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Title: The Blue Lagoon: A Romance

Author: H. De Vere Stacpoole

Release date: January 1, 1996 [eBook #393]
Most recently updated: September 5, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/393

Credits: Produced by Edward A. Malone. Corrections by Roger Frank.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLUE
LAGOON: A ROMANCE ***

The Blue Lagoon: A Romance

by H. de Vere Stacpoole

CONTENTS

BOOK I

PART I

I. WHERE THE SLUSH LAMP BURNS
II. UNDER THE STARS
III. THE SHADOW AND THE FIRE
IV. AND LIKE A DREAM DISSOLVED
V. VOICES HEARD IN THE MIST
VI. DAWN ON A WIDE, WIDE SEA
VII. STORY OF THE PIG AND THE BILLY-GOAT
VIII. “S-H-E-N-A-N-D-O-A-H”
IX. SHADOWS IN THE MOONLIGHT
X. THE TRAGEDY OF THE BOATS

PART II

XI. THE ISLAND
XII. THE LAKE OF AZURE
XIII. DEATH VEILED WITH LICHEN
XIV. ECHOES OF FAIRY-LAND
XV. FAIR PICTURES IN THE BLUE

PART III

XVI. THE POETRY OF LEARNING
XVII. THE DEVIL’S CASK
XVIII. THE RAT HUNT
XIX. STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM
XX. THE DREAMER ON THE REEF
XXI. THE GARLAND OF FLOWERS
XXII. ALONE
XXIII. THEY MOVE AWAY

BOOK II

PART I

I. UNDER THE ARTU TREE
II. HALF CHILD-HALF SAVAGE
III. THE DEMON OF THE REEF
IV. WHAT BEAUTY CONCEALED
V. THE SOUND OF A DRUM
VI. SAILS UPON THE SEA
VII. THE SCHOONER
VIII. LOVE STEPS IN
IX. THE SLEEP OF PARADISE

PART II
X. AN ISLAND HONEYMOON
XI. THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE
XII. THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE
(CONTINUED)
XIII. THE NEWCOMER
XIV. HANNAH
XV. THE LAGOON OF FIRE
XVI. THE CYCLONE
XVII. THE STRICKEN WOODS
XVIII. A FALLEN IDOL
XIX. THE EXPEDITION
XX. THE KEEPER OF THE LAGOON
XXI. THE HAND OF THE SEA
XXII. TOGETHER

BOOK III

I. MAD LESTRANGE
II. THE SECRET OF THE AZURE
III. CAPTAIN FOUNTAIN
IV. DUE SOUTH

THE BLUE LAGOON

BOOK I

PART I
CHAPTER I

WHERE THE SLUSH LAMP BURNS

Mr Button was seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He
was playing the “Shan van vaught,” and accompanying the tune,
punctuating it, with blows of his left heel on the fo’cs’le deck.
“O the Frinch are in the bay,
Says the Shan van vaught.”

He was dressed in dungaree trousers, a striped shirt, and a jacket baize—
green in parts from the influence of sun and salt. A typical old shell-back,
round-shouldered, hooked of finger; a figure with strong hints of a crab
about it.

His face was like a moon, seen red through tropical mists; and as he
played it wore an expression of strained attention as though the fiddle were
telling him tales much more marvellous than the old bald statement about
Bantry Bay.

“Left-handed Pat,” was his fo’cs’le name; not because he was left-
handed, but simply because everything he did he did wrong—or nearly so.
Reefing or furling, or handling a slush tub—if a mistake was to be made, he
made it.

He was a Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and
Connaught these forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element
from his blood, nor the belief in fairies from his soul. The Celtic nature is a
fast dye, and Mr Button’s nature was such that though he had been
shanghaied by Larry Marr in ’Frisco, though he had got drunk in most ports
of the world, though he had sailed with Yankee captains and been man-

handled by Yankee mates, he still carried his fairies about with him—they,
and a very large stock of original innocence.

Nearly over the musician’s head swung a hammock from which hung a
leg; other hammocks hanging in the semi-gloom called up suggestions of
lemurs and arboreal bats. The swinging kerosene lamp cast its light
forward, past the heel of the bowsprit to the knightheads, lighting here a
naked foot hanging over the side of a bunk, here a face from which
protruded a pipe, here a breast covered with dark mossy hair, here an arm
tattooed.

It was in the days before double topsail yards had reduced ships’ crews,
and the fo’cs’le of the Northumberland had a full company: a crowd of
packet rats such as often is to be found on a Cape Horner “Dutchmen”
Americans—men who were farm labourers and tending pigs in Ohio three
months back, old seasoned sailors like Paddy Button—a mixture of the best
and the worst of the earth, such as you find nowhere else in so small a space
as in a ship’s fo’cs’le.

The Northumberland had experienced a terrible rounding of the Horn.
Bound from New Orleans to ’Frisco she had spent thirty days battling with
head-winds and storms—down there, where the seas are so vast that three
waves may cover with their amplitude more than a mile of sea space; thirty
days she had passed off Cape Stiff, and just now, at the moment of this
story, she was locked in a calm south of the line.

Mr Button finished his tune with a sweep of the bow, and drew his right
coat sleeve across his forehead. Then he took out a sooty pipe, filled it with
tobacco, and lit it.

“Pawthrick,” drawled a voice from the hammock above, from which
depended the leg, “what was that yarn you wiz beginnin’ to spin ter night
’bout a lip me dawn?”

“A which me dawn?” asked Mr Button, cocking his eye up at the bottom
of the hammock while he held the match to his pipe.

“It vas about a green thing,” came a sleepy Dutch voice from a bunk.

“Oh, a Leprachaun you mane. Sure, me mother’s sister had one down in
Connaught.”

“Vat vas it like?” asked the dreamy Dutch voice—a voice seemingly
possessed by the calm that had made the sea like a mirror for the last three
days, reducing the whole ship’s company meanwhile to the level of wasters.

“Like? Sure, it was like a Leprachaun; and what else would it be like?”

“What like vas that?” persisted the voice.

“It was like a little man no bigger than a big forked raddish, an’ as green
as a cabbidge. Me a’nt had one in her house down in Connaught in the ould
days. O musha! musha! the ould days, the ould days! Now, you may b’lave
me or b’lave me not, but you could have put him in your pocket, and the
grass-green head of him wouldn’t more than’v stuck out. She kept him in a
cupboard, and out of the cupboard he’d pop if it was a crack open, an’ into
the milk pans he’d be, or under the beds, or pullin’ the stool from under
you, or at some other divarsion. He’d chase the pig—the crathur!—till it’d
be all ribs like an ould umbrilla with the fright, an’ as thin as a greyhound
with the runnin’ by the marnin; he’d addle the eggs so the cocks an’ hens
wouldn’t know what they wis afther wid the chickens comin’ out wid two
heads on them, an’ twinty-seven legs fore and aft. And you’d start to chase
him, an’ then it’d be mainsail haul, and away he’d go, you behint him, till
you’d landed tail over snout in a ditch, an’ he’d be back in the cupboard.”

“He was a Troll,” murmured the Dutch voice.

“I’m tellin’ you he was a Leprachaun, and there’s no knowin’ the
divilments he’d be up to. He’d pull the cabbidge, maybe, out of the pot
boilin’ on the fire forenint your eyes, and baste you in the face with it; and
thin, maybe, you’d hold out your fist to him, and he’d put a goulden soverin
in it.”

“Wisht he was here!” murmured a voice from a bunk near the
knightheads.

“Pawthrick,” drawled the voice from the hammock above, “what’d you
do first if you found y’self with twenty pound in your pocket?”

“What’s the use of askin’ me?” replied Mr Button. “What’s the use of
twenty pound to a sayman at say, where the grog’s all wather an’ the beef’s
all horse? Gimme it ashore, an’ you’d see what I’d do wid it!”

“I guess the nearest grog-shop keeper wouldn’t see you comin’ for dust,”
said a voice from Ohio.

“He would not,” said Mr Button; “nor you afther me. Be damned to the
grog and thim that sells it!”

“It’s all darned easy to talk,” said Ohio. “You curse the grog at sea when
you can’t get it; set you ashore, and you’re bung full.”

“I likes me dhrunk,” said Mr Button, “I’m free to admit; an’ I’m the divil
when it’s in me, and it’ll be the end of me yet, or me ould mother was a liar.
‘Pat,’ she says, first time I come home from say rowlin’, ‘storms you may
escape, an’ wimmen you may escape, but the potheen ’ill have you.’ Forty
year ago—forty year ago!”

“Well,” said Ohio, “it hasn’t had you yet.”

“No,” replied Mr Button, “but it will.”

CHAPTER II

UNDER THE STARS

It was a wonderful night up on deck, filled with all the majesty and
beauty of starlight and a tropic calm.

The Pacific slept; a vast, vague swell flowing from far away down south
under the night, lifted the Northumberland on its undulations to the rattling
sound of the reef points and the occasional creak of the rudder; whilst
overhead, near the fiery arch of the Milky Way, hung the Southern Cross
like a broken kite.

Stars in the sky, stars in the sea, stars by the million and the million; so
many lamps ablaze that the firmament filled the mind with the idea of a vast
and populous city—yet from all that living and flashing splendour not a
sound.

Down in the cabin—or saloon, as it was called by courtesy—were seated
the three passengers of the ship; one reading at the table, two playing on the
floor.

The man at the table, Arthur Lestrange, was seated with his large, deep-
sunken eyes fixed on a book. He was most evidently in consumption—very
near, indeed, to reaping the result of that last and most desperate remedy, a
long sea voyage.

Emmeline Lestrange, his little niece—eight years of age, a mysterious
mite, small for her age, with thoughts of her own, wide-pupilled eyes that
seemed the doors for visions, and a face that seemed just to have peeped
into this world for a moment ere it was as suddenly withdrawn—sat in a
corner nursing something in her arms, and rocking herself to the tune of her
own thoughts.

Dick, Lestrange’s little son, eight and a bit, was somewhere under the
table. They were Bostonians, bound for San Francisco, or rather for the sun
and splendour of Los Angeles, where Lestrange had bought a small estate,
hoping there to enjoy the life whose lease would be renewed by the long sea
voyage.

As he sat reading, the cabin door opened, and appeared an angular
female form. This was Mrs Stannard, the stewardess, and Mrs Stannard
meant bedtime.

“Dicky,” said Mr Lestrange, closing his book, and raising the table-cloth
a few inches, “bedtime.”

“Oh, not yet, daddy!” came a sleep-freighted voice from under the table;
“I ain’t ready. I dunno want to go to bed, I— Hi yow!”

Mrs Stannard, who knew her work, had stooped under the table, seized
him by the foot, and hauled him out kicking and fighting and blubbering all
at the same time.

As for Emmeline, she having glanced up and recognised the inevitable,
rose to her feet, and, holding the hideous rag-doll she had been nursing,
head down and dangling in one hand, she stood waiting till Dicky, after a
few last perfunctory bellows, suddenly dried his eyes and held up a tear-wet
face for his father to kiss. Then she presented her brow solemnly to her
uncle, received a kiss and vanished, led by the hand into a cabin on the port
side of the saloon.

Mr Lestrange returned to his book, but he had not read for long when the
cabin door was opened, and Emmeline, in her nightdress, reappeared,
holding a brown paper parcel in her hand, a parcel of about the same size as
the book you are reading.

“My box,” said she; and as she spoke, holding it up as if to prove its
safety, the little plain face altered to the face of an angel.

She had smiled.

When Emmeline Lestrange smiled it was absolutely as if the light of
Paradise had suddenly flashed upon her face: the happiest form of childish
beauty suddenly appeared before your eyes, dazzled them—and was gone.

Then she vanished with her box, and Mr Lestrange resumed his book.

This box of Emmeline’s, I may say in parenthesis, had given more
trouble aboard ship than all of the rest of the passengers’ luggage put
together.

It had been presented to her on her departure from Boston by a lady
friend, and what it contained was a dark secret to all on board, save its
owner and her uncle; she was a woman, or, at all events, the beginning of a
woman, yet she kept this secret to herself—a fact which you will please
note.

The trouble of the thing was that it was frequently being lost. Suspecting
herself, maybe, as an unpractical dreamer in a world filled with robbers, she
would cart it about with her for safety, sit down behind a coil of rope and
fall into a fit of abstraction: be recalled to life by the evolutions of the crew
reefing or furling or what not, rise to superintend the operations—and then
suddenly find she had lost her box.

Then she would absolutely haunt the ship. Wide-eyed and distressed of
face she would wander hither and thither, peeping into the galley, peeping
down the forescuttle, never uttering a word or wail, searching like an
uneasy ghost, but dumb.

She seemed ashamed to tell of her loss, ashamed to let any one know of
it; but every one knew of it directly they saw her, to use Mr Button’s
expression, “on the wandher,” and every one hunted for it.

Strangely enough it was Paddy Button who usually found it. He who was
always doing the wrong thing in the eyes of men, generally did the right
thing in the eyes of children. Children, in fact, when they could get at Mr
Button, went for him con amore. He was as attractive to them as a Punch
and Judy show or a German band—almost.

Mr Lestrange after a while closed the book he was reading, looked
around him and sighed.

The cabin of the Northumberland was a cheerful enough place, pierced
by the polished shaft of the mizzen mast, carpeted with an Axminster
carpet, and garnished with mirrors let into the white pine panelling.
Lestrange was staring at the reflection of his own face in one of these
mirrors fixed just opposite to where he sat.

His emaciation was terrible, and it was just perhaps at this moment that
he first recognised the fact that he must not only die, but die soon.

He turned from the mirror and sat for a while with his chin resting upon
his hand, and his eyes fixed on an ink spot upon the table-cloth; then he
arose, and crossing the cabin climbed laboriously up the companion-way to
the deck.

As he leaned against the bulwark rail to recover his breath, the splendour
and beauty of the Southern night struck him to the heart with a cruel pang.
He took his seat on a deck chair and gazed up at the Milky Way, that great
triumphal arch built of suns that the dawn would sweep away like a dream.

In the Milky Way, near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular
abyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void and
bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative mind
with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and as dismal as death, but the
smallest telescope reveals it beautiful and populous with stars.

Lestrange’s eyes travelled from this mystery to the burning cross, and
the nameless and numberless stars reaching to the sea-line, where they
paled and vanished in the light of the rising moon. Then he became aware
of a figure promenading the quarter-deck. It was the “Old Man.”

A sea captain is always the “old man,” be his age what it may. Captain
Le Farges’ age might have been forty-five. He was a sailor of the Jean Bart
type, of French descent, but a naturalised American.

“I don’t know where the wind’s gone,” said the captain as he drew near
the man in the deck chair. “I guess it’s blown a hole in the firmament, and
escaped somewheres to the back of beyond.”

“It’s been a long voyage,” said Lestrange; “and I’m thinking, Captain, it
will be a very long voyage for me. My port’s not ’Frisco; I feel it.”

“Don’t you be thinking that sort of thing,” said the other, taking his seat
in a chair close by. “There’s no manner of use forecastin’ the weather a
month ahead. Now we’re in warm latitoods, your glass will rise steady, and

you’ll be as right and spry as any one of us, before we fetch the Golden
Gates.”

“I’m thinking about the children,” said Lestrange, seeming not to hear
the captain’s words. “Should anything happen to me before we reach port, I
should like you to do something for me. It’s only this: dispose of my body
without—without the children knowing. It has been in my mind to ask you
this for some days. Captain, those children know nothing of death.”

Le Farge moved uneasily in his chair.

“Little Emmeline’s mother died when she was two. Her father—my
brother—died before she was born. Dicky never knew a mother; she died
giving him birth. My God, Captain, death has laid a heavy hand on my
family; can you wonder that I have hid his very name from those two
creatures that I love!”

“Ay, ay,” said Le Farge, “it’s sad! it’s sad!”

“When I was quite a child,” went on Lestrange, “a child no older than
Dicky, my nurse used to terrify me with tales about dead people. I was told
I’d go to hell when I died if I wasn’t a good child. I cannot tell you how
much that has poisoned my life, for the thoughts we think in childhood,
Captain, are the fathers of the thoughts we think when we are grown up.
And can a diseased father—have healthy children?”

“I guess not.”

“So I just said, when these two tiny creatures came into my care, that I
would do all in my power to protect them from the terrors of life—or rather,
I should say, from the terror of death. I don’t know whether I have done
right, but I have done it for the best. They had a cat, and one day Dicky
came in to me and said: ‘Father, pussy’s in the garden asleep, and I can’t
wake her.’ So I just took him out for a walk; there was a circus in the town,
and I took him to it. It so filled his mind that he quite forgot the cat. Next
day he asked for her. I did not tell him she was buried in the garden, I just
said she must have run away. In a week he had forgotten all about her—
children soon forget.”

“Ay, that’s true,” said the sea captain. “But ’pears to me they must learn
some time they’ve got to die.”

“Should I pay the penalty before we reach land, and be cast into that
great, vast sea, I would not wish the children’s dreams to be haunted by the
thought: just tell them I’ve gone on board another ship. You will take them
back to Boston; I have here, in a letter, the name of a lady who will care for
them. Dicky will be well off, as far as worldly goods are concerned, and so
will Emmeline. Just tell them I’ve gone on board another ship—children
soon forget.”

“I’ll do what you ask,” said the seaman.

The moon was over the horizon now, and the Northumberland lay adrift
in a river of silver. Every spar was distinct, every reef point on the great
sails, and the decks lay like spaces of frost cut by shadows black as ebony.

As the two men sat without speaking, thinking their own thoughts, a
little white figure emerged from the saloon hatch. It was Emmeline. She
was a professed sleepwalker—a past mistress of the art.

Scarcely had she stepped into dreamland than she had lost her precious
box, and now she was hunting for it on the decks of the Northumberland.

Mr Lestrange put his finger to his lips, took off his shoes and silently
followed her. She searched behind a coil of rope, she tried to open the
galley door; hither and thither she wandered, wide-eyed and troubled of
face, till at last, in the shadow of the hencoop, she found her visionary
treasure. Then back she came, holding up her little nightdress with one
hand, so as not to trip, and vanished down the saloon companion very
hurriedly, as if anxious to get back to bed, her uncle close behind, with one
hand outstretched so as to catch her in case she stumbled.

CHAPTER III

THE SHADOW AND THE FIRE

It was the fourth day of the long calm. An awning had been rigged up on
the poop for the passengers, and under it sat Lestrange, trying to read, and
the children trying to play. The heat and monotony had reduced even Dicky
to just a surly mass, languid in movement as a grub. As for Emmeline, she
seemed dazed. The rag-doll lay a yard away from her on the poop deck
unnursed; even the wretched box and its whereabouts she seemed to have
quite forgotten.

“Daddy!” suddenly cried Dick, who had clambered up, and was looking
over the after-rail.

“What?”

“Fish!”

Lestrange rose to his feet, came aft and looked over the rail.

Down in the vague green of the water something moved, something pale
and long—a ghastly form. It vanished; and yet another came, neared the
surface, and displayed itself more fully. Lestrange saw its eyes, he saw the
dark fin, and the whole hideous length of the creature; a shudder ran
through him as he clasped Dicky.

“Ain’t he fine?” said the child. “I guess, daddy, I’d pull him aboard if I
had a hook. Why haven’t I a hook, daddy?—why haven’t I a hook, daddy?
— Ow, you’re squeezin’ me!”

Something plucked at Lestrange’s coat: it was Emmeline—she also
wanted to look. He lifted her up in his arms; her little pale face peeped over
the rail, but there was nothing to see: the forms of terror had vanished,
leaving the green depths untroubled and unstained.

“What’s they called, daddy?” persisted Dick, as his father took him
down from the rail, and led him back to the chair.

“Sharks,” said Lestrange, whose face was covered with perspiration.

He picked up the book he had been reading—it was a volume of
Tennyson—and he sat with it on his knees staring at the white sunlit main-
deck barred with the white shadows of the standing rigging.

The sea had disclosed to him a vision. Poetry, Philosophy, Beauty, Art,
the love and joy of life—was it possible that these should exist in the same
world as those?

He glanced at the book upon his knees, and contrasted the beautiful
things in it which he remembered with the terrible things he had just seen,
the things that were waiting for their food under the keel of the ship.

It was three bells—half-past three in the afternoon—and the ship’s bell
had just rung out. The stewardess appeared to take the children below; and
as they vanished down the saloon companion-way Captain Le Farge came
aft, on to the poop, and stood for a moment looking over the sea on the port
side, where a bank of fog had suddenly appeared like the spectre of a
country.

“The sun has dimmed a bit,” said he; “I can a’most look at it. Glass
steady enough—there’s a fog coming up—ever seen a Pacific fog?”

“No, never.”

“Well, you won’t want to see another,” replied the mariner, shading his
eyes and fixing them upon the sea-line. The sea-line away to starboard had
lost somewhat its distinctness, and over the day an almost imperceptible
shade had crept.

The captain suddenly turned from his contemplation of the sea and sky,
raised his head and sniffed.

“Something is burning somewhere—smell it? Seems to me like an old
mat or summat. It’s that swab of a steward, maybe; if he isn’t breaking
glass, he’s upsetting lamps and burning holes in the carpet. Bless my soul,
I’d sooner have a dozen Mary Anns an’ their dustpans round the place than
one tomfool steward like Jenkins.” He went to the saloon hatch. “Below
there!”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“What are you burning?”

“I an’t burnin’ northen, sir.”

“Tell you, I smell it!”

“There’s northen burnin’ here, sir.”

“Neither is there, it’s all on deck. Something in the galley, maybe—rags,
most likely, they’ve thrown on the fire.”

“Captain!” said Lestrange.

“Ay, ay.”

“Come here, please.”

Le Farge climbed on to the poop.

“I don’t know whether it’s my weakness that’s affecting my eyes, but
there seems to me something strange about the main-mast.”

The main-mast near where it entered the deck, and for some distance up,
seemed in motion—a corkscrew movement most strange to watch from the
shelter of the awning.

This apparent movement was caused by a spiral haze of smoke so vague
that one could only tell of its existence from the mirage-like tremor of the
mast round which it curled.

“My God!” cried Le Farge, as he sprang from the poop and rushed
forward.

Lestrange followed him slowly, stopping every moment to clutch the
bulwark rail and pant for breath. He heard the shrill bird-like notes of the
bosun’s pipe. He saw the hands emerging from the forecastle, like bees out
of a hive; he watched them surrounding the main-hatch. He watched the

tarpaulin and locking-bars removed. He saw the hatch opened, and a burst
of smoke—black, villainous smoke—ascend to the sky, solid as a plume in
the windless air.

Lestrange was a man of a highly nervous temperament, and it is just this
sort of man who keeps his head in an emergency, whilst your level-headed,
phlegmatic individual loses his balance. His first thought was of the
children, his second of the boats.

In the battering off Cape Horn the Northumberland lost several of her
boats. There were left the long-boat, a quarter-boat, and the dinghy. He
heard Le Farge’s voice ordering the hatch to be closed and the pumps
manned, so as to flood the hold; and, knowing that he could do nothing on
deck, he made as swiftly as he could for the saloon companion-way.

Mrs Stannard was just coming out of the children’s cabin.

“Are the children lying down, Mrs Stannard?” asked Lestrange, almost
breathless from the excitement and exertion of the last few minutes.

The woman glanced at him with frightened eyes. He looked like the very
herald of disaster.

“For if they are, and you have undressed them, then you must put their
clothes on again. The ship is on fire, Mrs Stannard.”

“Good God, sir!”

“Listen!” said Lestrange.

From a distance, thin, and dreary as the crying of sea-gulls on a desolate
beach, came the clanking of the pumps.

CHAPTER IV

AND LIKE A DREAM DISSOLVED

Before the woman had time to speak a thunderous step was heard on the
companion stairs, and Le Farge broke into the saloon. The man’s face was
injected with blood, his eyes were fixed and glassy like the eyes of a
drunkard, and the veins stood on his temples like twisted cords.

“Get those children ready!” he shouted, as he rushed into his own cabin.
“Get you all ready—boats are being swung out and victualled. H--l! where
are those papers?”

They heard him furiously searching and collecting things in his cabin—
the ship’s papers, accounts, things the master mariner clings to as he clings
to his life; and as he searched, and found, and packed, he kept bellowing
orders for the children to be got on deck. Half mad he seemed, and half mad
he was with the knowledge of the terrible thing that was stowed amidst the
cargo.

Up on deck the crew, under the direction of the first mate, were working
in an orderly manner, and with a will, utterly unconscious of there being
anything beneath their feet but an ordinary cargo on fire. The covers had
been stripped from the boats, kegs of water and bags of biscuit placed in
them. The dinghy, smallest of the boats and most easily got away, was
hanging at the port quarter-boat davits flush with the bulwarks; and Paddy
Button was in the act of stowing a keg of water in her, when Le Farge broke
on to the deck, followed by the stewardess carrying Emmeline, and Mr
Lestrange leading Dick. The dinghy was rather a larger boat than the
ordinary ships’ dinghy, and possessed a small mast and long sail. Two
sailors stood ready to man the falls, and Paddy Button was just turning to
trundle forward again when the captain seized him.

“Into the dinghy with you,” he cried, “and row these children and the
passenger out a mile from the ship—two miles—three miles—make an
offing.”

“Sure, Captain dear, I’ve left me fiddle in the——”

Le Farge dropped the bundle of things he was holding under his left arm,
seized the old sailor and rushed him against the bulwarks, as if he meant to
fling him into the sea through the bulwarks.

Next moment Mr Button was in the boat. Emmeline was handed to him,
pale of face and wide-eyed, and clasping something wrapped in a little
shawl; then Dick, and then Mr Lestrange was helped over.

“No room for more!” cried Le Farge. “Your place will be in the long-
boat, Mrs Stannard, if we have to leave the ship. Lower away, lower away!”

The boat sank towards the smooth blue sea, kissed it and was afloat.

Now Mr Button, before joining the ship at Boston, had spent a good
while lingering by the quay, having no money wherewith to enjoy himself
in a tavern. He had seen something of the lading of the Northumberland,
and heard more from a stevedore. No sooner had he cast off the falls and
seized the oars, than his knowledge awoke in his mind, living and lurid. He
gave a whoop that brought the two sailors leaning over the side.

“Bullies!”

“Ay, ay!”

“Run for your lives—I’ve just rimimbered—there’s two bar’ls of blastin’
powther in the hould!”

Then he bent to his oars, as no man ever bent before.

Lestrange, sitting in the stern-sheets clasping Emmeline and Dick, saw
nothing for a moment after hearing these words. The children, who knew
nothing of blasting powder or its effects, though half frightened by all the
bustle and excitement, were still amused and pleased at finding themselves
in the little boat so close to the blue pretty sea.

Dick put his finger over the side, so that it made a ripple in the water (the
most delightful experience of childhood). Emmeline, with one hand clasped
in her uncle’s, watched Mr Button with a grave sort of half pleasure.

He certainly was a sight worth watching. His soul was filled with
tragedy and terror. His Celtic imagination heard the ship blowing up, saw
himself and the little dinghy blown to pieces—nay, saw himself in hell,
being toasted by “divils.”

But tragedy and terror could find no room for expression on his fortunate
or unfortunate face. He puffed and he blew, bulging his cheeks out at the
sky as he tugged at the oars, making a hundred and one grimaces—all the
outcome of agony of mind, but none expressing it. Behind lay the ship, a
picture not without its lighter side. The long-boat and the quarter-boat,
lowered with a rush and seaborne by the mercy of Providence, were floating
by the side of the Northumberland.

From the ship men were casting themselves overboard like water-rats,
swimming in the water like ducks, scrambling on board the boats anyhow.

From the half-opened main-hatch the black smoke, mixed now with
sparks, rose steadily and swiftly and spitefully, as if driven through the half-
closed teeth of a dragon.

A mile away beyond the Northumberland stood the fog bank. It looked
solid, like a vast country that had suddenly and strangely built itself on the
sea—a country where no birds sang and no trees grew. A country with
white, precipitous cliffs, solid to look at as the cliffs of Dover.

“I’m spint!” suddenly gasped the oarsman, resting the oar handles under
the crook of his knees, and bending down as if he was preparing to butt at
the passengers in the stern-sheets. “Blow up or blow down, I’m spint—
don’t ax me, I’m spint!”

Mr Lestrange, white as a ghost, but recovered somewhat from his first
horror, gave the Spent One time to recover himself and turned to look at the
ship. She seemed a great distance off, and the boats, well away from her,
were making at a furious pace towards the dinghy. Dick was still playing
with the water, but Emmeline’s eyes were entirely occupied with Paddy
Button. New things were always of vast interest to her contemplative mind,
and these evolutions of her old friend were eminently new.

She had seen him swilling the decks, she had seen him dancing a jig, she
had seen him going round the main deck on all fours with Dick on his back,
but she had never seen him going on like this before.

She perceived now that he was exhausted, and in trouble about
something, and, putting her hand in the pocket of her dress, she searched for
something that she knew was there. She produced a Tangerine orange, and
leaning forward she touched the Spent One’s head with it.

Mr Button raised his head, stared vacantly for a second, saw the
proffered orange, and at the sight of it the thought of “the childer” and their
innocence, himself and the blasting powder, cleared his dazzled wits, and he
took to the sculls again.

“Daddy,” said Dick, who had been looking astern, “there’s clouds near
the ship.”

In an incredibly short space of time the solid cliffs of fog had broken.
The faint wind that had banked it had pierced it, and was now making
pictures and devices of it, most wonderful and weird to see. Horsemen of
the mist rode on the water, and were dissolved; billows rolled on the sea,
yet were not of the sea; blankets and spirals of vapour ascended to high
heaven. And all with a terrible languor of movement. Vast and lazy and
sinister, yet steadfast of purpose as Fate or Death, the fog advanced, taking
the world for its own.

Against this grey and indescribably sombre background stood the
smouldering ship with the breeze already shivering in her sails, and the
smoke from her main-hatch blowing and beckoning as if to the retreating
boats.

“Why’s the ship smoking like that?” asked Dick. “And look at those
boats coming—when are we going back, daddy?”

“Uncle,” said Emmeline, putting her hand in his, as she gazed towards
the ship and beyond it, “I’m ’fraid.”

“What frightens you, Emmy?” he asked, drawing her to him.

“Shapes,” replied Emmeline, nestling up to his side.

“Oh, Glory be to God!” gasped the old sailor, suddenly resting on his
oars. “Will yiz look at the fog that’s comin’—”

“I think we had better wait here for the boats,” said Mr Lestrange; “we
are far enough now to be safe if—anything happens.”

“Ay, ay,” replied the oarsman, whose wits had returned. “Blow up or
blow down, she won’t hit us from here.”

“Daddy,” said Dick, “when are we going back? I want my tea.”

“We aren’t going back, my child,” replied his father. “The ship’s on fire;
we are waiting for another ship.”

“Where’s the other ship?” asked the child, looking round at the horizon
that was clear.

“We can’t see it yet,” replied the unhappy man, “but it will come.”

The long-boat and the quarter-boat were slowly approaching. They
looked like beetles crawling over the water, and after them across the
glittering surface came a dullness that took the sparkle from the sea—a
dullness that swept and spread like an eclipse shadow.

Now the wind struck the dinghy. It was like a wind from fairyland,
almost imperceptible, chill, and dimming the sun. A wind from Lilliput. As
it struck the dinghy, the fog took the distant ship.

It was a most extraordinary sight, for in less than thirty seconds the ship
of wood became a ship of gauze, a tracery—flickered, and was gone forever
from the sight of man.

CHAPTER V

VOICES HEARD IN THE MIST

The sun became fainter still, and vanished. Though the air round the
dinghy seemed quite clear, the on-coming boats were hazy and dim, and
that part of the horizon that had been fairly clear was now blotted out.

