Mr. Fortune (6 page)

Beyond a few romantic fancies about bathing by moonlight and a great many good resolutions to keep regular hours, Mr. Fortune had scarcely propounded to himself how he would be suited by the life of the only white man on the island of Fanua. In the stress of preparation there had been no incitement to picture himself at leisure. It seemed that between converting the islanders and dissolving soup-squares he would scarcely have an unoccupied minute. Now he found himself in possession of a great many—hours, whole days sometimes, without any particular obligation, stretching out around him waste and tranquil as the outstretched blue sky and spark-ling waves.

Leisure can be a lonely thing; and the sense of loneliness is terrifically enhanced by unfamiliar surroundings. Some men in Mr. Fortune's position might have been driven mad; and their madness would have been all the more deep and irrevocable because the conditions that nursed it were so paradisal. A delightful climate; a fruitful soil; scenery of extreme and fairy-tale beauty; agreeable meals to be had at the minimum of trouble; no venomous reptiles and even the mosquitoes not really troublesome; friendly natives and the most romantic lotus—these, and the prospect of always these, would have mocked them into a melancholy frenzy.

But Mr. Fortune happened to be peculiarly well fitted to live on the island of Fanua. Till now there had been no leisure in his life, there had only been holidays; and without being aware of it, in body and soul he was all clenched up with fatigue, so that it was an intuitive ecstasy to relax. He could not have put a name to the strange new pleasure which was come into his existence. He supposed it was something in the air.

As it was with leisure, so it was with luxuriance. Most Englishmen who visit the South Sea Islands are in the depths of their hearts a little shocked at the vegetation. Such fecundity, such a largesse and explosion of life—trees waving with ferns, dripping with creepers, and as it were flaunting their vicious and exquisite parasites; fruits like an emperor's baubles, flowers triumphantly gaudy or tricked out with the most sophisticated improbabilities of form and patterning: all this profusion unbridled and untoiled for and running to waste disturbs them. They look on it as on some conflagration, and feel that they ought to turn the hose on it. Mr. Fortune was untroubled by any such thoughts, because he was humble. The reckless expenditure of God's glory did not strike him as reckless, and his admiration of the bonfire was never overcast by a feeling that he ought to do something about it. Indeed, the man who ten years ago had been putting down in Mr. Beaumont's pass-book: Orchid Growers, Ltd., £72, 15s. od., had presently ceased to pay any special attention to the vegetables of Fanua, and was walking about among them as though they were the most natural thing in the world; which, if one comes to reflect on it, in that part of the world they were.

But though he came to disregard the island vegetation he never ceased to be attentive to the heavens. To have time to watch a cloud was perhaps the thing he was most grateful for among all his leisurely joys. About a mile or so from the hut was a small grassy promontory, and here he would lie for hours on end, observing the skies. Sometimes he chose out one particular cloud and followed it through all its changes, watching how almost imperceptibly it amassed and reared up its great rounded cauliflower curves, and how when it seemed most proud and sculptural it began to dissolve and pour itself into new moulds, changing and changing, so that he scarcely had time to grasp one transformation before another followed it. On some days the clouds scarcely moved at all, but remained poised like vast swans floating asleep with their heads tucked under their wings. They rested on the air, and when they brightened, or changed their white plumage to the shadowy pallor of swans at dusk, it was because of the sun's slow movement, not their own. But those days came seldom, for as a rule the sea wind blew, buoying them onward.

Lying on his stomach Mr. Fortune would watch a cloud come up from the horizon, and as it approached he would feel almost afraid at the silent oncoming of this enormous and towering being, an advance silent as the advance of its vast shadow on the sea. The shadow touched him, it had set foot on the island. And turning on his back he looked up into the cloud, and glancing inland saw how the shadow was already climbing the mountain side.

Though they were silent he imagined then a voice, an enormous soft murmur, sinking and swelling as they tumbled and dissolved and amassed. And when he went home he noted in his diary the direction of the wind and any peculiarities of weather that he had noticed. At these times he often wished, and deeply, that he had a barometer: but he had never been able to afford himself one, and naturally the people of the Mission had thought of a teapot.

