Burnett Swann

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK An Intext Publisher

I wish to express a large debt to the authors of the following books: Man and Dolphin by John C. Lilly, Children of the Sea by Wilfred Bronson, and A History of Everyday Things in England by Marjorie Quennell.

First Printing: October, 1971

Cover art by Gene Szafran

Printed in the United States of America

BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.

101 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003

To Grover DeLuca,

great friend and guardian spirit

Publisher’s Introduction to the Second Edition

The following history—and it is a history and not a novel —contains events so incredible, so seemingly manufactured by an over-imaginative if not a downright melodramatic novelist, that the publisher feels called upon to remind the public of several significant facts:

First, that verbal communication was established with the dolphin, more specifically that species of dolphin known as Tursiops truncatus, within the last year. Sounds which for centuries had appeared to human ears no more than a series of squeaks and snorts from a playful animal were in truth a highly developed language with a syntax comparable to that of Japanese and a vocabulary as rich and often as confusing as Etruscan. Furthermore, the dolphin, that is, the brighter members of the species, had been understanding the conversation of men since the time of Aristotle and, with the good-humored tolerance of their race, waiting patiently for him to return the compliment.

Second, once communications was achieved, dolphins not only conversed with men but revealed what many marine biologists had long suspected, that they possessed a literature—oral, to be sure, since flippers and flukes do not lend themselves to wielding pens—as fluid in style as their own motions in the water.

Third, that this literature, which was passed from generation to generation by infinite repetitions, generally took the form not of epics, nor of plays, nor of poems, but of histories. One might expect so playful a race to write comedies crackling with epigrams in the manner of Oscar Wilde. Such was not the case. Except for two monumental histories, one of the entire dolphin race since their mass migration from the land to the sea forty-five million years ago, the other of the human race since men began to build boats, it was the custom of each dolphin clan to compose, singly or in concert, an account of an episode or episodes concerning their own particular history. The account was intimate and personal—not a broad record of the entire clan, written with the sweep and grandeur of a Gibbon—but events involving a few or perhaps a single individual, seen, recorded, and evaluated through the microscope rather than the telescope; microcosms, not macrocosms.

Fourth, when we presented such a history from the 1870’s in our first edition last year, soberly labeling its nature on the cover and in our introduction, we were instantly accused of attempting to perpetrate yet another Gothic novel on a credulous public. Our Victorian dolphin narrator was variously identified with Mary Dewart, Victoria Bolt, and Daphne Duvalier. The ladies heatedly proclaimed that even if they had chosen to conceal their identities under pen-names (and why should such saleable names be concealed?), they would hardly have masqueraded as a fish, well, a mammal, but a fishy looking mammal all the same.

However, the authenticity of the book was attested by the renowned linguist, Julius Whipplejohn, who himself had anonymously transcribed the tale from the great-grand-son of the dolphin narrator; and by author Thomas Burnett Swann, who had edited and attempted to clarify the roughnesses inevitable in a communication between a mammal that lived in the sea and spoke largely through his

blowhole and a mammal that lived on the land and, assisted by tongue, teeth, and lips, spoke through his mouth. In a word, last year’s “Gothic novel” is now widely recognized as a legitimate history of certain extraordinary events transpiring on a Caribbean island in the Nineteenth Century. Gothic perhaps in the sense of grotesque, macabre, inexplicable, but fully as historical as those larger grotesqueries, the Inquisition and the Salem witch hunts.

A word of caution. The island in question, though bearing superficial resemblances to both Tobago and Saba, has not been identified, and according to the great grandson of the narrator was totally submerged by the volcanic eruption of Soufriere in 1902.

THE GOAT WITHOUT HORNS

Chapter One

I address my history not to my fellow dolphins, even though, following the custom of my race, I will repeat the words to my first son until he has learned them by rote and passed them in turn to his own first son. “My” history? “Charlie’s history,” I ought to say, for he is the subject and the hero, and it is to him and for him that I write, with the admiration of a warrior for a comrade-in-arms, and the adoration of one who swims but would like to walk, for one who walks like a god.

There was a time, earlier than our earliest recorded history, when dolphins lived on the shore, and walked on limbs which only later became flippers, and dwelled like rabbits in warrens or beavers in branch-built lodges. Our race eventually undertook a gradual migration into the sea, first becoming amphibians like frogs, then entirely seadwelling but still air-breathing. Perhaps our lives on shore had grown too difficult and too dangerous. Perhaps there were creatures which pierced our tender skin with giant claws or savage beaks, descended from trees to make a breakfast of us or emerged from the earth to drag us to their cackling young. Or perhaps we simply became restless and wished to explore a color different from green, a texture unlike dirt, a motion smoother than walking. For, as you know, we are the most adventurous of creatures, following the Gulf Stream north to Newfoundland every year and risking abrupt drops in temperature and bouts with sharks for the sheer joy of change, surprise, unpredictability.

I, for one, however, lamented my ancestors’ decision to forsake the land for the damp, enveloping cleanliness of the sea. Now, if I could reconvert my flippers, I would instantly clamber back onto the shore and revel among the fields of cacao and the forests of mahogany, quite satisfied to walk or climb instead of swim. What did the sea ever bring me except the loss of my mother to a giant hammerhead? Men go into the sea to cleanse themselves of dirt, but how I would love to clamber ashore and roll on a sandy beach I My friends called me Gloomer because I would rather brood in a sea-cave than gambol and frolic like most of my light-hearted race.

Until the death of my mother, at least I managed an occasional somersault and a half-hearted nip of a shapely pubescent female.

But Mama saw through my pretence. “Son, you don’t take after your family at all. As you well know, my lovers—and I have enjoyed more than any dolphin south of the Bahamas—call me Merry Mama, and your own dear father, the Great Triton rest his soul, could jolly a sea turtle out of a hundred-year gloom. Where have we failed you, dear?”

I deliberated. I was not one to make a quick answer. “You haven’t failed me, Mama. I expect it’s because I’m waiting.”

“For a comely young cow?”

“I don’t really know. Something. Someone. A difference”

The first difference was the death of my mother, and I thought: This accounts for my gloom. The shadow of her death, like an inky cloud exuded by a squid, stretched backwards as well as forwards.

The second difference was Charlie.

Obviously I did not witness all of his adventures on the island of Oleandra, since many took place on the land instead of in the water. But Charlie told me much of what I could not see, and the rest I surmised—his thoughts, some of his actions, the facets of a character which seemed to me saintly and human at the same time. Though being as modest as he was lovable, he saw himself as rather an ordinary fellow and blamed himself for some of the horrors which overtook his friends. You see, the story is monstrous at times, as chilling as a confrontation with a tiger shark, as unlikely as an octopus or a narwhal, and the ending—well, you shall judge for yourselves.

While once or twice I may have erred (though not about Charlie’s character), I think that my history on the whole is unevasive and accurate. I wish that parts of it—the horrors—were invented like the novels written by men, but dolphins are first of all historians. We have our anecdotes, and our tall tales, but our histories are strictest truth.

The shark which had killed my mother had not survived her, if that was any consolation. The leader of our herd, the Old Bull, had finished him with lethal blows to his underside, and afterwards the herd had been very solicitous of me. Not that I was a calf. I was five years old—in human terms, about eighteen. I was old enough to fend for myself, and when the herd skirted Oleandra, I decided to leave their company and linger near the little volcanic island which looked like an upright pinecone. My intuition—and a dolphin without intuition is like a man without reason—we call it our third ear—had not yet warned me.

They were greatly concerned at my decision. Dolphins are affectionate, familial creatures. Most of them are happiest in a herd. They considered my youth, my sorrow, and my inexperience, and they all but insisted that I follow the Gulf Stream north with them.

“Cape Hatteras. Do you want to miss all those big bouncing waves?” the Old Cow reproved me. She was probably an aunt, but considering the free morality of my race, it is sometimes difficult to establish family relationships. “Besides, your mother, bless her soul, would never forgive me if we left you here.”

The Old Bull, a practical fellow of thirty ripe years, had the last word. It was worth heeding.

“Sharks. Too many around the island. Must be something in the water they like to eat.”

“Well,” I said gloomily, “now there will be two somethings. I would make a tasty morsel for a hammerhead.”

“Indeed you would,” said the Old Cow. “You’ve been gorging yourself out of grief.”

“I may be plump,” I pouted, “and irresistible to hammerheads. But I’m still staying. Give me a little more length and a little less girth, and let the sharks beware!” Suppose I battled and lost; what had I to lose except my life and my gloom?

When the herd reluctantly left me to my whims, I drifted, grieved, and ate, catching unwary mullets by the thousand because I felt less alone when my four stomachs were occupied; following a ship for a few miles out of habit without even noticing if the sailors were waving and throwing me fish.

Oleandra was a curious island: a big volcanic cone, long since dead, its outer slopes sere from the beating of winds or gnarled with stunted, twisted sea grapes, its protected crater lush with oleanders and frangipani and cupping a lagoon as green as a mermaid’s hair. The Old Bull had shown me an underground passage which led from the sea into the lagoon.

“If the sharks get too troublesome,” he had said, “you can always nip into the lagoon and hope they won’t follow your scent. The entrance from the sea is hidden by rocks, and sharks, remember, have notoriously bad eyes.”

The days passed, perhaps a week, perhaps a month, with no dimming of sorrow and no sharpening of any appetite except for food. And then, in the mist of days, I saw a ship, and time resumed for me....

She had anchored a few hundred yards from the shore, and she was not one of those island-hopping schooners with barnacled hulls and crusty captains. She was a schooner, it is true, but bright and red and slim of line, with sails as gossamer as the wings of a flying fish. Swaying in the turbulence, she seemed to have alighted unwillingly from the sky and to contemplate a quick return. She belonged to Elizabeth Meynell, the English lady who owned the island and lived in a large red house inside the crater. Once a month, the Old Bull had said, this schooner brought her mail and supplies from Martinique.

There was no dock or jetty. The waters which ringed the island, always choppy, were often so turbulent that anything built by man would dissolve into foam. There was neither a beach nor a harbor, but a tiny cove where Carib Indians were lowering a dugout canoe from a low shelf of rock and pushing off from shore. The paddlers—three Caribs with black slits in their cheeks and countenances to match their barbarous adornments— paddled rapidly if sullenly out to the schooner and, on the leeward side, attached their canoe to the larger vessel by ropes like a shark sucker to a shark. A single passenger swayed his tortuous way down a rope ladder and prepared to step into the dugout.

It was my first sight of Charlie.

A dolphin on the surface of the water can see with perfect clarity anything in front of him, beside him, or under him, but because of the position of his eyes it is difficult for him to see anything higher than sixteen or seventeen feet above him—a high-flying seagull, for example—without actually leaping into the air. I could not see the top of the schooner’s mast. But I could see the deck and the passenger as he began to descend the ladder. I might have thought him a sailor lad from his brawny hands and his stocky frame. But his face—well, it was downright archangelic. Not angelic. Not simpering and pallidly virtuous, nor suggestive of harps and gossamer, but strong and kind and I suspected, capable of a martial fire when directed from the heavens. In a word, a young Gabriel or Michael.

