CHAPTER XLI

HIS KINGDOM

Broad as the reef break was at Karolin, no ship under sail could enter at the full ebb. Sweeping with an eight-knot clip and boiling round the coral piers, the waters of the great lagoon met the northward-running current in a leaping cross-sea of aquamarine and emerald whipped to snow when the wind was in the east. At slack all this died away; a child might have swum the passage and a leaf would have drifted with scarce a change of place. This was the sea gate of Karolin, and the keepers of the gate were the sun and the moon.

The sun and the moon and the wind and the sea—these four held the great atoll between them and had here a significance unguessed by dwellers on the continents and lands of the world; for here the new and the full moons were manifestly the letters-in of the great spring tides, and the first- and third-quarter moons the admitters of the neaps. Here the sun was seen from his rising to his setting, from his leap to his plunge, and storm and halcyon cast their spells on life, unbroken and uninterfered with by hills or walls or mountains or forests.

Here for undated ages man had lived alone with the sea and the gulls and the fish, and had remained man, learning little, forgetting nothing, with a memory and tradition kept alive by the necessities of the moment that urged him to build canoes as his forefathers had built them, and houses to shelter the canoes, and houses to protect him from the rains and winds.

Here there was nothing that did not date from the remote past, nothing that was not of use in the immediate present.

So is it with the beavers and the ants and the bees, whose work ever advances from the time of Nineveh and beyond, yet never advances to the future, who build as they built, who live as they lived, who die as they died, and as first they built and lived and died in the garden of God, which is Nature.

Only man can change, only man can live for ages without change, yet remain capable of change, only man can be sealed away in the land of instinct, yet remain capable of entering the land of reason.

So was it with the people of Karolin gathered together this morning on the beach by the gridiron of coral where for ages past victims had been sacrificed to Nanawa, the shark-toothed one, by his priests and through the agency of his servants, the sharks.

Le Juan, after the death of Uta Matu, had temporised. She did not in the least mind sacrificing the half-witted girl Ooma, but she greatly dreaded barren results.

Including the king’s wives, there were over two hundred women on Karolin, all wanting their men back, and close on three hundred children, more than half of which were boys. Of these boys a large number were over twelve and a good number over fourteen, all ripe for mischief, without much fear of Nanawa, and with the antagonism of all boys towards old women of Le Juan’s type.

Le Juan had sent the fathers and husbands of this terrible population to a war from which they had not returned, and, worse than that, she had made herself responsible, under Nanawa, for their return.

She had declared that they were “held” by Nanawa till the great sacrifice of a woman had been offered to him, yet, feeling that the tricky shark god had played her another trick, she simply dared not make the sacrifice. She knew what would happen if it failed; she felt the temper of the people as a man feels the sharp point of a dagger against his breast, so, as before said, she temporised, fell into pretended trances, had pretended visions, declared that nothing was to be done until it was absolutely sure that the mother of Ooma would not return, and sweated consumedly at night as she lay in her shack listening to the sounds of the village and the shouting of the ribald boys and the boom of the surf on the reef, whilst Ooma, half-witted and happy, slept protected from death by the ferocious beast that was the soul of Le Juan and whose one dread was extinction—through failure.

But the time had come, and the death warrant was sealed by the far red speck of light on the northern sky caused by the burning of the schooner.

A boy had seen it, two minutes later the whole village was watching it, and next day it had got into the minds of the people. It was looked on as a sign—of what, no one could say—but it was an angry sign, and that night Nalia, the chief wife of the dead Uta, had a dream.

She dreamt that Uta appeared to her and that the red light was his wrath that the great sacrifice had not been made. He also declared that if it was not made at once, worse would befall Karolin. That was the end. Before dawn Le Juan, dragged from her hut to hear the news, gave in, and as the sun broke above the lagoon the preparations began.

Ooma, awakening to another happy day of life, was anointed and rubbed with palm oil to make her acceptable to the god. She laughed with pleasure. She was of the happy half-witted kind with sense enough to know that she was being fêted; when they put flowers in her hair she laughed and laughed, and when they led her by the hand to a suddenly prepared banquet where she alone was the guest, she went laughing, the boys dancing around her and shouting: “Karak, O he, Ooma, karaka.”

The last of the tide was flowing out of the lagoon when, the banquet over, Le Juan, taking the hand of Ooma, led her along by the waterside, followed by the whole population of Karolin.

