Maru: A Dream of the Sea

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

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.

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.

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 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.