an adequate portrait of Roger Twining’s type. I don’t know what it calls
itself, but it is a young athlete, half in a gown, half out of it, with
a football under his arm and hockey shoes on his feet, with a Bible and
tennis racquets heaped vaguely against him--a symbolic presentment, I
take it, of young Kingsborough going forth to preach the Gospel to every
creature. A very nice person, that statue, but too heterogeneously
equipped. Twining, to the life: if he could once have got his
Polynesians to play basket-ball, he could have gone on, I believe, to
expound the Pauline epistles to them with fluent ease. For he was not a
fool, and he was the best fellow in the world. Only, you see, by
Twining’s time at Kingsborough (he graduated a few years after I did)
they had completely canalized religion between Y. M. C. A. embankments.
No one cared about categorical imperatives any more--not even Tug
Lambert when he was drunk. The statue is the expression of the
Kingsborough spirit which moulded Twining. For the very special trick
life was going to play him, he was a little handicapped by all those
implements of sport. They didn’t fit his fate. Variety without
complication--“muscular,” all of it. And Roger Twining was to be an
optimist caught by the Furies, a lad by no means Prometheus chained to
the Promethean rock. If it weren’t for the old Kingsborough
clannishness, I should be tempted to say that he was the seat of a
terrific tempest--and was himself only teapot size. But, then, I have
always stuck to the categorical imperative; and, while it is an open
question in my mind whether you can ever really convert a heathen, I am
quite sure that you cannot convert him with basket-ball. In that I side
with Aunt Miriam.
Twining himself felt something of it in those first discouraged days at
his remote, incredible post, where, by mismanagement at home and the
inopportune death on the high seas of the man who was to follow him at
once, he was for a time in sole charge. (You will have made out, I hope,
that he was a missionary.) As he put it to me petulantly one night on
his big verandah, “If I could only have worked backward instead of
forward, unlearned all the things a Christian child knows, acquired a
totem instead of a diploma!” He was coming to realize, and not without
regret, that basket-ball can never take the place of good, soul-shaking
ritual. Besides, the natives would not play basket-ball. They preferred
to spear fish, and get drunk of an evening, and smile as no Christian
has ever smiled.
Now let me get to work and abridge for you the preluding weeks.
Pure Kingsborough clannishness led Twining, when he found me existing,
tourist-fashion, in the best hotel on the island, to ask me to come up
to the Mission and pay him a visit. Pure Kingsborough clannishness made
it possible for me to accept; for, though we had plenty of common
acquaintance, we had never known each other, and missionaries are not my
tipple. They are like ginger-ale, neither intoxicating nor refreshing. I
had been in twenty minds about accepting, and finally I went up to see
for myself. Having seen, I stayed. The scene got me. I was new to the
South Seas.
I shall never forget how I found Twining, that first day, when I went to
return his visit. He was sitting on a palm-wreathed eminence, gazing
fixedly down a forty-five-degree slant of vegetation, at the huddle of
roofs whence I had climbed to his hill. Behind him, the wooden buildings
of his new compound gashed the dense, illimitable green of the jungle.
In a year or two the compound would be assimilated to the landscape; it
would be caressed, covered, crept over, by innumerable vegetable
parasites. But now it was a raw wound in the beauty of the forest. The
town lay a few hundred feet below. Beyond the roofs were docks of a
sort, and enough corrugated iron to prove that this paradise existed
commercially. Then the boats, the reef, and the ocean which took up the
tale of infinity where the jungle left it off. Twining sat there on his
volcanic headland, staring; and as I approached, a little pile of
cocoanuts toppled over on his left foot as he jerked it nervously. The
Chinese boy who had guided me to his retreat disappeared with the
merest grunt of announcement. Twining nodded, then picked up a cocoanut
and flung it petulantly down the slant of vegetation, in the direction
of the town. It grazed the green tree-tops for a second or two, then
dipped through the branches of a breadfruit and fell, no doubt, to earth
somewhere.
“A perfectly good cocoanut wasted,” I remarked, as I sat down beside
him.
“I’d like to waste a few thousands,” he groaned. “It would be a darned
good thing for these dwellers in Eden if they had to rustle a little
more for a living. On my word, I sometimes envy Sherry Spencer over in
China--rice-Christians and all. Sherry groans over the Oriental mind.
Heavens! It’s something you can get your teeth into, anyhow, even if it
bites back. These folk aren’t anything. They’re a law unto themselves.