By the break great sheets and coils of glass-smooth water, pale as forget-me-nots, could be seen moving between the wind-flaws where a half-dead breeze touched the surface; ahead of the advancing crowd the gridiron of coral lay almost entirely uncovered by the tide.

Nature, with that assistance which she sometimes lends to inhumanity, had tilted this terrible shelf so that the gradually rising water would take the victim to the waist at greater flood; art had driven in iron bars for the binding.

At quarter-flood or before, the sharks, who always knew what was going on, instructed maybe by Nanawa, would begin their struggle for the prize.

As the procession approached the gridiron, Ooma suddenly began to hold back.

Some instinctive warning had come to her that danger lay ahead, that all things were not as they pictured themselves to be; that the flowers and the feasting and all the splendours of that most glorious morning of her life were veils of illusion behind which lay Terror.

She stopped, trying to release her hand from the grip of Le Juan, then, struggling with her captor, she began to scream. They seized her, still screaming, and brutally cast her on the coral, binding her to it by each thigh, by the wrist and by the shoulders. Then, as she lay there half-stunned, voiceless, and staring the sky, suddenly from the great ring of the atoll rising to heaven like a protest, came a sigh, profound from the very heart of the sea. It was the turning of the tide.

CHAPTER THE LAST

At sunrise that morning Katafa had awakened to find the wind fallen to a gentle breeze. Away to the south she could see the palms of Karolin, and across the scarcely ruffled swell she could hear the song of the surf on the coral.

The Kanaka rock spouting to starboard told her the state of the tide; it was falling. Hours must elapse before they could make the break with the flood, so, instead of waking Dick, who was still soundly asleep, she sat watching the gulls and the wind-flaws on the water, listening, dreaming.

Far away over the past her mind flitted like the frigate bird, her namesake, tireless, covering vast distances. She saw again the reef where she had wandered as a child, that endless sunlit coral road, the sea wrack and the shells and the gulls always flying, the beaches where she had played like a ghost child with children untouchable as ghosts. The vast sunsets, the tumultuous dawns, the nights when, under the coil of the great snake, she had watched the torches of the fish-spearers on the reef, and the night when, under the sickle moon, the sea had taken her and swept her away to find love and a soul.

A gull sweeping past saluted the boat with a cry and Dick, stirring in his sleep, awoke, stretched, held out his arms and then clasped them around Katafa, gazing as she pointed away to the south, where every lift of the swell showed the palms of the great atoll whose mirror blaze was paling the sky.

Then hauling in the anchor and setting the sail to the light wind that had shifted to the west of north, Katafa steered, heading for the east, whilst Dick handed her food and water from the beaker, eating scarcely anything himself.

His eyes were fixed on the far-off shore to starboard, the endless shore that showed nothing but gulls and palms, foam jets when a greater breaker broke on the coral, all seen against air luminous with the dazzle of the vast lagoon.

And now, still following the turn of the reef, Katafa pointed ahead where, far away past the northern pier of the break, the whole sea danced as the outpouring waters met the current, the last of the ebb rushing like a river, foam dashed, jubilant, green against blue, white against green and gulls over all, gulls wheeling and shouting and diving and drifting on the wind like turbulent spirits on the sun blaze. Katafa held on still steering due east as though to leave Karolin behind, on and on till the vast sea disclosed itself to the south and the turmoil at the break died and oiled away into the slack. Deep in the knowledge of those waters, she held on steering now to the southwest against the current; then, turning the boat at last, she made due west. The wind had freshened and backed to the east of north as if to help them, yet it was half-flood before the piers of the break showed clear before them, the water pouring in and lashing the coral, leaping on the outer beach and filling the air with its fume and song; great fish went with them, albacores leaping like whirled swords, bream, garfish, all in the grip of the mighty river of the flood.

And now the blue and blazing lagoon, where the fleets of the world might have harboured, flung out its mighty arms, the roar and thunder and spray of the breakers saluted them, and then, under a storm of gulls, the spray and thunder and torrent of the sea passed like a dream, and before them, across the untroubled waters, lay the white beach where Uta Matu had watched the dawn and the return of the fleet that never more could return.

The beach was crowded. It was half-flood, and the sharks had snatched away the last of the last offering ever to be made to the great god Nanawa. Steering for the beach, Katafa saw nothing but the crowd—women, children, boys, all lined by the water’s edge, dumb, with scarcely a movement, watching the approaching boat that had appeared as if in answer to the sacrifice of Ooma.

