 12 The vanishing of Emma-Line continued. He dropped the line and turned with a start. There was no one visible. He ran amongst the trees, calling out her name, but only Echoes answered. Then he came back to the lagoon edge. He felt sure that what he had heard was only fancy. But it was nearly sunset, and more than time to be off. He pulled in his line, wrapped it up, took his fish spear, and started. It was just in the middle of the bad place that Dread came upon him. Not if anything had happened to her. It was dusk here, and never had the weeds seemed so thick. Dimmness, so dismal. The tendrils of the vines so gin-like. Then he lost his way, he who was so sure of his way always. The hunter's instinct had been crossed, and for a time he went hither and thither, helpless as a ship without a compass. At last he broke into the real wood, but far to the right of where he ought to have been. He felt like a beast escaped from a trap, and hurried along, led by the sound of the surf. When he reached the clear sward that led down to the lagoon, the sun had just vanished beyond the sea-line. A streak of red cloud floated like the feather of a flamingo in the western sky close to the sea, and twilight had already filled the world. He could see the house dimly under the shadow of the trees, and he ran towards it, crossing the sward diagonally. Always before when he had been away the first thing to greet his eyes on his return had been the figure of Emmeline. Either at the lagoon edge or the house door he would find her waiting for him. She was not waiting for him to-night. When he reached the house she was not there, and he paused after searching the place a prey to the most horrible perplexity, and unable for the moment to think or act. Since the shock of the occurrence on the reef she had been subject at times to occasional attacks of headache. When the pain was more than she could bear she would go off and hide. Dick would hunt for her amidst the trees, calling out her name and hallooing. A faint halloo would answer when she heard him, and then he would find her under a tree or bush, with her unfortunate head between her hands. A picture of misery. He remembered this now and started off along the borders of the woods, calling to her and pausing to listen. No answer came. He searched amidst the trees as far as the little well, waking the echoes with his voice. Then he came back, slowly, peering about him in the deep dusk that now was yielding to the starlight. He sat down before the door of the house, and, looking at him, you might have fancied him in the last stages of exhaustion. Profound grief and profound exhaustion act on the frame very much in the same way. He sat with his chin resting on his chest, his hands helpless. He could hear her voice, still as he heard it, over at the other side of the island. She had been in danger and called to him, and he had been calmly fishing, unconscious of it all. This thought maddened him. He sat up, stared around him, and beat the ground with the palms of his hands. Then he sprang to his feet and made for the dingy. He robed to the reef, the action of a madman, for she could not possibly be there. There was no moon. The starlight both lit and veiled the world, and no sound but the majestic thunder of the waves. As he stood, the night wind blowing on his face, the white foam seething before him, and canopus burning in the great silence overhead, the fact that he stood in the centre of an awful and profound indifference came to his untutored mind with a pang. He returned to the shore. The house was still deserted. A little bowl made from the shell of a coconut stood on the grass near the doorway. He had last seen it in her hands, and he took it up and held it for a moment, pressing it tightly to his breast. Then he threw himself down before the doorway, and lay upon his face with head resting upon his arms in the attitude of a person who is profoundly asleep. He must have searched through the wood again that night, just as a senambulist searches, for he found himself towards dawn in the valley before the idol. Then it was daybreak. The world was full of light and colour. He was seated before the house door, worn out and exhausted. When raising his head, he saw Emeline's figure coming out from amidst the distant trees on the other side of the sword. End of Chapter 12 Chapter 13 The Newcomer He could not move for a moment. Then he sprang to his feet and ran towards her. He looked pale and dazed, and she held something in her arms, something wrapped up in her scarf. As he pressed her to him, the something in the bundle struggled against his breast and emitted a squall, just like the squall of a cat. He drew back, and Emeline, tenderly moving her scarf a bit aside, exposed a wee face. It was brick-red and wrinkled. There were two bright eyes and a tuft of dark hair over the forehead. Then the eyes closed, the face screwed itself up, and the thing sneezed twice. Where did you get it? He asked, absolutely lost in astonishment, as she covered the face again gently with the scarf. I found it in the woods, replied Emeline. Dumb with amazement, he helped her along to the house, and she sat down, resting her head against the bamboos of the wall. I felt so bad, she explained, and then I went off to sit in the woods, and then I remembered nothing more, and when I woke up it was there. It's a baby, said Dick. I know, said Emeline. Mrs. James' baby, seen in the long ago, had risen up before their mind's eyes, a messenger from the past to explain what the new thing was. Then she told him things, things that completely shattered the old cabbage bed theory, supplanting it with a truth far more wonderful, far more poetical, too, to he who can appreciate the marvel and the mystery of life. It has something funny tied onto it, she went on, as if she was referring to a parcel that she had just received. Let's look, said Dick. No, she replied, leave it alone. She sat rocking the thing gently, seemingly oblivious to the whole world, and quite absorbed in it, as indeed was Dick. A physician would have shuddered, but perhaps fortunately enough there was no physician on the island. Only nature, and she put everything to rights in her own time and way. When Dick had sat marvelling long enough, he set to and lit the fire. He had eaten nothing since the day before, and he was nearly as exhausted as the girl. He cooked some breadfruit. There was some cold fish left over from the day before. This with some bananas, he served up on two broad leaves, making Emmeline eat first. Before they had finished, the creature in the bundle, as though it had smelt the food, began to scream. She drew the scarf aside. It looked hungry. Its mouth would now be pinched up, and now wide open. Its eyes opened and closed. The girl touched it on the lips with her finger, and it seized upon her fingertip and sucked it. Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked appealingly at Dick, who was on his knees. He took a banana, peeled it, broke off a bit, and handed it to her. She approached it to the baby's mouth. It tried to suck it, failed, blew bubbles at the sun, and squalled. "'Wait a minute,' said Dick. There were some green coconuts he had gathered the day before, close by. He took one, removed the green husk, and opened one of the eyes, making an opening also in the opposite side of the shell. The unfortunate infant sucked ravenously at the nut, filled its stomach with the young coconut juice, vomited violently, and wailed. Emmeline, in despair, clasped it to her naked breast, where from, in a moment, it was hanging like a leech. It knew more about babies than they did. CHAPTER XIV HANA At noon, in the shadows of the reef under the burning sun, the water would be quite warm. They would carry the baby down there, and Emmeline would wash it with a bit of flannel. After a few days it scarcely ever screamed, even when she washed it. It would lie on her knees during the process, striking valiantly out with its arms and legs, staring straight up at the sky. Then, when she turned it on its face, it would lay its head down and chuckle, and blow bubbles at the coral of the reef, examining, apparently, the pattern of the coral, with deep and philosophic attention. Dick would sit by with his knees up to his chin, watching it all. He felt himself to be part proprietor in the thing, as indeed he was. The mystery of the affair still hung over them both. A week ago they too had been alone, and suddenly, from nowhere, this new individual had appeared. It was so complete. It had hair on its head, tiny fingernails, and hands that would grasp you. It had a whole host of little ways of its own, and every day added to them. In a week the extreme ugliness of the newborn child had vanished. Its face, which had seemed carved in the imitation of a monkey's face from half a brick, became the face of a happy and healthy baby. It seemed to see things, and sometimes it would laugh and chuckle, as though it had been told a good joke. Its black hair all came off, and was supplanted by a sort of down. It had no teeth. It would lie on its back and kick and crow, and double its fists up, and try to swallow them, alternately, and cross its feet, and play with its toes. In fact it was exactly like any of the thousand and one babies that are born into the world at every tick of the clock. What will we call it? said Dick one day, as he sat watching his son and heir crawling about on the grass under the shade of the breadfruit leaves. Hannah said Amaline promptly. The recollection of another baby he once heard about was in her mind, and it was as good a name as any other perhaps in that lonely place, notwithstanding the fact that Hannah was a boy. Coco took a vast interest in the new rival. He would hop round it and peer at it with his head on one side, and Hannah would crawl after the bird, and try to grab it by the tail. In a few months so valiant and strong did he become that he would pursue his own father crawling behind him on the grass, and you might have seen the mother and father and child playing all together like three children. The bird sometimes hovering overhead like a good spirit, sometimes joining in the fun. Sometimes Amaline would sit and brood over the child, a troubled expression on her face, and a far away look in her eyes. The old, vague fear of mischance had returned. The dread of that viewless form, her imagination half pictured behind the smile on the face of nature. Her happiness was so great that she dreaded to lose it. There is nothing