The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
the sweetest and perhaps the saddest thing a man can ever know.
Dick took the child on his knee, and from that moment his love for it
was more than his love for Emmeline or anything else on earth.
CHAPTER XV
THE LAGOON OF FIRE
Ever since the tragedy of six years ago there had been forming in the
mind of Emmeline Lestrange a something—shall I call it a deep
mistrust. She had never been clever; lessons had saddened and wearied
her, without making her much the wiser. Yet her mind was of that order
into which profound truths come by short cuts. She was intuitive.
Great knowledge may lurk in the human mind without the owner of the
mind being aware. He or she acts in such or such a way, or thinks in
such and such a manner from intuition; in other words, as the outcome
of the profoundest reasoning.
When we have learned to call storms, storms, and death, death, and
birth, birth; when we have mastered the sailor’s horn book, and Mr
Piddington’s law of cyclones, Ellis’s anatomy, and Lewer’s midwifery,
we have already made ourselves half blind. We have become hypnotised by
words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the
commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.
Storms had burst over the island before this. And what Emmeline
remembered of them might be expressed by an instance.
The morning would be bright and happy, never so bright the sun, or so
balmy the breeze, or so peaceful the blue lagoon; then, with a horrid
suddenness, as if sick with dissimulation and mad to show itself,
something would blacken the sun, and with a yell stretch out a hand and
ravage the island, churn the lagoon into foam, beat down the cocoa-nut
trees, and slay the birds. And one bird would be left and another
taken, one tree destroyed, and another left standing. The fury of the
thing was less fearful than the blindness of it, and the indifference
of it.
One night, when the child was asleep, just after the last star was lit,
Dick appeared at the doorway of the house. He had been down to the
water’s edge and had now returned. He beckoned Emmeline to follow him,
and, putting down the child, she did so.
“Come here and look,” said he.
He led the way to the water; and as they approached it, Emmeline became
aware that there was something strange about the lagoon. From a
distance it looked pale and solid; it might have been a great stretch
of grey marble veined with black. Then, as she drew nearer, she saw
that the dull grey appearance was a deception of the eye.
The lagoon was alight and burning.
The phosphoric fire was in its very heart and being; every coral branch
was a torch, every fish a passing lantern. The incoming tide moving the
waters made the whole glittering floor of the lagoon move and shiver,
and the tiny waves to lap the bank, leaving behind them glow-worm
traces.
“Look!” said Dick.
He knelt down and plunged his forearm into the water. The immersed part
burned like a smouldering torch. Emmeline could see it as plainly as
though it were lit by sunlight. Then he drew his arm out, and as far as
the water had reached, it was covered by a glowing glove.
They had seen the phosphorescence of the lagoon before; indeed, any
night you might watch the passing fish like bars of silver, when the
moon was away; but this was something quite new, and it was entrancing.
Emmeline knelt down and dabbled her hands, and made herself a pair of
phosphoric gloves, and cried out with pleasure, and laughed. It was all
the pleasure of playing with fire without the danger of being burnt.
Then Dick rubbed his face with the water till it glowed.
“Wait!” he cried; and, running up to the house, he fetched out Hannah.
He came running down with him to the water’s edge, gave Emmeline the
child, unmoored the boat, and started out from shore.
The sculls, as far as they were immersed, were like bars of glistening
silver; under them passed the fish, leaving cometic tails; each coral
clump was a lamp, lending its lustre till the great lagoon was luminous
as a lit-up ballroom. Even the child on Emmeline’s lap crowed and cried
out at the strangeness of the sight.
They landed on the reef and wandered over the flat. The sea was white
and bright as snow, and the foam looked like a hedge of fire.
As they stood gazing on this extraordinary sight, suddenly, almost as
instantaneously as the switching off of an electric light, the
phosphorescence of the sea flickered and vanished.
The moon was rising. Her crest was just breaking from the water, and as
her face came slowly into view behind a belt of vapour that lay on the
horizon, it looked fierce and red, stained with smoke like the face of
Eblis.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CYCLONE
When they awoke next morning the day was dark. A solid roof of cloud,
lead-coloured and without a ripple on it, lay over the sky, almost to
the horizon. There was not a breath of wind, and the birds flew wildly
about as if disturbed by some unseen enemy in the wood.
As Dick lit the fire to prepare the breakfast, Emmeline walked up and
down, holding her baby to her breast; she felt restless and uneasy.
As the morning wore on the darkness increased; a breeze rose up, and
the leaves of the breadfruit trees pattered together with the sound of
rain falling upon glass. A storm was coming, but there was something
different in its approach to the approach of the storms they had
already known.
As the breeze increased a sound filled the air, coming from far away
beyond the horizon. It was like the sound of a great multitude of
people, and yet so faint and vague was it that sudden bursts of the
breeze through the leaves above would drown it utterly. Then it ceased,
and nothing could be heard but the rocking of the branches and the
tossing of the leaves under the increasing wind, which was now blowing
sharply and fiercely and with a steady rush dead from the west,
fretting the lagoon, and sending clouds and masses of foam right over
the reef. The sky that had been so leaden and peaceful and like a solid
roof was now all in a hurry, flowing eastward like a great turbulent
river in spate.
