‘We therefore have five parts in all: the loss of the daughter; the quest for the daughter in Brazil; abandonment of the quest, and the adventure of the island; assumption of the quest by the daughter; and reunion of the daughter with her mother. It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end. As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode – which is properly the second part of the middle – and by the reversal in which the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by her mother.’
All the joy I had felt in finding my way to Foe fled me. I sat heavy-limbed.
‘The island is not a story in itself,’ said Foe gently, laying a hand on my knee. ‘We can bring it to life only by setting it within a larger story. By itself it is no better than a waterlogged boat drifting day after day in an empty ocean till one day, humbly and without commotion, it sinks. The island lacks light and shade. It is too much the same throughout. It is like a loaf of bread. It will keep us alive, certainly, if we are starved of reading; but who will prefer it when there are tastier confections and pastries to be had?’
‘In the letters you did not read,’ I said, ‘I told you of my conviction that, if the story seems stupid, that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue.’
Foe made no reply, and I went on. ‘The story of Friday’s tongue is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me. That is to say, many stories can be told of Friday’s tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday.
‘Mr Foe,’ I proceeded, speaking with gathering difficulty, ‘when I lived in your house I would sometimes lie awake upstairs listening to the pulse of blood in my ears and to the silence from Friday below, a silence that rose up the stairway like smoke, like a welling of black smoke. Before long I could not breathe, I would feel I was stifling in my bed. My lungs, my heart, my head were full of black smoke. I had to spring up and open the curtains and put my head outside and breathe fresh air and see for myself that there were stars still in the sky.
‘In my letters I have told you the story of Friday’s dancing. But I have not told you the whole story.
‘After Friday discovered your robes and wig and took them as his livery, he would spend entire days spinning and dancing and singing, after his fashion. What I did not tell you was that for his dancing he would wear nothing but the robes and wig. When he stood still he was covered to the ankles; but when he spun, the robes would stand out stiffly about him, so much so that one might have supposed the purpose of his dancing was to show forth the nakedness underneath.
‘Now when Cruso told me that the slavers were in the habit of cutting out the tongues of their prisoners to make them more tractable, I confess I wondered whether he might not be employing a figure, for the sake of delicacy: whether the lost tongue might stand not only for itself but for a more atrocious mutilation; whether by a dumb slave I was to understand a slave unmanned.
‘When I heard the humming that first morning and came to the door and was met with the spectacle of Friday at his dancing with his robes flying about him, I was so confounded that I gaped without shame at what had hitherto been veiled from me. For though I had seen Friday naked before, it had been only from a distance: on our island we had observed the decencies as far as we could, Friday not least of us.
‘I have told you of the abhorrence I felt when Cruso opened Friday’s mouth to show me he had no tongue. What Cruso wanted me to see, what I averted my eyes from seeing, was the thick stub at the back of the mouth, which ever afterwards I pictured to myself wagging and straining under the sway of emotion as Friday tried to utter himself, like a worm cut in half contorting itself in death-throes. From that night on I had continually to fear that evidence of a yet more hideous mutilation might be thrust upon my sight.
‘In the dance nothing was still and yet everything was still. The whirling robe was a scarlet bell settled upon Friday’s shoulders and enclosing him; Friday was the dark pillar at its centre. What had been hidden from me was revealed. I saw; or, I should say, my eyes were open to what was present to them.
‘I saw and believed I had seen, though afterwards I remembered Thomas, who also saw, but could not be brought to believe till he had put his hand in the wound.
‘I do not know how these matters can be written of in a book unless they are covered up again in figures. When I first heard of you I was told you were a very secret man, a clergyman of sorts, who in the course of your work heard the darkest of confessions from the most desperate of penitents. I will not kneel before him like one of his gallows-birds, I vowed, with a mouth full of unspeakable confidences: I will say in plain terms what can be said and leave unsaid what cannot. Yet here I am pouring out my darkest secrets to you! You are like one of those notorious libertines whom women arm themselves against, but against whom they are at last powerless, his very notoriety being the seducer’s shrewdest weapon.’
‘You have not told me all I need to know of Bahia,’ said Foe.
‘I told myself (have I not confessed this before?): He is like the patient spider who sits at the heart of his web waiting for his prey to come to him. And when we struggle in his grasp, and he opens his jaws to devour us, and with our last breath we cry out, he smiles a thin smile and says: “I did not ask you to come visiting, you came of your own will.” ’
A long pause fell between us. ‘Tossed on shores I never thought to visit’ – the words came to me unbidden. What was their meaning? From the street below came the noise of a woman scolding. On and on went her tirade. I smiled – I could not help myself – and Foe smiled too.
