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The hawthorn tree never bloomed here, the climate was that of eternal summer, yet the spirit of May came just as she comes to the English countryside or the German forest. The doings in the artu branches greatly interested Emmeline. The love-making and the nest-building were conducted quite in the usual manner, according to rules laid down by Nature and carried out by men and birds.
He sat down beside Emmeline, flung the canes beside him, tried the edge of the old butcher's knife with which he had cut them, then, taking one of the canes across his knee, he began whittling at it. "What are you making?" asked Emmeline, releasing the bird, which flew into one of the branches of the artu and rested there, a blue point amidst the dark green. "Fish-spear," replied Dick.
You have seen a field of green barley ruffled over by the wind, just so from the hill-top you could see the wind in its passage over the sunlit foliage beneath. It was breezing up from the south-west, and banyan and cocoa-palm, artu and breadfruit tree, swayed and rocked in the merry wind.
Only one bird remained in the branches of the artu: Koko's children and mate had vanished, but he remained. The breadfruit leaves had turned from green to pale gold and darkest amber, and now the new green leaves were being presented to the spring.
As they listened, a sigh came from overhead; the evening breeze had risen and was moving in the leaves of the artu tree. Just as you might wipe a picture off a slate, the breeze banished the sound. Dick went on with his work. Next morning early he embarked in the dinghy. He took the hook and line with him, and some raw fish for bait.
Usually she followed him a bit into the wood when he was going away like this, but this morning she just sat at the doorway of the little house, the necklace in her lap, following him with her eyes until he was lost amidst the trees. He had no compass to guide him, and he needed none. He knew the woods by heart. The mysterious line beyond which scarcely an artu tree was to be found.
There was not a breath of wind; the hush of the far-distant surf came through the blue weather the only audible sound except, now and then, a movement and flutter from the bird perched in the branches of the artu. All at once another sound mixed itself with the voice of the surf a faint, throbbing sound, like the beating of a distant drum. "Listen!" said Emmeline.
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.
She would lie and let him, seeming absorbed in some far-away thought, of which he was the object, then all at once her arms would go round him. All this used to go on in the broad light of day, under the shadow of the artu leaves, with no one to watch except the bright-eyed birds in the leaves above. Not all their time would be spent in this fashion. Dick was just as keen after the fish.
Upon the terraces of the gigantic altars, at either end, were deposited green bread-fruit in baskets of cocoa-nut leaves, large rolls of tappa, bunches of white bananas, clusters of mammee-apples, the golden-hued fruit of the artu tree, and baked hogs, laid out in large wooden trenchers, fancifully decorated with freshly-plucked leaves, whilst a variety of rude implements of war were piled in confused heaps before the ranks of hideous idols.
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