Mr. Fortune (9 page)

“I see numbers of goats. Melancholy reflections.” What a world of sombre and attentive ennui, thought Mr. Fortune, is summed up in those words! The goats might supply him with suppers and raiment, but not with a cheerful thought. Their antics were wasted on him, he observed them without a smile, without sympathy, as unresponsive to natural history as the traduced Alexander Selkirk of Cowper's poem; for the real Alexander was a much more genial character who sometimes danced and sang with his troop of pet animals. True, Robinson was fond of his dog, and kind to him, setting him on his right hand at meal-times even after he was grown “very old and crazy.” He also gave decent burial to the two cats. But these were English animals, fellow-countrymen, assuring relics of the time when he had been knolled to church with other Christians: and it was for this he cherished them, clinging to them with a trivial and desperate affection.

No! In spite of his adventurous disposition and his knowledge of the world, he was not really suited to life on an island, this man who is for all time the representative of island-dwellers. Of course, his island was very different from Fanua: larger, not so beautiful probably; certainly not so convenient. And no doubt the presence of natives would have made a great difference to him. He was the sort of man who would soon marry. “But to be honest with myself,” thought Mr. Fortune, “though I came here to convert the islanders, except for my Friday I don't think I should miss their company if it were withdrawn. My happiness is of a rather selfish and dream-like kind and I take my life very much for granted. Why, I have not even walked round the island. That would seem strange to some, they would not believe in me. I should seem as absurd and idyllic as those other Robinsons, that Swiss family, who whenever they needed anything found it cast up on the shore or growing on a tree. I should be even more unlikely than Leila.”

And he began to ponder on how many years had gone by since he last thought of Leila. She came in a book belonging to his step-sister, and he had read it secretly and rather bashfully, because it was a book for girls. But he had been obliged to read on, for the subject of islands had always enthralled him. Leila was shipwrecked on a desert island with her papa, her nurse, a spaniel, and a needle. One day the needle was dropped by Leila and lost in the sand. Here was a sad to-do! But the nurse, a very superior politic woman, bade the spaniel “Go seek”; and presently he uttered a yelp and came running towards them with the needle sticking in his nose.

A very thin story! Yet it might have happened for all that it was so fortunate. Things do sometimes fall out as we would have them, though perhaps not often, for it is always the happy coincidences which are hardest to credit. Man, however gullible and full of high ideals for his own concerns, is suspicious of good-fortune in general. If Robinson had enjoyed himself on the island he would not have been received as somebody in real life.

“But I am in real life,” thought Mr. Fortune, adroitly jerking a limpet to assure himself of being so, “although I am so happy in my lot. I am real too, as real as Robinson. Some people might even say I was more real than he, because my birth is mentioned in the church register, and I used to pay income-tax, whereas he was only entered at Stationers' Hall. But I don't agree with them. I may seem to have the advantage of him now, but it is only temporary. In twenty years' time, maybe less, who will even remember my name?”

From such reflections he would be diverted by Lueli politely handing him a long streamer of seaweed, dripping and glistening, and freshly exhaling its deep-sea smell—a smell that excites in one strongly and mysteriously the sense of life—or beckoning to him with a brown hand that held a silver fish. These advances meant that Lueli thought it time for Mr. Fortune to bathe too, and to take his swimming-lesson—a turning of the tables which the convert considered extremely amusing and satisfactory.

He was a very poor pupil. As a child he had never done more than paddle about, and now he was too old to learn easily. He did not lack goodwill or perseverance, but he lacked faith. Faith which can remove mountains can also float. Mr. Fortune had not enough of it to do either. In the depths of his heart he mistrusted the sea, an ambiguous element. The real sea beyond the reef he never dreamed of venturing in, he could imagine how the long nonchalant rollers would pick him up and hurl him with their casual strength upon the rocks. Even in this sheltered pool he could gauge their force; for though scarcely a ripple traversed the surface, to every leisurely surge that crashed on the reef the pool responded throughout its depth with a thrill, a tremor, an impulsion, and the streamers of seaweed turned inland one after another as though they were obeying a solemn dance music.

