He had said nothing of the affair till now, a fact that spoke volumes as to their mental relationship. Between Dick and Kearney there had been little of what we call conversation, between Dick and Katafa none. The inanimate things around them had the time of their lives; they did the talking or supplied the talk. Abstractions had no place in this strange community of two where the actual moment was everything, at least to Dick.
“Men?” said the girl, breaking the silence at last. “Where are they?”
“Gone,” said Dick. “I struck one and they went away, all but the one.”
Some instinct checked him, helped by dislike of the labour of talking. Dick could think up things from the past easily enough if they were recent, but to arrange them in the order of thought, dressed in and connected by words, was becoming a hateful labour.
It was extraordinary. The things he saw or touched gave him no trouble, but the things he had seen or touched, even though it were only an hour ago, were bothersome when they had to be turned into talk.
He lay back and yawned. Then, rising up, he went down to the lagoon bank, and the girl, watching in the dusk, saw him getting into the dinghy. He was bailing water out of her. That done, he busied himself for a few minutes overhauling the lines and putting them back in the locker. Then he walked off to the house and turned in, without a word, just as a cave man might have done in the days before speech was invented.
The girl, left to herself, turned on her side and then on her face, lying with her forehead on her crossed arms, brooding, suffering, dumb.
Karolin had drawn close to her and drawn away again, perhaps for ever, but Karolin was only a thought. Something deeper than thought had her in its grip, something that had risen in her mind to destroy Dick just as Nanawa had risen from the sea to destroy Kearney.
Once a law becomes part of the human mind, it becomes a living thing capable of good and evil, and the law of taminan implanted in the mind of Katafa, though simple as the law of gravity, became capable of profound effects—became, in fact, a beast of prey.
Thou shalt not touch another nor be touched. What law could be simpler than that or more seemingly innocent? Yet of Katafa it had made a creature beyond human sympathy and appeal. It lay in her soul as the barrel-shaped decapod lay in the sea, watchful, ever waiting to strike, ever fearful of being itself destroyed.