No, there’re not; they’re just a set of privileges unto themselves.
Nature cockers them as if they were worth it.... Man, you can’t teach
the Gospel to a bunch of people who don’t want anything they haven’t
got. They don’t even regret the good old days of long pig.”
“Dying out, aren’t they?”
“Oh yes, and they’ll be Presbyterians when they’re dead, I shouldn’t
wonder.” And he kicked the ruins of the cocoanut-heap with a
white-canvas toe.
That was Twining’s state of mind when I first envisaged him and his
situation. I did not reply; I leaned back and looked, taking my ease;
for on this occasion I should have to decide whether or not to accept
his invitation. He did not interrupt my contemplation, even by shying
another cocoanut. I filled my eyes with the scene, my lungs with the
air, my heart with all that uncomprehended exotic implication. The
beauty was overpowering. Nothing that you could reasonably ask for was
omitted from the landscape. Mountain, gorge, and valley were assembled
in a hundred romantic contours; unseen torrents tinkled softly in my
ears; the trees and flowers were those of an emperor’s dream. A cool,
sweet trade-wind ruffled all that gorgeousness into life. And for the
last fillip, the thatched roofs below, constant hint that you were on
the threshold of something you could never hope to understand.... Down
in the town were officials, commercial travellers, beach-combers, men
“from Sydney” (sinister appellation), natives in corduroy
trousers--dramatic, full of plot for comic opera or a shilling shocker.
But I would eschew drama; I would live for a time on the unspoiled
heights.
Had I but known it, I was like a man with weak nerves refusing Stevenson
and taking to Sophocles. But I did not know.
“I’ll stay, thank you,” I said at last, and waved my hand inclusively to
suggest that it was to Nature I succumbed.
“Ripping, isn’t it? I’m so glad you will,” was Twining’s rejoinder. His
tone told me that he was glad, but the tribute to the scenery was merely
conventional.
So I came up and stayed with Twining and his aunt Miriam at the Mission.
I have, as well as I can, given you some inkling of Twining. You will
know more about him later. I must not, I suppose, take time to expound
Aunt Miriam, though I succumbed at once to her peculiarly American
charm. It is enough here to define her externally--a woman of sixty-odd,
with iron-gray hair, and a vast serenity which veiled her executive
type. She was not Roger’s aunt; she and her husband had adopted Roger,
who was an orphan, and it was her late husband, “Uncle Ephraim” (he,
too, in his time, a Kingsborough man), who had destined Roger to the
“foreign field.” Roger’s vocation was not spontaneous, you see; it was a
form of gratitude, an earnest of devotion; and that is important. Aunt
Miriam was there to see that he did his job; but she was especially and
chiefly there to help him through the months of his novitiate, to keep
his house until he got a wife (“helpmeet” was often Aunt Miriam’s word).
Then she would go back to her sisters in Illinois, to whom she wrote
long journal-letters. Aunt Miriam never went down the Mission hill to
the town. She knitted endlessly, and made calico clothes for those
native children whom the grim wolf with privy paw had not yet devoured.
And she would sit for hours, her writing-pad on her lap, gazing at the
summit of the volcanic headland where I first found Roger and had made
my earth-shaking decision. We had people to dinner now and then, and I
explored passes and ravines and caves while Roger was busy below us with
dark souls that matched the dark skins.
I stayed with them, as retrospectively it seems to me, an unconscionably
long time. I was a loafer, with my hands in my pockets, and I had never
seen anything I liked so much as this. I sketched a little; I dipped
into Twining’s folk-lore books; I bathed in cold mountain pools; I held
Aunt Miriam’s wool for her to wind. The place enchanted me in no
metaphorical sense. I can never hope to reproduce for you the unreality
of that island and its beauty. It was out of the world as I conceived
and knew the world; I hung, suspended in time, over the landscape of a
dream. There was no past or future; no relation, no claim, no human
plot. I might (as in childhood one dreams of doing) have been floating
on cirrhus clouds or treading the Milky Way. That is why this story
will never seem to me morbid.
From this fourth-dimensional world in which I moved and breathed I was
awakened, after many weeks, by the entrance of the heroine. Even then I
did not wake all at once, for the manner of her entrance was in keeping
with the scene. We were dining that night, Roger and I, with the British
consul, and we took a short cut through the jungle, instead of going
round by road. The trail was well marked and well used, but even so, the
wild guava clipped us close, and we tripped over the offspring of the
patriarchal bamboos. As we tore down the last slant, she
rose--materialized you might say--before our eyes: a white figure,
rounding a huge palm-trunk and standing suddenly before us. She was
laughing, under her wreath of orchids, and the juice of a half-eaten
mango rippled lusciously over her right hand.
