THE ISLAND

OR

AN ADVENTURE OF A PERSON OF QUALITY

BY

RICHARD WHITEING

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16^th STREET
1888

All rights reserved

PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

CONTENTS.

THE ISLAND.

CHAPTER I.
OUT OF FOCUS.

Lat. 25° 4′ S.; long. 130° 8′ W.: August 18.

Rest, peace, the sounds of a summer noon, and the murmur of waves. The calm of a peak in the Pacific thirteen thousand miles away from the dome of St. Paul’s, and completely out of sight of it, if only by reason of the curvature.

I hardly know how I came here. When last I took stock of myself, I was standing on the steps of the Royal Exchange, on another summer afternoon, and looking down. I was busy as usual. I am playing with my little pocket agenda now (perhaps the last I shall ever buy) as I lie here on the broad of my back, and I turn to the entry for that day: ‘8, Gallop, Row; 9.30, letters, coffee; 10.30, article for “Quarterly”; 12.30, City (I wanted Staples to put something on Turks, and thought I had better be on the spot); 1.30, lunch; 2.30 to bedtime, horse sale, chrysanthemums, calls, club, early dinner, address Working Men’s Constitutional Association—“Social Harmonies,” dance at Mrs. G.’s, club again, Daudet, bed.’

A mosaic like this is all very well, but a trifle throws it out. When I had done with Staples, I had no further business at the Royal Exchange. I had certainly nothing to do on the steps; yet I lingered there. It was only for ten minutes, but it spoiled my day, and perhaps changed my destiny.

It was such a sight—civilisation in a nutshell—that was what made me pause. I was a part of it, and Apollo was taking a peep at his own legs. Why not? we all seemed to be going on so beautifully; we were all busy, all doing something for progress. What a scene! The Exchange I had just left, with its groups of millionaires gossiping Bagdad and the Irawaddy, Chicago and the Cape; dividend day over at the Bank yonder, and the well known sight of the Blessed going to take their quarterly reward; a sheriff’s coach turning the angle of the Mansion House (breakfast to an African pro-consul, I believe), a vanishing splendour of satin and plush and gold; dandy clerks making for Birch’s, with the sure and certain hope of a partnership in their easy grace; shabby clerks making for the bun shops; spry brokers going to take the odds against Egyptians, and with an appropriate horsiness of air; a parson (two hundred and fortieth annual thanksgiving sermon at St. Hilda’s to commemorate Testator’s encounter with Barbary pirates, and providential escape); itinerant salesmen of studs, pocket combs, and universal watch keys; flower girls at the foot of the statue, a patch of colour; beggar at the foot of the steps, another patch, the red shirt beautifully toned down in wear—Perfect! We want more of this in London—giant policeman moving him on; irruption of noisy crowd from the Cornhill corner (East-End marching West to demonstrate for the right to a day’s toil for a day’s crust); thieves, and bludgeon men, and stone men in attendance on demonstration; detectives in attendance on thieves; shutters up at the jewellers’ as they pass; probable average of 7s. 6d. to the hundred pockets; with a wall only to divide them from all the turtle of the Mansion House, or all the bullion of the Bank! And, for background, the nondescript thousands in black and brown and russet and every neutral hue, with the sun over all, and between the sun and the thousands the London mist.

It was something as a picture, but so much more as a thought. What a wonder of parts and whole! What a bit of machinery! The beggars, and occasionally the stock jobbers and the nondescripts to go wrong; the policeman to take them up; the parson to show the way of repentance; and the sheriff to hang them, if need be, when all was done. With this, the dandies to adorn the scene—myself not altogether unornamental—the merchants, the clerks, and the dividend takers, all but cog and fly and crank of the same general scheme. What a bit of machinery!

But suddenly the sunlight faded, and there was a change in me. It was not a change of cause and effect, but only a coincidence. I fancied I saw the man in red furtively writhing in his shirt with the beggar’s itch, scratching himself, so to speak, against his own clothes. At any rate, something threw the apparatus out of gear. They seemed all scratching themselves on the sly. The whole thing looked as well as ever; but how did it work? I saw the clerks home, the shabbies to Stockton lodgings of unstained brick, where infants down with the measles called for drink in the night, and querulous wives compounded that claim for romance with which every woman born of woman comes into the world for the not too solid certainty of bread and butter, at thirty shillings a week all told. I saw the brokers making for their haven of Bayswater stucco to receive the reports of Jane’s progress in Elementary Physics, Master Harry’s broken window, the afternoon call of the Bristow family to bring news that of late Mr. Bristow has not been feeling quite so well—receiving these things, I say, and wanting to stamp and shout, or do something to give a pulse to life. I saw the sheriff’s coach, methought, with Care in it. There had been another troublesome meeting in Hyde Park; London was going to be governed for Londoners; and to-night’s snug Company Dinner, with its guzzling treasurers, masters, wardens, upper wardens, renter-wardens, past masters, chaplains, and the whole batch might be one of the last of the disgusting series. The very policeman had his anxieties; would civic reform bring him down to the wage level of the Metropolitan force? A soldier who had strayed into the prospect seemed to think it was odd to have to guard the Bank on sevenpence a day. They were all scratching themselves; and when an entire civilisation begins to do that, it is a serious thing.

It was a serious thing for me. For the life of me I could not get them into focus again for my grand pictorial composition of a community all playing the game of life for mutual diversion. Theirs was rather that infernal game of bowls in the Fourth Circle, where the tormented wretches will roll the balls in one another’s faces, when a more sensible direction would give them delightful sport. I drove home, telegraphed an excuse to the Constitutional Association, and, I am ashamed to say, went to bed.

I was no better next morning. Human society was still out of focus. I describe the complaint with some minuteness, because I believe it is quite a new case for the books, and I may go down to posterity, with my name tacked to this disease, like a second Bright. The anguish is insufferable: it is a sort of intense vertigo, with a very disagreeable accompaniment of sickness in the region of the heart, that robs life of all joy. The men and women about you, instead of having any relation to one another of love, friendship, trust, sympathy, and use, become a mass of gyrating atoms, with nothing but repulsions for their principle of movement. At times you do not know your own brother for such. They form no whole; they will not compose; say, rather, they are out of focus, I come back to that. How to get them in?

I consulted a friend of a most practical order of mind, and, while frankly confessing his ignorance of the complaint, he thought, from my persistent mention of the word focus, that distance might be the remedy. ‘You were too near,’ he said, ‘get further off. Go down to Richmond, and dine.’ I thought there might be something in that, and I took his advice. Still it would not come right. So I started for Paris by the night mail.

CHAPTER II.
FURTHER AFIELD.

London was now quite out of the question: Paris compelled me to be so busy with itself. I had not seen it for years, and had never gone below the surface. The tomb of Napoleon, and the view from the Arch (see Guide) were about the measure of my experience. This time I found a guide of another kind, and he gave me a glimpse of the real show.

He put me down at the Flute, a delightful club, where they try to amuse themselves all the year round. When they are not fiddling, at select evening concerts, they are showing their pictures; and when they are not showing their pictures, they are holding an assault-at-arms—the Flute is a great school of fence—or reviewing the year in a fancy piece, written, mounted, and played by their own men, in their own theatre. My Mentor gave me a month—as he facetiously put it—at another club, the choicest thing there. Through an acquaintance at the Jockey, I found a box-seat on a coach for the private race meeting at La Marche—very pretty, very select; no coming in your thousands, as at the Grand Prix, but just a snug thing between you and me, and a few others, of entirely the right sort. The women looked sweet and fresh as a bed of primroses; the course was like a tennis lawn; we lunched al fresco, and no one threw bones on the grass. Far, far away the yell of the bookmaker, and the smell of town. I never enjoyed anything more.

I was presented all round, and was engaged for a reception that night, at the house of one of the chaperones.

‘You will see the best salon in Paris,’ said A.

‘And what is a salon?’

‘Well, I don’t know; they say nobody knows but themselves. Perhaps a crowd of clever people trying to kill the worm of ennui. Nothing like that at home, where the beast is as sacred as the cow at Benares.’

It was grand monde tinctured with literature—that was the social blend. We went to a delightfully old-fashioned house, one of the few left, and saluted a delightfully old-fashioned person—a Marquise, I believe, to complete the harmony of association—who looked like an original of some Moreau le Jeune. Her hair was silver—perfect Louis XV., without the powder puff; she had quick piercing eyes, black amid all this whiteness, and there was a suspicion of hoop in her skirts. She was the queen of a little court, and very condescending. The courtiers acted up to their part by elegant flatteries. They told little stories at her to exemplify her wit and spirit, and capped quotations from her last book, in stage asides. The book was just out, and we had learned it by heart that morning, as the inevitable topic of the small hours. It was a dainty article de Paris; all her ripe experiences of life distilled in maxim, after the manner of M. de la Rochefoucauld. Every other maxim was about love; they are sometimes too young, but never too old for that vital theme. There was a certain disinterested grandeur in the attitude of the Marquise. ‘I too have played the grand game,’ she seemed to say, ‘and now I umpire the match.’

‘“One of the consolations of old age for a woman,” said a quoting courtier to his neighbours, “is to dare follow her inclinations without peril of love, and show herself a devoted friend, without encouraging dangerous hopes.” Is it possible to speak with more finesse?’

‘I overheard you,’ said the Marquise gaily, ‘but you weaken the compliment by talking so loud. I am not old enough to be deaf.’

‘For my part,’ said the other, ‘I want to know how the Marquise found you all out so well, vous autres. Listen to this: “Habit has as much power over the nature of men as the unknown over the mind of women.” That is my pearl from the chaplet. It is so true.’

‘And so finely said!’

‘Ah, all you care about is the workmanship,’ said our hostess. ‘But I tell you, I have lived all that.’

A General came by, with a charming woman on his arm. He was, in some sort, a counterpart of the elderly muse—silvery hair, a raven brow, and sparkling eyes.

‘The butcher of the Commune,’ whispered A. to me. ‘His column made the fewest prisoners.’

‘They are beginning to be troublesome again, General,’ I heard the lady say. ‘That dreadful meeting yesterday! Did you see the account?’

‘We are ready for them, Madame; and with the old argument, mitraille; I assure you they only pretend to like it: it hurts.’

There was a story about everybody—not always a good one; but their worst stories were told in their best way. With us, there is so much ingenuity of subterfuge in the other direction. We might do as well, if we dared. They dare, because the women insist on it, and the sovereign obligation is to keep the women amused—the best women, and best is brightest here. It is a great assault of arms for the gallery, and, if you have a good place, it is pleasanter to be in the gallery than in the ring. The exertion is terrible; some of the most noted performers, I believe, lie abed all next day. You have to justify by gifts, as well as by graces; and the gifts are not always there. Beautiful statues are left on their pedestals: the word tells.

Still, I don’t think they make the best of their women. There is, perhaps, a finer use. They try to make the most of them, certainly. The women shape the whole civilisation, and they are just now labouring with much energy at the decline and fall. I have always wondered why they do not include a representation of this commanding interest in the government—Le Ministère de la Femme. It would soon rule the whole cabinet, for the incumbent would be sure to know the business of most of the other departments—War, Commerce, Interior, Foreign Affairs.

It is too good for every day—life on the top of a twelfth cake, and some of the figures no more to be visited by sun and rain and the winds of Heaven than if they were cast in sugar. I heard one of them taking the law from another, on the authority of a gazette of fashion, as to the right way of getting up on a winter’s morning. There are two ways, it seems. ‘An hour before you turn out, ma chère, the maid is to light your fire, and put up the screen. Silver lined with pink silk is pretty; it throws a sort of rosy morning light into the room. Mind you have your chocolate on a warmer! And do you know how to warm your toast-rack? A little live charcoal sprinkled with vanilla; it makes the air so sweet. Raoul gave me such a love of a toast-rack (un amour) the other day. They are making them in gold now. Don’t jump up at once, mind—snooze. What do you wear for a déshabillé? I like satin lined with swansdown, and velvet fastenings; buttons are so horribly cold. Line your slippers with swansdown, too; I hate a cold slipper. B-r-r-r! Madame d’Argenson warms her bath-room with little gusts of rose vapour, pumped through a hole in the wall; it is an idea. Do you know how to get warm? Never get cold. Floss silk for your stockings, if you please. I won’t even see cold. I have my blinds embroidered with a rising sun, and the maid brings in fresh flowers with the chocolate. It makes summer in the room. Excusez du peu. Then, if you want to know how happy you are, just lift the blind, and peep out, and see the people dancing on the pavement to keep themselves warm. But you’ll see enough of that when you drive, if you like to look at such things. I don’t. They are making little things in enamel, for muff warmers, now; tiny apples filled with hot water—not big ones, or you’ll spoil the shape of your hands. Besides, big ones would make your fingers red; you only want to make them rosy, pas trop n’en faut.

