Limekiller!

A FAR COUNTRIE

At that time Jack and Felix were living in Eden, Felix was really Felicia, Love had just been invented, and the Garden was on the sea.

Limekiller gave his sunstained hair a shake, and began to get the sail up. Felix had already finished tying the skiff — he no longer checked to see if she were doing it right — and, jaw set, was giving an extra push down on the pole to which the Saccharissa had been, and the skiff now was, tied. Probably the skiff would still be there when they returned. It would be an extra drag to tow it under sail, and besides, they would not need it where they were going. It had taken them from Commeal Wharf to the wide waters of the harbor, but there was a wharf or dock at their destination. Behind, ahead, and all around them, others there, in the mouth of the Belinda (or Old Main) River, which was King Town’s Harbor, were doing the same or similar things to their own vessels. Some were going out for conch, some for sand or pipeshank-coral. Some for lobster. And some for fish. Well. some mainly for fish, and some for fish as well.

From astern Limekiller heard a voice ask the familiar question, “You no forget de ‘drop,’ mahn?”

And the answer, in the pearly light of pre-dawn: “Me forget me head, may-be. But no forget me ‘drop.’”

The somewhat more than colony of British Hidalgo abuts on the Great Bay of Hidalgo; the main things about the Great Bay of

Hidalgo is that God has put in it fish for the Bayfolk and the Black Arawack to eat but that God has not put enough fish in it for the Bayfolk and the Arawack to eat all the fish they want to eat. That is not to say" that they" are always hungry, but it is to say that they are always hungry' for fish. A local proverb goes, If there is not a plantain, there is a banana; and there is usually, also, for the Arawack, cassava, and, for the Bayfolk (who are also called Creoles), rice and beans. Both people will eat meat, Yea but we will eat flesh, when they can get it; except that the Bayfolk will not eat any fowl which has served an obeah purpose (and if you ask them why not, they say because it will make a man lose his “nature” and a woman lose her milk); and the Arawack will never under any" circumstances eat goat meat whether they can get it or not: and you must never, ever, ask them why not.

But best of all and most of all, thev both love fish.

It is not only unheard of for any of them deliberately to take to the water without a “drop” (i.e., a drop-line) to tow behind, it is inconceivable. They will eat the quash, a sort of lean-tailed raccoon; they" will eat the gibnut, a kind of large and large-eyed rodent; they" will eat the dark mauve meat of the “mountain-cow,” or tapir; they will eat crocodile tail and the ‘bocrob” or blue crab and the hind legs and red eggs of the iguana: but most of all, given any opportunity at all, they will eat fish.

But Limekiller and Felix were not going out for fish.

A brochure printed by what was still graciously named The Visitors’ Bureau contains the lines: “British Hidalgo’s numerous and picturesque lagoons, colorful coral reefs, sand banks and beaches together with clear blue skies and tropical vegetation, combine to provide this lovely little country a scenic beauty which, together with a mild climate and the friendly welcome of its people, forms the basis of its tourist industry. ”

This is, in fact, or, at any rate, very often in fact, a True Relation: although perhaps industry is too strong a word, and despite the Hotels Encouragement Act, Conrad Hilton somehow lacked the courage. Still, it is, in so many ways, a “lovely little country,” that one can perhaps understand its being coveted by other and rather larger countries.

Not so many years ago, it is well-known, the Director of Correspondence in the Republic of Hidalgo struck yet another blow for the liberation of what he and his countrymen still (after three hundred years) call Hidalgo Occupado, or Hidalgo Ingles: letters addressed to Inglaterra, he ruled, would be no more delivered. not, at least, until the Occupied Districts, falsely called “English,” were returned to their rightful allegiance, videlicet, the Republic of Hidalgo. This was front-page news for one full day throughout Centroamerica y Darien, with the implication of an isolated England supinely treating for a pax hispanica. (The ruling is, so far as anyone knows, technically still in effect; and the few letters which actually travel between Ciudad Hidalgo and, say, Birhmagnan, Mahcesthre, Liberpiil, and Londres — these being, it is also well- known, the only inhabited places in that distant and ice-bound Island, with its odd-odd names — are required to disguise their destination under the novel sobriquet of Gran Bretannia.) — A blow! Unquestionably a blow. One which could certainly not fail of effect, and of immediate effect at that time.

And yet. somehow. somehow. British Hidalgo, for reasons inexplicable (or, anyway, inexplicable in Centroamerica y Darien), failed to become Republican, Roman Catholic, and Mestizo-Ladino; and remained, as long it had been, Autonomously Monarchial, Nominally Protestant, and Predominantly Black. And, also, possessed of a memory like a wind of long fetch: not a single schoolchild cannot tell you how, when Don Diego Bustamente y Bobadilla, Sub-Admiral of the Spanish Main, came crawling down the Crawfish Channel with his armada of three shallow-draft galleys, intent on lowering the Unionjack, establishing the Inquisition, and raising both the Spanish Ensign and the tax on nutmeg — the Royal Navy being elsewhere at the time, either fighting the French for Canada or perhaps it was the Swedes for Spitzbergen — the Baymen both Black and White hastily mounted logs on cartwheels, stained them cannon-black with tar, and vigorously rolled up barrels of, presumably, gunpowder (actually: rum); and thronged threateningly around with lighted matchrope as they sighted their pseudo-weaponry. Don Diego and his three galleys prudently crawled back.

“And him de same mon who defeat de Torks at Toronto! Ah, but de Sponiard is ah fool, mon! De Sponiard is ah fool!"

Limekiller had once earnestly urged that the site of Don Diego’s victory over the Turks must have been Lepanto -

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,

Don John of Austria is going to the war.

Stiffflags straining in the night-blasts cold,

In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold…"

— as a Canadian he could hardly do less — but found that the dates did not fit, and so gave up. Be that as it may.

Be that as it may: although the boulevard which sweeps along the lower foreshore of King Town, then as now the capital of British Hidalgo, has some time since been renamed ‘'Caribbean Crescent,” hardly anyone ever calls it anything but Artillery. Like Government, it requires no definite article. This road, once the open space of the “quaker cannon” which had frightened off much the smallest squadron of the much-cuckolded king; I disdained to risk the valued vessels of el Rey against so wretched a rabble of heretics and slaves, reported Don Diego; after a long and preoccupied pause, Yo el Rey rewarded this thoughtfulness with a barrel of amontillated sherry which had gone bad in the royal cellars — though at least he did not invite Don Diego to descend and sample on location — this road is planted with palms and jacarandas and palms and casuarinas and palms and more palms; it contains Government House and many fine private residences at one end, and the Chief Minister’s House and many fine private residences at the other; and in between are such edifices as the National Library and Archives, the United Banana Boat Company offices, the two leading hotels and the three leading guest houses (and, since we are on the subject, many fine private residences): also the Public Park, and the Princess Minnie Monument. All these buildings are invariably in as fine a state as paint and labor can keep them in, which is, usually, very fine indeed. From the sea, then, King Town presents a very fine appearance indeed. There is, however, more to King Town than its foreshore buildings and boulevards, however called and however kept. much much more. And not all of this appears quite so fine at all. Perhaps this is inevitable. And perhaps not.

* Lepanto. G.K. Chesterton

A bumboat passed by the Saccharissa, carrying fruit for the South, or Main, Market (the North, or Little, Market was supplied via Cutlass Creek; it was also one of the three places roundabout King Town where the smoking of weed was, if not condoned, tolerated). The bumboatman had opened his mouth for a jovial and innocently obscene greeting, but, suddenly seeing Felix, had left his mouth silent but still open; his eyes moved to Limekiller, expressed appreciation and respect; then he plied his paddle again. There were not many beautiful redheads in King Town.

There were not even many ugly ones.

A full score of vessels were silently swooping out onto the Bay on sails catching the earl)- breeze, hulls catching the early tide, the wings of the morning sails and hulls took. A few although an increasing number of them did have auxiliary engines (an “ox,” it was called), but no true Bavman would use gas when he had a wind or tide. The Saccharissa of course had nothing but her mainsail, her jib, her spare pole, and her paddle. actually, her skiff’s paddle, but kept aboard when the skiff was not in use. As now. The air was grey and moist and cool, so cool that each of the million mosquitoes had his or her head tucked under its wing, so to speak. The sun was so far just an anticipatory smudge on the horizon, but there was light enough.

The Saccharissa was John Lutwidge Limekiller’s boat and Felix Anne Fox wasjohn Lutwidge Limekiller's lady: of course the apos- trophe-s did not imply the same degree of affiliation in each case and so it would probably be much better to say that the Saccharissa wasjohn Lutwidge Limekiller’s boat andjohn Lutwidge Limekiller was Felix Ann Fox’s lover. She had been “settling into” the boat; if she had felt even surprise not to say disappointment that it was absolutely no landlubber’s conception of a yacht, that it had rough and largely unpainted wooden insides (the hull, of course, had to be regularly painted outside. after, of course, having been previously and regularly scraped clean, and caulked), a soggy inner bottom with here and there a small though very real, very alive crab which had come aboard as inadvertent cargo during the vessel’s days as a sandboat; if the total absence of brightwork, if the sanitary conveniences were barely sanitary and certainly inconvenient (consisting of a jury-rigged curtain over the doorless cubbyhold behind which — the curtain — there was a can (not a slang “can,” a real can, though a very large one) with sometimes sand inside, which went over the side — taking very good care it went with and not against the wind — with the rest of its contents; sloshed with sea-water and replaced for next time — if Felix had or had had any qualms about any or all. well, nothing like a complaint had shown.

She had, which was just as important, every bit as, not gone, either, to the other extreme to overpraise. She had accepted. Accepted the rough old boat and all, as simply as she had, simply, accepted him. “I’m just travelling and ravelling,” she’d said. “Travel and ravel along with me,” he’d said, heart leaping. And she? “Yes.” That was all. All? Is there a more joyful syllable in the language? In the tongue of men and of angels?

Felix had learned to balance her long legs in the rudely made skiff, shaped almost like a flat-iron, seatless, so that you had to squat to paddle or stand up to pole. She had learned to share with him the simple way of cooking the few simple foods in the sand-filled scrap metal firebox called the caboose; and as for ropes or lines or sails. well, well, she had learned. And learned well; never having learned any boating before, she had anyway nothing to unlearn now. All of this, and much more, then, she had learned to do for the boat, and so, in no small way, for him: what had he learned to do for her? he found himself asking now, watching her. There were, of course, all the lovely things which they had learned to do for each other: she/he, he/she. They had of course their problems: but they had been nice problems. And it had certainly been nice the way they had learned to solve them. Together. Mostly they had solved them on their first voyage. He recalled that now. He recalled her voice in his ear. He recalled how much he had rejoiced in that: and how much also he had rejoiced in that the bamboo boom — the spar to which the foot of the mainsail fastened — was hollow, and slightly cracked lengthwise — it still was, of course, and never would he fix it now! — this had anyway not at all impaired its usefulness and the hollow and the crack and the wind had turned it into a sort of aeolian harp, and it had sung for them all the day long its long sweet song for “their watery epithalamion. ”

The boom at right angles rode the mast in a wooden yoke; the mast was of local Santa Maria wood, twenty-six years old, and still looked fresh.

The date today was early in December.

Abruptly, Felix asked, “What kind of rope are you using there?”

“What kind of — Why. hemp… of course. Why do you — “

She broke into his perplexity with, “What? Not nylon?”

A moment more he stared; then his blunt and shaggy face relaxed, and he guffawed. Her seriousness now revealed as merely mock-seriousness, she laughed with him: what a delight her laugh was. And what a more-than-delight, her presence.

A day or two before, on Commeal Wharf, a conversation between two Bayfolk wharfside superintendents; the subject: rope.

“Nylon rope very modern.”

“Oh yes. Fah true, fah true.”

“Nylon rope very modem, nah true?”

“Oh yes.”

“Hempen rope, w’old style, nah true?”

“Oh yes. Time of my great-gron-fahder, he hahv sailing-ship go four time ah year fah Cuba, fah Jamaica: use hempen rope. ”

“De Mexicans punishing, so many people buy nylon, not buy hemp. Mexican grow hemp, not nylon.”

“Nylon rope lahst much lahng-ah.”

“Oh yes. Eet sleek, some.”

“What you say?”

“Nylon rope very sleek. Sleep t’rough you hond. Sleep de knots, you know.”

“Well, dot ee's true. Nylon rope very sleepery. Muss use cleats.”

“Cleats cahst mon-ey, mon. Nah true?”

“Fah true, fah true. Nylon rope cahst mah dan hemp, mottah ahv fock.”

“Oh yes. Me no want buy eet.”

“Me no want buy eet. Sleep de knots, cahn’t get greep on eet, requiah cleats, cahst too much.”

“Fah true, fah true.”

“Yes, mon Fah true. ”

So much for nylon rope, then, at Commeal Wharf. And, for that matter, on the sloop Saccharissa, Jno. L. Limekiller, owner and master.

Who sniffed. “Ah, the sweet salt air!”

“A contradiction in terms, surely?”

‘“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.’”

“Yes, I know. You are vast, you contain multitudes.”

He wondered if he should swagger on this; decided that he would not. Instead, he said, “Sweet to me, anyway. - Gallards Point Caye, ho!”

