Katafa drew closer and drew her arm round Dick.
The dark, naked men swarming about the cooking fire fascinated her. Never had she seen such faces. The people of Karolin, owing to a Melanesian taint, were fierce enough, and some of them were plain enough, but the ugliest man of Karolin would have been handsome compared with any of these.
Recruited from the New Hebrides and beyond, naked but for a gee string, with slit ear lobes and nose rings all complete, they seemed less like men than apes, less like apes than devils.
Sometimes one of the two seated men would cry out a harsh order or rise to boot one of the ape men, and now, as Katafa watched, something broke the lagoon near the schooner—another boat, a boat laden with stores, tent poles, canvas, crawling slowly across the lagoon to beach where the zone of firelight met the ripples of the outgoing tide.
Dick drew Katafa away, the branches closed, and, turning, they made their way back through the clear, clean night of the woods, the green gloom of the thickets, the glades where the young moon lit the ferns.
What had happened to the island, to the night, to the very trees, to life itself? How and in what way did they sense the fact that what they had seen was bad—they who knew not even the name of evil—and how and in what way did they know that what had come had come to stay? That something had broken in on them, incomprehensible but loathsome, that the island would never be the same again?
Not a word did they speak the whole way back to the house, Dick leading, Katafa following. The most extraordinary thing in their strange life alone and cut off from the world was the fact that though they spoke little to each other with their tongues, they were always conversing together. A movement, a look, a touch, a change of expression could convey what would have taken a dozen words to convey, and above and beyond that they had a mind relationship perhaps purely psychic. They could think together. Often some wish or want of Dick would be understood by Katafa, and before he could stretch out his hand for something it would be handed to him. Or a wish of Katafa’s would become known to Dick without a word conveying it.
Arrived at the house, they consulted together for a moment.
“From where have they come?” asked Katafa—as though Dick could know.
He shook his head. Then standing, his eyes fixed on the house and his brow wrinkled, he came to a sudden decision. Everything must be hidden, even the dinghy; they must take to the trees—and before he had finished speaking, Katafa, who knew his mind, turned to the house whilst he ran down to the lagoon bank where the dinghy was moored, saw that the mast and sail were in her, and that the fishing gear was safe in the locker. There were three fish spears in the boat; he let them lie. Then running back to the house, he helped in the removal of the things.