The Bishop told how they had been with nineteen other Bishops and their families upon a cruise in the steam-yacht Oyster, each Bishop engaging to preach on Sundays to the lay passengers, and how the propeller had been broken and they had been carried out of their course and tossed this way and that, and finally wrecked (he thought) with the loss of all hands, though the wireless operator had stuck to his post to the last and managed to get off the tidings of the calamity with latitude and longitude into the air.
It all conveyed very little to George, but it was an acute pleasure to him to hear their voices, and as they talked he looked from one to the other with a happy, friendly smile.
He was very proud to show his island to his visitors, but distressed at the havoc wrought by the storm, and he apologised for its unusual behaviour in moving.
“It has never done it before,” he explained, and was rather hurt because Arabella laughed.
He showed them where, as far as he could remember, his father and mother lay buried, and he took them to the top of the hill, and to amuse them caught a goat and a little kind of kangaroo there was in the forest, and a turtle. He displayed his hammock in the palm tree and showed how he curled up in it and wedged himself in so as not to fall out, and promised to prepare two other trees for them. They demurred. The Bishop asked if he might have the lair, and Arabella asked George to build her a house. He did not know what a house was, but looked it up in Tittiker and could find mention only of the House of Swells and the House of Talk. Arabella made a little house of sand; he caught the idea and spent the day weaving her a cabin of palm branches and mud and pebbles. He sang whole passages from Tittiker as he worked, and when it was finished he led Arabella to the cabin and she smiled so dazzlingly that he reeled, but quickly recovered himself, remembered as in a vision how it had been with his mother, flung his arms round her neck and kissed her, saying:
“I love you.”
“I think we had better look for my father,” said Arabella.
IV: THE SKITISH NAVY
For three nights did the Bishop sleep in the lair and Arabella in her cabin. A grey scrub grew on the Bishop’s chin, and during the daytime he instructed George solemnly and heavily as he delivered himself of his invariable confirmation address,—(on the second day he baptised George in the creek, and Arabella was delighted to be his god-mother)—with an eager pride as he told him of the Skitish Isles where his diocese and the seat of the Empire lay. The United Kingdom, he said, consisted of four countries, Fatland, Smugland, Bareland, and Snales, but only Fatland mattered, because the Fattish absorbed the best of the Smugs and the Barish and the Snelsh and found jobs for the cleverest of them in Bondon or Buntown, which was the greatest city in the world. He assured George that he might go down on his knees and thank God—now that he was baptised—for having been born a Fattishman, and that if they ever returned to Bondon he would receive a reward for having added to the Skitish Empire.
George knew all about the Emperor-King and his family, and liked the idea of giving his island as a present. He asked the Bishop if he thought the Emperor-King would give him Arabella.