Love Stories

by Ruskin Bond

  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 Portsoy 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 breezing 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 hill 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 a 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 a white 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 north, 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 woul
d 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.

  He made for the southern beach.

  Although unused to woods, till he reached this island he had the instinct for direction, a brain compass more mysterious than the little trembling fish that had directed the movements of the wheel on board the Portsoy. Making due south, amidst the gloom of the trees, he reached the beach where the sun was blazing on the sands and the birds flying and calling over the lagoon. The reef lay far out, a continuous line, unlike the reefs to the north, continuous but for a single break though which the last of the ebb was flowing out oilily, mirroring a palm-tree that stood there like the warden of the lagoon. The sound of the surf was low, the wind had died away, and as Maru stood watching and listening, peace came to his distracted soul.

  He felt safe here. Even when Talia had been with him the woods had always seemed to him peopled with lurking things, unused as he was to trees in great masses; and now released from them and touched again by the warmth of the sun he felt safe. It seemed to him that the ghost could not come here. The gulls said it to him and the flashing water, and as he lay down on the sands, the surf on the reef said it to him. It was too far away for the ghost to come. It seemed to him that he had travelled many thousand miles from a country remote as his extreme youth, losing everything on the way but a weariness greater than time could hold or thought take recognition of.

  Then he fell asleep and he slept whilst the sun went down into the west and the flood swept into the lagoon and the stars broke out above. That tremendous sleep unstirred by the vaguest dream lasted till the dawn was full.

  Then he sat up, renewed as though God had remade him in mind and body.

  A gull was strutting on the sands by the water's edge, its long shadow strutting after it, and the shadow of the gull flew straight as a javelin into the renewed mind of Maru. Talia was not dead. He had not seen her ghost. She had come to life and had been walking by the sea wringing her hands for him thinking him drowned. For the form he had seen walking in the sands had cast a shadow. He remembered that now. Ghosts do not cast shadows.

  And instantly his min
d, made reasonable by rest and sleep, revisualised the picture that had terrified his mind distraught by grief. That was a real form, what folly could have made him doubt it? Talia was alive—alive, warm, and waiting for him on the northern beach, and seized him with a great joy that made him shout aloud as he sprang to his feet yet with a pain at his heart like the pain of a rankling spearwound as he broke through the trees shouting as he ran: "Talia! Talia! Talia!"

  He passed the bushes where he had hidden, and the ferns. He heard the sounds of the surf coming to meet him, he saw the veils of the northern sands and lagoon and sea.

  He stood and looked.

  Nothing.

  He ran to the place where he had laid her beneath the trees, there was still faintly visible the slight depression made by her body, and close by, strangely and clearly cut, the imprint of a little foot.

  Nothing else.

  He stood and called and called, and no answer came but the wood echo and the sound of the morning wind; then he ran to the sea edge. Then he knew.

  The sand was trodden up and on the sand, clear cut and fresh, lay the mark left by a beached canoe and the marks left by the feet of the men who had beached her and floated her again.

  They had come—perhaps her own people—come, maybe, yesterday whilst he was hiding from his fears, debating with his Tabu—come, and found her, and taken her away.

  He plunged into the lagoon and, swimming like an otter and helped by the out-going tide, reached the reef. Scrambling on to the rough coral, bleeding from cuts but feeling nothing of his wounds, he stood with wrinkled eyes facing the sea blaze and with the land-breeze blowing past him out beyond the thundering foam of the reef to the blue and heaving sea.

  Away to the north, like a brown wing-tip, showed the sail of a canoe. He watched it. Tossed by the lilt of the swell it seemed beckoning to him. Now it vanished in the sea dazzle, now reappeared, dwindling to a point, to vanish at last like a dream of the sea, gone, never to be recaptured.