Mr. Fortune

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Mr. Fortune hastened after him. Would all this strangeness, this bewilderment, this nightmare of familiar living confounded and turned backward never come to an end? He hastened on into the smell of burning, and pulling aside the drooping fronds of a banana tree which, uprooted, had fallen and lay across the pathway like a screen, he beheld the ruins of the hut.

  One wall was still standing, a few pale flames licking wistfully over it. The rest was charred logs and hummocks of grey ash sizzling under the rain—for now it was raining more and more heavily. Looking round on the devastation he began to recognise the remains of his belongings. Those shreds of tinder were his clothes. That scrap of shrivelled leather, that wasting impalpable bulk of feathery print, was his Bible; there lay the medicine chest and there the sewing-machine; and this, this intricate ruin of molten metal tubes, charred rubber, and dislocated machinery, was the harmonium, its scorched ivory keys strewed round about it like teeth fallen from a monstrous head.

  Lueli was there, but he seemed to have no thought for the unfortunate priest amid the ruins of his home. Wading among the hot ashes, crouching close to the wreckage, turning over this and that with rapid and trembling hands, Lueli was searching with desperate anxiety for—Mr. Fortune knew not what. At length he gave a bitter cry and cast himself down upon the ground.

  Instantly Mr. Fortune was kneeling beside him, patting his shoulder, trying to lift the averted head.

  “What is it, Lueli? What is it, my dear, dear friend?”

  Lueli sat up and turned on him a face discoloured and petrified into an expression of such misery that he could hardly endure to look at it.

  “What is it? Are you hurt? Are you ill?”

  The expression never changed.

  “Are you frightened, Lueli? Has it upset you to find our home burnt to the ground? But never mind! We will soon have another, it is nothing to grieve for.”

  He would have said that Lueli did not hear him, so unmoving he sat, so utterly aloof, but that at these last words a very slight smile of scorn quivered on the dry lips.

  Then Mr. Fortune remembered. He hung his head; and when he spoke again it was with the grave voice in which we address the bereaved.

  “Is it your god you were looking for? Is he gone?”

  Lueli did not answer. But it was clear that he had both heard and understood, for he fixed his eyes on the priest’s face with the look of an animal which knows itself at man’s mercy but does not know what man intends to do to it.

  “My poor Lueli! Is that it?... Is it so dreadful? Yes, I know it must be, I know, I know. I would do anything to comfort you, but I cannot think how, I can only tell you how I pity you with my whole heart. I do, indeed I do. Believe me, though I told you to burn your god, yet at this moment, if it were possible for me, I think I would even give it to you again.”

  He spoke very slowly, scarcely daring to lift his gaze to the sorrow which sat beside him, not answering, not crying out, meek with the meekness of despair. And still Lueli listened, and still looked, with his expression wavering between timidity and antagonism.

  “Lueli, I spoke very harshly to you last night, not like a Christian, not as one sad human being should speak to another. In blaspheming against your god I blasphemed against my own. And now I can’t comfort you. I don’t deserve to. I can only sit beside you and be sorry.”

  Lueli never answered, and Mr. Fortune acted his last words, sitting mournfully beside him in the rain. After an hour or so Lueli began to topple forward, then suddenly he lay down and fell asleep.

  Now Mr. Fortune had time to think, and though he was dog-tired think he must. For after a while Lueli would wake again, and then the missionary must have some settled reasonable comfort for him, some plan of consolation. On the face of it nothing could be clearer. He should say something of this sort: “Your god, Lueli, was only made of wood, perishable and subject to accidents, like man who is made of flesh. He is now burnt, and his ashes are lost among the other ashes. Now will you not see that my God is a better God than yours, and turn to Him? For my God is from everlasting, even though the earth shake He cannot be moved.”

  Yes, that was the sort of thing to say, but he felt a deep reluctance to saying it. It seemed ungentlemanly to have such a superior invulnerable God, part of that European conspiracy which opposes gun-boats to canoes and rifles to bows and arrows, which showers death from the mountains upon Indian villages, which rounds up the negro into an empire and tricks him of his patrimony.

