Front matter (continued 2)

“But they have seen me, I have never omitted to dress myself since I have lived at Fanua.”

“No, no, of course not,” answered the Archdeacon, a little testily, for really the missionary’s simplicity was making him very argumentative and tiresome. “But that is not to the point, for you surely don’t suppose that they look on you as one of themselves. You must clothe that boy, Fortune, you must make him wear trousers and a tunic. And at night he must wear a nightshirt.”

So now, seeing that the idol was gone, Mr. Fortune called Lueli into the hut and began to measure him. He had never learnt tailoring, however he supposed that by taking great care and doing his best he could turn out a suit of clothes which might insinuate the fact of their nakedness to the islanders of Fanua, even if it had no other merit. He measured Lueli, he wrote down the measurements, he made his calculations and drew a sort of ground plan. Then he fetched a roll of white cotton and having laid it upon the floor and tethered it with some books he crawled about on all fours cutting out the trousers and the tunic with a pair of nail-scissors; for he thought that the nightshirt might rest in abeyance for the present.

The nail-scissors could only manage very small bites, and by the time the cutting-out was completed he was rather dizzy and very hot from taking so much exercise on his knees.

“That will do for the present,” he thought, rolling up the pieces. “This afternoon I will visit my parishioners. Perhaps as they have not seen me for a week they will be more inclined to listen to my teaching. And I must keep my eyes open for idols.”

But early on the morrow Mr. Fortune got out the sewing-machine and continued his career as a tailor. The sewing-machine was suffering from the sea-air, it needed a great deal of oil and adjustment before it could be got to run smoothly, but he mastered it in the end and began to sew up the seams. As time went on he grew more and more excited. He worked the treadles faster and faster, he had never, even for the most spirited march, trodden the pedals of his harmonium so frantically; the machine rocked under his zeal and all the time the needle kept darting up and down, piercing the cotton with small accurate stabs in a way that seemed to express a kind of mechanical malevolence. The seams were all finished, the hems were turned up; now it was evening, there was nothing left but the buttons. Those he must put on by hand.

All day Lueli had sat beside him watching his performance with rapture. It was the machine which ravished him, he was not so much interested in the clothes. But when Mr. Fortune called him in a rather solemn voice and began to dress him, holding up the tunic above his head as though it were a form of baptism, he too began to put on looks of solemnity and importance.

The tunic fitted tolerably enough though there was no elegance about it; but alas! the trousers were a sad blow to Mr. Fortune. For he had designed them on a two-dimensional basis, cutting out the back and the front in one operation on a doubled fold of the cloth, and forgetting that even the slimmest boy is bulkier behind than in front; so that when attired in these unfortunate garments it was difficult for Lueli to move and almost impossible for him to sit down. He, in his innocence, thought the trousers all that they should be, and late as it was he wished to run down to the village in order to wake up his friends and show them his fine clothes. But Mr. Fortune bade him take them off. It made his heart bleed to see his boy made such a figure of fun, and when the living Lueli emerged from his white cotton sepulchre he privately called the Archdeacon a fool and foreswore the idea of the nightshirt for good and all. But on the next day and on the next again he struggled to make a practicable pair of trousers, and in the end he produced a pair that were rather on the baggy side perhaps, but still they were tolerable.

Unfortunately by this time his convert’s ardour was somewhat quenched. He had been measured so often, he had stood still to be fitted when he wanted to go fishing, he had had pins run into him and all this had made this particular novelty seem rather a tedious example of his pastor’s odd ways. So though he put on his white raiment at command and walked decorously through the village beside Mr. Fortune to be an object lesson, his demeanour while admirably meek and civil, wasn’t much of an advertisement for the happiness of those who are clothed in the whole armour of God.

The Archdeacon’s theory was not borne out by events. The islanders were too much struck and roused to speculation by the sight of Lueli’s apparel to spare a thought for their own nakedness. At first they were of the opinion that this was some new and powerful taboo invented by the stranger. They shrank back, and averted their eyes as if from some improper spectacle. Lueli’s mother was actually moved to a display of maternal feeling. She rushed weeping from the crowd, hurled herself at Mr. Fortune’s knees and began to implore him not to ruin the boy’s prospects. Disentangling himself a little pettishly from her pleadings Mr. Fortune explained that clothing such as this would do Lueli nothing but good: indeed, she herself would be none the worse for something of the sort. She took him at his word, before he could stay her she had torn the clothes off her son and was squirming into them. She was several sizes too fat and Mr. Fortune saw his seams being rent open in all directions. He had to bribe her with a promise of the blue glass mulberries from his Christmas tree selection before she would consent to undress. Finally he had to ease her out himself. It was a good thing that the Archdeacon was not present, but for all that Mr. Fortune half wished that he had been.

On their return he sewed up the seams once more and called Lueli. The boy began to protest and argue. Then he changed his methods and started coaxing. Mr. Fortune had his own ideas as to how Lueli should be managed. Rising discreetly he opened the harmonium and said that it was time to study another hymn.

That night he lay awake, wondering what he would do if his convert rebelled. He had already decided to drop the Archdeacon’s tactics at the first seemly opportunity: but he wished to choose the opportunity and do the dropping himself. He might have spared himself this anxiety. On the morrow Lueli donned the trousers and the tunic with a very matter of course air, and half an hour later went off to bathe. And it was a sure thing that if formerly he had bathed twice or thrice a day he now bathed as often again, undressing with a bland smile and folding up his white raiment with the utmost neatness. Of course it was a pretext; and the missionary wondered if his charge was learning to be deceitful. But Lueli’s deceitfulness was so very open and unconcerned that it could scarcely be reckoned as the genuine article.

The clothes were always deposited very carefully in some place where they would have every opportunity of happening to fall into the sea. At the end of a week they were so saturated with brine as to be quite unwearable. Exercising his authority Mr. Fortune forbade Lueli to wear them any more.

Lueli would bathe anywhere; he seemed equally happy lolling on the Pacific Ocean or folded up in a pool the size of a bedroom basin with a little waterfall splashing on his head. Mr. Fortune was more ceremonious. It was he who instituted the bathing-pool as a regular adjunct to their life.

About a half mile from the hut and near the cloud observatory was a small rocky cove with a half-moon of white shell-beach and a slope of fine sward running back into the woods. A small rivulet debouched here, very convenient for washing off the sea-salt in; and as the mouth of the cove was guarded by a barrier of coral-reef the water within was almost as still as a lake and so clear that one could look down and see the weeds twenty feet below slowly twirling their vast brown or madder-coloured ribbons, and the fish darting among them.

Mr. Fortune often thought of Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday as he sat on the rocks watching Lueli at his interminable diversions in the pool. Living on an island alone with his convert, spiritually alone at any rate, for though he had not given up hope of the other Fanuans and still visited them pretty frequently he could never feel the kinship with them which he felt so securely with Lueli, the comparison could scarcely fail to occur to him. And he thought gratefully how much happier he was than the other man. He was ideally contented with his island and with his companion, he had come there by his own wish and he liked the life so well that he proposed to continue in it until his death. So little did it distress him to be away from civilization that he was of his own will paring away the slender bonds that tied him to the rest of the world. For after the first visit to St. Fabien he had paid no more, and for the last twelve-month he had not even bestirred himself to write a report to be sent by canoe to the island of Maikalua, where a local steamer touched once a month. But poor Crusoe had no such contented mind. His is a tragic story, albeit considered so entertaining for school-boys: and though his stay on the island taught him to find religion it did not teach him to find happiness, but whether at work or at leisure he was always looking with a restless and haggard stare at the rigid horizon, watching for a sail, enemy or friend, he knew not.

“I see numbers of goats. Melancholy reflections.” What a world of sombre and attentive ennui, thought Mr. Fortune, is summed up in those words! The goats might supply him with suppers and raiment, but not with a cheerful thought. Their antics were wasted on him, he observed them without a smile, without sympathy, as unresponsive to natural history as the traduced Alexander Selkirk of Cowper’s poem; for the real Alexander was a much more congenial character who sometimes danced and sang with his troop of pet animals. True, Robinson was fond of his dog, and kind to him, setting him on his right hand at meal times even after he was grown “very old and crazy.” He also gave a decent burial to the two cats. But these were English animals, fellow-countrymen, assuring relics of the time when he had been knolled to church with other Christians: and it was for this he cherished them, clinging to them with a trivial and desperate affection.

No! In spite of his adventurous disposition and his knowledge of the world, he was not really suited to life on an island, this man who is for all time the representative of island-dwellers. Of course, his island was very different from Fanua: larger, not so beautiful probably; certainly not so convenient. And no doubt the presence of natives would have made a great difference to him. He was the sort of man who would soon marry. “But to be honest with myself,” thought Mr. Fortune, “though I came here to convert the islanders, except for my Friday I don’t think I should miss their company if it were withdrawn. My happiness is of a rather selfish and dream-like kind and I take my life very much for granted. Why, I have not even walked round the island. That would seem strange to some, they would not believe in me. I should seem as absurd and idyllic as those other Robinsons, that Swiss family, who whenever they needed anything found it cast up on shore or growing on a tree. I should be even more unlikely than Leila.”

