"On the contrary," said Gardiner, "lightning very often strikes twice in
the same place, and often three times. The so-called all-wise Providence
is still in the experimental stage. My grandmother, for instance,
presented my grandfather with fifteen children: seven live sons and
eight dead daughters. That's when the lightning had fun with itself. And
when the epidemic of ophthalmia broke out in the Straits Settlements,
what class of people do you suppose developed the highest percentage of
total loss of sight in one or both eyes?--why the inmates of the big
asylum for the deaf and dumb in Singapore: twenty per cent of those poor
stricken souls went stone blind. Then what do you think the lightning
did? Set the blooming asylum on fire and burned it to the ground. And
then, I dare say, the elements retired to some region of waste, off in
space somewhere, and sat down and thundered with laughter. But it wasn't
through with the deaf and dumb, and blind, and roofless even then. It
was decided by government, which is the next most irresponsible
instrument to lightning, to transfer the late inmates of the asylum to
a remantled barrack in the salubrious Ceylon hills; and they were put
aboard a ram-shackle, single-screw steamer named the _Nerissa_. She was
wrecked--"
"Coast of Java--in '80, wasn't it?" said Pedder, who has read nothing
but dictionaries and books of black-and-white facts and statistics in
the course of a long life otherwise entirely devoted to misdirected
efforts to defeat Colonel Bogey at golf.
"It was," said Gardiner, "and the lightning was very busy striking. It
drowned off every member of the crew who had any sense of decency; and
of the deaf and dumb passengers selected to be washed ashore a pair who
were also blind. Those saved came to land at a jungly stretch of coast,
dented by a slow-running creek. The crew called the place Quickstep
Inlet because of the panicky and inhuman haste in which they left it."
"Why inhuman?" asked Ludlow.
"Because," said Gardiner, "they only gave about one look at their two
comrades in misfortune who were deaf, and dumb, and blind, and decided
that it was impracticable to attempt to take them along. I suppose they
were right. I suppose it _would_ have been the devil's own job. The
really nasty part was that the crew made a secret of it, and when some
of them, having passed through the Scylla and Charybdis of fright and
fever, and foul water, and wild beasts, reached a settlement they didn't
say a word about the two unfortunates who had been deliberately
abandoned."
"How was it found out then?" Pedder asked.
"Years and years afterward by the ravings in liquor of one of the crew,
and by certain things that I'd like to tell you if you'd be interested."
"Go on," said Ludlow.
"The important thing," said Gardiner, "is that the pair were
deserted--not why they were deserted, or how it was found out that they
had been. And one thing--speaking of lightning and Providence--is very
important. If the pair hadn't been blind, if the asylum hadn't been
burned, if the _Nerissa_ hadn't been wrecked, and if the crew hadn't
deserted them--they would never in this world have had an opportunity to
lift to their lips the cup of human happiness and drink it off.
"The man did not know that he had been deserted. He vaguely understood
that there had been a shipwreck and that he had been washed
ashore--alone, he thought. When he got hungry he began to crawl round
and round with his hands in front of his face feeling for something to
eat, trying and approving of one handful of leaves and spitting out
another. But thirst began to torment him, and then, all of a sudden, he
went souse into the creek that there emptied into the sea. That way of
life went on for several days. And all the while, the woman, just as she
had come ashore, was keeping life going similarly--crawling about,
always near the creek, crossing the beach at low tide to the mud flats
and rooting among the mollusks, and stuffing herself with any kind of
sea-growth that tasted good enough. The two were probably often within a
few feet of each other; and they might have lived out their lives that
way without either of them ever having the least idea that he or she was
not the only human being in that part of the world. But something--pure
accident or some subtle instinct--brought them together. The man was out
crawling with one hand before his face--so was the woman. Their hands
met, and clinched. They remained thus, and trembling, for a long time.
From that time until the day of their death, years and years later, they
never for so much as one moment lost contact with each other.
"Daily they crawled or walked with infinite slowness, hand in hand, or
the arm of one about the waist of the other--neither knowing the look,
the age, the religion or even the color of the other. But I know, from
the only person fitted to judge, that they loved each other tremendously
and spotlessly--these two poor souls alone in that continuous,
soundless, sightless, expressionless night. I know because their baby,
when he grew up, and got away from that place, and learned white man's
talk--told me.
