(1958) Robinson Read online

  My next plan was to return to the house, avoiding Wells if possible, and find Jimmie. If this could be done before Wells discovered the disappearance of the journal it might be possible for us, supported by the Browning, to take Wells by surprise and place him under arrest.

  It seemed the wisest course to turn and retrace my journey through the tunnel to the beach, since by this route there would be less chance of my being overcome by the mist than if I emerged higher up on the South Arm. I still hesitated to return through the tunnel, for I was quite near to the South Arm door and I felt a suffocating desire for open air. However, I crouched under the shelf where my journal lay concealed, and gathered up my strength for the return journey through the caves. What I hated most in anticipation was the few yards of crawling. After a few minutes I set off, stooping and clutching at the rocky protuberances; and when the tunnel closed in to the dimensions of a tube, I crawled through as quickly as possible. The moment I emerged into the wider walls I had a fit of coughing. My cough echoed around me and, as it seemed, a short distance ahead. My cough subsided a little but the echoes from the interior seemed stronger and more frequent than my cough itself. I held my breath for a few seconds; and hearing a choking cough approach me, I knew it was not an echo. At that moment I saw the light of a flashlamp casting a weak pink glow. I flashed my stronger torch in that direction, and saw Tom Wells stumbling and slithering towards me. I turned to make my escape the way I had come. His voice, spluttered with coughs, followed me: ‘Don’t move or I’ll shoot. Don’t move there.’ The cave coughed and echoed his words: ‘Don’t move there. There, there, there.’ I put out my torch and, crouching low, I pressed sideways against the wall. His flashlamp found me as he approached. He held it in his left hand, while his right hand was poised, as I thought, with the pistol.

  ‘Where’s that book?’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘Your diary.’

  ‘You burnt it. You told me so.’

  My eye was on his right hand. By the dim light of his weak torch I saw that he was holding a knife, not a revolver.

  ‘I took your tip,’ he said. ‘Guns make too much noise.’

  I flashed on my light. He blinked, and while he did so I bashed the flashlamp hard into the pit of his stomach. He cried, slipped and fell backwards.

  I crawled back through the terrible hole, emerging to stumble along towards the air, clutching carelessly at rock ledges, so that my hands and arms were torn. When at last I came out of the cave the mist had fallen. I took refuge in a shallow crater, and lay there for about twenty minutes, not caring that the mist was pouring over me. Presently I pulled myself stiffly out of the crater and made my way to the deserted mill. There I spent the night, for the fog was too thick to permit my finding my way to the house. I spent most of the night listening fitfully for a sound and watching the dense air fearfully from the broken windows. Eventually I fell asleep on the soaking floor.

  It must have been about six in the morning when I heard a sound. The mist was unfurling and the sun had risen. Light footsteps came round from the back of the house. I was getting ready to run for it when Miguel appeared.

  He said, ‘Mr. Tom has got a bad cold. He got lost in the mist. He fell and hurt his head.’

  ‘Is he in the house?’

  ‘Yes. He came home this morning early. He fell and hurt himself.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to look for you. Jimmie has been to the Furnace to look for you.’

  ‘Is Jimmie at home now?’

  ‘Yes. He’s looking after Mr. Tom. Mr. Tom is sitting out in the sun with his feet up.’

  ‘You are sure Jimmie is in the house?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Miguel in the accents of his idol.

  ‘All right, I’ll come with you.’

  He made to set off in the direction of the tunnel.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’d rather not go home that way.’

  ‘It’s quicker,’ said Miguel.

  ‘This way’s nice,’ I said.

  ‘I like that way,’ said Miguel.

  ‘You go that way,’ I said, ‘and I’ll go this.’

  But he decided to accompany me, and on the way he chatted about how Mr. Tom’s ribs were better, because last night he had taken a walk. ‘And I showed him,’ said Miguel, ‘the secret tunnel at the beach, and he went in all by himself. But afterwards he got lost in the mist.’

  Jimmie was in the kitchen, mixing rum with hot water and sugar.

  ‘Ah,’ said Jimmie, ‘I lose my nerves that you have been lost. Where have you lodged?’

  I said, ‘At the mill.’

  ‘You lose your way?’ said Jimmie. ‘We are in great desolation that you are endangered last night from the mist.’

  ‘Wells came after me with a knife,‘ I said.

  ‘Is not so!’ said Jimmie.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘I believe he would have killed me if I hadn’t pushed him over and got away.’

  I sat down and started to cry.

  Jimmie said, ‘Is to go too far. I am a man of patience but is to go too far. I attend to this Wells for you.’

  He tasted the rum posset and seemed to approve of it. Then he carried it out to the patio where Tom Wells was sitting in the sun, nursing himself among a lot of garments. I stood by the door and watched him take the drink over to Wells. He threw the drink in Wells’ face. Then he took from his pocket the baby Browning and pointed it at Wells’ head.

  ‘Jimmie!‘ I shouted. ‘Don’t shoot at his head!’

  He pressed the trigger. Nothing happened, not even a click. He pressed the trigger again and again, looking angrily at the gun, giving no attention to its aim.

