The night was filled with vanilla and frangipanni odours and theendless sound of the rollers on the reef. Somewhere away back amidstthe trees a woman was singing, the tide was out, and from the verandahof Lygon’s house, across the star-shot waters of the lagoon, movingyellow points of light caught the eye. They were spearing fish bytorchlight in the reef pools.
It had been a shell lagoon once, and in the old days men had come toTokahoe for sandal wood; now there was only copra to be had, and justenough for one man to deal with. Tokahoe is only a little island whereone cannot make a fortune, but where you may live fortunately enough ifyour tastes are simple and beyond the lure of whisky and civilisation.
The last trader had died in this paradise, of whisky, or gin—I forgetwhich—and his ghost was supposed to walk the beach on moonlightnights, and it was apropos of this that Lygon suddenly put the questionto me “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Do you?” replied I.
“I don’t know,” said Lygon. “I almost think I do, because every onedoes. Oh, I know, a handful of hard-headed super-civilised people saythey don’t, but the mass of humanity does. The Polynesians andMicronesians do; go to Japan, go to Ireland, go anywhere, andeverywhere you will find ghost believers.”
“Lombrosso has written something like that,” said I.
“Has he? Well it’s a fact, but all the same it’s not evidence, theuniversality of a belief scorns to hint at reality in the thingbelieved in—yet what is more wanting in real reason than tabu. Yettabu is universal. You find men here who daren’t touch an artu treebecause artu trees are tabu to them, or eat turtle or touch a deadbody. Well, look at the Jews; a dead body is tabu to a Cohen. Indiais riddled with the business, so’s English society—it’s all the samething under different disguises.
“Funny that talking of ghosts we should have touched on this, for whenI asked you did you believe in ghosts I had a ghost story in mind andtabu comes into it. This is it.”
And this is the story somewhat as told by Lygon.
Some fifty years back when Pease was a pirate bold, and Hayes in hisbloom, and the topsails of the Leonora a terror to all duskybeholders, Maru was a young man of twenty. He was son of Malemake, Kingof Fukariva, a kingdom the size of a soup plate, nearly as round andwithout a middle—an atoll island, in short; just a ring of coral, seabeaten and circling, like a bezel, a sapphire lagoon.
Fukariva lies in the Paumotus or Dangerous Archipelago where thecurrents run every way and the trades are unaccountable. Theunderwriters to this day fight shy of a Paumotus trader, and in the’60’s few ships came here and the few that came were on questionablebusiness. Maru up to the time he was twenty years of age onlyremembered three.
There was the Spanish ship that came into the lagoon when he was seven.The picture of her remained with him, burning and brilliant, yet tingedwith the atmosphere of nightmare, a big topsail schooner that lay for aweek mirroring herself on the lagoon-water whilst she refitted, fellowswith red handkerchiefs tied round their heads crawling aloft and layingout on the spars. They came ashore for water and what they could findin the way of taro and nuts, and made hay on the beach, insulting theisland women till the men drove them off. Then when she was clearingthe lagoon a brass gun was run out and fired, leaving a score of dead