Orphan Island (20 page)

It was from this time on that Mr. Thinkwell thought he observed in the journal (which now, having finished Martial, began on large, thin, smooth pieces of bark) the beginnings of that megalomania which had grown, through Miss Smith's latter years, to such strange proportions. The didactic and domineering tone always observable became more marked.

In September, 1870, she wrote, “ It is more than time that we had a Minister of God's Word among us. Began to give more particular instruction in Church Doctrine to some of the elder lads. The Scottish, I find, are the readiest to apprehend these matters. In particular, Donald Maclean, a very intelligent young man now turned two-and-twenty, shows a great aptness. Have had to prohibit Jean
afresh from speaking to the Orphans of Theology, as I learn that she has been imparting Calvinist Doctrine.”

There followed, in the entries throughout the next two months, references to the progress of Donald Maclean in theological studies, till, in November, “To-day I ordained Donald Maclean a Deacon. I hope Almighty God, knowing that we have, nor can have, no Bishop among us, will extend His mercies to this Ordination and cause this young man to be a
Clergyman indeed
. I cannot be mistaken in feeling that He has endowed me with
special powers
to this end. For it cannot be the Almighty's Will that we should continue without the Rites of the Church, and with all these unblest Marriages, which monthly become more frequent as the Orphans reach adult years, and which have had hitherto to be solemnised in the Scottish manner, before two witnesses. From henceforth we shall not lack a Pastor. He will, of course, lead in future our Sunday Worship, and preach a sermon on Sunday morning. I shall supply him with the text and matter myself. This will save my voice, which I find gets strained with so much teaching and speaking.”

By Christmas of the same year, which struck Mr. Thinkwell, though indeed he knew little of such matters, as surely a little soon, “Ordained Donald a Priest.”

Meanwhile there were references to another youth who, it seemed, had received medical instruction from Dr. O'Malley, and was now the island doctor.

So the record went on. Babies were born and baptized; Miss Smith's ten children fell ill, recovered, behaved ill, were chastised, uttered remarks deemed
noteworthy by a maternal heart. Particularly prone to this was Albert Edward, a lad of great promise, sagacity, and virtue.

As each of her brood turned fifteen, Miss Smith had apparently presented him or her with a large piece of land (subject to her own proprietorship) so that by the year 1885 the whole island was partitioned out among the Smith family, but worked by Orphans, who gathered its fruits and preserved its birds for the benefit of the owner.

“The rise of a landed class,” Mr. Thinkwell commented. “Very interesting indeed.”

Strict property laws were obviously made early, and repressive measures instituted against those who broke them. The “rights of picking” might be rented by the landowner to any one they chose, and these included the rights of selling, provided that a heavy commission of fruits, cocoa-nuts, cocoa-nut cloth, fish, and game, was paid to the landlord. During the first years, the system of direct exchange in kind appeared to have exclusively prevailed, but as time went on a shell, coral, and pearl currency took its place. But, to tell the truth, Miss Smith's references to the commercial system of the islanders were so casual and incidental that its development was not at all clear to Mr. Thinkwell. She seemed to take it for granted, and woman-like, was more interested in the personal lives of her flock, and in the various phases of mental development through which they passed. She deplored certain lawless tendencies among them. Discontent with the land laws cropped up from time to time, and this she described as “very shocking and Jacobinical.” Occasionally there was a riot, which had to be dealt with severely by the police, a body early called into being.

“This amazing disregard of the Laws of God and Man,” Miss Smith wrote, “must be very firmly dealt with, or who knows where it may end? The Court has sentenced the rioters to a month's confinement with compulsory labour, after which they are to be let loose on probation.”

“The Court” had been, apparently, instituted some time earlier, to try to judge offenders. For Miss Smith, with all her natural autocracy, had been still, in her middle years, a devout upholder of the constitution.

