by Ruskin Bond
She lay in the lagoon like a mangy dog, a humble ship, very unlike the Spaniard or the blustering whale-man; she only wanted water and a few vegetables, and her men gave no trouble; then, one evening, she slank out again with the ebb, but she left something behind her—smallpox. It cleared the island, and of the 150 subjects of King Malemake, only ten were left—twelve people in all, counting the king and Maru.
The king died of a broken heart and age, and of the eleven people left, three were women, widows of men who had died of the smallpox.
Maru was unmarried, and as king (of the Community) he might have collected the women for his own household. But he had no thought of anything but grief; grief for his father and the people who were gone. He drew apart from the others, and the seven widowers began to arrange matters as to the distribution of the three widows. They began with arguments and ended with clubs; three men were killed, and one of the women killed another man because he had brained the man of her fancy.
Then the dead were buried in the lagoon—Maru refusing to help because of his Tabu—and the three newly-married couples settled down to live their lives, leaving Maru out in the cold. He was no longer the king. The women despised him because he hadn’t fought for one of them, and the men because he had failed in brutality and leadership. They were a hard lot, true survivors of the fittest, and Maru, straight as a palm tree, dark-eyed, gentle, and a dreamer, seemed, amongst them, like a man of another tribe and time.
He lived alone, and sometimes in the sun blaze on that great ring of coral, he fancied he saw the spirits of the departed walking as they had walked in life, and sometimes it might be thought he heard the voice of his father chiding him.
When the old man died Maru had refused to touch the body or help in its burial. Filial love, his own salvation, nothing would have induced Maru to break his Tabu, which barred him from touching a dead body.
It was part of him, an iron reef in his character beyond the influence of will.
II
One morning, some six weeks after all this marrying and settling down, a brig came into the lagoon. She was a Blackbirder, the Portsoy, owned and captained by Colin Robertson, a Banffshire man, hence the name of his brig. Robertson and his men landed, took off water, coconuts, bananas, and everything else they could find worth taking. Then they turned their attention to the population. Four men were not a great find, but Robertson was not above trifles; he recruited them; that is to say, he kicked them into his boat and took them on board the Portsoy, leaving the three widows, grass widows now—wailing on the shore. He had no finer feelings about the marriage tie, and he reckoned they would make out somehow. They were no use to him as labour, and they were ill-favoured; all the same, being a man of gallantry and some humour, he dipped his flag to them as the Portsoy cleared the lagoon and breasted the tumble at the break.
Maru, standing aft, saw the island with the white foam fighting the coral and the gulls threshing around the break; saw the palms cut against the pale aquamarine of the skyline that swept up into the burning blue of noon; heard the long rumble and boom of the surf on the following wind, and watched and listened till the sound of the surf died to nothingness, and of the island nothing remained but the palm tops, like pin-heads above the sea dazzle.
He felt no grief. But there came to him a new and strange thing, a silence, that the ship-board sounds could not break. Since birth the eternal boom of the waves on coral had been in his ears, night and day, and day and night, louder in storms, but always there. It was gone. That was why, despite the sound of the bow wash, and boost of the waves, and the creak of cordage and block, the brig seemed to have carried Maru into the silence of a new world.
He worked free of the Paumotus into the region of settled winds and accountable currents passing atolls, and reefs that showed like the threshing of a shark’s tail in the blue, heading north-west in a world of wind and waves and sky, desolate of life, and, for Maru, the land of Nowhere.
So it went on from week to week, and, as far as he was concerned, so it might have gone on forever. He knew nothing of the world into which he had been suddenly snatched, and land, which was not a ring of coral surrounding a lagoon, was for him unthinkable.
He knew nothing of navigation, and the brass-bound wheel, at which a sailor was always standing with his hands on the spokes, now twirling it this way, now that, had for him a fascination beyond words, the fascination of a strange toy for a little child, and something more. It was the first wheel he had ever seen, and its movements about its axis seemed magical, and it was never left without someone to hold it and move it—why? The mystery of the binnacle into which the wheel-mover was always staring, as a man stares into a rock pool after fish, was almost as fascinating.
