Foe (4 page)

'The
next day after our conversation, when Cruso returned from his
terraces, I was walking about in sandals. But if I expected thanks
for the labour I had saved him, I received none. "A little
patience and you would have had better shoes than that," he
said. This was very likely true, for the sandals were clumsily made.
Yet I could not let his words pass. "Patience has turned me into
a prisoner," I retorted. Whereupon Cruso wheeled about angrily
and picked up the skins from which I had cut my shoes and hurled them
with all his might over the fence.

'Seeing
that he was not to be mollified, I took myself off down the path to
the shore, and wandered there till I came to a place where the beach
was covered in seaweed that had been washed ashore, and lay rotting,
and where clouds of fleas, or sand-fleas, rose at every step. There I
paused, my temper cooling. He is bitter, I told myself, and why
should he not be? After years of unquestioned and solitary mastery,
he sees his realm invaded and has tasks set upon him by a woman. I
made a vow to· keep a tighter rein on my tongue. Worse fates
might have befallen me than to be abandoned on an island ruled over
by a countryman with the foresight to swim ashore with a knife at his
belt and a slave at his side. I might as easily have been cast away
alone on an island infested with lions and snakes, or on an island
where rain never fell, or else on the island home of some foreign
adventurer gone mad with solitude, naked, bestial, living on raw
flesh.

'So
I returned in a contrite spirit and went to Cruso and asked his
pardon for taking the skins, and gratefully accepted the food Friday
had set aside. When I lay down to sleep that night I seemed to feel
the earth sway beneath me. I told myself it was a memory of the
rocking of the ship coming back unbidden. But it was not so: it was
the rocking of the island itself as it floated on the sea. I thought:
It is a sign, a sign I am becoming an island-dweller. I am forgetting
what it is to live on the mainland. I stretched out my arms and laid
my palms on the earth, and, yes, the rocking persisted, the rocking
of the island as it sailed through the sea and the night bearing into
the future its freight of gulls and sparrows and fleas and apes and
castaways, all unconscious now, save me. I fell asleep smiling. I
believe it was the first time I smiled since I embarked for the New
World.

'They
say Britain is an island too, a great island. But that is a mere
geographer's notion. The earth under our feet is firm in Britain, as
it never was on Cruso's island.

'Now·that
I had shoes, I took to walking the shoreline every day, as far in
either direction as I could. I told myself I was keeping watch for a
sail. But too often my eyes would settle on the horizon in a kind of
fixity till, lulled by the beating of the wind and the roar of the
waves and the crunch of the sand under my feet, I would fall into a
waking slumber. I found a hollow in the rocks where I could lie
sheltered from the wind and gaze out to sea. In time I grew to think
of this as my private retreat, the one place reserved for me on an
island owned by another; though in truth the island no more belonged
to Cruso than to the King of Portugal or indeed to Friday or the
cannibals of Africa.

'There
is more, much more, I could tell you about the life we lived: how we
kept the fire smouldering day and night; how we made salt; how,
lacking soap, we cleaned ourselves with ash. Once I asked Cruso
whether he knew no way of fashioning a lamp or a candle so that we
should not have to retire when darkness fell, like brutes. Cruso
responded in the following words: "Which is easier: to learn to
see in the dark, or to kill a whale and seethe it down for the sake
of a candle?" There were many tart retorts I might have made;
but, remembering my vow, I held my tongue. The simple truth was,
Cruso would brook no change on his island.

'I
had been there about a month when one morning Cruso came home from
the terraces complaining he was unwell. Seeing he was shivering, I
put him to bed and covered him warmly. "It is the old fever that
came with me," he said. "There is no cure, it must run its
course."

'For
twelve days and nights I nursed him, sometimes holding him down when
fits of raving overtook him, when he sobbed or beat with his fists
and shouted · in Portuguese at figures he saw in the shadows.
One night, indeed, when for hours he had been moaning and shivering,
his hands and feet cold as ice, I lay down beside him, holding him in
my arms to warm him, fearing he would die otherwise. In my embrace he
at last fell asleep, and I slept too, though uneasily.

