The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
He took Dick’s arm and wandered over to the shade of the trees. Here
he threw himself down, and told the children to leave him to sleep.
They recognised that the game was over and left him. And he slept for
six hours on end; it was the first real sleep he had had for several
days. When he awoke he was well, but very shaky.
CHAPTER XIX
STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM
Mr Button saw no more rats, much to Dick’s disappointment. He was off
the drink. At dawn next day he got up, refreshed by a second sleep, and
wandered down to the edge of the lagoon. The opening in the reef faced
the east, and the light of the dawn came rippling in with the flooding
tide.
“It’s a baste I’ve been,” said the repentant one—“a brute baste.”
He was quite wrong; as a matter of fact, he was only a man beset and
betrayed.
He stood for a while, cursing the drink, “and them that sells it.” Then
he determined to put himself out of the way of temptation. Pull the
bung out of the barrel, and let the contents escape?
Such a thought never even occurred to him—or, if it did, was instantly
dismissed; for, though an old sailor-man may curse the drink, good rum
is to him a sacred thing; and to empty half a little barrel of it into
the sea, would be an act almost equivalent to child-murder. He put the
cask into the dinghy, and rowed it over to the reef. There he placed it
in the shelter of a great lump of coral, and rowed back.
Paddy had been trained all his life to rhythmical drunkenness. Four
months or so had generally elapsed between his bouts—sometimes six; it
all depended on the length of the voyage. Six months now elapsed before
he felt even an inclination to look at the rum cask, that tiny dark
spot away on the reef. And it was just as well, for during those six
months another whale-ship arrived, watered and was avoided.
“Blisther it!” said he; “the say here seems to breed whale-ships, and
nothin’ but whale-ships. It’s like bugs in a bed: you kill wan, and then
another comes. Howsomever, we’re shut of thim for a while.”
He walked down to the lagoon edge, looked at the little dark spot and
whistled. Then he walked back to prepare dinner. That little dark spot
began to trouble him after a while; not it, but the spirit it contained.
Days grew long and weary, the days that had been so short and pleasant.
To the children there was no such thing as time. Having absolute and
perfect health, they enjoyed happiness as far as mortals can enjoy it.
Emmeline’s highly-strung nervous system, it is true, developed a
headache when she had been too long in the glare of the sun, but they
were few and far between.
The spirit in the little cask had been whispering across the lagoon for
some weeks; at last it began to shout. Mr Button, metaphorically
speaking, stopped his ears. He busied himself with the children as much
as possible. He made another garment for Emmeline, and cut Dick’s hair
with the scissors (a job which was generally performed once in a couple
of months).
One night, to keep the rum from troubling his head, he told them the
story of Jack Dogherty and the Merrow, which is well known on the
western coast.
The Merrow takes Jack to dinner at the bottom of the sea, and shows him
the lobster pots wherein he keeps the souls of old sailor-men, and then
they have dinner, and the Merrow produces a big bottle of rum.
It was a fatal story for him to remember and recount; for, after his
companions were asleep, the vision of the Merrow and Jack hobnobbing,
and the idea of the jollity of it, rose before him, and excited a
thirst for joviality not to be resisted.
There were some green cocoa-nuts that he had plucked that day lying in
a little heap under a tree—half a dozen or so. He took several of
these and a shell, found the dinghy where it was moored to the aoa
tree, unmoored her, and pushed off into the lagoon.
The lagoon and sky were full of stars. In the dark depths of the water
might have been seen phosphorescent gleams of passing fish, and the
thunder of the surf on the reef filled the night with its song.
He fixed the boat’s painter carefully round a spike of coral and landed
on the reef, and with a shellful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixed
half and half, he took his perch on a high ledge of coral from whence a
view of the sea and the coral strand could be obtained.
On a moonlight night it was fine to sit here and watch the great
breakers coming in, all marbled and clouded and rainbowed with
spindrift and sheets of spray. But the snow and the song of them under
the diffused light of the stars produced a more indescribably beautiful
and strange effect.
The tide was going out now, and Mr Button, as he sat smoking his pipe
and drinking his grog, could see bright mirrors here and there where
the water lay in rock-pools. When he had contemplated these sights for
a considerable time in complete contentment, he returned to the lagoon
side of the reef and sat down beside the little barrel. Then, after a
while, if you had been standing on the strand opposite, you would have
heard scraps of song borne across the quivering water of the lagoon.
“Sailing down, sailing down
On the coast of Barbaree.”
Whether the coast of Barbary in question is that at San Francisco, or
the true and proper coast, does not matter. It is an old-time song; and
when you hear it, whether on a reef of coral or a granite quay, you may
feel assured that an old-time sailor-man is singing it, and that the
old-time sailor-man is bemused.
Presently the dinghy put off from the reef, the sculls broke the
starlit waters and great shaking circles of light made rhythmical
answer to the slow and steady creak of the thole pins against the
leather. He tied up to the aoa, saw that the sculls were safely
shipped; then, breathing heavily, he cast off his boots for fear of
waking the “childer.” As the children were sleeping more than two
hundred yards away, this was a needless precaution—especially as the
intervening distance was mostly soft sand.
