Taking Lueli’s arm he staggered down the little rocky path. The
morning was cold and now it began to rain. The rain was dirty rain,
full of smuts and fine grit from the volcano. It might have been
raining in London or Manchester.
Exercise soon restored Mr. Fortune to an ordinary frame of mind. He
looked with interested horror at the wood they passed through. Many
trees were uprooted or hung tottering with their roots half out of
the ground, the shrubs and grass were crushed and trampled, boughs
and torn creepers were scattered everywhere. It was as though some
savage beast had run amuck through the glades, tearing and havocking
and rooting up the ground with its horns. Lueli picked up a dead
parrot, and once they skirted by a swarm of angry bees. Their hive
had been broken in the fall of its tree, the honeycomb was scattered
on the grass and the affronted insects were buzzing hither and
thither, angrier than ever because now the rain was making its way
through the dishevelled green roof.
“But it will soon quench them,” thought Mr. Fortune. “And if some
bees and some parrots are the only deaths by this earthquake we shall
be well out of it.”
He was uneasy about the villagers, all the more so because he had
run away from them in their hour of peril. Also he wanted to talk to
someone about the stream of lava which he knew would soon flow down
from the crater. Provided it only flows to the south, he thought. He
questioned Lueli but could learn nothing; Lueli had never been in an
earthquake before, he had heard the old men of the island talking
about them but the last earthquake had happened long before his day.
On nearing the village Mr. Fortune heard a great hub-bub, but it was
impossible to discover from the noise of everyone talking at once
whether they were lamenting or merely excited; all he could conclude
was that at any rate they were not all dead.
When he appeared, with Lueli following sedately behind, a crowd of
gesticulating islanders rushed forward, all waving their arms and
shouting. The thought leapt up in his mind: “Suppose they think that
_I_ am responsible for this earthquake? Perhaps they will kill me
to appease the mountain!” He had never felt less in the mood for
martyrdom. The last twelve hours had given him more than enough to
cope with. Yet even if the fervour of his faith were lacking he could
make a shift to die decently: and he stiffened himself and went
forward. But Lueli? Suppose they wanted to martyr him too? No! That
he would not allow. While there was a kick left in him he would see
to that. He glanced back as though to reassure him, but as he caught
sight of him he remembered that Lueli was not a Christian, nor ever
had been one. What a sell if they should sacrifice him before there
was time to explain! Well, this made it even more urgent a matter to
defend him: martyrdom was one thing, miscarriage of justice quite
another.
But Mr. Fortune need not have been agitated. The islanders had no
intention but to welcome him and Lueli, and to rejoice round them
over their safety; which they did with the pleasanter excitement and
conviction since naturally, in the emotions of the night they had not
given them a thought till now.
Half smothered and quite deafened, Mr. Fortune pushed through the
throng, saying: “Where is Ori?” For having lived so long on the
island he had fallen into the proper respect for a chief, and
depended on Ori rather more than he would have liked to admit. “He is
almost like another European,”--so the priest explained to himself.
At this juncture Ori was behaving very much like an European, for he
was partaking of one of those emergency breakfasts, sketchy in form
but extremely solid and comprehensive in content, with which the
white races consummate and, as it were, justify any fly-by-night
catastrophe. Seeing Mr. Fortune he politely invited him to sit down
and take a share. “But the flow of lava?” enquired Mr. Fortune,
wiping his mouth. “Do you think it will come this way?” Ori took
another handful of stirabout. “There are no signs of it so far and if
it comes this way it will not come here yet.”
“But do you think it will come this way?”
“My god says, No.”
When breakfast was finished Ori got up and went off with the other
men of consequence to make an inquisition into the damage done by the
pigs. They had come bolting down from the woods and wrought even more
serious havoc than the earthquake, which had only shaken down a house
or two, whereas the pigs had trespassed into every enclosure and
eaten all the provisions. Mr. Fortune felt a little slighted that he
was not invited to go too. Apparently Ori did not quite regard him as
another Fanuan. “Oh well,” he said. “Perhaps they meant it politely,
seeing that I had not finished my breakfast.” But though he felt as
if he were hungry he had no real appetite, and rising he prepared to
walk back to his hut.
