Robinson Crusoe had had, as yet, little time to do more than leave
his footprints on the stretch of white sand sliding into the summer
seas of Car Nicobar, and the tide washed those out very quickly.
Wilder, lovelier, more brilliant were these islands than the
Andamans, while the Andamanese and the Nicobarese proved to be
separate races indeed, having no connection with one another.
Their very huts and canoes were secular in design. The Nicobarese
names, marking the different islands on the map, fascinated Ferlie.
Chowra, Teressa, Bompoka, Trinkat and Katehal of the Central Group,
and Great and Little Nicobar, with their satellites, Kondul and Pulo
Milo in the south, varied as to dialect in a language so primitive
that, as the Reverend Gabriel Jellybrand mournfully complained, there
seemed no words to express either "gratitude" or "forgiveness."
Which abstract nouns once eliminated from the Christian religion, his
sermons became uphill work.
For some years he had toiled in seclusion among this semi-civilized
yellowish flock, of whom it was said that, until Christianity came to
their territory, never one had been known to steal or lie.
Originally acknowledged to be of Indo-Chinese extraction, they were
Malayan-Mongolian in type; often above average height, well-made,
simple, lazy and cowardly, but very good-natured and polite to
strangers.
This, then, was the people among whom Ferlie and Cyprian came, with
their respective sons, to reflect upon the sequel to Eden's story and
decide what parts they would play in it themselves.
Gabriel Jellybrand accepted their arrival as a direct answer to
prayer, for he had been sick of a fever lately and very lonely. His
weak green eyes, rounded like marbles behind an enormous pair of
sun-glasses, protruded so unusually that Ferlie expected them to pop
out and hit her when she made clear her ambition to choose the
quietest corner of the quietest island and erect a row of Nicobarese
huts.
The padre invariably fought a losing battle with the letter "w."
"But there is no need to do that," he persisted. "The little
bungalow w-which the forest officer uses on inspection is standing
empty. There w-won't be enough beds, but if you say you've brought
hammocks--a most original idea!"
He led the way to the Settlement, clad in a cotton cassock, tied
round with a black cord which swung out and scourged anybody who
ventured too near him when he held up the garment to leap from rock
to rock, revealing an expanse of white cotton sock below a short
tussore trouser-leg.
From time to time he would lose his topee, and then a faithful
bodyguard of Baptismal Candidates, palpably prepared for total
immersion at any moment, would hasten to hand him a large khaki
umbrella, lined with green, which they took it by turns to carry
again after the topee had been recovered from the puddle or
overhanging branch which had claimed it.
"You might have warned us that he was a Comic Turn," Cyprian told
Haddock reproachfully.
"Describe him to me again at our next meeting," said the Colonel, for
whom Jellybrand betrayed a pathetically guileless admiration.
"Uncle Ricky has always had a number of the queerest friends," Ferlie
whispered. "Generally they are lame dogs who would have perished in
some one of the world's ditches but for him. This one, at any rate,
seems too nearly an imbecile to take any interest in the obstruse
riddles of our existence."
The jungle road, strewn with bamboo leaves, twisted them out on to a
cleared space among the coco-nut trees, where a tiny church, which
would have lost itself in an ordinary-sized drawing-room, stood on
stilts, as indeed, did everything in the form of a building, so that,
to reach the platforms on which they were built, it was necessary to
run up a short step-ladder.
The interior of the church was fraught with the pathos of primitive
endeavour. There was a crucifix, smothered in fading hibiscus heads;
a great many common candles, some of which were, nakedly, two
shortened corpses stuck one on top of the other to attain the
regulation length; a canopy of bamboo and coloured paper, enshrining
a Madonna with a broken nose imperfectly mended by means of hot wax,
which gave her a somewhat rakish appearance; the crudest of
moral-enforcing missionary prints; a framed St. Paul (after whom the
building was named) so literally "in the pink" as to impress one
instantaneously with his possible value in a football scrum, and--Oh,
lift up your heads!--a small shiny harmonium on which the little
padre had, in the course of a year, just learnt to accompany his
flock with one finger, though he had not yet given up hope of
bringing the other nine into requisition somewhen. For the rest,
they relied upon a catechist with a concertina, who knew seven hymns
which he performed in strict rotation.
