Latest / The Blue Lagoon / The Blue Lagoon

Transcript

The Blue Lagoon · The Blue Lagoon

• 0:00
  Book one, Chapter one, where the slush lamp burns. Mister Button was
• 0:07
  seated on a sea chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He was
• 0:11
  playing the shan Van Vault and accompanying the tune, punctuating it with blows of
• 0:17
  his left heel on the forecastle deck ol de Friendship in the bay, says
• 0:24
  the Shanvan Volde. He was dressed in dungaree trousers, a striped shirt,
• 0:30
  and a jacket blazed green in parts from the influence of sun and salt,
• 0:36
  a typical old shell back, round, shouldered, hooked of finger, a
• 0:41
  figure with strong hints of a crab about it. His face was like a
• 0:46
  moon seen red through tropical mists, and as he played it wore an expression
• 0:53
  of strained attention, as though the fiddle were telling him tales much more marvelous
• 0:59
  than the old bald statement about Bantry Bay. Left Handed Pat was his forecastle
• 1:06
  name, not because he was left handed, but simply because everything he did
• 1:11
  he did wrong or nearly so, reefing or furling or handling a slush tub.
• 1:18
  If a mistake was to be made, he made it. He was
• 1:22
  a celt and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and Connaught these
• 1:26
  forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element from his blood, nor
• 1:32
  the belief in fairies from his soul. The Celtic nature is a fast dye,
• 1:38
  and mister Button's nature was such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry
• 1:44
  Marr and Frisco, though he had got drunk in most parts of the world,
• 1:49
  though he had sailed with Yankee captains and been manhandled by Yankee mates,
• 1:53
  he still carried his fairies about with him. They and a very large stock
• 2:00
  of original innocence. Nearly over the musician's head swung a hammock, from which
• 2:07
  hung a leg. Other hammocks hanging in the semi gloom, called up suggestions
• 2:14
  of lemurs and arboreal bats. The swinging kerosene lamp cast its light forehead,
• 2:21
  past the heel of the bowsprit to the nightheads lighting. Here a naked foot
• 2:25
  hanging over the side of a bunk. Here, her face from which protruded
• 2:30
  a pipe. Here abreast covered with dark mossy hair. Here an arm tattooed.
• 2:38
  It was in the days before double topsail yards had reduced ship's crews,
• 2:43
  and the forecastle of the Northumberland had a full company, a crowd of packet
• 2:47
  rats, such as often to be found in a cape Horner, Dutchmen,
• 2:52
  Americans, men who were farm laborers and tending pigs in Ohio. Three months
• 2:57
  back, old seasoned soals like Paddy Button, a mixture of the best and
• 3:04
  the worst of the earth, such as you find nowhere else in so small
• 3:08
  a space as in a ship's forecastle. The Northumberland had experienced a terrible rounding
• 3:15
  of the horn. Bound from New Orleans to Frisco, she had spent thirty
• 3:21
  days battling with head winds and storms down there, where the seas are so
• 3:27
  vast that three waves may cover with their amplitude more than a mile of sea
• 3:31
  space. Thirty days she had passed off Cape Stiff, and just now,
• 3:38
  at the moment of this story, she was locked in a calm south of
• 3:42
  the line. Mister Button finished his tomb with the sweep of the bow,
• 3:47
  and drew his right coat sleeve across his forehead. Then he took out a
• 3:52
  sooty pipe, filled it with tobacco, and lit it. Par Trek drawled
• 3:59
  a voice from the hammock above, from which depended the leg Why was that
• 4:02
  yarn you was beginning to spin to night bowder lip me dawn a witch medn
• 4:11
  asked mister Button, cocking his eye up at the bottom of the hammock while
• 4:15
  he held the match to his pipe. It was about a green thing,
• 4:21
  came a sleepy Dutch voice from a bunk Oh a lepre khan ya main.
• 4:28
  Sure me mother's sister had won down in Connaught. But VA's it like?
• 4:33
  Asked the dreamy Dutch voice, a voice seemingly possessed by the calm that had
• 4:40
  made the sea like a mirror for the last three days, reducing the whole
• 4:44
  ship's company meanwhile to the level of wasters. Like sure, it was like
• 4:50
  a leprekhahan? What else would it be like? What like was that?
• 4:57
  Persisted the voice? It was like a little man, no bigger than a
• 5:02
  big forked radish, and as green as a cabbage. Me aunt had one
• 5:08
  in her house down in Connaught in the old days. Ah Musha musha the
• 5:13
  old days, the old days. Now you may believe me or believe me
• 5:17
  not, but you could have put him in your pocket, and the grass
• 5:20
  green head of him wouldn't more than have stuck out. She kept him in
• 5:26
  a cupboard, and out of the cupboard he'd pop, if it was a
• 5:29
  crack open and into the milk pans. He'd be or under the beds,
• 5:33
  or pulling the stool from under you, or at some other diversion. He'd
• 5:39
  chase the pig, the creature, till it be all ribs like an old
• 5:44
  umbrella with the fright, and as thin as the greyhound with the run in.
• 5:47
  By the morning, he'd addle the eggs so the cocks and hens wouldn't
• 5:53
  know what they was after, with the chickens coming out with two heads on
• 5:58
  them and twenty seven legs fore and aft. And you'd start to chase him,
• 6:02
  and and then it had been mainsail hall and away he'd go. You
• 6:08
  behind him to ye landed tail over snout in a ditch, and he'd be
• 6:13
  back in the cupboard. He was a troll, murmured the Dutch voice.
• 6:17
  I'm telling you he was a Leprechauan and there's no knowing the developments he'd be
• 6:23
  up to. He'd pull the cabbage, maybe out of the pot boiling on
• 6:27
  the fire furniture eyes and baste you into face with it. And then maybe
• 6:33
  you'd hold out your fist to him, and he'd put a golden sovereign in
• 6:36
  it. Wished he was here, murmured a voice from a bunk near the
• 6:43
  night heads. Partrack drawled the voice from the hammock above. What'd ye do
• 6:48
  first? If you found yourself with twenty pounds in your pocket? What's the
• 6:54
  use of asking me, replied mister mutton. What's the use of twenty pounds
• 6:59
  to us? Same? And at sea wire the grogs all water and the
• 7:03
  beef's all hoss. Give it ashore and ye'd see what I'd do with it.
• 7:10
  Ah, guess the nearest grog shop keeper wouldn't see you comin for dust,
• 7:15
  said the voice from Ohio. He would not, said mister Button,
• 7:19
  nor you after me. Be damned to the grog and demned it sells it.
• 7:25
  It's all darn easy to talk, said Ohio. You curse the grog
• 7:30
  at sea when you can't get it, sit you ashore an your boung full.
• 7:35
  I like me drunk, said mister Button. I'm free to admit,
• 7:41
  and I'm the devil when it's in me, and it'll be the end of
• 7:45
  me. Yet only O mother was a lawyer. Pat She says, first
• 7:49
  time I came home from sea rolling storms. You may escape, and women,
• 7:56
  you may escape. But the pattine'll have yer forty year ago. Forty
• 8:01
  year ago, well said Ohio. It hasn't had ye yet, no replied
• 8:11
  mister Button. But it will. End of Chapter one, Chapter two.
• 8:18
  Under the stars, It was a wonderful night upon deck, filled with all
• 8:26
  the majesty and beauty of starlight and a tropical calm. The Pacific slept a
• 8:33
  vast, vague swell flowing from far away down south under the night lifted the
• 8:41
  Northumberland on its undulations to the rattling sound of the reef points and the occasional
• 8:46
  creak of the rudder, whilst overhead, near the fiery arch of the Milky
• 8:52
  Way, hung the Southern Cross like a broken kite. Stars in the sky,
• 8:58
  stars in the sea, Stars by the million and the million, So
• 9:03
  many lamps ablaze that the firmament filled the mind with the idea of a vast
• 9:09
  and populous city. Yet from all that living and flashing splendor, not a
• 9:16
  sound. Down in the cabin or saloon, as it was called by courtesy,
• 9:22
  were seated the three passengers of the ship, one reading at the table,
• 9:28
  two playing on the floor. The man at the table, Arthur LaStrange,
• 9:33
  was seated with his large, deep sunken eyes fixed on a book.
• 9:37
  He was most evidently in consumption, very near indeed to reaping the last of
• 9:43
  that last and most desperate remedy, a long sea voyage. Emmeline LaStrange,
• 9:52
  his little niece, eight years of age, a mysterious mite, small for
• 9:56
  her age, with thoughts of her own, wide eyes that seemed the doors
• 10:01
  for visions, and a face that seemed just to have peeped into this world
• 10:05
  for a moment. Ere it was as suddenly, withdrawn sat in a corner,
• 10:11
  nursing something in her arms and rocking herself to the tune of her own
• 10:16
  thoughts. Dick l Stranger's little son Ate and a bit was somewhere under the
• 10:24
  table. They were Bostonians, bound for San Francisco, or rather for the
• 10:28
  sun and splendor of Los Angeles, where the Stranger had bought a small estate,
• 10:33
  hoping there to enjoy the life whose lease would be renewed by the long
• 10:37
  Sea voyage. As he sat reading, the cabin door opened and appeared an
• 10:43
  angular female form. This was Missus Stannard, the Stewardess, and Missus Stannard
• 10:50
  meant bedtime, Dickie said mister Lestrange, closing his book and raising the tablecloth
• 10:58
  a few inches time. Oh not yet, daddy, came a sleep frightened
• 11:05
  voice from under the table. I ain't ready, I dunnot want to go
• 11:09
  to bed. I Hia. Stannard, who knew her work, had stooped
• 11:13
  under the table, seized him by the foot and hauled him out, kicking
• 11:18
  and fighting and blubbering, all at the same time. As for Emmeline,
• 11:24
  she having glanced up and recognized the inevitable, rose to her feet and holding
• 11:30
  the hideous rag doll that she had been nursing, head down and dangling on
• 11:33
  one hand. She stood waiting till Dickie, after a few last perfunctory bellows,
• 11:41
  suddenly dried his eyes and held up a tear wet face for his father
• 11:45
  to kiss. Then she presented her brow solemnly to her uncle, received a
• 11:50
  kiss, and vanished, led by the hand into a cabin on the port
• 11:56
  side of the saloon. Mister l Strange returned to his but he had not
• 12:01
  read for long when the cabin door was opened and Emmeline, in her night
• 12:05
  dress, reappeared, holding a brown paper parcel in her hand, a parcel
• 12:11
  of about the same size as the book you are reading. My box,
• 12:16
  said she, and as she spoke, holding it up as if to prove
• 12:20
  its safety, the little plain face altered to the face of an angel.
• 12:26
  She had smiled. When Emmeline the Strange smiled, it was absolutely as if
• 12:31
  the light of paradise had suddenly flashed upon her face. The happiest form of
• 12:39
  childish beauty suddenly appeared before your eyes, dazzled them, and was gone.
• 12:46
  Then she vanished with her box, and mister Lestrange resumed his book. This
• 12:52
  box of Emmeline's, I may say in parenthesis, had given more trouble aboard
• 12:58
  ship than all the rest of the passenger's luggage put together. It had been
• 13:03
  presented to her on her departure from Boston by a lady friend, and what
• 13:07
  it contained was a dark secret to all on board save its owner and her
• 13:13
  uncle. She was a woman, or at least the beginning of a woman,
• 13:18
  yet she kept this secret to herself, a fact which you will please
• 13:22
  note. The trouble of the thing was that it was frequently being lost,
• 13:30
  suspecting herself, maybe as an unpractical dreamer in a world filled with robbers.
• 13:35
  She would cart it about with her for safety, sit down behind a coil
• 13:39
  of rope, and fall into a fit of abstraction, be recalled to life
• 13:45
  by the evolutions of the crew, reefing or furling or what not, rise
• 13:50
  to superintend the operations, and then suddenly find she had lost her box.
• 13:56
  Then she would absolutely haunt the ship. Wide eyed and distressed of face.
• 14:03
  She would wander hither and thither, peeping into the galley, peeping down the
• 14:07
  four scuttle, never uttering a word or a wail, searching like an uneasy
• 14:13
  ghost, but dumb. She seemed ashamed to tell of her loss, ashamed
• 14:20
  to let any one know of it. But every one knew of it directly.
• 14:24
  They saw her to use mister Button's expression on the wander, and every
• 14:28
  one hunted for it. Strangely enough, it was Paddy Button who usually found
• 14:35
  it. He who was always doing the wrong thing in the eyes of men,
• 14:39
  generally did the right thing in the eyes of children. Children, in
• 14:45
  fact, when they could get at mister Button, went for him conne no
• 14:48
  more. He was attractive to them as a punch and duty show or a
• 14:52
  German band. Almost mister la strange after a while, closed the book he
• 14:58
  was reading, looked around him, and sighed. The cabin of the Northumberland
• 15:05
  was a cheerful enough place, pierced by the polished shaft of the Mizzen mask,
• 15:11
  carpeted with an axe minster carpet, and garnished with mirrors let into the
• 15:15
  white pine paneling. Lestrange was staring at the reflection of his own face in
• 15:20
  one of these mirrors, fixed just opposite to where he sat. His emaciation
• 15:26
  was terrible, and it was just perhaps at this moment that he first recognized
• 15:33
  the fact that he must not only die, but die soon. He turned
• 15:39
  from the mirror and sat for a while, with his chin resting upon his
• 15:43
  hand and his eyes fixed upon an ink spot upon the tablecloth. Then he
• 15:48
  arose, and, crossing the cabin, climbed laboriously up the companionway to the
• 15:54
  deck. As he leaned against the bulwark rail to recover his breath, the
• 16:00
  splendor and beauty of the southern night struck him to the heart with a cruel
• 16:04
  pang. He took his seat on a deck chair and gazed up at the
• 16:10
  milky way, that great triumphal arch built of suns, that the dawn would
• 16:15
  sweep away like a dream. In the milky way. Near the southern cross
• 16:22
  occurs a terrible circular abyss, the coal sack so sharply defined, is it
• 16:29
  so suggestive of avoid and bottomless cavern that the contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative
• 16:36
  mind with vertigo. To the naked eye, it is as black and as
• 16:41
  dismal as death, but the small telescope reveals it beautiful and populous with stars.
• 16:51
  The stranger's eyes traveled from this mystery to the burning cross and the nameless
• 16:56
  and numberless stars, reaching to the sea line, where they paled and vanished
• 17:02
  in the light of the rising moon. Then he became aware of a figure
• 17:06
  promenading on the quarter deck. It was the old man. A sea captain
• 17:11
  is always the old man, be his age whatever it may. Captain Lefarge's
• 17:18
  age might have been forty five. He was a sailor of the Jean Bart
• 17:22
  type of French descent, but a naturalized American. I don't know where the
• 17:29
  wind's go on, said the captain, as he drew near the man in
• 17:32
  the deck chair. I guess it's blown a hole in the firmament and escape
• 17:37
  somewhere as to the back of beyond. It's been a long voyage, said
• 17:42
  l Strange, and I'm thinking, Captain, it will be a very long
• 17:45
  voyage for me. My port's not Frisco, I feel it. Don't you
• 17:52
  be thinking that sort of thing, said the other, taking his seat in
• 17:56
  a chair close by. There's no manner of use forecast in the weather a
• 18:02
  month ahead. Now we're in warm latitudes. Your glass will rise steadily,
• 18:07
  and he'll be as right and spry as any of us for we fetch the
• 18:11
  golden gates. I'm thinking about the children, said Lestrange, seeming not to
• 18:18
  hear the captain's words. Should anything happen to me before we reach port,
• 18:23
  I should like you to do something for me. It's only this dispose of
• 18:30
  my body without without the children knowing. It has been in my mind to
• 18:36
  ask you this for some days, Captain. Those children know nothing of death.
• 18:42
  LeFarge moved uneasily in his chair. Little Emmeline's mother died when she was
• 18:48
  two. Her father, my brother, died before she was born. Dickie
• 18:55
  never knew a mother. She died, giving him berth, My God,
• 19:00
  God, a captain. Death has laid a heavy hand on my family.
• 19:04
  Can you wonder that I have hid his very name from those two creatures that
• 19:08
  I love? I, I said, LeFarge, it's sad. It's sad.
• 19:17
  When I was quite a child went on LaStrange, a child no older
• 19:22
  than Dickie, my nurse used to terrify me with tales about dead people.
• 19:29
  I was told I'd go to hell when I died if I wasn't a good
• 19:32
  child. I cannot tell you how much that has poisoned my life. For
• 19:37
  the thoughts we think in childhood, Captain, are the fathers of the thoughts
• 19:41
  we think when we are grown up. And can a disease to father have
• 19:47
  healthy children? I guess not. So I just said, when these two
• 19:53
  tiny creatures came into my care, that I would do all in my power
• 19:59
  to protect them from the terrors of life, or rather, I should say,
• 20:03
  from the terror of death. I don't know whether I have done right,
• 20:08
  but I have done it for the best. They had a cat,
• 20:11
  and one day Dickie came to me and said, Father, pussies in the
• 20:17
  garden asleep and I can't wake her. So I just took him out for
• 20:22
  a walk. There was a circus in town, and I took him to
• 20:26
  it. It so filled his mind that he quite forgot the cat. Next
• 20:32
  day he asked for her. I did not tell him she was buried in
• 20:37
  the garden. I just said she must have run away. In a week,
• 20:41
  he had forgotten all about her. Children. Soon forget, Aye,
• 20:48
  that's true, said the sea captain. But peers to me. They must
• 20:52
  learn some time that they've got to die. Should I pay the penalty before
• 20:57
  we reached land and be cast into that great, vast sea. I would
• 21:03
  not wish the children's dreams to be haunted by the thought. Just tell them
• 21:10
  I've gone board another ship. You will take them back to Boston. I
• 21:15
  have here in a letter the name of a lady who will care for them.
• 21:18
  Dickie will be well off as far as worldly goods are concerned, and
• 21:23
  so will Emmeline. Just tell them I've gone on board another ship. Children
• 21:30
  soon forget. I'll do what you ask, said the seamen. The moon
• 21:37
  was over the horizon now, and the Northumberland lay adrift in a river of
• 21:41
  silver. Every spar was distinct, every reef point on the great sails,
• 21:48
  and the deck lay like spaces of frost, cut by shadows black as ebony
• 21:56
  as the two men sat without speaking, thinking their own thought thought. Her
• 22:00
  little white figure emerged from the saloon hatched. It was Emmeline. She was
• 22:06
  a professed sleep walker, a past mistress of the art Lestrange. Put his
• 22:11
  finger to his lips, took off his shoes, and silently followed her.
• 22:18
  She searched behind a coil of rope. She tried to open the galley door.
• 22:23
  Hither and thither she wandered, wide eyed and troubled of face, till
• 22:29
  at last, in the shadow of the hen coop she found her visionary treasure.
• 22:36
  Then back she came, holding up her little night dress with one hand
• 22:40
  so as not to trip, and vanished down the saloon companion very hurriedly,
• 22:45
  as if anxious to get back to bed. Her uncle close behind, with
• 22:51
  one hand outstretched so as to catch her in case she stumbled. End of
• 22:59
  Chapter two, Chapter three, The Shadow and the Fire. It was the
• 23:06
  fourth day of the long calm. An awning had been rigged up on the
• 23:10
  poop for the passengers, and under it sat La Strange trying to read,
• 23:15
  and the children trying to play. The heat and monotony had reduced even Dickie
• 23:21
  to just a surly mass languid in movement as a grub. As for Emmeline,
• 23:27
  she seemed dazed. The rag doll lay a yard away from her on
• 23:33
  the poop deck. Unnursed, even the wretched box and its whereabouts, she
• 23:37
  seemed to have quite forgotten. Daddy suddenly cried Dick, who had clambered up
• 23:44
  and was looking over the after rail. What fish? The Strange rose to
• 23:49
  his feet, came aft and looked over the rail. Down in the vague
• 23:55
  green of the water. Something moved, something pale and long, a ghastly
• 24:02
  form. It vanished, and yet another came near the surface and displayed itself
• 24:08
  more fully. La Strange saw its eyes. He saw the dark fin and
• 24:14
  the whole hideous length of the creature. A shudder ran through him as he
• 24:18
  clasped the Dickie ain't he fine? Said the child. I guess, Daddy,
• 24:25
  I'd pull him aboard if I had a hook. Why haven't I a
• 24:27
  hooked daddy? Why haven't I a hooked daddy? Ow you're squeezing me.
• 24:34
  Something plucked at Lastranger's coat. It was Emmeline. She also wanted to look.
• 24:41
  He lifted her up in his arms. Her little pale face peeped over
• 24:45
  the rail, but there was nothing to see. The forms of terror had
• 24:49
  vanished, leaving the green depths untroubled and unstained. What's they called Daddy?
• 24:57
  Persisted Dick as his fire took him down from the rail and led him back
• 25:02
  to the chair. Sharks, said Lestrange, whose face was covered with perspiration.
• 25:10
  He picked up the book that he had been reading. It was a
• 25:12
  volume of Tennyson, and he sat down with it on his knees, staring
• 25:17
  at the white sunlit main deck, barred with the white shadows of the standing
• 25:22
  rigging. The sea had disclosed to him a vision poetry, philosophy, beauty,
• 25:30
  art, the love and joy of life. Was it possible that these
• 25:34
  should exist in the same world as those? He glanced at the book upon
• 25:41
  his knees and contrasted the beautiful things in it which he remembered with the terrible
• 25:45
  things he had just seen, the things that were waiting for their food under
• 25:51
  the keel of the ship. It was just three bells half past three in
• 25:56
  the afternoon, and the ship's bell had just rung out. The stewardess appeared
• 26:00
  to take the children below, and as they vanished down the saloon companionway Captain
• 26:06
  LeFarge came aft on to the poop and stood for a moment looking over the
• 26:11
  sea on the port side, where a bank of fog had suddenly appeared,
• 26:15
  like a specter of a country. The sun has dimmed a bit, said
• 26:19
  he ARCon Amo's look at it, glass, steady enough, there's a fog
• 26:25
  coming up. Ever seen a Pacific fog? No? Never, Well,
• 26:32
  you won't one to see another, replied the mariner, shading his eyes and
• 26:36
  fixing them upon the sea line. The sea lion away to starboard, had
• 26:41
  lost somewhat its distinctness, and over the day an almost imperceptible shade had crept.
• 26:48
  The captain suddenly turned from his contemplation of the sea and sky, raised
• 26:52
  his head and sniffed. Something is burning somewhere. Smell. It seems to
• 27:00
  me like an old mat or summit. It's that swab of a steward.
• 27:04
  Maybe if he isn't breakin glass, he's upsettin lamps and burning holes in the
• 27:10
  carpet. Bless my soul, I sooner have a dozen merry ANNs and their
• 27:15
  dust pans round the place. The one tomful steward, like Jenkins, he
• 27:22
  went to the saloon hatch below there, hie, sir, what are you
• 27:27
  burnin? I ain't burning nuttin, sir, I tell you, I smell
• 27:33
  it. There's nothing burning here, sir. Neither is there. It's all
• 27:38
  on deck. Something in the galley, maybe rags, most likely they've thrown
• 27:42
  on the fire. Captain said Lestrange, Aye, aye, come here please.
• 27:49
  Lfarge climbed onto the poop. I don't know whether it's my weakness that's
• 27:55
  affecting my eyes, but there seems to me something s strange about the main
• 28:00
  mast. The main mast, near where it entered the deck, and for
• 28:06
  some distance up, seemed in motion a corkscrew movement, most strange to watch
• 28:12
  from the shelter of the awning. This apparent movement was caused by a spiral
• 28:18
  haze of smoke so vague that one could only tell of its existence from the
• 28:23
  mirage like tremor of the mast round which it curled. My God, cried
• 28:30
  LeFarge, as he sprang from the poop and rushed forward. The strange followed
• 28:36
  him, slowly, stopping every moment to clutch the bull rail and pant for
• 28:41
  breath. He heard the shrill, birdlike notes of the bowsan's pipe. He
• 28:45
  saw the hands emerging from the forecastle like bees out of a hive. He
• 28:51
  watched them surrounding the main hatch. He watched the tarpaulin and locking bars removed.
• 28:56
  He saw the hatch opened and a burst of smoke, black villainous smoke,
• 29:02
  ascend to the sky, solid as a plume in the windless air.
• 29:07
  The Strange was a man of a highly nervous temperament, and it is just
• 29:11
  this sort of a man who keeps his head in an emergency, whilst a
• 29:15
  level headed, phlegmatic individual loses his balance. His first thought was of the
• 29:22
  children, His second of the boats. In the battering off Cape Horn,
• 29:27
  the Northumberland lost several of her boats. They were left the long boat,
• 29:32
  a quarter boat and the dinghy. He heard Lfarge's voice ordering the hatch to
• 29:37
  be closed and the pumps manned so as to flood the hold, And knowing
• 29:41
  that he could do nothing on deck, he made swiftly as he could for
• 29:45
  the saloon companion way. Missus Stannard was just coming out of the children's cabin.
• 29:52
  Are the children lying down? Missus Stannard asked le Strange, almost breathless
• 29:56
  from the excitement and exertion of the last few minutes, the woman glanced at
• 30:00
  him with frightened eyes. He looked like the very herald of disaster. For
• 30:07
  if they are and you have undressed them, then you must put their clothes
• 30:11
  on again. The ship is on fire, Missus Stannard, good God,
• 30:15
  sir Listen said, lestrange from a distance, thin and dreary as the crying
• 30:22
  of sea gulls on a desolate beach, came the clanking of the pumps end
• 30:27
  of chapter three, Chapter four, and like a dream dissolved. Before the
• 30:36
  woman had time to speak, a thunderous step was heard on the companion stairs,
• 30:40
  and LeFarge broke into the saloon. The man's face was injected with blood.
• 30:45
  His eyes were fixed and glassy, like the eyes of a drunkard,
• 30:49
  and the veins stood in his temples like twisted cords. Get those children ready,
• 30:56
  he shouted, as he rushed into his own cabin. But you are
• 31:00
  ready. Bolts are being swung out, and victualled, Oh where are those
• 31:03
  papers? They heard him furiously searching and collecting things in his cabin. The
• 31:10
  ship's papers accounts things the master mariner clings to as he clings to his life,
• 31:15
  and as he searched and found and packed. He kept bellowing orders for
• 31:21
  the children to be got on deck. Half mad he seemed, and half
• 31:25
  mad he was with the knowledge of the terrible thing that was stowed amidst the
• 31:30
  cargo. Up on deck. The crew, under the direction of the first
• 31:33
  mate, were working in an orderly manner and with a will, utterly unconscious
• 31:40
  of there being anything beneath their feet but an ordinary cargo on fire. The
• 31:45
  covers had been stripped from the boats, kegs of water and bags of biscuit
• 31:49
  placed in them. The dinghy, smallest of the boats and most easily got
• 31:53
  away, was hanging at the port quarter boat davits flushed with the bulwarks,
• 31:59
  and Paddy was in the act of stowing a keg water in her when LeFarge
• 32:02
  broke on to the deck, followed by the stewardess carrying Emmeline and mister la
• 32:07
  Strange leading Dick. The dinghy was rather a larger boat than the ordinary ship's
• 32:14
  dinghy, and possessed a small mast and long sail. Two sailors stood ready
• 32:19
  to man the falls, and Paddy Button was just turning to trundle forward again
• 32:23
  when the captain seized him into the dinghy with you, he cried, and
• 32:28
  roll those childer and the passengers out a mile from the ship, two miles,
• 32:31
  three miles, make an offing, sheer, Captain dear, who'd left
• 32:36
  me fiddlin there? LeFarge dropped the bundle of things he was holding under his
• 32:40
  left arm, seized the old sailor and rushed him against the bulwarks, as
• 32:45
  if he meant to fling him into the sea through the bulwarks. Next moment
• 32:50
  mister Button was in the boat. Emmeline was handed to him pail of face
• 32:54
  and wide eyed and clasping something wrapped in a little shawl. Then Dick,
• 33:00
  and then mister la Strange was helped over. No room for more, cried
• 33:05
  LeFarge, your place will be in the long bolt, missus Stannard, if
• 33:08
  we have to leave the ship, lower away, lower away. The boat
• 33:15
  sank towards the smooth blue sea, kissed it and was afloat now. Mister
• 33:22
  Button, before joining the ship at Boston, had spent a good while lingering
• 33:25
  by the quay, having no money wherewith to enjoy himself. In a tavern.
• 33:30
  He had seen something of the lading of the Northumberland, and had heard
• 33:35
  more from a steve door. No sooner had he cast off the falls and
• 33:39
  seized the oars than his knowledge awoke in his mind, living and lurid.
• 33:45
  He gave a whoop that brought the two sailors leaning over the side bullies,
• 33:52
  Aye, Aye, run for your lives. I've just remembered des two barrels,
• 33:58
  a blast in powder in the hole. Then he bent to his oars
• 34:01
  as no man ever bent before. The strange sitting in the stern sheets clasping,
• 34:08
  Emmeline and Dick saw nothing for a moment after hearing these words. The
• 34:14
  children, who knew nothing of blasting powder or its effects, though half frightened
• 34:19
  by all the buttle and excitement, were still amused and pleased at finding themselves
• 34:23
  in the little boat, so close to the blue, pretty sea. Dick
• 34:29
  put his finger over the side so that it made a ripple in the water,
• 34:32
  the most delightful experience of childhood. Emmeline, with one hand clasped in
• 34:37
  her uncle's, watched mister Button with a grave sort of half pleasure. He
• 34:44
  certainly was a sight worth watching. His soul was filled with tragedy and terror.
• 34:50
  His celting imagination heard the ship blowing up, saw himself, and the
• 34:54
  little dinghy blown to pieces. Nay saw himself in hell being toasted by devils.
• 35:01
  But tragedy and terror could find no room for expression on his fortunate or
• 35:07
  unfortunate face. He puffed and he blew, bulging his cheeks out at the
• 35:13
  sky as he tugged at the oars, making a hundred and one grimaces,
• 35:17
  all the outcome of agony of mind, but none expressing it. Behind lay
• 35:23
  the ship, a picture not without its lighter side. The long boat and
• 35:30
  the quarter boat, lowered with a rush and sea borne by the mercy of
• 35:32
  providence, were floating by the side of the Northumberland. From the ship,
• 35:37
  men were casting themselves overboard like water rats, swimming in the water like ducks,
• 35:44
  scrambling on board the boats anyhow, from the half opened main hatch,
• 35:49
  the black smoke, mixed now with sparks, rose steadily and swiftly and spitefully,
• 35:55
  as if driven through the half closed teeth of a direct A mile away
• 36:01
  beyond the Northumberland stood the fog bank. It looked solid, like a vast
• 36:07
  country that had suddenly and strangely built itself on the sea, a country where
• 36:14
  no birds sang and no trees grew a country of white, precipitous cliffs,
• 36:21
  solid to look at as the cliffs of Dover. I'm spent, suddenly,
• 36:27
  gasped the oarsman, resting the oar handles under the crook of his knees and
• 36:31
  bending down as if he was prepared to butt at the passengers in the stern
• 36:36
  sheets. Blow up or blow down. I'm spent, don't axe me,
• 36:42
  Oh, I'm spent. Mister LaStrange white as a ghost, but recovered somewhat
• 36:47
  from his first horror, gave the spent one time to recover himself, and
• 36:52
  turned to look at the ship. She seemed a great distance off, and
• 36:57
  the boats well away from her were making at a furious pace towards the dinghy.
• 37:02
  Dick was still playing with the water, but Emmeline's eyes were entirely occupied
• 37:07
  with Paddy Button. New things were always of vast interest to her contemplative mind,
• 37:15
  and these evolutions of her old friend were eminently new. She had seen
• 37:20
  him swilling the decks. She had seen him dancing a jig. She had
• 37:24
  seen him going round the main deck on all fours with Dick on his back.
• 37:30
  But she had never seen him going on like this before. She perceived
• 37:35
  now that he was exhausted and in trouble about something, and putting her hand
• 37:39
  in the pocket of her dress, she searched for something that she knew was
• 37:44
  there. She produced a tangerine orange, and leaning forward, she touched the
• 37:50
  spent one's head with it. Mister Button raised his head, stared vacantly for
• 37:55
  a second, saw the proffered orange, and at the sight of it,
• 38:00
  the thoughts of the children and their innocence himself and the blasting powder cleared his
• 38:06
  dazzled wits, and he took to the skulls again. Daddy, said Dick,
• 38:12
  who'd been looking astern. There's clouds near the ship. In an incredibly
• 38:17
  short space of time, the solid cliffs of fog had broken. The faint
• 38:22
  wind that had banked it, had now pierced it, and was now making
• 38:27
  pictures and devices of it. Most wonderful and weird to see. Horsemen of
• 38:32
  the mist rose on the water and were dissolved. Billows rolled on the sea,
• 38:38
  yet were not of the sea. Blankets and spirals of vapor ascended to
• 38:44
  high heaven, and all with a terrible languor of movement, vast and lazy
• 38:51
  and sinister, yet steadfast of purpose as fate or death. The fog advanced,
• 38:59
  take king the world for its own. Against this gray and indescribably somber
• 39:06
  background stood the smoldering ship, with the breeze already shivering in her sails,
• 39:12
  and the smoke from her main hatch blowing and beckoning as if to the retreating
• 39:16
  boats. Why is the ship smoking like that? Asked Dick, And look
• 39:22
  at those boats coming. When are we going back? Daddy, uncle,
• 39:29
  said Emmeline, putting her hand in his as she gazed towards the ship and
• 39:34
  beyond it. I'm fraid. What frightens you, emmy, he asked,
• 39:38
  drawing her to him. Shapes, replied Emmeline, nestling up to his side.
• 39:45
  Oh glory, beat a guard, gasped the old sailor, suddenly resting
• 39:51
  on his ears. Will Yers, look at the fog that's coming. I
• 39:55
  think we had better wait here for the boats, said mister Lestrayne. We
• 40:00
  are far enough now to be safe if anything happens. Aye aye, replied
• 40:06
  the oarsman, whose wits had returned. Blow up or blow down? She
• 40:09
  won't hit us from here, Daddy, said Dick. When are we going
• 40:15
  back? I want my tea. We aren't going back, my child,
• 40:21
  replied his father. The ship's on fire. We are waiting for another ship.
• 40:25
  Where's the other ship, asked the child, looking round at the horizon
• 40:30
  that was clear. We can't see it yet, replied the unhappy man.
• 40:37
  But it will come. The long boat and the quarter boat were slowly approaching.
• 40:43
  They looked like beetles crawling over the water. And after them, across
• 40:47
  the glittering surface came a dullness that took the sparkle from the sea, a
• 40:53
  dullness that swept and spread like an eclipse shadow. Now the wind struck the
• 41:00
  dinghy. It was like a wind from fairy Land, almost imperceptible, chill
• 41:07
  and dimming the sun, a wind from Lilliput. As it struck the dinghy,
• 41:13
  the fog took the distant ship. It was a most extraordinary sight,
• 41:20
  for in less than thirty seconds, the ship of wood became a ship of
• 41:24
  gauze. A tracery flickered and was gone forever from the sight of man.
• 41:34
  End of Chapter four, Chapter five, voices heard in the mist. The
• 41:42
  sun became fainter still and vanished. Though the air round the dinghy seemed quite
• 41:49
  clear, the oncoming boats were hazy and dim, and that part of the
• 41:52
  horizon that had been fairly clear was now blotted out. The longboat was by
• 42:00
  a good way. When she was withinhaling distance, the captain's voice came,
• 42:06
  dinghy, ahoy, oy, fetch a long side here. The longboat ceased
• 42:14
  rowing to wait for the quarter boat that was slowly creeping up. She was
• 42:19
  a heavy boat to pull at all times, and now she was overloaded.
• 42:23
  The wrath of Captain LeFarge with Paddy button for the way he had stampeded the
• 42:29
  crew was profound, but he had not time to give vent to it.
• 42:34
  Here, get about us, mister la Strange, said he, when the
• 42:37
  dinghy was alongside. We have room for one. Missus Stannard is in the
• 42:43
  quarter boat and it's overcrowded. She's better aboard the dinghy, for she can
• 42:49
  look after the kids. Come hurry up, the smother is coming down on
• 42:52
  us. Fast Ay to the quarter boat. Hurry up, hurry up.
• 43:00
  The quarter boat had suddenly vanished. Mister Lestrange climbed into the longboat. Paddy
• 43:07
  pushed the dinghy a few yards away with the tip of a skull, and
• 43:10
  then lay on his oars, waiting. OHI ohy, cried LeFarge, Oh
• 43:19
  hoy came from the fog bank. Next moment, the longboat and the dinghy
• 43:24
  vanished from each other's sight. The great fog bank had taken them. Now,
• 43:31
  A couple of strokes of the port's scar with the brought mister Button alongside
• 43:37
  the longboat. So close was he, but the quarter boat was in his
• 43:42
  mind, or rather imagination. So what must he do but take three powerful
• 43:46
  strokes in the direction in which he fancied the quarter boat to be. The
• 43:52
  rest was voices, dinghy, ahay ay ah, hurry, don't be shoten
• 44:01
  together, or I'll not know which way to pall qu a bout a high
• 44:07
  Where is y poart your helm? Aye? Aye, putting his helm so
• 44:14
  to speak to starboard, I'd be widges in one minute, two or three
• 44:20
  minutes? Hard pulling, Oh much more faint, what d'ye mean? Rowing
• 44:27
  away from me? A dozen strokes? Oh ho fainter? Still, mister
• 44:35
  Button rested on his oars. Dear led mendam, I believe that was the
• 44:40
  lung boat shouting. He took to his oars again and pulled vigorously. Paddy
• 44:47
  came Dick's small voice, apparently from nowhere where are we now? Sure we're
• 44:54
  in a fog? Where else would we be? Don't you be afeared?
• 45:00
  I ain't a feard, but ems shiverin'. Give her me coat, said
• 45:06
  the oarsman, resting on his oars and taking it off. Wrap it round
• 45:10
  her, and when it's round her, we'll all let one big hallo together.
• 45:16
  There's an old shawl somewhere in the boat, but I can't be looking
• 45:21
  after for it now. He held out the coat, and an almost invisible
• 45:25
  hand took it. At the same moment, a tremulous report shook the sea
• 45:30
  and sky. There she goes, said mister button, and me old fiddle,
• 45:37
  and I'll don't be frightened, childer. It's only a gun de' feurin
• 45:42
  for diversion. Now raul hullo together? Are you ready? Ay? Ay,
• 45:47
  said Dick, who was a picker up of sea terms. Hullo yelled,
• 45:54
  Pat hallo, Hallo, piped Dick and Emmeline. A faint reply came,
• 46:02
  but from where it was difficult to say. The old man rowed a
• 46:07
  few strokes and then paused on his oars. So still was the surface of
• 46:14
  the sea that the chuckling of the water on the boat's bow. As he
• 46:17
  drove forward under the impetus of the last powerful stroke could be heard distinctly.
• 46:25
  It died out as she lost way, and silence closed round them like a
• 46:32
  ring. The light from above, a light that seemed to come through a
• 46:37
  vast scuttle of deeply muffed glass, faint as it was almost to extinction,
• 46:45
  still varied as the little boat floated through the strata of the mist. A
• 46:52
  great sea fog is not homogeneous. Its density varies. It is honeycomed with
• 47:00
  streets. It has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of solid vapor,
• 47:07
  all shifting and changing place with the subtlety of legemen. It has also
• 47:14
  this wizard peculiarity that it grows with the sinking of the sun and the approach
• 47:21
  of darkness. The sun could they have seen it was now leaving the horizon.
• 47:29
  They called again, Then they waited, but there was no response.
• 47:35
  There's no use ball in lake, bulls to chaps the steaf as adders,
• 47:38
  said the old sailor, shipping his oars, immediately upon which declaration he gave
• 47:45
  another shout with the same result. As far as eliciting a reply, mister
• 47:52
  Button came Emmeline's voice, What is it, honey, I'm fraid you'll wait
• 48:01
  one minute till I find the shawl. Here it is by the same token,
• 48:07
  and I'll wrap yo up at it. He crept cautiously off to the
• 48:12
  stern sheets and took Emmeline in his arms. Don't want the shawl, said
• 48:19
  Emmeline. I'm not so much afraid in your coat. The rough, tobacco
• 48:25
  smelling old coat gave her courage somehow. Well, then keep it on,
• 48:31
  Dicky, are you cold I've got into Daddy's great coat he left it behind
• 48:37
  him. Well, then I'll put the shawl round my old shoulders, for
• 48:43
  it's cold. I am Are you hungry, childer? No, said Dick,
• 48:49
  but I'm dreadful. How sleepy is it? Well, don't you get
• 48:55
  in the bottom of the bolt, and here's the shawl for a pillar.
• 49:00
  I'll be rowing again in a minute to keep myself warm. He buttoned the
• 49:05
  top button of the coat. I'm all right, murmured Emmeline in a dreamy
• 49:09
  voice. Shut your eyes tight, replied mister button. Our billy winker will
• 49:16
  be dredging sand in them oh ingju enju ye showy ollo ollo o. Enjure,
• 49:31
  enjure, enjoy oh shuabby the arm arby. It was a tag of
• 49:42
  the old nursery folk song they sing in the hovels of the Ancle coast,
• 49:46
  fixed in his memory, along with the rain, the wind, and the
• 49:51
  smell of the burning turf, and the grunting of the pig, and the
• 49:55
  nickedy knock of a rocking cradle. She's off, murmured mister Button to himself,
• 50:02
  as the form in his arms relaxed. Then he laid her gently down
• 50:07
  beside Dick. He shifted forward, moving like a crab. Then he put
• 50:15
  his hand to his pocket for his pipe and tobacco and tinder box. They
• 50:20
  were in his coat pocket, but Emmeline was in his coat. To search
• 50:24
  for them would be to awaken her. The darkness of night was now adding
• 50:30
  itself to the blindness of the fog. The Osmond could not see even the
• 50:36
  thole pins. He sat adrift, mind and body. He was to use
• 50:42
  his own expression, moderate, haunted by the mist, tormented by shapes.
• 50:51
  It was just in a fog like this that the Marrows could be heard disporting
• 50:55
  in Dunbeg Bay and off the Acle coast, and laughing and hallooing through the
• 51:01
  mist to lead unfortunate fishermen astray. Merrows are not altogether evil, but they
• 51:08
  have green hair and teeth, fishes, tails and fins for arms. And
• 51:15
  to hear them walloping in the water around you like salmon, and you,
• 51:19
  alone in a small boat, with the dread of one coming floundering on board,
• 51:24
  is enough to turn a man's hair gray. For a moment he thought
• 51:30
  of awakening the children to keep him company, but he was ashamed. Then
• 51:36
  he took to the skulls again and rowed. By the feel of the water,
• 51:39
  the creak of the oars was like a companion's voice. The exercise lulled
• 51:45
  his fears now and again. Forgetful of the sleeping children, he gave a
• 51:52
  halloo and paused to listen, but no answer came. Then he continued rowing,
• 52:00
  long, steady, laborious strokes, each taking him further and further from
• 52:07
  the boats that he was never destined to sight again. End of Chapter five.
• 52:15
  Chapter six, Dawn on a wide, wide sea. Is it a
• 52:21
  sleep I've been? Said mister Button, suddenly awakening with a start. He
• 52:27
  had shipped his oars for just a minute's rest. He must have slept for
• 52:31
  hours. For now behold, a warm, gentle wind was blowing, the
• 52:37
  moon was shining, and the fog was gone. Is it dreaming? Have
• 52:43
  been? Continued the awakened one? Where am I at alatal ah? Musha?
• 52:49
  Sure here I am ah? We're a we're a. I dreamt I'd
• 52:52
  gone asleep on the main hatch and the ship was blown up with powder and
• 52:58
  it I'll come through, mister button, came a small voice from the stern
• 53:04
  sheets emmelines, what is it? Honey? Where are we? Now?
• 53:09
  Sure? We're afloat on the sea a cushler? Where else would be be?
• 53:15
  Where's uncle? He's beIN dared the long bolt. He'll be after a
• 53:21
  cin a minute. I want to drink. He filled a tin pannikin that
• 53:27
  was by the beaker of water and gave her a drink. Then he took
• 53:30
  his pipe and tobacco from his coat pocket. She almost immediately fell asleep again,
• 53:37
  beside Dick, who had not stirred or moved, And the old sailor,
• 53:43
  standing up and steadying himself, cast his eyes round the horizon. Not
• 53:49
  a sign of sail or boat was there on all the moonlit sea. From
• 53:54
  the loyal ovation of an open boat, one has a very small horizon,
• 53:59
  and in the vague world of moonlight, somewhere round about, it was possible
• 54:05
  that the boats might be near enough to show up at daybreak. But open
• 54:08
  boats a few miles apart may be separated by long leagues in the course of
• 54:14
  a few hours. Nothing is more mysterious than the currents of the sea.
• 54:21
  The sea is an ocean of rivers, some swiftly flowing, some slow,
• 54:28
  and a league from where you are drifting at the rate of a mile an
• 54:31
  hour, another boat may be drifting too. A slight, warm breeze was
• 54:37
  frosting the water, blending moonshine and star shimmer. The ocean lay like a
• 54:45
  lake, yet the nearest mainland was perhaps a thousand miles away. The thoughts
• 54:52
  of youth may be long, long thoughts, but not longer than the thoughts
• 54:59
  of this old sailor man smoking his pipe under the stars, thoughts as long
• 55:06
  as the world is round, blazing bar rooms in Callao, harbors over whose
• 55:13
  oily surfaces, the sandpans slipped like water beetles, the lights of Macau,
• 55:20
  the docks of London. Scarcely ever a sea picture pure and simple. For
• 55:25
  why should an old seaman. Care to think about the sea, where life
• 55:30
  is all into the forecastle and out again, where one voyage blends and jumbles
• 55:36
  with another, Where after forty five years of reefing topsails, you can't well
• 55:42
  remember off which ship it was that Jack Rafferty fell overboard, or who it
• 55:46
  was killed? Who in the forecastle of what though you can still see,
• 55:52
  as in a mirror darkly the fight, and the bloody face over which a
• 55:57
  man is holding a kerosene lamp. I doubt if Paddy Button could have told
• 56:02
  you the name of the first ship he ever sailed in. If you had
• 56:07
  asked him, he would probably have replied, I disremember. It was to
• 56:13
  the Baltic and cruel cold weather, and I was say sick till I near
• 56:19
  brought me boatsop, and it was oh for old Ireland, and I was
• 56:23
  crying of the time, and the captain drawing me back with a rope's end
• 56:28
  to the tune of it. But the name of the hooker I disremember.
• 56:34
  Bad luck to her, whoever she was. So he sat smoking his pipe
• 56:39
  whilst the candles of heaven burned above him, and calling to mind roaring drunken
• 56:45
  scenes and palm shadowed harbors, and the men and the women he had known,
• 56:52
  such men and such women, the derelicts of the earth and the ocean.
• 56:58
  And he nodded off to sleep again, And when he awoke, the
• 57:01
  moon had gone. Now in the eastern sky might have been seen a pale
• 57:07
  fan of light, vague as the wing of an ephemera. It vanished and
• 57:15
  changed back to darkness. Presently, and almost at a stroke, A pencil
• 57:21
  of fire rolled a line along the eastern horizon, and the eastern sky became
• 57:28
  more beautiful than a rose leaf plucked in may. The line of fire contracted
• 57:34
  into one increasing spot, the rim of the rising sun. As the light
• 57:39
  increased, the sky above became of a blue impossible to imagine unless seen,
• 57:46
  a one blue, yet living and sparkling, as if borne of the impalpable
• 57:53
  dust of sapphires. Then the whole sea flashed like the harp of Apollo,
• 58:00
  touched by the fingers of the God. The light was music to the soul.