And he began to ponder on how many years had gone by since he last thought of Leila. She came in a book belonging to his step-sister, and he had read it secretly and rather bashfully because it was a book for girls. But he had been obliged to read on for the subject of islands had always enthralled him. Leila was shipwrecked on a desert island with her papa, her nurse, a spaniel, and a needle. One day the needle was dropped by Leila and lost in the sand. Here was a sad to-do! But the nurse, a very superior politic woman, bade the spaniel Go seek; and presently he uttered a yelp and came running towards them with the needle sticking in his nose.

A very thin story! Yet it might have happened for all that it was so fortunate. Things do sometimes fall out as we would have them, though perhaps not often, for it is always the happy coincidences which are hardest to credit. Man, however gullible and full of high ideals for his own concerns, is suspicious of good-fortune in general. If Robinson had enjoyed himself on the island he would not have been received as somebody in real life.

“But I am in real life,” thought Mr. Fortune, adroitly jerking a limpet to assure himself of being so, “although I am so happy in my lot. I am real too, as real as Robinson. Some people might even say I was more real than he, because my birth is mentioned in the church register, and I used to pay income-tax, whereas he was only entered at Stationers’ Hall. But I don’t agree with them. I may seem to have the advantage of him now, but it is only temporary. In twenty years’ time, maybe less, who will even remember my name?”

From such reflections he would be diverted by Lueli politely handing him a long streamer of sea-weed, dripping and glistening, and freshly exhaling its deep-sea smell—a smell that excites in one strongly and mysteriously the sense of life—or beckoning to him with a brown hand that held a silver fish. These advances meant that Lueli thought it time for Mr. Fortune to bathe too, and to take his swimming-lesson—a turning of the tables which the convert considered extremely amusing and satisfactory. Mr. Fortune was a very poor pupil. As a child he had never done more than to paddle about, and now he was too old to learn easily. He did not lack goodwill or perseverance, but he lacked faith. Faith which can remove mountains can also float. Mr. Fortune had not enough of it to do either. In the depths of his heart he mistrusted the sea, an ambiguous element. The real sea beyond the reef he never dreamed of venturing in, he could imagine how the long nonchalant rollers would pick him up and hurl him with their casual strength upon the rocks. Even in this sheltered pool he could gauge their force; for though scarcely a ripple traversed the surface, to every leisurely surge that crashed on the reef the pool responded throughout its depth with a thrill, a tremor, an impulsion, and the streamers of sea-weed turned inland one after another as though they were obeying a solemn dance music.

But for all his mistrust he enjoyed bathing, indeed the mistrust put a tang into his enjoyment. And with looks of derring-do he struck out into the middle of the pool, his teeth set, his eyes rolling, splashing horribly and snorting a good deal, labouring himself along with uncouth convulsions, while Lueli swam beside him or round him or under him as easily as a fish and with no more commotion, seeming like a fish to propel himself and change his direction with an occasional casual flip.

The further half of the pool, under the wall of rocks whence Lueli used to dive, was extremely deep. Whenever he had got so far Mr. Fortune was afraid and not afraid. He had a natural fear but he had a reasonable trust; for he knew that while Lueli was by he would never drown. It was sweet to him to be thus relying upon his convert—that was part of the pleasure of bathing. On shore it was fit and proper that Lueli should look up to him and learn from him; but every affectionate character even though it be naturally a dominant one, spending itself by rights in instruction and solicitude, likes sometimes to feel dependent. People, the most strong-minded people, perfectly accustomed to life, being ill may discover this; and as they lie there, passive, tended and a little bewildered, may be stirred to the depths of their being by finding themselves wrapped once more in the security of being a good child. Mr. Fortune bathing in the pool did not go quite so far as this. His dependence was not quite so emotional and he was too busy keeping himself afloat to analyse his feelings very carefully; but he liked to depend on Lueli, just as he liked Lueli to depend on him.

Though so ready to learn swimming from Lueli he was less favourably inclined to another of his convert’s desires: which was to oil him. He would not for the world have had Lueli guess it but at the first proposal of these kind offices he was decidedly shocked. Lueli oiled himself as a matter of course, and so did everybody on the island. They also oiled each other. Mr. Fortune had no objection. It was their way. But below all concessions to broadmindedness his views on oiling were positive and unshakable. They were inherent in the very marrow of his backbone, which was a British one. Oiling, and all that sort of thing, was effeminate, unbecoming, and probably vicious. It was also messy. And had Hector and Achilles, Brutus and Alexander detailed before him, all of them sleek and undeniably glistening as cricket-bats, he would have been of the same opinion still.

“No, thank you,” he said, firmly putting aside the flask of scented coco-nut oil (scented, too!). Or: “Not just now, Lueli, I am going for a walk. Exercise is the best thing after bathing.” Or again: “Unfortunately oil has a very painful effect on my skin.”

But he knew all the time that sooner or later he would have to muffle up his prejudices and give in, for every day Lueli began to look, first more hopeful and then more hurt, and was perpetually (if figuratively) standing on his head in the attempt to produce some unguent which could not injure his friend’s sensitive skin. So when he sprained his knee jumping off a rock he welcomed the pretext with feelings intricately compounded of relief and apostasy. For some weeks he confined the area of effeminacy to his left knee, and on one occasion he was base enough to lacerate the flesh in secret with a fish-hook in an attempt to justify the statement about his skin. But Lueli was so piteously full of compunction and so certain that if he climbed a yet higher tree or went in a canoe to another island he would be able to procure a balm entirely blameless that Mr. Fortune was ashamed of the prank and counterfeited no more. Indeed he was beginning to enjoy what he assured himself was not oiling, nothing of the sort, but a purely medicinal process. And by the time he had finished with the sprain it struck him that something of the same kind might be good for his rheumatism. After all there was nothing but what was manly and might quiet him in Elliman’s Embrocation—used extensively by many athletes and as far as he could remember by horse-doctors.

Mr. Fortune kept his rheumatism up and down his back, but inevitably a little of the embrocation slopped over his shoulders. By the end of six months he was stretching himself out for Lueli’s ministrations as methodically as when in the old days at the corner of the Hornsey Parade he offered one foot and then the other to the boot-black. It did him a great deal of good and improved his appearance tenfold, though that did not matter to him. Nothing could make him fat, but he began to look quite well-liking. The back of his hands grew smooth and suent, he ceased to have goose-flesh on his thighs, and one day, regarding himself more attentively than usual in the little shaving mirror, he discovered that somehow his expression had changed. How and why he would not stoop to examine into; but Lueli could have told him. For when he came to the island his face was so parched and wrinkled that it was like a mask of rough earthenware, and his eyes being the only surface in it that looked alive, also looked curiously vulnerable. But now his face had come alive too and instead of wrinkles had rather agreeable creases that yielded and deepened when he laughed. And his eyes were no longer vulnerable, but just kind.

But if Mr. Fortune had altered during his three years on the island, Lueli had altered a great deal more. Not in character though—he was still the same rather casual compendium of virtues and graces; nor in behaviour—for he still hung affectionately and admiringly round Mr. Fortune with a dependence which for all its compliance and intimacy yet remained somehow gaily and coolly aloof, so that the priest felt more and more that what he was rearing up was in truth a young plant, a vine or a morning glory, which while following all the contours of the tree it clings to draws from its own root alone a secret and mysterious life in which the very element of dependence is as secret and mysterious as the rest.

In the beginnings of an intimacy one seems to be finding out day by day more about another person’s inner life and character. But after a certain stage has been reached not only does further exploration become impossible but things which one thought were discoveries become suddenly meaningless and irrevelant and one finds that one really knows nothing about them, nothing at all. They sit beside one, they turn their heads and make some remark, and the turn of the head and the tone of the voice and even what they say seem all familiar and already recognized in one’s heart: but there can be no knowing why they turned and spoke at that moment and not at another nor why they said what they did and not something totally different. Though one might expect this realization to be agonizing it is so much part of the natural course of things that many people do not notice it at all and others, whilst acknowledging that something has happened, account for it perfectly to their own satisfaction by hypotheses which are entirely inapplicable.

Mr. Fortune, for instance, finding that he knew no more of Lueli than at the moment when he first beheld him kneeling on the grass, said to himself that he now knew him so well that he had grown used to him. In the same breath he was able to rejoice in a confidence that no phase of Lueli’s development could catch him napping; and he plumed himself on his acuteness in observing that Lueli was growing older every day and was now of an age to assert himself as a young man.

For all that, Mr. Fortune could never quite compass thinking of him as such. Time in this pleasant island where the seasons passed so lightly and where no one ever showed the smallest sense of responsibility was like a long happy afternoon spent under the acacia with the children. However, Lueli was grown up (or would be, the moment he noticed the fact himself) and something would have to be done about it. Something, particularly—for in matters of this sort it is best to go straight to the point—must be done about providing him with a wife.