  Wells so far overcame his surprise as to throw off the coats in which he was swaddled. The rum was still running down his face when he saw that Jimmie’s pistol was not working. He swiped at Jimmie and got him above the eye. Jimmie threw down the pistol and hit him back; it was a dreadful thud on the mouth, and blood began to run down Wells’ shirt. I wish I knew the technical terms for fights; for, thinking it over afterwards, this between Wells and Jimmie seemed to me rather professional. Jimmie hit fast, one hand after the other. Wells was slow, but more powerful. I retrieved the automatic from the ground. I think I had the feeling that the violence might set it off. I glanced at it, and saw that the safety catch was still on.

  Wells had been knocked over. He rose, shook his head violently and faced Jimmie again, in readiness. Jimmie was beginning to look glaze-eyed and exhausted when Miguel came running on to the patio with a very strange look. He seemed not to notice the fight, and ran up to the two breathless heaving men.

  ‘Out of the way, boy,’ said Wells.

  But Miguel was already tugging his arm, and Wells seemed glad of the pause.

  ‘What’s the matter, child?’ he said.

  Miguel’s eyes were round and startled.

  ‘Robinson is looking at the memorial,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that you say?’ said Wells.

  ‘What is?’ said Jimmie.

  Miguel pointed towards the mustard field. Even from my place by the door I could see a man’s figure stooping, with his hands on his knees, to read the words on Robinson’s memorial. He straightened up and started walking slowly up to the house. Thinner and more weary than before, he was none the less unmistakably Robinson.

  Chapter XI

  JIMMIE had to take the bottles out of the crates where they were stacked in the storehouse for shipment. All the bottles went back into the cellar. Slowly, and by request, Tom Wells rendered up the key of the armoury, three boxes of cigars, two shirts, a camera, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a pair of ormolu vases, a Bible, and other surprising objects which lay in the packing case he had prepared to take away with him. All that week Robinson went about enquiring after his goods: where was this and that? And he sat in his study like a potentate receiving tribute as his possessions came flowing back to him. Jimmie gave back the will.
I had Robinson’s fat fountain pen. He asked for that, of course.

  He did not appear at all to see why he should explain his disappearance. As soon as I realised that he had gone by his own choice, my fury rose.

  ‘You might have thought of Miguel. It was a mean trick to play on Miguel. It made him ill,’ I said, three or perhaps four times during our last week on the island.

  Robinson would sigh. ‘One can only act according to one’s capacity,’ or ‘Miguel is to go to school in any case. He has to leave me. It will be less difficult now.’

  Once he said, ‘Yours is, of course, the obvious view. Well, my actions are beyond the obvious range. It surely needs only that you should realise this, not that you should understand my actions.’

  I replied, ‘I chucked the antinomian pose when I was twenty. There’s no such thing as a private morality.’

  ‘Not for you. But for me, living on an island — I have a system.’

  On another occasion he said, ‘Normally, my life is regulated, it is a system. It was disrupted by your arrival.’

  ‘Any system,’ I said, ‘which doesn’t allow for the unexpected and the unwelcome is a rotten one.’

  At last he said, ‘Things mount up inside one, and then one has to perpetrate an outrage.’

  Owing to the strangeness of our predicament, the touchiness of our minds, the qualities of the island and perhaps the shock of our plane accident, we did not for a moment suspect what had really happened. The blood was lying about everywhere. Our minds were on the blood.

  Of course the main reason he did these things was that he simply could not stand us. We had intruded on his privacy and he did not like it. He didn’t like us. Perhaps we were fairly insufferable.

  When I think of Robinson now, I think of him as a selfish but well-meaning eccentric, but during our last week on the island I felt violently against him: one, because he went about with a lofty air; two, as a reaction against my romantic conception of him when I had thought him dead; and, three, because I had caught a heavy cold on the night I had spent in the old mill. I thought, noble heretic indeed. But really, after all, it was his island, and he probably, at the start, had saved our lives.

  Tom Wells, with his face and eyes bruised from the fight, took to bed the day Robinson returned, and stayed there all week. Robinson attempted to commission me to look after him. I refused. ‘He might catch my cold.’

  ‘Is humorous,’ Jimmie pointed out.

  Robinson showed little interest when Jimmie and I gave him a graphic account of our ordeals. Our story was illustrated by Jimmie’s black eye and my hands which had been cut and scratched in the tunnel.

  Robinson said, ‘It was only to be expected.’ Once he said to me, ‘Wells is complaining of stomach trouble through living on tinned food. That’s your fault for depriving him of wildfowl and rabbit. You ought not to have locked up the guns.’

  I said, ‘We caught some fish.’

  He said, ‘That’s insufficient diet for a man like Wells.’

  ‘He would never have stirred himself to go shooting game.’

  ‘Jimmie might have done so.’

  ‘Jimmie knows nothing about guns.’

  Then I noticed that Robinson was laughing silently to himself.

  ‘Tom Wells nearly killed me,’ I said.

  ‘That would not have been serious for you,‘ he said. ‘You’ve got to die some time.’

  I felt there was a flaw in this argument, but because of my cold in the head I simply could not think how to refute it with dignity on the spot. Instead, I took another line: ‘It would have been serious for Wells.’

