at times, as they had been
running in Palm Tree lagoon, where the big bream had taken themselves
off of late, and the schnapper and garfish rarely scaled more than a few
pounds.
Nan, on the southern reef, grinning out to sea, had done nothing, and as
the months passed, sliding away in long ribbons of coloured days, Dick
from time to time rubbed the fact in, Katafa saying nothing. She was not
expecting bream. She was expecting the long canoes from Karolin, and as
the months passed and they did not come, she might have lost heart, only
that she had something else to think about—Dick.
The relationship between the two had altered subtly.
For a long time—some three months or so—Dick had remembered Kearney,
wondering what had become of him, even hunting about the woods
spasmodically in the chance of coming on him. Dick knew nothing of
death. Kearney had gone, that was all. But where?
This incessant reference to “Kea’n’y” had stirred something in the
girl’s mind against Dick, a vague antagonism of the type that had been
bred by Kearney before he hit her on the back with the tia wood ball.
On Karolin she had never felt antagonism or hatred to any one of the
human phantoms that surrounded her. It had been reserved for Kearney, by
his attempt to hit her with the seaweed stick and his success in hitting
her with the ball, to humanise her to the point of being able to feel
aversion and hate.
This antagonism against Dick was helped by the fact that he had put her
in her place. Without a direct word, yet in a hundred little ways, he
made her feel that he was the superior being, or thought himself so.
Keeping still to her shack in the trees, she yet came to meals just as
she had done on the morning after Kearney’s disappearance, taking her
seat boldly, close to the boy, and showing no trace of the old
diffidence and humility, but, unchivalrous as a dog, Dick gave her the
worst of the fish and, whilst reserving to himself the high office of
cleaning the plates, gave her the rubbish on a leaf to fling into the
lagoon. Fishing, out in the boat and on the reef, it was the same. Dick
first, Katafa nowhere.
That is perhaps how sex first came between these two, making a foot-mat
of the female for the use of his lordship, Dick; sex, a law of Nature
from the workings of which Katafa was for ever barred out by _taminan_.
The law which Le Juan had implanted in her subconsciousness, condemning
her to eternal isolation, had shown its teeth at Kearney because he had
attempted to touch her. Was it showing its teeth at Dick because he was
a man?
Katafa only knew that Dick was going the way of Kearney in her mind,
turning from an almost abstraction into something she could resent and
dislike for some reason that she could not fathom, for he had never made
any attempt to touch her.
One day, when Dick had taken the dinghy fishing away beyond the cape, he
returned elate and triumphant.
“Katafa!” shouted he as he brought the boat up to the bank. “The big
fish have come!”
The girl, lying in the shade of the trees by the house, sprang to her
feet. The vision of Karolin flashed before her eyes, destroying
everything for a moment; then she came running to the bank.
“Where are they?” cried she.
“There,” replied Dick, pointing to the boat, where a brace of big bream
lay, red and silver in the sunlight.
It was like a blow between the eyes.
She sat crouched on the bank, watching him with a dark look on her face
as he hauled them on shore. Nan had fooled her nicely, but her animosity
was not against Nan but Dick, and next day, when he went off gaily with
a single fish spear to the reef, he found that the point had been
blunted, the fishing lines began to break without apparent reason, and a
lobster hung up one night was gone in the morning.
If he had chewed gum, his gum would have gone into the lagoon after the
lobster. It was the same old game she had played with Kearney, and, like
Kearney, Dick suspected nothing of what it all meant—or what it
portended.