Mr. Fortune (18 page)

But now he had no wish to recall his letter, though he was still sick with the wrench of definitely despatching it. His only thought was to leave Fanua as soon as possible; and until the moment of departure came he could not imagine how he would pass away the time. Gradually the pillar-box faded out before him and he saw the ocean-waste, the narrow diminishing boat, the empty indifferent sky. His head was aching again and he put his hand to his forehead. There was that deluded watch, mincing complacently on. It was much better at passing away time than he. Half-past seven. Another thirteen hours and he would be getting himself supper, and Lueli might come in or he might not. And after supper he would be going to bed. But if he fell asleep too soon he would wake early with another shining unending morning before him. No! It would be better to sit up late, to midnight if possible. For time passes more tolerantly at night when the body is drowsy and the mind tired; but in the morning hours there is no release from one's faculties, and every second is a needle-prick to consciousness.

The sand had dribbled out between his fingers, he found himself staring at the palm of his hand. It would be the better for washing; and he turned back towards the bathing-pool. While he was still the headache was not so bad; but every step jolted it and sent a heavy sick tingle up his spine to jar against his temples.

As the bathing-pool came in sight through the lattice of ferns and bushes he paused, for it came into his mind that Lueli might be there with his friends. And dropping on his hands and knees he crawled through the undergrowth, holding his breath and cautiously poking out his head from the greenery to scout if the coast were clear. He need not have been so discreet. The pool was empty. There was no footprint on the sandy rim.

He undressed and bathed his body wearily in the cool water—it was always exquisitely cool under the shadow of the rock. It did not occur to him that by going a little further he could drown. He hauled himself up on a ledge and began to clean his toes with a wisp of seaweed.

The shade on his wet limbs, the sound of the sea, the breathing murmur of the woods in the soft steady wind was comforting to his headache. He began to feel slightly lachrymose and a good deal better, and with the tenderness of a convalescent he watched the fish darting in and out of the streaming weed. Of course he might have gone himself by the canoe instead of sending his request for the launch. But though he now realised that it would have been perfectly feasible to have done so, something within him assured him that it would not really have been possible. Things must take their course: and thus to wait still in Fanua for the launch to come and fetch him away was the natural course for his departure. He could see himself leaving the island in the launch, but not any other how.

That bull-faced fish had dodged in and out from the weed a dozen times at least. It was as persistent as a swallow. His body was dry now and his headache smoothed away. Only the heartache remained; and he was getting used to that.

All this while, as he was crawling through the bushes, and cleaning his toes, and watching the fish, there had been but one deep preoccupying thought at the back of his mind—thought of Lueli and a longing for his presence. It was on the chance that Lueli might come down to bathe that he was waiting now. And he imagined the conversation that must take place between them.

“Lueli, I am going away from Fanua.”

“But you will come back again?”

“No. I am going away for ever.”

It would be quite simple—as simple as that. “I am going away from Fanua.” Above all he was determined that there should be no explanations. It would never do to tell Lueli that he was going away because of him. No smirch of complicity, no blight of responsibility should fall upon Lueli, happy Lueli, who had done him no wrong, and whom so often he had sought to injure from the best, worst, most fatal and affectionate motives. How could he have so teased his misery with that idiotic geometry—a misery, too, in which he was the agent, for it was through him that Lueli had lost his idol. That was bad enough, at any rate it was damnably silly. Though what else could he have done? Something equally senseless, no doubt. But what was it to his behaviour in the hut, when the idol lay between them, and Lueli crouched in his last refuge of silence while he sought with menaces and blackmailing to rob him of his faith, and bade him cast his god into the fire? Ah! of the two gods who had perished that night it was the wooden one he would now fetch back again.

But this he could never say. He must not give any reason for his departure lest he should at length fall into giving the true one and seeming to involve Lueli in his own blunders. “I am going away from Fanua.” That must be all. Little to say: so little that he must postpone saying it till the last hour came, the hour when one says good-bye. And for that reason he must shun Lueli's presence, hide from him if need be and crawl through bushes; for if he once allowed himself to resume their old familiar intercourse he would not be able to keep back the words: “Lueli, I am going away. I am going away for ever.”

