The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
he returned laden with his bananas, and, rushing into the water up to
his waist, saved her. Another time he had fallen out of a tree, and
just by a miracle escaped death. Another time a hurricane had broken,
lashing the lagoon into snow, and sending the cocoa-nuts bounding and
flying like tennis balls across the strand. This time he had just
escaped something, he knew not exactly what. It was almost as if
Providence were saying to him, “Don’t come here.”
He watched the brown sails as they dwindled in the wind-blown blue,
then he came down from the hill-top and cut his bananas. He cut four
large bunches, which caused him to make two journeys to the boat. When
the bananas were stowed he pushed off.
For a long time a great curiosity had been pulling at his
heart-strings: a curiosity of which he was dimly ashamed. Fear had
given it birth, and Fear still clung to it. It was, perhaps, the
element of fear and the awful delight of daring the unknown that made
him give way to it.
He had rowed, perhaps, a hundred yards when he turned the boat’s head
and made for the reef. It was more than five years since that day when
he rowed across the lagoon, Emmeline sitting in the stern, with her
wreath of flowers in her hand. It might have been only yesterday, for
everything seemed just the same. The thunderous surf and the flying
gulls, the blinding sunlight, and the salt, fresh smell of the sea. The
palm tree at the entrance of the lagoon still bent gazing into the
water, and round the projection of coral to which he had last moored
the boat still lay a fragment of the rope which he had cut in his hurry
to escape.
Ships had come into the lagoon, perhaps, during the five years, but no
one had noticed anything on the reef, for it was only from the hill-top
that a full view of what was there could be seen, and then only by eyes
knowing where to look. From the beach there was visible just a speck.
It might have been, perhaps, a bit of old wreckage flung there by a
wave in some big storm. A piece of old wreckage that had been tossed
hither and thither for years, and had at last found a place of rest.
Dick tied the boat up, and stepped on to the reef. It was high tide
just as before; the breeze was blowing strongly, and overhead a
man-of-war’s bird, black as ebony, with a blood-red bill, came sailing,
the wind doming out his wings. He circled in the air, and cried out
fiercely, as if resenting the presence of the intruder, then he passed
away, let himself be blown away, as it were, across the lagoon,
wheeled, circled, and passed out to sea.
Dick approached the place he knew, and there lay the little old barrel
all warped by the powerful sun; the staves stood apart, and the hooping
was rusted and broken, and whatever it had contained in the way of
spirit and conviviality had long ago drained away.
Beside the barrel lay a skeleton, round which lay a few rags of cloth.
The skull had fallen to one side, and the lower jaw had fallen from the
skull; the bones of the hands and feet were still articulated, and the
ribs had not fallen in. It was all white and bleached, and the sun
shone on it as indifferently as on the coral, this shell and framework
that had once been a man. There was nothing dreadful about it, but a
whole world of wonder.
To Dick, who had not been broken into the idea of death, who had not
learned to associate it with graves and funerals, sorrow, eternity, and
hell, the thing spoke as it never could have spoken to you or me.
Looking at it, things linked themselves together in his mind: the
skeletons of birds he had found in the woods, the fish he had slain,
even trees lying dead and rotten—even the shells of crabs.
If you had asked him what lay before him, and if he could have
expressed the thought in his mind, he would have answered you “change.”
All the philosophy in the world could not have told him more than he
knew just then about death—he, who even did not know its name.
He was held spellbound by the marvel and miracle of the thing and the
thoughts that suddenly crowded his mind like a host of spectres for
whom a door has just been opened.
Just as a child by unanswerable logic knows that a fire which has
burned him once will burn him again, or will burn another person, he
knew that just as the form before him was, his form would be some
day—and Emmeline’s.
Then came the vague question which is born not of the brain, but the
heart, and which is the basis of all religions—where shall I be then?
His mind was not of an introspective nature, and the question just
strayed across it and was gone. And still the wonder of the thing held
him. He was for the first time in his life in a reverie; the corpse
that had shocked and terrified him five years ago had cast seeds of
thought with its dead fingers upon his mind, the skeleton had brought
them to maturity. The full fact of universal death suddenly appeared
before him, and he recognised it.
He stood for a long time motionless, and then with a deep sigh turned
to the boat and pushed off without once looking back at the reef. He
crossed the lagoon and rowed slowly homewards, keeping in the shelter
of the tree shadows as much as possible.
Even looking at him from the shore you might have noticed a difference
in him. Your savage paddles his canoe, or sculls his boat, alert,
glancing about him, at touch with nature at all points; though he be
lazy as a cat and sleeps half the day, awake he is all ears and eyes—a
creature reacting to the least external impression.
Dick, as he rowed back, did not look about him: he was thinking or
retrospecting. The savage in him had received a check. As he turned the
little cape where the wild cocoa-nut blazed, he looked over his
shoulder. A figure was standing on the sward by the edge of the water.
It was Emmeline.
