CHAPTER XVI

THE POETRY OF LEARNING

To forget the passage of time you must live in the open air, in a warm climate, with as few clothes as possible upon you. You must collect and cook your own food. Then, after a while, if you have no special ties to bind you to civilisation, Nature will begin to do for you what she does for the savage. You will recognise that it is possible to be happy without books or newspapers, letters or bills. You will recognise the part sleep plays in Nature.

After a month on the island you might have seen Dick at one moment full of life and activity, helping Mr Button to dig up a taro root or what not, the next curled up to sleep like a dog. Emmeline the same. Profound and prolonged lapses into sleep; sudden awakenings into a world of pure air and dazzling light, the gaiety of colour all round. Nature had indeed opened her doors to these children.

One might have fancied her in an experimental mood, saying: “Let me put these buds of civilisation back into my nursery and see what they will become—how they will blossom, and what will be the end of it all.”

Just as Emmeline had brought away her treasured box from the Northumberland, Dick had conveyed with him a small linen bag that chinked when shaken. It contained marbles. Small olive-green marbles and middle-sized ones of various colours; glass marbles with splendid coloured cores; and one large old grandfather marble too big to be played with, but none the less to be worshipped—a god marble.

Of course one cannot play at marbles on board ship, but one can play with them. They had been a great comfort to Dick on the voyage. He knew them each personally, and he would roll them out on the mattress of his bunk and review them nearly every day, whilst Emmeline looked on.

One day Mr Button, noticing Dick and the girl kneeling opposite each other on a flat, hard piece of sand near the water’s edge, strolled up to see what they were doing. They were playing marbles. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth watching and criticising the game, pleased that the “childer” were amused. Then he began to be amused himself, and in a few minutes more he was down on his knees taking a hand; Emmeline, a poor player and an unenthusiastic one, withdrawing in his favour.

After that it was a common thing to see them playing together, the old sailor on his knees, one eye shut, and a marble against the nail of his horny thumb taking aim; Dick and Emmeline on the watch to make sure he was playing fair, their shrill voices echoing amidst the cocoa-nut trees with cries of “Knuckle down, Paddy, knuckle down!” He entered into all their amusements just as one of themselves. On high and rare occasions Emmeline would open her precious box, spread its contents and give a tea-party, Mr Button acting as guest or president as the case might be.

“Is your tay to your likin’, ma’am?” he would enquire; and Emmeline, sipping at her tiny cup, would invariably make answer: “Another lump of sugar, if you please, Mr Button;” to which would come the stereotyped reply: “Take a dozen, and welcome; and another cup for the good of your make.”

Then Emmeline would wash the things in imaginary water, replace them in the box, and every one would lose their company manners and become quite natural again.

“Have you ever seen your name, Paddy?” asked Dick one morning.

“Seen me which?”

“Your name?”

“Arrah, don’t be axin’ me questions,” replied the other. “How the divil could I see me name?”

“Wait and I’ll show you,” replied Dick.

He ran and fetched a piece of cane, and a minute later on the salt-white sand in face of orthography and the sun appeared these portentous letters:

B U T T E N

“Faith, an’ it’s a cliver boy y’are,” said Mr Button admiringly, as he leaned luxuriously against a cocoa-nut tree, and contemplated Dick’s handiwork. “And that’s me name, is it? What’s the letters in it?”

Dick enumerated them.

“I’ll teach you to do it, too,” he said. “I’ll teach you to write your name, Paddy—would you like to write your name, Paddy?”

“No,” replied the other, who only wanted to be let smoke his pipe in peace; “me name’s no use to me.”

But Dick, with the terrible gadfly tirelessness of childhood, was not to be put off, and the unfortunate Mr Button had to go to school despite himself. In a few days he could achieve the act of drawing upon the sand characters somewhat like the above, but not without prompting, Dick and Emmeline on each side of him, breathless for fear of a mistake.

“Which next?” would ask the sweating scribe, the perspiration pouring from his forehead—“which next? an’ be quick, for it’s moithered I am.”

“N. N.—that’s right—Ow, you’re making it crooked!—that’s right—there! it’s all there now—Hurroo!”

“Hurroo!” would answer the scholar, waving his old hat over his own name, and “Hurroo!” would answer the cocoa-nut grove echoes; whilst the far, faint “Hi hi!” of the wheeling gulls on the reef would come over the blue lagoon as if in acknowledgment of the deed, and encouragement.

The appetite comes with teaching. The pleasantest mental exercise of childhood is the instruction of one’s elders. Even Emmeline felt this. She took the geography class one day in a timid manner, putting her little hand first in the great horny fist of her friend.

“Mr Button!”

“Well, honey?”

“I know g’ography.”

“And what’s that?” asked Mr Button.

This stumped Emmeline for a moment.

“It’s where places are,” she said at last.

“Which places?” enquired he.

“All sorts of places,” replied Emmeline. “Mr Button!”

“What is it, darlin’?”

“Would you like to learn g’ography?”

“I’m not wishful for larnin’,” said the other hurriedly. “It makes me head buzz to hear them things they rade out of books.”

