Orphan Island

by Rose Macaulay

  “I am sure,” said one of them, “I thought there were enough on board to keep them in order should they get troublesome. But indeed, we never thought of such a notion. So quiet they seemed, and coming away so pleased last night after their audience with Miss Smith—ungrateful fellows. Who’d have dreamed of such a thing?”

  Mr. Albert Smith looked uneasy lest some one should mention what indeed the warders were bound to learn soon enough, the part played by Miss Smith in the day’s proceedings. He talked quickly of the poor brown sailors who had been thrown into the sea.

  Mr. Albert Smith was a shaken man.

  4

  Slowly the crowd dispersed. It was of no use to stay on the shore any longer, watching for a schooner now far away out of sight. They strolled off in groups and knots, discussing the day’s strange occurrences. Many were discontented, angry, rebellious; others thought they were, but were really relieved not to have to make this disturbing move and leave their home for ever behind them. But on all the Smith yoke lay, galling and precariously balanced; why should they stand it any more? That was the burden of their talk. Miss Smith had betrayed them, and was now fallen into a state that seemed a judgment. Her children, who had annexed the island, had, it seemed, no right to a foot of it, for they were bastards, and, as such, condemned by their own laws.…

  Why should they stand it any longer?

  They would not stand it any longer.

  Newspapers came out on the Hibernian shore, saying that they would not.

  “Up, Orphans, and take the island from these so-called Smiths!”

  “Why so-called?” inquired Mr. Thinkwell, reading this as it came out. “They are Smiths. To-day, in fact, we learn for the first time that Smith is (according to Jean Fraser anyhow) their correct name. Though, as to that, the point raised by Jean as to their illegitimacy is debatable. It raises, in fact, a not uninteresting legal question as to the marriage laws on desert islands.”

  Charles, who was sulkily reading the news with him, reminded him that so-called was, in Great Britain, often used merely as a term indicative of distaste and contempt. Sometimes during the European War people had even, when roused, spoken of our foes as “these so-called Germans.”

  “Very true,” Mr. Thinkwell agreed. “Obviously, here, as there, people will say anything.”

  They perused further revolutionary utterances.

  “It certainly looks,” said the languid voice of Hindley Smith-Rimski, “as if our respected family hadn’t a much longer run here. What do you think, Mr. Thinkwell?”

  “I certainly think it would be wise to make considerable changes in the constitution and the property laws. The time seems to have come when this is positively demanded.”

  “It may be demanded, but it won’t be granted, I imagine. The only change in the laws I anticipate is the repeal of the bastardy laws. But I dare say we shan’t even have that, as at present my Uncle Bertie’s line is to maintain that grandmamma’s—er—adultery (if you will pardon the crude word) is a delirious and senile fancy of old Jean’s.”

  “It is an awkward position for him,” said Mr. Thinkwell, who saw every one’s point of view.

  “It is. And it may very soon be a confoundedly awkward position for us all. See there!”

  In large capitals was being written, “THE NAME OF THIS ISLAND IS HEREBY CHANGED FROM SMITH ISLAND TO ORPHAN ISLAND.”

  Hindley shrugged his slim shoulders. “The Orphans mean business, I fear. In their present mood, and if they work themselves up much more and spend a fairly bibulous afternoon, they should be up to anything by the evening. Odd, how excited they get.”

  His glance at the population, calm, quizzical, amused, was such as a French aristocrat might have turned on the canaille on the eve of the Revolution.

  “It will be more amusing than this,” he said, “this evening, when the official journal comes out. It will need such very earnest and vigilant censoring on the part of poor Uncle Bertie. I shall be interested to see in what form he does let the day’s news appear. Let us leave this rather noisy peninsula.… Well, Mr. Charles, how does the prospect of settling down for some time among us please you? You look a little melancholy, if I may say so.”

  “Naturally,” said Charles, “I want to get home. I have a great many things to do there.… Not that I expect we shall be held up here for long, but still, it’s a bore. I’ve been talking to Paul about the chances of getting anywhere in a boat, but he doesn’t think much of them. He says you couldn’t provision a small boat for long enough, even if it wouldn’t be swamped. But I can’t see why it is impossible to build a much larger boat, that would be seaworthy.”