“Gallzards.”

“Gal-lards.”

“The map —”

“The chart —“

They laughed. They laughed a lot when they were together. She went and got both chart and map. Maps. She looked. She looked triumphant. Then she saluted, pouted. Laughed again. “Both right. Chart says Gal-lards, map says Gallzards — Oh. Well, poot! The big map says Galliards, the little map says Gallants.”

He shrugged. “Can’t spell for sour owl stools, some of them down here.” She said, Look who was talking. He asked, surprised, What was wrong with his spelling. She said, Anyone who would spell Labor Department with a u — He said, quickly, defensively, That was the way all British countries spelled it. She asked, with the u before the o? He thought it best to ignore this cavil, gestured off to starboard. “Can you say what those are?” Those being some greenerv-brownery blurs. ‘I mean, find them on the chart…?”

“I already know. The Duck and Ducklings — oops!”

They laughed again, together, at her error. That tiny archipelago was called The Goose and Goslings. By and by they came close enough to observe the shack of the aged light-keeper. No doubt that was the aged light-keeper himself, standing and waving. And. what was that?

Answering Felix’s question, Jack said that That was the Union Jack. “Of course the country does have its own flag now, but not all of these old-timers, you know — “

“I can tell that That’s the Union Jack, but I mean. That — underneath it. Is he surrendering? Or what?”

Jack took a closer squint, but she, on the spy-glass, was already answering her own question. “Oh for goodness sake! That’s not a white flag, that’s his shirt! Just like in a cartoon. ”

She looked at him, questioningly.

He grunted. “Means he wants something. Custom says we have to go see what it is. And, ah. ”

“'Help him out,’ yes.” She was already picking up the local idiom. Can you help me out for a pint, Sir? (“- of rum,” being understood.) Can you help me out, gi’ me a borrow of t’ree shilling? Me truck bruck down, could you help me out with a drop to de garage, mon?

The Goose was of course the biggest, but Captain Barber kept his light on the South Gosling, which long experience had shown was just that much higher as to make a difference in anything short of a hurricane. There was no lighthouse, the old man just lit his lamp and hoisted it on high; his lamp, he had to supply it himself, Government from early days having felt that this would make whoever kept the light keep it more carefully. Government however did supply the oil, plus a minuscule stipend on which he was not expected to live. On what did he live? Menander said that we live as we may and not as we would; there was fish, was there not? Conch. Turtle. He sent, old Captain Barber, now and then a load of red mangrove bark to King Town for Lemuel the tanner there; a stinking trade, but money has no odor. He had some coconut, too. And, also, once a month, from that ancient bequest called Lady Bucknam’s Bountv he had once a month a barrel of biscuit. And a bottle of wine.

In a country where prematurely grey meant grey at sixty, Captain Barber’s hair was quite white; but he was straightbacked or all of that. He had, on realizing that Felix, dungaree trousers or not, was a woman, gone back into his lee’ house and put on his “next” shirt. Now he gave her a courtly bow and a grave, rather shy smile. “Well, Captain,” Jack said, “what’s this I heard not long ago in Town: you found the iron chest at last?” For this was, after all, probably the real reason for his isolated existence, and not alone a desire for solitude. The iron chest. Every stretch of Caribbean coastline has its own iron chest for which men seek and women vearn, full of gold and silver and precious stones; the stranger does right to be often skeptical, but he would do wrong to be always skeptical, for — every now and then — the iron chest is found. and, sometimes, at least, is found full of gold and silver and precious stones. Who put it there? Who knows? Who cares? Sometimes the breath of Hurikan, the old Arawack god of winds and storms. Sometimes the reefs and shoals. Sometimes enemy cannon-shot. And sometimes, of course, of course: Captain Edward England. Major Stede Bonnet. Calico Jack Rackam. Terrible Tom Tew. Horrible Ben Hornigold. Unwomanlv Annv Bonnv. William Kidd, who “murdered Billy More/And laid him in his gore,/Not many miles from shore,/When he sailed. ” And maybe even Flint, he of the impeccable taste in rum. Even thinking of this made Jack Limekiller hear in his inner ear the parrot screaming.

Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!

Heat or no heat, timbers or no timbers, Limekiller shivered.

“Well, sir. Yes, sir. Oi did foind an oiron chist. For true, sir. and mistress. But not the righteous one. No. Emp-ty. ”

“Oh,” Felix gave a sympathetic and quite sincere sigh.

Barber’s smile, which had ebbed, renewed itself. “But Oi niver fret nor poine about that, mistress. Ah no. Where there is a one oiron chist, bound to be a next one.” His tone did not exactly drop off, and they waited for him to explain his reasons. But he did not do so: useless, clearly, to dawdle in hopes of details as to which stretches of beach or bog or mangrove bluff he went a-prowling and a-probing with his long iron rod, on which bay or bight or cove or creek his dor}’ glided over of nights — if not with its oarlocks muffled, at least with his grapples not assisted by lamplight —

— and then, perhaps, too, with its oarlocks muffled —

“What can we do for you, Captain Barber?” asked Jack, returning with silent sigh entirely into the twentieth century.

The old man gave a deep nod. “Do you suppose, sir. sir and mistress. that you could help me out with just a bit of sugar for me tea?”

“A cup of sugar?” Felix instantly had on an imaginary gingham apron. “Why of course;” she half-turned to go -

“Oh, no, mistress! Not a cup. Half a cup will do. Be some other boat, some next one, by and by. today, tomorrow. when God send. whenever. Sailingmen must help the old loightkeeper out: else, may-be: boi and boi: no light. Not your task to do it ahl yourself. - Where vou bound, mahn?”

South Gosling was as near the desert island of the cartoons as anything could be; Jack realizing and relishing the fact — and the sight — was a bit slow in answering. Back came Felix with the sugar, asked, with an air that showed the question had just occurred to her, “Do you say, ‘Gallards Cave,’ Captain Barber? Or ‘Galliards Caye’? Or — ”

Limekiller broke in, “Or ‘Gallants Caye.’ Eh? Which?”

Old Barber nodded slowly. “Galleons Caye, so. ” Then quite evidently a thought suddenly came to his own mind. He faintly frowned. “What day, today? Not St. Nicholas Day?”

Still rolling over in his mind the sound of “Galleons Caye” and mildly amused by yet another variation on a theme, Jack said, “Beats me. Why?” (“Galleons Caye?” murmured Felix, half-smiling, half-surprised, herself.)

Aloud (said she): “But I will have to ask for the cup back. Because we only have two, and he likes his sweeter than I do.”

The abstracted, faintly unhappy look vanished from the old man’s face; face a sort of worn and faded map onto which Europe, Africa, India, and Amerindia had blended. He gave once again that antique, courtly bow. “‘Sweeter than you. ’? Why, what could be sweeter than you, me choild? Captain Limekiller, sir, you have certainly plucked a beautiful blossom in the garden of love.” No bullshit about, perhaps they were just crewing together: in tropical British Hidalgo (and is not one of the Tropics that of old goatfooted Capricorn?), a he and a she of any age above the snottynosed and below the entirely senescent never did anything like just crewing together: any more than they ever lived together as brother and sister. unless of course they happened to be brother and sister… in which case one could be damned sure that the he was involved with someone else’s sister and the she with someone else’s brother.

And why not.

“Why, Captain Barber, how very nice and gallant of you. Not Gallants or Galliants Caye, then? You say, ‘Galleons Cave’?” Captain B. at the moment was saying nothing. From one pocket he was drawing a pair of specs of gothic mold, and from another a copy of the five-year almanac which, from frequent usage, looked as old if not older. Having searched out the current year, he slowly- traced down the days with one finger. Came to a line. Stopped. Read slowly. Slowly looked up. ‘Why, y7es, oh yes. You see He held the almanac up and out. “The 6th of December. St. Nicholas’s Day. Can’t go there today, Oi doubt.” And he waited for them to acknowledge the truth of what he said. And waited.

“What, ‘can’t get there from here’?” — Limekiller. Amused.

“Is there some local superstition against it?” — Felix (original name, Felicia; and the hell with it, she’d said). - Felix. Interested.

Also, tactless.

She had used a word which, like treason, like perversion, is never acknowledged to be such by those who practice it. Anything as impolite as a display of annoyance was not likely to be shown by Captain Barber to A Lady. Not even disapprobation. He did allow himself, however, to become exceedingly grave, and, in so doing, wiped the smiles off their own faces most effectively.

“Oi am not superstitious. Oi have been educated at the old Anglican Academy. And Oi recollect quite well what St. Pahl said to the Athenians. The sea does not roise boi superstition. The wind does not drop boi superstition. The rains do not commence in Yucatan the same w-eek they do in Darien. Is the day longer on St. John’s Day than on Christmas? Tis, ’tisn’t it?”

St. John's Day. Great-uncle Leicester Limekiller, a great Freemason, always let everyone know when St. John’s Day was, that day of Masonic festivity, or should one say solemnity? Either. Both. What the hell.

‘June 21st? Longest day in the

“Just so. Just so. And today is St. Nicholas’s Day. And no day to be going to Galleons Caye. Oi tell you. A bod day for it. Maybe you won’t even be able to fetch up there at all. Oh, not that Oi say that St. Nicholas has anything to do with it himself Maybe. Patron of sailors, though, hm. so. No.” Captain Barber got a firm Anglican hold of himself. “Oi cannot hold with the vain worship of the Saints. Simply, you do see, this 6th day of December, however it be marked: not a good day to go to Galleons Caye. It be the wind, you see.”

He reached for the worn old almanac, now so close to obsolescence and desuetude. ‘No,” said Limekiller. “Frankly, I don’t see.” He held the little booklet out, waited.

The old light-keeper took it back.

“You will,” he said.

It was because of Alex Brant.

There were a number of North Americans down there in old British Hidalgo, down there on the boggy barm and brink, the soggy margin, of the Carib Sea: and some were very good people and some were not and most of them were variously in between. This is of course true of most people in most places, Truisms are called them because they tend to be true. And one of these North Americans was Alex Brant, and Limekiller had known him for quite a while. Had they first met in the Pelican Bar? Or in Reuben Swift’s boatyard? And if in the Pelican Bar, adjacent and adjunct to the Hotel of the same name, had they been waiting for a drink? Or for a woman? Because they had met, and not just once and again, in both those places. And in others. Someone had summed Alex up as being “slim, muscular, and nervous”; like all summings-up, it left much unsummed. Sometimes he had a moustache or a beard or both. Sometimes he had not. He had formerly lived in another Commonwealth Country, on an island thereof, which he persistently, and, it may be, a trifle bitterly, referred to as “Great Exzema.” Had Limekiller himself been asked to sum up his friend, it would have been at greater length, and somewhat as follows:

“Is currently running a small plantation but on occasion acts as a ‘White Hunter’ or maybe he is not now running a plantation but maybe it’s chicle time and he is a chicle buyer… or buying crown gum, which Wrigley’s will not take but will be taken by Third World markets which don’t care about any difference but price. Brant buys tortoise-shell, too. Sponges. When available. Exports orchids. At times. Has a small distillery and when sugar is cheap, makes cheap-cheap rum. Sometimes takes boat charters, or he sometimes may plant rice. - Doesn’t ha ha hunt Whites, hunts tigers.; not his fault that the local jaguar is locally called a tiger, always explains the critter has spots not stripes; still, the very name, you know. Well. Tiger hunts as run by Alex Brant in these 1960s are $1,500 for ten days, kill guaranteed or money back; if an early kill leaves days unused, will run wild hog hunt if desired, at no extra cost. Sometimes runs boat charter. Lost his ass once in an inter-island cargo schooner and doesn’t like to get that tied up (or down) since that time. Will mate with White women or Brown, Black, or Brindle. Smuggling? A wry grimace. Spent seven months in a Spanish-speaking jail once for that; took him seventeen months to recover. Has been All Around, but prefers British Hidalgo because, well, ‘it’s too poor to be too much corrupted, small enough to put your arms around, just big enough to keep you from getting claustrophobic. Unspoiled? — yes, well — Great Salt Cave is unspoiled, too, but there’s nothing there worth spoiling, damnit.’

“Trustworthy? As a friend? Certainty. As a businessman? Not necessarily. As company? Always good company.’’

Alex Brant.

The party had been a rather crowded one, but, then, in British Hidalgo, all parties were by7 definition crowded ones. According to the Nationals, a party7 couldn’t be too crowded. Of course, not everyone in the Emerging Nation was a National thereof, and so not everyone down there felt accordingly.

“Do you remember, Jack,” Alex asked, “that New Year’s Eve, we go to that place and she comes out on the verandah as we’re coming up the steps and she says to y" ou, ‘Em sorry, but we’re quite full up here, and besides, these are your guests, not mine,’ and with that she turns around and goes back inside again, eh?”

Jack said that he remembered. “She only invited me because I was wearing a necktie and I was only" wearing a necktie because I’d been to see the bank manager — didn’t help — and I suppose she found out.”

Felix, sipping her rum-and-Coke, asked, “Who was she?”

Alex said, “Lady Bumtrinket.”

“ What?”

“Not her real name,” said Jack. Sipping his. “Close, though.”

