If only he could make a hole in it, he might get his wife and children
down into the cellar. Fortunately he did not have to look far: one arm
of the fallen couple had already done the work for him. Laura, Rachel,
Emily, Edward and John, Mrs. Thornton and finally Mr. Thornton himself,
were passed down into the darkness already thronged with negroes and
goats.
With great good sense, Mr. Thornton brought with him from the room
above a couple of decanters of madeira, and every one had a swig, from
Laura to the oldest negro. All the children made the most of this
unholy chance, but somehow to Emily the bottle got passed twice, and
each time she took a good pull. It was enough, at their age; and while
what was left of the house was blown away over their heads, through
the lull and the ensuing aerial return match, John, Emily, Edward,
Rachel, and Laura, blind drunk, slept in a heap on the cellar floor: a
sleep over which the appalling fate of Tabby, torn to pieces by those
fiends almost under their very eyes, dominated with the easy empire of
nightmare.
_Chapter 2_
All night the water poured through the house floor onto the people
sheltering below: but (perhaps owing to the madeira) it did them no
harm. Shortly after the second bout of blowing, however, the rain
stopped; and when dawn came Mr. Thornton crept out to assess the damage.
The country was quite unrecognisable, as if it had been swept by a
spate. You could hardly tell, geographically speaking, where you were.
It is vegetation which gives the character to a tropic landscape, not
the shape of the ground: and all the vegetation, for miles, was now
pulp. The ground itself had been ploughed up by instantaneous rivers,
biting deep into the red earth. The only living thing in sight was a
cow: and she had lost both her horns.
The wooden part of the house was nearly all gone. After they had
succeeded in reaching shelter, one wall after another had blown down.
The furniture was splintered into matchwood. Even the heavy mahogany
dining-table, which they loved, and had always kept with its legs in
little glass baths of oil to defeat the ants, was spirited right away.
There were some fragments which might be part of it, or they might not:
you could not tell.
Mr. Thornton returned to the cellar and helped his wife out: she was
so cramped as hardly to be able to move. They knelt down together and
thanked God for not having treated them any worse. Then they stood up
and stared about them rather stupidly. It seemed not credible that
all this had been done by a current of air. Mr. Thornton patted the
atmosphere with his hand. When still, it was so soft, so rare: how
could one believe that Motion, itself something impalpable, had lent it
a hardness: that this gentle, hind-like Meteor should have last night
seized Fat Betsy with the rapacity of a tiger and the lift of a roc,
and flung her, as he had seen her flung, across two fair-sized fields?
Mrs. Thornton understood his gesture.
‘Remember who is its Prince,’ she said.
The stable was damaged, though not completely destroyed: and Mr.
Thornton’s mule was so much hurt he had to tell a negro to cut its
throat. The buggy was smashed beyond repair. The only building
undamaged was a stone chamber which had been the hospital of the old
sugar-estate: so they woke the children, who were feeling ill and
beyond words unhappy, and moved into this: where the negroes, with an
unexpected energy and kindliness, did everything they could to make
them comfortable. It was paved and unlighted: but solid.
The children were bilious for a few days, and inclined to dislike
each other: but they accepted the change in their lives practically
without noticing it. It is a fact that it takes experience before
one can realise what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have
little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary
course of their lives. If Emily had known this was a _Hurricane_, she
would doubtless have been far more impressed, for the word was full of
romantic terrors. But it never entered her head: and a thunderstorm,
however severe, is after all a commonplace affair. The mere fact that
it had done incalculable damage, while the earthquake had done none at
all, gave it no right whatever to rival the latter in the hierarchy
of cataclysms: an Earthquake is a thing apart. If she was silent, and
inclined to brood over some inward terror, it was not the hurricane
she was thinking of, it was the death of Tabby. That, at times, seemed
a horror beyond all bearing. It was her first intimate contact with
death--and a death of violence, too. The death of Old Sam had no such
effect: there is, after all, a vast difference between a negro and a
favourite cat.
