OUT OF THE SEA

That morning, three hours after sun-up and half an hour after breakfast, Fate and Mr. Kearney had a difference of opinion.

The bananas were ripe on the eastern side of the island and he had arranged in his mind to go and fetch a bunch, taking the quickest way—that is to say, right over the hill-top instead of round by the lagoon edge—but he was lazy and disposed to put the business off to a more convenient time. He would have made Dick row him round in the dinghy, only that Dick wanted the boat for purposes of his own beyond on the reef.

Sitting with his back against a tree bole, he could see the figure of the boy away out on the coral; the amethyst and azure lagoon, the reef with the moving figure upon it and a touch of purple sea beyond, all made a picture as soothing as it was lovely on that perfect and almost windless morning.

But Kearney was not thinking of the beauty of the scene. Bananas were bothering him; he did not want to move, and they were calling on him to get on his legs, cross the island, cut them and fetch them.

Ten years of island life had altered Kearney almost as much as they had altered Dick. Always on the look-out for a ship during the first three years, he would not have left the island to-day unless shifted with a derrick. He had grown into the life, grown lazy and stout and grizzled—and moral. A most extraordinary type of beach-comber. The child and the island, the sun and the easy way of life, had all conspired in this work upon him. He had no hankerings now after bar-rooms; without tobacco for years, he had taken to chewing gum, finding plenty of it in the woods, and he had devised several innocent and non-laborious amusements for himself and the child, among others, ship building. The very first act of Kearney when they had landed on the island had been the cutting of a little boat for Dick from a bit of wood. He could do anything with a knife and one day, some six years ago, when time was hanging heavy, the saving idea came to him of constructing a model of the lost Ranatonga. It took him nearly eight months to accomplish, but it was a beauty when finished, with sails of silk made from an old shirt of Lestrange’s and a leaden keel constructed from the lead wrappings of a tea chest which he managed to melt down.

They took it over and sailed it on the reef pool where the nautilus fleet had once floated, and next day he set to work on another, a frigate this time. Four ships altogether had left the stocks of the Kearney-Dick combination, and meanwhile three real ships had touched the island, two whalers and a sandalwood schooner. The whalers Kearney had carefully avoided; the sandalwood schooner had come up in the arms of a hurricane, smashed herself to pieces on the reef, drowned every soul on board of her and left the coral littered with trade goods, bolts of cloth enough to clothe a village, boxes of beads, cheap looking-glasses, dull Barlow knives—everything but tobacco.

Having contemplated the lagoon, the reef and the moving figure of Dick for a while, Kearney suddenly shifted his position, rose, stretched himself and, fetching a case knife from the shelf in the house, turned towards the trees. The bananas had conquered. Passing through the woods, he struck uphill till he reached the summit, where he paused for a moment to rest, a figure not unlike that of Robinson Crusoe, standing with his hand on the great summit rock and gazing far and wide across the ocean.

Then he shaded his eyes. Far off on the dead calm sea a canoe was drifting; two miles away it might have been to the south and perhaps half a mile to the east. The land wind had died off completely and the tiny sail hung without a stir. He could not tell at that distance whether it had any occupants. Brown, like a withered leaf on the water, it lay drifting with the current that would take it past the island just as it had taken the dinghy with the lost children of Lestrange.

Kearney gazed for a full minute, then, turning, he came running downhill and back through the trees to the lagoon edge. Dick was still in view; Kearney hailed him, waving his arms, and the boy, understanding that he was wanted, left the business he was on, ran to the dinghy and, untying her, pushed across.

Dick was worth looking at as he came alongside, standing up in the dinghy, the boat hook in his hands. Nearly thirteen, yet tall and big as a boy of fourteen or more, naked but for a kilt of leaves, with the forthright gaze of an eagle and a face where decision met daring, a philosopher, looking at him, might have said, “Here is the making of the world’s finest man, here is the perfect human being, neither savage nor civilised, swift as a panther, graceful as a tree, yet endowed with mind, decision and character.”

Kearney saw only the red-headed boy whom he had watched growing up, and who had been a handful in his way ever since he had been big enough to row the dinghy.

“There’s a boat beyond the reef,” cried Kearney, stepping into the dinghy. “Now get aft with you and give me the sculls. I’m go’n’ to try ’n’ fetch it in.”

“A boat—where y’ say?” asked the boy.

“Out beyond the reef,” replied the other, pushing off. “Ship the tiller an’ keep us close to the bank. I’ve not time for talkin’!”

Dick shipped the tiller and steered whilst the other put all his strength into his stroke. They passed the little cape, nearly brushing the trees, and then down the long arm of the lagoon stretching to the east. It was slack tide, just before the flood, and the water was calm at the break. They shot through, taking the heave of the glassy swell, and there, drifted now quarter of a mile to the north, was the canoe, the sail still hanging without a stir.

