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 shell-back, 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 man-handled 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 she had spent thirty days battling with head-winds and storms—down there, where the seas are so vast that three waves may cover with their amplitude more than a mile of sea space; thirty days she had passed off Cape Stiff, and just now, at the moment of this story, she was locked in a calm south of the line.
Mr Button finished his tune with a sweep of the bow, and drew his right coat sleeve across his forehead. Then he took out a sooty pipe, filled it with tobacco, and lit it.
“Pawthrick,” drawled a voice from the hammock above, from which depended the leg, “what was that yarn you wiz beginnin’ to spin ter night ’bout a lip me dawn?”
“A which me dawn?” asked Mr Button, cocking his eye up at the bottom of the hammock while he held the match to his pipe.
“It vas about a green thing,” came a sleepy Dutch voice from a bunk.
“Oh, a Leprachaun you mane. Sure, me mother’s sister had one down in Connaught.”
“Vat vas it like?” asked the dreamy Dutch voice—a voice seemingly possessed by the calm that had made the sea like a mirror for the last three days, reducing the whole ship’s company meanwhile to the level of wasters.
“Like? Sure, it was like a Leprachaun; and what else would it be like?”
“What like vas that?” persisted the voice.
“It was like a little man no bigger than a big forked raddish, an’ as green as a cabbidge. Me a’nt had one in her house down in Connaught in the ould days. O musha! musha! the ould days, the ould days! Now, you may b’lave me or b’lave me not, but you could have put him in your pocket, and the grass-green head of him wouldn’t more than’v stuck out. She kept him in a cupboard, and out of the cupboard he’d pop if it was a crack open, an’ into the milk pans he’d be, or under the beds, or pullin’ the stool from under you, or at some other divarsion. He’d chase the pig—the crathur!—till it’d be all ribs like an ould umbrilla with the fright, an’ as thin as a greyhound with the runnin’ by the marnin; he’d addle the eggs so the cocks an’ hens wouldn’t know what they wis afther wid the chickens comin’ out wid two heads on them, an’ twinty-seven legs fore and aft. And you’d start to chase him, an’ then it’d be mainsail haul, and away he’d go, you behint him, till you’d landed tail over snout in a ditch, an’ he’d be back in the cupboard.”
“He was a Troll,” murmured the Dutch voice.
“I’m tellin’ you he was a Leprachaun, and there’s no knowin’ the divilments he’d be up to. He’d pull the cabbidge, maybe, out of the pot boilin’ on the fire forenint your eyes, and baste you in the face with it; and thin, maybe, you’d hold out your fist to him, and he’d put a goulden soverin in it.”
“Wisht he was here!” murmured a voice from a bunk near the knightheads.
“Pawthrick,” drawled the voice from the hammock above, “what’d you do first if you found y’self with twenty pound in your pocket?”
“What’s the use of askin’ me?” replied Mr Button. “What’s the use of twenty pound to a sayman at say, where the grog’s all wather an’ the beef’s all horse? Gimme it ashore, an’ you’d see what I’d do wid it!”
“I guess the nearest grog-shop keeper wouldn’t see you comin’ for dust,” said a voice from Ohio.
“He would not,” said Mr Button; “nor you afther me. Be damned to the grog and thim that sells it!”
“It’s all darned easy to talk,” said Ohio. “You curse the grog at sea when you can’t get it; set you ashore, and you’re bung full.”
“I likes me dhrunk,” said Mr Button, “I’m free to admit; an’ I’m the divil when it’s in me, and it’ll be the end of me yet, or me ould mother was a liar. ‘Pat,’ she says, first time I come home from say rowlin’, ‘storms you may escape, an’ wimmen you may escape, but the potheen ’ill have you.’ Forty year ago—forty year ago!”
“Well,” said Ohio, “it hasn’t had you yet.”
“No,” replied Mr Button, “but it will.”
“Childer!” shouted Paddy. He was at the cross-trees in the full dawn, whilst the children standing beneath on deck were craning their faces up to him. “There’s an island forenint us.”
“Hurrah!” cried Dick. He was not quite sure what an island might be like in the concrete, but it was something fresh, and Paddy’s voice was jubilant.
