South Pacific, _January._
|MRS. ULSWATER has collected more orphans.
There are, without doubt, many methods of selecting the beneficiaries
of a mission, asylum, home for curables or incurables, or similar
foundation. Mrs. Ulswater's favourite method seems to be what one of the
new orphans calls “a coopdeetat,” but she denies any such preference.
She says “It happens so.” That may be, and yet I have a feeling--a
marital weakness perhaps--that she has a sort of pull, a secret
understanding, so to speak, with circumstances. With the bait foresight,
and the rod discretion, she catches the trout accident.
Mrs. Ulswater, who first established over me a kind of Monroe Doctrine,
forbidding to other powers the annexation of any territorial portion
of me, followed it up by a species of suzerainty controlling foreign
relations; which having developed into something resembling the German
Empire,--that is, nominally an alliance, practically a solid entity of
control,--therein I rest, on the whole, patriotic and pleased.
A month ago my family consisted of Mrs. Ulswater, Norah the maid,
Susannah the orphan, Georgiana the hen,--both from the island of
Clementina,--and Ram Nad, a Cingalese pundit and fakeer, whom Mrs.
Ulswater had collected cavalierly--I admit, cavalierly,--who, after
the learning of his race, practised medicine, hypnotism, and sleight of
hand; whose medical ideas were ridiculous, his magic good, his status as
an orphan an acceptable probability; whose chief property was his wicker
basket, shaped like a truncated cone, with a flat cover on top, his
vade-mecum, his universal container.
All things he put into it, and there they disappeared. Many things he
took out of it. He was a bully magician, and looked something like a
prophet and something like a lamb.
Mrs. Ulswater was originally interested in foreign missions. Out of this
interest she developed a mission of her own. Her purpose was to
employ the _Violetta_ as a migratory orphan asylum, or mobile base of
operations, from which to scatter regenerative ideas; to sail about
picking up casual orphans perhaps, introducing neatness, good habits,
and practical housekeeping to the Pacific Ocean, rearranging haply
its populations and politics; a sort of slumming on the high seas, an
oceanic College Settlement. A stupendous idea! The Pacific Ocean was
much in need of Mrs. Ulswater. It is a loose, untidy ocean, a “Bohemian”
ocean with its far scattered islands, lunging seas, and idle solitudes.
“Brooms,” Mrs. Ulswater said, speaking of the islanders, “brooms, soap,
and taking pains, are what they need.”
An ominous phrase, “taking pains”! Is it a fact that not enough pains
are thrust upon us in the normal course of events, that we must acquire
“pains”?
I stumped Mrs. Ulswater with that question. Hadn't mankind enough pains
without taking pains? She said:
“The Kanakas haven't,” and then reflected. “People,” she said, “never
got civilised by having a good time.”
I fear that proposition is sound.