Philip Van Doren Stern (ed)

by Travelers In Time

  And Doña Inés, creeping up softly behind him, seemed brighter, gayer, than a humming-bird, in contrast to her pale pirate. Receiving a signal from her eye, he knew that he must make no mention of an earlier meeting.

  "My mistress, Doña Inés Samaniégos, of Santa Ana," announced the Captain, with a flourish.

  "Your servant, madam," said Patterson formally.

  And the lady, very grave and beautiful, ran her hand lightly over the Captain's sleeve and swept a curtsy, deep and billowing. She was not merry now, neither was she barefoot; she seemed haughty, and had shod herself in high-heeled, red shoes.

  "This flower," said Captain Thunder casually, indicating his paramour with a flick of white finger, "springs from a proud and splendid Castilian family. Is it not so, my heart? I took her when my fleet sacked Santa Ana, finding her myself, when my hands were steeped in blood above the wrists, praying in tenor before a waxen, tinseled image of the Virgin. She was sixteen, and very timid, being fresh from convent. Before I wooed I was forced to tame her. When I had tamed her, I was still enamored, and for four years she sailed the Main as queen of my fleet. The Black Joke, my ship, and the Black Lady, as they called my woman (being accustomed to flaxen peasant maids from Devon), those were all I prized in life. My ship they took, my woman I have kept, and will continue to keep whilst we remain here."

  The drawling voice was icy now, and the light eyes had become green stones. Patterson realized that he was being warned. He answered lightly:

  "And may I congratulate you, Captain, upon a lovely and most glorious prize?"

  "Do you mind," said the Captain to Doña Inés, "when that little ape, Heywood, tried to take you, and I slit his throat?"

  She nodded, her eyes very dark and lustrous. The Captain turned to Patterson.

  "There is no death on this island, sir, as you will discover for yourself, but it is possible to fight, and, fighting, to inflict wounds. A sorry business, very. I declare I regretted it, when I saw tire poor creature gurgling in mortal agony. He was sick for many days. But, sooner or later, we all heal. However, I'm soft-hearted, once my rage is appeased. And now you will pray excuse me, while I seek the shade. I'll leave madam here to entertain you for ten minutes. A change for her, a pleasant interlude for yourself. In ten minutes, then, my dove?"

  Bowing, he retreated, walking away with pointed toes, more like a dancing-master than ever.

  When he was out of earshot Patterson said impulsively:

  "I'm not enamored of your Captain!"

  "And I," she said thoughtfully, "was once enamored of him for forty years."

  "And now?" Patterson wanted to know.

  "Now?" She scooped up some sand and let it sift through her fingers. "Oh, my poor young man, does anyone remain in love for all eternity? Do you really believe that pretty legend?"

  "Then you hate him?"

  "Hate? No. You can neither hate nor love for a hundred years. I have suffered both, so I know, and tried to kill myself three times. Oh, yes, there is not much that I cannot tell you about love. One does not live as long as I have lived without learning wisdom."

  "And please tell me, Doña Inés," begged Patterson, "what you have learned about life in a hundred and forty years."

  "A hundred and sixty," she corrected. "I was twenty when cast up here. What have I learned? One thing above all—to live without emotion. Love, hate, tedium—those are all words, very unimportant words. They are nothing. I like to eat when I am hungry, sleep when I am tired, swim when the sun is hot. All that is good, because it is just enough. I used to think—I never think now. I was mad, you know, for a little time, five years or so, because I thought too much. But soon I was cured. That was when, having loved Micah and hated him, at last he sickened me. I imagined I could not bear that. But you see I was wrong."

  She laughed, shaking back a tress of hair, and he knew that, with death, she had also lost her soul and her humanity. She was, as she had said, empty, drained of all emotion; she was as sterile mentally, this lovely lady, as the parakeets chattering above her head. But she was very beautiful.

  "And the Captain?" he inquired. "Is it rude to ask what are his feelings towards you?"

  "Indeed, no!" And she laughed again. "The Captain is still a man, although he should have been dead long ago. Being a man, he has need of a woman sometimes. Being a man, he is determined that other men shall not take that woman. That is all. Apart from that, like us all, he is petrified."

