Front matter (continued 3)

Mr. Fortune attached special importance to these European refinements because he felt that to the eyes of the world he must now present such an un-European appearance. The earthquake had left him nothing save the clothes he stood up in, the contents of his pockets and a good-sized rubbish-heap. As for the rubbish-heap, he had with his own hands grubbed a large hole among the bushes and buried therein the bones of the harmonium, lamp, sewing-machine, etc., also the molten images of the communion plate and the tea-pot. He had done this by night, working by moonlight in the approved fashion of those who have a past to put away, and when he had covered in the hole and stamped down the earth he went back and forth from the ruins to the bushes, scooping up the ashes in a gourd and scattering them in the undergrowth.

His clothes he had folded and put away, thinking that as they were all he had, he had better save them up for future emergencies, such as a shipwreck, a visit of American tourists, the arrival of a new missionary or somebody dropping in from a flying-machine. In their stead he wore a kilt and a mantle of native cloth, soberly contrived without any fringes or fandangos, and sandals of plaited bark. Since this new garb was pocketless, the contents of his pockets were ranged on the shelf of honour of the kitchen dresser—a pocket magnifying glass, a whistle, a nail-file, a graduated medicine spoon, a flint-and-steel lighter, a copper medal commemorating Parnell which Henry Martin had brought from Ireland as a curiosity, nineteen mother-of-pearl counters in a wash-leather bag, a pencil-sharpener blunted by sand getting into it, a tape-measure that sprang back into a boxwood nut, several buttons, a silver pencil-case with no pencil and a small magnet, painted scarlet. There was also the knife with two blades, but this he carried on a string round his neck.

He looked on this array without sentiment. The parrot-cote and the pergola were also without charms for him. His intentions were severely practical. These things were all part of his designs on Lueli, they were so many fish-hooks to draw him from despair. Not by their proper qualities, of course, Mr. Fortune was not so simple as to expect that, even of the magnet. But indirectly they would build up around their owner and designer a compelling spiritual splendour, a glamour of mysterious attributes, fastidious living and foreign parts. After three years of such familiarity it would not be easy to re-construct his first fascination as something rich and strange. But it must be done if he were to compete successfully with his rival in Lueli’s affections. It must be done because that rival was death.

He thought as little as he could help about his progress in this contest. He dared not allow himself to be elated when he seemed to be gaining a little, he dared not admit the possibility of failure. He fought with his eyes turned away from the face of the adversary, like Perseus attacking the Gorgon. He fought by inches, by half-hours; he dared not attempt a decisive victory for he could not risk a decisive defeat. And when he crept out of the hut at night to refresh himself with solitude and darkness, the sullen red light kindling and wavering above the blackness of the crags betokened to him that his enemy was also awake and weaving his powerful spells of annihilation.

He had no time to think of his own loss. He was entirely taken up with solicitude for Lueli, a soul no longer—as he supposed—immortal, and for that reason a charge upon him all the more urgent, as one is more concerned for a humming-bird than for a tortoise. Only at such times as when he had received a serious set-back or was feeling especially desperate did he find himself on the point of taking refuge in prayer; and then remembering the real state of things he would feel exactly like a person who makes to cast himself down on a chair but recalls just in time (or maybe just too late) how all the furniture has been moved, and that the chair is no longer in its old place.

It was sometimes hard for him with his English prejudices not to grow irritated at Lueli’s abject listlessness and misery. He could not have believed that his friend could be so chicken-hearted. And since when one is down everything falls on one, circumstances seemed to conspire in twitting and outraging the luckless youth.

Mr. Fortune thought he would try games. Lueli was agile and dexterous, surely it would comfort him to exhibit those qualities? Mr. Fortune introduced him to ping-pong. They played with basket-work bats and small nuts. On the second day a nut hit Lueli and made his nose bleed. He turned green, cast down his bat and began to whimper.

Since ping-pong was too rough, what about spellikins? He carved a set of pieces out of splinters, dyed them with fruit juice to make them look more appetising, and made a great show of excitement to tempt the other on. Whenever it was Lueli’s turn to hook a piece from the tangle he sighed and groaned as though he had been requested to move mountains. Dicing and skittles were no better received.

Deciding that neither games nor gaming (they diced for the mother-of-pearl counters) were likely to rouse Lueli from his dejection, Mr. Fortune cast about for some new expedient. Perhaps a pet animal might have charms? He caught a baby flying-fox and reared it with great tenderness on guavas and coco-milk. The flying-fox soon grew extremely attached to him and learnt to put its head out of the cage when he called “Tibby!” But whenever Lueli could be induced to take any interest in it and to prod it up with a cautious finger, it scratched and bit him. Still persevering with natural history, Mr. Fortune spat on the magnifying glass, polished it, and began to show off the wonderful details of flowers, mosses, and water-fleas. Lueli would look, and look away again, obediently and haplessly bored.

Though the idea of such cold and rapacious blood-thirstiness was highly repugnant to him, he resolved to sacrifice his own feelings (and theirs) and make a moth collection. He prepared a mess of honey and water and took Lueli out that evening on an expedition to lime the trees. Two hours later they went out again with a string of candle-nuts for a lantern and collected a quantity of moths and nocturnal insects, poignantly beautiful and battered with their struggles to escape. But he stifled his sense of shame, all the more in that Lueli seemed inclined to rise to this lure, of his own accord suggesting a second expedition. He had not quite grasped the theory, however. Two days later Mr. Fortune, returning from an errand in the village, was surprised to hear a loud and furious buzzing proceeding from the dell. It was full of wild bees, and Lueli, very swollen and terrified, came crawling out of the bushes. He had smeared the parrot-cote and the posts of the verandah with honey and it seemed as though every bee and wasp on the island were assembled together to quarrel and gorge themselves. It was not possible to approach the hut until after nightfall, and drunk and disorderly bees hovered about it for days, not to speak of a sediment of ants.

Worse was to come. Since his arrival on the island Mr. Fortune had never ailed. But now, whether by exposure to night dews and getting his feet damp out mothing or by some special malignity of Fate, he found himself feeling sore at the back of the throat and sneezing; and presently he had developed a streaming cold. Lueli caught it from him and if his cold were bad, Lueli’s was ten times worse. He made no effort to struggle against it; indeed, he was so overwhelmed that struggling was practically out of the question. He crouched on his mats, snorting and groaning, with a face all chapped and bloated, blear eyes, a hanging jaw, and a sullen and unhealthy appetite; and every five minutes or so he sneezed as though he would bring the roof down.

Mr. Fortune was terrified, not only for Lueli, but for the whole population of the island. He knew how direly European diseases can rampage through a new field. He set up a rigid quarantine. Since the loss of his God Lueli had been at pains to avoid his friends, but naturally he was now seized with a passionate craving for their society; and there was some excuse for him as Mr. Fortune was not just now very exhilarating company. But he did his best to be, in spite of an ear-ache which followed the cold, and between Lueli’s paroxysms of sneezing he strove to cheer him with accounts of the Great Plague and the Brave Men of Eyam.

At last they were both recovered. But though restored in body Lueli was as mopish as ever. Mr. Fortune went on bracing, and beat his brains for some new distraction. But he had lost ground in this last encounter, and the utmost he could congratulate himself upon was that Lueli was still, however indifferently or unwillingly, consenting to exist. The worst of it was that he couldn’t allow himself to show any sympathy. There were times when he could scarcely hold himself back from pity and condolence. But he believed that if he were once to acknowledge the other’s grief he would lose his greatest hold over him—his title of being someone superior, august and exemplary.

And then one morning when they had been living in the new hut for about six weeks he woke up inspired. Why had he wasted so much time displaying his most trivial and uncompelling charms, opposing to the magnetism of death such fripperies and titbits of this world, such gewgaws of civilization as a path serpentining to a parrot-cote (a parrot-cote which hadn’t even allured the parrots), or a pocket magnifying glass, while all the time he carried within him the inestimable treasures of intellectual enjoyment? Now he would pipe Lueli a tune worth dancing to, now he would open for him a new world. He would teach him mathematics.

He sprang up from bed, full of enthusiasm. At the thought of all those stretches of white beach he was like a bridegroom. There they were, hard and smooth from the tread of the sea, waiting for that noble consummation of blank surfaces, to show forth a truth; waiting, in this particular instance, to show forth the elements of plane geometry.

At breakfast Mr. Fortune was so glorified and gay that Lueli caught a reflection of his high spirits and began to look more life-like than he had done for weeks. On their way down to the beach they met a party of islanders who were off on a picnic. Mr. Fortune with delight heard Lueli answering their greetings with something like his former sociability, and even plucking up heart enough for a repartee. His delight gave a momentary stagger when Lueli decided to go a-picnicing too. But, after all, it didn’t matter a pin. The beach would be as smooth again to-morrow, the air as sweet and nimble; Lueli would be in better trim for learning after a spree, and, now he came to think of it, he himself wouldn’t teach any the worse for a little private rubbing-up beforehand.

