“What ain’t right, Jim?” asked the boy, a fish in his fingers. “Why ain’t she right, Jim? What’s the matter she can’t talk?”
The only things he had ever heard Kearney address as “she” were the ships they made. Katafa had in some way taken in his mind a tinge from those delightful ships; she was a “she.” The canoe helped; it was hers. Now that the canoe was half out of sight, hidden by the bank, and Katafa sitting there close to him, she fascinated him. His passionate love of the sea, of the dinghy, of the little ships, of everything connected with the water, all lent colour to this strange new being who had come up out of the sea in that thing—it was almost as if she had a keel on her. He would have loved to make friends, but he was too shy as yet and she couldn’t talk so that he could understand.
He set his teeth in the fish.
“Lord, I dunno,” said Kearney, his recent experience hot in his mind, yet unable to explain it in speech. “She ain’t like other folk. There, don’t be askin’ questions, but get on with your dinner. Maybe it’s just she’s a Kanaka.”
“What’s a Kanaka, Jim?”
“You get on with your dinner and don’t be askin’ questions.”
The sociable meal proceeded, Katafa “tuckin’ into the food” with a good appetite, but with an eye ever on Kearney. Kearney, by his attempts to clap her on the shoulder, had laid the foundation of a lot of trouble for himself. He had raised against him the something that Le Juan had bred in the subconscious mind of the girl.
No man, woman or child on Karolin had ever tried to touch her. She was tabu to them, as they to her. The art of avoidance, which was as natural and unconscious to her as the art of walking, had always been exercised against an accidental touch. Kearney had done what no one else had ever done, tried to touch her.
But if you think that she reasoned this out in her mind, you would be far from the truth. Whatever Le Juan’s means of tuition may have been—a hot iron was one of them—they had left all but no mark on the conscious mind of the grown girl. Otherwise her life would have been as impossible as the life of a person who has to think over each step he takes, each movement of the body and each respiration he makes. Le Juan had made the tabu not a direction to be obeyed, but a law of being, living like a watchdog in the dark chambers of the girl’s mind, a watchdog baring its teeth at Kearney.
Katafa had evaded the friendly blow of Kearney just as on Karolin she had often evaded the touch of hands in the pulling in of a fishing net, instantaneously and all but unconsciously, but the difference was vast. Kearney had placed himself among a new order of beings by his act. His clothes helped. She had never seen any one in trousers and shirt before. Decidedly this strange bearded man required watching.