“Cecilie, anyway. Wife of the Commonwealth Com Commissioner, or something like that. They didn’t stay down here long.”

“Pit-ty!”

The record player was blaring out the latest hit, hot from Jamaica, where they liked it hot, I Am Not A Qualified Physician, So I Don’t Like To Give De Decision. Some of the guests were dancing while they were drinking and some were drinking while they were dancing. And some were standing around and -

“Can I get you anything from the buffet, Felix?” asked Alex. “It’s just loaded with fashionable munchies, and not a local item among them.”

“Well —”

“Imported potted meat product and byproduct, white bread sandwich, with the bread crusts carefully cut off, London style? Salad of imported Republic of Nueva Cartagena cabbage with imported Heinz Salad Cream and imported tinned peas? Some imported sweet-and-soggy biscuits? (‘Crackers,’ we call them.)”

Oh Doctor, I Don’t Like De Size of Your Needle, shrieked the record- player. Felix said she thought she’d pass over the fashionable munchies for the time being. Someone said that the Chief Minister, the Rt. Hon. Llewellyn Gonzaga McBride, was present. Or had been. Or w'as going to be.

“Really?” Felix. Looking around eagerly.

“Bound to be. Has to be.” — Alex; “Part of his official duties, laid down in the British Hidalgo Official Duties Act of 1958 as Amended by Orders-in-Council, 1965, ’66, and ’67: ‘. and the Chief Minister shall be everywhere at once. ’ Fact. That God is omnipresent, we take on faith. That the Chief Minister is omnipresent we don’t have to take on faith, we can see him for ourselves. - You guys coming out to the Caye tomorrow?”

The party was now at full blast. So was the record player. He Put It In, He Take It Out; He Put It In, He Take It Out. The Queen’s picture rattled on the wall. The three North Americans gathered close together in order to be able to hear each other shout.

WHICH caye?

GALLARDS Caye.

What’s doing THERE?

Party.

What?

A PARTY.

WHOSE party?

Well, really more of a PICnic. Sort of.

What?

A JAUNT. God damn it.

How come?

Noddy and Neville are going out, too.

Noddy and WHO?

And NEVILLE.

ENGLISH Neville?

Oh for Christ sake. NO. NorWEgian Neville.

Norwegian WHO?

Oh for Christ sake. YES: ENGLISH NEVILLE.

Oh. Well —

The plenty-decibels saga of the Doctor and His Needle, for which perhaps “suggestive” was far too feeble a word, came to its hysterical conclusion; while someone was trying to fumble the record over to its flip side in haste, lest, God forbid, there should be two seconds’ Silence, Alex managed to say that Neville and Noddy were going out to visit Major Deak, whoever Major Deak was, at Gallards Cave, along with Neville’s girlfriend and Noddy’s lady (ladies lived-in, girlfriends did not) and large hampers of victuals and Alex Brant and lots to drink and a couple of Nationals and their wives, ladies, and/or etc. and so — Alex suggested — why not Jack and Felix, too?

“We’re going in my launch,” he wound up.

Felix knew Alex’s launch, at least by sight. “Wouldn’t it be kind of crowded?” she asked, half-eager and half-doubtful.

“We’ll go in our own boat. Get an early start.” Said Jack.

Someone said, “ Where is the C.M.?”

Someone said, “In the kitchen, showing how to cut sandwiches in the least wasteful manner possible.”

Someone said, “And who is this lovely young lady?”

“Felix Limekiller,” she said.

“Ah, Mr. Limekiller! Here you are! You do not mind if I dance with this lovely young lady?”

“No, Sir, I don’t. Felix, this is

The music began again and in the second or so before it swelled up to shake the walls again Jack heard the words, “Llewellyn Gonzaga Me —” as the introduction dissolved into the dance: and they were off.

“See what I mean?” — Alex, into Jack’s ear. “Everywhere. At one time.”

“One does see what you mean.”

One did indeed. Did one’s car find itself tipped almost on its side in the famous Breakbone Gorge, rvho was that suddenly appearing with a winch-equipped truck? Who else but the tireless figure of Llewellyn Gonzaga McBride, the Queen’s Chief Minister. Did an Indian, overwhelmed by piety and rum at the Feast of the Four Crowned Martyrs, give the well-known signs of adding via his own machete to the number of the martyrdom, who was that appearing from nowhere and, addressing el Indio in his own language, getting the machete away and tucking it under his own arm as though it had been an umbrella? Llewellyn Gonzaga McBride, the first (and so far the only) Chief Minister of British Hidalgo. Was who. Was who. Instances innumerable; and he’s probably also, right nowr,” said Alex, “in his office, working on the Budget.”

“Something almost theological about it.”

Make You Big and Strong, blared the record player.

“Something absolutely theological that this country even exists!” shouted Alex. His lips moved some more, but hearing him was now impossible. They shrugged; then, the two kitchen-women having come out to beam at “the funs,” he and Jack swept them up and danced away with them.

And so now it wras the next day, and Jack and Felix were out on the waves of the waters of Eden; they had for the time being anyway left the, mangrove bluffs and the coral shoals and shallows behind them and were out in “the blue,” in the deep water: deep being hereabouts a relative term. It was alreadv somewhat hot in the sunlight but not boiling hot as it sometimes was. It wras for that matter hot in the shade but in no wise uncomfortably hot. There was no longer exactly a wind, but there was a sort of languid breeze, and it blew now and then like a warm pat in the face. On the coast of British Hidalgo there wras no surf, the surf beat against the Reef, about ten miles out. But the wind acted upon the water… or, now, the breeze did. and after each gust. and before the next. the water would surge slightly against the boat with a small soft slapping sound.

“What’s May doing, these last few days,” he asked, realizing that he had lately seen nothing of his lady’s cousin and (until recently) travelling companion.

“Hmm. Well, when did we last see her?”

Felix had a characteristic slight frown which enchanted him. Not near so much, of course, as her smile, or her laugh. Still. It was perhaps more intriguing than either. Because you never knew exactly what it meant. Oh, it never meant wrath, of course. Still.

“Oh. Couple of days ago. In the New Chinese Grand Grotto.”

‘“And Restaurant.’ Yes. Was that the dav we had the chicken cashewseeds? As the menu said?”

Something large in the water, to port. He glanced. Looked like a great ray-fish, slowly following the sun. “Uh. No. It was the day we had the prypish potato. As the menu said.” Blue sky. Cotton clouds. Hot sun. Dry my white hair. “And she said, ‘There is nothing like these exotic foods.’ Remember?”

“Oh, that’s what she always says.”

There was a soft silence. “Reading her way through the National Library, I suppose… I suppose we could have asked her to leave off for a day, and come out with us. ”

Caves blurry to the port distance. Caves blurry to the starboard distance. Behind, the low, low coast had sunk from sight. Of a sudden, also low, the cracked, hollow boom sang out; a fresh slap of wind, struck his cheek.

But it was not followed by another.

“And I suppose she’d say that she could always go on a picnic, back in the Thousand Islands: but where else could she find the Compleat Planter’s Almanac for 1800 through 1818?”

Felix had that slight frown, still, as she turned to face him. Or again. “That is what she would say. That’s exactly what she’d say. How could you know?”

Looking into her eyes, the color of water flowing over mangrove bark, Limekiller opened his mouth. Realized that whatever he was about to say was bound to be the wrong thing to say. And a spirit touched his lips with a glowing coal. And he said something else, instead.

“Reef the mainsail, would you?”

She turned. A moment later, in an entirely different tone of voice, she asked, “One reef enough?”

“Just exactly enough.”

And Skippy the Cat, in no wise resentful of his demotion, since Felix’s arrival aboard, from first mate to supercargo, at that moment rubbed his off-white pelt against her aft leg. She bent down to pet him and to utter endearments. Next she said, “Do you know, Skippy, what pleased me so much last night? It was when Captain Jack said, "our boat.’ Not ‘my boat.’ But "our boat.’”

In a sudden up-flowing of joy, Captain Jack said, “Well Skip, if you want to know what made my night, it was when First Mate Felix introduced herself to Chief Minister McBride as ‘Felix Limekiller.’”

Skippv’s comment was, “Must I put up with all this mush so early in the morning? Eeyoo. Blech. - a little more scratching abaft the starboard ear, Biped. Ahh…"

And then, for a white, nobody said anything at all, but everybody seemed verv well-content.

They had been heading east to begin with (never mind about Marley), with a good east wind behind them, and this had gradually dropped… so gradually that, being blissful all together there in Eden, they hardly noticed. And, in fact, they were slow to notice when the wind shifted and began blowing right up their noses. The flapping of the dirty old sail brought the change to their attention. The boat was now quite out of sight of the low-lying mainland; talk about the Lowland Sea… or sing.

But the boat had come in sight of some other point of land. “There it is,” Jack gestured to something small and bright, a house with the sun on it. “Galleons Cave… or whatever it’s called.”

She gave her ruddy hair a shake. “WTiatever it’s called, we don’t seem to be going there. Or anywhere else.”

“No… No way to steer, this way. The boat is in irons.”

Felix’s face wrinkled. “In what?”

‘“In irons. ’ Dead-assed still. As you’ve noticed.”

Felix said that she preferred in irons. It sounded, she said, much more romantic, “though kind of grim. Though.”

He nodded. “It used to be very grim indeed, when this happened in the open sea. Well. Often. However. Time to start tacking.”

They hauled the sails in, and, thus close-hauled on the starboard tack, the sloop proceeded to windward at a reasonable pace: they were heading, still, or, rather, again, out from land. But they were not steering toward Galleons Caye. Not yet. Neither were they heading dead away from it; they were away from it at an angle. but only at an angle. The jib had been loosed, and, with a “Ready — about,” Jack put the tiller over, the boat crossed the wind, the mainsail came over, the jib slithered across, and she pulled it in on the other side by the other sheet: sheet, here, not meaning sail, but the line that trimmed it. This being a close-hauled tack, the jib- sail did most of the work. The boat heeled over, then came back a bit, with the sea (seemingly, and perhaps, exactly) rising to meet it.

“Ugh,” said Felix, wincing at the shock.

“Pounding a bit.”

She said she was glad it was only a bit.

“Not exactly a downhill run, is it?”

“. not exactly… I guess. ”

After a bit he felt the wind shift; “Ready — about” he ordered. He was to say it again. And again.

The small bright building came nearer, after a while. It had never, after the first sighting, been out of sight at all. She asked, “Is it Gallard? Or is it Galliard? — Oh! I don’t mean the damned name! of the caye! — I mean: which is the dance? You don’t know, either? Well, I just had this picture. In my mind. Of those eighteenth century buccaneers dancing gaily out there, in the muck.” He smiled. She returned the smile, though somewhat more faintly. And, through the many tacks, the building became many times larger; Jack said to himself that he was glad to see it become so, become nearer. But something was odd. Sophia. Something was very odd. Sophia. What? Sophia. Well, who and what was Sophia? A woman’s name, of course. Of course! Well, actually a girl’s. He had been just a boy. How old? Seventeen, maybe, all legs and nose. I am in love with Sophia and any minute now I am going to see her and what a wonderful minute that will be, his thoughts had run, there in the station in Victoria, he having come over on the ferry from Vancouver for to see her and no other reason, she coming down on the train from whatever ossified moss-covered hamlet near the Island’s eastern shore where her family had been summering: and then he realized that he was not, after all, feeling wonderful: instantly she appeared and instantly he realized that he was not at all in love with her.

After all.

— Oh, of course; not the same thing. He had never fancied himself in love with Galleons, Gallards, Galliards Cave: still.

“But I can’t be pregnant,” Felix whispered, suddenly, almost fiercely.

He was less startled by the, to him, utterly unexpected prospect of fatherhood, than by the intensity of her voice.

“Would that be so terrible?” he asked.

“No.” She said this less reluctantly than thoughtfully.

“Well, then why

“Because I can’t be. Is why. I’ve already had my period: you ought to know; you haven’t forgotten so soon, have you?”

No, he hadn’t forgotten so soon. Yes, he ought to know; remembering his impatience. And all the rest of it. Slowly. almost, really, thinking out loud… he said, “Though I have heard

“- so have I,” she said, quickly, interrupting him. “But it — I feel pregnant, and not in the way it was before.”

Warm dav. Why should he feel cold? “Have you been —” He stopped. What a question to ask, when she’d never mentioned a child. Or anything about -

“Yes,” she said. She said, “Yes,” as simply as she might have said it to, “Have you been in Bridgeport?” He said nothing more. Was he waiting for her to say more? If so, he waited in vain. A few staple thoughts ran through his mind. Abortion. Adoption. Miscarriage. The child is at home with her mother, aunt, sister; she was married young; divorced: it was none of his goddamned business.

It was none of his goddamned business.

Unless, of course, she were to feel it was. And, of course, she wasn’t. Anyway, not right now. And so, right now, he had all the time in the world to think about this possible progeny. And the oddest thing he felt, as he thought about his feeling, was how odd it was that he didn’t feel much of anything about it at all. Was she, then? Okay. Or: she after all wasn’t! Also okay.

“Maybe it’s just that you’re sort of sea-sick… all the pounding the boat’s been doing… all these tacks, these winds — maybe.”

She said, “Maybe.”

