The BLUE LAGOON
H. de Vere Stacpoole
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, April 28, 2017)
Mr Button was seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He was playing the âShan van vaught,â and accompanying the tune, punctuating it, with blows of his left heel on the foâcsâle deck. âO the Frinch are in the bay, Says the Shan van vaught.â He was dressed in dungaree trousers, a striped shirt, and a jacket baizeâgreen 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. âLeft-handed Pat,â was his foâcsâle name; not because he was left-handed, but simply because everything he did he did wrongâor nearly so. Reefing or furling, or handling a slush tubâif 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 Buttonâs nature was such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in âFrisco, 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 himâthey, and a very large stock of original innocence. Nearly over the musicianâs 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 shipsâ crews, and the foâcsâle of the Northumberland had a full company: a crowd of packet rats such as often is to be found on a Cape Horner âDutchmenâ Americansâmen who were farm labourers and tending pigs in Ohio three months back, old seasoned sailors like Paddy Buttonâa mixture of the best and the worst of the earth, such as you find nowhere else in so small a space as in a shipâs foâcsâle. The Northumberland had experienced a terrible rounding of the Horn. Bound from New Orleans to âFrisco she had spent thirty days battling with head-winds and stormsâdown 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. âPawthrick,â drawled a voice from the hammock above, from which depended the leg, âwhat was that yarn you wiz beginninâ to spin ter night âbout a lip me dawn?â âA which me dawn?â asked Mr Button, cocking his eye up at the bottom of the hammock while he held the match to his pipe. âIt vas about a green thing,â came a sleepy Dutch voice from a bunk. âOh, a Leprachaun you mane. Sure, me motherâs sister had one down in Connaught.â âVat vas it like?â asked the dreamy Dutch voiceâa voice seemingly possessed by the calm that had made the sea like a mirror for the last three days, reducing the whole shipâs company meanwhile to the level of wasters. âLike? Sure, it was like a Leprachaun; and what else would it be like?â âWhat like vas that?â persisted the voice. âIt was like a little man no bigger than a big forked raddish, anâ as green as a cabbidge. Me aânt had one in her house down in Connaught in the ould days.