It has never occurred to me till this moment, but certainly we two live here alone. There are a few other people on the Island, I believe, and I see them every day, but only as pictures. I talk to them too, but only as one talks to pictures, not much heeding the answer back.
I have seen the Ancient, of course, and have had many a talk with him. There are the evenings; and it is not Victoria all the time. I am one of the great family, and I come and go in that unnoticed way which is the true footing of friendship and love.
I am more particularly aware of the Ancient just now, because he is issuing a proclamation. There is to be a public holiday in celebration of the Queen’s birthday, and the proclamation is to regulate the order of proceedings. It is written on a slate, and hung outside his Excellency’s hut. He has been elaborating it for days, with my modest help, for the text, and Victoria’s, for the common sense. Whenever we are going to do anything foolish, she interrupts from the window, where she sews by the fading light. She has thus effectually vetoed the following projects—a review of the garrison; a banquet with speeches; and a levée at Government House.
It is all settled now. There is to be a Spelling Bee at the schoolhouse, followed by a lecture on the Antiquities of the Island, by the schoolmaster. The populace will then be released for Sports and Pastimes, with prizes ranging from a nosegay to a sack of potatoes. For the wind-up, there is to be another lecture, ‘to steady their minds,’ and I am to be the lecturer.
I fought hard against it; I honestly did, but I was overborne. ‘Something about England, sir; we are never tired of that.’ The voice from the window assented, and then I gave way.
It begins, it begins; never mind the preliminaries, the blessed day is here! Vive la joie! Three fowling-pieces fire a salute, the first thing in the morning, and proclaim our revel to the universe. The Union Jack is run up at the flag-staff. Our breakfasts are despatched in a few minutes, and in less than an hour we are amid the fierce excitements of the Bee.
The competition is open to all comers, but it is, in effect, confined to the younger folk. The scholars, in their best, sit at one end of the schoolroom, with the schoolmaster in front of them, to call time, and an admiring audience beyond. The severity of the struggle betokens much secret preparation. The first heat is the spelling of proper names from Scripture. ‘Achaichus’ is attacked with much spirit, and carried with a shout, but we have to mourn the loss of some of our number before the flag waves over the conquered word. ‘Achaicharus’ yields in time, though it leaves but few survivors of a forlorn hope. ‘Habaziniah’ covers the field with slain, yet still we win. ‘Geuel,’ owing to some invincible difficulty in the placing of the vowels, plunges many of the competitors into tears. ‘Gezerites’ restores us all to good humour with a sense of universal failure. We cannot manage the final ‘s,’ where it is emphatic—a disability common to all our Island folk.
I pass over the other heats, to come to that lecture on Antiquities. Like the memorable trial, it is a function held in the open air. We break up the Bee, and troop forth, the man of learning at our head, and examine a few huge flat stones, which we have seen a hundred times before. They are the gravestones of our pre-historic race. There is one in front of a cottage, whither it has been removed to make a flag-stone for the porch. Another lies, where the vanished men left it, in a field on the other side of the Ridge. We know what we should find beneath, if we took it up—a human skeleton sleeping the long sleep, with a pearl shell for a pillow. For centuries it has slept there; for centuries let it sleep on. We cross the Ridge again, to the Peak where I first met Victoria; and we are told to look for the traces of four rude stone figures that once stood there on a platform, as though to keep eternal watch upon the sea. Most of us have seen these traces from our earliest infancy, but we look for them again with great diligence, and communicate the result with the cries appropriate to sudden and unexpected discovery—all to please the schoolmaster. We ask how they came there? what they signify?—’tis a part of the game. We are told that they afford undoubted evidence of a remoter Island race. But how did the race reach the Island? The lecturer bids us guess. Is there one of us so ill-bred as to hazard the suggestion of a boat? Not one! We play out our honest piece honestly, to the last scene. We hold our tongues: our virtue, or our habit, or verbal veracity will not allow us to do more. A rosy brown infant, who cries ‘I know,’ is hustled to the rear by Victoria, and has his mouth stopped with an orange. For that matter, the whole comedy is devoid of guile.
