Chapter I (5)

The suffragette was always without inspirations in the cause of comfort. She was a petty ascetic, and never thought personal well-being worth the acquiring. Her body was an unfortunate detail attached to her; she resented its demands, and took but little more care if it than she did of the mustard-coloured portmanteau, another troublesome but indispensable part of her equipment. She put her body and the portmanteau each into a wicker chair in the train, and promptly forgot how uncomfortable they both were.

(There is much fascination in the big world, but I think the most wonderful thing in it is the passing of the little bubble worlds that blow and burst in many colours around you and me every minute of our lives. In a ’bus or at a ball, in a crowd around a fallen horse, meeting for a moment as reader and writer of a book, or shoulder to shoulder in church singing to a God we all look at with different eyes, these things happen and will never happen exactly that way again. How I wondered at the cut of your moustache, O stranger, how I wondered at the colour of your tie.... But your little daughter with the thin straight legs and the thin straight hair pressed to your side, her glorying face filled with the light of novelty, and prayed that drive to heaven might never cease. And next to you was the girl who had just discovered the man by her side to be no saint, but a man. And he was trying by argument to recover his sanctitude. “But strite now, Mibel, I never dremp you’d tike it so ’ard. ’S only my bit of fun....” There was the man in khaki, next to me, born an idler, brought up a grocer’s assistant, and latterly shocked into becoming a hero.... There was the conductor, a man of twisted humour, chanting the words of his calling in various keys through the row of sixpences that he held between his lips, while the little bell at his belt tolled the knell of one ticket after another.... A little oblong world glazed in, ready to my hand. But I got out at the Bank, and the world went on to Hammersmith Broadway.... These things are, and never shall be again. The finest thing about life is its lack of repetition. I hate to hear that history repeats itself. My comfort is that history is never word-perfect in so doing. Fate has always some new joke up her sleeve. Sometimes the joke is not funny, but certainly it is always new.)

There were two Eves and an Adam in the world which evolved from chaos under the suffragette’s eyes, as the train moved out of Union station. Also a dog. We are never told about Adam’s dog, but I am sure that he had one, and that it wagged its tail at him as he awoke from being created, and snapped at the serpent, and did its best to propitiate the angel with the flaming sword.

Dogs seldom ignored the suffragette. As a race they have either more or less perspicacity than ourselves—you may look at it as you will—and they seldom concur with the public verdict of humanity on its own species. And in the suffragette a confiding dog was never disappointed, for she knew the exact spot where the starched buckram of one’s ear is sewn on to one’s skull, on which it is almost unbearably good to be scratched.

This dog was the sort whose name is always Scottie when he is owned by the unenterprising. He wore his forelegs so short and so bent that he looked as though he were continually posing as being thoroughbred. When he drew himself up to his full height, the under outline of his figure was about three inches from the ground. When at leisure he walked broadly and foursquare, as a table would walk, if endowed with life; when speeding up, he cantered diagonally—forefeet together—hindfeet together—no one foot moving independently of its twin.

The sort of conversation that this dog and the suffragette immediately began did not prevent the latter’s hearing the conversation that was woven by her fellow-passengers across the loom of the train’s roaring.

The fact that the dog’s name was really Scottie should give you a clue as to his mistress’s character. It was perhaps malicious of me to describe her as an Eve; that would have made her blush. For she was very fully clothed in blue serge. It is almost impossible for the average woman to conduct the business of life except in blue serge. We travel in blue serge (thin for the tropics, thick and satin-lined for our native climate), we sit at our desk in blue serge, we meet our Deity or our stockbroker in blue serge, in blue serge we raid the House of Commons. Perhaps the root of the feminist movement lies in blue serge. If I were defended by a crinoline, or rustled in satin or gingham or poplin, I might have been an exemplary spinster in my sphere to-day.

The other Eve, attired (for she was obviously cosmopolitan) in fawn tussore, occupied an undue fraction of the little universe. She was the sort of person whose bosom enters a room first, closely followed by her chin. Black eyes and a hooked Spanish nose led the rear not unworthily. She intended to be looked at, and she hoped to be recognised as a notorious novelist. For she was a momentary novelist with a contempt for yesterday and no concern at all for to-morrow. A public of a hundred thousand housemaids was all she asked.

One of the virtues of men is that they are not intended for fancy portrayal. Why should one ever describe the outward surface of a man, unless he is the hero of one’s book, or unless one is engaged to marry him? The particular Adam in this compartment comes under neither of these headings. He is copiously reproduced all over the world, but clusters thickest in Piccadilly. Possibly you see him at his best very far away from Piccadilly. There is something that transfigures the commonplace in the fact of having kissed the very hem of the Empire’s wide-flung robe.

“I say, Miss Brown, how’s Albert?” asked the young man.

For the other occupants of the little world seemed mutually familiar. It occurred to the suffragette that Fate always threw her with people who knew each other and did not know her.

Miss Brown, the Eve in blue serge, bridled. To all women so flawlessly brought up as Miss Brown, there exists a sort of electricity in the voice of man which sends a tremor across their manners, so to speak.

“Albert, Mr. Wise, is still very weakly. I sometimes wonder whether I shall rear him. His mental activities, I am told, have outgrown his physical strength.”

The young man fanned himself. And indeed mental activities sounded unsuited to the climate. The sun spilt square flames upon the floor through the window. The silhouette of the passing landscape scorched itself across the sky-line. Tattered bananas looked like crowds of creatures struck mad by a merciless sun.

