The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
and insects of strange shape; extraordinary orchids—some
filthy-looking, the very image of corruption, some beautiful, and all
strange. He found melons and guavas, and breadfruit, the red apple of
Tahiti, and the great Brazilian plum, taro in plenty, and a dozen
other good things—but there were no bananas. This made him unhappy
at times, for he was human.
Though Emmeline had asked Koko for Dick’s whereabouts, it was only a
remark made by way of making conversation, for she could hear him in
the little cane-brake which lay close by amidst the trees.
In a few minutes he appeared, dragging after him two canes which he had
just cut, and wiping the perspiration off his brow with his naked arm.
He had an old pair of trousers on—part of the truck salved long ago
from the _Shenandoah_—nothing else, and he was well worth looking at and
considering, both from a physical and psychological point of view.
Auburn-haired and tall, looking more like seventeen than sixteen, with
a restless and daring expression, half a child, half a man, half a
civilised being, half a savage, he had both progressed and retrograded
during the five years of savage life. He sat down beside Emmeline,
flung the canes beside him, tried the edge of the old butcher’s knife
with which he had cut them, then, taking one of the canes across his
knee, he began whittling at it.
“What are you making?” asked Emmeline, releasing the bird, which flew
into one of the branches of the artu and rested there, a blue point
amidst the dark green.
“Fish-spear,” replied Dick.
Without being taciturn, he rarely wasted words. Life was all business
for him. He would talk to Emmeline, but always in short sentences; and
he had developed the habit of talking to inanimate things, to the
fish-spear he was carving, or the bowl he was fashioning from a
cocoa-nut.
As for Emmeline, even as a child she had never been talkative. There
was something mysterious in her personality, something secretive. Her
mind seemed half submerged in twilight. Though she spoke little, and
though the subject of their conversations was almost entirely material
and relative to their everyday needs, her mind would wander into
abstract fields and the land of chimerae and dreams. What she found
there no one knew—least of all, perhaps, herself.
As for Dick, he would sometimes talk and mutter to himself, as if in a
reverie; but if you caught the words, you would find that they referred
to no abstraction, but to some trifle he had on hand. He seemed
entirely bound up in the moment, and to have forgotten the past as
completely as though it had never been.
Yet he had his contemplative moods. He would lie with his face over a
rock-pool by the hour, watching the strange forms of life to be seen
there, or sit in the woods motionless as a stone, watching the birds
and the swift-slipping lizards. The birds came so close that he could
easily have knocked them over, but he never hurt one or interfered in
any way with the wild life of the woods.
The island, the lagoon, and the reef were for him the three volumes of
a great picture book, as they were for Emmeline, though in a different
manner. The colour and the beauty of it all fed some mysterious want in
her soul. Her life was a long reverie, a beautiful vision—troubled
with shadows. Across all the blue and coloured spaces that meant months
and years she could still see as in a glass dimly the _Northumberland_,
smoking against the wild background of fog; her uncle’s face, Boston—a
vague and dark picture beyond a storm—and nearer, the tragic form on
the reef that still haunted terribly her dreams. But she never spoke of
these things to Dick. Just as she kept the secret of what was in her
box, and the secret of her trouble whenever she lost it, she kept the
secret of her feelings about these things.
Born of these things there remained with her always a vague terror: the
terror of losing Dick. Mrs Stannard, her uncle, the dim people she had
known in Boston, all had passed away out of her life like a dream and
shadows. The other one too, most horribly. What if Dick were taken
from her as well?
This haunting trouble had been with her a long time; up to a few months
ago it had been mainly personal and selfish—the dread of being left
alone. But lately it had altered and become more acute. Dick had
changed in her eyes, and the fear was now for him. Her own personality
had suddenly and strangely become merged in his. The idea of life
without him was unthinkable, yet the trouble remained, a menace in the
blue.
Some days it would be worse than others. To-day, for instance, it was
worse than yesterday, as though some danger had crept close to them
during the night. Yet the sky and sea were stainless, the sun shone on
tree and flower, the west wind brought the tune of the far-away reef
like a lullaby. There was nothing to hint of danger or the need of
distrust.
At last Dick finished his spear and rose to his feet.
“Where are you going?” asked Emmeline.
“The reef,” he replied. “The tide’s going out.”
“I’ll go with you,” said she.
He went into the house and stowed the precious knife away. Then he came
out, spear in one hand, and half a fathom of liana in the other. The
liana was for the purpose of stringing the fish on, should the catch be
large. He led the way down the grassy sward to the lagoon where the
dinghy lay, close up to the bank, and moored to a post driven into the
soft soil. Emmeline got in, and, taking the sculls, he pushed off. The
tide was going out.
I have said that the reef just here lay a great way out from the shore.