“Paddy,” said Dick, who was strong on drawing that afternoon, “look here.” He drew the following on the sand:

[Illustration: A bad drawing of an elephant]

“That’s an elephant,” he said in a dubious voice.

Mr Button grunted, and the sound was by no means filled with enthusiastic assent. A chill fell on the proceedings.

Dick wiped the elephant slowly and regretfully out, whilst Emmeline felt disheartened. Then her face suddenly cleared; the seraphic smile came into it for a moment—a bright idea had struck her.

“Dicky,” she said, “draw Henry the Eight.”

Dick’s face brightened. He cleared the sand and drew the following figure:

“That’s not Henry the Eight,” he explained, “but he will be in a minute. Daddy showed me how to draw him; he’s nothing till he gets his hat on.”

“Put his hat on, put his hat on!” implored Emmeline, gazing alternately from the figure on the sand to Mr Button’s face, watching for the delighted smile with which she was sure the old man would greet the great king when he appeared in all his glory.

Then Dick with a single stroke of the cane put Henry’s hat on.

Now, no portrait could be liker to his monk-hunting majesty than the above, created with one stroke of a cane (so to speak), yet Mr Button remained unmoved.

“I did it for Mrs Sims,” said Dick regretfully, “and she said it was the image of him.”

“Maybe the hat’s not big enough,” said Emmeline, turning her head from side to side as she gazed at the picture. It looked right, but she felt there must be something wrong, as Mr Button did not applaud. Has not every true artist felt the same before the silence of some critic?

Mr Button tapped the ashes out of his pipe and rose to stretch himself, and the class rose and trooped down to the lagoon edge, leaving Henry and his hat a figure on the sand to be obliterated by the wind.

After a while, as time went on, Mr Button took to his lessons as a matter of course, the small inventions of the children assisting their utterly untrustworthy knowledge. Knowledge, perhaps, as useful as any other there amidst the lovely poetry of the palm trees and the sky.

Days slipped into weeks, and weeks into months, without the appearance of a ship—a fact which gave Mr Button very little trouble; and even less to his charges, who were far too busy and amused to bother about ships.

The rainy season came on them with a rush, and at the words “rainy season” do not conjure up in your mind the vision of a rainy day in Manchester.

The rainy season here was quite a lively time. Torrential showers followed by bursts of sunshine, rainbows, and rain-dogs in the sky, and the delicious perfume of all manner of growing things on the earth.

After the rains the old sailor said he’d be after making a house of bamboos before the next rains came on them; but, maybe, before that they’d be off the island.

“However,” said he, “I’ll dra’ you a picture of what it’ll be like when it’s up;” and on the sand he drew a figure like this:

Having thus drawn the plans of the building, he leaned back against a cocoa-palm and lit his pipe. But he had reckoned without Dick.

The boy had not the least wish to live in a house, but he had a keen desire to see one built, and help to build one. The ingenuity which is part of the multiform basis of the American nature was aroused.

“How’re you going to keep them from slipping, if you tie them together like that?” he asked, when Paddy had more fully explained his method.

“Which from slippin’?”

“The canes—one from the other?”

“After you’ve fixed thim, one cross t’other, you drive a nail through the cross-piece and a rope over all.”

“Have you any nails, Paddy?”

“No,” said Mr Button, “I haven’t.”

“Then how’re you goin’ to build the house?”

“Ax me no questions now; I want to smoke me pipe.”

But he had raised a devil difficult to lay. Morning, noon, and night it was “Paddy, when are you going to begin the house?” or, “Paddy, I guess I’ve got a way to make the canes stick together without nailing.” Till Mr Button, in despair, like a beaver, began to build.

There was great cane-cutting in the cane-brake above, and, when sufficient had been procured, Mr Button struck work for three days. He would have struck altogether, but he had found a taskmaster.

The tireless Dick, young and active, with no original laziness in his composition, no old bones to rest, or pipe to smoke, kept after him like a bluebottle fly. It was in vain that he tried to stave him off with stories about fairies and Cluricaunes. Dick wanted to build a house.

Mr Button didn’t. He wanted to rest. He did not mind fishing or climbing a cocoa-nut tree, which he did to admiration by passing a rope round himself and the tree, knotting it, and using it as a support during the climb; but house-building was monotonous work.

He said he had no nails. Dick countered by showing how the canes could be held together by notching them.

“And, faith, but it’s a cliver boy you are,” said the weary one admiringly, when the other had explained his method.

“Then come along, Paddy, and stick ’em up.”

Mr Button said he had no rope, that he’d have to think about it, that to-morrow or next day he’d be after getting some notion how to do it without rope. But Dick pointed out that the brown cloth which Nature has wrapped round the cocoa-palm stalks would do instead of rope if cut in strips. Then the badgered one gave in.

They laboured for a fortnight at the thing, and at the end of that time had produced a rough sort of wigwam on the borders of the chapparel.

Out on the reef, to which they often rowed in the dinghy, when the tide was low, deep pools would be left, and in the pools fish. Paddy said if they had a spear they might be able to spear some of these fish, as he had seen the natives do away “beyant” in Tahiti.