The voice of the lady novelist seemed to reach the suffragette through a veil.

“That child will make his mark. He has the most marvellous mental grasp....”

Two hills to the northwest moved apart in the middle distance, like the curtains from a stage. And there was Union Town lying white beside her sea, white, but veiled by her green gardens. Port King George, on an attenuated isthmus, stretched its parallel form along to shield the mother coast from the Atlantic. Even from here you could see the white gleam of the ocean’s teeth, as they gnashed upon the reef. A spike of calm steel water lay between Union Town and her defending reef. The suffragette thought: “A skeleton in the grass with a sword beside it....” She also looked at the toy figure of the _Caribbeania_, so close to land as to be disguised as part of the island. Her two funnels mingled with the factory chimneys by the wharf.

“But he is sure to have landed by now,” thought the suffragette. She felt unsentimentally interested in the fact. It was too hot to feel more.

“I happened to mention the Book of Genesis,” said the lady novelist. “And Albert produced a most ingenious theory about the scientific explanation of the fable of creation. I wish I had such a nephew. What a marvellous link with the coming generation!”

“On the other hand,” said Mr. Wise, “I happened to mention _Alice in Wonderland_, and he said it was out of date, and, as a dream, most improbable.”

“I am sorry he criticised the Bible in your hearing,” apologised Miss Brown. “I am afraid he has a tendency towards irreverence.”

“I wish he had,” muttered Mr. Wise.

Acres of sugar filed past the window. High waved the proud crests of it, all innocent of its mean latter end as a common comestible. The suffragette’s mind laboured under a rocking confusion of green tufted miles,—and somewhere on the outskirts of her thoughts, a little sallow Albert entrenched behind an enormous pair of spectacles.

“A glorious child,” said the lady novelist, in her monopolising tones. “Simply glorious. Quite an experience to have met him.”

“Good copy, eh?” grinned Mr. Wise.

“Excellent. You know I collect copy.”

Now the suffragette collected copy, but she did it without self-consciousness. There are several kinds of copy-collectors. Some of us squeeze our copy into little six-shilling novels, or hack it into so many columns for the benefit of an unfeeling press. Some of us live three-score years and ten, and then wake suddenly to find our copy-coffers full. Upon which we become bores, and our relations hasten to engage a paid companion for us. But some of us carry our lives about with us sealed up in our holy of holies, and take pride in hiding the precious burden that we bear. Copy-collecting may become a religion; to the suffragette, who never put pen to paper for any one else’s benefit, and who never told an anecdote, this pursuit was the great consolation for a bleak life. At the gate of death, or on the step of Paradise, such a soul may be found filling its pockets with the gold of secret experience. I think the mania is most acute when no thought of eventual print intrudes. Its most encouraging characteristic to the lonely is the sense of irresponsibility it brings. After all I may go and turn cart-wheels down the Strand, I may murder you, or throw my last shilling into the Thames, I may go half-way to Hell, and if I miscalculate the distance and fall in—it’s all copy. To the lady novelist, however, copy was but a currency to spend. Every experience in her eyes formed a part of a printed page, surrounded by a halo of favourable reviews. She never wrote a letter without an eye on her posthumous biography, never met a notable individual without taking a mental note for the benefit of a future series of “Jottings about my Generation.” Both she and the suffragette kept diaries, but only the suffragette’s had a lock and key.

The engine was approaching the climax of its daily task. It faltered. Looking out of the window, Mr. Wise described its arrival at the foot of a pronounced hill. The engine gazed up the perspective of its duty, and panted prophetically, as pants an uncle before a game of stump-cricket.

“This hill is always a surprise to the engine,” said Mr. Wise. “Every day it has two or three tries, and yet it never learns the knack.”

The suffragette’s fingers tore at the arm of her chair. It was not only too hot to travel, it was also much too hot to cease to travel. She felt a crisis approaching.

Her window had stopped artistically opposite a little slice of distant world, carved out between the trunks of two great cotton trees. Union Town, perceptibly diminished since its last appearance, languished again around its bay. Against the white water you could see the cathedral and the factory chimneys, the spires of God and the spires of mammon.

The suffragette, as she looked, saw the cathedral spire cock suddenly awry and bend over, like a finger in three joints.

“The heat,” she thought. “I believe I’m dying.”

Almost at once after that the train suffered a great spasm, as though yearning for the top of the hill.

“She’s going to try again,” said Mr. Wise.

The suffragette’s head cocked suddenly awry, she bent over in three joints like a finger, and slid off her chair in a faint.

A prostrated suffragette is a contradiction in terms. This one became a child, lying in ungraceful angles, in need of its mother.

“By Jove!” said Mr. Wise. Miss Brown, after lifting up her skirt carefully, knelt upon her petticoat.

An ebony ticket-inspector rushed into the compartment.

“Ull right! Ull right!” he shouted. “Ull ovah! Nobuddy killed!”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Wise. “Why should they be? Only a faint.”

“Earthquake, sah, earthquake!” yelled the inspector. “Jes’ look at the steeple daown in taown!”

There was no steeple to look at.

“My—what an eventful journey!” said the lady novelist.

“Poor little thing,” said Miss Brown to the suffragette, in almost human tones. “Better now, better now?”