My immediate reaction needs some defending. Perhaps, being a male, even though delphinese, I was instinctively jealous of his looks, just as human males resent a man who is too handsome. Perhaps I had been so gloomy and petulant for so long that I needed to work some mischief. Perhaps —indeed, probably—I was listening to my third ear and I hoped instinctively to frighten him away from Oleandra for both of our sakes because I sensed that he was somehow sacrificial, and I was soon to become inseparable from his fate.

At any rate, I gave the canoe a forward nudge and Charlie dropped not into it but beside it into the water. Then I surprised myself by a piece of sheerest perfidy. I skulked under the surface and nudged him as if I were a shark foraging for dinner. In the murky waters it was hard for him to recognize me as a relatively small dolphin. But he did not panic; somewhere, he had learned that under shark attack you try to remain calm, you never flail and hit and kick like a drowning man. With quick, deliberate movements, getting, by the way, no help from the Caribs, he seized the gunwale and simultaneously hoisted and rolled himself into the canoe. Only then did he peer into the water to see what kind of attacker he had escaped. When he spied a four-foot adolescent dolphin instead of a twelve-foot tiger shark, he began to laugh. He was not angry; he was not embarrassed; he was amused, and not with me but with himself. It was a laugh of self-deprecation, amiable and infectious.

I circled the boat, feeling and trying to look remorseful but knowing that most men cannot read our expressions, all of which they generally mistake for a grin. Charlie, oblivious to his dripping clothes, was watching my antics with continued good humor. But when the Caribs pushed off from the schooner, someone called to him from the deck. It was the captain, a bearded, square-set bear of man with a gruffness which was really kindness.

“Charlie boy, I give you one month on that island and you’ll be swimming to meet us! Remember, we sail from Martinique the first of every month with mail and supplies.”

Charlie. So that was his name. It was right for him. Charles would have been too formal. Charlie, unlike Billy, a sailor’s name, sounded young and friendly and just nautical enough for someone who had sailed the Atlantic without actually being a sailor.

“I’ve signed on for a year,” Charlie said, “and a year it’ll be.”

“You haven’t met the young lady yet,” said the captain, faintly greeted by a snicker from some of the crew. “Your—er—pupil, did her mother say? She usually comes with the Caribs to meet us.”

But the Caribs had no intention of pausing for conversation. They had not greeted the passenger nor offered to help him when he fell into the water. Now, they ignored his presence in their boat and rowed as if his ship were carrying rats infected with bubonic plague.

Charlie raised his hand in a last, decisive goodbye, a year’s good-bye, and then he looked at me, breaking into a grin when he saw me still frantically circling the boat to attract his attention and, yes, to stare at him.

He was a youth about my own age (in human terms, that is, eighteen or nineteen). His hair was the yellowest I had ever seen, yellow as the show-er-of-gold tree, and the wind had tossed and tangled it into a silken tumult. But he was not, on the whole (thank the Great Triton), ethereal. His face was ruddy and healthy and English, and his stalwart frame, middling in height, planted him firmly on earth and within range of friendly overtures from an unethereal dolphin.

Looking up from me, he examined the island which was now within a hundred yards. He tried to look excited; he tried to look anticipatory, as if remarkable adventures awaited him. But a sadness darkened his face. No, “darkened” is hardly accurate. Charlie’s gold was without shadows. “Suffused” is the proper word, with its hint of light even in sadness. It was not a face which was meant to be sad. The contours were shaped by the configurations of joy. But something had happened to him very recently. He was not so much coming somewhere as he was leaving somewhere, and forgetting—or trying to forget—a lost, loved person. I knew then that we were destined to become friends. We were divided by the barrier which separates the sea from the shore, but linked by a kindred loss and a kindred need. I swam behind the canoe almost until it was beached (or rather, lifted out of the water by waiting Caribs, since as I have said there was no beach) .

After Charlie had tried to drop into the canoe and dropped by mistake into the water, his luggage and Mrs. Meynell’s mail had been lowered with more success into the canoe. With much grunting and scowling the Caribs now proceeded to strap a small trunk and a carton brimming with books onto the backs of two burros, which would carry them up the precipitous wall of the crater, over the top, and down to the Red House inside the crater.

I did not want to see the last of Charlie. I felt cheated; indeed, I felt outraged, and cursed the Great Triton under my breath. My punishment was prompt. One of the Caribs began to pelt me with stones. Of course he missed; the reactions of a dolphin, even a plump dolphin, are instantaneous. I ducked agilely under the water and out of range. But Charlie saw the action. He did not hit the man; he did something much more demeaning to the man’s pride. He gave him a prompt, powerful shove and the Carib, though taller by a foot and pounds heavier, landed on his back. When he scrambled to his feet, Charlie repeated his shove without bloodying his fists and without once being touched by the Carib’s flailing hands. This time the man’s friends restrained him with the gibberish, part original Carib, part African, and part English, which passes for their language. It is a gibberish which I have tried to learn, but I sensed that the man was being counseled to bide his time (the English phrase “Goat without horns” appeared several times) while Charlie stood his ground like a boy fresh from Eton at the Battle of Waterloo.

He gazed back at me and raised his hand in a gesture of farewell. I leaped out of the water and spun in the air. Men always expect us to perform antics, however melancholy we may feel, and if I had to frolic to hold his attention, I would turn a triple somersault. He called after the Caribs to wait for him. They glowered and halted the burros. Charlie was not to be hurried. I eased so close to the bank that I scraped my skin on a projecting root, but I gave no thought to the scrape when Charlie, with beautiful courtliness, leaned over the water, touched my head, and allowed his fingers to linger as if to say, “There is no strangeness in your wet, dark skin to me.” He was communicating in the only way possible at that time. After all, what else does one do with a dolphin when one does not understand his language? Shake his flipper? I said good-bye. To Charlie the words must have seemed a raucous squeak, but he guessed my intention.

“You can’t understand me,” he said (and I understood every word!), “but I think we will meet again. Good friends are not to be parted for long.”

The Caribs, needless to say, had not waited for him; they were driving the burros up the slope and strewing Charlie’s books behind them. With a decidedly unethereal oath, he gathered the books and overtook the strewers, who stopped beating the burros. Until they had left the range of my vision, I watched them ascend that windblown, tree-gnarled slope where clinging was a part of climbing.

Then I set out to find the opening which led into the lagoon.

Chapter Two

Now I must tell you about Charlie, about him before he came to Oleandra and why he came; about the grief which sent him wandering to the islands instead of continuing at Cambridge. Historians are allowed to digress about their heroes and villains, and my digression, as you will see, helps to explain why I made him the hero of my history. You may wonder how I, a dolphin, presume to speak knowledgeably about an England and a queen I have never seen and an age which I have viewed only from the sea. My teacher in such matters, my collaborating historian, was Charlie. Our methods of collaboration were unconventional since, for a long time, Charlie was unaware that I understood and remembered his English, and remembered it with the clarity and exactitude of a race whose literature is oral instead of written.

Charlie was a boy who, expressly created to love, found himself suddenly bereft of love. He did not remember his father, a civil servant in India who had died when Charlie and his twin brother Kenneth were infants in London, but his mother was parent, guardian, and goddess, and he never thought to lament the lack of a father. When she sent her sons to Marlborough at the age of twelve, it was not to be rid of them but to educate them, and they hurried to rejoin her in London for every holiday including that cornucopia of holidays, the summer. In short, she was a mother who would have liked to dote but who forced herself, for the good of her sons, to appear merely warm, loving, and affectionate; and she was blessed by sons who judged all other women by her standards, her grace, courtesy, and most of all compassion, and could not find her equal.

Charlie was a light-hearted boy, because sadness must be learned, and for nineteen years he had no teachers. Then, he was taught supremely well. After Marlborough he and Kenneth had completed a year at Cambridge. Charlie had gone to spend a summer weekend with a friend at Chichester. He was summoned by messenger to London, where he learned that both his mother and his brother had contracted typhoid fever, the same disease which had killed the Prince Consort and driven Victoria into a decade of mourning.

They died the next day and Charlie was inconsolable. He could not foresee an end to his grief; he did not want to die, but he did not want to live. He could not escape his own identity, his own remembrances, but at least he could escape his country and the places where he most remembered his mother and Kenneth. He decided to travel. He stood heir to a moderate fortune; in other words, he possessed the means to leave En-

gland. He approached his mother’s solicitor, the man who would handle his estate until he came o£ age, and received the assurance of a generous allowance which would allow him to travel as far as he chose and to any country of his choice. Since his object was forgetfulness and not pleasure, he must choose with discretion. Should he tour Europe like Lord Byron, whose poetry he adored (though it was out of fashion with most Victorians), whose womanizing he accepted without judgment, but whose posturing he disliked? No, there was something theatrical in a Byronic grand tour at such a time, particularly if one recorded one’s grief in four best-selling cantos. Should he take service in India like his father? The remoteness would have pleased him but the associations, even though he had never known his father, would have proved intolerable.

Two months, one day, and eleven hours after the death of his mother and Kenneth, he saw an advertisement in the London Times which promised distance and change and a measure of welcome challenge:

“Wanted: A young man between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, of genteel connections, presentable appearance, and classical education. Cambridge or Oxford preferred. Duties: To tutor the daughter of Mrs. Elizabeth Meynell of the Red House, Oleandra Island, British West Indies. Interested parties please consult Mrs. Meynell’s solicitor, James Long of Long, Snedley, and Bar-rows, 23 Grosvenor Park, between the hours of nine and eleven on Tuesday, November 3.”

A reader of Gothic novels might have found presentiments of doom in a name like the Red House—blood, plagues, Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”—but Charlie, though his Celtic fancy did in fact possess a Gothic strain, thought at once of the poet and painter William Morris, who had built a medieval manor house by that name and had been imitated in England and, apparently, as far as the West Indies.

He arrived at eight-thirty and found himself already preceded by a dozen young men in various stages of confidence, impatience, and anxiety. He was greeted by a woman of indeterminate years, fixed smile, and skirt so huge and flaring that Charlie expected her to float out of the window like a hot-air balloon. She took his name (“Mr. Lane will find out everything else”), and directed him to an over-stuffed chair which was trimmed with red silk tassels. Feeling altogether swallowed by the chair, which was large enough to hold Queen Victoria and most of her children at the same time, he awaited his turn with the impatience of one to whom inactivity had become a torment. There had been a time when he could enjoy equally a cricket match or an hour of contemplation under an alder tree. But now to contemplate meant to remember, and he sometimes found tears running down his cheeks when he was riding a train or shaving in front of the mirror which he had once shared with Kenneth. When he could not act, when outward inactivity was forced upon him as now, he activated his imagination and replaced, if he could, the spectres of grief with the phantoms of fancy. The chair, he decided, was a man-eating plant. There was no question that he was sinking deeper into its—stomach, should one say?—and that its digestive juices would soon begin to disintegrate him.

He had a long wait. Apparently each young man was questioned at great length, and Charlie began to despair of winning a position for which one must be examined as if one were sitting for a fellowship at Cambridge. But one by one his predecessors filed from the office, and not a single expression radiated victory.