“There’s someun in her,” cried Dick.

Kearney took a glance over his shoulder and saw the figure of the girl, who had tried to make the break with her single paddle and failed. She was standing, holding on to the mast and looking towards them, a form graceful as the new moon, naked but for her girdle of dracÆna leaves and with her free hand sheltering her eyes against the sun.

As they drew closer her voice came across the water clear as a bell and hailing them in some unknown language.

“It’s a girl!” cried Kearney.

“What’s a girl?” asked Dick, so filled with excitement over this new find that he was forgetting to steer.

“It’s a female—mind your steerin’—you’re a mile to starboard—there, let it be and I’ll manage meself.”

The girl, as they drew close, ran forward and seized the anchor rope; it had parted a good way from its fastening and there were some four fathoms of it left. She stood with it coiled in her hand and as the dinghy approached, she sent the coil flying towards them, straight and sure. Then, as Kearney caught it, she darted aft and seized the steering paddle, crying out in answer to the sailor’s questions in the same strange bell-like voice, but in a tongue dark to her saviours as Hebrew.

“Kanaka,” said Kearney, “but she knows her business. Dick, leave that boat huk down—we aren’t boardin’ her. We’ll tow her in—catch hold of the rope.”

He got the sculls in, fastened the rope end to the after-thwart, and then started to work towing the canoe’s head round.

Though Dick had asked Kearney what a girl was, it was the word he was enquiring about, not the thing. The stupid old story of the boy who saw girls for the first time at a fair, was told that they were ducks, and then expressed his desire for a duck, has no foundation in psychology. Life is cleverer than that. Dick saw in Katafa a young creature something like himself. Descended from a thousand generations of people who knew all about girls, his subconscious mind accepted Katafa’s structural differences without question; she was far less strange to him than the canoe. His ancestors had never seen a South Sea canoe. This strange, savage, mosquito-like structure, with its bindings of cocoanut sennit and its mat-sail, fascinated the boy far more than its occupant. To him, truly, it was like nothing earthly; the outrigger alone was a mystery and the whole thing a joy, a joy delightfully tinged with uneasiness, for the absolutely new is disturbing to the soul of man or beast. As he rowed, Kearney noticed that the girl was chewing something in the way of food, and once he saw her bend and take up a drinking cocoanut and put it to her mouth, a fact that eased his mind, bothered by the idea that she might be starving. The tide was beginning to flood. It swept them through the break and as the dinghy turned up the right arm of the lagoon, the tow rope now tautening, now smacking the water, it was the girl’s turn to be astonished. The tall trees from outside the reef had seemed monstrous to her eyes, accustomed only to the flat circle of the atoll, but here, inside the reef, the density of the foliage, the unknown plants, the unknown smells, the trees sweeping up to heaven almost terrified her, brave though she was; the only familiar and comforting thing was the reef and its voice—but those trees in their hundreds and thousands, climbing on each other’s shoulders!

Steering with her paddle, she kept the canoe in line with the dinghy, the wild cocoanut almost brushing her as they turned the little cape; then, as they came alongside the bank, she sprang out and stood, her arms crossed and a hand on each shoulder, watching, whilst the others landed and Kearney tied the boats up.

“Now then, Kanaka girl,” said Mr. Kearney, as he rose from this business and approached her, followed cautiously by the boy, “what’s yer name?—Jim,” pointing to his breast with his thumb. “I’m Jim—Jim.—What’s yourn, eh?”

She understood at once.

“Katafa,” came the reply; then, swift as a rippling stream, “Te tataga Karolin po uli agotoimoana—Katafa.”

“Ain’t no use,” replied Mr. Kearney. “Tie a clove hitch in it and we’ll call you Jimmy. Want some food? God bless my soul, where’s the use in talkin’ to her? Here you, Dick, come along an’ get the fire goin’. Come along, Kanaka girl.” He clapped her on the shoulder—made to do so, but his hand touched nothing but empty air.

“Well, I’m damned,” said Kearney. He had got the shock of his life. It was not the fact that she had evaded him, but the manner of the evasion. His hand had missed the shoulder, driven it away, seemingly, as wind moves a curtain; yet she had scarcely moved and her face and attitude had not altered in the least. She seemed quite unconscious of what had happened, and the man who has ever tried to touch a taminanite will know exactly the feeling of Mr. Kearney as he turned to make the fire, followed by Dick.

Katafa drew closer; then, at a certain distance, she squatted down and watched them at work. She had no fear of men or ghosts. Human beings and ghosts were things equally remote to Katafa, who could touch or be touched by neither.