The suffragette began to struggle a little. Even had she been in her grave, I think pity would have aroused a spark of militant protest in her bones.

“Tell her to make an effort,” said the lady novelist, who had never in her forty years been guilty of physical weakness. “Pretend not to notice her. Probably hysteria.”

This well-worn accusation touches a familiar chord in the ear of any rebel. It opened one of the suffragette’s eyes. She had black eyebrows which suggested that she might have fine eyes, but she had not. When her eyes were shut you only saw the hopeful suggestion.

“Come, come,” said Miss Brown, handing Mr. Wise’s brandy flask back to him, and becoming aware that her petticoat was bare to the gaze of an unmarried gentleman and a negro inspector. “Might I trouble you to lift the young lady on to a chair?” she added, as she rose.

Seven stone of political agitator takes but little time to move.

“A most eventful journey,” said the lady novelist.

Miss Brown, now decently seated on a chair, stroked the suffragette’s hand. “Are you going to friends, my child?” she asked.

“No, enemies, I expect,” said the suffragette drearily.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know where you are going,” said the novelist severely.

“Booked to Greyville,” said the inspector, who had picked up her ticket, and was thoughtfully clipping it all over.

“Do you know any one in Greyville?” asked Miss Brown.

“No.”

“Were you going to an hotel?”

“I suppose so.”

Some kind deeds are so obvious that they are impossible to escape.

“Albert can move into the back room,” said Miss Brown.

And the train, as if relieved to have this affair settled, moved on up the hill.

By the time the chapel bell, which Island engines always wear, had begun to sound its warning to the pigs upon the line at Greyville Junction, the suffragette’s independence was a thing dissolved. Her protests had no weight. Constitutionally she was unable to be politely firm. She must either be militant or acquiescent; she knew not the half measures of civilisation. And it was impossible to be militant in the face of Miss Brown’s impersonal sense of duty.

“If only she had been a more interesting person this might have been like the beginning of a novel,” murmured the lady novelist to Mr. Wise. That young man, who was wearing the sheepish look peculiar to the Englishman in the presence of matters which he considers to be feminine, shrugged his shoulders.

At Greyville station Miss Brown emerged like an empress from incognito. A black coachman, with so generous an expanse of teeth that you suspected them of being the only line of defence between you and the inner privacies of his brain, was on the platform. He seemed torn between acquired awe of Miss Brown, and an innate desire to conduct the welcome heartily. The station-master bowed. The porter chirruped to Scottie.

“New visitor, missis?” gasped the coachman, looking at the suffragette. He had taken some time to assimilate the visitorship of the lady novelist. His mind was being educated at too great a speed.

“Gorgeous fellow,” said the lady novelist, who considered all black people gorgeous because they were not white. The conversation of John the coachman had already filled two note-books, though he had never said anything original in his life.

There is so much superfluous sunshine in Trinity Islands that splashes of it have been lavished upon all sorts of unnecessary details, the lizards, and the birds, and the self-conscious orchids roosting in the trees. Some of it has even been rolled into the roads, making them white and merry and irresponsible. The buggy horses feel the tingle of it, for they seldom walk; although the Creator specialised in hills on Trinity Island.

Down from some lofty market came the peasant women; their children, their donkeys, their tawdry clothes, trappings and merchandise, soaked with sun. Fantastic in outline, fairies of a midsummer day’s dream, the little donkeys capered on spindle legs, bestridden by wide panniers, and by the peasant women, riding defiantly like brigands, with bandanas round their heads, and sun-coloured draperies.

It is curious that fashion has not yet decreed a mania for dyeing one’s complexion mahogany, that one might wear flame-colour with impunity.

The buggy scattered the marketers. The Island horse, a plebeian creature of humble stature, seldom meets with the luxury of feeling superior. But the Island donkey is nothing but a door-mat on four legs, clogged red with the hectic mud of its mother land. A cheap-jack’s pony would feel a prince beside it.

Mr. Wise, who had been met at the station by a very small brown boy with a very tall brown horse, had cantered away in another direction, with a message of greeting to Albert, the sincerity of which Miss Brown had possibly overrated.

A bungalow crouched behind a copper-coloured hedge upon the sky-line. Two cotton trees surveyed it, one on each side. A drive of the violently ambitious kind shot at an impossible angle up to its door-step.

“That is Park View, my home,” said Miss Brown.

“Of course, as your dog’s name is Scottie,” murmured the suffragette.

Miss Brown looked surprised. The poor suffragette’s attempts at polite interchange of fatuities never seemed to meet with the usual fate of such efforts. Her trivialities somehow always fell upon silence; if she ventured on the throwing of a light bridge over a gap in the conversation, it seemed to snap communication instead of furthering it. She was, of course, unlucky, but she was also, it must be admitted, too earnest in intention for petty intercourse. She tried too hard.

The buggy, commending its springs to the mercy of Providence, charged the drive of Park View.

On the door-step, carefully posed, Albert was reading a very large book. He started laboriously as the buggy approached, and placed the book under his arm, taking care that the title should be visible. An emaciated child, with manners too old, and clothes too young, for his years.

“I have dot bissed you at all, Ah-Bargaret,” said Miss Brown’s genial nephew. “I have been too idterested id by dew book od Chebistry. I ab quite sorry you have cob back.”

“Chemistry,” retailed Miss Brown to the lady novelist. “A child of ten. And—did you notice, he was so deep in his book, he got quite a start when we arrived.”