Dick enquired as to the nature of a spear, and next day produced a ten-foot cane sharpened at the end after the fashion of a quill pen.

“Sure, what’s the use of that?” said Mr Button. “You might job it into a fish, but he’d be aff it in two ticks; it’s the barb that holds them.”

Next day the indefatigable one produced the cane amended; he had whittled it down about three feet from the end and on one side, and carved a fairly efficient barb. It was good enough, at all events, to spear a “groper” with, that evening, in the sunset-lit pools of the reef at low tide.

“There aren’t any potatoes here,” said Dick one day, after the second rains.

“We’ve et ’em all months ago,” replied Paddy.

“How do potatoes grow?” enquired Dick.

“Grow, is it? Why, they grow in the ground; and where else would they grow?” He explained the process of potato-planting: cutting them into pieces so that there was an eye in each piece, and so forth. “Having done this,” said Mr Button, “you just chuck the pieces in the ground; their eyes grow, green leaves ‘pop up,’ and then, if you dug the roots up maybe, six months after, you’d find bushels of potatoes in the ground, ones as big as your head, and weeny ones. It’s like a family of childer—some’s big and some’s little. But there they are in the ground, and all you have to do is to take a fark and dig a potful of them with a turn of your wrist, as many a time I’ve done it in the ould days.”

“Why didn’t we do that?” asked Dick.

“Do what?” asked Mr Button.

“Plant some of the potatoes.”

“And where’d we have found the spade to plant them with?”

“I guess we could have fixed up a spade,” replied the boy. “I made a spade at home, out of a piece of old board, once—daddy helped.”

“Well, skelp off with you, and make a spade now,” replied the other, who wanted to be quiet and think, “and you and Em’line can dig in the sand.”

Emmeline was sitting near by, stringing together some gorgeous blossoms on a tendril of liana. Months of sun and ozone had made a considerable difference in the child. She was as brown as a gipsy and freckled, not very much taller, but twice as plump. Her eyes had lost considerably that look as though she were contemplating futurity and immensity—not as abstractions, but as concrete images, and she had lost the habit of sleep-walking.

The shock of the tent coming down on the first night she was tethered to the scull had broken her of it, helped by the new healthful conditions of life, the sea-bathing, and the eternal open air. There is no narcotic to excel fresh air.

Months of semi-savagery had made also a good deal of difference in Dick’s appearance. He was two inches taller than on the day they landed. Freckled and tanned, he had the appearance of a boy of twelve. He was the promise of a fine man. He was not a good-looking child, but he was healthy-looking, with a jolly laugh, and a daring, almost impudent expression of face.

The question of the children’s clothes was beginning to vex the mind of the old sailor. The climate was a suit of clothes in itself. One was much happier with almost nothing on. Of course there were changes of temperature, but they were slight. Eternal summer, broken by torrential rains, and occasionally a storm, that was the climate of the island; still, the “childer” couldn’t go about with nothing on.

He took some of the striped flannel and made Emmeline a kilt. It was funny to see him sitting on the sand, Emmeline standing before him with her garment round her waist, being tried on; he, with a mouthful of pins, and the housewife with the scissors, needles, and thread by his side.

“Turn to the lift a bit more,” he’d say, “aisy does it. Stidy so—musha! musha! where’s thim scissors? Dick, be holdin’ the end of this bit of string till I get the stitches in behint. Does that hang comfortable?—well, an’ you’re the trouble an’ all. How’s that? That’s aisier, is it? Lift your fut till I see if it comes to your knees. Now off with it, and lave me alone till I stitch the tags to it.”

It was the mixture of a skirt and the idea of a sail, for it had two rows of reef points; a most ingenious idea, as it could be reefed if the child wanted to go paddling, or in windy weather.

CHAPTER XVII

THE DEVIL’S CASK

One morning, about a week after the day on which the old sailor, to use his own expression, had bent a skirt on Emmeline, Dick came through the woods and across the sands running. He had been on the hill-top.

“Paddy,” he cried to the old man, who was fixing a hook on a fishing-line, “there’s a ship!”

It did not take Mr Button long to reach the hill-top, and there she was, beating up for the island. Bluff-bowed and squab, the figure of an old Dutch woman, and telling of her trade a league off. It was just after the rains, the sky was not yet quite clear of clouds; you could see showers away at sea, and the sea was green and foam-capped.

There was the trying-out gear; there were the boats, the crow’s nest, and all complete, and labelling her a whaler. She was a ship, no doubt, but Paddy Button would as soon have gone on board a ship manned by devils, and captained by Lucifer, as on board a South Sea whaleman. He had been there before, and he knew.

He hid the children under a large banyan, and told them not to stir or breathe till he came back, for the ship was “the devil’s own ship”; and if the men on board caught them they’d skin them alive and all.

Then he made for the beach; he collected all the things out of the wigwam, and all the old truck in the shape of boots and old clothes, and stowed them away in the dinghy. He would have destroyed the house, if he could, but he hadn’t time. Then he rowed the dinghy a hundred yards down the lagoon to the left, and moored her under the shade of an aoa, whose branches grew right over the water. Then he came back through the cocoa-nut grove on foot, and peered through the trees over the lagoon to see what was to be seen.

