Front matter

By

ERIC WALROND

New York

BONI & LIVERIGHT

1926

COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY

BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

To

Casper Holstein

CONTENTS

PAGE

1. Drought 11

2. Panama Gold 35

3. The Yellow One 61

4. The Wharf Rats 89

5. The Palm Porch 117

6. Subjection 139

7. The Black Pin 161

8. The White Snake 185

9. The Vampire Bat 211

10. Tropic Death 237

DROUGHT

TROPIC DEATH

DROUGHT[1]

I

The whistle blew for eleven o'clock. Throats parched, grim, sun-crazed blacks cutting stone on the white burning hillside dropped with a clang the hot, dust-powdered drills and flew up over the rugged edges of the horizon to descent into a dry, waterless gut. Hunger—pricks at stomachs inured to brackish coffee and cassava pone—pressed on folk, joyful as rabbits in a grassy ravine, wrenching themselves free of the lure of the white earth. Helter-skelter dark, brilliant, black faces of West Indian peasants moved along, in pain—the stiff tails of blue denim coats, the hobble of chigger-cracked heels, the rhythm of a stride ... dissipating into the sun-stuffed void the radiant forces of the incline.

The broad road—a boon to constables moping through the dusk or on hot, bright mornings plowing up the thick, adhesive marl on some seasonal chore, was distinguished by a black, animate dot upon it.

It was Coggins Rum. On the way down he had stopped for a tot—zigaboo word for tin cup—of water by the rock engine. The driver, a buckra johnny—English white—sat on the waste box scooping with a fork handle the meat out of a young water cocoanut. An old straw hat, black, and its rim saggy by virtue of the moisture of sweating sun-fingers, served as a calabash for a ball of "cookoo"—corn meal, okras and butter stewed—roundly poised in its crown. By the buckra's side, a black girl stood, her lips pursed in an indifferent frown, paralyzed in the intense heat.

Passing by them Coggins' bare feet kicked up a cloud of the white marl dust and the girl shouted, "Mistah Rum, you gwine play de guitah tee nite, no?" Visions of Coggins—the sky a vivid crimson or blackly star-gemmed—on the stone step picking the guitar, picking it "with all his hand...."

Promptly Coggins answered, "Come down and dance de fango fo' Coggins Rum and he are play for you."

Bajan gal don't wash 'ar skin Till de rain come down....

Grumblings. Pitch-black, to the "washed-out" buckra she was more than a bringer of victuals. The buckra's girl. It wasn't Sepia, Georgia, but a backwoods village in Barbadoes. "Didn't you bring me no molasses to pour in the rainwater?" the buckra asked, and the girl, sucking in her mouth, brought an ungovernable eye back to him.

Upon which Coggins, swallowing a hint, kept on his journey—noon-day pilgrimage—through the hot creeping marl.

Scorching—yet Coggins gayly sang:

O! you come with yo' cakes Wit' yo' cakes an' yo' drinks Ev'y collection boy ovah deah!—

An' we go to wah— We shall carry de name, Bajan boys for—evah!

"It are funny," mused Coggins, clearing his throat, "Massa Braffit an' dat chiggah-foot gal...."

He stopped and picked up a fern and pressed the back of it to his shiny ebon cheek. It left a white ferny imprint. Grown up, according to the ethics of the gap, Coggins was yet to it a "queer saht o' man," given to the picking of a guitar, and to cogitations, on the step after dark—indulging in an avowed juvenility.

Drunk with the fury of the sun Coggins carelessly swinging along cast an eye behind him—more of the boys from the quarry—overalled, shoeless, caps whose peaks wiggled on red, sun-red eyes ... the eyes of the black sunburnt folk.

He always cast an eye behind him before he turned off the broad road into the gap.

Flaring up in the sun were the bright new shingles on the Dutch-style cottage of some Antigua folk. Away in a clump of hibiscus was a mansion, the color of bilgy water, owned by two English dowager maidens. In the gap rock-stones shot up—obstacles for donkey carts to wrestle over at dusk. Rain-worms and flies gathered in muddy water platoons beside them.

"Yo' dam vagabond yo'!"

Coggins cursed his big toe. His big toe was blind. Helpless thing ... a blind big toe in broad daylight on a West Indian road gap.

He paused, and gathered up the blind member. "Isn't this a hell of a case fo' yo', sah?" A curve of flesh began to peel from it. Pree-pree-pree. As if it were frying. Frying flesh. The nail jerked out of place, hot, bright blood began to stream from it. Around the spot white marl dust clung in grainy cakes. Now, red, new blood squirted—spread over the whole toe—and the dust became crimson.

Gently easing the toe back to the ground, Coggins avoided the grass sticking up in the road and slowly picked his way to the cabin.

"I stump me toe," he announced, "I stump me toe ... woy ... woy."

"Go bring yo' pappy a tot o' water ... Ada ... quick."

Dusky brown Sissie took the gored member in her lap and began to wipe the blood from it.

"Pappy stump he toe."

"Dem rocks in de gap...."

"Mine ain't got better yet, needer...."

"Hurry up, boy, and bring de lotion."

"Bring me de scissors, an' tek yo' fingers out o' yo' mout' like yo' is starved out! Hey, yo', sah!"

" ... speakin' to you. Big boy lik' yo' suckin' yo' fingers...."

Zip! Onion-colored slip of skin fluttered to the floor. Rattah Grinah, the half-dead dog, cold dribbling from his glassy blue eyes on to his freckled nose, moved inanimately towards it. Fox terrier ... shaggy ... bony ... scarcely able to walk.

"Where is dat Beryl?" Coggins asked, sitting on the floor with one leg over the other, and pouring the salt water over the crimsoning wadding.

"Outside, sah."

"Beryl!"

"Wha' yo' dey?"

"Wha' yo' doin' outside?"

"Answer me, girl!"

" ... Hey, yo' miss, answer yo' pappy!"

"Hard-ears girl! She been eatin' any mo' marl, Sissie?"

"She, Ada?"

"Sho', gal eatin' marl all de haftah-noon...."

Pet, sugar—no more terms of endearment for Beryl. Impatient, Coggins, his big toe stuck up cautiously in the air,—inciting Rattah to indolent curiosity—moved past Sissie, past Ada, past Rufus, to the rear of the cabin.

II

Yesterday, at noon ... a roasting sun smote Coggins. Liquid ... fluid ... drought. Solder. Heat and juice of fruit ... juice of roasting cashews.

It whelmed Coggins. The dry season was at its height. Praying to the Lord to send rain, black peons gathered on the rumps of breadfruit or cherry trees in abject supplication.

Crawling along the road to the gap, Coggins gasped at the consequences of the sun's wretched fury. There, where canes spread over with their dark rich foliage into the dust-laden road, the village dogs, hunting for eggs to suck, fowls to kill, paused amidst the yellow stalks of cork-dry canes to pant, or drop, exhausted, sun-smitten.

The sun had robbed the land of its juice, squeezed it dry. Star apples, sugar apples, husks, transparent on the dry sleepy trees. Savagely prowling through the orchards blackbirds stopped at nothing.... Turtle doves rifled the pods of green peas and purple beans and even the indigestible Brazilian bonavis. Potato vines, yellow as the leaves of autumn, severed from their roots by the pressure of the sun, stood on the ground, the wind's eager prey. Undug, stemless—peanuts, carrots—seeking balm, relief, the caress of a passing wind, shot dead unlustered eyes up through sun-etched cracks in the hard, brittle soil. The sugar corn went to the birds. Ripening prematurely, breadfruits fell swiftly on the hard naked earth, half ripe, good only for fritters.... Fell in spatters ... and the hungry dogs, elbowing the children, lapped up the yellow-mellow fruit.

His sight impaired by the livid sun, Coggins turned hungry eyes to the soil. Empty corn stalks ... blackbirds at work....

Along the water course, bushy palms shading it, frogs gasped for air, their white breasts like fowls, soft and palpitating. The water in the drains sopped up, they sprang at flies, mosquitoes ... wrangled over a mite.

