CHAPTER XVII
Robinson Crusoe had had, as yet, little time to do more than leave his footprints on the stretch of white sand sliding into the summer seas of Car Nicobar, and the tide washed those out very quickly. Wilder, lovelier, more brilliant were these islands than the Andamans, while the Andamanese and the Nicobarese proved to be separate races indeed, having no connection with one another.
Their very huts and canoes were secular in design. The Nicobarese names, marking the different islands on the map, fascinated Ferlie. Chowra, Teressa, Bompoka, Trinkat and Katehal of the Central Group, and Great and Little Nicobar, with their satellites, Kondul and Pulo Milo in the south, varied as to dialect in a language so primitive that, as the Reverend Gabriel Jellybrand mournfully complained, there seemed no words to express either "gratitude" or "forgiveness." Which abstract nouns once eliminated from the Christian religion, his sermons became uphill work.
For some years he had toiled in seclusion among this semi-civilized yellowish flock, of whom it was said that, until Christianity came to their territory, never one had been known to steal or lie.
Originally acknowledged to be of Indo-Chinese extraction, they were Malayan-Mongolian in type; often above average height, well-made, simple, lazy and cowardly, but very good-natured and polite to strangers.
This, then, was the people among whom Ferlie and Cyprian came, with their respective sons, to reflect upon the sequel to Eden's story and decide what parts they would play in it themselves.
Gabriel Jellybrand accepted their arrival as a direct answer to prayer, for he had been sick of a fever lately and very lonely. His weak green eyes, rounded like marbles behind an enormous pair of sun-glasses, protruded so unusually that Ferlie expected them to pop out and hit her when she made clear her ambition to choose the quietest corner of the quietest island and erect a row of Nicobarese huts.
The padre invariably fought a losing battle with the letter "w."
"But there is no need to do that," he persisted. "The little bungalow w-which the forest officer uses on inspection is standing empty. There w-won't be enough beds, but if you say you've brought hammocks—a most original idea!"
He led the way to the Settlement, clad in a cotton cassock, tied round with a black cord which swung out and scourged anybody who ventured too near him when he held up the garment to leap from rock to rock, revealing an expanse of white cotton sock below a short tussore trouser-leg.
From time to time he would lose his topee, and then a faithful bodyguard of Baptismal Candidates, palpably prepared for total immersion at any moment, would hasten to hand him a large khaki umbrella, lined with green, which they took it by turns to carry again after the topee had been recovered from the puddle or overhanging branch which had claimed it.
"You might have warned us that he was a Comic Turn," Cyprian told Haddock reproachfully.
"Describe him to me again at our next meeting," said the Colonel, for whom Jellybrand betrayed a pathetically guileless admiration.
"Uncle Ricky has always had a number of the queerest friends," Ferlie whispered. "Generally they are lame dogs who would have perished in some one of the world's ditches but for him. This one, at any rate, seems too nearly an imbecile to take any interest in the obstruse riddles of our existence."
The jungle road, strewn with bamboo leaves, twisted them out on to a cleared space among the coco-nut trees, where a tiny church, which would have lost itself in an ordinary-sized drawing-room, stood on stilts, as indeed, did everything in the form of a building, so that, to reach the platforms on which they were built, it was necessary to run up a short step-ladder.
The interior of the church was fraught with the pathos of primitive endeavour. There was a crucifix, smothered in fading hibiscus heads; a great many common candles, some of which were, nakedly, two shortened corpses stuck one on top of the other to attain the regulation length; a canopy of bamboo and coloured paper, enshrining a Madonna with a broken nose imperfectly mended by means of hot wax, which gave her a somewhat rakish appearance; the crudest of moral-enforcing missionary prints; a framed St. Paul (after whom the building was named) so literally "in the pink" as to impress one instantaneously with his possible value in a football scrum, and—Oh, lift up your heads!—a small shiny harmonium on which the little padre had, in the course of a year, just learnt to accompany his flock with one finger, though he had not yet given up hope of bringing the other nine into requisition somewhen. For the rest, they relied upon a catechist with a concertina, who knew seven hymns which he performed in strict rotation.