Maru peeped into the binnacle one day, and saw the fish, something like a star fish, that still moved and trembled. Then someone kicked him away, and he ran forward and hid, feeling that he had pried into the secrets of the white men’s gods, and fearing the consequences.
But the white men’s gods were not confined to the wheel and binnacle; down below they had a god that could warn them of the weather, for that day at noon, and for no apparent reason, the sailors began to strip the brig of her canvas. Then the sea rose, and two hours later the cyclone seized them. It blew everything away, and then took them into its calm heart, where, dancing like giants in dead still air, and with the sea for a ballroom floor, the hundred-foot-high waves broke the Portnoy to pieces.
Maru alone was saved, clinging to a piece of hatch cover, half-stunned, confused, yet unafraid and feeling vaguely that the magic wheel and little trembling fish god had somehow betrayed the white men. He knew that he was not to die, because this strange world that had taken him from his island had not done with him yet, and the sea, in touch with him like this and half-washing over him at times, had no terror for him, for he had learned to swim before he had learned to walk. Also his stomach was full; he had been eating biscuits whilst the Portsoy’s canvas was being stripped away, and though the wind was strong enough almost to whip the food from his hands.
The peaceful swell that followed the cyclone was a thing enough to have driven an ordinary man mad with terror. Now lifted hill-high on a glassy slope, the whole wheel of the horizon came to view under the blowing wind and blazing sun, then gently down—sliding, the hatch cover would sink to a valley-bottom only to climb again a glassy slope, and rise again into the wind and sun. Foam flecks passed on the surface, and in the green sun-dazzled crystal of the valley floors, he glimpsed strips of fucus floating far down, torn by the storm from their rock attachments, and through the sloping wall of glass, up which the hatch cover was climbing, he once glimpsed a shark, lifted and cradled in it ridge of the great swell, strange to see as a fly in amber or a fish in ice.
The hatch cover was sweeping with a four-knot current, moving with a whole world of things concealed, or half-seen or hinted at. A sea current is a street; it is more, it is a moving pavement for the people of the sea; jelly fish were being carried with Maru on the great swell running with the current, a turtle broke the water close to him and plunged again, and once in a while roaring reef passed by only a few cable lengths away. He could see the rock exposed for a moment, and the water closing on it in a tumble of foam.
III
For a day and a night and a day and a night the voyage continued, the swell falling to a gentle heave, and then in the dawn came a sail, the mat-sail of a canoe like a brown wing cut against the haliotis-shell coloured sky.
In the canoe was a girl, naked as the new moon. Paddle in hand, and half-crouching, she drove the canoe towards him, the sail loose and flapping in the wind. Then he was on board the canoe, but how he got there he scarcely knew; the whole thing was like a dream within a dream.
In the canoe there was nothing, neither food nor water, only some fishing lines, and as he lay exhausted, consumed with thirst and faint with hunger, he saw the girl resetting the sail. She had been fishing last evening from an island up nor
th, and blown out to sea by a squall, had failed to make the land again, but she had sighted an island in the south-west, and was making for it, when she saw the hatch cover and the brown, clinging form of Maru.
As he lay half-dead in the bottom of the canoe, he watched her as she crouched with eyes fixed on the island and the steering paddle in hand, but before they could reach it, a squall took them, half-filling the canoe with rain-water, and Maru drank and drank till his ribs stood out, and then, renewed, half-rose, as the canoe, steered by the girl, rushed past tumbling green seas and a broken reef to a beach white as salt, towards which the great trees came down with the bread-fruits dripping with the new-fallen rain, and the palms bending like whips in the wind.