It was a dizzy spectacle and the black peons were praying to God to send rain. Coggins drew back....

Asking God to send rain ... why? Where was the rain? Barreled up there in the clouds? Odd! Invariably, when the ponds and drains and rivers dried up they sank on their knees asking God to pour the water out of the sky.... Odd ... water in the sky....

The sun! It wrung toll of the earth. It had its effect on Coggins. It made the black stone cutter's face blacker. Strong tropic suns make black skins blacker....

At the quarry it became whiter and the color of dark things generally grew darker. Similarly, with white ones—it gave them a whiter hue. Coggins and the quarry. Coggins and the marl. Coggins and the marl road.

Beryl in the marl road. Six years old; possessing a one-piece frock, no hat, no shoes.

Brown Beryl ... the only one of the Rum children who wasn't black as sin. Strange.... Yellow Beryl. It happens that way sometimes. Both Coggins and Sissie were unrelievably black. Still Beryl came a shade lighter. "Dat am nuttin'," Sissie had replied to Coggins' intimately naïve query, "is yo' drunk dat yo' can't fomembah me sistah-in-law what had a white picknee fo' 'ar naygeh man? Yo' don't fomembah, no?" Light-skinned Beryl....

It happens that way sometimes.

Victim of the sun—a bright spot under its singeing mask—Beryl hesitated at Coggins' approach. Her little brown hands flew behind her back.

"Eatin' marl again," Coggins admonished, "eatin' marl again, you little vagabon'!"

Only the day before he had had to chastise her for sifting the stone dust and eating it.

"You're too hard ears," Coggins shouted, slapping her hands, "you're too hard ears."

Coggins turned into the gap for home, dragging her by the hand. He was too angry to speak ... too agitated.

Avoiding the jagged rocks in the gap, Beryl, her little body lost in the crocus bag frock jutting her skinny shoulders, began to cry. A gulping sensation came to Coggins when he saw Beryl crying. When Beryl cried, he felt like crying, too....

But he sternly heaped invective upon her. "Marl'll make yo' sick ... tie up yo' guts, too. Tie up yo' guts like green guavas. Don't eat it, yo' hear, don't eat no mo' marl...."

No sooner had they reached home than Sissie began. "Eatin' marl again, like yo' is starved out," she landed a clout on Beryl's uncombed head. "Go under de bed an' lay down befo' I crack yo' cocoanut...."

Running a house on a dry-rot herring bone, a pint of stale, yellowless corn meal, a few spuds, yet proud, thumping the children around for eating scraps, for eating food cooked by hands other than hers ... Sissie....

"Don't talk to de child like dat, Sissie."

"Oh, go 'long you, always tryin' to prevent me from beatin' them. When she get sick who gwine tend she? Me or you? Man, go 'bout yo' business."

Beryl crawled meekly under the bed. Ada, a bigger girl—fourteen and "ownwayish"—shot a look of composed neutrality at Rufus—a sulky, cry-cry, suck-finger boy nearing twenty—Big Head Rufus.

"Serve she right," Rufus murmured.

"Nobody ain't gwine beat me with a hair-brush. I know dat." One leg on top of the other, Ada, down on the floor, grew impatient at Sissie's languor in preparing the food....

Coggins came in at eleven to dinner. Ada and Rufus did likewise. The rest of the day they spent killing birds with stones fired from slingshots; climbing neighbors' trees in search of birds' nests; going to the old French ruins to dig out, with the puny aid of Rattah Grinah, a stray mongoose or to rob of its prize some canary-catching cat; digging holes in the rocky gap or on the brink of drains and stuffing them with paper and gunpowder stolen from the Rum canister and lighting it with a match. Dynamiting! Picking up hollow pieces of iron pipe, scratching a hole on top of them, towards one end, and ramming them with more gunpowder and stones and brown paper, and with a pyramid of gunpowder moistened with spit for a squib, leveling them at snipes or sparrows. Touch bams.

"Well, Sissie, what yo' got fo' eat to-day?"

"Cookoo, what yo' think Ah are have?"

"Lawd, mo' o' dat corn mash. Mo' o' dat prison gruel. People would t'ink a man is a horse!" ... a restless crossing of scaly, marl-white legs in the corner.

"Any salt fish?"

"Wha' Ah is to get it from?"

"Herrin'?"

"You t'ink I muss be pick up money. Wha' you expect mah to get it from, wit' butter an' lard so dear, an' sugar four cents a pound. Yo' must be expect me to steal."

"Well, I ain't mean no harm...."

"Hey, this man muss be crazy. You forget I ain't workin' ni, yo' forget dat I can't even get water to drink, much mo' grow onions or green peas. Look outside. Look in the yard. Look at the parsley vines."

Formerly things grew under the window or near the tamarind trees, fed by the used water or the swill, yams, potatoes, lettuce....

Going to the door, Coggins paused. A "forty-leg" was working its way into the craw of the last of the Rum hens. "Lahd 'a' massie...." Leaping to the rescue, Coggins slit the hen's craw—undigested corn spilled out—and ground the surfeited centipede underfoot.

"Now we got to eat this," and he strung the bleeding hen up on a nail by the side of the door, out of poor Rattah Grinah's blinking reach....

Unrestrained rejoicing on the floor.

Coggins ate. It was hot—hot food. It fused life into his body. It rammed the dust which had gathered in his throat at the quarry so far down into his stomach that he was unaware of its presence. And to eat food that had butter on it was a luxury. Coggins sucked up every grain of it.

"Hey, Ada."

"Rufus, tek this."

"Where is dat Miss Beryl?"

"Under de bed, m'm."

"Beryl...."

"Yassum...."

Unweeping, Beryl, barely saving her skull, shot up from underneath the bed. Over Ada's obstreperous toes, over Rufus' by the side of Coggins, she had to pass to get the proffered dish.

"Take it quick!"

Saying not a word, Beryl took it and, sliding down beside it, deposited it upon the floor beside Coggins.

"You mustn't eat any more marl, yo' hear?" he turned to her. "It will make yo' belly hard."

"Yes ... pappy."

Throwing eyes up at him—white, shiny, appealing—Beryl guided the food into her mouth. The hand that did the act was still white with the dust of the marl. All up along the elbow. Even around her little mouth the white, telltale marks remained.

Drying the bowl of the last bit of grease, Coggins was completely absorbed in his task. He could hear Sissie scraping the iron pot and trying to fling from the spoon the stiff, overcooked corn meal which had stuck to it. Scraping the pan of its very bottom, Ada and Rufus fought like two mad dogs.

"You, Miss Ada, yo' better don't bore a hole in dat pan, gimme heah!"

"But, Mahmie, I ain't finish."

Picking at her food, Beryl, the dainty one, ate sparingly....

Once a day the Rums ate. At dusk, curve of crimson gold in the sensuous tropic sky, they had tea. English to a degree, it was a rite absurdly regal. Pauperized native blacks clung to the utmost vestiges of the Crown. Too, it was more than a notion for a black cane hole digger to face the turmoil of a hoe or fork or "bill"—zigaboo word for cutlass—on a bare cup of molasses coffee.

III

"Lahd 'a' massie...."

"Wha' a mattah, Coggins?"

"Say something, no!"

"Massie, come hay, an' see de gal picknee."

" ... open yo' mout' no, what's a mattah?"

Coggins flew to the rainwater keg. Knocked the swizzle stick—relic of Sissie's pop manufactures—behind it, tilting over the empty keg.

"Get up, Beryl, get up, wha' a mattah, sick?"

"Lif' she up, pappy."

"Yo' move out o' de way, Mistah Rufus, befo'...."

"Don't, Sissie, don't lick she!"

"Gal playin' sick! Gal only playin' sick, dat what de mattah wit' she. Gal only playin' sick. Get up, yo' miss!"

"God—don't, Sissie, leave she alone."

"Go back, every dam one o' yo', all yo' gwine get in de way."

Beryl, little naked brown legs apart, was flat upon the hard, bare earth. The dog, perhaps, or the echo of some fugitive wind had blown up her little crocus bag dress. It lay like a cocoanut flap-jack on her stomach....