Her voice was flat. She sounded not happy. She sounded not unhappy. She heard, she answered, but she wasn’t really there, she was really somewhere else, a million miles away, far away somewhere in her own bloodstream: So far, he could not call to her.

So. Still. What. Ah. Of course. The wind. No wind of long fetch, this one. “Ready,” he said, “. about. ”

And meanwhile, what else was the boat doing? The boat was shipping water, was what else the boat was doing. And had to be pumped. And so he pumped it. The common pump he had learned from the local boatmen how to make, use and repair, and use again.

It was part rubber, part leather, part wood, and had a long straight wooden handle and worked exclusively with an up-and-down motion, like the “plumber’s friend,” or plunger; it would probably never make the pages of Yachting Magazine, but, applied with vigor, it brought the intrusive water in a cold boiling froth up inside its long narrow rectangle of a case and out the spout and over the side. It beat bailing for sure: but though you expel Ocean with a plunge- pump, still, she will always return. Always. Always. Always.

That past winter an unexpected charter out to the Welshman’s Caves had left Limekiller with, all costs paid and reserves set aside for the inevitably lean and rainy days, with fifty dollars more than he had thought to have had: so he thought to buy a pair of binoculars. used, of course. eyetracks don’t wear the lenses out, was his thought… at Sitwell’s Sports Shop, on “Artillery.” (Sitw'ell was Honorary Vice-Consul for Iceland; “Do you get many Icelanders here?” was Jack’s question. Said Sitwell, “I never gits any. but it saves me thirty-five dollars a year tax exemption.”). However, on his way there he chanced to glance into a tiny optician’s shop, and the small sign in the small window caught his eye. William Wilson Setsewayo Smith, it read, Licentiate of the Worshipful Company of Spectacle-makers, London. How could he resist a further look? And there, propped in a corner, was a, well, no, it really wasn’t a telescope, it was an early nineteenth-century or maybe even late eighteenth-century Spy Glass, bound in only slightly-flaking light brown leather; the pricetag: seventy-five dollars. In he went, “Will you take fifty dollars for that?” The worshipful spectacle-maker was just about the same color. “I’ll take forty-nine,” he said, “and leff us boath have a nog of Governor Morgan Rum with the difference.” After setting down his glass with an appreciative sigh, “May ye see rare sights with that,” he said. “Best I be gittin bock to work now.” There was a slight, a very slight prismatic effect, an effulgence, which was not met in modem optical glasses: but it served him well enough. Besides: sliding the thing in and out: such fun!

“See what you make of this,” Limekiller said now, handing it over.

All morning long, and into the afternoon, that little yellow- house danced in the distance before their eyes. advancing.

receding. yellow. what was yellow, what had been yellow, and what had yellow been and stood for? that fellow/ in Austrian yellow,” no, no, certainly not Joyce; “In the porch of my printing insti- tute/The poor and deserving prostitute/Every night plays catch-as-catch- can/With her tight-breeched British artilleryman —” How ridiculous; they, Jack and Felix, they weren’t exiles, they were travellers. Just travelling and ravelling. - Ah yes. Ah. Yes. Yellow was the color of the old quarantine flag. Flags. Odd thought. Infection. Taint. (And a lot of use that thought was, too.) And, ah, and equally inapplicable, the yellow passport of Imperial Russia for the exclusive use of prostitutes: not for foreign travel, no, a sort of ID: “internal passport.” Bad joke, if so intended. This imperial government has fallen (old Prince Lvov, first premier of the Provisional Government which took its place) because history has not known of a government more cruel and more corrupt. But history was to get to know. A? Plenty.) Yella Isabella. Wouldn’t change her undies till Ghent was relieved; Ghent held put for how long? Was it Ghent? Was it Gal- lards, Galliards, Galleons, or — Isabella not of Spain but of Austria, there we go again.

The little yellow house danced and blurred. Must be Major Deak’s house. Whoever Major Deak was. Had the house been quite finished? Wasn’t part of a framework of a second story visible there? Just a few timbers. Something odd and yet familiar about it. them. Also, somehow: not nice. Some shapes, some angles, somehow not sympatico… or whatever the hell. Heat haze. Heat fever? Wasn’t that hot. The spy glass was old.

“Oh, Jack, I don’t like it,” she said, low-voiced. So. Felix felt it too. Whatever the “it” of it was, this time. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Perhaps not part of a framework of a house-yet- to-be, but of a house-which-once-was. Maybe the last remnants of an upper story. either unfinished or torn off in some hurricane or bayama or other wind of, really, long fetch. Maybe it was after all the wind like the squalid sirocco, the wretch mistral, or fehm, which was bothering Felix, like the khamsin which blew for fifty dreadful days, they say that under the old Ottoman Turkish law anyone who killed a spouse would be acquitted if the khamsin had been blowing for even a month. But: here: now: no: only a matter of hours… or, not so long as that, surely the wind had been a far-better feeling wind, until. well, long minutes… so: no.

So, then, what?

Not every building in this country (not so much forgotten by the rest of the world as to it unknown), not every one afflicted by hurricanes, tempest-torn, had been rebuilt, even ashore. Limekiller passed one such each day in King Town, squashed almost into a parallelogram, but still inhabited. Others. Plenty of others. So no big sweat that old Major Deak (and why “old’? He could be a major and yet young, na true?) had not gotten around to — Flaps of wallpaper flapped and dangled and flew about in the breeze, the hot, dry, cold, sticky breeze. Suddenly, no breeze here, though. Was. But not now. Over there.

Wallpaper? Out on the Cayes? Not very damned likely. curtains, yes, rags of curtains — part of a window frame with parts of the curtains still dangling -

“I bet that’s Alex,” she said, very suddenly. He held the glass. He squinted. Maybe those were, yes of course those were. People. But — “You’ve got better eyes than I, I guess, I can’t make out Alex.”

“Oh,” she said, easily, “neither can I. Make him out. But the one on the end, I mean, somehow he just seems like Alex.”

Their eyes met. Instantly he knew that if he said a single word about Alex, she would say at least a single word about May. And wouldn’t that be silly? What a day this had turned out to be.

Water flowing over mangrove bark.

The traps we dig for ourselves.

“It looks,” she said, as though judiciously, and as though judiciously changing the subject, “it looks as there must be another house on that cave, with the second story sort of ruined, you know what I mean? And from this distance, at a certain angle, it’s sort of as though the top of that one is sort of superimposed onto the other one. The yellow one. If you see what I mean.

“I do see. Yes.”

But later, once they’d gone ashore, and thought to ask, they were told, no such thing. Nothing like that. One cave. One house.

The caye. Mangrove bluffs. Shallows. Looking down, in some places, so clear, almost one could lean over and touch the negro-head coral, and the garfish. The insufferable wind. When there was wind. And yet, now, smoke coiling from cigarettes and scarcely rising. Much wind, coming out. but now, here at last, the air was dull above the mangrove bluff and reclaimed land, the sky was now slate-colored; even, half-turning, the color of the sea had changed, too.

“It seems somehow dead here,” she murmured, low-voiced, as they put ashore. It did. Haunted. Oppressive.

But now there was little time for such thought.

They were no longer alone.

Loud good cheer.

“What took you so long?”

“Had to make many tacks.”

“Thought you’d never get here! Well! Have a drink!”

“Why didn’t you come in the launch?” (Limekiller to himself: Because it’s Alex Brant’s launch. Is why. And was shocked to find he’d thought so.)

“ Glad to see you! Glad to see you!”

“Here’s a bottle of beer for each of you, then” — this was Neville (English Neville. There was not, really, any Norwegian Neville) producing the beer with an air of innocent sinfulness possible only to someone raised by a Baptist grandparent. Neville had a thin blond body and a thin blond beard.

“Felix! Gyel! Me wait-wait-wait fah you! Fret-fret-fret, may-be you hahv frock nice-ah dan mine! And what I see? Nutting like dot! Dun-gah-ree! What! Nicholine?” — This was Adah, Noddy’s lady. Nicholine was Neville’s girlfriend. Nicholine’s comment, couched in the form of a proverb, and said, in a low-quick mutter, was “Piggy play dead fih cotch corby live.” Nicholine was short and squat, and Nicholine was jealous. Adah threw back her head, laughed her friend’s comment into the air, and so, away: then she passed her hands over her lime-green-nylon-covered hips. Winked at Felix. Atjack. They did not wink at each other. Alex strolled up, casual and easy. “Come on over to the house and meet the official host. Well, we are paying him for the use of the place for the day. But he is our host. Adds class. - Some of us were worried, you being so long getting here. I told them, no sweat. Not to worry.” A smile for Felix.

Noddy said, “Yes, come along. You’ve got quite a lot of good drinking to catch up on.” Noddy was portly and ginger-moustached and learned and cheerful. except when you were trying to crash his party. Which was not now. There were others who had come strolling out to meet them, to help with the tying up. To bring drinks. Just In Case. The Honourable Somerset Summerville, Secretary to Government, and a not-bad-poet in his own right and on his own time, was there. So was his wife. (“Yes,” the Honourable was now and then heard to say, “I was the typical Colored Colonial student in London, and so, typically, I married my landlady’s daughter. well. actually. granddaughter.!” And, actually, he had; the Dowager Lady Blenkinson did not of course let lodgings: she owned the whole street. And the next one. And the next one. and, as my wife already was an Honourable, why, I had no choice but to become one, too!” His wife showed neither amusement nor annoyance; she was wearing khakies, and was the authority on the orchids of the Hidalgo Littoral.). Also present was Ethelred Edwards, a master adzeman at Nahum’s boatyard, and his wife — he and the Hon. Mrs. Summerville were the only wives at the party (or picnic)… or, at any rate, the only women who had been “married in church” to the men with whom thev were currently affiliated. British Hidalgo was strong on being married in church. Divorce, however, was something else altogether. It was difficult. It was expensive. And it was, finally, irrelevant.

It was unlikely that people from classes as diverse as Nicholine and Adah, the Summervilles, and the Edwardses would ever, in King Town, be at the same social gizmadoo. But foreigners, somehow, or, anyway certainly some of them, were outside the peripheries of caste. And could act as a catalyst. Or whatever.

They walked to the yellow house along a sort of boardwalk. “What do you think of the looks of the land?” asked Alex. Bothjack and Felix said, almost together, that it “looked funny.” Brant nodded. ‘Just step on it,” he suggested. “After they cut down the mangrove, they burned it off, and — well, just step on it. Go ahead. Won’t bite you.” Somewhat gingerly, the newcomers did. The signs of the burning-off were still visible, and it felt soggy beneath their feet. It, in fact, quivered. The effect was somewhat unsettling; Jack and Felix were glad to step back onto the boards.

“It will dry out, eventually. and then, to help it out, they’ll fill it with sand and with pipeshank. Those vertical planks you see will be helping it drain. It was dryer, once, the men have found signs that people had lived here before. old nails. old pieces of timber. old bones…” he rolled his eyes toward Felix, Felix shuddered, Alex laughed. “Old turtle bones. Rare and protected now, when I’m not catching them. they used to be common as fish.”

Rare? increasingly so. Expensive. accordingly. Protected? somewhat. Alex. somehow. was never caught catching them in legally protected areas, so it followed. didn’t it? that he had caught them in legally unprotected areas. And sold them. when he sold them… at great prices to such places as that stately old guest house the Queen Adelaide, and to the Empire Hotel and the Tropicalia Inn. Felix, perhaps uncomfortable about the turtles, asked if there were any interesting mammals. “. on Gallans or Galliard or whatever its name?”

The caye, whatever its name, probably had no mammals at all except perhaps for bats which perhaps ate the silver-pale hog-plum or the pale yellow governor-plum. But it hospitted the pelican, locally called the stork, which, bill empty, it did resemble. The insect-like hummingbird was there, though not in great numbers, for there were not many nectar-yielding flowering plants on that sombre islet. Plovers and sandpipers sometimes strolled the small stretch of strand and sand, and the shrieking gull and the tern were sometimes there. and the carrion-buzzard (“the corby”) furtively patrolled the place with its ugly croak and its filthy feathers. The dead air weighed them all down.

The newcomers rounded the angle of the boardwalk, the yellow house stood there on stilts before them, one story in all, and, from that first glance, one which led you in through the open door and came to a quick conclusion: one room in all.

Someone was coming toward them, walking very slowly. Said the Honourable Somerset, “And here is our host.” Jack felt something like instant recognition upon seeing Major Deak, and yet he knew he’d never seen him before… he seemed actually a giant tortoise walking upright, — the convex back, the waving fipperlike arms and hands, the head out-thrust from the loose collar at almost a right angle, the face here wrinkled and there divided into platelets, the absence of head or facial hair. The eyes lacked alike the clearness of youth and the milkiness of age; the eyes (Limekiller concluded) the eyes looked sick. He heard, in his inner ear, his own voice saying, You’re wrong. And, a second later, realized that he’d been replying to something not addressed to himself. something murmured back there a moment ago between Edwards and his wife.

De Major looking ageable.

Yes, mon, ahnd aging fahst.

But it was not age. The cayes were commonly considered to be of a healthier air than that of King Town; often Limekiller, comparing the fresh winds out on the islets to the soggy smells of the badly drained capital, had agreed. But clearly the air here was doing Major Deak no good. and, if today’s dead-sullen calm and. the phrase rose up in his mind and silently burst like a bubble of gas. and bad vibes. were typical… he did not finish the thought. He was being introduced, he had to speak.