"But now that you have come..." said Jellybrand, eyeing Ferlie with eager expectancy. And she had not the heart to erect a barrier of doctrinal differences, for her protection, between his hungry enthusiasm and the harmonium stool.
"I see you have started a shop," said Colonel Maddock emerging from a thatched fastness, wherein lay heaped up some yards of calico, red flannel, a few tin pots and pans, coloured prints, packets of tea, pounds of sugar and several bright glass necklaces.
"Oh, dear me, yes. W-would you believe it? Mr. Pell, here—w-where are you, Mr. Pell?—a most unselfish person, w-who always acts on the excellent principle that it is more blessed to give than to receive, w-was left in charge of the shop w-when I w-was over at Nankauri, visiting. And—w-would you believe it?—he gave every single thing away w-without taking any coco-nuts in payment! Of course, the people are ready now to let the Government start any number of shops...."
Mr. Pell, hitching up the nether garments which were the outward and visible sign of his inward state of grace, beamed urbanely upon the newcomers.
"This," said Jellybrand, indicating a gentleman with a string of cowrie shells about his middle and a battered English straw upon his head, "is Friend-of-England, the chief of the village. He is not yet a member of my little community though he w-wishes us w-well, I am sure.
"A long w-while ago, he had forty devils extracted from him by the menluana, or w-witch doctors, and it is hardly surprising that, under their conscientious exorcism, he nearly died. All the men in the village sat round him in a circle and on anyone's perceiving a devil he pounced on it, w-wrapped it in a leaf, and put it in the corner of the house.
"Every year, the Chief Commissioner, w-when he inspects us from Port Blair, presents him w-with a suit of clothes in virtue of his position; but he reserves them for festivals and always puts them away w-when it rains.
"The two beside him are Mr. Corney Grain and Mr. Don Juan. The traders coming to the islands give them those names in fun, but I hope to baptize them soon and then they w-will be Peter and Paul—much more suitable."
Ferlie wondered why.
A man with enormous calves supporting a very small body approached the speaker confidentially and, presently, Jellybrand interpreted.
"This is James Snook. He and Friend-of-England have both, as you see, got elephantiasis. A lot of them suffer from it—most unfortunate. He w-wishes to show you his new house."
Encouraged to proceed, James waved the party towards a thatched beehive supported on four rickety poles, seeming not to possess, at first sight, either door or window. However, a ladder discovered underneath the contraption vanished into a yawning hole, and Cyprian and Ferlie braved this first, to fall gasping on to a palm-plaited floor which bounded like a spring mattress beneath them. They could not stand upright and there was a thick warmth of atmosphere and almost total darkness until Mr. Snook removed a loose lump of thatch from the wall.
In one corner of the room lay his cooking utensils opposite the rag bundle on which he slept nightly, after blocking out all oxygen.
The walls were covered with works of art cut from any ancient illustrated paper which had happened to fall into his hands from the padre's stock. They were hung, for the most part, upside down, and thus Pavlova waved mocking legs at a Mission print of Christ crucified, into the Figure of which the enlightened James had brilliantly bethought himself to hammer real nails.
Above, glared a garish painting on talc of a Hindu deity with six arms.
Truly, Gabriel Jellybrand stood in need of that optimism which accompanies the faith of all Heaven's "little children."
* * * * * *
The steam-yacht pushed off again with the evening tide, leaving Cyprian and Ferlie wandering back from the shore, the coco-nut trees chattering above their heads in the falling breeze. Occasionally she picked up Thu Daw whose legs were not, as yet, quite to be trusted, and would carry him away to the left or to the right, down slight inclines into some cave of dark foliage.
"And is this Heaven?" asked John, following out some private train of thought connected with Jellybrand and the concertina, the owner of which could be heard practising in the distance.