He said it aloud, and as it were heard the words for the first time. He put on his clothes and began mechanically to walk back towards the hut. Then he had a good idea. Since he was leaving the island it would be a pity not to go up the mountain and have a look at the crater. Very likely he would never have another opportunity of inspecting an active volcano.

It would be a taxing expedition, and not without danger. He put up some food, cut himself a stout walking-stick, and gathered a bunch of plantain leaves to stick in his boots—for it was decidedly an occasion for boots. Preparations always pleased him, for he had a housewifely mind, and by the time he set out he was feeling, if not less miserable, at any rate a point or two deflected from his misery.

The new crater was on the further side of the mountain. He decided that the best way of approach would be to walk up through the woods by tracks which he knew and thence to skirt round under the foot of the crags, keeping against the wind in order to avoid the smoke and fumes. As he mounted through the woods he could hear, at first the sea and the tree-tops, presently the murmuring tree-tops alone. Soothed by their company and their shade he climbed on peacefully enough for a couple of hours, keeping a sharp look-out for rents and fissures; for however weary one may be of life one would not choose to discard it by starving, or suffocating in a deep crevice as hot as an oven.

At last he came out upon the tract of scrub and clinker which covered the upper slopes of the mountain. After the cool depth of the woodland it was like a pale hell, a prospect bleached and brittle such as even the greenest garden will offer if one sits up and looks at it suddenly after lying with the sun strong on one's eyelids. After a moment of dizziness the garden will revive again, but the longer Mr. Fortune looked at this landscape the more spectral and repellent it seemed. And because the air quivered with heat the face of the mountain side seemed to be twitching with fear.

There were the crags, some two miles away yet, but looking as though he could throw a stone and splinter them. They were not rhododendron-coloured now, but a reddish and scabby mottle. They reminded him of a group of ruined gas-vats with the paint scaling off them, standing in the middle of a brickfield. It smelt of brickfields too; and in the place of the former sounds of the sea and the tree-tops new sounds came to his ear, ugly to match the landscape, and of a kind of baleful insignificance like the landscape—far-off crashes and rumblings, the hiss and spurt of escaping steam: the noise of a flustered kitchen.

Now was the moment to put the plantain leaves in his boots. Those which he had gathered were faded, he threw them away and gathered fresh. Then, with a heart beating harshly and remotely, he set forth on the second stage of his climb.

It was hateful going—slippery bents, bristling scrub, sharp-edged clinker which hurt his feet. He tripped and fell constantly, and when he fell the clinker cut his hands. Twice he remained crumpled on the ground just as he had fallen, gasping for breath and cowed by the frantic beating of his heart, which did not seem to belong to him, behaving like some wild animal which, terrified and apprehensive, is dragged struggling to the summit of the mountain to be sacrificed there. And as he went on the brickfield smell grew stronger, and the kitchen noises grew louder, and the sun, striking down on him from the motionless sky, striking up at him from the ground, reverberating upon him from the parched landscape, enclosed him in its burning net.

He remembered the story of the woman Kapiolani, the Christian convert of Hawaii. Followed by a crowd of trembling islanders she had gone up the burning mountain to manifest her faith in the true God. When she was come to the crater of Kilauea she had scrambled down to the very edge of the burning lake, and there, half hidden in clouds of smoke, she called on Pele the Fire-goddess, and flouted her, calling her an impostor and challenging her, if goddess she were, to rise up out of her everlasting fiery den and overwhelm her accuser with its waves. Pele did not answer: she sulked in the heart of her fire, powerless before the name of Christ. And when she had waited long enough Kapiolani climbed up again out of the pit and showed herself once more to the crowd who had been cowering at the crater-side, trembling, and listening to the loud voice of her faith. And when they saw her, they believed.

