THE CLUB OF MA

“Taori!”

The birds were twittering on the branches above, and the first sunbeams breaking through the leaves.

“Taori!” whispered Katafa, her arm round the neck of the sleeper and her lips close to his ear.

He stirred, raised himself on his elbow, and sat up, sleep dropping from him suddenly, like a cloak.

“Listen!” said Katafa.

Awakening with the first beam of light, she had heard vague and far-away sounds, sounds caught and repeated by the echoes of the hated woods—the woods that had imprisoned her once, that seemed in league against her again—the woods she had always hated, that had always hated her, barring her from the freedom she craved for and the wide spaces that were part of her soul.

Karolin was calling and the sea was open and the boat was there ready; nothing was wanting but the dark of the next night, and just in that first clear minute of waking from sleep, with her arm around the man she loved, came a sense of oppression, imprisonment and evil—the woods.

The vision of the copra traders and the great canoe guarding the lagoon was almost forgotten. The sense of hate and imprisonment came from the trees, and maybe in that waking moment her mind had glimpsed the core of things, for it was the trees that had brought the traders.

Then came the far-away sounds: shouts and vague, indefinite noises heard through the movement of the wind in the leaves, now dying to nothing, now more clear and purposeful, almost like the sound of pursuit—it was the sound of search.

The copra traders were combing the groves. The remains of the canoes broken on the beach had given them pause before taking full possession of the place, and they wished to see what might possibly be lurking amidst the trees.

Even as Dick listened, the sounds grew clearer. They would die away as though finished and done with, and then they would break out, of a sudden, closer. There is nothing more deceptive than the trees with their dense patches, their winding runways, their echo-haunted dells, their draughts and stillnesses. Sound enters here like a runner and gets lost, and goes far or fails or drops dead, according to the road it takes, according to the wind it meets, or the absence of wind.

A shout came from the sward. Dick parted the leaves and there, running across the sward towards the house, was a man, a red-bearded man, gun in hand.

Four others came after him, brown and naked, with frizzy black beards, and Dick, whose piercing eyes noted everything, saw the marks on their bodies, marks of old wounds and ringworm sores.

He stooped and picked up the coral-headed club he had found that day on the eastern beach and, resting his hands lightly on it, continued to watch.

They made for the house and surrounded it whilst the red-bearded man went in. Dick could see him inside looking here and there at the shelves, at the walls, and round on the floor as if searching for trace of the owners; then he came out and the whole party disappeared into the grove to the left.

Ten minutes later they reappeared, recrossed the sward, and entered the woods, again making, evidently, for the eastern beach.

“They are gone,” said Katafa, “but let us still keep hidden, for they may return.”

Dick, without answering, stood listening. “No,” said he; “they are gone, but they will not return yet.”

He pushed his way through the branches to where the boat was hidden, fetched out a fishing line, caught a robber crab, and, using its flesh for bait, came out and began to fish from the bank in the full light of day. A bream was in the hook in a couple of minutes, and, leaving it for Katafa to clean and prepare, he went straight across the sward to the old fire-hole and began to light a fire.

Then, putting some bread-fruit to bake, he made off behind the house to the shack that the search party had missed, found the old water beaker of the dinghy, filled it at the little well at the back of the yam patch, and returned with it on his shoulder.

He placed it carefully in the boat; then he came back to where Katafa was cooking the fish, and stood with his brow knotted, watching, but scarcely seeing her.

He was reviewing everything in his mind, that mind so simple, yet so straight-thinking and clear-sighted; another person might have been bothering about the strangers and the possibility of their return to the sward, he was thinking of nothing but the journey ahead and the meal in hand.

Having determined to risk being found, he dismissed the matter from his mind.

After standing for a moment like this he suddenly turned, went back to the bank and, having rebaited the hook with the remains of the crab, began to fish again, landing in the course of five minutes or so a three-pound schnapper and another bream. “For to-morrow,” said he as he threw them on the ground by the girl and sat down to the meal she had prepared.

Katafa said nothing. Fear was at her heart, she could scarcely eat; every breath of the breeze was a footstep, and the hateful woods that surrounded the sward seemed only waiting to seize her, but she said nothing. The calm, certain courage of Dick bore her along with it, his coolness became part of her, but without destroying the fear that breathed on her from the woods.

Then when the meal was over and Dick, picking up the club that had never left him even when fishing, gave her directions to cook the remaining fish, place them in the boat and stay in the boat till his return, she made no objection, though the fear of being alone was like the fear of death.