A Christian wife. And of late he had made several inspections of the village with this end in view, keeping an open eye for all the young women, scanning them as searchingly as Coelebs, artfully devising the like cheese-paring tests for them and pondering which would be the most eligible for conversion and holy matrimony. There were plenty of charming possibles—by now he had quite got over his empirical aversion to them as bevies—though at first sight they seemed more eligible for holy matrimony than for conversion, for one and all they were smiling, wholesome and inclined to giggle. But of course convertibility was the prime consideration. Perhaps by catching his hare and making a special effort? Mr. Fortune admitted that during this last year his labours as a missionary had been growing rather perfunctory.

Not that he loved his flock less. Rather he loved them more, and to his love was added (and here was the rub) a considerable amount of esteem. For seeing the extraordinarily good hand they made at the business of living to their own contentment—a business that the wise consider so extremely laborious and risky—and reflecting that for all their felicity they yet contrived to do nobody any harm, he felt some diffidence in his mission to teach them to do better.

And then he would pull himself up with a jerk and remember fiercely that they were loose livers and worshipped idols. Moreover they had rejected the word of God, and had made their rejection if anything worse by making it with such flippancy and unconcern. The seed he scattered had fallen into a soil too rich and easy so that the weeds sprang up and choked it. Alas, all their charming good qualities were but a crop of fragrant and exotic groundsel and their innocence was like the pure whiteness and ravishing classical contours of the blossom of the common bindweed, which strangles the corn and looks up from the crime with its exquisite baby face.

Yet after all, he consoled himself by thinking, the apparent reluctance of the Fanuans to become Christians might all be part of God’s dealings. God proceeds diversely in divers places, and where His servants had prepared the ground for wheat He may overrule them and set barley. In some islands He may summon the souls with a loud immediate thunderclap; in others He would go about it differently, knowing the secrets of all hearts. God’s time is the best. And perhaps it was his intention in Fanua to raise up a people from the marriage of Lueli as He had prepared Himself a people in the seed of Abraham and Sarah. At this thought Mr. Fortune went off into one of his dreams and he grew cold with emotion as he gazed into the future, seeing in a vision Lueli’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, mild and blessed, stretching away into the distance like a field of ripened wheat which the wind flows over and the sun shines on. They would remember him, for their fathers would have told them. But no, he thought, there was no need for them to remember him. For it is only the unsatisfied who want to be remembered: old Simeon in the fullness of his joy, beholding the light and the glory had no plea but to depart in peace.

Meanwhile, which girl? Ori’s tall daughter, gentle Vaili, or the little plump one who laughed so much that he could never remember her name? It occurred to him that since it was Lueli’s wife he was choosing Lueli might well be consulted.

Lueli was out fishing. Mr. Fortune sat till dusk by the spring, thinking out what he would say and choosing his metaphors and turns of speech with unusual pleasure and care as though he were preparing a sermon.

The long shadows had merged into shadow and the western sky was a meditative green when Lueli returned. In one hand he held a glistening net of fish and in the other a bough of fruit, so that he looked like some god of plenty, a brown slip of Demeter’s who had not got into the mythology.

Mr. Fortune admired the fish and admired the fruit; but inwardly he admired Lueli more, this beautiful young man smelling of the sea. He gave a little cough and began his speech.

Marriage, he said, was a most excellent thing. It was God’s first institution, and in the world’s loveliest garden the flowers had asked no better than to be twined into a wreath for the bride. Men’s stories commonly end with a marriage, but in God’s story the marriage comes at the beginning. The ancient poets when they would celebrate the sun compared him to a bridegroom, the saints could find no tenderer name for Christ than the spouse of the soul, and in the vision of the last things John the Evangelist saw the church descending out of Heaven like a bride, so that God’s story which begins with a mortal marriage ends with a marriage too, but an immortal one.

What did Lueli think? Did he not agree that marriage was a good thing?

Lueli nodded. His face wore an admiring and far-away expression, as though he were listening to the harmonium.

Marriage, Mr. Fortune continued, is a gracious act, a bestowal, and a token of man’s gratitude to his Maker. When we are happy we needs must give; Lueli himself was always giving, be it fruit or fish, a strand of sea-weed or a flower. These gifts are transient and incomplete; the weed begins to lose its gloss from the moment it is taken out of the ocean, the fish and the fruit (unless, of course, eaten) go bad, the flower is broken from the stem, its petals will discolour and fold up in death; but whoever begets children gives life itself, gives that from which all gifts are drawn.

The procreation of children is the first end for which marriage is ordained. But that was not all. There was also the love of man and woman and the pleasure they had in one another’s company. When he was a young man, Mr. Fortune said, he had often wished for a wife to be merry with. Now he was too old to think much of such things but none the less marriage did not seem to him less desirable, for now he understood as he did not and could not in his youth how sweet it would be to have the faithful company of one with whom he had shared his best days if it were only, as a celebrated English Divine once expressed it in a sermon, that he might have someone to whom he could say: “How our shadows lengthen as our sun goes down!”

Mr. Fortune stopped. Lueli’s silent consenting and his own thought had led him too far. He had not meant to introduce such serious considerations into a discourse on marriage, and the mournful sound of his own voice alone in the shadow of night suddenly revealed to him that he was sorrowful, although he had not thought he was.

“Tell me, Lueli, have you thought at all about whom you would prefer?”

“Vaili is a nice girl and her father would give her a good dowry⁠——”

Lueli pressed up the tip of his nose with the tip of his finger and spoke in a soft considering voice.

“Or there is Fuma, or Lepe who loves singing. But I think Vaili would suit you best, so you had better marry her.”

“I marry! No, no, Lueli, you are mistaken, I was not talking of myself but of you. It is your marriage I was thinking about.”

“Oh! Were you?”

“Wouldn’t you like a wife, Lueli? As you were saying, Vaili is a nice girl. She is gentle and fond of children, we could soon teach her to become a Christian if we gave our minds to it. I’m sure you could be very happy with Vaili.”

A decided shake of the head.

“Fuma, then.”

Another shake.

“Well, what about Lepe or Tialua?”

Mr. Fortune proceeded to recite the names of all the girls on the island, feeling not very respectable as he did so, but going steadfastly on because he was in for it now, he could not go back on his own sermon. But he might as well have recited the Kings of Israel and Judah or the Queens consort of England from Matilda of Flanders down to Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen for all the effect it had on Lueli, who sat beside him listening decorously as though to a lesson and silently waving away each one of Mr. Fortune’s nominees.

“But, Lueli, if you don’t approve of any of these, whom do you want?”

A terrible possibility had flashed upon him. Suppose like the traditional young man, Lueli had placed his affections on some mature married woman? What steps should he take, indeed what steps could he take? He would not even have public opinion on his side.

“I don’t want anyone. I am quite happy as I am.”

“But Lueli, you are young and vigorous. This is not natural and I don’t think it is at all advisable. Why St. Paul himself—” And Mr. Fortune gave a short summary of St. Paul’s views on the marrying or burning question, toning them down a little, for privately he considered the saint’s conclusions a trifle acrid. But there was no shaking Lueli, who continued to asseverate that he found chastity an easier matter than St. Paul supposed, and in any case preferable to the nuisance of taking a wife.

It seemed rather odd and improbable to Mr. Fortune. But he let the matter drop and did not speak of it again. Lueli would change his tune all in good time no doubt. Meanwhile things could go on as before, and certainly nothing could be pleasanter. Of course, he was properly desirous to see the beginnings of that Christian family and he was much looking forward to becoming a godfather. He had already settled that since the proper consecrated kind of mugs were unprocurable the first child should have the tea-pot and the second the sovereign he still kept for luck. After that he supposed he would have to sacrifice the magnifying glass and the tuning fork, and after that again—well, he still had time to think about it. Indeed at present even the tea-pot seemed indefinitely postponed.

He was puzzled by Lueli, but he was not uneasy about him; when he went off by himself he did not speculate as to what he was up to, nor ask strategic questions on his return. He trusted the boy and he also trusted himself. He did not think he could be deceived in Lueli.

And so things went kindly and easily on till the day when he was to find out his mistake.

It was very hot weather. Mr. Fortune had been suffering from a severe headache, and had spent the whole day lying down in the shade with wet cloths on his head. About sundown he decided to go for a short stroll, hoping that the dusk and the cool airs from the sea would refresh him. He called for Lueli to come too, but Lueli was nowhere about, so he set forth alone, crossing the dell and going down toward the sea. As he went he admired the brilliance of the afterglow, a marvellous rose-coloured bloom that seemed to hang on the air like a cloud of the finest metallic dust. Perhaps his eyes were weakened by headache and so more sensitive to light than usual; but as he roamed up and down the shadowy strand, at each turn that brought him to face the west he marvelled, thinking that in all his evenings at Fanua he had never beheld the sky so vibrating with colour nor so slow to fade; for sunsets in the tropics are fleeting things, but to-night there was a strange steadfastness in the west. He admired it so much that it was not possible for him to admire it for very long, and there was still light in the sky as he turned homeward.