"'Over the fields of glory,' you know, Mother, and 'over the jasper sea'!"
"Not that Heaven, yet," said Ferlie. "This is more like the Garden of Paradise in your Hans Andersen."
"I sometimes wish," said Cyprian, "that you and John were not so inordinately well read."
"Anyway," finished John, after a thoughtful pause, "will I be let sleep in one of them kennels to-night?"
"There! He has said it." Cyprian rounded on Ferlie. "I trust, Ferlie, you are going to permit us the unromantic shelter of the forest bungalow, but I have not really any hope. Of course, if John honestly finds it coincides with his conception of the Simple Life to share the couch of James Snook—but I noticed several holes in the roof of the bungalow which should give primitive colour to the place for our satisfaction and more holes in the floor, which intuition tells me represent the overcrowded tenement lodgings of considerable families of snakes and rats."
"Firstly," said Ferlie, "you are sleeping out of doors. We will sling our hammocks between trees, under the mosquito nets. Secondly, John, you are not so much as to enter a kennel without leave. I don't know whether that elephantiasis is catching. Thirdly, an educated man's intuition should assure him that snakes and rats seldom dwell together in sunny amity."
"Scorpions, then," insisted Cyprian gloomily.
"Fourthly, a perforated roof cannot affect us until the Rains, and there will be ample time before they break, should we still be here, for you to have constructed us a model mansion with hot and cold water laid on and clematis and cabbages before and behind respectively.... Do I hear the sweet chiming of the village bells?"
"You do," replied Cyprian. "And, if I mistake not, shortly they will be drowned by the pious fervour of the village choir."
When they emerged at the clearing the bell was, indeed, ringing to Evensong.
Jellybrand had added a voluminous surplice and a limp stole to his attire, but had raptly removed his white canvas shoes instead of his topee, in absent-minded imitation of his parishioners.
A procession was forming outside the church led by Mr. Pell in the capacity of cross-bearer; in fact, it was Mr. Pell's top-hat that caused the padre to recollect that he was being reverent the wrong end for the colour of his skin, before the red-breeched row of boys proceeded to "survey the wondrous cross" in the highest key of which the concertina was capable.
The Unsaved of the village were cutting bamboo decorations, in the background, for a moonlight festival about to be held with the object of securing a mate for a lonely demon, who had been bringing bad luck to the community and was expected to depart in peace as soon as a she-demon could be found to share his flitting.
Ferlie and Cyprian stood some way apart from the two groups of worshippers while the crimson sunlight streamed across the stems of the coco-nut palms, and stained the uplifted cross as its followers passed, two by two, into the toy church and the last notes of the hymn thinned into silence.
The words were dragged out painfully by the child-voices singing in a strange tongue of a strange story, brought to them by strangers from another land.
"His dying crimson like a robe,
Spread o'er His Body on the Tree;
Then am I dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me."
Ferlie left Cyprian among the lengthening shadows and, herself, moved slowly across the sunlit space, and so up the wooden steps, into the tiny forlorn mansion of God.
* * * * * *
By the time they had decided to settle the bungalow as their headquarters, and making expeditions in the motor-boat to the neighbouring islands whenever they desired complete isolation, Cyprian, whose instincts for research had awakened with the cessation of his ordinary work, brought Ferlie an oddly carved board covered with paintings and punctured sketches.
"The padre calls these Henta. They are samples of the form in which the Nicobarese preserve their legends, and I ask you to look at the tangled thread of Christianity running through the whole. Jellybrand has been explaining. The first man offended the Chief of the Spirits at the instigation of the first woman. The Spirit's name, Deuse, savours of the mission teaching by your Church. Here, you see Deuse, in arresting négligé, surrounded by his cooking-pots, and below him huts, trees, birds and dancing figures. Also mermaids and mermen, because dugongs and whales are indigenous to these waters. The Henta are made to please the iwi-ka, or good spirits, and to alarm iwi-pot or demons."