• 58:06
  It was day. Daddy suddenly cried Dick, sitting up in the sunlight
• 58:12
  and rubbing his eyes with his open palms. Where are we ah right?
• 58:16
  Dicky, my son, cried The old sailor, who had been standing up,
• 58:21
  casting his eyes round in a vain endeavored to sight the boats. Here
• 58:25
  Daddy's as safe as if he was in heaven. Here be wit us in
• 58:29
  a minute, and bring another ship along with him. So you're awake,
• 58:34
  are ya? Emmeline. Emmeline, sitting in the old pilot coat, nodded
• 58:39
  in reply without speaking. Another child might have supplemented Dick's inquiries as to her
• 58:46
  uncle by questions of her own, but she did not. Did she guess
• 58:52
  that there was some subterfuge in mister Button's answer, and that things were different
• 59:00
  from what he was making them out to be. Who can tell? She
• 59:05
  was wearing an old cap of Dick's, which Missus Stannard in the hurry in
• 59:08
  confusion, had popped on her head. It was pushed to one side,
• 59:14
  and she made a quaint enough little figure as she sat up in the early
• 59:17
  morning brightness, dressed in the old salt stained coat, beside Dick, whose
• 59:23
  straw hat was somewhere in the bottom of the boat, and whose auban locks
• 59:28
  were blowing in the faint breeze. Harru cried Dick, looking around at the
• 59:35
  blue and sparkling water, and banging with a stretcher on the bottom of the
• 59:38
  boat. I'm going to be a sailor, aren't i? Paddy? You'll
• 59:44
  let me sail the boat, won't you? Paddy? And show me how
• 59:46
  to row? Easy, does it? Said Paddy, taking hold of the
• 59:52
  child. I haven't a sponge or towel, but I'll just wash your face
• 59:57
  in cold water and leave you to dry the sun. He filled the baling
• 1:00:01
  tin with sea water. I don't want to wash, shouted Dick. Stick
• 1:00:08
  your face into the water and the tin, commanded Paddy. You wouldn't be
• 1:00:13
  going about the place with your face like a sut bag, would yer?
• 1:00:17
  Stick yours in, commanded the other. Mister Button did so and made a
• 1:00:23
  hub bubbling noise in the water. Then he lifted a wet and streaming face
• 1:00:30
  and flung the contents of the baling tin overboard. No, you've lost your
• 1:00:35
  chance, said this arch nursery strategist. Ah, the water's gone. There's
• 1:00:40
  more in the sea. There's no more to wash with, not till tomorrow.
• 1:00:46
  The fishes don't allow it. I want to wash, grumbled Dick.
• 1:00:52
  I want to stick my face in the tin, same as you did.
• 1:00:57
  Besides em hasn't washed. I don't mind, murmured Emmeline. Well, then
• 1:01:04
  said mister Button, as if making a sudden resolve, I'll ask the sharks.
• 1:01:09
  He leaned over the boat's side, his face close to the surface of
• 1:01:14
  the water. Hullo there, he shouted, and then bent his head sideways
• 1:01:19
  to listen. The children also looked over the side, deeply interested. Hullo
• 1:01:24
  there ah ye a sleep, Oh there ye are. Here's a spalpeen with
• 1:01:30
  a dirty face AND's wishingful to wash it. May I take a bailin tin
• 1:01:35
  of ah Thank your anna, Thank your anna. Good day to you and
• 1:01:38
  my respects. What did the shark say, mister Button, asked Emmeline.
• 1:01:45
  He said, take a bal full and welcome mister Button, and it's wishful.
• 1:01:51
  I am. I had a drap o the creature to afy this fine
• 1:01:54
  mornin. Then he pupped his head under his fin and went asleep again.
• 1:02:00
  At leastways I heard him snore. Emmeline nearly always mister buttoned her friend.
• 1:02:07
  Sometimes she called him mister Paddy, as for Dick. It was always Paddy.
• 1:02:14
  Pure and simple children have etiquettes of their own. It must often strike
• 1:02:20
  landsmen and landswomen that the most terrible experience when cast away at sea in an
• 1:02:25
  open boat is the total absence of privacy. It seems an outrage on decency
• 1:02:32
  on the part of Providence to herd people together. So, but whoever has
• 1:02:37
  gone through the experience will bear me out that in great moments of life like
• 1:02:44
  this, the human mind enlarges, and things that would shock us ashore are
• 1:02:50
  as nothing out there face to face with eternity. If so with grown up
• 1:02:57
  people, how much more so with this old shellback and his two charges.
• 1:03:01
  And indeed, mister Button was a person who called a spade a spade,
• 1:03:06
  had no more conventions than a walrus, and looked after his two charges,
• 1:03:12
  just as a nurse maid might look after her charges, or a walrus after
• 1:03:16
  its young. There was a large bag of biscuits in the boat, and
• 1:03:22
  some tin stuff, mostly sardines. I have known a sailor to open a
• 1:03:27
  box of sardines with a tintac. He was in prison, the sardines had
• 1:03:32
  been smuggled into him, and he had no can opener, only his genius
• 1:03:37
  and a tintac. Paddy had a jackknife, however, and in a marvelously
• 1:03:44
  short time a box of sardines was opened and placed in the stern sheets beside
• 1:03:49
  some biscuits. These, with some water and Emmeline's tangerine orange, which she
• 1:03:54
  produced and added to the common store, formed the feast, and they fell
• 1:04:00
  two. When they had finished, the remains were put carefully away, and
• 1:04:04
  they proceeded to step the tiny mast. The sailor, when the mast was
• 1:04:10
  in its place, stood for a moment, resting his hand on it and
• 1:04:14
  gazing round him over the vast and voiceless blue. The Pacific has three blues,
• 1:04:20
  the blue of morning, the blue of midday, and the blue of
• 1:04:25
  evening. But the blue of morning is the happiest, the happiest thing in
• 1:04:30
  color, sparkling, vague, new born, the blue of heaven and youth.
• 1:04:41
  What are you looking for, Paddy, asked dick Sea gulls, replied
• 1:04:46
  the prevaricator, then to himself, not a signer, Sondervan musher Musha.
• 1:04:54
  Which way will I steer north, south, east or west? It's all
• 1:05:00
  one for if a steer to the east, they may be in the west,
• 1:05:03
  and if a steer to the west, they may be in the east.
• 1:05:08
  And I can't steer to the west, for it be steering right into
• 1:05:12
  the wind's eye east it is, I'll make a soldier's wind of it,
• 1:05:16
  and thrust to chance. He set the sail and came aft with the sheet.
• 1:05:23
  Then he shifted the rudder, lit a pipe, leaned luxuriously back,
• 1:05:28
  and gave the bellying sail to the gentle breeze. It was part of his
• 1:05:32
  profession, part of his nature, that steering maybe straight towards death by starvation
• 1:05:40
  and thirst. He was unconcerned, as if he was taking the children for
• 1:05:45
  a summer's sail. His imagination dealt little with the future, almost entirely influenced
• 1:05:51
  by his immediate surroundings. It could conjure up no fears from the scene now
• 1:05:58
  before it. The chill were the same. Never was there a happier starting,
• 1:06:03
  more joy in a little boat. During breakfast, the seamen had given
• 1:06:10
  his charges to understand that if Dick did not meet his father and Emmeline her
• 1:06:14
  uncle in a while or two, it was because he had gone on board
• 1:06:17
  a ship, and he be along presently. The terror of their position was
• 1:06:23
  as deeply veiled from them as eternity is veiled from you or me. The
• 1:06:29
  Pacific was still bound by one of those glacial calms that can only occur when
• 1:06:34
  the sea has been free from storms for a vast extent of its surface.
• 1:06:40
  For a hurricane down by the Horn will send its swell and disturbance beyond the
• 1:06:45
  Marqusas Dubois in his Table of amplitudes points out that more than half the sea
• 1:06:53
  disturbances at any given space are caused not by the wind but by storms at
• 1:06:59
  a great distance. But the sleep of the Pacific is only apparent. This
• 1:07:05
  placid lake over which the dinghy was pursuing the running ripple was heaving to an
• 1:07:12
  imperceptible swell and breaking on the shores of the Low Archipelago and the Marqusas in
• 1:07:18
  foam and thunder. Emmeline's rag doll was a shocking affair from a hygienic or
• 1:07:26
  artistic standpoint. Its face was just inked on. It had no features,
• 1:07:32
  no arms. Yet not for all the dolls in the world would she have
• 1:07:38
  exchanged this filthy and nearly formless thing. It was a fetish. She sat
• 1:07:45
  nursing it on one side of the helmsman, whilst Dick on the other side,
• 1:07:48
  hung his nose over the water on the lookout for fish. Why do
• 1:07:54
  you smoke, mister button, asked Emmeline, who had been watching her friend
• 1:07:59
  for some time in sight silence. M to eise me troubles, replied Paddy.
• 1:08:05
  He was leaning back with one eye shut and the other fixed on the
• 1:08:10
  luff of the sail. He was in his element, nothing to do but
• 1:08:15
  steer and smoke, Warmed by the sun and cooled by the breeze. A
• 1:08:20
  landsman would have been half demented in his condition. Many a sailor would have
• 1:08:26
  been taciturn and surly, on the lookout for sails and alternately damning his soul
• 1:08:31
  and praying to his God. Paddy smoked, whoo, cried Dick. Look,
• 1:08:40
  Paddy, an albacore a few cables length to port had taken a flying
• 1:08:45
  leap from the flashing sea, turned a complete summersault and vanished. It's an
• 1:08:51
  albacar take in a bock leap, hondreds I've seen before death. He's being
• 1:08:58
  chaste. What's chasing him? Paddy? What's chasin him? Why? What
• 1:09:03
  else? But the ghibligblums. Before Dick could inquire as to the personal appearance
• 1:09:10
  and habits of the latter, a shoal of silver arrow heads passed the boat
• 1:09:15
  and flicked into the water with a hissing sound. DEM's flowin' fish. What
• 1:09:20
  are you saying? Fish can't fly? Where is the eyes in your head?
• 1:09:26
  Are the ghibliums chasing them? Too? Asked Emmeline fearfully. No,
• 1:09:32
  tis the billy blows that's after them. Don't be asking me any more questions
• 1:09:39
  now, or I'll be telling you lois in a minute. Emmeline, it
• 1:09:44
  will be remembered, had brought a small parcel with her, done up in
• 1:09:47
  a little shawl. It was under the boat's seat, and every now and
• 1:09:51
  then she would stoop down to see if it were safe. End of Chapter
• 1:09:59
  six, Chapter seven, the Story of the Pig and the billygoat. Every
• 1:10:08
  hour or so, mister Button would shake his lethargy off and rise and look
• 1:10:12
  round for sea gulls, But the prospect was sailless as the prehistoric sea wingless,
• 1:10:20
  voiceless. When Dick would fret now and then, the old sailor would
• 1:10:27
  always devise some means of amusing him. He made him fishing tackle out of
• 1:10:31
  a bent pin and some small twine that happened to be in the boat,
• 1:10:35
  and told him to fish for Pinknes and Dick, with the pathetic faith of
• 1:10:42
  childhood, fished. Then he told them things. He had spent a year
• 1:10:47
  at Deal long ago, where a cousin of his was married to a boatman.
• 1:10:54
  Mister Button had put in a year as a longshoreman at Deal, and
• 1:10:58
  he had got a great deal to tell of his cousin and her husband,
• 1:11:01
  and more especially of one Hannah. Hannah was his cousin's baby, a most
• 1:11:09
  marvelous child who was born with its buck teeth fully developed, and whose first
• 1:11:14
  unnatural act on entering the world was to make a snap at the doctor hung
• 1:11:19
  on to his fist like a bulldog, and him barl in murder. Missus
• 1:11:25
  James, said Emmeline, referring to a Boston acquaintance, had a little baby,
• 1:11:31
  and it was pink. Aye, aye, said Paddy. They're mostly
• 1:11:38
  pink to start with, but they fade when they washed. It had no
• 1:11:43
  teeth, said Emmeline. For I put my finger into sea. The doctor
• 1:11:48
  brought it in in a bag, put in Dick, who was still steadily
• 1:11:53
  fishing, dug it out of a cabbage patch. And I got a trowel
• 1:11:59
  and dug all our cabbage patch up. But there weren't any babies, but
• 1:12:03
  there were no end of worms. I wish I had a baby, said
• 1:12:09
  Emmeline. And I wouldn't send it back to the cabbage patch, the doctor
• 1:12:15
  explained. Dick took it back and planted it again, and Missus James cried
• 1:12:21
  when I asked her, and Daddy said it was put back to grow and
• 1:12:26
  turn into an angel. Angels have wings, said Emmeline dreamily, and pursued
• 1:12:34
  Dick. I told Cook, and she said to Jane that Daddy was always
• 1:12:40
  stuffing children up with something or another. And I asked Daddy to let me
• 1:12:45
  see him stuffing up a child. And Daddy said Cook would have to go
• 1:12:48
  away for saying that, and she went away. Next day. She had
• 1:12:54
  three big trunks and a box for her bonnet, said Emmeline, the far
• 1:13:00
  away look as she recalled the incident, and the cabman asked her hadn't she
• 1:13:05
  any more trunks to put on his cab And hadn't she forgot the parrot cage,
• 1:13:11
  said Dick. I wish I had a parrot in a cage, murmured
• 1:13:16
  Emmeline, moving slightly so as to get more in the shadow of the sail.
• 1:13:21
  And what in the world. Would you be doing with a parrot in
• 1:13:25
  a cage, asked mister Button. I'd let it out, replied Emmeline.
• 1:13:32
  Speak in about letting parrots out of cages. I remember me grandfather had an
• 1:13:38
  old pig, said Paddy. They were all talking seriously together, like equals.
• 1:13:45
  I was a spalpane, no bigger than the hate of me knee.
• 1:13:48
  And I'd go down to the stayed dar and he'd come to the door and
• 1:13:54
  grunt and blowed his nose under it. And I'd grunt back to vex him
• 1:13:59
  and hammer with me fists on it and shout hullo there, hullo there,
• 1:14:03
  and hullo to you, he'd say, speaking the pig's language. Let me
• 1:14:09
  out, he'd say, and I'd give ye as a silver shillin' pass it
• 1:14:14
  under the door, I'd answer him. Then he'd stick the snout of him
• 1:14:18
  under the door, and I'd hit a clip with a stick, and he'd
• 1:14:21
  yell mother irish and me mother had come and baste me, and well I
• 1:14:27
  deserved it well. One day I opened the stye door, and out he
• 1:14:32
  bolted and away and beyond over the hill an hollow he goes till he gets
• 1:14:38
  to the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea, and there he meets a
• 1:14:42
  billygoat, and he and a billygoat has a division of opinion. Away witches,
• 1:14:47
  says the billygoat. Away, Wi yourself, says he who's your talkin'
• 1:14:53
  to, says t'other. Yourself says he who stole the eggs says the bellygoat.
• 1:15:01
  Ache suer, old grandmother says the pig axe me, old witch mother
• 1:15:06
  says the billygoat, Oh, axe me. And before he could complete the
• 1:15:12
  sentence, ram blind. The old billygoat bots him in the chest and away
• 1:15:16
  goes to both of them, whirling into the sea below. Then me,
• 1:15:21
  old grandfather comes out and colors me by the scruff. And into the stie
• 1:15:28
  with you, says he. And into the stieh I went. And there
• 1:15:31
  they kept me for a firtnight on bran mash and skim milk, and well
• 1:15:36
  I deserved it. They dined somewhere about eleven o'clock, and at noon Paddy
• 1:15:44
  unstepped the mast and made a sort of little tint or awning with the sail
• 1:15:48
  in the bow of the boat to protect the children from the rays of the
• 1:15:53
  vertical sun. Then he took his place in the bottom of the boat in
• 1:15:58
  the stern stuck's straw hat over his face to preserve it from the sun,
• 1:16:03
  kicked about a bit to get in a comfortable position, and fell asleep.
• 1:16:09
  End of Chapter seven, Chapter eight s h e n A n d h
• 1:16:18
  shannnondoer. He had slept an hour or more when he was brought to his
• 1:16:23
  senses by a thin and prolonged shriek. It was Emmeline in a nightmare,
• 1:16:30
  or more properly, a day mayre, brought on by a meal of sardines
• 1:16:34
  and the haunting memory of the Ghibeli goblins. When she was shaken. It
• 1:16:41
  always took a considerable time to bring her too from these seizures and comforted.
• 1:16:45
  The mast was restabbed. As mister Button stood with his hand on the spar,
• 1:16:50
  looking round him before going aft with the sheet, an object struck his
• 1:16:56
  eye some three miles ahead. Object rather, for they were the masts and
• 1:17:01
  spars of a small ship rising from the water, not a vestige of a
• 1:17:08
  sail, just the naked spars. It might have been a couple of old
• 1:17:13
  skeleton trees jutting out of the water, For all a landsman could have told.
• 1:17:18
  He stared at this sight for twenty or thirty seconds without speaking. His
• 1:17:23
  head projected like the head of a tortoise. Then he gave a wild haru.
• 1:17:30
  What is it? Paddy asked Dick. Harroo replied Button, ship,
• 1:17:35
  ahoy ship, Ahi, loe too till I be after barden. Ye sure
• 1:17:41
  they are lowe in two divel a rag of canvas on her a day a
• 1:17:45
  sleep er dreamin here. Dick, Let me get aft with the sheet.
• 1:17:50
  The wind'll take us up to her quicker than we'll roll. He crawled aft
• 1:17:56
  and took the tiller. The breeze took the sail, and the boat forged
• 1:18:00
  ahead. Is it Daddy's ship, asked Dick, who was almost as excited
• 1:18:05
  as his friend. I dunno. We'll see when we fetch her. Shall
• 1:18:12
  we go on her? Mister Button asked Emmeline, Aye, we will,
• 1:18:16
  honey. Emmeline bent down and, fetching her parcel from under the seat,
• 1:18:23
  held it on her lap. As they drew nearer, the outlines of the
• 1:18:28
  ship became more apparent. She was a small brig with stump topmasts. From
• 1:18:33
  the spas a few rags of canvas fluttered. It was apparent soon to the
• 1:18:40
  old sailor's eye what was amiss with her. She's derelict, bad cess to
• 1:18:45
  her, he muttered, derelict and done for just me. Luck, I
• 1:18:51
  can't see any people on the ship, cried Dick, who had crept forward
• 1:18:56
  to the bow. Daddy's not there. The old sailor let the boat off
• 1:19:01
  a point or two so as to get a view of the brig more fully.
• 1:19:05
  When there were within twenty cables lengths or so, he unstepped the mast
• 1:19:11
  and took to the skulls. The little brig floated very low on the water
• 1:19:15
  and presented a mournful enough appearance, her running rigging, all slack, shreads
• 1:19:21
  of canvas flapping at the yards, and no boats hanging at the davits.
• 1:19:28
  It was easy enough to see that she was a timber ship, and that
• 1:19:30
  she had started a butt, flooded herself, and been abandoned. Paddy lay
• 1:19:38
  on his oars. Within a few strokes of her. She was floating as
• 1:19:42
  placidly as though she were in the harbor of San Francisco. The green water
• 1:19:47
  showed in her shadow, and in the green water waved the tropic weeds that
• 1:19:51
  were growing from her copper. Her paint was blistered and burnt, absolutely as
• 1:19:59
  though a hot iron had been passed over it. And over her taffrail hung
• 1:20:03
  a large rope whose end was lost to sight in the water. A few
• 1:20:09
  strokes brought them under the stern. The name of the ship was there in
• 1:20:13
  faded letters, also the port to which she belonged Shenandoah Martha's Vineyard. There's
• 1:20:21
  letters on her, said mister Button, but I can't make them out.
• 1:20:26
  I've no larnin' I can read, said Dick, So can I, murmured
• 1:20:32
  Emmeline. S H E N A N d O a H spelt Dick.
• 1:20:44
  What's that, inquired Paddy. I don't know, replied Dick, rather downcastedly.
• 1:20:51
  And there you are, cried the oarsman, in a disgusted manner,
• 1:20:56
  pulling the boat round to the starboard side of the brig. They pretend to
• 1:21:00
  teach letters to childer in schools, picking their eyes out with book reading.
• 1:21:05
  And here's letters as big as we face, and they can't make hide no
• 1:21:10
  tail of them be dashed to book reading. The brig had old fashioned wide
• 1:21:15
  channels, regular platforms, and she floated so low in the water that they
• 1:21:21
  were scarcely a foot above the level of the dinghy. Mister Button secured the
• 1:21:27
  boat by passing the painter through a channel plate. Then, with Emmeline and
• 1:21:31
  her parcel in his arms, or rather in one arm, he clambered over
• 1:21:35
  the channel and passed her over the rail on to the deck. Then it
• 1:21:41
  was Dick's turn, and the children stood waiting whilst the old sailor brought the
• 1:21:46
  beaker of water, the biscuit and the tin stuff on board. It was
• 1:21:53
  a place to delight the heart of a boy. The deck of the Shenandoah
• 1:21:58
  forehead right from the main hatchway. It was laden with timber, running rigging
• 1:22:03
  lay loose on the deck in coils, and nearly the whole of the quarter
• 1:22:08
  deck was occupied by a deck house. The place had a delightful smell of
• 1:22:14
  sea beach, decaying wood, tar, and mystery bikes of buntline and other
• 1:22:20
  ropes were dangling from above, only waiting to be swung from. A bell
• 1:22:27
  was hung just forehead of the foremast. In half a moment, Dick was
• 1:22:31
  forehead hammering at the bell with a blaying pin he had picked up from the
• 1:22:35
  deck. Mister Button shouted to him to desist. The sound of the bell
• 1:22:41
  jarred on his nerves. It sounded like a summon's, and a summons on
• 1:22:45
  that deserted craft was quite out of place. Who knew what mightn't answer it
• 1:22:53
  in the way of the supernatural. Dick dropped the belaying pin and ran forward.
• 1:22:59
  He took the disengaged hand, and the three of them went off to
• 1:23:02
  the door of the deck house. The door was open, and they peeped
• 1:23:08
  in. The place had three windows on the starboard side, and through the
• 1:23:13
  windows the sun was shining in a mournful manner. There was a table in
• 1:23:17
  the middle of the place. A seat was pushed away from the table,
• 1:23:21
  as if someone had risen in a hurry. On the table lay the remains
• 1:23:26
  of a meal, a teapot, two teacups, two plates, and one
• 1:23:31
  of the plates rested a fork with a bit of putrefying bacon upon it that
• 1:23:36
  someone had evidently been conveying to his mouth when something had happened. Near the
• 1:23:44
  tea pot stood a tin of condensed milk haggled open. Some old salt had
• 1:23:48
  been in the act of putting milk in his tea when the mysterious something had
• 1:23:54
  occurred. Never did a lot of dead things speak so ill eloquently as these
• 1:24:00
  things spoke, one could conjure it all up. The skipper most likely had
• 1:24:08
  finished his tea, and the mate was hard at work with his when a
• 1:24:12
  leak had been discovered, or some derelict had been run into on whatever it
• 1:24:17
  was had happened happened. One thing was evident that since the abandonment of the
• 1:24:24
  brig, she had experienced fine weather, else the things would not have been
• 1:24:29
  left standing so trimly on the table. Mister Button and Dick entered the place
• 1:24:34
  to prosecute inquiries, but Emmeline remained at the door. The charm of the
• 1:24:41
  old brig appealed to her almost as much as to Dick, but she had
• 1:24:45
  a feeling about it, quite unknown to him. A ship where no one
• 1:24:50
  was had about it suggestions of other things. She was afraid to enter the
• 1:24:58
  gloomy deck house, and afraid to remain alone outside. She compromised matters by
• 1:25:04
  sitting down on the deck. Then she placed the small bundle beside her,
• 1:25:10
  and hurriedly took the rag doll from her pocket, into which it was stuffed
• 1:25:14
  head down, pulled its calico skirt from over its head, propped it up
• 1:25:18
  against the combing of the door, and told it not to be afraid.
• 1:25:24
  There was not much to be found in the deck house, but after it
• 1:25:28
  were two small cabins, like rabbit hutches, once inhabited by the skipper and
• 1:25:32
  his mate. Here there were great findings in the way of rubbish, old
• 1:25:38
  clothes, old boots, an old top hat of that extraordinary pattern you may
• 1:25:44
  see in the streets of pernambuco immensely tall and narrowing toward the brim, a
• 1:25:49
  telescope without a lens, a volume of hoit, a nautical almanac, a
• 1:25:57
  great bolt of striped flannel, shiping, a box of fish hooks, and
• 1:26:02
  in one corner, glorious find a coil of what seemed to be ten yards
• 1:26:09
  or so of black rope. Bucky Bigora shouted, pat seizing upon his treasure.
• 1:26:15
  It was pigtail. You may see coils of it in the tobacconist windows
• 1:26:20
  of seaport towns. A pipe full of it would make a hippopotamus vomit.
• 1:26:27
  He had old sailors chew it and smoke it and revel in it. We'll
• 1:26:31
  bring o the lot of the things out on deck, and see what's worth
• 1:26:35
  keeping and what's worth leaving, said mister Button, taking an immense armful of
• 1:26:41
  the old truck, whilst Dick, carrying the top hat upon which he had
• 1:26:45
  instantly seized as his own special booty, led the way. Em shouted Dick
• 1:26:53
  as he emerged from the doorway. See what I've got. He popped the
• 1:26:58
  awful looking structure of over his head. It went right down to his shoulders.
• 1:27:03
  Emmeline gave a shriek. It smells funny, said Dick, taking it
• 1:27:09
  off and applying his nose to the inside of it. Smells like an old
• 1:27:14
  hair brush. Here you try it on. Emmeline scrambled away as far as
• 1:27:20
  she could till she reached the starboard bulwarks, where she sat in the scupper
• 1:27:26
  breathless and speechless and wide eyed. She was always dumb when frightened, unless
• 1:27:32
  it were a nightmare or a very sudden shock. And this hat, suddenly
• 1:27:36
  seen half covering Dick, frightened her out of her wits. Besides, it
• 1:27:43
  was a black thing, and she hated black things, black cats, black
• 1:27:48
  horses, worst of all, black dogs. She had once seen a hearse
• 1:27:55
  in the streets of Boston an old time hearse, with black plumes, trappings
• 1:28:00
  and all complete. The sight had nearly given her a fit, though she
• 1:28:05
  did not know in the least the meaning of it. Meanwhile, mister Button
• 1:28:10
  was conveying armful after armful of stuff on deck. When the heap was complete,
• 1:28:15
  he sat down beside it in the glorious afternoon sunshine and lit his pipe.
• 1:28:21
  He had searched neither for food or water, as yet, content with
• 1:28:26
  the treasure God had given him. For the moment, the material things of
• 1:28:30
  life were forgotten. And indeed, if he had searched, he would have
• 1:28:34
  found only half a sack of potatoes in the caboose, for the lazarette was
• 1:28:40
  a wash, and the water in the scuttle butt was stinking. Emmeline,
• 1:28:45
  seeing what was in progress, crept up Dick, promising not to put the
• 1:28:49
  hat on her, and they all sat round the pile them pair of brogs,
• 1:28:56
  said the old man, holding a pair of old boots up for inspect
• 1:29:00
  like an auctioneer. We'd fetch half a dollah any day in the week in
• 1:29:04
  any sea pot in the world. Put them beside your dick, and lay
• 1:29:10
  hold of this pair of breeches. By the ends of them stretch him.
• 1:29:15
  The trousers were stretched out, examined and approved of, and laid beside the
• 1:29:20
  boots. Here's a telescope with one eye shut, said mister Button, examining
• 1:29:27
  the broken telescope and putting it in and out like a concertina. Stick it
• 1:29:30
  beside the brogues. It may come in handy for something. Here's a book,
• 1:29:36
  tossing the Nautical Almanac to the boy. Tell me what it says.
• 1:29:42
  Dick examined the pages of figures hopelessly. I can't read him, said Dick.
• 1:29:47
  It's numbers. Buzz it overboard, said mister Button. Dick did what
• 1:29:53
  he was told joyfully, and the proceedings resumed. He tried on the tall
• 1:29:59
  hat, and the children laughed on her old friend's head. The thing ceased
• 1:30:03
  to have terror for Emmeline. She had two methods of laughing, the angelic
• 1:30:11
  smile before mentioned a rare thing, and almost as rare, a laugh in
• 1:30:16
  which she showed her little white teeth while she pressed her hands together, the
• 1:30:21
  left one tight shut and the right clasped over it. He put the hat
• 1:30:27
  on one side and continued the sorting, searching all the pockets of the clothes
• 1:30:32
  and finding nothing. When he had arranged what to keep, they flung the
• 1:30:38
  rest overboard, and the valley walls were conveyed to the captain's cabin, there
• 1:30:42
  to remain till wanted. Then the idea that food might turn up useful,
• 1:30:46
  as well as old clothes in their present condition, struck the imaginative mind of
• 1:30:51
  mister Button, and he proceeded to search. The lazarette was simply a cistern
• 1:30:59
  full of sea water. What else it might contain, and not being a
• 1:31:03
  diver, he could not say. In the copper of the caboose lay a
• 1:31:08
  great lump of putrefying pork or meat of some sort. The harness cast contained
• 1:31:15
  nothing except huge crystals of salt. All meat had been taken away. Still,
• 1:31:21
  the provisions and water brought on board from the dinghy would be sufficient to
• 1:31:26
  last them some ten days or so, and in the course of ten days
• 1:31:30
  a lot of things might happen. Mister Button leaned over the side the dinghy
• 1:31:38
  was nestling beside the brig like a duckling beside a duck. The broad channel
• 1:31:44
  might have been likened to the duck's wing half extended. He got on the
• 1:31:48
  channel to see if the painter was safely attached. Having made all secure,
• 1:31:55
  he climbed slowly up the main yard arm and looked round upon the sea.
• 1:32:02
  End of Chapter eight, Chapter nine Shadows in the moonlight. Daddy's a long
• 1:32:11
  time coming, said Dick. All of a sudden they were seated on the
• 1:32:15
  bulks of timber that cumbered the deck of the brig on either side of the
• 1:32:18
  caboose, an ideal perch. The sun was setting over Australia way in a
• 1:32:27
  sea that had seemed like a sea of boiling gold. Some mystery of mirage
• 1:32:33
  caused the water to heave and tremble, as if troubled by fervent heat.
• 1:32:40
  Aye he is, said mister Button. But it's better late than never.
• 1:32:45
  No, don't be thinking of him, for that won't bring him. Look
• 1:32:49
  at the sun. Goin into the water, and don't be speaking a word
• 1:32:54
  now, but listen and you'll hear it hiss. The children gazed and listened.
• 1:33:01
  Paddy also All three were mute. As the great blazing shield at touched
• 1:33:09
  the water that leapt to meet it. You could hear the water hiss if
• 1:33:15
  you had imagination enough. Once having touched the water, the sun went down
• 1:33:20
  behind it as swiftly as a man in a hurry going down a ladder.
• 1:33:25
  As he vanished, a ghostly and golden twilight spread over the sea, a
• 1:33:30
  light, exquisite but immensely forlorn. When the sea became a violet shadow,
• 1:33:39
  the west darkened as if to a closing door, and the stars rushed over
• 1:33:44
  the sky. Mister Button, said Emmeline, nodding towards the sun as he
• 1:33:49
  vanished, what's over there the west, replied he staring at the sunset.
• 1:34:00
  Chiney an injy And are the way beyond? Where's the sun gone to now?
• 1:34:05
  Paddy asked Dick. He's gone chastened the moan, and she shkid daddling
• 1:34:13
  with her dress brailed up for all she's worth. She'll be along up in
• 1:34:17
  a minute. He's always after her, but he's never caught her yet.
• 1:34:24
  What would he do to her if he caught her, asked Emmeline, faith
• 1:34:30
  and maybe he'd fetch her a scalp, And well, she deserve it.
• 1:34:35
  Why did she deserve it, asked Dick, who was in one of his
• 1:34:40
  questioning moods. Because she's always deluthering people and leading them astray. Girls are
• 1:34:47
  men, She'll mothered them till once she gets the comether on them, same
• 1:34:53
  as she did. Buch mac can Who's he? Buch mac can fate?
• 1:35:00
  He was the village Igit, where I used to live in the old days.
• 1:35:04
  How's that hold? You wished? And don't be asking questions. He
• 1:35:11
  was always once in the moon, though he was twenty and six feet four.
• 1:35:16
  He'd a garb on him that hung open like a rat trap with a
• 1:35:19
  broken spring, and he was as ten as a barb as pole you could
• 1:35:26
  have tied a reef knot in the middle of em. And when the moon
• 1:35:30
  was full there was no hold in him. Mister Button gazed at the reflection
• 1:35:36
  of the sunset on the water for a moment, as if recalling some from
• 1:35:41
  the past, and then proceeded. He'd sit in the grass staring at her,
• 1:35:46
  and then he'd start a chaser over the hills, and they'd find him
• 1:35:50
  at last, maybe a day or two later, last in the mountains,
• 1:35:56
  grazin on berries and green as a cabbage from the hunger and the cold,
• 1:36:00
  till it got so bad at long last they had to hobble him. I've
• 1:36:06
  seen a donkey hobbled, cried dick. Then you've seen the twin brother of
• 1:36:13
  buckma can Well. One night, my elder brother Tim was sitting over the
• 1:36:17
  fire, smoking his dundeane and thinking of his sins. When in comes Buck
• 1:36:24
  with the hobbles on him. Tim says he, I've got her at last,
• 1:36:30
  got who says Tim. The moon says he got her? Where,
• 1:36:35
  says Tim? In a bucket by the pond, says t'other safe and sound,
• 1:36:43
  and not a scratch on her. You come and look, says he.
• 1:36:46
  So Tim follows him, he hobbling, and they go to the pond
• 1:36:51
  side, and there, sure enough stet a tin bucket full of water,
• 1:36:57
  and on the water the reflection of the moon. I dridged her out of
• 1:37:01
  the pond, whispers Buck. Easy now says he, And I'll dribble the
• 1:37:08
  water out gently, says he, and we'll catch her alive at the bottom
• 1:37:13
  of it like a trout. So he drains the water out gently of the
• 1:37:17
  bucket till it was near all gone. And then he looks in the bucket,
• 1:37:23
  expecting to find the moon floundering at the bottom of it like a flat
• 1:37:27
  fish. She's gone bad, says to her. Says he try again,
• 1:37:33
  says me. Brother, and Buck fills the bucket again, and there was
• 1:37:39
  the moon sure enough. When the water came to stand still, go on,
• 1:37:43
  says me, brotherterrain out the water, but go gentle, or she'll
• 1:37:48
  give ye is the slip again one minute, says Buck. I've got an
• 1:37:54
  idea, says he. She won't give me the slip this time, says
• 1:37:58
  he. You wait for me, says he, and off he hobbles to
• 1:38:01
  his old mother's cabin a stone's throwaway, and back he comes with a sieve.
• 1:38:08
  You hold the sieve, says Buck, and I'll drain the water into
• 1:38:13
  it. If she scapes from the bucket, we'll have her in the sieve.
• 1:38:17
  And he pours the water out of the bucket as gentle as if it
• 1:38:21
  were crame out of a jog. When all the water was out, he
• 1:38:27
  turns the bucket bottom up and shook it ran dan the tinge. He cries,
• 1:38:32
  she's gone again, and with that he flings the bucket into the pond,
• 1:38:39
  and a sieve after the bucket. When off comes his own mother,
• 1:38:43
  hobbling on her stick. Where's me, Bucket, says she in the pond,
• 1:38:48
  says Buck, And to be sieve says she gone. After the bucket.
• 1:38:55
  I'll give you a bucket in, says she. And she up with
• 1:38:59
  the stick and landed him a skelp, and drive him roaring, and hobble
• 1:39:03
  him before her, and locked him up in the cabin, and kept him
• 1:39:08
  on bread and water for a week to get the moon out of his head.
• 1:39:13
  But she might have saved the trouble for that day month it was again
• 1:39:18
  there she comes, the moon, argent and splendid was breaking from the water.
• 1:39:27
  She was full, and her light was powerful, almost as the light
• 1:39:30
  of day. The shadows of the children and the queer shadow of mister Button
• 1:39:35
  were cast on the wall of the caboose, hard and black as silhouettes.
• 1:39:41
  Look at our shadows, cried Dick, taking off his broad breamed straw hat
• 1:39:45
  and waving it Emmeline held up her doll to see its shadow, and mister
• 1:39:51
  Button held up his pipe. Come now, said he, putting the pipe
• 1:39:58
  back in his mouth and making to rise and shunder. After bed tis time
• 1:40:02
  you were asleep, to both of ya, Dick began to yowl. I
• 1:40:09
  don't want to go to bed. I ain't tired, Paddy. Let's stay
• 1:40:14
  a little longer, not a minute, said the other, with all the
• 1:40:18
  decision of a nurse. Not a minute after me, pipe's out. Fill
• 1:40:24
  it again, said Dick. Mister Button made no reply. The pipe gurgled
• 1:40:30
  as he puffed at it, a kind of death rattle. Speaking of almost
• 1:40:34
  immediate extinction, mister Button, said Emmeline. She was holding her nose in
• 1:40:43
  the air and sniffing, seated to windward of the smoker and out of the
• 1:40:48
  pig tailed poisoned air. Her delicate sense of smell perceived something lost to the
• 1:40:55
  others. What is it? A cushler? I smell so what' ye say?
• 1:41:01
  Ye smell something nice? What's it like? Asked Dick, sniffing hard.
• 1:41:10
  I don't smell anything. Emmeline sniffed again to make sure, Flowers,
• 1:41:17
  said she. The breeze, which had shifted several points since midday, was
• 1:41:24
  bearing with it a faint, faint odor, a perfume of vanilla and spice,
• 1:41:30
  so faint as to be imperceptible to all but the most acute olfactory sense.
• 1:41:38
  Flowers, said the old sailor, tapping the ashes cut of his pipe
• 1:41:43
  against the heel of his boot. And where'dye get, Flowers in the middle
• 1:41:46
  of the say it's dreamin ye are come now to bedwidges. Fill it again,
• 1:41:55
  wailed Dick, referring to the pipe. It's a spankin I'll give yer,
• 1:42:00
  replied his guardian, lifting him down from the timber bulks, and then
• 1:42:02
  assisting Emmeline in tow texts. If you don't behave come along, Emmeline.
• 1:42:10
  He started aft a small hand in each of his Dick, bellowing as they
• 1:42:16
  passed the ship's bell. Dick stretched towards the belaying pin that was still lying
• 1:42:21
  in the deck, seized it and hit the bell a mighty bang. It
• 1:42:27
  was the last pleasure to be snatched before sleep, and he snatched it.
• 1:42:32
  Paddy had made up beds for himself and his charges in the deck house.
• 1:42:36
  He had cleared the stuff off the table, broke open the windows to get
• 1:42:41
  the musty smell away, and place the mattresses from the captain and mate cabins
• 1:42:45
  on the floor. When the children were in bed and asleep, he went
• 1:42:50
  to the starboard rail, and, leaning on it, looked over the moonlit
• 1:42:55
  sea. He was thinking of ships as his wandering eye over the sea spaces,
• 1:43:01
  little dreaming of the message that the perfumed breeze was bearing him, the
• 1:43:06
  message that had been received and dimly understood by Emmeline. Then he leaned with
• 1:43:13
  his back to the rail and his hands in his pockets. He was not
• 1:43:17
  thinking now, he was ruminating. The basis of the Irish character, as
• 1:43:25
  exemplified by a Paddy Button, is a profound laziness mixed with a profound melancholy.
• 1:43:32
  Yet Paddy, in his left handed way, was as hard a worker
• 1:43:36
  as any man on board ship. And as for melancholy, he was the
• 1:43:41
  life and soul of the forecastle. Yet there they were, the laziness and
• 1:43:46
  the melancholy, only waiting to be tapped. As he stood with his hands
• 1:43:53
  thrust deep in his pockets longshore fashion, counting the dowels in the planking of
• 1:43:59
  the deck by the moonlight, he was reviewing the old days the tale of
• 1:44:04
  Buck Macairn had recalled them. And across all the salt seas he could see
• 1:44:10
  the moonlight on the Connemara mountains, and hear the seagulls crying on the thunderous
• 1:44:15
  beach, where each wave has behind it three thousand miles of sea. Suddenly
• 1:44:24
  mister Button came back from the mountains of Connemara to find himself on the deck
• 1:44:28
  of the Shenandoah, and he instantly became possessed by fears. Beyond the white,
• 1:44:35
  deserted deck, barred by the shadows of the standing rigging, he could
• 1:44:41
  see the door of the caboose. Suppose he should suddenly see a head pop
• 1:44:45
  out, or worse, a shadowy form go in. He turned to the
• 1:44:53
  deck house, where the children were sound asleep, and where in a few
• 1:44:57
  minutes he too was sound asleep beside them. Whilst all night long the brig
• 1:45:03
  rocked to the gentle swell of the Pacific, and the breeze blew, bringing
• 1:45:10
  with it the perfume of flowers. End of Chapter nine, Chapter ten,
• 1:45:18
  The Tragedy of the Boats. When the fog lifted after midnight, the people
• 1:45:26
  in the longboat saw the quarter boat half a mile to starboard of them.
• 1:45:30
  Can you see the dinghy, asked l Stranger of the captain, who was
• 1:45:33
  standing up searching the horizon. Not a speck, answered LeFarge. Damned that
• 1:45:41
  irishman, but for him, might have got the boats away properly victualled,
• 1:45:45
  and all as it is, I don't know what we've got aboard you,
• 1:45:50
  jenkins. What have you got forard? There? Two bags of bread and
• 1:45:56
  a beaker of water, answered the steward, A beaker of all to be
• 1:46:00
  sugared. Came another voice, A beaker half fool you mean, then the
• 1:46:06
  steward's voice, So it is. There's not more than a couple of gallons
• 1:46:11
  in her, My God, said LeFarge. Damn that irishman. There's not
• 1:46:18
  more than I'll give us two half pannikins apiece all around, said the steward.
• 1:46:26
  Maybe, said LeFarge, the corner boats better are started pull for her.
• 1:46:32
  She's pulling for us, said the stroke Oar captain asked, la strange,
• 1:46:40
  Are you sure there's no sight of the dinghy? None, replied LeFarge.
• 1:46:46
  The unfortunate man's head sank on his breast. He had little time to
• 1:46:51
  brood over his troubles, however, for a tragedy was beginning to unfold around
• 1:46:57
  him, the most shocking perhaps in the annals of the sea, a tragedy
• 1:47:01
  to be hinted at rather than spoken of. When the boats were withinhaling distance,
• 1:47:09
  a man in the bow of the longboat rose up, qull a boat
• 1:47:13
  A hoy o, ho, how much water have you none? The word
• 1:47:21
  came floating over the placid moonlit water at it. The fellows in the longboat
• 1:47:28
  ceased rowing, and you could see the water drops dripping off their oars like
• 1:47:32
  diamonds in the moonlight. Qull a boat, a hoy, shouted the fellow
• 1:47:39
  in the bow. Lay on your oars here you scale banker, cried LeFarge.
• 1:47:45
  Who are you to be given orders? Scale banker, yourself replied the
• 1:47:51
  fellow. Bullies put her about the starboard oars backed water, and the boat
• 1:47:59
  came. By chance, the worst lots of the Northumberland's crew were in the
• 1:48:05
  long boat. Veritable scow Banker's scum. And how scum clings to life.
• 1:48:13
  You will never know until you have been amongst it in an open boat at
• 1:48:16
  sea. LeFarge had no more command over this lot than you have who are
• 1:48:23
  reading this book. Heave two came from the quarter boat as she labored behind.
• 1:48:30
  Lay on your oars, bullies, cried the ruffian at the bow,
• 1:48:35
  who was still standing up like an evil genius who had taken momentary command over
• 1:48:40
  events. Lay on your oars, bullies, they'd better have it now.
• 1:48:46
  The quarter boat, in her turn, ceased rowing and lay a cable's length
• 1:48:50
  away. How much wa have you came the mate's voice, Note enough to
• 1:48:57
  go round. Defarge made to rise, and the stroke oar struck at him,
• 1:49:03
  catching him in the wind and doubling him up in the bottom of the
• 1:49:06
  boat. Give us some, for God's sake, came the mate's voice.
• 1:49:13
  We're parched with rowing, and there's a woman on board. The fellow in
• 1:49:17
  the bow of the longboat, as if some one had suddenly struck him,
• 1:49:21
  broke into a tornado of blasphemy. Give us some, came the mate's voice.
• 1:49:29
  Or by God, we'll lay you aboard. Before the words were well
• 1:49:33
  spoken, the men in the quarter boat carried the threat into action. The
• 1:49:38
  conflict was brief. The quarter boat was too crowded for fighting. The starboard
• 1:49:44
  men in the longboat fought with their oars, whilst the fellow's to port steadied
• 1:49:47
  the boat. The fight did not last long, and presently the quarter boat
• 1:49:53
  sheered off half of the men in her, cut about the head and bleeding
• 1:49:58
  two of them senseless. It was sundown on the following day. The longboat
• 1:50:03
  lay adrift. The last drop of water had been served out eight hours before.
• 1:50:11
  The quarterboat, like a horrible phantom, had been haunting and pursuing her
• 1:50:16
  all day begging for water when there was none. It was like the prayers
• 1:50:23
  one might expect to hear in hell. The men in the longboat, gloomy
• 1:50:28
  and morose, weighed down with a sense of crime, tortured by thirst and
• 1:50:34
  tormented by the voices imploring for water, lay on their oars. When the
• 1:50:40
  other boat tried to approach now and then suddenly, and as if moved by
• 1:50:46
  a common impulse, they would all shout out together, we have none.
• 1:50:54
  But the quarterboat would not believe it was in vain to hold the bee with
• 1:51:00
  the bung out to prove the dryness. The half delirious creatures had it fixed
• 1:51:05
  in their minds that their comrades were withholding from them the water that was not.
• 1:51:13
  Just as the sun touched the sea, the strange, rousing himself from
• 1:51:16
  a tupa into which he had sunk, raised himself and looked over the gunwale.
• 1:51:23
  He saw the quarter boat drifting a cable's length away, lit by the
• 1:51:28
  full light of sunset, and the specters in it, seeing him, held
• 1:51:32
  out in mute appeal their blackened tongues. Of the night that followed, it
• 1:51:41
  is almost impossible to speak. First was nothing to what the scale bankers suffered
• 1:51:47
  from the torture of the whimpering appeal for water that came to them at intervals
• 1:51:53
  during the night. When at last the arago a French whale ship sighted them.
• 1:52:00
  The crew of the longboat worth still alive, but three of them were
• 1:52:04
  raving madmen. Of the crew of the quarter boat was saved, not one.