Ordinarily he kept to the same routes as faithfully as though they had been ruled for him with red ink. But to-night, lost in thoughts of he knew not what, he strayed from his direction and found himself approaching a little grove of coco-palms. They grew prettily together, laced with creepers and thickened with an undergrowth of ferns; there was something about the innocence of their arrangement which reminded him of an English copse, and the resemblance was increased by a little path that turned and twisted its way in among them. But in an English copse even the slenderest path is wide enough for two lovers to walk it with their arms about each other, while this path was so narrow that it was clearly the path of one who visited the thicket alone.

A parrot flew off from a bough above his head, uttering a loud cry. Mr. Fortune roused himself from his dream. He was not in an English copse, looking for bluebells and being careful not to tread on a nightingale’s nest, he was in a grove of coco-palms on the island of Fanua, an island in the midst of the Pacific ocean like an island in a story book. And he was looking for—? He was not looking for anything; for in all his time at Fanua though he admired the flowers he had rarely picked any. It did not occur to him to do so. One picks only the flowers that one learned to pick as a child—cowslips and primroses and cuckoo-pint, and pale starwort that grows in the dusty summer hedge and fades before one can carry it home.

Lueli was always picking flowers. Perhaps he came here for them, perhaps he had been along this path but an hour ago? At any rate some flower gatherer had; for lying at his feet Mr. Fortune observed a dark-coloured blossom like a stain. He stooped and picked it up. Yes, it was freshly gathered, it had not begun to wither yet, but it was moist with dew and felt cold and forsaken.

Presently Mr. Fortune came on a trail of lilac-flowered creeper caught up on a fern. He disentangled this and carried it along with him.

“Extravagant creature!” he said; for now he felt sure that he was on Lueli’s track. “I could make myself a bouquet out of what he spills and scatters.”

He still followed the path, wondering what next he would pick up. A little further on he perceived a whole garland lying on a patch of greensward. He was in the heart of the little wood and here the path seemed to end.

“I declare that he’s still child enough to be playing at houses. And this is the young man I’ve been trying to find a wife for!”

It looked exactly as though Lueli had been playing at house. The ferns and bushes were hung with trailing sprays of blossom which looped them into a pretence of being walls, and in the midst beside the garland was a platter arranged with fruits and leaves.

“What a child!” exclaimed the priest. “Yet after all it may not be Lueli. Why should I be so sure that this is his fancy-work?”

In an instant he was to be made quite sure. Something slim and dusky and motionless was reared up behind the platter of fruit. He looked closer. It was dreadfully familiar. He snatched it up and stared close into its face, a face he had seen before. And trampling on the garland he stood glaring at Lueli’s idol, which looked back at him with flowers behind its ears.

It was quite obvious, quite certain. There was no chance of being mistaken, no hope of doubt. For all these years Lueli had been playing a double game, betraying him, feigning to be a Christian, and in secret, in the reality of secretness, worshipping an idol.

“It’s my fault,” said the priest, speaking aloud because of his desperate loneliness. “Not his at all, nor yours either,” and he gave the idol a sort of compassionate shake.

“I have deluded myself wilfully, I have built my house on the sand....”

“I have forgotten the fear of God,” he went on. “All this time I have gone on pretending that religion is a pleasant, is a gentle thing, a game for good children.”

“But it is an agony!” he suddenly shouted out.

There was no echo. The sultry twilight was closing in on him like a dark fleece. He could scarcely see the idol now, but in his mind’s eye he could see it, a face coldly and politely attentive, and the narrow polished shoulders over which a doll’s necklace slipped and sidled as it shook with his trembling hands.

“It is torments, wounds, mutilation, and death. It is exile and weariness. It is strife—an endless strife—it is bewilderment and fear and trembling. It is despair.”

Turning abruptly he left the thicket by the path which had led him in, and stumbling in the dark and feeling his body heavy and cold in the hot night he made his way to the hut.

It was all dark; but that was no reason why Lueli should not be within, for he had been so often warned to handle the lamp carefully that he was a coward about it and never touched it if he could avoid doing so.

Mr. Fortune threw down the idol and lit the lamp from his tinder-box. Then he looked round. Lueli was curled up on his mat. He had been asleep and now he opened his eyes and looked drowsily at his friend. Mr. Fortune said nothing. He stood in the centre of the hut under the hanging lamp and waited for Lueli to notice the idol.

Lueli parted his lips. He was just about to speak when he saw what lay on the ground. He raised his eyes to Mr. Fortune’s countenance, for a moment he put on a confused smile, then with an ill-feigned yawn he turned over and pretended to have fallen asleep again.

“Deceit,” said Mr. Fortune, as though he were reading from a note-book.

A faint grunt answered him.

“Lueli, my poor Lueli, this is useless. You can’t get out of it like this. Get up and tell me what it is that I have found.”

Lueli sat up. The pupils of his eyes were still distended by sleep and this gave him a frightened look; but his demeanour was perfectly calm.

“That?”

He shook his head as if to say that he really couldn’t tell what it was.

“Look again.”

Mr. Fortune spoke curtly, but it was from pure sorrow.

“It is an idol.”

“Yes, and it is your idol.”

Lueli gave a sigh of distress. Mr. Fortune knew exactly how much that was worth. Lueli hated any unpleasantness.

“You don’t ask me how I came by it. I found it in a thicket near the beach, the lonely one. And there were flowers round it, and offerings of fruit, and look, there are flowers stuck behind its ears.”

“So there are.”

“Is this your doing? Why do I ask you, for I know it is. Lueli, you mustn’t lie to me. I implore you not to lie. Is this your doing, have you been worshipping this object?”

“I picked the flowers.”

Mr. Fortune groaned. Then he sat down like one who foresees a long and weariful business before him. Lueli edged himself a little nearer. He had rumpled up his brow into a grimace of condolence, he looked like a beautiful and sympathetic marmoset.

He said in a voice at once tender and sly:

“But why are you unhappy? I have done nothing, it is only my idol, and I just happened to pick it a few flowers. That is all.”

“Listen. I will tell you why I am unhappy. When I came to Fanua I came to teach you not to worship idols but to worship God. I came to teach you all, but the others would have none of me. You were my only convert, you received my teaching, I thought you loved it, and I trusted you. Now I have found out my mistake. If you worship your idol still I am to blame. It is my fault. If I had done my duty by you you would have known better. But I have not shown you the true God, so you have kept to the old one, the false one, a wooden thing, a worship so false that you can treat him like a toy. As I came back to-night I was tempted with the thought that perhaps after all your fault was only childishness. And for a moment (to spare myself and you) I had half a mind to pretend to God that your idol was only a doll. But we will have none of that.”

Now he spoke sternly, and at the last words he beat one fist against the other. Lueli started.

“I blame myself, I say, not you. I should have been on my guard. When I saw that thing four years ago I should have acted then. But I shut my eyes (I am most horribly to blame) and now, see what has come of it. You are in fault too, for you have been deceiving me. But I know you are rather cowardly and very affectionate; your deceitfulness after all is not so surprising.”

He could have gone on talking like this for some time and finding it soothing, but he knew by experience that Lueli would find it soothing too. He raised his eyes from his heavily folded hands and looked at the boy. Sure enough, there was the familiar expression, the lulled face of one who listens to a powerful spell.

He stopped short, nerved himself to deliver the blow and said in a slow dull voice:

“You must destroy your idol. You had better burn it.”

With a vehement gesture of refusal Lueli sprang to his feet.

“Burn it,” repeated the priest.

Such a wild and affronted antagonism defied him from the tautened brown body and the unswerving, unbeholding gaze that for a moment the priest was appalled. But his looks gave back defiance for defiance. They bore the other’s down, and averting his eyes Lueli gave a sudden shrug and made as though to walk out of the hut.

Mr. Fortune was between him and the door. He jumped up and barred the line of retreat. Lueli wavered. Then he went back to his corner and sat down without a word. Mr. Fortune half expected him to weep, but he did nothing so obliging.

For a good hour Mr. Fortune talked on, commanding, reasoning, expostulating, explaining, persuading, threatening. Lueli never answered him, never even looked at him. He sat with downcast eyes in utter stubbornness and immobility.

The night was sultry and absolutely still. Mr. Fortune dripped with sweat, he felt as though he were heaving enormous boulders into a bottomless pit. He continued to heave his words into silence, a silence only broken by the hissing of the lamp, or the creak of his chair as he changed from one uneasy position to another, but the pauses grew longer between each sentence. He was weary, and at his wit’s end. But he could see nothing for it but to go on talking. And now he became so oppressed by the silence into which he spoke that he could foresee a moment when he would have to go on talking because he would be afraid to hold his tongue.