Albert, at Park View, met with that appreciation of his poses which we all hope to meet in heaven.

“Albert, you are to move into the back room,” said Miss Brown.

“Why?” asked Albert.

“To make room for this lady.”

“Priceless child,” said the lady novelist in brackets.

“Because she needs somewhere to rest,” said Miss Brown in a voice of tentative reproof.

“But so do I.”

“I had better move into the back room myself, then,” sighed his aunt.

The suffragette began those hopeless protests which make the burden of an obligation so heavy. It is so very much easier as well as more blessed to give than to receive, that the wonder is that generosity should retain the name of a virtue. Up to a certain point we are all altruists, because it is too much trouble to be otherwise.

Albert, who, having gained his point, was once more comparatively genial, prepared to bring the suffragette to his feet.

“I expect you are wudderig what is the dabe of the book I ab readig,” he suggested to her as she stepped shakily from the buggy.

“No, I was not,” she replied gently. “I’m afraid science bores me.”

“Wha-t a lot you biss,” observed the child. “You probably spedd your precious time id dancig, ad dressig yourself up, ad bakig berry. How buch better——”

“Albert,” said his aunt, “this lady is tired and waiting to pass.”

“Yes, but I ab speaking to her.”

The suffragette smiled at him, and gave him her portmanteau to carry.

The earthquake at Union Town had shot the most lurid rumours into Greyville. All the Park View servants had suddenly gone to church. The whole village was enjoying an impromptu half-holiday. The triangular village green, which held Greyville together and formed the pedestal of the Court-house, echoed with news at every stage of exaggeration. One of the mildest rumours was that Union Town had fallen into the sea. It was said on the highest authority that the Devil had run along the streets, throwing flames right and left. No actual news arrived, the sources of news being wrecked, but towards evening all the Americans whose cars had survived the ordeal suddenly invaded the hills, suffering from nerves and a lack of luggage.

Miss Brown says she does not believe in doing a thing unless you do it thoroughly. She says this as if it had never been said before; she propounds it as one propounds a revolutionary theory. But unlike most theory makers, she always translates such boasts into action. She performed the feat of keeping a militant suffragette in bed for the rest of that day.

The suffragette lay and imagined the gardener and the earthquake at different stages of contact. She thought of him fighting to get out of a falling house, and her eyes shone. She thought of him with his head bound up, and wriggled where she lay. She thought of him unhurt, walking with his usual gait as though he were marching to a band, and this thought left her neutral. She never thought of him dead.

She never believed in death either as a punishment or a reward. She had either lost the art of faith, or else she had never found it. She pictured death as a blink of the eyes, as an altering of the facet turned towards life, never as a miracle. She was the only person I ever knew who honestly looked on death as unworthy of contemplation.

Of course if a friend steps round a corner, you lose sight of that friend. But you must get used to the windings of the road. If you are a suffragette, you have to be your own friend. You must not stretch out your hands to find the hands of another; you must keep them clenched by your side. On the other hand, even a suffragette is human—(I daresay you have doubted this)—and my suffragette was only a little less human than you or I. The fact must stand, therefore, that when she thought of the gardener in pain, she forgot to clench her fists.

It may still be a mystery to you why the suffragette should expend ingenuity in running away from her only friend.

If you are a rebel of thorough nature, you believe that your cause is such a good cause that no supporter can be worthy of it. And, in the effort to reach worth, you may possibly arrive, step by step, at the Theory of the Hair Shirt, to which my suffragette had attained. For in throwing her little weight on the side of the best cause she could see, she cowed: “All my life long to discard everything superfluously comfortable or easy. To despise peace, and to love loneliness....”

This is the texture of the Hair Shirt worn beneath the armour of a rebel. You may call it hysteria. And perhaps you are perfectly right. But perhaps there are even better things than being perfectly right.

The night on the Island falls as abruptly as though he who manages the curtain had let go the string by mistake.

With the night came a trayful of supper for the suffragette, and with the supper came Albert, not of course in the useful rôle of supper purveyor, but only as an ornament.

“This earthquake id Udiod Towd seebs to have beed quite a catastrophe.”

“Quite,” agreed the suffragette.

“I caddot picture ad earthquake,” continued Albert. “I suppose doboddy cad picture such ad urheard-of disaster.”

“I can,” said the suffragette. “I expect my picture is all wrong, but it’s certainly there. I see it red and grey, which is the most vicious discord I know.”

“Red ad grey?” repeated Albert. “Why red ad grey? What for idstadce is red, ad what grey?”

“Why,” said the suffragette rather lamely, “I suppose the quaking is red, and the pain grey.”

“You seeb to be talking dodsedse,” said Albert, with creditable toleration. “I expect the flabes are red, ad the sboke grey. However, go od with your picture.”

“I think the world would suddenly give a lurch to one side, and you would wonder what had happened, and why you felt so sick. Before you realised anything else you would notice a sort of dazzle of chalk-white faces all round you.”

“The people are dearly all degroes id Udiod Towd.”

“Then you would understand, but still you wouldn’t believe that this thing was really happening to you. You would see the houses curtsey sideways in a leaping dust, and a house front, with its windows, all complete, would shoot across the street with an unbearable roar, pricked by cracking noises....”

“Why would it dot fall od you?”

“Because things don’t. And there would be a great chord of screams. And men running a few yards this way or that, and then back again, yelping, with lighted pipes still in their mouths....”