The long-boat was leading by a good way. When she was within hailing
distance the captain’s voice came.

“Dinghy ahoy!”

“Ahoy!”

“Fetch alongside here!”

The long-boat ceased rowing to wait for the quarter-boat that was slowly
creeping up. She was a heavy boat to pull at all times, and now she was
overloaded.

The wrath of Captain Le Farge with Paddy Button for the way he had
stampeded the crew was profound, but he had not time to give vent to it.

“Here, get aboard us, Mr Lestrange!” said he, when the dinghy was
alongside; “we have room for one. Mrs Stannard is in the quarter-boat, 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, 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.

“‘Away wid yourself!’ says he.

“‘Whose you talkin’ to?’ says t’other.

“‘Yourself,’ says him.

“‘Who stole the eggs?’ says the billy-goat.

“‘Ax your ould grandmother!’ says the pig.

“‘Ax me ould which mother?’ says the billy-goat.

“‘Oh, ax me——’ And before he could complete the sintence ram, blam,
the ould billy-goat butts him in the chist, and away goes the both of thim
whirtlin’ into the say below.

“Thin me ould grandfather comes out, and collars me by the scruff, and
‘Into the sty with you!’ says he; and into the sty I wint, and there they kep’
me for a fortni’t on bran mash and skim milk—and well I desarved it.”

They dined somewhere about eleven o’clock, and at noon Paddy
unstepped the mast and made a sort of little tent or awning with the sail in
the bow of the boat to protect the children from the rays of the vertical sun.

Then he took his place in the bottom of the boat, in the stern, stuck
Dick’s straw hat over his face to preserve it from the sun, kicked about a bit
to get a comfortable position, and fell asleep.

CHAPTER VIII

“S-H-E-N-A-N-D-O-A-H”

He had slept an hour and more when he was brought to his senses by a
thin and prolonged shriek. It was Emmeline in a nightmare, or more
properly a day-mare, brought on by a meal of sardines and the haunting
memory of the gibbly-gobbly-ums. When she was shaken (it always took a
considerable time to bring her to, from these seizures) and comforted, the
mast was restepped.

As Mr Button stood with his hand on the spar looking round him before
going aft with the sheet, an object struck his eye some three miles ahead.
Objects rather, for they were the masts and spars of a small ship rising from
the water. Not a vestige of sail, just the naked spars. It might have been a
couple of old skeleton trees jutting out of the water for all a landsman could
have told.

He stared at this sight for twenty or thirty seconds without speaking, his
head projected like the head of a tortoise. Then he gave a wild “Hurroo!”

“What is it, Paddy?” asked Dick.

“Hurroo!” replied Mr Button. “Ship ahoy! ship ahoy! Lie to till I be
afther boardin’ you. Sure, they are lyin’ to—divil a rag of canvas on her—
are they aslape or dhramin’? Here, Dick, let me get aft wid the sheet; the
wind’ll take us up to her quicker than we’ll row.”

He crawled aft and took the tiller; the breeze took the sail, and the boat
forged ahead.

“Is it daddy’s ship?” asked Dick, who was almost as excited as his
friend.

“I dinno; we’ll see when we fetch her.”

“Shall we go on her, Mr Button?” asked Emmeline.

“Ay will we, honey.”

Emmeline bent down, and fetching her parcel from under the seat, held it
in her lap.

As they drew nearer, the outlines of the ship became more apparent. She
was a small brig, with stump topmasts, from the spars a few rags of canvas
fluttered. It was apparent soon to the old sailor’s eye what was amiss with
her.

“She’s derelick, bad cess to her!” he muttered; “derelick and done for—
just me luck!”

“I can’t see any people on the ship,” cried Dick, who had crept forward
to the bow. “Daddy’s not there.”

The old sailor let the boat off a point or two, so as to get a view of the
brig more fully; when they were within twenty cable lengths or so he
unstepped the mast and took to the sculls.

The little brig floated very low on the water, and presented a mournful
enough appearance; her running rigging all slack, shreds of canvas flapping
at the yards, and no boats hanging at her davits. It was easy enough to see
that she was a timber ship, and that she had started a butt, flooded herself
and been abandoned.

Paddy lay on his oars within a few strokes of her. She was floating as
placidly as though she were in the harbour of San Francisco; the green
water showed in her shadow, and in the green water waved the tropic weeds
that were growing from her copper. Her paint was blistered and burnt
absolutely as though a hot iron had been passed over it, and over her taffrail
hung a large rope whose end was lost to sight in the water.

A few strokes brought them under the stern. The name of the ship was
there in faded letters, also the port to which she belonged. “Shenandoah.
Martha’s Vineyard.”

“There’s letters on her,” said Mr Button. “But I can’t make thim out. I’ve
no larnin’.”

“I can read them,” said Dick.

“So c’n I,” murmured Emmeline.

“S-H-E-N-A-N-D-O-A-H,” spelt Dick.

“What’s that?” enquired Paddy.

“I don’t know,” replied Dick, rather downcastedly.

“There you are!” cried the oarsman in a disgusted manner, pulling the
boat round to the starboard side of the brig. “They pritind to tache letters to
childer in schools, pickin’ their eyes out wid book-readin’, and here’s letters
as big as me face an’ they can’t make hid or tail of them—be dashed to
book-readin’!”

The brig had old-fashioned wide channels, regular platforms; and she
floated so low in the water that they were scarcely a foot above the level of
the dinghy.

Mr Button secured the boat by passing the painter through a channel
plate, then, with Emmeline and her parcel in his arms or rather in one arm,
he clambered over the channel and passed her over the rail on to the deck.
Then it was Dick’s turn, and the children stood waiting whilst the old sailor
brought the beaker of water, the biscuit, and the tinned stuff on board.

It was a place to delight the heart of a boy, the deck of the Shenandoah;
forward right from the main hatchway it was laden with timber. Running
rigging lay loose on the deck in coils, and nearly the whole of the quarter-
deck was occupied by a deck-house. The place had a delightful smell of
sea-beach, decaying wood, tar, and mystery. Bights of buntline and other
ropes were dangling from above, only waiting to be swung from. A bell was
hung just forward of the foremast. In half a moment Dick was forward
hammering at the bell with a belaying pin he had picked from the deck.

Mr Button shouted to him to desist; the sound of the bell jarred on his
nerves. It sounded like a summons, and a summons on that deserted craft
was quite out of place. Who knew what mightn’t answer it in the way of the
supernatural?

Dick dropped the belaying pin and ran forward. He took the disengaged
hand, and the three went aft to the door of the deck-house. The door was
open, and they peeped in.

The place had three windows on the starboard side, and through the
windows the sun was shining in a mournful manner. There was a table in
the middle of the place. A seat was pushed away from the table as if some
one had risen in a hurry. On the table lay the remains of a meal, a teapot,
two teacups, two plates. On one of the plates rested a fork with a bit of
putrifying bacon upon it that some one had evidently been conveying to his
mouth when—something had happened. Near the teapot stood a tin of
condensed milk, haggled open. Some old salt had just been in the act of
putting milk in his tea when the mysterious something had occurred. Never
did a lot of dead things speak so eloquently as these things spoke.

One could conjure it all up. The skipper, most likely, had finished his tea,
and the mate was hard at work at his, when the leak had been discovered, or
some derelict had been run into, or whatever it was had happened—
happened.

One thing was evident, that since the abandonment of the brig she had
experienced fine weather, else the things would not have been left standing
so trimly on the table.

Mr Button and Dick entered the place to prosecute enquiries, but
Emmeline remained at the door. The charm of the old brig appealed to her
almost as much as to Dick, but she had a feeling about it quite unknown to
him. A ship where no one was had about it suggestions of “other things.”

She was afraid to enter the gloomy deck-house, and afraid to remain
alone outside; she compromised matters by sitting down on the deck. Then
she placed the small bundle beside her, and hurriedly took the rag-doll from
her pocket, into which it was stuffed head down, pulled its calico skirt from

over its head, propped it up against the coaming of the door, and told it not
to be afraid.

There was not much to be found in the deck-house, but aft of it were two
small cabins like rabbit hutches, once inhabited by the skipper and his mate.
Here there were great findings in the way of rubbish. Old clothes, old boots,
an old top-hat of that extraordinary pattern you may see in the streets of
Pernambuco, immensely tall, and narrowing towards the brim. A telescope
without a lens, a volume of Hoyt, a nautical almanac, a great bolt of striped
flannel shirting, a box of fish hooks. And in one corner—glorious find!—a
coil of what seemed to be ten yards or so of black rope.

“Baccy, begorra!” shouted Pat, seizing upon his treasure. It was pigtail.
You may see coils of it in the tobacconists’ windows of seaport towns. A
pipe full of it would make a hippopotamus vomit, yet old sailors chew it
and smoke it and revel in it.

“We’ll bring all the lot of the things out on deck, and see what’s worth
keepin’ an’ what’s worth leavin’,” said Mr Button, taking an immense
armful of the old truck; whilst Dick, carrying the top-hat, upon which he
had instantly seized as his own special booty, led the way.

“Em,” shouted Dick, as he emerged from the doorway, “see what I’ve
got!”

He popped the awful-looking structure over his head. It went right down
to his shoulders.

Emmeline gave a shriek.

“It smells funny,” said Dick, taking it off and applying his nose to the
inside of it—“smells like an old hair brush. Here, you try it on.”

Emmeline scrambled away as far as she could, till she reached the
starboard bulwarks, where she sat in the scupper, breathless and speechless
and wide-eyed. She was always dumb when frightened (unless it were a
nightmare or a very sudden shock), and this hat suddenly seen half covering

Dick frightened her out of her wits. Besides, it was a black thing, and she
hated black things—black cats, black horses; worst of all, black dogs.

She had once seen a hearse in the streets of Boston, an old-time hearse
with black plumes, trappings and all complete. The sight had nearly given
her a fit, though she did not know in the least the meaning of it.

Meanwhile Mr Button was conveying armful after armful of stuff on
deck. When the heap was complete, he sat down beside it in the glorious
afternoon sunshine, and lit his pipe.

He had searched neither for food or water as yet; content with the
treasure God had given him, for the moment the material things of life were
forgotten. And, indeed, if he had searched he would have found only half a
sack of potatoes in the caboose, for the lazarette was awash, and the water
in the scuttle-butt was stinking.

Emmeline, seeing what was in progress, crept up, Dick promising not to
put the hat on her, and they all sat round the pile.

“Thim pair of brogues,” said the old man, holding a pair of old boots up
for inspection like an auctioneer, “would fetch half a dollar any day in the
wake in any sayport in the world. Put them beside you, Dick, and lay hold
of this pair of britches by the ends of em’—stritch them.”

The trousers were stretched out, examined and approved of, and laid
beside the boots.

“Here’s a tiliscope wid wan eye shut,” said Mr Button, examining the
broken telescope and pulling it in and out like a concertina. “Stick it beside
the brogues; it may come in handy for somethin’. Here’s a book”—tossing
the nautical almanac to the boy. “Tell me what it says.”

Dick examined the pages of figures hopelessly.

“I can’t read ’em,” said Dick; “it’s numbers.”

“Buzz it overboard,” said Mr Button.

Dick did what he was told joyfully, and the proceedings resumed.

He tried on the tall hat, and the children laughed. On her old friend’s
head the thing ceased to have terror for Emmeline.

She had two methods of laughing. The angelic smile before mentioned—
a rare thing—and, almost as rare, a laugh in which she showed her little
white teeth, whilst she pressed her hands together, the left one tight shut,
and the right clasped over it.

He put the hat on one side, and continued the sorting, searching all the
pockets of the clothes and finding nothing. When he had arranged what to
keep, they flung the rest overboard, and the valuables were conveyed to the
captain’s cabin, there to remain till wanted.

Then the idea that food might turn up useful as well as old clothes in
their present condition struck the imaginative mind of Mr Button, and he
proceeded to search.

The lazarette was simply a cistern full of sea water; what else it might
contain, not being a diver, he could not say. In the copper of the caboose lay
a great lump of putrifying pork or meat of some sort. The harness cask
contained nothing except huge crystals of salt. All the meat had been taken
away. Still, the provisions and water brought on board from the dinghy
would be sufficient to last them some ten days or so, and in the course of
ten days a lot of things might happen.

Mr Button leaned over the side. The dinghy was nestling beside the brig
like a duckling beside a duck; the broad channel might have been likened to
the duck’s wing half extended. He got on the channel to see if the painter
was safely attached. Having made all secure, he climbed slowly up to the
main-yard arm, and looked round upon the sea.

CHAPTER IX

SHADOWS IN THE MOONLIGHT

“Daddy’s a long time coming,” said Dick all of a sudden.

They were seated on the baulks of timber that cumbered the deck of the
brig on either side of the caboose. An ideal perch. The sun was setting over
Australia way, in a sea that seemed like a sea of boiling gold. Some mystery
of mirage caused the water to heave and tremble as if troubled by fervent
heat.

“Ay, is he,” said Mr Button; “but it’s better late than never. Now don’t be
thinkin’ of him, for that won’t bring him. Look at the sun goin’ into the
wather, and don’t be spakin’ a word, now, but listen and you’ll hear it hiss.”

The children gazed and listened, Paddy also. All three were mute as the
great blazing shield touched the water that leapt to meet it.

You could hear the water hiss—if you had imagination enough. Once
having touched the water, the sun went down behind it, as swiftly as a man
in a hurry going down a ladder. As he vanished a ghostly and golden
twilight spread over the sea, a light exquisite but immensely forlorn. Then
the sea became a violet shadow, the west darkened as if to a closing door,
and the stars rushed over the sky.

“Mr Button,” said Emmeline, nodding towards the sun as he vanished,
“where’s over there?”

“The west,” replied he, staring at the sunset. “Chainy and Injee and all
away beyant.”

“Where’s the sun gone to now, Paddy?” asked Dick.

“He’s gone chasin’ the moon, an’ she’s skedadlin’ wid her dress brailed
up for all she’s worth; she’ll be along up in a minit. He’s always afther her,
but he’s never caught her yet.”

“What would he do to her if he caught her?” asked Emmeline.

“Faith, an’ maybe he’d fetch her a skelp—an’ well she’d desarve it.”

“Why’d she deserve it?” asked Dick, who was in one of his questioning
moods.

“Because she’s always delutherin’ people an’ leadin’ thim asthray. Girls
or men, she moidhers thim all once she gets the comeither on them; same as
she did Buck M’Cann.”

“Who’s he?”

“Buck M’Cann? Faith, he was the village ijit where I used to live in the
ould days.”

“What’s that?”

“Hould your whisht, an’ don’t be axin’ questions. He was always wantin’
the moon, though he was twinty an’ six feet four. He’d a gob on him that
hung open like a rat-trap with a broken spring, and he was as thin as a
barber’s pole, you could a’ tied a reef knot in the middle of ’um; and whin
the moon was full there was no houldin’ him.” Mr Button gazed at the
reflection of the sunset on the water for a moment as if recalling some form
from the past, and then proceeded. “He’d sit on the grass starin’ at her, an’
thin he’d start to chase her over the hills, and they’d find him at last, maybe
a day or two later, lost in the mountains, grazin’ on berries, an’ as green as a
cabbidge from the hunger an’ the cowld, till it got so bad at long last they
had to hobble him.”

“I’ve seen a donkey hobbled,” cried Dick.

“Thin you’ve seen the twin brother of Buck M’Cann. Well, one night me
elder brother Tim was sittin’ over the fire, smokin’ his dudeen an’ thinkin’
of his sins, when in comes Buck with the hobbles on him.

“‘Tim,’ says he, ‘I’ve got her at last!’

“‘Got who?’ says Tim.

“‘The moon,’ says he.

“‘Got her where?’ says Tim.

“‘In a bucket down by the pond,’ says t’other, ‘safe an’ sound an’ not a
scratch on her; you come and look,’ says he. So Tim follows him, he
hobblin’, and they goes to the pond side, and there, sure enough, stood a tin
bucket full of wather, an’ on the wather the refliction of the moon.

“‘I dridged her out of the pond,’ whispers Buck. ‘Aisy now,’ says he,
‘an’ I’ll dribble the water out gently,’ says he, ‘an’ we’ll catch her alive at
the bottom of it like a trout.’ So he drains the wather out gently of the
bucket till it was near all gone, an’ then he looks into the bucket expectin’ to
find the moon flounderin’ in the bottom of it like a flat fish.

“‘She’s gone, bad ’cess to her!’ says he.

“‘Try again,’ says me brother, and Buck fills the bucket again, and there
was the moon sure enough when the water came to stand still.

“‘Go on,’ says me brother. ‘Drain out the wather, but go gentle, or she’ll
give yiz the slip again.’

“‘Wan minit,’ says Buck, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ says he; ‘she won’t give me
the slip this time,’ says he. ‘You wait for me,’ says he; and off he hobbles to
his old mother’s cabin a stone’s-throw away, and back he comes with a
sieve.

“‘You hold the sieve,’ says Buck, ‘and I’ll drain the water into it; if she
’scapes from the bucket we’ll have her in the sieve.’ And he pours the
wather out of the bucket as gentle as if it was crame out of a jug. When all
the wather was out he turns the bucket bottom up, and shook it.

“‘Ran dan the thing!’ he cries, ‘she’s gone again;’ an’ wid that he flings
the bucket into the pond, and the sieve afther the bucket, when up comes his
old mother hobbling on her stick.

“‘Where’s me bucket?’ says she.

“‘In the pond,’ say Buck.

“‘And me sieve?’ says she.

“‘Gone afther the bucket.’

“‘I’ll give yiz a bucketin’!’ says she; and she up with the stick and
landed him a skelp, an’ driv him roarin’ and hobblin’ before her, and locked
him up in the cabin, an’ kep’ him on bread an’ wather for a wake to get the
moon out of his head; but she might have saved her thruble, for that day
month in it was agin—— There she comes!”

The moon, argent and splendid, was breaking from the water. She was
full, and her light was powerful almost as the light of day. The shadows of
the children and the queer shadow of Mr Button were cast on the wall of the
caboose hard and black as silhouettes.

“Look at our shadows!” cried Dick, taking off his broad-brimmed straw
hat and waving it.

Emmeline held up her doll to see its shadow, and Mr Button held up his
pipe.

“Come now,” said he, putting the pipe back in his mouth, and making to
rise, “and shadda off to bed; it’s time you were aslape, the both of you.”

Dick began to yowl.

“I don’t want to go to bed; I aint tired, Paddy—les’s stay a little longer.”

“Not a minit,” said the other, with all the decision of a nurse; “not a
minit afther me pipe’s out!”

“Fill it again,” said Dick.

Mr Button made no reply. The pipe gurgled as he puffed at it—a kind of
death-rattle speaking of almost immediate extinction.

“Mr Button!” said Emmeline. She was holding her nose in the air and
sniffing; seated to windward of the smoker, and out of the pigtail-poisoned
air, her delicate sense of smell perceived something lost to the others.

“What is it, acushla?”

“I smell something.”

“What d’ye say you smell?”

“Something nice.”

“What’s it like?” asked Dick, sniffing hard. “I don’t smell anything.”

Emmeline sniffed again to make sure.

“Flowers,” said she.

The breeze, which had shifted several points since midday, was bearing
with it a faint, faint odour: a perfume of vanilla and spice so faint as to be
imperceptible to all but the most acute olfactory sense.

“Flowers!” said the old sailor, tapping the ashes out of his pipe against
the heel of his boot. “And where’d you get flowers in middle of the say? It’s
dhramin’ you are. Come now—to bed wid yiz!”

“Fill it again,” wailed Dick, referring to the pipe.

“It’s a spankin’ I’ll give you,” replied his guardian, lifting him down
from the timber baulks, and then assisting Emmeline, “in two ticks if you
don’t behave. Come along, Em’line.”

He started aft, a small hand in each of his, Dick bellowing.

As they passed the ship’s bell, Dick stretched towards the belaying pin
that was still lying on the deck, seized it, and hit the bell a mighty bang. It
was the last pleasure to be snatched before sleep, and he snatched it.

Paddy had made up beds for himself and his charges in the deck-house;
he had cleared the stuff off the table, broken open the windows to get the
musty smell away, and placed the mattresses from the captain and mate’s
cabins on the floor.

When the children were in bed and asleep, he went to the starboard rail,
and, leaning on it, looked over the moonlit sea. He was thinking of ships as
his wandering eye roved over the sea spaces, little dreaming of the message
that the perfumed breeze was bearing him. The message that had been
received and dimly understood by Emmeline. Then he leaned with his back
to the rail and his hands in his pockets. He was not thinking now, he was
ruminating.

The basis of the Irish character as exemplified by Paddy Button is a
profound laziness mixed with a profound melancholy. Yet Paddy, in his left-
handed way, was as hard a worker as any man on board ship; and as for
melancholy, he was the life and soul of the fo’cs’le. Yet there they were, the
laziness and the melancholy, only waiting to be tapped.

As he stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, longshore fashion,
counting the dowels in the planking of the deck by the moonlight, he was
reviewing the “old days.” The tale of Buck M’Cann had recalled them, and
across all the salt seas he could see the moonlight on the Connemara
mountains, and hear the sea-gulls crying on the thunderous beach where
each wave has behind it three thousand miles of sea.

Suddenly Mr Button came back from the mountains of Connemara to
find himself on the deck of the Shenandoah; and he instantly became
possessed by fears. Beyond the white deserted deck, barred by the shadows
of the standing rigging, he could see the door of the caboose. Suppose he
should suddenly see a head pop out—or, worse, a shadowy form go in?

He turned to the deck-house, where the children were sound asleep, and
where, in a few minutes, he, too, was sound asleep beside them, whilst all
night long the brig rocked to the gentle swell of the Pacific, and the breeze
blew, bringing with it the perfume of flowers.

CHAPTER X

THE TRAGEDY OF THE BOATS

When the fog lifted after midnight the people in the long-boat saw the
quarter-boat half a mile to starboard of them.

“Can you see the dinghy?” asked Lestrange of the captain, who was
standing up searching the horizon.

“Not a speck,” answered Le Farge. “Damn that Irishman! but for him I’d
have got the boats away properly victualled and all; as it is I don’t know
what we’ve got aboard. You, Jenkins, what have you got forward there?”

“Two bags of bread and a breaker of water,” answered the steward.

“A breaker of water be sugared!” came another voice; “a breaker half
full, you mean.”

Then the steward’s voice: “So it is; there’s not more than a couple of
gallons in her.”

“My God!” said Le Farge. “Damn that Irishman!”

“There’s not more than’ll give us two half pannikins apiece all round,”
said the steward.

“Maybe,” said Le Farge, “the quarter-boat’s better stocked; pull for her.”

“She’s pulling for us,” said the stroke oar.

“Captain,” asked Lestrange, “are you sure there’s no sight of the
dinghy?”

“None,” replied Le Farge.

The unfortunate man’s head sank on his breast. He had little time to
brood over his troubles, however, for a tragedy was beginning to unfold
around him, the most shocking, perhaps, in the annals of the sea—a tragedy
to be hinted at rather than spoken of.

When the boats were within hailing distance, a man in the bow of the
long-boat rose up.

“Quarter-boat ahoy!”

“Ahoy!”

“How much water have you?”

“None!”

The word came floating over the placid moonlit water. At it the fellows
in the long-boat ceased rowing, and you could see the water-drops dripping
off their oars like diamonds in the moonlight.

“Quarter-boat ahoy!” shouted the fellow in the bow. “Lay on your oars.”

“Here, you scowbanker!” cried Le Farge, “who are you to be giving
directions—”

“Scowbanker yourself!” replied the fellow. “Bullies, put her about!”

The starboard oars backed water, and the boat came round.

By chance the worst lot of the Northumberland’s crew were in the long-
boat—veritable “scowbankers,” scum; and how scum clings to life you will
never know, until you have been amongst it in an open boat at sea. Le Farge
had no more command over this lot than you have who are reading this
book.

“Heave to!” came from the quarter-boat, as she laboured behind.

“Lay on your oars, bullies!” cried the ruffian at the bow, who was still
standing up like an evil genius who had taken momentary command over
events. “Lay on your oars, bullies; they’d better have it now.”

The quarter-boat in her turn ceased rowing, and lay a cable’s length
away.

“How much water have you?” came the mate’s voice.

“Not enough to go round.”

Le Farge made to rise, and the stroke oar struck at him, catching him in
the wind and doubling him up in the bottom of the boat.

“Give us some, for God’s sake!” came the mate’s voice; “we’re parched
with rowing, and there’s a woman on board.”

The fellow in the bow of the long-boat, as if some one had suddenly
struck him, broke into a tornado of blasphemy.

“Give us some,” came the mate’s voice, “or, by God, we’ll lay you
aboard!”

Before the words were well spoken the men in the quarter-boat carried
the threat into action. The conflict was brief: the quarter-boat was too
crowded for fighting. The starboard men in the long-boat fought with their
oars, whilst the fellows to port steadied the boat.

The fight did not last long, and presently the quarter-boat sheered off,
half of the men in her cut about the head and bleeding—two of them
senseless.

It was sundown on the following day. The long-boat lay adrift. The last
drop of water had been served out eight hours before.

The quarter-boat, like a horrible phantom, had been haunting and
pursuing her all day, begging for water when there was none. It was like the
prayers one might expect to hear in hell.

The men in the long-boat, gloomy and morose, weighed down with a
sense of crime, tortured by thirst, and tormented by the voices imploring for

water, lay on their oars when the other boat tried to approach.

Now and then, suddenly, and as if moved by a common impulse, they
would all shout out together: “We have none.” But the quarter-boat would
not believe. It was in vain to hold the breaker with the bung out to prove its
dryness, the half-delirious creatures had it fixed in their minds that their
comrades were withholding from them the water that was not.

Just as the sun touched the sea, Lestrange, rousing himself from a torpor
into which he had sunk, raised himself and looked over the gunwale. He
saw the quarter-boat drifting a cable’s length away, lit by the full light of
sunset, and the spectres in it, seeing him, held out in mute appeal their
blackened tongues.

Of the night that followed it is almost impossible to speak. Thirst was
nothing to what the scowbankers suffered from the torture of the
whimpering appeal for water that came to them at intervals during the night.

When at last the Arago, a French whale ship, sighted them, the crew of
the long-boat were still alive, but three of them were raving madmen. Of the
crew of the quarter-boat was saved—not one.

PART II

CHAPTER XI

THE ISLAND

“Childer!” shouted Paddy. He was at the cross-trees in the full dawn,
whilst the children standing beneath on deck were craning their faces up to
him. “There’s an island forenint us.”

“Hurrah!” cried Dick. He was not quite sure what an island might be like
in the concrete, but it was something fresh, and Paddy’s voice was jubilant.

“Land ho! it is,” said he, coming down to the deck. “Come for’ard to the
bows, and I’ll show it you.”

He stood on the timber in the bows and lifted Emmeline up in his arms;
and even at that humble elevation from the water she could see something
of an undecided colour—green for choice—on the horizon.

It was not directly ahead, but on the starboard bow—or, as she would
have expressed it, to the right. When Dick had looked and expressed his
disappointment at there being so little to see, Paddy began to make
preparations for leaving the ship.

It was only just now, with land in sight, that he recognised in some
fashion the horror of the position from which they were about to escape.

He fed the children hurriedly with some biscuits and tinned meat, and
then, with a biscuit in his hand, eating as he went, he trotted about the
decks, collecting things and stowing them in the dinghy. The bolt of striped
flannel, all the old clothes, a housewife full of needles and thread, such as
seamen sometimes carry, the half-sack of potatoes, a saw which he found in

the caboose, the precious coil of tobacco, and a lot of other odds and ends
he transhipped, sinking the little dinghy several strakes in the process. Also,
of course, he took the breaker of water, and the remains of the biscuit and
tinned stuff they had brought on board. These being stowed, and the dinghy
ready, he went forward with the children to the bow, to see how the island
was bearing.

It had loomed up nearer during the hour or so in which he had been
collecting and storing the things—nearer, and more to the right, which
meant that the brig was being borne by a fairly swift current, and that she
would pass it, leaving it two or three miles to starboard. It was well they
had command of the dinghy.

“The sea’s all round it,” said Emmeline, who was seated on Paddy’s
shoulder, holding on tight to him, and gazing upon the island, the green of
whose trees was now visible, an oasis of verdure in the sparkling and
seraphic blue.

“Are we going there, Paddy?” asked Dick, holding on to a stay, and
straining his eyes towards the land.

“Ay, are we,” said Mr Button. “Hot foot—five knots, if we’re makin’
wan; and it’s ashore we’ll be by noon, and maybe sooner.”

The breeze had freshened up, and was blowing dead from the island, as
though the island were making a weak attempt to blow them away from it.

Oh, what a fresh and perfumed breeze it was! All sorts of tropical
growing things had joined their scent in one bouquet.

“Smell it,” said Emmeline, expanding her small nostrils. “That’s what I
smelt last night, only it’s stronger now.”

The last reckoning taken on board the Northumberland had proved the
ship to be south by east of the Marquesas; this was evidently one of those
small, lost islands that lie here and there south by east of the Marquesas.
Islands the most lonely and beautiful in the world.

As they gazed it grew before them, and shifted still more to the right. It
was hilly and green now, though the trees could not be clearly made out;
here, the green was lighter in colour, and there, darker. A rim of pure white
marble seemed to surround its base. It was foam breaking on the barrier
reef.

In another hour the feathery foliage of the cocoa-nut palms could be
made out, and the old sailor judged it time to take to the boat.

He lifted Emmeline, who was clasping her luggage, over the rail on to
the channel, and deposited her in the stern-sheets; then Dick.

In a moment the boat was adrift, the mast stepped, and the Shenandoah
left to pursue her mysterious voyage at the will of the currents of the sea.

“You’re not going to the island, Paddy,” cried Dick, as the old man put
the boat on the port tack.

“You be aisy,” replied the other, “and don’t be larnin’ your gran’mother.
How the divil d’ye think I’d fetch the land sailin’ dead in the wind’s eye?”

“Has the wind eyes?”

Mr Button did not answer the question. He was troubled in his mind.
What if the island were inhabited? He had spent several years in the South
Seas. He knew the people of the Marquesas and Samoa, and liked them. But
here he was out of his bearings.

However, all the troubling in the world was of no use. It was a case of
the island or the deep sea, and, putting the boat on the starboard tack, he lit
his pipe and leaned back with the tiller in the crook of his arm. His keen
eyes had made out from the deck of the brig an opening in the reef, and he
was making to run the dinghy abreast of the opening, and then take to the
sculls and row her through.

Now, as they drew nearer a sound came on the breeze, a sound faint and
sonorous and dreamy. It was the sound of the breakers on the reef. The sea

just here was heaving to a deeper swell, as if vexed in its sleep at the
resistance to it of the land.

Emmeline, sitting with her bundle in her lap, stared without speaking at
the sight before her. Even in the bright, glorious sunshine, and despite the
greenery that showed beyond, it was a desolate sight seen from her place in
the dinghy. A white, forlorn beach, over which the breakers raced and
tumbled, sea-gulls wheeling and screaming, and over all the thunder of the
surf.

Suddenly the break became visible, and a glimpse of smooth, blue water
beyond. Mr Button unshipped the tiller, unstepped the mast, and took to the
sculls.

As they drew nearer, the sea became more active, savage, and alive; the
thunder of the surf became louder, the breakers more fierce and threatening,
the opening broader.

One could see the water swirling round the coral piers, for the tide was
flooding into the lagoon; it had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it
along far swifter than the sculls could have driven it. Sea-gulls screamed
around them, the boat rocked and swayed. Dick shouted with excitement,
and Emmeline shut her eyes tight.

Then, as though a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of
the surf became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened
her eyes and found herself in Wonderland.

