The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
“Sure, an’ faith it’s an’ ould empty bar’l,” said Mr Button, wiping the
sweat from his brow and staring at the thing. “Some ship must have been
wathering here an’ forgot it. It’ll do for a sate whilst we have
dinner.”
He sat down upon it and distributed the bananas to the children, who
sat down on the grass.
The barrel looked such a deserted and neglected thing that his
imagination assumed it to be empty. Empty or full, however, it made an
excellent seat, for it was quarter sunk in the green soft earth, and
immovable.
“If ships has been here, ships will come again,” said he, as he munched
his bananas.
“Will daddy’s ship come here?” asked Dick.
“Ay, to be sure it will,” replied the other, taking out his pipe. “Now
run about and play with the flowers an’ lave me alone to smoke a pipe,
and then we’ll all go to the top of the hill beyant, and have a look
round us.
“Come ’long, Em!” cried Dick; and the children started off amongst the
trees, Dick pulling at the hanging vine tendrils, and Emmeline plucking
what blossoms she could find within her small reach.
When he had finished his pipe he hallooed, and small voices answered
him from the wood. Then the children came running back, Emmeline
laughing and showing her small white teeth, a large bunch of blossoms
in her hand; Dick flowerless, but carrying what seemed a large green
stone.
“Look at what a funny thing I’ve found!” he cried; “it’s got holes in
it.”
“Dhrap it!” shouted Mr Button, springing from the barrel as if some one
had stuck an awl into him. “Where’d you find it? What d’you mane by
touchin’ it? Give it here.”
He took it gingerly in his hands; it was a lichen-covered skull, with a
great dent in the back of it where it had been cloven by an axe or some
sharp instrument. He hove it as far as he could away amidst the trees.
“What is it, Paddy?” asked Dick, half astonished, half frightened at
the old man’s manner.
“It’s nothin’ good,” replied Mr Button.
“There were two others, and I wanted to fetch them,” grumbled Dick.
“You lave them alone. Musha! musha! but there’s been black doin’s here
in days gone by. What is it, Emmeline?”
Emmeline was holding out her bunch of flowers for admiration. He took a
great gaudy blossom—if flowers can ever be called gaudy—and stuck its
stalk in the pocket of his coat. Then he led the way uphill, muttering
as he went.
The higher they got the less dense became the trees and the fewer the
cocoa-nut palms. The cocoa-nut palm loves the sea, and the few they had
here all had their heads bent in the direction of the lagoon, as if
yearning after it.
They passed a cane-brake where canes twenty feet high whispered
together like bulrushes. Then a sunlit sward, destitute of tree or
shrub, led them sharply upward for a hundred feet or so to where a
great rock, the highest point of the island, stood, casting its shadow
in the sunshine. The rock was about twenty feet high, and easy to
climb. Its top was almost flat, and as spacious as an ordinary
dinner-table. From it one could obtain a complete view of the island
and the sea.
Looking down, one’s eye travelled over the trembling and waving
tree-tops, to the lagoon; beyond the lagoon to the reef, beyond the
reef to the infinite space of the Pacific. The reef encircled the whole
island, here further from the land, here closer; the song of the surf
on it came as a whisper, just like the whisper you hear in a shell;
but, a strange thing, though the sound heard on the beach was
continuous, up here one could distinguish an intermittency as breaker
after breaker dashed itself to death on the coral strand below.
You have seen a field of green barley ruffled over by the wind, just so
from the hill-top you could see the wind in its passage over the sunlit
foliage beneath.
It was breezing up from the south-west, and banyan and cocoa-palm, artu
and breadfruit tree, swayed and rocked in the merry wind. So bright and
moving was the picture of the breeze-swept sea, the blue lagoon, the
foam-dashed reef, and the rocking trees that one felt one had surprised
some mysterious gala day, some festival of Nature more than ordinarily
glad.
As if to strengthen the idea, now and then above the trees would burst
what seemed a rocket of coloured stars. The stars would drift away in a
flock on the wind and be lost. They were flights of birds. All-coloured
birds peopled the trees below—blue, scarlet, dove-coloured, bright of
eye, but voiceless. From the reef you could see occasionally the
sea-gulls rising here and there in clouds like small puffs of smoke.
The lagoon, here deep, here shallow, presented, according to its depth
or shallowness, the colours of ultra-marine or sky. The broadest parts
were the palest, because the most shallow; and here and there, in the
shallows, you might see a faint tracery of coral ribs almost reaching
the surface. The island at its broadest might have been three miles
across. There was not a sign of house or habitation to be seen, and not
a sail on the whole of the wide Pacific.
It was a strange place to be, up here. To find oneself surrounded by
grass and flowers and trees, and all the kindliness of nature, to feel
the breeze blow, to smoke one’s pipe, and to remember that one was in a
place uninhabited and unknown. A place to which no messages were ever
carried except by the wind or the sea-gulls.
In this solitude the beetle was as carefully painted and the flower as
carefully tended as though all the peoples of the civilised world were
standing by to criticise or approve.
Nowhere in the world, perhaps, so well as here, could you appreciate
Nature’s splendid indifference to the great affairs of Man.
The old sailor was thinking nothing of this sort. His eyes were fixed
on a small and almost imperceptible stain on the horizon to the
sou’-sou’-west. It was no doubt another island almost hull-down on the
horizon. Save for this blemish the whole wheel of the sea was empty and
serene.