It was as though the earthquake had literally shaken his wits. All
his recollections were dislodged and tumbled together, he knew they
were there somewhere, but he could not find them, just as he had
mislaid the discovery of overnight until, turning to view Lueli as a
possible martyr, he beheld and recognized him as the idolater he was
and always had been. Now he was walking to the hut in the same kind
of oblivion. He must have remembered the lamp tossing its flame up
to the roof, the burning sheaves of thatch falling down around him,
for he had a very clear vision of Lueli’s face bending over him, so
violently modelled by the flames that it had looked like the face,
sad and powerful, of a stranger, of an angel. But his thoughts went
no further; and even when the smell of charred wood came sadly to his
nostrils through the falling rain he did not put two and two together.
“I wonder if those pigs have messed up my place too,” he said. A sigh
out of the air answered him. He had not noticed till then that Lueli
was following.
“Poor Lueli, you must be so tired!” There was no answer and still the
boy lagged behind. He must be tired indeed. Mr. Fortune stopped. He
was about to speak once more, bidding Lueli to lean on him and take
heart, when suddenly the boy shot past him, running desperately, and
whispering to himself as he ran as though he were imploring his own
mind.
Mr. Fortune hastened after him. Would all this strangeness, this
bewilderment, this nightmare of familiar living confounded and turned
backward never come to an end? He hastened on into the smell of
burning and pulling aside the drooping fronds of a banana tree which,
uprooted, had fallen and lay across the pathway like a screen, he
beheld the ruins of the hut.
One wall was still standing, a few pale flames licking wistfully over
it. The rest was charred logs and hummocks of grey ash, sizzling
under the rain--for now it was raining more and more heavily. Looking
round on the devastation he began to recognize the remains of his
belongings. Those shreds of tinder were his clothes. That scrap
of shrivelled leather, that wasting impalpable bulk of feathery
print was his Bible; there lay the medicine chest and there the
sewing-machine, and this, this intricate ruin of molten metal tubes,
charred rubber and dislocated machinery was the harmonium, its
scorched ivory keys strewed round about it like teeth fallen from a
monstrous head.
Lueli was there, but he seemed to have no thought for the unfortunate
priest amid the ruins of his home. Wading among the hot ashes,
crouching close to the wreckage, turning over this and that with
rapid and trembling hands, Lueli was searching with desperate anxiety
for--Mr. Fortune knew not what. At length he gave a bitter cry and
cast himself upon the ground.
Instantly Mr. Fortune was kneeling beside him, patting his shoulder,
trying to lift the averted head.
“What is it, Lueli? What is it, my dear, dear friend?”
Lueli sat up and turned on him a face discoloured and petrified into
an expression of such misery that he could hardly endure to look at
it.
“What is it? Are you hurt? Are you ill?”
The expression never changed.
“Are you frightened, Lueli? Has it upset you to find our home burnt
to the ground? But never mind! We will soon have another, it is
nothing to grieve for.”
He would have said that Lueli did not hear him, so unmoving he sat,
so utterly aloof, but that at these last words a very slight smile of
scorn quivered on the dry lips.
Then Mr. Fortune remembered. He hung his head and when he spoke
again it was with the grave voice in which we address the bereaved.
“Is it your god you were looking for? Is he gone?”
Lueli did not answer. But it was clear that he had both heard and
understood, for he fixed his eyes on the priest’s face with the look
of an animal which knows itself at man’s mercy but does not know what
man intends to do to it.
“My poor Lueli! Is that it?... Is it so dreadful? Yes, I know it must
be, I know, I know. I would do anything to comfort you, but I cannot
think now, I can only tell you how I pity you with my whole heart. I
do, indeed I do. Believe me, though I told you to burn your god, yet
at this moment, if it were possible for me, I think I would even give
it to you again.”
