Orphan Island (15 page)

“A pretty bed, is it not. We spread this sheet over it, you see, and here's another to go over you. I hope you'll be comfortable. And there is the washstand, with warm water and soap. You'll find our soap makes a very nice lather, especially with a little sea water, which I've put in this bowl for you. I hope you'll have everything you want. You'll be woken in the morning, and if you'd like a warm bath Flora shall take you to the hot springs.”

“Thank you. But I'd rather bathe in the lagoon. Is there church?”

“To-morrow? Oh, yes. At eleven o'clock.”

“I meant before breakfast,” said Rosamond, this being the only time at which she was used to church.

“Before breakfast! No, my dear; what a droll idea!” The stout, kind lady looked nervously over her shoulder at Mr. Smith, to see if he was listening, and saw that he was.

“Quite a popish idea,” she said. “I am sure we never heard of divine service before breakfast in
our
church. Did we, papa?”

Mr. Smith looked stonily at her and at Rosamond.

“Certainly not,” he said. “You are not a Roman Catholic, are you?” he asked suspiciously.

“Oh, no. But I thought all churches had early services.”

“Not the Church of England,” said Mr. Smith firmly, and Mr. Thinkwell noted that Miss Smith had not been in touch with the Tractarian movement.

“We will all go to church at eleven,” said Mrs. Smith. “I don't think it's Communion Sunday; if it were we could stop on. That would have been nice, to be sure, but it will have to be another Sunday. Good-night, my dear. I hope you will sleep. Would you like Flora to lend you one of her nightdresses?”

“No, thank you.”

Mr. Thinkwell, meanwhile, said that he would, before turning in, make an examination of the stars. He took a good deal of interest in the stars, and, though ethnology and sociology were his subjects, he always felt that stellar episodes were more attractive and pleasing than terrestrial ones, and had,
somehow, more of purity. Charles said that this was only because his telescopes magnified insufficiently.

Mr. Thinkwell and Charles said good-night to Mrs. Smith, and were conducted by Mr. Smith to the place in a private part of the woods where, after observing the heavenly bodies, they would sleep.

Rosamond, in a silk vest behind her palm curtain, lit by a hanging string of candle-nuts, sank deep into bright feathers from the breasts of birds. The Sunday morning moon looked whitely in through the window on her. Small winds from the thicket stole in, smelling of frangipani and island spices, and breathed into her mouth. Small sharp cries, small sweet flutings and wailings and warblings, soft stirrings of birds and beasts, the thud of dropping nuts, the murmur of the wind in feathery palms, sounded all night through her dreams, and beyond them the Pacific crooned and moaned against a coral reef.

Rosamond, intoxicated child, slept.

In the garden Flora lay awake, excited with rebellion, dancing, and love.

In the wood Mr. Thinkwell and William gazed at planets and at stars, while Charles jotted down notes for a poem. Then they all three lay beneath a mangrove tree on the palm mattresses they had been given, drew coverings over them, and slept. The more common parts of the wood were full of other sleeping forms—persons of both sexes too Orphan to sleep in houses. Many lay in amity two by two, as if Orphan Island were Hyde Park.

MR. THINKWELL was woken next morning, after the kind of night one expects in woods, by a man rattling a tray of cocoa-nuts about the island and crying “Miow.” Mr. Thinkwell inferred that he was, therefore, the milkman, and made a note in his pocket-book.

“The inability, or aversion, on the part of British milkmen to utter the word “milk” is to be found also on this island. An interesting example of a curious human phenomenon revealing itself apart from infection. Unless, indeed, one of the original orphans chanced to be a milkman's child and conveyed the tradition.”

When the milkman came near, Mr. Thinkwell called to him and asked him, “Why do you cry miow?”

“Because I'm the milkman, sir. Any milk to-day?”

“Yes, please; I will take a nutful. But you do not make yourself quite clear to me. Why do you not rather call
milk?”

“That's just what I do call, sir. Shall I charge it to Mr. Smith, sir? Miow!” He pursued his rounds. Mr. Thinkwell drank his nutful of milk, which he liked very much, as it came from the
cow-tree and had a peculiar, rich flavour. “Vegetables do these things better than we do,” he reflected, and went to sleep again, for the stars, centipedes, land crabs, birds, monkeys, and other ingredients of the woodland scene, had kept him awake much of the night.