CHAPTER XII

THE LAKE OF AZURE

On either side lay a great sweep of waving blue water. Calm, almost as a
lake, sapphire here, and here with the tints of the aqua marine. Water so

clear that fathoms away below you could see the branching coral, the
schools of passing fish, and the shadows of the fish upon the spaces of sand.

Before them the clear water washed the sands of a white beach, the
cocoa-palms waved and whispered in the breeze; and as the oarsman lay on
his oars to look a flock of bluebirds rose, as if suddenly freed from the tree-
tops, wheeled, and passed soundless, like a wreath of smoke, over the tree-
tops of the higher land beyond.

“Look!” shouted Dick, who had his nose over the gunwale of the boat.
“Look at the fish!”

“Mr Button,” cried Emmeline, “where are we?”

“Bedad, I dunno; but we might be in a worse place, I’m thinkin’,”
replied the old man, sweeping his eyes over the blue and tranquil lagoon,
from the barrier reef to the happy shore.

On either side of the broad beach before them the cocoa-nut trees came
down like two regiments, and bending gazed at their own reflections in the
lagoon. Beyond lay waving chapparel, where cocoa-palms and breadfruit
trees intermixed with the mammee apple and the tendrils of the wild vine.
On one of the piers of coral at the break of the reef stood a single cocoa-
palm; bending with a slight curve, it, too, seemed seeking its reflection in
the waving water.

But the soul of it all, the indescribable thing about this picture of
mirrored palm trees, blue lagoon, coral reef and sky, was the light.

Away at sea the light was blinding, dazzling, cruel. Away at sea it had
nothing to focus itself upon, nothing to exhibit but infinite spaces of blue
water and desolation.

Here it made the air a crystal, through which the gazer saw the loveliness
of the land and reef, the green of palm, the white of coral, the wheeling
gulls, the blue lagoon, all sharply outlined—burning, coloured, arrogant, yet
tender—heart-breakingly beautiful, for the spirit of eternal morning was
here, eternal happiness, eternal youth.

As the oarsman pulled the tiny craft towards the beach, neither he nor
the children saw away behind the boat, on the water near the bending palm
tree at the break in the reef, something that for a moment insulted the day,
and was gone. Something like a small triangle of dark canvas, that rippled
through the water and sank from sight; something that appeared and
vanished like an evil thought.

It did not take long to beach the boat. Mr Button tumbled over the side
up to his knees in water, whilst Dick crawled over the bow.

“Catch hould of her the same as I do,” cried Paddy, laying hold of the
starboard gunwale; whilst Dick, imitative as a monkey, seized the gunwale
to port. Now then:
“‘Yeo ho, Chilliman,
Up wid her, up wid her,
Heave O, Chilliman.’

“Lave her be now; she’s high enough.”

He took Emmeline in his arms and carried her up on the sand. It was
from just here on the sand that you could see the true beauty of the lagoon.
That lake of sea water forever protected from storm and trouble by the
barrier reef of coral.

Right from where the little clear ripples ran up the strand, it led the eye
to the break in the coral reef where the palm gazed at its own reflection in
the water, and there, beyond the break, one caught a vision of the great
heaving, sparkling sea.

The lagoon, just here, was perhaps more than a third of a mile broad. I
have never measured it, but I know that, standing by the palm tree on the
reef, flinging up one’s arm and shouting to a person on the beach, the sound
took a perceptible time to cross the water: I should say, perhaps, an almost
perceptible time. The distant signal and the distant call were almost
coincident, yet not quite.

Dick, mad with delight at the place in which he found himself, was
running about like a dog just out of the water. Mr Button was discharging

the cargo of the dinghy on the dry, white sand. Emmeline seated herself
with her precious bundle on the sand, and was watching the operations of
her friend, looking at the things around her and feeling very strange.

For all she knew all this was the ordinary accompaniment of a sea
voyage. Paddy’s manner throughout had been set to the one idea, not to
frighten the “childer”; the weather had backed him up. But down in the
heart of her lay the knowledge that all was not as it should be. The hurried
departure from the ship, the fog in which her uncle had vanished, those
things, and others as well, she felt instinctively were not right. But she said
nothing.

She had not long for meditation, however, for Dick was running towards
her with a live crab which he had picked up, calling out that he was going to
make it bite her.

“Take it away!” cried Emmeline, holding both hands with fingers
widespread in front of her face. “Mr Button! Mr Button! Mr Button!”

“Lave her be, you little divil!” roared Pat, who was depositing the last of
the cargo on the sand. “Lave her be, or it’s a cow-hidin’ I’ll be givin’ you!”

“What’s a ‘divil,’ Paddy?” asked Dick, panting from his exertions.
“Paddy, what’s a ‘divil’?”

“You’re wan. Ax no questions now, for it’s tired I am, an’ I want to rest
me bones.”

He flung himself under the shade of a palm tree, took out his tinder box,
tobacco and pipe, cut some tobacco up, filled his pipe and lit it. Emmeline
crawled up, and sat near him, and Dick flung himself down on the sand near
Emmeline.

Mr Button took off his coat and made a pillow of it against a cocoa-nut
tree stem. He had found the El Dorado of the weary. With his knowledge of
the South Seas a glance at the vegetation to be seen told him that food for a
regiment might be had for the taking; water, too.

Right down the middle of the strand was a depression which in the rainy
season would be the bed of a rushing rivulet. The water just now was not
strong enough to come all the way to the lagoon, but away up there
“beyant” in the woods lay the source, and he’d find it in due time. There
was enough in the breaker for a week, and green “cuca-nuts” were to be had
for the climbing.

Emmeline contemplated Paddy for a while as he smoked and rested his
bones, then a great thought occurred to her. She took the little shawl from
around the parcel she was holding and exposed the mysterious box.

“Oh, begorra, the box!” said Paddy, leaning on his elbow interestedly; “I
might a’ known you wouldn’t a’ forgot it.”

“Mrs James,” said Emmeline, “made me promise not to open it till I got
on shore, for the things in it might get lost.”

“Well, you’re ashore now,” said Dick; “open it.”

“I’m going to,” said Emmeline.

She carefully undid the string, refusing the assistance of Paddy’s knife.
Then the brown paper came off, disclosing a common cardboard box. She
raised the lid half an inch, peeped in, and shut it again.

“Open it!” cried Dick, mad with curiosity.

“What’s in it, honey?” asked the old sailor, who was as interested as
Dick.

“Things,” replied Emmeline.

Then all at once she took the lid off and disclosed a tiny tea service of
china, packed in shavings; there was a teapot with a lid, a cream jug, cups
and saucers, and six microscopic plates, each painted with a pansy.

“Sure, it’s a tay-set!” said Paddy, in an interested voice. “Glory be to
God! will you look at the little plates wid the flowers on thim?”

“Heugh!” said Dick in disgust; “I thought it might a’ been soldiers.”

“I don’t want soldiers,” replied Emmeline, in a voice of perfect
contentment.

She unfolded a piece of tissue paper, and took from it a sugar-tongs and
six spoons. Then she arrayed the whole lot on the sand.

“Well, if that don’t beat all!” said Paddy.

“And whin are you goin’ to ax me to tay with you?”

“Some time,” replied Emmeline, collecting the things, and carefully
repacking them.

Mr Button finished his pipe, tapped the ashes out, and placed it in his
pocket.

“I’ll be afther riggin’ up a bit of a tint,” said he, as he rose to his feet, “to
shelter us from the jew to-night; but I’ll first have a look at the woods to see
if I can find wather. Lave your box with the other things, Emmeline; there’s
no one here to take it.”

Emmeline left her box on the heap of things that Paddy had placed in the
shadow of the cocoa-nut trees, took his hand, and the three entered the
grove on the right.

It was like entering a pine forest; the tall symmetrical stems of the trees
seemed set by mathematical law, each at a given distance from the other.
Whichever way you entered a twilight alley set with tree boles lay before
you. Looking up you saw at an immense distance above a pale green roof
patined with sparkling and flashing points of light, where the breeze was
busy playing with the green fronds of the trees.

“Mr Button,” murmured Emmeline, “we won’t get lost, will we?”

“Lost! No, faith; sure we’re goin’ uphill, an’ all we have to do is to come
down again, when we want to get back—ware nuts!” A green nut detached
from up above came down rattling and tumbling and hopped on the ground.

Paddy picked it up. “It’s a green cucanut,” said he, putting it in his pocket
(it was not very much bigger than a Jaffa orange), “and we’ll have it for
tay.”

“That’s not a cocoa-nut,” said Dick; “cocoa-nuts are brown. I had five
cents once an’ I bought one, and scraped it out and y’et it.”

“When Dr Sims made Dicky sick,” said Emmeline, “he said the wonder
t’im was how Dicky held it all.”

“Come on,” said Mr Button, “an’ don’t be talkin’, or it’s the Cluricaunes
will be after us.”

“What’s cluricaunes?” demanded Dick.

“Little men no bigger than your thumb that make the brogues for the
Good People.”

“Who’s they?”

“Whisht, and don’t be talkin’. Mind your head, Em’leen, or the
branches’ll be hittin’ you in the face.”

They had left the cocoa-nut grove, and entered the chapparel. Here was a
deeper twilight, and all sorts of trees lent their foliage to make the shade.
The artu with its delicately diamonded trunk, the great breadfruit tall as a
beech, and shadowy as a cave, the aoa, and the eternal cocoa-nut palm all
grew here like brothers. Great ropes of wild vine twined like the snake of
the laocoon from tree to tree, and all sorts of wonderful flowers, from the
orchid shaped like a butterfly to the scarlet hibiscus, made beautiful the
gloom.

Suddenly Mr Button stopped.

“Whisht!” said he.

Through the silence—a silence filled with the hum and the murmur of
wood insects and the faint, far song of the reef—came a tinkling, rippling

sound: it was water. He listened to make sure of the bearing of the sound,
then he made for it.

Next moment they found themselves in a little grass-grown glade. From
the hilly ground above, over a rock black and polished like ebony, fell a tiny
cascade not much broader than one’s hand; ferns grew around and from a
tree above where a great rope of wild convolvulus flowers blew their
trumpets in the enchanted twilight.

The children cried out at the prettiness of it, and Emmeline ran and
dabbled her hands in the water. Just above the little waterfall sprang a
banana tree laden with fruit; it had immense leaves six feet long and more,
and broad as a dinner-table. One could see the golden glint of the ripe fruit
through the foliage.

In a moment Mr Button had kicked off his shoes and was going up the
rock like a cat, absolutely, for it seemed to give him nothing to climb by.

“Hurroo!” cried Dick in admiration. “Look at Paddy!”

Emmeline looked, and saw nothing but swaying leaves.

“Stand from under!” he shouted, and next moment down came a huge
bunch of yellow-jacketed bananas. Dick shouted with delight, but
Emmeline showed no excitement: she had discovered something.

CHAPTER XIII

DEATH VEILED WITH LICHEN

“Mr Button,” said she, when the latter had descended, “there’s a little
barrel”; she pointed to something green and lichen-covered that lay between
the trunks of two trees—something that eyes less sharp than the eyes of a
child might have mistaken for a boulder.

“Sure, an’ faith it’s an’ ould empty bar’l,” said Mr Button, wiping the
sweat from his brow and staring at the thing. “Some ship must have been
wathering here an’ forgot it. It’ll do for a sate whilst we have dinner.”

He sat down upon it and distributed the bananas to the children, who sat
down on the grass.

The barrel looked such a deserted and neglected thing that his
imagination assumed it to be empty. Empty or full, however, it made an
excellent seat, for it was quarter sunk in the green soft earth, and
immovable.

“If ships has been here, ships will come again,” said he, as he munched
his bananas.

“Will daddy’s ship come here?” asked Dick.

“Ay, to be sure it will,” replied the other, taking out his pipe. “Now run
about and play with the flowers an’ lave me alone to smoke a pipe, and then
we’ll all go to the top of the hill beyant, and have a look round us.

“Come ’long, Em!” cried Dick; and the children started off amongst the
trees, Dick pulling at the hanging vine tendrils, and Emmeline plucking
what blossoms she could find within her small reach.

When he had finished his pipe he hallooed, and small voices answered
him from the wood. Then the children came running back, Emmeline
laughing and showing her small white teeth, a large bunch of blossoms in
her hand; Dick flowerless, but carrying what seemed a large green stone.

“Look at what a funny thing I’ve found!” he cried; “it’s got holes in it.”

“Dhrap it!” shouted Mr Button, springing from the barrel as if some one
had stuck an awl into him. “Where’d you find it? What d’you mane by
touchin’ it? Give it here.”

He took it gingerly in his hands; it was a lichen-covered skull, with a
great dent in the back of it where it had been cloven by an axe or some
sharp instrument. He hove it as far as he could away amidst the trees.

“What is it, Paddy?” asked Dick, half astonished, half frightened at the
old man’s manner.

“It’s nothin’ good,” replied Mr Button.

“There were two others, and I wanted to fetch them,” grumbled Dick.

“You lave them alone. Musha! musha! but there’s been black doin’s here
in days gone by. What is it, Emmeline?”

Emmeline was holding out her bunch of flowers for admiration. He took
a great gaudy blossom—if flowers can ever be called gaudy—and stuck its
stalk in the pocket of his coat. Then he led the way uphill, muttering as he
went.

The higher they got the less dense became the trees and the fewer the
cocoa-nut palms. The cocoa-nut palm loves the sea, and the few they had
here all had their heads bent in the direction of the lagoon, as if yearning
after it.

They passed a cane-brake where canes twenty feet high whispered
together like bulrushes. Then a sunlit sward, destitute of tree or shrub, led
them sharply upward for a hundred feet or so to where a great rock, the

highest point of the island, stood, casting its shadow in the sunshine. The
rock was about twenty feet high, and easy to climb. Its top was almost flat,
and as spacious as an ordinary dinner-table. From it one could obtain a
complete view of the island and the sea.

Looking down, one’s eye travelled over the trembling and waving tree-
tops, to the lagoon; beyond the lagoon to the reef, beyond the reef to the
infinite space of the Pacific. The reef encircled the whole island, here
further from the land, here closer; the song of the surf on it came as a
whisper, just like the whisper you hear in a shell; but, a strange thing,
though the sound heard on the beach was continuous, up here one could
distinguish an intermittency as breaker after breaker dashed itself to death
on the coral strand below.

You have seen a field of green barley ruffled over by the wind, just so
from the hill-top you could see the wind in its passage over the sunlit
foliage beneath.

It was breezing up from the south-west, and banyan and cocoa-palm,
artu and breadfruit tree, swayed and rocked in the merry wind. So bright
and moving was the picture of the breeze-swept sea, the blue lagoon, the
foam-dashed reef, and the rocking trees that one felt one had surprised some
mysterious gala day, some festival of Nature more than ordinarily glad.

As if to strengthen the idea, now and then above the trees would burst
what seemed a rocket of coloured stars. The stars would drift away in a
flock on the wind and be lost. They were flights of birds. All-coloured birds
peopled the trees below—blue, scarlet, dove-coloured, bright of eye, but
voiceless. From the reef you could see occasionally the sea-gulls rising here
and there in clouds like small puffs of smoke.

The lagoon, here deep, here shallow, presented, according to its depth or
shallowness, the colours of ultra-marine or sky. The broadest parts were the
palest, because the most shallow; and here and there, in the shallows, you
might see a faint tracery of coral ribs almost reaching the surface. The
island at its broadest might have been three miles across. There was not a
sign of house or habitation to be seen, and not a sail on the whole of the
wide Pacific.

It was a strange place to be, up here. To find oneself surrounded by grass
and flowers and trees, and all the kindliness of nature, to feel the breeze
blow, to smoke one’s pipe, and to remember that one was in a place
uninhabited and unknown. A place to which no messages were ever carried
except by the wind or the sea-gulls.

In this solitude the beetle was as carefully painted and the flower as
carefully tended as though all the peoples of the civilised world were
standing by to criticise or approve.

Nowhere in the world, perhaps, so well as here, could you appreciate
Nature’s splendid indifference to the great affairs of Man.

The old sailor was thinking nothing of this sort. His eyes were fixed on a
small and almost imperceptible stain on the horizon to the sou’-sou’-west. It
was no doubt another island almost hull-down on the horizon. Save for this
blemish the whole wheel of the sea was empty and serene.

Emmeline had not followed them up to the rock. She had gone
botanising where some bushes displayed great bunches of the crimson arita
berries as if to show to the sun what Earth could do in the way of
manufacturing poison. She plucked two great bunches of them, and with
this treasure came to the base of the rock.

“Lave thim berries down!” cried Mr Button, when she had attracted his
attention. “Don’t put thim in your mouth; thim’s the never-wake-up
berries.”

He came down off the rock, hand over fist, flung the poisonous things
away, and looked into Emmeline’s small mouth, which at his command she
opened wide. There was only a little pink tongue in it, however, curled up
like a rose-leaf; no sign of berries or poison. So, giving her a little shake,
just as a nursemaid would have done in like circumstances, he took Dick off
the rock, and led the way back to the beach.

CHAPTER XIV

ECHOES OF FAIRY-LAND

“Mr Button,” said Emmeline that night, as they sat on the sand near the
tent he had improvised, “Mr Button—cats go to sleep.”

They had been questioning him about the “never-wake-up” berries.

“Who said they didn’t?” asked Mr Button.

“I mean,” said Emmeline, “they go to sleep and never wake up again.
Ours did. It had stripes on it, and a white chest, and rings all down its tail. It
went asleep in the garden, all stretched out, and showing its teeth; an’ I told
Jane, and Dicky ran in an’ told uncle. I went to Mrs Sims, the doctor’s wife,
to tea; and when I came back I asked Jane where pussy was—and she said it
was deadn’ berried, but I wasn’t to tell uncle.”

“I remember,” said Dick. “It was the day I went to the circus, and you
told me not to tell daddy the cat was deadn’ berried. But I told Mrs James’s
man when he came to do the garden; and I asked him where cats went when
they were deadn’ berried, and he said he guessed they went to hell—at least
he hoped they did, for they were always scratchin’ up the flowers. Then he
told me not to tell any one he’d said that, for it was a swear word, and he
oughtn’t to have said it. I asked him what he’d give me if I didn’t tell, an’ he
gave me five cents. That was the day I bought the cocoa-nut.”

The tent, a makeshift affair, consisting of two sculls and a tree branch,
which Mr Button had sawed off from a dwarf aoa, and the stay-sail he had
brought from the brig, was pitched in the centre of the beach, so as to be out
of the way of falling cocoa-nuts, should the breeze strengthen during the
night. The sun had set, but the moon had not yet risen as they sat in the
starlight on the sand near the temporary abode.

“What’s the things you said made the boots for the people, Paddy?”
asked Dick, after a pause.

“Which things?”

“You said in the wood I wasn’t to talk, else—”

“Oh, the Cluricaunes—the little men that cobbles the Good People’s
brogues. Is it them you mane?”

“Yes,” said Dick, not knowing quite whether it was them or not that he
meant, but anxious for information that he felt would be curious. “And what
are the good people?”

“Sure, where were you born and bred that you don’t know the Good
People is the other name for the fairies—savin’ their presence?”

“There aren’t any,” replied Dick. “Mrs Sims said there weren’t.”

“Mrs James,” put in Emmeline, “said there were. She said she liked to
see children b’lieve in fairies. She was talking to another lady, who’d got a
red feather in her bonnet, and a fur muff. They were having tea, and I was
sitting on the hearthrug. She said the world was getting too—something or
another, an’ then the other lady said it was, and asked Mrs James did she see
Mrs Someone in the awful hat she wore Thanksgiving Day. They didn’t say
anything more about fairies, but Mrs James——”

“Whether you b’lave in them or not,” said Paddy, “there they are. An’
maybe they’re poppin’ out of the wood behint us now, an’ listenin’ to us
talkin’; though I’m doubtful if there’s any in these parts, though down in
Connaught they were as thick as blackberries in the ould days. O musha!
musha! the ould days, the ould days! when will I be seein’ thim again?
Now, you may b’lave me or b’lave me not, but me own ould father—God
rest his sowl!—was comin’ over Croagh Patrick one night before Christmas
with a bottle of whisky in one hand of him, and a goose, plucked an’ claned
an’ all, in the other, which same he’d won in a lottery, when, hearin’ a
tchune no louder than the buzzin’ of a bee, over a furze-bush he peeps, and
there, round a big white stone, the Good People were dancing in a ring hand
in hand, an’ kickin’ their heels, an’ the eyes of them glowin’ like the eyes of
moths; and a chap on the stone, no bigger than the joint of your thumb,
playin’ to thim on a bagpipes. Wid that he let wan yell an’ drops the goose
an’ makes for home, over hedge an’ ditch, boundin’ like a buck kangaroo,
an’ the face on him as white as flour when he burst in through the door,

where we was all sittin’ round the fire burnin’ chestnuts to see who’d be
married the first.

“‘An’ what in the name of the saints is the mather wid yiz?’ says me
mother.

“‘I’ve sane the Good People,’ says he, ‘up on the field beyant,’ says he;
‘and they’ve got the goose,’ says he, ‘but, begorra, I’ve saved the bottle,’ he
says. ‘Dhraw the cork and give me a taste of it, for me heart’s in me throat,
and me tongue’s like a brick-kil.’

“An’ whin we come to prize the cork out of the bottle, there was nothin’
in it; an’ whin we went next marnin’ to look for the goose, it was gone. But
there was the stone, sure enough, and the marks on it of the little brogues of
the chap that’d played the bagpipes—and who’d be doubtin’ there were
fairies after that?”

The children said nothing for a while, and then Dick said:

“Tell us about Cluricaunes, and how they make the boots.”

“Whin I’m tellin’ you about Cluricaunes,” said Mr Button, “it’s the truth
I’m tellin’ you, an’ out of me own knowlidge, for I’ve spoken to a man
that’s held wan in his hand; he was me own mother’s brother, Con Cogan—
rest his sowl! Con was six fut two, wid a long, white face; he’d had his head
bashed in, years before I was barn, in some ruction or other, an’ the docthers
had japanned him with a five-shillin’ piece beat flat.”

Dick interposed with a question as to the process, aim, and object of
japanning, but Mr Button passed the question by.

“He’d been bad enough for seein’ fairies before they japanned him, but
afther it, begorra, he was twiced as bad. I was a slip of a lad at the time, but
me hair near turned grey wid the tales he’d tell of the Good People and their
doin’s. One night they’d turn him into a harse an’ ride him half over the
county, wan chap on his back an’ another runnin’ behind, shovin’ furze
prickles under his tail to make him buck-lep. Another night it’s a dunkey
he’d be, harnessed to a little cart, an’ bein’ kicked in the belly and made to

draw stones. Thin it’s a goose he’d be, runnin’ over the common wid his
neck stritched out squawkin’, an’ an old fairy woman afther him wid a
knife, till it fair drove him to the dhrink; though, by the same token, he
didn’t want much dhrivin’.

“And what does he do when his money was gone, but tear the five-
shillin’ piece they’d japanned him wid aff the top of his hed, and swaps it
for a bottle of whisky, and that was the end of him.”

Mr Button paused to relight his pipe, which had gone out, and there was
silence for a moment.

The moon had risen, and the song of the surf on the reef filled the whole
night with its lullaby. The broad lagoon lay waving and rippling in the
moonlight to the incoming tide. Twice as broad it always looked seen by
moonlight or starlight than when seen by day. Occasionally the splash of a
great fish would cross the silence, and the ripple of it would pass a moment
later across the placid water.

Big things happened in the lagoon at night, unseen by eyes from the
shore. You would have found the wood behind them, had you walked
through it, full of light. A tropic forest under a tropic moon is green as a sea
cave. You can see the vine tendrils and the flowers, the orchids and tree
boles all lit as by the light of an emerald-tinted day.

Mr Button took a long piece of string from his pocket.

“It’s bedtime,” said he; “and I’m going to tether Em’leen, for fear she’d
be walkin’ in her slape, and wandherin’ away an’ bein’ lost in the woods.”

“I don’t want to be tethered,” said Emmeline.

“It’s for your own good I’m doin’ it,” replied Mr Button, fixing the string
round her waist. “Now come ’long.”

He led her like a dog in a leash to the tent, and tied the other end of the
string to the scull, which was the tent’s main prop and support.

“Now,” said he, “if you be gettin’ up and walkin’ about in the night, it’s
down the tint will be on top of us all.”

And, sure enough, in the small hours of the morning, it was.

CHAPTER XV

FAIR PICTURES IN THE BLUE

“I don’t want my old britches on! I don’t want my old britches on!”

Dick was darting about naked on the sand, Mr Button after him with a
pair of small trousers in his hand. A crab might just as well have attempted
to chase an antelope.

They had been on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered the
keenest joy in life—to be naked. To be naked and wallow in the shallows of
the lagoon, to be naked and sit drying in the sun. To be free from the curse
of clothes, to shed civilisation on the beach in the form of breeches, boots,
coat, and hat, and to be one with the wind and the sun and the sea.

The very first command Mr Button had given on the second morning of
their arrival was, “Strip and into the water wid you.”

Dick had resisted at first, and Emmeline (who rarely wept) had stood
weeping in her little chemise. But Mr Button was obdurate. The difficulty at
first was to get them in; the difficulty now was to keep them out.

Emmeline was sitting as nude as the day star, drying in the morning sun
after her dip, and watching Dick’s evolutions on the sand.

The lagoon had for the children far more attraction than the land. Woods
where you might knock ripe bananas off the trees with a big cane, sands
where golden lizards would scuttle about so tame that you might with a

little caution seize them by the tail, a hill-top from whence you might see,
to use Paddy’s expression, “to the back of beyond”; all these were fine
enough in their way, but they were nothing to the lagoon.

Deep down where the coral branches were you might watch, whilst
Paddy fished, all sorts of things disporting on the sand patches and between
the coral tufts. Hermit crabs that had evicted whelks, wearing the evicted
ones’ shells—an obvious misfit; sea anemones as big as roses. Flowers that
closed up in an irritable manner if you lowered the hook gently down and
touched them; extraordinary shells that walked about on feelers, elbowing
the crabs out of the way and terrorising the whelks. The overlords of the
sand patches, these; yet touch one on the back with a stone tied to a bit of
string, and down he would go flat, motionless and feigning death. There
was a lot of human nature lurking in the depths of the lagoon, comedy and
tragedy.

An English rock-pool has its marvels. You can fancy the marvels of this
vast rock-pool, nine miles round and varying from a third to half a mile
broad, swarming with tropic life and flights of painted fishes; where the
glittering albicore passed beneath the boat like a fire and a shadow; where
the boat’s reflection lay as clear on the bottom as though the water were air;
where the sea, pacified by the reef, told, like a little child, its dreams.

It suited the lazy humour of Mr Button that he never pursued the lagoon
more than half a mile or so on either side of the beach. He would bring the
fish he caught ashore, and with the aid of his tinder box and dead sticks
make a blazing fire on the sand; cook fish and breadfruit and taro roots,
helped and hindered by the children. They fixed the tent amidst the trees at
the edge of the chapparel, and made it larger and more abiding with the aid
of the dinghy’s sail.

Amidst these occupations, wonders, and pleasures, the children lost all
count of the flight of time. They rarely asked about Mr Lestrange; after a
while they did not ask about him at all. Children soon forget.

PART III

CHAPTER XVI

THE POETRY OF LEARNING

To forget the passage of time you must live in the open air, in a warm
climate, with as few clothes as possible upon you. You must collect and
cook your own food. Then, after a while, if you have no special ties to bind
you to civilisation, Nature will begin to do for you what she does for the
savage. You will recognise that it is possible to be happy without books or
newspapers, letters or bills. You will recognise the part sleep plays in
Nature.

After a month on the island you might have seen Dick at one moment
full of life and activity, helping Mr Button to dig up a taro root or what not,
the next curled up to sleep like a dog. Emmeline the same. Profound and
prolonged lapses into sleep; sudden awakenings into a world of pure air and
dazzling light, the gaiety of colour all round. Nature had indeed opened her
doors to these children.

One might have fancied her in an experimental mood, saying: “Let me
put these buds of civilisation back into my nursery and see what they will
become—how they will blossom, and what will be the end of it all.”

Just as Emmeline had brought away her treasured box from the
Northumberland, Dick had conveyed with him a small linen bag that
chinked when shaken. It contained marbles. Small olive-green marbles and
middle-sized ones of various colours; glass marbles with splendid coloured
cores; and one large old grandfather marble too big to be played with, but
none the less to be worshipped—a god marble.

Of course one cannot play at marbles on board ship, but one can play
with them. They had been a great comfort to Dick on the voyage. He knew
them each personally, and he would roll them out on the mattress of his
bunk and review them nearly every day, whilst Emmeline looked on.

One day Mr Button, noticing Dick and the girl kneeling opposite each
other on a flat, hard piece of sand near the water’s edge, strolled up to see
what they were doing. They were playing marbles. He stood with his hands
in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth watching and criticising the game,
pleased that the “childer” were amused. Then he began to be amused
himself, and in a few minutes more he was down on his knees taking a
hand; Emmeline, a poor player and an unenthusiastic one, withdrawing in
his favour.

After that it was a common thing to see them playing together, the old
sailor on his knees, one eye shut, and a marble against the nail of his horny
thumb taking aim; Dick and Emmeline on the watch to make sure he was
playing fair, their shrill voices echoing amidst the cocoa-nut trees with cries
of “Knuckle down, Paddy, knuckle down!” He entered into all their
amusements just as one of themselves. On high and rare occasions
Emmeline would open her precious box, spread its contents and give a tea-
party, Mr Button acting as guest or president as the case might be.

“Is your tay to your likin’, ma’am?” he would enquire; and Emmeline,
sipping at her tiny cup, would invariably make answer: “Another lump of
sugar, if you please, Mr Button;” to which would come the stereotyped
reply: “Take a dozen, and welcome; and another cup for the good of your
make.”

Then Emmeline would wash the things in imaginary water, replace them
in the box, and every one would lose their company manners and become
quite natural again.

“Have you ever seen your name, Paddy?” asked Dick one morning.

“Seen me which?”

“Your name?”

“Arrah, don’t be axin’ me questions,” replied the other. “How the divil
could I see me name?”

“Wait and I’ll show you,” replied Dick.

He ran and fetched a piece of cane, and a minute later on the salt-white
sand in face of orthography and the sun appeared these portentous letters:

BUTTEN

“Faith, an’ it’s a cliver boy y’are,” said Mr Button admiringly, as he
leaned luxuriously against a cocoa-nut tree, and contemplated Dick’s
handiwork. “And that’s me name, is it? What’s the letters in it?”

Dick enumerated them.

“I’ll teach you to do it, too,” he said. “I’ll teach you to write your name,
Paddy—would you like to write your name, Paddy?”

“No,” replied the other, who only wanted to be let smoke his pipe in
peace; “me name’s no use to me.”

But Dick, with the terrible gadfly tirelessness of childhood, was not to be
put off, and the unfortunate Mr Button had to go to school despite himself.
In a few days he could achieve the act of drawing upon the sand characters
somewhat like the above, but not without prompting, Dick and Emmeline
on each side of him, breathless for fear of a mistake.

“Which next?” would ask the sweating scribe, the perspiration pouring
from his forehead—“which next? an’ be quick, for it’s moithered I am.”

“N. N.—that’s right—Ow, you’re making it crooked!—that’s right—
there! it’s all there now—Hurroo!”

“Hurroo!” would answer the scholar, waving his old hat over his own
name, and “Hurroo!” would answer the cocoa-nut grove echoes; whilst the
far, faint “Hi hi!” of the wheeling gulls on the reef would come over the
blue lagoon as if in acknowledgment of the deed, and encouragement.

