Kay saw that the cutter was heading for a ship in the channel. As he sat in the stern-sheets, looking at the crew, he found their eyes fixed on him. He had seen a cat looking at a little bird with that sort of look; he had heard that snakes will look at mice with that sort of look. He began to notice their dress: they wore short buckled shoes, no stockings, rude red canvas petticoats or kilts, and canvas jackets. In their belts were stuck pistols, knives and hangers. The boat was old, dirty, and had once been painted red.
He looked a little anxiously towards the ship. He had heard that Mediterranean cruises are delightful, and that the ships in which they are made are spotlessly clean, brightly lit and very comfortable. There was nothing of all this about this ship. For one thing, she flew no colours; for another, she was not in any sort of order. There was a sort of green grass at her water-line; the paint had long since gone from her sides. It seemed, too, that she had been in action not long before, for splinters had been torn off her planking, leaving white wounds, sometimes jagged and irregular, sometimes round like the shot which had caused them. She was rolling slightly to the swell; some of her gear gave out a melancholy creak as she rolled. One of the rowers in the boat spat some tobacco juice over his shoulder and said, ‘She creaks, just like Old Bill after he was hanged in chains.’
Kay noticed that the fore-topsail was loose. He knew enough of the sea to know that this meant that the ship was about to sail. He was shocked to notice that she was not flying the Blue Peter. He had always heard that a ship about to sail invariably flies the Blue Peter. The boat ran alongside the ship and the stroke oar said, ‘Up with you, young Master’; so Kay clambered up the ladder to the deck. He was shocked to find that the deck was dirty, scarred like the sides, and cluttered with gear. The ropes were not coiled up; the hammocks were not in the nettings. There were heaps of old clothes and hats on the deck. Two or three of the crew lay asleep in the scuppers. The ship had guns upon both sides of her deck: on her bulwarks were little swivel-guns which could be turned in any direction. On the quarter-deck, just above the ship’s wheel, was a scrollwork which had once been gilded. Within the scroll was a painting of the ship as she had been on her setting forth. ‘She must then have been a beauty,’ Kay thought, for the picture showed her gay with paint and hung with colours. Her name had been painted underneath her, in white letters: The Bristol Merchant. Somebody had run a streak of red paint across this name and had painted over it a new name: The Royal Fortune. ‘I see what this is,’ Kay thought. ‘She is a merchant ship which has been captured by pirates.’
He had not time to think of his discovery. A pale man, who seemed to be the captain, blew a whistle; all the crew gathered to him on the quarter-deck.
‘Brothers,’ the captain said, ‘I have called you all together . . . Steward, a bowl of rum . . .’ A bowl of rum was brought forward. It was a tub of rum, not a bowl. The captain said, ‘Brothers, fill your pannikins. We are going again on the Grand Account.’
The crew gave three loud cheers, dipped their pannikins in the rum, lifted their pannikins, called out each one of them a different sentiment, such as: ‘Here’s how’, ‘Drink hearty’, ‘Success to The Royal Fortune’; then they all drank success to their cruise, drank a second, then a third success, and fired a salvo of guns.
Instantly the ship began to sail. Malta dropped astern in half a minute; they cleared Gibraltar a moment later. The ship slipped swiftly towards the west.
Very soon the ship was in the tropics, not far from land: there in the water were scarlet seaweeds, rainbow-coloured fishes, bits of wreck with coral stuck on them and branches with strange leaves and fruits. Kay kept away from the evil-looking men, who smoked short clay pipes, and sipped rum, as they sat on deck dicing for the old clothes.
Soon Kay saw an island rising ahead. It must once have been a volcano, for it rose up in a cone, from which the slopes lapsed to the sea, under dense wood. At one side, the island was sheer cliff against which the surf was bursting: elsewhere little valleys ran down to beautiful white beaches. Kay could see the sparkle of brooks tumbling down the hill.
He was so intently watching the island that he was surprised to find one of the crew intently watching himself. This man had a bloated mouth with only two front teeth in it. Suddenly this man seized him by the collar.