Through the hush of the opaline morning Rosamond stole from the Yams in the bathing suit she had brought with her from the
Typee
(for she always remembered to take her bathing-suit with her wherever she went). She thought she would wear it all the day, so that she could be in and out of the sea without trouble.

Her head ached a little, but the air was like thin, sweet wine. The grass under her naked feet was silver with the dew; under the trees and shrubs about the path sleepers lay; the island was waking into life, but was not yet waked. But the birds had woken with the dawn, and were shrilling cascades of music everywhere, and courting tortoises were uttering hoarse cries of love, and milkmen entreating the pierced trunks of the tall cow-trees for their sunrise flow, as one coaxes the udders of cows.

The shore was golden under the climbing sun, and the lagoon lay pale and smooth like milk, or like a great pearl.

By the lagoon's edge there was a great yellow she-turtle with mauve stripes, and it was chasing Charles, who, clad in an apron of fig-leaves, held out his hand to it as he fled, flattering it with ingratiating smiles, as one flatters a fierce dog,
saying “Good turtle. Nice turtle. Down, sir” (for though I say it was a she-turtle, and it is the truth, this was not for Charles to know).

A little way off, William, similarly costumed, crouched with a net and a tin basin in a deep coral pool, up to his chest in dull green sargassum, which he was exploring for live creatures with the care of a cat who hunts fleas in his long fur. Already he had caught and detached from their protective weed three green crabs, two violet and orange molluscs, several hydroids, and a small filefish, and he was now tugging at a large scarlet anemone who clung desperately to white coral rock.

Rosamond watched him. How much did anemones feel?

“Don't be rough with it, William.”

“All right, it likes it,” said William, as he used to tell her ten years ago about worms on hooks, and, indeed, fishes too. To Rosamond the world had seemed, in those days, a wonderful place, full of minor animals rejoicing in suffering like the Christian saints.

“It's
ammonia sargassensis,”
said William, winning the tug-of-war. “It had no business on the rock.”

“Oh,” Rosamond breathed, bending over the pool, “there are tiny things like shrimps, transparent as glass, with green balls in them.”

“Shrimps with eggs,” said William.

“Don't catch them, William.”

“Yes. They'll like it in the basin. They'll lay their eggs there.”

A brood of baby shrimps leaping from the egg, clear as glass, scuttling round and round the basin.… Perhaps they would like it.

Rosamond hung face downwards from a rock,
peering deep into the weedy pool. She saw the small sea world where scarlet and yellow and green crabs, some bearing their shells on their backs, some on their stomachs, scuttled about among tiny, bright-coloured fishes, and pink and yellow and blue trifles which were, William said, copepods. Tiny anemones opened and shut like flowers; little sea worms wriggled among waving hydroids; translucent shrimps, egg-laden, passed beamily about their business.

“I wish,” remarked Charles, behind them, “that some one who can control this turtle would call it off. I can't bathe with it swimming after me with its mouth open and hissing.”

“You shouldn't have aggravated it,” William grunted, thrusting his net beneath a patch of weed. “You'd better sit on its back. They like that.”

Charles tried.

“I daren't sit with my whole weight, I'm afraid of cracking it. Steady, you brute.… You're quite wrong, William; they don't like it. Animals like far fewer things than you think. I've told you that before.”

“What are you doing to Sarah?” called a voice, thin and husky from recent sleep, and there, stepping down from the wood together, beautiful and bronze-limbed, clad in scanty skin bathing suits, were Flora and her golden-haired young man.

“It is more,” Charles explained, “what Sarah is doing to me.… I went in to swim, and Sarah pursued me like a devil and chased me up the beach. Look, she is after me now.”

“You must have annoyed her, poor Sarah. Down, Sarah; down, miss. Back to the sea with you. Shoo!”

Before the advance and hand-clapping of Flora
and her friend, Sarah retreated, with sulky hissings and wagging head, and floundered into the lagoon.

“I didn't know,” said Charles to the young man, “that you kept turtles as pets here. I thought they were caught and eaten.”