A frightful imagination took possession of him: that Lueli was become like his idol, a handsome impassive thing of brown wood, that had ears and heard not, that had no life in its heart. Would nothing move him? He would have been thankful for a look of hate, for a curse or an insult. But with the same show of inanimate obstinacy Lueli continued to bend his look upon the ground, a figure too austere to be sullen, too much withdrawn into itself to be defiant.

Mr. Fortune heard himself say at the top of his voice: “Lueli! Don’t you hear me?”

It seemed that his outcry had broken the spell. Lueli suddenly looked up and began to listen, to listen with such strained, absorbed, animal attention that Mr. Fortune found himself listening too. There was a sound: a sound like a violent gust of wind strangely sweeping through the motionless night. It came rapidly, it came near, brushing its way through the tree-tops. Like an actual angry presence the wind came vehemently into the hut and as though an invisible hand had touched it Mr. Fortune saw the hanging lamp begin to sway. It swayed faster and faster, widening its sweep at every oscillation; and while he stared at it in a stupor of amazement he felt the earth give a violent twitch under his feet as though it were hitting up at him and he was thrown to the ground. There was a noise of rending and bellowing, the lamp gave a last frantic leap, again he felt the ground buffet him like the horns of a bull and then with a crash and a spurt of fire the roof of the hut caved in.

At the same moment he felt something large and heavy topple across his body.

He could not move and he could not think. He saw flames rising up around him and heard the crackle of the dried thatch. Again the ground began to quiver and writhe beneath him, and suddenly he knew what was happening—an earthquake!

The bulk that lay on top of him was the harmonium. He was pinned beneath it—presently the flames would reach him and he would be burnt to death.

He felt no kind of fear or emotion, only a calm certainty as to what was happening, and with it a curious detached satisfaction at being able to understand it all so well. The flames would enclose him and he would be burnt to death, unless the ground opened first and swallowed him up. Then he remembered Lueli. What of him? He struggled again, but he could not get out from under the harmonium. The struggle reminded him that he was a human being, not only an intelligence but a creature defencelessly sentient that must perish by fire. Fear came on him, and self-pity, and with it a sort of pique; for he said to himself: “I know now he never cared for me. He has made off and left me to burn, just what I should expect.” And at the same moment he heard himself cry out: “Save yourself, Lueli! Be quick, child! Never mind me, I am all right.” And then, seeing Lueli bending over him, he said in a voice of command: “Lueli, I tell you to save yourself. Get out of this while there’s time.”

He saw Lueli in the light of the flames, he saw him put his shoulder against the harmonium and begin to heave it up; he saw the muscles leap out along the thrusting body—all with a sort of anger and impatience because his friend would not attend to what he was saying. Even when it was jolted backward and he was freed he lay where he had fallen, half-stunned, with no definite thought except to compel Lueli to obey him and get away before the next tremor sent the whole hut crashing down on them.

He felt Lueli put his arms round his shoulders, shaking him and hauling him on to his feet, and he noticed with surprise how stern the boy looked, not frightened, but extraordinarily stern, like a stranger, like an angel. The earth began to quake again, another sheaf of thatch slid from the roof and the flames leaped up to seize upon it. Mr. Fortune suddenly came out of his stupor. Stumbling and losing his footing on the wavering floor he caught hold of Lueli’s arm and together they ran out of the hut.

Three times in crossing the dell they were thrown to the earth. There was something horribly comic in this inability to stand upright. It was as though they were being tossed in a blanket. They did not speak to each other; all thought of speech was forbidden by the appalling novelty of the uproar that was going on, rumblings and bellowings underground, trees beating against each other or crashing to the ground, the cries of terror-struck creatures. Lueli dragged him on, hastening toward the mountain. There was a little path that led up by the ravine, difficult to mount at any time and more difficult still in an earthquake.

“Why do you go this way?” Mr. Fortune asked, when the tremor had subsided enough for him to be able to remember how to speak. Lueli turned on him a face of terror.

“The sea,” he said. “The sea.”

Mr. Fortune had forgotten the sea. Now he remembered what he had read in books of adventure as a boy: how after an earthquake comes a tidal wave, a wall of water frantically hurling itself upon the land. And not daring to look behind him he followed Lueli up the steep path as though the sea were at his heels.

At last they came out upon a little grassy platform, overlooking the ravine. They were only just in time, for the earthquake began again. They sat side by side, holding on to one another. Mr. Fortune discovered that it was a brilliant and impassive moonlight night. He looked toward the ocean. It seemed strangely calm, incredibly vast, more solid than the tormented earth. A glittering path of silver across it reflected the moon.

They were close to the cataract. To-night, instead of the usual steady roar of falling water, the noise was coming in curious gouts of sound, now loud, now almost nothing. He turned his eyes and saw the slender column of falling water all distorted, and flapping like a piece of muslin in a draught. For some reason this sight was overwhelmingly piteous and a sort of throe hollowed him as if he were going to cry.

At every shock thousands of birds flew up from the tossing tree-tops. In wild excitement they circled overhead, flying in droves, sweeping past with a whirr of innumerable wings, soaring higher and higher, then suddenly diving aslant, shot from the wake of their own vortex. Their continual angry clamour, passionate and derisive, swayed above the uproar of trampling earth and clashing forest. One bird came volleying so close to Mr. Fortune that he saw its beak flash in the moonlight and put up his hand to shield his face. As it passed it screamed in his ear like a railway whistle. He thought: “I should like to scream like that.”

Although he and Lueli sat holding on to each other, Mr. Fortune had no sense of companionship. In this appalling hour there did not seem to be anyone alive save himself. He was the Last Man, alone in a universe which had betrayed him, abandoned on the face of an earth which had failed under his feet. He was isolated even from himself. There was no Mr. Fortune now, a missionary who had been a bank-clerk, an Englishman and a member of the Church of England. Such a one would have been behaving quite differently. At the best he might have been behaving much better, he might have been in the village, keeping troth with his fellow-men; at the least he would have been trembling for his own skin and calling on God. But this man sat on the reeling mountain-side with but one sensation: a cold-hearted excitement, a ruthless attentive craving that at the height of horror would welcome another turn of the screw, another jab of the spur, another record broken.

The shocks were now coming so continuously that it was scarcely possible to say when one followed another; but he went on keeping count and comparing them, and if they seemed to be slackening off he was disappointed. He sat with his eyes shut, for so he could both feel and hear more unmitigatedly. At intervals he looked out seaward for the coming of the tidal wave. But the sea was always calm, as coldly calm as himself and a great deal more solid. “Yet it must come,” he told himself. “It is certain to come.” And after a terrific shock, accompanied by sounds of rending and shattering as though the whole island were splitting asunder, he thought with certainty: “It will come now,” and opened his eyes once more.

Something had happened. There was a difference in the air, in the colour of the night. Had dawn come already? His faculties were so cramped with attention that he could scarcely receive a new sensation, still less analyse it. Yet he felt that there was something he must account for, some discrepancy between this light and the light of dawn. The sun rose—yes, the sun rose in the east, over the sea: but this light seemed to come from behind him. He turned and saw the sky lit up with the light of fire.

“The mountain is on fire!” he cried out. And at the sound of his own words he suddenly understood what had happened. The mountain was on fire. Its ancient fires had come back to it, Fanua was once more an active volcano.

Below the bed of the cold and heavy sea, below the foundations of the great deep, into an unimaginable hell of energy and black burning those fires had withdrawn. They had rejoined the imprisoned original frenzy that lies in the heart of the earth, working and wallowing in unknown tides, and once more the fiery spring had mounted, revolting against the encompassing pressure, fumbling in darkness, melting its way, flooding along its former channels until now it flared on the crest of the island, brightening and brightening upon the sky, a glow of such intense and vivid rose-colour that by contrast the moonlight turned to an icily-piercing blue. Cloud upon cloud of smoke rolled upwards and at every fresh surge of fire the vault of heaven appeared to grow more vast and haughty, and the stars seemed recoiling into space. The mountain shouted and bellowed as though it were triumphing because its fires had come back to it.

Mr. Fortune leapt to his feet. He waved his arms, he stood on tip-toe in order to see better. Though the next moment might engulf him he was going to make the most of this. But there was no need to be so provident, so economical. This bonfire had been preparing for decades, it would not burn out in a minute or two. Realizing this he sat down again and relinquished himself to an entire and passive contemplation, almost lulled by the inexhaustible procession of fire and smoke, warming his mind at the lonely terrific beauty of a mountain burning by night amid an ocean.

Clouds began to gather at daybreak. Only a pallor showed where the sun groped upwards among them, and the sea which but a few hours ago had looked so lustrous, and solid like a floor of onyx, was now pale and weltering.

The earthquake seemed to be over; sometimes the ground gave a sort of a twitch and a tremble like an animal that dreams a bad dream; but this happened at longer and longer intervals and each disturbance was fainter than the last. Except for the plume of foul smoke that issued from the crater and sagged over the mountain-side as it was checked by the morning airs there was nothing to distinguish this daybreak from any other, unless, thought Mr. Fortune, that it was a peculiarly dreary one.

