To take a ship out of Karolin lagoon with the ebb running strong and a south wind, required a cool head and a steady nerve on the part of the steersman. The great lagoon emptying like a bath met the northerly current, the outflowing waters setting up a cross sea. There was also a point where steerage way was lost and it all depended how the ship was set for the opening as to whether she would broach to and be dashed against the coral.
But Poni was used to lagoon waters and the schooner safe in his hands came dead for the centre of the opening; then the ebb took her, like an arrow she came past the piers of coral, met the wash of the cross sea, shook herself and then to the thunder of thrashing, cleared the land and headed north.
“She will eat the wind,” Aioma had once said, “there will be no more wind left for canoes in all the islands”; and now as Poni shifted the helm and the main boom stuttered and then lashed out to port, she was eating the wind indeed, the wind that was coming now almost dead aft. The smashing of the seas against her bows had ceased: with a following swell and a following breeze, silence took them—silence broken only by the creak of timber, block and cordage.
Le Moan looked back again. Almost behind them to the sou’-sou’west Karolin lay with the morning splendour on its vast outer beach whose song came faint across the blue sea, on the tall palms bending to the wind, on its gulls for ever fishing.
Her eyes trained to great distances could pick out the thicker tree clumps where the houses lay and near the trees on a higher point of coral something that was not coral; the form of a girl, a mote in the sea dazzle now perceived, now gone.
Le Moan watched till the reef line was swallowed by the shimmer from which the trees rose as if footed in the sea. She had stirred no hand in the whole of this business: her coming on board had been at the direction of Aioma, the fate that threw her and Taori together even for a few hours whilst separating him from Katafa was a thing working beyond and outside her, and yet it came to her that all this was part of the message of the cassi flowers, something that had to be because of her love for Taori, something brought into existence by the power of her passion—something that united her for ever with Taori.
The mind of Le Moan had no littleness, it was wanting in many things but feeble in nothing; it was merciless but not cruel, and when the sun of Taori shone on it, it showed heights and depths that had only come into being through the shining of that sun. For the sake of Taori she had sacrificed herself to Peterson, for the sake of Taori she had destroyed Carlin, for the sake of Taori she would sacrifice herself again, she who knew not even the meaning of the word “unselfish” or the meaning of the word “pity.”
She could have killed Katafa easily, and in some secret manner—but that would not have brought her Taori’s love, and to kill the body of Katafa, of what use would that be whilst the image of Katafa endured in Taori’s mind.
Katafa was a midge whose buzzing disturbed her dream, it was passing, it would pass.
She turned to where Aioma, who had recovered his assurance and stability of mind, had suddenly flung his arms round Dick, embracing him.