Infected by Le Juan and filled with wild fancies, or maybe endowed with psychic powers, she had seen the “men who leave no footprints” walking in the sun-blaze of Karolin. There was a sandy cove eight or nine miles from the break and here with Taori, the second son of Laminai, she had watched them walking like people astray and bewildered.

She had flung stones through them, Taori wondering and seeing nothing. At night, had you possessed the eyes of the Spanish girl, you would have seen in the dark of the moon, and at a certain hour, a man swimming in the starlight from the old anchorage of the Pablo Poirez towards the break, leaving a trail in the starlight, always at the same hour and always in the same direction; and sometimes on these nights fires would spring up on the reef where it trended to the west, lit by no man’s hand, for no man was there.

But Palm Tree to her eyes seemed free of anything like this. Amongst the gifts presented by the wreck were three or four tin cases of Swedish matches, enough to last for years. Kearney had discarded the tinder-box and he was lighting the fire with a box of matches, a fact more interesting than bonnets to Katafa as she squatted, watching his every movement.

Then, when the food was ready and Dick had fetched some water from the little spring at the back of the yam patch, Kearney called to the “Kanaka girl” to pull in her chair.

She came within a couple of yards, but would come no further, squatting on her heels in an attitude that gave her freedom to spring away at a moment’s notice. Kearney stretched over with some food on a plate for her, then he handed a cocoanut bowl with some water in it. Then he began on his own meal. He seemed put out.

“She ain’t right,” said Mr. Kearney, as though communing with himself.

“What ain’t right, Jim?” asked the boy, a fish in his fingers. “Why ain’t she right, Jim? What’s the matter she can’t talk?”

The only things he had ever heard Kearney address as “she” were the ships they made. Katafa had in some way taken in his mind a tinge from those delightful ships; she was a “she.” The canoe helped; it was hers. Now that the canoe was half out of sight, hidden by the bank, and Katafa sitting there close to him, she fascinated him. His passionate love of the sea, of the dinghy, of the little ships, of everything connected with the water, all lent colour to this strange new being who had come up out of the sea in that thing—it was almost as if she had a keel on her. He would have loved to make friends, but he was too shy as yet and she couldn’t talk so that he could understand.

He set his teeth in the fish.

“Lord, I dunno,” said Kearney, his recent experience hot in his mind, yet unable to explain it in speech. “She ain’t like other folk. There, don’t be askin’ questions, but get on with your dinner. Maybe it’s just she’s a Kanaka.”

“What’s a Kanaka, Jim?”

“You get on with your dinner and don’t be askin’ questions.”

The sociable meal proceeded, Katafa “tuckin’ into the food” with a good appetite, but with an eye ever on Kearney. Kearney, by his attempts to clap her on the shoulder, had laid the foundation of a lot of trouble for himself. He had raised against him the something that Le Juan had bred in the subconscious mind of the girl.

No man, woman or child on Karolin had ever tried to touch her. She was tabu to them, as they to her. The art of avoidance, which was as natural and unconscious to her as the art of walking, had always been exercised against an accidental touch. Kearney had done what no one else had ever done, tried to touch her.

But if you think that she reasoned this out in her mind, you would be far from the truth. Whatever Le Juan’s means of tuition may have been—a hot iron was one of them—they had left all but no mark on the conscious mind of the grown girl. Otherwise her life would have been as impossible as the life of a person who has to think over each step he takes, each movement of the body and each respiration he makes. Le Juan had made the tabu not a direction to be obeyed, but a law of being, living like a watchdog in the dark chambers of the girl’s mind, a watchdog baring its teeth at Kearney.

Katafa had evaded the friendly blow of Kearney just as on Karolin she had often evaded the touch of hands in the pulling in of a fishing net, instantaneously and all but unconsciously, but the difference was vast. Kearney had placed himself among a new order of beings by his act. His clothes helped. She had never seen any one in trousers and shirt before. Decidedly this strange bearded man required watching.

Dick was different. For all his red head and straight nose and strange-coloured eyes he might have been a boy of Karolin.

She finished her food. Kearney had given her a plate, one of the few unbroken of those Stanistreet had left behind for them. It had flowers painted on it and the thing intrigued her vastly. It seemed to her a new sort of shell, and when the sailor rose, replete and drowsy, and went off for his siesta in a comfortable spot amidst the trees, Dick, who had received instructions to “clear up them things an’ give’s a call if she tries to meddle with the boats,” saw Katafa furtively trying to scratch one of the flowers off the plate.

“They’re painted on,” said Dick, suddenly losing his shyness. “You can’t get them things off.” Finding his voice gave him courage, and getting on his legs, he ran off to the house, returning in a minute with one of the ships, a frigate. Kearney had made rests for each one to stand on, and he carried the frigate, rest and all, and placed it close by her on the ground.