more wonderful than the birth of a man and all that goes to bring it about. Here on this island, in the very heart of the sea, amidst the sunshine and the wind-blown trees, under the great blue arch of the sky, in perfect purity of thought, they would discuss the question from beginning to end without a blush, the object of their discussion crawling before them on the grass, and attempting to grab feathers from Coco's tail. It was the loneliness of the place, as well as their ignorance of life that made the old, old miracle appear so strange and fresh, as beautiful as the miracle of death had appeared awful. In thoughts vague and beyond expression in words, they linked this new occurrence with that old occurrence on the reef six years before. The vanishing and the coming of a man. Hannah, despite his unfortunate name, was certainly a most virile and engaging baby. The black hair which had appeared and vanished like some practical joke played by nature, gave place to a down at first, as yellow as sun-bleached wheat, but in a few months' time tinged with orbit. One day he had been uneasy and biting at his thumbs for some time past. Emilyne, looking into his mouth, saw something white and like a grain of rice protruding from his gum. It was a tooth just born. He could eat bananas now and breadfruit, and they often fed him on fish, a fact which again might have caused a medical man to shudder, yet he throwed on it all and waxed stouter every day. Emilyne, with profound and natural wisdom, let him crawl about stark-naked, dressed in ozone and sunlight. Taking him out on the reef, she would let him paddle in the shadow pools, holding him under the armpits, whilst he splashed the diamond bright water into spray with his feet, and laughed and shouted. They were beginning now to experience a phenomenon as wonderful as the birth of the child's body, the birth of his intelligence, the peeping out of a little personality with predilections of his own, likes and dislikes. He knew Dick from Emilyne, and when Emilyne had satisfied his material once, he would hold out his arms to go to Dick if he were by. He looked upon Coco as a friend, but when a friend of Coco's, a bird with an inquisitive mind and three red feathers in his tail, dropped him one day to inspect the newcomer, he resented the intrusion and screamed. He had a passion for flowers or anything bright. He would laugh and shout when taken on the lagoon in the dinghy, and make as if to jump into the water to get at the bright-colored corals below. Ah, me! We laugh at young mothers and all the miraculous things they tell us about their babies. They see what we cannot see, the first unfolding of that mysterious flower, the mind. One day they were out on the lagoon. Dick had been rowing. He had ceased and was letting the boat drift for a bit. Emilyne was dancing the child on her knee, when it suddenly held out his arms to the oarsman and said, Dick! The little word so often heard and easily repeated was its first word on earth, a voice that had never spoken in the world before had spoken, and to hear his name thus mysteriously uttered by a being he has created is the sweetest and perhaps the saddest thing a man can ever know. Dick took the child on his knee, and from that moment his love for it was more than his love for Emilyne or anything else on earth. End of Chapter 14. Chapter 15. The Lagoon of Fire. Ever since the tragedy of six years ago there had been forming in the mind of Emilyne the strange a something. Shall I call it a deep mistrust? She had never been clever. Lessons had saddened and wearied her without making her much the wiser. Yet her mind was of that order into which profound truths come by shortcuts. She was intuitive. Great knowledge may lurk in the human mind without the owners of the mind being aware. He or she acts in such or such a way or thinks in such and such a manner from intuition. In other words as the outcome of the profoundest reasoning. When we have learned to call storms storms and death death and birth birth when we have mastered the sailors horn book and Mr. Pittington's laws of cyclones Ellis's Anatomy and Lua's midwifery we have already made ourselves half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names not in ideas. The common place has triumphed. The true intellect is half crushed. Storms had burst over the island before this and what Emmeline remembered of them might be expressed by an instance. The morning would be bright and happy. Never so bright the sun or so barmy the breeze or so peaceful the blue lagoon. Then, with a horrid suddenness as if sick with dissimulation and man to show itself, something would blacken the sun and with a yell stretch out a hand and ravage the island turn the lagoon into foam beat down the coconut trees and slay the birds and one bird would be left and another taken. One tree would be destroyed and another left standing. The fury of the thing was so less fearful than the blindness of it and the indifference of it. One night when the child was asleep just after the last star was lit, Dick appeared at the doorway of the house. He had been down to the water's edge and had now returned. He beckoned Emmeline to follow him and, putting down the child, she did so. Come here and look, said he. He led the way to the water and as they approached it Emmeline became aware that there was something strange about the lagoon. From a distance it looked pale and solid. It might have been a great stretch of grey marble veined with black. Then, as she drew nearer, she saw that the grey, dull appearance was a deception of the eye. The lagoon was a light and burning. The phosphoric fire was in its very heart and being. Every coral branch was a torch. Every fish a passing lantern. The incoming tide moving the waters made the whole glittering floor of the lagoon move and shiver and the tiny waves to lap the bank, leaving behind them glow-worm traces. Look, said Dick. He knelt down and plunged his forearm into the water. The immersed part burned like a smoldering torch. Emmeline could see it as plainly as though it were lit by sunlight. Then he drew his arm out and as far as the water had reached it it was covered by a glowing glove. They had seen the phosphorescence of the lagoon before. Indeed, any night you might watch the passing fish like bars of silver when the moon was away. But this was something quite new and it was entrancing. Emmeline knelt down and dabbled her hands and made herself a pair of phosphoric gloves and cried out with pleasure and laughed. It was all the pleasure of playing with fire without the danger of being burnt. Then Dick rubbed his face with the water till it glowed. Wait! he cried and running up to the house he fetched out Hannah. He came running down with him to the water's edge, gave Emmeline the child, unmoored the boat, and started out from shore. The skulls as far as they were immersed were like bars of glistening silver. Under them passed the fish leaving cometic tails. Each coral clump was a lamp, lending its luster till the great lagoon was luminous as a lit up ballroom. Even the child on Emmeline's lap crowed and cried out at the strangeness of the site. They landed on the reef and wandered over the flat. The sea was white and bright as snow and the foam looked like a hedge of fire. As they stood gazing on this extraordinary site, suddenly almost as instantaneously as the switching off of an electric light, the phosphorescence of the sea flickered and vanished. The moon was rising, her crest was just breaking from the water, and as her face came slowly into view behind a belt of vapor that lay on the horizon, it looked fierce and red, stained with smoke like the face of Eblis. End of Chapter 15. Book 2 chapters 16 and 17 of The Blue Lagoon. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by Adrian Pretzelis. The Blue Lagoon by H. DeVeer Stackpool. Chapter 16. The Cyclone. When they woke next morning, the day was dark. A solid roof of cloud, lead-coloured and without a ripple on it, lay over the sky almost to the horizon. There was not a breath of wind, and the birds flew wildly about as if disturbed by some unseen enemy in the wood. As Dick lit the fire to prepare the breakfast, Emmeline walked up and down, holding her baby to her breast. She felt restless and uneasy. As the morning wore on the darkness increased, a breeze rose up, and the leaves of the breadfruit trees patted together with the sound of rain falling on glass. A storm was coming, but there was something different in its approach to the approach of the storms they had already known. As the breeze increased a sound filled the air, coming from far away beyond the horizon. It was like the sound of a great multitude of people, and yet so faint and vague was it that sudden bursts of the breeze through the leaves above would drown it utterly. Then it ceased, and nothing could be heard but the rocking of the branches and the tossing of the leaves under the increasing wind which was now blowing sharply and fiercely, and with a steady rush dead from the west, fretting the lagoon and sending clouds and masses of foam right over the reef. The sky that had been so ledden and peaceful and like a solid roof was now all in a hurry, flowing eastward like a great turbulent river in spate, and now again one could hear the sound in the distance, the thunder of the captains of the storm and the shouting, but still so faint, so vague, so intermediate and unearthly that it seemed like the sound in a dream. Emilyen sat amidst the ferns on the floor, cowed and dumb, holding the baby to her breast. It was fast asleep. Dick stood at the doorway. He was disturbed in mind, but he did not show it. The whole beautiful island world had now taken on the colour of ashes and the colour of lead. Beauty had utterly vanished. All seemed sadness and distress. The coco palms under the wind that had lost its steady rush and was now blowing in hurricane blasts, flung themselves about in all the attitudes of distress, and whoever has seen a tropical storm will know what a coco palm can express by its movements under the lash of the wind. Fortunately the house was so placed that it was protected by the whole depth of the grove between it and the lagoon, and fortunately too it was sheltered by the dense foliage of the breadfruit. For suddenly with a crash of thunder, as if the hammer of Thor had been flung from sky to earth, the clouds split and rain came down in a great slanting wave. It roared on the foliage above which, bending leaf on leaf, made