THE MONTHS PASS

Under the sea surface lies a world ruled by laws of which we know little or nothing. We know that the shoals have roads that they follow, and that some master law keeps the balance so that the ocean’s population is checked and restrained to certain limits; that the palu change their feeding ground for some mysterious reason, and that for some other reason equally mysterious the lagoons are poisoned periodically so that the fish become uneatable; but no man knows how or why the poisoner uses his art, or why, as in the instance of Palm Tree, some lagoons are immune.

No one can tell why the fish run small at times, as they had been running in Palm Tree lagoon, where the big bream had taken themselves off of late, and the schnapper and garfish rarely scaled more than a few pounds.

Nan, on the southern reef, grinning out to sea, had done nothing, and as the months passed, sliding away in long ribbons of coloured days, Dick from time to time rubbed the fact in, Katafa saying nothing. She was not expecting bream. She was expecting the long canoes from Karolin, and as the months passed and they did not come, she might have lost heart, only that she had something else to think about—Dick.

The relationship between the two had altered subtly.

For a long time—some three months or so—Dick had remembered Kearney, wondering what had become of him, even hunting about the woods spasmodically in the chance of coming on him. Dick knew nothing of death. Kearney had gone, that was all. But where?

This incessant reference to “Kea’n’y” had stirred something in the girl’s mind against Dick, a vague antagonism of the type that had been bred by Kearney before he hit her on the back with the tia wood ball.

On Karolin she had never felt antagonism or hatred to any one of the human phantoms that surrounded her. It had been reserved for Kearney, by his attempt to hit her with the seaweed stick and his success in hitting her with the ball, to humanise her to the point of being able to feel aversion and hate.

This antagonism against Dick was helped by the fact that he had put her in her place. Without a direct word, yet in a hundred little ways, he made her feel that he was the superior being, or thought himself so.

Keeping still to her shack in the trees, she yet came to meals just as she had done on the morning after Kearney’s disappearance, taking her seat boldly, close to the boy, and showing no trace of the old diffidence and humility, but, unchivalrous as a dog, Dick gave her the worst of the fish and, whilst reserving to himself the high office of cleaning the plates, gave her the rubbish on a leaf to fling into the lagoon. Fishing, out in the boat and on the reef, it was the same. Dick first, Katafa nowhere.

That is perhaps how sex first came between these two, making a foot-mat of the female for the use of his lordship, Dick; sex, a law of Nature from the workings of which Katafa was for ever barred out by taminan. The law which Le Juan had implanted in her subconsciousness, condemning her to eternal isolation, had shown its teeth at Kearney because he had attempted to touch her. Was it showing its teeth at Dick because he was a man?

Katafa only knew that Dick was going the way of Kearney in her mind, turning from an almost abstraction into something she could resent and dislike for some reason that she could not fathom, for he had never made any attempt to touch her.

One day, when Dick had taken the dinghy fishing away beyond the cape, he returned elate and triumphant.

“Katafa!” shouted he as he brought the boat up to the bank. “The big fish have come!”

The girl, lying in the shade of the trees by the house, sprang to her feet. The vision of Karolin flashed before her eyes, destroying everything for a moment; then she came running to the bank.

“Where are they?” cried she.

“There,” replied Dick, pointing to the boat, where a brace of big bream lay, red and silver in the sunlight.

It was like a blow between the eyes.

She sat crouched on the bank, watching him with a dark look on her face as he hauled them on shore. Nan had fooled her nicely, but her animosity was not against Nan but Dick, and next day, when he went off gaily with a single fish spear to the reef, he found that the point had been blunted, the fishing lines began to break without apparent reason, and a lobster hung up one night was gone in the morning.

If he had chewed gum, his gum would have gone into the lagoon after the lobster. It was the same old game she had played with Kearney, and, like Kearney, Dick suspected nothing of what it all meant—or what it portended.