THE STRICKEN WOODS
At first they thought they were ruined; then Dick, searching, found the
old saw under a tree, and the butcher’s knife near it, as though the
knife and saw had been trying to escape in company and had failed.
Bit by bit they began to recover something of their scattered property.
The remains of the flannel had been taken by the cyclone and wrapped
round and round a slender cocoa-nut tree, till the trunk looked like a
gaily-bandaged leg. The box of fishhooks had been jammed into the
centre of a cooked breadfruit, both having been picked up by the
fingers of the wind and hurled against the same tree; and the stay-sail
of the _Shenandoah_ was out on the reef, with a piece of coral carefully
placed on it as if to keep it down. As for the lug-sail belonging to
the dinghy, it was never seen again.
There is humour sometimes in a cyclone, if you can only appreciate it;
no other form of air disturbance produces such quaint effects. Beside
the great main whirlpool of wind, there are subsidiary whirlpools, each
actuated by its own special imp.
Emmeline had felt Hannah nearly snatched from her arms twice by these
little ferocious gimlet winds; and that the whole business of the great
storm was set about with the object of snatching Hannah from her, and
blowing him out to sea, was a belief which she held, perhaps, in the
innermost recesses of her mind.
The dinghy would have been utterly destroyed, had it not heeled over
and sunk in shallow water at the first onset of the wind; as it was,
Dick was able to bail it out at the next low tide, when it floated as
bravely as ever, not having started a single seam.
But the destruction amidst the trees was pitiful. Looking at the woods
as a mass, one noticed gaps here and there, but what had really
happened could not be seen till one was amongst the trees. Great,
beautiful cocoa-nut palms, not dead, but just dying, lay crushed and
broken as if trampled upon by some enormous foot. You would come
across half a dozen lianas twisted into one great cable. Where
cocoa-nut palms were, you could not move a yard without kicking against
a fallen nut; you might have picked up full-grown, half-grown, and wee
baby nuts, not bigger than small apples, for on the same tree you will
find nuts of all sizes and conditions.
One never sees a perfectly straight-stemmed cocoa-palm; they all have
an inclination from the perpendicular more or less; perhaps that is why
a cyclone has more effect on them than on other trees.
Artus, once so pretty a picture with their diamond-chequered trunks,
lay broken and ruined; and right through the belt of mammee apple,
right through the bad lands, lay a broad road, as if an army, horse,
foot, and artillery, had passed that way from lagoon edge to lagoon
edge. This was the path left by the great fore-foot of the storm; but
had you searched the woods on either side, you would have found paths
where the lesser winds had been at work, where the baby whirlwinds had
been at play.
From the bruised woods, like an incense offered to heaven, rose a
perfume of blossoms gathered and scattered, of rain-wet leaves, of
lianas twisted and broken and oozing their sap; the perfume of
newly-wrecked and ruined trees—the essence and soul of the artu, the
banyan and cocoa-palm cast upon the wind.
You would have found dead butterflies in the woods, dead birds too; but
in the great path of the storm you would have found dead butterflies’
wings, feathers, leaves frayed as if by fingers, branches of the aoa,
and sticks of the hibiscus broken into little fragments.
Powerful enough to rip a ship open, root up a tree, half ruin a city.
Delicate enough to tear a butterfly wing from wing—that is a cyclone.
Emmeline, wandering about in the woods with Dick on the day after the
storm, looking at the ruin of great tree and little bird, and
recollecting the land birds she had caught a glimpse of yesterday being
carried along safely by the storm out to sea to be drowned, felt a
great weight lifting from her heart. Mischance had come, and spared
them and the baby. The blue had spoken, but had not called them.
She felt that something—the something which we in civilisation call
Fate—was for the present gorged; and, without being annihilated, her
incessant hypochondriacal dread condensed itself into a point, leaving
her horizon sunlit and clear.
The cyclone had indeed treated them almost, one might say, amiably. It
had taken the house—but that was a small matter, for it had left them
nearly all their small possessions. The tinder box and flint and steel
would have been a much more serious loss than a dozen houses, for,
without it, they would have had absolutely no means of making a fire.
If anything, the cyclone had been almost too kind to them; had let them
pay off too little of that mysterious debt they owed to the gods.