“That’s fore ’n’ aft.”
Katafa looked at the model of the Ranatonga; with her head slightly on one side, she seemed admiring it. Dick, watching her, felt pleased. Many a grown-up English person, able to talk, would have failed in this business or blundered in their appreciation of these important things, but Katafa was one of the craft—seemed so, anyway—and Dick, old friends with her now and free and easy as though she were Kearney, proceeded to demonstrate the action of the throat and peak halyards in raising the gaff, the topping lifts in supporting the boom, and how the head canvas was set. Then, suddenly remembering duty, he ran back to the house with the ships and set to work to clear away the remains of the food and the three plates.
He did not wash the plates; he was too anxious to get busy again with Katafa.
She had become all of a sudden the first great event of his life. She could neither speak in ordinary language to him nor he to her—but she was youth.
Though he had lived ten years with Kearney and though Kearney had practically taught him to talk, the sailor had never got so close to him as this creature of his own age who had suddenly appeared as if at the lift of a curtain.
The instant Kearney had withdrawn, the spell had begun to work. It might have been weeks before Dick would have shown those treasured ships to a grown person.
As he bustled about, filled with a new energy and interest, Katafa, who had risen to her feet, watched him. Light-minded and irresponsible as the boy, there still lay between her and him an abyss that even youth could not cross, the abyss that had lain between her and the children of Karolin, with whom, yet, she had played, but as a person might play with shadows. All the same, youth could gaze across the abyss, over which, despite everything, the little ships had sailed. These things had fascinated her; she could see more of them in the house, attractive as toys, yet mysterious as fetishes—maybe having something to do with the gods of Dick and Kearney.
Dick knew nothing of this. Duty done with, he made another dash for the house, producing no ship this time, but a stick three feet long and a ball made of tia wood.
Kearney had invented a game for him, a sort of cross between baseball and cricket. The trunk of a jack-fruit tree on the grove edge did for wickets, and the run was from this to an artu trunk and back.
Kearney, since he had grown lazy, had held off from this game, saying it was “too much of a bother.”