The Blue Lagoon

The Blue Lagoon

By Henry de Vere Stacpoole.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Book I
   1. Part I
      1. I: Where the Slush Lamp Burns
      2. II: Under the Stars
      3. III: The Shadow and the Fire
      4. IV: And Like a Dream Dissolved
      5. V: Voices Heard in the Mist
      6. VI: Dawn on a Wide, Wide Sea
      7. VII: Story of the Pig and the Billy-Goat
      8. VIII: “S-H-E-N-A-N-D-O-A-H”
      9. IX: Shadows in the Moonlight
      10. X: The Tragedy of the Boats
   2. Part II
      1. XI: The Island
      2. XII: The Lake of Azure
      3. XIII: Death Veiled with Lichen
      4. XIV: Echoes of Fairyland
      5. XV: Fair Pictures in the Blue
   3. Part III
      1. XVI: The Poetry of Learning
      2. XVII: The Devil’s Cask
      3. XVIII: The Rat Hunt
      4. XIX: Starlight on the Foam
      5. XX: The Dreamer on the Reef
      6. XXI: The Garland of Flowers
      7. XXII: Alone
      8. XXIII: They Move Away
4. Book II
   1. Part I
      1. I: Under the Artu Tree
      2. II: Half Child-Half Savage
      3. III: The Demon of the Reef
      4. IV: What Beauty Concealed
      5. V: The Sound of a Drum
      6. VI: Sails Upon the Sea
      7. VII: The Schooner
      8. VIII: Love Steps In
      9. IX: The Sleep of Paradise
   2. Part II
      1. X: An Island Honeymoon
      2. XI: The Vanishing of Emmeline
      3. XII: The Vanishing of Emmeline (Continued)
      4. XIII: The Newcomer
      5. XIV: Hannah
      6. XV: The Lagoon of Fire
      7. XVI: The Cyclone
      8. XVII: The Stricken Woods
      9. XVIII: A Fallen Idol
      10. XIX: The Expedition
      11. XX: The Keeper of the Lagoon
      12. XXI: The Hand of the Sea
      13. XXII: Together
5. Book III
   1. I: Mad Lestrange
   2. II: The Secret of the Azure
   3. II: Captain Fountain
   4. IV: Due South
6. List of Illustrations
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Book I

Part I

I

Where the Slush Lamp Burns

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.

Nearly over the musician’s head swung a hammock from which hung a leg; other hammocks hanging in the semi-gloom called up suggestions of lemurs and arboreal bats. The swinging kerosene lamp cast its light forward, past the heel of the bowsprit to the knightheads, lighting here a naked foot hanging over the side of a bunk, here a face from which protruded a pipe, here a breast covered with dark mossy hair, here an arm tattooed.

It was in the days before double topsail yards had reduced ships’ crews, and the fo’cs’le of the Northumberland had a full company: a crowd of packet rats such as often is to be found on a Cape Horner “Dutchmen” Americans⁠—men who were farm labourers and tending pigs in Ohio three months back, old seasoned sailors like Paddy Button⁠—a mixture of the best and the worst of the earth, such as you find nowhere else in so small a space as in a ship’s fo’cs’le.

The Northumberland had experienced a terrible rounding of the Horn. Bound from New Orleans to ’Frisco