It must be going on for forty years since he had done any mathematics; for he had gone into the Bank the same year that his father died, leaving Rugby at seventeen because, in the state that things were then in, the Bank was too good an opening to be missed. He had once got a prize—The Poetical Works of Longfellow—for Algebra, and he had scrambled along well enough in other branches of mathematics; but he had not learnt with any particular thrill or realized that thrill there might be until he was in the Bank, and learning a thing of the past.

Then, perhaps because of that never-ending entering and adding up and striking balances, and turning on to the next page to enter, add up and strike balances again, a mental occupation minute, immediate and yet, so to speak, wool-gathering, as he imagined knitting to be, the absolute quality of mathematics began to take on for him an inexpressibly romantic air. “Pure Mathematics.” He used to speak of them to his fellow clerks as though he were hinting at some kind of transcendental debauchery of which he had been made free—and indeed there does seem to be a kind of unnatural vice in being so completely pure. After a spell of this holy boasting he would grow a little uneasy; and going to the Free Library he took out mathematical treatises, just to make sure that he could follow step by step as well as soar. For twenty pages perhaps, he read slowly, carefully, dutifully, with pauses for self-examination and working out the examples. Then, just as it was working up and the pauses should have been more scrupulous than ever, a kind of swoon and ecstasy would fall on him, and he read ravening on, sitting up till dawn to finish the book, as though it were a novel. After that his passion was stayed; the book went back to the Library and he was done with mathematics till the next bout. Not much remained with him after these orgies, but something remained: a sensation in the mind, a worshipping acknowledgment of something isolated and unassailable, or a remembered mental joy at the rightness of thoughts coming together to a conclusion, accurate thoughts, thoughts in just intonation, coming together like unaccompanied voices coming to a close.

But often his pleasure flowered from quite simple things that any fool could grasp. For instance he would look out of the bank windows, which had green shades in their lower halves; and rising above the green shades he would see a row of triangles, equilateral, isosceles, acute-angled, right-angled, obtuse-angled. These triangles were a range of dazzling mountain peaks, eternally snowy, eternally untrodden; and he could feel the keen wind which blew from their summits. Yet they were also a row of triangles, equilateral, isosceles, acute-angled, right-angled, obtuse-angled.

This was the sort of thing he designed for Lueli’s comfort. Geometry would be much better than algebra, though he had not the same certificate from Longfellow for teaching it. Algebra is always dancing over the pit of the unknown, and he had no wish to direct Lueli’s thoughts to that quarter. Geometry would be best to begin with, plain plane geometry, immutably plane. Surely if anything could minister to the mind diseased it would be the steadfast contemplation of a right angle, an existence that no mist of human tears could blur, no blow of fate deflect.

Walking up and down the beach, admiring the surface which to-morrow with so much epiphany and glory was going to reveal the first axioms of Euclid, Mr. Fortune began to think of himself as possessing an universal elixir and charm. A wave of missionary ardour swept him along and he seemed to view, not Lueli only, but all the islanders rejoicing in this new dispensation. There was beach-board enough for all and to spare. The picture grew in his mind’s eye, somewhat indebted to Raphael’s Cartoon of the School of Athens. Here a group bent over an equation, there they pointed out to each other with admiration that the square on the hypotenuse equalled the sum of the squares on the sides containing the right angle; here was one delighting in a rhomboid and another in conic sections, that enraptured figure had secured the twelfth root of two, while the children might be filling up the foreground with a little long division.

By the morrow he had slept off most of his fervour. Calm, methodical, with a mind prepared for the onset, he guided Lueli down to the beach and with a stick prodded a small hole in it.

“What is this?”

“A hole.”

“No, Lueli, it may seem like a hole, but it is a point.”

Perhaps he had prodded a little too emphatically. Lueli’s mistake was quite natural. Anyhow, there were bound to be a few misunderstandings at the start.

He took out his pocket knife and whittled the end of the stick. Then he tried again.

“What is this?”

“A smaller hole.”

“Point,” said Mr. Fortune suggestively.

“Yes, I mean a smaller point.”

“No, not quite. It is a point, but it is not smaller. Holes may be of different sizes, but no point is larger or smaller than another point.”

Lueli looked from the first point to the second. He seemed to be about to speak, but to think better of it. He removed his gaze to the sea.

Meanwhile, Mr. Fortune had moved about, prodding more points. It was rather awkward that he should have to walk on the beach-board, for his footmarks distracted the eye from the demonstration.

“Look, Lueli!”

Lueli turned his gaze inland.

“Where?” said he.

“At all these. Here; and here; and here. But don’t tread on them.”

Lueli stepped back hastily. When he was well out of the danger-zone he stood looking at Mr. Fortune with great attention and some uneasiness.

“These are all points.”

Lueli recoiled a step further. Standing on one leg he furtively inspected the sole of his foot.

“As you see, Lueli, these points are in different places. This one is to the west of that and consequently that one is to the east of this. Here is one to the south. Here are two close together, and there is one quite apart from all the others. Now look at them, remember what I have said, think carefully and tell me what you think.”

Inclining his head and screwing up his eyes Lueli inspected the demonstration with an air of painstaking connoisseurship. At length he ventured the opinion that the hole lying apart from the others was perhaps the neatest. But if Mr. Fortune would give him the knife he would whittle the stick even finer.

“Now what did I tell you? Have you forgotten that points cannot be larger or smaller? If they were holes it would be a different matter. But these are points. Will you remember that?”

Lueli nodded. He parted his lips, he was about to ask a question. Mr. Fortune went on hastily.

“Now suppose I were to cover the whole beach with these: what then?”

A look of dismay came over Lueli’s countenance. Mr. Fortune withdrew the hypothesis.

“I don’t intend to. I only ask you to imagine what it would be like if I did.”

The look of dismay deepened.

“They would all be points,” said Mr. Fortune, impressively. “All in different places. And none larger or smaller than another.

“What I have explained to you is summed up in the axiom: a point has position but not magnitude. In other words if a given point were not in a given place it would not be there at all.”

Whilst allowing time for this to sink in he began to muse about those other words. Were they quite what he meant? Did they indeed mean anything? Perhaps it would have been better not to try to supplement Euclid. He turned to his pupil. The last words had sunk in at any rate, had been received without scruple and acted upon. Lueli was out of sight.

Compared with his intentions actuality had been a little quelling. It became more quelling as time went on. Lueli did not again remove himself without leave; he soon discovered that Mr. Fortune was extremely in earnest, and was resigned to regular instruction every morning and a good deal of rubbing-in and evocation during the rest of the day. No one ever had a finer capacity for listening than he, or a more docile and obliging temperament. But whereas in the old days these good gifts had flowed from him spontaneously and pleasurably he now seemed to be exhibiting them by rote and in a manner almost desperate, as though he were listening and obliging as a circus animal does its tricks. Humane visitors to circuses often point out with what alacrity the beasts run into the ring to perform their turn. They do not understand that in the choice of two evils most animals would rather flourish round a spacious ring than be shut up in a cage. The activity and the task is a distraction from their unnatural lot, and they tear through paper hoops all the better because so much of their time is spent behind iron bars.

It had been a very different affair when Lueli was learning Bible history and the Church Catechism, The King of Love my Shepherd is and The Old Hundredth. Then there had been no call for this blatant submission; lessons had been an easy-going conversation, with Lueli keeping his end up as an intelligent pupil should and Mr. Fortune feeling like a cross between wise old Chiron and good Mr. Barlow. Now they were a succession of harangues, and rather strained harangues to boot. Theology, Mr. Fortune found, is a more accommodating subject than mathematics; its technique of exposition allows greater latitude. For instance when you are gravelled for matter there is always the moral to fall back upon. Comparisons too may be drawn, leading cases cited, types and antetypes analysed and anecdotes introduced. Except for Archimedes mathematics is singularly naked of anecdotes.

Not that he thought any the worse of it for this. On the contrary he compared its austere and integral beauty to theology decked out in her flaunting charms and wielding all her bribes and spiritual bonuses; and like Dante at the rebuke of Beatrice he blushed that he should ever have followed aught but the noblest. No, there was nothing lacking in mathematics. The deficiency was in him. He added line to line, precept to precept; he exhausted himself and his pupil by hours of demonstration and exposition; leagues of sand were scarred, and smoothed again by the tide, and scarred afresh: never an answering spark rewarded him. He might as well have made the sands into a rope-walk.

Sometimes he thought that he was taxing Lueli too heavily, and desisted. But if he desisted for pity’s sake, pity soon drove him to work again, for if it were bad to see Lueli sighing over the properties of parallel lines, it was worse to see him moping and pining for his god. Teioa’s words, uttered so matter-of-factly, haunted his mind. “I expect he will die soon.” Mr. Fortune was thinking so too. Lueli grew steadily more lacklustre, his eyes were dull, his voice was flat; he appeared to be retreating behind a film that thickened and toughened and would soon obliterate him.