a slanting roof from which it rushed in a steady sheet-like cascade. Dick had darted into the house and was now sitting beside Emmeline who was shivering and holding the child which had awakened at the sound of the thunder. For an hour they sat, the rain ceasing and coming again, the thunder shaking earth and sea, and the wind passing overhead with a piercing monotonous cry. Then, all at once, the wind dropped. The rain ceased and a pale spectral light, like the light of dawn, fell before the doorway. It's over, cried Dick, making to get up. Oh, listen! said Emmeline, clinging to him and holding the baby to his breast, as if the touch of him would give it protection. She had divine that there was something approaching worse than a storm. Then, listening in the silence, away from the other side of the island, they heard a sound like the droning of a great top. It was the centre of the cyclone approaching. A cyclone is a circular storm, a storm in the form of a ring. This ring of hurricane travels across the ocean with inconceivable speed and fury. Yet, its centre is a haven of peace. As they listened, the sound increased, sharpened, and became a tang that pierced the eardrums. A sound that shook with hurry and speed, increasing, bringing with it the bursting and crashing of trees and breaking at last overhead in a yell that stunned the brain, like the blow of a bludgeon. In a second the house was torn away, and they were clinging to the roots of the breadfruit, deaf, blinded, half lifeless. The terror and the prolonged shock of it reduced them from thinking beings to the level of frightened animals whose one instinct is preservation. How long the horror lasted they could not tell, when, like a madman who pauses for a moment in the midst of his struggles and stands stock still, the wind ceased blowing, and there was peace. The centre of the cyclone was passing over the island. Looking up one saw a marvellous sight. The air was full of birds, butterflies, insects, all hanging in the heart of the storm, and travelling with it under its protection. Though the air was still as the air of a summer's day, from north, south, east, and west, from every point on the compass came the yell of the hurricane. There was something shocking in this. In a storm one is so beaten about by the wind that one has no time to think. One is half stupefied. But in the dead centre of a cyclone one is in perfect peace. The trouble is all around, but it is not here. One has time to examine the thing like a tiger in a cage, listen to its voice, and shudder at its ferocity. The girl, holding the baby to her breast, sat up gasping. The baby had come to no harm. It had cried at first when the thunder broke, but now it seemed impassive, almost dazed. Dick stepped from under the tree and looked at the prodigy in the air. The cyclone had gathered on its way sea birds and birds from the land. There were gulls, electric white, and black man of war birds, butterflies, and they all seemed imprisoned under a great drifting dome of glass. As they went, travelling like things without volition, and in a dream, with a hum and a roar, the southwest quadrant of the cyclone burst on the island, and the whole bitter business began over again. It lasted for hours. Then towards midnight the wind fell, and when the sun rose next morning he came through a cloudless sky without a trace of apology for the destruction caused by his children, the winds. He showed trees uprooted, and birds lying dead, three or four canes remaining of what had once been a house, the lagoon, the colour of a pale sapphire, and a grass-green, foam-capped sea racing in thunder against the reef. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 The Stricken Woods At first they thought they were ruined. Then Dick, searching, found the old saw under a tree, and the butcher's knife near it, as though the knife and saw had been trying to escape in company, and had failed. Bit by bit they began to recover something of their scattered property. The remains of the flannel had been taken up by the cyclone and wrapped round and round a slender coconut tree, till the trunk looked like a gaily bandaged leg. The box of fish-hooks had been jammed into the centre of a cooked breadfruit, both having been picked up by the fingers of the wind, and hurled against the same tree, and the stacyle of the Shenandoah was out on the reef, with a piece of coral carefully placed on it as if to keep it down. As for the lug-sail belonging to the dinghy, it was never seen again. There is humour sometimes in a cyclone, if you can only appreciate it. No other form of air disturbance produces such quaint effects. Beside the great main whirlpool of wind there are subsidiary whirlpools, each actuated by its own special imp. Emeline had felt Hannah nearly snatched from her arms twice by these little ferocious gimlet winds, and that the whole business of the great storm was set about with the object of snatching Hannah from her and blowing him out to sea was a belief which she held, perhaps, in the innermost recesses of her mind. The dinghy would have been utterly destroyed had it not healed over and sunk in shallow water at the first onset of the wind. As it was, Dick was able to bail it out at the next low tide when it floated as bravely as ever, not having started a single seam. But the destruction amidst the trees was pitiful. Looking at the woods as a mass, one noticed gaps here and there, but what had really happened could not be seen till one was amongst the trees. Great, beautiful coconut palms, not dead, but just dying, lay crushed and broken, as if trampled upon by some enormous foot. You would come across half a dozen lianas twisted into one great cable. Where coconut palms were, you could not move a yard without kicking against a fallen nut. You might have picked up full-grown, half-grown, and wee baby nuts, not bigger than small apples, for on the same tree you will find nuts of all sizes and conditions. One never sees a perfectly straight-stemmed coconut palm, for they all have an inclination from the perpendicular more or less. Perhaps that is why a cyclone has more effect on them than on other trees. Artus, once so prettier picture with their diamond-checkered trunks, lay broken and ruined, and right through the belt of mammy-apples, right through the badlands, lay a broad road, as if an army, horse, foot, and artillery, had passed that way from Lagoon Edge to Lagoon Edge. This was the path left by the great forefoot of the storm, but had you searched the woods on either side, you would have found paths where the lesser winds had been at work, where the baby whirlwinds had been at play. From the bruised woods, like an incense offered to heaven, arose a perfume of blossoms gathered and scattered, of rain-wet leaves, of lianas twisted and broken and oozing their sap, the perfume of newly wrecked and ruined trees, the essence and soul of the artu, the banyan, and the coco palm cast upon the wind. You would have found dead butterflies in the woods, dead birds too, but in the great path of the storm you would have found dead butterflies' wings, feathers, leaves, frayed as if by fingers, branches of the Eoa, and sticks of the hibiscus broken into little fragments, powerful enough to rip a ship open, root up a tree, half ruin a city, delicate enough to tear a butterfly wing from wing. That is a cyclone. Emmeline, wandering about in the woods with Dick on the day after the storm, looking at the ruin of great tree and little bird, and recollecting the land-birds she had caught a glimpse of yesterday, being carried along safely by the storm, out to sea, to be drowned, felt a great weight lifting from her heart. Mischance had come, and spared them and the baby. The blue had spoken, but had not called them. She felt that something, the something which we in civilisation call fate, was, for the present, gorged, and, without being annihilated, her incessant hypochondrical dread condensed itself into a point, leaving her horizon sunlit and clear. The cyclone had indeed treated them almost, one might say, amiably. It had taken the house, but that was a small matter, for it had left them nearly all their small possessions. The tinder-box and flint and steel would have been a much more serious loss than a dozen houses, for without it they would have had absolutely no means of making a fire. If anything, the cyclone had been almost too kind to them, had let them pay off too little of that mysterious debt they owed to the gods. End of Chapter 17. Book 2, Chapters 18 and 19 of The Blue Lagoon. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by Adrian Pretzelis. The Blue Lagoon by H. Deveree Stackpool. Chapter 18. A Fallen Idol. The next day, Dick began to rebuild the house. He had fetched the stasisle from the reef, and rigged up a temporary tent. It was a great business cutting the canes and dragging them out in the open. Emeline helped, whilst Hannah, seated on the grass, played with the bird that had vanished during the storm, but reappeared the evening after. The child and the bird had grown fast friends. They were friendly enough even at first, but now the bird would sometimes let the tiny hands clasp him right round his body, at least as far as the hands would go. It is a rare experience for a man to hold a tame and unstruggling and unfrightened bird in his hands. Next to pressing a woman in his arms, it is the pleasantest tactile sensation he will ever experience, perhaps in life. He will feel a desire to press it to his heart, if he has such a thing. Hannah would press Coco to his little brown stomach, as if in artless admission of where his heart lay. He was an extraordinarily bright and intelligent child. He did not promise to be talkative, for, having achieved the word Dick, he rested content for a long while, before advancing further into the labyrinth of language. But though he did not use his tongue, he spoke in a host of other ways, with his eyes that were as bright as Coco's, and full of all sorts of mischief, with his hands and feet and the movements of his body. He had a way of shaking his hands before him when highly delighted, a way of expressing nearly all the shades of pleasure, and though he rarely expressed anger, when he did so he expressed it fully. He was just now passing over the frontier into Toyland. In civilisation he would no doubt have been the possessor of an India rubber dog, or a woolly lamb. But there were no toys here at all. Emmeline's old doll had been left behind when they took flight