perhaps worse than a fool! This came of letting oneself get into a
fuss, of conscientiously supposing oneself to be the centre of the
universe. A man turned into stone by a fury of self-justification,
he had laid hold of Lueli and threatened him with pious wrath whilst
all the time his longing had been to thrash the boy or to smite his
body down on the grass and ravish it. Murder or lust, it had seemed
that only by one or the other could he avenge his wounded pride,
the priestly rage against the relapsed heretic. And then by the
grace of God Lueli had leapt aside with that ludicrous expression,
that fantastic agility: and by a moment’s vivid realization of his
convert’s personality, of Lueli no longer a convert but a person,
individual, unexpected, separate, he was released, and laughed the
man of stone away.
He looked back on it without embarrassment or any feelings of
remorse. Remorse was beside the point for what was so absolutely
over and done with. Lueli had nothing to fear from him now--unless
it were indigestion; for he proposed to make him some coco-nut buns
as a peace-offering. They were quite easy to make. One just grated
the coco-nut into a bowl, added a little water and drove the contents
round with a spoon till they mixed. Then one formed the mixture into
rocks, made each rock into a package with leaves, and baked them
under the ashes. The results were quite palatable while they remained
hot. And Lueli would take it as a compliment.
He would set about it presently. Meanwhile he would lie here,
looking up at the tree and taking an interest in his sensations.
“I suppose it is partly reaction,” he thought, “but I do feel most
extraordinarily happy. And as mild as milk--as mothers’ milk.” He was
not only happy, he was profoundly satisfied and rather pleased with
himself, with his new self, that is.
“And why shouldn’t I be? It is a great improvement on the old. It
would be absurd to pretend now that I am not entirely different from
what I was then. I might as well refuse to feel pleased at waking
from a nightmare. A nightmare, a storm of error. The heavens after a
thunderstorm, and the air, are so radiant, so fresh, that they seem
to be newly-created. But they are not: the heavens and the eternal
air were created once for all, it is only in man, that creature of
a day, so ignorant and fugitive, that these changes can be wrought.
The great thing, though, is not to make too much fuss about it. One
should take things as they come, and keep reasonably busy. Those
buns.... How I must have frightened that pig!”
This time there were no bananas round him when he woke and no sign
of Lueli. He did not fret himself: knowing how very unfrightening
he was, he could not seriously apprehend that his convert was much
frightened of him.
Nor was he. For hearing his name called he came out from where he
had been reconnoitring in the bushes with scufflings so soft and yet
so persistent that they might have been self-commendatory, serene,
perfectly at his ease, with a pleasant smile and his head only
slightly to one side. He showed no tactless anxiety to sound himself
in Mr. Fortune’s good graces. Only when Mr. Fortune ventured on a
few words of apology did he seem at a loss, frowning a little, and
wriggling his toes. He made no answer, and presently introduced a new
topic. But he made it quite sufficiently clear that he would prefer
an act of oblivion.
From that day the two friends lived together in the greatest amity.
True, the very next week Lueli disappeared again. But this time Mr.
Fortune remembered his psalm and waited with the utmost peacefulness
and contentment. Indeed he found himself quite pleased to be left to
the enjoyment of his own society. It had never seemed very enjoyable
in old days but it was now. For on this enchanting island where
everything was so gay, novel and forthcoming his transplanted soul
had struck root enough to be responding to the favouring soil and
sending up blossoms well worth inspection.
Beyond a few romantic fancies about bathing by moonlight and a great
many good resolutions to keep regular hours, Mr. Fortune had scarcely
propounded to himself how he would be suited by the life of the only
white man on the island of Fanua. In the stress of preparation there
had been no incitement to picture himself at leisure. It seemed that
between converting the islanders and dissolving soup-squares he
would scarcely have an unoccupied minute. Now he found himself in
possession of a great many--hours, whole days sometimes, without any
particular obligation, stretching out around him waste and tranquil
as the outstretched blue sky and sparkling waves.
Leisure can be a lonely thing: and the sense of loneliness is
terrifically enhanced by unfamiliar surroundings. Some men in Mr.
