Ian Hay

“ It is not easy to dive cleanly in a cork jacket.
Presently he reappeared, and struck out boldly in the direction of Double-Tooth Islet. Miss Etherington, seated upon the summit of Point Garry, her round chin resting on her hands, followed the course of his black head as it slowly forged its way across the limpid channel. Many thoughts passed through her mind. On the one hand, she hated Mr. Leslie Gale to the fullest extent of a nature more than usually well endowed for the purpose. ”

“ He had behaved like a cad, he felt, and being an honourable young man, he was filled with a desire to make confession.
“You are not very amusing to-night,” remarked Miss Etherington suddenly.
For purposes of playful badinage, there was a tacit understanding between them that everything which went wrong on the island—from cyclones to a fit of the dumps—was Leslie Gale's fault; and that long suffering young man was growing accustomed to being treated as something between a sinful little schoolboy and a rather incompetent court jester. ”

“ Gale.
Thus Nature, who sets the dockleaf beside the nettle, adjusts the fine balance of sex deportment.
When they had eaten, Leslie Gale hauled the dinghy into a shady patch of sand and proceeded to invert it over a blanket.
“What are you doing?” inquired Miss Etherington, wiping a plate.
“I propose to take a siesta,” said Mr. Gale. “I have been working like a coolie since four o'clock this morning. I made two trips before you were up, and I am done to the world. I advise you to retire to your cave of harmony and do likewise. We must keep ourselves fit, you know, and—and—be merry and bright. ”

“ We eat food out of tins; we do a little bathing and fishing in the morning, and play golf in the afternoon, and sit about in the evening and say how jolly it must be in Town just now. It seems to me that we are out of the picture somehow. We ought to be a little more primitive—barbaric. Do you follow me?”
“No,” said Miss Etherington. “In my opinion really nice people continue to behave just as nicely on a desert island as on a yacht.”
“But don't you think,” continued Mr. Gale perseveringly, “that we might train two goats to play bridge with us, or teach a turtle to sing, or something? ”

“ Her sleeves were rolled up for culinary duties, and her arms looked very round and white. Snatches of a song she was singing floated upwards to his ears. Mr. Gale's pulse quickened; his purpose hardened; his conscience died within him.
“I can't do it,” he muttered—“I can't!” A box of matches dropped from his nerveless fingers. ...
Presently he crawled upon his hands and knees—he would not even risk the exposure of his figure against the skyline now—to a position from which he could see the schooner. The breeze had freshened; she had gone about again, and was bowling away from the island. ”

“ His hands were clasped about his knees; his eyes were fixed on vacancy; and his tongue wagged unceasingly. A hare-brained and occasionally bumptious young man, but a man for all that.
Suddenly Gale inquired—
“I say, what do you think of me now? Has your opinion of me altered at all, after three months of me neat?”
The next moment he repented of his inquiry. He had firmly resolved never to embarrass the girl in this fashion so long as they remained on the island together. Now he had broken his word to himself. Miss Etherington's rippling mane had been a little too much for his fortitude. ”

“ Gale remarked, a caddy when you possess only one club looks ostentatious.
The golf course is a characteristic product of British occupation of alien territory. John Bull, we all know, has a weakness for descending casually upon the unappropriated spaces of the earth, the fact that they do not strictly belong to him being, in his view, fully balanced by the fact that he causes them to prosper as they have never prospered before. If you make a desert, he argues, blossom like the rose, what does it matter whose desert it was previously? ”

“ A book, perhaps: she was in the habit of reading late in bed and dropping off to sleep, the volume under perusal usually being retrieved somewhere in the neighbour hood of the hot-water bottle in the morning. Should she make an effort now, or—the sluggard's inevitable alternative—give herself just five minutes longer?
The question was settled for her. Her toes were once again sending up signals for help, and their appeal was backed ten seconds later by a sudden splash of water, which broke over the sleeper's feet and deluged her to the knees. ”

“ When you have seen a little more of the world you will realize that mankind has progressed beyond the schoolboy attitude towards life. Women are now free agents.”
“Yes. And I’m not sure,” remarked the experienced Mr. Gale, “that there are as many happy marriages under the new system as the old. Women are notoriously bad judges of a man. I shall watch your future career with interest, Miss Etherington—interest and apprehension. ”

“ And so powerful are use and wont that these two unruffled Britons bade fair to expel Nature from her own stronghold. Cave man and cave woman they certainly were not yet. They were members of a class which has always been carelessly indifferent to outside influences, and does not easily change its habits or mode of speech. Consequently the island had not barbarized them. They were gently denaturalizing the island.
Mr. Gale took the eighteenth hole in a perfect nine, Miss Etherington's ball overrunning the green and taking refuge in a lie with which only a corkscrew could have coped. ”