“Not the females; they are too valuable.… Flora, introduce us, if you please.”

“Certainly. Mr. Charles Thinkwell—Mr. Conolly. A cousin of my own. As to his first name, he was christened Nogood, but his parents, not liking the name, privately called him Peter. Shall we swim?”

Mr. Nogood Peter Conolly shook hands with Charles, with a very pleasing smile.

“I have,” he said, “a thousand things to ask you about the world.”

“And I you about the island,” Charles replied. “The island is the more interesting, I think.”

“Oh, Lord, the island ain't interesting at all. Is it, Flora?”

“Not in the least. The most tedious place in the world, I dare say. Cramped, narrow, old-fashioned, ruled by old people who haven't marched with the times… we're sick to death of it. We want to be free, and to see the world. Oh, I can tell you, Mr. Charles Thinkwell, we were pleased enough to see you land here. Shall we swim?”

Rosamond tumbled from her rock and splashed into the lagoon after them. Flora glanced at her over her shoulder.

“A pretty morning,” she said. “I hope you slept well.”

“Very, thank you. But to-night I shall sleep out of doors.”

“That's as may be.” Flora dived. Rosamond saw her, through swaying green prisms of light, crawling on the sandy floor, picking up bright shells.
Mr. Conolly joined her, and in a moment they shot up, hand in hand.

“You should dive,” called Flora to Rosamond. “It clears the head.”

Rosamond plunged head downwards into green light. But she could not arrive at the sandy bottom; she sputtered and came up. Charles tried too, but the Cambridge Thinkwells were no divers.

Heathcliff came running down the beach and leaped shouting into the lagoon. He took Charles and Rosamond each by a hand, and plunged with them to the bottom of the sea. A handful of shells and wet sand Rosamond scooped up; she grabbed at a scarlet fish; bursting with spent breath she shot up, spluttered too soon, came to the surface and choked.

“All a matter of habit,” Heathcliff told her. “You'll dive famously before long.”

Flora and Mr. Conolly were swimming out, racing, splashing each other, to the reef that bounded the lagoon. The others followed. The morning lay like a smile on the Pacific. The dawn held the lagoon at its heart, as an oyster shell holds a pearl. Swimming shorewards, they saw the wooded island rising up from the white beach, breathed its scented airs, heard its light, sharp cries.

William, at the sea's edge, was wriggling along wet sand on his stomach, chasing a thorny lobster.

They waded out, shaking the sea from their hair and eyes.

“I hope, Thinkwells,” said Flora, “that you can keep a secret better than you can dive. For there is a detail in this morning's events which you would oblige me by not mentioning. You bathed with Heathcliff and myself, if you like, but not with Mr Peter Nogood Conolly Neither have I
introduced you to him. If he bathed at all, this morning, it was off the Hibernian shore, not here. One has one's discretions, you will observe, in one's narrations to one's parents. You too, no doubt. Though, as to that, I would willingly exchange my papa for yours. Yours has the air of being scarcely a papa at all. You'll discreet?”

“Completely. As to Rosamond, she seldom troubles to tell any one anything, unless they ask. And William notices little among the human species.”

“He is a sensible young man. Lobsters are more harmless than people, even when they pinch. Peter, you must leave us; people are coming down to the shore.”

Mr. Conolly rapidly described a circuit that led him to the isthmus that joined Hibernia to the main island.

Flora looked after him.

“Nogood,” she explained, “because my grandmamma told his mother—she was a Smith—that no good would come of her taking up with his father. And what came of it was Peter. So grandmamma had him christened Nogood. And I am not supposed to see him or speak to him, because of two things—he is a bastard, since his parents weren't allowed to marry, and his papa is a rebel, who took a leading part in the Revolution, and is now a convict. But I do see him and speak to him, as you see.”

“A convict! You have convicts here? How do you manage?”

“Oh, yes, we have convicts. They work in a gang in Convicts' Cove, at the other side of the island. They are roped together so that they can't escape, and always guarded by police.”

“Are they criminals?”

“For the most part. Some are rebels. I dare say papa will take you to see them; he would enjoy it. In fact, you'll see them if you look behind you at service this morning. They sit at the back.”