GEORGIANA AND DELORES
Samoa. _March_.
|IN respect to incisive logic, decision, and force, I have sometimes
thought that Susannah resembles Mrs. Ulswater. The characters of
both, in contact with my temperament, produce a harmony, thrilling but
agreeable. But then my temperament is a kettle drum. I have sometimes
thought that on a temperament more lute-like, the impact of Susannah
might produce--shall I say?--surprise. On the temperament of
Sadler,--melancholy and yet buoyant, intricate and yet simple,--the
impact of Susannah seems to produce sometimes extraordinary jubilation,
sometimes a condition quite the reverse. He calls her “a melojous
circus,” a phrase implying jubilation.
He is a man of moods, a contrast to the consistent placidity of Ram Nad,
the Occident to the Orient. Are they then supersignificant types of that
new world and that old? One of them turns to life's mystery a bold but
troubled face, and covers with a jocular and careless manner a soul
unreconciled. The toil and restless wandering of individuals, the
surging migration of races, the incessant change called progress,
are all but the symptoms of his feverish discomfort, his cosmic ill
adjustment? And the other, the Ram Nads, the old-world type, meek,
timid, tricky, placid, has it found at least, out of its age-long
thoughts, how to make its truckling peace with the mystery? C'est un
grand peut-être. Meanwhile the education of Susannah is the principal
enterprise of Mrs. Ulswater, Sadler, and me, to say nothing of Ram Nad.
It was my habit to read aloud from the poets, the divine Shelley, the
noble Tennyson, the golden Keats. Susannah's opinion of these poets was,
on the whole, scornful.
They appeared to her tortuous and deceitful. Their language was, she
thought, “mussy.” She did not believe they stated the facts.
Hence, if any one had asked me sometime ago whether I thought it
possible or likely that Susannah would bud, bloom, burst loose and
explode into song, I should have said: “No! Impossible! Susannah has all
the materials of strident criticism, but none of poesy.”
Nevertheless here lies her “Ballad of the Kings of Lua.” Here lies
moreover her tragic and profound “Ballad of Georgiana and Dolores.” What
can be said of them? First, this; that I take the immediate cause of
Susannah's explosion to have been Sadler. He has the lyric habit. He
composes as a rooster crows, whenever it occurs to him. He is apt to
state his mind in that form. The lyric habit is infectious; youth is
imitative; hence arise schools of poetry; hence Susannah's explosion.
But Susannah's gift is for the narrative, the reflective. She has not
the lyric cry. Hers rather are the forceful expression and the just
remark.
We left King Ogel at Sydney. He was pensioned by Sadler. He will
probably pass his remaining years in intemperate leisure. Mrs. Ulswater
did not think there was any prospect of working his reformation. He
was not a desirable orphan. My opinion was that Susannah was occupation
enough for an orphanage.
Of Georgiana Tupper, that reserved, that exclusive hen from the island
of Clementina, and of Dolores, that stricken cat from Lua, I am about to
speak.
It was the 13th of February. We were steaming eastward somewhat to the
south of the Loyalty Islands. The weather had been oppressive, the night
turned threatening, and by morning it was blowing a gale. I went on deck
to watch the watery phenomena. The sea was tumultuous and black,
the clouds overhead hung low and rainy, and the intense wind trailed
streamers of cloud across the sea.
Suddenly, as I stood there, a tall black column of water rose directly
ahead of the _Violetta_.
She swerved aside in answer to her helm, narrowly escaped disaster;
and that contorted and insurgent object, that careening maelstrom, and
insensate Charybdis, that water spout, went whirling by on the port
side.
But now, behold! the sea all about was columned with water spouts,
mushroom-shaped, their summits lost in eddying gloom--infuriate
smoke-stacks, roaring volcanoes waltzing on end--perpendicular
and intoxicated whales, bowelless of compassion, active and
voracious--gyrating black funnels of wind and water, full of exuberant
malice, full of demons of the nethermost deep striving to climb the
pendant and embattled heavens. Between the shattered sea and low
curtaining clouds, rumbled about us that tremendous warfare. Now and
again a spout would fall, broken like a pipe stem near its base, and
another heave up, grip the vapourish canopy above it, and come racing
over that chaotic ocean; through the midst of which forest of fluid
insanity and monstrous fungi of the sea--even as through some vast
cavern columned with maniac stalagmites and abandoned pillars of wet
combustion--we fled.
How long this condition of affairs lasted, I could not say. How we
escaped, Heaven and Captain Jansen may know. The seas now and again
swept the deck.
When we found ourselves at last with no water spouts anywhere near, and
the upper and lower world reasonably disconnected, Sadler and I went
below, where we found Mrs. Ulswater nervous, Susannah excited, Ram
Nad calm as a browsing cow. We discussed the experience. By night the
weather was fairly calm. Not till then did we find that Dolores and
Georgiana Tupper were missing.
In the forecastle, it had been supposed that they were aft; in the
cabin, that they were forward. They were nowhere. The minutest search
was in vain. From one end of the yacht to the other we went--from deck
to keel. None could remember having noticed them, except Ram Nad, who
stated that he had seen them on deck before the tumult arose. No doubt
remained then. They were gone. What could be said? What interpretation
could be put upon it? What other than this? that in endeavouring to
pass, during the storm, from the forecastle to the cabin, or vice versa,
they had been blown or swept overboard.
But why both? How, in particular, Dolores? Georgiana was but a hen; a
hen can be swept or blown; her anchorage is weak, her sail area apt to
enlarge with the wind; whereas Dolores was a cat, carrying four to five
anchors to each foot, and a sail area small under all circumstances.
What force then could have torn loose her desperate grapple? unless it
were--a pathetic possibility here--that, seeing Georgiana, the companion
and support of her bereaved existence, thus blown away, she had rushed
devotedly to her rescue; or--a still more affecting thought--that,
simply resolved not to outlive Georgiana but to perish with her, she had
cast herself after Georgiana upon the weltering deep.
When this last idea occurred to me, I sought Susannah and turned it
over to her. The first effect was unfortunate. Tearful, at the time,
she burst out weeping. Mrs. Ulswater said I ought to be ashamed. Sadler,
with mournful sarcasm, did not see why a man, because he was full of
ideas, had to slop over like a tub of soapsuds--surely a mixed metaphor,
a confused figure of speech.
Another idea occurred to me. It was that Susannah had the entire
sympathies of the _Violetta_ in tow.