The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
of the _Shenandoah_ was out on the reef, with a piece of coral carefully
placed on it as if to keep it down. As for the lug-sail belonging to
the dinghy, it was never seen again.
There is humour sometimes in a cyclone, if you can only appreciate it;
no other form of air disturbance produces such quaint effects. Beside
the great main whirlpool of wind, there are subsidiary whirlpools, each
actuated by its own special imp.
Emmeline had felt Hannah nearly snatched from her arms twice by these
little ferocious gimlet winds; and that the whole business of the great
storm was set about with the object of snatching Hannah from her, and
blowing him out to sea, was a belief which she held, perhaps, in the
innermost recesses of her mind.
The dinghy would have been utterly destroyed, had it not heeled over
and sunk in shallow water at the first onset of the wind; as it was,
Dick was able to bail it out at the next low tide, when it floated as
bravely as ever, not having started a single seam.
But the destruction amidst the trees was pitiful. Looking at the woods
as a mass, one noticed gaps here and there, but what had really
happened could not be seen till one was amongst the trees. Great,
beautiful cocoa-nut palms, not dead, but just dying, lay crushed and
broken as if trampled upon by some enormous foot. You would come
across half a dozen lianas twisted into one great cable. Where
cocoa-nut palms were, you could not move a yard without kicking against
a fallen nut; you might have picked up full-grown, half-grown, and wee
baby nuts, not bigger than small apples, for on the same tree you will
find nuts of all sizes and conditions.
One never sees a perfectly straight-stemmed cocoa-palm; they all have
an inclination from the perpendicular more or less; perhaps that is why
a cyclone has more effect on them than on other trees.
Artus, once so pretty a picture with their diamond-chequered trunks,
lay broken and ruined; and right through the belt of mammee apple,
right through the bad lands, lay a broad road, as if an army, horse,
foot, and artillery, had passed that way from lagoon edge to lagoon
edge. This was the path left by the great fore-foot of the storm; but
had you searched the woods on either side, you would have found paths
where the lesser winds had been at work, where the baby whirlwinds had
been at play.
From the bruised woods, like an incense offered to heaven, rose a
perfume of blossoms gathered and scattered, of rain-wet leaves, of
lianas twisted and broken and oozing their sap; the perfume of
newly-wrecked and ruined trees—the essence and soul of the artu, the
banyan and cocoa-palm cast upon the wind.
You would have found dead butterflies in the woods, dead birds too; but
in the great path of the storm you would have found dead butterflies’
wings, feathers, leaves frayed as if by fingers, branches of the aoa,
and sticks of the hibiscus broken into little fragments.
Powerful enough to rip a ship open, root up a tree, half ruin a city.
Delicate enough to tear a butterfly wing from wing—that is a cyclone.
Emmeline, wandering about in the woods with Dick on the day after the
storm, looking at the ruin of great tree and little bird, and
recollecting the land birds she had caught a glimpse of yesterday being
carried along safely by the storm out to sea to be drowned, felt a
great weight lifting from her heart. Mischance had come, and spared
them and the baby. The blue had spoken, but had not called them.
She felt that something—the something which we in civilisation call
Fate—was for the present gorged; and, without being annihilated, her
incessant hypochondriacal dread condensed itself into a point, leaving
her horizon sunlit and clear.
The cyclone had indeed treated them almost, one might say, amiably. It
had taken the house—but that was a small matter, for it had left them
nearly all their small possessions. The tinder box and flint and steel
would have been a much more serious loss than a dozen houses, for,
without it, they would have had absolutely no means of making a fire.
If anything, the cyclone had been almost too kind to them; had let them
pay off too little of that mysterious debt they owed to the gods.
CHAPTER XVIII
A FALLEN IDOL
The next day Dick began to rebuild the house. He had fetched the
stay-sail from the reef and rigged up a temporary tent.
It was a great business cutting the canes and dragging them out in the
open. Emmeline helped; whilst Hannah, seated on the grass, played with
the bird that had vanished during the storm, but reappeared the evening
after.
The child and the bird had grown fast friends; they were friendly
enough even at first, but now the bird would sometimes let the tiny
hands clasp him right round his body—at least, as far as the hands
would go.
It is a rare experience for a man to hold a tame and unstruggling and
unfrightened bird in his hands; next to pressing a woman in his arms,
it is the pleasantest tactile sensation he will ever experience,
perhaps, in life. He will feel a desire to press it to his heart, if he
has such a thing.
Hannah would press Koko to his little brown stomach, as if in artless
admission of where his heart lay.
He was an extraordinarily bright and intelligent child. He did not
promise to be talkative, for, having achieved the word “Dick,” he
rested content for a long while before advancing further into the
labyrinth of language; but though he did not use his tongue, he spoke
in a host of other ways. With his eyes, that were as bright as Koko’s,
and full of all sorts of mischief; with his hands and feet and the
movements of his body. He had a way of shaking his hands before him
when highly delighted, a way of expressing nearly all the shades of
pleasure; and though he rarely expressed anger, when he did so, he
expressed it fully.
