The Blue Lagoon Part 31

CHAPTER XVIII

A FALLEN IDOL

The next day d.i.c.k 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 gra.s.s, 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 "d.i.c.k," 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 pa.s.sing 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 d.i.c.k, 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, 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 d.i.c.k 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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ces 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 d.i.c.k woke also, and they went out on to the sward, and then down to the water's edge. d.i.c.k 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.

d.i.c.k came ash.o.r.e, 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 sh.e.l.ls of the cocoa-nuts they used for fuel; and you never could imagine the blazing splendour there lives in the sh.e.l.l of a cocoa-nut till you see it burning. Yesterday, d.i.c.k, 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.

d.i.c.k had stepped into the boat, and was on the point of unmooring her, and pushing her off, when Emmeline stopped him.

"d.i.c.k!"

"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 d.i.c.k pushed off. Scarcely had he put out the sculls than a new pa.s.senger 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-sh.o.r.e, 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 d.i.c.k, 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 d.i.c.k to row on.

They slipped by the pleasant sh.o.r.es 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.k 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.