IV
Talia, that was her name, and though her language was different from the tongue of Maru, it had a likeness of a sort. In those days that little island was uncharted and entirely desolate but for the gulls of the reef and the birds of the woods, and it was a wonderland to Maru, whose idea of land as a sea-beaten ring of coral was shattered by woods that bloomed green as a sea-cave to the moonlight, high ground, where rivulets danced amidst the ferns, and a beach protected from the outer seas by a far-flung line of reefs. Talia to him was as wonderful as the island; she had come to him out of the sea; she had saved his life; she was as different from the women of the Paumotus as day from night. A European would have called her beautiful, but Maru had no thought of her beauty or her sex; she was just a being, beneficent, almost divorced from earth; the strangest thing in the strange world that Fate had seized him into, part with the great heaving swell he had ridden so long, the turtle that had broken up to look at him, the spouting reef, the sunsets over wastes of water, and the stars spread over wastes of sky.
He worshipped her in his way, and he might have worshipped her at a greater distance, only for the common bond of youth between them, and the incessant call of the world around them. Talia was practical; she seemed to have forgotten her people, and that island up north, and to live entirely in the moment. They made two shacks in the bushes, and she taught him island woodcraft, and the uses of berries and fruit that he had never seen before; also when to fish in the lagoon; for a month after they reached the island the poisonous season arrived, and Talia knew it, how, who can tell? She knew many things by instinct, the approach of storms, and when the poisonous season had passed, the times for fishing, and little by little their tongues, that had almost been divided at first, became almost one so that they could chatter together on all sorts of things, and she could tell him that her name was Talia, the daughter of Tepairu, that her island was named Makea, that her people had twenty canoes, big ones, and many little ones, and that Tepairu was not the name of a man, but a woman. That Tepairu was queen or chief woman of her people, now that her husband was dead.
And Maru was able to tell her by degrees of what he would remember, of the old Spanish ship, and how she spouted smoke and thunder, and killed the beach people, of his island and its shape—he drew it on the sand, and Talia, who knew nothing of atolls, at first refused to believe in it, thinking he was jesting—of his father, who was chief man or king of Fukariva, and of the destruction of the tribe. Then he told of the ship with the little wheel—he drew it on the sand—and the little fish god; of the centre of the cyclone, where the waves were like white dancing men, and of his journey on the hatch cover across the blue heaving sea.
They would swim in the lagoon together, right out to the reefs where the great rollers were always breaking, and out there Talia always seemed to remember her island, pointing north with her eyes fixed across the sea dazzle, as though she could see it, and her people, and the twenty canoes beached on the spume white beach beneath the palms.
‘Some day they will come,’ said Talia. She knew her people, those sea rovers, inconsequent as the gulls. Some day, for some reason or none, one of the fishing canoes would fish as far as this island, or be blown there by some squall. She would take Maru back with her. She told him this.
The thought began to trouble Maru. Then he grew gloomy. He was in love. Love had hit him suddenly. Somehow, and in some mysterious manner, she had changed from a beneficent being, and part of a dream, to a girl of flesh and blood. She knew it, and at the same moment he turned for her into a man.
Up to this she had no thought of him except as an individual, for all her dreams about him, he might as well have been a palm-tree, but now it was different, and in a flash he was everything. The surf on the reef said, Maru, and the wind in the trees, Maru, and the gulls fishing and crying at the break had one word, Maru! Maru! Maru!
Then, one day, swimming out near the bigger break in the reefs, a current drove them together, their shoulders touched, and Maru’s arm went round her, and amidst the blue laughing sea and the shouting of the gulls, he told her that the whole world was Talia, and as he told her and as she listened, the current of the ebb, like a treacherous hand, was drawing them through the break towards the devouring sea.
They had to fight their way back, the ebb just beginning would soon be a mill-race, and they knew, and neither could help the other. It was a hard struggle for love and life against the enmity against life and love that hides in all things from the heart of man to the heart of the sea, but they won. They had reached calm waters, and were within twenty strokes of the beach when Talia cried out suddenly and sank.
