I remembered that morning when I had struggled into shore with the boy clingling to my back, his slim arms wound about my neck. I had noticed a peculiar sensation at the time; but in my state of waterlogged and bone-weary exhaustion, it had not registered clearly on my attention.
Now it came back to me as I lay there, wide-awake. I understood why Shann had displayed such shock and consternation, upon discovering me lying there naked in the sun.
As he clung to my back, his upper body had been pressed against my naked back and shoulders. And I, felt—not the smooth chest of a young boy—but the firm, pointed, shallow breasts of an adolescent girl.
Chapter 13.
JUNGLE LOVERS
During the next few days, Shann and I learned more about the nameless island which was to be our home for an indeterminate period.
Insofar as we could discover, it was completely uninhabited by human beings. Shann had climbed the tallest tree which grew nearabout; from an aerial perch aloft, my comrade had searched the horizon to all points of the compass. Nowhere had the girl descried the slightest tokens of human habitation. Not even the smoke of cooking-fires could be seen coiling up into the clear sunlit air.
The crude and rudimentary lean-to we had shared during our first night together on the island had proved sufficient to protect us from the elements; but it left much to be desired in the way of permanent accommodations. Working together during the long afternoons, we erected a more permanent hut; we constructed it of fallen branches trimmed to proper length with sharp shells or pointed stones. This provided us with the rough frame for a simple, two-chamber dwelling. The roof we thatched with palm-leaves, whose steins we tied to the roof-arch thongs made of dried grasses. The walls of this little hut were then covered by mats of rattan, which the nimble fingers of Shann wove from the stiffer fibers of the palm leaves. In this last task, I could not provide assistance, for my blindness made me clumsy; unable to see what I was doing, I made a botch of my every attempt at weaving.
Our diet consisted of nuts, berries and jungle fruit, which grew wild in the interior of the island; this we soon supplemented with bird’s eggs stolen from treetop nests, and with the tender and succulent meat of certain crabs and shellfish which were wont to scuttle about the sandy seashore, or which dwelt in the shallow waters of the lagoon. Here, again, it was Shann and not I who must provide our nutriment.
That the unequal burden of securing our foods must fall upon my companion in misfortune would not have rankled me as much as it did, had we truly been two young boys marooned together. But we were not; for Shann was a girl only a year or two younger than I, myself. Every civilized instinct and every scrap on chivalry and protectiveness within me cried out in protest, at the necessity of her fulfilling the masculine role in our existence.
There were other constraints produced by my knowledge of her sex, which knowledge I still concealed from her. For one thing, I now understood her reticence as to our sharing sleeping accommodations. Quite obviously, it was a violation of her modesty to insist we share the same bed of fragrant grasses. This made it necessary for us to divide the hut into two compartments. Moreover, there was the problem of bathing. Had Shann been truly a younger boy, as she pretended, I would have thought nothing of our bathing together each morning in the clear, warm waters of the lagoon. As things stood, however, I had to adopt a ruse to avoid such an intimacy; at the same time, I kept her from knowing my actual reason for declining to bathe in her company.
From this, my reader will deduce that I believed it only proper for me to pretend ignorance of her sex. I understood her reasons for the pretense of boyhood which she steadfastly maintained. When first she had rescued me from the waves, she had no way of forming an accurate estimate of my character or the degree of civilization which my forebears had attained. A girl, thrown together by circumstances with a healthy young male, would naturally fear certain advances against her modesty. For all that Shann knew, I was a lustful young savage from the nomadic mainland tribes who would force her to become my bedmate as a matter of course.
Thus I strove to protect her own modesty and allay any fears she might still entertain, by continuing the pretense of my ignorance of her true gender. The relief she felt at my pretense was obvious in her voice. While I am certain she came to respect me and enjoy my company during these first few days of our strangely primitive life together, I am equally sure that she would have continued her pretense of being a boy throughout our adventures together, if only to avoid any embarrassment.
We became very good friends. In fact, we became something closer and warmer than merely friends. Her tenderness and solicitude as regards my blindness, and my own chivalrous respect of her privacy; my deliberate avoidance of any further physical intimacies than were strictly necessary, wove between us a bond of comradeship stronger than would have been the result of shared perils and deprivations, had we been two boys castaway together in a savage, hostile environment.
For my part, I was possessed with a consuming curiosity as to her appearance. I listened eagerly to her warm, clear soprano, painting in my imagination a thousand tentative portraits of the mysterious girl-child who was my constant companion, night and day. The sound of her voice, dreamily singing a little song while she went about her domestic tasks, enthralled me. I drank in the liquid music of her delighted laughter at a jest or quip or circumstance. The slightest touch of her hand, or of her shoulder against mine, aroused within me a heady emotion I hardly dare name. Once, her long, silken hair blew across my face while we bent together over a shared labor; and the faint perfume of her nearness and the feathery caress of her floating locks choked me with joy. On another occasion, while assisting the girl to drag her captured shellfish from the shallows, her bare thigh brushed intimately against my own. The warm touch of her smooth, naked flesh aroused within me an intoxication so pleasant that I almost strove to sustain the contact a moment longer before recovering myself.
I believe my interest in her was returned; that the girl whom I knew only as a sweet voice with a name responded, perhaps against her own will or inclination, to my masculinity. At times as we conversed a warmth and intimacy stole into her voice, which grew gentle and husky with emotion. Now and again, when she extended her hand to assist me over some unseen obstacle, she seemed to prolong our hand-clasp beyond the moment of necessity; it was as if she, too, revelled in our physical nearness.
There could be no question about the fact that I was on the verge of falling in love with the unknown girl whose face I had never seen.
This was impossible, and I denied it vehemently to myself. For I loved another; my heart was pledged to Niamh the Fair until death severed us forever. So even as my pulses quickened to the nearness of Shann, even while I tossed and turned feverishly on my bed during interminable sleepless nights, torturing myself by trying to imagine her unguessable loveliness, I castigated myself for wandering into forbidden paths.
I would not—could not—be unfaithful to the exquisite Princess of Phaolon! Grimly I clung to that standard of behavior, striving to ignore the way my senses stirred and quickened to the touch of Shann, or the warm nearness of her young body. I became curt and even rude in my dealings with the girl, who was hurt by my mystifying attitude towards her, I am sure. Her tentative small gestures of friendliness, however innocent, I came in time to rebuff. Believing that her pretense of being a boy had gone undetected, she obviously did not understand why I so sharply turned away from the small tendernesses and the innocent gestures of friendliness. Had she truly been a boy, I would have welcomed it, in the loneliness of one blind like myself.