Read Ebook: Maru: A Dream of the Sea by Stacpoole H De Vere Henry De Vere

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Ebook has 73 lines and 8189 words, and 2 pages

Produced by: Roger Frank

MARU

A Dream of the Sea

The night was filled with vanilla and frangipanni odours and the endless sound of the rollers on the reef. Somewhere away back amidst the trees a woman was singing, the tide was out, and from the verandah of Lygon's house, across the star-shot waters of the lagoon, moving yellow points of light caught the eye. They were spearing fish by torchlight in the reef pools.

It had been a shell lagoon once, and in the old days men had come to Tokahoe for sandal wood; now there was only copra to be had, and just enough for one man to deal with. Tokahoe is only a little island where one cannot make a fortune, but where you may live fortunately enough if your tastes are simple and beyond the lure of whisky and civilisation.

The last trader had died in this paradise, of whisky, or gin--I forget which--and his ghost was supposed to walk the beach on moonlight nights, and it was apropos of this that Lygon suddenly put the question to me "Do you believe in ghosts?"

"I don't know," said Lygon. "I almost think I do, because every one does. Oh, I know, a handful of hard-headed super-civilised people say they don't, but the mass of humanity does. The Polynesians and Micronesians do; go to Japan, go to Ireland, go anywhere, and everywhere you will find ghost believers."

And this is the story somewhat as told by Lygon.

Fukariva lies in the Paumotus or Dangerous Archipelago where the currents run every way and the trades are unaccountable. The underwriters to this day fight shy of a Paumotus trader, and in the '60's few ships came here and the few that came were on questionable business. Maru up to the time he was twenty years of age only remembered three.

There was the Spanish ship that came into the lagoon when he was seven. The picture of her remained with him, burning and brilliant, yet tinged with the atmosphere of nightmare, a big topsail schooner that lay for a week mirroring herself on the lagoon-water whilst she refitted, fellows with red handkerchiefs tied round their heads crawling aloft and laying out on the spars. They came ashore for water and what they could find in the way of taro and nuts, and made hay on the beach, insulting the island women till the men drove them off. Then when she was clearing the lagoon a brass gun was run out and fired, leaving a score of dead and wounded on that salt white strand.

That was the Spaniard. Then came a whaler who took what she wanted and cut down trees for fuel and departed, leaving behind the smell of her as an enduring recollection, and lastly, when Maru was about eighteen, a little old schooner slank in one early morning.

She lay in the lagoon like a mangy dog, a humble ship, very unlike the Spaniard or the blustering whaleman. 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 hundred and fifty 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 the 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.

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 at night he thought he heard the voice of his father chiding him.

It was part of him, an iron reef in his character beyond the touch of will.

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 the burning blue of the 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 pinheads above the sea dazzle.

He felt no grief, but there came to him a new and strange thing, a silence that the shipboard 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.

They 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 wave 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 for ever. 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, like a starfish, yet trembling and moving like a frightened thing. Then some one 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.

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 climbing again a glassy slope and rise again hill-high 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 face 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. He could see the rock exposed for a moment and the water closing on it in a tumble of foam.

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 sou'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.

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 fern, 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 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 sprouting reef, the sunsets over wastes of water and the stars spread over the 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 wood-craft 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 could 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 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 that 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.

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 sea wind began to reach him through the leaves, then the light of the 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.

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