“Land ho! it is,” said he, coming down to the deck. “Come for’ard to the bows, and I’ll show it you.”
He stood on the timber in the bows and lifted Emmeline up in his arms; and even at that humble elevation from the water she could see something of an undecided colour—green for choice—on the horizon.
It was not directly ahead, but on the starboard bow—or, as she would have expressed it, to the right. When Dick had looked and expressed his disappointment at there being so little to see, Paddy began to make preparations for leaving the ship.
It was only just now, with land in sight, that he recognised in some fashion the horror of the position from which they were about to escape.
He fed the children hurriedly with some biscuits and tinned meat, and then, with a biscuit in his hand, eating as he went, he trotted about the decks, collecting things and stowing them in the dinghy. The bolt of striped flannel, all the old clothes, a housewife full of needles and thread, such as seamen sometimes carry, the half-sack of potatoes, a saw which he found in the caboose, the precious coil of tobacco, and a lot of other odds and ends he transhipped, sinking the little dinghy several strakes in the process. Also, of course, he took the breaker of water, and the remains of the biscuit and tinned stuff they had brought on board. These being stowed, and the dinghy ready, he went forward with the children to the bow, to see how the island was bearing.
It had loomed up nearer during the hour or so in which he had been collecting and storing the things—nearer, and more to the right, which meant that the brig was being borne by a fairly swift current, and that she would pass it, leaving it two or three miles to starboard. It was well they had command of the dinghy.
“The sea’s all round it,” said Emmeline, who was seated on Paddy’s shoulder, holding on tight to him, and gazing upon the island, the green of whose trees was now visible, an oasis of verdure in the sparkling and seraphic blue.
“Are we going there, Paddy?” asked Dick, holding on to a stay, and straining his eyes towards the land.
“Ay, are we,” said Mr Button. “Hot foot—five knots, if we’re makin’ wan; and it’s ashore we’ll be by noon, and maybe sooner.”
The breeze had freshened up, and was blowing dead from the island, as though the island were making a weak attempt to blow them away from it.
Oh, what a fresh and perfumed breeze it was! All sorts of tropical growing things had joined their scent in one bouquet.
“Smell it,” said Emmeline, expanding her small nostrils. “That’s what I smelt last night, only it’s stronger now.”
The last reckoning taken on board the Northumberland had proved the ship to be south by east of the Marquesas; this was evidently one of those small, lost islands that lie here and there south by east of the Marquesas. Islands the most lonely and beautiful in the world.
As they gazed it grew before them, and shifted still more to the right. It was hilly and green now, though the trees could not be clearly made out; here, the green was lighter in colour, and there, darker. A rim of pure white marble seemed to surround its base. It was foam breaking on the barrier reef.
In another hour the feathery foliage of the cocoa-nut palms could be made out, and the old sailor judged it time to take to the boat.
He lifted Emmeline, who was clasping her luggage, over the rail on to the channel, and deposited her in the stern-sheets; then Dick.
In a moment the boat was adrift, the mast stepped, and the Shenandoah left to pursue her mysterious voyage at the will of the currents of the sea.
“You’re not going to the island, Paddy,” cried Dick, as the old man put the boat on the port tack.
“You be aisy,” replied the other, “and don’t be larnin’ your gran’mother. How the divil d’ye think I’d fetch the land sailin’ dead in the wind’s eye?”
“Has the wind eyes?”
Mr Button did not answer the question. He was troubled in his mind. What if the island were inhabited? He had spent several years in the South Seas. He knew the people of the Marquesas and Samoa, and liked them. But here he was out of his bearings.
However, all the troubling in the world was of no use. It was a case of the island or the deep sea, and, putting the boat on the starboard tack, he lit his pipe and leaned back with the tiller in the crook of his arm. His keen eyes had made out from the deck of the brig an opening in the reef, and he was making to run the dinghy abreast of the opening, and then take to the sculls and row her through.
Now, as they drew nearer a sound came on the breeze, a sound faint and sonorous and dreamy. It was the sound of the breakers on the reef. The sea just here was heaving to a deeper swell, as if vexed in its sleep at the resistance to it of the land.
