THE CRISIS
Next morning Dick, who had spent the night hunting cachalots in
dreamland, came out to find Katafa lighting the fire for breakfast. She
seemed just the same as ever, save for the fact that she had no flower
in her hair, but a third person, had one been present, would have
noticed that her eyes evaded him, that she ate scarcely anything, and
sat mumchance as though some bitter quarrel had arisen between them.
Dick noticed nothing of all this. He did not even help to clear away and
tidy the place. He was off to see if there was anything left of the
cachalot, and as he picked up a spear and made away towards the opposite
trees, he shouted some words of directions to her which she did not
reply to. She seemed deaf as well as dumb, and when he was gone, instead
of clearing away the remains of the food and putting out the fire, she
turned on her side and lay with eyes half closed, scarcely breathing,
seemingly asleep. Her half-closed eyes were fixed on the point where
Dick had vanished among the trees—Dick, who, without a thought of her,
was making his way through the woods, now skirting the water side, now
plunging through the growths of mammee-apple and fern.
When he reached the beach, all traces of the cachalot were gone. Not a
sign remained of the great fight of yesterday. The gulls were fishing
just as of old, and the lagoon lay placid and untroubled, blue and
breezed and happy, to where the reef line whispered its eternal message
to the shore.
He saw Nan on his post away to the south. He remembered the “big fish,”
and a sudden respect for Nan and his power—perhaps the first dawn of a
religious feeling—came into his mind. Nan had brought the cachalot into
the lagoon as well as the big bream and schnapper, and as he stood by
the creaming ripples on the sand, he gave a nod of his head in the
direction of the gollywog as if in recognition.
Then he came plunging back through the trees. Nan had suddenly reminded
him of the sapling he had cut for his elevation, and the sapling of the
mast he had made for the dinghy.
He must get busy on that mast and sail—he had neglected them for
days—and, full of the fury of the newly released idea, he came bursting
out of the wood across the sward, making for the house and shack where
the sail was stowed. He would be able to sail the dinghy out beyond the
reef and hunt for bigger things. Unhappy Dick, he did not know of the
bigger thing that was feeling for him to grip him, of the hunting
awaiting him on that day.
Full of this idea, heedless of earth, sea, sky or Katafa, he came
running across the sward. The girl saw him coming and half rose, sitting
on her heels, a lovely picture in the tree shadows; a picture that might
have driven an artist to despair or drawn an anchorite from his cell; a
picture only to be matched by that of Dick as he ran, sunny-haired and
light of foot and swift as the wind.
One might have fancied him running towards her and have pictured the
embrace of these two most lovely of God’s creatures, but he passed her
as though she were a tree stump, vanished behind the house, and
reappeared in a minute dragging after him the ugly old mat sail. Casting
it on the ground, he made for the dinghy, seized the mast which he had
left lying in it, and came back with it on his shoulder, still running.
That was just like him. He would leave a thing undone for days, maybe
for weeks, and then, of a sudden, start on it, forgetful of everything
else.
There was some old rope and signal halyard line that Kearney had salved
from the wreck. This had to be fetched, also some tools from the tool
box; he fetched them himself and then, sitting down, happy and content,
he set to work and found his work cut out for him.
The sail was too big, it and the spar that carried it. With the sail and
spar spread out on the ground, he crawled about it on his hands and
knees, measuring it as against the mast.
Sometimes he would say a few words to the girl, heedless whether she
replied or not. Then, when he had been working some half hour or so,
looking up, he caught her eyes.
He was sitting with the sail spread on his knees and she was lying
opposite to him, resting on her arm. She had looked in his face a
thousand times before, straight as the sun looked at him or the lagoon,
but now, just before her eyes could evade him, he caught their glance,
caught the look on her face—something that vanished and became nothing
before his mind could fully seize it.
Pausing in his work, he looked at her for a moment without speaking. She
seemed to have forgotten his presence; her eyes, cast down under their
long lashes, were following some pattern her finger was tracing on the
ground, and her face showed no expression.
He went on with his business mechanically. His mind, so far from
straying, focused on the work in his hands. Every fibre of the mat that
differed in colour from the others impressed itself on his sight and
understanding. The stitches went in evenly spaced, as though made by
some unerring mechanism; Katafa might seemingly have been a thousand
miles away, and yet every fibre of the sail, every stitch he put in,
seemed part of the something strange that had suddenly come to him from
Katafa.
He worked with head bent as if lost in thought; then, pausing in his
work, he raised his head and looked at her, his lips pursed ever so
slightly, the trace of a wrinkle on his forehead.
She heard the stitches cease. Slowly raising her face, her eyes met his
fully, without flinching, steadfast, whilst with her eyes still clinging
to his, her breast rose with a sigh that died to a shudder. He had
dropped the needle from his hand and the sail from his knees. Leaning
forward with half-parted lips, his respiration ceased whilst her gaze
fell away languorously like the gaze of a dying person, only to be
raised again and plunged into his very soul.
They were standing now, the mat between them, Katafa flushed,
shuddering, half laughing, as one might fancy a being new-dead and on
the threshold of Paradise. Dick, his nostrils wide-spread, his pupils
broad with new-born desire, flinging out his arm, tried to seize her,
and grasped—nothing. She had evaded him as though some wind had blown
her aside. The attempt to seize her had thrown her into the world we
enter when we fall asleep.