“How are you, sir?”

And Major Deak, alas, proceded to tell him “. thought I was choking, strangling. doctor finds no evidence of asthma or emphysema. can’t go elsewhere to live,” he said, slowly moving his head from side to side, as though Limekiller had urged him to move on. “. all my savings here. planned to add a few rooms. receive a few people, retired people. paying guests. labor troubles. can’t seem to catch my breath for long. thought that in a place with underemployment there’d be no problem hiring workpeople, but. nothing seems to get done. eating up my capital. pension a trifle. say that from today on for a month nobody will do a job of work. would have retired in the Golconda Colony but the fanatics have gained control there.

There was one word which, Jack thought, described the man’s state. Misery.

Upstairs, surprisingly, the air was by far less dead. It was not only to discourage Critturs that this house, like so many in the country, was built on stilts: the chief purpose was to catch the wind. And it caught it. But the wind did not stay caught. And someone else was upstairs, as though waiting for them. Stickney Forster.

Stickney Forster was a Member of the Bar, and by now the only actively practicing White member. Those who liked him said, “Ah very clever mahn, he went to the Oxford College, you know.” Those who did not like him said that if he had ever been to Oxford it was only to use the toilet. “That Limey bahstard,” they called him. Although on this occasion he was not in his black robe and white tie and wig, Jack recognized him at once, had long been qui- edy amused by his having once said, “I have placed in my will that on my tombstone it should read, Father of the Illegitimate Children’s Sustentation Act, being the shortest Act in the Law Code. Do you know it? It reads in its entirely, The Illegitimate Children’s Sustentation Act shall follow in every detail the provisions of the Legitimate Children’s Sustentation Act. Caused a few grumbles, I can tell you, fat lot I care, but it makes sure that no ‘outside’ child is going to go raggedy-arsed while his half-sibs are fully-clothed just because their parents were ‘married in church.’ “Married in church and An outside child, Jack knew the words well, as they often appeared in casual conversation in British Hidalgo; B.H. being, he had often thought, the one country he knew of in which absolute adherence to the old-time religion went hand in hand with absolute heterosexual freedom. (There was as yet nothing like a “Gay Rights” Movement in British Hidalgo; very very rarely was the matter even mentioned, and then usually in a very tight-lipped line in the official Gazette: Sixteen months in gaol for having committed the crime against nature.)

However.

Outside child.

Married in church. .

These phrases now restored to the top-level of his mind, Jack now began to think about them and about their implications; and, whilst somebody’s record-player shrieked loud good times and loud bad music, think of them he did. He lacked the languorous tropical attitude toward carnal congress and parturition and the sus- tentation of children: and so, he was sure, did Felix. There was no likelihood that she would cut cane in the field till her time arrived and then retire behind a clump of trees, easily to give birth to the offspring of their love. There was no likelihood that Jack would simply give her what he chanced to have in his pockets and inform her that if rations grew scarce his great-aunt in Ladysmith Street would always have an extra plantain or an extra banana. And, although Grandy was always willing and indeed more than willing to take in the tot, Felix did not have a Grandy in the Colony, and neither did Jack, and in the colder climates hearts were at least in this respect less warm. Which left what? The choice. Abortion? And, if not. marriage.

In short, he was perhaps now being obliged to ask himself if he would rather slay the baby in her belly or at long last Settle Down and bend his sunburned neck beneath the yoke. “Shandygaff? Shandygaff?” this was Noddy asking, and, taking some murmur or motion for Yes, he stuck a glass in Jack’s hand and simultaneously and deftly, poured out half a bottle of Coca-Cola and half a bottle of Tennant’s Milk Stout (imported, and well worth the importation). Jack quaffed deeply. “Noddy, thank you,” he said. “Usually I don’t care for fantods in my drink, but this one is just great.” Noddy made a brief mock-bow, murmured something about Native Arts and Crafts, mimed that he would pour another, shook his head briefly at Jack’s No; was off. Mr. J.L.L. asked, “Hey, Felix, do you want,” her eyes turned away the exact second that they met his, and she rose from the rough bench and moved off. A prey once again to the Dismals, Jack said, “a drink,” in a low, helpless voice. Knew as well as he knew anything that if he did not follow after her he would later be furiously accused of neglect; that if he did follow after her, she would turn on him like a cornered wildcat, with a forced-out, “Don’t follow me!” Why, with all the Hazards of the World, did people feel the need to devise new' ones? The heavy air produced no answer. Jack decided he would pay his respects to the nominal host, a matter at which she would perhaps decide she need not resent; and, the second he saw her, call out an invitation to be introduced to the man. It would not be correct to say that he failed to meet Deak’s eye, or that he listened with half an ear; but his attention was not altogether with it.

Just at the moment, however, Major Deak was talking to the tw o Honourables andjack did not care to horn in. He was too well- bred for one thing, and for another he knew not but that the major as principal local landlord might not still exercise medieval powers — say, “the alcalde jurisdiction” or pervovnter in uccage and flemage, say, and order him to be staked out on the foreshore at Sandy Cave until two tides should have flowed and ebbed — and anyway a voice in his ear murmured, ’Jock” and he turned to fight.

“It’s not Jock, it’s — ah, Stickney!” They shook hands, Limekiller explaining that he didn’t wish to be Jock to anyone who w anted to trot out a sporranful of old Scotchman jokes, but, “and what brings you here? didn’t know you were a party-goer.?”

“Came to see Judge Deak, Major Deak, that is, my older brother knew him well when John Deak wras a judge in Golconda Colony and Richard was the Assistant Colonial Secretary. They both went back into the Army during the War, John became a major and Richard became dead; awfully pretty woman, that, you ugly young troll, ah youth! ah woe, the fleeting hours!” Very deftly did Stickney Forster give Jack all the information needed, and then turn the conversation so as to leave no room for feeling a formal need to express regret on the long ago death of someone he had never till now heard of, which expression could be nothing but hypocrisy, or, as Dr. Johnson called it, cant (Sir, clear your mind of cant!). “Deftly,” yes. Part of being a gentleman, and having nothing to do with money, position, and a command of the pickle forks. Jack envied.

Major Deak moved off and the Honourable Mrs. Whatsis stopped rummaging in her shoulder-bag or was it a knapsack, it looked roomy enough and durable enough to pack a waree or a wild bush hog in, assuming it to have been cleaned and quartered and cut up into chops, chines, and hams. The Black Arawack were very fond of the cheaper cuts of pig, referring to their favorite cuts as pigtaili and pigsnoutu. But neither they nor those were present. “Don’t know what I’m looking for,” she murmured. ‘Yes, I do. But it’s not in here. Somerset!” she adjured her husband, who looked up with a yes-my-dear expression on his lean and naturally tan face. “I think perhaps you ought to tell these people what you were telling me about the caye. you do recall, don’t you? the night after Sir Joshua prorogued the Assembly and we discovered that Mrs. Hodkins had stolen the cheese again. The caye, Somerset!” and, leaving her Honourable husband neither time nor chance to reply, swept on. “She’s a good housekeeper, a fine cook, and an absolutely splendid laundress, my sister Alice once compared her to Queen Elizabeth’s Silk Woman, of course one understands the first Elizabeth, I do think that was so squalid of the King of Spain to have kept a spy in the Virgin Queen’s laundry to see if she were still capable of having children. But she does „tote’ as the Americans say. Somerset?”

Limekiller, slightly dazed, nevertheless understood that it was not the first Elizabeth who had chosen to make off with the cheese. The Honourable Mrs. did not often speak at length, socially, but when she did, she spoke.

The Honourable Minister to Government carefully put his glass down. He gave a glance over his shoulder. “Where is Major — Ah. Down there. I am not quite sure that I wish him to hear this. Of course he must be told eventually. Well. What I said to my wife is this. This present attempt to develop this caye is not the first, you know. No, it is not. The United National Investment Association — what? Oh, yes, one of the Harrisite groups, remarkable man, Aurelius Harris, pity that those remarkably large hands were so remarkably sticky — mm, yes, the UNIA had bought this caye from the Crown, cash down, and planned to build an hotel here; my uncle George was one of the board of directors, a remarkable farseeing man, foresaw the tourist possibilities of such a place, and it was he who told my father about what they found. I was just a youngster at the time, but naturally I was all ears. The story seems to have quite faded away, but I well remember it, yes. ”

Jack, either still dazed or dazed again, trying hard to make the connection between Queen Elizabeth I and Aurelius Harris, of whom he had barely heard; Limekiller wondered if the Honourable Lady had learned discursiveness from the Honourable Minister, or if it had been the other way around, or if a mutual tendency had first attracted them to each other. Be that as it may..

Time: the late Nineteen Twenties. Scene: Galliards or whatever name Caye. Cast of Characters: A band of men, Nationals, delving and digging with shovels and spades and buckets in the mud and muck of the quaking soil, in the partially dried and partially drying soil, in the wet and mucky and boggy soil, had come across some heavy timbers. What kind? Some said, teak. Yes: teak. Despite a total absence of elephants, teak did grow in the hospitable soil of what was once called His Majesty’s Settlement of Woodcutters on the Bay of Hidalgo. Hard to cut, teak? Damnably hard to cut, teak. But that didn’t mean that they didn’t cut it. Teak. Others said that the timbers were mahogany. Would mahogany have been brought over from the mainland to a “pure mangrove bluff,” as these caves were called? Surely not to make furniture? No. Surely not to build a boat, for example? Nothing surely about it. For building purposes the wood of choice hereabouts had always been pine, the tropical hardwood pine. In fact, it was so choice, that one could not always obtain it. Jack well recalled a local builder of rowboats and skiffs telling him that he had gone looking for boat wood, and, “Wanted pine, you know, mahn: cou’n’t git it. Had to take mahogany,” a sad shake of the head. And, for that matter, he well knew that when Lemuel Cracovius the dentist had built a second house along the Spanish River he had built it out of mahogany, that being at the time cheaper than pine, European market had been depressed; had built the entire cottage out of mahogany, Lemuel: and then he had painted it green. Protective coloration, John, his only explanation.

“Well, it’s well known that wood kept under water or anyway well wet,” said the Honourable, making gestures to his Lady Wife, who delved into her dittybag and came out with a pipe and a pouch of tobacco and proceeded to fill the pipe as her lord talked on; “will keep very much better than wood which is seasoned dry. So it was no surprise that the timbers gave every evidence of being very old. the axe-marks and adze-marks had not been made by any modern tools, they saw that at once. Thank you, my dear.” He put the filled pipe between his teeth while she struck a large wooden “Swede’s match,” as they were locally called (on the Prairies they were called — farmer matches”; merely proves that there were a lot of Swedes farming on the Prairies; nothing new about that) and a puff of smoke from a pipe tobacco which had never been cured or blended by the Indians (whose slash-and-burn farmings were industriously ruining the slopes of the Mayan Mountains) filled the room with its delicious scent.

And they had puzzled over the timbers, their shapes and purpose, and in a few moments realized what they were. Puff. Puff. Puff.

And the warm wind seemed to echo: puff. puff. puff.

“And what were they?” Felix could not wait, needs must ask.

“Don’t know if you’ve ever wondered, puff,” the Honourable Minister said, “what the right name of this caye is, puff, puff.”

“Never gave it a thought,” she said, mendaciously. “Gal something, isn’t it?”

How those lovely lips could lie! — Jack’s admiring thought.

The clouds of Three Grommets Cut Shag, or was it Lord Tweedweevil’s Prime Shaved Plug, filled the room. ‘“Gal something,’ just so. Galliards, Gallards, Gallants, Galleons, Gal-this and Gal-that. Eh? What, Mr. Brant? ‘Gal Cut and Run?’ Ah, but that is on the Old Belinda River. Well, not to make a very long matter of it, puff’ puff; the timbers fitted very neatly into an old engine of execution, that is to say, a gibbet, or in other words, a

And Jack and Felix in one gust of breath cried out, “Gallows!."

The matter of why the Gal had Cut and Run, fascinating though it probably was, and for that matter who the Gal was, must needs wait another occasion, as Sheherazade doubtless told the sultan as he sipped his cup of cawwa tinged with ambergrise through his musky-scented moustache. Uncle George realized at once that this was Gallows Caye and that the timbers were those of the gallows, and nought else. They thought of burning them, but they were too damp. So they just reburied them again until they could think of something else, because naturally they didn’t wish the story to get out (“Naturally!”) or the workmen would have downed tools at once. And no one would have stopped at the hotel. And in fact the work on the building scheme alas went no further because the Slump, the Depression, you know, simply destroyed the foreign mahogany market and eventually the caye was sold for half the purchase price to Merchant Henricus Deak who didn’t really want it and did nothing with it whatsoever, and after he died I believe it was the Grasshopper Bank in London paid the taxes for oh donkey’s years. Then came forth from over the seas Major John Deak, formerly Judge Deak: nephew, isn’t he?”

“Cousin,” said Stickney Forster. Briefly.

