Orphan Island

by Rose Macaulay

  A little later (this was in 1895) Miss Smith had to dissolve parliament because its sumptuary decrees and its attitude towards unmarried unions did not satisfy her, and superintend a general election, which apparently produced a legislative body more to her mind.

  “A very Cromwell,” reflected Mr. Thinkwell admiringly.

  Then came the great excitement of the landing of the Jesuit missionary and his West Africans. Miss Smith was naturally a good deal disturbed by his advent, and by the possible effects of his persuasions on the minds of her flock; he, for his part, was, equally naturally, convinced that here was an island of perishing souls, and took every step to impart the true doctrine to these poor people. Miss Smith, to circumvent the Scarlet Woman, had to exercise a stern and anxious vigilance, which was not even ended by the entry, after six months, “The unhappy Papist was killed last night in a quarrel about the validity of our Orders, and was afterwards devoured by his ignorant and unbridled blacks. Alas, that he had taught them a religion which permitted of such deeds! Had he but kept them true to the Faith of that great and good Man after whom they were named, his remains would not have met with such a fearful end. Fearful is Thy Wrath, O Lord, and terrible Thy judgments! The poor man has gone to his last Account steeped in error, and fresh from imparting his error to the innocent Lambs of this Flock. We cannot even bury him; we can but leave his soul, without much hope, to the possible Mercies of God. I pray that he has not done incalculable damage among our Community. The blacks we are retaining as labourers.”

  To Mr. Thinkwell, who regarded both Catholics and Protestants with impartial aloofness and surprise, all this made very good reading. It interested him to see these strange, hot, and bigoted creeds at their perpetual duel, even on this remote island.

  Poor Miss Smith had to deplore, at this time, a good deal of immorality and laxity as to the marriage ceremony, which was punished with a severity worthy of a New England state. The Orphans, it seemed, had a shocking habit of taking the law into their own hands, and, when a marriage was forbidden them, merely doing without. Also there were, as in the wider world, a certain number of casually illicit encounters and illegitimate births.

  “This island is a Sink of Iniquity,” wrote Miss Smith, no doubt in a mood of exaggeration, on December 31st, 1899, when she held that a new century was about to begin. “On Sunday I instructed David” (the Reverend Donald Maclean had died in the previous year, and Miss Smith had ordained his son), “in a very eloquent and severe sermon on the text, ‘Sodom and Gomorrah, these wicked cities.’ He delivered it well, and I hope the Orphans profited. He warned them most solemnly that, if their wickedness persisted (there have been two unlawful alliances this week) the Almighty in His Wrath might cause our Island to be overtaken with some fearful Fate, attacked by fierce savages, by plague, or overwhelmed by one of those monstrous waves that sometimes, during the monsoons, have swept up and ravaged our shores. Then, he said, would the innocent perish with the guilty, so that it behoved all of us to have a care for the Virtue of the rest, and to observe the utmost stringency in the laws on these matters. Nellie Perkins, who has lately had a baby she has no business with, was so overcome as to faint. I hope the Discourse may not fall to the ground.”

  Every now and then, throughout all this period, social and constitutional developments would be noted. There were, it seemed, recurrent complaints among the Orphans of the land laws, of conditions of labour, of inequalities, injustices, and oppressions. From time to time a riot broke out and had to be suppressed. In 1910 a regular revolutionary war raged; one of the Smith sons was killed by rebels, and there was much bloodshed before it was put down. Miss Smith’s account of all this was a little incoherent and illegible—she was, after all, then eighty-five—and the death of her son William affected her very deeply with rage and grief. However, Mr. Thinkwell gathered that the rebels had been defeated, and that such as were not killed or sentenced to convict labour withdrew (compulsorily or otherwise) with their families to Hibernia, the other and more barren spur of the island, where they had continued in a state of unrest even to the present day.

  It was after this war that Miss Smith adopted, with increasing regularity as she got used to it, the royal “we.” Also, her handwriting became noticeably worse.

  “Re-named our house Balmoral,” she wrote in 1911, “which is far more fitting to our Position.”