Her faith, thought Mr. Fortune, had carried her lightly up the mountain side, and over the lava-flow which she had trodden with scorched and bleeding feet. But he, though a man, and born free from the burden of heathen fears, and wearing boots, was already tired out and reluctant, and only a cold tourist's curiosity could carry him onward, and a bargain-hunting spirit which told him that having gone so far it would be a waste not to go on to the end.

Kapiolani had made her act of faith in the year 1825. And after that, as though for her courage she were like the prophetess Deborah, the land had peace thirty years. Then Pele shook herself contemptuously, and fell to her tricks again. At her first shake the island trembled, as though it knew what was to come. “Yet a little,” said the Fire-goddess; and slept for another ten years. This time she woke angrier. The island quivered like the lid of a boiling pot; a river of fire, flowing terribly underground, rent open a green and fertile plain, and five times a tidal wave reared up and fell upon the helpless land. And once more Pele fell asleep, but fell asleep to dream; snarling to herself, and hotly, voluptuously, obscurely triumphing in a dream of what her next awakening would be.

Kapiolani would not know of that awakening at any rate. It was to be hoped that she had been spared the others. Simple faith like hers would be cruelly jolted by such ambiguities in God's law. She might even have lost it thereby, as did Voltaire, another blunt, straightforward thinker, at a rather similar exhibition; for she could hardly be expected to take the subtler view of those long-standing and accustomed believers who can gloss over an eruption as a very justifiable protest against the wickedness of their neighbours. And as for saying that it is all a mystery—well, there is not much satisfaction to be got out of that.

These thoughts carried him over the last mile, and looking up he was surprised to find himself under the crags. He began to skirt round them. Now the noises and the smells were so strong that as he rounded every jut of the crags he expected to come on the new crater. Just as he had climbed on to the top of a large rock a gust of wind, veering among the crags, brought with it a volley of foul smoke, which rose up from beneath him and smothered him round, just as smoke comes suddenly belching out of the vent of a tunnel. He stood for a moment coughing and stifling: and then the wind shifted again, and the smoke lifted away from him, and looking out underneath it he saw that he was come to the end of his search.

The rock on which he stood was the last westernmost redoubt of the crags, and before him extended the other side of the island of Fanua. Far off and strangely high up he saw the sea-line. The ocean seemed to fall steeply and smoothly downhill to where it broke upon the reef in a motionless pattern of foam. Stretching away down the mountain side was a long, serpentining slab of lava—the thickly-burning torrent which had torn apart the flanks of the mountain on the night of the eruption, wallowing downward with an ever more heavy and glutted motion until now it was solidifying into rock; a brutal surface of formless hummocks and soppy and still oozing fissures. Everything around was deep in ashes, and here and there little gushes of steam showed where the heat still worked under the outer crust. It was like the surface of a saucepan of porridge which has been lifted off the fire but still pimples and undulates with its own heat.

Another jet of smoke belched up. Holding his breath Mr. Fortune crept over the rock on his hands and knees and looked down into the crater.

By night the spectacle might have had a sort of Medusa's head beauty, for ever wakeful and writhing and dangerous; but in the light of day it was all sordid and despairing. Thick smoke hung low over the burning lava, and thin gaseous flames flickered on the surface, livid and cringing, like the ghosts of bad men still haunting around the corrupting body. Below this play of dun smoke and shadowy flame the lava moved unceasingly, impelled to the south, on and on and over and over as though its torment were bound upon an axle. Every now and then two currents would flow into each other with a heavy impact, a splash and a leap of fire. And then it was as though it clapped hands in its agony.

Slowly, because he was cramped with having watched it so long, Mr. Fortune raised himself to his feet and turned away. He had no thoughts, no feelings. What he had seen was something older than the earth; but vestigial, and to the horror of the sun what the lizard is to the dragon: degenerate. Shuddering and cold he went down past the shadow of the crags and over the scorched expanse of hell-ground towards the woods, hastening, still having in his ears the growlings and concussions of the pit and with that foul smell still in his nostrils.