Mr. Fortune (8 page)

“After all,” thought Mr. Fortune, “I have not made a single convert in this island though it is now almost a year since I came. For I did not convert Lueli, God gave him to me (by the way I must remember to call him Theodore). And God still withholds the others.”

This was a comfortable point of view. It satisfied Mr. Fortune, all the more so since it agreed so aptly with his psalm, of which the last verse runs: “And that Thou, Lord, art merciful: for Thou rewardest every man according to his work.” And he quoted this verse of it in the report which he handed to Archdeacon Mason on returning to St. Fabien to buy more stores and give an account of his ministry.

The Archdeacon frowned slightly when he laid down the report, which was a pretty piece of work, for Mr. Fortune had written it in his neatest hand and Lueli (under his direction) had tinted blue, fawn-colour, and green the little sketch-map of the island which embellished it as a frontispiece.

The next day Mr. Fortune called upon his superior. “My dear Fortune,” said he after a few polite questions about the soil of Fanua and its marriage ceremonies, “this is excellent” (here he tapped the report which lay on the table). “Indeed I may say it is idyllic. But you must allow me to make one comment, you must let me tell you that there is such a thing as being too modest. Believe me, conversions at the rate of one
per annum
are not an adequate reward of your works. God's grace is infinite, and I am sure that your labours have been most truly conscientious; and yet you say you have made only one convert. This is not enough—mind, I would not speak a word of blame. I only say—if I may so express myself—that there must have been a leakage somewhere, a leakage!”

He paused. Mr. Fortune looked at his hands and realised how sunburnt they had become.

“Compel them to come in, you know.”

Mr. Fortune wondered if he should confess to his superior the one so nearly disastrous occasion when he had tried to use compulsion. But the Archdeacon's metaphor about the leakage had pained him and he decided not to. Instead he asked the Archdeacon how he would advise him to act in order to convert the whole island.

It was rather a shock to him to be recommended to take a leaf out of the Jesuits' book. However on the first evening of his return to the island he began to make some discreet inquiries of Lueli about what gods the islanders worshipped, though being very careful to convey by his tone and choice of words that he thought it a terrible pity that they should not worship his.

“Oh, they,” said Lueli, offering him some more fruit, which Mr. Fortune refused, since he had been stuffed with gifts in kind ever since the moment he got out of the launch. “Oh, they—they only worship one god.”

This answer did not sound quite as it should; and in deference to his recent memories of the Archdeacon, Mr. Fortune ran his convert through the Apostles' Creed before proceeding with his inquiries. It was quite all right. Lueli remembered the creed without a single lapse, and on further questioning Mr. Fortune discovered that the islanders worshipped one god each, a much more suitable state of affairs for heathens; although on thinking it over before he fell asleep the missionary reflected that in the island of Fanua conversion must necessarily be a slow business since he would have to break the faggot stick by stick. Just before he lost consciousness he began to wonder what sort of god Lueli had worshipped.

In the morning he remembered his curiosity. He said to Lueli: “What god had you before I came and taught you to know the true God?”

“I'll show him to you,” said Lueli; and running into the bushes he presently returned with an idol about two foot long.

Mr. Fortune looked at the idol very seriously, almost respectfully, as though he were measuring swords with an adversary. It was a rather well-looking idol, made of wood and nicely polished, and he was pleased to note that it was not obscene; but for all that a slight shudder ran through his flesh, such as one feels on looking at a dead snake even though one knows that it is a dead one.

“Drop it,” he commanded, and the boy laid it down on the grass between them. Mr. Fortune remembered the words of a female missionary from China who had visited St. Fabien on a tour. “The first thing I make my converts do,” she had said, and as she spoke she clenched her hands till the knuckles showed up as bones, “is to destroy their idols. Then I can feel sure of them. And not till then.”

Talking over her lecture afterwards Mr. Fortune had been of the opinion of the majority: that the lady missionary had been right. “I don't agree at all,” said his friend, Henry Merton. “We teach that idols are the works of men's hands, things of wood and stone. To insist on their destruction is to show our converts that we believe in them ourselves, that we look on them with anxiety and attribute power to them. No, no, it is silly to take any idol so seriously!” And Mr. Fortune, who was humble before others, thought that after all he had judged too hastily and that his friend was in the right of it.

