history and the Church Catechism, _The King of Love my Shepherd is_
and _The Old Hundredth_. Then there had been no call for this blatant
submission; lessons had been an easy-going conversation, with Lueli
keeping his end up as an intelligent pupil should and Mr. Fortune
feeling like a cross between wise old Chiron and good Mr. Barlow. Now
they were a succession of harangues, and rather strained harangues
to boot. Theology, Mr. Fortune found, is a more accommodating
subject than mathematics; its technique of exposition allows greater
latitude. For instance when you are gravelled for matter there is
always the moral to fall back upon. Comparisons too may be drawn,
leading cases cited, types and antetypes analysed and anecdotes
introduced. Except for Archimedes mathematics is singularly naked of
anecdotes.
Not that he thought any the worse of it for this. On the contrary
he compared its austere and integral beauty to theology decked out
in her flaunting charms and wielding all her bribes and spiritual
bonuses; and like Dante at the rebuke of Beatrice he blushed that
he should ever have followed aught but the noblest. No, there was
nothing lacking in mathematics. The deficiency was in him. He added
line to line, precept to precept; he exhausted himself and his pupil
by hours of demonstration and exposition; leagues of sand were
scarred, and smoothed again by the tide, and scarred afresh: never an
answering spark rewarded him. He might as well have made the sands
into a rope-walk.
Sometimes he thought that he was taxing Lueli too heavily, and
desisted. But if he desisted for pity’s sake, pity soon drove him
to work again, for if it were bad to see Lueli sighing over the
properties of parallel lines, it was worse to see him moping and
pining for his god. Teioa’s words, uttered so matter-of-factly,
haunted his mind. “I expect he will die soon.” Mr. Fortune was
thinking so too. Lueli grew steadily more lacklustre, his eyes were
dull, his voice was flat; he appeared to be retreating behind a film
that thickened and toughened and would soon obliterate him.
“If only, if only I could teach him to enjoy an abstract notion! If
he could once grasp how it all hangs together, and is everlasting and
harmonious, he would be saved. Nothing else can save him, nothing
that I or his fellows can offer him. For it must be new to excite him
and it must be true to hold him, and what else is there that is both
new and true?”
There were women, of course, a race of beings neither new nor true,
yet much vaunted by some as a cure for melancholy and a tether for
the soul. Mr. Fortune would have cheerfully procured a damsel (not
that they were likely to need much of that), dressed her hair, hung
the whistle and the Parnell medal round her neck, dowered her with
the nineteen counters and the tape measure and settled her in Lueli’s
bed if he had supposed that this would avail. But he feared that
Lueli was past the comfort of women, and in any case that sort of
thing is best arranged by the parties concerned.
So he resorted to geometry again, and once more Lueli was hurling
himself with frantic docility through the paper hoops. It was really
rather astonishing, how dense he could be! Once out of twenty,
perhaps, he would make the right answer. Mr. Fortune, too anxious to
be lightly elated, would probe a little into his reasons for making
it. Either they were the wrong reasons or he had no reasons at all.
Mr. Fortune was often horribly tempted to let a mistake pass. He was
not impatient: he was far more patient than in the palmiest days of
theology--but he found it almost unendurable to be for ever saying
with various inflexions of kindness: “No, Lueli. Try again,” or:
“Well, no, not exactly,” or: “I fear you have not quite understood,”
or: “Let me try to make that clearer.” He withstood the temptation.
His easy acceptance (though in good faith) of a sham had brought them
to this pass, and tenderness over a false currency was not likely
to help them out of it. No, he would not be caught that way twice.
Similarly he pruned and repressed Lueli’s talent for leaking away
down side-issues, though this was hard too, for it involved snubbing
him almost every time he spoke on his own initiative.
Just as he had been so mistaken about the nature of points,
confounding them with holes and agitating himself at the prospect
of a beach pitted all over, Lueli contrived to apply the same sort
of well-meaning misconceptions to every stage of his progress--if
progress be the word to apply to one who is hauled along in a state
of semiconsciousness by the scruff of his neck. When the points
seemed to be tolerably well-established in his mind Mr. Fortune led
him on to lines, and by joining up points he illustrated such simple
figures as the square, the triangle and the parallelogram. Lueli
perked up, seemed interested, borrowed the stick and began joining
up points too. At first he copied Mr. Fortune, glancing up after each
stroke to see if it had been properly directed. Then growing rather
more confident, and pleased--as who is not?--with the act of drawing
on sand, he launched out into a more complicated design.
