Three Stories (4 page)

Or else let the man be a saddler with a home and a shop and a warehouse in
Whitechapel
and a mole on his chin and a wife who loves him and does not chatter and bears him
children, daughters mainly, and gives him much happiness, until the plague descends
upon the city, it is the year 1665, the great fire of London has not yet come. The
plague descends upon London: daily, parish by parish, the count of the dead mounts,
rich and poor, for the plague makes no distinction among stations, all this saddler's
worldly wealth will not save him. He sends his wife and daughters into the countryside
and makes plans to flee himself, but then does not.
Thou shalt not be afraid for
the terror at night
, he reads, opening the Bible at hazard,
not for the arrow that
flieth by day; not for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction
that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy
right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee
.

Taking heart from this sign, a sign of
safe passage, he remains in afflicted London
and sets about writing reports. I came upon a crowd in the street, he writes, and
a woman in its midst pointing to the heavens.
See
, she cries,
an angel in white brandishing
a flaming sword!
And all in the crowd nod among themselves.
Indeed it is so
, they
say:
an angel with a sword!
But he, the saddler, can see no angel, no sword. All
he can see is a strange-shaped cloud brighter on the one side than the other, from
the shining of the sun.

It is an allegory!
cries the woman in the street; but he can see no allegory for
the life of him. Thus in his report.

On another day, walking by the riverside in Wapping, his man that used to be a saddler
but now has no occupation observes how a woman from the door of her house calls out
to a man rowing in a dory:
Robert! Robert!
she calls; and how the man then rows ashore,
and
from the dory takes up a sack which he lays upon a stone by the riverside, and
rows away again; and how the woman comes down to the riverside and picks up the sack
and bears it home, very sorrowful looking.

He accosts the man Robert and speaks to him. Robert informs him that the woman is
his wife and the sack holds a week's supplies for her and their children, meat and
meal and butter; but that he dare not approach nearer, for all of them, wife and
children, have the plague upon them; and that it breaks his heart. And all of this—the
man Robert and wife keeping communion through calls across the water, the sack left
by the waterside—stands for itself certainly, but stands also as a figure of his,
Robinson's, solitude on his island, where in his hour of darkest despair he called
out across the waves to his loved ones in England to save him, and at
other times
swam out to the wreck in search of supplies.

Further report from that time of woe. Able no longer to bear the pain from the swellings
in the groin and armpit that are the signs of the plague, a man runs out howling,
stark naked, into the street, into Harrow Alley in Whitechapel, where his man the
saddler witnesses him as he leaps and prances and makes a thousand strange gestures,
his wife and children running after him crying out, calling to him to come back.
And this leaping and prancing is allegoric of his own leaping and prancing when,
after the calamity of the shipwreck and after he had scoured the strand for sign
of his shipboard companions and found none, save a pair of shoes that were not mates,
he had understood he was cast up all alone on a savage island, likely to perish and
with no hope of salvation.

(But of what else does he secretly sing, he wonders to himself, this poor afflicted
man of whom he reads, besides his desolation? What is he calling, across the waters
and across the years, out of his private fire?)

A year ago he, Robinson, paid two guineas to a sailor for a parrot the sailor had
brought back from, he said, Brazil—a bird not so magnificent as his own well-beloved
creature but splendid nonetheless, with green feathers and a scarlet crest and a
great talker too, if the sailor was to be believed. And indeed the bird would sit
on its perch in his room in the inn, with a little chain on its leg in case it should
try to fly away, and say the words
Poor Poll! Poor Poll!
over and over till he was
forced to hood it; but could not be taught to say any other word,
Poor Robin!
for
instance, being perhaps too old for that.

Poor Poll, gazing out through the narrow
window over the mast-tops and, beyond the
mast-tops, over the grey Atlantic swell:
What island is this
, asks Poor Poll,
that
I am cast up on, so cold, so dreary? Where were you, my Saviour, in my hour of great
need?

A man, being drunk and it being late at night (another of his man's reports), falls
asleep in a doorway in Cripplegate. The dead-cart comes on its way (we are still
in the year of the plague), and the neighbours, thinking the man dead, place him
on the dead-cart among the corpses. By and by the cart comes to the dead pit at Mountmill
and the carter, his face all muffled against the effluvium, lays hold of him to throw
him in; and he wakes up and struggles in his bewilderment.
Where am I?
he says.
You
are about to be buried among the dead
, says the carter.
But am I dead then?
says
the man. And this too is a figure of him on his island.

Some London folk continue to go about their business, thinking they are healthy and
will be passed over. But secretly they have the plague in their blood: when the infection
reaches the heart they fall dead upon the spot, so reports his man, as if struck
by lightning. And this is a figure for life itself, the whole of life. Due preparation.
We should make due preparation for death, or else be struck down where we stand.
As he, Robinson, was made to see when of a sudden, on his island, he came one day
upon the footprint of a man in the sand. It was a print, and therefore a sign: of
a foot, of a man. But it was a sign of much else too.
You are not alone
, said the
sign; and also,
No matter how far you sail, no matter where you hide, you will be
searched out.

