Orphan Island (28 page)

“Not at all,” said Mr. Thinkwell. “A little commonplace, perhaps, as young people's verse is apt to be. I am very much interested to see it.”

Slightly nettled, but still bland and well bred, Hindley gave him some of his own essays to read. These Mr. Thinkwell found better. Hindley had a gay, amusing pen; his descriptions were entertaining and his comments apt. A tendency to a rather Petronian wit was held in check by a natural well-bred discretion. The same qualities marked the Satiric History, in which Mr. Thinkwell found a good deal of entertainment and interest. Decidedly Hindley Smith-Rimski had talent, for all his foppish airs.

Mr. Thinkwell's pleasure in his prose consoled the author for his lack of appreciation of his verse, and put him in a very good humour over supper, which they had before Mr. Thinkwell went on to read the other literature in the library. After the elegant and delicious repast had been consumed, and its indications removed by a beautifully trained young Zachary Macaulay, host and guest settled down to smoke, sip a very pleasant liquor, and read.

The literature was a miscellaneous collection of short and long stories, verse (for the most part either merely conventional or shockingly bad, but here and there having originality and occasionally some beauty or charm), and long or short prose essays. There were some political writings. One revolutionary poem, dated 1910 and signed” Michael Conolly,” began—“Orphans, arise! throw off the tyrants' yoke,” and ended—“To that great day when Smiths shall be no more.”

“My unfortunate brother-in-law,” said Hindley, “was always rather a politician than a poet—though not very successful even in that capacity, as you know.… See, here are some samples of our most modern verse—the kind the young men and women are writing to-day.”

The most modern verse had a good deal of swing and tune about it, and less of the moralising of much of the earlier poetry, which was still under the influence of Dr. Watts. Its most marked characteristic was a peculiar habit of ending in the middle of a sentence, “so as to avoid the obvious,” Hindley explained. “Do young English poets adopt that device? Your son Charles is a poet, I hear. I am anxious to make his acquaintance.”

“Yes, I believe Charles writes verse, among other things. I read very little modern verse, but I fancy it is not, for the most part, much like this. Charles will be able to tell you better as to that.… Have you, by the way, that curious branch of literature, the
novel?”

“Nothing so long as to be called that, if
Wuthering Heights
is the standard. There are difficulties as to writing materials, you see. The serial stories written daily on the shore are pretty long sometimes, but they are rubbed out when read.”

“An excellent idea, indeed. Sand is a most appropriate material, and should be more widely used.”

“Have you many novels?”

“I believe a very great many indeed.”

“And are they good reading?”

“Roughly speaking, no. But no worse, I imagine, than most short stories, verse, or plays.”

“Ah, plays we don't have here. My old grandmamma has always forbidden them, on moral grounds.”

“Moral?
Why so?”

“Oh, I can't explain grandmamma's notions. The old lady has always been rather mad, I fancy. Anyhow, plays are wicked, and players worse, so we have had no drama in our island home. We amuse ourselves in the evening by dancing, or
games, or telling stories. Perhaps, if you feel you have sampled enough of our literature for the moment, you would like to stroll out and watch some of these innocent entertainments.”

They strolled out into the dark, warm, close-growing woods, into which the low moon scarcely looked. They followed the thin path until they came out on to the open glade which ran round the wood's edge above the shore. Here lights burned, and people sat about in groups, talking and playing games or telling stories. The largest group sat round a little old Jewess; her cracked voice rose high and excited, her withered hands gesticulated as she told her tale, which seemed to be of the penny dreadful type.

“A great story-teller, old Leah,” Hindley said. “Look, there is your son, with Flora.”

True enough, Flora and Charles sat together on the edge of the group round Leah.

“Peter will be jealous,” said Hindley, “if your Charles steals his Flora from him like this. They've been together all day, those two.”

Charles looked round and saw his father.

“Where are William and Rosamond, Charles?”

“Gone out spearing fish in the lagoon, with a fisherman they've picked up with. You should come and listen to this; it's worth it.”