Fortune’s position might have been driven mad; and their madness
would have been all the more deep and irrevocable because the
conditions that nursed it were so paradisal. A delightful climate; a
fruitful soil; scenery of extreme and fairy-tale beauty; agreeable
meals to be had at the minimum of trouble; no venomous reptiles and
even the mosquitoes not really troublesome; friendly natives and the
most romantic lotus--these, and the prospect of always these would
have mocked them into a melancholy frenzy.
But Mr. Fortune happened to be peculiarly well fitted to live on the
island of Fanua. Till now there had been no leisure in his life,
there had only been holidays; and without being aware of it, in
body and soul he was all clenched up with fatigue, so that it was
an intuitive ecstasy to relax. He could not have put a name to the
strange new pleasure which was come into his existence. He supposed
it was something in the air.
As it was with leisure, so it was with luxuriance. Most Englishmen
who visit the South Sea Islands are in the depths of their hearts a
little shocked at the vegetation. Such fecundity, such a largesse and
explosion of life, trees waving with ferns, dripping with creepers,
and as it were flaunting their vicious and exquisite parasites,
fruits like an emperor’s baubles, flowers triumphantly gaudy or
tricked out with the most sophisticated improbabilities of form and
patterning, all this profusion unbridled and untoiled for and running
to waste disturbs them. They look on it as on some conflagration
and feel that they ought to turn the hose on it. Mr. Fortune was
untroubled by any such thoughts, because he was humble. The reckless
expenditure of God’s glory did not strike him as reckless, and his
admiration of the bonfire was never overcast by a feeling that he
ought to do something about it. Indeed the man who ten years ago had
been putting down in Mr. Beaumont’s pass-book: Orchid Growers Ltd.,
£72 15s. 0d. had presently ceased to pay any special attention to
the vegetables of Fanua, and was walking about among them as though
they were the most natural thing in the world; which if one comes to
reflect on it, in that part of the world they were.
But though he came to disregard the island vegetation he never
ceased to be attentive to the heavens. To have time to watch a
cloud was perhaps the thing he was most grateful for among all his
leisurely joys. About a mile or so from the hut was a small grassy
promontory, and here he would lie for hours on end, observing the
skies. Sometimes he chose out one particular cloud and followed it
through all its changes, watching how almost imperceptibly it amassed
and reared up its great rounded cauliflower curves, and how when it
seemed most proud and sculptural it began to dissolve and pour itself
into new moulds, changing and changing, so that he scarcely had time
to grasp one transformation before another followed it. On some days
the clouds scarcely moved at all, but remained poised like vast swans
floating asleep with their heads tucked under their wings. They
rested on the air, and when they brightened, or changed their white
plumage to the shadowy pallor of swans at dusk, it was because of the
sun’s slow movement, not their own. But those days came seldom, for
as a rule the sea-wind blew, buoying them onward.
Lying on his stomach Mr. Fortune would watch a cloud come up from
the horizon, and as it approached he would feel almost afraid at
the silent oncoming of this enormous and towering being, an advance
silent as the advance of its vast shadow on the sea. The shadow
touched him, it had set foot on the island. And turning on his back
he looked up into the cloud, and glancing inland saw how the shadow
was already climbing the mountain-side.
Though they were silent he imagined then a voice, an enormous soft
murmur, sinking and swelling as they tumbled and dissolved and
amassed. And when he went home he noted in his diary the direction
of the wind and any peculiarities of weather that he had noticed. At
these times he often wished, and deeply, that he had a barometer:
but he had never been able to afford himself one, and naturally the
people of the Mission had thought of a tea-pot.
On the first really wet day, however, he rushed out with joy and
contrived a rain-gauge. And having settled this in and buttered its
paws, he went for a long rejoicing walk, a walk full of the most
complicated animal ecstasy, or perhaps vegetable would be the truer
word; for all round him he heard the noise of the woods guzzling
rain, and he felt a violent sympathy with all the greenery that
seemed to be wearing the deepened colour of intense gratification,
and with the rich earth trodden by the rain, and sending up a steam
of mist as though in acknowledgment. And all the time as he trudged
along he was pretending to himself how hardy he was to be out in such
disagreeable weather, and looking forward to how nice it would be to
get back to the hut and change into dry clothes, and boil a kettle
for tea.
He was behaving as though he had never been out in the rain before.
