Foe Read online

  ‘Then Cruso began to mend. The wild glitter in his eye abated, the lines of his face softened, his bouts of raving ended, he slept peacefully. His appetite came back. Soon he was walking from hut to garden unaided, and giving Friday orders.

  ‘I greeted his return to health with gladness. In Brazil I had seen younger men carried off by the fever; there had been a night and a day, indeed, when I was sure Cruso was dying, and looked forward with dismay to being left alone with Friday. It was the vigorous life he lived, I believe, that saved Cruso – the vigorous life and the simple diet, not any skill of mine.

  ‘Shortly hereafter we had a great storm, the wind howling and rain falling in torrents. In one of the gusts part of the roof of the hut was torn off and the fire we guarded so jealously drowned. We moved the bed to the last dry corner; even there the floor soon turned to mud.

  ‘I had thought Friday would be terrified by the clamour of the elements (I had never known such a storm, and pitied the poor mariners at sea). But no, Friday sat under the eaves with his head on his knees and slept like a baby.

  ‘After two nights and a day the rain abated and we came out to stretch our limbs. We found the garden near washed away, and where the path had led down the hillside a gully as deep as my waist had been cut by the waters. The beach was covered in seaweed tossed up by the waves. Then it began to rain again, and for a third night we retired to our miserable shelter, hungry, cold, unable to make fire.

  ‘That night Cruso, who had seemed quite mended, complained of being hot, and tossed off his clothes and lay panting. Then he began to rave and throw himself from side to side as if unable to breathe, till I thought the bed would break. I gripped him by the shoulders and tried to soothe him, but he beat me away. Great tremors ran through him; he grew stiff as a board and began to bellow about Masa or Massa, a word with no meaning I can discover. Woken by the din, Friday took out his flute and began to play his damnable tune, till what with the rain and the wind and Cruso’s shouting and Friday’s music, I could have believed myself in a madhouse. But I continued to hold Cruso and soothe him, and at last he grew still, and Friday ceased his noise, and even the rain grew softer. I stretched myself out against Cruso to warm his body with mine; in time the trembling gave out and both he and I slept.

  ‘I came to myself in daylight, in an unfamiliar silence, the storm having at last blown itself out. A hand was exploring my body. So befuddled was I that I thought myself still aboard the ship, in the Portuguese captain’s bed. But then I turned and saw Cruso’s wild hair and the great beard he never cut and his yellow eyes, and I knew it was all true, I was indeed cast away on an island with a man named Cruso, who though an Englishman was as strange to me as a Laplander. I pushed his hand away and made to rise, but he held me. No doubt I might have freed myself, for I was stronger than he. But I thought, He has not known a woman for fifteen years, why should he not have his desire? So I resisted no more but let him do as he wished. When I left the hut Friday was nowhere in sight, for which I was glad. I walked some distance, then sat down to collect myself. Around me in the bushes settled a flock of sparrows, cocking their heads curiously, quite unafraid, having known no harm from man since the beginning of time. Was I to regret what had passed between Cruso and me? Would it have been better had we continued to live as brother and sister, or host and guest, or master and servant, or whatever it was we had been? Chance had cast me on his island, chance had thrown me in his arms. In a world of chance, is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger’s embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? The questions echoed in my head without answer.

  ‘I was walking one day at the north end of the island, on the Bluff, when I spied Friday below me bearing on his shoulder a log or beam nearly as long as himself. While I watched, he crossed the shelf of rock that stretched out from the cliff-face, launched his log upon the water – which was deep at that place – and straddled it.

  ‘I had often observed Friday at his fishing, which he did standing on the rocks, waiting till a fish swam below him and then darting his spear at it with great dexterity. How he could spear fish belly-down upon his clumsy vessel was not plain to me.

  ‘But Friday was not fishing. After paddling out some hundred yards from the shelf into the thickest of the seaweed, he reached into a bag that hung about his neck and brought out handfuls of white flakes which he began to scatter over the water. At first I thought this was bait to lure the fish to him; but no, when he had strewn all his flakes he turned his log-boat about and steered it back to the ledge, where he landed it with great difficulty through the swell.