“I am endeavouring, with God's help,” she wrote, “to model my Island on British lines, keeping in mind the great Charter of our Liberties. I think it of the utmost importance to give the male Orphans a sense of civic Responsibility, and I have therefore created a House of Parliament, which shall consist of twenty-one of the most steady and virtuous Orphans, as well, of course, as my own four Sons, who will be their natural Leaders. Caroline says, why should not
she
, the eldest of the Family, be there, and I had to discourse to her at some length on the different functions of
Man
and
Woman
in the scheme of Creation, and how it would not be fitting that the gentler and frailer Sex should take an active part in the male arts of Government. She replied, ‘But
you
do, Mamma!' and I had to explain to her the peculiar Position to which God had called me. I fear she gets no more docile as time goes by, and her desire for marriage with Conrad Rimski does not abate.”

But, a month later, “Have given my consent to Carrie's engagement to Conrad Rimski. It grieves me, but, after all, my Children
must marry some one
, if the Family is not to die out, and an unhappy fate has made it impossible that they
should wed within their own Class. Rimski is a respectable enough young man, in spite of his origins (he is the son of a Polish street singer) and, in accepting him as my Son-in-law, I must also accept him as a Gentleman, and endeavour to teach him the manners of Superior Society. A refined and correct pronunciation I have always endeavoured to impart to these poor children, without, however, entire success, for many of them were thoroughly practised in the vulgar speech of their infancy before they came under my care. One thing I shall insist on: my Daughters must all retain their Family Name, and Carrie will be Mrs. Smith-Rimski, so that their children may never forget that they are of the Smith Caste. Conrad will now, of course, become in a sense a Land-owner, but he must not be allowed to forget that he is only, so to speak, a
Consort
, and that the land is really Caroline's. I believe that the young people truly love one another, and I pray that I am making a wise decision in allowing the match.”

That was in 1880, and from then on the alliances of the Smith sons and daughters occurred with frequency. Miss Smith became a grandmother, and had much to record of that. She was not altogether satisfied with the wife selected by Albert Edward, who became affianced in 1888 to the handsome young daughter of a Spanish orphan—the first to have married on the island. This young woman, Anna Gomez, Miss Smith thought un-English, and suspected her father, who had been nine years old on coming to the island, and who had been bred in Soho, of having taught her Popery. However, she was placid and sweet-tempered, and Miss Smith made the best of it, merely recording a
resolve to keep a particularly careful watch over the children of the match.

Not long after this time, the diarist had sadly to record a shocking wave of religious unrest among the younger generation of Orphans, those born about 1870 and later.

“It is hardly credible,” she wrote, “that, surrounded as we are by every mark of the Almighty's beneficent Care,
Atheism
should show its horrid head. But so, alas, it is. I find that only too many of the young people just grown up are questioning the very Existence of their Creator, and refusing to attend Divine Service. I have instituted, with the approval of the Court of Justice, a system of heavy fines, which will, I trust, soon cure this Disease. In extreme cases, sterner measures will be taken.”

There were complaints, too, of fashions in dress, which, on the part of the younger females, were becoming immodest and suggestive.…

“Dear me!” Mr. Thinkwell commented. “Dear me! They have actually got hold of that foolish use of ‘suggestive' for too scanty, here too. I had not known it was used in that sense so early as 1855. Or perhaps it was not; possibly Miss Smith evolved it for herself. Very interesting parallels there are, to be sure.”

He detected parallels even to the European æsthetic movement, in “There is a
mincing
habit I do not care for arising among the younger people—a loss of true Manliness and true Womanliness, a kind of
Affectation
, which affects me very disagreeably. Some of the young men waste a great deal of their time drawing pictures in the sand, and even writing verses! Though, as they are acquainted with so little Poetry, they have no idea
of how to do this. The same young men affect a kind of personal elegance which is far from manly, oiling themselves all over continually, and some even
wearing flowers behind their ears
. This species of 'adornment' I have found it necessary to forbid. I am distressed to find that Hindley, Caroline's eldest boy, is one of the leaders in this foolishness.”

A little later (this was in 1895) Miss Smith had to dissolve parliament because its sumptuary decrees and its attitude towards unmarried unions did not satisfy her, and superintend a general election, which apparently produced a legislative body more to her mind.

