Mr. Fortune by Sylvia Townsend Warner Read Free Book Online Page B

troublesome; friendly natives and the most romantic lotus—these, and the prospect of always these, would have mocked them into a melancholy frenzy.
    But Mr. Fortune happened to be peculiarly well fitted to live on the island of Fanua. Till now there had been no leisure in his life, there had only been holidays; and without being aware of it, in body and soul he was all clenched up with fatigue, so that it was an intuitive ecstasy to relax. He could not have put a name to the strange new pleasure which was come into his existence. He supposed it was something in the air.
    As it was with leisure, so it was with luxuriance. Most Englishmen who visit the South Sea Islands are in the depths of their hearts a little shocked at the vegetation. Such fecundity, such a largesse and explosion of life—trees waving with ferns, dripping with creepers, and as it were flaunting their vicious and exquisite parasites; fruits like an emperor’s baubles, flowers triumphantly gaudy or tricked out with the most sophisticated improbabilities of form and patterning: all this profusion unbridled and untoiled for and running to waste disturbs them. They look on it as on some conflagration, and feel that they ought to turn the hose on it. Mr. Fortune was untroubled by any such thoughts, because he was humble. The reckless expenditure of God’s glory did not strike him as reckless, and his admiration of the bonfire was never overcast by a feeling that he ought to do something about it. Indeed, the man who ten years ago had been putting down in Mr. Beaumont’s pass-book: Orchid Growers, Ltd., £72, 15s. od., had presently ceased to pay any special attention to the vegetables of Fanua, and was walking about among them as though they were the most natural thing in the world; which, if one comes to reflect on it, in that part of the world they were.
    But though he came to disregard the island vegetation he never ceased to be attentive to the heavens. To have time to watch a cloud was perhaps the thing he was most grateful for among all his leisurely joys. About a mile or so from the hut was a small grassy promontory, and here he would lie for hours on end, observing the skies. Sometimes he chose out one particular cloud and followed it through all its changes, watching how almost imperceptibly it amassed and reared up its great rounded cauliflower curves, and how when it seemed most proud and sculptural it began to dissolve and pour itself into new moulds, changing and changing, so that he scarcely had time to grasp one transformation before another followed it. On some days the clouds scarcely moved at all, but remained poised like vast swans floating asleep with their heads tucked under their wings. They rested on the air, and when they brightened, or changed their white plumage to the shadowy pallor of swans at dusk, it was because of the sun’s slow movement, not their own. But those days came seldom, for as a rule the sea wind blew, buoying them onward.
    Lying on his stomach Mr. Fortune would watch a cloud come up from the horizon, and as it approached he would feel almost afraid at the silent oncoming of this enormous and towering being, an advance silent as the advance of its vast shadow on the sea. The shadow touched him, it had set foot on the island. And turning on his back he looked up into the cloud, and glancing inland saw how the shadow was already climbing the mountain side.
    Though they were silent he imagined then a voice, an enormous soft murmur, sinking and swelling as they tumbled and dissolved and amassed. And when he went home he noted in his diary the direction of the wind and any peculiarities of weather that he had noticed. At these times he often wished, and deeply, that he had a barometer: but he had never been able to afford himself one, and naturally the people of the Mission had thought of a teapot.
    On the first really wet day however, he rushed out with joy and contrived a rain-gauge. And having