• 1:52:14
  End of chapter ten and end of part one of The Blue Lagoon,
• 1:52:18
  Part two, Chapter eleven. The island childer shouted Paddy. He was at
• 1:52:27
  the cross trees in the full dawn, whilst the children standing beneath on deck
• 1:52:31
  were craning their faces up to him. There's an island, furnatus hurrah,
• 1:52:39
  cried Dick. He was not quite sure what an island might be like in
• 1:52:43
  the concrete, but it was something fresh, and Paddy's voice was jubilant.
• 1:52:48
  Land, how it is, said he coming down to the deck, Come
• 1:52:54
  forard to the boughs, and I'll show it to you. He stood on
• 1:52:58
  the timber in the bows and lifted out Emmeline up in his arms. And
• 1:53:01
  even at that humble elevation from the water, she could see something of an
• 1:53:06
  undecided color green for choice on the horizon. It was not directly ahead,
• 1:53:14
  but on the starboard bow, or as she would have expressed it, to
• 1:53:17
  the right. When Dick had looked and expressed his disappointment at their being so
• 1:53:24
  little to see, Paddy began to make preparations for leaving the ship. It
• 1:53:29
  was only just now, with land in sight, that he recognized in some
• 1:53:32
  fashion the horror of the position from which they were about to escape. He
• 1:53:38
  fed the children hurriedly with some biscuits and tinned meat, and then with a
• 1:53:43
  biscuit in his hand, eating as he went. He trotted about the decks,
• 1:53:47
  collecting things and stowing them in the dinghy. The bolt of striped flannel,
• 1:53:53
  all the old clothes a housewife full of needles and thread, such as
• 1:53:57
  seamen sometimes carry, the hut off sack of potatoes, a saw which he
• 1:54:01
  found in the caboose, the precious coil of tobacco, and a lot of
• 1:54:06
  other odds and ends he'd transshipped, sinking the little dinghy several strakes in the
• 1:54:13
  process. Also, of course, he took the breaker of water and the
• 1:54:17
  remains of the biscuit and tin stuff they had brought on board. These being
• 1:54:23
  stowed and the dinghy ready, he went forward with the children to the bow
• 1:54:27
  to see how the island was bearing. It had loomed up nearer during the
• 1:54:32
  hour or so in which he had been collecting and storing the things, nearer
• 1:54:38
  and more to the right, which meant that the brig was being borne by
• 1:54:42
  a fairly swift current, and that she would pass it, leaving two or
• 1:54:45
  three miles to starboard. It was well they had command of the dinghy the
• 1:54:53
  seas all around it, said Emmeline, who was seated on Paddy's shoulder,
• 1:54:59
  holding on tight him and gazing upon the island, the green of whose trees
• 1:55:03
  was now visible, an oasis of verdure in the sparkling and seraphic blue.
• 1:55:11
  Are we going there, Paddy asked Dick, holding on to a stay and
• 1:55:15
  straining his eyes toward the land. Hi we are, said mister button hot
• 1:55:23
  foot. Five nuts if we're making one, and it's a show, we'll
• 1:55:27
  be by noon, and maybe sooner. The breeze had freshened up and was
• 1:55:32
  blowing dead from the island, as though the island were making a weak attempt
• 1:55:36
  to blow them away from it. Oh, what a fresh and perfumed breeze.
• 1:55:43
  It was all sorts of tropical growing things had joined their scent in one
• 1:55:48
  bouquet smell. It said Emmeline, expanding her small nostrils. That's what I
• 1:55:57
  smelt last night, only it's stronger now. The last reckoning taken on board
• 1:56:03
  the Northumberland, had proved the ship to be south by east of the Marquases.
• 1:56:10
  This was evidently one of those small lost islands that lie here and there,
• 1:56:15
  south by east of the Marquases Islands, the most lonely and beautiful in
• 1:56:19
  the world. As they gazed, it grew before them and shifted still more
• 1:56:27
  to the right. It was hilly and green now, though the trees could
• 1:56:30
  not be clearly made out. Here, the green was lighter in color,
• 1:56:35
  and there darker. A rim of pure white marble seemed to surround its base.
• 1:56:42
  It was foam breaking on the barrier reef. In another hour, the
• 1:56:47
  feathery foliage of the cocoanut palms could be made out, and the old sailor
• 1:56:53
  judged it time to take to the boat. He lifted Emmeline, who was
• 1:56:57
  clasping her luggage, over the rail, on to the channel, and deposited
• 1:57:01
  her in the stern sheets. Then dick. In a moment, the boat
• 1:57:08
  was adrift the mast steeped, and the Shenandoah left to pursue her mysterious voyage
• 1:57:14
  at the will of the currents of the sea. You're not going to the
• 1:57:18
  island, Paddy, cried Dick, as the old man put the boat on
• 1:57:23
  the port tack. Hugh, be easy, replied the other, And don't
• 1:57:29
  be learning your grandmother. How dare devil? Ye tink i'd fetched a land
• 1:57:33
  sailing dead in the wind's eye? Has the wind eyes? Mister Button did
• 1:57:42
  not answer the question. He was troubled in his mind. What if the
• 1:57:46
  island were inhabited? He had spent several years in the South seas. He
• 1:57:51
  knew the people of the Marquessas and Samoa and liked them, But here he
• 1:57:57
  was out of his bearings. However, all the troubling in the world was
• 1:58:01
  of no use. It was a case of the island or the deep sea.
• 1:58:06
  And putting the boat on the starboard tack, he lit his pipe and
• 1:58:11
  leaned back with the tiller in the crook of his arm. His keen eyes
• 1:58:15
  had made out from the deck of the brig an opening in the reef,
• 1:58:19
  and he was making to run the dinghy abreast of the opening and then to
• 1:58:24
  take to the skulls and row her through. Now, as they drew nearer,
• 1:58:30
  a sound came on the breeze, sound faint and sonorous and dreamy.
• 1:58:36
  It was the sound of the breakers on the reef. The sea just here
• 1:58:42
  was heaving to a deeper swell, as if it vexed in its sleep at
• 1:58:46
  the resistance to it of the land. Emmeline, sitting with her bundle in
• 1:58:51
  her lap, stared without speaking at the sight before her, Even in the
• 1:58:58
  bright, glorious sunshine, and despite the greenery that showed beyond, It was
• 1:59:02
  a desolate sight seen from her place in the dinghy, a white, forlorn
• 1:59:09
  beach, over which the breakers raced and tumbled, sea gulls wheeling and screaming,
• 1:59:15
  and over all the thunder of the surf. Suddenly the brake became visible,
• 1:59:21
  and a glimpse of smooth blue water beyond. Button unshipped, the tiller,
• 1:59:28
  unstepped the mast, and took to the skulls. As they drew nearer,
• 1:59:32
  the sea became more active, savage and alive. The thunder of the
• 1:59:38
  surf became louder, the breakers more fierce and threatening. The opening broader one
• 1:59:45
  could see the water swirling round the coral piers. For the tide was flooding
• 1:59:50
  into the lagoon. It had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it along,
• 1:59:56
  far swifter than the skulls could have driven it. Seagulls screamed around them,
• 2:00:02
  the boat rocked and swayed. Dick shouted with excitement, and Emmeline shut
• 2:00:09
  her eyes tight. Then, as though a door had been swiftly and silently
• 2:00:15
  closed, the sound of the surf became suddenly less. The boat floated on
• 2:00:23
  an even keel. She opened her eyes and found herself in wonderland. End
• 2:00:31
  of chapter eleven, Chapter twelve. The Lake of Azure. On either side
• 2:00:41
  lay a great sweep of waving blue water, calm, almost as a lake
• 2:00:46
  sapphire, here and here, with the tints of the aquamarine water so clear
• 2:00:54
  that fathoms away below you could see the branching coral, the schools of passing
• 2:00:59
  fish, and the shadows of the fish upon the spaces of sand before them.
• 2:01:04
  The clear water washed the sands of the white beach. The cocoa palms
• 2:01:10
  waved and whispered in the breeze, And as the oarsman lay on his oars
• 2:01:15
  to look a flock of blue birds rose, as if suddenly freed from the
• 2:01:20
  tree tops, wheeled and passed soundless, like a wreath of smoke over the
• 2:01:27
  tree tops of the higher land. Beyond look, shouted Dick, who had
• 2:01:33
  his nose over the side of the boat. Look at the fish. Mister
• 2:01:40
  Button, cried emmeline, where are we be? Dad? I dunno,
• 2:01:45
  But we might be in a worse place, I'm thinking, replied the old
• 2:01:49
  man, sweeping his eyes over the blue and tranquil lagoon from the barrier reef
• 2:01:55
  to the happy shore on either side of the broad beach. Before them,
• 2:02:00
  the coconut trees came down like two regiments and bending, gazed at their own
• 2:02:04
  reflections in the lagoon. Beyond lay waving chaparral, where cocoa palms and the
• 2:02:11
  breadfruit trees intermixed with the mammy apple and the tendrils of the wild vine.
• 2:02:17
  On one of the piers of coral at the break of the reef stood a
• 2:02:21
  single cocoa palm, bending with a slight curve. It too seemed seeking its
• 2:02:29
  reflection in the waving water. But the soul of it all the indescribable thing
• 2:02:36
  about this picture of mirrored palm trees, blue lagoon, coral reef, and
• 2:02:43
  sky was the light away at sea. The light was blinding, dazzling,
• 2:02:50
  cruel Away at sea. It had nothing to focus itself upon, nothing to
• 2:02:57
  exhibit, but infinite spaces of blue, blue water and desolation. Here it
• 2:03:03
  made the air a crystal through which the gazer saw the loveliness of the land
• 2:03:09
  and reef, the green of palm, the white of coral, the wheeling
• 2:03:14
  gulls, a blue lagoon, all sharply outlined, burning colored, arrogant,
• 2:03:20
  yet tender, heartbreakingly beautiful. For the spirit of eternal mourning was there eternal
• 2:03:29
  happiness, eternal youth. As the oarsman pulled the tiny craft towards the beach,
• 2:03:35
  neither he nor the children saw away behind the boat, on the water,
• 2:03:41
  near the bending palm tree, at the break of the reef, something
• 2:03:44
  that for a moment insulted the day and was gone, Something like a small
• 2:03:51
  triangle of dark canvas that rippled through the water and sank from sight, something
• 2:03:59
  that peered and vanished like an evil thought. It did not take long to
• 2:04:05
  beach the boat. Mister Button tumbled over the side, up to his knees
• 2:04:10
  in water, whilst Dick crawled over the bow, catch hold of her,
• 2:04:15
  the same as I do, cried Paddy, laying hold of the starboard gunwale,
• 2:04:19
  whilst Dick, imitative as a monkey, seized the gunnale to port.
• 2:04:25
  And then yo, ho chilimin, up witter, up witter, heave ho
• 2:04:30
  chilimin. Leave her bee. Now she's high enough. He took Emmeline in
• 2:04:36
  his arms and carried her up on the sand. It was from just here,
• 2:04:42
  on the sand that you could see the true beauty of the lagoon,
• 2:04:45
  that lake of sea water, forever protected from storm and trouble by the barrier
• 2:04:51
  reef of coral, right from where the little clear ripples ran up the strand.
• 2:04:59
  It led the eye to the break in the coral reef, where the
• 2:05:01
  palm gazed at his own reflection in the water. And there beyond the break
• 2:05:06
  one caught a vision of the great, heaving, sparkling sea. The lagoon
• 2:05:14
  just here was perhaps more than a third of a mile broad. I have
• 2:05:17
  never measured it, but I know that standing by the palm tree on the
• 2:05:21
  reef, flinging up one's arm and shouting to a person on the beach,
• 2:05:27
  the sound took a perceptible time to cross the water. I should say,
• 2:05:31
  perhaps an almost perceptible time. The distant signal and the distant call were almost
• 2:05:39
  coincident, yet not quite. Dick, mad with delight at the place in
• 2:05:45
  which he found himself, was running about like a dog just out of the
• 2:05:48
  water. Mister Button was discharging the cargo of the dinghy on the dry white
• 2:05:55
  sand. Emmeline seated herself with her precious bundle on the side, and was
• 2:06:00
  watching the operations of her friend, looking at the things around her, and
• 2:06:04
  feeling very strange. For all she knew all this was the ordinary accompaniment of
• 2:06:12
  a sea voyage. Paddy's manner throughout had been set to the one idea not
• 2:06:17
  to frighten the children. The weather had backed him up. But down in
• 2:06:23
  the heart of her lay the knowledge that all was not as it should be.
• 2:06:29
  The hurried departure from the ship, the fog in which her uncle had
• 2:06:32
  vanished. Those things, and others as well, she felt instinctively were not
• 2:06:39
  right, but she said nothing. She had not long for meditation, however,
• 2:06:45
  for Dick was running towards her with a live crab which he had picked
• 2:06:49
  up, calling out that he was going to make it. Bite her,
• 2:06:54
  take it away, cried Emmeline, holding both her hands with fingers widespread in
• 2:06:59
  front of her face. Mister button, mister button, mister button, leave
• 2:07:05
  her beey, little devil, roared pat who was depositing the last of the
• 2:07:10
  cargo on the sand. Leave her bee or it's a hidin. I'll be
• 2:07:14
  given you. What's a devil, Paddy asked Dick, panting from his exertions.
• 2:07:20
  Paddy, what's a devil? You're one aks, no questions now,
• 2:07:27
  for it's tired I am, and they want to rest me bolds. He
• 2:07:31
  flung himself under the shade of a palm tree, took out his tinder box,
• 2:07:35
  tobacco and pipe, cut some tobacco up, filled his pipe and lit
• 2:07:41
  it. Emmeline crawled up and sat near him, and Dick flung himself down
• 2:07:46
  on the sand near Emmeline. Mister Button took off his coat and made a
• 2:07:51
  pillow of it against a cocoa nut tree stem. He had found the eldorado
• 2:07:58
  of the weary with his knowledge of the south seas. A glance at the
• 2:08:03
  vegetation to be seen told him that food for a regiment might be had for
• 2:08:07
  the taking water too right down the middle of the strand was a depression,
• 2:08:15
  which in the rainy season would be the bed of a rushing rivulet. The
• 2:08:20
  water just now was not strong enough to come all the way to the lagoon.
• 2:08:24
  But away up there beyond in the woods lay the sauce, and he'd
• 2:08:28
  find it in due time. There was enough in the breaker for a week,
• 2:08:33
  and green cocoa nuts were to be had for the climbing. Emmeline contemplated
• 2:08:39
  Paddy for a while as he smoked and rested his bones. Then a great
• 2:08:43
  thought occurred to her. She took the little shawl from around the parcel she
• 2:08:48
  was holding and exposed the mysterious box. Oh bigara the box, said Paddy,
• 2:08:56
  leaning on his elbow interestedly. I might have known you wouldn't have forgot
• 2:09:01
  it, missus, James said. Emmeline made me promise not to open it
• 2:09:09
  till I got on shore, for the things in it might get lost.
• 2:09:13
  Well, you're on shore now, said Dick. Open it. I'm going
• 2:09:18
  too, said Emmeline. She carefully undid the string, refusing the assistance of
• 2:09:26
  Paddy's knife. Then the brown paper came off, disclosing a common cardboard box.
• 2:09:33
  She raised the lid half an inch, peeped in and shut it again.
• 2:09:39
  Open it, cried Dick, mad with curiosity. What's in it?
• 2:09:43
  Honey, asked the old sailor, who was as interested as Dick. Things,
• 2:09:50
  replied Emmeline. Then all at once she took the lid off and disclosed
• 2:09:56
  a tiny tea service of china packed in shaving. There was a teapot with
• 2:10:01
  a lid, a cream jug, cups and saucers, and six microscopic plates,
• 2:10:07
  each painted with a pansy. Sure it's a tay set, said Paddy
• 2:10:13
  in an interested voice. Glory beat a guard? Would ye look at the
• 2:10:18
  little plates with the flowers under them? Hah, said Dick in disgust.
• 2:10:24
  I thought it might have been soldiers. I don't want soldiers, replied Emmeline
• 2:10:31
  in a voice of perfect contentment. She unfolded a piece of tissue paper and
• 2:10:37
  took from it a sugar tongs and six spoons. Then she arrayed the whole
• 2:10:43
  lot on the sand. Well, if that don't beat all, said Paddy.
• 2:10:48
  And when are yo going to ask me to tay with ye? Sometime
• 2:10:54
  replied Emmeline, collecting the things and carefully repacking them. Mister Button finished his
• 2:11:01
  pipe tapped the ashes out and placed it in his pocket. I'd be after
• 2:11:05
  rigging up a bit of a tent, said he, as he rose to
• 2:11:09
  his feet to shelter us from the dew to night. But I'd first have
• 2:11:13
  a look at the woods to see if I can find water. Leave your
• 2:11:18
  box with the other things, Emmeline, there's no one here to take it.
• 2:11:22
  Emmeline left her box on the heap of things that Paddy had placed in
• 2:11:26
  the shadow of the cocoanut trees, took his hand, and the three entered
• 2:11:31
  the grove on the right. It was like entering a pine forest. The
• 2:11:37
  tall, symmetrical stems of the trees seemed set by mathematical law, each at
• 2:11:43
  a given distance from the other. Whichever way you entered, a twilight alley
• 2:11:50
  set with tree bowls lay before you. Looking up, you saw, at
• 2:11:54
  an immense distance above, a pale green roof patterned with sparkling and flashing points
• 2:12:01
  of light, where the breeze was busy playing with the green fronds of the
• 2:12:05
  tree. Mister Button murmured, Emmeline, we won't get lost, will we
• 2:12:13
  last? No faith, Sure, we're goin up hill, and all we
• 2:12:18
  have to do is to calm down again when we want to get back where
• 2:12:22
  nuts. A green nut detached itself from up above, came down, rattling
• 2:12:28
  and tumbling, and hopped on the ground. Paddy picked it up. It's
• 2:12:33
  a green coconut, said he putting it in his pocket. It was not
• 2:12:39
  much bigger than a jaffer orange. And we'll have it for a tay.
• 2:12:43
  That's not a coconut, said Dick. Coconuts are brown. I had five
• 2:12:50
  cents once, and I bought one and scraped it out, And yet it
• 2:12:54
  when doctor Simms made Dicky sick, said Emmeline. He said, the wonder
• 2:13:01
  to him was how Dicky held it all. Come on, said mister Button,
• 2:13:07
  and don't be tarking, or it's the chloracans will be after us.
• 2:13:11
  What chloracans demanded Dick, little men no bigger than yer tomb that make the
• 2:13:18
  brogs for the good people who's they wished. And don't be tarking. Mind
• 2:13:26
  your head, emlyn Oar. The branches'll be heading in the face.
• 2:13:30
  They had left the cocoanut grove and entered the chaparral. Here was a deeper
• 2:13:35
  twilight, and all sorts of trees lent their foliage to make the shade.
• 2:13:41
  The Artu, with its delicately diamond trunk, the great bread fruit, tall
• 2:13:46
  as a beech and shadowy as a cave, the aoa and the eternal cocoanut
• 2:13:54
  palm all grew here like brothers. Great ropes of wild vine twined like the
• 2:14:01
  snake of the laocoon from tree to tree, and all sorts of wonderful flowers,
• 2:14:07
  from the orchid shaped like a butterfly to the scarlet hibiscus, made beautiful
• 2:14:13
  the gloom. Suddenly, mister Button stopped, wished, said he. Through
• 2:14:20
  the silence, a silence filled with the hum and the murmur of wood insects,
• 2:14:24
  and the faint, far song of the reef, came a tinkling,
• 2:14:28
  rippling sound. It was water. He listened to make sure of the bearing
• 2:14:33
  of the sound. Then he made for it. Next moment they found themselves
• 2:14:39
  in a little grass grown glade. From the hilly ground above, over a
• 2:14:45
  rock black and polished like ebony, fell a tiny cascade, not much broader
• 2:14:50
  than one's hand. Ferns grew around, and from a tree above a great
• 2:14:56
  rope of wild, convolvulous flowers blew their trumpets in the enchanted twilight. The
• 2:15:03
  children cried out at the prettiness of it, and Emmeline ran and dabbled her
• 2:15:09
  hands in the water. Just above the little waterfall sprang a banana tree laden
• 2:15:15
  with fruit. It had immense leaves, six feet long and more and broad
• 2:15:20
  as a dinner table. One could see the golden glint of the right fruit
• 2:15:26
  through the foliage. In a moment, mister Button had kicked off his shoes
• 2:15:31
  and was going up the rock like a cat, absolutely for it seemed to
• 2:15:35
  give him nothing to climb by. Hollau, cried Dick in admiration. Look
• 2:15:41
  at Paddy. Emmeline looked and saw nothing but swaying leaves stand from under.
• 2:15:50
  He shouted, and the next moment down came a huge bunch of yellow jacketed
• 2:15:56
  bananas. Dick shouted with delight, but Emmeline showed no excitement. She had
• 2:16:03
  discovered something. End of chapter twelve, Chapter thirteen, Death veiled with lichen,
• 2:16:15
  Mister Button said she, when the latter had descended. There's a little
• 2:16:20
  barrel. She pointed to something green and lichen covered that lay between the trunks
• 2:16:26
  of two trees, something that eyes less sharp than the eyes of a child
• 2:16:31
  might have mistaken for a boulder. Sure, in faith, it's an old
• 2:16:37
  empty barrel, said Button, wiping the sweat from his brow and staring at
• 2:16:41
  the thing. Some ship must have been weather in here and forgot it.
• 2:16:46
  It'll do for a seat whilst we have dinner. He sat down upon it
• 2:16:50
  and distributed the bananas to the children, who sat down on the grass.
• 2:16:56
  The barrel looked such a deserted and neglected thing that his imagination assumed it to
• 2:17:01
  be empty. Empty your full. However, it made an excellent seat,
• 2:17:07
  for it was quarter sunk in the green, soft earth, and immovable.
• 2:17:15
  If ships has been here, ships will come again, said he, as
• 2:17:18
  he munched his bananas. Will daddy's ship come here, asked Dick. Ay
• 2:17:26
  to be sure it will, replied the other, taking out his pipe.
• 2:17:31
  Now run a bolt and play with deflowers, and leave me alone to smoke
• 2:17:35
  a pipe. And then well, I'll go to the top of the hill
• 2:17:37
  beyond and have a luck round us. Come along, em cried Dick,
• 2:17:43
  and the children started off amongst the trees, Dick pulling at the hanging vine
• 2:17:48
  tendrils, and Emmeline plucking what blossoms she could find within her small reach.
• 2:17:54
  When he had found his pipe. He hallooed, and small voices are answered
• 2:18:00
  him from the wood. Then the children came running back. Emmeline laughing and
• 2:18:05
  showing her small white teeth a large bunch of blossoms in her hand. Dick
• 2:18:11
  flowerless, but carrying what seemed a large green stone. Look, what a
• 2:18:18
  funny thing I've found, he cried, It's got holes in it. Drop
• 2:18:24
  it, shouted mister Button, springing from the barrel, as if some one
• 2:18:28
  had strucken all into him. Where yer find it? What do you mean
• 2:18:31
  by touching it? Give it here? He took it gingerly in his hands.
• 2:18:37
  It was a lichen covered skull, with a great dent in the back
• 2:18:41
  of it, where it had been cloven by an axe or some sharp instrument.
• 2:18:46
  He hove it as far as he could away amidst the trees. What
• 2:18:52
  is it, Paddy asked Dick, half astonished, half frightened at the old
• 2:18:56
  man's manner. It's nothing good, replied mister Button. There were two others,
• 2:19:03
  and I wanted to fetch them, grumbled Dick. You must leave them
• 2:19:07
  alone, Musha musha, But there's been black doings here in days gone by.
• 2:19:13
  What is it? Emmeline, Emmeline, was holding out a bunch of
• 2:19:18
  flowers for admiration. He took a great gaudy blossom, if flowers can ever
• 2:19:24
  be called gaudy, and struck its stalk in the pocket of his coat.
• 2:19:28
  Then he led the way up hill, muttering as he went. The higher
• 2:19:33
  they got, the less dense became the trees, and the fewer the cocoanut
• 2:19:39
  palms. The cocoanut palm loves the sea. And the few they had here
• 2:19:43
  all had their heads bent in the direction of the lagoon, as if yearning
• 2:19:48
  after it. They passed a cane break, where canes twenty feet high whispered
• 2:19:54
  together like bulrushes. Then a sunlit swared destitute of tree or shrub led them
• 2:20:01
  sharply upward for a hundred feet or so, to where a great rock,
• 2:20:05
  the highest point on the island, stood, casting its shadow in the sunshine.
• 2:20:11
  The rock was about twenty feet high and easy to climb. Its top
• 2:20:18
  was almost flat and as spacious as an ordinary dinner table. From it,
• 2:20:22
  one could obtain a complete view of the island and the sea. Looking down,
• 2:20:28
  one's eyes traveled over the trembling and waving tree tops to the lagoon,
• 2:20:33
  beyond the lagoon, to the reef, beyond the reef to the infinite space
• 2:20:37
  of the Pacific. The reef encircled the whole island. Here further from the
• 2:20:45
  land, here closer. The song of the surf on it came as a
• 2:20:50
  whisper, just like the whisper you hear in a shell, but a strange
• 2:20:56
  thing. Though the sound heard on the beach was continual us up here one
• 2:21:01
  could distinguish an intermittency, as breaker after breaker dashed itself to death. On
• 2:21:07
  the coral strand below you have seen a field of green barley, ruffled over
• 2:21:15
  by the wind. Just so from the hilltop you could see the wind in
• 2:21:20
  its passage over the sunlit foliage below. It was breezing up from the southwest,
• 2:21:26
  and banyon and cocoa, palm, ar to and bread fruit swayed and
• 2:21:31
  rocked in the merry wind. So bright and moving was the picture of the
• 2:21:37
  breeze swept sea, the blue lagoon, the foam dashed reef, and the
• 2:21:41
  rocking trees that one felt one had surprised some mysterious gala day, some festival
• 2:21:48
  of nature, more than ordinarily glad. As if to strengthen the idea.
• 2:21:54
  Now and then above the trees would burst what seemed a rocket of colored stars.
• 2:22:01
  The stars would drift away in a flock on the wind and be lost.
• 2:22:05
  They were flights of birds, all colored birds peopled the trees below.
• 2:22:11
  Blue scarlet dove, colored bright of eye but voiceless. From the reef,
• 2:22:18
  you could occasionally see the seagulls rising here and there in clouds, like small
• 2:22:24
  puffs of smoke. The lagoon here deep, here shallow, presented according to
• 2:22:31
  its depth or shallowness, the colors of ultramarine or sky. The broadest parts
• 2:22:39
  were the palest, because the most shallow. And here and there in the
• 2:22:43
  shallows you might see a faint tracery of coral ribs, almost reaching the surface.
• 2:22:50
  The island at its broadest might have been three miles across. There was
• 2:22:54
  not a sign of house or habitation to be seen, and not a sail
• 2:23:01
  on the whole of the wide Pacific. It was a strange place to be
• 2:23:07
  up here, to find oneself surrounded by grass and flowers and trees and all
• 2:23:13
  the kindliness of nature, To feel the breeze blow, to smoke one's pipe,
• 2:23:18
  and to remember that one was in a place uninhabited and unknown, a
• 2:23:24
  place to which no messages were ever carried except by the wind or by the
• 2:23:31
  sea gulls. In this solitude, the beetle was as carefully painted and the
• 2:23:37
  flower carefully tended, as though all the peoples of the civilized world were standing
• 2:23:43
  by to criticize or approve. Nowhere in the world, perhaps so well as
• 2:23:48
  here, could you appreciate nature's splendid indifference to the great affairs of man.
• 2:23:56
  The old sailor was thinking nothing of this sort. His eyes were fixed on
• 2:24:01
  a small and almost imperceptible stain on the horizon to the south or west.
• 2:24:07
  It was no doubt another island, almost hull down on the horizon. Save
• 2:24:13
  for this blemish, the whole wheel of the sea was empty. And Serene
• 2:24:20
  Emmeline had not followed them up to the rock. She had gone botanizing,
• 2:24:26
  where some bushes displayed great bunches of the crimson rita berries, as if to
• 2:24:31
  show to the sun what Earth could do in the way of manufacturing poison.
• 2:24:37
  She plucked two great bunches of them, and with this treasure came back to
• 2:24:41
  the base of the rock. Leave dem berries down, cried mister Button,
• 2:24:48
  when she had attracted his attention. Don't put them into your mouth, dams,
• 2:24:52
  then never wake up berries. He came down off the rock, hand
• 2:24:56
  over fist, flung the poisonous things way, and looked into Emmeline's small mouth,
• 2:25:03
  which, at his command as she opened wide. There was only a
• 2:25:07
  little pink tongue in it, however, cold up like a rose leaf,
• 2:25:13
  no sign of berries or poison. So giving her a little shake, just
• 2:25:18
  as a nurse maid would have done in like circumstances, he took dick off
• 2:25:22
  the rock and led the way back to the beach. End of Chapter thirteen,
• 2:25:28
  Chapter fourteen, Echoes of Fairyland. Mister Button said Emmeline. That night,
• 2:25:37
  as they sat on the sand near the tent he had improvised, mister
• 2:25:41
  Button, cats go to sleep. They had been questioning him about the never
• 2:25:48
  wake up berries. All said they didn't, asked mister Button. I mean,
• 2:25:56
  said Emmeline, They go to sleep and never wake up again. Ours
• 2:26:01
  did. It had stripes on it, and a white chest, and rings
• 2:26:05
  all down its tail. It went asleep in the garden, all stretched out
• 2:26:13
  and showing its teeth. And I told Jane, and Dicky ran in and
• 2:26:18
  told Uncle. I went to missus Simms, the doctor's wife to tea,
• 2:26:24
  and when I came back, I asked Jane where Pussy was, and she
• 2:26:28
  said it was dead and buried. And I wasn't to tell Uncle. I
• 2:26:33
  remember, said Dick, it was the day I went to the circus,
• 2:26:39
  and you told me not to tell Daddy the cat was dead and buried.
• 2:26:43
  But I told Missus James's man when he came to do the garden, and
• 2:26:46
  I asked him where cats went when they were dead and buried, and he
• 2:26:52
  said he guessed they went to Hell. At least he hoped they did,
• 2:26:56
  for they were always scratching up the flowers. Then he told told me not
• 2:27:00
  to telling one. He said that, for it was a swear word and
• 2:27:03
  he oughtn't to have said it. I asked him what he'd give me if
• 2:27:07
  I didn't tell, and he gave me five cents. That was the day
• 2:27:11
  I bought the coconut. The tent, a makeshift affair consisting of two skulls
• 2:27:16
  and a tree branch which mister Button had sawed off from a dwarf aoa and
• 2:27:22
  the stasile he had brought from the brig was pitched in the center of the
• 2:27:26
  beach so as to be out of the way of falling coconuts. Should the
• 2:27:30
  breeze strengthen During the night, the sun had set, but the moon had
• 2:27:35
  not yet risen, and they sat in the starlight on the sand near the
• 2:27:39
  temporary abode. What's the things you said made the boots for the people,
• 2:27:43
  Paddy asked Dick, after a pause. Which tanings you said in the wood?
• 2:27:50
  I wasn't to talk else? Oh to Clara Khans the little men that
• 2:27:56
  cobbles the good people's brogues? Is that what you mean? Yes, said
• 2:28:01
  Dick, not knowing quite whether it was them or not that he meant,
• 2:28:05
  but anxious for information that he felt would be curious. And what are the
• 2:28:11
  good people? Sure? Where were you born and bred that you don't know?
• 2:28:16
  The good people? Is the other name for the fairies save in their
• 2:28:20
  presents? There, aunt any, replied Dick. Missus Simms said there weren't,
• 2:28:26
  Missus James put in. Emmeline said there were. She said she liked
• 2:28:33
  to see children believe in fairies. She was talking to another lady who'd got
• 2:28:37
  a red feather in her bonnet and a fur muff. They were having tea,
• 2:28:43
  and I was sitting on the hearth rug. She said, the world
• 2:28:46
  was getting too something or other. And then the other lady said it was
• 2:28:52
  and asked Missus James, did she see missus some one in the awful hat
• 2:28:56
  she wore Thanksgiving Day. They didn't say anything more bout fairies, but Missus
• 2:29:01
  James, whether ye believe in him or not, said Paddy. There they
• 2:29:07
  are, and maybe they're popping out of the woods behind us now and listening
• 2:29:11
  to us talking. Though I'm doubtful if there's any in these parts. Though
• 2:29:16
  downing Connaught they were as thick as blackberries in the old days. Ah Musha
• 2:29:22
  musha, the old days, the old days when were thy beasts seeing them
• 2:29:26
  again? Now you may believe me or believe me not, But me own
• 2:29:31
  old father, God rest his soul, was coming over Krockpatrick one night before
• 2:29:35
  Christmas, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand of him, and a
• 2:29:39
  goose plucked and cleaned an all in the other, which same he'd won in
• 2:29:43
  a lottery. When here in a tune, no loader than the bosom of
• 2:29:48
  a bee over a furze bush, he peeps, And there round a big
• 2:29:54
  white stone, the good people were dancing in a ring, hand in hand
• 2:29:58
  and kicking their heels, and the eyes of them glowing like the eyes of
• 2:30:03
  moths, and a chap on the stone no bigger than the joint of view
• 2:30:07
  thumb playing to them on a bagpipes. With that, he let out a
• 2:30:13
  yell and drops the goose and makes for home over the hedge and ditch,
• 2:30:18
  bound in like a buck kangaroo, and a face on him as white as
• 2:30:22
  flower when he burst in through the door where we was all sittin round a
• 2:30:28
  fire, brown in chestnuts, to see who'd be married the first? And
• 2:30:33
  what in the name of the saints is the matter with? Yes, says
• 2:30:35
  me, mother. I've seen the good people, says he, up on
• 2:30:39
  the field beyond, says he. And they've got the goose, says he.
• 2:30:43
  But Bgara, I've saved the bottle, he says, Draw the cock
• 2:30:48
  and give me a taste of it. From me hats in me throat,
• 2:30:52
  and me tugs like a brick kiln. And when we come to proize the
• 2:30:56
  cock out of the bottle, there was nothing in it. And when we
• 2:31:00
  went next morning to look for the goose, it was gone. But there
• 2:31:03
  was the stone, sure enough, and the marks on it of the little
• 2:31:07
  brogues of the chap that played the bagpipes, and who'd be dealting there were
• 2:31:13
  fairies. After that, the children said nothing for a while, and then
• 2:31:18
  Dick said, tell us about chloracans and hawd he make their boots? When
• 2:31:24
  I'm telling you about Clara Khan's, said mister Button. It's the truth I'm
• 2:31:30
  telling you, and out of my own knowledge. For I spoke to a
• 2:31:33
  man as held one in his hand. He was my own mother's brother,
• 2:31:39
  Khan Cogan rest his soul. Khan was six foot two with a long white
• 2:31:46
  face. He had his head bashed in years before I was borne in some
• 2:31:50
  rouction or other, and the doctors had japanned him with a five shillin piece
• 2:31:54
  beat flat. Dick interposed with a question as to the process aim an object
• 2:32:01
  of Japanning, but mister Button passed the question by. He'd been bad enough
• 2:32:07
  for seeing faires before the japanned him, but after it, Bigarah, he
• 2:32:13
  was twice as bad. I was a slip of a lad at the time,
• 2:32:16
  but Mihan nearly turned gray with the tails he'd tell of the good people
• 2:32:22
  and their doing's. One night they turned him into a horse and ride him
• 2:32:26
  half over the country. One chap on his back, and another running behind,
• 2:32:33
  shoving furze prickles under his tail to make him buck lip. Another night,
• 2:32:37
  it's a donkey, he'd be harnessed to a little cart and being kicked
• 2:32:41
  in the belly and made to draw stones. Then it's a goose. He'd
• 2:32:46
  be running over the common with his neck stretched out, squawking, and an
• 2:32:52
  old fairy woman after him with a knife till it fared to drove him to
• 2:32:56
  the drink, though by the same token he didn't quite much traven. And
• 2:33:03
  what does he do when his money was gone but tear the foth shill in
• 2:33:07
  piece. They japanned him with af the top of his head and swaps it
• 2:33:11
  for a bottle of whisky, and that was the end of him. Mister
• 2:33:16
  Button paused to relight his pipe, which had gone out, and there was
• 2:33:20
  silence for a moment. The moon had risen, and the song of the
• 2:33:24
  surf on the reef filled the whole night with its lullaby. The broad lagoon
• 2:33:31
  lay waving and rippling in the moonlight in the incoming tide, twice as broad
• 2:33:37
  it always looked, seen by moonlight or starlight than when seen by day.
• 2:33:43
  Occasionally, the splash of a great fish would cross the silence, and the
• 2:33:48
  ripple of it would pass a moment later across the placid water. Big things
• 2:33:54
  happened in the lagoon at night, unseen by eyes from the shore. You
• 2:34:00
  would have found the wood behind them, and you walked through it full of
• 2:34:03
  light. A tropic forest under a tropic moon is green as a sea cave.
• 2:34:11
  You can see the vine tendrils, and the flowers, the orchids and
• 2:34:15
  tree bowls, all lit as by the light of an emerald tinted day.
• 2:34:22
  Mister Button took a long piece of string from his pocket. It's bedtime,
• 2:34:26
  said he, and am goin to tether Emmeline, for fear she'll be walking
• 2:34:31
  in her sleep and wandering away and being lust in the woods. I don't
• 2:34:37
  want to be tethered, said Emmeline. Tis for your own good. I'm
• 2:34:41
  doin' it, replied mister Button, fixing the string round her waist. Now
• 2:34:46
  come along. He led her, like a dog on a leash, to
• 2:34:50
  the tent, and tied the other end of the string to the skull,
• 2:34:54
  which was the tent's main prop and support. No, said he, if
• 2:35:00
  you'll be getting up and walking a boat in the night, it's down,
• 2:35:03
  the tent will be on top of us all And sure enough, in the
• 2:35:07
  small hours of the morning, it was end of chapter fourteen, Chapter fifteen,
• 2:35:16
  Fair Pictures in the Blue. I don't want my old breeches on.
• 2:35:20
  I don't want my old breeches on. Dick was darting about naked on the
• 2:35:26
  sand, mister Button after him, with a pair of small trousers in his
• 2:35:31
  hand. A crab might just as well have attempted to chase an antelope.
• 2:35:37
  They had been on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered the keenest
• 2:35:41
  joy in life to be naked, to be naked and wallow in the shallows
• 2:35:46
  of the lagoon, to be naked and sit drying in the sun, to
• 2:35:50
  be free from the curse of clothes, to shed civilization on the beach in
• 2:35:56
  the form of breeches, boots, coat and hat, And to be won
• 2:36:01
  with the wind and the sun and the sea. The very first command mister
• 2:36:07
  Button had given him on the second morning of their arrival was strep and into
• 2:36:11
  the water widger. Dick had resisted at first, and Emmeline, who rarely
• 2:36:18
  wept, had stood weeping in her little chemise. But mister Button was obdurate.
• 2:36:24
  The difficulty at first was to get them in. The difficulty now was
• 2:36:28
  to keep them out. Emmeline was sitting as nude as the day star,
• 2:36:33
  drying in the morning sun after her dip, and watching Dick's evolutions on the
• 2:36:39
  sand. The lagoon had for the children far more attraction than the land woods,
• 2:36:46
  where you might not write bananas off the tree with a big cane,
• 2:36:50
  sands where golden lizards would scuttle about so tame that you might, with the
• 2:36:56
  little caution, seize them by the tail. A hilltop from whence you might
• 2:37:01
  see, to use Paddy's expression, to the back of beyond. All these
• 2:37:05
  were fine enough in their way, but they were nothing to the lagoon.
• 2:37:13
  Deep down, where the coral branches were. You might watch whilst Paddy fished,
• 2:37:18
  all sorts of things disporting on the sand patches and in between the coral
• 2:37:22
  tufts, hermit crabs that had evicted whelks wearing the evicted one's shells, an
• 2:37:31
  obvious misfit, seeing enemies as big as roses, flowers that closed up in
• 2:37:37
  an irritable manner if you lowered the hook gently down and touched them, Extraordinary
• 2:37:43
  shells that walked about on feelers, elbowing the crabs out of the way,
• 2:37:50
  and terrorizing the whelks, the overlords of the sand patches. These yet touch
• 2:37:56
  one on the back with a stone tied to a bit of string, and
• 2:38:00
  down he would go, flat, motionless and feigning death. There was a
• 2:38:05
  lot of human nature lurking in the depths of the lagoon, comedy and tragedy.
• 2:38:13
  An English rockpool has its marvels. You can fancy the marvels of this
• 2:38:18
  vast rock pool, nine miles round and varying from a third to a half
• 2:38:24
  a mile broad, swarming with tropic life and flights of painted fishes. Where
• 2:38:31
  the glittering albacore passed beneath the boat like a fire in a shadow, Where
• 2:38:37
  the boat's reflection lay as clear on the bottom as though the water were air.
• 2:38:41
  Where the sea, pacified by the reef, told like a little child
• 2:38:46
  its dreams. It suited the lazy humor of mister Button that he never pursued
• 2:38:52
  the lagoon more than half a mile or so. On either side of the
• 2:38:56
  beach. He would bring the fish he caught ashore, and with the aid
• 2:39:01
  of his tinder box and dead sticks, make a blazing fire on the sand,
• 2:39:05
  cook fish and bread, fruit and taro roots. Helped and hindered by
• 2:39:09
  the children, they fixed the tent amidst the trees at the edge of the
• 2:39:15
  chapparal, and made it larger and more abiding with the aid of the DEA's
• 2:39:20
  sail. Amidst these occupations, wonders and pleasures, the children lost all count
• 2:39:26
  of the flight of time. They rarely asked about mister Lestrange. After a
• 2:39:33
  while they didn't ask about him at all. Children soon forget end of chapter
• 2:39:43
  fifteen. End of Part two, Part three, Chapter sixteen, The Poetry
• 2:39:50
  of learning. To forget the passage of time, you must live in the
• 2:39:54
  open air, in a warm climate, with as few clothes as possible upon
• 2:40:01
  you. You must collect and cook your own food. Then, after a
• 2:40:05
  while, if you have no special ties to bind you to civilization, nature
• 2:40:11
  will begin to do for you what she does for the savage. You will
• 2:40:16
  recognize that it is possible to be happy without books on newspapers, letters or
• 2:40:22
  bills. You will recognize the parts sleep plays in nature. After a month
• 2:40:31
  on the island, you might have seen Dick at one moment, full of
• 2:40:35
  life and activity, helping mister Button to dig up a tarow route or what
• 2:40:41
  not, the next cold up to sleep like a dog. Emmeline the same
• 2:40:48
  profound and prolonged lapses into sleep, sudden awakenings into a world of pure air
• 2:40:54
  and dazzling light. The gaiety of color all around indeed opened her doors to
• 2:41:01
  these children. One might have fancied her in an experimental mood, saying,
• 2:41:07
  let me put these buds of civilization back into my nursery and see what they
• 2:41:13
  will become, how they will blossom, and what will be the end of
• 2:41:18
  it all. Just as Emmeline had brought away her treasured box from the Northumberland,
• 2:41:24
  Dick had conveyed with him a small linen bag that chinked when shaken.
• 2:41:31
  It contained marbles, small olive green marbles and middle sized ones of various colors,
• 2:41:39
  glass marbles with splendid colored cows, and one old grandfather marble too big
• 2:41:45
  to be played with, but nonetheless to be worshiped a god marble. Of
• 2:41:52
  course, one cannot play at marbles on board ship, but one can play
• 2:41:56
  with them. They had been a great comfort to Dick on the voyage.
• 2:42:01
  He knew them each personally, and he would roll them out on the mattress
• 2:42:05
  of his bunk and review them nearly every day, whilst Emmeline looked on.
• 2:42:11
  One day, mister Button, noticing Dick and the girl kneeling opposat each other
• 2:42:16
  on a flat, hard piece of sand near the water's edge, strolled up
• 2:42:20
  to see what they were doing. They were playing marbles. He stood with
• 2:42:26
  his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth, watching and criticizing
• 2:42:31
  the game. Pleased that the childer were amused, then he began to be
• 2:42:35
  amused himself, and in a few minutes more he was down on his knees
• 2:42:39
  taking a hand Emmeline, a poor player and an unenthusiastic one, withdrawing in
• 2:42:46
  his favor. After that it was a common thing to see them playing together,
• 2:42:52
  the old sailor on his knees, one eye shut and a marble against
• 2:42:56
  the nail of his horny thumb, taking aim Dick and Emmeline on the watch
• 2:43:01
  to make sure he was playing fair, their shrill voices echoing amidst the cocoa
• 2:43:07
  nut trees with cries of knuckle down, Paddy, knuckle down. He entered
• 2:43:13
  into all their amusements, just as one of themselves. On high and rare
• 2:43:18
  occasions, Emmeline would open her precious box, spread its contents, and give
• 2:43:22
  a tea party. Mister Button, acting as guest or president, as the
• 2:43:28
  case might be, Is your taty a lake in, ma'am? He would
• 2:43:31
  inquire, and Emmeline, sipping at her tiny cup, would invariably make answer,
• 2:43:37
  another lump of sugar, if you please, mister Button, to which
• 2:43:41
  would come the stereotype to reply, take a dozen and welcome, and another
• 2:43:46
  cup for the good of you make Then Emmeline would wash the things in imaginary
• 2:43:52
  water, replace them in the box, and every one would lose their company
• 2:43:56
  manners and become quite natural again. Have you ever seen your name? Paddy,
• 2:44:03
  asked Dick one morning. See me which your name? Ah, don't
• 2:44:09
  be asking me questions, replied the other. How the devil coate? I
• 2:44:13
  see me name? Wait and I'll show you, replied Dick. He ran
• 2:44:20
  and fetched a piece of cane, and a minute later, on the salt
• 2:44:22
  white sand in the face of orthography and the sun appeared these portentous letters.
• 2:44:30
  Be you t T E. N. Button? Faith In. It's a
• 2:44:37
  clever boy you are, said mister Button admiringly, as he leaned luxuriantly against
• 2:44:43
  a cocoanut tree and contemplated Dick's handiwork. And that's me name is it?
• 2:44:48
  What's the letters in it? Dick enumerated them. I'll teach you to do
• 2:44:54
  it too, he said, I'll teach you to write your name, Paddy,
• 2:44:58
  Would you like to write your name? Paddy? No, replied the
• 2:45:01
  other, who only wanted to be let smoke his pipe in peace. Me
• 2:45:07
  name's no use to me. But Dick, with the terrible gadfly tirelessness of
• 2:45:13
  childhood, was not to be put off, and the unfortunate mister Button had
• 2:45:16
  to go to school despite himself. In a few days he could achieve the
• 2:45:22
  act of drawing upon the sand characters somewhat like the above, but not without
• 2:45:28
  prompting Dick an emmeline on each side of him, breathless for fear of a
• 2:45:33
  mistake, which next would ask the sweating scribe the perspiration pouring from his forehead?
• 2:45:41
  Which next? And be quick, for it's mothered? I am en
• 2:45:48
  en. That's right, Oh you're making it crooked. That's right there,
• 2:45:52
  It's all there now. Haorrue Hoorau would answer the scholar, waving his old
• 2:46:00
  hat over his own name, and Haorul would answer, the cocoanut grove echoes,
• 2:46:05
  whilst the far faint he he of the wheeling gulls on the reef would
• 2:46:11
  come over the blue lagoon, as if in acknowledgment of the deed and encouragement.
