under her chin had begun to stroke her hair with the other. A sort of
blind vertigo seized her: she caught his thumb and bit as hard as she
could: then, terrified at her own madness, dashed across the hold to
where the other children were gathered in a wondering knot.
‘What _have_ you done!’ cried Laura, pushing her away angrily: ‘Oh you
wicked girl, you’ve hurt him!’
Jonsen was stamping about, swearing and sucking his thumb. Edward had
produced a handkerchief, and between them all they had managed to tie
it up. He stood staring at the bandaged member for a few moments: shook
his head like a wet retriever and retreated on deck, dang-danging under
his breath. Margaret had then been so sick they thought she must really
have caught fever, and they couldn’t get any sense out of her at all.
As Emily, with her new-found consciousness, recapitulated the scene, it
was like re-reading a story in a book, so little responsibility did she
feel for the merely mechanical creature who had bitten the captain’s
thumb. Nor was she even very interested: it had been queer, but then
there was very little in life which didn’t seem queer, now.
As for Jonsen, he and Emily had avoided each other ever since, by
mutual consent. She indeed had been in Coventry with everybody for
biting him; none of the other children would play with her all the
next day, and she recognised that she thoroughly deserved it--it was a
_mad_ thing to have done. And yet Jonsen, in avoiding her, had himself
more the air of being ashamed than angry ... which was unaccountable.
But what interested her more was the curious way Margaret had gone on,
those next few days.
For some time she had behaved very oddly indeed. At first she seemed
exaggeratedly frightened of all the men: but then she had suddenly
taken to following them about the deck like a dog--not Jonsen, it is
true, but Otto especially. Then suddenly she had departed from them
altogether and taken up her quarters in the cabin. The curious thing
was that now she avoided them all utterly, and spent all her time with
the sailors: and the sailors, for their part, seemed to take peculiar
pains not only not to let her speak to, but even not to let her be seen
by the other children.
Now they hardly saw her at all: and when they did she seemed so
different, they hardly recognised her: though where the difference lay
it would be hard to say.
Emily, from her perch at the mast-head, could just see the girl’s head
now, through the cabin skylight. Further forward, José had joined the
children at their game, and was crawling about on hands and knees with
all of them on his back--a fire-engine, of course, such as they had
seen in the illustrated magazines from England.
‘Emily!’ called Harry: ‘Come and play!’
Down with a rush fell the curtain on all Emily’s cogitations. In a
second she was once more a happy little animal--_any_ happy little
animal. She slid down the shrouds like a real sailor, and in no time
was directing the fire-fighting operations as imperiously as any other
of this brigade of superintendents.
iii
That night in the Parliament of Beds there was raised at last a
question which you may well be surprised had not been raised before.
Emily had just reduced her family to silence by sheer ferocity, when
Harry’s rapid, nervous, lisping voice piped up:
‘Emily, Emily may I ask you a question, please?’
‘Go to sleep!’
There was a moment’s whispered confabulation.
‘But it’s very important, please, and we all want to know.’
‘What?’
‘Are these people pirates?’
Emily sat bolt upright with astonishment.
‘Of course not!’
Harry sounded rather crestfallen.
‘I don’t know ... I just thought they might....’
‘But they _are_!’ declared Rachel firmly. ‘Margaret told me!’
‘Nonsense!’ said Emily. ‘There aren’t any pirates nowadays.’
‘Margaret said,’ went on Rachel, ‘that time we were shut up on the
other ship she heard one of the sailors calling out pirates had come on
board.’
Emily had an inspiration.
‘No, you silly, he must have said _pilots_.’
‘What are pilots?’ asked Laura.
‘They Come On Board,’ explained Emily, lamely. ‘Don’t you remember that
picture in the dining-room at home, called The Pilot Comes On Board?’
Laura listened with rapt attention. The explanation of what pilots were
was not very illuminating; but then she did not know what pirates were
either. So you might think the whole discussion meant very little to
her, but there you would be wrong: the question was evidently important
to the older ones, therefore she gave her whole mind to listening.
