The Blue Lagoon

Love blossoms amid a tropical paradise in this tale of two children stranded on a remote South Pacific island. Richard and Emmeline escape from a burning ship and learn to fend for themselves, as they fish, swim, dive for pearls, and explore their idyllic home in the Blue Lagoon. But with the passing of time, the innocents begin to experience strange emotions and discover a new dimension to their relationship.

H. De Vere Stacpoole’s popular 1908 romance inspired two sequels as well as four movie versions. His lyrical descriptions of the restless sea, the enchanting desert island, and the charming young lovers are complemented by captivating images envisioned by a master from the Golden Age of Illustration, Willy Pogány.

H. De Vere Stacpoole

The Blue Lagoon

The Blue Lagoon - 1

ePUB r1.0

nalasss 03.03.2014

Original title: The Blue Lagoon

H. De Vere Stacpoole, 1908

Illustrations: Willy Pogány

Digital editor: nalasss

ePub base r1.0

ON EITHER SIDE LAY A GREAT SWEEP OF WAVING BLUE WATER

BOOK I

PART I

CHAPTER I

Where the Slush Lamp Burns

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 manhandled 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.