‘What kind of gloves do you sleep in? I prefer a plush lining to the kid. Some say swansdown. I think it’s too warm. Remember there is the coverlet. Stick to plush, you can’t do better, from head to foot. I have seen the nightcap fastened with a little cosy turtle-dove, just under the left ear—if you lie on that side. And make her bring you a light crême de Sabaillon when you turn in. You know, two fresh eggs, and a small glass of Madeira. B-r-r-r! how I hate the cold.’

A padded person of the sterner sex, who was one of the council, propounded a still more original scheme. ‘Chère Comtesse, why all these precautions, when you might so easily get out of the way? I travel in search of perpetual summer, and find it. My man begins to move south, as soon as the cold threatens here, and the moment he finds settled sunshine, he telegraphs me to come on. I never go till Nature is ready, and, when I reach one place, he starts for another, so I always have sunshine in reserve. We keep steadily flying south till the turn of the weather, and then we make north again for the Paris May. I was only caught twice by rain last year, and once by sleet, and then I threatened to discharge him if it happened again. Chère Comtesse, life is too precious: do not waste it in these trials. Will you have a cup of tea?’

‘He is very wretched, for all his make-believe,’ said Mentor, ‘he is going to marry; and he is in a torment of prospective jealousy. It is the funniest case in the world. The young person is faultless; all our young persons are, you know. He pays the proper visits, always in evening-dress—it is our way—and talks to her about the picture-gallery of the Louvre, and the Advent sermons, for just three-quarters of an hour by the clock, with her mother on guard all the time. This is courtship. When she marries, she will acquire the privilege of watching others in the same way, and of being herself unwatched; and there the retribution comes in. He is not in the least jealous now; he only knows he is going to be. There are complications, you see. He is not only about to marry the young person, he is very fond of her, which is perhaps inexcusable at his time of life. In the days of his age he remembers his youth, and—il n’a pas confiance. He is meditating some domestic ukase about visitors, and positively wants to include his mother-in-law in the family circle. “The duenna, or the cheap defence of households,” is, I believe, the idea. All this, of course, implies no suspicion of the lady, but only a most horrible retrospective suspicion of himself. “Do to others as you would not be done by,” has been the rule of his joyous life; and—il n’a pas confiance. We used to call him “Proverbs.” His choicest conversational effect was a detestable little saying about the folly of acquiring the material of happiness for yourself, when you might always command the stores of your friends. He never quotes his proverb now. I would rewrite the story of Don Juan from his case, with this torment for the Nemesis. Let Juan marry and settle on this prospect of eternal anguish, and leave old raw-head the Commandant, and his horse, for the nursery tales.’

To a lazy man like myself there is but one drawback in this city; you are rather expected to make love to your neighbour’s wife. The nuisance is even greater than in London. They are not exactly rude to you, if you don’t, but they mark their sense of your behaviour in a thousand delicate ways. It is considered disrespectful to the lady of the house.

We went to the Opera, and, of course, he led me behind the scenes. It is certainly magnificent. The most self-indulgent monarchs have never enjoyed half so much luxury as these essentially combining people get on the joint-stock principle. They are true democrats, and, as their institutions develop, the poorest will have his parc aux cerfs. There is no selfishness in the foyer de la danse; all the subscribers are brothers, all equal, all free, as in a temple of faith. Ces dames make no distinctions of persons. It was touching to see Army, Navy, Commerce, Senate, and Bar—Bench, I believe, as well—paying homage at these gauze-curtained shrines. Radical and Conservative leaders, wealthy Jews, the epigrammatic General I had just met, sparks from the club, and some hideous heads of age that ought to have been under nightcaps, were all at their devotions, visiting one shrine after another, sometimes with offerings. Mesdames were occasionally wayward and severe, but I am loath to believe that they are cruel divinities, and I am confirmed in this by those who know them best. It was a brilliant scene, the green room itself a blaze of decoration, in ceiling, chandeliers and walls; portraits of great dancers and composers on the panels; grand pictorial compositions above, the War dance, the Country dance, the Love dance, the Bacchic dance; below, a curious patchwork of black coat and white skirt, with here and there a sylph pirouetting for practice, on a floor that slopes like the stage—a fleece cloud driven by the wind—or holding on for support to an iron bar cased with velvet, and pointing, with satin-shod toe, to another and a brighter world. Here, as I have said, Valour reposes after the toils of war, and Legislation after the fatigues of debate. Art sketching in the corner is represented by that solitary, who has a passion for problems, and who is haunted by the desire to transfer this poetry of motion to canvas, and to make the work tremble with life as you gaze. Great soul and genius, the only single-minded one in all this throng—hail!

We looked in at another club on the way home, a mere tripot this, but gorgeous like all the rest, and throwing blazing beams across the boulevard from its many chandeliers. Here their industry is baccarat, and the net profits of many a mine and factory, transmitted by inheritance to youths of spirit who want to see the world, pass from hand to hand across the baize. Sailors reef the topsail in storms, coal miners lie on backs or bellies in the dark, girls ripen to premature womanhood in the tropic heat of factories, to feed this sport. I lost a few coins, supped, and came away. One of the players was pointed out to me as the inventor of a new diversion, the Snail Race. The race-course is a smooth board, with a lighted candle at the end, laid on the table in a darkened room. The snails naturally creep towards the light. There are miniature hurdles, and a water-jump, and the handicapping is done with pellets of clay. You may lose quite enough at this to make it exciting, by maintaining a due disproportion between the amount of the wager and the value of the snail. It is played between five and six, just before dressing for dinner, and it fills in an hour that many find heavy on their hands.

Next day it was a drive in the Bois to salute one’s friends. I had already quite a list of them. Surely this people have the secret, I thought, as we span along through alleys of tender green, with sunlight dancing in the leaves, blue and white in the bordering villas, and the purple slopes of Valérien to close in the scene. We skipped the Lake, according to directions, and looked out for faces under the acacia trees. They were all there. I was so delighted with it that I could not go indoors; so we pushed on, by the Cours la Reine, and the river, to see more.

They have the philosophic taste for angling; the banks were lined, yet the waters lost nothing by their sport. It was live and let live, with man and fish. We had left the black coats behind us; they were blouses now; and everywhere the white and blue and green, the brightness, and the leisured groups. A worthy pair of retired rentiers, male and female, seemed to have devoted the whole afternoon to washing their poodle in the Seine. Monsieur lathered him, and drove him into the water for the rinsing with innocent oaths and ejaculations, ‘cré nom! bigre! saperlipopette!’ or whistled him back with a properly certificated dog-call, when he seemed to be going out of his depth. Madame stood by with towel, comb, and brush. For this they had kept the little grocer’s shop at the corner of the Rue St. Jacques de la Boucherie for seven-and-twenty years, and toiled late and early, Sabbath and fête, and put savings in the Paris Loans! ‘And why not?’ I ask, with ever increasing emphasis, while anyone shall say, ‘And why?’ All classes seem so happy, I thought, so innocently gay—it is the stock reflection of the tourist in the Paris streets.

I was standing on the bridge; and just then there was a rush past me of the avant-garde of a crowd, followed by the main body. They were fierce-looking and sorrowful. Those who were not in blouses wore grease-polished coats and hats—always a bad sign—and the few who were not frowning had the grease in their smile, always a worse. There was a woman at the head of them, in black, and carrying a black flag, an angular creature, as lantern-jawed as a saint from a missal, with eyes like live coals.

‘What is it? Who is it?’

‘The Red Virgin. We want bread, citoyen.’

It was not literally true, I think—most of them looked fat enough—prospectively true, perhaps. They hurried off towards the outer boulevards, I following, and, on their way, they pillaged a baker’s shop, the Black or Red one standing by, and waving her corpse-flag with approval, but touching no morsel of the food. Then they poured into a dirty little hall, garnished in the vestibule with a collection of pamphlets inciting to murder and arson, and began to ‘meet.’

They had a clear issue before them, and they knew their own minds. They were met to see how they could burn down civilisation. Nothing more, nothing less. Government was to go, property, laws, classes, the whole framework, with all the pretty things I had lately seen—the drag that took me to La Marche, the salons, the Opera, the coaches in the Wood, myself too, I suppose, by implication, though none took notice of me. They spoke with beautiful volubility, precision, logic, each man perfect in the spouter’s gift.

Presently the Virgin in black rose, and I began to understand why she was called the Red. She spoke in sing-song the chaunted dirge of the thing they wanted to burn. It was very grotesque, and very serious. ‘Citizens, it must all go, only the fire can purge it. Nothing will better it; it has been bettering for eighteen centuries, and it is worse to-day. I believed once, like them, and wrote hymns to the other Virgin, and I know she never hears. She is made of stone, like their hearts. O citizens, the infamy of it!—their fine houses and fine feasts, fine adulteries and fine lies, with labour for their everlasting bond-slave and thrall. Voyons! it is all a mockery. How many of you, before we broke the bread shop open, had eaten to-day?’ ‘Moi!’ shouted perhaps twenty voices, and about as many hands were held up, while about five times as many were held down. ‘If there were only one,’ said the Red Virgin, ‘we would burn it for that one. What! with ships in every port, and the finest climate and soil in the universe, and all the labour and all the martyrdom of the past behind us to start us fair, we cannot give every man his crust and his cup of wine! Voyons: on se moque de nous! Stand out of the way, with your governments and your religions, and leave us to ourselves, to be good. We should be so good without you. It would be so easy; love comes naturally to man, and justice; only the laws of loving and the laws of justice bar the way. The codes are between us and the Sun. Burn them, and start afresh. Vive l’Anarchie!’

‘Vive l’Anarchie!’ cried most of us, but it was not nem. con. ‘Down with the Virgin,’ shouted a big, black-muzzled fellow near the door; and he meant the Red one too!

‘A la porte l’espion!’ roared fifty others back at him. It was a fight.

He was not alone—‘à bas la Vierge!’ repeated his body-guard, closing round him. The chairs were broken into fragments in an instant, and I was luckily able to interpose my walking-stick between one of the fragments and the head of a prostrate man.

So they fell to buffets, the troubled souls who had met to settle the new law of love, beating each other cruelly with hand and foot. It was clear possession, and their tormentors were, perhaps, the self-same legion that once did duty in the swine. They tore each other, in sheer impatience for the rise of the curtain on the great poetic drama of the Millennial Reign. They had bad seats for the show, I think; that had something to do with it; in the comparative airiness of the boxes, patience does not come so hard.

I strolled away. Out of focus, too, this group of humanity; and worse than the last!

CHAPTER III.
FLIGHT.

I was really running away now. It was not retreat, but flight; useless to pretend that I was even looking civilisation in the face.

Some instinct led me to Geneva. There would be safety, I thought, in its balanced poetry and prose, the mountains held in check by the tourists, the lake by the hotels.

But I had reckoned without the gentleman whose crown I had saved in the late mêlée. He turned up one day on Rousseau’s Island, and hailed me as a brother. I assured him I was but a second cousin, at the outside. It was in vain. He led me to a remote garret in the old town, and introduced me to a circle of blood relations in democracy, by whom, after examination, I was received into the family.

I did not mind; only it was hard to find this sort of thing going on everywhere.

I was evidently found to improve on acquaintance, for, one day, I was solemnly invited to a polyglot tea party, in another garret, with a Russian lady making the tea.

