Desert Islands

NOT the metaphorical desert island of doubt or despair, but the genuine Robinson Crusoe kind, with cave, and solitary footprint, and beetling crag where we watch for the sail so long delayed.

It is between dark and daylight that these isles uncharted, afloat on amethystine seas, drift into one’s mental vision : remote, palm-crowned, girt about with silent coves and golden beaches, and nightly silvered by the gleaming Southern Cross.

And here, upon these lonely shores are we pleased to pine.

To set up his private desert island one need by no means be a misanthrope, nor is solitude an indispensable feature. One may choose from one’s circle of friends whom one will as companion in adventure, or, like the Swiss Family Robinson, be wrecked sociably en famille and with all the comforts of home. Still, to taste the real elusive flavor of desert-island residence, a short period of one’s own unrelieved society is highly to be commended.

The first and all-absorbing interest is, of course, to hurry down to the stormbeaten strand to see what wreckage, besides one’s dripping self, the waves have washed ashore. In my case, it is invariably one and the same article, — a mammoth box, four by six, of writing paper.

I have been cast away in a dozen varying fashions : sometimes alone ; sometimes with a bosom friend; sometimes with a beautiful, dark-eyed boy of lofty lineage, whom I tenderly rear and instruct in all I remember of my past schooling ; but always the foremost treasure I pull, panting, from the hungry surges is my precious trove of paper. Then I draw breath, and nonchalantly set about collecting the carpenter’s chests, sailcloth, hard-tack, firearms, cases of strong waters, and other accessories of life on a desert island. At times, on a foaming crest, a smaller box of lead pencils, or penholders and inkstands, rides to my feet; but oftener I am forced to concoct my own writing fluid from the juice of a superb purple berry indigenous to these parts, and my quill is dropped from the snowy pinion of a gull.

It was not for many years that I dared confide to any one my Ulysses-like wanderings, but one day I half sheepishly opened the subject to a friend, and he, to my infinite relief, unhesitatingly confessed to a desert island of his own. His, it appeared, was picked up and laid down with his after-dinner pipe, and was inhabited only so long as he sat toasting his feet before the open fire.

Thus, being himself to the manner born, he listened with respectful and intelligently appreciative interest to my detailed accounts of how I barricaded my cave, roasted my shellfish, and manufactured a comb out of a paper of pins. He strongly objected, however, to my four-by-six case of writing paper.

“ If you are scribbling all the time, what is — is the other person to do ? ”

“ At present there is n’t any other person. I am engaged on a three-volume novel, and I need all the time I can get.”

“ Oh, I was merely wondering how it would be in case you ever happened to be cast away on my desert island.”

Then he told me, with great earnestness and elaborate detail, all about his island. One singular feature in regard to his wreckage was, that it drifted ashore, so to speak, alphabetically. That is, one was allowed to find on a given day only such articles as began with a certain letter: on one day, adzes, albums, arrack ; on another day, bolsters, biscuit, beer, or bricabrac. In fact, of late, he had been narrowed down rigidly to one letter, which chanced to be e.

“ Why do you do it in that way?” I asked.

“ I don’t know.”

“ But is n’t it very inconvenient ? ”

“ Horribly. The other day I was in the greatest straits for a hairpin.”

“ A hairpin ? What for ? ”

“ Why — for — the person who was wrecked with me. But, you see, I was not allowed to leave e. Finally I was obliged to carve some hairpins out of a block of ebony that was washed ashore.”

I considered for a moment, and suggested that an evasion of that adamantine law might be found by seeking refuge in another tongue. If he could not escape the rule of e, might not his English hairpin float ashore as a French épingle ? He hailed this idea as an inspiration from Heaven.

But to return to my own desert island. After my dress wears out I invariably find, cast up by the waves, bales of that vague “ soft, white, clinging stuff,” so popular in fiction, and construct myself Miranda-like garments in the convenient Greek style, which needs few stitches and no fitting.

If it is with the orphan boy one is cast away, then it becomes absorbingly interesting to see, when deprived of schoolbooks, how much one is able to impart in any given branch of learning. You flatter yourself that you are a tolerably well-educated person, but when, for instance, you set to work to draw maps for the lad, what amazing and distorted Europes, Africas, and Americas emerge! And yet in your head how clearly you see those familiar outlines! In despair you turn to one of the modern languages. You will write a German grammar. Yes, the der, die, das, and the first declension go swimmingly; but how hazy appear those rules about the prepositions that govern the dative, and how suddenly and hopelessly entangled the inseparable verbs have become ! At this juncture you find it advisable to take a stroll down to the shore and discover an Otto or Ollendorff in the cranny of a wave-beaten rock. Or it may occur to you that the boy is the scion of a noble Austrian house, and knows more of the German tongue than do you.

But in regard to all these difficulties I could get scant sympathy from my friend. Once upon his desert island, he casts the strenuous life to the winds, and simply hunts, fishes, cooks, constructs tree huts and dugouts, and makes himself, when he has a companion, coats and trousers of goatskin, or, when alone, luxuriates in a primitive necklace of shells.

“ Yet why,” I asked, returning to the alphabetical scheme, “ do you do it that way ? ”

“ It’s the law of my island. Have n’t you things you would like to alter and can’t ? ”

I thought a moment, and was obliged to admit that I had. I wanted my island to have a cliff toward the east, where I could watch for ships at sunrise ; but in spite of my desires, there stood an impassable jungle on that side, and I could not remove it. In vain I tried to chop it down or bodily transplant it. Something stronger than my own will or imaginative power would have its way.

“ That’s simply the law of your island,” said my friend definitively. “ There’s no use trying to work against the law of your island.”

“ But you did change your alphabetical law,” I suggested.

“ No, it did itself.”

“ It’s lucky it did n’t narrow itself down to z.”

“ E is certainly preferable,” replied my friend. Then he added reflectively, “ E happens to be the initial letter of — the person who is usually wrecked with me.”