The Garden of God

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

If Uta had never loved a human being, he had loved the sea, as the gulls love it, and the fish. It was part of him.

Then suddenly the whispering ceased. The chief wife had risen and was standing erect and motionless, like a brown statue, by the door.

Deceived by a cessation of the breathing in the house, she gave the signal that her lord and master was dead, but scarcely had she raised her arm to lower it again when a voice from the house made her jump as though she had received a slap behind.

The king of Karolin was not the man to depart from this world like a sickly child. He who had entered it shouting eighty-one years ago was not the man to leave it without saying good-bye.

He was calling for his women, calling them to carry him down to the water’s edge. “It is hot here,” cried Uta. “I wish to be cool. I want the wind.”

There was no wind, but they carried him, four women, one at each shoulder and one at each thigh, and lo! as they reached the lagoon edge and placed him on the sand facing the water and propped in their arms, the air stirred with a breath that shivered the star reflections on the lagoon.

The wind of dawn had begun to blow, and in the east beyond the break the dawn itself showed a dubious light that brightened and burned as though day were hurrying to greet Uta and crown him for the last time with the only crown he had ever worn. With the strengthening light the tide could be seen sweeping into the lagoon. It had turned half an hour ago and was coming strong, sweeping past the coral piers from the dim violet sea above which the high flying gulls showed bright with the day.

Uta watched. He was not the man to go out with the tide. The full flood was the time for him when, bravely swimming, his soul might go fearless to the God who made the sharks and the gulls and the kings and peoples of the sea.

He watched the light break on the water, and the brow of the sun rise from the ocean. Then, as the morning lit the lagoon in the whole of its forty-mile stretch, Uta, straightening in the arms of the women, gave a shout.

“They come!”