It was green tea, fortunately; else it would have been altogether too absurdly innocent a compound for this entertainment. Everybody but myself had done something, and I felt quite ashamed to say that I had only stood on the steps of the Royal Exchange. My sponsor came out in a new light; he had been first smearer of petroleum at the Ministry of Finance, during the Commune. He assured us that no other building burnt half so well. He laid it all on the rez-de-chaussée; his colleagues wasted their stuff on the upper walls. A friend from Spain had shot three priests in the Carthagena riots, with one discharge of a blunderbuss. There was an offer to introduce me as one of the gentlemen who tried to sky London Bridge, so that I might not look strange, but I hate a false pretence. The lady at the samovar was a student emissary, who crossed the frontier with despatches, and she had just come back with news. She had seen the latest execution at St. Petersburg—two of the brethren and one sister hanging up in the falling snow, as stiff as frozen ox-tongues. There were other cheerful reports from Rome, and from Belgrade; and one companion, who was strong in geography, gave us a bird’s-eye of the whole woeful earth. It was to much the same effect, only that, further afield, the dull pain of living was oftener met by endurance than by revolt. We had five minutes in the native quarter at Amoy, and saw an ingenious device of the needy to qualify as mendicant cripples, by making their feet rot off. It is something of a trade secret; but the right way is to tie a cord tightly round the ankle, till the member mortifies. It is a living—where it is not certain death. Next, we were with the stark naked casuals, squatting in the streets of Pekin in winter time, while, gorged with humanitarian learning, the lordly scholars pass. We came home by way of Central Asia, and dropped in on the squalid poor of Smarkand lousing among their quilted rags. The coaling coolies at Aden detained us but a moment; and, but a moment more, the sponge divers of the Ægean, with their lungs choked with blood, for the great law of the margin of subsistence reaches even to the ocean bed.

Next day, I made straight for Genoa. I seemed to labour for breath on the dry land, and to want the sweet clean sea.

There was an Italian merchantman in port, fitting out for a voyage round the world. They had macaroni on board; and, if they had boiled the huge cargo, they might have girdled the globe as they sailed. They were going to take it to Ceylon and the Philippines, by way of the Suez Canal, and then, come back by the Horn to pick up something for the home market. I wanted a ship; they were not averse to a passenger. Short of ballooning, it seemed the readiest way of giving Civilisation the slip.

We sailed; and, as I just had the honour to inform you, here I am, on a peak in the Pacific, and thirteen thousand miles away from the dome of St. Paul’s—which, as everybody knows, is but a stone’s throw from the Royal Exchange. For distance, I think this will do.

CHAPTER IV.
ADVENTURE.

How I got there, this chapter will tell.

The calm of that passage of the Indian Ocean!—the days of sunlight, a little too ardent, perhaps; the nights of moons—the calm of the spirit, I mean, profounder than the calm of waters. A ship is either a heaven or a hell; and when it is a heaven, why not let that one suffice? The world empty, and no papers—no daily report from the sick bed of civilisation. Who could want more, or less?

Ceylon, with its new faces and its shipman’s bustle, hardly ruffled our repose, and when it did, I shut my eyes. At the Philippines, it was much the same. Both are fully described in the Gazetteers.

Then it was hey! for the next long lap to the Horn, with only a call for water or for wild-fowl, here and there. We were in the Pacific now, for all its bursts of temper how finely named! Should not all oceans, boreal or equinoctial, have the same generic title, for, spite of storm and reef and waterspout, surely their message is peace? Such stretches of proud, self-sufficing silence in between the gusts, such comforting assurance, in deepest whispers, of the final rest! Here, on salt water only, can we set compass for the land voyage. Now and again it thundered, and the rain crashed down like falling walls of water, but always my soul was still. If the worst happened, we should still reach the deepest bottom at last, and find a soft bed in the ooze.

There was magnetic disturbance of a kind, however, in that Italian skipper. He was not too well acquainted with the course, and he was subject to scares about cannibals. He feared that the natives of these parts might prefer him to his macaroni. He had an old Genoese edition of Cook, and he read it as if it were a deliverance of yesterday. Whenever we touched at an island, existence seemed hardly worth having at his price of precaution—scouts, and rear-guard, and main body, all to effect a positive life insurance against some old woman squatting on a mat. Poisoned arrows, again, were his peculiar aversion, and, to keep out of reach of them, he usually directed landing operations through a trumpet from the ship’s side. In vain I argued that one fear ought to preclude the other, and that, if they poisoned him, he would certainly never be fit to eat. Sometimes I tried to reassure him by landing alone, and returning with an escort of friendly natives, and a store of yams. The lesson was lost on him; he attributed my safety to the fact that my joints offered no temptation to the critical eye.

One glorious afternoon, sailing from the south we saw a peak rising sheer from the ocean and huge, for it still might be about thirty miles off. It seemed to taper from a broad and solid base, like the summit of a cathedral. He said, ‘St. Peter’s.’ I said, ‘St. Paul’s.’ As we got nearer, we made out a small island of solid rock, with sharp precipitous sides, plumped down in the blue, and with no neighbours in sight. Add Kensington Gardens to Hyde Park, and you might have its total area. It was covered with verdure and stately trees; but a fringe of white at the water’s edge showed that, in spite of the perfectly calm weather, the surf was boiling against its awful shores.

It looked fruity, though desolate, and I insisted on going ashore for guavas, much to the disgust of the skipper. He offered me dried plums, in dissuasion, from a box fringed with paper lace, but the sight of them only increased my craving for the fresh fruit. At last he let me put off alone, crossing himself as I left the ship’s side; but he had done this so often that it made no particular impression on me. I promised to be back in three hours at the outside, while he stood off and on. There was no anchorage for us, even if there had been time to let go.

The little place grew in beauty as I neared it, but in grimness, too. Below the verdure, it was all great fangs of rock, biting into the sea at the sharpest angles. The surf was more terrible than ever on a closer view. The water was flaked with the fury of its strife with the iron-bound shore. I thought of turning back, but I am very fond of guavas. Besides, I had seen something of the management of boats in surf, and I fancied it was easier than it looked. The knack is to mount the crest of a wave, and shoot in with it into a soft place. There was one soft place here, in the angle of a little bay, with earth and wild plants sloping to the water’s edge, and for this I made. I thought I was doing it very nicely, until I felt a heavy blow on the head, and, just before my eyes closed in a dead faint, saw the boat, bottom upwards, floating out to sea. I had missed by a hair’s-breadth, and brushed a boulder half hidden in the grass.

The moon was up when I came to. I must have lain there some hours, wedged comfortably in the brushwood that clung to the stone, high, and nearly dry again, though at the outset I was, of course, wet through. It was a mercy rather than a judgment, after all. The sea had shot me out of its own reach, and no one could have been more considerately stunned. There was a slight flesh wound on my forehead, but no bone broken anywhere. I sat up, and brought my thoughts back to life; then slowly found my feet, and went to look for my hat. In a few moments I became aware that there were other things missing, namely, the boat and the ship.

All were gone. The great stretch of sea was without a speck. I was alone, abandoned to starvation or other miserable death. I threw myself on the ground and sobbed.

What had become of the ship? Alas! my theory of probabilities was only too easy to form. They had found the upturned boat, and perhaps the hat, had jumped to the conclusion that it was all over with me, and made off, pursued no doubt, in fancy, by a fleet of cannibal canoes. And here was I, a second Robinson, on a lonely shore, without so much as a wreck to start me in housekeeping.

The rock sloped at this place, as I have said, and I easily climbed to the summit, and looked around. I meant to sit down there, and form plans. But I forgot all about the morrow, as soon as I saw what nature had sent me that night. It was the full moon; and to know what moonlight is you must come to these Southern seas. I had no print to read, but I could trace the lines in my palm, and I was consoled by the observation that my line of life was a long one. Behind me were the massive shadows of higher hills, before, a tableland of grass and wild trees, bathed in the soothing light, and beyond, the molten silver of the sea fringed with the everlasting surf. The only landward sound was the soft ‘click, click’ of some native bird. It was impossible to feel sad; it was a place to die in, if not to live in, come what might.

The night was warm, I felt no chill, and I sat down and thought the thoughts one thinks in the moonlight. The pity of it that one should ever take the trouble to be less than one’s best in this passing flash of life! What matters the pain for the purchase of this certain joy—the only joy that is sure, so why not make the most of it in valour, honour, fortitude, without waiting for aught sweeter in the dim beatitudes beyond? So to live as, at this moment, thou couldst cease to live! It is the moon’s message, delivered with unfailing regularity once a month, and her main business is to deliver it, not to suck up tides. The shilling almanacs will never contain everything till they devote a line to this interesting fact. When the moon gets that message into the soul, all else must make way for it. Stockbroking seems a pity, in her mildly searching light, with most other modes of getting on; and no wonder there is a tradition in Bayswater families that this kind of natural illumination is bad for the eyes.

I, too, was not unmindful of a domestic tradition on the subject; and, when I felt sleepy, I sought the shade of a hill. I made my bed of brushwood, and sank down. I ought to have felt cold, and caught cold, but I did neither—perhaps the very dews were pickled by the sea air.

The sun called me betimes next morning, and I rose at once, painfully hungry, but in perfect serenity of mind. Now that I saw more of my new home, I could not think of it as my grave. Before me, to the north east, rose the tremendous peak we had sighted from the sea. The hills into which it sank at its base stretched right across the island, forming a ridge at right angles to the other previously seen from the ship. I was thus shut in a corner, and I could see nothing of what lay beyond. I might have seen more by mounting the hill, but I seemed to dread to do it. I thought I would follow the coast line, from a vague idea that it would be safer to have the sea at hand. There was no sign of human life, but the air was alive with myriads of sea birds, wheeling about the rock. The fly catchers, darting through the air for breakfast, added to the animation of the scene, but, of course, made me feel hungrier than ever. There was a distant prospect of a meal, however, in the wild goats looking down on me from the hills—in grave wonder, I hoped, at their first sight of a man. Early as it was, tiny lizards darted about at my feet in evident distress of mind.

Always skirting the rock, I came soon to another peak, lower than the one first seen, but still awful in its sheer fall of six or seven hundred feet right into the sea. I lay down, to peep over the almost perpendicular wall, and rose again with a sense that I and my island were going to be very cosy together, and all to ourselves. Then, lifting my eyes to the highest summit beyond me, to measure the breadth of our domain, I saw a human shape, standing clean and clear and quiet on the verge, against the cloudless sky.

CHAPTER V.
RESCUE.

It was a woman—so much I could make out, in spite of the distance, some three hundred yards as the crow flies, though more, of course, by the dip between the two hills—a woman, by the rounded contours of the silhouette, and a tall one. Of her face, I could as yet say nothing: she was looking out to sea.

A woman, then, but of what tribe? There was no telling by the dress. She wore a petticoat of some dark material, reaching to the knee. It was but a dark patch, of course, as I saw it; and above it was the white one of another garment. At first, that was all I made out—the patch of dark, the patch of white, with the half tint that stood for her bare limbs. She seemed to be shading her eyes with her hand, as she stood in the glare of light.

Suddenly she wheeled round, as though to descend the peak, and, in doing it, saw me. We were now face to face, she on the higher summit, I on the lower, with only the valley between us. I could not see her features, but she seemed rooted to the spot with astonishment.

I instinctively felt for a weapon. I expected a scream or a signal, and savage warriors trooping over the hill. But she made no sign. Hesitation was out of the question: I moved straight towards her. I had no beads about me for a peace-offering, so I fumbled at my watch chain, and wrenched off a propitiatory pencil-case that I hoped might serve.

She advanced too. Then, at every step, the bands of light and dark began to develop into the most majestic shape of youthful womanhood I had ever seen. The white was evidently a sleeveless undergarment reaching, like the petticoat of deep blue, no further than the knee. The naked arms, legs, and feet were no darker than the cheek of a brunette. The chemise was low, and above it rose the glorious bust, almost as broad as a man’s, and with a virgin firmness of line that was strength and softness too. She was very tall for her sex, tall even for mine, but the perfect proportion between body and limbs took off all effect of ungainliness. She moved with the beautiful poise and precision of a mountaineer, brushing hillock, tuft, and boulder in the slope, as though they formed but one level.

Would she attack? It looked so, else why had she met my advance so boldly, without calling her tribe? She seemed to have taken the measure of me for single combat. She would have been a formidable foe, in any case, to say nothing of the handicapping in respect for the sex.

But there was no more of aggression than there was of flight in her attitude, as she paused at last, when but a few feet parted us, and looking down on me in placid wonder, from large and lustrous eyes, showed me the peculiar beauty of her face. Her features were regular, without being faultlessly, or rather, faultily so. Her complexion would have passed muster for fairness in Provence, if not farther north. The only signs of race type were in a certain prominence of the brow, and in the deep liquid softness of the gaze. I had seen such eyes in some of the Coral Islands, and I used sometimes to wish we could take a pair of them back with us, to put the Italian women out of conceit with their own. Her lips were rather full and sensuous, but this did not impair the tender dignity of her expression. Her dark hair, shining, I regret to say, with some native oil, which, even at a distance, I could perceive was scented, seemed to have been caught up with one sweeping gesture, and gathered in a knot behind. Her feet were rather large, though perfectly formed; and she had drawn them close together, as she paused, like a child toeing the line in school. To complete the similitude, she stood perfectly straight, with her arms folded behind her, and her head thrown back—her bosom, the while, gently rising and falling with excitement but half suppressed, and carrying with it, in its motion, her sole ornament, a common English navy button, fastened with ribbon to her throat. I had looked on other women as beautiful in feature, but never on one so magnificently formed. It recalled poetic ideals of the youth of the race.

