Mr. Fortune (2 page)

In 1930, though, she reread
Mr. Fortune's Maggot
and decided she could do more for her hapless hero than desert him with apologies. She could intervene again, and continue his story.

She wrote two thousand words of what became
The Salutation
in a single sitting, with no idea of what would come next. A timely dream that night provided her plot. Warner continued to think well of the finished story, written “out of my heart as an
amende
to my poor Timothy. Not that I could make him happier, but to show that I did not forget him.” She described it as “the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote,” and made it the title story of a collection published in 1932.

That phrase “time-serving” seems unduly harsh, an implied rebuke to the rest of her short fiction, but she may have had a particular private criterion in mind. In a letter of 1962 Warner referred, with regret, to the “moral purpose” informing some of her writing, saying she was never aware of it at the time of composition, “but when I read myself afterward I see my moral purpose shining out like a bad fish in a dark larder.” Perhaps she meant that there were no off smells of that sort about
The Salutation
. The novella is free of any taint of wheedling—though there is an inherent paradox about a sequel that offers no antidote to the unconsoling firmness of its original.

This was the only time in her literary career that Sylvia Townsend Warner returned to finished work and tried to take it further. Her instinct was all the other way, toward moving on. In her last extraordinary group of stories, published as
Kingdoms of Elfin
(1977), the characters are mainly fairies, though the cuteness factor is low to nonexistent—it's as if she wanted a change even from warm-bloodedness.

The Salutation
, being designed to be read without necessary reference to
Mr. Fortune's Maggot
, contains no explicit identification of the heroes of both stories as one. It isn't quite substantial enough to be a companion piece to the novel, but there's too much new material (a whole new country and society, a whole new palette) for it to be considered a coda. Not quite matching, not quite contrasting, novel and novella are like a chair and a stool from the same marvelous maker. The ending of
The Salutation
, with its dream loop, suggests that even the second time around, Sylvia Townsend Warner found it hard to finish her business with so tender a creation.

—A
dam
M
ars
-J
ones

M
aggot.
2. A whimsical or perverse fancy; a crotchet.

—N. E. D.

The scenes and characters of this story are entirely imaginary. In the island names the vowels should be pronounced separately with the Italianate vowel-sounds. Words of three syllables are accented on the second: Fanùa, Luèli
.

I am greatly obliged to Mr. Victor Butler for his assistance in the geometrical passages, and for the definition of an umbrella
.

IN 1918 when I first went to live in London, at 127 Queens Road, I was poor and thought I could not afford a Times Book Club subscription. I soon exhausted my own books, and though I had the British Museum by day I wanted something to read in the evening. Then I happened on the Westbourne Grove branch of the Paddington Public Library. It was a very down-at-heel establishment, with a great many bad biographies of unimportant people, and all the books had the same smell (I suppose it was some public disinfectant). I found it very convenient, and used it hard. One of the books I borrowed was a volume of letters by a woman missionary in Polynesia. I can't remember the title, or her name; but the book pleased me a great deal, it had the minimum of religion, only elementary scenery, and a mass of details of everyday life. The woman wrote out of her own heart—for instance, describing an earthquake, she said that the ground trembled like the lid of a boiling kettle.

In 1925 I had finished
Lolly Willowes
, and was writing poetry and a few short stories when one early morning I woke up remembering an extremely vivid dream. A man stood alone on an ocean beach, wringing his hands in an intensity of despair; as I saw him in my dream, I also knew something of his circumstances. He was a missionary, he was middle-aged, and a deprived character, his name was Hegarty, he was on an island where he had made only one convert: and at the moment I saw him he had just realised that the convert was no convert at all. I jumped out of bed and began to write it down, and even as I wrote a great deal which I had known in the dream began to scatter; but the main facts, and the man's loneliness, simplicity, and despair, and the look of the island, all remained as actual as something I had really experienced.