'All
this time Friday made no effort to help .me, but on the contrary
shunned the hut as though we two had the plague. At daybreak he would
set off with his fishing-spear; returning, he would put his catch
down beside the stove, gutted and scaled, and then retire to a far
corner of the garden, where he would sleep curled on his side like a
cat, or else play over and over again on his little reed flute a tune
of six notes, always the same. This tune, of which he seemed never to
tire, grew so to annoy me that one day I marched over and dashed the
flute from his hands and would have scolded him too, whether or not
he understood, had I not feared to wake Cruso. Friday sprang to his
feet, his eyes wide with surprise, for I had never lost patience with
him before, or indeed paid him much heed.

'Then
Cruso began to mend. The wild glitter in his eye abated, the lines of
his face softened, his bouts of raving ended, he slept peacefully.
His appetite came back. Soon he was walking from hut to garden
unaided, and giving Friday orders.

'I
greeted his return to health with gladness. In Brazil I had seen
younger men carried off by the fever; there had been a night and a
day, indeed, when I was sure Cruso was dying, and looked forward with
dismay to being left alone with Friday. It was the vigorous life he
lived, I believe, that saved Cruso -the vigorous life and the simple
diet, not any skill of mine.

'Shortly
hereafter we had a great storm, the wind howling and rain falling in
torrents. In one of the gusts part of the roof of the hut was tom off
and the fire we guarded so jealously drowned. We moved the bed to the
last dry corner; even there the floor soon turned to mud.

'I
had thought Friday would be terrified by the clamour of the elements
(I had never known such a storm, and pitied the poor mariners at
sea). But no, Friday sat under the eaves with his head on his knees
and slept like a baby.

'After
two nights and a day the rain abated and we came out to stretch our
limbs. We found the garden near washed away, and where the path had
led down the hillside a gully as deep as my waist had been cut by the
waters. The beach was covered in seaweed tossed up by the waves. Then
it began to rain again, and for a third night we retired to our
miserable shelter, hungry, cold, unable to make fire.

'That
night Cruso, who had seemed quite mended, complained of being hot,
and tossed off his clothes and lay panting. Then he began to rave and
throw himself from side to side as if unable to breathe, till I
thought the bed would break. I gripped him by the shoulders and tried
to soothe him, but he beat me away. Great tremors ran through him; he
grew stiff as a board and began to bellow about
Masa
or
Massa
,
a word with no meaning I can discover. Woken by the din, Friday took
out his flute and began to play his damnable tune, till what with the
rain and the wind and Cruso's shouting and Friday's music, I could
have believed myself in a madhouse. But I continued to hold Cruso and
soothe him, and at last he grew still, and Friday ceased his noise,
and even the rain grew softer. I stretched myself out against Cruso
to warm his body with mine; in time the trembling gave out and both
he and I slept.

'I
came to myself in daylight, in an unfamiliar silence, the storm
having at last blown itself out. A hand was exploring my body. So
befuddled was I that I thought myself still aboard the ship, in the
Portuguese captain's bed. But then I turned and saw Cruso's wild hair
and the great beard he never cut and his yellow eyes, and I knew it
was all true, I was indeed cast away on an island with a man named
Cruso, who though an Englishman was as strange to me as a Laplander.
I pushed his hand away and made to rise, but he held me. No doubt I
might have freed myself, for I was stronger than he. But I thought,
He has not known a woman for fifteen years, why should he not have
his desire? So I resisted no more but let him do as he wished. When I
left the hut Friday was nowhere in sight, for which I was glad. I
walked some distance, then sat down to collect myself. Around·
me in the bushes settled a flock of sparrows, cocking their heads
curiously, quite unafraid, having known no harm from man since the
beginning of time. Was I to regret what had passed between Cruso and
me? Would it have been better had we continued to live as brother and
sister, or host and guest, or master and servant, or whatever it was
we had been? Chance had cast me on his island, chance had thrown me
in his arms. In a world of chance, is there a better and a worse? We
yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the
blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we
awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks
of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and
inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through
which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right
do we close our ears to them? The questions echoed in my head without
answer.

