CHAPTER XVII
THE STRICKEN WOODS
At first they thought they were ruined; then Dick, searching, found theold saw under a tree, and the butcher’s knife near it, as though theknife 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 wrappedround and round a slender cocoa-nut tree, till the trunk looked like agaily-bandaged leg. The box of fishhooks had been jammed into thecentre of a cooked breadfruit, both having been picked up by thefingers of the wind and hurled against the same tree; and the stay-sailof the _Shenandoah_ was out on the reef, with a piece of coral carefullyplaced on it as if to keep it down. As for the lug-sail belonging tothe 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. Besidethe great main whirlpool of wind, there are subsidiary whirlpools, eachactuated by its own special imp.
Emmeline had felt Hannah nearly snatched from her arms twice by theselittle ferocious gimlet winds; and that the whole business of the greatstorm was set about with the object of snatching Hannah from her, andblowing him out to sea, was a belief which she held, perhaps, in theinnermost recesses of her mind.
The dinghy would have been utterly destroyed, had it not heeled overand 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 asbravely as ever, not having started a single seam.
But the destruction amidst the trees was pitiful. Looking at the woodsas a mass, one noticed gaps here and there, but what had reallyhappened could not be seen till one was amongst the trees. Great,beautiful cocoa-nut palms, not dead, but just dying, lay crushed andbroken as if trampled upon by some enormous foot. You would comeacross half a dozen lianas twisted into one great cable. Wherecocoa-nut palms were, you could not move a yard without kicking againsta fallen nut; you might have picked up full-grown, half-grown, and weebaby nuts, not bigger than small apples, for on the same tree you willfind nuts of all sizes and conditions.
One never sees a perfectly straight-stemmed cocoa-palm; they all havean inclination from the perpendicular more or less; perhaps that is whya 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 lagoonedge. This was the path left by the great fore-foot of the storm; buthad you searched the woods on either side, you would have found pathswhere the lesser winds had been at work, where the baby whirlwinds hadbeen at play.
From the bruised woods, like an incense offered to heaven, rose aperfume of blossoms gathered and scattered, of rain-wet leaves, oflianas twisted and broken and oozing their sap; the perfume ofnewly-wrecked and ruined trees—the essence and soul of the artu, thebanyan and cocoa-palm cast upon the wind.
You would have found dead butterflies in the woods, dead birds too; butin 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 thestorm, looking at the ruin of great tree and little bird, andrecollecting the land birds she had caught a glimpse of yesterday beingcarried along safely by the storm out to sea to be drowned, felt agreat weight lifting from her heart. Mischance had come, and sparedthem and the baby. The blue had spoken, but had not called them.
She felt that something—the something which we in civilisation callFate—was for the present gorged; and, without being annihilated, herincessant hypochondriacal dread condensed itself into a point, leavingher horizon sunlit and clear.
The cyclone had indeed treated them almost, one might say, amiably. Ithad taken the house—but that was a small matter, for it had left themnearly all their small possessions. The tinder box and flint and steelwould 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 thempay off too little of that mysterious debt they owed to the gods.