CHAPTER XVIII
A FALLEN IDOL
The next day Dick began to rebuild the house. He had fetched thestay-sail from the reef and rigged up a temporary tent.
It was a great business cutting the canes and dragging them out in theopen. Emmeline helped; whilst Hannah, seated on the grass, played withthe bird that had vanished during the storm, but reappeared the eveningafter.
The child and the bird had grown fast friends; they were friendlyenough even at first, but now the bird would sometimes let the tinyhands clasp him right round his body—at least, as far as the handswould go.
It is a rare experience for a man to hold a tame and unstruggling andunfrightened bird in his hands; next to pressing a woman in his arms,it is the pleasantest tactile sensation he will ever experience,perhaps, in life. He will feel a desire to press it to his heart, if hehas such a thing.
Hannah would press Koko to his little brown stomach, as if in artlessadmission of where his heart lay.
He was an extraordinarily bright and intelligent child. He did notpromise to be talkative, for, having achieved the word “Dick,” herested content for a long while before advancing further into thelabyrinth of language; but though he did not use his tongue, he spokein a host of other ways. With his eyes, that were as bright as Koko’s,and full of all sorts of mischief; with his hands and feet and themovements of his body. He had a way of shaking his hands before himwhen highly delighted, a way of expressing nearly all the shades ofpleasure; and though he rarely expressed anger, when he did so, heexpressed it fully.
He was just now passing over the frontier into toyland. In civilisationhe would no doubt have been the possessor of an india-rubber dog or awoolly lamb, but there were no toys here at all. Emmeline’s old dollhad been left behind when they took flight from the other side of theisland, and Dick, a year or so ago, on one of his expeditions, hadfound it lying half buried in the sand of the beach.
He had brought it back now more as a curiosity than anything else, andthey had kept it on the shelf in the house. The cyclone had impaled iton a tree-twig near by, as if in derision and Hannah, when it waspresented to him as a plaything, flung it away from him as if indisgust. But he would play with flowers or bright shells, or bits ofcoral, making vague patterns with them on the sward.
All the toy lambs in the world would not have pleased him better thanthose things, the toys of the Troglodyte children—the children of theStone Age. To clap two oyster shells together and make a noise—what,after all, could a baby want better than that?
One afternoon, when the house was beginning to take some sort of form,they ceased work and went off into the woods; Emmeline carrying thebaby, and Dick taking turns with him. They were going to the valley ofthe idol.
Since the coming of Hannah, and even before, the stone figure standingin its awful and mysterious solitude had ceased to be an object ofdread to Emmeline, and had become a thing vaguely benevolent. Love hadcome to her under its shade; and under its shade the spirit of thechild had entered into her—from where, who knows? But certainly throughheaven.
Perhaps the thing which had been the god of some unknown people hadinspired her with the instinct of religion if so, she was his lastworshipper on earth, for when they entered the valley they found himlying upon his face. Great blocks of stone lay around him: there hadevidently been a landslip, a catastrophe preparing for ages, anddetermined, perhaps, by the torrential rain of the cyclone.
In Ponape, Huahine, in Easter Island, you may see great idols that havebeen felled like this, temples slowly dissolving from sight, andterraces, seemingly as solid as the hills, turning softly and subtlyinto shapeless mounds of stone.
The Blue Lagoon: A Romance Page 41