The appetite comes with teaching. The pleasantest mental exercise of
childhood is the instruction of one’s elders. Even Emmeline felt this. She
took the geography class one day in a timid manner, putting her little hand
first in the great horny fist of her friend.

“Mr Button!”

“Well, honey?”

“I know g’ography.”

“And what’s that?” asked Mr Button.

This stumped Emmeline for a moment.

“It’s where places are,” she said at last.

“Which places?” enquired he.

“All sorts of places,” replied Emmeline. “Mr Button!”

“What is it, darlin’?”

“Would you like to learn g’ography?”

“I’m not wishful for larnin’,” said the other hurriedly. “It makes me head
buzz to hear them things they rade out of books.”

“Paddy,” said Dick, who was strong on drawing that afternoon, “look
here.” He drew the following on the sand:

[Illustration: A bad drawing of an elephant]

“That’s an elephant,” he said in a dubious voice.

Mr Button grunted, and the sound was by no means filled with
enthusiastic assent. A chill fell on the proceedings.

Dick wiped the elephant slowly and regretfully out, whilst Emmeline felt
disheartened. Then her face suddenly cleared; the seraphic smile came into
it for a moment—a bright idea had struck her.

“Dicky,” she said, “draw Henry the Eight.”

Dick’s face brightened. He cleared the sand and drew the following
figure:
l l
<[ ]>
/ \

“That’s not Henry the Eight,” he explained, “but he will be in a minute.
Daddy showed me how to draw him; he’s nothing till he gets his hat on.”

“Put his hat on, put his hat on!” implored Emmeline, gazing alternately
from the figure on the sand to Mr Button’s face, watching for the delighted
smile with which she was sure the old man would greet the great king when
he appeared in all his glory.

Then Dick with a single stroke of the cane put Henry’s hat on.
=== l
l l
<[ ]>
/ \

Now, no portrait could be liker to his monk-hunting majesty than the
above, created with one stroke of a cane (so to speak), yet Mr Button
remained unmoved.

“I did it for Mrs Sims,” said Dick regretfully, “and she said it was the
image of him.”

“Maybe the hat’s not big enough,” said Emmeline, turning her head from
side to side as she gazed at the picture. It looked right, but she felt there
must be something wrong, as Mr Button did not applaud. Has not every true
artist felt the same before the silence of some critic?

Mr Button tapped the ashes out of his pipe and rose to stretch himself,
and the class rose and trooped down to the lagoon edge, leaving Henry and
his hat a figure on the sand to be obliterated by the wind.

After a while, as time went on, Mr Button took to his lessons as a matter
of course, the small inventions of the children assisting their utterly
untrustworthy knowledge. Knowledge, perhaps, as useful as any other there
amidst the lovely poetry of the palm trees and the sky.

Days slipped into weeks, and weeks into months, without the appearance
of a ship—a fact which gave Mr Button very little trouble; and even less to
his charges, who were far too busy and amused to bother about ships.

The rainy season came on them with a rush, and at the words “rainy
season” do not conjure up in your mind the vision of a rainy day in
Manchester.

The rainy season here was quite a lively time. Torrential showers
followed by bursts of sunshine, rainbows, and rain-dogs in the sky, and the
delicious perfume of all manner of growing things on the earth.

After the rains the old sailor said he’d be after making a house of
bamboos before the next rains came on them; but, maybe, before that they’d
be off the island.

“However,” said he, “I’ll dra’ you a picture of what it’ll be like when it’s
up;” and on the sand he drew a figure like this:
X

Having thus drawn the plans of the building, he leaned back against a
cocoa-palm and lit his pipe. But he had reckoned without Dick.

The boy had not the least wish to live in a house, but he had a keen
desire to see one built, and help to build one. The ingenuity which is part of
the multiform basis of the American nature was aroused.

“How’re you going to keep them from slipping, if you tie them together
like that?” he asked, when Paddy had more fully explained his method.

“Which from slippin’?”

“The canes—one from the other?”

“After you’ve fixed thim, one cross t’other, you drive a nail through the
cross-piece and a rope over all.”

“Have you any nails, Paddy?”

“No,” said Mr Button, “I haven’t.”

“Then how’re you goin’ to build the house?”

“Ax me no questions now; I want to smoke me pipe.”

But he had raised a devil difficult to lay. Morning, noon, and night it was
“Paddy, when are you going to begin the house?” or, “Paddy, I guess I’ve
got a way to make the canes stick together without nailing.” Till Mr Button,
in despair, like a beaver, began to build.

There was great cane-cutting in the cane-brake above, and, when
sufficient had been procured, Mr Button struck work for three days. He
would have struck altogether, but he had found a taskmaster.

The tireless Dick, young and active, with no original laziness in his
composition, no old bones to rest, or pipe to smoke, kept after him like a
bluebottle fly. It was in vain that he tried to stave him off with stories about
fairies and Cluricaunes. Dick wanted to build a house.

Mr Button didn’t. He wanted to rest. He did not mind fishing or climbing
a cocoa-nut tree, which he did to admiration by passing a rope round
himself and the tree, knotting it, and using it as a support during the climb;
but house-building was monotonous work.

He said he had no nails. Dick countered by showing how the canes could
be held together by notching them.

“And, faith, but it’s a cliver boy you are,” said the weary one admiringly,
when the other had explained his method.

“Then come along, Paddy, and stick ’em up.”

Mr Button said he had no rope, that he’d have to think about it, that to-
morrow or next day he’d be after getting some notion how to do it without
rope. But Dick pointed out that the brown cloth which Nature has wrapped
round the cocoa-palm stalks would do instead of rope if cut in strips. Then
the badgered one gave in.

They laboured for a fortnight at the thing, and at the end of that time had
produced a rough sort of wigwam on the borders of the chapparel.

Out on the reef, to which they often rowed in the dinghy, when the tide
was low, deep pools would be left, and in the pools fish. Paddy said if they
had a spear they might be able to spear some of these fish, as he had seen
the natives do away “beyant” in Tahiti.

Dick enquired as to the nature of a spear, and next day produced a ten-
foot cane sharpened at the end after the fashion of a quill pen.

“Sure, what’s the use of that?” said Mr Button. “You might job it into a
fish, but he’d be aff it in two ticks; it’s the barb that holds them.”

Next day the indefatigable one produced the cane amended; he had
whittled it down about three feet from the end and on one side, and carved a
fairly efficient barb. It was good enough, at all events, to spear a “groper”
with, that evening, in the sunset-lit pools of the reef at low tide.

“There aren’t any potatoes here,” said Dick one day, after the second
rains.

“We’ve et ’em all months ago,” replied Paddy.

“How do potatoes grow?” enquired Dick.

“Grow, is it? Why, they grow in the ground; and where else would they
grow?” He explained the process of potato-planting: cutting them into
pieces so that there was an eye in each piece, and so forth. “Having done
this,” said Mr Button, “you just chuck the pieces in the ground; their eyes

grow, green leaves ‘pop up,’ and then, if you dug the roots up maybe, six
months after, you’d find bushels of potatoes in the ground, ones as big as
your head, and weeny ones. It’s like a family of childer—some’s big and
some’s little. But there they are in the ground, and all you have to do is to
take a fark and dig a potful of them with a turn of your wrist, as many a
time I’ve done it in the ould days.”

“Why didn’t we do that?” asked Dick.

“Do what?” asked Mr Button.

“Plant some of the potatoes.”

“And where’d we have found the spade to plant them with?”

“I guess we could have fixed up a spade,” replied the boy. “I made a
spade at home, out of a piece of old board, once—daddy helped.”

“Well, skelp off with you, and make a spade now,” replied the other, who
wanted to be quiet and think, “and you and Em’line can dig in the sand.”

Emmeline was sitting near by, stringing together some gorgeous
blossoms on a tendril of liana. Months of sun and ozone had made a
considerable difference in the child. She was as brown as a gipsy and
freckled, not very much taller, but twice as plump. Her eyes had lost
considerably that look as though she were contemplating futurity and
immensity—not as abstractions, but as concrete images, and she had lost
the habit of sleep-walking.

The shock of the tent coming down on the first night she was tethered to
the scull had broken her of it, helped by the new healthful conditions of life,
the sea-bathing, and the eternal open air. There is no narcotic to excel fresh
air.

Months of semi-savagery had made also a good deal of difference in
Dick’s appearance. He was two inches taller than on the day they landed.
Freckled and tanned, he had the appearance of a boy of twelve. He was the
promise of a fine man. He was not a good-looking child, but he was

healthy-looking, with a jolly laugh, and a daring, almost impudent
expression of face.

The question of the children’s clothes was beginning to vex the mind of
the old sailor. The climate was a suit of clothes in itself. One was much
happier with almost nothing on. Of course there were changes of
temperature, but they were slight. Eternal summer, broken by torrential
rains, and occasionally a storm, that was the climate of the island; still, the
“childer” couldn’t go about with nothing on.

He took some of the striped flannel and made Emmeline a kilt. It was
funny to see him sitting on the sand, Emmeline standing before him with
her garment round her waist, being tried on; he, with a mouthful of pins,
and the housewife with the scissors, needles, and thread by his side.

“Turn to the lift a bit more,” he’d say, “aisy does it. Stidy so—musha!
musha! where’s thim scissors? Dick, be holdin’ the end of this bit of string
till I get the stitches in behint. Does that hang comfortable?—well, an’
you’re the trouble an’ all. How’s that? That’s aisier, is it? Lift your fut till I
see if it comes to your knees. Now off with it, and lave me alone till I stitch
the tags to it.”

It was the mixture of a skirt and the idea of a sail, for it had two rows of
reef points; a most ingenious idea, as it could be reefed if the child wanted
to go paddling, or in windy weather.

CHAPTER XVII

THE DEVIL’S CASK

One morning, about a week after the day on which the old sailor, to use
his own expression, had bent a skirt on Emmeline, Dick came through the
woods and across the sands running. He had been on the hill-top.

“Paddy,” he cried to the old man, who was fixing a hook on a fishing-
line, “there’s a ship!”

It did not take Mr Button long to reach the hill-top, and there she was,
beating up for the island. Bluff-bowed and squab, the figure of an old Dutch
woman, and telling of her trade a league off. It was just after the rains, the
sky was not yet quite clear of clouds; you could see showers away at sea,
and the sea was green and foam-capped.

There was the trying-out gear; there were the boats, the crow’s nest, and
all complete, and labelling her a whaler. She was a ship, no doubt, but
Paddy Button would as soon have gone on board a ship manned by devils,
and captained by Lucifer, as on board a South Sea whaleman. He had been
there before, and he knew.

He hid the children under a large banyan, and told them not to stir or
breathe till he came back, for the ship was “the devil’s own ship”; and if the
men on board caught them they’d skin them alive and all.

Then he made for the beach; he collected all the things out of the
wigwam, and all the old truck in the shape of boots and old clothes, and
stowed them away in the dinghy. He would have destroyed the house, if he
could, but he hadn’t time. Then he rowed the dinghy a hundred yards down
the lagoon to the left, and moored her under the shade of an aoa, whose
branches grew right over the water. Then he came back through the cocoa-
nut grove on foot, and peered through the trees over the lagoon to see what
was to be seen.

The wind was blowing dead on for the opening in the reef, and the old
whaleman came along breasting the swell with her bluff bows, and entered
the lagoon. There was no leadsman in her chains. She just came in as if she
knew all the soundings by heart—as probably she did—for these whalemen
know every hole and corner in the Pacific.

The anchor fell with a splash, and she swung to it, making a strange
enough picture as she floated on the blue mirror, backed by the graceful
palm tree on the reef. Then Mr Button, without waiting to see the boats

lowered, made back to his charges, and the three camped in the woods that
night.

Next morning the whaleman was off and away, leaving as a token of her
visit the white sand all trampled, an empty bottle, half an old newspaper,
and the wigwam torn to pieces.

The old sailor cursed her and her crew, for the incident had brought a
new exercise into his lazy life. Every day now at noon he had to climb the
hill, on the look-out for whalemen. Whalemen haunted his dreams, though I
doubt if he would willingly have gone on board even a Royal Mail steamer.
He was quite happy where he was. After long years of the fo’cs’le the island
was a change indeed. He had tobacco enough to last him for an indefinite
time, the children for companions, and food at his elbow. He would have
been entirely happy if the island had only been supplied by Nature with a
public-house.

The spirit of hilarity and good fellowship, however, who suddenly
discovered this error on the part of Nature, rectified it, as will be presently
seen.

The most disastrous result of the whaleman’s visit was not the
destruction of the “house,” but the disappearance of Emmeline’s box. Hunt
high or hunt low, it could not be found. Mr Button in his hurry must have
forgotten it when he removed the things to the dinghy—at all events, it was
gone. Probably one of the crew of the whalemen had found it and carried it
off with him; no one could say. It was gone, and there was the end of the
matter, and the beginning of great tribulation, that lasted Emmeline for a
week.

She was intensely fond of coloured things, coloured flowers especially;
and she had the prettiest way of making them into a wreath for her own or
some one else’s head. It was the hat-making instinct that was at work in her,
perhaps; at all events, it was a feminine instinct, for Dick made no wreaths.

One morning, as she was sitting by the old sailor engaged in stringing
shells, Dick came running along the edge of the grove. He had just come
out of the wood, and he seemed to be looking for something. Then he found

what he was in search of—a big shell—and with it in his hand made back to
the wood.

Item.—His dress was a piece of cocoa-nut cloth tied round his middle.
Why he wore it at all, goodness knows, for he would as often as not be
running about stark naked.

“I’ve found something, Paddy!” he cried, as he disappeared among the
trees.

“What have you found?” piped Emmeline, who was always interested in
new things.

“Something funny!” came back from amidst the trees.

Presently he returned; but he was not running now. He was walking
slowly and carefully, holding the shell as if it contained something precious
that he was afraid would escape.

“Paddy, I turned over the old barrel and it had a cork thing in it, and I
pulled it out, and the barrel is full of awfully funny-smelling stuff—I’ve
brought some for you to see.”

He gave the shell into the old sailor’s hands. There was about half a gill
of yellow liquid in the shell. Paddy smelt it, tasted, and gave a shout.

“Rum, begorra!”

“What is it, Paddy?” asked Emmeline.

“Where did you say you got it—in the ould bar’l, did you say?” asked
Mr Button, who seemed dazed and stunned as if by a blow.

“Yes; I pulled the cork thing out—”

“Did yiz put it back?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, glory be to God! Here have I been, time out of mind, sittin’ on an
ould empty bar’l, with me tongue hangin’ down to me heels for the want of
a drink, and it full of rum all the while!”

He took a sip of the stuff, tossed the lot off, closed his lips tight to keep
in the fumes, and shut one eye.

Emmeline laughed.

Mr Button scrambled to his feet. They followed him through the
chapparel till they reached the water source. There lay the little green
barrel; turned over by the restless Dick, it lay with its bung pointing to the
leaves above. You could see the hollow it had made in the soft soil during
the years. So green was it, and so like an object of nature, a bit of old tree-
bole, or a lichen-stained boulder, that though the whalemen had actually
watered from the source, its real nature had not been discovered.

Mr Button tapped on it with the butt end of the shell: it was nearly full.
Why it had been left there, by whom, or how, there was no one to tell. The
old lichen-covered skulls might have told, could they have spoken.

“We’ll rowl it down to the beach,” said Paddy, when he had taken
another taste of it.

He gave Dick a sip. The boy spat it out, and made a face, then, pushing
the barrel before them, they began to roll it downhill to the beach,
Emmeline running before them crowned with flowers.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE RAT HUNT

They had dinner at noon. Paddy knew how to cook fish, island fashion,
wrapping them in leaves, and baking them in a hole in the ground in which

a fire had previously been lit. They had fish and taro root baked, and green
cocoa-nuts; and after dinner Mr Button filled a big shell with rum, and lit
his pipe.

The rum had been good originally, and age had improved it. Used as he
was to the appalling balloon juice sold in the drinking dens of the “Barbary
coast” at San Francisco, or the public-houses of the docks, this stuff was
nectar.

Joviality radiated from him: it was infectious. The children felt that some
happy influence had fallen upon their friend. Usually after dinner he was
drowsy and “wishful to be quiet.” To-day he told them stories of the sea,
and sang them songs—chantys:
“I’m a flyin’ fish sailor come back from Hong Kong,
Yeo ho! blow the man down.
Blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down,
Oh, give us time to blow the man down.
You’re a dhirty black-baller come back from New York,
Yeo ho! blow the man down,
Blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down.
Oh, give us time to blow the man down.”

“Oh, give us time to blow the man down!” echoed Dick and Emmeline.

Up above, in the trees, the bright-eyed birds were watching them—such
a happy party. They had all the appearance of picnickers, and the song
echoed amongst the cocoa-nut trees, and the wind carried it over the lagoon
to where the sea-gulls were wheeling and screaming, and the foam was
thundering on the reef.

That evening, Mr Button feeling inclined for joviality, and not wishing
the children to see him under the influence, rolled the barrel through the
cocoa-nut grove to a little clearing by the edge of the water. There, when the
children were in bed and asleep, he repaired with some green cocoa-nuts
and a shell. He was generally musical when amusing himself in this
fashion, and Emmeline, waking up during the night, heard his voice borne
through the moonlit cocoa-nut grove by the wind:
“There were five or six old drunken sailors
Standin’ before the bar,

And Larry, he was servin’ them
From a big five-gallon jar.

“Chorus.—
Hoist up the flag, long may it wave!
Long may it lade us to glory or the grave.
Stidy, boys, stidy—sound the jubilee,
For Babylon has fallen, and the niggers are all set free.”

Next morning the musician awoke beside the cask. He had not a trace of
a headache, or any bad feeling, but he made Dick do the cooking; and he
lay in the shade of the cocoa-nut trees, with his head on a “pilla” made out
of an old coat rolled up, twiddling his thumbs, smoking his pipe, and
discoursing about the “ould” days, half to himself and half to his
companions.

That night he had another musical evening all to himself, and so it went
on for a week. Then he began to lose his appetite and sleep; and one
morning Dick found him sitting on the sand looking very queer indeed—as
well he might, for he had been “seeing things” since dawn.

“What is it, Paddy?” said the boy, running up, followed by Emmeline.

Mr Button was staring at a point on the sand close by. He had his right
hand raised after the manner of a person who is trying to catch a fly.
Suddenly he made a grab at the sand, and then opened his hand wide to see
what he had caught.

“What is it, Paddy?”

“The Cluricaune,” replied Mr Button. “All dressed in green he was—
musha! musha! but it’s only pretindin’ I am.”

The complaint from which he was suffering has this strange thing about
it, that, though the patient sees rats, or snakes, or what not, as real-looking
as the real things, and though they possess his mind for a moment, almost
immediately he recognises that he is suffering from a delusion.

The children laughed, and Mr Button laughed in a stupid sort of way.

“Sure, it was only a game I was playin’—there was no Cluricaune at all
—it’s whin I dhrink rum it puts it into me head to play games like that. Oh,
be the Holy Poker, there’s red rats comin’ out of the sand!”

He got on his hands and knees and scuttled off towards the cocoa-nut
trees, looking over his shoulder with a bewildered expression on his face.
He would have risen to fly, only he dared not stand up.

The children laughed and danced round him as he crawled.

“Look at the rats, Paddy! look at the rats!” cried Dick.

“They’re in front of me!” cried the afflicted one, making a vicious grab
at an imaginary rodent’s tail. “Ran dan the bastes!—now they’re gone.
Musha, but it’s a fool I’m makin’ of meself.”

“Go on, Paddy,” said Dick; “don’t stop— Look there—there’s more rats
coming after you!”

“Oh, whisht, will you?” replied Paddy, taking his seat on the sand, and
wiping his brow. “They’re aff me now.”

The children stood by, disappointed of their game. Good acting appeals
to children just as much as to grown-up people. They stood waiting for
another access of humour to take the comedian, and they had not to wait
long.

A thing like a flayed horse came out of the lagoon and up the beach, and
this time Mr Button did not crawl away. He got on his feet and ran.

“It’s a harse that’s afther me—it’s a harse that’s afther me! Dick! Dick!
hit him a skelp. Dick! Dick! dhrive him away.”

“Hurroo! Hurroo!” cried Dick, chasing the afflicted one, who was
running in a wide circle, his broad red face slewed over his left shoulder.
“Go it, Paddy! go it, Paddy!”

“Kape off me, you baste!” shouted Paddy. “Holy Mary, Mother of God!
I’ll land you a kick wid me fut if yiz come nigh me. Em’leen! Em’leen!

come betune us!”

He tripped, and over he went on the sand, the indefatigable Dick beating
him with a little switch he had picked up to make him continue.

“I’m better now, but I’m near wore out,” said Mr Button, sitting up on
the sand. “But, bedad, if I’m chased by any more things like them it’s into
the say I’ll be dashin’. Dick, lend me your arum.”

He took Dick’s arm and wandered over to the shade of the trees. Here he
threw himself down, and told the children to leave him to sleep. They
recognised that the game was over and left him. And he slept for six hours
on end; it was the first real sleep he had had for several days. When he
awoke he was well, but very shaky.

CHAPTER XIX

STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM

Mr Button saw no more rats, much to Dick’s disappointment. He was off
the drink. At dawn next day he got up, refreshed by a second sleep, and
wandered down to the edge of the lagoon. The opening in the reef faced the
east, and the light of the dawn came rippling in with the flooding tide.

“It’s a baste I’ve been,” said the repentant one—“a brute baste.”

He was quite wrong; as a matter of fact, he was only a man beset and
betrayed.

He stood for a while, cursing the drink, “and them that sells it.” Then he
determined to put himself out of the way of temptation. Pull the bung out of
the barrel, and let the contents escape?

Such a thought never even occurred to him—or, if it did, was instantly
dismissed; for, though an old sailor-man may curse the drink, good rum is
to him a sacred thing; and to empty half a little barrel of it into the sea,
would be an act almost equivalent to child-murder. He put the cask into the
dinghy, and rowed it over to the reef. There he placed it in the shelter of a
great lump of coral, and rowed back.

Paddy had been trained all his life to rhythmical drunkenness. Four
months or so had generally elapsed between his bouts—sometimes six; it all
depended on the length of the voyage. Six months now elapsed before he
felt even an inclination to look at the rum cask, that tiny dark spot away on
the reef. And it was just as well, for during those six months another whale-
ship arrived, watered and was avoided.

“Blisther it!” said he; “the say here seems to breed whale-ships, and
nothin’ but whale-ships. It’s like bugs in a bed: you kill wan, and then
another comes. Howsomever, we’re shut of thim for a while.”

He walked down to the lagoon edge, looked at the little dark spot and
whistled. Then he walked back to prepare dinner. That little dark spot began
to trouble him after a while; not it, but the spirit it contained.

Days grew long and weary, the days that had been so short and pleasant.
To the children there was no such thing as time. Having absolute and
perfect health, they enjoyed happiness as far as mortals can enjoy it.
Emmeline’s highly-strung nervous system, it is true, developed a headache
when she had been too long in the glare of the sun, but they were few and
far between.

The spirit in the little cask had been whispering across the lagoon for
some weeks; at last it began to shout. Mr Button, metaphorically speaking,
stopped his ears. He busied himself with the children as much as possible.
He made another garment for Emmeline, and cut Dick’s hair with the
scissors (a job which was generally performed once in a couple of months).

One night, to keep the rum from troubling his head, he told them the
story of Jack Dogherty and the Merrow, which is well known on the
western coast.

The Merrow takes Jack to dinner at the bottom of the sea, and shows him
the lobster pots wherein he keeps the souls of old sailor-men, and then they
have dinner, and the Merrow produces a big bottle of rum.

It was a fatal story for him to remember and recount; for, after his
companions were asleep, the vision of the Merrow and Jack hobnobbing,
and the idea of the jollity of it, rose before him, and excited a thirst for
joviality not to be resisted.

There were some green cocoa-nuts that he had plucked that day lying in
a little heap under a tree—half a dozen or so. He took several of these and a
shell, found the dinghy where it was moored to the aoa tree, unmoored her,
and pushed off into the lagoon.

The lagoon and sky were full of stars. In the dark depths of the water
might have been seen phosphorescent gleams of passing fish, and the
thunder of the surf on the reef filled the night with its song.

He fixed the boat’s painter carefully round a spike of coral and landed on
the reef, and with a shellful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixed half and
half, he took his perch on a high ledge of coral from whence a view of the
sea and the coral strand could be obtained.

On a moonlight night it was fine to sit here and watch the great breakers
coming in, all marbled and clouded and rainbowed with spindrift and sheets
of spray. But the snow and the song of them under the diffused light of the
stars produced a more indescribably beautiful and strange effect.

The tide was going out now, and Mr Button, as he sat smoking his pipe
and drinking his grog, could see bright mirrors here and there where the
water lay in rock-pools. When he had contemplated these sights for a
considerable time in complete contentment, he returned to the lagoon side
of the reef and sat down beside the little barrel. Then, after a while, if you
had been standing on the strand opposite, you would have heard scraps of
song borne across the quivering water of the lagoon.
“Sailing down, sailing down,
On the coast of Barbaree.”

Whether the coast of Barbary in question is that at San Francisco, or the
true and proper coast, does not matter. It is an old-time song; and when you
hear it, whether on a reef of coral or a granite quay, you may feel assured
that an old-time sailor-man is singing it, and that the old-time sailor-man is
bemused.

Presently the dinghy put off from the reef, the sculls broke the starlit
waters and great shaking circles of light made rhythmical answer to the
slow and steady creak of the thole pins against the leather. He tied up to the
aoa, saw that the sculls were safely shipped; then, breathing heavily, he cast
off his boots for fear of waking the “childer.” As the children were sleeping
more than two hundred yards away, this was a needless precaution—
especially as the intervening distance was mostly soft sand.

Green cocoa-nut juice and rum mixed together are pleasant enough to
drink, but they are better drunk separately; combined, not even the brain of
an old sailor can make anything of them but mist and muddlement; that is to
say, in the way of thought—in the way of action they can make him do a
lot. They made Paddy Button swim the lagoon.

The recollection came to him all at once, as he was walking up the strand
towards the wigwam, that he had left the dinghy tied to the reef. The dinghy
was, as a matter of fact, safe and sound tied to the aoa; but Mr Button’s
memory told him it was tied to the reef. How he had crossed the lagoon was
of no importance at all to him; the fact that he had crossed without the boat,
yet without getting wet, did not appear to him strange. He had no time to
deal with trifles like these. The dinghy had to be fetched across the lagoon,
and there was only one way of fetching it. So he came back down the beach
to the water’s edge, cast down his boots, cast off his coat, and plunged in.
The lagoon was wide, but in his present state of mind he would have swum
the Hellespont. His figure gone from the beach, the night resumed its
majesty and aspect of meditation.

So lit was the lagoon by starshine that the head of the swimmer could be
distinguished away out in the midst of circles of light; also, as the head
neared the reef, a dark triangle that came shearing through the water past
the palm tree at the pier. It was the night patrol of the lagoon, who had

heard in some mysterious manner that a drunken sailor-man was making
trouble in his waters.

Looking, one listened, hand on heart, for the scream of the arrested one,
yet it did not come. The swimmer, scrambling on to the reef in an exhausted
manner, forgetful evidently of the object for which he had returned, made
for the rum cask, and fell down beside it as though sleep had touched him
instead of death.

CHAPTER XX

THE DREAMER ON THE REEF

“I wonder where Paddy is?” cried Dick next morning. He was coming
out of the chapparel pulling a dead branch after him. “He’s left his coat on
the sand, and the tinder box in it, so I’ll make the fire. There’s no use
waiting. I want my breakfast. Bother——”

He trod the dead stick with his naked feet, breaking it into pieces.

Emmeline sat on the sand and watched him.

Emmeline had two gods of a sort: Paddy Button and Dick. Paddy was
almost an esoteric god wrapped in the fumes of tobacco and mystery. The
god of rolling ships and creaking masts—the masts and vast sail spaces of
the Northumberland were an enduring vision in her mind—the deity who
had lifted her from a little boat into this marvellous place, where the birds
were coloured and the fish were painted, where life was never dull, and the
skies scarcely ever grey.

Dick, the other deity, was a much more understandable personage, but
no less admirable, as a companion and protector. In the two years and five
months of island life he had grown nearly three inches. He was as strong as
a boy of twelve, and could scull the boat almost as well as Paddy himself,

and light a fire. Indeed, during the last few months Mr Button, engaged in
resting his bones, and contemplating rum as an abstract idea, had left the
cooking and fishing and general gathering of food as much as possible to
Dick.

“It amuses the craythur to pritind he’s doing things,” he would say, as he
watched Dick delving in the earth to make a little oven—island-fashion—
for the cooking of fish or what not.

“Come along, Em,” said Dick, piling the broken wood on top of some
rotten hibiscus sticks; “give me the tinder box.”

He got a spark on to a bit of punk, and then he blew at it, looking not
unlike Æolus as represented on those old Dutch charts that smell of
schiedam and snuff, and give one mermaids and angels instead of
soundings.

The fire was soon sparkling and crackling, and he heaped on sticks in
profusion, for there was plenty of fuel, and he wanted to cook breadfruit.

The breadfruit varies in size, according to age, and in colour according
to season. These that Dick was preparing to cook were as large as small
melons. Two would be more than enough for three people’s breakfast. They
were green and knobbly on the outside, and they suggested to the mind
unripe lemons, rather than bread.

He put them in the embers, just as you put potatoes to roast, and
presently they sizzled and spat little venomous jets of steam, then they
cracked, and the white inner substance became visible. He cut them open
and took the core out—the core is not fit to eat—and they were ready.

Meanwhile, Emmeline, under his directions, had not been idle.

There were in the lagoon—there are in several other tropical lagoons I
know of—a fish which I can only describe as a golden herring. A bronze
herring it looks when landed, but when swimming away down against the
background of coral brains and white sand patches, it has the sheen of

burnished gold. It is as good to eat as to look at, and Emmeline was
carefully toasting several of them on a piece of cane.

The juice of the fish kept the cane from charring, though there were
accidents at times, when a whole fish would go into the fire, amidst shouts
of derision from Dick.

She made a pretty enough picture as she knelt, the “skirt” round the
waist looking not unlike a striped bath-towel, her small face intent, and
filled with the seriousness of the job on hand, and her lips puckered out at
the heat of the fire.

“It’s so hot!” she cried in self-defence, after the first of the accidents.

“Of course it’s hot,” said Dick, “if you stick to looward of the fire. How
often has Paddy told you to keep to windward of it!”

“I don’t know which is which,” confessed the unfortunate Emmeline,
who was an absolute failure at everything practical: who could neither row
nor fish, nor throw a stone, and who, though they had now been on the
island twenty-eight months or so, could not even swim.

“You mean to say,” said Dick, “that you don’t know where the wind
comes from?”

“Yes, I know that.”

“Well, that’s to windward.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, you know it now.”

“Yes, I know it now.”

“Well, then, come to windward of the fire. Why didn’t you ask the
meaning of it before?”

“I did,” said Emmeline; “I asked Mr Button one day, and he told me a lot
about it. He said if he was to spit to windward and a person was to stand to
loo’ard of him, he’d be a fool; and he said if a ship went too much to
loo’ard she went on the rocks, but I didn’t understand what he meant.
Dicky, I wonder where he is?”

“Paddy!” cried Dick, pausing in the act of splitting open a breadfruit.
Echoes came from amidst the cocoa-nut trees, but nothing more.

“Come on,” said Dick; “I’m not going to wait for him. He may have
gone to fetch up the night lines”—they sometimes put down night lines in
the lagoon—“and fallen asleep over them.”