After the first boy emerged, Charlie turned his attention from man-eating plants to possible reasons for rejection. This boy was patently a dullard. No one with such vacant eyes—erased blue was the best description—could teach a young girl anything but croquet. This boy was an egotist. Charlie had seen him enter with the swagger of assured triumph; he now looked like a defeated gamecock. Even his hair seemed crestfallen. But soon he would be boasting to his friends that the position had been beneath him. This boy looked too sickly to survive a voyage to any Indies, even the reasonably accessible Western ones. This boy was, to put it bluntly, unorthodox in looks. Did he lack what the advertisement had termed “presentable appearance”? He was neatly dressed, he was courteous and soft-spoken when he took leave of the fixedly-smiling secretary. He looked intelligent, he was certainly a gentleman, and the girl he tutored would not embarrass her mother by getting a crush on him. But his outsized nose looked like a carrot and his ears turned over at the tips like wilting lettuces. In short, he resembled an ambulatory vegetable garden.

In fact, Charlie noticed that several boys appeared to have been rejected because they lacked presentability. Was he himself presentable? He and Kenneth, identical twins, had decided that they were not tall enough to cut a dashing figure in the world of society, and they had used this presumed deficiency to evade invitations garnered for them by their mother. Otherwise, looks had not concerned them. Mirrors, it seemed to Charlie, were for shaving and not preening. True, he had sometimes been complimented by young ladies on his “Byronic nose” and his “hair like daffodils.” But at nineteen his experience with the opposite sex was limited; and who could trust the fulsome compliments of those simpletons with whom he waltzed and whom through his mother’s urging and in the company of their own mothers, he called on in their salons and gardens?

At last his turn had come. The secretary nodded toward a door whose heavy oak paneling looked about as inviting as that to the office of the headmaster at Marlborough, whose favorite adage had been, “Cane a boy once a month. It’s as necessary as exercise and sound diet.”

When Charlie entered the room, he felt a return of confidence. It suffered from an excess not of austerity but of opulence. Following the general taste of the day, and ignoring the salutary influence of John Ruskin and William Morris, the walls were crowded with gilt-framed pictures, a Gainsborough here, a Reynolds there, and elsewhere a host of stiffly posed family portraits. He had to weave his way among rosewood tables, which he momentarily expected to collapse under such bric-a-brac as wax flowers beneath glass, cuckoo clocks, and candlesticks. Still, for its style, it seemed both expensive and respectable; Mr. Lane was known to represent some of the oldest families in London.

The solicitor wheezed an unintelligible hello (or was he simply coughing?) and proceded to look him up and down with embarrassing intensity and to make notes, unconsciously muttering the words that he recorded in a small book with covers of tooled leather.

“Height—middling.” Such a lacklustre adjective! A simple “tall” would have resounded with dignity; even a nondescript “medium” would have been acceptable.

“Build—sturdy. Good at wrestling, I should say.”

Charlie was poised to admit that he did indeed like to wrestle when he remembered that Mr. Lane was not asking a question and in fact was probably not aware of his own muttering.

“Face—handsome but manly. Not in the least effeminate. Not one of your pretty boys.”

Handsome indeed! That was a revelation, though Charlie did not particularly care, unless his face helped him to get the position, which was growing more attractive the more difficult it seemed of attainment.

“Now sit down, my young friend. Relax and we’ll have a little chat.” Mr. Lane, it appeared, had not been rude when examining Charlie like a hog at a county fair. He had simply been following the instructions of his client.

“Let me explain the situation. The advertisement in the Times was cryptic, to say the least. Mrs. Meynell worded it, by the way. To put it bluntly, she is a lady of enormous wealth and occasional eccentricities who some years ago lost her husband while cruising through the Indies on their yacht. She did not choose to return to England. She chose to bring England to her. She bought an island—an entire island, which she renamed Oleandra—it had been called Shark Island by the natives. She imported overseers and materials from London, and built a house on the style of William Morris. His Red House, don’t you know. You do know, don’t you?”

“Yes, Mr. Lane. I went to Marlborough.”

“Ah, a fellow alumnus. I’ll wager they remember Morris well at his old school. At any rate she was left with an infant girl who is now at an age when her mother wishes her to be tutored in subjects which in my own youth—and Mrs. Meynell’s, I might add, she’s a lady of some forty-five or fifty years—were thought unsuitable for young ladies, and righdy so. Some of these new fangled sciences. Bad enough for a boy, but Mrs. Meynell insists on them for her daughter. Geology. And biology. Can you imagine? With emphasis on marine life. Mrs. Meynell’s own words. And that far-fetched nonsense about the apes. Evolution. I don’t even like to say the word. It makes one feel so—simian. I trust you finished your studies at Cambridge or Oxford?”

A lesser school, it seemed, was beyond consideration.

Charlie spoke staunchly, though with a sinking, no, a sunken heart. “I’ve only had one year at Cambridge. You see, I’m not quite twenty.” The advertisement had implied a degree and expressly stipulated an age. Sheer presumption had brought Charlie to the interview, and now, at the moment of reckoning, he refused to be cowed.

The silence was broken only by the ticking of three cuckoo clocks which showed the hour to be variously 11:15, 11:25, and 11:31. Charlie held his ground, or rather his chair, but he felt that if one of the clocks cuckooed he would start from the room like a flushed stag.

“How close to twenty?”

“Eleven months and one week.”

“A bit of a gap, but we might stretch a point there. It’s the education Mrs. Meynell is really concerned about. You weren’t, I take it, expelled?”

“No. My grades were more than satisfactory. I won the Chancellor’s Medal for the best poem, in fact.” It was an annual college honor in which Tennyson as an undergraduate at Cambridge had long ago anticipated Charlie with a very bad poem. “It’s just that I—I lost my mother, and also my brother who was with me in school, and I want to leave Cambridge for awhile. Come back and finish in a few years, perhaps. But not now.”

Mr. Lane patted Charlie on the shoulder. One would not have thought him capable of such tenderness. There must be tears streaming down my cheeks, thought Charlie, longing for a chance to mop surreptitiously with a handkerchief. “I understand, my boy, I understand. But we mustn’t stint Mrs. Meynell and her daughter, must we? If she wants biology with emphasis on marine life, we must give her sharks and dolphins and cuttlefish, mustn’t we? Are you scientifically inclined?”

“I studied geology at Marlborough. We made a lot of field trips. All those rolling downs make good digging. And you learn some archaeology along with the geology. But biology—I’ve always liked the sea and what’s in it, but I’m not learned in the subject. I can learn, however. I can read on the voyage to Oleandra.”

“Personally,” muttered the barrister, “I don’t know what good biology or geology will do a young girl in the first place. In my father’s youth, he was taught that the world was formed in the year 4004 B.C., followed in a few days or years, depending on how long you reckon a Biblical day, by Adam and Eve. And that was that. Things are so much more complicated since we’ve begun to question the Scriptures. At any rate I think we can pass you in the sciences. Now then. We come to the most important subject of all. Mrs. Meynell particularly emphasized poetry. ‘Don’t send me a young man who calls Wordsworth Wadsworth,’ she cautioned me. Seems she has an inordinate love for the stuff—er, art. You say you write it, but do you know the Masters? Suppose we give you a little test. Incidentally, she devised it herself. Not much for poetry myself. Passing it is one of her conditions, though, and every one of the young

men ahead of you failed it. That is, except for the chap with the big nose. But he had other disqualifications. We’ll do it this way. I’ll quote a line and then you’ll quote the next line and tell me the title and the author. Sounds hard, eh?”

If he quotes Wordsworth, I’m doomed, thought Charlie.

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day..

Good. An easy one. “Shakespeare. Sonnet XVIII. The next lines are:

'Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date....”’

Charlie was prepared to complete the sonnet, but Mr. Lane grew visibly impatient and interrupted him.

“Splendid, my boy, splendid. Most unusual to find a knowledge of poetry in a sturdy chap like you. Built like an athlete. Played cricket at Marlborough, I’ll wager.”

Yes, he admitted. And Rugby and soccer, and he had wrestled and boxed and swum in water cold enough to frostnip a penguin.

“And yet you know your poetry. I guess you take after young John Keats. All that rot about Truth and Beauty, but he knew how to handle his fists. And Lord Byron, they say, was no slouch with a sword. Let’s try one more:

‘The child is father to the man.’ ”

Charlie shuddered. It was Wordsworth, hut fortunately not difficult Wordsworth.

“Don’t know that one, eh?”

“Oh yes. I missed it once on a test and looked it up later. The title is the first line. ‘My Heart Leaps up When I Behold.' And the lines after the ones you quoted go:

‘And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.’ ”

Mr. Lane sighed with the relief of one who had himself passed a difficult examination. “Young man, if you want the job, it’s yours. As you know, the pay is lucrative. Oleandra is said to be one of the loveliest islands in the West Indies, and Mrs. Meynell, for all her eccentricities, is a damned fine-looking woman. Opulent, one could say. Lots of everything but nothing in excess. Not one of your starved Pre-Raphaelite beauties. Of course I haven’t seen her in sixteen years. The tropic sun may have ruined her complexion, or she may have run to fat. I repeat, if you want the job it’s yours. But consider carefully. It’s a long way from home.”

“I haven’t any home anymore. My mother’s solicitor has put the London house up for sale.”

“No home?” Nonsense. You still have Cambridge. Why not go back and finish your studies? A cricketer and a poet. What a combination! After that, you’ll be looking for a wife, and a lucky girl she’ll be, if I may say so. You’re not to think of marrying one of those island women. Mrs. Meynell is too old and her daughter is too young, and most of the native population is indian. Caribs, they’re called, not India indians.”

There was something both touching and paternal—and also disquieting—in the old man as he cautioned Charlie about the job he had just offered him. In loyalty to his employer, he had praised the job; but his reservations were all too evident.

“I’ll come back and finish at Cambridge one day, I hope, but not now.”

“Let me come straight to the point. As I say, I haven’t seen Mrs. Meynell since she lost her husband. She pays me a sizeable fee. I follow her instructions to the letter. But sometimes I wonder if—well, grief might have softened her brain.” “How do you mean, Mr. Lane?”

“The things she has me order for her. Weapons of all kinds. Swords from India. Nooses used for strangling by that infamous sect, the Assassins. Cannons of every make. It’s as if she were collecting for a man’s trophy room.”

Except for her choice of Wordsworth, Mrs. Meynell had impressed Charlie as an extraordinary woman. Now he came to her defense. “Don’t you think it’s her way of revering her husband’s memory? Adding to his collection, I mean? The Queen, they say, has a fresh suit of clothes laid out for Albert every day, and he’s been dead as long as Mr. Meynell.” He could understand such observances. He treasured his shaving mirror as if it were cut from diamond because his brother had shared it with him.

“Mrs. Meynell’s husband did not collect weapons. He collected wines and liquors—whenever he could resist guzzling them. Bibulous Bobby, we used to call him. But I’ve said more than I should. If you’ve made up your mind, you must go ahead with a stout heart and a strong back, as we used to say at Eton. Mrs. Meynell may be mad as a hatter, but she will be good company, you may be sure of that. For all I know, she wants you for herself instead of her daughter.” He hastened to clarify. “To quote poetry, I mean. You can be David to her Saul, if you’ll forgive my likening an English lady to a Jewish king. She includes a line or two in every letter she writes me. For some reason, the last one stuck in my mind. Couldn’t make head or tail of it:

‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came’ ”

“Browning.”

