The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
mother.
During that dreadful night these two children had no comfort to seek
anywhere in the whole wide universe but in each other. She, in a sense
of his protection, he, in a sense of being her protector. The
manliness in him greater and more beautiful than physical strength,
developed in those dark hours just as a plant under extraordinary
circumstances is hurried into bloom.
Towards dawn Emmeline fell asleep. Dick stole out of the hut when he
had assured himself from her regular breathing that she was asleep,
and, pushing the tendrils and the branches of the mammee apples aside,
found the beach. The dawn was just breaking, and the morning breeze was
coming in from the sea.
When he had beached the dinghy the day before, the tide was just at the
flood, and it had left her stranded. The tide was coming in now, and in
a short time it would be far enough up to push her off.
Emmeline in the night had implored him to take her away. Take her away
somewhere from there, and he had promised, without knowing in the least
how he was to perform his promise. As he stood looking at the beach, so
desolate and strangely different now from what it was the day before,
an idea of how he could fulfil his promise came to him. He ran down to
where the little boat lay on the shelving sand, with the ripples of the
incoming tide just washing the rudder, which was still shipped. He
unshipped the rudder and came back.
Under a tree, covered with the stay-sail they had brought from the
_Shenandoah_, lay most of their treasures: old clothes and boots, and all
the other odds and ends. The precious tobacco stitched up in a piece of
canvas was there, and the housewife with the needles and threads. A
hole had been dug in the sand as a sort of _cache_ for them, and the
stay-sail put over them to protect them from the dew.
The sun was now looking over the sea-line, and the tall cocoa-nut trees
were singing and whispering together under the strengthening breeze.
CHAPTER XXIII
THEY MOVE AWAY
He began to collect the things, and carry them to the dinghy. He took
the stay-sail and everything that might be useful; and when he had
stowed them in the boat, he took the breaker and filled it with water
at the water source in the wood; he collected some bananas and
breadfruit, and stowed them in the dinghy with the breaker. Then he
found the remains of yesterday’s breakfast, which he had hidden between
two palmetto leaves, and placed it also in the boat.
The water was now so high that a strong push would float her. He turned
back to the hut for Emmeline. She was still asleep: so soundly asleep,
that when he lifted her up in his arms she made no movement. He placed
her carefully in the stern-sheets with her head on the sail rolled up,
and then standing in the bow pushed off with a scull. Then, taking the
sculls, he turned the boat’s head up the lagoon to the left. He kept
close to the shore, but for the life of him he could not help lifting
his eyes and looking towards the reef.
Round a certain spot on the distant white coral there was a great
commotion of birds. Huge birds some of them seemed, and the “Hi! hi!
hi!” of them came across the lagoon on the breeze as they quarrelled
together and beat the air with their wings. He turned his head away
till a bend of the shore hid the spot from sight.
Here, sheltered more completely than opposite the break in the reef,
the artu trees came in places right down to the water’s edge; the
breadfruit trees cast the shadow of their great scalloped leaves upon
the water; glades, thick with fern, wildernesses of the mammee apple,
and bushes of the scarlet “wild cocoa-nut” all slipped by, as the
dinghy, hugging the shore, crept up the lagoon.
Gazing at the shore edge one might have imagined it the edge of a lake,
but for the thunder of the Pacific upon the distant reef; and even that
did not destroy the impression, but only lent a strangeness to it.
A lake in the midst of the ocean, that is what the lagoon really was.
Here and there cocoa-nut trees slanted over the water, mirroring their
delicate stems, and tracing their clear-cut shadows on the sandy bottom
a fathom deep below.
He kept close in-shore for the sake of the shelter of the trees. His
object was to find some place where they might stop permanently, and
put up a tent. He was seeking a new home, in fact. But, pretty as were
the glades they passed, they were not attractive places to live in.
There were too many trees, or the ferns were too deep. He was seeking
air and space, and suddenly he found it. Rounding a little cape, all
blazing with the scarlet of the wild cocoa-nut, the dinghy broke into a
new world.
Before her lay a great sweep of the palest blue wind-swept water, down
to which came a broad green sward of park-like land set on either side
with deep groves, and leading up and away to higher land, where, above
the massive and motionless green of the great breadfruit trees, the
palm trees swayed and fluttered their pale green feathers in the
breeze. The pale colour of the water was due to the extreme shallowness
of the lagoon just here. So shallow was it that one could see brown
spaces indicating beds of dead and rotten coral, and splashes of
darkest sapphire where the deep pools lay. The reef lay more than half
a mile from the shore: a great way out, it seemed, so far out that its
cramping influence was removed, and one had the impression of wide and
unbroken sea.
Dick rested on his oars, and let the dinghy float whilst he looked
around him. He had come some four miles and a half, and this was right
at the back of the island. As the boat drifting shoreward touched the
bank, Emmeline awakened from her sleep, sat up, and looked around her.