from the other side of the island, and Dick, a year or so ago on one of his expeditions, had found it lying half-buried in the sand of the beach. He had brought it back now more as a curiosity than anything else, and they had kept it on the shelf in the house. The cyclone had impaled it on a tree-twig nearby, as if in derision, and Hannah, when it was presented to him as a plaything, flew it away from him as if in disgust. But he would play with flowers or bright shells or bits of coral, making vague patterns with them, on the sword. All the toy-lams in the world would not have pleased him better than these things, the toys of the troglodyte children, the children of the Stone Age. To clap two oyster shells together and make a noise, what, after all, could a baby want better than that? One afternoon when the house was beginning to take some sort of form, they ceased to work and went off into the woods, Emmeline carrying the baby and Dick taking turns with him. They were going to the valley of the idol. Since the coming of Hannah, and even before, the stone figure standing in its awful and mysterious solitude had ceased to be an object of dread to Emmeline and had become a thing vaguely benevolent. Love had come to her under its shade, and under its shade the spirit of the child had entered into her from where, who knows, but certainly through heaven. Perhaps the thing which had been the god of some unknown people had inspired her with the instinct of religion. If so, she was his last worshipper on earth, for when they entered the valley they found him lying upon his face. Great blocks of stone lay around him. They had evidently been a landslip, a catastrophe preparing for ages, and determined perhaps by the torrential rain of the cyclone. In Ponope, Huahini, in Easter Island, you may see great idols that have been felled like this. Temples slowly dissolving from sight, and terraces seemingly as solid as the hills turning softly and subtly into shapeless mounds of stone. End of Chapter 18 Chapter 19 The Expedition Next morning the light of day filtering through the trees awakened Demiline in the tent which they had improvised whilst the house was building. Dawn came later here than on the other side of the island which faced east. Later and in a different manner, for there is the difference of worlds between dawn coming over a wooded hill and dawn coming over the sea. Over at the other side, sitting on the sand with the break of the reef which faced the east before you, scarcely would the east change colour before the sea line would be on fire. The sky lit up into an inimitable void of blue and the sunlight flooding into the lagoon, the ripples of light seeming to chase the ripples of water. On this side it was different. The sky would be dark and full of stars and the woods great spaces of velvety shadow. Then through the leaves of the artoo would come a sigh and the leaves of the breadfruit would patter and the sound of the reef become faint. The land breeze had awakened and in a while as if it had blown them away looking up you would find the stars gone and the sky a veil of palest blue. In this indirect approach of dawn there was something ineffably mysterious. One could see but the things seen were indecisive and vague just as they are in the gloaming of an English summer's day. Scarcely had Emma Lyon arisen when Dick woke also and they went out on the sword and then down to the water's edge. Dick went in for a swim and the girl holding the baby stood on the bank watching him. Always after a great storm the weather of the island would become more bracing and exhilarating and this morning the air seemed filled with the spirit of spring. Emma Lyon felt it and as she watched the swimmer desporting in the water she laughed and held the child up to watch him. She was fae. The breeze filled with all sorts of sweet perfumes from the woods blew her black hair about her shoulders and the full light of morning coming over the palm fronds of the woods beyond the sword touched her and the child. Nature seemed caressing them. Dick came ashore and then ran about to dry himself in the wind. Then he went to the dinghy and examined her for he had determined to leave the house building for half a day and row around to the old place to see how the banana trees had fared during the storm. His anxiety about them was not to be wondered at. The island was his larder and the bananas were a most valuable article of food. He had all the feelings of a careful housekeeper about them and he could not rest until he had seen for himself the extent of damage if damage there was any. He examined the boat and then they all went back to breakfast. Living their lives they had to use forethought. They would put away for instance all the shells of the coconuts they used for fuel and you could never imagine the blazing splendour their lives in the shell of a coconut to see it burning. Yesterday Dick with his usual prudence had placed a heap of sticks all wet with the rain of the storm to dry in the sun. As a consequence they had plenty of fuel to make a fire with this morning. When they had finished breakfast he got the knife to cut the bananas with if there were any left to cut and taking the javelin he went down to the boat followed by Emmeline and the child. Dick had stepped into the boat and was at the point of unmooring her and pushing her off when Emmeline stopped him. Dick, yes, I will go with you. You? said he in astonishment. Yes, I'm not afraid any more. It was a fact. Since the coming of the child she had lost that dread of the other side of the island or almost lost it. Death is a great darkness. Earth is a great light. They had intermixed in her mind. The darkness was still there but it was no longer terrible to her for it was infused with the light. The result was a twilight, sad but beautiful and unpeopled with forms of fear. Years ago she had seen a mysterious door close and shut a human being out forever from the world. The sight had filled her with dread unimaginable for she had no words for the thing, no religion or philosophy to explain it away or gloss it over. Just recently she had seen an equally mysterious door open and admit a human being and deep down in her mind in the place where the dreams were the one great fact had explained and justified the other. Life had vanished into the void but life had come from there. There was life in the void and it was no longer terrible. Perhaps all religions were born on a day when some woman seated upon a rock by the prehistoric sea looked at her newborn child and recalled to mind her man who had been slain, thus closing the charm and imprisoning the idea of a future state. Emeline, with the child in her arms, stepped into the little boat and took her seat in the stern whilst Dick pushed off. Scarcely had he put out the skulls than a new passenger arrived. It was Coco. He would often accompany them to the reef, though strangely enough he would never go there alone of his own accord. He made a circle or two over them and then lit on the gull in the bow and perched there, pumped up and with his long dove-colored tail feathers presented to the water. The oarsmen kept close in shore and as they rounded the little cape all gay with wild coconut, the bushes brushed the boat and the child, excited by their collar, held out his hands to them. Emeline stretched out her hand and broke off a branch, but it was not a branch of the wild coconut she had plucked. It was a branch of the never-wake-up berries, the berries that will cause a man to sleep should eat of them, to sleep and dream and never wake up. Throw them away, cried Dick, who remembered. I will in a minute. She was holding them up before the child, who was laughing and trying to grasp them. Then she forgot them and dropped them in the bottom of the boat, for something had struck the keel with a thud, and the water was boiling all round. There was a savage fight going on below. In the breeding season great battles would sometimes take place in the lagoon, for fish have their jealousies just like men, love affairs, friendships. The two great forms could be dimly perceived, one in pursuit of the other, and they terrified Emeline, who implored Dick to row on. They slipped by the pleasant shores that Emeline had never seen before, having been sound asleep when they came past them those years ago. Just before putting off, she had looked back at the beginnings of the little house under the R2 tree, and as she looked at the strange glades and groves, the picture of it rose before her and seemed to call her back. It was a tiny possession, but it was home, and so little used to change was she that already a sort of homesickness was upon her. But it passed away almost as soon as it came, and she felt a wandering of the things around her, and pointing them out to the child. When they came to the place where Dick had hooked the albacore, he hung on to his oars and told her about it. It was the first time she had heard of it, a fact which shows into what state of savagery he had been lapsing. He had mentioned about the canoes, for he had to account for the javelin, but as for telling her of the incidents of the chase, he no more thought of doing so than a red indian would think of detailing to his squaw the incidents of a bear hunt. Contempt for women is the first law of savagery, and perhaps the last law of some old and profound philosophy. She listened, and when it came to the incident of the shark, she shuddered. I wish I had a hook big enough to catch him with, said he, staring into the water, as if in search of his enemy. Don't think of him, Dick, said Emmeline, holding the child more tightly to her heart. Rowan! He resumed the skulls, but you could have seen from his face that he was recounting to himself the incident. When they had rounded the last promontory, and the strand and the break in the reef opened before them, Emmeline caught her breath. The place had changed in some subtle manner. Everything was there as before, yet everything seemed different. The legume seemed narrower, the reef nearer. The coco palms not nearly so tall. She was contrasting the real things with the recollection of them when seen by a child. The black speck had vanished from the reef. The storm had swept it utterly away. Dick beached the boat on the shelving sand and left Emmeline seated in the stern of it, whilst he went in search of the bananas. She would have accompanied him, but the child had fallen asleep. Hannah asleep was even a pleasanter picture than when