The wind was blowing dead on for the opening in the reef, and the old whaleman came along breasting the swell with her bluff bows, and entered the lagoon. There was no leadsman in her chains. She just came in as if she knew all the soundings by heart—as probably she did—for these whalemen know every hole and corner in the Pacific.

The anchor fell with a splash, and she swung to it, making a strange enough picture as she floated on the blue mirror, backed by the graceful palm tree on the reef. Then Mr Button, without waiting to see the boats lowered, made back to his charges, and the three camped in the woods that night.

Next morning the whaleman was off and away, leaving as a token of her visit the white sand all trampled, an empty bottle, half an old newspaper, and the wigwam torn to pieces.

The old sailor cursed her and her crew, for the incident had brought a new exercise into his lazy life. Every day now at noon he had to climb the hill, on the look-out for whalemen. Whalemen haunted his dreams, though I doubt if he would willingly have gone on board even a Royal Mail steamer. He was quite happy where he was. After long years of the fo’cs’le the island was a change indeed. He had tobacco enough to last him for an indefinite time, the children for companions, and food at his elbow. He would have been entirely happy if the island had only been supplied by Nature with a public-house.

The spirit of hilarity and good fellowship, however, who suddenly discovered this error on the part of Nature, rectified it, as will be presently seen.

The most disastrous result of the whaleman’s visit was not the destruction of the “house,” but the disappearance of Emmeline’s box. Hunt high or hunt low, it could not be found. Mr Button in his hurry must have forgotten it when he removed the things to the dinghy—at all events, it was gone. Probably one of the crew of the whalemen had found it and carried it off with him; no one could say. It was gone, and there was the end of the matter, and the beginning of great tribulation, that lasted Emmeline for a week.

She was intensely fond of coloured things, coloured flowers especially; and she had the prettiest way of making them into a wreath for her own or some one else’s head. It was the hat-making instinct that was at work in her, perhaps; at all events, it was a feminine instinct, for Dick made no wreaths.

One morning, as she was sitting by the old sailor engaged in stringing shells, Dick came running along the edge of the grove. He had just come out of the wood, and he seemed to be looking for something. Then he found what he was in search of—a big shell—and with it in his hand made back to the wood.

Item.—His dress was a piece of cocoa-nut cloth tied round his middle. Why he wore it at all, goodness knows, for he would as often as not be running about stark naked.

“I’ve found something, Paddy!” he cried, as he disappeared among the trees.

“What have you found?” piped Emmeline, who was always interested in new things.

“Something funny!” came back from amidst the trees.

Presently he returned; but he was not running now. He was walking slowly and carefully, holding the shell as if it contained something precious that he was afraid would escape.

“Paddy, I turned over the old barrel and it had a cork thing in it, and I pulled it out, and the barrel is full of awfully funny-smelling stuff—I’ve brought some for you to see.”

He gave the shell into the old sailor’s hands. There was about half a gill of yellow liquid in the shell. Paddy smelt it, tasted, and gave a shout.

“Rum, begorra!”

“What is it, Paddy?” asked Emmeline.

“Where did you say you got it—in the ould bar’l, did you say?” asked Mr Button, who seemed dazed and stunned as if by a blow.

“Yes; I pulled the cork thing out—”

“Did yiz put it back?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, glory be to God! Here have I been, time out of mind, sittin’ on an ould empty bar’l, with me tongue hangin’ down to me heels for the want of a drink, and it full of rum all the while!”

He took a sip of the stuff, tossed the lot off, closed his lips tight to keep in the fumes, and shut one eye.

Emmeline laughed.

Mr Button scrambled to his feet. They followed him through the chapparel till they reached the water source. There lay the little green barrel; turned over by the restless Dick, it lay with its bung pointing to the leaves above. You could see the hollow it had made in the soft soil during the years. So green was it, and so like an object of nature, a bit of old tree-bole, or a lichen-stained boulder, that though the whalemen had actually watered from the source, its real nature had not been discovered.

Mr Button tapped on it with the butt end of the shell: it was nearly full. Why it had been left there, by whom, or how, there was no one to tell. The old lichen-covered skulls might have told, could they have spoken.

“We’ll rowl it down to the beach,” said Paddy, when he had taken another taste of it.

He gave Dick a sip. The boy spat it out, and made a face, then, pushing the barrel before them, they began to roll it downhill to the beach, Emmeline running before them crowned with flowers.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE RAT HUNT

They had dinner at noon. Paddy knew how to cook fish, island fashion, wrapping them in leaves, and baking them in a hole in the ground in which a fire had previously been lit. They had fish and taro root baked, and green cocoa-nuts; and after dinner Mr Button filled a big shell with rum, and lit his pipe.

The rum had been good originally, and age had improved it. Used as he was to the appalling balloon juice sold in the drinking dens of the “Barbary coast” at San Francisco, or the public-houses of the docks, this stuff was nectar.