CHAPTER VII
THE SCHOONER
They carried the bananas up to the house, and hung them from a branch
of the artu. Then Dick, on his knees, lit the fire to prepare the
evening meal. When it was over he went down to where the boat was
moored, and returned with something in his hand. It was the javelin
with the iron point—or, rather, the two pieces of it. He had said
nothing of what he had seen to the girl.
Emmeline was seated on the grass; she had a long strip of the striped
flannel stuff about her, worn like a scarf, and she had another piece
in her hand which she was hemming. The bird was hopping about, pecking
at a banana which they had thrown to him; a light breeze made the
shadow of the artu leaves dance upon the grass, and the serrated leaves
of the breadfruit to patter one on the other with the sound of
rain-drops falling upon glass.
“Where did you get it?” asked Emmeline, staring at the piece of the
javelin which Dick had flung down almost beside her whilst he went into
the house to fetch the knife.
“It was on the beach over there,” he replied, taking his seat and
examining the two fragments to see how he could splice them together.
Emmeline looked at the pieces, putting them together in her mind. She
did not like the look of the thing: so keen and savage, and stained
dark a foot and more from the point.
“People had been there,” said Dick, putting the two pieces together and
examining the fracture critically.
“Where?”
“Over there. This was lying on the sand, and the sand was all trod up.”
“Dick,” said Emmeline, “who were the people?”
“I don’t know; I went up the hill and saw their boats going away—far
away out. This was lying on the sand.”
“Dick,” said Emmeline, “do you remember the noise yesterday?”
“Yes,” said Dick.
“I heard it in the night.”
“When?”
“In the night before the moon went away.”
“That was them,” said Dick.
“Dick!”
“Yes?”
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know,” replied Dick.
“It was in the night, before the moon went away, and it went on and on
beating in the trees. I thought I was asleep, and then I knew I was
awake; you were asleep, and I pushed you to listen, but you couldn’t
wake, you were so asleep; then the moon went away, and the noise went
on. How did they make the noise?”
“I don’t know,” replied Dick, “but it was them; and they left this on
the sand, and the sand was all trod up, and I saw their boats from the
hill, away out far.”
“I thought I heard voices,” said Emmeline, “but I was not sure.”
She fell into meditation, watching her companion at work on the savage
and sinister-looking thing in his hands. He was splicing the two pieces
together with a strip of the brown cloth-like stuff which is wrapped
round the stalks of the cocoa-palm fronds. The thing seemed to have
been hurled here out of the blue by some unseen hand.
When he had spliced the pieces, doing so with marvellous dexterity, he
took the thing short down near the point, and began thrusting it into
the soft earth to clean it; then, with a bit of flannel, he polished it
till it shone. He felt a keen delight in it. It was useless as a
fish-spear, because it had no barb, but it was a weapon. It was useless
as a weapon, because there was no foe on the island to use it against;
still, it was a weapon.
When he had finished scrubbing at it, he rose, hitched his old trousers
up, tightened the belt of cocoa-cloth which Emmeline had made for him,
went into the house and got his fish-spear, and stalked off to the
boat, calling out to Emmeline to follow him. They crossed over to the
reef, where, as usual, he divested himself of clothing.
It was strange that out here he would go about stark naked, yet on the
island he always wore some covering. But not so strange, perhaps, after
all.
The sea is a great purifier, both of the mind and the body; before that
great sweet spirit people do not think in the same way as they think
far inland. What woman would appear in a town or on a country road, or
even bathing in a river, as she appears bathing in the sea?
Some instinct made Dick cover himself up on shore, and strip naked on
the reef. In a minute he was down by the edge of the surf, javelin in
one hand, fish-spear in the other.
Emmeline, by a little pool the bottom of which was covered with
branching coral, sat gazing down into its depths, lost in a reverie
like that into which we fall when gazing at shapes in the fire. She had
sat some time like this when a shout from Dick aroused her. She
started to her feet and gazed to where he was pointing. An amazing
thing was there.
To the east, just rounding the curve of the reef, and scarcely a
quarter of a mile from it, was coming a big topsail schooner; a
beautiful sight she was, heeling to the breeze with every sail drawing,
and the white foam like a feather at her fore-foot.
Dick, with the javelin in his hand, was standing gazing at her; he had
dropped his fish-spear, and he stood as motionless as though he were
carved out of stone. Emmeline ran to him and stood beside him; neither
of them spoke a word as the vessel drew closer.
Everything was visible, so close was she now, from the reef points on
the great mainsail, luminous with the sunlight, and white as the wing
of a gull, to the rail of the bulwarks. A crowd of men were hanging
over the port bulwarks gazing at the island and the figures on the
reef. Browned by the sun and sea-breeze, Emmeline’s hair blowing on the
wind, and the point of Dick’s javelin flashing in the sun, they looked
an ideal pair of savages, seen from the schooner’s deck.
“They are going away,” said Emmeline, with a long-drawn breath of
relief.
Dick made no reply; he stared at the schooner a moment longer in
silence, then, having made sure that she was standing away from the
land, he began to run up and down, calling out wildly, and beckoning to
the vessel as if to call her back.
A moment later a sound came on the breeze, a faint hail; a flag was run