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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75530 ***





  A HIGH WIND
  IN
  JAMAICA




       By Richard Hughes

        _Short Stories_

       A MOMENT OF TIME

           _Poems_

       CONFESSIO JUVENIS

           _Drama_

       PLAYS: IN ONE VOL.
   _Also available separately_

       Chatto & Windus

               *

  _Mr. Hughes has also edited a
  selection of Skelton’s Poems,
  published by Wm. Heinemann Ltd._




  A HIGH WIND
  IN JAMAICA

  RICHARD HUGHES

  1929

  CHATTO & WINDUS
  LONDON




  Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. Constable Ltd.
  at the University Press, Edinburgh

  Third Impression

  All rights reserved

  Copyright in the U.S.A. by Richard Hughes, 1929,
  under the title of ‘The Innocent Voyage.’




A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA




_Chapter 1_


One of the fruits of Emancipation in the West Indian islands is
the number of the ruins, either attached to the houses that remain
or within a stone’s throw of them: ruined slaves’ quarters, ruined
sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses; often ruined mansions
that were too expensive to maintain. Earthquake, fire, rain, and
deadlier vegetation, did their work quickly.

One scene is very clear in my mind, in Jamaica. There was a vast
stone-built house called Derby Hill (where the Parkers lived). It had
been the centre of a very prosperous plantation. With Emancipation,
like many others, that went _bung_. The sugar buildings fell down.
Bush smothered the cane and guinea-grass. The field negroes left
their cottages in a body, to be somewhere less disturbed by even the
possibility of work. Then the house negroes’ quarters burned down,
and the three remaining faithful servants occupied the mansion. The
two heiresses of all this, the Miss Parkers, grew old; and were by
education incapable. And the scene is this: coming to Derby Hill on
some business or other, and wading waist-deep in bushes up to the front
door, now lashed permanently open by a rank plant. The jalousies of
the house had been all torn down, and then supplanted as darkeners,
by powerful vines: and out of this crumbling half-vegetable gloom
an old negress peered, wrapped in filthy brocade. The two old Miss
Parkers lived in bed, for the negroes had taken away all their clothes:
they were nearly starved. Drinking water was brought in two cracked
Worcester cups and three coconut shells on a silver salver. Presently
one of the heiresses persuaded her tyrants to lend her an old print
dress, and came and pottered about in the mess half-heartedly: tried to
wipe the old blood and feathers of slaughtered chickens from a gilt and
marble table: tried to talk sensibly: tried to wind an ormolu clock:
and then gave it up and mooned away back to bed. Not long after this,
I believe, they were both starved altogether to death. Or, if that
were hardly possible in so prolific a country, perhaps given ground
glass--rumour varied. At any rate, they died.

That is the sort of scene which makes a deep impression on the mind;
far deeper than the ordinary, less romantic, everyday thing which shows
the real state of an island in the statistical sense. Of course, even
in the transition period one only found melodrama like this in rare
patches. More truly typical was Ferndale, for instance, an estate about
fifteen miles away from Derby Hill. Only the overseer’s house here
remained: the Big House had altogether collapsed and been smothered
over. It consisted of a ground floor of stone, given over to goats and
the children, and a first floor of wood, the inhabited part, reached
from outside by a double flight of wooden steps. When the earthquakes
came the upper part only slid about a little, and could be jacked back
into position with big levers. The roof was of shingles: after very dry
weather it leaked like a sieve, and the first few days of the rainy
season would be spent in a perpetual general-post of beds and other
furniture to escape the drips, until the wood swelled.

The people who lived there at the time I have in mind were the
Bas-Thorntons: not natives of the Island, ‘Creoles,’ but a family from
England. Mr. Bas-Thornton had a business of some kind in St. Anne’s,
and used to ride there every day on a mule. He had such long legs that
his stunted mount made him look rather ridiculous: and being quite
as temperamental as a mule himself, a quarrel between the two was
generally worth watching.

Close to the dwelling were the ruined grinding and boiling houses.
These two are never quite cheek by jowl: the grinding-house is set on
higher ground, with a water-wheel to turn the immense iron vertical
rollers. From these the cane juice runs down a wedge-shaped trough to
the boiling house, where a negro stands and rinses a little lime-wash
into it with a grass brush to make it granulate. Then it is emptied
into big copper vats, over furnaces burning faggots and ‘trash,’ or
squeezed-out cane. There a few negroes stand, skimming the poppling
vats with long-handled copper ladles, while their friends sit round,
eating sugar or chewing trash, in a mist of hot vapour. What they
skim off oozes across the floor with an admixture of a good deal of
filth--insects, even rats, and whatever sticks to negroes’ feet--into
another basin, thence to be distilled into rum.

This, at any rate, is how it used to be done. I know nothing of modern
methods--or if there are any, never having visited the island since
1860, which is a long time ago now.

But long before that year all this was over at Ferndale: the big copper
vats were overturned, and up in the grinding-house the three great
rollers lay about loose. No water reached it: the stream had gone
about its own business elsewhere. The Bas-Thornton children used to
crawl into the cut-well through the vent, among dead leaves and the
wreck of the wheel. There, one day, they found a wild-cat’s nest, with
the mother away. The kittens were tiny, and Emily tried to carry them
home in her pinafore; but they bit and scratched so fiercely, right
through her thin frock, that she was very glad--except for pride--that
they all escaped but one. This one, Tom, grew up: though he was never
really tamed. Later he begat several litters on an old tame cat they
had, Kitty Cranbrook; and the only survivor of this progeny, Tabby,
became rather a famous cat in his way. (But Tom soon took to the jungle
altogether.) Tabby was faithful, and a good swimmer, which he would do
for pleasure, sculling around the bathing-pool behind the children,
giving an occasional yowl of excitement. Also, he had mortal sport with
snakes: would wait for a rattler or a black-snake like a mere mouse:
drop on it from a tree or somewhere, and fight it to death. Once he
got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular
death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate
something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as
ready to eat snakes as ever.

Red-headed John’s room was full of rats: he used to catch them in big
gins, and then let them go for Tabby to despatch. Once the cat was so
impatient he seized trap and all and caterwauled off into the night
banging it on the stones and sending up showers of sparks. Again he
returned in a few days, very sleek and pleased: but John never saw his
trap again. Another plague of his were the bats, which also infested
his room in hundreds. Mr. Bas-Thornton could crack a stockwhip, and
used to kill a bat on the wing with it most neatly. But the din
this made in that little box of a room at midnight was infernal:
earsplitting cracks, and the air already full of the tiny penetrating
squeaks of the vermin.

It was a kind of paradise for English children to come to, whatever it
might be for their parents: especially at that time, when no one lived
in at all a wild way at home. Here one had to be a little ahead of
the times: or decadent, whichever you like to call it. The difference
between boys and girls, for instance, had to be left to look after
itself. Long hair would have made the evening search for grass-ticks
and nits interminable: Emily and Rachel had their hair cut short, and
were allowed to do everything the boys did--to climb trees, swim, and
trap animals and birds: they even had two pockets in their frocks.

It was round the bathing-pool their life centred, more than the
house. Every year, when the rains were over, a dam was built across
the stream, so that all through the dry season there was quite a
large pool to swim in. There were trees all round: enormous fluffed
cotton-trees, with coffee trees between their paws, and log-wood, and
gorgeous red and green peppers: amongst them, the pool was almost
completely shaded. Emily and John set tree-springes in them--Lame-foot
Sam taught them how. Cut a bendy stick, and tie a string to one end.
Then sharpen the other, so that it can impale a fruit as bait. Just at
the base of this point flatten it a little, and bore a hole through the
flat part. Cut a little peg that will just stick in the mouth of this
hole. Then make a loop in the end of the string: bend the stick, as in
stringing a bow, till the loop will thread through the little hole, and
jam it with the peg, along which the loop should lie spread. Bait the
point, and hang it in a tree among the twigs: the bird alights on the
peg to peck the fruit, the peg falls out, the loop whips tight round
its ankles: then away up out of the water like pink predatory monkeys,
and decide by ‘Eena, deena, dina, do,’ or some such rigmarole, whether
to twist its neck or let it go free--thus the excitement and suspense,
both for child and bird, can be prolonged beyond the moment of capture.

It was only natural that Emily should have great ideas of improving
the negroes. They were, of course, Christians, so there was nothing to
be done about their morals: nor were they in need of soup, or knitted
things; but they were sadly ignorant. After a good deal of negotiation
they consented in the end to let her teach Little Jim to read: but
she had no success. Also she had a passion for catching house-lizards
without their dropping their tails off, which they do when frightened:
it needed endless patience to get them whole and unalarmed into a
match-box. Catching green grass-lizards was also very delicate. She
would sit and whistle, like Orpheus, till they came out of their
crannies and showed their emotion by puffing out their pink throats:
then, very gently, she would lasso them with a long blade of grass.
Her room was full of these and other pets, some alive, others probably
dead. She also had tame fairies; and a familiar, or oracle, the White
Mouse with an Elastic Tail, who was always ready to settle any point in
question, and whose rule was a rule of iron--especially over Rachel,
Edward, and Laura, the little ones (or Liddlies, as they came to be
known in the family). To Emily, his interpreter, he allowed, of course,
certain privileges: and with John, who was older than Emily, he quite
wisely did not interfere.

_He_ was omnipresent: the fairies were more localised, living in a
small hole in the hill guarded by two dagger-plants.

The best fun at the bathing-pool was had with a big forked log. John
would sit astride the main stem, and the others pushed him about by the
two prongs. The little ones, of course, only splashed about the shallow
end: but John and Emily dived. John, that is to say, dived properly,
head-foremost: Emily only jumped in feet first, stiff as a rod; but
she, on the other hand, would go off higher boughs than he would. Once,
when she was eight, Mrs. Thornton had thought she was too big to bathe
naked any more. The only bathing-dress she could rig was an old cotton
night-gown. Emily jumped in as usual: first the balloons of air tipped
her upside down, and then the wet cotton wrapped itself round her head
and arms and nearly drowned her. After that, decency was let go hang
again: it is hardly worth being drowned for--at least, it does not at
first sight appear to be.

But once a negro really was drowned in the pool. He had gorged himself
full of stolen mangoes: and feeling guilty, thought he might as well
also cool himself in the forbidden pond, and make one repentance cover
two crimes. He could not swim, and had only a child (Little Jim)
with him. The cold water and the surfeit brought on an apoplexy: Jim
poked at him with a piece of stick a little, and then ran away in a
fright. Whether the man died of the apoplexy or the drowning was a
point for an inquest; and the doctor, after staying at Ferndale for
a week, decided it was from drowning, but that he was full of green
mangoes right up to his mouth. The great advantage of this was that
no negro would bathe there again, for fear the dead man’s ‘duppy,’ or
ghost, should catch him. So if any black even came near while they
were bathing, John and Emily would pretend the duppy had grabbed at
them, and off he would go, terribly upset. Only one of the negroes at
Ferndale had ever actually seen a duppy: but that was quite enough.
They cannot be mistaken for living people, because their heads are
turned backwards on their shoulders, and they carry a chain: moreover
one must never call them duppies to their faces, as it gives them
power. This poor man forgot, and called out ‘_Duppy!_’ when he saw it.
He got terrible rheumatics.

Lame-foot Sam told most stories. He used to sit all day on the stone
barbecues where the pimento was dried, digging maggots out of his toes.
This seemed at first very horrid to the children, but he seemed quite
contented: and when jiggers got under their own skins, and laid their
little bags of eggs there, it was not absolutely unpleasant. John used
to get quite a sort of thrill from rubbing the place. Sam told them
the Anansi stories: Anansi and the Tiger, and how Anansi looked after
the Crocodile’s nursery, and so on. Also he had a little poem which
impressed them very much:

  Quacko Sam
  Him bery fine man:
  Him dance all de dances dat de darkies can:
  Him dance de schottische, him dance de Cod Reel:
  Him dance ebery kind of dance till him foot-bottom peel.

Perhaps that was how old Sam’s own affliction first came about: he was
very sociable. He was said to have a great many children.


ii

The stream which fed the bathing-hole ran into it down a gully through
the bush which offered an enticing vista for exploring: but somehow
the children did not often go up it very far. Every stone had to be
overturned in the hope of finding cray-fish: or if not, John had to
take a sporting gun, which he bulleted with spoonfuls of water to
shoot humming-birds on the wing, too tiny frail quarry for any solider
projectile. For, only a few yards up, there was a Frangipani tree: a
mass of brilliant blossom and no leaves, which was almost hidden in
a cloud of humming-birds so vivid as much to outshine the flowers.
Writers have often lost their way trying to explain how brilliant a
jewel the humming-bird is: it cannot be done.

They build their wee woollen nests on the tops of twigs, where no snake
can reach them. They are devoted to their eggs, and will not move
though you touch them. But they are so delicate the children never did
that: they held their breath and stared and stared--and were out-stared.

Somehow the celestial vividness of this barrier generally arrested
them: it was seldom they explored further: only once, I think, on a day
when Emily was feeling peculiarly irritated.

It was her own tenth birthday. They had frittered away all the morning
in the glass-like gloom of the bathing-hole. Now John sat naked on
the bank making a wicker trap. In the shallows the small ones rolled
and chuckled. Emily, for coolness, sat up to her chin in water, and
hundreds of infant fish were tickling with their inquisitive mouths
every inch of her body, a sort of expressionless light kissing.

Anyhow she had lately come to hate being touched--but this was
abominable. At last, when she could stand it no longer, she clambered
out and dressed. Rachel and Laura were too small for a long walk: and
the last thing, she felt, that she wanted was to have one of the boys
with her: so she stole quietly past John’s back, scowling balefully
at him for no particular reason. Soon she was out of sight among the
bushes.

She pushed on rather fast, not taking much notice of things, up the
river bed for about three miles. She had never been so far afield
before. Then her attention was caught by a clearing leading down
to the water: and here was the source of the river. She caught her
breath delightedly: it bubbled up clear and cold, through three
distinct springs, under a clump of bamboos, just as a river should:
the greatest possible find, and a private discovery of her own. She
gave instantaneous inward thanks to God for thinking of such a perfect
birthday treat, especially as things had seemed to be going all wrong:
and then began to ferret in the limestone sources with the whole length
of her arm, among the ferns and cresses.

Hearing a splash, she looked round. Some half-dozen strange negro
children had come down the clearing to fetch water and were staring at
her in astonishment. Emily stared back. In sudden terror they flung
down their calabashes and galloped away up the clearing like hares.
Immediately, but with dignity, Emily followed them. The clearing
narrowed to a path, and the path led in a very short time to a village.

It was all ragged and unkempt, and shrill with voices. There were small
one-storey wattle huts dotted about, completely overhung by the most
enormous trees. There was no sort of order: they appeared anywhere:
there were no railings, and only one or two of the most terribly
starved, mangy cattle to keep in or out. In the middle of all was an
indeterminate quagmire or muddy pond, where a group of half-naked
negroes, and totally naked black children, and a few brown ones, were
splashing with geese and ducks.

Emily stared: they stared back. She made a movement towards them: they
separated at once into the various huts, and watched her from there.
Encouraged by the comfortable feeling of inspiring fright she advanced,
and at last found an old creature who would talk: Dis Liberty Hill,
dis Black Man’s Town, Old-time niggers, dey go fer run from de bushas
(overseers), go fer live here. De piccaninnies, dey never see buckras
(whites).... And so on. It was a refuge, built by runaway slaves, and
still inhabited.

And then, that her cup of happiness might be full, some of the bolder
children crept out and respectfully offered her flowers--really to get
a better look at her pallid face. Her heart bubbled up in her, she
swelled with glory: and taking leave with the greatest condescension
she trod all the long way home on veritable air, back to her beloved
family, back to a birthday cake wreathed with stephanotis, lit with
ten candles, and in which it so happened that the sixpenny piece was
invariably found in the birthday-person’s slice.


iii

This was, fairly typically, the life of an English family in Jamaica.
Mostly these only stayed a few years. The Creoles--families who had
been in the West Indies for more than one generation--gradually evolved
something a little more distinctive. They lost some of the traditional
mental mechanism of Europe, and the outlines of a new one began to
appear.

There was one such family the Bas-Thorntons were acquainted with, who
had a ramshackle estate to the eastward. They invited John and Emily to
spend a couple of days with them, but Mrs. Thornton was in two minds
about letting them go, lest they should learn bad ways. The children
there were a wildish lot, and, in the morning at least, would often run
about barefoot like negroes, which is a very important point in a place
like Jamaica where the whites have to keep up appearances. They had a
governess whose blood was possibly not pure, and who used to beat the
children ferociously with a hair-brush. However, the climate at the
Fernandez’s place was healthy, and also Mrs. Thornton thought it good
for them to have some intercourse with other children outside their own
family, however undesirable: and she let them go.

It was the afternoon after that birthday, and a long buggy-ride. Both
fat John and thin Emily were speechless and solemn with excitement:
it was the first visit they had ever paid. Hour after hour the buggy
laboured over the uneven road. At last the lane to Exeter, the
Fernandez’s place, was reached. It was evening, the sun about to do
his rapid tropical setting. He was unusually large and red, as if
he threatened something peculiar. The lane, or drive, was gorgeous:
for the first few hundred yards it was entirely hedged with ‘seaside
grapes,’ clusters of fruit half-way between a gooseberry and a golden
pippin, with here and there the red berries of coffee trees newly
planted among the burnt stumps in a clearing, but already neglected.
Then a massive stone gateway in a sort of Colonial-Gothic style. This
had to be circumvented: no one had taken the trouble to heave open the
heavy gates for years. There was no fence, nor ever had been, so the
track simply passed it by.

And beyond the gates an avenue of magnificent cabbage-palms. No tree,
not oldest beech nor chestnut, is more spectacular in an avenue: rising
a sheer hundred feet with no break in the line before the actual crown
of plumes; and palm upon palm, palm upon palm, like a heavenly double
row of pillars, leading on interminably, till even the huge house was
dwarfed into a sort of ultimate mouse-trap.

As they journeyed on between these palms the sun went suddenly down,
darkness flooded up round them out of the ground, retorted to almost
immediately by the moon. Presently, shimmering like a ghost, an old
blind white donkey stood in their way. Curses did not move him: the
driver had to climb down and push him aside. The air was full of the
usual tropic din: mosquitoes humming, cicalas trilling, bull-frogs
twanging like guitars. That din goes on all night and all day almost:
is more insistent, more memorable than the heat itself, even, or the
number of things that bite. In the valley beneath the fire-flies came
to life: as if at a signal passed along, wave after wave after wave
of light swept down the gorge. From a neighbouring hill the cockatoos
began their serenade, an orchestration of drunk men laughing against
iron girders tossed at each other and sawn up with rusty hack-saws:
the most awful noise. But Emily and John, so far as they noticed it
at all, found it vaguely exhilarating. Through it could presently be
distinguished another sound: a negro praying. They soon came near him:
where an orange tree loaded with golden fruit gleamed dark and bright
in the moonlight, veiled in the pinpoint scintillation of a thousand
fire-flies sat the old black saint among the branches, talking loudly,
drunkenly, and confidentially with God.

Almost unexpectedly they came on the house, and were whisked straight
off to bed. Emily omitted to wash, since there seemed such a hurry, but
made up for it by spending an unusually long time over her prayers. She
pressed her eyeballs devoutly with her fingers to make sparks appear,
in spite of the slightly sick feeling it always induced: and then,
already sound asleep, clambered, I suppose, into bed.

The next day the sun rose as he had set: large, round, and red. It
was blindingly hot, foreboding. Emily, who woke early in a strange
bed, stood at the window watching the negroes release the hens from
the chicken-houses, where they were shut up at night for fear of
John-crows. As each bird hopped sleepily out, the black passed his hand
over its stomach to see if it meditated an egg that day: if so, it was
confined again, or it would have gone off and laid in the bush. It was
already as hot as an oven. Another black, with eschatological yells and
tail-twistings and lassoings, was confining a cow in a kind of pillory,
that it might have no opportunity of sitting down while being milked.
The poor brute’s hooves were aching with the heat, its miserable
tea-cup of milk fevered in its udder. Even as she stood at the shady
window Emily felt as sweaty as if she had been running. The ground was
fissured with drought.

Margaret Fernandez, whose room Emily was sharing, slipped out of bed
silently and stood beside her, wrinkling the short nose in her pallid
face.

‘Good morning,’ said Emily politely.

‘Smells like an earthquake,’ said Margaret, and dressed. Emily
remembered the awful story about the governess and the hair-brush:
certainly Margaret did not use one for its ordinary purpose, though she
had long hair: so it must be true.

Margaret was ready long before Emily, and banged out of the room.
Emily followed later, neat and nervous, to find no one. The house was
empty. Presently she spied John under a tree, talking to a negro boy.
By his off-hand manner Emily guessed he was telling _disproportionate_
stories (not _lies_) about the importance of Ferndale compared with
Exeter. She did not call him, because the house was silent and it was
not her place, as guest, to alter anything: so she went out to him.
Together they circumnavigated: they found a stable-yard, and negroes
preparing ponies, and the Fernandez children, barefoot even as Rumour
had whispered. Emily caught her breath, shocked. Even at that moment a
chicken, scuttling across the yard, trod on a scorpion and tumbled over
stark dead as if shot. But it was not so much the danger which upset
Emily as the unconventionality.

‘Come on,’ said Margaret: ‘it’s much too hot to stay about here. We’ll
go down to Exeter Rocks.’

The cavalcade mounted--Emily very conscious of her boots, buttoned
respectably half-way up her calf. Somebody had food, and calabashes
of water. The ponies evidently knew the way. The sun was still red
and large: the sky above cloudless, and like blue glaze poured over
baking clay: but close over the ground a dirty grey haze hovered. As
they followed the lane towards the sea they came to a place where,
yesterday, a fair-sized spring had bubbled up by the roadside. Now it
was dry. But even as they passed a kind of gout of water gushed forth:
and then it was dry again, although gurgling inwardly to itself. But
the cavalcade were hot, far too hot to speak to one another: they sat
their ponies as loosely as possible, longing for the sea.

The morning advanced. The heated air grew quite easily hotter, as if
from some reserve of enormous blaze on which it could draw at will.
Bullocks only shifted their stinging feet when they could bear the
soil no longer: even the insects were too languorous to pipe, the
basking lizards hid themselves and panted. It was so still you could
have heard the least buzz a mile off. Not a naked fish would willingly
move his tail. The ponies advanced because they must. The children
ceased even to muse.

They all very nearly jumped out of their skins; for close at hand a
crane had trumpeted once desperately. Then the broken silence closed
down as flawless as before. They perspired twice as violently with the
stimulus. Their pace grew slower and slower. It was no faster than a
procession of snails that at last they reached the sea.

Exeter Rocks is a famous place. A bay of the sea, almost a perfect
semicircle, guarded by the reef: shelving white sands to span the few
feet from the water to the under-cut turf: and then, almost at the mid
point, a jutting-out shelf of rocks right into deep water--fathoms
deep. And a narrow fissure in the rocks, leading the water into a small
pool, or miniature lagoon, right inside their bastion. There it was,
safe from sharks or drowning, that the Fernandez children meant to soak
themselves all day, like turtles in a crawl. The water of the bay was
as smooth and immovable as basalt, yet clear as the finest gin: albeit
the swell muttered a mile away on the reef. The water within the pool
itself could not reasonably be smoother. No sea-breeze thought of
stirring. No bird trespassed on the inert air.

For a while they had not energy to get into the water, but lay on their
faces, looking down, down, down, at the sea-fans and sea-feathers,
the scarlet-plumed barnacles and corals, the black and yellow
schoolmistress-fish, the rainbow-fish--all that forest of ideal
Christmas trees which is a tropical sea-bottom. Then they stood up,
giddy and seeing black, and in a trice were floating suspended in water
like drowned ones, only their noses above the surface, under the shadow
of a rocky ledge.

An hour or so after noon they clustered together, puffy from the warm
water, in the insufficient shade of a Panama fern: ate such of the
food they had brought as they had appetite for; and drank all the
water, wishing for more. Then a very odd thing happened: for even as
they sat there they heard the most peculiar sound: a strange, rushing
sound that passed overhead like a gale of wind--but not a breath of
breeze stirred, that was the odd thing: followed by a sharp hissing and
hurtling, like a flight of rockets, or gigantic swans--very distant
rocs, perhaps--on the wing. They all looked up: but there was nothing
at all. The sky was empty and lucid. Long before they were back in the
water again all was still. Except that after a while John noticed a
sort of tapping, as if some one were gently knocking the outside of
a bath you were in. But the bath they were in had no outside, it was
solid world. It was funny.

By sunset they were so weak from long immersion they could barely stand
up, and as salted as bacon: but, with some common impulse, just before
the sun went down they all left the rocks and went and stood by their
clothes, where the ponies were tethered, under some palms. As he sank
the sun grew even larger: and instead of red was now a sodden purple.
Down he went, behind the western horn of the bay, which blackened till
its water-line disappeared and substance and reflection seemed one
sharp symmetrical pattern.

Not a breath of breeze even yet ruffled the water: yet momentarily it
trembled of its own accord, shattering the reflections: then was glassy
again. On that the children held their breath, waiting for it to happen.

A school of fish, terrified by some purely sub-marine event, thrust
their heads right out of the water, squattering across the bay in an
arrowy rush, dashing up sparkling ripples with the tiny heave of their
shoulders: yet after each disturbance all was soon like hardest, dark,
thick, glass.

Once things vibrated slightly, like a chair in a concert-room: and
again there was that mysterious winging, though there was nothing
visible beneath the swollen iridescent stars.

Then it came. The water of the bay began to ebb away, as if some one
had pulled up the plug: a foot or so of sand and coral gleamed for a
moment new to the air: then back the sea rushed in miniature rollers
which splashed right up to the feet of the palms. Mouthfuls of turf
were torn away: and on the far side of the bay a small piece of cliff
tumbled into the water: sand and twigs showered down, dew fell from the
trees like diamonds: birds and beasts, their tongues at last loosed,
screamed and bellowed: the ponies, though quite unalarmed, lifted up
their heads and yelled.

That was all: a few moments. Then silence, with a rapid countermarch,
recovered all his rebellious kingdom. Stillness again. The trees moved
as little as the pillars of a ruin, each leaf laid sleekly in place.
The bubbling foam subsided: the reflections of the stars came out
among it as if from clouds. Silent, still, dark, placid, as if there
could never have been a disturbance. The naked children too continued
to stand motionless beside the quiet ponies, dew on their hair and
eyelashes, shine on their infantile round paunches.

But as for Emily, it was too much. The earthquake went completely to
her head. She began to dance, hopping laboriously from one foot on to
another. John caught the infection. He turned head over heels on the
damp sand, over and over in an elliptical course, till before he knew
it he was in the water, and so giddy as hardly to be able to tell up
from down.

At that, Emily knew what it was she wanted to do. She scrambled on to
a pony and galloped him up and down the beach, trying to bark like a
dog. The Fernandez children stared, solemn but not disapproving. John,
shaping a course for Cuba, was swimming as if sharks were paring his
toe-nails. Emily rode her pony into the sea, and beat and beat him till
he swam: and so she followed John towards the reef, yapping herself
hoarse.

It must have been fully a hundred yards before they were spent. Then
they turned for the shore, John holding on to Emily’s leg, puffing and
gasping, both a little overdone, their emotion run down. Presently John
gasped:

‘You shouldn’t ride on your bare skin, you’ll catch ringworm.’

‘I don’t care if I do,’ said Emily.

‘You would if you did,’ said John.

‘I don’t care!’ chanted Emily.

It seemed a long way to the shore. When they reached it the others had
dressed and were preparing to start. Soon the whole party were on
their way home in the dark. Presently Margaret said:

‘So that’s that.’

No one answered.

‘I could smell it was an earthquake coming when I got up. Didn’t I say
so, Emily?’

‘You and your smells!’ said Jimmie Fernandez. ‘You’re always smelling
things!’

‘She’s awfully good at smells,’ said the youngest, Harry, proudly, to
John. ‘She can sort out people’s dirty clothes for the wash by smell:
who they belong to.’

‘She can’t really,’ said Jimmie: ‘she fakes it. As if every one smelt
different!’

‘I can!’

‘Dogs can, anyway,’ said John.

Emily said nothing. Of course people smelt different: it didn’t need
arguing. She could always tell her own towel from John’s, for instance:
or even knew if one of the others had used it. But it just showed what
sort of people Creoles were, to _talk_ about Smell, in that open way.

‘Well, anyhow I said there was going to be an earthquake and there was
one,’ said Margaret.

That was what Emily was waiting for! So it really had been an
Earthquake (she had not liked to ask, it seemed so ignorant: but now
Margaret had said in so many words that it was one).

If ever she went back to England, she could now say to people, ‘_I have
been in an Earthquake_.’

With that certainty, her soused excitement began to revive. For there
was nothing, no adventure from the hands of God or Man, to equal it.
Realise that if she had suddenly found she could fly it would not
have seemed more miraculous to her. Heaven had played its last, most
terrible card; and small Emily had survived, where even grown men (such
as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram) had succumbed.

Life seemed suddenly a little empty: for never again could there happen
to her anything so dangerous, so sublime.

Meanwhile, Margaret and Jimmie were still arguing:

‘Well, there’s one thing, there’ll be plenty of eggs to-morrow,’ said
Jimmie. ‘There’s nothing like an earthquake for making them lay.’

How funny Creoles were! They didn’t seem to realise the difference it
made to a person’s whole after-life to have been in an Earthquake.

When they got home, Martha, the black housemaid, had hard things to
say about the sublime cataclysm. She had dusted the drawing-room china
only the day before: and now everything was covered again in a fine
penetrating film of dust.


iv

The next morning, Sunday, they went home. Emily was still so saturated
in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake:
her fingers and legs were earthquake. With John it was ponies.
The earthquake had been fun: but it was the ponies that mattered.
But at present it did not worry Emily that she was alone in her
sense of proportion. She was too completely possessed to be able
to see anything, or realise that any one else pretended to even a
self-delusive fiction of existence.

Their mother met them at the door. She bubbled questions: John
chattered ponies, but Emily was still tongue-tied. She was, in her
mind, like a child who has eaten too much even to be able to be sick.

Mrs. Thornton got a little worried about her at times. This sort of
life was very peaceful, and might be excellent for nervy children like
John: but a child like Emily, thought Mrs. Thornton, who is far from
nervy, really needs some sort of stimulus and excitement, or there is
a danger of her mind going to sleep altogether for ever. This life was
too vegetable. Consequently Mrs. Thornton always spoke to Emily in
her brightest manner, as if everything was of the greatest possible
interest. She had hoped, too, the visit to Exeter might liven her up:
but she had come back as silent and expressionless as ever. It had
evidently made no impression on her at all.

John marshalled the small ones in the cellar, and round and round
they marched, wooden swords at the slope, singing ‘Onward, Christian
Soldiers.’ Emily did not join them. What did it now matter, that
earlier woe, that being a girl she could never when grown up become a
real soldier with a real sword? She had been in an Earthquake.

Nor did the others keep it up very long. (Sometimes they would go on
for three or four hours.) For, whatever it might have done for Emily’s
soul, the earthquake had done little to clear the air. It was as hot as
ever. In the animal world there seemed some strange commotion, as if
they had wind of something. The usual lizards and mosquitoes were still
absent: but in their place the earth’s most horrid progeny, creatures
of darkness, sought the open: land-crabs wandered about aimlessly,
angrily twiddling their claws: and the ground seemed almost alive with
red ants and cockroaches. Up on the roof the pigeons were gathered,
talking to each other fearfully.

The cellar (or rather, ground floor), where they were playing, had
no communication with the wooden structure above, but had an opening
of its own under the twin flight of steps leading to the front door;
and there the children presently gathered in the shadow. Out in the
compound lay one of Mr. Thornton’s best handkerchiefs. He must have
dropped it that morning. But none of them felt the energy to go and
retrieve it, out into the sun. Then, as they stood there, they saw
Lame-foot Sam come limping across the yard. Seeing the prize, he was
about to carry it off. Suddenly he remembered it was Sunday. He dropped
it like a hot brick, and began to cover it with sand, exactly where he
had found it.

‘Please God, I thieve you to-morrow,’ he explained hopefully. ‘Please
God, you still there?’

A low mutter of thunder seemed to offer grudging assent.

‘Thank you, Lord,’ said Sam, bowing to a low bank of cloud. He hobbled
off: but then, not too sure perhaps that Heaven would keep Its promise,
changed his mind: snatched up the handkerchief and made off for his
cottage. The thunder muttered louder and more angrily: but Sam ignored
the warning.

It was the custom that, whenever Mr. Thornton had been to St. Anne’s,
John and Emily should run out to meet him, and ride back with him, one
perched on each of his stirrups.

That Sunday evening they ran out as soon as they saw him coming, in
spite of the thunderstorm that by now was clattering over their very
heads--and not only over their heads either, for in the Tropics a
thunderstorm is not a remote affair up in the sky, as it is in England,
but is all round you: lightning plays ducks and drakes across the
water, bounds from tree to tree, bounces about the ground, while the
thunder seems to proceed from violent explosions in your own very core.

‘Go back! Go back, you damned little fools!’ he yelled furiously: ‘Get
into the house!’

They stopped, aghast: and began to realise that after all it was a
storm of more than ordinary violence. They discovered that they were
drenched to the skin--must have been the moment they left the house.
The lightning kept up a continuous blaze: it was playing about their
father’s very stirrup-irons; and all of a sudden they realised that he
was afraid. They fled to the house, shocked to the heart: and he was in
the house almost as soon as they were. Mrs. Thornton rushed out:

‘My dear, I’m so glad....’

‘I’ve never seen such a storm! Why on earth did you let the children
come out?’

‘I never dreamt they would be so silly! And all the time I was
thinking--but thank Heaven you’re back!’

‘I think the worst is over now.’

Perhaps it was; but all through supper the lightning shone almost
without flickering. And John and Emily could hardly eat: the memory of
that momentary look on their father’s face haunted them.

It was an unpleasant meal altogether. Mrs. Thornton had prepared for
her husband his ‘favourite dish’: than which no action could more annoy
a man of whim. In the middle of it all in burst Sam, ceremony dropped:
he flung the handkerchief angrily on the table and stumped out.

‘What on earth ...’ began Mr. Thornton.

But John and Emily knew: and thoroughly agreed with Sam as to the cause
of the storm. Stealing was bad enough anyway, but on a Sunday!

Meanwhile, the lightning kept up its play. The thunder made talking
arduous, but no one was anyhow in a mood to chatter. Only thunder was
heard, and the hammering of the rain. But suddenly, close under the
window, there burst out the most appalling inhuman shriek of terror.

‘Tabby!’ cried John, and they all rushed to the window.

But Tabby had already flashed into the house: and behind him was a
whole club of wild cats in hot pursuit. John momentarily opened the
dining-room door and puss slipped in, dishevelled and panting. Not
even then did the brutes desist: what insane fury led these jungle
creatures to pursue him into the very house is unimaginable; but there
they were, in the passage, caterwauling in concert: and as if at their
incantation the thunder awoke anew, and the lightning nullified the
meagre table lamp. It was such a din as you could not speak through.
Tabby, his fur on end, pranced up and down the room, his eyes blazing,
talking and sometimes exclaiming in a tone of voice the children
had never heard him use before and which made their blood run cold.
He seemed like one inspired in the presence of Death, he had gone
utterly Delphic: and without in the passage Hell’s pandemonium reigned
terrifically.

