Since diving was out of the question he must run to the village to fetch helpers. The village was nearly a mile away, there might be no one there but old women and babies, he would be breathless, every one would shout and wave their arms, by the time he got back with a rescue party it would be too late, Lueli would be drowned.
This time it was harder to haul himself out of the water, for he had forgotten to throw off his large draperies and they were now water-logged. After the shadow of the pool the sunlight seemed black and blinding. He started to run, loosening the knots as he went, for he would run quicker naked. As he threw off the cloak he caught sight over his shoulder of a canoe out to sea. It was heading away from the island, but perhaps it was still within earshot. He shouted and waved the cloak and shouted and coo-eed again. Each cry came out of his body like a thing with jagged edges, tearing him inwardly. The canoe kept on its course. The sweat ran down and blinded him, so that he thought for a moment that the canoe had changed its direction and was coming towards him: but it was only the sweat in his eyes which had enlarged it.
He began to run again. It was a pity that he had wasted so much good breath shouting. He was among the trees now, rushing down a vista of light and shadow. Each tall tree seemed to gather speed as he approached it till it shot past him with a whirr of foliage and a swoop of darkness. His going shook the ground, and the fruit fell off the bushes as he ran by.
The path began to wind downhill and grew stonier. He was about half-way to the village, he could hear the noise of the brook. He shot round a corner, tripped over something, and fell headlong into a group of human beings, falling among smooth brown limbs and cries of astonishment. It was one of those bevies, half a dozen young women who had come out to the brook to net crayfish. To his horror they all leapt to their feet and began to run away. Lying along the ground as he fell, with his head in the brook, he caught hold of an ankle.
“Stop! Don’t be little fools!” he cried out, sobbing for breath. “Lueli is drowning in the bathing-pool. You must come back with me and save him.”
The ankle belonged to Fuma, a hoyden whom he had once loathed beyond words; but now he adored her, for she was going to play up. She called back the other girls, rallied them, sent one back to the village, and bade the others run as fast as they could to the pool; and in a twinkling she and Mr. Fortune were following them up through the woods. Fuma caught hold of his arm and patted it encouragingly.
“He is in the deep hole under the black rock,” he said. “He is lying there holding on to the weed. I have been shouting, and I may not be able to keep up with you. But you must run on without me and dive until you find him.”
“Silly boy! Silly Lueli! He told me three days ago that he meant to die. Such nonsense! Never mind, we will pull him up and breathe him alive again.”
They ran on side by side. Presently Mr. Fortune said: “You know, Fuma, this is all my fault.”
Fuma laughed under her breath. “Lueli thinks the world of you,” she said. “He is always telling us how lovable you are.”
After a few more yards Mr. Fortune said: “Fuma, you must run on alone now.”
She gave his arm a gentle nip and shot ahead. He saw her join the others as a starling flies into the flock, and then they were out of sight. He could only think of quite small immediate things, Fuma’s eyebrows, a beautiful clear arch, and the soft quick sound of her breathing. He was thinking more of her than of Lueli. She seemed more real.
He was still running, but now every time that he put a foot down it was with a stamp that disintegrated his balance, so that he could not guide his direction. Then he heard a splash, and another and another. They had reached the pool and begun diving. Then he heard Fuma’s voice crying: “Further to the left. He’s down here.” Then a babble of voices and more splashings. Then silence.
He gathered up his will for the last thirty yards, was down on to the beach and out breast high into the water. He saw a girl’s head rise above the surface of the empty pool. She shook the hair from her eyes, saw him standing there, and came swimming towards him.
“We’ve got him,” she said. “But Fuma has to cut the weed with a shell for we can’t loosen his hands.”
Mr. Fortune took the pocket-knife from his neck and held it out to her. Then he saw a strangely intricate and beautiful group emerge and slowly approach. They had brought up Lueli and were bearing him among them. His head lolled and dipped back into the water from Fuma’s shoulder where it lay. His eyes were open in a fixed and piteous stare, his mouth was open too, and a little trickle of blood ran down from his lip where he had bitten it. His inanimate body trailed in the water with gestures inexpressibly weary. But two long streamers of weed still hung from his clenched hands.
