The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
“Whin I’m tellin’ you about Cluricaunes,” said Mr Button, “it’s the
truth I’m tellin’ you, an’ out of me own knowlidge, for I’ve spoken to a
man that’s held wan in his hand; he was me own mother’s brother, Con
Cogan—rest his sowl! Con was six fut two, wid a long, white face; he’d
had his head bashed in, years before I was barn, in some ruction or
other, an’ the docthers had japanned him with a five-shillin’ piece
beat flat.”
Dick interposed with a question as to the process, aim, and object of
japanning, but Mr Button passed the question by.
“He’d been bad enough for seein’ fairies before they japanned him, but
afther it, begorra, he was twiced as bad. I was a slip of a lad at the
time, but me hair near turned grey wid the tales he’d tell of the Good
People and their doin’s. One night they’d turn him into a harse an’
ride him half over the county, wan chap on his back an’ another runnin’
behind, shovin’ furze prickles under his tail to make him buck-lep.
Another night it’s a dunkey he’d be, harnessed to a little cart, an’
bein’ kicked in the belly and made to draw stones. Thin it’s a goose
he’d be, runnin’ over the common wid his neck stritched out squawkin’,
an’ an old fairy woman afther him wid a knife, till it fair drove him
to the dhrink; though, by the same token, he didn’t want much dhrivin’.
“And what does he do when his money was gone, but tear the
five-shillin’ piece they’d japanned him wid aff the top of his hed, and
swaps it for a bottle of whisky, and that was the end of him.”
Mr Button paused to relight his pipe, which had gone out, and there was
silence for a moment.
The moon had risen, and the song of the surf on the reef filled the
whole night with its lullaby. The broad lagoon lay waving and rippling
in the moonlight to the incoming tide. Twice as broad it always looked
seen by moonlight or starlight than when seen by day. Occasionally the
splash of a great fish would cross the silence, and the ripple of it
would pass a moment later across the placid water.
Big things happened in the lagoon at night, unseen by eyes from the
shore. You would have found the wood behind them, had you walked
through it, full of light. A tropic forest under a tropic moon is green
as a sea cave. You can see the vine tendrils and the flowers, the
orchids and tree boles all lit as by the light of an emerald-tinted day.
Mr Button took a long piece of string from his pocket.
“It’s bedtime,” said he; “and I’m going to tether Em’leen, for fear
she’d be walkin’ in her slape, and wandherin’ away an’ bein’ lost in
the woods.”
“I don’t want to be tethered,” said Emmeline.
“It’s for your own good I’m doin’ it,” replied Mr Button, fixing the
string round her waist. “Now come ’long.”
He led her like a dog in a leash to the tent, and tied the other end of
the string to the scull, which was the tent’s main prop and support.
“Now,” said he, “if you be gettin’ up and walkin’ about in the night,
it’s down the tint will be on top of us all.”
And, sure enough, in the small hours of the morning, it was.
CHAPTER XV
FAIR PICTURES IN THE BLUE
“I don’t want my old britches on! I don’t want my old britches on!”
Dick was darting about naked on the sand, Mr Button after him with a
pair of small trousers in his hand. A crab might just as well have
attempted to chase an antelope.
They had been on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered the
keenest joy in life—to be naked. To be naked and wallow in the shallows
of the lagoon, to be naked and sit drying in the sun. To be free from
the curse of clothes, to shed civilisation on the beach in the form of
breeches, boots, coat, and hat, and to be one with the wind and the sun
and the sea.
The very first command Mr Button had given on the second morning of
their arrival was, “Strip and into the water wid you.”
Dick had resisted at first, and Emmeline (who rarely wept) had stood
weeping in her little chemise. But Mr Button was obdurate. The
difficulty at first was to get them in; the difficulty now was to keep
them out.
Emmeline was sitting as nude as the day star, drying in the morning sun
after her dip, and watching Dick’s evolutions on the sand.
The lagoon had for the children far more attraction than the land.
Woods where you might knock ripe bananas off the trees with a big cane,
sands where golden lizards would scuttle about so tame that you might
with a little caution seize them by the tail, a hill-top from whence
you might see, to use Paddy’s expression, “to the back of beyond”; all
these were fine enough in their way, but they were nothing to the
lagoon.
Deep down where the coral branches were you might watch, whilst Paddy
fished, all sorts of things disporting on the sand patches and between
the coral tufts. Hermit crabs that had evicted whelks, wearing the
evicted ones’ shells—an obvious misfit; sea anemones as big as roses.
Flowers that closed up in an irritable manner if you lowered the hook
gently down and touched them; extraordinary shells that walked about on
feelers, elbowing the crabs out of the way and terrorising the whelks.
The overlords of the sand patches, these; yet touch one on the back
with a stone tied to a bit of string, and down he would go flat,
motionless and feigning death. There was a lot of human nature lurking
in the depths of the lagoon, comedy and tragedy.
An English rock-pool has its marvels. You can fancy the marvels of this
vast rock-pool, nine miles round and varying from a third to half a
mile broad, swarming with tropic life and flights of painted fishes;
where the glittering albicore passed beneath the boat like a fire and a
shadow; where the boat’s reflection lay as clear on the bottom as
though the water were air; where the sea, pacified by the reef, told,
like a little child, its dreams.
