him whom he had not thought to meet again. Lueli was infected by
his embarrassment, and the two regarded each other with caution and
constraint, as dear friends do who meet unexpectedly after long
separation. Lueli was the first to speak.
“How ill you look. Your face is all holes.”
“Lueli, you would have laughed if you could have seen me trying to
dive in after you. Twice I threw myself in, but I could do nothing
but float.”
“I expect you let yourself crumple up.”
“Yes, I expect I did.”
“But it was very kind of you to try.”
“Not at all.”
The situation was horrible. Mr. Fortune was tongue-tied, very jealous
of the others and haunted with the feeling that behind all this cause
for rejoicing there was some fatal obstacle which he ought to know
all about but which his mind was shirking the contemplation of. Lueli
fidgetted and made faces. The awkwardness of being raised from the
dead was too much even for his _savoir faire_.
“Why can’t I be natural?” thought Mr. Fortune. “Why can’t I say how
glad I feel? And why don’t I feel my gladness? What have I done? Why
is it like this, what is the matter with me?”
Lueli’s thoughts were something like this: “He has a blemish on his
neck, but didn’t I ever notice it before? It must have grown larger.
I hope they won’t begin to laugh at him because he can’t dive. I love
him, but Oh dear! what a responsibility he is. I don’t think I can
bear it much longer, not just now. I don’t want responsibilities. I
only want to go to sleep.”
Round them stood half the population of the island, raging with
congratulations, jokes and enquiries. Even when they had escorted
them back to the hut, superintended Lueli’s falling asleep, and
eaten all the provisions which Mr. Fortune brought out to them, they
would not go away but sat among their crumbs and on the rock-garden
imploring Fuma to tell them once more how Mr. Fortune had come
bounding through the wood and fallen headlong into the girls’ laps.
For no reason that he could see he had suddenly become immensely
popular. And as he walked to and fro in the twilight waiting for
his guests to take themselves off he heard his name being bandied
about in tones of the liveliest affection and approval. He had one
consolation: by the morrow he would be out of fashion again. As for
Lueli, they scarcely mentioned him. If he had been drowned they would
have spent the evening wailing and lamenting; not for him but for
themselves, at the reminder of their own mortality, after the natural
way of mourning. And there would have been just as much gusto, he
thought--but tenderly, for he felt no animosity to them now, only a
desire to get rid of them and be left to his own soul--and just as
many crumbs.
The moon had set before they went away. Mr. Fortune stole into the
hut and listened for a while to Lueli’s quiet breathing, a slight
human rhythm recovered that day from the rhythm of the sea. He knelt
down very quietly and creakingly and taking hold of Lueli’s limp
warm hand he put it to his lips. “Good-bye, my dear,” he murmured
under his breath. Lueli stirred, and uttered a drowsy inarticulate
Goodnight.
Both rhythms were in Mr. Fortune’s ears as he lay down to rest. He
did not sleep, at least not for some hours; but he lay unharried in
a solemn and dream-like repose, listening to the gentle fanning of
Lueli’s slumber and the slow tread of the sea.
Thus, tranquil and full of long thoughts, he had lain on his first
night in Fanua, gazing at the star Canopus and watching the trail
of creeper stir at the sweet breath of night. All that he had then
of hope and faith was lost. But now at the last he seemed strangely
to have resumed the temper of that night, and the thought of his
renunciation was as full and perfect as the former thought of his
vocation had been. “It is not one’s beliefs that matter,” he told
himself, “but to be acting up to them. To have come to Fanua and now
to have made up my mind to go away--it is the decision that fills me
with this amazing kind of joy.”
To go away. It was the only solution, he had the parrot’s word for
it. The slow tread of the sea told him the same story. “I brought
you here,” it said, “and presently I shall bear you away. My ebbing
tides will return to Fanua, and ebb and return again and ebb and
return again. But for you there will be no return.” And the tread of
the sea became the footfall of a warder. It was this necessity, still
implicit and unrealized, which had lain like a stone in his heart
when he saw Lueli brought back from the dead. If he had not thought
of Lueli as being dead, he would never have understood. But Death had
vouchsafed him a beam of her darkness to see clearly by; and having
seen, he could not sin against that light. He must go away, that
was the only stratagem by which love could outwit its own inherent
treachery. If he stayed on, flattering himself with the belief that
he had learnt his lesson, he would remember for a while no doubt;
but sooner or later, inevitably he would yield to his will again, he
would begin to meddle, he would seek to destroy.