Death comes with her black ruler and red ink and scores a firm line under the long tale of more or less, debit and credit, all the small multitudinous entries which have made up the relationship between one’s self and another. The line is drawn, the time has come to audit; and from the heart of her shadow a strange clarity, dream-like and precise, is shed upon the page, so that without any doubt or uncertainty we can add up the account which is now at an end, and perceive the sum-total of the expenditure of time. While the others were ministering around the body of Lueli, squeezing the water out of his lungs, rubbing him, breathing into his nostrils, burning herbs and performing incantations, Mr. Fortune sat under a tree, a little apart, and audited the past. In the tree sat a parrot, uttering from time to time its curious airy whistle—a high, sweet, meditative note. It seemed to Mr. Fortune that the bird was watching the process of his thoughts, and that its whistle, detached from any personal emotion, even from that of astonishment, was an involuntary and philosophic acknowledgment of the oddity of men’s lives and passions.
“I loved him,” he thought. “From the moment I set eyes on him I loved him. Not with what is accounted a criminal love, for though I set my desire on him it was a spiritual desire. I did not even love him as a father loves a son, for that is a familiar love, and at the times when Lueli most entranced me it was as a being remote, intact, and incalculable. I waited to see what his next movement would be, if he would speak or no—it was the not knowing what he would do that made him dear. Yes, that was how I loved him best, those were my happiest moments: when I was just aware of him, and sat with my senses awaiting him, not wishing to speak, not wishing to make him notice me until he did so of his own accord because no other way would it be perfect, would it be by him. And how often, I wonder, have I let it be just like that? Perhaps a dozen times, perhaps twenty times all told, perhaps, when all is put together, for an hour out of the three years I have had with him. For man’s will is a demon that will not let him be. It leads him to the edge of a clear pool; and while he sits admiring it, with his soul suspended over it like a green branch and dwelling in its own reflection, will stretches out his hand and closes his fingers upon a stone—a stone to throw into it.
“I’d had a poor, meagre, turnpike sort of life until I came here and found Lueli. I loved him, he was a refreshment to me, my only pleasant surprise. He was perfect because he was a surprise. I had done nothing to win him, he was entirely gratuitous. I had had no hand in him, I could no more have imagined him beforehand than I could have imagined a new kind of flower. So what did I do? I started interfering. I made him a Christian, or thought I did. I taught him to do this and not to do the other, I checked him, I fidgeted over him. And because I loved him so for what he was I could not spend a day without trying to alter him. How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it about! We couldn’t even love a tree, not a stone even; for sooner or later we should be pruning the tree or chipping a bit off the stone. Yet if it were not for a will I suppose we should cease to exist. Anyhow it is in us, and while we live we cannot escape from it, so however we love and whatever we love, it can only be for a few minutes, and to buy off our will for those few minutes we have to relinquish to it for the rest of our live
s whatever it is we love. Lueli has been the price of Lueli. I enslaved him, I kept him on a string. I robbed him of his god twice over—first in intention, then in fact. I made his misery more miserable by my perpetual interference. Up till an hour ago I was actually tormenting him with that damned geometry. And now he is dead.... Yes, parrot! You may well whistle. But be careful. Don’t attract my attention too much lest I should make a pet of you, and put you in a cage, and then in the end, when you had learnt to talk like me instead of whistling like a wise bird, wring your neck because you couldn’t learn to repeat Paradise Lost.”
At these words the parrot flew away, just as though it had understood and wished to keep on the safe side; and looking up Mr. Fortune saw some of the islanders running towards him. He got up and went to meet them. “Well, is he dead?” he asked, too deeply sunk in his own wan hope to pay any attention to their looks and greetings.
It was some time before they could make him understand that Lueli was alive. He followed them, dumb, trembling, and stupefied, to where Lueli was sitting propped up under a tree. He looked rather battered, and rather bewildered, and slightly ashamed of himself, like a child that has been at a rich tea-party, grown over-excited and been sick. But the hag-ridden look he had worn since the earthquake was gone, and he was answering the congratulations and chaff of those around him with a semblance of his old gaiety.