The pirate heresy was considerably shaken. How could they say for
certain which word Margaret had really heard? Rachel changed sides.
‘They can’t be pirates,’ she said. ‘Pirates are wicked.’
‘Couldn’t we ask them?’ Edward persisted.
Emily considered.
‘I don’t think it would be very polite.’
‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind,’ said Edward. ‘They’re awfully decent.’
‘I think they mightn’t like it,’ said Emily. In her heart she was
afraid of the answer; and if they were pirates, it would here again be
better to pretend not to know.
‘I know!’ she said. ‘Shall I ask the Mouse with the Elastic Tail?’
‘Yes, do!’ cried Laura. It was months since the oracle had been
consulted; but her faith was still perfect.
Emily communed with herself in a series of short squeaks.
‘He says they are _Pilots_,’ she announced.
‘Oh,’ said Edward deeply: and they all went to sleep.
_Chapter 7_
Edward often thought, as he strode scowling up and down the deck by
himself, that this was exactly the life for him. What a lucky boy he
was, to have tumbled into it by good fortune, instead of having to run
away to sea as most other people did! In spite of the White Mouse’s
pronouncement (whom secretly he had long ceased to believe in), he had
no doubt that this was a pirate vessel: and no doubt either that when
presently Jonsen was killed in some furious battle the sailors would
unanimously elect him their captain.
The girls were a great nuisance. A ship was no place for them. When he
was captain he would have them marooned.
Yet there had been a time when he had wished he was a girl himself.
‘When I was young,’ he once confided to the admiring Harry, ‘I used to
think girls were bigger and stronger than boys. Weren’t I silly?’
‘Yes,’ said Harry.
Harry did not confide it to Edward, but he also, _now_, wished he was a
girl. It was not for the same reason: younger than Edward, he was still
at the amorous age; and because he found the company of girls almost
magically pleasing, fondly imagined it would be even more so if he were
one himself. He was always finding himself, for being a boy, shut out
from their most secret councils. Emily of course was too old to count
as female in his eyes: but to Rachel and Laura he was indiscriminately
devoted. When Edward was captain, he would be mate: and when he
imagined this future, it consisted for the most part in rescuing
Rachel--or Laura, _n’importe_--from new and complicated dangers.
They were all by now just as much at home on the schooner as they had
been in Jamaica. Indeed, nothing very continuous was left of Ferndale
for the youngest ones: only a number of luminous pictures of quite
unimportant incidents. Emily of course remembered most things, and
could put them together. The death of Tabby, for instance: she would
never forget that as long as she lived. She could recollect, too, that
Ferndale had tumbled down flat. And her Earthquake: she had been in an
earthquake, and could remember every detail of _that_. Had it been as a
result of the earthquake that Ferndale had tumbled down? That sounded
likely. There had been quite a high wind at that time, too.... She
could remember that they had all been bathing when the earthquake had
come, and then had ridden somewhere on ponies. But they had been _in_
the house when it fell down: she was pretty sure of that. It was all
a little difficult to join up.--Then, when was it she had found that
negro village? She could remember with a startling clearness bending
down and feeling among the bamboo roots for the bubbling spring, then
looking round and seeing the black children scampering away up the
clearing. That must have been years and years ago. But clearer than
everything was that awful night when Tabby had stalked up and down the
room, his eyes blazing and his fur twitching, his voice melodious with
tragedy, until those horrible black shapes had flown in through the
fanlight and savaged him out into the bush. The horror of the scene was
even increased because it had once or twice come back to her in dreams,
and because when she dreamt it (though it seemed the same) there was
always some frightful difference. One night (and that was the worst of
all) she had rushed out to rescue him, when her darling faithful Tabby
had come up to her with the same horrible look on his face the captain
had worn that time she bit his thumb, and had chased her down avenues
and avenues and avenues and avenues of cabbage-palms, with Exeter House
at the end of them never getting any nearer however much she ran. She
knew, of course, it was not the real Tabby, but a sort of diabolic
double: and Margaret had sat up an orange tree jeering at her, gone as
black as a negro.
