The Sea and the Jungle Part 16

Then he put the pot down and made a rush at Bill, to get it back; but Bill jumped backwards, got through the door, ran through the house, grabbed the admiral's c.o.c.ked hat, and clapped it on backwards. Then he shot out of the water at once, and found himself on the rocks outside the cave, with the c.o.c.ked hat still on his head. He's kept that hat ever since, and money wouldn't buy it."

When I woke next morning it was like waking to a great occasion. The tropic sun was blazing outside. The day seemed of a superior quality. An old negress shuffled by my cabin door, through which was a peep of the town across the harbour, and she had some necklaces of sh.e.l.ls strung on one skinny black arm and carried a basket of oranges on the other. I jumped up, and bought all the oranges. A boat came to our gangway and some of us went ash.o.r.e. I don't know what a man feels like who is released one fine day from imprisonment into the stream of his fellows, but I should think he is first a little stunned, and afterwards becomes like a child's balloon in a breeze. The people we had met in the Brazils never laughed; and I myself had always felt that there we had been watched and followed unseen, that something was there, watching us, waiting its time, knowing well it could get us before we escaped.

We were at last outside it and free. The anchorage of Bridgetown seemed anarchic, after our level sombre experience, for the sea was a green light, flas.h.i.+ng and volatile, with white schooners driving upon it, negroes shouting and laughing over the bulwarks, or frantically hauling on the sheets. The rus.h.i.+ng water was crowded with leaping boats, all gaudily painted; and even the suns.h.i.+ne, moving rapidly on quivering white sails and the white hulls buoyantly swinging, was a kind of shaking laughter. Our negro boatmen sang as they rowed, when they were not swearing at other boatmen. The world had got wine in its head.

We went to the Ice House, and bought English beer. (Oh, the taste of beer!) In the brisk and sunny streets there were English women, cool, dainty, a little haughty, their dresses smelling of new linen, and they were looking in at shop windows. We had got our feet down on home pavements, and the streets had the newness and sparkle of holiday. "Hi, cabby!"

He drove us along coral roads, under cocoanut palms, and there were golden hills (hills once more!) one way, and on the other hand was a beach glowing like white fire, with a sea beyond of a blue that was ultimate, profound, and as tense and as still as rapture. We came to a hotel where there was stiff napery, with creases in it, on a breakfast table. There was a silver coffee-pot. There was sweet-smelling and crusty bread, b.u.t.ter in ice, and new milk. There was a heaped plate of fruit. There was a crystal jug filled with cold water and suns.h.i.+ne, and it threw a wavering light on the damask.

We had some of everything. We ate for more than an hour, steadily. A man could not have done it alone, and without shame. There was one superior lady tourist, with grey curls on her cheeks and a face like doom, and she sent for the manager, and asked if we were to breakfast there again.

She wanted to know. The Chief begged me, as the youngest of the party, to go over and kiss her. But I pointed out that, seeing where we had come from, and what we had suffered, it was the plain duty of any really dear old soul to come over and kiss us on a morning like that.

In the afternoon we were aboard again, waiting for the Skipper to return with the new orders. To what part of the world would the power in Leadenhall Street now consign us? Sandy thought New Orleans; but we could rule that out, for there was no cotton just then. Pensacola was more likely, the Chief said, with a deck cargo of lumber for Hamburg.

That guess made the crowd glum. Winter in the Atlantic, she rolling her heart out, and the timber that was level with the engine-room casing groaning and straining at every roll-to dwell on that prospect was to feel a cold draught out of the Valley of Shadows.

Two n.i.g.g.e.r boys were overside, diving for coins. You threw a coin-Brazil's nickel muck, a handful worth nothing-and it went below oscillating, as though sentiently dodging the contorted and convulsive figure of the boy diving after it. The transparency of the fathoms was that of a denser air. When the sea was still, at the slack of the tides, this tropic anchorage was not like water. You did not look upon it, but into it, being hardly aware of its surface. It was surprising to see our ma.s.sive iron plates stand upright in it. We were still an ugly black bulk, as we were on the ditch water of Swansea, but our sea wagon had lost its look of squat heaviness. Even our iron s.h.i.+p was trans.m.u.ted, such was the lift and radiance of Barbados and its sea, into the buoyancy of the unsubstantial stuff of that scene about us, the low hills of greenish gold so delicate under the sky of malachite blue that you doubted whether mortals could walk there. Bridgetown was between those hills and the sea, a cl.u.s.ter of white cubes, with inconsequential touches of scarlet, orange, and emerald. Beneath our keel was a boy who might have been flying there.