To see everything so clearly and to know that his mind was made
up was almost to be released from human bondage. This must be the
boasted calm joy of mathematicians which he had once pretended
to share. Euclid had failed him or he had failed Euclid; but the
contemplation of his own reasoning and resolved mind gave him a
felicity beyond even that which the rightness of right-angles could
afford. He would keep awake a little longer and make the most of it.
He could be sure it would not last. But when it had shattered and
desolation came in its stead there would still be common-sense and
common manliness and several practical preoccupations with which to
keep desolation at bay.
First he must get a message to St. Fabien. In the pocket of the coat
he had worn on the night of the earthquake were a couple of sheets
torn out of an exercise book. He had carried them on his stroll on
the chance that he might feel impelled to write a sonnet (Petrarchan
Sonnets were the only poetical form he attempted because they were so
regular, and even so he did them very badly) On The Setting Sun, or
To a Hermit Crab. He had not done so, partly because he had forgotten
to take a pencil too; but now, when he had smoothed the crumples out,
these sheets would come in handy for his letter to the Archdeacon.
In the morning he gathered some purple fruit whose juice he knew from
experience to be indelible, squeezed them into a bowl, and with a
reed pen wrote as follows:
Fanua.
My dear Archdeacon.
I am sorry to trouble you but I must ask that the launch may be
sent to fetch me away from Fanua. My ministry here has been a
failure. I have converted no one, moreover I think that they are
best as they are.
I am aware that I shall seem to you an unprofitable servant,
and I am prepared for reproof. But I must tell you that in my
present state of mind nothing that you can say, either of blame
or consolation, is likely to make much difference.
I should be very much obliged if you could send with the launch a
pair of stout black boots (size eleven) some collars (sixteen and
a half inch), and a bottle of Aspirin tablets.
Yours sincerely,
TIMOTHY FORTUNE.
P.S. Also some bone collar-studs. There was an earthquake and I
lost those which I had.
When the letter was written he put it away. His mind was quite made
up as to leaving Fanua, there was no danger that a week’s delay or so
in sending off the letter would weaken his resolution. Indeed if he
had consulted his own feelings he would not have delayed for an hour.
But he did not wish to leave Lueli until he was quite certain the boy
was able to stand on his own feet.
One thing was beyond doubt: Lueli would not try to kill himself
again. He had been frightened by the dark look of Death under the
water. Though he said nothing about his drowning or his rescue it
was obvious that he had set himself to get on good terms with the
life he had then thought fit to abandon. Never before had he been so
beautiful, nor moved so lithely, nor sprawled so luxuriously on the
warm grass. Sleek, languid and glittering, he was like a snake that
has achieved its new skin. He was grown more sociable too, and with
a quite new form of sociability; for instead of seeking the company
of others he exerted himself to make others seek his. Although his
drowning had done him no harm whatsoever and he had never been in
better trim, he chose to preen himself as an interesting invalid.
At all hours of the day the youth and beauty of the island would
appear with offerings of fruit and invalid delicacies. Since the
Fanuans are a people unequalled in kindness and idleness this was not
such a great tribute to Lueli’s fascinations. But what was really
remarkable was the success with which he imposed himself upon them as
a young hero. Even Fuma, who had stood out against his pretensions
for several days, laughing at him and pulling his hair and making
sarcastic remarks about people who couldn’t swim, suddenly dropped
her sisterly airs and attended on him as devoutly as the rest. As
though this were the last plum that he had been proposing should
drop into his mouth Lueli began to feel a little better now; was
able to go sailing or swimming--not even the waters that drowned him
could quench his love for water--or to take a stroll in the woods.
Presently he was addressing Fuma as “Child.”
If he had not so utterly forsworn meddling, if the letter to the
Archdeacon were not put away in his coat pocket, Mr. Fortune might
have yielded himself to a glow of matchmaking. Perhaps Fuma was not
quite the girl he would have chosen; perhaps for that matter Lueli’s
choice of her was not quite to the exclusion of other girls; but
having been so heart-rent over the defeated estate of that spiritless
and godless boy whom even his own younger brothers had been able to
tease out of the village it would have been sweet now to abet the
happiness of this triumphant young man.