"Bring she inside, Coggins, wait I gwine fix de bed."

Mahogany bed ... West Indian peasants sporting a mahogany bed; canopied with a dusty grimy slice of cheesecloth....

Coggins stood up by the lamp on the wall, looking on at Sissie prying up Beryl's eyelids.

"Open yo' eyes ... open yo' eyes ... betcha the little vagabon' is playin' sick."

Indolently Coggins stirred. A fist shot up—then down. "Move, Sissie, befo' Ah hit yo'." The woman dodged.

"Always wantin' fo' hit me fo' nuttin', like I is any picknee."

" ... anybody hear this woman would think...."

"I ain't gwine stand for it, yes, I ain't gwine...."

"Shut up, yo' old hard-hearted wretch! Shut up befo' I tump yo' down!" ... Swept aside, one arm in a parrying attitude ... backing, backing toward the larder over the lamp....

Coggins peered back at the unbreathing child. A shade of compassion stole over Sissie. "Put dis to 'er nose, Coggins, and see what'll happen." Assafetida, bits of red cloth....

Last year Rufus, the sickliest of the lot, had had the measles and the parish doctor had ordered her to tie a red piece of flannel around his neck....

She stuffed the red flannel into Coggins' hand. "Try dat," she said, and stepped back.

Brow wrinkled in cogitation, Coggins—space cleared for action—denuded the child. "How it ah rise! How 'er belly a go up in de year!"

Bright wood; bright mahogany wood, expertly shellacked and laid out in the sun to dry, not unlike it. Beryl's stomach, a light brown tint, grew bit by bit shiny. It rose; round and bright, higher and higher. They had never seen one so none of them thought of wind filling balloons. Beryl's stomach resembled a wind-filling balloon.

Then—

"She too hard ears," Sissie declared, "she won't lissen to she pappy, she too hard ears."

Dusk came. Country folk, tired, soggy, sleepy, staggering in from "town"—depressed by the market quotations on Bantam cocks—hollowed howdy-do to Coggins, on the stone step, waiting.

Rufus and Ada strangely forgot to go down to the hydrant to bathe their feet. It had been a passion with Coggins. "Nasty feet breed disease," he had said, "you Mistah Rufus, wash yo' foots befo' yo' go to sleep. An' yo', too, Miss Ada, I'm speaking to yo', gal, yo' hear me? Tak' yo' mout' off o' go 'head, befo' Ah box it off...."

Inwardly glad of the escape, Ada and Rufus sat, not by Coggins out on the stone step, but down below the cabin, on the edge of a stone overlooking an empty pond, pitching rocks at the frogs and crickets screaming in the early dusk.

The freckled-face old buckra physician paused before the light and held up something to it....

"Marl ... marl ... dust...."

It came to Coggins in swirls. Autopsy. Noise comes in swirls. Pounding, pounding—dry Indian corn pounding. Ginger. Ginger being pounded in a mortar with a bright, new pestle. Pound, pound. And. Sawing. Butcher shop. Cow foot is sawed that way. Stew—or tough hard steak. Then the drilling—drilling—drilling to a stone cutter's ears! Ox grizzle. Drilling into ox grizzle....

"Too bad, Coggins," the doctor said, "too bad, to lose yo' dawtah...."

In a haze it came to Coggins. Inertia swept over him. He saw the old duffer climb into his buggy, tug at the reins of his sickly old nag and slowly drive down the rocky gap and disappear into the night.

Inside, Sissie, curious, held things up to the light. "Come," she said to Coggins, "and see what 'im take out a' ar. Come an' see de marl...."

And Coggins slowly answered, "Sissie—if yo' know what is good fo' yo'self, you bes' leave dem stones alone."

FOOTNOTES:

PANAMA GOLD

2

PANAMA GOLD

I

The sun was slowly dying. Ella, a switch in her hand, rounded up her chicks. Cocks came proudly in, puffed by poise and conquest; hens, agitated, jealous of their young, clucked in—furious at the disappearance of a one-eyed one caught by the leg and dragged down the hole of a mongoose.

"Yo' go up dere, an' behave yo'self."

Swish, swish, swish.... "Ah know you had to be last, yo' rascal yo' ... jump inside!" Guinea fowl, swifter than a hare, wild as any of the gap's tabbies.

The wind subsided. Butter fish clung to the sky ... fish in the sky ... mullets, gar fish, butter fish. Fish—blue, gold, black, orange—tossing on a sea, floundering around in God's sky. Fishermen at Low'rd set their nets by the twilight visions, mirrored in the sky, of the lore rolling drunk on the sea's bottom. They were dark sea rats streaming out at twilight to embark on some intrepid quest.

She would be alone at dusk, cooking, mixing flour, or tasting broth.... "Why taste it, why? It no fo' me alone?" Yampies, eddoes, plantains....

"De Bajan man him say," Ella smiled, "'plantain an' salt fish me don't want 'um, an' de Mud-head man him say, me wish me had 'um, me wish me had 'um....'" And moisture came to Ella's laughing eyes.

From the plantains to the corn and the flour dumplings.... "One o' dem would knock a man in a cock hat," she observed ... a man ... a man....

All of a sudden a problem arose, "Gahd, I ain't got a bit o' salt in de house. No, sah," she cried frantically, "me can't stand no fresh food—me muss get a pinch o' salt."

II

"Yo' mahmie inside, Capadosia?" Ella paused before the Dalrimple cabin. Even the mangy brindle pup with his ears sticking sickly up row-rowed hoarsely after the spunky downpour of rain.

"I is talkin' to you, girl!"

And Capadosia, still pricking the chigger fester in her thumb, hollowed, "Mahmie!"

"Don't tu'n yo' back 'pon me, girl, befo' I tell yo' mahmie!" Unruly Capadosia!

"Capadosia, what is it?"

"Miss Heath, heah, mum, she want yo'...."

Skimpy-legged Capadosia, the color of a warm chestnut, freckles dominant on her rude, glazed, hard little face.

"Hey, dese chilrun, Lizzie...."

Ella stepped over to Capadosia's mother. "Hey, I ask de gal if she mahmie home an' Lizzie, yo' know what she tell ma, why de little rapscallion tu'n me she back side an' didn't even say ax yo' pardin."

"Come in heah, miss, come in heah an' tu'n round. Ax Miss Heath pardin! Ax she! yo' won't—yo' wretch! Vagabond! Take dat, an' dat, an' dat—shut up, I sez. Shut up, befo' I box ev'y one o' dem teets down yo' t'roat! Didn't I tell yo' not to be rude, shut up, yes—didn't I tell yo' not to be onmannerly to people, dat yo' must respect de neighbors? Like she ain't got no manners! Shut up, I sez, befo' I hamstring yo', yo' little whelp!"

"Dese gal picknees nowadays is 'nouf to send yo' to de madhouse! Hey, but Lizzie, what we gwine do wit' de chilrun, ni? Ev'y day dey is gettin' wussah an' wussah."

"Lord only knows, soulee gal, dat Miss Capadosia, yo' wait till she pappy come home. He gwine beat she fo' true."

Ella drew near the cabin door; near enough to be able to spy, through the blue smoke of Lizzie Dalrimple's cooking, Capadosia cutting her eyes at her and murmuring, "come complainin' 'pon me—de old hag—why she don't go 'n get sheself a man?"

"An' how yo', ni," cried Ella, turning to Lizzie and coloring brightly, "how yo'?"

"Oh, so so, soulee gal, I still got de rheumaticks in me leg."

"Yo' ain't doin' not'ing far-rit, no? Hey, gal yo' ain't frighten, no? Yo' ain't afraid o' de horspitral, no?"

"Come in an' sit down, Ella, an' res' yo'self."

"Don't put yo'self out o' de way, Lizzie, on account o' me. I wus jus' gwine ask yo' to len' me a pinch o' salt when dat gal chile o' yours skin up she behin' at me. A body can't even talk to chilrun nowadays."