awake. He looked like a little brown cupid, without wings, bow, or arrow. He had all the grace of a curled up feather. Sleep was always in pursuit of him, and would catch him up at the most unexpected moments. When he was at play, or indeed at any time, Emmeline would sometimes find him with a coloured shell or bit of coral that he had been playing with in his hand, faster sleep, a happy expression on his face as if his mind were pursuing its earthly avocations on some fortunate beach in Dreamland. Dick had plucked a huge breadfruit leaf and given it to her as a shelter from the sun, and she sat holding it over her and gazing straight before her over the white sunlit sands. The flight of the mind in reverie is not a direct line. To her dreaming as she sat came all sorts of coloured pictures recalled by the scene before her. The green water under the stern of a ship, and the word Shenandoah vaguely reflected on it. Their landing and the little tea set spread out on the white sand. She could still see the pansies painted on the plates, and she counted in memory the lead spoons, the great stars that burned over the reef at nights, the chlorocorns and fairies, the cask by the well where the convovula splossomed and the wind-blown trees seen from the summit of the hill. All these pictures drifted before her, dissolving and replacing each other as they went. There was a sadness in the contemplation of them, but pleasure too. She felt at peace with the world. All trouble seemed far behind her. It was as if the great storm that had left them unharmed had been an ambassador from the powers above to assure her of their forbearance, protection and love. All at once she noticed that between the boat's bow and the sand there lay a broad blue sparkling line. The dinghy was afloat. CHAPTER XXXV The Woods here had been less affected by the cyclone than those upon the other side of the island, but there had been destruction enough. To reach the place he wanted Dick had to climb over felled trees and fight his way through a tangle of vines that had once hung overhead. The banana trees had not suffered at all, as if by some special dispensation of providence even the great bunches of fruit had been scarcely injured, and he proceeded to climb and cut them. He cut two bunches, and with one across his shoulder came back down through the trees. He had got half across the sands, his head bent under the load, when a distant call came to him, and raising his head he saw the boat adrift in the middle of the lagoon, and the figure of the girl in the bow of it waving to him with her arm. He saw a skull floating on the water, halfway between the boat and the shore, which she had no doubt lost in an attempt to paddle the boat back. He remembered that the tide was going out. He flung his load aside and ran down the beach, in a moment he was in the water. Emmeline, standing up in the boat, watched him. When she found herself adrift she had made an effort to row back, and in her hurry, shipping the skulls, she had lost one. With a single skull she was quite helpless, as she had not the art of sculling a boat from the stern. At first she was not frightened because she knew that Dick would soon return to her assistance. But as the distance between the boat and shore increased, a cold hand seemed laid upon her heart. Looking at the shore, it seemed very far away, and the view towards the reef was terrific, for the opening had increased in apparent size, and the great sea beyond seemed drawing her to it. She saw Dick coming out of the wood with the load on his shoulder, and she called to him. At first he did not seem to hear. Then she saw him look up, cast the bananas away, and come running down the sand to the water's edge. She saw him swimming, she saw him seize the skull, and her heart gave a great leap of joy. Toeing the skull and swimming with one arm, he rapidly approached the boat. He was quite close, only ten feet away, when Emmeline saw behind him, shearing through the clear, rippling water and advancing with speed, a dark triangle that seemed made of canvas stretched upon a sword-point. Forty years ago he had floated adrift on the sea in the form and likeness of a small, shabby pine-cone, a prey to anything that might find him. He had escaped the jaws of the dogfish, and the jaws of the dogfish are a very wide door. He had escaped the albacore and the squid. His life had been one long series of miraculous escapes from death. Out of a billion like him, born in the same year, he and a few others only had survived. For thirty years he had kept the lagoon to himself as a ferocious tiger keeps a jungle. He had known the palm tree on the reef when it was a seedling, and he had known the reef even before the palm tree was there. The things he had devoured, flung one upon another, would have made a mountain. Yet he was as clear as enmity as a sword, as cruel and as soulless. He was the spirit of the lagoon. Amaline screamed and pointed to the thing behind the swimmer. He turned, saw it, dropped the oar, and made for the boat. She had seized the remaining skull and stood with it, poised, and then she hurled it, blade foremost at the form in the water, now fully visible and close on its prey. She could not throw a stone straight. Yet the skull went like an arrow to the mark, bulking the pursuer and saving the pursued. In a moment more his leg was over the gunnel and he was saved. But the skull was lost. End of Chapter 20 Chapter 21 The Hand of the Sea There was nothing in the boat that could possibly be used as a paddle. The skull was only five or six yards away, but to attempt to swim to it was certain death. Yet they were being swept out to sea. He might have made the attempt only that on the starboard quarter the form of the shark gently swimming at the same pace as they were drifting could be made out only half veiled by the water. The bird, perched on the gunnel, seemed to divine their trouble, for he rose in the air, made a circle, and resumed his perch with all his feathers ruffled. Dick stood in despair, helpless, his hands clasping his head. The shore was drawing away before him, the surf loudening behind him, yet he could do nothing. The island was being taken away from them by the great hand of the sea. Then, suddenly, the little boat entered the race formed by the confluence of the tides from the right and left arms of the lagoon. The sound of the surf suddenly increased as though a door had been flung open, the breakers were falling, and the seagulls crying on either side of them, and for a moment the ocean seemed to hesitate as to whether they were to be taken away into her wastes or dashed on the coral strand. Only for a moment this seeming hesitation lasted. Then the power of the tide prevailed over the power of the swell, and the little boat, taken by the current, drifted gently out to sea. Dick flung himself down beside Emmeline, who was seated in the bottom of the boat, holding the child to her breast. The bird, seeing the land retreat, and wise in its instinct, rose into the air. It circled thrice round the drifting boat, and then, like a beautiful but faithless spirit, passed away to the shore. End of Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Together The island had sunk slowly from sight. At sundown it was just a trace, a stain on the southwestern horizon. It was before the new moon and the little boat lay drifting. It drifted from the light of sunset into a world of vague violet twilight, and now it lay drifting under the stars. The girl, clasping the baby to her breast, leaned against her companion's shoulder. Neither of them spoke. All the wonders in their short existence had culminated in this final wonder, this passing away together from the world of time. This strange voyage they had embarked on to wear, now that the first terror was over, they felt neither sorrow nor fear. They were together. Come what might, nothing could divide them. Even should they sleep and never wake up, they would sleep together. Had one been left and the other taken, as though the thought had occurred to them simultaneously, they turned one to the other, and their lips met. Their souls met, mingling in one dream, whilst above in the windless heaven, space answered space, with flashes of sidereal light, and cannabis shone and burned like the pointed sword of Azrael. Clasped in Emeline's hand was the last and most mysterious gift of the mysterious world they had known, the branch of Crimson Berries. Book 3, Chapter 1. Mad Lestrange They knew him upon the Pacific slope as Mad Lestrange. He was not mad, but he was a man with a fixed idea. He was pursued by a vision, the vision of two children and an old sailor, adrift in a little boat upon a wide blue sea. When the Erago, bound for Papiti, picked up the boats of the Northumberland, only the people on the longboat were alive. Lafarge the captain was mad, and he never recovered his reason. Lestrange was utterly shattered. The awful experience in the boats and the loss of the children had left him a seemingly helpless wreck. The scow bankers, like all their class, had fared better, and in a few days were about the ship and sitting in the sun. Four days after the rescue the Erago spoke the new castle, bound for San Francisco, and trans-shipped the shipwrecked men. Had a physician seen the strange on board the Northumberland as she lay in that long, long calm before the fire, he would have declared that nothing but a miracle could prolong his life. The miracle came about. In the general hospital of San Francisco, as the clouds cleared from his mind, they unveiled the picture of the children and the little boat. The picture had been there daily, seen but not truly comprehended. The horrors gone through in the open boat, the sheer physical exhaustion had merged all the accidents of the great disaster into one mournful, half-comprehended fact. When his brain cleared, all the other incidents fell out of focus, and memory, with her eyes set upon the children, began to paint a picture that he was ever more to see. Memory cannot produce a picture that imagination has not retouched. And her pictures, even the ones least touched by imagination, are no mere photographs, but the work of an artist. All that is inessential, she casts away. All that is essential, she retains, she idealizes, and that is why her picture of a lost mistress has the power to keep a man a celibate to the end of his days, and why she can break a human heart with the picture of a dead child. She is a painter, but she is also a poet. The