The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
lagoon edge, is sixty miles long by twenty miles broad, at its broadest
part. In the Marshall Archipelago, Rimsky Korsacoff is fifty-four miles
long and twenty miles broad; and Rimsky Korsacoff is a living thing,
secreting, excreting, and growing—more highly organised than the
cocoa-nut trees that grow upon its back, or the blossoms that powder
the hotoo trees in its groves.
The story of coral is the story of a world, and the longest chapter in
that story concerns itself with coral’s infinite variety and form.
Out on the margin of the reef where Dick was spearing fish, you might
have seen a peach-blossom-coloured lichen on the rock. This lichen was
a form of coral. Coral growing upon coral, and in the pools at the edge
of the surf branching corals also of the colour of a peach bloom.
Within a hundred yards of where Emmeline was sitting, the pools
contained corals of all colours, from lake-red to pure white, and the
lagoon behind her—corals of the quaintest and strangest forms.
Dick had speared several fish, and had left them lying on the reef to
be picked up later on. Tired of killing, he was now wandering along,
examining the various living things he came across.
Huge slugs inhabited the reef, slugs as big as parsnips, and somewhat
of the same shape; they were a species of Bech de mer. Globe-shaped
jelly-fish as big as oranges, great cuttlefish bones flat and shining
and white, shark’s teeth, spines of echini; sometimes a dead scarus
fish, its stomach distended with bits of coral on which it had been
feeding; crabs, sea urchins, sea-weeds of strange colour and shape;
star-fish, some tiny and of the colour of cayenne pepper, some huge and
pale. These and a thousand other things, beautiful or strange, were to
be found on the reef.
Dick had laid his spear down, and was exploring a deep bath-like pool.
He had waded up to his knees, and was in the act of wading further when
he was suddenly seized by the foot. It was just as if his ankle had
been suddenly caught in a clove hitch and the rope drawn tight. He
screamed out with pain and terror, and suddenly and viciously a
whip-lash shot out from the water, lassoed him round the left knee,
drew itself taut, and held him.
CHAPTER IV
WHAT BEAUTY CONCEALED
Emmeline, seated on the coral rock, had almost forgotten Dick for a
moment. The sun was setting, and the warm amber light of the sunset
shone on reef and rock-pool. Just at sunset and low tide the reef had a
peculiar fascination for her. It had the low-tide smell of sea-weed
exposed to the air, and the torment and trouble of the breakers seemed
eased. Before her, and on either side, the foam-dashed coral glowed in
amber and gold, and the great Pacific came glassing and glittering in,
voiceless and peaceful, till it reached the strand and burst into song
and spray.
Here, just as on the hill-top at the other side of the island, you
could mark the rhythm of the rollers. “Forever, and forever—forever,
and forever,” they seemed to say.
The cry of the gulls came mixed with the spray on the breeze. They
haunted the reef like uneasy spirits, always complaining, never at
rest; but at sunset their cry seemed farther away and less melancholy,
perhaps because just then the whole island world seemed bathed in the
spirit of peace.
She turned from the sea prospect and looked backwards over the lagoon
to the island. She could make out the broad green glade beside which
their little house lay, and a spot of yellow, which was the thatch of
the house, just by the artu tree, and nearly hidden by the shadow of
the breadfruit. Over woods the fronds of the great cocoa-nut palms
showed above every other tree silhouetted against the dim, dark blue of
the eastern sky.
Seen by the enchanted light of sunset, the whole picture had an unreal
look, more lovely than a dream. At dawn—and Dick would often start for
the reef before dawn, if the tide served—the picture was as beautiful;
more so, perhaps, for over the island, all in shadow, and against the
stars, you would see the palm-tops catching fire, and then the light of
day coming through the green trees and blue sky, like a spirit, across
the blue lagoon, widening and strengthening as it widened, across the
white foam, out over the sea, spreading like a fan, till, all at once,
night was day, and the gulls were crying and the breakers flashing, the
dawn wind blowing, and the palm trees bending, as palm trees only know
how. Emmeline always imagined herself alone on the island with Dick,
but beauty was there, too, and beauty is a great companion.
The girl was contemplating the scene before her. Nature in her
friendliest mood seemed to say, “Behold me! Men call me cruel; men have
called me deceitful, even treacherous. _I_—ah well! my answer is,
‘Behold me!’”
The girl was contemplating the specious beauty of it all, when on the
breeze from seaward came a shout. She turned quickly. There was Dick up
to his knees in a rock-pool a hundred yards or so away, motionless, his
arms upraised, and crying out for help. She sprang to her feet.
There had once been an islet on this part of the reef, a tiny thing,
consisting of a few palms and a handful of vegetation, and destroyed,
perhaps, in some great storm. I mention this because the existence of
this islet once upon a time was the means, indirectly, of saving Dick’s
life; for where these islets have been or are, “flats” occur on the
reef formed of coral conglomerate.
Emmeline in her bare feet could never have reached him in time over
rough coral, but, fortunately, this flat and comparatively smooth
surface lay between them.
“My spear!” shouted Dick, as she approached.