"He left Quickstep Inlet when he was about fifteen years old, naked as
the day he was born; ignorant of everything--who he was or what he was,
or that the world contained anything similar to him. It was some
restless spirit of exploration that smoulders I suppose, in every human
heart, that compelled him to leave the few hundred acres of shore and
wood that were familiar to him. He carried with him upon his bold
journey a roll of bark, resembling birch-bark, upon which he had
scratched with a sharp shell the most meaningless-looking lines, curves,
spirals and gyrations that you can imagine. He will have that roll in
his possession now, I expect, for even when I knew him--when he was
twenty years old, and could talk English pretty nimbly, he could hardly
bear to be separated from it--or, if he let you take one of the sheets
in your hands, he would watch you as a dog watches the person that is
about to give him his dinner. But he ran very little risk of having it
stolen. Nobody wanted it.
"He must have been a gentle savage, with all sorts of decent inherited
instincts, for when I knew him he had already taken kindly to
civilization. At first, of course, they had a bad time with him; they
couldn't talk to him, and when, quite naturally and nonchalantly he
would start in to do the most outrageous things, they had to teach him
better, literally by force. If Pedder weren't such an old stickler for
propriety, I could go more into detail. You needn't look offended, Ped,
you know you are very easily shocked, and that you make it unpleasant
for everybody. He was taken on by the English consul at Teerak, who was
a good fellow, and clothed, and taught to speak English, and, as a
beginning, to work in the garden. Indoor work seemed to have almost the
effect of nauseating him; and houses and closed doors threw him at first
into frenzies of fear, and always made him miserable. It was apparent in
his face, but more in his way of putting up his fists when in doubt,
that he wasn't Dutch nor German nor French. He was probably English,
they thought, but he might have been American, and so they had an
orthodox christening and named him Jonathan Bull. Of course, after he
got the trick of speech, they found out, by putting two and two
together, just about who and what he was; and that he was of English
parentage. But, of course, they had to let the name stand.
"The first thing, he told me, that ever came to him in the way of a
thought was that he was different from his parents--that they couldn't
see, nor hear, nor make a noise as he could. He could remember sitting
comfortably in the mud at low tide and being convulsed with laughter at
his mother's efforts to find a fat mussel that was within a few inches
of her hand. He said that within a small radius his parents had made
paths, by constant peregrinations in search of food, that had become so
familiar to them that they could move hither and thither, hand in hand,
with considerable precision and alacrity. It was one of his earliest
mischievous instincts to place obstacles in those paths, and take a
humorous view of the consequent tumbles.
"The only intercourse that he could have with his parents was, of
course, by sense of touch. And he told me that, whenever they could
catch him, they would kiss him and fondle him. But he didn't like to be
caressed, especially in the daytime. It was different at night when one
became nervous and afraid; then he used to let himself be caught; and he
said that he used to hold hands with his mother until he went to sleep
and that when he awoke it was to find that the clasp still held. It was
a long time before he realized that what to him were whimsical pranks,
were in the nature of tragedies to his parents. If he put a
stumbling-block in one of their paths, it upset the whole fabric of
their daily life, made them feel, I suppose, that they were losing such
faculties as they possessed: memory and the sense of touch--and they
would be obliged either to walk with infinite slowness, or actually to
crawl. And it was long before he realized that things which were
perfectly simple and easy for him, were frightfully difficult for them;
and he said that his first recollection of a tender and gentle feeling
was once when--heaven only knows how--his parents found a nest with eggs
in it--and brought these eggs to him. He realized then something of what
a prize these eggs must have seemed to them--for he had often scrambled
into trees and glutted himself with eggs, whereas, so far as he could
recollect, his parents had never had any at all. He began from that time
on to collect choice tidbits for _them_; and wondered why he had not
done so before. And they rewarded him with caresses and kisses; I
suppose his real reward was his own virtue. Anyway, though very
gradually at first, instinct taught him to be a good son to them.
"The lessons that he learned of life were, first of all, from his
parents, who were always near at hand for study; second, from birds and
animals, there being a pool not far up the creek where even tigers
sometimes came to drink; from occasional monkeys; but mostly, of course,
by intuition and introspection.
"He noticed that birds and animals all had the use of sight and hearing,
and were able to make sounds; and his own forest-trained senses soon
perceived different meanings, and even shades of meaning in certain of
these sounds. The larger animals were not, of course, constantly under
observation, and from tigers, for instance, he learned only the main
principles of tiger-talk--a kind of singsong snuffling purr that means
'get out of the way'; the cringing whine that means the tiger is very
sorry for himself; and two or three of the full-throated roars: the one
expressing rage, the one expressing fear, and the one expressing pained
astonishment. But into the vocabularies of birds he penetrated
very deeply.
