 Book 1, chapters 21, 22, and 23 of the Blue Lagoon, read by Adrian Pretzelis, the Blue Lagoon by H. DeVere Stackpool. Chapter 21 The Garland of Flowers You could just make the figure out, lying on the reef near the little cask, and comfortably sheltered from the sun by an upstanding lump of coral. "'He's asleep,' said Dick. He had not thought to look towards the reef from the beach, or he might have seen the figure before. "'Dicky,' said Emmeline, "'well, how did he get over, if you said the dinghy was tied to the tree?' "'I don't know,' said Dick, who had not thought of this. "'There he is, anyhow. I'll tell you what, Em, we'll row across and wake him. I'll boo into his ear and make him jump.' They got down from the rock and came back down through the wood. As they came, Emmeline picked flowers, and began making them up into one of her wreaths. Some scarlet hibiscus, some bluebells, a couple of pale poppies with furry stalks and bitter perfume. "'What are you making that for?' asked Dick, who always viewed Emmeline's wreath-making with a mixture of compassion and vague disgust. "'I'm going to put it on Mr. Button's head,' said Emmeline, "'so when you say boo into his ear, he'll jump up with it on.' Dick chuckled with pleasure at the idea of the practical joke, and almost admitted in his own mind for a moment that, after all, there might be a use for such futilities as wreaths. The dinghy was moored under the spreading shade of the aower. The painter tied to one of the branches that projected over the water. These dwarf aowers branched in an extraordinary way, close to the ground, throwing out limbs like rails. The tree had made a good protection for the little boat, protecting it from marauding hands and from the sun. Besides the protection of the tree, Paddy had now and then scuttled the boat in shallow water. It was a new boat to start with, and with precautions like these might be expected to last many years. "'Get in,' said Dick, pulling on the painter, so that the bow of the dinghy came close to the beach. Emmeline got in and went aft. Then Dick got in, pushed off, and took to the skulls. Next moment they were out on the sparkling water. Dick rode cautiously, fearing to wake the sleeper. He fastened the painter to the coral spike that seemed set there by nature for the purpose. He scrambled on to the reef, and lying down on his stomach drew the boat's gun on close up so that Emmeline might land. He had no boots on. The soles of his feet from constant exposure had become insensitive as leather. Emmeline also was without boots. The soles of her feet, as is always the case with highly nervous people, were sensitive, and she walked delicately, avoiding the worst places, holding her wreath in her right hand. It was full tide, and the thunder of the waves outside shook the reef. It was like being in a church, when the deep base of the organ is turned full on, shaking the ground and the air, the walls and the roof. Dashes of spray came over with the wind, and the melancholy, Hi, hi, of the wheeling gulls came like the voices of ghostly sailor men hauling at the halyards. Paddy was lying on his right side, steeped in profound oblivion. His face was buried in the crook of his right arm, and his brown tattooed left hand lay on his left thigh, palm upward. He had no hat, and the breeze stirred his grizzled hair. Dick and Emmeline stole up to him till they got right beside him. Then Emmeline, flashing out a laugh, flung the little wreath of flowers on the old man's head, and Dick, popping down on his knees, shouted into his ear. But the dreamer did not stir or move a finger. Paddy, cried Dick, wake up, wake up! He pulled at the shoulder till the figure from its sideways posture fell over on its back. The eyes were wide open and staring. The mouth hung open, and from the mouth darted a little crab. It scuttled over the chin and dropped on the coral. Emmeline screamed and screamed and would have fallen, but the boy caught her in his arms. One side of the face had been destroyed by the larvae of the rocks. He held her to him as he stared at the terrible figure lying upon its back, hands outspread. Then, while with terror, he dragged her towards the little boat. She was struggling and panting and gasping like a person drowning in ice-cold water. His one instinct was to escape, to fly anywhere, no matter where. He dragged the girl to the coral edge and pulled the boat up close. Had the reef suddenly become enveloped in flames he could not have exerted himself more to escape from it and save his companion. A moment later they were afloat and he was pulling wildly for the shore. He did not know what had happened, nor did he pause to think he was fleeing from horror, nameless horror, while the child at his feet, with her head resting against the gunnel, stared up open-eyed and speechless at the great blue sky as if at some terror visible there. The boat grounded on the white sand, and the wash of the incoming tide drove it up sideways. Emmeline had fallen forward. She had lost consciousness. Chapter 22 Alone The idea of spiritual life must be innate in the heart of man, for all that terrible night when the children lay huddled together in the little heart in the chaparral, the fear that filled them was of their old friend might suddenly darken the entrance and seek to lie down beside them. They did not speak about him. Something had been done to him. Something terrible had happened to the world they knew, but they dared not speak of it or question each other. Dick had carried his companion to the hut where he left the boat and hidden with her there. The evening had come on and the night, and now in the darkness, without having tasted food all day, he was telling her not to be afraid that he would take care of her, but not a word of the thing that had happened. The thing for them had no precedent and no vocabulary. They had come across death, raw and real, uncooked by religion, undiodourized by the sayings of sages and poets. They knew nothing of the philosophy that tells us that death is the common lot and the natural sequence to birth, or the religion that teaches us that death is the door to life. A dead old sailor man lying like a festering carcass on the coral ledge, eyes staring and glazed and fixed, a wide open mouth that once had spoken comforting words, and now spoke living crabs. That was the vision before them. They did not philosophise about it, and though they were filled with terror I do not think it was terror that held them from speaking about it, but a vague feeling that what they had beheld was obscene, unspeakable, and a thing to avoid. Lestrange had brought them up in his own way. He had told them that there was a good God who looked after the world, determined as far as he could do to exclude demonology and sin and death from their knowledge. He had rested content with the bold statement that there was a good God who looked after the world, without explaining fully that the same God would torture them for ever and ever should they fail to believe in him or keep his commandments. This knowledge of the Almighty therefore was but a half knowledge, the vaguest abstraction. Had they been brought up, however, in the most strict Calvinistic school, this knowledge of him would have been no comfort now, believing God is no comfort to a frightened child. Teach him as many parrot-like prayers as you please, and in distress, or the dark, of what use are they to him? His cries for his nurse, or for his mother. During that dreadful night these two children had no comfort to seek anywhere in the whole wild universe but in each other. She in a sense of his protection, he in a sense of being her protector. The manliness in him greater and more beautiful than physical strength developed in those dark hours just as a plant under extraordinary circumstances is hurried into bloom. Towards dawn Emmeline fell asleep. Dick stole out of the hut when he had assured himself from her regular breathing that she was asleep and, pushing the tendrils and the branches of the mammy apples aside, found the beach. The dawn was just breaking, and the morning breeze was coming in from the sea. When he had reached the dinghy the day before, the tide was just at the flood, and it had left her stranded. The tide was coming in now, and in a short time it would be far enough up to push her off. Emmeline in the night had implored him to take her away, take her away somewhere from here, and he had promised, without knowing in the least how he was to perform his promise. As he stood looking at the beach, so desolate and strangely different now from what it was the day before, an idea of how he could fulfill his promise came to him. He ran down to where the little boat lay on the shelving sand with the ripples of the incoming tide just washing the rudder which was still shipped. He unshipped the rudder and came back. Under a tree covered with the stacil they had brought from the Shenandoah lay most of their treasures, old clothes and boots, and all the other odds and ends. The precious tobacco stitched up in a piece of canvas was there, and the housewife with the needles and threads. A hole had been dug in the sand as a sort of cache for them, and the stacil put over them to protect them from the dew. The sun was now looking over the sea-line, and the tall coconut trees were singing and whispering together under the strengthening breeze. End of Chapter 22 Chapter 23 They move away He began to collect the things and carry them to the dinghy. He took the stacil and everything that might be useful, and when he had stowed them in the boat he took the breaker and filled it with water at the water-sauce in the wood. He collected some bananas and breadfruit and stowed them in the dinghy with the breaker. Then he found the remains of yesterday's breakfast, which he had hidden between two palmetto leaves and placed it also in the boat. The water was now so high that a strong push would float her. He turned back to the hut for Emmeline. Emmeline was still asleep, so soundly asleep that when he lifted her up in his arms she made no movement. He placed her carefully in the stern sheets, with her head on the sail rolled up, and then, standing in the bow, pushed off with a skull. Taking the skulls he turned the boat's head up the lagoon to the left. He kept close to the shore, but for the life of him he could not help lifting his eyes and looking toward the reef. Round a certain spot in the distant white coral there was a great commotion of birds, huge birds some of them seemed, and the high, high, high of them came across the lagoon on the breeze as they quarreled together and beat the air with their wings. He turned his head away till a bend of the shore hid the spot from sight. Here, sheltered more completely than opposite the