Orphan Island

by Rose Macaulay

  “Dear me! How you do value class here, to be sure!”

  Mr. Denis Smith winked. “I should say so! Mamma’s pet idea. She says the Creator appointed us gentry, trades people, and poor. The great thing is to keep the lower classes in their place. They get a bit uppish if one isn’t careful; begin fancying themselves Smith, y’ know, and all that. Wanting power, and land, and higher wages, and what not. Don’t your upper classes feel like that about the poor?”

  Mr. Thinkwell took off his glasses and rubbed them thoughtfully. “I suppose,” he said, “that a certain number do. Naturally, each class likes to keep such advantages as it has. But, as to power —political power, that is—it is always in the hands of a few, who are more often rich than poor, even when the poor have most of the votes. Money generally beats the vote in the race for power.”

  “That’s sound! Legislation ain’t dangerous, then, even in the hands of the poor?”

  “All legislation,” said Mr. Thinkwell, “is dangerous. Dangerous, I mean, to the public welfare. As to the vote, it is a form for putting one of our slightly ridiculous political parties rather than another in power (voters are perennially hopeful), but in point of fact no party in our country is very different from any other. None are intelligent, and all do considerably more harm than good. Most politicians are rather stupid and selfish people, who care for little beyond their own advantage, and seem very soon dazzled with the pleasures of power.” Mr. Thinkwell, academic and cultured, despised politicians to perhaps an unjust extent.

  “They sound amazingly like ourselves. Well now, here is our Orphan school.”

  3

  The Orphan school sat in groups or classes, with about twenty in each, on the sea shore, and before each class stood a male or female teacher, obviously also Orphan in class, imparting instruction. The school rose to its feet as Mr. Smith approached, but he motioned it to be seated.

  They stopped near a group consisting of children of about ten years old, who were chanting in chorus. while their teacher beat time with a cane:—

  “Julius invades at half B.C.,

  Claudius conquers at half A.D.,

  The Saxons come at half-past four,

  At six converted they adore,

  The Danish pirates land at eight,

  At nine great Alfred yields to fate,

  Half-past ten comes, yet Normans tarry,

  Eleven brings the first king Harry.…”

  “History,” Mr. Smith explained. “All in verse, y’ see. Easier to learn, eh?”

  “Fifteen four seven, five three and five eight,

  Sixth Edward, Mary, Elizabeth date,”

  the children chanted.

  “I note,” said Mr. Thinkwell, “that your educational system suffers, as ours does, from a strange obsession as to the importance of the dates at which kings and queens reigned.”

  “Oh, yes. Mamma always swore by the dates of the kings and queens. She taught us all that poem. Said it was composed by some clergyman her papa knew. We had to learn long lists of dates too, of course. Now here’s a Scripture lesson.”

  They moved on to another group, of whom a buxom young woman was inquiring, “What did God make on the first day?” She took them briskly through creation week, ending with, “And how did the Lord spend Saturday?”

  “Resting,” said the class in chorus.

  “And which day does He tell us to rest?”

  “Sunday.”

  “Why not Saturday?”

  “To show we aren’t Jews.”

  After a few further inquiries derogatory to Jews, who were obviously not well thought of on the island, the teacher conducted her pupils to the Reformation, eliciting from them the unanimous view that this was a great and glorious event.

  “Are there still Roman Catholics in the world?” she then inquired, and, on receiving an affirmative reply, “What do Roman Catholics worship instead of God?”

  “The Virgin Mary and a piece of bread,” the Orphans told her, with some zest.

  “How do they pray?”

  “With vain repetitions in an unknown tongue and a string of beads.”

  “And how does God punish Roman Catholics for their idolatry?”

  “He has them killed, and eaten up by black men, who are the blind and ignorant instruments of His will.”

  “What do we learn from this?”

  “Not to be Roman Catholics!” The Orphans were quite sure as to that.

