CHAPTER XIX
STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM
Mr Button saw no more rats, much to Dick’s disappointment. He was offthe drink. At dawn next day he got up, refreshed by a second sleep, andwandered down to the edge of the lagoon. The opening in the reef facedthe east, and the light of the dawn came rippling in with the floodingtide.
“It’s a baste I’ve been,” said the repentant one—“a brute baste.”
He was quite wrong; as a matter of fact, he was only a man beset andbetrayed.
He stood for a while, cursing the drink, “and them that sells it.” Thenhe determined to put himself out of the way of temptation. Pull thebung out of the barrel, and let the contents escape?
Such a thought never even occurred to him—or, if it did, was instantlydismissed; for, though an old sailor-man may curse the drink, good rumis to him a sacred thing; and to empty half a little barrel of it intothe sea, would be an act almost equivalent to child-murder. He put thecask into the dinghy, and rowed it over to the reef. There he placed itin the shelter of a great lump of coral, and rowed back.
Paddy had been trained all his life to rhythmical drunkenness. Fourmonths or so had generally elapsed between his bouts—sometimes six; itall depended on the length of the voyage. Six months now elapsed beforehe felt even an inclination to look at the rum cask, that tiny darkspot away on the reef. And it was just as well, for during those sixmonths another whale-ship arrived, watered and was avoided.
“Blisther it!” said he; “the say here seems to breed whale-ships, andnothin’ but whale-ships. It’s like bugs in a bed: you kill wan, and thenanother comes. Howsomever, we’re shut of thim for a while.”
He walked down to the lagoon edge, looked at the little dark spot andwhistled. Then he walked back to prepare dinner. That little dark spotbegan to trouble him after a while; not it, but the spirit it contained.
Days grew long and weary, the days that had been so short and pleasant.To the children there was no such thing as time. Having absolute andperfect health, they enjoyed happiness as far as mortals can enjoy it.Emmeline’s highly-strung nervous system, it is true, developed aheadache when she had been too long in the glare of the sun, but theywere few and far between.
The spirit in the little cask had been whispering across the lagoon forsome weeks; at last it began to shout. Mr Button, metaphoricallyspeaking, stopped his ears. He busied himself with the children as muchas possible. He made another garment for Emmeline, and cut Dick’s hairwith the scissors (a job which was generally performed once in a coupleof months).
One night, to keep the rum from troubling his head, he told them thestory of Jack Dogherty and the Merrow, which is well known on thewestern coast.
The Merrow takes Jack to dinner at the bottom of the sea, and shows himthe lobster pots wherein he keeps the souls of old sailor-men, and thenthey have dinner, and the Merrow produces a big bottle of rum.
It was a fatal story for him to remember and recount; for, after hiscompanions were asleep, the vision of the Merrow and Jack hobnobbing,and the idea of the jollity of it, rose before him, and excited athirst for joviality not to be resisted.
There were some green cocoa-nuts that he had plucked that day lying ina little heap under a tree—half a dozen or so. He took several ofthese and a shell, found the dinghy where it was moored to the aoatree, unmoored her, and pushed off into the lagoon.
The lagoon and sky were full of stars. In the dark depths of the watermight have been seen phosphorescent gleams of passing fish, and thethunder of the surf on the reef filled the night with its song.
He fixed the boat’s painter carefully round a spike of coral and landedon the reef, and with a shellful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixedhalf and half, he took his perch on a high ledge of coral from whence aview of the sea and the coral strand could be obtained.
On a moonlight night it was fine to sit here and watch the greatbreakers coming in, all marbled and clouded and rainbowed withspindrift and sheets of spray. But the snow and the song of them underthe diffused light of the stars produced a more indescribably beautifuland strange effect.
The tide was going out now, and Mr Button, as he sat smoking his pipeand drinking his grog, could see bright mirrors here and there wherethe water lay in rock-pools. When he had contemplated these sights fora considerable time in complete contentment, he returned to the lagoonside of the reef and sat down beside the little barrel. Then, after awhile, if you had been standing on the strand opposite, you would haveheard scraps of song borne across the quivering water of the lagoon.
“Sailing down, sailing down On the coast of Barbaree.”
Whether the coast of Barbary in question is that at San Francisco, orthe true and proper coast, does not matter. It is an old-time song; andwhen you hear it, whether on a reef of coral or a granite quay, you mayfeel assured that an old-time sailor-man is singing it, and that theold-time sailor-man is bemused.
Presently the dinghy put off from the reef, the sculls broke thestarlit waters and great shaking circles of light made rhythmicalanswer to the slow and steady creak of the thole pins against theleather. He tied up to the aoa, saw that the sculls were safelyshipped; then, breathing heavily, he cast off his boots for fear ofwaking the “childer.” As the children were sleeping more than twohundred yards away, this was a needless precaution—especially as theintervening distance was mostly soft sand.
Green cocoa-nut juice and rum mixed together are pleasant enough todrink, but they are better drunk separately; combined, not even thebrain of an old sailor can make anything of them but mist andmuddlement; that is to say, in the way of thought—in the way of actionthey can make him do a lot. They made Paddy Button swim the lagoon.
The recollection came to him all at once, as he was walking up thestrand towards the wigwam, that he had left the dinghy tied to thereef. The dinghy was, as a matter of fact, safe and sound tied to theaoa; but Mr Button’s memory told him it was tied to the reef. How hehad crossed the lagoon was of no importance at all to him; the factthat he had crossed without the boat, yet without getting wet, did notappear to him strange. He had no time to deal with trifles like these.The dinghy had to be fetched across the lagoon, and there was only oneway of fetching it. So he came back down the beach to the water’s edge,cast down his boots, cast off his coat, and plunged in. The lagoon waswide, but in his present state of mind he would have swum theHellespont. His figure gone from the beach, the night resumed itsmajesty and aspect of meditation.
So lit was the lagoon by starshine that the head of the swimmer couldbe distinguished away out in the midst of circles of light; also, asthe head neared the reef, a dark triangle that came shearing throughthe water past the palm tree at the pier. It was the night patrol of thelagoon, who had heard in some mysterious manner that a drunkensailor-man was making trouble in his waters.
Looking, one listened, hand on heart, for the scream of the arrestedone, yet it did not come. The swimmer, scrambling on to the reef in anexhausted manner, forgetful evidently of the object for which he hadreturned, made for the rum cask, and fell down beside it as thoughsleep had touched him instead of death.
The Blue Lagoon: A Romance Page 19