Evidently she was waiting for me to say something, but how was I to say it? The whole Melanesian mission might have been at fault in the speech of this solitary isle. So I began toying with the pencil-case once more, and then, in a desperate attempt to recall some characters of a universal sign language, I folded my hands on my breast—as I had once seen it done by savages of wilder aspect, in a ballet in Leicester Square.

No language in the world could do justice to my astonishment at what followed, and therefore I set it down without comment, just as it passed.

‘You speak English, I suppose,’ said the girl. ‘How did you come on the Island?’

The accent was as pure as yours or mine; in fact, there was no accent; and the voice was as soft as the eyes.

For some moments I could utter no word. I went on with the sign language, but then, only to pass my hand over my brow.

‘Who are you? and how did you come here? We saw no ship from the Point!’

‘Madam, I——’

The gravity of the features relaxed, and the girl laughed.

‘I knew you spoke English; but why won’t you go on? Oh, how stupid I am! You are faint and ill. Lean on me, and come and have something to eat.’ In another moment she was by my side, with one strong arm round me, and nearly lifting me off the ground, in the attempt to help me to walk—a most humiliating reversal of protective rôles.

‘I can walk perfectly well, thank you; please let me go,’ I had to say, like some coy schoolgirl in the grasp of a dragoon. It was very ridiculous, but I really could not get free.

‘Very well, then, but I will carry you when you like. Now, tell me who you are, and please don’t call me Madam again. Victoria is my name—after the Queen—“Victoria.”’

—‘By the grace of God,’ I could not help thinking, remembering what I had feared, and what I had found.

‘Victoria, I was nearly dashed to pieces on these rocks last night.’

‘Where is your ship?’

‘It was over there, but it has sailed away.’

‘On the south side. But don’t you know that the landing-place is on the north?’

‘I know nothing. I never thought to find a living, still less a civilised, soul in this place. Tell me where I am.’

‘You don’t seem to know much geography,’ she said, with an offended air. But she was mollified in a moment. ‘How faint you must be! Lean on me. If you don’t, I will carry you, whether you like it or no. Poor thing!’

I wanted no support, but I was nothing loath to lean upon Victoria. So we walked away, with an arm round each other’s waist, as innocently affectionate as the primal pair.

She led me towards another slope of the Peak, and, all too soon for me, with such leading, we reached the top.

The whole island lay before me, from sea to sea, quivering with life in the morning sun. In its irregular outline, it seemed like some quaint sea monster that had shot up from the depths of the Pacific to take a look round, and that might instantly disappear. It was head and shoulders out of the water, joining the sea almost everywhere at the base of perpendicular rocks rising to heights of from four to six hundred feet, and it had little or no beach. On all sides, the wave seemed in fretful strife with the rock, but beyond the broken lines of surf lay the calm of the immeasurable ocean, with nothing in the way, it seemed, between this and the next world. The range of hills cutting the island in half from east to west sloped to the edge of the cliff; on the southern side, in deep valleys, filled with plantation plots; on the northern, into two terraced spaces, one above the other, commanding a view of the sea. On the highest of these lay a settlement of civilised men, its cottages lapped warm, like birds in their mosses, in exquisite vegetation—palms, and banyans, and cocoa-nut trees, and, as I might guess, by what was nearer to the view, passion-flowers, and trumpet vines, and creeping plants of infinite variety, the rich growth clothing even the adjacent summits and hillsides, and the sharp inaccessible slopes, right down to the water’s edge. Below the settlement, on the lower terrace, was a grove of cocoa-trees, with no habitation, and below this again, a little bay, evidently the landing-place, and the only one on this cruel shore. All this beauty of nature and homely sweetness of ordered life, lying to the north of the dividing ridge, had been hidden from me in my rude landing-place, even the cultivated valleys being shut out by a transverse section of the rock.

We were still standing on the hill when, from a clump of cocoa at its foot, a little girl came running towards us—a reduced copy, to scale, of Victoria, in build and strength and perfect animal grace. Without standing in the least upon ceremony, she gave me a most hearty kiss, and asked me my name.

‘I wonder now if you could read it,’ I said, feeling in my pocket for the card-case which I had kept by me in all my wanderings, and extracting from it a card that showed woeful traces of the ducking of the night before. The little one’s eyes dilated in wonder as she read the inscription, and in one swift glance took me in from head to foot. Then she turned, and started for the village, at breakneck speed down the steep incline, shouting as she went, ‘Mother! mother! Here’s a lord!’

In a few moments she was mounting the hill on the other side, to the first terrace, and I lost her for a moment in the cocoa grove. She emerged into the second steep path that led to the settlement, still uttering her strange cry. I could see the doors opening, the people turning out, the terrified flutter of domestic fowl.

‘Come!’ said Victoria, and she strode on in the track of the child, turning now and then to help me. We soon reached the level of the grove, a majestic scene, roofed with branches, and carpeted with shrubs spangled with the sunshine that shot through the trees.

I sank down in the delicious shade, not caring to go farther, not caring to speak. I was more faint than ever, for, in spite of the excitement of the adventure, my long fast began to tell.

An opening in the trees showed the path to the settlement, with fifteen or twenty villagers trooping down under the leadership of the infant herald, who waved them on with my card. There were women and children, and, this time, men, most of the latter fit mates for Victoria in frame and stature. Their shirts were armless, their trousers reached only to the knee, all beyond was bare bronzed skin. They looked all strength, suppleness, and abounding health.

A dozen began to talk at once. ‘How did you get him, Victoria?’—‘All last night!’—‘Oh, the poor thing!’—‘How white his skin is!’—‘Is he a real lord?’—‘Let me give him a kiss!’—‘Has he had his breakfast?’—‘He must stay with us.’—‘No, you had the last one.’—‘With me!’—‘Me! Me!’—It was like a clamour of children, but it was stilled in a moment on the arrival of an elder, dressed rather differently from the others, and for whom they all made way.

‘Father,’ said Victoria, addressing the old man, ‘I won’t give him up to anybody. I found him, and he belongs to me.’

‘Take him to my house,’ said the Ancient, ‘and none of you speak a word to him till he has had something to eat. Here, Reuben, lend a hand;’ and he nodded to a young fellow standing at least six foot two, who lifted me to my feet as one might lift a child.

It was time, for their talk began to come to me like a far-off buzzing. I walked as in a dream, but I was aware of a hushed crowd, a beautiful path through the trees, a green lawn on the summit, bordered on three sides with houses of dark wood and thatch, embowered in gardens that scented all the air. Into one of these houses I was taken, and laid on a comfortable couch.

‘Where am I?’

‘Hush!’ said Victoria. ‘You are in the house of the chief magistrate of Pitcairn.’

CHAPTER VI.
BEARINGS.

Pitcairn! I remembered something of what the word meant, next morning, when I woke from a refreshing sleep.

Who does not know that story, just a century old? A ship of war from England sent out to these southern seas to fetch breadfruit for transplantation. Her work easy, her crew passing long delicious enervating months in this contrasting clime; the southern sky, in lieu of our murky heavens, the southern woman, in lieu of Deptford Poll. Then, the breadfruit all collected, the signal given to start for home, but given by an unpopular commander. Mutiny next. The captain and a faithful remnant thrust into an open boat, with a handful of provisions; the crew gently sailing away in search of some happy isle. One group thinking they had found it in Otaheite, and there disembarking, leaving the others to steer further forward into the unknown. These last, finally, spying the dot of Pitcairn, and stopping there, scuttling their ship to signify ‘Good-bye’ to the world. An auspicious settlement, with all the comforts—the heathen woman (imported) and heathen whisky, home made, by an inventor of genius, who could not find even this morning light sufficiently exhilarating without his dram; a few native men for service, beside. So, they began to be happy for ever, according to the most approved methods of Wapping Old Stairs. Meanwhile, the captain and his faithful remnant, in the open boat, make the best of their way to England, through sun and storm; their first halting stage, and nearest prospect of relief and refreshment, twelve hundred leagues away, their rations weighed to the twenty-fifth fraction of a pound, and a cocked pistol always ready for service between the rotting bread and the famished crew. Home at last; the story told; and another war ship sent out to the Pacific, to pick up the mutineers. The Otaheitan settlers, or what is left of them, caught and brought back to hang, or otherwise pay their score; the Pitcairners never found by the avenger, though she rakes the seas for them for months. Nothing heard of them for close on twenty years, when, one day, in the following century, a Yankee skipper, ranging the smooth ocean, finds this speck of volcanic eruption on its face; and then the whole story comes out. We left them, it may be remembered, with liquor and ladies, sunshine and a solitary isle, the honestest attempt ever made to realise the nautical ideal—said sometimes to extend to other professions—of a paradise ashore. Alas! it still was not enough. There had been wild debauchery in both kinds; riot and midnight murder; sudden and crafty slayings, to the confusion of all method in the butcher’s art, of men by women, women by men, Englishmen by natives, and contrariwise, then, of Englishmen, among themselves. At last, only one man is left, and he of our stock, with twelve native women in his guardianship, and nineteen children, most of them fathered by the Englishmen dead and gone. This man, struck with horror and remorse, takes a turn to piety, and, knowing nothing of heredity, is simple enough to believe that God gives the race a fresh start with every generation. So believing, he reclaims this spawn of hell to Christianity and civilisation, and makes a new human type. Other varieties may yet be found in the stars; this one owned a virtue that almost ignored evil, and that was well nigh as effortless as the love of light. It was strong and gentle, truthful and brave, by fine instinct; it had an untaught facility of laughter and of tears; was passionate in loving, yet strange to violent hate—an image of character that cast no shadows, the most wonderful curiosity in life.

The Yankee skipper soon made his strange discovery known, and then this colony of half-castes became the pets of the world. English war ships went to visit them, this time not for vengeance, but to carry them all whereof they stood in need, in loving gifts. French war ships looked in, and, charmed with their innocence and simplicity, deigned to give them leave to hoist a Gallic flag, but showed no resentment when the offer was declined. America opened her generous hand. It was a place of pilgrimage; mankind seemed to see much that it might have been in this outlandish folk, without a war, a debt, a slave class, or a bottle of brandy to boast of, but only with labour and love. So much had been omitted, from sheer defect of memory and knowledge in that poor stranded tar. He had just tried to make them good, and had left the rest to take care of itself. Suppose he had come earlier, and caught the whole race on their exit from the Ark. How it might have spoiled history—all the devilment of the world cleared off, and a new start made with a germ of good! Well, they multiplied, with this encouragement, till their numbers threatened to exceed the capacities of the isle, when a considerate British Government transported them to another island, ever so far superior, and set them up in housekeeping. They flourished; but the new island was the great world, and the gentler spirits among them sighed for their worldlet once more. So these came back to it; and their children and children’s children are here, in the old peace and beauty of life, to this day.

CHAPTER VII.
SETTLING DOWN.

So much I remember of my reading, and I slowly bring it back to life, with much help in concentration from one of the rafters of yellow wood with which my chamber is roofed. I am steadily gazing at the rafter, as I have been any time this hour past, when I hear a knock at the door, give the familiar pass-word, and receive Victoria’s unembarrassed ‘Good-morning’ as she walks majestically in, and takes a seat on the edge of the bed. I watched her savage cheek for the trace of a blush, but there was none. I hope she did not watch mine.

‘Must we call you “Lord”?’ she inquired, with grave politeness. ‘Father says we ought, but I thought I would ask you first.’

I set her mind at rest on this point, and then she became herself of yesterday, protecting and calm.

‘I came to call you. How long have you been awake? Did you sleep well?’ So many questions, one might say, out of an Ollendorffan First Course in the language of the island.

‘Delightfully,’ I replied. ‘I hope I have not kept breakfast waiting.’ (Exercise No. 2.)

‘Oh, we have had breakfast long ago,’ said Victoria, now beginning real talk, ‘and they have all gone to work; but I stayed at home to look after you.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘Well, work in the plantations—how do you suppose we get our yams?’

‘What else?’