  The next class was learning arithmetic, the sand being used as blackboard, and to the one beyond was being imparted such geography as Miss Smith had acquired in her youth, developed and perverted through three generations of transmission. The world, as viewed from Orphan Island, wore a curious, Brito-Centric aspect. Furthermore, each country seemed to revolve round one large town, or capital, and to spend its entire time exporting and importing commodities to and fro between itself and Great Britain. One would have gathered that no other occupation was carried on. It was obvious that Miss Smith had been brought up on sound Free Trade principles, and had faithfully passed down the torch.

  The French class then attracted Mr. Thinkwell’s attention; having paused near it long enough to learn that, whatever the quality of Miss Smith’s own French, it had become, as transmitted through seventy years, an almost unrecognisable jargon, he moved on to a group which seemed to be learning natural history by the catechising method quoted by Mr. Lane at supper last night, illustrated by drawings on the sand by Orphans of the animal under discussion. Mr. Thinkwell acquired as he listened some information as to the habits of various island creatures, and, more particularly, as to their various uses to the islanders, for natural history was taught here in the old-fashioned, homocentric manner. Kindness to animals was, however, urged, and unnecessary cruelty strongly condemned; though, as the teacher pointed out, it was often necessary to deprive an animal of its life, in fact, it might often be the kindest treatment, since, as animals were not, like man, religious beings, their sufferings ended with their death. Furthermore, if we leave them to die of natural causes, we cannot eat them. The many lessons that should be learnt from animals were touched on, with particular reference to ants and bees, who were so very busy, intelligent and industrious as to put man to shame. The teacher, apropos of this, repeated to his class a poem about Matilda, who was set up in that she had made a purse of beads for her aunt, and was bidden to observe the bees, how they made hives full of honey and other ingenious contrivances far beyond her powers.

  “All the same,” Mr. Thinkwell said, remembering vaguely a retort of Matilda’s that he had seen somewhere appended to this tale, and absent-mindedly, as was a habit of his, quoting it aloud, “all the same,—

  Whate’er their skill and busy deeds,

  They cannot make a purse of beads.”

  He spoke more loudly than he knew, and the teacher and class turned to look at him.

  “They cannot make a purse of beads,” Mr. Think-well repeated, with some emphasis, and laughed, and the children laughed too, at being interrupted, and at the strange gentleman in his queer clothes.

  Their teacher, an amiable young man, said “Ha, ha! Very true, sir. Very true indeed.”

  “So, you see,” said Mr. Thinkwell, “Matilda had the laugh of the bees after all. Or did she? I’m not so sure! The bees might ask, why should any one wish to make a purse of beads? Beads! What an idea! However, anyhow Matilda could do it if she wanted to, and the bees couldn’t. On the other hand, they could make honey, and she couldn’t. Well, perhaps after all the bees had the best of it.”

  The Orphan children laughed more, with joy at the interruption and mirth at the droll gentleman dressed all in white with glass eyes who was come to take them all away on a ship.

  “Dear me,” said Mr. Thinkwell, “I am afraid I am disturbing your class, sir. I should not have interrupted.”

  “Indeed, sir, I pray you!”

  Mr. Denis Smith, who had strolled away during the Scripture lesson, here came back and said that Mr. T
hinkwell might perhaps be interested in the physiology lesson which was proceeding a little way off.

  “They have lately introduced new methods of teaching this subject,” he said. “Some eager busy-bodies got up a fuss about children being kept in ignorance of physical matters—birth, don’t you know, and what not. The modern view is that ignorance of such important things warps their little minds and lives. Of course mamma wouldn’t agree. She always told us, when we asked questions, not to be inquisitive, and that we should know all that was necessary when it was necessary. And, sure enough, so we did. Most parents in our day brought up their children to believe that babies grew on cocoa-nut trees. You see, we’re used to the idea that we get nearly everything we want from cocoa-nut trees—food, drink, cups, cord, cloth, oil, butter, soap, wax, resin, gum, thatch, baskets, screens, mats, and so forth—so why not babies? Anyhow that’s always been the legend here. Don’t know if it warped our young minds. It didn’t hurt mine, so far as I recollect, but then I didn’t believe it. Never met a boy who did, what’s more. Fact is, Mr. Thinkwell, children ain’t such fools as people think. Now, if I may ask, pray what did you tell your children about such matters?”