“ You will run away.”
“Why should I run away—from you?” inquired Miss Etherington icily.
“Because,” replied Mr.Gale,“you are afraid of me.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes.”
“Then you think you will subdue me?”
“No,” he said frankly—“I don’t. You won't give me the chance. Modern civilization deprives man of many of his weapons. If we were shut up together on a desert island, or if we had lived in the cave-dwelling period—”
“You would have subdued me with a flint axe, I suppose,” said Miss Etherington scornfully. ”

“ It must be the yacht. It is the yacht! I can see the top of her funnel. She must have grounded there. I was right. It was a cyclone. The wind has been playing a perfect game of rounders with itself.”
“Do you think there is any one on board?” asked Miss Etherington, suddenly hopeful. After all, a steward or a coal-trimmer would be something with which to dilute Mr. Gale. Another woman seemed too much to expect. ”

“ You will find me a fearful domestic tyrant.”
Miss Etherington, dimly wondering whether this excursion into the realms of humour masked a threat or merely indicated mental vacuity of the hollowest type, rose from her seat and departed in the direction of the cave. But she did not halt there. Instead, she climbed to the summit of Point Garry, and there sat for a full hour surveying the sunset with an expression upon her features for which a competent under-nurse would have prescribed just one remedy. ”

“ Miss Etherington nodded.
“We must build a little wooden hut,” continued Gale, with all the enthusiasm of a small boy playing at Red Indians. “I can sleep in one half and keep the stores in the other. A sort of lean-to. We will regularly organize this island before we have done with it! I wonder, now, about clothes. What we have on won't last forever. It's a pity your cabin was under water, or I might have salved a regular wardrobe for you. ”

“ Being of the class called leisured, accustomed to extract as much enjoyment from life as possible and on no account ever to worry about anything, they had settled down in one of Nature's most typical strongholds to the nearest approach they could compass to the careless artificial life that they were accustomed to live. ”

“ Then we should feel that we were getting back to Nature—quite Biblical, in fact. ‘The voice of the turtle is heard in the land,’ and so forth.”
“If you are going to talk nonsense,” said Miss Etherington, “I will go and get dinner ready.”
“When we get away from here,” continued the imaginative Mr. Gale, “we could take the little troupe with us, and earn an honest living on the music-hall stage. I once saw some performing seals at the Palace. I should think performing turtles would get quite as big a salary ”

“ He proceeded to buckle on the jacket, apparently oblivious of a look which to a thinner-skinned man would have made drowning seem an easy death, and scrambled over the rocks to the water's edge. He poised himself upon a convenient taking-off place. ”

“ Gale, “are requested not to chastise the club servants personally, but to enter all complaints upon the backs of their bills, which will be considered by the Committee at its next session. But I am sorry you don’t like cocoa. I will try and find some coffee for you. I am going to make a final trip to the yacht after breakfast.”
“Is she still there, then?”
“Yes, I have been out already this morning. I don’t think the old thing will hang on much longer, though. There is a heavy swell outside. By the way, do you know why Robinson Crusoe was not alone when he landed on his island? Give it up? ”

“ You are a girl with brains and character—and a bit of a spoiled child into the bargain. You cannot love a man who is your mental and moral inferior, and you are too opinionated and conceited to give in to your superior. ”

“ Because he found a heavy swell on the beach and a little cove running up the sand. ... No?”—as Miss Etherington remained quite impervious to this outrage—“Well, perhaps not! It might go better with a larger audience. It used to be received with rapture in the schoolroom at home. I thought, perhaps— However, to resume. Is there anything else you require before the yacht goes under?”
“Yes—hairpins,” said Miss Etherington unexpectedly.
“I’m afraid not,” said Gale. “The only cabins not under water by this time are the engineers', and engineers always have their hair bobbed, as you know. ”

“ Gale, as he scrambled up Point Garry. “Heaven help a man left alone on a desert island with a girl! And I actually thought it would make things easier! Flint axe, and all that. Why don't I—Hallo, hallo, hallo! Steady, my boy! Is wisions about?”
He had reached the summit of the bluff. There, two miles to the northward, slipping gently over the rollers under easy sail, he beheld a ship—a three-masted Schooner.
VI For a castaway, hungering for a reëntry into civilization, Mr. Gale's subsequent behaviour was peculiar. ”