“What ad ugly picture. How cad you see it all so clearly?”

“I have been thinking all day—of a friend of mine, who must have seen it. I don’t expect an earthquake is a pretty thing, although there is something beautiful about any curious happening.”

“I doad’t agree with you,” said Albert. “There are oadly a few beautiful thigs. Roses ... ad sudsets ... ad love....”

“Really, Albert,” protested the suffragette, “what do you know about love?”

“Well, if it cobs to that—what do you dow about earthquakes? I cad picture love, easily. A bad, kissing a girl, udder a cocoadut palb....”

“Nonsense,” exclaimed the suffragette, bounding so violently in her bed as to cause a serious storm in her soup. “Kissing’s not love. Everything that was ever said or written about kissing, I think, must have been said or written by a man. It’s only another of their tyrannies, to which, for the sake of love, women have had to submit.”

“You sowd like a suffragette whed you talk like that,” mocked Albert.

“No wonder,” she replied. “I am one.”

Albert looked shocked to find himself in the presence of such a monstrosity. He went at once to warn his aunt. And she replied: “It doesn’t matter, Albert dear, she’s only staying a few days, till she is well enough to make other plans.”

The suffragette, left to her cooling soup, reviewed her theories and her practice.

“What’s the good of being hard?” she asked herself, “if you are not hard enough? Either you are harder than the world and can bruise it, or the world is harder than you and bruises you. There is no point in just having a hard crust. As well be dough.”

In the middle of the night there was a loud wail from Albert’s room. The suffragette, whose room adjoined his, was the first on the spot.

“I seeb to have a bad paid,” cried Albert, who was always cautious in his statements, “id the heart. It feels like cadcer, I thigk.”

“I don’t think so,” said the suffragette. “Perhaps you are only in love.”

She went and knocked on Miss Brown’s door.

“But I doad’t wadt Ah-Bargaret,” said Albert, as his aunt came in. “I should hate to die lookig at Ah-Bargaret. I ab sure I ab going to die.”

“We’ll see that you don’t,” said the suffragette, as she began to rub his side, his poor little ribs, furrowed like a ploughed field.

“But you are an invalid yourself,” objected Miss Brown jealously. “You had better go back to bed.”

“Doh, she is dot ad idvalid, she’s a suffragette,” whined Albert. “I doad’t wish her to go back to bed.”

Even Albert, with his wide range of scientific ways of being inconvenient, could scarcely have chosen a more impossible moment for an illness. Next day it became apparent that every doctor on the Island who had survived the disaster had plunged into the whirlpool of its after effects. Nursing on the Island is in a rudimentary stage at all times, but what nurses existed were not to be dragged now from Union Town.

The lady novelist said: “I know I must appear heartless, dear Margaret, not to be helping to nurse him, but the sight of suffering gives me such acute pain.... It’s not heartlessness, you see, it’s that my heart is too tender.”

“I wish she would go to an hotel then,” said the harassed Miss Brown to the suffragette. “She wants her meals so good and so regular, and I seem to hate the sight of food just now.”

It was against the suffragette’s principles to hope anything so desirable without translating her hope into action. It was also beyond her powers to be diplomatic.

“I think you had better go to the hotel,” she said militantly to the lady novelist. “You would be better fed there, and we should be more comfortable alone.”

“In that case perhaps I had better, not being welcome in my friend’s house,” replied the novelist. “I was going to suggest it myself, as the sound of that priceless child’s cries wrings my heart.”

The suffragette therefore gained her point at the expense of tact, which, as future historians will note, is a characteristic of suffragettes.

Albert’s temperament was not that of the Spartan. He never ceased to cry for a week. As for the pain, it was as if the god—whoever he may be—who likes little children to suffer, sat beside him, and with a blunt shears sliced off the top of each breath.

There is a sword, a fatal blade,
Unthwarted, subtle as the air,
And I could meet it unafraid
If I might only meet it fair.
But how I wonder why the smith
Who wrought that steel of subtle grain
Should also be contented with
So blunt and mean a thing as pain....

Albert clung to the suffragette, the straw in his sea of troubles. His constant wail rose an octave if she ventured from the room.

The only holiday she had during that first week was half an hour on the second evening of the ordeal, half an hour spent in carrying the lady novelist’s majestic suit-case to the hotel.

John the coachman could not do it, as the road to the hotel was infested with “duppies” after dark. The probability of meeting a “rolling calf” with a human head and green eyes, or the duppy of some regrettable ancestor, robbed even a tip of its splendour.

The carrying of the suit-case was a physical impossibility to one of the suffragette’s lack of muscle. But to her impossibility was only an additional “Anti” to fight, a rather worthier enemy than the rest. She believed in the power of the thought over the deed, that was her religion, and one is tempted to wonder whether any more complex belief is needed. Has it ever been proved that the human will, if reverently approached, is not omnipotent?

At any rate the suit-case, borne by a thing that looked like the suffragette, but was in reality a super-suffragette created for the occasion, travelled to the hotel, unmolested by duppies, but followed by a literary lady poisoned by injured pride.

At the hotel were many Americans who said, “I guess” and “Bully” and “I should worry,” and all the things that make a second-rate copy collector swell with copy and feel exquisitely cosmopolitan. This collector’s diary began to overflow to three or four foolscap sheets a day, closely covered with dialogues on trivial subjects by very ordinary American husbands and fathers; all Americanisms underlined and spattered with liberal exclamation marks.

