Delphi collected works o.., p.200
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 200
At last, the adventurous young chief, who had advised killing Felix off-hand on the island, mustered up courage to paddle his own canoe a little nearer, and flung his spear madly in the direction of the gig. It fell short by ten yards. He stood eying it angrily. But the captain, grimly quiet, raising his Winchester to his shoulder without one second’s delay, and marking his man, fired at the young chief as he stood, still half in the attitude of throwing, on the prow of his canoe, an easy aim for fire-arms. The ball went clean through the savage’s breast, and then ricochetted three times on the water afar off. The young chief fell stone dead into the sea like a log, and sank instantly to the bottom.
It was a critical moment. The captain felt uncertain whether the natives would close round them in force or not. It is always dangerous to fire a shot at savages. But the Boupari men were too utterly awed to venture on defence. “He was Tu-Kila-Kila’s enemy,” they cried, in astonished tones. “He raised his voice against the very high god. Therefore, the very high god’s friends have smitten him with their lightning. Their thunderbolt went through him, and hit the water beyond. How strong is their hand! They can kill from afar. They are mighty gods. Let no man strive to fight against the friends of Tu-Kila-Kila.”
The sailors rowed on and reached the landing-place. There, half of them, headed by the captain, disembarked in good order, with drawn cutlasses, while the other half remained behind to guard the gig, under the third officer. The natives also disembarked, a little way off, and, making humble signs of submission with knee and arm, endeavored, by pantomime, to express the idea of their willingness to guide the strangers to their friends’ quarters.
The captain waved them on with his hand. The natives, reassured, led the way, at some distance ahead, along the paths through the jungle. The captain had his finger on his six-shooter the while; every sailor grasped his cutlass and kept his revolver ready for action. “I don’t half like the look of it,” the captain observed, partly to himself. “They seem to be leading us into an ambuscade or something. Keep a sharp lookout against surprise from the jungle, boys; and if any native shows fight shoot him down instantly.”
At last they emerged upon a clear space in the front, where a great group of savages stood in a circle, with serried spears, round a large wattled hut that occupied the elevated centre of the clearing.
For a minute or two the action of the savages was uncertain. Half of the defenders turned round to face the invaders angrily; the other half stood irresolute, with their spears still held inward, guarding a white line of sand with inflexible devotion.
The warriors who had preceded them from the shore called aloud to their friends by the temple in startled tones. The captain and sailors had no idea what their words meant. But just then, from the midst of the circle, an English voice cried out in haste, “Don’t fire! Do nothing rash! We’re safe. Don’t be frightened. The natives are disposed to parley and palaver. Take care how you act. They’re terribly afraid of you.”
Just outside the taboo-line the captain halted. The gray-headed old chief, who had accompanied his fellows to the shore, spoke out in Polynesian. “Do not resist them,” he said, “my people. If you do, you will be blasted by their lightning like a bare bamboo in a mighty cyclone. They carry thunder in their hands. They are mighty, mighty gods. The white-faced Korong spoke no more than the truth. Let them do as they will with us. We are but their meat. We are as dust beneath their sole, and as driven mulberry-leaves before the breath of the tempest.”
The defenders hesitated still a little. Then, suddenly losing heart, they broke rank at last at a point close by where the captain of the Australasian stood, one man after another falling aside slowly and shamefacedly a pace or two. The captain, unhesitatingly, overstepped the white taboo-line. Next instant, Felix and Muriel were grasping his hand hard, and M. Peyron was bowing a polite Parisian reception.
Forthwith, the sailors crowded round them in a hollow square. Muriel and Felix, half faint with relief from their long and anxious suspense, staggered slowly down the seaward path between them. But there was no need now for further show of defence. The islanders, pressing near and flinging away their weapons, followed the procession close, with tears and lamentations. As they went on, the women, rushing out of their huts while the fugitives passed, tore their hair on their heads, and beat their breasts in terror. The warriors who had come from the shore recounted, with their own exaggerative additions, the miracle of the six-shooter and the dynamite cartridge. Gradually they approached the landing-place on the beach. There the third officer sat waiting in the gig to receive them. The lamentations of the islanders now became positively poignant. “Oh, my father,” they cried aloud, “my brother, my revered one, you are indeed the true Tu-Kila-Kila. Do not go away like this and desert us! Oh, our mother, great queen, mighty goddess, stop with us! Take not away your sun from the heavens, nor your rain from the crops. We acknowledge we have sinned; we have done very wrong; but the chief sinner is dead; the wrong-doer has paid; spare us who remain; spare us, great deity; do not make the bright lights of heaven become dark over us. Stay with your worshippers, and we will give you choice young girls to eat every day, we will sacrifice the tenderest of our children to feed you.”
