II.
Thus the Viola dropped anchor in Ahuan Skap, in possession of the following evidence that an entire populace had committed suicide: the remnants of a poisonous liquid, which had been poured into a carefully stoppered bottle; the crazed Scorrey; an open letter signed by twenty-four people who were now dead; and two children, a boy and a girl, who were, by our standards, completely feral.
Further questioning of the children added very little to the testimonies of the sailors and the captain. The boy could offer nothing at all, since he scarcely knew how to speak, while the girl, evidently confusing her memories of life on the island with her impressions of the voyage and the city, uttered patent absurdities:
“Father said they’d kill us all.”
“Who would?”
“Some people. There were a lot of them.”
“Did you see them?”
“No.”
“Did ships come to the island?”
“A very big one came, taller than me.”
“Try to remember, Liv, when was this? A long time ago?”
“Yes, a long time ago.”
“Or perhaps not so long ago?”
“Not so long ago.”
She could not orient herself in time, and her subsequent remarks about the ship, the people who visited the island, and their number bore the mark of a dark, half-forgotten dream. She then began to tell how everyone had feared they would be killed, and how at night, many ships arrived and fired at the houses. Several ships were airborne. The investigator put this down to a child’s fantasy, adulterated by the sailors’ tales, and also attributed it to the children’s marked disposition toward mystification. Still, he wrote down everything, but only as a formality.
And yet, a peculiar and rare circumstance emerged from the girl’s account—one that virtually eliminated the possibility of any outside interference in the affair. The six-year-old child recalled only one visit to Farfont by a single ship; assuming that lasting impressions on the memory begin at the age of three, then, for the duration of three years, the island had been cut off from all contact with the outside world, which naturally gave rise to the question: How often did ships visit the shores of Farfont, and did these visits not constitute a sort of legend in the years that followed? Put plainly, was Farfont not such an out-of-the-way place, where ships stopped but a few times in a century, and even then by accident, like the Viola?
In view of Farfont’s near-total obscurity as far as administrative authorities were concerned, and owing to its almost perfect nonexistence for all major and minor shipping lanes, the answer to this question was, self-evidently, affirmative. In that case, there could not have been any outside criminal interference in the affair of the natives of Farfont, and the isolation of the settlement was confirmed by the testimony of the crew of the Viola. Domestic utensils, implements, clothing, and other items that the sailors had swiftly examined bore traces of local manufacture, with the exception of several old rifles, books, and trinkets such as a shard of a mirror and a piece of fabric that had at one time ended up on Farfont. As for the island’s ecology, everyone concurred that it was “a very pretty spot.” More impressionable than others, Gabster declared that the island was a veritable paradise. Captain Tart expatiated on the island in more detail but, being a practical man, noted the richness and fertility of the soil, as well as the abundance of excellent springwater.
Below we shall encounter a detailed description of the island, and so let us return to an examination of the facts. On the basis of the testimony, the investigator fixed upon two versions of events: (1) the inhabitants of Farfont, under the pressure of strange and inescapable circumstances, reasons, and motives—of a local and not external origin—voluntarily, by consensus, committed suicide; (2) they were killed for reasons not uncovered during the investigation by the only person left alive, the now insane Scorrey, who, in an attempt to divert suspicion, confected a spurious letter containing the forged signatures of the Farfont inhabitants attesting to their suicide.
The second version, corresponding better to the simplicity of the criminal investigator’s mind and to the irresistible gravitation of the authorities toward the unmasking of malicious intent, even in cases where a person has simply fallen and cracked open his head, was unfortunately picked up on too eagerly by certain newspapers, whose publishers thus saved the public any exasperating puzzlement, while the reporters maintained the facile position of “common sense”—the very one that should be avoided like the plague with regard to certain phenomena.
The Morning Herald wrote:
Ha! We are asked to believe that an entire village of healthy people, raised in the bosom of nature, people who knew no excess, who were unaffected and half-savage, experienced some kind of common tragedy. It is of course possible that the men might have quarreled over a native beauty. But what of the women? Yet in this case we are supposed to assume a general disillusionment with life, a collapse of ideals and so forth! However, Scorrey is alive, as are two of the children, and they, more than anything, convince us of the villain’s cunning foresight. He knew that a ship might call at Farfont, and he was prepared for this unlikely event. Now he stands before us as the savior of these children, who have supposedly been entrusted to his, Scorrey’s, care. The children could quite conceivably have slept while this diabolical murderer poisoned his fellow villagers. Note that he also drank the poison but did not die. Clearly the dose had been calculated through experiment …
And so it continued.