On one side of the town was a belt of coral beach. It was a-fire, and the palms above the beach, with their secretive villas, and the green-gold hills beyond, floated on that white glow. The sea below the beach was an incandescent green; it might have been burning through contact with the island. Then the sea spread down to us in areas of opaque violet and blue, till in the neighbourhood of the s.h.i.+p it became transparent and was but a denser atmosphere. You, in the hard and bitter north, on the exposed summit of the world where Polaris glitters in the forehead of a frozen G.o.d, hardly know what young and luscious stuff this earth is, where the constant sun and tepid rains and salt air have preserved its bloom and flush of abounding life.

There came the Skipper's boat, he in his sh.o.r.e-going white ducks and Panama hat in the stern sheets, his wallet in his hand. He knew that we all looked at him with a.s.sumed indifference, when he stepped among us on deck. That was his time to show he was the s.h.i.+p's master. He feigned that we were not there. He turned to the chief mate: "All ready, Mr.

Brown?" "All ready, sir." Then the master walked slowly, knowing our eyes were on his back, to his place aft, first going in to speak to the Chief. The Chief came out some minutes after. "Tampa, boys," said he.

"Florida for phosphate, then home."

That evening we were on our way, and turned inwards through the line of the Caribbees, pa.s.sing between the islands of St. Lucia and St. Vincent, high purple ma.s.ses of rock, St. Lucia's ma.s.s ascending into cones. The Skipper had been to most of the West Indian islands, and remembered them, while I listened. We stood at the chart-room door, watching the islands across the evening seas. The sun, just above the sharply dark rim of ocean, touched the sea, and sank. A thin paring of silver moon had the sky to itself. I went into the chart-room; and the old man who, grim and sour as you might think him, mellows into confidential friendliness when he has you to himself, spread his charts of the Spanish Main under the yellow lamp, which was a slow pendulum as she rolled, and he put his spectacles on his lean brown face, talked of unfrequented cays, and of the negro islands, and debated which route we should take.

The fourth morning at breakfast-time, was a burning day, with a sky almost cloudless, and a slow sea which had the surface of its rich blue deeps shot with turquoise lights, while fields of saffron gulfweed stained it; and we had, close over our port bow, the most beautiful island in the world. It is useless to deny it, and to declare you know a better island. Can't I see Jamaica now? I see it most plain. It descends abruptly from the meridian, pinnacles and escarpments trembling in the upper air with distance and delicate poise, and comes down in rolling forests and steep verdant slopes, where facets of bare rock glitter, to more leisurely open glades and knolls; and then, being not far from the sea, drops in sheer cliffs to where the white combers pulse. It is a jewel which smells like a flower. The "Capella" went close in till Port Antonio under the Blue Mountains was plain, and though I could see the few scattered houses, I could not see the narrow ledges where men could stand in such a steep land. We crawled over the blue floor in which that sea mountain is set, and cruised along, feeling very small, under the various and towering shape. For long I watched it, declaring continually that some day I must return. (And that is the greatest compliment a traveller on his way home can pay to any spot on earth.)

It faded as we drew northwards. Over seas to the north was a long low stratum of permanent cloud, and beneath it was the faint presentiment of Cuba. Still we were in the spell of the very halcyon weather of old tales, with the world our own, though once this day there was a great rain burst, and the "Capella" was lost in falling water, her syren blaring. We neared the Cuban coast by the Isle of Pines, a pallid desert sh.o.r.e, apparently treeless and parched. The next morning we came to the western cape of the island, rounding it in company with a white island schooner, its crew of toughs watching us from her shadeless deck; and changed our course almost due north.

Now we were in the Gulf of Mexico, and soon upset its notoriously uncertain temper, for a "norther" met us and piped till it was a full gale, end-on, and it kicked up a nasty sea which flung about the empty "Capella" like a band-box. There was a night of it. Towards morning it eased up, and I woke to a serene sunrise, and found we were in the pale green water of coral soundings, with the Floridan pilot even then standing in to us, his tug bearing centrally on its bridge a gilded eagle with rampant wings. In a little while we were fast to the quarantine quay at Mullet Island, detained as a yellow fever suspect.

The medical officers boarded us, ranged amids.h.i.+ps the "Capella's" crowd from the master down, and put in the mouth of each of us a thermometer; and so for a time we stood ridiculously smoking gla.s.s cigarettes. One stoker was put aside, for he had a temperature. Then into the cabins, and the saloon, the forecastle, and into the holds, were put gallipots of burning sulphur, and the doors were closed. We became a great and dreadful stench; and I went ash.o.r.e.