  And then, although the ten minutes were not up, she heard Judd coming up the hill and slipped like a bright shadow to her own hut.

  Days passed slowly on the island. One day was like another. Always the sun poured brilliantly upon sapphire seas, gleaming sands, jeweled foliage. Macaws flashed like darting rainbows through the dusky green of jungle arches, the fruit hung coral-bright from trees whose blossoms flung out trailing creepers gayer, more gaudy, than the patterns of vivid Spanish shawls. And yet it seemed to Patterson after two months that all this radiant beauty was evil and poisoned, like a sweet fruit rotten at the core. What should have been paradise was only a pretty hell. Slowly, reluctantly, he had been forced to accept the island for what it was according to his comrades. He now believed, although shamefacedly, that Thunder and Doña Inés had lived there since the mutiny of the Black Joke, that Heywood had been marooned in the last century for insubordination, that Judd had emerged from the wreck of the Titanic. And yet, obstinately, he still clung to the idea of escape. One day he would escape. And then, once away from the island's shores, he would regain mortality, he would wrap mortality about him like a cloak.

  Meanwhile, he noticed one or two curious facts. His clothes, after eight weeks' rough living, were almost as good as new. It was no longer necessary for him to shave more than once a week. And, once, Judd, climbing a palm in search of coco-nuts, had slipped, crashing on his head to what seemed certain death fifty feet below and had been picked up suffering from nothing worse than slight concussion. This accident shook his faith more than anything else that he saw.

  They lived comfortably enough on fish, home-baked bread, fruit, coco-nuts, and the flesh of young pigs found in tire jungle. Patterson learned to shoot with a bow and arrow, and to tell the time by the sun and stars. He learned to be patient with Heywood, who was halfwitted, and he learned to search for turtles' eggs in a temperature of ninety-nine in the shade. He learned, too, to treat Captain Thunder with respect and Doña Inés with formality.

  Sometimes, the Captain, a reserved, sour-tempered man, would unbend, and, fingering his cutlass, tell stories of his life as a buccaneer on the Spanish Main. Terrible stories, these, vile, filthy, sadistic stories of murder and vice, plunder and torture, and fiendish, cold-blooded, ferocious revenge. Told in his drawling, affected voice, they became nauseous, and yet Doña Inés listened peacefully enough, her dark eyes soft and velvety, her red, silken mouth calmer than an angel's. Sometimes she would look up and nod, and say:

  "Oh, yes, Micah; I remember that, don't I? I was with you then, wasn't I?"

  "You were, my dove, my heart. If you remember, I burnt your hand in the flame of my candle until you swooned, because you affronted me by asking mercy for those dogs."

  And she would laugh.

  '1 was foolish, was I not, Micah? For what did it matter?"

  Patterson, loathing these conversations, was, nevertheless, forced to listen because at night there was really nothing else to do. Always before in his life he had accepted books without question as being quite naturally part of his life; now that he had none, the lack of them appalled him. He tried to write, scratching a diary on strips of bark, but the effort was not successful. Nor did his companions do much to ameliorate the loneliness of his situation. He preferred Judd to the others because Judd was young and gay, and comparatively untouched by the sinister, dragging life of the island, yet there were times when even Judd seemed to withdraw himself, to become watchful, remote, secretive. Patterson learned to recognize these as the interludes when his friend,
pitifully afraid, thought in a panic of the future that lay ahead for him.

  Heywood was sulky and monosyllabic. The Captain, so cynical and depraved, with his vicious mind, his giggle, and his will of iron, had revolted Patterson from the first. Only Doña Inés, with her vivid face and her beautiful, empty, animal mind, seemed to him restful and gracious, like some handsome, well-behaved child, in this crazy world of sunshine and plenty and despair. For this reason she began to haunt him at night, so that he was unable to sleep, and he longed, not so much to make love to her as to rest his head against her and to feel her cool hand upon his forehead, soothing him, that he might forget for a few hours. But Doña Inés was watched so carefully that it seemed impossible to speak to her alone.

  And then one day, when he had been on the island for more than three months and was in a mood of black depression, he encountered her in the woods.

