"Oh, Philip," cried Maura, "I am so unhappy. Didn't he ask about me
at all? Didn't he say he'd like to visit me--didn't he giv' yo' any
message fo' me, Philip?"
The boy toyed with a blade of grass. His eyes were downcast. Sighing
heavily he at last spoke. "No, Maura, he didn't ask about you."
"What, he didn't ask about me? Philip? I don't believe it! Oh, my God!"
She clung to Philip, mutely; her face, her breath coming warm and fast.
"I wish to God I'd never seen either of you," cried Philip.
"Ah, but wasn't he your friend, Philip? Didn't yo' tell me that?" And
the boy bowed his head sadly.
"Answer me!" she screamed, shaking him. "Weren't you his friend?"
"Yes, Maura--"
"But you lied to me, Philip, you lied to me! You took messages from
me--you brought back--lies!" Two _pearls_, large as pigeon's eggs,
shone in Maura's burnished face.
"To think," she cried in a hollow sepulchral voice, "that I dreamed
about a ghost, a man who didn't exist. Oh, God, why should I suffer
like this? Why was I ever born? What did I do, what did my people do,
to deserve such misery as this?"
She rose, leaving Philip with his head buried in his hands. She went
into the night, tearing her hair, scratching her face, raving.
"Oh, how happy I was! I was a happy girl! I was so young and I had such
merry dreams! And I wanted so little! I was carefree--"
Down to the shore of the sea she staggered, the wind behind her, the
night obscuring her.
"Maura!" cried Philip, running after her. "Maura! come back!"
Great sheaves of clouds buried the moon, and the wind bearing up from
the sea bowed the cypress and palm lining the beach.
"Maura--Maura--"
He bumped into some one, a girl, black, part of the dense pattern of
the tropical night.
"Maffi," cried Philip, "have you seen Maura down yondah?"
The girl quietly stared at him. Had Philip lost his mind?
"Talk, no!" he cried, exasperated.
And his quick tones sharpened Maffi's vocal anger. Thrusting him aside,
she thundered, "Think I'm she keeper! Go'n look fo' she yo'self. I is
not she keeper! Le' me pass, move!"
Towards the end of the track he found Maura, heartrendingly weeping.
"Oh, don't cry, Maura! Never mind, Maura!"
He helped her to her feet, took her to the stand-pipe on the lawn,
bathed her temples and sat soothingly, uninterruptingly, beside her.
V
At daybreak the next morning Ernest rose and woke Philip.
He yawned, put on the loin cloth, seized a "cracked licker" skillet,
and stole cautiously out of the house. Of late Jean Baptiste had put
his foot down on his sons' copper-diving proclivities. And he kept at
the head of his bed a greased cat-o'-nine-tails which he would use on
Philip himself if the occasion warranted.
"Come on, Philip, let's go--"
Yawning and scratching Philip followed. The grass on the lawn was
bright and icy with the dew. On the railroad tracks the six o'clock
labor trains were coupling. A rosy mist flooded the dawn. Out in the
stream the tug _Exotic_ snorted in a heavy fog.
On the wharf Philip led the way to the rafters below.
"Look out fo' that _crapeau_, Ernest, don't step on him, he'll spit on
you."
The frog splashed into the water. Prickle-backed crabs and oysters and
myriad other shells spawned on the rotting piles. The boys paddled the
boat. Out in the dawn ahead of them the tug puffed a path through the
foggy mist. The water was chilly. Mist glistened on top of it. Far out,
beyond the buoys, Philip encountered a placid, untroubled sea. The
liner, a German tourist boat, was loaded to the bridge. The water was
as still as a lake of ice.
"All right, Ernest, let's hurry--"
Philip drew in the oars. The _Kron Prinz Wilhelm_ came near. Huddled
in thick European coats, the passengers viewed from their lofty estate
the spectacle of two naked Negro boys peeping up at them from a wiggly
_bateau_.
"Penny, mistah, penny, mistah!"