“If only, if only I could teach him to enjoy an abstract notion! If he could once grasp how it all hangs together, and is everlasting and harmonious, he would be saved. Nothing else can save him, nothing that I or his fellows can offer him. For it must be new to excite him and it must be true to hold him, and what else is there that is both new and true?”

There were women, of course, a race of beings neither new nor true, yet much vaunted by some as a cure for melancholy and a tether for the soul. Mr. Fortune would have cheerfully procured a damsel (not that they were likely to need much of that), dressed her hair, hung the whistle and the Parnell medal round her neck, dowered her with the nineteen counters and the tape measure and settled her in Lueli’s bed if he had supposed that this would avail. But he feared that Lueli was past the comfort of women, and in any case that sort of thing is best arranged by the parties concerned.

So he resorted to geometry again, and once more Lueli was hurling himself with frantic docility through the paper hoops. It was really rather astonishing, how dense he could be! Once out of twenty, perhaps, he would make the right answer. Mr. Fortune, too anxious to be lightly elated, would probe a little into his reasons for making it. Either they were the wrong reasons or he had no reasons at all. Mr. Fortune was often horribly tempted to let a mistake pass. He was not impatient: he was far more patient than in the palmiest days of theology—but he found it almost unendurable to be for ever saying with various inflexions of kindness: “No, Lueli. Try again,” or: “Well, no, not exactly,” or: “I fear you have not quite understood,” or: “Let me try to make that clearer.” He withstood the temptation. His easy acceptance (though in good faith) of a sham had brought them to this pass, and tenderness over a false currency was not likely to help them out of it. No, he would not be caught that way twice. Similarly he pruned and repressed Lueli’s talent for leaking away down side-issues, though this was hard too, for it involved snubbing him almost every time he spoke on his own initiative.

Just as he had been so mistaken about the nature of points, confounding them with holes and agitating himself at the prospect of a beach pitted all over, Lueli contrived to apply the same sort of well-meaning misconceptions to every stage of his progress—if progress be the word to apply to one who is hauled along in a state of semiconsciousness by the scruff of his neck. When the points seemed to be tolerably well-established in his mind Mr. Fortune led him on to lines, and by joining up points he illustrated such simple figures as the square, the triangle and the parallelogram. Lueli perked up, seemed interested, borrowed the stick and began joining up points too. At first he copied Mr. Fortune, glancing up after each stroke to see if it had been properly directed. Then growing rather more confident, and pleased—as who is not?—with the act of drawing on sand, he launched out into a more complicated design.

“This is a man,” he said.

Mr. Fortune was compelled to reply coldly:

“A man is not a geometrical figure.”

At length Mr. Fortune decided that he had better take in sail. Pure mathematics were obviously beyond Lueli; perhaps applied mathematics would work better. Mr. Fortune, as it happened, had never applied any, but he knew that other people did so, and though he considered it a rather lower line of business he was prepared to try it.

“If I were to ask you to find out the height of that tree, how would you set about it?”

Lueli replied with disconcerting readiness:

“I should climb up to the top and let down a string.”

“But suppose you couldn’t climb up it?”

“Then I should cut it down.”

“That would be very wasteful: and the other way might be dangerous. I can show you a better plan than either of those.”

The first thing was to select a tree, an upright tree, because in all elementary demonstrations it is best to keep things as clear as possible. He would never have credited the rarity of upright trees had he not been pressed to find one. Coco-palms, of course, were hopeless: they all had a curve or a list. At length he remembered a tree near the bathing-pool, a perfect specimen of everything a tree should be, tall, straight as a die, growing by itself; set apart, as it were, for purposes of demonstration.

He marched Lueli thither, and when he saw him rambling towards the pool he recalled him with a cough.

“Now I will show you how to discover the height of that tree. Attend. You will find it very interesting. The first thing to do is to lie down.”

Mr. Fortune lay down on his back and Lueli followed his example.

Many people find that they can think more clearly in a recumbent position. Mr. Fortune found it so too. No sooner was he on his back than he remembered that he had no measuring stick. But the sun was delicious and the grass soft; he might well spare a few minutes in exposing the theory.

“It is all a question of measurements. Now my height is six foot two inches, but for the sake of argument we will assume it to be six foot exactly. The distance from my eye to the base of the tree is so far an unknown quantity. My six feet however are already known to you.”

Now Lueli had sat up, and was looking him up and down with an intense and curious scrutiny, as though he were something utterly unfamiliar. This was confusing, it made him lose the thread of his explanation. He felt a little uncertain as to how it should proceed.

Long ago on dark January mornings, when a septic thumb (bestowed on him by a cat which he had rescued from a fierce poodle) obliged him to stay away from the Bank, he had observed young men with woollen comforters and raw-looking wind-bitten hands practising surveying under the snarling elms and whimpering poplars of Finsbury Park. They had tapes and tripods, and the girls in charge of perambulators dawdled on the asphalt paths to watch their proceedings. It was odd how vividly fragments of his old life had been coming back to him during these last few months.

He resumed:

“In order to ascertain the height of the tree I must be in such a position that the top of the tree is exactly in a line with the top of a measuring stick—or any straight object would do, such as an umbrella—which I shall secure in an upright position between my feet. Knowing then that the ratio that height of the tree bears to the length of the measuring stick must equal the ratio that the distance from my eye to the base of the tree bears to my height, and knowing (or being able to find out) my height, the length of the measuring stick and the distance from my eye to the base of the tree, I can, therefore, calculate the height of the tree.”

“What is an umbrella?”

Again the past flowed back, insurgent and actual. He was at the Oval, and out of an overcharged sky it had begun to rain again. In a moment the insignificant tapestry of lightish faces was exchanged for a noble pattern of domes, blackish, blueish and greenish domes, sprouting like a crop of miraculous and religious mushrooms. The rain fell harder and harder, presently the little white figures were gone from the field and, as with an abnegation of humanity, the green plain, so much smaller for their departure, lay empty and forsaken, ringed round with tier upon tier of blackly glistening umbrellas.

He longed to describe it all to Lueli, it seemed to him at the moment that he could talk with the tongues of angels about umbrellas. But this was a lesson in mathematics: applied mathematics, moreover, a compromise, so that all further compromises must be sternly nipped. Unbending to no red herrings he replied:

“An umbrella, Lueli, when in use resembles the—the shell that would be formed by rotating an arc of curve about its axis of symmetry, attached to a cylinder of small radius whose axis is the same as the axis of symmetry of the generating curve of the shell. When not in use it is properly an elongated cone, but it is more usually helicoidal in form.”

Lueli made no answer. He lay down again, this time face-downward.

Mr. Fortune continued: “An umbrella, however, is not essential. A stick will do just as well, so find me one, and we will go on to the actual measurement.”

Lueli was very slow in finding a stick. He looked for it rather languidly and stupidly, but Mr. Fortune tried to hope that this was because his mind was engaged on what he had just learnt.

Holding the stick between his feet, Mr. Fortune wriggled about on his back trying to get into the proper position. He knew he was making a fool of himself. The young men in Finsbury Park had never wriggled about on their backs. Obviously there must be some more dignified way of getting the top of the stick in line with the top of the tree and his eye, but just then it was not obvious to him. Lueli made it worse by standing about and looking miserably on. When he had placed himself properly he remembered that he had not measured the stick. It measured (he had had the forethought to bring the tape with him) three foot seven, very tiresome: those odd inches would only serve to make it seem harder to his pupil. So he broke it again, drove it into the ground, and wriggled on his stomach till his eye was in the right place, which was a slight improvement in method, at any rate. He then handed the tape to Lueli, and lay strictly motionless, admonishing and directing while Lueli did the measuring of the ground. In the interests of accuracy he did it thrice, each time with a different result. A few minutes before noon the height of the tree was discovered to be fifty-seven foot, nine inches.

Mr. Fortune now had leisure for compassion. He thought Lueli was looking hot and fagged, so he said:

“Why don’t you have a bathe? It will freshen you up.”

Lueli raised his head and looked at him with a long dubious look, as though he had heard the words but without understanding what they meant. Then he turned his eyes to the tree and looked at that. A sort of shadowy wrinkle, like the blurring on the surface of milk before it boils, crossed his face.

“Don’t worry any more about that tree. If you hate all this so much we won’t do any more of it, I will never speak of geometry again. Put it all out of your head and go and bathe.”

Still Lueli looked at him as though he heard but didn’t understand. Then in the same sleepwalking fashion he turned and went down towards the bathing-pool.

Presently, looking between the trees, Mr. Fortune saw him reappear on the rock above the deep part of the pool. He was going to dive. Very slowly and methodically he took off everything that was on him, he even took off his earrings. Then he stretched his arms in a curve above his head and leapt in.