"Tell yo' de troot, Ella," Lizzie answered, "I jus' use de las' drop meself to sweeten Christian's coffee. It make he coffee taste good."

"An' how's Christian, soulee?"

"Oh, so so, chile."

"He still at de quarry?"

"Yes, soul."

"Well, I gwine go back down de gap. I lef' de pot boilin'."

"Yes, soulee gal, I jus' shell de bonavis an' put dem in, an' in course de dumplings will tek long fo' swell up."

"Which kahl to mine dat las' ebenin' Christian bring home a bag o' soup crabs from Miss Foulkes, de buckra. She are always givin' him soup meat, or pepper soup, or crab fo' soup, fo' tek' 'way. Howsomevah, dem crabs is so nice, chile, I nevah taste nothin' like dem in all me bawn days."

"We usta catch dem in Low'rd, too—but I don't like dem. Giv' me de belly ache."

"Why yo' don't go up de road an' get a bag o' salt?"

"Up whey?"

"Up at Missah Poyah's shop."

"Missah who?"

"Missah Poyah, no."

"Who 'im are—whey he come from?"

"Palama, soul."

"Palama?"

"Yes."

"An' wha' he doin' heah?"

"He open a shop, soulee."

"Oh, I see."

"Yes, chile, he are a Palama man."

"Well, I must be goin' den," Ella drew the shawl around her shoulders. "I must go see dis-yah Poyah."

"An' oh, Ella, he got one leg—"

"Yo' don't say!"

"Deed he is! Got it cut off on de canal—"

"I gwine 'long now. Got to go back ... leave me pot boilin' ... got to go back an' eat me fresh food."

III

Aftermath—green aftermath.

The gap gave up the scurvy ghost. In balloons of steaming froth, the fog of drought and heat, which had settled over the gap for the entire summer, bore its way over the craggy tips of Low'rd to the red, brewing sea beyond.

Splashes of rain—a swift transfusion. The earth murmured under it; lay tense, groaning, swollen, like a woman in toil, with the burden of its inheritance. Gold and green and yellow things, near-ripe, sent up tall, nodding fronds to trumpet the bursting of the dawn.

Dawn cast a greenish gold over the gap. Over the jagged stones donkey carts slipped, wheels stuck in mud. Men got down to coax their beasts out of the muddy gutter. Gone the dust. Red mud flowed over the land. Red mud—good for beans and potatoes—crawled up the legs of dusky West Indian peasant women, up the hoofs of townbound cattle.

Once more the peewits sang. Strange—the way they found their way back to the tip-top ends of guava or breadfruit or pine. Gobbling turkeys and fowls, fond of their new, egg-crusted young, proudly stepped out of coops, traversing the broad marl highway. Worms swarmed into their paths to be devoured; plenty to go round. Mixed with the rain the marl dust made a hard resilient road.

The wind tossed the lanky guava tree. Scudding popcorn—white, yellow, crimson pink guava buds blew upon the ground. Forwards and backwards the wind tossed the guava tree. It shook buds and blossoms on the ground—moist, unforked, ground—on Ella Heath's lap, in her black, plenteous hair, in the water she was drawing from the well. Guava buds fell in Ella's bucket, and she liked it. They gave flavor to the water. All of nature gave flavor to Ella, wrought a magic color in Ella's life. Green, wavy moss—rhubarb moss—at the bottom of the frog-harboring well, with fern and broad leaf sprawled along its ribs; brought color to the water, gave body flavor to it. Gave the water a tang.

Cast up on a bare half acre of land, Ella came to know the use of green, virgin things. Ore; green ore—spread over the land. Riotously nature peopled the earth about her. In front of her cabin door there was a water course. It was filled with sparrow grass. A wild, mad, hectic green—the green of young sugar canes. Up and down the gap, horses, donkeys, ring-horned goats, on the way to Bridgetown to be raced, tugged at their tethers, crazy to eat up Ella's sparrow grass. It tempted the oxen carting tremulous loads of salty sugar cane grown on the swampy seaside of Barbadoes—tempted sheep, oracular, voiceless, dog-shy sheep bewilderedly on the road to market—tempted hens frizzly with the pip, and leaping, lap-eared dogs.

Ella had come from Low'rd—the Lower Side—that dinky bar of salty black earth jutting out to sea on the easternmost tip of Barbadoes. From Low'rd Ella had brought a donkey cart load of sea crab shells, horns, conchs, rose and orange and crimson hued, and set them in rows between the blazing hibiscus and chrysanthemum along the walk.

Inexhaustible stems of green sprang up around Ella's domain. It'd take five years to mature, but she had planted a cocoanut tree on the northernmost wing of the cabin. Half an acre of land, but it was no trifling stake. Inch by inch green overspread it. Corn, okras, gunga peas, eddoes, tannias, tomatoes—in such a world Ella moved.

As if she were on an immemorial lark, Ella experimented with the green froth of the earth. One day she was grafting a pine and breadfruit. Standing, "jooking" a foreign stalk in—tamarind, star apple, almond—and strapping it into the gummy gash dug into the tree's side.

Similarly, with the pigeons and the ground doves. Pigeons at sunrise on a soap box coop set on top the latrine cooing:

A rooka ta coo A rooka ta coo My wife is just as good as you Good as you Good as you

to sherbet-winged doves on the cabin roof—in spite of Ella's scissors. And rabbits; red-eyed ones, white and shy, Ella'd set in the thick sparrow grass, guarded over by Jit, the dog, to play and frolic. Sometimes, unmoved by their genetic dissimilarity, Ella'd use drastic, aggressive methods....

Sows fared prodigiously at the hands of Ella. She filled huge, fat-stinking troughs of slime for them. Ella's boars grew tusks of flint-like ivory. Vicious, stiff-haired boars who ate up the sow's young, frothed at the mouth at Jit's approach, tried to stick their snouts between Ella's legs whenever she ventured in the pen.

Under Ella's tutelage the one cow she owned streamed milk. From fat luscious udders filled skillet after skillet....

Gay, lonely girl, her bare arms yellow in the blazing February sun, the words of a West Indian madrigal issued from her lips:

Do Mistah Bee don't chase me 'way Fo' de gals nex' do' will laugh at me Break me han' but let me stan' Break me han' but let me stan'....

Ella poured the water in a skillet. Guava buds in the water—honey in guava buds.

All around it was dark. Gravel assailed her feet. A moon worked its way through a welter of thick black clouds to soar untrammeled in the phosphorescent sky. Marl dust assailed Ella's unshod feet.

Under the evergreen big barnacled roots stood up like a mass of sleeping crocodiles—and Ella grew tired, and like blacks on a dark country road at night, began to sing

Do Mistah Bee don't chase me 'way

The broad road led to the world. Beyond Black Rock, beyond St. Michael's to Eagle Hall Corner, and Bridgetown. Along it traders from Low'rd, in landaux and victorias and oxcarts sped to barter sea eggs

Sea egg, sea egg Tittee Ann tan tan!

Evergreen leaves fell swirling through the dusk upon Ella's face. She brushed them away, and into her untutored mind came a legend. "Sh, carrion crow," she cried, "me no dead yet." The evergreen leaves, caressing her face, brought it vividly to her.... "Sh, carrion crow, me no dead yet." An old Dutch Guianese had uttered the ghastly words. Black Portuguese legend.... For sticking his hand in a pork barrel in a Portuguese grocer's shop, a Negro had been caught and whisked off to a dark spot in the woods. His hands had been cut off and he had been buried alive, with only his head sticking out of the ground. That had happened at night. In the morning the crows had come to gouge the eyes out of his head. "Sh, carrion crow, me no dead yet...." Evergreen leaves on Ella's face ... crows swirling around the head of a body buried on the Guiana mound....

"Dis muss be it," Ella murmured.

Up a greasy embankment, one more leap, and Ella paused, breathing hard. Words—male words—vied with the wind for position in her alert consciousness.

Voices—

" ... I mek dem pay me! Deed I dids! Says to dem, 'pay me, or be Christ you'll stan' de consequences!' 'Pay me,' I says, 'or I'll sick de British bulldog on all yo' Omericans!'

