A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes [49]
How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind, like a Fascist in Rome?
When swimming under water, it is a very sobering thing suddenly to look a large octopus in the face. One never forgets it: one's respect, yet one's feeling of the hopelessness of any real intellectual sympathy. One is soon reduced to mere physical admiration, like any silly painter, of the cow-like tenderness of the eye, of the beautiful and infinitesimal mobility of that large and toothless mouth, which accepts as a matter of course that very water against which you, for your life's sake, must be holding your breath. There he reposes in a fold of rock, apparently weightless in the clear green medium but very large, his long arms, suppler than silk, coiled in repose, or stirring in recognition of your presence. 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: but she had a power of apt movement, the appropriate attitude for every occasion, that was most striking. A child who can show her affection for you, for instance, in the very way she plants her feet on the ground, has a liberal gift of that bodily genius called charm. Actually, this particular one was a rare gesture with her: nine-tenths of her life being spent in her own head, she seldom had time to feel at all strongly either for or against people. The feelings she thus expressed were generally of a more impersonal kind, and would have fascinated an admirer of the ballet: and it was all the more remarkable that she _had_ developed a dog-like devotion to the reserved and coarse-looking captain of the pirates.
No one really contends that children have any insight into character: their likings are mostly imaginative, not intuitive. "What do you think I am?" the exasperated ruffian had asked on a famous occasion. One might well ask what Laura thought he was: and there is no means of knowing.
II
Pigs grow quickly, quicker even than children: and much though the latter altered in the first month on board, the little black porker (whose name by the by was Thunder) altered even more. He soon grew to such a size one could not possibly allow him to lie on one's stomach any more: so, as his friendliness did not diminish, the functions were reversed, and it became a common thing to find one child, or a whole bench of them, sitting on his scaly side. They grew very fond of him indeed (especially Emily), and called him their Dear Love, their Only Dear, their Own True Heart, and other names. But he had only two things he ever said. When his back was being scratched he enunciated an occasional soft and happy grunt; and that same phrase (only in a different tone) had to serve for every other occasion and emotion--except one. 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 pin-hole.
One cannot wish for a more comfortable seat than an acquiescent pig.
"If I was the