  ‘Curious to find what he had been casting on the waves, I waited that evening till he had gone to fill the water-bowls. Then I searched under his mat and discovered a little bag with a drawstring, and turning it out found some few white petals and buds from the brambles that were at the time flowering on parts of the island. So I concluded he had been making an offering to the god of the waves to cause the fish to run plentifully, or performing some other such superstitious observance.

  ‘The sea continuing calm the next day, I crossed the rocks below the Bluff as Friday had done till I stood at the edge of the shelf. The water was cold and dark; when I thought of committing myself to those depths and swimming out, whether on a log or not, among the circling arms of the seaweed, where no doubt cuttlefish hung in stealth waiting for prey to swim into their grasp, I shivered. Of Friday’s petals not a trace was left.

  ‘Hitherto I had given to Friday’s life as little thought as I would have a dog’s or any other dumb beast’s – less, indeed, for I had a horror of his mutilated state which made me shut him from my mind, and flinch away when he came near me. This casting of petals was the first sign I had that a spirit or soul – call it what you will – stirred beneath that dull and unpleasing exterior.

  ‘ “Where did the ship go down on which you and Friday sailed?” I asked Cruso.

  ‘He indicated a part of the coast I had never visited.

  ‘ “If we could dive to the wreck, even now,” I said, “we might save from it tools of the greatest utility. A saw, for instance, or an axe, both of which we lack. Timbers too we might loosen and bring back. Is there no way to explore the wreck? Might Friday not swim out to it, or float out on a log, and then dive down, with a rope tied about his middle for safety?”

  ‘ “The ship lies on the bed of the ocean, broken by the waves and covered in sand,” Cruso replied. “What has survived the salt and seaworm will not be worth the saving. We have a roof over our heads, made without saw or axe. We sleep, we eat, we live. We have no need of tools.”

  ‘He spoke as if tools were heathenish inventions. Yet I knew if I had swum ashore with a saw tied to my ankle he would have taken it and used it most happily.

  ‘Let me tell you of Cruso’s terraces.

  ‘The terraces covered much of the hillside at the eastern end of the island, where they were best sheltered from the wind. There were twelve levels of terracing at the time I arrived, each some twenty paces deep and banked with stone walls a yard thick and at their highest as high as a man’s head. Within each terrace the ground was levelled and cleared; the stones that made up the walls had been dug out of the earth or borne from elsewhere one by one. I asked Cruso how many stones had gone into the walls. A hundred thousand or more, he replied. A mighty labour, I remarked. But privately I thought: Is bare earth, baked by the sun and walled about, to be preferred to pebbles and bushes and swarms of birds? “Is it your plan to clear the whole island of growth, and turn it into terraces?” I asked. “It would be the work of many men and many lifetimes to clear the whole island,” he replied; by which I s
aw he chose to understand only the letter of my question. “And what will you be planting, when you plant?” I asked. “The planting is not for us,” said he. “We have nothing to plant – that is our misfortune.” And he looked at me with such sorry dignity, I could have bit my tongue. “The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground and piling stones is little enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness.” And then, with great earnestness, he went on: “I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway at heart.”

  ‘I reflected long on these words, but they remained dark to me. When I passed the terraces and saw this man, no longer young, labouring in the heat of the day to lift a great stone out of the earth or patiently chopping at the grass, while he waited year after year for some saviour castaway to arrive in a boat with a sack of corn at his feet, I found it a foolish kind of agriculture. It seemed to me he might occupy his time as well in digging for gold, or digging graves first for himself and Friday and then if he wished for all the castaways of the future history of the island, and for me too.

