HIS KINGDOM
Broad as the reef break was at Karolin, no ship under sail could enter
at the full ebb. Sweeping with an eight-knot clip and boiling round the
coral piers, the waters of the great lagoon met the northward-running
current in a leaping cross-sea of aquamarine and emerald whipped to snow
when the wind was in the east. At slack all this died away; a child
might have swum the passage and a leaf would have drifted with scarce a
change of place. This was the sea gate of Karolin, and the keepers of
the gate were the sun and the moon.
The sun and the moon and the wind and the sea—these four held the great
atoll between them and had here a significance unguessed by dwellers on
the continents and lands of the world; for here the new and the full
moons were manifestly the letters-in of the great spring tides, and the
first- and third-quarter moons the admitters of the neaps. Here the sun
was seen from his rising to his setting, from his leap to his plunge,
and storm and halcyon cast their spells on life, unbroken and
uninterfered with by hills or walls or mountains or forests.
Here for undated ages man had lived alone with the sea and the gulls and
the fish, and had remained man, learning little, forgetting nothing,
with a memory and tradition kept alive by the necessities of the moment
that urged him to build canoes as his forefathers had built them, and
houses to shelter the canoes, and houses to protect him from the rains
and winds.
Here there was nothing that did not date from the remote past, nothing
that was not of use in the immediate present.
So is it with the beavers and the ants and the bees, whose work ever
advances from the time of Nineveh and beyond, yet never advances to the
future, who build as they built, who live as they lived, who die as they
died, and as first they built and lived and died in the garden of God,
which is Nature.
Only man can change, only man can live for ages without change, yet
remain capable of change, only man can be sealed away in the land of
instinct, yet remain capable of entering the land of reason.
So was it with the people of Karolin gathered together this morning on
the beach by the gridiron of coral where for ages past victims had been
sacrificed to Nanawa, the shark-toothed one, by his priests and through
the agency of his servants, the sharks.
Le Juan, after the death of Uta Matu, had temporised. She did not in the
least mind sacrificing the half-witted girl Ooma, but she greatly
dreaded barren results.
Including the king’s wives, there were over two hundred women on
Karolin, all wanting their men back, and close on three hundred
children, more than half of which were boys. Of these boys a large
number were over twelve and a good number over fourteen, all ripe for
mischief, without much fear of Nanawa, and with the antagonism of all
boys towards old women of Le Juan’s type.
Le Juan had sent the fathers and husbands of this terrible population to
a war from which they had not returned, and, worse than that, she had
made herself responsible, under Nanawa, for their return.
She had declared that they were “held” by Nanawa till the great
sacrifice of a woman had been offered to him, yet, feeling that the
tricky shark god had played her another trick, she simply dared not make
the sacrifice. She knew what would happen if it failed; she felt the
temper of the people as a man feels the sharp point of a dagger against
his breast, so, as before said, she temporised, fell into pretended
trances, had pretended visions, declared that nothing was to be done
until it was absolutely sure that the mother of Ooma would not return,
and sweated consumedly at night as she lay in her shack listening to the
sounds of the village and the shouting of the ribald boys and the boom
of the surf on the reef, whilst Ooma, half-witted and happy, slept
protected from death by the ferocious beast that was the soul of Le Juan
and whose one dread was extinction—through failure.
But the time had come, and the death warrant was sealed by the far red
speck of light on the northern sky caused by the burning of the
schooner.
A boy had seen it, two minutes later the whole village was watching it,
and next day it had got into the minds of the people. It was looked on
as a sign—of what, no one could say—but it was an angry sign, and that
night Nalia, the chief wife of the dead Uta, had a dream.
She dreamt that Uta appeared to her and that the red light was his wrath
that the great sacrifice had not been made. He also declared that if it
was not made at once, worse would befall Karolin. That was the end.
Before dawn Le Juan, dragged from her hut to hear the news, gave in, and
as the sun broke above the lagoon the preparations began.
Ooma, awakening to another happy day of life, was anointed and rubbed
with palm oil to make her acceptable to the god. She laughed with
pleasure. She was of the happy half-witted kind with sense enough to
know that she was being fêted; when they put flowers in her hair she
laughed and laughed, and when they led her by the hand to a suddenly
prepared banquet where she alone was the guest, she went laughing, the
boys dancing around her and shouting: “Karak, O he, Ooma, karaka.”
The last of the tide was flowing out of the lagoon when, the banquet
over, Le Juan, taking the hand of Ooma, led her along by the waterside,
followed by the whole population of Karolin.