The Observer, which insisted on mass suicide, stuck primarily to the testimony of the Viola’s captain. “Besides the gravity of the poisoning,” wrote the Observer,
a poisoning that very nearly dispatched Scorrey to the hereafter, his innocence is supported by the sighting of a mass grave. According to Captain Tart, a mound was discovered in the vicinity of the village; it had been dug and filled conscientiously, covered over with topsoil and topped with a durable cross. It constitutes the surest evidence that Scorrey executed with respect the lamentable duty thrust upon him by fate. Several rowboats were at his disposal; had he been the murderer, he could have thrown the corpses into the sea without haste or hindrance and proclaimed that all the inhabitants had drowned on a fishing expedition. These are merely possible scenarios. Naturally, the reasons for the suicide are inscrutable, since the text of the letter, which is written quite lucidly, suggests neither madness nor “possession by demons,” but only the consequences of certain factors that have not yet come to light. The authors of the letter clearly harbored strong doubts as to the possibility of its being made public; otherwise, we might perhaps be dealing with a lengthier document outlining the situation in detail. The letter’s brevity also indicates the haste with which these unfortunate souls rushed to do away with themselves. All we can do is await Scorrey’s recovery, for which, according to Doctor Nessar, there is now hope.
The analysis of the liquid recovered by Captain Tart established the presence of a strong poison.
Scorrey, assigned to Professor Arno Nessar’s clinic, was declared to be suffering from a mild form of temporary insanity. Scorrey spent four months at Nessar’s clinic, during which previously unknown circumstances came to light owing to an expedition and a publication by the psychiatrist De Maistre.
III.
De Maistre, who had devoted a significant part of his life to the study of suicide, was for some considerable time besieged by journalists, ladies, officials, and undercover policemen; to each of them he pointed out the obvious intricacy of the affair, although he himself was inclined toward the hypothesis of suicide.
On August 11, subsidized by the magazine Union and hoping to obtain new leads through a private visit to the island, he sailed from Ahuan Skap aboard the Terentius, a steamer that had been chartered for this very purpose, and returned on September 24 to astound the world with what he had uncovered, facts that cast strong doubt on the view that the deaths of the Farfontese had come about independently of outside f
actors. Namely: not far from the sea, in a rocky hollow by the shore, De Maistre found forty-four wine bottles (a product foreign to Farfont), a white safety pin, and an aged, half-disintegrated issue of the Guard Ship, dated May 18, 1920. It was this last article that finally convinced De Maistre that another ship had visited the island not long before the Viola.
Meanwhile, thanks to the publication of De Maistre’s findings and, more generally, the wave of publicity accorded the affair, the editorial board of the Observer received a letter from Bombay that was signed by a Captain Brahms and witnessed by a notary. Brahms had served in the Sidney Transport Company aboard the steamer Rickshaw. His report constituted, as it were, a gateway to the truth, whose melancholy visage appeared in full only on the day of Scorrey’s recovery. Here is Brahms’s letter:
On April 5, 1920, the Rickshaw, in search of the lost ship Vendôme, was thrown off course by a cyclone and, having sustained significant damage, carried far to the south. On the morning of April 20, we spotted a small island that was not shown on the map; none of my crew had visited it, nor had they heard of its existence. The inhabitants, who had interbred, explained that they were descended from two families of emigrants that had been put ashore in this secluded corner of the world in 1870 by the military cruiser Brobdingnag, for reasons of a political nature. Because of this, only two families lived on Farfont: the Scorreys and the Gonzálezes. Their pursuits were farming, hunting, and fishing. Placed in exceptional circumstances, they manufactured or obtained all of life’s necessities with their own hands and resources, with the exception of a small number of things that had been brought by the first settlers or sold to the island subsequently by ships that happened to pass by.
The last ship to visit them was the mutinous Scarab, which dropped anchor off the shore of Farfont six years ago. You can imagine with what fatiguing attention and excitement we were met. The inhabitants spilled out onto the shore, surrounding these miraculous visitors. Everything, right down to the buttons on our clothing, became the subject of endless disputes, questions, and explanations. It transpired that we had arrived on the wedding day of the young Antonio González and the no less young Johanna Scorrey. Feasting, unceasing questions about life in the outside world, and a primitive but quite charming spectacle lay in store for us.
The bridegroom, dressed in clothing of a fairly good cut and an enormous straw hat, left everyone in agreement about his looks: he was a well-built, swarthy young man with a slightly foolish smile and large, serious eyes, in which one could espy an awareness of the moment’s importance and solemnity. However, at the crucial moment, the bride hid herself around the corner of the house—embarrassed, of course, by our presence—and we wasted no little patience before we were able to see her charming visage. Finally, blushing crimson, she came out of her hiding place. The skipper Polladiou, a master of the compliment, began vociferously extolling her virtues, whereupon she became markedly more cheerful and deigned to look at him with one eye that was as black as a walnut and as naive as a week-old chick. Her simple dress of coarse homespun cloth fitted her pretty, slender, still awkward figure well.
The wedding ceremony was a simple and dignified affair. We stood on the shore of a stream that glittered blue and white in the fissures of the granite that formed an intricate deep-red arc across the stream in front of us. Along the arc stretched velvet clusters of creeping plants. The sun’s rays, which scattered over the arc, made the air look like a blazing bonfire or a golden curtain, through which the contours of the shore shone in pale-blue shadows. The shore was dappled with colorful flowers. On the horizon, a narrow sickle of ocean glinted.
Grandfather Scorrey read several prayers and excerpts from the Bible, and with his aged hand, he joined the burning hands of the young couple, whereafter we returned to the village. There, in a rocky hollow by the ocean shore, a feast began, which we irrigated with two crates of wine and rum. I began to tell stories of the momentous world affairs of the day, the inventions and the titanic struggle of our times, relishing the effect my tale would have on these people.