“Mrs. Browning, eh? Now there was a great lady.”

“Robert, I mean.”

“Oh, the obscure one. The Sordello fellow.”

And so Childe Roland had come to Oleandra.

Chapter Three

Charlie’s first impression of Oleandra was that he had accomplished his purpose: that he had substituted the alien for the familiar, the exotically memorable for the wistfully remembered. That monumental leech called grief, which feeds on memories, would not be starved by a change of landscape, but at least it would not be fed by a house in London or the downs of Marlborough.

Certainly the burros, the Caribs, the circuitous climb up the side of the crater, over the rim, and down through frangipani and mountain immortelle, kapok and shower-of-gold, was totally alien to him. Outside the crater, the winds had screeched and whistled and beaten the sea grapes against the disheveled earth; inside the crater, the riot of birds and flowers, the intensity of colors, had seemed not even remotely English; a jungle instead of a forest, with red-bellied trogans and rufous-tailed jacamars, whose very names, laboriously learned from Birds of the Indies by Father

Jeremiah McIntosh, immediately distinguished them from the larks and blackbirds of home.

But then there had been the quieting of the winds as they descended the inner slopes and a little pleasant lane of stone cottages with thatched roofs and, substituting admirably for hollyhocks and geraniums, neatly trimmed hedges of crimson bougainvillea. He felt a curious revulsion, even a sense of betrayal. What right had an English village to twinkle on the inner slopes of a crater in the West Indies? One of the cottages, it was true, was reached by a path which ran between two enormous cannons. Still, they were English cannons, rusty, innocuous, looking as if they had come from a museum in the suburbs of London. Why could they not have been Spanish or Moorish or Malay or anything strange and alien and yes, sinister? (He was later to learn that the master of the cottage was not to be judged by his cannons.)

At the end of the village the path curved sharply into a small forest of oleanders, some of them growing to ten or more feet and spreading their tapered leaves into graceful green fingers which flaunted an abundance of pink and white flowers like so many rings. Another curve of the path and he saw the Red House, and he was inescapably back in England, looking at the house which Morris had built for his beloved bride, Jane Burden, in 1860. Here in painstaking imitation—and many a pain had been taken to transport the bricks from England—was the tranquil and restrained Gothic beloved by Morris; Gothic in its purity and simplicity rather than its grotesquerie. Here was no Castle of Otranto-, here were no black, bristling turrets and waterspouts ending in gargoyles, but a warm expanse of red brick, a high-pitched red-tiled roof, and three gables, each with tall sash windows through which no Duke of Otranto ever seemed to have peered; furthermore, the trees which randomly sprinkled the lawn were not funereal yews or moss-laden oaks but apple blossom cassias, abloom with clusters of pink-white flowers and deep pink buds.

His disappointment was acute. He had crossed the Atlantic and half of the Caribbean to escape England, to renounce England, to forget England, and here was the very country of his grief resurrected in miniature and, what was worse, in its milder aspects. After talking with Mr. Lane, he had, like the heroine of Northanger Abbey, anticipated something not only different, but barbarous and even threatening. His landing with the Caribs had been an adventure, the ascent of the crater like a journey up a lunar mountain. He had been stirred, troubled, angered, frightened until, for the moment, he had forgotten his grief. But the tranquillities of the Red House seemed precisely calculated to recall his mother, whom he had always associated with green gardens and gracious houses. It was if he were coming home but only in a dream which he knew to be a cruel deception. Where were the eccentricities with which Mrs. Meynell had startled the staid Mr. Lane?

In sight of their mistress’ house, the Caribs dropped their gloom and petulance; they chattered merrily; they vied to unload Charlie’s baggage; they began to address him, in their polyglot language, with a word which was unmistakably

“master.” At first he supposed that they wanted a gratuity and wondered if they would accept English pounds.

Then he saw the reason for their transformation. Mrs. Meynell was standing in the arch of the main door. Mr. Lane had thought her a splendid and opulent woman. Sixteen years ago. She still looked exactly as the barrister had pictured her: “Lots of everything in exactly the right place.” Only she ought to have been described by the poet whose house she had imitated:

... see my breast rise

Like waves of purple sea as here I stand;

And how my arms are moved in wonderful wise. .

Thus had Morris described Guinevere, yearning for the lost spring of first love but still radiant in the fulness of midsummer and using her beauty as a defense against a charge of adultery with Lancelot.

Like her countrywomen in England, she wore the hot, flaring, impractical, but magnificent skirt of the day. Under that voluminous bell, she could have hidden the hips of an elephant or a giraffe, but her bold and revealing blouse left little doubt as to the splendor of her forearms, her shoulders, and her breasts. Her gown was green satin. Below her elbows were cuffs of green brocade; and a moss-green bonnet followed the contours of her golden, backswept, downfalling hair, except where a pert white feather flared above her head. The Lady Greensleeves, he thought, and remembered

with a guilty—no, guiltless—thrill that Greensleeves had been a woman of pleasure. Guinevere, Greensleeves. . . . The two women shared more than their alliterative names, and Charlie liked both of them.

At first she made no gesture to greet him. She stared at him with unconcealed surprise and it seemed to Charlie, a concern which was strangely akin to that of Mr. Lane when the kindly old solicitor had cautioned him about accepting the position. She stepped forward slightly and extended her hand. He noticed that the movement seemed difficult for her. She moved with a kind of slow and graceful languor, and she held tightly to his hand for support. Perhaps the tropical climate had enervated her. Perhaps she had been ill with malaria or yellow fever.

A smile illuminated her face. In fact, she did not so much smile as radiate with her entire body, as if she had been suffused by the lights of a great candelabrum in a ballroom. Her skin was the pink of sweetheart roses. He looked in vain for the lines which should have marked the passage of sixteen years, including her widowhood and whatever illness had drained her of strength. But for all he could tell, she appeared to be a ripe and bountiful woman of thirty. Perhaps in this tropical climate— though because of the trade winds it was not really hot, even inside the crater—she preserved her beauty by economizing in her movements; her languor, so contrary to the bloom of her face and figure, was as deliberate as her delicately indelicate gown and her artfully artless coiffure.

“I stared at you,” she smiled, “because of my

good fortune and Mr. Lane’s good judgment in choosing one who somehow manages to look like both an athlete and a poet at the same time. The athlete will please my daughter, and the poet will delight her mother. If it weren’t for your blond hair and your considerable height, I could have taken you for John Keats.”

Considerable height. How much more gracious than Mr. Lane’s description of him as middling! And the comparison to Keats! Charlie was not adept at exchanging fulsome compliments, but now his words spilled forth like coins from a cornucopia.

“And I took you for Guinevere. I’m sure she had hair like yours. The color of ripe wheat. And she was beautiful and bountiful.”

She laughed heartily. “I take that for a compliment, though ‘bountiful’ has been used as a synonym for ‘fat.’ ”

“Oh no,” he protested. “I meant to say you’re a stunner!”

And then, tongue-tied by his lapse into slang, he waited to be rescued by her tact.

She said quite simply, “Thank you, my dear. No one on Oleandra has ever paid me such a tribute. I’ve always identified a little with Guinevere. Iseult was a goddess—she lived in a book, never on earth—but Guinevere was flesh and blood. ’Tis the low sun makes the color.’ You must teach my daughter about the Arthurian cycle. She disdains Malory and abhors Tennyson. I’m afraid she prefers the local folklore, with all its barbarisms.”

“Where is your daughter?” A charming fancy occurred to him. If a woman between forty-five and fifty could look thirty, perhaps a girl of fifteen could look nineteen and, even if she disliked Tennyson, possess her mother’s grace and naturalness instead of the affectations and airs of the girls he had known in England.

“She’s with us now, I suspect. Behind a tree, in a tree, in the house staring out a window. Who can say? Probably she wanted to look you over from a distance before she meets you. Her manners could use some polishing, and I hope she overhears me. Jill! Jill! Come and meet Mr. Sor-ley!”

There was no answer. Silence seemed tangible in the cassia-sweet air. With a shock akin to fear, Charlie realized that in all the trees surrounding the Red House, he had seen and heard no birds. Approaching the village, yes. Even in the village, yellow-breasted sugar birds had played among the bougainvilleas and warbled their rapid and somewhat wheezing songs. But not here, not within the enchanted (bewitched?) circle of the Red House. He would have to modify his first impression of bland English charm. To Charlie a house without birds was a troubled house.

But there were still the Caribs. Even after unloading his belongings and Mrs. Meynell’s supplies, they had not withdrawn into the bush where they seemed to belong. Two English servants, a stooped, sallow man, rather like a bent broomstick, and a small boy who seemed to be his son, muffled in a shapeless sack-like garment from which his bare feet protruded like the feelers of a snail, had emerged from the house, glared at the Indians, and wordlessly appropriated the belongings while the Caribs had taken up silent stations among the trees. Their sullen faces glittered with curiosity and malice. Perhaps they wished to see the confrontation between the young Englishman and the girl he had come to teach.

Mrs. Meynell followed Charlie’s gaze, and Charlie watched the look which passed between her and her presumed servants and reached some intuitive conclusions. She was their mistress, yes, but they disliked her even while they served her. For her own part, she needed them to fetch her supplies from the schooner, cultivate cacao and other island crops, and tend the cottages in the village; she tolerated and controlled them—to a point. But at any moment, depending on circumstances which even Charlie’s intuition could not surmise, the control might falter and fail. The Red House grew steadily less tranquil and more intriguing. He began to hope for a real adventure.

Almost curtly, she dismissed the Caribs with a flick of her wrist, or tried to dismiss them. In fact, they did not respond with the least movement; they had not yet seen what they were waiting to see. They kept to their places with a tenacity bordering on insolence.

The clapping of hands was neither loud nor prolonged; once, twice, and the Caribs were gone, and in their place stood a single native. He was not one of the rowers and porters; he was a newcomer; and to call him a Carib like his countrymen was to do him an injustice. He was tall and bronzed and fiercely beautiful, and he somehow seemed, even on this tiny island, a king. He directed his smile to Charlie, and it was as if he had said, “Welcome to my kingdom, as guest—and subject.”

Then, like his men, he faded among the cassias.

“His name is Curk,” Elizabeth said with a studied casualness. “He is my foreman. You will have to forgive his men for their bad manners. A stranger, especially one who has come to teach their beloved Jill, makes them curious and a little jealous. You see, she has spent a lot of time with them—far too much, in fact. I am often confined to my bed and she’s thrown on her own devices. Without playmates, she goes to the Caribs. Now they feel they’re losing her to an Englishman. They don’t like us very much, except for Jill. Or anybody else, including each other, again with one exception—Curk, whom they adore. You might call them living anachronisms, a race that ought to be extinct but has somehow survived in spite of itself, and in a world it despises.”