The check could only be a short one. Outside the door stood the
big filter, and above the door the fanlight was long since broken.
Something black and yelling flashed through the fanlight, landing clean
in the middle of the supper table, scattering the forks and spoons and
upsetting the lamp. And another and another--but already Tabby was
through the window and streaking again for the bush. The whole dozen of
those wild cats leapt one after the other from the top of the filter
clean through the fanlight onto the supper table, and away from there
only too hot in his tracks: in a moment the whole devil-hunt and its
hopeless quarry had vanished into the night.

‘Oh Tabby, my darling Tabby!’ wailed John; while Emily rushed again to
the window.

They were gone. The lightning behind the creepers in the jungle lit
them up like giant cobwebs: but of Tabby and his pursuers there was
nothing to be seen.

John burst into tears, the first time for several years, and flung
himself on his mother: Emily stood transfixed at the window, her eyes
glued in horror on what she could not, in fact, see: and all of a
sudden was sick.

‘God, what an evening!’ groaned Mr. Bas-Thornton, groping in the
darkness for what might be left of their supper.

Shortly after that Sam’s hut burst into flames. They saw, from the
dining-room, the old negro stagger dramatically out into the darkness.
He was throwing stones at the sky. In a lull they heard him cry: ‘I gib
it back, didn’t I? I gib de nasty t’ing back?’

Then there was another blinding flash, and Sam fell where he stood. Mr.
Thornton pulled the children roughly back and said something like ‘I’ll
go and see. Keep them from the window.’

Then he closed and barred the shutters, and was gone.

John and the little ones kept up a continuous sobbing. Emily wished
some one would light a lamp, she wanted to read. Anything, so as not to
think about poor Tabby.

I suppose the wind must have begun to rise some while before this, but
now, by the time Mr. Thornton had managed to carry old Sam’s body into
the house, it was more than a gale. The old man, stiff in the joints as
he might have been in life, had gone as limp as a worm. Emily and John,
who had slipped unbeknownst into the passage, were thrilled beyond
measure at the way he dangled: they could hardly tear themselves away,
and be back in the dining-room, before they should be discovered.

There Mrs. Thornton sat heroically in a chair, her brood all grouped
round her, saying the Psalms, and the poems of Sir Walter Scott, over
by heart: while Emily tried to keep her mind off Tabby by going over
in her head all the details of her Earthquake. At times the din, the
rocketing of the thunder and torrential shriek of the wind, became so
loud as almost to impinge on her inner world: she wished this wretched
thunderstorm would hurry up and get over. First she held an actual
performance of the earthquake, went over it direct, as if it was again
happening. Then she put it into Oratio Recta, told it as a story,
beginning with that magic phrase, ‘Once I was in an Earthquake.’
But before long the dramatic element reappeared--this time, the awed
comments of her imaginary English audience. When that was done, she put
it into the Historical--a Voice, declaring that a girl called Emily was
once in an Earthquake. And so on, right through the whole thing a third
time.

The horrid fate of poor Tabby appeared suddenly before her eyes, caught
her unawares: and she was all but sick again. Even her earthquake had
failed her. Caught by the incubus, her mind struggled frantically to
clutch at even the outside world, as an only remaining straw. She tried
to fix her interest on every least detail of the scene around her--to
count the slats in the shutters, any least detail that was _outward_.
So it was that for the first time she really began to notice the
weather.

The wind by now was more than redoubled. The shutters were bulging as
if tired elephants were leaning against them, and Father was trying
to tie the fastening with that handkerchief. But to push against
this wind was like pushing against rock. The handkerchief, shutters,
everything burst: the rain poured in like the sea into a sinking
ship, the wind occupied the room, snatching pictures from the wall,
sweeping the table bare. Through the gaping frames the lightning-lit
scene without was visible. The creepers, which before had looked like
cobwebs, now streamed up into the sky like new-combed hair. Bushes were
lying flat, laid back on the ground as close as a rabbit lays back his
ears. Branches were leaping about loose in the sky. The negro huts
were clean gone, and the negroes crawling on their stomachs across the
compound to gain the shelter of the house. The bouncing rain seemed to
cover the ground with a white smoke, a sort of sea in which the blacks
wallowed like porpoises. One nigger-boy began to roll away: his mother,
forgetting caution, rose to her feet: and immediately the fat old
beldam was blown clean away, bowling along across fields and hedgerows
like some one in a funny fairy-story, till she fetched up against a
wall and was pinned there, unable to move. But the others managed to
reach the house, and soon could be heard in the cellar underneath.

Moreover the very floor began to ripple, as a loose carpet will ripple
on a gusty day: in opening the cellar door the blacks had let the wind
in, and now for some time they could not shut it again. The wind, to
push against, was more like a solid block than a current of air.

Mr. Thornton went round the house--to see what could be done, he said.
He soon realised that the next thing to go would be the roof. So he
returned to the Niobe-group in the dining-room. Mrs. Thornton was
half-way through _The Lady of the Lake_, the smaller children listening
with rapt attention. Exasperated, he told them that they would probably
not be alive in half an hour. No one seemed particularly interested in
his news: Mrs. Thornton continued her recitation with faultless memory.

After another couple of cantos the threatened roof went. Fortunately,
the wind taking it from inside, most of it was blown clear of the
house: but one of the couples collapsed skew-eyed, and was hung up on
what was left of the dining-room door--within an ace of hitting John.
Emily, to her intense resentment, suddenly felt cold. All at once,
she found she had had enough of the storm: it had become intolerable,
instead of a welcome distraction.

Mr. Thornton began to look for something to break through the floor.
If only he could make a hole in it, he might get his wife and children
down into the cellar. Fortunately he did not have to look far: one arm
of the fallen couple had already done the work for him. Laura, Rachel,
Emily, Edward and John, Mrs. Thornton and finally Mr. Thornton himself,
were passed down into the darkness already thronged with negroes and
goats.

With great good sense, Mr. Thornton brought with him from the room
above a couple of decanters of madeira, and every one had a swig, from
Laura to the oldest negro. All the children made the most of this
unholy chance, but somehow to Emily the bottle got passed twice, and
each time she took a good pull. It was enough, at their age; and while
what was left of the house was blown away over their heads, through
the lull and the ensuing aerial return match, John, Emily, Edward,
Rachel, and Laura, blind drunk, slept in a heap on the cellar floor: a
sleep over which the appalling fate of Tabby, torn to pieces by those
fiends almost under their very eyes, dominated with the easy empire of
nightmare.




_Chapter 2_


All night the water poured through the house floor onto the people
sheltering below: but (perhaps owing to the madeira) it did them no
harm. Shortly after the second bout of blowing, however, the rain
stopped; and when dawn came Mr. Thornton crept out to assess the damage.

The country was quite unrecognisable, as if it had been swept by a
spate. You could hardly tell, geographically speaking, where you were.
It is vegetation which gives the character to a tropic landscape, not
the shape of the ground: and all the vegetation, for miles, was now
pulp. The ground itself had been ploughed up by instantaneous rivers,
biting deep into the red earth. The only living thing in sight was a
cow: and she had lost both her horns.

The wooden part of the house was nearly all gone. After they had
succeeded in reaching shelter, one wall after another had blown down.
The furniture was splintered into matchwood. Even the heavy mahogany
dining-table, which they loved, and had always kept with its legs in
little glass baths of oil to defeat the ants, was spirited right away.
There were some fragments which might be part of it, or they might not:
you could not tell.

Mr. Thornton returned to the cellar and helped his wife out: she was
so cramped as hardly to be able to move. They knelt down together and
thanked God for not having treated them any worse. Then they stood up
and stared about them rather stupidly. It seemed not credible that
all this had been done by a current of air. Mr. Thornton patted the
atmosphere with his hand. When still, it was so soft, so rare: how
could one believe that Motion, itself something impalpable, had lent it
a hardness: that this gentle, hind-like Meteor should have last night
seized Fat Betsy with the rapacity of a tiger and the lift of a roc,
and flung her, as he had seen her flung, across two fair-sized fields?

Mrs. Thornton understood his gesture.

‘Remember who is its Prince,’ she said.

The stable was damaged, though not completely destroyed: and Mr.
Thornton’s mule was so much hurt he had to tell a negro to cut its
throat. The buggy was smashed beyond repair. The only building
undamaged was a stone chamber which had been the hospital of the old
sugar-estate: so they woke the children, who were feeling ill and
beyond words unhappy, and moved into this: where the negroes, with an
unexpected energy and kindliness, did everything they could to make
them comfortable. It was paved and unlighted: but solid.

The children were bilious for a few days, and inclined to dislike
each other: but they accepted the change in their lives practically
without noticing it. It is a fact that it takes experience before
one can realise what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have
little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary
course of their lives. If Emily had known this was a _Hurricane_, she
would doubtless have been far more impressed, for the word was full of
romantic terrors. But it never entered her head: and a thunderstorm,
however severe, is after all a commonplace affair. The mere fact that
it had done incalculable damage, while the earthquake had done none at
all, gave it no right whatever to rival the latter in the hierarchy
of cataclysms: an Earthquake is a thing apart. If she was silent, and
inclined to brood over some inward terror, it was not the hurricane
she was thinking of, it was the death of Tabby. That, at times, seemed
a horror beyond all bearing. It was her first intimate contact with
death--and a death of violence, too. The death of Old Sam had no such
effect: there is, after all, a vast difference between a negro and a
favourite cat.

There was something enjoyable, too, in camping in the hospital: a sort
of everlasting picnic in which their parents for once were taking part.
Indeed it led them to begin for the first time to regard their parents
as rational human beings, with understandable tastes--such as sitting
on the floor to eat one’s dinner.

It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told
that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children.
She took a keen interest in Psychology (the Art Babblative, Southey
calls it). She was full of theories about their upbringing which she
had not time to put into effect; but nevertheless she thought she
had a deep understanding of their temperaments and was the centre of
their passionate devotion. Actually, she was congenitally incapable
of telling one end of a child from the other. She was a dumpy little
woman--Cornish, I believe. When she was herself a baby she was so small
they carried her about on a cushion for fear a clumsy human arm might
damage her. She could read when she was two and a half. Her reading was
always serious. Nor had she been backward in the humaner studies: her
mistresses spoke of her Deportment as something rarely seen outside
the older Royal Houses: in spite of a figure like a bolster, she could
step into a coach like an angel getting onto a cloud. She was very
quick-tempered.

Mr. Bas-Thornton also had every accomplishment, except two: that of
primogeniture, and that of making a living. Either would have provided
for them.

If it would have surprised the mother, it would undoubtedly have
surprised the children also to be told how little their parents meant
to them. Children seldom have any power of quantitative self-analysis:
whatever the facts, they believe as an article of faith that they love
Father and Mother first and equally. Actually, the Thornton children
had loved Tabby first and foremost in all the world, some of each other
second, and hardly noticed their mother’s existence more than once
a week. Their father they loved a little more: partly owing to the
ceremony of riding home on his stirrups.

Jamaica remained, and blossomed anew, its womb being inexhaustible.
Mr. and Mrs. Thornton remained, and with patience and tears tried to
reconstruct things, in so far as they could be reconstructed. But the
danger which their beloved little ones had been through was not a thing
to risk again. Heaven had warned them. The children must go.

Nor was the only danger physical.

‘That awful night!’ said Mrs. Thornton, once, when discussing their
plan of sending them home to school: ‘Oh my dear, what the poor little
things must have suffered! Think how much more acute Fear is to a
child! And they were so brave, so English.’

‘I don’t believe they realised it.’ (He only said that to be
contradictious: he could hardly expect it to be taken seriously.)

‘You know, I am terribly afraid what permanent, _inward_ effect a shock
like that may have on them. Have you noticed they never so much as
mention it? In England they would at least be safe from dangers of that
sort.’

Meanwhile the children, accepting the new life as a matter of course,
were thoroughly enjoying it. Most children, on a railway journey,
prefer to change at as many stations as possible.

The rebuilding of Ferndale, too, was a matter of absorbing interest.
For there is one advantage to these match-box houses--easy gone, easy
come: and once begun, the work proceeded apace. Mr. Thornton himself
led the building gang, employing no end of mechanical devices of his
own devising, and it was not long before the day came when he stood
with his handsome head emerging through the fast dwindling hole in
the new roof, shouting directions to the two black carpenters, who,
lying spread-eagle in their check shirts, pinned on shingle after
shingle--walling him in, like the victim in some horrid story. At last
he had to draw in his head, and where it had been the last few shingles
were clapped into place.

An hour later the children had looked their last on Ferndale.

When they had been told they were to go to England, they had received
it as an isolated fact: thrilling in itself, but without any particular
causation--for it could hardly be due to the death of the cat, and
nothing else of importance had occurred lately.

The first stage of their journey was by land, to Montego Bay, and
the notable thing about it was that the borrowed wagonette was drawn
not by a pair of horses or a pair of mules, but by one horse and one
mule. Whenever the horse wanted to go fast the mule fell asleep in the
shafts: and if the driver woke it up it set off at a gallop, which
angered the horse. Their progress would have been slow anyhow, as all
the roads were washed away.

John was the only one who could remember England. What he remembered
was sitting at the top of a flight of stairs, which was fenced off
from him by a little gate, playing with a red toy milk-cart: and he
knew, without having to look, that in the room on the left Baby Emily
was lying in her cot. Emily _said_ she could remember something which
sounded like a Prospect of the Backs of some Brick Houses at Richmond:
but she might have invented it. The others had been born in the
Island--Edward only just.

They all had, nevertheless, most elaborate ideas about England, built
up out of what their parents had told them, and from the books and
old magazines they sometimes looked at. Needless to say it was a very
Atlantis, a land at the back of the North Wind: and going there was
about as exciting as it would be to die and go to Heaven.

John told them all about the top of the stairs for the hundredth time
as they drove along; the others listening attentively (as the Believing
do to a man remembering his reincarnations).

Suddenly Emily recalled sitting at a window and seeing a big bird with
a beautiful tail. At the same time there had been a horrid screeching
going on, or perhaps something else disagreeable--she could not quite
remember which sense was offended. It did not occur to her that it was
this self-same bird which had screeched: and anyhow it was all too
vague for her to try to describe it. She switched off to wondering how
it was possible actually to _sleep_ when walking, as the driver said
the mule did.

They put up for the first night at St. Anne’s, and there another
notable thing occurred. Their host was a hardened Creole: and at supper
he ate Cayenne pepper with a spoon. Not ordinary Cayenne pepper, mind,
such as is sold in shops, which is heavily adulterated with log-wood:
but the far fierier pure original. This indeed was an Event of the
first water: none of them ever forgot it.

The desolation through which they drove is indescribable. Tropical
scenery is anyhow tedious, prolific, and gross: the greens more or
less uniform: great tubular stems supporting thick leaves: no tree
has an outline because it is crushed up against something else--no
_room_. In Jamaica this profusion swarms over the very mountain
ranges: and even the peaks are so numerous that on the top of one you
are surrounded by others, and can see nothing. There are hundreds of
flowers. Then imagine all this luxuriance smashed, as with a pestle and
mortar--crushed, pulped, and already growing again! Mr. Thornton and
his wife were ready to shout with relief when they caught their first
glimpse of the sea, and at last came out in view of the whole beautiful
sweep of Montego Bay itself.

In the open sea there was a considerable swell: but within the shelter
of the coral reef, with its pinhole entrance, all was still as a
mirror, where three ships of different sizes lay at anchor, the whole
of each beautiful machine repeated in the water under it. Within
the Roads lay the Bogue Islands; and immediately to the left of the
islands, in the low land at the base of the hills, was the mouth of a
small river--swampy, and (Mr. Thornton informed John) infested with
crocodiles. The children had never seen a crocodile, and hoped one
might venture as far as the town, where they presently arrived: but
none did. It was with considerable disappointment that they found they
were to go on board the barque at once; for they still hoped that round
some corner of the street a crocodile might yet appear.

The _Clorinda_ had let go her anchor in six fathoms: the water so
clear, and the light so bright, that as they drew near the reflection
suddenly disappeared, and instead they found themselves looking right
underneath her and out the other side. The refraction made her seem
as flat-bellied as a turtle, as if practically all of her were above
the surface: and the anchor on its cable seemed to stream out flatly,
like a downwards kite, twisting and twining (owing to the undulating
surface) in the writhing coral.

This was the only impression Emily retained of going on board the ship:
but the ship itself was a strange enough object, requiring all her
attention. John was the only one who could remember the journey out at
all clearly. Emily thought she could, but was really only remembering
her visualisations of what she had been told: in fact, she found that a
real ship was totally unlike the thing she thought she remembered.

By some last whim of the captain’s the shrouds were being set
up--tauter than seemed good to the sailors, who grumbled as they
strained the creaking lanyards. John did not envy them, winding away at
that handle in the hot sun: but he did envy the chap whose job it was
to dip his hand in a great pot of aromatic Stockholm tar, and work it
into the dead-eyes. He was tarred up to the elbows: and John itched to
be so too.

In a moment the children were scattered all over the ship, smelling
here, miaowing, sniffing there, like cats in a new home. Mr. and Mrs.
Thornton stood by the main companion-way, a little disconsolate at
their children’s happy preoccupation, a little regretting the lack of
proper emotional scene.

‘I think they will be happy here, Frederic,’ said Mrs. Thornton. ‘I
wish we could have afforded to send them by the steamboat: but children
find amusement even in discomfort.’

Mr. Thornton grunted.

‘I wish schools had never been invented!’ he suddenly burst out: ‘they
wouldn’t then be so indispensable!’

There was a short pause for the logic of this to cross the footlights:
then he went on:

‘I know what will happen; they’ll come away ... _mugs_! Just ordinary
little mugs, like any one else’s brats! I’m dashed if I don’t think a
hundred hurricanes would be better than that.’

Mrs. Thornton shuddered: but she continued bravely:

‘You know, I think they were getting almost _too_ devoted to us? We
have been such an unrivalled centre of their lives and thoughts. It
doesn’t do for minds developing to be completely dependent on one
person.’

Captain Marpole’s grizzled head emerged from the scuttle. A sea-dog:
clear blue eyes of a translucent trustworthiness: a merry, wrinkled,
morocco-coloured face: a rumbling voice.

‘He’s too good to be true,’ whispered Mrs. Thornton.

‘Not at all! It’s a sophism to imagine people don’t conform to type!’
barked Mr. Thornton. He felt at sixes and sevens.

Captain Marpole certainly looked the ideal Children’s Captain. He
would, Mrs. Thornton decided, be careful without being fussy--for she
was all in favour of courageous gymnastics, though glad she would not
have to witness them herself. Captain Marpole cast his eyes benignantly
over the swarming imps.

‘They’ll worship him,’ she whispered to her husband. (She meant, of
course, that he would worship them.) It was an important point, this,
of the captain: important as the personality of a headmaster.

‘So that’s the nursery, eh?’ said the captain, crushing Mrs. Thornton’s
hand. She strove to answer, but found her throat undoubtedly paralysed.
Even Mr. Thornton’s ready tongue was at a loss. He looked hard at the
captain, jerked his thumb towards the children, wrestled in his mind
with an elaborate speech, and finally enunciated in a small, unlikely
voice:

‘Smack ’em.’

Then the captain had to go about his duties: and for an hour the father
and mother sat disconsolately on the main-hatch, quite deserted. Even
when all was ready for departure it was impossible to muster the flock
for a collective good-bye.

Already the tug was fulminating in its gorge: and ashore they must go.
Emily and John had been captured, and stood talking uneasily to their
parents, as if to strangers, using only a quarter of their minds. With
a rope to be climbed dangling before his very nose, John simply did
not know how this delay was to be supported, and lapsed into complete
silence.

‘Time to go ashore, Ma’am,’ said the captain: ‘we must be off now.’

Very formally the two generations kissed each other, and said farewell.
Indeed the elders were already at the gangway before the meaning of
it all dawned in Emily’s head. She rushed after her mother, gripped
her ample flesh in two strong fists, and sobbed and wept, ‘Come too,
Mother, oh, do come too!’

Honestly, it had only occurred to her that very moment that this was a
_parting_.

‘But think what an adventure it will be,’ said Mrs. Thornton bravely:
‘much more than if I come too!--You’ll have to look after the Liddlies
just as if you were a real grown-up!’

‘But I don’t want any more adventures!’ sobbed Emily: ‘I’ve _got_ an
_Earthquake_!’

Passions were running far too high for any one to be aware how the
final separation took place. The next thing Mrs. Thornton could
remember was how tired her arm had been, after waving and waving at
that dwindling speck which bore away on the land breeze, hung awhile
stationary in the intervening calm, then won the Trade and climbed up
into the blue.

Meanwhile, at the rail stood Margaret Fernandez, who, with her little
brother Harry, was going to England by the same boat. No one had come
to see them off: and the brown nurse who was accompanying them had
gone below the moment she came on board, so as to be ill as quickly as
possible. How handsome Mr. Bas-Thornton had looked, with his English
distinction! Yet every one knew he had no money. Her set white face
was turned towards the land, her chin quivering at intervals. Slowly
the harbour disappeared: the disordered profligacy of the turbulent,
intricate mass of hills sunk lower in the sky. The occasional white
houses, and white puffs of steam and smoke from the sugar-mills,
vanished. At last the land, all palely shimmering like the bloom on
grapes, settled down into the mirror of emerald and blue.

She wondered whether the Thornton children would prove companionable,
or a nuisance. They were all younger than she was: which was a pity.


ii

On the journey back to Ferndale both father and mother were silent,
actuated by that tug of jealousy against sympathy which a strong common
emotion begets in familiar rather than passionate companions. They
were above the ordinary sentimentalities of grass-bereavement (above
choking over small shoes found in cupboards): but not above a rather
strong dose of the natural instincts of parenthood, Frederic no less
than his wife.

But when they were nearly home, Mrs. Thornton began to chuckle to
herself.

‘Funny little thing, Emily! Did you notice almost the last thing she
said? She said “I’ve got an earthquake.” She must have got it mixed up
in her silly old head with earache.’

There was a long pause: and then she remarked again:

‘John is so much the most sensitive: he was absolutely too full to
speak.’


iii

When they got home it was many days before they could bring themselves
openly to mention the children. When some reference had to be made,
they spoke round them, in an uncomfortable way, as if they had died.

But after a few weeks they had a most welcome surprise. The _Clorinda_
was calling at the Caymans, and taking the Leeward Passage: and while
riding off the Grand Cayman Emily and John wrote letters, and a vessel
bound for Kingston had taken charge of them and eventually they reached
Ferndale. It had not even occurred to either parent that this would be
possible.

This was Emily’s:

  MY DEAR PARENTS,--This ship is full of Turtles. We stopped here and
  they came out in boats. There is turtles in the saloon under the
  tables for you to put your feet on, and turtles in the passages and
  on the deck, and everywhere you go. The captain says we mustn’t fall
  overboard now because his boats are full of turtles too, with water.
  The sailors bring the others on deck every day to have a wash and
  when you stand them up they look just as if they had pinafores on.
  They make such a funny sighing and groaning in the night, at first
  I thought it was everybody being ill, but you get used to it, it is
  just like people being ill.--Your loving daughter,
                                                                  EMILY.

And John’s:

  MY DEAREST PARENTS,--The captain’s son Henry is a wonderful chap,
  he goes up the rigging with his hands alone, he is ever so strong.
  He can turn round under a bellying pin without touching the deck, I
  can’t but I hang from the ratlines by my heels which the sailors say
  is very brave, but they don’t like Emily doing it, funny. I hope you
  are both in excellent health, one of the sailors has a monkey but its
  tail is Sore.--Your affectionate Son,
                                                                   JOHN.

That was the last news they could expect for many months. The
_Clorinda_ was not touching anywhere else. It gave Mrs. Thornton a cold
feeling in the stomach to measure just _how_ long. But she argued,
logically enough, that the time must come to an end, all time does:
there is nothing so inexorable as a ship, plodding away, plodding
away, all over the place, till at last it quite certainly reaches that
small speck on the map which all the time it had intended to reach.
Philosophically speaking, a ship in its port of departure is just as
much in its port of arrival: two point-events differing in time and
place, but not in degree of reality. _Ergo_, that first letter from
England was as good as written, only not quite ... legible yet. And
the same applied to seeing them. (But here one must stop, for the same
argument applied to old age and death, it wouldn’t do.)

Yet, a bare fortnight after the arrival of this first budget, still
another letter arrived, from Havana. The _Clorinda_ had put in there
unexpectedly, it appeared: the letter was from Captain Marpole.

‘What a dear man he is,’ said Alice. ‘He must have known how anxious we
would be for every scrap of news.’

Captain Marpole’s letter was not so terse and vivid as the children’s
had been: still, for the news it contained, I give it in full:

                                                         HAVANA DE CUBA.

  HONOURED SIR AND MADAM,--I hasten to write to you to relieve you of
  any uncertainty!

  After leaving the Caymans we stood for the Leeward Passage, and
  sighted the Isle of Pines and False Cape on the morning of the 19th
  and Cape S. Antonio in the evening, but were prevented from rounding
  the same by a true Norther, the first of the season, on the 22nd,
  however, the wind coming round sufficiently we rounded the cape in
  a lively fashion and stood N½E. well away from the Coloradoes which
  are a dangerous reef lying off this part of the Cuban coast. At six
  o’clock on the morning of the 23rd there being light airs only I
  sighted three sail in the North-East, evidently merchantmen bound on
  the same course as ourselves, at the same time a schooner of similar
  character was observed standing out towards us from the direction
  of Black Key, and I pointed her out to my mate just before going
  below, having the wind of us he was within hailing distance by ten
  in the morning, judge then of our astonishment when he rudely opened
  ten or twelve disguised gun-ports and unmasked a whole broadside
  of artillery trained upon us, ordering us at the same time in the
  most peremptory manner to heave-to or he would sink us instanter.
  There was nothing to do but to comply although considering the
  friendly relations at present existing between the English and all
  other governments my mate was quite at a loss to account for his
  action, and imagined it due to a mistake which would be speedily
  explained, we were immediately boarded by about fifty or seventy
  ruffians of the worst Spanish type, armed with knives and cutlasses,
  who took possession of the ship and confined me in my cabin and my
  mate and crew forward while they ransacked the vessel committing
  every possible excess broaching rum-casks and breaking the necks
  off wine-bottles and soon a great number of them were lying about
  the deck in an intoxicated condition, their leader then informed
  me he was aware I had a considerable sum in specie on board and
  used _every possible threat which villainy could devise_ to make
  me disclose its hiding-place, it was useless for me to assure him
  that beyond the fifty or so pounds they had already discovered I
  carried none, he grew even more insistent in his demands, declaring
  that his information was certain, tearing down the panelling in my
  cabin in his search. He carried off my instruments, my clothes, and
  all my personal possessions, even taking from me the poor Locket in
  which I was used to carry the portrait of my Wife, and no appeal to
  his sensibility, tho’ I shed tears, would make him return this to
  him worthless object, he also tore down and carried away the cabin
  bell-pulls, which could be of no possible use to him and was an act
  of the most open _piracy_, at length, seeing I was obdurate, he
  threatened to blow up the ship _and all in it_ if I would not yield,
  he prepared the train and would have proceeded to carry out this
  devilish threat if I had not in this last extremity, consented.

  I come now to the latter part of my tale. The children had taken
  refuge in the deck-house and had been up to now free from harm,
  except for a cuff or two and the Degrading Sights they must have
  witnessed, but no sooner was the specie some five thousand pounds in
  all mostly my private property and most of our cargo (chiefly rum
  sugar coffee and arrowroot) removed to the schooner than her captain,
  in sheer infamous wantonness, had them all brought out from their
  refuge your own little ones and the two Fernandez children who were
  also on board and murdered them, every one. That anything so wicked
  should look like a man I should not have believed, had I been told,
  tho’ I have lived long and seen all kinds of men, I think he is mad:
  indeed I am sure of it; and I take Oath that he shall be brought
  to at least that tithe of justice which is in Human hands, for two
  days we drifted about in a helpless condition, for our rigging had
  all been cut, and at last fell in with an American man-of-war, who
  gave us some assistance, and would have proceeded in pursuit of the
  miscreants himself had he not most explicit orders to elsewhere. I
  then put in to the port of Havana, where I informed the correspondent
  of Lloyds, the government, and the representative of the _Times_
  newspaper, and take the opportunity of writing you this melancholy
  letter before proceeding to England.

  There is one point on which you will still feel some anxiety,
  considering the sex of some of the poor innocents, and on which I am
  glad to be able to set your minds at rest, the children were taken
  onto the other vessel in the evening and I am glad to say there done
  to death _immediately_, and their little bodies cast into the sea, as
  I saw with great relief with my own eyes. There was no time for what
  you might fear to have occurred, and this consolation I am glad to be
  able to give you.--I have the honour to be,

                                      Your obedient servant,
                                                     JAS. MARPOLE,
                                              Master, barque _Clorinda_.




_Chapter 3_


The passage from Montego Bay to the Caymans, where the children had
written their letters, is only a matter of a few hours: indeed, in
clear weather one can look right across from Jamaica to the peak of
Turquino in Cuba.

There is no harbour; and the anchorage, owing to the reefs and ledges,
is difficult. The _Clorinda_ brought up off the Grand Cayman, the
look-out man in the chains feeling his way to a white, sandy patch of
bottom which affords the only safe resting-place there, and causing the
anchor to be let go to windward of it. Luckily, the weather was fine.

The island, a longish one at the western end of the group, is low,
and covered with palms. Presently a succession of boats brought out
a quantity of turtles, as Emily described. The natives also brought
parrots to sell to the sailors: but failed to dispose of many.

At last, however, the uncomfortable Caymans were left behind, and
they set their course towards the Isle of Pines, a large island in a
gulf of the Cuban coast. One of the sailors, called Curtis, had once
been wrecked there, and was full of stories about it. It is a very
unpleasant place; sparsely inhabited, and covered with labyrinthine
woods. The only food available is a kind of tree. There is also a
species of bean which looks tempting: but it is deadly poison. The
crocodiles, Curtis said, were so fierce they chased him and his
companions into trees: the only way to escape from them was to throw
them your cap to worry: or if you were bold, to disable them with a
blow of a stick on the loins. There were also a great many snakes,
including a kind of boa.

The current off the Isle of Pines sets strongly to the east: so
the _Clorinda_ kept close inshore, to cheat it. They passed Cape
Corrientes--looking, when first sighted, like two hummocks in the
sea: they passed Holandes Point, known as False C. Antonio: but were
prevented for some time, as Captain Marpole told in his letter, from
rounding the true one. For to attempt C. Antonio in a Norther is to
waste your labour.

They lay-to in sight of that long, low, rocky, treeless promontory
in which the great island of Cuba terminates, and waited. They were
so close that the fisherman’s hut on its southern side was clearly
discernible.

For the children, those first few days at sea had flashed by like a
kind of prolonged circus. There is no machine invented for sober
purposes so well adapted also to play as the rigging of a ship: and
the kindly captain, as Mrs. Thornton had divined, was willing to give
them a lot of freedom. First came the climbing of a few rungs of the
ratlines in a sailor’s charge: higher each time, till John attained a
gingerly touching of the yard: then hugged it: then straddled it. Soon,
running up the ratlines and prancing on the yard (as if it were a mere
table-top) had no further thrill for John or Emily either. (To go out
on the yard was not allowed.)

But when the ratlines had palled, the most lasting joy undoubtedly
lay in that network of foot-ropes and chains and stays which spreads
out under and on each side of the bowsprit. Here, familiarity only
bred content. Here, in fine weather, one could climb or be still:
stand, sit, hang, swing, or lie: now this end up, now that: and all
with the cream of the blue sea being whipt up for one’s own especial
pleasure, almost within touching distance: and the big white wooden
lady (Clorinda herself), bearing the whole vessel so lightly on her
back, her knees in the hubble-bubble, her cracks almost filled up
with so much painting, vaster than any living lady, as a constant and
unannoying companion.

In the midst there was a kind of spear, its haft set against the
under-side of the bowsprit, its point perpendicularly down towards
the water--the dolphin-striker. Here it was that the old monkey (who
had the Sore tail) loved to hang, by the mere stub which was all a
devouring cancer had left him, chattering to the water. He took no
notice of the children, nor they of him: but both parties grew attached
to each other, for all that.

--How small the children all looked, on a ship, when you saw them
beside the sailors! It was as if they were a different order of beings!
Yet they were living creatures just the same, full of promise.

_John_, with his downy, freckled face, and general round
energeticalness.

_Emily_, with her huge palm-leaf hat, and colourless cotton frock tight
over her minute impish erect body: her thin, almost expressionless
face: her dark grey eyes contracted to escape the blaze, yet shining
as it were in spite of themselves: and her really beautiful lips, that
looked almost as if they were sculptured.

_Margaret Fernandez_, taller (as midgets go: she was just thirteen),
with her square white face and tangled hair, her elaboratish clothes.

Her little brother _Harry_, by some throw-back for all the world like a
manikin Spaniard.

And the smaller Thorntons: _Edward_, mouse-coloured, with a general
mousy (but pleasing) expression: _Rachel_, with tight short gold curls
and a fat pink face (John’s colouring watered down): and last of all
_Laura_, a queer mite of three with heavy dark eyebrows, and blue eyes,
a big head-top and a receding chin--as if the Procreative Spirit was
getting a little hysterical by the time it reached her. A silver-age
conception, Laura’s, decidedly.

When the Norther blew itself out, it soon fell away almost dead calm.
The morning they finally rounded Cape San Antonio was hot, blazing hot.
But it is never stuffy at sea: there is only this disadvantage, that
while on land a shady hat protects you from the sun, at sea nothing can
protect you from that second sun which is mirrored upwards from the
water, strikes under all defences, and burns the unseasoned skin from
all your under-sides. Poor John! His throat and chin were a blistered
red.

From the point itself there is a whitish bank in two fathoms, bowed
from north to north-east. The outer side is clean and steep-to, and
in fine weather one can steer along it by eye. It ends in Black Key,
a rock standing out of the water like a ship’s hull. Beyond that
lies a channel, very foul and difficult to navigate: and beyond that
again the Coloradoes Reef begins, the first of a long chain of reefs
following the coast in a north-easterly direction as far as Honde Bay,
two-thirds the way to Havana. Within the reefs lies the intricate Canal
de Guaniguanico, of which this channel is the westernmost outlet, with
its own rather dubious little ports. But ocean traffic, needless to
say, shuns the whole box of tricks: and the _Clorinda_ advisedly stood
well away to the northward, keeping her course at a gentle amble for
the open Atlantic.

John was sitting outside the galley with the sailor called Curtis, who
was instructing him in the neat mystery of a Turk’s-head. Young Henry
Marpole was steering. Emily was messing around--not talking, just being
by him.

As for the other sailors, they were all congregated in a ring, up in
the bows, so that one saw nothing but their backs. But every now and
then a general guffaw, and a sudden surging of the whole group, showed
they were up to something or other.

John presently tiptoed forward, to see what it might be. He thrust his
bullet-head among their legs, and worked his way in till he had as good
a view as the earliest comer.

He found they had got the old monkey, and were filling him up with
rum. First they gave him biscuit soaked in it: then they dipped rags
in a pannikin of the stuff, and squeezed them into his mouth. Then
they tried to make him drink direct: but that he would not do--it only
wasted a lot of spirit.

John felt a vague horror at all this: though of course he did not guess
the purpose behind it.