At the end of the second week of the lady novelist’s stay at the hotel arrived a millionaire, who immediately became the gem of the collection. He was exactly modelled on the stock millionaire to be met with in the pages of the comic papers. He was lean, self-made, and marvellously dressed; he wore eyeglasses and a little stitched-linen hat tilted over them. Also the beard of a goat. At the very outset he expressed himself, “Vurry happy to meet you, madam, always happy to meet any of our neighbours from across the duck-pond.” It was almost too good to be true. The novelist followed him about, so to speak, with fountain pen poised.

His conversation was almost entirely financial. Neither the lady novelist nor I understand such matters well enough to write them down, but only I am wise enough not to try.

“Do you mind if I say you are a treasure?” asked the lady novelist, after listening for an hour to a dissertation on Wall Street.

“Not at all, ma’am,” replied the millionaire politely, and drew breath to continue his discourse. But he rewarded her by descending to the level of her intelligence.

“Say, talking of money, I guess there’ve been more fine opportunities lorst in Union Town this last fortnight, than ever I missed since I commenced collecting the dollars. Would you believe me—there’s a fellow, by name Dallas Tring, who’s inherited the only flour dee-pot in Union Town. Uncle’s orfice crumpled in on Uncle during the quake, and left Tring his fill of dollars right there for the picking up, so to speak. Union Town wants flour at this crisis, and if it was mine I’d say that Union Town, or the British Government, had darn well got to pay for it. We don’t calc’late in hearts, this side of heaven, but in hard dollars. Philanthropy’s a fool-game.”

“You are simply priceless,” said the lady novelist. “Please go on.”

“I’m going right on, ma’am,” said the treasure. “Would you believe me, this Tring e-volves a system (save the mark) by which he gives away this flour—gives it away, mind you, gratis, free, for nothing, with a kiss thrown in if required, to any nigger cute enough to rub his little tummy and say he’s feeling empty. You may reckon I just couldn’t quit Union Town without a call to see if the man was an imbecile or what. I found a young cub with a curly smile playing around in the orfice. Say, what do you suppose he answered me when I told him ‘Good-morning, and what’s this sentimental money-chucking, anyway?’”

“I am dying to know,” said the lady novelist.

“Said it was the foyrst time he’d ever been led to think there might be something in sentiment after all. I was fair rattled.”

The young cub with the curly smile, as you may, with your customary astuteness, have guessed, was the gardener. He had assumed the pose of philanthropist, which, when conducted at some one else’s expense, is one of the most delightful poses conceivable. The pleasure to be found in helping the dirty destitute seems to need an explanation beyond the plea of altruism. There is a real charm in domineering to good purpose. To say unto one man Go and he goeth, and to another Come and he cometh, is at all times pleasant, but when such a luxury as autocracy becomes a virtue, there are few who disregard its glamour.

The gardener’s broken leg recovered as quickly as any leg could have done. He had an enthusiastic and healthy attitude towards suffering and illness, an attitude which he took instinctively, and which mental scientists and faith-healers try to produce artificially. He was always serenely convinced that he would be better next day. He lived in a state of secret disappointment in to-day’s progress, and unforced confidence in to-morrow’s. He might be described as a discontented optimist; though often convinced that the worst had happened, he was always sure that the best was going to happen. Conversely, of course, you can be a contented pessimist, happy in to-day, but entirely distrustful of to-morrow.

To the gardener’s methods may perhaps be ascribed the fact that in a fortnight he was able with the help of a stick, and with the encouragement of Aitch and Zed, to walk about his room. His first excursion was to the window.

The houses opposite had fallen in on their own foundations. One complete wall was standing starkly amid the mass. Portraits of the King and Queen and a text or two still clung to their positions against the stained and florid wall-paper.

“Do you see that house that you just can’t see, the other side of that wall?” asked Aitch.

“Yes, I see,” said the gardener. “I mean I just can’t see.”

“That’s where dead Uncle Jonathan lives,” said Aitch. “He’s left Father the flour in his will.”

“How good of him. I hope it was a pretty one.”

“Father said, ‘There’s a fortune there.’ And Mother said, ‘Oh, Dally, it’s as if it was left in trust for poor Union Town.’”

When the gardener next met Mr. Tring, he discovered how entirely sufficient for two are the opinions of one.

“Of course I’m awfully lucky, in a way,” said Mr. Tring. “It’s a big inheritance, and hardly damaged at all by the earthquake. But at present, of course, it’s all responsibility and no returns. I feel as if it’s sort of left me in trust for Union Town.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Courtesy—surely the least witty comment ever invented.

“I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mrs. Rust, who now made this remark mechanically in any pause in the conversation.

“You consider that Mr. Tring should pile up a big bill against the British Government?” suggested the gardener.

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “I consider the niggers can eat—mangoes.”

“I sometimes wonder,” said the gardener, “whether one has a duty to oneself. One feels as if one has, but I always—in theory—distrust a duty that pays.”

“Certainly one has a duty to oneself,” said Courtesy. “Duty begins at home. That’s in the Bible, isn’t it?”

“Most of the texts tell you your only duty is to the man next door,” said Mr. Tring, blushing.

“I entirely disagree with you,” said Mrs. Rust.

Soon after this discussion Mr. Tring, inspired by his wife, produced a plan for the benefit of the gardener.