• 2:46:18
  The appetite comes with teaching. The pleasantest mental exercise of childhood is the
• 2:46:24
  instruction of one's elders. Even Emmeline felt this. She took the geography class
• 2:46:31
  one day in a timid manner, putting her little hand first in the great
• 2:46:35
  horny fist of her friend, mister Button. Well, honey, I know
• 2:46:41
  geography, and what's that, asked mister Button. This stumped Emmeline for a
• 2:46:48
  moment. It's where places are, she said. At last, which places?
• 2:46:56
  Inquired? He All sorts of places, replied Emmeline. Mister Button,
• 2:47:03
  what is it, darling? Would you like to loin geography? I am
• 2:47:07
  not wishful for lanin, said the other hurriedly. It makes me head buzz
• 2:47:13
  to hear them things they read out of books, Paddy, said Dick,
• 2:47:18
  who was strong on drawing that afternoon. Look here he drew the following on
• 2:47:24
  the sand. Here follows an illustration, a bad drawing of an elephant that's
• 2:47:31
  an elephant, he said, in a dubious voice. Mister Button grunted,
• 2:47:37
  and the sound was by no means filled with enthusiastic assent. A chill fell
• 2:47:43
  on the proceedings. Dick wiped the elephant slowly and regretfully out, whilst Emmeline
• 2:47:52
  felt disheartened. Then her face suddenly cleared. The seraphic smile came on to
• 2:47:58
  it. For a moment, a bright idea had struck her. Dickie,
• 2:48:03
  she said, draw Henry the Eighth. Dick's face brightened, He cleared the
• 2:48:09
  sand and drew the following figure. Here follows a series of vertical, horizontal,
• 2:48:16
  and oblique lines resembling somewhat Henry the Eighth. That's not Henry the Eighth,
• 2:48:22
  he explained, but he will be in a minute. Daddy showed me
• 2:48:26
  how to draw him. He's nothing till he gets his hat on. Put
• 2:48:31
  his hat on. Put his hat on, implored Emmeline, gazing alternately from
• 2:48:35
  the figure on the sand to mister Button's face, watching for the delighted smile
• 2:48:41
  with which she was sure the old man would greet the Great King when he
• 2:48:46
  appeared in all his glory. Then Dick, with a single stroke of the
• 2:48:50
  cane put Henry's hat on. Here follows a series of vertical, horizontal,
• 2:48:56
  and oblique lines, with a double line vertical for Henry's hat. Now,
• 2:49:03
  no portrait could be likeer to his monk hunting majesty than the above, created
• 2:49:09
  with one stroke of a cane, so to speak. Yet mister Button remained
• 2:49:15
  unmoved. I did it for missus Simms, said Dick regretfully, and she
• 2:49:20
  said it was the image of him. Maybe the hat's not big enough,
• 2:49:26
  said Emmeline, turning her head from side to side as she gazed at the
• 2:49:30
  picture. It looked right, but she felt there must be something wrong,
• 2:49:35
  as mister Button did not applaud has not every true artist felt the same.
• 2:49:41
  Before the silence of some critic, mister Button tapped the ashes out of his
• 2:49:46
  pipe and rose to stretch himself, and the class rose and trooped down to
• 2:49:50
  the lagoon edge, leaving Henry in his hat a figure on the sand,
• 2:49:56
  to be obliterated by the wind after a while. As time went on,
• 2:50:01
  mister Button took his lessons as a matter of course, the small inventions of
• 2:50:07
  the children assisting their utterly untrustworthy knowledge, knowledge perhaps as useful as any other
• 2:50:13
  there might be. Amidst the lovely poetry of the palm trees and the sky,
• 2:50:20
  days slipped into weeks, and weeks into months without the appearance of a
• 2:50:26
  ship, a fact which gave mister Button very little trouble, and even less
• 2:50:31
  to his charges, who were far too busy in amused to bother about ships.
• 2:50:37
  The rainy season came on them with a rush. And at the words
• 2:50:43
  rainy season, do not conjure up in your mind the vision of a rainy
• 2:50:46
  day in Manchester. The rainy season here was quite a lively time, torrental
• 2:50:54
  showers followed by bursts of sunshine, rainbows and ray dogs in the sky,
• 2:51:01
  and the delicious perfume of all manner of growing things on the earth. After
• 2:51:07
  the rains, the old sailor said he'd be after making a house of bamboos
• 2:51:11
  before the next rains came upon them, but maybe before that they'd be off
• 2:51:18
  the island, however, said he, I'd drive you a picture of what
• 2:51:22
  it'd be like when it's up and on the sand, he drew a figure
• 2:51:28
  like this. Here follows a figure looking remarkably like the letter X. Having
• 2:51:35
  thus drawn the plans of the building, he leaned back against a cocoa palm
• 2:51:39
  and lit his pipe, But he had reckoned without dick. The boy had
• 2:51:45
  not the least wish to live in a house, but he had a keen
• 2:51:48
  desire to see one built, and to help build one. The ingenuity,
• 2:51:54
  which is part of the multiform basis of the American nature, was aroused.
• 2:52:00
  How are you going to keep them from slipping if you tie them together like
• 2:52:03
  that? He asked, when Paddy had more fully explained his method, which
• 2:52:09
  from slipping the canes one from the other. After you've fixed them, one
• 2:52:16
  crosses t'other, you drive a nail, throwed a cross piece, and a
• 2:52:20
  rope over all. Have you any nails? Paddy? No, said mister
• 2:52:26
  Button. I haven't. Then how are you going to build the house?
• 2:52:33
  Ask me no questions? Now I want to smoke me pipe. But he
• 2:52:37
  had raised a devil difficult to lay morning, noon and night. It was
• 2:52:43
  Paddy, when are you going to begin the house? Or Paddy? I
• 2:52:48
  guess I've got away to make the canes stick together without nailing. Till mister
• 2:52:52
  Button, in despair, like a beaver, began to build. There was
• 2:52:58
  a great cane cutting in the crane brake above, and when sufficient had been
• 2:53:05
  procured, mister Button struck work for three days. He would have struck altogether,
• 2:53:11
  but he had found a taskmaster. The tireless Dick, young and active,
• 2:53:16
  with no original laziness in his composition, no old bones to rest or
• 2:53:22
  pipe to smoke, kept after him like a blue bottle fly. It was
• 2:53:28
  in vain that he tried to stave him off with stories about fairies and chloricorns.
• 2:53:35
  Dick wanted to build a house. Mister Button didn't. He wanted to
• 2:53:43
  rest. He did not mind fishing or climbing a coco nut tree, which
• 2:53:46
  he did to admiration by passing a rope round himself and the tree, knotting
• 2:53:52
  it and using it as a support during the climb. But house building was
• 2:53:58
  monotonous work. He said he had no nails. Dick counted by showing how
• 2:54:03
  the canes could be held together by notching them, and faith. But it's
• 2:54:09
  a clever boy, ye are, said the weary one, admiringly, when
• 2:54:13
  the other had explained his method. Then come along Paddy and stick em up.
• 2:54:20
  And mister Button said he had no rope, that he'd have to think
• 2:54:22
  about it that to morrow or the next day he'd be after getting some notion
• 2:54:28
  how to do it without rope, But Dick pointed out that the brown cloth
• 2:54:33
  which nature has wrapped around the cocoa palm stalks, would do instead of rope
• 2:54:39
  if cut in strips. Then the badgered one gave in. They labored for
• 2:54:46
  a fortnight at the thing, and at the end of that time had produced
• 2:54:50
  a rough sort of wigwam on the borders of the chapparal out on the reef
• 2:54:56
  to which they often rode in the dinghy. When the tide was low,
• 2:55:00
  deep pools would be left, and in the pools fish. Paddy said that
• 2:55:05
  if they had a spear, they might be able to spear some of the
• 2:55:09
  fish, as he had seen the natives do away beyond in Tahiti. Dick
• 2:55:15
  inquired as to the nature of a spear, and the next day produced a
• 2:55:18
  ten foot cane sharpened at the end after the fashion of quill pen. Sure
• 2:55:24
  what's the use of that, said mister Button. You might jump it into
• 2:55:30
  a fish, but he'd be up in two ticks. It's the barb that
• 2:55:33
  holds them. Next day, the indefatigable one produced the cane, amended he
• 2:55:39
  had whittled it down about three feet from the end, and on one side
• 2:55:45
  had carved a fairly efficient barb. It was good enough at all events to
• 2:55:50
  spear a grouper that evening in the sunlit pools of the reef at low tide.
• 2:55:56
  There aren't any potatoes here, said Dick one day after the second rains.
• 2:56:03
  We vet em all months ago, replied Paddy. How do potatoes grow?
• 2:56:09
  Inquired Dick. Grow? Is it? Why they grow in the ground?
• 2:56:15
  Where else would they grow? He explained the process of potato planting,
• 2:56:20
  cutting them into pieces so that there was an eye in each piece, and
• 2:56:22
  so forth. Having done this, said mister Button, you just chuck the
• 2:56:28
  pieces in the ground, the eyes grow, green leaves pop up, and
• 2:56:33
  then if you dig the roots up, maybe six months after you'd find bushels
• 2:56:37
  of potatoes in the ground. One's as big as your head, and weeny
• 2:56:43
  ones. It's like a family of childer some's big and some's little, And
• 2:56:48
  there they are in the ground, and all you have to do is to
• 2:56:52
  take a fark and dig up a potful of them with a twist of your
• 2:56:54
  wrist. And many a time I've done it in the old days. Why
• 2:57:00
  didn't we do that, asked Dick, Do what plant some of the potatoes?
• 2:57:07
  And where do we have found the spade to plant them with? I
• 2:57:09
  guess we could have fixed up a spade, replied the boy. I made
• 2:57:15
  a spade at home out of a piece of an old board once Daddy helped.
• 2:57:20
  Well, skelpafittya and make a spade, now, replied the other,
• 2:57:26
  who wanted to be quiet and think, And you and Emmeline can dig into
• 2:57:31
  sand. Emmeline was sitting near by, stringing together some gorgeous blossoms on a
• 2:57:37
  tendril of leana. Months of sun and ozone had made a considerable difference in
• 2:57:43
  the child. She was as brown as a gipsy and freckled, not much
• 2:57:48
  taller, but twice as plump. Her eyes had lost considerably that look,
• 2:57:54
  as though she were contemplating futurity and immensity, not as abstractions but as concrete
• 2:58:03
  images. And she had lost the habit of sleepwalking. The shock of the
• 2:58:07
  tent coming down on the first night she was tethered to the skull had broken
• 2:58:11
  her of it. Helped by the new healthful conditions of life, the sea,
• 2:58:16
  bathing, and the eternal open air, there is no narcotic to excel
• 2:58:22
  fresh air. Months of semi savagery had also made a good deal of difference
• 2:58:28
  in Dick's appearance. He was two inches taller than on the day they'd landed,
• 2:58:35
  freckled and tanned, he had the appearance of a boy of twelve.
• 2:58:39
  He was the promise of a fine man. He was not a good looking
• 2:58:43
  child, but he was healthy looking, with a jolly laugh and a daring,
• 2:58:48
  almost impudent expression of face. On the question of the children's clothes was
• 2:58:54
  beginning to vex the mind of the old sailor. The climate was a suit
• 2:58:58
  of clothes itself. One was much happier with almost nothing on. Of course,
• 2:59:05
  there were changes of temperature, but they were slight, eternal summer,
• 2:59:11
  broken by torrential rains and occasionally a storm. That was the climate of the
• 2:59:16
  island. Still, the children couldn't go about with nothing on. He took
• 2:59:22
  some of the striped flannel and made Emmeline a kilt. It was funny to
• 2:59:26
  see him sitting on the sand, Emmeline standing before him with her garment round
• 2:59:31
  her waist being tied on. He with a mouthful of pins, and the
• 2:59:37
  housewife with the scissors needles and thread by his side. Turn to the left
• 2:59:43
  a bit more, he'd say, easy, does it? Steady? Soul?
• 2:59:48
  Musha musha, where's them scissors? Dick, behold in the end of
• 2:59:52
  this bit of straying till he get the stitches in behind? Does that hang
• 2:59:56
  comfortable? Well? Adieu? The trouble an aile? How's that that's easier?
• 3:00:01
  Is it? Lift yiffoot till I see if it comes to your knees.
• 3:00:05
  Now off with it and leave me alone till I stitched the tags to
• 3:00:09
  it. It was the mixture of a skirt and the idea of a sail,
• 3:00:16
  for it had two rows of reef points, a most ingenious idea,
• 3:00:20
  as it could be reefed if the child wanted to go paddling or in windy
• 3:00:24
  weather. End of Chapter sixteen, Chapter seventeen, The Devil's Cask. One
• 3:00:35
  morning, about a week after day on which the old sailor, to use
• 3:00:39
  his own expression, had bent a skirt on Emmeline, Dick came through the
• 3:00:45
  woods and across the sands running he had been on the hilltop paddy. He
• 3:00:50
  cried to the old man, who was fixing a hook on a fishing line.
• 3:00:54
  There's a ship It did not take mister Button long to reach the hilltop,
• 3:01:01
  and there she was beating up for the island, bluff bowed and squat,
• 3:01:07
  the figure of an older Dutch woman, and telling of her trade a
• 3:01:11
  league off. It was just after the rains. The sky was not yet
• 3:01:16
  clear of clouds. You could see showers away at sea, and the sea
• 3:01:22
  was green and foam capped. There was the trying out gear, there were
• 3:01:28
  the boats, the crow's nest, and all complete, and labeling her a
• 3:01:33
  whaler. She was a ship, no doubt, But Paddy Button would as
• 3:01:39
  soon as gone on board a ship manned by devils and captain by lucifer as
• 3:01:46
  on board a south sea whaleman. He had been there before, and he
• 3:01:50
  knew. He hid the children under a large banyon and told them not to
• 3:01:56
  stir or breathe till he came back, For the ship was the devil's own
• 3:02:01
  ship, and if the men on board caught them, they'd skin them alive
• 3:02:07
  and all. Then he made for the beach. He collected all the things
• 3:02:11
  out of the wigwam, and all the old truck in the shape of boots
• 3:02:16
  and old clothes, and stowed them away in the dinghy he would have destroyed
• 3:02:22
  the house if he could, but he hadn't time. Then he rowed the
• 3:02:26
  dinghey a hundred yards down the lagoon to the left and moored her under the
• 3:02:31
  shade of an aoa whose branches grew right over the water. Then he came
• 3:02:37
  back through the coco nut grove on foot and peered through the trees over the
• 3:02:41
  lagoon to see what was to be seen. The wind was blowing dead on
• 3:02:48
  for the opening in the reef, and the old whaleman came along, breasting
• 3:02:52
  the swell with her bluff boughs, and entered the lagoon. There was no
• 3:02:58
  leadsman in her chains. She just came in as if she knew all the
• 3:03:01
  soundings by heart, as probably she did, for these walmen knew every hole
• 3:03:07
  and corner in the Pacific. The anchor fell with a splash, and she
• 3:03:15
  sprung to it, making a strange enough picture as she floated on the blue
• 3:03:18
  mirror, backed by the graceful palm tree on the reef. Then mister Button,
• 3:03:24
  without waiting to see the boats lowered, made back to his charges,
• 3:03:28
  and the three camped in the woods that night. The next morning, the
• 3:03:33
  whaleman was off and away leaving. As a token of her visit, the
• 3:03:39
  white sand all trampled an empty bottle, half an old newspaper, and the
• 3:03:45
  wigwam torn to pieces. The old sailor cursed her and her crew for the
• 3:03:52
  incident had brought a new exercise into his lazy life. Every day now at
• 3:03:58
  noon he had to climb the hill on the lookout for Waleman. Walman hunted
• 3:04:05
  his dreams. Though I doubt he willingly have gone on board even a Royal
• 3:04:09
  mail steamer. He was quite happy where he was after long years of the
• 3:04:16
  forecastle. The island was a change. Indeed, he had tobacco enough to
• 3:04:22
  last him for an indefinite time, the children for companions, and food at
• 3:04:28
  his elbow. He would have been entirely happy if the island had only been
• 3:04:33
  supplied by nature with a public house. The spirit of hilarity and good fellowship.
• 3:04:41
  However, who suddenly discovered this error on the part of nature rectified it,
• 3:04:46
  As will be presently seen, the most disastrous result of the Waleman's visit
• 3:04:52
  was not the destruction of the house, but the disappearance of Emmeline's box high
• 3:05:00
  or hunt low, it could not be found. Mister Button in his Hurry
• 3:05:05
  must have forgotten it when he removed the things to the dinghy. At all
• 3:05:09
  events, it was gone. Probably one of the crew of the whaleman had
• 3:05:15
  found it and carried it off with him. No one could say it was
• 3:05:20
  gone, and there was the end of the matter, and the beginning of
• 3:05:24
  a great tribulation that lasted Emmeline for a week. She was intensely fond of
• 3:05:31
  colored things, colored flowers especially, and she had the prettiest way of making
• 3:05:37
  them into a wreath for her own or some one else's head. It was
• 3:05:41
  the hat making instinct that was at work in her. Perhaps at all events
• 3:05:48
  it was a feminine instinct, for Dick made no wreaths. One morning,
• 3:05:54
  as she was sitting by the old sailor engaged in stringing shells, Dick came
• 3:05:58
  running along the edge of the grove. He had just come out of the
• 3:06:01
  wood, and he seemed to be looking for something. Then he found what
• 3:06:07
  he was in search of, a big shell, and with it in his
• 3:06:11
  hand, made back to the wood. Item his dress was a peaks of
• 3:06:16
  coconut cloth tied round his middle. Why he wore it at all, Goodness
• 3:06:22
  knows, for he would just as often as not be running about stark naked.
• 3:06:28
  I found something, Paddy, he cried, as he disappeared among the
• 3:06:31
  trees. What have you found, pipe Dammeline, who was always interested in
• 3:06:37
  new things? Something funny came back from amidst the trees. Presently he returned,
• 3:06:46
  but he was not running now. He was walking slowly and carefully,
• 3:06:50
  holding the shell as if it contained something precious that he was afraid would escape.
• 3:06:56
  Paddy, I turned over the old barrel and it had a cork thing
• 3:07:01
  in it, and I pulled it out, and the barrel is full of
• 3:07:05
  awfully funny smelling stuff. I brought some for you to see. He gave
• 3:07:11
  the shell into the old sailor's hands. There was about half a jill of
• 3:07:18
  yellow liquid in the shell. Paddy smelt it, tasted and gave a shout.
• 3:07:24
  Rom bgara, What is it? Paddy asked Emmeline. Where did you
• 3:07:30
  say you got it in the old barrel? Did you say? Asked mister
• 3:07:35
  Button, who seemed dazed and stunned as if by a blow. Yes,
• 3:07:41
  I pulled the cork thing out. Did you put it back? Yes?
• 3:07:46
  Oh glory to God. Here have I been time? Out of mind?
• 3:07:50
  Sitting in an old empty barrel, with me tongue hanging down by me heels
• 3:07:56
  for the want of a drink, and it's full of rum. All the
• 3:08:00
  while he took a sip of the stuff, tossed the lot off, closed
• 3:08:05
  his lips tight to keep in the fumes, and shut one eye. Emmeline
• 3:08:11
  laughed. Mister Button scrambled to his feet. They followed him through the chapparal
• 3:08:16
  till they reached the water source. There lay the little green barrel, turned
• 3:08:22
  over by the restless dick. It lay with its bung pointing to the leaves
• 3:08:26
  above. You could see the hollow it had made in the soft soil during
• 3:08:33
  the years. So green was it, and so like an object of nature,
• 3:08:39
  a bit of old tree bowl or alike in stained boulder, that though
• 3:08:43
  the whaleman had actually watered from the sauce, its real nature had not been
• 3:08:48
  discovered. Mister Button tapped on it with the butt end of the shell.
• 3:08:54
  It was nearly full. Why it had been left there by whom? How
• 3:09:01
  there was no one to tell. The old lichen covered skulls might have told,
• 3:09:05
  could they have spoken? We'll roll it down the beach, said Paddy,
• 3:09:11
  when he had taken another taste of it. He gave Dick a sip.
• 3:09:16
  The boy spat it out and made a face. Then, pushing the
• 3:09:20
  barrel before them, they began to roll it down hill to the beach.
• 3:09:24
  Emmeline running before them, crowned with flowers. End of Chapter seventeen. Chapter
• 3:09:31
  eighteen, The rat Hunt. They had dinner at noon. Paddy knew how
• 3:09:39
  to cook fish island fashion, wrapping them in leaves and baking them in a
• 3:09:45
  hole in the ground in which a fire had been previously lit. They had
• 3:09:48
  fish and tarow root baked, and green cocoanuts, And after dinner mister Button
• 3:09:56
  filled a big shell with rum and lit his pipe. The rum had been
• 3:10:01
  good originally, and age had improved it used as he was to the appalling
• 3:10:07
  balloon juice sold in the drinking dens of the Barbary coast at San Francisco,
• 3:10:13
  by the public houses of the docks. This stuff was nectar. Joviality radiated
• 3:10:20
  from him. It was infectious. The children felt that some happy influence had
• 3:10:26
  fallen upon their friend. Usually after dinner he was drowsy and wishful to be
• 3:10:33
  quiet to day. He told them stories of the sea and sang them songs,
• 3:10:39
  chanties, I'm a flying fish sailor. Come back from hongkonger. Blow
• 3:10:48
  the moon dome low the mon don bullies, blow the moon don ol gilvous,
• 3:10:56
  time to blow the man down. You're a dirty blackballer, come back
• 3:11:01
  from New York. You below the man down. Blow the mound down,
• 3:11:09
  bullies, blow the man down. Oh, give us some time to blow
• 3:11:16
  the man down. Oh, give us time to blow the man down,
• 3:11:22
  echoed Dick and Emmeline. Up above in the trees, the bright eyed birds
• 3:11:28
  were watching them. Such a happy party. They had all the appearance of
• 3:11:33
  picnickers. And the song echoed amongst the coconut trees, and the wind carried
• 3:11:39
  it over the lagoon to where the seagulls were wheeling and screaming, and the
• 3:11:45
  foam was thundering on the reef. That evening, mister Button, feeling inclined
• 3:11:50
  for joviality and not wishing the children to see him under the influence, rolled
• 3:11:56
  the barrel through the coconut grove to a little cling by the edge of the
• 3:12:01
  water. There, when the children were in bed and asleep, he repaired
• 3:12:05
  with some green coconuts and a shell. He was generally musical when amusing himself
• 3:12:11
  in this fashion, and Emmeline, waking up during the night, heard his
• 3:12:16
  voice borne through the moonlit coconut grove. By the wind. There was five
• 3:12:22
  or six old drunken sailors standing re for holl the bar and larry he was
• 3:12:33
  served in them throb the big faive car and jar HOI stopped the flag.
• 3:12:43
  Long, may it wave, long, may it lead us to the glory
• 3:12:48
  or the grave. Steady boys, steady sown the jubilee, for Barbelon has
• 3:12:58
  fallen on the sleighs are all said free. Next morning the musician awoke beside
• 3:13:07
  the cask. He had not a trace of a headache or any bad feeling,
• 3:13:13
  but he made Dick do the cooking, and he lay in the shade
• 3:13:16
  of the cocoanut trees with his head on a pillow made out of an old
• 3:13:20
  coat, rolled up, twiddling his thumbs, smoking his pipe, and discoursing
• 3:13:26
  about the old days, half to himself and half to his companions. That
• 3:13:31
  night he had another musical evening, all to himself, and so it went
• 3:13:35
  on for a week. Then he began to loose his appetite and sleep,
• 3:13:41
  and one morning Dick found him sitting on the sand, looking very queer.
• 3:13:46
  Indeed as well he might, for he had been seeing things since dawn.
• 3:13:52
  What is it, Paddy, said the boy running up, followed by Emmeline.
• 3:13:58
  Mister Button was staring at point on the sand close by. He had
• 3:14:03
  his right hand raised, after the manner of a person who is trying to
• 3:14:07
  catch a fly. Suddenly he made a grab at the sand and then opened
• 3:14:13
  his hand wide to see what he had caught. What is it, Paddy
• 3:14:18
  hat the Chloracan, replied mister Button. Ah dressed in green. He was
• 3:14:24
  erh musha musher. But it's only pretending I am. The complaint from which
• 3:14:30
  he was suffering has this strange thing about it that though the patient sees rats
• 3:14:37
  or snakes or what not, as real looking as the real things, and
• 3:14:41
  though they possess his mind for a moment, almost immediately he recognizes that he
• 3:14:48
  is suffering from a delusion. The children laughed, and mister Button laughed in
• 3:14:54
  a stupid sort of way. A Sure, it was only a game I
• 3:15:00
  was played. There was no Clara Khan at all. It's when I drink
• 3:15:05
  rum. It puts into me head to play games like that. Oh,
• 3:15:09
  by the holy poker, there's red rats coming out of the sand. He
• 3:15:15
  got on his hands and knees and scuttled off towards the cocoanut trees, looking
• 3:15:20
  over his shoulder with a bewildered expression on his face. He would have risen
• 3:15:26
  to fly, only he dared not stand up. The children laughed and danced
• 3:15:31
  round him as he crawled. Look at the rats, Paddy, Look at
• 3:15:35
  the rats, cried Dick. They're in front of me, cried the afflicted
• 3:15:41
  one, making a vicious grab at an imaginary rodent's tail. Randandabasas. Now
• 3:15:48
  they're gone, Musha. But it's a fool I'm making of myself. Go
• 3:15:54
  on, Paddy said, Dick, don't stop. Look there, there's more
• 3:15:58
  rats coming after you. Ah wish twitcher replied Paddy, taking his seat on
• 3:16:05
  the sand and wiping his brow. They're after me now. The children stood
• 3:16:09
  by, disappointed of their game. Good acting appeals to children as much as
• 3:16:16
  to grown up people. They stood waiting for another excess of humor to take
• 3:16:20
  the comedian, and they had not to wait long. A thing like a
• 3:16:26
  flayed horse came out of the lagoon and up on the beach, and this
• 3:16:30
  time Button did not crawl away. He got on his feet and ran it's
• 3:16:37
  a horse that's after me. Dick. Dick hit him with a scalp.
• 3:16:41
  Dick, Dick, drive him away. Hallo Hallo, cried Dick, chasing
• 3:16:46
  the afflicted one, who was running in a wide circle. His broad red
• 3:16:50
  face slewed over his left shoulder. Go it, Paddy, go it,
• 3:16:54
  Paddy, keep off me A bast shouted Paddy, Holy Merry, Mother of
• 3:17:01
  God, I land yer, kick with me foot If he's come, nay
• 3:17:05
  me emlyn emelyn, come betunus. He tripped and over he went on the
• 3:17:11
  sand, the indefatigable Dick beating him with a little switch he had picked up
• 3:17:16
  to make him continue. I I'm better now, but I'm near war,
• 3:17:22
  out said mister Button, sitting up on the sand. But bedad. If
• 3:17:28
  I'm chased by any more things like them, it's into the sea. I'll
• 3:17:31
  be dashin. Dick, lend me your arm. He took Dick's arm and
• 3:17:37
  wandered over to the shade of the trees. Here he threw himself down and
• 3:17:43
  told the children to leave him to sleep. They recognized that the game was
• 3:17:46
  over and left him, and he slept for six hours on end. It
• 3:17:54
  was the first real sleep he had had for several days. When he awoke
• 3:17:58
  he was well, but very shaky. End of chapter eighteen, Chapter nineteen,
• 3:18:07
  starlight on the foam, Mister Button saw no more rats, much to
• 3:18:13
  Dick's disappointment. He was off the drink. At dawn next day. He
• 3:18:20
  got up, refreshed by a second sleep, and wandered down to the edge
• 3:18:24
  of the lagoon. The opening in the reef faced the east, and the
• 3:18:30
  light of the dawn came rippling in with the flood tide. It's a beast,
• 3:18:35
  I've been, said the repenitent one, a brute beast. He was
• 3:18:41
  quite wrong. As a matter of fact, he was only a man beset
• 3:18:48
  and betrayed. He stood for a while cursing the drink and them that sells
• 3:18:54
  it. Then he determined to put himself out of the way of temptation,
• 3:19:00
  pulled the bung out of the barrel, and let the contents escape. Such
• 3:19:05
  a thought never occurred to him, or if it did, was instantly dismissed.
• 3:19:11
  For though an old sailor man may curse the drink, good rum is
• 3:19:16
  to him a sacred thing, and to empty half a little barrel of it
• 3:19:22
  into the sea would be an act almost equivalent to child murder. He put
• 3:19:30
  the cask into the dinghy and rode it over to the reef. There he
• 3:19:33
  placed it in the shelter of a great lump of coral and rode back.
• 3:19:41
  Paddy had been trained all his life to rhythmical drunkenness. Four months or so
• 3:19:48
  had generally elapsed between his bouts, sometimes six. It all depended on the
• 3:19:54
  length of the voyage. Six months now elapsed before he felt even an ink
• 3:20:00
  nation to look at the rum cask, that tiny dark spot away on the
• 3:20:05
  reef, And it was just as well, for during those six months,
• 3:20:11
  another whale ship arrived, watered and was avoided. Blister Et said he the
• 3:20:20
  sea here seems to breed whale ships, and nothing but whale ships. It's
• 3:20:26
  like bogs in a bed. Ye kill one and then another comes, howsomever
• 3:20:31
  we've shut of them for a while. He walked down to the lagoon edge,
• 3:20:37
  looked out of the little dark spot and whistled. Then he walked back
• 3:20:43
  to prepare dinner. That little dark spot began to trouble him after a while,
• 3:20:50
  not it, but the spirit it contained. Days grew long and weary,
• 3:20:58
  The days that had been so short and pleasant to the children, there
• 3:21:03
  was no such thing as time. Having absolute and perfect health, they enjoyed
• 3:21:09
  happiness as far as mortals can enjoy it. Emmeline's highly strung nervous system,
• 3:21:16
  it is true, developed a headache when she had been too long in the
• 3:21:20
  glare of the sun, but they were few and far between. The spirit
• 3:21:26
  in the little cask had been whispering across the lagoon for some weeks. At
• 3:21:33
  last it began to shout. Mister Button metaphorically speaking stopped his ears, but
• 3:21:41
  he busied himself with the children as much as possible. He made another garment
• 3:21:46
  for Emmeline and cut Dick's hair with the scissors, a job which was generally
• 3:21:52
  performed once in a couple of months. One night, to keep the rum
• 3:21:56
  from troubling his head, he told them the story of Jack Dougherty and the
• 3:22:03
  Merrow, the sea people, which is well known on the Western coast.
• 3:22:07
  The Merrow takes Jack to dinner at the bottom of the sea and shows him
• 3:22:13
  the lobster pots, wherein he keeps the souls of old sailormen. And then
• 3:22:18
  they have dinner, and the Merrow produces a big bottle of rum. It
• 3:22:24
  was a fatal story for him to remember and recount, for after his companions
• 3:22:31
  were asleep, the vision of the marrow and jack hobnobbing, and the idea
• 3:22:37
  of the jollity of it rose before him and excited a thirst for joviality not
• 3:22:43
  to be resisted. There were some green coconuts that he had plucked that day,
• 3:22:50
  lying in a little heap under the tree, half a dozen or so.
• 3:22:54
  He took several of these, and a shell found the dinghy where it
• 3:22:58
  was moored to the aoa tree unmoored her and pushed off into the lagoon.
• 3:23:05
  The lagoon and sky were full of stars. In the dark depths of the
• 3:23:11
  water might have been seen phosphorescent gleams of passing fish, and the thunder of
• 3:23:16
  the surf on the reef filled the night with its song. He fixed the
• 3:23:22
  boat's painter carefully round a spike of coral, and landed on the reef,
• 3:23:28
  and, with a shell full of rum and cocoanut lemonade mixed half and half,
• 3:23:33
  he took his perch on a high ledge of coral, from whence a
• 3:23:37
  view of the sea and the coral strand could be obtained. On a moonlight
• 3:23:43
  night, it was fine to sit there and watch the great breakers come in,
• 3:23:48
  all marbled and clouded, and rainbowed with spin, drift and sheets of
• 3:23:54
  spray. But the snow and the song of them, under the diffused lights
• 3:23:58
  of the sun stars produced a more indescribably beautiful and strange effect. The tide
• 3:24:07
  was going out now, and mister Button, as he sat smoking his pipe
• 3:24:11
  and drinking his grog, could see bright mirrors here and there where the water
• 3:24:16
  lay in rock pools. When he had contemplated these signs for a considerable time,
• 3:24:24
  in complete contentment, he returned to the lagoon side of the reef and
• 3:24:28
  sat down beside the little barrel. Then, after a while, if you
• 3:24:35
  had been standing on the strand opposite, you would have heard scraps of song
• 3:24:39
  born across the quivering water of the lagoon, low high below low. And
• 3:24:46
  so sailed we sailing down, sailin down on the coast of Barbary. Whether
• 3:24:58
  the coast of Barbary in question is that at San Francisco or the true and
• 3:25:03
  proper coast, does not matter. It is an old time song. And
• 3:25:07
  when you hear it, whether on a reef of coral or a granite key,
• 3:25:13
  you may feel assured that an old time sailor man is singing it,
• 3:25:16
  and that the old time sailor man is bemused. Presently the dinghy put off
• 3:25:24
  from the reef. The skulls broke the starlit waters, and great shaking circles
• 3:25:28
  of light made rhythmical answer to the slow and steady creek of the thole pins
• 3:25:35
  against the leather. He tied up to the oa, saw that the skulls
• 3:25:41
  were safely shipped. Then, breathing heavily, he cast off his boots for
• 3:25:46
  fear of waking the children, as the children were sleeping more than two hundred
• 3:25:50
  yards away. This was a needless precaution, especially as the intervening distance was
• 3:25:58
  mostly soft sand. Green cocoanut, juice and rum mixed together are pleasant enough
• 3:26:05
  to drink, but they are better drunk separately. Combined, Not even the
• 3:26:11
  brain of an old sailor can make anything out of them, but mist and
• 3:26:15
  muddlement, that is to say, in the way of thought, in the
• 3:26:18
  way of action. They can make him do a lot. They made Paddy
• 3:26:24
  Button swim the lagoon. The recollection came to him all at once as he
• 3:26:31
  was walking up the strand towards the wigwam that he had left the dinghy tied
• 3:26:35
  to the reef. The dinghy was, as a matter of fact, safe
• 3:26:39
  and sound tied to the oar, but mister Button's memory told him it was
• 3:26:45
  tied to the reef. How he had crossed the lagoon was of no importance
• 3:26:50
  at all to him. The fact that he had crossed without the boat,
• 3:26:54
  yet without getting wet, did not appear to him strange. He had no
• 3:27:00
  time to deal with trifles like these. The dinghy had to be fetched across
• 3:27:05
  the lagoon, and there was only one way of fetching it. So he
• 3:27:09
  came back down the beach to the water's edge, cast down his boots,
• 3:27:13
  cast off his coat, and plunged in. The lagoon was wide, but
• 3:27:20
  in his present state of mind, he would have swung the Hellas pont his
• 3:27:24
  figure gone down from the beach. The night resumed its majesty and aspect of
• 3:27:31
  meditation. So lit was the lagoon by star shine that the head of the
• 3:27:37
  swimmer could be distinguished away out in the midst of circles of light. Also,
• 3:27:45
  as the head neared the reef, a dark triangle that came shearing through
• 3:27:50
  the water past the palm tree at the pier. It was the night patrol
• 3:27:56
  of the lagoon, who had heard in some mysterious manner that a drunken sailor
• 3:28:01
  man was making trouble in his waters. Looking one listened hand on heart for
• 3:28:09
  the scream of the arrested one. Yet it did not come. The swimmer,
• 3:28:16
  scrambling on to the reef in an exhausted manner, forgetful, evidently of
• 3:28:22
  the object for which he had returned, made for the rum cask, and
• 3:28:26
  fell down beside it, as though sleep had touched him instead of death.
• 3:28:33
  End of Chapter nineteen, Chapter twenty. The dreamer on the reef, I
• 3:28:41
  wonder where Paddy is, cried Dick. Next morning, he was coming out
• 3:28:46
  of the chapparal, pulling a dead branch after him. He's left his coat
• 3:28:50
  on the sand and the tinder box in it, so I'll make fire.
• 3:28:54
  There's no use waiting. I want my breakfast. Bother. He trod the
• 3:29:01
  dead stick with his naked feet, breaking it into pieces. Emmeline sat on
• 3:29:05
  the sand and watched him. Emmeline had two gods of a sort, Paddy
• 3:29:13
  Button and Dick. Paddy was almost an esoteric god, wrapped up in the
• 3:29:20
  fumes of tobacco and mystery. The guard of rolling ships and creaking masts.
• 3:29:26
  The masts and vast sail spaces of the Northumberland were an enduring vision in her
• 3:29:33
  mind, the deity who had lifted her from a little boat into this marvelous
• 3:29:37
  place, where the birds were colored and the fish were painted, where life
• 3:29:43
  was never dull and the skies scarcely ever. Gray Dick, the other deity,
• 3:29:50
  was a much more understandable personage, but no less admirable as a companion
• 3:29:56
  and protector. In the two years and fi five months of island life,
• 3:30:01
  he had grown nearly three inches. He was as strong as a boy of
• 3:30:05
  twelve, and could scull the boat almost as well as Paddy himself and light
• 3:30:11
  a fire. Indeed, during the last few months, mister Button, engaged
• 3:30:16
  in resting his bones and contemplating rum as an abstract idea, had left the
• 3:30:22
  cooking and fishing and general gathering of food as much as possible to Dick.
• 3:30:28
  Item uses the creature to pretend he's doing things, he would say, as
• 3:30:33
  he watched Dick delving into the earth to make a little oven island fashion for
• 3:30:39
  the cooking of fish and what not. Come along, em, said Dick,
• 3:30:43
  piling the broken wood on top of some rotten hibiscus sticks. Give me
• 3:30:48
  the tinder box. He got a spark onto a bit of punk, and
• 3:30:52
  then he blew at it, looking not unlike eolus as represented on those old
• 3:30:58
  Dutch charts that smellll of schneiderm and snuff and give one mermaids and angels instead
• 3:31:05
  of soundings. The fire was soon sparkling and crackling, and he heaped on
• 3:31:11
  sticks in profusion, for there was plenty of fuel. And he wanted to
• 3:31:15
  cook breadfruit. The bread fruit varies in size according to age, and in
• 3:31:22
  color according to season. These that Dick was preparing to cook were as large
• 3:31:26
  as small melons. Two would be more than enough for three people's breakfast.
• 3:31:33
  They were green and nobbly on the outside, and they suggested to the mind
• 3:31:37
  unripe lemons rather than bread. He put them in the embers, just as
• 3:31:43
  you put potatoes to roast, and presently they sizzled and spat little venomous jets
• 3:31:50
  of steam. Then they cracked, and the white inner substance became visible.
• 3:31:56
  He cut them open and took the cow out. The core is not fit
• 3:32:00
  to eat, and they were ready. Meanwhile, Emmeline under his directions had
• 3:32:05
  not been idle. There were in the lagoon, there are in several other
• 3:32:11
  tropical lagoons. I know of a fish which I can only describe as a
• 3:32:16
  golden herring a bronze herring. It looks when landed, but when swimming away
• 3:32:22
  down against the background of coral brains and white sand patches, it has the
• 3:32:28
  sheen of burnished gold. It is as good to eat as to look at.
• 3:32:33
  And Emmeline was carefully toasting several of them on a piece of cane.
• 3:32:39
  The juice of the fish kept the cane from charring, though there were accidents
• 3:32:45
  at times when a whole fish would go into the fire. Amidst shouts of
• 3:32:48
  derision from Dick, she made a pretty enough picture as she knelt the skirt
• 3:32:54
  round her waist, looking not unlike a striped bath towel, her small face
• 3:33:01
  intent and filled with the seriousness of the job on hand, and her lips
• 3:33:07
  puckered out at the heat of the fire. It's so hot, she cried
• 3:33:11
  in self defense after the first of the accidents. Of course, it's hot,
• 3:33:18
  said Dick. If you stick to leeward of the fire, How often
• 3:33:22
  has Paddy told you to keep off to windward of it. I don't know
• 3:33:26
  which is which, confessed the unfortunate Emmeline, who was an absolute failure at
• 3:33:31
  everything practical, who would neither roan, nor fish nor throw a stone,
• 3:33:37
  and who, though they had been on the island at twenty eight months or
• 3:33:41
  so, could not even swim. You mean to say, said Dick,
• 3:33:46
  that you don't know where the wind comes from. Yes, I know that,
• 3:33:50
  well, that's to windward. I didn't know that. Well, you
• 3:33:56
  know it now, Yes, I know it now. Well, then come
• 3:34:01
  to windward of the fire. Why didn't you ask the meaning of it before
• 3:34:07
  I did? Said Emmeline. I asked mister Button one day, and he
• 3:34:11
  told me a lot about it. He said, if he was to spit
• 3:34:16
  to windward and a person was to stand to liward of him, he'd be
• 3:34:20
  a fool. And he said if a ship went too much to leeward,
• 3:34:24
  she went on the rocks. But I didn't understand what he meant. Dickie,
• 3:34:30
  I wonder where he is, Paddy, cried Dick, pausing in the
• 3:34:35
  act as splitting open a bread fruit. Echoes came from amidst the cocoanut trees,
• 3:34:41
  but nothing more. Come on, said Dick, I'm not going to
• 3:34:46
  wait for him. He may have gone to fetch up the night lines.
• 3:34:50
  They sometimes put down night lines in the lagoon and fallen asleep over them.
• 3:34:56
  Now, though Emmeline honored mister Button as a minor deity, Dick had no
• 3:35:01
  illusions at all upon the matter. He admired Paddy because he could not and
• 3:35:07
  splice, and climb a cocoanut tree, and exercise his sailor craft in other
• 3:35:13
  admirable ways. But he felt the old man's limitations. They ought to have
• 3:35:18
  had potatoes now, but they had eaten both potatoes and the possibility of potatoes
• 3:35:26
  when they consumed the content of that half sack. Young as he was,
• 3:35:33
  Dick felt the absolute thriftlessness of this proceeding. Emmeline did not. She never
• 3:35:41
  thought of potatoes, though she could have told you the color of all the
• 3:35:45
  birds on the island. Then again, the house wanted rebuilding, and mister
• 3:35:50
  Button said every day he would set about seeing after it tomorrow, and on
• 3:35:56
  the morrow it would be tomorrow. The necessities of the life they led were
• 3:36:03
  a stimulus to the daring and active mind of the boy, but he was
• 3:36:07
  always being checked by the go as you please methods of his elder. Dick
• 3:36:13
  came of the people who made sewing machines and typewriters. Mister Button came of
• 3:36:18
  a people notable for ballads, tender hearts, and pothine. That was the
• 3:36:26
  main difference. Paddy again cried the boy, when he had eaten as much
• 3:36:31
  as he wanted. Halloo, where are you? They listened, but no
• 3:36:37
  answer came. A bright hued bird flew across the sand space, a lizard
• 3:36:43
  scuttled along the glistening sand, the reef spoke, and the wind in the
• 3:36:48
  tree tops. But mister Button made no reply. Wait, said Dick.
• 3:36:56
  He ran through the grove toward the aoa, where the dinghy was maud.
• 3:37:01
  Then he returned. The dingey is all right, he said, Where on
• 3:37:05
  earth can he be? I don't know, said Emmeline, upon whose heart
• 3:37:11
  a filling of loneliness had fallen. Let's go up the hill, said Dick.
• 3:37:18
  Perhaps we'll find him there. They went up hill, through the wood,
• 3:37:22
  past the watercourse. Every now and then Dick would call out, and
• 3:37:26
  echoes would answer. There were quaint, moist voiced echoes amongst the trees,
• 3:37:33
  or a bevy of birds would take to flight. The little waterfall gurgled and
• 3:37:37
  whispered, and the great banana leaves spread their shade. Come on, said
• 3:37:43
  Dick, when he had called again, without receiving a reply, they found
• 3:37:48
  the hilltop, and the great boulder stood, casting its shadow in the sun.
• 3:37:54
  The morning breeze was blowing, the sea sparkling, the reef flashed,
• 3:38:00
  the foliage of the island waving in the wind like the flames of a green
• 3:38:05
  flamed torch. A deep swell was spreading itself across the bosom of the Pacific.
• 3:38:11
  Some hurricane away beyond the navigators or Gilbert's had sent this message and was
• 3:38:18
  finding its echo here a thousand miles away, in the deep thunder of the
• 3:38:24
  reef. Nowhere else in the world could you get such a picture, such
• 3:38:30
  a combination of splendor and summer, such a vision of freshness and strength and
• 3:38:37
  the delight of morning. It was the smallness of the island perhaps that closed
• 3:38:43
  the charm and made it perfect, just a bunch of foliage and flowers set
• 3:38:48
  in the midst of the blowing wind and sparkling blue. Suddenly, Dick,
• 3:38:54
  standing beside Emmeline on the rock, pointed with his finger to the reef the
• 3:39:00
  opening. There he is, cried he end of chapter twenty Chapter twenty one,
• 3:39:09
  The Garland of Flowers. You could just make the figure out lying on
• 3:39:16
  the reef, near the little cask, and comfortably sheltered from the sun by
• 3:39:20
  an upstanding lump of coral. He's asleep, said Dick. He had not
• 3:39:28
  thought to look towards the reef from the beach, or he might have seen
• 3:39:31
  the figure before Dickie said Emmeline. Well, how did he get over if
• 3:39:39
  you said the dinghy was tied to the tree? I don't know, said
• 3:39:43
  Dick, who had not thought of this. There he is, anyhow,
• 3:39:46
  I'll tell you what, em We'll row across and wake him. I'll boo
• 3:39:52
  into his ear and make him jump. They got down from the rock and
• 3:39:56
  came back down through the wood. As they came, Emmeline picked flowers and
• 3:40:01
  began making them up into one of her wreaths. Some scarlet hibiscus, some
• 3:40:07
  bluebells, a couple of pale poppies with furry stalks and bitter perfume. What
• 3:40:13
  are you making that for? Asked Dick, who always viewed Emmeline's wreath making
• 3:40:20
  with a mixture of compassion and vague disgust. I'm going to put it on
• 3:40:24
  mister Button's head, said Emmeline, so when you say boo into his ear,
• 3:40:30
  he'll jump up with it on. Dick chuckled with pleasure at the idea
• 3:40:35
  of the practical joke, and almost admitted in his own mind for a moment
• 3:40:39
  that after all, there might be a use for such futilities as wreaths.
• 3:40:46
  The dinghy was moored under the spreading shade of the Aoa. The painter tied
• 3:40:50
  to one of the branches that projected over the water. These dwarff aoas branched
• 3:40:56
  in an extraordinary way, close to the ground, throwing out limbs like rails.
