Talia, that was her name, and though her language was different from
the tongue of Maru, it had a likeness of a sort. In those days that
little island was uncharted and entirely desolate but for the gulls of
the reef and the birds of the woods, and it was a wonderland to Maru,
whose idea of land as a sea-beaten ring of coral was shattered by woods
that bloomed green as a sea cave to the moonlight, high ground where
rivulets danced amidst the fern, and a beach protected from the outer
seas by a far-flung line of reefs. Talia to him was as wonderful as the
island; she had come to him out of the sea, she had saved his life, she
was as different from the women of the Paumotus as day from night. A
European would have called her beautiful, but Maru had no thought of
her beauty or her sex; she was just a being, beneficent, almost
divorced from earth, the strangest in the strange world that Fate had
seized him into, part with the great heaving swell he had ridden so
long, the turtle that had broken up to look at him, the sprouting reef,
the sunsets over wastes of water and the stars spread over the wastes
of sky.
He worshipped her in his way, and he might have worshipped her at a
greater distance only for the common bond of youth between them and the
incessant call of the world around them. Talia was practical. She
seemed to have forgotten her people and that island up north and to
live entirely in the moment. They made two shacks in the bushes and she
taught him island wood-craft and the uses of berries and fruit that he
had never seen before, also when to fish in the lagoon; for, a month
after they reached the island the poisonous season arrived and Talia
knew it, how, who can tell? She knew many things by instinct--the
approach of storms, and when the poisonous season had passed, the times
for fishing; and little by little their tongues, that had almost been
divided at first, became almost one so that they could chatter together
on all sorts of things and she could tell him that her name was Talia
the daughter of Tepairu, that her island was named Makea, that her
people had twenty canoes, big ones, and many little ones, and that
Tepairu was not the name of a man, but a woman. That Tepairu was queen
or chief woman of her people now that her husband was dead.
And Maru was able to tell her by degrees of what he could remember, of
the old Spanish ship and how she spouted smoke and thunder and killed
the beach people, of his island, and its shape--he drew it on the sand,
and Talia, who knew nothing of atolls at first, refused to believe in
it, thinking he was jesting. Of his father, who was chief man or king
of Fukariva, and of the destruction of the tribe. Then he told of the
ship with the little wheel--he drew it on the sand--and the little fish
god, of the centre of the cyclone where the waves were like white
dancing men, and of his journey on the hatch cover across the blue
heaving sea.
They would swim in the lagoon together right out to the reefs where the
great rollers were always breaking, and out there Talia always seemed
to remember her island, pointing north with her eyes fixed across the
sea dazzle, as though she could see it, and her people and the twenty
canoes beached on the spume-white beach beneath the palms.
“Some day they will come,” said Talia. She knew her people, those sea
rovers, inconsequent as the gulls; some day for some reason or none,
one of the fishing canoes would fish as far as this island, or be blown
there by some squall; she would take Maru back with her. She told him
this.
The thought began to trouble Maru. Then he grew gloomy. He was in love.
Love had hit him suddenly. Somehow and in some mysterious manner she
had changed from a beneficent being and part of a dream to a girl of
flesh and blood. She knew it, and at the same moment he turned for her
into a man.
Up to this she had had no thought of him except as an individual, for
all her dreams about him he might as well have been a palm tree; but
now it was different, and in a flash he was everything. The surf on the
reef said Maru, and the wind in the trees, Maru, and the gulls fishing
and crying at the break had one word, Maru, Maru, Maru.
Then one day, swimming out near the bigger break in the reefs, a
current drove them together, their shoulders touched and Maru’s arm
went round her, and amidst the blue laughing sea and the shouting of
the gulls he told her that the whole world was Talia, and as he told
her and as she listened the current of the ebb like a treacherous hand
was drawing them through the break towards the devouring sea.
They had to fight their way back; the ebb just beginning would soon be
a mill race, and they knew, and neither could help the other. It was a
hard struggle for love and life against the enmity against life and
love that hides in all things, from the heart of man to the heart of
the sea, but they won. They had reached calm waters and were within
twenty strokes of the beach when Talia cried out suddenly and sank.