Mr. Fortune stood looking down on him in silence, confused at meeting him whom he had not thought to meet again. Lueli was infected by his embarrassment, and the two regarded each other with caution and constraint, as dear friends do who meet unexpectedly after long separation. Lueli was the first to speak.
“How ill you look. Your face is all holes.”
“Lueli, you would have laughed if you could have seen me trying to dive in after you. Twice I threw myself in, but I could do nothing but float.”
“I expect you let yourself crumple up.”
“Yes, I expect I did.”
“But it was very kind of you to try.”
“Not at all.”
The situation was horrible. Mr. Fortune was tongue-tied, very jealous of the others, and haunted with the feeling that behind all this cause for rejoicing there was some fatal obstacle which he ought to know all about but which his mind was shirking the contemplation of. Lueli fidgeted and made faces. The awkwardness of being raised from the dead was too much even for his savoir faire.
“Why can’t I be natural?” thought Mr. Fortune. “Why can’t I say how glad I feel? And why don’t I feel my gladness? What have I done? Why is it like this, what is the matter with me?”
Lueli’s thoughts were something like this: “He has a blemish on his neck, but didn’t I ever notice it before? It must have grown larger. I hope they won’t begin to laugh at him because he can’t dive. I love him, but, oh dear! what a responsibility he is. I don’t think I can bear it much longer, not just now. I don’t want responsibilities. I only want to go to sleep.”
Round them stood half the population of the island, raging with congratulations, jokes, and inquiries. Even when they had escorted them back to the hut, superintended Lueli’s falling asleep, and eaten all the provisions which Mr. Fortune brought out to them, they would not go away but sat among their crumbs and on the rock-garden imploring Fuma to tell them once more how Mr. Fortune had come bounding through the wood and fallen headlong into the girls’ laps.
For no reason that he could see he had suddenly become immensely popular. And as he walked to and fro in the twilight waiting for his guests to take themselves off he heard his name being bandied about in tones of the liveliest affection and approval. He had one consolation: by the morrow he would be out of fashion again. As for Lueli, they scarcely mentioned him. If he had been drowned they would have spent the evening wailing and lamenting: not for him but for themselves, at the reminder of their own mortality, after the natural way of mourning. And there would have been just as much gusto, he thought—but tenderly, for he felt no animosity to them now, only a desire to get rid of them and be left to his own soul—and just as many crumbs.
The moon had set before they went away. Mr. Fortune stole into the hut and listened for a while to Lueli’s quiet breathing, a slight human rhythm recovered that day from the rhythm of the sea. He knelt down very quietly and creakingly, and taking hold of Lueli’s limp warm hand he put it to his lips. “Good-bye, my dear,” he murmured under his breath. Lueli stirred, and uttered a drowsy inarticulate Good-night.
Both rhythms were in Mr. Fortune’s ears as he lay down to rest. He did not sleep, at least not for some hours; but he lay unharried in a solemn and dream-like repose, listening to the gentle fanning of Lueli’s slumber and the slow tread of the sea.
Thus, tranquil and full of long thoughts, he had lain on his first night in Fanua, gazing at the star Canopus and watching the trail of creeper stir at the sweet breath of night. All that he had then of hope and faith was lost. But now at the last he seemed strangely to have resumed the temper of that night, and the thought of his renunciation was as full and perfect as the former thought of his vocation had been. “It is not one’s beliefs that matter,” he told himself, “but to be acting up to them. To have come to Fanua and now to have made up my mind to go away—it is the decision that fills me with this amazing kind of joy.”