It is an awful thing for any race or nation when its taboos fail all at once, and die out entirely. To the men of Boupari, the Tu-Kila-Kila of the moment represented both the Moral Order and the regular sequence of the physical universe. Anarchy and chaos might rule when he was gone. The sun might be quenched, and the people run riot. No wonder they shrank from the fearful consequence that might next ensue. King and priest, god and religion, all at one fell blow were to be taken away from them!
Felix turned round on the shore and spoke to them again. “My people,” he said, in a kindly tone — for, after all, he pitied them— “you need have no fear. When I am gone, the sun will still shine and the trees will still bear fruit every year as formerly. I will send the messengers I promised from my own land to teach you. Until they come, I leave you this as a great Taboo. Tu-Kila-Kila enjoins it. Shed no human blood; eat no human flesh. Those who do will be punished when another fire-canoe comes from the far land to bring my messengers.”
The King of Fire bent low at the words. “Oh, Tu-Kila-Kila,” he said, “it shall be done as you say. Till your messengers come, every man shall live at peace with all his neighbors.”
They stepped into the gig. Mali and Toko followed before M. Peyron as naturally as they had always followed their masters on the island before.
“Who are these?” the captain asked, smiling.
“Our Shadows,” Felix answered. “Let them come. I will pay their passage when I reach San Francisco. They have been very faithful to us, and they are afraid to remain, lest the islanders should kill them for letting us go or for not accompanying us.”
“Very well,” the captain answered. “Forward all, there, boys! Now, ahead for the ship. And thank God, we’re well out of it!”
But the islanders still stood on the shore and wept, stretching their hands in vain after the departing boat, and crying aloud in piteous tones, “Oh, my father, return! Oh, my mother, come back! Oh, very great gods, do not fly and desert us!”
Seven weeks later Mr. and Mrs. Felix Thurstan, who had been married in the cathedral at Honolulu the very morning the Australasian arrived there, sat in an eminently respectable drawing-room in a London square, where Mrs. Ellis, Muriel’s aunt by marriage, was acting as their hostess.
“But how dreadful it is to think, dear,” Mrs. Ellis remarked for the twentieth time since their arrival, with a deep-drawn sigh, “how dreadful to think that you and Felix should have been all those months alone on the island together without being married!”
Muriel looked up with a quiet smile toward Felix. “I think, Aunt Mary,” she said, dreamily, “if you’d been there yourself, and suffered all those fears, and passed through all those horrors that we did together, you’d have troubled your head very little indeed about such conventionalities, as whether or not you happened to be married…. Besides,” she added, after a pause, with a fine perception of the inexorable stringency of Mrs. Grundy’s law, “we weren’t quite without chaperons, either, don’t you know; for our Shadows, of course, were always with us.”
Whereat Felix smiled an equally quiet smile. “And terrible as it all was,” he put in, “I shall never regret it, because it made Muriel know how profoundly I loved her, and it made me know how brave and trustful and pure a woman could be under such awful conditions.”
But Mrs. Ellis sat still in her chair and smiled uncomfortably. It affected her spirits. Taboos, after all, are much the same in England as in Boupari.
Dumaresq’s Daughter
First serialised Chambers’ Journal in 1891, this novel offers more psychological penetration than many other narratives written by Allen. The central character is Haviland Dumaresq, a philosopher and deviser of a grandiose Encyclopaedic Philosophy. Aging and embittered by his relative failure and early years of poverty, Dumaresq has become an opium addict — likely inspired by the life of Allen’s hero and mentor, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). An English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist, Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia.
The novel relates how Dumaresq is forced to engage with the ‘Philistine’ world when planning the future of his beloved daughter Psyche. She is in love with a successful, yet shy painter, Austen Linnell, who has inherited a fortune from his father’s American patent medicine company. Shy of the origins of his fortune, Linnell lets no one know that he is rich. Dumaresq, fearing his daughter will marry a penniless painter, forces her to promise not to encourage him for three years. Feeling jilted, Linnell leaves for Khartoum on a madcap adventure with a journalist. In England Psyche suffers from episodes of psychosomatic blindness…
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
Herbert Spencer, c. 1900
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
BY THE GATE OF THE SEA.
When any man tells you he doesn’t know Petherton Episcopi, you may immediately conceive a low opinion of his character and intellect. For all the world, in fact, has been to Petherton. Not, of course, in the same broad sense that all the world has been to Margate and Great Yarmouth; nor yet in the same narrow and restricted sense that all the world has been to Brighton and Scarborough. The vulgar mob that frequents the first, the fashionable mob that frequents the second, would find in Petherton nothing to satisfy their essentially similar and gregarious tastes. Birds of a feather flock together in the crowded promenades of the Spa and the Pierhead. But the quiet, cultivated, nature-loving few, the saving minority who form the salt of the earth (according to Matthew Arnold) in these latter hurrying scurrying centuries, all of them seem by some native instinct or elective affinity to have picked out the very name of Petherton from the list of competing English watering-places at the end of Bradshaw.