"An' dey pay yo' fas' enough, didn' dey?"

"Pay me? Man, yo' should o' see how fas' dey pay me! Pay me fas' enough, indeed! Five hundred pounds! Ev'y blind cent! Man, I wuz ready to sick Nelson heself 'pon dem! At a moment's notice, me an' de council wuz gettin' ready fo ramsack de Isthmus and shoot up de whole blasted locks! Hell wit' de Canal! We wuz gwine blow up de dam, cut down de wireless station, an' breck up de gubment house! If dey didn't pay me fo' my foot!"

"Yo' handle dem fo' true, didn't yo'?"

"Man, don't tahlk! Shut yo' mout'! Handle dem? Dat am not all de troot. I swallow dem up! Swallow dem up like a salipentah! Sha'? Man, let me tell yo' something. I let dem understand quick enough dat I wuz a Englishman and not a bleddy American nigger! A' Englishman—big distinction in dat, Bruing! An' dat dey couldn't do as dey bleddy well please wit' a subject o' de King! Whuh? I carry on like a rattlesnake. Carry on like a true Bimshah! Heah I wuz losin' my foot fo' dem wit' dere bleddy canal an' dey come tellin' me dey wuzn't to blame, dat nobody wuz to blame, dat de engine wuz gwine slow an' dat I wuz musta been layin' down on de job. Hear dem Americans, ni? Layin' down on de job, hear dat, Bruing? And wuzzahmo' dey say dat why I didn't ketch holt o' de cow-katcher an' fling meself outa de way! Wha', man, dah t'ing knock me onconscience! I didn't even know I wuz hit! Dere I wuz oilin' de switch—oilin' de switch an' de nex' t'ing yo' know I wuz in de horspitral at Ancong wit' one foot cut off."

Pipes were being smoked ... stinking tobacco smote Ella. Green tobacco leaves burning in rotting corncob pipes.

Sugar, snuff, codfish, lard oil, sweet oil, corn, rum, kerosene—were the ingredients of one grand symphonic smell.

"Giv' me a bag o' salt an' a package o' senna."

"Are dat yo', Miss Ella?"

"Yes, it am me."

She turned. Perched on an old biscuit barrel was Pettit Bruin, the village idiot, smoking a pipe which exuded an odor of burning cow dung.

"Howdy do, Mistah Bruing, how de worle a treat yo'?"

"Oh, so so, gal."

Ella's eyes deserted the old man to light upon the shopkeeper sticking his black veiny hand in the brine for the salt beef, his back to her. With a stab to the breast, she noted the protrudent tip of the cork leg....

"Anything else, miss?" he asked, the brine dripping from his salt-crusted arm.

"Gahd, he are black in troot," Ella, mulatto Ella observed to herself; then aloud, "bettah giv' me a gill o' bakin' soda, I might wan' to make a cake."

"Look out dey, Poyah," mumbled Bruin, "gwine bring down dat salmon tin 'pon yo' head too."

"Oh dat can't hit me," Poyer replied, lowering the baking powder on the tip of the hook. "I's a man, man."

He faced Ella, piling up the goods on the counter. "I's a man, man," he said, meeting Ella's frosting eyes. "I wuz a brakesman in Palama, don't fomembah dat. I wuz de bes' train hooper on de Isthmus!"

"Count up de bill, quick!" Ella hastened, putting a sixpence on the counter. "It a get dark."

"Frighten fo' duppies?" Poyer said, a suggestion of teasing and mockery in his voice.

Island bugaboo.... "Who, me?" Ella's eyes blazed, "I ain't frighten fo' de livin' much mo' de dead!"

"T'ink I is any cry-cry ooman, t'ink I is any cry-cry ooman—yo' lie!"

On the way back up the gap Ella felt unforgivingly warm in the temples at the very idea of Poyer's thinking she was afraid of ghosts. "Like I is any mamby-pamby ooman, like I ain't usta to takin' care o' meself."

Six days passed. Ella stuck a pig and corned the meat. The sapodillas ripened. Shaddocks—tropical grapefruits—filled donkey cart after donkey cart going through the gap to Eagle Hall Corner. Often as the sun rose showers fell. And then a visitor came—with a peg-step....

It was dark when he came. He was perspiring furiously. He was one of those black men whose faces present an onion-like sheen, and upon whose brow and flabby jaws little fester-bright pimples stand out with a plaguing glitter.

He met Ella by the side of the well, binding up the spurs of a pugnacious game cock.

"I shut up de shop," he said abruptly, "why don't yo' come an' buy from me any mo'?"

"Hey, wha' yo' t'ink o' dat? Wha' wuz I doin' befo' yo' come along? Yo' t'ink I was starvin'? I look like I is starved out? Look at me good! We had plenty shops befo' yo' come along, bo."

"I taught—"

"Wha' yo' are taught? Yo' must be a funny man. Hey, yo' lock up yo' shop fi' come aftah one customah! Dat are a funny business."

"Bruing is dere—besides, it are good business."

"Tell me, how it are good business? Explain yo'self."

"Fo' me it are."

"Me can't see it, sah, furdah mo, I gwine ask yo' fo' excuse me, I got de chicken dem fo' feed."

"Wait—befo' yo' go, Ella—Miss Ella, yo' don't seem fo' hav' no feelings at all fo' de po' wooden foot man."

"Gahd! How yo' mean feelings? Wha' yo' want me fo' do? Hug yo' up?"

"Tek pity...."

"Go 'way from heah I say. Don't come near me. Loose me befo' I go get de cutlass an' chop off yo' udder foot."

"Yo' know yo' won't do dat."

"Is dat so?"

"Yo' know yo' won't...."

"Fo' true?"

"Yo' too kind. Yo' won't—yo' like me—"

"Oh, is dat de saht o' man yo' is, eh?"

"Wha' yo' mean? Tahlk, ooman, what saht o' man is dat?"

"T'ink dat ev'y ooman is de same. But yo' is a dam liar! Nutting can frighten me. All dem bag o' flour yo' 'a' got, an' dem silk shut, an' dem gold teets, an' dem Palama hats, yo' a spote round heah wid—dem don't frighten me. I is a woman what is usta t'ings. I got me hogs an' me fowls an' me potatoes. No wooden foot neygah man can frighten me wit' he clothes or he barrels o' cologne...."

Yellow kerchief mopping his brow, he walked off ... peg step, peg step ... leaving Ella by the well, gazing with defiance in her being.

"What he t'ink I is, anyhow?"

"Go back an' lahn, go back an' lahn, dat not de way fi' cote."

The western sky of Barbadoes was ablaze. A mixture of fire and gold, it burned, and burned—into one vast sulphurous mass. It burned the houses, the trees, the windowpanes. The burnt glass did amazing color somersaults—turned brown and gold and lavender and red. It poured a burning liquid over the gap. It colored the water in the ponds a fierce dull yellowish gold. It flung on the corn and the peas and the star apples a lavender glow. It pitched its golden, flaming, iridescent shadow upon the lush of paw-paw and sunflower. It withered the petals of rose or sweet pea or violet or morning glory. Its flame upon the earth was mighty. Sunset over the gap paralyzed. Sunset shot weird amber tints in the eyes of the black peons ... sent strange poetic dreams through the crinkly heads of mule boys tiredly bowed over the reins of some starved-out buckra cart horse.

Sunset at Ella's—"Go in yo' pen, sah, go in...." Hogs, fowls, pigeons, geese, bastard creations, straggled waywardly in.

Smoke. Smoke is easy to smell. Ella quickly smelt it. Then she began to look for it.... Smoke and the sunset. A smoky sunset. No. The setting sun kept her from seeing it. But slowly it grew dim, dark; slowly the gold burned into a deep rich bronze ... slowly it burned and burned ... black.

"Somebody grass burnin'," Ella sniffed and looked about. The dense night helped. The smoke persisted. "Ah, dere it are." Ella paused, a hen, sick with the yaws, clutched to her bosom.