Maru, who was slightly in front, turned and found her gone. She had
been seized with cramp, the cramp that comes from over-exertion, but he
did not know that. The lagoon was free of sharks, but despite that fact
and the fact that he did not fear them, he fancied for one fearful
moment that a shark had taken her.
Then he saw her below, a dusky form on the coral floor, and he dived.
He brought her to the surface, reached the sandy beach, and carrying
her in his arms ran with her to the higher level of the sands and
placed her beneath the shade of the trees; she moved in his arms as he
carried her, and when he laid her down her breast heaved in one great
sigh, water ran from her mouth, her limbs stiffened, and she moved no
more.
[Illustration: Then all the world became black for Maru; he knew
nothing of the art of resuscitating the drowned. Talia was dead.]
He ran amongst the trees crying out that Talia was dead, he struck
himself against tree boles and was tripped by ground lianas; the things
of the forest seemed trying to kill him too. Then he hid amongst the
ferns, lying on his face and telling the earth that Talia was dead.
Then came sundown and after that the green moonlight of the woods, and
suddenly sleep, with a vision of blue laughing sea and Talia swimming
beside him, and then day again, and with the day the vision of Talia
lying dead beneath the trees. He could not bury her. He could not touch
her. The iron reel of his _tabu_ held firm, indestructible, unalterable
as the main currents of the sea.
He picked fruits and ate them like an animal and without knowing that
he ate, torn towards the beach by the passionate desire to embrace once
more the form that he loved, but held from the act by a grip ten
thousand years old and immutable as gravity or the spirit that lives in
religions.
He must not handle the dead. Through all his grief came a weird touch
of comfort, she had not been dead when he carried her ashore. He had
not touched the dead.
Then terrible thoughts came to him of what would happen to Talia if he
left her lying there. Of what predatory gulls might do. He had some
knowledge of these matters, and past visions of what had happened on
Fukariva when the dead were too numerous for burial came to him, making
him shiver like a whipped dog. He could, at all events, drive the birds
away, without touching her, without even looking at her; his presence
on the beach would keep the birds away. It was near noon when this
thought came to him. He had been lying on the ground, but he sat up
now, as though listening to this thought. Then he rose up and came along
cautiously amongst the trees. As he came the rumble of the reef grew
louder and the sea wind began to reach him through the leaves, then the
light of the day grew stronger, and slipping between the palm boles he
pushed a great bread-fruit leaf aside and peeped, and there on the
blinding beach under the forenoon sun, more clearly even than he had
seen the ghosts of men on Fukariva, he saw the ghost of Talia walking
by the sea and wringing its hands.
Then the forest took him again, mad, this time, with terror.
When on Fukariva he had seen the ghosts of men walking in the sun blaze
on the coral he had felt no terror; he had never seen them except on
waking from sleep beneath some tree, and the sight of them had never
lasted for more than a moment. He had said to himself, “they are the
spirits of the departed,” and they had seemed to him part of the scheme
of things, like reflections cast on the lagoon, or the spirit voices
heard in the wind, or dreams, or the ships that had come from Nowhere
and departed Nowhere.
But the ghost of Talia was different from these. It was in some
tremendous way real, and it wept because the body of Talia lay unburied.
He had made it weep.
He alone could give it rest.
Away, deep in the woods, hiding amongst the bushes, springing alive
with alarm at the slightest sound, he debated this matter with himself;
and curiously, now, love did not move him at all or urge him--it was as
though the ghost of Talia had stepped between him and his love for
Talia, not destroying it, but obscuring it. Talia for him had become
two things, the body he had left lying on the sand under the trees and
the ghost he had seen walking on the beach; the real Talia no longer
existed for him except as the vaguest wraith. He lay in the bushes
facing the fact that so long as the body lay unburied the ghost would
walk. It might even leave the beach and come to him.
This thought brought him from his hiding-place--he could not lie alone
with it amongst the bushes, and then he found that he could not stand
alone with it amongst the trees, for at any moment she might appear
wringing her hands in one of the glades, or glide to his side from
behind one of the tree boles.
He made for the southern beach.
Although unused to woods till he reached this island, he had the
instinct for direction, a brain compass more mysterious than the
trembling starfish that had directed the movements of the wheel on
board the _Portsoy_. Making due south amidst the gloom of the trees, he
reached the beach, where the sun was blazing on the sands and the birds
flying and calling over the lagoon. The reef lay far out, a continuous
line unlike the reefs to the north, continuous but for a single break
through which the last of the ebb was flowing out oilily, mirroring a
palm tree that stood like the warden of the lagoon. The sound of the
surf was low, the wind had died away, and as Maru stood watching and
listening, peace came to his distracted soul.