• 3:41:03
  The tree had made a good protection for the little boat, protecting it
• 3:41:07
  from marauding hands and from the sun. Besides the protection of the tree,
• 3:41:11
  Paddy had now and then scuttled the boat in shallow water. It was a
• 3:41:16
  new boat to start with, and with precautions like these, might be expected
• 3:41:20
  to last many years. Get in, said Dick, pulling on the painter
• 3:41:26
  so that the bow of the dinghy came close to the beach. Emmeline got
• 3:41:31
  in and went aft. Then Dick got in, pushed off and took to
• 3:41:35
  the skulls. Next moment they were out on the sparkling water. Dick rowed
• 3:41:41
  cautiously, fearing to wake the sleeper. He fastened the painter to the coral
• 3:41:48
  spike that seemed set there by nature for the purpose. He scrambled on to
• 3:41:52
  the reef, and, lying down on his stomach, drew the boats gone
• 3:41:56
  on close up so that Emmeline might land. He had no boots on the
• 3:42:01
  soles of his feet from constant exposure, had become insensitive as leather. Emmeline
• 3:42:09
  also was without boots. The soles of her feet, as is always the
• 3:42:13
  case with highly nervous people, were sensitive, and she walked delicately, avoiding
• 3:42:18
  the worst places, holding her wreath in her right hand. It was full
• 3:42:24
  tide, and the thunder of the waves outside shook the reef. It was
• 3:42:30
  like being in a church when the deep base of the organ is turned full
• 3:42:35
  on, shaking the ground and the air, the walls and the roof.
• 3:42:39
  Dashes of spray came over with the wind, and the melancholy hi hiy of
• 3:42:46
  the wheeling gulls came like the voices of ghostly sailor men hauling at the halliards.
• 3:42:54
  Paddy was lying on his right side, steeped in profound oblivion. His
• 3:42:58
  face was buried in the crook of his right arm, and his brown tattooed
• 3:43:03
  left hand lay on his left thigh, palm upward. He had no hat,
• 3:43:09
  and the breeze stirred his grizzled hair. Dick and Emmeline stole up to
• 3:43:16
  him till they got right beside him. Then Emmeline, flashing out a laugh,
• 3:43:22
  flung the little wreath of flowers on the old man's head, and Dick,
• 3:43:26
  popping down on his knees, shouted into his ear. But the dreamer
• 3:43:31
  did not stir or move a finger. Paddy cried, Dick, wake up,
• 3:43:37
  Wake up. He pulled at the shoulder till the figure, from its
• 3:43:41
  sideway's posture, fell over on its back. The eyes were wide open and
• 3:43:48
  staring. The mouth hung open, and from the mouth darted a little crab.
• 3:43:56
  It scuttled over the chin and dropped on the coral. Emmeline screamed and
• 3:44:03
  screamed, and would have fallen, but the boy caught her in his arms.
• 3:44:09
  One side of the face had been destroyed by the larvae of the rocks.
• 3:44:15
  He held her to him as he stared at the terrible figure lying upon
• 3:44:20
  its back, hands outspread. Then wild with terror, he dragged her towards
• 3:44:28
  the little boat. She was struggling and panting and gasping, like a person
• 3:44:33
  drowning in ice cold water. His one instinct was to escape, to fly
• 3:44:41
  anywhere, no matter where. He dragged the girl to the coral edge and
• 3:44:46
  pulled the boat up close. Had the reef suddenly become enveloped in flames,
• 3:44:50
  he could not have exerted himself more to escape from it and save his companion.
• 3:44:58
  A moment later, they were a float, and he was pulling wildly
• 3:45:01
  for the shore. He did not know what had happened, nor did he
• 3:45:05
  pause to think. He was fleeing from horror, nameless horror, while the
• 3:45:13
  child at his feet, with her head resting against the gunwale, stared up,
• 3:45:18
  open eyed and speechless at the great blue sky, as if at some
• 3:45:22
  terror visible there. The boat grounded on the white sand, and the wash
• 3:45:28
  of the incoming tide drove it up sideways. Emmeline had fallen forward. She
• 3:45:35
  had lost consciousness. End of Chapter twenty one. Chapter twenty two alone,
• 3:45:45
  The idea of spiritual life must be innate in the heart of man, For
• 3:45:50
  all that terrible night, when the children lay huddled together in the little heart
• 3:45:54
  in the chapparal, the fear that filled them was of their old friend might
• 3:46:01
  suddenly darken the entrance and seek to lie down beside them. They did not
• 3:46:07
  speak about him. Something had been done to him, Something terrible had happened
• 3:46:13
  to the world. They knew, but they dared not speak of it or
• 3:46:16
  question each other. Dick had carried his companion to the hut where he left
• 3:46:22
  the boat, and hidden with her there. The evening had come on,
• 3:46:26
  and the night, and now in the darkness, without having tasted food all
• 3:46:31
  day, he was telling her not to be afraid, that he would take
• 3:46:35
  care of her, but not a word of the thing that had happened.
• 3:46:41
  The thing, for them had no precedent and no vocabulary. They had come
• 3:46:46
  across death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorized by the sayings of
• 3:46:54
  sages and poets. They knew nothing of the full of Sophia that tells us
• 3:47:01
  that death is the common lot and the natural sequence to birth, or the
• 3:47:05
  religion that teaches us that death is the dough to life. A dead old
• 3:47:11
  sailor man lying like a festering carcass on the coral ledge, eyes staring and
• 3:47:18
  glazed and fixed, a wide open mouth that once had spoken comforting words and
• 3:47:26
  now spoke living crabs. That was the vision before them. They did not
• 3:47:33
  philosophize about it, And though they were filled with terror, I do not
• 3:47:37
  think it was terror that held them from speaking about it, but a vague
• 3:47:41
  feeling that what they had beheld was obscene, unspeakable, and a thing to
• 3:47:48
  avoid. Lestrange had brought them up in his own way. He had told
• 3:47:56
  them that there was a good God who looked after the world, to turn
• 3:48:00
  as far as he could do to exclude demonology and sin and death from their
• 3:48:05
  knowledge. He had rested content with the bald statement that there was a good
• 3:48:09
  God who looked after the world, without explaining fully that the same God would
• 3:48:16
  torture them forever and ever should they fail to believe in Him or keep his
• 3:48:20
  commandments. This knowledge of the Almighty, therefore, was but a half knowledge,
• 3:48:28
  the vaguest abstraction. Had they been brought up, however, in the
• 3:48:33
  most strict Calvinistic school, this knowledge of Him would have been no comfort.
• 3:48:39
  Now belief in God is no comfort to a frightened child, teach him as
• 3:48:45
  many parrot like prayers as you please, and in distress or the dark of
• 3:48:50
  what you sare they to him his cries for his nurse or for his mother.
• 3:48:56
  During that dreadful night, the these two children had no comfort to seek
• 3:49:01
  anywhere in the whole wild universe, but in each other. She in a
• 3:49:07
  sense of his protection, he in a sense of being her protector. The
• 3:49:13
  manliness in him greater and more beautiful than physical strength, developed in those dark
• 3:49:20
  hours, just as a plant under extraordinary circumstances is hurried into bloom. Towards
• 3:49:28
  dawn, Emmeline fell asleep. Dick stole out of the hut when he had
• 3:49:33
  assured himself from her regular breathing that she was asleep, and pushing the tendrils
• 3:49:39
  and the branches of the mammy apples aside, found the beach. The dawn
• 3:49:45
  was just breaking, and the morning breeze was coming in from the sea.
• 3:49:50
  When he had reached the dinghy the day before, the tide was just at
• 3:49:54
  the flood, and it had left her stranded. The tide was coming in
• 3:49:58
  now, and in a short time it would be far enough up to push
• 3:50:03
  her off. Emmeline in the night had implored him to take her away,
• 3:50:09
  take her away somewhere from here, and he had promised, without knowing in
• 3:50:13
  the least how he was to perform his promise. As he stood looking at
• 3:50:18
  the beach, so desolate and strangely different now from what it was the day
• 3:50:24
  before, an idea of how he could fulfill his promise came to him.
• 3:50:28
  He ran down to where the little boat lay on the shelving sand, with
• 3:50:33
  the ripples of the incoming tide just washing the rudder, which was still shipped.
• 3:50:39
  He unshipped the rudder and came back under a tree covered with the stasil.
• 3:50:45
  They had brought from the Shannondoah lay most of their treasures, old clothes
• 3:50:50
  and boots, and all the other odds and ends. The precious tobacco stitched
• 3:50:56
  up in a piece of canvas, was there, and the housewife would needles
• 3:51:00
  and threads. A hole had been dug in the sand as a sort of
• 3:51:03
  cash for them, and the stasil put over them to protect them from the
• 3:51:07
  dew. The sun was now looking over the sea. Lion and the tall
• 3:51:11
  coconut trees were singing and whispering together under the strengthening breeze. End of chapter
• 3:51:18
  twenty two Chapter twenty three, they move away. He began to collect the
• 3:51:28
  things and carry them to the dinghy. He took the stacil and everything that
• 3:51:31
  might be useful, and when he had stowed them in the boat, he
• 3:51:35
  took the breaker and filled it with water. At the water source in the
• 3:51:39
  wood, he collected some bananas and bread fruit and stowed them in the dinghy
• 3:51:43
  with the breaker. Then he found the remains of yesterday's breakfast, which he
• 3:51:48
  had hidden between two palmetto leaves, and placed it also in the boat.
• 3:51:54
  The water was now so high that a strong push would float her. He
• 3:51:58
  turned back to the for Emmeline. She was still asleep, so soundly asleep
• 3:52:05
  that when he lifted her up in his arms, she made no movement.
• 3:52:09
  He placed her carefully in the stern sheets with her head and the sail rolled
• 3:52:13
  up, and then, standing in the bow, pushed off with a skull.
• 3:52:20
  Taking the skulls, he turned the boat's head up the lagoon to the
• 3:52:22
  left. He kept close to the shore, but for the life of him
• 3:52:28
  he could not help lifting his eyes and looking toward the reef. Round a
• 3:52:35
  certain spot in the distant white coral there was a great commotion of birds,
• 3:52:41
  huge birds, some of them seemed, and the high, high, high
• 3:52:46
  of them came across the lagoon on the breeze. As they quarreled together and
• 3:52:52
  beat the air with their wings. He turned his head away till a bend
• 3:52:56
  of the shore hid the spot from sight. Here sheltered more completely than opposite
• 3:53:03
  the break in the reef, the r tou trees came in places right down
• 3:53:07
  to the water's edge. The bread fruit trees cast the shadow of their great
• 3:53:13
  scolloped leaves upon the water. Glades thick with fern, wilderness of the mammie
• 3:53:20
  apple, and bushes of the scarlet wild coconut, all slipped by as the
• 3:53:24
  dinghy hugging the shore, crept up the lagoon. Gazing at the shore edge,
• 3:53:31
  one might have imagined it the edge of a lake, but for the
• 3:53:35
  thunder of the Pacific on the distant reef, And even that did not destroy
• 3:53:39
  the impression, but only lent a strangeness to it. A lake in the
• 3:53:46
  midst of the ocean, that is what the lagoon really was. Here and
• 3:53:52
  there cocoanut trees slanted over the water, mirroring their delicate stems and tracing their
• 3:53:58
  clear cutches shadows on the sandy bottom a fathom deep below. He kept close
• 3:54:05
  in shore for the sake of the shelter of the trees. His object was
• 3:54:09
  to find some place where they might stop permanently and put up a tent.
• 3:54:15
  He was seeking a new home in fact, but pretty as were the glades
• 3:54:18
  they passed, they were not attractive places to live in. There were too
• 3:54:24
  many trees, or the ferns were too deep. He was seeking air and
• 3:54:30
  space, and suddenly he found it, rounding a little cape, all blazing
• 3:54:37
  with the scarlet of the wild cocoanut, the dinghy broke into a new world.
• 3:54:45
  Before her lay a great sweep of the palest blue swept water, down
• 3:54:50
  to which came a broad green sward of park like land, set on either
• 3:54:54
  side with deep groves, and leading up and away to higher land, where
• 3:55:00
  above the massive and motionless green of the great bread fruit trees. The palm
• 3:55:05
  trees swayed and fluttered their pale green feathers in the breeze. The pale color
• 3:55:11
  of the water was due to the extreme shallowness of the lagoon. Just here,
• 3:55:16
  so shallow was it that one could see brown spaces indicating beds of dead
• 3:55:22
  and rotten coral, and splashes of darkest sapphire where the deep pools lay.
• 3:55:30
  The reef lay more than half a mile from the shore, a great way
• 3:55:35
  out. It seemed so far out that its cramping influence was removed, and
• 3:55:41
  one had the impression of wide and unbroken sea. Dick rested on his oars
• 3:55:48
  and let the dinghy float whilst he looked around him. He had come some
• 3:55:54
  four miles and a half, and this was right at the back of the
• 3:55:58
  island. As the boat, drifting shoreward touched the bank, Emmeline awaked from
• 3:56:03
  her sleep, sat up and looked around her. End of Chapter twenty three.
• 3:56:13
  End of book one, Chapter one. Under the r to tree,
• 3:56:18
  on the edge of the green sward, between a diamond checkered R two trunk
• 3:56:24
  and the massive bowl of a bread fruit, a house had come into being.
• 3:56:30
  It was not much larger than a big hen house, but quite sufficient
• 3:56:33
  for the needs of two people in a climate of eternal summer. It was
• 3:56:39
  built of bamboos and thatched with a double thatch of palmetto leaves. So neatly
• 3:56:46
  built and so well thatched that one might have fancied it. The production of
• 3:56:50
  several skilled workmen. The bread fruit tree was barren of fruit, as these
• 3:56:56
  trees sometimes are, whole groves of them, ceasing to bear for some mysterious
• 3:57:01
  reason only known to nature. It was green now, but when suffering its
• 3:57:07
  yearly change, the great scalloped leaves would take on all imaginable tinges of gold
• 3:57:13
  and bronze and amber. Beyond the r to was a little clearing where the
• 3:57:20
  chaparral had been carefully removed and tarow roots planted. Stepping from the house doorway
• 3:57:26
  onto the sward, you might have fancied yourself except for the tropical nature of
• 3:57:31
  the foliage. In some English park, looking to the right, the eye
• 3:57:37
  became lost in the woods, where all tints of green were tinging the foliage,
• 3:57:41
  and the bushes of the wild coconut, burned scarlet as hawberries. The
• 3:57:48
  house had a doorway, but no door. It might have been said to
• 3:57:52
  have a double roof, for the bread fruit foliage above gave good shelter during
• 3:57:58
  the rains. Inside it was bare enough. Dried, sweet smelling ferns covered
• 3:58:05
  the floor. Two sails rolled up lay on either side of the doorway.
• 3:58:11
  There was a rude shelf attached to one of the walls, and on the
• 3:58:15
  shelf some bowls made out of cocoanut shell. The people to whom the place
• 3:58:20
  belonged evidently did not trouble it much with their presence, using it only at
• 3:58:26
  night and as a refuge from the dew. Sitting on the grass by the
• 3:58:31
  doorway, sheltered by the bread fruit shade, yet with the hot rays of
• 3:58:35
  the afternoon sun just touching her naked feet, was a girl, a girl
• 3:58:41
  of fifteen or sixteen, naked except for a kilt of gaily striped material reaching
• 3:58:48
  from her waist to her knees. Her long black hair was drawn back from
• 3:58:54
  the forehead and tied behind with a loop of elastic vine. A scarlet blossom
• 3:59:00
  was stuck behind her right ear, after the fashion of a clerk's pen.
• 3:59:05
  Her face was beautiful, powdered with tiny freckles, especially under the eyes,
• 3:59:11
  which were of a deep tranquil blue gray. She half sat, half lay
• 3:59:18
  on her left side, whilst before her, quite close strutted up and down
• 3:59:22
  on the grass a bird with blue plumage, coral red beak, and bright
• 3:59:28
  watchful eyes. The girl was emmeline less strange. Just by her elbow stood
• 3:59:35
  a little bowl made from half a cocoanut, and filled with some white substance
• 3:59:41
  with which she was feeding the bird. Dick had found it in the woods
• 3:59:46
  two years ago, quite small, deserted by its mother and starving. They
• 3:59:52
  had fed it and tamed it, and now it was one of the family,
• 3:59:56
  roosting on the roof at night and appearing regularly at meal times. All
• 4:00:01
  at once, she held out her hand, the bird flew into the air,
• 4:00:07
  lit on her forefinger, and balanced itself, sinking its head between its
• 4:00:11
  shoulders and uttering the sound which formed its entire vocabulary and one means of vocal
• 4:00:18
  expression, a sound from which it had derived its name, Koco, said
• 4:00:24
  Emmeline, where's Dick. The bird turned his head about as if searching for
• 4:00:30
  his master, and the girl lay back lazily on the grass, laughing and
• 4:00:35
  holding him up, poised on her finger, as if he were some enameled
• 4:00:39
  jewel she wished to admire at a little distance. They made a pretty picture
• 4:00:45
  under the cave like shadow of the bread fruit leaves, and it was difficult
• 4:00:50
  to understand how this young girl, so perfectly formed, so fully developed,
• 4:00:54
  and so beautiful, had evolved from plain little Emmeline. The strain and the
• 4:01:01
  whole thing, as far as the beauty of her was concerned, had happened
• 4:01:05
  during the last six months end of chapter one, Chapter two, Half Child,
• 4:01:13
  half Savage. Five rainy seasons had passed and gone since the tragic occurrence
• 4:01:22
  on the reef. Five long years. The breakers had thundered, and the
• 4:01:26
  seagulls had cried round the figure whose spell had drawn a mysterious barrier across the
• 4:01:33
  lagoon. The children had never returned to the old place. They had kept
• 4:01:39
  entirely to the back of the island and the woods. The lagoon down to
• 4:01:43
  a certain point, and the reef a wide enough and beautiful enough world,
• 4:01:48
  but a hopeless world as far as help from civilization was concerned. Four of
• 4:01:56
  the few ships that touched at the island in the course of the years,
• 4:02:00
  how many would explore the lagoon or woods, perhaps not one. Occasionally Dick
• 4:02:07
  would make an excursion in the dinghy to the old place, but Emmeline refused
• 4:02:11
  to accompany him. He went chiefly to obtain bananas, for on the whole
• 4:02:16
  island there was but one clump of banana trees that near the water source,
• 4:02:22
  in the wood where the old green skulls had been discovered, and the little
• 4:02:28
  barrel she had never quite recovered. From the occurrence on the reef, something
• 4:02:35
  had been shown to her, the purport of which she vaguely understood, and
• 4:02:39
  it had filled her with horror and a terror. Of the place where it
• 4:02:43
  had occurred. Dick was quite different. He had been frightened enough at first,
• 4:02:50
  but the feeling wore away in time. Dick had built three houses in
• 4:02:56
  succession during the five years. He had laid out a patch of tarot and
• 4:03:00
  another of sweet potatoes. He knew every pool on the reef for two miles
• 4:03:05
  either way, and the forms of their inhabitants, and though he did not
• 4:03:11
  know the names of the creatures to be found there, he made a profound
• 4:03:15
  study of their habits. He had seen some astonishing things during these five years,
• 4:03:22
  from a fight between a whale and two thrashes conducted outside the reef,
• 4:03:28
  lasting an hour and dyeing the breaking waves with blood, to the poisoning of
• 4:03:33
  the fish in the lagoon by fresh water due to an extraordinarily heavy rainy season.
• 4:03:39
  He knew the woods of the back of the island by heart, and
• 4:03:43
  the forms of life that inhabited them, butterflies and moths and birds, lizards
• 4:03:48
  and insects of strange shape, extraordinary orchids, some filthy looking the very image
• 4:03:56
  of corruption, some beauty, and all strange. He found melons and guavas,
• 4:04:05
  and bread fruit, the red apple of Tahiti, and the great Brazilian
• 4:04:11
  plum tarot in plenty, and a dozen other good things. But there were
• 4:04:16
  no bananas. This made him unhappy at times, for he was human.
• 4:04:24
  Although Emmeline had asked cocoa for Dick's whereabouts, it was only a remark made
• 4:04:28
  by way of making conversation, for she could hear him in the little cane
• 4:04:33
  break which lay close by amidst the trees. In a few minutes he appeared,
• 4:04:39
  dragging after him two canes which he had just cut, and wiping the
• 4:04:43
  perspiration off his brow with his naked arm. He had an old pair of
• 4:04:48
  trousers on part of the truck, salved long ago from the Shannondoah, nothing
• 4:04:54
  else, and he was well worth looking at and considering, both from a
• 4:04:58
  physical end the psychological point of view. Auburn, haired and tall, looking
• 4:05:05
  more like seventeen than sixteen, with a restless and daring expression. Half a
• 4:05:11
  child, half a man, half a civilized. Being half a savage,
• 4:05:16
  he had progressed and retrograded during the five years of savage life. He sat
• 4:05:22
  down beside Emmeline, flung the canes beside him, tried the edge of the
• 4:05:26
  old butcher's knife with which he had cut them. Then, taking one of
• 4:05:31
  the canes across his knee, he began whittling at it. What are you
• 4:05:35
  making, asked Emmeline, releasing the bird, which flew into one of the
• 4:05:41
  branches of the artu and rested there a blue point amidst the dark green fish
• 4:05:46
  spear, replied Dick. Without being taciturn, he rarely wasted words. Life
• 4:05:54
  was all business for him. He would talk to Emmeline, but always in
• 4:06:00
  short sentences, and he had developed the habit of talking to inanimate things,
• 4:06:05
  to the fish spear he was carving, or the bowl he was fashioning from
• 4:06:09
  a cocoanut. As for Emmeline, even as a child, she had never
• 4:06:13
  been talkative. There was something mysterious in her personality, something secretive. Her
• 4:06:20
  mind seemed half submerged in twilight. Though she spoke little, and though the
• 4:06:26
  subject of their conversations was almost entirely material and relative to their everyday needs,
• 4:06:33
  her mind would wander into abstract fields and the land of chimera and dreams.
• 4:06:41
  What she found there no one knew, least of all perhaps herself. As
• 4:06:48
  for Dick, he would sometimes talk and mutter to himself, as if in
• 4:06:52
  a reverie. But if you caught the words, you would find they referred
• 4:06:56
  to no abstraction, some trifle he had on hand. He seemed entirely bound
• 4:07:05
  up in the moment, and to have forgotten the past as completely as though
• 4:07:09
  it had never been. Yet he had his contemplative moods. He would lie
• 4:07:15
  with his face over a rickpool by the hour, watching the strange forms of
• 4:07:20
  life to be seen there, or sit in the woods, motionless as a
• 4:07:24
  stone, watching the birds and the swift slipping lizards. The birds came so
• 4:07:31
  close that he could easily have knocked them over, but he never hurt one
• 4:07:37
  or interfered in any way with the wild life of the woods. The island,
• 4:07:43
  the lagoon, and the reef were for him the three volumes of a
• 4:07:48
  great picture book, as they were for Emmeline, though in a different manner.
• 4:07:54
  The color and beauty of it all fed some mysterious want in her soul.
• 4:08:00
  Her life was a long reverie, a beautiful vision troubled with shadows across
• 4:08:09
  all the blue and colored spaces that meant months and years. She could still
• 4:08:13
  see as in a glass, dimly the Northumberland smoking against the wild background of
• 4:08:20
  fog, her uncle's face, Boston, a vague and dark picture beyond the
• 4:08:26
  storm, and nearer the tragic form on the reef that still haunted terribly her
• 4:08:33
  dreams. But she never spoke of these things to Dick, just as she
• 4:08:39
  kept the secret of what was in her box and the secret of her trouble
• 4:08:43
  whenever she lost it, she kept the secret of her feelings about these things.
• 4:08:50
  Born of these things, there remained with her always a vague terror,
• 4:08:56
  the terror of losing Dick, Missus Stannard, her uncle, the dim people
• 4:09:01
  she had known in Boston, all had passed away out of her life like
• 4:09:07
  a dream, and shadows the other one too, most horribly, what if
• 4:09:15
  Dick were taken from her as well. This haunting trouble had been with her
• 4:09:20
  a long time. Up to a few months ago, it had been mainly
• 4:09:26
  personal and selfish, the dread of being left alone. But lately it had
• 4:09:31
  altered and become more acute, Dick had changed in her eyes, and the
• 4:09:37
  fear was now for him. Her own personality had suddenly and strangely become merged
• 4:09:43
  in his. The idea of life without him was unthinkable. Yet the trouble
• 4:09:50
  remained a menace in the blue. Some days it would be worse than others.
• 4:09:56
  Today, for instance, it was worse than yes to day, as
• 4:10:01
  though some danger had crept close to them during the night. Yet the sky
• 4:10:05
  and sea were stainless. The sun shone on tree and flower. The west
• 4:10:11
  wind blew the tune of the far away reef like a lullaby. There was
• 4:10:18
  nothing to hint of danger or the need of distrust. At last, Dick
• 4:10:22
  finished his spear and rose to his feet. Where are you going, asked
• 4:10:28
  Emmeline the reef, he replied, the tides going out. I'll go with
• 4:10:35
  you, said she. He went into the house and stowed the precious knife
• 4:10:39
  away. Then he came out, spear in one hand and half a fathom
• 4:10:45
  of leanna in the other. The leanna was for the purpose of stringing the
• 4:10:50
  fish on, should the catch be large. He led the way down the
• 4:10:54
  grassy sward to the lagoon, where the dinghy lay close up to the bank,
• 4:10:58
  and more to a post driven into the soft soil. Emmeline got in,
• 4:11:05
  and at taking the skulls he pushed off. The tide was going out.
• 4:11:11
  I have said that the reef just here lay a great way out from
• 4:11:15
  the shore. The lagoon was so shallow that at low tide one could have
• 4:11:20
  waded almost right across it, were it not for potholes here and there,
• 4:11:24
  ten feet traps, and great beds of rotten coral into which one would sink
• 4:11:31
  as into brushwood, to say nothing of the nettle coral that stings like a
• 4:11:35
  bed of nettles. There were also other dangers. Tropical shallows are full of
• 4:11:43
  wild surprises in the way of life and death. Dick had long ago marked
• 4:11:48
  out in his memory the soundings of the lagoon, and it was fortunate that
• 4:11:52
  he possessed the special sense of location, which is the main standby of the
• 4:11:58
  hunter and the savage. For from the disposition of the coral in ribs,
• 4:12:03
  the water from the shore edge to the reef ran in lanes. Only two
• 4:12:09
  of these lanes gave a clear fair way from the shore edge to the reef.
• 4:12:13
  Had you followed the others, even in a boat of such shallow draft
• 4:12:18
  as the dinghy, you would have found yourself stranded half way across, unless
• 4:12:22
  indeed it were a spring tide. Half way across, the sound of the
• 4:12:28
  surf on the barrier became louder, and the everlasting and monotonous cries of the
• 4:12:33
  gulls came on the breeze. It was lonely out there, and looking back
• 4:12:39
  the shore seemed a great way off. It was lonely as still on the
• 4:12:45
  reef. Dick tied up the boat to a projection of coral and helped Emmeline
• 4:12:50
  to land. The sun was creeping down into the west, The tide was
• 4:12:56
  nearly half out, and large pools of water lay glitter like burnished shields in
• 4:13:01
  the sunlight. Dick, with his precious spear beside him, sat calmly down
• 4:13:07
  on a ledge of coral and began to divest himself of his one and only
• 4:13:11
  garment. Emmeline turned away her head and contemplated the distant shore, which seemed
• 4:13:18
  thrice as far off as it was in reality. When she turned her head
• 4:13:24
  again, he was racing along the edge of the surf. He and his
• 4:13:28
  spear silhouetted against the spin, drift and dazzling foam formed a picture savage enough
• 4:13:35
  and well in keeping with the general desolation of the background. She watched him
• 4:13:39
  lie down and cling to a piece of coral, whilst the surf rushed round
• 4:13:45
  and over him, and then rise and shake himself like a dog, and
• 4:13:48
  pursue his gambols, his body all glittering with the wet. Sometimes a whoop
• 4:13:56
  would come on the breeze, mixing with the sound of the surf from the
• 4:14:00
  cry of the gulls, and she would see him plunge his spear into a
• 4:14:03
  pool, and the next moment the spear would be held aloft with something struggling
• 4:14:09
  and glittering at the end of it. He was quite different out here on
• 4:14:15
  the reef to what he was ashore. The surroundings here seemed to develop all
• 4:14:20
  that was savage in him in a startling way, and he would kill and
• 4:14:26
  kill just for the pleasure of killing, destroying more fish than they could possibly
• 4:14:31
  use. End of Chapter two, Chapter three, The Demon of the Reef.
• 4:14:41
  The Romance of Coral has still to be written. There still exists a
• 4:14:48
  widespread opinion that the Coral Reef and the Coral Island are the work of an
• 4:14:52
  insect. This fabulous insect, accredited with the genius of Brune and the patience
• 4:15:01
  of Job, has been humorously enough held up before the children of many generations
• 4:15:07
  as an example of industry, a thing to be admired, a model to
• 4:15:13
  be followed. As a matter of fact, nothing could be more slow full,
• 4:15:18
  or slow more given up to a life of ease and degeneracy than the
• 4:15:24
  reef building polifer. To give him his scientific name, he is the hobo
• 4:15:31
  of the animal world. But unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp
• 4:15:35
  for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm. He attracts
• 4:15:41
  to himself calcareous elements from the water to make himself a house mark. You
• 4:15:48
  the sea does the building. He dies, and he leaves his house behind
• 4:15:54
  him, and a reputation for industry, besides which the reputation of the end
• 4:16:00
  turns pale, and that of the bee becomes of little account. On a
• 4:16:04
  coral reef, you are treading on rock that the reef building polypifer of ages
• 4:16:11
  have left behind them as evidence of their idle and apparently useless lives. You
• 4:16:18
  might fancy that the reef is formed of dead rock, but it is not
• 4:16:23
  that is where the wonder of the thing comes in. A coral reef is
• 4:16:29
  half alive. If it were not, it would not resist the action of
• 4:16:33
  the seas ten years. The live part of the reef is just where the
• 4:16:37
  breakers come in and beyond the gelatinous rock building. Polypifers die almost at once
• 4:16:47
  if exposed to the sun, or if left uncovered by the water, sometimes
• 4:16:52
  at a very low tide. If you have enough courage to risk being swept
• 4:16:56
  away by the breakers, going out as far on the reef as you can,
• 4:17:00
  you may catch a glimpse of them in their living state. Great mounds
• 4:17:06
  and masses of what seems rock, but which is a honeycomb of coral whose
• 4:17:11
  cells are filled with the living polypifers. Those in the uppermost cells are usually
• 4:17:19
  dead, but lower down they are living, always dying, always being renewed,
• 4:17:27
  devoured by fish, attacked by the sea. That is the life of
• 4:17:33
  a coral reef. It is a thing as living as a cabbage or a
• 4:17:37
  tree. Each storm tears a piece off the reef, which the living coral
• 4:17:42
  replaces. Wounds occur in it, which actually granulate and heel as wounds do
• 4:17:49
  of the human body. There is nothing perhaps more mysterious in nature than this
• 4:17:56
  fact of the existence of a living land, a land that repairs itself when
• 4:18:03
  injured by vital processes, and resists the eternal attack of the sea by vital
• 4:18:07
  force, especially when we think of the extent of some of these lagoons or
• 4:18:12
  atolls, whose existences are an eternal battle with the waves, Unlike the island
• 4:18:19
  of this story, which is an island surrounded by a barrier reef of coral
• 4:18:25
  surrounding a space of sea the lagoon. The reef forms the island. The
• 4:18:30
  reef may be grown over by trees, or it may be perfectly destitute of
• 4:18:36
  important vegetation, or it may be crusted with islets. Some islets may exist
• 4:18:41
  within the lagoon, but often as not, it is just a great empty
• 4:18:45
  lake, floored with sand and coral, peopled with life different to the life
• 4:18:52
  of the outside ocean, protected from the waves and reflecting the sky like a
• 4:18:56
  mirror. When we remember that the atoll is a living thing, an organic
• 4:19:03
  whole, as full of life, though not so highly organized as a tortoise,
• 4:19:08
  the meanest imagination must be struck with the immensity of one of the structures,
• 4:19:15
  the ligan atoll in the Lower Archipelago, measured from the lagoon edge to
• 4:19:19
  lagoon edge, is sixty miles long by twenty miles broad. At its broadest
• 4:19:26
  part. In the Marshall Appelago, Rymsky Corsicov is fifty four miles long and
• 4:19:33
  twenty miles broad, and Rymsky Corskov is a living thing, secreting, excreting,
• 4:19:41
  and growing more highly organized than the coconut trees that grow upon its back
• 4:19:47
  or the blossoms that powder the hutu trees in its groves. The story of
• 4:19:52
  Coral is the story of a world, and the longest chapter in that story
• 4:19:56
  concerns itself with coral's infinite variety and form. Out on the margin of the
• 4:20:03
  reef where Dick was spearing fish, you might have seen a peach blossom colored
• 4:20:08
  lichen on the rock. This lichen was a form of coral. Coral growing
• 4:20:15
  upon coral, and in the pools at the edge of the surf, branching
• 4:20:19
  corals, also of the color of a peach bloom. Within one hundred yards
• 4:20:25
  of where Emmeline was sitting, the pools contained corals of all colors, from
• 4:20:30
  lake red to pure white, and the lagoon behind her corals of the quaintest
• 4:20:37
  and strangest forms. Dick had speared several fish and had left them lying on
• 4:20:42
  the reef to be picked up later on. Tired of killing, he was
• 4:20:48
  now wandering along, examining the various living things he came across. Huge slugs
• 4:20:55
  inhabited the reefs. Slugs as big as parsnips, and so somewhat of the
• 4:21:00
  same shape. They were a species of beck de mare, globe shaped jellyfish
• 4:21:06
  as big as oranges, great cuttlefish, bones flat and shining, and white
• 4:21:11
  shark's teeth, spines of vichini. Sometimes a dead scaerus fish, its stomach
• 4:21:19
  distended with bits of coral on which it had been feeding, Crabs, sea
• 4:21:25
  urchins, seaweeds of strange colour and shape, starfish, some tiny and some
• 4:21:30
  the color of cay and pepper, some huge and pale. These and a
• 4:21:37
  thousand other things beautiful or strange, were to be found on the reef.
• 4:21:42
  Dick had laid his spear down and was exploring a deep bath like pool.
• 4:21:48
  He had waded up to his knees and was in the act of wading further
• 4:21:52
  when he was suddenly seized by the foot. It was just as if his
• 4:21:56
  ankle had been suddenly caught in a clove here, which and the rope drawn
• 4:22:00
  tight. He screamed out with pain and terror, And suddenly and viciously our
• 4:22:07
  whiplash shot out from the water, lassoed him round the left knee, drew
• 4:22:14
  itself taut, and held him. End of Chapter three, Chapter four,
• 4:22:23
  What beauty concealed? Emmeline, seated on the coral rock, had almost forgotten
• 4:22:30
  Dick for a moment. The sun was setting in the warm amber light of
• 4:22:36
  the sunset shone on reef and rock pool, just at sunset and low tide.
• 4:22:42
  The reef had a peculiar fascination for her. It had the low tide
• 4:22:48
  smell of seaweed exposed to the air, and the torment and the trouble of
• 4:22:52
  the breakers seemed eased before her. And on either side, the foam dashed
• 4:23:00
  coral glowed in amber and gold, and the Great Pacific came glassing and glittering
• 4:23:07
  in voiceless and peaceful till it reached the strand and burst into song and spray.
• 4:23:15
  Here, just as on the hilltop on the other side of the island,
• 4:23:18
  you could mark the rhythm of the rollers forever and forever and forever,
• 4:23:27
  they seemed to say. The cry of the gulls came mixed with the spray
• 4:23:33
  on the breeze. They haunted the reef like uneasy spirits, always complaining,
• 4:23:40
  never at rest. But at sunset their cry seemed farther away and less melancholy,
• 4:23:48
  perhaps because just then the whole island seemed bathed in the spirit of peace.
• 4:23:55
  She turned from the sea prospect and looked backwards over the lagoon to the
• 4:23:59
  island. She could make out the broad green glade beside which their little house
• 4:24:06
  lay, and a spot of yellow which was the thatch of the house,
• 4:24:10
  just by the Artu tree, and nearly hidden by the shadow of the bread
• 4:24:14
  fruit. Over woods, the fronds of the great coconut palms showed above every
• 4:24:19
  other tree, silhouetted against the dim, dark blue of the eastern sky.
• 4:24:26
  Seen by the enchanted light of sunset, the whole picture had an unreal look,
• 4:24:32
  more lovely than a dream. At dawn, and Dick would often start
• 4:24:37
  for the reef before dawn. If the tide served, the picture was as
• 4:24:42
  beautiful, more so, perhaps, for over the island, all in shadow
• 4:24:48
  and against the stars, you could see the palm tops catching fire, and
• 4:24:52
  then the light of day coming through the green trees and blue sky, like
• 4:24:57
  a spirit across the blue lagoon, widening and strengthening as it widened across the
• 4:25:03
  white foam out over the sea, spreading like a fan, till all at
• 4:25:10
  once night was day, and the gulls were crying, and the breakers flashing,
• 4:25:17
  the dawn wind blowing, and the palm trees bending as palm trees only
• 4:25:22
  know how. Emmeline always imagined herself alone on the island with Dick, But
• 4:25:30
  beauty was there too, and beauty is a great companion. The girl was
• 4:25:36
  contemplating the scene before her. Nature, in her friendliest mood, seemed to
• 4:25:41
  say, behold me. Men call me cruel, men have called me deceitful,
• 4:25:48
  even treacherous. I Ah, well, my answer is behold me.
• 4:25:57
  The girl was contemplating the specious beauty of it all, when on the breeze
• 4:26:03
  from the seaward came a shout. She turned quickly. There was Dick up
• 4:26:07
  to his knees in a rock pool a hundred yards or so away, motionless,
• 4:26:12
  his arms upraised and crying out for help. She sprang to her feet.
• 4:26:18
  There had once been an islet on this part of the reef, a
• 4:26:22
  tiny thing consisting of a few palms and a handful of vegetation, and destroyed
• 4:26:29
  perhaps in some great storm. I mentioned this because the existence of this island,
• 4:26:34
  once upon a time was the means indirectly of saving Dick's life. For
• 4:26:41
  where these islands have been or are, flats occur on the reef formed of
• 4:26:48
  coral conglomerate. Emmeline in her bare feet could never have reached him in time
• 4:26:53
  over rough coral, but fortunately this flat and comparatively smooth surface lay between them.
• 4:27:00
  My spear, shouted Dick. As she approached. He seemed at first
• 4:27:07
  tangled in brambles. Then she thought ropes were tangling round him and tying him
• 4:27:12
  to something in the water. Whatever it was, it was most awful and
• 4:27:17
  hideous, and like a nightmare. She ran with the speed of Atalanta to
• 4:27:22
  the rock where the spear was resting, all red with the blood of new
• 4:27:26
  slain fish afoot from the point. As she approached Dick, spear in hand,
• 4:27:33
  she saw, gasping with terror, that the ropes were alive, and
• 4:27:37
  that they were flickering and rippling over his back. One of them bound his
• 4:27:41
  left arm to his side, but his right arm was free. Quick he
• 4:27:47
  shouted. In a second the spear was in his free hand, and Emmeline
• 4:27:52
  had cast herself down on her knees and was staring with terrified eyes into the
• 4:27:56
  pool of the water from whence the ropes. She was, despite her terror,
• 4:28:03
  quite prepared to fling herself in and do battle with the thing, whatever
• 4:28:07
  it might be. What she saw was only for a second in the deep
• 4:28:12
  water of the pool. Gazing up and forward and straight at Dick, she
• 4:28:18
  saw a face lugubrious and awful. The eyes were wide as saucers, stony
• 4:28:26
  and steadfast. A large, heavy parrot like beak hung before the eyes and
• 4:28:32
  worked and wobbled and seemed to beckon. But what froze one's heart was the
• 4:28:38
  expression of the eyes, so stonely and lugubrious, so passionless, so devoid
• 4:28:47
  of speculation, yet so fixed a purpose and full of fate. From away,
• 4:28:55
  far down, he had risen with the rising tide. He had been
• 4:28:59
  feeding on crabs. When the tide betraying him had gone out, leaving him
• 4:29:03
  trapped in the rock pool. He had slept, perhaps and awakened to find
• 4:29:10
  a being naked and defenseless, invading his pool. He was quite small as
• 4:29:15
  octopods go, and young, yet he was large and powerful enough to have
• 4:29:22
  drowned an ox. The octopod has only been described once in stone by a
• 4:29:29
  Japanese artist. The statue is still extant, and it is the most terrible
• 4:29:34
  masterpiece of sculpture ever executed by human hands. It represents a man who has
• 4:29:41
  been bathing on a low tide beach and has been caught. The man is
• 4:29:47
  shouting in a delirium of terror and threatening with his free arm the specter that
• 4:29:52
  has him in its grip. The eyes of the octopod are fixed upon the
• 4:29:57
  man, passion stionless and lugubrious eyes, but steadfast and fixed. Another whiplash
• 4:30:07
  shot out of the water in a shower of spray, and seized Dick by
• 4:30:12
  the left thigh. At the same instant, he drove the point of the
• 4:30:17
  spear through the right eye of the monster, deep down through eye and soft
• 4:30:22
  gelatinous carcass, till the spear point durled and splintered against the rock. At
• 4:30:30
  the same moment, the water of the pool became black as ink. The
• 4:30:34
  bands around him relaxed, and he was free. Emmeline rose up and seized
• 4:30:41
  him, sobbing and clinging to him and kissing him. He clasped her with
• 4:30:45
  his left arm around her body, as if to protect her, but it
• 4:30:48
  was a mechanical action. He was not thinking of her. Wild with rage
• 4:30:55
  and uttering hoarse cries, he plunged the broken spear again and again into the
• 4:31:00
  depths of the pool, seeking utterly to destroy the enemy that had so lately
• 4:31:07
  had him in its grip. Then slowly he came to himself and wiped his
• 4:31:14
  forehead and looked at the broken spear in his hand. Beast, he said,
• 4:31:21
  did you see its eyes? I wish it had a hundred eyes,
• 4:31:25
  and I had a hundred spears to drive into them. She was clinging to
• 4:31:30
  him and sobbing, and laughing hysterically and praising him. One might have thought
• 4:31:37
  that he had rescued her from death, not she him. The sun had
• 4:31:41
  nearly vanished, and he led her back to where the dinghy was moored,
• 4:31:45
  recapturing and putting on his trousers. On the road, he picked up the
• 4:31:51
  dead fish she had speared, and as he rode her back across the lagoon,
• 4:31:56
  he talked and laughed, recounting the incidents of the fight, taking all
• 4:32:02
  the glory of the thing to himself, and seeming quite to ignore the important
• 4:32:06
  parts she had played in it. This was not from any callousness or want
• 4:32:11
  of gratitude, but simply from the fact that for the last five years he
• 4:32:17
  had been the bee all and end all of their tiny community, the imperial
• 4:32:22
  master, and he would just as soon have thought of thanking her for handing
• 4:32:26
  him the spear as for thanking his right hand for driving it home. She
• 4:32:33
  was quite content, seeking neither thanks nor praise. Everything she had came from
• 4:32:40
  him. She was his shadow and his slave. He was her son.
• 4:32:47
  He went over the fight again and again before they laid down to rest,
• 4:32:52
  telling her he had done this and that and what he would do to the
• 4:32:56
  next beast of the thought the reataration was tiresome enough, or would have been
• 4:33:03
  to an outside listener, but to Emmeline it was better than Homer. People's
• 4:33:08
  minds do not improve in an intellectual sense when they are isolated from the world,
• 4:33:15
  even though they are living the wild and happy lives of savages. Then
• 4:33:21
  Dick lay down in the dried ferns and covered himself with a piece of the
• 4:33:25
  striped flannel which they'd used for blanketing, and he snored and chattered in his
• 4:33:30
  sleep like a dog hunting imaginary game. And Emmeline lay beside him, wakeful
• 4:33:37
  and thinking a new terror had come into her life. She had seen death
• 4:33:45
  for the second time, but this time active and in being end of chapter
• 4:33:52
  four, Chapter five, the sound of a drum. The next Dick was
• 4:34:00
  sitting under the shade of the r to. He had a box of fish
• 4:34:04
  hooks beside him, and he was bending a line on to one of them.
• 4:34:10
  There had originally been a couple of dozen hooks, large and small in
• 4:34:14
  the box. There remained now only six, four small and two large ones.
• 4:34:22
  It was a large one he was fixing to the line, for he
• 4:34:25
  intended to go on the morrow to the old place to fetch the bananas,
• 4:34:29
  and on the way to try for a fish in the deeper parts of the
• 4:34:33
  lagoon. It was late afternoon and the heat had gone out of the day.
• 4:34:38
  Emmeline, seated on the grass opposite him, was holding the end of
• 4:34:42
  the line whilst he got the kinks out of it. When suddenly she raised
• 4:34:48
  her head. There was not a breath of wind, the hush of the
• 4:34:52
  far distant surf came through the blue weather. The only audible sound except now
• 4:34:59
  and then a movement and flutter from the bird perched in the branches of the
• 4:35:03
  artu. All at once, another sound mixed itself with the voice of the
• 4:35:08
  surf, a faint, throbbing sound, like the beating of a distant drum.
• 4:35:15
  Listen, said Emmeline. Dick paused for a moment. All the sounds
• 4:35:22
  of the island were familiar. This was something quite strange, faint and far
• 4:35:30
  away, now rapid, now slow, coming from where who could say?
• 4:35:37
  Sometimes it seemed to come from the sea, sometimes if the fancy of the
• 4:35:41
  listener turned that way. From the woods. As they listened, a sigh
• 4:35:48
  came from overhead. The evening breeze had risen and was moving in the leaves
• 4:35:53
  of the Artu tree, just as you might wipe a picture off of a
• 4:35:57
  slate. The breeze banished the sound. Dick went on with his work.
• 4:36:06
  Next morning. Early, he embarked in the dinghy. He took the hook
• 4:36:11
  and the line with him, and some raw fish for bait. Emmeline helped
• 4:36:15
  him to push off and stood on the bank, waving her hand as he
• 4:36:18
  rounded the little cape covered with wild coconut. These expeditions of Dick's were one
• 4:36:25
  of her sorrows. To be left alone was frightful, Yet she never complained.
• 4:36:32
  She was living in a paradise, and something told her that behind all
• 4:36:37
  that sun, all that splendor of blue sea and sky, behind the flowers
• 4:36:42
  and the leaves, behind all that specious and simpering appearance of happiness in nature
• 4:36:49
  lurked a frown and the dragon of mischance. Dick rode for about a mile.
• 4:36:56
  Then he shipped his skulls and let the dinghy flo The water here was
• 4:37:02
  very deep, so deep that despite its clearness, the bottom was invisible.
• 4:37:07
  The sunlight over the reef struck through it diagonally, filling it with sparkles.