He was chilled with watching, and oppressed with the indigestion common to those who have sat up all night. He was also bruised with so much falling about, and his ribs ached from being crushed under the harmonium. But his excitement which in spite of all the adventures of the last twelve hours was still a deferred excitement, unsatisfied and defrauded of its prey, wouldn’t let him settle down into a reasonable fatigue, but still kept his muscles strung up and his vision strained.

It seemed an age since he had last thought of Lueli. He looked at him now as though from a long way off and rather crossly and it seemed as though his vague irritation were in a way to be justified, for Lueli lay as though asleep.

That Lueli should sleep while he waked was enough. It showed that he was inconsiderate, incapable of true sympathy, an inferior being who hadn’t got indigestion. Mr. Fortune heaved a loud short sigh. Lueli didn’t stir. No doubt of it. He was asleep. He lay so that Mr. Fortune could only see the curve of his cheek and half his mouth, which bore the sad resigned expression of those who slumber. But bending a little over him to make sure, Mr. Fortune discovered that the boy’s eyes were open and fixed mournfully upon the empty and tormented sea. There was something so devastated about that blank and unmoving gaze that the priest was awed. Why did Lueli look so old, so set and austere? The face so well known seemed that of a stranger: and suddenly he recalled Lueli bending over him in the burning hut as he lay helpless under the harmonium, and remembered that then his face had worn the same look, grave and stern.

Lueli had saved his life at the risk of his own, he had shown that greatest love which makes a man ready to lay down his life for his friend. And now the rescued one sat coldly beside the rescuer eyeing his unknown sorrow, and but a moment ago seeking some pretext for scorning and disliking him.

“What a hateful creature I am,” thought Mr. Fortune, “and how this earthquake has shown me up! But Lueli has behaved well throughout, he saved my life, he kept his head, he didn’t want to cheer and behave like a tripper when the mountain exploded.” And in his thoughts he begged Lueli’s pardon.

Still Lueli lay beside him, staring out to sea with the same mournful look. His silence was like a reproach to Mr. Fortune. It seemed to say: “You have slighted me unjustly and now I must forget you.” Mr. Fortune waited patiently, he had a confused idea that his patience now must repair his former impatience. But at length his love could endure no longer, and he laid his hand gently on Lueli’s arm. There was no response. Lueli didn’t even turn his eyes.

“He is tired out,” thought the priest. “That is why he looks so miserable.” He said aloud: “Wake up, Lueli, you will make yourself ill if you lie there any longer so still on the cold ground. Wake up. Rouse yourself. It is all over now.” And he gave him an encouraging slap on the shoulder.

At last Lueli sighed and stretched himself and turned and met Mr. Fortune’s anxious gaze.

“I think the earthquake is over,” he remarked in an everyday voice.

“Just what I said a minute ago,” thought Mr. Fortune. “But he doesn’t know I said it. What can he have been thinking of that he didn’t hear me?”

He still felt slightly worried about the boy.

“We had better walk about a little,” he said. “Ow! I’ve got cramp.”

Taking Lueli’s arm he staggered down the little rocky path. The morning was cold and now it began to rain. The rain was dirty rain, full of smuts and fine grit from the volcano. It might have been raining in London or Manchester.

Exercise soon restored Mr. Fortune to an ordinary frame of mind. He looked with interested horror at the wood they passed through. Many trees were uprooted or hung tottering with their roots half out of the ground, the shrubs and grass were crushed and trampled, boughs and torn creepers were scattered everywhere. It was as though some savage beast had run amuck through the glades, tearing and havocking and rooting up the ground with its horns. Lueli picked up a dead parrot, and once they skirted by a swarm of angry bees. Their hive had been broken in the fall of its tree, the honeycomb was scattered on the grass and the affronted insects were buzzing hither and thither, angrier than ever because now the rain was making its way through the dishevelled green roof.

“But it will soon quench them,” thought Mr. Fortune. “And if some bees and some parrots are the only deaths by this earthquake we shall be well out of it.”

He was uneasy about the villagers, all the more so because he had run away from them in their hour of peril. Also he wanted to talk to someone about the stream of lava which he knew would soon flow down from the crater. Provided it only flows to the south, he thought. He questioned Lueli but could learn nothing; Lueli had never been in an earthquake before, he had heard the old men of the island talking about them but the last earthquake had happened long before his day.

On nearing the village Mr. Fortune heard a great hub-bub, but it was impossible to discover from the noise of everyone talking at once whether they were lamenting or merely excited; all he could conclude was that at any rate they were not all dead.

When he appeared, with Lueli following sedately behind, a crowd of gesticulating islanders rushed forward, all waving their arms and shouting. The thought leapt up in his mind: “Suppose they think that I am responsible for this earthquake? Perhaps they will kill me to appease the mountain!” He had never felt less in the mood for martyrdom. The last twelve hours had given him more than enough to cope with. Yet even if the fervour of his faith were lacking he could make a shift to die decently: and he stiffened himself and went forward. But Lueli? Suppose they wanted to martyr him too? No! That he would not allow. While there was a kick left in him he would see to that. He glanced back as though to reassure him, but as he caught sight of him he remembered that Lueli was not a Christian, nor ever had been one. What a sell if they should sacrifice him before there was time to explain! Well, this made it even more urgent a matter to defend him: martyrdom was one thing, miscarriage of justice quite another.

But Mr. Fortune need not have been agitated. The islanders had no intention but to welcome him and Lueli, and to rejoice round them over their safety; which they did with the pleasanter excitement and conviction since naturally, in the emotions of the night they had not given them a thought till now.

Half smothered and quite deafened, Mr. Fortune pushed through the throng, saying: “Where is Ori?” For having lived so long on the island he had fallen into the proper respect for a chief, and depended on Ori rather more than he would have liked to admit. “He is almost like another European,”—so the priest explained to himself. At this juncture Ori was behaving very much like an European, for he was partaking of one of those emergency breakfasts, sketchy in form but extremely solid and comprehensive in content, with which the white races consummate and, as it were, justify any fly-by-night catastrophe. Seeing Mr. Fortune he politely invited him to sit down and take a share. “But the flow of lava?” enquired Mr. Fortune, wiping his mouth. “Do you think it will come this way?” Ori took another handful of stirabout. “There are no signs of it so far and if it comes this way it will not come here yet.”

“But do you think it will come this way?”

“My god says, No.”

When breakfast was finished Ori got up and went off with the other men of consequence to make an inquisition into the damage done by the pigs. They had come bolting down from the woods and wrought even more serious havoc than the earthquake, which had only shaken down a house or two, whereas the pigs had trespassed into every enclosure and eaten all the provisions. Mr. Fortune felt a little slighted that he was not invited to go too. Apparently Ori did not quite regard him as another Fanuan. “Oh well,” he said. “Perhaps they meant it politely, seeing that I had not finished my breakfast.” But though he felt as if he were hungry he had no real appetite, and rising he prepared to walk back to his hut.

It was as though the earthquake had literally shaken his wits. All his recollections were dislodged and tumbled together, he knew they were there somewhere, but he could not find them, just as he had mislaid the discovery of overnight until, turning to view Lueli as a possible martyr, he beheld and recognized him as the idolater he was and always had been. Now he was walking to the hut in the same kind of oblivion. He must have remembered the lamp tossing its flame up to the roof, the burning sheaves of thatch falling down around him, for he had a very clear vision of Lueli’s face bending over him, so violently modelled by the flames that it had looked like the face, sad and powerful, of a stranger, of an angel. But his thoughts went no further; and even when the smell of charred wood came sadly to his nostrils through the falling rain he did not put two and two together.

“I wonder if those pigs have messed up my place too,” he said. A sigh out of the air answered him. He had not noticed till then that Lueli was following.

“Poor Lueli, you must be so tired!” There was no answer and still the boy lagged behind. He must be tired indeed. Mr. Fortune stopped. He was about to speak once more, bidding Lueli to lean on him and take heart, when suddenly the boy shot past him, running desperately, and whispering to himself as he ran as though he were imploring his own mind.

Mr. Fortune hastened after him. Would all this strangeness, this bewilderment, this nightmare of familiar living confounded and turned backward never come to an end? He hastened on into the smell of burning and pulling aside the drooping fronds of a banana tree which, uprooted, had fallen and lay across the pathway like a screen, he beheld the ruins of the hut.

One wall was still standing, a few pale flames licking wistfully over it. The rest was charred logs and hummocks of grey ash, sizzling under the rain—for now it was raining more and more heavily. Looking round on the devastation he began to recognize the remains of his belongings. Those shreds of tinder were his clothes. That scrap of shrivelled leather, that wasting impalpable bulk of feathery print was his Bible; there lay the medicine chest and there the sewing-machine, and this, this intricate ruin of molten metal tubes, charred rubber and dislocated machinery was the harmonium, its scorched ivory keys strewed round about it like teeth fallen from a monstrous head.