Mr. Thinkwell stood and listened. Hindley strolled away.

The high old voice rose and fell, cracked and quavered and shrilled, above the murmur of the sea and the soft ruffle of the wind in the palms.

To Nogood Peter Conolly, apathetically working in his dentist's tent, fiercely painting pictures, patiently searching for new colours in shells and flowers and shrubs, these days after the landing of the Thinkwells became gradually filled with an odd, new, and very bitter pain, a pain which seared even the joyful prospect of the new life which had so suddenly and amazingly opened before him; a pain which deepened and intensified day by day, and to which he foresaw no end.

Flora had left him for Charles Thinkwell: that was how it appeared to him. She was with Charles Thinkwell all day, every day; that he loved her any one could see; that she, if she did not love him (and whom, thought Peter bitterly, did Flora love, beyond herself?) meant to have him, seemed only too likely. She was caught, he supposed, by the novelty of Charles, by the glamour of strangeness he carried, the romantic aroma of Europe and London; she, who was sick of the tediousness of island life, and had always longed for the world beyond, might well be ensnared by these. No doubt, too, she would like the position he could offer her; like to appear in London town as the affianced wife of a fashionable young Londoner.
Yet was Charles fashionable? After all, thought Peter sulkily, he was but a writer, and writing, Rosamond had said, was not very Smith.

But still, there it was. Peter seldom got speech alone with Flora now. When he did, she would put him off, declaring that she would make no promises; yesterday was one thing, to-morrow quite another. “And to-day,” she added, “quite a third.”

He had, of course, made her angry by refusing to say that he would give up painting when he got to London and go in for some more spectacular and fashionable line of life. They had quarrelled about this on Sunday evening, and since then she would have none of him.

Peter did not dislike Charles on any other grounds. He, like the other islanders, thought the whole Thinkwell family very odd, but he did not dislike them.

The islanders, as the days went by, became used to this strange family among them. They became familiar figures; Mr. Thinkwell, the dark, odd, learned, interested man, who looked closely at everything through glass eye-windows as he went about, making notes every now and then in the little book he carried, making inquiries about everything he saw, puzzling over simple remarks made to him, taking them literally when obviously they were meant loosely, enormously interested in small things and great. It became the fashion among some of the more inventive of the population to tell Mr. Thinkwell all kinds of things calculated to interest him, whether true or false.… He deserved this attention, it was felt. As old Jean had taught them in childhood, “Gin ye dinna speer nae questions, ye winna be tauld nae lees.”

The younger Thinkwells too, were popular; Charles, the graceful, pleasant-mannered young man, to whom Flora Smith had taken a fancy and who had no eyes for any one else, though Hindley Smith-Rimski and all the literary set tried to get hold of him; William, the square-headed boy who was for ever hunting about for small animals with field glasses and a net, and who made friends with woodmen and fishermen; Rosamond, the funny, silent young girl, with her little round freckled face and grave, gray eyes and yellow hair cut round her neck in the pretty fashion of twenty years ago, and her habit of holding the tip of her pink tongue between her small white teeth when she was absorbed; Rosamond, who climbed the trees and crawled about the rocks, and, like William, watched the woodmen and fishermen at their work, and drank milk and ate fruit at all hours of the day; Rosamond, whose happy grin showed how much she enjoyed life on an island, though she had not many words to waste on it.

“Yes, certainly, one liked these Thinkwells, queer though they were.

One morning Charles Thinkwell came to the dentist's to have a tooth out. It had, he said, been aching for some time; he fancied it had an abcess.

He found the dentist painting outside his tent.

“That's uncommonly good,” he said, surprised, looking over Peter's shoulder.

Peter put his picture away, and spoke of Charles's tooth. He agreed that it seemed like an abcess, and should be extracted. He rubbed the gum with a narcotic juice, and also gave Charles to drink.

“You don't inject, then?” said Charles.

“Inject?”

“Yes. Prick the gum and put the stuff inside.”

