A High Wind in Jamaica quotes

and then gave it up and mooned away back to bed. Not long after this, I believe, they were both starved altogether to death. Or, if that were hardly possible in so prolific a country, perhaps given ground glass—rumour varied. At any rate, they died.

That is the sort of scene which makes a deep impression on the mind; far deeper than the ordinary, less romantic, everyday thing which shows the real state of an island in the statistical sense.

Of course, even in the transition period one only found melodrama like this in rare patches. More truly typical was Ferndale, for instance, an estate about fifteen miles away from Derby Hill. Only the overseer’s house here remained:

With that certainty, her soused excitement began to revive. For there was nothing, no adventure from the hands of God or Man, to equal it.

Realise that if she had suddenly found she could fly it would not have seemed more miraculous to her.

Heaven had played its last, most terrible card; and small Emily had survived, where even grown men (such as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram) had succumbed.

The children were bilious for a few days, and inclined to dislike each other: but they accepted the change in their lives practically without noticing it.

It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realise what is a catastrophe and what is not.

Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives. If Emily had known this was a Hurricane, she would doubtless have been far more impressed, for the word was full of romantic terrors. But it never entered her head:

She was full of theories about their upbringing which she had not time to put into effect; but nevertheless she thought she had a deep understanding of their temperaments and was the centre of their passionate devotion.

Actually, she was congenitally incapable of telling one end of a child from the other.

She was a dumpy little woman—Cornish, I believe. When she was herself a baby she was so small they carried her about on a cushion for fear a clumsy human arm might damage her. She could read when she was two and a half.

her mistresses spoke of her Deportment as something rarely seen outside the older Royal Houses: in spite of a figure like a bolster, she could step into a coach like an angel getting onto a cloud. She was very quick-tempered.

Mr. Bas-Thornton also had every accomplishment, except two: that of primogeniture, and that of making a living.

Either would have provided for them.

Meanwhile the children, accepting the new life as a matter of course, were thoroughly enjoying it.

Most children, on a railway journey, prefer to change at as many stations as possible.

The rebuilding of Ferndale, too, was a matter of absorbing interest. For there is one advantage to these matchbox houses—easy gone, easy come: and once begun, the work proceeded apace. Mr.

“But think what an adventure it will be,” said Mrs. Thornton bravely: “much more than if I come too!—You’ll have to look after the Liddlies just as if you were a real grownup!”

“But I don’t want any more adventures!” sobbed Emily: “I’ve got an Earthquake!”

Passions were running far too high for anyone to be aware how the final separation took place. The next thing Mrs.

They found Captain Marpole even now only half awake: and the stranger stood for a moment in silence, nervously twiddling his cap in his hands. When he spoke at last, it was with a soft German accent:

“Excuse me,” he began, “but would you have the goodness to lend me a few stores?”

Captain Marpole stared in astonishment, first at him and then at the much be-painted faces of the “ladies” pressed against his cabin skylight.

They were not really much frightened; except Margaret, who did seem to be taking it all to heart rather.

Being shot at is so unlike what one expects it to be that one can hardly connect the two ideas enough to have the appropriate emotions, the first few times.

It is not half so startling as someone jumping out on you with a “Boo!” in the dark, for instance. The boys were crying a little: the girls were hot and cross and hungry.

Yet, as if by some mute flash of understanding, no one commented on his absence. No one questioned Margaret, and she offered no information.

Neither then nor thereafter was his name ever mentioned by anybody: and if you had known the children intimately you would never have guessed from them that he had ever existed.

The children’s only enemy on board the schooner (which presently put to sea again, with them still on board) was the big white pig. (There was a little black fellow, too.)

When Destiny knocks the first nail in the coffin of a tyrant, it is seldom long before she knocks the last.

It was the very next morning that the schooner, in the lightest of airs, was sidling gently to leeward.

They gazed at him in astonishment and disillusion.

There is a period in the relations of children with any new grownup in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and the first reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of Eden.

Once a reproof has been administered, this can never be recovered again.

and tiring of it was walking rather aimlessly aft, thinking vaguely about some bees and a fairy queen, when it suddenly flashed into her mind that she was she.

She stopped dead, and began looking over all of her person which came within the range of eyes.

She could not see much, except a foreshortened view of the front of her frock, and her hands when she lifted them for inspection: but it was enough for her to form a rough idea of the little body she suddenly realised to be hers.

Once she had declared herself there would be no turning back; it was much better to keep her godhead up her sleeve for the present.

Grownups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving, and generally fail. But not so children.

A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection.

Grownups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving, and generally fail. But not so children.

A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection.

Parents, finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realise that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances are nil.

Far above, everything is bounded by the surface of the air, like a bright window of glass. Contact with a small baby can conjure at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain.

Of course it is not really so cut-and-dried as all this; but often the only way of attempting to express the truth is to build it up, like a card-house, of a pack of lies.