"Gahd, a cane fire." Vaults of black smoke rose. A winding, spouting pyramid of it. Black, greasy, caneless.

"It must be de church steeple, dem ministers is so careless...." Ella watched, lured by the curving, spouting ascent.

"Miss Heath!" From the gap a voice called. "Fiah, Miss Heath, fiah, Poyah shop on fiah!" One of the Dalrimple children ... speeding down the gap, to the rest of the folks....

"Lahd, 'a' massie!"

The hen suddenly took flight out of Ella's arm, spilling the molasses and corn she had been feeding it. Emptying the bucket containing the relishes of her evening meal, she ran to the well and jerked it down it. Swiftly the bucket was jerked back up. Water splashed. It was a big bucket. With one grand sweep Ella swung it on her head. Ella was a mulatto, with plenty of soft black hair. She didn't need a cloth twisted and plaited to form a matting for her head. Her hair did that; it was thick enough. It could hold, balance a bucket.

The bucket sat on the crown of her head looking as if it had been created there. And Ella sailed on with it. She forgot to put out the fire under her food.

And down the gap she fled, the bucket of water on her head. Her strides were typical of the West Indian peasant woman—free, loose, firm. Zim, zam, zim, zam. Her feet were made to traverse that stony gap. No stones defied her free, lithe approach. Left foot to right hand, right hand to left foot—and Ella swept down with amazing grace and ease. Her toes were broad; they encountered no obstacles. Her feet did not slip. The water did not splash. It was safe, firm, serene on top of her head.

Ella got in the broad road—easier. A sigh escaped her lips. The road was enlivened by one or two people coming up from town—

"Run, dahtah, the shop a bu'n."

"Quick, dem a need it."

It was dry; a little marl dust. Up the stony resilient incline she went, then swiftly down by the evergreen tree.

"Gahd, he is burnt out clean." All around the evergreen tree there used to be shadows. The fire sent gleams of firelight pelting through the dark. The shadows flew. You could have picked up a pin under the evergreen....

Crowds of anxious hill dwellers gathered up the road. From Eagle Hall Corner a constable was coming with the white cork hat, the creaking shoes, the regal swagger of the black constabulary....

It was easy for Ella to strain through the tiny crowd of folk up the embankment.

Fire singed Ella. Smoke dazed her, choked and repelled her.... "Go back dere, go back. You—stand back!"

"Where is Missah Poyah, where is Missah Poyah?" Ella screamed. A straw valise, label spattered—deckers luggage—an old shirt—one or two stray sacks of split peas—the money canister.

Faces; old Bruin, "Where is Missah Poyah?" Ella pursued madly, collaring the weed gourmand. "Where is Missah Poyah?"

"Stand back!" the constable ordered, "stand back, and let 'em bring in de stretcher!"

Old Bruin gave way, talking loudly and excitedly. "He is in dey, yes, he is in dey ... don't push me 'bout.... I tell yo' he is in dey. Yo' must be drunk yo'self."

It was then that Ella realized how for-nothing was her bucket of water.

THE YELLOW ONE

3

THE YELLOW ONE

I

Once catching a glimpse of her, they swooped down like a brood of starving hawks. But it was the girl's first vision of the sea, and the superstitions of a Honduras peasant heritage tightened her grip on the old rusty canister she was dragging with a frantic effort on to the Urubamba's gangplank.

"Le' me help yo', dahtah," said one.

"Go 'way, man, yo' too farrad—'way!"

"'Im did got de fastiness fi' try fi' jump ahead o' me again, but mahn if yo' t'ink yo' gwine duh me outa a meal yo' is a dam pitty liar!"

"Wha' yo' ah try fi' do, leggo!" cried the girl, slapping the nearest one. But the shock of her words was enough to paralyze them.

They were a harum scarum lot, hucksters, ex-cable divers and thugs of the coast, bare-footed, brown-faced, raggedly—drifting from every cave and creek of the Spanish Main.

They withdrew, shocked, uncertain of their ears, staring at her; at her whom the peons of the lagoon idealized as la madurita: the yellow one.

Sensing the hostility, but unable to fathom it, she felt guilty of some untoward act, and guardedly lowered her eyes.

Flushed and hot, she seized the canister by the handle and started resuming the journey. It was heavy. More energy was required to move it than she had bargained on.

In the dilemma rescuing footsteps were heard coming down the gangplank. She was glad to admit she was stumped, and stood back, confronted by one of the crew. He was tall, some six feet and over, and a mestizo like herself. Latin blood bubbled in his veins, and it served at once to establish a ready means of communication between them.

"I'll take it," he said, quietly, "you go aboard—"

"Oh, many thanks," she said, "and do be careful, I've got the baby bottle in there and I wouldn't like to break it." All this in Spanish, a tongue spontaneously springing up between them.

She struggled up the gangplank, dodging a sling drooping tipsily on to the wharf. "Where are the passengers for Kingston station?" she asked.

"Yonder!" he pointed, speeding past her. Amongst a contortion of machinery, cargo, nets and hatch panels he deposited the trunk.

Gazing at his hardy hulk, two emotions seared her. She wanted to be grateful but he wasn't the sort of person she could offer a tip to. And he would readily see through her telling him that Alfred was down the dock changing the money.

But he warmed to her rescue. "Oh, that's all right," he said, quite illogically, "stay here till they close the hatch, then if I am not around, somebody will help you put it where you want it."

Noises beat upon her. Vendors of tropical fruits cluttered the wharf, kept up sensuous cries; stir and clamor and screams rose from every corner of the ship. Men swerved about her, the dock hands, the crew, digging cargo off the pier and spinning it into the yawning hatch.

"Wha' ah lot o' dem," she observed, "an' dem so black and ugly. R—r—!" Her words had the anti-native quality of her Jamaica spouse's, Alfred St. Xavier Mendez.

The hatch swelled, the bos'n closed it, and the siege commenced. "If Ah did got any sense Ah would Ah wait till dem clean way de rope befo' me mek de sailor boy put down de trunk. Howsomevah, de Lawd will provide, an' all me got fi' do is put me trus' in Him till Halfred come."

With startling alacrity, her prayers were answered, for there suddenly appeared a thin moon-faced decker, a coal-black fellow with a red greasy scarf around his neck, his teeth giddy with an ague he had caught in Puerta Tela and which was destined never to leave him. He seized the trunk by one end and helped her hoist it on the hatch. When he had finished, he didn't wait for her trepid words of thanks but flew to the ship's rail, convulsively shaking.

She grew restive. "Wha' dat Halfred, dey, eh," she cried, "wha' a man can pacify time dough, eh?"

The stream of amassing deckers overran the Urubamba's decks. The din of parts being slugged to rights buzzed. An oily strip of canvas screened the hatch. Deckers clamorously crept underneath it.

The sea lay torpid, sizzling. Blue rust flaked off the ship's sides shone upon it. It dazzled you. It was difficult to divine its true color. Sometimes it was so blue it blinded you. Another time it would turn with the cannon roar of the sun, red. Nor was it the red of fire or of youth, of roses or of red tulips. But a sullen, grizzled red. The red of a North Sea rover's icicled beard; the red of a red-headed woman's hair, the red of a red-hot oven. It gave to the water engulfing the ship a dark, copper-colored hue. It left on it jeweled crusts.

A bow-legged old Maroon, with a trunk on his head, explored the deck, smoking a gawky clay pipe of some fiery Jamaica bush and wailing, "Scout bway, scout bway, wha' yo' dey? De old man ah look fa' yo'." The trunk was beardy and fuzzy with the lashes of much-used rope. It was rapidly dusking, and a woman and an amazing brood of children came on. One pulled, screaming, at her skirt, one was astride a hip, another, an unclothed one, tugged enthusiastically at a full, ripened breast. A hoary old black man, in a long black coat, who had taken the Word, no doubt, to the yellow "heathen" of the fever-hot lagoon, shoeless, his hard white crash pants rolled up above his hairy, veiny calves, with a lone yellow pineapple as his sole earthly reward.

