Five Thousand Miles

A Moral Homily Inspired by All the Current Talk About the Wild Free Life in the South Seas

DJUNA BARNES

THE beach of a tropical island in the South Seas. It is high noon and excessively hot. The leaves of a single unknown plant, wilt like the ears on a hundred hounds. There is no sound of insect or bird or reptile, no call of human voice, only the steady rhythmical lap of the sea.

Then, just as this loneliness and vastness is beginning to be amusing, a tiny speck is seen approaching from the left, a tinier speck approaching from the right. The specks continue for half an hour or so, andpresently become man and maid, facing each other in this torrid noon.

He is very beautiful and rather bare; she is exquisite and no better off. A girdle, of almost reprehensibly sheer fern, encircles her waist. He wears a belt of riveted boar's tusks.

They are at a loss for an appropriate greeting.

SHE: Up la.

HE: Uggle uggle.

SHE: Was willst du?

HE : Rien.

SHE: Good Heaven!

HE: Thank God! (They shake hands.) SHE: You are an American?

HE: And you, if I'm not mistaken, come from Virginia?

SHE (blushing beneath her tan): How did you know?

HE: Your first sentence—Only a lady could have thought of it, a member of an old and honored family-

SHE {shuddering and turning pale beneath her tan): Don't.

HE: Don't what?

SHE: Don't recall civilization to me. I came here, five thousand miles from everything, to forget convention and man-made-law.

HE: That's odd, so did I. I came here, five thousand miles from anything I knew or loved or had acquired a habit for, just for those identical reasons.

SHE: Isn't it wonderful?

HE: Superb. But a little inaccessible. I've been here for five years.

SHE (starting): Five years? Why, so have I. Flow did you get here?

HE: I got shipwrecked.

SHE: SO did I.

HE : This is most strange.

SHE (an ugly light coming into her tender eyes): Was it on the good ship Nothingmore?

HE (amazed): It was.

SHE (covering her face with her hands): Are you—Henry Allover?

HE {the light of recognition making his face radiant): Is it possible that I am speaking to—to Mazie Notataul?

SHE: {placing her open palms resignedly down upon her knees, which arc now stretched out beneath the sun):

Well, it's inevitable, that's all. Here we are.

HE: {awkwardly): Yes, aren't we?

SHE: We might as well make it up.

HE: What?

SHE: Have you forgotten our quarrel?

HE: Oh of course; where were we, in the quarrel?

SHE: YOU had just broken away from your family, you had begun to doubt immortality. Don't you remember that, on the night of the storm on the ship Nothingmore, you asked me to take a turn with you about the deck? And then, suddenly you turned to me and said, in almost a religious voice "I believe in nature. I hate conventionality. I am flying from it."

HE: Did I?

SITE: YOU did. The implication of your simple words almost carried me away. Then you said that love should be like that. That you would have, for your mate, no one who did not believe in Nature. And then you said that any girl you loved must be the kind who thought

nothing of convention, who lived a free untutored life.

HE: Ah, yes, to be sure, I remember—

SHE: Well, I agreed with you, in everything you said.

HE: Really?

SHE : Well, aren't you going to make any deductions?

HE (trying): I deduce that, once here, five thousand miles from civilization, you determined to live your life, freely, beautifully— SHE (temporarily off her guard): Yes, and with no thought of consequences.

HE (impulsively).: Wonderful, gorgeous, courageous woman!

SHE: And you?

HE: Since I have been here, five thousand miles from civilization, I have been trying to forget you. I thought of course that you would marry that captain from West Point.

SHE: And we've been within a stone's throw from each other, here, on this tropical island for five years and never met before.

HE: I seldom come up to this part of the beach.

SHE: I seldom leave it—but we have found each other at last.

HE: Yes, haven't we?

SHE: Well, and now what?

HE: I don't know.

SHE : Do you still love me?

HE : I adore you—

SHE: Well?

HE: That's all. That's a simple feeling, simply stated.

SHE {impatiently): Is idiocy one of the requisites of simplicity?

HE: What do you mean?

SHE: For Heaven's sake, kiss me!

HE {putting an arm about her and kissing her): Are you—are you—mine?

SHE: Entirely. As you wanted me to be, five years ago. Simple, untouched by convention, daring all civilizations, and the savagery we are living in. Five thousand miles from anywhere, willing to face any kind of criticism, —yours, before Heaven. {They are standing now and kiss each other with a passion and fervor that makes the boar's tusks rattle. Suddenly, with, a little scream—the moon having broken roughly through the clouds, she says:) My God, what's that?

HE: What's what?

SHE: That, there—on the sand, it came in with the last wave! It's —a—it's a—(She frees her waist of his arms while her manner changes to one of congealed hauteur.) We are followed. A ship must be nearing the island. People! Your family, or mine! You must leave me—at once. {She draws her ferns about her.) It's no use, Henry Allover, we can't get away from society.

HE {dumbfounded, peering down at an object on the sand): What is it?

SHE {in a stark whisper): An egg-beater!