  ‘Time passed with increasing tediousness. When I had exhausted my questions to Cruso about the terraces, and the boat he would not build, and the journal he would not keep, and the tools he would not save from the wreck, and Friday’s tongue, there was nothing left to talk of save the weather. Cruso had no stories to tell of the life he had lived as a trader and planter before the shipwreck. He did not care how I came to be in Bahia or what I did there. When I spoke of England and of all the things I intended to see and do when I was rescued, he seemed not to hear me. It was as though he wished his story to begin with his arrival on the island, and mine to begin with my arrival, and the story of us together to end on the island too. Let it not by any means come to pass that Cruso is saved, I reflected to myself; for the world expects stories from its adventurers, better stories than tallies of how many stones they moved in fifteen years, and from where, and to where; Cruso rescued will be a deep disappointment to the world; the idea of a Cruso on his island is a better thing than the true Cruso tight-lipped and sullen in an alien England.

  ‘I spent my days walking on the cliffs or along the shore, or else sleeping. I did not offer to join Cruso in his work on the terraces, for I held it a stupid labour. I made a cap with flaps to tie over my ears; I wore this, and sometimes closed my ears with plugs too, to shut out the sound of the wind. So I became deaf, as Friday was mute; what difference did it make on an island where no one spoke? The petticoat I had swum ashore in was in tatters. My skin was as brown as an Indian’s. I was in the flower of my life, and now this had befallen me. I did not weep; but sometimes I would find myself sitting on the bare earth with my hands over my eyes, rocking back and forth and moaning to myself, and would not know how I had got there. When Friday set food before me I took it with dirty fingers and bolted it like a dog. I squatted in the garden, heedless of who saw me. And I watched and watched the horizon. It mattered not who came, Spaniard or Muscovite or cannibal, so long as I escaped.

  ‘This was the darkest time for me, this time of despair and lethargy; I was as much a burden on Cruso now as he had been on me when he raved with fever.

  ‘Then step by step I recovered my spirits and began to apply myself again to little tasks. Though my heart was no warmer towards Cruso, I was grateful he had suffered my moods and not turned me out.

  ‘Cruso did not use me again. On the contrary, he held himself as distant as if nothing had passed between us. For this I was not sorry. Yet I will confess, had I been convinced I was to spend the rest of my days on the island, I would have offered myself to him again, or importuned him, or done whatever was necessary to conceive and bear a child; for the morose silence which he impressed upon our lives would have driven me mad, to say nothing of the prospect of passing my last years alone with Friday.

  ‘One day I asked Cruso whether there were laws on his island, and what such laws might be; or whether he preferred to follow his inner dictates, trusting his heart to guide him on the path of righteousness.

  ‘ “Laws are made for one purpose only,” he told me: “to hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are moderate we have no need of laws.”

  ‘ “I have a desire to be saved which I must call immoderate,” I said. “It burns in me night and day, I can think of nothing else.”

  ‘ “I do not wish to hear of your desire,” said Cruso. “It concerns other things, it does not concern the island, it is not a matter of the island. On the island there is no law except the law that we shall work for our bread, which is a commandment.” And with that he strode away.

  ‘This answer did not satisfy me. If I was but a third mouth to feed, doing no useful labour on the terraces, what held Cruso back from binding me hand and foot and tossing me from the cliffs into the sea? What had held Friday back all these years from beating in his master’s head with a stone while he slept, so bringing slavehood to an end and inaugurating a reign of idleness? And what held Cruso back from tying Friday to a post every night, like a dog, to sleep the more secure, or from blinding him, as they blind asses in Brazil? It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace one with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.

  ‘ “How do you punish Friday, when you punish him?” I asked on another occasion.

  ‘ “There is no call to punish Friday,” replied Cruso. “Friday has lived with me for many years. He has known no other master. He follows me in all things.”

  ‘ “Yet Friday has lost his tongue,” said I, the words uttering themselves.

  ‘ “Friday lost his tongue before he became mine,” said Cruso, and stared at me in challenge. I was silent. But I thought: We are all punished, every day. This island is our punishment, this island and one another’s company, to the death.