The poor brute shivered and chattered, rolled his eyes, spluttered.
I suppose it must have been an excruciatingly funny sight. Every now
and then he would seem altogether overcome by the spirit. Then one of
them would lay him on the top of an old beef barrel--but hey presto, he
would be up like lightning, trying to streak through the air over their
heads. But he was no bird: they caught him each time, and set to work
to dope him again.

As for John, he could no more have left the scene now than Jacko the
monkey could.

It was astonishing what a lot of spirit the wizened little brute could
absorb. He was drunk, of course: hopelessly, blindly, madly drunk. But
he was not paralytic, not even somnolent: and it seemed as if nothing
could overcome him. So at last they gave up the attempt. They fetched
a wooden box, and cut a notch in the edge. Then they put him on the
barrel-top, and clapped the box over him, and after much manœuvring his
gangrenous tail was made to come out through the notch. Anaesthetised
or not, the operation on him was to proceed. John stared, transfixed,
at that obscene wriggling stump which was all one could see of the
animal: and out of the corner of his eye he could see at the same time
the uproarious operators, the tar-stained knife.

But the moment the blade touched flesh, with an awful screech the
mommet contrived to fling off his cage--leapt on the surgeon’s
head--leapt from there high in the air--caught the forestay--and in a
twinkling was away and up high in the fore-rigging.

Then began the hue and cry. Sixteen men flinging about in lofty
acrobatics, all to catch one poor old drunk monkey. For he was drunk
as a lord, and sick as a cat. His course varied between wild and
hair-raising leaps (a sort of inspired gymnastics), and doleful
incompetent reelings on a taut rope which threatened at every moment to
catapult him into the sea. But even so they could never quite catch him.

No wonder that all the children, now, stood open-mouthed and open-eyed
on the deck beneath in the sun till their necks nearly broke--_such_ a
Free Fun Fair and Circus!

And no wonder that on that passenger-schooner which Marpole, before
going below, had sighted drifting towards them from the direction
of the Black Key channel, the ladies had left the shade of the
awning and were crowding at the rail, parasols twirling, lorgnettes
and opera-glasses in action, all twittering like a cage of linnets.
Just too far off to distinguish the tiny quarry, they might well
have wondered what sort of a bedlam-vessel of sea-acrobats the light
easterly air was bearing them down upon.

They were so interested that presently a boat was hoisted out, and the
ladies--and some gentlemen as well--crowded into it.

Poor little Jacko missed his hold at last: fell plump on the deck
and broke his neck. That was the end of him--and of the hunt too,
of course. The aerial ballet was over, in its middle, with no final
tableau. The sailors began, in twos and threes, to slide to the deck.

But the visitors were already on board.

That is how the _Clorinda_ really was taken. There was no display of
artillery--but then, Captain Marpole could hardly know this, seeing he
was below in his bunk at the time. Henry was steering by that sixth
sense which only comes into operation when the other five are asleep.
The mate and crew had been so intent on what they were doing that the
Flying Dutchman himself might have laid alongside, for all they cared.


ii

Indeed, the whole manœuvre was executed so quietly that Captain Marpole
never even woke--incredible though this will seem to a seaman. But
then, Marpole had begun life as a successful coal-merchant.

The mate and crew were bundled into the fo’c’sle (the Fox-hole, the
children thought it was called), and confined there, the scuttle being
secured with a couple of nails.

The children themselves were shepherded, as related, into the
deck-house, where the chairs, and perfectly useless pieces of old rope,
and broken tools, and dried-up paint-pots were kept, without taking
alarm. But the door was immediately shut on them. They had to wait for
hours and hours before anything else happened--nearly all day, in fact:
and they got very bored, and rather cross.

The actual number of the men who had effected the capture cannot
have been more than eight or nine, most of them ‘women’ at that, and
not armed--at least with any visible weapon. But a second boatload
soon followed them from the schooner. These, for form’s sake, were
armed with muskets. But there was no possible resistance to fear. Two
long nails through the scuttle can secure any number of men pretty
effectually.

With this second boatload came both the captain and the mate. The
former was a clumsy great fellow, with a sad, silly face. He was
bulky; yet so ill-proportioned one got no impression of power. He was
modestly dressed in a drab shore-going suit: he was newly shaven,
and his sparse hair was pomaded so that it lay in a few dark ribbons
across his baldish head-top. But all this shore-decency of appearance
only accentuated his big splodgy brown hands, stained and scarred and
corned with his calling. Moreover, instead of boots he wore a pair of
gigantic heel-less slippers in the Moorish manner, which he must have
sliced with a knife out of some pair of dead sea-boots. Even his great
spreading feet could hardly keep them on, so that he was obliged to
walk at the slowest of shuffles, flop-flop along the deck. He stooped,
as if always afraid of banging his head on something; and carried the
backs of his hands forward, like an orang-outang.

Meanwhile the men set to work methodically but very quietly to remove
the wedges that held the battens of the hatches, getting ready to haul
up the cargo.

Their leader took several turns up and down the deck before he seemed
able to make up his mind to the interview: then lowered himself into
Marpole’s cabin, followed by his mate.

This mate was a small man: very fair, and intelligent-looking beside
his chief. He was almost dapper, in a quiet way, in his dress.

They found Captain Marpole even now only half awake: and the stranger
stood for a moment in silence, nervously twiddling his cap in his
hands. When he spoke at last, it was with a soft German accent:

‘Excuse me,’ he began, ‘but would you have the goodness to lend me a
few stores?’

Captain Marpole stared in astonishment, first at him and then at
the much be-painted faces of the ‘ladies’ pressed against his cabin
skylight.

‘Who the devil are you?’ he contrived to ask at last.

‘I hold a commission in the Columbian navy,’ the stranger explained:
‘and I am in need of a few stores.’

(Meanwhile his men had the hatches off, and were preparing to help
themselves to everything in the ship.)

Marpole looked him up and down. It was barely conceivable that even the
Columbian navy should have such a figure of an officer. Then his eye
wandered back to the skylight:

‘If you call yourself a man-of-war, sir, who in Heaven’s name are
_those_?’ As he pointed, the smirking faces hastily retreated.

The stranger blushed.

‘They are rather difficult to explain,’ he admitted ingenuously.

‘If you had said _Turkish_ navy, that would have been more
reasonable-sounding!’ said Marpole.

But the stranger did not seem to take the joke. He stood, silent, in a
characteristic attitude: rocking himself from foot to foot, and rubbing
his cheek on his shoulder.

Suddenly Marpole’s ear caught the muffled racketing forward. Almost
at the same time a bump that shivered the whole barque told that the
schooner had been laid alongside.

‘What’s that?’ he exclaimed. ‘Is there some one in my hold?’

‘Stores ...’ mumbled the stranger.

Marpole up to now had lain growling in his bunk like a dog in its
kennel. Now for the first time realising that something serious was
afoot he flung himself out and made for the companion-way. The little
silent fair man tripped him up, and he fell against the table.

‘You had much better stay here, yes?’ said the big man. ‘My fellows
shall keep a tally, you shall be paid in full for everything we take.’

The eyes of the marine coal-merchant gleamed momentarily:

‘You’ll have to pay for this outrage to a pretty tune!’ he growled.

‘I will pay you,’ said the stranger, with a sudden magnificence in his
voice, ‘at the very least five thousand pounds!’

Marpole stared in astonishment.

‘I will write you an order on the Columbian government for that
amount,’ the other went on.

Marpole thumped the table, almost speechless:

‘D’you think I believe that cock-and-bull story?’ he thundered.

Captain Jonsen made no protest.

‘Do you realise that you are technically guilty of _piracy_, making a
forced requisition on a British ship like this, even if you pay every
farthing?’

Still Jonsen made no reply: though the bored expression of his mate was
lit up for a moment by a smile.

‘You’ll pay me in _cash_!’ Marpole concluded. Then he went off on a
fresh tack: ‘Though how the devil you got on board without being called
beats me!--Where’s my mate?’

Jonsen began in a toneless voice, as if by rote: ‘I will write you an
order for five thousand pounds: three thousand for the stores, and two
thousand you will give me in money.’

‘We know you’ve got specie on board,’ interjected the little fair mate,
speaking for the first time.

‘Our information is certain!’ declared Jonsen.

Marpole at last went white and began to sweat. It took even Fear an
extraordinarily long time to penetrate his thick skull. But he denied
that he had any treasure on board.

‘Is that your answer?’ said Jonsen. He drew a heavy pistol from his
side pocket. ‘If you do not tell us the truth, your life shall pay the
forfeit.’ His voice was peculiarly gentle, and mechanical, as if he did
not attach much meaning to what he said. ‘Do not expect mercy, for this
is my profession, and in it I am inured to blood.’

A frightful squawking from the deck above told Marpole that his
chickens were being moved to new quarters.

In an agony of feeling Marpole told him that he had a wife and
children, who would be left destitute if his life was taken.

Jonsen, with rather a perplexed look on his face, put the gun back in
his pocket, and the two of them began to search for themselves, at the
same time stripping the saloon and cabins of everything they contained:
firearms, wearing apparel, the bedclothes, and even (as Marpole with a
rare touch of accuracy mentioned in his report) the bell-pulls.

Overhead there was a continuous bumping: the rolling of casks, cases,
etc.

‘Remember,’ Jonsen went on over his shoulder while he searched, ‘money
cannot recall life, nor in the least avail you when you are dead.
If you regard your life in the least, at once acquaint me with the
hiding-place, and your life shall be safe.’

Marpole’s only reply was again to invoke the thought of his wife
and children (he was, as a matter of fact, a widower: and his only
relative, a niece, would be the better off by his death to the tune of
some ten thousand pounds).

But this reiteration seemed to give the mate an idea: and he began to
talk to his chief rapidly in a language Marpole had never even heard.
For a moment a curious glint came into Jonsen’s eye: but soon he was
chuckling in the sentimentalest manner, and rubbing his hands.

The mate went on deck to prepare things.

Marpole had no inkling of what was afoot. The mate went on deck to
prepare his plan, whatever it was: and Jonsen busied himself with a
last futile search for the hiding-place, in silence.

Presently the mate shouted down to him, and he ordered Marpole on deck.

Poor Marpole groaned. Unloading cargo is inclined to be a messy
business anyway: but these visitors had been none too careful. There is
no smell in the world worse than when molasses and bilge-water marry:
now it was let loose like ten thousand devils. His heart was almost
broken when he saw the havoc that had been made with the cargo: broken
cases, casks, bottles, all about the deck: everything in the greatest
confusion: tarpaulins cut to pieces: hatches broken.

From the deck-house came the piercing voice of Laura:

‘_I want to come out!_’

The Spanish ladies seemed to have returned to the schooner. His own men
were shut up in the fo’c’sle. It was obvious where all the children
were, for Laura was not the only vociferator. But the only persons to
be seen were six members of the visiting crew, who stood in a line,
facing the deck-house, a musket apiece.

It was the little mate who now took charge of the situation:

‘Where is your specie hid, Captain?’

The musketeers having their backs to him, ‘Go to the Devil!’ replied
Marpole.

A startling volley rang out: six neat holes were punctured in the top
of the deck-house.

‘Hi! Steady there, what are you doing?’ John cried out indignantly from
within.

‘If you refuse to tell us, next time their aim will be a foot lower.’

‘You fiends!’ cried Marpole.

‘Will you tell me?’

‘_No!_’

‘_Fire!_’

The second row of holes can only have missed the taller children by a
few inches.

There was a moment’s silence: then a sudden wild shriek from within the
deck-house. It was so terrified a sound not their own mothers could
have told which throat it came from. One only, though.

The stranger-captain had been slouching about in an agitated way: but
at that shriek he turned on Marpole, his face purple with a sudden fury:

‘_Now_ will you say?’

But Marpole was now completely master of himself. He did not hesitate:

‘NO!’

‘Next time he gives the order it will be to shoot right through their
little bodies!’

So that was what Marpole had meant in his letter by ‘_every possible
threat which villainy could devise_’! But even by this he was not to be
daunted:

‘No, I tell you!’

Heroic obstinacy! But instead of giving the fatal order, Jonsen lifted
a paw like a bear’s, and banged Marpole’s jaw with it. The latter fell
to the deck, stunned.

It was then they took the children out of the deck-house.

They were not really much frightened; except Margaret, who did seem to
be taking it all to heart rather. Being shot at is so unlike what one
expects it to be that one can hardly connect the two ideas enough to
have the appropriate emotions, the first few times. It is not half so
startling as some one jumping out on you with a ‘_Boo!_’ in the dark,
for instance. The boys were crying a little: the girls were hot and
cross and hungry.

‘What were you doing?’ Rachel asked brightly of one of the firing-party.

But only the captain and the mate could speak English. The latter,
ignoring Rachel’s question, explained that they were all to go on board
the schooner--‘to have some supper,’ he said.

He had all a sailor’s reassuring charm of manner. So under the charge
of two Spanish seamen they were helped over the bulwarks onto the
smaller vessel, which was just casting off.

There the strange sailors broke open a whole case of crystallised
fruits, on which they might turn the edge of their long appetites as
much as they would.

       *       *       *       *       *

When poor stunned Captain Marpole came to his senses, it was to
find himself tied to the mainmast. Several handfuls of shavings and
splintered wood were piled round his feet, and Jonsen was sprinkling
them plentifully with gun-powder--though not perhaps enough, it is
true, to ‘blow up the ship and all in it.’

The small fair mate stood at hand in the gathering dusk with a lighted
torch, ready to fire the pyre.

What could a man do in such straits? At that dreadful moment the
gallant old fellow had to admit that he was beaten at last. He told
them where his freight-money--some £900--was hidden: and they let him
go.

Just as the darkness closed in, the last of the pirates returned to
their ship. Not a sound was to be heard of the children: but Marpole
guessed that they had been taken there too.

Before releasing his crew he lit a lantern and began a sort of
inventory of what was gone. It was heart-breaking enough: besides the
cargo, all his spare sails, cordage, provisions, guns, paint, powder:
all his wearing apparel, and that of his mate: all nautical instruments
gone, cabin stores--the saloon in fact gutted of everything, not even a
knife or spoon left, tea or sugar, nor a second shirt to his back left.
Only the children’s luggage was left untouched: and the turtles. Their
melancholy sighing was the sole sound to be heard.

But it was almost as heart-breaking to see what the pirates had _left_:
anything damaged, such worn-out and useless gear as he had been only
waiting for some ‘storm’ to wash overboard--not one of these eyesores
was missing.

What, in Heaven’s name, was the use of an insurance policy? He began to
collect the rubbish himself and dump it over the side.

But Captain Jonsen saw him:

‘Hi!’ he shouted: ‘You dirty svindler! I will write to Lloyds and
expose you! I will write myself!’ He was horribly shocked at the
other’s dishonesty.

So Marpole had to give it up, for the time at any rate: took a
spike and broke open the fo’c’sle: and as well as the sailors found
Margaret’s brown nurse. She had hidden there the whole day: probably
from motives of fright.


iii

You would have thought that supper on the schooner that night would
have been a hilarious affair. But, somehow, it was _manqué_.

A prize of such value had naturally put the crew in the best of
humours: and a meal which consisted mainly of crystallised fruit,
followed as an afterthought by bread and chopped onions served in one
enormous communal bowl, eaten on the open deck under the stars, after
bed-time, should have done the same by the children. But nevertheless
both parties were seized by a sudden, overpowering, and most unexpected
fit of shyness. Consequently no state banquet was ever so formal, or so
boring.

I suppose it was the lack of a common language which first generated
the infection. The Spanish sailors, used enough to this difficulty,
grinned, pointed, and bobbed: but the children retired into a display
of good manners which it would certainly have surprised their parents
to see. Whereon the sailors became equally formal: and one poor
monkeyfied little fellow who by nature belched continually was so
be-nudged and be-winked by his companions, and so covered in confusion
of his own accord, that presently he went away to eat by himself.
Even then, so silent was this revel, he could still be heard faintly
belching, half the ship’s length away.

Perhaps it would have gone better if the captain and mate had been
there, with their English. But they were too busy, looking over the
personal belongings they had brought from the barque, sorting out by
the light of a lantern anything too easily identifiable and reluctantly
committing it to the sea.

It was at the loud splashes made by a couple of empty trunks, stamped
in large letters JAS. MARPOLE, that a roar of unassumed indignation
arose from the neighbouring barque. The two paused in their work,
astonished: why should a crew already spoiled of all they possessed
take it so hardly when one heaved a couple of old worthless trunks in
the sea?

It was inexplicable.

They continued their task, taking no further notice of the _Clorinda_.

Once supper was over, the social situation became even more awkward.
The children stood about, not knowing what to do with their hands, or
even their legs: unable to talk to their hosts, and feeling it would be
rude to talk to each other, wishing badly that it was time to leave. If
only it had been light they could have been happy enough exploring: but
in the darkness there was nothing to do, nothing whatever.

The sailors soon found occupations of their own: and the captain and
mate, as I have said, were already busy.

Once the sorting was over, however, there was nothing for Jonsen to do
except return the children to the barque, and get well clear while the
breeze and the darkness lasted.

But on hearing those splashes, Marpole’s lively imagination had
interpreted them in his own way. They suggested that there was now no
reason to wait: indeed, every reason to be gone.

I think he was quite honestly misled.

It was after all but a small slip to say he had ‘seen with his own
eyes’ what he had heard with his own ears: and the intention was pious.

He set his men feverishly to work: and when Captain Jonsen looked his
way again, the _Clorinda_, with every stitch spread in the starlight,
was already half a mile to leeward.

To pursue her, right in the track of shipping, was out of the question.
Jonsen had to content himself with staring after her through his
night-glass.


iv

Captain Jonsen set the little monkeyfied sailor, who had been so
mortified earlier in the evening, to clear the schooner’s fore-hold.
The warps and brooms and fenders it contained were all piled to one
side, and a sufficiency of bedclothes for the guests was provided from
the plunder.

But nothing could now thaw them. They clambered down the ladder and
received their blanket apiece in an uncomfortable silence. Jonsen hung
about, anxious to be helpful in this matter of getting into beds which
were not there, but not knowing how to set about it. So he gave it
up at last, and swung himself up through the fore-hatch, talking to
himself.

The last they saw of him was his fantastic slippers, hanging each from
a big toe, outlined against the stars: but it never entered their heads
to laugh.

Once, however, the familiar comfort of a blanket under their chins had
begun to have its effect, and they were obviously quite alone, a little
life did begin to return into these dumb statues.

The darkness was profound, only accentuated by the starlit square
of the open hatchway. First the long silence was broken by some one
turning over, almost freely. Then presently:

LAURA (_in slow sepulchral tones_). I don’t like this bed.

RACHEL (_ditto_). I do.

LAURA. It’s a horrid bed; there isn’t any!

EMILY. }
       } Sh! Go to sleep!
JOHN.  }

EDWARD. I smell cockroaches.

EMILY. Sh!

EDWARD (_loudly and hopefully_). They’ll bite all our nails off,
because we haven’t washed, and our skin, and our hair, and----

LAURA. There’s a cockroach in my bed! Get out!

  (_You could hear the brute go zooming away. But Laura was already out
  too._)

EMILY. Laura! Go back to bed!

LAURA. I can’t when there’s a cockroach in it!

JOHN. Get into bed again, you little fool! He’s gone long ago!

LAURA. But I expect he has left his wife.

HARRY. They don’t have wives, they’re wives themselves.

RACHEL. Ow!--Laura, stop it!--Emily, Laura’s walking on me!

EMILY. Lau-RER!

LAURA. Well, I must walk on something!

EMILY. Go to sleep!

  (_Silence for a while._)

LAURA. I haven’t said my prayers.

EMILY. Well, say them lying down.

RACHEL. She mustn’t, that’s lazy.

JOHN. Shut up, Rachel, she must.

RACHEL. It’s wicked! You go to sleep in the middle then. People who go
to sleep in the middle ought to be damned, they ought.--Oughtn’t they?
(_Silence._) Oughtn’t they? (_Still silence._) Emily, I say, oughtn’t
they?

JOHN. NO!

RACHEL (_dreamily_). I think there’s lots more people ought to be
damned than are.

  (_Silence again._)

HARRY. Marghie.

  (_Silence._)

Marghie!

  (_Silence._)

JOHN. What’s up with Marghie? Won’t she speak?

  (_A faint sob is heard._)

HARRY. I don’t know.

  (_Another sob._)

JOHN. Is she often like this?

HARRY. She’s an awful ass sometimes.

JOHN. Marghie, what’s up?

MARGARET (_miserably_). Let me alone!

RACHEL. I believe she’s frightened! (_Chants tauntingly_) Marghie’s got
the bogies, the bogies, the bogies!

MARGARET (_sobbing out loud_). _Oh_ you little fools!

JOHN. Well, what’s the matter with you then?

MARGARET (_after a pause_). I’m older than any of you.

HARRY. Well, _that’s_ a funny reason to be frightened!

MARGARET. It isn’t.

HARRY. It is!

MARGARET (_warming to the argument_). It isn’t, I tell you!

HARRY. _It is!_

MARGARET (_smugly_). That’s simply because you’re all too young to
know....

JOHN. Oh, hit her, Emily!

EMILY (_sleepily_). Hit her yourself.

HARRY. But, Marghie, why are we here?

  (_No answer._)

Emily, why are we here?

EMILY (_indifferently_). I don’t know. I expect they just wanted to
change us.

HARRY. I expect so. But they never _told_ us we were going to be
changed.

EMILY. Grown-ups never _do_ tell us things.




_Chapter 4_


The children all slept late, and all woke at the same moment as if
by clockwork. They sat up, and yawned uniformly, and stretched the
stiffness out of their legs and backs (they were lying on solid wood,
remember).

The schooner was steady, and people tramping about the deck. The
main-hold and fore-hold were all one: and from where they were they
could see the main-hatch had been opened. The captain appeared
through it legs first, and dropped onto the higgledy-piggledy of the
_Clorinda’s_ cargo.

For some time they simply stared at him. He looked uneasy, and was
talking to himself as he tapped now this case with his pencil, now
that; and presently shouted rather fiercely to people on deck.

‘All right, all right,’ came from above the injured voice of the mate.
‘There’s no such hurry as all that.’

On which the captain’s mutterings to himself swelled, as if ten people
were conversing at once in his chest.

‘May we get up yet?’ asked Rachel.

Captain Jonsen spun round--he had forgotten their existence.

‘Eh?’

‘May we get up, please?’

‘You can go to the debble.’ He muttered this so low the children did
not hear it. But it was not lost on the mate.

‘Hey! Ey! Ey!’ he called down, reprovingly.

‘Yes! Get up! Go on deck! Here!’ The captain viciously set up a short
ladder for them to climb through the hatch.

They were greatly astonished to find the schooner was no longer at sea.
Instead, she was snugly moored against a little wooden wharf, in a
pleasant land-locked bay; with a pleasant but untidy village, of white
wooden houses with palm-leaf roofs, behind it; and the tower of a small
sandstone church emerging from the abundant greenery. On the quay were
a few well-dressed loungers, watching the preparations for unloading.
The mate was directing the labours of the crew, who were rigging the
cargo-gaff and getting ready for a hot morning’s work.

The mate nodded cheerfully to the children, but thereafter took no
notice of them, which was rather mortifying. The truth is that the man
was busy.

At the same time there emerged from somewhere aft a collection of the
oddest-looking young men. Margaret decided she had never seen such
beautiful young men before. They were slim, yet nicely rounded: and
dressed in exquisite clothes (if a trifle threadbare). But their faces!
Those beautiful olive-tinted ovals! Those large, black-ringed, soft
brown eyes, those unnaturally carmine lips! They minced across the
deck, chattering to each other in high-pitched tones, ‘twittering like
a cage of linnets ...’ and made their way on shore.

‘Who are they?’ Emily asked the captain, who had just re-emerged from
below.

‘Who are who?’ he murmured absently, without looking round. ‘Oh, those?
Fairies.’

‘_Hey! Yey! Yey!_’ cried the mate, more disapprovingly than ever.

‘_Fairies?_’ cried Emily in astonishment.

But Captain Jonsen began to blush. He went crimson from the nape of his
neck to the bald patches on the top of his head, and left.

‘He is _silly_!’ said Emily.

‘I wonder if we go onto the land yet,’ said Edward.

‘We’d better wait until we’re told, hadn’t we, Emily?’ said Harry.

‘I didn’t know England would be like this,’ said Rachel: ‘it’s very
like Jamaica.’

‘This isn’t England,’ said John, ‘you stupid!’

‘But it must be,’ said Rachel: ‘England’s where we’re going.’

‘We don’t get to England yet,’ said John: ‘it must be somewhere we’re
stopping at, like when we got all those turtles.’

‘I like stopping at places,’ said Laura.

‘I don’t,’ said Rachel.

‘I do, though,’ pursued Laura.

‘Where are those young men gone?’ Margaret asked the mate. ‘Are they
coming back?’

‘They’ll just come back to be paid, after we’ve sold the cargo,’ he
answered.

‘Then they’re not living on the ship?’ she pursued.

‘No, we hired them from Havana.’

‘But what for?’

He looked at her in surprise: ‘Why, those are the “ladies” we had on
board, to look like passengers--You didn’t think they were real ladies,
did you?’

‘What, were they dressed up?’ asked Emily excitedly: ‘What fun!’

‘I like dressing up,’ said Laura.

‘I don’t,’ said Rachel, ‘I think it’s babyish.’

‘_I_ thought they were real ladies,’ admitted Emily.

‘We’re a respectable ship’s crew, we are,’ said the mate, a trifle
stiffly--and without too good logic, when you come to think of it.
‘Here, you go on shore and amuse yourselves.’

So the children went ashore, holding hands in a long row, and
promenaded the town in a formal sort of way. Laura wanted to go off by
herself, but the others would not let her: and when they returned, the
line was still unbroken. They had seen all there was to see, and no one
had taken the least notice of them (so far as they were aware), and
they wanted to start asking questions again.

It was, then, a charming little sleepy old place, in its way, this
Santa Lucia: isolated on the forgotten western end of Cuba between
Nombre de Dios and the Rio de Puercos: cut off from the open sea by
the intricate nature of the channels through the reefs and the Banks
of Isabella, channels only navigable to the practised and creeping
local coasting craft and shunned like poison by bigger traffic: on land
isolated by a hundred miles of forest from Havana.

Time was, these little ports of the Canal de Guaniguanico had been
pretty prosperous, as bases for pirates: but it was a fleeting
prosperity. There came the heroic attack of an American squadron under
Captain Allen, in 1823, on the Bay of Sejuapo, their headquarters.
From that blow (although it took many years to take full effect)
the industry never really recovered: it dwindled and dwindled, like
hand-weaving. One could make money much faster in a city like Havana,
and with less risk (if less respectably). Piracy had long since ceased
to pay, and should have been scrapped years ago: but a vocational
tradition will last on a long time after it has ceased to be economic,
in a decadent form. Now, Santa Lucia--and piracy--continued to exist
because they always had: but for no other reason. Such a haul as the
_Clorinda_ did not come once in a blue moon. Every year the amount
of land under cultivation dwindled, and the pirate schooners were
abandoned to rot against the wharves or ignominiously sold as traders.
The young men left for Havana or the United States. The maidens yawned.
The local grandees increased in dignity as their numbers and property
dwindled: an idyllic, simple-minded country community, oblivious of the
outer world and of its own approaching oblivion.

‘I don’t think I should like to live here,’ John decided, when they got
back to the ship.

Meanwhile the cargo had been unloaded onto the quay: and after the
siesta a crowd of about a hundred people gathered round, poking and
discussing. The auction was about to begin. Captain Jonsen tramped
about rather in the way of everybody, but especially annoying the mate
by shouting contrary directions every minute. The latter had a ledger,
and a number of labels with numbers on them which he was pasting onto
the various bales and packages. The sailors were building a kind of
temporary stage--the thing was to be done in style.

Every moment the crowd increased. Because they all talked Spanish it
was a pantomime to the children: like puppets acting, not like real
people moving and talking. So they discovered what a fascinating game
it is to watch foreigners, whose very simplest words mean nothing to
you, and try to guess what they are about.

Moreover, these were all such funny-looking people: they moved about
as if they were kings, and spat all the time, and smoked thin black
cigars, the blue smoke of which ascended from their enormous hats as
from censers.

At one moment there was a diversion--the crowd suddenly gaped, and
there staggered onto the stage the whole crew of the schooner carrying
a huge pair of scales: it was always on the point of being too much for
them, and running suddenly away with them in another direction.

There were quite a number of ladies in the crowd--old ones, they seemed
to the children. Some were thin and dried up, like monkeys: but most
were fat, and one was fatter than all of them and treated with the
greatest respect (perhaps for her moustache). She was the wife of the
Chief Magistrate--Señora del Illustrious Juzgado del Municipal de Santa
Lucia, to give her her title. She had a rocking-chair of suitable
strength and width, which was carried by a short squinting negro and
set in the very middle of the scene, right in front of the platform.
There she throned herself: and the negro stood behind her, holding a
violet silk sunshade over her head.

No one can doubt that she immediately became the most noticeable thing
in the picture.

She had a powerful bass voice, and when she uttered some jocundity
(as she repeatedly did), every one heard it, however much they were
chattering among themselves.

The children, as was their custom, wormed their way without any excess
of civility through the crowd and grouped themselves round her throne.

The captain either did not know, or suddenly refused to know, a single
word of Spanish: so the auctioneering devolved on the mate. The latter
mounted the stage: and with a great assumption of competence began.

But auctioneering is an art: it is as easy to write a sonnet in a
foreign tongue as to conduct a successful auction. One must have at
one’s command eloquence without a hitch: the faculty of kindling an
audience, amusing them, castigating them, converting them, till they
rattle out increments as a camp-meeting rattles out Amens: till they
totally forget the worth (and even the nature) of the lot, and begin
to take a real pride in a long run of bidding--as a champion does in a
long break at billiards.

This little Viennese had been to a good school, it is true: for he
had once resided in Wales, where one sees auctioneering in its finest
flower. In Welsh, or English, or even in his native tongue, he could
have acquitted himself fairly well: but in Spanish, just that margin of
power was lacking to him. The audience remained stern, cold, critical,
bidding grudgingly.

As if this language difficulty were not in itself enough, there sat
that overpowering old dame on her throne, distracting with her jokes
whatever vestige of attention he might otherwise have managed to arouse.

When the third lot of coffee came to be dealt with, there was even the
beginning of a rather nasty row. The children were highly scandalised:
they had never seen grown-ups being rude to one another before. The
captain had undertaken the weighing: and it was something to do with a
habit he had of leaning against the scales while he read them. Being
short-sighted, he could see the figures much more clearly like that:
but it displeased the buyers, and they had a lot to say about it.

The captain, mortified, wrung his hands, and began to answer them in
Danish. They rejoined in Spanish even more stingingly. He stumped off
in a sulk: they could all conduct his affairs without him, if they
weren’t prepared to treat him with a little consideration.

But who would be less partial? The mate, angry, maintained that to
elect one of the buyers was equally objectionable.

Thereon an earthquake began in the fat old lady, and gradually gathered
enough force to lift her onto her feet. She took John by the shoulders,
and pushed him before her to the scales. Then in a few witty, ringing
words she suggested her solution--_he_ should do the weighing.

The audience were pleased: but as soon as John understood he went very
red, and wanted to escape. The rest of the children, on the other hand,
were eaten with envy.

‘Mayn’t I help too?’ piped Rachel.

The despairing mate thought he saw just a forlorn hope in this. While
John was being instructed, he gathered the other children: and out of
the heap of miscellaneous clothing rigged them all out in a sort of
fancy dress. Then he gave them the samples to carry round, and the sale
began anew.

It had now assumed rather the character of a parochial bazaar. Even the
Vicar was present--though less well shaved than he would have been in
England, and cunninger-looking. He was one of the only buyers.

The children thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and minced and pranced and
tugged each other’s turbans. But the crowd was a Latin one, not Nordic:
and their endearing tricks failed altogether to arouse any interest.
The sale went worse than ever.

There was only one exception, and that was the important old lady.
Once her attention had been called (by her own act) to the children,
it fixed itself on one of them, on Edward. She drew him to her bosom,
like a mother in melodrama, and with her hairy mouth gave him three
resounding kisses.

Edward could no more have struggled than if caught by a boa. Moreover,
the portentous woman fascinated him, as if she had been a boa indeed.
He lay in her arms limp, self-conscious, and dejected: but without
active thought of escape.

And so the business went on: on the one hand the unheeded drone of the
mate, on the other the great creature still keeping up her witticisms,
still dominating everything: all of a sudden remembering Edward, and
giving him a couple of kisses like so many bombs: then clean forgetting
all about him: then remembering him again, and hugging him: then
dropping her salts: then nearly dropping Edward: then suddenly twisting
round to launch a dart into the crowd behind her--she was the despair
of that unhappy auctioneer, who saw lot after lot fall for a tenth of
its value, or even find no bidder at all.

Captain Jonsen, however, had his own idea of how to enliven a parochial
bazaar that is proving a frost. He went on board, and mixed several
gallons of that potion known in alcoholic circles as Hangman’s Blood
(which is compounded of rum, gin, brandy, and porter). Innocent (merely
beery) as it looks, refreshing as it tastes, it has the property of
increasing rather than allaying thirst, and so, once it has made a
breach, soon demolishes the whole fort.

This he poured out into mugs, merely remarking that it was a noted
English cordial, and gave it to the children to distribute among the
crowd.

At once the Cubans began to show more interest in them than when they
came bearing samples of arrowroot: and with their popularity their
happiness increased, and like rococo Ganymedekins and Hebelettes they
darted about the crowd, distributing the enticing poison to all who
would.

When he saw what was on foot, the mate wiped his mouth in despair.

‘_Oh_ you fool!’ he groaned.

But the captain himself was highly pleased with his ruse: kept rubbing
his hands, and grinning, and winking.

‘That’ll liven ’em, eh?’

‘Wait and see!’ was all the mate let himself say. ‘You just wait and
see!’

‘Look at Edward!’ said Emily to Margaret in a pause. ‘It’s perfectly
sickening!’

It was. The very first mug rendered the fat señora even more motherly.
Edward by now was fascinated, was in her power completely. He sat and
gazed up in her little black eyes, his own large brown ones glazed with
sentiment. He avoided her moustache, it is true: but on her cheek he
was returning her kisses earnestly. All this, of course, without the
possibility of their exchanging a single word--pure instinct. ‘With
a fork drive Nature out ...’ one would gladly have taken a fork to
Nature, on that occasion.

Meanwhile, on the rest of the crowd the liquor was having exactly the
effect the mate had foreseen. Instead of stimulating them, it dissolved
completely whatever vestiges of attention they were still giving to
the sale. He stepped down from the platform--gave it all up in despair.
For they had now broken up into little groups, which discussed and
argued their own affairs as if they were in a café. He in his turn went
on board, and shut himself in his cabin--Captain Jonsen could deal with
the mess he had made himself!

But alas! No worse host than Jonsen was ever born: he was utterly
incapable of either understanding or controlling a crowd. All he could
think of doing was plying them with more.

For the children the spectacle was an absorbing one. The whole nature
of these people, as they drank, seemed to be changing: under their very
eyes something seemed to be breaking up, like ice melting. Remember
that to them this was a pantomime: no word spoken to explain, and so
the eyes exercised a peculiar clearness.

It was rather as if the whole crowd had been immersed in water, and
something dissolved out of them while the general structure yet
remained. The tone of their voices changed, and they began to talk much
slower, to move more slowly and elaborately. The expression of their
faces became more candid, and yet more mask-like: hiding less, there
was also less to hide. Two men even began to fight: but they fought
so incompetently it was like a fight in a poetic play. Conversation,
which before had a beginning and an end, now grew shapeless and
interminable, and the women laughed a lot.