“This is a man,” he said.
Mr. Fortune was compelled to reply coldly:
“A man is not a geometrical figure.”
At length Mr. Fortune decided that he had better take in sail. Pure
mathematics were obviously beyond Lueli; perhaps applied mathematics
would work better. Mr. Fortune, as it happened, had never applied
any, but he knew that other people did so, and though he considered
it a rather lower line of business he was prepared to try it.
“If I were to ask you to find out the height of that tree, how would
you set about it?”
Lueli replied with disconcerting readiness:
“I should climb up to the top and let down a string.”
“But suppose you couldn’t climb up it?”
“Then I should cut it down.”
“That would be very wasteful: and the other way might be dangerous.
I can show you a better plan than either of those.”
The first thing was to select a tree, an upright tree, because in
all elementary demonstrations it is best to keep things as clear as
possible. He would never have credited the rarity of upright trees
had he not been pressed to find one. Coco-palms, of course, were
hopeless: they all had a curve or a list. At length he remembered a
tree near the bathing-pool, a perfect specimen of everything a tree
should be, tall, straight as a die, growing by itself; set apart, as
it were, for purposes of demonstration.
He marched Lueli thither, and when he saw him rambling towards the
pool he recalled him with a cough.
“Now I will show you how to discover the height of that tree. Attend.
You will find it very interesting. The first thing to do is to lie
down.”
Mr. Fortune lay down on his back and Lueli followed his example.
Many people find that they can think more clearly in a recumbent
position. Mr. Fortune found it so too. No sooner was he on his back
than he remembered that he had no measuring stick. But the sun was
delicious and the grass soft; he might well spare a few minutes in
exposing the theory.
“It is all a question of measurements. Now my height is six foot two
inches, but for the sake of argument we will assume it to be six foot
exactly. The distance from my eye to the base of the tree is so far
an unknown quantity. My six feet however are already known to you.”
Now Lueli had sat up, and was looking him up and down with an intense
and curious scrutiny, as though he were something utterly unfamiliar.
This was confusing, it made him lose the thread of his explanation.
He felt a little uncertain as to how it should proceed.
Long ago on dark January mornings, when a septic thumb (bestowed on
him by a cat which he had rescued from a fierce poodle) obliged him
to stay away from the Bank, he had observed young men with woollen
comforters and raw-looking wind-bitten hands practising surveying
under the snarling elms and whimpering poplars of Finsbury Park.
They had tapes and tripods, and the girls in charge of perambulators
dawdled on the asphalt paths to watch their proceedings. It was odd
how vividly fragments of his old life had been coming back to him
during these last few months.
He resumed:
“In order to ascertain the height of the tree I must be in such a
position that the top of the tree is exactly in a line with the
top of a measuring stick--or any straight object would do, such as
an umbrella--which I shall secure in an upright position between
my feet. Knowing then that the ratio that height of the tree bears
to the length of the measuring stick must equal the ratio that the
distance from my eye to the base of the tree bears to my height, and
knowing (or being able to find out) my height, the length of the
measuring stick and the distance from my eye to the base of the tree,
I can, therefore, calculate the height of the tree.”
“What is an umbrella?”
Again the past flowed back, insurgent and actual. He was at the
Oval, and out of an overcharged sky it had begun to rain again. In
a moment the insignificant tapestry of lightish faces was exchanged
for a noble pattern of domes, blackish, blueish and greenish domes,
sprouting like a crop of miraculous and religious mushrooms. The rain
fell harder and harder, presently the little white figures were gone
from the field and, as with an abnegation of humanity, the green
plain, so much smaller for their departure, lay empty and forsaken,
ringed round with tier upon tier of blackly glistening umbrellas.
He longed to describe it all to Lueli, it seemed to him at the moment
that he could talk with the tongues of angels about umbrellas. But
this was a lesson in mathematics: applied mathematics, moreover, a
compromise, so that all further compromises must be sternly nipped.