picture before the mind of Lestrange was filled with this almost diabolical poetry, for in it the little boat and her helpless crew were represented adrift on a blue and sunlit sea. A sea most beautiful to look at, yet most terrible, bearing as it did the recollections of thirst. He had been dying when, raising himself on his elbow, so to say, he looked at this picture. It recalled him to life. His willpower asserted itself, and he refused to die. The will of a man has, if it is strong enough, the power to reject death. He was not in the least conscious of the exercise of this power. He only knew that a great and absorbing interest had suddenly arisen in him, and that a great aim stood before him—the recovery of the children. The disease that was killing him ceased its ravages, or rather was slain in its turn by the increasing vitality against which it had to strive. He left the hospital and took up his quarters at the Palace Hotel, and then, like the general of an army, he began to formulate his plan of campaign against fate. When the crew of the Northumberland had stampeded, hurling their officers aside, lowering the boats with a rush, and casting themselves into the sea, everything had been lost in the way of ship's papers—the charts, the two logs, everything, in fact, that could indicate the latitude and longitude of the disaster. The first and second officers and a midshipman had shared the fate of the quarterboat. Of the foremost hands saved, not one, of course, could give the slightest hint as to the locality of the spot. A time reckoning from the horn told little, for there was no record of the log. All that could be said was that the disaster had occurred somewhere south of the line. In Lafarge's brain lay for a certainty the position, and the strange went to see the captain in the Maison de Santé, where he was being looked after, and found him quite recovered from the furious mania that he had been suffering from—quite recovered and playing with a ball of coloured worsted. The erago, due at Papiti, became overdue. LaStrange watched the overdue lists from day to day, week to week, from month to month, uselessly, for the erago was never heard of again. One could not affirm even that she was wrecked. She was simply one of the ships that never came back from the sea. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 The Secret of the Azure To lose a child he loves is undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe that can happen to a man. I do not refer to its death. A child wanders into the street, or is left by its nurse for a moment, and vanishes. At first the thing is not realised. There is a pang and a hurry at the heart which half vanishes. Whilst the understanding explains that in a civilised city if a child gets lost it will be found and brought back by the neighbours or the police. But the police know nothing of the matter or the neighbours, and the hours pass. Any minute may bring back the wanderer, but the minutes pass, and the day wears into evening, and the evening into night, and the night to dawn, and the common sounds of a new day begin. You cannot remain at home for restlessness. You go out only to return hurriedly for news. You are eternally listening, and what you hear shocks you. The common sounds of life, the roll of the carts and cabs in the street, the footsteps of the passers by a full of indescribable mournfulness. Music increases your misery into madness, and the joy of others is monstrous as laughter heard in hell. If someone were to bring you the dead body of the child you might weep, but you would bless him, for it is the uncertainty that kills. You go mad or go on living, years pass by, and you are an old man. You say to yourself he would have been twenty years of age today. There is not in the old ferocious penal code of our forefathers a punishment adequate to the case of the man or woman who steals a child. Lestrange was a wealthy man, and one hope remained to him that the children might have been rescued by some passing ship. It was not the case of children lost in a city, but in the broad Pacific, where ships travel from all ports to all ports, and to advertise his loss adequately it was necessary to placard the world. $10,000 was the reward offered for news of the lost ones, $20,000 for the recovery, and the advertisement appeared in every newspaper likely to reach the eyes of a sailor from the Liverpool post to the dead bird. The years passed without anything definite coming in to answer all these advertisements. Once news came of two children saved from the sea in the neighbourhood of the Gilberts, and it was not false news, but they were not the children he was seeking for. This incident had once depressed and stimulated him, for it seemed to say, if these children have been saved, why not yours? The strange thing was that in his heart he felt a certainty that they were alive. His intellect suggested their death in twenty different forms, but a whisper somewhere out of that great blue ocean told him at intervals that what he sought was there, living, waiting for him. He was somewhat of the same temperament as Emmeline, a dreamer with a mind tuned to receive and record the fine rays that fill this world, flowing from intellect to intellect, and even from what we call the inanimate things. A course of nature would, through feeling, perhaps as acutely the grief, have given up in despair the search. But he kept on, and at the end of the fifth year, so far from desisting, he chartered a schooner, and passed eighteen months in a fruitless search, calling at little-known islands, and once, unknowing, at an island only three hundred miles, from the tiny island of this story. If you wish to feel the hopelessness of this unguided search, do not look at a map of the Pacific, but go there. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of square leagues of sea, thousands of islands, reefs, atolls. Up to a few years ago, there were many small islands utterly unknown. Even still there are some, though the charts of the Pacific are the greatest triumphs of hydrography, and though the island of the story was actually on the admiralty charts, of what use was that fact a little strange. He would have continued searching, but he dared not, for the desolation of the sea had touched him. In that eighteen months the Pacific explained itself to him in part, explained its vastness, its secrecy, and inviability. The schooner lifted veil upon veil of distance, and veil upon veil lay beyond. He could only move in a right line, to search the wilderness of water with any hope one would have to be endowed with the gift of moving in all directions at once. He would often lean over the bulwark rail, and watch the swell slip by, as if questioning the water. Then the sunsets began to weigh upon his heart, and the stars to speak to him in a new language, and he knew that it was time to return, if he would return with a whole mind. When he got back to San Francisco he called upon his agent Wanamaker of Kearney Street. But there was still no news. Chapter 3 Captain Fountain He had a suite of rooms at the palace hotel, and he lived the life of any other rich man who was not addicted to pleasure. He knew some of the best people in the city, and conducted himself so sanely in all respects that a casual stranger would never have guessed his reputation for madness. But when you know him better you would find sometimes in the middle of a conversation that his mind was away from the subject, and were you to follow him in the street you would hear him in conversation with himself. Once at a dinner party he rose and left the room and did not return. Trifles weren't sufficient to establish a reputation of a sort. One morning, to be precise it was the second day of May, exactly eight years and five months after the wreck of the Northumberland, Lestrange was in his sitting-room reading, when the bell of the telephone which stood in the corner of the room rang. He went to the instrument. Are you there? came a high American voice. Lestrange? Right, come down and see me, Wanamaker, I have news for you. Lestrange held the receiver for a moment, then he put it back in the rest. He went to a chair and sat down, holding his head between his hands. Then he rose and went to the telephone again, but he dared not use it. He dared not shatter the newborn hope. News. What a world lies in that word. In Kearney Street he stood before the door of Wanamaker's office, collecting himself and watching the crowd drifting by. Then he entered and went up the stairs. He pushed open a swing door and entered a great room. The clink and rattle of a dozen typewriters filled the place and all the hurry of business. Clarks passed and came with sheaves of correspondence in their hands, and Wanamaker himself, rising from bending over a message which he was correcting on one of the typewriter's tables, saw the newcomer and led him to the private office. What is it? said Lestrange. Only this, said the other, taking a slip of paper with a name and a dress on it. Simon J. Fountain of Forty-Five Rathrae Street West. That's down near the wharves. Says he has seen your ad in an old number of a paper, and he thinks he can tell you something. He did not specify the nature of the intelligence, but it might be worth finding out. I will go there, said Lestrange. Do you know Rathrae Street? No. Wanamaker went out and called a boy and gave him some directions. Then Lestrange and the boy started. Lestrange left the office without saying thank you or taking leave in any way of the advertising agent who did not feel in the least affronted, for he knew his customer. Rathrae Street is, or was before the earthquake, a street of small clean houses. It had a seafaring look that was accentuated by the marine perfumes from the wolves close by, and the sound of steam winches loading or discharging cargo, a sound that ceased not night or day, as the work went on beneath the sun or the sizzling arc lamps. Number Forty-Five was almost exactly like its fellows, neither better nor worse. But the door was opened by a neat prim woman, small and of middle age. Commoner place she was, no doubt, but not common place to Lestrange. Is Mr. Fountain in? he asked. I have come about the advertisement. Oh, have you, sir? she replied, making way for him to enter, and showing him into a little sitting-room on the left of the passage. The captain is in bed. He is a great invalid, but he was expecting, perhaps, someone would call, and he will be able to see you in a minute, if