"You are an inquisitive soul, Cyprian. Are you hitting at the Missions, or what?"
"No. Except that, but for them, in this Eden we should have been able to escape the story of the Fall. Apart from that teaching, the people believe their origin dates from the time a shipwrecked sailor was cast up on these shores with a pet dog. By her he had a son whom she concealed in her leaf petticoat, or ngong, and this son, on attaining years of discretion, slew his father and married his mother to continue the race.
"Therefore, the young men wear a bow of coco-nut leaves on their foreheads, representing the ears of the dog-ancestor, and all dogs are well treated in her honour."
"And poor little Jellybrand is trying to replace their allegories with ours? The one they will really appreciate will be Jonah and the whale."
"The most ridiculous part of it all to me is the way that each race, temporarily in power here, has striven to produce a different form of Christianity. Think of the waste labour since 1756, after the Danish Mission departed and was followed by the Dutch. When the Dutch attempt at colonization failed, the Jesuits and Moravians were inspired to try their luck till the British took over with Danish consent in order to try and stop the piracy then rife in these waters. But I don't understand Jelly's line, Ferlie. He is not a Roman."
"In England he would belong to what was once known as the High Church Party, but now has developed into Anglo-Catholicism. I can easily imagine that his successor will probably have ultra-Protestant and anti-Catholic notions and solemnly smash the pink St. Paul and the battered Madonna which to-day are the pride of the converts."
"I think he is an amazing specimen," said Cyprian.
"I think he is an amazing duck.... And doesn't he just remind me of a white rat!"
"Mother," and John broke in upon Cyprian's amusement, "I've found a house and they say the man in it is going to have a baby. Come and see how he does it."
Ferlie looked at him.
"The daily round and common task will furnish all you need to ask here, I can foresee, my son," she told him.
"Dare we investigate?" asked Cyprian, when he had recovered his gravity. "He may have discovered something interesting in the way of a rite."
He had. The hut he referred to was, to the islanders, tabu, or forbidden, since an unfortunate husband, about to become a father, was imprisoned within it beside his wife, sharing her troubles by sympathetic imitation. He was deprived of the luxury of a bath and betel-chewing and, for some while before, he had not been allowed to bind any objects together nor to attend feasts. Moreover, a whole month must elapse, after the child's birth, before he would be permitted to escape.
Friend-of-England, whom they chanced upon in the vicinity, described the custom in much-broken English, and Ferlie managed to keep a straight face while Cyprian examined the texture of coco-nut leaves and wished, for the time being, that he had never been born at all, or, at any rate, that nobody knew how.
"Ought John to discover these things?" he asked Ferlie later; "isn't it spoiling his innocence rather young?"
She laughed at him. "I should be sorry to think that you had lost yours in learning of them," she said. "Nature did not fall with the Fall. But so long as Mankind is content to lie supine, including all Nature in his own disgrace, so long will the serpent insinuate horror into the man-made Eden."
"I suppose, in due course, you will interpret; but sometimes I do not know whether to regard you as a totally unnatural product of Super-civilization or merely a successful example of the triumph of mind over matter."
He did not know, either, how to read the look she gave him.
"In a little while, my dear," she said, "you will be able to decide."
* * * * * *
The days fled by; long days of lethargic rest. The children had grown popular with the Mission, and one lady member in particular had attached herself to them as a kind of voluntary nurse. This left the two Explorers time for longer expeditions round the islands than they could have taken with John and Thu Daw.
One day they lost themselves in a more impenetrable part of the forest, where ten yards of experimenting with paths was sufficient to shut out the sky and enclose inexperienced travellers in a leafy tomb. On escaping from it, stained and breathless, just as they were beginning to think they had better make their peace with the invisible heavens, preparatory to holding it for ever, they nearly fell over the bank of an unexpected river.
Ferlie contemplated it awhile in silence and then turned deliberately back a little way into the jungle.
"You can have that palm tree all to yourself," she told Cyprian.
