Maru: A Dream of the Sea

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

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.

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, 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 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.

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 fine 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-flavored; 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 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.