you don't mind waiting. Thanks, Sir Lestrange. I can wait. He had waited eight years. What mattered a few minutes now? But at no time in the eight years had he suffered such suspense, for his heart knew that now, just now in this common-placed little house, from the lips of, perhaps, the husband of that common-placed woman, he was going to learn either what he feared to hear, or what he hoped. It was a depressing little room. It was so clean and looked as though it were never used. A ship imprisoned in a glass bottle stood upon the mantelpiece, and there were shells from many faraway places, pictures of ships in sand, all the things one finds as a rule adorning an old sailor's home. Lestrange, as he sat waiting, could hear movements from the next room, probably the invalids, which were preparing for his reception. The distant sounds of the derricks and winches came muted through the tightly-shut window, that looked as though it had never been opened. A square of sunlight lit the upper part of the cheap lace curtain on the right of the window, and repeated its pattern vaguely on the lower part of the wall opposite. Then a blue-bottle fly woke suddenly into life, and began to buzz and drum against the window-pane, and Lestrange wished that they would come. A man of his temperament massed necessarily, even under the happiest circumstances, suffer in going through the world. The fine fibre always suffers when brought in contact with the course. These people were as kindly disposed as any one else. The advertisement and the face and manners of the visitor might have told them that it was not the time for delay. Yet they kept him waiting whilst they arranged bedquilts, and put medicine-bottle straight, as if he could see. At last the door opened, and the woman said, Will you step this way, sir? She showed him into a bedroom, opening off the passage. The room was neat and clean, and had that indescribable appearance which marks the bedroom of the invalid. In the bed, making a mountain under the counter-pane with an enormously distended stomach, lay a man, black-bearded, and with his large, capable, useless hands spread out on the covalet, hands ready and willing, but debarred from work. Without moving his body, he turned his head slowly and looked at the newcomer. This slow movement was not from weakness or disease, it was the slow, emotionless nature of the man speaking. This is the gentleman, Silas, said the woman, speaking over the stranger's shoulder. Then she withdrew and closed the door. Take a chair, sir, said the sea-captain, flapping one of his hands on the counter-pane, as if in weird protest against his own helplessness. I haven't the pleasure of your name, but the Mrs tells me you've come about the advertisement, a litanyester even. He took a paper, folded small, that lay beside him, and held it out to his visitor. It was a Sidney Bulletin, three years old. Yes, said the stranger looking at the paper, that is my advertisement. Wow, it's strange, very strange, said Captain Fountain, that I should have lit on it only yesterday. I've had it all three years in my chest, the way old papers get lying at the bottom with odds and ends. Mightn't have seen it now, only the Mrs cleared the raffle out of the chest, and give me that paper, I says, seeing it in her hand, and I fell to reading it. For a man reads anything by tracks lying in bed eight months, as I've been with the dropsy. I've been whaler, man and boy, forty year, and my last chip was the seahorse. Over seven years ago, one of my men picked up something on a beach of one of them islands east of the Marquesas. We'd put into water. Yes, yes, said the stranger. What was it he found? Mrs. Roared the captain in a voice that shook the walls of the room. The door opened, and the woman appeared. Fetch me my keys out of my trousers pocket. The trousers were hanging up on the back of the door, as if only waiting to be put on. The woman fetched the keys, and he fumbled over them, and found one. He handed it to her, and pointed to the drawer of a bureau opposite the bed. She knew evidently what was wanted, for she opened the drawer, and produced a box which she handed to him. It was a small cardboard box, tied round with a bit of string. He undid the string, and disclosed the child's tea service. A teapot, cream jug, six little plates all painted with a pansy. It was the box which Emmeline had always been losing, lost again. The stranger buried his face in his hands. He knew the things. Emmeline had shown them to him in a burst of confidence. Out of all that vast ocean he had searched unavailingly. They had come to him like a message, and the awe and mystery of it bowed him down and crushed him. The captain had placed the things on the newspaper spread out by his side, and he was unrolling the little spoons from their tissue paper covering. He counted them as if entering up the tail of some trust, and placed them on the newspaper. When did you find them? asked the strange, speaking with his face still covered. A matter of over seven years ago, replied the captain, we'd put into water at a place south of the line. Palm tree island, we whaler men call it, because of the tree at the break of the lagoon. One of my men brought it aboard, found it in a shanty built of sugar canes which the men bused up for divouralment. Good God! said the strange, was there no one there, nothing but this box? Not a sight or sound, so the men said, just the shanty, abandoned seemingly. I had no time to land and hunt for castaways. I was after Wales. How big is the island? Oh, a fairish, middle-sized island, no natives, I've heard tellets to boo. Why, the Lord only knows. Some crank of the canack, as I suppose. Anyhow, there's your findings. You recognise him? I do. Seems strange, said the captain, that I should pick him up. Seems strange, your advertisement out, and the answer to it, lines to monk my gear. But that's the way things go. Strange, said the other, it's more than strange. Of course, continued the captain, they might have been on the island hit away somewhere. There's no saying. Only appearances are against it. Of course, they might be there now, unbeknownst to you or me. They are there now, answered the strange who was sitting up and looking at the playthings, as though he read in them some hidden message. They are there now. Have you the position of the island? I have. Mrs. Hand me my private log. She took a bulky, greasy, black notebook from the bureau and handed it to him. He opened it, thumbed the pages, and then read out the latitude and longitude. I entered it on the day of finding. Here's the entry. Adams brought aboard a child's toy box out of deserted shanty which men pulled down. Traded it to me for a corker of rum. The cruise lasted three years and eight months after that. We'd only been out three when it happened. I forgot all about it. Three years scrubbing round the world after Wales doesn't brighten a man's memory. Right round we went, and paid off at Nand took it. Then after a foot on shore and a month repairing, the old seahorse was off again. I withered. It was at Honolulu this dropsy took me, and back I come here home. That's the yarn. There's not much to it. But seeing your advertisement, I thought I might answer it. Lestrange took Fountain's hand and shook it. You see the reward I offered? he said. I have not my checkbook with me, but you shall have the check in an hour from now. No, sir, replied the captain. If anything comes of it, I don't say I'm not open to some small acknowledgement, but ten thousand dollars for a five cent box. That's not my way of doing business. I can't make you take the money now. I can't even thank you properly now, said Lestrange. I'm in a fever. But when all is settled, you and I will settle this business. My God! he buried his face in his hands again. I'm not wishing to be inquisitive, said Captain Fountain, slowly putting the things back in the box and tucking the paper shavings round them. But may I ask how you propose to move in this business? I will hire a ship at once and search. I, said the captain, wrapping up the little spoons in a meditative manner. Perhaps that will be best. He felt in his own mind that the search would be fruitless, but he did not say so. If he had been absolutely certain in his mind without being able to produce the proof, he would not have counseled Lestrange to any other course, knowing that the man's mind would never be settled until the proof positive was produced. The question is, said Lestrange, what is my quickest way to get there? Ah, there I may be able to help you, said Fountain, tying the string round the box. A schooner with good heels to her is what you want, and if I'm not mistaken, there's one discharging cargo at this present minute at Old Sullivan's Wharf. Mrs., the woman answered the call. Lestrange felt like a person in a dream, and these people who were interesting themselves in his affairs seemed to him beneficent beyond the nature of human beings. Is Captain Stannis Street home, do you think? I don't know, replied the woman, but I can go see. Do. She went. He lives only a few doors down, said Fountain, and he's the man for you. Best schooner captain ever sailed out of Frisco. The Raratunga is the name of the boat I have in my mind. Best boat that ever wore copper. Stannis Street is the captain of her. Old is her McVitie. She's been missionary, and she's been pigs. Copper was her last cargo, and she's nearly discharged it. Oh, McVitie would hire her out to siten at a price. You needn't be afraid of their boggling at it if you can raise the dollars. She's had nearly a new suit of sales only the beginning of the year. Oh, she'll fix you up to a T, and you can take the word of S. Fountain for that. I'll engineer the thing from this bed if you let me put my R in your trouble. I'll victual her and find a crew three-quarter price of any of those damn Skulkin agents. Oh, I'll take a commission right enough, but I'm half paid with doing the thing. He ceased, for footsteps sounded in the passage outside, and Captain Stannis Street was shown in. He was a young man of not more than thirty, alert, quick of eye, and pleasant of face. Fountain introduced him to Lestrange, who had taken a fancy term at first sight. When he heard about the business in hand, he seemed interested at once. The affair seemed to appeal to him more than it had been a purely commercial matter, much of copper and pigs. If you'll come with me, sir, down to the wharf, I'll show you the boat now, he said when they had discussed the matter, and threshed it out thoroughly. He rose, bared good day to his friend Fountain, and Lestrange followed him, carrying the brown paper-box in his hand. O'Sullivan's wharf was not far away. A tall, cape-horner that looked almost a twin sister of the ill-fated Northumberland was discharging iron, and a stern of her, graceful as a dream, with snow-white decks lay the Rorotonga, discharging copper. That's the boat, said Stannis Street, cargo nearly all out. How does she strike your fancy? I'll take her, so Lestrange, cost what it will. End of chapter three. Book three, chapter four. The last chapter of the Blue Lagoon. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Read by Adrian Pretzellus. The Blue Lagoon by H. Devere, Stagpool. It was on the 10th of May. So quickly did things move under the supervision of the bed-ridden captain, that the Rorotonga, with Lestrange on board, cleared the Golden Gate, and made south, healing to a ten-knot breeze. There is no mode of travel to be compared to your sailing ship. In a great ship, if you have ever made a voyage in one, the vast spaces of canvas, the sky-high spars, the finesse with which the wind is met and taken advantage of, will form a memory never to be blotted out. A schooner is the queen of all rigs. She has a bounding buoyancy denied to the square-rigged craft, to which she stands in the same relationship as a young girl to a dowager, and the Rorotonga was not only a schooner, but the queen acknowledged of all the schooners in the Pacific. For the first few days they made good way south, then the wind became baffling and headed them off. Added to Lestrange's feverish excitement, there was an anxiety, a deep and soul-fretting anxiety, as if some half-herd voice were telling him that the children he sought were threatened by some danger. These baffling winds blew upon the smouldering anxiety in his breast, as the wind blows upon embers, causing them to glow. They lasted some days, and then, as if fate had relented, up-sprang in the starboard quarter, a spanking breeze, making the rigging sing to a merry tune, and blowing the spindrift from the forefoot, as the Rorotonga, healing to its pressure, went humming through the sea, leaving a wake spreading behind her like a fan. It took them along five hundred miles, silently, and with the speed of a dream. Then it ceased. The ocean and the air stood still. The sky above stood solid like a great pale blue dome, just where it met the water-line of the far horizon, a delicate tracery of cloud draped the entire round of the sky. I have said that the ocean stood still as well as the air. To the eye it was so, for the swell, underrunning the glitter on its surface, was so even, so equable, and so rhythmical, that the surface seemed not in motion. Occasionally a dimple broke the surface, and strips of dark seaweed floated by, showing up the green. Dim things rose to the surface, and, guessing the presence of man, sank slowly and dissolved from sight. Two days never to be recovered passed, and still the calm continued. On the morning of the third day it breezed up from the non-West, and they continued their course, a cloud of canvas, every sail-drawing, and the music of the ripple under the forefoot. Captain Stannastreet was a genius in his profession. He could get more speed out of a schooner than any other man afloat, and carry more canvas without losing a stick. He was also, fortunately, for the strange, a man of refinement and education, and what was better still, understated. They were pacing the deck one afternoon, when the strange, who was walking with his hands behind him, and his eyes counting the brown dowels in the cream-white planking, broke silence. You don't believe in visions and dreams? How do you know that? replied the other. Oh, I only put it as a question. Most people say they don't. Yes, but I don't know. People say they don't. Yes, but most people do. I do, so do a strange. He was silent for a moment. You know my trouble so well that I won't bother you going over it, but there has come over me of late a feeling. It is like a waking dream. Yes, I can't quite explain, for it is as if I saw something which my intelligence could not comprehend or make an image of. I think I know what you mean. I don't think you do. This is something quite strange. I am fifty, and in fifty years a man has experienced as a rule all the ordinary and most of the extraordinary sensations that a human being can be subjected to. Well, I have never felt this sensation before. It comes on only at times. I see, as you might imagine, a young baby sees, and things are before me that I do not comprehend. It is not through my bodily eyes that this sensation comes, but through some window of the mind from before which a curtain has been drawn. That strange, said Stannis Street, who did not like the conversation over much, being simply a schooner-captain and a plain man, though intelligent enough and sympathetic. This something tells me, went on the strange, that there is danger threatening thee. He ceased, paused a minute, and then to Stannis Street's relief went on, if I talk like that you will think I am not right in my head. Let us pass the subject by. Let us forget dreams and omens and come to realities. You know how I lost the children. You know how I hoped to find them at the place where a captain-fountain found their traces. He says the island was uninhabited, but he was not sure. No, replied Stannis Street. He only spoke of the beach. Yes. Well, suppose there were natives on the other side of the island who had taken these children. If so, they would grow up with the natives. And become savages? Yes, but the Polynesians can't really be called savages. They are a very decent lot. I've knocked about amongst them a good while, and a canacker is as white as a white man, which is not saying much, but it's something. Most of the islands are civilized now. Of course there are a few that aren't, but still suppose even that savages, as you call them, had come and taken the children off. The stranger's breath caught. For this was the very fear that was in his heart, though he had never spoken of it. Well, well, they would be well treated. And brought up as savages? I suppose so. The strange side. Look here, said the captain. It's all very well talking, but upon my word, I think that we civilized folk put on a lot of heirs and waste a lot of pity on savages. How so? What does a man want to be but happy? Yes. Well, who is happier than a naked savage in a warm climate? Oh, he's happy enough, and he's not always holding a corrobore. Sorry? He's a good deal of a gentleman. He has perfect health. He lives the life a man was born to live, face to face with nature. He doesn't see the sun through an office window, or the moon through the smoke of factory chimneys. Happy and civilized too, but bless you, where is he? The whites have driven him out. In one or two small islands you may find him still, a crumb or so of him. Suppose, said Lestrange, suppose those children had been brought up face to face with nature. Yes, living that free life. Yes, waking up under the stars. Lestrange was speaking with his eyes fixed, as if upon something very far away. Going to sleep as the sun sets, feeling the air fresh like this which blows upon us all around them. Suppose they were like that. Would it not be a cruelty to bring them to what we call civilization? I think it would, said Stannis Street. Lestrange said nothing, but continued pacing the deck. His head bowed, and his hands behind his back. One evening at sunset, Stannis Street said, We are two hundred and forty miles from the island, reckoning from today's reckoning at noon. We're going all ten knots, even with this breeze. We ought to fetch the place this time tomorrow. Before that, if it fractions. I am greatly disturbed, said Lestrange. He went below, and the schooner-captain shook his head, and, locking his arm around a rat-line, gave his body to the gentle roll of the craft as she stole along, skirting the sunset, splendid, and to the nautical eye full of fine weather. The breeze was not quite so fresh next morning, but it had been blowing fairly all the night, and the Rarotonga had made good way. About eleven it began to fail. It became the lightest sailing breeze, just sufficient to keep the sails drawing, and the wake rippling and swirling behind. Suddenly, Stannis Street, who had been standing, talking to Lestrange, climbed a few feet up the mizzen rat-lines and shaded his eyes. What is it? asked Lestrange. A boat, he replied, Hand me that glass you will find in the sling there. He leveled the glass, and looked for a long time without speaking. It's a boat, a drift, a small boat, nothing in her. Stay, I see something white, can't make it out. Hi there, to a fellow at the wheel. Keep her a point more to starboard. He got onto the deck. We're going dead on for her. Is there anyone in her? asked Lestrange. Can't quite make out, but I'll lower the whale boat and fetch her alongside. He gave orders for the whale boat to be slung out and manned. As they approached nearer, it was evident that the drifting boat, which looked like a ship's dinghy, contained something, but what could not be made out? When he had approached near enough, Stannis Street put the helm down and brought the schooner to, with her sails all shivering. He took his place in the bow of the whale boat, and Lestrange in the stern. The boat was lowered, the falls cast off, and the oars bent to the water. The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, looking scarcely bigger than a walnut shell. In thirty strokes, the whale boat's nose was touching her quarter. Stannis Street grasped her gunnel. In the bottom of the dinghy lay a girl, naked all but for a strip of coloured striped material. One of her arms was clasped round the neck of a form that was half hidden by her body. The other, clasped partly to herself, partly to her companion, the body of a baby. They were natives, evidently, wrecked or lost by some mishance from some inter-island schooner. Their breasts rose and fell gently, and clasped in the girl's hand was a branch of some tree. And on the branch a single withered berry. Are they dead? asked Lestrange, who divined that there were people in the boat, and who was standing up in the stern of the whale boat, trying to see. No, said Stannis Street. They are asleep. End of Chapter Four and End of The Blue Lagoon by H. DeVere Stackpool. Read by Adrian Pretzelis in Santa Rosa, California, October 1st, 2010.