She made no pretence of not knowing us, or of introducing herself. She
did not even say, “You are Mr. Twining and Mr. Malcolm, and I am Letitia
Quayle, whom you are to meet at dinner.” She merely greeted and joined
us. Nor did she apologize for the mango (which is a fruit without social
virtues), though she threw it away.
I did not know, just at first, how it affected Twining, for I was busy
feeling the pleasant shock of it to the full. She was artless and
exquisite as a dryad or as Virginia on the sands of Mauritius. She came
forward as if she belonged to us, as if we all belonged together in some
naïf legend. She did not break the dream. She was natural as the mango
that she flung away to rot beneath the bamboos. Perhaps I can describe
better the effect of her apparition if I say that my mind suddenly
became a reminiscent welter of _Atala_, _Typee_, and the like--though
she was fair as a lily.
It was I who made foolish talk until we turned into the consular garden.
Twining was dumb. Only as we climbed the steps of the verandah he turned
to her and asked, “Do you ever wear blue?”
“Constantly.” And the least shade of formality, of Europeanism, crept
over her face.
“I thought so.” He turned away and walked up to the consul.
My thoughts veered sharply to Aunt Miriam, above. Perhaps the “helpmeet”
was nearer than she thought. Roger was pale, his dark eyes had
recaptured their lost fervor, and an immortal curiosity sharpened his
fine features. Mentally, I withdrew on the spot. I devoted myself to
that eminent scientist, Professor Quayle, fellow of every society that
exists for the purpose of discovering the skeleton in the racial closet.
It was worth while. He was eclectic, as the great scientists are; he
knew a lot about anthropology, and could see the humor of a dinosaur.
His talk was delightful; negligently challenged by our host,
he became the Scheherazade of the Stone Age. Also he had been
everywhere--scientists are the pampered children of our generation--and
his metaphors were as good as his facts. If this be “shop,” I thought,
let me never hear anything else. Letitia had accompanied him to many
places far from trade centres, and joined in with eager anecdotes. A
curious education, I reflected, as I listened to her. She had never been
to Paris or Rome, but she was intimate with sharks and fruit-eating
bats, and the Falls of the Zambesi were to her a more familiar name than
Niagara. Fair, very fair, her blond hair growing in a widow’s peak;
young with the very essence of youth; a child, not of cosmopolis, but of
the planet. I let my eyes dwell on her in sheer pleasure, this girl of
strictly Saxon featuring, whose familiar allusions were to places,
people, food, and customs that I had never heard of. The only drawback
to my irresponsible delight (for, remember, I had withdrawn while yet
there was time--had taken a great backward leap before I reached the
threshold) was Roger’s silence. Though I had never witnessed the
phenomenon before, I knew what it was and what it meant: the stored
experience of the race had taught me this thing which I had never
seen--as you would recognize an earthquake the first time you felt it.
Love at first sight was its name; even before we reached the consular
garden Roger had handed over the key. So much beauty lies buried for me
in that South Sea isle to which I shall never return, and the most
beautiful of all things in that isolated dream, I now feel, was the
suddenness and completeness of Roger Twining’s surrender to the miracle.
They step through the pages of the great fairy-tales--the Dantes, the
Romeos, the Siegfrieds--and we watch and listen, and are moved to tears,
and go away disbelieving. But once in a thousand moons Life makes the
incomparable gesture for herself; and I shall always thank God, in spite
of everything, that I have seen love burst into complete flower in a
single instant.
Letitia? Well, she was a woman; she had her little part to play; and,
that evening, after his hoarse question (“Do you ever wear blue?” How it
rings, sinister in my ears, but sweet!) she played it. But he saw her
first stepping out of the forest as Virginia. Letitia Quayle was
complicated, yes. But what is more complicated than a flower? We prate
of the simplicity of Nature by way of disparaging the poor little
nursery subtleties of civilization. We are great fools. Letitia Quayle
was simple as a rose; and let the botanists say how simple that is. Now
you see what I mean. She was idyllically natural--and very complex. She
bloomed and glowed with perfect fitness at the heart of that tropic
jungle; she surprised us no more than a butterfly. But--simple? I stick
to my own theory.
