Mr. Fortune (7 page)

Dinner was immediately followed by afternoon tea. Mr. Fortune would not forego that comfortable meal, so they had it as a sort of dessert. Then followed a long subafternoon, spent in various ways of doing nothing in particular. Lueli always went bathing then. He had no theories about it being dangerous to bathe on the heels of a large meal, and after an interval for digestion Mr. Fortune bathed too. Sometimes they paid visits, or received them. On these occasions Mr. Fortune never spoke of religion. He produced his pocket magnifying-glass and showed them his pores. At other times they went sailing or took a stroll.

These were all pleasant doings, but perhaps the moment he enjoyed best was when, dusk having fallen, he lit the lamp. He had a peculiar affection for his lamp. It hung from the ridge-pole of the hut, and he felt about it much as Sappho felt about the evening star. It shone as though with a kindness upon everything that was dear to him: upon his books and the harmonium; upon the bowls and dishes and woven mats that were both dear in themselves as tokens of the islanders' good-will, and endeared by use; upon the wakeful shine of the teapot and the black tin box, and upon Lueli's sleepy head. He would often walk out into the darkness for the pleasure of seeing his hut lighted up within, the rays of warm light shining through the chinks in the latticed walls as though they were shining through a very large birds' nest. Overhead were the stars trembling with the intensity of their remote fires. The air was very sweet and the dark grass gentle underfoot as he walked round about his home.

He whistled to himself, softly, an air that Delilah sings in the oratorio of
Samson
—a rather foolish, chirruping tune, in which Handel expressed his private opinion of soprano Delilahs: but he liked the words—

(after that they ceased to be appropriate).

A thousand, thousand ways he would strive to please until he had converted all the islanders. And planning new holy wiles for the morrow, he re-entered the hut to eat a slight supper, and perhaps to darn a rent or replace a button, and then to write up his diary, to read prayers, and so to end another day.

Saturdays and Saints' days were holidays, for himself and Lueli both. Lueli disported himself as he pleased, and Mr. Fortune watched clouds. On Sundays they performed the services appointed by the Church of England.

There was a week or two when he believed that he was in the way to make another convert. She was a very old woman, extremely ugly, not very agreeable, and rather doting. But she seemed perfectly able to understand about eternal life, and showed great anxiety to lay hold on it. Mr. Fortune visited her daily and tried hard to teach her the love of God, and the Christian belief. But she seemed deaf to all topics save one—and her anxiety to lay hold became as the days went by positively grasping.

One day the wife of Teioa, a sensible woman whom Mr. Fortune had a great respect for, came in with some food for the invalid and overheard part of their colloquy.

“Live for ever,” she remarked rather scornfully to the missionary as they left the house. “Why, isn't she old enough already? How much more does she want?” And though Mr. Fortune deplored her blindness, yet in this particular instance he admitted to himself that she had perceived clearly enough, and that his old woman was no sort of genuine convert, only very old and frightened and rapacious. None the less he continued to visit her, and to do what he could to comfort her. And often as he sat by her bedside he thought what a mystery this business of eternal life is, and how strangely, though almost all desire it, they differ in their conception of what it is they desire; some, like Shakespeare (and how many others unknown?) coolly confident of an immortality

some, like Buddha, hoping for an eternal life in which their own shall be absolved and lost; some, like this old woman, desiring an eternity like an interminable piece of string which she could clutch one end of and reel for ever about herself. “And how do I desire it?” he thought. “I want to feel it on every side, more abundantly. But I want to die first.”

In the end he grew quite attached to the old creature, and when she died he was sorry. He would have liked, as a mark of respect, to attend her funeral: (he certainly did not feel that he had any claim to conduct it himself). But no one suggested that he should, and he hesitated to suggest it lest he should be offending against some taboo. So he went off by himself for a day in the woods and thought about her, and said a prayer or two. And in the evening he returned to Lueli. One convert at any rate had been granted to him, and perhaps it would be greedy to want more, especially as that one was in every way so exemplary and delightful.

