Maru: A Dream of the Sea

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

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.

This thought brought him from his hiding-place—he could not lie alone with it amongst the bushes, and then he found that he could not stand alone with it amongst 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.