  Hindley shcok his head.

  “All our attempts at that have so far failed—and we’ve tried, at intervals, for sixty-eight years, you must remember. We haven’t the materials. We can build houses, of a sort but not ships.”

  “The experience of all castaways as to that seems to have been much the same,” Mr. Thinkwell agreed. “Even Crusoe, a man full of resource and perseverance, though stupid in many ways, failed to build a boat in which he could voyage far. We have to make about two hundred miles, across a sea noted for its sudden and violent storms. But I certainly feel we should give our minds to the problem. It would seem a pity merely to sit idle, waiting for rescue.”

  “Meanwhile,” said Hindley, “and pending both the construction of this vessel and the Orphan revolt, let us dine while we may. Perhaps you will both honour me? We will talk of literature and the arts, and forget the troublous world awhile.”

  5

  The banquet had been, of course, given up, on account of Miss Smith’s indisposition, which remained unchanged. Loyalty would have demanded a respectful quiet on this her birthday evening, while she lay ill. The fact that there was no respectful quiet seemed to the Smith family ominous. There was defiant noise, shouting, public speaking. Some assisted in the making of noise because they were annoyed, some because they were relieved, others because they liked noise.

  Mr. Albert Smith stayed in Balmoral, after a painful half-hour spent in superintending the issue of the evening news on the shore. He had failed to censor the news as he thought fit; for the first time the news editor took no notice of him, but, supported by public opinion, went his own way, and Mr. Smith had the vexation of reading in full the story of the convicts and his mamma, and that of his mamma’s alleged illicit union with his papa. Nothing he could say, not all his loud commands and imperious gestures, had sufficed to stop or ameliorate these news. When he said “Erase, please,” the editor had said, in effect, “Stet,” and no one had come forward to obey the Prime Minister’s command. There was even a paragraph about the bastardy of the Smiths of the second generation, and how this might affect their position in the state. This paragraph Mr. Smith had, stepping forward, erased with his own foot, but not before great numbers had read it. When it came to the paragraph headed “Health of Miss Smith,” all that was said was “Miss Smith has had a fit, and is no better.” No anxiety or regret was expressed. Mr. Smith heard even his brother-in-law, Mr. Carter, mutter, “Serve her right, too, the old devil.” Mr. Carter had never got on over well with his mother-in-law, who had kept him in his place as merely the consort of Adelaide Smith. Only some of the Orphan women, incurably loyal, said, “Poor old lady! I hope she’ll get better. She is Miss Smith, when all’s said, and she acted for our good, after all.” (For they did not by any means all desire to leave the island.)

  It was all very unpleasant. There was nothing for it but to retire to Balmoral and hold a family conclave outside the sick room. Dr. Field and the nurse bustled in and out, letting Miss Smith’s blood, applying cold compresses to her head, saying, “A severe fit. She is conscious but helpless, and may remain so indefinitely. There is no reason to apprehend immediate death. In these cases, no one knows what will happen.”

  The family tiptoed about the bed, talking in whispers.

  Miss Smith lay, purple and rigid, breathing heavily, with wide ope
n eyes. If she was conscious, if she was enraged, if she was struggling to say “Don’t whisper, Bertie; it annoys us; we’ve told you before,” she failed to indicate it. She merely lay and breathed.

  Anticipating no immediate change in her condition, Mr. Albert Smith went back to the Yams for supper. At the Yams sat Mrs. Albert Smith, sewing at a frock for an infant grandchild, saying at intervals, “Tut, tut. To think of your mamma doing such a thing! Well, I never!” which was not helpful, whether it referred to Miss Smith’s exploit with regard to the Typee or to her earlier behaviour with the doctor.

  Flora came in, sullen and defiant, and Heathcliff, excited and flushed. Heathcliff, during supper, remarked that the island was in a great state of discontent, and that, so far as he could see, the only way to avert a rising which would overthrow the government was for parliament to meet tomorrow and radically reform the constitution itself, redistributing both land and power among the many.