“You’re not fair to them, Mama.” It was Jill. She appeared to have dropped from a tree or come around a tree or even out of the earth. She made no apology. Unfortunately, her appearance was far less provocative than her arrival. Almost with relief Charlie realized that he was not in danger of falling in love with her. She was no competition for her mother. Though he knew her to be about fifteen, she looked at the moment even younger, a tom-boy this side of puberty, dressed in cut-off sailor trousers and middy blouse, her hair like a nest constructed by an untidy bird.

“You’re not fair at all,” she continued. “You hold it against them that they won’t live in your cottages and take baths and plant gardens. I keep telling you, they’re happy in the mangrove swamp, and dirt to them isn’t something to be washed off.”

There were redeeming features to the girl. Her skin was a rich, deep brown—it was not an English complexion but it was not unbecoming—and her green eyes possessed almost an Oriental slant which would have seemed mysterious and alluring had she dressed to accentuate them and combed her tawny hair. She was, in brief, probably a pretty girl who had managed to disguise her prettiness and, almost, her sex.

There seemed nothing calculated about her guise. There was no hint of posing, or of a wish to shock. It was as if she did not know that girls were expected to look like girls. She dressed as she chose, and she chose to dress like a scrawny pirate lad. Even her movements were quick, brusque, and boyish. In total contrast to her mother, there were no softnesses about her body, no undulations about her movements. She needed a tutor for more than biology and poetry. Why had she not observed and imitated so radiant and utterly feminine a mother?

When Mrs. Meynell failed to pursue the argument about the Caribs, Jill turned to Charlie. “I dislike French. I’ll study it only because of the boats that come in from Martinique—I like to talk to the sailors—but you’ll have to prod me with the grammar. I’m very good at biology, though. I can teach you some things about life in the sea. And how to dress on Oleandra. I keep telling Mother not to wear those absurd skirts. But she will look like the ladies in England. And you—What are those ridiculous tweeds and boots you’re wearing? And the bowler hat with the feather about to take flight?”

“They’re my bicycling outfit,” said Charlie, crestfallen. He had really not known how a young man should dress on Oleandra and he had chosen his jauntiest outfit. But Jill had a point; a tweed coat, braided trousers, and Hessian boots, however jaunty in England, were merely hot in the tropics. “What should I wear?”

“What I do,” she said. “You can pick up some sailor togs from the schooner next month.”

“We don’t want two sailors in the house,” Mrs. Meynell said tartly. “Some of my husband’s old linens can be altered to fit Mr. Sorley, though he looks very nice as he is.”

“If you like ruddy English schoolboys who learn how to win battles on the playing fields of Eton.” Charlie forced a smile. “In my case, Marlborough, and my first battle is not yet won.” He was trying to like her in spite of her absolute refusal to be gracious, but he found himself withholding judgment; he must learn what frustrations explained her incivilities. “I’m sure you can teach me a great deal about the Caribbean. Just an hour ago I mistook a dolphin for a shark.”

Her eyes brightened. “You’re sure it wasn't a shark? There are all kinds in the waters around the island. Real beauties. Hammerheads, especially, but also blue sharks and tigers. Usually the dolphins keep their distance.”

“No, it was a dolphin all right. We became friends while the Caribs rowed me ashore.”

“He won’t last long in these waters,” she predicted happily. “Not with all those sharks.”

“Oh, he was a lovable dolphin. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to him.” Not only was he finding it hard, as yet, to like her, he was finding it hard not to dislike her.

She grimaced. “They’re such ugly creatures. And so vicious. Have you ever seen a shark battered to death by dolphins? They ram him from all sides until he’s a bloody pulp.”

“My sympathies would be with the dolphins. After all, the sharks kill their calves.”

“That’s because you’re sentimental. A dolphin knows how to play up to a man. To get his attention with tricks. Leaping and gamboling and catching fish in mid-air and all that. You probably believe those silly stories about dolphins rescuing sailors. But at heart they’re the most vicious creatures in the sea.”

“I don’t think so at all,” he snapped, wishing for the big hickory cane which had belonged to the headmaster at Marlborough. If she dressed like a boy and talked like a bully, a good caning was exactly what she deserved. “The one I saw today—” “Come into the house now. Mother’s not used to being on her feet so long.”

He looked at Mrs. Meynell. The color had left her face, but not, it seemed to him, from weariness. She was looking at her daughter with a kind of disgust and despair.

“Jill has a curious sense of—affection,” she said in a dead voice. “I hope you change her tastes.” “Or I’ll change his,” Jill laughed. “What’ll I call you? Charles or Charlie?”

Goat Without Homs

It was the one time in his life when he stood on his dignity. No one who disliked dolphins could use his given name.

“You may call me ‘Mr. Sorley.’ ”

They walked into the house.

And no birds sang.

Chapter Four

I emerged from a tortuous and torturous passage into a brilliance of sunlight and green water. I was used to blue lagoons which reflected the sky and black lagoons so deep that they seemed to have swallowed the sky. But green. It had borrowed the hue of young palm fronds and it spoke of the land and not the sea; it spoke to me.

On one end, a mangrove swamp enticed me with many canals; on the other was a beach of powder-fine black sand, expressly created for swimmers like Charlie to rest and sunbathe after they had frolicked in the water with a dolphin. I had heard of such beaches, black instead of pink or white, but soft to the toe or the eye, from dolphins who had visited Tahiti.

The other sides of the lagoon were less inviting. I leaped repeatedly until I had chiseled a clear sculpture of them in my brain. Sheer walls, like titan faces bewhiskered with foliage, reared toward the sky. One such face was broken by a ledge, perhaps a hundred feet above the water. I shuddered as if I had suddenly spilled from the Gulf Stream into the cold Atlantic, for I knew its name: The Ledge Which Looms Like a Shark. Its stone configurations, even its gaping jaws, not only deserved the name but (according to my informant, the Old Bull) served the Caribs in their rituals honoring shark-headed Tark, their national deity.

There was no trace of a shark in the lagoon, however. My superlatively developed sonar sense would have warned me of any such presence immediately. I peered, I exercised my nostrils, I opened my mouth and allowed the water to flow across my sensitive taste buds. All in all, and in spite of the ominous-looking ledge, I loved what I had found. I could not return to the land and reverse the disastrous course of my ancestors, but I could at least surround myself with land and reduce the encompassment of the sea. What was more, in my leaps I had seen the little English cottages climbing the crater wall, and above them, flaunting its chimneys and flashing its red bricks in the afternoon sun, the house of Mrs. Meynell and my new friend, Charlie; the Red House inspired by William Morris.

You understand that at this time I did not know about contemporary human poets and designers like Morris. We dolphins only know what we hear and see and what our elders have known and seen. I knew about Shakespeare and his play The Tempest. I knew about Milton’s Paradise Lost, which seemed to me a parable of the dolphins and their exile from the land. Later I overheard Charlie giving Jill some of her lessons, and of course he often talked to me, even though it was a long time until he learned that I could understand him. Since dolphins are born historians, we pick up facts as naturally and quickly as we capture slow-swimming prawns in our open jaws. It is due to our not being able to write, and having to remember things. Now, thanks to Charlie, I can list the works of Lord Tennyson and dear Mrs. Browning (Charlie’s favorite), as well as Morris. What is more, I can tell you every king and queen of England, wicked or good, beloved or beheaded, and what poets flourished in whose reigns.

I swam and leapt until I was exhausted, memorizing the contours of this, my new home, remembering distances, gauging relationships between the lagoon and the land. I found the water remarkably fresh, considering its single outlet to the sea, and abundant with pompano, lobsters, crabs, angel fish, and small octopi, with an occasional man-of-war which I scrupulously avoided. Yesterday, I would have fed as I wandered, and wandered with listless flippers and unobservant eyes. Today I was too excited to feed. Once I had ascertained the abundance of food, I proceded to the mangrove swamp and discovered a maze of canals, and tiny islets where dirt had collected around the roots of the thick-grown plants, and occasional land bridges evidently made by men. There was one path which led straight from the edge of the lagoon, where three dugout canoes had been upended and covered with palm fronds, through the swamp, and up the slope toward the Red House. Bordering this path (or should I say littering?) were the palm-thatched huts of the Caribs, whom Mrs. Meynell had been unable to entice into her cleanly cottages. Naked babies waded in the canals or played among a refuse of coconut shells and banana peels, and slatternly women snoozed on straw pallets which they had arranged in the shade as far as possible from their children. Had I been a shark, I could have taken my pick of the wading babies, though in spite of their plumpness they were much too dirty—squalid is the word—to be appetizing.

Throughout my explorations, I lost no chance of leaping from the water to observe the Red House, with the hope that Charlie would appear in the great arch of the door and spy me in the lagoon. But it was not until the second day that he finally emerged from the house. He had changed his manner of dress. In place of the bicycling outfit he had worn on his arrival, he now wore sky-blue bell-bottom trousers, with an open shirt and a red scarf. He looked down at the lagoon and as I spun madly in midair I saw that I had caught his eye. He moved to descend the cliff. But almost at once a slender figure—boy or girl, I could not say—stepped from the house, beckoned commandingly , almost insolently, it seemed to me, and Charlie stopped in his tracks. The figure was indeterminate, the shape was slim and girlish though without any perceptible bosom, but the clothes were male: the pants of a sailor cut off below the knees, a kind of middy blouse, and neither shoes nor sandals. Sailor, did I say? I might have said pirate. Immediately I disliked it. Anything gotten up so strangely meant no good to Charlie or me; besides, it was keeping him from his visit to me.

But my distaste ran deeper than jealousy. It was touched with fear. My third eye saw more than it liked.

The figure took Charlie by the arm and attempted to lead him into the house. He pointed vehemently to the lagoon, to me, spinning through my endless somersaults. I was too distant to follow their conversation. The figure shrugged as if to say, “You’re not going to climb the crater to see a dolphin, are you?” He nodded.

“Yes,” he seemed to say, “that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” The figure spun away from him and stalked into the house. Of course it was Jill, the girl I have already described to you in an earlier episode. He followed her into the house. Really, he had no choice. Her mother had engaged him. Still, I felt betrayed. I did not like young girls to look like scrawny boys, and being a dolphin with beautiful undulating curves, I felt that a girl of Jill’s apparent age—to judge by her height—should have at least the rudiments of a bosom. It was not her appearance, though, which troubled me most. It was something which I can only all her aura. Not that she was necessarily evil, but she had at least been touched by evil.

When Charlie disappeared into the house, I felt as if he had been swallowed, like a seal by a killer whale. All those pretty red bricks—old bricks brought at great expense from England; those three handsome gables, the stately chimneys and the door like an archway into a cathedral; they seemed to shut him into a prison, all the more threatening because of its pretty façade, and I had

to stay in that other prison, the water, and brood about our mutual helplessness.

All day I circled the lagoon, exhausting myself by leaping to view the house, skirting the shore in case Charlie eluded his charge and came exploring. Finally, the next afternoon, I was rewarded for my vigilance. Perhaps he had left her occupied with lessons—memorizing kings or lines of poetry. At any rate, he left the house with the confident stride of one who knows his destination. Joyfully he clambered down the side of the crater, taking an occasional tumble over a banyan root, rising to resume his descent without even bothering to brush off his clothes.