On the first really wet day however, he rushed out with joy and contrived a rain-gauge. And having settled this in and buttered its paws, he went for a long rejoicing walk, a walk full of the most complicated animal ecstasy, or perhaps vegetable would be the truer word; for all round him he heard the noise of the woods guzzling rain, and he felt a violent sympathy with all the greenery that seemed to be wearing the deepened colour of intense gratification, and with the rich earth trodden by the rain and sending up a steam of mist as though in acknowledgment. And all the time as he trudged along he was pretending to himself how hardy he was to be out in such disagreeable weather, and looking forward to how nice it would be to get back to the hut and change into dry clothes and boil a kettle for tea.

He was behaving as though he had never been out in the rain before. It had rained quite often in St. Fabien, indeed there were times when it seemed never to do anything else. But rain there had been a very different matter, veiling the melancholy quayside, clanking on the roofs of the rabble of tin church premises, and churning the soft grit of the roads into mud. It had rained in St. Fabien and he had constantly been out in it, but with no more ecstasy than he had known when it rained in Hornsey. No doubt the ownership of a rain-gauge accounted for much; but there was more to it than that—a secret core of delight, a sense of truancy, of freedom, because now for the first time in his life he was walking in the rain entirely of his own accord, and not because it was his duty, or what public opinion conceived to be so.

Public opinion was waiting for him in the hut when he got back. While he was still shaking himself like a dog in the verandah, Lueli appeared in the doorway, looking very dry and demure, and began to pet and expostulate in the same breath.

“How very wet! How very silly! Come in at once! Why do you go out when it rains?”

“It is healthy to go for a walk in the rain,” replied Mr. Fortune, trampling firmly on public opinion.

“It would be better to stay under a roof and sleep.”

“Not at all. In England it rains for days at a time, but every one goes out just the same. We should think it very effeminate to stop indoors and sleep.”

“I haven't been asleep the whole time,” Lueli remarked in a defensive voice. “That new pot of yours—I've been out to fetch it in case it got spoilt.”

While he was drinking his tea (Lueli drank tea also, because his affection and pride made him in everything a copy-cat, but he sipped it with a dubious and wary expression), Mr. Fortune found himself thinking of England. He thought about his father, a sanguine man who suddenly upped and shot himself through the head; and thence his thoughts jumped to a Whitsuntide bank holiday which he had spent in a field near Ruislip. The sky was a pale milky blue, the field was edged with some dowdy elms and beyond them was a view of distant gasworks. At two o'clock he had eaten his lunch—a cold pork chop; and clear as ever he could recall the exquisite unmeaning felicity of that moment.

How little pleasure his youth had known, that this outing should remain with him like an engraved gem! And now he scarcely knew himself for happiness. The former things were passed away: the bank with its façade trimmed with slabs of rusticated stone—a sort of mural tripe; his bed-sitting-room at “Marmion,” 239 Lyttleton Road, N.E., so encumbered and subfusc; and the horrible disappointment of St. Fabien. There had passed the worst days of his life; for he had expected something of them, he had gone there with an intention of happiness and doing good. But though he had tried his best he had not been able to love the converts, they were degenerate, sickly, and servile; and in his discouragement he had thought to himself: “It's a good thing I know about book-keeping, for I shall never be fit to do anything better.” And now he was at Fanua, and at his side squatted Lueli, carving a pattern on the rain-gauge.

The next day it rained again, and he went for another walk, a walk not so ecstatic as the former, but quite as wet and no doubt quite as healthy. Hollow peals of thunder rumbled through the cold glades, the chilling South wind blew and the coco-nuts fell thumping from the trees. He walked to his promontory and stood for some time watching the clouds—which were to-day rounded, dark, and voluminous, a presentation to the eye of what the thunder was to the ear—and the waves. He felt no love for the sea, but he respected it. That evening the rain-gauge recorded 1.24.