Emmeline, sitting with her bundle in her lap, stared without speaking at the sight before her. Even in the bright, glorious sunshine, and despite the greenery that showed beyond, it was a desolate sight seen from her place in the dinghy. A white, forlorn beach, over which the breakers raced and tumbled, sea-gulls wheeling and screaming, and over all the thunder of the surf.
Suddenly the break became visible, and a glimpse of smooth, blue water beyond. Mr Button unshipped the tiller, unstepped the mast, and took to the sculls.
As they drew nearer, the sea became more active, savage, and alive; the thunder of the surf became louder, the breakers more fierce and threatening, the opening broader.
One could see the water swirling round the coral piers, for the tide was flooding into the lagoon; it had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it along far swifter than the sculls could have driven it. Sea-gulls screamed around them, the boat rocked and swayed. Dick shouted with excitement, and Emmeline shut her eyes tight.
Then, as though a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of the surf became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened her eyes and found herself in Wonderland.
“Mr Button,” said Emmeline that night, as they sat on the sand near the tent he had improvised, “Mr Button—cats go to sleep.”
They had been questioning him about the “never-wake-up” berries.
“Who said they didn’t?” asked Mr Button.
“I mean,” said Emmeline, “they go to sleep and never wake up again. Ours did. It had stripes on it, and a white chest, and rings all down its tail. It went asleep in the garden, all stretched out, and showing its teeth; an’ I told Jane, and Dicky ran in an’ told uncle. I went to Mrs Sims, the doctor’s wife, to tea; and when I came back I asked Jane where pussy was—and she said it was deadn’ berried, but I wasn’t to tell uncle.”
“I remember,” said Dick. “It was the day I went to the circus, and you told me not to tell daddy the cat was deadn’ berried. But I told Mrs James’s man when he came to do the garden; and I asked him where cats went when they were deadn’ berried, and he said he guessed they went to hell—at least he hoped they did, for they were always scratchin’ up the flowers. Then he told me not to tell any one he’d said that, for it was a swear word, and he oughtn’t to have said it. I asked him what he’d give me if I didn’t tell, an’ he gave me five cents. That was the day I bought the cocoa-nut.”
The tent, a makeshift affair, consisting of two sculls and a tree branch, which Mr Button had sawed off from a dwarf aoa, and the stay-sail he had brought from the brig, was pitched in the centre of the beach, so as to be out of the way of falling cocoa-nuts, should the breeze strengthen during the night. The sun had set, but the moon had not yet risen as they sat in the starlight on the sand near the temporary abode.
“What’s the things you said made the boots for the people, Paddy?” asked Dick, after a pause.
“Which things?”
“You said in the wood I wasn’t to talk, else—”
“Oh, the Cluricaunes—the little men that cobbles the Good People’s brogues. Is it them you mane?”
“Yes,” said Dick, not knowing quite whether it was them or not that he meant, but anxious for information that he felt would be curious. “And what are the good people?”
“Sure, where were you born and bred that you don’t know the Good People is the other name for the fairies—savin’ their presence?”
“There aren’t any,” replied Dick. “Mrs Sims said there weren’t.”
“Mrs James,” put in Emmeline, “said there were. She said she liked to see children b’lieve in fairies. She was talking to another lady, who’d got a red feather in her bonnet, and a fur muff. They were having tea, and I was sitting on the hearthrug. She said the world was getting too—something or another, an’ then the other lady said it was, and asked Mrs James did she see Mrs Someone in the awful hat she wore Thanksgiving Day. They didn’t say anything more about fairies, but Mrs James——”
“Whether you b’lave in them or not,” said Paddy, “there they are. An’ maybe they’re poppin’ out of the wood behint us now, an’ listenin’ to us talkin’; though I’m doubtful if there’s any in these parts, though down in Connaught they were as thick as blackberries in the ould days. O musha! musha! the ould days, the ould days! when will I be seein’ thim again? Now, you may b’lave me or b’lave me not, but me own ould father—God rest his sowl!—was comin’ over Croagh Patrick one night before Christmas with a bottle of whisky in one hand of him, and a goose, plucked an’ claned an’ all, in the other, which same he’d won in a lottery, when, hearin’ a tchune no louder than the buzzin’ of a bee, over a furze-bush he peeps, and there, round a big white stone, the Good People were dancing in a ring hand in hand, an’ kickin’ their heels, an’ the eyes of them glowin’ like the eyes of moths; and a chap on the stone, no bigger than the joint of your thumb, playin’ to thim on a bagpipes. Wid that he let wan yell an’ drops the goose an’ makes for home, over hedge an’ ditch, boundin’ like a buck kangaroo, an’ the face on him as white as flour when he burst in through the door, where we was all sittin’ round the fire burnin’ chestnuts to see who’d be married the first.