‘Listen’—and I heard a muffled sound of beating from the back of the house. I had heard it before, but it had passed unnoticed—‘Can’t you guess what they are doing there?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘They are making cloth, tappa cloth. See, here is some of it;’ and she showed me the snowy counterpane of my bed. ‘We make it from the bark of a tree. I’ll show you, by-and-by. We like English cloth better, though, when we can get it. I always dress in English cloth.’

‘So you have done no work to-day, Victoria, all because of me.’

‘Oh yes, I have. I have cooked your breakfast, and caught it too. Do you like fish?’

‘What fish?’

‘Squid.’

‘I hope I do,’ I said fervently—‘I am sure I do.’

‘Such fun! I had to go in three times for him, and was washed off twice.’

‘I don’t quite understand.’

‘In the surf, you know. They cling to the rocks; and you have to catch them before the sea comes back and catches you.’

I remembered my dismal attempt to rule the waves the night before last, and was silent with humiliation.

She must have read my thoughts with her clear eye. ‘Oh, none of you can swim; and no wonder—you have such nice ships to swim for you. I must give you a few lessons. We will go right round the island—I will look after you. But not till you are stronger. Are you strong to-day?’ asked Victoria, with the tenderest solicitude, looking down on me as on a babe in its cot.

Upon my word, I thought she was going to offer to dress me. ‘As a lion,’ I returned, determined to resist this last indignity to the death.

‘Well, make haste, and get up,’ said Victoria, and she rose and walked out—no better enlightened as to the proprieties, I am afraid, than when she came in.

I was soon in the next room; and for some minutes I had it to myself. This gave me time to look round. It was a long chamber, with windows on one of the longer sides, or rather unglazed openings that might be closed with a shutter. On the opposite side were two beds in recesses facing the light, and screened by sliding panels that made each recess a tiny bed-chamber. Portholes in the wall above the beds would admit light when the panels were closed. They were not closed now; and the beds, with their coverlets of spotless tappa, formed no insignificant part of the furniture. It appeared to be the great common room of the house, serving all purposes by turns. My breakfast things, spread on a white cloth, stood on the table. There was a large clothes press in one corner, of home make, I should say, but still the work of a craftsman. An old-fashioned writing-desk, in another corner, was evidently from Europe. Floor, walls, and ceiling were of the yellow wood already noticed. There was no fireplace; but a well-stored bookcase hung over what might have been the mantel. In other respects, the place was like a cabinet of curiosities. There were articles of use or ornament that must have come out of the old scuttled ship, with others that were, as clearly, recent gifts from Europe. Some of the gifts were useful; a few would have been purely ornamental, even in the boudoir of a duchess. There was a good timepiece, side by side with a machine for moistening postage stamps. A copper tea-kettle divided the honours of a little sideboard with a miniature chest of drawers, in morocco leather, for the storage of cash—labelled ‘Gold,’ ‘Silver,’ ‘Notes,’ in letters richly embossed. A huge shoehorn in ivory, tapering to a button hook in polished steel, hung against the wall, near an old-fashioned native club. Kind-hearted people at home seemed to have had happy thoughts about the Pitcairn plunders while walking down Bond Street, and to have rushed into the first fancy-shop, and bought the first thing that came to hand. The islanders were none the worse for it; they had received these gifts as so much European fetich, and reverently laid them by, without attempting to discover their use.

I was still enjoying this strange feast of the eye, when the Ancient of yesterday, the Governor of the Island, came in. He was between fifty and sixty, tall, straight, and strong, and, in many points of look and manner, a strange survival of the old-fashioned man-of-war’s man, though he might never have trod a vessel’s deck. He was dressed like a seaman, in blue pilot cloth with brass buttons, that must have come from England. He had the inheritance of a pigtail and side locks, in his way of trimming his hair. He was no swarthier than an English tar who has seen service, in spite of his cross of native blood. He had softer manners, however, than one would look for in his great original. Yet, to say the best for him, he came somewhat short of the common conception of a Governor. His face had something of the grave beauty of Victoria’s, without any trace of its spiritual charm.

—‘Hope you are better, sir,’ said his Excellency, laying his hat on the writing-desk, and holding out his hand. One thing especially charmed me in him, as, afterwards, in all of them. He was as free as a Spanish peasant from all subservience of manner born of a sense of difference in social grade. None of them seemed to know their station, although, strangely enough, this implied no ignorance of their Catechism. The secret of my unfortunate position at home, as revealed by the visiting card, made me an object of curiosity, but not in the least of deference, still less, if possible, of ill will. They seemed to feel without explanation—what I was at first so anxious to tell them—that it was no fault of mine.

After compliments, he gave me his history, in reply to my eager questions. He was the grandson of an English mutineer; and both his father and mother were of mixed English and native blood. So, too, was his wife—now dead. Victoria was his only child. The very mention of her, I could see, brought a faint glow of pride to his bronzed cheek; and when she came in, bearing a smoking dish for my breakfast, he embraced her as lovingly as though they had not met for months.

‘Be careful, father, or you’ll upset the bird,’ said the girl, as she laid a baked fowl on the table, which was quite a master-piece as a colour study in luscious browns. It took three journeys to complete her preparations; and then I was invited to sit down to the most deliciously novel repast ever spread before me—grey mullet, and the mysterious squid, now turning out to be the more familiar cuttle-fish, to take off the sharper edge of appetite; the baked bird, with yams, roasted breadfruit, and plantain cake to follow; bananas, oranges, and cocoa-nuts for dessert. The liquors, I am bound to say, were a failure. I was offered water with the fish, and cocoa-nut milk with the bird; and, I suppose, my passing spasm of pain caught Victoria’s eye.

‘I knew he would never like it,’ she said to her father, ‘I must make him some tea, this minute,’ and she flew outside once more.

I followed, with a bunch of bananas in my hand, to entreat her not to execute her kindly intention, and then I discovered that the kitchen was in the open air. It was the old Otaheite oven, described by Cook—heated stones in a hole in the ground, the food laid on them, and covered with more heated stones, which, in their turn, were covered with leaves and cleanly rubbish to keep out every particle of cold. Half an hour in this bath of hot air cooks a fowl to perfection. Other things were new and strange to me. The houses stood about a yard above the soil on huge sleepers of stone, and these sleepers, again, were laid on low terraces of earth, for further security against damp. Each house was surrounded by its own plot—a garden in front, and in the rear a miniature farm-yard, and offices, including the oven, and a shed for the making of cloth. The roofs were thatched with leaves, and most of the dwellings had an upper floor.

CHAPTER VIII.
GOVERNMENT, ARTS, AND LAWS.

Victoria goes afield, and I return to the house, to smoke with the Ancient, and to interview him on government, arts, and laws. This is what I learn.

Our population, men, women and children, is less than one hundred souls.

Our arts—well, we till the soil, as aforesaid, but in our own way. The plough and the windmill were unknown to us a few years ago. We breed a little stock, and we exchange wool and tallow for flour and biscuit, with passing ships. When a ship comes to us, we grow wild with joy, and it is fête day throughout the island.

We get most things in this way, and our latest transaction in barter was for slate pencils and files, of which we stood much in need. The school was reduced to chalk and the blackboard. For a long time, we were greatly at a loss for wedding rings; and the one ring on the Island had to be lent for each successive ceremony. This want is now supplied.

Coin is a curiosity: we have but two sovereigns, a dozen half-crowns, with a choice assortment of minor pieces, and one fourpenny bit. This last stands under an inverted tumbler, which constitutes our nearest approach to a numismatic museum. The collection might increase, if only the ladies could consent to part with their jewelry, for our few English coins are worn as ornaments. There are American dollars in greater plenty, but the currency is chiefly in potatoes.

We think of raising cotton, which would thrive very well in this latitude, and it is quite possible that, in a few years, we may be no longer dependent on Europe for shirts. It would add much to our sense of dignity, and, beside, would tend to make us more self-supporting, in the event of complications with a foreign power.

We have no navy to speak of, but there is a first-rate whale boat. The steersman of the whale boat is also Magistrate, or Governor of the Island—my host. There is precedent for it: Pitt, I believe, was First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the same time. The Governor is elected annually, by universal suffrage of both sexes.

O that Governor!

He has just laid down his pipe, to fish the Revised Statutes out of the pocket of his pilot coat. ‘We make ’em as we want ’em,’ he says simply, ‘but I hope we shall soon want no more. There’s quite enough already, to my mind.

‘You see, sir, the first is a “Law Respecting the Magistrate” (that’s me, for the present). He’s to carry out the laws, and when there’s any complaint to call the people together and hear both sides. Everyone is to treat him with respect. But they all do, you know, without that,’ his Excellency was pleased to add.

‘Then there’s a “Law Regarding the School.” All children to go; or to pay, whether they go or not. Fee, a barrel of Irish potatoes a year, or thereabouts.’

‘A barrel of Irish potatoes, you see, in our currency, stands for twelve shillings, and the school fee is a shilling a month. A barrel of sweet potatoes is only eight shillings. Three good bunches of plantains make four shillings, and so on.

‘On the 1st of January we visit landmarks, first thing after the election, and see they are all right.

‘Then there’s a law about drinks, sir—as I dare say you know. No strong liquor on the Island, except for physic. You see, we gave liquor a trial when our people first came here, and the man that invented it went funny, and jumped into the sea. It seemed to bring bad luck, so we gave it up.

‘Now we come to our great difficulty,’ and he proceeded to read aloud another chapter of the statutes headed, ‘Laws for Cats.’ ‘Cats, you must know, sir, are very useful in keeping down rats, but our young people will sometimes shoot them for sport, so we’ve been obliged to pass a very severe law, our severest, I may say. There’s a heavy fine for killing a cat, half of it to go to the informer. For all that, it’s no easy matter to settle these cases. Sometimes people say the cat came to kill their fowls; and what are you to do then? It is a difficult case for a magistrate. I always say this—was the cat caught killing the bird; or was it merely a suspicion? If you can’t produce your dead bird, then down with your potatoes! There’s another way; you may pay your fine in rats killed by yourself. Three hundred is the price of a cat’s life; we try to be fair all round.

‘Take fowls again; if a fowl trespasses in your garden, you may shoot it, and the owner must return you your charge of powder and shot. That’s the law as it stands in the book, but nowadays you generally send back the bird, and say no more about it. We are all neighbours, you know.

‘There’s another thing,’ continued his Excellency, pursuing his commentary on the code, ‘You mustn’t carve on trees. Who wants to carve on trees? you may say. Well, the young people, when they are a-courting. But it ruins the timber. We’ve had no end of trouble with that law. As you walk about the Island, sir, you’ll come upon true lovers’ knots, and such like, in the most out of the way places. You mustn’t be startled by ’em, and think it’s savages; it’s just sweethearts, neither more or less. Where we can’t tell which pair was walking there, I draws ’em all up in line, and asks who did it, straight out. Oh, you have to look sharp after things here, I do assure you. Our people are not so wicked, but they get careless sometimes. Who’d ever think, now, that we want a “Law for the Public Anvil”? but we do.’ And he read aloud,

‘“Any person taking the public anvil and public sledge-hammer from the blacksmith’s shop is to take it back after he has done with it; and, in case the anvil and sledge-hammer should get lost, by his neglecting to take it back, he is to get another anvil and sledge-hammer, and pay a fine of four shillings”—potatoes, you know.

‘You’ve got a good many more laws in Europe, I’ve heard say,’ he observed, as he closed his book, and restored the entire code of Pitcairn to his breast pocket.

‘You have not been misinformed,’ I replied. ‘But tell me—have you any machinery of appeal from the decisions of the Court of First Instance?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if they don’t like what I tell ’em, it goes before a jury.’

‘And if they don’t like that any better?’

‘Then we hold over till the next British man-o’-war touches, and the captain decides. We’ve got an appeal waiting now—a cat case. None of us can get to the rights of it, so we must wait: but the parties are friendly enough, meanwhile.’

‘Have you ever carried a case to the House of Lords?’

‘We shouldn’t like to trouble you, sir, thank you, all the same.’

CHAPTER IX.
NURSE.

Victoria is my nurse. There is no doubt of it: I am in her charge. She governs all my goings out, and my comings in, and is told off, I think, to see that I do not drown myself, or fall off the rocks. For a few days I see next to nothing of the others. They are gone out to work long before I get up, and I catch mere glimpses of them in our walks afield. They come up in the evening, to look at me through the windows, but Victoria heads them off, with a promise to produce me on Sunday. I am supposed to be convalescent in the meanwhile. I am quite content, and I sham.