break in the reef, the artoo trees came in places right down to the water's edge. The breadfruit trees cast the shadow of their great scalloped leaves upon the water, glades, thick with fern, wilderness of the mammy-apple, and bushes of the scarlet wild coconut all slipped by as the dinghy, hugging the shore, crept up the lagoon. Gazing at the shore edge one might have imagined it the edge of a lake, but for the thunder of the Pacific on the distant reef, and even that did not destroy the impression but only lent a strangeness to it. A lake in the midst of the ocean, that is what the lagoon really was. Here and there coconut trees slanted over the water, mirroring their delicate stems and tracing their clear-cut shadows on the sandy bottom, a fathom deep below. He kept close in shore for the sake of the shelter of the trees. His object was to find some place where they might stop permanently and put up a tent. He was seeking a new home, in fact, but pretty as were the glades they passed they were not attractive places to live in. There were too many trees, all the ferns were too deep. He was seeking air and space, and suddenly he found it. Rounding a little cape, all blazing with the scarlet of the wild coconut, the dinghy broke into a new world. All her lay a great sweep of the palest blue-swept water, down to which came a broad green sward of park-like land set on either side with deep groves, and leading up and away to higher land where, above the massive and motionless green of the great breadfruit trees, the palm trees swayed and fluttered their pale green feathers in the breeze. The pale colour of the water was due to the extreme shallowness of the lagoon just here. So shallow was it that one could see brown spaces indicating beds of dead and rotten coral, and splashes of darkest sapphire where the deep pools lay. The reef lay more than half a mile from the shore, a great way out it seemed, so far out that its cramping influence was removed, and one had the impression of wide and unbroken sea. Dick rested on his oars and let the dinghy float whilst he looked around him. He had come some four miles and a half, and this was right at the back of the island. As the boat drifting shoreward touched the bank, Emmeline awaked from her sleep, sat up and looked around her. End of Chapter 23. End of Book 1. Book 2. Chapters 1 and 2 of the Blue Lagoon. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by Adrian Pretzelis. The Blue Lagoon by H. Deveree Stackpool. Book 2. Part 1. Chapter 1. Under the R2 tree. On the edge of the green sward, between a diamond-checkered R2 trunk and the massive bowl of a breadfruit, a house had come into being. It was not much larger than a big hen-house, but quite sufficient for the needs of two people in a climate of eternal summer. It was built of bamboos, and thatched with a double thatch of palmetto leaves, so neatly built, and so well thatched that one might have fancied it the production of several skilled workmen. The breadfruit tree was barren of fruit, as these trees sometimes are, whole groves of them ceasing to bear for some mysterious reason only known to nature. It was green now, but when suffering its yearly change, the great scalloped leaves would take on all imaginable tinges of gold and bronze and amber. Beyond the R2 was a little clearing, where the chaparral had been carefully removed and taro-roots planted. Stepping from the house doorway onto the sward, you might have fancied yourself, except for the tropical nature of the foliage, in some English park. Going to the right, the eye became lost in the woods, where all tints of green were tinging the foliage, and the bushes of the wild coconut burned scarlet as horberries. The house had a doorway, but no door. It might have been said to have a double roof, for the breadfruit foliage above gave good shelter during the rains. If it was bare enough, dried, sweet-smelling ferns covered the floor. Two sails rolled up lay on either side of the doorway. There was a rude shelf attached to one of the walls, and on the shelf some bowls made out of coconut shell. The people to whom the place belonged evidently did not trouble it much with their presence, using it only at night, and as a refuge from the dew. Moving on the grass by the doorway, sheltered by the breadfruit shade, yet with the hot rays of the afternoon sun just touching her naked feet, was a girl. A girl of fifteen or sixteen, naked except for a kilt of gaily striped material reaching from her waist to her knees. Her long black hair was drawn back from the forehead and tied behind with a loop of elastic vine. A scarlet plossum was stuck behind her right ear after the fashion of a clark's pen. Her face was beautiful, powdered with tiny freckles, especially under the eyes which were of a deep, tranquil blue-gray. She half sat, half lay on her left side, whilst before her, quite close, strutted up and down on the grass a bird with blue plumage, coral-red beak, and bright, watchful eyes. The girl was emeline-less strange. Just by her elbow stood a little bowl made from half a coconut, and filled with some white substance with which she was feeding the bird. Dick had found it in the woods two years ago, quite small, deserted by its mother and starving. They had fed it and tamed it, and now it was one of the family, roosting on the roof at night and appearing regularly at mealtimes. All at once she held out to her hand. The bird flew into the air, lit on her forefinger and balanced itself, sinking its head between its shoulders and uttering the sound which formed its entire vocabulary and one means of vocal expression, a sound from which it had derived its name. Coco, said emeline, where's Dick? The bird turned his head about, as if searching for his master, and the girl lay back lazily on the grass, laughing and holding him up, poised on her finger, as if he were some enameled jewel she wished to admire at a little distance. They made a pretty picture under the cave-like shadow of the breadfruit leaves, and it was difficult to understand how this young girl, so perfectly formed, so fully developed and so beautiful, had evolved from plain little emeline a strange, and the whole thing, as far as the beauty of her was concerned, had happened during the last six months. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Half-Child, Half-Savage Five rainy seasons had passed and gone since the tragic occurrence on the reef. Five long years the breakers had thundered, and the seagulls had cried round the figure whose spell had drawn a mysterious barrier across the lagoon. The children had never returned to the old place, they had kept entirely to the back of the island and the woods, the lagoon down to a certain point and the reef, a wide enough and beautiful enough world, but a hopeless world, as far as help from civilisation was concerned, four of the few ships that touched at the island in the course of the years, how many would explore the lagoon or woods? That's not one. Occasionally Dick would make an excursion in the dinghy to the old place, but Emeline refused to accompany him. He went chiefly to obtain bananas, for on the whole island there was but one clump of banana trees, that near the water-source in the wood, where the old green skulls had been discovered, and the little barrel. He had never quite recovered from the occurrence on the reef. Something had been shown to her, the purport of which she vaguely understood, and it had filled her with horror and a terror of the place where it had occurred. Dick was quite different, he had been frightened enough at first, but the feeling wore away in time. Dick had built three houses in succession during the five years. He had laid out a patch of tarot and another of sweet potatoes. He knew every pool on the reef, for two miles either way, and the forms of their inhabitants, and though he did not know the names of the creatures to be found there, he made a profound study of their habits. He had seen some astonishing things during these five years, from a fight between a whale and two thrashes conducted outside the reef, lasting an hour, and dying the breaking waves with blood, to the poisoning of the fish in the lagoon by fresh water, due to an extraordinarily heavy rainy season. He knew the woods of the back of the island by heart, and the forms of life that inhabited them, butterflies and moths and birds, lizards and insects of strange shape, extraordinary orchids, some filthy looking, the very image of corruption, some beautiful, and all strange. He found melons and guavas and breadfruit, the red apple of Tahiti, and the great Brazilian plum, tarot and plenty, and a dozen other good things, but there were no bananas. This made him unhappy at times, for he was human. Although Emeline had asked Coco for Dick's whereabouts, it was only a remark made by way of making conversation, for she could hear him in the little cane break which lay close by amidst the trees. In a few minutes he appeared, dragging after him two canes which he had just cut, and wiping the perspiration off his brow with his naked arm. He had an old pair of trousers on, part of the truck salved long ago from the Shenandoah. Nothing else, and he was well worth looking at and considering, both from a physical and a psychological point of view. Orban-haired and tall, looking more like seventeen than sixteen, with a restless and daring expression, half a child, half a man, half a civilised being, half a savage. He had progressed and retrograded during the five years of savage life. He sat down beside Emeline, flung the canes beside him, tried the edge of the old butcher's knife with which he had cut them, then, taking one of the canes across his knee, he began whittling at it. What are you making? asked Emeline, releasing the bird, which flew into one of the branches of the artoo, and rested there, a blue point amidst the dark green. Fish-spear replied Dick. Without being taciturn he rarely wasted words. Life was all business for him. He would talk to Emeline, but always in short sentences, and he had developed the habit of talking to inanimate things, to the fish-spear he was carving, or the bowl he was fashioning from a cocoa-nut. As for Emeline, even as a child she had never been talkative, there was something mysterious in her personality, something secretive. Her mind seemed half-submerged in twilight, though she spoke little and though the subject of their conversations was almost entirely material and relative to their everyday needs, her mind would wander into abstract fields and the land of chimaire and dreams. What she found there no one knew, least of all perhaps herself. As for Dick he would sometimes talk and mutter to himself as if in a reverie, but if you caught the words you would find they referred to no