It had rained quite often in St. Fabien, indeed there were times
when it seemed never to do anything else. But rain there had been a
very different matter, veiling the melancholy quayside, clanking on
the roofs of the rabble of tin church premises, and churning the soft
grit of the roads into mud. It had rained in St. Fabien and he had
constantly been out in it, but with no more ecstasy than he had known
when it rained in Hornsey. No doubt the ownership of a rain-gauge
accounted for much; but there was more to it than that--a secret
core of delight, a sense of truancy, of freedom, because now for the
first time in his life he was walking in the rain entirely of his
own accord, and not because it was his duty, or what public opinion
conceived to be so.
Public opinion was waiting for him in the hut when he got back.
While he was still shaking himself like a dog in the verandah, Lueli
appeared in the doorway, looking very dry and demure, and began to
pet and expostulate in the same breath.
“How very wet! How very silly! Come in at once! Why do you go out
when it rains?”
“It is healthy to go for a walk in the rain,” replied Mr. Fortune,
trampling firmly on public opinion.
“It would be better to stay under a roof and sleep.”
“Not at all. In England it rains for days at a time, but everyone
goes out just the same. We should think it very effeminate to stop
indoors and sleep.”
“I haven’t been asleep the whole time,” Lueli remarked in a defensive
voice. “That new pot of yours--I’ve been out to fetch it in case it
got spoilt.”
While he was drinking his tea, (Lueli drank tea also, because his
affection and pride made him in everything a copycat, but he sipped
it with a dubious and wary expression), Mr. Fortune found himself
thinking of England. He thought about his father, a sanguine man who
suddenly upped and shot himself through the head; and thence his
thoughts jumped to a Whitsuntide bank holiday, which he had spent
in a field near Ruislip. The sky was a pale milky blue, the field
was edged with some dowdy elms and beyond them was a view of distant
gasworks. At two o’clock he had eaten his lunch--a cold pork chop;
and clear as ever he could recall the exquisite unmeaning felicity
of that moment.
How little pleasure his youth had known, that this outing should
remain with him like an engraved gem! And now he scarcely knew
himself for happiness. The former things were passed away--the bank
with its façade trimmed with slabs of rusticated stone--a sort of
mural tripe; his bed-sitting-room at “Marmion,” 239 Lyttleton Road,
N. E., so encumbered and subfusk, and the horrible disappointment of
St. Fabien. There had passed the worst days of his life; for he had
expected something of them, he had gone there with an intention of
happiness and doing good. But though he had tried his best he had not
been able to love the converts, they were degenerate, sickly, and
servile; and in his discouragement he had thought to himself: “It’s a
good thing I know about bookkeeping, for I shall never be fit to do
anything better.” And now he was at Fanua, and at his side squatted
Lueli, carving a pattern on the rain-gauge.
The next day it rained again, and he went for another walk, a walk
not so ecstatic as the former, but quite as wet and no doubt quite as
healthy. Hollow peals of thunder rumbled through the cold glades,
the chilling South wind blew and the coco-nuts fell thumping from
the trees. He walked to his promontory and stood for some time
watching the clouds--which were to-day rounded, dark and voluminous,
a presentation to the eye of what the thunder was to the ear--and the
waves. He felt no love for the sea, but he respected it. That evening
the rain-gauge recorded 1.24.
The project of bathing by moonlight never came to much, for somehow
when the time came he was always too sleepy to be bothered; but he
was extremely successful in keeping regular hours, for all that so
many of them were hours of idleness. Morning prayers, of course,
began the day, and after prayers came breakfast. A good breakfast
is the foundation of a good day. Mr. Fortune supposed that a great
deal of the islanders’ lack of steadfastness might be attributed to
their ignorance of this maxim. Lueli, for instance, was perfectly
content to have no breakfast at all, or satisfied himself with a
flibberty-gibberty meal of fruit eaten off the bushes. Mr. Fortune
made tea, softened and sweetened at once by coco-milk, and on
Sundays, coffee. With this he had three boiled eggs. The eggs were
those of the wild pigeon, eggs so small that three was really a
quite moderate allowance. Unfortunately there was no certainty of
them being new-laid, and very often they were not. So it was a
notable day when it occurred to him that a native dish of breadfruit
sopped into a paste was sufficiently stodgy and sticky to be
perfectly well eaten in lieu of porridge.