One old gentleman in most respectable clothes settled himself on the
dirty ground at full length, with his head in the shade of the throned
lady, spread a handkerchief over his face, and went to sleep: three
other middle-aged men, holding each other with one hand to establish
contact and using the other for emphasis, kept up a continuous clacking
talk, that faltered intolerably though never quite stopping--like a
very old engine.

A dog ran in and out among them all wagging its tail, but no one kicked
it. Presently it found the old gentleman who was asleep on the ground,
and began licking his ear excitedly: it had never had such a chance
before.

The old lady also had fallen asleep, a little crookedly--she might
even have slipped off her chair if her negro had not buttressed her
up. Edward got off her, and went and joined the other children rather
shamefacedly: but they would not speak to him.

Jonsen looked round him perplexedly. Why had Otto abandoned the sale,
now the crowd were all primed and ready? Probably he had some good
reason, though. He was an incomprehensible man, that mate: but clever.

The truth is that Captain Jonsen was himself a man with a very weak
head for liquor, and so he very seldom touched it, and knew little of
the subtler aspects of its effects.

He paced up and down the dusty wharf at his usual slow shuffle, his
head sunk forward in wretchedness, occasionally wringing his hands in
the naturalest way, and even whimpering. When the priest came up to him
confidentially and offered him a price for all that remained unsold he
simply shook his head and continued his shuffle.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was something a little nightmare-like in the whole scene which
riveted the children’s attention, and was very near the border of
frightening them. It was with something of a struggle that at last
Margaret said ‘Let’s go on the ship.’ So they all went on board: and
feeling a little unprotected even there, descended into the hold, which
was the safest place because they had already slept in it. They sat
down on the kelson without doing or saying much, still with a vague
apprehension, till boredom at last eliminated it.

‘Oh I _wish_ I had brought my paint-box!’ said Emily, with a sigh
fetched right up from her boots.


ii

That night, after they had all gone to bed, they saw in a half-asleep
state a lantern bobbing up and down in the open hatch. It was held by
José, the little monkeyfied one (they had already decided he was the
nicest of the crew). He was grinning winningly, and beckoning to them.

Emily was too sleepy to move, and so were Laura and Rachel: so leaving
them to lie, the others--Margaret, Edward, and John--scrambled on deck.

It was mysteriously quiet. Not a sign of the crew, but for José. In the
bright starlight the town looked unnormally beautiful: there was music
coming from one of the big houses up by the church. José conducted them
ashore and up to this house: tiptoed up to the jalousies and signed to
them to follow him.

As the light struck his face it became transfigured, so affected was he
by the opulence within.

The children craned up to the level of the windows and peered in too,
oblivious of the mosquitoes making havoc of their necks.

It was a very grand sight. This was the house of the Chief Magistrate:
and he was giving a dinner in honour of Captain Jonsen and his mate.
There he sat at the head of the table, in uniform; very stiff, yet his
little beard even stiffer than himself. His was the kind of dignity
that grows from reserve and stillness, from freezing every minute like
game which scents the hunter: while in total contrast to him there sat
his wife (the important señora who had made so much of Edward), far
more impressive than her husband, but doing it not by dignity but by
that calculated abandon and vulgarity which transcends dignity. Indeed,
her flinging about got the greater part of its effect from the very
formality of her setting.

When the children arrived at the window she must even have been
discussing the size of her own belly: for she suddenly seized the shy
hand of the mate, and made him, willy-nilly, feel it, as if to clench
an argument.

As for her husband, he did not seem to see her: nor did the servants:
she was such a very great lady.

But it was not her, it was the meal which raped José’s attention. It
was certainly an impressive one. Together on the table were tomato
soup, mountain mullet, cray-fish, a huge red-snapper, land-crabs, rice
and fried chicken, a young turkey, a small joint of goat-mutton, a wild
duck, beef steak, fried pork, a dish of wild pigeons, sweet potatoes,
yuca, wine, and guavas and cream.

It was a meal which would take a long time.

Captain Jonsen and the lady appeared to be on excellent terms: he
pressing some project on her, and she, without the least loss of
amiability, putting it on one side. What they were talking about,
of course, the children could not hear. As a matter of fact, it was
themselves. Captain Jonsen was trying to get the lady to discuss the
disposal of his impromptu nursery: the most reasonable solution being
plainly to leave them at Santa Lucia, more or less in her charge. But
she was adept at eluding the importunate. It was not till the banquet
was over that he realised he had failed to make any arrangement
whatever.

But long before this, before the dinner was ended and the dance began,
the children were tired of the peep-show. So José tiptoed away with
them, down to the back streets by the dock. Presently they came to a
mysterious door at the bottom of a staircase, with a negro standing
as if on guard. But he made no effort to stop them, and, José leading
them, they climbed several flights to a large upper room.

The air was one you could hardly push through. The place was crowded
with negroes, and a few rather smudgy whites: among whom they
recognised most of the rest of the crew of the schooner. At the far end
was the most primitive stage you ever saw: there was a cradle on it,
and a large star swung on the end of a piece of string. There was to be
a nativity-play--rather early in the season. While the Chief Magistrate
entertained the pirate captain and mate, the priest had got this up in
honour of the pirate crew.

A nativity-play, with real cattle.

The whole audience had arrived an hour early, so as to see the entry of
the cow. The children were just in time for this.

The room was in the upper part of a warehouse, which had been built,
through some freak of vanity, in the English fashion, several stories
high; and was provided with the usual large door opening onto
nothingness, with a beam-and-tackle over it. Many the load of gold-dust
and arrowroot which must have once been hoisted into it: now, like most
of the others at Santa Lucia, it had long since ceased to be used.

But to-day a new rope had been rove through the block: and a broad
belly-band put round the waist of the priest’s protesting old cow.

Margaret and Edward lingered timidly near the top of the stairs; but
John, putting his head down and burrowing like a mole, was not content
till he had reached the open doorway. There he stood looking out into
the darkness: where he saw a slowly revolving cow treading the air a
yard from the sill, while at each revolution a negro reached out to
the utmost limit of balance, trying to catch her by the tail and draw
her to shore.

John, in his excitement, leaned out too far. He lost his balance and
fell clear to the ground, forty feet, right on his head.

José gave a cry of alarm, sprang onto the cow’s back, and was instantly
lowered away--just as if the cinema had already been invented. He must
have looked very comic. But what was going on inside him the while it
is difficult to know. Such a responsibility does not often fall on an
old sailor; and he would probably feel it all the more for that reason.
As for the crowd beneath, they made no attempt to touch the body till
José had completed his descent: they stood back and let him have a good
look at it, and shake it, and so on. But the neck was quite plainly
broken.

Margaret and Edward, however, had not any clear idea of what was going
on, since they had not actually seen John fall. So they were rather
annoyed when two of the schooner’s crew appeared and insisted on their
coming back to bed at once. They wanted to know where John was: but
even more they wanted to know where José was, and why they weren’t to
be allowed to stay. However they obeyed, in the impossibility of asking
questions, and started back to bed.

Just as they were about to go on board the schooner, they heard a huge
report on their left, like a cannon. They turned; and looking past
the quiet, silver town, with its palm-groves, to the hills behind,
they saw a large ball of fire, travelling at a tremendous rate. It was
quite close to the ground: and not very far off either--just beyond the
Church. It left a wake of the most brilliant blue, green, and purple
blobs of light. For a while it hovered: then it burst, and the air was
shortly charged with a strong sulphurous smell.

They were all frightened, the sailors even more than the children, and
hastened on board.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the small hours, Edward suddenly called Emily in his sleep. She woke
up: ‘What is it?’

‘It’s rather cow-catching, isn’t it?’ he asked anxiously, his eyes
tight shut.

‘What’s the matter?’

He did not answer, so she roused him--or thought she had.

‘I only wanted to see if you were a _real_ Cow-catching Zomfanelia,’ he
explained in a kind voice: and was immediately deep asleep again.

In the morning they might easily have thought the whole thing a
dream--if John’s bed had not been so puzzlingly empty.

Yet, as if by some mute flash of understanding, no one commented
on his absence. No one questioned Margaret, and she offered no
information. Neither then nor thereafter was his name ever mentioned by
anybody: and if you had known the children intimately you would never
have guessed from _them_ that he had ever existed.


iii

The children’s only enemy on board the schooner (which presently put to
sea again, with them still on board) was the big white pig. (There was
a little black fellow, too.)

He was a pig with no decision of mind. He could never choose a place
to lie for himself; but was so ready to follow any one else’s opinion,
that whatever position you took up he immediately recognised as the
best, the only site: and came and routed you out of it. Seeing how rare
shady patches of deck are in a calm, or dry patches in a stiff breeze,
this was a most infernal nuisance. One is so defenceless against big
pigs when lying on one’s back.

The little black one could be a nuisance also, it is true--but that was
only from excess of friendliness. He hated to be left out of any party:
nay more, he hated lying on inanimate matter if a living couch was to
be found.

On the north beach of Cape San Antonio it is possible to land a boat,
if you pick your spot. About fifty yards through the bushes there are a
couple of acres of open ground: cross this, and among some sharp coral
rocks in the scrub on the far side are two wells, the northernmost the
better of the two.

So, being becalmed off the Mangrove Keys one morning, Jonsen sent a
boat on shore to get water.

The heat was extreme. The ropes hung like dead snakes, the sails as
heavy as ill-sculptured drapery. The iron stanchion of the awning
blistered any hand that touched it. Where the deck was unsheltered, the
pitch boiled out of the seams. The children lay gasping together in the
small shade, the little black pig squealing anxiously till he found a
comfortable stomach to settle down on.

The big white pig had not found them yet.

From the silent shore came an occasional gun-shot. The water-party
were potting pigeons. The sea was like a smooth pampas of quicksilver:
so steady you could not split shore from reflection, till the casual
collision of a pelican broke the phantom. The crew were mending sails,
under the awning, with infinite slowness: all except one negro, who
straddled the bowsprit in his trousers, admiring his own grin in the
mirror beneath. The sun lit an iridescent glimmer on his shoulders: in
such a light even a negro could not be black.

Emily was missing John badly: but the little black pig snuffled in
supreme content, his snout buried amicably in her armpit.

When the boatload returned, they had other game besides pigeons and
grey land-crabs. They had stolen a goat from some lonely fisherman.

It was just as they came up over the side that the big white pig
discovered the party under the awning, and prepared for the attack. But
the goat at that moment bounded nimbly from the bulwarks: and without
even stopping to look round, swallowed his chin and charged. He caught
the old pig full in the ribs, knocking his wind out completely.

Then the battle began. The goat charged, the pig screamed and hustled.
Each time the goat arrived at him the pig yelled as if he was killed;
but each time the goat drew back the pig advanced towards him. The
goat, his beard flying like a prophet’s, his eyes crimson and his
scut as lively as a lamb’s at the teat, bounded in, bounded back into
the bows for a fresh run: but at each charge his run grew shorter and
shorter. The pig was hemming him in.

Suddenly the pig gave a frightful squeal, chiefly in surprise at his
own temerity, and pounced. He had got the goat cornered against the
windlass: and for a few flashing seconds bit and trampled.

It was a very chastened goat which was presently led off to his
quarters: but the children were prepared to love him for ever, for the
heroic bangs he had given the old tyrant.

       *       *       *       *       *

But he was not entirely inhuman, that pig. That same afternoon, he was
lying on the hatch eating a banana. The ship’s monkey was swinging on a
loose tail of rope; and spotting the prize, swung further and further
till at last he was able to snatch it from between his very trotters.
You would never have thought that the immobile mask of a pig could wear
a look of such astonishment, such dismay, such piteous injury.




_Chapter 5_


When Destiny knocks the first nail in the coffin of a tyrant, it is
seldom long before she knocks the last.

It was the very next morning that the schooner, in the lightest of
airs, was sidling gently to leeward. The mate was at the wheel,
shifting his weight from foot to foot with that rhythmic motion many
steersmen affect, the better to get the feel of a finicky helm; and
Edward was teaching the captain’s terrier to beg, on the cabin-top. The
mate shouted to him to hang on to something.

‘Why?’ said Edward.

‘_Hang on!_’ cried the mate again, spinning the wheel over as fast as
he could to bring her into the wind.

The howling squall took her, through his promptness, almost straight
in the nose; or it would have carried all away. Edward clung to the
skylight. The terrier skidded about alarmedly all over the cabin-top,
slipped off onto the deck, and was kicked by a dashing sailor clean
through the galley door. But not so that poor big pig, who was taking
an airing on deck at the time. Overboard he went, and vanished to
windward, his snout (sometimes) sticking up manfully out of the water.
God, Who had sent him the goat and the monkey for a sign, now required
his soul of him. Overboard, too, went the coops of fowls, three
new-washed shirts, and--of all strange things to get washed away--the
grind-stone.

Up out of his cabin appeared the captain’s shapeless brown head,
cursing the mate as if it was _he_ who had upset the apple-cart. He
came up without his boots, in grey wool socks, and his braces hanging
down his back.

‘Get below!’ muttered the mate furiously. ‘I can manage her!’

The captain did not, however: still in his socks, he came up on deck
and took the wheel out of the mate’s hand. The latter went a dull
brick-red: walked for’ard: then aft again: then went below and shut
himself in his cabin.

In a few moments the wind had combed up some quite hearty waves: then
it blew their tops off, and so flattened the sea out again, a sea that
was black except for little whipt-up fountains of iridescent foam.

‘Get my boots!’ bellowed Jonsen at Edward.

Edward dashed down the companion with alacrity. It is a great moment,
one’s first order at sea; especially when it comes in an emergency. He
reappeared with a boot in each hand, and a lurch flung him boots and
all at the captain’s feet. ‘Never carry things in both hands,’ said the
captain, smiling pleasantly.

‘Why?’ asked Edward.

‘Keep one hand to lay hold with.’

There was a pause.

‘Some day I will teach you the three Sovereign Rules of Life.’ He shook
his head meditatively. ‘They are very wise. But not yet. You are too
young.’

‘Why not?’ asked Edward. ‘When shall I be old enough?’

The captain considered, going over the Rules in his head.

‘When you know which is windward and which is leeward, then I will
teach you the first rule.’

Edward made his way forward, determined to qualify as soon as he
possibly could.

When the worst of the squall was over they got the advantage of it, the
schooner lying over lissomly and spinning along like a race-horse. The
crew were in great spirits--chaffing the carpenter, who, they declared,
had thrown his grind-stone overboard as a lifebuoy for the pig.

The children were in good spirits also. Their shyness was all gone now.
The schooner lying over as she did, her wet deck made a most admirable
toboggan-slide; and for half an hour they tobogganed happily on their
bottoms from windward to leeward, shrieking with joy, fetching up in
the lee-scuppers, which were mostly awash, and then climbing from thing
to thing to the windward bulwarks raised high in the air, and so all
over again.

Throughout that half hour, Jonsen at the wheel said not a single word.
But at last his pent-up irritation broke out:

‘Hi! You! Stop that!’

They gazed at him in astonishment and disillusion.

There is a period in the relations of children with any new grown-up
in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and the first
reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of
Eden. Once a reproof has been administered, this can never be recovered
again.

Jonsen now had done it.

But he was not content with that--he was still bursting with rage:

‘Stop it! Stop it, I tell you!’

(They had already done so, of course.)

The whole unreasonableness, the monstrousness of the imposition of
these brats on his ship suddenly came over him, and summed itself up in
a single symbol:

‘If you go and wear holes in your drawers, do you think _I_ am going to
mend them?--Lieber Gott! What do you think I am, eh? What do you think
this ship is? What do you think we all are? To mend your drawers for
you, eh? _To mend ... your ... drawers?_’

There was a pause, while they all stood thunderstruck.

But even now he had not finished:

‘Where do you think you’ll get new ones, eh?’ he asked, in a voice
explosive with rage. Then he added, with an insulting coarseness of
tone: ‘And I’ll not have you going about my ship without them! See?’

Scarlet to the eyes with outrage they retreated to the bows. They
could hardly believe so unspeakable a remark had crossed human lips.
They assumed an air of lightness, and talked together in studied loud
voices: but their joy was dashed for the day.

So it was that--small as a man’s hand--a spectre began to show over
their horizon: the suspicion at last that this was _not_ all according
to plan, that they might even not be wanted. For a while their actions
showed the unhappy wariness of the uninvited guest.

Later in the afternoon, Jonsen, who had not spoken again, but looked
from time to time acutely miserable, was still at the wheel. The mate
had shaved himself and put on shore clothes, as a parable: he now
appeared on deck: pretended not to see the captain, but strolled like a
passenger up to the children and entered into conversation with them.

‘If I’m not fit to steer in foul weather, I’m not fit to steer in
fair!’ he muttered, but without glancing at the captain. ‘He can take
the helum all day and night, for all the help _I’ll_ give him!’

The captain appeared equally not to see the mate. He looked quite ready
to take both watches till kingdom come.

‘If _he’d_ been at the wheel when that squall struck us,’ said the mate
under his voice but with biting passion, ‘he’d have lost the ship! He’s
no more eye for a squall coming than a sucker-fish! And he knows it,
too: that’s what makes him go on this way!’

The children did not answer. It shocked them deeply to have to see
a grown-up, a should-be Olympian, displaying his feelings. In exact
opposition to the witnesses at the Transfiguration, they felt it would
have been good for them to be almost anywhere rather than there. He
was totally unconscious of their discomfort, however: too self-occupied
to notice how they avoided catching his eye.

‘Look! There’s a steamship!’ exclaimed Margaret, with much too bright a
brightness.

The mate glowered at it.

‘Aye, they’ll be the death of us, those steamers,’ he said. ‘Every year
there’s more of them. They’ll be using them for men-of-war next, and
then where’ll we be? Times are bad enough without steamers.’

But while he spoke he wore a preoccupied expression, as if he were more
concerned with what was going on at the back of his mind than with what
went on in the front.

‘Did you ever hear about what happened when the first steamer put to
sea in the Gulf of Paria?’ he asked, however.

‘No, what?’ asked Margaret, with an eagerness that even exceeded the
necessities of politeness in its falsity.

‘She was built on the Clyde, and sailed over. (Nobody thought of using
steam for a long ocean voyage in those days.) The Company thought they
ought to make a to-do--to popularise her, so to speak. So the first
time she put to sea under her own power, they invited all the big-wigs
on board: all the Members of Assembly in Trinidad, and the Governor
and his Staff, and a Bishop. It was the Bishop what did the trick.’

His story died out: he became completely absorbed in watching sidelong
the effect of his bravado on the captain.

‘Did what?’ asked Margaret.

‘Ran ’em aground.’

‘But what did they let him steer for?’ asked Edward. ‘They might have
known he couldn’t!’

‘Edward! How dare you talk about a Bishop in that rude way!’ admonished
Rachel.

‘It wasn’t the steamer he ran aground, sonny,’ said the mate: ‘it was a
poor innocent little devil of a pirate craft, that was just beating up
for the Boca Grande in a northerly breeze.’

‘Good for him!’ said Edward. ‘How did he do it?’

‘They were all sea-sick, being on a steamer for the first time: the way
she rolls, not like a decent sailing-vessel. There wasn’t a man who
could stay on deck--except the Bishop, and he just thrived on it. So
when the poor little pirate cut under her bows, and seen her coming up
in the eye of the wind, no sail set, with a cloud of smoke amidships
and an old Bishop bung in the middle of the smoke, and her paddles
making as much turmoil as a whale trying to scratch a flea in its ear,
he just beached his vessel and took to the woods. Never went to sea
again, he didn’t; started growing cocoa-nuts. But there was one poor
fish was in such a hurry he broke his leg, and they came ashore and
found him. When he saw the Bishop coming for him he started yelling out
it was the Devil.’

‘O-oh!’ gasped Rachel, horror-struck.

‘How silly of him,’ said Edward.

‘I don’t know so much!’ said the mate. ‘He wasn’t too far wrong! Ever
since that, they’ve been the death of our profession, Steam and the
Church ... what with steaming, and what with preaching, and steaming
and preaching.... Now that’s a funny thing,’ he broke off, suddenly
interested by what he was saying: ‘_Steam_ and the _Church_! What have
they got in common, eh? Nothing, you’d say: you’d think they’d fight
each other cat-and-dog: but no: they’re thick as two thieves ... thick
as thieves.--Not like in the days of Parson Audain.’

‘Who was he?’ asked Margaret helpfully.

‘He was a right sort of a parson, he was, _yn wyr iawn_! He was Rector
of Roseau--oh, a long time back.’

‘Here! Come and take this wheel while I have a spell!’ grunted the
captain.

‘I couldn’t well say _how_ long back,’ continued the mate in a loud,
unnatural, and now slightly exultant voice: ‘forty years or more.’

He began to tell the story of the famous Rector of Roseau: one of the
finest pathetic preachers of his age, according to contemporaries;
whose appearance was fine, gentle, and venerable, and who supplemented
his stipend by owning a small privateer.

‘Here! Otto!’ called Jonsen.

But the mate had a long recital of the parson’s misfortunes before him:
beginning with the capture of his schooner (while smuggling negroes to
Guadaloupe) by another privateer, from Nevis; and how the parson went
to Nevis, posted his rival’s name on the court-house door, and stood
on guard there with loaded pistols for three days in the hope the man
would come and challenge him.

‘What, to fight a _duel_?’ asked Harry.

‘But wasn’t he a clergyman, you said?’ asked Emily.

But duels, it appeared, did not come amiss to this priest. He fought
thirteen altogether in his life, the mate told them: and on one
occasion, while waiting for the seconds to reload, he went up to his
opponent, suggested ‘just a little something to fill in time, good
sir’--and knocked him flat with his fist.

This time, however, his enemy lay low: so he fitted out a second
schooner, and took command of her, week-days, himself. His first quarry
was an apparently harmless Spanish merchantman: but she suddenly opened
fourteen masked gun-ports and it was he who had to surrender. All his
crew were massacred but himself and his carpenter, who hid behind a
water-cask all night.

‘But I don’t understand,’ said Margaret: ‘was he a pirate?’

‘Of course he was!’ said Otto the mate.

‘Then _why_ did you say he was a clergyman?’ pursued Emily.

The mate looked as puzzled as she did. ‘Well, he was Rector of Roseau,
wasn’t he? And B.A., B.D.? Anyway, he was Rector until the new Governor
listened to some cock-and-bull story against him, and made him resign.
He was the best preacher they ever had--he’d have been a Bishop one
day, if some one hadn’t slandered him to the Governor!’

‘Otto!’ called the captain in a conciliatory voice. ‘Come over here, I
want to speak to you.’

But the deaf and exulting mate had plenty of his story still to run:
how Audain now turned trader, and took a cargo of corn to San Domingo,
and settled there: how he challenged two black generals to a duel, and
shot them both, and Christophe threatened to hang him if they died.
But the parson (having little faith in Domingan doctors) escaped by
night in an open boat and went to St. Eustatius. There he found many
religions but no ministers; so he recommenced clergyman of every kind:
in the morning he celebrated a mass for the Catholics, then a Lutheran
service in Dutch, then Church of England matins: in the evening he sang
hymns and preached hell-fire to the Methodists. Meanwhile his wife, who
had more tranquil tastes, lived at Bristol: so he now married a Dutch
widow, resourcefully conducting the ceremony himself.

‘But I _don’t_ understand!’ said Emily despairingly: ‘Was he a real
clergyman?’

‘Of course he wasn’t,’ said Margaret.

‘But he couldn’t have married himself _himself_ if he wasn’t,’ argued
Edward. ‘Could he?’

The mate heaved a sigh.

‘But the English Church aren’t like that nowadays,’ he said. ‘They’re
all against us.’

‘I should think not, indeed!’ pronounced Rachel slowly, in a deep
indignant voice. ‘He was a very wicked man!’

‘He was a most respectable person,’ replied the mate severely, ‘and a
_wonderful_ pathetic preacher!--You may take it they were chagrined at
Roseau, when they heard St. Eustatius had got him!’

Captain Jonsen had lashed the wheel, and came up, his face piteous with
distress.

‘Otto! Mein Schatz...!’ he began, laying his great bear’s-arm round the
mate’s neck. Without more ado they went below together, and a sailor
came aft unbidden and took the wheel.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ten minutes later the mate reappeared on deck for a moment, and sought
out the children.

‘What’s the captain been saying to you?’ he asked. ‘Flashed out at you
about something, did he?’

He took their complex, uncomfortable silence for assent.

‘Don’t you take too much notice of what he says,’ he went on. ‘He
flashes out like that sometimes; but a minute after he could eat
himself, fair eat himself!’

The children stared at him in astonishment: what on earth was he trying
to say?

But he seemed to think he had explained his mission fully: turned, and
once more went below.

       *       *       *       *       *

For hours a merry but rather tedious hubble-bubble, suggesting liquor,
was heard ascending from the cabin skylight. As evening drew on, the
breeze having dropped away almost to a calm, the steersman reported
that both Jonsen and Otto were now fast asleep, their heads on each
other’s shoulders across the cabin table. As he had long forgotten what
the course was, but had been simply steering by the wind, and there was
now no wind to steer by, he (the steersman) concluded the wheel could
get on very well without him.

The reconciliation of the captain and the mate deserved to be
celebrated by all hands with a blind.

A rum-cask was broached: and the common sailors were soon as
unconscious as their betters.

Altogether this was one of the unpleasantest days the children had
spent in their lives.

When dawn came, every one was still pretty incapable, and the neglected
vessel drooped uncertainly. Jonsen, still rather unsteady on his feet,
his head aching and his mind Napoleonic but muddled, came on deck and
looked about him. The sun had come up like a searchlight: but it was
about all there was to be seen. No land was anywhere in sight, and the
sea and sky seemed very uncertain as to the most becoming place to
locate their mutual firmament. It was not till he had looked round and
round a fair number of times that he perceived a vessel, up in what by
all appearances must be sky, yet not very far distant.

For some little while he could not remember what it is a pirate
captain does when he sees a sail; and he felt in no mood to overtax his
brain by trying to. But after a time it came back unbidden--one gives
chase.

‘Give chase!’ he ordered solemnly to the morning air: and then went
below again and roused the mate, who roused the crew.

No one had the least idea where they were, or what kind of a craft
this quarry might be: but such considerations were altogether too
complicated for the moment. As the sun parted further from his
reflection a breeze sprang up: so the sails were trimmed after a
fashion, and chase was duly given.

In an hour or two, as the air grew clearer, it was plain their quarry
was a merchant brig, not too heavily laden, and making a fair pace: a
pace, indeed, which in their incompetently trimmed condition they were
finding it pretty difficult to equal. Jonsen shuffled rapidly up and
down the deck like a shuttle, passing his woof backwards and forwards
through the real business of the ship. He was hugging himself with
excitement, trying to evolve some crafty scheme of capture. The chase
went on: but noon passed, the distance between the two vessels was
barely, if at all, lessened. Jonsen, however, was much too optimistic
to realise this.

It used to be a common device of pirates when in chase of a vessel to
tow behind them a spare topmast, or some other bulky object. This would
act as a drogue, or brake: and the pursued, seeing them with all sail
set apparently doing their utmost, would under-estimate their powers of
speed. Then when night fell the pirate would haul the spar on board,
overtake the other vessel rapidly, and catch it unprepared.

There were several reasons why this device was unsuitable to the
present occasion. First and most obviously, it was doubtful whether, in
their present condition, they were capable of overtaking the brig at
all, leaving such handicaps altogether out of consideration. A second
was that the brig showed no signs of alarm. She was proceeding on her
voyage at her natural pace, quite unaware of the honour they were doing
her.

However, Captain Jonsen was nothing if not a crafty man; and during
the afternoon he gave orders for a spare spar to be towed behind as I
have described. The result was that the schooner lost ground rapidly:
and when night fell they were at least a couple of miles further from
the brig than they had been at dawn. When night fell, of course, they
hauled the spar on board and prepared for the last act. They followed
the brig by compass through the hours of darkness, without catching
sight of her. When morning came, all hands crowded expectantly at the
rail.

But the brig was vanished. The sea was as bare as an egg.

If they were lost before, now they were double-lost. Jonsen did
not know where he might be within two hundred miles; and being no
sextant-man, but an incurable dead-reckoner, he had no means of finding
out. This did not worry him very greatly, however, because sooner or
later one of two things might happen: he might catch sight of some bit
of land he recognised, or he might capture some vessel better informed
than himself. Meanwhile, since he had no particular destination, one
bit of sea was much the same to him as another.

The piece he was wandering in, however, was evidently out of the main
track of shipping; for days went by, and weeks, without his coming even
so near to effecting a capture as he had been in the case of the brig.

But Captain Jonsen was not sorry to be out of the public eye for a
while. Before he had left Santa Lucia, news had reached him of the
_Clorinda_ putting into Havana; and of the fantastic tale Marpole
was telling. The ‘twelve masked gun-ports’ had amused him hugely,
since he was altogether without artillery: but when he heard Marpole
accused him of murdering the children--Marpole, that least reputable
of skunks--his anger had broken out in one of its sudden explosions.
For it was unthinkable--during those first few days--that he would ever
touch a hair of their heads, or even speak a cross word to them. They
were still a sort of holy novelty then: it was not till their shyness
had worn off that he had begun to regret so whole-heartedly the failure
of his attempt to leave them behind with the Chief Magistrate’s wife.




_Chapter 6_


The weeks passed in aimless wandering. For the children, the lapse
of time acquired once more the texture of a dream: things ceased
happening: every inch of the schooner was now as familiar to them as
the _Clorinda_ had been, or Ferndale: they settled down quietly to
grow, as they had done at Ferndale, and as they would have done, had
there been time, on the _Clorinda_.

And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She
suddenly realised who she was.

There is little reason that one can see why it should not have happened
to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none, why it should
have come that particular afternoon.

She had been playing houses in a nook right in the bows, behind the
windlass (on which she had hung a devil’s-claw as a door-knocker); and
tiring of it was walking rather aimlessly aft, thinking vaguely about
some bees and a fairy queen, when it suddenly flashed into her mind
that she was _she_.

She stopped dead, and began looking over all of her person which
came within the range of eyes. She could not see much, except a
fore-shortened view of the front of her frock, and her hands when she
lifted them for inspection: but it was enough for her to form a rough
idea of the little body she suddenly realised to be hers.

She began to laugh, rather mockingly. ‘Well!’ she thought, in effect:
‘Fancy _you_, of all people, going and getting caught like this!--You
can’t get out of it now, not for a very long time: you’ll have to go
through with being a child, and growing up, and getting old, before
you’ll be quit of this mad prank!’

Determined to avoid any interruption of this highly important
occasion, she began to climb the ratlines, on her way to her favourite
perch at the mast-head. Each time she moved an arm or a leg in this
simple action, however, it struck her with fresh amusement to find
them obeying her so readily. Memory told her, of course, that they
had always done so before: but before, she had never realised how
surprising this was.

Once settled on her perch, she began examining the skin of her hands
with the utmost care: for it was _hers_. She slipped a shoulder out of
the top of her frock; and having peeped in to make sure she really was
continuous under her clothes, she shrugged it up to touch her cheek.
The contact of her face and the warm bare hollow of her shoulder gave
her a comfortable thrill, as if it was the caress of some kind friend.
But whether the feeling came to her through her cheek or her shoulder,
which was the caresser and which the caressed, that no analysis could
tell her.

Once fully convinced of this astonishing fact, that she was now Emily
Bas-Thornton (why she inserted the ‘now’ she did not know, for she
certainly imagined no transmigrational nonsense of having been any one
else before), she began seriously to reckon its implications.

First, what agency had so ordered it that out of all the people in the
world who she might have been, she was this particular one, this Emily:
born in such-and-such a year out of all the years in Time, and encased
in this particular rather pleasing little casket of flesh? Had she
chosen herself, or had God done it?

At this, another consideration: who was God? She had heard a terrible
lot about Him, always: but the question of His identity had been left
vague, as much taken for granted as her own. Wasn’t she perhaps God,
herself? Was it that she was trying to remember? However, the more she
tried, the more it eluded her. (How absurd, to disremember such an
important point as whether one was God or not!) So she let it slide:
perhaps it would come back to her later.

Secondly, why had all this not occurred to her before? She had been
alive for over ten years now, and it had never once entered her head.
She felt like a man who suddenly remembers at eleven o’clock at night,
sitting in his own arm-chair, that he had accepted an invitation to go
out to dinner that night. There is no reason for him to remember it
now: but there seems equally little why he should not have remembered
it in time to keep his engagement. How could he have sat there all the
evening without being disturbed by the slightest misgiving? How could
Emily have gone on being Emily for ten years without once noticing this
apparently obvious fact?

It must not be supposed that she argued it all out in this ordered,
but rather long-winded fashion. Each consideration came to her in a
momentary flash, quite innocent of words: and in between her mind
lazed along, either thinking of nothing or returning to her bees and
the fairy queen. If one added up the total of her periods of conscious
thought, it would probably reach something between four and five
seconds; nearer five, perhaps; but it was spread out over the best part
of an hour.

Well then, granted she was Emily, what were the consequences, besides
enclosure in that particular little body (which now began on its
own account to be aware of a sort of unlocated itch, most probably
somewhere on the right thigh), and lodgment behind a particular pair of
eyes?

It implied a whole series of circumstances. In the first place, there
was her family, a number of brothers and sisters from whom, before, she
had never entirely dissociated herself; but now she got such a sudden
feeling of being a discrete person that they seemed as separate from
her as the ship itself. However, willy-nilly she was almost as tied to
them as she was to her body. And then there was this voyage, this ship,
this mast round which she had wound her legs. She began to examine it
with almost as vivid an illumination as she had studied the skin of her
hands. And when she came down from the mast, what would she find at the
bottom? There would be Jonsen, and Otto, and the crew: the whole fabric
of a daily life which up to now she had accepted as it came, but which
now seemed vaguely disquieting. What was going to happen? Were there
disasters running about loose, disasters which her rash marriage to the
body of Emily Thornton made her vulnerable to?

A sudden terror struck her: did any one know? (Know, I mean, that she
was some one in particular, Emily--perhaps even God--not just any
little girl.) She could not tell why, but the idea terrified her.
It would be bad enough if they should discover she was a particular
person--but if they should discover she was God! At all costs she must
hide _that_ from them.--But suppose they knew already, had simply been
hiding it from her (as guardians might from an infant king)? In that
case, as in the other, the only thing to do was to continue to behave
as if she did not know, and so outwit them.

But if she was God, why not turn all the sailors into white mice, or
strike Margaret blind, or cure somebody, or do some other Godlike act
of the kind? Why should she hide it? She never really asked herself
why: but instinct prompted her strongly of the necessity. Of course,
there was the element of doubt (suppose she had made a mistake, and
the miracle missed fire): but more largely it was the feeling that she
would be able to deal with the situation so much better when she was a
little older. Once she had declared herself there would be no turning
back; it was much better to keep her godhead up her sleeve for the
present.

Grown-ups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving,
and generally fail. But not so children. A child can hide the most
appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure
against detection. Parents, finding that they see through their child
in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realise that, if
there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their
chances are nil.

So Emily had no misgivings when she determined to preserve her secret,
and needed have none.

Down below on the deck the smaller children were repeatedly crowding
themselves into a huge coil of rope, feigning sleep and then suddenly
leaping out with yelps of panic and dancing round it in consternation
and dismay. Emily watched them with that impersonal attention one gives
to a kaleidoscope. Presently Harry spied her, and gave a hail.