abstraction, but as some trifle he had on hand. He seemed entirely bound up in the moment, and to have forgotten the past as completely as though it had never been. Yet he had his contemplative moods. He would lie with his face over a rick-pool by the hour, watching the strange forms of life to be seen there, or sit in the woods motionless as a stone, watching the birds and the swift slipping lizards. The birds came so close that he could easily have knocked them over, but he never hurt one or interfered in any way with the wild life of the woods. The island, the lagoon and the reef, were for him the three volumes of a great picture-book as they were for Emmeline, though in a different manner. The colour and beauty of it all fed some mysterious want in her soul. Her life was a long reverie, a beautiful vision, troubled with shadows. Across all the blue and coloured spaces that meant months and years, she could still see, as in a glass dimly, the Northumberland, smoking against the wild background of fog, her uncle's face, Boston, a vague and dark picture beyond the storm, and nearer, the tragic form on the reef that still haunted terribly her dreams. But she never spoke of these things to Dick, just as she kept the secret of what was in her box, and the secret of her trouble whenever she lost it, she kept the secret of her feelings about these things. Born of these things, there remained with her always a vague terror. The terror of losing Dick, Mrs. Stannard, her uncle, the dim people she had known in Boston, all had passed away out of her life like a dream and shadows, the other one too, most horribly. What if Dick were taken from her as well? This haunting trouble had been with her a long time. About a few months ago it had been mainly personal and selfish, the dread of being left alone, but lately it had altered and become more acute. Dick had changed in her eyes, and the fear was now for him. Her own personality had suddenly and strangely become merged in his. The idea of life without him was unthinkable, yet the trouble remained a menace in the blue. Some days it would be worse than others. Today for instance it was worse than yesterday as though some danger had crept close to them during the night. Yet the sky and sea were stainless. The sun shone on tree and flower. The west wind blew the tune of the far away reef like a lullaby. There was nothing to hint of danger or the need of distrust. At last Dick finished his spear and rose to his feet. Where are you going? asked Emeline. The reef, he replied, the tide's going out. I'll go with you, said she. He went into the house and stowed the precious knife away. Then he came out, spear in one hand and half a fathom of Liana in the other. Liana was for the purpose of stringing the fish on, should the catch be large. He led the way down the grass he swore to the lagoon where the dinghy lay, close up to the bank, and moored to a post driven into the soft soil. Emeline got in, and at taking the skulls he pushed off. The tide was going out. I have said that the reef just here lay a great way out from the shore. The lagoon was so shallow that at low tide one could have waded almost right across it, were it not for potholes here and there, ten feet traps, and great beds of rotten coral into which one would sink as into brushwood, to say nothing of the nettle coral that stings like a bed of nettles. There were also other dangers. All shallows are full of wild surprises in the way of life and death. Dick had long ago marked out in his memory the soundings of the lagoon, and it was fortunate that he possessed the special sense of location which is the main standby of the hunter and the savage, for, from the disposition of the coral in ribs, the water from the shore edge to the reef ran in lanes. Only two of these lanes gave a clear, fair way from the shore edge to the reef. Had you followed the others, even in a boat of such shallow draught as the dinghy, you would have found yourself stranded half-way across unless indeed it were a spring tide. Half-way across the sound of the surf on the barrier became louder, and the everlasting and monotonous cries of the gulls came on the breeze. It was lonely out there, and looking back the shore seemed a great way off. It was lonelier still on the reef. Dick tied up the boat to a projection of coral, and helped Amaline to land. The sun was creeping down into the west, the tide was nearly half out, and large pools of water lay glittering like burnished shields in the sunlight. Dick, with his precious spear beside him, sat calmly down on a ledge of coral, and began to divest himself of his one and only garment. Amaline turned away her head and contemplated the distant shore, which seemed thrice as far off as it was in reality. When she turned her head again he was racing along the edge of the surf. He and his spear, silhouetted against the spin drift and dazzling foam, formed a picture savage enough and well in keeping with the general desolation of the background. She watched him lie down and cling to a piece of coral, whilst the surf rushed round and over him, and then rise and shake himself like a dog, and pursue his gambles, his body all glittering with the wet. Sometimes a whoop would come on the breeze, mixing with the sound of the surf and the cry of the gulls, and she would see him plunge his spear into a pool, and the next moment the spear would be held aloft with something struggling and glittering at the end of it. He was quite different out here on the reef to what he was ashore. The surroundings here seemed to develop all that was savage in him in a startling way, and he would kill and kill just for the pleasure of killing, destroying more fish than they could possibly use. CHAPTER III THE DEMON OF THE REAF The romance of coral has still to be written. Death still exists a widespread opinion that the coral reef and the coral island are the work of an insect. This fabulous insect, accredited with the genius of Brunel and the patience of Job, has been humorously enough held up before the children of many generations as an example of industry, a thing to be admired, a model to be followed. As a matter of fact nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given up to a life of ease and degeneracy than the reef-building polifer, to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but unlike the hobo he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm. He attracts to himself calcareous elements from the water to make himself a house. Mark you, the sea does the building. He dies, and he leaves his house behind him, and a reputation for industry, besides which the reputation of the ant turns pale, and that of the bee becomes of little account. On a coral reef you are treading on rock that the reef-building polifer of ages have left behind them as evidence of their idle and apparently useless lives. You might fancy that the reef is formed of dead rock, but it is not. That is where the wonder of the thing comes in. A coral reef is half alive. If it were not, it would not resist the action of the seas ten years. The live part of the reef is just where the breakers come in and beyond. The gelatinous rock-building polipiphers die almost at once, if exposed to the sun or if left uncovered by the water. Sometimes at a very low tide, if you have enough courage to risk being swept away by the breakers, going out as far on the reef as you can, you may catch a glimpse of them in their living state, great mounds and masses of what seems rock, but which is a honeycomb of coral whose cells are filled with the living polipiphers. Those in the uppermost cells are usually dead, but lower down they are living. Always being renewed, devoured by fish, attacked by the sea. That is the life of a coral reef. It is a thing as living as a cabbage or a tree. Each storm tears a piece off the reef which the living coral replaces. Wounds occur in it which actually granulate and heal as wounds do of the human body. There is nothing perhaps more mysterious in nature than this fact of the existence of a living land, a land that repairs itself when injured by vital processes and resists the eternal attack of the sea by vital force, especially when we think of the extent of some of these lagoons or atolls whose existences are an eternal battle with the waves. Like the island of this story, which is an island surrounded by a barrier reef of coral surrounding a space of sea, the lagoon, the reef forms the island. The reef may be grown over by trees or it may be perfectly destitute of important vegetation or it may be crusted with islets. Some islets may exist within the lagoon, but often as not it is just a great empty lake afloat with sand and coral, peepled with life, different to the life of the outside ocean, protected from the waves and reflecting the sky like a mirror. When we remember that the atoll is a living thing, an organic whole, as full of life, though not so highly organised as a tortoise, the meanest imagination must be struck with the immensity of one of the structures. An atoll, in the lower archipelago, measured from lagoon edge to lagoon edge, is 60 miles long by 20 miles broad at its broadest part. In the marshall apelago, Rimsky-Korsakov is 54 miles long and 20 miles broad, and Rimsky-Korsakov is a living thing, secreting, excreting, and growing more highly organised than the coconut trees that grow upon its back or the blossoms that powder the Hutu trees in its groves. The story of coral is the story of a world, and the longest chapter in that story concerns itself with coral's infinite variety and form. Out on the margin of the reef, where Dick was spearing fish, you might have seen a peach blossom-coloured lichen on the rock. This lichen was a form of coral, coral growing upon coral, and in the pools at the edge of the surf, branching corals also of the colour of a peach bloom. Within a hundred yards of where Emmeline was sitting, the pools contained corals of all colours, from lake red to pure white, and the lagoon behind her, corals of the quaintest and strangest forms. Dick had speared several fish and had left them lying on the reef to be picked up later on. Tired of killing, he was now wandering along examining the various living things he came across. Huge slugs inhabited the reefs, slugs as big as parsnips, and somewhat of the same shape, they were a species of bech de mer, globe-shaped jellyfish as big as oranges, great cuttlefish bones flat and shining and white, shark's teeth, spines of a kidney, sometimes a dead scarous fish, its stomach distended with bits of coral on which it had been feeding, crabs, sea urchins, seaweeds of strange colour and shape, starfish, some tiny, and some the colour of cayenne pepper, some huge and pale, these and a thousand other things, beautiful or