The Island of Regeneration | Page 2

landward
over countless leagues of seas. Back of her and on either side the
ground, gently undulating, was covered with the luxuriant verdure of
the tropics. The island was set in the blue of the Pacific like an emerald
bordered with pearls and sunk in a great sapphire of flashing light. She
would have time to grow accustomed to this scene. Through weary
days of staring seaward and longing for that which never came, it
would be imprinted upon her soul, etched upon her consciousness with
a graver's burin of unsatisfied desire. But for the moment the one object
of her faculties was the man. Before Nature, in Nature, throughout
Nature, the supreme interest is always in Man.
In her surprise, astonishment, admiration, and curiosity she even forgot
for the moment that she was hungry and that she was thirsty; that she
was starving for food and dying for water while she looked upon him.
She was not the first woman nor will she be the last to forget earth and
sea and every material passion while she looked upon a man. So Eve
might have looked on Adam, awakening in the primal dawn. Nay, from
his view point, so Adam might have looked on Eve at that selfsame
hour. For this woman had looked on many men; this man had seen no
woman but this at least since he clung to his mother's breast!
It was the man who broke the silence, as it had been the man whose
hard stare had broken the spell of her slumber although she knew it not.

He made that queer little chuckling noise in his throat which sounded
familiar enough, albeit she had heard it from the lips of no man before.
It meant nothing to her except that he who stood before her at least was
not dumb, although the noise he made was certainly no articulate
speech as she knew speech or could imagine it.
At any rate it was a stimulus to her. She opened her own parched lips
and strove to make reply, but her thirst, with a rising terror and
nervousness, made her dumb and no sound came forth. The man might
be preparing to kill her. He could do so, if he willed, she thought, but
she must drink or die. If she could not speak, she could make signs. She
leaned forward, raised her arm, hollowed her hand and dipped as if
from a well and made as if to pour it into her lips. Then she stretched
out both her hands to him in the attitude of petition. The man stared
hard at her. His brow wrinkled. It was such a simple sign that any
savage would have comprehended it, she thought, and yet it appeared to
her, watching in despair, that it took a long time for the idea to beat into
his brain. She could wait no longer. She rose to her knees and stretched
out her hands again.
"Water!" she gasped in a hoarse whisper. "Water, or I die!"
The man had started violently at her speech. Giving him no time to
recover, she went through the motion again, this time with greater
effect, for the man turned and vanished. She sank down on the sand too
exhausted to follow him even with her eyes. If he brought the water,
she would drink it and live; if he did not, she would lie where she was
and die. She did not care much, she thought, which would happen. She
had so sickened of life before she essayed that open boat, that she
believed it was simply an animal craving in her which would make her
take the water in case it should be brought her. And yet when he did
appear with a cocoanut shell brimming with clear, sparking liquid, she
felt as though the elixir of life had been proffered her.
She seized the shell with both hands, which yet so trembled that most
of the precious water spilled on her dress as she carried it to her
parched lips. This was good in the end, for if that vessel had been the
famed Jotunheim drinking horn, she would have drained it dry ere she

set it down. As it was, she got but little; yet that little was enough to set
her heart beating once more. Emptying the shell of the last drop and
with that keenness of perception which her long training had intensified
and developed, marking the while that it had not been cut clean by any
knife or saw or human implement, but was jagged and broken as if
from a fall, she dropped it on the sand and looked again toward the man.
He held in his hand fruit of some kind, she did not know what