Lueli was there, but he seemed to have no thought for the unfortunate priest amid the ruins of his home. Wading among the hot ashes, crouching close to the wreckage, turning over this and that with rapid and trembling hands, Lueli was searching with desperate anxiety for—Mr. Fortune knew not what. At length he gave a bitter cry and cast himself upon the ground.

Instantly Mr. Fortune was kneeling beside him, patting his shoulder, trying to lift the averted head.

“What is it, Lueli? What is it, my dear, dear friend?”

Lueli sat up and turned on him a face discoloured and petrified into an expression of such misery that he could hardly endure to look at it.

“What is it? Are you hurt? Are you ill?”

The expression never changed.

“Are you frightened, Lueli? Has it upset you to find our home burnt to the ground? But never mind! We will soon have another, it is nothing to grieve for.”

He would have said that Lueli did not hear him, so unmoving he sat, so utterly aloof, but that at these last words a very slight smile of scorn quivered on the dry lips.

Then Mr. Fortune remembered. He hung his head and when he spoke again it was with the grave voice in which we address the bereaved.

“Is it your god you were looking for? Is he gone?”

Lueli did not answer. But it was clear that he had both heard and understood, for he fixed his eyes on the priest’s face with the look of an animal which knows itself at man’s mercy but does not know what man intends to do to it.

“My poor Lueli! Is that it?... Is it so dreadful? Yes, I know it must be, I know, I know. I would do anything to comfort you, but I cannot think now, I can only tell you how I pity you with my whole heart. I do, indeed I do. Believe me, though I told you to burn your god, yet at this moment, if it were possible for me, I think I would even give it to you again.”

He spoke very slowly, scarcely daring to lift his gaze to the sorrow which sat beside him, not answering, not crying out, meek with the meekness of despair. And still Lueli listened, and still looked, with his expression wavering between timidity and antagonism.

“Lueli, I spoke very harshly to you last night, not like a Christian, not as one sad human being should speak to another. In blaspheming against your god I blasphemed against my own. And now I can’t comfort you. I don’t deserve to. I can only sit beside you and be sorry.”

Lueli never answered and Mr. Fortune acted his last words, sitting mournfully beside him in the rain. After an hour or so Lueli began to topple forward, then suddenly he lay down and fell asleep.

Now Mr. Fortune had time to think, and though he was dog-tired think he must. For after awhile Lueli would wake again, and then the missionary must have some settled reasonable comfort for him, some plan of consolation. On the face of it nothing could be clearer. He should say something of this sort: “Your god, Lueli, was only made of wood, perishable and subject to accidents, like man who is made of flesh. He is now burnt, and his ashes are lost among the other ashes. Now will you not see that my God is a better God than yours, and turn to Him? For my God is from everlasting, even though the earth shake He cannot be moved.”

Yes, that was the sort of thing to say, but he felt a deep reluctance to saying it. It seemed ungentlemanly to have such a superior invulnerable God, part of that European conspiracy which opposes gun-boats to canoes and rifles to bows and arrows, which showers death from the mountains upon Indian villages, which rounds up the negro in an empire and tricks him of his patrimony.

Mr. Fortune remembered the Man of Sorrows. Would Lueli accept in the place of his wooden god a God that had once been made flesh? In the old days Lueli had enjoyed hearing about Jesus, though Mr. Fortune had always suspected him of preferring Joshua. Many, very many must have taken Jesus to their hearts out of pity; following the example of the woman who washed His feet although to her they were most likely but the feet of a wayfaring man. But it was rare to find a Polynesian accepting Him for these mortal motives, they themselves were not sorrowful enough. Probably despite the loss of his god Lueli would still prefer the more robust and stirring character of Joshua.

The trumpet that shall awaken the dead with the sanction of the resurrection is louder than all the rams’ horns that blew down Jericho. As an honest priest it was Mr. Fortune’s duty to preach, not only Christ crucified but also Christ arisen to comfort His followers awhile with neighbourly humanity ere He ascended to His Father. If this were all, it might suit Lueli very well: but in a twinkling it would lead him on to the Trinity, a mysterious sign revolving in the heavens from everlasting, a triangle that somehow is also a sphere. And so he was back again where he started from, embarrassed with a God so superior to poor Lueli’s that to insist upon him now would be heartless boasting, would be exploiting an unfair advantage, wouldn’t be cricket.

“If I were a proper missionary,”—he burst out in a cross voice. And then with a wry grin he added: “It doesn’t look as though I were any sort of missionary. Lord, what a mess I’ve made of it!”

He had indeed. The mess amid which he sat was nothing to it. Disconsolately, he looked at his watch. It had stopped. In the stress of overnight he had forgotten to wind it up, and now it recorded the epoch at which his last link with European civilization had been snapped—eight hours thirty-five minutes. It could not be much later than that now. But a miss is as good as a mile, and for the rest of his sojourn on the island, for the rest of his life maybe, he would not know what o’clock it was. This circumstance, not serious in itself and not to be compared with the loss of the medicine chest or his books, upset him horribly. He felt frightened, he felt as small and as desperate as a child lost. “I must set it as best I can,” he thought. “After all, time is a convention, just like anything else. My watch will measure out my days and remind me to be up and doing just as well though it be a little askew. And no doubt I shall die at my appointed hour however erroneously I reckon to it.”

But what time was it? The sky was overcast, he could not guess by the sun and he could not guess by his own time-feeling either, for his body had lost touch with ordinary life. He sat debating between nine-seventeen, five past ten, ten forty-three, eleven-twenty—indecisive times which all seemed reasonably probable, and noon exactly, which was bracing and decisive, a good moment to begin a new era—but too good to be true. At last he settled on ten twenty-five; but even so he still delayed, for he felt a superstitious reluctance to move the hands and so to destroy the last authentic witness his watch could bear him. Five minutes, he judged, had been spent in this weak-minded dallying: so resolutely he set the hands to ten-thirty and wound the poor machine up. It began to tick, innocently, obediently. It had set out on its fraudulent career.

It was a good watch, painstaking and punctual, its voice was confident, it had an honest face; but henceforth its master had lost his trust in it, and though he wore it (like a wife) at bed and board and wound it up regularly and hung it on a tree when he went bathing, yet he never could feel it was his true wife (watch, I mean) again.

Still Lueli slept.

“I make all this fuss,” thought Mr. Fortune. “I even feel helpless and abandoned, because I have lost my reckoning of time. How much worse to lose one’s God!”

Thus the watch diversion over and done with, and the new time being ten-thirty-one, he was back on the old problem. What could he do for poor Lueli who had lost his god? “And it was for me that he lost it,” he thought, with a poignancy of feeling that was almost irritation. “He might have picked up his god and run out of the hut with it, but he would not leave me under the harmonium.” It was heroic, desperately heroic.... Yet there might have been time to save both? A god that could be picked up in one hand. Had Lueli in the flurry of the moment forgotten that the idol lay on the floor of the hut? But No, one would not forget one’s god, thought he, even in an earthquake.

Now he could understand why Lueli had seemed so cold in the early morning, so aloof and unlike his usual self. When he had lain staring out to sea with that strange expression he had been tasting what it feels like to be without a god. And when they approached the hut that was why he had lagged behind until the last explosion of hope had sent him running to seek his god among the wood-ashes. Now he was asleep. But he would not sleep much longer. Already he had stirred once or twice, and sighed, as those do who must soon awaken. And still Mr. Fortune had not settled how to deal with him when he awoke. Would the Man of Sorrows fit his sorrowful case, He who had once cried out, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani?” Or would it be better to try Jehovah, a tribal character whose voice was in the clouds, whose arrows stuck very fast? The worst of it was that Lueli knew all about them already. For three years he had been living on the terms of the greatest intimacy with them, he was even at home with the Trinity. And so all that Mr. Fortune could tell him now would be but a twice-told tale; and that was not likely to be of much effect, for Polynesians are fickle, they tire as easily as children and must be bribed with novelties.

Mr. Fortune grew increasingly despondent. He was even growing bored, and more and more quickly he turned over in his mind the various expedients of Godhead which might appeal to Lueli, like a woman tossing over a piece-bag in search of something she cannot find. The blue print, the grey merino, the long and ever more tangled trail of metal lace, a scrap of corduroy: none of these is what she looks for, and what she looks for is not there.

“I can do nothing,” he cried out; and then an inner voice finishing the quotation for him added, “without Thee.”

Of course he could do nothing without God. Why had he not thought of that before? Why, instead of vain thinking, hadn’t he prayed?

He looked about him. He was alone in a mesh of rain. For leagues around the rain was falling, falling upon the quenched ashes of his homestead where were mingled and quenched too the ashes of Lueli’s god, falling upon the motionless forest, falling upon the moving ocean, on that vast watery and indivisible web of tides and currents, falling everywhere with an equal and unstaying pressure. Only upon the newly-open mouth of the pit was the rain not falling, for there the flames rushed up and caught and consumed it.