Amongst them stood Le Juan, and as she watched, wondering like the others and as dumb, the rapidly approaching boat called up in her mind a vision from far away—the boat of the Spanish ship of years ago, the ship that had brought Katafa and whose timbers lay sunk ten fathoms deep, crusted by the ever-building coral.

She saw in the boat the answer of Nanawa, the evil god who was to play her one last trick, for, as the prow dashed on the sand, and as though the god had suddenly stripped a curtain aside, she saw Katafa.

Ah, the spirit of prophecy had not been denied to her those long years ago when, urging Uta Matu to destroy the child, she saw in her the agent of revenge for the murdered papalagi. Katafa, who had brought Taiofa to his death and Sru, Laminai, and all the men of Karolin. Katafa, who had destroyed half a nation to re-create it. Katafa, who had vanished to return, a woman beautiful like a star risen from the sea.

She saw nothing else, neither Taori, who stood on the sands beside the girl, nor the people, who had surged back as the cry rang along the beach: “Katafa, from the dead she has returned, Katafa!”

She saw neither the boat that the lagoon waves were driving broadside on to the sand, nor the lagoon, nor the sky beyond; like a beast the spirit that had dwelt with her always swelled and seized her and shook her and spoke, spoke in words that were strange and unknown as though it had flung human speech aside for the language of the devils.

Then, as though the great hand that had used her was crushing her and dropping her, she fell, and with her the power of Nanawa for ever.

The sun was near his setting, and in the evening light Nan stood on his post erected by the house of Uta, once king of Karolin, and in the house, dimly to be seen, were the little ships of Taori, toys of the long ago, symbols now of the sea power that he dreamed of vaguely as he stood in the sunset on the reef with Katafa, and facing the line of the empty canoe houses.

Only yesterday he had stood armed with the pasht by the dead body of Le Juan whilst the people, listening to the words of Katafa, proclaimed him their chief; yet by this evening he had visited the canoe houses and had sent fisher-boys to the southern beach to fetch Aioma, Falia and Tafuta, the three old men, too old for war, but canoe-builders all of them, and holding between them the secret of the construction of the great war canoes.

For to Dick, standing with uptilted chin before the women and the children and the boys who, with the sure instinct of children and women and boys, had seen in him their ruler, a vision had come, God-sent, of the world that lay beyond the world he knew. He had seen again Ma in the moonlight, and the spear of Laminai, the red-bearded man he had put to death, and, the black-bearded man chased through the woods, the burning schooner and the ape-men who still held the beach of Palm Tree; and as he looked on Katafa, on the women and helpless children, on the boys growing towards war age but still unripe, the great knowledge came to him, as it came to the earliest men who fronted the wolf, that strength is possession, and that without possession love is a mockery—that dreams based on unreality are dreams.

They turned from the canoe houses and came along the reef. Here, on the outer beach, the village far behind them, they sat down to rest.

It was the first time they had found themselves alone since leaving Palm Tree. All last night the village had hummed around them, bonfires burning all along the coral and bonfires answering from the southern beach, conch answering conch, whilst the great stars watched and the breakers thundered as they had thundered at the coming of Uta Matu to power, of Uta Maru, his father, and all the line of the kings of Karolin stretching to the remote past, but never beyond the voice of the sea.

Here they were at last alone, all trouble done with for the moment, the past like a tempestuous sea, the future veiled and vague, but great and full of the splendours of Promise.

For a moment neither of them spoke, their eyes following the spray clouds of the breakers and the flighting gulls wheeling above the flooding sea. Then as they turned one to the other, and as he seized her by the shoulders, to Katafa for the first time fully came the knowledge of the splendour of man crowned with power—man triumphant, mighty, kingly and dominant. For in the past few hours Taori had changed from the passionate boy to a man fit to be the ruler of men.

Holding her from him for a moment, his head drawn back like the head of a cobra, he consumed her with his eyes.

Then he struck, crushing her with his arms, his lips to her lips, her throat, her breast, whilst the full-flooding sea shook the coral with its thunder and the gulls in great circles swung chanting above the haze of the spray.

As the sea touched the horizon, pouring its gold across the outgoing tide, Katafa, turning from her lover and sweeping the sea with her eyes, saw floating far above the northern sky-line something that was not cloud, that was not land, that was not sea. The ghost of an island, lonely and illusive as the land where in his dream Lestrange had met his vanished children.

Palm Tree, far lifted above all things earthly—by mirage.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Garden of God, by H. De Vere Stacpoole