There was a deserted beach of comminuted sh.e.l.ls, its glare as bright as snow in suns.h.i.+ne. It was littered with the relics of old wrecks, with sea rubbish, and the carapaces of crabs. Beyond the beach was a calcareous desert, with a scrub of palmetto and evergreen, and patches of flowering coreopsis and blue squills. Hidden by the scrub were shallow lagoons. It is hard to tell the sea from the land in warm and aqueous Florida, for sea and land so invade each other's dominions.

Water and land were asleep in the sun. I was alone in the island, and sat in a decaying boat by the sh.o.r.e of a lagoon where nothing moved but the little crabs playing hide and seek in the moist crevices of the boat, and the pelicans which sat round the interminable flat sh.o.r.es.

Sometimes the pelicans woke, and yawned, and fanned the heat with great slow wings.

In the early afternoon we were allowed to proceed to Tampa, which we reached in three hours; and there we came once more to the press of the busy and indifferent world. The muddle of roofs and steeples of a great city were about us, and men met us and talked to us, but they had no leisure for interest in the wonders of the strange land from which we had come, and would not have cared if afterwards we were going to Gehenna. We made fast under a new structure of timber and iron which was something between a flour mill and the Tower of Babel, for it was wan and powdered, and full of strange noises; and it had a habit of eating, in a mechanical way, an interminable length of railway trucks, wagon after wagon, one every minute. A great weariness and yearning filled me that night. The strangulating fumes of the sulphur clung to all the cabin, and puffed in clouds from the pillow when I changed sides; for the wagons clanked and banged till daylight. I sat up and beat my breast, and swore I would leave her and go home. The next morning that inexplicable structure beside us began from many mouths to vomit floods of powdered phosphate into us, and the "Capella," in and out, turned pale through an almost impalpable dust. Everybody took bronchitis and cursed Tampa and its phosphate.

I spoke to the Skipper and the Chief about it, and they agreed that n.o.body would stop with her now, who could leave her; but that yet was I no pal to desert them. What about them? They had yet to see her safe across the most ruthless of seas at a time when its temper would be at its worst; and what about them? Though they admitted that, were they in my case, they would certainly take the train to New York, and catch there the fastest steamer for England. Then come with me to the British Consul like an honest man, said I to the captain, and get me off your articles.

The three of us left her, I for the last time. I turned upon the "Capella," and the boys stood leaning on her taffrail watching me; and I am not going to put down here what I felt, nor what the lads cried to me, nor what I said when I stood beneath her counter, and called up to them. We came to a corner by a warehouse, and I turned to look upon the "Capella" for the last time.

Tampa, the noisy city about us, was rawly new, most of its site but lately a shallow lagoon, and one of its natives, the s.h.i.+p's agent who was entertaining us at lunch, did not fail to impress that enterprise and industry upon us with great earnestness. Tampa was a large, hasty, makes.h.i.+ft standing of depots, railway sidings, cigar factories, wharves, and huge elevators which could load I forget how many thousands of tons of bulk cargo into a steamer in twelve hours, as though she were an iron bucket under a pump. A town spontaneous unexpected and complete, with a hurrying population in its sidewalks, pus.h.i.+ng to secure foothold in life, and not a book-shop there, and no talk but in its saloons and commercial exchanges. We went into many of those saloons, the Skipper, and the Chief, and the late Purser, shaking hands for the last time in each, and then dropping into another to recall old affairs; and shaking hands finally again, and so to the next bar.

That night I was alone in Tampa, with a torrent of urgent affairs surging past. I could not find the railway station. Standing at a corner, outside a tobacconist's shop, a huge corridor train shaped among the lights of the street, trundled down the centre of the roadway, then edged close to the sidewalk, b.u.mping past a row of shops as casually as a tram for a penny journey, and stopped just where I stood with a hand-bag wondering how I was to get to New York. New York was a thousand miles away. The train was but a mere episode of the open street, and I could not feel it bore out the promise of my railway vouchers. This train, a row of lighted villas in motion, came down the roadway, out of nowhere, while carts and women with market baskets waited for it to pa.s.s, stopped outside a tobacconist's shop, and the light of the shop window illuminated a round of a huge wheel which stood higher than my head. The wheel came to rest upon an abandoned newspaper. A negro was pa.s.sing me, and I stopped him. "Noo Yark? Step aboard right now!" His word was all I had to go upon that this train would take me to the precise point in a continent I did not know. A struggle for existence eddied fiercely round the train, and a.s.suming it was the right train, and I missed it-it was an unbearable thought! The train had to be mounted. It was like climbing a wall; but I would have cast my luggage, scaled more than walls, and dealt conclusively with any obstruction if the way home left me no other choice. The traveller who has been in the wilds and has lived with the barbarous, though he has not allowed his thoughts to look back there, yet he knows something of that eagerness which dumb things feel when he turns about. I took my train on trust, as one does so many things in the United States, found we should really get to New York, in time, and lay listening to the beat of the flying wheels beneath my berth; tried to count their pulse, and fell asleep.