There had been an earthquake and now it was raining. Both events were equally natural, equally accountable for, equally inevitable. There was nowhere any room for chance; no happening from the greatest to the least could be altered or provoked or turned aside. And why should he specify into greatest or least? In causation there is no great or small. He himself was as great as the mountain, as little as the least of the ashes of Lueli’s god.

Still he looked about him. But he was not looking for anything now nor did he need to raise his eyes to heaven or close them before any presence unseen. The God who had walked with him upon the island had gone. He had ascended in the flames that had burst roaring and devouring from the mountain-top, and hiding His departure in clouds of smoke, He had gone up and was lost in space.

Mr. Fortune no longer believed in a God.

It had all happened quite quietly, just like that. Once he put out his hand as though to arrest something that was floating away out of reach, but in a moment it dropped again. And there it was before him, resting upon his knees, the hand of a man who didn’t any longer believe in a God, with fingers idly patting out a slow and flagging rhythm, tick-tock like a time-piece that is running down. The real time-piece went on nimbly enough, it was now (he noticed) five minutes to eleven of the new era. If his diary had not been burnt he could have mentioned in it with impressive accuracy: “At 10:54 A. M. (N. T.) I ceased to believe in God.” This quaint fancy gave him pleasure.

How differently to Lueli was he taking his loss. The reason must be that Lueli though losing his god had kept his faith. Lueli had lost something real, like losing an umbrella; he had lost it with frenzy and conviction. But his loss was utter and retrospective, a lightning-flash loss which had wiped out a whole life-time of having. In fact the best way of expressing it, though it sounded silly and paradoxical, was to say that what he had lost for ever was nothing. “Forever is a word that stretches backward too,” he explained to himself. If any proof were needed his own behaviour was supplying it. He had ceased to believe in God but this was making no difference to him. Consequently what he had ceased to believe in had never been.

He sighed—the loud horse’s sigh of one who has come to the end of a long stint. Then he stood up amid the rain and the ashes and stretched himself. He had got pins and needles in his legs from sitting still for so long, but it was a pleasure to his body to stretch and he stretched once more. The air struck cold on the muscles and skin which had, as it were, started to live again. He felt at once both tired and vigorous. In an odd way he was feeling rather pleased with himself, a pleasure that was perhaps the independent pleasure of his flesh which had waited patiently around his motionless thinking as a dog waits at the feet of its master absorbed in writing. The pen is thrown down rather wantonly, so that the ink may give a little spurt on to the page that a moment ago was all the world, that now is finished and prostrate and floutable. The master gets up and stretches, the dog gambols round him with congratulations. “Now you have come home to your senses again, now we can be reasonable and go for a walk!”

He leant down and gave Lueli a little shake, affectionate but brisk.

“Wake up, wake up. We are going down to the village now to find a lodging. You cannot sleep here in the rain all day or you will get rheumatism.”

A policeman could not have been kinder, a mother more competent. He had got Lueli up and walking through the wet woods and eating stirabout by Ori’s fire before he had had time to bethink him of his unhappiness.

Lueli sat swallowing and blinking and looking very debauched and youthful while Mr. Fortune and Ori made arrangements. For the present they could live under the chief’s ample roof. Meanwhile the burnt hut could be re-built, or some dwelling could be fitted up to receive them as lodgers, whichever Mr. Fortune thought best. As for the volcano, that would not interfere with anybody’s plans. The pigs had been corralled once more, the earthquake was already half-forgotten. Ori had sent an old woman up to the mountain to make a reconnaissance, and she had reported that the lava was flowing down the south side of the mountain where nobody lived. Everything was all right again, and the rain would freshen things up nicely. To-morrow he would invite a few friends in, and there would be roast meat and a party in honour of his guest.

Personally Mr. Fortune would have preferred to have the former hut re-built and to go on living there, much as of old except for religion, the harmonium, and other European amenities. But he feared that Lueli would mope and be miserable. It would be better for him to have a change of scene, company and gaiety. Accordingly, he arranged that for the future they should lodge with Teioa, a lesser chief, whose family included several lively sons and daughters, and an extremely vivacious great-grandmother.

Unfortunately this plan worked badly. Mr. Fortune was much happier than he expected to be. He was now engaged in growing a beard, and freed from any obligation to convert his housemates he found their society very agreeable. The great-grandmother was especially good company. She was a celebrated story-teller, and when she had exhausted her stock of scandals about everyone in the village she fell back upon legends and fairy-tales. Mr. Fortune was interested to find that many of these were almost word for word the stories of the Old Testament. One hot afternoon as they sat bathing their legs in a pool and waving away the flies from each other, she recounted the story of Joseph and his Brethren. Joseph was called Kila and was carried to the land of Egypt in a canoe, but all the familiar characters were there, all the familiar incidents, even to where Kila turned away from the brothers he was threatening, to hide the tears which he could no longer keep back. The only variation was in the character of Isaac, who had changed his sex and split into Joseph’s mother and aunt. But in truth the change made little difference, nor did it detract from the dignity of the story, for in spite of our English prejudice there is nothing inherently ridiculous about a mother’s sister. Mr. Fortune was not perturbed to hear the history of the Jews from the lips of a wrinkled and engraved old Polynesian harridan. He reflected that everywhere mankind is subject to the same anxious burden of love and loneliness, and must in self-defence enchant their cares into a story and a dream. In return for Joseph and his Brethren he told the old dame of the adventures of Mr. Pickwick, many of which were new to her.

But while Mr. Fortune was getting on so nicely Lueli was very unhappy. His playmates had soon found out his misfortune. They teased him, saying that he had lost his god and would soon go to Hell. Every day the boy grew more dispirited. He shunned his fellows and went slinking off to hide himself in the woods, where he could mope in peace and quiet. Late in the evening he would creep back, smelling of damp forest earth and wild spices; and without a word he would lie down on his mat and fall into a dreary slumber.

One day Teioa remarked to Mr. Fortune: “That boy has lost his god. I expect he will die soon.”

“What nonsense!” shouted Mr. Fortune in a loud rude voice. He felt too suddenly sick to choose his words. He remembered what he had once read in a book about the Polynesians: that they can renounce life at their own will, not with the splash of suicide but slowly, sullenly, deliberately, driving death into themselves like a wedge. Was Lueli doing this—gay, inconsequent, casual Lueli? But since the loss of his god Lueli was gay no longer, and his casualness had taken on a new and terrible aspect, as though it were the casualness of one who could not be bothered to live, who was discarding life as naturally and callously as he had picked flowers and thrown them down to die.

Just then a troop of boys and girls danced by. They were dancing after Lueli and pelting him with small glittering fishes. “Catch!” they cried, “Here’s a god for you, Lueli. Catch him!”

Lueli walked on as if he hadn’t noticed them. He looked down and saw one of the fish lying at his feet. Like an animal he picked it up and began eating it, but he ate inattentively, without appetite. He was like a sick dog that snatches listlessly at a tuft of grass. Mr. Fortune stepped out from the verandah. His intention had been to drive the dancers away, but instead of that he put his arm through Lueli’s and began walking him down to the beach.

“Let us bathe together,” he said. “It is a long time since you gave me a swimming lesson.”

Lueli swam so beautifully that it was hard to believe he was not happy. Mr. Fortune surpassed himself in flounderings. He tried to catch a fish in his mouth.

When they were sitting on the beach again he said: “Where shall we live when we leave Teioa’s house? Shall we make a new hut or shall we build up our old one again?”

“Go back to the old,” Lueli replied instantly in a soft fearful whisper.

“Yes, I think so too. Our own bathing-pool is much the best.”

“Yes. It’s deeper than the one here.”

“I think the fish are tamer, too.”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering if we couldn’t make a small wickerwork bower on a pole and teach the parrots to sleep in it. In England people do so, only the birds are doves, not parrots. Perhaps you remember me telling you about our doves and pigeons?”

“They take messages.”

“Yes, those are carrier pigeons. There are also pouters and fantails and tumbling pigeons that turn head over heels in the air. But parrots would be very nice too. You could feed them.”

“Won’t they be able to feed themselves?”

“Oh, yes, certainly. But they would be more apt to stay with us if we fed them.”

“Must they stay?”

“Now am I diverting him from his grief”—thought Mr. Fortune, “or am I only boring him?”

The new hut that rose on the place of the old had a faint whiff of burning. Mr. Fortune had superintended the building of it and because the islanders were fond of him they allowed him to introduce several novelties, such as window-boxes and a kitchen dresser. He also threw out a bay. The parrot-cote stood in a corner of the lawn and leading up to it was a narrow serpentining path with crazy paving made out of flat shells. On the other side of the house to balance the parrot-cote was a pergola, constructed in bamboo. In front of the house, in fact exactly where it always had been, but uprooted by the earthquake, was the flat stone on which he had celebrated Holy Communion on that first Sunday morning. He looked at it a little sadly. He bore it no malice, although it reminded him of a special kind of happiness which he could taste no more. He decided that he would make it the head-stone of a rock-garden.