Unbending to no red herrings he replied:
“An umbrella, Lueli, when in use resembles the--the shell that would
be formed by rotating an arc of curve about its axis of symmetry,
attached to a cylinder of small radius whose axis is the same as
the axis of symmetry of the generating curve of the shell. When not
in use it is properly an elongated cone, but it is more usually
helicoidal in form.”
Lueli made no answer. He lay down again, this time face-downward.
Mr. Fortune continued: “An umbrella, however, is not essential. A
stick will do just as well, so find me one, and we will go on to the
actual measurement.”
Lueli was very slow in finding a stick. He looked for it rather
languidly and stupidly, but Mr. Fortune tried to hope that this was
because his mind was engaged on what he had just learnt.
Holding the stick between his feet, Mr. Fortune wriggled about on his
back trying to get into the proper position. He knew he was making a
fool of himself. The young men in Finsbury Park had never wriggled
about on their backs. Obviously there must be some more dignified
way of getting the top of the stick in line with the top of the tree
and his eye, but just then it was not obvious to him. Lueli made it
worse by standing about and looking miserably on. When he had placed
himself properly he remembered that he had not measured the stick.
It measured (he had had the forethought to bring the tape with him)
three foot seven, very tiresome: those odd inches would only serve to
make it seem harder to his pupil. So he broke it again, drove it into
the ground, and wriggled on his stomach till his eye was in the right
place, which was a slight improvement in method, at any rate. He then
handed the tape to Lueli, and lay strictly motionless, admonishing
and directing while Lueli did the measuring of the ground. In the
interests of accuracy he did it thrice, each time with a different
result. A few minutes before noon the height of the tree was
discovered to be fifty-seven foot, nine inches.
Mr. Fortune now had leisure for compassion. He thought Lueli was
looking hot and fagged, so he said:
“Why don’t you have a bathe? It will freshen you up.”
Lueli raised his head and looked at him with a long dubious look, as
though he had heard the words but without understanding what they
meant. Then he turned his eyes to the tree and looked at that. A sort
of shadowy wrinkle, like the blurring on the surface of milk before
it boils, crossed his face.
“Don’t worry any more about that tree. If you hate all this so much
we won’t do any more of it, I will never speak of geometry again. Put
it all out of your head and go and bathe.”
Still Lueli looked at him as though he heard but didn’t understand.
Then in the same sleepwalking fashion he turned and went down towards
the bathing-pool.
Presently, looking between the trees, Mr. Fortune saw him reappear
on the rock above the deep part of the pool. He was going to dive.
Very slowly and methodically he took off everything that was on him,
he even took off his earrings. Then he stretched his arms in a curve
above his head and leapt in.
A beautiful dive--Mr. Fortune found himself thinking of the arc
of a stretched bow, the curve and flash of a scimitar, the jet
of a harpoon--all instruments of death, all displaying the same
austere and efficient kind of beauty, the swiftness to shed blood. A
beautiful dive--and a long one. Had he come up already? Hardly; from
where he sat Mr. Fortune could see almost the whole surface of the
bathing-pool. Perhaps though he had come up behind the rock, swimming
back under water.
Mr. Fortune rose to his feet. Instantly, with the movement, agonizing
fear took hold of him. He ran down to the pool, and out along the
rocks, shouting and calling. No sign, only the quietly-heaving water
under the impervious blue sky. No sound, except the parrots and
sea-birds, squawking in answer to his disturbing voice. Lueli was
staying down on purpose. He was holding on to the sea-weed, drowning
himself, with the resolute fatal despair of his lighthearted race.
Mr. Fortune leapt over his own fear of deep water. Where Lueli had
dived, he could dive too. He hurled himself off the rock, he felt
the water break like a stone under him, he felt himself smothered and
sinking; and the next moment he was bouncing about on the surface,
utterly and hopelessly afloat. He kicked and beat the water, trying
to force a passage downward. It would not let him through.
He swam to the rock and scrambled out into the weight of air, and
dived for a second time. Once more the sea caught him and held him up.
“Damn!” he said, softly and swiftly, as though he were pursuing a
pencil which had rolled into a dark corner out of reach.
Since diving was out of the question he must run to the village to
fetch helpers. The village was nearly a mile away, there might be no
one there but old women and babies, he would be breathless, everyone
would shout and wave their arms, by the time he got back with a
rescue party it would be too late, Lueli would be drowned.