Soon after that Henry Merton had died, and the words of the dead have a special value. Mr. Fortune remembered his friend's opinion, but he also remembered the female missionary. She had spoken with an air of authority; and for all he knew she might be dead too, she might even be a martyr. He stood and looked at Lueli's idol which lay on the grass between them and he wondered if he should tell Lueli to burn it. At last, without saying anything, he walked into the hut. When he came out again Lueli was scouring a wooden bowl with sand and the idol was gone.

One of the Archdeacon's first questions about the convert of Fanua was: Had Mr. Fortune dressed him properly? And Mr. Fortune had replied with perfect candour that he had been too busy caring for his soul to think of his clothing. This too the Archdeacon had objected to, saying that dress made a great difference, and that when the other islanders saw Lueli dressed befittingly they would become aware of their nakedness and wish to be converted and wear white raiment.

“But they have seen me,
I
have never omitted to dress myself since I have lived on Fanua.”

“No, no, of course not,” answered the Archdeacon, a little testily, for really the missionary's simplicity was making him very argumentative and tiresome. “But that is not to the point, for you surely don't suppose that they look on you as one of themselves. You must clothe that boy, Fortune, you must make him wear trousers and a tunic. And at night he must wear a night-shirt.”

So now, seeing that the idol was gone, Mr. Fortune called Lueli into the hut and began to measure him. He had never learnt tailoring; however he supposed that by taking great care and doing his best he could turn out a suit of clothes which might insinuate the fact of their nakedness to the islanders of Fanua, even if it had no other merit. He measured Lueli, he wrote down the measurements, he made his calculations and drew a sort of ground plan. Then he fetched a roll of white cotton and having laid it upon the floor and tethered it with some books he crawled about on all fours cutting out the trousers and the tunic with a pair of nail-scissors; for he thought that the night-shirt might rest in abeyance for the present.

The nail-scissors could only manage very small bites, and by the time the cutting-out was completed he was rather dizzy and very hot from taking so much exercise on his knees. “That will do for the present,” he thought, rolling up the pieces. “This afternoon I will visit my parishioners. Perhaps as they have not seen me for a week they will be more inclined to listen to my teaching. And I must keep my eyes open for idols.”

But early on the morrow Mr. Fortune got out the sewing-machine and continued his career as a tailor. The sewing-machine was suffering from the sea-air, it needed a great deal of oil and adjustment before it could be got to run smoothly, but he mastered it in the end and began to sew up the seams. As time went on he grew more and more excited. He worked the treadles faster and faster, he had never, even for the most spirited march, trodden the pedals of his harmonium so frantically; the machine rocked under his zeal and all the time the needle kept darting up and down, piercing the cotton with small accurate stabs in a way that seemed to express a kind of mechanical malevolence. The seams were all finished, the hems were turned up; now it was evening, there was nothing left but the buttons. Those he must put on by hand.

All day Lueli had sat beside him watching his performance with rapture. It was the machine which ravished him, he was not so much interested in the clothes. But when Mr. Fortune called him in a rather solemn voice and began to dress him, holding up the tunic above his head as though it were a form of baptism, he too began to put on looks of solemnity and importance.

The tunic fitted tolerably enough though there was no elegance about it; but alas! the trousers were a sad blow to Mr. Fortune. For he had designed them on a two-dimensional basis, cutting out the back and the front in one operation on a doubled fold of the cloth, and forgetting that even the slimmest boy is bulkier behind than in front; so that when attired in these unfortunate garments it was difficult for Lueli to move and almost impossible for him to sit down. He, in his innocence, thought the trousers all that they should be, and late as it was he wished to run down to the village in order to wake up his friends and show them his fine clothes. But Mr. Fortune bade him take them off. It made his heart bleed to see his boy made such a figure of fun, and when the living Lueli emerged from his white cotton sepulchre he privately called the Archdeacon a fool and forswore the idea of the night-shirt for good and all. But on the next day and on the next again he struggled to make a practicable pair of trousers, and in the end he produced a pair that were rather on the baggy side perhaps, but still they were tolerable.