“I am going to look,” said Dick, “to see if the big canoe is still there and how it lies, and count how many of them there are, and see what they are doing. Wait for me.” He swept the sward, the trees and the lagoon with a glance; then he made off, trailing the club towards the eastern trees.

She had played her part so well that he did not guess her terror. He himself had no fear even of the ape-like men; fear had been left out of his composition when he was born in those same woods he was treading now, light of foot, silent as a panther, and as swift on the trail.

Katafa, left to herself, bent her head for a moment as though a heavy hand were pressing it down. Then, straightening herself and flinging out her arms as though casting fear away, she set to on the work before her.

In half an hour it was finished, the fish cooked and wrapped in leaves and placed in the boat, the fire put out, and all traces of the meal cast into the lagoon.

Then, snuggling down in the dinghy, she waited.

Nothing could be more hidden than her position, nothing more secure, yet fear lay with her, clawing at her heart. Never had she felt such fear as this fear, not for herself now, but for Dick.

It was their first parting. She had not known at all what Dick was to her till now, how every fibre of her being was tied to him, and the true and awful meaning of love—the sexless love that is akin to mother love, the one thing deathless, if there is no death.

For a moment she had felt it on that night when the point of Laminai’s spear killed taminan and self in her and she had flung passion away only to be seized by it again in the arms of Taori.

Since then life had been a dream almost without thought, a happiness whose only stain was the far-off vision of Karolin.

Now alone, with the branches moving above her in the wind, she knew what love really was, the crudest gift the gods ever gave to man, and the most beautiful; the most terrible, and yet the most benign.

As the embryo passes through the forms of all things once embryonic, even of the fish, before it takes the form of man, so had the soul of Katafa passed through all the forms of human soul states in its change from the nebulous to the formed.

Antagonism when Kearney tried to hit her with the whip of seaweed, hatred when he hit her with the tia wood ball, the longing for revenge which brought him death, the boundless irritation that had been born in her from Dick, the mad desire to destroy him, pity born in her at his cry for help, tenderness brought to her by the bird, passion full-grown in a moment and casting her to embrace the living tree, love that turned all other things to nothing, even the spell of taminan.

Who finds a soul finds sorrow, and who finds love finds death. Death surely and at last, and almost as surely a hundred little deaths in imagination, absence or estrangement.

She heard the movement of the leaves in the wind and the eternal voice of the surf on the reef, and beyond them the silence so full of possibilities.

Katafa knew more of the world than Dick. Dick was the child of two people who had gone far to a state of savagery, Katafa had been born in civilisation. On Karolin, when she had walked as a ghost amongst ghosts, she had seen terrible things that had left her unmoved owing to the gulf that had separated her from humanity, and now from that past came all sorts of half-formless imaginings threatening Dick.

Time and again she would have left the boat and made for the eastern beach to see what had happened, but for his order. She was to stay in the boat and wait for him. She could not resist that order and, fortunately for them both, she did not try.

As she lay there listening, waiting, loathing her own security and inaction, the one thing giving her comfort and strength was the fact that she was obeying his order. It was as though he had left with her part of his mind, warm, living and sustaining.

An hour passed, and then from the trees came a sound, the sound of something moving swiftly and moving towards her. A form dashed the leaves and branches aside—it was Dick.

The club was trailing from his left hand; his right, grasping a branch, was holding it thrust aside; around his neck a tendril of convolvulus twined as though the woods, worshipping, had wreathed him, and his face was lit with battle, triumph and the light of something terrible that was almost laughter. For a moment he stood there like a god of old time before his worshipper; then, letting the branches close behind him, he slipped into the boat and lay holding her in his arms, his lips almost to her ear.

He had stolen through the trees to spy on the strangers and, drawing towards the eastern beach, had heard the sound of axes at work. The men with holes in their ears and slit noses were cutting down trees away to the right of the beach, in amongst the trees and invisible from the beach. Having watched them through the leaves without being seen, he made for the beach itself. The great canoe was in the lagoon, just as she had been on the night before, and on the sands, walking up and down, were two white men. Men the same as Kearney, only different in face; men with hair on their faces, one red, the other black.

What happened then he told in few words.

Watching the bearded men walking up and down and talking together, the wish came on him to go up to them and look them in the face and speak to them. His pride had somehow risen against the fact that he was hiding there in concealment whilst they were walking free with command of the beach, and besides that there was the wish to speak to them, to hear them speak, to see them closer. Yet something held him back. Caution, maybe—who knows?—but it did not hold him long. Just as though something were pushing him from behind, out he came from the trees and, crossing the sands, approached the two men. They stopped in their walk, turned and stared at him.