Now, though Emmeline honoured Mr Button as a minor deity, Dick had
no illusions at all upon the matter. He admired Paddy because he could
knot, and splice, and climb a cocoa-nut tree, and exercise his sailor craft in
other admirable ways, but he felt the old man’s limitations. They ought to
have had potatoes now, but they had eaten both potatoes and the possibility
of potatoes when they consumed the contents of that half sack. Young as he
was, Dick felt the absolute thriftlessness of this proceeding. Emmeline did
not; she never thought of potatoes, though she could have told you the
colour of all the birds on the island.

Then, again, the house wanted rebuilding, and Mr Button said every day
he would set about seeing after it to-morrow, and on the morrow it would be
to-morrow. The necessities of the life they led were a stimulus to the daring
and active mind of the boy; but he was always being checked by the go-as-
you-please methods of his elder. Dick came of the people who make sewing
machines and typewriters. Mr Button came of a people notable for ballads,
tender hearts, and potheen. That was the main difference.

“Paddy!” again cried the boy, when he had eaten as much as he wanted.
“Hullo! where are you?”

They listened, but no answer came. A bright-hued bird flew across the
sand space, a lizard scuttled across the glistening sand, the reef spoke, and
the wind in the tree-tops; but Mr Button made no reply.

“Wait,” said Dick.

He ran through the grove towards the aoa where the dinghy was moored;
then he returned.

“The dinghy is all right,” he said. “Where on earth can he be?”

“I don’t know,” said Emmeline, upon whose heart a feeling of loneliness
had fallen.

“Let’s go up the hill,” said Dick; “perhaps we’ll find him there.”

They went uphill through the wood, past the water-course. Every now
and then Dick would call out, and echoes would answer—there were quaint,
moist-voiced echoes amidst the trees—or a bevy of birds would take flight.
The little waterfall gurgled and whispered, and the great banana leaves
spread their shade.

“Come on,” said Dick, when he had called again without receiving a
reply.

They found the hill-top, and the great boulder stood casting its shadow in
the sun. The morning breeze was blowing, the sea sparkling, the reef
flashing, the foliage of the island waving in the wind like the flames of a
green-flamed torch. A deep swell was spreading itself across the bosom of
the Pacific. Some hurricane away beyond the Navigators or Gilberts had
sent this message and was finding its echo here, a thousand miles away, in
the deeper thunder of the reef.

Nowhere else in the world could you get such a picture, such a
combination of splendour and summer, such a vision of freshness and
strength, and the delight of morning. It was the smallness of the island,
perhaps, that closed the charm and made it perfect. Just a bunch of foliage
and flowers set in the midst of the blowing wind and sparkling blue.

Suddenly Dick, standing beside Emmeline on the rock, pointed with his
finger to the reef near the opening.

“There he is!” cried he.

CHAPTER XXI

THE GARLAND OF FLOWERS

You could just make the figure out lying on the reef near the little cask,
and comfortably sheltered from the sun by an upstanding lump of coral.

“He’s asleep,” said Dick.

He had not thought to look towards the reef from the beach, or he might
have seen the figure before.

“Dicky!” said Emmeline.

“Well?”

“How did he get over, if you said the dinghy was tied to the tree?”

“I don’t know,” said Dick, who had not thought of this; “there he is,
anyhow. I’ll tell you what, Em, we’ll row across and wake him. I’ll boo into
his ear and make him jump.”

They got down from the rock, and came back down through the wood.
As they came Emmeline picked flowers and began making them up into
one of her wreaths. Some scarlet hibiscus, some bluebells, a couple of pale
poppies with furry stalks and bitter perfume.

“What are you making that for?” asked Dick, who always viewed
Emmeline’s wreath-making with a mixture of compassion and vague
disgust.

“I’m going to put it on Mr Button’s head,” said Emmeline; “so’s when
you say boo into his ear he’ll jump up with it on.”

Dick chuckled with pleasure at the idea of the practical joke, and almost
admitted in his own mind for a moment, that after all there might be a use
for such futilities as wreaths.

The dinghy was moored under the spreading shade of the aoa, the painter
tied to one of the branches that projected over the water. These dwarf aoas
branch in an extraordinary way close to the ground, throwing out limbs like
rails. The tree had made a good protection for the little boat, protecting it
from marauding hands and from the sun; besides the protection of the tree
Paddy had now and then scuttled the boat in shallow water. It was a new
boat to start with, and with precautions like these might be expected to last
many years.

“Get in,” said Dick, pulling on the painter so that the bow of the dinghy
came close to the beach.

Emmeline got carefully in, and went aft. Then Dick got in, pushed off,
and took to the sculls. Next moment they were out on the sparkling water.

Dick rowed cautiously, fearing to wake the sleeper. He fastened the
painter to the coral spike that seemed set there by nature for the purpose. He
scrambled on to the reef, and lying down on his stomach drew the boat’s
gunwale close up so that Emmeline might land. He had no boots on; the
soles of his feet, from constant exposure, had become insensitive as leather.

Emmeline also was without boots. The soles of her feet, as is always the
case with highly nervous people, were sensitive, and she walked delicately,
avoiding the worst places, holding her wreath in her right hand.

It was full tide, and the thunder of the waves outside shook the reef. It
was like being in a church when the deep bass of the organ is turned full on,
shaking the ground and the air, the walls and the roof. Dashes of spray came
over with the wind, and the melancholy “Hi, hi!” of the wheeling gulls
came like the voices of ghostly sailor-men hauling at the halyards.

Paddy was lying on his right side steeped in profound oblivion. His face
was buried in the crook of his right arm, and his brown tattooed left hand
lay on his left thigh, palm upwards. He had no hat, and the breeze stirred his
grizzled hair.

Dick and Emmeline stole up to him till they got right beside him. Then
Emmeline, flashing out a laugh, flung the little wreath of flowers on the old
man’s head, and Dick, popping down on his knees, shouted into his ear. But
the dreamer did not stir or move a finger.

“Paddy,” cried Dick, “wake up! wake up!”

He pulled at the shoulder till the figure from its sideways posture fell
over on its back. The eyes were wide open and staring. The mouth hung
open, and from the mouth darted a little crab; it scuttled over the chin and
dropped on the coral.

Emmeline screamed, and screamed, and would have fallen, but the boy
caught her in his arms—one side of the face had been destroyed by the
larvæ of the rocks.

He held her to him as he stared at the terrible figure lying upon its back,
hands outspread. Then, wild with terror, he dragged her towards the little
boat. She was struggling, and panting and gasping, like a person drowning
in ice-cold water.

His one instinct was to escape, to fly—anywhere, no matter where. He
dragged the girl to the coral edge, and pulled the boat up close. Had the reef
suddenly become enveloped in flames he could not have exerted himself
more to escape from it and save his companion. A moment later they were
afloat, and he was pulling wildly for the shore.

He did not know what had happened, nor did he pause to think: he was
fleeing from horror—nameless horror; whilst the child at his feet, with her
head resting against the gunwale, stared up open-eyed and speechless at the
great blue sky, as if at some terror visible there. The boat grounded on the
white sand, and the wash of the incoming tide drove it up sideways.

Emmeline had fallen forward; she had lost consciousness.

CHAPTER XXII

ALONE

The idea of spiritual life must be innate in the heart of man, for all that
terrible night, when the children lay huddled together in the little hut in the
chapparel, the fear that filled them was that their old friend might suddenly
darken the entrance and seek to lie down beside them.

They did not speak about him. Something had been done to him;
something had happened. Something terrible had happened to the world
they knew. But they dared not speak of it or question each other.

Dick had carried his companion to the hut when he left the boat, and
hidden with her there; the evening had come on, and the night, and now in
the darkness, without having tasted food all day, he was telling her not to be
afraid, that he would take care of her. But not a word of the thing that had
happened.

The thing, for them, had no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had
come across death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by the
sayings of sages and poets.

They knew nothing of the philosophy that tells us that death is the
common lot, and the natural sequence to birth, or the religion that teaches
us that Death is the door to Life.

A dead old sailor-man lying like a festering carcass on a coral ledge,
eyes staring and glazed and fixed, a wide-open mouth that once had spoken
comforting words, and now spoke living crabs.

That was the vision before them. They did not philosophise about it; and
though they were filled with terror, I do not think it was terror that held
them from speaking about it, but a vague feeling that what they had beheld
was obscene, unspeakable, and a thing to avoid.

Lestrange had brought them up in his own way. He had told them there
was a good God who looked after the world; determined as far as he could
to exclude demonology and sin and death from their knowledge, he had
rested content with the bald statement that there was a good God who
looked after the world, without explaining fully that the same God would
torture them for ever and ever, should they fail to believe in Him or keep
His commandments.

This knowledge of the Almighty, therefore, was but a half knowledge,
the vaguest abstraction. Had they been brought up, however, in the most
strictly Calvinistic school, this knowledge of Him would have been no
comfort now. Belief in God is no comfort to a frightened child. Teach him
as many parrot-like prayers as you please, and in distress or the dark of
what use are they to him? His cry is for his nurse, or his mother.

During that dreadful night these two children had no comfort to seek
anywhere in the whole wide universe but in each other. She, in a sense of
his protection, he, in a sense of being her protector. The manliness in him
greater and more beautiful than physical strength, developed in those dark
hours just as a plant under extraordinary circumstances is hurried into
bloom.

Towards dawn Emmeline fell asleep. Dick stole out of the hut when he
had assured himself from her regular breathing that she was asleep, and,
pushing the tendrils and the branches of the mammee apples aside, found
the beach. The dawn was just breaking, and the morning breeze was coming
in from the sea.

When he had beached the dinghy the day before, the tide was just at the
flood, and it had left her stranded. The tide was coming in now, and in a
short time it would be far enough up to push her off.

Emmeline in the night had implored him to take her away. Take her
away somewhere from there, and he had promised, without knowing in the
least how he was to perform his promise. As he stood looking at the beach,
so desolate and strangely different now from what it was the day before, an
idea of how he could fulfil his promise came to him. He ran down to where
the little boat lay on the shelving sand, with the ripples of the incoming tide
just washing the rudder, which was still shipped. He unshipped the rudder
and came back.

Under a tree, covered with the stay-sail they had brought from the
Shenandoah, lay most of their treasures: old clothes and boots, and all the
other odds and ends. The precious tobacco stitched up in a piece of canvas
was there, and the housewife with the needles and threads. A hole had been
dug in the sand as a sort of cache for them, and the stay-sail put over them
to protect them from the dew.

The sun was now looking over the sea-line, and the tall cocoa-nut trees
were singing and whispering together under the strengthening breeze.

CHAPTER XXIII

THEY MOVE AWAY

He began to collect the things, and carry them to the dinghy. He took the
stay-sail and everything that might be useful; and when he had stowed them
in the boat, he took the breaker and filled it with water at the water source
in the wood; he collected some bananas and breadfruit, and stowed them in
the dinghy with the breaker. Then he found the remains of yesterday’s
breakfast, which he had hidden between two palmetto leaves, and placed it
also in the boat.

The water was now so high that a strong push would float her. He turned
back to the hut for Emmeline. She was still asleep: so soundly asleep, that

when he lifted her up in his arms she made no movement. He placed her
carefully in the stern-sheets with her head on the sail rolled up, and then
standing in the bow pushed off with a scull. Then, taking the sculls, he
turned the boat’s head up the lagoon to the left. He kept close to the shore,
but for the life of him he could not help lifting his eyes and looking towards
the reef.

Round a certain spot on the distant white coral there was a great
commotion of birds. Huge birds some of them seemed, and the “Hi! hi! hi!”
of them came across the lagoon on the breeze as they quarrelled together
and beat the air with their wings. He turned his head away till a bend of the
shore hid the spot from sight.

Here, sheltered more completely than opposite the break in the reef, the
artu trees came in places right down to the water’s edge; the breadfruit trees
cast the shadow of their great scalloped leaves upon the water; glades, thick
with fern, wildernesses of the mammee apple, and bushes of the scarlet
“wild cocoa-nut” all slipped by, as the dinghy, hugging the shore, crept up
the lagoon.

Gazing at the shore edge one might have imagined it the edge of a lake,
but for the thunder of the Pacific upon the distant reef; and even that did not
destroy the impression, but only lent a strangeness to it.

A lake in the midst of the ocean, that is what the lagoon really was.

Here and there cocoa-nut trees slanted over the water, mirroring their
delicate stems, and tracing their clear-cut shadows on the sandy bottom a
fathom deep below.

He kept close in-shore for the sake of the shelter of the trees. His object
was to find some place where they might stop permanently, and put up a
tent. He was seeking a new home, in fact. But, pretty as were the glades
they passed, they were not attractive places to live in. There were too many
trees, or the ferns were too deep. He was seeking air and space, and
suddenly he found it. Rounding a little cape, all blazing with the scarlet of
the wild cocoa-nut, the dinghy broke into a new world.

Before her lay a great sweep of the palest blue wind-swept water, down
to which came a broad green sward of park-like land set on either side with
deep groves, and leading up and away to higher land, where, above the
massive and motionless green of the great breadfruit trees, the palm trees
swayed and fluttered their pale green feathers in the breeze. The pale colour
of the water was due to the extreme shallowness of the lagoon just here. So
shallow was it that one could see brown spaces indicating beds of dead and
rotten coral, and splashes of darkest sapphire where the deep pools lay. The
reef lay more than half a mile from the shore: a great way out, it seemed, so
far out that its cramping influence was removed, and one had the
impression of wide and unbroken sea.

Dick rested on his oars, and let the dinghy float whilst he looked around
him. He had come some four miles and a half, and this was right at the back
of the island. As the boat drifting shoreward touched the bank, Emmeline
awakened from her sleep, sat up, and looked around her.

BOOK II

PART I
CHAPTER I

UNDER THE ARTU TREE

On the edge of the green sward, between a diamond-chequered artu
trunk and the massive bole of a breadfruit, a house had come into being. It
was not much larger than a big hen-house, but quite sufficient for the needs
of two people in a climate of eternal summer. It was built of bamboos, and
thatched with a double thatch of palmetto leaves, so neatly built, and so
well thatched, that one might have fancied it the production of several
skilled workmen.

The breadfruit tree was barren of fruit, as these trees sometimes are,
whole groves of them ceasing to bear for some mysterious reason only
known to Nature. It was green now, but when suffering its yearly change
the great scalloped leaves would take all imaginable tinges of gold and
bronze and amber. Beyond the artu was a little clearing, where the
chapparel had been carefully removed and taro roots planted.

Stepping from the house doorway on to the sward you might have
fancied yourself, except for the tropical nature of the foliage, in some
English park.

Looking to the right, the eye became lost in the woods, where all tints of
green were tinging the foliage, and the bushes of the wild cocoa-nut burned
scarlet as haw-berries.

The house had a doorway, but no door. It might have been said to have a
double roof, for the breadfruit foliage above gave good shelter during the
rains. Inside it was bare enough. Dried, sweet-smelling ferns covered the
floor. Two sails, rolled up, lay on either side of the doorway. There was a
rude shelf attached to one of the walls, and on the shelf some bowls made
of cocoa-nut shell. The people to whom the place belonged evidently did

not trouble it much with their presence, using it only at night, and as a
refuge from the dew.

Sitting on the grass by the doorway, sheltered by the breadfruit shade,
yet with the hot rays of the afternoon sun just touching her naked feet, was
a girl. A girl of fifteen or sixteen, naked, except for a kilt of gaily-striped
material reaching from her waist to her knees. Her long black hair was
drawn back from the forehead, and tied behind with a loop of the elastic
vine. A scarlet blossom was stuck behind her right ear, after the fashion of a
clerk’s pen. Her face was beautiful, powdered with tiny freckles; especially
under the eyes, which were of a deep, tranquil blue-grey. She half sat, half
lay on her left side; whilst before her, quite close, strutted up and down on
the grass, a bird, with blue plumage, coral-red beak, and bright, watchful
eyes.

The girl was Emmeline Lestrange. Just by her elbow stood a little bowl
made from half a cocoa-nut, and filled with some white substance with
which she was feeding the bird. Dick had found it in the woods two years
ago, quite small, deserted by its mother, and starving. They had fed it and
tamed it, and it was now one of the family; roosting on the roof at night,
and appearing regularly at meal times.

All at once she held out her hand; the bird flew into the air, lit on her
forefinger and balanced itself, sinking its head between its shoulders, and
uttering the sound which formed its entire vocabulary and one means of
vocal expression—a sound from which it had derived its name.

“Koko,” said Emmeline, “where is Dick?”

The bird turned his head about, as if he were searching for his master;
and the girl lay back lazily on the grass, laughing, and holding him up
poised on her finger, as if he were some enamelled jewel she wished to
admire at a little distance. They made a pretty picture under the cave-like
shadow of the breadfruit leaves; and it was difficult to understand how this
young girl, so perfectly formed, so fully developed, and so beautiful, had
evolved from plain little Emmeline Lestrange. And the whole thing, as far
as the beauty of her was concerned, had happened during the last six
months.

CHAPTER II

HALF CHILD—HALF SAVAGE

Five rainy seasons had passed and gone since the tragic occurrence on
the reef. Five long years the breakers had thundered, and the sea-gulls had
cried round the figure whose spell had drawn a mysterious barrier across
the lagoon.

The children had never returned to the old place. They had kept entirely
to the back of the island and the woods—the lagoon, down to a certain
point, and the reef; a wide enough and beautiful enough world, but a
hopeless world, as far as help from civilisation was concerned. For, of the
few ships that touched at the island in the course of years, how many would
explore the lagoon or woods? Perhaps not one.

Occasionally Dick would make an excursion in the dinghy to the old
place, but Emmeline refused to accompany him. He went chiefly to obtain
bananas; for on the whole island there was but one clump of banana trees—
that near the water source in the wood, where the old green skulls had been
discovered, and the little barrel.

She had never quite recovered from the occurrence on the reef.
Something had been shown to her, the purport of which she vaguely
understood, and it had filled her with horror and a terror of the place where
it had occurred. Dick was quite different. He had been frightened enough at
first; but the feeling wore away in time.

Dick had built three houses in succession during the five years. He had
laid out a patch of taro and another of sweet potatoes. He knew every pool
on the reef for two miles either way, and the forms of their inhabitants; and
though he did not know the names of the creatures to be found there, he
made a profound study of their habits.

He had seen some astonishing things during these five years—from a
fight between a whale and two thrashers conducted outside the reef, lasting
an hour, and dyeing the breaking waves with blood, to the poisoning of the
fish in the lagoon by fresh water, due to an extraordinarily heavy rainy
season.

He knew the woods of the back of the island by heart, and the forms of
life that inhabited them—butterflies, and moths, and birds, lizards, and
insects of strange shape; extraordinary orchids—some filthy-looking, the
very image of corruption, some beautiful, and all strange. He found melons
and guavas, and breadfruit, the red apple of Tahiti, and the great Brazilian
plum, taro in plenty, and a dozen other good things—but there were no
bananas. This made him unhappy at times, for he was human.

Though Emmeline had asked Koko for Dick’s whereabouts, it was only
a remark made by way of making conversation, for she could hear him in
the little cane-brake which lay close by amidst the trees.

In a few minutes he appeared, dragging after him two canes which he
had just cut, and wiping the perspiration off his brow with his naked arm.
He had an old pair of trousers on—part of the truck salved long ago from
the Shenandoah—nothing else, and he was well worth looking at and
considering, both from a physical and psychological point of view.

Auburn-haired and tall, looking more like seventeen than sixteen, with a
restless and daring expression, half a child, half a man, half a civilised
being, half a savage, he had both progressed and retrograded during the five
years of savage life. He sat down beside Emmeline, flung the canes beside
him, tried the edge of the old butcher’s knife with which he had cut them,
then, taking one of the canes across his knee, he began whittling at it.

“What are you making?” asked Emmeline, releasing the bird, which flew
into one of the branches of the artu and rested there, a blue point amidst the
dark green.

“Fish-spear,” replied Dick.

Without being taciturn, he rarely wasted words. Life was all business for
him. He would talk to Emmeline, but always in short sentences; and he had
developed the habit of talking to inanimate things, to the fish-spear he was
carving, or the bowl he was fashioning from a cocoa-nut.

As for Emmeline, even as a child she had never been talkative. There
was something mysterious in her personality, something secretive. Her
mind seemed half submerged in twilight. Though she spoke little, and
though the subject of their conversations was almost entirely material and
relative to their everyday needs, her mind would wander into abstract fields
and the land of chimerae and dreams. What she found there no one knew—
least of all, perhaps, herself.

As for Dick, he would sometimes talk and mutter to himself, as if in a
reverie; but if you caught the words, you would find that they referred to no
abstraction, but to some trifle he had on hand. He seemed entirely bound up
in the moment, and to have forgotten the past as completely as though it had
never been.

Yet he had his contemplative moods. He would lie with his face over a
rock-pool by the hour, watching the strange forms of life to be seen there, or
sit in the woods motionless as a stone, watching the birds and the swift-
slipping lizards. The birds came so close that he could easily have knocked
them over, but he never hurt one or interfered in any way with the wild life
of the woods.

The island, the lagoon, and the reef were for him the three volumes of a
great picture book, as they were for Emmeline, though in a different
manner. The colour and the beauty of it all fed some mysterious want in her
soul. Her life was a long reverie, a beautiful vision—troubled with
shadows. Across all the blue and coloured spaces that meant months and
years she could still see as in a glass dimly the Northumberland, smoking
against the wild background of fog; her uncle’s face, Boston—a vague and
dark picture beyond a storm—and nearer, the tragic form on the reef that
still haunted terribly her dreams. But she never spoke of these things to
Dick. Just as she kept the secret of what was in her box, and the secret of
her trouble whenever she lost it, she kept the secret of her feelings about
these things.

Born of these things there remained with her always a vague terror: the
terror of losing Dick. Mrs Stannard, her uncle, the dim people she had
known in Boston, all had passed away out of her life like a dream and
shadows. The other one too, most horribly. What if Dick were taken from
her as well?

This haunting trouble had been with her a long time; up to a few months
ago it had been mainly personal and selfish—the dread of being left alone.
But lately it had altered and become more acute. Dick had changed in her
eyes, and the fear was now for him. Her own personality had suddenly and
strangely become merged in his. The idea of life without him was
unthinkable, yet the trouble remained, a menace in the blue.

Some days it would be worse than others. To-day, for instance, it was
worse than yesterday, as though some danger had crept close to them during
the night. Yet the sky and sea were stainless, the sun shone on tree and
flower, the west wind brought the tune of the far-away reef like a lullaby.
There was nothing to hint of danger or the need of distrust.

At last Dick finished his spear and rose to his feet.

“Where are you going?” asked Emmeline.

“The reef,” he replied. “The tide’s going out.”

“I’ll go with you,” said she.

He went into the house and stowed the precious knife away. Then he
came out, spear in one hand, and half a fathom of liana in the other. The
liana was for the purpose of stringing the fish on, should the catch be large.
He led the way down the grassy sward to the lagoon where the dinghy lay,
close up to the bank, and moored to a post driven into the soft soil.
Emmeline got in, and, taking the sculls, he pushed off. The tide was going
out.

I have said that the reef just here lay a great way out from the shore. The
lagoon was so shallow that at low tide one could have waded almost right
across it, were it not for pot-holes here and there—ten-feet traps—and great

beds of rotten coral, into which one would sink as into brushwood, to say
nothing of the nettle coral that stings like a bed of nettles. There were also
other dangers. Tropical shallows are full of wild surprises in the way of life
—and death.

Dick had long ago marked out in his memory the soundings of the
lagoon, and it was fortunate that he possessed the special sense of location
which is the main stand-by of the hunter and the savage, for, from the
disposition of the coral in ribs, the water from the shore edge to the reef ran
in lanes. Only two of these lanes gave a clear, fair way from the shore edge
to the reef; had you followed the others, even in a boat of such shallow
draught as the dinghy, you would have found yourself stranded half-way
across, unless, indeed, it were a spring tide.

Half-way across the sound of the surf on the barrier became louder, and
the everlasting and monotonous cry of the gulls came on the breeze. It was
lonely out here, and, looking back, the shore seemed a great way off. It was
lonelier still on the reef.

Dick tied up the boat to a projection of coral, and helped Emmeline to
land. The sun was creeping down into the west, the tide was nearly half out,
and large pools of water lay glittering like burnished shields in the sunlight.
Dick, with his precious spear beside him, sat calmly down on a ledge of
coral, and began to divest himself of his one and only garment.

Emmeline turned away her head and contemplated the distant shore,
which seemed thrice as far off as it was in reality. When she turned her head
again he was racing along the edge of the surf. He and his spear silhouetted
against the spindrift and dazzling foam formed a picture savage enough,
and well in keeping with the general desolation of the background. She
watched him lie down and cling to a piece of coral, whilst the surf rushed
round and over him, and then rise and shake himself like a dog, and pursue
his gambols, his body all glittering with the wet.

Sometimes a whoop would come on the breeze, mixing with the sound
of the surf and the cry of the gulls, and she would see him plunge his spear
into a pool, and the next moment the spear would be held aloft with
something struggling and glittering at the end of it.

He was quite different out here on the reef to what he was ashore. The
surroundings here seemed to develop all that was savage in him, in a
startling way; and he would kill, and kill, just for the pleasure of killing,
destroying more fish than they could possibly use.

CHAPTER III

THE DEMON OF THE REEF

The romance of coral has still to be written. There still exists a
widespread opinion that the coral reef and the coral island are the work of
an “insect.” This fabulous insect, accredited with the genius of Brunel and
the patience of Job, has been humorously enough held up before the
children of many generations as an example of industry—a thing to be
admired, a model to be followed.

As a matter of fact, nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given
up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the “reef-building polypifer”—to
give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike
the hobo, he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and
gelatinous worm; he attracts to himself calcareous elements from the water
to make himself a house—mark you, the sea does the building—he dies,
and he leaves his house behind him—and a reputation for industry, beside
which the reputation of the ant turns pale, and that of the bee becomes of
little account.

On a coral reef you are treading on rock that the reef-building polypifers
of ages have left behind them as evidences of their idle and apparently
useless lives. You might fancy that the reef is formed of dead rock, but it is
not: that is where the wonder of the thing comes in—a coral reef is half
alive. If it were not, it would not resist the action of the sea ten years. The
live part of the reef is just where the breakers come in and beyond. The

gelatinous rock-building polypifers die almost at once, if exposed to the sun
or if left uncovered by water.

Sometimes, at very low tide, if you have courage enough to risk being
swept away by the breakers, going as far out on the reef as you can, you
may catch a glimpse of them in their living state—great mounds and masses
of what seems rock, but which is a honeycomb of coral, whose cells are
filled with the living polypifers. Those in the uppermost cells are usually
dead, but lower down they are living.

Always dying, always being renewed, devoured by fish, attacked by the
sea—that is the life of a coral reef. It is a thing as living as a cabbage or a
tree. Every storm tears a piece off the reef, which the living coral replaces;
wounds occur in it which actually granulate and heal as wounds do of the
human body.

There is nothing, perhaps, more mysterious in nature than this fact of the
existence of a living land: a land that repairs itself, when injured, by vital
processes, and resists the eternal attack of the sea by vital force, especially
when we think of the extent of some of these lagoon islands or atolls, whose
existences are an eternal battle with the waves.

Unlike the island of this story (which is an island surrounded by a barrier
reef of coral surrounding a space of sea—the lagoon), the reef forms the
island. The reef may be grown over by trees, or it may be perfectly destitute
of important vegetation, or it may be crusted with islets. Some islets may
exist within the lagoon, but as often as not it is just a great empty lake
floored with sand and coral, peopled with life different to the life of the
outside ocean, protected from the waves, and reflecting the sky like a
mirror.

When we remember that the atoll is a living thing, an organic whole, as
full of life, though not so highly organised, as a tortoise, the meanest
imagination must be struck with the immensity of one of the structures.

Vliegen atoll in the Low Archipelago, measured from lagoon edge to
lagoon edge, is sixty miles long by twenty miles broad, at its broadest part.
In the Marshall Archipelago, Rimsky Korsacoff is fifty-four miles long and

twenty miles broad; and Rimsky Korsacoff is a living thing, secreting,
excreting, and growing—more highly organised than the cocoa-nut trees
that grow upon its back, or the blossoms that powder the hotoo trees in its
groves.

The story of coral is the story of a world, and the longest chapter in that
story concerns itself with coral’s infinite variety and form.

Out on the margin of the reef where Dick was spearing fish, you might
have seen a peach-blossom-coloured lichen on the rock. This lichen was a
form of coral. Coral growing upon coral, and in the pools at the edge of the
surf branching corals also of the colour of a peach bloom.

Within a hundred yards of where Emmeline was sitting, the pools
contained corals of all colours, from lake-red to pure white, and the lagoon
behind her—corals of the quaintest and strangest forms.

Dick had speared several fish, and had left them lying on the reef to be
picked up later on. Tired of killing, he was now wandering along,
examining the various living things he came across.

Huge slugs inhabited the reef, slugs as big as parsnips, and somewhat of
the same shape; they were a species of Bech de mer. Globe-shaped jelly-
fish as big as oranges, great cuttlefish bones flat and shining and white,
shark’s teeth, spines of echini; sometimes a dead scarus fish, its stomach
distended with bits of coral on which it had been feeding; crabs, sea
urchins, sea-weeds of strange colour and shape; star-fish, some tiny and of
the colour of cayenne pepper, some huge and pale. These and a thousand
other things, beautiful or strange, were to be found on the reef.

Dick had laid his spear down, and was exploring a deep bath-like pool.
He had waded up to his knees, and was in the act of wading further when he
was suddenly seized by the foot. It was just as if his ankle had been
suddenly caught in a clove hitch and the rope drawn tight. He screamed out
with pain and terror, and suddenly and viciously a whip-lash shot out from
the water, lassoed him round the left knee, drew itself taut, and held him.

CHAPTER IV

WHAT BEAUTY CONCEALED

Emmeline, seated on the coral rock, had almost forgotten Dick for a
moment. The sun was setting, and the warm amber light of the sunset shone
on reef and rock-pool. Just at sunset and low tide the reef had a peculiar
fascination for her. It had the low-tide smell of sea-weed exposed to the air,
and the torment and trouble of the breakers seemed eased. Before her, and
on either side, the foam-dashed coral glowed in amber and gold, and the
great Pacific came glassing and glittering in, voiceless and peaceful, till it
reached the strand and burst into song and spray.

Here, just as on the hill-top at the other side of the island, you could
mark the rhythm of the rollers. “Forever, and forever—forever, and
forever,” they seemed to say.

The cry of the gulls came mixed with the spray on the breeze. They
haunted the reef like uneasy spirits, always complaining, never at rest; but
at sunset their cry seemed farther away and less melancholy, perhaps
because just then the whole island world seemed bathed in the spirit of
peace.

She turned from the sea prospect and looked backwards over the lagoon
to the island. She could make out the broad green glade beside which their
little house lay, and a spot of yellow, which was the thatch of the house, just
by the artu tree, and nearly hidden by the shadow of the breadfruit. Over the
woods the fronds of the great cocoa-nut palms showed above every other
tree silhouetted against the dim, dark blue of the eastern sky.

Seen by the enchanted light of sunset, the whole picture had an unreal
look, more lovely than a dream. At dawn—and Dick would often start for
the reef before dawn, if the tide served—the picture was as beautiful; more

so, perhaps, for over the island, all in shadow, and against the stars, you
would see the palm-tops catching fire, and then the light of day coming
through the green trees and blue sky, like a spirit, across the blue lagoon,
widening and strengthening as it widened, across the white foam, out over
the sea, spreading like a fan, till, all at once, night was day, and the gulls
were crying and the breakers flashing, the dawn wind blowing, and the
palm trees bending, as palm trees only know how. Emmeline always
imagined herself alone on the island with Dick, but beauty was there, too,
and beauty is a great companion.