‘Emilee-ee! Come down and play House-on-fire!’

At that, her normal interests momentarily revived. Her stomach as it
were leapt within her sympathetically toward the game. But it died in
her as suddenly; and not only died, but she did not even feel disposed
to waste her noble voice on them. She continued to stare without making
any reply whatever.

‘Come on!’ shouted Edward.

‘Come and play!’ shouted Laura. ‘Don’t be a pig!’

Then in the ensuing stillness Rachel’s voice floated up:

‘Don’t call her, Laura, we don’t really want her.’


ii

But Emily was completely unaffected--only glad that for the present
they were all right by themselves. She was already beginning to feel
the charge of the party a burden.

It had automatically devolved on her with the defection of Margaret.

It was puzzling, this Margaret business. She could not understand it,
and it disturbed her. It dated back really to that night, about a week
ago, when she herself had so unaccountably bitten the captain. The
memory of her own extraordinary behaviour gave her now quite a little
shiver of alarm.

Everybody had been very drunk that night, and making a terrible
racket--it was impossible to get to sleep. So at last Edward had asked
her to tell them a story. But she was not feeling ‘storyable,’ so
they had asked Margaret; all except Rachel, who had begged Margaret
not to, because she wanted to think, she said. But Margaret had been
very pleased at being asked, and had begun a very stupid story about a
princess who had lots and lots of clothes and was always beating her
servant for making mistakes and shutting him up in a dark cupboard.
The whole story, really, had been nothing but clothes and beating, and
Rachel had _begged_ her to stop.

In the middle, a sort of rabble of sailors had come down the ladder,
very slowly and with much discussion. They stood at the bottom in a
knot, swaying a little and all turned inwards on one of their number.
It was so dark one could not see who this was. They were urging him to
do something--he hanging back.

‘Oh, damn it!’ he cried in a thick voice. ‘Bring me a light, I can’t
see where dey are!’

It was the voice of the captain--but how altered! There was a sort of
suppressed excitement in it. Some one lit a lantern and held it up in
the middle. Captain Jonsen stood on his legs half like a big sack of
flour, half like a waiting tiger.

‘What do you want?’ Emily had asked kindly.

But Captain Jonsen stood irresolute, shifting his weight from foot to
foot as if he was steering.

‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’ Rachel had piped, loudly and disapprovingly.

But it was Margaret who had behaved most queerly. She had gone yellow
as cheese, and her eyes large with terror. She was shivering from head
to foot as if she had the fever. It was absurd. Then Emily remembered
how stupidly frightened Margaret had been the very first night on the
schooner.

At that moment Jonsen had staggered up to Emily, and putting one hand
under her chin had begun to stroke her hair with the other. A sort of
blind vertigo seized her: she caught his thumb and bit as hard as she
could: then, terrified at her own madness, dashed across the hold to
where the other children were gathered in a wondering knot.

‘What _have_ you done!’ cried Laura, pushing her away angrily: ‘Oh you
wicked girl, you’ve hurt him!’

Jonsen was stamping about, swearing and sucking his thumb. Edward had
produced a handkerchief, and between them all they had managed to tie
it up. He stood staring at the bandaged member for a few moments: shook
his head like a wet retriever and retreated on deck, dang-danging under
his breath. Margaret had then been so sick they thought she must really
have caught fever, and they couldn’t get any sense out of her at all.

As Emily, with her new-found consciousness, recapitulated the scene, it
was like re-reading a story in a book, so little responsibility did she
feel for the merely mechanical creature who had bitten the captain’s
thumb. Nor was she even very interested: it had been queer, but then
there was very little in life which didn’t seem queer, now.

As for Jonsen, he and Emily had avoided each other ever since, by
mutual consent. She indeed had been in Coventry with everybody for
biting him; none of the other children would play with her all the
next day, and she recognised that she thoroughly deserved it--it was a
_mad_ thing to have done. And yet Jonsen, in avoiding her, had himself
more the air of being ashamed than angry ... which was unaccountable.

But what interested her more was the curious way Margaret had gone on,
those next few days.

For some time she had behaved very oddly indeed. At first she seemed
exaggeratedly frightened of all the men: but then she had suddenly
taken to following them about the deck like a dog--not Jonsen, it is
true, but Otto especially. Then suddenly she had departed from them
altogether and taken up her quarters in the cabin. The curious thing
was that now she avoided them all utterly, and spent all her time with
the sailors: and the sailors, for their part, seemed to take peculiar
pains not only not to let her speak to, but even not to let her be seen
by the other children.

Now they hardly saw her at all: and when they did she seemed so
different, they hardly recognised her: though where the difference lay
it would be hard to say.

Emily, from her perch at the mast-head, could just see the girl’s head
now, through the cabin skylight. Further forward, José had joined the
children at their game, and was crawling about on hands and knees with
all of them on his back--a fire-engine, of course, such as they had
seen in the illustrated magazines from England.

‘Emily!’ called Harry: ‘Come and play!’

Down with a rush fell the curtain on all Emily’s cogitations. In a
second she was once more a happy little animal--_any_ happy little
animal. She slid down the shrouds like a real sailor, and in no time
was directing the fire-fighting operations as imperiously as any other
of this brigade of superintendents.


iii

That night in the Parliament of Beds there was raised at last a
question which you may well be surprised had not been raised before.
Emily had just reduced her family to silence by sheer ferocity, when
Harry’s rapid, nervous, lisping voice piped up:

‘Emily, Emily may I ask you a question, please?’

‘Go to sleep!’

There was a moment’s whispered confabulation.

‘But it’s very important, please, and we all want to know.’

‘What?’

‘Are these people pirates?’

Emily sat bolt upright with astonishment.

‘Of course not!’

Harry sounded rather crestfallen.

‘I don’t know ... I just thought they might....’

‘But they _are_!’ declared Rachel firmly. ‘Margaret told me!’

‘Nonsense!’ said Emily. ‘There aren’t any pirates nowadays.’

‘Margaret said,’ went on Rachel, ‘that time we were shut up on the
other ship she heard one of the sailors calling out pirates had come on
board.’

Emily had an inspiration.

‘No, you silly, he must have said _pilots_.’

‘What are pilots?’ asked Laura.

‘They Come On Board,’ explained Emily, lamely. ‘Don’t you remember that
picture in the dining-room at home, called The Pilot Comes On Board?’

Laura listened with rapt attention. The explanation of what pilots were
was not very illuminating; but then she did not know what pirates were
either. So you might think the whole discussion meant very little to
her, but there you would be wrong: the question was evidently important
to the older ones, therefore she gave her whole mind to listening.

The pirate heresy was considerably shaken. How could they say for
certain which word Margaret had really heard? Rachel changed sides.

‘They can’t be pirates,’ she said. ‘Pirates are wicked.’

‘Couldn’t we ask them?’ Edward persisted.

Emily considered.

‘I don’t think it would be very polite.’

‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind,’ said Edward. ‘They’re awfully decent.’

‘I think they mightn’t like it,’ said Emily. In her heart she was
afraid of the answer; and if they were pirates, it would here again be
better to pretend not to know.

‘I know!’ she said. ‘Shall I ask the Mouse with the Elastic Tail?’

‘Yes, do!’ cried Laura. It was months since the oracle had been
consulted; but her faith was still perfect.

Emily communed with herself in a series of short squeaks.

‘He says they are _Pilots_,’ she announced.

‘Oh,’ said Edward deeply: and they all went to sleep.




_Chapter 7_


Edward often thought, as he strode scowling up and down the deck by
himself, that this was exactly the life for him. What a lucky boy he
was, to have tumbled into it by good fortune, instead of having to run
away to sea as most other people did! In spite of the White Mouse’s
pronouncement (whom secretly he had long ceased to believe in), he had
no doubt that this was a pirate vessel: and no doubt either that when
presently Jonsen was killed in some furious battle the sailors would
unanimously elect him their captain.

The girls were a great nuisance. A ship was no place for them. When he
was captain he would have them marooned.

Yet there had been a time when he had wished he was a girl himself.
‘When I was young,’ he once confided to the admiring Harry, ‘I used to
think girls were bigger and stronger than boys. Weren’t I silly?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry.

Harry did not confide it to Edward, but he also, _now_, wished he was a
girl. It was not for the same reason: younger than Edward, he was still
at the amorous age; and because he found the company of girls almost
magically pleasing, fondly imagined it would be even more so if he were
one himself. He was always finding himself, for being a boy, shut out
from their most secret councils. Emily of course was too old to count
as female in his eyes: but to Rachel and Laura he was indiscriminately
devoted. When Edward was captain, he would be mate: and when he
imagined this future, it consisted for the most part in rescuing
Rachel--or Laura, _n’importe_--from new and complicated dangers.

They were all by now just as much at home on the schooner as they had
been in Jamaica. Indeed, nothing very continuous was left of Ferndale
for the youngest ones: only a number of luminous pictures of quite
unimportant incidents. Emily of course remembered most things, and
could put them together. The death of Tabby, for instance: she would
never forget that as long as she lived. She could recollect, too, that
Ferndale had tumbled down flat. And her Earthquake: she had been in an
earthquake, and could remember every detail of _that_. Had it been as a
result of the earthquake that Ferndale had tumbled down? That sounded
likely. There had been quite a high wind at that time, too.... She
could remember that they had all been bathing when the earthquake had
come, and then had ridden somewhere on ponies. But they had been _in_
the house when it fell down: she was pretty sure of that. It was all
a little difficult to join up.--Then, when was it she had found that
negro village? She could remember with a startling clearness bending
down and feeling among the bamboo roots for the bubbling spring, then
looking round and seeing the black children scampering away up the
clearing. That must have been years and years ago. But clearer than
everything was that awful night when Tabby had stalked up and down the
room, his eyes blazing and his fur twitching, his voice melodious with
tragedy, until those horrible black shapes had flown in through the
fanlight and savaged him out into the bush. The horror of the scene was
even increased because it had once or twice come back to her in dreams,
and because when she dreamt it (though it seemed the same) there was
always some frightful difference. One night (and that was the worst of
all) she had rushed out to rescue him, when her darling faithful Tabby
had come up to her with the same horrible look on his face the captain
had worn that time she bit his thumb, and had chased her down avenues
and avenues and avenues and avenues of cabbage-palms, with Exeter House
at the end of them never getting any nearer however much she ran. She
knew, of course, it was not the real Tabby, but a sort of diabolic
double: and Margaret had sat up an orange tree jeering at her, gone as
black as a negro.

One of the drawbacks of life at sea was the cockroaches. They were
winged. They infested the fore-hold, and the smell they made was
horrible. One had to put up with them. But one didn’t do much washing
at sea: and it was a common thing to wake up in the morning and find
the brutes had gnawed the quick from under one’s nails, or gnawed all
the hard skin off the soles of one’s feet, so that one could hardly
walk. Anything in the least greasy or dirty they set on at once.
Button-holes were their especial delight. One did little washing: fresh
water was too valuable, and salt water had practically no effect.
From handling tarry ropes and greasy ironwork their hands would have
disgraced a slum-child. There is a sailor saying which includes a peck
of dirt in the mariner’s monthly rations: but the children on the
schooner must have often consumed far more.

Not that it was a dirty ship--the fo’c’sle probably was, but the
Nordicism of captain and mate kept the rest looking clean enough. But
even the cleanest-looking ship is seldom clean to the touch. Their
clothes José washed occasionally with his own shirt: and in that
climate they were dry again by the morning.

Jamaica had faded into the past: England, to which they had supposed
they were going, and of which a very curious picture had formerly
been built up in their minds by their parents’ constant references to
it, receded again into the mists of myth. They lived in the present,
adapted themselves to it, and might have been born in a hammock and
christened at a binnacle before they had been there many weeks. They
seemed to have no natural fear of heights, and the farther they were
above the deck, the happier. On a calm day Edward used to hang by his
knees from the cross-trees in order to feel the blood run into his
head. The flying-jib, too, which was usually down, made an admirable
cocoon for hide-and-seek: one took a firm grip of the hanks and
robands, and swathed oneself in the canvas. Once, suspecting Edward was
hidden there, instead of going out on the jib-boom to look, the other
children cast off the down-haul and then all together gave a great tug
at the halyard which nearly pitched him into the sea. The shark myth
is greatly exaggerated: it is untrue, for instance, that they can take
a leg clean off at the hip--their bite is a tearing one, not a clean
cut: and a practised bather can keep them off easily with a welt on
the nose each time they turn over to strike[1]: but all the same,
once overboard there would have been little hope for a small boy like
Edward: and a severe wigging they all got for their prank.

Often several of those thick, rubber-like protuberances would follow
the vessel for hours--perhaps in the hope of just some such antic.

Sharks were not without their uses, however: it is well known that
Catch a Shark Catch a Breeze, so when a breeze was needed the sailors
baited a big hook and presently hauled one on board with the winch. The
bigger he was, the better breeze was hoped for: and his tail was nailed
to the jib-boom. One day they got a great whacking fellow on board,
and having cut off his jaw some one heaved it into the ship’s latrine
(which no one was so lubberly as to use for its proper purpose) and
thought no more about it. One wildish night, however, old José did go
there, and sat full on that wicked _cheval de frise_. He yelled like
a madman: and the crew were better pleased than they had been with
any joke that year, and even Emily thought if only it had been less
improper how funny it would have been. It would certainly have puzzled
an archæologist, faced with José’s mummy, to guess how he came by those
curious scars.

The ship’s monkey also added a lot to the ship’s merriment. One day
some sucker-fish had fixed themselves firmly to the deck, and he
undertook to dislodge them. After a few preliminary tugs, he braced
three legs and his tail against the deck and lunged like a madman.
But they would not budge. The crew were standing round in a ring, and
he felt his honour was at stake: somehow, they _must_ be removed. So,
disgusting though they must have tasted to a vegetarian, he set to and
ate them, right down to the sucker, and was loudly applauded.

Edward and Harry often talked over how they would distinguish
themselves in the next engagement. Sometimes they would rehearse it:
storm the galley with uncouth shouts, or spring into the main rigging
and order every one to be thrown into the sea. Once, as they went into
battle,

‘I am armed with a sword and a pistol!’ chanted Edward:

‘And I am armed with a key and half a whist-le!’ chanted the more
literal Harry.

They took care to hold those rehearsals when the real pirates were out
of the way: it was not so much that they feared the criticism of the
professional eye as that it was not yet openly recognised what they
were; and all the children shared Emily’s instinct that it was better
to pretend not to know--a sort of magical belief, at bottom.

Although Laura and Rachel were thrown together a great deal, and were
all one goddess to Harry, their inner lives differed in almost every
respect. It was a matter of principle, as will have been noticed, for
them to disagree on every point: but it was a matter of nature too.
Rachel had only two activities. One was domestic. She was never happy
unless surrounded by the full paraphernalia of a household: she left
houses and families wherever she went. She collected bits of oakum and
the moultings of a worn-out mop, wrapped them in rags and put them to
sleep in every nook and cranny. _Guai_, who woke one of her twenty or
thirty babies--worse still, should he clear it away! She could even
summon up maternal feelings for a marline-spike, and would sit up
aloft rocking it in her arms and crooning. The sailors avoided walking
underneath: for such an infant, if dropped from a height, will find its
way through the thickest skull (an accident which sometimes befalls
unpopular captains).

Further, there was hardly an article of ship’s use, from the windlass
to the bosun’s chair, but she had metamorphosed it into some sort of
furniture: a table or a bed or a lamp or a tea-set: and marked it as
her property: and what she had marked as her property no one might
touch--if she could prevent it. To parody Hobbes, she claimed as her
own whatever she had mixed her imagination with; and the greater
part of her time was spent in angry or tearful assertions of her
property-rights.

Her other interest was moral. She had an extraordinary vivid, _simple_
sense, that child, of Right and Wrong--it almost amounted to a
precocious ethical genius. Every action, her own or any one else’s, was
immediately judged good or bad, and uncompromisingly praised or blamed.
She was never in doubt.

To Emily, Conscience meant something very different. She was still
only half aware of that secret criterion within her: but was terrified
of it. She had not Rachel’s clear divination: she never knew when she
might offend this inner harpy, Conscience, unwittingly: and lived in
terror of those brazen claws, should she ever let it be hatched from
the egg. When she felt its latent strength stir in its pre-natal sleep,
she forced her mind to other things, and would not even let herself
recognise her fear of it. But she knew, at the bottom of her heart she
_knew_, that one day some action of hers would rouse it, something
awful done quite unwittingly would send it raging round her soul like
a whirlwind. She might go weeks together in a happy unconsciousness,
she might have flashes of vision when she knew she was God Himself: but
at the same time she knew, beyond all doubt, in her innermost being,
that she was damned, that there never had been any one as wicked as her
since the world began.

Not so Rachel: to her, Conscience was by no means so depressing
an affair. It was simply a comfortable mainspring of her life,
smooth-working, as pleasant as a healthy appetite. For instance, it was
now tacitly admitted that all these men were pirates. That is, they
were wicked. It therefore devolved on her to convert them: and she
entered on her plans for this without a shadow either of misgiving or
reluctance. Her conscience gave her no pain because it never occurred
to her as conceivable that she should do anything but follow its
dictates, or fail to see them clearly. She would try and convert these
people first: probably they would reform, but if they did not--well,
she would send for the police. Since either result was right, it
mattered not at all which Circumstance should call for.

So much for Rachel. The inside of Laura was different indeed:
something vast, complicated, and nebulous that can hardly be put into
language. To take a metaphor from tadpoles, though legs were growing
her gills had not yet dropped off. Being nearly four years old, she
was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term
‘human’ a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby:
and babies of course are not human--they are animals, and have a very
ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even
snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid,
since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the
lower vertebrates.

In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their
own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the
human mind.

It is true they look human--but not so human, to be quite fair, as many
monkeys.

Subconsciously, too, every one recognises they are animals--why else
do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the
human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a
less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.

Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either:
but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more
ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are
_mad_, in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination,
think like a child, at least in a partial degree--and even if one’s
success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more
think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a
bee.

How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the
child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind,
like a Fascist in Rome?

When swimming under water, it is a very sobering thing suddenly to look
a large octopus in the face. One never forgets it: one’s respect, yet
one’s feeling of the hopelessness of any real intellectual sympathy.
One is soon reduced to mere physical admiration, like any silly
painter, of the cow-like tenderness of the eye, of the beautiful and
infinitesimal mobility of that large and toothless mouth, which accepts
as a matter of course that very water against which you, for your
life’s sake, must be holding your breath. There he reposes in a fold of
rock, apparently weightless in the clear green medium but very large,
his long arms, suppler than silk, coiled in repose, or stirring in
recognition of your presence. Far above, everything is bounded by the
surface of the air, like a bright window of glass. Contact with a small
baby can conjure at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not
obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain.

Of course it is not really so cut-and-dried as all this; but often the
only way of attempting to express the truth is to build it up, like a
card-house, of a pack of lies.

It was only in Laura’s inner mind, however, that these elaborate
vestiges of babyhood remained: outwardly she appeared fully a child--a
rather reserved, odd, and indeed rather captivating one. Her face was
not pretty, with its heavy eyebrows and reduced chin: but she had a
power of apt movement, the appropriate attitude for every occasion,
that was most striking. A child who can show her affection for you,
for instance, in the very way she plants her feet on the ground,
has a liberal gift of that bodily genius called charm. Actually,
this particular one was a rare gesture with her: nine-tenths of her
life being spent in her own head, she seldom had time to feel at all
strongly either for or against people. The feelings she thus expressed
were generally of a more impersonal kind, and would have fascinated
an admirer of the ballet: and it was all the more remarkable that she
_had_ developed a dog-like devotion to the reserved and coarse-looking
captain of the pirates.

No one really contends that children have any insight into character:
their likings are mostly imaginative, not intuitive. ‘What do you think
I am?’ the exasperated ruffian had asked on a famous occasion. One
might well ask what Laura thought he was: and there is no means of
knowing.


ii

Pigs grow quickly, quicker even than children: and much though the
latter altered in the first month on board, the little black porker
(whose name by the by was Thunder) altered even more. He soon grew to
such a size one could not possibly allow him to lie on one’s stomach
any more: so, as his friendliness did not diminish, the functions
were reversed, and it became a common thing to find one child, or a
whole bench of them, sitting on his scaly side. They grew very fond
of him indeed (especially Emily), and called him their Dear Love,
their Only Dear, their Own True Heart, and other names. But he had
only two things he ever said. When his back was being scratched he
enunciated an occasional soft and happy grunt; and that same phrase
(only in a different tone) had to serve for every other occasion and
emotion--except one. When a particularly heavy lot of children sat down
on him at once, he uttered the faintest ghost of a little moan, as
affecting as the wind in a very distant chimney, as if the air in him
was being squeezed out through a pinhole.

One cannot wish for a more comfortable seat than an acquiescent pig.

‘If I was the Queen,’ said Emily, ‘I should most certainly have a pig
for a throne.’

‘Perhaps she has,’ suggested Harry.

‘He _does_ like being scratched,’ she added presently in a very
sentimental tone, as she rubbed his scurfy back.

The mate was watching:

‘I should think _you_’d like being scratched, if your skin was in that
condition!’

‘Oh how disGUSTing you are!’ cried Emily, delighted.

But the idea took root.

‘I don’t think I should kiss him quite so much if I was you,’ Emily
presently advised Laura, who was lying with her arms tight round his
neck and covering his briny snout with kisses from ring to ears.

‘My pet! My love!’ murmured Laura, by way of indirect protest.

The wily mate had foreseen that some estrangement would be necessary
if they were ever to have fresh pork served without salt tears. He
intended this to be the thin end of the wedge. But alas! Laura’s mind
was as humoursome an instrument to play as the Twenty-three-stringed
Lute.

When dinner-time came, the children mustered for their soup and biscuit.

They were not overfed on the schooner: they were given little that
is generally considered wholesome, or to contain vitamines (unless
these lurked in the aforesaid peck of dirt): but they seemed none the
worse. First the cook boiled the various non-perishable vegetables they
carried in a big pot together for a couple of hours. Then a lump of
salt beef from the cask forward, having been rinsed in a little fresh
water, was added, and allowed to simmer with the rest till it was just
cooked. Then it was withdrawn, and the captain and mate ate their soup
first and their meat afterwards, out of plates, like gentlemen. After
that, if it was a week-day, the meat was put to cool on the cabin
shelf, ready to warm up in to-morrow’s soup, and the crew and children
ate the liquor with biscuit: but if it was Sunday, the captain took the
lump of meat and with a benevolent air cut it up in small pieces, as if
indeed for a nursery, and mixed it up with the vegetables in the huge
wooden bowl out of which crew and children all dipped. It was a very
patriarchal way of feeding.

Even at dinner Margaret did not join the others, but ate in the cabin;
though there were only two plates on the whole ship. Probably she used
the mate’s when he had finished.

Laura and Rachel fought that day to tears over a particularly succulent
piece of yam. Emily let them. To make those two agree was a task she
was wise not to undertake. Besides, she was very busy over her own
dinner. Edward managed to silence them, however, by declaring in a most
terrible voice: ‘Shut up or I’ll SABRE you!’

Emily’s estrangement from the captain had reached by now a rather
uncomfortable stage. When these things are fresh and new the two
parties avoid meeting, and all is well: but after some days they are
apt to forget, find themselves on the point of chatting, and then
suddenly remember that they are not on speaking terms and have to
retire in confusion. Nothing can be more uncomfortable for a child.
The difficulty of effecting a reconciliation in this case was that
both parties felt wholly in the wrong. Each repented the impulse of a
momentary insanity, and neither had an inkling the other felt the same:
thus each waited for the other to show signs of forgiveness. Moreover,
while the captain had far the more serious reason for being ashamed of
himself, Emily was naturally far the more sensitive and concerned of
the two: so it about balanced. Thus, if Emily rushed blithely up to the
captain embracing a flying-fish, caught his eye and slunk round the
other side of the galley, he put it down to a permanent feeling of
condemnation and repulsion: blushed a deep purple and stared stonily at
his wrinkling mainsail--and Emily wondered if he was _never_ going to
forget that bitten thumb.

But this afternoon things came to a head. Laura was trotting about
behind him, striking her attitudes. Edward had at last discovered which
was windward and which was leeward, and had come hot-foot to learn
the first of the Sovereign Rules of Life: and Emily, with one of her
wretched lapses of memory, was all agog at his elbow.

Edward was duly catechised and passed.

‘Dis is the first rule,’ said the captain: ‘_Never throw anything to
windward except hot water or ashes._’

Edward’s face developed exactly the look of bewilderment that was
intended.

‘But _windward_ is ...’ he began: ‘I mean, wouldn’t they blow ...’ then
he stopped, wondering if he had got the terms the right way round after
all. Jonsen was delighted at the success of this ancient joke. Emily,
trying to stand on one leg, bewildered also, lost her balance and
clutched at Jonsen’s arm. He looked at her--they all looked at her.

Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to
walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in
a series of somersaults. Emily immediately started turning head over
heels up the deck.

It was very difficult to keep direction, and the giddiness was
appalling; but she _must_ keep it up till she was out of sight, or die.

Just then, Rachel, who was up the mainmast, dropped, for the first
time, her marline-spike. She uttered a terrible shriek--for what _she_
saw was a baby falling to dash its brains out on the deck.

Jonsen gave an ineffectual little grunt of alarm--men can never learn
to give a full-bodied scream like a woman.

But Emily gave the most desperate yell of all, though several seconds
after the other two: for the wicked steel stood quivering in the deck,
having gouged a track through her calf on the way. Her wrought-up
nerves and sickening giddiness joined with the shock and pain to give a
heart-rending poignancy to her crying. Jonsen was by her in a second,
caught her up, and carried her, sobbing miserably, down into the cabin.
There sat Margaret, bending over some mending, her slim shoulders
hunched up, humming softly and feeling deadly ill.

‘Get out!’ said Jonsen, in a low, brutal voice. Without a word or sign
Margaret gathered up her sewing and climbed on deck.

Jonsen smeared some Stockholm tar on a rag, and bound up Emily’s leg
with more than a little skill, though the tar of course was agonising
to her. She had cried herself right out by the time he laid her in his
bunk. When she opened her streaming eyes and saw him bending over her,
nothing in his clumsy face but concern and an almost overpowering pity,
she was so full of joy at being at last forgiven that she reached up
her arms and kissed him. He sat down on the locker, rocking himself
backwards and forwards gently. Emily dozed for a few minutes: when she
woke up he was still there.

‘Tell me about when you were little,’ she said.

Jonsen sat on, silent, trying to project his unwieldy mind back into
the past.

‘When I was a boy,’ he said at last, ‘it wasn’t thought lucky to grease
your own sea-boots. My Auntie used to grease mine before we went out
with the lugger.’

He paused for some time.

‘We divided the fish up into six shares--one for the boat, and one for
each of us.’

That was all. But it was of the greatest interest to Emily, and she
shortly fell asleep again, supremely happy.

So for several days the captain and mate had to share the latter’s
bunk, Box-and-Cox; Heaven knows what hole Margaret was banished to.
The gash in Emily’s leg was one which would take some time to heal. To
make things worse, the weather became very unsteady: when she was awake
she was all right, but if she fell asleep she began to roll about the
bunk, and then, of course, the pain waked her again; which soon reduced
her to a feverish and nervous condition, although the leg itself was
going on as well as could be expected. The other children, of course,
used to come and see her: but they did not enjoy it much, as there was
nothing to do down in the cabin, once the novelty of admittance to the
Holy Place had worn off. So their visits were perfunctory and short.
They must have had a high old time at night, however, by themselves in
the fore-hold, now that the cat was away. They looked like it, too, in
the mornings.

Otto used sometimes to come and teach her to make fancy knots, and at
the same time pour out his grievances against the captain: though these
latter were always received with an uncomfortable silence. Otto was a
Viennese by birth, but had stowed away in a Danube barge when he was
ten years old, had taken to the sea, and thereafter generally served
in English ships. The only place since his childhood where he had ever
spent any considerable time on shore was Wales. For some years he had
sailed coastwise from the once-promising harbour of Portdinlleyn,
which is now practically dead: and so, as well as German, Spanish, and
English, he could talk Welsh fluently. It was not a long residence, but
at an impressionable age; and when he talked to Emily of his past it
was mostly of his life as a ‘boy’ on the slate-boats. Captain Jonsen
came of a Danish family settled on the Baltic coast, at Lübeck. He too
had spent most of his time on English ships. How or when he and Otto
had first met, or how they had drifted into the Cuban piracy business,
Emily never discovered. They had plainly been inseparable for many
years. She preferred letting them ramble on, to asking questions or
trying to fit things together: she had that sort of mind.

When the knots palled, José sent her a beautiful crochet-hook he had
carved out of a beef bone: and by pulling threads out of a piece of
sail-cloth she was able to set to work to crochet doilies for the
cabin table. But I am afraid that she also drew a lot, till the whole
of the inside of the bunk was soon as thoroughly scribbled over as
a palæolithic cave. What the captain would say when he found out
was a consideration best postponed. The fun was to find knots, and
unevennesses in the paint, that looked like something; and then with a
pencil to make them look more like it--putting an eye in the walrus, or
supplying the rabbit with his missing ear. That is what artists call
having a proper feeling for one’s material.

Instead of getting better the weather got worse: and the universe soon
became a very unstable place indeed: it became almost impossible to
crochet. She had to cling on to the side of the bunk all the time, to
prevent her leg getting banged.

It was in this inconvenient weather, however, that the pirates chose
at last to make another capture. It turned out not a rich one: a small
Dutch steamer, taking a consignment of performing animals to one of Mr.
Barnum’s predecessors. The captain of the steamer, who was conceited
in a way that only certain Dutchmen _can_ be conceited, gave them a
lot of trouble, in spite of the fact that he had practically nothing
worth taking. He was a first-class sailor: but he was very fair, and
had no neck. In the end they had to tie him up, bring him on board the
schooner, and lay him on the cabin floor where Emily could keep an eye
on him. He reeked of some particularly nauseous brand of cigars that
made her head swim.

The other children had played quite an important part in the capture.
They did far better as a badge of innocuousness than even the ‘ladies.’
The steamer (little more than dressed-up sailing-vessels they were
then), thoroughly disgruntled at the weather, was wallowing about like
a porpoise, her decks awash and her funnel over one ear, so to speak:
so when a boat put out from the schooner, its departure cheered lustily
by Edward, Harry, Rachel, and Laura, though his pride might resent
it, the Dutchman never thought of suspecting this presumable offer of
assistance, and let them come on board.

It was then he began to give trouble, and they had to remove him onto
the schooner. Their tempers were none too good on finding their booty
was a lion, a tiger, two bears, and a lot of monkeys: so it is quite
likely they were none too gentle with him in transit.

The next thing was to discover whether the _Thelma_, like the
_Clorinda_, carried another, a secret cargo of greater value. They had
imprisoned all the crew, now, aft: so one by one they were brought up
on deck and questioned. But either there was no money on board, or
the crew did not know of it, or would not tell. Most of them, indeed,
appeared frightened enough to have sold their grandmothers: but some of
them simply laughed at the pirates’ bogey-bogey business, guessing they
drew the line at murder in cold blood, sober.

What was done in each case was the same. When each man was finished
with he was sent forward and shut in the fo’c’sle: and before bringing
another up from aft one of the pirates would unmercifully belabour a
roll of sail-cloth with a cat-o’-nine-tails while another yelled like
the damned. Then a shot was fired in the air, and something thrown
overboard to make a splash. All this, of course, was to impress those
still down in the cabin awaiting their turns: and the pretence was
quite as effective as the reality could have been. But it did no good,
since probably there was no treasure to disclose.

There was, however, a plentiful supply of Dutch spirits and liqueurs on
board: and these the pirates found a welcome change after so much West
Indian rum.

After they had been drinking them for an hour or two Otto had a
brilliant idea. Why not give the children a circus? They had begged and
begged to be taken onto the steamer to see the animals. Well, why not
stage something really magnificent for them--a fight between the lion
and the tiger, for instance?

No sooner said than done. The children, and every man who could be
spared, came onto the steamer, and took up positions at safe heights
in the rigging. The cargo-gaff was rigged, the hatch opened, and the
two iron cages, with their stale cat-like reek, were hauled up on deck.
Then the little Malay keepers, who kept twittering to each other in
their windy tones, were made to open them, that the two monarchs of the
jungle might come out and do battle.

How they were to be got in again was a question that never occurred to
any one’s consideration. Yet it is generally supposed to be easier to
let tigers out of cages than to put them back.

In this case, however, even when the cages were open, neither of the
beasts seemed very anxious to get out. They lay on the floor growling
(or groaning) slightly, but making no move except to roll their eyes.

It was very unfortunate for poor Emily that she was missing all this,
laid by the leg in Jonsen’s stuffy cabin with the Dutch captain to
guard.

When at first they had been left alone together he had tried to speak
to her: but unlike so many Dutchmen he did not know a word of English.
He could just move his head, and he kept turning his eyes first on a
very sharp knife which some idiot had dropped in a corner of the cabin
floor, then on Emily. He was asking her to get it for him, of course.

But Emily was terrified of him. There is something much more
frightening about a man who is tied up than a man who is not tied up--I
suppose it is the fear he may get loose.

The feeling of not being able to get out of the bunk and escape added
the true nightmare panic.

Remember that he had no neck, and the cigar-reek.

At last he must have caught the look of fear and disgust in her face,
where he had expected compassion. He began to act for himself. First
gently rocking his bound body from side to side, he set himself to roll.

Emily screamed for help, beating with her fist on the bunk: but none
came. Even the sailors who were left on board were out of ear-shot:
they were straining all their attention to see what was happening on
the steamer that wallowed and heaved seventy yards away. There, one
of the pirates, greatly daring, had descended to the rail and begun
throwing belaying-pins at the cages, to rouse their occupants. If the
beasts so much as lashed their tails in response, however, he would
scuttle up any rope like a frightened mouse. Only the Malay keepers
remained permanently on deck, taking no notice: sitting on their heels
in a ring and crooning discordantly through their noses. Probably they
felt inside much as the lion and tiger did.

After some minutes, however, the pirates grew bolder. Otto came right
up to one cage, and started poking the tiger’s ribs with a hand-spike.
But the poor beast was far too sea-sick to be roused even by that.
Gradually the whole crowd of the spectators descended onto the deck and
stood round, still not unprepared to bolt, while the drunk mate, and
even Captain Jonsen (who was perfectly sober), goaded and jeered.

It was not surprising no one heard poor Emily, left alone in the cabin
with the terrible Dutchman.

She screamed and screamed: but there was no awakening from _this_
nightmare.

By now he had managed to roll himself, in spite of the motion of the
vessel, almost within reach of the coveted knife. The veins on his
forehead stood out with his exertion and the stricture of his bonds.
His fingers were groping, behind his back, for the edge.

Emily, beside herself with terror, suddenly became possessed by the
strength of despair. In spite of the agony it caused her leg she flung
herself out of the bunk, and just managed to seize the knife before he
could manœuvre his bound hands within reach of it.

In the course of the next five seconds she had slashed and jabbed at
him in a dozen places: then, flinging the knife towards the door,
somehow managed to struggle back into the bunk.

The Dutchman, bleeding rapidly, blinded with his own blood, lay still
and groaned. Emily, her own wound reopened, and overcome with pain and
terror, fainted. The knife, flung wildly, missed its aim and clattered
down the steps again onto the cabin floor: and the first witness of the
scene was Margaret, who presently peered down from the deck above, her
dulled eyes standing out from her small, skull-like face.

