The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
surf—a faint, throbbing sound, like the beating of a distant drum.
“Listen!” said Emmeline.
Dick paused for a moment in his work. All the sounds of the island were
familiar: this was something quite strange.
Faint and far away, now rapid, now slow; coming from where, who could
say? Sometimes it seemed to come from the sea, sometimes, if the fancy
of the listener turned that way, from the woods. As they listened, a
sigh came from overhead; the evening breeze had risen and was moving in
the leaves of the artu tree. Just as you might wipe a picture off a
slate, the breeze banished the sound. Dick went on with his work.
Next morning early he embarked in the dinghy. He took the hook and line
with him, and some raw fish for bait. Emmeline helped him to push off,
and stood on the bank waving her hand as he rounded the little cape
covered with wild cocoa-nut.
These expeditions of Dick’s were one of her sorrows. To be left alone
was frightful; yet she never complained. She was living in a paradise,
but something told her that behind all that sun, all that splendour of
blue sea and sky, behind the flowers and the leaves, behind all that
specious and simpering appearance of happiness in nature, lurked a
frown, and the dragon of mischance.
Dick rowed for about a mile, then he shipped his sculls, and let the
dinghy float. The water here was very deep; so deep that, despite its
clearness, the bottom was invisible; the sunlight over the reef struck
through it diagonally, filling it with sparkles.
The fisherman baited his hook with a piece from the belly of a scarus
and lowered it down out of sight, then he belayed the line to a thole
pin, and, sitting in the bottom of the boat, hung his head over the
side and gazed deep down into the water. Sometimes there was nothing to
see but just the deep blue of the water. Then a flight of spangled
arrowheads would cross the line of sight and vanish, pursued by a form
like a moving bar of gold. Then a great fish would materialise itself
and hang in the shadow of the boat motionless as a stone, save for the
movement of its gills; next moment with a twist of the tail it would be
gone.
Suddenly the dinghy shored over, and might have capsized, only for the
fact that Dick was sitting on the opposite side to the side from which
the line hung. Then the boat righted; the line slackened, and the
surface of the lagoon, a few fathoms away, boiled as if being stirred
from below by a great silver stick. He had hooked an albicore. He tied
the end of the fishing-line to a scull, undid the line from the thole
pin, and flung the scull overboard.
He did all this with wonderful rapidity, while the line was still
slack. Next moment the scull was rushing over the surface of the
lagoon, now towards the reef, now towards the shore, now flat, now end
up. Now it would be jerked under the surface entirely; vanish for a
moment, and then reappear. It was a most astonishing thing to watch,
for the scull seemed alive—viciously alive, and imbued with some
destructive purpose; as, in fact, it was. The most venomous of living
things, and the most intelligent could not have fought the great fish
better.
The albicore would make a frantic dash down the lagoon, hoping,
perhaps, to find in the open sea a release from his foe. Then, half
drowned with the pull of the scull, he would pause, dart from side to
side in perplexity, and then make an equally frantic dash up the
lagoon, to be checked in the same manner. Seeking the deepest depths,
he would sink the scull a few fathoms; and once he sought the air,
leaping into the sunlight like a crescent of silver, whilst the splash
of him as he fell echoed amidst the trees bordering the lagoon. An hour
passed before the great fish showed signs of weakening.
The struggle had taken place up to this close to the shore, but now the
scull swam out into the broad sheet of sunlit water, and slowly began
to describe large circles rippling up the peaceful blue into flashing
wavelets. It was a melancholy sight to watch, for the great fish had
made a good fight, and one could see him, through the eye of
imagination, beaten, half drowned, dazed, and moving as is the fashion
of dazed things in a circle.
Dick, working the remaining oar at the stern of the boat, rowed out and
seized the floating scull, bringing it on board. Foot by foot he hauled
his catch towards the boat till the long gleaming line of the thing
came dimly into view.
The fight had been heard for miles through the lagoon water by all
sorts of swimming things. The lord of the place had got sound of it. A
dark fin rippled the water; and as Dick, pulling on his line, hauled
his catch closer, a monstrous grey shadow stained the depths, and the
glittering streak that was the albicore vanished as if engulfed in a
cloud. The line came in slack, and Dick hauled in the albicore’s head.
It had been divided from the body as if with a huge pair of shears. The
grey shadow slipped by the boat, and Dick, mad with rage, shouted and
shook his fist at it; then, seizing the albicore’s head, from which he
had taken the hook, he hurled it at the monster in the water.
The great shark, with a movement of the tail that caused the water to
swirl and the dinghy to rock, turned upon his back and engulfed the
head; then he slowly sank and vanished, just as if he had been
dissolved. He had come off best in this their first encounter—such as
it was.
CHAPTER VI
SAILS UPON THE SEA
Dick put the hook away and took to the sculls. He had a three-mile row
before him, and the tide was coming in, which did not make it any the
easier. As he rowed, he talked and grumbled to himself. He had been in
a grumbling mood for some time past: the chief cause, Emmeline.