strange, were to be found on the reef. Dick had laid his spear down, and was exploring a deep bath-like pool. He had waded up to his knees, and was in the act of wading further, when he was suddenly seized by the foot it was just as if his ankle had been suddenly caught in a clove-hitch and the rope drawn tight. He screamed out with pain and terror, and suddenly and viciously a whiplash shot out from the water, lassoed him round the left knee, drew it self-taught, and held him. Chapter 4 What Beauty Concealed Emeline, seated on the coral rock, had almost forgotten Dick for a moment. The sun was setting and the warm amber light of the sunset shone on reef and rock-pool. Just at sunset and low tide, the reef had a peculiar fascination for her. It had the low tide smell of seaweed exposed to the air, and the torment and the trouble of the breakers seemed eased. Before her and on either side the foam-dashed coral glowed in amber and gold, and the Great Pacific came glassing and glittering in, voiceless and peaceful, till it reached the strand and burst into song and spray. Here, just as on the hilltop on the other side of the island, you could mark the rhythm of the rollers. Forever and for ever and for ever, they seemed to say. The cry of the gulls came mixed with the spray on the breeze. They haunted the reef like uneasy spirits, always complaining never at rest. But at sunset their cry seemed farther away and less melancholy, perhaps because just then the whole island seemed bathed in the spirit of peace. She turned from the sea prospect and looked backwards over the lagoon to the island. She could make out the broad green glade, beside which their little house lay, and a spot of yellow, which was the thatch of the house, just by the artoo tree, and nearly hidden by the shadow of the breadfruit. Over woods the fronds of the great coconut palm showed above every other tree silhouetted against the dim dark blue of the eastern sky. Seen by the enchanted light of sunset, the whole picture had an unreal look, more lovely than a dream. At dawn, and Dick would often start for the reef before dawn if the tide served, the picture was as beautiful. Also perhaps, for over the island, all in shadow and against the stars, you could see the palm tops catching fire, and then the light of day coming through the green trees and blue sky like a spirit across the blue lagoon, widening and strengthening as it widened across the white foam, out over the sea, spreading like a fan till, all at once, night was day, and the gulls were crying, and the breakers flashing, the dawn wind blowing, and the palm trees bending as palm trees only know how. Emeline always imagined herself alone on the island with Dick, but beauty was there too, and beauty is a great companion. The girl was contemplating the scene before her, nature in her friendliest mood seemed to say, Behold me, men call me cruel, men have called me deceitful, even treacherous, I, ah well, my answer is, Behold me. The girl was contemplating the specious beauty of it all, when on the breeze from the seaward came a shout, she turned quickly, there was Dick up to his knees in a rock-pool a hundred yards or so away, motionless, his arms upraised, and crying out for help. She sprang to her feet. There had once been an islet on this part of the reef, a tiny thing consisting of a few palms and a handful of vegetation, and destroyed perhaps in some great storm. I mention this because the existence of this island once upon a time was the means indirectly of saving Dick's life, for where these islands have been or are, flats occur on the reef formed of coral conglomerate. Emeline in her bare feet could never have reached him in time over rough coral, but fortunately this flat and comparatively smooth surface lay between them. My spear shouted Dick as she approached. He seemed at first tangled in brambles. Then she thought ropes were tangling round him, and tying him to something in the water, whatever it was it was most awful and hideous and like a nightmare. She ran with the speed of Atalanta to the rock where the spear was resting, all red with the blood of new slain fish, a foot from the point. As she approached Dick, spear in hand, she saw, gasping with terror, that the ropes were alive and that they were flickering and rippling over his back. One of them bound his left arm to his side, but his right arm was free. Quick! he shouted. In a second the spear was in his free hand, and Emeline had cast herself down on her knees, and was staring with terrified eyes into the pool of the water from whence the ropes issued. She was, despite her terror, quite prepared to fling herself in and do battle with the thing, whatever it might be. What she saw was only for a second. In the deep water of the pool, gazing up and forward and straight at Dick, she saw a face, legubrious and awful. The eyes were wide as saucers, stony and steadfast, a large heavy parrot-like beak hung before the eyes, and worked and wobbled and seemed to beckon. But what froze one's heart was the expression of the eyes, so stonely and legubrious, so passionless, so devoid of speculation, yet so fixed of purpose and full of fate. From away far down he had risen with the rising tide. He had been feeding on crabs when the tide, betraying him, had gone out, leaving him trapped in the rock-pool. He had slept, perhaps, and awakened to find a being naked and defenceless, invading his pool. He was quite small as octopods go, and young, yet he was large and powerful enough to have drowned an ox. The octopod has only been described once in stone by a Japanese artist. The statue is still extant, and it is the most terrible masterpiece of sculpture ever executed by human hands. It represents a man who has been bathing on a low-tide beach and has been caught. The man is shouting in a delirium of terror and threatening with his free arm the spectre that has him in its grip. The eyes of the octopod are fixed upon the man, passionless and legubrious eyes, but steadfast and fixed. Another whiplash shot out of the water in a shower of spray and seized a dick by the left thigh. At the same instant he drove the point of the spear through the right eye of the monster deep down through eye and soft gelatinous carcass till the spear point dulled and splintered against the rock. At the same moment the water of the pool became black as ink, the bands around him relaxed and he was free. Emeline rose up and seized him, sobbing and clinging to him and kissing him. He clasped her with his left arm around her body as if to protect her, but it was a mechanical action. He was not thinking of her. Wild with rage and uttering hoarse cries he plunged the broken spear again and again into the depths of the pool seeking utterly to destroy the enemy that had so lately had him in its grip. Then slowly he came to himself and wiped his forehead and looked at the broken spear in his hand. "'Beast,' he said, "'do you see its eyes? I wish it had a hundred eyes and I had a hundred spears to drive into them.' She was clinging to him and sobbing and laughing hysterically and praising him. One might have thought that he had rescued her from death, not she him. The sun had nearly vanished and he led her back to where the dinghy was moored, recapturing and putting on his trousers on the road. He picked up the dead fish she had speared and as he rode her back across the lagoon he talked and laughed, recounting the incidents of the fight, taking all the glory of the thing to himself, and seeming quite to ignore the important part she had played in it. This was not from any callousness or want of gratitude, but simply from the fact that, for the last five years, he had been the be-all and end-all of their tiny community, the Imperial Master, and he would just as soon have thought of thanking her for handing him the spear, as for thanking his right hand for driving it home. She was quite content, seeking neither thanks nor praise. Everything she had came from him. She was his shadow and his slave. He was her son. He went over the fight again and again before they laid down to rest, telling her he had done this and that, and what he would do to the next beast of the sort. The reiteration was tiresome enough or would have been to an outside listener, but to Emmeline it was better than Homer. People's minds do not improve in an intellectual sense when they are isolated from the world, even though they are living the wild and happy lives of savages. Then Dick lay down in the dried ferns and covered himself with a piece of the striped flannel which they had used for blanketing, and he snored and chattered in his sleep like a dog hunting imaginary game, and Emmeline lay beside him, wakeful and thinking. A new terror had come into her life. She had seen death for the second time, but this time active and in being. The next day Dick was sitting under the shade of the Artu. He had a box of fish hooks beside him, and he was bending a line onto one of them. They had originally been a couple of dozen hooks, large and small, in the box. They remained now only six, full small and two large ones. It was a large one he was fixing to the line, for he intended to go on the morrow to the old place to fetch some bananas, and on the way to try for a fish in the deeper parts of the lagoon. It was late afternoon, and the heat had gone out of the day. Emmeline seated on the grass opposite him was holding the end of the line whilst he got the kinks out of it when suddenly she raised her head. There was not a breath of wind. The harsh of the far distant surf came through the blue weather, the only audible sound except now and then a movement and flutter from the bird perched in the branches of the Artu. All at once another sound mixed itself with the voice of the surf, a faint throbbing sound like the beating of a distant drum. Listen said Emmeline. Dick paused for a moment. All the sounds of the island were familiar. This was something quite strange. Faint and far away, now rapid, now slow, coming from where, who could say? Sometimes it seemed to come from the sea, sometimes if the fancy of the listener turned that way from the woods. As they listened a sigh came from overhead. The evening breeze had risen and was moving in the leaves of the Artu tree. Just as you might wipe a picture off of a slate, the breeze banished the sound. Dick went on with his work. Next morning early he embarked in the dinghy. He took the hook and the line with him and some raw fish for bait. Emmeline helped him to push off and stood on the bank, waving her hand as he rounded the little cape covered with wild coconut. These expeditions of Dick's were one of her sorrows. To be left alone was frightful, yet she never complained. She was living in a paradise, and something told her that behind