"But now that you have come..." said Jellybrand, eyeing Ferlie with
eager expectancy. And she had not the heart to erect a barrier of
doctrinal differences, for her protection, between his hungry
enthusiasm and the harmonium stool.
"I see you have started a shop," said Colonel Maddock emerging from a
thatched fastness, wherein lay heaped up some yards of calico, red
flannel, a few tin pots and pans, coloured prints, packets of tea,
pounds of sugar and several bright glass necklaces.
"Oh, dear me, yes. W-would you believe it? Mr. Pell, here--w-where
are you, Mr. Pell?--a most unselfish person, w-who always acts on the
excellent principle that it is more blessed to give than to receive,
w-was left in charge of the shop w-when I w-was over at Nankauri,
visiting. And--w-would you believe it?--he gave every single thing
away w-without taking any coco-nuts in payment! Of course, the
people are ready now to let the Government start any number of
shops...."
Mr. Pell, hitching up the nether garments which were the outward and
visible sign of his inward state of grace, beamed urbanely upon the
newcomers.
"This," said Jellybrand, indicating a gentleman with a string of
cowrie shells about his middle and a battered English straw upon his
head, "is Friend-of-England, the chief of the village. He is not yet
a member of my little community though he w-wishes us w-well, I am
sure.
"A long w-while ago, he had forty devils extracted from him by the
menluana, or w-witch doctors, and it is hardly surprising that, under
their conscientious exorcism, he nearly died. All the men in the
village sat round him in a circle and on anyone's perceiving a devil
he pounced on it, w-wrapped it in a leaf, and put it in the corner of
the house.
"Every year, the Chief Commissioner, w-when he inspects us from Port
Blair, presents him w-with a suit of clothes in virtue of his
position; but he reserves them for festivals and always puts them
away w-when it rains.
"The two beside him are Mr. Corney Grain and Mr. Don Juan. The
traders coming to the islands give them those names in fun, but I
hope to baptize them soon and then they w-will be Peter and
Paul--much more suitable."
Ferlie wondered why.
A man with enormous calves supporting a very small body approached
the speaker confidentially and, presently, Jellybrand interpreted.
"This is James Snook. He and Friend-of-England have both, as you
see, got elephantiasis. A lot of them suffer from it--most
unfortunate. He w-wishes to show you his new house."
Encouraged to proceed, James waved the party towards a thatched
beehive supported on four rickety poles, seeming not to possess, at
first sight, either door or window. However, a ladder discovered
underneath the contraption vanished into a yawning hole, and Cyprian
and Ferlie braved this first, to fall gasping on to a palm-plaited
floor which bounded like a spring mattress beneath them. They could
not stand upright and there was a thick warmth of atmosphere and
almost total darkness until Mr. Snook removed a loose lump of thatch
from the wall.
In one corner of the room lay his cooking utensils opposite the rag
bundle on which he slept nightly, after blocking out all oxygen.
The walls were covered with works of art cut from any ancient
illustrated paper which had happened to fall into his hands from the
padre's stock. They were hung, for the most part, upside down, and
thus Pavlova waved mocking legs at a Mission print of Christ
crucified, into the Figure of which the enlightened James had
brilliantly bethought himself to hammer real nails.
Above, glared a garish painting on talc of a Hindu deity with six
arms.
Truly, Gabriel Jellybrand stood in need of that optimism which
accompanies the faith of all Heaven's "little children."
* * * * * *
The steam-yacht pushed off again with the evening tide, leaving
Cyprian and Ferlie wandering back from the shore, the coco-nut trees
chattering above their heads in the falling breeze. Occasionally she
picked up Thu Daw whose legs were not, as yet, quite to be trusted,
and would carry him away to the left or to the right, down slight
inclines into some cave of dark foliage.
"And is this Heaven?" asked John, following out some private train of
thought connected with Jellybrand and the concertina, the owner of
which could be heard practising in the distance.