In the last few months she had changed; even her face had changed. A
new person had come upon the island, it seemed to him, and taken the
place of the Emmeline he had known from earliest childhood. This one
looked different. He did not know that she had grown beautiful, he just
knew that she looked different; also she had developed new ways that
displeased him—she would go off and bathe by herself, for instance.
Up to six months or so ago he had been quite contented; sleeping and
eating, and hunting for food and cooking it, building and rebuilding
the house, exploring the woods and the reef. But lately a spirit of
restlessness had come upon him; he did not know exactly what he wanted.
He had a vague feeling that he wanted to go away from the place where
he was; not from the island, but from the place where they had pitched
their tent, or rather built their house.
It may have been the spirit of civilisation crying out in him, telling
him of all he was missing. Of the cities, and the streets, and the
houses, and the businesses, and the striving after gold, the striving
after power. It may have been simply the man in him crying out for
Love, and not knowing yet that Love was at his elbow.
The dinghy glided along, hugging the shore, past the little glades of
fern and the cathedral gloom of the breadfruit; then, rounding a
promontory, she opened the view of the break in the reef. A little bit
of the white strand was visible, but he was not looking that way—he
was looking towards the reef at a tiny, dark spot, not noticeable
unless searched for by the eye. Always when he came on these
expeditions, just here, he would hang on his oars and gaze over there,
where the gulls were flying and the breakers thundering.
A few years ago the spot filled him with dread as well as curiosity,
but from familiarity and the dullness that time casts on everything,
the dread had almost vanished, but the curiosity remained: the
curiosity that makes a child look on at the slaughter of an animal even
though his soul revolts at it. He gazed for a while, then he went on
pulling, and the dinghy approached the beach.
Something had happened on the beach. The sand was all trampled, and
stained red here and there; in the centre lay the remains of a great
fire still smouldering, and just where the water lapped the sand, lay
two deep grooves as if two heavy boats had been beached there. A South
Sea man would have told from the shape of the grooves, and the little
marks of the out-riggers, that two heavy canoes had been beached there.
And they had.
The day before, early in the afternoon, two canoes, possibly from that
far-away island which cast a stain on the horizon to the
sou’-sou’-west, had entered the lagoon, one in pursuit of the other.
What happened then had better be left veiled. A war drum with a
shark-skin head had set the woods throbbing; the victory was celebrated
all night, and at dawn the victors manned the two canoes and set sail
for the home, or the hell, they had come from. Had you examined the
strand you would have found that a line had been drawn across the
beach, beyond which there were no footmarks: that meant that the rest
of the island was for some reason _tabu_.
Dick pulled the nose of the boat up a bit on the strand, then he looked
around him. He picked up a broken spear that had been cast away or
forgotten; it was made of some hard wood and barbed with iron. On the
right-hand side of the beach something lay between the cocoa-nut trees.
He approached; it was a mass of offal; the entrails of a dozen sheep
seemed cast here in one mound, yet there were no sheep on the island,
and sheep are not carried as a rule in war canoes.
The sand on the beach was eloquent. The foot pursuing and the foot
pursued; the knee of the fallen one, and then the forehead and
outspread hands; the heel of the chief who has slain his enemy, beaten
the body flat, burst a hole through it through which he has put his
head, and who stands absolutely wearing his enemy as a cloak; the head
of the man dragged on his back to be butchered like a sheep—of these
things spoke the sand.
As far as the sand traces could speak, the story of the battle was
still being told; the screams and the shouting, the clashing of clubs
and spears were gone, yet the ghost of the fight remained.
If the sand could bear such traces, and tell such tales, who shall say
that the plastic æther was destitute of the story of the fight and the
butchery?
However that may have been, Dick, looking around him, had the shivering
sense of having just escaped from danger. Whoever had been, had
gone—he could tell that by the canoe traces. Gone either out to sea,
or up the right stretch of the lagoon. It was important to determine
this.
He climbed to the hill-top and swept the sea with his eyes. There, away
to the south-west, far away on the sea, he could distinguish the brown
sails of two canoes. There was something indescribably mournful and
lonely in their appearance; they looked like withered leaves—brown
moths blown to sea—derelicts of autumn. Then, remembering the beach,
these things became freighted with the most sinister thoughts for the
mind of the gazer. They were hurrying away, having done their work.
That they looked lonely and old and mournful, and like withered leaves
blown across the sea, only heightened the horror.
Dick had never seen canoes before, but he knew that these things were
boats of some sort holding people, and that the people had left all
those traces on the beach. How much of the horror of the thing was
revealed to his subconscious intelligence, who can say?
He had climbed the boulder, and he now sat down with his knees drawn
up, and his hands clasped round them. Whenever he came round to this
side of the island, something happened of a fateful or sinister nature.
The last time he had nearly lost the dinghy; he had beached the little
boat in such a way that she floated off, and the tide was just in the
act of stealing her, and sweeping her from the lagoon out to sea, when