all that sun, all that splendor of blue sea and sky, behind the flowers and the leaves, behind all that specious and simpering appearance of happiness in nature, lurked a frown and the dragon of mischance. Dick rode for about a mile, then he shipped his skulls and let the dinghy float. The water here was very deep, so deep that, despite its clearness, the bottom was invisible. The sunlight over the reef struck through it diagonally, filling it with sparkles. The fisherman baited his hook with a piece from the belly of a scarus and lowered it down out of sight. Then he belayed the line to a thulpin and, sitting in the bottom of the boat, hung his head over the side and gazed deep down into the water. There was nothing to see but just the deep blue of the water. Then a flight of spangled arrowheads would cross the line of sight and vanish, pursued by a form like a moving bar of gold. Then a great fish would materialise itself and hang in the shadow of the boat, motionless as a stone, save the movement of its gills. That moment with a twist of the tail it would be gone. Suddenly the dinghy shored over and might have capsized only for the fact that Dick was sitting on the opposite side to the side from which the line hung. Then the boat rited, the line slackened, and the surface of the lagoon a few fathoms away boiled as if being stirred from below by a great silver stick. He had hooked an albacore. He tied the end of the fishing line to a skull, undid the line from the thulpin and flung the skull overboard. He did all this with wonderful rapidity while the line was still slack. Next moment the skull was rushing over the surface of the lagoon, now towards the reef, now towards the shore, now flat, now end up, now it would be jerked under the surface entirely, vanish for a moment, and then reappear. It was a most astonishing thing to watch, for the skull seemed alive, viciously alive, and imbued with some destructive purpose, as in fact it was. The most venomous of living things and the most intelligent could not have fought the great fish better. The albacore would make a frantic dash down the lagoon, hoping perhaps to find in the open sea a release from his foe. Then half-drowned from the pull of the skull he would pause, dart from side to side in perplexity, and then make up an equally frantic dash up the lagoon to be checked in the same manner. Seeking the deepest depths he would sink the skull a few fathoms, and once he sought the air leaping into the sunlight like a crescent of silver, whilst the splash of him as he fell echoed amidst the trees bordering the lagoon. An hour passed before the great fish sowed signs of weakening. The struggle had taken place up to this, close to the shore, but now the skull swam out into the broad sheet of sunlit water, and slowly began to describe large circles rippling up the peaceful blue into flashing wavelets. It was a melancholy sight to watch, for the great fish had made a good fight, and one could see him through the eye of imagination, beaten, half-drowned, dazed, and moving as is the fashion of dazed things in a circle. Dick, working the remaining oar at the stern of the boat, rode out and seized the floating skull, bringing it on board. Foot by foot he hauled his catch toward the boat, to the long gleaming line of the thing came dimly into view. The fight had been heard from miles through the lagoon water by all sorts of swimming things. The lord of the place had got sound of it. A dark fin rippled the water, and as Dick, pulling on his line, hauled his catch closer, a monstrous grey shadow stained the depths, and the glittering streak that was the albacore vanished as if engulfed in a cloud. The line came in slack, and Dick hauled in the albacore's head. It had been divided from the body as if with a huge pair of shears. The grey shadow slipped by the boat, and Dick, mad with rage, shouted and shook his fist at it. Then, seizing the albacore's head from which he had taken the hook, he hurled it at the monster in the water. The great shark, with a movement of the tail that caused the water to swirl and the dinghy to rock, turned upon his back and engulfed the head. Then he slowly sank and vanished, just as if he had been dissolved. He had come off best in this, their first encounter, such as it was. Chapter 6 Sales Upon the Sea Dick put the hook away and took to the skulls. He had a three-mile row before him, and the tide was coming in, which did not make it any easier. As he rowed, he talked and grumbled to himself. He had been in a grumbling mood for some time past. The chief cause, Emmeline. In the last few months she had changed. Even her face had changed. A new person had come upon the island, it seemed to him, and taken the place of the Emmeline he had known from earliest childhood. This one looked different. He did not know that she had grown beautiful. He just knew that she looked different. Also, she had developed new ways that displeased him. She would go off and bathe by herself, for instance. Up to six months or so ago he had been quite contented, sleeping and eating and hunting for food and cooking it, building and rebuilding the house, exploring the woods and the reef. But lately a spirit of restlessness had come upon him. He did not know exactly what he wanted. He had a vague feeling that he wanted to go away from the place where he was, not from the island but from the place where they had pitched their tent or rather built their house. It may have been the spirit of civilisation crying out in him, telling him of all he was missing, of the cities and the streets and the houses and the businesses and the striving after gold, the striving after power. It may have been simply the man in him crying out for love and not knowing yet that love was at his elbow. The dinghy glided along, hugging the shore, past the little glades of fern and the cathedral gloom of the breadfruit. Then rounding a promontory, she opened the view of the break in the reef. A little bit of the white strand was visible, but he was not looking that way. He was looking towards the reef at a tiny dark spot, not noticeable unless searched for by the eye. Always when he came upon these expeditions, just here, he would hang on to his oars and gaze over there where the gulls were flying and the breakers thundering. A few years ago the spot filled him with dread as well as curiosity, but from familiarity and the dullness that time casts on everything the dread had almost vanished, but the curiosity remained, the curiosity that makes a child look on at the slaughter of an animal even though his soul revolts at it. He gazed for a while, then he went on pulling, and the dinghy approached the beach. Something had happened on the beach. The sand was all trampled and stained red here and there. In the centre lay the remains of a great fire still smoldering, and just where the water lapped the sand lay two deep grooves as if two heavy boats had been beached there. A south sea-man would have told from the shape of the grooves and the little marks of the out-riggers that two heavy canoes had been beached there, and they had. The day before, early in the afternoon, two canoes possibly from that faraway island which cast the stain on the horizon to the south-south west had entered the lagoon, one in pursuit of the other. What happened then had better be left availed. A war-drum with a shark-skin head had set the woods throbbing. The victory was celebrated all night, and at dawn the victors manned the two canoes and set sail for the home or hell they had come from. Had you examined the strand you would have found that a line had been drawn across the beach, beyond which there were no foot-marks. That meant that the rest of the island was, for some reason, taboo. Dick pulled the nose of the boat up a bit on the strand, and then he looked around him. He picked up a broken spear that had been cast away or forgotten. It was made of some hard wood and barbed with iron. On the right-hand side of the beach lay something between the coconut trees. He approached. It was a mass of awful. The entrails of a dozen sheep seemed cast there in one mound, yet there were no sheep on the island, and sheep are not carried as a rule in war canoes. The sand on the beach was eloquent. The foot pursuing and the foot pursued the knee of the fallen one, and then the forehead and outspread hands. The heel of the chief who had slain his enemy, beaten the body flat, burst the hole through it through which he has put his head and who stands absolutely wearing his enemy as a cloak. The head of the man dragged on his back to be butchered like a sheep. Of these things spoke the sand. As far as the sand traces could speak, the story of the battle was still being told. The screams and the shouting, the clashing of clubs and spears were gone, yet the ghost of the fight remained. If the sand could bear such traces and tell such tales, who shall say that the plastic ether was destitute of the story of the fight and the butchery? However that may have been Dick looking around him had the shivering sense of having just escaped from danger. Whoever had been had gone. He could tell that by the canoe traces, gone either out to sea or up to the right stretch of the lagoon. It was important to determine this. He climbed to the hilltop and swept the sea with his eyes. There, away to the south west, far away on the sea, he could distinguish the brown sails of two canoes. There was something indescribably mournful and lonely in their appearance. They looked like withered leaves, brown moths, blown to sea, derelicts of autumn. Then, remembering the beach, these things became freighted with the most sinister thoughts for the mind of the gazer. They were hurrying away, having done their work. That they looked lonely and old and mournful, and like withered leaves blown across the sea only heightened the horror. Dick had never seen canoes before, but he knew that these things were boats of some sort holding people, and that the people had left all these traces on the beach. How much of the horror of the thing was revealed to his subconscious intelligence, who can say? He had climbed the boulder, and now he sat down with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped round them. Whenever he came round to this side of the island, something happened of a fateful or sinister nature. The last time he had nearly lost the dinghy. He had beached the little boat in such a way that she floated off, and the tide was just in the act of stealing her and sweeping her from the lagoon out to the sea when he returned laden with his bananas and rushing into the water up to his waist, saved her. Another time he had fallen out of a tree, and just by a miracle escaped a death. Another time a hurricane had broken, lashing the lagoon