The two friends—for such they were despite more than sixty degrees of latitude and over thirty years between them (and the latter is a more insuperable barrier than an equator)—lived together in the greatest amity. Lueli had now quite given up running away. He settled down to Mr. Fortune's ways, and curled himself up amidst the new customs and regulations as peacefully as though he had never known any other manner of existence. Indeed Mr. Fortune was sometimes obliged to pack him off to the village to play with the other boys, thinking that it would harm him never to be with company of his own age.

Lueli was no anchorite, he enjoyed larking about the island with his friends as much as any boy should do; but what he loved beyond anything was novelty, and for this he worshipped Mr. Fortune, whose every action might reveal some new and august entertainment. The faces he made in shaving, the patch of hair on his chest, his ceremonious method of spitting out pips into his hand, the way in which his boot-laces went round the little hooks, his watch, his pockets and the things he kept in them—Lueli might grow accustomed to these daily delights, but he did not tire of them any more than Wordsworth tired of the Lesser Celandine. And there was more than this, and much more: prayer, the harmonium, the sewing-machine, religious instruction and occasional examples of European cookery. Prayer Lueli had taken to from the beginning, but he needed to acclimatise himself to the harmonium. When Mr. Fortune played to him he would sit as close as possible to the instrument, quivering like a dog and tilting up his chin with such an ecstatic and woebegone look that Mr. Fortune almost expected him to howl; and thinking that he didn't really enjoy it he would leave off playing. But Lueli would then edge a little closer and beg for more, and Mr. Fortune was only too glad to comply.

Like the harpsichord, the harmonium has a repertory of its own, pieces that can only be properly rendered on this instrument. Naturally I do not speak of the harmonium compositions of such recent composers as Schoenberg or Max Reger: these would have been too difficult for Mr. Fortune to play even if they had been stocked by the music-shop he had frequented. But without being in any way a virtuoso—and some think that the harmonium, being essentially a domesticated instrument, sober and of a religious cast, is inherently unsuited for displays of skill—Mr. Fortune played quite nicely and had a repertory of many classical larghettos and loud marches, besides, of course, the usual hymns and chants. Haydn was his favourite composer; and arrangements from the string quartets go rather well on the harmonium.

Lueli too was a musician after a simpler fashion. He had a wooden pipe, rather like a flageolet, of a small compass and a sad, squeaky tone; and the two friends passed many happy evenings entertaining each other with their performances. First Mr. Fortune obliged, leaning forward at an acute angle on the music-stool, his knees rising and falling like parts of a machine, his face very close to the music, his large hands manœuvring among the narrow keys, or sometimes hovering like a bee in a flower border over the ranks of stops, pulling out one, hitting another back with a tap, as though his fingers could read, though rather short-sightedly, in black Gothic lettering on the ivory knobs such names as Gamba, Corno di Bassetto, Bourdon, or Dulciana. And then, when rising he released the last throbbing chord and stretched himself (for he was a tall man, and in order to adjust his body and legs to the instrument he had to assume a rather cramped position), it was pleasant to see Lueli discoursing music in his turn, and a curious study in contrasts. For the boy sat cross-legged on the floor, or leant against the wall in the attitude of the boy in the statue, an attitude so physically nonchalant, so spiritually intent, that whoever looks at the statue, or even a cast of it or a photograph, understands, sometimes with a kind of jealous horror, how musicians are free of a world of their own, inhabiting their bodies as it were nominally or by proxy—just as we say of a house: That is Mr. So-and-So's; but the house is empty save for a sleepy caretaker, the owner is away travelling in Africa.

Lueli's tunes were very long tunes, though the phrases composing them were short; the music seemed to waver to and fro, alighting unexpectedly and then taking another small flight, and listening to it was like watching a bird flitting about in a bush; the music ends, the bird flies away; and one is equally at a loss to explain why the bird stayed so long and seemed so busy or why it suddenly made up its mind that the time had come for a longer flight, for a flight that dismisses it from our vision.