“Ain’t like yours,” said Dick, reclining beside it and handling the tiny spars so that she might see how they swung. “It’s a fridgit.”

The girl, appealed to in the language of ships and sitting on her heels, regarded the little vessel with interest. In Karolin lagoon, two miles beyond the break and in ten-fathom water, lay the hull of a sunk ship that the Kanakas had burnt. She had knocked a hole in herself by drifting on a reef, and the flames had only time to bring the masts down before she sunk, and there she lay on an even keel, clear to be seen in the crystal water and with the fish playing round her stern post.

The Karolin boys called her the big canoe of the papalagi. Katafa knew nothing of her history or of its connection with herself, but the shape was the same as the shape of the “fridgit”; only the masts were wanting.

“Look!” said Dick, showing how the yards were swung. “She’s square-sailed, all but the mizzen, same’s your boat. You could reef ’em up, only there ain’t any reef points; she’s too small, Jim says. This is the rudder an’ tiller. You ain’t got no rudder to yours.” He looked up at her. From her face and the interest in it, she seemed to understand. She leaned forward and moved the tiny tiller with her finger tip. A wheel was beyond Kearney’s art and the steering gear of Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s ships had to suffice. Then she leaned further forward and blew hard at the tiny main topsail, slinging the yard round.

“Matagi,” cried she, “O he amorai—Matagi.”

“That’s the way it goes!” cried Dick, pleased to find her so apt, and talking just as though she were able to understand every word. “And when you’re sailin’ close to the wind you haul it that way. That square rig—wait a minit.”

He rushed off to the house and returned with the schooner, dumping it before her.

“That’s fore ’n’ aft.”

Katafa looked at the model of the Ranatonga; with her head slightly on one side, she seemed admiring it. Dick, watching her, felt pleased. Many a grown-up English person, able to talk, would have failed in this business or blundered in their appreciation of these important things, but Katafa was one of the craft—seemed so, anyway—and Dick, old friends with her now and free and easy as though she were Kearney, proceeded to demonstrate the action of the throat and peak halyards in raising the gaff, the topping lifts in supporting the boom, and how the head canvas was set. Then, suddenly remembering duty, he ran back to the house with the ships and set to work to clear away the remains of the food and the three plates.

He did not wash the plates; he was too anxious to get busy again with Katafa.

She had become all of a sudden the first great event of his life. She could neither speak in ordinary language to him nor he to her—but she was youth.

Though he had lived ten years with Kearney and though Kearney had practically taught him to talk, the sailor had never got so close to him as this creature of his own age who had suddenly appeared as if at the lift of a curtain.

The instant Kearney had withdrawn, the spell had begun to work. It might have been weeks before Dick would have shown those treasured ships to a grown person.

As he bustled about, filled with a new energy and interest, Katafa, who had risen to her feet, watched him. Light-minded and irresponsible as the boy, there still lay between her and him an abyss that even youth could not cross, the abyss that had lain between her and the children of Karolin, with whom, yet, she had played, but as a person might play with shadows. All the same, youth could gaze across the abyss, over which, despite everything, the little ships had sailed. These things had fascinated her; she could see more of them in the house, attractive as toys, yet mysterious as fetishes—maybe having something to do with the gods of Dick and Kearney.

Dick knew nothing of this. Duty done with, he made another dash for the house, producing no ship this time, but a stick three feet long and a ball made of tia wood.

Kearney had invented a game for him, a sort of cross between baseball and cricket. The trunk of a jack-fruit tree on the grove edge did for wickets, and the run was from this to an artu trunk and back.

Kearney, since he had grown lazy, had held off from this game, saying it was “too much of a bother.”

“Catch!” cried Dick, throwing the ball to Katafa. She caught it, and he held out his hands, and she flung it back hard and swift and sure. She could throw a stone a hundred yards and throw it like a man.

He showed her the stick and, tossing the ball back to her, ran to the tree, pointed to it, and then stood with the stick, ready to defend it.

She understood at once.

When Kearney came forth from his afternoon rest he found Dick tired out, sitting by the house, and the girl by the lagoon bank, dabbling her feet in the water. It looked almost as though they had quarrelled, but they had not in the least. One of Dick’s moody fits had come on him, as they often did after excitement or strenuous exertion. He was a different creature from the Dick of only a moment ago, and when these fits took him, it was always the same; he seemed caught away to another world, and liked to sit by himself.

If ever a mother “came out” in a child, the lost Emmeline came out in Dick during these moods. It was almost as though he had changed sex.

“What have you been doin’ with the stick?” asked Kearney.

“Playin’,” said Dick, waking from his reverie.