Foe (2 page)

'At
last we came to the end of our climb and my porter halted to catch
his breath. I found myself on a level plateau not far from some kind
of encampment. On all sides stretched the shimmering sea, while to
the east the ship that had brought me receded under full sail.

'My
one thought was for water. I did not care to what fate I was being
borne so long as I could drink. At the gate of the encampment stood a
man, darkskinned and heavily bearded. "
Agua
,"
I said, making signs. He gestured to the Negro, and I saw I was
talking to a European. "
Fala
inglez?
"
I asked, as I had learned to say in Brazil. He nodded. The Negro
brought me a bowl of water. I drank, and he brought more. It was the
best water I ever had.

'The
stranger's eyes were green, his hair burnt to a straw colour. I
judged he was sixty years of age. He wore (let me give my description
of him all together) a jerkin, and drawers to below his knees, such
as we see watermen wear on the Thames, and a tall cap rising in a
cone, all of these made of pelts laced together, the fur outwards,
and a stout pair of sandals. In his belt were a short stick and a
knife. A mutineer, was my first thought: yet another mutineer, set
ashore by a merciful captain, with one of the Negroes of the island,
whom he has made his servant. "My name is Susan Barton," I
said. "I was cast adrift by the crew of the ship yonder. They
killed their master and did this to me." And all at once, though
I had remained dry-eyed through all the insults done me on board ship
and through the hours of despair when I was alone on the waves with
the captain lying dead at my feet, a handspike jutting from his
eye-socket, I fell to crying. I sat on the bare earth with my sore
foot between my hands and rocked back and forth and sobbed like a
child, while the stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of)
gazed at me more as if I were a fish cast up by the waves than an
unfortunate fellow-creature.

'I
have told you how Cruso was dressed; now let me tell you of his
habitation.

'In
the centre of the· flat hilltop was a cluster of rocks as high
as a house. In the angle between two of these rocks Cruso had built
himself a hut of poles and reeds, the reeds artfully thatched
together and woven in and out of the poles with fronds to form roof
and walls. A fence, with a gate that turned on leather hinges,
completed an encampment in the shape of a triangle which Cruso termed
his castle. Within the fence, protected from the apes, grew a patch
of wild bitter lettuce. This lettuce, with fish and birds' eggs,
formed our sole diet on the island, as you shall hear.

'In
the hut Cruso had a narrow bed, which was all his furniture. The bare
earth formed the floor. For his bed Friday had a mat under the eaves.

'Drying
my tears at last, I asked Cruso for a needle or some such instrument
to remove the thorn from my foot. He brought out a needle made of a
fishbone with a hole pierced through the broad end, by what means I
do not know, and watched in silence while I took out the thorn.

'"Let
me tell you my story," said I; "for I am sure you are
wondering who I am and how I come to be here.

"'My
name is Susan Barton, and I am a woman alone. My father was a
Frenchman who fled to England to escape the persecutions in Flanders.
His name was properly Berton, but, as happens, it became corrupted in
the mouths of strangers. My mother was an Englishwoman.

'"Two
years ago my only daughter was abducted and conveyed to the New World
by an Englishman, a factor and agent in the carrying trade. I
followed in search of her. Arriving in Bahia, I was met with denials
and, when I persisted, with rudeness and threats. The officers of the
Crown afforded me no aid, saying it was a matter between the English.
I lived in lodgings, and took in sewing, and searched, and waited,
but saw no trace of my child. So, despairing at last, and my means
giving out, I embarked for Lisbon on a merchantman.

'"Ten
days out from port, as if my misfortunes were not great enough, the
crew mutinied. Bursting into their captain's cabin, they slew him
heartlessly even while he pleaded for his life. Those of their
fellows who were not with them they clapped in irons. They put me in
a boat with the captain's corpse beside me, and set us adrift. Why
they chose to cast me away I do not know. But those whom we have
abused we customarily grow to hate, and wish never to lay eyes on
again. The heart of man is a dark forest -that is one of the sayings
they have in Brazil.

'"As
chance would have it -or perhaps the mutiny had been so ordered -I
was set adrift in sight of this island. '
Remos
!'
shouted the seaman from the deck, meaning I should take up the oars
and row. But l was shaking with terror. So while they laughed and
jeered I drifted hither and thither on the waves, till the wind came
up.

'"All
morning, while the ship drew away (I believe the mutineers were of a
mind to become pirates off Hispaniola), I rowed with the dead captain
at my feet. My palms were soon blistered -see! -but I dared not rest,
fearing that the current would draw me past your island. Worse by far
than the pain of rowing was the prospect of being adrift at night in
the vast emptiness of the sea, when, as I have heard, the monsters of
the deep ascend in quest of prey.

'"Then
at last I could row no further. My hands were raw, my back was
burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped
overboard and began to swim towards your island. The waves took me
and bore me on to the beach. The rest you know."

'With
these words I presented myself to Robinson Cruso, in the days when he
still ruled over his island, and became his second subject, the first
being his manservant Friday.