‘As for Bahia,’ I resumed, ‘it is by choice that I say so little of it. The story I desire to be known by is the story of the island. You call it an episode, but I call it a story in its own right. It commences with my being cast away there and concludes with the death of Cruso and the return of Friday and myself to England, full of new hope. Within this larger story are inset the stories of how I came to be marooned (told by myself to Cruso) and of Cruso’s shipwreck and early years on the island (told by Cruso to myself), as well as the story of Friday, which is properly not a story but a puzzle or hole in the narrative (I picture it as a buttonhole, carefully cross-stitched around, but empty, waiting for the button). Taken in all, it is a narrative with a beginning and an end, and with pleasing digressions too, lacking only a substantial and varied middle, in the place where Cruso spent too much time tilling the terraces and I too much time tramping the shores. Once you proposed to supply a middle by inventing cannibals and pirates. These I would not accept because they were not the truth. Now you propose to reduce the island to an episode in the history of a woman in search of a lost daughter. This too I reject.
‘You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You will respond: he is neither cannibal nor laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a substantial body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself (is he anything to himself? – how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what I make of him. Therefore the silence of Friday is a helpless silence. He is the child of his silence, a child unborn, a child waiting to be born that cannot be born. Whereas the silence I keep regarding Bahia and other matters is chosen and purposeful: it is my own silence. Bahia, I assert, is a world in itself, and Brazil an even greater world. Bahia and Brazil do not belong within an island story, they cannot be cramped into its confines. For instance: In the streets of Bahia you will see Negro women bearing trays of confections for sale. Let me name some few of th
ese confections. There are pamonhas or Indian corn-cakes; quimados, made of sugar, called in French bon-bons; pão de milho, sponge-cake made with corn, and pão de arroz, made with rice; also rolete de cana or sugar-cane roll. These are the names that come to me; but there are many others, both sweet and savoury, and all to be found on a single confectioner’s tray on the corner of any street. Think how much more there is of the strange and new in this vigorous city, where throngs of people surge through the streets day and night, naked Indians from the forests and ebony Dahomeyans and proud Lusitanians and half-breeds of every hue, where fat merchants are borne in litters by their slaves amid processions of flagellants and whirling dancers and food-vendors and crowds on their way to cock-fights. How can you ever close Bahia between the covers of a book? It is only small and thinly peopled places that can be subjugated and held down in words, such as desert islands and lonely houses. Besides, my daughter is no longer in Bahia but is gone into the interior, into a world so vast and strange I can hardly conceive it, a world of plains and plantations such as the one Cruso left behind, where the ant is emperor and everything is turned on its head.
‘I am not, do you see, one of those thieves or highwaymen of yours who gabble a confession and are then whipped off to Tyburn and eternal silence, leaving you to make of their stories whatever you fancy. It is still in my power to guide and amend. Above all, to withhold. By such means do I still endeavour to be father to my story.’
Foe spoke. ‘There is a story I would have you hear, Susan, from my days as visitor to Newgate. A woman, a convicted thief, as she was about to be led to the cart that would take her to Tyburn, asked for a minister to whom to make her true confession; for the confession she had made before, she said, was false. So the ordinary was summoned. To him she confessed again the thefts for which she had stood accused, and more besides; she confessed numerous impurities and blasphemies; she confessed to abandoning two children and stifling a third in the cot. She confessed a husband in Ireland and a husband transported to the Carolinas and a husband with her in Newgate, all alive. She detailed crimes of her young womanhood and crimes of her childhood, till at last, with the sun high in the heavens and the turnkey pounding at the door, the chaplain stilled her. “It is hard for me to believe, Mrs —,” he said, “that a single lifetime can have sufficed for the commission of all these crimes. Are you truly as great a sinner as you would have me believe?” “If I do not speak the truth, reverend father,” replied the woman (who was Irish, I may say), “then am I not abusing the sacrament, and is that not a sin worse even than those I have confessed, calling for further confession and repentance? And if my repentance is not truly felt (and is it truly felt? – I look into my heart and cannot say, so dark is it there), then is my confession not false, and is that not sin redoubled?” And the woman would have gone on confessing and throwing her confession in doubt all day long, till the carter dozed and the pie-men and the crowds went home, had not the chaplain held up his hands and in a loud voice shriven the woman, over all her protestations that her story was not done, and then hastened away.’
‘Why do you tell me this story?’ I asked. ‘Am I the woman whose time has come to be taken to the gallows, and are you the chaplain?’
‘You are free to give to the story what application you will,’ Foe replied. ‘To me the moral of the story is that there comes a time when we must give reckoning of ourselves to the world, and then forever after be content to hold our peace.’
‘To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force. I mean the executioner and his assistants, both great and small. If I were the Irishwoman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned.’
‘Then I will tell you a second story. A woman (another woman) was condemned to die – I forget the crime. As the fatal day approached she grew more and more despairing, for she could find no one to take charge of her infant daughter, who was with her in the cell. At last one of her gaolers, taking pity on her distress, spoke with his wife, and together they agreed they would adopt the child as their own. When this condemned woman saw her child safe in the arms of her foster-mother, she turned to her captors and said: “Now you may do with me as you wish. For I have escaped your prison; all you have here is the husk of me” (intending, I believe, the husk that the butterfly leaves behind when it is born). This is a story from the old days; we no longer handle mothers so barbarously. Nevertheless, it retains its application, and the application is: There are more ways than one of living eternally.’