The lecturer knows that we might all echo the cry of the infant; only he must have an opening for his line:—‘How about a raft from the Gambier Islands, three hundred miles away?’ ‘Ah, yes, a raft to be sure! But then, why should they come here?’ It is impossible to deny him that. ‘Suppose they came because they couldn’t help it,’ returns the man of lore. ‘That would certainly alter the case. But how?’ He needs no more. ‘In earlier times, especially, and even within living memory, it was the custom of the rude natives of the South Pacific to put their vanquished enemies on a raft, and commit them to the mercy of the waves.’ There is more of it, but this may serve.
‘Come, and I will show you something,’ says the good man; and we follow him again—this time down the steep path to the market grove, and up the other steep path to the settlement, and through the settlement, till we stop at his own cottage door, and come to a final halt in his bedroom, which is the museum of the Island. What matter, if we have already seen the solitary shelf that holds the entire national collection! What matter, if these spear heads and axe heads of stone are only less familiar to the hand than our own knives and forks! We are doing a fellow-creature a kindness—that is enough. And the way of doing it is so pleasant to ourselves! It is the ideal combination duty and delight. For, that walk to the museum was a walk through the fields of Paradise, with barelegged children for attendant angels, fleet as any shapes with wings. Behind these, the bigger lads and lasses, too old for play, too young for love, trod the rock, as though it were soft cloud, in the lightness of their perfect strength. And behind them, man and maiden, maiden and man, dragged the slow foot of the deepest spiritual joy. May the time be far distant when they, too, shall sleep on the pearl shell!
I have forgotten all about my lecture, until the schoolmaster reminds me of it, at the conclusion of his own. He uses the freedom of a brother artist to make a courteous inquiry as to my choice of a topic, and I am obliged to confess that no thought of preparation for the coming duty has once entered my mind. ‘We shall expect you to do your best for us,’ he says, with a smile. ‘I could not venture to do less,’ is my answer, ‘after what I have just heard.’ But this, like most smooth sayings, leaves us just where we were. I begin to cast about for a theme. ‘I have seen your festival; how would you like to hear of a festival on a larger scale, on the other side of the world? “A Roman Holiday”—what do you think of that?’
‘But you said you would tell us something about England.’
‘I mean a holiday in modern Rome; and modern Rome, you know, is on the banks of the Thames.’
‘That would do perfectly. Would you like to sit in my bedroom, and collect your thoughts?’
‘He will collect nothing there, but stones and bones,’ says Victoria, who has lingered with us. ‘He wants watching, if you are to get any work out of him. Nobody can manage him, but me. Come, sir, come along!’
One may be in leading like a bear, or like a man of genius; and I hope I am not a bear. My leader makes straight for the Peak, by the grove sacred to her tenderest thoughts. She establishes me on the ruins of the platform, solitary now, for it will not be the scene of a lecture for another year. As she leaves me, I receive the order to remain perfectly still, in profitable meditation, until her return. I promise, and I perform. I throw myself down on my back, watch the floating billions of light globules that seem to make the substance of the air, and wonder if each of them, all proportions preserved, holds a divine Victoria, and a contemplative Me. What a conception of the infinite in happiness, if it could be so! Then, anon, a light footstep warns me that she is here again; and I leave all speculation for the sweet and sufficient certainty that the larger globule holds us two. She has a basket of fruit in her hand; but is it Flora or is it Minerva? The emblems are confusing, for a pencil and a little note-book lie on the top of the store. The bananas and the guavas are to make a lunch for the lonely thinker; the pencil and the paper are to preserve his precious thoughts for the lecture, ere they fly away. I stretch out an eager hand for the eatables, but she offers me the pencil first.
‘Put down what you have been thinking about while I was away.’
How doubly delicious it would be if there were but a shade of coquetry in it; but there is not—not the shadow of a shade.
‘I have been thinking about the Infinite.’
‘What a waste of time! I thought it was to be about Roman Holidays.’
‘It! What? Oh, the lecture. Yes.’
‘Do you mean to say you have not been—oh, how lazy you are!’
‘And how silly, you, my Victoria! but I like you best that way.’
‘What have I to do with it?’
‘So much that, without you, the whole world——’
‘Will you eat a banana?’
‘I do not mind, if you will eat one too.’
‘I have no appetite.’
‘Nor I.’
‘You seemed quite hungry just now.’
‘So I was.’
She was kneeling with the basket before her, and she began to straighten her shape, always, with her, a sign of a certain concentration of feeling. But she still retained her posture, and she looked like a fragment of a grand statue, broken short off at the hem of the robe.