Somebody dropped a quarter. Ernest, like a shot, flew after it. Half a
foot down he caught it as it twisted and turned in the gleaming sea.
Vivified by the icy dip, Ernest was a raving wolf and the folk aboard
dealt a lavish hand.
"Ovah, yah, mistah," cried Philip, "ovah, yah."
For a Dutch guilder Philip gave an exhibition of "cork." Under
something of a ledge on the side of the boat he had stuck a piece of
cork. Now, after his and Ernest's mouths were full of coins, he could
afford to be extravagant and treat the Europeans to a game of West
Indian "cork."
Roughly ramming the cork down in the water, Philip, after the fifteenth
ram or so, let it go, and flew back, upwards, having thus "lost" it. It
was Ernest's turn now, as a sort of end-man, to scramble forward to the
spot where Philip had dug it down and "find" it; the first one to do
so, having the prerogative, which he jealously guarded, of raining on
the other a series of thundering leg blows. As boys in the West Indies
Philip and Ernest had played it. Of a Sunday the Negro fishermen on the
Barbadoes coast made a pagan rite of it. Many a Bluetown dandy got his
spine cracked in a game of "cork."
With a passive interest the passengers viewed the proceedings. In a
game of "cork," the cork after a succession of "rammings" is likely
to drift many feet away whence it was first "lost." One had to be an
expert, quick, alert, to spy and promptly seize it as it popped up on
the rolling waves. Once Ernest got it and endeavored to make much of
the possession. But Philip, besides being two feet taller than he, was
slippery as an eel, and Ernest, despite all the artful ingenuity at his
command, was able to do no more than ineffectively beat the water about
him. Again and again he tried, but to no purpose.
Becoming reckless, he let the cork drift too far away from him and
Philip seized it.
He twirled it in the air like a crap shooter, and dug deep down in the
water with it, "lost" it, then leaped back, briskly waiting for it to
rise.
About them the water, due to the ramming and beating, grew restive.
Billows sprang up; soaring, swelling waves sent the skiff nearer the
shore. Anxiously Philip and Ernest watched for the cork to make its
ascent.
It was all a bit vague to the whites on the deck, and an amused chuckle
floated down to the boys.
And still the cork failed to come up.
"I'll go after it," said Philip at last, "I'll go and fetch it." And,
from the edge of the boat he leaped, his body long and resplendent in
the rising tropic sun.
It was a suction sea, and down in it Philip plunged. And it was lazy,
too, and willful--the water. Ebony-black, it tugged and mocked. Old
brass staves--junk dumped there by the retiring French--thick, yawping
mud, barrel hoops, tons of obsolete brass, a wealth of slimy steel
faced him. Did a "rammed" cork ever go that deep?
And the water, stirring, rising, drew a haze over Philip's eyes. Had
a cuttlefish, an octopus, a nest of eels been routed? It seemed so
to Philip, blindly diving, pawing. And the sea, the tide--touching
the roots of Deathpool--tugged and tugged. His gathering hands stuck
in mud. Iron staves bruised his shins. It was black down there.
Impenetrable.
Suddenly, like a flash of lightning, a vision blew across Philip's
brow. It was a soaring shark's belly. Drunk on the nectar of the deep,
it soared above Philip--rolling, tumbling, rolling. It had followed the
boy's scent with the accuracy of a diver's rope.
Scrambling to the surface, Philip struck out for the boat. But the sea,
the depths of it wrested out of an æon's slumber, had sent it a mile
from his diving point. And now, as his strength ebbed, a shark was at
his heels.
"Shark! Shark!" was the cry that went up from the ship.
Hewing a lane through the hostile sea Philip forgot the cunning of
the doddering beast and swam noisier than he needed to. Faster grew
his strokes. His line was a straight, dead one. Fancy strokes and
dives--giraffe leaps ... he summoned into play. He shot out recklessly.
One time he suddenly paused--and floated for a stretch. Another time he
swam on his back, gazing at the chalky sky. He dived for whole lengths.
But the shark, a bloaty, stone-colored man-killer, took a shorter cut.