into snow, and sending the coconuts bounding and flying like tennis balls across the strand. This time he had just escaped something. He knew not exactly what. It was almost as if Providence were saying to him, Don't come here. He watched the brown sails as they dwindled in the wind-blown blue. Then he came down from the hill-top and cut his bananas. He cut four large bunches, which caused him to make two journeys to the boat. When the bananas were stowed he pushed off. For a long time a great curiosity had been pulling at his heartstrings, a curiosity of which he was dimly ashamed. Fear had given it birth, and fear still clung to it. It was perhaps the element of fear and the awful delight of daring the unknown that made him give way to it. He had rowed perhaps a hundred yards when he turned the boat's head and made for the reef. It was more than five years since that day when he rode across the lagoon, Emmeline sitting in the stern with her wreath of flowers in her hand. It might have been only yesterday, for everything seemed just the same. The thunderous surf and the flying gulls, the blinding sunlight and the salt-fresh smell of the sea. The palm-tree at the entrance of the lagoon still bent gazing into the water and round the projection of coral, to which he had last moored the boat, still lay a fragment of the rope which he had cut in his hurry to escape. Ships had come into the lagoon perhaps during the five years, but no one had noticed anything on the reef, for it was only from the hilltop that a full view of what was there could be seen, and then only by eyes knowing where to look. From the beach there was visible just a speck. It might have been perhaps an old bit of wreckage flung there by a wave in some big storm, a piece of old wreckage that had been tossed hither and thither for years, and had at last found a place of rest. Dick tied the boat up and stepped onto the reef. It was high-tied just as before. The breeze was blowing strongly, and overhead a man of warbird, back as ebony, with a blood-red bill, came sailing, the wind doming out his wings. He circled in the air and cried out fiercely, as if resenting the presence of the intruder. Then he passed away, let himself be blown away as it were across the lagoon, wheeled, circled, and passed out to sea. Dick approached the place he knew, and there lay the little old barrel, all warped by the powerful sun. The staves stood apart, and the hooping was rusted and broken, and whatever it had contained in the way of spirit and conviviality had long ago drained away. Beside the barrel lay a skeleton, round which lay a few rags of cloth. The scarlet had fallen to one side, and the lower jaw had fallen from the scarlet. The bones of the hands and feet were still articulated, and the ribs had not fallen in. It was all white and bleached, and the sun shone on it as indifferently as on the coral, this shell and framework that had once been a man. There was nothing dreadful about it, but a whole world of wonder. To Dick, who had not been broken into the idea of death, who had not learned to associate it with graves and funerals, sorrow, eternity, and hell, the thing spoke as it never could have spoken to you or me. Looking at it, things linked themselves together in his mind. The skeletons of birds he had found in the woods, the fish she had slain, even trees lying dead and rotten, even the shells of crabs. If he would ask him what lay before him, and if he could have expressed the thought in his mind, he would have answered you, change. All the philosophy in the world could not have told him more than he knew just then about death. He who did not even know its name. He was held spellbound by the marvel and miracle of the thing, and the thoughts that suddenly crowded his mind like a host of spectres for whom a door has just been opened. Just as a child, by unanswerable logic, knows that a fire which has burned him once will burn him again or will burn another person, he knew that just as the form before him was, his form would be some day. And Emma Lynes. Then came the vague question which is born not of the brain, but the heart, and which is the basis of all religions. Where shall I be then? His mind was not of an introspective nature, and the question just strayed across it, and was gone. And still the wonder of the thing held him. He was for the first time in his life in a reverie. The corpse that had shocked and terrified him five years ago had cast seas of thought with its dead fingers upon his mind. The skeleton had brought them to maturity. The full fact of universal death suddenly appeared before him, and he recognized it. He stood for a long time motionless, and then, with a deep sigh, turned to the boat and pushed off without once looking back at the reef. He crossed the lagoon, and rode slowly homewards, keeping in the shelter of the tree shadows as much as possible. Even looking at him from the shore you might have noticed a difference in him. Your savage paddles his canoe, or skulls his boat, alert, glancing about him, a touch with nature at all points. Though he be lazy as a cat, and sleeps half the day, awake he is all ears and eyes, a creature reacting to the least external impression. Jack, as he rode back, did not look about him. He was thinking, or retrospecting. The savage in him had received a check. As he turned the little cape where the wild coconut blazed, he looked over his shoulder. A figure was standing on the sword by the edge of the water. It was Emmeline. CHAPTER VII. They carried the bananas up to the house, and hung them from a branch of the artoo. One dick on his knees lit the fire to prepare the evening meal. When it was over he went down to where the boat was moored, and returned with something in his hand. It was the javelin, with the iron point, or rather the two pieces of it. He had said nothing of what he had seen to the girl. Emmeline was seated on the grass. She had a long strip of the striped flannel stuff about her, worn like a scarf, and she had another piece in her hand which she was hemming. The bird was hopping about, pecking at a banana which they had thrown to him. A light breeze made the shadow of the artoo leaves dance upon the grass, and the serrated leaves of the breadfruit to patter one on the other with the sound of raindrops falling on glass. Where did you get it? Asked Emmeline, staring at the piece of the javelin, which Dick had flung down almost beside her whilst he went into the house to fetch the knife. It was on the beach over there, he replied, taking his seat and examining the two fragments to see how he could splice them together. Emmeline looked at the pieces, putting them together in her mind. She did not like the look of the thing, so keen and savage, and stained dark a foot or more from the point. People have been there, said Dick, putting the two pieces together and examining the fracture critically. Where? Over there. This was lying on the sand, and the sand was all trod up. Dick, said Emmeline, who were the people? I don't know. I went up the hill and saw their boats going away, far away out. This was lying on the sand. Dick, said Emmeline, do you remember the noise yesterday? Yes, said Dick. I heard it in the night. When? In the night before the moon went away. That was them, said Dick. Dick? Yes. Who were they? I don't know, replied Dick. It was in the night before the moon went away, and it went on and on, beating in the trees. I thought I was asleep, and then I knew I was awake. You were asleep, and I pushed you to listen. But you couldn't wake. You were so asleep. Then the moon went away, and the noise went on. How did they make the noise? I don't know, replied Dick. But it was them, and they left this on the sand, and the sand was all trod up, and I saw their boats from the hill, away out far. I thought I heard voices, said Emmeline, but I was not sure. She fell into meditation, watching her companion at work on the savage and sinister-looking thing in his hands. He was splicing the two pieces together with a strip of the brown and cloth-like stuff, which is wrapped round the stalks of the cocoa-palm fronds. The things seemed to have been hurled there out of the blue by some unseen hand. When he had spliced the pieces, doing so with marvellous dexterity, he took the thing short down near the point and began thrusting it into the soft earth to clean it. Then, with a bit of flannel, he polished it till it shone. He felt a keen delight in it. It was useless as a fish-spear because it had no barb. But it was a weapon. It was useless as a weapon because there was no foe on the island to use it against. Still, it was a weapon. When he had finished scrubbing at it, he rose, hitched his old trousers up, tightening the belt of cocoa-cloth, which Emmeline had made for him, and went into the house and got his fish-spear and stalked off to the boat, calling out to Emmeline to follow him. They crossed over to the reef where, as usual, he divested himself of clothing. It was strange that out here he would go about stark naked, yet on the island he always wore some covering, but not so strange perhaps, after all. The sea is a great purifier, both of the mind and the body. Before that great sweet spirit, people do not think in the same way as they think far inland. What woman would appear in a town or on a country road or even bathing in a river as she appears bathing in the sea? Some instinct-made dick cover himself up on shore and strip naked on the reef. In a minute he was down by the edge of the surf, javelin in one hand, fish-spear in the other. Emmeline, by a little pool, the bottom of which was covered with branching coral, sat gazing down into its depths, lost in a reverie, like that into which we fall when gazing at shapes in the fire. She had sat some time like this when a shout from Dick aroused her. She started to her feet and gazed to where he was pointing. An amazing thing was there. Just to the east, just rounding the curve of the reef and scarcely a quarter of a mile from it was coming a big topsel schooner, a beautiful sight she was, healing to the breeze with every sail-drawing and the white foam like a feather at her forefoot. Dick, with the javelin in his hand, was standing gazing at her. He had dropped his fish-spear and he stood as motionless as though he was carved out of stone. Emmeline ran to him and stood beside him. Neither of them spoke a word as the vessel drew closer. Everything was visible, so close was she now, from the reef points on her great mainsail, luminous with the sunlight and white as the wing of a gull, to the rail of the bulwarks. A crowd of men were hanging over the pork bulwarks gazing at the island in the figures on the reef, browned by the sun and sea breeze, Emmeline's hair blowing on the wind, and the point of Dick's