There was something enjoyable, too, in camping in the hospital: a sort
of everlasting picnic in which their parents for once were taking part.
Indeed it led them to begin for the first time to regard their parents
as rational human beings, with understandable tastes--such as sitting
on the floor to eat one’s dinner.
It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told
that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children.
She took a keen interest in Psychology (the Art Babblative, Southey
calls it). She was full of theories about their upbringing which she
had not time to put into effect; but nevertheless she thought she
had a deep understanding of their temperaments and was the centre of
their passionate devotion. Actually, she was congenitally incapable
of telling one end of a child from the other. She was a dumpy little
woman--Cornish, I believe. When she was herself a baby she was so small
they carried her about on a cushion for fear a clumsy human arm might
damage her. She could read when she was two and a half. Her reading was
always serious. Nor had she been backward in the humaner studies: her
mistresses spoke of her Deportment as something rarely seen outside
the older Royal Houses: in spite of a figure like a bolster, she could
step into a coach like an angel getting onto a cloud. She was very
quick-tempered.
Mr. Bas-Thornton also had every accomplishment, except two: that of
primogeniture, and that of making a living. Either would have provided
for them.
If it would have surprised the mother, it would undoubtedly have
surprised the children also to be told how little their parents meant
to them. Children seldom have any power of quantitative self-analysis:
whatever the facts, they believe as an article of faith that they love
Father and Mother first and equally. Actually, the Thornton children
had loved Tabby first and foremost in all the world, some of each other
second, and hardly noticed their mother’s existence more than once
a week. Their father they loved a little more: partly owing to the
ceremony of riding home on his stirrups.
Jamaica remained, and blossomed anew, its womb being inexhaustible.
Mr. and Mrs. Thornton remained, and with patience and tears tried to
reconstruct things, in so far as they could be reconstructed. But the
danger which their beloved little ones had been through was not a thing
to risk again. Heaven had warned them. The children must go.
Nor was the only danger physical.
‘That awful night!’ said Mrs. Thornton, once, when discussing their
plan of sending them home to school: ‘Oh my dear, what the poor little
things must have suffered! Think how much more acute Fear is to a
child! And they were so brave, so English.’
‘I don’t believe they realised it.’ (He only said that to be
contradictious: he could hardly expect it to be taken seriously.)
‘You know, I am terribly afraid what permanent, _inward_ effect a shock
like that may have on them. Have you noticed they never so much as
mention it? In England they would at least be safe from dangers of that
sort.’
Meanwhile the children, accepting the new life as a matter of course,
were thoroughly enjoying it. Most children, on a railway journey,
prefer to change at as many stations as possible.
The rebuilding of Ferndale, too, was a matter of absorbing interest.
For there is one advantage to these match-box houses--easy gone, easy
come: and once begun, the work proceeded apace. Mr. Thornton himself
led the building gang, employing no end of mechanical devices of his
own devising, and it was not long before the day came when he stood
with his handsome head emerging through the fast dwindling hole in
the new roof, shouting directions to the two black carpenters, who,
lying spread-eagle in their check shirts, pinned on shingle after
shingle--walling him in, like the victim in some horrid story. At last
he had to draw in his head, and where it had been the last few shingles
were clapped into place.
An hour later the children had looked their last on Ferndale.
When they had been told they were to go to England, they had received
it as an isolated fact: thrilling in itself, but without any particular
causation--for it could hardly be due to the death of the cat, and
nothing else of importance had occurred lately.
The first stage of their journey was by land, to Montego Bay, and
the notable thing about it was that the borrowed wagonette was drawn
not by a pair of horses or a pair of mules, but by one horse and one
mule. Whenever the horse wanted to go fast the mule fell asleep in the
shafts: and if the driver woke it up it set off at a gallop, which
angered the horse. Their progress would have been slow anyhow, as all
the roads were washed away.