After breakfast and a pipe shared with Lueli--he did not really
approve of boys of Lueli’s years smoking, but he knew that
pipe-sharing was such an established Polynesian civility that
Lueli’s feelings would be seriously wounded if he didn’t fall in
with the custom--the hut was tidied, the mats shaken in the sun, and
the breakfast things put away. Then came instruction in befitting
branches of Christian lore: then, because the pupil was at hand, and
it was well to make sure of him while he had him. For all that there
were a good many holidays given and taken. With such an admirable
pupil one could afford oneself the pleasure of bestowing it.
Since the teachings had to be entirely conversational, Lueli learnt
much that was various and seemingly irrelevant. Strange alleys
branched off from the subject in hand, references and similes that
strayed into the teacher’s discourse as the most natural things in
the world had to be explained and enlarged upon. In the middle of
an account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, Mr. Fortune would find
himself obliged to break off and describe a donkey. This would lead
naturally to the sands of Weston-super-Mare, and a short account of
bathing machines; and that afternoon he would take his pupil down
to the beach and show him how English children turned sand out of
buckets, and built castles with a moat round them. Moats might lead
to the Feudal system and the Wars of the Barons. Fighting Lueli
understood very well, but other aspects of civilization needed a
great deal of explaining; and Mr. Fortune nearly gave himself heat
apoplexy by demonstrating in the course of one morning the technique
of urging a golf ball out of a bunker and how English housewives
crawl about on their hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum.
After dismissing Lueli from his lessons, Mr. Fortune generally
strolled down to the village to enlarge the work of conversion. By
now he had given up general preaching and exhortation--not that he
thought it a bad way to go to work, on the contrary, he knew that
it had been sanctioned by the best Apostolic usage; but preaching
demands the concurrence of an audience, even though it be one of
fishes or pigs; and since he was no longer a novelty, the islanders
had become as slippery as the one, as artful and determined in
dodging away as the other. He practiced instead the Socratic method
of pouncing upon any solitary and defenceless person who happened to
pass by. And like Socrates he would lead them aside into the shade
and ask them questions.
Many charming conversations took place. But nothing ever came of
them, and the fields so white for the harvest continued to ripple and
rustle in the sun, eluding all his efforts to reap and bind them into
sheaves and carry them into God’s barn in time for the harvest-home.
He had now been on the island for nearly six months and every day he
knew himself to have less attractive power. How he wished that he had
thought of bringing some fireworks with him! Two or three rockets
touched off, a green Bengal light or a Catherine wheel, he would have
been sure of a congregation then. And there is no religious reason
why fireworks should not be used as a means to conversion. Did not
God lure the fainting Israelites by letting Himself off as a pillar
of fire by night? He thought, though, that had he fireworks at his
command, he would draw the line at that variety which is known as
British Cannon. They are very effective, but they are dangerous; and
he did not wish to frighten his flock.
From mid-day till about two or three in the afternoon, there was no
possibility of converting anybody, for the islanders one and all went
firmly to sleep. This was the time when Mr. Fortune went for his
daily walk. After so much endeavour he would have been quite pleased
to take a nap himself; but he knew the value of regular exercise and
by taking it at this time of day he was safe from molestation by the
bevies. He usually ate a good deal of fruit on these walks, because
he had not yet accustomed himself to such a long stretch between
breakfast and dinner. Indeed for some time after his arrival on the
island he felt rather underfed. Dinner consisted of more breadfruit,
messes prepared by Lueli, fish sometimes, roots flavoured with
sea-water. Lueli preferred his fish raw. Sometimes Mr. Fortune made
soup or opened a tin of sardines.
Dinner was immediately followed by afternoon tea. Mr. Fortune would
not forego that comfortable meal, so they had it as a sort of
dessert. Then followed a long sub-afternoon, spent in various ways of
doing nothing in particular. Lueli always went bathing then. He had
no theories about it being dangerous to bathe on the heels of a large
meal, and after an interval for digestion Mr. Fortune bathed too.
Sometimes they paid visits, or received them. On these occasions Mr.