The housewives, of course, see me, as I walk through the village. They have all kissed me, nobody objecting, I least of all. I am the best of friends with the children, and these always call me ‘Lord.’ Victoria calls me by my Christian name.

She wakes me in the morning, feeds me as aforesaid, then takes me for an airing, perhaps to St. Paul’s Point, a thousand feet high, which affords a fine bird’s-eye view of infinitude. When the ascent becomes unusually steep, she grasps me by the arm, and pushes me up. It is useless to try to shake her off; I need her as much in that country as Gulliver needed Glumdalclitch elsewhere. The goats can hardly follow us sometimes. Her education has been neglected in the matter of nerves; she stands on perpendicular summits, and coils her hair; she drops on ledges of rock less than a yard wide, to rescue a stray kid, and walks to and fro on them with a certitude that precludes courage. Never have I felt so small. There is nothing to keep up the fiction of knightly service, not a fan to hold, a carriage door to open, a wrap to arrange. So I make no more pretence of homage to the sex than any other infant in charge. Fractiousness, on the contrary, is rather my cast of mind; if anything, I am a troublesome child.

In all things she is a model nurse, and especially in this, that she teaches me to tell the truth. I had no idea of what truthfulness might mean, till I came here. Victoria never says the thing that is not, and she sometimes misses the most tempting effects of humour, in consequence. Her yea is yea, her nay, nay. So, it seems, the primitive founder from Wapping understood his charge under the Writ. Whatever is she states as it is, and this mere habit often gives her talk the charm of classic prose. The Ancient, as we have seen, in his love-knot cases, supplies the want of a detective police by public confession. I praised her once for this virtue; she said I had strange ideas.

It kills coquetry, though. ‘I don’t think you care for me one bit, Victoria,’ I said one day. ‘Why should I care for you?’ I, of course, expected on her part, as the next move in the game. All the best treatises lay this down as the appropriate answer. But Victoria simply played the native gambit. ‘I am sure I do: I like you very much. How stupid of me never to think of telling you! So does father too.’ I threw a stone at a goat, by way of changing the subject, and Victoria redoubled her attentions all the way home. I could only throw more stones at the goats. Shooting, alas! was out of the question: all the live things were stock, and they had no stock to spare.

She tells me stories, like the best of nurses, stories of that unregenerate early time, when evil was killing itself out of the island, and the Devil stinging himself to death with the fork of his own tail. There is a story of an awful night, which I often ask for. All the native men had risen on all the English, and left but one of them alive, the future law-giver, and him half dead. Then, when darkness fell, the native women stole on the sleeping murderers, and finished them. This was the last massacre; the Devil was dead in Pitcairn. The scene is always with me, as the background of the picture of to-day. Here the sweet benignant maids and wives, the sunshine and the peace; there the dusky furies they sprang from, stealing forth in the night to the deed of blood. Love redeemed, if it did not justify; and ah, how these Southern women possess that finest of the arts! At Tahiti—it is another of Victoria’s stories—when the avenging war ship came out to fetch the mutineers home to be hanged, one of them was torn from the side of Peggy, his native wife, who held an infant at her breast. He lay heavily ironed on deck, when Peggy climbed the side, infant and all, from a canoe—as it was thought, only to say a discreet good-bye. But Peggy behaved without discretion, throwing herself on the poor manacled wretch, hugging his very fetters, to get a little nearer the father of her baby, and sobbing the most heart-breaking things to him in the patois of her isle. He turned, and begged she might be led away, as though he were already tasting something sharper than death. Led away she was, and sent back in her canoe, and she made such haste to die of a broken heart that she was at peace long before he went down in his irons in the storm that nearly destroyed the whole ship’s company, captives and all, on the homeward voyage.

Once, it might have been a ghost story. I am walking with Victoria at night, through a deep gorge, to show her the scene of my disaster in the landing. A high ridge bounds the valley; and chancing to raise her eyes to it, the girl suddenly utters a cry of terror, and clings all trembling to me. ‘Tell me what it is—I cannot look at it.’ Then, as suddenly, she flings herself away from me, cowering, and will not be touched; and, with hands clasped, utters more cries of mystery, in which I am not concerned. ‘Oh!—if!—speak to me, only! come to me! I have not forgotten, I have not done wrong.’ There is certainly something stirring up there, in the green moonlight, but Victoria will in nowise let me obey her order to find out what it is, but draws me back into the shadow of the gorge, and insists on our hurrying home. Amiable and harmless ghost, the girl is mute about thee, and I am fain to be content with thy biography from the Ancient’s lips. The Ridge is haunted by the phantom of a murdered chief, another of the victims of that old wild time. The news of our adventure spreads through the settlement, and no one peeps in at the windows that night.

She takes me for walks, too, the cunningest. There is a wild cave at the western end, where one of the mutineers, ever haunted by the dread of that avenging ship, used to entrench himself against possible attempts at capture that were never made. He would sit there whole summer days, his eye on a narrow rim of rock that led to his cavern, and that one man might, with ease, have kept inviolate against a hundred. He was provisioned and stored for a long siege, and a hard fight; and as he sat watching through the long hours, no doubt he had his thoughts. The eastern end has its cave too, another sanctuary, but of far-off aboriginal man, who carved sun, moon and stars on its walls, and then retired into eternal oblivion and the night of things. The vanished one’s modest avoidance of publicity could not fail to be remarked, in spite of him. He had found, or made, his cavern, in the face of a wall of rock that rose some six hundred feet sheer from the foaming sea. A few feet from the summit, there was a ledge just wide enough to support a man, and this was the pathway to his chapel of little ease.

At our first visit, Victoria dropped on the ledge with the mingled lightness and precision of fall of a weighted feather, forbidding me to follow, on pain of death. I did follow, in spite of the prohibition, whereupon she stood stock still on the ledge, till I could recover touch of her, and then burst into tears. The tears saved me, for I was beginning to look down the wall into the surf, and that way self-murder lay. They made me look up at Victoria, though I could not see her face. She recovered herself in a moment. ‘Now you will shut your eyes,’ she said, ‘lay both hands on my shoulders, and walk straight on after me.’ So we reached the cave, when she turned and faced me, and began to cry once more. ‘How am I to get you back? Why, not all our people can walk here—only the youngest! I will never take you out again, never; I mean, perhaps I never will.’ I examined the curiosities of the cave meanwhile, and assumed a silent, remorseful air. Then came the return journey. ‘Try to forget all about the scolding,’ said Victoria, ‘I take it back—for the present—and do just as you did before.’ It was done; and I declare the indefinable charm of companionship with her in peril was a sufficient antidote to fear. ‘Now,’ she said, when we reached the end of the pathway, ‘keep your eyes shut, and hold on to this till I come to you.’ And she guided my hand to a small projection, and scrambled, by what I afterwards found was an almost perpendicular facet, to the top of the rock. In a few seconds, something soft touched my face; it was a long woollen girdle, that Victoria sometimes wore, and she had lowered it to my aid. I, too, reached the level at last. ‘I shall not speak to you for some time,’ she said, resuming the quarrel, and she stalked on ahead, I meekly following without a word. She turned as we reached the path leading to the settlement. ‘Do you unfeignedly repent?’ When she was most serious she often talked the English of the Church Service, and without the faintest sense of incongruity. ‘Victoria, I can hardly find words—’ ‘Very well, then: I forgive you from my heart, though, you know, I am not obliged to forgive you till sundown. But it would be a pity to waste an afternoon.’

We finished the day in great amity, under the shade of a banyan tree, whither we retired for consultation on a matter that gave Victoria some perplexity of spirit. She had lately bought a Milton from a passing ship—with her own savings in potatoes—and had read it through so often that she knew long passages by heart. The work had left in her mind an impression of unfairness in the treatment of Satan, and she was most anxious to submit this difficulty to the judgment of a friend. I was at first disposed to make light of it, but I soon saw that Victoria took it very seriously indeed. They had but few books; each book went the round of the settlement; and it was taken in most edifying good faith, as a report from that visionary outer world, that unexplored planet, whose laws, customs, institutions, ways of being and doing were such a mystery to the worldlet of the rock. The hero of the latest volume to hand, novel, history or poem, no matter what its date, was always the personage of the day at Pitcairn. His difficulties were the living issues in politics, morals, and the art of life.

‘I am going to say something about it at the meeting to-morrow night; but I thought I should like to speak to you first. I do not think he was properly treated, though Mr. John Milton seems to have no pity for him, and he ought to know. Yet I cannot think it. I could hardly sleep at all, last night; it troubled me so.’

‘Well, Victoria, I suppose he staked his stake, and lost, and had to put up with the consequences; that is all I see.’

‘Yes, but perhaps if they had only been kinder to him, he might have repented. He was very proud, you know, and there was no one to soothe him. I think Gabriel was very haughty and hard with him, and Zephon quite disrespectful, considering his place. Do you always approve of Gabriel?’ she asked, with much earnestness, and looking me straight in the eyes, as though our friendship depended on the answer. ‘Surely,’ she said, with rising warmth, ‘you would never stand up for that speech at the end of the fourth book. Rulers should not be so high and distant, just clearing their throats, and giving their commands, as though all others were servants. Suppose father ruled like that—who would obey the laws? I know Satan felt it. It is a pity he had no good female angel to take care of him—only there is no marrying, nor giving in marriage there: so they say,’ and she sighed. ‘People may meet again, though, without marrying,’ she said after a pause, and with her eyes fixed on the vacancy of sea and sky. ‘Thank God for that! But oh what meetings, if they have not been true!’ She seemed to have forgotten Satan for a moment, I thought, but I soon brought her back to the case before the court.

‘There was an attempt to bring feminine influence to bear on him, I believe, but it hardly turned out well.’

‘When? where? Mr. John Milton says nothing about it.’

‘No, that comes from another reporter, a Frenchman. It did not answer. A pitying angel left Paradise, to come and speak comfort to him, as he lay writhing on his hot bed. She was fearful, though compassionate, and she meant always to keep out of arm’s length. But her pity drew her too near, all the same, and he clutched her, and dragged her down. So runs the tale.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Victoria firmly, ‘I think he never had a chance. I shall say so at the meeting; and you back me up.’

CHAPTER X.
SUNDAY.

I was produced on Sunday before the whole settlement; more strictly speaking, they produced themselves before me. The villagers were in the village, for the first time, at my hour of rising. There was an absolute cessation from labour, but there was hardly rest. They were in a flutter of joyous excitement, and ran from cottage to cottage, as though they were spreading good news. Yet there was no news, for who could need telling that it was Sunday, and that the sky was blue? For that matter, they needed no excuse to make free of each other’s houses. Property in their own roofs seemed the merest accident among them. One man’s arm-chair was another man’s arm-chair. They walked in and out, by the open doors—often into unguarded dwellings, when the owners were on a visit elsewhere—read the books, smelt the flowers, touched the harmonium, if they could, or cared, and came away. When you sought a man, you went into the nearest cottage; you never thought of going first to his own, unless it lay in your path. There was more of this curious house to house visiting to-day, because there was more time for it, and because there was a greater intensity of childlike happiness in movement and communion—that was all.

There seemed to be much borrowing and lending of the Sabbath finery of cleanliness. If you had no better coat for the day, why, your neighbour might have one to spare, and you asked him for it. Victoria lent two loose gowns, a kind of robe de chambre worn on state occasions over the scanty costume of the women. At the same time, she went into a neighbour’s garden, and helped herself freely to flowers for her hair, our own stock having suffered from the movements of some four-footed intruder during the night. If Proudhon had lived here, he would have written ‘property is vanity,’ the innermost truth. Victoria was very smart—a new ribbon for the navy button, beside the blossoms inwoven with her shining locks.

The church was a hut. I have seen St. Peter’s, too, yet I give this one the preference for majesty, taking its surroundings into account. For St. Peter’s, as the best thing in its quarter, all else meaner, leads nowhere beyond itself, while this island fane, backed first by a stately tropic grove, then by a towering cone of mountain, then by the clouds, carried the eye from height to height of beauty and of wonder, right up to Heaven.

We were rather late, and it was all the better, for now I could take in the whole population of the island at a glance. They were mostly of superb physique, men and women, and Victoria was but one finest example of them. Reuben, the young giant, who had helped me on the day of landing, was another. Among the women, however, some foolish hat, or trailing skirt, of civilisation here and there departed from the classic simplicity of Victoria’s dress. Most of the men wore shoes, in honour of the day; a few, like the Ancient, long trousers, instead of the loose knee-breeches of their working suits. Trousers seemed to be a sign of authority, or of the beginning of years. The priest, or ministrant, wore them, and indeed he might have been entitled to wear two pairs, for, I think, he was schoolmaster as well. The types varied from Victoria’s front of Western Europe to almost pure Tahiti, but always they had their point of unity in the large soft eyes.

