Three Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

saddler
but now has no occupation observes how a woman from the door of her house calls out
to a man rowing in a dory: Robert! Robert! she calls; and how the man then rows ashore,
and from the dory takes up a sack which he lays upon a stone by the riverside, and
rows away again; and how the woman comes down to the riverside and picks up the sack
and bears it home, very sorrowful looking.
    He accosts the man Robert and speaks to him. Robert informs him that the woman is
his wife and the sack holds a week’s supplies for her and their children, meat and
meal and butter; but that he dare not approach nearer, for all of them, wife and
children, have the plague upon them; and that it breaks his heart. And all of this—the
man Robert and wife keeping communion through calls across the water, the sack left
by the waterside—stands for itself certainly, but stands also as a figure of his,
Robinson’s, solitude on his island, where in his hour of darkest despair he called
out across the waves to his loved ones in England to save him, and at other times
swam out to the wreck in search of supplies.
    Further report from that time of woe. Able no longer to bear the pain from the swellings
in the groin and armpit that are the signs of the plague, a man runs out howling,
stark naked, into the street, into Harrow Alley in Whitechapel, where his man the
saddler witnesses him as he leaps and prances and makes a thousand strange gestures,
his wife and children running after him crying out, calling to him to come back.
And this leaping and prancing is allegoric of his own leaping and prancing when,
after the calamity of the shipwreck and after he had scoured the strand for sign
of his shipboard companions and found none, save a pair of shoes that were not mates,
he had understood he was cast up all alone on a savage island, likely to perish and
with no hope of salvation.
    (But of what else does he secretly sing, he wonders to himself, this poor afflicted
man of whom he reads, besides his desolation? What is he calling, across the waters
and across the years, out of his private fire?)
    A year ago he, Robinson, paid two guineas to a sailor for a parrot the sailor had
brought back from, he said, Brazil—a bird not so magnificent as his own well-beloved
creature but splendid nonetheless, with green feathers and a scarlet crest and a
great talker too, if the sailor was to be believed. And indeed the bird would sit
on its perch in his room in the inn, with a little chain on its leg in case it should
try to fly away, and say the words Poor Poll! Poor Poll! over and over till he was
forced to hood it; but could not be taught to say any other word, Poor Robin! for
instance, being perhaps too old for that.
    Poor Poll, gazing out through the narrow window over the mast-tops and, beyond the
mast-tops, over the grey Atlantic swell: What island is this , asks Poor Poll, that
I am cast up on, so cold, so dreary? Where were you, my Saviour, in my hour of great
need?
    A man, being drunk and it being late at night (another of his man’s reports), falls
asleep in a doorway in Cripplegate. The dead-cart comes on its way (we are still
in the year of the plague), and the neighbours, thinking the man dead, place him
on the dead-cart among the corpses. By and by the cart comes to the dead pit at Mountmill
and the carter, his face all muffled against the effluvium, lays hold of him to throw
him in; and he wakes up and struggles in his bewilderment. Where am I? he says. You
are about to be buried among the dead , says the carter. But am I dead then? says
the man. And this too is a figure of him on his island.
    Some London folk continue to go about their business, thinking they are healthy and
will be passed over. But secretly they have the plague in their blood: when the infection
reaches the heart they fall dead upon the spot, so reports his man, as if struck
by lightning. And this is a figure for life itself, the whole of life. Due