A tar-black Jamaica sister, in a gown of some noisy West Indian silk, her face entirely removed by the shadowy girth of a leghorn hat, waltzed grandly up on the deck. The edge of her skirt in one hand, after the manner of the ladies at Wimbledon, in the other a fluttering macaw, she was twittering, "Hawfissah, hawfissah, wear is de hawfissah, he?" Among the battering hordes there were less brusque folk; a native girl,—a flower, a brown flower—was alone, rejecting the opulent offer of a bunk, quietly vowing to pass two nights of sleepful concern until she got to Santiago. And two Costa Rica maidens, white, dainty, resentful and uncommunicative.

He came swaggering at last. La Madurita said, "Wha' yo' been, Halfred, all dis lang time, no?"

"Cho, it wuz de man dem down dey," he replied, "dem keep me back." He gave her the sleeping child, and slipped down to doze on the narrow hatch.

In a mood of selfless bluster he was returning to Kingston. He adored Jamaica. He would go on sprees of work and daring, to the jungles of Changuinola or the Cut at Culebra, but such flights, whether for a duration of one or ten years, were uplifted mainly by the traditional deprivations of Hindu coolies or Polish immigrants—sunless, joyless. Similarly up in Cabello; work, sleep, work; day in and day out for six forest-hewing years. And on Sabbaths a Kentucky evangelist, a red-headed hypochondriac, the murky hue of a British buckra from the beat of the tropic sun, tearfully urged the blacks to embrace the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ before the wrath of Satan engulfed them. Then, one day, on a tramp to Salamanca, a fancy struck him. It stung, was unexpected. He was unused to the sensations it set going. It related to a vision—something he had surreptitiously encountered. Behind a planter's hut he had seen it. He was slowly walking along the street, shaded by a row of plum trees, and there she was, gloriously unaware of him, bathing her feet in ample view of the sky. She was lovely to behold. Her skin was the ripe red gold of the Honduras half-breed. It sent the blood streaming to his head. He paused and wiped the sweat from his face. He looked at her, calculating. Five—six—seven-fifty. Yes, that'd do. With seven hundred and fifty pounds, he'd dazzle the foxy folk of Kingston with the mellow Spanish beauty of her.

In due time, and by ample means, he had been able to bring round the girl's hitherto chumbo-hating folk.

"Him mus' be hungry," she said, gazing intently at the baby's face.

"Cho'," replied Alfred, "leave de picknee alone, le' de gal picknee sleep." He rolled over, face downwards, and folded his arms under his chin. He wore a dirty khaki shirt, made in the States, dark green corduroy pants and big yellow shoes which he seldom took off.

Upright on the trunk, the woman rocked the baby and nursed it. By this time the hatch was overcrowded with deckers.

Down on the dock, oxen were yoked behind wagons of crated bananas. Gnawing on plugs of hard black tobacco and firing reels of spit to every side of them, New Orleans "crackers" swearingly cursed the leisurely lack of native labor. Scaly ragamuffins darted after boxes of stale cheese and crates of sun-sopped iced apples that were dumped in the sea.

II

The dawning sunlight pricked the tarpaulin and fell upon the woman's tired, sleep-sapped face. Enamel clanged and crashed. A sickly, sour-sweet odor pervaded the hatch. The sea was calm, gulls scuttled low, seizing and ecstatically devouring some reckless, sky-drunk sprat.

"Go, no, Halfred," cried the woman, the baby in her arms, "an' beg de backra man fi' giv' yo' a can o' hot water fi' mek de baby tea. Go no?"

He rolled over lazily; his loggish yellow bulk, solid, dispirited. "Cho', de man dem no ha' no hot water, giv' she a lemon, no, she na'h cry." He tossed back again, his chin on his arms, gazing at the glorious procession of the sun.

"Even de man dem, ovah yondah," she cried, gesticulating, "a hold a kangfarance fi' get some hot water. Why yo' don't get up an' go, no man? Me can't handastan' yo', sah."

A conspiration, a pandemonium threatened—the deckers.

"How de bleedy hell dem heckspeck a man fi' trabble tree days an' tree whole a nights beout giv' him any hot watah fi' mek even a can o' tea is somet'ing de hagent at Kingston gwine hay' fi' pint out to me w'en de boat dey lan'—"

"Hey, mistah hawfissah, yo' got any hot watah?"

"Hot watah, mistah?"

"Me will giv' yo' a half pint o' red rum if yo' giv' me a quatty wut' o' hot watah."

"Come, no, man, go get de watah, no?"

"Ripe apples mek me t'row up!"

"Green tamarin' mek me tummack sick!"

"Sahft banana mek me fainty!"

"Fish sweetie giv' me de dysentery."

Craving luscious Havana nights the ship's scullions hid in refuse cans or in grub for the Chinks hot water which they peddled to the miserable deckers.

"Get up, no Halfred, an' go buy some o' de watah," the girl cried, "de baby a cry."

Of late he didn't answer her any more. And it was useless to depend upon him. Frantic at the baby's pawing of the clotted air, at the cold dribbling from its twisted mouth, which turned down a trifle at the ends like Alfred's, she began conjecturing on the use to which a decker could put a cup of the precious liquid. Into it one might pour a gill of goat's milk—a Cuban señora, a decker of several voyages, had fortified herself with a bucket of it—or melt a sprig of peppermint or a lump of clove or a root of ginger. So many tropical things one could do with a cup of hot water.

The child took on the color of its sweltering environs. It refused to be pacified by sugared words. It was hungry and it wished to eat, to feel coursing down its throat something warm and delicious. It kicked out of its mother's hand the toy engine she locomotioned before it. It cried, it ripped with its naked toes a hole in her blouse. It kept up an irrepressible racket.

The child's agony drove her to reckless alternatives. "If you don't go, then I'll go, yo' lazy t'ing," she said, depositing the baby beside him and disappearing down the galley corridor.

Her bare earth-red feet slid on the hot, sizzling deck. The heat came roaring at her. It swirled, enveloping her. It was a dingy corridor and there were pigmy paneled doors every inch along it. It wasn't clear to her whither she was bound; the vaporing heat dizzied things. But the scent of stewing meat and vegetables lured her on. It sent her scudding in and out of barrels of cold storage, mounds of ash debris of an exotic kind. It shot her into dark twining circles of men, talking. They either paused or grew lecherous at her approach. Some of the doors to the crew's quarters were open and as she passed white men'd stick out their heads and call, pull, tug at her. Grimy, ash-stained faces; leprous, flesh-crazed hands. Onward she fled, into the roaring, fuming galley.

Heat. Hearths aglow. Stoves aglow. Dishes clattering. Engines, donkey-engines, wheezing. Bright-faced and flame-haired Swedes and Bristol cockneys cursing. Half-nude figures of bronze and crimson shouting, spearing, mending the noisy fire. The wet, clean, brick-colored deck danced to the rhythm of the ship. Darky waiters—white shirt bosoms—black bow ties—black, braided uniforms—spat entire menus at the blond cooks.

"Slap it on dey, Dutch, don't starve de man."

"Hey, Hubigon, tightenin' up on any mo' hoss flesh to-day?"

"Come on fellahs, let's go—"

"There's my boy Porto Rico again Hubigon, Ah tell yo' he is a sheik, tryin' to git nex' to dat hot yallah mama."

On entering she had turned, agonized and confused, to a lone yellow figure by the port hole.

"Oh, it's you," she exclaimed, and smiled wanly.

He was sourly sweeping dishes, forks, egg-stained things into a mossy wooden basket which he hoisted and dropped into a cesspool of puttering water.

He paused, blinking uncomprehendingly.

"You," she was catching at mementoes, "you remember—you helped me—my trunk—"

"Oh, yes, I remember," he said slowly. He was a Cuban, mix-blooded, soft-haired, and to him, as she stood there, a bare, primitive soul, her beauty and her sex seemed to be in utmost contrast to his mechanical surroundings.

"Can you," she said, in that half-hesitant way of hers, "can you give me some hot watah fo' my baby?"