Dick’s description of the two men was succinct. They stank—gin probably, but whatever it was, it offended his fine sense of smell and the memory of it made him spit over the side of the dinghy as he told of it.

One can fancy that the disgust was written on his beautiful and expressive face as he came towards the strangers, chin uptilted and with level eyes, like an object lesson in what man ought to be, contrasted with what man is; and one may fancy what the products of high civilisation may have felt at the sight of a bloody Kanaka walking as if the world belonged to him as well as the beach, and with a look like that on his mug.

Nothing is so infectious as dislike and distaste, and the gentlemen from the ship exchanged remarks and laughed, and, though Dick had all but forgotten the language of his birth, he knew. An animal would have known what they said and what they thought, for the language of insult is universal, and Dick, standing before them, forgetting Katafa, forgetting everything, replied. Just one word: “Panaka!”

“Panaka” in Karolinese means a dogfish, just as “kanaka” means a shark. Do the Karolinites know the relationship between the two creatures, since they use only a single letter to differentiate one name from the other? Who knows? But the single letter concludes the business as far as insult is concerned, for the shark is feared and respected, the dogfish loathed and despised; it steals the bait, it bites the fish on the hook, it will sometimes attack a man if he is defenceless, or a child. It was Katafa’s term of dishonour and reproach for the robber crabs, and scavenger gulls, and the bula fish, all spines and snap, the ink-jetting octopods and the green eels that tangled the lines when caught.

The word heaped with insult had scarcely left Dick’s mouth when the red man struck. Dick nearly fell, recovered himself and, with a great half-moon sweep of the club, brought the red man low. Then he chased the black-bearded man for half a hundred yards till reason returned and he remembered the ape-men, Katafa and all the things he ought never to have forgotten.

Shouts from the anchored schooner did not delay his steps as he took cover in the trees, making with all speed for the hidden dinghy.

That was the story he told into Katafa’s ear.

“Remembering you, I came back,” he finished.

That was the truth. Only for Katafa he would have no doubt done to the black-bearded man what he had done to the red. Heaven knows what the end of the whole adventure might have been, or the end of that dominant and fearless spirit—whether he would have fallen beneath the weight of numbers and been trodden out on the sand, or whether he would have brought the New Hebrideans to heel, taken the schooner, sailed and found civilisation and risen to Napoleonic heights. No one knows where a human rocket may go, once fired, but Katafa and Fate interposed—at least to delay the firing and alter the direction of the line of energy.

They lay listening, yet hearing nothing but the wind and the surf; but they knew that this silence was absolutely deceptive—the woods were full of trickery and the altering of a few points in the wind would cut off or increase sound travelling from a distance.

More, the altering of the time of day made a difference. Here, in the twenty-four hours of a day, leaves, twigs, branches, the very trees themselves, altered in pose or position, and every alteration of the great green curtain interposed or removed barriers to sound. The energy expended in the opening and closing of earth flowers—what mill might it not drive if “properly directed”? And the energy Palm Tree Island expended in a day—who could measure it? It was unknown, or only instinctively known, to Dick and Katafa in the recognition that the sound-carrying qualities of the woods varied with morning, noon and night.

As they lay secure, hidden and listening, Katafa, whose left arm was about the neck of her companion, let her right hand rest on the club that lay beside her.

The cocoanut fibre always wrapped round the club handles in war time, so as to give a better grip, had unwound a bit, and her fingers, straying, felt a ring surrounding the wood, lower down another ring, and lower down another. It was the three-ringed club of Karolin, the sacred pasht always carried by the eldest son of the king or his representative in battle. It had been carried by Laminai in the attack on the Spanish ship long years ago, and recently by Ma, the only son of Laminai. When Dick had killed Ma in the glade, it had lain there in the moonlight and had been picked up by one of the fugitives from the battle, who cast it away on the beach before plunging into the water in his vain attempt to escape.

Katafa knew that it was the royal club, a thing equivalent to a sceptre. She had seen it naked of its cocoanut-fibre wrapping, carried in state, worshipped.

No woman of Karolin dared handle it on pain of death, and as her fingers touched the sacred rings and the fact became clear to her that it was it, a thrill of pride went through her.

It was Dick’s.

Karolin’s symbol of power and success in war had fallen into the hands of Taori.

She did not know that she was handling the weapon that had slain her mother—the weapon that had fallen into the hands of Taori, not through coincidence, but the iron logic of events.