The Garden of God

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

The rainy season came and made Dick busy mending a hole that had suddenly come in the roof of the house. It passed, leaving the island greener than ever and the birds preparing to mate.

Nan, on his stick on the southern reef, was beginning to show signs of wear and weather. Gulls roosting on his crown had left a white patch that did not add to his beauty, and the winds, for ever bending and straightening the sapling, had loosened his head so that it waggled a bit, making at times a click-clocking noise, as though he were clucking his tongue with impatience. But all things have their time and season, and had he been god of the lagoon instead of the cocoanut trees and puraka patches, he might have known that the poisonous season had arrived at Karolin.

They had fish ponds there stocked with sea fish to tide them over the bad time, but these pond fish were never quite as good as fresh fish from the sea, and adventurous spirits would put out sometimes long distances after the real article and, unable to carry fire with them, eat their catches raw.

“A raw sea fish is better than a cooked pond fish,” was a proverb with them, and one morning, when Dick took the dinghy round to the eastern beach after bananas, the proverb bore fruit. He had secured his bananas and placed them on the sand ready for shipment, when the idea suddenly took him of having a look at the gollywog on the reef. He rowed over, and no sooner had he landed on the coral than away across the sea he saw a canoe. It was longer than the canoe of Katafa, it was standing in towards the reef, and when the occupant caught sight of him a cry came across the water, fierce and sharp like the tearing of a sheet.

Dick didn’t wait. He dropped into the dinghy, rowed off to where an aoa tree jutted over the water, just beyond the beach sand, and hid the dinghy under its branches. Then he took to the trees. He had forgotten the bananas. They lay there on the sand, shouting to the sun, and it was too late now to secure them, for the canoe was coming into the lagoon. The sail was brailed up and paddles were flashing, and Dick, peeping through the branches, could see the forms and faces of the four rowers, fierce faces utterly unlike the face of Katafa, and forms brown and polished like mahogany.

The canoe passed the break and took the quiet undulations of the lagoon, the paddles now scarcely touching the water. Gliding and silent as a stoat it came, the faces of the paddle men turning to right, to left, to left, to right, the eyeballs showing, white as the shark’s-teeth necklaces on the breast of the bow paddle.

The bow touched the sand. Two of the men jumped out, made for the bananas, turned them over, and gave a shout. The bunches had been cut—no ghost had done that—and assured of this fact, the powwow began, the fellows on the beach shouting to the fellows in the canoe, evidently urging them to land.

But the boatmen were coy. Land! not they! It was well known that this beach was haunted by the spirits of the ancients and the men who had fallen in battle. They were unarmed, they were too few, they would come at another season with more men to follow them.

“Go, then, and search in the trees thyself, O Sru, son of Laminai,” cried the stern paddler; “if there is nought to fear, why fear it?”

“Dogs!” cried Sru. He bent, picked up the two banana bunches, and turned to the boats with them.