John was the only one who could remember England. What he remembered
was sitting at the top of a flight of stairs, which was fenced off
from him by a little gate, playing with a red toy milk-cart: and he
knew, without having to look, that in the room on the left Baby Emily
was lying in her cot. Emily _said_ she could remember something which
sounded like a Prospect of the Backs of some Brick Houses at Richmond:
but she might have invented it. The others had been born in the
Island--Edward only just.
They all had, nevertheless, most elaborate ideas about England, built
up out of what their parents had told them, and from the books and
old magazines they sometimes looked at. Needless to say it was a very
Atlantis, a land at the back of the North Wind: and going there was
about as exciting as it would be to die and go to Heaven.
John told them all about the top of the stairs for the hundredth time
as they drove along; the others listening attentively (as the Believing
do to a man remembering his reincarnations).
Suddenly Emily recalled sitting at a window and seeing a big bird with
a beautiful tail. At the same time there had been a horrid screeching
going on, or perhaps something else disagreeable--she could not quite
remember which sense was offended. It did not occur to her that it was
this self-same bird which had screeched: and anyhow it was all too
vague for her to try to describe it. She switched off to wondering how
it was possible actually to _sleep_ when walking, as the driver said
the mule did.
They put up for the first night at St. Anne’s, and there another
notable thing occurred. Their host was a hardened Creole: and at supper
he ate Cayenne pepper with a spoon. Not ordinary Cayenne pepper, mind,
such as is sold in shops, which is heavily adulterated with log-wood:
but the far fierier pure original. This indeed was an Event of the
first water: none of them ever forgot it.
The desolation through which they drove is indescribable. Tropical
scenery is anyhow tedious, prolific, and gross: the greens more or
less uniform: great tubular stems supporting thick leaves: no tree
has an outline because it is crushed up against something else--no
_room_. In Jamaica this profusion swarms over the very mountain
ranges: and even the peaks are so numerous that on the top of one you
are surrounded by others, and can see nothing. There are hundreds of
flowers. Then imagine all this luxuriance smashed, as with a pestle and
mortar--crushed, pulped, and already growing again! Mr. Thornton and
his wife were ready to shout with relief when they caught their first
glimpse of the sea, and at last came out in view of the whole beautiful
sweep of Montego Bay itself.
In the open sea there was a considerable swell: but within the shelter
of the coral reef, with its pinhole entrance, all was still as a
mirror, where three ships of different sizes lay at anchor, the whole
of each beautiful machine repeated in the water under it. Within
the Roads lay the Bogue Islands; and immediately to the left of the
islands, in the low land at the base of the hills, was the mouth of a
small river--swampy, and (Mr. Thornton informed John) infested with
crocodiles. The children had never seen a crocodile, and hoped one
might venture as far as the town, where they presently arrived: but
none did. It was with considerable disappointment that they found they
were to go on board the barque at once; for they still hoped that round
some corner of the street a crocodile might yet appear.
The _Clorinda_ had let go her anchor in six fathoms: the water so
clear, and the light so bright, that as they drew near the reflection
suddenly disappeared, and instead they found themselves looking right
underneath her and out the other side. The refraction made her seem
as flat-bellied as a turtle, as if practically all of her were above
the surface: and the anchor on its cable seemed to stream out flatly,
like a downwards kite, twisting and twining (owing to the undulating
surface) in the writhing coral.
This was the only impression Emily retained of going on board the ship:
but the ship itself was a strange enough object, requiring all her
attention. John was the only one who could remember the journey out at
all clearly. Emily thought she could, but was really only remembering
her visualisations of what she had been told: in fact, she found that a
real ship was totally unlike the thing she thought she remembered.
By some last whim of the captain’s the shrouds were being set
up--tauter than seemed good to the sailors, who grumbled as they
strained the creaking lanyards. John did not envy them, winding away at
that handle in the hot sun: but he did envy the chap whose job it was
to dip his hand in a great pot of aromatic Stockholm tar, and work it
into the dead-eyes. He was tarred up to the elbows: and John itched to
be so too.
In a moment the children were scattered all over the ship, smelling
here, miaowing, sniffing there, like cats in a new home. Mr. and Mrs.