javelin flashing in the sun. They looked an ideal pair of savages seen from the schooner's deck. They're going away, said Emmeline, with a long-drawn breath of relief. Dick had made no reply. He stared at the schooner a moment longer in silence then, having made sure that she was standing away from the land. He began to run up and down, calling out wildly and beckoning to the vessel as if to call her back. A moment later a sound came on the breeze, a faint hail, a flag was run to the peak and dipped as in derision, and the vessel continued on her course. As a matter of fact she had been at the point of putting about, her captain had for the moment been undecided as to whether the forms on the reef were those of castaways or savages, but the javelin in Dick's hand had turned the scale of his opinion in favour of the theory of savages. CHAPTER VIII. LOVE STEPPS IN. Two birds were sitting in the branches of the R2 tree. Coco had taken a mate. They had built a nest out of fibres pulled from the wrappings of the coco fronts, bits of stick and wire grass, anything in fact, even fibres from the palmetto thatch of the house below. The pilferings of birds, the building of nests, what charming incidents they are in the great episode of spring. The hawthorn tree never bloomed here. The climate was that of eternal summer, yet the spirit of May came just as she comes to the English countryside or the German forest. The doings in the R2 branches greatly interested Emeline. The love-making and the nest building were conducted quite in the usual manner, according to rules laid down by nature and carried out by men and birds. All sorts of quaint sounds came filtering down through the leaves from the branch, where the sapphire-coloured lovers sat side by side, or the fork where the nest was beginning to form, croonings and cluckings, sounds like the flirting of a fan, the sounds of a squabble, followed by the sounds that told of the squabble made up. Sometimes after one of these squabbles a pale blue downy feather or two would come floating earthwards, touch the palmetto leaves on the house-roof, and cling there, or be blown onto the grass. It was some days after the appearance of the schooner, and Dick was making ready to go into the woods and pick guavas. He had all the morning been engaged in making a basket to carry them in. In civilisation he would, judging from his mechanical talent, perhaps have been an engineer, building bridges and ships instead of palmetto-leaf baskets and cane-houses. Who knows if he would have been happier? The heat of midday had passed when, with the basket hanging over his shoulder on a piece of cane, he started for the woods, Emmeline following. The place they were going to always filled her with a vague dread. Not for a great deal would she have gone there alone. Dick had discovered it in one of his rambles. They entered the wood and passed a little well, a well without a parent's source or outlet, and a bottom of fine white sand. How the sand had formed there it would be impossible to say, but there it was, and around the margin grew ferns, redoubling themselves on the surface of the crystal clear water. They left this to the right and struck into the heart of the wood. The heat of midday still lurked there. The way was clear, for there was a sort of path between the trees, as if in very ancient days there had been a road. Right across this path, half lost in shadow, half sunlit, the lianas hung their ropes. The Hutu tree, with its powdering of delicate blossoms, pierced to it, showing its lost loveliness to the sun. In the shade the scarlet hibiscus burned like a flame. Artu and breadfruit trees and coconut boarded the way. As they proceeded, the trees grew denser and the path more obscure. All at once, rounding a sharp turn, the path ended in a valley carpeted with fern. This was the place that always filled emeline with an undefined dread. One side of it was all built up in terraces with huge blocks of stone, blocks of stone so enormous that the wonder was how the ancient builders had put them in their places. Trees grew along the terraces, thrusting their roots between the interstices of the blocks. At their base, slightly tilted forward, as if with the sinkage of years, stood a great stone figure, roughly carved, thirty feet high at least, mysterious looking, the very spirit of the place. This figure and the terraces, the valley itself and the very trees that grew there, inspired emeline with deep curiosity and vague fear. People had been here once. Sometimes she could fancy she saw dark shadows moving amidst the trees, and the whisper of the foliage seemed to her to hide voices at times, even as its shadow concealed forms. It was indeed an uncanny place to be alone in, even under the bright light of day. All across the Pacific for thousands of miles you find relics of the past, like these, scattered through the islands. These temple places are nearly all the same, great terraces of stone, massive idols, desolation overgrown with foliage. They hint at one religion, and a time when the sea space of the Pacific was a continent which, sinking slowly through the ages, has left only its higher lands and hilltops visible in the form of islands. Among these places the woods are thicker than elsewhere, hinting at the presence there once of sacred groves. The idols are immense, their faces are vague, the storms and the suns and the rains of the ages have cast over them a veil. The Sphinx is understandable, and a toy compared to these things, some of which have a statue of fifty feet, whose creation is veiled in absolute mystery, the gods of a people for ever and for ever lost. The stone man, was the name Emma Lyon had given the idol of the valley, and sometimes at nights when her thoughts would stray that way she would picture him standing all alone in the moonlight or starlight, staring straight before him. He seemed forever listening. Unconsciously one felt a listening too, and then the valley seemed steeped in a supernatural silence. He was not good to be alone with. Emma Lyon sat down amidst the fears just at his base. When one was close to him he lost the suggestion of life and was simply a great stone which cast a shadow in the sun. Dick threw himself down also to rest. Then he rose up and went off amidst the guava bushes, plucking the fruit and filling his basket. Since he had seen the schooner, the white men on her decks, the great masts and sails, and general appearance of freedom and speed and unknown adventure, he had been more than ordinarily glum and restless. Perhaps he connected her in his mind with the far away vision of the Northumberland and the idea of other places and lands and the yearning for change that the idea of them inspired. He came back with his basket full of the ripe fruit, gave some to the girl, and sat down beside her. When she had finished eating them she took the cane that he used to carry the basket and held it in her hands. She was bending it now in the form of a bow when it slipped, flew out, and struck her companion a sharp blow on the side of his face. Almost on the instant he turned and slapped her on the shoulder. She stared at him for a moment in troubled amazement. A sob came in her throat. Then some veil seemed lifted. Some wizards wand stretched out. Some mysterious vile broken. As she looked at him like that he suddenly and fiercely clasped her in his arms. He held her like this for a moment, dazed, stupefied, not knowing what to do with her. Then her lips told him, for they met his in an endless kiss. CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 THE SLEEP OF PARADISE The moon rose up that evening and shot her silver arrows at the house under the artoo tree. The house was empty. Then the moon came across the sea and across the reef. She lit the lagoon in its dark, dim heart. She lit the coral brains and sandspaces and the fish, casting their shadows on the sand and the coral. The keeper of the lagoon rose to greet her, and the fin of him broke her reflection on the mirror-like surface into a thousand glittering ripples. She saw the white-staring ribs of the form on the reef. Then peeping over the trees she looked down into the valley, where the great idol of stone had kept his solitary vigil for five thousand years, perhaps, or more. At his base, in his shadow, looking as if under his protection, lay two human beings, naked, clasped in each other's arms and fast asleep. One could scarcely pity his vigil had it been marked sometimes through the years by such an incident as this. The thing had been conducted just as the birds conducted their love affairs, an affair absolutely natural, absolutely blameless, and without sin. It was a marriage according to nature, without feast or guests, consummated with accidental cynicism under the shadow of religion a thousand years dead. So happy in their ignorance were they that they only knew that suddenly life had changed, that the skies and the sea were bluer, and that they had become, in some magical way, one a part of the other. The birds on the tree above were equally as happy in their ignorance and in their love. End of Chapter 9, End of Part 1. One day Dick climbed onto the tree above the house, and driving Madame Coco off the nest upon which she was sitting, peeped in. There were several pale green eggs in it. He did not disturb them, but climbed down again, and the bird resumed her seat as if nothing had happened. Such an occurrence would have terrified a bird used to the ways of men, but here the birds were so fearless and so full of confidence that often they would follow Emma Lyne in the wood, flying from branch to branch, peering at her through the leaves, lighting quite close to her, once even on her shoulder. The days passed. Dick had lost his restlessness. His wish to wander had vanished. He had no reason to wander. Perhaps that was the reason why. In all the broad earth he could not have found anything more desirable than what he had. Instead now of finding a half-naked savage, followed dog-like by his mate, you would have found of an evening a pair of lovers wandering on the reef. They had, in a pathetic sort of way, attempted to adorn the house with a blue flowering creeper taken from the wood and trained over the entrance. Emma Lyne up to this had mostly done the cooking, such as it was. Dick helped her now always. He talked to her no longer in short sentences, flung out as if to a dog, and she, almost losing the strange reserve that had clung to her from childhood, half showed him her mind. It was a curious mind, the mind of a dreamer, almost the mind of a poet. The chlorocons dwelt there, and vague shapes, born of things she had heard about or dreamt of. She had thoughts about the sea and stars, the flowers and birds. Dick would listen to her as she