The Garden of God

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Now alone, with the branches moving above her in the wind, she knew what love really was, the crudest gift the gods ever gave to man, and the most beautiful; the most terrible, and yet the most benign.

As the embryo passes through the forms of all things once embryonic, even of the fish, before it takes the form of man, so had the soul of Katafa passed through all the forms of human soul states in its change from the nebulous to the formed.

Antagonism when Kearney tried to hit her with the whip of seaweed, hatred when he hit her with the tia wood ball, the longing for revenge which brought him death, the boundless irritation that had been born in her from Dick, the mad desire to destroy him, pity born in her at his cry for help, tenderness brought to her by the bird, passion full-grown in a moment and casting her to embrace the living tree, love that turned all other things to nothing, even the spell of taminan.

Who finds a soul finds sorrow, and who finds love finds death. Death surely and at last, and almost as surely a hundred little deaths in imagination, absence or estrangement.

She heard the movement of the leaves in the wind and the eternal voice of the surf on the reef, and beyond them the silence so full of possibilities.

Katafa knew more of the world than Dick. Dick was the child of two people who had gone far to a state of savagery, Katafa had been born in civilisation. On Karolin, when she had walked as a ghost amongst ghosts, she had seen terrible things that had left her unmoved owing to the gulf that had separated her from humanity, and now from that past came all sorts of half-formless imaginings threatening Dick.

Time and again she would have left the boat and made for the eastern beach to see what had happened, but for his order. She was to stay in the boat and wait for him. She could not resist that order and, fortunately for them both, she did not try.

As she lay there listening, waiting, loathing her own security and inaction, the one thing giving her comfort and strength was the fact that she was obeying his order. It was as though he had left with her part of his mind, warm, living and sustaining.

An hour passed, and then from the trees came a sound, the sound of something moving swiftly and moving towards her. A form dashed the leaves and branches aside—it was Dick.

The club was trailing from his left hand; his right, grasping a branch, was holding it thrust aside; around his neck a tendril of convolvulus twined as though the woods, worshipping, had wreathed him, and his face was lit with battle, triumph and the light of something terrible that was almost laughter. For a moment he stood there like a god of old time before his worshipper; then, letting the branches close behind him, he slipped into the boat and lay holding her in his arms, his lips almost to her ear.