He spoke very slowly, scarcely daring to lift his gaze to the sorrow
which sat beside him, not answering, not crying out, meek with the
meekness of despair. And still Lueli listened, and still looked, with
his expression wavering between timidity and antagonism.
“Lueli, I spoke very harshly to you last night, not like a Christian,
not as one sad human being should speak to another. In blaspheming
against your god I blasphemed against my own. And now I can’t
comfort you. I don’t deserve to. I can only sit beside you and be
sorry.”
Lueli never answered and Mr. Fortune acted his last words, sitting
mournfully beside him in the rain. After an hour or so Lueli began to
topple forward, then suddenly he lay down and fell asleep.
Now Mr. Fortune had time to think, and though he was dog-tired think
he must. For after awhile Lueli would wake again, and then the
missionary must have some settled reasonable comfort for him, some
plan of consolation. On the face of it nothing could be clearer. He
should say something of this sort: “Your god, Lueli, was only made of
wood, perishable and subject to accidents, like man who is made of
flesh. He is now burnt, and his ashes are lost among the other ashes.
Now will you not see that my God is a better God than yours, and turn
to Him? For my God is from everlasting, even though the earth shake
He cannot be moved.”
Yes, that was the sort of thing to say, but he felt a deep reluctance
to saying it. It seemed ungentlemanly to have such a superior
invulnerable God, part of that European conspiracy which opposes
gun-boats to canoes and rifles to bows and arrows, which showers
death from the mountains upon Indian villages, which rounds up the
negro in an empire and tricks him of his patrimony.
Mr. Fortune remembered the Man of Sorrows. Would Lueli accept in the
place of his wooden god a God that had once been made flesh? In the
old days Lueli had enjoyed hearing about Jesus, though Mr. Fortune
had always suspected him of preferring Joshua. Many, very many must
have taken Jesus to their hearts out of pity; following the example
of the woman who washed His feet although to her they were most
likely but the feet of a wayfaring man. But it was rare to find a
Polynesian accepting Him for these mortal motives, they themselves
were not sorrowful enough. Probably despite the loss of his god Lueli
would still prefer the more robust and stirring character of Joshua.
The trumpet that shall awaken the dead with the sanction of the
resurrection is louder than all the rams’ horns that blew down
Jericho. As an honest priest it was Mr. Fortune’s duty to preach, not
only Christ crucified but also Christ arisen to comfort His followers
awhile with neighbourly humanity ere He ascended to His Father. If
this were all, it might suit Lueli very well: but in a twinkling it
would lead him on to the Trinity, a mysterious sign revolving in the
heavens from everlasting, a triangle that somehow is also a sphere.
And so he was back again where he started from, embarrassed with a
God so superior to poor Lueli’s that to insist upon him now would be
heartless boasting, would be exploiting an unfair advantage, wouldn’t
be cricket.
“If I were a proper missionary,”--he burst out in a cross voice. And
then with a wry grin he added: “It doesn’t look as though I were any
sort of missionary. Lord, what a mess I’ve made of it!”
He had indeed. The mess amid which he sat was nothing to it.
Disconsolately, he looked at his watch. It had stopped. In the stress
of overnight he had forgotten to wind it up, and now it recorded the
epoch at which his last link with European civilization had been
snapped--eight hours thirty-five minutes. It could not be much later
than that now. But a miss is as good as a mile, and for the rest of
his sojourn on the island, for the rest of his life maybe, he would
not know what o’clock it was. This circumstance, not serious in
itself and not to be compared with the loss of the medicine chest or
his books, upset him horribly. He felt frightened, he felt as small
and as desperate as a child lost. “I must set it as best I can,” he
thought. “After all, time is a convention, just like anything else.
My watch will measure out my days and remind me to be up and doing
just as well though it be a little askew. And no doubt I shall die at
my appointed hour however erroneously I reckon to it.”