‘Don’t you think you are a little uncertain in your sayings and doings, sometimes? If you are hungry, why won’t you eat?’
‘It is a hunger strike.’
‘What is that?’
‘An invention of the Siberian captives. When they are very sick of everything, they strike against their dinners, and die.’
‘You need not starve yourself to get anything in our gift,’ she said, and her glance intensified the grave beauty of her face.
It was too delicious; who could have helped going on?
‘Yes, I know; I have everything, and still I want one thing more.’
‘Oh, now I understand,’ she said, rising to her full height, and making a great litter of fruit and writing materials, as she overturned the basket. ‘Oh, I understand perfectly; I know exactly what you want to say. You need not go on with your half meanings, in that sly way. You said it once before, and you promised you would never say it again.’
Silly Victoria, she has spread all the cards on the table, and killed the game! One short half-hour’s lesson in a London boudoir, for that matter, in a London schoolroom, would have taught her how to play. This comes of being brought up to tell the truth like a Quaker, by an Ancient in a savage isle.
‘All the same, Victoria, I won’t eat my lunch.’
‘Dear friend, dear, dear friend, if I might only say to you all I want to say! But why do you trouble me so, why do you try to make me do wrong?’
It was my turn to jump up now, and to take her hand, which she did not refuse.
‘Victoria, who can contend against you? You play by your own rules, and mine seems the sharper’s game. Come, the hunger strike is over; hand up the fruit.’
Victoria peeled the bananas, and I ate them. This arrangement was nearly as good as the best. It was glorious sunshine again in her face, as in the sky above. ‘Not more than others I deserve, yet God hath given me more,’ was my humble grace.
By-and-by, but all too soon, I was left to my reflections once more. Victoria withdrew, on the understanding that I should work at my lecture during her absence. I watched her to the foot of the slope, fixing myself in an attitude of meditation when she turned to watch me. I saw her skirmishing with a band of infant wanderers who wanted to climb to my study, and heading them off, with much ingenuity, into an orchard beyond the Ridge.
I really tried to work, but it was impossible. The sounds and sights of the fête came up to me, on my lofty post of observation, from all the peopled region of the Isle, and from the more distant summits on the other side, that rose like towers from the wall of rock. Distance subdued every laugh and shout, every cry of bird or beast, into perfect harmony with the rhythmic beat of the waves; and the sounds seemed but varied modes of musical silence. There was the same harmony in the tints, seen through the wide stretches of summer mist. It was sometimes almost impossible to say where the flowers ended, and the men and women began. You might tell it only by the motion of the figures darting in and out of the patches of blossom, as pursuers and pursued. The pairs that sauntered soon became absolutely one with the landscape, as they moved further from the point of view. It was exquisite to the sense and to the soul, as an image of the unity of nature. Sky and earth and sea, man and woman, flower and tree, seemed but so many forms and manifestations of one universal element of beauty, each separate perception of the beholder realising them in a uniform impression, in its own way. I was busy with this fancy, face downwards in the grass, and trying to work it out in consultation with a wild-flower, when Victoria surprised me again. If she had sought my life, it would have been hers, for she was within a yard of me, before I knew that she was there.
‘Princess, hear my confession before you begin to frown. I have done nothing; nothing—nothing done! Now I will begin, just whenever you like. Only I cannot work here; I must go somewhere else.’
‘Home to your own room?’
‘Stuffy!’
‘Where then?’ Tapping the turf carpet with her naked foot.
‘I know; only I mustn’t say.’
‘Just say it out.’
‘To the Cave; the Cave of the Great Scrape, where we went before.’
‘Madness! You’ll just be killed, if you try it.’
‘Was I killed the first time?’
‘I helped you.’
‘I want you to help me again.’
‘I wonder why I like you at all, and I do like you so much.’ Then, after a pause, ‘If God meant to let you be killed, He would never make me help to do it. Come along.’
This feat of engineering having been once described, the courteous reader may wish to be spared the repetition of its details. It is enough to say that I was soon walking along the narrow ridge, with my eyes closed, by order, and with my hands on the shoulders of Victoria, who led the way. Just before the eyes closed, they caught one look of tenderest concern in hers that was a thing to remember for a lifetime. When I was allowed to open them again, we were both in the Cave. Victoria left, the moment she saw me safe, promising to come back in an hour, and fetch me out.