Joviality radiated from him: it was infectious. The children felt that some happy influence had fallen upon their friend. Usually after dinner he was drowsy and “wishful to be quiet.” To-day he told them stories of the sea, and sang them songs—chantys:

“I’m a flyin’ fish sailor come back from Hong Kong,
Yeo ho! blow the man down.
Blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down,
Oh, give us time to blow the man down.
You’re a dhirty black-baller come back from New York,
Yeo ho! blow the man down,
Blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down.
Oh, give us time to blow the man down.”

“Oh, give us time to blow the man down!” echoed Dick and Emmeline.

Up above, in the trees, the bright-eyed birds were watching them—such a happy party. They had all the appearance of picnickers, and the song echoed amongst the cocoa-nut trees, and the wind carried it over the lagoon to where the sea-gulls were wheeling and screaming, and the foam was thundering on the reef.

That evening, Mr Button feeling inclined for joviality, and not wishing the children to see him under the influence, rolled the barrel through the cocoa-nut grove to a little clearing by the edge of the water. There, when the children were in bed and asleep, he repaired with some green cocoa-nuts and a shell. He was generally musical when amusing himself in this fashion, and Emmeline, waking up during the night, heard his voice borne through the moonlit cocoa-nut grove by the wind:

“There were five or six old drunken sailors
Standin’ before the bar,
And Larry, he was servin’ them
From a big five-gallon jar.

“Chorus.—
Hoist up the flag, long may it wave!
Long may it lade us to glory or the grave.
Stidy, boys, stidy—sound the jubilee,
For Babylon has fallen, and the niggers are all set free.”

Next morning the musician awoke beside the cask. He had not a trace of a headache, or any bad feeling, but he made Dick do the cooking; and he lay in the shade of the cocoa-nut trees, with his head on a “pilla” made out of an old coat rolled up, twiddling his thumbs, smoking his pipe, and discoursing about the “ould” days, half to himself and half to his companions.

That night he had another musical evening all to himself, and so it went on for a week. Then he began to lose his appetite and sleep; and one morning Dick found him sitting on the sand looking very queer indeed—as well he might, for he had been “seeing things” since dawn.

“What is it, Paddy?” said the boy, running up, followed by Emmeline.

Mr Button was staring at a point on the sand close by. He had his right hand raised after the manner of a person who is trying to catch a fly. Suddenly he made a grab at the sand, and then opened his hand wide to see what he had caught.

“What is it, Paddy?”

“The Cluricaune,” replied Mr Button. “All dressed in green he was—musha! musha! but it’s only pretindin’ I am.”

The complaint from which he was suffering has this strange thing about it, that, though the patient sees rats, or snakes, or what not, as real-looking as the real things, and though they possess his mind for a moment, almost immediately he recognises that he is suffering from a delusion.

The children laughed, and Mr Button laughed in a stupid sort of way.

“Sure, it was only a game I was playin’—there was no Cluricaune at all—it’s whin I dhrink rum it puts it into me head to play games like that. Oh, be the Holy Poker, there’s red rats comin’ out of the sand!”

He got on his hands and knees and scuttled off towards the cocoa-nut trees, looking over his shoulder with a bewildered expression on his face. He would have risen to fly, only he dared not stand up.

The children laughed and danced round him as he crawled.

“Look at the rats, Paddy! look at the rats!” cried Dick.

“They’re in front of me!” cried the afflicted one, making a vicious grab at an imaginary rodent’s tail. “Ran dan the bastes!—now they’re gone. Musha, but it’s a fool I’m makin’ of meself.”

“Go on, Paddy,” said Dick; “don’t stop— Look there—there’s more rats coming after you!”

“Oh, whisht, will you?” replied Paddy, taking his seat on the sand, and wiping his brow. “They’re aff me now.”

The children stood by, disappointed of their game. Good acting appeals to children just as much as to grown-up people. They stood waiting for another access of humour to take the comedian, and they had not to wait long.

A thing like a flayed horse came out of the lagoon and up the beach, and this time Mr Button did not crawl away. He got on his feet and ran.

“It’s a harse that’s afther me—it’s a harse that’s afther me! Dick! Dick! hit him a skelp. Dick! Dick! dhrive him away.”

“Hurroo! Hurroo!” cried Dick, chasing the afflicted one, who was running in a wide circle, his broad red face slewed over his left shoulder. “Go it, Paddy! go it, Paddy!”

“Kape off me, you baste!” shouted Paddy. “Holy Mary, Mother of God! I’ll land you a kick wid me fut if yiz come nigh me. Em’leen! Em’leen! come betune us!”

He tripped, and over he went on the sand, the indefatigable Dick beating him with a little switch he had picked up to make him continue.

“I’m better now, but I’m near wore out,” said Mr Button, sitting up on the sand. “But, bedad, if I’m chased by any more things like them it’s into the say I’ll be dashin’. Dick, lend me your arum.”

He took Dick’s arm and wandered over to the shade of the trees. Here he threw himself down, and told the children to leave him to sleep. They recognised that the game was over and left him. And he slept for six hours on end; it was the first real sleep he had had for several days. When he awoke he was well, but very shaky.