  A headier, testier, more arrogant and impatient tone began to mark the journal. Miss Smith seemed to be losing her respect for the constitution.…

  “Have had a decree issued,” she wrote, “that Our Name, when mentioned, shall be greeted with an obeisance. Also, that the National Anthem shall be sung when We appear at public functions. Royal etiquette must be preserved, if only for the general safety of the Constitution. Parliament has our Birthday Celebrations next week well in hand.”

  These celebrations had obviously been so thorough and satisfactory as to put it out of the question that Miss Smith should use the pen for several days afterwards. The entries became, in fact, yearly rarer and less intelligible. Age, liquor, and a wandering mind had the old lady by this time well in their grip. Occasionally there was one of the old characteristic autocratic outbursts, or pious reflections, but for the most part the scrawlings on the bark became at once fainter, wilder, and more obscure, till they almost ceased.

  The last entry was dated June, 1920.

  “David died. Ordained his son, Angus. Have ordered that the prayer for Rescue be dropped out of Divine Worship, as obviously this is not the Lord’s Will for us. Jean made a foolish scene about it; she gets tiresome, can talk of nothing but Aberdeen haddocks. Personally We feel We have been called to these great responsibilities, and do not now even desire to leave them. Ordained Angus Maclean.”

  Thus Miss Smith ceased, the fearful arrogance of her last brief statement made pathetic by that repetition which is due to wandering senility. Age had at last defeated her; her recording quill dropped from her unsteady hand.

  Mr. Thinkwell re-tied the bundle of bark with the Martial, and fell to musing on the strange career of this old lady, called to so odd a fortune. On the history of the island, too, he mused, as revealed in these jottings. The world in microcosm! Interesting to note the factors which had caused in this tiny world its particular development; to compare them with those more universal factors which had kept it spinning, roughly, along the same lines as the societies of the larger world. An inexhaustible study, had one but the time to give to it. Ten days was all too little; however, Mr. Thinkwell proposed to spend those ten days as profitably as he could. He would get Denis Smith to show him round; he was a man of more mother-wit than his egregious brother, or, indeed, than any of the elder Smiths whom Mr. Thinkwell had yet met. So long as Denis Smith was sober, he should be able to make enlightening revelations and comments on the history of his own times. Decidedly, a man of wits.

  3

  Mr. Thinkwell was drowsing off in the pleasant afternoon when Mr. Denis Smith, in a kind of loose bath robe, returned to him and seated himself at his side.

  “I am afraid,” he said, “that I disturb your rest. Well, have you perused our literature, including the journal?”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Thinkwell, rousing to animation, “I have perused the journal. The other books I only glanced at. But the journal—what a remarkable achievement! I must say I found it of absorbing interest.”

  “I suppose it would be,” said Miss Smith’s son, “to a stranger.… As to remarkable—well, y’ know, my dear sir, mamma’s a damned remarkable woman, and that’s a fact. Always has been.”

  “I can well believe it,” Mr. Thinkwell replied. “These apparently commonplace types, when moulded by such strange circumstances as were your mother’s lot … who can say what the result will be? … By the way, do you know what was the great shock which Miss Smith would seem to have sustained in 1870, just before your father’s death? A shock, one gathers, for which your father was responsible, for it embittered her a good dea
l against him, as you know.”

  “Oh, he was always shocking her. Yes, I believe something out of the ordinary happened about that time, but she’s never told us what. I wouldn’t wonder if papa kissed an orphan girl—or went further still, y’ know. Papa was a gay dog—might have done anything. And mamma’s always been easily shocked. A funny match that was, to be sure. Papa’d probably have suited himself better if he’d waited for the eldest orphan—but of course she’d have been a bit young for him, and there was mamma all ripe and ready.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Thinkwell, changing the subject, for, though he liked Mr. Denis Smith, he thought that he was talking in rather a common way, “I am anticipating a very interesting stay here. You must show me and tell me a great deal, if you will be so kind.”

