OUT OF THE GLOOM

When Dick came back to the house, the girl had not returned.

Kearney seemed to have recovered his temper, and presently, putting the ship away on the shelf till to-morrow, he helped the boy to prepare supper. They scarcely spoke over this business; the shadow of the quarrel still hung between them, and that supper, as they sat silent opposite one another, was a mark in the life of Dick. It was his coming-of-age party, for Kearney was treating him as a man with whom he had a difference, not as a boy to be threatened and skelped.

Neither of them saw that far-away scene of the Dick of the Ranatonga, the tall sailor dancing the tiny child in his arms and crying out to Bowers: “Says his other name’s M. Sure as there’s hair on his head, he’s been tellin’ me Dick M’s his name. Ain’t it, bo?”

Neither of them saw the early island days when Dick M, left entirely in the sailor’s charge by his grandfather, fished in the lagoon with thread for line and played at fish-spearing on the reef and tried to scull the dinghy, guided and assisted by his big companion.

Dick, sitting there in the sunset this evening, was no longer a child. Not quite a man, he was greater than a man. Fresh from the hand of Nature that had moulded and wrought on his father and mother, not quite civilized, not quite a savage, a poet might have seen in him the youth of the world, the dawn of man before cities arose to cast their shadows on him, before civilisation created savages.

Neither of them saw the long years of companionship during which they had worked as shipbuilders together, the storms and incidents by shore and reef—it was all as nought. Katafa had brought a new interest to Dick. Age and laziness had done their work with Kearney.

As they sat like this, the meal nearly finished, they saw the girl. She had come out from among the trees away on the other side of the sward. She was carrying something under her arm. She stood for a moment shading her eyes against the sunset and looking towards them. Then she vanished back amongst the trees, and Dick, rising to his feet, came running across the sward. He knew where to find her. Since the breaking of the canoe, she had made a shack for herself amongst the trees, and there she was crouched now and dimly to be seen in the fading light.

At the sound of the parting of the leaves, she moved suddenly as if trying to hide something with her body.

“Katafa,” said the boy, speaking in the native, “the food is waiting for you and he is no longer angry.”

“It does not matter, Taori,” replied her voice from the shadows. “I will eat to-morrow.”

“What is that you have beneath you there?”

“A bread-fruit, Taori—I want no better food.”

“Ahai—but you have no fire to cook it.”

“It does not matter, Taori. I will cook it to-morrow.”

“Then eat it raw,” said he, angry with her, and off he went.

Taori was the name she had given him.

When he had gone she took the skull which she had been hiding and placed it beside her. Then she lay down with her eyes fixed on the ruddy-tinted light of the sunset visible through the spaces of the leaves.

There was no moon that night, and a dead calm had set in an hour before sunset. The heat was oppressive. Even the great Pacific seemed drugged and drowsy, and the sound of the surf on the reef like the breathing of a sleeper uneasy in his sleep.

Kearney, awaking about midnight, came out for a breath of air. It was almost as oppressive out of doors as in the house, and above the trees the sky, heavy with stars, stood like the roof of a jewelled oven. The fronds of a palmetto by the water stood without a tremor and the lagoon lay like a fallen sky of stars, tremorless as space itself.

Kearney came down to the bank and sat bathing his feet in the water, the ripples waving out and shattering the reflected firmament. He heard the rustle of robber crabs feeding on the fallen drupes of a pandanus near by, the splash of a heavy fish beyond the cape of wild cocoanut, the fall of a nut from the grove behind the house, the fret and murmur of the reef—no other sound from land and sea and all that wilderness of stars.

Then, as he lay on his elbow yawning and half asleep, a spark of light that was not a star struck his sight. It was on the reef line. It died out, came to life again, flickered and grew. Some one was lighting a fire on the reef. He sat up, glanced at the dinghy lying safely at her moorings, then out away at the far-off fire.

“She ain’t taken the boat,” said he to himself. “She must have got over smimmin’, curse that Kanaka! What trick is she up to anyway, signalling? That’s what she’s after—signalling. That’s her game, maybe to bring a hive of niggers atop of us.”

He rushed off to see if the box of matches had been taken; no, it was there, but he knew she could light a fire with a fire-stick. She had taught Dick to do it. He came running back to the dinghy, got in, unmoored her, and pushed out.

He had always had it in his mind that the fire she had lit long ago was a signal made to attract her people, whoever they might be.

The absurdity of this idea never struck him; he just “had it in his mind” as an easy way of accounting for the matter, and to-night, in face of this second offence, his wrath rose up against the girl as it had never risen before. Everything conspired—the heat, the want of sleep, the quarrel with Dick, and the long hump-backed antagonism she had constructed against herself by snatching Dick away into Kanaka land and making him talk her lingo—her very youth was against her to-night. It was her youth that had made her companion with Dick. Kearney had killed men in his time, and the years of soft island life, the companionship of the child, the absence of drink, whilst softening him, had not destroyed the fierce something which was not Kearney and which could wake under stimulus to strike, regardless of consequences.