One of the drawbacks of life at sea was the cockroaches. They were
winged. They infested the fore-hold, and the smell they made was
horrible. One had to put up with them. But one didn’t do much washing
at sea: and it was a common thing to wake up in the morning and find
the brutes had gnawed the quick from under one’s nails, or gnawed all
the hard skin off the soles of one’s feet, so that one could hardly
walk. Anything in the least greasy or dirty they set on at once.
Button-holes were their especial delight. One did little washing: fresh
water was too valuable, and salt water had practically no effect.
From handling tarry ropes and greasy ironwork their hands would have
disgraced a slum-child. There is a sailor saying which includes a peck
of dirt in the mariner’s monthly rations: but the children on the
schooner must have often consumed far more.
Not that it was a dirty ship--the fo’c’sle probably was, but the
Nordicism of captain and mate kept the rest looking clean enough. But
even the cleanest-looking ship is seldom clean to the touch. Their
clothes José washed occasionally with his own shirt: and in that
climate they were dry again by the morning.
Jamaica had faded into the past: England, to which they had supposed
they were going, and of which a very curious picture had formerly
been built up in their minds by their parents’ constant references to
it, receded again into the mists of myth. They lived in the present,
adapted themselves to it, and might have been born in a hammock and
christened at a binnacle before they had been there many weeks. They
seemed to have no natural fear of heights, and the farther they were
above the deck, the happier. On a calm day Edward used to hang by his
knees from the cross-trees in order to feel the blood run into his
head. The flying-jib, too, which was usually down, made an admirable
cocoon for hide-and-seek: one took a firm grip of the hanks and
robands, and swathed oneself in the canvas. Once, suspecting Edward was
hidden there, instead of going out on the jib-boom to look, the other
children cast off the down-haul and then all together gave a great tug
at the halyard which nearly pitched him into the sea. The shark myth
is greatly exaggerated: it is untrue, for instance, that they can take
a leg clean off at the hip--their bite is a tearing one, not a clean
cut: and a practised bather can keep them off easily with a welt on
the nose each time they turn over to strike[1]: but all the same,
once overboard there would have been little hope for a small boy like
Edward: and a severe wigging they all got for their prank.
Often several of those thick, rubber-like protuberances would follow
the vessel for hours--perhaps in the hope of just some such antic.
Sharks were not without their uses, however: it is well known that
Catch a Shark Catch a Breeze, so when a breeze was needed the sailors
baited a big hook and presently hauled one on board with the winch. The
bigger he was, the better breeze was hoped for: and his tail was nailed
to the jib-boom. One day they got a great whacking fellow on board,
and having cut off his jaw some one heaved it into the ship’s latrine
(which no one was so lubberly as to use for its proper purpose) and
thought no more about it. One wildish night, however, old José did go
there, and sat full on that wicked _cheval de frise_. He yelled like
a madman: and the crew were better pleased than they had been with
any joke that year, and even Emily thought if only it had been less
improper how funny it would have been. It would certainly have puzzled
an archæologist, faced with José’s mummy, to guess how he came by those
curious scars.
The ship’s monkey also added a lot to the ship’s merriment. One day
some sucker-fish had fixed themselves firmly to the deck, and he
undertook to dislodge them. After a few preliminary tugs, he braced
three legs and his tail against the deck and lunged like a madman.
But they would not budge. The crew were standing round in a ring, and
he felt his honour was at stake: somehow, they _must_ be removed. So,
disgusting though they must have tasted to a vegetarian, he set to and
ate them, right down to the sucker, and was loudly applauded.
Edward and Harry often talked over how they would distinguish
themselves in the next engagement. Sometimes they would rehearse it:
storm the galley with uncouth shouts, or spring into the main rigging
and order every one to be thrown into the sea. Once, as they went into
battle,
‘I am armed with a sword and a pistol!’ chanted Edward:
‘And I am armed with a key and half a whist-le!’ chanted the more
literal Harry.
