A HIGH WIND
IN
JAMAICA
By Richard Hughes
_Short Stories_
A MOMENT OF TIME
_Poems_
CONFESSIO JUVENIS
_Drama_
PLAYS: IN ONE VOL.
_Also available separately_
Chatto & Windus
*
_Mr. Hughes has also edited a
selection of Skelton’s Poems,
published by Wm. Heinemann Ltd._
A HIGH WIND
IN JAMAICA
RICHARD HUGHES
1929
CHATTO & WINDUS
LONDON
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. Constable Ltd.
at the University Press, Edinburgh
Third Impression
All rights reserved
Copyright in the U.S.A. by Richard Hughes, 1929,
under the title of ‘The Innocent Voyage.’
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA
_Chapter 1_
One of the fruits of Emancipation in the West Indian islands is
the number of the ruins, either attached to the houses that remain
or within a stone’s throw of them: ruined slaves’ quarters, ruined
sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses; often ruined mansions
that were too expensive to maintain. Earthquake, fire, rain, and
deadlier vegetation, did their work quickly.
One scene is very clear in my mind, in Jamaica. There was a vast
stone-built house called Derby Hill (where the Parkers lived). It had
been the centre of a very prosperous plantation. With Emancipation,
like many others, that went _bung_. The sugar buildings fell down.
Bush smothered the cane and guinea-grass. The field negroes left
their cottages in a body, to be somewhere less disturbed by even the
possibility of work. Then the house negroes’ quarters burned down,
and the three remaining faithful servants occupied the mansion. The
two heiresses of all this, the Miss Parkers, grew old; and were by
education incapable. And the scene is this: coming to Derby Hill on
some business or other, and wading waist-deep in bushes up to the front
door, now lashed permanently open by a rank plant. The jalousies of
the house had been all torn down, and then supplanted as darkeners,
by powerful vines: and out of this crumbling half-vegetable gloom
an old negress peered, wrapped in filthy brocade. The two old Miss
Parkers lived in bed, for the negroes had taken away all their clothes:
they were nearly starved. Drinking water was brought in two cracked
Worcester cups and three coconut shells on a silver salver. Presently
one of the heiresses persuaded her tyrants to lend her an old print
dress, and came and pottered about in the mess half-heartedly: tried to
wipe the old blood and feathers of slaughtered chickens from a gilt and
marble table: tried to talk sensibly: tried to wind an ormolu clock:
and then gave it up and mooned away back to bed. Not long after this,
I believe, they were both starved altogether to death. Or, if that
were hardly possible in so prolific a country, perhaps given ground
glass--rumour varied. At any rate, they died.
That is the sort of scene which makes a deep impression on the mind;
far deeper than the ordinary, less romantic, everyday thing which shows
the real state of an island in the statistical sense. Of course, even
in the transition period one only found melodrama like this in rare
patches. More truly typical was Ferndale, for instance, an estate about
fifteen miles away from Derby Hill. Only the overseer’s house here
remained: the Big House had altogether collapsed and been smothered
over. It consisted of a ground floor of stone, given over to goats and
the children, and a first floor of wood, the inhabited part, reached
from outside by a double flight of wooden steps. When the earthquakes
came the upper part only slid about a little, and could be jacked back
into position with big levers. The roof was of shingles: after very dry
weather it leaked like a sieve, and the first few days of the rainy
season would be spent in a perpetual general-post of beds and other
furniture to escape the drips, until the wood swelled.
The people who lived there at the time I have in mind were the
Bas-Thorntons: not natives of the Island, ‘Creoles,’ but a family from
England. Mr. Bas-Thornton had a business of some kind in St. Anne’s,
and used to ride there every day on a mule. He had such long legs that
his stunted mount made him look rather ridiculous: and being quite
as temperamental as a mule himself, a quarrel between the two was
generally worth watching.
Close to the dwelling were the ruined grinding and boiling houses.
These two are never quite cheek by jowl: the grinding-house is set on
higher ground, with a water-wheel to turn the immense iron vertical
rollers. From these the cane juice runs down a wedge-shaped trough to
the boiling house, where a negro stands and rinses a little lime-wash
into it with a grass brush to make it granulate. Then it is emptied
into big copper vats, over furnaces burning faggots and ‘trash,’ or
squeezed-out cane. There a few negroes stand, skimming the poppling
vats with long-handled copper ladles, while their friends sit round,
eating sugar or chewing trash, in a mist of hot vapour. What they
skim off oozes across the floor with an admixture of a good deal of
filth--insects, even rats, and whatever sticks to negroes’ feet--into
another basin, thence to be distilled into rum.
This, at any rate, is how it used to be done. I know nothing of modern
methods--or if there are any, never having visited the island since
1860, which is a long time ago now.
