Mary of Marion Isle

MARY OF MARION ISLE

months, also with dried fish-heads, whereof she showed him a large pile covered over with stones to protect them from sea-birds. At this season of the year, however, they were grazing about on the moor above the cliff. There was a place on a bare rock where she dried fish to make her winter food, cutting them open and leaving them to cure in the sun. This was close to the cave-mouth and ingeniously protected with bushes to keep the sea-birds from stealing the fish. Also there was a pit in which she laid down penguins’ eggs together with those of gulls, covering them with sea sand mixed with evaporated brine to serve as salt that she gathered from certain spots. These too were for winter food, and the process of collecting the eggs was now going on.

Thus the morning went by and for Andrew it was full of wonder. About midday they rested a while and for the first time tried to talk. With difficulty he made her understand that he did not care for the society of Old man Tom at night.

She nodded her head sagaciously and went through a kind of pantomime, covering her face with a corner of her robe and uttering blood-curdling groans. Suddenly it struck Andrew that she was trying to convey to him that she supposed him to have seen Tom’s ghost, or at least was asking him if this were so. He nodded vaguely in assent, although in fact he had done nothing of the sort, whereon she put her hand to her head and thought for a while. Presently she came to a decision and, pointing first towards his cave and then to the sea, fetched the basket in which she carried fish, together with some of her grass torches, and signed to him to follow her.

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Off she ran to the cave, Andrew being under the impression that she meant to collect earth and buy Old Tom therein. This, however, was not her idea, for when they reached its mouth she indicated that he must light the torches, pointing to his pocket whence she had observed him take matches when he wished to smoke. He did so, she watching the process with delight, and they went into the cave. Arriving at the niche, she pulled away the grass fence and kneeling down solemnly kissed Old Tom’s skull. Then she put it in her basket, also his leg and arm bones. The rest of him, namely, his ribs and backbone which the basket would not hold, she made it clear to Andrew that he must carry in the remnants of the coat.

He obeyed though without enthusiasm, and when she had seen that not one scrap of bone was left behind, they went out of the cave carrying their ghastly burden. She led him for some way to a spot where the sea water had eaten into the cliff face, making a shadowed pool which was very deep and still, since the channel connecting it with the bay was quite narrow. Here she emptied her basket of remains on to the rock and made Andrew put down his bundle. This done, with her strong fingers she twisted the gilt buttons with an anchor on them off the rotten garment and placed them in a sealskin pouch she had, whence a few days later they reappeared on a new fur coat of her own. Then, while Andrew watched amazed, she rearranged Old Tom’s skeleton very nicely upon a flat piece of rock, making sure that every bone was in its place and smiling at her own cleverness. This completed, once more she knelt down and kissed the dead man’s skull, then suddenly threw it into the pool, and after it with great swiftness and ac-

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curacy, all the rest of him, finishing up with the decayed coat which floated a little before it sank.

When it had vanished she remarked, as a child does that has finished its food:

«All done! Say prayer», and plumped down on to her knees. Here, however, Andrew came in. In his pocket was poor Jacks’ Church-service. This he produced and, dimly hoping that it might conciliate Old Tom, who after all, being a sailor, should be glad to rest in the deep, for the second time on that

island he read the Burial Office over a dead man.

Mary watched and listened, enormously impressed, especially when he collected some dust, and threw it on to the water. This action seemed to puzzle her, but it was clear that she quite understood the rest, since she nodded her head at intervals and from time to time murmured, «Our Father, ’liver us from evil. Amen».

When all was finished, first she sighed, then clapped her hands and laughed as though glad to be rid of an unpleasant business, and trotted off back to Andrew’s cave. On her way, however, she took from her store a great double armful of the dried seaweed, making Andrew do likewise. Arriving at the cave she signed to him to relight the torches, and entered. Then she lifted the skins, or what remained of them, upon which Old Tom had lain, putting dried seaweed underneath and above them, and throwing the grass fence on to the top. When everything was arranged to her satisfaction, she fired the pile and led Andrew from the cave.

About an hour later she returned there with a brush made of rushes and her basket, and by their aid collected

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CHAPTER XIX

OLD MAN TOM

Now it may be well to tell Mary’s story, as by degrees Andrew extracted it from her when she began to recover the use of her tongue and her half-forgotten knowledge of the English language.

It began, so far as her great adventure was concerned, fifteen years before, as he was able to fix by the date of a Whitaker’s Almanack which she proudly produced to show that he was not the only person who possessed a book. Also she showed him fifteen notches cut upon a piece of driftwood that she kept in her cave, each of which she made him understand represented a year that she had been on the island. Her years, by the way, she reckoned by the season when her corn began to grow and the gulls laid their eggs. Also from observation and from what Old Tom had taught her, she had some knowledge of the position of the sun at the various periods of the world’s annual journey.

It appeared that she had lived in a large town in England, probably London, for she remembered the streets and the houses. There, when she was about six, she said goodbye to an old lady who cried at parting with her and fastened round her neck the string of pearls which she still wore. After

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this she was driven in a carriage, together with a woman who would seem to have been a servant, to a big ship, doubtless in the London Docks, where a man dressed in uniform, probably Old Tom himself, in fact she was sure it was Old Tom, met her and patted her upon the head.

Of the voyage she remembered very little, except that she saw a shark caught in some hot place which Andrew could not quite identify. Her next recollection was of great shouting and confusion, of being wrapped in blankets and carried by Old Tom, who was called Captain, down a rope ladder into a boat at night time. After this all became vague except for an impression of prolonged misery and cold, till at length as in a dream she had a vision of the boat in which were Old Tom, three sailors and herself, approaching the headlands that were at the entrance of the bay, past which ran the Race. Here there was a quarrel between the men, she thought it must have been about the island on which they should land. The end of it was that Old Tom sprang up and hit one of the men over the head with a piece of wood so that he fell into the sea and vanished. Then the other two became quiet and did what he told them.