A beautiful dive—Mr. Fortune found himself thinking of the arc of a stretched bow, the curve and flash of a scimitar, the jet of a harpoon—all instruments of death, all displaying the same austere and efficient kind of beauty, the swiftness to shed blood. A beautiful dive—and a long one. Had he come up already? Hardly; from where he sat Mr. Fortune could see almost the whole surface of the bathing-pool. Perhaps though he had come up behind the rock, swimming back under water.

Mr. Fortune rose to his feet. Instantly, with the movement, agonizing fear took hold of him. He ran down to the pool, and out along the rocks, shouting and calling. No sign, only the quietly-heaving water under the impervious blue sky. No sound, except the parrots and sea-birds, squawking in answer to his disturbing voice. Lueli was staying down on purpose. He was holding on to the sea-weed, drowning himself, with the resolute fatal despair of his lighthearted race.

Mr. Fortune leapt over his own fear of deep water. Where Lueli had dived, he could dive too. He hurled himself off the rock, he felt the water break like a stone under him, he felt himself smothered and sinking; and the next moment he was bouncing about on the surface, utterly and hopelessly afloat. He kicked and beat the water, trying to force a passage downward. It would not let him through.

He swam to the rock and scrambled out into the weight of air, and dived for a second time. Once more the sea caught him and held him up.

“Damn!” he said, softly and swiftly, as though he were pursuing a pencil which had rolled into a dark corner out of reach.

Since diving was out of the question he must run to the village to fetch helpers. The village was nearly a mile away, there might be no one there but old women and babies, he would be breathless, everyone would shout and wave their arms, by the time he got back with a rescue party it would be too late, Lueli would be drowned.

This time it was harder to haul himself out of the water, for he had forgotten to throw off his large draperies and they were now waterlogged. After the shadow of the pool the sunlight seemed black and blinding. He started to run, loosening the knots as he went, for he would run quicker naked. As he threw off the cloak he caught sight over his shoulder of a canoe out to sea. It was heading away from the island but perhaps it was still within earshot. He shouted and waved the cloak and shouted and coo-eed again. Each cry came out of his body like a thing with jagged edges, tearing him inwardly. The canoe kept on its course. The sweat ran down and blinded him, so that he thought for a moment that the canoe had changed its direction and was coming towards him; but it was only the sweat in his eyes which had enlarged it.

He began to run again. It was a pity that he had wasted so much good breath shouting. He was among the trees now, rushing down a vista of light and shadow. Each tall tree seemed to gather speed as he approached it till it shot past him with a whirr of foliage and a swoop of darkness. His going shook the ground and the fruit fell off the bushes as he ran by.

The path began to wind downhill and grew stonier. He was about halfway to the village, he could hear the noise of the brook. He shot round a corner, tripped over something, and fell headlong into a group of human beings, falling among smooth brown limbs and cries of astonishment. It was one of those bevies, half-a-dozen young women who had come out to the brook to net crayfish. To his horror they all leapt to their feet and began to run away. Lying along the ground as he fell, with his head in the brook, he caught hold of an ankle.

“Stop! Don’t be little fools!” he cried out, sobbing for breath. “Lueli is drowning in the bathing-pool. You must come back with me and save him.”

The ankle belonged to Fuma, a hoyden whom he had once loathed beyond words; but now he adored her, for she was going to play up. She called back the other girls, rallied them, sent one back to the village, and bade the others run as fast as they could to the pool, and in a twinkling she and Mr. Fortune were following them up through the woods. Fuma caught hold of his arm and patted it encouragingly.

“He is in the deep hole under the black rock,” he said. “He is lying there holding on to the weed. I have been shouting, and I may not be able to keep up with you. But you must run on without me and dive until you find him.”

“Silly boy! Silly Lueli! He told me three days ago that he meant to die. Such nonsense! Never mind, we will pull him up and breathe him alive again.”

They ran on side by side. Presently Mr. Fortune said: “You know, Fuma, this is all my fault.”

Fuma laughed under her breath. “Lueli thinks the world of you,” she said. “He is always telling us how lovable you are.”

After a few more yards Mr. Fortune said: “Fuma, you must run on alone now.”

She gave his arm a gentle nip, and shot ahead. He saw her join the others as a starling flies into the flock and then they were out of sight. He could only think of quite small immediate things, Fuma’s eyebrows, a beautiful clear arch, and the soft quick sound of her breathing. He was thinking more of her than of Lueli. She seemed more real.

He was still running but now every time that he put a foot down it was with a stamp that disintegrated his balance, so that he could not guide his direction. Then he heard a splash, and another and another. They had reached the pool and begun diving. Then he heard Fuma’s voice crying: “Further to the left. He’s down here.” Then a babble of voices and more splashings. Then silence.

He gathered up his will for the last thirty yards, was down on to the beach and out breast-high into the water. He saw a girl’s head rise above the surface of the empty pool. She shook the hair from her eyes, saw him standing there, and came swimming towards him.

“We’ve got him,” she said. “But Fuma has to cut the weed with a shell for we can’t loosen his hands.”

Mr. Fortune took the pocket-knife from his neck and held it out to her. Then he saw a strangely intricate and beautiful group emerge and slowly approach. They had brought up Lueli and were bearing him among them. His head lolled and dipped back into the water from Fuma’s shoulder, where it lay. His eyes were open in a fixed and piteous stare, his mouth was open too, and a little trickle of blood ran down from his lip, where he had bitten it. His inanimate body trailed in the water with gestures inexpressibly weary. But two long streamers of weed still hung from his clenched hands.

Death comes with her black ruler and red ink and scores a firm line under the long tale of more or less, debit and credit, all the small multitudinous entries which have made up the relationship between one’s self and another. The line is drawn, the time has come to audit; and from the heart of her shadow a strange clarity, dream-like and precise, is shed upon the page, so that without any doubt or uncertainty we can add up the account which is now at an end, and perceive the sum-total of the expenditure of time. While the others were ministering around the body of Lueli, squeezing the water out of his lungs, rubbing him, breathing into his nostrils, burning herbs and performing incantations, Mr. Fortune sat under a tree, a little apart, and audited the past. In the tree sat a parrot, uttering from time to time its curious airy whistle—a high, sweet, meditative note. It seemed to Mr. Fortune that the bird was watching the process of his thoughts, and that its whistle, detached from any personal emotion, even from that of astonishment, was an involuntary and philosophic acknowledgment of the oddity of men’s lives and passions.

“I loved him,” he thought. “From the moment I set eyes on him I loved him. Not with what is accounted a criminal love, for though I set my desire on him, it was a spiritual desire. I did not even love him as a father loves a son, for that is a familiar love, and at the times when Lueli most entranced me it was as a being remote, intact, and incalculable. I waited to see what his next movement would be, if he would speak or no—it was the not knowing what he would do that made him dear. Yes, that was how I loved him best, those were my happiest moments: when I was just aware of him, and sat with my senses awaiting him, not wishing to speak, not wishing to make him notice me until he did so of his own accord because no other way would it be perfect, would it be by him. And how often, I wonder, have I let it be just like that? Perhaps a dozen times, perhaps twenty times all told, perhaps, when all is put together, for an hour out of the three years I have had with him. For man’s will is a demon that will not let him be. It leads him to the edge of a clear pool; and while he sits admiring it, with his soul suspended over it like a green branch and dwelling in its own reflection, will stretches out his hand and closes his fingers upon a stone—a stone to throw into it.

“I’d had a poor meagre turnpike sort of life until I came here and found Lueli. I loved him, he was a refreshment to me, my only pleasant surprise. He was perfect because he was a surprise. I had done nothing to win him, he was entirely gratuitous. I had had no hand in him, I could no more have imagined him before hand than I could have imagined a new kind of flower. So what did I do? I started interfering. I made him a Christian, or thought I did, I taught him to do this and not to do the other, I checked him, I fidgetted over him. And because I loved him so for what he was I could not spend a day without trying to alter him. How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it about! We couldn’t even love a tree, not a stone even; for sooner or later we should be pruning the tree or chipping a bit off the stone. Yet if it were not for a will I suppose we should cease to exist. Anyhow it is in us and while we live we cannot escape from it; so however we love and whatever we love it can only be for a few minutes, and to buy off our will for those few minutes we have to relinquish to it for the rest of our lives whatever it is we love. Lueli has been the price of Lueli. I enslaved him, I kept him on a string. I robbed him of his god twice over—first in intention, then in fact. I made his misery more miserable by my perpetual interference. Up till an hour ago I was actually tormenting him with that damned geometry. And now he is dead.... Yes, parrot! You may well whistle. But be careful. Don’t attract my attention too much lest I should make a pet of you, and put you in a cage, and then in the end, when you had learnt to talk like me instead of whistling like a wise bird, wring your neck because you couldn’t learn to repeat Paradise Lost.”