CHAPTER XIX

STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM

Mr Button saw no more rats, much to Dick’s disappointment. He was off the drink. At dawn next day he got up, refreshed by a second sleep, and wandered down to the edge of the lagoon. The opening in the reef faced the east, and the light of the dawn came rippling in with the flooding tide.

“It’s a baste I’ve been,” said the repentant one—“a brute baste.”

He was quite wrong; as a matter of fact, he was only a man beset and betrayed.

He stood for a while, cursing the drink, “and them that sells it.” Then he determined to put himself out of the way of temptation. Pull the bung out of the barrel, and let the contents escape?

Such a thought never even occurred to him—or, if it did, was instantly dismissed; for, though an old sailor-man may curse the drink, good rum is to him a sacred thing; and to empty half a little barrel of it into the sea, would be an act almost equivalent to child-murder. He put the cask into the dinghy, and rowed it over to the reef. There he placed it in the shelter of a great lump of coral, and rowed back.

Paddy had been trained all his life to rhythmical drunkenness. Four months or so had generally elapsed between his bouts—sometimes six; it all depended on the length of the voyage. Six months now elapsed before he felt even an inclination to look at the rum cask, that tiny dark spot away on the reef. And it was just as well, for during those six months another whale-ship arrived, watered and was avoided.

“Blisther it!” said he; “the say here seems to breed whale-ships, and nothin’ but whale-ships. It’s like bugs in a bed: you kill wan, and then another comes. Howsomever, we’re shut of thim for a while.”

He walked down to the lagoon edge, looked at the little dark spot and whistled. Then he walked back to prepare dinner. That little dark spot began to trouble him after a while; not it, but the spirit it contained.

Days grew long and weary, the days that had been so short and pleasant. To the children there was no such thing as time. Having absolute and perfect health, they enjoyed happiness as far as mortals can enjoy it. Emmeline’s highly-strung nervous system, it is true, developed a headache when she had been too long in the glare of the sun, but they were few and far between.

The spirit in the little cask had been whispering across the lagoon for some weeks; at last it began to shout. Mr Button, metaphorically speaking, stopped his ears. He busied himself with the children as much as possible. He made another garment for Emmeline, and cut Dick’s hair with the scissors (a job which was generally performed once in a couple of months).

One night, to keep the rum from troubling his head, he told them the story of Jack Dogherty and the Merrow, which is well known on the western coast.

The Merrow takes Jack to dinner at the bottom of the sea, and shows him the lobster pots wherein he keeps the souls of old sailor-men, and then they have dinner, and the Merrow produces a big bottle of rum.

It was a fatal story for him to remember and recount; for, after his companions were asleep, the vision of the Merrow and Jack hobnobbing, and the idea of the jollity of it, rose before him, and excited a thirst for joviality not to be resisted.

There were some green cocoa-nuts that he had plucked that day lying in a little heap under a tree—half a dozen or so. He took several of these and a shell, found the dinghy where it was moored to the aoa tree, unmoored her, and pushed off into the lagoon.

The lagoon and sky were full of stars. In the dark depths of the water might have been seen phosphorescent gleams of passing fish, and the thunder of the surf on the reef filled the night with its song.

He fixed the boat’s painter carefully round a spike of coral and landed on the reef, and with a shellful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixed half and half, he took his perch on a high ledge of coral from whence a view of the sea and the coral strand could be obtained.

On a moonlight night it was fine to sit here and watch the great breakers coming in, all marbled and clouded and rainbowed with spindrift and sheets of spray. But the snow and the song of them under the diffused light of the stars produced a more indescribably beautiful and strange effect.

The tide was going out now, and Mr Button, as he sat smoking his pipe and drinking his grog, could see bright mirrors here and there where the water lay in rock-pools. When he had contemplated these sights for a considerable time in complete contentment, he returned to the lagoon side of the reef and sat down beside the little barrel. Then, after a while, if you had been standing on the strand opposite, you would have heard scraps of song borne across the quivering water of the lagoon.

“Sailing down, sailing down,
On the coast of Barbaree.”

Whether the coast of Barbary in question is that at San Francisco, or the true and proper coast, does not matter. It is an old-time song; and when you hear it, whether on a reef of coral or a granite quay, you may feel assured that an old-time sailor-man is singing it, and that the old-time sailor-man is bemused.

Presently the dinghy put off from the reef, the sculls broke the starlit waters and great shaking circles of light made rhythmical answer to the slow and steady creak of the thole pins against the leather. He tied up to the aoa, saw that the sculls were safely shipped; then, breathing heavily, he cast off his boots for fear of waking the “childer.” As the children were sleeping more than two hundred yards away, this was a needless precaution—especially as the intervening distance was mostly soft sand.

Green cocoa-nut juice and rum mixed together are pleasant enough to drink, but they are better drunk separately; combined, not even the brain of an old sailor can make anything of them but mist and muddlement; that is to say, in the way of thought—in the way of action they can make him do a lot. They made Paddy Button swim the lagoon.

