‘Or like a mouth,’ said I. ‘Friday sailed all unwitting across a great mouth, or beak as you called it, that stood open to devour him. It is for us to descend into the mouth (since we speak in figures). It is for us to open Friday’s mouth and hear what it holds: silence, perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear.’
‘That too,’ said Foe. ‘I intended something else; but that too. We must make Friday’s silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday.’
‘But who will do it?’ I asked. ‘It is easy enough to lie in bed and say what must be done, but who will dive into the wreck? On the island I told Cruso ·it should be Friday, with a rope about his middle for safety. But if Friday cannot tell us what he sees, is Friday in my story any more than a figuring (or prefiguring) of another diver?’
Foe made no reply.
‘All my efforts to bring Friday to speech, or to bring speech to Friday, have failed,’ I said. ‘He utters himself only in music and dancing, which are to speech as cries and shouts are to words. There are times when I ask myself whether in his earlier life he had the slightest mastery of language, whether he knows what kind of thing language is.’
‘Have you shown him writing?’ said Foe.
‘How can he write if he cannot speak? Letters are the mirror of words. Even when we seem to write in silence, our writing is the manifest of a speech spoken within ourselves or to ourselves.’
‘Nevertheless, Friday has fingers. If he has fingers he can form letters. Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech. Be attentive to yourself as you write and you will mark there are times when the words form themselves on the paper de novo, as the Romans used to say, out of the deepest of inner silences. We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?’
‘Whether writing is able to form itself out of nothing I am not competent to say,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps it will do so for authors; it will not for me. As to Friday, I ask nevertheless: How can he be taught to write if there are no words within him, in his heart, for writing to reflect, but on the contrary only a turmoil of feelings and urges? As to God’s writing, my opinion is: If he writes, he employs a secret writing, which it is not given to us, who are part of that writing, to read.’
‘We cannot read it, I agree, that was part of my meaning, since we are that which he writes. We, or some of us: it is possible that some of us are not written, but merely are; or else (I think principally of Friday) are written by another and darker author. Nevertheless, God’s writing stands as an instance of a writing without speech. Speech is but a means through which the word may be uttered, it is not the word itself. Friday has no speech, but he has fingers, and those fingers shall be his means. Even if he had no fingers, even if the slavers had lopped them all off, he can hold a stick of charcoal between his toes, or between his teeth, like the beggars on the Strand. The waterskater, that is an insect and dumb, traces the name of God on the surfaces of ponds, or so the Arabians say. None is so deprived that he cannot write.’
Finding it as thankless to argue with Foe as it had been with Cruso, I held my tongue, and soon he fell asleep.
Whether the cause was the unfamiliar surroundings or Foe’s body pressed against mine in the narrow bed I do not know; but, weary though I was, I could not sleep. Every hour I heard the watchman rapping on the doors below; I heard, or thought I heard, the patter of mouse-paws on the bare floorboards. Foe began to snore. I endured the noise as long as I could; then I slipped out of bed an~ put on my shift and stood at the window staring over the starlit rooftops, wondering how long it was yet to the dawn. I crossed the room to Friday’s alcove and drew aside the curtain. In the pitch blackness of that space was he asleep, or did he lie awake staring up at me? Again it struck me how lightly he breathed. One would have said he vanished when darkness fell, but for the smell of him, which I had once thought was the smell of woodsmoke, but now knew to be his own smell, drowsy and comfortable. A pang of longing went through me for the island. With a sigh I let the curtain drop and returned to bed. Foe’s body seemed to grow as he slumbered: there was barely a handsbreadth of space left me. Let day come soon, I prayed; and in that instant fell asleep.
When I opened my eyes it was broad daylight and Foe was at his desk, with his back to me, writing. I dressed and crept over to the alcove. Friday lay on his mat swathed in his scarlet robes. ‘Come, Friday,’ I whispered — ‘Mr Foe is at his labours, we must leave him.’
But before we reached the door, Foe recalled us. ‘Have you not forgotten the writing, Susan?’ he said. ‘Have you not forgotten you are to teach Friday his letters?’ He held out a child’s slate and pencil. ‘Come back at noon and let Friday demonstrate what he has learned. Take this for your breakfast.’ And he gave me sixpence, which, though no great payment for a visit from the Muse, I accepted.
So we breakfasted well on new bread and milk, and then found a sunny seat in a churchyard. ‘Do your best to follow, Friday,’ I said-’Nature did not intend me for a teacher, I lack patience.’ On the slate I drew a house with a door and windows and a chimney, and beneath it wrote the letters h-o-u-s. ‘This is the picture,’ I said, pointing to the picture, ‘and this the word.’ I made the sounds of the word house one by one, pointing to the letters as I made them, and then took Friday’s finger and guided it over the letters as I spoke the word; and finally gave the pencil into his hand and guided him to write h-o-u-s beneath the h-o-u-s I had written. Then I wiped the slate clean, so that there was no picture left save the picture in Friday’s mind, and guided his hand in forming the word a third and a fourth time, till the slate was covered in letters. I wiped it clean again. ‘Now do it alone, Friday,’ I said; and Friday wrote the four letters h-o-u-s, or four shapes passably like them: whether they were truly the four letters, and stood truly for the word house, and the picture I had drawn, and the thing itself, only he knew.
I drew a ship in full sail, and made him write ship, and then began to teach him Africa. Africa I represented as a row of palm trees with a lion roaming among them. Was my Africa the Africa whose memory Friday bore within him? I doubted it. Nevertheless, I wrote A-f-r-i-c-a and guided him in forming the letters. So at the least he knew now that all words were not four letters long. Then I taught him m-o-th-e-r (a woman with a babe in arms), and, wiping the slate clean, commenced the task of rehearsing our four words. ‘Ship,’ I said, and motioned him to write. hs-h-s-h-s he wrote, on and on, or perhaps h-f; and would have filled the whole slate had I not removed the pencil from his hand.
Long and hard I stared at him, till he lowered his eyelids and shut his eyes. Was it possible for anyone, however benighted by a lifetime of dumb servitude, to be as stupid as Friday seemed? Could it be that somewhere within him he was laughing at my efforts to bring him nearer to a state of speech? I reached out and took him by the chin and turned . his face toward me. His eyelids opened. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of those black pupils was there a spark of mockery? I could not see it. But if it were there, would it not be an African spark, dark to my English eye? I sighed. ‘Come, Friday,’ I said, ‘let us return to our master and show him how we have fared in our studies.’