But for all his mistrust he enjoyed bathing, indeed the mistrust put a tang into his enjoyment. And with looks of derring-do he struck out into the middle of the pool, his teeth set, his eyes rolling, splashing horribly and snorting a good deal, labouring himself along with uncouth convulsions, while Lueli swam beside him or round him or under him as easily as a fish and with no more commotion, seeming like a fish to propel himself and change his direction with an occasional casual flip.

The further half of the pool, under the wall of rock whence Lueli used to dive, was extremely deep. Whenever he had got so far Mr. Fortune was afraid and not afraid. He had a natural fear, but he had a reasonable trust; for he knew that while Lueli was by he would never drown. It was sweet to him to be thus relying upon his convert—that was part of the pleasure of bathing. On shore it was fit and proper that Lueli should look up to him and learn from him; but every affectionate character, even though it be naturally a dominant one, spending itself by rights in instruction and solicitude, likes sometimes to feel dependent. People, the most strong-minded people, perfectly accustomed to life, being ill may discover this; and as they lie there, passive, tended, and a little bewildered, may be stirred to the depths of their being by finding themselves wrapped once more in the security of being a good child. Mr. Fortune bathing in the pool did not go quite so far as this. His dependence was not quite so emotional and he was too busy keeping himself afloat to analyse his feelings very carefully; but he liked to depend on Lueli, just as he liked Lueli to depend on him.

Though so ready to learn swimming from Lueli he was less favourably inclined to another of his convert's desires: which was to oil him. He would not for the world have had Lueli guess it; but at the first proposal of these kind offices he was decidedly shocked. Lueli oiled himself as a matter of course, and so did everybody on the island. They also oiled each other. Mr. Fortune had no objection. It was their way. But below all concessions to broad-mindedness his views on oiling were positive and unshakable. They were inherent in the very marrow of his backbone, which was a British one. Oiling, and all that sort of thing, was effeminate, unbecoming, and probably vicious. It was also messy. And had Hector and Achilles, Brutus and Alexander defiled before him, all of them sleek and undeniably glistening as cricket-bats, he would have been of the same opinion still.

“No, thank you,” he said, firmly putting aside the flask of scented coco-nut oil (scented, too!). Or: “Not just now, Lueli, I am going for a walk. Exercise is the best thing after bathing.” Or again: “Unfortunately oil has a very painful effect on my skin.”

But he knew all the time that sooner or later he would have to muffle up his prejudices and give in, for every day Lueli began to look, first more hopeful and then more hurt, and was perpetually (if figuratively) standing on his head in the attempt to produce some unguent which could not injure his friend's sensitive skin. So when he sprained his knee jumping off a rock he welcomed the pretext with feelings intricately compounded of relief and apostasy. For some weeks he confined the area of effeminacy to his left knee, and on one occasion he was base enough to lacerate the flesh in secret with a fish-hook in an attempt to justify the statement about his skin. But Lueli was so piteously full of compunction and so certain that if he climbed a yet higher tree or went in a canoe to another island he would be able to procure a balm entirely blameless, that Mr. Fortune was ashamed of the prank and counterfeited no more. Indeed he was beginning to enjoy what he assured himself was not oiling, nothing of the sort, but a purely medicinal process. And by the time he had finished with the sprain it struck him that something of the same kind might be good for his rheumatism. After all there was nothing but what was manly and might quiet him in Elliman's Embrocation—used extensively by many athletes and as far as he could remember by horse-doctors.

Mr. Fortune kept his rheumatism up and down his back, but inevitably a little of the embrocation slopped over his shoulders. By the end of six months he was stretching himself out for Lueli's ministrations as methodically as when in the old days at the corner of the Hornsey Parade he offered one foot and then the other to the boot-black. It did him a great deal of good, and improved his appearance tenfold, though that did not matter to him. Nothing could make him fat, but he began to look quite well-liking. The back of his hands grew smooth and suent, he ceased to have goose-flesh on his thighs, and one day, regarding himself more attentively than usual in the little shaving mirror, he discovered that somehow his expression had changed. How and why he would not stoop to examine into; but Lueli could have told him. For when he came to the island his face was so parched and wrinkled that it was like a mask of rough earthenware, and his eyes, being the only surface in it that looked alive, also looked curiously vulnerable. But now his face had come alive too, and instead of wrinkles had rather agreeable creases that yielded and deepened when he laughed. And his eyes were no longer vulnerable, but just kind.

