The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
little hand first in the great horny fist of her friend.
“Mr Button!”
“Well, honey?”
“I know g’ography.”
“And what’s that?” asked Mr Button.
This stumped Emmeline for a moment.
“It’s where places are,” she said at last.
“Which places?” enquired he.
“All sorts of places,” replied Emmeline. “Mr Button!”
“What is it, darlin’?”
“Would you like to learn g’ography?”
“I’m not wishful for larnin’,” said the other hurriedly. “It makes me
head buzz to hear them things they rade out of books.”
“Paddy,” said Dick, who was strong on drawing that afternoon, “look
here.” He drew the following on the sand:
“That’s an elephant,” he said in a dubious voice.
Mr Button grunted, and the sound was by no means filled with
enthusiastic assent. A chill fell on the proceedings.
Dick wiped the elephant slowly and regretfully out, whilst Emmeline
felt disheartened. Then her face suddenly cleared; the seraphic smile
came into it for a moment—a bright idea had struck her.
“Dicky,” she said, “draw Henry the Eight.”
Dick’s face brightened. He cleared the sand and drew the following
figure:
l l
<[ ]>
/ \
“_That’s_ not Henry the Eight,” he explained, “but he will be in a
minute. Daddy showed me how to draw him; he’s nothing till he gets his
hat on.”
“Put his hat on, put his hat on!” implored Emmeline, gazing alternately
from the figure on the sand to Mr Button’s face, watching for the
delighted smile with which she was sure the old man would greet the
great king when he appeared in all his glory.
Then Dick with a single stroke of the cane put Henry’s hat on.
=== l
l l
<[ ]>
/ \
Now, no portrait could be liker to his monk-hunting majesty than the
above, created with one stroke of a cane (so to speak), yet Mr Button
remained unmoved.
“I did it for Mrs Sims,” said Dick regretfully, “and _she_ said it was
the image of him.”
“Maybe the hat’s not big enough,” said Emmeline, turning her head from
side to side as she gazed at the picture. It looked right, but she felt
there must be something wrong, as Mr Button did not applaud. Has not
every true artist felt the same before the silence of some critic?
Mr Button tapped the ashes out of his pipe and rose to stretch himself,
and the class rose and trooped down to the lagoon edge, leaving Henry
and his hat a figure on the sand to be obliterated by the wind.
After a while, as time went on, Mr Button took to his lessons as a
matter of course, the small inventions of the children assisting their
utterly untrustworthy knowledge. Knowledge, perhaps, as useful as any
other there amidst the lovely poetry of the palm trees and the sky.
Days slipped into weeks, and weeks into months, without the appearance
of a ship—a fact which gave Mr Button very little trouble; and even
less to his charges, who were far too busy and amused to bother about
ships.
The rainy season came on them with a rush, and at the words “rainy
season” do not conjure up in your mind the vision of a rainy day in
Manchester.
The rainy season here was quite a lively time. Torrential showers
followed by bursts of sunshine, rainbows, and rain-dogs in the sky, and
the delicious perfume of all manner of growing things on the earth.
After the rains the old sailor said he’d be after making a house of
bamboos before the next rains came on them; but, maybe, before that
they’d be off the island.
“However,” said he, “I’ll dra’ you a picture of what it’ll be like when
it’s up;” and on the sand he drew a figure like this:
X
Having thus drawn the plans of the building, he leaned back against a
cocoa-palm and lit his pipe. But he had reckoned without Dick.
The boy had not the least wish to live in a house, but he had a keen
desire to see one built, and help to build one. The ingenuity which is
part of the multiform basis of the American nature was aroused.
“How’re you going to keep them from slipping, if you tie them together
like that?” he asked, when Paddy had more fully explained his method.
“Which from slippin’?”
“The canes—one from the other?”
“After you’ve fixed thim, one cross t’other, you drive a nail through
the cross-piece and a rope over all.”
“Have you any nails, Paddy?”
“No,” said Mr Button, “I haven’t.”
“Then how’re you goin’ to build the house?”
“Ax me no questions now; I want to smoke me pipe.”
But he had raised a devil difficult to lay. Morning, noon, and night it
was “Paddy, when are you going to begin the house?” or, “Paddy, I guess
I’ve got a way to make the canes stick together without nailing.” Till
Mr Button, in despair, like a beaver, began to build.
There was great cane-cutting in the cane-brake above, and, when
sufficient had been procured, Mr Button struck work for three days. He
would have struck altogether, but he had found a taskmaster.
The tireless Dick, young and active, with no original laziness in his
composition, no old bones to rest, or pipe to smoke, kept after him
like a bluebottle fly. It was in vain that he tried to stave him off
with stories about fairies and Cluricaunes. Dick wanted to build a
house.
Mr Button didn’t. He wanted to rest. He did not mind fishing or
climbing a cocoa-nut tree, which he did to admiration by passing a rope
round himself and the tree, knotting it, and using it as a support
during the climb; but house-building was monotonous work.
He said he had no nails. Dick countered by showing how the canes could
be held together by notching them.
“And, faith, but it’s a cliver boy you are,” said the weary one
admiringly, when the other had explained his method.
“Then come along, Paddy, and stick ’em up.”