  “Nothing, that I remember. I have no recollection that the subject was ever broached. They may, of course, have raised it to their mother.…”

  “Well, supposing they had asked you?”

  “Naturally, I should have told them the facts. Why not? It would never have occurred to me to conceal them, any more than any other facts. They are of no great interest, and of no immediate importance to children, of course, but neither can there be any reason for concealing them. I am afraid I have never understood either the impulse to make a mystery of them or the enthusiasm for imparting them. Both seem to me to be unbalanced.”

  “You, too, then, have both movements in your country?”

  “I believe we have. But such matters do not come my way very much.”

  “Well, here is the physiology class. Unknown, I needn’t say, to my mother, the teachers of the new type have got their way, and a little careful information is now imparted, very delicately, to the higher classes.”

  They stopped by the physiology class and listened. A little careful—very careful—information was certainly being imparted; human physiology, via plants, birds, and animals. Mr. Thinkwell several times caught the words “Very holy. Very beautiful. A very wonderful arrangement of God’s.”

  “Dear me!” he said. “Dear me! What a curious notion! What is the idea in telling them that? Why not let them know at once, what they will have eventually to know, that it is one of the very worst, silliest, most inefficient, and most infernally inconvenient and dangerous arrangements in all nature?”

  “My dear fellow,” said Mr. Smith, “that’s not the way we talk here. It would be regarded as blasphemy to the divine Contriver who arranged all things.”

  “Well, but one hears this ‘holy and beautiful’ talk even among those who don’t acknowledge a divine Contriver. I must say I can’t understand it. They must all be celibates. They should ask a few mothers their frank opinion of feeling ill for months and then producing in great agony a creature not only grotesquely unattractive but so helpless and incompetent as to require attention from morning till night for years to keep it alive. It is a positive disgrace to science that no better system has yet been devised. I fear these teachers of yours, like many of ours, are sentimentalists. If it is that they are afraid of scaring the children off the whole business, they needn’t be; nature will see to that.”

  “I dare say you are very right,” said Mr. Smith. “Only once you begin telling children the worst about life, where are you to stop? I mean, you know, why darken their poor little lives at the dawn, so to speak? I mean, ’pon my soul, there’s all kinds of trouble coming to them, poor little devils, pretty soon, and there’s something to be said for giving ’em a rosy view of life to start with. But I dare say I am quite wrong.… Mind you, I don’t uphold the cocoa-nut tree theory. But I can’t say I see much harm in letting ’em think the whole business is going to be rather jolly.”

  “It is better,” said Mr. Thinkwell, “in matters of science, to tell people dry facts; plain facts, without either embellishment or depreciation, and then they can judge for themselves. All these adjectives people use are a mistake.”

  “A dry fellow,” thought Mr. Denis Smith, as they walked away together. “A very queer, dry, fellow. Learned, of course, and it’s made him a trifle inhuman. He should drink more. Likeable, though; no humbug about him.”

  Aloud he said, “Well, that’s the Orphan school. Now for the other. It’s just round the next cove.”

  The Smith school was smaller in numbers than the Orphan, and looked more select. The children were plumper and handsomer, and less coarsely clad. They sat on benches, instead of on the ground. Their teachers must also have had some Smith blood, for their accents were more high-class and their deportment had more gentility. The Smith children spoke with more agreeable voices and more refined pronunciation than the Orphans; some of them were a good deal older, for, whereas the eldest Orphan pupils seemed not above thirteen, the Smiths ranged up to sixteen or so. Mr. Thinkwell commented on this, and Mr. Smith replied, “The others have to go to work early and help their parents. These don’t.”

  Class in the making. Mr. Thinkwell was interested.