BOOK II
PART I
CHAPTER I
UNDER THE ARTU TREE
On the edge of the green sward, between a diamond-chequered artu trunk
and the massive bole of a breadfruit, a house had come into being. It
was not much larger than a big hen-house, but quite sufficient for the
needs of two people in a climate of eternal summer. It was built of
bamboos, and thatched with a double thatch of palmetto leaves, so
neatly built, and so well thatched, that one might have fancied it the
production of several skilled workmen.
The breadfruit tree was barren of fruit, as these trees sometimes are,
whole groves of them ceasing to bear for some mysterious reason only
known to Nature. It was green now, but when suffering its yearly change
the great scalloped leaves would take all imaginable tinges of gold and
bronze and amber. Beyond the artu was a little clearing, where the
chapparel had been carefully removed and taro roots planted.
Stepping from the house doorway on to the sward you might have fancied
yourself, except for the tropical nature of the foliage, in some
English park.
Looking to the right, the eye became lost in the woods, where all tints
of green were tinging the foliage, and the bushes of the wild cocoa-nut
burned scarlet as haw-berries.
The house had a doorway, but no door. It might have been said to have a
double roof, for the breadfruit foliage above gave good shelter during
the rains. Inside it was bare enough. Dried, sweet-smelling ferns
covered the floor. Two sails, rolled up, lay on either side of the
doorway. There was a rude shelf attached to one of the walls, and on
the shelf some bowls made of cocoa-nut shell. The people to whom the
place belonged evidently did not trouble it much with their presence,
using it only at night, and as a refuge from the dew.
Sitting on the grass by the doorway, sheltered by the breadfruit shade,
yet with the hot rays of the afternoon sun just touching her naked
feet, was a girl. A girl of fifteen or sixteen, naked, except for a
kilt of gaily-striped material reaching from her waist to her knees.
Her long black hair was drawn back from the forehead, and tied behind
with a loop of the elastic vine. A scarlet blossom was stuck behind her
right ear, after the fashion of a clerk’s pen. Her face was beautiful,
powdered with tiny freckles; especially under the eyes, which were of a
deep, tranquil blue-grey. She half sat, half lay on her left side;
whilst before her, quite close, strutted up and down on the grass, a
bird, with blue plumage, coral-red beak, and bright, watchful eyes.
The girl was Emmeline Lestrange. Just by her elbow stood a little bowl
made from half a cocoa-nut, and filled with some white substance with
which she was feeding the bird. Dick had found it in the woods two
years ago, quite small, deserted by its mother, and starving. They had
fed it and tamed it, and it was now one of the family; roosting on the
roof at night, and appearing regularly at meal times.
All at once she held out her hand; the bird flew into the air, lit on
her forefinger and balanced itself, sinking its head between its
shoulders, and uttering the sound which formed its entire vocabulary
and one means of vocal expression—a sound from which it had derived
its name.
“Koko,” said Emmeline, “where is Dick?”
The bird turned his head about, as if he were searching for his master;
and the girl lay back lazily on the grass, laughing, and holding him up
poised on her finger, as if he were some enamelled jewel she wished to
admire at a little distance. They made a pretty picture under the
cave-like shadow of the breadfruit leaves; and it was difficult to
understand how this young girl, so perfectly formed, so fully
developed, and so beautiful, had evolved from plain little Emmeline
Lestrange. And the whole thing, as far as the beauty of her was
concerned, had happened during the last six months.
CHAPTER II
HALF CHILD—HALF SAVAGE
Five rainy seasons had passed and gone since the tragic occurrence on
the reef. Five long years the breakers had thundered, and the sea-gulls
had cried round the figure whose spell had drawn a mysterious barrier
across the lagoon.
The children had never returned to the old place. They had kept
entirely to the back of the island and the woods—the lagoon, down to a
certain point, and the reef; a wide enough and beautiful enough world,
but a hopeless world, as far as help from civilisation was concerned.
For, of the few ships that touched at the island in the course of
years, how many would explore the lagoon or woods? Perhaps not one.
Occasionally Dick would make an excursion in the dinghy to the old
place, but Emmeline refused to accompany him. He went chiefly to obtain
bananas; for on the whole island there was but one clump of banana
trees—that near the water source in the wood, where the old green
skulls had been discovered, and the little barrel.
She had never quite recovered from the occurrence on the reef.
Something had been shown to her, the purport of which she vaguely
understood, and it had filled her with horror and a terror of the place
where it had occurred. Dick was quite different. He had been frightened
enough at first; but the feeling wore away in time.
Dick had built three houses in succession during the five years. He had
laid out a patch of taro and another of sweet potatoes. He knew every
pool on the reef for two miles either way, and the forms of their
inhabitants; and though he did not know the names of the creatures to
be found there, he made a profound study of their habits.
He had seen some astonishing things during these five years—from a
fight between a whale and two thrashers conducted outside the reef,
lasting an hour, and dyeing the breaking waves with blood, to the
poisoning of the fish in the lagoon by fresh water, due to an
extraordinarily heavy rainy season.
He knew the woods of the back of the island by heart, and the forms of
life that inhabited them—butterflies, and moths, and birds, lizards,