The island

by Richard Whiteing

A bridegroom’s not a banner,

Though the banns he will put up before he’s wed.

I tremble: a little more, and the whole secret will be out, of the murk of mind in which so many of our brethren live, while Lord Tennyson is at the tailor’s about his ermine, and dilettantism attends its monthly meeting of the Browning Society, and leaves them in their pen. A little more, and they may suspect that beauty and taste are all grown for Mayfair by the Jews, just like the big pine apples, and that the poet himself is but one more market gardener for the rich. This lyre of the slums threatens to kill the whole pageant; these sewer gases seem to tarnish the gold lace on the Captain’s hat.

‘How nice it must be to have your English sense of humour,’ says Victoria, ‘and to be able to enjoy all these funny things!’

Saved! Once more they have taken the blame upon themselves.

We wander over the ship; admire the cutlasses in their racks; fit our heads in the muzzle of a big gun, gravely waiting our turn in file, under the orders of a corporal; eat cake in the Captain’s cabin, refuse wine; see everything, ask foolish questions everywhere. Never-to-be-forgotten day! A tar dances a hornpipe for us; three of our girls dance the rhythmic dance of Tahiti for the tars. The Captain asks questions about it, and takes notes, always in view of that report to the Lords of the Admiralty. Some of us are photographed—no, it is getting too maddeningly gay! The Ancient looks grave, and gives the signal for departure. The cutters are lowered; the little whaler takes its freight again; the boats dance us home in the dusk. It is not all over yet; they send up a rocket and a blue light, to say ‘Good-night,’ as we step ashore. Never-to-be-forgotten day!

And there are more such days to come—days when it is our turn, once more, to do the honours. Our girls take the distinguished visitors over the Island—to the cave of the Carvings, the cave of the Watcher, the Point—tending them carefully on ledge and summit and declivity, as my nurse tended me. They try to do without such guidance, and come to grief over it, figuring as meanly as the sinking Cæsar crying for help. The water sports are just as disheartening. What stoutest man among us will follow this sea-nymph, in her sea toilette, plunging into the breakers with a plank in her arms, diving and ducking till she comes to the far side of the hugest wave, then lying flat on the curling crest, and rolling in with it, till it breaks in thunder on the rocks? Always, after the explosion, you look for a mangled body, and you find only a laughing Venus, rising whole and perfect from the foam.

Nature herself smiles benignly on the festival, and contributes to it with great sunsets that touch the summits of grove and mountain with indescribable beauty, and harmonise into perfect peacefulness of association even the tumult of the breakers in their everlasting strife with the shore. There are fishings by torchlight, later on, in the intense shadow of the rocks; above us, the coruscating wall of rock towering to the moonlit heaven; below, the deep, deep water, all black and horrible beyond our tiny circle of flame. The cod flock to the light, like their betters, and get speared with a five-pronged fork for their pains. The girls, who are deftest at the exercise, look not unlike Britannia on the halfpenny, as they sit at ease with their forks, waiting their turn. Now, we paddle out of the shadow into the silvered sea, and so ashore to the green. Then there is another concert (ours this time), with simple songs of meeting and of parting, mostly of the schoolmaster’s writing, quired by the voices of virgins, and, with such rendering—the scene and the hour also taken into account—pure intuitions of the deeper significance of life. Impossible to doubt, after this, that the spirit is to be lord of the house; that living is the finest of the fine arts, or nothing; and that such is the message, delivered through Nature, of the Unknowable behind the Nature veil.

The Ancient is thoughtful all the while, thoughtfullest at the hour of the breaking-up of this great council of the soul, when the councillors wander away in pairs, and are lost in the radiant hazes of the night. It is the last council—to-morrow they go. Our Chief has led the way to his cottage, and has asked the Captain to step in on his way home. ‘I wish you gentlemen might never come here,’ he says pleasantly to his guest, ‘or, if you come, I wish you might never go away. It is a moment’s pastime for some of you, but, one way or other, it lasts some of us a lifetime. “Jack ashore”—I’ve heard of him from my father’s father; but then he goes ashore so often. Our girls never forget—that’s their nature. I’ve known ’em die, sir, of these visits of a Queen’s ship. They think it’s only a beginning—your youngsters think it too, Captain, while the moon shines—I know it’s an ending, for ever and ever. They’ll never meet again, sir, in this world—although, at this very minute, perhaps, they’re a-cutting love-knots all over the place to make believe they will.’

The incidental reference to the love-knots seemed to have set him on a new track of reflection. ‘It’s a pity to spoil the trees for nothing, all the same,’ he murmured, ‘and, if you’ll excuse the liberty, I think I’ll just have a look round.’