The Blue Lagoon - A Romance - Book I

"I wonder where Paddy is?" cried Dick next morning. He was coming out of the chapparel, pulling a dead branch after him. "He's left his coat on the sand, and the tinder box in it, so I'll make the fire. There's no use waiting. I want my breakfast. Bother!"

He trod the dead stick with his naked feet, breaking it into pieces.

Emmeline sat on the sand and watched him.

Emmeline had two gods of a sort: Paddy Button and Dick. Paddy was almost an esoteric god wrapped in the fumes of tobacco and mystery. The god of rolling ships and creaking masts--the masts and vast sail spaces of the Northumberland were an enduring vision in her mind--the deity who had lifted her from a little boat into this marvellous place, where the birds were coloured and the fish were painted, where life was never dull, and the skies scarcely ever grey.

Dick, the other deity, was a much more understandable personage, but no less admirable, as a companion and protector. In the two years and five months of island life he had grown nearly three inches. He was as strong as a boy of twelve, and could scull the boat almost as well as Paddy himself, and light a fire. Indeed, during the last few months Mr Button, engaged in resting his bones, and contemplating rum as an abstract idea, had left the cooking and fishing and general gathering of food as much as possible to Dick.

"It amuses the craythur to pritind he's doing things," he would say, as he watched Dick delving in the earth to make a little oven--Island-fashion--for the cooking of fish or what-not.

"Come along, Em," said Dick, piling the broken wood on top of some rotten hibiscus sticks; "give me the tinder box."

He got a spark on to a bit of punk, and then he blew at it, looking not unlike Aeolus as represented on those old Dutch charts that smell of schiedam and snuff, and give one mermaids and angels instead of soundings.

The fire was soon sparkling and crackling, and he heaped on sticks in profusion, for there was plenty of fuel, and he wanted to cook breadfruit.

The breadfruit varies in size, according to age, and in colour according to season. These that Dick was preparing to cook were as large as small melons. Two would be more than enough for three people's breakfast. They were green and knobbly on the outside, and they suggested to the mind unripe lemons, rather than bread.

He put them in the embers, just as you put potatoes to roast, and presently they sizzled and spat little venomous jets of steam, then they cracked, and the white inner substance became visible. He cut them open and took the core out--the core is not fit to eat--and they were ready.