‘I have got you,’ he said. ‘Here he is, boys; here’s another of them.’
The captain, hearing this commotion, turned and said, ‘What is it, there?’
‘It’s another of them, please, Captain,’ the man said. ‘I have been watching him for some time and he has got no shadow.’
‘Bring him up in the sun,’ the captain said.
They brought Kay up into the sun; they stood round him with their pistols drawn; they turned him about, so that he caught the light.
‘It’s true,’ they said. ‘He’s got no shadow, no more than that other one we had.’
‘Well, we’ll soon settle him,’ one of the men said, drawing his cutlass and running his thumb along the edge. ‘One good whack with this,’ he said, ‘it’ll let the shadow out that he’s got tucked away inside of him.’
‘Hold on there, brother,’ another pirate said. ‘That’s Death: it’s well-known sure Death to cut a man with no shadow. Never take an edge to such. Tie ropes to him, that is the way, and pull him underneath the ship from side to side till he is torn in three; then let the sharks have him, shadow and all.’
‘That’s a soft way to be rid of him,’ another said. ‘It’s plain that you’re New to the Coast, talking like that. That is just the way to start disease among the fish. The sharks would swallow the shadow and die, the fish would eat the sharks and die; then men would eat the fish and die. It’s just sheer murder, all the way along. Hang the sculpin up by the heels till the shadow falls out of him, I say.’
Then another man said that it was well-known that the thing to do with a person of that sort was to shoot him with a blessed bullet. This sentiment met with general applause that that was undoubtedly the way, but when they came to apply it to Kay they found that they had not a blessed bullet. In fact they found that the only blessed thing on board was a church candlestick, which had been in use so long on board for lighting pipes and warming rum that it was probably no longer blessed. The general vote was that it was probably, by this time, not blessed, and that in any case it would be a pity to spoil the candlestick for a twopenny sculpin with no shadow.
‘Wait now,’ the captain said. ‘Once before we had one of this sort with no shadow, but we found a way of dealing with him. We marooned him on the Tiburones. There are the Tiburones. I say that we should maroon this man there too.’
This met with immense applause. ‘Yes,’ they cried to Kay. ‘The Tiburones. You will stay there and live with the other fellow till you get your shadows back. That’s the place for them – the Tiburones.’
Kay heard one of the men say in an Irish voice, ‘That’s a queer sort of a name to give a place. What did they give it a name like that for?’
Well,’ one of the men said, ‘Tiburones is its name, and Tiburones is its nature. It’s the Spanish word for sharks.’
Having decided Kay’s fate, they filled the bowl with more rum. Some of the crew dragged Kay to what they called the Bilboes, which were two iron rails fixed to the deck. They chained his wrists to one rail and his ankles to the other, so that he sat with great discomfort, with his hands behind him and the back of his neck being scorched by the sun. After this, all hands drank their rum, fired their pistols and flung sea-boots at Kay’s head. In a few minutes, the ship glided into the quiet of the anchorage: instead of the roaring surf Kay heard a queer, dry, snapping noise.
‘You hear that, sculpin?’ one of the men said. ‘Those are the Tiburones, champing their teeth for you. Each has got three rows of teeth; one to grip, one to tear, and the third to chump up tiny.’
By this time some of them had lowered a boat. They thrust Kay into it and rowed him towards the shore. The water in the
bay was of the most vivid, pure green, so curiously clear that far, far below he could see shark after shark, all spotted, spangled and striped. From time to time an enormous shark would heave silently alongside, just out of reach of the ends of the oars. It would turn over on its back a little and show its awful mouth with the three rows of teeth.
‘Now, out you get, you shadowless sculpin,’ the captain said, as the boat ran into the sand. They pitched Kay out head first on to the beach. ‘If you look among the woods,’ they cried, ‘you may find your brother.’ With that the boat turned for the ship. Kay was left alone on the desolate beach.
He thought, ‘Perhaps I would have been wise not to come exploring into the Past.’