• 4:37:15
  The fisherman baited his hook with a piece from the belly of a scaus and
• 4:37:18
  lowered it down out of sight. Then he belayed the line to a thole
• 4:37:23
  pin, and, sitting in the bottom of the boat, hung his head
• 4:37:26
  over the side and gazed deep down into the water. Sometimes there was nothing
• 4:37:33
  to see but just the deep blue of the water. Then a flight of
• 4:37:38
  spangled arrowheads would cross the line of sight and vanish, pursued by a form
• 4:37:45
  like a moving bar of gold. Then a great fish would materialize itself and
• 4:37:52
  hang in the shadow of the boat, motionless as a stone save the movement
• 4:37:56
  of its gills. Next moment, with a twist of the tail, it
• 4:38:02
  would be gone. Suddenly the dinghy shored over and might have capsized only for
• 4:38:07
  the fact that Dick was sitting on the opposite side to the side from which
• 4:38:11
  the line hung. Then the boat righted, the line slackened, and the
• 4:38:17
  surface of the lagoon a few fathoms away boiled, as if being stirred from
• 4:38:22
  below by a great silver stick. He had hooked an alba core. He
• 4:38:29
  tied the end of the fishing line to a skull, undid the line from
• 4:38:32
  the foal pin, and flung the scarl overboard. He did all this with
• 4:38:37
  wonderful rapidity while the line was still slack Next moment, the skull was rushing
• 4:38:44
  over the surface of the lagoon, now towards the reef, now towards the
• 4:38:48
  shore, now flat, now end up. Now it would be jerked under
• 4:38:52
  the surface, entirely, vanish for a moment, and then reappear. It
• 4:38:59
  was almost astonishing thing to watch, for the skull seemed alive, viciously alive
• 4:39:06
  and imbued with some destructive purpose, as in fact it was the most venomous
• 4:39:14
  of living things, and the most intelligent could not have fought the Great fish
• 4:39:18
  better. The Alba core would make a frantic dash down the lagoon, hoping
• 4:39:23
  perhaps to find in the open sea a release from his foe. Then,
• 4:39:29
  half drowned from the pull of the skull, he would pause, dart from
• 4:39:33
  side to sign in perplexity, and then make up an equally frantic dash up
• 4:39:38
  the lagoon to be checked in the same manner, seeking the deepest steps,
• 4:39:44
  he would sink the skull a few fathoms, and once he sought the air,
• 4:39:48
  leaping into the sunlight like a crescent of silver, whilst the splash of
• 4:39:53
  him as he fell echoed amidst the trees bordering the lagoon. Hour passed before
• 4:40:00
  the Great Fish showed signs of weakening. The struggle had taken place up to
• 4:40:06
  this close to the shore, But now the skull swam out into the broad
• 4:40:11
  sheet of sunlit water and slowly began to describe large circles rippling up the peaceful
• 4:40:18
  blue into flashing wavelets. It was a melancholy sight to watch, for the
• 4:40:26
  great Fish had made a good fight, and one could see him through the
• 4:40:30
  eye of imagination, beaten, half drowned, dazed and moving as is the
• 4:40:37
  fashion of dazed things in a circle. Dick, working the remaining oar at
• 4:40:42
  the stern of the boat, rowed out and seized the floating skull, bringing
• 4:40:48
  it on board. Foot by foot, he hauled his catch toward the boat
• 4:40:53
  till the long, gleaming line of the thing came dimly into view. The
• 4:41:00
  fight had been heard for miles through the lagoon water by all sorts of swimming
• 4:41:04
  things. The lord of the place had got sound of it. A dark
• 4:41:11
  fin rippled the water, and as Dick, pulling on his line, hauled
• 4:41:17
  his catch closer, a monstrous gray shadow stained the depths, and the glittering
• 4:41:22
  streak that was the albacore vanished, as if engulfed in a cloud. The
• 4:41:30
  line came in slack, and Dick hauled in the albacore's head. It had
• 4:41:37
  been divided from the body as if with a huge pair of shears. The
• 4:41:42
  gray shadow slipped by the boat, and Dick, mad with rage, shouted
• 4:41:48
  and shook his fist at it, then seizing the albacore's head, from which
• 4:41:52
  he had taken the hook. He hurled it at the monster in the water.
• 4:41:59
  The great shark, with a movement of the tail that caused the water
• 4:42:02
  to swirl and the dinghy to rock, turned upon his back and engulfed the
• 4:42:07
  head. Then he slowly sank and vanished, just as if he had been
• 4:42:15
  dissolved. He had come off best in this their first encounter, such as
• 4:42:22
  it was, end of chapter five, Chapter six, Sails upon the Sea.
• 4:42:30
  Dick put the hook away and took to the skulls. He had a
• 4:42:34
  three mile row before him, and the tide was coming in, which did
• 4:42:38
  not make it any easier. As he rode, he talked and grumbled to
• 4:42:44
  himself. He had been in a grumbling mood for some time past the chief
• 4:42:49
  cause Emmeline. In the last few months, she had changed, even her
• 4:42:56
  face had changed. A new person had come upon the island, it seemed
• 4:43:02
  to him, and taken the place of the Emmeline he had known from earliest
• 4:43:06
  childhood. This one looked different. He did not know that she had grown
• 4:43:12
  beautiful. He just knew that she looked different. Also, she had developed
• 4:43:18
  new ways that displeased him. She would go off and bathe by herself,
• 4:43:23
  For instance, up to six months or so ago, he had been quite
• 4:43:29
  contented, sleeping and eating, and hunting for food and cooking it, building
• 4:43:33
  and rebuilding the house, exploring the woods and the reef. But lately a
• 4:43:40
  spirit of restlessness had come upon him. He did not know exactly what he
• 4:43:45
  wanted. He had a vague feeling that he wanted to go away from the
• 4:43:48
  place where he was, not from the island, but from the place where
• 4:43:53
  they had pitched their tent, or rather built their house. It may have
• 4:43:59
  been the spirit of civilization crying out in him, telling him of all he
• 4:44:03
  was missing, of the cities and the streets, and the houses, and
• 4:44:07
  the businesses, and the striving after gold, the striving after power. It
• 4:44:15
  may have been simply the man in him crying out for love, and not
• 4:44:19
  knowing yet that love was at his elbow. The dinghy glided along, hugging
• 4:44:27
  the shore, past the little glades of fern and the cathedral gloom of the
• 4:44:33
  bread fruit. Then rounding a promontory, she opened the view of the break
• 4:44:37
  in the reef. A little bit of the white strand was visible, but
• 4:44:42
  he was not looking that way. He was looking towards the reef at a
• 4:44:48
  tiny dark spot, not noticeable unless searched for by the eye, or was
• 4:44:55
  when he came upon these expeditions. Just here he would hang on to his
• 4:45:00
  oars and gaze over there, where the gulls were flying and the breakers thundering.
• 4:45:07
  A few years ago, the spot filled him with dread as well as
• 4:45:11
  curiosity. But from familiarity in the dullness that time casts on everything, the
• 4:45:18
  dread had almost vanished. But the curiosity remained, the curiosity that makes a
• 4:45:25
  child look on at the slaughter of an animal, even though his soul revolts
• 4:45:30
  at it. He gazed for a while, and then he went on pulling,
• 4:45:34
  and the dinghy approached the beach. Something had happened on the beach.
• 4:45:41
  The sand was all trampled and stained red. Here and there in the center
• 4:45:45
  lay the remains of a great fire, still smoldering, And just where the
• 4:45:51
  water lapped the sand lay two deep grooves, as if two heavy boats had
• 4:45:56
  been beached there. A south sea would have told from the shape of the
• 4:46:02
  grooves and the little marks of the outriggers that two heavy canoes had been beached
• 4:46:07
  there, and they had the day before, early in the afternoon, two
• 4:46:14
  canoes possibly from that far away island, which cast a stain on the horizon
• 4:46:18
  to the south. Our west had entered the lagoon, one in pursuit of
• 4:46:22
  the other. What happened then had better be left veiled. Our war drum
• 4:46:30
  with a shark skin head had set the woods throbbing. The victory was celebrated
• 4:46:36
  all night, and at dawn the victor's manned the two canoes and set sail
• 4:46:41
  for the home or hell they had come from. Had you examined the strand,
• 4:46:48
  you would have found that a line had been drawn across the beach,
• 4:46:52
  beyond which there were no footmarks. That meant that the rest of the island
• 4:46:56
  was for some reason taboo. Dick pulled the nose of the boat up a
• 4:47:03
  bit on the strand, and then he looked around him. He picked up
• 4:47:07
  a broken spear that had been cast away or forgotten. It was made of
• 4:47:11
  some hard wood and barbed with iron. On the right hand side of the
• 4:47:18
  beach lay something between the cocoanut trees. He approached. It was a mass
• 4:47:25
  of offal, the entrails of a dozen sheep that seemed cast there in one
• 4:47:30
  mound. Yet there were no sheep on the island, and sheep are not
• 4:47:34
  carried as a rule in war canoes. The sand on the beach was eloquent,
• 4:47:42
  the foot pursuing, and the foot pursued the knee of the fallen one,
• 4:47:48
  and then the forehead and outspread hands, the heel of the chief,
• 4:47:52
  who had slain his enemy, beaten the body flat, burst a whole through
• 4:47:59
  it which he has put his head, and who stands absolutely wearing his enemy
• 4:48:06
  as a cloak. The head of the man dragged on his back to be
• 4:48:10
  butchered like a sheep. Of these things spoke the sand. As far as
• 4:48:17
  the sand traces could speak. The story of the battle were still being told.
• 4:48:22
  The screams and the shouting, the clashing of clubs and spears were gone,
• 4:48:29
  Yet the ghost of the fight remained. If the sand could bear such
• 4:48:33
  traces and tell such tales, who shall say that the plastic ether was destitute
• 4:48:40
  of the story of the fight and the butchery, however that may have been.
• 4:48:45
  Dick, looking around him, had the shivering sense of having just escaped
• 4:48:51
  from danger. Whoever had been had gone. He could tell that by the
• 4:48:56
  canoe traces gone either our not to see, or up to the right stretch
• 4:49:02
  of the lagoon it was important to determine this. He climbed to the hilltop
• 4:49:07
  and swept the sea with his eyes there away to the southwest. Far away
• 4:49:14
  on the sea, he could distinguish the brown sails of two canoes. There
• 4:49:18
  was something indescribably mournful and lonely in their appearance. They looked like withered leaves,
• 4:49:27
  brown moths blown to sea, derelicts of autumn. Then, remembering the
• 4:49:34
  beach, these things became freighted with the most sinister thoughts. For the mind
• 4:49:40
  of the gazer they were hurrying away, having done their work. That they
• 4:49:45
  looked lonely and old and mournful, and like withered leaves blown across the sea,
• 4:49:52
  only heightened the horror. Dick had never seen canoes before, but he
• 4:49:59
  knew that the things were boats of some sort, holding people, and that
• 4:50:03
  the people had left all these traces on the beach. How much of the
• 4:50:08
  horror of the thing was revealed to his subconscious intelligence? Who can say?
• 4:50:15
  He had climbed the boulder, and now he sat down with his knees drawn
• 4:50:18
  up and his hands clasped round them. Whenever he came round to this side
• 4:50:25
  of the island, something happened of a fateful or sinister nature. The last
• 4:50:30
  time he had nearly lost the dinghy. He had beat the little boat in
• 4:50:34
  such a way that she floated off, and the tide was just in the
• 4:50:38
  act of stealing her and sweeping her from the lagoon out to the sea.
• 4:50:42
  When he returned, laden with his bananas and rushing into the water up to
• 4:50:48
  his waist, saved her. Another time, he had fallen out of a
• 4:50:52
  tree and just by a miracle, escaped to death. Another time, a
• 4:50:57
  hurricane had broken, lashing the lagoon into snow and sending the cocoa nuts bounding
• 4:51:03
  and flying like tennis balls across the strand. This time he had just escaped
• 4:51:10
  something he knew, not exactly what it was, almost as if Providence were
• 4:51:15
  saying to him, don't come here. He watched the brown sails as they
• 4:51:22
  dwindled in the wind, blowing blue. Then he came down from the hilltop
• 4:51:26
  and cut his bananas. He cut four large bunches, which caused him to
• 4:51:33
  make two journeys to the boat. When the bananas were stowed, he pushed
• 4:51:37
  off. For a long time, a great curiosity had been pulling at his
• 4:51:41
  heart strings, a curiosity of which he was dimly ashamed. Fear had given
• 4:51:48
  it birth, and fear still clung to it. It was perhaps the element
• 4:51:53
  of fear and the awful delight of daring the unknown, that made him give
• 4:51:59
  way. He had rowed perhaps a hundred yards when he turned the boat's head
• 4:52:04
  and made for the reef. It was more than five years since that day
• 4:52:10
  when he rowed across the lagoon. Emmeline sitting in the stern with her wreath
• 4:52:15
  of flowers in her hand, It might have been only yesterday, for everything
• 4:52:21
  seemed just the same, the thunderous surf and the flying gulls, the blinding
• 4:52:27
  sunlight, and the salt fresh smell of the sea. The palm tree at
• 4:52:33
  the entrance of the lagoon still bent gazing into the water, and round the
• 4:52:37
  projection of coral to which he had last maored the boat still lay a fragment
• 4:52:42
  of the rope which he had cut in his hurry to escape. Ships had
• 4:52:48
  come into the lagoon, perhaps during the five years, but no one had
• 4:52:53
  noticed anything on the reef, for it was only from the hilltop that a
• 4:52:57
  full view of what was there could be seen, and then only by eyes
• 4:53:03
  knowing where to look. From the beach, there was visible, just as
• 4:53:08
  speck. It might have been, perhaps an old bit of wreckage flung there
• 4:53:14
  by a wave in some big storm, a piece of old wreckage that had
• 4:53:18
  been tossed hither and thither for years, and had at last found a place
• 4:53:23
  of rest. Dick tied the boat up and stepped on to the reef.
• 4:53:30
  It was high tide, just as before, the breeze was blowing strongly,
• 4:53:34
  and overhead a man of war bird black as ebony, with a blood red
• 4:53:38
  bill, came sailing the wind, doming out his wings. He circled in
• 4:53:45
  the air and cried out fiercely, as if resenting the presence of the intruder.
• 4:53:52
  Then he passed away, let himself be blown away as it were.
• 4:53:56
  Across the lagoon, wheel circled and passed out to sea. Dick approached the
• 4:54:04
  place he knew, and there lay the little old barrel, all walked by
• 4:54:11
  the powerful sun. The staves stood apart, and the hooping was rusted and
• 4:54:17
  broken, and whatever it had contained in the way of spirit and conviviality had
• 4:54:22
  long ago drained away. Beside the barrel lay a skeleton, round which lay
• 4:54:30
  a few rags of cloth. The skull had fallen to one side, and
• 4:54:36
  the lower jaw had fallen from the skull. The bones of the hands and
• 4:54:41
  feet were still articulated, and the ribs had not fallen in It was all
• 4:54:47
  white and bleached, and the sun shone on it as indifferently as on the
• 4:54:52
  coral. This shell and framework that had once been a man. There was
• 4:54:59
  nothing dreadful about it, but a whole world of wonder. To Dick,
• 4:55:06
  who had not been broken into the idea of death, who had not learned
• 4:55:10
  to associate it with graves and funerals, sorrow, eternity, and hell.
• 4:55:17
  The thing spoke as it never could have spoken to you or me. Looking
• 4:55:22
  at it, things linked themselves together in his mind, the skeletons of birds
• 4:55:27
  he had found in the woods, the fish she had slain, even trees
• 4:55:33
  lying dead and rotten, even the shells of crabs. If you had asked
• 4:55:40
  him what lay before him, and if he could have expressed the thought in
• 4:55:44
  his mind, he would have answered you change. All the philosophy in the
• 4:55:51
  world could not have told him more than he knew just then about death,
• 4:55:57
  He who did not even know its name. He was held spellbound by the
• 4:56:04
  marvel and miracle of the thing. And the thoughts that suddenly crowded his mind
• 4:56:10
  like a host of specters for whom a door has just been opened. Just
• 4:56:15
  as a child, by unanswerable logic, knows that a fire which has burned
• 4:56:21
  him once will burn him again, or will burn another person, he knew
• 4:56:27
  that, just as the form before him was, his form would be some
• 4:56:33
  day and emmelines. Then came the vague question, which is borne not of
• 4:56:40
  the brain but the heart, and which is the basis of all religions,
• 4:56:45
  Where shall I be? Then his mind was not of an introspective nature,
• 4:56:52
  and the question just strayed across it and was gone. And still the wonder
• 4:56:59
  of the thing held him. He was, for the first time in his
• 4:57:03
  life in a reverie. The corpse that had shocked and terrified him five years
• 4:57:08
  ago had cast seeds of thought with its dead fingers upon his mind. The
• 4:57:15
  skeleton had brought them to maturity. The full fact of universal death suddenly appeared
• 4:57:23
  before him, and he recognized it. He stood for a long time motionless,
• 4:57:30
  and then, with a deep sigh, turned to the boat and pushed
• 4:57:33
  off, without once looking back at the reef. He crossed the lagoon and
• 4:57:40
  rowed slowly homewards, keeping in the shelter of the tree shadows as much as
• 4:57:45
  possible. Even looking at him from the shore, you might have noticed a
• 4:57:51
  difference in him. Your savage paddles his canoe or skulls his boat, alert,
• 4:57:56
  glancing about him, a touch with nature at all points. Though he
• 4:58:02
  be lazy as a cat and sleeps half the day awake, he is all
• 4:58:07
  ears and eyes, a creature reacting to the least external impression. Dick,
• 4:58:15
  as he rode back, did not look about him. He was thinking or
• 4:58:19
  retrospecting. The savage in him had received a check. As he turned the
• 4:58:26
  little cape where the wild cocoanut blazed, he looked over his shoulder. A
• 4:58:32
  figure was standing on the sward by the edge of the water. It was
• 4:58:37
  Emmeline. End of chapter six, Chapter seven the schooner. They carried the
• 4:58:45
  bananas up to the house and hung them from a branch of the artu.
• 4:58:51
  Then Dick, on his knees, lit the fire to prepare the evening meal.
• 4:58:56
  When it was over, he went down to where the boat was moored
• 4:58:59
  and re turned with something in his hand. It was the javelin with the
• 4:59:03
  iron point, or rather the two pieces of it. He had said nothing
• 4:59:08
  of what he had seen to the girl. Emmeline was seated on the grass.
• 4:59:14
  She had a long strip of the striped flannel stuff about her, worn
• 4:59:18
  like a scarf, and she had another piece in her hand, which she
• 4:59:22
  was hemming. The bird was hopping about, pecking at a banana which they
• 4:59:26
  had thrown to him. A light breeze made the shadow of the r two
• 4:59:32
  leaves dance upon the grass, and the serrated leaves of the bread fruit to
• 4:59:37
  patter one on the other, with the sound of raindrops falling on glass.
• 4:59:42
  Where did you get it, asked Emmeline, staring at the piece of the
• 4:59:47
  javelin which Dick had flung down almost beside her, whilst he went into the
• 4:59:52
  house to fetch the knife. It was on the beach over there, he
• 4:59:56
  replied, taking his seat and examining the two fragments to see how he could
• 5:00:00
  splice them together. Emmeline looked at the pieces, putting them together in her
• 5:00:06
  mind. She did not like the look of the thing, so keen and
• 5:00:11
  savage and stained, dark afoot or more from the point people have been there,
• 5:00:18
  said Dick, putting the two pieces together and examining the fracture critically.
• 5:00:23
  Where over there this was lying on the sand, and the sand was all
• 5:00:30
  trod up, Dick said Emmeline. Who were the people? I don't know.
• 5:00:37
  I went up the hill and saw their boats going away far away out
• 5:00:41
  This was lying on the sand, Dick said Emmeline. Do you remember the
• 5:00:48
  noise yesterday, Yes, said Dick. I heard it in the night when
• 5:00:56
  in the night before the moon went away. That was them, said Dick.
• 5:01:03
  Dick, Yes, who were they? I don't know, replied Dick.
• 5:01:10
  It was in the night before the moon went away, and it went
• 5:01:14
  on and on, beating in the trees. I thought I was asleep,
• 5:01:18
  and then I knew I was awake. You were asleep, and I pushed
• 5:01:21
  you to listen, but you couldn't wake you was so asleep. Then the
• 5:01:26
  moon went away and the noise went on. How did they make the noise?
• 5:01:32
  I don't know, replied Dick. But it was them, and they
• 5:01:36
  left this on the sand, and the sand was all trod up, and
• 5:01:40
  I saw their boats from the hill away out far. I thought I heard
• 5:01:45
  voices, said Emmeline, but I was not sure. She fell into meditation,
• 5:01:52
  watching her companion at work on the savage and sinister looking thing in his
• 5:01:56
  hands. He was splicing the two pieces together. There were the strip of
• 5:02:00
  the brown cloth like stuff which is wrapped round the stalks of the cocoa palm
• 5:02:04
  fronds. The thing seemed to have been hurled there out of the blue by
• 5:02:10
  some unseen hand. When he had spliced the pieces, doing so with marvelous
• 5:02:17
  dexterity, he took the thing short down near the point and began thrusting it
• 5:02:22
  into the soft earth to clean it. Then with a bit of flannel he
• 5:02:26
  polished it till it shone. He felt a keen delight in it. It
• 5:02:32
  was useless as a fish spear because it had no barb, but it was
• 5:02:36
  a weapon. It was useless as a weapon because there was no foe on
• 5:02:41
  the island to use it against. Still it was a weapon. When he
• 5:02:47
  had finished scrubbing at it, he rose, hitched his old trousers up,
• 5:02:51
  tightening the belt of cocoa cloth which Emmeline had made for him, and went
• 5:02:56
  into the house and got his fish spear and stalked off to the boat,
• 5:03:00
  calling out to Emmeline to follow him. They crossed over to the reef,
• 5:03:04
  where as usual, he divested himself of clothing. It was strange that out
• 5:03:11
  here he would go about stark naked, yet on the island he always wore
• 5:03:15
  some covering. But not so strange perhaps, after all, the sea is
• 5:03:22
  a great purifier, both of the mind and the body. Before that great
• 5:03:27
  sweet spirit, people do not think in the same way as they think far
• 5:03:33
  inland. What woman would appear in a town, or or on a country
• 5:03:37
  road, or even bathing in a river, as she appears bathing in the
• 5:03:41
  sea. Some instinct made Dick cover himself up on shore and strip naked on
• 5:03:48
  the reef. In a minute, he was down by the edge of the
• 5:03:52
  surf, javelin in one hand, fish spear in the other. Emmeline,
• 5:03:56
  by a little pool the bottom of wind, which was covered with branching coral,
• 5:04:02
  sat gazing down into its depths, last in a reverie like that into
• 5:04:07
  which we fall when gazing at shapes in the fire. She had sat some
• 5:04:12
  time like this. When a shout from Dick aroused her. She started to
• 5:04:17
  her feet and gazed to where he was pointing. An amazing thing was there
• 5:04:22
  just to the east, just rounding the curve of the reef, and scarcely
• 5:04:27
  a quarter of a mile from it was coming a big topsail schooner. A
• 5:04:32
  beautiful sight. She was heeling to the breeze, with every sail drawing,
• 5:04:37
  and the white foam like a feather at her forefoot. Dick, with the
• 5:04:42
  javelin in his hand, was standing gazing at her. He had dropped his
• 5:04:47
  fish spear, and he stood as motionless as though he was carved out of
• 5:04:51
  stone. Emmeline ran to him and stood beside him. Neither of them spoke
• 5:04:56
  a word. As the vessel drew closer, everything was visible. So close
• 5:05:02
  was she now, from the reef points on her great mainsail, luminous with
• 5:05:07
  the sunlight, and white as the wing of a gull, to the rail
• 5:05:11
  of the bulwarks. A crowd of men were hanging over the port bulwarks,
• 5:05:15
  gazing at the island and the figures on the reef, browned by the sun
• 5:05:19
  and sea breeze, Emmeline's hair blowing on the wind, and the point of
• 5:05:26
  Dick's javelin flashing in the sun. They looked an ideal pair of savages seen
• 5:05:32
  from the schooner's deck. They're going away, said Emmeline, with a long
• 5:05:37
  drawn breath of relief. Dick had made no reply. He stared at the
• 5:05:42
  schooner a moment longer in silence. Then, having made sure that she was
• 5:05:47
  standing away from the land, he began to run up and down, calling
• 5:05:52
  out wildly and beckoning to the vessel as if to call her back. A
• 5:05:57
  moment later a sound came on there, a faint hail. A flag was
• 5:06:03
  run to the peak and dipped as in derision, and the vessel continued on
• 5:06:08
  her course. As a matter of fact, she had been at the point
• 5:06:12
  of putting about her captain had for the moment been undecided as to whether the
• 5:06:18
  forms on the reef were those of castaways or savages, But the javelin in
• 5:06:22
  Dick's hand had turned the scale of his opinion in favor of the theory of
• 5:06:27
  savages. End of chapter seven, Chapter eight, Love steps in. Two
• 5:06:37
  birds were sitting in the branches of the r to tree cocoa had taken a
• 5:06:42
  mate. They had built a nest out of fibers pulled from the wrappings of
• 5:06:48
  the cocoa fronts, bits of stick and wiregrass, anything, in fact,
• 5:06:53
  even fibers from the palmetto thatch of the house below. The pilferings of birds
• 5:07:00
  the building of nests. What charming incidents they are in the great episode of
• 5:07:06
  spring. The hawthorn tree never bloomed here. The climate was that of eternal
• 5:07:12
  summer. Yet the spirit of May came just as she comes to the English
• 5:07:18
  countryside or the German forest. The doings and the r tu branches greatly interested
• 5:07:26
  Emmeline. The love making and the nest building were conducted quite in the usual
• 5:07:30
  manner, according to rules laid down by nature and carried out by men and
• 5:07:37
  birds. All sorts of quaint sounds came filtering down through the leaves from the
• 5:07:42
  branch where the sapphire colored lovers sat side by side, or the fork where
• 5:07:48
  the nest was beginning to form, croonings and cluckings, sounds like the flirting
• 5:07:55
  of a fan, the sounds of a squabble, followed by the sounds that
• 5:08:00
  told of the squabble made up. Sometimes after one of these squabbles, a
• 5:08:06
  pale, blue, downy feather or two would come floating earthwards, touch the
• 5:08:11
  palmetto leaves on the house roof, and cling there ll be blown onto the
• 5:08:15
  grass. It was some days after the appearance of the schooner, and Dick
• 5:08:22
  was making ready to go into the woods and pick quavas. He had all
• 5:08:26
  the morning been engaged in making a basket to carry them in. In civilization,
• 5:08:32
  he would, judging from his mechanical talent, perhaps have been an engineer,
• 5:08:37
  building bridges and ships instead of palmetto leaf baskets and cane houses. Who
• 5:08:44
  knows if he would have been happier. The heat of midday had passed,
• 5:08:48
  when, with the basket hanging over his shoulder on a piece of cane,
• 5:08:52
  he started for the woods. Emmeline following the place they were going to al
• 5:08:59
  was filled her with a vague dread. Not for a great deal would she
• 5:09:03
  have gone there alone. Dick had discovered it in one of his rambles.
• 5:09:10
  They entered the wood and passed a little well, a well without apparent saw
• 5:09:15
  sow outlet, and a bottom of fine white sand. How the sand had
• 5:09:21
  formed there, it would be impossible to say, but there it was,
• 5:09:25
  and around the margin grew ferns, redoubling themselves on the surface of the crystal
• 5:09:30
  clear water. They left this to the right and struck into the heart of
• 5:09:36
  the wood. The heat of midday still lurked there. The way was clear,
• 5:09:41
  for there was a sort of path between the trees, as if in
• 5:09:45
  very ancient days there had been a road right across this path, half lost
• 5:09:52
  in shadow, half sunlit. The leanas hung their ropes. The hutu tree,
• 5:09:57
  with its powdering of delicate blue bossoms, here stood, showing its lost
• 5:10:02
  loveliness to the sun. In the shade, the scarlet hibiscus burned like a
• 5:10:07
  flame. R To and bread fruit trees and cocoanut bordered the way. As
• 5:10:15
  they proceeded, the trees grew denser and the path more obscure, all at
• 5:10:21
  once. Rounding a sharp turn, the path ended in a valley carpeted with
• 5:10:26
  fern. This was the place that all was filled emmeline with an undefined dread.
• 5:10:33
  One side of it was all built up in terraces with huge blocks of
• 5:10:37
  stone, blocks of stone so enormous that the wonder was how the ancient builders
• 5:10:44
  had put them in their places. Trees grew along the terraces, thrusting their
• 5:10:49
  roots between the interstices of the blocks. At their base, slightly tilted forward,
• 5:10:56
  as if with the sinkage of years, stood a great stone figure,
• 5:11:00
  roughly carved thirty feet high, at least mysterious, looking the very spirit of
• 5:11:07
  the place. This figure, and the terraces, the valley itself, and
• 5:11:12
  the very trees that grew there, inspired Emmeline with deep curiosity and vague fear
• 5:11:22
  people had been here once. Sometimes she could fancy she saw dark shadows moving
• 5:11:27
  amidst the trees, and the whisper of the foliage seemed to her to hide
• 5:11:32
  voices at times, even as its shadow concealed forms. It was indeed an
• 5:11:38
  uncanny place to be alone in, even under the bright light of day.
• 5:11:45
  All across the Pacific, for thousands of miles, you find relics of the
• 5:11:48
  past like these, scattered through the islands. These temple places are nearly all
• 5:11:55
  the same, great terraces of stone, massive idols, desolation, overgrown with
• 5:12:03
  foliage. They hint at one religion and a time when the sea space of
• 5:12:08
  the Pacific was a continent, which, sinking slowly through the ages, has
• 5:12:14
  left only its higher lands and hilltops visible in the form of islands. Round
• 5:12:19
  these places, the woods are thicker than elsewhere, hinting at the presence there
• 5:12:25
  wants of sacred groves. The idols are immense, their faces are vague.
• 5:12:33
  The storms and the suns and the rains of the ages have cast over them
• 5:12:37
  a veil. The sphinx is understandable and a toy compared to these things,
• 5:12:45
  some of which have a stature of fifty feet, whose creation is veiled in
• 5:12:49
  absolute mystery, the gods of a people forever and forever lost. The Stone
• 5:12:57
  Man was the name Emmeline had given the idol of the valley, and sometimes
• 5:13:03
  at nights, when her thoughts would stray that way, she would picture him
• 5:13:07
  standing all alone in the moonlight or starlight, staring straight before him. He
• 5:13:15
  seemed forever listening. Unconsciously, one fell to listening too, and then the
• 5:13:21
  valley seemed steeped in a supernatural silence. He was not good to be alone
• 5:13:27
  with. Emmeline sat down amidst the fears, just at his base. When
• 5:13:33
  one was close to him, he lost the suggestion of life, and was
• 5:13:37
  simply a great stone which cast a shadow in the sun. Dick threw himself
• 5:13:44
  down also to rest. Then he rose up and went off amidst the guava
• 5:13:48
  bushes, plucking the fruit and filling his basket. Since he had seen the
• 5:13:53
  schooner, the white men on her decks, the great masts and sails,
• 5:14:00
  and general appearance of freedom and speed, and unknown adventure, he had been
• 5:14:04
  more than ordinarily glum and restless. Perhaps he connected her in his mind with
• 5:14:11
  the far away vision of the Northumberland, and the idea of other places and
• 5:14:17
  lands, and the yearning for change that the idea of them inspired. He
• 5:14:23
  came back with his basket full of the ripe fruit, gave some to the
• 5:14:29
  girl, and sat down beside her. When she had finished eating them,
• 5:14:33
  she took the cane that he used to carry the basket and held it in
• 5:14:37
  her hands. She was bending it now in the form of a bow,
• 5:14:41
  when it slipped, flew out and struck her companion a sharp blow on the
• 5:14:45
  side of his face. Almost on the instant, he turned and slapped her
• 5:14:52
  on the shoulder. She stared at him for a moment in troubled amazement.
• 5:14:56
  A sob came in her throat. Then some veil seemed lifted, some wizard's
• 5:15:03
  wand stretched out some mysterious vile. Broken. As she looked at him like
• 5:15:11
  that, he suddenly and fiercely clasped her in his arms. He held her
• 5:15:17
  like this for a moment, dazed, stupefied, not knowing what to do
• 5:15:22
  with her. Then her lips told him, for they met his in an
• 5:15:26
  endless kiss. End of chapter eight, Chapter nine, The Sleep of Paradise.
• 5:15:38
  The moon rose up that evening and shot her silver arrows at the house
• 5:15:44
  under the Artu tree. The house was empty. Then the moon came across
• 5:15:49
  the sea and across the reef. She lit the lagoon in its dark,
• 5:15:55
  dim heart. She lit the coral brains and set spaces and the fish,
• 5:16:02
  casting their shadows on the sand and the coral. The keeper of the lagoon
• 5:16:07
  rose to greet her, and the fin of him broke her reflection on the
• 5:16:11
  mirror like surface into a thousand glittering ripples. She saw the white, staring
• 5:16:18
  ribs of the form on the reef. Then, peeping over the trees,
• 5:16:23
  she looked down into the valley where the Great Idol of Stone had kept his
• 5:16:27
  solitary vigil for five thousand years, perhaps or more. At his base in
• 5:16:34
  his shadow, looking as if under his protection, lay two human beings,
• 5:16:41
  naked, clasped in each other's arms, and fast asleep. One could scarcely
• 5:16:47
  pity his vigil, had it been marked sometimes through the years by such an
• 5:16:52
  incident as this. The thing had been conducted just as the birds conducted their
• 5:16:57
  love affairs, an affair absolutely natural, absolutely blameless, and without sin.
• 5:17:07
  It was a marriage according to nature, without feast or guests consummated with accidental
• 5:17:14
  cynicism under the shadow of religion a thousand years dead. So happy in their
• 5:17:21
  ignorance were they that they only knew that suddenly life had changed, that the
• 5:17:27
  skies and the sea were bluer, and that they had become, in some
• 5:17:33
  magical way, one a part of the other. The birds on the tree
• 5:17:38
  above were equally as happy in their ignorance and in their love. End of
• 5:17:47
  chapter nine. End of Part one, Part two, Chapter ten, An
• 5:17:52
  island honeymoon. One day Dick climbed on to the tree above the house,
• 5:18:00
  and driving Madame Coco off, the nest upon which she was sitting, peeped
• 5:18:03
  in. There were several pale green eggs in it. He did not disturb
• 5:18:10
  them, but climbed down again, and the bird resumed her seat, as
• 5:18:15
  if nothing had happened. Such an occurrence would have terrified a bird used to
• 5:18:19
  the ways of men, But here the birds were so fearless and so full
• 5:18:25
  of confidence, that often they would follow Emmeline in the wood, flying from
• 5:18:29
  branch to branch, peering at her through the leaves, lighting quite close to
• 5:18:33
  her, once even on her shoulder. The days passed, Dick had lost
• 5:18:41
  his restlessness. His wish to wander had vanished. He had no reason to
• 5:18:47
  wander. Perhaps that was the reason why, in all the broad earth he
• 5:18:53
  could not have found anything more desirable than what he had. Instead, now
• 5:19:00
  of finding a half naked savage followed dog like by his mate, he would
• 5:19:06
  have found of an evening a pair of lovers wandering on the reef. They
• 5:19:11
  had, in a pathetic sort of way, attempted to adorn the house with
• 5:19:15
  a blue flowering creeper, taken from the wood and trained over the entrance.
• 5:19:21
  Emmeline, up to this had mostly done the cooking, such as it was.
• 5:19:25
  Dick helped her now always. He talked to her, no longer in
• 5:19:30
  short sentences, flung out as if to a dog, and she, almost
• 5:19:36
  losing the strange reserve that had clung to her from childhood, half showed him
• 5:19:41
  her mind. It was a curious mind, the mind of a dreamer,
• 5:19:45
  almost the mind of a poet. The chlorocorns dwelt there, and vague shapes
• 5:19:52
  born of things she had heard about or dreamt of. She had thought about
• 5:19:57
  the sea and stars, flowers and birds. Dick would listen to her as
• 5:20:03
  she talked, as a man might listen to the sound of a rivulet.
• 5:20:07
  His practical mind could take no share in the dreams of his other half,
• 5:20:12
  but her conversation pleased him. He would look at her for a long time
• 5:20:18
  together, absorbed in thought he was admiring her. Her hair, blue black
• 5:20:26
  and glossy, tangled him in its meshes. He would stroke it so to
• 5:20:30
  speak with his eyes, and then pull her close to him and bury his
• 5:20:34
  face in it. The smell of it was intoxicating. He breathed her as
• 5:20:41
  one does the perfume of a rose. Her ears were small, like little
• 5:20:47
  white shells. He would take one between finger and thumb and play with it
• 5:20:52
  as if it were a toy, pulling at the lobe of it, or
• 5:20:55
  trying to flatten out the curved part. Her breasts, her shoulders, her
• 5:21:00
  knees, her little feet, every bit of her he would examine and play
• 5:21:04
  with and kiss. She will lie down and let him, seeming absorbed in
• 5:21:11
  some far away thought of which he was the object. Then all at once
• 5:21:15
  her arms would go round him. All this used to go on in the
• 5:21:21
  broad light of day under the shadow of the Artu leaves, with no one
• 5:21:26
  to watch except the bright eyed birds in the leaves above. Not all their
• 5:21:30
  time would be spent in this fashion. Dick was just as keen after the
• 5:21:34
  fish. He dug up with a spade improvised from one of the boards of
• 5:21:40
  the dinghy, a space of soft earth near the tarot patch, and planted
• 5:21:44
  the seeds of melons he found in the wood. He re thatched the house.
• 5:21:48
  They were in short as busy as they could be in such a climate,
• 5:21:53
  but love making would come upon them in fits, and then everything would
• 5:21:57
  be forgotten, just as one revisits some spot to renew the memory of a
• 5:22:03
  painful or pleasant experience received there. They would return to the valley of the
• 5:22:07
  idol and spend a whole afternoon in its shade. The absolute happiness of wandering
• 5:22:15
  through the woods together, discovering new flowers, getting lost, and finding their
• 5:22:21
  way again was a thing beyond expression. Dick had suddenly stumbled upon love.
• 5:22:30
  His courtship had lasted only some twenty minutes. It was being gone over again
• 5:22:36
  now and extended. One day, Hearing a curious noise from the tree above
• 5:22:41
  the house, he climbed it. The noise came from the nest, which
• 5:22:47
  had been temporarily left by the mother bird. It was a gasping, wheezing
• 5:22:52
  sound, and it came from four wide open beaks so anxious to be fed
• 5:22:57
  that one could almost into the very crops of the owners. They were Coco's
• 5:23:03
  children. In another year, each of those ugly, downy things would,
• 5:23:10
  if permitted to live, be a beautiful sapphire colored bird with a few dove
• 5:23:15
  colored tail feathers, coral beak, and bright intelligent eyes. A few days
• 5:23:22
  ago, each of these things was imprisoned in a pale green egg. A
• 5:23:26
  month ago, they were nowhere. Something hit Dick on the cheek. It
• 5:23:33
  was the mother bird returned with food for the young ones. Dick drew his
• 5:23:37
  head aside, and she proceeded without more ado to fill their crops. End
• 5:23:44
  of chapter ten, Chapter eleven, the vanishing of Emmeline. Months passed away.
• 5:23:52
  Only one bird remained in the branches of the Artu. Coco's children and
• 5:23:57
  mate had vanished, but he remained. The bread fruit leaves had turned from
• 5:24:03
  green to pale gold and darkest amber, and now the new green leaves were
• 5:24:08
  being presented to the spring Dick, who had a complete chart of the lagoon
• 5:24:15
  in his head, and knew all the soundings and best fishing places, the
• 5:24:18
  locality of the stinging coral, and the places where you could wade right across
• 5:24:22
  at low tide. Dick one morning was gathering his things together for a fishing
• 5:24:29
  expedition. The place he was going to lay some two and a half miles
• 5:24:33
  across the island, and as the road was bad, he was going alone.
• 5:24:38
  Emmeline had been passing a new thread through the beads of the necklace she
• 5:24:42
  sometimes wore. This necklace had a history in the shallows. Not far away,
• 5:24:49
  Dick had found a bed of shell fish wading out at low tide.
• 5:24:55
  He had taken some of them out to examine. They were oysters. The
• 5:25:00
  first one he opened, so disgusting did its appearance seem to him, might
• 5:25:04
  have been the last, only that under the beard of the thing lay a
• 5:25:08
  pearl. It was about twice the size of a large pea, and so
• 5:25:15
  lustrous that even he could not but admire its beauty, though quite unconscious of
• 5:25:21
  its value. He flung the unopened oysters down and took the thing to Emmeline.
• 5:25:27
  Next day, returning by chance to the same spot. He found the
• 5:25:32
  oysters he had cast down, all dead and opened in the sun. He
• 5:25:36
  examined them and found another pearl embedded in one of them. Then he collected
• 5:25:41
  nearly a bushel of the oysters and left them to die and open. The
• 5:25:47
  idea had occurred to him of making a necklace for his companion. She had
• 5:25:52
  one made of shells. He intended to make her one of pearls. It
• 5:25:57
  took a long time, but it was something to do. He pierced them
• 5:26:03
  with a big needle, and at the end of four months or so the
• 5:26:06
  thing was complete, great pearls. Most of them were pure white black ink,
• 5:26:14
  some perfectly round, some tear shaped, some irregular. The thing was
• 5:26:19
  worth perhaps fifteen or perhaps twenty thousand pounds, for he only used the biggest
• 5:26:25
  he could find, casting away the small ones as useless. Emmeline this morning
• 5:26:30
  had just finished restringing them on a double thread. She looked pale and not
• 5:26:36
  at all well, and had been restless all night. As he went off,
• 5:26:41
  armed with his spear and fishing tackle, she waved her hand to him
• 5:26:45
  without getting up. Usually she followed him a bit into the wood when he
• 5:26:49
  was going away like this. But this morning she just sat at the doorway
• 5:26:53
  of the little house, the necklace in her lap, following him with her
• 5:26:57
  eyes until he was lost amidst the trees. He had no compass to guide
• 5:27:03
  him, and he needed none. He knew the woods by heart. The
• 5:27:07
  mysterious line beyond which scarcely an RTU tree was to be found, the long
• 5:27:14
  strip of mammy Apple, a regular sheet of it, one hundred yards broad
• 5:27:18
  and reaching from the middle of the island right down to the lagoon. The
• 5:27:22
  clearings some almost circular, where the fern grew knee deep. Then he came
• 5:27:29
  to the bad part. The vegetation here had burst into a riot. All
• 5:27:34
  sorts of great, sappy stalks of unknown plants barred the way and tangled the
• 5:27:40
  foot. And there were boggy places into which one sank horribly, pausing to
• 5:27:45
  wipe one's brow. The stalks and tendrils one had beaten down or beaten aside,
• 5:27:49
  rose up and closed together, making one a prisoner, almost as closely
• 5:27:55
  surrounded as a fly in amber. All the noontides that had ever fallen upon
• 5:28:00
  the island seemed to have left some of their heat behind them. Here the
• 5:28:06
  air was damp and close, like the air of a laundry, and the
• 5:28:11
  mournful and perpetual buzz of insects filled the silence without destroying it. A hundred
• 5:28:18
  men with scythes might make a road through the place today, a month or
• 5:28:22
  two later, searching for the road, you would find none. The vegetation
• 5:28:26
  would have closed in as water closes when divided. This was the haunt of
• 5:28:33
  the jug orchid, a veritable jug lid, and all raising the lid you
• 5:28:38
  would find the jug half filled with water. Sometimes in the tangle up above,
• 5:28:44
  between two trees, you would see a thing like a bird come to
• 5:28:47
  ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hothouse. All the trees, the
• 5:28:53
  few there were, had a spectral and miserable appearance. They were half stick
• 5:29:00
  by the voluptuous growth of the gigantic weeds. If one had much imagination,
• 5:29:07
  one felt afraid in this place, For one felt not alone. At any
• 5:29:12
  moment. It seemed that one might be touched on the elbow by a hand
• 5:29:17
  reaching out from the surrounding tangle. Even Dick felt this unimaginative, and fearless
• 5:29:25
  as he was, it took him nearly three quarters of an hour to get
• 5:29:30
  through, and then at last came the blessed air of real day and a
• 5:29:34
  glimpse of the lagoon between the tree balls. He would have rowed round in
• 5:29:41
  the dinghy, only that at low tide the shallows of the north of the
• 5:29:45
  island were a bar to the boat's passage. Of course, he might have
• 5:29:51
  rowed all the way round by way of the strand and reef entrance, but
• 5:29:55
  that would have meant a circuit of six miles or more. When he came
• 5:30:00
  between the trees down to the lagoon edge, it was about eleven o'clock in
• 5:30:03
  the morning, and the tide was nearly at the full. The lagoon just
• 5:30:08
  here was like a trough, and the reef was very near, scarcely a
• 5:30:12
  quarter of a mile from the shore. The water did not shelve, it
• 5:30:18
  went down sheer fifty fathoms or more, and one could fish from the bank
• 5:30:22
  just as from a pier head. He had brought some food with him,
• 5:30:26
  and he placed it under a tree whilst he prepared his line, which had
• 5:30:30
  a lump of coral for a sinker. He baited the hook, and whirling
• 5:30:36
  the sinker round in the air, sent it flying about one hundred feet from
• 5:30:41
  the shore, there was a baby cocoanut tree growing just at the edge of
• 5:30:45
  the water. He fastened the edge of his line round the narrow stem in
• 5:30:51
  case of eventualities, and then holding the line itself, he fished. He
• 5:30:56
  had promised Emmeline to return before some down. He was a fisherman, that
• 5:31:03
  is to say, a creature with the enduring patience of a cat, tireless
• 5:31:08
  and heedless of time. As an oyster. He came here for sport more
• 5:31:12
  than for fish. Large things would be found in this part of the lagoon.
• 5:31:18
  Last time he had hooked a horror in the form of a catfish.
• 5:31:22
  At least in outwards appearance, it was likest to a Mississippi catfish. Unlike
• 5:31:29
  the catfish, it was coarse and useless as food, but it gave good
• 5:31:33
  sport. The tide was now going out, and it was at the going
• 5:31:37
  out of the tide that the best fishing was to be had. There was
• 5:31:41
  no wind, and the lagoon lay like a sheet of glass, with just
• 5:31:45
  a dimple here and there where the outgoing tide made a swirl in the water.
• 5:31:51
  As he fished, he thought of Emmeline and the little house under the
• 5:31:55
  trees. Scarcely one could call it. Thinking. Pictures passed before his mind's
• 5:32:00
  eye, pleasant and happy pictures, sunlit, moonlit, starl it. Three
• 5:32:08
  hours passed thus without a bite or symptom that the lagoon contained anything else but
• 5:32:14
  sea water and disappointment. But he did not grumble. He was a fisherman.
• 5:32:21
  Then he left the line tied to the tree and sat down to eat
• 5:32:25
  the food he had brought with him. He had scarcely finished his meal when
• 5:32:29
  the baby coconut tree shivered and became convulsed, and he did not require to
• 5:32:33
  touch the taut line to know that it was useless to attempt to cope with
• 5:32:37
  the thing at the end of it. The only course was to let it
• 5:32:41
  targeted around itself. So he sat down and watched. After a few minutes,
• 5:32:48
  the line slackened, and the little cocoanut tree resumed its attitude of pensive
• 5:32:52
  meditation and repose. He pulled the line up. There was nothing at the
• 5:32:57
  end of it but a hook. He did not grumble. He baited the
• 5:33:03
  hook again and flung it in, for it was quite likely that the ferocious
• 5:33:07
  thing in the water would bite again. Full of this idea and heedless of
• 5:33:11
  time. He fished and waited. The sun was sinking into the west.
