CHAPTER XVIII

A FALLEN IDOL

The next day Dick began to rebuild the house. He had fetched the

stay-sail from the reef and rigged up a temporary tent.

It was a great business cutting the canes and dragging them out in the

open. Emmeline helped; whilst Hannah, seated on the grass, played with

the bird that had vanished during the storm, but reappeared the evening

after.

The child and the bird had grown fast friends; they were friendly

enough even at first, but now the bird would sometimes let the tiny

hands clasp him right round his body—at least, as far as the hands

would go.

It is a rare experience for a man to hold a tame and unstruggling and

unfrightened 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 he

has such a thing.

Hannah would press Koko to his little brown stomach, as if in artless

admission of where his heart lay.

He was an extraordinarily bright and intelligent child. He did not

promise to be talkative, for, having achieved the word “Dick,” he

rested content for a long while before advancing further into the

labyrinth of language; but though he did not use his tongue, he spoke

in 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 the

movements of his body. He had a way of shaking his hands before him

when highly delighted, a way of expressing nearly all the shades of

pleasure; and though he rarely expressed anger, when he did so, he

expressed it fully.

He was just now passing over the frontier into toyland. In civilisation

he would no doubt have been the possessor of an india-rubber dog or a

woolly lamb, but there were no toys here at all. Emmeline’s old doll

had been left behind when they took flight from the other side of the

island, and Dick, a year or so ago, on one of his expeditions, had

found it lying half buried in the sand of the beach.

He had brought it back now more as a curiosity than anything else, and

they had kept it on the shelf in the house. The cyclone had impaled it

on a tree-twig near by, as if in derision; and Hannah, when it was

presented to him as a plaything, flung it away from him as if in

disgust. But he would play with flowers or bright shells, or bits of

coral, making vague patterns with them on the sward.

All the toy lambs in the world would not have pleased him better than

those things, the toys of the Troglodyte children—the children of the

Stone 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 the

baby, and Dick taking turns with him. They were going to the valley of

the idol.

Since the coming of Hannah, and even before, the stone figure standing

in its awful and mysterious solitude had ceased to be an object of

dread to Emmeline, and had become a thing vaguely benevolent. Love had

come to her under its shade; and under its shade the spirit of the

child had entered into her—from where, who knows? But certainly through

heaven.

Perhaps the thing which had been the god of some unknown people had

inspired her with the instinct of religion; if so, she was his last

worshipper on earth, for when they entered the valley they found him

lying upon his face. Great blocks of stone lay around him: there had

evidently been a landslip, a catastrophe preparing for ages, and

determined, perhaps, by the torrential rain of the cyclone.

In Ponape, Huahine, in Easter Island, you may see great idols that have

been felled like this, temples slowly dissolving from sight, and

terraces, seemingly as solid as the hills, turning softly and subtly

into shapeless mounds of stone.