  ‘My judgment on Cruso was not always so harsh. One evening, seeing him as he stood on the Bluff with the sun behind him all red and purple, staring out to sea, his staff in his hand and his great conical hat on his head, I thought: He is a truly kingly figure; he is the true king of his island. I thought back to the vale of melancholy through which I had passed, when I had dragged about listlessly, weeping over my misfortune. If I had then known misery, how much deeper must the misery of Cruso not have been in his early days? Might he not justly be deemed a hero who had braved the wilderness and slain the monster of solitude and returned fortified by his victory?

  ‘I used once to think, when I saw Cruso in this evening posture, that, like me, he was searching the horizon for a sail. But I was mistaken. His visits to the Bluff belonged to a practice of losing himself in the contemplation of the wastes of water and sky. Friday never interrupted him during these retreats; when once I innocently approached him, I was rebuffed with angry words, and for days afterwards he and I did not speak. To me, sea and sky remained sea and sky, vacant and tedious. I had not the temperament to love such emptiness.

  ‘I must tell you of the death of Cruso, and of our rescue.

  ‘One morning, a year and more after I became an islander, Friday brought his master home from the terraces weak and fainting. I saw at once the fever had returned. With some foreboding I undressed him and put him to bed and prepared to devote myself to his care, wishing I knew more of cupping and bloodletting.

  ‘This time there was no raving or shouting or struggling. Cruso lay pale as a ghost, a cold sweat standing out on his body, his eyes wide open, his lips sometimes moving, though I could make out no word. I thought: He is a dying man, I cannot save him.

  ‘The very next day, as if the spell of Cruso’s gaze on the waters had been broken, a merchantman named the John H obart, making for Bristol wi
th a cargo of cotton and indigo, cast anchor off the island and sent a party ashore. Of this I knew nothing till Friday suddenly came scampering into the hut and snatched up his fishing-spears and dashed off towards the crags where the apes were. Then I came out and saw the ship below, and the sailors in the rigging, and the oars of the rowboat dipping in the waves, and I gave a great cry of joy and fell to my knees.

  ‘Of the arrival of strangers in his kingdom Cruso had his first intimation when three seamen lifted him from his bed into a litter and proceeded to bear him down the path to the shore; and even then he likely thought it all a dream. But when he was hoisted aboard the H obart, and smelled the tar, and heard the creak of timbers, he came to himself and fought so hard to be free that it took strong men to master him and convey him below.

  ‘ “There is another person on the island,” I told the ship’s-master. “He is a Negro slave, his name is Friday, and he is fled among the crags above the north shore. Nothing you can say will persuade him to yield himself up, for he has no understanding of words or power of speech. It will cost great effort to take him. Nevertheless, I beseech you to send your men ashore again; inasmuch as Friday is a slave and a child, it is our duty to care for him in all things, and not abandon him to a solitude worse than death.”

  ‘My plea for Friday was heeded. A new party was sent ashore under the command of the third mate, with orders by no means to harm Friday, since he was a poor simpleton, but to effect what was needed to bring him aboard. I offered to accompany the party, but Captain Smith would not allow this.

  ‘So I sat with the captain in his cabin and ate a plate of salt pork and biscuit, very good after a year of fish, and drank a glass of Madeira, and told him my story, as I have told it to you, which he heard with great attention. “It is a story you should set down in writing and offer to the booksellers,” he urged – “There has never before, to my knowledge, been a female castaway of our nation. It will cause a great stir.” I shook my head sadly. “As I relate it to you, my story passes the time well enough,” I replied; “but what little I know of book-writing tells me its charm will quite vanish when it is set down baldly in print. A liveliness is lost in the writing down which must be supplied by art, and I have no art.” “As to art I cannot pronounce, being only a sailor,” said Captain Smith; “but you may depend on it, the booksellers will hire a man to set your story to rights, and put in a dash of colour too, here and there.” “I will not have any lies told,” said I. The captain smiled. “There I cannot vouch for them,” he said: “their trade is in books, not in truth.” “I would rather be the author of my own story than have lies told about me,” I persisted – “If I cannot come forward, as author, and swear to the truth of my tale, what will be the worth of it? I might as well have dreamed it in a snug bed in Chichester.”