He was just now passing over the frontier into toyland. In civilisation
he would no doubt have been the possessor of an india-rubber dog or a
woolly lamb, but there were no toys here at all. Emmeline’s old doll
had been left behind when they took flight from the other side of the
island, and Dick, a year or so ago, on one of his expeditions, had
found it lying half buried in the sand of the beach.
He had brought it back now more as a curiosity than anything else, and
they had kept it on the shelf in the house. The cyclone had impaled it
on a tree-twig near by, as if in derision; and Hannah, when it was
presented to him as a plaything, flung it away from him as if in
disgust. But he would play with flowers or bright shells, or bits of
coral, making vague patterns with them on the sward.
All the toy lambs in the world would not have pleased him better than
those things, the toys of the Troglodyte children—the children of the
Stone Age. To clap two oyster shells together and make a noise—what,
after all, could a baby want better than that?
One afternoon, when the house was beginning to take some sort of form,
they ceased work and went off into the woods; Emmeline carrying the
baby, and Dick taking turns with him. They were going to the valley of
the idol.
Since the coming of Hannah, and even before, the stone figure standing
in its awful and mysterious solitude had ceased to be an object of
dread to Emmeline, and had become a thing vaguely benevolent. Love had
come to her under its shade; and under its shade the spirit of the
child had entered into her—from where, who knows? But certainly through
heaven.
Perhaps the thing which had been the god of some unknown people had
inspired her with the instinct of religion; if so, she was his last
worshipper on earth, for when they entered the valley they found him
lying upon his face. Great blocks of stone lay around him: there had
evidently been a landslip, a catastrophe preparing for ages, and
determined, perhaps, by the torrential rain of the cyclone.
In Ponape, Huahine, in Easter Island, you may see great idols that have
been felled like this, temples slowly dissolving from sight, and
terraces, seemingly as solid as the hills, turning softly and subtly
into shapeless mounds of stone.
CHAPTER XIX
THE EXPEDITION
Next morning the light of day filtering through the trees awakened
Emmeline in the tent which they had improvised whilst the house was
building. Dawn came later here than on the other side of the island
which faced east—later, and in a different manner—for there is the
difference of worlds between dawn coming over a wooded hill, and dawn
coming over the sea.
Over at the other side, sitting on the sand with the break of the reef
which faced the east before you, scarcely would the east change colour
before the sea-line would be on fire, the sky lit up into an
illimitable void of blue, and the sunlight flooding into the lagoon,
the ripples of light seeming to chase the ripples of water.
On this side it was different. The sky would be dark and full of stars,
and the woods, great spaces of velvety shadow. Then through the leaves
of the artu would come a sigh, and the leaves of the breadfruit would
patter, and the sound of the reef become faint. The land breeze had
awakened, and in a while, as if it had blown them away, looking up, you
would find the stars gone, and the sky a veil of palest blue. In this
indirect approach of dawn there was something ineffably mysterious. One
could see, but the things seen were indecisive and vague, just as they
are in the gloaming of an English summer’s day.
Scarcely had Emmeline arisen when Dick woke also, and they went out on
to the sward, and then down to the water’s edge. Dick went in for a
swim, and the girl, holding the baby, stood on the bank watching him.
Always after a great storm the weather of the island would become more
bracing and exhilarating, and this morning the air seemed filled with
the spirit of spring. Emmeline felt it, and as she watched the swimmer
disporting in the water, she laughed, and held the child up to watch
him. She was fey. The breeze, filled with all sorts of sweet perfumes
from the woods, blew her black hair about her shoulders, and the full
light of morning coming over the palm fronds of the woods beyond the
sward touched her and the child. Nature seemed caressing them.
Dick came ashore, and then ran about to dry himself in the wind. Then
he went to the dinghy and examined her; for he had determined to leave
the house-building for half a day, and row round to the old place to
see how the banana trees had fared during the storm. His anxiety about
them was not to be wondered at. The island was his larder, and the
bananas were a most valuable article of food. He had all the feelings
of a careful housekeeper about them, and he could not rest till he had
seen for himself the extent of damage, if damage there was any.
He examined the boat, and then they all went back to breakfast. Living
their lives, they had to use forethought. They would put away, for
instance, all the shells of the cocoa-nuts they used for fuel; and you
never could imagine the blazing splendour there lives in the shell of a
cocoa-nut till you see it burning. Yesterday, Dick, with his usual
prudence, had placed a heap of sticks, all wet with the rain of the
storm, to dry in the sun: as a consequence, they had plenty of fuel to
make a fire with this morning.
When they had finished breakfast he got the knife to cut the bananas
with—if there were any left to cut—and, taking the javelin, he went
down to the boat, followed by Emmeline and the child.
Dick had stepped into the boat, and was on the point of unmooring her,
and pushing her off, when Emmeline stopped him.
“Dick!”
“Yes?”
“I will go with you.”
“You!” said he in astonishment.
“Yes, I’m—not afraid any more.”