The girl was contemplating the scene before her. Nature in her friendliest
mood seemed to say, “Behold me! Men call me cruel; men have called me
deceitful, even treacherous. I—ah well! my answer is, ‘Behold me!’”

The girl was contemplating the specious beauty of it all, when on the
breeze from seaward came a shout. She turned quickly. There was Dick up
to his knees in a rock-pool a hundred yards or so away, motionless, his arms
upraised, and crying out for help. She sprang to her feet.

There had once been an islet on this part of the reef, a tiny thing,
consisting of a few palms and a handful of vegetation, and destroyed,
perhaps, in some great storm. I mention this because the existence of this
islet once upon a time was the means, indirectly, of saving Dick’s life; for
where these islets have been or are, “flats” occur on the reef formed of coral
conglomerate.

Emmeline in her bare feet could never have reached him in time over
rough coral, but, fortunately, this flat and comparatively smooth surface lay
between them.

“My spear!” shouted Dick, as she approached.

He seemed at first tangled in brambles; then she thought ropes were
tangling round him and tying him to something in the water—whatever it
was, it was most awful, and hideous, and like a nightmare. She ran with the
speed of Atalanta to the rock where the spear was resting, all red with the
blood of new-slain fish, a foot from the point.

As she approached Dick, spear in hand, she saw, gasping with terror, that
the ropes were alive, and that they were flickering and rippling over his
back. One of them bound his left arm to his side, but his right arm was free.

“Quick!” he shouted.

In a second the spear was in his free hand, and Emmeline had cast
herself down on her knees, and was staring with terrified eyes into the water
of the pool from whence the ropes issued. She was, despite her terror, quite
prepared to fling herself in and do battle with the thing, whatever it might
be.

What she saw was only for a second. In the deep water of the pool,
gazing up and forward and straight at Dick, she saw a face, lugubrious and
awful. The eyes were wide as saucers, stony and steadfast; a large, heavy,
parrot-like beak hung before the eyes, and worked and wobbled, and
seemed to beckon. But what froze one’s heart was the expression of the
eyes, so stony and lugubrious, so passionless, so devoid of speculation, yet
so fixed of purpose and full of fate.

From away far down he had risen with the rising tide. He had been
feeding on crabs, when the tide, betraying him, had gone out, leaving him
trapped in the rock-pool. He had slept, perhaps, and awakened to find a
being, naked and defenceless, invading his pool. He was quite small, as
octopods go, and young, yet he was large and powerful enough to have
drowned an ox.

The octopod has only been described once, in stone, by a Japanese artist.
The statue is still extant, and it is the most terrible masterpiece of sculpture
ever executed by human hands. It represents a man who has been bathing
on a low-tide beach, and has been caught. The man is shouting in a delirium
of terror, and threatening with his free arm the spectre that has him in its
grip. The eyes of the octopod are fixed upon the man—passionless and
lugubrious eyes, but steadfast and fixed.

Another whip-lash shot out of the water in a shower of spray, and seized
Dick by the left thigh. At the same instant he drove the point of the spear
through the right eye of the monster, deep down through eye and soft

gelatinous carcass till the spear-point dirled and splintered against the rock.
At the same moment the water of the pool became black as ink, the bands
around him relaxed, and he was free.

Emmeline rose up and seized him, sobbing and clinging to him, and
kissing him. He clasped her with his left arm round her body, as if to protect
her, but it was a mechanical action. He was not thinking of her. Wild with
rage, and uttering hoarse cries, he plunged the broken spear again and again
into the depths of the pool, seeking utterly to destroy the enemy that had so
lately had him in its grip. Then slowly he came to himself, and wiped his
forehead, and looked at the broken spear in his hand.

“Beast!” he said. “Did you see its eyes? Did you see its eyes? I wish it
had a hundred eyes, and I had a hundred spears to drive into them!”

She was clinging to him, and sobbing and laughing hysterically, and
praising him. One might have thought that he had rescued her from death,
not she him.

The sun had nearly vanished, and he led her back to where the dinghy
was moored recapturing and putting on his trousers on the road. He picked
up the dead fish he had speared; and as he rowed her back across the
lagoon, he talked and laughed, recounting the incidents of the fight, taking
all the glory of the thing to himself, and seeming quite to ignore the
important part she had played in it.

This was not from any callousness or want of gratitude, but simply from
the fact that for the last five years he had been the be-all and end-all of their
tiny community—the Imperial master. And he would just as soon have
thought of thanking her for handing him the spear as of thanking his right
hand for driving it home. She was quite content, seeking neither thanks nor
praise. Everything she had came from him: she was his shadow and his
slave. He was her sun.

He went over the fight again and again before they lay down to rest,
telling her he had done this and that, and what he would do to the next beast
of the sort. The reiteration was tiresome enough, or would have been to an
outside listener, but to Emmeline it was better than Homer. People’s minds

do not improve in an intellectual sense when they are isolated from the
world, even though they are living the wild and happy lives of savages.

Then Dick lay down in the dried ferns and covered himself with a piece
of the striped flannel which they used for blanketing, and he snored, and
chattered in his sleep like a dog hunting imaginary game, and Emmeline lay
beside him wakeful and thinking. A new terror had come into her life. She
had seen death for the second time, but this time active and in being.

CHAPTER V

THE SOUND OF A DRUM

The next day Dick was sitting under the shade of the artu. He had the
box of fishhooks beside him, and he was bending a line on to one of them.
There had originally been a couple of dozen hooks, large and small, in the
box; there remained now only six—four small and two large ones. It was a
large one he was fixing to the line, for he intended going on the morrow to
the old place to fetch some bananas, and on the way to try for a fish in the
deeper parts of the lagoon.

It was late afternoon, and the heat had gone out of the day. Emmeline,
seated on the grass opposite to him, was holding the end of the line, whilst
he got the kinks out of it, when suddenly she raised her head.

There was not a breath of wind; the hush of the far-distant surf came
through the blue weather—the only audible sound except, now and then, a
movement and flutter from the bird perched in the branches of the artu. All
at once another sound mixed itself with the voice of the surf—a faint,
throbbing sound, like the beating of a distant drum.

“Listen!” said Emmeline.

Dick paused for a moment in his work. All the sounds of the island were
familiar: this was something quite strange.

Faint and far away, now rapid, now slow; coming from where, who
could say? Sometimes it seemed to come from the sea, sometimes, if the
fancy of the listener turned that way, from the woods. As they listened, a
sigh came from overhead; the evening breeze had risen and was moving in
the leaves of the artu tree. Just as you might wipe a picture off a slate, the
breeze banished the sound. Dick went on with his work.

Next morning early he embarked in the dinghy. He took the hook and
line with him, and some raw fish for bait. Emmeline helped him to push off,
and stood on the bank waving her hand as he rounded the little cape
covered with wild cocoa-nut.

These expeditions of Dick’s were one of her sorrows. To be left alone
was frightful; yet she never complained. She was living in a paradise, but
something told her that behind all that sun, all that splendour of blue sea
and sky, behind the flowers and the leaves, behind all that specious and
simpering appearance of happiness in nature, lurked a frown, and the
dragon of mischance.

Dick rowed for about a mile, then he shipped his sculls, and let the
dinghy float. The water here was very deep; so deep that, despite its
clearness, the bottom was invisible; the sunlight over the reef struck
through it diagonally, filling it with sparkles.

The fisherman baited his hook with a piece from the belly of a scarus
and lowered it down out of sight, then he belayed the line to a thole pin,
and, sitting in the bottom of the boat, hung his head over the side and gazed
deep down into the water. Sometimes there was nothing to see but just the
deep blue of the water. Then a flight of spangled arrowheads would cross
the line of sight and vanish, pursued by a form like a moving bar of gold.
Then a great fish would materialise itself and hang in the shadow of the
boat motionless as a stone, save for the movement of its gills; next moment
with a twist of the tail it would be gone.

Suddenly the dinghy shored over, and might have capsized, only for the
fact that Dick was sitting on the opposite side to the side from which the
line hung. Then the boat righted; the line slackened, and the surface of the
lagoon, a few fathoms away, boiled as if being stirred from below by a great
silver stick. He had hooked an albicore. He tied the end of the fishing-line
to a scull, undid the line from the thole pin, and flung the scull overboard.

He did all this with wonderful rapidity, while the line was still slack.
Next moment the scull was rushing over the surface of the lagoon, now
towards the reef, now towards the shore, now flat, now end up. Now it
would be jerked under the surface entirely; vanish for a moment, and then
reappear. It was a most astonishing thing to watch, for the scull seemed
alive—viciously alive, and imbued with some destructive purpose; as, in
fact, it was. The most venomous of living things, and the most intelligent
could not have fought the great fish better.

The albicore would make a frantic dash down the lagoon, hoping,
perhaps, to find in the open sea a release from his foe. Then, half drowned
with the pull of the scull, he would pause, dart from side to side in
perplexity, and then make an equally frantic dash up the lagoon, to be
checked in the same manner. Seeking the deepest depths, he would sink the
scull a few fathoms; and once he sought the air, leaping into the sunlight
like a crescent of silver, whilst the splash of him as he fell echoed amidst
the trees bordering the lagoon. An hour passed before the great fish showed
signs of weakening.

The struggle had taken place up to this close to the shore, but now the
scull swam out into the broad sheet of sunlit water, and slowly began to
describe large circles rippling up the peaceful blue into flashing wavelets. It
was a melancholy sight to watch, for the great fish had made a good fight,
and one could see him, through the eye of imagination, beaten, half
drowned, dazed, and moving as is the fashion of dazed things in a circle.

Dick, working the remaining oar at the stern of the boat, rowed out and
seized the floating scull, bringing it on board. Foot by foot he hauled his
catch towards the boat till the long gleaming line of the thing came dimly
into view.

The fight had been heard for miles through the lagoon water by all sorts
of swimming things. The lord of the place had got sound of it. A dark fin
rippled the water; and as Dick, pulling on his line, hauled his catch closer, a
monstrous grey shadow stained the depths, and the glittering streak that was
the albicore vanished as if engulfed in a cloud. The line came in slack, and
Dick hauled in the albicore’s head. It had been divided from the body as if
with a huge pair of shears. The grey shadow slipped by the boat, and Dick,
mad with rage, shouted and shook his fist at it; then, seizing the albicore’s
head, from which he had taken the hook, he hurled it at the monster in the
water.

The great shark, with a movement of the tail that caused the water to
swirl and the dinghy to rock, turned upon his back and engulfed the head;
then he slowly sank and vanished, just as if he had been dissolved. He had
come off best in this their first encounter—such as it was.

CHAPTER VI

SAILS UPON THE SEA

Dick put the hook away and took to the sculls. He had a three-mile row
before him, and the tide was coming in, which did not make it any the
easier. As he rowed, he talked and grumbled to himself. He had been in a
grumbling mood for some time past: the chief cause, Emmeline.

In the last few months she had changed; even her face had changed. A
new person had come upon the island, it seemed to him, and taken the place
of the Emmeline he had known from earliest childhood. This one looked
different. He did not know that she had grown beautiful, he just knew that
she looked different; also she had developed new ways that displeased him
—she would go off and bathe by herself, for instance.

Up to six months or so ago he had been quite contented; sleeping and
eating, and hunting for food and cooking it, building and rebuilding the
house, exploring the woods and the reef. But lately a spirit of restlessness
had come upon him; he did not know exactly what he wanted. He had a
vague feeling that he wanted to go away from the place where he was; not
from the island, but from the place where they had pitched their tent, or
rather built their house.

It may have been the spirit of civilisation crying out in him, telling him
of all he was missing. Of the cities, and the streets, and the houses, and the
businesses, and the striving after gold, the striving after power. It may have
been simply the man in him crying out for Love, and not knowing yet that
Love was at his elbow.

The dinghy glided along, hugging the shore, past the little glades of fern
and the cathedral gloom of the breadfruit; then, rounding a promontory, she
opened the view of the break in the reef. A little bit of the white strand was
visible, but he was not looking that way—he was looking towards the reef
at a tiny, dark spot, not noticeable unless searched for by the eye. Always
when he came on these expeditions, just here, he would hang on his oars
and gaze over there, where the gulls were flying and the breakers
thundering.

A few years ago the spot filled him with dread as well as curiosity, but
from familiarity and the dullness that time casts on everything, the dread
had almost vanished, but the curiosity remained: the curiosity that makes a
child look on at the slaughter of an animal even though his soul revolts at it.
He gazed for a while, then he went on pulling, and the dinghy approached
the beach.

Something had happened on the beach. The sand was all trampled, and
stained red here and there; in the centre lay the remains of a great fire still
smouldering, and just where the water lapped the sand, lay two deep
grooves as if two heavy boats had been beached there. A South Sea man
would have told from the shape of the grooves, and the little marks of the
out-riggers, that two heavy canoes had been beached there. And they had.

The day before, early in the afternoon, two canoes, possibly from that
far-away island which cast a stain on the horizon to the sou’-sou’-west, had
entered the lagoon, one in pursuit of the other.

What happened then had better be left veiled. A war drum with a shark-
skin head had set the woods throbbing; the victory was celebrated all night,
and at dawn the victors manned the two canoes and set sail for the home, or
the hell, they had come from. Had you examined the strand you would have
found that a line had been drawn across the beach, beyond which there were
no footmarks: that meant that the rest of the island was for some reason
tabu.

Dick pulled the nose of the boat up a bit on the strand, then he looked
around him. He picked up a broken spear that had been cast away or
forgotten; it was made of some hard wood and barbed with iron. On the
right-hand side of the beach something lay between the cocoa-nut trees. He
approached; it was a mass of offal; the entrails of a dozen sheep seemed
cast here in one mound, yet there were no sheep on the island, and sheep are
not carried as a rule in war canoes.

The sand on the beach was eloquent. The foot pursuing and the foot
pursued; the knee of the fallen one, and then the forehead and outspread
hands; the heel of the chief who has slain his enemy, beaten the body flat,
burst a hole through it through which he has put his head, and who stands
absolutely wearing his enemy as a cloak; the head of the man dragged on
his back to be butchered like a sheep—of these things spoke the sand.

As far as the sand traces could speak, the story of the battle was still
being told; the screams and the shouting, the clashing of clubs and spears
were gone, yet the ghost of the fight remained.

If the sand could bear such traces, and tell such tales, who shall say that
the plastic æther was destitute of the story of the fight and the butchery?

However that may have been, Dick, looking around him, had the
shivering sense of having just escaped from danger. Whoever had been, had
gone—he could tell that by the canoe traces. Gone either out to sea, or up
the right stretch of the lagoon. It was important to determine this.

He climbed to the hill-top and swept the sea with his eyes. There, away
to the south-west, far away on the sea, he could distinguish the brown sails
of two canoes. There was something indescribably mournful and lonely in
their appearance; they looked like withered leaves—brown moths blown to
sea—derelicts of autumn. Then, remembering the beach, these things
became freighted with the most sinister thoughts for the mind of the gazer.
They were hurrying away, having done their work. That they looked lonely
and old and mournful, and like withered leaves blown across the sea, only
heightened the horror.

Dick had never seen canoes before, but he knew that these things were
boats of some sort holding people, and that the people had left all those
traces on the beach. How much of the horror of the thing was revealed to
his subconscious intelligence, who can say?

He had climbed the boulder, and he now sat down with his knees drawn
up, and his hands clasped round them. Whenever he came round to this side
of the island, something happened of a fateful or sinister nature. The last
time he had nearly lost the dinghy; he had beached the little boat in such a
way that she floated off, and the tide was just in the act of stealing her, and
sweeping her from the lagoon out to sea, when he returned laden with his
bananas, and, rushing into the water up to his waist, saved her. Another time
he had fallen out of a tree, and just by a miracle escaped death. Another
time a hurricane had broken, lashing the lagoon into snow, and sending the
cocoa-nuts bounding and flying like tennis balls across the strand. This time
he had just escaped something, he knew not exactly what. It was almost as
if Providence were saying to him, “Don’t come here.”

He watched the brown sails as they dwindled in the wind-blown blue,
then he came down from the hill-top and cut his bananas. He cut four large
bunches, which caused him to make two journeys to the boat. When the
bananas were stowed he pushed off.

For a long time a great curiosity had been pulling at his heart-strings: a
curiosity of which he was dimly ashamed. Fear had given it birth, and Fear
still clung to it. It was, perhaps, the element of fear and the awful delight of
daring the unknown that made him give way to it.

He had rowed, perhaps, a hundred yards when he turned the boat’s head
and made for the reef. It was more than five years since that day when he
rowed across the lagoon, Emmeline sitting in the stern, with her wreath of
flowers in her hand. It might have been only yesterday, for everything
seemed just the same. The thunderous surf and the flying gulls, the blinding
sunlight, and the salt, fresh smell of the sea. The palm tree at the entrance of
the lagoon still bent gazing into the water, and round the projection of coral
to which he had last moored the boat still lay a fragment of the rope which
he had cut in his hurry to escape.

Ships had come into the lagoon, perhaps, during the five years, but no
one had noticed anything on the reef, for it was only from the hill-top that a
full view of what was there could be seen, and then only by eyes knowing
where to look. From the beach there was visible just a speck. It might have
been, perhaps, a bit of old wreckage flung there by a wave in some big
storm. A piece of old wreckage that had been tossed hither and thither for
years, and had at last found a place of rest.

Dick tied the boat up, and stepped on to the reef. It was high tide just as
before; the breeze was blowing strongly, and overhead a man-of-war’s bird,
black as ebony, with a blood-red bill, came sailing, the wind doming out his
wings. He circled in the air, and cried out fiercely, as if resenting the
presence of the intruder, then he passed away, let himself be blown away, as
it were, across the lagoon, wheeled, circled, and passed out to sea.

Dick approached the place he knew, and there lay the little old barrel all
warped by the powerful sun; the staves stood apart, and the hooping was
rusted and broken, and whatever it had contained in the way of spirit and
conviviality had long ago drained away.

Beside the barrel lay a skeleton, round which lay a few rags of cloth. The
skull had fallen to one side, and the lower jaw had fallen from the skull; the
bones of the hands and feet were still articulated, and the ribs had not fallen
in. It was all white and bleached, and the sun shone on it as indifferently as
on the coral, this shell and framework that had once been a man. There was
nothing dreadful about it, but a whole world of wonder.

To Dick, who had not been broken into the idea of death, who had not
learned to associate it with graves and funerals, sorrow, eternity, and hell,
the thing spoke as it never could have spoken to you or me.

Looking at it, things linked themselves together in his mind: the
skeletons of birds he had found in the woods, the fish he had slain, even
trees lying dead and rotten—even the shells of crabs.

If you had asked him what lay before him, and if he could have
expressed the thought in his mind, he would have answered you “change.”

All the philosophy in the world could not have told him more than he
knew just then about death—he, who even did not know its name.

He was held spellbound by the marvel and miracle of the thing and the
thoughts that suddenly crowded his mind like a host of spectres for whom a
door has just been opened.

Just as a child by unanswerable logic knows that a fire which has burned
him once will burn him again, or will burn another person, he knew that just
as the form before him was, his form would be some day—and Emmeline’s.

Then came the vague question which is born not of the brain, but the
heart, and which is the basis of all religions—where shall I be then? His
mind was not of an introspective nature, and the question just strayed across
it and was gone. And still the wonder of the thing held him. He was for the
first time in his life in a reverie; the corpse that had shocked and terrified
him five years ago had cast seeds of thought with its dead fingers upon his
mind, the skeleton had brought them to maturity. The full fact of universal
death suddenly appeared before him, and he recognised it.

He stood for a long time motionless, and then with a deep sigh turned to
the boat and pushed off without once looking back at the reef. He crossed
the lagoon and rowed slowly homewards, keeping in the shelter of the tree
shadows as much as possible.

Even looking at him from the shore you might have noticed a difference
in him. Your savage paddles his canoe, or sculls his boat, alert, glancing

about him, at touch with nature at all points; though he be lazy as a cat and
sleeps half the day, awake he is all ears and eyes—a creature reacting to the
least external impression.

Dick, as he rowed back, did not look about him: he was thinking or
retrospecting. The savage in him had received a check. As he turned the
little cape where the wild cocoa-nut blazed, he looked over his shoulder. A
figure was standing on the sward by the edge of the water. It was
Emmeline.

CHAPTER VII

THE SCHOONER

They carried the bananas up to the house, and hung them from a branch
of the artu. Then Dick, on his knees, lit the fire to prepare the evening meal.
When it was over he went down to where the boat was moored, and
returned with something in his hand. It was the javelin with the iron point—
or, rather, the two pieces of it. He had said nothing of what he had seen to
the girl.

Emmeline was seated on the grass; she had a long strip of the striped
flannel stuff about her, worn like a scarf, and she had another piece in her
hand which she was hemming. The bird was hopping about, pecking at a
banana which they had thrown to him; a light breeze made the shadow of
the artu leaves dance upon the grass, and the serrated leaves of the
breadfruit to patter one on the other with the sound of rain-drops falling
upon glass.

“Where did you get it?” asked Emmeline, staring at the piece of the
javelin which Dick had flung down almost beside her whilst he went into
the house to fetch the knife.

“It was on the beach over there,” he replied, taking his seat and
examining the two fragments to see how he could splice them together.

Emmeline looked at the pieces, putting them together in her mind. She
did not like the look of the thing: so keen and savage, and stained dark a
foot and more from the point.

“People had been there,” said Dick, putting the two pieces together and
examining the fracture critically.

“Where?”

“Over there. This was lying on the sand, and the sand was all trod up.”

“Dick,” said Emmeline, “who were the people?”

“I don’t know; I went up the hill and saw their boats going away—far
away out. This was lying on the sand.”

“Dick,” said Emmeline, “do you remember the noise yesterday?”

“Yes,” said Dick.

“I heard it in the night.”

“When?”

“In the night before the moon went away.”

“That was them,” said Dick.

“Dick!”

“Yes?”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know,” replied Dick.

“It was in the night, before the moon went away, and it went on and on
beating in the trees. I thought I was asleep, and then I knew I was awake;
you were asleep, and I pushed you to listen, but you couldn’t wake, you
were so asleep; then the moon went away, and the noise went on. How did
they make the noise?”

“I don’t know,” replied Dick, “but it was them; and they left this on the
sand, and the sand was all trod up, and I saw their boats from the hill, away
out far.”

“I thought I heard voices,” said Emmeline, “but I was not sure.”

She fell into meditation, watching her companion at work on the savage
and sinister-looking thing in his hands. He was splicing the two pieces
together with a strip of the brown cloth-like stuff which is wrapped round
the stalks of the cocoa-palm fronds. The thing seemed to have been hurled
here out of the blue by some unseen hand.

When he had spliced the pieces, doing so with marvellous dexterity, he
took the thing short down near the point, and began thrusting it into the soft
earth to clean it; then, with a bit of flannel, he polished it till it shone. He
felt a keen delight in it. It was useless as a fish-spear, because it had no
barb, but it was a weapon. It was useless as a weapon, because there was no
foe on the island to use it against; still, it was a weapon.

When he had finished scrubbing at it, he rose, hitched his old trousers
up, tightened the belt of cocoa-cloth which Emmeline had made for him,
went into the house and got his fish-spear, and stalked off to the boat,
calling out to Emmeline to follow him. They crossed over to the reef,
where, as usual, he divested himself of clothing.

It was strange that out here he would go about stark naked, yet on the
island he always wore some covering. But not so strange, perhaps, after all.

The sea is a great purifier, both of the mind and the body; before that
great sweet spirit people do not think in the same way as they think far
inland. What woman would appear in a town or on a country road, or even
bathing in a river, as she appears bathing in the sea?

Some instinct made Dick cover himself up on shore, and strip naked on
the reef. In a minute he was down by the edge of the surf, javelin in one
hand, fish-spear in the other.

Emmeline, by a little pool the bottom of which was covered with
branching coral, sat gazing down into its depths, lost in a reverie like that
into which we fall when gazing at shapes in the fire. She had sat some time
like this when a shout from Dick aroused her. She started to her feet and
gazed to where he was pointing. An amazing thing was there.

To the east, just rounding the curve of the reef, and scarcely a quarter of
a mile from it, was coming a big topsail schooner; a beautiful sight she was,
heeling to the breeze with every sail drawing, and the white foam like a
feather at her fore-foot.

Dick, with the javelin in his hand, was standing gazing at her; he had
dropped his fish-spear, and he stood as motionless as though he were carved
out of stone. Emmeline ran to him and stood beside him; neither of them
spoke a word as the vessel drew closer.

Everything was visible, so close was she now, from the reef points on the
great mainsail, luminous with the sunlight, and white as the wing of a gull,
to the rail of the bulwarks. A crowd of men were hanging over the port
bulwarks gazing at the island and the figures on the reef. Browned by the
sun and sea-breeze, Emmeline’s hair blowing on the wind, and the point of
Dick’s javelin flashing in the sun, they looked an ideal pair of savages, seen
from the schooner’s deck.

“They are going away,” said Emmeline, with a long-drawn breath of
relief.

Dick made no reply; he stared at the schooner a moment longer in
silence, then, having made sure that she was standing away from the land,
he began to run up and down, calling out wildly, and beckoning to the
vessel as if to call her back.

A moment later a sound came on the breeze, a faint hail; a flag was run
up to the peak and dipped as in derision, and the vessel continued on her
course.

As a matter of fact, she had been on the point of putting about. Her
captain had for a moment been undecided as to whether the forms on the
reef were those of castaways or savages. But the javelin in Dick’s hand had
turned the scale of his opinion in favour of the theory of savages.

CHAPTER VIII

LOVE STEPS IN

Two birds were sitting in the branches of the artu tree: Koko had taken a
mate. They had built a nest out of fibres pulled from the wrappings of the
cocoa-nut fronds, bits of stick and wire grass—anything, in fact; even fibres
from the palmetto thatch of the house below. The pilferings of birds, the
building of nests, what charming incidents they are in the great episode of
spring!

The hawthorn tree never bloomed here, the climate was that of eternal
summer, yet the spirit of May came just as she comes to the English
countryside or the German forest. The doings in the artu branches greatly
interested Emmeline.

The love-making and the nest-building were conducted quite in the usual
manner, according to rules laid down by Nature and carried out by men and
birds. All sorts of quaint sounds came filtering down through the leaves
from the branch where the sapphire-coloured lovers sat side by side, or the
fork where the nest was beginning to form: croonings and cluckings, sounds
like the flirting of a fan, the sounds of a squabble, followed by the sounds
that told of the squabble made up. Sometimes after one of these squabbles a
pale blue downy feather or two would come floating earthwards, touch the
palmetto leaves of the house-roof and cling there, or be blown on to the
grass.

It was some days after the appearance of the schooner, and Dick was
making ready to go into the woods and pick guavas. He had all the morning
been engaged in making a basket to carry them in. In civilisation he would,
judging from his mechanical talent, perhaps have been an engineer, building
bridges and ships, instead of palmetto-leaf baskets and cane houses—who
knows if he would have been happier?

The heat of midday had passed, when, with the basket hanging over his
shoulder on a piece of cane, he started for the woods, Emmeline following.
The place they were going to always filled her with a vague dread; not for a

great deal would she have gone there alone. Dick had discovered it in one
of his rambles.

They entered the wood and passed a little well, a well without apparent
source or outlet and a bottom of fine white sand. How the sand had formed
there, it would be impossible to say; but there it was, and around the margin
grew ferns redoubling themselves on the surface of the crystal-clear water.
They left this to the right and struck into the heart of the wood. The heat of
midday still lurked here; the way was clear, for there was a sort of path
between the trees, as if, in very ancient days, there had been a road.

Right across this path, half lost in shadow, half sunlit, the lianas hung
their ropes. The hotoo tree, with its powdering of delicate blossoms, here
stood, showing its lost loveliness to the sun; in the shade the scarlet hibiscus
burned like a flame. Artu and breadfruit trees and cocoa-nut bordered the
way.

As they proceeded the trees grew denser and the path more obscure. All
at once, rounding a sharp turn, the path ended in a valley carpeted with fern.
This was the place that always filled Emmeline with an undefined dread.
One side of it was all built up in terraces with huge blocks of stone. Blocks
of stone so enormous, that the wonder was how the ancient builders had put
them in their places.

Trees grew along the terraces, thrusting their roots between the
interstices of the blocks. At their base, slightly tilted forward as if with the
sinkage of years, stood a great stone figure roughly carved, thirty feet high
at least—mysterious-looking, the very spirit of the place. This figure and
the terraces, the valley itself, and the very trees that grew there, inspired
Emmeline with deep curiosity and vague fear.

People had been here once; sometimes she could fancy she saw dark
shadows moving amidst the trees, and the whisper of the foliage seemed to
her to hide voices at times, even as its shadow concealed forms. It was
indeed an uncanny place to be alone in even under the broad light of day.
All across the Pacific for thousands of miles you find relics of the past, like
these scattered through the islands.

These temple places are nearly all the same: great terraces of stone,
massive idols, desolation overgrown with foliage. They hint at one religion,
and a time when the sea space of the Pacific was a continent, which, sinking
slowly through the ages, has left only its higher lands and hill-tops visible
in the form of islands. Round these places the woods are thicker than
elsewhere, hinting at the presence there, once, of sacred groves. The idols
are immense, their faces are vague; the storms and the suns and the rains of
the ages have cast over them a veil. The sphinx is understandable and a toy
compared to these things, some of which have a stature of fifty feet, whose
creation is veiled in absolute mystery—the gods of a people for ever and for
ever lost.

The “stone man” was the name Emmeline had given the idol of the
valley; and sometimes at nights, when her thoughts would stray that way,
she would picture him standing all alone in the moonlight or starlight
staring straight before him.

He seemed for ever listening; unconsciously one fell to listening too, and
then the valley seemed steeped in a supernatural silence. He was not good
to be alone with.

Emmeline sat down amidst the fears just at his base. When one was close
up to him he lost the suggestion of life, and was simply a great stone which
cast a shadow in the sun.

Dick threw himself down also to rest. Then he rose up and went off
amidst the guava bushes, plucking the fruit and filling his basket. Since he
had seen the schooner, the white men on her decks, her great masts and
sails, and general appearance of freedom and speed and unknown
adventure, he had been more than ordinarily glum and restless. Perhaps he
connected her in his mind with the far-away vision of the Northumberland,
and the idea of other places and lands, and the yearning for change the idea
of them inspired.

He came back with his basket full of the ripe fruit, gave some to the girl
and sat down beside her. When she had finished eating them she took the
cane that he used for carrying the basket and held it in her hands. She was

bending it in the form of a bow when it slipped, flew out and struck her
companion a sharp blow on the side of his face.

Almost on the instant he turned and slapped her on the shoulder. She
stared at him for a moment in troubled amazement, a sob came in her
throat. Then some veil seemed lifted, some wizard’s wand stretched out,
some mysterious vial broken. As she looked at him like that, he suddenly
and fiercely clasped her in his arms. He held her like this for a moment,
dazed, stupefied, not knowing what to do with her. Then her lips told him,
for they met his in an endless kiss.

CHAPTER IX

THE SLEEP OF PARADISE

The moon rose up that evening and shot her silver arrows at the house
under the artu tree. The house was empty. Then the moon came across the
sea and across the reef.

She lit the lagoon to its dark, dim heart. She lit the coral brains and sand
spaces, and the fish, casting their shadows on the sand and the coral. The
keeper of the lagoon rose to greet her, and the fin of him broke her
reflection on the mirror-like surface into a thousand glittering ripples. She
saw the white staring ribs of the form on the reef. Then, peeping over the
trees, she looked down into the valley, where the great idol of stone had
kept its solitary vigil for five thousand years, perhaps, or more.

