Maru

HE night was filled with vanilla and frangipani odors and the endless sounds of the rollers on the reef. Somewhere away back amid the trees a woman was singing, the tide was out, and from the veranda 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 sandalwood, 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 civilization.

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 moonlit nights, and it was apropos of this that Lygon suddenly put the question to me:

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Do you?” replied I.

“I don’t know,” said Lygon. “I almost think I do, because every one does—oh, I know, a handful of hard-headed supercivilized people say they don’t, but the mass of humanity does. The Polynesians and Micronesians do. Go to Japan, go to Iceland, go anywhere and everywhere you will find ghost believers.”

“Lombroso has written something like that,” said I.

“Has he? Well, it’s a fact, but all the same it’s not evidence, the universality of a belief seems to hint at reality in the thing believed in—yet what is more wanting in real reason than tabu. Yet tabu is universal. You find men here who daren’t touch an artu tree because artu trees are tabu to them, or eat turtle or touch a dead body. Well, look at the Jews, a dead body is tabu to a Cohen, India is riddled with the business, so’s English society—it’s all the same thing under different disguises.”

“Funny that talking of ghosts we should have touched on this, for when I asked you did you believe in ghosts I had a ghost story in mind and tabu comes into it. This is it.”

And this is the story somewhat as told by Lygon:

Some fifty years back when Pease was a pirate bold and Hayes in his bloom and the topsails of the Leonora a terror to all dusky beholders, Maru was a young man of twenty. He was son of Malemake, King of Fukariva, a kingdom the size of a soup plate, nearly as round and without a middle, an atoll island in short; just a ring of coral, sea-beaten and circling, like a bezel, a sapphire lagoon.

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 only 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 while 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 beach.

That was the Spaniard. Then came a whaler, who took what she wanted and cut down tree s 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 slung in one early morning.

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 slunk 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 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 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 survivals of the fittest, and Maru, straight as a palm tree, dark-eyed, gentle, and a dreamer, seemed, among 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 at night he 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.

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

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, 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 labor and they were ill-favored. All the same, being a man of gallantry and some humor, 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 thrashing around the break, saw the palms cut against the pale aqua marine of the sky line 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 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 thrashing of a shark’s tail in the blue, heading northwest 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 some one 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 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.

But the white men’s gods were not confined to the wheel and binnacle. Down below they had a god that could warmwarn [sic] 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 while 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 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 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 an escalator—a moving pavement for the people of the sea. Jellyfish 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 colored sky.

In the canoe was a girl, naked as the new moon. Paddle in hand and half crouching, she drove the canoe toward 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 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, toward 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 amid 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 worshiped her, in his way, and he might have worshiped 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 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 center 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 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! Marul 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 amid 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 toward 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 overexertion, but he did not know that; the lagoon was free of sharks, but, despite that 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 mere.

Then all the world became black for Maru. He knew nothing of the art of resuscitating the drowned. Talia was dead.

He ran among 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 among 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 toward 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 among 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 day grew stronger, and, slipping between the palm boles, he pushed a great breadfruit 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.

Away, deep in the woods, hiding among 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 lie alone with it among the bushes, and then he found that he could not stand alone with it among 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.

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 traveled many thousand miles from a country remote as his extreme youth, losing everything pn the way but a weariness greater than time could hold or thought take recognition of.

Then he fell asleep, and he slept while 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 on the sands had cast a shadow. He remembered that now. Ghosts do not cast shadows.

“Talia! Talia! Talia!”

He passed the bushes where he had hidden, and the ferns. He heard the sound of the surf coming to meet him, he saw the veils of the leaves divide and the blaze of light and morning splendor on the northern sands and lagoon and sea.

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.

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, while 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 outgoing 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.

“And Maru?” I asked of Tyson. “Did he ever”

“Never,” said Lygon. “The islands of the sea are many. Wait.” He struck a gong that stood close to his chair, struck it three times, and the sounds passing into the night mixed with the voices of the canoe men returning from fishing on the reef.

Then a servant came oh to the veranda, an old, old man half bent like a withered tree.

“Maru,” said Lygon, “you can take away these glasses—but one moment, Maru, tell this gentleman your story.”

“The islands of the sea are many,” said Maru like a child repeating a lesson. He paused for a moment as though trying to remember some more, then he passed out of the lamplight with the glasses.

“A year ago he remembered the whole story,” said Lygon.

But for me the whole story lay in those words, that voice, those trembling hands that seemed still searching for what the eyes could see no more.