In spite of her initial playing of the part, Letitia came to Roger
Twining very naturally. Professor Quayle was due to stay for a month,
investigating coral formations. Aunt Miriam lifted Letitia bodily from
the hospitalities below and carried her up to the Mission headland. I do
not know how else to put it, though of course Mrs. Twining never stirred
from the compound. There seemed to be no formal invitations; simply,
Aunt Miriam expected her, and she came. Roger and I would take her back,
late in the evening, after dinner. Mrs. Twining had seen, as I had seen,
and she wanted to be sure. I do not think it occurred to her that Miss
Quayle would refuse Roger. Nor did it occur to me, though never was
courtship less like courtships at home. Roger showed less ardor than
absorption; he went about the business of life as though Letitia were
the air he breathed. He took her, you would say, calmly; but she was the
basis of existence. When she was not there, he seemed to suffer dumbly,
like an animal. I could swear that for a fortnight he spoke no word to
her; yet if he had been visibly on his knees, his attitude could not
have been clearer. His Polynesians got drunk in peace, those days.
And Letitia? No girl in my world has ever treated a lover, declared or
undeclared, as she treated Roger. She turned to him for everything. We
picnicked in deep, vine-hung ravines above frigid and shadowed pools;
and I have seen her, without coquetry, without affectation, bend her
head forward to drink from a cup he held, or feed him a rose apple with
her own fingers. They clambered down exotic trails hand in hand, and
stood together like children to gaze at a waterfall. Not a hint of
passion; only that beautiful and calm clinging to each other. My
constant presence did not embarrass them; if it was Arden, I was their
faithful fool. Do you wonder that my dream was so long undisturbed, or
that, in spite of all that came after, I look back upon it as the most
beautiful thing in life--a thing (sometimes I desperately feel) that
fate should never have dared to touch?
The wonder of it is, of course, that that fortnight could ever have
been. Even I, completely obsessed with the notion that we were existing
outside of history, knew that it could not last like this. A breath
suffices to destroy so delicate a beauty. I knew the breath would come.
Even in tales, it always does. We pay tribute forever to the Eumenides.
All those enchanted days, Aunt Miriam said nothing. She left Letitia to
Roger and to me--though Letitia spent many an hour by Aunt Miriam’s
side, and God knows what they talked of. That Aunt Miriam’s was not the
first disturbing breath, I know. Sixty years of self-control had made
Aunt Miriam a marvel of a woman. She was, in this case, the more of a
marvel that she had no romance in her. I have been bitter, very bitter,
about it all; but, strangely enough, never, in my most sky-defying
moods, bitter against Aunt Miriam.
The disturbing breath came, as I knew it would and must; came when Roger
Twining’s cup spilled over and his passion declared itself. Disturbing,
at first, only in the sense that the manner of perfection changed; that
the tenderness quickened and flashed and kindled into a romance so
poignant that my eyes smarted in beholding it. By what slow gradations
or what swift transmutation, known only to their inmost selves, it came,
I cannot say. Though two people were never more meetly chaperoned, they
were sometimes alone; and I fancy that change could have become
conscious only when they were together in solitude. They came back hand
in hand from the volcanic headland where I had first found Roger
petulantly staring, and ranged themselves like decorous children before
Aunt Miriam and me. The flaming sunset was behind them; the sudden
twilight was already darkening the remoter corners of the verandah. Hand
in hand, with soft, awe-struck voices, they told us that they were going
to be married. It was the gentlest climax I have ever known, yet I felt
as if something perfect had passed away. The marvel, as I have said
before, was that the previous fortnight could ever have been. Roger
Twining fell manfully in love at sight; nothing but the perfect concord
of the two creatures could have kept him like a child with her just so
long as she wanted to be a child. You pay for concord like that between
man and woman--pay with sacrifices laid on the immemorial altar of sex.
Love itself is a fever; and, as if that were not enough, the irrelevant
world steps in to point out that marriage is a practical matter. With
love announced, the world, the flesh, and the devil troop in. Small
wonder that priests bolster marriage up with sacraments!