  “With all my heart. If only to spite old Bertie. … By the way, your little girl’s been up to mischief on Bertie’s land—climbing a palm tree and bringing down a baby monkey. One, she mustn’t climb my brother’s trees, or she’ll get into trouble; two, she mustn’t either climb trees or catch monkeys on Sunday. A nice little girl, and I don’t want to see her in trouble.”

  “Rosamond is a troublesome child,” said Mr. Thinkwell, displeased. “Absent-minded, I am afraid, and remarkable neither for intelligence nor common sense.”

  Chapter XV

  SUNDAY EVENING

  1

  CHARLES, William, and Rosamond, defeated early in their walk in the matter of the young monkey, about which a keeper spoke to them very firmly (Sunday being here, as elsewhere, a keeper’s most vigilant day), proceeded to climb a path that took them up the nearer of the two forested hills.

  “They are cutting down the trees,” said Charles. “In another twenty years there will be no forest left. And they are planting seedlings, as if that helped matters. The Smiths would. It strikes me that all the European vices and imbecilities thrive on Orphan Island. First a few of them steal the land from the many, then they spoil it. I hate these Smiths.”

  “A hawk-moth,” said William, and stalked it.

  Rosamond tipped a silver candle-nut leaf full of dew over her face and mouth. The pulling of the branch shook loose from the shining tree a flurry of green and scarlet birds; they dipped about her like a field of grass and poppies.

  “Sugar cane,” said Charles, breaking off a juicy green stem. “Probably it’s a frightful crime to pick it. I wonder whose estate we are on now. Here, Rosamond.”

  Rosamond took a foot of the cane and sucked 190 it. There was a stir of warm wind smelling of honey, and on it black butterflies drifted.

  A green cocoa-nut tumbled at Rosamond’s feet; it burst open, smelling of sweet spices. A land crab sprang into it, saturating himself with delightful liquor.

  They climbed over a spur of hill, and suddenly at their feet a rose bloomed in the forest. A tarn held the evening aflame within its breast. Water birds scuttled about its surface; water-plants more gently and sedately swayed.

  Rosamond plunged down to its green shore, and soon was in it, flapping among the water-hens, floating in the glowing rose’s heart. William meanwhile examined the insects that ran about its surface, and Charles stood on the brow of the hill, looking through his field glasses at the view. He swept them over such parts of the island as he could see, as if he looked for some one, whistling softly to himself.

  Rosamond came out, green with weed, and rubbed her limbs with oily fluid from the palm trees, as she had observed Flora to do, until she shone like wax. She resumed the feather tunic, and then they went down into the deep wooded valley that cleft the island, and climbed the other hill.

  They were submerged in brilliant colours, drowned in strong and exquisite scents, covered with the fragrant pollen of many flowers. They encountered scorpions, hornets, centipedes, land turtles, even wild pigs. People, too. Lovers strolling together, or lying in the woods, who looked at them as they passed with curious and friendly eyes. Huts dotted the woods, and outside them people sat; simple Orphan families, peasants, mostly, working on their lords’ estates.

  Then, as they topped the other hill, they saw Flora Smith and Nogood Peter Conolly standing below them, beneath a clump of pepper trees, earnestly talking.

  “Damn,” said Charles, who did not like to feel an intruder.

  But Flora greeted them with her half mocking “Well, Thinkwells,” and added, “You find us discussing our future lives. I am resolved mine is to be prodigiously merry and fashionable. Charles, Rosamond tells me you know all about London life.”

  “Not quite all, I’m glad to say.” Charles, composed young man, blushed faintly when Flora spoke to him, passing it off with a smile.

  “Oh, well, enough for me. You must tell me all about it. Come, leave these three and walk back with me through the woods. Meanwhile Nogood here can take Rosamond and William to see the convicts down below there in the cove.” There was, surely, something of unkindness in Flora this evening towards her friend Peter, who took it, however, coolly enough.

  “Do you want to see the convicts?” he asked Rosamond, who said, “No, thank you.”

  “Oh, well,” said Flora, “take them somewhere else then. I’m sure I don’t care where. Charles and I are going off together, that’s all I mean. That is, Charles, if you haven’t other things to do.”

