The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
whose straw hat was somewhere in the bottom of the boat, and whose
auburn locks were blowing in the faint breeze.
“Hurroo!” cried Dick, looking around at the blue and sparkling water,
and banging with a stretcher on the bottom of the boat. “I’m goin’ to
be a sailor, aren’t I, Paddy? You’ll let me sail the boat, won’t you,
Paddy, an’ show me how to row?”
“Aisy does it,” said Paddy, taking hold of the child. “I haven’t a
sponge or towel, but I’ll just wash your face in salt wather and lave
you to dry in the sun.”
He filled the bailing tin with sea water.
“I don’t want to wash!” shouted Dick.
“Stick your face into the water in the tin,” commanded Paddy. “You
wouldn’t be going about the place with your face like a sut-bag, would
you?”
“Stick yours in!” commanded the other.
Mr Button did so, and made a hub-bubbling noise in the water; then he
lifted a wet and streaming face, and flung the contents of the bailing
tin overboard.
“Now you’ve lost your chance,” said this arch nursery-strategist, “all
the water’s gone.”
“There’s more in the sea.”
“There’s no more to wash with, not till to-morrow—the fishes don’t
allow it.”
“I want to wash,” grumbled Dick. “I want to stick my face in the tin,
same’s you did; ’sides, Em hasn’t washed.”
“_I_ don’t mind,” murmured Emmeline.
“Well, thin,” said Mr Button, as if making a sudden resolve, “I’ll ax
the sharks.” He leaned over the boat’s side, his face close to the
surface of the water. “Halloo there!” he shouted, and then bent his
head sideways to listen; the children also looked over the side, deeply
interested.
“Halloo there! Are y’aslape— Oh, there y’are! Here’s a spalpeen with a
dhirty face, an’s wishful to wash it; may I take a bailin’ tin of— Oh,
thank your ’arner, thank your ’arner—good day to you, and my respects.”
“What did the shark say, Mr Button?” asked Emmeline.
“He said: ‘Take a bar’l full, an’ welcome, Mister Button; an’ it’s
wishful I am I had a drop of the crathur to offer you this fine
marnin’.’ Thin he popped his head under his fin and went aslape agin;
leastwise, I heard him snore.”
Emmeline nearly always “Mr Buttoned” her friend; sometimes she called
him “Mr Paddy.” As for Dick, it was always “Paddy,” pure and simple.
Children have etiquettes of their own.
It must often strike landsmen and landswomen that the most terrible
experience when cast away at sea in an open boat is the total absence
of privacy. It seems an outrage on decency on the part of Providence to
herd people together so. But, whoever has gone through the experience
will bear me out that in great moments of life like this the human mind
enlarges, and things that would shock us ashore are as nothing out
there, face to face with eternity.
If so with grown-up people, how much more so with this old shell-back
and his two charges?
And indeed Mr Button was a person who called a spade a spade, had no
more conventions than a walrus, and looked after his two charges just
as a nursemaid might look after her charges, or a walrus after its
young.
There was a large bag of biscuits in the boat, and some tinned
stuff—mostly sardines.
I have known a sailor to open a box of sardines with a tin-tack. He was
in prison, the sardines had been smuggled into him, and he had no
can-opener. Only his genius and a tin-tack.
Paddy had a jack-knife, however, and in a marvellously short time a box
of sardines was opened, and placed on the stern-sheets beside some
biscuits.
These, with some water and Emmeline’s Tangerine orange, which she
produced and added to the common store, formed the feast, and they fell
to.
When they had finished, the remains were put carefully away, and
they proceeded to step the tiny mast.
The sailor, when the mast was in its place, stood for a moment resting
his hand on it, and gazing around him over the vast and voiceless blue.
The Pacific has three blues: the blue of morning, the blue of midday,
and the blue of evening. But the blue of morning is the happiest: the
happiest thing in colour—sparkling, vague, newborn—the blue of heaven
and youth.
“What are you looking for, Paddy?” asked Dick.
“Say-gulls,” replied the prevaricator; then to himself: “Not a sight or
a sound of them! Musha! musha! which way will I steer—north, south,
aist, or west? It’s all wan, for if I steer to the aist, they may be in
the west; and if I steer to the west, they may be in the aist; and I
can’t steer to the west, for I’d be steering right in the wind’s eye.
Aist it is; I’ll make a soldier’s wind of it, and thrust to chance.”
He set the sail and came aft with the sheet. Then he shifted the
rudder, lit a pipe, leaned luxuriously back and gave the bellying sail
to the gentle breeze.
It was part of his profession, part of his nature, that, steering,
maybe, straight towards death by starvation and thirst, he was as
unconcerned as if he were taking the children for a summer’s sail. His
imagination dealt little with the future; almost entirely influenced by
his immediate surroundings, it could conjure up no fears from the scene
now before it. The children were the same.
Never was there a happier starting, more joy in a little boat. During
breakfast the seaman had given his charges to understand that if Dick
did not meet his father and Emmeline her uncle in a “while or two,” it
was because he had gone on board a ship, and he’d be along presently.
The terror of their position was as deeply veiled from them as eternity
is veiled from you or me.
The Pacific was still bound by one of those glacial calms that can only
occur when the sea has been free from storms for a vast extent of its
surface, for a hurricane down by the Horn will send its swell and
disturbance beyond the Marquesas. De Bois in his table of amplitudes
points out that more than half the sea disturbances at any given space
are caused, not by the wind, but by storms at a great distance.
But the sleep of the Pacific is only apparent. This placid lake, over
which the dinghy was pursuing the running ripple, was heaving to an
imperceptible swell and breaking on the shores of the Low Archipelago,
and the Marquesas in foam and thunder.