“When this business is over we shall—I mean I shall be a rich man and a busy man. I need somebody young around. I’d like fine to buy your youth (his wife’s words). What about being my secretary for the present? It might give you a start in Island business.”

“This is not a time for paid work,” said the gardener, “with half the money on the Island gone to dust.”

“I take your meaning,” said Mr. Tring. “But in my opinion the time’s all right. Good work’s good work, whether it’s honorary or not. I never liked the idea that there’s something heroic in refusing money, making out that there’s something mean in accepting it. If you help you help, and the help’s none the worse if it makes you self-supporting.”

The word “self-supporting” was a sharp and accusing word to the gardener. Most of us privately possess certain words that search out the tender parts in our spiritual anatomy. The words “absolute impossibility,” for instance, angered the suffragette to militant protest; the mention of “narrow-mindedness” ruffled the priest’s sensibilities; as for me, the expression “physical disability” hurts me like a knife. It may or may not be out of place to add that the effect on Courtesy—that practical girl—of an allusion to “banana fritters” was to make her feel sick. You may know people better by their weaknesses than by their strength.

The word self-supporting, therefore, goaded the gardener into accepting Mr. Tring’s offer.

His stock of poses, though very wide in range, had not as yet extended as far as practical business, in black and white, hours ten to five daily. He had—I report it with disgust—a contempt for the pen as a business implement. He was himself an artist without expression, a poet caged; a musician in desire, he suffered from a mute worship of all art. And he believed that the pen was as sacred an instrument as the violin, or the palette. To make money by the pen in business was equal to fiddling on a kerb-stone, or designing picture post cards. These theories are pose-theories, of course, and untenable by the practical man. But some of the gardener’s poses had crystallised into belief. He was, as you may have noticed, anything but a practical man.

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Tring, “you might be what my wife calls an ‘out-of-doors secretary.’ I have been officially asked to organise the distributing of the flour. Enquiries will have to be made. The niggers are awfully sly, you know; you’d have thought they’d be too silly to be sly.”

“I have noticed that the silly seem to be protected by Providence. Slyness seems to be given as a sort of compensation. Otherwise, of course, we should stamp out the silly, and a lot of valuable human curiosities would become extinct.”

“I take your meaning,” said Mr. Tring. “That being so, if we found you a horse to ride about on, would you undertake the notification and examination of the necessitous cases, the pruning away—as my wife would say—of the dishonest applicants.”

“I am a gardener,” said the gardener. “I love interfering with nature. Mr. Tring, you are a most excellent friend to me. Thank you seems too little a word.”

There are only a few people to be met with who can do justice to such a thankless task as the expression of thanks. Man under an obligation is always convinced that the conventional words are not enough, and tries to improve on them. This must always be a failure, however, as improving on convention is a work that only genius can undertake with success.

A horse was found for the gardener. He was what might be called an anxious rider, and Courtesy, after watching his first equestrian exhibition, went to some trouble to find him an elderly mare of sober propensities. Mounted upon this excellent creature, the gardener one morning threaded the little passes that had been made in and out of the crags of ruined Union Town. It was early. The Olympians had not yet begun to compound that horrible broth of sun and steam and dust which they brew daily upon the plains of the Island. The sun’s eyes had not yet opened even on the most ambitious of the hills, but the sky was awake, and so clear that you might have thought you were looking through crystal at a blue Zion. The dew was laughing in the crushed gardens. Grey lizards with a purple bloom on them jumped from ruin to ruin over chasms of ruin. A humming-bird, looking as though its tail and beak had been added hurriedly out of the wrong box, stood in the air glaring into the open eye of a passion flower. The air was shining cool. The songs of the birds were like little fountains of cold water.

There is always a pessimistic gloom about the woods of the Island. The cotton tree, with its ashen blasted trunk, looks as if it had known a bitter past. Logwood gives the impression of firewood left standing by mistake. And the cocoanut palms, which are unstable souls, lean this way and that, as though glancing over their shoulders for their enemy the wind, against whom they have no defence. Only the great creepers throw cables of hope from tree to tree, and the orchids nestle blood-red against the colourless hearts of the cotton trees.

The huts for the homeless had been built in a wide clearing in the woods, only divided from the sea by the road, a belt of palms, and a frill of sand so white that the word white sounded dirty as you looked at it. The rocks leant out of opal water into pearl air. A pensive pelican, resting its double chin upon its breast, stood waiting on a low rock.

The gardener dismounted with great care. A person of three summers or so came to watch him do it. The only thing she wore that nature had not from the first provided her with was a hair-ribbon. Her head looked like a phrenologist’s chart. It was mapped out in squares by multiplied partings at right angles to each other. From every square plot of wool sprang a rigid plait of perhaps one inch in length. On the highest plait was a scarlet hair-ribbon. The effect was not really beautiful, but suggested a beautiful maternal patience. The person thus decorated was gnawing a piece of bread.

“That bread,” thought the gardener, who in flashes posed as Sherlock Holmes, “must have been made with flour. That flour probably came from Tring’s. Where did you get that bit of bread, Miss?” he added.

The person, determined not to appear to overlook a joke for want of an effort, gave a high fat chuckle, and danced the opening steps of a natural tango. The gardener, unwilling to shatter the illusion of his own humour, did not repeat the question. He gave the elderly mare in charge of not more than a dozen little boys. It was an insult to the mare, a creature with a deep sense of responsibility, who could much more reasonably have taken charge of the little boys.

