THREE DAYS.
Business over, our pleasures begin. They are to stay only three clear
days in all, and we must make the most of them, putting as much into
every precious hour as though it were to be our last of joy.
We visit the ship. She invites us to a party, puts on a little bunting
for the occasion, and fires a gun. Everybody goes. The Captain is
aboard, and makes believe he has never been ashore, shaking hands with
us as we climb the side, though he left us but an hour ago. He wears
his cocked hat and epaulettes, by special request; his officers, too,
have not been sparing of their best. His crew, subdued to the most
mealy-mouthed propriety of speech by such glimpses as they have had of
the Island life, entertain us with a concert. It is the forecastle
fiddle and accordion, with the repertory of the cockney music-halls.
This last seems to lose vitality on our pure uplands, and to gasp
for the breath of its native fen. Our good folk listen to ‘Blow me
up an apple-tree,’ or ‘Did ’em do it, did ’em, did ’em did ’em do?’
believing it must be right, because it is English, yet beginning to
doubt--not us, however, but themselves, beautiful first form of the
doubt of candid souls! Some of the songs are too far away from them
for even the glimmerings of comprehension--the humour of the mere
sordidness of life. ‘Penny paper-collar Joe.’--Well, they wear no
collars; consequently, they make no paper imitations; consequently,
these cost neither a penny nor a pound. For the same reason, ‘O father,
dear father, the brokers are in!’ leaves them stone-cold. ‘What are the
brokers?’ whispers Victoria to me. How curious to have to expound these
elementary things! ‘Hush, Victoria, not now--when they are gone--it
would take all day. Listen to the ballads of the people.’ Next it is a
fantasia of punning effects:
A sloth is not an idol;
A bride can’t wear a bridle,
Though surely by the (h)altar she is led;
Sixpence is not a tanner;
A bridegroom’s not a banner,
Though the banns he will put up before he’s wed.
I tremble: a little more, and the whole secret will be out, of the murk
of mind in which so many of our brethren live, while Lord Tennyson is
at the tailor’s about his ermine, and dilettantism attends its monthly
meeting of the Browning Society, and leaves them in their pen. A little
more, and they may suspect that beauty and taste are all grown for
Mayfair by the Jews, just like the big pine apples, and that the poet
himself is but one more market gardener for the rich. This lyre of the
slums threatens to kill the whole pageant; these sewer gases seem to
tarnish the gold lace on the Captain’s hat.
‘How nice it must be to have your English sense of humour,’ says
Victoria, ‘and to be able to enjoy all these funny things!’
Saved! Once more they have taken the blame upon themselves.
We wander over the ship; admire the cutlasses in their racks; fit
our heads in the muzzle of a big gun, gravely waiting our turn in
file, under the orders of a corporal; eat cake in the Captain’s
cabin, refuse wine; see everything, ask foolish questions everywhere.
Never-to-be-forgotten day! A tar dances a hornpipe for us; three of
our girls dance the rhythmic dance of Tahiti for the tars. The Captain
asks questions about it, and takes notes, always in view of that report
to the Lords of the Admiralty. Some of us are photographed--no, it is
getting too maddeningly gay! The Ancient looks grave, and gives the
signal for departure. The cutters are lowered; the little whaler takes
its freight again; the boats dance us home in the dusk. It is not all
over yet; they send up a rocket and a blue light, to say ‘Good-night,’
as we step ashore. Never-to-be-forgotten day!
And there are more such days to come--days when it is our turn, once
more, to do the honours. Our girls take the distinguished visitors over
the Island--to the cave of the Carvings, the cave of the Watcher, the
Point--tending them carefully on ledge and summit and declivity, as my
nurse tended me. They try to do without such guidance, and come to
grief over it, figuring as meanly as the sinking Cæsar crying for help.
The water sports are just as disheartening. What stoutest man among
us will follow this sea-nymph, in her sea toilette, plunging into the
breakers with a plank in her arms, diving and ducking till she comes to
the far side of the hugest wave, then lying flat on the curling crest,
and rolling in with it, till it breaks in thunder on the rocks? Always,
after the explosion, you look for a mangled body, and you find only a
laughing Venus, rising whole and perfect from the foam.
Nature herself smiles benignly on the festival, and contributes to
it with great sunsets that touch the summits of grove and mountain
with indescribable beauty, and harmonise into perfect peacefulness
of association even the tumult of the breakers in their everlasting
strife with the shore. There are fishings by torchlight, later on, in
the intense shadow of the rocks; above us, the coruscating wall of
rock towering to the moonlit heaven; below, the deep, deep water, all
black and horrible beyond our tiny circle of flame. The cod flock to
the light, like their betters, and get speared with a five-pronged
fork for their pains. The girls, who are deftest at the exercise,
look not unlike Britannia on the halfpenny, as they sit at ease with
their forks, waiting their turn. Now, we paddle out of the shadow into
the silvered sea, and so ashore to the green. Then there is another
concert (ours this time), with simple songs of meeting and of parting,
mostly of the schoolmaster’s writing, quired by the voices of virgins,
and, with such rendering--the scene and the hour also taken into
account--pure intuitions of the deeper significance of life. Impossible
to doubt, after this, that the spirit is to be lord of the house; that
living is the finest of the fine arts, or nothing; and that such is the
message, delivered through Nature, of the Unknowable behind the Nature
veil.