"'Over the fields of glory,' you know, Mother, and 'over the jasper
sea'!"
"Not that Heaven, yet," said Ferlie. "This is more like the Garden
of Paradise in your Hans Andersen."
"I sometimes wish," said Cyprian, "that you and John were not so
inordinately well read."
"Anyway," finished John, after a thoughtful pause, "will I be let
sleep in one of them kennels to-night?"
"There! He has said it." Cyprian rounded on Ferlie. "I trust,
Ferlie, you are going to permit us the unromantic shelter of the
forest bungalow, but I have not really any hope. Of course, if John
honestly finds it coincides with his conception of the Simple Life to
share the couch of James Snook--but I noticed several holes in the
roof of the bungalow which should give primitive colour to the place
for our satisfaction and more holes in the floor, which intuition
tells me represent the overcrowded tenement lodgings of considerable
families of snakes and rats."
"Firstly," said Ferlie, "you are sleeping out of doors. We will
sling our hammocks between trees, under the mosquito nets. Secondly,
John, you are not so much as to enter a kennel without leave. I
don't know whether that elephantiasis is catching. Thirdly, an
educated man's intuition should assure him that snakes and rats
seldom dwell together in sunny amity."
"Scorpions, then," insisted Cyprian gloomily.
"Fourthly, a perforated roof cannot affect us until the Rains, and
there will be ample time before they break, should we still be here,
for you to have constructed us a model mansion with hot and cold
water laid on and clematis and cabbages before and behind
respectively.... Do I hear the sweet chiming of the village bells?"
"You do," replied Cyprian. "And, if I mistake not, shortly they will
be drowned by the pious fervour of the village choir."
When they emerged at the clearing the bell was, indeed, ringing to
Evensong.
Jellybrand had added a voluminous surplice and a limp stole to his
attire, but had raptly removed his white canvas shoes instead of his
topee, in absent-minded imitation of his parishioners.
A procession was forming outside the church led by Mr. Pell in the
capacity of cross-bearer; in fact, it was Mr. Pell's top-hat that
caused the padre to recollect that he was being reverent the wrong
end for the colour of his skin, before the red-breeched row of boys
proceeded to "survey the wondrous cross" in the highest key of which
the concertina was capable.
The Unsaved of the village were cutting bamboo decorations, in the
background, for a moonlight festival about to be held with the object
of securing a mate for a lonely demon, who had been bringing bad luck
to the community and was expected to depart in peace as soon as a
she-demon could be found to share his flitting.
Ferlie and Cyprian stood some way apart from the two groups of
worshippers while the crimson sunlight streamed across the stems of
the coco-nut palms, and stained the uplifted cross as its followers
passed, two by two, into the toy church and the last notes of the
hymn thinned into silence.
The words were dragged out painfully by the child-voices singing in a
strange tongue of a strange story, brought to them by strangers from
another land.
"His dying crimson like a robe,
Spread o'er His Body on the Tree;
Then am I dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me."
Ferlie left Cyprian among the lengthening shadows and, herself, moved
slowly across the sunlit space, and so up the wooden steps, into the
tiny forlorn mansion of God.
* * * * * *
By the time they had decided to settle the bungalow as their
headquarters, and making expeditions in the motor-boat to the
neighbouring islands whenever they desired complete isolation,
Cyprian, whose instincts for research had awakened with the cessation
of his ordinary work, brought Ferlie an oddly carved board covered
with paintings and punctured sketches.
"The padre calls these Henta. They are samples of the form in which
the Nicobarese preserve their legends, and I ask you to look at the
tangled thread of Christianity running through the whole. Jellybrand
has been explaining. The first man offended the Chief of the Spirits
at the instigation of the first woman. The Spirit's name, Deuse,
savours of the mission teaching by your Church. Here, you see Deuse,
in arresting _négligé_, surrounded by his cooking-pots, and below him
huts, trees, birds and dancing figures. Also mermaids and mermen,
because dugongs and whales are indigenous to these waters. The Henta
are made to please the iwi-ka, or good spirits, and to alarm iwi-pot
or demons."
"You are an inquisitive soul, Cyprian. Are you hitting at the
Missions, or what?"