  ‘Yes, it would have been serious for Wells,’ he said. ‘And for me too,’ I said then, ‘for I’m not ready to die yet.’

  Robinson would not be drawn into telling where he had concealed himself. When Jimmie told him of our long search, he assumed the air of a triumphant schoolmistress.

  Bit by bit we got the story out of Miguel, whose manner with Robinson was now rather restrained, and to whom Robinson, in the hope of regaining his confidence, had given an account of his late whereabouts.

  A few weeks before his disappearance he had planned to leave us; he began to lay up stores for himself in the old smugglers’ store-house, of which he had told us, the cave called The Market. The last of these stores were conveyed from the house at the time when, some of our food having gone bad, he and Jimmie had made up packages for the Furnace. He managed to bamboozle Jimmie, which did not surprise me, and got some good stores away without suspicion.

  The Market, lying among the sheer cliffs on the west coast of the South Arm, was quite inaccessible from the island.

  ‘Have you ever seen The Market?’ I asked Miguel.

  ‘No, naturally.’

  ‘How did Robinson get there with all his stores?’

  ‘He took the little boat.’

  A few days before Robinson’s disappearance he had been mending this boat with the aid of Jimmie.

  ‘Did Robinson often go to The Market in the boat? ‘

  ‘No, naturally. It’s dangerous among the rocks, with a little boat.’

  ‘I think I want my head examined,’ Jimmie said, ‘as I have assisted Robinson to mend this boat.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘why didn’t we think of the boat?’

  ‘We were taking thought for the blood,’ Jimmie said.

  It was the blood which gave me to think of the well of darkness in Robinson’s character. Of course, it was amusing in a sense, his having led the goat to the mountain, fired the shot for all to hear, without shooting the goat. He cut its throat a few days later in the mustard field, during the night of the second of July, had soaked in its blood everything he could lay hands on, and, dragging the carcass to the Furnace, had scattered the bloody evidence all along the path. I pictured how he had plastered goat’s blood over our clothes, carefully omitting those of Tom Wells and Miguel. I could not deny the comic element, at the same time as I could not help thinking, there is something vicious in him. What urged him to make such a display of blood? Why? What bloody delight was satisfied?

  Once, in my presence, Ian Brodie telephoned to Curly Lonsdale to tell him, confidentially, that Julia had cancer of the womb. I knew that Julia had been rather unwell, but this was the first I had heard of cancer. I gasped, and looked at Agnes. She was sitting fatly in the chair, giggling quietly to herself. Agnes always abetted her husband in his practical jokes, as unconscious of her motives in this as she was in her habit of giving Ian for birthdays and Christmas photographic books of ‘art studies‘ — that is, representations of nude girls, and making no secret of it, for wasn’t it art?

  ‘Nothing much,‘ Ian Brodie said into the telephone, ‘to worry about, only cancer of the womb.’

  I thought, ‘What’s Julia to him? What cancer of the soul is venting itself?’

  All through that week Jimmie continued to press garrulously upon Robinson the details of what had occurred during his absence. Robinson would usually reply, ‘It was only to be expected.’ I found this phrase unendurable with its implication that he had foreseen all the consequences of his action to the last detail, and that he more or less held the wires that made us move.

  Towards the end of the week I said to Robinson, ‘I believe Tom Wells is a professional blackmailer.’

  ‘You are full of suspicions,’ he said.

  ‘What about his trying to blackmail Jimmie and me?’ I said.

  ‘That does not prove him a professional.’

  ‘I think those documents he missed from his bag were to do with blackmail.’

  ‘In fact,’ said Robinson, ‘they were obscene photographs. I burnt them.’

  ‘He’s a criminal type,’ I said.

  ‘You are full of suspicions. You thought he had murdered me, and you were wrong.’

  ‘Not far wrong. He tried to kill me.’

  ‘It was only to be expected.’

  I turned on him. I said, ‘What do you mean, it was only to be
expected?’

  He sighed, and I could have thrown something at him for it.

  ‘Generally,’ he said, ‘people act in this way. Human nature does not vary much. It was to be expected that a man like Wells would turn a situation to his own interests. It was to be expected that a woman like you would, in the circumstances, withdraw very rapidly from a man like Jimmie.’

  ‘That was the reason!‘ I said.

  He looked troubled. ‘What reason for what?’

  ‘Your reason for arranging this farce — it was to separate Jimmie and me. You need not have bothered, I’m quite capable of judging for myself—’

  ‘I don’t want you to think — I mean, you never know where these things may lead.’

  ‘It would never do,’ I said, ‘to keep a disorderly island.’

  He said, ‘I don’t want you to think that I had nothing else in mind but your relationship with Jimmie when I decided to leave. Motives are seldom simple. I find no call upon me to go into my motives. Of course, you are annoyed. It is only to be expected.’

  I said, ‘I have taught the child the rosary.’

  He said, ‘I didn’t think you would do that.’

  I said, ‘It was only to be expected. I made a very nice rosary for him from the amber beads among the salvage.’

  ‘The salvage is not your property,’ he said helplessly. ‘There was no-one to guard the salvage and so I helped myself. It was only to be—’