“What nonsense!” shouted Mr. Fortune in a loud rude voice. He felt too suddenly sick to choose his words. He remembered what he had once read in a book about the Polynesians: that they can renounce life at their own will, not with the splash of suicide, but slowly, sullenly, deliberately, driving death into themselves like a wedge. Was Lueli doing this—gay, inconsequent, casual Lueli? But since the loss of his god Lueli was gay no longer, and his casualness had taken on a new and terrible aspect, as though it were the casualness of one who could not be bothered to live, who was discarding life as naturally and callously as he had picked flowers and thrown them down to die.
Just then a troop of boys and girls danced by. They were dancing after Lueli and pelting him with small glittering fishes. “Catch!” they cried; “here’s a god for you, Lueli. Catch him!”
Lueli walked on as if he hadn’t noticed them. He looked down and saw one of the fish lying at his feet. Like an animal he picked it up and began eating it, but he ate inattentively, without appetite. He was like a sick dog that snatches listlessly at a tuft of grass. Mr. Fortune stepped out from the verandah. His intention had been to drive the dancers away, but instead of that he put his arm through Lueli’s and began walking him down to the beach.
“Let us bathe together,” he said. “It is a long time since you gave me a swimming-lesson.”
Lueli swam so beautifully that it was hard to believe he was not happy. Mr. Fortune surpassed himself in flounderings. He tried to catch a fish in his mouth.
When they were sitting on the beach again he said: “Where shall we live when we leave Teioa’s house? Shall we make a new hut or shall we build up our old one again?”
“Go back to the old,” Lueli replied instantly in a soft fearful whisper.
“Yes, I think so too. Our own bathing-pool is much the best.”
“Yes. It’s deeper than the one here.”
“I think the fish are tamer too.”
“Yes.”
“I was wondering if we couldn’t make a small wicker-work bower on a pole and teach the parrots to sleep in it. In England people do so, only the birds are doves, not parrots. Perhaps you remember me telling you about our doves and pigeons?”
“They take messages.”
“Yes, those are the carrier pigeons. There are also pouters and fantails and tumbling pigeons that turn head over heels in the air. But parrots would be very nice too. You could feed them.”
“Won’t they be able to feed themselves?”
“Oh yes, certainly. But they would be more apt to stay with us if we fed them.”
“Must they stay?”
“Now, am I diverting him from his grief,” thought Mr. Fortune, “or am I only boring him?”
The new hut that rose on the place of the old had a faint whiff of burning. Mr. Fortune had superintended the building of it, and because the islanders were fond of him they allowed him to introduce several novelties, such as window-boxes and a kitchen dresser. He also threw out a bay. The parrot-cote stood in a corner of the lawn, and leading up to it was a narrow serpentining path with crazy paving made out of flat shells. On the other side of the house to balance the parrot-cote was a pergola, constructed in bamboo. In front of the house, in fact exactly where it always had been, but uprooted by the earthquake, was the flat stone on which he had celebrated Holy Communion on that first Sunday morning. He looked at it a little sadly. He bore it no malice, although it reminded him of a special kind of happiness which he could taste no more. He decided that he would make it the headstone of a rock-garden.
Mr. Fortune attached special importance to these European refinements because he felt that to the eyes of the world he must now present such an un-European appearance. The earthquake had left him nothing save the clothes he stood up in, the contents of his pockets, and a good-sized rubbish-heap. As for the rubbish-heap, he had with his own hands grubbed a large hole among the bushes and buried therein the bones of the harmonium, lamp, sewing-machine, etc., also the molten images of the communion plate and the teapot. He had done this by night, working by moonlight in the approved fashion of those who have a past to put away, and when he had covered in the hole and stamped down the earth he went back and forth from the ruins to the bushes, scooping up the ashes in a gourd and scattering them in the undergrowth.