"No. Except that, but for them, in this Eden we should have been
able to escape the story of the Fall. Apart from that teaching, the
people believe their origin dates from the time a shipwrecked sailor
was cast up on these shores with a pet dog. By her he had a son whom
she concealed in her leaf petticoat, or ngong, and this son, on
attaining years of discretion, slew his father and married his mother
to continue the race.
"Therefore, the young men wear a bow of coco-nut leaves on their
foreheads, representing the ears of the dog-ancestor, and all dogs
are well treated in her honour."
"And poor little Jellybrand is trying to replace their allegories
with ours? The one they will really appreciate will be Jonah and the
whale."
"The most ridiculous part of it all to me is the way that each race,
temporarily in power here, has striven to produce a different form of
Christianity. Think of the waste labour since 1756, after the Danish
Mission departed and was followed by the Dutch. When the Dutch
attempt at colonization failed, the Jesuits and Moravians were
inspired to try their luck till the British took over with Danish
consent in order to try and stop the piracy then rife in these
waters. But I don't understand Jelly's line, Ferlie. He is not a
Roman."
"In England he would belong to what was once known as the High Church
Party, but now has developed into Anglo-Catholicism. I can easily
imagine that his successor will probably have ultra-Protestant and
anti-Catholic notions and solemnly smash the pink St. Paul and the
battered Madonna which to-day are the pride of the converts."
"I think he is an amazing specimen," said Cyprian.
"I think he is an amazing duck.... And doesn't he just remind me of
a white rat!"
"Mother," and John broke in upon Cyprian's amusement, "I've found a
house and they say the man in it is going to have a baby. Come and
see how he does it."
Ferlie looked at him.
"The daily round and common task will furnish all you need to ask
here, I can foresee, my son," she told him.
"Dare we investigate?" asked Cyprian, when he had recovered his
gravity. "He may have discovered something interesting in the way of
a rite."
He had. The hut he referred to was, to the islanders, tabu, or
forbidden, since an unfortunate husband, about to become a father,
was imprisoned within it beside his wife, sharing her troubles by
sympathetic imitation. He was deprived of the luxury of a bath and
betel-chewing and, for some while before, he had not been allowed to
bind any objects together nor to attend feasts. Moreover, a whole
month must elapse, after the child's birth, before he would be
permitted to escape.
Friend-of-England, whom they chanced upon in the vicinity, described
the custom in much-broken English, and Ferlie managed to keep a
straight face while Cyprian examined the texture of coco-nut leaves
and wished, for the time being, that he had never been born at all,
or, at any rate, that nobody knew how.
"Ought John to discover these things?" he asked Ferlie later; "isn't
it spoiling his innocence rather young?"
She laughed at him. "I should be sorry to think that you had lost
yours in learning of them," she said. "Nature did not fall with the
Fall. But so long as Mankind is content to lie supine, including all
Nature in his own disgrace, so long will the serpent insinuate horror
into the man-made Eden."
"I suppose, in due course, you will interpret; but sometimes I do not
know whether to regard you as a totally unnatural product of
Super-civilization or merely a successful example of the triumph of
mind over matter."
He did not know, either, how to read the look she gave him.
"In a little while, my dear," she said, "you will be able to decide."
* * * * * *
The days fled by; long days of lethargic rest. The children had
grown popular with the Mission, and one lady member in particular had
attached herself to them as a kind of voluntary nurse. This left the
two Explorers time for longer expeditions round the islands than they
could have taken with John and Thu Daw.
One day they lost themselves in a more impenetrable part of the
forest, where ten yards of experimenting with paths was sufficient to
shut out the sky and enclose inexperienced travellers in a leafy
tomb. On escaping from it, stained and breathless, just as they were
beginning to think they had better make their peace with the
invisible heavens, preparatory to holding it for ever, they nearly
fell over the bank of an unexpected river.
Ferlie contemplated it awhile in silence and then turned deliberately
back a little way into the jungle.
"You can have that palm tree all to yourself," she told Cyprian.
But he was still attitudinizing, incomprehensive, on the bank of the
river when she returned in a somewhat scantily improvised bathing
dress.
