“He’d been bad enough for seein’ fairies before they japanned him, but afther it, begorra, he was twiced as bad. I was a slip of a lad at the time, but me hair near turned grey wid the tales he’d tell of the Good People and their doin’s. One night they’d turn him into a harse an’ ride him half over the county, wan chap on his back an’ another runnin’ behind, shovin’ furze prickles under his tail to make him buck-lep. Another night it’s a dunkey he’d be, harnessed to a little cart, an’ bein’ kicked in the belly and made to draw stones. Thin it’s a goose he’d be, runnin’ over the common wid his neck stritched out squawkin’, an’ an old fairy woman afther him wid a knife, till it fair drove him to the dhrink; though, by the same token, he didn’t want much dhrivin’.
“And what does he do when his money was gone, but tear the five-shillin’ piece they’d japanned him wid aff the top of his hed, and swaps it for a bottle of whisky, and that was the end of him.”
Mr. Button paused to relight his pipe, which had gone out, and there was silence for a moment.
The moon had risen, and the song of the surf on the reef filled the whole night with its lullaby. The broad lagoon lay waving and rippling in the moonlight to the incoming tide. Twice as broad it always looked seen by moonlight or starlight than when seen by day. Occasionally the splash of a great fish would cross the silence, and the ripple of it would pass a moment later across the placid water.
Big things happened in the lagoon at night, unseen by eyes from the shore. You would have found the wood behind them, had you walked through it, full of light. A tropic forest under a tropic moon is green as a sea cave. You can see the vine tendrils and the flowers, the orchids and tree boles all lit as by the light of an emerald-tinted day.
Mr. Button took a long piece of string from his pocket.
“It’s bedtime,” said he; “and I’m going to tether Em’leen, for fear she’d be walkin’ in her slape, and wandherin’ away an’ bein’ lost in the woods.”
“I don’t want to be tethered,” said Emmeline.
“It’s for your own good I’m doin’ it,” replied Mr. Button, fixing the string round her waist. “Now come ’long.”
He led her like a dog in a leash to the tent, and tied the other end of the string to the scull, which was the tent’s main prop and support.
“Now,” said he, “if you be gettin’ up and walkin’ about in the night, it’s down the tint will be on top of us all.”
And, sure enough, in the small hours of the morning, it was.
XV
Fair Pictures in the Blue
“I don’t want my old britches on! I don’t want my old britches on!”
Dick was darting about naked on the sand, Mr. Button after him with a pair of small trousers in his hand. A crab might just as well have attempted to chase an antelope.
They had been on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered the keenest joy in life—to be naked. To be naked and wallow in the shallows of the lagoon, to be naked and sit drying in the sun. To be free from the curse of clothes, to shed civilisation on the beach in the form of breeches, boots, coat, and hat, and to be one with the wind and the sun and the sea.
The very first command Mr. Button had given on the second morning of their arrival was, “Strip and into the water wid you.”
Dick had resisted at first, and Emmeline (who rarely wept) had stood weeping in her little chemise. But Mr. Button was obdurate. The difficulty at first was to get them in; the difficulty now was to keep them out.
Emmeline was sitting as nude as the day star, drying in the morning sun after her dip, and watching Dick’s evolutions on the sand.
The lagoon had for the children far more attraction than the land. Woods where you might knock ripe bananas off the trees with a big cane, sands where golden lizards would scuttle about so tame that you might with a little caution seize them by the tail, a hilltop from whence you might see, to use Paddy’s expression, “to the back of beyond”; all these were fine enough in their way, but they were nothing to the lagoon.
Deep down where the coral branches were you might watch, whilst Paddy fished, all sorts of things disporting on the sand patches and between the coral tufts. Hermit crabs that had evicted whelks, wearing the evicted ones’ shells—an obvious misfit; sea anemones as big as roses. Flowers that closed up in an irritable manner if you lowered the hook gently down and touched them; extraordinary shells that walked about on feelers, elbowing the crabs out of the way and terrorising the whelks. The overlords of the sand patches, these; yet touch one on the back with a stone tied to a bit of string, and down he would go flat, motionless and feigning death. There was a lot of human nature lurking in the depths of the lagoon, comedy and tragedy.
An English rock-pool has its marvels. You can fancy the marvels of this vast rock-pool, nine miles round and varying from a third to half a mile broad, swarming with tropic life and flights of painted fishes; where the glittering albicore passed beneath the boat like a fire and a shadow; where the boat’s reflection lay as clear on the bottom as though the water were air; where the sea, pacified by the reef, told, like a little child, its dreams.
It suited the lazy humour of Mr. Button that he never pursued the lagoon more than half a mile or so on either side of the beach.