'I
was walking one day at the north end of the island, on the Bluff,
when I spied Friday below me bearing on his shoulder a log or beam
nearly as long as himself. While I watched, he crossed the shelf of
rock that stretched out from the cliff-face, launched his log upon
the water -which was deep at that place -and straddled it.

'I
had often observed Friday at his fishing, which he did standing on
the rocks, waiting till a fish swam below him and then darting his
spear at it with great dexterity. How he could spear fish belly-down
upon his clumsy vessel was not plain to me.

'But
Friday was not fishing. After paddling out some hundred yards from
the shelf into the thickest of the seaweed, he reached into a bag
that hung about his neck and brought out handfuls of white flakes
which he began to scatter over the water. At first I thought this was
bait to lure the fish to him; but no,. when he had strewn all his
flakes he turned his log boat about and steered it back to the ledge,
where he landed it with great difficulty through the swell.

'Curious
to find what he had been casting on the waves, I waited that evening
till he had gone to fill the water-bowls. Then I searched under his
mat and discovered a little bag with a drawstring, and turning it out
found some few white petals and buds from the brambles that were at
the time flowering on parts of the island. So I concluded he had been
making an offering to the god of the waves to cause the fish to run
plentifully, or performing some other such superstitious observance.

'The
sea continuing calm the next day, I crossed the rocks below the Bluff
as Friday had done till I stood at the edge of the shelf. The water
was cold and dark; when I thought of committing myself to those
depths and swimming out, whether on a log or not, among the circling
arms of the seaweed, where no doubt cuttlefish hung in stealth
waiting for prey to swim into their grasp, I shivered. Of Friday's
petals not a trace was left.

'Hitherto
I had given to Friday's life as little thought as I would have a
dog's or any other dumb beast's -less, indeed, for I had a horror of
his mutilated state which made me shut him from my mind, and flinch
away when he came near me. This casting of petals was the first sign
I had that a spirit or soul call it what you will -stirred beneath
that dull and unpleasing exterior.

'"Where
did the ship go down on which you and Friday sailed?" I asked
Cruso.

'He
indicated a part of the coast I had never visited.

"'If
we could dive to the wreck, even now," I said, "we might
save from it tools of the greatest utility. A saw, for instance, or
an axe, both of which we lack. Timbers too we might loosen and bring
back. Is there no way to explore the wreck? Might Friday not swim out
to it, or float out on a log, and then dive down, with a rope tied
about his middle for safety?"

'"The
ship lies on the bed of the ocean, broken by the waves and covered in
sand," Cruso replied. "What has survived the salt and
seaworm will not be worth the saving. We have a roof over our heads,
made without saw or axe. We sleep, we eat, we live. We have no need
of tools."

'He
spoke as if tools were heathenish inventions. Yet I knew if I
had swum ashore with a saw tied to my ankle he would have taken
it and used it most happily. 'Let me tell you of Cruso's terraces.
'The terraces covered much of the hillside at the eastern end of
the island, where they were best sheltered from the wind. There were
twelve levels of terracing at the time I arrived, each some twenty
paces deep and banked with stone walls a yard thick and at their
highest as high as a man's head. Within each terrace the ground was
levelled and cleared; the stones that made up the walls had been dug
out of the earth or borne from elsewhere one by one. I asked Cruso
how many stones had gone into the walls. A hundred thousand or more,
he replied. A mighty labour, I remarked. But privately I thought: Is
bare earth, baked by the sun and walled about, to be preferred to
pebbles and bushes and swarms of birds? "Is it your plan to
clear the whole island of growth, and turn it into terraces?" I
asked. "It would be the work of many men and many lifetimes to
clear the whole island," he replied; by which I saw he chose to
understand only the letter of my question. "And what will you be
planting, when you plant?" I asked. "The planting is not
for us," said he. "We have nothing to plant-that is our
misfortune." And he looked at me with such sorry dignity, I
could have bit my tongue. "The planting is reserved for those
who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear
the ground for them. Clearing ground and piling stones is little
enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness." And then,
with great earnestness, he went on: "I ask you to remember, not
every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway at heart."