Fortune never spoke of religion. He produced his pocket magnifying
glass and showed them his pores. At other times they went sailing or
took a stroll.
These were all pleasant doings, but perhaps the moment he enjoyed
best was when, dusk having fallen, he lit the lamp. He had a peculiar
affection for his lamp. It hung from the ridge pole of the hut and
he felt about it much as Sappho felt about the evening star. It
shone as though with a kindness upon everything that was dear to
him: upon his books, and the harmonium; upon the bowls and dishes
and woven mats that were both dear in themselves as tokens of the
islanders’ goodwill, and endeared by use; upon the wakeful shine of
the tea-pot and the black tin box, and upon Lueli’s sleepy head. He
would often walk out into the darkness for the pleasure of seeing
his hut lighted up within, the rays of warm light shining through the
chinks in the latticed walls as though they were shining through a
very large birds’ nest. Overhead were the stars trembling with the
intensity of their remote fires. The air was very sweet and the dark
grass gentle underfoot as he walked round about his home.
He whistled to himself, softly, an air that Delilah sings in the
oratorio of Samson--a rather foolish chirruping tune, in which Handel
expressed his private opinion of soprano Delilahs: but he liked the
words--
“How charming is domestic ease,
A thousand ways I’ll strive to please:”
(after that they ceased to be appropriate).
A thousand, thousand ways he would strive to please until he had
converted all the islanders. And planning new holy wiles for the
morrow he re-entered the hut to eat a slight supper, and perhaps to
darn a rent or replace a button, and then to write up his diary, to
read prayers, and so to end another day.
Saturday and Saints’ days were holidays, for himself and Lueli both.
Lueli disported himself as he pleased, and Mr. Fortune watched
clouds. On Sundays they performed the services appointed by the
Church of England.
There was a week or two when he believed that he was in the way to
make another convert. She was a very old woman, extremely ugly, not
very agreeable and rather doting. But she seemed perfectly able to
understand about eternal life, and showed great anxiety to lay hold
on it. Mr. Fortune visited her daily and tried hard to teach her the
love of God, and the Christian belief. But she seemed deaf to all
topics save one--and her anxiety to lay hold became as the days went
by positively grasping.
One day the wife of Teioa, a sensible woman whom Mr. Fortune had
a great respect for, came in with some food for the invalid and
overheard part of their colloquy.
“Live for ever,” she remarked rather scornfully to the missionary as
they left the house. “Why, isn’t she old enough already? How much
more does she want?” And though Mr. Fortune deplored her blindness,
yet in this particular instance he admitted to himself that she had
perceived clearly enough, and that his old woman was no sort of
genuine convert, only very old and frightened and rapacious. None the
less he continued to visit her, and to do what he could to comfort
her. And often as he sat by her bedside he thought what a mystery
this business of eternal life is and how strangely, though almost
all desire it, they differ in their conception of what it is they
desire; some, like Shakespeare (and how many others unknown?) coolly
confident of an immortality
“Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men”;
some like Buddha, hoping for an eternal life in which their own
shall be absolved and lost, some, like this old woman, desiring an
eternity like an interminable piece of string which she could clutch
one end of and reel forever about herself. “And how do I desire it?”
he thought. “I want to feel it on every side, more abundantly. But I
want to die first.”
In the end he grew quite attached to the old creature, and when she
died, he was sorry. He would have liked, as a mark of respect, to
attend her funeral (he certainly did not feel that he had any claim
to conduct it himself). But no one suggested that he should, and he
hesitated to suggest it, lest he should be offending against some
taboo. So he went off by himself for a day in the woods and thought
about her, and said a prayer or two. And in the evening he returned
to Lueli. One convert at any rate had been granted to him, and
perhaps it would be greedy to want more, especially as that one was
in every way so exemplary and delightful.
The two friends--for such they were despite more than sixty degrees
of latitude and over thirty years between them (and the latter is
a more insuperable barrier than an equator) lived together in the
greatest amity. Lueli had now quite given up running away. He settled
down to Mr. Fortune’s ways and curled himself up amidst the new
customs and regulations as peacefully as though he has never known
any other manner of existence. Indeed Mr. Fortune was sometimes
obliged to pack him off to the village to play with the other boys,
thinking that it would harm him never to be with company of his own
age.