'I
would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso,
as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so
various, and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was
more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken
their toll on his memory, and he no longer knew for sure what was
truth, what fancy. Thus one day he would say his father had been a
wealthy merchant whose counting-house he had quit in search of
adventure. But the next day he would tell me he had been a poor lad
of no family who had shipped as a cabin-boy and been captured by the
Moors (he bore a scar on his arm which was, he said, the mark of the
branding iron) and escaped and made his way to the New World.
Sometimes he would say he had dwelt on his island the past fifteen
years, he and Friday, none but they having been spared when their
ship went down. "Was Friday then a child, when the ship went
down?" I asked. "Aye, a child, a mere child, a little
slaveboy," replied Cruso. Yet at other times, as for instance
when he was in the grip of the fever (and should we not believe that
in fever as in drunkenness the truth speaks itself willy-nilly?) he
would tell stories of cannibals, of how Friday was a cannibal whom he
had saved from being roasted and devoured by fellow cannibals. "Might
the cannibals not return to reclaim Friday?" I would ask, and he
would nod. "Is that why you are forever looking out to sea: to
be warned of the return of the cannibals?" I would pursue; and
he would nod again. So in the end I did not know what was truth, what
was lies, and what was mere rambling.

'But
let me return to my relation.

'Tired
to the bone, I asked to lie down, and fell at once into a deep sleep.
The sun was sinking when I awoke, and Friday was preparing our
supper. Though it was no more than fish roasted over coals and served
with lettuce, I ate with gusto. Grateful to have my belly full and my
feet on solid earth again, I expressed my thanks to this singular
saviour of mine. I would have told him more about myself too, about
my quest for my stolen daughter, about the mutiny. But he asked
nothing, gazing out instead into the setting sun, nodding to himself
as though a voice spoke privately · inside him that he was
listening to.

'"May
I ask, sir," said I, after a while: "Why in all these years
have you not built a boat and made your escape from this island?"

'"And
where should I escape to?" he replied, smiling to himself as
though no answer were possible.

"'Why,
you might sail to the coast of Brazil, or meet a ship and be saved."

'"Brazil
is hundreds of miles distant, and full of cannibals," said he.
"As for sailing-ships, we shall see sailing-ships as well and
better by staying at home."

'"I
beg to disagree," said I. "I spent two long years in Brazil
and met no cannibals there." '"You were in Bahia,"
said he. "Bahia is naught but an island on the rim of the
Brazilian forests."

'So
I early began to see it was a waste of breath to urge Cruso to save
himself. Growing old on his island kingdom with no one to say him nay
had so narrowed his horizon -when the horizon all around us was so
vast and so majestic! -that he had come to be persuaded he knew all
there was to know about the world. Besides, as I later found, the
desire to escape had dwindled within him. His heart was set on
remaining not fear of pirates or cannibals that held him from making
bonfires or dancing about on the hilltop waving his hat, but
indifference to salvation, and habit, and the stubbornness of old
age.

'It
was time to retire. Cruso offered to give up his bed, but I would not
accept, preferring to have Friday spread me a bed of grass on the
floor. There I laid myself down, an arm's-length from Cruso (for the
hut was small). Last night I had been bound for home; tonight I was a
castaway. Long hours I lay awake, unable to believe the change in my
fortunes, troubled too by the pain of my blistered hands. Then I fell
asleep. I awoke once in the night. The wind had dropped; I could hear
the singing of crickets and, far away, the roar of the waves. "I
am safe, I am on an island, all will be well," I whispered to
myself, and hugged myself tight, and slept again.

'I
was woken by the drumming of rain on the roof. It was morning; Friday
was crouched before the stove (I have not yet told you of Cruso's
stove, which was built very neatly of stone), feeding the fire,
blowing it into life. At first I was ashamed that he should see me
abed, but then I reminded myself of how free the ladies of Bahia were
before their servants, and so felt better. Cruso came in, and we
breakfasted well on birds' eggs, while the rain dripped here and
there through the roof and hissed on the hot stones. In time the rain
ceased and the sun came out, drawing wisps of steam from the earth,
and the wind resumed and blew without respite till the next lull and
the next rain. Wind, rain, wind, rain: such was the pattern of the
days in that place, and had been, for all I knew, since the beginning
of time. If one circumstance above all determined me to escape,
whatever the cost, it was not the loneliness nor the rudeness of the
life, nor the monotony of the diet, but the wind that day after day
whistled in my ears and tugged at my hair and blew sand into my eyes,
till sometimes I would kneel in a corner of the hut with my head in
my arms and moan to myself, on and on, to hear some other sound than
the beating of the wind; or later, when I had taken to bathing in the
sea, would hold my breath and dip my head under the water merely to
know what it was to have silence. Very likely you will say to
yourself: In Patagonia the wind blows all year without let, and the
Patagonians do not hide their heads, so why does she? But the
Patagonians, knowing no home but Patagonia, have no reason to doubt
that the wind blows at all seasons without let in all quarters of the
globe; whereas I know better.

'Before
setting out to perform his island duties, Cruso gave me his knife and
warned me not to venture from his castle; for the apes, he said,
would not be as wary of a woman as they were of him and Friday. I
wondered at this: was a woman, to an ape, a different species from a
man? Nevertheless, I prudently obeyed, and stayed at home, and
rested.

'Save
for the knife, all tools on the island were of wood or stone. The
spade with which Cruso levelled his terraces (I shall have more to
say of the terraces later) was a narrow wooden thing with a crooked
handle, carved all of a piece and hardened in the fire. His mattock
was a sharp stone lashed to a stick. The bowls we ate and drank from
were crude blocks of wood hollowed out by scraping and burning. For
there was no clay on the island to mould and bake, and such trees as
there were were puny, stunted by the wind, their twisted stems seldom
broader than my hand. It seemed a great pity that from the wreck
Cruso should have brought away no more than a knife. For had he
rescued even the simplest of carpenter's tools, and some spikes and
bars and suchlike, he might have fashioned better tools, and with
better tools contrived a less laborious life, or even built a boat
and escaped to civilization.