"Ferlie!"
"Aren't you ready?"
The quiver of amusement in the challenge did it. He flung back his
head and laughed outright.
"Why not? But, oh, Ferlie, you are incorrigible!"
She was trailing her feet in the water when he joined her, forgetful
of all problems not directly connected with the cool green water.
"I shall dive off and swim to that log," pointing to one barely
visible near the opposite bank. "From there I shall encourage your
amateur efforts and proffer suitable advice."
Said Ferlie: "I shall be sitting on the most comfortable end of the
log long before your slow-coach head has emerged from the weedy
depths to be mistaken for a floating coco-nut by some water-fowl in
search of a raft."
But as she slipped into the water, the log on which they anticipated
basking rolled over without rhyme or reason into deep water. It
splashed lazily upstream breaking the green jade surface into a
million ripples before, having yawned in their faces with thoughtful
deliberation, it sank gracefully out of sight.
After an instant's smitten silence they collapsed backwards on the
soft mud above the bank, sobbing with relieved merriment.
"Which is the most comfortable end of him?" gasped Cyprian.
Cheated of their swim, they threw themselves on to higher ground and
stretched full length along the warm grass.
She was wet to her arm-pits and Digby Maur might have long sought a
more suitable subject for a River Nat.
The sense of comfort and physical well-being, as he lay sunning
himself, occupied Cyprian too completely for his attention to rivet
itself at once upon the near intimacy of her, outlined on an emerald
shield, defenceless in her slim fairness against his eyes.
Idly tossing twigs into the stream, one missed its mark and alighted
on her bare shoulder.
She smiled in absent acknowledgment, but her gaze remained fixed upon
the shifting reflections ahead.
He studied her then, with sleepy interest and, by the subconscious
link between them, was aware that she knew his attitude of mind to be
both puzzled and interrogative. He gathered that something was
busily revolving in her brain which she would not yet disclose.
And as the leaves above them made changing patterns upon his own
rapidly browning limbs, he forgot the scantiness of his attire and
this outright defiance of all safeguarding law which stood between
him and the whip of that Master Force from whose dominion she had
despairingly wondered whether Mankind would ever be free.
Once-known sentences in Greek intruded, word by word, upon his brain,
till the whole resolved itself into a fragment from Plato's immortal
Republic preserved fresh, since, on the earlier waxen tablets of the
mind, impressions remain cut singly and deep, though neglected for
long periods in the crowded years which follow:
[Illustration: Greek text]
He saw himself again, an angular youth still in the magic teens,
wrestling studiously with the paragraph; his sympathies completely
with Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and his subsequent bull-like attack
upon Polemarchus and Socrates, when, "playing the fool together in
mutual complaisance," they had expanded the drivellings of old
Cephalus concerning the abatement of his appetites into an
interminable and exceedingly toilsome-to-translate discussion on the
nature of Justice.
Words, words, words, thought Cyprian, now as then. The ancient
writers of all nations might philosophize and analyse and theorize
through pages of intellectual war, but still Justice struggled to
dwell upon this globe, and still the Frantic Master scourged men on
to deeds which drove her out. With what object? The perpetual
propagation of a mortal race, apparently doomed (while the chemical
atoms of mud and water to which they clung, held together) to blind
burrowings for some Philosopher's Stone upon which might be engraved
the key to their existence.
Always that awareness, stifling their half-developed senses, of
bodily decay and rotting death, mental and physical, till the spirit
cried out like a terrified child in the imprisonment of a gradually
enveloping Darkness.
Was it wonderful if the mind strove to drug realization of the
conditions under which it existed by resorting to fruitless
accumulation of metal and mummified matter, materially precious only
because so far as Man knew, there was not enough of it to go round?
Was it wonderful if, wearying of this empty labour, he passed from
the opium dreams of wealth to the cocaine illusions of power over his
fellows, or acted yet another part, inebriate with meditation upon a
solitary mountain top, or grovelled in a secret cave, denying access
to any who might wish to awaken him from dreams to cold reality once
more?