Breathlessly I watched his progress (I can hold my breath for a good twenty minutes), expecting all the way that Jill would change her mind about the lesson and follow him or send a Carib after him. But no, he made his way to the bottom of the cliff and followed the dry, raised path among the mangrove trees. I lost sight of him for a time and hoped that those dirty little Carib children would not gawk at him or pelt him with indian cigars, the fruit of the mangrove. It was not long before, apparently unpelted, he reached the end of the path and the edge of the water and gave a huge, buoyant cry. Suddenly I felt a surprising shyness and made myself as unobtrusive as possible under the water. Have you ever anticipated a meeting with great enthusiasm and then, once it approaches, feared that it will be a disappointment, that you may appear ridiculous rather than enthusiastic?

He blithely stripped off his clothes and dove

into the lagoon. I must confess to a certain surprise.

I was not accustomed to seeing young English gentlemen remove their clothes. Caribs, yes. Sailors from any country yes. But not English boys like Charlie. I could fancy the Carib slatterns crouching behind the mangroves to ogle and ridicule his (to their eyes) pallid skin. But no bushes crackled and the slatterns were doubtless asleep along with their urchins. Another reservation occurred to me. If Charlie wished to strip, that was his privilege, but how did I know that, thus vulnerable, he was safe in these unfamiliar waters? He was a northerner who knew nothing of the tropics. I had seen no sharks, but one might yet discover the entrance from the sea; and a man-of-war, of which I had seen a number, could sting him into unconsciousness. Well, I would just have to scout for him, guide him, protect him. First, though, we must get re-acquainted. I was sadly aware that all dolphins of the same size, unless they happen to be albinos, look the same to most humans. What is more they are usually miscalled porpoises (who are distant cousins without our “bottle-noses”). In the first place, he probably would not recognize me from yesterday in this totally different location. In the second place, even if he did, it was one thing to pat a dolphin’s head when you are on the land, another to meet him nose to bottle-nose in his own element.

Stroking with grace and power, like one who had traversed many a Thames or Severn, he sped away from the shore. With alarm I saw that he meant to swim the entire half mile to the beach. Those English schoolboys! There is nothing they will not do to test their skill. Not that half a mile is any great distance, but it might prove dangerous in a lagoon which was totally unknown to him. Tangling with a man-of-war can be worse than painful; it can be fatal for a swimmer far from shore. I eased around him in a large circle so that I would not crowd and frighten him. He recognized me at once and began to tread water. What is more, he smiled. Such prompt recognition was flattering to say the least. Since I possessed no distinguishing physical characteristics, except for my slight inclination to plumpness, it must have been sheer mental rapport. Waving happily, he swam toward me and I advanced to meet him.

Soon we were face to face. The golden aureole of his hair was subdued by the water and clung about his ears like seaweed, but his splendor was undiminished. Had he possessed a tail, I might have mistaken him for the Great Triton. He did not so much swim as glitter through the water; he should have been attended by mermaids and mermen and whales like moving islands; conch shells should blow to announce his coming and the waters should part to ease his path. It is curious— and also sad—that to dolphins, men look distinguished if not, as in Charlie’s case, downright Olympian, while to men a dolphin looks merely humorous. Our large snouts, however versatile, are hard to take seriously, and our fishlike contours remind men of something they catch on hooks and fry for the table.

There was an inevitable awkwardness when we met: young man and dolphin; land and sea. If he had been a dolphin like me, I would have tumbled

about with him in a merry scramble, nudging, tickling, flipping. If I had been a young man like him, he would have shaken my hand or clapped me on the shoulder. As it was, we were both at a loss as to how to communicate a greeting. It was Charlie who found a way. He simply reached out and, treading water, placed his hand on my head in a gesture of uncondescending salutation.

In response, I squeaked, “Rest now. Then we’ll swim and get acquainted,” though I knew that my words would seem to Charlie nothing more than noises emitted through my airhole. At least I hoped that they would put him at ease; that he could grasp my good intentions from my intonations.

Humans are brighter than dolphins in many respects. They can build houses with their hands and paint pictures of themselves and us and the sea and write books instead of having to compose orally and distort with every telling. But no man since Arion, the Greek poet, has ever been able to understand us.

Needless to say, however, I could understand practically everything Charlie said to me, since dolphins have been overhearing and understanding swimmers and divers and sailors and beachcombers for several thousand years. I myself can understand eleven human languages and also readily converse with sperm whales and sea turtles.

When he spoke, it was for the same reason that I had spoken to him.

“You can’t understand me,” he said, “but I

know that dolphins have ears, much prettier than mine, since they don’t stick out”—leave it to tactful Charlie to notice my ears instead of my snout— “and I just feel like talking to you because, well, because I want to talk to someone who’s sympathetic.”

Sympathetic. That was his exact word to me. To selfish Gloomer, who had thought about nothing and nobody but himself since his mother had died. Well, Charlie changed all that just by thinking the best of me.

“It’s funny. I can’t speak with the people in the house. Mrs. Meynell rests most of the time and Jill talks most of the time about sharks and battles. I can talk to you, though, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what I’m saying. If you did, you’d understand, and that’s what matters.”

There were big tears in his eyes. This stocky, manly boy was about to cry. He ducked to erase the tears and emerged with a smile.

“What a windbag I am! Let’s have a swim.” He let go of me and resumed his passage across the lagoon. Since I had appointed myself his protector, it seemed the propitious moment to teach him how to ride me. Metaphorically speaking, it was the best way to keep him under my flipper. In the old Greek sculptures, the boy is shown clutching the dolphin’s back, legs wrapped around the body. Such a conception represents the error of sculptors who had never ridden dolphins nor seen them ridden. Certainly it was not the way Arion rode the dolphin or dolphins who rescued him from the pirates. It is not by tail and flippers alone that we manage to swim with the speed of a shark and the zest of a seal. We have to be free to wriggle our entire bodies.

My problem was two-fold: first I had to convey to Charlie that he ought to ride me; second, how to ride me. I caught his foot in my beak and interrupted his swim. He turned and surveyed me over his shoulder with some astonishment. Another joke? The shark masquerade repeated? An invitation to horseplay? (Forgive my zoologically misleading word.) He was not angry, but he was just this side of impatience. I released the foot and immediately darted under him and rose under his legs. Now he understood that I was offering him a ride. My first problem was solved. But he clutched me so tightly that he almost sank both of us. I could neither breathe nor advance. I shook clear of him, dipped, and rose under him so gently that I did not so much lift as ease him out of the water. This time he held me much less tightly but still his legs hampered my movements.

Dolphins pride themselves on their smooth, sensitive skin—never a barnacle on us—and Charlie’s arms and legs, though muscular, were neither abrasive nor bruising. In fact, it was as if he were giving me a big, friendly embrace; he seemed a part of the land warming me momentarily from the wetness and sliminess of the sea I disliked. But remember, I am still a youth, and I lacked the skill to swim with my body enwrapped, however lightly, by two strapping legs. Once more I dislodged him, faced him directly, and wriggled my dorsal fin in a manner to suggest the part of me which I meant for him to grasp. He delivered an “ah” of comprehension, grasped the fin with amazingly sensitive fingers for such a sturdy hand, and off I sped, his body gliding above me. To an observer on the shore it must have looked as if he were lying directly on my back; in truth, I was drawing him through the water.

The beach loomed up at us like the side view of a long black whale and Charlie, quite breathless from excitement, and I, equally breathless because of my burden, parted company in shallow water. He patted my head and clambered on to the fine, squishing sand. By this time his nakedness seemed to me entirely natural. After all, I never wear clothes, and why should men—even English gentlemen—wear them in a warm lagoon? He shook the water from his golden hair and threw back his head to catch the sun in his face and, though his body was a little pale from England and thus a sharp contrast to the black sand, it was already pinkening from the tropical sun (I had to find a way to warn him about sunburn.) If Apollo instead of Aphrodite had been bom in the sea, he would have climbed ashore with just such supple and unselfconscious grace.

Then I heard a laugh. The indeterminate person from the Red House (I saw now that she was a young girl of fifteen or so; it is hard to be exact about the age of young human females, since they all look much the same to me except for their bosoms—or lack thereof) was standing on the beach and shaking with laughter. She was disfigured as usual (I refuse to say dressed) by fisherman’s trousers cut off at the knees, and an old shirt which a Carib would have been ashamed to wear and which failed to conceal the fact that if she had any breasts, they resembled lemons instead of coconuts. A lady would not have appeared in such garb. Furthermore, a lady would have absented herself when faced by a naked gentleman. Was she trying to pass for a pirate lad?

Charlie turned and, without the least discomposure, retraced his steps into the water. When he was covered to his waist, he turned to face her. He seemed to forget that the water was transparent.

“I thought you were Odysseus washed ashore by the storm,” she taunted.

“If you’re Nausicaä, I suggest you disappear with your maidens to study your French. You were supposed to read two lessons in the grammar.”

“You’ve already given me an anatomy lesson. I’ve always wondered if Englishmen were like Caribs. Besides, you’re not old enough to be Odysseus, and I’m not decorous enough to be a princess. If you insist on the French, you’ll have to give me some help with the irregular verbs. From what I’ve heard of French novels, I think you’re dressed exactly right.”

He forced himself to sound very stem and tutorial. “Young ladies do not read French novels. Not the kind in yellow covers, I mean. The kind you seem to mean.”

Then, with infinite dignity (though I could see that he was smothering a chuckle) he turned his back on her, grasped my dorsal fin, and we began to re-cross the lagoon.

“Wait, Mr. Sorley,” she called after him. “I’ll fetch you some clothes.”

He pretended not to hear her.

“Mr. Sorley, I command you to wait.” Charlie always did prefer older women.

Chapter Five

His room was austerely but tastefully furnished. What had William Morris said? Let objects be few, functional and beautiful. There was a dressing table of plain oak and a marble-topped wash-stand. A massive settle, a pillowless bench with sides and back as tall as a standing man and embellished with medieval maidens playing dulcimers, dominated the room, pleased the eye, and functioned no doubt for those with generously padded backbones, but Charlie was a little sore from his swim in the lagoon and deplored the lack of cushions. He climbed into his nightdress and then into his bed, a large canopied affair, its curtains intertwined with lilies and blades of grass. Should he draw the curtains? No. Though the night was cool, such a gesture seemed a confession of cowardice—a shutting out of whatever vaguely but tangibly frightened him about the island on this his second night; a shutting in of his loneliness and grief. And yet he permitted himself to snuggle into his pillows like a field mouse burrowing from a hawk; that luxury, that escape seemed allowable under the circumstances and he tried not to wish directly for sleep, because the wish would soon grow insistent and keep him awake all night. He must surprise that most precious and precariously held of possessions, that brief respite from the day’s glare and the night’s woundings. Think about Jill and wonder if she were twelve or fifteen or ageless. About Mrs. Meynell and wonder if the bright daylight would reveal blemishes in her seemingly flawless skin. About the dolphin he had met in the sea and then again in the lagoon and their strange, almost instantaneous sense of kinship. (You see, from the very first he returned my affection; I have his own assurances.)

