Blue Lagoon — 07 - Book1 Chap13 - 15

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