THE WISH
Island life had not quickened Mr. Kearney’s intellectual powers, and for eight or nine months after that day things happened to him that he could not account for. Sometimes fishing lines broke that ought not to have broken. He would leave a bit of chewing gum on the shelf outside the house and it would be gone, taken by the birds, maybe—but why did the birds suddenly develop a desire for gum? The dinghy sprang a leak that took him two days to mend, and fish spears would become mysteriously blunted though put away apparently sharp enough.
He never thought of the girl. The feud between them had died down, at least on his part, and she and Dick seemed getting on well together. Too well, perhaps, from a civilised person’s point of view. She and Dick would chatter away together now in the native; the girl had picked up at first enough English to help them along, but at the end of nine months it was always the language of Karolin they spoke, and even to Kearney’s heavy intelligence it was funny to hear them “clacking away” and to think that she had made him talk her lingo instead of the other way about. More than that, the boy was altering, losing the fits of abstraction that had made him seem at times almost the reincarnation of his mother, losing also the light-heartedness of the child; laughing rarely, and desperately serious over the little things of life, the moment seemed to him everything, as it is to the savage.
“She’s turning him into a —— Kanaka,” grumbled Kearney one day as he watched them starting for the reef, Dick with his fish spears over his shoulder, the girl following him. “Ain’t to hold on to these days, and sulks if he’s spoke to crooked or crossed in his vagaries. Well, if he ain’t careful I’ll l’arn him for once and all.”
But he never put the threat in action—too lazy, maybe, or too dispirited, feeling himself a back number. He was. The reins had gone out of his hands, youth had pushed him aside, and the boy, moving away towards savagery, had left this relict of high civilisation a good piece astern.
But one day Kearney was roused out of his apathy. Resting in the tree shadows at the opposite side of the sward, he saw the girl, who fancied herself alone and unobserved, cautiously approaching the house.
Never for one single day since her landing had she lost the desire to escape, to find freedom and the great spaces of the sea. Her intercourse with Dick had attached her neither to Dick nor the island, yet beyond playing tricks upon Kearney she had shown no sign of the fret that lay in her soul.
The cannon shot from the Portsoy that had burst the canoe in pieces, and the report of the gun that had rolled in echoes from the woods—these, in her firm belief, were the manifestations of the power and the voice of the shark-toothed one. Just as firmly she believed that some other god had intervened, frustrating the doings of Nanawa and spoiling the canoe out of spite.
The idea had come to her that maybe it was the god who presided over the little ships, that if she got rid of them—not all at once, for that might make a disturbance with the god, but one by one—the way might be clear. Kearney had never suspected her of stealing and throwing away his gum, of breaking the fishing lines or blunting the spears, and if she took these things off into the wood one by one and smashed them he would be equally stupid and unsuspicious—perhaps.
It was worth trying, and to-day, finding herself alone, she stole up to the house and peeped in. There they stood in the twilight on their shelves, the things whose god had broken her canoe. Impudent, unbroken themselves, and no doubt manned by sprites, they stood, the schooner, the frigate, a full-rigged ship and a tiny whaleman with bluff bows, wooden davits, crow’s nest and try-works, all complete.