But long before that year all this was over at Ferndale: the big copper
vats were overturned, and up in the grinding-house the three great
rollers lay about loose. No water reached it: the stream had gone
about its own business elsewhere. The Bas-Thornton children used to
crawl into the cut-well through the vent, among dead leaves and the
wreck of the wheel. There, one day, they found a wild-cat’s nest, with
the mother away. The kittens were tiny, and Emily tried to carry them
home in her pinafore; but they bit and scratched so fiercely, right
through her thin frock, that she was very glad--except for pride--that
they all escaped but one. This one, Tom, grew up: though he was never
really tamed. Later he begat several litters on an old tame cat they
had, Kitty Cranbrook; and the only survivor of this progeny, Tabby,
became rather a famous cat in his way. (But Tom soon took to the jungle
altogether.) Tabby was faithful, and a good swimmer, which he would do
for pleasure, sculling around the bathing-pool behind the children,
giving an occasional yowl of excitement. Also, he had mortal sport with
snakes: would wait for a rattler or a black-snake like a mere mouse:
drop on it from a tree or somewhere, and fight it to death. Once he
got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular
death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate
something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as
ready to eat snakes as ever.
Red-headed John’s room was full of rats: he used to catch them in big
gins, and then let them go for Tabby to despatch. Once the cat was so
impatient he seized trap and all and caterwauled off into the night
banging it on the stones and sending up showers of sparks. Again he
returned in a few days, very sleek and pleased: but John never saw his
trap again. Another plague of his were the bats, which also infested
his room in hundreds. Mr. Bas-Thornton could crack a stockwhip, and
used to kill a bat on the wing with it most neatly. But the din
this made in that little box of a room at midnight was infernal:
earsplitting cracks, and the air already full of the tiny penetrating
squeaks of the vermin.
It was a kind of paradise for English children to come to, whatever it
might be for their parents: especially at that time, when no one lived
in at all a wild way at home. Here one had to be a little ahead of
the times: or decadent, whichever you like to call it. The difference
between boys and girls, for instance, had to be left to look after
itself. Long hair would have made the evening search for grass-ticks
and nits interminable: Emily and Rachel had their hair cut short, and
were allowed to do everything the boys did--to climb trees, swim, and
trap animals and birds: they even had two pockets in their frocks.
It was round the bathing-pool their life centred, more than the
house. Every year, when the rains were over, a dam was built across
the stream, so that all through the dry season there was quite a
large pool to swim in. There were trees all round: enormous fluffed
cotton-trees, with coffee trees between their paws, and log-wood, and
gorgeous red and green peppers: amongst them, the pool was almost
completely shaded. Emily and John set tree-springes in them--Lame-foot
Sam taught them how. Cut a bendy stick, and tie a string to one end.
Then sharpen the other, so that it can impale a fruit as bait. Just at
the base of this point flatten it a little, and bore a hole through the
flat part. Cut a little peg that will just stick in the mouth of this
hole. Then make a loop in the end of the string: bend the stick, as in
stringing a bow, till the loop will thread through the little hole, and
jam it with the peg, along which the loop should lie spread. Bait the
point, and hang it in a tree among the twigs: the bird alights on the
peg to peck the fruit, the peg falls out, the loop whips tight round
its ankles: then away up out of the water like pink predatory monkeys,
and decide by ‘Eena, deena, dina, do,’ or some such rigmarole, whether
to twist its neck or let it go free--thus the excitement and suspense,
both for child and bird, can be prolonged beyond the moment of capture.
It was only natural that Emily should have great ideas of improving
the negroes. They were, of course, Christians, so there was nothing to
be done about their morals: nor were they in need of soup, or knitted
things; but they were sadly ignorant. After a good deal of negotiation
they consented in the end to let her teach Little Jim to read: but
she had no success. Also she had a passion for catching house-lizards
without their dropping their tails off, which they do when frightened:
it needed endless patience to get them whole and unalarmed into a
match-box. Catching green grass-lizards was also very delicate. She
would sit and whistle, like Orpheus, till they came out of their
crannies and showed their emotion by puffing out their pink throats:
then, very gently, she would lasso them with a long blade of grass.
Her room was full of these and other pets, some alive, others probably
dead. She also had tame fairies; and a familiar, or oracle, the White
Mouse with an Elastic Tail, who was always ready to settle any point in
question, and whose rule was a rule of iron--especially over Rachel,
Edward, and Laura, the little ones (or Liddlies, as they came to be
known in the family). To Emily, his interpreter, he allowed, of course,
certain privileges: and with John, who was older than Emily, he quite
wisely did not interfere.
_He_ was omnipresent: the fairies were more localised, living in a
small hole in the hill guarded by two dagger-plants.
The best fun at the bathing-pool was had with a big forked log. John
would sit astride the main stem, and the others pushed him about by the
two prongs. The little ones, of course, only splashed about the shallow
end: but John and Emily dived. John, that is to say, dived properly,
head-foremost: Emily only jumped in feet first, stiff as a rod; but
she, on the other hand, would go off higher boughs than he would. Once,
when she was eight, Mrs. Thornton had thought she was too big to bathe
naked any more. The only bathing-dress she could rig was an old cotton
night-gown. Emily jumped in as usual: first the balloons of air tipped
her upside down, and then the wet cotton wrapped itself round her head
and arms and nearly drowned her. After that, decency was let go hang
again: it is hardly worth being drowned for--at least, it does not at
first sight appear to be.
