The Blue Lagoon Part 30

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 d.i.c.k 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 gla.s.s. 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 mult.i.tude 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 ma.s.ses 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. d.i.c.k 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 att.i.tudes 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.

d.i.c.k 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 pa.s.sing 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 d.i.c.k, 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 pa.s.sing over the island.

Looking up, one saw a marvellous sight. The air was full of birds, b.u.t.terflies, 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 compa.s.s, 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 impa.s.sive, almost dazed. d.i.c.k 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, b.u.t.terflies, and they all seemed imprisoned under a great drifting dome of gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s-green, foam-capped sea racing in thunder against the reef.

CHAPTER XVII

THE STRICKEN WOODS

At first they thought they were ruined; then d.i.c.k, 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 fish-hooks 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.n.a.t.c.hing 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, d.i.c.k 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 ma.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.terflies in the woods, dead birds too; but in the great path of the storm you would have found dead b.u.t.terflies'

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 b.u.t.terfly wing from wing--that is a cyclone.

Emmeline, wandering about in the woods with d.i.c.k 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 G.o.ds.