This time it was harder to haul himself out of the water, for he
had forgotten to throw off his large draperies and they were now
waterlogged. After the shadow of the pool the sunlight seemed black
and blinding. He started to run, loosening the knots as he went, for
he would run quicker naked. As he threw off the cloak he caught
sight over his shoulder of a canoe out to sea. It was heading away
from the island but perhaps it was still within earshot. He shouted
and waved the cloak and shouted and coo-eed again. Each cry came out
of his body like a thing with jagged edges, tearing him inwardly. The
canoe kept on its course. The sweat ran down and blinded him, so that
he thought for a moment that the canoe had changed its direction and
was coming towards him; but it was only the sweat in his eyes which
had enlarged it.
He began to run again. It was a pity that he had wasted so much good
breath shouting. He was among the trees now, rushing down a vista
of light and shadow. Each tall tree seemed to gather speed as he
approached it till it shot past him with a whirr of foliage and a
swoop of darkness. His going shook the ground and the fruit fell off
the bushes as he ran by.
The path began to wind downhill and grew stonier. He was about
halfway to the village, he could hear the noise of the brook. He shot
round a corner, tripped over something, and fell headlong into a
group of human beings, falling among smooth brown limbs and cries of
astonishment. It was one of those bevies, half-a-dozen young women
who had come out to the brook to net crayfish. To his horror they all
leapt to their feet and began to run away. Lying along the ground as
he fell, with his head in the brook, he caught hold of an ankle.
“Stop! Don’t be little fools!” he cried out, sobbing for breath.
“Lueli is drowning in the bathing-pool. You must come back with me
and save him.”
The ankle belonged to Fuma, a hoyden whom he had once loathed beyond
words; but now he adored her, for she was going to play up. She
called back the other girls, rallied them, sent one back to the
village, and bade the others run as fast as they could to the pool,
and in a twinkling she and Mr. Fortune were following them up through
the woods. Fuma caught hold of his arm and patted it encouragingly.
“He is in the deep hole under the black rock,” he said. “He is lying
there holding on to the weed. I have been shouting, and I may not be
able to keep up with you. But you must run on without me and dive
until you find him.”
“Silly boy! Silly Lueli! He told me three days ago that he meant to
die. Such nonsense! Never mind, we will pull him up and breathe him
alive again.”
They ran on side by side. Presently Mr. Fortune said: “You know,
Fuma, this is all my fault.”
Fuma laughed under her breath. “Lueli thinks the world of you,” she
said. “He is always telling us how lovable you are.”
After a few more yards Mr. Fortune said: “Fuma, you must run on alone
now.”
She gave his arm a gentle nip, and shot ahead. He saw her join the
others as a starling flies into the flock and then they were out of
sight. He could only think of quite small immediate things, Fuma’s
eyebrows, a beautiful clear arch, and the soft quick sound of her
breathing. He was thinking more of her than of Lueli. She seemed more
real.
He was still running but now every time that he put a foot down it
was with a stamp that disintegrated his balance, so that he could not
guide his direction. Then he heard a splash, and another and another.
They had reached the pool and begun diving. Then he heard Fuma’s
voice crying: “Further to the left. He’s down here.” Then a babble of
voices and more splashings. Then silence.
He gathered up his will for the last thirty yards, was down on to
the beach and out breast-high into the water. He saw a girl’s head
rise above the surface of the empty pool. She shook the hair from her
eyes, saw him standing there, and came swimming towards him.
“We’ve got him,” she said. “But Fuma has to cut the weed with a shell
for we can’t loosen his hands.”
Mr. Fortune took the pocket-knife from his neck and held it out to
her. Then he saw a strangely intricate and beautiful group emerge and
slowly approach. They had brought up Lueli and were bearing him among
them. His head lolled and dipped back into the water from Fuma’s
shoulder, where it lay. His eyes were open in a fixed and piteous
stare, his mouth was open too, and a little trickle of blood ran down
from his lip, where he had bitten it. His inanimate body trailed in
the water with gestures inexpressibly weary. But two long streamers
of weed still hung from his clenched hands.