To go away. It was the only solution, he had the parrot’s word for it. The slow tread of the sea told him the same story. “I brought you here,” it said, “and presently I shall bear you away. My ebbing tides will return to Fanua, and ebb and return again and ebb and return again. But for you there will be no return.” And the tread of the sea became the footfall of a warder. It was this necessity, still implicit and unrealised, which had lain like a stone in his heart when he saw Lueli brought back from the dead. If he had not thought of Lueli as being dead he would never have understood. But Death had vouchsafed him a beam of her darkness to see clearly by; and having seen, he could not sin against that light. He must go away, that was the only stratagem by which love could outwit its own inherent treachery. If he stayed on, flattering himself with the belief that he had learnt his lesson, he would remember for a while no doubt; but sooner or later, inevitably he would yield to his will again, he would begin to meddle, he would seek to destroy.
To see everything so clearly and to know that his mind was made up was almost to be released from human bondage. This must be the boasted calm joy of mathematicians which he had once pretended to share. Euclid had failed him, or he had failed Euclid; but the contemplation of his own reasoning and resolved mind gave him a felicity beyond even that which the rightness of right-angles could afford. He would keep awake a little longer and make the most of it. He could be sure it would not last. But when it had shattered and desolation came in its stead there would still be common sense and common manliness and several practical preoccupations with which to keep desolation at bay.
First he must get a message to St. Fabien. In the pocket of the coat he had worn on the night of the earthquake were a couple of sheets torn out of an exercise book. He had carried them on his stroll on the chance that he might feel impelled to write a sonnet (Petrarchan sonnets were the only poetical form he attempted, because they were so regular, and even so he did them very badly) On the Setting Sun, or To a Hermit Crab. He had not done so, partly because he had forgotten to take a pencil too; but now, when he had smoothed the crumples out these sheets would come in handy for his letter to the Archdeacon.
In the morning he gathered some purple fruit whose juice he knew from experience to be indelible, squeezed them into a bowl, and with a reed pen wrote as follows:
FANUA.
MY DEAR ARCHDEACON,—I am sorry to trouble you, but I must ask that the launch may be sent to fetch me away from Fanua. My ministry here has been a failure. I have converted no one, moreover I think that they are best as they are.
I am aware that I shall seem to you an unprofitable servant, and I am prepared for reproof. But I must tell you that i
n my present state of mind nothing that you can say, either of blame or consolation, is likely to make much difference.
I should be very much obliged if you could send with the launch a pair of stout black boots (size eleven), some collars (sixteen and a half inch), and a bottle of Aspirin tablets.—Yours sincerely,
TIMOTHY FORTUNE
P.S.—Also some bone collar-studs. There was an earthquake and I lost those which I had.
When the letter was written he put it away. His mind was quite made up as to leaving Fanua, there was no danger that a week’s delay or so in sending off the letter would weaken his resolution. Indeed if he had consulted his own feelings he would not have delayed for an hour. But he did not wish to leave Lueli until he was quite certain the boy was able to stand on his own feet.
One thing was beyond doubt: Lueli would not try to kill himself again. He had been frightened by the dark look of Death under the water. Though he said nothing about his drowning or his rescue it was obvious that he had set himself to get on good terms with the life he had then thought fit to abandon. Never before had he been so beautiful, nor moved so lithely, nor sprawled so luxuriously on the warm grass. Sleek, languid, and glittering, he was like a snake that has achieved its new skin. He was grown more sociable too, and with a quite new form of sociability; for instead of seeking the company of others he exerted himself to make others seek his. Although his drowning had done him no harm whatsoever and he had never been in better trim, he chose to preen himself as an interesting invalid. At all hours of the day the youth and beauty of the island would appear with offerings of fruit and invalid delicacies. Since the Fanuans are a people unequalled in kindness and idleness this was not such a great tribute to Lueli’s fascinations. But what was really remarkable was the success with which he imposed himself upon them as a young hero. Even Fuma, who had stood out against his pretensions for several days, laughing at him and pulling his hair and making sarcastic remarks about people who couldn’t swim, suddenly dropped her sisterly airs and attended on him as devoutly as the rest. As though this were the last plum that he had been proposing should drop into his mouth Lueli began to feel a little better now; was able to go sailing or swimming—not even the waters that drowned him could quench his love for water—or to take a stroll in the woods. Presently he was addressing Fuma as “Child.”
Mr. Fortune Page 13