To tell the truth, Mr. Fortune was not as much impressed by Lueli's music as Lueli was by his. His chin even sank further into his chest as he sat, his listening flesh was unmoved, and he never felt the least impulse to howl. Mr. Fortune, in spite of his superior accomplishments, his cultivated taste, and enough grasp of musical theory to be able to transpose any hymn into its nearly related keys, was not so truly musical as Lueli. For instance, he never had the least idea whether Lueli's tunes were lively or sad. They all seemed alike to him. But Lueli learnt almost immediately to distinguish between a march and a sentimental piece, and as the harmonies grew more and more passionate his chin would lift higher, his mouth would contract, and the shadow of his long eyelashes would shorten up over his cheek.

It would have been pleasant if the two musicians could have joined forces. Mr. Fortune by listening very often and pretty intently to Lueli's rambling tunes was able to memorise two of them—as he believed, perfectly. Sending Lueli down to the village he spent an afternoon practising these two melodies on the harmonium and putting in a part for the left hand. It would make an agreeable surprise for his boy, he thought, to hear his tunes played by some one else; and then with Lueli playing his pipe whilst he supported the melody with chords and figurations they could achieve a duet. But the surprise fell quite flat; perhaps Mr. Fortune's European harmonies queered the pitch, perhaps he had misunderstood the time-values; in any case Lueli showed no signs of recognising the tunes, and even when their identity was pointed out to him he seemed doubtful. As for the duet plan it was not feasible, for the harmonium was tuned to the mean tone temperament and Lueli's pipe obeyed some unscientific native scale; either alone sounded all right, but in conjunction they were painfully discordant.

Finding it impossible to convert Lueli's pipe, Mr. Fortune next essayed to train his voice to Christian behaviour. In this he was more successful; Lueli's voice was of a nondescript newly broken timbre. He couldn't always control it, and Mr. Fortune had to smoke his pipe very hard in order not to laugh at the conjunction of Lueli's expression, so determined in well-doing, and the vagaries of his voice wandering from the straight path and ricochetting from note to note.

He also taught him to whistle, or tried to, for he was rather shocked at the idea of a boy not knowing how to whistle, explaining to him beforehand the secular nature of the act, and forbidding him to whistle tunes that had any especially sacred associations. But though Lueli screwed up his lips and almost burst himself taking in breath his whistling remained of a very girlish incompetent kind. On the other hand he showed an immediate aptitude for the vulgar kind of whistling which is done with a blade of grass. The first hearing of this was one of the pleasantest surprises that his pastor gave him. He mastered the technique in a few minutes and raced off to show the new accomplishment to his friends in the village. The fashion caught on like wildfire, and soon every boy on the island was looking for the proper blades of grass, which are called squeakers. The woods rang with their performances, and the parrots looked down with awe and astonishment at hearing men producing sounds so much more ear-splitting than anything they could achieve themselves.

The fashion raged like wildfire, and like wildfire burnt itself out. The groves were peaceful again, that is to say peaceful as any groves can be with parrots in them (not that the reader should suppose that the parrots at Fanua were like the parrots in the Zoological Gardens: oppression makes them much noisier); and every one was out in the salt-meadows, passionately flying kites.

The islanders were like that; enthusiastic and fickle, they would wear a whim to shreds and cast it away in the course of a week. Lueli was as bad; if it had not been for Mr. Fortune he would never have persevered in anything. It was provoking for a master to find his pupil so changeable and inconstant, all the more so because of Lueli's extraordinary docility and aptitude in learning. Nothing could have exceeded the readiness with which he accepted a new idea; and finding him so swift to become a Christian Mr. Fortune used to wonder why the other islanders would not respond as pleasantly to his teaching, for at this time he was still in hopes of converting the whole island. He preached to them, he prayed among them, every night and morning he prayed for them, he gave them biscuits and showed them pictures. They behaved themselves to him most charmingly, tactfully overlooking his blunders in etiquette, accepting him as their friend, though an unaccountable one. But his message they would not accept, it slid off them as though their very innocence and guilelessness had spread a fine impermeable film over their souls.