"One day, when I had got to know Jonathan rather well, he surprised me
by saying, 'the minute I got the idea, I talked all day long, but it was
years before I thought of writing down what I said, instead of plain
trying to remember. At first, when I'd say something that I wanted to
remember, I'd have to coax my head into remembering the place where I
had said it, near which tree, or which stone on the beach, what had
happened to make me think of saying it, and then, more often than not, I
could repeat it word for word,' Then he showed me the sheets of bark
with the scratches and scrawls and gyrations on them. 'It isn't spelled
writing,' he explained, 'or what they call picture writing. I don't
believe it has enough general principles for me to be able to explain it
as a system, though it has a sort of system to it. If it's like
anything, I think it must be like the way they write down music. It
would be, wouldn't it? Because beasts don't talk with words, they talk
with sounds, and I copycatted my language from beasts and birds,'
"I asked him what the writing on the bark was all about. He said, and he
blushed, as every young author, and most old ones, should, that the
writing was just more or less nothing--all about different kinds of
things. So I pointed specifically to the top of one sheet, and said,
'begin there and tell me what that's about.' 'If I began there,' he
said, 'I'd have to go backward; that's the finish of--oh!' he literally
threw himself on my mercy with the most ingenuous blushing face. 'Oh,'
he said, 'I suppose _you'd_ call them poems.' I, of course, had my
doubts of that; but I kept countenance, and said, 'well, what's that one
about?' He looked puzzled for a moment, and then he smiled. 'Why,' he
said, 'I suppose it's about me, about the way I felt one day, I suppose;
but if I tried to say it into English it would just sound damn foolish;
but, perhaps, you'd sooner hear it in my own language. It's better,
because, after all, you can't turn sounds into words, can you?' 'Go
ahead,' I said.
"His hands, holding the sheet of bark shook a little with embarrassment,
and he was very red in the face; and before he could begin--I suppose
you would call it _reading_--he had to wet his lips two or three times.
I expected, of course, to hear the usual grunts and minor guttural
sounds of the usual very primitive dialect. But Jonathan's own
particular patent language was not that sort of thing at all. He began
with the faintest, and most distinct rustling of leaves--I can't imagine
how he made the sound at all. It seemed to come from somewhere between
the back of his throat and his lips, and to have nothing to do with his
tongue or vocal cords. It lasted for, perhaps, half a minute; dying out,
fainter and fainter and finer and finer into complete silence. Then,
from the distant point where the rustling had last been heard, there
came the softest little throaty whistle, three times repeated; then, for
two good minutes without seeming to draw breath, the young man burst
into peal after peal of the sweetest, clearest, highest, swiftest
whistling that you can possibly imagine. I don't know how he did it--he
didn't even purse or move his lips--they were barely parted, in a kind
of plaintive, sad little smile--and the notes came out; that was all. Of
course I can't tell you what the thing meant word for word or sound for
sound; but, in general, it said youth, youth and spring: and I tell you
it had those compositions of Mendelssohn, and Grieg, and Sinding lashed
to the mast. Well, the leaves rustled again, a little lower in the
scale, I think, but wouldn't swear to it, and the first little soft
throaty whistle was twice repeated--and there was a little, tiny whisper
of a human moan. And that was the end of that poem.
"I made him read to me from his bark sheets until he was tired out. And
the next day I was at him again early, and the next. Suppose you were
living in a jumping-off place, bored to death, and blowing yourself
every fifth or sixth day to a brand new crop of prickly heat; and wanted
to go away, and couldn't because you had to sit around until a fat
Dutchman made up his mind about a concession; and suppose the only book
in the place was on the uses of and manufacture and by-products of the
royal palm, written in a beastly language called Tamil, which you only
knew enough of to ask for tea and toast at four o'clock in the morning,
and were usually understood to mean soda biscuits and a dish of buffalo
milk. And suppose that then you came across the complete works of
Shakespeare--and that you had never read them--or the Odyssey and that
you had never read that--or, better, suppose that there was a Steinway
piano in your sitting-room, and that one day the boy who worked the
punka for you dropped the rope and sat down at the piano and played
Beethoven from beginning to end--as Rubenstein would have played
him--and suppose you had never heard a note of Beethoven before. It was
like that--listening to the works of Jonathan Bull."
Gardiner paused, as if considering very carefully what he should say.