The sun was exceedingly hot and he was without a hat. The beach was composed of millions of tiny white shells, some of them flushed with pink. They scrunched under his feet as he walked towards the shelter of the forest. As he reached the line of the trees he turned to look at the ship, which was now heading for sea again. A bright flash darted from her stern port and Kay instantly jumped to one side, thinking, ‘They have fired at me.’ He saw a column of water leap up from the bay, then another and then another, as the shot skimmed towards him. Just as the bang of the report reached him, the shot buried itself in the beach close to where he had been standing. A shower of little shells came pattering on the leaves near him, and all the birds of the island (it seemed) screamed and mewed and rose up out of the treetops.
‘Well, here I am, marooned,’ Kay said to himself; keeping well under cover lest they should send another cannon ball. ‘Now I am like poor Ben Gunn in Treasure Island: unless I am able to run down the goats, if there are any, I am not likely to get much dinner. I am frightfully hungry.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘what I could do for food. There are lots of berries and things on the trees, but they may be poisonous.’
He remembered to have read that berries which the birds ate freely could usually be safely eaten by men. He saw that birds were pecking various red and yellow fruits, but these fruits were high in the trees, and the trees were bare of lower branches; there was no climbing to them. There were coconuts on some coco palms, but no monkeys to hurl them to him, as he had read that monkeys did. He saw no goats, and he had no pin about him with which to make a fish-hook.
Now that the ship had gone he thought that perhaps he would be able to creep down to the rocks to find shellfish. There were some shellfish stuck to the rocks, but so tightly stuck that he could not get them away. He repeated to himself an old poem:
‘Said gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,
“I am extremely hunger-ee.”’
He remembered to have read of a sailor who used his white toes as bait, dangling them in the sea to attract the fish and then spearing them as they came to nibble. He found a stick and with great trouble rubbed it to a point on the rough shells of the shellfish on the rocks. Then, finding a rocky pool on the beach, he drew off his stocking, slipped his foot into the water and gently waggled it about. Suddenly, what seemed like the bottom of the pool rose up in a mass towards him. He snatched his foot from the water, dropped his stick and fled, but had time to see two terrible jaws snap within an inch of his foot as he withdrew it. The worst of it was that in his hurry he knocked his shoe into the pool. Turning round he saw this floating like a little boat for a moment; then the great jaws rose and snapped it up.
‘Now I’ve only got one shoe,’ Kay thought; ‘and shipwrecked seamen have to eat their shoes. Well, I suppose I had better do that . . . eat the other shoe . . .’
He took it off and tried to bite some of it, but it was extraordinarily tough and the taste of blacking was not very pleasant.
‘Oh come,’ he thought; ‘animals can live on grass and leaves and things. Why shouldn’t I?’
He picked some leaves, but they were so very bitter that they shrivelled his mouth up. Then he picked some grass, but this was very salt. Then he picked some other grass, which was so rough and sharp that it made his lips and tongue bleed.
He seemed to remember that some shipwrecked man or tribe of savages of whom he had read had made elegant fish-hooks of sea shells. Among the tiny shells on the beach there were many bigger ones, but he could not find the knack of cracking them into hooks.
‘Well,’ he thought at last, ‘perhaps this island is inhabited. There may be people somewhere or other in it who will help me.’
He set off to walk through the jungle. He held his one shoe in his left hand as that was his only supply of food. He found the going extraordinarily rough with so many fallen trees and branches, but he had not gone long before a most appetising smell came to his nose.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘there are people. That’s something being cooked.’ There was no doubt about it: something very nice was being cooked not very far away. Then Kay thought, ‘Supposing, when I come through the jungle I find that it is a whole lot of cannibals cooking Man Friday or his brother. I wish I knew what cooked man smelt like.’