Was not the ascetic, hugging and hoarding his visions, as useless a
product as the miser hugging and hoarding his gold?--and the mystic,
luxuriating in a religious mirage, as much a glutton for prayer as
his Epicurean neighbour might prove himself a glutton for pleasure?
What did he, himself, desire of the gods that be, asked Cyprian.
Ferlie? And of Ferlie, what? Her white limbs entwined in his, ever
and anon, throughout the years, in the thirsting hope that much
yielding to a fitful and passing emotion would so unite him with her
Being that nothing could separate them again?...
"For sudden ... a peace out of pain...
Then a light, then thy breast,
Oh, thou, soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!"
Not this way lay the road to that satisfied unity. And she knew it.
God, yes! How terribly well she must know it! He, in Thu Daw, she,
in John, had yielded to the Earth that heritage it demanded of all
living creatures which crawled upon its face. They had added their
quota to Creation, lest Life perish here before its incomprehensible
purpose should have been fulfilled.
Was another life required of them to perfect the love they bore one
another? All life is by no means conceived in love. Did not that
which was weigh more precious in the scales of Eternity than any
conceived in duty to the natural law of a source called "God"? And
yet ... out here, where one could almost listen to the pulses of
Nature beating, unregulated and unquickened by the fevers which dull
the senses of Earth's normal sons and daughters, how had these
barriers melted which the crowded places interposed between his Self
and Hers? What law but the natural one was good in the eyes of
Nature's Creator?
And Nature bade him reach out to her his starving arms. He stirred
among the shrivelling strands of fibre, strewing the turf, and sat
up, clasping his hands about his knees.
Still she did not look at him, and savagely he tore in imagination at
the filmy veil barring him out of her dreams.
But she spoke, dispassionately as an oracle, from her strongly
splendid aloofness.
"Think it out a little further, Cyprian, before you decide."
He felt the Master's lash about his body; and was stung by it to
sharpened understanding.
Deliberately and fearlessly, Ferlie was challenging his faith. By it
she would rise or fall.
If it drove him along that path of desire which led but to the grave,
she would follow because her own will was pledged to his, "through
all the beauty and all the loving of the eternal years...." She did
not believe that this momentary impulse was grounded in his faith.
He saw, as in a drowning panorama, all the forms of all the
acknowledged great lovers who had staked their gift of life upon
Desire and, with the fading of that frail rainbow thing, had
discovered themselves upon the edge of the burnt-out desert, Age,
beyond which flowed only the bitterly black waters of Death. With
the inexorable tread of the years Ferlie and he would be dying slowly
before one another's watching eyes. The end must come in sweating
battle with the impotency of those same bodies, glowing now in the
deceiving radiance of a sun which would, some day, itself be
darkened. Of what avail then the agonizing vows, sealed lip to lip
in the sheltering purple shadows of dead nights whose beauty was now
a scorching memory to contrast with the starless darkness of the
opening tomb? (Ferlie had always been able to visualize that tomb.)
There must be some other fulfilment for the love which has kept watch
o'er its immortality. Some other road than this, along which the
faithless "Little Ones" had stumbled with bleeding feet down the
revealing arches of the years.... One was risking all for a
shadow.... But as one saw the shadow it was that of a very mighty
reality.... Behind every shadow there must be a substance. Ferlie
had decided that herself ... already. In this, it was, fairly, hers
to lead.
"Lead on," echoed Cyprian aloud of his heart, remembering when she
had used the selfsame words to him.
She put out, to touch his, a hand still cool and damp with undried
crystals of moisture.
"It is extraordinary to remember," she said, "that the crocodile had
probably never set eyes on a human being before. There is,
practically, no animal life in these forests, so Jelly told me,
except pigs and birds. In the interior there are rumours of bison
and, of course, the hamadryad we have always with us."
"Yes, your Garden of Paradise is certainly not serpentless," Cyprian
answered, a note of amusement now in his voice.
She got up and shook the clinging twigs from her hair.
"I am dry. I must go and dress. The one thing which calms my fear
of serpents is a discovery that if you keep still when they are
about, and leave them alone, they invariably leave you alone."