       *       *       *       *       *

As for Jonsen and Otto, unable by other means to rouse the dormant
animals, they collected their men and with big levers managed to tilt
the cages, spilling the beasts out onto the deck.

But not even so would they fight--or even show signs of resentment. As
they had lain and groaned in their cages, so they now lay and groaned
on the deck.

They were small specimens of their kind, and emaciated by travel. Otto
with a sudden oath seized the tiger round its middle and hauled it
upright on its hind legs: Jonsen did the same by the more top-heavy
lion: and so the two principals to the duel faced each other, their
heads lolling over the arms of their seconds.

But in the eyes of the tiger a slight ember of consciousness seemed
to smoulder. Suddenly it tautened its muscles: a slight effort, yet
it burst from the merely human grip of Otto like Samson from the new
ropes--nearly dislocated his arms before he had time to let go.
Quicker than eye could see, it had cuffed him, rending half his face.
Tigers are no plaything. Jonsen dropped the huge bulk of the lion
on top of it, and escaped with Otto through an open door: while the
pirates, tumbling over each other like people in a burning theatre,
struggled to get back in the rigging.

The lion rolled clear. The tiger, lurching unsteadily, crept back into
its cage. The keening Malays took no notice of the whole scene.

And yet, what a scene it had been!

But now the heroic circus was over. Chastened, bruised by each other in
their panic, the drunken pirates helped the mate into the first of the
two boats, and pulling helter-skelter in the choppy sea, returned to
the schooner. One by one they climbed the rail and vaulted on deck.

Sailors have keen noses. They smelt blood at once, and crowded round
the companion-way: where Margaret still sat, as if numb, on the top
step.

Emily lay in the bunk below, her eyes shut--conscious again, but her
eyes shut.

The Dutch captain they could see on the floor, stretched in a pool of
blood. ‘_But, Gentlemen, I have a wife and children!_’ he suddenly said
in Dutch, in a surprised and gentle tone: then died, not so much of
any mortal wound as of the number of superficial gashes he had received.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was plainly Margaret who had done it--killed a bound, defenceless
man, for no reason at all; and now sat watching him die, with her dull,
meaningless stare.




_Chapter 8_


The contempt they already felt for Margaret, their complete lack of
pity in her obvious illness and misery, had been in direct proportion
to the childhood she had belied.

This crime would have seemed to them grave on the part of a grown
man, in its unrelieved wantonness: but done by one of her years, and
nurture, it was unspeakable. She was lifted by the arms from the stair
where she still sat, and without a moment’s hesitation (other than that
resulting from too many helping hands) was dropped into the sea.

But yet the expression of her face, as--like the big white pig in the
squall--she vanished to windward, left a picture in Otto’s mind he
never forgot. She was, after all, his affair.

The Dutchman’s body was fetched up on deck. Captain Jonsen went below:
and once bent over poor little Emily. She only screwed up her eyes
tighter, when she felt his hot breath on her face. She did not open
them till everybody had quite gone--and shut them again when presently
José came to swab the cabin floor.

       *       *       *       *       *

The second boat, bringing back the rest of the crew and the four
children, almost ran into Margaret before they saw her. She was
swimming desperately, but in complete silence: her hair now plastered
across her eyes and mouth, now floating out on the water as her
head went under. They lifted her into the boat and set her in the
stern-sheets with the other children. So it was they found themselves
together again.

In her sopping condition, the others naturally gave her elbow-room: but
still, she was among them. They sat and stared at her, their eyes very
wide and serious, but without speaking. Margaret, her teeth chattering
with exhaustion, tried ineffectually to wring out the hem of her frock.
She did not speak either: but nevertheless it was not long before both
she and the other children felt a sort of thaw setting in between them.

As to the oarsmen, they never troubled their heads as to how she came
in the water. They supposed she had accidentally slipped over the side:
but were not particularly interested, especially as they had their work
cut out manœuvring round to the schooner’s lee and clambering on board.
There was a tremendous pow-wow going on aft, so that no one noticed
them arrive.

Once on board, Margaret went straight forward as of old, climbed
down the ladder into the fore-hold and undressed, the other children
watching her every movement with an unfeigned interest. Then she
rolled herself in a blanket, and lay down.

They none of them noticed quite how it happened: but in less than
half an hour they were all five absorbed in a game of Consequences.
Presently one of the crew came, peered down the hatch and then shouted
‘Yes!’ to the rest, and then went away again. But they neither saw nor
heard him.

From now on, however, the atmosphere of the schooner suffered a change.
A murder is inclined to have this effect on a small community. As a
matter of fact, the Dutch captain’s was the first blood to be shed on
board, in the course of business at any rate (I will not answer for
private quarrels). The way it had been shed left the pirates profoundly
shocked, their eyes opened to a depravity of human nature they had not
dreamt of: but also it gave them an uncomfortable feeling round the
neck. So long as there was only the circus-prank to avenge, no American
man-of-war was likely to be despatched in their pursuit: high Naval
Authorities shrink naturally from any contact with the ridiculous: but
suppose the steamer put into port, and announced the forcible abduction
of her captain? Or worse, suppose her mate, with an accursed spy-glass,
had seen that captain’s bloody body take its last dive? Pursuit would
be only too likely.

The plea ‘It was none of us men did this wicked deed, but one of our
young female prisoners,’ was hardly one which could be submitted to a
jury.

Captain Jonsen had discovered from the steamer’s log where he was: so
he put the schooner about, and set a course for his refuge at Santa
Lucia. It was unlikely, he thought, now, that any British man-of-war
would still be cruising about the scene of the _Clorinda_ episode--they
had too much to do: and he had reasons (fairly expensive ones) for
not anticipating any molestation from the Spanish authorities. He did
not like going home with an empty ship, of course: but that appeared
inevitable.

The outward sign of this change in the atmosphere of the schooner was a
spontaneous increase in the strictness of discipline. Not a drop of rum
was drunk. Watch was kept with the regularity of a line-of-battle ship.
The schooner became tidier, more seamanlike in every way.

Thunder was slain and eaten the next day, without any regard for the
feelings of his lovers: indeed, all tenderness towards the children
vanished. Even José ceased playing with them. They were treated
with a detached severity not wholly divorced from fear--as if these
unfortunate men at last realised what diabolic yeast had been
introduced into their lump.

So sensible were the children themselves of the change that they even
forgot to mourn for Thunder--excepting Laura, whose face burned an
angry red for half a day.

But the ship’s monkey, on the other hand, with no pig now to tease,
nearly died of ennui.


ii

The reopening of the wound in her leg made it several days more before
Emily was fit to be moved from the cabin. During this time she was
much alone. Jonsen and Otto seldom came below, and when they did were
too preoccupied to heed her blandishing. She sang, and conversed to
herself, almost incessantly; only interrupting herself to beseech these
two, with a superfluity of endearments, to pick up her crochet-hook,
to look at the animal she had built out of her blanket, to tell her
a story, to tell her what naughty things they did when they were
little--how unlike Emily it was, all this gross bidding for attention!
But as a rule they went away again, or went to sleep, without taking
the least notice of her.

As well, she told herself, _to_ herself, endless stories: as many
as there are in _The Arabian Nights_, and quite as involved. But
the strings of words she used to utter aloud had nothing to do with
this: I mean, that when she made a sort of narrative noise (which was
often), she did it for the noise’s sake: the silent, private formation
of sentences and scenes, in one’s head, is far preferable for real
story-telling. If you had been watching her then, unseen, you could
only have told she was doing it by the dramatic expressions of her
face, and her restless flexing and tossing--and if she had had the
slightest inkling you were there, the audible rigmarole would have
started again. (No one who has private thoughts going on loudly in
his own head is quite sure of their not being overheard unless he is
providing something else to occupy foreign ears.)

When she sang, however, it was always wordless: an endless succession
of notes, like a bird’s, fixed to the first vocable handy, and
practically without tune. Not being musical, there was never any reason
for her to stop: so one song would often go on for half an hour.

Although José had scrubbed the cabin floor as well as he could, a large
stain still remained.

At times she let her mind wander about, quite peacefully, in her
memories of Jamaica: a period which now seemed to her very remote, a
golden age. How young she must have been! When her imagination grew
tired, too, she could recall the Anansi stories Old Sam had told her:
and they often proved the point of departure for new ones of her own.

Also she could remember the creepy things he had told her about
duppies. _How_ they used to tease the negroes about the supposed duppy
at the bathing-hole, the duppy of the drowned man! It gave one an
enormous sense of power, that--not to believe in duppies.

But she found herself taking much less pleasure in duppies now than she
used.

She even once caught herself wondering what the Dutchman’s duppy would
look like, all bloody, with its head turned backwards on its shoulders
and clanking a chain ... it was a momentary flash, the way the banished
image of Tabby had come back to her. For a moment her head reeled:
in another she was far from Jamaica, far from the schooner, far from
duppies, on a golden throne in the remotest East.

The other children were no longer allowed in the cabin to visit her:
but when she heard their feet scampering overhead, she often conversed
with them in loud yells. One of these yells from above told her:

‘Marghie’s back, you know.’

‘O-oh.’

After that Emily was silent for a bit, her beautiful, innocent grey
eyes fixed on the ear of a dwarf at the end of her bunk. Only the
slight pucker at the top of her nose showed with what intensity she was
thinking: and the minute drops of sweat on her temples.

But it was not only when there was some outward occasion, like this,
that she suffered acute distress.

Froth as she might, those times of consciousness, which had begun
with a moment of such sublime vision, were both growing on her and
losing their lustre. They were become sinister. Life threatened to be
no longer an incessant, automatic discharge of energy: more and more
often, and when least expected, all that would suddenly drop from her,
and she would remember that she was _Emily_, who had killed ... and
who was _here_ ... and that Heaven alone knew what was going to happen
to the incompetent little thing, by what miracle she was going to keep
her end up.... Whenever this happened, her stomach seemed to drop away
within her a hundred and fifty feet.

She, like Laura, had one foot each side of a threshold now. As a piece
of Nature, she was practically invulnerable. But as _Emily_, she
was absolutely naked, tender. It was particularly cruel that this
transition should come when so fierce a blast was blowing.

For mark this: any one in bed, with a blanket up to her chin, is in a
measure safe. She might go through abysms of terror; but once these
passed, no practical harm had been done. But once she was up and about?
Suppose it was at some crisis, some call to action, that her Time came
on her? What appalling blunder could she fail to make?

Oh why must she grow up? Why, for pity’s sake?

Quite apart from these attacks of blind, secret panic, she had other
times of an ordinary, very rational anxiety. She was ten and a half
now. What sort of future lay before her, what career? (Their mother
had implanted in them young, as a matter of principle, girls and
boys alike, the idea that they would one day have to earn their own
livings.) I say she was ten and a half: but it seemed such ages since
she had come on the schooner that she thought she was probably older
even than that.--Now this life was full of interest: but was it, she
asked herself, a really useful education? What did it fit her for?
Plainly, it taught her nothing but to be a sort of pirate too (what
sort of a pirate, being a girl, was a problem in itself). But as time
slipped by, it became clearer and clearer that every other life would
be impossible for her--indeed, for all of them.

Gone, alas, was any shred of confidence that she was God. That
particular, supreme career was closed to her. But the conviction that
she was the wickedest person who had ever been born, this would not die
for much longer. Some appalling Power had determined it: it was no good
struggling against it. Had she not already committed the most awful of
crimes ... the most awful of crimes, though, that was not murder, that
was the mysterious crime against the Holy Ghost, which dwarfed even
murder ... had she, unwittingly, at some time committed this too? She
so easily might have, since she did not know what it was. And if that
were so, no wonder the pity of Heaven was sealed against her!

So the poor little outcast lay shivering and sweating under her
blanket, her gentle eyes fixed on the ear of the dwarf she had drawn.

But presently she was singing again happily, and hanging right out of
the bunk to outline in pencil the brown stain on the floor. A touch
here, a touch there, and it was an old market-woman to the life,
hobbling along with a bundle on her back! I admit that it staggered
even Otto a bit when he came in later and saw what she had done.

But when again she lay still on her back, and contemplated the
practical difficulties of the life ahead of her (even leaving God and
her Soul and all that on one side), she had not the support of Edward’s
happy optimism: she was old enough to know how helpless she really was.
How should she, dependent now for her very life on the kindness of
those around her, how should she ever acquire the wit and strength to
struggle against them and their kind?

She had developed by this time a rather curious feeling about Jonsen
and Otto. In the first place, she had become very fond of them.
Children, it is true, have a way of becoming more or less attached to
any one they are in close contact with: but it was more than that,
deeper. She was far fonder of them than she had ever been of her
parents, for instance. They, for their part, showed every mild sign
consonant with their natures of being fond of her: but how could she
_know_? It would be so easy for adult things like them to dissemble to
her, she felt. Suppose they really intended to kill her: they could so
easily hide it: they would behave with exactly this same kindness ... I
suppose this was the reflection of her own instinct for secretiveness?

When she heard the captain’s step on the stairs, it might be that he
was bringing her a plate of soup, or it might be that he had come to
kill her--suddenly, with no warning change of expression on his amiable
face even at the very end.

If that was his intention, there was nothing whatever she could do
to hinder him. To scream, struggle, attempt flight--they would be
absolutely useless, and--well, a breach of decorum. If he chose to keep
up appearances, it behoved her to do so too. If he showed no sign of
his intention, she must show no sign of her inkling of it.

That was why, when either of them came below, she would sing on, smile
at him impishly and confidently, actually plague him for notice.

She was a little fonder of Jonsen than of Otto. Ordinarily, any
coarseness or malformity of adult flesh is in the highest degree
repulsive to a child: but the cracks and scars on Jonsen’s enormous
hands were as interesting to her as the valleys on the moon to a boy
with a telescope. As he clumsily handled his parallel rulers and
dividers, fitting them with infinite care to the marks on his chart,
Emily would lie on her side and explore them, give them all names.

_Why_ must she grow up? _Why_ couldn’t she leave her life always in
other people’s keeping, to order as if it was no concern of hers?

Most children have something of this feeling. With most children it is
outweighed: still, they will generally hesitate before telling you
they prefer to grow up. But then, most children live secure lives,
and have an at least apparently secure future to grow up to. To have
already murdered a full-sized man, and to have to keep it for ever
secret, is not a normal background for a child of ten: to have a
Margaret one could not altogether banish from one’s thoughts: to see
every ordinary avenue of life locked against one, only a violent road,
leading to Hell, open.

She was still on the border-line: so often Child still, and nothing
but Child ... it needed little conjuring ... Anansi and the Blackbird,
Genies and golden thrones....

Which is all a rather groping attempt to explain a curious fact: that
Emily appeared--indeed _was_ rather young for her age: and that this
was due to, not in spite of, the adventures she had been through.

But this youngness, it burnt with an intenser flame. She had never
yelled so loud at Ferndale, for sheer pleasure in her own voice, as now
she yelled in the schooner’s cabin, carolling like a larger, fiercer
lark.

Neither Jonsen nor Otto were nervous men: but the din she made
sometimes drove them almost distracted. It was very little use telling
her to shut up: she only remembered for such a short time. In a minute
she was whispering, in two she was talking, in five her voice was in
full blast.

Jonsen was himself a man who seldom spoke to any one. His companionship
with Otto, though devoted, was a singularly silent one. But when he did
speak, he hated not to be able to make himself heard at all: even when,
as was usual, it was himself he was talking to.


iii

Otto was at the wheel (there was hardly one of the crew fit to steer).
His lively mind was occupied with Santa Lucia, and his young lady
there. Jonsen slipper-sloppered up and down his side of the deck.

Presently, his interest in his subject waning, Otto’s eye was caught by
the ship’s monkey, which was sporting on its back on the cabin skylight.

That animal, with the same ingenious adaptability to circumstance which
has produced the human race, had now solved the playmate question. As
a gambler will play left hand against right, so he fought back legs
against front. His extraordinary lissomness made the dissociation
most lifelike: he might not have been joined at the waist at all, for
all the junction discommoded him. The battle, if good-tempered on
both sides, was quite a serious one: now, while his hind feet were
doing their best to pick out his eyes, his sharp little teeth closed
viciously on his own private parts.

From below the skylight, too, came tears and cries for help that one
might easily have taken for real if they had not been occasionally
interrupted by such phrases as ‘It’s no good: I shall cut off your head
just the same!’

Captain Jonsen was thinking about a little house in far-off, shadowy
Lübeck--with a china stove ... it didn’t do to talk about retiring:
above all, one must never say aloud ‘This is my last voyage,’ even
addressing oneself. The sea has an ironic way of interpreting it in her
own fashion, if you do. Jonsen had seen too many skippers sail on their
‘last voyage’--and never return.

He felt acutely melancholy, not very far from tears: and presently he
went below. He wanted to be alone.

Emily by now was conducting, in her head, a secret conversation
with John. She had never done so before: but to-day he had suddenly
presented himself to her imagination. Of course his disappearance
was strictly taboo between them: what they chiefly discussed was
the building of a magnificent raft, to use in the bathing-hole at
Ferndale; just as if they had never left the place.

When she heard the captain’s step, so nearly surprising her at it, she
blushed a deep red. She felt her cheeks still hot when he arrived. As
usual, he did not even glance at her. He plumped down on a seat, put
his elbows on the cabin table, his head in his hands, and rocked it
rhythmically from side to side.

‘Look, Captain!’ she insisted. ‘Do I look pretty like this? Look!
_Look!_ Look, _do_ I look pretty like this?’

For once he raised his head, turned, and considered her at length. She
had rolled up her eyes till only the whites showed, and turned her
under lip inside out. With her first finger she was squashing her nose
almost level with her cheeks.

‘No,’ he said simply, ‘you do not.’ Then he returned to his cogitation.

She stuck out her tongue as well, and waggled it.

‘Look!’ she went on, ‘Look!’

But instead of looking at her, he let his eye wander round the cabin.
It seemed changed somehow--emasculated: a little girl’s bedroom, not a
man’s cabin. The actual physical changes were tiny: but to a meticulous
man they glared. The whole place smelt of children.

Unable to contain himself, he crammed on his cap and burst up the
stairs.

On deck, the others were romping round the binnacle, wildly excited.

‘_Damn!_’ cried Jonsen at the sight of them, stamping in an
ungovernable rage.

Of course his slippers came off, and one of them skiddered up the deck.

What devil entered into Edward I do not know: but the sight was too
much for him. He seized the slipper and rushed off with it, shrieking
with delight. Jonsen roared at him: he passed it to Laura, and was soon
dancing up and down at the end of the jib-boom. Edward, of all people!
The timid, respectful Edward!

Laura could hardly carry the enormous thing: but she clasped it
tight in her arms, lowered her head, and with the purposeful air of
a rugger-player ran back with it very fast up the deck, apparently
straight into Jonsen’s arms. At the last moment she dodged him neatly:
continued right on past Otto at the wheel, just as serious and just as
fast, and forward again on the port-side. Jonsen, no quick mover at any
time, stood in his socks and roared himself hoarse. Otto was shaking
with laughter like a jelly.

This mad intoxication, which had flashed from child to child, now
dropped a spark into the crew. They were already peering excitedly
from the fo’c’sle hatch, grins struggling with outrage for pride of
place: but at this point they broke into a cheer. Then, like the devils
in a pantomime, they all sank together through the floor, aghast at
themselves, and pulled the scuttle over their heads.

Laura, still hugging the slipper, caught her toe in an eye-bolt and
fell full length, set up a yell.

Otto, with a suddenly straight face, ran forward, picked up the slipper
and returned it to Jonsen, who put it on. Edward stopped jumping up and
down and became frightened.

Jonsen was trembling with rage. He advanced on Edward with an iron
belaying-pin in his hand.

‘Come down from there!’ he commanded.

‘Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!’ cried Edward, not moving. Harry suddenly ran and
hid himself in the galley, though he had had no part in it.

With a surprising agility which he rarely used, Jonsen started out
along the bowsprit towards Edward, who did nothing but moan ‘Don’t!’ at
the sight of that murderous belaying-pin. When Jonsen was just on him,
however, he swarmed up a stay, helping himself with the iron hanks of
the jib.

Jonsen returned to the deck, wringing his hands and angrier than ever.
He sent a sailor to the cross-trees to head the boy off and drive him
down again.

Indeed, but for an extraordinary diversion, I shudder to think what
might have happened to him. But just at this moment there appeared, up
the ladder from the children’s fore-hold, Rachel. She wore one of the
sailors’ shirts, back to front, and reaching to her heels: in her hand,
a book. She was singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ at the top of her
voice. But as soon as she reached the deck she became silent: strutted
straight aft, looking neither to right nor left, genuflected to Otto at
the wheel, and then sat herself down on a wooden bucket.

Every one, Jonsen included, stood petrified. After a moment of silent
prayer she arose, and commenced an inarticulate gabble-gabble which
reproduced extraordinarily well the sound of what she used to hear in
the little church at St. Anne’s, where the whole family went one Sunday
in each month.

Rachel’s religious revival had begun. It could hardly have been more
opportune: who shall say it was not Heaven which had chosen the moment
for her?

Otto, entering into the thing at once, rolled up his eyes and spread
out his arms, cross-wise, against the wheel-house at his back.

Jonsen, rapidly recovering some of his temper, strode up to her. Her
imitation was admirable. For a few moments he listened in silence. He
wavered: should he laugh? Then what remained of his temper prevailed.

‘Rachel!’ he rebuked.

She continued, almost without taking breath, ‘Gabble-gabble, Bretheren,
gabble-gabble.’

‘I am not a religious man myself,’ said the captain, ‘but I will not
allow religion to be made a mock of on my ship!’

He caught hold of Rachel.

‘Gabble-gabble!’ she went on, slightly faster and on a higher note.
‘Let me alone! Gabble-gabble! Amen! Gabble....’

But he sat himself on the bucket, and stretched her over his knee.

‘You’re a wicked pirate! You’ll go to Hell!’ she shrieked, breaking at
last into the articulate.

Then he began to smack her; so hard that she screamed almost as much
with pain as with rage.

When at last he set her down, her face was swollen and purple. She
directed a tornado of punches with her little fists against his knees,
crying ‘Hell! Hell! Hell!’ in a strangulated voice.

He flipped her fists aside with his hand, and presently she went away,
so tired with crying she could hardly get her breath.

Meanwhile, Laura’s behaviour had been characteristic. When she tripped
and fell, she roared till her bumps ceased hurting. Then, with no
perceptible transition, her convulsions of agony became an attempt to
stand on her head. This she kept up throughout Edward’s flight up the
stay, throughout the electric appearance of Rachel. During the latter’s
punishment, having happened to topple in the direction of the mainmast,
and finding her feet against the rack round its base for belaying the
halyards to, she gave a tremendous shove off--she would roll instead.
And roll she did, very rapidly, till she arrived at the captain’s
feet. There she lay all the while he was smacking Rachel, completely
unconcerned, on her back, her knees drawn up to her chin, humming a
little tune.


iv

When Emily returned to the fore-hold, her first act was one which
greatly complicated life. As if there was not sea enough already
outside the ship, she decreed that practically all the deck was
sea also. The main-hatch was an island, of course; and there were
others--chiefly natural excrescences of the same kind. But all the
rest, all the open deck, could only be safely crossed in a boat, or
swimming.

As to who was in a boat and who wasn’t, Emily decided that herself. No
one ever knew till she had been asked. But Laura, once she had got the
main idea into her head, always swam, whether said to be in a boat or
not--to be on the safe side.

‘_Isn’t_ she silly?’ said Edward once, when she refused to stop working
her arms although they had all told her she was safe on board.

‘I expect we were all as silly as that when we were young,’ said Harry.

It was a source of consternation to the children that none of the
grown-ups would recognise this ‘sea.’ The sailors trod carelessly on
the deepest oceans, refusing so much as to paddle with their hands. But
it was equally irritating to the sailors when the children, either safe
on an island or bearing down in a vessel of their own, would scream at
them in a tone of complete conviction:

‘You’re drowning! You’re drowning! O-o-oh, look out! You’re out of your
depth there! The sharks’ll eat you!’

‘O-oh look! Miguel’s sinking! The waves are right over his head!’

That happens to be the one sort of joke sailors can’t enjoy. Even
though the words were unintelligible, their gist--eked out by the
slightly malicious hints of the mate--was not. If they steadily refused
to swim, they at least took to crossing themselves fervently and
continuously whenever they had to traverse a piece of open deck. For
there was no way one could be certain that these brats were not gifted
with second sight--_hijos de puntas_!

What the children were really doing, of course, was trying out what it
would feel like when they themselves were all grown pirates, running a
joint venture or each with a craft of his own: and though they never
so much as mentioned piracy in the course of these public navigations,
they talked their heads off about it at night now.

Margaret also refused to swim: but they knew by now it was no good
trying to make her: no good yelling at _her_ she was drowning, for all
she did at that word was to sit down and cry. So it became a recognised
convention that Margaret, wherever she went or whatever she was
doing, was on a raft, with a keg of biscuit and a barrel of water, by
herself--and could be ignored.

For, since her return, she had become very dull company. That one game
of Consequences had been a flash in the pan. For several days after it
she had remained in bed, hardly speaking, and inclined to tear strips
off her blanket when she was asleep: and even when she was about
again, though perfectly amiable--more amiable than before--she refused
to join in any game whatever. She seemed happy: but for any imaginative
purpose she was useless.

Moreover, she made no attempt to regain the sovereignty to which Emily
had succeeded. She never ordered any one about. There was not even any
fun to be got out of baiting her: nothing seemed to ruffle her temper.
She was sometimes treated with a good-humoured contempt, sometimes
ignored altogether: and it was enough for _her_ to say something for it
to be automatically voted silly.

Rachel also, for several days after her service, showed no disposition
to join with the others. She preferred to sit about below, sulking, in
the hold. From time to time she attempted to pick a hole, with a copper
nail she had got hold of, in the bottom of the ship, and so sink it. It
was Laura who discovered her purpose, and came hot-foot to Emily with
the news. Laura never doubted, any more than Rachel did, that the task
was a possible one.

Emily came below and found her at it. After three days, she had only
managed to scratch up one single splinter--partly because she never
attacked the same place twice: but both she and Laura expected to see
quantities of water come welling through and rapidly fill the ship.
Indeed, though no water had yet appeared, Laura was convinced the ship
was already perceptibly lowered as a result of Rachel’s efforts.

Laura clasped her hands in expectation, waiting to see what Emily would
do in the face of this impending disaster.

‘You stupid, _that’s_ no good!’ was all Emily’s comment.

Rachel looked at her angrily:

‘You leave me alone! I know what I am doing!’

Emily’s eyes grew very wide, and danced with a strange light.

‘If you talk to me like that, I’ll have you hanged from the yard-arm!’

‘What’s _that_?’ asked Rachel sulkily.

‘You ought to know which is the yard-arm by now!’

‘I don’t care!’ growled Rachel, and went on scratching with her nail.

Emily picked up a big piece of iron, in a corner, so heavy she could
hardly carry it:

‘Do you know what I’m going to do?’ she asked in a strange voice.

At the sound of it Rachel stopped scratching and looked up.

‘No,’ she said, a trifle uneasily.

‘I’m going to kill you! I’m turned a pirate, and I’m going to kill you
with this sword!’

At the word ‘sword,’ the misshapen lump of metal seemed to Rachel to
flicker to a sharp, wicked point.

She looked Emily in the eyes, doubtfully. Did she mean it, or was it a
game?

As a matter of fact, she had always been a little afraid of Emily.
Emily was so huge, so strong, so old (as good as grown up), so cunning!
Emily was the cleverest, the most powerful person in the world! The
muscles of a giant, the ancient experience of a serpent!--And now, her
terrible eyes, with no hint in them of pretence.

Emily glared fixedly, and saw real panic dawn in Rachel’s face.
Suddenly the latter turned, and as fast as her short fat legs would
carry her began to swarm up the ladder. Emily rang her iron once
against it, and Rachel nearly tumbled down again in her haste.

The iron was so big and heavy it took Emily a long time to haul it
up on deck. Even when that was done, it greatly impeded her running,
so that she and Rachel did three laps round the deck without their
distances altering much, cheered boisterously by Edward. Even in her
terror Rachel did not forget to work her arms as in breast-stroke.
Finally, with a cry of ‘Oh, I can’t run any more, my bad leg’s
hurting!’ Emily flung down the iron and dropped panting beside Edward
on the main-hatch.

‘I shall put poison in your dinner!’ she shouted cheerfully to Rachel:
but the latter retreated behind the windlass and began to nurse with an
abandoned devotion the particular brood she had parked there, working
herself almost to tears with the depth of her maternal pity for them.

Emily went on chuckling for some time at the memory of her sport.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Edward scornfully, puffing out his
chest. He was feeling particularly manly at the moment. ‘Have you got
the giggles?’

‘I _like_ having the giggles,’ said Emily disarmingly. ‘Let’s see if we
can’t all get them. Come on, Laura! Harry, come!’

The two smaller ones came obediently. They stared her in the face
attentively and seriously, awaiting the Coming of the God, while she
herself broke into louder and louder explosions of laughter. Soon the
infection took and they were laughing too, each shriller and more
wildly than the other.

‘I can’t stop! I can’t stop!’ they cried at intervals.

‘Come on, Edward! Look me in the face!’

‘I won’t!’ said Edward.

So she set on him and tickled him till he was as hysterical as the rest.

‘Oh, I _do_ want to stop, my tummy is hurting so!’ complained Harry at
last.

‘Go away then,’ advised Emily in a lucid interval. And so the group
presently broke up. But they had all to avoid each other’s eye for a
long while, if they were not to risk another attack.

It was Laura who was cured the quickest. She suddenly discovered what a
beautiful deep cave her armpit made, and decided to keep fairies in it
in future. For some time she could think of nothing else.


v

Captain Jonsen called suddenly to José to take the wheel, and went
below for his telescope. Then, buttressing his hip against the rail,
and extending the shade over the object-glass, he stared fixedly at
something almost in the eye of the setting sun. Emily, in a gentle
mood, wandered up to him, and stood, her side just touching him. Then
she began lightly rubbing her cheek on his coat, as a cat does.

Jonsen lowered the glass and tried his naked eye, as if he had more
trust in it. Then he explored with the glass once more.

What was that business-like-looking sail, tall and narrow as a pillar?
He swept his eye round the rest of the horizon: it was empty: only that
single threatening finger, pointing upwards.

Jonsen had chosen his course with care to avoid all the ordinary tracks
of shipping at that time of year. Especially he had chosen it to avoid
the routine-passages of the Jamaica Squadron from one British island to
another. This--it had no business here: no more than he had himself.

Emily put her arm round his waist and gave it a slight hug.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Do let me look.’

Jonsen said nothing, continuing to stare with concentration.

‘_Do_ let me look!’ said Emily. ‘I haven’t ever looked through a
telescope, ever!’

Jonsen abruptly snapped the glass to, and looked down at her. His
usually expressionless features were stirred from their roots. He
lifted one hand and gently began to stroke her hair.

‘Do you love me?’ he asked.

‘Mm,’ assented Emily. Later she added, with a wriggle, ‘You’re a
darling.’

‘If it was to help me, would you do something ... very difficult?’

‘Yes, but _do_ let me have a look through your telescope, because I
haven’t, not ever, and I do so want to!’

Jonsen gave a weary sigh, and sat down on the cabin-top. What _on
Earth_ were children’s heads made of, inside?

‘Now listen,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you seriously.’

‘Yes,’ said Emily, trying to hide her extreme discomfort. Her eye
plaintively searched the deck for something to hold it. He pressed her
against his knee in an attempt to win her attention.

‘If bad, cruel men came and wanted to kill me and take you away, what
would you do?’

‘Oh, how horrid!’ said Emily. ‘Will they?’

‘Not if you help me.’

It was unbearable. With a sudden leap she was astride his knees, her
arms round his neck and her hands pressing the back of his head.

‘I wonder if you make a good Cyclops?’ she said; and holding his head
firmly laid her nose to his nose, her forehead to his forehead, both
staring into each other’s eyes, an inch apart, till each saw the
other’s face grow narrow and two eyes converge to one large, misty eye
in the middle.

‘Lovely!’ said Emily. ‘You’re just right for one! Only now one of your
eyes has got loose and is floating up above the other one!’

The sun touched the sea, and for thirty seconds every detail of the
distant man-of-war was outlined in black against the flame. But, for
the life of him, Jonsen could think of nothing but that house in quiet
Lübeck, with the green porcelain stove.




_Chapter 9_


The darkness closed down with its sudden curtain on that minatory
finger.

Captain Jonsen remained on deck all night, whether it was his watch or
not. It was a hot night, even for those latitudes: and no moon. The
suffused brilliance of the stars lit up everything close quite plainly,
but showed nothing in the distance. The black masts towered up, clear
against the jewelry, which seemed to swing slowly a little to one
side, a little to the other, of their tapering points. The sails, the
shadows in their curves all diffused away, seemed flat. The halyards
and topping-lifts and braces showed here, were invisible there, with an
arbitrariness which took from them all meaning as mechanism.

Looking forward with the glowing binnacle-light at one’s back, the
narrow milky deck sloped up to the fore-shortened tilt of the bowsprit,
which seemed to be trying to point at a single enlarged star just above
the horizon.

The schooner moved just enough for the sea to divide with a slight
rustle on her stem, breaking out into a shower of sparks, which lit
up also wherever the water rubbed the ship’s side, as if the ocean
were a tissue of sensitive nerves; and still twinkled behind in the
mere paleness of the wake. Only a faint tang of tar in the nostrils
was there to remind one that this was no ivory and ebony fantasia but
a machine. For a schooner is in fact one of the most mechanically
satisfactory, austere, unornamented engines ever invented by Man.

A few yards off, a shoal of luminous fish shone at different depths.

But a few hundred yards off, one could see nothing! The sea became a
steady glittering black that did not seem to move. Near, one could see
so much detail it seemed impossible to believe that there a whole ship
might lie invisible: impossible to believe that by no glass, no anxious
straining of the eyes, could one ever _see_.

Jonsen strode up and down the lee-side of the vessel, so that what
breeze there was, collecting in the hollow of the sails, overflowed
down onto him in a continuous cool cascade. From time to time he
climbed to the foremast-head, in spite of the fact that added height
could not possibly give added vision: stared into the blank till his
eyes ached, and then came down and resumed his restless pacing. A ship
with her lights out might creep within a mile of him, and he not know
it.

Jonsen was not given to intuitions: but he had now an extraordinary
feeling of certainty that somewhere close in that cover of darkness his
enemy lay, preparing destruction for him. He strained his ears too:
but he could hear nothing either, except the rustle of the water, the
occasional knocking of a loose block.

If only there had been a moon! He remembered another occasion, fifteen
years before. The slaver of which he was then second mate was bowling
along, the hatches down on her stinking cargo, all canvas spread, when
right across the glittering path of the moon a frigate crossed, almost
within gun-shot--crossed the light, and disappeared again. Jonsen had
realised at once that though the frigate, with the light behind it,
was now invisible to them, they, with the moonlight shining full on
them, would be perfectly visible to the frigate. The boom of a gun soon
proved it. He had wanted to make a blind bolt for it: but his captain,
instead, ordered every stitch of sail to be furled: and so they lay all
night under their bare poles, not moving, of course, but (with nothing
to reflect the light) grown invisible in their turn. When dawn came the
frigate was so far down the wind they had easily shown her a clean pair
of heels.

