THE GREAT WIND

Creeping close to the wood edge, she had watched like a person in a dream whilst Dick rose to his feet and faced the spearman. She had heard the words of Laminai, she had seen him point the spear, and in those few seconds she had seen death and she had known love, the real love that heeds nothing, even death.

In those few seconds self vanished, and with it the spell that had bound her since childhood, the spell that passion or hatred could not break, that nothing could have broken in the mind of a Kanaka.

As the arm flung back for the fatal stroke, she launched herself, Laminai came crashing to earth, the spear flew from his hand, and Dick caught it. Useless, but for one thing, the cry that went up from Laminai’s men as Dick, seizing the spear, cried: “Katafa.” Instantly they recognised her, the girl who was dead, the taminanite whom no man dare touch, who dared touch no man. They saw her ghost clinging to Laminai and, breaking, they ran like curs, filling the woods with their cries.

But Laminai did not run. Rolling on the ground, fighting and struggling to free himself from the creature that had him in its grip, teeth in his hair and arms round his neck and legs locked in his, screaming like a horse in terror or rage, he tried to rise, whilst Dick, the spear held short, not daring to thrust, called on Katafa to release him. Then, as with a great and mighty effort the brute half rose, Dick, seeing his chance, drove the spear into his gaping mouth, raising the butt with the stroke so that the point emerged from the neck.

Then, with Katafa in his arms, Katafa clinging to him almost as tightly as she had clung to the other, he made upwards across the sward till he reached the rock. He was making for the southern woods, where the bad lands would give them a hiding place and protection, but as he reached the summit something seized him and wrestled with him and tried to drive him back. It was the wind.

Hot as the breath of a tiger, blowing up from southward, through the clear night it had come, tremendous and sudden, like a giant springing on the island; shouting and dashing the trees together, clashing the branches, stripping the leaves and sending the nuts flying like cannon balls.

It took Nan from his post and sent him flying into the lagoon, the post after him; it stripped the mat sails from the anchored fleet and sent them sailing off like dish cloths; it drove the limp, dead body of Laminai up against the trees, the spear still sticking in its throat.

Dick, with Katafa’s hair streaming across his face, half bent, nearly blown from his feet, took shelter to leeward of the rock. Here there was peace though the whole island beneath them was yelling and tossing under an absolutely cloudless sky and in the strong, clear light of the moon. It was the Naya e Matadi, the great wind without rain that once in a decade swept Karolin and the sea for a hundred miles beyond, coming always at night and always at the full of the moon, lasting only an hour, and more dreaded than a hurricane, because more mysterious.

Here, sheltered in the cup of the wind, they lay in the light of the quiet moon, the fight, the killing of Laminai, the still imminent presence of death, all as remote from them as the tossing trees below, the thundering reef and the infinite moonlit sea.