Briefly. And everyone had time to think thoughts. Puff. puff. puff… — How long did or had the gallows tree remained there? “Too long by far. Timber’s always been cheap here. too cheap, you know. and it was even cheaper back then. No reason to dismantle the damned engine,” he used the word in an archaic meaning without hesitation but not without emphasis; “and bring the baulks and beams back, bring them anywhere for that matter — there was after all another gallows in King Town — so here it stayed, tainting the very sky, as you might say, till down they fell. Did anyone topple them? I doubt it. Probably tumbled down in some strong wind, a wind of long fetch. not one of hurricane strength, else the pieces would’ve been flung afar. ”

The few pieces of exotic furniture, a painting showing a jungle scene, similar to but not the same as the local “bush,” brassware and other foreign finery, scarcely filled or disguised the bareness of the room; and through the open doors on each side the breeze blew fitfully but without interruption for very long. Sounds of gaiety accompanied at times by the tunes from Alex Brant’s gramophone, snatches of loud amused conversation, came to them in fits and snatches; from time to time the drone of Deak’s monologue into the ears of, by the murmur of an occasional comment, good-natured Neville. Felix asked, “But what do you mean, ‘another gallows in King Town’? If there was one there, why did they have another one here?”

Ah, said the Honourable (with a wave of the by now puffed-out pipe), ah, that was another story. “My uncle George became interested in the matter and he copied an account of it out of some annal or archive and I made a copy of his copy and I placed it in that book, the yellow one there on the shelf between the Bible and the Dictionary, which I lent to Major Deak with the intention that he should read it as a sort of preparation of the, well, ha ha, no, not for the Gospel; you know Eusebius, do you “Somerset!" “Mmm, yes, my dear; preparation for knowing the background of the — but I suppose he hasn’t read it, eh?”

“He hasn’t read it.” — Stickney Forster. Still brief.

“Mm. Well, I thought the book might anyway interest him, like most men I assume that if a book interests me, it must interest others, and — “

Jack knew exactly what the man meant, and, knowing that the man spent very long hours trying to prepare such arid items as A BILL to ascertain that the SEWERS and DRAINS of the Municipality of KING TOWN, as set forth in Sanitary Act 3317, Schedule B, Article 6C of the 18th April, 1959, be hereby AMENDED, as follows', so that the National Assembly might prevent being up to its nostrils in SLUDGE: whereas the Members of the Assembly would much, much rather have been adopting resolutions condemning the Repressive Regime of Zambazunga — or, better yet, voting to adjourn early to see the Middle Schools cricket game; Jack, knowing this, felt a burst of sympathy for the Honourable Minister for Government’s rambling away on other subjects. “What book is that, Sir?” he asked.

“It is a copy of the Planter’s Annual for 1810.”

It was absolutely astonishing how all at once Jack’s eyes and Felix’s eyes were locked into each other’s gaze; and in hers he read with alas all too absolute certainty the charge that by knowing that May was fascinated by that series of historical volumes he was somehow convicted of being privy to some passion between May and himself — a passion of which he knew himself utterly innocent. He had never given May any more than a cousinly kiss; May was sweet in her own dry, acerbic way; her face was a plate of pudding with just enough nose to hold her eye-glasses up, and her blouse concealed no more curves than would hospit a pair of doorknobs; all this was beside the point, the point being that (a) he had perhaps gat Felix with child when she would probably rather not be gat, and (b) at a time when he had a felonious intuition of May’s preferred taste in historical reading matter. Surely Queen Elizabeth, the High and Mighty Prince, Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII, “that vile monster,” as Who? had called him, would have sent any man to The Tower on just such a charge. And Felicia Ann Fox, the sole true love of John Lutwidge Limekiller’s life and perhaps the bearer of his baby beneath her beating heart was now staring at him with a blazing gaze which seemed to accuse him of every crime and conceivable offense from masturbation to simony: and defying him to have any expression upon his face or even to drop his eyes.

“If it weren’t for the breeze I couldn’t tolerate being out here,” said the Honourable Mrs.; “and I don’t much like the breeze.”

***

Now was heard from a different quarter a puffing and a huffing which was neither the offending breeze nor the Honourable’s pipe. Major Deak was slowly lifting his large tortoise’s body up the shallow steps from the sand-filled yard to the house, with nice Neville at one elbow. and horrid dreams,” the Major was saying, between gasps. “Thought I was choking or strangling. but doctor finds no sign of asthma or emphysema. can’t live here,” he sank into the chair which Jack vacated, “and can’t live elsewhere.” He paid no attention as Felix, who had taken the yellow book from its shelf, proceeded to drop it, fumbled picking it off the floor, quite twisting herself around, got it at last, replaced it. “For Christ’s sake pour me a drink, Stickney. ”

Limekiller, glad to be free of that freezing gaze, bent over the bottles. “Whiskey, Major?” he asked, solicitously. “Water? Soda?” There was no ice.

For the first time Deak gave him the benefit of his attention. “Whiskey?” he demanded. “ Whiskey? Before the sunset gun? Certainly not. Gin and tonic, Stickney.” Limekiller, fairly crushed, yielded his place at the bar.

Squatting peacefully in the shade as she smoked her pipe, a middle-aged Arawack woman had given Jack a brief nod; he supposed she was the housekeeper. The floor here must have certainly been swept, for the Arawack were notoriously vigorous sweepers; but sand had been tracked inside, and the breeze, that same breeze which had been so reluctant to waft the Saccharissa along with any speed at all, now blew the sand in little swirls and eddies. “I’d thought to retire here,” Major Deak, perhaps none the better for his deep sip of Mother’s Ruin (and perhaps none the worse: he did not, somehow, have the look of a drinkard), continued his plaint. “Thought to put up a house and several cottages, take in a few congenial paying guests. The only solid place on the caye is under this house, this half-built house. Got to pave the rest of the place, in effect, clear off the mangrove, which I can’t even sell, market for tanbark is sated, not to say cloyed; clear off the mangrove, box in the bog and fill it with sand like a kiddies’ sand box. half the time when we've dumped I don’t know how many boatloads of sand, I find that the plot wasn’t boxed in at all, and the sand just slips away. ‘Cottages’? Can’t even seem to get this house finished, let alone cottages. Can’t hire proper workmen, they don’t want to work out on the caye, don’t want to stay overnight, they come late and leave early, collect their wages and are gone till they’re spent, demand advances, don’t return to earn them back, steal tools,” the drone went on. Limekiller had little doubt that there was much to complain. Bayfolk would work hard, would work very hard indeed. but they much preferred to work their hard work in King Town, the ancient capital which was London, Paris, Rome, and Jerusalem to them. Away from King Town and its incessant cheerful noise, away from the dram-shops with their convivial tencent glasses of low-proof local rum and local water, away from the chance to lime the passing women and girls, away from the continuous opportunity to break the monotony of labor with a purchase from passing vendors of fried conch-flitter or a handful of peanuts or a cluster of fibrous pocono-boy nuts; away from all this and from the very bumboats gliding along the Foreshore or the canals, the Bavman tended to wilt and to lose interest. All this was nothing new to Jack. Nor did Deak seem at all the type to toil alongside his workmen and cheer them up with a jest or a quip.

And he certainly did not look as though a jest or a quip would cheer him up. At all. And as for his very evident bad health, Jack, in the words of the song, was not a qualified physician and did not want to give the decision. Perhaps the man had picked up one of the multitude of little-known bugs which added to the White Man’s Burden… or for that matter, the Black and Brown. Whoever. Or, if a psychosomatic illness, well, a perforated ulcer, for example, caused by worry, was a hole in the stomach just as much as a hole in the stomach not caused by worry. Or, putting it another way, three and three equals six and so does four plus two equals six and so five and -

“Oh, I works fih Whitemon fih money,” sang someone in the cheerful yard, „ahn I geeves eet to my honey,” and at once Nora or was it Gwendolyn or Eva, cried out in a cheerful shriek, “You naw geeve eet to me!” Much laughter. The singer shouted “What I does geeve you, gyel? Eef you no like eet, senn eet bock!” Much, much laughter.

“Did you have much trouble getting here today?” was Jack’s question to Stickney Forster.

“No. None. We’ve a good little engine in the boat. One of yours, you know, Johnson.”

Perhaps not every boat motor in the waters of “the Colony” was a Johnson-Evinrude, but Johnson, in Hidalgo-English — or anyway, in Bavtalk — was the word for an outboard engine. “Ah, you came by motorboat,” said Jack, nodding.

“Yes. You not? No, I see not. I well remember, on my old boat, sometimes trying to avoid this cave, yet it keeps coming back into sight. And sometimes, try as one will, it seems that one can hardly get here at all: the winds require one to tack back and forth. Well, on certain days. And the old people, de w’old people,”he slipped into Baytalk, not at all in mockery but as though to reinforce his own statement; ""they used to say, those days are the anniversaries of hangings.” Having said this, in a tone slightly that of saying something in confidence, Stickney Forster seemed rather resentful at having said it. He gave a covert look at Major (‘Judge”) Deak. Who had not seemed to hear it, was studying his gin. It was, after all, his gin; was he perhaps recollecting the sign over the cellar in Hogarth’s Gin Lane engraving. Drunk for a penny. Dead drunk for two pence. Clean Straw for nothing.? George IV brand gin cost a deal more than a penny.

But someone else had heard it. Felix removed her water-overmangrove-bark-dark gaze from Limekiller’s eyes (but what have I done? he cried in his heart; she did not seem to have heard it), and turned to — almost on — Stickney Forster. “You still hang people here, then?” she asked.

Stickney Forster seemed, suddenly, or once again, a very model of a model English gentleman. With no trace of the old colonial or modern North American tones which had overlaid his accent previously, he said, “Yes. I’m afraid we do. you know. ”

“Yes. I’m afraid I do know'. But isn’t that a very terrible thing to do?”

As an attorney, either for the Crown or in private practice, he was usually capable of speaking crisply and succinctly. Now? Not. “Hm, well, still, hm, you know, I don’t know,” he said, brushing back the tip of his auburn moustache with the tip of his auburn finger, and sounding almost as if he had determined to burlesque himself. “I don’t know, you know. About that. Not so sure. About that. You know.”

“No,” said Felix, suddenly as calm as the eye of a hurricane. “I don’t know. Explain it to me.”

Stickney concentrated. Cleared his throat. “ Well. You are from The States, I take it.” “You may.” “Well, you see. Now you must be familiar with at least one large city in The States. Hmm. Ah, Chicago. You’ve been in Chicago?” Felix had been in Chicago. “Well. There you are.”

“I am where?”

Clearly she was going to give him no help at all. He made a long, slow motion with his long, slow hand, tawny from the tropic sun. Made up his mind to make his point. “Well. In which place do you feel safer? At night, I mean?”

Felix was hostile. But, whether poor or not, she was honest. “Here,” she said.

He nodded. “Exactly so. And do you know why? Because of Murderers. Beg pardon. But you do let them get away with murder there. Perhaps what you call ‘a good lawyer’ gets them off. If not, what then? Found guilty? Appeal. Appeals. Chap wears the courts out, often. Evidence grows stale. New trial? Witnesses have died. Or grown forgetful. Or reluctant. Chap often walks away free. Or. Guilty? No new trial? ‘Life imprisonment’? Out on the streets in six years. Perhaps does it again.

“You see.

“Here. no.

“Evidence. Testimony. Guilty, Sentenced. Three Weeks later. Dead, you know. Result? Very few murders.” He paused a moment, said, “You see…”

Felix, it was clear, did see. But still didn’t like what she saw. After a moment she murmured, “A twelve-year-old boy for stealing a pearl-handled penknife?”

“Ahh —” Stickney’s groan was deep in his throat. “Terrible. I quite agree. Two hundred years ago. Time when George Washington owned slaves. When free Negroes owned slaves. ”

There was silence. Limekiller stared at the flaccid sea. Then Major Deak’s sick eyes drooped. Blinked. Opened wider. “Freshen your drinks?” he asked. “Freshen mine, Stickney, a good chap.”

More George IV gin (and less tonic) added to his glass, Deak, who had listened absolutely silently to Stickney Forster, now said, with the by now familiar breath-breaks and gasps and sighs, “During my years as District Judge I had to pass sentence of death on between I suppose oh twenty to thirty men. Only one woman.” A voice not his: “Ohhh?" A gasp. His. Then, “Mmm. First she killed her baby because child didn’t look like her husband. Then killed her husband. Too.” A gulp of air.

Outside, someone shouted, “Dahnce, everybody? Dahnce? Dahnce!

The joviality note at once rose high. So did the music. Someone’s familiar voice sang out, “ Oh baby, oh, baby; O Baby: 0h!” Jack wondered if it were Alex Brant. and by Felix’s quick glance out the door, wondered if she were not wondering, too; her glance returned, met his, blazed. Suddenly he thought of National Senator Weston’s remark (at which he had then laughed), “Frahnkly, me dear Jahk, my trouble is that my wife understands me!”

Felix asked, “And was she hanged?”

An inhaustion of gin. Of air. “Of course.”

Silence. Felix asked, in a strained voice, “I don’t suppose you took into account her state of mind —?”

„Oh ves.”