His clothes he had folded and put away, thinking that as they were all he had, he had better save them up for future emergencies, such as a shipwreck, a visit of American tourists, the arrival of a new missionary or somebody dropping in from a flying machine. In their stead he wore a kilt and a mantle of native cloth, soberly contrived without any fringes or fandangos, and sandals of plaited bark. Since this new garb was pocketless, the contents of his pockets were ranged on the shelf of honour of the kitchen dresser—a pocket magnifying-glass, a whistle, a nail-file, a graduated medicine spoon, a flint-and-steel lighter, a copper medal commemorating Parnell which Henry Martin had brought from Ireland as a curiosity, nineteen mother-of-pearl counters in a wash-leather bag, a pencil-sharpener blunted by sand getting into it, a tape-measure that sprang back into a boxwood nut, several buttons, a silver pencil-case with no pencil, and a small magnet painted scarlet. There was also a knife with two blades, but this he carried on a string round his neck.
He looked on this array without sentiment. The parrot-cote and the pergola were also without charms for him. His intentions were severely practical. These things were all part of his designs on Lueli, they were so many fish-hooks to draw him from despair. Not by their proper qualities, of course; Mr. Fortune was not so simple as to expect that, even of the magnet. But indirectly they would build up around their owner and designer a compelling spiritual splendour, a glamour of mysterious attributes, fastidious living, and foreign parts. After three years of such familiarity it would not be easy to reconstruct his first fascination as something rich and strange. But it must be done if he were to compete successfully with his rival in Lueli’s affections. It must be done, because that rival was death.
He thought as little as he could help about his progress in this contest. He dared not allow himself to be elated when he seemed to be gaining a little, he dared not admit the possibility of failure. He fought with his eyes turned away from the face of the adversary, like Perseus attacking the Gorgon. He fought by inches, by half-hours; he dared not attempt a decisive victory for he could not risk a decisive defeat. And when he crept out of the hut at night to refresh himself with solitude and darkness, the sullen red light kindling and wavering above the blackness of the crags betokened to him that his enemy was also awake and weaving his powerful spells of annihilation.
He had no time to think of his own loss. He was entirely taken up with solicitude for Lueli, a soul no longer—as he supposed—immortal, and for that reason a charge upon him all the more urgent, as one is more concerned for a humming-bird than for a tortoise. Only at such times as when he had received a serious set-back or was feeling especially desperate did he find himself on the point of taking refuge in prayer; and then remembering the real state of things he would feel exactly like a person who makes to cast himself down on a chair but recalls just in time (or maybe just too late) how all the furniture has been moved, and that the chair is no longer in its old place.
It was sometimes hard for him with his English prejudices not to grow irritated at Lueli’s abject listlessness and misery. He could not have believed that his friend could be so chicken-hearted. And since when one is down everything falls on one, circumstances seemed to conspire in twitting and outraging the luckless youth.
Mr. Fortune thought he would try games. Lueli was agile and dexterous, surely it would comfort him to exhibit those qualities. Mr. Fortune introduced him to ping-pong. They played with basket-work bats and small nuts. On the second day a nut hit Lueli and made his nose bleed. He turned green, cast down his bat and began to whimper.
Since ping-pong was too rough, what about spillikins? He carved a set of pieces out of splinters, dyed them with frui
t juice to make them look more appetising, and made a great show of excitement to tempt the other on. Whenever it was Lueli’s turn to hook a piece from the tangle he sighed and groaned as though he had been requested to move mountains. Dicing and skittles were no better received.
Deciding that neither games nor gaming (they diced for the mother-of-pearl counters) were likely to rouse Lueli from his dejection, Mr. Fortune cast about for some new expedient. Perhaps a pet animal might have charms? He caught a baby flying fox and reared it with great tenderness on guavas and coco-milk. The flying fox soon grew extremely attached to him and learnt to put its head out of the cage when he called “Tibby!” But whenever Lueli could be induced to take an interest in it and to prod it up with a cautious finger, it scratched and bit him. Still persevering with natural history Mr. Fortune spat on the magnifying-glass, polished it, and began to show off the wonderful details of flowers, mosses, and water-fleas. Lueli would look, and look away again, obediently and haplessly bored.