As things were Lueli’s recovery must be the waving of the flag
which signalled his departure. So one morning he set off to find Ori
and explained to him that he wished to send a message by canoe to
Maikalua. Would Ori as usual see about it and oblige?
Early in the morning the canoe was launched: and singing and shouting
the boatmen set out on their voyage.
As he watched them depart Mr. Fortune had a sudden vision of a
pillar-box. It seemed to spring up before him, a substantial scarlet
cylinder, out of the glittering untenanted beach. He remembered how
long ago, one August afternoon, he had posted a note accepting with
pleasure an invitation to play tennis, an invitation which came
from some people called Tubbs who lived at Ealing; and how having
done so, he stood with the sun beating down upon him, just outside
the station, with people jostling past him and the newspaper man
shouting: “Star, Standard, Westminster! Surrey all out!” wishing with
despair that he could get his note back, for it seemed to him that
nothing could be more distasteful than to play tennis at Ealing with
those rollicking Tubbses.
But now he had no wish to recall his letter, though he was still sick
with the wrench of definitely despatching it. His only thought was to
leave Fanua as soon as possible; and until the moment of departure
came he could not imagine how he would pass away the time. Gradually
the pillar-box faded out before him and he saw the ocean-waste, the
narrow diminishing boat, the empty indifferent sky. His head was
aching again and he put his hand to his forehead. There was that
deluded watch, mincing complacently on. It was much better at passing
away time than he. Half-past seven. Another thirteen hours and he
would be getting himself supper, and Lueli might come in or he might
not. And after supper he would be going to bed. But if he fell asleep
too soon he would wake early with another shining unending morning
before him. No! It would be better to sit up late, to midnight if
possible. For time passes more tolerantly at night when the body
is drowsy and the mind tired; but in the morning hours there is no
release from one’s faculties, and every second is a needleprick to
consciousness.
The sand had dribbled out between his fingers, he found himself
staring at the palm of his hand. It would be the better for washing;
and he turned back toward the bathing-pool. While he was still the
headache was not so bad; but every step jolted it and sent a heavy
sick tingle up his spine to jar against his temples.
As the bathing-pool came in sight through the lattice of ferns and
bushes he paused, for it came into his mind that Lueli might be there
with his friends. And dropping on his hands and knees he crawled
through the undergrowth, holding his breath and cautiously poking
out his head from the greenery to scout if the coast were clear. He
need not have been so discreet. The pool was empty. There was no
foot-print on the sandy rim.
He undressed and bathed his body wearily in the fresh cool water--it
was always exquisitely cool under the shadow of the rock. It did not
occur to him that by going a little further he could drown. He hauled
himself up on a ledge and began to clean his toes with a wisp of
sea-weed.
The shade on his wet limbs, the sound of the sea, the breathing
murmur of the woods in the soft steady wind was comforting to his
headache. He began to feel slightly lachrymose and a good deal
better, and with the tenderness of a convalescent he watched the fish
darting in and out of the streaming weed. Of course he might have
gone himself by the canoe instead of sending his request for the
launch. But though he now realized that it would have been perfectly
feasible to have done so, something within him assured him that it
would not really have been possible. Things must take their course:
and thus to wait still in Fanua for the launch to come and fetch him
away was the natural course for his departure. He could see himself
leaving the island in the launch, but not any other how.
That bull-faced fish had dodged in and out from the weed a dozen
times at least. It was as persistent as a swallow. His body was dry
now and his headache smoothed away. Only the heartache remained; and
he was getting used to that.
All this while, as he was crawling through the bushes, and cleaning
his toes, and watching the fish, there had been but one deep
preoccupying thought at the back of his mind--the thought of Lueli
and a longing for his presence. It was on the chance that Lueli might
come down to bathe that he was waiting now. And he imagined the
conversation that must take place between them.
“Lueli, I am going away from Fanua.”
“But you will come back again?”
“No. I am going away for ever.”
