CHAPTER II
HALF CHILD—HALF SAVAGE
Five rainy seasons had passed and gone since the tragic occurrence onthe reef. Five long years the breakers had thundered, and the sea-gullshad cried round the figure whose spell had drawn a mysterious barrieracross the lagoon.
The children had never returned to the old place. They had keptentirely to the back of the island and the woods—the lagoon, down to acertain point, and the reef; a wide enough and beautiful enough world,but a hopeless world, as far as help from civilisation was concerned.For, of the few ships that touched at the island in the course ofyears, how many would explore the lagoon or woods? Perhaps not one.
Occasionally Dick would make an excursion in the dinghy to the oldplace, but Emmeline refused to accompany him. He went chiefly to obtainbananas; for on the whole island there was but one clump of bananatrees—that near the water source in the wood, where the old greenskulls had been discovered, and the little barrel.
She had never quite recovered from the occurrence on the reef.Something had been shown to her, the purport of which she vaguelyunderstood, and it had filled her with horror and a terror of the placewhere it had occurred. Dick was quite different. He had been frightenedenough at first; but the feeling wore away in time.
Dick had built three houses in succession during the five years. He hadlaid out a patch of taro and another of sweet potatoes. He knew everypool on the reef for two miles either way, and the forms of theirinhabitants; and though he did not know the names of the creatures tobe found there, he made a profound study of their habits.
He had seen some astonishing things during these five years—from afight between a whale and two thrashers conducted outside the reef,lasting an hour, and dyeing the breaking waves with blood, to thepoisoning of the fish in the lagoon by fresh water, due to anextraordinarily heavy rainy season.
He knew the woods of the back of the island by heart, and the forms oflife that inhabited them—butterflies, and moths, and birds, lizards,and insects of strange shape; extraordinary orchids—somefilthy-looking, the very image of corruption, some beautiful, and allstrange. He found melons and guavas, and breadfruit, the red apple ofTahiti, and the great Brazilian plum, taro in plenty, and a dozenother good things—but there were no bananas. This made him unhappyat times, for he was human.
Though Emmeline had asked Koko for Dick’s whereabouts, it was only aremark made by way of making conversation, for she could hear him inthe little cane-brake which lay close by amidst the trees.
In a few minutes he appeared, dragging after him two canes which he hadjust cut, and wiping the perspiration off his brow with his naked arm.He had an old pair of trousers on—part of the truck salved long agofrom the _Shenandoah_—nothing else, and he was well worth looking at andconsidering, both from a physical and psychological point of view.
Auburn-haired and tall, looking more like seventeen than sixteen, witha restless and daring expression, half a child, half a man, half acivilised being, half a savage, he had both progressed and retrogradedduring the five years of savage life. He sat down beside Emmeline,flung the canes beside him, tried the edge of the old butcher’s knifewith which he had cut them, then, taking one of the canes across hisknee, he began whittling at it.
“What are you making?” asked Emmeline, releasing the bird, which flewinto one of the branches of the artu and rested there, a blue pointamidst the dark green.
“Fish-spear,” replied Dick.
Without being taciturn, he rarely wasted words. Life was all businessfor him. He would talk to Emmeline, but always in short sentences; andhe had developed the habit of talking to inanimate things, to thefish-spear he was carving, or the bowl he was fashioning from acocoa-nut.
As for Emmeline, even as a child she had never been talkative. Therewas something mysterious in her personality, something secretive. Hermind seemed half submerged in twilight. Though she spoke little, andthough the subject of their conversations was almost entirely materialand relative to their everyday needs, her mind would wander intoabstract fields and the land of chimerae and dreams. What she foundthere no one knew—least of all, perhaps, herself.
As for Dick, he would sometimes talk and mutter to himself, as if in areverie; but if you caught the words, you would find that they referredto no abstraction, but to some trifle he had on hand. He seemedentirely bound up in the moment, and to have forgotten the past ascompletely as though it had never been.
Yet he had his contemplative moods. He would lie with his face over arock-pool by the hour, watching the strange forms of life to be seenthere, or sit in the woods motionless as a stone, watching the birdsand the swift-slipping lizards. The birds came so close that he couldeasily have knocked them over, but he never hurt one or interfered inany way with the wild life of the woods.