At these words the parrot flew away, just as though it had understood and wished to keep on the safe side; and looking up Mr. Fortune saw some of the islanders running towards him. He got up and went to meet them. “Well, is he dead?” he asked, too deeply sunk in his own wan-hope to pay any attention to their looks and greetings.

It was some time before they could make him understand that Lueli was alive. He followed them, dumb, trembling and stupefied, to where Lueli was sitting propped up under a tree. He looked rather battered, and rather bewildered, and slightly ashamed of himself, like a child that has been at a rich tea-party, grown over-excited and been sick. But the hag-ridden look he had worn since the earthquake was gone, and he was answering the congratulations and chaff of those around him with a semblance of his old gaiety.

Mr. Fortune stood looking down on him in silence, confused at meeting him whom he had not thought to meet again. Lueli was infected by his embarrassment, and the two regarded each other with caution and constraint, as dear friends do who meet unexpectedly after long separation. Lueli was the first to speak.

“How ill you look. Your face is all holes.”

“Lueli, you would have laughed if you could have seen me trying to dive in after you. Twice I threw myself in, but I could do nothing but float.”

“I expect you let yourself crumple up.”

“Yes, I expect I did.”

“But it was very kind of you to try.”

“Not at all.”

The situation was horrible. Mr. Fortune was tongue-tied, very jealous of the others and haunted with the feeling that behind all this cause for rejoicing there was some fatal obstacle which he ought to know all about but which his mind was shirking the contemplation of. Lueli fidgetted and made faces. The awkwardness of being raised from the dead was too much even for his savoir faire.

“Why can’t I be natural?” thought Mr. Fortune. “Why can’t I say how glad I feel? And why don’t I feel my gladness? What have I done? Why is it like this, what is the matter with me?”

Lueli’s thoughts were something like this: “He has a blemish on his neck, but didn’t I ever notice it before? It must have grown larger. I hope they won’t begin to laugh at him because he can’t dive. I love him, but Oh dear! what a responsibility he is. I don’t think I can bear it much longer, not just now. I don’t want responsibilities. I only want to go to sleep.”

Round them stood half the population of the island, raging with congratulations, jokes and enquiries. Even when they had escorted them back to the hut, superintended Lueli’s falling asleep, and eaten all the provisions which Mr. Fortune brought out to them, they would not go away but sat among their crumbs and on the rock-garden imploring Fuma to tell them once more how Mr. Fortune had come bounding through the wood and fallen headlong into the girls’ laps.

For no reason that he could see he had suddenly become immensely popular. And as he walked to and fro in the twilight waiting for his guests to take themselves off he heard his name being bandied about in tones of the liveliest affection and approval. He had one consolation: by the morrow he would be out of fashion again. As for Lueli, they scarcely mentioned him. If he had been drowned they would have spent the evening wailing and lamenting; not for him but for themselves, at the reminder of their own mortality, after the natural way of mourning. And there would have been just as much gusto, he thought—but tenderly, for he felt no animosity to them now, only a desire to get rid of them and be left to his own soul—and just as many crumbs.

The moon had set before they went away. Mr. Fortune stole into the hut and listened for a while to Lueli’s quiet breathing, a slight human rhythm recovered that day from the rhythm of the sea. He knelt down very quietly and creakingly and taking hold of Lueli’s limp warm hand he put it to his lips. “Good-bye, my dear,” he murmured under his breath. Lueli stirred, and uttered a drowsy inarticulate Goodnight.

Both rhythms were in Mr. Fortune’s ears as he lay down to rest. He did not sleep, at least not for some hours; but he lay unharried in a solemn and dream-like repose, listening to the gentle fanning of Lueli’s slumber and the slow tread of the sea.

Thus, tranquil and full of long thoughts, he had lain on his first night in Fanua, gazing at the star Canopus and watching the trail of creeper stir at the sweet breath of night. All that he had then of hope and faith was lost. But now at the last he seemed strangely to have resumed the temper of that night, and the thought of his renunciation was as full and perfect as the former thought of his vocation had been. “It is not one’s beliefs that matter,” he told himself, “but to be acting up to them. To have come to Fanua and now to have made up my mind to go away—it is the decision that fills me with this amazing kind of joy.”

To go away. It was the only solution, he had the parrot’s word for it. The slow tread of the sea told him the same story. “I brought you here,” it said, “and presently I shall bear you away. My ebbing tides will return to Fanua, and ebb and return again and ebb and return again. But for you there will be no return.” And the tread of the sea became the footfall of a warder. It was this necessity, still implicit and unrealized, which had lain like a stone in his heart when he saw Lueli brought back from the dead. If he had not thought of Lueli as being dead, he would never have understood. But Death had vouchsafed him a beam of her darkness to see clearly by; and having seen, he could not sin against that light. He must go away, that was the only stratagem by which love could outwit its own inherent treachery. If he stayed on, flattering himself with the belief that he had learnt his lesson, he would remember for a while no doubt; but sooner or later, inevitably he would yield to his will again, he would begin to meddle, he would seek to destroy.

To see everything so clearly and to know that his mind was made up was almost to be released from human bondage. This must be the boasted calm joy of mathematicians which he had once pretended to share. Euclid had failed him or he had failed Euclid; but the contemplation of his own reasoning and resolved mind gave him a felicity beyond even that which the rightness of right-angles could afford. He would keep awake a little longer and make the most of it. He could be sure it would not last. But when it had shattered and desolation came in its stead there would still be common-sense and common manliness and several practical preoccupations with which to keep desolation at bay.

First he must get a message to St. Fabien. In the pocket of the coat he had worn on the night of the earthquake were a couple of sheets torn out of an exercise book. He had carried them on his stroll on the chance that he might feel impelled to write a sonnet (Petrarchan Sonnets were the only poetical form he attempted because they were so regular, and even so he did them very badly) On The Setting Sun, or To a Hermit Crab. He had not done so, partly because he had forgotten to take a pencil too; but now, when he had smoothed the crumples out, these sheets would come in handy for his letter to the Archdeacon.

In the morning he gathered some purple fruit whose juice he knew from experience to be indelible, squeezed them into a bowl, and with a reed pen wrote as follows:

Fanua.

My dear Archdeacon.

I am sorry to trouble you but I must ask that the launch may be sent to fetch me away from Fanua. My ministry here has been a failure. I have converted no one, moreover I think that they are best as they are.

I am aware that I shall seem to you an unprofitable servant, and I am prepared for reproof. But I must tell you that in my present state of mind nothing that you can say, either of blame or consolation, is likely to make much difference.

I should be very much obliged if you could send with the launch a pair of stout black boots (size eleven) some collars (sixteen and a half inch), and a bottle of Aspirin tablets.

Yours sincerely, Timothy Fortune.

P.S. Also some bone collar-studs. There was an earthquake and I lost those which I had.

When the letter was written he put it away. His mind was quite made up as to leaving Fanua, there was no danger that a week’s delay or so in sending off the letter would weaken his resolution. Indeed if he had consulted his own feelings he would not have delayed for an hour. But he did not wish to leave Lueli until he was quite certain the boy was able to stand on his own feet.

One thing was beyond doubt: Lueli would not try to kill himself again. He had been frightened by the dark look of Death under the water. Though he said nothing about his drowning or his rescue it was obvious that he had set himself to get on good terms with the life he had then thought fit to abandon. Never before had he been so beautiful, nor moved so lithely, nor sprawled so luxuriously on the warm grass. Sleek, languid and glittering, he was like a snake that has achieved its new skin. He was grown more sociable too, and with a quite new form of sociability; for instead of seeking the company of others he exerted himself to make others seek his. Although his drowning had done him no harm whatsoever and he had never been in better trim, he chose to preen himself as an interesting invalid. At all hours of the day the youth and beauty of the island would appear with offerings of fruit and invalid delicacies. Since the Fanuans are a people unequalled in kindness and idleness this was not such a great tribute to Lueli’s fascinations. But what was really remarkable was the success with which he imposed himself upon them as a young hero. Even Fuma, who had stood out against his pretensions for several days, laughing at him and pulling his hair and making sarcastic remarks about people who couldn’t swim, suddenly dropped her sisterly airs and attended on him as devoutly as the rest. As though this were the last plum that he had been proposing should drop into his mouth Lueli began to feel a little better now; was able to go sailing or swimming—not even the waters that drowned him could quench his love for water—or to take a stroll in the woods. Presently he was addressing Fuma as “Child.”

If he had not so utterly forsworn meddling, if the letter to the Archdeacon were not put away in his coat pocket, Mr. Fortune might have yielded himself to a glow of matchmaking. Perhaps Fuma was not quite the girl he would have chosen; perhaps for that matter Lueli’s choice of her was not quite to the exclusion of other girls; but having been so heart-rent over the defeated estate of that spiritless and godless boy whom even his own younger brothers had been able to tease out of the village it would have been sweet now to abet the happiness of this triumphant young man.

