The Blue Lagoon

Mr. Button was seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He was playing the “Shan van vaught,” and accompanying the tune, punctuating it, with blows of his left heel on the fo’cs’le deck.

“O the Frinch are in the bay, Says the Shan van vaught.”

He was dressed in dungaree trousers, a striped shirt, and a jacket baize⁠—green in parts from the influence of sun and salt. A typical old shellback, round-shouldered, hooked of finger; a figure with strong hints of a crab about it.

His face was like a moon, seen red through tropical mists; and as he played it wore an expression of strained attention as though the fiddle were telling him tales much more marvellous than the old bald statement about Bantry Bay.

“Left-handed Pat,” was his fo’cs’le name; not because he was left-handed, but simply because everything he did he did wrong⁠—or nearly so. Reefing or furling, or handling a slush tub⁠—if a mistake was to be made, he made it.

He was a Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and Connaught these forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element from his blood, nor the belief in fairies from his soul. The Celtic nature is a fast dye, and Mr. Button’s nature was such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in ’Frisco, though he had got drunk in most ports of the world, though he had sailed with Yankee captains and been manhandled by Yankee mates, he still carried his fairies about with him⁠—they, and a very large stock of original innocence.

“Captain!” said Lestrange.

“Ay, ay.”

“Come here, please.”

Le Farge climbed on to the poop.

“I don’t know whether it’s my weakness that’s affecting my eyes, but there seems to me something strange about the mainmast.”

The mainmast near where it entered the deck, and for some distance up, seemed in motion⁠—a corkscrew movement most strange to watch from the shelter of the awning.

This apparent movement was caused by a spiral haze of smoke so vague that one could only tell of its existence from the mirage-like tremor of the mast round which it curled.

“My God!” cried Le Farge, as he sprang from the poop and rushed forward.

Lestrange followed him slowly, stopping every moment to clutch the bulwark rail and pant for breath. He heard the shrill birdlike notes of the bosun’s pipe. He saw the hands emerging from the forecastle, like bees out of a hive; he watched them surrounding the main-hatch. He watched the tarpaulin and locking-bars removed. He saw the hatch opened, and a burst of smoke⁠—black, villainous smoke⁠—ascend to the sky, solid as a plume in the windless air.

Now a couple of strokes of the port scull would have brought Mr. Button alongside the longboat, so close was he; but the quarter-boat was in his mind, or rather imagination, so what must he do but take three powerful strokes in the direction in which he fancied the quarter-boat to be.

The rest was voices.

“Dinghy ahoy!”

“Ahoy!”

“Ahoy!”

“Don’t be shoutin’ together, or I’ll not know which way to pull. Quarter-boat ahoy! where are yiz?”

“Port your helm!”

“Ay, ay!”⁠—putting his helm, so to speak, to starboard⁠—“I’ll be wid yiz in wan minute⁠—two or three minutes’ hard pulling.”

“Ahoy!”⁠—much more faint.

“What d’ye mane rowin’ away from me?”⁠—a dozen strokes.

“Ahoy!”⁠—fainter still.

Mr. Button rested on his oars.

“Divil mend them⁠—I b’lave that was the longboat shoutin’.”

He took to his oars again and pulled vigorously.

He seemed at first tangled in brambles; then she thought ropes were tangling round him and tying him to something in the water⁠—whatever it was, it was most awful, and hideous, and like a nightmare. She ran with the speed of Atalanta to the rock where the spear was resting, all red with the blood of new-slain fish, a foot from the point.

As she approached Dick, spear in hand, she saw, gasping with terror, that the ropes were alive, and that they were flickering and rippling over his back. One of them bound his left arm to his side, but his right arm was free.

“Quick!” he shouted.

In a second the spear was in his free hand, and Emmeline had cast herself down on her knees, and was staring with terrified eyes into the water of the pool from whence the ropes issued. She was, despite her terror, quite prepared to fling herself in and do battle with the thing, whatever it might be.

What she saw was only for a second. In the deep water of the pool, gazing up and forward and straight at Dick, she saw a face, lugubrious and awful. The eyes were wide as saucers, stony and steadfast; a large, heavy, parrot-like beak hung before the eyes, and worked and wobbled, and seemed to beckon. But what froze one’s heart was the expression of the eyes, so stony and lugubrious, so passionless, so devoid of speculation, yet so fixed of purpose and full of fate.

To the east, just rounding the curve of the reef, and scarcely a quarter of a mile from it, was coming a big topsail schooner; a beautiful sight she was, heeling to the breeze with every sail drawing, and the white foam like a feather at her forefoot.

Dick, with the javelin in his hand, was standing gazing at her; he had dropped his fish-spear, and he stood as motionless as though he were carved out of stone. Emmeline ran to him and stood beside him; neither of them spoke a word as the vessel drew closer.

Everything was visible, so close was she now, from the reef points on the great mainsail, luminous with the sunlight, and white as the wing of a gull, to the rail of the bulwarks. A crowd of men were hanging over the port bulwarks gazing at the island and the figures on the reef. Browned by the sun and sea-breeze, Emmeline’s hair blowing on the wind, and the point of Dick’s javelin flashing in the sun, they looked an ideal pair of savages, seen from the schooner’s deck.

“They are going away,” said Emmeline, with a long-drawn breath of relief.

Dick made no reply; he stared at the schooner a moment longer in silence, then, having made sure that she was standing away from