• 5:33:18
  He did not heed it. He had quite forgotten that he had promised Emmeline
• 5:33:22
  to return before sunset. It was nearly sunset now. Suddenly, just behind
• 5:33:29
  him, from among the trees, he heard a voice crying dick. End
• 5:33:34
  of chapter eleven, Chapter twelve, The vanishing of Emmeline continued. He dropped
• 5:33:44
  the line and turned with a start. There was no one visible. He
• 5:33:48
  ran amongst the trees, calling out her name, but only echoes answered.
• 5:33:56
  Then he came back to the lagoon edge. He felt sure that what he
• 5:34:00
  had heard was only fancy, but it was nearly sunset and more than time
• 5:34:06
  to be off. He pulled in his line, wrapped it up, took
• 5:34:10
  his fish spear, and started. It was just in the middle of the
• 5:34:15
  bad place that dread came upon him. What if anything had happened to her?
• 5:34:22
  It was dusk here, and never had the weeds seemed so thick,
• 5:34:27
  dimness so dismal, the tendrils of the vines so gin like. Then he
• 5:34:36
  lost his way, He who was so sure of his way always the hunter's
• 5:34:41
  instinct had been crossed, and for a time he went hither and thither,
• 5:34:48
  helpless as a ship without a compass. At last he broke into the real
• 5:34:53
  wood, but far to the right of where he ought to have been.
• 5:34:59
  He felt like a beast escaped from a trap, and hurried along, led
• 5:35:03
  by the sound of the surf. When he reached the clear sward that led
• 5:35:10
  down to the lagoon, the sun had just vanished beyond the sea line.
• 5:35:15
  A streak of red cloud floated like the feather of a flamingo in the western
• 5:35:21
  sky close to the sea, and twilight had already filled the world. He
• 5:35:26
  could see the house dimly under the shadow of the trees, and he ran
• 5:35:32
  towards it, crossing the sward diagonally. Always before, when he had been
• 5:35:37
  away, the first thing to greet his eyes on his return had been the
• 5:35:42
  figure of Emmeline. Either at the lagoon edge or the house door, he
• 5:35:47
  would find her waiting for him. She was not waiting for him to night.
• 5:35:53
  When he reached the house, she was not there, and he paused
• 5:35:57
  after searching the place, a prey to the most horrible perplexity, and unable
• 5:36:03
  for the moment to think or act. Since the shock of the occurrence on
• 5:36:07
  the reef, she had been subject at times to occasional attacks of headache,
• 5:36:12
  and when the pain was more than she could bear, she would go off
• 5:36:17
  and hide. Dick would hunt for her amidst the trees, calling out her
• 5:36:22
  name and hallooing a faint halloo would answer when she heard him, and then
• 5:36:29
  he would find her under a tree or bush, with her unfortunate head between
• 5:36:33
  her hands, a picture of misery. He remembered this now and started off
• 5:36:40
  along the borders of the woods, calling to her and pausing to listen.
• 5:36:45
  No answer came. He searched amidst the trees as far as the little well,
• 5:36:51
  waking the echoes with his voice. Then he came back, slowly,
• 5:36:56
  peering about him in the deep dusk that now was yielded to the starlight.
• 5:37:02
  He sat down before the door of the house, and looking at him,
• 5:37:06
  you might have fancied him in the last stages of exhaustion. Profound grief and
• 5:37:11
  profound exhaustion act on the frame very much in the same way. He sat,
• 5:37:18
  with his chin resting on his chest, his hands helpless. He could
• 5:37:23
  hear her voice still as he heard it over at the other side of the
• 5:37:27
  island. She had been in danger and called to him, and he had
• 5:37:33
  been calmly fishing, unconscious of it. All. This thought maddened him.
• 5:37:41
  He sat up, stared around him, and beat the ground with the palms
• 5:37:45
  of his hands. Then he sprang to his feet and made for the dinghy.
• 5:37:51
  He rode to the reef the action of a madman, for she could
• 5:37:55
  not possibly be there. For there was no moon, the starlight it both
• 5:38:00
  lit and veiled the world, and no sound but the majestic thunder of the
• 5:38:06
  waves. As he stood the night wind blowing on his face, the white
• 5:38:11
  foam seething before him, and canopus burning in the great silence overhead, the
• 5:38:18
  fact that he stood in the center of an awful and profound indifference came to
• 5:38:25
  his untutored mind with a pang. He returned to the shore. The house
• 5:38:32
  was still deserted. A little bowl made from the shell of a cocoa nut
• 5:38:37
  stood on the grass near the doorway. He had last seen it in her
• 5:38:41
  hands, and he took it up and held it for a moment, pressing
• 5:38:45
  it tightly to his breast. Then he threw himself down before the doorway and
• 5:38:52
  lay upon his face, with head resting upon his arms, in the attitude
• 5:38:56
  of a person who is profoundly a sleep. He must have searched through the
• 5:39:03
  wood again that night, just as a somnambulist searches for He found himself towards
• 5:39:10
  dawn in the valley before the idol. Then it was daybreak. The world
• 5:39:17
  was full of light and color. He was seated before the house door,
• 5:39:22
  worn out and exhausted. When raising his head he saw Emmeline's figure coming out
• 5:39:29
  from amidst the distant trees on the other side of the sward end of chapter
• 5:39:34
  twelve, Chapter thirteen, The Newcomer. He could not move for a moment.
• 5:39:44
  Then he sprang to his feet and ran towards her. She looked pale
• 5:39:48
  and dazed, and she held something in her arms, something wrapped up in
• 5:39:52
  her scarf. As he pressed her to him, the something in the bundle
• 5:40:00
  struggled against his breast and emitted a squawll, just like the squall of a
• 5:40:06
  cat. He drew back, and Emmeline, tenderly moving her scarf. A
• 5:40:11
  bitter side exposed a wee face. It was brick red and wrinkled. There
• 5:40:18
  were two bright eyes and a tuft of dark hair over the forehead. Then
• 5:40:26
  the eyes closed, the face screwed itself up, and the thing sneezed twice.
• 5:40:33
  Where did you get it, he asked, absolutely lost in astonishment,
• 5:40:38
  as she covered the face again gently with the scarf. I found it in
• 5:40:44
  the woods, replied Emmeline, dumb with amazement. He helped her along to
• 5:40:51
  the house and she sat down, resting her head against the bamboos of the
• 5:40:55
  wall. I felt so bad, she explained, and then I went off
• 5:41:02
  to sit in the woods, and then I remembered nothing more. And when
• 5:41:07
  I woke up, it was there. It's a baby, said Dick.
• 5:41:12
  I know, said Emmeline. Missus james baby seen in the long ago had
• 5:41:18
  risen up before their mind's eyes, a messenger from the past to explain what
• 5:41:25
  the new thing was. Then she told him things, the things that completely
• 5:41:30
  shattered the old cabbage bed theory, supplanting it with a truth far more wonderful,
• 5:41:37
  far more poetical too, to he who can appreciate the marvel and the
• 5:41:42
  mystery of life. It has something funny tied on to it. She went
• 5:41:49
  on, as if she was referring to a parcel that she had just received.
• 5:41:55
  Let's look, said Dick, No, she replied, it alone.
• 5:42:02
  She sat rocking the thing gently, seemingly oblivious to the whole world and quite
• 5:42:07
  absorbed in it, as indeed was Dick. A physician would have shuddered,
• 5:42:15
  but perhaps fortunately enough that there was no physician on the island, only nature,
• 5:42:22
  and she put everything to rights in her own time and way. When
• 5:42:27
  Dick had sat marveling long enough, he sat to and lit the fire.
• 5:42:33
  He had eaten nothing since the day before, and he was nearly as exhausted
• 5:42:37
  as the girl. He cooked some bread fruit. There was some cold fish
• 5:42:42
  left over from the day before. This with some bananas he served up on
• 5:42:48
  two broad leaves, making Emmeline eat first. Before they had finished, the
• 5:42:55
  creature in the bundle, as though it had smelt the food began to scream.
• 5:43:00
  Emmeline drew the scarf aside. It looked hungry. Its mouth would now
• 5:43:07
  be pinched up and now wide open, its eyes opened and closed. The
• 5:43:12
  girl touched it on the lips with her finger, and it seized upon her
• 5:43:18
  finger tip and sucked it. Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked
• 5:43:25
  appealingly at Dick, who was on his knees. He took a banana,
• 5:43:30
  peeled it, broke off a bit, and handed it to her. She
• 5:43:33
  approached it to the baby's mouth. It tried to suck, it failed,
• 5:43:38
  blew bubbles at the sun, and squawled. Wait a minute, said Dick.
• 5:43:45
  There were some green cocoanuts he had gathered the day before close by.
• 5:43:49
  He took one and removed the green husk and opened one of the eyes,
• 5:43:55
  making an opening also in the opposite side of the shell. The un fortunate
• 5:44:00
  infant sucked ravenously at the nut, filled its stomach with the young coconut juice,
• 5:44:07
  vomited violently, and wailed. Emmeline, in despair, clasped it to
• 5:44:14
  her naked breast, wherefrom in a moment it was hanging like a leech.
• 5:44:19
  It knew more about babies than they did. End of Chapter thirteen. Chapter
• 5:44:26
  fourteen, Hannah at noon, in the shadows of the reef, under the
• 5:44:33
  burning sun, the water would be quite warm. They would carry the baby
• 5:44:37
  down there, and Emmeline would wash it with a bit of flannel. After
• 5:44:42
  a few days, it scarcely ever, screamed even when she washed it.
• 5:44:48
  It would lie on her knees during the process, striking valiantly out with its
• 5:44:52
  arms and legs, staring straight up at the sky. Then when she turned
• 5:44:56
  it on its face, it would lay its head down and chuckle and blow
• 5:45:02
  bubbles at the coral of the reef, examining apparently the pattern of the coral
• 5:45:07
  with deep and philosophic attention. Dick would sit by with his knees up to
• 5:45:12
  his chin, watching it all. He felt himself to be part proprietor in
• 5:45:18
  the thing, as indeed he was. The mystery of the affair still hung
• 5:45:23
  over them both. A week ago, they too had been alone, and
• 5:45:27
  suddenly, from nowhere this new individual had appeared. It was so complete.
• 5:45:37
  It had hair on its head, tiny fingernails, and hands that would grasp
• 5:45:41
  youw It had a whole host of little ways of its own, and every
• 5:45:47
  day added to them. In a week, the extreme ugliness of the newborn
• 5:45:52
  child had vanished. Its face, which had seemed carved in the imitation of
• 5:45:57
  a monkey's face from her a brick, became the face of a happy and
• 5:46:03
  healthy baby. It seemed to see things, and sometimes it would laugh and
• 5:46:08
  chuckle, as though it had been told a good joke. Its black hair
• 5:46:12
  all came off and was supplanted by a sort of down. It had no
• 5:46:18
  teeth. It would lie on its back and kick and crow and double its
• 5:46:23
  fists up and try to swallow them alternately, and cross its feet and play
• 5:46:29
  with its toes. In fact, it was exactly like any of the thousand
• 5:46:34
  and one babies that are borne into the world at every tick of the clock.
• 5:46:41
  What will we call it? Said Dick one day, as he sat
• 5:46:45
  watching his son and Air crawling about on the grass under the shade of the
• 5:46:49
  bread fruit leaves. Hannah, said Emmeline promptly. The recollection of another baby,
• 5:46:56
  once heard about, was in her mind, and it was as good
• 5:47:00
  a name as any other, perhaps in that lonely place. Notwithstanding the fact
• 5:47:04
  that Hannah was a boy, Ko Ko took a vast interest in the new
• 5:47:10
  arrival. He would hop round it and peer at it with his head on
• 5:47:15
  one side, and Hannah would crawl after the bird and try to grab it
• 5:47:18
  by the tail. In a few months, so valiant and strong did he
• 5:47:23
  become that he would pursue his own father, crawling behind him on the grass.
• 5:47:29
  And you might have seen the mother and father and child playing all together
• 5:47:33
  like three children, the bird sometimes hovering overhead like a good spirit, sometimes
• 5:47:41
  joining in the fun. Sometimes Emmeline would sit and brood over the child,
• 5:47:47
  a troubled expression on her face and a far away look in her eyes.
• 5:47:52
  The old vague fear of mischance had returned, the dread of that viewless form,
• 5:47:59
  her imagenation half pictured behind the smile on the face of nature. Her
• 5:48:04
  happiness was so great that she dreaded to lose it. There is nothing more
• 5:48:11
  wonderful than the birth of a man, and all that goes to bring it
• 5:48:15
  about. Here on this island, in the very heart of the sea,
• 5:48:21
  amidst the sunshine and the wind blown trees, under the great blue arch of
• 5:48:26
  the sky, in perfect purity of thought, they would discuss the question from
• 5:48:30
  beginning to end without a blush, the object of their discussion crawling before them
• 5:48:37
  on the grass and attempting to grab feathers from Coco's tail. It was the
• 5:48:42
  loneliness of the place, as well as their ignorance of life, that made
• 5:48:47
  the old old miracle appear so strange and fresh, as beautiful as the miracle
• 5:48:53
  of death had appeared. Awful in thoughts, vague and beautre beyond expression.
• 5:49:00
  In words. They linked this new occurrence with that old occurrence on the reef
• 5:49:06
  six years before the vanishing and the coming of a man. Hannah, despite
• 5:49:14
  his unfortunate name, was certainly a most virile and engaging baby. The black
• 5:49:19
  hair, which had appeared and vanished, like some practical joke played by nature,
• 5:49:25
  gave place to a down, at first as yellow as sun bleached wheat,
• 5:49:30
  but in a few months time tinged with auburn. One day, he
• 5:49:36
  had been uneasy in biting at his thumbs for some time past, Emmeline,
• 5:49:41
  looking into his mouth, saw something white and like a grain of rice protruding
• 5:49:45
  from his gum. It was a tooth just born. He could eat bananas
• 5:49:52
  now and bread fruit, and they often fed him on fish, a fact
• 5:49:56
  which again might have caused a medical man to sho udder. Yet he throve
• 5:50:02
  on it all and waxed stouter. Every day. Emmeline, with profound and
• 5:50:07
  natural wisdom, let him crawl about stark naked, dressed in ozone and sunlight.
• 5:50:15
  Taking him out on the reef. She would let him paddle in the
• 5:50:18
  shadow pools, holding him under the armpits, whilst he splashed the diamond bright
• 5:50:23
  water into spray with his feet and laughed and shouted. They were beginning now
• 5:50:30
  to experience a phenomenon as wonderful as the birth of the child's body, the
• 5:50:36
  birth of his intelligence, the peeping out of a little personality with predilections of
• 5:50:42
  his own likes and dislikes. He knew Dick from Emmeline, and when Emmeline
• 5:50:49
  had satisfied his material wants, he would hold out his arms to go to
• 5:50:53
  Dick if he were by. He looked upon Coco as a friend. But
• 5:51:00
  when a friend of Coco's, a bird with an inquisitive mind and three red
• 5:51:04
  feathers in his tail, dropped in one day to inspect the new comer,
• 5:51:08
  he resented the intrusion and screamed. He had a passion for flowers or anything
• 5:51:15
  bright. He would laugh and shout when taken on the lagoon in the dinghy,
• 5:51:22
  and make as if to jump into the water to get at the bright
• 5:51:25
  colored corals below. Ah Me, we laugh at young mothers and all the
• 5:51:32
  miraculous things they tell us about their babies. They see what we cannot see,
• 5:51:38
  the first unfolding of that mysterious flower, the mind. One day they
• 5:51:45
  were out on the lagoon. Dick had been rowing, he had ceased and
• 5:51:52
  was letting the boat drift for a bit. Emmeline was dancing the child on
• 5:51:56
  her knee, when it suddenly held out his arms to the oarsman and said,
• 5:52:00
  Dick, the little word so often heard and easily repeated, was its
• 5:52:07
  first word on earth. A voice that had never spoken in the world before
• 5:52:14
  had spoken. And to hear his name thus mysteriously uttered by a being he
• 5:52:21
  has created, is the sweetest and perhaps the saddest thing a man can ever
• 5:52:26
  know. Dick took the child on his knee, and from that moment his
• 5:52:33
  love for it was more than his love for Emmeline or anything else on earth.
• 5:52:40
  End of Chapter fourteen. Chapter fifteen, The Lagoon of Fire. Ever
• 5:52:47
  since the tragedy of six years ago, there had been forming in the mind
• 5:52:52
  of Emmeline the Strange a something, shall I call it? A deep mistrust.
• 5:52:57
  She had never been clever, lessons had saddened and wearied her without making
• 5:53:03
  her much the wiser. Yet her mind was of that order into which profounder
• 5:53:08
  truths come by short cuts. She was intuitive. Great knowledge may lurk in
• 5:53:15
  the human mind without the owners of the mind being aware he or she acts
• 5:53:22
  in such or such a way, or thinks in such and such a manner
• 5:53:26
  from intuition. In other words, as the outcome of the profoundest reasoning.
• 5:53:33
  When we have learned to call storms storms and death, death and birth birth,
• 5:53:40
  When we have mastered the Sailor's horn Book and mister Pittington's Laws of cyclones,
• 5:53:45
  Ellis's Anatomy, and Leeure's Midwiffery, we have already made ourself half blind.
• 5:53:53
  We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in wordsds and
• 5:54:00
  names, not in ideas. The commonplace has triumphed. The true intellect is
• 5:54:07
  half crushed. Storms had burst over the island before this, and what Emmeline
• 5:54:14
  remembered of them might be expressed by an instance. The morning would be bright
• 5:54:19
  and happy, never so bright the sun, or so balmy the breeze,
• 5:54:25
  or so peaceful the blue lagoon. Then, with a horrid suddenness, as
• 5:54:30
  if sick with dissimulation and man to show itself, something would blacken the sun,
• 5:54:37
  and with a yell, stretch out a hand and ravage the island,
• 5:54:41
  churn the lagoon into foam, beat down the cocoanut trees, and slay the
• 5:54:45
  birds, and one bird would be left and another taken. One tree would
• 5:54:53
  be destroyed and another left standing. The fury of the thing, so less
• 5:55:00
  fearful than the blindness of it and the indifference of it. One night,
• 5:55:07
  when the child was asleep, just after the last star was lit, Dick
• 5:55:11
  appeared the doorway of the house. He had been down to the water's edge
• 5:55:17
  and had now returned. He beckoned Emmeline to follow him, and, putting
• 5:55:22
  down the child, she did so. Come here and look, said he.
• 5:55:26
  He led the way to the water, and as they approached it,
• 5:55:30
  Emmeline became aware that there was something strange about the lagoon. From a distance,
• 5:55:37
  it looked pale and solid. It might have been a great stretch of
• 5:55:41
  gray marble veined with black. Then as she drew nearer, she saw that
• 5:55:47
  the gray dull appearance was a deception of the eye. The lagoon was a
• 5:55:52
  light and burning. The phosphoric fire was in its very heart and being.
• 5:56:00
  Every coral branch was a torch, every fish a passing lantern. The incoming
• 5:56:07
  tide moving the waters, made the whole glittering floor of the lagoon move and
• 5:56:11
  shiver, and the tiny waves to lap the bank, leaving behind them glow
• 5:56:17
  worm traces. Look, said Dick. He knelt down and plunged his forearm
• 5:56:23
  into the water. The immersed part burned like a smoldering torch. Emmeline could
• 5:56:30
  see it as plainly as though it were lit by sunlight. Then he drew
• 5:56:36
  his arm out, and as far as the water had reached it, it
• 5:56:38
  was covered by a glowing glove. They had seen the phosphorescence of the lagoon
• 5:56:45
  before. Indeed, any night you might watch the passing fish like bars of
• 5:56:51
  silver when the moon was away. But this was something quite new, and
• 5:56:56
  it was entrancing. Emmeline knelt down and dabbled her hands, and made herself
• 5:57:03
  a pair of phosphoric gloves, and cried out with pleasure and laughed. It
• 5:57:11
  was all the pleasure of playing with fire without the danger of being burnt.
• 5:57:15
  Then Dick rubbed his face with the water till it glowed. Wait, he
• 5:57:21
  cried, and running up to the house, he fetched out Hannah. He
• 5:57:26
  came running down with him to the water's edge, gave Emmeline the child,
• 5:57:30
  unmoored the boat and started out from shore. The skulls, as far as
• 5:57:34
  they were immersed, were like bars of glistening silver. Under them passed the
• 5:57:41
  fish, leaving cometic tails. Each coral clump was a lamp, lending its
• 5:57:47
  luster till the great lagoon was luminous as a lit up ball room. Even
• 5:57:52
  the child on Emmeline's lap crowed and cried out at the strangeness of the sight.
• 5:58:00
  They landed on the reef and wandered over the flat. The sea was
• 5:58:04
  white and bright as snow, and the foam looked like a hedge of fire.
• 5:58:11
  As they stood gazing on this extraordinary sight, Suddenly, almost as instantaneously
• 5:58:18
  as the switching off of an electric light, the phosphorescence of the sea flickered
• 5:58:25
  and vanished. The moon was rising, her crest was just breaking from the
• 5:58:30
  water, and as her face came slowly into view behind a belt of vapor
• 5:58:36
  that lay on the horizon, it looked fierce and red, stained with smoke,
• 5:58:41
  like the face of Ebliss. End of Chapter fifteen, Chapter sixteen,
• 5:58:48
  the Cyclone. When they awoke next morning, the day was dark. A
• 5:58:55
  solid roof of cloud, lead colored, and without a rip on it lay
• 5:59:00
  over the sky almost of the horizon. There was not a breath of wind,
• 5:59:07
  and the birds flew wildly about, as if disturbed by some unseen enemy
• 5:59:11
  in the wood. As Dick lit the fire to prepare the breakfast, Emmeline
• 5:59:17
  walked up and down, holding her baby to her breast. She felt restless
• 5:59:22
  and uneasy. As the morning wore on, the darkness increased. A breeze
• 5:59:27
  rose up, and the leaves of the bread fruit trees pattered, together with
• 5:59:32
  the sound of rain falling on glass. A storm was coming, but there
• 5:59:38
  was something different in its approach to the approach of the storms they had already
• 5:59:42
  known. As the breeze increased, a sound filled the air, coming from
• 5:59:49
  far away, beyond the horizon. It was like the sound of a great
• 5:59:55
  multitude of people, and yet so faint and vagu ague was it that sudden
• 6:00:02
  bursts of the breeze through the leaves above would drown it utterly. Then it
• 6:00:08
  ceased, and nothing could be heard but the rocking of the branches and the
• 6:00:14
  tossing of the leaves under the increasing wind, which was now blowing sharply and
• 6:00:19
  fiercely, and with a steady rush, dead from the west, fretting the
• 6:00:25
  lagoon and sending clouds and masses of foam right over the reef. The sky
• 6:00:32
  that had been so leaden and peaceful and like a solid roof, was now
• 6:00:37
  all in a hurry, flowing eastward like a great turbulent river in spate,
• 6:00:42
  and now again one could hear the sound in the distance, the thunder of
• 6:00:48
  the captains of the storm, and the shouting, but still so faint,
• 6:00:53
  so vague, so intermediate and unearthly, that it seemed like the sound in
• 6:01:00
  a dream. Emmeline sat amidst the ferns on the floor, cowed and dumb,
• 6:01:07
  holding the baby to her breast. It was fast asleep. Dick stood
• 6:01:12
  at the doorway. He was disturbed in mind, but he did not show
• 6:01:18
  it. The whole beautiful island world had now taken on the color of ashes,
• 6:01:23
  and the color of lead. Beauty had utterly vanished. All seemed sadness
• 6:01:32
  and distress. The cocoa palms under the wind that had lost its steady rush
• 6:01:38
  and was now blowing in hurricane blasts, flung themselves about in all the attitudes
• 6:01:45
  of distress. And whoever has seen a tropical storm will know what a cocoa
• 6:01:49
  palm can express by its movements under the lash of the wind. Fortunately the
• 6:01:56
  house was so placed that it was protected by the whole depth of the grove
• 6:02:00
  between it and the lagoon, and fortunately too, it was sheltered by the
• 6:02:07
  dense foliage of the bread fruit. For suddenly, with a crash of thunder,
• 6:02:12
  as if the hammer of thor had been flung from sky to earth,
• 6:02:17
  the clouds split, and rain came down in a great slanting wave. It
• 6:02:25
  roared on the foliage, above which, bending leaf on leaf made a slanting
• 6:02:30
  roof, from which it rushed in a steady, sheet like cascade. Dick
• 6:02:37
  had darted into the house and was now sitting beside Emmeline, who was shivering
• 6:02:41
  and holding the child, which had awakened at the sound of the thunder.
• 6:02:48
  For an hour they sat, the rain ceasing and coming again, the thunder
• 6:02:53
  shaking earth and sea, and the wind passing overhead with a piercing, monotonous
• 6:03:00
  cry. Then all at once the wind dropped, the rain ceased, and
• 6:03:07
  a pale spectral light, like the light of dawn fell before the doorway.
• 6:03:14
  It's over, cried Dick, making to get up. Oh, listen,
• 6:03:18
  said Emmeline, clinging to him and holding the baby to his breast, as
• 6:03:23
  if the touch of him would give it protection. She had divined that there
• 6:03:29
  was something approaching worse than a storm. Then, listening in the silence away
• 6:03:37
  from the other side of the island, they heard a sound like the droning
• 6:03:41
  of a great top. It was the center of the cyclone approaching. A
• 6:03:48
  cyclone is a circular storm, a storm in the form of a ring.
• 6:03:55
  This ring of hurricane travels across the ocean with in conceit evable speed and fury,
• 6:04:02
  yet its center is a haven of peace. As they listened, the
• 6:04:07
  sound increased, sharpened, and became a tang that pierced the ear drums,
• 6:04:15
  a sound that shook with hurry and speed increasing, bringing with it the bursting
• 6:04:21
  and crashing of trees, and breaking at last overhead in a yell that stunned
• 6:04:26
  the brain like the blow of a bludgeon. In a second, the house
• 6:04:33
  was torn away, and they were clinging to the roots of the bread fruit
• 6:04:37
  death, blinded, half lifeless. The terror and the prolonged shock of it
• 6:04:44
  reduced them from thinking beings to the level of frightened animals whose one instinct is
• 6:04:49
  preservation. How long the horror lasted, they could not tell. When,
• 6:04:56
  like a madman who pauses for a moment in the midst of his struggles and
• 6:05:02
  stands stock still, the wind ceased blowing, and there was peace. The
• 6:05:10
  center of the cyclone was passing over the island. Looking up, one saw
• 6:05:15
  a marvelous sight. The air was full of birds, butterflies, insects,
• 6:05:23
  all hanging in the heart of the storm and traveling with it under its protection.
• 6:05:30
  Though the air was still as the air of a summer's day, from
• 6:05:34
  north, south, east, and west, from every point on the compass
• 6:05:40
  came the yell of the hurricane. There was something shocking in this. In
• 6:05:48
  a storm, one is so beaten about by the wind that one has no
• 6:05:52
  time to think. One is half stupefied. But in the dead center of
• 6:05:56
  a cyclone, one is in perfect peace. The trouble is all around,
• 6:06:03
  but it is not here. One has time to examine the thing. Like
• 6:06:08
  a tiger in a cage, listened to its voice and shudder at its ferocity.
• 6:06:18
  The girl holding the baby to her breast sat up, gasping. The
• 6:06:22
  baby had come to no harm. It had cried at first when the thunder
• 6:06:26
  broke, but now it seemed impassive, almost dazed. Dick stepped from under
• 6:06:34
  the tree and looked at the prodigy in the air. The cyclone had gathered
• 6:06:41
  on its way sea birds and birds from the land. There were gulls,
• 6:06:45
  electric white and black man of war birds, butterflies, and they all seemed
• 6:06:52
  imprisoned under a great drifting dome of glass as they went, traveling like things
• 6:07:00
  without volition, and in a dream with a hum and a roar. The
• 6:07:04
  southwest quadrant of the cyclone burst on the island, and the whole bitter business
• 6:07:11
  began over again. It lasted for hours, then towards midnight the wind fell,
• 6:07:21
  and when the sun rose next morning, he came through a cloudless sky,
• 6:07:26
  without a trace of apology for the destruction caused by his children the winds.
• 6:07:32
  He showed trees uprooted and birds lying dead, three or four canes remaining
• 6:07:38
  of what had once been a house, The lagoon the color of a pale
• 6:07:44
  sapphire, and a grass green foam capped sea, racing in thunder against the
• 6:07:51
  reef end of Chapter sixteen, Chapter seventeen. The stricken woods. At first
• 6:08:03
  they thought they were ruined. Then Dick searching found the old saw under a
• 6:08:08
  tree and the butcher's knife near it, as though the knife and saw had
• 6:08:14
  been trying to escape in company and had failed. Bit by bit, they
• 6:08:19
  began to recover something of their scattered property. The remains of the flannel had
• 6:08:25
  been taken up by the cyclone, and wrapped round and round a slender coconut
• 6:08:30
  tree, till the trunk looked like a gaily bandaged leg. The box of
• 6:08:36
  fish hooks had been jammed into the center of a cooked bread fruit, both
• 6:08:40
  having been picked up by the fingers of the wind and hurled against the same
• 6:08:44
  tree. And the stacil of the shannondoor was out on the reef, with
• 6:08:48
  a piece of coral carefully placed on it, as if to keep it down.
• 6:08:53
  As for the lug sail belonging to the dinghy, it was never seen
• 6:08:59
  again. There is humor sometimes in a cyclone, if you can only appreciate
• 6:09:06
  it. No other form of air disturbance produces such quaint effects. Beside the
• 6:09:14
  great main whirlpool of wind, there are subsidiary whirlpools, each actuated by its
• 6:09:21
  own special imp Emmeline had felt Hannah nearly snatched from her arms twice by these
• 6:09:27
  little, ferocious gimlet winds, and that the whole business of the great storm
• 6:09:33
  was set about with the object of snatching Hannah from her and blowing him out
• 6:09:38
  to sea, was a belief which she held, perhaps in the innermost recesses
• 6:09:44
  of her mind. The dinghy would have been utterly destroyed had it not healed
• 6:09:51
  over and sunk in shallow water at the first onset of the wind. As
• 6:09:56
  it was, Dick was able to bail it out at the next low time,
• 6:10:00
  when it floated as bravely as ever, not having started a single seam.
• 6:10:06
  But the destruction amidst the trees was pitiful. Looking at the woods as
• 6:10:14
  a mass, one noticed gaps here and there, but what had really happened
• 6:10:18
  could not be seen till one was amongst the trees. Great beautiful coconut palms,
• 6:10:26
  not dead but just dying, lay crushed and broken, as if trampled
• 6:10:33
  upon by some enormous foot. You would come across half a dozen leanas twisted
• 6:10:37
  into one great cable where coconut palms were. You could not move a yard
• 6:10:44
  without kicking against the fallen nut. You might have picked up full grown,
• 6:10:49
  half grown, and wee baby nuts not bigger than small apples, For on
• 6:10:55
  the same tree you will find nuts of all sizes and conditions. One never
• 6:11:00
  sees a perfectly straight stemmed coconut palm, for they all have an inclination from
• 6:11:06
  the perpendicular more or less. Perhaps that is why a cyclone has more effect
• 6:11:12
  on them than on other trees. Artus, once so pretty a picture with
• 6:11:18
  their diamond checkered trunks, lay broken and ruined, and right through the belt
• 6:11:25
  of mammy apples, right through the bad lands lay abroad road, as if
• 6:11:30
  an army horse foot and artillery had passed that way, from lagoon edge to
• 6:11:36
  Lagoon edge. This was the path left by the great forefoot of the storm.
• 6:11:42
  But had you searched the woods on either side, he would have found
• 6:11:47
  paths where the lesser winds had been at work, where the baby whirlwinds had
• 6:11:52
  been at play. From the bruised woods, like an incense offered to heaven
• 6:11:59
  a rose, the perfume of blossoms gathered and scattered of rain wet leaves of
• 6:12:06
  the annas twisted and broken and oozing their sap, the perfume of newly wrecked
• 6:12:11
  and ruined trees, the essence and soul of the Artu, the banyon,
• 6:12:17
  and the cocoa palm. Cast upon the wind, you would have found dead
• 6:12:22
  butterflies in the woods, dead birds too. But in the great path of
• 6:12:27
  the storm you would have found dead butterflies, wings, feathers, leaves frayed,
• 6:12:33
  as if by fingers, branches of the aoa and sticks of the hibiscus
• 6:12:40
  broken into little fragments powerful enough to rip a ship open, root up a
• 6:12:47
  tree, half ruin a city, delicate enough to tear a butterfly wing from
• 6:12:55
  wing, That is a cyclone. Wandering about in the woods with Dick on
• 6:13:02
  the day after the storm, looking at the ruin of great tree and little
• 6:13:07
  bird, and recollecting the land birds, she had caught a glimpse of yesterday,
• 6:13:11
  being carried along safely by the storm out to sea to be drowned.
• 6:13:18
  Felt a great weight lifting from her heart. Mischance had come and spared them,
• 6:13:26
  and the baby. The blue had spoken, but had not called them.
• 6:13:33
  She felt that something, the something which we in civilization call fate,
• 6:13:41
  was for the present gorged, and without being annihilated, her incessant hypochondrical dread
• 6:13:49
  condensed itself into a point, leaving her horizon sunlit and clear. The cyclone
• 6:13:57
  had indeed treated them almost, one might say amiably. It had taken the
• 6:14:04
  house, but that was a small matter, for it had left them nearly
• 6:14:10
  all their small possessions. The tinder box and flint and steel would have been
• 6:14:15
  a much more serious loss than a dozen houses, for without it they would
• 6:14:18
  have had absolutely no means of making a fire. If anything, the cyclone
• 6:14:25
  had been almost too kind to them, had let them pay off too little
• 6:14:30
  of that mysterious debt they owed to the gods. End of Chapter seventeen.
• 6:14:38
  Chapter eighteen, A fallen idol. The next day Dick began to rebuild the
• 6:14:45
  house. He had fetched the stasil from the reef and rigged up a temporary
• 6:14:49
  tent. It was a great business cutting the canes and dragging them out in
• 6:14:55
  the open. Emmeline helped, whilst Hannah seated on the grass us played with
• 6:15:00
  the bird that had vanished during the storm, but reappeared the evening after.
• 6:15:06
  The child and the bird had grown fast friends. They were friendly enough even
• 6:15:11
  at first, but now the bird would sometimes let the tiny hands clasp him
• 6:15:17
  right round his body, at least as far as the hands would go.
• 6:15:22
  It is a rare experience for a man to hold a tame and unstruggling an
• 6:15:26
  unfrightened bird in his hands, Next to pressing a woman in his arms.
• 6:15:30
  It is the pleasantest tactile sensation he will ever experience. Perhaps in life he
• 6:15:38
  will feel a desire to press it to his heart. If he has such
• 6:15:42
  a thing, Hannah would press koco to his little brown stomach, as if
• 6:15:48
  in artless admission of where his heart lay. He was an extraordinarily bright and
• 6:15:56
  intelligent child. He did not promise to be talkative. For having achieved the
• 6:16:02
  word dick, he rested content for a long while before advancing further into the
• 6:16:07
  labyrinth of language. But though he did not use his tongue, he spoke
• 6:16:12
  in a host of other ways, with his eyes that were as bright as
• 6:16:18
  cocoa's and full of all sorts of mischief. With his hands and feet and
• 6:16:22
  the movements of his body. He had a way of shaking his hands before
• 6:16:27
  him when highly delighted, a way of expressing nearly all the shades of pleasure,
• 6:16:33
  And though he rarely expressed anger, when he did so, he expressed
• 6:16:37
  it fully. He was just now passing over the frontier into toyland. In
• 6:16:45
  civilization, he would no doubt have being the possessor of an India rubber dog
• 6:16:48
  or a wooly lamb. But there were no toys here at all. Emmeline's
• 6:16:55
  old doll had been left behind when they took flight from the other side of
• 6:16:59
  the island, and Dick a year or so ago, on one of his
• 6:17:02
  expeditions, had found it lying half buried in the sand of the beach.
• 6:17:07
  He had brought it back now more as a curiosity than anything else, and
• 6:17:12
  they had kept it on the shelf in the house. The cyclone had impaled
• 6:17:18
  it on a tree twig near by, as if in derision, and Hannah,
• 6:17:22
  when it was presented to him as a plaything, flung it away from
• 6:17:26
  him, as if in disgust that he would play with flowers or bright shells
• 6:17:32
  or bits of coral, making vague patterns with them on the sward. All
• 6:17:37
  the toy lambs in the world would not have pleased him better than these things,
• 6:17:44
  the toys of the Troglodite children, the children of the Stone age,
• 6:17:48
  to clap two oyster shells together and make a noise, What, after all,
• 6:17:53
  could a baby want better than that. One afternoon, when the house
• 6:17:59
  was beginning to take some sort of form, they ceased work and went off
• 6:18:03
  into the woods, Emmeline carrying the baby, and Dick taking turns with him.
• 6:18:10
  They were going to the valley of the Idol. Since the coming of
• 6:18:14
  Hannah, and even before the stone figure standing in its aweful and mysterious solitude,
• 6:18:21
  had ceased to be an object of dread to Emmeline, and had become
• 6:18:25
  a thing. Vaguely benevolent. Love had come to her under its shade,
• 6:18:32
  and under its shade the spirit of the Child had entered into her. From
• 6:18:37
  where who knows, but certainly through heaven. Perhaps the thing which had been
• 6:18:44
  the god of some unknown people had inspired her with the instinct of religion.
• 6:18:51
  If so, she was his last worshiper on earth, for when they entered
• 6:18:56
  the valley they found him lying upon his face. Great blocks of stone lay
• 6:19:03
  around him. There had evidently been a landslip, a catastrophe preparing for ages,
• 6:19:10
  and determined perhaps by the torrential rain of the cyclone. In Ponapee Hueheni
• 6:19:18
  in Easter Island, you may see great idols that have been felled like this,
• 6:19:23
  temples slowly dissolving from sight, and terraces seemingly as solid as the hills,
• 6:19:32
  turning softly and subtly into shapeless mounds of stone. End of Chapter eighteen,
• 6:19:41
  Chapter nineteen the expedition. Next morning, the light of day filtering through
• 6:19:48
  the trees awakened Emmeline in the tent, which they had improvised whilst the house
• 6:19:53
  was building. Dawn came later here than on the other side of the island,
• 6:19:59
  which faced Ea, later and in a different manner, For there is
• 6:20:04
  the difference of worlds between dawn coming over a wooded hill and dawn coming over
• 6:20:11
  the sea over at the other side. Sitting on the sand with the break
• 6:20:15
  of the reef which faced the east before you, scarcely would the east change
• 6:20:21
  color. Before the sea lion would be on fire, the sky lit up
• 6:20:26
  into an inimitable void of blue, and the sunlight flooding into the lagoon,
• 6:20:33
  the ripples of light seeming to chase the ripples of water. On this side
• 6:20:37
  it was different. The sky would be dark and full of stars, and
• 6:20:42
  the woods great spaces of velvety shadow. Then through the leaves of the artu
• 6:20:51
  would come a sigh, and the leaves of the bread fruit would patter,
• 6:20:56
  and the sound of the reef become faint. The land breeze had awakened,
• 6:21:02
  and in a while, as if it had blown them away. Looking up,
• 6:21:07
  he would find the stars gone and the sky a veil of palest blue.
• 6:21:12
  In this indirect approach of dawn, there was something ineffably mysterious one could
• 6:21:21
  see, but the things seen were indecisive and vague, just as they are
• 6:21:27
  in the gloaming of an English summer's day. Scarcely had Emmelina risen when Dick
• 6:21:34
  woke also, and they went out on the sward and then down to the
• 6:21:38
  water's edge. Dick went in for a swim, and the girl, holding
• 6:21:45
  the baby, still on the bank watching him. Always after a great storm,
• 6:21:51
  the weather of the island would become more bracing and exhilarating, and this
• 6:21:56
  morning the air seemed filled with the spirit of spring. Emmeline felt it,
• 6:22:02
  and as she watched the swimmer disporting in the water, she laughed and held
• 6:22:07
  the child up to watch him. She was fay. The breeze, filled
• 6:22:14
  with all sorts of sweet perfumed from the woods, blew her black hair about
• 6:22:18
  her shoulders, and the full light of morning coming over the palm fronds of
• 6:22:22
  the woods beyond the sward, touched her and the child. Nature seemed caressing
• 6:22:30
  them. Dick came ashore and then ran about to dry himself in the wind.
• 6:22:37
  Then he went to the dinghy and examined her, for he had determined
• 6:22:41
  to leave the house building for half a day and row around to the old
• 6:22:45
  place to see how the banana trees had fared during the storm. His anxiety
• 6:22:51
  about them was not to be wondered at. The island was his larder,
• 6:22:56
  and the bananas were a most valuable article of food. He had all the
• 6:23:00
  feelings of a careful housekeeper about them, and he could not rest till he
• 6:23:06
  had seen for himself the extent of damage, If damaged there was any,
• 6:23:11
  He examined the boat, and then they all went back to breakfast. Living
• 6:23:17
  their lives they had to use forethought they would put away, for instance,
• 6:23:22
  all the shells of the cocoanuts they used for fuel, And you could never
• 6:23:26
  imagine the blazing splendor their lives in the shell of a cocoanut, to see
• 6:23:32
  it burning. Yesterday, Dick, with his usual prudence, had placed a
• 6:23:37
  heap of sticks, all wet with the rain of the storm, to dry
• 6:23:41
  in the sun. As a consequence, they had plenty of fuel to make
• 6:23:45
  a fire with. This morning, when they had finished breakfast, he got
• 6:23:49
  the knife to cut the bananas with if they were left to cut, and
• 6:23:55
  taking the javelin, he went down to the boat, followed by Emmeline.
• 6:24:00
  The child. Dick had stepped into the boat and was at the point of
• 6:24:03
  unmooring her and pushing her off when Emmeline stopped him. Dick, yes,
• 6:24:11
  I will go with you, you, said he in astonishment. Yes,
• 6:24:15
  I'm not afraid any more. It was a fact. Since the coming of
• 6:24:22
  the child, she had lost that dread of the other side of the island,
• 6:24:26
  or almost lost it. Death is a great darkness, Earth is a
• 6:24:34
  great light, they had intermixed in her mind. The darkness was still there,
• 6:24:41
  but it was no longer terrible to her, for it was infused with
• 6:24:45
  the light. The result was a twilight, sad but beautiful and unpeopled with
• 6:24:53
  forms of fear. Years ago, she had seen a mysterious door close and
• 6:25:00
  shut a human being out forever from the world. The sight had filled her
• 6:25:06
  with dread unimaginable, for she had no words for the thing, no religion
• 6:25:11
  or philosophy to explain it away or gloss it over. Just recently, she
• 6:25:18
  had seen an equally mysterious door open and admit a human being, and deep
• 6:25:23
  down in her mind, in the place where the dreams were, the one
• 6:25:29
  great fact had explained and justified the other. Life had vanished into the void,
• 6:25:37
  but life had come from there. There was life in the void,
• 6:25:41
  and it was no longer terrible. Perhaps all religions were born on a day
• 6:25:48
  when some woman seated upon a rock by the prehistoric sea, looked at her
• 6:25:53
  newborn child and recalled to mind her man who had been slain, thus closing
• 6:26:00
  the charm and imprisoning the idea of a future state. Emmeline, with the
• 6:26:07
  child in her arms, stepped into the little boat and took her seat in
• 6:26:11
  the stern, whilst Dick pushed off. Scarcely had he put out the skulls
• 6:26:17
  than a new passenger arrived. It was Ko Ko. He would often accompany
• 6:26:22
  them to the reef, though strangely enough, he would never go there alone.
• 6:26:27
  Of his own accord. He made a circle or two over them,
• 6:26:32
  and then lit on the gunwale in the bow, and perched there, humped
• 6:26:36
  up and with his long dove colored tail feathers presented to the water. The
• 6:26:42
  oarsman kept close in shore, and as they rounded the little cape, all
• 6:26:47
  gay with wild cocoanut, the bushes brushed the boat, and the child,
• 6:26:52
  excited by their color, held out his hands to them. Emmeline stretched out
• 6:26:57
  her hand and broke off a branch. But it was not a branch of
• 6:27:03
  the wild cocoanut she had plucked. It was a branch of the never wake
• 6:27:07
  up berries, the berries that will cause a man to sleep. Should eat
• 6:27:11
  of them, to sleep and dream and never wake up. Throw them away,
• 6:27:18
  cried Dick, who remembered, I will in a minute. She was
• 6:27:23
  holding them up before the child, who was laughing and trying to grasp them.
• 6:27:30
  Then she forgot them and dropped them in the bottom of the boat,
• 6:27:33
  for something had struck the keel with a thud, and the water was boiling
• 6:27:38
  all round. There was a savage fight going on below. In the breeding
• 6:27:45
  season, great battles would sometimes take place in the lagoon, for fish have
• 6:27:49
  their jealousies just like men love affairs friendships. The two great forms could be
• 6:27:57
  dimly perceived while in pursuit of the other, and they terrified Emmeline, who
• 6:28:03
  implored Dick to row on. They slipped by the pleasant shores that Emmeline had
• 6:28:08
  never seen before, having been sound asleep when they came past them those years
• 6:28:14
  ago. Just before putting off, she had looked back at the beginnings of
• 6:28:18
  the little house under the Artu tree and as she looked at the strange glades
• 6:28:25
  and groves, the picture of it rose before her and seemed to call her
• 6:28:30
  back. It was a tiny possession, but it was home, and so
• 6:28:37
  little used to change. Was she that already a sort of home. Sickness
• 6:28:41
  was upon her, but it passed away almost as soon as it came,
• 6:28:47
  and she fell to wondering at the things around her and pointing them out to
• 6:28:51
  the child. When they came to the place where Dick had hooked the albacore,
• 6:28:56
  he hung on to his oars and told her about it. It was
• 6:29:00
  the first time she had heard of it, a fact which shows into what
• 6:29:04
  state of savagery he had been lapsing. He had mentioned about the canoes,
• 6:29:11
  for he had to account for the javelin, but as for telling her of
• 6:29:14
  the incidents of the chase, he no more thought of doing so than a
• 6:29:18
  red Indian would think of detailing to his squaw the incidents of a bear hunt.