With the minimum of fuss I made a few notes of the development, discarded the name of Hegarty because it might lead me into a comic Irishman, and began to write. The opening, up to Lueli's baptism, is, with scarcely a word's alteration, as I wrote it down. This must have been in winter, because I remember Duncan Grant coming to dinner on the same day, and we had the gas fire on, and ate some sort of stewed game. The moment he had gone I went on writing.

My remembrance of the book from the Paddington Public Library was so vivid and substantial that I never felt a need to consult any other books. The lady's account of the earthquake I could supplement by Bea Howe's remembrance of the Valparaiso earthquake: this gave me the lamp beginning to swing. The public library lady also gave me the lava in the water flowing towards the south. The idol I had from the missionary's cottage at Wayford in Somerset which I hired for the summer of 1926. The parrot lived next door to this cottage, and I grew very familiar with its voice in a tree, and noticed how much quieter unconfined parrots sound.

There had been some breaks between when Duncan came to dine and when I was at Wayford; but after that I wrote steadily, and with increasing anxiety; not because I had any doubt about the story, but because I was so intensely conscious that the shape and balance of the narrative must be exactly right—or the whole thing would fall to smithereens, and I could never pick it up again. I remember saying to Bea that I felt as if I were in advanced pregnancy with a Venice glass child. It was made the more alarming by the way in which things kept on going right—like the business of Mr. Fortune's watch, for instance. I was really in a very advanced stage of hallucination when I finished the book—writing in manuscript and taking wads of it to be typed at the Westbourne Secretarial College in Queens Road.

I remember writing the last paragraph—and reading over the conclusion, and then impulsively writing the envoy, and beginning to weep bitterly.

I took the two copies, one for England and one for USA to Chatto and Windus myself. I was afraid to trust them by post. It was a very foggy day, and I was nearly run over. I left them with a sense that my world was now nicely and neatly over.

—S
ylvia
T
ownsend
W
arner
, D
orset
, 1978

THOUGH the Reverend Timothy Fortune had spent three years in the island of Fanua he had made but one convert. Some missionaries might have been galled by this state of things, or if too good to be galled, at least flustered; but Mr. Fortune was a humble man of heart and he had the blessing which rests upon humility: an easy-going nature. In appearance he was tall, raw-boned, and rather rummaged-looking; even as a young man he had learnt that to jump in first doesn't make the 'bus start any sooner; and his favourite psalm was the one which begins: “My soul truly waiteth still upon God.”

Mr. Fortune was not a scholar, he did not know that the psalms express bygone thoughts and a bygone way of life. In his literal way he believed that the sixty-second psalm applied to him. For many years he had been a clerk in the Hornsey branch of Lloyds Bank, but he had not liked it. Whenever he weighed out the golden sovereigns in the brass scales, which tacked and sidled like a yacht in a light breeze, he remembered uneasily that the children of men are deceitful upon the weights, that they are altogether lighter than vanity itself.

In the bank, too, he had seen riches increase. But he had not set his heart upon them: and when his godmother, whose pass-book he kept, died and left him one thousand pounds, he went to a training-college, was ordained deacon, and quitted England for St. Fabien, a port on an island of the Raratongan Archipelago in the Pacific.

St. Fabien was a centre of Christianity. It had four missions: one Catholic, one Protestant, one Wesleyan, and one American. Mr. Fortune belonged to the Protestant mission. He gave great satisfaction to his superiors by doing as he was bid, teaching in the school, visiting the sick, and carrying the subscription list to the English visitors, and even greater satisfaction when they had discovered that he could keep all the accounts. At the end of ten years Archdeacon Mason was sorry to hear that Mr. Fortune (who was now a priest) had felt a call to go to the island of Fanua.

Fanua was a small remote island which could only be seen in imagination from that beach edged with tin huts where Mr. Fortune walked slowly up and down on evenings when he had time to. No steamers called there, the Archdeacon had visited it many years ago in a canoe. Now his assistant felt a call thither, not merely to visit it in the new mission launch, but to settle there, and perhaps for life.