The recollection came to him all at once, as he was walking up the strand towards the wigwam, that he had left the dinghy tied to the reef. The dinghy was, as a matter of fact, safe and sound tied to the aoa; but Mr Button’s memory told him it was tied to the reef. How he had crossed the lagoon was of no importance at all to him; the fact that he had crossed without the boat, yet without getting wet, did not appear to him strange. He had no time to deal with trifles like these. The dinghy had to be fetched across the lagoon, and there was only one way of fetching it. So he came back down the beach to the water’s edge, cast down his boots, cast off his coat, and plunged in. The lagoon was wide, but in his present state of mind he would have swum the Hellespont. His figure gone from the beach, the night resumed its majesty and aspect of meditation.

So lit was the lagoon by starshine that the head of the swimmer could be distinguished away out in the midst of circles of light; also, as the head neared the reef, a dark triangle that came shearing through the water past the palm tree at the pier. It was the night patrol of the lagoon, who had heard in some mysterious manner that a drunken sailor-man was making trouble in his waters.

Looking, one listened, hand on heart, for the scream of the arrested one, yet it did not come. The swimmer, scrambling on to the reef in an exhausted manner, forgetful evidently of the object for which he had returned, made for the rum cask, and fell down beside it as though sleep had touched him instead of death.

CHAPTER XX

THE DREAMER ON THE REEF

“I wonder where Paddy is?” cried Dick next morning. He was coming out of the chapparel pulling a dead branch after him. “He’s left his coat on the sand, and the tinder box in it, so I’ll make the fire. There’s no use waiting. I want my breakfast. Bother——”

He trod the dead stick with his naked feet, breaking it into pieces.

Emmeline sat on the sand and watched him.

Emmeline had two gods of a sort: Paddy Button and Dick. Paddy was almost an esoteric god wrapped in the fumes of tobacco and mystery. The god of rolling ships and creaking masts—the masts and vast sail spaces of the Northumberland were an enduring vision in her mind—the deity who had lifted her from a little boat into this marvellous place, where the birds were coloured and the fish were painted, where life was never dull, and the skies scarcely ever grey.

Dick, the other deity, was a much more understandable personage, but no less admirable, as a companion and protector. In the two years and five months of island life he had grown nearly three inches. He was as strong as a boy of twelve, and could scull the boat almost as well as Paddy himself, and light a fire. Indeed, during the last few months Mr Button, engaged in resting his bones, and contemplating rum as an abstract idea, had left the cooking and fishing and general gathering of food as much as possible to Dick.

“It amuses the craythur to pritind he’s doing things,” he would say, as he watched Dick delving in the earth to make a little oven—island-fashion—for the cooking of fish or what not.

“Come along, Em,” said Dick, piling the broken wood on top of some rotten hibiscus sticks; “give me the tinder box.”

He got a spark on to a bit of punk, and then he blew at it, looking not unlike Æolus as represented on those old Dutch charts that smell of schiedam and snuff, and give one mermaids and angels instead of soundings.

The fire was soon sparkling and crackling, and he heaped on sticks in profusion, for there was plenty of fuel, and he wanted to cook breadfruit.

The breadfruit varies in size, according to age, and in colour according to season. These that Dick was preparing to cook were as large as small melons. Two would be more than enough for three people’s breakfast. They were green and knobbly on the outside, and they suggested to the mind unripe lemons, rather than bread.

He put them in the embers, just as you put potatoes to roast, and presently they sizzled and spat little venomous jets of steam, then they cracked, and the white inner substance became visible. He cut them open and took the core out—the core is not fit to eat—and they were ready.

Meanwhile, Emmeline, under his directions, had not been idle.

There were in the lagoon—there are in several other tropical lagoons I know of—a fish which I can only describe as a golden herring. A bronze herring it looks when landed, but when swimming away down against the background of coral brains and white sand patches, it has the sheen of burnished gold. It is as good to eat as to look at, and Emmeline was carefully toasting several of them on a piece of cane.

The juice of the fish kept the cane from charring, though there were accidents at times, when a whole fish would go into the fire, amidst shouts of derision from Dick.

She made a pretty enough picture as she knelt, the “skirt” round the waist looking not unlike a striped bath-towel, her small face intent, and filled with the seriousness of the job on hand, and her lips puckered out at the heat of the fire.

“It’s so hot!” she cried in self-defence, after the first of the accidents.

“Of course it’s hot,” said Dick, “if you stick to looward of the fire. How often has Paddy told you to keep to windward of it!”

“I don’t know which is which,” confessed the unfortunate Emmeline, who was an absolute failure at everything practical: who could neither row nor fish, nor throw a stone, and who, though they had now been on the island twenty-eight months or so, could not even swim.

“You mean to say,” said Dick, “that you don’t know where the wind comes from?”

“Yes, I know that.”

“Well, that’s to windward.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, you know it now.”

“Yes, I know it now.”

“Well, then, come to windward of the fire. Why didn’t you ask the meaning of it before?”

“I did,” said Emmeline; “I asked Mr Button one day, and he told me a lot about it. He said if he was to spit to windward and a person was to stand to loo’ard of him, he’d be a fool; and he said if a ship went too much to loo’ard she went on the rocks, but I didn’t understand what he meant. Dicky, I wonder where he is?”