As things were Lueli’s recovery must be the waving of the flag which signalled his departure. So one morning he set off to find Ori and explained to him that he wished to send a message by canoe to Maikalua. Would Ori as usual see about it and oblige?

Early in the morning the canoe was launched: and singing and shouting the boatmen set out on their voyage.

As he watched them depart Mr. Fortune had a sudden vision of a pillar-box. It seemed to spring up before him, a substantial scarlet cylinder, out of the glittering untenanted beach. He remembered how long ago, one August afternoon, he had posted a note accepting with pleasure an invitation to play tennis, an invitation which came from some people called Tubbs who lived at Ealing; and how having done so, he stood with the sun beating down upon him, just outside the station, with people jostling past him and the newspaper man shouting: “Star, Standard, Westminster! Surrey all out!” wishing with despair that he could get his note back, for it seemed to him that nothing could be more distasteful than to play tennis at Ealing with those rollicking Tubbses.

But now he had no wish to recall his letter, though he was still sick with the wrench of definitely despatching it. His only thought was to leave Fanua as soon as possible; and until the moment of departure came he could not imagine how he would pass away the time. Gradually the pillar-box faded out before him and he saw the ocean-waste, the narrow diminishing boat, the empty indifferent sky. His head was aching again and he put his hand to his forehead. There was that deluded watch, mincing complacently on. It was much better at passing away time than he. Half-past seven. Another thirteen hours and he would be getting himself supper, and Lueli might come in or he might not. And after supper he would be going to bed. But if he fell asleep too soon he would wake early with another shining unending morning before him. No! It would be better to sit up late, to midnight if possible. For time passes more tolerantly at night when the body is drowsy and the mind tired; but in the morning hours there is no release from one’s faculties, and every second is a needleprick to consciousness.

The sand had dribbled out between his fingers, he found himself staring at the palm of his hand. It would be the better for washing; and he turned back toward the bathing-pool. While he was still the headache was not so bad; but every step jolted it and sent a heavy sick tingle up his spine to jar against his temples.

As the bathing-pool came in sight through the lattice of ferns and bushes he paused, for it came into his mind that Lueli might be there with his friends. And dropping on his hands and knees he crawled through the undergrowth, holding his breath and cautiously poking out his head from the greenery to scout if the coast were clear. He need not have been so discreet. The pool was empty. There was no foot-print on the sandy rim.

He undressed and bathed his body wearily in the fresh cool water—it was always exquisitely cool under the shadow of the rock. It did not occur to him that by going a little further he could drown. He hauled himself up on a ledge and began to clean his toes with a wisp of sea-weed.

The shade on his wet limbs, the sound of the sea, the breathing murmur of the woods in the soft steady wind was comforting to his headache. He began to feel slightly lachrymose and a good deal better, and with the tenderness of a convalescent he watched the fish darting in and out of the streaming weed. Of course he might have gone himself by the canoe instead of sending his request for the launch. But though he now realized that it would have been perfectly feasible to have done so, something within him assured him that it would not really have been possible. Things must take their course: and thus to wait still in Fanua for the launch to come and fetch him away was the natural course for his departure. He could see himself leaving the island in the launch, but not any other how.

That bull-faced fish had dodged in and out from the weed a dozen times at least. It was as persistent as a swallow. His body was dry now and his headache smoothed away. Only the heartache remained; and he was getting used to that.

All this while, as he was crawling through the bushes, and cleaning his toes, and watching the fish, there had been but one deep preoccupying thought at the back of his mind—the thought of Lueli and a longing for his presence. It was on the chance that Lueli might come down to bathe that he was waiting now. And he imagined the conversation that must take place between them.

“Lueli, I am going away from Fanua.”

“But you will come back again?”

“No. I am going away for ever.”

It would be quite simple—as simple as that. “I am going away from Fanua.” Above all he was determined that there should be no explanations. It would never do to tell Lueli that he was going away because of him. No smirch of complicity, no blight of responsibility should fall upon Lueli, happy Lueli who had done him no wrong, and whom so often he had sought to injure from the best, worst, most fatal and affectionate motives. How could he have so teased him in his misery with that idiotic geometry—a misery, too, in which he was the agent, for it was through him that Lueli had lost his idol. That was bad enough, at any rate it was damnably silly. Though what else could he have done? Something equally senseless, no doubt. But what was it to his behaviour in the hut, when the idol lay between them, and Lueli crouched in his last refuge of silence while he sought with menaces and blackmailing to rob him of his faith, and bade him cast his god into the fire? Ah! of the two gods who had perished that night it was the wooden one he would now fetch back again.

But this he could never say. He must not give any reason for his departure lest he should at length fall into giving the true one and seeming to involve Lueli in his own blunders. “I am going away from Fanua.” That must be all. Little to say: so little that he must postpone saying it till the last hour came, the hour when one says Good-bye. And for that reason he must shun Lueli’s presence, hide from him if need be and crawl through bushes, for if he once allowed himself to resume their old familiar intercourse he would not be able to keep back the words: “Lueli, I am going away. I am going away for ever.”

He said it aloud, and as it were heard the words for the first time. He put on his clothes and began mechanically to walk back toward the hut. Then he had a good idea. Since he was leaving the island it would be a pity not to go up the mountain and have a look at the crater. Very likely he would never have another opportunity of inspecting an active volcano.

It would be a taxing expedition, and not without danger. He put up some food, cut himself a stout walking-stick and gathered a bunch of plantain leaves to stick in his boots—for it was decidedly an occasion for boots. Preparations always pleased him, for he had a house-wifely mind, and by the time he set out he was feeling, if not less miserable, at any rate a point or two deflected from his misery.

The new crater was on the further side of the mountain. He decided that the best way of approach would be to walk up through the woods by tracks which he knew and thence to skirt round under the foot of the crags, keeping against the wind in order to avoid the smoke and fumes. As he mounted through the woods he could hear, at first the sea and the tree-tops, presently the murmuring tree-tops alone. Soothed by their company and their shade he climbed on peacefully enough for a couple of hours, keeping a sharp look-out for rents and fissures; for however weary one may be of life one would not choose to discard it by starving, or suffocating in a deep crevice as hot as an oven.

At last he came out upon the tract of scrub and clinker which covered the upper slopes of the mountain. After the cool depth of the woodland it was like a pale hell, a prospect bleached and brittle, such as even the greenest garden will offer if one sits and looks at it suddenly after lying with the sun strong on one’s eye-lids. After a moment of dizziness the garden will revive again, but the longer Mr. Fortune looked at this landscape the more spectral and repellent it seemed. And because the air quivered with heat the face of the mountain-side seemed to be twitching with fear.

There were the crags, some two miles away yet, but looking as though he could throw a stone and splinter them. They were not rhododendron-coloured now, but a reddish and scabby mottle. They reminded him of a group of ruined gas-vats with the paint scaling off them, standing in the middle of a brick-field. It smelt of brick-fields too; and in the place of the former sounds of the sea and the tree-tops new sounds came to his ear, ugly to match the landscape, and of a kind of baleful insignificance like the landscape—far-off crashes and rumblings, the hiss and spurt of escaping steam: the noise of a flustered kitchen.

Now was the moment to put the plantain leaves in his boots. Those which he had gathered were faded, he threw them away and gathered fresh. Then, with a heart beating harshly and remotely, he set forth on the second stage of his climb.

It was hateful going—slippery bents, bristling scrubs, sharp-edged clinker which hurt his feet. He tripped and fell constantly, and when he fell the clinker cut his hands. Twice he remained crumpled on the ground just as he had fallen, gasping for breath, and cowed by the frantic beating of his heart, which did not seem to belong to him, behaving like some wild animal which, terrified and apprehensive, is dragged struggling to the summit of the mountain to be sacrificed there. And as he went on, the brickfield smell grew stronger, and the kitchen noises grew louder, and the sun striking down on him from the motionless sky, striking up at him from the ground, reverberating upon him from the parched landscape, enclosed him in its burning net.

He remembered the story of the woman Kapiolani, the Christian convert of Hawaii. Followed by a crowd of trembling islanders she had gone up the burning mountain to manifest her faith in the true God. When she was come to the crater of Kilauea she had scrambled down to the very edge of the burning lake, and there, half hidden in clouds of smoke, she called on Pele the Fire-goddess, and flouted her, calling her an impostor and challenging her, if goddess she were, to rise up out of her everlasting fiery den and overwhelm her accuser with its waves. Pele did not answer: she sulked in the heart of her fire, powerless before the name of Christ. And when she had waited long enough Kapiolani climbed up again out of the pit and showed herself once more to the crowd who had been cowering at the crater-side, trembling, and listening to the loud voice of her faith. And when they saw her, they believed.