Somehow the smell in his nostrils seemed too pleasant to be the smell of toasted man. He went on with increasing hope that he would soon come to someone who would feed him. He heard on ahead the pleasant splash of falling water. At this point, somewhere beyond him in the jungle, an old man’s wavering voice began to sing a song. As from the first it seemed a very queer song, Kay sat down on a fallen tree to listen to it. This was the song:
‘When I was three, or two, or one,
I used to go to bed on Sun,
And wake on Mon.
And when I went to bed on Tues,
I woke on Wed, as true as trues,
I could not choose.
When Thurs, on Fri; when Fri, on Sat;
When Sat, on Sun; it all fell pat;
And that was that.
Now that I’m four, or five, or six,
It is another bag of tricks;
It is a mix.
For, when Tomorrow’s bedtime, say,
I never, never wake today,
But yesterday.
Yesterday, or the day before.
Or two months since, or three, or more,
In years, long o’er.
Sometimes, of course, I find this pleasant,
I never greatly loved the Present,
Except when eating roasted pheasant,
Or reading Greek:
But still sometimes I stand aghast,
Stuck in the week before the last,
With all the Present turned to Past,
And Now, last week.
And what is worse, I sometimes fear
It isn’t Now at all that’s here . . .
No, but Next Year;
Next Year, or worse, some year beyond
In future time unkenned, unconned,
As far away as Trebizond,
From Todi Weir.
And this I ask, and fain would know:
Will Now be in a day or so?
Is this-time-next-year Now or no?
Or did Now happen long ago,
Long, long ago?
And was Tomorrow Yesterday?
Or has it been and gone Today?
Will no one say?
I wish someone would say.’
The voice trailed off from the tune here, and the song ended. The singer muttered to himself two or three times, ‘Yes, indeed, truly, I wish someone would say. The fact of the matter is, they don’t know.’
Something in the voice made Kay feel sure that the singer would not harm him; he rose from his log and pushed through the scrub towards him. After a few yards, the jungle was less thick. He came through the jungle to a clearing, where he saw the mouth of a cave, a bubbling spring falling down some rocks near the cave-mouth into a rocky pool, and an old man sitting beside a fire, toasting two bananas stuck upon skewers, which he held, one in each hand.
Kay limped towards this old man, who looked at him and said, ‘Italiano?’ Kay shook his head.
The man said, ‘Français?’
Kay,
who was on surer ground here, said, ‘Non . . . English.’
The old man looked at him in astonishment and interest. ‘Come then,’ he said kindly; ‘sit, eat, drink;’ he took the toasted bananas from the skewers, put them on a broad leaf and offered them to Kay with a big shell full of water. Kay, who was really very, very hungry, ate the bananas with thankfulness. He looked at the man who had welcomed him. He was extraordinarily old, ragged-haired and tatter-bearded. He was dressed like a scarecrow in a most strange patchwork of palm leaves, pieces of old sail and what may once have been leather. Presently the man spoke in strange English:
‘You excuse me,’ the man said. ‘Make pardon. What year in Anno Domini is this?’
‘Nineteen-thirty-five,’ Kay said.
‘What you say? Nineteen – nineteen hundred?’
‘Yes,’ Kay said, opening his hand three times and then showing four fingers. ‘Nineteen-thirty-five.’
‘In the Future, or in the Present?’
‘In the Present,’ Kay said.
‘Oh,’ said the old man. ‘What a thing is Time. I have got lost in Time.’
‘Tell me, please, sir,’ Kay said, with interest, ‘are you Mr Arnold of Todi?’
‘I was once, young Englishman,’ he said, ‘but that was when I belonged to the year of Our Lord, which I went out of, by my own act. I would have none of it: I went back into the Past, and should therefore have a name from the Past, such as Alexander.’
‘Why did you go back into the Past?’ Kay asked.
‘Why?’ Arnold said. ‘Because of the dullness of the Time into which I was born.
‘But tell me; you, you say, are English. You will please excuse and pardon. The English I have never seen. It is true that we Italians conquered the land. We have a legend that the English are like rabbits, in that their front teeth stick out, but that they are unlike rabbits, in that they have tails. You are a strange people.’
The Box of Delights Page 19