For the service, never had I seen such fervour, such passion of prayer and praise! It was the Church of England form, I believe, but form of any kind was hardly to be recognised in the melting heat of their zeal. The poor old Litany seemed like a veritable audience at the throne of God. The Commandments came as His voice from our own mountain, thundering from the summit of the cone. Our hymns soared after Him to the very farthest heaven as He retired. One boy’s note, I think, must have got there first, so clear was it, so clean and pure and true, with nought of earth to keep it from the skies. It was a living faith, no mere specimen of what once had lived, dried for keeping, and not even dried in the sun. Here were the true Primitives, the joyous band of Galilean vagabonds, exulting in that new conception of the brotherhood of man whose secret we have for ever lost. Solemnity, as we understand it, seemed far from them; devoutness was swallowed up in joy. Often they laid their hands affectionately on each other’s shoulders as they sang: once I saw two children kiss after a prayer.

I had been completely ignored during the service, but, when it was over, my turn came. As we trooped back towards the village, I was the centre of a questioning crowd. I had come from England—that was enough, for England is their great archetype of power, wisdom, and beauty of life. Needless to say they have not seen it; I mean, of course, that circumstance has bound them to their rock. All that they know as best comes from England, from the great war ship, which they regard with almost the wonder of Indians, down to the harmonium in the cottage. It is not much to know, but a generous imagination easily does the rest. England has been good to them: England, then, is goodness. She is visibly strong: then she is strength. She has sent them Bibles; ah! she must be the Word made Flesh.

So it was one long bewildering inquisition. Would I tell them of the great churches, the great wonders manifold of that far-off Isle of the Saints? What of the rulers and statesmen, of the bishops, those captains of captains of the thousands of God, of the choirs of the faithful—five thousand strong, as they had heard—hymning Handel under a crystal dome? They seemed to see human life not at all as a mere struggle, but as a great race for a crown of virtue, in which Britain was first, and their poor island so decidedly nowhere that she could afford to sink rivalry in unqualified admiration. I winced, and winced, and winced again.

‘We are but poor things here, and we know it,’ said the schoolmaster.

‘You will improve,’ I said kindly.

‘Well, sir, we are always ready to learn; perhaps you would like to take a service yourself next Sunday? You are not in orders, but you have heard the Archbishop of Canterbury, I dare say.’

‘No, only a bishop now and then.’

‘Oh, what opportunities!’ said Victoria sadly. ‘We once had a navy-chaplain here, but it was four years ago. Though, of course, that is no excuse for our not being better than we are.’

‘They say he has fifteen thousand a year to spend on the poor,’ said the schoolmaster, returning to the Primate.

‘Yes, he has fifteen thousand a year.’

‘How much would that be in potatoes, let’s see?’ murmured Reuben, and he withdrew for an operation in mental arithmetic.

‘I’ve heard of a lady who has made fifty thousand people happy, all by herself,’ said one of the women. ‘She’s a baroness.’

‘And that’s not the highest,’ said another, ‘there’s duchesses who must be richer. Oh, what a country for the poor!’

‘It’s the big churches I’m thinking of,’ observed the schoolmaster. ‘Why, there’s one that holds six thousand people. Six thousand people, twice a day! Think of the spread of it!’

‘Them’s the things I want to see,’ said Reuben, returning, not unoppressed, I thought, by his weight of potatoes, ‘the big things—St. Paul’s, the Railway.’

‘You should use the plural form, Reuben,’ urged the schoolmaster gently, ‘the railways. There are dozens of them. Why, there are three great lines running to Birmingham! I’ve got a map of it.’

‘And how about the Parliament?’ struck in the Ancient, pre-occupied, and not unnaturally, with the question of legislation. ‘Over a thousand people to make the laws; and at it day and night, too! The moment anything goes wrong anywhere, there they are, waiting on the premises, as you may say, to put it right. We’ve nothing like that here. Not that we want it either; I only make the remark.’

This touching disposition to take us in good faith had no limits. In their quaint conception of our corporate life, all things existed to that great end of the crown of virtue. Nothing was merely neutral or indifferent. To talk of making people virtuous by Act of Parliament would, for them, have had none of the significance of a sneer. What else were Acts of Parliament for? So, churches were to promote brotherhood and love, with no reserves for a Pickwickian sense; armies, to suppress the wicked. Rank and riches, as we have just seen, were mere equivalents for more opportunity; if a baroness made fifty thousand people happy, what might not a duchess do? The islanders simply multiplied our means by their own yearnings, and the product was a colossal sum in good. Everything seemed to count; from a question the Ancient put to me as to the number of cabs and omnibuses in the British capital, I more than suspect that these, too, contributed to his grand total. The drivers were obliging persons whose chief concern was to give tired Righteousness a lift.

‘I want to see St. Paul’s and the railways,’ murmured Reuben again, in an amended version, as he wandered away from the group.

Victoria’s wistful gaze went after him: ‘Poor fellow!’

‘Is anything the matter with him, Victoria?’

‘Yes, but he daren’t tell anyone but me; he wants to go.’

‘To go where?’

‘Out there,’ she said, with a gesture that was meant to indicate the world at large. ‘He wants to see it all; he can never rest here. These things our people talk about with strangers trouble him. He’s venturous; he must see and know. He was always like that: he dived two fathoms lower than anyone else—off the Point, and brought up a watch from the old ship. No one can follow him on the rocks. He discovered an island once—over there. I went to see it: I’ll take you one day. Now it’s England. He can never rest here. But, oh! how I dread it! and, besides, you know, they will never let him go.’

‘Did he find so much in the first island, then, that he longs to try the other?’

‘No; only some dry bones in a cave. But England will be different, of course.’

They prayed and praised, in the exultant fashion of the morning, all day long—with due intervals for refreshment. There were five services, I think, big and little. If there were not six, it was only because this Sunday did not happen to fall on the longest day.

‘I hope it is because we love God,’ said Victoria, ‘but I think it is just as much because we love one another. Or perhaps it is to bring Him nearer, so that we may love Him like the rest. He must not be too far off. I think that is why some of the poor wild people we read of take so long to convert. You must show them something, and let them feel the strong arm, and see the face of human love. They always want to worship the missionary first. Why not let them; and then pass it on, when they get stronger? Do you know, in spite of all my advantages, I could sometimes just fall down and say my prayers to a child, to things even—a rose-tree? It’s the old wickedness in our blood, I suppose. But mind, don’t you dare tell anybody; I should die of shame!’

I had begged to be excused from attendance at the remaining four services, on the ground that I preferred an open-air rite; and, on my assurance that this mode of devotion had the sanction of British custom, Victoria had consented to join me. We were wandering, talking, musing in long silences, picking wild-flowers, breathing the balmy air, basking in the warm light.

In one of these reveries I caught a strange gleam in Victoria’s eyes. ‘Tell me about the blessed Sabbaths in England,’ she murmured, placing her hand in mine.

O my England, my England! why cannot I speak of a thing we all must honour so? why, rather, do I pray for strength to keep the secret of thy Sabbaths well? Dread day of the division of classes, weekly vision of the Judgment, in its utter separation of the social sheep and goats, never one flock, alas! at any time, but now so clearly two. In this dark hour of remembrance, I hear the hoarse clappers of thy meeting-houses, vainly fanning the stagnant air in cities of the spiritual dead. I see thy funereal processions of the elect, wending to or from the conventicles, past groups of coster-boys, who wait for the opening of the houses, and expectorate on the pavement in patterns of the dawn of decorative art. It is all before me, the dingy squalor of thy miles of shuttered marts, the crying contrasts of thy Sunday finery, more hurtful to the eye than thy week-day rags! I hear thy muffin-bells in the deep silences, and thy hawkers’ wail; and, amid this worst of all spiritual destitution, the destitution of beauty, I ask myself, what is it that we have lost; what is it these little ones have found?

CHAPTER XI.
A SAIL.

I was roused next morning by the report of a gun, followed by a strange commotion in the village. I had barely time to dress, and join the Ancient in the sitting-room, when a man ran in, breathless, to announce a ship off the Point, and a Queen’s ship.

A Queen’s ship! No wonder the village was astir. A ship that might fly the Royal Standard, a ship that was English authority and English might! No work in the Island this day!

The Ancient put on his Sunday coat, and quietly took command. ‘How lucky the landing is easy this morning! Jonah, hurry off to the Point, with the white flag, and signal their cutter “All right!” Quintal, you go down to the landing, and see them over the breakers. Now, folks, who’s to take them in?’

It was a call to public meeting on the question of the entertainment of the officers. The islanders always claimed this privilege of boarding and lodging the Queen’s uniform. Half a dozen heads of families at once offered to provide for as many guests. There was a brisk competition for the Captain, who would have fallen to the Governor ex-officio, but for my occupancy of the spare bedroom in his Excellency’s house. I offered to retire, but my generous hostess would not hear of it.

‘I found him, father, and he belongs to me,’ said Victoria, in the terms of that earlier claim which had sometimes made me suspect the existence of slavery in the Island. The blood of the free-born ought to have rushed to my face in protest against this attempt to count me as a chattel; but it did not.

The Captain is knocked down to the schoolmaster; the women hurry away to light their ovens; the meeting breaks up. Its dispersed groups, however, form so many subcommittees of reception, for they talk of nothing but the comfort and delight of the public guests. The only private interest is represented by the two litigants who have the case on appeal from a decision of the Island courts to the supreme tribunal of a British man-of-war. They are tossing with a parti-coloured bean, to see which shall open the pleadings first.

The Ancient, hurrying down to the landing-place, calls for his whale-boat and his mariners three, and our navy goes forth in modest pride to meet the Queen’s ship. She is close in-shore, the depth of water admitting of a near approach; so, when our Governor boards her, we see all that passes. His Excellency takes off his hat, and pulls at a forelock that is not there to pull. No real one has been pulled in that family since the time of George III., but the gesture has survived with them as a sign of respect. The Captain shakes hands with him, and presents him to his officers, who do the same. Then they leave the clean white deck, flashing light from its polished brasses, and go below, as though for complimentary refreshments. On their return, the Governor takes charge of the ship’s cutter, in which our guests embark. Only a native can dodge the rocks, rocklets, and surf currents of our bay. They wait at the back of the rollers till the look-out man ashore waves his hat; then they give way with a will, and are hurled in, safely, on the crest of the wave.

Two of the officers are old friends of mine. What a little world it is! You would think all were old friends of the islanders, by the warmth of welcome. Men, women and children struggle for a grasp of their hands, and a girl offers flowers to the Captain. He kisses her; his officers kiss the other girls: fathers, brothers, and cousins hurrah approval, and content.

Then we lead them to the schoolhouse, by the steep paths, in joyous procession of old and young. Here the Captain must enter in the Island register the name of his ship, with other particulars, and meet a deputation of the elders, who come to trade. The ship wants water, yams, and potatoes: we want hardware. The terms of exchange are settled according to a written tariff, and the elders depart, to weigh over the commodities on their side. They are poor traders, though: yams are scarce at the moment, yet they ask no higher price for them; nor can I make them understand that to do so would be to seek an honest gain. ‘Is there less steel in the hatchets than there used to be,’ they ask, ‘that we are to give less in yams?’ I remember that the value of a thing is what it will fetch, and I tell them so, but they shake their heads. For the first time, it occurs to me that these people have no natural turn for economic speculation; and that, with all their religion, they may need a missionary of a kind. A certain finer sense is wanting; but no more of this just now.

The guests have, meanwhile, been led to their quarters, the Captain beaming with affability and good nature. He foresees his report to the Lords of the Admiralty on the morals, manners and customs of these innocent islanders, with the articles thereon in the daily papers. It is all such a relief after the official landings of the Pacific station, and the French polish of the South American dons, much tarnished by keeping in a torrid clime.

The people are as curious and inquisitive as children. They draw the officers’ swords, run their fingers along the dulled edges, cry wonder at the damascened blades. Some of them have never seen the uniform before: none can ever see it too often. They have the fullest confidence in the honour of the wearers; and they give themselves up to enjoyment, without a thought of harm. All the rules governing their intercourse with traders are suspended. The girls go where they please, with whom they please: every middy, even, has his feminine aide-de-camp, and local guide. The Captain is attended by no less a person than the Ancient himself, though I think he would prefer to rough it with his officers. The Ancient treats him with a fine courtesy, affecting not to be master in his own domain.

