The Garden of God

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

A far-off echo in the trees caught the hail and sent it back. “Hai! hai!”—faint, yet clear came the echo, dying off to a silence troubled only by the sound of the reef.

“He answers,” said Katafa, “but he is too far away, he cannot come.”

There was a grove on the south beach of Karolin that had an echo; call there and you would hear the spirits of the departed answering you, jeering you in your own voice. She did not believe that the spirit of Kearney was answering Dick; some old spirit of the grove, maybe, but not Kearney. She knew that Kearney was not among the trees, and she spoke in mockery.

Dick knew that it was only an echo. He gave another shout and then, dropping the business as a bad job and Kearney from his mind, ran off to the boat to overhaul the fishing tackle. When he had finished he came back for her to go fishing and found her busy with a huge old grandfather cocoanut and one of the Barlow knives salved from the wreck.

She must have gone into the house to get the knife, but Dick never thought of that; the work she was on held him. She had frayed away the brown husk into a sort of frill and was busy now on the face of it, making eyes in it and the semblance of a nose and mouth.

A new idea had come to Katafa, a common-sensical idea, and it was this. Nanawa was the active god of Karolin; frightful, capricious, striking right and left when invoked, and sometimes hitting the invoker. She had brought him to her twice, and the first time he had roared over the lagoon and broken her canoe, angry no doubt at having been balked by the god of the little ships; the second time, last night, he was much more satisfactory in his behaviour. But Katafa had a dim suspicion that, had he not found Kearney and taken him to himself, he would have found her, and this suspicion was perfectly well founded—he would. She determined not to deal with him again.

Now, on Karolin there was another god, Nan, very old, amiable, the president of the cocoanut groves, the puraka patches and the pandanus trees; a sort of minister of agriculture, but much beloved, honoured and fêted. Nan, in fact, was more than a god; he was the symbol of Karolin, just as the British flag is the symbol of Britain. His old carved-cocoanut face was to be found in all the houses, and the sight of it to a Karolinite was as the sight of the Union Jack to an Englishman.

Katafa’s idea was to make a symbol of Nan and stick it up on the southern reef. The common-sensical part of the business was the idea of using the deity as a signal. If any fishing canoe from Karolin were to sight that effigy erected on the reef, it would come in to explore, and, if Katafa knew anything of the Karolinites, it would not leave till the whole place had been searched for the persons who had dared to erect the image of the cocoanut god on an alien shore. For not only would they consider that the god had been trifled with, which was bad, but that his virtue had been diluted, which was worse. He belonged exclusively to Karolin, and if he went spending his powers on other islands it would be all the worse for Karolin.

Dick watched the girl as she sat working away on a business as bloody and desperate as that of filling a shell with high explosive. Any little trifling thing beyond the routine of daily life would interest Dick, and now, squatting on his heels, the fishing utterly forgotten, he followed every movement of the knife as it worked away at the mouth of the deity, which was anything but an imitation of a rosebud.

“What are you doing that for?” asked he.