“‘An’ what in the name of the saints is the mather wid yiz?’ says me mother.
“‘I’ve sane the Good People,’ says he, ‘up on the field beyant,’ says he; ‘and they’ve got the goose,’ says he, ‘but, begorra, I’ve saved the bottle,’ he says. ‘Dhraw the cork and give me a taste of it, for me heart’s in me throat, and me tongue’s like a brick-kil.’
“An’ whin we come to prize the cork out of the bottle, there was nothin’ in it; an’ whin we went next marnin’ to look for the goose, it was gone. But there was the stone, sure enough, and the marks on it of the little brogues of the chap that’d played the bagpipes—and who’d be doubtin’ there were fairies after that?”
The children said nothing for a while, and then Dick said:
“Tell us about Cluricaunes, and how they make the boots.”
“Whin I’m tellin’ you about Cluricaunes,” said Mr Button, “it’s the truth I’m tellin’ you, an’ out of me own knowlidge, for I’ve spoken to a man that’s held wan in his hand; he was me own mother’s brother, Con Cogan—rest his sowl! Con was six fut two, wid a long, white face; he’d had his head bashed in, years before I was barn, in some ruction or other, an’ the docthers had japanned him with a five-shillin’ piece beat flat.”
Dick interposed with a question as to the process, aim, and object of japanning, but Mr Button passed the question by.
“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.
To forget the passage of time you must live in the open air, in a warm climate, with as few clothes as possible upon you. You must collect and cook your own food. Then, after a while, if you have no special ties to bind you to civilisation, Nature will begin to do for you what she does for the savage. You will recognise that it is possible to be happy without books or newspapers, letters or bills. You will recognise the part sleep plays in Nature.
After a month on the island you might have seen Dick at one moment full of life and activity, helping Mr Button to dig up a taro root or what not, the next curled up to sleep like a dog. Emmeline the same. Profound and prolonged lapses into sleep; sudden awakenings into a world of pure air and dazzling light, the gaiety of colour all round. Nature had indeed opened her doors to these children.
One might have fancied her in an experimental mood, saying: “Let me put these buds of civilisation back into my nursery and see what they will become—how they will blossom, and what will be the end of it all.”
Just as Emmeline had brought away her treasured box from the Northumberland, Dick had conveyed with him a small linen bag that chinked when shaken. It contained marbles. Small olive-green marbles and middle-sized ones of various colours; glass marbles with splendid coloured cores; and one large old grandfather marble too big to be played with, but none the less to be worshipped—a god marble.
Of course one cannot play at marbles on board ship, but one can play with them. They had been a great comfort to Dick on the voyage. He knew them each personally, and he would roll them out on the mattress of his bunk and review them nearly every day, whilst Emmeline looked on.
One day Mr Button, noticing Dick and the girl kneeling opposite each other on a flat, hard piece of sand near the water’s edge, strolled up to see what they were doing. They were playing marbles. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth watching and criticising the game, pleased that the “childer” were amused. Then he began to be amused himself, and in a few minutes more he was down on his knees taking a hand; Emmeline, a poor player and an unenthusiastic one, withdrawing in his favour.
After that it was a common thing to see them playing together, the old sailor on his knees, one eye shut, and a marble against the nail of his horny thumb taking aim; Dick and Emmeline on the watch to make sure he was playing fair, their shrill voices echoing amidst the cocoa-nut trees with cries of “Knuckle down, Paddy, knuckle down!” He entered into all their amusements just as one of themselves. On high and rare occasions Emmeline would open her precious box, spread its contents and give a tea-party, Mr Button acting as guest or president as the case might be.
“Is your tay to your likin’, ma’am?” he would enquire; and Emmeline, sipping at her tiny cup, would invariably make answer: “Another lump of sugar, if you please, Mr Button;” to which would come the stereotyped reply: “Take a dozen, and welcome; and another cup for the good of your make.”