  “Not a thing in the world. Let’s walk, and I’ll tell you London scandals.”

  They turned and climbed back over the brow of the hill together. Their laughter rang out.

  Peter Conolly did not look after them. He said, “If you come down this path to the cove, you can walk back round the shore to the other side. It saves the climb over the hills, and is an agreeable walk.”

  Rosamond thought, “Flora and he have quarrelled. I should not like that, to quarrel with Flora.”

  They went down the winding path, past little houses, little plots of cultivated land, to the shore, which was indented here into a little bay.

  “Convict Cove,” said Conolly indifferently, and Rosamond remembered that his father was there.

  In the distance they saw the convicts—a crowd of roped men sitting on the sand. Oh, dear, what had they done to be so unfortunate? Was any crime dreadful enough for captivity, for loss of freedom? Why not kill them at once, and have done? Easier for them, and less trouble for authority. To be tied hand and foot and man to man … only to be set loose to labour, and then to be tied again.… who, even in this world of miserable sinners, ever deserved that?

  Rosamond blinked away tears as they skirted Convict Cove and came down on the shore beyond it.

  A good deal of quiet bathing in the lagoon was going on, and at the sea’s edge fishermen were setting turtle-traps; probably no Sunday occupation.

  Nogood Conolly talked gaily; he asked them questions about England. But Charles should have been there, for his questions were mostly of pictures, and of pictures William and Rosamond knew little. Did people draw and paint pictures much, in England, of what they saw? How did they make their colours? What colours did they use? On the island there were only a few colours, and a few more that could be obtained by mixing. At school they had learnt about the great artists of the world, but perhaps now there were many more? For all William and Rosamond knew, there might be thousands more; artists might have arrived every year in great shoals and schools, like porpoises, ever since the eighteen-fifties. Rosamond said she expected there were lots. As to William, he was busy searching the wet sand for creatures, so said nothing. Certainly Charles was needed. But, since Flora too had needed Charles, Mr. Nogood Conolly had to make the best of these younger and less cultured Thinkwells. He intended, he said, when he got to England, to learn to draw and paint properly.

  “Are you good at it?” asked Rosamond, and he said, well, he thought he was, rather. Anyhow, it was what he liked doing best, and he meant to do it, whatever any one said.

  “Don’t they like your doing it?”

  “Oh Lord, here I have to be a dentist. You see, my father was a dentist, before
he was a rebel and a convict, and I was trained for it. But I hate it.”

  “How do you pull teeth out?” asked William. “You haven’t any pincers, have you?”

  “Yes: wooden ones. But I usually break them—the teeth, I mean.”

  “Have you any stuff you use to numb them with?”

  “Yes, a juice we get from a shrub. But I hate the whole business. Why should I pull out people’s disgusting teeth, when I want to be painting pictures?”

  “Well,” said William judicially, “there must be people to see to teeth, and there needn’t really be pictures, I suppose. So dentists are more important than artists. All the same, I’m all for every one doing what they want. I should be jolly sick if any one stopped me bug-hunting.”

  “Pray,” said Nogood, “are painters regarded as Smith in England?”

  “Smith?”

  “Upper class, that means,” Rosamond explained to William.

  “Upper what? Good Lord, I don’t know. Never noticed. I expect so. Are they, Rosamond?”

  Rosamond searched her memory for the artists of Cambridge.…

  “Oh, yes, I think so.”

  “I don’t think,” said William, reflecting on such alien matters for the first time, “that all that stuff people talk in England about class depends on what people do. It seems to be more what they are—what their people are, and what schools they went to, and all that. So far as I can make out, at least. But what do you want to bother about that kind of rot for?” He was a little contemptuous of a man who could ask such a question as that.

  “I don’t,” said Nogood Peter. “But Flora does. She wants to lead a life of fashion. She desires me to do no work at all, once we get to England; or else to try to get into the Government or something. You see, here it isn’t Smith to work at anything except government. But I hoped that perhaps in England painting might be counted Smith.”