He felt safe here. Even when Talia had been with him the woods had
always seemed to him peopled with lurking things, unused as he was to
trees in great masses; and now released from them and touched again by
the warmth of the sun he felt safe. It seemed to him that the ghost
could not come here. The gulls said it to him and the flashing water,
and as he lay down on the sands the surf on the reef said it to him. It
was too far away for the ghost to come. It seemed to him that he had
travelled many thousand miles from a country remote as his extreme
youth, losing everything on the way but a weariness greater than time
could hold or thought take recognition of.
Then he fell asleep, and he slept whilst the sun went down into the
west and the flood swept into the lagoon and the stars broke out above.
That tremendous sleep, unstirred by the vaguest dream, lasted till the
dawn was full.
Then he sat up, renewed, as though God had remade him in mind and body.
A gull was strutting on the sands by the water’s edge, it’s long shadow
strutting after it, and the shadow of the gull flew straight as a
javelin into the renewed mind of Maru. Talia was not dead. He had not
seen her ghost. She had come to life and had been walking by the sea
wringing her hands for him thinking him drowned. For the form he had
seen walking on the sands had cast a shadow. He remembered that now.
Ghosts do not cast shadows.
And instantly his mind, made reasonable by rest and sleep, revisualized
the picture that had terrified his mind distraught by grief. That was a
real form--what folly could have made him doubt it! Talia was
alive--alive, warm, and waiting for him on the northern beach, and the
love for her that fear had veiled rushed in upon him and seized him
with a great joy that made him shout aloud as he sprang to his feet,
yet with a pain at his heart like the pain of a rankling spear wound as
he broke through the trees shouting as he ran. “Talia! Talia! Talia!”
He passed the bushes where he had hidden, and the ferns; he heard the
sound of the surf coming to meet him, he saw the veils of the leaves
divide and the blare of light and morning splendour on the northern
sands and lagoon and sea.
He stood and looked.
Nothing.
He ran to the place where he had laid her beneath the trees; there was
still faintly visible the slight depression made by her body, and close
by, strangely and clearly cut, the imprint of a little foot.
Nothing else.
He stood and called and called, and no answer came but the wood echo
and the sound of the morning wind, then he ran to the sea edge. Then he
knew.
The sand was trodden up, and on the sand, clear cut and fresh, lay the
mark left by a beached canoe and the marks by the feet of the men who
had beached her and floated her again.
They had come--perhaps her own people--come, maybe, yesterday whilst he
was hiding from his fears debating with his _tabu_--come, and found
her, and taken her away.
He lunged into the lagoon and swimming like an otter and helped by the
outgoing tide, reached the reef. Scrambling on to the rough coral,
bleeding from cuts but feeling nothing of his wounds, he stood with
wrinkled eyes facing the sea blaze and with the land breeze blowing
past him out beyond the thundering foam of the reef to the blue and
heaving sea.
Away from the north, like a brown wing tip, showed the sail of a canoe.
He watched it. Tossed by the lilt of the swell it seemed beckoning to
him. Now it vanished in the sea dazzle, now reappeared, dwindling to a
point, to vanish at last like a dream of the sea, gone, never to be
recaptured.
“And Maru?” I asked of Lygon, “did he ever----”
“Never,” said Lygon “The islands of the sea are many. Wait.” He struck
a gong that stood close to his chair, struck it three times, and the
sounds passing into the night mixed with the voices of the canoe men
returning from fishing on the reef.
Then a servant came on to the verandah, an old, old man, half bent like
a withered tree.
“Maru,” said Lygon, “you can take away these glasses--but, one moment,
Maru, tell this gentleman your story.”
“The islands of the sea are many,” said Maru, like a child repeating a
lesson. He paused for a moment as though trying to remember some more,
then he passed out of the lamplight with the glasses.
“A year ago he remembered the whole story,” said Lygon.
But for me the whole story lay in those words, that voice, those
trembling hands that seemed still searching for what the eyes could see
no more.