talked, as a man might listen to the sound of a rivulet. His practical mind could take no share in the dreams of his other half, but her conversation pleased him. He would look at her for a long time together, absorbed in his eyes, he was admiring her. Her hair, blue-black and glossy, tangled him in its meshes. He would stroke it, so to speak, with his eyes, and then pull her close to him and bury his face in it. The smell of it was intoxicating. He breathed her as one does the perfume of a rose. Her ears were small, like little white shells. He would take one between finger and thumb and play with it, as if it were a toy pulling at the lobe of it, or trying to flatten out the curved part. Her breasts, her shoulders, her knees, her little feet, every bit of her he would examine and play with and kiss. She would lie down and let him, seeming absorbed in some faraway thought of which he was the object. Then all at once her arms would go round him. All this used to go on in the broad light of day, under the shadow of the Artoo leaves, with no one to watch, except the bright-eyed birds in the leaves above. Not all their time would be spent in this fashion. Dick was just as keen after the fish. He dug up with a spade, improvised from one of the boards of the dinghy, a space of soft earth near the taro patch, and planted the seeds of melons he found in the wood. He re-thatched the house. They were, in short, as busy as they could be in such a climate, but love-making would come upon them in fits, and then everything would be forgotten. Just as one revisits some spot to renew the memory of a painful or pleasant experience received there, they would return to the valley of the idol and spend a whole afternoon in its shade. The absolute happiness of wandering through the woods together, discovering new flowers, getting lost and finding their way again, was a thing beyond expression. Dick had suddenly stumbled upon love. His courtship had lasted only some twenty minutes. It was being gone over again now, and extended. One day, hearing a curious noise from the tree above the house, he climbed it. The noise came from the nest, which had been temporarily left by the mother bird. It was a gasping wheezing sound, and it came from four wide-open beaks, so anxious to be fed that one could almost see into the very crops of their owners. They were Coco's children. In another year each of those ugly, downy things would, if permitted to live, be a beautiful sapphire-coloured bird with a few dove-coloured tail-feathers, coral-beak and bright, intelligent eyes. A few days ago each of these things was imprisoned in a pale green egg. A month ago they were nowhere. Something hit Dick on the cheek. It was the mother bird returned with food for the young ones. Dick drew his head aside, and she proceeded without more ado to fill their crops. CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI. THE VANISHING OF EMELINE Months passed away. Only one bird remained in the branches of the Artu. Coco's children and mate had vanished, but he remained. The breadfruit leaves had turned from green to pale gold and darkest amber, and now the new green leaves were being presented to the spring. Dick, who had a complete chart of the lagoon in his head, and knew all the soundings and best fishing places, the locality of the stinging coral, and the places where you could wade right across at low tide, Dick, one morning, was gathering his things together for a fishing expedition. The place he was going to lay some two-and-a-half miles across the island, and as the road was bad he was going alone. Caroline had been passing a new thread through the beads of the necklace she sometimes wore. This necklace had a history. In the shallows, not far away, Dick had found a bed of shellfish. Wading out at low tide he had taken some of them out to examine. They were oysters. The first one he opened, so disgusting did its appearance seem to him, might have been the last, only that, under the beard of the thing, lay a pearl. It was about twice the size of a large pea, and so lustrous that even he could not but admire its beauty, though quite unconscious of its value. He flung the unopered oysters down and took the thing to Emmeline. Next day, returning by chance to the same spot, he found the oysters he had cast down all dead and opened in the sun. He examined them and found another pearl embedded in one of them. Then he collected nearly a bushel of the oysters and left them to die and open. The idea had occurred to him of making a necklace for his companion. She had one made of shells. He intended to make her one of pearls. It took a long time, but it was something to do. He pierced them with a big needle, and at the end of four months or so, the thing was complete. Great pearls, most of them were pure white, black, ink, some perfectly round, some tear-shaped, some irregular. The thing was worth perhaps 15 or perhaps 20,000 pounds, for he only used the biggest he could find, casting away the small ones as useless. Emmeline this morning had just finished restringing them on a double thread. She looked pale, and not at all well, and had been restless all night. As he went off, armed with his spear and fishing tackle, she waved her hand to him without getting up. Usually she followed him a bit into the wood when he was going away like this, but this morning she just sat at the doorway of the little house, the necklace in her lap, following him with her eyes, until he was lost amidst the trees. He had no compass to guide him, and he needed none. He knew the woods by heart. The mysterious line beyond which scarcely an artu tree was to be found, the long strip of Mami-Apple, a regular sheet of it a hundred yards broad, and reaching from the middle of the island right down to the lagoon. The clearings, some almost circular, where the fern grew knee-deep. Then he came to the bad part. The vegetation here had burst into a riot, all sorts of great sappy stalks of unknown plants barred the way and tangled the foot, and there were boggy places into which one sank horribly. Pausing to white one's brow, the stalks and tendrils one had beaten down or beaten aside, rose up and closed together, making one a prisoner almost as closely surrounded as a fly and amber. All the noontides that had ever fallen upon the island seemed to have left some of their heat behind them here. The air was damp and close, like the air of a laundry, and the mournful and perpetual bars of insects filled the silence without destroying it. A hundred men with scythes might make a road through the place today, a month or two later, searching for the road, you would find none. The vegetation would have closed in as water closes when divided. This was the haunt of the jug orchid, a veritable jug, lid and all. Raising the lid you would find the jug half filled with water. Sometimes in the tangle up above between two trees you would see a thing like a bird come to ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hot house. All the trees, the few there were, had a spectral and miserable appearance. They were half starved by the voluptuous growth of the gigantic weeds. If one had much imagination one felt afraid in this place, for one felt not alone. At any moment it seemed that one might be touched on the elbow by a hand reaching out from the surrounding tangle. Even Dick felt this unimaginative and fearless as he was. It took him nearly three quarters of an hour to get through, and then at last came the blessed air of real day, and a glimpse of the lagoon between the tree-balls. He would have rowed round in the dinghy, only that, at low tide, the shallows of the north of the island were a bar to the boat's passage. Of course he might have rowed all the way round by way of the strand and reef entrance, but that would have meant a circuit of six miles or more. When he came between the trees down to the lagoon edge, it was about eleven o'clock in the morning, and the tide was nearly at the full. The lagoon just here was like a trough, and the reef was very near, scarcely a quarter of a mile from the shore. The water did not shelve, it went down sheer fifty fathoms or more, and one could fish from the bank just as from a pier head. He had brought some food with him, and he placed it under a tree whilst he prepared his line, which had a lump of coral for a sinker. He baited the hook, and whirling the sinker round in the air, sent it flying about a hundred feet from the shore. There was a baby coconut tree growing just at the edge of the water. He fastened the edge of his line round the narrow stem in case of eventualities, and then holding the line itself, he fished. He had promised Emma Lyne to return before sundown. He was a fisherman. That is to say, a creature with the enduring patience of a cat, tireless and heedless of time as an oyster. He came here for sport more than for fish. Large things would be found in this part of the lagoon. Last time he had hooked a horror in the form of a catfish. At least in App was appearance it was likeest to a Mississippi catfish. Unlike the catfish it was coarse and useless as food, but it gave good sport. The tide was now going out, and it was at the going out of the tide that the best fishing was to be had. There was no wind, and the lagoon lay like a sheet of glass, with just a dimple here and there where the outgoing tide made a swirl in the water. As he fished he thought of Emma Lyne and the little house under the trees. Scarcely one could call it thinking. Pictures passed before his mind's eye. Pleasant and happy pictures. Sunlit, moonlit, starlit. Three hours passed thus without a bite or symptom that the lagoon contained anything else but sea water and disappointment. But he did not grumble. He was a fisherman. Then he left the line tied to the tree and sat down to eat the food he had brought with him. He had scarcely finished his meal when the baby coconut tree shivered and became convulsed, and he did not require to touch the taut line to know that it was useless to attempt to cope with the thing at the end of it. The only course was to let it target and drown itself, so he sat down and watched. After a few minutes the line slackened and the little coconut tree resumed its attitude of pensive meditation and repose. He pulled the line up. There was nothing at the end of it but a hook. He did not grumble. He baited the hook again and flung it in, for it was quite likely that the ferocious thing in the water would bite again. All of this idea and heedless of time he fished and waited. The sun was sinking into the west. He did not heed it. He had quite forgotten that he had promised Amaline to return before sunset. It was nearly sunset now. Suddenly just behind him from among the trees he heard a voice crying, Dick! End of chapter 11