Barefooted, shuffling, his little form inundated by his large hooded robe, Telesphorus entered the room with a pair of candles; one to light his way, one to leave with Charlie.

“Mistress say you will need two candle to read by.” He was an English boy, but reared in the islands with indian playmates, and his voice was soft, his grammar relaxed, and he tended to slur and run together his words like the Negroes Charlie had seen on Martinique. It was a speech which suited a leisurely life in the tropics, where to sleep through the afternoon was considered a necessity instead of an indolence, and no one ran when he could walk unless he was being pursued by a fer-de-lance.

Charlie thought guiltily that he ought to be reading the third chapter in that abominable grammer he was trying to teach Jill.

“Thank you, Telesphorus. Tell your mistress I’m grateful for her thoughtfulness.”

Telesphorus looked carefully around the room, at Charlie, at the bed, at the books scattered on the settle, and seemed to feel that he could depart and carry a good report to the mistress about the studiousness of the new tutor.

“Will tell Mistress. Master too.”

“The Master, you say?” Mr. Meynell had been dead some fifteen years. “Do you mean your father?”

“No.”

“Are there other servants who give you orders?” He had been puzzled at the seeming lack of them in so large and fine a house.

“Five of them once. All go back to England. Now Caribs come to clean when Master allow.”

“But who is the Master you keep mentioning?” His exasperation was hard to contain.

“Lives in village. Back of cannons.” And then he was gone, like a candle snuffed by a sudden wind.

“Mr. Sorley.”

He woke with a jolt. Yes, he had actually fallen asleep after Telesphorus’ departure. He might, for a change, have slept all night had he not been awakened by Jill. He could not be vexed with her, however, when he saw the fragile face lit by a single taper, the tanned skin beneath hair as fine and silvery as a spider’s web. Jill in the evening, it seemed, was not the strident tomboy of the afternoon.

“Mr. Sorley, my mother wishes to see you.”

“Now?” The hour was late, if he could judge by his half-burned candle.

“At once. She is ill, you see. She has taken a spell.”

“But Telesphorus and his father—” It was not drowsiness which kept him from wanting to visit Mrs. Meynell in her bed, nor even propriety; it was something which he dared not try to define.

She made a gesture of contempt. “They have no understanding.”

“I’ll follow you,” he said. “First, I must”—and here he stammered—“I must put on my trousers.”

She laughed and tugged on his arm. “I’m an island girl. I don’t know your English niceties. Come as you are. All I can see are your feet, and I saw much more this afternoon. Here are some slippers I’ve brought. So now you’re as muffled as a corpse laid out for burial.” Again, the disquieting Jill, brazen of gesture, macabre of speech.

He followed her down the hall; she was careful to keep ahead of him, not out of deference to his modesty, he supposed, but in her haste to reach her mother. His slippers slapped the bare wooden floor with little hollow taps.

He wondered why he had been embarrassed by his nightdress in front of this strange, wild girl, who had not in the least embarrassed him that afternoon on the beach. In England, it was true, in a country house, if there was only one bathroom to a suite of bedrooms and guests met in the halls by accident at night, they politely averted their eyes and did not speak. But he was not in England and his hostess of the moment, in spite of her English parenthood, had proclaimed herself a child of the islands. Perhaps it was the vulnerability which had briefly marked her when she first awoke him. Then it was as if she, and not he, had been the one surprised in an unguarded and revealing gentleness.

Mrs. Meynell’s canopied bed, with its damask curtains flowered with the golden sunflowers so beloved by the Pre-Raphaelites, reminded him of the great red tent of a queen—Guinevere? Iseult?— who had come to watch her lover joust in a tournament. His fancies were not in the least diminished by the practical observation that the feet of the bed were set in little pails of water to prevent the encroachment of ants or spiders.

The scent of laudanum was strong in the air, at once acrid and sickeningly sweet. The powerful, sleep-inducing drug was freely dispensed in most apothecary shops. But such quantities as he smelled in the room indicated addiction. He thought of Elizabeth Barrett languishing in her sickbed with drugs and dreams; waiting for the robust poet who would free her from the twin tyrannies of a harsh father and a mysterious malady.

Jill paused in the door, her face a curious complexity for one so young. Compassion for her mother’s apparent pain. Surprise and envy at the summoning of a stranger in the middle of the night when she, the daughter, stood ready to comfort her mother.

Through the open curtains of her bed, Mrs. Meynell spoke drowsily but with quiet authority.

“Thank you, Jill. You may go now. Your robe is thin. The trade winds are chilly at night.”

“Shall I come back to fetch Mr. Sorley?”

“He can find his own way back.”

Mrs. Meynell motioned him beside her on the bed. She smiled at his hesitation.

“In the islands we forget the amenities. I am an invalid, you see. Do you think I feel compromised if a young gentleman, young enough to be my son, sits beside me on my sick bed? Should he feel compromised? Think of me as Elizabeth Barrett before her marriage to Robert. You’ve come to administer a medicine or prescribe a trip to Italy for my health, or simply to keep me company through another sleepless night.”

His hesitation was momentary. He was not a prude but a poet, and Mrs. Meynell’s mention of the Brownings seemed to him to border on the clairvoyant and to augur the development of a devoted friendship. Furthermore, she was disarmingly young and beautiful in the light of the candelabrum, a rosette of mischievous angels, which swung from the ceiling. By daylight she had looked a ripe thirty; by candlelight, an intoxicating twenty-five.

She took his hand and held it against her forehead. She was damp and cold.

“You’re having a chill,” he cried.

“Loneliness is chilling, my dear. But you must know that already, better than I.” Her beauty was flawless even at closest range.

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

“Loneliness is like a sea anemone writhing in your entrails. Nobody knows it’s there but you. But it grows and wounds and finally devours you.”

The slight coarseness of her speech, the word “entrails,” unthinkable in England except among women of the lower classes, did not trouble him in the least; rather, he was fascinated by her total disregard for the dictates of the society into which they had both been bom and which, apparently, they had both withstood.

“You lost your husband some years ago, didn’t you?”

“Lost him? Yes, but it was what I found which—”

She broke off suddenly and squeezed his hand with desperate tenderness. Her amber eyes reminded him of honeycombs. Why did he also think, momentarily and guiltily, of bees and stingers, of pride and the power to wound?

“May I bring you some medicine?” he asked with real concern.

“I have a cabinet of medicines. I have two servants and a daughter to administer them. I have already taken my nightly dose of laudanum. But your arrival—first on the island, then in my room— has excited me beyond sleep. Sit here and talk to

“Never with you,” he said, almost with vehemence. “How could I be angry with you? With myself, I meant. Most of all, with circumstances.”

“But circumstances—those beyond our controlare indeed maddening. Impatience is a very tiny and quite forgivable sin in such cases. Now we shall forget our sins and talk of happy things. Our tropical nights seem longer than those in England, don’t they? Sometimes I feel quite maddened by tree-frogs or the wind in the casuarina trees. Talk to me, Mr. Sorley, and we shall pass the night together.”

“You surely don’t want to hear the adventures of a schoolboy. You know, till now I’ve never been out of school. First Marlborough, then a year at Cambridge.”

She pressed his hand with maternal ardor. “Poor little school boy thrust out into the sinful world.” Was there a touch of irony in her words? “I should never have sent for you. I had no way of knowing how innocent you were. I had expected a hard, brawling fellow, educated—yes, after all, he had to teach my daughter—but dogged by gambling debts and enemies, and likely as not, dispossessed by his father for excessive wenching.”

“Whatever you expected, I’m glad I came. I found more than I had expected.”

“Yes, I’m afraid you did,” she sighed. “Much, much more. Now talk to me about England. The Lake Country. The downs around Marlborough. The incredible greenness of the trees along the Thames. I know about your mother and your brother and I grieve for you. But now I want countrysides, oaks and not palms, heather and not sea-grapes. Winters and hearthfires and snow on the roof. Changing seasons—how precious they are. There are no seasons here. Except that one still grows old, and it’s more of a shock because the leaves don’t redden and fall, there isn’t any cycle in nature to reflect the change. There are only mirrors. But here I am growing morbid again. And what did you love the most in England?”

“Walking the downs near Marlborough in the autumn. Digging among the leaves for mounds where the fairies live—the Irish call them Sidhe.” “Do you believe in the Sidhe?”

“Yes.” His ancestors were Celts and his answer was unequivocal. He was not being figurative or fanciful. He was telling her the literal truth. She was not a woman to whom one lied, though she might be a woman, he reflected, who told one lies. “They’re still there—in their mounds?”

“I don’t think so. I think they’ve gone away. Gone somewhere else where people still believe in them.”

“No, my dear,” she said with finality. “Every land has its Sidhe, its Dark Ones. They’re much too strong, proud, clever to flee. You see, they know how to hide when people cease to honor them. When the church speaks out against them. The Little People, they’re called. But of course they aren’t little at all. They’re just hard to recognize through their disguises. Thus they can work their evil so secretly that people think them small, if people think about them at all. But when they choose to be seen, they are ... monstrous. Whatever their names, every land has them.”

“You’ve seen them?”

The change in her was instantaneous. Like Jill, she sometimes seemed to be several persons. She laughed a quick bitter laugh. “It’s the late hour. The fancies of childhood are coming back to me. No, I haven’t seen them. Your mounds near

Marlborough are not their dwellings at all, but tombs for the old warriors. The Sidhe never existed except in our nightmares. And here on Oleandra we can leave them to the superstitious Caribs. . . .”

He wanted to argue for the existence of Sidhe, fairies, gnomes, Tritons, Centaurs. He wanted to argue that they were not so much evil as unmoral; that they loved and warred without violating any moral code because they were not concerned with morality. But arguments would only disturb her. She had dismissed such beings from the conversation and, as it were, from the earth.

“And when you walk on the downs, what do you think about? London? Girls? Latin declensions for the next examination?” Though the bed was large, she was cosily close to him. He was sure that on first alighting he had allowed a decorous distance between them.

“I make up poetry,” he said without embarrassment. At Marlborough they had called him The Poet out of admiration, not derision, because like William Morris and John Keats he had been as quick with his fists as with a couplet or a quatrain. He had once throttled a fellow for snickering at one of his sonnets.

“Love poetry? Nature poetry?”

“No,” he corrected her. “I’ve never been in love so I don’t try to write about it yet. And everybody writes about nature. Wordsworth quite turned me against daffodils. I write about the Celts and the Romans and the Saxons and the Normans. Bardic poetry. Battle poetry. Epic poetry, you might say,

only I haven't finished a whole epic yet. I’ve only done two thousand lines of one.”

“Your choice of subjects is highly commendable—Jill will be fascinated—but I don’t feel like trumpets and clarions tonight. Tomorrow you shall recite your fragmentary epic to me. Tonight . . . tonight I should like something sweet, plaintive, melancholy. The nightingale and not the war hawk.”

“I’m not a nightingale myself but what if I quoted some lines by Tennyson I learned at Marlborough? I thought them silly at the time, \ but they seem to have grown on me.”

“I suspect you’ve grown on them. Go ahead.”