‘Mr Foe, I do not have the skill of bringing out parables one after another like roses from a conjurer’s sleeve. There was a time, I grant, when I hoped to be famous, to see heads turn in the street and hear folk whisper, “There goes Susan Barton the castaway.” But that was an idle ambition, long since discarded. Look at me. For two days I have not eaten. My clothes are in tatters, my hair is lank. I look like an old woman, a filthy old gipsy-woman. I sleep in doorways, in churchyards, under bridges. Can you believe this beggar’s life is what I desire? With a bath and new clothes and a letter of introduction from you I could tomorrow find myself a situation as a cook-maid, and a comfortable situation too, in a good house. I could return in every respect to the life of a substantial body, the life you recommend. But such a life is abject. It is the life of a thing. A whore used by men is used as a substantial body. The waves picked me up and cast me ashore on an island, and a year later the same waves brought a ship to rescue me, and of the true story of that year, the story as it should be seen in God’s great scheme of things, I remain as ignorant as a newborn babe. That is why I cannot rest, that is why I follow you to your hiding-place like a bad penny. Would I be here if I did not believe you to be my intended, the one alone intended to tell my true story?
‘Do you know the story of the Muse, Mr Foe? The Muse is a woman, a goddess, who visits poets in the night and begets stories upon them. In the accounts they give afterwards, the poets say that she comes in the hour of their deepest despair and touches them with sacred fire, after which their pens, that have been dry, flow. When I wrote my memoir for you, and saw how like the island it was, under my pen, dull and vacant and without life, I wished that there were such a being as a man-Muse, a youthful god who visited authoresses in the night and made their pens flow. But now I know better. The Muse is both goddess and begetter. I was intended not to be the mother of my story, but to beget it. It is not I who am the intended, but you. But why need I argue my case? When is it ever asked of a man who comes courting that he plead in syllogisms? Why should it be demanded of me?’
Foe made no reply, but crossed the room to the curtained alcove and returned with a jar. ‘These are wafers made with almond-paste after the Italian fashion,’ he said. ‘Alas, they are all I have to offer.’
I took one and tasted it. So light was it that it melted on my tongue. ‘The food of gods,’ I remarked. Foe smiled and shook his head. I held out a wafer to Friday, who languidly took it from my hand. ‘The boy Jack will be coming shortly,’ said Foe; ‘then I will send him out for our supper.’
A silence fell. I gazed out at the steeples and rooftops. ‘You have found yourself a fine retreat,’ I said – ‘a true eagle’s-nest. I wrote my memoir by candlelight in a windowless room, with the paper on my knee. Is that the reason, do you think, why my story was so dull – that my vision was blocked, that I could not see?’
‘It is not a dull story, though it is too much the same,’ said Foe.
‘It is not dull so long as we remind ourselves it is true. But as an adventure it is very dull indeed. That is why you pressed me to bring in the cannibals, is it not?’ Foe inclined his head judiciously this way and that. ‘In Friday here you have a living cannibal,’ I pursued. ‘Behold. If we are to go by Friday, cannibals are no less dull than Englishmen.’ ‘They lose their vivacity when deprived of human flesh, I am sure,’ replied Foe.
There was a tap at the door and the
boy came in who had guided us to the house. ‘Welcome, Jack!’ called Foe. ‘Mistress Barton, whom you have met, is to dine with us, so will you ask for double portions?’ He took out his purse and gave Jack money. ‘Do not forget Friday,’ I put in. ‘And a portion for Friday the manservant too, by all means,’ said Foe. The boy departed. ‘I found Jack among the waifs and orphans who sleep in the ash-pits at the glassworks. He is ten years old, by his reckoning, but already a notable pick-pocket.’ ‘Do you not try to correct him?’ I inquired. ‘To make him honest would be to condemn him to the workhouse,’ said Foe – ‘Would you see a child in the workhouse for the sake of a few handkerchiefs?’ ‘No; but you are training him for the gallows,’ I replied – ‘Can you not take him in and teach him his letters and send him out as an apprentice?’ ‘If I were to follow that advice, how many apprentices would I not have sleeping on my floor, whom I have saved from the streets?’ said Foe – ‘I should be taken for a thief-master and sent to the gallows myself. Jack has his own life to live, better than any I could devise for him.’ ‘Friday too has a life of his own,’ I said; ‘but I do not therefore turn Friday out on the streets.’ ‘Why do you not?’ said Foe. ‘Because he is helpless,’ said I – ‘Because London is strange to him. Because he would be taken for a runaway, and sold, and transported to Jamaica.’ ‘Might he not rather be taken in by his own kind, and cared for and fed?’ said Foe – ‘There are more Negroes in London than you would believe. Walk along Mile End Road on a summer’s afternoon, or in Paddington, and you will see. Would Friday not be happier among other Negroes? He could play for pennies in a street band. There are many such strolling bands. I would make him a present of my flute.’