In the year of the plague, writes his man, others, out of terror, abandoned all,
their homes, their wives and children, and fled as far
from London as they could.
When the plague had passed, their flight was condemned as cowardice on all sides.
But, writes his man, we forget what kind of courage was called on to confront the
plague. It was not a mere soldier's courage, like gripping a weapon and charging
the foe: it was like charging Death himself on his pale horse.

Even at his best, his island parrot, the better loved of the two, spoke no word he
was not taught to speak by his master. How then has it come about that this man of
his, who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well as or better than
his master? For he wields an able pen, this man of his, no doubt of that.
Like charging
Death himself on his pale horse.
His own skill, learned in the counting house, was
in making tallies and accounts, not in turning phrases.
Death himself on his pale
horse
: those are words he would not think of. Only when
he yields himself up to this
man of his do such words come.

And decoy ducks, or duckoys: What did he, Robinson, know of decoy ducks? Nothing
at all, until this man of his began sending in reports.

The duckoys of the Lincolnshire fens, the great engine of execution in Halifax: reports
from a great tour this man of his seems to be making of the island of Britain, which
is a figure of the tour he made of his own island in the skiff he built, the tour
that showed there was a farther side to the island, craggy and dark and inhospitable,
which he ever afterwards avoided, though if in the future colonists shall arrive
upon the island they will perhaps explore it and settle it; that too being a figure,
of the dark side of the soul and the light.

When the first bands of plagiarists and imitators descended upon his island history
and foisted on the public their own feigned stories of the castaway life, they seemed
to him no more or less than a horde of cannibals falling upon his own flesh, that
is to say, his life; and he did not scruple to say so.
When I defended myself against
the cannibals, who sought to strike me down and roast me and devour me
, he wrote,
I thought I defended myself against the thing itself. Little did I guess
, he wrote,
that these cannibals were but figures of a more devilish voracity, that would gnaw
at the very substance of truth.

But now, reflecting further, there begins to creep into his breast a touch of fellow
feeling for his imitators. For it seems to him now that there are but a handful of
stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then
they must sit for ever in silence.

Thus in the narrative of his island adventures he tells of how he awoke in
terror
one night convinced the devil lay upon him in his bed in the shape of a huge dog.
So he leapt to his feet and grasped a cutlass and slashed left and right to defend
himself while the poor parrot that slept by his bedside shrieked in alarm. Only many
days later did he understand that neither dog nor devil had lain upon him, but rather
that he had suffered a palsy of a passing kind, and being unable to move his leg
had concluded there was some creature stretched out upon it. Of which event the lesson
would seem to be that all afflictions, including the palsy, come from the devil and
are the very devil; that a visitation by illness may be figured as a visitation by
the devil, or by a dog figuring the devil, and vice versa, the visitation figured
as an illness, as in the saddler's history of the plague; and therefore that no one
who writes stories of either, the devil or
the plague, should forthwith be dismissed
as a forger or a thief.

When, years ago, he resolved to set down on paper the story of his island, he found
that the words would not come, the pen would not flow, his very fingers were stiff
and reluctant. But day by day, step by step, he mastered the writing business, until
by the time of his adventures with Friday in the frozen north the pages were rolling
off easily, even thoughtlessly.

That old ease of composition has, alas, deserted him. When he seats himself at the
little writing-desk before the window looking over Bristol harbour, his hand feels
as clumsy and the pen as foreign an instrument as ever before.

Does he, the other one, that man of his,
find the writing business easier? The stories
he writes of ducks and machines of death and London under the plague flow prettily
enough; but then so did his own stories once. Perhaps he misjudges him, that dapper
little man with the quick step and the mole upon his chin. Perhaps at this very moment
he sits alone in a hired room somewhere in this wide kingdom dipping the pen and
dipping it again, full of doubts and hesitations and second thoughts.

How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin
brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes? What name shall he give this
nameless fellow with whom he shares his evenings and sometimes his nights too, who
is absent only in the daytime, when he, Robin, walks the quays inspecting the new
arrivals and his man gallops about the kingdom making his inspections?

Will this man, in the course of his travels, ever come to Bristol? He yearns to meet
the fellow in the flesh, shake his hand, take a stroll with him along the quayside
and hearken as he tells of his visit to the dark north of the island, or of his adventures
in the writing business. But he fears there will be no meeting, not in this life.
If he must settle on a likeness for the pair of them, his man and he, he would write
that they are like two ships sailing in contrary directions, one west, the other
east. Or better, that they are deckhands toiling in the rigging, the one on a ship
sailing west, the other on a ship sailing east. Their ships pass close, close enough
to hail. But the seas are rough, the weather is stormy: their eyes lashed by the
spray, their hands burned by the cordage, they pass each other by, too busy even
to wave.