A High Wind in Jamaica
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 hellfire 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.ﾠ
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 realize 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 honor 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.ﾠ
But the brig was vanished. The sea was as bare as an egg.ﾠ
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 recognized, 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.ﾠ
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.
6
/> I
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 .ﾠ
And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She suddenly realized who she was.ﾠ
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.ﾠ
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 realized to be hers.ﾠ
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 favorite 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 realized 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.ﾠ
Once fully convinced of this astonishing fact, that she was now Emily Bas-Thornton (why she inserted theﾠ“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.ﾠ
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?ﾠWas 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?ﾠShe 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.ﾠ
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.ﾠ
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 realize 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.ﾠ
It had automatically devolved on her with the defection of Margaret.ﾠ
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 behavior 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.ﾠ
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.