Emmeline had not followed them up to the rock. She had gone botanising
where some bushes displayed great bunches of the crimson arita berries
as if to show to the sun what Earth could do in the way of
manufacturing poison. She plucked two great bunches of them, and with
this treasure came to the base of the rock.
“Lave thim berries down!” cried Mr Button, when she had attracted his
attention. “Don’t put thim in your mouth; thim’s the never-wake-up
berries.”
He came down off the rock, hand over fist, flung the poisonous things
away, and looked into Emmeline’s small mouth, which at his command she
opened wide. There was only a little pink tongue in it, however, curled
up like a rose-leaf; no sign of berries or poison. So, giving her a
little shake, just as a nursemaid would have done in like
circumstances, he took Dick off the rock, and led the way back to the
beach.
CHAPTER XIV
ECHOES OF FAIRY-LAND
“Mr Button,” said Emmeline that night, as they sat on the sand near
the tent he had improvised, “Mr Button—cats go to sleep.”
They had been questioning him about the “never-wake-up” berries.
“Who said they didn’t?” asked Mr Button.
“I mean,” said Emmeline, “they go to sleep and never wake up again.
Ours did. It had stripes on it, and a white chest, and rings all down
its tail. It went asleep in the garden, all stretched out, and showing
its teeth; an’ I told Jane, and Dicky ran in an’ told uncle. I went to
Mrs Sims, the doctor’s wife, to tea; and when I came back I asked Jane
where pussy was—and she said it was deadn’ berried, but I wasn’t to
tell uncle.”
“I remember,” said Dick. “It was the day I went to the circus, and you
told me not to tell daddy the cat was deadn’ berried. But I told Mrs
James’s man when he came to do the garden; and I asked him where cats
went when they were deadn’ berried, and he said he guessed they went to
hell—at least he hoped they did, for they were always scratchin’ up
the flowers. Then he told me not to tell any one he’d said that, for it
was a swear word, and he oughtn’t to have said it. I asked him what
he’d give me if I didn’t tell, an’ he gave me five cents. That was the
day I bought the cocoa-nut.”
The tent, a makeshift affair, consisting of two sculls and a tree
branch, which Mr Button had sawed off from a dwarf aoa, and the
stay-sail he had brought from the brig, was pitched in the centre of the
beach, so as to be out of the way of falling cocoa-nuts, should the
breeze strengthen during the night. The sun had set, but the moon had
not yet risen as they sat in the starlight on the sand near the
temporary abode.
“What’s the things you said made the boots for the people, Paddy?”
asked Dick, after a pause.
“Which things?”
“You said in the wood I wasn’t to talk, else—”
“Oh, the Cluricaunes—the little men that cobbles the Good People’s
brogues. Is it them you mane?”
“Yes,” said Dick, not knowing quite whether it was them or not that he
meant, but anxious for information that he felt would be curious. “And
what are the good people?”
“Sure, where were you born and bred that you don’t know the Good People
is the other name for the fairies—savin’ their presence?”
“There aren’t any,” replied Dick. “Mrs Sims said there weren’t.”
“Mrs James,” put in Emmeline, “said there were. She said she liked to
see children b’lieve in fairies. She was talking to another lady, who’d
got a red feather in her bonnet, and a fur muff. They were having tea,
and I was sitting on the hearthrug. She said the world was getting
too—something or another, an’ then the other lady said it was, and
asked Mrs James did she see Mrs Someone in the awful hat she wore
Thanksgiving Day. They didn’t say anything more about fairies, but Mrs
James——”
“Whether you b’lave in them or not,” said Paddy, “there they are. An’
maybe they’re poppin’ out of the wood behint us now, an’ listenin’ to
us talkin’; though I’m doubtful if there’s any in these parts, though
down in Connaught they were as thick as blackberries in the ould days.
O musha! musha! the ould days, the ould days! when will I be seein’
thim again? Now, you may b’lave me or b’lave me not, but me own ould
father—God rest his sowl!—was comin’ over Croagh Patrick one night
before Christmas with a bottle of whisky in one hand of him, and a
goose, plucked an’ claned an’ all, in the other, which same he’d won in
a lottery, when, hearin’ a tchune no louder than the buzzin’ of a bee,
over a furze-bush he peeps, and there, round a big white stone, the
Good People were dancing in a ring hand in hand, an’ kickin’ their
heels, an’ the eyes of them glowin’ like the eyes of moths; and a chap
on the stone, no bigger than the joint of your thumb, playin’ to thim
on a bagpipes. Wid that he let wan yell an’ drops the goose an’ makes
for home, over hedge an’ ditch, boundin’ like a buck kangaroo, an’ the
face on him as white as flour when he burst in through the door, where
we was all sittin’ round the fire burnin’ chestnuts to see who’d be
married the first.
“‘An’ what in the name of the saints is the mather wid yiz?’ says me
mother.
“‘I’ve sane the Good People,’ says he, ‘up on the field beyant,’ says
he; ‘and they’ve got the goose,’ says he, ‘but, begorra, I’ve saved the
bottle,’ he says. ‘Dhraw the cork and give me a taste of it, for me
heart’s in me throat, and me tongue’s like a brick-kil.’
“An’ whin we come to prize the cork out of the bottle, there was
nothin’ in it; an’ whin we went next marnin’ to look for the goose, it
was gone. But there was the stone, sure enough, and the marks on it of
the little brogues of the chap that’d played the bagpipes—and who’d be
doubtin’ there were fairies after that?”
The children said nothing for a while, and then Dick said:
“Tell us about Cluricaunes, and how they make the boots.”