  Mr. Fortune remembered the Man of Sorrows. Would Lueli accept in the place of his wooden god a God that had once been made flesh? In the old days Lueli had enjoyed hearing about Jesus, though Mr. Fortune had always suspected him of preferring Joshua. Many, very many, must have taken Jesus to their hearts out of pity, following the example of the woman who washed His feet, although to her they were most likely but the feet of a wayfaring man. But it was rare to find a Polynesian accepting Him for these mortal motives, they themselves were not sorrowful enough. Probably, despite the loss of his god, Lueli would still prefer the more robust and stirring character of Joshua.

  The trumpet that shall awaken the dead with the sanction of the resurrection is louder than all the rams’ horns that blew down Jericho. As an honest priest it was Mr. Fortune’s duty to preach not only Christ crucified but also Christ arisen to comfort His followers awhile with neighbourly humanity ere He ascended to His Father. If this were all, it might suit Lueli very well: but in a twinkling it would lead him on to the Trinity, a mysterious sign revolving in the heavens from everlasting, a triangle that somehow is also a sphere. And so he was back again where he started from, embarrassed with a God so superior to poor Lueli’s that to insist upon Him now would be heartless boasting, would be exploiting an unfair advantage, wouldn’t be cricket.

  “If I were a proper missionary,” he burst out in a cross voice. And then with a wry grin he added: “It doesn’t look as though I were any sort of missionary. Lord, what a mess I’ve made of it!”

  He had indeed. The mess amid which he sat was nothing to it. Disconsolately he looked at his watch. It had stopped. In the stress of overnight he had forgotten to wind it up, and now it recorded the epoch at which his last link with European civilisation had been snapped—eight hours thirty-five minutes. It could not be much later than that now. But a miss is as good as a mile, and for the rest of his sojourn on the island, for the rest of his life maybe, he would not know what o’clock it was. This circumstance, not serious in itself and not to be compared with the loss of the medicine chest or his books, upset him horribly. He felt frightened, he felt as small and as desperate as a child lost. “I must set it as best I can,” he thought. “After all, time is a convention, just like anything else. My watch will measure out my days and remind me to be up and doing just as well though it be a little askew. And no doubt I shall die at my appointed hour, however erroneously I reckon to it.”

  But what time was it? The sky was overcast, he could not guess by the sun and he could not guess by his own time-feeling either, for his body had lost touch with ordinary life. He sat debating between nine-seventeen, five past ten, ten-forty-three, eleven-twenty—indecisive times which all seemed reasonably probable—and noon exactly, which was bracing and decisive, a good moment to begin a new era—but too good to be true. At last he settled on ten-twenty-five; but even so he still delayed, for he felt a superstitious reluctance to move the hands and so to destroy the last authentic witness his watch could bear him. Five minutes, he judged, had been spent in this weak-minded dallying: so resolutely he set the hands to ten-thirty and wound the poor machine up. It began to tick, innocently, obediently. It had set out on its fraudulent career.

  It was a good watch, painstaking and punctual, its voice was confident, it had an honest face; but henceforth its master had lost his trust in it, and though he wore it (like a wife) at bed and at board and wound it up regularly and hung it on a tree when he went bathing, yet he never could feel it was his true wife (watch, I me
an) again.

  Still Lueli slept.

  “I make all this fuss,” thought Mr. Fortune, “I even feel helpless and abandoned, because I have lost my reckoning of time. How much worse to lose one’s god!”

  Thus, the watch diversion over and done with, and the new time being ten-thirty-one, he was back on the old problem. What could he do for poor Lueli who had lost his god? “And it was for me that he lost it,” he thought, with a poignancy of feeling that was almost irritation. “He might have picked up his god and run out of the hut with it, but he would not leave me under the harmonium.” It was heroic, desperately heroic.... Yet there might have been time to save both? A god that could be picked up in one hand. Had Lueli in the flurry of the moment forgotten that the idol lay on the floor of the hut? “But No, one would not forget one’s god,” thought he, “even in an earthquake.”