But once a negro really was drowned in the pool. He had gorged himself
full of stolen mangoes: and feeling guilty, thought he might as well
also cool himself in the forbidden pond, and make one repentance cover
two crimes. He could not swim, and had only a child (Little Jim)
with him. The cold water and the surfeit brought on an apoplexy: Jim
poked at him with a piece of stick a little, and then ran away in a
fright. Whether the man died of the apoplexy or the drowning was a
point for an inquest; and the doctor, after staying at Ferndale for
a week, decided it was from drowning, but that he was full of green
mangoes right up to his mouth. The great advantage of this was that
no negro would bathe there again, for fear the dead man’s ‘duppy,’ or
ghost, should catch him. So if any black even came near while they
were bathing, John and Emily would pretend the duppy had grabbed at
them, and off he would go, terribly upset. Only one of the negroes at
Ferndale had ever actually seen a duppy: but that was quite enough.
They cannot be mistaken for living people, because their heads are
turned backwards on their shoulders, and they carry a chain: moreover
one must never call them duppies to their faces, as it gives them
power. This poor man forgot, and called out ‘_Duppy!_’ when he saw it.
He got terrible rheumatics.
Lame-foot Sam told most stories. He used to sit all day on the stone
barbecues where the pimento was dried, digging maggots out of his toes.
This seemed at first very horrid to the children, but he seemed quite
contented: and when jiggers got under their own skins, and laid their
little bags of eggs there, it was not absolutely unpleasant. John used
to get quite a sort of thrill from rubbing the place. Sam told them
the Anansi stories: Anansi and the Tiger, and how Anansi looked after
the Crocodile’s nursery, and so on. Also he had a little poem which
impressed them very much:
Quacko Sam
Him bery fine man:
Him dance all de dances dat de darkies can:
Him dance de schottische, him dance de Cod Reel:
Him dance ebery kind of dance till him foot-bottom peel.
Perhaps that was how old Sam’s own affliction first came about: he was
very sociable. He was said to have a great many children.
ii
The stream which fed the bathing-hole ran into it down a gully through
the bush which offered an enticing vista for exploring: but somehow
the children did not often go up it very far. Every stone had to be
overturned in the hope of finding cray-fish: or if not, John had to
take a sporting gun, which he bulleted with spoonfuls of water to
shoot humming-birds on the wing, too tiny frail quarry for any solider
projectile. For, only a few yards up, there was a Frangipani tree: a
mass of brilliant blossom and no leaves, which was almost hidden in
a cloud of humming-birds so vivid as much to outshine the flowers.
Writers have often lost their way trying to explain how brilliant a
jewel the humming-bird is: it cannot be done.
They build their wee woollen nests on the tops of twigs, where no snake
can reach them. They are devoted to their eggs, and will not move
though you touch them. But they are so delicate the children never did
that: they held their breath and stared and stared--and were out-stared.
Somehow the celestial vividness of this barrier generally arrested
them: it was seldom they explored further: only once, I think, on a day
when Emily was feeling peculiarly irritated.
It was her own tenth birthday. They had frittered away all the morning
in the glass-like gloom of the bathing-hole. Now John sat naked on
the bank making a wicker trap. In the shallows the small ones rolled
and chuckled. Emily, for coolness, sat up to her chin in water, and
hundreds of infant fish were tickling with their inquisitive mouths
every inch of her body, a sort of expressionless light kissing.
Anyhow she had lately come to hate being touched--but this was
abominable. At last, when she could stand it no longer, she clambered
out and dressed. Rachel and Laura were too small for a long walk: and
the last thing, she felt, that she wanted was to have one of the boys
with her: so she stole quietly past John’s back, scowling balefully
at him for no particular reason. Soon she was out of sight among the
bushes.
She pushed on rather fast, not taking much notice of things, up the
river bed for about three miles. She had never been so far afield
before. Then her attention was caught by a clearing leading down
to the water: and here was the source of the river. She caught her
breath delightedly: it bubbled up clear and cold, through three
distinct springs, under a clump of bamboos, just as a river should:
the greatest possible find, and a private discovery of her own. She
gave instantaneous inward thanks to God for thinking of such a perfect
birthday treat, especially as things had seemed to be going all wrong:
and then began to ferret in the limestone sources with the whole length
of her arm, among the ferns and cresses.
Hearing a splash, she looked round. Some half-dozen strange negro
children had come down the clearing to fetch water and were staring at
her in astonishment. Emily stared back. In sudden terror they flung
down their calabashes and galloped away up the clearing like hares.
Immediately, but with dignity, Emily followed them. The clearing
narrowed to a path, and the path led in a very short time to a village.
It was all ragged and unkempt, and shrill with voices. There were small
one-storey wattle huts dotted about, completely overhung by the most
enormous trees. There was no sort of order: they appeared anywhere:
there were no railings, and only one or two of the most terribly
starved, mangy cattle to keep in or out. In the middle of all was an
indeterminate quagmire or muddy pond, where a group of half-naked
negroes, and totally naked black children, and a few brown ones, were
splashing with geese and ducks.
Emily stared: they stared back. She made a movement towards them: they
separated at once into the various huts, and watched her from there.
Encouraged by the comfortable feeling of inspiring fright she advanced,
and at last found an old creature who would talk: Dis Liberty Hill,
dis Black Man’s Town, Old-time niggers, dey go fer run from de bushas
(overseers), go fer live here. De piccaninnies, dey never see buckras
(whites).... And so on. It was a refuge, built by runaway slaves, and
still inhabited.