Green cocoa-nut juice and rum mixed together are pleasant enough to
drink, but they are better drunk separately; combined, not even the
brain of an old sailor can make anything of them but mist and
muddlement; that is to say, in the way of thought—in the way of action
they can make him do a lot. They made Paddy Button swim the lagoon.
The recollection came to him all at once, as he was walking up the
strand towards the wigwam, that he had left the dinghy tied to the
reef. The dinghy was, as a matter of fact, safe and sound tied to the
aoa; but Mr Button’s memory told him it was tied to the reef. How he
had crossed the lagoon was of no importance at all to him; the fact
that he had crossed without the boat, yet without getting wet, did not
appear to him strange. He had no time to deal with trifles like these.
The dinghy had to be fetched across the lagoon, and there was only one
way of fetching it. So he came back down the beach to the water’s edge,
cast down his boots, cast off his coat, and plunged in. The lagoon was
wide, but in his present state of mind he would have swum the
Hellespont. His figure gone from the beach, the night resumed its
majesty and aspect of meditation.
So lit was the lagoon by starshine that the head of the swimmer could
be distinguished away out in the midst of circles of light; also, as
the head neared the reef, a dark triangle that came shearing through
the water past the palm tree at the pier. It was the night patrol of the
lagoon, who had heard in some mysterious manner that a drunken
sailor-man was making trouble in his waters.
Looking, one listened, hand on heart, for the scream of the arrested
one, yet it did not come. The swimmer, scrambling on to the reef in an
exhausted manner, forgetful evidently of the object for which he had
returned, made for the rum cask, and fell down beside it as though
sleep had touched him instead of death.
CHAPTER XX
THE DREAMER ON THE REEF
“I wonder where Paddy is?” cried Dick next morning. He was coming out
of the chapparel pulling a dead branch after him. “He’s left his coat
on the sand, and the tinder box in it, so I’ll make the fire. There’s
no use waiting. I want my breakfast. Bother——”
He trod the dead stick with his naked feet, breaking it into pieces.
Emmeline sat on the sand and watched him.
Emmeline had two gods of a sort: Paddy Button and Dick. Paddy was
almost an esoteric god wrapped in the fumes of tobacco and mystery. The
god of rolling ships and creaking masts—the masts and vast sail spaces
of the _Northumberland_ were an enduring vision in her mind—the deity
who had lifted her from a little boat into this marvellous place, where
the birds were coloured and the fish were painted, where life was never
dull, and the skies scarcely ever grey.
Dick, the other deity, was a much more understandable personage, but no
less admirable, as a companion and protector. In the two years and five
months of island life he had grown nearly three inches. He was as
strong as a boy of twelve, and could scull the boat almost as well as
Paddy himself, and light a fire. Indeed, during the last few months Mr
Button, engaged in resting his bones, and contemplating rum as an
abstract idea, had left the cooking and fishing and general gathering
of food as much as possible to Dick.
“It amuses the craythur to pritind he’s doing things,” he would say,
as he watched Dick delving in the earth to make a little
oven—island-fashion—for the cooking of fish or what not.
“Come along, Em,” said Dick, piling the broken wood on top of some
rotten hibiscus sticks; “give me the tinder box.”
He got a spark on to a bit of punk, and then he blew at it, looking not
unlike Æolus as represented on those old Dutch charts that smell of
schiedam and snuff, and give one mermaids and angels instead of
soundings.
The fire was soon sparkling and crackling, and he heaped on sticks in
profusion, for there was plenty of fuel, and he wanted to cook
breadfruit.
The breadfruit varies in size, according to age, and in colour
according to season. These that Dick was preparing to cook were as
large as small melons. Two would be more than enough for three people’s
breakfast. They were green and knobbly on the outside, and they
suggested to the mind unripe lemons, rather than bread.
He put them in the embers, just as you put potatoes to roast, and
presently they sizzled and spat little venomous jets of steam, then
they cracked, and the white inner substance became visible. He cut
them open and took the core out—the core is not fit to eat—and they
were ready.
Meanwhile, Emmeline, under his directions, had not been idle.
There were in the lagoon—there are in several other tropical lagoons I
know of—a fish which I can only describe as a golden herring. A bronze
herring it looks when landed, but when swimming away down against the
background of coral brains and white sand patches, it has the sheen of
burnished gold. It is as good to eat as to look at, and Emmeline was
carefully toasting several of them on a piece of cane.
The juice of the fish kept the cane from charring, though there were
accidents at times, when a whole fish would go into the fire, amidst
shouts of derision from Dick.
She made a pretty enough picture as she knelt, the “skirt” round the
waist looking not unlike a striped bath-towel, her small face intent,
and filled with the seriousness of the job on hand, and her lips
puckered out at the heat of the fire.
“It’s so hot!” she cried in self-defence, after the first of the
accidents.
“Of course it’s hot,” said Dick, “if you stick to looward of the fire.
How often has Paddy told you to keep to windward of it!”
“I don’t know which is which,” confessed the unfortunate Emmeline, who