He seemed at first tangled in brambles; then she thought ropes were
tangling round him and tying him to something in the water—whatever it
was, it was most awful, and hideous, and like a nightmare. She ran with
the speed of Atalanta to the rock where the spear was resting, all red
with the blood of new-slain fish, a foot from the point.
As she approached Dick, spear in hand, she saw, gasping with terror,
that the ropes were alive, and that they were flickering and rippling
over his back. One of them bound his left arm to his side, but his
right arm was free.
“Quick!” he shouted.
In a second the spear was in his free hand, and Emmeline had cast
herself down on her knees, and was staring with terrified eyes into the
water of the pool from whence the ropes issued. She was, despite her
terror, quite prepared to fling herself in and do battle with the
thing, whatever it might be.
What she saw was only for a second. In the deep water of the pool,
gazing up and forward and straight at Dick, she saw a face, lugubrious
and awful. The eyes were wide as saucers, stony and steadfast; a large,
heavy, parrot-like beak hung before the eyes, and worked and wobbled,
and seemed to beckon. But what froze one’s heart was the expression of
the eyes, so stony and lugubrious, so passionless, so devoid of
speculation, yet so fixed of purpose and full of fate.
From away far down he had risen with the rising tide. He had been
feeding on crabs, when the tide, betraying him, had gone out, leaving
him trapped in the rock-pool. He had slept, perhaps, and awakened to
find a being, naked and defenceless, invading his pool. He was quite
small, as octopods go, and young, yet he was large and powerful enough
to have drowned an ox.
The octopod has only been described once, in stone, by a Japanese
artist. The statue is still extant, and it is the most terrible
masterpiece of sculpture ever executed by human hands. It represents a
man who has been bathing on a low-tide beach, and has been caught. The
man is shouting in a delirium of terror, and threatening with his free
arm the spectre that has him in its grip. The eyes of the octopod are
fixed upon the man—passionless and lugubrious eyes, but steadfast and
fixed.
Another whip-lash shot out of the water in a shower of spray, and
seized Dick by the left thigh. At the same instant he drove the point
of the spear through the right eye of the monster, deep down through
eye and soft gelatinous carcass till the spear-point dirled and
splintered against the rock. At the same moment the water of the pool
became black as ink, the bands around him relaxed, and he was free.
Emmeline rose up and seized him, sobbing and clinging to him, and
kissing him. He clasped her with his left arm round her body, as if to
protect her, but it was a mechanical action. He was not thinking of
her. Wild with rage, and uttering hoarse cries, he plunged the broken
spear again and again into the depths of the pool, seeking utterly to
destroy the enemy that had so lately had him in its grip. Then slowly
he came to himself, and wiped his forehead, and looked at the broken
spear in his hand.
“Beast!” he said. “Did you see its eyes? Did you see its eyes? I wish
it had a hundred eyes, and I had a hundred spears to drive into them!”
She was clinging to him, and sobbing and laughing hysterically, and
praising him. One might have thought that he had rescued her from
death, not she him.
The sun had nearly vanished, and he led her back to where the dinghy
was moored recapturing and putting on his trousers on the road. He
picked up the dead fish he had speared; and as he rowed her back across
the lagoon, he talked and laughed, recounting the incidents of the
fight, taking all the glory of the thing to himself, and seeming quite
to ignore the important part she had played in it.
This was not from any callousness or want of gratitude, but simply from
the fact that for the last five years he had been the be-all and
end-all of their tiny community—the Imperial master. And he would
just as soon have thought of thanking her for handing him the spear as
of thanking his right hand for driving it home. She was quite content,
seeking neither thanks nor praise. Everything she had came from him:
she was his shadow and his slave. He was her sun.
He went over the fight again and again before they lay down to rest,
telling her he had done this and that, and what he would do to the next
beast of the sort. The reiteration was tiresome enough, or would have
been to an outside listener, but to Emmeline it was better than Homer.
People’s minds do not improve in an intellectual sense when they are
isolated from the world, even though they are living the wild and happy
lives of savages.
Then Dick lay down in the dried ferns and covered himself with a piece
of the striped flannel which they used for blanketing, and he snored,
and chattered in his sleep like a dog hunting imaginary game, and
Emmeline lay beside him wakeful and thinking. A new terror had come
into her life. She had seen death for the second time, but this time
active and in being.
CHAPTER V
THE SOUND OF A DRUM
The next day Dick was sitting under the shade of the artu. He had the
box of fishhooks beside him, and he was bending a line on to one of
them. There had originally been a couple of dozen hooks, large and
small, in the box; there remained now only six—four small and two
large ones. It was a large one he was fixing to the line, for he
intended going on the morrow to the old place to fetch some bananas,
and on the way to try for a fish in the deeper parts of the lagoon.
It was late afternoon, and the heat had gone out of the day. Emmeline,
seated on the grass opposite to him, was holding the end of the line,
whilst he got the kinks out of it, when suddenly she raised her head.
There was not a breath of wind; the hush of the far-distant surf came
through the blue weather—the only audible sound except, now and then,
a movement and flutter from the bird perched in the branches of the
artu. All at once another sound mixed itself with the voice of the