They took care to hold those rehearsals when the real pirates were out
of the way: it was not so much that they feared the criticism of the
professional eye as that it was not yet openly recognised what they
were; and all the children shared Emily’s instinct that it was better
to pretend not to know--a sort of magical belief, at bottom.
Although Laura and Rachel were thrown together a great deal, and were
all one goddess to Harry, their inner lives differed in almost every
respect. It was a matter of principle, as will have been noticed, for
them to disagree on every point: but it was a matter of nature too.
Rachel had only two activities. One was domestic. She was never happy
unless surrounded by the full paraphernalia of a household: she left
houses and families wherever she went. She collected bits of oakum and
the moultings of a worn-out mop, wrapped them in rags and put them to
sleep in every nook and cranny. _Guai_, who woke one of her twenty or
thirty babies--worse still, should he clear it away! She could even
summon up maternal feelings for a marline-spike, and would sit up
aloft rocking it in her arms and crooning. The sailors avoided walking
underneath: for such an infant, if dropped from a height, will find its
way through the thickest skull (an accident which sometimes befalls
unpopular captains).
Further, there was hardly an article of ship’s use, from the windlass
to the bosun’s chair, but she had metamorphosed it into some sort of
furniture: a table or a bed or a lamp or a tea-set: and marked it as
her property: and what she had marked as her property no one might
touch--if she could prevent it. To parody Hobbes, she claimed as her
own whatever she had mixed her imagination with; and the greater
part of her time was spent in angry or tearful assertions of her
property-rights.
Her other interest was moral. She had an extraordinary vivid, _simple_
sense, that child, of Right and Wrong--it almost amounted to a
precocious ethical genius. Every action, her own or any one else’s, was
immediately judged good or bad, and uncompromisingly praised or blamed.
She was never in doubt.
To Emily, Conscience meant something very different. She was still
only half aware of that secret criterion within her: but was terrified
of it. She had not Rachel’s clear divination: she never knew when she
might offend this inner harpy, Conscience, unwittingly: and lived in
terror of those brazen claws, should she ever let it be hatched from
the egg. When she felt its latent strength stir in its pre-natal sleep,
she forced her mind to other things, and would not even let herself
recognise her fear of it. But she knew, at the bottom of her heart she
_knew_, that one day some action of hers would rouse it, something
awful done quite unwittingly would send it raging round her soul like
a whirlwind. She might go weeks together in a happy unconsciousness,
she might have flashes of vision when she knew she was God Himself: but
at the same time she knew, beyond all doubt, in her innermost being,
that she was damned, that there never had been any one as wicked as her
since the world began.
Not so Rachel: to her, Conscience was by no means so depressing
an affair. It was simply a comfortable mainspring of her life,
smooth-working, as pleasant as a healthy appetite. For instance, it was
now tacitly admitted that all these men were pirates. That is, they
were wicked. It therefore devolved on her to convert them: and she
entered on her plans for this without a shadow either of misgiving or
reluctance. Her conscience gave her no pain because it never occurred
to her as conceivable that she should do anything but follow its
dictates, or fail to see them clearly. She would try and convert these
people first: probably they would reform, but if they did not--well,
she would send for the police. Since either result was right, it
mattered not at all which Circumstance should call for.
So much for Rachel. The inside of Laura was different indeed:
something vast, complicated, and nebulous that can hardly be put into
language. To take a metaphor from tadpoles, though legs were growing
her gills had not yet dropped off. Being nearly four years old, she
was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term
‘human’ a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby:
and babies of course are not human--they are animals, and have a very
ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even
snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid,
since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the
lower vertebrates.
In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their
own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the
human mind.
It is true they look human--but not so human, to be quite fair, as many
monkeys.
Subconsciously, too, every one recognises they are animals--why else
do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the
human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a
less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.
Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either:
but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more
ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are
_mad_, in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination,
think like a child, at least in a partial degree--and even if one’s
success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more
think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a
bee.