Unfortunately by this time his convert's ardour was somewhat quenched. He had been measured so often, he had stood still to be fitted when he wanted to go fishing, he had had pins run into him, and all this had made this particular novelty seem rather a tedious example of his pastor's odd ways. So though he put on his white raiment at command and walked decorously through the village beside Mr. Fortune to be an object lesson, his demeanour, while admirably meek and civil, wasn't much of an advertisement for the happiness of those who are clothed in the whole armour of God.

The Archdeacon's theory was not borne out by events. The islanders were too much struck and roused to speculation by the sight of Lueli's apparel to spare a thought for their own nakedness. At first they were of the opinion that this was some new and powerful taboo invented by the stranger. They shrank back, and averted their eyes as if from some improper spectacle. Lueli's mother was actually moved to a display of maternal feeling. She rushed weeping from the crowd, hurled herself at Mr. Fortune's knees and began to implore him not to ruin the boy's prospects. Disentangling himself a little pettishly from her pleadings, Mr. Fortune explained that clothing such as this would do Lueli nothing but good: indeed, she herself would be none the worse for something of the sort. She took him at his word; before he could stay her she had torn the clothes off her son and was squirming into them. She was several sizes too fat, and Mr. Fortune saw his seams being rent open in all directions. He had to bribe her with a promise of the blue glass mulberries from his Christmas tree selection before she would consent to undress. Finally he had to ease her out himself. It was a good thing that the Archdeacon was not present, but for all that Mr. Fortune half wished that he had been.

On their return he sewed up the seams once more and called Lueli. The boy began to protest and argue. Then he changed his methods and started coaxing. Mr. Fortune had his own ideas as to how Lueli should be managed. Rising discreetly he opened the harmonium and said that it was time to study another hymn.

That night he lay awake, wondering what he would do if his convert rebelled. He had already decided to drop the Archdeacon's tactics at the first seemly opportunity; but he wished to choose the opportunity and do the dropping himself. He might have spared himself this anxiety. On the morrow Lueli donned the trousers and the tunic with a very matter of course air, and half an hour later went off to bathe. And it was a sure thing that if formerly he had bathed twice or thrice a day he now bathed as often again, undressing with a bland smile and folding up his white raiment with the utmost neatness. Of course it was a pretext; and the missionary wondered if his charge was learning to be deceitful. But Lueli's deceitfulness was so very open and unconcerned that it could scarcely be reckoned as the genuine article.

The clothes were always deposited very carefully in some place where they would have every opportunity of happening to fall into the sea. At the end of a week they were so saturated with brine as to be quite unwearable. Exercising his authority, Mr. Fortune forbade Lueli to wear them any more.

Lueli would bathe anywhere, he seemed equally happy lolling on the Pacific Ocean or folded up in a pool the size of a bedroom basin with a little waterfall splashing on his head. Mr. Fortune was more ceremonious. It was he who instituted the bathing-pool as a regular adjunct to their life.

About half a mile from the hut and near the cloud observatory was a small rocky cove with a half-moon of white shell-beach and a slope of fine sward running back into the woods. A small rivulet debouched here, very convenient for washing off the sea-salt in; and as the mouth of the cove was guarded by a barrier of coral-reef the water within was almost as still as a lake, and so clear that one could look down and see the weeds twenty feet below slowly twirling their vast brown or madder-coloured ribbons, and the fish darting among them.

Mr. Fortune often thought of Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday as he sat on the rocks watching Lueli at his interminable diversions in the pool. Living on an island alone with his convert, spiritually alone at any rate, for though he had not given up hope of the other Fanuans and still visited them pretty frequently, he could never feel the kinship with them which he felt so securely with Lueli, the comparison could scarcely fail to occur to him. And he thought gratefully how much happier he was than the other man.
He
was ideally contented with his island and with his companion, he had come there by his own wish, and he liked the life so well that he proposed to continue in it until his death. So little did it distress him to be away from civilisation that he was of his own will paring away the slender bonds that tied him to the rest of the world. For after the first visit to St. Fabien he had paid no more, and for the last twelvemonth he had not even bestirred himself to write a report to be sent by canoe to the island of Maikalua, where a local steamer touched once a month. But poor Crusoe had no such contented mind. His is a tragic story, albeit considered so entertaining for schoolboys: and though his stay on the island taught him to find religion it did not teach him to find happiness, but whether at work or at leisure he was always looking with a restless and haggard stare at the rigid horizon, watching for a sail, enemy or friend, he knew not.