The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
was an absolute failure at everything practical: who could neither row
nor fish, nor throw a stone, and who, though they had now been on the
island twenty-eight months or so, could not even swim.
“You mean to say,” said Dick, “that you don’t know where the wind comes
from?”
“Yes, I know that.”
“Well, that’s to windward.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, you know it now.”
“Yes, I know it now.”
“Well, then, come to windward of the fire. Why didn’t you ask the
meaning of it before?”
“I did,” said Emmeline; “I asked Mr Button one day, and he told me a
lot about it. He said if he was to spit to windward and a person was to
stand to loo’ard of him, he’d be a fool; and he said if a ship went too
much to loo’ard she went on the rocks, but I didn’t understand what he
meant. Dicky, I wonder where he is?”
“Paddy!” cried Dick, pausing in the act of splitting open a breadfruit.
Echoes came from amidst the cocoa-nut trees, but nothing more.
“Come on,” said Dick; “I’m not going to wait for him. He may have gone
to fetch up the night lines”—they sometimes put down night lines in
the lagoon—“and fallen asleep over them.”
Now, though Emmeline honoured Mr Button as a minor deity, Dick had no
illusions at all upon the matter. He admired Paddy because he could
knot, and splice, and climb a cocoa-nut tree, and exercise his sailor
craft in other admirable ways, but he felt the old man’s limitations.
They ought to have had potatoes now, but they had eaten both potatoes
and the possibility of potatoes when they consumed the contents of that
half sack. Young as he was, Dick felt the absolute thriftlessness of
this proceeding. Emmeline did not; she never thought of potatoes,
though she could have told you the colour of all the birds on the
island.
Then, again, the house wanted rebuilding, and Mr Button said every day
he would set about seeing after it to-morrow, and on the morrow it
would be to-morrow. The necessities of the life they led were a
stimulus to the daring and active mind of the boy; but he was always
being checked by the go-as-you-please methods of his elder. Dick came
of the people who make sewing machines and typewriters. Mr Button came
of a people notable for ballads, tender hearts, and potheen. That was
the main difference.
“Paddy!” again cried the boy, when he had eaten as much as he wanted.
“Hullo! where are you?”
They listened, but no answer came. A bright-hued bird flew across the
sand space, a lizard scuttled across the glistening sand, the reef
spoke, and the wind in the tree-tops; but Mr Button made no reply.
“Wait,” said Dick.
He ran through the grove towards the aoa where the dinghy was moored;
then he returned.
“The dinghy is all right,” he said. “Where on earth can he be?”
“I don’t know,” said Emmeline, upon whose heart a feeling of loneliness
had fallen.
“Let’s go up the hill,” said Dick; “perhaps we’ll find him there.”
They went uphill through the wood, past the water-course. Every now and
then Dick would call out, and echoes would answer—there were quaint,
moist-voiced echoes amidst the trees—or a bevy of birds would take
flight. The little waterfall gurgled and whispered, and the great
banana leaves spread their shade.
“Come on,” said Dick, when he had called again without receiving a
reply.
They found the hill-top, and the great boulder stood casting its shadow
in the sun. The morning breeze was blowing, the sea sparkling, the reef
flashing, the foliage of the island waving in the wind like the flames
of a green-flamed torch. A deep swell was spreading itself across the
bosom of the Pacific. Some hurricane away beyond the Navigators or
Gilberts had sent this message and was finding its echo here, a
thousand miles away, in the deeper thunder of the reef.
Nowhere else in the world could you get such a picture, such a
combination of splendour and summer, such a vision of freshness and
strength, and the delight of morning. It was the smallness of the
island, perhaps, that closed the charm and made it perfect. Just a
bunch of foliage and flowers set in the midst of the blowing wind and
sparkling blue.
Suddenly Dick, standing beside Emmeline on the rock, pointed with his
finger to the reef near the opening.
“There he is!” cried he.
CHAPTER XXI
THE GARLAND OF FLOWERS
You could just make the figure out lying on the reef near the little
cask, and comfortably sheltered from the sun by an upstanding lump of
coral.
“He’s asleep,” said Dick.
He had not thought to look towards the reef from the beach, or he might
have seen the figure before.
“Dicky!” said Emmeline.
“Well?”
“How did he get over, if you said the dinghy was tied to the tree?”
“I don’t know,” said Dick, who had not thought of this; “there he is,
anyhow. I’ll tell you what, Em, we’ll row across and wake him. I’ll boo
into his ear and make him jump.”
They got down from the rock, and came back down through the wood. As
they came Emmeline picked flowers and began making them up into one of
her wreaths. Some scarlet hibiscus, some bluebells, a couple of pale
poppies with furry stalks and bitter perfume.
“What are you making that for?” asked Dick, who always viewed
Emmeline’s wreath-making with a mixture of compassion and vague disgust.
“I’m going to put it on Mr Button’s head,” said Emmeline; “so’s when
you say boo into his ear he’ll jump up with it on.”
Dick chuckled with pleasure at the idea of the practical joke, and
almost admitted in his own mind for a moment, that after all there
might be a use for such futilities as wreaths.