He quoted with the fervor of his own grief:

‘Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean;

Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn-fields And thinking of the days that are no more.’

“Our beloved Laureate. Now he’s our greatest poet, but the days that are no more are much more precious to him than the Laureateship or audiences with the Queen. The days at Cambridge. The days with his friend Hallam. His tears weren’t idle at all, were they?”

She took him in her arms as naturally as a mother enfolds her child. She was beautiful like his own mother, with the sweet rounded softness of a Madonna, and then with delectable guilt he realized that she was not so much a madonna as a Titian Venus, soft and rounded, yes, but for cradling

Mars and not the Christ child. She appeared to him less maternal by the second.

Though inexperienced, he had read the poems of Algernon Swinburne and a large number of French novels and with gentle reluctance he disengaged himself from her embrace.

She laughed. “My little virgin. You’ve never known a woman, have you?”

Why had she twice called him little? Why did she not see that he was medium in height, even if not tall, and stocky of build, rather like the William Morris she so much admired? A good wrestler, a good climber. No softness anywhere. And why had she called him “virgin” with seeming disdain? Victorian boys of nineteen were expected to be virgins, but some of his friends had been taken to Places by their fathers, given a knowing nudge in the ribs, and left in the custody of a plump, painted woman. She had grinned hugely and, acting half maternal, half businesslike, presented them to a line of simpering women in their thirties who looked like girls until you got close to them. Still, they were real “stunners” in bed, his friends had boasted, and later they had gone back on their own, and the secret was one between them and their fathers and carefully guarded from their mothers and of course from the girls they later married. Mrs. Meynell obviously knew about such places and approved of them.

“Dear Mr. Sorley,” she smiled. “You didn’t know you had been engaged—lured all the way from England—by a fallen woman, did you? You didn’t realize the full extent of your duties.”

“My duties,” he said manfully, “are to tutor Jill in French, biology, poetry, and related subjects.”

“And nothing left for her mother? No wisdom to impart? No biology? No related subjects? Nothing to learn from her mother? No wisdom to be imparted?”

“You’ve already taught me something,” he said. “If you’re a fallen woman, I think I like them better than the other kind. Certainly they’re prettier and better educated, and they make excellent conversation. With girls my age, I just sit around and talk about summering at Bath or the next Season in London, and all I can do with them is waltz or walk in a garden. I kissed a girl once behind a grape arbor, and she was obviously enjoying herself until her sister found us and then she slapped me and ordered me never to call on her again. Another time, I told a girl she had a pretty ankle and she stomped on my foot. It seems I wasn’t supposed to have seen her ankle. Or maybe I was supposed to see it but not say anything. I don’t know what you think you fell from, but I would call you a climbed woman. I always did like Lucifer better than Michael.”

“If you’re Lucifer, why don’t you tempt me? I shall be your Eve.”

“Lilith,” he said. “Eve was a bit of a simpleton. She had no mind of her own. Whoever was with her at the moment—God, Adam, snake—was her master.”

She looked at him with pleasure and also with a question. His speech had clearly pleased and flattered her. But where did she stand with him? Was

he merely bantering with her or was he ready to yield to her blandishments?

He looked not at her but into his heart, pleased because he had managed to save her pride, drawn to her by her learning, loveliness, and sadness, wondering if at last he had begun, just begun, to fall in love with her. It was the wondering—the necessity to wonder at such a time—which restrained him. She desired him; he desired her; but perhaps he would overwhelmingly come to love her, and he must save the gift of his body for the moment of certainty. For it was, after all, though to him unremarkable, a gift. Wenches had beckoned to him in the street. A flower girl had whispered a secret address and a girl in the strand had cracked nuts between her teeth and laughed an invitation: “Now there’s a proper gentleman from ’is ’ead to ’is toes. But I could teach ’im a thing or three.” He had resisted these multiple temptations, not out of fear and not with the abstinence of a priest or a saint, but because he wanted his first love to be his only love, and the one gift he had to offer besides his heart was his body, firm, clean, and chaste. Unlike practically everyone who met him, he did not think of himself as a handsome boy, but at least he would be, well, like a clean-growing fir tree without any broken branches and without any rot. His mother had been a goddess to him; his brother had been his closest friend, perfectly understood, perfectly understanding. Having known the highest in family love, he did not intend to accept less than the highest in the love of a man for a woman.

He took her hand and kissed it with a warm,

firm pressure, courteously yet not without passion. That was his answer. It was not yet time. He saw that she understood; that she was disappointed but not wounded; he was postponing her, not rejecting her.

“Very well,” she said with a little gesture of futility. She had a way of making a kind of butterfly-shape in the air with her hands. “Go if you must. But I shan’t sleep if you leave me.”

“Neither shall I,” he confessed.

She called after him as he reached the door; “Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land....”

He turned in the door and continued the poem: “When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay...." “Christina Rossetti,” she said softly. “She loved two men. But chastely. That kind of love is possible too, my dear. Stay with me a little, Charlie.” The change to his given name was natural and touching. To his playmates and schoolmasters he had been Sorley; to his mother and brother, Charlie. “As my friend and nothing more. Will you do that for me, my dear?”

When he hesitated, she smiled mischievously. “Could one of your girlfriends have quoted Christina Rossetti to you? The one you kissed behind the grape arbor?”

“All she could quote was the first stanza of 7 Wandered Lonely Asa Cloud.' I’ve always disliked it. What’s lonely about a cloud? If you had quoted Wordsworth, I would have kept on going.”

He came into her arms as gratefully as a bear to its winter cave. She was redolent not of laudanum but of frangipani, exquisite and penetrating. He did not change his original resolve; he was content or at least resigned merely to lie with her in his arms, loving but not her lover, in a sweet and unassuageable yearning. She was Helen and Anna-belle Lee and Ligeia and all those other sad, shadowy women of Edgar Allan Poe. She was his Lady of Frangipanis. . ..

He seemed to walk into sleep, and the path was soft with leaves and petals. A little boy and his mother were exploring a great garden.

“Look, Mother. The air is held up with birds!”

“It’s the air that holds the birds up,” she had laughed.

“Never mind. There’s every color of a peacock’s tail. Like the one in the London Zoo. Blue and red and—what’s that color, Mother?”

“Indigo.”

“I-n-d-i-g-o.” He spoke each letter distinctly, relishing it, then putting them together into a new word which he would never forget. “Indigo. I like it best of all. It seems to have fallen out of a sunset.”

When he awoke, the windows were brimming with light like three tall sun-gods come to awaken him.

But Elizabeth, unlike the lady in Shakespeare’s sonnet, outshone the sun. Even in the dishevelment of her awakening, she stirred him with her beauty.

“My lovely virgin boy,” she said. “Swaddled in your night dress like an overgrown savior.”

“Considerably overgrown,” he said, “and not much good at saving.”

She looked at him strangely. “Perhaps not souls. Nobody can save one’s soul except oneself. But you saved the night for me.” Then she grew playful. “Your hair is even more yellow than mine. It’s the color of sugar birds. And as for the rest of you, even through all that cloth I can see those firm arms and legs. Do you know what, Charlie? Jill swims in the lagoon with nothing on I”

He had to admit to a momentary shock. Victorian girls who went swimming usually garbed themselves as if for Purdah, segregated themselves from men, and shut themselves from the shore with bathing machines.

“One day you will swim in the lagoon like Jill and think you’re all alone, but I will slip up behind a banyan tree and blend right in with the roots and spy on you.”

“You may be disappointed,” he began. “I’m not as tall as I ought to be. Just middling. That’s the best you can say. And I have a mole on my back shoulder, and—”

She interrupted him with a laugh. “You don’t even recognize the banter of a fallen woman. Here you chatter away as if I were a respectable matron. I had rather hoped to shock you into shocking me.”

He yawned and stretched like a sleepy bear. “I’m too happy to be shocked.”

“And you still have your virtue,” she sighed. “Really, my dear, it isn’t fair. You ought to feel horribly frustrated. Instead, you’ve had your teacakes and eaten them too.”

Morning-glories lifted purple—no, indigo—chalices around the window, but there was something wrong about them. An absence ... of what?

“Why don’t the birds come to your window?” he asked. “Even at Marlborough we had sparrows in the morning.”

“They used to come, when Jill was a little girl. But she never liked them. She said they were cruel and spiteful and we only thought them pretty because of their feathers, which were like a cloak to hide their ugly hearts. She began to throw rocks at them. One day she took some oleander juice—you know, it’s quite deadly—and sprinkled it over the morning-glories. The birds that came that morning were all poisoned. None of them come any more, not even the little sugar birds which are everywhere else on the island.”

“What a horrible thing for Jill to do!”

“It was Curk who thought of the poison.”

“Curk?”

“My manager. You saw him the afternoon you arrived.”

“Yes, I saw him. He lives in the house with the cannons, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. He visits with Jill sometimes. Teaches her things.”

“I think he’s a bad teacher.”

“But of course he is. That’s why I sent for you.”

“Then I’m going to try to keep her away from him.”

“That may be difficult. Do you know what his people call him?”

“No.”

“The Man Who Swims with the Sharks.”

Chapter Six

Jill was staring down the crater as if she would like to be visiting with the Caribs instead of studying in Rouaulls’s French. Grammar. But Charlie had already made far too many concessions to her. They would study not in the library, she had insisted, amidst a resplendent collection of world classics bound in leather, but under the cassia trees. They would sit on a particularly knobby area of ground, which Jill seemed to find as comfortable as moss though Charlie would have preferred a bench or an expanse of soft leaves. She was wearing her usual shortened sailor togs—he had never seen her in a gown—and he himself was garbed in a larger outfit of bell-bottom trousers, unshortened, but otherwise similar, jacket, scarf, and round, flat cap.

He did not object to looking like a sailor, and he knew that small concessions were necessary if he was to win large ones from her, and at least achieve a tentative truce between them and lessen her appalling ignorance on most subjects to be

found in books. Only her knowledge about the flora and fauna of the Caribbean seemed extensive. Today he had listened for fifteen minutes to a lecture about the predatory fish in the seas around Oleandra (“not only sharks but barracudas, small but moody and you ought to see their teethl”) and then he had insisted on the French.

But she stared down the hill.

“Miss Meynell, you may join your friends after we have covered six more verbs. So far we have covered two, and I think you have already forgotten them.” Today, as always, he was quite alone in making demands of her. Mrs. Meynell was resting and not to be disturbed. The household staff, that is the old man and his muffled little son, avoided Jill as if she had typhoid fever, perhaps because she consorted with the Caribs, whom they looked upon as unmitigated savages.

“Mr. Sorley, I am not in the least interested in your irregular verbs. I’ve decided they’re unnecessary for conversing with the sailors on the boats from Martinique.” Except in moments of anger, her speech, unlike her dress, was correct and curiously formal; she appeared to have learned rhetoric from her mother. “I can understand them already, and they don’t worry about tenses.” That morning Mrs. Meynell had insisted that she submit to a prolonged hair brushing, and she looked almost like a girl, with a hint of prettiness which with years and cultivation could blossom into her mother’s beauty. It was significant, though, that whenever Charlie thought of her looks, it was in