DAYBREAK

For a moment only.

Next day and for days after, Katafa, drawing apart from Dick, would sit brooding, watchful, waiting, but wherever she might be, by the wood edge or lagoon bank, if Dick were in sight her face would be turned towards him, her eyes stealthily watching him.

She had forgotten Karolin. There was only one thing in the world now that mattered to her—Dick.

Since the night when he had cried to her in his sleep for help, everything else had ceased to matter, and her light-thinking mind had become the wrestling-ground of two opposing forces.

The impulse to destroy Dick came at times in great waves up from the darkest recesses of her mind, like the rollers from the storm that had destroyed the Ranatonga. Yet the impulse always just failed of effect. The terrible desire to destroy, and destroy with her own hand, had less relationship to hatred than to irritation. Dick vexed her soul, or the something dark that lay in her soul, and time and again she would almost stretch out her hand towards the fish spear or the knife that, once clasped, would have been driven into his heart.

Taminan cried to her, “Seize it and destroy him!” and then the voice of taminan would turn into the voice of Dick: “Hai, amonai, Katafa! Help!” and her hand would lose its power.

One day, when Dick was off hunting for turtle on the reef, the crisis came and the evil thing in her heart triumphed.

The fear of Nanawa and danger to herself vanished and, rising up from where she had been sitting beside the house, she put fresh fuel on the cooking fire they had used for the midday meal and which had not been put out.

Then, swift as Atalanta, she crossed the sward, dived amongst the leaves and, fetching the skull from where she had hidden it, close to her shack, returned with it, placed it on the ground before the fire, and, piling on more fuel, stood like a beautiful priestess, her eyes on the skull and her lips moving, repeating the old formula. “Come now, Nanawa, powerful to kill or save, come now and fulfil the wish of my heart—the wish of my heart—the wish of my heart—”

The formula ran from her lips, a string of meaningless words. The something that had checked her hand was checking now her thinking power. She could not put into thought the wish to destroy; just as yesterday, she could not put the will into action.

Nanawa, that figment of a Kanaka’s fancy, was powerless against a real god more terrible and cruel than any deity of man’s imagination—a god that held Katafa now in his grip.

She put the fire out and hid the skull in the leaves. Then casting herself down in the shadow of the trees, she lay balked, demagnetised, impotent, looking at the lagoon water, the far-off reefs and the sky beyond.

Above the house two birds were building, two blue parua birds, exquisite in colour and form, fearless of man, and making their house again in the same position they had chosen for numberless years.

These birds, long-lived as parrots, had seen the father and mother of Dick build, mate, bring forth their young and depart; they had seen the arrival of Lestrange, the growth of Dick, the coming of Katafa. They had seen Lestrange waiting for his lost children, they had seen him vanish, and now they had seen his skull laid on a strange altar. Verily they had seen strange things, but the strangest lay below them on the sward in the tree shadows of that slumbrous afternoon, for Katafa might have been Emmeline, who had often lain there just like that, Emmeline with the faithful flower still in her hair and her dark eyes fixed across the lagoon on the mysterious sea beyond.

The birds, whilst friendly, had always held aloof, the noisy and restless Dick managing to break somehow that thread of confidence which had drawn them sometimes to swoop down and light on Emmeline’s shoulder or hand.

Now, Dick away and Katafa lying absolutely motionless, one of the birds, stirred, maybe, by some old memory, fluttered down on the sward close to her, looked at her with bright eyes, picked up a bit of dried grass, and flew up with it to the nest.

Again it came down and, the girl stretching out her hand to it, it lit on her thumb, hopping at once back to the ground. She put her hand on its blue, warm back, clasping it for a moment. It was the first warm-blooded living thing she had ever touched, the first thing she had handled without intent to kill, the first thing that had come to waken the warmth of humanity in her heart—except that cry of Dick: “Hai, amonai, Katafa! Help!”