  He had wandered there in search of shade, aimless, solitary, and discontented. She was gathering moss, on her knees, her bright skirts kilted. Stars of sunlight, dripping through the green and matted tent of foliage, cast flickering, dappled shadows upon the amber of her neck and arms. When she heard his footsteps, she turned to look at him, smiling very wisely, her head turned to one side.

  "May I speak to you," he asked her, "without being snarled at by the Captain?"

  "But of course," she said. "Micah and Heywood went out an hour ago to fish on the other side of the island."

  He sat down beside her on the green froth of the moss.

  "Inés," he began, and he had never called her by her name before, "I wonder if you will be patient and listen to me for a moment?"

  She nodded, saying nothing; she was never very glib of words.

  "It's this," he said, encouraged; "perhaps, being so much wiser,.you can help me. . . . It's a bad day with me; I've got the horrors. To-day I believe all your crazy stories, and, try as I will, I can't escape from them . . . to-day I feel the island shutting me in, and I want to run away from the island. What am I to do?"

  "You must begin," she told him, "by making yourself more stupid than you are. Oh, it was easy for Heywood, more easy even for Judd. For you it is very difficult. Can you not think only of to-day? Must you let your mind race on ahead?"

  Her voice was murmurous and very soft. He said, after a pause:

  "It would be easier, I think, if I might talk to you more often. Time, the time of the island, has touched you scarcely at all. With you one almost ceases to feel the horror."

  "If it were not for Micah I would talk to you, yes, whenever you want. But you know how I am situated."

  "Oh, don't think I'm trying to make love to you," he told her impatiently, "it's not that. It's only that you bring me peace—you're so beautiful, so restful."

  Doña Inés looked away from him towards the green twilight.

  "Perhaps that wasn't very polite of me. In fact, it was clumsily expressed. Let me try once more—listen, Inés, you're sanity, loveliness, a bright angel in a mad world. I respect you as I would respect a saint. But I want to be with you, I want to talk to you. I'm lonely when you're not there—I need your protection."

  Doña Inés looked away from him towards the green twilight of the trees. His eyes devoured her dark clear-cut profile. She said at length, speaking very slowly in her grave, beautiful voice:

  "Mi querido, I can't grant your request. I am too afraid of Micah, and perhaps I am afraid of something else. . . . Listen, if I saw much of you I might forget that I should be a dead woman. I might forget that my heart is cold and my mind empty. I might wake up again, and I don't want to wake up. I am afraid of life, after so many years. And already you are making my sleep a little restless."

  She turned her face towards him and he saw that the red flower of her mouth was trembling. A bright drop, that might have been a tear, save that she never wept, hung like a jewel upon the shadow of her lashes. Yet her face was radiant, transfigured, more sparkling than the sunshine.

  Straightway, Patterson forgot about respect and saints and Captain Thunder, and kissed her on the lips.

  For one enchanted moment she was acquiescent, then pushed him away, hiding her face in her hands. And he, realizing the horror that lay ahead for both, felt more like weeping than rejoicing.

  "Go away," she whispered, "go away before you make me hate you for what you are doing. A moment ago you talked of peace: do you realize that you are stealing mine?"

  He stammered, scarcely knowing what he said:

  "There are better dreams."

  "Not here," she told him; "here there are no dreams but bad ones, and so it is safer not to dream at all. Please, please, go away." "Inés," he said eagerly, "I will go away—we'll both go away. If I build a boat, or a raft, and provision her, will you trust yourself to me?

  We'll escape—we may drown, but I promise you "

  He stopped. In her tired yet vivid eyes he had suddenly surprised, for the first time, the dead, haunted look that so much disconcerted him when he glimpsed it in the others' gaze. It was as if she retreated very far away, drawing down a blind.

  She said, patiently, as one speaking to a child:

  "Oh, my friend, please don't be so foolish. ... I have tried, we have all tried, so many times. And it hurts, to fail so often."

  "Then you won't come?"

  She climbed slowly to her feet, brushing moss from her bright skirts. Then she shook her black, silken head twice, very emphatically. "No. I will not come with you."