And then, that her cup of happiness might be full, some of the bolder
children crept out and respectfully offered her flowers--really to get
a better look at her pallid face. Her heart bubbled up in her, she
swelled with glory: and taking leave with the greatest condescension
she trod all the long way home on veritable air, back to her beloved
family, back to a birthday cake wreathed with stephanotis, lit with
ten candles, and in which it so happened that the sixpenny piece was
invariably found in the birthday-person’s slice.
iii
This was, fairly typically, the life of an English family in Jamaica.
Mostly these only stayed a few years. The Creoles--families who had
been in the West Indies for more than one generation--gradually evolved
something a little more distinctive. They lost some of the traditional
mental mechanism of Europe, and the outlines of a new one began to
appear.
There was one such family the Bas-Thorntons were acquainted with, who
had a ramshackle estate to the eastward. They invited John and Emily to
spend a couple of days with them, but Mrs. Thornton was in two minds
about letting them go, lest they should learn bad ways. The children
there were a wildish lot, and, in the morning at least, would often run
about barefoot like negroes, which is a very important point in a place
like Jamaica where the whites have to keep up appearances. They had a
governess whose blood was possibly not pure, and who used to beat the
children ferociously with a hair-brush. However, the climate at the
Fernandez’s place was healthy, and also Mrs. Thornton thought it good
for them to have some intercourse with other children outside their own
family, however undesirable: and she let them go.
It was the afternoon after that birthday, and a long buggy-ride. Both
fat John and thin Emily were speechless and solemn with excitement:
it was the first visit they had ever paid. Hour after hour the buggy
laboured over the uneven road. At last the lane to Exeter, the
Fernandez’s place, was reached. It was evening, the sun about to do
his rapid tropical setting. He was unusually large and red, as if
he threatened something peculiar. The lane, or drive, was gorgeous:
for the first few hundred yards it was entirely hedged with ‘seaside
grapes,’ clusters of fruit half-way between a gooseberry and a golden
pippin, with here and there the red berries of coffee trees newly
planted among the burnt stumps in a clearing, but already neglected.
Then a massive stone gateway in a sort of Colonial-Gothic style. This
had to be circumvented: no one had taken the trouble to heave open the
heavy gates for years. There was no fence, nor ever had been, so the
track simply passed it by.
And beyond the gates an avenue of magnificent cabbage-palms. No tree,
not oldest beech nor chestnut, is more spectacular in an avenue: rising
a sheer hundred feet with no break in the line before the actual crown
of plumes; and palm upon palm, palm upon palm, like a heavenly double
row of pillars, leading on interminably, till even the huge house was
dwarfed into a sort of ultimate mouse-trap.
As they journeyed on between these palms the sun went suddenly down,
darkness flooded up round them out of the ground, retorted to almost
immediately by the moon. Presently, shimmering like a ghost, an old
blind white donkey stood in their way. Curses did not move him: the
driver had to climb down and push him aside. The air was full of the
usual tropic din: mosquitoes humming, cicalas trilling, bull-frogs
twanging like guitars. That din goes on all night and all day almost:
is more insistent, more memorable than the heat itself, even, or the
number of things that bite. In the valley beneath the fire-flies came
to life: as if at a signal passed along, wave after wave after wave
of light swept down the gorge. From a neighbouring hill the cockatoos
began their serenade, an orchestration of drunk men laughing against
iron girders tossed at each other and sawn up with rusty hack-saws:
the most awful noise. But Emily and John, so far as they noticed it
at all, found it vaguely exhilarating. Through it could presently be
distinguished another sound: a negro praying. They soon came near him:
where an orange tree loaded with golden fruit gleamed dark and bright
in the moonlight, veiled in the pinpoint scintillation of a thousand
fire-flies sat the old black saint among the branches, talking loudly,
drunkenly, and confidentially with God.
Almost unexpectedly they came on the house, and were whisked straight
off to bed. Emily omitted to wash, since there seemed such a hurry, but
made up for it by spending an unusually long time over her prayers. She
pressed her eyeballs devoutly with her fingers to make sparks appear,
in spite of the slightly sick feeling it always induced: and then,
already sound asleep, clambered, I suppose, into bed.
The next day the sun rose as he had set: large, round, and red. It
was blindingly hot, foreboding. Emily, who woke early in a strange
bed, stood at the window watching the negroes release the hens from
the chicken-houses, where they were shut up at night for fear of
John-crows. As each bird hopped sleepily out, the black passed his hand
over its stomach to see if it meditated an egg that day: if so, it was
confined again, or it would have gone off and laid in the bush. It was
already as hot as an oven. Another black, with eschatological yells and
tail-twistings and lassoings, was confining a cow in a kind of pillory,
that it might have no opportunity of sitting down while being milked.
The poor brute’s hooves were aching with the heat, its miserable
tea-cup of milk fevered in its udder. Even as she stood at the shady
window Emily felt as sweaty as if she had been running. The ground was
fissured with drought.
Margaret Fernandez, whose room Emily was sharing, slipped out of bed
silently and stood beside her, wrinkling the short nose in her pallid
face.
‘Good morning,’ said Emily politely.
‘Smells like an earthquake,’ said Margaret, and dressed. Emily
remembered the awful story about the governess and the hair-brush:
certainly Margaret did not use one for its ordinary purpose, though she
had long hair: so it must be true.
