Blue Lagoon — 11 - Book1 Chap21 - 23
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