"No!" he said presently, "I'm _not_ overdoing it. My judgment of
Jonathan Bull is no longer a sudden enthusiasm, as the natural effort of
a man to make his own discoveries seem more important to his friends
than they deserve. He _is_ one of the giants. Think of it: he had made,
on an impulse of out and out creation, the most expressive of all
languages, so far as mere sound goes; and as if that were not enough, he
had gone ahead and composed in that language incomparable lyrics. The
meanings were in the sounds. You couldn't mistake them. Have you ever
heard a tiger roar--full steam ahead? There was one piece that began
suddenly with a kind of terrible, obsessing, strong purring that shook
the walls of the room and that went into a series of the most terrible
tiger roars and ended with the nightmare screams of a child. I have
never been so frightened in my life. And there was a snake song, a soft,
wavy, piano, _pianissimo_ effect, all malignant stealth and horror, and
running through it were the guileless and insistently hungry twitterings
of baby birds in the nest. But there were comical pieces, too, in which
ludicrous adventures befell unsophisticated monkeys; and there was a
whole series of spring-fever songs--some of them just rotten and
nervous, and some of them sad and yearning--and some of them--I don't
know just how to put it--well, some of them you might say were not
exactly fit to print. One thing he read me--it was very
short--consisted of hoarse, inarticulate, broken groans--I couldn't make
out what it meant at all. And I was very curious to know, because it
seemed to move Jonathan himself much more than anything else of his.
"'You know,' he explained to me, 'my father and mother couldn't make any
sound at all--oh, yes--they could clap their hands together and make a
sound that way--but I mean with their voices--they hadn't any
voices--sometimes their lips smacked and made a noise over eating, or
kissing; but they couldn't make sounds in their throats. Well, when my
mother died--just think, she couldn't make my father understand that she
was sick; and I couldn't. I tried every way. He didn't know that she was
leaving him--I'm glad you can't see that poor blind face of her's,
turned to father's blind face and trying to tell him good-by--I see it,
almost all the time,' he said. 'You know they were always touching--I
can't remember a single second in all those years when they weren't at
least holding hands. She went in the night. My father was asleep with
one arm over and about her. As she got colder and colder it waked him.
And he understood. Then he began to make those dumb, helpless groans,
like that piece I just read you--the nearest he got to speaking. He sat
on the ground and held her in his arms all the rest of the night, and
all the next day, and the next night--I couldn't make him let go, and
every little while he went into those dreadful, dumb groanings. You
don't get brought up in the jungle without knowing death when you see
it, and what dead things do. The second night, about midnight, the news
of my mother's death began to get about; and horrible, hunchbacked
beasts that I had never seen or dreamed of before began to slink about
among the trees, and peer out, and snuffle, and complain--and suddenly
laugh just like men. And I was so frightened of them, and of the night
anyway, that every now and then I'd go into a regular screaming fit, and
that would drive them away and keep them quiet for a time, but pretty
soon I'd hear their cautious steps, way off, drawing closer and closer,
and then the things would begin to snuffle, and complain, and laugh
again--they had disgusting, black dogfaces, and one came very close, and
I could see the water running out of its mouth. But when dawn began to
break they drew farther and farther away, until you could only hear
them--now and then.
"'My father looked very white and ill, as was natural enough; but his
face now had a peaceful, contented expression. I didn't understand at
first that he, in his turn, was dying. But it wasn't of a broken heart,
as you might suppose, or anything like that; he had gnawed his left
wrist until he got the arteries open; and he was bleeding to death.
"'Once a big dead fish was washed up on the beach--it was when I was
quite a little boy--but I remembered how, after a day or two, even my
parents had no trouble in finding it, and I remembered how my father had
scooped a hole in the sand and buried it. So I scooped a great deep hole
in the sand, very deep until water began to trickle into it. And I had
sense enough, when it came to filling up the hole, to put in lots of big
stones, the biggest I could roll in. And I'm strong. I stayed on--for
about six months, getting lonelier and lonelier--and then spring came. I
think that was really what started me. I still go almost crazy every
spring--anyway I got to this place, and found people.'"
* * * * *
"What's he doing now?" asked Pedder.
"He's trying," said Gardiner, "to do it in English. Of course it seems
impossible that he should succeed. But then it was absolutely impossible
for Shakespeare to do what he did with the English language, wasn't it?
And yet he did it."
"But--" said Pedder.
"Ped," said Gardiner, "we don't control the lightnings; and you never
can tell where they are going to strike next--or when."
Ludlow flushed a little, and did not look at his friends.
"Wouldn't it be wonderful," he said, "to be loved and to be in love the
way his father and mother were. Maybe they were the ones that really
heard and saw, and--sang. We admire the lily, but we owe her to the
loves of the blind rain for the deaf and the dumb earth...."
Nobody spoke for some moments. It had been the only allusion that Ludlow
had made in years and years to that which had left him a lonely and a
cynical man.
"I wonder," Pedder mused, "how it ever occurred to a blind, deaf mute
that severing his wrist with his teeth would induce death?"
Gardiner shrugged his shoulders.
"It is always interesting," he said, "to know just which part of a
story--if any--is thought worthy of consideration by a given
individual."