Indeed, they were shaken. I painted for them as complete a picture of the gigantic struggle of nine nations as I could, describing all its major events, its timeline, its movement and tempo, the technical and moral resources deployed by the antagonists. There were those who expressed doubt as to the veracity of my words, so I gave them an old edition of the Guard Ship that we happened to have. If people from Mars or the Moon were to land on Earth, it would not have drawn such murderous interest as we, with our Guard Ship and our tales of battles between million-strong armies: they asked us so many questions that it would have taken half a lifetime to answer them all in any detail.
I confess that in spite of the gravity of the events that blighted the last decade, I experienced an involuntary sense of pride or, rather, of superiority over these half-Robinsons when I began to tell them of man’s ingenious achievements in the fields of aeronautics, radio, chemistry, naval design, and ordnance. I described to them the appearance of dreadnaughts, Zeppelins, airplanes, concrete bunkers, and armored fortifications, setting my audience atremble with the weight of a sixteen-inch shell or the dimensions of a crater following the explosion of a bomb capable of sweeping away a village.
We talked throughout the night. On the following day, toward evening, the Rickshaw finished repairing the damage and weighed anchor, arriving in Melbourne on May 3. All the circumstances of our sojourn on Farfont are set forth in this letter; I consider it necessary to add that news of the tragic and unusual death of our former hosts has produced an indescribably painful impression on all of us who met them. If my report, which ostensibly has no direct bearing on the matter, can shed light on the mystery of the death of these cheerful and hospitable people, I shall experience the bitter gladness of a man who has enabled the discovery of a terrible truth.
IV.
On September 20, Scorrey finally gave his testimony. The stenographic record of Scorrey’s account is greatly confused, replete with repetitions and digressions; moreover, the speaker’s very language is so unlike our modes of thought and expression—modes developed through continual association with a multitude of people, present and absent, via letters, telegrams, books, and newspapers—that we have found it necessary to imbue his testimony with a common literary form, omitting neither the facts nor the impressions produced by them. “It was very hard for us,” said Scorrey,
to believe the words of Captain Brahms, who told us that Europe had suffered a terrible war while we, suspecting nothing of the sort, had heard only the lapping of waves and the rustle of blossoming branches. However, Brahms showed us a newspaper, which, though old, convincingly relayed the self-same story.
Throughout the night the captain and his crew talked with us, initiating us fearful, shaken, and spellbound people into the terrible scale of the events. We learned that hundreds of millions of people had found themselves in the grip of war. We learned that many cities and whole countries had been destroyed. We learned that man now flew in flocks on winged machines, dropping bombs on ships, houses, and forests. We learned that by means of a special asphyxiating wind, the lungs of tens of thousands of soldiers were burned, and much else. And also that no one knew whether there would be another such war again.
In the morning, the captain and his crew returned to their ship to repair the damage, while we carried on discussing what we had heard. None of us even thought of working that day. Each appraised the goings-on in his own way. Some averred that Brahms had not told us the whole truth and that the war was probably still raging. Others maintained that it was a propitious time for pirates and that soon we would very likely come under attack. On the whole, we were gripped by a mood of suspicion and melancholy; each of us became obsessed with forebodings, making predictions left and right about events in the Europe we so vaguely imagined.
Somebody—I do not remember who exactly—said that it was quite possible that in a year or two, we would be the only inhabitants left on
earth, because the belligerents would undoubtedly destroy one another with their monstrous inventions. Leon Scorrey, my nephew, said that the danger lay elsewhere, in a mass exodus of millions of people from the heavily populated continents—people who would scatter to the farthest corners of the earth in search of safety. A great number of outsiders, well armed, could, of course, conquer us, taking our property, cultivated lands, and boats. It was even proposed that we ask the Rickshaw to take us with it, lest we be left alone in fear and ignorance, but the coward who suggested this was intimidated and brought to his senses after it was explained to him that ignorance was better than what was then taking place in the great nations. That evening, however, as the Rickshaw was weighing anchor, two of our elders went aboard with a request that they tell everyone about us and send a ship back for those who want to leave, if any so decided. Brahms calmed them with a promise to do just that. At sunset, the Rickshaw got under way and departed.
Like many others, I passed that night in a heavy half-slumber, getting up from time to time to help my wife, who had fallen ill from all this unrest. Two days after the Rickshaw’s departure, Juan González, who had gone fishing with Johanna’s husband, Antonio, came back early and announced that half a mile from shore, they had spotted a shiny round object that was studded with nails and bobbing on the waves. Before long Antonio arrived and confirmed this. “We very nearly sailed into it,” he said, turning pale. Apparently this was one of those floating mines that Brahms had mentioned.
At noon a powerful crackling rumble resounded above our heads, and everyone came running out of their houses. Terrified workers rushed from the fields. Up above, skirting a tree, an enormous dark object with changing contours flew as fast as a gull; after altering its course by the forest, it plunged down and vanished.
Fandango and Other Stories Page 18