  Now he could understand why Lueli had seemed so cold in the early morning, so aloof and unlike his usual self. When he had lain staring out to sea with that strange expression he had been tasting what it feels like to be without a god. And when they approached the hut that was why he had lagged behind until the last explosion of hope had sent him running to seek his god among the wood-ashes. Now he was asleep. But he would not sleep much longer. Already he had stirred once or twice, and sighed, as those do who must soon awaken. And still Mr. Fortune had not settled how to deal with him when he awoke. Would the Man of Sorrows fit his sorrowful case, He who had once cried out, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? Or would it be better to try Jehovah, a tribal character whose voice was in the clouds, whose arrows stuck very fast? The worst of it was that Lueli knew all about them already. For three years he had been living on the terms of the greatest intimacy with them, he was even at home with the Trinity. And so all that Mr. Fortune could tell him now would be but a twice-told tale; and that was not likely to be of much effect, for Polynesians are fickle, they tire as easily as children and must be bribed with novelties.

  Mr. Fortune grew increasingly despondent. He was even growing bored, and more and more quickly he turned over in his mind the various expedients of Godhead which might appeal to Lueli, like a woman tossing over a piece-bag in search of something she cannot find. The blue print, the grey merino, the long and ever more tangled trail of metal lace, a scrap of corduroy: none of these is what she looks for, and what she looks for is not there.

  “I can do nothing,” he cried out; and then an inner voice finishing the quotation for him added, “without Thee.”

  Of course he could do nothing without God. Why had he not thought of that before? Why, instead of vain thinking, hadn’t he prayed?

  He looked about him. He was alone in a mesh of rain. For leagues around the rain was falling, falling upon the quenched ashes of his homestead where were mingled and quenched too the ashes of Lueli’s god, falling upon the motionless forest, falling upon the moving ocean, on that vast watery and indivisible web of tides and currents, falling everywhere with an equal and unstaying pressure. Only upon the newly open mouth of the pit was the rain not falling, for there the flames rushed up and caught and consumed it.

  There had been an earthquake and now it was raining. Both events were equally natural, equally accountable for, equally inevitable. There was nowhere any room for chance; no happening from the greatest to the least could be altered or provoked or turned aside. And why should he specify into greatest or least? In causation there is no great or small. He himself was as great as the mountain, as little as the least of the ashes of Lueli’s god.

  Still he looked about him. But he was not looking for anything now, nor did he need to raise his eyes to heaven or close them before any presence unseen. The God who had walked with him upon the island was gone. He had ascended in the flames that had burst roaring and devouring from the mountain-top, and hiding His departure in clouds of smoke He had gone up and was lost in space.

  Mr. Fortune no longer believed in a God. It had all happened quite quietly, just like that. Once he put out his hand as though to arrest something that was floating away out of reach, but in a moment it dropped again. And there it was before him, resting upon his knees, the hand of a man who didn’t any longer believe in a God, with fingers idly patting out a slow and flagging rhythm, ticktock, like a time-piece that is running down. The real time-piece went on nimbly enough, it was now (he noticed) five minutes to eleven of the new era. If his diary had not been burnt he could have mentioned in it with impressive accuracy: “At 10.54 A.M. (N.T.) I ceased to believe in God.” This quaint fancy gave him pleasure.

  How differently to Lueli was he taking his loss! The reason must be that Lueli though losing his god had kept his faith. Lueli had lost something real, like losing an umbrella; he had lost it with frenzy and conviction. But his loss was utter and retrospective, a lightning-flash loss which had wiped out a whole life-time of having. In fact the best way of expressing it, though it sounded silly and paradoxical, was to say that what he had lost for ever was nothing. “Forever is a word that stretches backward too,” he explained to himself. If any proof were needed his own behaviour was supplying it. He had ceased to believe in God, but this was making no difference to him. Consequently what he had ceased to believe in had never been.

