THE CRISIS

Next morning Dick, who had spent the night hunting cachalots in dreamland, came out to find Katafa lighting the fire for breakfast. She seemed just the same as ever, save for the fact that she had no flower in her hair, but a third person, had one been present, would have noticed that her eyes evaded him, that she ate scarcely anything, and sat mumchance as though some bitter quarrel had arisen between them.

Dick noticed nothing of all this. He did not even help to clear away and tidy the place. He was off to see if there was anything left of the cachalot, and as he picked up a spear and made away towards the opposite trees, he shouted some words of directions to her which she did not reply to. She seemed deaf as well as dumb, and when he was gone, instead of clearing away the remains of the food and putting out the fire, she turned on her side and lay with eyes half closed, scarcely breathing, seemingly asleep. Her half-closed eyes were fixed on the point where Dick had vanished among the trees—Dick, who, without a thought of her, was making his way through the woods, now skirting the water side, now plunging through the growths of mammee-apple and fern.

When he reached the beach, all traces of the cachalot were gone. Not a sign remained of the great fight of yesterday. The gulls were fishing just as of old, and the lagoon lay placid and untroubled, blue and breezed and happy, to where the reef line whispered its eternal message to the shore.

He saw Nan on his post away to the south. He remembered the “big fish,” and a sudden respect for Nan and his power—perhaps the first dawn of a religious feeling—came into his mind. Nan had brought the cachalot into the lagoon as well as the big bream and schnapper, and as he stood by the creaming ripples on the sand, he gave a nod of his head in the direction of the gollywog as if in recognition.

Then he came plunging back through the trees. Nan had suddenly reminded him of the sapling he had cut for his elevation, and the sapling of the mast he had made for the dinghy.

He must get busy on that mast and sail—he had neglected them for days—and, full of the fury of the newly released idea, he came bursting out of the wood across the sward, making for the house and shack where the sail was stowed. He would be able to sail the dinghy out beyond the reef and hunt for bigger things. Unhappy Dick, he did not know of the bigger thing that was feeling for him to grip him, of the hunting awaiting him on that day.

Full of this idea, heedless of earth, sea, sky or Katafa, he came running across the sward. The girl saw him coming and half rose, sitting on her heels, a lovely picture in the tree shadows; a picture that might have driven an artist to despair or drawn an anchorite from his cell; a picture only to be matched by that of Dick as he ran, sunny-haired and light of foot and swift as the wind.

One might have fancied him running towards her and have pictured the embrace of these two most lovely of God’s creatures, but he passed her as though she were a tree stump, vanished behind the house, and reappeared in a minute dragging after him the ugly old mat sail. Casting it on the ground, he made for the dinghy, seized the mast which he had left lying in it, and came back with it on his shoulder, still running.

That was just like him. He would leave a thing undone for days, maybe for weeks, and then, of a sudden, start on it, forgetful of everything else.

There was some old rope and signal halyard line that Kearney had salved from the wreck. This had to be fetched, also some tools from the tool box; he fetched them himself and then, sitting down, happy and content, he set to work and found his work cut out for him.

The sail was too big, it and the spar that carried it. With the sail and spar spread out on the ground, he crawled about it on his hands and knees, measuring it as against the mast.

Sometimes he would say a few words to the girl, heedless whether she replied or not. Then, when he had been working some half hour or so, looking up, he caught her eyes.

He was sitting with the sail spread on his knees and she was lying opposite to him, resting on her arm. She had looked in his face a thousand times before, straight as the sun looked at him or the lagoon, but now, just before her eyes could evade him, he caught their glance, caught the look on her face—something that vanished and became nothing before his mind could fully seize it.

Pausing in his work, he looked at her for a moment without speaking. She seemed to have forgotten his presence; her eyes, cast down under their long lashes, were following some pattern her finger was tracing on the ground, and her face showed no expression.

He went on with his business mechanically. His mind, so far from straying, focused on the work in his hands. Every fibre of the mat that differed in colour from the others impressed itself on his sight and understanding. The stitches went in evenly spaced, as though made by some unerring mechanism; Katafa might seemingly have been a thousand miles away, and yet every fibre of the sail, every stitch he put in, seemed part of the something strange that had suddenly come to him from Katafa.

He worked with head bent as if lost in thought; then, pausing in his work, he raised his head and looked at her, his lips pursed ever so slightly, the trace of a wrinkle on his forehead.

She heard the stitches cease. Slowly raising her face, her eyes met his fully, without flinching, steadfast, whilst with her eyes still clinging to his, her breast rose with a sigh that died to a shudder. He had dropped the needle from his hand and the sail from his knees. Leaning forward with half-parted lips, his respiration ceased whilst her gaze fell away languorously like the gaze of a dying person, only to be raised again and plunged into his very soul.

They were standing now, the mat between them, Katafa flushed, shuddering, half laughing, as one might fancy a being new-dead and on the threshold of Paradise. Dick, his nostrils wide-spread, his pupils broad with new-born desire, flinging out his arm, tried to seize her, and grasped—nothing. She had evaded him as though some wind had blown her aside. The attempt to seize her had thrown her into the world we enter when we fall asleep.