How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the
child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind,
like a Fascist in Rome?
When swimming under water, it is a very sobering thing suddenly to look
a large octopus in the face. One never forgets it: one’s respect, yet
one’s feeling of the hopelessness of any real intellectual sympathy.
One is soon reduced to mere physical admiration, like any silly
painter, of the cow-like tenderness of the eye, of the beautiful and
infinitesimal mobility of that large and toothless mouth, which accepts
as a matter of course that very water against which you, for your
life’s sake, must be holding your breath. There he reposes in a fold of
rock, apparently weightless in the clear green medium but very large,
his long arms, suppler than silk, coiled in repose, or stirring in
recognition of your presence. Far above, everything is bounded by the
surface of the air, like a bright window of glass. Contact with a small
baby can conjure at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not
obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain.
Of course it is not really so cut-and-dried as all this; but often the
only way of attempting to express the truth is to build it up, like a
card-house, of a pack of lies.
It was only in Laura’s inner mind, however, that these elaborate
vestiges of babyhood remained: outwardly she appeared fully a child--a
rather reserved, odd, and indeed rather captivating one. Her face was
not pretty, with its heavy eyebrows and reduced chin: but she had a
power of apt movement, the appropriate attitude for every occasion,
that was most striking. A child who can show her affection for you,
for instance, in the very way she plants her feet on the ground,
has a liberal gift of that bodily genius called charm. Actually,
this particular one was a rare gesture with her: nine-tenths of her
life being spent in her own head, she seldom had time to feel at all
strongly either for or against people. The feelings she thus expressed
were generally of a more impersonal kind, and would have fascinated
an admirer of the ballet: and it was all the more remarkable that she
_had_ developed a dog-like devotion to the reserved and coarse-looking
captain of the pirates.
No one really contends that children have any insight into character:
their likings are mostly imaginative, not intuitive. ‘What do you think
I am?’ the exasperated ruffian had asked on a famous occasion. One
might well ask what Laura thought he was: and there is no means of
knowing.
ii
Pigs grow quickly, quicker even than children: and much though the
latter altered in the first month on board, the little black porker
(whose name by the by was Thunder) altered even more. He soon grew to
such a size one could not possibly allow him to lie on one’s stomach
any more: so, as his friendliness did not diminish, the functions
were reversed, and it became a common thing to find one child, or a
whole bench of them, sitting on his scaly side. They grew very fond
of him indeed (especially Emily), and called him their Dear Love,
their Only Dear, their Own True Heart, and other names. But he had
only two things he ever said. When his back was being scratched he
enunciated an occasional soft and happy grunt; and that same phrase
(only in a different tone) had to serve for every other occasion and
emotion--except one. When a particularly heavy lot of children sat down
on him at once, he uttered the faintest ghost of a little moan, as
affecting as the wind in a very distant chimney, as if the air in him
was being squeezed out through a pinhole.
One cannot wish for a more comfortable seat than an acquiescent pig.
‘If I was the Queen,’ said Emily, ‘I should most certainly have a pig
for a throne.’
‘Perhaps she has,’ suggested Harry.
‘He _does_ like being scratched,’ she added presently in a very
sentimental tone, as she rubbed his scurfy back.
The mate was watching:
‘I should think _you_’d like being scratched, if your skin was in that
condition!’
‘Oh how disGUSTing you are!’ cried Emily, delighted.
But the idea took root.
‘I don’t think I should kiss him quite so much if I was you,’ Emily
presently advised Laura, who was lying with her arms tight round his
neck and covering his briny snout with kisses from ring to ears.
‘My pet! My love!’ murmured Laura, by way of indirect protest.
The wily mate had foreseen that some estrangement would be necessary
if they were ever to have fresh pork served without salt tears. He
intended this to be the thin end of the wedge. But alas! Laura’s mind
was as humoursome an instrument to play as the Twenty-three-stringed
Lute.
When dinner-time came, the children mustered for their soup and biscuit.