  "Then," said Patterson, "since I can't stay here to watch you with the Captain, I shall escape alone. Won't you change your mind?"

  She came near to him and put her hand for one moment upon his shoulder.

  "No. I'll not change my mind."

  And with a swishing of silk, that sounded strange enough in that tropical, emerald glade, she left him to his thoughts, and his thoughts were agony.

  For weeks he slaved in secret to build a great rakish-looking solid raft that grew slowly into shape as it lay concealed amid the dusky green of overhanging branches. He had told no one save Doña Inés of his resolution to escape. The reason was simple; in his heart of hearts he dreaded their bitter mockery, their cynical disbelief in any possible salvation from the trap of the island. Yet he still had faith; once aboard his raft and he would be for ever borne away from those perilous and beckoning shores; he might find death, but this he did not really mind, although he much preferred the thought of life, human life, life with Inés. And then he had to remind himself that the Spanish woman was a thing of dust, to crumble away at the first contact with normal humanity, and that he would, in any event, be better without her, since she meant another mouth to feed.

  But he still desired her, and it was as though the Captain knew, for she was very seldom left alone. And so he toiled in secret, and in his spare time nursed Judd, who lay sick of a poisonous snake-bite that swelled his foot, and turned it black, and would have meant death in any other land.

  Once, when his raft was nearly completed, he caught Inés alone on the beach, where, against a background of golden rock, she fed a swirling silver mass of seagulls. The birds wheeled, crying harshly, and Doña Inés smiled. She wore a knot of scarlet passion-flowers in the dark satin of her hair. Patterson, determined not to miss a second alone with her, advanced triumphantly across the sands. The seagulls scattered.

  "Look, you've frightened my birds," she complained indignantly. "Never mind the birds—they can see you whenever they want. I can't. Inés, haven't you changed your mind about coming with me?" She shook her head.

  "Inés, please, please listen! Even if we drown out there together, wouldn't it be better than this?"

  "Oh, yes, if we drowned. But we should not drown. We should come back here—to Micah—and then our lives would not be worth living."

  "My life," he said, "isn't worth living now, not while I have to see you with that creature night and day." "Be quiet," she warned in a low voice.

  Patterson turned, following her eyes. B
ehind, only just out of earshot, stood the Captain, watching them sardonically. The breeze lifted the skirts of his green taffeta coat, ballooning them about hi$ slender body. The green, too, seemed reflected in his face, so pale was it; paler, more waxen, even, than a corpse-candle.«

  "Are you also feeding the birds, Patterson?" inquired the Captain softly.

  "No. I am looking for turtles' eggs."

  "How many have you found?" the Captain wanted to know.

  Patterson felt rather foolish.

  "None-yet."

  "Then you had better make haste, unless you wish to fast for dinner. Come, my rose."

  And Captain Thunder turned away indifferently, followed by Doña Inés, who walked behind him obediently, her head bent, with no backward look.

  That night Patterson thought he heard weeping in the hut that lay only a few hundred yards from his own, and he crouched, perspiring, sleepless, for many hours, until it was dark no longer, and bars of rose and lemon streaked the sky. Then he got up and went forth to the woods to complete his preparations for escape.

  He had rigged up a sail upon his raft and had already floated her on a narrow lagoon that led towards the sea. He was taking with him three barrels of water, a barrel of bread, his fishing-tackle, a blanket, and a flint and tinder. He knew he would not starve, since fish were plentiful, but he was aware that he would, probably, unless he were fortunate enough to end in a shark's belly, die of a thirst that must endure for many days of torment in a pitiless and scorching heat.

  Yet he could not wait; he must start at once, before the sun was up, before the first sign of life from that hut nestling on the cliffs behind him. And so, at a moment's notice, he took his departure, nervous and weary and taut with anxiety, drifting with his raft like some dark bird against the misty violet-blue of the lagoon at dawn.

  Everything was silent; trees and cliff and sky, the limpid reflection of these in the glassy waters of the lagoon; even the monkeys and the chattering parakeets, all were frozen into a breathless silence that seemed to watch, aghast, the reckless departure of this creature determined at all costs to break away from their sorrowful eternity.