CHAPTER 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 apair of small trousers in his hand. A crab might just as well haveattempted to chase an antelope.
They had been on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered thekeenest joy in life—to be naked. To be naked and wallow in the shallowsof the lagoon, to be naked and sit drying in the sun. To be free fromthe curse of clothes, to shed civilisation on the beach in the form ofbreeches, boots, coat, and hat, and to be one with the wind and the sunand the sea.
The very first command Mr Button had given on the second morning oftheir arrival was, “Strip and into the water wid you.”
Dick had resisted at first, and Emmeline (who rarely wept) had stoodweeping in her little chemise. But Mr Button was obdurate. Thedifficulty at first was to get them in; the difficulty now was to keepthem out.
Emmeline was sitting as nude as the day star, drying in the morning sunafter 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 mightwith a little caution seize them by the tail, a hill-top from whenceyou might see, to use Paddy’s expression, “to the back of beyond”; allthese were fine enough in their way, but they were nothing to thelagoon.
Deep down where the coral branches were you might watch, whilst Paddyfished, all sorts of things disporting on the sand patches and betweenthe coral tufts. Hermit crabs that had evicted whelks, wearing theevicted ones’ shells—an obvious misfit; sea anemones as big as roses.Flowers that closed up in an irritable manner if you lowered the hookgently down and touched them; extraordinary shells that walked about onfeelers, elbowing the crabs out of the way and terrorising the whelks.The overlords of the sand patches, these; yet touch one on the backwith 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 lurkingin the depths of the lagoon, comedy and tragedy.
An English rock-pool has its marvels. You can fancy the marvels of thisvast rock-pool, nine miles round and varying from a third to half amile broad, swarming with tropic life and flights of painted fishes;where the glittering albicore passed beneath the boat like a fire and ashadow; where the boat’s reflection lay as clear on the bottom asthough 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 lagoonmore than half a mile or so on either side of the beach. He would bringthe fish he caught ashore, and with the aid of his tinder box and deadsticks make a blazing fire on the sand; cook fish and breadfruit andtaro roots, helped and hindered by the children. They fixed the tentamidst the trees at the edge of the chapparel, and made it larger andmore abiding with the aid of the dinghy’s sail.
Amidst these occupations, wonders, and pleasures, the children lost allcount of the flight of time. They rarely asked about Mr Lestrange;after a while they did not ask about him at all. Children soon forget.
The Blue Lagoon: A Romance Page 15