And now, again, one could hear the sound in the distance—the thunder
of the captains of the storm and the shouting; but still so faint, so
vague, so indeterminate and unearthly that it seemed like the sound in
a dream.
Emmeline sat amidst the ferns on the floor cowed and dumb, holding the
baby to her breast. It was fast asleep. Dick stood at the doorway. He
was disturbed in mind, but he did not show it.
The whole beautiful island world had now taken on the colour of ashes
and the colour of lead. Beauty had utterly vanished, all seemed sadness
and distress.
The cocoa-palms, under the wind that had lost its steady rush and was
now blowing in hurricane blasts, flung themselves about in all the
attitudes of distress; and whoever has seen a tropical storm will know
what a cocoa-palm can express by its movements under the lash of the
wind.
Fortunately the house was so placed that it was protected by the whole
depth of the grove between it and the lagoon; and fortunately, too, it
was sheltered by the dense foliage of the breadfruit, for suddenly,
with a crash of thunder as if the hammer of Thor had been flung from
sky to earth, the clouds split and the rain came down in a great
slanting wave. It roared on the foliage above, which, bending leaf on
leaf, made a slanting roof from which it rushed in a steady sheet-like
cascade.
Dick had darted into the house, and was now sitting beside Emmeline,
who was shivering and holding the child, which had awakened at the
sound of the thunder.
For an hour they sat, the rain ceasing and coming again, the thunder
shaking earth and sea, and the wind passing overhead with a piercing,
monotonous cry.
Then all at once the wind dropped, the rain ceased, and a pale spectral
light, like the light of dawn, fell before the doorway.
“It’s over!” cried Dick, making to get up.
“Oh, listen!” said Emmeline, clinging to him, and holding the baby to
his breast as if the touch of him would give it protection. She had
divined that there was something approaching worse than a storm.
Then, listening in the silence, away from the other side of the island,
they heard a sound like the droning of a great top.
It was the centre of the cyclone approaching.
A cyclone is a circular storm: a storm in the form of a ring. This ring
of hurricane travels across the ocean with inconceivable speed and
fury, yet its centre is a haven of peace.
As they listened the sound increased, sharpened, and became a tang that
pierced the ear-drums: a sound that shook with hurry and speed,
increasing, bringing with it the bursting and crashing of trees, and
breaking at last overhead in a yell that stunned the brain like the
blow of a bludgeon. In a second the house was torn away, and they were
clinging to the roots of the breadfruit, deaf, blinded, half-lifeless.
The terror and the prolonged shock of it reduced them from thinking
beings to the level of frightened animals whose one instinct is
preservation.
How long the horror lasted they could not tell, when, like a madman who
pauses for a moment in the midst of his struggles and stands
stock-still, the wind ceased blowing, and there was peace. The centre
of the cyclone was passing over the island.
Looking up, one saw a marvellous sight. The air was full of birds,
butterflies, insects—all hanging in the heart of the storm and
travelling with it under its protection.
Though the air was still as the air of a summer’s day, from north,
south, east, and west, from every point of the compass, came the yell
of the hurricane.
There was something shocking in this.
In a storm one is so beaten about by the wind that one has no time to
think: one is half stupefied. But in the dead centre of a cyclone one
is in perfect peace. The trouble is all around, but it is not here. One
has time to examine the thing like a tiger in a cage, listen to its
voice and shudder at its ferocity.
The girl, holding the baby to her breast, sat up gasping. The baby had
come to no harm; it had cried at first when the thunder broke, but now
it seemed impassive, almost dazed. Dick stepped from under the tree and
looked at the prodigy in the air.
The cyclone had gathered on its way sea-birds and birds from the land;
there were gulls, electric white and black man-of-war birds,
butterflies, and they all seemed imprisoned under a great drifting dome
of glass. As they went, travelling like things without volition and in
a dream, with a hum and a roar the south-west quadrant of the cyclone
burst on the island, and the whole bitter business began over again.
It lasted for hours, then towards midnight the wind fell; and when the
sun rose next morning he came through a cloudless sky, without a trace
of apology for the destruction caused by his children the winds. He
showed trees uprooted and birds lying dead, three or four canes
remaining of what had once been a house, the lagoon the colour of a
pale sapphire, and a glass-green, foam-capped sea racing in thunder
against the reef.
CHAPTER XVII
THE STRICKEN WOODS
At first they thought they were ruined; then Dick, searching, found the
old saw under a tree, and the butcher’s knife near it, as though the
knife and saw had been trying to escape in company and had failed.
Bit by bit they began to recover something of their scattered property.
The remains of the flannel had been taken by the cyclone and wrapped
round and round a slender cocoa-nut tree, till the trunk looked like a
gaily-bandaged leg. The box of fishhooks had been jammed into the
centre of a cooked breadfruit, both having been picked up by the
fingers of the wind and hurled against the same tree; and the stay-sail