Guiding the dinghy across the water, he was steering straight for murder. Not intentional murder, but the murder we come on in the slums when men of Kearney’s type, urged to the deed by a nagging wife or gone-wrong daughter, and assisted maybe by alcohol, suddenly give loose to themselves and maim or kill.

His project was to land unobserved if possible, and then go for her with a scull, bowl her over, and then beat the devil out of her once and for all with his fists. He’d “l’arn” her this time, sure.

Less than half-way across, he drew in his sculls and then, with a single scull at the stern, began working the boat almost noiselessly towards the reef. He could see her now standing by the fire and feeding it, the cairngorm light of the flames upon her face and arms. It was a big fire and lit the reef, the lagoon water and the foam of the gently curling waves. Great fish, attracted by the light, were swimming in the waters of the lagoon, nosing about the reef. The news had gone far and wide that something was doing, and could Nature, who has her own methods of warning men and beasts, have expressed herself in writing, with fire for ink, above the breaking foam would have appeared the words: “The Reef Is Dangerous To-night.”

Then, as Kearney drew closer, the girl, who had suddenly turned and sighted him, broke away from the fire and ran.

He drew in the scull, took his seat, and, seizing the other scull, rowed as if rowing a race. The nose of the dinghy crashed against the coral. He sprang out, secured her, and turned, scull in hand.

The girl was gone.

Beyond the fire-glow he thought he saw her for a moment, but the light dazzled his eyes, and when he put it behind him he could see nothing but the starlit coral, its humps and dips and pools, the foam of the waves and the tranquil mirror of the lagoon.

He knew quite well what had become of her—she had dipped into one of the reef pools; they were the only possible places of concealment. She had not taken to the lagoon—he could see that at a glance—for the water lay unrippled and a swimmer’s head would have shown even more clearly than by day. He came along, grasping the scull, with the anger of the balked hunter now at his heart. He looked into the first great pool—nothing, only a trapped fish flitting like a ghost here and there, its shadow ghost following it across the white coral sand of the bottom.

He rose and was moving on, when a great undulation came in the lagoon water, flowing from behind him and spreading to the west.

Kearney turned. The fire still gave a good light, and between him and the fire something had heaved itself on to the coral. Attracted by the firelight, it had left the lagoon, soundless as a crawling cat, yet tons in weight. It was only some thirty feet away from him, yet it seemed formless, a long heaped mass covered with shiny tarpaulin. Then suddenly it took form, extending itself like a slug; lamps, like the headlights of a locomotive, blazed out, and around the lamps great serpents curled like the locks of Medusa.

For one fatal moment he stood staring at the thing before him. Then a rope slashed round his waist and tightened.

He was caught.

Katafa had taken refuge in the second great pool, a pool some four feet deep and large enough for a person to swim in. The water was tepid and the floor of soft sand, and as she slipped into it, gracile as a serpent, she did not look to see what fish there might be there.

A small whip-ray, an electric eel or a stinging jellyfish would have made the pool untenable, she knew, but chanced it, and, lying submerged to the chin, waited and listened.

She felt an eel pass like a cold waving ribbon over her thighs; it touched the outer side of her left leg as it made its way along the sand and was gone. Then she felt the tap of small sharp-pointed fingers here and there on her body. Fish were nuzzling her, yet she dared not move for dread of setting the water waving. Instinct told her that Kearney was more to be feared than fish or eels or the great crab of the reef, and even when a sting like a hot needle sticking in her side told her that a banda fish had attacked her flesh, her only movement was the drift of her right hand like floating seaweed towards her side, and the sudden snap of the fingers as the banda fish, caught by the hand, was crushed to death.

She kneaded the fragments viciously between her fingers. Then, as she released them, sudden and sharp came a cry, the piercing cry of a man who has been speared or stabbed with a shark-toothed dagger. Raising her head swift as a lizard, she glanced, shuddered and dived again. She had seen Nanawa.

Katafa knew the seas and its creatures with an intimacy given to few naturalists. She had seen great fleets of giant whip-rays enter Karolin lagoon disporting under the stars and filling the night with a sound like the thunder of big guns at battle practice. She had seen a cachalot driven by destroyers to its death, and an octopus with sixty-foot tentacles floating like a burst balloon near the palu bank, driven up from mile-deep water by some submarine disturbance, the sharks tearing at it and the eyes still living, lugubrious, and staring at the sky as if in astonishment. But she had never seen the most terrible of all sea things, the giant decapod, barrel-shaped, great as an oak-tree, with two beaks, a tongue armed with teeth, eyes a foot broad and ten tentacles, two of thirty or forty feet in length.

Snuggling into the tepid water, she lay listening—nothing. Only the sound of the surf rising and falling to the pulse of the sea whilst the untroubled stars shone down on her and the minutes passed, bringing not another sound to tell of what was happening—of what had happened.

Then, raising herself gently, she looked again. The reef showed nothing but the last embers of the fire. The dinghy was lying still just where she had been moored, but of the man who had brought her across there was no trace.