• 6:29:25
  Contempt for women is the first law of savagery, and perhaps the last
• 6:29:30
  law of some old and profound philosophy. She listened, and when it came
• 6:29:36
  to the incident of the shark, she shuddered. I wish I had a
• 6:29:41
  hook big enough to catch him with, said he, staring into the water
• 6:29:45
  as if in search of his enemy. Don't think of him, Dick,
• 6:29:49
  said Emmeline, holding the child more tightly to her heart. Row On he
• 6:29:56
  resumed the skulls. But you could have seen from him his face that he
• 6:30:00
  was recounting to himself the incident. When they had rounded the last promontory and
• 6:30:07
  the strand, and the break in the reef opened before them, Emmeline caught
• 6:30:11
  her breath. The place had changed in some subtle manner. Everything was there
• 6:30:18
  as before, yet everything seemed different. The lagoon seemed narrower, the reef
• 6:30:26
  nearer, the cocoa palms not nearly so tall. She was contrasting the real
• 6:30:33
  things with the recollection of them when seen by a child. The black speck
• 6:30:38
  had vanished from the reef. The storm had swept it utterly away. Dick
• 6:30:47
  beached the boat on the shelving sand and left Emmeline seated in the stern of
• 6:30:51
  it whilst he went in search of the bananas. She would have accompanied him,
• 6:30:56
  but the child had fallen asleep. Asleep was even a pleasanter picture than
• 6:31:03
  when awake. He looked like a little brown cupid without wings, bow or
• 6:31:08
  arrow. He had all the grace of a cold up feather. Sleep was
• 6:31:15
  always in pursuit of him, and would catch him up at the most unexpected
• 6:31:18
  moments when he was at play, or indeed, at any time. Emmeline
• 6:31:23
  would sometimes find him with a colored shell or bit of coral that he had
• 6:31:29
  been playing with in his hand, fast asleep, a happy expression on his
• 6:31:33
  face, as if his mind were pursuing its earthly avocations on some fortunate beach
• 6:31:40
  in dreamland. Dick had plucked a huge bread fruit leaf and given it to
• 6:31:45
  her as a shelter from the sun, and she sat holding it over her
• 6:31:49
  and gazing straight before her over the white sunlit sands. The flight of the
• 6:31:56
  mind in reverie is not a direct line to her dreaming. As she sat
• 6:32:03
  came all sorts of colored pictures recalled by the scene before her, the green
• 6:32:08
  water under the stern of a ship, and the word Shannondoah vaguely reflected on
• 6:32:15
  it. Their landing, and the little tea set spread out on the white
• 6:32:19
  sand. She could still see the pansies painted on the plates, and she
• 6:32:25
  counted in memory the lead spoons, the great stars, that burned over the
• 6:32:30
  reef at nights, the chloricorns and fairies, the cask by the well where
• 6:32:37
  the convolvulus blossomed, and the wind blown trees seen from the summit of the
• 6:32:42
  hill. All these pictures drifted before her, dissolving and replacing each other as
• 6:32:49
  they went. There was a sadness in the contemplation of them, but pleasure
• 6:32:56
  too. She felt at peace with the world. All trouble seemed far behind
• 6:33:03
  her. It was as if the great storm that had left them unharmed had
• 6:33:07
  been an ambassador from the powers above to assure her of their forbearance, protection,
• 6:33:15
  and love. All at once she noticed that between the boat's bow and
• 6:33:19
  the sand there lay abroad blue sparkling line. The dinghy was afloat end of
• 6:33:30
  chapter nineteen, Chapter twenty, the Keeper of the Lagoon. The woods here
• 6:33:37
  had been less affected by the cyclone than those upon the other side of the
• 6:33:41
  island, but there had been destruction enough. To reach the place he wanted,
• 6:33:47
  Dick had to climb over felled trees and fight his way through a tangle
• 6:33:52
  of vines that had once hung overhead. The banana trees had not suffered at
• 6:33:56
  all, as if by some special dispensation of providence. Even the great bunches
• 6:34:03
  of fruit had been scarcely injured, and he proceeded to climb and cut them.
• 6:34:10
  He cut two bunches, and with one across his shoulder, came back
• 6:34:15
  down through the trees. He had got half across the sands, his head
• 6:34:19
  bent under the load, when a distant call came to him, and raising
• 6:34:25
  his head, he saw the boat adrift in the middle of the lagoon,
• 6:34:29
  and the figure of the girl in the bow of it, waving to him
• 6:34:33
  with her arm. He saw a skull floating on the water, half way
• 6:34:37
  between the boat and the shore, which she had no doubt lost in an
• 6:34:41
  attempt to paddle the boat back. He remembered that the tide was going out.
• 6:34:48
  He flung his load aside and ran down the beach. In a moment
• 6:34:53
  he was in the water. Emmeline, standing up in the boat, watched
• 6:34:57
  him. When she found herself adrift. She had made an effort to row
• 6:35:03
  back, and in her hurry shipping the skulls she had lost one with a
• 6:35:08
  single skull. She was quite helpless, as she had not the art of
• 6:35:14
  sculling a boat from the stern. At first she was not frightened, because
• 6:35:18
  she knew that Dick would soon return to her assistance. But as the distance
• 6:35:23
  between the boat and shore increased, a cold hand seemed laid upon her heart.
• 6:35:30
  Looking at the shore, it seemed very far away, and the view
• 6:35:34
  towards the reef was terrific, for the opening had increased in apparent size,
• 6:35:41
  and the great sea beyond seemed drawing her to it. She saw Dick coming
• 6:35:47
  out of the wood with a load on his shoulder, and she called to
• 6:35:49
  him. At first he did not seem to hear. Then she saw him
• 6:35:55
  look up, cast the bananas away, and come running down the sand to
• 6:36:00
  the water's edge. She saw him swimming. She saw him seize the skull,
• 6:36:04
  and her heart gave a great leap of joy. Towing the skull and
• 6:36:10
  swimming with one arm, he rapidly approached the boat. He was quite close,
• 6:36:15
  only ten feet away, when Emmeline saw behind him, shearing through the
• 6:36:21
  clear, rippling water and advancing with speed a dark triangle that seemed made of
• 6:36:26
  canvas, stretched upon a sword point. Forty years ago, he had floated
• 6:36:33
  adrift on the sea, in the form and likeness of a small, shabby
• 6:36:37
  pine cone, A prey to anything that might find him. He had escaped
• 6:36:44
  the jaws of the dogfish, and the jaws of the dogfish are a very
• 6:36:48
  wide door. He had escaped the albacore and the squid. His life had
• 6:36:55
  been one long series of miraculous escapes from death. Out of a billion like
• 6:37:00
  him born in the same year, he and a few others only had survived
• 6:37:07
  for thirty years. He had kept the lagoon to himself, as a ferocious
• 6:37:11
  tiger keeps a jungle. He had known the palm tree on the reef when
• 6:37:18
  it was a seedling, and he had known the reef even before the palm
• 6:37:22
  tree was there. The things he had devoured, flung one upon another,
• 6:37:27
  would have made a mountain. Yet he was as clear as enmity, as
• 6:37:33
  a sword, as cruel, and as soulless. He was the spirit of
• 6:37:41
  the lagoon. Emmeline screamed and pointed to the thing behind the swimmer. He
• 6:37:47
  turned, saw it drop the oar, and made for the boat. She
• 6:37:52
  had seized the remaining skull and stood with it poised. Then she hurled it
• 6:37:56
  blayed foremost that the form in the water, now fully visible and close on
• 6:38:02
  its prey, she could not throw a stone straight. Yet the skull went
• 6:38:10
  like an arrow to the mark, bulking the pursuer and saving the pursued.
• 6:38:17
  In a moment more, his leg was over the gunwale, and he was
• 6:38:19
  saved, But the skull was lost. End of Chapter twenty Chapter twenty one,
• 6:38:30
  The hand of the Sea. There was nothing in the boat that could
• 6:38:33
  possibly be used as a paddle. The skull was only five or six yards
• 6:38:38
  away, but to attempt to swim to it was certain death. Yet they
• 6:38:45
  were being swept out to sea. He might have made the attempt, only
• 6:38:49
  that on the starboard quarter the form of the shark, gently swimming at the
• 6:38:55
  same pace as they were drifting, could be made out, only half veiled
• 6:39:00
  by the water. The bird perched on the gunwale seemed to divine their trouble,
• 6:39:07
  for he rose in the air, made a circle, and resumed his
• 6:39:10
  perch, with all his feathers ruffled. Dick stood in despair, helpless,
• 6:39:17
  his hands clasping his head. The shore was drawing away before him, the
• 6:39:22
  surf loudening behind him. Yet he could do nothing. The island was being
• 6:39:27
  taken away from them by the great hand of the sea. Then suddenly the
• 6:39:33
  little boat entered the race formed by the confluence of the tides from the right
• 6:39:40
  and left arms of the lagoon. The sound of the surf suddenly increased,
• 6:39:45
  as though a door had been flung open. The breakers were falling, and
• 6:39:49
  the sea gulls crying on either side of them, and for a moment the
• 6:39:55
  ocean seemed to hesitate as to whether they were to be taken away into her
• 6:40:00
  waists or dashed on the coral strand only for a moment this seeming hesitation lasted.
• 6:40:07
  Then the power of the tide prevailed over the power of the swell,
• 6:40:12
  and the little boat, taken by the current, drifted gently out to sea.
• 6:40:19
  Dick flung himself down beside Emmeline, who was seated in the bottom of
• 6:40:23
  the boat, holding the child to her breast. The bird, seeing the
• 6:40:29
  land retreat and wise in its instinct, rose into the air. It circled
• 6:40:34
  thrice round the drifting boat, and then like a beautiful but faithless spirit,
• 6:40:41
  passed away to the shore. End of Chapter twenty one, Chapter twenty two
• 6:40:49
  together the island had sunk slowly from sight. At sundown, it was just
• 6:40:57
  a trace a ste on the southwestern horizon. It was before the new moon,
• 6:41:04
  and the little boat lay drifting. It drifted from the light of sunset
• 6:41:10
  into a world of vague, violet twilight, And now it lay drifting under
• 6:41:15
  the stars. The girl, clasping the baby to her breast, leaned against
• 6:41:22
  her companion's shoulder. Neither of them spoke. All the wonders in their short
• 6:41:29
  existence had culminated in this final wonder, this passing away together from the world
• 6:41:36
  of time, this strange voyage they had embarked on to where now that the
• 6:41:44
  first terror was over, they felt neither sorrow nor fear. They were together,
• 6:41:51
  come what might. Nothing could divide them, even should they sleep and
• 6:41:56
  never wake up. They would sleep together had one been left and the other
• 6:42:02
  taken. As though the thought had occurred to them simultaneously, they turned one
• 6:42:07
  to the other, and their lips met, their souls met, mingling in
• 6:42:12
  one dream, whilst above, in the windless heaven, space answered space with
• 6:42:21
  flashes of sidereal light, and canopus shone and burned like the pointed sword of
• 6:42:27
  Asrael. Clasped in Emmeline's hand was the last and most mysterious gift of the
• 6:42:36
  mysterious world they had known. The branch of crimson berries end of Chapter twenty
• 6:42:44
  two, end of Book two, Book three, Chapter one, Mad le
• 6:42:49
  Strange. They knew him upon the Pacific Slope as madle Strange. He was
• 6:42:59
  not mad, but he was a man with a fixed idea. He was
• 6:43:03
  pursued by a vision, the vision of two children and an old sailor adrift
• 6:43:11
  in a little boat upon a wide blue sea. When the Rago, bound
• 6:43:17
  for Papiti, picked up the boats of the Northumberland, only the people on
• 6:43:22
  the long boat were alive. Lfarge, the captain was mad, and he
• 6:43:26
  never recovered his reason. The Strange was utterly shattered. The awful experience in
• 6:43:34
  the boats and the loss of the children had left him a seemingly helpless wreck.
• 6:43:41
  The sco bankers, like all their class, had fared better, and
• 6:43:45
  in a few days were about the ship and sitting in the sun. Four
• 6:43:49
  days after the rescue, the Rago spoke the Newcastle, bound for San Francisco,
• 6:43:56
  and transshipped the shipwrecked men. A physician seen the Strange on board the
• 6:44:02
  Northumberland as she lay in that long, long calm before the fire, he
• 6:44:07
  would have declared that nothing but a miracle could prolong his life. The miracle
• 6:44:14
  came about in the General Hospital of San Francisco. As the cloud cleared from
• 6:44:21
  his mind, they unveiled the picture of the children and the little boat.
• 6:44:26
  The picture had been there daily, seen, but not truly comprehended. The
• 6:44:33
  horrors gone through in the open boat. The sheer physical exhaustion had merged all
• 6:44:41
  the accidents of the great disaster into one mournful, half comprehended fact. When
• 6:44:48
  his brain cleared, all the other incidents fell out of focus, and memory,
• 6:44:56
  with her eyes set upon the children, began to paint a picture that
• 6:45:00
  he was ever more to see. Memory cannot produce a picture that imagination has
• 6:45:07
  not retouched, and her pictures, even the ones least touched by imagination,
• 6:45:15
  are no mere photographs, but the work of an artist. All that is
• 6:45:21
  inessential she casts away. All that is essential, she retains, she idealizes.
• 6:45:29
  And that is why her picture of a lost mistress has the power to
• 6:45:33
  keep a man a celibate to the end of his days, and why she
• 6:45:37
  can break a human heart with the picture of a dead child. She is
• 6:45:42
  a painter, but she is also a poet. The picture before the mind
• 6:45:48
  of Lestrange was filled with this almost diabolical poetry. For in it. The
• 6:45:56
  little boat and her helpless crew were represented a rift on a blue and sunlet
• 6:46:02
  sea, a seem most beautiful to look at, yet most terrible, bearing
• 6:46:08
  as it did the recollections of thirst. He had been dying. When raising
• 6:46:14
  himself on his elbow, so to say, he looked at this picture,
• 6:46:19
  it recalled him to life. His will power asserted itself, and he refused
• 6:46:26
  to die. The will of a man has, if it is strong enough,
• 6:46:30
  the power to reject death. He was not in the least conscious of
• 6:46:36
  the exercise of this power. He only knew that a great and absorbing interest
• 6:46:41
  had suddenly arisen in him, and that a great aim stood before him,
• 6:46:48
  the recovery of the children. The disease that was killing him ceased its ravages,
• 6:46:56
  or rather was slain in its turn by the increasing lighttality against which it
• 6:47:00
  had to strive. He left the hospital and took up his quarters at the
• 6:47:06
  Palace Hotel, and then, like the general of an army, he began
• 6:47:11
  to formulate his plan of campaign against fate. When the crew of the Northumberland
• 6:47:18
  had stampeded, hurling their officers aside, lowering the boats with a rush,
• 6:47:23
  and casting themselves into the sea, everything had been lost in the way of
• 6:47:29
  ship's papers, the charts, the two logs, everything in fact that could
• 6:47:34
  indicate the latitude and longitude of the disaster. The first and second officers and
• 6:47:41
  a midshipmen had shared the fate of the quarter boat of the foremast hands saved.
• 6:47:47
  Not one, of course, could give the slightest hint as to the
• 6:47:51
  locality of the spot. A time reckoning from the horn told little, for
• 6:47:56
  there was no record of the log. All that could be was that the
• 6:48:00
  disaster had occurred somewhere south of the line. In Lefarge's brain lay for a
• 6:48:07
  certainty the position, and the strange went to see the captain in the Maison
• 6:48:12
  de Sante, where he was being looked after, and found him quite recovered
• 6:48:18
  from the furious mania that he had been suffering from, quite recovered, and
• 6:48:23
  playing with a ball of colored woosted. The Arago due at Papiti became overdue.
• 6:48:33
  Lestrange watched the overdue lists from day to day, week to week,
• 6:48:37
  from month to month, uselessly, for the Rago was never heard of again.
• 6:48:45
  One could not affirm even that she was wrecked. She was simply one
• 6:48:49
  of the ships that never come back from the sea end of chapter one,
• 6:48:57
  Chapter two, The secret of the Azure. To lose a child he loves
• 6:49:04
  is undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe that can happen to a man. I do not
• 6:49:11
  refer to its death. A child wanders into the street or is left by
• 6:49:17
  its nurse for a moment and vanishes. At first the thing is not realized.
• 6:49:23
  There is a pang and a hurry at the heart, which half vanishes,
• 6:49:29
  whilst the understanding explains that in a civilized city, if a child gets
• 6:49:34
  lost, it will be found and brought back by the neighbors or the police.
• 6:49:41
  But the police know nothing of the matter, or the neighbors, and
• 6:49:45
  the hours pass. Any minute may bring back the wanderer. But the minutes
• 6:49:52
  pass, and the day he wears into evening, and the evening into night,
• 6:49:59
  and the night to dawn, and the common sounds of a new day
• 6:50:03
  begin. You cannot remain at home for restlessness. You go out, only
• 6:50:10
  to return hurriedly for news. You are eternally listening, and what you hear
• 6:50:17
  shocks you. The common sounds of life, the role of the carts and
• 6:50:22
  cabs in the street, The footsteps of the passers by are full of indescribable
• 6:50:30
  mournfulness. Music increases your misery into madness, and the joy of others as
• 6:50:37
  monstrous as laughter heard in hell. If someone were to bring you the dead
• 6:50:42
  body of the child, you might weep, but you would bless him,
• 6:50:48
  for it is the uncertainty that kills you go mad or go on living.
• 6:50:56
  Years pass by, and you are an old man, you say to yourself,
• 6:51:03
  he would have been twenty years of age today. There is not in
• 6:51:08
  the old, ferocious penal code of our forefathers a punishment adequate to the case
• 6:51:15
  of the man or woman who steals a child. Lestrange was a wealthy man,
• 6:51:23
  and one hope remained to him that the children might have been rescued by
• 6:51:29
  some passing ship. It was not the case of children lost in a city,
• 6:51:34
  but in the broad Pacific, where ships travel from all ports to all
• 6:51:40
  ports. And to advertise his loss adequately it was necessary to placard the world.
• 6:51:48
  Ten thousand dollars was the reward offered for news of the lost ones,
• 6:51:53
  twenty thousand for the recovery, and the advertisement appeared in every newspaper likely to
• 6:52:00
  reach the eyes of a sailor. From the Liverpool Post to the dead bird.
• 6:52:07
  The years passed without anything definite coming in to answer all these advertisements.
• 6:52:12
  Once news came of two children saved from the sea in the neighborhood of the
• 6:52:18
  Gilberts, and it was not false news, but they were not the children
• 6:52:22
  he was seeking. For. This incident at once depressed and stimulated him,
• 6:52:29
  for it seemed to say, if these children have been saved, why not
• 6:52:33
  yours. The strange thing was that in his heart he felt a certainty that
• 6:52:41
  they were alive. His intellect suggested their death in twenty different forms. But
• 6:52:48
  a whisper somewhere out of that great blue ocean told him at intervals that what
• 6:52:55
  he sought was there, living, waiting for him. He was somewhat of
• 6:53:02
  the same temperament as Emmeline, a dreamer with a mind tune to receive and
• 6:53:08
  record the fine rays that fill this world, flowing from intellect to intellect,
• 6:53:15
  and even from what we call the inanimate things. A coarser nature would,
• 6:53:22
  through feeling, perhaps as acutely the grief, have given up in despair the
• 6:53:27
  search. But he kept on, and at the end of the fifth year,
• 6:53:33
  so far from desisting, he chartered a schooner and passed eighteen months in
• 6:53:40
  a fruitless search, calling at little known islands, and once unknowing at an
• 6:53:45
  island only three hundred miles from the tiny island of this story. If you
• 6:53:52
  wish to feel the hopelessness of this unguided search, do not look at a
• 6:53:57
  map of the Pacific, but go there. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
• 6:54:06
  square leagues of sea, thousands of islands, reefs, atolls. Up to
• 6:54:12
  a few years ago there were many small islands utterly unknown. Even still there
• 6:54:19
  are some. Though the charts of the Pacific are the greatest triumphs of hydrography.
• 6:54:26
  And though the island of the story was actually on the Admiralty charts,
• 6:54:32
  of what use was that fact? To l Strange. He would have continued
• 6:54:37
  searching, but he dared not, for the desolation of the sea had touched
• 6:54:44
  him. In that eighteen months. The Pacific explained itself to him, in
• 6:54:49
  part, explained its vastness, its secrecy, and inviability. The schooner lifted
• 6:55:00
  veil upon veil of distance, and veil upon veil lay beyond. He could
• 6:55:07
  only move in a right line. To search the wilderness of water with any
• 6:55:11
  hope, one would have to be endowed with the gift of moving in all
• 6:55:15
  directions at once. He would often lean over the bulwark rail and watch the
• 6:55:22
  swell slip by, as if questioning the water. Then the sunsets began to
• 6:55:30
  weigh upon his heart, and the stars to speak to him in a new
• 6:55:34
  language, and he knew that it was time to return, if he would
• 6:55:41
  return with a whole mind. When he got back to San Francisco, he
• 6:55:45
  called upon his agent, one, a maker of Kearney Street, but there
• 6:55:51
  was still no news. In the chapter two, Chapter three, Captain Fountain.
• 6:56:02
  He had a suite of rooms at the Palace Hotel, and he lived
• 6:56:04
  the life of any other rich man who is not addicted to pleasure. He
• 6:56:11
  knew some of the best people in the city, and conducted himself so sanely
• 6:56:15
  in all respects that a casual stranger would never have guessed his reputation for madness.
• 6:56:22
  But when you know him better, you would find, sometimes in the
• 6:56:27
  middle of a conversation that his mind was away from the subject, And were
• 6:56:33
  you to follow him in the street, you would hear him in conversation with
• 6:56:38
  himself. Once at a dinner party, he rose and left the room and
• 6:56:44
  did not return. Trifles might sufficient to establish a reputation of a sort.
• 6:56:52
  One morning, to be precise, it was the second day of May,
• 6:56:56
  exactly eight years and five months after the wreck of the Northumberland. Lestrange was
• 6:57:03
  in his sitting room reading when the bell of the telephone, which stood in
• 6:57:07
  the corner of the room rang. He went to the instrument. Are you
• 6:57:12
  there? Came a high American voice, La Strange, right, come down
• 6:57:18
  and see me, Wannamaker, I have news for you. Lestrange held the
• 6:57:25
  receiver for a moment, then he put it back in the rest. He
• 6:57:30
  went to a chair and sat down, holding his head between his hands.
• 6:57:34
  Then he rose and went to the telephone again. But he dared not use
• 6:57:40
  it. He dare not shatter the newborn hope news. What a world lies
• 6:57:48
  in that word. In Kearney Street, he stood before the door of Wannamaker's
• 6:57:53
  office, collecting himself and watching the crowd drifting by. Then he entered and
• 6:58:00
  went up the stairs. He pushed open a swing door and entered a great
• 6:58:06
  room. The clink and rattle of a dozen typewriters filled the place, and
• 6:58:11
  all the hurry of business clerks passed and came with sheaves of correspondence in their
• 6:58:18
  hands, and wanna maker himself, rising from bending over a message which he
• 6:58:23
  was correcting on one of the typewriter's tables, saw the newcomer and led him
• 6:58:29
  to the private office. What is it, said Lestrange. Only this said
• 6:58:36
  the other, taking a slip of paper with a name and address on it.
• 6:58:41
  Simon J. Fountain of forty five Rathray Street West, that's down near
• 6:58:48
  the wharves, says he has seen your ad in an old number of a
• 6:58:52
  paper, and he thinks he can tell you something. He did not specify
• 6:58:56
  the nature of the intelligence, but it might he worth finding out. I
• 6:59:02
  will go there, said Lestrange. Do you know Rathray Street. No.
• 6:59:08
  Wannamaker went out and called a boy and gave him some directions. Then La
• 6:59:15
  Strange and the boy started. Lestrange left the office without saying thank you or
• 6:59:21
  taking leave in any way of the advertising agent, who did not feel in
• 6:59:25
  the least affronted, for he knew his customer. Rathray Street is, or
• 6:59:32
  was, before the earthquake, a street of small, clean houses. It
• 6:59:37
  had a seafaring look that was accentuated by the marine perfumes from the wolves close
• 6:59:42
  by, and the sound of steam winches loading or discharging cargo, a sound
• 6:59:48
  that ceased, not night or day, as the work went on beneath the
• 6:59:52
  sun or the sizzling arc lamps. Number forty five was almost exactly like its
• 7:00:00
  fellows, neither better nor worse. But the door was opened by a neat,
• 7:00:06
  prim woman, small and of middle age. Commonplace. She was,
• 7:00:11
  no doubt, but not commonplace till a strange is mister fountain inn, He
• 7:00:18
  asked, I have come about the advertisement? Oh have you, sir,
• 7:00:23
  she replied, making way for him to enter, and showing him into a
• 7:00:27
  little sitting room on the left of the passage. The captain is in bed.
• 7:00:33
  He is a great invalid, but he was expecting perhaps some one would
• 7:00:38
  call, and he will be able to see you in a minute. If
• 7:00:41
  you don't mind waiting, thanks, said Lestrange. I can wait. He
• 7:00:48
  had waited eight years, what mattered a few minutes now, But at no
• 7:00:55
  time in the eight years had he suffered such suspense. For his heart knew
• 7:01:00
  that now, just now, in this commonplace little house, from the lips
• 7:01:06
  of perhaps the husband of that commonplace woman, he was going to learn either
• 7:01:11
  what he feared to hear or what he hoped. It was a depressing little
• 7:01:18
  room. It was so clean and looked as though it were never used.
• 7:01:23
  A ship imprisoned in a glass bottle stood upon the mantel piece, and there
• 7:01:29
  were shells from many far away places, pictures of ships in sand, all
• 7:01:34
  the things one finds as a rule adorning an old sailor's home. Le Stranger,
• 7:01:41
  as he sat waiting, could hear movements from the next room, probably
• 7:01:45
  the invalids, which were preparing for his reception. The distant sounds of the
• 7:01:52
  derricks and winches came muted through the tightly shut window that looked as though it
• 7:01:57
  had never been opened. A square of sunlight lit the upper part of the
• 7:02:03
  cheap lace curtain on the right of the window, and repeated its pattern vaguely
• 7:02:07
  on the lower part of the wall opposite. Then a blue bottle fly woke
• 7:02:12
  suddenly into life and began to buzz and drum against the window pane. And
• 7:02:18
  the Strange wished that they would come. A man of his temperament, masked
• 7:02:25
  necessarily, even under the happiest circumstances, suffer in going through the world.
• 7:02:32
  The fine fiber always suffers when brought in contact with the course. These people
• 7:02:38
  were as kindly disposed as any one else. The advertisement and the face and
• 7:02:45
  manners of the visitor might have told them that it was not the time for
• 7:02:48
  delay. Yet they kept him waiting whilst they arranged bed quilts and put medicine
• 7:02:55
  bottles straight, as if he could see. At last, the door opened
• 7:03:00
  and the woman said, will you step this way, sir. She showed
• 7:03:06
  him into a bedroom opening off the passage. The room was neat and clean,
• 7:03:11
  and had that indescribable appearance which marks the bedroom of the invalid. In
• 7:03:18
  the bed making a mountain under the counterpane, with an enormously distended stomach,
• 7:03:23
  lay a man, black bearded, and with his large, capable useless hands
• 7:03:30
  spread out on the coverlet hands ready and willing, but debarred from work.
• 7:03:37
  Without moving his body, he turned his head slowly and looked at the newcomer.
• 7:03:44
  This slow movement was not from weakness or disease. It was the slow,
• 7:03:48
  emotionless nature of the man speaking. This is the gentleman, silas,
• 7:03:56
  said the woman, speaking over a stranger's shoulder. Then she withdrew and closed
• 7:04:02
  the door. Take a chair, sir, said the sea captain, flapping
• 7:04:08
  one of his hands on the counterpane, as if in wearied protest against his
• 7:04:14
  own helplessness. I haven't the pleasure of your name, But the Missus tells
• 7:04:19
  me you've come about the advertisement. I lit on, yester even. He
• 7:04:26
  took a paper, folded small that lay beside him and held it out to
• 7:04:30
  his visitor. It was a Sydney bulletin three years old. Yes, said
• 7:04:37
  Lestrange, looking at the paper that is my advertisement. Well it's strange,
• 7:04:45
  very strange, said Captain Fountain, that I should have lit on it only
• 7:04:51
  yesterday. I've had it all three years in my chest the way old papers
• 7:04:56
  get lyne at the bottom, with odds and ends. Might n't have seen
• 7:05:03
  it now. Only the Missus cleared the raffle out of the chest and give
• 7:05:07
  me that paper, I says, seeing it in her hand, And I
• 7:05:11
  fell to reading it. For a man reads anything bar tracts. Lying in
• 7:05:18
  bed eight months as i've been with the Dropsy, I've been whaler man,
• 7:05:23
  and by forty year, and my last ship was the Sea Horse. Over
• 7:05:30
  seven years ago. One of my men picked up something on the beach of
• 7:05:37
  one of them islands east of the Marquesses we'd put into water. Yes,
• 7:05:44
  yes, said LaStrange. What was it he found missus, roared the captain
• 7:05:51
  in a voice that shook the walls of the room. The door opened,
• 7:05:56
  and the woman appeared. Fetch me my keys out of my trouser's pocket.
• 7:06:03
  The trousers were hanging up on the back of the door, as if only
• 7:06:07
  waiting to be put on. The woman fetched the keys, and he fumbled
• 7:06:11
  over them and found one. He handed it to her and pointed to the
• 7:06:15
  drawer of a bureau opposite the bed. She knew evidently what was wanted,
• 7:06:21
  for She opened the drawer and produced a box, which she handed to him.
• 7:06:26
  It was a small cardboard box tied round with a bit of string.
• 7:06:33
  He undid the string and disclosed the child's tea service, a teapot, cream
• 7:06:40
  jug, six little plates, all painted with a pansy. It was the
• 7:06:45
  box which Emmeline had always been losing. Lost again, the Strange buried his
• 7:06:53
  face in his hands. He knew the things. Emmeline had shown them to
• 7:07:00
  him in a burst of confidence. Out of all that vast ocean he had
• 7:07:06
  searched unavailingly, they had come to him like a message, And the awe
• 7:07:11
  and mystery of it bowed him down and crushed him The captain had placed the
• 7:07:18
  things on the newspaper spread out by his side, and he was unrolling the
• 7:07:22
  little spoons from their tissue paper covering. He counted them as if entering up
• 7:07:30
  the tale of some trust, and placed them on the newspaper. When did
• 7:07:36
  you find them, asked Strange, speaking with his face still covered. A
• 7:07:44
  matter of over seven years ago, replied the captain. We put into water
• 7:07:51
  at a place south of the line, Palm Tree Island. We whaler men
• 7:07:56
  call it because of the tree. At the break of the lagoon. One
• 7:08:02
  of my men brought it aboard, found it in a shanty built of sugar
• 7:08:07
  canes, which the men bust up for divilment. Good God, said Lestrange.
• 7:08:15
  Was there no one there, nothing but this box. Not a sight
• 7:08:21
  or sound, so the men said, just the shanty abandoned seemingly. I
• 7:08:29
  had no time to land and hunt for castaways. I was after whales.
• 7:08:37
  How big is the island? Oh, a fairish middle sized island. No
• 7:08:44
  natives, I've heard tell it's taboo. Why the lord only knows some crank
• 7:08:51
  of the Kannakers. I suppose anyhow, there's your findings. You recognize em.
• 7:09:00
  I do seems strange said the captain, that I should pick him up.
• 7:09:07
  Seems strange. Your advertisement out and the answer to it lines among my
• 7:09:14
  gear. But that's the way things go, strange, said the other.
• 7:09:22
  It's more than strange, of course, continued the captain. They might have
• 7:09:29
  been on the island, hid away somewhere. There's no saying. Only appearances
• 7:09:34
  are against it. Of course they might be there now, unbeknownst to you
• 7:09:41
  or me. They are there now, answered the strange, who was sitting
• 7:09:45
  up and looking at the playthings as though he read in them some hidden message.
• 7:09:52
  They are there now. Have you the position of the island? I
• 7:09:56
  have missus hand me my private log. She took a bonky, greasy black
• 7:10:06
  notebook from the bureau and handed it to him. He opened it, thumbed
• 7:10:11
  the pages, and then read out the latitude and longitude. I entered it
• 7:10:17
  on the day of finding here's the entry. Adams brought aboard a child's tie
• 7:10:25
  box out of deserted shanty, which men pulled down. Traded it to me
• 7:10:33
  for a carcer of rum. The cruise lasted three years and eight months.
• 7:10:40
  After that, we'd only been out three when it happened. I forgot all
• 7:10:45
  about it. Three years scrubbing round the world after Wales doesn't brighten a man's
• 7:10:52
  memory. Right round we went and paid off at Nantucket. Then after a
• 7:11:00
  foot and on shore and a month repairing, the old sea horse was off
• 7:11:04
  again. I wither it was at Honolulu. This dropsy took me and back.
• 7:11:11
  I come here home. That's the n There's not much to it,
• 7:11:18
  but seeing your advertisement, I thought I might answer it. The stranger took
• 7:11:25
  Fountain's hand and shook it. You see the reward, I offered. He
• 7:11:30
  said, I have not my check book with me, but you shall have
• 7:11:33
  the check in an hour from now. No, sir, replied the captain,
• 7:11:40
  if anything comes of it, I don't say. I'm not open to
• 7:11:44
  some small acknowledgment, but ten thousand dollars for a five cent box. Hmm,
• 7:11:52
  that's not my way of doing business. I can't make you take the
• 7:11:56
  money now. I can't even thank you properly. Now, said LaStrange.
• 7:12:02
  I am in a fever. But when all is settled, you and I
• 7:12:07
  will settle this business. My god. He buried his face in his hands
• 7:12:12
  again. I'm not wishing to be inquisitive, said Captain Fountain, slowly putting
• 7:12:21
  the things back in the box and tucking the paper shavings round them. But
• 7:12:26
  may I ask how you propose to move in this business? I will hire
• 7:12:32
  a ship at once and search, Aye, said the captain, wrapping up
• 7:12:38
  the little spoons in a meditative manner. Perhaps that will be best. He
• 7:12:45
  felt in his own mind that the search would be fruitless, but he did
• 7:12:48
  not say so. If he had been absolutely certain in his mind, without
• 7:12:55
  being able to produce the proof, he would not have counseled La Strange to
• 7:12:59
  any other course, knowing that the man's mind would never be settled until the
• 7:13:04
  proof positive was produced. The question is said, lestrange, what is my
• 7:13:11
  quickest way to get there? Ah? There, I may be able to
• 7:13:15
  help you, said Fountain, tying the string round the box. A schooner
• 7:13:21
  with good heels to her is what you want? And if I am not
• 7:13:25
  mistaken, there's one discharging cargo at this present minute at Old Sullivan's wharf.
• 7:13:33
  Missus, the woman answered the call. The Strange felt like a person in
• 7:13:40
  a dream, and these people, who were interesting themselves in his affairs,
• 7:13:45
  seemed to him beneficent. Beyond the nature of human beings, is Captain Stanner
• 7:13:52
  Street home? Do you think I don't know, replied the woman, But
• 7:13:56
  I can go see do she went? He lives only a few doors down,
• 7:14:04
  said Fountain, and he's the man for you. Best schooner captain ever
• 7:14:11
  sailed out of Frisco. The rare Tongua is the name of the boat I
• 7:14:15
  have in my mind, best boat that ever wore Copper. Stanny Street is
• 7:14:22
  the captain of her. Olders are mcvittie. She's been missionary and she's been
• 7:14:27
  pigs. Copper was her last cargo, and she's nearly discharged it. Oh.
• 7:14:34
  McVitty would hire her out to Satan at a price. You needn't be
• 7:14:40
  afraid of their boggling at it, if you can raise the dollars. She's
• 7:14:45
  had nearly a new suit of sails only the beginning of the year. Oh,
• 7:14:49
  she'll fix you up to a tea, and you can take the word
• 7:14:53
  of s. Fountain for that. I'll engineer the thing from this bear.
• 7:15:00
  If you'll let me put my r in your trouble. I'll victual her and
• 7:15:04
  find a crew three quarter price of any of those damned skulking agents. Oh.
• 7:15:11
  I'll take a commission, right enough, but I am half paid with
• 7:15:15
  doing the thing. He ceased for footsteps sounded in the passage outside, and
• 7:15:22
  Captain Stanny Street was shown in. He was a young man of not more
• 7:15:26
  than thirty, alert, quick of eye, and pleasant of face. Fountain
• 7:15:33
  introduced him to LaStrange, who had taken a fancy term at first sight.
• 7:15:38
  When he heard about the business in hand, he seemed interested at once.
• 7:15:44
  The affair seemed to appeal to him more than it had been a purely commercial
• 7:15:48
  matter, much of copper and pigs. If you'll come with me, sir,
• 7:15:53
  down to the wharf, I'll show you the boat now, he said.
• 7:15:57
  When they had discussed the matter and thrashed it out thoroughly, he rose,
• 7:16:03
  bearde a good day to his friend Fountain, and LaStrange followed him,
• 7:16:07
  carrying the brown paper box in his hand. O'Sullivan's wharf was not far away.
• 7:16:15
  A tall cape horner that looked almost a twin sister of the ill fated
• 7:16:21
  Northumberland was discharging iron, and astern of her graceful as a dream, with
• 7:16:27
  snow white decks, lay the roarer Tongua discharging copper. That's the boat,
• 7:16:36
  said Stannis Street, Cargo nearly all out. How does she strike your fancy?
• 7:16:41
  I'll take her, said lestrange cost what it will end of chapter three,
• 7:16:49
  Chapter four due south. It was on the tenth of May. So
• 7:16:56
  quickly did things move, under the supervision of the bed ridden captain, that
• 7:17:02
  the Rotonga, with the Strange on board, cleared the golden gate and made
• 7:17:07
  south, healing to attend knot breeze. There is no mode of travel to
• 7:17:12
  be compared to your sailing ship in a great ship. If you have ever
• 7:17:18
  made a voyage in one, the vast spaces of canvas, the sky high
• 7:17:22
  spars, the finesse with which the wind is met and taken advantage of,
• 7:17:29
  will form a memory never to be blotted out. A schooner is the queen
• 7:17:34
  of all rigs. She has a bounding buoyancy denied to the square rigged craft
• 7:17:41
  to which she stands in the same relationship as a young girl to a dowager.
• 7:17:45
  And the Raratonga was not only a schooner, but the queen acknowledged of
• 7:17:52
  all the schooners in the Pacific. For the first few days they made good
• 7:17:56
  way south. Then the wind became baff and headed them off. Added to
• 7:18:03
  the Stranger's feverish excitement, there was an anxiety, a deep and soul fretting
• 7:18:10
  anxiety, as if some half heard voice were telling him that the children he
• 7:18:15
  sought were threatened by some danger. These baffling winds blew upon the smoldering anxiety
• 7:18:22
  in his breast, as the wind blows upon embers, causing them to glow.
• 7:18:29
  They lasted some days, and then, as if fate had relented,
• 7:18:33
  up sprang in the starboard quarter, a spanking breeze, making the rigging seing
• 7:18:40
  to a merry tune, and blowing the spindriff from the forefoot. As the
• 7:18:44
  raratonga, healing to its pressure, went humming through the sea, leaving a
• 7:18:49
  wake spreading behind her like a fan. It took them along five hundred miles
• 7:18:56
  silently and with the speed of a dream. Then it ceased. The ocean
• 7:19:03
  and the air stood still. The sky above stood solid, like a great,
• 7:19:08
  pale blue dome. Just where it met the water line of the far
• 7:19:12
  horizon, a delicate tracery of cloud draped the entire round of the sky.
• 7:19:19
  I have said that the ocean stood still as well as the air. To
• 7:19:25
  the eye. It was so, for the swell under running the glitter on
• 7:19:29
  its surface was so even, so equable, and so rhythmical that the surface
• 7:19:36
  seemed not in motion. Occasionally a dimple broke the surface, and strips of
• 7:19:41
  dark seaweed floated. By showing up the green dim things rose to the surface,
• 7:19:48
  and, guessing the presence of man, sank slowly and dissolved from sight.
• 7:19:56
  Two days, never to be recovered, passed, and still the calm
• 7:20:00
  continued. On the morning of the third day, it breezed up from the
• 7:20:06
  norn or west, and they continued their course, a cloud of canvas,
• 7:20:11
  every sail drawing, and the music of the ripple under the forefoot. Captain
• 7:20:17
  Stanner Street was a genius in his profession. He could get more speed out
• 7:20:22
  of a schooner than any other man afloat, and carry more canvas without losing
• 7:20:27
  a stick. He was also, fortunately for a strange, a man of
• 7:20:33
  refinement and education, and what was better, still understanding. They were pacing
• 7:20:40
  the deck one afternoon when the Strange, who was walking with his hands behind
• 7:20:45
  him and his eyes counting the brown dowls in the cream white planking, broke
• 7:20:51
  silence. You don't believe in visions and dreams. How do you know?
• 7:20:56
  That, replied the other. I only put it as a question. Most
• 7:21:02
  people say they don't. Yes, but most people do. I do,
• 7:21:08
  said Lestrange. He was silent for a moment. You know my trouble so
• 7:21:14
  well that I won't bother you going over it. But there has come over
• 7:21:18
  me of late, a feeling. It is like a waking dream. Yes,
• 7:21:26
  I can't quite explain, for it is as if I saw something which
• 7:21:32
  my intelligence could not comprehend or make an image of. I think I know
• 7:21:37
  what you mean. I don't think you do. This is something quite strange.
• 7:21:44
  I am fifty, and in fifty years a man has experienced, as
• 7:21:48
  a rule, all the ordinary and most of the extraordinary sensations that a human
• 7:21:53
  being can be subjected to. Well, I have never felt this sensation,
• 7:22:00
  and before it comes on only at times I see as you might imagine a
• 7:22:07
  young baby sees, and things are before me that I do not comprehend.
• 7:22:15
  It is not through my bodily eyes that this sensation comes, but through some
• 7:22:19
  window of the mind from before which a curtain has been drawn. That's strange,
• 7:22:26
  said Stanistreet, who did not like the conversation over much. Being simply
• 7:22:32
  a schooner captain and a plain man, though intelligent enough and sympathetic, this
• 7:22:38
  something tells me, went on the strange that there is danger threatening thee He
• 7:22:47
  ceased, paused a minute, and then, to Santa Street's relief, went
• 7:22:52
  on, if I talk like that, you will think I am not right
• 7:22:55
  in my head. Let us pass the subject by. Let us get dreams
• 7:23:00
  and omens and come to realities. You know how I lost the children,
• 7:23:06
  You know how I hoped to find them at the place where Captain Fountain found
• 7:23:10
  their traces. He says the island was uninhabited, but he was not sure.
• 7:23:17
  No, replied Stanis Street. He only spoke of the beach. Yes,
• 7:23:22
  well, suppose there were natives on the other side of the island who
• 7:23:26
  had taken these children. If so, they would grow up with the natives
• 7:23:32
  and become savages. Yes, but the Polynesians can't really be called savages.
• 7:23:38
  They are a very decent lot. I've knocked about amongst them a good while.
• 7:23:44
  And a Kannaker is as white as a white man, which is not
• 7:23:47
  saying much, but it's something. Most of the islands are civilized now.
• 7:23:52
  Of course there are a few that aren't. But still, suppose even that
• 7:23:56
  savages as you call them, had come and taken the children off the Stranger's
• 7:24:00
  breath caught, for this was the very fear that was in his heart,
• 7:24:04
  though he had never spoken of it. Well, well, they would be
• 7:24:10
  well treated and brought up as savages, I suppose, so, the Strange
• 7:24:18
  sighed. Look here, said the captain. It's all very well talking.
• 7:24:22
  But upon my word, I think that we civilized folk put on a lot
• 7:24:26
  of airs and waste a lot of pity on savages. How so, what
• 7:24:32
  does a man want to be but happy? Yes? Well, who is
• 7:24:37
  happier than a naked savage in a warm climate. Oh he's happy enough,
• 7:24:42
  and he's not always holding a corral boy. He's a good deal of a
• 7:24:48
  gentleman. He has perfect health. He lives the life a man was born
• 7:24:53
  to live, face to face with nature. He doesn't see the sun through
• 7:24:57
  an office window, or the through the smoke of factory chimneys. Happy in
• 7:25:03
  civilized too, But bless you, where is he? The whites have driven
• 7:25:10
  him out in one or two small islands. You may find him still a
• 7:25:14
  crumb or so of him, Suppose, said Lestrange. Suppose those children had
• 7:25:21
  been brought up face to face with nature, yet living that free life,
• 7:25:27
  Yes, waking up under the stars. Lestrange was speaking with his eyes fixed
• 7:25:36
  as if upon something very far away, going to sleep as the sun sets,
• 7:25:41
  feeling the air fresh like this, which blows upon us all around them.
• 7:25:48
  Suppose they were like that, would it not be a cruelty to bring
• 7:25:52
  them to what we call civilization? I think it would, said Stannis Street.
• 7:26:00
  La Strange said nothing, but continued pacing the deck, his head bowed
• 7:26:06
  and his hands behind his back. One evening, at sunset, Stannys Street
• 7:26:11
  said, we are two hundred and forty miles from the island, reckoning from
• 7:26:15
  to day's reckoning at noon, we going all ten knots even with this breeze.
• 7:26:22
  We ought to fetch the place this time to morrow, before that,
• 7:26:25
  if it freshens, I am greatly disturbed, said Lestrange. He went below,
• 7:26:32
  and the schooner captain shook his head, and, locking his arm around
• 7:26:37
  a rat line, gave his body to the gentle roll of the craft as
• 7:26:41
  she stole along, skirting the sunset splendid and to the nautical eye, full
• 7:26:48
  of fine weather. The breeze was not quite so fresh next morning, but
• 7:26:53
  it had been blowing fairly all the night, and the Raretonga had made good
• 7:26:59
  way about eleven It began to fail. It became the lightest sailing breeze,
• 7:27:06
  just sufficient to keep the sails drawing and the wake rippling and swirling behind.
• 7:27:12
  Suddenly, Stanner Street, who had been standing talking till a Strange, climbed
• 7:27:17
  a few feet up the mizzen ratlines and shaded his eyes. What is it,
• 7:27:22
  asked La Strange? A boat, he replied, hand me that glass
• 7:27:27
  you will find in the sling. There. He leveled the glass and looked
• 7:27:32
  for a long time without speaking. It's a boat, a drift, a
• 7:27:37
  small boat. Nothing in her. Stay, I see something white, can't
• 7:27:45
  make it out. Hi there to a fellow at the wheel, Keep her
• 7:27:48
  a point more to starboard. He got on to the deck. We're going
• 7:27:53
  dead on for her. Is there any one in her? Asked La Strange.
• 7:28:00
  Can't quite make out, but I'll lower the whale boat and fetch her
• 7:28:03
  alongside. He gave orders for the whale boat to be slung out and manned.
• 7:28:10
  As they approached nearer, it was evident that the drifting boat, which
• 7:28:12
  looked like a ship's dinghy, contained something, but what could not be made
• 7:28:18
  out. When he had approached near enough, Stannis Street put the helm down
• 7:28:23
  and brought the schooner two, with her sails all shivering. He took his
• 7:28:29
  place in the bow of the whale boat and LaStrange in the stern. The
• 7:28:33
  boat was lowered, the falls cast off, and the oars bent to the
• 7:28:37
  water. The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, looking scarcely
• 7:28:44
  bigger than a walnut shell. In thirty strokes, the whale boat's nose was
• 7:28:49
  touching her quarter. Stannis Street grasped her gunale. In the bottom of the
• 7:28:56
  dinghi lay a girl naked all but for a strip of collored striped material.
• 7:29:02
  One of her arms was clasped round the neck of a form that was half
• 7:29:06
  hidden by her body. The other clasped partly to herself, partly to her
• 7:29:11
  companion, the body of a baby. They were natives, evidently wrecked or
• 7:29:18
  lost by some mischance from some inter island schooner. Their breasts rose and fell
• 7:29:25
  gently, and clasped in the girl's hand was a branch of some tree,
• 7:29:30
  and on the branch a single withered berry. Are they dead? Asked l
• 7:29:37
  Strange, who divined that there were people in the boat, and who was
• 7:29:41
  standing up in the stern of the whale boat trying to see no, said
• 7:29:45
  Stannis Street. They are asleep. End of Chapter four and end of the
• 7:29:55
  Blue Lagoon by H. De Vere Stackpool