Though the idea of such cold and rapacious blood-thirstiness was highly repugnant to him, he resolved to sacrifice his own feelings (and theirs) and make a moth collection. He prepared a mess of honey and water and took Lueli out that evening on an expedition to lime the trees. Two hours later they went out again with a string of candle-nuts for a lantern and collected a quantity of moths and nocturnal insects, poignantly beautiful and battered with their struggles to escape. But he stifled his sense of shame, all the more in that Lueli seemed inclined to rise to this lure, of his own accord suggesting a second expedition. He had not quite grasped the theory, however. Two days later Mr. Fortune, returning from an errand in the village, was surprised to hear a loud and furious buzzing proceeding from the dell. It was full of wild bees, and Lueli, very swollen and terrified, came crawling out of the bushes. He had smeared the parrot-cote and the posts of the verandah with honey, and it seemed as though every bee and wasp on the island were assembled together to quarrel and gorge themselves. It was not possible to approach the hut until after nightfall, and drunk and disorderly bees hovered about it for days, not to speak of a sediment of ants.
Worse was to come. Since his arrival on the island Mr. Fortune had never ailed. But now, whether by exposure to night dews and getting his feet damp out mothing or by some special malignity of Fate, he found himself feeling sore at the back of the throat and sneezing; and presently he had developed a streaming cold. Lueli caught it from him, and if his cold were bad, Lueli’s was ten times worse. He made no effort to struggle against it; indeed, he was so overwhelmed that struggling was practically out of the question. He crouched on his mats, snorting and groaning, with a face all chapped and bloated, blear eyes, a hanging jaw, and a sullen and unhealthy appetite; and every five minutes or so he sneezed as though he would bring the roof down.
Mr. Fortune was terrified, not only for Lueli, but for the whole population of the island. He knew how direly European diseases can rampage through a new field. He set up a rigid quarantine. Since the loss of his god Lueli had been at pains to avoid his friends, but naturally he was now seized with a passionate craving for their society; and there was some excuse for him, as Mr. Fortune was not just now very exhilarating company. But he did his best to be, in spite of an earache which followed the cold, and between Lueli’s paroxysms of sneezing he strove to cheer him with accounts of the Great Plague and the Brave Men of Eyam.
At last they were both recovered. But though restored in body Lueli was as mopish as ever. Mr. Fortune went on bracing, and beat his brains for some new distraction. But he had lost ground in this last encounter, and the utmost he could congratulate himself upon was that Lueli was still, however indifferently or unwillingly, consenting to exist. The worst of it was that he couldn’t allow himself to show any sympathy. There were times when he could scarcely hold himself back from pity and condolence. But he believed that if he were once to acknowledge the other’s grief he would lose his greatest hold over him—his title of being some one superior, august and exemplary.
And then one morning, when they had been living in the new hut for about six weeks, he woke up inspired. Why had he wasted so much time displaying his most trivial and uncompelling charms, opposing to the magnetism of death such fripperies and titbits of this world, such gewgaws of civilisation as a path serpentining to a parrot-cote (a parrot-cote which hadn’t even allured the parrots), or a pocket magnifying-glass, while all the time he carried within him the inestimable treasures of intellectual enjoyment? Now he would pipe Lueli a tune worth dancing to, now he would open for him a new world. He would teach him mathematics.
He sprang up from bed, full of enthusiasm. At the thought of all those stretches of white beach he was like a bridegroom. There they were, hard and smooth from the tread of the sea, waiting for that noble consummation of blank surfaces, to show forth a truth; waiting, in this particular instance, to show forth the elements of plane geometry.
At breakfast Mr. Fortune was so glorified and gay that Lueli caught a reflection of his high spirits and began to look more lifelike than he had done for weeks. On their way down to the beach they met a party of islanders who were off on a picnic. Mr. Fortune with delight heard Lueli answering their greetings with something like his former sociability, and even plucking up heart enough for a repartee. His delight gave a momentary stagger when Lueli decided to go a-picnicking too. But, after all, it didn’t matter a pin. The beach would be as smooth again to-morrow, the air as sweet and nimble; Lueli would be in better trim for learning after a spree, and, now he came to think of it, he himself wouldn’t teach any the worse for a little private rubbing-up beforehand.