  As to the substance of the teaching, it seemed much the same; except that the higher classes in the Smith school had got further in mathematics. Probably, Mr. Thinkwell reflected, that was about the only subject in which advance could be made by individual intelligence, on the stock of knowledge originally brought to the island.

  Presently play-time was announced, and the boys of the school repaired to a smooth piece of turf at the edge of the wood and began to play a kind of cricket, using polished cocoa-nuts for balls.

  “Curious,” Mr. Thinkwell commented, and Mr. Albert Edward Smith, who had just joined them, said, “What is curious?”

  “Why, that cricket should have found its way here. Miss Smith, I suppose—and your father, no doubt.…”

  “Miss Smith,” said Albert Edward, with that touch of distance which the mention of his father always evoked, “taught us all cricket from the first. She told us it was the national English game, and that not to play it would be un-English. So we have always played it.”

  “Quite so. But in point of fact, you know, it is a tedious game. A slow game. Don’t you find it so?”

  “I must confess,” said Albert Edward, with his faint laugh, “that I am English enough to enjoy it.… Do you remember, Denis, that time I hit you to leg in 1881 and made six? And that famous catch of poor William’s?”

  “No,” said Denis, rather rudely. “Can’t say I do. Of course, if one plays cricket—and I agree with you, Mr. Thinkwell, that it’s a tedious game —there must be hits and runs and catches. I don’t keep ’em all in my mind for forty years.”

  Mr. Thinkwell noted that the brothers did not always get on very harmoniously together.

  “Football is a much better game,” he remarked. “Rugby. Do you play that here?”

  “The boys kick balls about, of course. But with no very definite rules. It was always cricket we were taught to play. What a training for an English gentleman! We have a phrase, ‘It’s not cricket,’ which we apply to anything underhand or unfair.”

  “Have you indeed?” said Mr. Thinkwell disagreeably. He was reflecting that most of England’s worst phrases seemed to have taken root in this island. Miss Smith had doubtless been a most pernicious carrier. Her papa would, almost certainly, have used that dreadful cricket phrase, and she would have admired it very much and have passed it on to her young charges.

  “What about the girls?” he said. “Don’t they play?”

  “Hardly cricket.” Albert Edward gave a superior, Victorian smile at the thought. “That would scarcely be ladylike, would it? Not the older girls, anyhow. They have their games, of course.…”

&
nbsp; “Oh! They play cricket at girls’ schools with us. They are as keen as boys, I believe.”

  “My mother,” said Albert Edward rather coldly, “would be amazed to hear it.… There is croquet, of course—hitting balls through hoops. Young ladies here play that.”

  “Croquet! A more tedious game than cricket even. Nearly as bad as golf. In my opinion, the only good games with balls are of an active nature—football, hockey, or some form of tennis.”

  “I am afraid,” said Albert Edward, “that you will think it dreadfully English of me, but I still must champion cricket as the king of games.”

  He looked, indeed, such a king of men, as he stood benignly smiling, topping Mr. Thinkwell and his brother Denis by a head, his sweeping chestnut whiskers shining like floss silk in the sun, that Mr. Thinkwell could not withhold his admiration. These Smiths! What a family, when all was said! Whether Mr. Smith thought of it first, or Mr. Thinkwell, it somehow came into the common consciousness that Mr. Thinkwell, whatever his present station and learning, was only two generations removed from that scoundrelly sailor, a rough fellow of no class at all, who had deserted and marooned Mr. Smith’s mamma. He would not have cared for cricket, that scoundrel sailor; it had not been cricket, what he had done—marooning a lady and forty orphans. No, that had not been cricket; and it was not to be expected that his grandson, Mr. Thinkwell of Cambridge, should be a supporter of the king of games.

  3

  For a little longer the gentlemen stood and watched the school at play—the boys at cricket and the girls at their less organised and more childish scrambling about, chasing each other, playing at battles, climbing trees, and wading knee-deep in the sea after crabs. Then Mr. Albert Edward, glancing at the sundial near him, said, “Twelve o’clock. It is time that I went to the House. Do you care to accompany me, Mr. Thinkwell?”