Mr. Fortune Read Free

Hegarty because it might lead me into a comic Irishman, and began to write. The opening, up to Lueli’s baptism, is, with scarcely a word’s alteration, as I wrote it down. This must have been in winter, because I remember Duncan Grant coming to dinner on the same day, and we had the gas fire on, and ate some sort of stewed game. The moment he had gone I went on writing.
    My remembrance of the book from the Paddington Public Library was so vivid and substantial that I never felt a need to consult any other books. The lady’s account of the earthquake I could supplement by Bea Howe’s remembrance of the Valparaiso earthquake: this gave me the lamp beginning to swing. The public library lady also gave me the lava in the water flowing towards the south. The idol I had from the missionary’s cottage at Wayford in Somerset which I hired for the summer of 1926. The parrot lived next door to this cottage, and I grew very familiar with its voice in a tree, and noticed how much quieter unconfined parrots sound.
    There had been some breaks between when Duncan came to dine and when I was at Wayford; but after that I wrote steadily, and with increasing anxiety; not because I had any doubt about the story, but because I was so intensely conscious that the shape and balance of the narrative must be exactly right—or the whole thing would fall to smithereens, and I could never pick it up again. I remember saying to Bea that I felt as if I were in advanced pregnancy with a Venice glass child. It was made the more alarming by the way in which things kept on going right—like the business of Mr. Fortune’s watch, for instance. I was really in a very advanced stage of hallucination when I finished the book—writing in manuscript and taking wads of it to be typed at the Westbourne Secretarial College in Queens Road.
    I remember writing the last paragraph—and reading over the conclusion, and then impulsively writing the envoy, and beginning to weep bitterly.
    I took the two copies, one for England and one for USA to Chatto and Windus myself. I was afraid to trust them by post. It was a very foggy day, and I was nearly run over. I left them with a sense that my world was now nicely and neatly over.
    â€”S ylvia T ownsend W arner , D orset , 1978

THOUGH the Reverend Timothy Fortune had spent three years in the island of Fanua he had made but one convert. Some missionaries might have been galled by this state of things, or if too good to be galled, at least flustered; but Mr. Fortune was a humble man of heart and he had the blessing which rests upon humility: an easy-going nature. In appearance he was tall, raw-boned, and rather rummaged-looking; even as a young man he had learnt that to jump in first doesn’t make the ’bus start any sooner; and his favourite psalm was the one which begins: “My soul truly waiteth still upon God.”
    Mr. Fortune was not a scholar, he did not know that the psalms express bygone thoughts and a bygone way of life. In his literal way he believed that the sixty-second psalm applied to him. For many years he had been a clerk in the Hornsey branch of Lloyds Bank, but he had not liked it. Whenever he weighed out the golden sovereigns in the brass scales, which tacked and sidled like a yacht in a light breeze, he remembered uneasily that the children of men are deceitful upon the weights, that they are altogether lighter than vanity itself.
    In the bank, too, he had seen riches increase. But he had not set his heart upon them: and when his godmother, whose pass-book he kept, died and left him one thousand pounds, he went to a training-college, was ordained deacon, and quitted England for St. Fabien, a port on an island of the Raratongan Archipelago in the Pacific.
    St. Fabien was a centre of Christianity. It had four missions: one Catholic, one Protestant, one Wesleyan, and one American. Mr. Fortune belonged to the Protestant mission. He gave great satisfaction to