The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
He remembered this now, and started off along the borders of the wood,
calling to her, and pausing to listen. No answer came.
He searched amidst the trees as far as the little well, waking the
echoes with his voice; then he came back slowly, peering about him in
the deep dusk that now was yielding to the starlight. He sat down
before the door of the house, and, looking at him, you might have
fancied him in the last stages of exhaustion. Profound grief and
profound exhaustion act on the frame very much in the same way. He sat
with his chin resting on his chest, his hands helpless. He could hear
her voice, still as he heard it over at the other side of the island.
She had been in danger and called to him, and he had been calmly
fishing, unconscious of it all.
This thought maddened him. He sat up, stared around him and beat the
ground with the palms of his hands; then he sprang to his feet and made
for the dinghy. He rowed to the reef: the action of a madman, for she
could not possibly be there.
There was no moon, the starlight both lit and veiled the world, and no
sound but the majestic thunder of the waves. As he stood, the night
wind blowing on his face, the white foam seething before him, and
Canopus burning in the great silence overhead, the fact that he stood
in the centre of an awful and profound indifference came to his
untutored mind with a pang.
He returned to the shore: the house was still deserted. A little bowl
made from the shell of a cocoa-nut stood on the grass near the doorway.
He had last seen it in her hands, and he took it up and held it for a
moment, pressing it tightly to his breast. Then he threw himself down
before the doorway, and lay upon his face, with head resting upon his
arms in the attitude of a person who is profoundly asleep.
He must have searched through the woods again that night just as a
somnambulist searches, for he found himself towards dawn in the valley
before the idol. Then it was daybreak—the world was full of light and
colour. He was seated before the house door, worn out and exhausted,
when, raising his head, he saw Emmeline’s figure coming out from amidst
the distant trees on the other side of the sward.
CHAPTER XIII
THE NEWCOMER
He could not move for a moment, then he sprang to his feet and ran
towards her. She looked pale and dazed, and she held something in her
arms; something wrapped up in her scarf. As he pressed her to him, the
something in the bundle struggled against his breast and emitted a
squall—just like the squall of a cat. He drew back, and Emmeline,
tenderly moving her scarf a bit aside, exposed a wee face. It was
brick-red and wrinkled; there were two bright eyes, and a tuft of dark
hair over the forehead. Then the eyes closed, the face screwed itself
up, and the thing sneezed twice.
“Where did you _get_ it?” he asked, absolutely lost in astonishment as
she covered the face again gently with the scarf.
“I found it in the woods,” replied Emmeline.
Dumb with amazement, he helped her along to the house, and she sat
down, resting her head against the bamboos of the wall.
“I felt so bad,” she explained; “and then I went off to sit in the
woods, and then I remembered nothing more, and when I woke up it was
there.”
“It’s a baby!” said Dick.
“I know,” replied Emmeline.
Mrs James’s baby, seen in the long ago, had risen up before their
mind’s eyes, a messenger from the past to explain what the new thing
was. Then she told him things—things that completely shattered the old
“cabbage bed” theory, supplanting it with a truth far more wonderful,
far more poetical, too, to he who can appreciate the marvel and the
mystery of life.
“It has something funny tied on to it,” she went on, as if she were
referring to a parcel she had just received.
“Let’s look,” said Dick.
“No,” she replied; “leave it alone.”
She sat rocking the thing gently, seeming oblivious to the whole world,
and quite absorbed in it, as, indeed, was Dick. A physician would have
shuddered, but, perhaps fortunately enough, there was no physician on
the island. Only Nature, and she put everything to rights in her own
time and way.
When Dick had sat marvelling long enough, he set to and lit the fire.
He had eaten nothing since the day before, and he was nearly as
exhausted as the girl. He cooked some breadfruit, there was some cold
fish left over from the day before; this, with some bananas, he served
up on two broad leaves, making Emmeline eat first.
Before they had finished, the creature in the bundle, as though it had
smelt the food, began to scream. Emmeline drew the scarf aside. It
looked hungry; its mouth would now be pinched up and now wide open, its
eyes opened and closed. The girl touched it on the lips with her
finger, and it seized upon her fingertip and sucked it. Her eyes filled
with tears, she looked appealingly at Dick, who was on his knees; he
took a banana, peeled it, broke off a bit and handed it to her. She
approached it to the baby’s mouth. It tried to suck it, failed, blew
bubbles at the sun and squalled.
“Wait a minute,” said Dick.
There were some green cocoa-nuts he had gathered the day before close
by. He took one, removed the green husk, and opened one of the eyes,
making an opening also in the opposite side of the shell. The
unfortunate infant sucked ravenously at the nut, filled its stomach
with the young cocoa-nut juice, vomited violently, and wailed. Emmeline
in despair clasped it to her naked breast, wherefrom, in a moment, it
was hanging like a leech. It knew more about babies than they did.