By the break great sheets and coils of glass-smooth water, pale as
forget-me-nots, could be seen moving between the wind-flaws where a
half-dead breeze touched the surface; ahead of the advancing crowd the
gridiron of coral lay almost entirely uncovered by the tide.
Nature, with that assistance which she sometimes lends to inhumanity,
had tilted this terrible shelf so that the gradually rising water would
take the victim to the waist at greater flood; art had driven in iron
bars for the binding.
At quarter-flood or before, the sharks, who always knew what was going
on, instructed maybe by Nanawa, would begin their struggle for the
prize.
As the procession approached the gridiron, Ooma suddenly began to hold
back.
Some instinctive warning had come to her that danger lay ahead, that all
things were not as they pictured themselves to be; that the flowers and
the feasting and all the splendours of that most glorious morning of her
life were veils of illusion behind which lay Terror.
She stopped, trying to release her hand from the grip of Le Juan, then,
struggling with her captor, she began to scream. They seized her, still
screaming, and brutally cast her on the coral, binding her to it by each
thigh, by the wrist and by the shoulders. Then, as she lay there
half-stunned, voiceless, and staring the sky, suddenly from the great
ring of the atoll rising to heaven like a protest, came a sigh, profound
from the very heart of the sea. It was the turning of the tide.
CHAPTER THE LAST
At sunrise that morning Katafa had awakened to find the wind fallen to a
gentle breeze. Away to the south she could see the palms of Karolin, and
across the scarcely ruffled swell she could hear the song of the surf on
the coral.
The Kanaka rock spouting to starboard told her the state of the tide; it
was falling. Hours must elapse before they could make the break with the
flood, so, instead of waking Dick, who was still soundly asleep, she sat
watching the gulls and the wind-flaws on the water, listening, dreaming.
Far away over the past her mind flitted like the frigate bird, her
namesake, tireless, covering vast distances. She saw again the reef
where she had wandered as a child, that endless sunlit coral road, the
sea wrack and the shells and the gulls always flying, the beaches where
she had played like a ghost child with children untouchable as ghosts.
The vast sunsets, the tumultuous dawns, the nights when, under the coil
of the great snake, she had watched the torches of the fish-spearers on
the reef, and the night when, under the sickle moon, the sea had taken
her and swept her away to find love and a soul.
A gull sweeping past saluted the boat with a cry and Dick, stirring in
his sleep, awoke, stretched, held out his arms and then clasped them
around Katafa, gazing as she pointed away to the south, where every lift
of the swell showed the palms of the great atoll whose mirror blaze was
paling the sky.
Then hauling in the anchor and setting the sail to the light wind that
had shifted to the west of north, Katafa steered, heading for the east,
whilst Dick handed her food and water from the beaker, eating scarcely
anything himself.
His eyes were fixed on the far-off shore to starboard, the endless shore
that showed nothing but gulls and palms, foam jets when a greater
breaker broke on the coral, all seen against air luminous with the
dazzle of the vast lagoon.
And now, still following the turn of the reef, Katafa pointed ahead
where, far away past the northern pier of the break, the whole sea
danced as the outpouring waters met the current, the last of the ebb
rushing like a river, foam dashed, jubilant, green against blue, white
against green and gulls over all, gulls wheeling and shouting and diving
and drifting on the wind like turbulent spirits on the sun blaze. Katafa
held on still steering due east as though to leave Karolin behind, on
and on till the vast sea disclosed itself to the south and the turmoil
at the break died and oiled away into the slack. Deep in the knowledge
of those waters, she held on steering now to the southwest against the
current; then, turning the boat at last, she made due west. The wind had
freshened and backed to the east of north as if to help them, yet it was
half-flood before the piers of the break showed clear before them, the
water pouring in and lashing the coral, leaping on the outer beach and
filling the air with its fume and song; great fish went with them,
albacores leaping like whirled swords, bream, garfish, all in the grip
of the mighty river of the flood.
And now the blue and blazing lagoon, where the fleets of the world might
have harboured, flung out its mighty arms, the roar and thunder and
spray of the breakers saluted them, and then, under a storm of gulls,
the spray and thunder and torrent of the sea passed like a dream, and
before them, across the untroubled waters, lay the white beach where Uta
Matu had watched the dawn and the return of the fleet that never more
could return.
The beach was crowded. It was half-flood, and the sharks had snatched
away the last of the last offering ever to be made to the great god
Nanawa. Steering for the beach, Katafa saw nothing but the crowd—women,
children, boys, all lined by the water’s edge, dumb, with scarcely a
movement, watching the approaching boat that had appeared as if in
answer to the sacrifice of Ooma.