Nor indeed is he master for the time—at least on the judicial side. The Queen’s navy, as already stated, is our court of final appeal under the constitution; and there is that unsettled case. It is called on the morrow of the Captain’s visit, with the cocoa grove for the seat of the appellate tribunal. The Ancient offered the schoolhouse, but the Judge asked why a clearing in the trees would not do as well; and his will was law. It is quieter than most halls of justice, for the whispers are lost in the open air. The twitter of the birds overhead is not so troublesome as an usher’s cry of ‘Silence in Court.’ The gentle breeze is hardly an inconvenience, for there are no papers to blow about; and the perfume which it brings from the village gardens would be a distinct improvement to the atmosphere of Lincoln’s Inn.

I had never quite understood this case, and no wonder, for it had puzzled all the courts of the Island. A cat had been killed: it opened in that way, clearly enough, but, soon after, the obscurity began. Who killed the cat? Even here there was broad daylight—one Elias McCall. Was he justified in the deed?—Ha! His plea was that the cat had sought the lives of his chickens, and that, after losing several of these in successive midnight raids, he had, at length, sought the life of the cat. The law of the case is perfectly explicit: the cat that slays fowl shall itself be slain. But the proof of murderous outrage must be conclusive: the cat must be ‘positively detected in killing’—the Ancient read the statute from his pocket-book, at the request of the Court. Now, was the circumstantial evidence so strong as to constitute detection within the meaning of the Act? The proprietor of the fledglings, as a truthful man, could say no more than that the cat had been in the habit of taking up her station near his hen-coop in the cool of the evening, and that, on the morrow of every such visit, he had missed one or more birds. He had put two and two together, that was his expression, and finally, his feelings getting the better of him, he had ‘let go’ at the cat (the Ancient, at this point, bade him remember in whose presence he stood), with the result that his brood thereafter remained intact. On a post-mortem examination, moreover, he had found a small feather clinging to the fur. Pressed by the other side, he was bound in honour to admit that he had never seen the cat looking at the hen-coop—on the contrary, her head was usually turned the other way. She often sang to herself, as though pre-occupied; and her movements were so little of a threatening nature that she was washing her face at the very moment of the fatal stroke. It was not denied that there were many other cats in the neighbourhood; it was not denied that the fowls often flew upon the fence where the cat used to sit, nor that they might there have left the stray feather found on her person. With this evidence, the owner of the cat left his case in the hands of the Supreme Court. The courts below had decided against him, the Ancient first, as Chief Magistrate, and then a jury. Now, the Captain of H.M.S. ‘Rollo’ was asked to give the final award.

That his Honour was troubled was evident by the frequency with which he asked his assessor, the First Lieutenant, to give him a light for his cheroot. The ‘positively detected’ of the statute was his stumbling-block; we could see that with half an eye.

‘Where did you find the feather?’ he said at length, ‘near the tail end, where the cat might have been sitting?’ It was a leading question, but no one seemed to notice the irregularity. ‘No, sir,’ returned the murderer, ‘on her cheek, just under the right whisker.’

‘That settles it, I think,’ said the Judge; ‘she was washing up, after she had eaten the bird.’ ‘Yes, that settles it,’ echoed the First Lieutenant. ‘That settles it, of course,’ said the ship’s surgeon, who, as a mere bystander, had no business to deliver an opinion on the matter. ‘That settles it,’ said the Ancient; ‘I never thought of asking the question.’ ‘That settles it,’ said all the villagers present, including, strange to say, the owner of the cat.—Judgment of the courts below confirmed.

CHAPTER XII.
THREE DAYS.

Business over, our pleasures begin. They are to stay only three clear days in all, and we must make the most of them, putting as much into every precious hour as though it were to be our last of joy.

We visit the ship. She invites us to a party, puts on a little bunting for the occasion, and fires a gun. Everybody goes. The Captain is aboard, and makes believe he has never been ashore, shaking hands with us as we climb the side, though he left us but an hour ago. He wears his cocked hat and epaulettes, by special request; his officers, too, have not been sparing of their best. His crew, subdued to the most mealy-mouthed propriety of speech by such glimpses as they have had of the Island life, entertain us with a concert. It is the forecastle fiddle and accordion, with the repertory of the cockney music-halls. This last seems to lose vitality on our pure uplands, and to gasp for the breath of its native fen. Our good folk listen to ‘Blow me up an apple-tree,’ or ‘Did ’em do it, did ’em, did ’em did ’em do?’ believing it must be right, because it is English, yet beginning to doubt—not us, however, but themselves, beautiful first form of the doubt of candid souls! Some of the songs are too far away from them for even the glimmerings of comprehension—the humour of the mere sordidness of life. ‘Penny paper-collar Joe.’—Well, they wear no collars; consequently, they make no paper imitations; consequently, these cost neither a penny nor a pound. For the same reason, ‘O father, dear father, the brokers are in!’ leaves them stone-cold. ‘What are the brokers?’ whispers Victoria to me. How curious to have to expound these elementary things! ‘Hush, Victoria, not now—when they are gone—it would take all day. Listen to the ballads of the people.’ Next it is a fantasia of punning effects:

A sloth is not an idol;

A bride can’t wear a bridle,

Though surely by the (h)altar she is led;

Sixpence is not a tanner;

A bridegroom’s not a banner,

Though the banns he will put up before he’s wed.

I tremble: a little more, and the whole secret will be out, of the murk of mind in which so many of our brethren live, while Lord Tennyson is at the tailor’s about his ermine, and dilettantism attends its monthly meeting of the Browning Society, and leaves them in their pen. A little more, and they may suspect that beauty and taste are all grown for Mayfair by the Jews, just like the big pine apples, and that the poet himself is but one more market gardener for the rich. This lyre of the slums threatens to kill the whole pageant; these sewer gases seem to tarnish the gold lace on the Captain’s hat.

‘How nice it must be to have your English sense of humour,’ says Victoria, ‘and to be able to enjoy all these funny things!’

Saved! Once more they have taken the blame upon themselves.

We wander over the ship; admire the cutlasses in their racks; fit our heads in the muzzle of a big gun, gravely waiting our turn in file, under the orders of a corporal; eat cake in the Captain’s cabin, refuse wine; see everything, ask foolish questions everywhere. Never-to-be-forgotten day! A tar dances a hornpipe for us; three of our girls dance the rhythmic dance of Tahiti for the tars. The Captain asks questions about it, and takes notes, always in view of that report to the Lords of the Admiralty. Some of us are photographed—no, it is getting too maddeningly gay! The Ancient looks grave, and gives the signal for departure. The cutters are lowered; the little whaler takes its freight again; the boats dance us home in the dusk. It is not all over yet; they send up a rocket and a blue light, to say ‘Good-night,’ as we step ashore. Never-to-be-forgotten day!

And there are more such days to come—days when it is our turn, once more, to do the honours. Our girls take the distinguished visitors over the Island—to the cave of the Carvings, the cave of the Watcher, the Point—tending them carefully on ledge and summit and declivity, as my nurse tended me. They try to do without such guidance, and come to grief over it, figuring as meanly as the sinking Cæsar crying for help. The water sports are just as disheartening. What stoutest man among us will follow this sea-nymph, in her sea toilette, plunging into the breakers with a plank in her arms, diving and ducking till she comes to the far side of the hugest wave, then lying flat on the curling crest, and rolling in with it, till it breaks in thunder on the rocks? Always, after the explosion, you look for a mangled body, and you find only a laughing Venus, rising whole and perfect from the foam.

Nature herself smiles benignly on the festival, and contributes to it with great sunsets that touch the summits of grove and mountain with indescribable beauty, and harmonise into perfect peacefulness of association even the tumult of the breakers in their everlasting strife with the shore. There are fishings by torchlight, later on, in the intense shadow of the rocks; above us, the coruscating wall of rock towering to the moonlit heaven; below, the deep, deep water, all black and horrible beyond our tiny circle of flame. The cod flock to the light, like their betters, and get speared with a five-pronged fork for their pains. The girls, who are deftest at the exercise, look not unlike Britannia on the halfpenny, as they sit at ease with their forks, waiting their turn. Now, we paddle out of the shadow into the silvered sea, and so ashore to the green. Then there is another concert (ours this time), with simple songs of meeting and of parting, mostly of the schoolmaster’s writing, quired by the voices of virgins, and, with such rendering—the scene and the hour also taken into account—pure intuitions of the deeper significance of life. Impossible to doubt, after this, that the spirit is to be lord of the house; that living is the finest of the fine arts, or nothing; and that such is the message, delivered through Nature, of the Unknowable behind the Nature veil.

The Ancient is thoughtful all the while, thoughtfullest at the hour of the breaking-up of this great council of the soul, when the councillors wander away in pairs, and are lost in the radiant hazes of the night. It is the last council—to-morrow they go. Our Chief has led the way to his cottage, and has asked the Captain to step in on his way home. ‘I wish you gentlemen might never come here,’ he says pleasantly to his guest, ‘or, if you come, I wish you might never go away. It is a moment’s pastime for some of you, but, one way or other, it lasts some of us a lifetime. “Jack ashore”—I’ve heard of him from my father’s father; but then he goes ashore so often. Our girls never forget—that’s their nature. I’ve known ’em die, sir, of these visits of a Queen’s ship. They think it’s only a beginning—your youngsters think it too, Captain, while the moon shines—I know it’s an ending, for ever and ever. They’ll never meet again, sir, in this world—although, at this very minute, perhaps, they’re a-cutting love-knots all over the place to make believe they will.’

The incidental reference to the love-knots seemed to have set him on a new track of reflection. ‘It’s a pity to spoil the trees for nothing, all the same,’ he murmured, ‘and, if you’ll excuse the liberty, I think I’ll just have a look round.’

He stole out to watch the public property; and, by his orders, no doubt, Victoria, who had lingered in the garden, came in to entertain the guest. Yet Victoria said not a word. She had been unlike her old self all the time of their stay; she had become pensive, melancholy, retiring, joining in none of the diversions, only looking on, or languidly asking a question now and then. I felt what service she required of me, and made the talk—no very difficult matter, for the Captain and I had many acquaintance in common. He knew some of my own people, besides, and was able to tell me that a young pickle of a cousin, who had taken to the Navy, had lately joined the ‘Tanis’ for service on the China station.

‘The “Tanis” was here three years ago,’ said Victoria, very softly, but looking up at the Captain, I thought, in a rather wistful way.

‘I know she was; I boarded her at Portsmouth, when she went out of commission. They all talked of nothing but your little Island, and made me long to come here.’

‘You knew the midshipman of the “Tanis,” perhaps,’ said Victoria, still with her peculiar ‘inward’ air. ‘Where is he now?’

‘What midshipman?’ the Captain very naturally asked.

If Victoria knew the name, she did not care to give it. ‘He was a tall young gentleman,’ she said with more animation, yet with a pause to give the Captain time to collect his thoughts after each item of the inventory; ‘fair—a quick way of speaking—a pleasant laugh. If you ever heard him sing, you would be sure to remember him.’ The Captain shook his head.

‘He fought the battle with the slave-dhow, on the west coast of Africa.’

‘What battle, my dear girl?’

‘The battle,’ she repeated.

‘Do you mean he was in a boat that ran down one of those rascally traders? We do that every day.’

‘He won the battle, that’s all I know,’ said Victoria. ‘He told me so. I believe they called him “Curly” in the mess, because they were jealous of his hair,’ she added, blushing to find herself forced into these particulars, but determined to have him recognised.

‘Curly,’ mused the Captain, doing his very best—‘can’t say I know the name.’

‘He wore a dirk to fight with,’ said Victoria.

‘They all wear dirks,’ returned the Captain.

‘His laugh was so pleasant!’ She was repeating herself beyond question, but, perhaps, it was only to give the Captain one more chance.

‘No doubt, no doubt!’

‘Yet some liked his smile better.’

‘Some like one thing, some another,’ said the Captain—feebly, I thought, but he was hard pressed.

‘I suppose they all wear buttons like this?’ she said, producing the uncouth ornament from her neck.

‘Yes, one middy’s button’s like another middy’s button, you know; that’s the worst of it,’ said the Captain; ‘and it’s just the same with their dirks and their heads of hair. They seem to turn all the young dogs out of one mould. I think they ought to be stamped for identification.’