Her faith, thought Mr. Fortune, had carried her lightly up the mountain-side, and over the lava-flow which she had trodden with scorched and bleeding feet. But he, though a man, and born free from the burden of heathen fears, and wearing boots, was already tired out and reluctant, and only a cold tourists’ curiosity could carry him onward, and a bargain-hunting spirit which told him that having gone so far it would be a waste not to go on to the end.

Kapiolani had made her act of faith in the year 1825. And after that, as though for her courage she were like the prophetess Deborah, the land had peace thirty years. Then Pele shook herself contemptuously and fell to her tricks again. At her first shake the island trembled, as though it knew what was to come. “Yet a little,” said the Fire-goddess; and slept for another ten years. This time she woke angrier. The island quivered like the lid of a boiling pot, a river of fire, flowing terribly underground, rent open a green and fertile plain, and five times a tidal wave reared up and fell upon the helpless land. And once more Pele fell asleep, but fell asleep to dream; snarling to herself, and hotly, voluptuously, obscurely triumphing in a dream of what her next awakening would be.

Kapiolani would not know of that awakening at any rate. It was to be hoped that she had been spared the others. A simple faith like hers would be cruelly jolted by such ambiguities in God’s law. She might even have lost it thereby, as did Voltaire, another blunt, straightforward thinker, at a rather similar exhibition; for she could hardly be expected to take the subtler view of those long-standing and accustomed believers who can gloss over an eruption as a very justifiable protest against the wickedness of their neighbours. And as for saying that it is all a mystery—well, there is not much satisfaction to be got out of that.

These thoughts carried him over the last mile, and looking up he was surprised to find himself under the crags. He began to skirt round them. Now the noises and the smells were so strong that as he rounded every jut of the crags he expected to come on the new crater. Just as he had climbed on to the top of a large rock a gust of wind, veering among the crags, brought with it a volley of foul smoke, which rose up from beneath him and smothered him round, just as smoke comes suddenly belching out of the vent of a tunnel. He stood for a moment coughing and stifling; and then the wind shifted again, and the smoke lifted away from him, and looking out underneath it he saw that he was come to the end of his search.

The rock on which he stood was the last westernmost redoubt of the crags, and before him extended the other side of the island of Fanua. Far off and strangely high up he saw the sea-line. The ocean seemed to fall steeply and smoothly downhill to where it broke upon the reef in a motionless pattern of foam. Stretching away down the mountain-side was a long, serpentining slab of lava—the thickly-burning torrent which had torn apart the flanks of the mountain on the night of the eruption, wallowing downward with an ever more heavy and glutted motion until now it was solidifying into rock; a brutal surface of formless hummocks and soppy and still-oozing fissures. Everything around was deep in ashes, and here and there little gushes of steam showed where the heat still worked under the outer crust. It was like the surface of a saucepan of porridge which has been lifted off the fire but still pimples and undulates with its own heat.

Another jet of smoke belched up. Holding his breath Mr. Fortune crept over the rock on his hands and knees and looked down into the crater.

By night the spectacle might have had a sort of Medusa’s head beauty, forever wakeful and writhing and dangerous; but in the light of day it was all sordid and despairing. Thick smoke hung low over the burning lava, and thin gaseous flames flickered on the surface, livid and cringing, like the ghosts of bad men still haunting around the corrupting body. Below the play of dun smoke and shadowy flame the lava moved unceasingly, impelled to the south, on and on and over and over as though its torment were bound upon an axle. Every now and then two currents would flow into each other with a heavy impact, a splash and a leap of fire. And then it was as though it clapped hands in its agony.

Slowly, because he was cramped with having watched it so long, Mr. Fortune raised himself to his feet and turned away. He had no thoughts, no feelings. What he had seen was something older than the earth; but vestigial, and to the horror of the sun what the lizard is to the dragon: degenerate. Shuddering and cold he went down past the shadow of the crags and over the scorched expanse of hell-ground towards the woods, hastening, still having in his ears the growlings and concussions of the pit and with that foul smell still in his nostrils.

When he came into the woods he stopped and looked up. The green boughs hid away the skies. He was glad. He did not want to look at anything eternal just now. He sat down on a fallen tree. Moss covered it, and creepers and tree-ferns were springing out of it; but he parted the ferns and creeper and scratched away the moss and put down his nose to snuff up the scent of decay. Everywhere in the woods was the odour of mortality; it was sweet to him, like a home-coming. He lay down and buried his face in the leaf-mould, pressing his eye-lids to the warm mouldering softness, trying to forget the rock.

When he felt better he went on again; and coming to a stream he bathed himself, and ate some fruit. He was not very sure of his whereabouts, so to follow the stream seemed the best plan. It was a pleasant guide. He heard it singing ahead as he followed its windings. All this part of the woodland was unknown to him. It seemed very venerable and solitary. The solemn girth and glossy great leaves of the breadfruit trees pleased him all the better because he was thinking of them as beings transient and subject to laws of growth and decay. They were steadfast, he thought, because they knew of their appointed end. They soothed him, bearing faithful witness that his own should be no other—that he too should one day lie along the earth and be gathered into it.

It occurred to him for the first time that now he would not, as he had hoped, be buried in Fanua. And as though the thought had called up a vision, he saw what appeared to be a graveyard before him. It was a sort of pound or enclosure, built of rough stones. Whatever the purpose of the place it was clearly unfrequented, perhaps forsaken; for the mossy walls were breached and tumbled and the grass grew clean and untrodden in the entry. Overhead the breadfruit trees mingled their large boughs like a roof of wings. He turned and went in. He found himself surrounded by ranks of idols, idols of all sizes and all fashions, idols of wood and stone, all very old, subdued with weather, moss-grown, with the grass tangling round their bases. He knew well what they must be: in this island where everyone had his own god these were the gods of the dead. At the death of their worshippers the gods were carried here and left to their repose, till they too in their time failed and sank into the earth. He remembered who had died since he came to the island and peered among the idols for some more recent than the others which might be those of his acquaintance. Yes, that was Akau’s god perhaps, and that pot-bellied fellow with the humorous squint might be the god of poor old Live-for-Ever. Only Lueli’s god would never come here.

Sad Lueli! Just now in his flourish of youth and affability he might forget his lost god and do quite as well without him; but one day Lueli would be growing old and then—then he would feel his loss. For the day must come when a man turns from the companionship of flesh and blood, be it flesh and blood failing like his own, or the flesh and blood he has begotten, and seeks back into the traditions of his race for a companionship more ghostly and congenial—old habits, old beliefs, old stories—the things his childhood accepted and his forefathers lived by. In that day Lueli would need his god. The lack of it would be a kind of disgrace, a mutilation.

“I cannot go from Fanua,” said Mr. Fortune, standing among the idols: “until I have given Lueli back his god.”

The knife hung round his neck: it would be easy to take one of the idols, re-trim its features, scrape off the moss and make a new idol of it. But a feeling of decorum stayed his hand. However, he might study them, for he would need an example. He spent half an hour or so in the enclosure, kneeling before the idols, examining the details of their workmanship and trying to acquire the convention. Then, for it was still afternoon, he spent some time wandering round in search of a suitable piece of wood. It must be about two foot long, straight, without knots, not so fresh as to tear, not so old as to crumble, of an easy grain to carve, and for choice, of a pleasant colour. He sought out several pieces and experimented on them with his knife before he found one to his liking. It was of rather dark, sweet-smelling wood, of what tree he knew not, for he found it lying beside the stream. A freshet must have carried it there, perhaps from the hands of some other woodman; for there seemed to be cutting-marks about one end of it.

He sat down and began to rough out the image he had in his mind: a man with a bird perched on his wrist, his head a little inclined towards the bird as though it were telling him something; and seated at his feet a plain smooth dog, also looking at the bird, but quite kindly. After so many failures, great and small: the trousers, the introduction to mathematics, all his very indifferent attempts at cookery, boiled bad eggs and clammy coco-nut buns, the conversion of the islanders and the domestication of the parrots, it might have been expected of Mr. Fortune that he would put forth on sculpture with diffidence. But his heart was in it; he had never attempted anything of the kind before; and anyhow, it is the vainglorious people who expect difficulties. Mr. Fortune in his modesty supposed that cookery, conversion, etc., were really quite easy matters, and that it was only he who made a botch of them. So when after an hour or so of whittling and measuring and whittling again, he found himself possessed of a considerable aptitude for wood-carving, and the man, the dog and the bird emerging from the billet with every promise of looking very much as he intended them to, he was pleased but without any amazement.

He worked while there was light; then wrapping the idol carefully in soft grasses and leaves and tying it into a parcel with vines he set out to follow the stream by starlight.