Amongst them stood Le Juan, and as she watched, wondering like the
others and as dumb, the rapidly approaching boat called up in her mind a
vision from far away—the boat of the Spanish ship of years ago, the ship
that had brought Katafa and whose timbers lay sunk ten fathoms deep,
crusted by the ever-building coral.
She saw in the boat the answer of Nanawa, the evil god who was to play
her one last trick, for, as the prow dashed on the sand, and as though
the god had suddenly stripped a curtain aside, she saw Katafa.
Ah, the spirit of prophecy had not been denied to her those long years
ago when, urging Uta Matu to destroy the child, she saw in her the agent
of revenge for the murdered papalagi. Katafa, who had brought Taiofa to
his death and Sru, Laminai, and all the men of Karolin. Katafa, who had
destroyed half a nation to re-create it. Katafa, who had vanished to
return, a woman beautiful like a star risen from the sea.
She saw nothing else, neither Taori, who stood on the sands beside the
girl, nor the people, who had surged back as the cry rang along the
beach: “Katafa, from the dead she has returned, Katafa!”
She saw neither the boat that the lagoon waves were driving broadside on
to the sand, nor the lagoon, nor the sky beyond; like a beast the spirit
that had dwelt with her always swelled and seized her and shook her and
spoke, spoke in words that were strange and unknown as though it had
flung human speech aside for the language of the devils.
Then, as though the great hand that had used her was crushing her and
dropping her, she fell, and with her the power of Nanawa for ever.
The sun was near his setting, and in the evening light Nan stood on his
post erected by the house of Uta, once king of Karolin, and in the
house, dimly to be seen, were the little ships of Taori, toys of the
long ago, symbols now of the sea power that he dreamed of vaguely as he
stood in the sunset on the reef with Katafa, and facing the line of the
empty canoe houses.
Only yesterday he had stood armed with the pasht by the dead body of Le
Juan whilst the people, listening to the words of Katafa, proclaimed him
their chief; yet by this evening he had visited the canoe houses and had
sent fisher-boys to the southern beach to fetch Aioma, Falia and Tafuta,
the three old men, too old for war, but canoe-builders all of them, and
holding between them the secret of the construction of the great war
canoes.
For to Dick, standing with uptilted chin before the women and the
children and the boys who, with the sure instinct of children and women
and boys, had seen in him their ruler, a vision had come, God-sent, of
the world that lay beyond the world he knew. He had seen again Ma in the
moonlight, and the spear of Laminai, the red-bearded man he had put to
death, and, the black-bearded man chased through the woods, the burning
schooner and the ape-men who still held the beach of Palm Tree; and as
he looked on Katafa, on the women and helpless children, on the boys
growing towards war age but still unripe, the great knowledge came to
him, as it came to the earliest men who fronted the wolf, that strength
is possession, and that without possession love is a mockery—that dreams
based on unreality are dreams.
They turned from the canoe houses and came along the reef. Here, on the
outer beach, the village far behind them, they sat down to rest.
It was the first time they had found themselves alone since leaving Palm
Tree. All last night the village had hummed around them, bonfires
burning all along the coral and bonfires answering from the southern
beach, conch answering conch, whilst the great stars watched and the
breakers thundered as they had thundered at the coming of Uta Matu to
power, of Uta Maru, his father, and all the line of the kings of Karolin
stretching to the remote past, but never beyond the voice of the sea.
Here they were at last alone, all trouble done with for the moment, the
past like a tempestuous sea, the future veiled and vague, but great and
full of the splendours of Promise.
For a moment neither of them spoke, their eyes following the spray
clouds of the breakers and the flighting gulls wheeling above the
flooding sea. Then as they turned one to the other, and as he seized her
by the shoulders, to Katafa for the first time fully came the knowledge
of the splendour of man crowned with power—man triumphant, mighty,
kingly and dominant. For in the past few hours Taori had changed from
the passionate boy to a man fit to be the ruler of men.
Holding her from him for a moment, his head drawn back like the head of
a cobra, he consumed her with his eyes.
Then he struck, crushing her with his arms, his lips to her lips, her
throat, her breast, whilst the full-flooding sea shook the coral with
its thunder and the gulls in great circles swung chanting above the haze
of the spray.
As the sea touched the horizon, pouring its gold across the outgoing
tide, Katafa, turning from her lover and sweeping the sea with her eyes,
saw floating far above the northern sky-line something that was not
cloud, that was not land, that was not sea. The ghost of an island,
lonely and illusive as the land where in his dream Lestrange had met his
vanished children.
Palm Tree, far lifted above all things earthly—by mirage.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Garden of God, by H. De Vere Stacpoole