But what time was it? The sky was overcast, he could not guess
by the sun and he could not guess by his own time-feeling
either, for his body had lost touch with ordinary life. He sat
debating between nine-seventeen, five past ten, ten forty-three,
eleven-twenty--indecisive times which all seemed reasonably probable,
and noon exactly, which was bracing and decisive, a good moment
to begin a new era--but too good to be true. At last he settled
on ten twenty-five; but even so he still delayed, for he felt a
superstitious reluctance to move the hands and so to destroy the last
authentic witness his watch could bear him. Five minutes, he judged,
had been spent in this weak-minded dallying: so resolutely he set the
hands to ten-thirty and wound the poor machine up. It began to tick,
innocently, obediently. It had set out on its fraudulent career.
It was a good watch, painstaking and punctual, its voice was
confident, it had an honest face; but henceforth its master had lost
his trust in it, and though he wore it (like a wife) at bed and board
and wound it up regularly and hung it on a tree when he went bathing,
yet he never could feel it was his true wife (watch, I mean) again.
Still Lueli slept.
“I make all this fuss,” thought Mr. Fortune. “I even feel helpless
and abandoned, because I have lost my reckoning of time. How much
worse to lose one’s God!”
Thus the watch diversion over and done with, and the new time being
ten-thirty-one, he was back on the old problem. What could he do for
poor Lueli who had lost his god? “And it was for me that he lost it,”
he thought, with a poignancy of feeling that was almost irritation.
“He might have picked up his god and run out of the hut with it,
but he would not leave me under the harmonium.” It was heroic,
desperately heroic.... Yet there might have been time to save both? A
god that could be picked up in one hand. Had Lueli in the flurry of
the moment forgotten that the idol lay on the floor of the hut? But
No, one would not forget one’s god, thought he, even in an earthquake.
Now he could understand why Lueli had seemed so cold in the early
morning, so aloof and unlike his usual self. When he had lain staring
out to sea with that strange expression he had been tasting what
it feels like to be without a god. And when they approached the hut
that was why he had lagged behind until the last explosion of hope
had sent him running to seek his god among the wood-ashes. Now he was
asleep. But he would not sleep much longer. Already he had stirred
once or twice, and sighed, as those do who must soon awaken. And
still Mr. Fortune had not settled how to deal with him when he awoke.
Would the Man of Sorrows fit his sorrowful case, He who had once
cried out, “_Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani?_” Or would it be better
to try Jehovah, a tribal character whose voice was in the clouds,
whose arrows stuck very fast? The worst of it was that Lueli knew all
about them already. For three years he had been living on the terms
of the greatest intimacy with them, he was even at home with the
Trinity. And so all that Mr. Fortune could tell him now would be but
a twice-told tale; and that was not likely to be of much effect, for
Polynesians are fickle, they tire as easily as children and must be
bribed with novelties.
Mr. Fortune grew increasingly despondent. He was even growing bored,
and more and more quickly he turned over in his mind the various
expedients of Godhead which might appeal to Lueli, like a woman
tossing over a piece-bag in search of something she cannot find. The
blue print, the grey merino, the long and ever more tangled trail of
metal lace, a scrap of corduroy: none of these is what she looks for,
and what she looks for is not there.
“I can do nothing,” he cried out; and then an inner voice finishing
the quotation for him added, “without Thee.”
Of course he could do nothing without God. Why had he not thought of
that before? Why, instead of vain thinking, hadn’t he prayed?
He looked about him. He was alone in a mesh of rain. For leagues
around the rain was falling, falling upon the quenched ashes of his
homestead where were mingled and quenched too the ashes of Lueli’s
god, falling upon the motionless forest, falling upon the moving
ocean, on that vast watery and indivisible web of tides and currents,
falling everywhere with an equal and unstaying pressure. Only upon
the newly-open mouth of the pit was the rain not falling, for there
the flames rushed up and caught and consumed it.
There had been an earthquake and now it was raining. Both events
were equally natural, equally accountable for, equally inevitable.
There was nowhere any room for chance; no happening from the greatest
to the least could be altered or provoked or turned aside. And why
should he specify into greatest or least? In causation there is no
great or small. He himself was as great as the mountain, as little as
the least of the ashes of Lueli’s god.
