The Island of Regeneration | Page 4

such as women carry. It had been elaborately fitted with
bottles and mirrors and toilet articles. Alas, it was in a sad state of
dilapidation now. The bottles were broken, their contents gone. The
bag had been lying in the boat when it had been hurled on the barrier in
the night, and the same storm and tide which had borne her ashore had
cast it also on the sand. It had come open in the battering and its
contents were pitiably ruined. With eager eyes and fingers she
examined everything. She found intact a little mirror, a pair of scissors,
a little housewife, which was not a part of the fittings, and she
wondered how it failed of being washed away, two combs, and a
package of hairpins.
She had fought against starvation and thirst and loneliness and despair
as she had fought against men, and she had not given way. She had set
her teeth and locked her hands and endured hardship like the
stoutest-hearted, most-determined soldier in the history of human
struggles. But as the realization of this small misfortune burst upon her,
she sank down on the sands and put her head in her hands and sobbed.
Tears did her good. She had her cry out, utterly unhindered, for the man
stood by, shaking his head and staring at her and making those strange
little sounds, but offering in no way to molest her.
The water was beautifully clear and she could see on the other side of
the barrier the remains of her boat. Perhaps some time, if there were
need, she could get at that boat, but for the present all the flotsam and
jetsam of her wild and fearful voyage lay in a water-soaked bag full of
broken glass and battered silver from which she had rescued a pair of
scissors, a mirror, two combs, a housewife full of rusty needles, and
some hairpins. O vanitas vanitatum!
She was wearing a serviceable dress of blue serge with a sailor's blouse
and a short skirt. Putting her precious treasure trove within the loose
blouse and carrying the battered bag, which she meant to examine more
carefully later, she turned and made for the shade of the trees again. For

one thing, the sun, rising rapidly, was gaining power and beating down
with great force upon her bare head. She had enjoyed the protection of
a wonderfully plaited straw hat on her long voyage, else she could not
have borne the heat, but that, too, was gone.
As she walked inward, she noticed again off to her right that stream of
water which dropped over the tall cliff in a slender waterfall making a
sweet inviting pool at the base before it ran through the sands toward
the sea. She made her way thither and at the brink knelt down and took
long draughts of it. Eating and drinking evidently went together in the
mind of the man, for when she raised her head, she found him standing
before her with both hands filled with some of the fruit she had
partaken of before and other fruit. She thought she recognized the
breadfruit and a species of banana. At any rate, she ate again and,
having by this time recovered to some extent her mental poise, she ate
sparingly and with caution.
Then having satisfied her material needs, she knelt down by the stream
again and washed her face and hands. How sweet was the freshness of
that water to her face, burned by the sun and the wind and subjected for
a long time to the hard spray of the briny seas! She would have been
glad to have taken off her clothing and plunged into the pool, to have
washed the salt of days from her tired body, to have had the stimulus
and refreshment of its sparkling coolness over her weary limbs. But in
the presence of her doglike attendant this was not yet possible.
Still she could and must arrange her hair. Of all the articles in her
dressing bag, she was more fervently thankful at that moment for the
combs than anything else, the combs and the little mirror and the
hairpins -- small things indeed, but human happiness as a rule turns on
things so small that the investigator and promoter thereof generally
overlook them. And we know not the significance of the little until
upon some desert island we are left with only that.
Washed, fed, and dressed -- for it is astonishing the difference that the
neat coils in which she arranged her hair made in her appearance -- and
now in her right mind, she rose to her feet. As she did so, as an
experiment, she handed the man the little silver-backed mirror. He

stared into it