  “Don’t talk nonsense, my dear boy,” his papa told him. “We Smiths are not the sort to betray our trust through fear. And at the moment, too, when your grandmamma lies helpless.…”

  Flora, rousing from a sullen reverie, said that, for her part, she did not care in the least what happened to the constitution or the land, to the Orphans or to the Smiths, but that she supposed her papa would no longer raise objections to her marrying Peter Conolly on the grounds that he was a bastard.

  Her papa said that he certainly could and did.

  “Well,” said Flora spitefully, “in that case, and if marriages of that kind are wrong, I think you ought to undo your marriage with mamma.”

  “Flora, be silent. I desire you to be silent immediately. I should have thought, I must say, that you would have known better than to use, in order to wound and insult me, the irresponsible libel of a demented old woman. To say the least of it, that appears to me to be hardly cricket. Particularly with your grandmamma lying helpless and unable to defend herself.”

  Flora shrugged a shoulder, possibly a trifle ashamed.

  “Well, in any case,” she said, “Angus says he will marry us. He says he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t. We talked to him about it this afternoon. Oh, dear me, papa, surely if we have to spend months and years more on this tedious island, we must pass the time as best we can!”

  Her voice broke on a sob. The prospect of marrying Peter, though it might alleviate the island’s tedium, could not compensate Flora for losing the world.

  “Oh, tut, my dear, tut,” her mamma soothed her. “We mustn’t be peevish, you know. I shall have to talk to you like little Harriet’s mamma in the poem—I’m sure I used to be always saying it to you when you were little:—

  “These slight disappointments are sent to prepare

  For what may hereafter befall;

  For seasons of real disappointment and care,

  Which commonly happen to all.

  For, just like to-day with its holiday lost,

  Is life and its unnfoits at best:

  Our pleasures are blighted, our purposes crossed,

  To teach us it is not our rest.

  And when those distresses and crosses appear

  With which you may shortly be tried,

  You’ll wonder that ever you wasted a tear …”

  “Oh, mamma, do be quiet!”

  Heathcliff got up and went to the door.

  “They are very noisy,” he said, listening. “There are a lot of them coming this way. I expect they are going to hold a meeting outside the Yams—a demonstration. They’ll probably call for you, papa. They half suspect, you know, that you had something to do with grandmamma’s performance this morning—knew of it anyhow. I told them you didn’t.”

  “I? Indeed, no. It is your Uncle Denis they should blame for that, not me.”

  “They do blame Uncle Denis, for being a fool, and probably tipsy. But they don’t suspect him of knowing of grandmamma’s plot. Uncle Denis is pretty popular, you see, on the whole, so far as any Smith can be. It’s you they seem so down on —after grandmamma, who’s out of action now.… Anyhow they’re coming this way. Listen!”

  There were confused noises without.

  “I shall not,” said Mr. Smith, squaring his shoulders and throwing out his chest, “take the slightest notice.”

  6

  All the evening and far into the night the noise of demonstration rolled. Hindley Smith-Rimski, playing chess with Mr. Thinkwell at Belle Vue, heard it, and said, “The populace appear to clamour for my family’s blood. I can’t say I’m surprised. Where are your offspring?”

  Mr. Thinkwell looked vaguely round the room.

  “They seem to be all out. I suppose, like Paul and Merton, they are watching the evening’s doings. I can’t say, myself, that mere demonstrations of excitement interest me greatly. Persons carried away by feeling are, as a rule, at their least interesting.”

  “Besides,” said Hindley, “being in deucedly bad form. Knight takes your rook.… I suppose your daughter will be all right?”

  “I imagine so,” said Mr. Thinkwell. “She is no doubt with her brothers.”

  7

  As a matter of fact, Rosamond was not with her brothers, for William was on the shore pursuing the zoological investigations which the misconduct of the convicts had abruptly interrupted in the morning, and Charles had walked up into the hills. Rosamond was with Captain Paul, who, tucking her hand firmly into his arm, was taking care of her, as they strolled about listening to the conversations, demonstrations, and music. Rosamond had no great inclination to be taken care of, and would have preferred solitude, but Captain Paul thought that unsafe for young females on such a night as this.