Still he looked about him. But he was not looking for anything now
nor did he need to raise his eyes to heaven or close them before any
presence unseen. The God who had walked with him upon the island
had gone. He had ascended in the flames that had burst roaring and
devouring from the mountain-top, and hiding His departure in clouds
of smoke, He had gone up and was lost in space.
Mr. Fortune no longer believed in a God.
It had all happened quite quietly, just like that. Once he put out
his hand as though to arrest something that was floating away out
of reach, but in a moment it dropped again. And there it was before
him, resting upon his knees, the hand of a man who didn’t any longer
believe in a God, with fingers idly patting out a slow and flagging
rhythm, tick-tock like a time-piece that is running down. The real
time-piece went on nimbly enough, it was now (he noticed) five
minutes to eleven of the new era. If his diary had not been burnt he
could have mentioned in it with impressive accuracy: “At 10:54 A. M.
(N. T.) I ceased to believe in God.” This quaint fancy gave him
pleasure.
How differently to Lueli was he taking his loss. The reason must
be that Lueli though losing his god had kept his faith. Lueli had
lost something real, like losing an umbrella; he had lost it with
frenzy and conviction. But _his_ loss was utter and retrospective, a
lightning-flash loss which had wiped out a whole life-time of having.
In fact the best way of expressing it, though it sounded silly and
paradoxical, was to say that what he had lost for ever was nothing.
“Forever is a word that stretches backward too,” he explained to
himself. If any proof were needed his own behaviour was supplying
it. He had ceased to believe in God but this was making no difference
to him. Consequently what he had ceased to believe in had never been.
He sighed--the loud horse’s sigh of one who has come to the end
of a long stint. Then he stood up amid the rain and the ashes and
stretched himself. He had got pins and needles in his legs from
sitting still for so long, but it was a pleasure to his body to
stretch and he stretched once more. The air struck cold on the
muscles and skin which had, as it were, started to live again. He
felt at once both tired and vigorous. In an odd way he was feeling
rather pleased with himself, a pleasure that was perhaps the
independent pleasure of his flesh which had waited patiently around
his motionless thinking as a dog waits at the feet of its master
absorbed in writing. The pen is thrown down rather wantonly, so that
the ink may give a little spurt on to the page that a moment ago was
all the world, that now is finished and prostrate and floutable.
The master gets up and stretches, the dog gambols round him with
congratulations. “Now you have come home to your senses again, now we
can be reasonable and go for a walk!”
He leant down and gave Lueli a little shake, affectionate but brisk.
“Wake up, wake up. We are going down to the village now to find a
lodging. You cannot sleep here in the rain all day or you will get
rheumatism.”
A policeman could not have been kinder, a mother more competent.
He had got Lueli up and walking through the wet woods and eating
stirabout by Ori’s fire before he had had time to bethink him of his
unhappiness.
Lueli sat swallowing and blinking and looking very debauched and
youthful while Mr. Fortune and Ori made arrangements. For the
present they could live under the chief’s ample roof. Meanwhile
the burnt hut could be re-built, or some dwelling could be fitted
up to receive them as lodgers, whichever Mr. Fortune thought best.
As for the volcano, that would not interfere with anybody’s plans.
The pigs had been corralled once more, the earthquake was already
half-forgotten. Ori had sent an old woman up to the mountain to make
a reconnaissance, and she had reported that the lava was flowing down
the south side of the mountain where nobody lived. Everything was all
right again, and the rain would freshen things up nicely. To-morrow
he would invite a few friends in, and there would be roast meat and a
party in honour of his guest.
Personally Mr. Fortune would have preferred to have the former
hut re-built and to go on living there, much as of old except for
religion, the harmonium, and other European amenities. But he feared
that Lueli would mope and be miserable. It would be better for him to
have a change of scene, company and gaiety. Accordingly, he arranged
that for the future they should lodge with Teioa, a lesser chief,
whose family included several lively sons and daughters, and an
extremely vivacious great-grandmother.