The Blue Lagoon Part 17

"Put his hat on, put his hat on!" implored Emmeline, gazing alternately from the figure on the sand to Mr b.u.t.ton'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 d.i.c.k with a single stroke of the cane put Henry's hat on.

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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 b.u.t.ton remained unmoved.

"I did it for Mrs Sims," said d.i.c.k 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 b.u.t.ton did not applaud. Has not every true artist felt the same before the silence of some critic?

Mr b.u.t.ton tapped the ashes out of his pipe and rose to stretch himself, and the cla.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton took to his lessons as a matter of course, the small inventions of the children a.s.sisting 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 s.h.i.+p--a fact which gave Mr b.u.t.ton very little trouble; and even less to his charges, who were far too busy and amused to bother about s.h.i.+ps.

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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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:

X

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

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 b.u.t.ton, "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 b.u.t.ton, in despair, like a beaver, began to build.

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

The tireless d.i.c.k, 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. d.i.c.k wanted to build a house.

Mr b.u.t.ton didn't. He wanted to rest. He did not mind fis.h.i.+ng or climbing a cocoa-nut tree, which he did to admiration by pa.s.sing 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. d.i.c.k 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 b.u.t.ton 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 d.i.c.k 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.

d.i.c.k enquired as to the nature of a spear, and next day produced a ten-foot cane sharpened at the end after the fas.h.i.+on of a quill pen.

"Sure, what's the use of that?" said Mr b.u.t.ton. "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 d.i.c.k one day, after the second rains.

"We've et 'em all months ago," replied Paddy.

"How do potatoes grow?" enquired d.i.c.k.

"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 b.u.t.ton, "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 d.i.c.k.

"Do what?" asked Mr b.u.t.ton.

"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 nearby, 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 d.i.c.k'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.