Read Online Mr. Fortune by Sylvia Townsend Warner - Free Book Online

expressed his private opinion of soprano Delilahs: but he liked the words—
    How charming is domestic ease,
    A thousand ways I’ll strive to please:
    (after that they ceased to be appropriate).
    A thousand, thousand ways he would strive to please until he had converted all the islanders. And planning new holy wiles for the morrow, he re-entered the hut to eat a slight supper, and perhaps to darn a rent or replace a button, and then to write up his diary, to read prayers, and so to end another day.
    Saturdays and Saints’ days were holidays, for himself and Lueli both. Lueli disported himself as he pleased, and Mr. Fortune watched clouds. On Sundays they performed the services appointed by the Church of England.
    There was a week or two when he believed that he was in the way to make another convert. She was a very old woman, extremely ugly, not very agreeable, and rather doting. But she seemed perfectly able to understand about eternal life, and showed great anxiety to lay hold on it. Mr. Fortune visited her daily and tried hard to teach her the love of God, and the Christian belief. But she seemed deaf to all topics save one—and her anxiety to lay hold became as the days went by positively grasping.
    One day the wife of Teioa, a sensible woman whom Mr. Fortune had a great respect for, came in with some food for the invalid and overheard part of their colloquy.
    â€œLive for ever,” she remarked rather scornfully to the missionary as they left the house. “Why, isn’t she old enough already? How much more does she want?” And though Mr. Fortune deplored her blindness, yet in this particular instance he admitted to himself that she had perceived clearly enough, and that his old woman was no sort of genuine convert, only very old and frightened and rapacious. None the less he continued to visit her, and to do what he could to comfort her. And often as he sat by her bedside he thought what a mystery this business of eternal life is, and how strangely, though almost all desire it, they differ in their conception of what it is they desire; some, like Shakespeare (and how many others unknown?) coolly confident of an immortality
    Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men;
    some, like Buddha, hoping for an eternal life in which their own shall be absolved and lost; some, like this old woman, desiring an eternity like an interminable piece of string which she could clutch one end of and reel for ever about herself. “And how do I desire it?” he thought. “I want to feel it on every side, more abundantly. But I want to die first.”
    In the end he grew quite attached to the old creature, and when she died he was sorry. He would have liked, as a mark of respect, to attend her funeral: (he certainly did not feel that he had any claim to conduct it himself). But no one suggested that he should, and he hesitated to suggest it lest he should be offending against some taboo. So he went off by himself for a day in the woods and thought about her, and said a prayer or two. And in the evening he returned to Lueli. One convert at any rate had been granted to him, and perhaps it would be greedy to want more, especially as that one was in every way so exemplary and delightful.
    The two friends—for such they were despite more than sixty degrees of latitude and over thirty years between them (and the latter is a more insuperable barrier than an equator)—lived together in the greatest amity. Lueli had now quite given up running away. He settled down to Mr. Fortune’s ways, and curled himself up amidst the new customs and regulations as peacefully as though he had never known any other manner of existence. Indeed Mr. Fortune was sometimes obliged to pack him off to the village to play with the other boys, thinking that it would harm him never to be with company of his own age.
    Lueli was no anchorite, he enjoyed larking about the island with his friends as much as any boy