Then Emmeline would wash the things in imaginary water, replace them in the box, and every one would lose their company manners and become quite natural again.
“Have you ever seen your name, Paddy?” asked Dick one morning.
“Seen me which?”
“Your name?”
“Arrah, don’t be axin’ me questions,” replied the other. “How the divil could I see me name?”
“Wait and I’ll show you,” replied Dick.
He ran and fetched a piece of cane, and a minute later on the salt-white sand in face of orthography and the sun appeared these portentous letters:
B U T T E N
“Faith, an’ it’s a cliver boy y’are,” said Mr Button admiringly, as he leaned luxuriously against a cocoa-nut tree, and contemplated Dick’s handiwork. “And that’s me name, is it? What’s the letters in it?”
Dick enumerated them.
“I’ll teach you to do it, too,” he said. “I’ll teach you to write your name, Paddy—would you like to write your name, Paddy?”
“No,” replied the other, who only wanted to be let smoke his pipe in peace; “me name’s no use to me.”
But Dick, with the terrible gadfly tirelessness of childhood, was not to be put off, and the unfortunate Mr Button had to go to school despite himself. In a few days he could achieve the act of drawing upon the sand characters somewhat like the above, but not without prompting, Dick and Emmeline on each side of him, breathless for fear of a mistake.
“Which next?” would ask the sweating scribe, the perspiration pouring from his forehead—“which next? an’ be quick, for it’s moithered I am.”
“N. N.—that’s right—Ow, you’re making it crooked!—that’s right—there! it’s all there now—Hurroo!”
“Hurroo!” would answer the scholar, waving his old hat over his own name, and “Hurroo!” would answer the cocoa-nut grove echoes; whilst the far, faint “Hi hi!” of the wheeling gulls on the reef would come over the blue lagoon as if in acknowledgment of the deed, and encouragement.
The appetite comes with teaching. The pleasantest mental exercise of childhood is the instruction of one’s elders. Even Emmeline felt this. She took the geography class one day in a timid manner, putting her little hand first in the great horny fist of her friend.
“Mr Button!”
“Well, honey?”
“I know g’ography.”
“And what’s that?” asked Mr Button.
This stumped Emmeline for a moment.
“It’s where places are,” she said at last.
“Which places?” enquired he.
“All sorts of places,” replied Emmeline. “Mr Button!”
“What is it, darlin’?”
“Would you like to learn g’ography?”
“I’m not wishful for larnin’,” said the other hurriedly. “It makes me head buzz to hear them things they rade out of books.”
“Paddy,” said Dick, who was strong on drawing that afternoon, “look here.” He drew the following on the sand:
[Illustration: A bad drawing of an elephant]
“That’s an elephant,” he said in a dubious voice.
Mr Button grunted, and the sound was by no means filled with enthusiastic assent. A chill fell on the proceedings.
Dick wiped the elephant slowly and regretfully out, whilst Emmeline felt disheartened. Then her face suddenly cleared; the seraphic smile came into it for a moment—a bright idea had struck her.
“Dicky,” she said, “draw Henry the Eight.”
Dick’s face brightened. He cleared the sand and drew the following figure:
“That’s not Henry the Eight,” he explained, “but he will be in a minute. Daddy showed me how to draw him; he’s nothing till he gets his hat on.”
“Put his hat on, put his hat on!” implored Emmeline, gazing alternately from the figure on the sand to Mr Button’s face, watching for the delighted smile with which she was sure the old man would greet the great king when he appeared in all his glory.
Then Dick with a single stroke of the cane put Henry’s hat on.
Now, no portrait could be liker to his monk-hunting majesty than the above, created with one stroke of a cane (so to speak), yet Mr Button remained unmoved.
“I did it for Mrs Sims,” said Dick regretfully, “and she said it was the image of him.”
“Maybe the hat’s not big enough,” said Emmeline, turning her head from side to side as she gazed at the picture. It looked right, but she felt there must be something wrong, as Mr Button did not applaud. Has not every true artist felt the same before the silence of some critic?