  He sighed—the loud horse’s sigh of one who has come to the end of a long stint. Then he stood up amid the rain and the ashes and stretched himself. He had got pins and needles in his leg from sitting still for so long, but it was a pleasure to his body to stretch and he stretched once more. The air struck cold on the muscles and skin which had, as it were, started to live again. He felt at once both tired and vigorous. In an odd way he was feeling rather pleased with himself, a pleasure that was perhaps the independent pleasure of his flesh which had waited patiently around his motionless thinking as a dog waits at the feet of its master absorbed in writing. The pen is thrown down rather wantonly, so that the ink may give a little spurt on to the page that a moment ago was all the world, that now is finished and prostrate and floutable. The master gets up and stretches, the dog gambols round him with congratulation. “Now you have come home to your senses again, now we can be reasonable and go for a walk!”

  He leant down and gave Lueli a little shake, affectionate but brisk.

  “Wake up, wake up. We are going down to the village now to find a lodging. You cannot sleep here in the rain all day or you will get rheumatism.”

  A policeman could not have been kinder, a mother more competent. He had got Lueli up and walking through the wet woods and eating stirabout by Ori’s fire before he had had time to bethink him of his unhappiness.

  Lueli sat swallowing and blinking and looking very debauched and youthful while Mr. Fortune and Ori made arrangements. For the present they could live under the chief’s ample roof. Meanwhile the burnt hut could be rebuilt, or some dwelling could be fitted up to receive them as lodgers, whichever Mr. Fortune thought best. As for the volcano, that would not interfere with anybody’s plans. The pigs had been corralled once more, the earthquake was already half-forgotten. Ori had sent an old woman up to the mountain to make a reconnaissance, and she had reported that the lava was flowing down the south side of the mountain where nobody lived. Everything was all right again, and the rain would freshen things up nicely. To-morrow he would invite a few friends in, and there would be roast meat and a party in honour of his guest.

  Personally Mr. Fortune would have preferred to have the former hut rebuilt and to go on living there, much as of old except for religion, the harmonium, and other European amenities. But he feared that Lueli would mope and be miserable. It would be better for him to have a change of scene, company and gaiety. Accordingly, he arranged that for the future they should lodge with Teioa, a lesser chief, whose family included several lively sons and daughters and an extremely vivacious great-grandmother.

  Unfortunately this plan worked badly. Mr. Fortune was much happier than he expected to be. He was now engaged in growing a beard, and freed from any obligation to convert his housem
ates he found their society very agreeable. The great-grandmother was especially good company. She was a celebrated story-teller, and when she had exhausted her stock of scandals about every one in the village she fell back upon legends and fairy-tales. Mr. Fortune was interested to find that many of these were almost word for word the stories of the Old Testament. One hot afternoon as they sat bathing their legs in a pool and waving away the flies from each other she recounted the story of Joseph and his Brethren. Joseph was called Kila and was carried to the land of Egypt in a canoe, but all the familiar characters were there, all the familiar incidents, even to where Kila turned away from the brothers he was threatening to hide the tears which he could no longer keep back. The only variation was in the character of Isaac, who had changed his sex and split into Joseph’s mother and aunt. But in truth the change made little difference, nor did it detract from the dignity of the story, for in spite of our English prejudice there is nothing inherently ridiculous about a mother’s sister. Mr. Fortune was not perturbed to hear the history of the Jews from the lips of a wrinkled and engraved old Polynesian harridan. He reflected that everywhere mankind is subject to the same anxious burden of love and loneliness, and must in self-defence enchant their cares into a story and a dream. In return for Joseph and his Brethren he told the old dame of the adventures of Mr. Pickwick, many of which were new to her.

  But while Mr. Fortune was getting on so nicely Lueli was very unhappy. His playmates had soon found out his misfortune. They teased him, saying that he had lost his god and would soon go to Hell. Every day the boy grew more dispirited. He shunned his fellows and went slinking off to hide himself in the woods, where he could mope in peace and quiet. Late in the evening he would creep back, smelling of damp forest earth and wild spices; and without a word he would lie down on his mat and fall into a dreary slumber.

  One day Teioa remarked to Mr. Fortune: “That boy has lost his god. I expect he will die soon.”