CHAPTER XIV—DR. ULSWATER'S NARRATIVE CONTINUES: THE ISLAND OF LUA
South Pacific, January.
MRS. ULSWATER has collected more orphans.
There are, without doubt, many methods of selecting the beneficiaries of a mission, asylum, home for curables or incurables, or similar foundation. Mrs. Ulswater's favourite method seems to be what one of the new orphans calls “a coopdeetat,” but she denies any such preference. She says “It happens so.” That may be, and yet I have a feeling—a marital weakness perhaps—that she has a sort of pull, a secret understanding, so to speak, with circumstances. With the bait foresight, and the rod discretion, she catches the trout accident.
Mrs. Ulswater, who first established over me a kind of Monroe Doctrine, forbidding to other powers the annexation of any territorial portion of me, followed it up by a species of suzerainty controlling foreign relations; which having developed into something resembling the German Empire,—that is, nominally an alliance, practically a solid entity of control,—therein I rest, on the whole, patriotic and pleased.
A month ago my family consisted of Mrs. Ulswater, Norah the maid, Susannah the orphan, Georgiana the hen,—both from the island of Clementina,—and Ram Nad, a Cingalese pundit and fakeer, whom Mrs. Ulswater had collected cavalierly—I admit, cavalierly,—who, after the learning of his race, practised medicine, hypnotism, and sleight of hand; whose medical ideas were ridiculous, his magic good, his status as an orphan an acceptable probability; whose chief property was his wicker basket, shaped like a truncated cone, with a flat cover on top, his vade-mecum, his universal container.
All things he put into it, and there they disappeared. Many things he took out of it. He was a bully magician, and looked something like a prophet and something like a lamb.
Mrs. Ulswater was originally interested in foreign missions. Out of this interest she developed a mission of her own. Her purpose was to employ the Violetta as a migratory orphan asylum, or mobile base of operations, from which to scatter regenerative ideas; to sail about picking up casual orphans perhaps, introducing neatness, good habits, and practical housekeeping to the Pacific Ocean, rearranging haply its populations and politics; a sort of slumming on the high seas, an oceanic College Settlement. A stupendous idea! The Pacific Ocean was much in need of Mrs. Ulswater. It is a loose, untidy ocean, a “Bohemian” ocean with its far scattered islands, lunging seas, and idle solitudes.
“Brooms,” Mrs. Ulswater said, speaking of the islanders, “brooms, soap, and taking pains, are what they need.”
An ominous phrase, “taking pains”! Is it a fact that not enough pains are thrust upon us in the normal course of events, that we must acquire “pains”?
I stumped Mrs. Ulswater with that question. Hadn't mankind enough pains without taking pains? She said:
“The Kanakas haven't,” and then reflected. “People,” she said, “never got civilised by having a good time.”
I fear that proposition is sound.