THE CALL OF KAROLIN

If the blue parua birds resting above the house were indeed the birds of long ago, they might have fancied nothing changed since those days when the father of Dick returned from the valley of the idol with Emmeline.

Love never alters, and the forms of the lovers were almost the same, and the incidents of their simple and humble lives made beautiful by love and the absolute innocence which is Nature.

The joyous awakenings to mornings of new life, the sudden and passionate embraces, the sudden and seeming forgetfulness of one another, as when the figure of Dick could be seen far away on the reef, heedless of everything but the fish he was hunting for, followed by the figure of Katafa, faithful as his shadow—all was the same and yet, touched by the wizard spell of Karolin beyond the southern sea, all was vaguely different. The spell of Karolin had seized Dick through Katafa; though he had never seen the reef and the gulls and the forty-mile sweep of lagoon, the great atoll island had begun its work upon him even before Kearney had died.

It had made him talk its language; it had made him forget his past; little by little, and strand by strand, it had broken him away from all things connecting him with the world, drifting him farther than his parents had ever drifted from civilisation and its fantastic labours, its hopes, dreams and ambitions.

And this it had done through Katafa.

He was no longer Dick but Taori. The language of his early childhood had gone from him like a bird flown. Kearney was the recollection of something that had once been part of a dream; Nan, on his pole by the house, was far more potent and living.

At night sometimes now Katafa, as they sat under the stars, would talk to him in an extraordinary way. It was as though Karolin were speaking and trying to tell of itself.

Karolin had never released its hold on her, and in some strange manner the coming of love, the breaking of the spell of taminan, the new meaning of life, all revived in his mind the memory of the environment of her childhood. She told him of Le Juan, the priestess of Nanawa, and of Nanawa, and of Uta Matu, the king, so old that his skin was beginning to scale off in white scales like the scales of the alomba. She told him that at Karolin there was nothing but reef—no island—nothing but reef.

Dick laughed at this, a short, hard laugh that struck through the starlight like the cough of a stabbing spear. She took his hand as they lay there side by side, as if to lead his imagination.

At Karolin there was nothing but reef, a reef so great that sight could not follow it; on one side the lagoon—the quiet water—and on the other the sea. Were you to follow it on foot you would walk for days before it led you round back to the break. Two days’ journey it was, and you had to sleep at night without a roof under the stars. The lagoon was so wide that it held all the stars, even the Milky Way—the great smoke—and the moon, travelling all night, could not cross it.

She told of the great fish that came in from the outer sea and made thunder, whip-rays tossing themselves into the air and falling back in fountains of foam, the coral ringing to the echo of the concussions.

Then, in a voice more remote and as if telling a secret: “There are no trees there, only the palms.”

It was Karolin speaking, not Katafa—Karolin the treeless, Karolin that had become part of her through the magic of environment. If the great sea spaces, the forty-mile reef, the lagoon mirror and the snow of surf had found voices to tell of themselves, could they have spoken more clearly than they spoke through her?

Her antagonism to the trees, felt when she first viewed them in their great masses, had become increased by the part they had played in trapping her; yet at base it was the antagonism of Karolin expressed by the human mind.

In all these talks there was no word of herself or the spell that had been put upon her by Le Juan. She herself scarcely knew the meaning of it, or why for years she had lived in the world as a shadow amongst shadows, or how it was that she had awakened to this new world in the arms of Dick. Yet deep in her heart a light had pierced, showing something vague and monstrous, something nameless that named itself Le Juan.

And now, as though Karolin had placed its finger upon the very woods themselves and upon the trees it hated because it had no trees, sometimes, when the wind was in a certain quarter, the dead men from Karolin would hint of their presence vaguely and dreadfully, driving Dick and Katafa to the reef to escape them.

The rigor had long since lost its grip and the fantastic show had collapsed, figures falling apart and in pieces like waxworks melted by heat in the furious corruption of the tropics.

Then, in a month, the woods were sweet again, but the stain remained in memory.

Dick had never loved the woods. His passion was all for the sea and the reef, and the stories of the girl about Karolin, whilst only half believed in, had left their mark on his mind. She had never indicated where the island lay, only conveying to him that somewhere there was a place where she had come from where nothing existed but sea and reef and lagoon; it was just a story, yet it dwelt with him and, working in the inner recesses of his mind, it joined itself with vague recollections of what Kearney had said about the place where she had come from. Kearney had shown him one day the stain on the southern horizon, telling him that another island lay there and that the girl had come from it in all likelihood.

The thing had passed almost out of recollection.

One morning, a month or so after the woods had regained their sweetness, Dick, who had completed the sail for the dinghy, was standing by the little boat as she lay moored to the bank, when suddenly a whole lot of things grouped themselves together in his mind—the dinghy, the mast and sail, the open sea, recollections of Katafa’s stories about the great reef and the lagoon where fish made thunder.

Katafa was in the boat, ready to push off, but instead of joining her he beckoned her on shore again and saying, “Come,” led the way off towards the trees. She followed him through the woods and up to the hill-top. There, on the southernmost side of the great rock, he stood and pointed south across the morning sea. She gazed and saw nothing.

“I see nothing, Taori, but the water and the wind on the water and the sea birds on the wind. Ah! There!”

Her eyes had caught the stain.

Out on the fishing bank, long ago, she had seen the full blaze of the lagoon striking upwards to the sky, making a vague, pale window in the blue; this was the same, though remote.

“Karolin,” said Dick.

She stood, the wind lifting her hair, and her eyes fixed on the stain, which grew and spread in her imagination till the song of the reef came round her, and the freedom of the infinite spaces of sea and sky. All she longed for lay there, and all she loved stood beside her. She said nothing. Never once in her talk of her old home had she expressed the wish to go back. The place where she had found Dick was antagonistic to her, yet it was the place where she had found him, and was in some way part of him, and she could not put her dislike of it in speech, nor her desire to leave it. Even now she said nothing.

She did not know that the craving for adventure, for movement, for change, and the desire for newness were stirring in Dick’s heart.

He scarcely knew it himself. The thing that had come in his mind was scarcely formed as yet, or, being formed, had not yet developed its wings.

They left the hill-top and came down through the trees, scarcely speaking. One might have thought that they had quarrelled but for the fact that his arm was about her neck.

Before leaving the hill-top, had they turned their eyes to the north, they might have seen across the blue morning sea a vision that seemed cast on the screen of things by the gods in opposition to the far, faint vision of Karolin.

There, on the northern horizon, white as the wing of a gull, stood a sail, remote, lonely, only visible from this height—the sail of the first copra trader in these waters.