Mr Button said he had no rope, that he’d have to think about it, that
to-morrow or next day he’d be after getting some notion how to do it
without rope. But Dick pointed out that the brown cloth which Nature
has wrapped round the cocoa-palm stalks would do instead of rope if cut
in strips. Then the badgered one gave in.
They laboured for a fortnight at the thing, and at the end of that time
had produced a rough sort of wigwam on the borders of the chapparel.
Out on the reef, to which they often rowed in the dinghy, when the tide
was low, deep pools would be left, and in the pools fish. Paddy said
if they had a spear they might be able to spear some of these fish, as
he had seen the natives do away “beyant” in Tahiti.
Dick enquired as to the nature of a spear, and next day produced a
ten-foot cane sharpened at the end after the fashion of a quill pen.
“Sure, what’s the use of that?” said Mr Button. “You might job it into
a fish, but he’d be aff it in two ticks; it’s the barb that holds them.”
Next day the indefatigable one produced the cane amended; he had
whittled it down about three feet from the end and on one side, and
carved a fairly efficient barb. It was good enough, at all events, to
spear a “groper” with, that evening, in the sunset-lit pools of the
reef at low tide.
“There aren’t any potatoes here,” said Dick one day, after the second
rains.
“We’ve et ’em all months ago,” replied Paddy.
“How do potatoes grow?” enquired Dick.
“Grow, is it? Why, they grow in the ground; and where else would they
grow?” He explained the process of potato-planting: cutting them into
pieces so that there was an eye in each piece, and so forth. “Having
done this,” said Mr Button, “you just chuck the pieces in the ground;
their eyes grow, green leaves ‘pop up,’ and then, if you dug the roots
up maybe, six months after, you’d find bushels of potatoes in the
ground, ones as big as your head, and weeny ones. It’s like a family of
childer—some’s big and some’s little. But there they are in the
ground, and all you have to do is to take a fark and dig a potful of
them with a turn of your wrist, as many a time I’ve done it in the ould
days.”
“Why didn’t we do that?” asked Dick.
“Do what?” asked Mr Button.
“Plant some of the potatoes.”
“And where’d we have found the spade to plant them with?”
“I guess we could have fixed up a spade,” replied the boy. “I made a
spade at home, out of a piece of old board, once—daddy helped.”
“Well, skelp off with you, and make a spade now,” replied the other,
who wanted to be quiet and think, “and you and Em’line can dig in the
sand.”
Emmeline was sitting near by, stringing together some gorgeous blossoms
on a tendril of liana. Months of sun and ozone had made a considerable
difference in the child. She was as brown as a gipsy and freckled, not
very much taller, but twice as plump. Her eyes had lost considerably
that look as though she were contemplating futurity and immensity—not
as abstractions, but as concrete images, and she had lost the habit of
sleep-walking.
The shock of the tent coming down on the first night she was tethered
to the scull had broken her of it, helped by the new healthful
conditions of life, the sea-bathing, and the eternal open air. There is
no narcotic to excel fresh air.
Months of semi-savagery had made also a good deal of difference in
Dick’s appearance. He was two inches taller than on the day they
landed. Freckled and tanned, he had the appearance of a boy of twelve.
He was the promise of a fine man. He was not a good-looking child, but
he was healthy-looking, with a jolly laugh, and a daring, almost
impudent expression of face.
The question of the children’s clothes was beginning to vex the mind of
the old sailor. The climate was a suit of clothes in itself. One was
much happier with almost nothing on. Of course there were changes of
temperature, but they were slight. Eternal summer, broken by torrential
rains, and occasionally a storm, that was the climate of the island;
still, the “childer” couldn’t go about with nothing on.
He took some of the striped flannel and made Emmeline a kilt. It was
funny to see him sitting on the sand, Emmeline standing before him with
her garment round her waist, being tried on; he, with a mouthful of
pins, and the housewife with the scissors, needles, and thread by his
side.
“Turn to the lift a bit more,” he’d say, “aisy does it. Stidy
so—musha! musha! where’s thim scissors? Dick, be holdin’ the end of
this bit of string till I get the stitches in behint. Does that hang
comfortable?—well, an’ you’re the trouble an’ all. How’s _that_? That’s
aisier, is it? Lift your fut till I see if it comes to your knees. Now
off with it, and lave me alone till I stitch the tags to it.”
It was the mixture of a skirt and the idea of a sail, for it had two
rows of reef points; a most ingenious idea, as it could be reefed if
the child wanted to go paddling, or in windy weather.
CHAPTER XVII
THE DEVIL’S CASK
One morning, about a week after the day on which the old sailor, to use
his own expression, had bent a skirt on Emmeline, Dick came through the
woods and across the sands running. He had been on the hill-top.
“Paddy,” he cried to the old man, who was fixing a hook on a
fishing-line, “there’s a ship!”
It did not take Mr Button long to reach the hill-top, and there she
was, beating up for the island. Bluff-bowed and squab, the figure of an
old Dutch woman, and telling of her trade a league off. It was just
after the rains, the sky was not yet quite clear of clouds; you could
see showers away at sea, and the sea was green and foam-capped.
There was the trying-out gear; there were the boats, the crow’s nest,
and all complete, and labelling her a whaler. She was a ship, no doubt,
but Paddy Button would as soon have gone on board a ship manned by
devils, and captained by Lucifer, as on board a South Sea whaleman. He
had been there before, and he knew.
He hid the children under a large banyan, and told them not to stir or