The two clergymen strolled along the beach in the cool of the evening. The air smelt of the sea, of flowers, and of the islanders' suppers.

“I must warn you, Fortune, you are not likely to make many converts in Fanua.”

“What, are they cannibals?”

“No, no! But they are like children, always singing and dancing, and of course immoral. But all the natives are like that. I believe I have told you that the Raratongan language has no words for chastity or for gratitude?”

“Yes, I believe you did.”

“Well, well! You are not a young man, Fortune, you will not expect too much of the Fanuans. Singing and dancing! No actual harm in that, of course, and no doubt the climate is partly responsible. But light, my dear Fortune, light! And not only in their heels either.”

“I am afraid that none of the children of men weigh altogether true,” said Mr. Fortune. “For that matter, I have heard that many cannibals are fond of dancing.”

“Humanly speaking I fear that you would be wasted in Fanua. Still, if you have felt a call I must not dissuade you, I won't put any obstacles in your way. But you will be a great loss.”

The Archdeacon spoke so sadly that Mr. Fortune, knowing how much he disliked accounts, wondered for a moment if God would prefer him to wait still in St. Fabien. God tries the souls of men in crafty ways, and perhaps the call had been a temptation, a temptation sent to try his humility. He turned his eyes towards where he knew the island of Fanua to lie. What his superior had said about it had not displeased him, on the contrary he liked to think of the islanders dancing and singing. It would be a beautiful estate to live among them and gather their souls as a child gathers daisies in a field.

But now the horizon was hidden in the evening haze, and Fanua seemed more remote than ever. A little cloud was coming up the heavens, slowly, towards the sunset; as it passed above the place of Fanua it brightened, it shone like a pearl, it caught the rays of the sun and glowed with a rosy rim. Mr. Fortune took the cloud to be a sign.

Heartened by a novel certainty that he was doing the right thing, he disappointed the Archdeacon quite unflinchingly and set about his preparations for the new life. Since the island was so unfrequented it was necessary to take with him provisions for at least a year. In the ordinary course of things the Mission would have supplied his outfit, but he had a scruple against availing himself of this custom because, having kept the accounts, he knew their poverty and their good works, and also because he was aware that the expedition to Fanua was looked on as, at best, a sort of pious escapade. Fortunately there were the remains of his godmother's legacy. With feelings that were a nice mixture of thrift and extravagance he bought tinned meat, soup-squares, a chest of tea, soap, a tool-box, a medicine chest, a gentleman's housewife, a second-hand harmonium (rather cumbrous and wheezy but certainly a bargain), and an oil-lamp. He also bought a quantity of those coloured glass baubles which hang so ravishingly on Christmas trees, some picture-books, rolls of white cotton, and a sewing-machine to make clothes for his converts. The Archdeacon gave him a service of altar furniture and the other mission-workers presented him with a silver teapot. With the addition of some plate-powder Mr. Fortune was now ready to embark.

In fancy he had seen himself setting foot upon the island alone, though he knew that in fact some one must go with him if only to manage the launch. But that some one would be a sailor, a being so aloofly maritime as scarcely to partake in the act of landing. He was slightly dashed when he discovered that the Archdeacon, accompanied by his secretary, was coming too in order to install him with a proper appearance of ceremony.

“We cannot impress upon them too early,” said the Archdeacon, “the solemn nature of your undertaking. “ And Mr. Fortune hung his head, a grey one, old and wise enough to heed an admonition or a rebuke.

The voyage was uneventful. The Archdeacon sat in the bows dictating to the secretary, and Mr. Fortune looked at the Pacific Ocean until he fell asleep, for he was tired out with packing.

About sunset he was aroused by the noise of surf and by peals of excited laughter; and opening his eyes he found that they were close in under the shadow of the island of Fanua. The launch was manœuvring round seeking for an inlet in the reef, and the islanders were gathered together to view this strange apparition. Some were standing on the rocks, some were in the sea, others were diving from cliff to water, in movement and uproar like a flock of seagulls disturbed by a fishing-boat.