Margaret was ready long before Emily, and banged out of the room.
Emily followed later, neat and nervous, to find no one. The house was
empty. Presently she spied John under a tree, talking to a negro boy.
By his off-hand manner Emily guessed he was telling _disproportionate_
stories (not _lies_) about the importance of Ferndale compared with
Exeter. She did not call him, because the house was silent and it was
not her place, as guest, to alter anything: so she went out to him.
Together they circumnavigated: they found a stable-yard, and negroes
preparing ponies, and the Fernandez children, barefoot even as Rumour
had whispered. Emily caught her breath, shocked. Even at that moment a
chicken, scuttling across the yard, trod on a scorpion and tumbled over
stark dead as if shot. But it was not so much the danger which upset
Emily as the unconventionality.
‘Come on,’ said Margaret: ‘it’s much too hot to stay about here. We’ll
go down to Exeter Rocks.’
The cavalcade mounted--Emily very conscious of her boots, buttoned
respectably half-way up her calf. Somebody had food, and calabashes
of water. The ponies evidently knew the way. The sun was still red
and large: the sky above cloudless, and like blue glaze poured over
baking clay: but close over the ground a dirty grey haze hovered. As
they followed the lane towards the sea they came to a place where,
yesterday, a fair-sized spring had bubbled up by the roadside. Now it
was dry. But even as they passed a kind of gout of water gushed forth:
and then it was dry again, although gurgling inwardly to itself. But
the cavalcade were hot, far too hot to speak to one another: they sat
their ponies as loosely as possible, longing for the sea.
The morning advanced. The heated air grew quite easily hotter, as if
from some reserve of enormous blaze on which it could draw at will.
Bullocks only shifted their stinging feet when they could bear the
soil no longer: even the insects were too languorous to pipe, the
basking lizards hid themselves and panted. It was so still you could
have heard the least buzz a mile off. Not a naked fish would willingly
move his tail. The ponies advanced because they must. The children
ceased even to muse.
They all very nearly jumped out of their skins; for close at hand a
crane had trumpeted once desperately. Then the broken silence closed
down as flawless as before. They perspired twice as violently with the
stimulus. Their pace grew slower and slower. It was no faster than a
procession of snails that at last they reached the sea.
Exeter Rocks is a famous place. A bay of the sea, almost a perfect
semicircle, guarded by the reef: shelving white sands to span the few
feet from the water to the under-cut turf: and then, almost at the mid
point, a jutting-out shelf of rocks right into deep water--fathoms
deep. And a narrow fissure in the rocks, leading the water into a small
pool, or miniature lagoon, right inside their bastion. There it was,
safe from sharks or drowning, that the Fernandez children meant to soak
themselves all day, like turtles in a crawl. The water of the bay was
as smooth and immovable as basalt, yet clear as the finest gin: albeit
the swell muttered a mile away on the reef. The water within the pool
itself could not reasonably be smoother. No sea-breeze thought of
stirring. No bird trespassed on the inert air.
For a while they had not energy to get into the water, but lay on their
faces, looking down, down, down, at the sea-fans and sea-feathers,
the scarlet-plumed barnacles and corals, the black and yellow
schoolmistress-fish, the rainbow-fish--all that forest of ideal
Christmas trees which is a tropical sea-bottom. Then they stood up,
giddy and seeing black, and in a trice were floating suspended in water
like drowned ones, only their noses above the surface, under the shadow
of a rocky ledge.
An hour or so after noon they clustered together, puffy from the warm
water, in the insufficient shade of a Panama fern: ate such of the
food they had brought as they had appetite for; and drank all the
water, wishing for more. Then a very odd thing happened: for even as
they sat there they heard the most peculiar sound: a strange, rushing
sound that passed overhead like a gale of wind--but not a breath of
breeze stirred, that was the odd thing: followed by a sharp hissing and
hurtling, like a flight of rockets, or gigantic swans--very distant
rocs, perhaps--on the wing. They all looked up: but there was nothing
at all. The sky was empty and lucid. Long before they were back in the
water again all was still. Except that after a while John noticed a
sort of tapping, as if some one were gently knocking the outside of
a bath you were in. But the bath they were in had no outside, it was
solid world. It was funny.
By sunset they were so weak from long immersion they could barely stand
up, and as salted as bacon: but, with some common impulse, just before
the sun went down they all left the rocks and went and stood by their
clothes, where the ponies were tethered, under some palms. As he sank
the sun grew even larger: and instead of red was now a sodden purple.
Down he went, behind the western horn of the bay, which blackened till
its water-line disappeared and substance and reflection seemed one
sharp symmetrical pattern.
Not a breath of breeze even yet ruffled the water: yet momentarily it
trembled of its own accord, shattering the reflections: then was glassy
again. On that the children held their breath, waiting for it to happen.
A school of fish, terrified by some purely sub-marine event, thrust
their heads right out of the water, squattering across the bay in an
arrowy rush, dashing up sparkling ripples with the tiny heave of their
shoulders: yet after each disturbance all was soon like hardest, dark,
thick, glass.
Once things vibrated slightly, like a chair in a concert-room: and
again there was that mysterious winging, though there was nothing
visible beneath the swollen iridescent stars.