Death comes with her black ruler and red ink and scores a firm line
under the long tale of more or less, debit and credit, all the small
multitudinous entries which have made up the relationship between
one’s self and another. The line is drawn, the time has come to
audit; and from the heart of her shadow a strange clarity, dream-like
and precise, is shed upon the page, so that without any doubt or
uncertainty we can add up the account which is now at an end, and
perceive the sum-total of the expenditure of time. While the others
were ministering around the body of Lueli, squeezing the water out of
his lungs, rubbing him, breathing into his nostrils, burning herbs
and performing incantations, Mr. Fortune sat under a tree, a little
apart, and audited the past. In the tree sat a parrot, uttering from
time to time its curious airy whistle--a high, sweet, meditative
note. It seemed to Mr. Fortune that the bird was watching the process
of his thoughts, and that its whistle, detached from any personal
emotion, even from that of astonishment, was an involuntary and
philosophic acknowledgment of the oddity of men’s lives and passions.
“I loved him,” he thought. “From the moment I set eyes on him I loved
him. Not with what is accounted a criminal love, for though I set my
desire on him, it was a spiritual desire. I did not even love him as
a father loves a son, for that is a familiar love, and at the times
when Lueli most entranced me it was as a being remote, intact, and
incalculable. I waited to see what his next movement would be, if he
would speak or no--it was the not knowing what he would do that made
him dear. Yes, that was how I loved him best, those were my happiest
moments: when I was just aware of him, and sat with my senses
awaiting him, not wishing to speak, not wishing to make him notice me
until he did so of his own accord because no other way would it be
perfect, would it be by him. And how often, I wonder, have I let it
be just like that? Perhaps a dozen times, perhaps twenty times all
told, perhaps, when all is put together, for an hour out of the three
years I have had with him. For man’s will is a demon that will not
let him be. It leads him to the edge of a clear pool; and while he
sits admiring it, with his soul suspended over it like a green branch
and dwelling in its own reflection, will stretches out his hand and
closes his fingers upon a stone--a stone to throw into it.
“I’d had a poor meagre turnpike sort of life until I came here
and found Lueli. I loved him, he was a refreshment to me, my only
pleasant surprise. He was perfect because he _was_ a surprise. I had
done nothing to win him, he was entirely gratuitous. I had had no
hand in him, I could no more have imagined him before hand than I
could have imagined a new kind of flower. So what did I do? I started
interfering. I made him a Christian, or thought I did, I taught him
to do this and not to do the other, I checked him, I fidgetted over
him. And because I loved him so for what he was I could not spend a
day without trying to alter him. How dreadful it is that because of
our wills we can never love anything without messing it about! We
couldn’t even love a tree, not a stone even; for sooner or later we
should be pruning the tree or chipping a bit off the stone. Yet if
it were not for a will I suppose we should cease to exist. Anyhow it
is in us and while we live we cannot escape from it; so however we
love and whatever we love it can only be for a few minutes, and to
buy off our will for those few minutes we have to relinquish to it
for the rest of our lives whatever it is we love. Lueli has been the
price of Lueli. I enslaved him, I kept him on a string. I robbed him
of his god twice over--first in intention, then in fact. I made his
misery more miserable by my perpetual interference. Up till an hour
ago I was actually tormenting him with that damned geometry. And now
he is dead.... Yes, parrot! You may well whistle. But be careful.
Don’t attract my attention too much lest I should make a pet of you,
and put you in a cage, and then in the end, when you had learnt to
talk like me instead of whistling like a wise bird, wring your neck
because you couldn’t learn to repeat Paradise Lost.”
At these words the parrot flew away, just as though it had understood
and wished to keep on the safe side; and looking up Mr. Fortune saw
some of the islanders running towards him. He got up and went to
meet them. “Well, is he dead?” he asked, too deeply sunk in his own
wan-hope to pay any attention to their looks and greetings.
It was some time before they could make him understand that Lueli
was alive. He followed them, dumb, trembling and stupefied, to where
Lueli was sitting propped up under a tree. He looked rather battered,
and rather bewildered, and slightly ashamed of himself, like a child
that has been at a rich tea-party, grown over-excited and been sick.
But the hag-ridden look he had worn since the earthquake was gone,
and he was answering the congratulations and chaff of those around
him with a semblance of his old gaiety.