The project of bathing by moonlight never came to much, for somehow when the time came he was always too sleepy to be bothered; but he was extremely successful in keeping regular hours, for all that so many of them were hours of idleness. Morning prayers, of course, began the day, and after prayers came breakfast. A good breakfast is the foundation of a good day. Mr. Fortune supposed that a great deal of the islanders' lack of steadfastness might be attributed to their ignorance of this maxim. Lueli, for instance, was perfectly content to have no breakfast at all, or satisfied himself with a flibberty-gibberty meal of fruit eaten off the bushes. Mr. Fortune made tea, softened and sweetened at once by coco-milk, and on Sundays coffee. With this he had three boiled eggs. The eggs were those of the wild pigeon, eggs so small that three were really a quite moderate allowance. Unfortunately there was no certainty of them being new-laid, and very often they were not. So it was a notable day when it occurred to him that a native dish of bread-fruit sopped into a paste was sufficiently stodgy and sticky to be perfectly well eaten in lieu of porridge.

After breakfast and a pipe shared with Lueli—he did not really approve of boys of Lueli's years smoking, but he knew that pipe-sharing was such an established Polynesian civility that Lueli's feelings would be seriously wounded if he didn't fall in with the custom—the hut was tidied, the mats shaken in the sun, and the breakfast things put away. Then came instruction in befitting branches of Christian lore; then, because the pupil was at hand and it was well to make sure of him while he had him. For all that there were a good many holidays given and taken. With such an admirable pupil he could afford himself the pleasures of approbation.

Since the teaching had to be entirely conversational, Lueli learnt much that was various and seemingly irrelevant. Strange alleys branched off from the subject in hand, references and similes that strayed into the teacher's discourse as the most natural things in the world had to be explained and enlarged upon. In the middle of an account of Christ's entry into Jerusalem Mr. Fortune would find himself obliged to break off and describe a donkey. This would lead naturally to the sands of Weston-super-Mare, and a short account of bathing-machines; and that afternoon he would take his pupil down to the beach and show him how English children turned sand out of buckets, and built castles with a moat round them. Moats might lead to the Feudal System and the Wars of the Barons. Fighting Lueli understood very well, but other aspects of civilisation needed a great deal of explaining; and Mr. Fortune nearly gave himself heat apoplexy by demonstrating in the course of one morning the technique of urging a golf ball out of a bunker and how English housewives crawl about on their hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum.

After dismissing Lueli from his lessons Mr. Fortune generally strolled down to the village to enlarge the work of conversion. By now he had given up general preaching and exhortation—not that he thought it a bad way to go to work, on the contrary, he knew that it had been sanctioned by the best Apostolic usage; but preaching demands the concurrence of an audience, even though it be one of fishes or pigs; and since he was no longer a novelty the islanders had become as slippery as the one, as artful and determined in dodging away as the other. He practised instead the Socratic method of pouncing upon any solitary and defenceless person who happened to pass by. And like Socrates he would lead them aside into the shade and ask them questions.

Many charming conversations took place. But nothing ever came of them, and the fields so white for the harvest continued to ripple and rustle in the sun, eluding all his efforts to reap and bind them into sheaves and carry them into God's barn in time for the harvest-home.

He had now been on the island for nearly six months, and every day he knew himself to have less attractive power. How he wished that he had thought of bringing some fireworks with him! Two or three rockets touched off, a green Bengal light or a Catherine wheel, he would have been sure of a congregation then. And there is no religious reason why fireworks should not be used as a means to conversion. Did not God allure the fainting Israelites by letting Himself off as a pillar of fire by night? He thought, though, that had he fireworks at his command he would draw the line at that variety which is known as British Cannon. They are very effective, but they are dangerous; and he did not wish to frighten his flock.

From midday till about two or three in the afternoon there was no possibility of converting anybody, for the islanders one and all went firmly to sleep. This was the time when Mr. Fortune went for his daily walk. After so much endeavour he would have been quite pleased to take a nap himself; but he knew the value of regular exercise, and by taking it at this time of day he was safe from molestation by the bevies. He usually ate a good deal of fruit on these walks, because he had not yet accustomed himself to such a long stretch between breakfast and dinner. Indeed for some time after his arrival on the island he felt rather underfed. Dinner consisted of more bread-fruit, messes prepared by Lueli, fish sometimes, roots flavoured with sea-water. Lueli preferred his fish raw. Sometimes Mr. Fortune made soup or opened a tin of sardines.