But if Mr. Fortune had altered during his three years on the island, Lueli had altered a great deal more. Not in character though—he was still the same rather casual compendium of virtues and graces; nor in behaviour; for he still hung affectionately and admiringly round Mr. Fortune with a dependence which, for all its compliance and intimacy, yet remained somehow gaily and coolly aloof, so that the priest felt more and more that what he was rearing up was in truth a young plant, a vine or a morning glory, which, while following all the contours of the tree it clings to, draws from its own root alone a secret and mysterious life in which the very element of dependence is as secret and mysterious as the rest.

In the beginnings of an intimacy one seems to be finding out day by day more about another person's inner life and character. But after a certain stage has been reached not only does further exploration become impossible but things which one thought were discoveries become suddenly quite meaningless and irrelevant, and one finds that one really knows nothing about them, nothing at all. They sit beside one, they turn their heads and make some remark, and the turn of the head and the tone of the voice and even what they say seem all familiar and already recognised in one's heart: but there can be no knowing why they turned and spoke at that moment and not at another, nor why they said what they did and not something totally different. Though one might expect this realisation to be agonising, it is so much part of the natural course of things that many people do not notice it at all, and others, whilst acknowledging that something has happened, account for it perfectly to their own satisfaction by hypotheses which are entirely inapplicable.

Mr. Fortune, for instance, finding that he knew no more of Lueli than at the moment when he first beheld him kneeling on the grass, said to himself that he now knew him so well that he had grown used to him. In the same breath he was able to rejoice in a confidence that no phase of Lueli's development could catch him napping; and he plumed himself on his acuteness in observing that Lueli was growing older every day and was now of an age to assert himself as a young man.

For all that, Mr. Fortune could never quite compass thinking of him as such. Time in this pleasant island where the seasons passed so lightly and where no one ever showed the smallest sense of responsibility was like a long happy afternoon spent under the acacia with the children. However, Lueli was grown up (or would be, the moment he noticed the fact himself), and something would have to be done about it. Something, particularly—for in matters of this sort it is best to go straight to the point—must be done about providing him with a wife.

A Christian wife. And of late he had made several inspections of the village with this end in view, keeping an open eye for all the young women, scanning them as searchingly as Cœlebs, artfully devising the like cheese-paring tests for them and pondering which would be the most eligible for conversion and holy matrimony. There were plenty of charming possibles—by now he had quite got over his empirical aversion to them as bevies—though at first sight they seemed more eligible for holy matrimony than for conversion, being, one and all, smiling, wholesome, and inclined to giggle. But of course convertibility was the prime consideration. Perhaps by catching his hare and making a special effort? Mr. Fortune admitted that during this last year his labours as a missionary had been growing rather perfunctory.

Not that he loved his flock less. Rather he loved them more, and to his love was added (and here was the rub) a considerable amount of esteem. For seeing the extraordinarily good hand they made at the business of living to their own contentment—a business that the wise consider so extremely laborious and risky—and reflecting that for all their felicity they yet contrived to do nobody any harm, he felt some diffidence in his mission to teach them to do better.

And then he would pull himself up with a jerk and remember fiercely that they were loose livers and worshipped idols. Moreover they had rejected the word of God, and had made their rejection if anything worse by making it with such flippancy and unconcern. The seed he scattered had fallen into a soil too rich and easy, so that the weeds sprang up and choked it. Alas, all their charming good qualities were but a crop of fragrant and exotic groundsel, and their innocence was like the pure whiteness and ravishing classical contours of the blossom of the common bindweed, which strangles the corn and looks up from the crime with its exquisite babyface.