The glass of gin and its minuscule dose of quinine went up. and up. came down. came down. Shimmering. Very slight tinge of blue?

and the Hell she must have been in

“Yes.” The thrust-out, hairless, tortoise-head nodded, twice. “First off, she had taken her great knife to be sharpened. Secondly, she had dug up her jewelry and her husband’s savings and placed it all in her travelling trunk. Then killed them both. And left. Found her waiting for the train, ticket in her hand. Premediteflon. Flight to avoid prosecution. Jury found her guilty. My duty was to pronounce sentence.”

“Which you did.” Eyes smoldering into Jack’s as if he himself had donned the Black Cap over the wig. After accurately guessing her cousin’s taste in reading matter. Well, he eyeballed to her, May’s taste in books is one hell of a lot better than your friend Alex Brant’s taste in music —

“Which,” choke, gasp, “I did.”

Silence. Even, for some reason, the music. The eyeball semaphore informed him what be could do with his opinion.

“Stifling weather all this past week,” said Major/Judge Deak. “Can’t breathe. Doctor says no trace of asthma,” bad sounds in chest; “or of emphysema.” He made Stickney Forster a signal to recharge his glass. Judge Deak’s expenses were exceeding his income. But he drank the best gin.

Somewhat suddenly several of the sitters-in-the-room were gone downstairs, and, as though in a game of Musical Chairs/Going to Jerusalem, several of the dancers-in-the-yard were come upstairs. “Are there rather a lot of sea-turtles around here?” asked English Neville. Deak said he’d seen a few. “Ah, there must have been more than a few in the days of yore,” Neville reckoned; “we found you jolly well wouldn’t believe how many ghastly old turtle-bones just dug up recently and thrown over there in the bog. Burnt, I shouldn’t wonder

“Kept them in a crawl,” the Honourable said.

Noddy: “In a what?"

“A cor-ral in North America. Africa? K-r-a-a-1. We say 'crawl.'"

“Well, I daresay they do. Never heard of a turtle trot, eh? Haw haw!”

“Who kept them in the crawl?”

“Pair of cut-throats, who —”

“Cut-throats? Here on Galleon’s Cave?”

Jack had not remembered seeing the National improbably- named Pony-Boy here before, but here he was: bottle of rum in one hand, bottle of ginger stout (temperance beverage) in the other: And feeling no pain. “Planty of cut-t’roats here on Galliard’s Caye in de w’old days,” he said, clearly pleased to contribute to the general enlightenment. “Live for mont’s on tortle-meat! Galliard, he was ahn Ehnglishmahn, me grahd/a/irfer knew he’m. well. me great grahdfahder.” Immediately, regardless of the shades of antiquity, for Stephenson the explorer had remarked, back in those very davs, that “all the Bavmen are boatmen, and cradled on the water,” Pony-Boy said, ’Jock, as your boat hasn’t got no ox —”

Noddy: “No what?"

„— no ox, no oxilliary engine, just sail; as you hasn’t got none, Jock, meh-be best you be starting bock. Else you gwayne be oet on de wah-tah ahl night.”

What response Limekiller might have given to this unsolicitate advice, with its implication that he was a mere suckling-child where these things were concerned, might or might not soon have been known. But Felix very civilly and very swiftly made her farewells and was gone down the stairs. Leaving Guess Who to follow after. Hastily. Lest she be off, and leave him up to his huckle-bones in the bog. Doomed to live on broiled turtle-meat, and the leavings and drippings of the shandygaff. And the gin.

The need to set the sails and sheets and tackle-in-general to rights relieved either of them from the need to say anything. Certainly a damned good thing. The fading sun would probably serve them well enough until the light tended by Old Captain Barber was visible, and after that sank more-or-less behind them, the lights of King Town would be visible. And even if a mist were to come up (not an impossible thing at this season of the waning year) so that they couldn’t see the nation’s onlyr city: well, they could damned well smell it: the drains of the capital (scarcely above sea-level) were notorious, let the Honourable draft how many Sanitary Ordinances as he would.

By and by, what between steering, pumping, and scanning the horizon, Jack was aware that his temper had gone down to nearly normal. And he looked around to see what Felix was doing. She was being mighty quiet. This was the first real quarrel that they had had, and he hoped that she was not making any plans to scuttle the boat; lo! she was crouching very near to him, and she was shining the flashlight. Was she planning to —? Shucks. The water was so shallow he could almost walk ashore. She wasn’t as tall as he was? Very well. He would carry her on his shoulders; vague thoughts of Saint Christopher.

What was she doing?

She was reading a sheet of paper.

He leaned over. It was a, it was a. well, it was something typed.

Hoping that being the first to speak would not result in a pudding or a cheese or something attached to his nose, he said, “What’s that?

“It fell out of the book. back there.”

“And you just took it?” Whoa, there, Limekiller!

She shifted, shrugged, and swiftly shook her shoulders, as if trying to cast off a touch which he had not applied. “Well, he said it was a copy. So he can easily make another one, and besides Iwanted to finish it without seeming nosy; why are you being so judgmental?”

Iniquity, transgression, and sin. Judge not, that ye —

Limekiller had learned enough to know that he still had much to learn, and so, silently complimenting himself on his wisdom, thought to drop the matter. Only to learn some more, to wit, that when someone wants an argument, really wants it, nothing and nobody is going to prevent it. There is then no Right Way to Handle It. So they had It. Not “Had it Out,” just had it. And he felt miserable. How could love turn to this? And then bv and bv she opened the paper again and they both read it and read it together.

Linzer and Quashee. About that time, one Linzer or Linzen, a Native of Austria and Quashee a Natuve of Guinea, made a Devilish plot to blow up the Poweder Magazine which would worke great loss of Life both Black and White and in the Confusion they rightly expected to follow, it had been their Plot to steal the Gold in the Publick Treasury, which they had reckoned to have opened with a small Blast of Powder simultaneous with the greater and thence they would head for Spanish Waters not doubting but to receive a Welcome after they’d dishonestly profess the Papish Religion. But one or the other attempting to inviegle a Woman of Colour along of them, she having the fear of God before her eyes, divulged the Scheme. Linzer and Quashee were taken tried and sentenced to be hanged. HOWEVER it having come about that the Chapalin’s Wife Mris. Manningtone being at that Time in a delicate Condition and their being no point in the Settlement, scarcely, which was not overlooked from the Chamber in which twas expected she would be confined, Govemour Endderby a most humane and merciful Man, gave orders that contrary to the usual prackticke, Sentence of Execution was not to be carried out in the Settlement but ye Gallowes was erected on Tanbarke Cave as twas then known, on 6th Decern being St. Nicholas Dave. Quashee expressed a degree of Contritione but Linzene with many Oaths and blusterings declared that ‘by G—’ he was glad of the Excursion ‘Yea he had eat many a great green tortle on said Cave and had rather be hanged there where the Sea Winds blew than in any stinking Settlement and regretted Nothing.’ Sentence was carried out and that Part of Tanbarke Caye (the red- brown Mangrave being used for the Purpose of preparing Hydes) has since ben known as Galleowes Point.

Two pennys in the Pund a Bounty on Torbinado Sugar

“Couldn’t spell worth a fiddle-head fern,” he began, hoping that the Black Dog might be sent firmly from their midst by a diagonal change in subject. But it was not to be. Her look was no friendly one. It was still the slightly sidewise gaze of an accountant who wishes to make clear that although he has yet to lodge an Information with the police he has by jove become fully aware of the attempt to queer the books; “You are sailing under a curse aren’t you?” — and what, demanded the Look, had he done which deserved it? he must have done something to deserve it, said the Look; sacked a cathedral, or what? and what did he plan to do to undeserve it? malignantly involving her, said the Look —

“What do you mean? What curse? Why just me?”

Protests of innocence would get him nowhere, said the Look. “It’s just one weird thing after another with you, isn’t it? Was one of your ancestors a hanging judge, too?” And she cited and related to him other of his odd adventures which he had. with some hesitation. related and cited to her, events explicable only by accepting the fantastic and the metaphysical. Events which had happened here within the compass of this so small yet so astonishing nation: the size of Wales? larger than the Atlantic Province of Prince Edward’s Island, where so many Limekillers were buried within sight and sound and scent and touch of the circumambient sea. - But he would accept no guilt on his own broad shoulders. “That’s the kind of country it is. WTien you’re in a country' that’s still partly in the last century —”

‘“the last century’! Jesus

„— or the century before that, well, that’s what it’s like here. Nobody travels to Harvard or McGill in a dugout and nobody’s car in Ohio ever gets hit by a tapir, but here, here, that’s what it’s like. Here. In North America,” he used it in the Canadian sense of The United States and Canada, “in North America you’ve got smog —”

“I haven’t got smog!” — and so they were at it again. Having it again. “And oh my God that’s what those ‘curtains’ were! Those ‘bundles of rags and that ‘window frame’ as I thought they were! It was a gallows and it was those bodies hanging on it until they rotted and fell down! Oh Christ pity women,” she moaned.

And there in the dying day, with the curls of white foam, the perilous seas of faerie lands forlorn, and the emerging stars, and a line of fading light to the west above the Mayan Mountains, he was astonished and vexed and perplexed and pleased and all the rest of it: was he to be a father? Good! “- but I thought you said you’d decided you weren’t pregnant.”

And she: “Oh I don’t mean me. I don’t mean me. I mean that poor woman in the old paper. That chaplain’s wife. Life within her, life inside of her, because that damn dumbell dominus vobiscum man of hers couldn’t get it together to pull out in time, life inside of her and then from any window she could look out of, all she could see was death. A child hanging inside of her from a cord, and anywhere she looked, what were they getting ready to do, why hang some other woman’s child by cords. Ropes, lines,” she gestured to those on the boat; “goddamn you all, goddamn it all, all of it

A new noise out of the sea, a hum and a buzz, and new lights out of the sea: Noddy’s motor-cruiser, or Alex’s, and the faint sounds of music and laughter; she lifted the flashlight and waved it and shouted; he made to seize it more in astonishment than anything else, shouted What was she doing? and she made to strike him with it and then she just as suddenly flung it down and ran a few steps and leaned against the side; he could hear her heavybreathing. She was sorry, she was not sorry, she wept, she did not weep.

The new noises and new lights faded and were merged into the sea again. A new star rose up from the sea, wavered an instant, then it swung slightly to and fro. Then it was still and hung steady in the firmament. Captain Barber’s light. Limekiller adjusted his perceptions. Nodded. Swung the helm just a bit to port.

Having adjusted the inadvertancies of the boat, he thought, he still thought, still he thought he might, readjust the inadvertancies of their lives. their life… In a low and calm voice, he said, “Well, we don’t like it, but we don’t have to like it, that the wind almost didn’t take us there. It’s the anniversary of some grim event, but it’s also the anniversary of St. Nicholas Day, and he is the patron saint of sailors. So the wind wasn’t very willing, but it took us there, and now it’s more willing and it’s taking us back.” Another and a farther and a fainter star skimmed over the sea further out: another of the motor-craft bringing the guests back to port: Alex Brant? Stickney Porster? and who else? Didn’t matter. He saw that she saw- it. “And, anyway, now we’ve got the name cleared up. We don’t like the name? Not Gallants, not Galliards, not Galleon’s. So it’s Gallows Cave. At least now- we know. Now we know, eh. Maybe that ghastly tree does fill the air there with its. whatever they are. Whatever it is. Vibrations? ‘Vibes’? Emanations?” He did not say, but he thought, and he thought that she thought so too: affecting the very winds to drop, to slow, and to delay, one’s arrival. The winds had no power over the power boats? So be it. The twentieth century moved on, moved on; dissipating what once had been projected: the infinite reluctancy of those ancient criminals and their prayers not to get quickly to their destination. For St. Nicholas was the bringer and giver of gifts. It was grotesque, was it, to recall that St. Nicholas became Santa Claus? Life was often grotesque. And death, too.

Small wonder the large severalty of names: any variation of the basic one. Galleon Cave. Gallon Cave. Galliards. Gallants. Had he not even heard Callous Caye?. for stealing a puncheon of rum, to be hanged by the neck until dead… for striking his superior officer, to be hanged by the neck until dead. for selling plated silver as sterling. for breaking and entering. for arson… to be hanged by the neck until dead. They must, it would seem, have felt incalculably sure of themselves to pass and carry out such sentences for such crimes. And vet it seemed thev felt what Anthonv a Wood called a Great Reluctancy to name the plot of bog and sog where the carrying-out took place, and call it by its rightful, awful name. To call it by its dirty name.

Callous indeed.

But not that callous.

The wind blew better, coming in. But. somehow. the cracked boom no longer sang to them.

Felix (from “Felicia,” happiness), Felix didn’t speak. That is, she didn’t speak words. But a tiny figure moved from who knows where, from the cubby-hole, probably; and uttered a tiny voice. Skippy. The little cat. And she picked it up, and she crooned a sound to it as she cuddled it and bent her head over it. And he realized that it had originally been his cat and comrade alone, that it had shared its master and captain with her; that she could not fail to recall these things herself. Skippy had been a part of him longer than she had. And she held it. And she sang a small wordless song to it.

