DAYBREAK
For a moment only.
Next day and for days after, Katafa, drawing apart from Dick, would sit
brooding, watchful, waiting, but wherever she might be, by the wood edge
or lagoon bank, if Dick were in sight her face would be turned towards
him, her eyes stealthily watching him.
She had forgotten Karolin. There was only one thing in the world now
that mattered to her—Dick.
Since the night when he had cried to her in his sleep for help,
everything else had ceased to matter, and her light-thinking mind had
become the wrestling-ground of two opposing forces.
The impulse to destroy Dick came at times in great waves up from the
darkest recesses of her mind, like the rollers from the storm that had
destroyed the _Ranatonga_. Yet the impulse always just failed of effect.
The terrible desire to destroy, and destroy with her own hand, had less
relationship to hatred than to irritation. Dick vexed her soul, or the
something dark that lay in her soul, and time and again she would almost
stretch out her hand towards the fish spear or the knife that, once
clasped, would have been driven into his heart.
_Taminan_ cried to her, “Seize it and destroy him!” and then the voice
of _taminan_ would turn into the voice of Dick: “Hai, amonai, Katafa!
Help!” and her hand would lose its power.
One day, when Dick was off hunting for turtle on the reef, the crisis
came and the evil thing in her heart triumphed.
The fear of Nanawa and danger to herself vanished and, rising up from
where she had been sitting beside the house, she put fresh fuel on the
cooking fire they had used for the midday meal and which had not been
put out.
Then, swift as Atalanta, she crossed the sward, dived amongst the leaves
and, fetching the skull from where she had hidden it, close to her
shack, returned with it, placed it on the ground before the fire, and,
piling on more fuel, stood like a beautiful priestess, her eyes on the
skull and her lips moving, repeating the old formula. “Come now, Nanawa,
powerful to kill or save, come now and fulfil the wish of my heart—the
wish of my heart—the wish of my heart—”
The formula ran from her lips, a string of meaningless words. The
something that had checked her hand was checking now her thinking power.
She could not put into thought the wish to destroy; just as yesterday,
she could not put the will into action.
Nanawa, that figment of a Kanaka’s fancy, was powerless against a real
god more terrible and cruel than any deity of man’s imagination—a god
that held Katafa now in his grip.
She put the fire out and hid the skull in the leaves. Then casting
herself down in the shadow of the trees, she lay balked, demagnetised,
impotent, looking at the lagoon water, the far-off reefs and the sky
beyond.
Above the house two birds were building, two blue parua birds, exquisite
in colour and form, fearless of man, and making their house again in the
same position they had chosen for numberless years.
These birds, long-lived as parrots, had seen the father and mother of
Dick build, mate, bring forth their young and depart; they had seen the
arrival of Lestrange, the growth of Dick, the coming of Katafa. They had
seen Lestrange waiting for his lost children, they had seen him vanish,
and now they had seen his skull laid on a strange altar. Verily they had
seen strange things, but the strangest lay below them on the sward in
the tree shadows of that slumbrous afternoon, for Katafa might have been
Emmeline, who had often lain there just like that, Emmeline with the
faithful flower still in her hair and her dark eyes fixed across the
lagoon on the mysterious sea beyond.
The birds, whilst friendly, had always held aloof, the noisy and
restless Dick managing to break somehow that thread of confidence which
had drawn them sometimes to swoop down and light on Emmeline’s shoulder
or hand.
Now, Dick away and Katafa lying absolutely motionless, one of the birds,
stirred, maybe, by some old memory, fluttered down on the sward close to
her, looked at her with bright eyes, picked up a bit of dried grass, and
flew up with it to the nest.
Again it came down and, the girl stretching out her hand to it, it lit
on her thumb, hopping at once back to the ground. She put her hand on
its blue, warm back, clasping it for a moment. It was the first
warm-blooded living thing she had ever touched, the first thing she had
handled without intent to kill, the first thing that had come to waken
the warmth of humanity in her heart—except that cry of Dick: “Hai,
amonai, Katafa! Help!”