Circumnavigating the swimmer it bore down upon him with the speed of a
hurricane. Within adequate reach it turned, showed its gleaming belly,
seizing its prey.
A fiendish gargle--the gnashing of bones--as the sea once more closed
its jaws on Philip.
Some one aboard ship screamed. Women fainted. There was talk of a gun.
Ernest, an oar upraised, capsized the boat as he tried to inflict a
blow on the coursing, chop-licking man-eater.
And again the fish turned. It scraped the waters with its deadly fins.
* * * * *
At Coco Té, at the fledging of the dawn, Maffi, polishing the tinware,
hummed an _obeah_ melody
Trinidad is a damn fine place
But _obeah_ down dey....
Peace had come to her at last.
_THE PALM PORCH_
5
_THE PALM PORCH_
I
Below, a rock engine was crushing stone, shooting up rivers of steam
and signaling the frontier's rebirth. Opposite, there was proof, a
noisy, swaggering sort of proof, of the gradual death and destruction
of the frontier post. Black men behind wheelbarrows slowly ascended a
rising made of spliced boards and emptied the sand rock into the maw
of a mixing machine. More black men, a peg down, behind wheelbarrows,
formed a line which caught the mortar pouring into the rear organ of
the omnivorous monster.
"All, all gone," cried Miss Buckner, and the girls at her side
shuddered. All quietly felt the sterile menace of it. There, facing its
misery, tears came to Miss Buckner's eyes and a jeweled, half-white
hand, lifted gently to give a paltry vision of the immensity of it.
"All of that," she sighed, "all of that was swamp--when I came to
the Isthmus. All." A gang of "taw"-pitching boys, sons of the dusky
folk seeping up from Caribbean isles, who had first painted Hudson
Alley and "G" Street a dense black, and were now spreading up to the
Point--swarmed to a spot in the road which the stone crusher had been
especially cruel to, and drew a marble ring. Contemptibly pointing
to them, Miss Buckner observed, "a year ago that would have been
impossible. I can't understand what the world is coming to." Gazing
at one another the girls were not tempted to speak, but were a bit
bewildered, at this show of grossness on their mother's part. And
anyway, it was noon, and they wanted to go to sleep.
But a light, flashed on a virgin past, burst on Miss Buckner, and she
became reminiscent....
* * * * *
Dark dense thicket; water paving it. Deer, lions, tigers bounding
through it. Centuries, perhaps, of such pure, free rule. Then some
khaki-clad, red-faced and scrawny-necked whites deserted the Zone
and brought saws to the roots of palmetto, spears to the bush cats
and jaguars, lysol to the mosquitoes and flies and tar to the burning
timber-swamp. A wild racing to meet the Chagres and explore the high
reaches of the Panama jungle. After the torch, ashes and ghosts--bare,
black stalks, pegless stumps, flakes of charred leaves and half-burnt
tree trunks. Down by a stream watering a village of black French
colonials, dredges began to work. More of the Zone pests, rubber-booted
ones, tugged out huge iron pipes and safely laid them on the gutty
bosom of the swamp. Congeries of them. Then one windy night the
dredges began a moaning noise. It was the sea groaning and vomiting.
Through the throat of the pipes it rattled, and spat stones--gold and
emerald and amethyst. All sorts of juice the sea upheaved. It dug deep
down, too, far into the recesses of its sprawling cosmos. Back to a
pre-geologic age it delved, and brought up things.
Down by the mouth of a creole stream the dredges worked. Black in the
golden mist, black on the lagoon.
With the aftermath there came a dazzling array of corals and
jewels--jewels of the griping sea. Magically the sun hardened and
whitened it. Sandwhite. Brown. Golden. Dross surged up; guava stumps,
pine stumps, earth-burned sprats, river stakes. But the crab shell--sea
crabs, pink and crimson--the sharks' teeth, blue, and black, and purple
ones--the pearls, and glimmering stones--shone brightly.
Upon the lake of jeweled earth dusk swept a mantle of hazy blue.