But he was still attitudinizing, incomprehensive, on the bank of the river when she returned in a somewhat scantily improvised bathing dress.
"Ferlie!"
"Aren't you ready?"
The quiver of amusement in the challenge did it. He flung back his head and laughed outright.
"Why not? But, oh, Ferlie, you are incorrigible!"
She was trailing her feet in the water when he joined her, forgetful of all problems not directly connected with the cool green water.
"I shall dive off and swim to that log," pointing to one barely visible near the opposite bank. "From there I shall encourage your amateur efforts and proffer suitable advice."
Said Ferlie: "I shall be sitting on the most comfortable end of the log long before your slow-coach head has emerged from the weedy depths to be mistaken for a floating coco-nut by some water-fowl in search of a raft."
But as she slipped into the water, the log on which they anticipated basking rolled over without rhyme or reason into deep water. It splashed lazily upstream breaking the green jade surface into a million ripples before, having yawned in their faces with thoughtful deliberation, it sank gracefully out of sight.
After an instant's smitten silence they collapsed backwards on the soft mud above the bank, sobbing with relieved merriment.
"Which is the most comfortable end of him?" gasped Cyprian.
Cheated of their swim, they threw themselves on to higher ground and stretched full length along the warm grass.
She was wet to her arm-pits and Digby Maur might have long sought a more suitable subject for a River Nat.
The sense of comfort and physical well-being, as he lay sunning himself, occupied Cyprian too completely for his attention to rivet itself at once upon the near intimacy of her, outlined on an emerald shield, defenceless in her slim fairness against his eyes.
Idly tossing twigs into the stream, one missed its mark and alighted on her bare shoulder.
She smiled in absent acknowledgment, but her gaze remained fixed upon the shifting reflections ahead.
He studied her then, with sleepy interest and, by the subconscious link between them, was aware that she knew his attitude of mind to be both puzzled and interrogative. He gathered that something was busily revolving in her brain which she would not yet disclose.
And as the leaves above them made changing patterns upon his own rapidly browning limbs, he forgot the scantiness of his attire and this outright defiance of all safeguarding law which stood between him and the whip of that Master Force from whose dominion she had despairingly wondered whether Mankind would ever be free.
Once-known sentences in Greek intruded, word by word, upon his brain, till the whole resolved itself into a fragment from Plato's immortal Republic preserved fresh, since, on the earlier waxen tablets of the mind, impressions remain cut singly and deep, though neglected for long periods in the crowded years which follow:
He saw himself again, an angular youth still in the magic teens, wrestling studiously with the paragraph; his sympathies completely with Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and his subsequent bull-like attack upon Polemarchus and Socrates, when, "playing the fool together in mutual complaisance," they had expanded the drivellings of old Cephalus concerning the abatement of his appetites into an interminable and exceedingly toilsome-to-translate discussion on the nature of Justice.
Words, words, words, thought Cyprian, now as then. The ancient writers of all nations might philosophize and analyse and theorize through pages of intellectual war, but still Justice struggled to dwell upon this globe, and still the Frantic Master scourged men on to deeds which drove her out. With what object? The perpetual propagation of a mortal race, apparently doomed (while the chemical atoms of mud and water to which they clung, held together) to blind burrowings for some Philosopher's Stone upon which might be engraved the key to their existence.
Always that awareness, stifling their half-developed senses, of bodily decay and rotting death, mental and physical, till the spirit cried out like a terrified child in the imprisonment of a gradually enveloping Darkness.
Was it wonderful if the mind strove to drug realization of the conditions under which it existed by resorting to fruitless accumulation of metal and mummified matter, materially precious only because so far as Man knew, there was not enough of it to go round? Was it wonderful if, wearying of this empty labour, he passed from the opium dreams of wealth to the cocaine illusions of power over his fellows, or acted yet another part, inebriate with meditation upon a solitary mountain top, or grovelled in a secret cave, denying access to any who might wish to awaken him from dreams to cold reality once more?