It would be quite simple--as simple as that. “I am going away
from Fanua.” Above all he was determined that there should be no
explanations. It would never do to tell Lueli that he was going away
because of him. No smirch of complicity, no blight of responsibility
should fall upon Lueli, happy Lueli who had done him no wrong, and
whom so often he had sought to injure from the best, worst, most
fatal and affectionate motives. How could he have so teased him in
his misery with that idiotic geometry--a misery, too, in which he was
the agent, for it was through him that Lueli had lost his idol. That
was bad enough, at any rate it was damnably silly. Though what else
could he have done? Something equally senseless, no doubt. But what
was it to his behaviour in the hut, when the idol lay between them,
and Lueli crouched in his last refuge of silence while he sought with
menaces and blackmailing to rob him of his faith, and bade him cast
his god into the fire? Ah! of the two gods who had perished that
night it was the wooden one he would now fetch back again.
But this he could never say. He must not give any reason for his
departure lest he should at length fall into giving the true one
and seeming to involve Lueli in his own blunders. “I am going away
from Fanua.” That must be all. Little to say: so little that he must
postpone saying it till the last hour came, the hour when one says
Good-bye. And for that reason he must shun Lueli’s presence, hide
from him if need be and crawl through bushes, for if he once allowed
himself to resume their old familiar intercourse he would not be able
to keep back the words: “Lueli, I am going away. I am going away for
ever.”
He said it aloud, and as it were heard the words for the first time.
He put on his clothes and began mechanically to walk back toward
the hut. Then he had a good idea. Since he was leaving the island
it would be a pity not to go up the mountain and have a look at
the crater. Very likely he would never have another opportunity of
inspecting an active volcano.
It would be a taxing expedition, and not without danger. He put up
some food, cut himself a stout walking-stick and gathered a bunch
of plantain leaves to stick in his boots--for it was decidedly an
occasion for boots. Preparations always pleased him, for he had a
house-wifely mind, and by the time he set out he was feeling, if not
less miserable, at any rate a point or two deflected from his misery.
The new crater was on the further side of the mountain. He decided
that the best way of approach would be to walk up through the woods
by tracks which he knew and thence to skirt round under the foot
of the crags, keeping against the wind in order to avoid the smoke
and fumes. As he mounted through the woods he could hear, at first
the sea and the tree-tops, presently the murmuring tree-tops alone.
Soothed by their company and their shade he climbed on peacefully
enough for a couple of hours, keeping a sharp look-out for rents and
fissures; for however weary one may be of life one would not choose
to discard it by starving, or suffocating in a deep crevice as hot as
an oven.
At last he came out upon the tract of scrub and clinker which covered
the upper slopes of the mountain. After the cool depth of the
woodland it was like a pale hell, a prospect bleached and brittle,
such as even the greenest garden will offer if one sits and looks at
it suddenly after lying with the sun strong on one’s eye-lids. After
a moment of dizziness the garden will revive again, but the longer
Mr. Fortune looked at this landscape the more spectral and repellent
it seemed. And because the air quivered with heat the face of the
mountain-side seemed to be twitching with fear.
There were the crags, some two miles away yet, but looking as
though he could throw a stone and splinter them. They were not
rhododendron-coloured now, but a reddish and scabby mottle. They
reminded him of a group of ruined gas-vats with the paint scaling
off them, standing in the middle of a brick-field. It smelt of
brick-fields too; and in the place of the former sounds of the
sea and the tree-tops new sounds came to his ear, ugly to match
the landscape, and of a kind of baleful insignificance like the
landscape--far-off crashes and rumblings, the hiss and spurt of
escaping steam: the noise of a flustered kitchen.
Now was the moment to put the plantain leaves in his boots. Those
which he had gathered were faded, he threw them away and gathered
fresh. Then, with a heart beating harshly and remotely, he set forth
on the second stage of his climb.
It was hateful going--slippery bents, bristling scrubs, sharp-edged
clinker which hurt his feet. He tripped and fell constantly, and when
he fell the clinker cut his hands. Twice he remained crumpled on the
ground just as he had fallen, gasping for breath, and cowed by the
frantic beating of his heart, which did not seem to belong to him,
behaving like some wild animal which, terrified and apprehensive, is
dragged struggling to the summit of the mountain to be sacrificed
there. And as he went on, the brickfield smell grew stronger, and the
kitchen noises grew louder, and the sun striking down on him from the
motionless sky, striking up at him from the ground, reverberating
upon him from the parched landscape, enclosed him in its burning net.