It was only in Laura’s inner mind, however, that these elaborate vestiges of babyhood remained: outwardly she appeared fully a child—a rather reserved, odd, and indeed rather captivating one. Her face was not pretty, with its heavy eyebrows and reduced chin:

When a particularly heavy lot of children sat down on him at once, he uttered the faintest ghost of a little moan, as affecting as the wind in a very distant chimney, as if the air in him was being squeezed out through a pinhole.

One cannot wish for a more comfortable seat than an acquiescent pig.

“If I was the Queen,” said Emily, “I should most certainly have a pig for a throne.”

“Dis is the first rule,” said the captain:

“Never throw anything to windward except hot water or ashes.”

Edward’s face developed exactly the look of bewilderment that was intended.

But Emily was terrified of him.

There is something much more frightening about a man who is tied up than a man who is not tied up⁠—I suppose it is the fear he may get loose.

The feeling of not being able to get out of the bunk and escape added the true nightmare panic.

but once these passed, no practical harm had been done. But once she was up and about? Suppose it was at some crisis, some call to action, that her Time came on her? What appalling blunder could she fail to make?

Oh why must she grow up? Why, for pity’s sake?

Quite apart from these attacks of blind, secret panic, she had other times of an ordinary, very rational anxiety. She was ten and a half now. What sort of future lay before her, what career?

It was very little use telling her to shut up: she only remembered for such a short time. In a minute she was whispering, in two she was talking, in five her voice was in full blast.

Jonsen was himself a man who seldom spoke to anyone.

His companionship with Otto, though devoted, was a singularly silent one. But when he did speak, he hated not to be able to make himself heard at all: even when, as was usual, it was himself he was talking to.

But instead of looking at her, he let his eye wander round the cabin. It seemed changed somehow—emasculated: a little girl’s bedroom, not a man’s cabin. The actual physical changes were tiny: but to a meticulous man they glared.

The whole place smelt of children.

Unable to contain himself, he crammed on his cap and burst up the stairs.

A light of comprehension dawned suddenly in Jonsen’s worried face.

“We could sew them up in little bags,” he said with a genial smile, “and put them over the side.”

Otto gave him one quick glance; what he saw was enough to relieve him.

There, soothing and talking to her without ceasing, she undressed her, and washed her with warm water, and put her to bed.

Emily’s head felt different to any way it had ever felt before: hardly as if it were her own.

It sang, and went round like a wheel, without so much as with your leave or by your leave.

So this was an alligator! She was actually going to sleep with an alligator! She had thought that to anyone who had once been in an earthquake nothing really exciting could happen again: but then, she had not thought of this.

There was once a girl called Emily, who slept with an alligator.⁠ ⁠…

In search of greater warmth, the creature high-stepped warily up the bed towards her face. About six inches away it paused, and they looked each other in the eye, those two children.

then turned and wormed his way into the neck of her nightgown, and crawled down inside, cool and rough against her skin, till he found a place to rest. It is surprising that she could stand it as she did, without flinching.

Alligators are utterly untamable.

From the deck of the schooner, Jonsen and Otto watched the children climb onto the steamer: watched their boat return, and the steamer get under way.

Jonsen could feel the difference at once: and it seemed almost as if the schooner could.

A schooner, after all, is a place for men.

He stretched himself, and took a deep breath, feeling that a cloying, enervating influence was lifted. José was industriously sweeping up some of Rachel’s abandoned babies. He swept them into the lee-scuppers.

Emily jumped as if shot. Call this goddess by her Christian name? She burnt a glowing vermilion at the very thought. The Christian names of all grownups were sacred: something never to be uttered by childish lips: to do so, the most blasphemous disrespect.

For Miss Dawson to tell her to do so was as embarrassing as if she had seen written up in church Please Spit.

Of course, if Miss Dawson told her to call her Lulu, at least she must not call her Miss Dawson any more. But say … the Other Word aloud, her lips refused.

The children listened to all they were told: and according to their ages believed it. Having as yet little sense of contradiction, they blended it quite easily in their minds with their own memories; or sometimes it even cast their memories out.

Who were they, children, to know better what had happened to them than grownups?

Mrs. Thornton was a feeling, but an essentially Christian woman. The death of John was a blow to her from which she would never recover, as indeed the death of all of them had once been.

so that it gradually came about that whenever God was mentioned in her hearing the face she imagined for Him was Captain Jonsen’s.

Once more a phase of their lives was receding into the past, and crystallising into myth.

Emily was too old to say her prayers aloud, so no one could know whether she put in the same phrase as the others about the pirates or not.

“Yes. She was a barque.”

“There was a monkey,” she said judicially.

“And a lot of turtles,” put in Rachel.

“Tell him about the pirates,” prompted Mrs. Thornton. Mr. Mathias frowned at her slightly: “Let her tell it in her own words, please.”

“Oh yes,” said Emily dully, “we were captured by pirates, of course.”

Both Edward and Laura had sat up at the word, stiff as spokes.

The look of irony on Thornton’s face attained an intensity that was almost diabolical.

“I think it is possible,” he said, “even for children to make such a mistake.”

“But this … affection: it is highly improbable.”

Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities.

It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion

: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than to show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.