It suited the lazy humour of Mr Button that he never pursued the lagoon
more than half a mile or so on either side of the beach. He would bring
the fish he caught ashore, and with the aid of his tinder box and dead
sticks make a blazing fire on the sand; cook fish and breadfruit and
taro roots, helped and hindered by the children. They fixed the tent
amidst the trees at the edge of the chapparel, and made it larger and
more abiding with the aid of the dinghy’s sail.
Amidst these occupations, wonders, and pleasures, the children lost all
count of the flight of time. They rarely asked about Mr Lestrange;
after a while they did not ask about him at all. Children soon forget.
PART III
CHAPTER XVI
THE POETRY OF LEARNING
To forget the passage of time you must live in the open air, in a warm
climate, with as few clothes as possible upon you. You must collect and
cook your own food. Then, after a while, if you have no special ties to
bind you to civilisation, Nature will begin to do for you what she does
for the savage. You will recognise that it is possible to be happy
without books or newspapers, letters or bills. You will recognise the
part sleep plays in Nature.
After a month on the island you might have seen Dick at one moment full
of life and activity, helping Mr Button to dig up a taro root or
what not, the next curled up to sleep like a dog. Emmeline the same.
Profound and prolonged lapses into sleep; sudden awakenings into a
world of pure air and dazzling light, the gaiety of colour all round.
Nature had indeed opened her doors to these children.
One might have fancied her in an experimental mood, saying: “Let me put
these buds of civilisation back into my nursery and see what they will
become—how they will blossom, and what will be the end of it all.”
Just as Emmeline had brought away her treasured box from the
_Northumberland_, Dick had conveyed with him a small linen bag that
chinked when shaken. It contained marbles. Small olive-green marbles
and middle-sized ones of various colours; glass marbles with splendid
coloured cores; and one large old grandfather marble too big to be
played with, but none the less to be worshipped—a god marble.
Of course one cannot play at marbles on board ship, but one can play
_with_ them. They had been a great comfort to Dick on the voyage. He knew
them each personally, and he would roll them out on the mattress of his
bunk and review them nearly every day, whilst Emmeline looked on.
One day Mr Button, noticing Dick and the girl kneeling opposite each
other on a flat, hard piece of sand near the water’s edge, strolled up
to see what they were doing. They were playing marbles. He stood with
his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth watching and
criticising the game, pleased that the “childer” were amused. Then he
began to be amused himself, and in a few minutes more he was down on
his knees taking a hand; Emmeline, a poor player and an unenthusiastic
one, withdrawing in his favour.
After that it was a common thing to see them playing together, the old
sailor on his knees, one eye shut, and a marble against the nail of his
horny thumb taking aim; Dick and Emmeline on the watch to make sure he
was playing fair, their shrill voices echoing amidst the cocoa-nut
trees with cries of “Knuckle down, Paddy, knuckle down!” He entered
into all their amusements just as one of themselves. On high and rare
occasions Emmeline would open her precious box, spread its contents and
give a tea-party, Mr Button acting as guest or president as the case
might be.
“Is your tay to your likin’, ma’am?” he would enquire; and Emmeline,
sipping at her tiny cup, would invariably make answer: “Another lump of
sugar, if you please, Mr Button;” to which would come the stereotyped
reply: “Take a dozen, and welcome; and another cup for the good of your
make.”
Then Emmeline would wash the things in imaginary water, replace them in
the box, and every one would lose their company manners and become
quite natural again.
“Have you ever seen your name, Paddy?” asked Dick one morning.
“Seen me which?”
“Your name?”
“Arrah, don’t be axin’ me questions,” replied the other. “How the divil
could I see me name?”
“Wait and I’ll show you,” replied Dick.
He ran and fetched a piece of cane, and a minute later on the
salt-white sand in face of orthography and the sun appeared these
portentous letters:
B U T T E N
“Faith, an’ it’s a cliver boy y’are,” said Mr Button admiringly, as he
leaned luxuriously against a cocoa-nut tree, and contemplated Dick’s
handiwork. “And that’s me name, is it? What’s the letters in it?”
Dick enumerated them.
“I’ll teach you to do it, too,” he said. “I’ll teach you to write your
name, Paddy—would you like to write your name, Paddy?”
“No,” replied the other, who only wanted to be let smoke his pipe in
peace; “me name’s no use to me.”
But Dick, with the terrible gadfly tirelessness of childhood, was not
to be put off, and the unfortunate Mr Button had to go to school
despite himself. In a few days he could achieve the act of drawing upon
the sand characters somewhat like the above, but not without prompting,
Dick and Emmeline on each side of him, breathless for fear of a mistake.
“Which next?” would ask the sweating scribe, the perspiration pouring
from his forehead—“which next? an’ be quick, for it’s moithered I am.”
“N. N.—that’s right—Ow, you’re making it crooked!—_that’s_
right—there! it’s all there now—Hurroo!”
“Hurroo!” would answer the scholar, waving his old hat over his own
name, and “Hurroo!” would answer the cocoa-nut grove echoes; whilst the
far, faint “Hi hi!” of the wheeling gulls on the reef would come over
the blue lagoon as if in acknowledgment of the deed, and encouragement.
The appetite comes with teaching. The pleasantest mental exercise of
childhood is the instruction of one’s elders. Even Emmeline felt this.
She took the geography class one day in a timid manner, putting her