Foe (12 page)

* *

'Searching
through a chest of drawers some days ago for items to take to market,
I came across a case of recorders you must once have played: perhaps
you played the big bass recorder while your sons and daughters played
the smaller ones. (What has happened to your sons and daughters?
Could they not be trusted to shelter you from the law?) I took out
the smallest of these, the soprano, and set it aside where Friday
would find it. The next morning I heard him toying with it; soon he
had so far mastered it as to play the tune of six notes I will
forever associate with the island and Cruso's first sickness. This he
played over and over all morning. When I came to remonstrate, I found
him spinning slowly around with the flute to his lips and his eyes
shut; he paid no heed to me, perhaps not even hearing my words. How
like a savage to master a strange instrument -to the extent that he
is able without a tongue -and then be content forever to play one
tune upon it! It is a form of incuriosity, is it not, a form of
sloth. But I digress.

'While
I was polishing the bass flute, and idly blowing a few notes upon it,
it occurred to me that if there were any language accessible to
Friday, it would be the language of music. So I closed the door and
practised the blowing and the fingering as I had seen people do, till
I could play Friday's little tune tolerably well, and one or two
others, to my ear more melodious. All the while I was playing, which
I did in the dark, to spare the candle, Friday lay awake downstairs
in his own dark listening to the deeper tones of my flute, the like
of which he could never have heard before.

'When
Friday commenced his dancing and fluteplaying this morning, I was
ready: I sat upstairs on my bed, my legs crossed, and played Friday's
tune, first in unison with him, then in the intervals when he was not
playing; and went on playing as long as he did, till my hands ached
and my head reeled. The music we made was not pleasing: there was a
subtle discord all the time, though we seemed to be playing the same
notes. Yet our instruments were made to play together, else why were
they in the same case?

'When
Friday fell silent awhile, I came downstairs to the kitchen. "So,
Friday," I said, and smiled-"we are become musicians
together." And I raised my flute and blew his tune again, till a
kind of contentment came over me. I thought: It is true, I am not
conversing with Friday, but is this not as good? Is conversation not
simply a species of music in which first the one takes up the refrain
and then the other? Does it matter what the refrain of our
conversation is any more than it matters what tune it is we play? And
I asked myself further: Are not both music and conversation like
love? Who would venture to say that what passes between lovers is of
substance (I refer to their lovemaking, not their talk), yet is it
not true that something is passed between them, back and forth, and
they come away refreshed and healed for a while of their loneliness?
As long as I have music in common with Friday, perhaps he and I will
need no language. And if there had been music on our island, if
Friday and I had filled the evening with melody, perchance who can
say? -Cruso might at last have relented, and picked up the third
pipe, and learned to finger it, if his fingers had not by then been
too stiff, and the three of us might have become a consort (from
which you may conclude, Mr Foe, that what we needed from the wreck
was not a chest of tools but a case of flutes).

'For
that hour in your kitchen I believe I was at ease with the life that
has befallen me.

'But
alas, just as we cannot exchange forever the same utterances-"Good
day, sir" - "Good day" -and believe we are conversing,
or perform forever the same motion and call it lovemaking, so it is
with music: we cannot forever play the same tune and be content. Or
so at least it is with civilized people. Thus at last I could not
restrain myself from varying the tune, first making one note into two
half-notes, then changing two of the notes entirely, turning it into
a new tune and a pretty one too, so fresh to my ear that I was sure
Friday would follow me. But no, Friday persisted in the old tune, and
the two tunes played together formed no pleasing counterpoint, but on
the contrary jangled and jarred. Did Friday in truth so much as hear
me. I began to wonder? I ceased playing. and his eyes (which were
always closed when he did his flute-playing and spinning) did not
open; I blew long blasts and the lids did not so much as flutter. So
now I knew that all the time I had stood there playing to Friday's
dancing. thinking he and I made a consort, he had been insensible of
me. And indeed. when I stepped forward in some pique and grasped at
him to halt the infernal spinning. he seemed to feel my touch no more
than if it had been a fly's; from which "I concluded that he was
in a trance of possession. and his soul more in Africa than in
Newington. Tears came to my eyes, I am ashamed to say; all the
elation of my discovery that through the medium of music I might at
last converse with Friday was dashed. and bitterly I began to
recognize that it might not be mere dullness that kept him shut up in
himself. nor the accident of the loss of his tongue, nor even an
incapacity to distinguish speech from babbling. but a disdain for
intercourse with me. Watching him whirling in his dance. I had to
hold back an urge to strike him and tear the wig and robes away and
thus rudely teach him he was not alone on this earth.

'Had
I struck Friday. I now ask myself. would he have borne the blow
meekly? Cruso never chastised him that I saw. Had the cutting out of
his tongue taught him eternal obedience. or at least the outward form
of obedience. as gelding takes the fire out of a stallion?'

* *

'Dear
Mr Foe,

'I
have written a deed granting Friday his freedom and signed it in
Cruso's name. This I have sewn into a little bag and hung on a cord
around Friday's neck.

'If
Friday is not mine to set free, whose is he? No man can be the slave
of a dead hand. If Cruso had a widow, I am she; if there are two
widows, I am the first. What life do I live but that of Cruso's
widow? On Cruso's island I was washed ashore; from that all else has
flowed. I am the woman washed ashore.

'I
write from on the road. We are on the road to Bristol. The sun is
shining. I walk ahead, Friday follows carrying the pack which
contains our provisions as well as some few items from the house, and
the wig, from which he will not be parted. The robes he wears,
instead of a coat.

