A High Wind in Jamaica (15 page)

So much for Rachel. The inside of Laura was different indeed: something vast, complicated, and nebulous that can hardly be put into language. To take a metaphor from tadpoles, though legs were growing her gills had not yet dropped off. Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term “human” a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies of course are not human—they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.

In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.

It is true they look human—but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.

Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals—why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely. Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either: but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are
mad
, in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination, think like a child, at least in a partial degree—and even if one's success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a bee.

How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind, like a Fascist in Rome?

When swimming under water, it is a very sobering thing suddenly to look a large octopus in the face. One never forgets it: one's respect, yet one's feeling of the hopelessness of any real intellectual sympathy. One is soon reduced to mere physical admiration, like any silly painter, of the cow-like tenderness of the eye, of the beautiful and infinitesimal mobility of that large and toothless mouth, which accepts as a matter of course that very water against which you, for your life's sake, must be holding your breath. There he reposes in a fold of rock, apparently weightless in the clear green medium but very large, his long arms, suppler than silk, coiled in repose, or stirring in recognition of your presence. Far above, everything is bounded by the surface of the air, like a bright window of glass. Contact with a small baby can conjure at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain. Of course it is not really so cut-and-dried as all this; but often the only way of attempting to express the truth is to build it up, like a card-house, of a pack of lies. It was only in Laura's inner mind, however, that these elaborate vestiges of babyhood remained: outwardly she appeared fully a child—a rather reserved, odd, and indeed rather captivating one. Her face was not pretty, with its heavy eyebrows and reduced chin: but she had a power of apt movement, the appropriate attitude for every occasion, that was most striking. A child who can show her affection for you, for instance, in the very way she plants her feet on the ground, has a liberal gift of that bodily genius called charm. Actually, this particular one was a rare gesture with her: nine-tenths of her life being spent in her own head, she seldom had time to feel at all strongly either for or against people. The feelings she thus expressed were generally of a more impersonal kind, and would have fascinated an admirer of the ballet: and it was all the more remarkable that she
had
developed a dog-like devotion to the reserved and coarse-looking captain of the pirates. No one really contends that children have any insight into character: their likings are mostly imaginative, not intuitive. “What do you think I am?” the exasperated ruffian had asked on a famous occasion. One might well ask what Laura thought he was: and there is no means of knowing.

* The tiger-shark of the South Seas is of course a very different cattle.

II

Pigs grow quickly, quicker even than children: and much though the latter altered in the first month on board, the little black porker (whose name by the by was Thunder) altered even more. He soon grew to such a size one could not possibly allow him to lie on one's stomach any more: so, as his friendliness did not diminish, the functions were reversed, and it became a common thing to find one child, or a whole bench of them, sitting on his scaly side. They grew very fond of him indeed (especially Emily), and called him their Dear Love, their Only Dear, their Own True Heart, and other names. But he had only two things he ever said. When his back was being scratched he enunciated an occasional soft and happy grunt; and that same phrase (only in a different tone) had to serve for every other occasion and emotion—except one. When a particularly heavy lot of children sat down on him at once, he uttered the faintest ghost of a little moan, as affecting as the wind in a very distant chimney, as if the air in him was being squeezed out through a pin-hole.

One cannot wish for a more comfortable seat than an acquiescent pig.

“If I was the Queen,” said Emily, “I should most certainly have a pig for a throne.”

“Perhaps she has,” suggested Harry.

“He
does
like being scratched,” she added presently in a very sentimental tone, as she rubbed his scurfy back. The mate was watching:

“I should think
you
'd like being scratched, if your skin was in that condition!”

“Oh how disGUSTing you are!” cried Emily, delighted. But the idea took root.

“I don't think I should kiss him quite so much if I was you,” Emily presently advised Laura, who was lying with her arms tight round his neck and covering his briny snout with kisses from ring to ears.

“My pet! My love!” murmured Laura, by way of indirect protest. The wily mate had foreseen that some estrangement would be necessary if they were ever to have fresh pork served without salt tears. He intended this to be the thin end of the wedge. But alas! Laura's mind was as humorsome an instrument to play as the Twenty-three-stringed Lute.

When dinner-time came, the children mustered for their soup and biscuit.

They were not overfed on the schooner: they were given little that is generally considered wholesome, or to contain vitamines (unless these lurked in the aforesaid peck of dirt): but they seemed none the worse. First the cook boiled the various non-perishable vegetables they carried in a big pot together for a couple of hours. Then a lump of salt beef from the cask forward, having been rinsed in a little fresh water, was added, and allowed to simmer with the rest till it was just cooked. Then it was withdrawn, and the captain and mate ate their soup first and their meat afterwards, out of plates, like gentlemen. After that, if it was a week-day, the meat was put to cool on the cabin shelf, ready to warm up in to-morrow's soup, and the crew and children ate the liquor with biscuit: but if it was Sunday, the captain took the lump of meat and with a benevolent air cut it up in small pieces, as if indeed for a nursery, and mixed it up with the vegetables in the huge wooden bowl out of which crew and children all dipped. It was a very patriarchal way of feeding. Even at dinner Margaret did not join the others, but ate in the cabin; though there were only two plates on the whole ship. Probably she used the mate's when he had finished.

Laura and Rachel fought that day to tears over a particularly succulent piece of yam. Emily let them. To make those two agree was a task she was wise not to undertake. Besides, she was very busy over her own dinner. Edward managed to silence them, however, by declaring in a most terrible voice: “Shut up or I'll SABER you!”