The Ancient is thoughtful all the while, thoughtfullest at the hour
of the breaking-up of this great council of the soul, when the
councillors wander away in pairs, and are lost in the radiant hazes
of the night. It is the last council--to-morrow they go. Our Chief
has led the way to his cottage, and has asked the Captain to step in
on his way home. ‘I wish you gentlemen might never come here,’ he
says pleasantly to his guest, ‘or, if you come, I wish you might never
go away. It is a moment’s pastime for some of you, but, one way or
other, it lasts some of us a lifetime. “Jack ashore”--I’ve heard of
him from my father’s father; but then he goes ashore so often. Our
girls never forget--that’s their nature. I’ve known ’em die, sir, of
these visits of a Queen’s ship. They think it’s only a beginning--your
youngsters think it too, Captain, while the moon shines--I _know_
it’s an ending, for ever and ever. They’ll never meet again, sir, in
this world--although, at this very minute, perhaps, they’re a-cutting
love-knots all over the place to make believe they will.’
The incidental reference to the love-knots seemed to have set him on a
new track of reflection. ‘It’s a pity to spoil the trees for nothing,
all the same,’ he murmured, ‘and, if you’ll excuse the liberty, I think
I’ll just have a look round.’
He stole out to watch the public property; and, by his orders, no
doubt, Victoria, who had lingered in the garden, came in to entertain
the guest. Yet Victoria said not a word. She had been unlike her old
self all the time of their stay; she had become pensive, melancholy,
retiring, joining in none of the diversions, only looking on, or
languidly asking a question now and then. I felt what service she
required of me, and made the talk--no very difficult matter, for the
Captain and I had many acquaintance in common. He knew some of my own
people, besides, and was able to tell me that a young pickle of a
cousin, who had taken to the Navy, had lately joined the ‘Tanis’ for
service on the China station.
‘The “Tanis” was here three years ago,’ said Victoria, very softly, but
looking up at the Captain, I thought, in a rather wistful way.
‘I know she was; I boarded her at Portsmouth, when she went out of
commission. They all talked of nothing but your little Island, and made
me long to come here.’
‘You knew the midshipman of the “Tanis,” perhaps,’ said Victoria, still
with her peculiar ‘inward’ air. ‘Where is he now?’
‘What midshipman?’ the Captain very naturally asked.
If Victoria knew the name, she did not care to give it. ‘He was a tall
young gentleman,’ she said with more animation, yet with a pause to
give the Captain time to collect his thoughts after each item of the
inventory; ‘fair--a quick way of speaking--a pleasant laugh. If you
ever heard him sing, you would be sure to remember him.’ The Captain
shook his head.
‘He fought the battle with the slave-dhow, on the west coast of Africa.’
‘What battle, my dear girl?’
‘_The_ battle,’ she repeated.
‘Do you mean he was in a boat that ran down one of those rascally
traders? We do that every day.’
‘He won the battle, that’s all I know,’ said Victoria. ‘He told me
so. I believe they called him “Curly” in the mess, because they were
jealous of his hair,’ she added, blushing to find herself forced into
these particulars, but determined to have him recognised.
‘Curly,’ mused the Captain, doing his very best--‘can’t say I know the
name.’
‘He wore a dirk to fight with,’ said Victoria.
‘They all wear dirks,’ returned the Captain.
‘His laugh was so pleasant!’ She was repeating herself beyond question,
but, perhaps, it was only to give the Captain one more chance.
‘No doubt, no doubt!’
‘Yet some liked his smile better.’
‘Some like one thing, some another,’ said the Captain--feebly, I
thought, but he was hard pressed.
‘I suppose they all wear buttons like this?’ she said, producing the
uncouth ornament from her neck.
‘Yes, one middy’s button’s like another middy’s button, you know;
that’s the worst of it,’ said the Captain; ‘and it’s just the same
with their dirks and their heads of hair. They seem to turn all the
young dogs out of one mould. I think they ought to be stamped for
identification.’
Victoria withdrew into the shade of the room.
The next morning was the last morning; yet who would have guessed it?
It began just as the others had begun, with early wanderings on the
breezy hills, with laughter, with the giving and taking of tokens. It
went on like the other mornings, only now the ship had landed the last
of our simple stores, and her boat was waiting to take her people off.
She was to fire a Royal Salute, as she left us, by particular request,
and to hoist the Royal Standard, and man the yards. The girls seemed
merrier than ever at the prospect of it. The Captain, at the head of
his officers, stood at the landing-stage; the Ancient faced him, with
his smiling subjects in the rear. There was but one more ceremony,
and it was accomplished when the two grasped hands, as the boat, now
freighted with our departing guests, with one strong shove, left the
shores of the Island.
Then, for a truth, the womankind seemed to feel that it was parting,
and a cry went up from them as blood-curdling as a cry of ‘Murder!’
heard in the night. It was the fatal gift of intensity in extremes
common to these southern natures. The place of gladness was, in a
moment, turned into the place of grief; they threw themselves on the
ground, and bit their dishevelled hair; they stretched supplicating
hands towards the boat. It was a tropic storm of woe. Never had I
seen such utter abandonment of the very hope of hope. It made one
sick to think of the pain there is in the world--the pain that clings
like a shadow to every joy, and that sets its seal on every decisive
fact of being, from birth to death, on the going out, equally with
the coming in, as though to forbid all false comfort in the belief of
mere alternation. For alternation there is not; with a wail begins the
dismal account of human experience, and with a groan it ends, whatever
may come between. Poor wretches! bloated out of all beauty with the
water of their tears, I could have killed them as they grovelled there,
for very rage of pity. Anything to stop these dreary sequences of
sorrow. The three days of beatitude are past; and, for the promise of
all the coming years, listen to the Ancient as he turns away:
‘Never again with thee, Robin!
Never again by the light of the moon.’