Then it came. The water of the bay began to ebb away, as if some one
had pulled up the plug: a foot or so of sand and coral gleamed for a
moment new to the air: then back the sea rushed in miniature rollers
which splashed right up to the feet of the palms. Mouthfuls of turf
were torn away: and on the far side of the bay a small piece of cliff
tumbled into the water: sand and twigs showered down, dew fell from the
trees like diamonds: birds and beasts, their tongues at last loosed,
screamed and bellowed: the ponies, though quite unalarmed, lifted up
their heads and yelled.
That was all: a few moments. Then silence, with a rapid countermarch,
recovered all his rebellious kingdom. Stillness again. The trees moved
as little as the pillars of a ruin, each leaf laid sleekly in place.
The bubbling foam subsided: the reflections of the stars came out
among it as if from clouds. Silent, still, dark, placid, as if there
could never have been a disturbance. The naked children too continued
to stand motionless beside the quiet ponies, dew on their hair and
eyelashes, shine on their infantile round paunches.
But as for Emily, it was too much. The earthquake went completely to
her head. She began to dance, hopping laboriously from one foot on to
another. John caught the infection. He turned head over heels on the
damp sand, over and over in an elliptical course, till before he knew
it he was in the water, and so giddy as hardly to be able to tell up
from down.
At that, Emily knew what it was she wanted to do. She scrambled on to
a pony and galloped him up and down the beach, trying to bark like a
dog. The Fernandez children stared, solemn but not disapproving. John,
shaping a course for Cuba, was swimming as if sharks were paring his
toe-nails. Emily rode her pony into the sea, and beat and beat him till
he swam: and so she followed John towards the reef, yapping herself
hoarse.
It must have been fully a hundred yards before they were spent. Then
they turned for the shore, John holding on to Emily’s leg, puffing and
gasping, both a little overdone, their emotion run down. Presently John
gasped:
‘You shouldn’t ride on your bare skin, you’ll catch ringworm.’
‘I don’t care if I do,’ said Emily.
‘You would if you did,’ said John.
‘I don’t care!’ chanted Emily.
It seemed a long way to the shore. When they reached it the others had
dressed and were preparing to start. Soon the whole party were on
their way home in the dark. Presently Margaret said:
‘So that’s that.’
No one answered.
‘I could smell it was an earthquake coming when I got up. Didn’t I say
so, Emily?’
‘You and your smells!’ said Jimmie Fernandez. ‘You’re always smelling
things!’
‘She’s awfully good at smells,’ said the youngest, Harry, proudly, to
John. ‘She can sort out people’s dirty clothes for the wash by smell:
who they belong to.’
‘She can’t really,’ said Jimmie: ‘she fakes it. As if every one smelt
different!’
‘I can!’
‘Dogs can, anyway,’ said John.
Emily said nothing. Of course people smelt different: it didn’t need
arguing. She could always tell her own towel from John’s, for instance:
or even knew if one of the others had used it. But it just showed what
sort of people Creoles were, to _talk_ about Smell, in that open way.
‘Well, anyhow I said there was going to be an earthquake and there was
one,’ said Margaret.
That was what Emily was waiting for! So it really had been an
Earthquake (she had not liked to ask, it seemed so ignorant: but now
Margaret had said in so many words that it was one).
If ever she went back to England, she could now say to people, ‘_I have
been in an Earthquake_.’
With that certainty, her soused excitement began to revive. For there
was nothing, no adventure from the hands of God or Man, to equal it.
Realise that if she had suddenly found she could fly it would not
have seemed more miraculous to her. Heaven had played its last, most
terrible card; and small Emily had survived, where even grown men (such
as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram) had succumbed.
Life seemed suddenly a little empty: for never again could there happen
to her anything so dangerous, so sublime.
Meanwhile, Margaret and Jimmie were still arguing:
‘Well, there’s one thing, there’ll be plenty of eggs to-morrow,’ said
Jimmie. ‘There’s nothing like an earthquake for making them lay.’
How funny Creoles were! They didn’t seem to realise the difference it
made to a person’s whole after-life to have been in an Earthquake.
When they got home, Martha, the black housemaid, had hard things to
say about the sublime cataclysm. She had dusted the drawing-room china
only the day before: and now everything was covered again in a fine
penetrating film of dust.
iv
The next morning, Sunday, they went home. Emily was still so saturated
in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake:
her fingers and legs were earthquake. With John it was ponies.
The earthquake had been fun: but it was the ponies that mattered.
But at present it did not worry Emily that she was alone in her
sense of proportion. She was too completely possessed to be able
to see anything, or realise that any one else pretended to even a
self-delusive fiction of existence.
Their mother met them at the door. She bubbled questions: John
chattered ponies, but Emily was still tongue-tied. She was, in her
mind, like a child who has eaten too much even to be able to be sick.
Mrs. Thornton got a little worried about her at times. This sort of
life was very peaceful, and might be excellent for nervy children like
John: but a child like Emily, thought Mrs. Thornton, who is far from
nervy, really needs some sort of stimulus and excitement, or there is
a danger of her mind going to sleep altogether for ever. This life was
too vegetable. Consequently Mrs. Thornton always spoke to Emily in
her brightest manner, as if everything was of the greatest possible
interest. She had hoped, too, the visit to Exeter might liven her up:
but she had come back as silent and expressionless as ever. It had
evidently made no impression on her at all.