CHAPTER XIV
HANNAH
At noon, in the shallows of the reef, under the burning sun, the water
would be quite warm. They would carry the baby down here, and Emmeline
would wash it with a bit of flannel. After a few days it scarcely ever
screamed, even when she washed it. It would lie on her knees during the
process, striking valiantly out with its arms and legs, staring
straight up at the sky. Then, when she turned it on its face, it would
lay its head down and chuckle and blow bubbles at the coral of the
reef, examining, apparently, the pattern of the coral with deep and
philosophic attention.
Dick would sit by with his knees up to his chin, watching it all. He
felt himself to be part proprietor in the thing—as indeed he was.
The mystery of the affair still hung over them both. A week ago they
two had been alone, and suddenly from nowhere this new individual had
appeared.
It was so complete. It had hair on its head, tiny finger-nails, and
hands that would grasp you. It had a whole host of little ways of its
own, and every day added to them.
In a week the extreme ugliness of the newborn child had vanished. Its
face, which had seemed carved in the imitation of a monkey’s face from
half a brick, became the face of a happy and healthy baby. It seemed to
see things, and sometimes it would laugh and chuckle as though it had
been told a good joke. Its black hair all came off and was supplanted
by a sort of down. It had no teeth. It would lie on its back and kick
and crow, and double its fists up and try to swallow them alternately,
and cross its feet and play with its toes. In fact, it was exactly like
any of the thousand-and-one babies that are born into the world at
every tick of the clock.
“What will we call it?” said Dick one day, as he sat watching his son
and heir crawling about on the grass under the shade of the breadfruit
leaves.
“Hannah,” said Emmeline promptly.
The recollection of another baby once heard about was in her mind; and
it was as good a name as any other, perhaps, in that lonely place,
notwithstanding the fact that Hannah was a boy.
Koko took a vast interest in the new arrival. He would hop round it and
peer at it with his head on one side; and Hannah would crawl after the
bird and try to grab it by the tail. In a few months so valiant and
strong did he become that he would pursue his own father, crawling
before him on the grass, and you might have seen the mother and father
and child playing all together like three children, the bird sometimes
hovering overhead like a good spirit, sometimes joining in the fun.
Sometimes Emmeline would sit and brood over the child, a troubled
expression on her face and a far-away look in her eyes. The old vague
fear of mischance had returned—the dread of that viewless form her
imagination half pictured behind the smile on the face of Nature. Her
happiness was so great that she dreaded to lose it.
There is nothing more wonderful than the birth of a man, and all that
goes to bring it about. Here, on this island, in the very heart of the
sea, amidst the sunshine and the wind-blown trees, under the great blue
arch of the sky, in perfect purity of thought, they would discuss the
question from beginning to end without a blush, the object of their
discussion crawling before them on the grass, and attempting to grab
feathers from Koko’s tail.
It was the loneliness of the place as well as their ignorance of life
that made the old, old miracle appear so strange and fresh—as
beautiful as the miracle of death had appeared awful. In thoughts vague
and beyond expression in words, they linked this new occurrence with
that old occurrence on the reef six years before. The vanishing and the
coming of a man.
* * * * * *
Hannah, despite his unfortunate name, was certainly a most virile and
engaging baby. The black hair which had appeared and vanished like some
practical joke played by Nature, gave place to a down at first as
yellow as sun-bleached wheat, but in a few months’ time tinged with
auburn.
One day—he had been uneasy and biting at his thumbs for some time
past—Emmeline, looking into his mouth, saw something white and like a
grain of rice protruding from his gum. It was a tooth just born. He
could eat bananas now, and breadfruit, and they often fed him on
fish—a fact which again might have caused a medical man to shudder;
yet he throve on it all, and waxed stouter every day.
Emmeline, with a profound and natural wisdom, let him crawl about stark
naked, dressed in ozone and sunlight. Taking him out on the reef, she
would let him paddle in the shallow pools, holding him under the
armpits whilst he splashed the diamond-bright water into spray with his
feet, and laughed and shouted.
They were beginning now to experience a phenomenon, as wonderful as the
birth of the child’s body—the birth of his intelligence: the peeping
out of a little personality with predilections of its own, likes and
dislikes.
He knew Dick from Emmeline; and when Emmeline had satisfied his
material wants, he would hold out his arms to go to Dick if he were by.
He looked upon Koko as a friend, but when a friend of Koko’s—a bird
with an inquisitive mind and three red feathers in his tail—dropped in
one day to inspect the newcomer, he resented the intrusion, and
screamed.
He had a passion for flowers, or anything bright. He would laugh and
shout when taken on the lagoon in the dinghy, and make as if to jump
into the water to get at the bright-coloured corals below.
Ah me! we laugh at young mothers, and all the miraculous things they
tell us about their babies. They see what we cannot see: the first
unfolding of that mysterious flower, the mind.
One day they were out on the lagoon. Dick had been rowing; he had
ceased, and was letting the boat drift for a bit. Emmeline was dancing
the child on her knee, when it suddenly held out its arms to the
oarsman and said:
“Dick!”
The little word, so often heard and easily repeated, was its first word
on earth.
A voice that had never spoken in the world before, had spoken; and to
hear his name thus mysteriously uttered by a being he has created, is