Mr Button tapped the ashes out of his pipe and rose to stretch himself, and the class rose and trooped down to the lagoon edge, leaving Henry and his hat a figure on the sand to be obliterated by the wind.
After a while, as time went on, Mr Button took to his lessons as a matter of course, the small inventions of the children assisting their utterly untrustworthy knowledge. Knowledge, perhaps, as useful as any other there amidst the lovely poetry of the palm trees and the sky.
Days slipped into weeks, and weeks into months, without the appearance of a ship—a fact which gave Mr Button very little trouble; and even less to his charges, who were far too busy and amused to bother about ships.
The rainy season came on them with a rush, and at the words “rainy season” do not conjure up in your mind the vision of a rainy day in Manchester.
The rainy season here was quite a lively time. Torrential showers followed by bursts of sunshine, rainbows, and rain-dogs in the sky, and the delicious perfume of all manner of growing things on the earth.
After the rains the old sailor said he’d be after making a house of bamboos before the next rains came on them; but, maybe, before that they’d be off the island.
“However,” said he, “I’ll dra’ you a picture of what it’ll be like when it’s up;” and on the sand he drew a figure like this:
Having thus drawn the plans of the building, he leaned back against a cocoa-palm and lit his pipe. But he had reckoned without Dick.
The boy had not the least wish to live in a house, but he had a keen desire to see one built, and help to build one. The ingenuity which is part of the multiform basis of the American nature was aroused.
“How’re you going to keep them from slipping, if you tie them together like that?” he asked, when Paddy had more fully explained his method.
“Which from slippin’?”
“The canes—one from the other?”
“After you’ve fixed thim, one cross t’other, you drive a nail through the cross-piece and a rope over all.”
“Have you any nails, Paddy?”
“No,” said Mr Button, “I haven’t.”
“Then how’re you goin’ to build the house?”
“Ax me no questions now; I want to smoke me pipe.”
But he had raised a devil difficult to lay. Morning, noon, and night it was “Paddy, when are you going to begin the house?” or, “Paddy, I guess I’ve got a way to make the canes stick together without nailing.” Till Mr Button, in despair, like a beaver, began to build.
There was great cane-cutting in the cane-brake above, and, when sufficient had been procured, Mr Button struck work for three days. He would have struck altogether, but he had found a taskmaster.
The tireless Dick, young and active, with no original laziness in his composition, no old bones to rest, or pipe to smoke, kept after him like a bluebottle fly. It was in vain that he tried to stave him off with stories about fairies and Cluricaunes. Dick wanted to build a house.
Mr Button didn’t. He wanted to rest. He did not mind fishing or climbing a cocoa-nut tree, which he did to admiration by passing a rope round himself and the tree, knotting it, and using it as a support during the climb; but house-building was monotonous work.
He said he had no nails. Dick countered by showing how the canes could be held together by notching them.
“And, faith, but it’s a cliver boy you are,” said the weary one admiringly, when the other had explained his method.
“Then come along, Paddy, and stick ’em up.”
Mr Button said he had no rope, that he’d have to think about it, that to-morrow or next day he’d be after getting some notion how to do it without rope. But Dick pointed out that the brown cloth which Nature has wrapped round the cocoa-palm stalks would do instead of rope if cut in strips. Then the badgered one gave in.
They laboured for a fortnight at the thing, and at the end of that time had produced a rough sort of wigwam on the borders of the chapparel.
Out on the reef, to which they often rowed in the dinghy, when the tide was low, deep pools would be left, and in the pools fish. Paddy said if they had a spear they might be able to spear some of these fish, as he had seen the natives do away “beyant” in Tahiti.
Dick enquired as to the nature of a spear, and next day produced a ten-foot cane sharpened at the end after the fashion of a quill pen.
“Sure, what’s the use of that?” said Mr Button. “You might job it into a fish, but he’d be aff it in two ticks; it’s the barb that holds them.”
Next day the indefatigable one produced the cane amended; he had whittled it down about three feet from the end and on one side, and carved a fairly efficient barb. It was good enough, at all events, to spear a “groper” with, that evening, in the sunset-lit pools of the reef at low tide.
“There aren’t any potatoes here,” said Dick one day, after the second rains.
“We’ve et ’em all months ago,” replied Paddy.
“How do potatoes grow?” enquired Dick.