Thornton stood by the main companion-way, a little disconsolate at
their children’s happy preoccupation, a little regretting the lack of
proper emotional scene.
‘I think they will be happy here, Frederic,’ said Mrs. Thornton. ‘I
wish we could have afforded to send them by the steamboat: but children
find amusement even in discomfort.’
Mr. Thornton grunted.
‘I wish schools had never been invented!’ he suddenly burst out: ‘they
wouldn’t then be so indispensable!’
There was a short pause for the logic of this to cross the footlights:
then he went on:
‘I know what will happen; they’ll come away ... _mugs_! Just ordinary
little mugs, like any one else’s brats! I’m dashed if I don’t think a
hundred hurricanes would be better than that.’
Mrs. Thornton shuddered: but she continued bravely:
‘You know, I think they were getting almost _too_ devoted to us? We
have been such an unrivalled centre of their lives and thoughts. It
doesn’t do for minds developing to be completely dependent on one
person.’
Captain Marpole’s grizzled head emerged from the scuttle. A sea-dog:
clear blue eyes of a translucent trustworthiness: a merry, wrinkled,
morocco-coloured face: a rumbling voice.
‘He’s too good to be true,’ whispered Mrs. Thornton.
‘Not at all! It’s a sophism to imagine people don’t conform to type!’
barked Mr. Thornton. He felt at sixes and sevens.
Captain Marpole certainly looked the ideal Children’s Captain. He
would, Mrs. Thornton decided, be careful without being fussy--for she
was all in favour of courageous gymnastics, though glad she would not
have to witness them herself. Captain Marpole cast his eyes benignantly
over the swarming imps.
‘They’ll worship him,’ she whispered to her husband. (She meant, of
course, that he would worship them.) It was an important point, this,
of the captain: important as the personality of a headmaster.
‘So that’s the nursery, eh?’ said the captain, crushing Mrs. Thornton’s
hand. She strove to answer, but found her throat undoubtedly paralysed.
Even Mr. Thornton’s ready tongue was at a loss. He looked hard at the
captain, jerked his thumb towards the children, wrestled in his mind
with an elaborate speech, and finally enunciated in a small, unlikely
voice:
‘Smack ’em.’
Then the captain had to go about his duties: and for an hour the father
and mother sat disconsolately on the main-hatch, quite deserted. Even
when all was ready for departure it was impossible to muster the flock
for a collective good-bye.
Already the tug was fulminating in its gorge: and ashore they must go.
Emily and John had been captured, and stood talking uneasily to their
parents, as if to strangers, using only a quarter of their minds. With
a rope to be climbed dangling before his very nose, John simply did
not know how this delay was to be supported, and lapsed into complete
silence.
‘Time to go ashore, Ma’am,’ said the captain: ‘we must be off now.’
Very formally the two generations kissed each other, and said farewell.
Indeed the elders were already at the gangway before the meaning of
it all dawned in Emily’s head. She rushed after her mother, gripped
her ample flesh in two strong fists, and sobbed and wept, ‘Come too,
Mother, oh, do come too!’
Honestly, it had only occurred to her that very moment that this was a
_parting_.
‘But think what an adventure it will be,’ said Mrs. Thornton bravely:
‘much more than if I come too!--You’ll have to look after the Liddlies
just as if you were a real grown-up!’
‘But I don’t want any more adventures!’ sobbed Emily: ‘I’ve _got_ an
_Earthquake_!’
Passions were running far too high for any one to be aware how the
final separation took place. The next thing Mrs. Thornton could
remember was how tired her arm had been, after waving and waving at
that dwindling speck which bore away on the land breeze, hung awhile
stationary in the intervening calm, then won the Trade and climbed up
into the blue.