“Paddy!” cried Dick, pausing in the act of splitting open a breadfruit. Echoes came from amidst the cocoa-nut trees, but nothing more.

“Come on,” said Dick; “I’m not going to wait for him. He may have gone to fetch up the night lines”—they sometimes put down night lines in the lagoon—“and fallen asleep over them.”

Now, though Emmeline honoured Mr Button as a minor deity, Dick had no illusions at all upon the matter. He admired Paddy because he could knot, and splice, and climb a cocoa-nut tree, and exercise his sailor craft in other admirable ways, but he felt the old man’s limitations. They ought to have had potatoes now, but they had eaten both potatoes and the possibility of potatoes when they consumed the contents of that half sack. Young as he was, Dick felt the absolute thriftlessness of this proceeding. Emmeline did not; she never thought of potatoes, though she could have told you the colour of all the birds on the island.

Then, again, the house wanted rebuilding, and Mr Button said every day he would set about seeing after it to-morrow, and on the morrow it would be to-morrow. The necessities of the life they led were a stimulus to the daring and active mind of the boy; but he was always being checked by the go-as-you-please methods of his elder. Dick came of the people who make sewing machines and typewriters. Mr Button came of a people notable for ballads, tender hearts, and potheen. That was the main difference.

“Paddy!” again cried the boy, when he had eaten as much as he wanted. “Hullo! where are you?”

They listened, but no answer came. A bright-hued bird flew across the sand space, a lizard scuttled across the glistening sand, the reef spoke, and the wind in the tree-tops; but Mr Button made no reply.

“Wait,” said Dick.

He ran through the grove towards the aoa where the dinghy was moored; then he returned.

“The dinghy is all right,” he said. “Where on earth can he be?”

“I don’t know,” said Emmeline, upon whose heart a feeling of loneliness had fallen.

“Let’s go up the hill,” said Dick; “perhaps we’ll find him there.”

They went uphill through the wood, past the water-course. Every now and then Dick would call out, and echoes would answer—there were quaint, moist-voiced echoes amidst the trees—or a bevy of birds would take flight. The little waterfall gurgled and whispered, and the great banana leaves spread their shade.

“Come on,” said Dick, when he had called again without receiving a reply.

They found the hill-top, and the great boulder stood casting its shadow in the sun. The morning breeze was blowing, the sea sparkling, the reef flashing, the foliage of the island waving in the wind like the flames of a green-flamed torch. A deep swell was spreading itself across the bosom of the Pacific. Some hurricane away beyond the Navigators or Gilberts had sent this message and was finding its echo here, a thousand miles away, in the deeper thunder of the reef.

Nowhere else in the world could you get such a picture, such a combination of splendour and summer, such a vision of freshness and strength, and the delight of morning. It was the smallness of the island, perhaps, that closed the charm and made it perfect. Just a bunch of foliage and flowers set in the midst of the blowing wind and sparkling blue.

Suddenly Dick, standing beside Emmeline on the rock, pointed with his finger to the reef near the opening.

“There he is!” cried he.

CHAPTER XXI

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’s 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 aoa, the painter tied to one of the branches that projected over the water. These dwarf aoas branch 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 carefully in, and went aft. Then Dick got in, pushed off, and took to the sculls. Next moment they were out on the sparkling water.

Dick rowed 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 gunwale 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 bass 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 upwards. 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 larvÆ of the rocks.

He held her to him as he stared at the terrible figure lying upon its back, hands outspread. Then, wild 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; whilst the child at his feet, with her head resting against the gunwale, 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.

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 hut in the chapparel, the fear that filled them was that 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 had happened. 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 when 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, undeodorised 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 a 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 there was a good God who looked after the world; determined as far as he could to exclude demonology and sin and death from their knowledge, he had rested content with the bald 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 strictly Calvinistic school, this knowledge of Him would have been no comfort now. Belief in 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 cry is for his nurse, or his mother.

During that dreadful night these two children had no comfort to seek anywhere in the whole wide 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 mammee apples aside, found the beach. The dawn was just breaking, and the morning breeze was coming in from the sea.

When he had beached 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 there, 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 fulfil 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 stay-sail 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 stay-sail put over them to protect them from the dew.

The sun was now looking over the sea-line, and the tall cocoa-nut trees were singing and whispering together under the strengthening breeze.

CHAPTER XXIII

THEY MOVE AWAY

He began to collect the things, and carry them to the dinghy. He took the stay-sail 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 source 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. She 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 scull. Then, taking the sculls, 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 towards the reef.

Round a certain spot on the distant white coral there was a great commotion of birds. Huge birds some of them seemed, and the “Hi! hi! hi!” of them came across the lagoon on the breeze as they quarrelled 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 artu 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, wildernesses of the mammee apple, and bushes of the scarlet “wild cocoa-nut” 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 upon 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 cocoa-nut 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, or 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 cocoa-nut, the dinghy broke into a new world.

Before her lay a great sweep of the palest blue wind-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 awakened from her sleep, sat up, and looked around her.