You have been there yourself, I feel sure beforehand, so I needn’t describe it to you. It is of a type, indeed, with Lyme Regis, and Sherringham, and St. Ives, and Overstrand; with Newquay, and Aldeburgh, and Mundesley, and Budleigh Salterton; one of the many unspoilt nooks and corners in a broken gap of rockbound coast, shunned by the vast class of noisy tourists to whom the seaside means only a pier and an esplanade and a military band and a crowd of loungers — but dearly prized by simple old-fashioned souls, like you and me, to whom the seaside is synonymous rather with open cliffs and heather-clad heights and creeping surf and a broad beach, broken only by the fishermen’s boats and the bare brown legs of the shrimpers in the foreground. Hence, when any man tells you he doesn’t know Petherton, you may set him down at once with tolerable accuracy in your own mind as a son of the Philistines — a member of the Yarmouth and Scarborough contingent — and take his mental and moral gauge accordingly.
Charles Austen Linnell — he was careful to put the accent, himself, on the last syllable — found Petherton suit him to the very top of his liking. It lies surrounded, as you know, by high sloping hills, with a sea-front undesecrated as yet by the financial freaks of the speculative builder, and a tiny stone pier of Plantagenet antiquity, enclosing in its curve one of the quaintest and oldest coasting ports in all England. There are endless ‘bits’ to sketch in the neighbourhood; and Linnell, who loved to describe himself as ‘a painter by trade,’ found subjects ready to his hand at every turn of the picturesque old borough. He stood in front of his easel on the west cliff, that summer morning, gazing with ingenuous admiration and delight, first at the cottage with the creeper-covered porch, and then at his own clever counterfeit presentment of the same on the sheet of thick white Whatman’s paper stretched out before him. And well he might; for it was a cottage of the almost obsolete poetic type, the thatched and gabled cottage with low overhanging eaves now being rapidly crowded out of existence in the struggle for life by the bare and square brick and slated workman’s dwelling-house. Happy the farm-labourer, if only he knew his own good-fortune, the painter murmured half unconsciously to himself (after the second Georgic), whose luck it was to dwell within those pretty, rose-clad, insanitary windows.
As he held his handsome head appreciatively on one side, and surveyed his own work with the complacent smile of the satisfied artist, an unexpected voice from behind startled him suddenly.
‘What, Linnell!’ the voice cried. ‘You here, my dear fellow! I’d no idea of this. How lucky I met you!’
Linnell turned, blushing crimson like a girl. To say the truth, he hated to be caught in the obvious act of admiring his own poor tentative water-colours. ‘Ha, ha, the prowling art-critic!’ he answered, with a guilty air. ‘Our avenging angel! We can never escape him. He dogs the trade like its own evil conscience. I didn’t know, Mansel, you were looking over my shoulder and appraising my poor ineffective efforts.’
‘Well, that’s a nice way to welcome an old friend, after I don’t know how many years that we haven’t seen one another!’ Mansel responded good-humouredly, grasping his hand hard with a friendly pressure. ‘I steal upon you unawares from the middle distance, making sure it’s you, in the full expectation of a warm reception; and I get called in return an avenging angel, and likened unwarrantably, out of pure wantonness, to the most hateful and baneful of created things, the crawling art-critic. For I, too, you know, have felt the creature bite my heel. I, too, have crushed the loathly worm. I, too, have suspended myself from a hook in Suffolk Street.’
Linnell wrung his old friend’s hands warmly.
‘You took me so by surprise,’ he replied in an apologetic tone. ‘I’m afraid you must have thought me an awful fool, surveying my own handiwork with a complacent smirk, as if I were a Cox, or a Crome, or a Turner. But the fact is, my dear boy, every fellow on earth who paints at all must throw his whole heart into it; he must cultivate egotism, and believe in himself, or he’ll never get other people to believe in him. Not that I believe in myself, for one moment, at bottom: I know I’m not worth a crooked sixpence, viewed as a painter. But don’t think I didn’t know you for a fellow-journeyman. I’ve seen your name at the Institute often, and admired your work too, if you’ll allow me to say so. It’s queer, indeed, we’ve never knocked up against one another accidentally anywhere since we left Christ Church.’
‘Well, not so queer,’ the other replied, ‘if you take into consideration the patent fact that you go and bury yourself for half the year in the wilds of Africa, and only come to England for the other half, when all the rest of us are hard at work in Cornwall, or the Highlands, or Norway, or Switzerland. Very few artists frequent the desert in mid-December, and you never show up in winter in London.’
Linnell blushed again, this time with a faint flush of visible pleasure.
