The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
and it’s overcrowded; she’s better aboard the dinghy, for she can look
after the kids. Come, hurry up, the smother is coming down on us fast.
Ahoy!”—to the quarter-boat—“hurry up, hurry up!”
The quarter-boat had suddenly vanished.
Mr Lestrange climbed into the long-boat. Paddy pushed the dinghy a few
yards away with the tip of a scull, and then lay on his oars waiting.
“Ahoy! ahoy!” cried Le Farge.
“Ahoy!” came from the fog bank.
Next moment the long-boat and the dinghy vanished from each other’s
sight: the great fog bank had taken them.
Now a couple of strokes of the port scull would have brought Mr Button
alongside the long-boat, so close was he; but the quarter-boat was in
his mind, or rather imagination, so what must he do but take three
powerful strokes in the direction in which he fancied the quarter-boat
to be.
The rest was voices.
“Dinghy ahoy!”
“Ahoy!”
“Ahoy!”
“Don’t be shoutin’ together, or I’ll not know which way to pull.
Quarter-boat ahoy! where are yiz?”
“Port your helm!”
“Ay, ay!”—putting his helm, so to speak, to starboard—“I’ll be wid yiz
in wan minute—two or three minutes’ hard pulling.”
“Ahoy!”—much more faint.
“What d’ye mane rowin’ away from me?”—a dozen strokes.
“Ahoy!”—fainter still.
Mr Button rested on his oars.
“Divil mend them—I b’lave that was the long-boat shoutin’.”
He took to his oars again and pulled vigorously.
“Paddy,” came Dick’s small voice, apparently from nowhere, “where are
we now?”
“Sure, we’re in a fog; where else would we be? Don’t you be affeared.”
“I ain’t affeared, but Em’s shivering.”
“Give her me coat,” said the oarsman, resting on his oars and taking it
off. “Wrap it round her; and when it’s round her we’ll all let one big
halloo together. There’s an ould shawl som’er in the boat, but I can’t
be after lookin’ for it now.”
He held out the coat and an almost invisible hand took it; at the same
moment a tremendous report shook the sea and sky.
“There she goes,” said Mr Button; “an’ me old fiddle an’ all. Don’t be
frightened, childer; it’s only a gun they’re firin’ for divarsion. Now
we’ll all halloo togither—are yiz ready?”
“Ay, ay,” said Dick, who was a picker-up of sea terms.
“Halloo!” yelled Pat.
“Halloo! Halloo!” piped Dick and Emmeline.
A faint reply came, but from where, it was difficult to say. The old
man rowed a few strokes and then paused on his oars. So still was the
surface of the sea that the chuckling of the water at the boat’s bow as
she drove forward under the impetus of the last powerful stroke could
be heard distinctly. It died out as she lost way, and silence closed
round them like a ring.
The light from above, a light that seemed to come through a vast
scuttle of deeply-muffed glass, faint though it was, almost to
extinction, still varied as the little boat floated through the strata
of the mist.
A great sea fog is not homogeneous—its density varies: it is
honeycombed with streets, it has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of
solid vapour, all shifting and changing place with the subtlety of
legerdemain. It has also this wizard peculiarity, that it grows with
the sinking of the sun and the approach of darkness.
The sun, could they have seen it, was now leaving the horizon.
They called again. Then they waited, but there was no response.
“There’s no use bawlin’ like bulls to chaps that’s deaf as adders,”
said the old sailor, shipping his oars; immediately upon which
declaration he gave another shout, with the same result as far as
eliciting a reply.
“Mr Button!” came Emmeline’s voice.
“What is it, honey?”
“I’m—m—’fraid.”
“You wait wan minit till I find the shawl—here it is, by the same
token!—an’ I’ll wrap you up in it.”
He crept cautiously aft to the stern-sheets and took Emmeline in his
arms.
“Don’t want the shawl,” said Emmeline; “I’m not so much afraid in your
coat.” The rough, tobacco-smelling old coat gave her courage somehow.
“Well, thin, keep it on. Dicky, are you cowld?”
“I’ve got into daddy’s great-coat; he left it behind him.”
“Well, thin, I’ll put the shawl round me own shoulders, for it’s cowld
I am. Are y’ hungry, childer?”
“No,” said Dick, “but I’m drefful—Hi—yow——”
“Slapy, is it? Well, down you get in the bottom of the boat, and here’s
the shawl for a pilla. I’ll be rowin’ again in a minit to keep meself
warm.”
He buttoned the top button of the coat.
“I’m a’right,” murmured Emmeline in a dreamy voice.
“Shut your eyes tight,” replied Mr Button, “or Billy Winker will be
dridgin’ sand in them.
“’Shoheen, shoheen, shoheen, shoheen,
Sho-hu-lo, sho-hu-lo.
Shoheen, shoheen, shoheen, shoheen,
Hush a by the babby O.’”
It was the tag of an old nursery folk-song they sing in the hovels of
the Achill coast fixed in his memory, along with the rain and the wind
and the smell of the burning turf, and the grunting of the pig and the
knickety-knock of a rocking cradle.
“She’s off,” murmured Mr Button to himself, as the form in his arms
relaxed. Then he laid her gently down beside Dick. He shifted forward,
moving like a crab. Then he put his hand to his pocket for his pipe and
tobacco and tinder box. They were in his coat pocket, but Emmeline was
in his coat. To search for them would be to awaken her.
The darkness of night was now adding itself to the blindness of the
fog. The oarsman could not see even the thole pins. He sat adrift mind
and body. He was, to use his own expression, “moithered.” Haunted by
the mist, tormented by “shapes.”