But to-night! There was no friendly moon-track to betray the attacker:
nothing but this inner conviction, which grew every moment more
certain.

Shortly after midnight he had descended from one of his useless climbs
to the mast-head, and stood for a moment by the open fore-hatch. The
warm breath of the children was easily discernible. Margaret was
chattering in her sleep--quite loud, but you could not distinguish a
single clear word.

Moved by a whim, Jonsen climbed down the ladder into the hold. Below,
it was hot as an oven. A zooming winged cockroach cannoned about. The
sound of the water, a dry rustle above, was here a pleasant gurgle and
plop against the wooden shell; most musical of sounds to a sailor.

Laura lay on her back in the faint light of the open hatch. She had
discarded her blanket; and the vest which did duty for a night-gown was
rucked right up under her arms. Jonsen wondered how anything so like a
frog could ever conceivably grow into the billowy body of a woman. He
bent down and attempted to pull down the vest: but at the first touch
Laura rolled violently over onto her stomach, then drew her knees up
under her, thrusting her pointed rump up at him; and continued to sleep
in that position, breathing noisily.

As his eyes got used to the gloom, vague white splodges showed him that
most of the children had discarded their dark blankets. But he did not
notice Emily, sitting up in the darkness and watching him.

As he turned to go, an experimental smile lit up his face: he bent, and
gently flicked Laura’s behind with his finger-nail. It collapsed like a
burst balloon; but still she went on sleeping, flat on her face now.

Jonsen was still chuckling to himself as he reached the deck. But
there his forebodings returned to him with redoubled force. He could
_feel_ that man-of-war lying-to in the darkness, biding its time! For
the fiftieth time he climbed the ratlines and took his stand at the
cross-trees, skinning his eyes.

Presently, looking down, he could just discern the small white figure
on the deck which was Emily, hopping and skipping about. But it passed
at once out of his mind.

Suddenly his tired eye caught a patch of something darker than the sea.
He looked away, then back again, to make sure. It was still there: on
the port bow: impossible to make out clearly, though.... Jonsen slid
down the shrouds in a flash, like a prentice. Landing on the deck like
a thunderbolt, he nearly startled Emily out of her life: she had no
idea he was up there. She startled him no less.

‘It’s so _hot_ down there,’ she began, ‘I can’t sleep----’

‘Get below!’ hissed Jonsen furiously: ‘don’t you dare come up again!
And don’t let any of the others, till I tell you!’

Emily, thoroughly frightened, tumbled down the ladder as fast as she
could, and rolled herself in her blanket from head to foot: partly
because her bare legs were really a little chilled, but more for
comfort. What had she done? What was happening? She was hardly down
when feet were heard scurrying across the deck, and the hatches over
her head were loosely fitted into place. The darkness was profound, and
seemed to be rolling on her. No one was within reach: and she dared not
move an inch. Every one was asleep.

Jonsen called all hands on deck: and in silence they mustered at the
rail. The patch was clearly visible now: nearer, and smaller than he
had thought at first. They listened for the splash of oars: but it came
on in silence.

Suddenly they were upon it, it was grating against the ship’s side,
slipping astern. It was a dead tree, carried out to sea by some river
in spate, and tangled up with weed.

But after that, he kept all hands on deck till dawn. In their new mood
they obeyed him readily enough. For they knew he was not incompetent.
He generally did the right thing--it was only the fuss he made in any
emergency which gave him the appearance of blundering.

Yet, though there were now so many eyes watching, no further alarm was
given.

But the moment the first paleness of dawn glimmered, every one’s nerves
tightened to cracking-point. The rapidly increasing light would any
moment show them their fate.

It was not till full daylight, however, that Jonsen would let himself
be convinced there was absolutely no man-of-war there.

As a matter of fact, its royals had sunk below the horizon less than an
hour after he had first sighted it.


ii

But the alarm of that night caused Jonsen at last to make up his mind.

He altered his course: and as before he had designed it to avoid other
shipping, now on the contrary it was calculated to run as soon as
possible into the very track of the Eastward Bounders.

Otto rubbed his eyes. What had come over the fellow? Did he want
revenge for the fright he had had? Was he going to try and cut out a
prize right in the thick of the traffic? It would be like Jonsen, that:
to put his head in the lion’s mouth after trembling at its roar: and
Otto’s heart warmed towards him. But he asked no questions.

Meanwhile Jonsen went to his cabin, opened a secret receptacle in his
bunk, and took out a job-lot of ships’ papers which he had bought from
a Havana dealer in such things. _The ‘John Dodson,’ of Liverpool, bound
for the Seychelles with a cargo of cast-iron pots_--what use was that
in these waters? The man had sold him a pup!--Ah, this was better:
‘_Lizzie Green,’ of Bristol, bound from Matanzas to Philadelphia in
ballast_ ... a funny trip to make in ballast, true: but that was no
one’s affair but his imaginary owner’s. Jonsen made sure all was in
order--filled in the blank dates, and so on--then returned the bundle
to its hiding-place for another occasion. Coming on deck, he gave a
number of orders.

First, stages were rigged over the bows and stern, and José and a
paint-pot went over the rail to add _Lizzie Green_ to the many names
which from time to time had decorated the schooner’s escutcheon.
Not content with that, he had it painted on every other appropriate
place--the boats, the buckets--it was as well to be thorough.
Meanwhile, many of the sails were taken down and new ones bent--or
rather, old ones, distinctive sails that a man would swear he couldn’t
have forgotten if he had ever seen them before. Otto sewed a large
patch to the mainsail, where there was no hole. In his zeal Jonsen even
considered lowering the yards and rigging her as a pure fore-and-after:
but luckily for his sweating crew, abandoned the idea.

The master-stroke of his disguise was permanent--that he carried no
guns. Guns can be hidden or thrown overboard, it is true: but the
grooves they make in the deck cannot, as many a protesting-innocent
sea-robber has found to his cost. Jonsen not only had no guns to hide,
he had no grooves: any fool could see he had no guns, and never had had
any. And who ever heard of a pirate without guns? It was laughable:
yet he had proved again and again that one could make a capture just
as easily without them: and further, that the captured merchantman, in
making his report, could generally be counted on to imagine a greater
or less display of artillery. Whether it was to save their faces, or
pure conservatism--presumption that there must have been guns--nearly
every vessel Jonsen had had dealings with had reported masked
artillery, manned by ‘fifty or seventy ruffians of the worst Spanish
type.’

Of course if he met and was challenged by a man-of-war, he would
have to give in without a fight. But then, it never pays to fight a
man-of-war anyhow. If he is a big one, he sinks you. If he is some
little cock-shell of a cutter, commanded by a fire-eating young officer
just into his teens, you sink him--and then there is the devil to pay.
Better be sunk outright than insult the honour of a great nation in
that fashion.

When he at last remembered to take the hatches off the children, they
were half dead with suffocation. It was hot enough, stuffy enough
anyhow down there, only the square opening above for ventilation; but
with the hatches even loosely in place it was a Black Hole. Emily had
at last dropped asleep, and slept late, through a chain of nightmares:
when she did wake in the closed hold, she sat up, then fainted
immediately, and fell back, her breath coming in loud snores. Before
she came to again she was already sobbing miserably. At that the little
ones began to cry too: which sound it was that reminded Jonsen, rather
late, to take the hatches off.

He was quite alarmed when he saw them. It was not till they had been
out in the morning freshness of the deck for some time that they even
summoned up interest in the strange metamorphosis of the schooner that
was in progress.

Jonsen looked at them with a troubled eye. They had not indeed the
appearance of well-cared-for children: though he had not noticed this
before. They were dirty to a fault: their clothes torn, and mended, if
at all, with twine. Their hair was not only uncombed--there was tar
in it. They were mostly thin, and a yellowy-brown colour. Only Rachel
remained obstinately plump and pink. The scar on Emily’s leg was still
a blushing purple: and they all were blotched with insect bites.

Jonsen called José off his painting job: gave him a bucket of fresh
water: the mate’s (the only) comb: and a pair of scissors. José
wondered innocently: they did not look to him particularly dirty. But
he did his duty, while they were still too sorry for themselves to
object actively, to do anything more than sob weakly when he hurt them.
Even when he had finished their toilet, of course, he had not reached
the point at which a nursemaid usually begins.

It was noon before the _Lizzie Green_ looked herself--whoever
that might be: and a little after noon she was still heading for
‘Philadelphia’ when, hull down on the horizon, two sail were sighted,
many miles apart, at about the same minute. Captain Jonsen considered
them carefully; made his choice, and altered his course so as to fall
in with her as soon as might be.

Meanwhile, the crew had no more doubt than Otto had of Jonsen’s
intention: and the sound of the whetstone floated merrily aft, till
each man’s knife had an edge that did its master’s heart good. I have
said that the murder of the Dutch captain had affected the whole
character of their piracy. The yeast was working.

Presently the smoke of a large steamer cropped up over the horizon as
well. Otto sniffed the breeze. It might hold, or it might not. They
were still far from home, and these seas crowded. The whole enterprise
looked to him pretty desperate.

Jonsen was at his usual shuffle-shuffle, nervously biting his nails.
Suddenly he turned on Otto and called him below. He was plainly very
agitated; his cheeks red, his eye wild. He began by plotting himself
meticulously on the chart. Then he growled over his shoulder:

‘Those children, they must go.’

‘Aye,’ said Otto. Then, as Jonsen said no more, he added: ‘You’ll land
them at Santa, I take it?’

‘No! They must go now. We may never get to Santa.’

Otto took a deep breath.

Jonsen turned on him, blustering:

‘If we get taken with them, where’ll _we_ be, eh?’

Otto went white, then red, before he answered.

‘You’ll have to risk that,’ he said slowly. ‘You can’t land them no
other place.’

‘Who said I was going to land them?’

‘There’s nothing else you can do,’ said Otto stubbornly.

A light of comprehension dawned suddenly in Jonsen’s worried face.

‘We could sew them up in little bags,’ he said with a genial smile,
‘and put them over the side.’

Otto gave him one quick glance; what he saw was enough to relieve him.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘Sew them up in little bags! Sew them up in little bags!’ Jonsen
affirmed, rubbing his hands together and chuckling, all the latent
sentimentality of the man getting the better of him. Then he pushed
past Otto and went on deck.

The big brigantine, which he had aimed for at first, was proving a
bit too far up the wind for him: so now he took the helm and let the
schooner’s head down a couple of points, to intercept the steamer
instead.

Otto whistled. At last an inkling of what the captain was at had dawned
on him.


iii

As they drew nearer, the children were all immensely interested: they
had never before seen anything like this big, miraculous tub. The Dutch
steamer, an old-fashioned craft, had not differed very materially from
a sailing-vessel: but this, in form, was already more like the steamers
of our own day. Its funnel was still tall and narrow, with a kind of
artichoke on top, it is true: but otherwise it was much the same as you
and I are used to.

Jonsen spoke her urgently: and presently her engines stopped. The
_Lizzie Green_ slipped round under her lee. Jonsen had a boat lowered:
then embarked in it himself. The children and the schooner’s crew stood
at the rail in tense excitement: watched a little ladder lowered from
her towering iron side: watched Jonsen, alone, in his dark Sunday suit
and the peaked cap of his rank, climb on board. He had timed it nicely:
in another hour it would be dark.

He had no easy task. First he had his premeditated fiction to
establish, his explanation of how he came by his passengers. Secondly,
he had to persuade the captain of the steamship, a stranger, to relieve
him, where he had so signally failed to persuade his friend the señora
at Santa Lucia.

Otto was not a man to show agitation: but he felt it, none the less.
This scheme of Jon’s was the foolhardiest thing he had ever heard of:
the slightest suspicion, and they were as good as done for.

Jonsen had ordered him, if he guessed anything was wrong, to run.

Meanwhile, the breeze was dropping, and it was still light.

Jonsen had vanished into the steamer as into a forest.

Emily was as excited as any of them, pointing out the novel features
of this extraordinary vessel. The children still thought it was
professional quarry. Edward was openly bragging of what he would do
when he had captured it.

‘I shall cut the captain’s head off and throw it in the water!’ he
declared aloud.

‘S-s-sh!’ exclaimed Harry in a stage whisper.

‘Coo! I don’t care!’ cried Edward, intoxicated with bravado. ‘Then I
shall take out all the gold and keep it for myself.’

‘I shall sink it!’ said Harry, in imitation: then added as an
afterthought, ‘Right to the very bottom!’

Emily fell silent, her peculiarly vivid imagination having the mastery
of her. She saw the hold of the steamer, piled with gold and jewels.
She saw herself, fighting her way through hordes of hairy sailors,
with her bare fists, till only the steamer’s captain stood between her
and the treasure.

Then it happened! It was as if a small cold voice inside her said
suddenly, ‘_How can you? You’re only a little girl!_’ She felt herself
falling giddily from the heights, shrinking. She was _Emily_.

The awful, blood-covered face of the Dutch captain seemed to threaten
her out of the air. She cowered back at the shock. But it was over in a
moment.

She looked around her in terror. Did any one know how defenceless she
was? Surely some one must have noticed her. The other children were
gibbering in their animal innocence. The sailors, their knives half
concealed, grinned at each other or cursed. Otto, his brows knotted,
stood with his eyes fixed on the steamer.

She feared everybody, she hated everybody.

Margaret was whispering something to Edward, and he nodded. Again
panic seized her. What was Margaret telling him? Had she told every
one? Did they all know? Were they all playing with her, deceiving
her by pretending not to know, waiting their own time to burst their
revelation on her and punish her in some quite unimaginably awful way?

_Had_ Margaret told? If she crept up behind Margaret now, and pushed
her in the sea, might she yet be in time?--But even as she thought it,
she seemed to see Margaret rising waist-high out of the waves, telling
the whole story to everybody in a calm, dispassionate voice, and
climbing back on board.

In another flash she saw the fat, comfortable person of her mother,
standing at the door of Ferndale, abusing the cook.

Again her eyes roamed round the sinister reality of the schooner. She
suddenly felt sick to death of it all: tired, beyond words tired.
Why must she be chained for ever to this awful life? Could she never
escape, never get back to the ordinary life little girls lead, with
their papas and mamas and ... birthday cakes?

Otto called her. She went to him obediently: though with a presentiment
that it was to her execution. He turned, and called Margaret too.

She was in a more attentive mood than she had been the other night with
the captain, Heaven knows! But Otto was too preoccupied to notice how
frightened her eyes were.

Jonsen had no easy task on the steamer: but Otto did not greatly relish
his own. He did not know how to begin--and everything depended on his
success.

‘See here,’ he burst out. ‘You’re going to England.’

Emily shot him a quick glance. ‘Yes?’ she said at last: her voice
showing merely a polite interest.

‘The captain has gone onto that steamboat to arrange about it.’

‘Aren’t we staying with you any longer, then?’

‘No,’ said Otto: ‘you’re going home on that steamboat.’

‘Shan’t we see you any more, then?’ Emily pursued.

‘No,’ said Otto: ‘--Well, some day, perhaps.’

‘Are they all going, or only us two?’

‘Why, all of you, of course!’

‘Oh. I didn’t know.’

There was an awkward silence, while Otto wondered how to tackle the
real problem.

‘Had we better go and get ready?’ asked Margaret.

‘Now listen!’ Otto interrupted her. ‘When you get on board, they’ll ask
you all about everything. They’ll want to know how you got here.’

‘Are we to tell them?’

Otto was astonished she took his point so readily.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The captain and me don’t want you to. We want you to
keep it a secret, do you see?’

‘What _are_ we to say, then?’ Emily asked.

‘Tell them ... you were captured by pirates, and then ... they put you
ashore at a little port in Cuba----’

‘--Where the Fat Woman was?’

‘--Yes. And then we came along, and took you on board our schooner,
which was going to America, to save you from the pirates.’

‘I see,’ said Emily.

‘You’ll say that, and keep the ... other a secret?’ Otto asked
anxiously.

Emily gave him her peculiar, gentle stare.

‘Of course!’ she said.

Well, he had done his best: but Otto felt heavy at heart. That little
cherub! He didn’t believe she could keep a secret for ten seconds.

‘Now: do you think you can make the little ones understand?’

‘Oh yes, I’ll tell them,’ said Emily easily. She considered for a
moment: ‘I don’t suppose they remember much anyway. Is that all?’

‘That’s all,’ said Otto: and they walked away.

‘What was he saying?’ Margaret asked. ‘What was it all about?’

‘Oh shut up!’ said Emily rudely. ‘It’s nothing to do with you!’

But inwardly she did not know whether she was on her head or her heels.
Were they really going to let her escape? Weren’t they just tantalising
her, meaning to stop her at the last moment? Were they handing her
over to strangers, who had come to hang her for murder? Was her mother
perhaps on that steamer, come to save her? But she loved Jonsen
and Otto: how could she bear to part with them? The dear, familiar
schooner.... All these thoughts in her head at once! But she dealt
firmly enough with the Liddlies:

‘Come on!’ she said. ‘We’re going on that steamer.’

‘Are _we_ to do the fighting?’ Edward asked, timorously enough.

‘There isn’t going to be any fighting,’ said Emily.

‘Will there be another circus?’ asked Laura.

Then she told them they were to change ships again.

When Captain Jonsen came back, mopping the sweat from his polished
forehead with a big cotton handkerchief, he seemed in a terrible hurry.
As for the children, they were so excited they were ready to tumble
into the boat: in such a flurry they nearly tumbled into the sea
instead. _Now_ they knew why they had been washed and combed.

It did not seem at first as if there was going to be any difficulty
about getting them started. But it was Rachel who began the break-away.

‘My babies! My babies!’ she shrieked, and began running all over the
ship, routing out bits of rag, fuzzy rope-ends, paint-pots ... her arms
were soon full.

‘Here, you can’t take all that junk!’ dissuaded Otto.

‘Oh but my darlings, I can’t leave you behind!’ cried Rachel piteously.
Out rushed the cook, just in time to retrieve his ladle--and a
battle-royal began.

Naturally, Jonsen was on tenterhooks to be gone. But it was essential
they should part on good terms.

José was lifting Laura over the side.

‘_Darling_ José!’ she burst out suddenly, and twined her arms tightly
round his neck.

At that Harry and Edward, who were already in the boat, scrambled back
on deck. They had forgotten to say good-bye. And so each child said
good-bye to each pirate, kissing him and lavishing endearments on him.

‘Go on! Go on!’ muttered Jonsen impatiently.

Emily flung herself in his arms, sobbing as if her heart would break.

‘Don’t make me go!’ she begged. ‘Let me stay with you always, always!’
She clung tight to the lapels of his coat, hiding her face in his
chest: ‘Oh, I _don’t_ want to go!’

Jonsen was strangely moved: for a moment, almost toyed with the idea.

But the others were already in the boat.

‘Come on!’ said Otto, ‘or they’ll go without you!’

‘Wait! Wait!’ shrieked Emily, and was over the side and in the boat in
a flash.

Jonsen shook his head confusedly. For this last time, she had him
puzzled.

But now, as they rowed across to the steamer, all the children stood up
in the boat, in danger of tumbling out, and cried:

‘Good-bye! Good-bye!’

‘Adios!’ cried the pirates, waving sentimental hands, and guffawing
secretly to each other.

‘C-c-come and see us in England!’ came Edward’s clear treble.

‘Yes!’ cried Emily. ‘Come and stay with us! All of you!--_Promise_
you’ll come and stay with us!’

‘All right!’ shouted Otto. ‘We’ll come!’

‘Come _soon_!’

‘My babies!’ wailed Rachel. ‘I’ve lost ’most all my babies!’

But now they were alongside the steamer: and soon they were mounting a
rope ladder to her deck.

What a long way up it was! But at last they were all on board.

The little boat returned to the schooner.

The children never once looked after it.

And well might they forget it. For exciting as it had been to go onto a
ship of any kind for the first time, to find themselves on this steamer
was infinitely more so. The luxury of it! The white paint! The doors!
The windows! The stairs! The brass!--A fairy palace, no: but a mundane
wonder of a quite unimagined kind.

But they had little time now to take in the details. All the
passengers, wild with curiosity, were gathered round them in a ring. As
the dirty, dishevelled little mites were handed one by one on board, a
gasp went up. The story of the capture of the _Clorinda_ by as fiendish
a set of buccaneers as any in the past that roamed the same Caribbean
was well known: and how the little innocents on board her had been
taken and tortured to death before the eyes of the impotent captain. To
see now face to face the victims of so foul a murder was for them too a
thrill of the first water.

The tension was first broken by a beautiful young lady in a muslin
dress. She sank on her knees beside little Harry, and folded him in her
delicate arms.

‘The little angel!’ she murmured. ‘You poor little man, what horrors
you have been through! How will you ever forget them?’

As if that were the signal, all the lady passengers fell on the
astonished children and pitied them: while the men, less demonstrative,
stood around with lumps in their throats.

Bewildered at first, it was not long before they rose to the
occasion--as children generally will, when they find themselves the
butt of indiscriminate adoration. Bless you, they were kings and
queens! They were so sleepy they could hardly keep their eyes open: but
they were not going to bed, not they! They had never been treated like
this before. Heaven alone knew how long it would last. Best not waste a
minute of it.

It was not long before they ceased even to be surprised, became
convinced that it was all their right and due. They were very important
people--quite unique.

Only Emily stood apart, shy, answering questions uncomfortably. She did
not seem to be able to throw herself into her importance with the same
zest as the others.

Even the passengers’ children joined in the fuss and admiration:
perhaps realising the opportunity which the excitement gave of
avoiding their own bed-time. They began to bring (probably not without
suggestion) their toys, as offerings to these new gods: and vied with
each other in their generosity.

A shy little boy of about her own age, with brown eyes and a nice
smile, his long hair brushed smooth as silk, his clothes neat and
sweet-smelling, sidled up to Rachel.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.

‘Harold.’

She told him hers.

‘How much do you weigh?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You look rather heavy. May I see if I can lift you?’

‘Yes.’

He clasped his arms round her stomach from behind, leant back, and
staggered a few paces with her. Then he set her down, the friendship
cemented.

Emily stood apart; and for some reason every one unconsciously
respected her reserve. But suddenly something seemed to snap in her
heart. She flung herself face-downwards on the deck--not crying, but
kicking convulsively. It was a huge great stewardess who picked her
up and carried her, still quivering from head to foot, down to a neat,
clean cabin. There, soothing and talking to her without ceasing, she
undressed her, and washed her with warm water, and put her to bed.

Emily’s head felt different to any way it had ever felt before: hardly
as if it were her own. It sang, and went round like a wheel, without so
much as with your leave or by your leave. But her body, on the other
hand, was more than usually sensitive, absorbing the tender, smooth
coolness of the sheets, the softness of the mattress, as a thirsty
horse sucks up water. Her limbs drank in comfort at every pore: it
seemed as if she could never be sated with it. She felt physical peace
soaking slowly through to her marrow: and when at last it got there,
her head became more quiet and orderly too.

All this while she had hardly heard what was said to her: only a
refrain that ran through it all made any impression, ‘_Those wicked men
... men ... nothing but men ... those cruel men._...’

Men! It was perfectly true that for months and months she had seen
nothing but men. To be at last back among other women was heavenly.
When the kind stewardess bent over her to kiss her, she caught tight
hold of her, and buried her face in the warm, soft, yielding flesh, as
if to sink herself in it. Lord! How unlike the firm, muscular bodies of
Jonsen and Otto!

When the stewardess stood up again, Emily feasted her eyes on her, eyes
grown large and warm and mysterious. The woman’s enormous, swelling
bosom fascinated her. Forlornly, she began to pinch her own thin little
chest. Was it conceivable she would herself ever grow breasts like
that--beautiful, mountainous breasts, that had to be cased in a sort of
cornucopia? Or even firm little apples, like Margaret’s?

Thank God she had not been born a boy! She was overtaken with a sudden
revulsion against the whole sex of them. From the tips of her fingers
to the tips of her toes she felt female: one with that exasperating,
idiotic secret communion: initiate of the γυναικεῖον.

Suddenly Emily reached up and caught the stewardess by the head,
pulling it down to her close: began whispering earnestly in her ear.

On the woman’s face the first look of incredulity changed to utter
stupefaction, from stupefaction to determination.

‘My eye!’ she said at last. ‘The cheek of the rascals! The impudence!’

Without another word she slipped out of the cabin. And you may imagine
that the steamer captain, when he heard the trick that had been played
upon him, was as astonished as she.

For a few moments after she had gone Emily lay staring at nothing, a
very curious expression on her face indeed. Then, all of a sudden, she
dropped asleep, breathing sweetly and easily.

But she only slept for about ten minutes: and when she woke the cabin
door was open, and in it stood Rachel and her little boy friend.

‘What do you want?’ said Emily forbiddingly.

‘Harold has brought his alligator,’ said Rachel.

Harold stepped forward, and laid the little creature on Emily’s
coverlet. It was very small: only about six inches long: a yearling:
but an exact miniature of its adult self, with the snub nose and round
Socratic forehead that distinguish it from the crocodile. It moved
jerkily, like a clockwork toy. Harold picked it up by the tail: it
spread its paws in the air, and jerked from side to side, more like
clockwork than ever. Then he set it down again, and it stood there, its
tongueless mouth wide open and its harmless teeth looking like grains
of sand-paper, alternately barking and hissing. Harold let it snap at
his finger--it was plainly hungry in the warmth down there. It darted
its head so fast you could hardly see it move: but its bite was still
so weak as to be painless, even to a child.

Emily drew a deep breath, fascinated.

‘May I have him for the night?’ she asked.

‘All right,’ said Harold: and he and Rachel were summoned away by some
one without.

Emily was translated into Heaven. So this was an alligator! She was
actually going to sleep with an alligator! She had thought that to any
one who had once been in an earthquake nothing really exciting could
happen again: but then, she had not thought of this.

_There was once a girl called Emily, who slept with an alligator...._

In search of greater warmth, the creature high-stepped warily up the
bed towards her face. About six inches away it paused, and they looked
each other in the eye, those two children.

The eye of an alligator is large, protruding, and of a brilliant
yellow, with a slit pupil like a cat’s. A cat’s eye, to the casual
observer, is expressionless: though with attention one can distinguish
in it many changes of emotion. But the eye of an alligator is
infinitely more stony and brilliant--reptilian.

What possible meaning could Emily find in such an eye? Yet she lay
there, and stared, and stared: and the alligator stared too. If there
had been an observer it might have given him a shiver to see them
so--well, eye to eye like that.

Presently the beast opened his mouth and hissed again gently. Emily
lifted a finger and began to rub the corner of his jaw. The hiss
changed to a sound almost like a purr. A thin, filmy lid first covered
his eye from the front backwards, then the outer lid closed up from
below.

Suddenly he opened his eyes again, and snapped on her finger: then
turned and wormed his way into the neck of her night-gown, and crawled
down inside, cool and rough against her skin, till he found a place
to rest. It is surprising that she could stand it as she did, without
flinching.

       *       *       *       *       *

Alligators are utterly untamable.


iv

From the deck of the schooner, Jonsen and Otto watched the children
climb onto the steamer: watched their boat return, and the steamer get
under way.

So: it had all gone without a hitch. No one had suspected his story--a
story so simple as to be very nearly the truth.

They were gone.

Jonsen could feel the difference at once: and it seemed almost as if
the schooner could. A schooner, after all, is a place for _men_. He
stretched himself, and took a deep breath, feeling that a cloying,
enervating influence was lifted. José was industriously sweeping up
some of Rachel’s abandoned babies. He swept them into the lee-scuppers.
He drew a bucket of water, and dashed it at them over the deck. The
trap swung open--whew, it was gone, all that truck!

‘Batten down that fore-hatch!’ ordered Jonsen.

The men all seemed lighter of heart than they had been for many months:
as if the weight they were relieved of had been enormous. They sang
as they worked, and two friends playfully pummelled each other in
passing--hard. The lean, masculine schooner shivered and plunged in the
freshening evening breeze. A shower of spray for no particular reason
suddenly burst over the bows, swept aft and dashed full in Jonsen’s
face. He shook his head like a wet dog, and grinned.

Rum appeared: and for the first time since the encounter with the Dutch
steamer all the sailors got bestially drunk, and lay about the deck,
and were sick in the scuppers. José was belching like a bassoon.

It was dark by then. The breeze dropped away again. The gaffs clanked
aimlessly in the calm, with the motion of the sea: the empty sails
flapped with reports like cannon, a hearty applause. Jonsen and Otto
themselves remained sober, but they had not the heart to discipline the
crew.

The steamer had long since disappeared into the dark. The foreboding
which had oppressed Jonsen all the night before was gone. No intuition
told him of Emily’s whispering to the stewardess: of the steamer,
shortly after, meeting with a British gunboat: of the long series
of lights flickering between them. The gunboat, even now, was fast
overhauling him: but no premonition disturbed his peace.

He was tired--as tired as a sailor ever lets himself be. The last
twenty-four hours had been hard. He went below as soon as his watch was
over, and climbed into his bunk.

But he did not, at once, sleep. He lay for a while conning over the
step he had taken. It was really very astute. He had returned the
children, undoubtedly safe and sound: Marpole would be altogether
discredited. Even to have landed them at Santa Lucia, his first
intention, could never have closed the _Clorinda_ episode so
completely, since the world at large would not have heard of it: and it
would have been difficult to produce them, should need arise.

Indeed, it had seemed to be a choice of evils: either he must carry
them about always, as a proof that they were alive, or he must land
them and lose control of them. In the first case, their presence would
certainly connect him with the _Clorinda_ piracy of which he might
otherwise go unsuspected: in the second, he might be convicted of their
murder if he could not produce them.

But this wonderful idea of his, now that he had carried it out
successfully, solved both difficulties.

It had been a near thing with that little bitch Margaret, though ...
lucky the second boat had picked her up....

The light from the cabin lamp shone into the bunk, illuminating part of
the wall defaced with Emily’s puerile drawings. As they caught his eye
a frown gathered on his forehead: but as well a sudden twinge affected
his heart. He remembered the way she had lain there, ill and helpless.
He suddenly found himself remembering at least forty things about
her--an overwhelming flood of memories.

The pencil she had used was still among the bedding, and his fingers
happened on it. There were still some white spaces not drawn on.

Jonsen could only draw two things: ships, and naked women. He could
draw any type of ship he liked, down to the least detail--any
particular ship he had sailed in, even. In the same way he could
draw voluptuous, buxom women, also down to the least detail: in any
position, and from any point of view: from the front, from the back,
from the side, from above, from below: his fore-shortening faultless.
But set him to draw any third thing--even a woman with her clothes
on--and he could not have produced a scribble that would have been even
recognisable.

He took the pencil: and before long there began to appear between
Emily’s crude uncertain lines round thighs, rounder bellies, high
swelling bosoms, all somewhat in the manner of Rubens.

At the same time his mind was still occupied with reflections on his
own astuteness. Yes, it had been a near thing with Margaret--it would
have been awkward if, when he returned the party, there had been one
missing.

A recollection descended on his mind like a cold douche, something he
had completely forgotten about till then. His heart sank--as well it
might:

‘Hey!’ he called to Otto on the deck above. ‘What was the name of that
boy who broke his neck at Santa? Jim--Sam--what was he called?’

Otto did not answer, except by a long-drawn-out whistle.




_Chapter 10_


Emily grew quite a lot during the passage to England on the steamer:
suddenly shot up, as children will at that age. But she did it without
any gawkiness: instead, an actual increase of grace. Her legs and
arms, though longer, did not lose any of the nicety of their shape;
and her grave face lost none of its attractiveness by being a fraction
nearer your own. The only drawback was that she used to get pains in
the calves of her legs, now, and sometimes in her back: but those of
course did not show. (They were all provided with clothes by a general
collection, so it did not matter that she grew out of her old ones.)

She was a nice child: and being a little less shy than formerly, was
soon the most popular of all of them. Somehow, no one seemed to care
very much for Margaret: old ladies used to shake their heads over her a
good deal. At least, any one could see that Emily had infinitely more
sense.

You would never have believed that Edward after a few days’ washing and
combing would look such a little gentleman.

After a short while Rachel threw Harold over, to be uninterrupted in
her peculiar habits of parthenogenesis, eased now a little by the many
presents of real dolls. But Harold became soon just as firm friends
with Laura, young though she was.

Most of the steamer children had made friends with the seamen, and
loved to follow them about at their romantic occupations--swabbing
decks, and so on. One day, one of these men actually went a short way
up the rigging (what little there was), leaving a glow of admiration on
the deck below. But all this had no glamour for the Thorntons. Edward
and Harry liked best to peer in at the engines: but what Emily liked
best was to walk up and down the deck with her arm round the waist of
Miss Dawson, the beautiful young lady with the muslin dresses: or stand
behind her while she did little water-colour compositions of toppling
waves with wrecks foundering in them, or mounted dried tropical flowers
in wreaths round photographs of her uncles and aunts. One day Miss
Dawson took her down to her cabin and showed her all her clothes, every
single item--it took hours. It was the opening of a new world to Emily.

The captain sent for Emily, and questioned her: but she added nothing
to that first, crucial burst of confidence to the stewardess. She
seemed struck dumb--with terror, or something: at least, he could get
nothing out of her. So he wisely let her alone. She would probably
tell her story in her own time: to her new friend, perhaps. But this
she did not do. She would not talk about the schooner, or the pirates,
or anything concerning them: what she wanted was to listen, to drink
in all she could learn about England, where they were really going at
last--that wonderfully exotic, romantic place.

Louisa Dawson was quite a wise young person for her years. She saw that
Emily did not want to talk about the horrors she had been through: but
considered it far better that she should be made to talk than that
she should brood over them in secret. So when the days passed and no
confidences came, she set herself to draw the child out. She had, as
everybody has, a pretty clear idea in her own head of what life is
like in a pirate vessel. That these little innocents should have come
through it alive was miraculous, like the three Hebrews in the fiery
furnace.

‘Where used you to live when you were on the schooner?’ she asked Emily
one day suddenly.

‘Oh, in the hold,’ said Emily nonchalantly. ‘Is that your Great-uncle
_Vaughan_, did you say?’

In the hold. She might have known it. Chained, probably, down there in
the darkness like blacks, with rats running over them, fed on bread
and water.

‘Were you very frightened when there was a battle going on? Did you
hear them fighting over your head?’

Emily looked at her with her gentle stare: but kept silence.

Louisa Dawson was very wise in thus trying to ease the load on the
child’s mind. But also she was consumed with curiosity. It exasperated
her that Emily would not talk.

There were two questions which she particularly wanted to ask. One,
however, seemed insuperably difficult of approach. The other she could
not contain.

‘Listen, darling,’ she said, wrapping her arms round Emily. ‘Did you
ever actually see any one killed?’

Emily stiffened palpably. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Why should we?’

‘Didn’t you ever even see a body?’ she went on: ‘A dead one?’

‘No,’ said Emily, ‘there weren’t any.’ She seemed to meditate a while.
‘There weren’t many,’ she corrected.

‘You poor, poor little thing,’ said Miss Dawson, stroking her forehead.

But though Emily was slow to talk, Edward was not. Suggestion was
hardly necessary. He soon saw what he was expected to say. It was
also what he wanted to say. All these rehearsals with Harry, these
springings into the main rigging, these stormings of the galley ...
they had seemed real enough at the time. Now, he had soon no doubt
about them at all. And Harry backed him up.

It was wonderful for Edward that every one seemed ready to believe what
he said. Those who came to him for tales of bloodshed were not sent
empty away.