John marshalled the small ones in the cellar, and round and round
they marched, wooden swords at the slope, singing ‘Onward, Christian
Soldiers.’ Emily did not join them. What did it now matter, that
earlier woe, that being a girl she could never when grown up become a
real soldier with a real sword? She had been in an Earthquake.
Nor did the others keep it up very long. (Sometimes they would go on
for three or four hours.) For, whatever it might have done for Emily’s
soul, the earthquake had done little to clear the air. It was as hot as
ever. In the animal world there seemed some strange commotion, as if
they had wind of something. The usual lizards and mosquitoes were still
absent: but in their place the earth’s most horrid progeny, creatures
of darkness, sought the open: land-crabs wandered about aimlessly,
angrily twiddling their claws: and the ground seemed almost alive with
red ants and cockroaches. Up on the roof the pigeons were gathered,
talking to each other fearfully.
The cellar (or rather, ground floor), where they were playing, had
no communication with the wooden structure above, but had an opening
of its own under the twin flight of steps leading to the front door;
and there the children presently gathered in the shadow. Out in the
compound lay one of Mr. Thornton’s best handkerchiefs. He must have
dropped it that morning. But none of them felt the energy to go and
retrieve it, out into the sun. Then, as they stood there, they saw
Lame-foot Sam come limping across the yard. Seeing the prize, he was
about to carry it off. Suddenly he remembered it was Sunday. He dropped
it like a hot brick, and began to cover it with sand, exactly where he
had found it.
‘Please God, I thieve you to-morrow,’ he explained hopefully. ‘Please
God, you still there?’
A low mutter of thunder seemed to offer grudging assent.
‘Thank you, Lord,’ said Sam, bowing to a low bank of cloud. He hobbled
off: but then, not too sure perhaps that Heaven would keep Its promise,
changed his mind: snatched up the handkerchief and made off for his
cottage. The thunder muttered louder and more angrily: but Sam ignored
the warning.
It was the custom that, whenever Mr. Thornton had been to St. Anne’s,
John and Emily should run out to meet him, and ride back with him, one
perched on each of his stirrups.
That Sunday evening they ran out as soon as they saw him coming, in
spite of the thunderstorm that by now was clattering over their very
heads--and not only over their heads either, for in the Tropics a
thunderstorm is not a remote affair up in the sky, as it is in England,
but is all round you: lightning plays ducks and drakes across the
water, bounds from tree to tree, bounces about the ground, while the
thunder seems to proceed from violent explosions in your own very core.
‘Go back! Go back, you damned little fools!’ he yelled furiously: ‘Get
into the house!’
They stopped, aghast: and began to realise that after all it was a
storm of more than ordinary violence. They discovered that they were
drenched to the skin--must have been the moment they left the house.
The lightning kept up a continuous blaze: it was playing about their
father’s very stirrup-irons; and all of a sudden they realised that he
was afraid. They fled to the house, shocked to the heart: and he was in
the house almost as soon as they were. Mrs. Thornton rushed out:
‘My dear, I’m so glad....’
‘I’ve never seen such a storm! Why on earth did you let the children
come out?’
‘I never dreamt they would be so silly! And all the time I was
thinking--but thank Heaven you’re back!’
‘I think the worst is over now.’
Perhaps it was; but all through supper the lightning shone almost
without flickering. And John and Emily could hardly eat: the memory of
that momentary look on their father’s face haunted them.
It was an unpleasant meal altogether. Mrs. Thornton had prepared for
her husband his ‘favourite dish’: than which no action could more annoy
a man of whim. In the middle of it all in burst Sam, ceremony dropped:
he flung the handkerchief angrily on the table and stumped out.
‘What on earth ...’ began Mr. Thornton.
But John and Emily knew: and thoroughly agreed with Sam as to the cause
of the storm. Stealing was bad enough anyway, but on a Sunday!
Meanwhile, the lightning kept up its play. The thunder made talking
arduous, but no one was anyhow in a mood to chatter. Only thunder was
heard, and the hammering of the rain. But suddenly, close under the
window, there burst out the most appalling inhuman shriek of terror.
‘Tabby!’ cried John, and they all rushed to the window.
But Tabby had already flashed into the house: and behind him was a
whole club of wild cats in hot pursuit. John momentarily opened the
dining-room door and puss slipped in, dishevelled and panting. Not
even then did the brutes desist: what insane fury led these jungle
creatures to pursue him into the very house is unimaginable; but there
they were, in the passage, caterwauling in concert: and as if at their
incantation the thunder awoke anew, and the lightning nullified the
meagre table lamp. It was such a din as you could not speak through.
Tabby, his fur on end, pranced up and down the room, his eyes blazing,
talking and sometimes exclaiming in a tone of voice the children
had never heard him use before and which made their blood run cold.
He seemed like one inspired in the presence of Death, he had gone
utterly Delphic: and without in the passage Hell’s pandemonium reigned
terrifically.
The check could only be a short one. Outside the door stood the
big filter, and above the door the fanlight was long since broken.