There were some more days and nights, and all the pa.s.sengers of the earlier stages of the journey had pa.s.sed away. Then the train slowed through imperceptible gradations, and stopped. I thought a cow was on the line. But the negro attendant came to me and told me to get out.

This was New York. Outside there was a street in the rain, the stones were deep with yellow reflections, and some cabmen stood about in s.h.i.+ny capes. No majestic figure of Liberty met me. A cab met me, on a rainy night.

It was on one of those huge liners, and the steward told him they would reach Plymouth in the morning. He was packing up his things in his cabin. England to-morrow! The things went into his trunks in the lump, with a compressing foot after each. It did not matter. All the clothes were in ruins. The only care he took was with the toucans brilliant skins, the bundle of arrows, the biscuit tins full of b.u.t.terflies-they would excite the Boy-and the barbaric Indian ornaments for Miss m.u.f.fet and the Curly n.o.b; how their eyes would s.h.i.+ne. His telegram from Plymouth would surprise them. They did not know where he was.

But he knew, when they did not, that there was but one more day to tick off the calendar to complete the exile. He had turned back that day to the earlier pages of the diary and found some illuminating entries; "Gone," or "That's another," were written across some s.p.a.ces which otherwise were blank. It was curious that those cryptic entries recalled the hours they stood for more vividly to his mind than those which had happenings minutely recorded. He threw the diary into a trunk; the long job was finished.

The suns.h.i.+ne all that day was different from the well remembered burning weight of the tropics. It was a frail and grateful spring warmth, and the incidence of its rays was happy and illuminating, as though the light had only just reached the world, and so things looked just discovered and interesting. A faint silver haze hung upon a pallid sea, and the slow smooth mounds of water were full of fugitive glints and flashes. You hardly knew the sea was there. The mist was the luminous nimbus of a new world, a world not yet fully formed, for it had no visible bounds. Night came, and a nearly full moon, and the only reality was the stupendous bulk of the liner. She might have been in the clouds, herself a dark cloud near the moon, with but rumours of light in the aerial deeps beneath. It seemed another of the dreams. Would he wake up presently to the reality of the forest, with the sun blazing on the enamel of its hard foliage?

He wanted some a.s.surance of time and s.p.a.ce. He would stay on deck till the first sign came of England. So he leaned motionless for hours on the rail of the boat-deck, gazing ahead, where the outlook remained as unshapen as it had since he left home. Far on the port bow appeared the headlight of a steamer.

He watched that light. This, then, was no dream sea. Others were there.

But was it a headlight? ... No!

The Bishop's! England now!

The steward came again, peeping through his curtain, and said, "Plymouth, sir!" and turned on the glow lamp, for it was not yet dawn.

There was an early breakfast laid in the saloon; but he went on deck.

The liner had hardly way on her; the water was but uncoiling noiselessly alongside. There were shapes of hills near, with villas painted on them, but so bluish and immaterial was all that it might have rippled like the flat water, being but a flimsy background which could be easily shaken.

The hills drew nearer imperceptibly, grew higher. A touch of real day gave a hill-top body; and there was a confident shout from somebody unseen in plain English. The vision grounded and got substance. Not only home, but spring in Devon.

From the train window the countryside in the tones and flush of the renascence absorbed him. He went from side to side of the carriage. What was most extraordinary was the sparsity and lowness of the trees and bushes, the fineness of the growth. The outlines of the trees could be seen, and they crouched so near to the ground and were so very meagre.

The colours were faint enough to be but tinted mists. The biggest of the trees were manageable, looked like toys. The orderly hedges, the clean roads, the geometrical patterns of the fields, gave him a.s.surance once more of order and security. Here was law again, and the permanence of affairs long decided upon. He closed his eyes, sinking into the cus.h.i.+ons of the carriage as though the arms under him were proved friendly and could be trusted....

The slowing of the train woke him. They were running into Paddington. He got his feet fair and solid on London before the train stopped, and looked into the crowd waiting there. A flushed youngster ran towards him out of a group, then stopped shyly. He caught The Boy, and held him up.... Here again was the centre of the world.

THE END