“No; that's not the way we do it here.” He said it arrogantly, implying that Charles did not know what was done in the most advanced dental circles.

Charles, Peter could see, was trying not to look as if he thought it a pity that was not the way they did it here. Peter was trying not to look as nervous and anxious as he felt. He had a great desire to make a good job of Charles's tooth, to extract it whole with one tug, and without a great amount of pain, so that Charles should not have cause to complain of him.

After a minute of waiting for the narcotics, external and internal, to work, Peter took a pair of wooden pincers and bade Charles open. Charles though a good deal frightened, opened, was gagged, and gripped tightly the arms of his chair.

The anguish Charles then endured was unspeakable.

“It's coming,” said Peter, heaving. Something came, with a crack.

“There. It's broken,” said Peter, flushed and vexed. “Open once more, please; we must go on while it's still numb.”

Numb! What, Charles speculated deliriously in his agony, would an extraction of Peter's be like were the tooth
not
numb? For his part, he could not feel that the narcotics had made the least difference.…

“It's coming,” said Peter, heaving again.

This time it really came, root, abcess, and all.

“My God,” said Charles.

“Rinse, please,” said Peter.

Charles rinsed.

“There it is,” said Peter, showing him the tooth. “I am sorry it broke. Rotten teeth are brittle, of course.”

Charles mumbled, “It wasn't a rotten tooth. It was a perfectly good tooth, with an abcess. But that's all right, it's gone now.”

“Have a drink,” said Peter. “This is reviving.” He gave him a drink that tasted of gruel and peppermint.

“Now,” said Charles presently, feeling rather better, “may I see some of your pictures?”

Peter hesitated. He half wanted to refuse. But the other half of him craved for the opinion of Charles, who knew, probably, more about painting than his father. To make Charles admire his pictures—he would like that.

“Very well,” he said.

He could not read Charles's mind as he showed him the pictures. Charles, though in devilish pain, commented, praised, was interested, mumbled once or twice “Good Lord!” Then he fell silent, and Peter did not know what he thought of, or whether the pain in his jaw had overcome him. He did not know that Charles was thinking, “London will go mad about him. If Flora knew that.… But, of course, she doesn't.…”

“Extraordinarily interesting,” said Charles presently. “How do you get your colours?”

Peter explained to him the derivation of each.

They were interrupted by the arrival of another patient, and Charles, after paying his bill, went away. Actually to lie down and recover, but Peter supposed it was to meet Flora somewhere. “Open, please,” he said bitterly. And then, “Your teeth are in a shocking state Very few of them can be
saved. You had better wait till you get to England, and have them all out there and get new ones. It's very little use
my
doing anything to them.”

He never wanted to do anything to any teeth again.

The days passed slowly by. Slowly to the Thinkwells because each was so new, so delightful, so many-coloured, and so strange. Like some lovely fruit that puts forth, ripens, and tumbles, over-mellow, to the ground, between dawn and nightfall, so each lovely day rose from the sea, small and gold and exquisite, ripened to a hot and fragrant noon, and slid rosily into the sea again, leaving the island afloat beneath the myriad eyes of a vast and purple night.

It was the fine season. Had they been there a few months later, they were told, there would have been storms, seas, rains, thunders, monsoons. As it was, the only storm that shook the island was a small earthquake one afternoon, which threw Rosamond from a mango tree so that she badly bit her tongue. William was pleased, because all sorts of new fishes were thrown up on the beach by the earthquake wave.

It was the gay season, in the world of fashion and society. There were dances, banquets, parties, swimming races, tortoise races, sports. The Thinkwells were asked out a great deal. Except Charles, who went where Flora went, and that was everywhere, they did not always accept. William disliked parties, and only attended the sporting events. Mr. Thinkwell did not go to dances, or stay long at parties. He preferred really a game of
chess with Hindley Smith-Rimski, with whom he played about level, or a conversation with some one of intelligence, such as Denis Smith or one of the workmen. For the rest, he attended social functions in pursuit of his study of island life.