Meanwhile, at the rail stood Margaret Fernandez, who, with her little
brother Harry, was going to England by the same boat. No one had come
to see them off: and the brown nurse who was accompanying them had
gone below the moment she came on board, so as to be ill as quickly as
possible. How handsome Mr. Bas-Thornton had looked, with his English
distinction! Yet every one knew he had no money. Her set white face
was turned towards the land, her chin quivering at intervals. Slowly
the harbour disappeared: the disordered profligacy of the turbulent,
intricate mass of hills sunk lower in the sky. The occasional white
houses, and white puffs of steam and smoke from the sugar-mills,
vanished. At last the land, all palely shimmering like the bloom on
grapes, settled down into the mirror of emerald and blue.
She wondered whether the Thornton children would prove companionable,
or a nuisance. They were all younger than she was: which was a pity.
ii
On the journey back to Ferndale both father and mother were silent,
actuated by that tug of jealousy against sympathy which a strong common
emotion begets in familiar rather than passionate companions. They
were above the ordinary sentimentalities of grass-bereavement (above
choking over small shoes found in cupboards): but not above a rather
strong dose of the natural instincts of parenthood, Frederic no less
than his wife.
But when they were nearly home, Mrs. Thornton began to chuckle to
herself.
‘Funny little thing, Emily! Did you notice almost the last thing she
said? She said “I’ve got an earthquake.” She must have got it mixed up
in her silly old head with earache.’
There was a long pause: and then she remarked again:
‘John is so much the most sensitive: he was absolutely too full to
speak.’
iii
When they got home it was many days before they could bring themselves
openly to mention the children. When some reference had to be made,
they spoke round them, in an uncomfortable way, as if they had died.
But after a few weeks they had a most welcome surprise. The _Clorinda_
was calling at the Caymans, and taking the Leeward Passage: and while
riding off the Grand Cayman Emily and John wrote letters, and a vessel
bound for Kingston had taken charge of them and eventually they reached
Ferndale. It had not even occurred to either parent that this would be
possible.
This was Emily’s:
MY DEAR PARENTS,--This ship is full of Turtles. We stopped here and
they came out in boats. There is turtles in the saloon under the
tables for you to put your feet on, and turtles in the passages and
on the deck, and everywhere you go. The captain says we mustn’t fall
overboard now because his boats are full of turtles too, with water.
The sailors bring the others on deck every day to have a wash and
when you stand them up they look just as if they had pinafores on.
They make such a funny sighing and groaning in the night, at first
I thought it was everybody being ill, but you get used to it, it is
just like people being ill.--Your loving daughter,
EMILY.
And John’s:
MY DEAREST PARENTS,--The captain’s son Henry is a wonderful chap,
he goes up the rigging with his hands alone, he is ever so strong.
He can turn round under a bellying pin without touching the deck, I
can’t but I hang from the ratlines by my heels which the sailors say
is very brave, but they don’t like Emily doing it, funny. I hope you
are both in excellent health, one of the sailors has a monkey but its
tail is Sore.--Your affectionate Son,
JOHN.
That was the last news they could expect for many months. The
_Clorinda_ was not touching anywhere else. It gave Mrs. Thornton a cold
feeling in the stomach to measure just _how_ long. But she argued,
logically enough, that the time must come to an end, all time does:
there is nothing so inexorable as a ship, plodding away, plodding
away, all over the place, till at last it quite certainly reaches that
small speck on the map which all the time it had intended to reach.
Philosophically speaking, a ship in its port of departure is just as
much in its port of arrival: two point-events differing in time and
place, but not in degree of reality. _Ergo_, that first letter from
England was as good as written, only not quite ... legible yet. And
the same applied to seeing them. (But here one must stop, for the same
argument applied to old age and death, it wouldn’t do.)
Yet, a bare fortnight after the arrival of this first budget, still
another letter arrived, from Havana. The _Clorinda_ had put in there
unexpectedly, it appeared: the letter was from Captain Marpole.
‘What a dear man he is,’ said Alice. ‘He must have known how anxious we
would be for every scrap of news.’
Captain Marpole’s letter was not so terse and vivid as the children’s
had been: still, for the news it contained, I give it in full:
HAVANA DE CUBA.
HONOURED SIR AND MADAM,--I hasten to write to you to relieve you of
any uncertainty!