At his base, in his shadow, looking as if under his protection, lay two
human beings, naked, clasped in each other’s arms, and fast asleep. One
could scarcely pity his vigil, had it been marked sometimes through the
years by such an incident as this. The thing had been conducted just as the
birds conduct their love affairs. An affair absolutely natural, absolutely
blameless, and without sin.

It was a marriage according to Nature, without feast or guests,
consummated with accidental cynicism under the shadow of a religion a
thousand years dead.

So happy in their ignorance were they, that they only knew that suddenly
life had changed, that the skies and the sea were bluer, and that they had
become in some magical way one a part of the other. The birds on the tree
above were equally as happy in their ignorance, and in their love.

PART II

CHAPTER X

AN ISLAND HONEYMOON

One day Dick climbed on to the tree above the house, and, driving
Madame Koko off the nest upon which she was sitting, peeped in. There
were several pale green eggs in it. He did not disturb them, but climbed
down again, and the bird resumed her seat as if nothing had happened. Such
an occurrence would have terrified a bird used to the ways of men, but here
the birds were so fearless and so full of confidence that often they would
follow Emmeline in the wood, flying from branch to branch, peering at her
through the leaves, lighting quite close to her—once, even, on her shoulder.

The days passed. Dick had lost his restlessness: his wish to wander had
vanished. He had no reason to wander; perhaps that was the reason why. In
all the broad earth he could not have found anything more desirable than
what he had.

Instead now of finding a half-naked savage followed dog-like by his
mate, you would have found of an evening a pair of lovers wandering on
the reef. They had in a pathetic sort of way attempted to adorn the house
with a blue flowering creeper taken from the wood and trained over the
entrance.

Emmeline, up to this, had mostly done the cooking, such as it was; Dick
helped her now, always. He talked to her no longer in short sentences flung
out as if to a dog; and she, almost losing the strange reserve that had clung
to her from childhood, half showed him her mind. It was a curious mind:
the mind of a dreamer, almost the mind of a poet. The Cluricaunes dwelt

there, and vague shapes born of things she had heard about or dreamt of:
she had thoughts about the sea and stars, the flowers and birds.

Dick would listen to her as she talked, as a man might listen to the sound
of a rivulet. His practical mind could take no share in the dreams of his
other half, but her conversation pleased him.

He would look at her for a long time together, absorbed in thought. He
was admiring her.

Her hair, blue-black and glossy, tangled him in its meshes; he would
stroke it, so to speak, with his eyes, and then pull her close to him and bury
his face in it; the smell of it was intoxicating. He breathed her as one does
the perfume of a rose.

Her ears were small, and like little white shells. He would take one
between finger and thumb and play with it as if it were a toy, pulling at the
lobe of it, or trying to flatten out the curved part. Her breasts, her shoulders,
her knees, her little feet, every bit of her, he would examine and play with
and kiss. She would lie and let him, seeming absorbed in some far-away
thought, of which he was the object, then all at once her arms would go
round him. All this used to go on in the broad light of day, under the
shadow of the artu leaves, with no one to watch except the bright-eyed birds
in the leaves above.

Not all their time would be spent in this fashion. Dick was just as keen
after the fish. He dug up with a spade—improvised from one of the boards
of the dinghy—a space of soft earth near the taro patch and planted the
seeds of melons he found in the wood; he rethatched the house. They were,
in short, as busy as they could be in such a climate, but love-making would
come on them in fits, and then everything would be forgotten. Just as one
revisits some spot to renew the memory of a painful or pleasant experience
received there, they would return to the valley of the idol and spend a whole
afternoon in its shade. The absolute happiness of wandering through the
woods together, discovering new flowers, getting lost, and finding their way
again, was a thing beyond expression.

Dick had suddenly stumbled upon Love. His courtship had lasted only
some twenty minutes; it was being gone over again now, and extended.

One day, hearing a curious noise from the tree above the house, he
climbed it. The noise came from the nest, which had been temporarily left
by the mother bird. It was a gasping, wheezing sound, and it came from
four wide-open beaks, so anxious to be fed that one could almost see into
the very crops of the owners. They were Koko’s children. In another year
each of those ugly downy things would, if permitted to live, be a beautiful
sapphire-coloured bird with a few dove-coloured tail feathers, coral beak,
and bright, intelligent eyes. A few days ago each of these things was
imprisoned in a pale green egg. A month ago they were nowhere.

Something hit Dick on the cheek. It was the mother bird returned with
food for the young ones. Dick drew his head aside, and she proceeded
without more ado to fill their crops.

CHAPTER XI

THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE

Months passed away. Only one bird remained in the branches of the artu:
Koko’s children and mate had vanished, but he remained. The breadfruit
leaves had turned from green to pale gold and darkest amber, and now the
new green leaves were being presented to the spring.

Dick, who had a complete chart of the lagoon in his head, and knew all
the soundings and best fishing places, the locality of the stinging coral, and
the places where you could wade right across at low tide—Dick, one
morning, was gathering his things together for a fishing expedition. The
place he was going to lay some two and a half miles away across the island,
and as the road was bad he was going alone.

Emmeline had been passing a new thread through the beads of the
necklace she sometimes wore. This necklace had a history. In the shallows
not far away, Dick had found a bed of shell-fish; wading out at low tide, he
had taken some of them out to examine. They were oysters. The first one he
opened, so disgusting did its appearance seem to him, might have been the
last, only that under the beard of the thing lay a pearl. It was about twice the
size of a large pea, and so lustrous that even he could not but admire its
beauty, though quite unconscious of its value.

He flung the unopened oysters down, and took the thing to Emmeline.
Next day, returning by chance to the same spot, he found the oysters he had
cast down all dead and open in the sun. He examined them, and found
another pearl embedded in one of them. Then he collected nearly a bushel
of the oysters, and left them to die and open. The idea had occurred to him
of making a necklace for his companion. She had one made of shells, he
intended to make her one of pearls.

It took a long time, but it was something to do. He pierced them with a
big needle, and at the end of four months or so the thing was complete.
Great pearls most of them were—pure white, black, pink, some perfectly
round, some tear shaped, some irregular. The thing was worth fifteen, or
perhaps twenty thousand pounds, for he only used the biggest he could find,
casting away the small ones as useless.

Emmeline this morning had just finished restringing them on a double
thread. She looked pale and not at all well and had been restless all night.

As he went off, armed with his spear and fishing tackle, she waved her
hand to him without getting up. Usually she followed him a bit into the
wood when he was going away like this, but this morning she just sat at the
doorway of the little house, the necklace in her lap, following him with her
eyes until he was lost amidst the trees.

He had no compass to guide him, and he needed none. He knew the
woods by heart. The mysterious line beyond which scarcely an artu tree was
to be found. The long strip of mammee apple—a regular sheet of it a
hundred yards broad, and reaching from the middle of the island right down

to the lagoon. The clearings, some almost circular where the ferns grew
knee-deep. Then he came to the bad part.

The vegetation here had burst into a riot. All sorts of great sappy stalks
of unknown plants barred the way and tangled the foot; and there were
boggy places into which one sank horribly. Pausing to wipe one’s brow, the
stalks and tendrils one had beaten down, or beaten aside, rose up and closed
together, making one a prisoner almost as closely surrounded as a fly in
amber.

All the noontides that had ever fallen upon the island seemed to have left
some of their heat behind them here. The air was damp and close like the air
of a laundry; and the mournful and perpetual buzz of insects filled the
silence without destroying it.

A hundred men with scythes might make a road through the place to-
day; a month or two later, searching for the road, you would find none—the
vegetation would have closed in as water closes when divided.

This was the haunt of the jug orchid—a veritable jug, lid and all. Raising
the lid you would find the jug half filled with water. Sometimes in the
tangle up above, between two trees, you would see a thing like a bird come
to ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hothouse. All the trees—the few there
were—had a spectral and miserable appearance. They were half starved by
the voluptuous growth of the gigantic weeds.

If one had much imagination one felt afraid in this place, for one felt not
alone. At any moment it seemed that one might be touched on the elbow by
a hand reaching out from the surrounding tangle. Even Dick felt this,
unimaginative and fearless as he was. It took him nearly three-quarters of
an hour to get through, and then, at last, came the blessed air of real day,
and a glimpse of the lagoon between the tree-boles.

He would have rowed round in the dinghy, only that at low tide the
shallows of the north of the island were a bar to the boat’s passage. Of
course he might have rowed all the way round by way of the strand and reef
entrance, but that would have meant a circuit of six miles or more. When he

came between the trees down to the lagoon edge it was about eleven
o’clock in the morning, and the tide was nearly at the full.

The lagoon just here was like a trough, and the reef was very near,
scarcely a quarter of a mile from the shore. The water did not shelve, it
went down sheer fifty fathoms or more, and one could fish from the bank
just as from a pier head. He had brought some food with him, and he placed
it under a tree whilst he prepared his line, which had a lump of coral for a
sinker. He baited the hook, and whirling the sinker round in the air sent it
flying out a hundred feet from shore. There was a baby cocoa-nut tree
growing just at the edge of the water. He fastened the end of his line round
the narrow stem, in case of eventualities, and then, holding the line itself, he
fished.

He had promised Emmeline to return before sundown.

He was a fisherman. That is to say, a creature with the enduring patience
of a cat, tireless and heedless of time as an oyster. He came here for sport
more than for fish. Large things were to be found in this part of the lagoon.
The last time he had hooked a horror in the form of a cat-fish; at least in
outward appearance it was likest to a Mississippi cat-fish. Unlike the cat-
fish, it was coarse and useless as food, but it gave good sport.

The tide was now going out, and it was at the going-out of the tide that
the best fishing was to be had. There was no wind, and the lagoon lay like a
sheet of glass, with just a dimple here and there where the outgoing tide
made a swirl in the water.

As he fished he thought of Emmeline and the little house under the trees.
Scarcely one could call it thinking. Pictures passed before his mind’s eye—
pleasant and happy pictures, sunlit, moonlit, starlit.

Three hours passed thus without a bite or symptom that the lagoon
contained anything else but sea water, and disappointment; but he did not
grumble. He was a fisherman. Then he left the line tied to the tree and sat
down to eat the food he had brought with him. He had scarcely finished his
meal when the baby cocoa-nut tree shivered and became convulsed, and he
did not require to touch the taut line to know that it was useless to attempt

to cope with the thing at the end of it. The only course was to let it tug and
drown itself. So he sat down and watched.

After a few minutes the line slackened, and the little cocoa-nut tree
resumed its attitude of pensive meditation and repose. He pulled the line up:
there was nothing at the end of it but a hook. He did not grumble; he baited
the hook again, and flung it in, for it was quite likely that the ferocious
thing in the water would bite again.

Full of this idea and heedless of time he fished and waited. The sun was
sinking into the west—he did not heed it. He had quite forgotten that he had
promised Emmeline to return before sunset; it was nearly sunset now.
Suddenly, just behind him, from among the trees, he heard her voice,
crying:

“Dick!”

CHAPTER XII

THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE (continued)

He dropped the line, and turned with a start. There was no one visible.
He ran amongst the trees calling out her name, but only echoes answered.
Then he came back to the lagoon edge.

He felt sure that what he had heard was only fancy, but it was nearly
sunset, and more than time to be off. He pulled in his line, wrapped it up,
took his fish-spear and started.

It was just in the middle of the bad place that dread came to him. What if
anything had happened to her? It was dusk here, and never had the weeds
seemed so thick, dimness so dismal, the tendrils of the vines so gin-like.
Then he lost his way—he who was so sure of his way always! The hunter’s
instinct had been crossed, and for a time he went hither and thither helpless

as a ship without a compass. At last he broke into the real wood, but far to
the right of where he ought to have been. He felt like a beast escaped from a
trap, and hurried along, led by the sound of the surf.

When he reached the clear sward that led down to the lagoon the sun had
just vanished beyond the sea-line. A streak of red cloud floated like the
feather of a flamingo in the western sky close to the sea, and twilight had
already filled the world. He could see the house dimly, under the shadow of
the trees, and he ran towards it, crossing the sward diagonally.

Always before, when he had been away, the first thing to greet his eyes
on his return had been the figure of Emmeline. Either at the lagoon edge or
the house door he would find her waiting for him.

She was not waiting for him to-night. When he reached the house she
was not there, and he paused, after searching the place, a prey to the most
horrible perplexity, and unable for the moment to think or act.

Since the shock of the occurrence on the reef she had been subject at
times to occasional attacks of headache; and when the pain was more than
she could bear, she would go off and hide. Dick would hunt for her amidst
the trees, calling out her name and hallooing. A faint “halloo” would answer
when she heard him, and then he would find her under a tree or bush, with
her unfortunate head between her hands, a picture of misery.

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 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 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.”

It was a fact; since the coming of the child she had lost that dread of the
other side of the island—or almost lost it.

Death is a great darkness, birth is a great light—they had intermixed in
her mind; the darkness was still there, but it was no longer terrible to her,
for it was infused with the light. The result was a twilight sad, but beautiful,
and unpeopled with forms of fear.

Years ago she had seen a mysterious door close and shut a human being
out for ever from the world. The sight had filled her with dread
unimaginable, for she had no words for the thing, no religion or philosophy
to explain it away or gloss it over. Just recently she had seen an equally
mysterious door open and admit a human being; and deep down in her

mind, in the place where the dreams were, the one great fact had explained
and justified the other. Life had vanished into the void, but life had come
from there. There was life in the void, and it was no longer terrible.

Perhaps all religions were born on a day when some woman, seated upon
a rock by the prehistoric sea, looked at her newborn child and recalled to
mind her man who had been slain, thus closing the charm and imprisoning
the idea of a future state.

Emmeline, with the child in her arms, stepped into the little boat and
took her seat in the stern, whilst Dick pushed off. Scarcely had he put out
the sculls than a new passenger arrived. It was Koko. He would often
accompany them to the reef, though, strangely enough, he would never go
there alone of his own accord. He made a circle or two over them, and then
lit on the gunwale in the bow, and perched there, humped up, and with his
long dove-coloured tail feathers presented to the water.

The oarsman kept close in-shore, and as they rounded the little cape all
gay with wild cocoa-nut the bushes brushed the boat, and the child, excited
by their colour, held out his hands to them. Emmeline stretched out her
hand and broke off a branch; but it was not a branch of the wild cocoa-nut
she had plucked, it was a branch of the never-wake-up berries. The berries
that will cause a man to sleep, should he eat of them—to sleep and dream,
and never wake up again.

“Throw them away!” cried Dick, who remembered.

“I will in a minute,” she replied.

She was holding them up before the child, who was laughing and trying
to grasp them. Then she forgot them, and dropped them in the bottom of the
boat, for something had struck the keel with a thud, and the water was
boiling all round.

There was a savage fight going on below. In the breeding season great
battles would take place sometimes in the lagoon, for fish have their
jealousies just like men—love affairs, friendships. The two great forms

could be dimly perceived, one in pursuit of the other, and they terrified
Emmeline, who implored Dick to row on.

They slipped by the pleasant shores that Emmeline had never seen
before, having been sound asleep when they came past them those years
ago.

Just before putting off she had looked back at the beginnings of the little
house under the artu tree, and as she looked at the strange glades and
groves, the picture of it rose before her, and seemed to call her back.

It was a tiny possession, but it was home; and so little used to change
was she that already a sort of home-sickness was upon her; but it passed
away almost as soon as it came, and she fell to wondering at the things
around her, and pointing them out to the child.

When they came to the place where Dick had hooked the albicore, he
hung on his oars and told her about it. It was the first time she had heard of
it; a fact which shows into what a state of savagery he had been lapsing. He
had mentioned about the canoes, for he had to account for the javelin; but as
for telling her of the incidents of the chase, he no more thought of doing so
than a red Indian would think of detailing to his squaw the incidents of a
bear hunt. Contempt for women is the first law of savagery, and perhaps the
last law of some old and profound philosophy.

She listened, and when it came to the incident of the shark, she
shuddered.

“I wish I had a hook big enough to catch him with,” said he, staring into
the water as if in search of his enemy.

“Don’t think of him, Dick,” said Emmeline, holding the child more
tightly to her heart. “Row on.”

He resumed the sculls, but you could have seen from his face that he was
recounting to himself the incident.

When they had rounded the last promontory, and the strand and the
break in the reef opened before them, Emmeline caught her breath. The
place had changed in some subtle manner; everything was there as before,
yet everything seemed different—the lagoon seemed narrower, the reef
nearer, the cocoa-palms not nearly so tall. She was contrasting the real
things with the recollection of them when seen by a child. The black speck
had vanished from the reef; the storm had swept it utterly away.

Dick beached the boat on the shelving sand, and left Emmeline seated in
the stern of it, whilst he went in search of the bananas; she would have
accompanied him, but the child had fallen asleep.

Hannah asleep was even a pleasanter picture than when awake. He
looked like a little brown Cupid without wings, bow or arrow. He had all
the grace of a curled-up feather. Sleep was always in pursuit of him, and
would catch him up at the most unexpected moments—when he was at
play, or indeed at any time. Emmeline would sometimes find him with a
coloured shell or bit of coral that he had been playing with in his hand fast
asleep, a happy expression on his face, as if his mind were pursuing its
earthly avocations on some fortunate beach in dreamland.

Dick had plucked a huge breadfruit leaf and given it to her as a shelter
from the sun, and she sat holding it over her, and gazing straight before her,
over the white, sunlit sands.

The flight of the mind in reverie is not in a direct line. To her, dreaming
as she sat, came all sorts of coloured pictures, recalled by the scene before
her: the green water under the stern of a ship, and the word Shenandoah
vaguely reflected on it; their landing, and the little tea-set spread out on the
white sand—she could still see the pansies painted on the plates, and she
counted in memory the lead spoons; the great stars that burned over the reef
at nights; the Cluricaunes and fairies; the cask by the well where the
convolvulus blossomed, and the wind-blown trees seen from the summit of
the hill—all these pictures drifted before her, dissolving and replacing each
other as they went.

There was sadness in the contemplation of them, but pleasure too. She
felt at peace with the world. All trouble seemed far behind her. It was as if

the great storm that had left them unharmed had been an ambassador from
the powers above to assure her of their forbearance, protection, and love.

All at once she noticed that between the boat’s bow and the sand there
lay a broad, blue, sparkling line. The dinghy was afloat.

CHAPTER XX

THE KEEPER OF THE LAGOON

The woods here had been less affected by the cyclone than those upon
the other side of the island, but there had been destruction enough. To reach
the place he wanted, Dick had to climb over felled trees and fight his way
through a tangle of vines that had once hung overhead.

The banana trees had not suffered at all; as if by some special
dispensation of Providence even the great bunches of fruit had been
scarcely injured, and he proceeded to climb and cut them. He cut two
bunches, and with one across his shoulder came back down through the
trees.

He had got half across the sands, his head bent under the load, when a
distant call came to him, and, raising his head, he saw the boat adrift in the
middle of the lagoon, and the figure of the girl in the bow of it waving to
him with her arm. He saw a scull floating on the water half-way between
the boat and the shore, which she had no doubt lost in an attempt to paddle
the boat back. He remembered that the tide was going out.

He flung his load aside, and ran down the beach; in a moment he was in
the water. Emmeline, standing up in the boat, watched him.

When she found herself adrift, she had made an effort to row back, and
in her hurry shipping the sculls she had lost one. With a single scull she was
quite helpless, as she had not the art of sculling a boat from the stern. At

first she was not frightened, because she knew that Dick would soon return
to her assistance; but as the distance between boat and shore increased, a
cold hand seemed laid upon her heart. Looking at the shore it seemed very
far away, and the view towards the reef was terrific, for the opening had
increased in apparent size, and the great sea beyond seemed drawing her to
it.

She saw Dick coming out of the wood with the load on his shoulder, and
she called to him. At first he did not seem to hear, then she saw him look
up, cast the bananas away, and come running down the sand to the water’s
edge. She watched him swimming, she saw him seize the scull, and her
heart gave a great leap of joy.

Towing the scull and swimming with one arm, he rapidly approached the
boat. He was quite close, only ten feet away, when Emmeline saw behind
him, shearing through the clear, rippling water and advancing with speed, a
dark triangle that seemed made of canvas stretched upon a sword point.

Forty years ago he had floated adrift on the sea in the form and likeness
of a small shabby pine-cone, a prey to anything that might find him. He had
escaped the jaws of the dog-fish, and the jaws of the dog-fish are a very
wide door; he had escaped the albicore and squid: his life had been one long
series of miraculous escapes from death. Out of a billion like him born in
the same year, he and a few others only had survived.

For thirty years he had kept the lagoon to himself, as a ferocious tiger
keeps a jungle. He had known the palm tree on the reef when it was a
seedling, and he had known the reef even before the palm tree was there.
The things he had devoured, flung one upon another, would have made a
mountain; yet he was as clear of enmity as a sword, as cruel, and as
soulless. He was the spirit of the lagoon.

Emmeline screamed, and pointed to the thing behind the swimmer. He
turned, saw it, dropped the oar and made for the boat. She had seized the
remaining scull and stood with it poised, then she hurled it blade foremost
at the form in the water, now fully visible, and close on its prey.

She could not throw a stone straight, yet the scull went like an arrow to
the mark, balking the pursuer and saving the pursued. In a moment more his
leg was over the gunwale, and he was saved.

But the scull was lost.

CHAPTER XXI

THE HAND OF THE SEA

There was nothing in the boat that could possibly be used as a paddle;
the scull was only five or six yards away, but to attempt to swim to it was
certain death, yet they were being swept out to sea. He might have made the
attempt, only that on the starboard quarter the form of the shark, gently
swimming at the same pace as they were drifting, could be made out only
half veiled by the water.

The bird perched on the gunwale seemed to divine their trouble, for he
rose in the air, made a circle, and resumed his perch with all his feathers
ruffled.

Dick stood in despair, helpless, his hands clasping his head. The shore
was drawing away before him, the surf loudening behind him, yet he could
do nothing. The island was being taken away from them by the great hand
of the sea.

Then, suddenly, the little boat entered the race formed by the confluence
of the tides, from the right and left arms of the lagoon; the sound of the surf
suddenly increased as though a door had been flung open. The breakers
were falling and the sea-gulls crying on either side of them, and for a
moment the ocean seemed to hesitate as to whether they were to be taken
away into her wastes, or dashed on the coral strand. Only for a moment this
seeming hesitation lasted; then the power of the tide prevailed over the

power of the swell, and the little boat taken by the current drifted gently out
to sea.

Dick flung himself down beside Emmeline, who was seated in the
bottom of the boat holding the child to her breast. The bird, seeing the land
retreat, and wise in its instinct, rose into the air. It circled thrice round the
drifting boat, and then, like a beautiful but faithless spirit, passed away to
the shore.

CHAPTER XXII

TOGETHER

The island had sunk slowly from sight; at sundown it was just a trace, a
stain on the south-western horizon. It was before the new moon, and the
little boat lay drifting. It drifted from the light of sunset into a world of
vague violet twilight, and now it lay drifting under the stars.

The girl, clasping the baby to her breast, leaned against her companion’s
shoulder; neither of them spoke. All the wonders in their short existence had
culminated in this final wonder, this passing away together from the world
of Time. This strange voyage they had embarked on—to where?

Now that the first terror was over they felt neither sorrow nor fear. They
were together. Come what might, nothing could divide them; even should
they sleep and never wake up, they would sleep together. Had one been left
and the other taken!

As though the thought had occurred to them simultaneously, they turned
one to the other, and their lips met, their souls met, mingling in one dream;
whilst above in the windless heaven space answered space with flashes of
siderial light, and Canopus shone and burned like the pointed sword of
Azrael.

Clasped in Emmeline’s hand was the last and most mysterious gift of the
mysterious world they had known—the branch of crimson berries.

BOOK III
CHAPTER I

MAD LESTRANGE

They knew him upon the Pacific slope as “Mad Lestrange.” He was not
mad, but he was a man with a fixed idea. He was pursued by a vision: the
vision of two children and an old sailor adrift in a little boat upon a wide
blue sea.

When the Arago, bound for Papetee, picked up the boats of the
Northumberland, only the people in the long-boat were alive. Le Farge, the
captain, was mad, and he never recovered his reason. Lestrange was utterly
shattered; the awful experience in the boats and the loss of the children had
left him a seemingly helpless wreck. The scowbankers, like all their class,
had fared better, and in a few days were about the ship and sitting in the
sun. Four days after the rescue the Arago spoke the Newcastle, bound for
San Francisco, and transhipped the shipwrecked men.

Had a physician seen Lestrange on board the Northumberland as she lay
in that long, long calm before the fire, he would have declared that nothing
but a miracle could prolong his life. The miracle came about.

In the general hospital of San Francisco, as the clouds cleared from his
mind, they unveiled the picture of the children and the little boat. The
picture had been there daily, seen but not truly comprehended; the horrors
gone through in the open boat, the sheer physical exhaustion, had merged
all the accidents of the great disaster into one mournful half-comprehended
fact. When his brain cleared all the other incidents fell out of focus, and
memory, with her eyes set upon the children, began to paint a picture that
he was ever more to see.

Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched;
and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere

photographs, but the work of an artist. All that is inessential she casts away,
all that is essential she retains; she idealises, and that is why her picture of a
lost mistress has had power to keep a man a celibate to the end of his days,
and why she can break a human heart with the picture of a dead child. She
is a painter, but she is also a poet.

The picture before the mind of Lestrange was filled with this almost
diabolical poetry, for in it the little boat and her helpless crew were
represented adrift on a blue and sunlit sea. A sea most beautiful to look at,
yet most terrible, bearing as it did the recollections of thirst.

He had been dying, when, raising himself on his elbow, so to say, he
looked at this picture. It recalled him to life. His willpower asserted itself,
and he refused to die.

The will of a man has, if it is strong enough, the power to reject death.
He was not in the least conscious of the exercise of this power; he only
knew that a great and absorbing interest had suddenly arisen in him, and
that a great aim stood before him—the recovery of the children.

The disease that was killing him ceased its ravages, or rather was slain in
its turn by the increased vitality against which it had to strive. He left the
hospital and took up his quarters at the Palace Hotel, and then, like the
General of an army, he began to formulate his plan of campaign against
Fate.

When the crew of the Northumberland had stampeded, hurling their
officers aside, lowering the boats with a rush, and casting themselves into
the sea, everything had been lost in the way of ship’s papers; the charts, the
two logs—everything, in fact, that could indicate the latitude and longitude
of the disaster. The first and second officers and a midshipman had shared
the fate of the quarter-boat; of the foremast hands saved, not one, of course,
could give the slightest hint as to the locality of the spot.

A time reckoning from the Horn told little, for there was no record of the
log. All that could be said was that the disaster had occurred somewhere
south of the line.

In Le Farge’s brain lay for a certainty the position, and Lestrange went to
see the captain in the “Maison de Sante,” where he was being looked after,
and found him quite recovered from the furious mania that he had been
suffering from. Quite recovered, and playing with a ball of coloured
worsted.

There remained the log of the Arago; in it would be found the latitude
and longitude of the boats she had picked up.

The Arago, due at Papetee, became overdue. Lestrange watched the
overdue lists from day to day, from week to week, from month to month,
uselessly, for the Arago never was heard of again. One could not affirm
even that she was wrecked; she was simply one of the ships that never come
back from the sea.

CHAPTER II

THE SECRET OF THE AZURE

To lose a child he loves is undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe that can
happen to a man. I do not refer to its death.

A child wanders into the street, or is left by its nurse for a moment, and
vanishes. At first the thing is not realised. There is a pang and hurry at the
heart which half vanishes, whilst the understanding explains that in a
civilised city, if a child gets lost, it will be found and brought back by the
neighbours or the police.

But the police know nothing of the matter, or the neighbours, and the
hours pass. Any minute may bring back the wanderer; but the minutes pass,
and the day wears into evening, and the evening to night, and the night to
dawn, and the common sounds of a new day begin.

You cannot remain at home for restlessness; you go out, only to return
hurriedly for news. You are eternally listening, and what you hear shocks
you; the common sounds of life, the roll of the carts and cabs in the street,
the footsteps of the passers-by, are full of an indescribable mournfulness;
music increases your misery into madness, and the joy of others is
monstrous as laughter heard in hell.

If some one were to bring you the dead body of the child, you might
weep, but you would bless him, for it is the uncertainty that kills.

You go mad, or go on living. Years pass by, and you are an old man. You
say to yourself: “He would have been twenty years of age to-day.”

There is not in the old ferocious penal code of our forefathers a
punishment adequate to the case of the man or woman who steals a child.

Lestrange was a wealthy man, and one hope remained to him, that the
children might have been rescued by some passing ship. It was not the case
of children lost in a city, but in the broad Pacific, where ships travel from all
ports to all ports, and to advertise his loss adequately it was necessary to
placard the world. Ten thousand dollars was the reward offered for news of
the lost ones, twenty thousand for the recovery; and the advertisement
appeared in every newspaper likely to reach the eyes of a sailor, from the
Liverpool Post to the Dead Bird.

The years passed without anything definite coming in answer to all these
advertisements. Once news came of two children saved from the sea in the
neighbourhood of the Gilberts, and it was not false news, but they were not
the children he was seeking for. This incident at once depressed and
stimulated him, for it seemed to say, “If these children have been saved,
why not yours?”

The strange thing was, that in his heart he felt a certainty that they were
alive. His intellect suggested their death in twenty different forms; but a
whisper, somewhere out of that great blue ocean, told him at intervals that
what he sought was there, living, and waiting for him.

He was somewhat of the same temperament as Emmeline—a dreamer,
with a mind tuned to receive and record the fine rays that fill this world
flowing from intellect to intellect, and even from what we call inanimate
things. A coarser nature would, though feeling, perhaps, as acutely the grief,
have given up in despair the search. But he kept on; and at the end of the
fifth year, so far from desisting, he chartered a schooner and passed
eighteen months in a fruitless search, calling at little-known islands, and
once, unknowing, at an island only three hundred miles away from the tiny
island of this story.

If you wish to feel the hopelessness of this unguided search, do not look
at a map of the Pacific, but go there. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands
of square leagues of sea, thousands of islands, reefs, atolls.

Up to a few years ago there were many small islands utterly unknown;
even still there are some, though the charts of the Pacific are the greatest
triumphs of hydrography; and though the island of the story was actually on
the Admiralty charts, of what use was that fact to Lestrange?

He would have continued searching, but he dared not, for the desolation
of the sea had touched him.

In that eighteen months the Pacific explained itself to him in part,
explained its vastness, its secrecy and inviolability. The schooner lifted veil
upon veil of distance, and veil upon veil lay beyond. He could only move in
a right line; to search the wilderness of water with any hope, one would
have to be endowed with the gift of moving in all directions at once.

He would often lean over the bulwark rail and watch the swell slip by, as
if questioning the water. Then the sunsets began to weigh upon his heart,
and the stars to speak to him in a new language, and he knew that it was
time to return, if he would return with a whole mind.

When he got back to San Francisco he called upon his agent,
Wannamaker of Kearney Street, but there was still no news.

CHAPTER III

CAPTAIN FOUNTAIN

He had a suite of rooms at the Palace Hotel, and he lived the life of any
other rich man who is not addicted to pleasure. He knew some of the best
people in the city, and conducted himself so sanely in all respects that a
casual stranger would never have guessed his reputation for madness; but
when you knew him better, you would find sometimes in the middle of a
conversation that his mind was away from the subject; and were you to
follow him in the street, you would hear him in conversation with himself.
Once at a dinner-party he rose and left the room, and did not return. Trifles,
but sufficient to establish a reputation of a sort.

One morning—to be precise, it was the second day of May, exactly eight
years and five months after the wreck of the Northumberland—Lestrange
was in his sitting-room reading, when the bell of the telephone, which stood
in the corner of the room, rang. He went to the instrument.

“Are you there?” came a high American voice. “Lestrange—right—
come down and see me—Wannamaker—I have news for you.”