Was not the ascetic, hugging and hoarding his visions, as useless a product as the miser hugging and hoarding his gold?—and the mystic, luxuriating in a religious mirage, as much a glutton for prayer as his Epicurean neighbour might prove himself a glutton for pleasure?
What did he, himself, desire of the gods that be, asked Cyprian. Ferlie? And of Ferlie, what? Her white limbs entwined in his, ever and anon, throughout the years, in the thirsting hope that much yielding to a fitful and passing emotion would so unite him with her Being that nothing could separate them again?...
"For sudden ... a peace out of pain...
Then a light, then thy breast,
Oh, thou, soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!"
Not this way lay the road to that satisfied unity. And she knew it. God, yes! How terribly well she must know it! He, in Thu Daw, she, in John, had yielded to the Earth that heritage it demanded of all living creatures which crawled upon its face. They had added their quota to Creation, lest Life perish here before its incomprehensible purpose should have been fulfilled.
Was another life required of them to perfect the love they bore one another? All life is by no means conceived in love. Did not that which was weigh more precious in the scales of Eternity than any conceived in duty to the natural law of a source called "God"? And yet ... out here, where one could almost listen to the pulses of Nature beating, unregulated and unquickened by the fevers which dull the senses of Earth's normal sons and daughters, how had these barriers melted which the crowded places interposed between his Self and Hers? What law but the natural one was good in the eyes of Nature's Creator?
And Nature bade him reach out to her his starving arms. He stirred among the shrivelling strands of fibre, strewing the turf, and sat up, clasping his hands about his knees.
Still she did not look at him, and savagely he tore in imagination at the filmy veil barring him out of her dreams.
But she spoke, dispassionately as an oracle, from her strongly splendid aloofness.
"Think it out a little further, Cyprian, before you decide."
He felt the Master's lash about his body; and was stung by it to sharpened understanding.
Deliberately and fearlessly, Ferlie was challenging his faith. By it she would rise or fall.
If it drove him along that path of desire which led but to the grave, she would follow because her own will was pledged to his, "through all the beauty and all the loving of the eternal years...." She did not believe that this momentary impulse was grounded in his faith.
He saw, as in a drowning panorama, all the forms of all the acknowledged great lovers who had staked their gift of life upon Desire and, with the fading of that frail rainbow thing, had discovered themselves upon the edge of the burnt-out desert, Age, beyond which flowed only the bitterly black waters of Death. With the inexorable tread of the years Ferlie and he would be dying slowly before one another's watching eyes. The end must come in sweating battle with the impotency of those same bodies, glowing now in the deceiving radiance of a sun which would, some day, itself be darkened. Of what avail then the agonizing vows, sealed lip to lip in the sheltering purple shadows of dead nights whose beauty was now a scorching memory to contrast with the starless darkness of the opening tomb? (Ferlie had always been able to visualize that tomb.) There must be some other fulfilment for the love which has kept watch o'er its immortality. Some other road than this, along which the faithless "Little Ones" had stumbled with bleeding feet down the revealing arches of the years.... One was risking all for a shadow.... But as one saw the shadow it was that of a very mighty reality.... Behind every shadow there must be a substance. Ferlie had decided that herself ... already. In this, it was, fairly, hers to lead.
"Lead on," echoed Cyprian aloud of his heart, remembering when she had used the selfsame words to him.
She put out, to touch his, a hand still cool and damp with undried crystals of moisture.
"It is extraordinary to remember," she said, "that the crocodile had probably never set eyes on a human being before. There is, practically, no animal life in these forests, so Jelly told me, except pigs and birds. In the interior there are rumours of bison and, of course, the hamadryad we have always with us."
"Yes, your Garden of Paradise is certainly not serpentless," Cyprian answered, a note of amusement now in his voice.
She got up and shook the clinging twigs from her hair.
"I am dry. I must go and dress. The one thing which calms my fear of serpents is a discovery that if you keep still when they are about, and leave them alone, they invariably leave you alone."