“Dat Mrs. Morra’s pickney,” said one of the older boys, with a polite desire to effect an introduction between the gardener and the dancing person. On hearing herself thus described, Mrs. Morra’s pickney at once led the way at great speed to Mrs. Morra. Now Mrs. Morra’s was the first name on the gardener’s list of applications.

She was discovered outside the door of her hut, submitting the head of an elder daughter to that process of which the coiffure of the younger was a finished example. The conversation was punctured by wails from the victim. Wool does not adapt itself to painless combing.

“Good morning, Mrs. Morra,” said the gardener, with his confiding smile. Mrs. Morra screamed with amusement.

“I hear the earthquake knocked down your home and didn’t leave you anything to live on. You asked for some of the free bread, didn’t you? The police gave us your name.”

“P’leece?” questioned Mrs. Morra, who seemed amused by the mention of her necessity. “Whe’ dat, please?”

“The police—the big man in blue,” said the gardener, before he remembered that on the Island the police was always a little man in white.

“P’leece?” persisted Mrs. Morra.

“The policeman—the law,” said the gardener desperately.

Every nigger is familiar with the law. Going to law is a vice that on the Island takes the place of drink. The nigger’s idea of heaven is a vast courthouse, with the Almighty sitting at a desk awarding him damages and costs.

“Oh, de law—de polizman, please sah,” said Mrs. Morra.

“Right. Now how did your little girl get this bread?”

“Beg a quattie from a lady, please,” said the mother.

“Yes, but where did she buy the bread when she had the quattie. Bread is free now, you can’t buy it.”

“Bought it fim Daddy Hamilton, please, old man who live alone by himself across opposite. But he ha’n’t got no more, please!”

“I’ll go and see Daddy Hamilton,” said the gardener. “How many children have you got, Mrs. Morra?”

“Please?”

“How many children?”

“Please?”

“How many pickneys?” said the gardener, inspired.

“Pickneys please thank you,” said Mrs. Morra. “I got Dacia Maree Blanche Rosabel Benjum Teodor Lionel.”

“Seven,” panted the gardener, who had kept careful count.

“Tree, please sah,” corrected the lady.

“Me Dacia Maree,” explained the victim of maternal pride.

“Have you a husband?” continued the gardener.

“O la, no please sah.”

“A widow?” he suggested.

Mrs. Morra shrieked with laughter.

“Nebber had no man mo’ dan tree monts,” she said. “Dacia Maree’s fader—he on’y stop a week. Benjum’s dad bin in gaol two yahs. Blanche Rosabel—her fader was a brown man, her grand-dad was a buckra.”

The gardener blushed into his notebook.

The police had certified that the family’s means of subsistence had been swept away by the earthquake, and the gardener, by one glance into an unsavoury hut, satisfied himself that no luxuries had been saved from the wreck. He therefore noted the case as needy, and asked his way to Daddy Hamilton.

This gentleman, seated upon an upturned bucket, was studying a hymn-book through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

“God bless you, sah,” he said in the loud unmistakable voice of a joyous Christian.

The gardener thanked him.

“I see, Mr. Hamilton, that you told the police you had two married daughters whose husbands had been killed by the earthquake, and seven grandchildren dependent on you.”

“Yessah. De Lawd giveth, an’ de Lawd taketh away.”

“Certainly. And you had an emergency grant of several loaves of bread on Monday.”

“Praise be to God, sah, I did. De Lawd giveth——”

“On the contrary, in this case it was Mr. Tring that gave. Now, are either of your married daughters or any of your grandchildren at home?”

“No, sah. Dey all gone to chapel.”

“Really? Now there seems to be an idea among your neighbours that you live by yourself. How is it they have never noticed your two daughters and seven grandchildren?”

“Dunno, sah. Deir eyes dey hab closed, lest at any time dey should see wid deir eyes, and hear wid deir ears——”

“Do the whole ten of you sleep in that little hut?”

“No, sah, I sleep on de graound aoutside. Foxes hab holes——”

“Now, Mr. Hamilton, can you look me in the face and tell me that the bread that was given you was really eaten by yourself, and two daughters, and seven grandchildren?”

“Yes, sah. To tell you de troot, sah, dey wasn’t ezackly blood-grandchildren. All men are brudders, we are told, sah, and derefore grandchildren, an’ daughters, an’ nieces too, sah. All de pickneys call me Daddy Hamilton. Suffer de little children to come unto me, saith de Lawd, so I suffer dem gladly.”

“Yes, but do you ever charge anything for suffering them? Have you ever sold any of the bread that was given you?”

“Well, sah, a man mus’ live.”

“Yes, but the bread was given you to live on.”

“Well, sah, money is better dan bread. You ask for bread and dey give you a stone.”

“Not in this case. The bread was excellent. Do you know, Mr. Hamilton, I believe you are liable to be prosecuted for obtaining Mr. Tring’s gift under false pretences.”

“No, sah, not false. I am a faitful sojer in de Lawd’s army, sah, faitful an’ joyful. Old Joybells dey call me.”

“Still, this time I’m afraid you stepped aside. I will ask Mr. Tring what he would like done about it. At any rate, you won’t get any more bread given you for the present. I’ll see to that.”

“God bless you, sah. De Lawd giveth, an’ de Lawd taketh away.”