The lagoon was so shallow that at low tide one could have waded almost
right across it, were it not for pot-holes here and there—ten-feet
traps—and great beds of rotten coral, into which one would sink as
into brushwood, to say nothing of the nettle coral that stings like a
bed of nettles. There were also other dangers. Tropical shallows are
full of wild surprises in the way of life—and death.
Dick had long ago marked out in his memory the soundings of the lagoon,
and it was fortunate that he possessed the special sense of location
which is the main stand-by of the hunter and the savage, for, from the
disposition of the coral in ribs, the water from the shore edge to the
reef ran in lanes. Only two of these lanes gave a clear, fair way from
the shore edge to the reef; had you followed the others, even in a boat
of such shallow draught as the dinghy, you would have found yourself
stranded half-way across, unless, indeed, it were a spring tide.
Half-way across the sound of the surf on the barrier became louder, and
the everlasting and monotonous cry of the gulls came on the breeze. It
was lonely out here, and, looking back, the shore seemed a great way
off. It was lonelier still on the reef.
Dick tied up the boat to a projection of coral, and helped Emmeline to
land. The sun was creeping down into the west, the tide was nearly half
out, and large pools of water lay glittering like burnished shields in
the sunlight. Dick, with his precious spear beside him, sat calmly down
on a ledge of coral, and began to divest himself of his one and only
garment.
Emmeline turned away her head and contemplated the distant shore, which
seemed thrice as far off as it was in reality. When she turned her head
again he was racing along the edge of the surf. He and his spear
silhouetted against the spindrift and dazzling foam formed a picture
savage enough, and well in keeping with the general desolation of the
background. She watched him lie down and cling to a piece of coral,
whilst the surf rushed round and over him, and then rise and shake
himself like a dog, and pursue his gambols, his body all glittering
with the wet.
Sometimes a whoop would come on the breeze, mixing with the sound of
the surf and the cry of the gulls, and she would see him plunge his
spear into a pool, and the next moment the spear would be held aloft
with something struggling and glittering at the end of it.
He was quite different out here on the reef to what he was ashore. The
surroundings here seemed to develop all that was savage in him, in a
startling way; and he would kill, and kill, just for the pleasure of
killing, destroying more fish than they could possibly use.
CHAPTER III
THE DEMON OF THE REEF
The romance of coral has still to be written. There still exists a
widespread opinion that the coral reef and the coral island are the
work of an “insect.” This fabulous insect, accredited with the genius
of Brunel and the patience of Job, has been humorously enough held up
before the children of many generations as an example of industry—a
thing to be admired, a model to be followed.
As a matter of fact, nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given
up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the “reef-building
polypifer”—to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the
animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a
living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to
himself calcareous elements from the water to make himself a
house—mark you, the sea does the building—he dies, and he leaves his
house behind him—and a reputation for industry, beside which the
reputation of the ant turns pale, and that of the bee becomes of little
account.
On a coral reef you are treading on rock that the reef-building
polypifers of ages have left behind them as evidences of their idle and
apparently useless lives. You might fancy that the reef is formed of
dead rock, but it is not: that is where the wonder of the thing comes
in—a coral reef is half alive. If it were not, it would not resist the
action of the sea ten years. The live part of the reef is just where
the breakers come in and beyond. The gelatinous rock-building
polypifers die almost at once, if exposed to the sun or if left
uncovered by water.
Sometimes, at very low tide, if you have courage enough to risk being
swept away by the breakers, going as far out on the reef as you can,
you may catch a glimpse of them in their living state—great mounds and
masses of what seems rock, but which is a honeycomb of coral, whose
cells are filled with the living polypifers. Those in the uppermost
cells are usually dead, but lower down they are living.
Always dying, always being renewed, devoured by fish, attacked by the
sea—that is the life of a coral reef. It is a thing as living as a
cabbage or a tree. Every storm tears a piece off the reef, which the
living coral replaces; wounds occur in it which actually granulate and
heal as wounds do of the human body.
There is nothing, perhaps, more mysterious in nature than this fact of
the existence of a living land: a land that repairs itself, when
injured, by vital processes, and resists the eternal attack of the sea
by vital force, especially when we think of the extent of some of these
lagoon islands or atolls, whose existences are an eternal battle with
the waves.
Unlike the island of this story (which is an island surrounded by a
barrier reef of coral surrounding a space of sea—the lagoon), the reef
forms the island. The reef may be grown over by trees, or it may be
perfectly destitute of important vegetation, or it may be crusted with
islets. Some islets may exist within the lagoon, but as often as not it
is just a great empty lake floored with sand and coral, peopled with
life different to the life of the outside ocean, protected from the
waves, and reflecting the sky like a mirror.
When we remember that the atoll is a living thing, an organic whole, as
full of life, though not so highly organised, as a tortoise, the
meanest imagination must be struck with the immensity of one of the
structures.
Vliegen atoll in the Low Archipelago, measured from lagoon edge to