  “Might meet with unpleasantness,” he said.

  Meet with unpleasantness! Rosamond thought, that would be dreadful. It sounded so sinister, unpleasantness in the abstract, a creature stalking along the roads, that one might meet at any turning face to face. One would run for one’s life, but Unpleasantness would run faster, hurrying in a horrid lumbering gallop.… No, one must not meet Unpleasantness. So Rosamond submitted to having her hand tucked into Captain Paul’s arm, and to being escorted about her own island.

  She could not help feeling a little happy to-day, deep in her soul, despite the disaster that had befallen them all, and that had so vexed some of the islanders, and, in particular, her dear Flora. Of course it was very vexing for them, to lose their Promised Land at a blow, like this. Vexing, too, for her father, who had his work in Cambridge, to which he was so oddly attached. One might not be able to understand how any one could prefer work in Cambridge to idleness on a coral island, but still, fathers are odd, and there it was. Rosamond was not so selfish as to desire her father to be permanently marooned and the islanders permanently disappointed, but, as this would appear to have occurred, for herself she could not but feel rather pleased, though the thought of her dog Peter somewhat distressed her.

  “Some kind of sufficiently navigable craft might be built, possibly,” Captain Paul speculated aloud to himself. “Though the Lord alone knows how.…”

  Rosamond reflected that the Lord’s alone knowing would not help them very much. In her view, it could not be done. No one on desert islands ever escaped from them in boats—not even in real boats saved from the ship. Even Masterman Ready (who was so clever that he could build houses, stockades, turtle traps, anything, for poor, stupid Mr. Seagrave, who could not help him at all), had known that he could not hope to do that. Even Jack, Ralph, and Peterkin, who had made a wonderful boat of chestnut planks, with nothing but an axe, had only used it to voyage round the island, and, on the one occasion when they went further, had been very nearly wrecked in a storm. Even Robinson Crusoe, so busy, persevering, and helped by Providence, had failed here. No; obviously it could not be done. Elsewhere one built ships, but not on desert islands. One waited for ships instead, and, if ships did not come, one went on waiting.

  “I expect,” said Rosamond, “we shall have to wait to be rescued.”
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br />   Chapter XXII

  CHARLES

  1

  CHARLES climbed above the crowds, up the steep wood path, beneath dense spreading boughs that hid him from the moon. He was shut in warm, scented darkness, with sleeping birds, huddled ball-shaped, heads under wings, who loaded the branches like coloured fruits, with monkeys who woke and chattered at his step, with armadillos who rattled like corn-crakes, fireflies who sparked like flames in a rick, tortoises who cried of love. Feathery boughs of pepper trees struck him softly across the face; pollen from brushed flowers dusted him and made him sneeze, and all the perfumes of the forest assailed him on small warm wandering winds, which bore no comfort on their wings.

  He climbed above the woods, and on the hill’s rocky brow met the moon. It stared low from a purple sky, with millions of enormous stars, drenching the island and the sea with pale gold.

  Dreams, dreams, dreams! The perfumed island was a dream, afloat in a vast and shining ocean. Only the golden moon and the myriad stars burned on, imperishable lamps of truth. Beauty was a dream, that flashed across one’s path, brilliant bird of paradise, and vanished in confusion and bitterness. Beauty fled; one woke on a cold hillside, alone and palely loitering. Dreams, dreams, dreams!

  From the shores below confused sounds came up, as of an island in uproar.

  “Noise doesn’t help,” said Charles, and turned his back on the climbing moon and plunged down the hill’s other side, into the shallow, shadowed valley where the sedgy lake lay in gloom beneath hanging thickets.

  By the lake’s edge Charles lay. The golden stars were caught in green, weedy scum, floating there with sleeping water-birds and a thousand crawling insects.

  “Very Baudelairien,” muttered Charles.

  From the green stagnant water mist steamed, drifting about him in cold wreaths. He shivered, as if he had ague.