As luck would have it, Professor Quayle had gone, in a motor-boat, to
cruise for a few days among outlying uninhabited islands and far reefs
whence he could gather polypi at will. Letitia was under the nominal
chaperonage of the British consul’s wife, but it had been arranged that
she should spend a night or two at the Mission. To this Aunt Miriam now
objected. Letitia must not be her guest, she told Roger, until Professor
Quayle had sanctioned the betrothal. The flesh had come in, you see,
already, and here was the world. The devil got his innings later. Roger
affected to be shocked by the conventions--what true lover is not
shocked by them?--but Aunt Miriam was adamant. Letitia succumbed dumbly,
like a hurt child. It seemed wanton cruelty to part them. That Professor
Quayle should refuse Roger was incredible. It was mere superstition,
vain as any _tabu_. I took it upon myself to tell Mrs. Twining this; but
she did not move a hair’s breadth from her position. Until Letitia’s
father could give his consent, she would not have Letitia under her roof
as Roger’s betrothed. She owed it to Professor Quayle. So we took
Letitia down to the town again, instead of keeping her with us on the
heights.
The prohibition was purely formal, as even Aunt Miriam admitted, and
Letitia was at liberty to come each morning and “spend the day.” So few
of those days of prohibition there were--only three, all told, between
the engagement and Professor Quayle’s return. Yet, with their atmosphere
of trial, of waiting, we seemed to be taking something indefinite,
equivocal, painful, into our lungs with each breath we drew. Gone was
the happy oxygen of the idyllic fortnight. Sometimes I gazed up at the
low-hung stars and clenched my fists and vowed it shouldn’t pass; that
one instant should suffice for Quayle’s consent, and that then Letitia
and Roger should wander back hand in hand, for a time, to their Eden. I,
their faithful fool, would stand guard between them and the world.
Curiously, you see, I did not crave an immediate marriage for them; I
craved, rather, a return of the uncapturable days. Nothing had ever been
so beautiful as the fortnight of their idyll. Nothing--I set it down
with an unflinching pen--ever has been. I stand committed to that.
They stuck--the dears!--more closely to Aunt Miriam during those days.
The world and the flesh, as I was saying, had got in their work. They
were not so happy as they had been, though love was in every sweet and
modest gesture. I knew--don’t ask me how--that they themselves (even as
I, the spectator) were looking back rather than forward. Better,
infinitely, marriage than this; but, oh, best of all, the unreal days
forever past. Their ardor was the tenderest thing imaginable. Even Roger
seemed only to want Letitia’s hand to hold--quietly, peacefully, in our
presence. It was not mawkish, for there was no ulterior suggestion in
that simple, mutual caress. Friends, you would have said, if friends
ever had just that hunger. But I knew better than that, for my room was
next to Roger’s, and I knew how he paced his wide porch, sleepless,
through the night, and how he was never himself again until the morning
when Letitia came stepping through the garden, bringing calm with her.
They were bad, those three days of the professor’s absence, but so
cunningly arranged that each hour was tolerable, almost desirable,
compared with the one that followed it. In all that stillness and
sweetness, events progressed with catastrophic speed. It seemed as
though an unseen hurricane drove us on, though the Trade never ceased
its gentle rhythm.
It was the second evening, and the last savored hour before Letitia must
descend to the hospitality of the consul’s wife. Mrs. Twining stirred
the scented air with some faint rebuke of Roger for neglect of duty. He
answered, defending himself. Then Aunt Miriam turned to Letitia to make
her peace.
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t go down to the school to-morrow, my dear.
You can’t know too soon about the work that you will share if you marry
Roger.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t.” The girl stopped, as if to find a tone even
gentler than that first murmur of hers. “You see, I don’t believe any of
it.”
Aunt Miriam gave no sign of what must have been to her a terrible shock.
A strong woman, very. “You mean that you are not a Christian, Letitia?”
“A Christian? Oh no. I’ve never been to any church. Father has no
religion, and of course I think as he does.”
“You poor child!”
It must have been Letitia Quayle’s beauty that wrung this groan from
Mrs. Twining, for on matters of faith she was uncompromising. I felt
sick.
“Did you know this, Roger?” His aunt turned to him.
“It never occurred to me to tell him.” Letitia threw in. “Does it
matter, Roger?”
Twining answered, slowly, heavily, “Not the least bit in the world, my
dear.”
“You see.” The girl turned to Mrs. Twining. “He says it doesn’t matter.”
“But, Letitia”--Aunt Miriam faltered for an instant, then went on--“how
could you, an atheist, marry a Christian missionary? A wife must be a
helpmeet.”
I breathed more easily now that the fatal word was out; it had not been
pronounced before, and it was inevitable that some time it should be.