He remembered the story of the woman Kapiolani, the Christian convert
of Hawaii. Followed by a crowd of trembling islanders she had gone
up the burning mountain to manifest her faith in the true God. When
she was come to the crater of Kilauea she had scrambled down to the
very edge of the burning lake, and there, half hidden in clouds of
smoke, she called on Pele the Fire-goddess, and flouted her, calling
her an impostor and challenging her, if goddess she were, to rise
up out of her everlasting fiery den and overwhelm her accuser with
its waves. Pele did not answer: she sulked in the heart of her fire,
powerless before the name of Christ. And when she had waited long
enough Kapiolani climbed up again out of the pit and showed herself
once more to the crowd who had been cowering at the crater-side,
trembling, and listening to the loud voice of her faith. And when
they saw her, they believed.
Her faith, thought Mr. Fortune, had carried her lightly up the
mountain-side, and over the lava-flow which she had trodden with
scorched and bleeding feet. But he, though a man, and born free from
the burden of heathen fears, and wearing boots, was already tired out
and reluctant, and only a cold tourists’ curiosity could carry him
onward, and a bargain-hunting spirit which told him that having gone
so far it would be a waste not to go on to the end.
Kapiolani had made her act of faith in the year 1825. And after
that, as though for her courage she were like the prophetess
Deborah, the land had peace thirty years. Then Pele shook herself
contemptuously and fell to her tricks again. At her first shake the
island trembled, as though it knew what was to come. “Yet a little,”
said the Fire-goddess; and slept for another ten years. This time she
woke angrier. The island quivered like the lid of a boiling pot, a
river of fire, flowing terribly underground, rent open a green and
fertile plain, and five times a tidal wave reared up and fell upon
the helpless land. And once more Pele fell asleep, but fell asleep
to dream; snarling to herself, and hotly, voluptuously, obscurely
triumphing in a dream of what her next awakening would be.
Kapiolani would not know of that awakening at any rate. It was
to be hoped that she had been spared the others. A simple faith
like hers would be cruelly jolted by such ambiguities in God’s
law. She might even have lost it thereby, as did Voltaire, another
blunt, straightforward thinker, at a rather similar exhibition;
for she could hardly be expected to take the subtler view of those
long-standing and accustomed believers who can gloss over an eruption
as a very justifiable protest against the wickedness of their
neighbours. And as for saying that it is all a mystery--well, there
is not much satisfaction to be got out of that.
These thoughts carried him over the last mile, and looking up he was
surprised to find himself under the crags. He began to skirt round
them. Now the noises and the smells were so strong that as he rounded
every jut of the crags he expected to come on the new crater. Just as
he had climbed on to the top of a large rock a gust of wind, veering
among the crags, brought with it a volley of foul smoke, which rose
up from beneath him and smothered him round, just as smoke comes
suddenly belching out of the vent of a tunnel. He stood for a moment
coughing and stifling; and then the wind shifted again, and the smoke
lifted away from him, and looking out underneath it he saw that he
was come to the end of his search.
The rock on which he stood was the last westernmost redoubt of the
crags, and before him extended the other side of the island of
Fanua. Far off and strangely high up he saw the sea-line. The ocean
seemed to fall steeply and smoothly downhill to where it broke
upon the reef in a motionless pattern of foam. Stretching away
down the mountain-side was a long, serpentining slab of lava--the
thickly-burning torrent which had torn apart the flanks of the
mountain on the night of the eruption, wallowing downward with an
ever more heavy and glutted motion until now it was solidifying
into rock; a brutal surface of formless hummocks and soppy and
still-oozing fissures. Everything around was deep in ashes, and here
and there little gushes of steam showed where the heat still worked
under the outer crust. It was like the surface of a saucepan of
porridge which has been lifted off the fire but still pimples and
undulates with its own heat.
Another jet of smoke belched up. Holding his breath Mr. Fortune crept
over the rock on his hands and knees and looked down into the crater.