They came to the shore and found the caves. In that which was now hers she slept with Old Tom, the two sailors occupying the other. She remembered that at first they had very little to eat, but afterwards, when the spring came, they got plenty of eggs and fish.

Again a quarrel arose because the two men wanted to go across the Race to the other island twelve or fourteen miles away, which Old Tom would not do, whereon they threatened to kill him and take her away with them. The end of it

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was that they stole the boat and went away by themselves. At dawn Old Tom found that it had gone, and hurried with her to a high point, whence in the light of the risen sun they saw the boat rowing out into the Race which rushed fiercely between the islands. Old Tom cried out that they would drown, and presently the boat turned over, and that was the end of it and them.

Then began their life together upon the island. All that had been in the boat was in their cave and left to them. Amongst many useful articles, most of which she still had, such as some knives, tin pannikins, a water-barrel, ropes and the sails, was a bag of oats mixed with barley, beans and peas, some of that which had been used to feed horses that were on the ship. Part of this forage Old Tom sowed. The oats and the beans grew well. The barley and the peas did not flourish. For the rest they caught some kids of the wild goats, for of these there were many on the island, and tamed them, till they too produced young and gave them milk. Also they netted numbers of fish, of which they dried a quantity for winter food, and generally arranged their troglodytic household as Andrew found it in after years.

At first their life was hard, but by degrees, as they grew to understand the peculiarities of the rigorous climate in which they lived, and how to guard against its difficulties and to keep themselves fed and warmed, it came, by comparison, to be quite comfortable. Happily for themselves, when they landed on the island they had some matches, also a tinder-lighter which Old Tom used for his pipe upon the ship. Being a clever and experienced seaman, he understood that during the long,

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sub-Arctic winter, and indeed all the year round, their first necessity would be fire.

At the beginning this was fed with driftwood and bushes. Then he made the lucky discovery that a certain kind of seaweed which lay in endless plenty on the shore, if dried, made an excellent fuel, also one that with proper management it was easy to leave at night, and indeed for a great number of hours, without attention. So of this seaweed he and the child collected tons which, when dry, they piled into stacks and from it fed their fire, or rather fires, for another burnt in the cave. Never was a sacred lamp before a shrine watched with more continuous care than were those fires, especially that within the cave which was out of the reach of wind and could not be extinguished by snow or rain. As a last resource there was the flint and tinder arrangement to fall back upon, should it be needed, and this Mary still cherished hidden in a dry spot beneath the stones, though as yet during all those years, save once, she had never been obliged to put it to use. That was after the death of Old Tom, who for some thirty hours before he breathed his last would not allow her to leave his side.

For about six years, till she was a girl of twelve years of age or so, they lived together. At first they made a habit of climbing the cliff behind them morning and evening to look out for ships; also, as Andrew had done, they rigged up a distress signal with the help of the boat’s mast and a sail that served as a flag, but as in his own case it blew down in a gale and was never replaced. As he had done they grew tired of searching for vessels which never came.

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Nor did they attempt to explore the island, for Old Tom being lame could not walk very far on its rough surface, and refused to allow Mary to make such expeditions alone. Indeed, she had never been more than a mile from the caves on her search for grasses and flowers, or reeds and bushes of which they made their nets, ropes, and baskets, for as it chanced all these grew in plenty within that radius, as did the Kerguelen cabbage and other edible herbs which they domesticated in the garden. They had no gun, and therefore never killed anything except fish, which, with eggs, was their staple food.

For their garments and other purposes, they skinned seals that had been slain in combat with their fellows, especially the young of that species which had perished from one cause or another. Indeed, although at the time she never was sure how they came by their end, a number of these Old Tom used to knock upon the head with a club, saying that he had found them dead. This he confessed to her when he was sick. Thus it came about that before his own decease, he had accumulated a great store of pelts of which she had still many in stock. These skins they tanned by scraping them with sharp stones, after drying them pegged out in the sun, and then rubbing them with the ashes of seaweed and between their hands till they were quite soft. In these arts Mary was an expert, also in sewing them together into rugs with sinews by help of needles made from the ivory of the sea-lion, of which they split the tusks by burying them in hot ashes.

Thus employed the years went by swiftly enough and, for Mary at any rate, very happily indeed. Nor did she grow up altogether savage as might have been expected, since Tom – she

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never knew him by any other name – educated her to the best of his ability. They had one book with them, the Whitaker’s Almanack which has been mentioned, which was either in his pocket or in that of one of the men at the time of the shipwreck, whereof by the way she never learned the cause, or had been lying in the boat. Out of this during the dark winter days or when it stormed, or after sunset by the help of candles and lamps which they fashioned from the fat and oil of seals, with rushes for wicks, she learned to read and acquired incidentally an enormous amount of miscellaneous information about the countries of the world and other matters which are summarized in those valuable pages. Also, with a sharpened stone of the agate kind, he taught her to write upon thin slabs of soft slate-like rock, of which they secured plenty at a certain place. Further, he instructed her as to the movements of the heavenly bodies of which, as a sailorman, he knew a good deal.

Lastly, she possessed a talent of her own, though for the most part this developed after his death; that of modelling in clay taken from the brook. All the wild life about her gave her plenty of subjects from which to study, such as the seals and sea-lions, the birds and the goats. These models, when they were finished, she would bake in the hot ashes taken from the seaweed fire, thus turning them into a kind of terra-cotta. Although, of course, many broke in the ashes, she had great numbers of them set about in her cave which, when he saw them, Andrew found full of life and spirit. Some of them, indeed, were quite remarkable, and showed that she had a natural gift for sculpture.

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