Lestrange held the receiver for a moment, then he put it back in the rest.
He went to a chair and sat down, holding his head between his hands, then
he rose and went to the telephone again; but he dared not use it, he dare not
shatter the newborn hope.

“News!” What a world lies in that word.

In Kearney Street he stood before the door of Wannamaker’s office
collecting himself and watching the crowd drifting by, then he entered and
went up the stairs. He pushed open a swing-door and entered a great room.
The clink and rattle of a dozen typewriters filled the place, and all the hurry
of business; clerks passed and came with sheaves of correspondence in their
hands; and Wannamaker himself, rising from bending over a message which

he was correcting on one of the typewriters’ tables, saw the newcomer and
led him to the private office.

“What is it?” said Lestrange.

“Only this,” said the other, taking up a slip of paper with a name and
address on it. “Simon J. Fountain, of 45 Rathray Street, West—that’s down
near the wharves—says he has seen your ad. in an old number of a paper,
and he thinks he can tell you something. He did not specify the nature of the
intelligence, but it might be worth finding out.”

“I will go there,” said Lestrange.

“Do you know Rathray Street?”

“No.”

Wannamaker went out and called a boy and gave him some directions;
then Lestrange and the boy started.

Lestrange left the office without saying “Thank you,” or taking leave in
any way of the advertising agent—who did not feel in the least affronted,
for he knew his customer.

Rathray Street is, or was before the earthquake, a street of small clean
houses. It had a seafaring look that was accentuated by the marine perfumes
from the wharves close by and the sound of steam winches loading or
discharging cargo—a sound that ceased not night or day as the work went
on beneath the sun or the sizzling arc lamps.

No. 45 was almost exactly like its fellows, neither better nor worse; and
the door was opened by a neat, prim woman, small, and of middle age.
Commonplace she was, no doubt, but not commonplace to Lestrange.

“Is Mr Fountain in?” he asked. “I have come about the advertisement.”

“Oh, have you, sir?” she replied, making way for him to enter, and
showing him into a little sitting-room on the left of the passage. “The
Captain is in bed; he is a great invalid, but he was expecting, perhaps, some

one would call, and he will be able to see you in a minute, if you don’t mind
waiting.”

“Thanks,” said Lestrange; “I can wait.”

He had waited eight years, what mattered a few minutes now? But at no
time in the eight years had he suffered such suspense, for his heart knew
that now, just now in this commonplace little house, from the lips of,
perhaps, the husband of that commonplace woman, he was going to learn
either what he feared to hear, or what he hoped.

It was a depressing little room; it was so clean, and looked as though it
were never used. A ship imprisoned in a glass bottle stood upon the
mantelpiece, and there were shells from far-away places, pictures of ships
in sand—all the things one finds as a rule adorning an old sailor’s home.

Lestrange, as he sat waiting, could hear movements from the next room
—probably the invalid’s, which they were preparing for his reception. The
distant sounds of the derricks and winches came muffled through the
tightly-shut window that looked as though it never had been opened. A
square of sunlight lit the upper part of the cheap lace curtain on the right of
the window, and repeated its pattern vaguely on the lower part of the wall
opposite. Then a bluebottle fly awoke suddenly into life and began to buzz
and drum against the window pane, and Lestrange wished that they would
come.

A man of his temperament must necessarily, even under the happiest
circumstances, suffer in going through the world; the fine fibre always
suffers when brought into contact with the coarse. These people were as
kindly disposed as any one else. The advertisement and the face and
manners of the visitor might have told them that it was not the time for
delay, yet they kept him waiting whilst they arranged bed-quilts and put
medicine bottles straight—as if he could see!

At last the door opened, and the woman said:

“Will you step this way, sir?”

She showed him into a bedroom opening off the passage. The room was
neat and clean, and had that indescribable appearance which marks the
bedroom of the invalid.

In the bed, making a mountain under the counterpane with an
enormously distended stomach, lay a man, black-bearded, and with his
large, capable, useless hands spread out on the coverlet—hands ready and
willing, but debarred from work. Without moving his body, he turned his
head slowly and looked at the newcomer. This slow movement was not
from weakness or disease, it was the slow, emotionless nature of the man
speaking.

“This is the gentleman, Silas,” said the woman, speaking over
Lestrange’s shoulder. Then she withdrew and closed the door.

“Take a chair, sir,” said the sea captain, flapping one of his hands on the
counterpane as if in wearied protest against his own helplessness. “I haven’t
the pleasure of your name, but the missus tells me you’re come about the
advertisement I lit on yester-even.”

He took a paper, folded small, that lay beside him, and held it out to his
visitor. It was a Sidney Bulletin three years old.

“Yes,” said Lestrange, looking at the paper; “that is my advertisement.”

“Well, it’s strange—very strange,” said Captain Fountain, “that I should
have lit on it only yesterday. I’ve had it all three years in my chest, the way
old papers get lying at the bottom with odds and ends. Mightn’t a’ seen it
now, only the missus cleared the raffle out of the chest, and, ‘Give me that
paper,’ I says, seeing it in her hand; and I fell to reading it, for a man’ll read
anything bar tracts lying in bed eight months, as I’ve been with the dropsy.
I’ve been whaler man and boy forty year, and my last ship was the Sea-
Horse. Over seven years ago one of my men picked up something on a
beach of one of them islands east of the Marquesas—we’d put in to water
—”

“Yes, yes,” said Lestrange. “What was it he found?”

“Missus!” roared the captain in a voice that shook the walls of the room.

The door opened, and the woman appeared.

“Fetch me my keys out of my trousers pocket.”

The trousers were hanging up on the back of the door, as if only waiting
to be put on. The woman fetched the keys, and he fumbled over them and
found one. He handed it to her, and pointed to the drawer of a bureau
opposite the bed.

She knew evidently what was wanted, for she opened the drawer and
produced a box, which she handed to him. It was a small cardboard box tied
round with a bit of string. He undid the string, and disclosed a child’s tea
service: a teapot, cream jug, six little plates—all painted with a pansy.

It was the box which Emmeline had always been losing—lost again.

Lestrange buried his face in his hands. He knew the things. Emmeline
had shown them to him in a burst of confidence. Out of all that vast ocean
he had searched unavailingly: they had come to him like a message, and the
awe and mystery of it bowed him down and crushed him.

The captain had placed the things on the newspaper spread out by his
side, and he was unrolling the little spoons from their tissue-paper covering.
He counted them as if entering up the tale of some trust, and placed them on
the newspaper.

“When did you find them?” asked Lestrange, speaking with his face still
covered.

“A matter of over seven years ago,” replied the captain, “we’d put in to
water at a place south of the line—Palm Tree Island we whalemen call it,
because of the tree at the break of the lagoon. One of my men brought it
aboard, found it in a shanty built of sugar-canes which the men bust up for
devilment.”

“Good God!” said Lestrange. “Was there no one there—nothing but this
box?”

“Not a sight or sound, so the men said; just the shanty abandoned
seemingly. I had no time to land and hunt for castaways, I was after
whales.”

“How big is the island?”

“Oh, a fairish middle-sized island—no natives. I’ve heard tell it’s tabu;
why, the Lord only knows—some crank of the Kanakas, I s’pose. Anyhow,
there’s the findings—you recognise them?”

“I do.”

“Seems strange,” said the captain, “that I should pick ’em up; seems
strange your advertisement out, and the answer to it lying amongst my gear,
but that’s the way things go.”

“Strange!” said the other. “It’s more than strange.”

“Of course,” continued the captain, “they might have been on the island
hid away som’ere, there’s no saying; only appearances are against it. Of
course they might be there now unbeknownst to you or me.”

“They are there now,” answered Lestrange, who was sitting up and
looking at the playthings as though he read in them some hidden message.
“They are there now. Have you the position of the island?”

“I have. Missus, hand me my private log.”

She took a bulky, greasy, black note-book from the bureau, and handed it
to him. He opened it, thumbed the pages, and then read out the latitude and
longitude.

“I entered it on the day of finding—here’s the entry. ‘Adams brought
aboard child’s toy box out of deserted shanty, which men pulled down;
traded it to me for a caulker of rum.’ The cruise lasted three years and eight
months after that; we’d only been out three when it happened. I forgot all

about it: three years scrubbing round the world after whales doesn’t
brighten a man’s memory. Right round we went, and paid off at Nantucket.
Then, after a fortni’t on shore and a month repairin’, the old Sea-Horse was
off again, I with her. It was at Honolulu this dropsy took me, and back I
come here, home. That’s the yarn. There’s not much to it, but, seein’ your
advertisement, I thought I might answer it.”

Lestrange took Fountain’s hand and shook it.

“You see the reward I offered?” he said. “I have not my cheque book
with me, but you shall have the cheque in an hour from now.”

“No, sir,” replied the captain; “if anything comes of it, I don’t say I’m
not open to some small acknowledgment, but ten thousand dollars for a
five-cent box—that’s not my way of doing business.”

“I can’t make you take the money now—I can’t even thank you properly
now,” said Lestrange—“I am in a fever; but when all is settled, you and I
will settle this business. My God!”

He buried his face in his hands again.

“I’m not wishing to be inquisitive,” said Captain Fountain, slowly
putting the things back in the box and tucking the paper shavings round
them, “but may I ask how you propose to move in this business?”

“I will hire a ship at once and search.”

“Ay,” said the captain, wrapping up the little spoons in a meditative
manner; “perhaps that will be best.”

He felt certain in his own mind that the search would be fruitless, but he
did not say so. If he had been absolutely certain in his mind without being
able to produce the proof, he would not have counselled Lestrange to any
other course, knowing that the man’s mind would never be settled until
proof positive was produced.

“The question is,” said Lestrange, “what is my quickest way to get
there?”

“There I may be able to help you,” said Fountain, tying the string round
the box. “A schooner with good heels to her is what you want; and, if I’m
not mistaken, there’s one discharging cargo at this present minit at
O’Sullivan’s wharf. Missus!”

The woman answered the call. Lestrange felt like a person in a dream,
and these people who were interesting themselves in his affairs seemed to
him beneficent beyond the nature of human beings.

“Is Captain Stannistreet home, think you?”

“I don’t know,” replied the woman; “but I can go see.”

“Do.”

She went.

“He lives only a few doors down,” said Fountain, “and he’s the man for
you. Best schooner captain ever sailed out of ’Frisco. The Raratonga is the
name of the boat I have in my mind—best boat that ever wore copper.
Stannistreet is captain of her, owners are M’Vitie. She’s been missionary,
and she’s been pigs; copra was her last cargo, and she’s nearly discharged it.
Oh, M’Vitie would hire her out to Satan at a price; you needn’t be afraid of
their boggling at it if you can raise the dollars. She’s had a new suit of sails
only the beginning of the year. Oh, she’ll fix you up to a T, and you take the
word of S. Fountain for that. I’ll engineer the thing from this bed if you’ll
let me put my oar in your trouble; I’ll victual her, and find a crew three
quarter price of any of those d--d skulking agents. Oh, I’ll take a
commission right enough, but I’m half paid with doing the thing—”

He ceased, for footsteps sounded in the passage outside, and Captain
Stannistreet was shown in. He was a young man of not more than thirty,
alert, quick of eye, and pleasant of face. Fountain introduced him to
Lestrange, who had taken a fancy to him at first sight.

When he heard about the business in hand, he seemed interested at once;
the affair seemed to appeal to him more than if it had been a purely
commercial matter, such as copra and pigs.

“If you’ll come with me, sir, down to the wharf, I’ll show you the boat
now,” he said, when they had discussed the matter and threshed it out
thoroughly.

He rose, bid good-day to his friend Fountain, and Lestrange followed
him, carrying the brown-paper box in his hand.

O’Sullivan’s Wharf was not far away. A tall Cape Horner that looked
almost a twin sister of the ill-fated Northumberland was discharging iron,
and astern of her, graceful as a dream, with snow-white decks, lay the
Raratonga discharging copra.

“That’s the boat,” said Stannistreet; “cargo nearly all out. How does she
strike your fancy?”

“I’ll take her,” said Lestrange, “cost what it will.”

CHAPTER IV

DUE SOUTH

It was on the 10th of May, so quickly did things move under the
supervision of the bedridden captain, that the Raratonga, with Lestrange on
board, cleared the Golden Gates, and made south, heeling to a ten-knot
breeze.

There is no mode of travel to be compared to your sailing-ship. In a great
ship, if you have ever made a voyage in one, the vast spaces of canvas, the
sky-high spars, the finesse with which the wind is met and taken advantage
of, will form a memory never to be blotted out.

A schooner is the queen of all rigs; she has a bounding buoyancy denied
to the square-rigged craft, to which she stands in the same relationship as a
young girl to a dowager; and the Raratonga was not only a schooner, but
the queen, acknowledged of all the schooners in the Pacific.

For the first few days they made good way south; then the wind became
baffling and headed them off.

Added to Lestrange’s feverish excitement there was an anxiety, a deep
and soul-fretting anxiety, as if some half-heard voice were telling him that
the children he sought were threatened by some danger.

These baffling winds blew upon the smouldering anxiety in his breast, as
wind blows upon embers, causing them to glow. They lasted some days,
and then, as if Fate had relented, up sprang on the starboard quarter a
spanking breeze, making the rigging sing to a merry tune, and blowing the
spindrift from the forefoot, as the Raratonga, heeling to its pressure, went
humming through the sea, leaving a wake spreading behind her like a fan.

It took them along five hundred miles, silently and with the speed of a
dream. Then it ceased.

The ocean and the air stood still. The sky above stood solid like a great
pale blue dome; just where it met the water line of the far horizon a delicate
tracery of cloud draped the entire round of the sky.

I have said that the ocean stood still as well as the air: to the eye it was
so, for the swell under-running the glitter on its surface was so even, so
equable, and so rhythmical, that the surface seemed not in motion.
Occasionally a dimple broke the surface, and strips of dark sea-weed
floated by, showing up the green; dim things rose to the surface, and,
guessing the presence of man, sank slowly and dissolved from sight.

Two days, never to be recovered, passed, and still the calm continued.
On the morning of the third day it breezed up from the nor’-nor’west, and
they continued their course, a cloud of canvas, every sail drawing, and the
music of the ripple under the forefoot.

Captain Stannistreet was a genius in his profession; he could get more
speed out of a schooner than any other man afloat, and carry more canvas
without losing a stick. He was also, fortunately for Lestrange, a man of
refinement and education, and what was better still, understanding.

They were pacing the deck one afternoon, when Lestrange, who was
walking with his hands behind him, and his eyes counting the brown dowels
in the cream-white planking, broke silence.

“You don’t believe in visions and dreams?”

“How do you know that?” replied the other.

“Oh, I only put it as a question; most people say they don’t.”

“Yes, but most people do.”

“I do,” said Lestrange.

He was silent for a moment.

“You know my trouble so well that I won’t bother you going over it, but
there has come over me of late a feeling—it is like a waking dream.”

“Yes?”

“I can’t quite explain, for it is as if I saw something which my
intelligence could not comprehend, or make an image of.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“I don’t think you do. This is something quite strange. I am fifty, and in
fifty years a man has experienced, as a rule, all the ordinary and most of the
extraordinary sensations that a human being can be subjected to. Well, I
have never felt this sensation before; it comes on only at times. I see, as you
might imagine, a young baby sees, and things are before me that I do not
comprehend. It is not through my bodily eyes that this sensation comes, but
through some window of the mind, from before which a curtain has been
drawn.”

“That’s strange,” said Stannistreet, who did not like the conversation
over-much, being simply a schooner captain and a plain man, though
intelligent enough and sympathetic.

“This something tells me,” went on Lestrange, “that there is danger
threatening the—” He ceased, paused a minute, and then, to Stannistreet’s
relief, went on. “If I talk like that you will think I am not right in my head:
let us pass the subject by, let us forget dreams and omens and come to
realities. You know how I lost the children; you know how I hope to find
them at the place where Captain Fountain found their traces? He says the
island was uninhabited, but he was not sure.”

“No,” replied Stannistreet, “he only spoke of the beach.”

“Yes. Well, suppose there were natives at the other side of the island who
had taken these children.”

“If so, they would grow up with the natives.”

“And become savages?”

“Yes; but the Polynesians can’t be really called savages; they are a very
decent lot. I’ve knocked about amongst them a good while, and a kanaka is
as white as a white man—which is not saying much, but it’s something.
Most of the islands are civilised now. Of course there are a few that aren’t,
but still, suppose even that ‘savages,’ as you call them, had come and taken
the children off—”

Lestrange’s breath caught, for this was the very fear that was in his heart,
though he had never spoken it.

“Well?”

“Well, they would be well treated.”

“And brought up as savages?”

“I suppose so.”

Lestrange sighed.

“Look here,” said the captain; “it’s all very well talking, but upon my
word I think that we civilised folk put on a lot of airs, and waste a lot of pity
on savages.”

“How so?”

“What does a man want to be but happy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, who is happier than a naked savage in a warm climate? Oh, he’s
happy enough, and he’s not always holding a corroboree. He’s a good deal
of a gentleman; he has perfect health; he lives the life a man was born to
live face to face with Nature. He doesn’t see the sun through an office
window or the moon through the smoke of factory chimneys; happy and
civilised too—but, bless you, where is he? The whites have driven him out;
in one or two small islands you may find him still—a crumb or so of him.”

“Suppose,” said Lestrange, “suppose those children had been brought up
face to face with Nature—”

“Yes?”

“Living that free life—”

“Yes?”

“Waking up under the stars”—Lestrange was speaking with his eyes
fixed, as if upon something very far away—“going to sleep as the sun sets,
feeling the air fresh, like this which blows upon us, all around them.
Suppose they were like that, would it not be a cruelty to bring them to what
we call civilisation?”

“I think it would,” said Stannistreet.

Lestrange said nothing, but continued pacing the deck, his head bowed
and his hands behind his back.

One evening at sunset, Stannistreet said:

“We’re two hundred and forty miles from the island, reckoning from to-
day’s reckoning at noon. We’re going all ten knots even with this breeze;
we ought to fetch the place this time to-morrow. Before that if it freshens.”

“I am greatly disturbed,” said Lestrange.

He went below, and the schooner captain shook his head, and, locking
his arm round a ratlin, gave his body to the gentle roll of the craft as she
stole along, skirting the sunset, splendid, and to the nautical eye full of fine
weather.

The breeze was not quite so fresh next morning, but it had been blowing
fairly all the night, and the Raratonga had made good way. About eleven it
began to fail. It became the lightest sailing breeze, just sufficient to keep the
sails drawing, and the wake rippling and swirling behind. Suddenly
Stannistreet, who had been standing talking to Lestrange, climbed a few
feet up the mizzen ratlins, and shaded his eyes.

“What is it?” asked Lestrange.

“A boat,” he replied. “Hand me that glass you will find in the sling
there.”

He levelled the glass, and looked for a long time without speaking.

“It’s a boat adrift—a small boat, nothing in her. Stay! I see something
white, can’t make it out. Hi there!”—to the fellow at the wheel “Keep her a
point more to starboard.” He got on to the deck. “We’re going dead on for
her.”

“Is there any one in her?” asked Lestrange.

“Can’t quite make out, but I’ll lower the whale-boat and fetch her
alongside.”

He gave orders for the whale-boat to be slung out and manned.

As they approached nearer, it was evident that the drifting boat, which
looked like a ship’s dinghy, contained something, but what, could not be
made out.

When he had approached near enough, Stannistreet put the helm down
and brought the schooner to, with her sails all shivering. He took his place
in the bow of the whale-boat and Lestrange in the stern. The boat was
lowered, the falls cast off, and the oars bent to the water.

The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, looking
scarcely bigger than a walnut shell. In thirty strokes the whale-boat’s nose
was touching her quarter. Stannistreet grasped her gunwale.

In the bottom of the dinghy lay a girl, naked all but for a strip of
coloured striped material. One of her arms was clasped round the neck of a
form that was half hidden by her body, the other clasped partly to herself,
partly to her companion, the body of a baby. They were natives, evidently,
wrecked or lost by some mischance from some inter-island schooner. Their
breasts rose and fell gently, and clasped in the girl’s hand was a branch of
some tree, and on the branch a single withered berry.

“Are they dead?” asked Lestrange, who divined that there were people in
the boat, and who was standing up in the stern of the whale-boat trying to
see.

“No,” said Stannistreet; “they are asleep.”

THE END

----- Transcriber’s Note #1 -----

Introduction to the Project Gutenberg text of H. de Vere Stacpoole’s The
Blue Lagoon: A Romance

by Edward A. Malone
University of Missouri-Rolla

Born on April 9, 1863, in Kingstown, Ireland, Henry de Vere Stacpoole
grew up in a household dominated by his mother and three older sisters.
William C. Stacpoole, a doctor of divinity from Trinity College and
headmaster of Kingstown school, died some time before his son’s eighth
birthday, leaving the responsibility of supporting the family to his
Canadian-born wife, Charlotte Augusta Mountjoy Stacpoole. At a young
age, Charlotte had been led out of the Canadian backwoods by her widowed
mother and taken to Ireland, where their relatives lived. This experience had
strengthened her character and prepared her for single parenthood.

Charlotte cared passionately for her children and was perhaps overly
protective of her son. As a child, Henry suffered from severe respiratory
problems, misdiagnosed as chronic bronchitis by his physician, who in the
winter of 1871 advised that the boy be taken to Southern France for his
health. With her entire family in tow, Charlotte made the long journey from
Kingstown to London to Paris, where signs of the Franco-Prussian War
were still evident, settling at last in Nice at the Hotel des Iles Britannique.
Nice was like paradise to Henry, who marveled at the city’s affluence and
beauty as he played in the warm sun.

After several more excursions to the continent, Stacpoole was sent to
Portarlington, a bleak boarding school more than 100 miles from
Kingstown. In contrast to his sisters, the Portarlington boys were noisy and
uncouth. As Stacpoole writes in his autobiograhy Men and Mice, 1863-
1942 (1942), the boys abused him mentally and physically, making him feel
like “a little Arthur in a cage of baboons.” One night, he escaped through an
adjacent girls’ school and returned to Kingstown, only to be betrayed by his
family and dragged back to school by his eldest sister.

When his family moved to London, he was taken out of Portarlington
and enrolled at Malvern College, a progressive school with refined students
and plenty of air and sunshine. Stacpoole thoroughly enjoyed his new

surroundings, which he associated with the description of Malvern Hills in
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857): “Keepers of Piers
Plowman’s visions / Through the sunshine and the snow.” This environment
encouraged his interest in literature and writing.

The idyll ended, however, when Stacpoole began his medical training. At
his mother’s prodding, he entered the medical school at St. George’s
Hospital. Twice a day, he had to traverse a park frequented by
perambulating nursemaids, and he became romantically involved with one
of them. When his mother discovered their affair, she insisted that he
transfer to University College, and he complied.

More interested in literature than corpses, Stacpoole began to neglect his
studies and miss classes, especially the required dissections. Finally, the
dean of the medical school confronted him, and their argument drove
Stacpoole to St. Mary’s Hospital, where he completed his medical training
and qualified L. S. A. in 1891. At some point after this date, Stacpoole made
several sea voyages into the tropics (at least once as a doctor aboard a
cable-mending ship), collecting information for future stories.

Stacpoole’s literary career, which he once described as being “more like
a Malay fishing prahu than an honest-to-God English literary vessel,” began
inauspiciously with the publication of The Intended (1894), a tragic novel
about two look-alikes, one rich, the other poor, who switch places on a
whim. Bewildered by the novel’s lack of success, Stacpoole consulted his
friendly muse, Pearl Craigie, alias John Oliver Hobbes, who suggested a
comic rather than tragic treatment. Years later, Stacpoole retold the story in
The Man Who Lost Himself (1918), a commercially successful comic novel
about a down-and-out American who impersonates his wealthy look-alike
in England.

Set in France during the Franco-Prussian War, Stacpoole’s second novel,
Pierrot (1896), recounts a French boy’s eerie relationship with a patricidal
doppelganger. Like its predecessor, it was a commercial failure, and it was
at this point, perhaps, that Stacpoole began to view literary success only in
terms of sales figures and numbers of editions.

A strange tale of reincarnation, cross dressing, and uxoricide,
Stacpoole’s third novel, Death, the Knight, and the Lady (1897), purports to
be the deathbed confession of Beatrice Sinclair, who is both a reincarnated
murderer (male) and a descendant of the murder victim (female). She falls
in love with Gerald Wilder, a man disguised as a woman, who is both a
reincarnated murder victim (female) and the descendant of the murderer
(male). Despite its originality, the novel was killed by “Public Indifference”
(Stacpoole’s term), which also killed The Rapin (1899), a novel about an art
student in Paris.

Stacpoole spent the summer of 1898 in Sommerset, where he took over
the medical practice of an ailing country doctor. So peaceful were his days
in this pastoral setting that he had time to write The Doctor (1899), a novel
about an old-fashioned physician practicing medicine in rural England. “It
is the best book I have written,” Stacpoole declared more than forty years
later. He could also say, in retrospect, that the book’s weak sales were a
disguised blessing, “for I hadn’t ballast on board in those days to stand up
to the gale of success, which means incidentally money.” He would be
spared the gale of success for nine more years, during which he published
seven books, including a collection of children’s stories and two
collaborative novels with his friend William Alexander Bryce.

In 1907, two events occurred that altered the course of Stacpoole’s life:
he wrote The Blue Lagoon and he married Margaret Robson. Unable to
sleep one night, he found himself thinking about and envying the caveman,
who in his primitiveness was able to marvel at such commonplace
phenomena as sunsets and thunderstorms. Civilized, technological man had
unveiled these mysteries with his telescopes and weather balloons, so that
they were no longer “nameless wonders” to be feared and contemplated. As
a doctor, Stacpoole had witnessed countless births and deaths, and these
events no longer seemed miraculous to him. He conceived the idea of two
children growing up alone on an island and experiencing storms, death, and
birth in almost complete ignorance and innocence. The next morning, he
started writing The Blue Lagoon. The exercise was therapeutic because he
was able to experience the wonders of life and death vicariously through his
characters.

The Blue Lagoon is the story of two cousins, Dicky and Emmeline
Lestrange, stranded on a remote island with a beautiful lagoon. As children,
they are cared for by Paddy Button, a portly sailor who drinks himself to
death after only two and a half years in paradise. Frightened and confused
by the man’s gruesome corpse, the children flee to another part of Palm
Tree Island. Over a period of five years, they grow up and eventually fall in
love. Sex and birth are as mysterious to them as death, but they manage to
copulate instinctively and conceive a child. The birth is especially
remarkable: fifteen-year-old Emmeline, alone in the jungle, loses
consciousness and awakes to find a baby boy on the ground near her.
Naming the boy Hannah (an example of Stacpoole’s penchant for gender
reversals), the Lestranges live in familial bliss until they are unexpectedly
expelled from their tropical Eden.

The parallels between The Blue Lagoon and the Biblical story of Adam
and Eve are obvious and intentional, but Stacpoole was also influenced by
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which he
invokes in a passage describing the castaways’ approach Palm Tree Island:

“One could see the water swirling round the coral piers, for the tide was
flooding into the lagoon; it had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it
along far swifter than the sculls could have driven it. Sea-gulls screamed
about them, the boat rocked and swayed. Dick shouted with excitement, and
Emmeline shut her eyes TIGHT.

“Then, as though a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound
of the surf became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she
opened her eyes and found herself in Wonderland.”

This direct reference to Wonderland prepares the reader for the many
parallels that follow. When their adventures begin, both girls are about the
same age, Alice seven and a half, Emmeline exactly eight. Just as Alice
joins a tea party in Wonderland, Emmeline plays with her tiny tea set on the
beach after they land. Emmeline’s former pet, like the Cheshire Cat, “had
white stripes and a white chest, and rings down its tail” and died “showing
its teeth.” Whereas Alice looks for a poison label on a bottle that says
“Drink Me,” Emmeline innocently tries to eat “the never-wake-up berries”
and receives a stern rebuke and a lecture about poison from Paddy Button.

“The Poetry of Learning” chapter echoes Alice’s dialogue with the
caterpillar. Like the wily creature smoking a hookah, Paddy smokes a pipe
and shouts “Hurroo!” as the children teach him to write his name in the
sand. The children lose “all count of time,” just as the Mad Hatter does.
Whereas Alice grows nine feet taller, Dick sprouts “two inches taller” and
Emmeline “twice as plump.” Like the baby in the “Pig and Pepper,”
Hannah sneezes at the first sight of Dicky. The novel is artfully littered with
references to wonder, curiosity, and strangeness—all evidence of
Stacpoole’s conscious effort to invoke and honor his Victorian predecessor.

Stacpoole presented The Blue Lagoon to Publisher T. Fisher Unwin in
September 1907 and went to Cumberland to assist another ailing doctor in
his practice. Every day from Eden Vue in Langwathby, Stacpoole wrote to
his fiancee, Margaret Robson (or Maggie, as he called her), and waited
anxiously for their wedding day. On December 17, 1907, the couple were
married and spent their honeymoon at Stebbing Park, a friend’s country
house in Essex, about three miles from the village of Stebbing. It was there
that they stumbled upon Rose Cottage, where Stacpoole lived for several
years before he moved to Cliff Dene on the Isle of Wight in the 1920s.

Published in January 1908, The Blue Lagoon was an immediate success,
both with reviewers and the public. “[This] tale of the discovery of love,
and innocent mating, is as fresh as the ozone that made them strong,”
declared one reviewer. Another claimed that “for once the title of
‘romance,’ found in so many modern stories, is really justified.” The novel
was reprinted more than twenty times in the next twelve years and remained
popular in other forms for more than eighty years. Norman MacOwen and
Charlton Mann adapted the story as a play, which ran for 263 performances
in London from August 28, 1920, to April 16, 1921. Film versions of the
novel were made in 1923, 1949, and 1980.

Stacpoole also wrote two successful sequels: The Garden of God (1923)
and The Gates of Morning (1925). These three books and two others were
combined to form The Blue Lagoon Omnibus in 1933. The Garden of God
was filmed as Return to the Blue Lagoon in 1992.

This Gutenberg etext of The Blue Lagoon: A Romance is based on the
1908 first American edition published by J. B. Lippincott Company of

Philadelphia.

----- Transcriber’s Note #2 -----

The stated edition for this etext is the 1908 first American edition published
by J. B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia. Stacpoole delivered his
original manuscript to publisher T. Fisher Unwin (London) in September
1907. The London edition and the Lippincott (this etext) edition were both
published in 1908. Four changes were made in creating the Lippincott
edition:

1. On page 18:

London edition: he sat with it on his knees staring at the white sunlit
main-deck barred with the black shadows of the standing rigging.

U.S. edition: he sat with it on his knees staring at the white sunlit
main-deck barred with the white shadows of the standing rigging.

Stacpoole originally indicated black shadows of the rigging on the
deck.

2. On page 19:

London edition: It was seven bells—half-past three in the afternoon—
and the ship’s bell had just rung out.

U.S. edition: It was three bells—half-past three in the afternoon—and
the ship’s bell had just rung out.

The London edition is correct: seven bells is 3:30 in the afternoon.
Three bells is half-past one.

3. On page 24:

London edition: The dinghy was rather a larger boat than the ordinary
ships’ dinghy, and possessed a small mast and lug-sail.

U.S. edition: The dinghy was rather a larger boat than the ordinary
ships’ dinghy, and possessed a small mast and long sail.

A lug-sail (modern: lugsail) is an evolved version of the classical
square sail that is correct for the boat as described.

4. On page 309:

London edition: “This is the gentleman, Simon,” ...

U.S. edition: “This is the gentleman, Silas,” ...

Other than these four changes, both 1908 editions are essentially identical.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLUE
LAGOON: A ROMANCE ***

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