Off to starboard in the very last light he saw a waterspout, rather like a sketchy impression of a brontosaur with a long twisty neck coming out of the water. Two things were essential to create a spout: for one, you had to have the funnel-shaped vortex of wind; and for another, you had to have the ever-yielding ocean, drowner of men. Neither one could do it alone. Was this a metaphor for his own life down here? Seemingly so calm, his own persona, sometimes calm to the point of indolence, was there nevertheless something latent within him which roused up the elements and elementals of this seemingly placid little nation, itself apparently calm to the point of indolence: so that when the two of them came together, heaven and earth and fire and water were tom apart and reassembled to form shapes unheard of? The, whatever it was, call it the national collective unconscious, may have lain inert until he came upon the scene: a national undersoul awaiting his own catalytic presence? An ambience composed of history, the jungle, the ocean and the night: long subdued. and long awaiting… Was that it? Could that be true? that the explanation? Of course, as an explanation, it was incredible.

But what credible explanation was there?

The seemingly sweet and placid pre-Columbian Indians, touring the antique waters of the not-yet Spanish Main in their long dugout canoes with their long cane bows: arriving on these coral strands to sack and burn, enslave the children and the women, and then eat the men in their great victorious cannibal feasts (cannibal, carribal, caribee, Caribbean). then the Spanish swineherds, pious killers of Moors, suddenly becoming overseas conquista- dores and viceroys, destroyers of enemy. the French fishermen converted into buccaneers. the English merchant adventurers and woodcutters transformed to pirates and warriors. Black folk caught and enslaved by other Black folk and sold like codfish in the African markets to strange White folk who carried them over the seas to till the soil and clear the forests. Red men enslaved by Red men, White men enslaved by White men and sent over the wild wastes of seas for the crimes of having supported King Charles or King Monmouth. Cannibal fires, galleons plundered and burned, stinking sullied slaveships each one leaving at least one burning village behind; and the forge fires which heated the shackles. Colonial wars and slave rebellions, Indians massacring Black folk and White, Whites and Blacks massacring Indians; American spilling American blood because of dynastic wars initiated in Europe. And then the fearful rites of Hurican, Quetzalcoatl, and Setebos, overlaid with Old World witchcraft and with ju-ju and obeah, and wax mommets thrust through with thorns, and the voodoo dolls, and the unclean spirits conjured up and given forms and escaped into the woods, there lying latent until -

— until there came down from the oft-times frozen North the very quick corpus of one John Lutwidge Limekiller, from the wild lands of hungry Wendigo: and the Beothuck and Micmac and Huron, torturing their own captives until themselves dead of musket-balls and brandy rum and small-pox -

Was it that he carried with him a pressure like an aura which none might see but which nevertheless and at once and from time to time in its times and seasons swooped down, turning and twisting and sucking up the sea of superstition to form some (so to speak) waterspout, capable nonetheless of killing and of laying waste? Did he, had he, not alone once, but again and again, turned the latent lewdness of ancient times into psychopomps and psychodramas to be played out again and again in the present?

Was he, although as unwilling as any hunchback with his immovable hunch, a wizard with his own immovable wizardry?

Did he, like some old Italian “thrower of evil eye,” cast infection by his very glance?

It was a fearful summing-up for him to make, and while making it, and speaking it, he stared intently at Felix: and intently she stared back. And, when at the ending of his summation he stumbled into excuses, “I can’t help it, I can’t help any of it, I just —”

“I know,” she said, ‘you ‘just work here.’ Isn’t that what the hangman says? No wonder your friends the Nationals prefer hempen rope; tend to your helm” she flung at him, fiercely, as he moved toward her. “Typhoid Mary couldn’t help it, either'.” a breath she took; then: “Sorcerer!.” and “Sorcerer!.”

The sails luffed, crack! crack! The bow-wave curled around the prow, shedding phosphorescence as a plow sheds loam. “If I am a sorcerer,” he said, slowly (slowly! for this was quite a new conception) — and Felix: “If’ — scornful, almost: if the woman with child can be almost pregnant. “If l am a sorcerer,” he repeated, now white-hot with emotion, “then you are my familiar!.”

It hit her, he saw on her stricken face the apprehension that it just might be true. Then she turned away.

Winds of good fetch or not, it was hours before they came into port into that small port and ancient haven there on the barm and marge of the Carib Sea: For the world is wondrous large — Seven Seas from marge to marge — Lights reflected and shimmered. Music sounded, not the music of any classic instruments, indeed (It is sweet to dance to music, when love and life are fair./ To dance to lutes, to dance to flutes, is delicate and rare./But it is not sweet, with nimble feet, to dance upon the air.); the instruments were raw and the music raucous; the Holiday season had begun, and from St. Nicholas Day on the 6th of December to the Day of Epiphany on January 6th, Holiday would hold sway in a Saturday night that was one month long. To and fro, to and fro, the people: they did not, indeed, talk of Michelangelo, their talk was of the New Year’s new linoleum and of the Christmas turkey and the Christmas ham: of the presence of these traditional favors. Or of their absence. And of the chaparitas and the pint and, if one were especially fortunate, of the quarts and the “galleon” jugs of festive, festive rum. The vendors were setting out the fresh cabbages and the boxes of fresh apples, be sure most of them were ruddv and sweet-scented and (Limekiller knew) Canadian. The shops had set out the currants and the scented glazed citron rinds both alike from the Isles of Greece, and the raisins and the nutmeats from manywhere and the brandy and the cashew wine: to start the making and the baking of many and many a holiday fruitcake. Peppery cowfoot soup was cooking odorously in cauldrons. Millions of mosquitoes whined and hummed, but the Nationals, dismissing these as mere flies, danced around as though there was nothing in the warm night air anything like a vexation or a bother.

And those who had none of these material things (save the flies) and not even any hopes of them? What joy had they of the season? They had the inalienable joys of watching and mingling with those who did have, they would baste their scant bread in the rich smoke of the others’ cook-fires. And would pay with the sounds of their inextinguishable laughter, like the ringing of many rich coins. And they had the infinite joys of song. St. Nicholas did not leave them with nought.

Jack and Felix took down the sail. The sails. The mainsail and the jib. Coasted a ways. Then put over to where their pole, their pole, still hospitted their skiff. Indeed, she said it: There’s our pole and skiff.

A spirit touched his lips with a glowing coal. Enough of Oscar and of Rudyard and Tom. “Rowing in Eden./ Ah, the sea!/ That I might moor myself/ In thee.” She whirled around (Felix), her face demanding immediate knowledge of Who? “Emily Dickinson,” said he. Added, “Critics assure us that of course she had no idea — virginal Emily? — that it might be a metaphor of —”

She said, verv, very rapidly, “Believe that, you’ll believe anything;” said it with emphasis. and without emotion. whirled around and jumped onto the stone coping of Corn Meal Wharf. And was off into the throng. A moment he thought of striding after her, did not. A moment he thought of shouting. something. Did not. Watched and observed that she was not heading toward the Swinging Bridge over the Old Belinda River which bisected King Town, and therefore not toward any of the large hotels with their wicked bars; he observed that she almost at once flitted into Spyglass Alley. And was gone. For a scant fraction of a second he thought she might be making for the Spy Glass itself: a liquor booth, but respectable enough that ah ’oman might enter without total loss of respect or reputation: but almost at once he knew better.

“Tidings of gret jye, Coptain,” a soft, soft voice wished him. He looked down and saw it was the half-hydrocephalic little cripple called, God knows why, Baron Benjamin. (Nicknames in British Hidalgo were a subject on which a thesis might be written: easy enough to say why a certain gaunt, pale missioner was called Holy Ghost and why a certain rough-skinned merchant was known as Mawmee Opple. but why was a certain clerk called “Mr. Mottram” to his face but otherwise referred to as Noncy-hahv-ah-behby-in-de-high grahss? go know.) “I am begging for my charity,” said Baron Benjamin. Limekiller reached into his pocket and found there a coin of two shillings, a fifty cent piece, still here if nowhere else called a florin; gave it to him, and, with a gesture, said, “Keep [meaning, guard] the boat;” and was off. Never so bad a boy or even so brazen a thief would risk the little Baron’s displeasure: “Me no want heem to give me ah bull-eye, mahn!”

Spy Glass Alley was not very long, and its end was quite ended by a great wooden barn of a building, the property of an ancient endowment and popularly called The Hall. Over its wide-open doors was a weathered sign reading, Society for the Promotion of Christian Evangelism, in large letters. Under this, in only slightly smaller ones: Make ye a joyful noise unto the Lord. To one side on a blackboard was chalked in colored chalk, St. Nich Day Dance Join the Funs. Limekiller heard the joyful noise, thought he might as well join: anyway, this was where Lelix must have gone. It was as good a where to go as any, and better than many.

Also about to enter were a man and a woman. Jack politely stepped aside; it was Neville. And Nicholine. Their faces, which had been fairly appropriate for Making a Joyful Noise, drew formally downcast as they recognized him. “Bad show, eh?” said Neville.

“Poor mahn,” said Nicholine.

“Who? What? eh?”

“Major Deak, you know.”

“What do you mean?” Was Neville going to mention the sad decay, the rapidly increasing ageable quality, the illness, the —?

“Ah, you’ve not heard.” Nicholine’s face grew rather cheerful at being arm-in-arm with a bearer of sad tidings. Neville took a deep breath. “Well, he’d said goodbye to Stickney Forster and me and Nicky, and as we were leaving, you know, we saw him start up the steps, and we turned away to stow our gear, you know, in the boat. And we heard him give this ghastly cry. And down he fell! We dashed up directly, but it was clear that he was quite dead.”

Jack at once said, “Heart attack.”

Neville pulled his nose. It was a long and very English-looking nose. “Don’t know about that, old boy. Praps. Been no autopsy. Yet. Broke his neck. Hmm. Quite obvious, angle which. yes. Dead.

“You know…”

And, laying their hands upon him, they passed on into The Hall with him.

Who was in there? Felix, of course. And Alex Brant. Dancing. don’t you know. Jack didn’t mind this anymore than he would have minded an ice-pick up his sphincter. Alex was his friend. Wasn’t he. And anyway Felix didn’t look as though she were terribly intensely enjoying it. Although neither did she look as though it hurt. Why shouldn’t she be dancing with, well, anybody? No reason at all. Though of course Alex was not anybody. He was a lecherous, treacherous son of a bitch. He was probably, among men, his, John Lutwidge Limekiller’s, best friend. Who immediately recalled Clair Hoffman’s definition, worthy of Ambrose Bierce, of Cuckold as Someone whose best friend has it in for him. Immediately after that at once noted and noticed the really impressive number of really charming women, ivory to ebony, who clearly did not equate the Promotion of Christian Evangelism with the wearing of a chastity belt: way they looked at him. Why not? He was certainly lookable, wasn’t he. What said Solomon the King? Rejoice, young man, in the days of thy youth, ere the evil days draw nigh. Was what. At that moment the music stopped. And as he began to look around with more precision, a voice which well he knew in British Hidalgo, and who did not? was heard speaking in a not unpleasantly penetrating tone.

Someone who was supposed to be everywhere at once (but had not been, Jack now realized, at Gallows Cave. and no wonder that for almost two hundred years folk had been somehow reluctant to call it by its necessary but nasty name; had called it’ by any other name sounding enough like it to identify it): “Ah, Mr. Jack Limekiller and where is your lovely lady, ah there you are me dear Mrs. Felix, hello me dear Alex! I can only stop a moment as I am due at a Convocation of the Grand Lodge of the Wise Men of Wales of which I am Titular Grand Wise Man —”

“Yes, Chief Minister.”

“Yes, Chief Minister.”

The familiar night tumult of the port city was all around, increased by the place and the occasion, but the Honourable Llewellyn Gonzaga McBride’s voice, though not particularly loud, was a voice which carried well (and, Gad! it better!). “— but I have just come down from Benbow Bight, where I was being hospitted by the White Creoles at Woodcutters’ Cove, and there I heard for the first time what I am sure must be an old folk song, Mr. Thomas Hardy cites it in one of his stories and I am sure you will be interested to hear it — ’’Jack was not sure he shared that surety, but the Queen’s Chief Minister in British Hidalgo had already raised his voice (somewhere in between tenor and baritone, and if musicologists had no term for it, so much the worse for them) in song: one listened.

Oh me trade it is a qveer vun,

Simple sailors all,

Me trade it is a soight to see!

For me customers Oi toi And Oi svings 'em up on hoigh,

And Oi vafts ‘em to afar countrie-ee-ee!

And Oi vafts ‘em to afar coun-trie!

The Black Bayfolk paused and laughed and called out to hear their clear tan leader singing in perfect imitation of the archaic accent of the White Creoles; called for more, More! but L. G. McBride, saying something about “a rather grim and grisly humor, eh?” with a wave of his hand and a smile passed on. Alex Brant also smiled at Limekiller, his rather thin, cool smile was neither friendly nor defiant, but seemed ready to be either. Limekiller looked at Felix and Felix looked at him. Her look. and it was a long, long look. was really neither grim nor grisly, neither defiant nor friendly; what was it then? he had never seen it nor anything like it until just these few hours: once again: it contained emphasis but emphasis of what? It was not familiar, this look, but he felt that he was going to have to become familiar with seeing it again. And perhaps again and again.

For, without having been swung up on high he had indeed been wafted to a far countrie, a very, very far countrie indeed. He had yet to learn exactly where it was.

But wherever it was, it was verv far from Eden.