The island, the lagoon, and the reef were for him the three volumes ofa great picture book, as they were for Emmeline, though in a differentmanner. The colour and the beauty of it all fed some mysterious want inher soul. Her life was a long reverie, a beautiful vision—troubledwith shadows. Across all the blue and coloured spaces that meant monthsand years she could still see as in a glass dimly the _Northumberland_,smoking against the wild background of fog; her uncle’s face, Boston—avague and dark picture beyond a storm—and nearer, the tragic form onthe reef that still haunted terribly her dreams. But she never spoke ofthese things to Dick. Just as she kept the secret of what was in herbox, and the secret of her trouble whenever she lost it, she kept thesecret of her feelings about these things.
Born of these things there remained with her always a vague terror: theterror of losing Dick. Mrs Stannard, her uncle, the dim people she hadknown in Boston, all had passed away out of her life like a dream andshadows. The other one too, most horribly. What if Dick were takenfrom her as well?
This haunting trouble had been with her a long time; up to a few monthsago it had been mainly personal and selfish—the dread of being leftalone. But lately it had altered and become more acute. Dick hadchanged in her eyes, and the fear was now for him. Her own personalityhad suddenly and strangely become merged in his. The idea of lifewithout him was unthinkable, yet the trouble remained, a menace in theblue.
Some days it would be worse than others. To-day, for instance, it wasworse than yesterday, as though some danger had crept close to themduring the night. Yet the sky and sea were stainless, the sun shone ontree and flower, the west wind brought the tune of the far-away reeflike a lullaby. There was nothing to hint of danger or the need ofdistrust.
At last Dick finished his spear and rose to his feet.
“Where are you going?” asked Emmeline.
“The reef,” he replied. “The tide’s going out.”
“I’ll go with you,” said she.
He went into the house and stowed the precious knife away. Then he cameout, spear in one hand, and half a fathom of liana in the other. Theliana was for the purpose of stringing the fish on, should the catch belarge. He led the way down the grassy sward to the lagoon where thedinghy lay, close up to the bank, and moored to a post driven into thesoft soil. Emmeline got in, and, taking the sculls, he pushed off. Thetide was going out.
I have said that the reef just here lay a great way out from the shore.The lagoon was so shallow that at low tide one could have waded almostright across it, were it not for pot-holes here and there—ten-feettraps—and great beds of rotten coral, into which one would sink asinto brushwood, to say nothing of the nettle coral that stings like abed of nettles. There were also other dangers. Tropical shallows arefull of wild surprises in the way of life—and death.
Dick had long ago marked out in his memory the soundings of the lagoon,and it was fortunate that he possessed the special sense of locationwhich is the main stand-by of the hunter and the savage, for, from thedisposition of the coral in ribs, the water from the shore edge to thereef ran in lanes. Only two of these lanes gave a clear, fair way fromthe shore edge to the reef; had you followed the others, even in a boato
f such shallow draught as the dinghy, you would have found yourselfstranded half-way across, unless, indeed, it were a spring tide.
Half-way across the sound of the surf on the barrier became louder, andthe everlasting and monotonous cry of the gulls came on the breeze. Itwas lonely out here, and, looking back, the shore seemed a great wayoff. It was lonelier still on the reef.
Dick tied up the boat to a projection of coral, and helped Emmeline toland. The sun was creeping down into the west, the tide was nearly halfout, and large pools of water lay glittering like burnished shields inthe sunlight. Dick, with his precious spear beside him, sat calmly downon a ledge of coral, and began to divest himself of his one and onlygarment.
Emmeline turned away her head and contemplated the distant shore, whichseemed thrice as far off as it was in reality. When she turned her headagain he was racing along the edge of the surf. He and his spearsilhouetted against the spindrift and dazzling foam formed a picturesavage enough, and well in keeping with the general desolation of thebackground. She watched him lie down and cling to a piece of coral,whilst the surf rushed round and over him, and then rise and shakehimself like a dog, and pursue his gambols, his body all glitteringwith the wet.
Sometimes a whoop would come on the breeze, mixing with the sound ofthe surf and the cry of the gulls, and she would see him plunge hisspear into a pool, and the next moment the spear would be held aloftwith something struggling and glittering at the end of it.
He was quite different out here on the reef to what he was ashore. Thesurroundings here seemed to develop all that was savage in him, in astartling way; and he would kill, and kill, just for the pleasure ofkilling, destroying more fish than they could possibly use.