Emmeline’s rag-doll was a shocking affair from a hygienic or artistic
standpoint. Its face was just inked on, it had no features, no arms;
yet not for all the dolls in the world would she have exchanged this
filthy and nearly formless thing. It was a fetish.
She sat nursing it on one side of the helmsman, whilst Dick, on the
other side, hung his nose over the water, on the look-out for fish.
“Why do you smoke, Mr Button?” asked Emmeline, who had been watching
her friend for some time in silence.
“To aise me thrubbles,” replied Paddy.
He was leaning back with one eye shut and the other fixed on the luff
of the sail. He was in his element: nothing to do but steer and smoke,
warmed by the sun and cooled by the breeze. A landsman would have been
half demented in his condition, many a sailor would have been taciturn
and surly, on the look-out for sails, and alternately damning his soul
and praying to his God. Paddy smoked.
“Whoop!” cried Dick. “Look, Paddy!”
An albicore a few cables lengths to port had taken a flying leap from
the flashing sea, turned a complete somersault and vanished.
“It’s an albicore takin’ a buck lep. Hundreds I’ve seen before this;
he’s bein’ chased.”
“What’s chasing him, Paddy?”
“What’s chasin’ him?—why, what else but the gibly-gobly-ums!”
Before Dick could enquire as to the personal appearance and habits of
the latter, a shoal of silver arrow heads passed the boat and flittered
into the water with a hissing sound.
“Thim’s flyin’ fish. What are you sayin’—fish can’t fly! Where’s the
eyes in your head?”
“Are the gibblyums chasing them too?” asked Emmeline fearfully.
“No; ’tis the Billy balloos that’s afther thim. Don’t be axin’ me any
more questions now, or I’ll be tellin’ you lies in a minit.”
Emmeline, it will be remembered, had brought a small parcel with her
done up in a little shawl; it was under the boat seat, and every now
and then she would stoop down to see if it were safe.
CHAPTER VII
STORY OF THE PIG AND THE BILLY-GOAT
Every hour or so Mr Button would shake his lethargy off, and rise and
look round for “sea-gulls,” but the prospect was sail-less as the
prehistoric sea, wingless, voiceless. When Dick would fret now and
then, the old sailor would always devise some means of amusing him. He
made him fishing-tackle out of a bent pin and some small twine that
happened to be in the boat, and told him to fish for “pinkeens”; and
Dick, with the pathetic faith of childhood, fished.
Then he told them things. He had spent a year at Deal long ago, where a
cousin of his was married to a boatman.
Mr Button had put in a year as a longshoreman at Deal, and he had got a
great lot to tell of his cousin and her husband, and more especially of
one, Hannah; Hannah was his cousin’s baby—a most marvellous child, who
was born with its “buck” teeth fully developed, and whose first
unnatural act on entering the world was to make a snap at the
“docther.” “Hung on to his fist like a bull-dog, and him bawlin’
‘Murther!’”
“Mrs James,” said Emmeline, referring to a Boston acquaintance, “had a
little baby, and it was pink.”
“Ay, ay,” said Paddy; “they’re mostly pink to start with, but they fade
whin they’re washed.”
“It’d no teeth,” said Emmeline, “for I put my finger in to see.”
“The doctor brought it in a bag,” put in Dick, who was still steadily
fishing—“dug it out of a cabbage patch; an’ I got a trow’l and dug all
our cabbage patch up, but there weren’t any babies—but there were no
end of worms.”
“I wish I had a baby,” said Emmeline, “and _I_ wouldn’t send it back to
the cabbage patch.”
“The doctor,” explained Dick, “took it back and planted it again; and
Mrs James cried when I asked her, and daddy said it was put back to
grow and turn into an angel.”
“Angels have wings,” said Emmeline dreamily.
“And,” pursued Dick, “I told cook, and she said to Jane, daddy
was always stuffing children up with—something or ’nother. And I asked
daddy to let me see him stuffing up a child—and daddy said cook’d have
to go away for saying that, and she went away next day.”
“She had three big trunks and a box for her bonnet,” said Emmeline,
with a far-away look as she recalled the incident.
“And the cabman asked her hadn’t she any more trunks to put on his cab,
and hadn’t she forgot the parrot cage,” said Dick.
“I wish _I_ had a parrot in a cage,” murmured Emmeline, moving slightly
so as to get more in the shadow of the sail.
“And what in the world would you be doin’ with a par’t in a cage?”
asked Mr Button.
“I’d let it out,” replied Emmeline.
“Spakin’ about lettin’ par’ts out of cages, I remimber me grandfather
had an ould pig,” said Paddy (they were all talking seriously together
like equals). “I was a spalpeen no bigger than the height of me knee,
and I’d go to the sty door, and he’d come to the door, and grunt an’
blow wid his nose undher it; an’ I’d grunt back to vex him, an’ hammer
wid me fist on it, an’ shout ‘Halloo there! halloo there!’ and ‘Halloo
to you!’ he’d say, spakin’ the pigs’ language. ‘Let me out,’ he’d say,
‘and I’ll give yiz a silver shilling.’
“‘Pass it under the door,’ I’d answer him. Thin he’d stick the snout of
him undher the door an’ I’d hit it a clip with a stick, and he’d yell
murther Irish. An’ me mother’d come out an’ baste me, an’ well I
desarved it.
“Well, wan day I opened the sty door, an’ out he boulted and away and
beyant, over hill and hollo he goes till he gets to the edge of the
cliff overlookin’ the say, and there he meets a billy-goat, and he and
the billy-goat has a division of opinion.
“‘Away wid yiz!’ says the billy-goat.