'No
doubt we make a strange sight, the barefoot woman in breeches and her
black slave (my shoes pinch, the old apeskin sandals are fallen
apart). When passers-by stop to question us, I say that I am on my
way to my brother in Slough, that my footman and I were robbed of our
horses and clothes and valuables by highwaymen. This story earns me
curious looks. Why? Are there no more highwaymen on the roads? Were
all the highwaymen hanged while I was in Bahia? Do I seem an unlikely
owner of horses and valuables? Or is my air too blithe to befit one
stripped bare mere hours before?

* *

'In
Ealing we passed a cobbler's. I took out one of the books from the
pack, a volume of sermons handsomely bound in calf, and offered to
exchange it for new shoes. The cobbler pointed to your name on the
flyleaf. "Mr Foe of Stoke Newington," I said, "lately
deceased." "Have you no other books?" asked he. I
offered him the
Pilgrimages
of Purchas, the first volume, and for that he gave me a pair of
shoes, stoutly made and well-fitting. You will protest that he gained
by the exchange. But a time comes when there are more important
things than books. "Who is the blackfellow?" the cobbler
asked. "He is a slave who is now free, that I am taking to
Bristol to find him a passage back to his own people." "It
is a long road to Bristol," said the cobbler-"Does he speak
English?" "He understands some things but he does not
speak," I replied. A hundred miles and more to Bristol: how many
more questioners, how many more questions?

What
a boon to be stricken speechless too!

'To
you, Mr Foe, a journey to Bristol may call to mind hearty meals at
roadside inns and diverting encounters with strangers from all walks
of life. But remember, a woman alone must travel like a hare, one ear
forever cocked for the hounds. If it happens we are set upon by
footpads, what protection will Friday afford me? He never had call to
protect Cruso; indeed, his upbringing has taught him to not so much
as raise a hand in self-defence. Why should he regard an assault on
me as of concern to him? He does not understand that I am leading him
to freedom. He does not know what freedom is. Freedom is a word, less
than a word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I
open my mouth. His master is dead, now he has a mistress -that is all
he knows. Having never wished for a master, why should he guard his
mistress? How can he guess that there is any goal to our rambling,
that without me he is lost? "Bristol is a great port," I
tell him. "Bristol is where we landed when the ship brought us
back from the island. Bristol is where you saw the great chimney
belching smoke, that so amazed you. From Bristol ships sail to all
corners of the globe, principally to the Americas, but also to
Africa, which was once your home. In Bristol we will seek out a ship
to take you back to the land of your birth, or else to Brazil and the
life of a freeman there."'

* *

'Yesterday
the worst came to pass. We were stopped on the Windsor road by two
drunken soldiers who made their intention on my person all too plain.
I broke away and took to the fields and escaped, with Friday at my
heels, in mortal terror all the while we ran that they would shoot
upon us. Now I pin my hair up under my hat and wear a coat at all
times, hoping to pass for a man.

'In
the afternoon it began to rain. We sheltered under a hedge, trusting
it was but a shower. But the rain had truly set in. So at last we
trudged on, wet to the bone, till we came to an alehouse. With some
misgiving I pushed the door open and led Friday in, making for a
table in the obscurest corner.

'I
do not know whether the people of that place had never seen a black
man before, or never seen a woman in breeches, or simply never seen
such a bedraggled pair, but all speech died as we entered, and we
crossed the room in a silence in which I could plainly hear the
splashing of water from the eaves outside. I thought to myself: This
is a great mistake better we had sought out a hayrick and sheltered
there, hungry or not. But I put on a bold face and pulled out a chair
for Friday, indicating to him that he should sit. From under the
sodden robe came the same smell I had smelled when the sailors
brought him aboard ship: a smell of fear.

'The
innkeeper himself came to our table. I asked civilly for two measures
of small beer and a plate of bread and cheese. He made no reply, but
stared pointedly at Friday and then at me. "This is my
manservant," I said -"He is as clean as you or I."
"Clean or dirty, he wears shoes in this house," he replied.
I coloured. "If you will attend to serving us, I will attend to
my servant's dress," I said. "This is a clean house, we do
not serve strollers or gipsies," said the innkeeper, and turned
his back on us. As we made our way to the door a lout stuck out his
foot, causing Friday to stumble, at which there was much guffawing.

'We
skulked under hedgerows till darkness fell and then crept into a
barn. I was shivering by this time in my wet clothes. Feeling about
in the dark, I came to a crib filled with clean hay. I stripped off
my clothes and burrowed like a mole into the hay, but still found no
warmth. So I climbed out again and donned the sodden clothes and
stood miserably in the dark, my teeth chattering. Friday seemed to
have disappeared. I could not even hear his breathing. As a man born
in the tropic forest he should have felt the cold more keenly than I;
yet he walked barefoot in the dead of winter and did not complain.
"Friday," I whispered. There was no reply.

'In
some despair, and not knowing what else to do, I stretched out my
arms and, with my head thrown back, began to turn in Friday's dance.
It is a way of drying my clothes, I told myself: I dry them by
creating a breeze. It is a way of keeping warm. Otherwise I shall
perish of cold. I felt my jaw relax, and heat, or the illusion of
heat, begin to steal through my limbs. I danced till the very straw
seemed to warm under my feet. I have discovered why Friday dances in
England, I thought, smiling to myself; which, if we had remained at
Mr Foe's, I should never have learned. And I should never have made
this discovery had I not been soaked to the skin and then set down in
the dark in an empty ham. From which we may infer that there is after
all design in our lives, and if we wait long enough we are bound to
see that design unfolding; just as, observing a carpet-maker, we may
see at first glance only a tangle of threads; yet, if we are patient,
flowers begin to emerge under our gaze, and prancing unicorns, and
turrets.