“A very Cromwell,” reflected Mr. Thinkwell admiringly.

Then came the great excitement of the landing of the Jesuit missionary and his West Africans. Miss Smith was naturally a good deal disturbed by his advent, and by the possible effects of his persuasions on the minds of her flock; he, for his part, was, equally naturally, convinced that here was an island of perishing souls, and took every step to impart the true doctrine to these poor people. Miss Smith, to circumvent the Scarlet Woman, had to exercise a stern and anxious vigilance, which was not even ended by the entry, after six months, “The unhappy Papist was killed last night in a quarrel about the validity of our Orders, and was afterwards devoured by his ignorant and unbridled blacks. Alas, that he had taught them a religion which permitted of such deeds! Had he but kept them true to the Faith of that great and good Man after whom they were named, his remains would not have met with such a fearful end. Fearful is Thy Wrath, O Lord, and terrible Thy judgments! The poor man has gone to his last Account steeped
in error, and fresh from imparting his error to the innocent Lambs of this Flock. We cannot even bury him; we can but leave his soul, without much hope, to the
possible
Mercies of God. I pray that he has not done incalculable damage among our Community. The blacks we are retaining as labourers.”

To Mr. Thinkwell, who regarded both Catholics and Protestants with impartial aloofness and surprise, all this made very good reading. It interested him to see these strange, hot, and bigoted creeds at their perpetual duel, even on this remote island.

Poor Miss Smith had to deplore, at this time, a good deal of immorality and laxity as to the marriage ceremony, which was punished with a severity worthy of a New England state. The Orphans, it seemed, had a shocking habit of taking the law into their own hands, and, when a marriage was forbidden them, merely doing without. Also there were, as in the wider world, a certain number of casually illicit encounters and illegitimate births.

“This island is a
Sink of Iniquity
,” wrote Miss Smith, no doubt in a mood of exaggeration, on December 31st, 1899, when she held that a new century was about to begin. “On Sunday I instructed David” (the Reverend Donald Maclean had died in the previous year, and Miss Smith had ordained his son), “in a very eloquent and severe sermon on the text, ‘Sodom and Gomorrah, these wicked cities.' He delivered it well, and I hope the Orphans profited. He warned them most solemnly that, if their wickedness persisted (there have been
two
unlawful alliances this week) the Almighty in His Wrath might cause our Island to be overtaken with some fearful Fate, attacked
by fierce savages, by plague, or overwhelmed by one of those monstrous waves that sometimes, during the monsoons, have swept up and ravaged our shores. Then, he said, would the innocent perish with the guilty, so that it behoved
all
of us to have a care for the Virtue of the rest, and to observe the
utmost stringency
in the laws on these matters. Nellie Perkins, who has lately had a baby she has no business with, was so overcome as to faint. I hope the Discourse may not fall to the ground.”

Every now and then, throughout all this period, social and constitutional developments would be noted. There were, it seemed, recurrent complaints among the Orphans of the land laws, of conditions of labour, of inequalities, injustices, and oppressions. From time to time a riot broke out and had to be suppressed. In 1910 a regular revolutionary war raged; one of the Smith sons was killed by rebels, and there was much bloodshed before it was put down. Miss Smith's account of all this was a little incoherent and illegible—she was, after all, then eighty-five—and the death of her son William affected her very deeply with rage and grief. However, Mr. Thinkwell gathered that the rebels had been defeated, and that such as were not killed or sentenced to convict labour withdrew (compulsorily or otherwise) with their families to Hibernia, the other and more barren spur of the island, where they had continued in a state of unrest even to the present day.

It was after this war that Miss Smith adopted, with increasing regularity as she got used to it, the royal “we.” Also, her handwriting became noticeably worse.

“Re-named our house Balmoral,” she wrote in
1911, “which is far more fitting to our Position.”

A headier, testier, more arrogant and impatient tone began to mark the journal. Miss Smith seemed to be losing her respect for the constitution.…