The dinghy was moored under the spreading shade of the aoa, the painter
tied to one of the branches that projected over the water. These dwarf
aoas branch in an extraordinary way close to the ground, throwing out
limbs like rails. The tree had made a good protection for the little
boat, protecting it from marauding hands and from the sun; besides the
protection of the tree Paddy had now and then scuttled the boat in
shallow water. It was a new boat to start with, and with precautions
like these might be expected to last many years.
“Get in,” said Dick, pulling on the painter so that the bow of the
dinghy came close to the beach.
Emmeline got carefully in, and went aft. Then Dick got in, pushed off,
and took to the sculls. Next moment they were out on the sparkling
water.
Dick rowed cautiously, fearing to wake the sleeper. He fastened the
painter to the coral spike that seemed set there by nature for the
purpose. He scrambled on to the reef, and lying down on his stomach
drew the boat’s gunwale close up so that Emmeline might land. He had no
boots on; the soles of his feet, from constant exposure, had become
insensitive as leather.
Emmeline also was without boots. The soles of her feet, as is always
the case with highly nervous people, were sensitive, and she walked
delicately, avoiding the worst places, holding her wreath in her right
hand.
It was full tide, and the thunder of the waves outside shook the reef.
It was like being in a church when the deep bass of the organ is turned
full on, shaking the ground and the air, the walls and the roof. Dashes
of spray came over with the wind, and the melancholy “Hi, hi!” of the
wheeling gulls came like the voices of ghostly sailor-men hauling at
the halyards.
Paddy was lying on his right side steeped in profound oblivion. His
face was buried in the crook of his right arm, and his brown tattooed
left hand lay on his left thigh, palm upwards. He had no hat, and the
breeze stirred his grizzled hair.
Dick and Emmeline stole up to him till they got right beside him. Then
Emmeline, flashing out a laugh, flung the little wreath of flowers on
the old man’s head, and Dick, popping down on his knees, shouted into
his ear. But the dreamer did not stir or move a finger.
“Paddy,” cried Dick, “wake up! wake up!”
He pulled at the shoulder till the figure from its sideways posture
fell over on its back. The eyes were wide open and staring. The mouth
hung open, and from the mouth darted a little crab; it scuttled over
the chin and dropped on the coral.
Emmeline screamed, and screamed, and would have fallen, but the boy
caught her in his arms—one side of the face had been destroyed by the
larvæ of the rocks.
He held her to him as he stared at the terrible figure lying upon its
back, hands outspread. Then, wild with terror, he dragged her towards
the little boat. She was struggling, and panting and gasping, like a
person drowning in ice-cold water.
His one instinct was to escape, to fly—anywhere, no matter where. He
dragged the girl to the coral edge, and pulled the boat up close. Had
the reef suddenly become enveloped in flames he could not have exerted
himself more to escape from it and save his companion. A moment later
they were afloat, and he was pulling wildly for the shore.
He did not know what had happened, nor did he pause to think: he was
fleeing from horror—nameless horror; whilst the child at his feet,
with her head resting against the gunwale, stared up open-eyed and
speechless at the great blue sky, as if at some terror visible there.
The boat grounded on the white sand, and the wash of the incoming tide
drove it up sideways.
Emmeline had fallen forward; she had lost consciousness.
CHAPTER XXII
ALONE
The idea of spiritual life must be innate in the heart of man, for all
that terrible night, when the children lay huddled together in the
little hut in the chapparel, the fear that filled them was that their
old friend might suddenly darken the entrance and seek to lie down
beside them.
They did not speak about him. Something had been done to him; something
had happened. Something terrible had happened to the world they knew.
But they dared not speak of it or question each other.
Dick had carried his companion to the hut when he left the boat, and
hidden with her there; the evening had come on, and the night, and now
in the darkness, without having tasted food all day, he was telling her
not to be afraid, that he would take care of her. But not a word of
the thing that had happened.
The thing, for them, had no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had come
across death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by the
sayings of sages and poets.
They knew nothing of the philosophy that tells us that death is the
common lot, and the natural sequence to birth, or the religion that
teaches us that Death is the door to Life.
A dead old sailor-man lying like a festering carcass on a coral ledge,
eyes staring and glazed and fixed, a wide-open mouth that once had
spoken comforting words, and now spoke living crabs.
That was the vision before them. They did not philosophise about it;
and though they were filled with terror, I do not think it was terror
that held them from speaking about it, but a vague feeling that what
they had beheld was obscene, unspeakable, and a thing to avoid.
Lestrange had brought them up in his own way. He had told them there
was a good God who looked after the world; determined as far as he
could to exclude demonology and sin and death from their knowledge, he
had rested content with the bald statement that there was a good God
who looked after the world, without explaining fully that the same God
would torture them for ever and ever, should they fail to believe in
Him or keep His commandments.
This knowledge of the Almighty, therefore, was but a half knowledge,
the vaguest abstraction. Had they been brought up, however, in the most
strictly Calvinistic school, this knowledge of Him would have been no
comfort now. Belief in God is no comfort to a frightened child. Teach
him as many parrot-like prayers as you please, and in distress or the
dark of what use are they to him? His cry is for his nurse, or his