It must be going on for forty years since he had done any mathematics; for he had gone into the bank the same year that his father died, leaving Rugby at seventeen because, in the state that things were then in, the bank was too good an opening to be missed. He had once got a prize—the Poetical Works of Longfellow—for algebra, and he had scrambled along well enough in other branches of mathematics; but he had not learnt with any particular thrill, or realised that thrill there might be, until he was in the bank, and learning a thing of the past.
Then, perhaps because of that never-ending entering and adding up and striking balances, and turning on to the next page to enter, add up, and strike balances again, a mental occupation minute, immediate, and yet, so to speak, wool-gathering, as he imagined knitting to be, the absolute quality of mathematics began to take on for him an inexpressibly romantic air. “Pure Mathematics.” He used to speak of them to his fellow-clerks as though he were hinting at some kind of transcendental debauchery of which he had been made free—and indeed there does seem to be a kind of unnatural vice in being so completely pure. After a spell of this holy boasting he would grow a little uneasy; and going to the Free Library he took out mathematical treatises, just to make sure that he could follow step by step as well as soar. For twenty pages, perhaps, he read slowly, carefully, dutifully, with pauses for self-examination and working out the examples. Then, just as it was working up and the pauses should have been more scrupulous than ever, a kind of swoon and ecstasy would fall on him, and he read ravening on, sitting up till dawn to finish the book, as though it were a novel. After that his passion was stayed; the book went back to the Library and he was done with mathematics till the next bout. Not much remained with him after these orgies, but something remained: a sensation in the mind, a worshipping acknowledgment of something isolated and unassailable, or a remembered mental joy at the rightness of thoughts coming together to a conclusion, accurate thoughts, thoughts in just intonation, coming together like unaccompanied voices coming to a close.
But often his pleasure flowered from quite simple things that any fool could grasp. For instance, he would look out of the bank windows, which had green shades in their lower halves; and rising above the green shades he would see a row of triangles, equilateral, isosceles, acute-angled, right-angled, obtuse-angled. These triangles were a range of dazzling mountain peaks, eterna
lly snowy, eternally untrodden; and he could feel the keen wind which blew from their summits. Yet they were also a row of triangles, equilateral, isosceles, acute-angled, right-angled, obtuse-angled.
This was the sort of thing he designed for Lueli’s comfort. Geometry would be much better than algebra, though he had not the same certificate from Longfellow for teaching it. Algebra is always dancing over the pit of the unknown, and he had no wish to direct Lueli’s thoughts to that quarter. Geometry would be best to begin with, plain plane geometry, immutably plane. Surely if anything could minister to the mind diseased it would be the steadfast contemplation of a right angle, an existence that no mist of human tears could blur, no blow of fate deflect.
Walking up and down the beach, admiring the surface which to-morrow with so much epiphany and glory was going to reveal the first axioms of Euclid, Mr. Fortune began to think of himself as possessing an universal elixir and charm. A wave of missionary ardour swept him along, and he seemed to view, not Lueli only, but all the islanders rejoicing in this new dispensation. There was beach-board enough for all and to spare. The picture grew in his mind’s eye, somewhat indebted to Raphael’s Cartoon of the School of Athens. Here a group bent over an equation, there they pointed out to each other with admiration that the square on the hypotenuse equalled the sum of the squares on the sides containing the right angle; here was one delighting in a rhomboid and another in conic sections; that enraptured figure had secured the twelfth root of two, while the children might be filling up the foreground with a little long division.
By the morrow he had slept off most of his fervour. Calm, methodical, with a mind prepared for the onset, he guided Lueli down to the beach and with a stick prodded a small hole in it.
“What is this?”
“A hole.”
“No, Lueli, it may seem like a hole, but it is a point.”
Mr. Fortune Page 11