Something black and yelling flashed through the fanlight, landing clean
in the middle of the supper table, scattering the forks and spoons and
upsetting the lamp. And another and another--but already Tabby was
through the window and streaking again for the bush. The whole dozen of
those wild cats leapt one after the other from the top of the filter
clean through the fanlight onto the supper table, and away from there
only too hot in his tracks: in a moment the whole devil-hunt and its
hopeless quarry had vanished into the night.
‘Oh Tabby, my darling Tabby!’ wailed John; while Emily rushed again to
the window.
They were gone. The lightning behind the creepers in the jungle lit
them up like giant cobwebs: but of Tabby and his pursuers there was
nothing to be seen.
John burst into tears, the first time for several years, and flung
himself on his mother: Emily stood transfixed at the window, her eyes
glued in horror on what she could not, in fact, see: and all of a
sudden was sick.
‘God, what an evening!’ groaned Mr. Bas-Thornton, groping in the
darkness for what might be left of their supper.
Shortly after that Sam’s hut burst into flames. They saw, from the
dining-room, the old negro stagger dramatically out into the darkness.
He was throwing stones at the sky. In a lull they heard him cry: ‘I gib
it back, didn’t I? I gib de nasty t’ing back?’
Then there was another blinding flash, and Sam fell where he stood. Mr.
Thornton pulled the children roughly back and said something like ‘I’ll
go and see. Keep them from the window.’
Then he closed and barred the shutters, and was gone.
John and the little ones kept up a continuous sobbing. Emily wished
some one would light a lamp, she wanted to read. Anything, so as not to
think about poor Tabby.
I suppose the wind must have begun to rise some while before this, but
now, by the time Mr. Thornton had managed to carry old Sam’s body into
the house, it was more than a gale. The old man, stiff in the joints as
he might have been in life, had gone as limp as a worm. Emily and John,
who had slipped unbeknownst into the passage, were thrilled beyond
measure at the way he dangled: they could hardly tear themselves away,
and be back in the dining-room, before they should be discovered.
There Mrs. Thornton sat heroically in a chair, her brood all grouped
round her, saying the Psalms, and the poems of Sir Walter Scott, over
by heart: while Emily tried to keep her mind off Tabby by going over
in her head all the details of her Earthquake. At times the din, the
rocketing of the thunder and torrential shriek of the wind, became so
loud as almost to impinge on her inner world: she wished this wretched
thunderstorm would hurry up and get over. First she held an actual
performance of the earthquake, went over it direct, as if it was again
happening. Then she put it into Oratio Recta, told it as a story,
beginning with that magic phrase, ‘Once I was in an Earthquake.’
But before long the dramatic element reappeared--this time, the awed
comments of her imaginary English audience. When that was done, she put
it into the Historical--a Voice, declaring that a girl called Emily was
once in an Earthquake. And so on, right through the whole thing a third
time.
The horrid fate of poor Tabby appeared suddenly before her eyes, caught
her unawares: and she was all but sick again. Even her earthquake had
failed her. Caught by the incubus, her mind struggled frantically to
clutch at even the outside world, as an only remaining straw. She tried
to fix her interest on every least detail of the scene around her--to
count the slats in the shutters, any least detail that was _outward_.
So it was that for the first time she really began to notice the
weather.
The wind by now was more than redoubled. The shutters were bulging as
if tired elephants were leaning against them, and Father was trying
to tie the fastening with that handkerchief. But to push against
this wind was like pushing against rock. The handkerchief, shutters,
everything burst: the rain poured in like the sea into a sinking
ship, the wind occupied the room, snatching pictures from the wall,
sweeping the table bare. Through the gaping frames the lightning-lit
scene without was visible. The creepers, which before had looked like
cobwebs, now streamed up into the sky like new-combed hair. Bushes were
lying flat, laid back on the ground as close as a rabbit lays back his
ears. Branches were leaping about loose in the sky. The negro huts
were clean gone, and the negroes crawling on their stomachs across the
compound to gain the shelter of the house. The bouncing rain seemed to
cover the ground with a white smoke, a sort of sea in which the blacks
wallowed like porpoises. One nigger-boy began to roll away: his mother,
forgetting caution, rose to her feet: and immediately the fat old
beldam was blown clean away, bowling along across fields and hedgerows
like some one in a funny fairy-story, till she fetched up against a
wall and was pinned there, unable to move. But the others managed to
reach the house, and soon could be heard in the cellar underneath.
Moreover the very floor began to ripple, as a loose carpet will ripple
on a gusty day: in opening the cellar door the blacks had let the wind
in, and now for some time they could not shut it again. The wind, to
push against, was more like a solid block than a current of air.
Mr. Thornton went round the house--to see what could be done, he said.
He soon realised that the next thing to go would be the roof. So he
returned to the Niobe-group in the dining-room. Mrs. Thornton was
half-way through _The Lady of the Lake_, the smaller children listening
with rapt attention. Exasperated, he told them that they would probably
not be alive in half an hour. No one seemed particularly interested in
his news: Mrs. Thornton continued her recitation with faultless memory.
After another couple of cantos the threatened roof went. Fortunately,
the wind taking it from inside, most of it was blown clear of the
house: but one of the couples collapsed skew-eyed, and was hung up on
what was left of the dining-room door--within an ace of hitting John.
Emily, to her intense resentment, suddenly felt cold. All at once,
she found she had had enough of the storm: it had become intolerable,
instead of a welcome distraction.