Maru: A Dream of the Sea

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

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.

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 reel of his tabu held firm, indestructible, unalterable as the main currents of the sea.