Then, in a voice more remote and as if telling a secret: “There are no trees there, only the palms.”
It was Karolin speaking, not Katafa—Karolin the treeless, Karolin that had become part of her through the magic of environment. If the great sea spaces, the forty-mile reef, the lagoon mirror and the snow of surf had found voices to tell of themselves, could they have spoken more clearly than they spoke through her?
Her antagonism to the trees, felt when she first viewed them in their great masses, had become increased by the part they had played in trapping her; yet at base it was the antagonism of Karolin expressed by the human mind.
In all these talks there was no word of herself or the spell that had been put upon her by Le Juan. She herself scarcely knew the meaning of it, or why for years she had lived in the world as a shadow amongst shadows, or how it was that she had awakened to this new world in the arms of Dick. Yet deep in her heart a light had pierced, showing something vague and monstrous, something nameless that named itself Le Juan.
And now, as though Karolin had placed its finger upon the very woods themselves and upon the trees it hated because it had no trees, sometimes, when the wind was in a certain quarter, the dead men from Karolin would hint of their presence vaguely and dreadfully, driving Dick and Katafa to the reef to escape them.
The rigor had long since lost its grip and the fantastic show had collapsed, figures falling apart and in pieces like waxworks melted by heat in the furious corruption of the tropics.
Then, in a month, the woods were sweet again, but the stain remained in memory.
Dick had never loved the woods. His passion was all for the sea and the reef, and the stories of the girl about Karolin, whilst only half believed in, had left their mark on his mind. She had never indicated where the island lay, only conveying to him that somewhere there was a place where she had come from where nothing existed but sea and reef and lagoon; it was just a story, yet it dwelt with him and, working in the inner recesses of his mind, it joined itself with vague recollections of what Kearney had said about the place where she had come from. Kearney had shown him one day the stain on the southern horizon, telling him that another island lay there and that the girl had come from it in all likelihood.
The thing had passed almost out of recollection.
One morning, a month or so after the woods had regained their sweetness, Dick, who had completed the sail for the dinghy, was standing by the little boat as she lay moored to the bank, when suddenly a whole lot of things grouped themselves together in his mind—the dinghy, the mast and sail, the open sea, recollections of Katafa’s stories about the great reef and the lagoon where fish made thunder.