Now into the solemn caverns of the wood came rolling solemnly the noise of the ocean. Wafts of sweet scent wandered to him from flowering shrubs whose flowers he could not discern, and large soft moths brushed across his face. He was foot-sore and perhaps sorrowful, and he knew that soon he must quit this island which was so beautiful and romantic under its crown of horror, and go, he knew not whither, but certainly never again to any place like this; but nothing disturbed his enjoyment of the hour. His thoughts were slow and peaceful, and looking up through the trees he saw the heavens without disquiet, although they were eternal. The stream laughed and ran joyously forward to the waterfall. He looked about him and knew where he was. The stream which had borne him such pleasant company was the same whose torrent he had seen wavering and distorted on the night of the earthquake.

He hitched the god a little closer up under his arm and turned into a path he knew. As he neared the village he heard voices not far off. He stopped. Yes, that was Fuma’s voice: and the laugh—only Lueli could laugh like that. Standing in the darkness he blessed them. The god weighed on his arm, and it occurred to him that this was the first time he had ever returned from a walk bringing with him a present for Lueli. Lueli never came back without some gift or other; he was as prodigal as his native clime. Trails of flowers which festooned the doorway and wound themselves round Mr. Fortune’s neck whenever he went in or out. Shells, which were casually thrown down on his mat and ran into his sleep when he turned over in the night. Perfectly uneatable shell-fish because they were so pretty, feathers and fantastic ornaments which he wore with gratified embarrassment round his neck. He too had sometimes brought things back with him, but things practical or edible. Never real presents, objects perishable, useless and inconvenient, friendship’s tokens, emblems of love, that passion which man, for all his sad conscience and ingenuity, will never be able quite to tame into something useful.

Well, at last he was making some atonement where he had been so remiss. He was a poor hand at presents: an Englishman with a public school training still lurking in his heel, he would never be able with any sort of grace or naturalness to offer garlands of morning-glories or small gay striped crabs. But he was doing his best; he was bringing Lueli a god.

When Lueli came into the hut Mr. Fortune had eaten his supper and was almost asleep.

“Where have you been all day?” enquired Lueli. “I kept on looking for you, and wondering where you had gone. I was growing very anxious, I assure you.”

“I have been to the mountain.”

“To the mountain?”

“Yes, right to the top of it.”

“Oh! did you see the flames and the smoke they talk about? What’s it like? Are there a great many flames? Does it make a great noise? Did you feel frightened? I hope you were careful not to fall in. Tell me all about it.”

“It is a very impressive sight.”

“Well? Go on!”

“I will tell you the rest to-morrow. Now it is time you went to bed. You needn’t trouble about Tibby. I’ve fed her.”

He turned over and fell asleep. All night he lay with the idol close against his side.

For three days he worked on it in secret, chipping and scooping and shaving, rubbing it smooth with fine sand, oiling it, treating it as tenderly as a cricket-bat. As he worked, intent and unflurried, strange thoughts concerning it stole into his mind. Sometimes he thought that the man was himself, listening to the parrot which told him how the doom of love is always to be destroying the thing it looks upon. At other times the man seemed to be Christ, and the bird on His wrist the Holy Ghost. In these suppositions there was no part for the dog, save as an adjunct to the design, steadying the base of the composition, and helping it to stand upright. But there was yet a third fancy; and then the man was Lueli, the bird neither parrot nor dove but the emblem of his personality, while the dog was he himself, looking up at Lueli’s bird but on trust not to snatch at it or frighten it away.

On the afternoon of the third day the idol was finished. So far it had been his, the creature of his brain, the work of his hands. In an approving look he took his farewell of it, and dismissing it from his care he put it to stand upright on the rock before the hut. Then, moving very quietly, for inside the hut Lueli was taking his afternoon nap and must not be disturbed till everything was ready, he went to the bush by the spring where the red flowers grew. Of these he wove a rather uncouth garland, after the style of the daisy-chains that children make, but a daisy-chain like slow drops of blood. He arranged this round the idol and walked into the hut.

“Lueli!”

Under the smooth brown eye-lids the eyes flickered and awakened. Lueli blinked at him, shut his eyes once more and stretched protestingly. It was all most right: he would hear the words as he should hear them, he would hear them as in a dream.

“Lueli, on the rock outside there is something waiting for you. Go out and see what it is.”

He was conscious of Lueli rising and passing him by, and pausing for a moment on the threshold. He sat down with his face to the wall, for he dared not watch an encounter that must be so momentous. Even the eyes of his mind he turned away, and sat in a timeless world, listening. Then, at last, he heard and was released—for what he heard, a murmur, a wandering wreath of sound, was Lueli talking softly to his god.

He made a movement to arise, and then stayed himself. This time he would not intrude, would not interfere. Lueli should be left in peace. He too was at peace, wasn’t he? His atonement had been accepted, his part was done. Now there was nothing left for him but to go away. He began to reckon the days. His letter had caught the boat, he knew; for last night the canoe had returned and Moki told him that he had seen the Captain and put the letter into his hands. That was two days ago, and so by now Archdeacon Mason had hitched on his gold-rimmed eyeglasses and was scanning the letter at arm’s length in that dignified way he had, a way of reading letters which was as much as to announce: “Whilst reserving my judgment I remain perfectly infallible.” At any rate by to-morrow morning he would learn that Mr. Fortune wished to be recalled from Fanua: for though the boat touched at two or three ports before reaching St. Fabien, she was never more than half a day out of her time. By this reckoning the launch might be expected, perhaps to-morrow evening, perhaps on the day following. Then the canoe would push out to the opening of the reef and dodge forward between two waves. He would stand up in the canoe, catch hold of a rope, push against that footing, buoyant and unsteady almost as the sea. He would be on the launch, looking at the neat life-belt, and smelling brass-polish again and warm machine oil. He would be off, he would be gone.

Outside among the birds and the sliding shadows of the palm-fronds Lueli was still talking to his god—a happy noise. Mr. Fortune listened for a minute or two and then went on thinking. He would have no luggage and that was a pity, for he felt the need of doing something business-like, packing would have been a solace. Stay! There would of course be presents: the islanders would not allow him to depart without gifts. They would give him mats, carved bowls and platters, a pig-sticker hung with elaborate tassels, a pipe. A pleasant people, and very beautiful, with their untrammelled carriage and arabesqued nakedness. He glanced down at his forearm where he had allowed old Hina to prick out a vignette of a fish with whiskers. While she was jabbing and chattering he had thought: “A man who has lost his faith in God may perfectly well allow himself to be tattooed.” After Lueli, Hina was the islander with whom he had gone nearest to a feeling of intimacy. In extreme old age as in infancy, distinctions of nationality scarcely exist; and Hina had seemed to him very little different from any legendary old lady in an English chimney-corner. She might almost have been his godmother, grown so aged as to be grown gay, and without her wig.

To-morrow he must go round and bid Good-bye to everybody. They would be very surprised, very exclamatory: he did not think that they would be very much upset. If they had seemed rather unreal to him how much more unreal must he have seemed to them! They had been on easy terms with him—they would be on easy terms with anybody; they had accepted his odd ways without demur. While he still preached they had sometimes listened, and when he ceased preaching they asked no questions. When he was happy they smiled back, and when he was parched with anxiety they had not appeared to notice much difference. And at all times they continued to supply him with food and to perform any service he required of them.

They had grown accustomed to him but they had not assimilated him; and his odd ways they had taken as something quite natural since he himself was an oddity. His departure would affect them much as if a star had fallen out of their sky: that is to say it wouldn’t really affect them at all. There were once three stars where now you see two: there was once a white man with a magic box which groaned when he trampled it, who came to Fanua. In the course of time the few remaining people who had seen the lost star would brag a little about its superior size and lustre, saying that there were no such stars in these days; and similarly in times to come a black and white being ten foot high and able to speak in a voice of thunder for seven days and seven nights might haunt the groves of Fanua. The ginger-nuts, they too might be commemorated in the fact that he fed men with red-hot pebbles. All he hoped was that they would not use him to frighten children with. But alas!—he was fooling himself. There would soon be plenty of white men to frighten the children of Fanua, to bring them galvanized iron and law-courts and commerce and industry and bicycles and patent medicines and American alarm clocks, besides the blessing of religion. The island could not hope to keep its innocence much longer. Had he not come, a single spy? And soon there would come battalions. Poor islanders! He almost said: “Poor flock!” Well, to-morrow he must bid them good-bye, and to-morrow too, before he bade farewell to the rest he must say: “I am going away, Lueli, I am going away for ever.”

And then—suppose the launch didn’t come? Suppose that the earthquake at Fanua had been but a ripple of an enormous earthquake which had swallowed up St. Fabien?

It would not do to fancy such things. He got up and walked out of the hut. Lueli was gone and had taken his god with him; maybe he had carried him off to the little copse where he had cherished the old one. Absently Mr. Fortune sat down on the altar. His hand touched something cold and flabby. It was the garland of red flowers which he had woven in order to give the idol a more festive and Christmas-tree appearance—for a present is a present twice over if it be tied up prettily. He smiled, and hung it round his neck.