It was midday. Foe was fresh-shaven and in good spirits.
‘Friday will not learn,’ I said. ‘If there is a portal to his faculties, it is closed, or I cannot find it.
‘Do not be downcast,’ said Foe. ‘If you have planted a seed, that is progress enough, for the time being. Let us persevere: Friday may yet surprise us.’
‘Writing does not grow within us like a cabbage while our thoughts are elsewhere,’ I replied, not a little testily. ‘It is a craft won by long practice, as you should know.’
Foe pursed his lips. ‘Perhaps, he said. ‘But as there are many kinds of men, so there are many kinds of writing. Do not judge your pupil too hastily. He too may yet be visited by the Muse.’
While Foe and I spoke, Friday had settled himself on his mat with the slate. Glancing over his shoulder, I saw he was filling it with a design of, as it seemed, leaves and flowers. But when I came closer I saw the leaves were eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot: row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes.
I reached out to take the slate, to show it to Foe, but Friday held tight to it. ‘Give! Give me the slate, Friday!’ I commanded. Whereupon, instead of obeying me, Friday put three fingers into his mouth and wet them with spittle and rubbed the slate clean.
I drew back in disgust. ‘Mr Foe, I must have my freedom!’ I cried. ‘It is becoming more than I can bear! It is worse than the island! He is like the old man of the river!’
Foe tried to soothe me. ‘The old man of the river, he murmured — ‘I believe I do not know whom you mean.’
‘It is a story, nothing but a story,’ I replied. ‘There was once a fellow who took pity on an old man waiting at the riverside, and offered to carry him across. Having borne him safely through the flood, he knelt to set him down on the other side. But the old man would not leave his shoulders: no, he tightened his knees about his deliverer’s neck and beat him on his flanks and, to be short, turned him into a beast of burden. He took the very food from his mouth, and would have ridden him to his death had he not saved himself by a ruse.’
‘I recognize the story now. It was one of the adventures of Sin bad of Persia.’
‘So be it: I am Sinbad of Persia and Friday is the tyrant riding on my shoulders. I walk with him, I eat with him, he watches me while I sleep. If I cannot be free of him I will stifle!’
‘Sweet Susan, do not fly into a passion. Though you say you are the ass and Friday the rider, you may be sure that if Friday had his tongue back he would claim the contrary. We deplore the barbarism of whoever maimed him, yet have we, his later masters, not reason to be secretly grateful? For as long as he is dumb we can tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish.’
‘Friday’s desires are not dark to me. He desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine. But how is Friday to recover his freedom, who has been a slave all his life? That is the true question. Should I liberate him into a world of wolves and expect to be commended for it? What liberation is it to be packed off to Jamaica, or turned out of doors into the night with a shilling in your hand? Even in his native Africa, dumb and friendless, would he know freedom? There is an urging that we feel, all of us, in our hearts, to be free; yet which of us can say what freedom truly is? When I am rid of Friday, will I then know freedom? Was Cruso free, that was despot of an island all his own? If so, it brought no joy to him that I could discover. As to Friday, how can Friday know what freedom· means when he barely knows his name?’
‘There is not need for us to know what freedom means, Susan. Freedom is a word like any word. It is a puff of air, seven letters on a slate. It is but the name we give to the desire you speak of, the desire to be free. What concerns us is the desire, not the name. Because we cannot say in words what an apple is, it is not forbidden us to eat the apple. It is enough that we know the names of our needs and are able to use these names to satisfy them, as we use coins to buy food when we are hungry. It is no great task to teach Friday such language as will serve his needs. We are not asked to turn Friday into a philosopher.’
‘You speak as Cruso used to speak, Mr Foe, when he taught Friday Fetch and Dig. But as there are not two kinds of man, Englishman and savage, so the urgings of Friday’s heart will not be answered by Fetch or Dig or Apple, or even by Ship and Africa. There will always be a voice in him to whisper doubts, whether in words or nameless sounds or tunes or tones.’
‘If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honour, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain. They are words without a home, wanderers like the planets, and that is an end of it. But you must ask yourself, Susan: as it was a slaver’s stratagem to rob Friday of his tongue, may it not be a slaver’s stratagem to hold him in subjection while we cavil over words in a dispute we know to be endless?’
‘Friday is no more in subjection than my shadow is for following me around. He is not free, but he is not in subjection. He is his own master, in law, and has been since Cruso’s death.’
‘Nevertheless, Friday follows you: you do not follow Friday. The words you have written and hung around his neck say he is set free; but who, looking at Friday, will believe them?’
‘I am no slave-owner, Mr Foe. And before. you think to yourself: Spoken like a true slave-owner!, should you not beware? As long as you close your ears to me, mistrusting every word I say as a word of slavery, poisoned, do you serve me any better than the slavers served Friday when they robbed him of his tongue?’
‘I would not rob you of your tongue for anything, Susan. Leave Friday here for the afternoon. Go for a stroll. Take the air. See the sights. I am sadly enclosed. Be my spy. Come back and report to me how the world does.’
So I went for a stroll, and in the bustle of the streets began to recover my humour. I was wrong, I knew, to blame my state on Friday. If he was not a slave, was he nevertheless not the helpless captive of my desire to have our story told? How did he differ from one of the wild Indians whom explorers bring back with them, in a cargo of parakeets and golden idols and indigo and skins of panthers, to show they have truly been to the Americas? And might not Foe be a kind of captive too? I had thought him dilatory. But might the truth not be instead that he had laboured all these months to move a rock so heavy no man alive could budge it; that the pages I saw issuing from his pen were not idle tales of courtesans and grenadiers, as I supposed, but the same story over and over, in version after version, stillborn every time: the story of the island, as lifeless from his hand as from mine?
‘Mr Foe,’ I said, ‘I have come to a resolution.’
But the man seated at the table was not Foe. It was Friday, with Foe’s robes on his back and Foe’s wig, filthy as a bird’s nest, on his head. In his hand, poised over Foe’s papers, he held a quill with a drop of black ink glistening at its tip. I gave a cry and sprang forward to snatch it away. But at that moment Foe spoke from the bed where he lay. ‘Let him be, Susan,’ he said in a tired voice: ‘he is accustoming himself to his tools, it is part of learning to write.’
‘He will foul your papers,’ I cried.
‘My papers are foul enough, he can make them no worse,’ he replied — ‘Come and sit with me.’