It was just in a fog like this that the Merrows could be heard
disporting in Dunbeg bay, and off the Achill coast. Sporting and
laughing, and hallooing through the mist, to lead unfortunate fishermen
astray.
Merrows are not altogether evil, but they have green hair and teeth,
fishes’ tails and fins for arms; and to hear them walloping in the
water around you like salmon, and you alone in a small boat, with the
dread of one coming floundering on board, is enough to turn a man’s
hair grey.
For a moment he thought of awakening the children to keep him company,
but he was ashamed. Then he took to the sculls again, and rowed “by the
feel of the water.” The creak of the oars was like a companion’s voice,
the exercise lulled his fears. Now and again, forgetful of the sleeping
children, he gave a halloo, and paused to listen. But no answer came.
Then he continued rowing, long, steady, laborious strokes, each taking
him further and further from the boats that he was never destined to
sight again.
CHAPTER VI
DAWN ON A WIDE, WIDE SEA
“Is it aslape I’ve been?” said Mr Button, suddenly awaking with a start.
He had shipped his oars just for a minute’s rest. He must have slept
for hours, for now, behold! a warm, gentle wind was blowing, the moon
was shining, and the fog was gone.
“Is it dhraming I’ve been?” continued the awakened one. “Where am I at
all, at all? O musha! sure, here I am. O wirra! wirra! I dreamt I’d
gone aslape on the main-hatch and the ship was blown up with powther,
and it’s all come true.”
“Mr Button!” came a small voice from the stern-sheets (Emmeline’s).
“What is it, honey?”
“Where are we now?”
“Sure, we’re afloat on the say, acushla; where else would we be?”
“Where’s uncle?”
“He’s beyant there in the long-boat—he’ll be afther us in a minit.”
“I want a drink.”
He filled a tin pannikin that was by the beaker of water, and gave her
a drink. Then he took his pipe and tobacco from his coat pocket.
She almost immediately fell asleep again beside Dick, who had not
stirred or moved; and the old sailor, standing up and steadying
himself, cast his eyes round the horizon. Not a sign of sail or boat
was there on all the moonlit sea.
From the low elevation of an open boat one has a very small horizon,
and in the vague world of moonlight somewhere round about it was
possible that the boats might be near enough to show up at daybreak.
But open boats a few miles apart may be separated by long leagues in
the course of a few hours. Nothing is more mysterious than the currents
of the sea.
The ocean is an ocean of rivers, some swiftly flowing, some slow, and a
league from where you are drifting at the rate of a mile an hour
another boat may be drifting two.
A slight warm breeze was frosting the water, blending moonshine and
star shimmer; the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest mainland was
perhaps a thousand miles away.
The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts, but not longer than
the thoughts of this old sailor man smoking his pipe under the stars.
Thoughts as long as the world is round. Blazing bar rooms in
Callao—harbours over whose oily surfaces the sampans slipped like
water-beetles—the lights of Macao—the docks of London. Scarcely ever
a sea picture, pure and simple, for why should an old seaman care to
think about the sea, where life is all into the fo’cs’le and out again,
where one voyage blends and jumbles with another, where after
forty-five years of reefing topsails you can’t well remember off which
ship it was Jack Rafferty fell overboard, or who it was killed who in
the fo’cs’le of what, though you can still see, as in a mirror darkly,
the fight, and the bloody face over which a man is holding a kerosene
lamp.
I doubt if Paddy Button could have told you the name of the first ship
he ever sailed in. If you had asked him, he would probably have
replied: “I disremimber; it was to the Baltic, and cruel cowld weather,
and I was say-sick—till I near brought me boots up; and it was ‘O for
ould Ireland!’ I was cryin’ all the time, an’ the captin dhrummin me
back with a rope’s end to the tune uv it—but the name of the hooker—I
disremimber—bad luck to her, whoever she was!”
So he sat smoking his pipe, whilst the candles of heaven burned above
him, and calling to mind roaring drunken scenes and palm-shadowed
harbours, and the men and the women he had known—such men and such
women! The derelicts of the earth and the ocean. Then he nodded off to
sleep again, and when he awoke the moon had gone.
Now in the eastern sky might have been seen a pale fan of light, vague
as the wing of an ephemera. It vanished and changed back to darkness.
Presently, and almost at a stroke, a pencil of fire ruled a line along
the eastern horizon, and the eastern sky became more beautiful than a
rose leaf plucked in May. The line of fire contracted into one
increasing spot, the rim of the rising sun.
As the light increased the sky above became of a blue impossible to
imagine unless seen, a wan blue, yet living and sparkling as if born of
the impalpable dust of sapphires. Then the whole sea flashed like the
harp of Apollo touched by the fingers of the god. The light was music
to the soul. It was day.
“Daddy!” suddenly cried Dick, sitting up in the sunlight and rubbing
his eyes with his open palms. “Where are we?”
“All right, Dicky, me son!” cried the old sailor, who had been standing
up casting his eyes round in a vain endeavour to sight the boats. “Your
daddy’s as safe as if he was in hivin; he’ll be wid us in a minit, an’
bring another ship along with him. So you’re awake, are you, Em’line?”
Emmeline, sitting up in the old pilot coat, nodded in reply without
speaking. Another child might have supplemented Dick’s enquiries as to
her uncle by questions of her own, but she did not.
Did she guess that there was some subterfuge in Mr Button’s answer, and
that things were different from what he was making them out to be? Who
can tell?
She was wearing an old cap of Dick’s, which Mrs Stannard in the hurry
and confusion had popped on her head. It was pushed to one side, and
she made a quaint enough little figure as she sat up in the early
morning brightness, dressed in the old salt-stained coat beside Dick,