Spurlock's novel was a tale of regeneration. For a long time to come that would naturally be the theme of any story he undertook to write. After he was gone in the morning, Ruth would steal into the study and hurriedly read what he had written the previous night. She never questioned the motives of the characters; she had neither the ability nor the conceit for that; but she could and often did correct his lapses in colour. She never touched the manuscript with pencil, but jotted down her notes on slips of paper and left them where he might easily find them.
She marvelled at his apparent imperviousness to the heat. He worked afternoons, when everybody else went to sleep; he worked at night under a heat-giving light, with insects buzzing and dropping about, with a blue haze of tobacco smoke that tried to get out and could not. With his arms bare, the neckband of his shirt tucked in, he laboured. Frequently he would take up a box of talc and send a shower down his back, or fill his palms with the powder and rub his face and arms and hands. He kept at it even on those nights when the monsoon began to break with heavy storms and he had to weight down with stones everything on his table. Soot was everywhere, for the lamp would not stay trimmed in the gale. But he wrote on.
As the novel grew Ruth was astonished to see herself enter and dominate it: sometimes as she actually was, with all her dreams reviewed—as if he had caught her talking in her sleep. It frightened her to behold her heart and mind thus laid bare; but the chapter following would reassure her. Here would be a woman perfectly unrecognizable, strong, ruthless but just.
This heroine ruled an island which (in the '80s) was rich with shell—pearl-shell; and she fought pearl thievers and marauding beachcombers, fought them with weapons and with woman's guile. No man knew whence she had come nor why. That there would eventually be a lover Ruth knew; and she waited his appearance upon the scene, waited with an impatience which was both personal and literary. If the creator drew a hero anything like himself, she would accept it as a sign that he did care a little.
Ruth did not resent the use of her mind and body in this tale of adventure. She gloried in it: he needed her. When the hero finally did appear, Ruth became filled with gentle self-mockery. He was no Hoddy, but a tremendous man, with hairy arms and bearded face and drink-shattered intellect. Day by day she followed the spiritual and physical contest between this man and woman. One day a pall of blackness encompassed the sick mind of the giant; and when he came to his senses, they properly functioned: and he saw his wife by his bedside!
An astonishing idea entered Ruth's head one day—when the novel was complete in the rough—an astonishing idea because it had not developed long ago. A thing which had mystified her since childhood, a smouldering wonder why it should be, and until now she had never felt the urge to investigate. She tucked the mission Bible under her arm, and crooking a finger at Rollo, went forth to the west beach where the sou'-west surge piled up muddily, burdened with broken spars, crates, boxes, and weeds. During the wet monsoon the west beach was always littered. Where the stuff came from was always a mystery.
The Enschede Bible—the one out of which she read—had been strangely mutilated. Sections and pages had been pasted together, and all through both Testaments a word had been blotted out. The open books she knew by heart; aye, they had been ground into her, morning and night. One of her duties, after she had been taught to read, had been to read aloud after breakfast and before going to bed. The same old lines and verses, over and over, until there had come times when shrieking would have relieved her. How she had hated it!… All these mumblings which were never explained, which carried no more sense to her brain than they would have carried to Old Morgan's swearing parrot. Like the parrot, she could memorize the lines, but she could not understand them. Never had her father explained. "Read the first chapter of Job"; beyond that, nothing. Whenever she came upon the obliterated word and paused, her father would say: "Faith. Go on." So, after a time, encountering the blot, she herself would supply the word Faith. But was it Faith? That is what she was this day going to find out.
She closed her eyes more vividly to recall some line which had carried the blot. And so she came upon the word Love. Blotted out—Love! With infinite care, through nearly a thousand pages, her father had obliterated the word Love. Why? Love was a word of God's, and yet her father had denied it—denied it to the Book, denied it to his own flesh and blood. Why? He could preach the Word and deny Love!—tame the savage heart, succour broken white men!—pray with his face strained with religious fervour! The idea made her dizzy because it was so inexplicable. She could accord her father with one grace: he was not in any manner a hypocrite. Tender with the sick, firm with the strong, fearless, with a body that had the resistance of iron, there was nothing of the hypocrite in him.
She recalled him. A gaunt, powerful man: no feature of his face decided, and yet for all that it had the significance of a countenance hewn out of rock. Never had he corrected her with hand or whip, the ring in his voice had always been sufficient to cower her. But never had the hand touched her with a father's caress; never had he taken her into his arms; never had he kissed her. She had never been "My child" or "My dear"; always her name—Ruth.
Love, obliterated, annihilated; out of his heart and out of his Bible. Why? Here was a curtain indeed. No matter. It was ended. She herself had cut the slender tie that had bound them. Ah, but she could remember; and many things there were that she would never forgive. Sometimes—a lonely forlorn child—she had gone to him and put her arms around his neck. Stonily he had disengaged himself. "I forbid you to do that." She had brought home a puppy one day. He had taken it back. He destroyed her clumsily made dolls whenever he found them.