Emily's estrangement from the captain had reached by now a rather uncomfortable stage. When these things are fresh and new the two parties avoid meeting, and all is well: but after some days they are apt to forget, find themselves on the point of chatting, and then suddenly remember that they are not on speaking terms and have to retire in confusion. Nothing can be more uncomfortable for a child. The difficulty of effecting a reconciliation in this case was that both parties felt wholly in the wrong. Each repented the impulse of a momentary insanity, and neither had an inkling the other felt the same: thus each waited for the other to show signs of forgiveness. Moreover, while the captain had far the more serious reason for being ashamed of himself, Emily was naturally far the more sensitive and concerned of the two: so it about balanced. Thus, if Emily rushed blithely up to the captain embracing a flying-fish, caught his eye and slunk round the other side of the galley, he put it down to a permanent feeling of condemnation and repulsion: blushed a deep purple and stared stonily at his wrinkling mainsail—and Emily wondered if he was
never
going to forget that bitten thumb. But this afternoon things came to a head. Laura was trotting about behind him, striking her attitudes. Edward had at last discovered which was windward and which was leeward, and had come hot-foot to learn the first of the Sovereign Rules of Life: and Emily, with one of her wretched lapses of memory, was all agog at his elbow. Edward was duly catechized and passed.

“Dis is the first rule,” said the captain: “
Never throw
anything to windward except hot water or ashes
.”

Edward's face developed exactly the look of bewilderment that was intended.

“But
windward
is...” he began: “I mean, wouldn't they blow...” then he stopped, wondering if he had got the terms the right way round after all. Jonsen was delighted at the success of this ancient joke. Emily, trying to stand on one leg, bewildered also, lost her balance and clutched at Jonsen's arm. He looked at her—they all looked at her. Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in a series of somersaults. Emily immediately started turning head over heels up the deck.

It was very difficult to keep direction, and the giddiness was appalling; but she
must
keep it up till she was out of sight, or die.

Just then, Rachel, who was up the mainmast, dropped, for the first time, her marline-spike. She uttered a terrible shriek—for what
she
saw was a baby falling to dash its brains out on the deck.

Jonsen gave an ineffectual little grunt of alarm—men can never learn to give a full-bodied scream like a woman. But Emily gave the most desperate yell of all, though several seconds after the other two: for the wicked steel stood quivering in the deck, having gouged a track through her calf on the way. Her wrought-up nerves and sickening giddiness joined with the shock and pain to give a heartrending poignancy to her crying. Jonsen was by her in a second, caught her up, and carried her, sobbing miserably, down into the cabin. There sat Margaret, bending over some mending, her slim shoulders hunched up, humming softly and feeling deadly ill.

“Get out!” said Jonsen, in a low, brutal voice. Without a word or sign Margaret gathered up her sewing and climbed on deck.

Jonsen smeared some Stockholm tar on a rag, and bound up Emily's leg with more than a little skill, though the tar of course was agonizing to her. She had cried herself right out by the time he laid her in his bunk. When she opened her streaming eyes and saw him bending over her, nothing in his clumsy face but concern and an almost overpowering pity, she was so full of joy at being at last forgiven that she reached up her arms and kissed him. He sat down on the locker, rocking himself backwards and forwards gently. Emily dozed for a few minutes: when she woke up he was still there.

“Tell me about when you were little,” she said. Jonsen sat on, silent, trying to project his unwieldy mind back into the past.

“When I was a boy,” he said at last, “it wasn't thought lucky to grease your own sea-boots. My Auntie used to grease mine before we went out with the lugger.”

He paused for some time.

“We divided the fish up into six shares—one for the boat, and one for each of us.”

That was all. But it was of the greatest interest to Emily, and she shortly fell asleep again, supremely happy. So for several days the captain and mate had to share the latter's bunk, Box-and-Cox; Heaven knows what hole Margaret was banished to. The gash in Emily's leg was one which would take some time to heal. To make things worse, the weather became very unsteady: when she was awake she was all right, but if she fell asleep she began to roll about the bunk, and then, of course, the pain waked her again; which soon reduced her to a feverish and nervous condition, although the leg itself was going on as well as could be expected. The other children, of course, used to come and see her: but they did not enjoy it much, as there was nothing to do down in the cabin, once the novelty of admittance to the Holy Place had worn off. So their visits were perfunctory and short. They must have had a high old time at night, however, by themselves in the fore-hold, now that the cat was away. They looked like it, too, in the mornings.

Otto used sometimes to come and teach her to make fancy knots, and at the same time pour out his grievances against the captain: though these latter were always received with an uncomfortable silence. Otto was a Viennese by birth, but had stowed away in a Danube barge when he was ten years old, had taken to the sea, and thereafter generally served in English ships. The only place since his childhood where he had ever spent any considerable time on shore was Wales. For some years he had sailed coastwise from the once-promising harbor of Portdinlleyn, which is now practically dead: and so, as well as German, Spanish, and English, he could talk Welsh fluently. It was not a long residence, but at an impressionable age; and when he talked to Emily of his past it was mostly of his life as a “boy” on the slate-boats. Captain Jonsen came of a Danish family settled on the Baltic coast, at Lübeck. He too had spent most of his time on English ships. How or when he and Otto had first met, or how they had drifted into the Cuban piracy business, Emily never discovered. They had plainly been inseparable for many years. She preferred letting them ramble on, to asking questions or trying to fit things together: she had that sort of mind.