Maru, who was slightly in front, turned and found her gone; she had been seized with cramp, the cramp that comes from over-exertion, but he did not know that; the lagoon was free of sharks, but, despite that fact, and the fact he did not fear them, he fancied for one fearful moment that a shark had taken her.
Then he saw her below, a dusky form on the coral floor, and he dived.
He brought her to the surface, reached the sandy beach, and, carrying her in his arms, ran with her to the higher level of the sands, and placed her beneath the shade of the trees. She moved in his arms as he carried her, and when he laid her down, her breast heaved in one great sigh, water ran from her mouth, her limbs stiffened, and she moved no more.
Then all the world became black for Maru; he knew nothing of the art of resuscitating the drowned. Talia was dead.
He ran amongst the trees crying out that Talia was dead; he struck himself against tree boles and was tripped by ground lianas; the things of the forest seemed trying to kill him too. Then he hid amongst the ferns, lying on his face, and telling the earth that Talia was dead. Then came sundown, and after that the green moonlight of the woods, and suddenly sleep, with a vision of blue laughing sea and Talia swimming beside him, and then day again, and with the day the vision of Talia lying dead beneath the trees. He could not bury her. He could not touch her. The iron reef of his Tabu held firm, indestructible, unalterable as the main currents of the sea.
He picked fruits and ate them like an animal, and without knowing that he ate, torn towards the beach by the passionate desire to embrace once more the form that he loved, but held from the act by a grip ten thousand years old, and immutable as gravity or the spirit that lives in religions.
He must not handle the dead. Through all his grief came a weird touch of comfort; she had not been dead when he carried her ashore. He had not touched the dead.
Then terrible thoughts came to him of what would happen to Talia if he left her lying there. Of what predatory gulls might do. He had some knowledge of these matters, and past visions of what had happened on Fukariva, when the dead were too numerous for burial, came to him, making him shiver like a whipped dog. He could, at all events, drive the birds away, without touching her, without even looking at her, his presence on the beach would keep the birds away. It was near noon when this thought came to him. He had been lying on the ground, but he sat up now as though listening to this thought. Then he rose up and came along cautiously amongst the trees. As he came, the rumble of the reef grew louder, and the seawind began to reach him through the leaves; then the light of day grew stronger, and slipping between the palm boles, he
pushed a great bread-fruit leaf aside and peeped, and there, on the blinding beach, under, the forenoon sun, more clearly even than he had seen the ghosts of men on Fukariva, he saw the ghost of Talia walking by the sea and wringing its hands.
Then the forest took him again, mad, this time, with terror.
When on Fukariva he had seen the ghosts of men walking in the sun-blaze on the coral, he had felt no terror; he had never seen them except on waking from sleep beneath some tree, and the sight of them had never lasted for more than a moment. He had said to himself, ‘They are the spirits of the departed,’ and they had seemed to him part of the scheme of things, like reflections cast on the lagoon, or the spirit voices heard in the wind, or dreams, or the ships that had come from Nowhere and departed Nowhere.
But the ghost of Talia was different from these. It was in some tremendous way real, and it wept because the body of Talia lay unburied.
He had made it weep.
He alone could give it rest.
Away, deep in the woods, hiding amongst the bushes, springing alive with alarm at the slightest sound, he debated this matter with himself, and curiously, now, love did not move him at all or urge him; it was as though the ghost of Talia had stepped between him and his love for Talia, not destroying it, but obscuring it. Talia for him had become two things: the body he had left lying on the sand under the trees, and the ghost he had seen walking on the beach; the real Talia no longer existed for him, except as the vaguest wraith. He lay in the bushes, facing the fact that so long as the body lay unburied the ghost would walk. It might even leave the beach and come to him.
This thought brought him from his hiding-place; he could not be alone with it amongst the bushes, and then he found that he could not stand alone with it amongst the trees, for at any moment she might appear, wringing her hands, in one of the glades, or glide to his side from behind one of the tree boles.