Nor did Rachel contradict him. The pirates were wicked--deadly wicked,
as she had good reason to know. So they had probably done all Edward
said: probably when she was not looking.

Miss Dawson did not always press Emily like this: she had too much
sense. She spent a good deal of her time simply in tying more firmly
the knots of the child’s passion for her.

She was ready enough to tell her about England. But how strange it
seemed that these humdrum narrations should interest any one who had
seen such romantic, terrible things as Emily had!

She told her all about London, where the traffic was so thick things
could hardly pass, where things drove by all day, as if the supply of
them would never come to an end. She tried also to describe trains,
but Emily could not see them, somehow: all she could envisage was a
steamer like this one, only going on land--but she knew that was not
right.

What a wonderful person her Miss Dawson was! What marvels she had seen!
Emily had again the feeling she had in the schooner’s cabin: how time
had slipped by, been wasted. Now she would be eleven in a few months:
a great age: and in all that long life, how little of interest or
significance had happened to her! There was her Earthquake, of course,
and she had slept with an alligator: but what were these compared with
the experiences of Miss Dawson, who knew London so well it hardly
seemed any longer wonderful to her, who could not even count the number
of times she had travelled in a train?

Her Earthquake ... it was a great possession. Dared she tell Miss
Dawson about it? Was it possible that it would raise her a little
in Miss Dawson’s esteem, show that even she, little Emily, had
had experiences? But she never dared. Suppose that to Miss Dawson
earthquakes were as familiar as railway trains: the fiasco would be
unbearable. As for the alligator, Miss Dawson had told Harold to take
it away as if it was a worm.

Sometimes Miss Dawson sat silently fondling Emily, looking now at her,
now at the other children at play. How difficult it was to imagine
that these happy-looking creatures had been, for months together, in
hourly danger of their lives! Why had they not died of fright? She was
sure that she would have. Or at least gone stark, staring, raving mad?

She had always wondered how people survived even a moment of danger
without dropping dead with fear: but months and months ... and
children.... Her head could not swallow it.

As for that other question, how dearly she would have liked to ask it,
if only she could have devised a formula delicate enough.

Meanwhile Emily’s passion for her was nearing its crisis; and one day
this was provoked. Miss Dawson kissed Emily three times, and told her
in future to call her Lulu.

Emily jumped as if shot. Call this goddess by her Christian name? She
burnt a glowing vermilion at the very thought. The Christian names of
all grown-ups were sacred: something never to be uttered by childish
lips: to do so, the most blasphemous disrespect.

For Miss Dawson to tell her to do so was as embarrassing as if she had
seen written up in church,

  PLEASE SPIT.

Of course, if Miss Dawson told her to call her Lulu, at least she must
not call her Miss Dawson any more. But say ... the Other Word aloud,
her lips refused.

And so for some time, by elaborate subterfuges, she managed to avoid
calling her anything at all. But the difficulty of this increased
in geometrical progression: it began to render all intercourse an
intolerable strain. Before long she was avoiding Miss Dawson.

Miss Dawson was terribly wounded: what could she have done to offend
this strange child? (‘Little Fairy-girl,’ she used to call her.) The
darling had seemed so fond of her, but now....

So Miss Dawson used to follow her about the ship with hurt eyes, and
Emily used to escape from her with scarlet cheeks. They had never had
a real talk, heart to heart, again, by the time the steamer reached
England.


ii

When the steamer took in her pilot, you may imagine that her news
travelled ashore; and also, that it quickly reached the _Times_
newspaper.

Mr. and Mrs. Bas-Thornton, after the disaster, unable to bear Jamaica
any longer, had sold Ferndale for a song and travelled straight back
to England, where Mr. Thornton soon got posts as London dramatic
critic to various Colonial newspapers, and manipulated rather remote
influences at the Admiralty in the hope of getting a punitive
expedition sent against the whole island of Cuba. It was thus the
_Times_ which, in its quiet way, broke the news to them, the very
morning that the steamer docked at Tilbury. She was a long time doing
it, owing to the fog, out of which the gigantic noises of dockland
reverberated unintelligibly. Voices shouted things from the quays.
Bells ting-a-linged. The children welded themselves into a compact
mass facing outwards, an improvised Argus determined to miss nothing
whatever. But they could not gather really what anything was about,
much less everything.

Miss Dawson had taken charge of them all, meaning to convey them to her
Aunt’s London house till their relations could be found. So now she
took them ashore, and up to the train, into which they climbed.

‘What are we getting into this box for?’ asked Harry: ‘Is it going to
rain?’

It took Rachel several journeys up and down the steep steps to get all
her babies inside.

The fog, which had met them at the mouth of the river, was growing
thicker than ever. So they sat there in semi-darkness at first, till a
man came and lit the light. It was not very comfortable, and horribly
cold: but presently another man came, and put in a big flat thing which
was hot: it was full of hot water, Miss Dawson said, and for you to put
your feet on.

Even now that she was in a train, Emily could hardly believe it would
ever start. She had become quite sure it was not going to when at last
it did, jerking along like a cannon-ball would on a leash.

Then their powers of observation broke down. For the time they were
full. So they played Up-Jenkins riotously all the way to London: and
when they arrived hardly noticed it. They were quite loath to get out,
and finally did so into as thick a pea-soup fog as London could produce
at the tail end of the season. At this they began to wake up again, and
jog themselves to remember that this really was _England_, so as not to
miss things.

They had just realised that the train had run right inside a sort
of enormous house, lit by haloed yellow lights and full of this
extraordinary orange-coloured air, when Mrs. Thornton found them.

‘Mother!’ cried Emily. She had not known she could be so glad to see
her. As for Mrs. Thornton, she was far beyond the bounds of hysteria.
The little ones held back at first, but soon followed Emily’s example,
leaping on her and shouting: indeed it looked more like Actæon with his
hounds than a mother with her children: their monkey-like little hands
tore her clothes in pieces, but she didn’t care a hoot. As for their
father, he had totally forgotten how much he disliked emotional scenes.

‘I slept with an alligator!’ Emily was shouting at intervals. ‘Mother!
I’ve slept with an alligator!’

Margaret stood in the background holding all their parcels. None of her
relations had appeared at the station. Mrs. Thornton’s eye at last took
her in.

‘Why, Margaret ...’ she began vaguely.

Margaret smiled and came forward to kiss her.

‘Get out!’ cried Emily fiercely, punching her in the chest. ‘She’s _my_
mother!’

‘Get out!’ shouted all the others. ‘She’s _our_ mother!’

Margaret fell back again into the shadows: and Mrs. Thornton was too
distracted to be as shocked as she would normally have been.

Mr. Thornton, however, was just sane enough to take in the situation.
‘Come on, Margaret!’ he said. ‘Margaret’s _my_ pal! Let’s go and look
for a cab!’

He took the girl’s arm, bowing his fine shoulders, and walked off with
her up the platform.

They found a cab, and brought it to the scene, and they all got in,
Mrs. Thornton just remembering to say ‘How-d’you-do-good-bye’ to Miss
Dawson.

Packing themselves inside was difficult. It was in the middle of it all
that Mrs. Thornton suddenly exclaimed:

‘But where’s John?’

The children fell immediately silent.

‘Where is he?--Wasn’t he on the train with you?’

‘No,’ said Emily, and went as dumb as the rest.

Mrs. Thornton looked from one of them to another.

‘John! Where is John?’ she asked the world at large, a faint hint of
uneasiness beginning to tinge her voice.

It was then that Miss Dawson showed a puzzled face at the window.

‘_John?_’ she asked. ‘Why, who is John?’


iii

The children passed the spring at the house their father had taken in
Hammersmith Terrace, on the borders of Chiswick: but Captain Jonsen,
Otto, and the crew passed it in Newgate.

They were taken there as soon as the gunboat which apprehended them
reached the Thames.

The children’s bewilderment lasted. London was not what they had
expected, but it was even more astounding. From time to time, however,
they would realise how this or that did chime in with something they
had been told, though not at all with the idea that the telling had
conjured up. On these occasions they felt something as Saint Matthew
must have felt when, after recounting some trivial incident, he adds:
‘That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Prophet So-and-So.’

‘Why look!’ exclaimed Edward. ‘There’s only toys in this store!’

‘Why, don’t you remember ...’ began Emily.

Yes, their mother had told them, on a visit to their father’s general
store in St. Anne’s, that in London there were stores which not only
sold toys but which sold toys only. At that time they hardly knew what
toys were. A cousin in England had once sent them out some expensive
wax dolls, but even before the box was opened the wax had melted:
consequently the only dolls they had were empty bottles, which they
clothed with bits of rag. These had another advantage over the wax
kind: you could feed them, poking it into the neck. If you put in
some water too, in a day or so the food began to digest, visibly. The
bottles with square shoulders they called He-beasties, and the bottles
with round shoulders they called She-beasties.

Their other toys were mostly freakish sticks, and different kinds of
seeds and berries. No wonder it seemed strange to them to imagine
these things in a shop. But the idea engaged them, nevertheless. Down
by the bathing-hole there were several enormous cotton-trees, which
lift themselves on their roots right out of the earth, as on stilts,
making a big cage. One of these they dubbed their toy-shop: decorated
it up with lace-bark, and strings of bright-coloured seeds, and their
other toys: then they would go inside and take turns to sell them to
each other. So now this was the picture the phrase ‘toy-shop’ evoked in
them. No wonder the London kind was a surprise to them, seemed a very
far-fetched fulfilment of the prophecy.

The houses in Hammersmith are tall, roomy, comfortable houses, though
not big or aristocratic, with gardens running right down to the river.

It was a shock to them to find how dirty the river was. The
litter-strewn mud when the tide was out somehow offended them much less
than the sewery water when it was up. At low tide they would often
climb down the wall and scrounge about in the mud for things of value
to them happily enough. They stank like polecats when they came up
again. Their father was sensible about dirt. He ordered a tub of water
to be kept permanently outside the basement door, in which they must
wash before entering the house: but none of the other children in the
terrace were allowed to play in the mud at all.

Emily did not play in the mud either: it was only the little ones.

Mr. Thornton was generally at a theatre till the small hours; and when
he came home used to sit and write, and then he would go out, about
dawn, to the post. The children were often awake in time to hear him
going to bed. He drank whisky while he worked, and that helped him to
sleep all the morning (they had to be quiet too). But he got up for
luncheon, and then he often had battles with their mother about the
food. She would try to make him eat it.

All that spring they were an object of wonder to their acquaintances,
as they had been on the steamer; and also an object of pity. In
the wide world they had become almost national figures: but it was
easier to hide this from them then than it would be nowadays. But
people--friends--would often come and tell them about the pirates:
what wicked men they were, and how cruelly they had maltreated them.
Children would generally ask to see Emily’s scar. They were especially
sorry for Rachel and Laura, who, as being the youngest, must have
suffered most. These people used also to tell them about John’s
heroism, and that he had died for his country just the same as if he
had grown up and become a real soldier: that he had shown himself a
true English gentleman, like the knights of old were and the martyrs.
They were to grow up to be very proud of John, who though still a child
had dared to defy these villains and die rather than allow anything to
happen to his sisters.

The glorious deeds which Edward would occasionally confess to were
still received with an admiration hardly at all tempered with
incredulity. He had the intuition, by now, to make them always done in
defiance of Jonsen and his crew, not, as formerly, in alliance with or
superseding them.

The children listened to all they were told: and according to their
ages believed it. Having as yet little sense of contradiction, they
blended it quite easily in their minds with their own memories; or
sometimes it even cast their memories out. Who were they, children, to
know better what had happened to them than grown-ups?

Mrs. Thornton was a feeling, but an essentially Christian woman. The
death of John was a blow to her from which she would never recover,
as indeed the death of all of them had once been. But she taught the
children in saying their prayers to thank God for John’s noble end and
let it always be an example to them: and then she taught them to ask
God to forgive the pirates for all their cruelty to them. She explained
to them that God could only do this when they had been properly
punished on earth. The only one who could not understand this at all
was Laura--she was, after all, rather young. She used the same form
of words as the others, yet contrived to imagine that she was praying
to the pirates, not for them; so that it gradually came about that
whenever God was mentioned in her hearing the face she imagined for Him
was Captain Jonsen’s.

Once more a phase of their lives was receding into the past, and
crystallising into myth.

Emily was too old to say her prayers aloud, so no one could know
whether she put in the same phrase as the others about the pirates or
not. No one, in point of fact, knew much what Emily was thinking about
anything, at that time.


iv

One day a cab came for the whole family, and they drove together right
into London. The cab took them into the Temple: and then they had to
walk through twisting passages and up some stairs.

It was a day of full spring, and the large room into which they were
ushered faced south. The windows were tall and heavily draped with
curtains. After the gloomy stairs it seemed all sunshine and warmth.
There was a big fire blazing, and the furniture was massive and
comfortable, the dark carpet so thick it clung to their shoes.

A young man was standing in front of the fire when they came in. He was
very correctly, indeed beautifully dressed: and he was very handsome as
well, like a prince. He smiled at them all pleasantly, and came forward
and talked like an old friend. The suspicious eyes of the Liddlies soon
accepted him as such. He gave their parents cake and wine: and then
he insisted on the children being allowed a sip too, with some cake,
which was very kind of him. The taste of the wine recalled to all of
them that blowy night in Jamaica: they had had none since.

Soon some more people arrived. They were Margaret and Harry, with a
small, yellow, fanatical-looking aunt. The two lots of children had not
seen each other for a long time: so they only said Hallo to each other
very perfunctorily. Mr. Mathias, their host, was just as kind to the
new arrivals.

Every one was at great pains to make the visit appear a casual one; but
the children all knew more or less that it was nothing of the sort,
that something was presently going to happen. However, they could
play-act too. Rachel climbed onto Mr. Mathias’s knee. They all gathered
round the fire, Emily sitting bolt upright on a foot-stool, Edward and
Laura side by side in a capacious arm-chair.

In the middle of every one talking there was a pause, and Mr. Thornton,
turning to Emily, said, ‘Why don’t you tell Mr. Mathias about your
adventures?’

‘Oh yes!’ said Mr. Mathias, ‘do tell me all about it. Let me see,
you’re ...’

‘Emily,’ whispered Mr. Thornton.

‘Age?’

‘Ten.’

Mr. Mathias reached for a piece of clean paper and a pen.

‘What adventures?’ asked Emily clearly.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Mathias, ‘you started for England on a sailing-ship,
didn’t you? The _Clorinda_?’

‘Yes. She was a barque.’

‘And then what happened?’

She paused before answering.

‘There was a monkey,’ she said judicially.

‘A monkey?’

‘And a lot of turtles,’ put in Rachel.

‘Tell him about the pirates,’ prompted Mrs. Thornton. Mr. Mathias
frowned at her slightly: ‘Let her tell it in her own words, please.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Emily dully, ‘we were captured by pirates, of course.’

Both Edward and Laura had sat up at the word, stiff as spokes.

‘Weren’t you with them too, Miss Fernandez?’ Mr. Mathias asked.

Miss Fernandez! Every one turned to see who he could mean. He was
looking at Margaret.

‘Me?’ she said suddenly, as if waking up.

‘Yes, you! Go on!’ said her aunt.

‘Say yes,’ prompted Edward. ‘You were with us, weren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Margaret, smiling.

‘Then why couldn’t you say so?’ hectored Edward.

Mr. Mathias silently noted this curious treatment of the eldest: and
Mrs. Thornton told Edward he mustn’t speak like that.

‘Tell us what you remember about the capture, will you?’ he asked,
still of Margaret.

‘The what?’

‘Of how the pirates captured the _Clorinda_.’

She looked round nervously and laughed, but said nothing.

‘The monkey was in the rigging, so they just came on the ship,’ Rachel
volunteered.

‘Did they--er--fight with the sailors? Did you see them hit anybody? Or
threaten anybody?’

‘Yes!’ cried Edward, and jumped up from his chair, his eyes wide and
inspired. ‘_Bing! Bang! Bong!_’ he declared, thumping the seat at each
word; then sat down again.

‘They didn’t,’ said Emily. ‘Don’t be silly, Edward.’

‘Bing, bang, bong,’ he repeated, with less conviction.

‘_Bung!_’ contributed Harry to his support, from under the arm of the
fanatical aunt.

‘Bim-bam, bim-bam,’ sing-songed Laura, suddenly waking up and starting
a tattoo of her own.

‘Shut up!’ cried Mr. Thornton. ‘Did you, or did you not, any of you,
see them hit anybody?’

‘Cut off their heads!’ cried Edward. ‘And throw them in the sea!--Far,
far ...’ his eyes became dreamy and sad.

‘They didn’t hit anybody,’ said Emily. ‘There wasn’t any one to hit.’

‘Then where were all the sailors?’ asked Mr. Mathias.

‘They were all up the rigging,’ said Emily.

‘I see,’ said Mr. Mathias. ‘Er--didn’t you say the monkey was in the
rigging?’

‘He broke his neck,’ said Rachel. She wrinkled up her nose disgustedly:
‘He was drunk.’

‘His tail was rotted,’ explained Harry.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Mathias, ‘when they came on board, what did they do?’

There was a general silence.

‘Come, come! What did they do?--What did they do, Miss Fernandez?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Emily?’

‘_I_ don’t know.’

He sat back in despair: ‘But you saw them!’

‘No we didn’t,’ said Emily, ‘we went in the deck-house.’

‘And stayed there?’

‘We couldn’t open the door.’

‘_Bang-bang-bang!_’ Laura suddenly rapped out.

‘Shut up!’

‘And then, when they let you out?’

‘We went on the schooner.’

‘Were you frightened?’

‘What of?’

‘Well: them.’

‘Who?’

‘The pirates.’

‘Why should we?’

‘They didn’t do anything to frighten you?’

‘To _frighten_ us?’

‘Coo! José did belch!’ Edward interjected merrily, and began giving an
imitation. Mrs. Thornton chid him.

‘Now,’ said Mr. Mathias gravely, ‘there’s something I want you to tell
me, Emily. When you were with the pirates, did they ever do anything
you didn’t like? You know what I mean, something _nasty_?’

‘Yes!’ cried Rachel, and every one turned to her. ‘He talked about
drawers,’ she said in a shocked voice.

‘What did he say?’

‘He told us once not to toboggan down the deck on them,’ put in Emily
uncomfortably.

‘Was that all?’

‘He shouldn’t have talked about drawers,’ said Rachel.

‘Don’t _you_ talk about them, then,’ cried Edward: ‘Smarty!’

‘Miss Fernandez,’ said the lawyer diffidently, ‘have you anything to
add to that?’

‘What?’

‘Well ... what we are talking about.’

She looked from one person to another, but said nothing.

‘I don’t want to press you for details,’ he said gently, ‘but did they
ever--well, make suggestions to you?’

Emily fixed her glowing eyes on Margaret, catching hers.

‘It’s no good questioning Margaret,’ said the Aunt morosely; ‘but it
ought to be perfectly clear to you what has happened.’

‘Then I am afraid I must,’ said Mr. Mathias. ‘Another time, perhaps.’

Mrs. Thornton had for some while been frowning and pursing her lips, to
stop him.

‘Another time would be much better,’ she said: and Mr. Mathias turned
the examination back to the capture of the _Clorinda_.

But they seemed to have been strangely unobservant of what went on
around them, he found.


v

When the others had all gone, Mathias offered Thornton, whom he liked,
a cigar: and the two sat together for a while over the fire.

‘Well,’ said Thornton, ‘did the interview go as you had expected?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘I noticed you questioned them chiefly about the _Clorinda_. But you
have got all the information you need on that score, surely?’

‘Naturally I did. Anything they affirmed I could check exactly by
Marpole’s detailed affidavit. I wanted to test their reliability.’

‘And you found?’

‘What I have always known. That I would rather have to extract
information from the devil himself than from a child.’

‘But what information, exactly, do you want?’

‘Everything. The whole story.’

‘You know it.’

Mathias spoke with a dash of exasperation:

‘Do you realise, Thornton, that without considerable help from them we
may even fail to get a conviction?’

‘What is the difficulty?’ asked Thornton in a peculiar, restrained tone.

‘We could get a conviction for piracy, of course. But since ’37,
piracy has ceased to be a hanging offence unless it is accompanied by
murder.’

‘And is the killing of one small boy insufficient to count as murder?’
asked Thornton in the same cold voice.

Mathias looked at him curiously.

‘We can guess at the probabilities of what happened,’ he said. ‘The boy
was undoubtedly taken onto the schooner; and now he can’t be found.
But, strictly speaking, we have no proof that he is dead.’

‘He may, of course, have swum across the Gulf of Mexico and landed at
New Orleans.’

Thornton’s cigar, as he finished speaking, snapped in two.

‘I know this is ...’ began Mathias with professional gentleness, then
had the sense to check himself. ‘I am afraid there is no doubt that we
can personally entertain that the lad is dead: but there is a legal
doubt: and where there is a legal doubt a jury might well refuse to
convict.’

‘Unless they were carried away by an attack of common sense.’

Mathias paused for a moment before asking:

‘And the other children have dropped, as yet, no hint as to what
precisely did happen to him?’

‘None.’

‘Their mother has questioned them?’

‘Exhaustively.’

‘Yet they must surely know.’

‘It is a great pity,’ said Thornton, deliberately, ‘that when the
pirates decided to kill the child, they did not invite in his sisters
to watch.’

Mathias was ready to make allowances. He merely shifted his position
and cleared his voice.

‘Unless we can get definite evidence of murder, either of your boy
or the Dutch captain, I am afraid there is a very real danger of
these men escaping with their lives: though they would of course be
transported.--It’s all highly unsatisfactory, Thornton,’ he went on
confidentially. ‘We do not, as lawyers, like aiming at a conviction for
piracy alone. It is too vague. The most eminent jurists have not even
yet decided on a satisfactory definition of piracy. I doubt, now, if
they ever will. One school holds that it is any felony committed on the
High Seas. But that does little except render a separate term otiose.
Moreover, it is not accepted by other schools of thought.’

‘To the layman, at least, it would seem to be a queer sort of piracy to
commit suicide in one’s cabin, or perform an illegal operation on the
captain’s daughter!’

‘Well, you see the difficulties. Consequently we always prefer to make
use of it simply as a make-weight with another more serious charge.
Captain Kidd, for instance, was not, strictly speaking, hanged for
piracy. The first count in his indictment, on which he was condemned,
sets forth that he feloniously, intentionally, and with malice
aforethought hit his own gunner on the head with a wooden bucket value
eightpence. That is something definite. What _we_ need is something
definite. We have not got it. Take the second case, the piracy of the
Dutch steamer. We are in the same difficulty there: a man is taken on
board the schooner, he disappears. What happened? We can only surmise.’

‘Isn’t there such a thing as turning King’s Evidence?’

‘Another most unsatisfactory proceeding, to which I should be loath to
have recourse. No, the natural and proper witnesses are the children.
There is a kind of beauty in making them, who have suffered so much at
these men’s hands, the instruments of justice upon them.’

Mathias paused, and looked at Thornton narrowly.

‘You haven’t been able, in all these weeks, to get the smallest hint
from them with regard to the death of Captain Vandervoort either?’

‘None.’

‘Well, is it your impression that they do truly know nothing, or that
they have been terrorised into hiding something?’

Thornton gave a gentle sigh, almost of relief.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think they have been terrorised. But I do think
they may know something they won’t tell.’

‘But why?’

‘Because, during the time they were on the schooner, it is plain they
got very fond of this man Jonsen, and of his lieutenant, the man called
Otto.’

Mathias was incredulous.

‘Is it possible for children to be mistaken in a man’s whole nature
like that?’

The look of irony on Thornton’s face attained an intensity that was
almost diabolical.

‘I think it is possible,’ he said, ‘even for children to make such a
mistake.’

‘But this ... affection: it is highly improbable.’

‘It is a fact.’

Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with
facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is
concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did
do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to
go further than to show what the ordinary man would be most likely to
do under presumed circumstances.

Mathias, as he conned these paradoxes, smiled to himself a little
grimly. It would never do to give utterance to them.

‘I think if they know anything I shall be able to find it out,’ was all
he said.

‘D’you mean to put them in the box?’ Thornton asked suddenly.

‘Not all of them, certainly: Heaven forbid! But we shall have to
produce one of them at least, I am afraid.’

‘Which?’

‘Well. We had intended it to be the Fernandez girl. But she seems ...
unsatisfactory?’

‘Exactly.’ Then Thornton added, with a characteristic forward jerk:
‘She was sane enough when she left Jamaica.--Though always a bit of a
fool.’

‘Her aunt tells me that she seems to have lost her memory: or a
great part of it. No, if I call her it will simply be to exhibit her
condition.’

‘Then?’

‘I think I shall call your Emily.’

Thornton stood up.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to settle with her yourself what she’s to
say. Write it out, and make her learn it by heart.’

‘Certainly,’ said Mathias, looking at his finger-nails. ‘I am not in
the habit of going into court unprepared.--It’s bad enough having a
child in the box anyway,’ he went on.

Thornton paused at the door.

‘--You can never count on them. They say what they think you want them
to say. And then they say what they think the opposing counsel wants
them to say too--if they like his face.’

Thornton gesticulated--a foreign habit.

‘I think I will take her to Madame Tussaud’s on Thursday afternoon and
try my luck,’ ended Mathias: and the two bade each other good-bye.


vi

Emily enjoyed the wax-works; even though she did not know that a
wax-work of Captain Jonsen, his scowling face bloody and a knife in
his hand, was already in contemplation. She got on well with Mr.
Mathias. She felt very grown-up, going out at last without the little
ones endlessly tagging. Afterwards he took her to a bun-shop in Baker
Street, and tried to persuade her to pour out his tea for him: but she
turned shy at that, and he had in the end to do it for himself.

Mr. Mathias, like Miss Dawson, spent a good deal of his time and energy
in courting the child’s liking. He was at least sufficiently successful
for it to come as a complete surprise to her when presently he began
to throw out questions about the death of Captain Vandervoort. Their
studied casualness did not deceive her for a moment. He learnt nothing:
but she was hardly home, and his carriage departed, than she was
violently sick. Presumably she had eaten too many cream buns. But, as
she lay in bed sipping from a tumbler of water in that mood of fatalism
which follows on the heels of vomiting, Emily had a lot to think over,
as well as an opportunity of doing so without emotion.

Her father was spending a rare evening at home: and now he stood unseen
in the shadows of her bedroom, watching her. To his fantastic mind, the
little chit seemed the stage of a great tragedy: and while his bowels
of compassion yearned towards the child of his loins, his intellect was
delighted at the beautiful, the subtle combination of the contending
forces which he read into the situation. He was like a powerless
stalled audience, which pities unbearably, but would not on any account
have missed the play.

But as he stood now watching her, his sensitive eyes communicated to
him an emotion which was not pity and was not delight: he realised,
with a sudden painful shock, that he was afraid of her!

But surely it was some trick of the candle-light, or of her
indisposition, that gave her face momentarily that inhuman, stony,
basilisk look?

Just as he was tiptoeing from the room, she burst out into a sudden,
despairing moan, and leaning half out of her bed began again an
ineffectual, painful retching. Thornton persuaded her to drink off her
tumbler of water, and then held her hot moist temples between his hands
till at last she sank back, exhausted, in a complete passivity, and
slipped off to sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were several occasions after this when Mr. Mathias took her out
on excursions, or simply came and examined her at the house. But still
he learnt nothing.

What was in her mind now? I can no longer read Emily’s deeper thoughts,
or handle their cords. Henceforth we must be content to surmise.

As for Mathias, there was nothing for it but to accept defeat at her
hands, and then explain it away to himself. He ceased to believe that
she had anything to hide, because, if she had, he was convinced she
could not have hidden it.

But if she could not give him any information, she remained,
spectacularly speaking, a most valuable witness. So, as Thornton had
suggested, he set his clerk to copy out in his beautiful hand a sort
of Shorter Catechism: and this he gave to Emily and told her to learn
it.

She took it home and showed it to her mother, who said Mr. Mathias
was quite right, she was to learn it. So Emily pinned it to her
looking-glass, and learnt the answers to two new questions every
morning. Her mother heard her these with her other lessons,
and badgered her a lot for the sing-song way she repeated them. But how
can one speak naturally anything learnt by heart, Emily wondered? It
is impossible. And Emily knew this catechism backwards and forwards,
inside and out, before the day came.

       *       *       *       *       *

Once more they drove into town: but this time it was to the Central
Criminal Court. The crowd outside was enormous, and Emily was bundled
in with the greatest rapidity. The building was impressive, and full of
policemen, and the longer she had to wait in the little room where they
were shown, the more nervous she became. Would she remember her piece,
or would she forget it? From time to time echoing voices sounded down
the corridors, summoning this person or that. Her mother stayed with
her, but her father only looked in occasionally, when he would give
some news to her mother in a low tone. Emily had her catechism with
her, and read it over and over.

Finally a policeman came, and conducted them into the court.

A criminal court is a very curious place. The seat of a ritual quite as
elaborate as any religious one, it lacks in itself any impressiveness
or symbolism of architecture. A robed judge in court looks like a
catholic bishop would if he were to celebrate mass in some municipal
bath-house. There is nothing to make one aware that here the Real
Presence is: the presence of death.

As Emily came into court, past the many men in black gowns writing with
their quill pens, she did not at first see judge, jury, or prisoners.
Her eye was caught by the face of the Clerk, where he sat below the
Bench. It was an old and very beautiful face, cultured, unearthly
refined. His head laid back, his mouth slightly open, his eyes closed,
he was gently sleeping.

That face remained etched on her mind as she was shown her way into the
box. The Oath, which formed the opening passages of her catechism, was
administered; and with its familiar phrases her nervousness vanished,
and with complete confidence she sang out her responses to the familiar
questions which Mr. Mathias, in fancy dress, was putting to her. But
until he had finished she kept her eyes fixed on the rail in front of
her, for fear something should confuse her. At last, however, Mr.
Mathias sat down; and Emily began to look around her. High above the
sleeping man sat another, with a face even more refined, but wide
awake. His voice, when now he spoke a few words to her, was the kindest
she had ever heard. Dressed in his strange disguise, toying with a
pretty nosegay, he looked like some benign old wizard who spent his
magic in doing good.

Beneath her was the table where so many other wigged men were sitting.
One was drawing funny faces: but his own was grave. Two more were
whispering together.

Now another man was on his feet. He was shorter than Mr. Mathias, and
older, and in no way good-looking or even interesting. He in turn began
to ask her questions.

He, Watkin, the defending counsel, was no fool. He had not failed to
notice that, among all the questions Mathias had put to her, there had
been no reference to the death of Captain Vandervoort. That must mean
that either the child knew nothing of it--itself a valuable lacuna in
the evidence to establish, or that what she did know was somehow in
his clients’ favour. Up till now he had meant to pursue the obvious
tactics--question her on the evidence she had already given, perhaps
frighten her, at any rate confuse her and make her contradict herself.
But any one, even a jury, could see through that. Nor was there any
hope, under any circumstances, of a total acquittal: the most he could
hope for was escape from the murder charge.

He suddenly decided to change his whole policy. When he spoke, his
voice too was kind (though it lacked perforce the full benign timbre of
the judge’s). He made no attempt to confuse her. By his sympathy with
her, he hoped for the sympathy, himself, of the court.

His first few questions were of a general nature: and he continued them
until her answers were given with complete confidence.

‘Now, my dear young lady,’ he said at last. ‘There is just one more
question I want to ask you: and please answer it loudly and clearly, so
that we can all hear. We have been told about the Dutch Steamer, which
had the animals on board. Now a very horrible thing has been suggested.
It has been said that a man was taken off the steamer, the captain of
it in fact, onto the schooner, and that he was murdered there. Now what
I want to ask you is this. Did you see any such thing happen?’

Those who were watching the self-contained Emily saw her turn very
white and begin to tremble. Suddenly she gave a shriek: then after
a second’s pause she began to sob. Every one listened in an icy
stillness, their hearts in their mouths. Through her tears they heard,
they all heard, the words: ‘... He was all lying in his blood ... he
was awful! He ... he died, he said something and then he _died_!’

That was all that was articulate. Watkin sat down, thunderstruck. The
effect on the court could hardly have been greater. As for Mathias, he
did not show surprise: he looked more like a man who has digged a pit
into which his enemy has fallen.

The judge leant forward and tried to question her: but she only sobbed
and screamed. He tried to soothe her: but by now she had become too
hysterical for that. She had already, however, said quite enough for
the matter in hand: and they let her father come forward and lift her
out of the box.

As he stepped down with her she caught sight for the first time of
Jonsen and the crew, huddled up together in a sort of pen. But they
were much thinner than the last time she had seen them. The terrible
look on Jonsen’s face as his eye met hers, what was it that it reminded
her of?

Her father hurried her home. As soon as she was in the cab she became
herself again with a surprising rapidity. She began to talk about all
she had seen, just as if it had been a party: the man asleep, and the
man drawing funny faces, and the man with the bunch of flowers, and had
she said her piece properly?

‘Captain was there,’ she said. ‘Did you see him?’

‘What was it all about?’ she asked presently. ‘Why did I have to learn
all those questions?’

Mr. Thornton made no attempt to answer her questions: he even shrank
back, physically, from touching his child Emily. His mind reeled with
the many possibilities. Was it conceivable she was such an idiot as
really not to know what it was all about? Could she possibly not know
what she had done? He stole a look at her innocent little face, even
the tear-stains now gone. What was he to think?

But as if she read his thoughts, he saw a faint cloud gather.

‘What are they going to do to Captain?’ she asked, a faint hint of
anxiety in her voice.

Still he made no answer. In Emily’s head the Captain’s face, as she had
last seen it ... what was it she was trying to remember?

Suddenly she burst out:

‘Father, _what_ happened to Tabby in the end, that dreadful windy night
in Jamaica?’


vii

Trials are quickly over, once they begin. It was no time before the
judge had condemned these prisoners to death and was trying some one
else with the same concentrated, benevolent, individual attention.

Afterwards, a few of the crew were reprieved and transported.

The night before the execution, Jonsen managed to cut his throat: but
they found out in time to bandage him up. He was unconscious by the
morning, and had to be carried to the gallows in a chair: indeed, he
was finally hanged in it. Otto bent over once and kissed his forehead;
but he was completely insensible.

It was the negro cook, however, according to the account in the
_Times_, who figured most prominently. He showed no fear of death
himself, and tried to comfort the others.

‘We have all come here to die,’ he said. ‘_That_’ (pointing to the
gallows) ‘was not built for nothing. We shall certainly end our lives
in this place: nothing can now save us. But in a few years we should
die in any case. In a few years the judge who condemned us, all men now
living, will be dead. _You_ know that I die innocent: anything I have
done, I was forced to do by the rest of you. But I am not sorry. I
would rather die now, innocent, than in a few years perhaps guilty of
some great sin.’


viii

It was a few days later that term began, and Mr. and Mrs. Thornton took
Emily to her new school at Blackheath. While they remained to tea with
the head mistress, Emily was introduced to her new playmates.

‘Poor little thing,’ said the mistress, ‘I hope she will soon forget
the terrible things she has been through. I think our girls will have
an especially kind corner in their hearts for her.’

In another room, Emily with the other new girls was making friends
with the older pupils. Looking at that gentle, happy throng of clean
innocent faces and soft graceful limbs, listening to the ceaseless,
artless babble of chatter rising, perhaps God could have picked out
from among them which was Emily: but I am sure that I could not.


FINIS




FOOTNOTE:

[1] The tiger-shark of the South Seas is of course a very different
cattle.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

  New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
    public domain.



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75530 ***