He was briefly attired; overalls, a dirty, pink singlet. His reddish yellow face, chest and neck shone with the grease and sweat. His face was buttered with it.

"Sure," he replied, seizing an empty date can on the ledge of the port hole and filling it. "Be careful," he cautioned, handing it back to her.

She took it and their eyes meeting, fell.

She started to go, but a burning touch of his hand possessed her.

"Wait," he said, "I almost forgot something." From beneath the machine he exhumed an old moist gold dust box. Inside it he had pummeled, by some ornate instinct, odds and ends—echoes of the breakfast table. He gave the box to her, saying, "If any one should ask you where you got it, just say Jota Arosemena gave it to you."

"Hey, Porto Rico, wha' the hell yo' git dat stuff at, hotting stuff fo' decks?"

Both of them turned, and the Cuban paled at the jaunty mug of the cook's Negro mate.

"You speak to me?" he said, ice cool.

Hate shone on the black boy's face. "Yo' heard me!" he growled. "Yo' ain't cock-eyed." Ugly, grim, black, his face wore an uneasy leer. He was squat and bleary-eyed.

A son of the Florida Gulf, he hated "Porto Rico" for reasons planted deep in the Latin's past. He envied him the gentle texture of his hair. On mornings in the galley where they both did their toilet he would poke fun at the Cuban's meticulous care in parting it. "Yo' ain't gwine sho," Hubigon'd growl. "Yo' don't have to dress up like no lady's man." And Jota, failing to comprehend the point of view, would question, "What's the matter with you, mang, you mek too much noise, mang." Hubigon despised him because he was yellow-skinned; one night in Havana he had spied him and the chef cook, a nifty, freckle-faced Carolina "cracker" for whom the cook's mate had no earthly use, and the baker's assistant, a New Orleans creole,—although the Negro waiters aboard were sure he was a "yallah" nigger—drinking anee in a high-hat café on the prado which barred jet-black American Negroes. He loathed the Latin for his good looks and once at a port on the Buenaventura River they had gone ashore and met two native girls. One was white, her lips pure as the petals of a water lily; the other was a flaming mulatto. That night, on the steps of an adobe hut, a great, low moon in the sky, both forgot the presence of the cook's mate and pledged tear-stained love to Jota. "An' me standin' right by him, doin' a fadeaway." He envied Jota his Cuban nationality for over and over again he had observed that the Latin was the nearest thing to a white man the ofay men aboard had yet met. They'd play cards with him—something they never did with the Negro crew—they'd gang with him in foreign ports, they'd listen in a "natural" sort of way to all the bosh he had to say.

Now all the mate's pent-up wrath came foaming to the front.

He came up, the girl having tarried, a cocky, chesty air about him. He made deft, telling jabs at the vapors enmeshing him. "Yo' can't do that," he said, indicating the victuals, "like hell yo' kin! Who de hell yo' t'ink yo' is anyhow? Yo' ain't bettah'n nobody else. Put it back, big boy, befo' Ah starts whisperin' to de man. Wha' yo' t'ink yo' is at, anyhow, in Porto Rico, where yo' come fum at? Com' handin' out poke chops an' cawn muffins, like yo' is any steward. Yo' cain't do dat, ole man."

It slowly entered the other's brain—all this edgy, snappy, darky talk. But the essence of it was aggressively reflected in the mate's behavior. Hubigon made slow measured steps forward, and the men came flocking to the corner.

"Go to it, Silver King, step on his corns."

"Stick him with a ice pick!"

"Easy fellahs, the steward's comin'."

All of them suddenly fell away. The steward, initiating some fruit baron into the mysteries of the galley, came through, giving them time to speed back to their posts unobserved. The tension subsided, and Jota once more fed the hardware to the dish machine.

As she flew through the corridor all sorts of faces, white ones, black ones, brown ones, leered sensually at her. Like tongues of flame, hands sped after her. Her steps quickened, her heart beat faster and faster till she left behind her the droning of the galley, and safely ascending the hatch, felt on her face the soft, cool breezes of the Caribbean ocean.

Alfred was sitting up, the unpacified baby in his arms.

"'Im cry all de time yo' went 'way," he said, "wha' yo t'ink is de mattah wit' 'im, he? Yo' t'ink him tummack a hut 'im?"

"Him is hungry, dat is wha' is de mattah wit' 'im! Move, man! 'Fo Ah knock yo', yah! Giv' me 'im, an' get outa me way! Yo' is only a dyam noosant!"

"Well, what is de mattah, now?" he cried in unfeigned surprise.

"Stid o' gwine fo' de watah yo'self yo' tan' back yah an' giv' hawdahs an' worryin' wha' is de mattah wit' de picknee."

"Cho, keep quiet, woman, an' le' me lie down." Satisfied, he rolled back on the hatch, fatuously staring at the sun sweeping the tropic blue sea.

"T'un ovah, Halfred, an' lif' yo' big able self awf de baby, yo' Ah crush 'im to debt," she said, awake at last. The baby was awake and ravenous before dawn and refused to be quieted by the witty protestations of the Jamaica laborers scrubbing down the deck. But it was only after the sun, stealing a passage through a crack in the canvas, had warmed a spot on the girl's mouth, that she was constrained to respond to his zestful rantings. "Hey, yo' heah de picknee ah bawl all de time an' yo' won't even tek heed—move yah man!" She thrust the sleeping leg aside and drawing the child to her, stuck a breast in his mouth.

The boat had encountered a sultry sea, and was dipping badly. Water flooded her decks. Getting wet, dozing deckers crawled higher on top of each other. The sea was blue as indigo and white reels of foam swirled past as the ship dove ahead.

It was a disgusting spectacle. There was the sea, drumming on the tinsel sides of the ship, and on top of the terror thus resulting rose a wretched wail from the hatch, "Watah! Hot Watah!"

The galley was the Bastille. Questioning none, the Yellow One, giving the baby to Alfred rushed to the door, and flung herself through it. Once in the corridor, the energy of a dynamo possessed her. Heated mist drenched her. She slid on grimy, sticky deck.

He was hanging up the rag on a brace of iron over the port hole. His jaws were firm, grim, together.

The rest of the galley was a foetic blur to her.

He swung around, and his restless eyes met her. He was for the moment paralyzed. His eyes bore into hers. He itched to toss at her words, words, words! He wanted to say, "Oh, why couldn't you stay away—ashore—down there—at the end of the world—anywhere but on this ship."

"Some water," she said with that gentle half-hesitant smile of hers, "can I get some hot water for my little baby?" And she extended the skillet.

He took it to the sink, his eyes still on hers. The water rained into it like bullets and he brought it to her.

But a sound polluted the lovely quiet.

"Hey, Porto Rico, snap into it! Dis ain't no time to git foolin' wit' no monkey jane. Get a move on dey, fellah, an' fill dis pail full o' water."

He was sober, afar, as he swept a pale, tortured face at Hubigon. As if it were the song of a lark, he swung back to the girl, murmuring, "Ah, but you didn't tell me," he said, "you didn't tell me what the baby is, a boy or girl?" For answer, the girl's eyes widened in terror at something slowly forming behind him.

But it was not without a shadow, and Jota swiftly ducked. The mallet went galloping under the machine. He rose and faced the cook's mate. But Hubigon was not near enough to objectify the jab, sent as fast as the fangs of a striking snake, and Jota fell, cursing, to the hushed cries of the woman. For secretly easing over to the fireplace Hubigon had taken advantage of the opening to grasp a spear and as the other was about to rise brought it thundering down on the tip of his left shoulder. It sent him thudding to the deck in a pool of claret. The cook's mate, his red, red tongue licking his mouth after the manner of a collie in from a strenuous run, pounced on the emaciated figure in the corner, and kicked and kicked it murderously. He kicked him in the head, in the mouth, in the ribs. When he struggled to rise, he sent him back to the floor, dizzy from short, telling jabs with the tip of his boot.

Pale, impassive, the men were prone to take sides. Unconsciously forming a ring, the line was kept taut. Sometimes it surged; once an Atlanta mulatto had to wrest a fiery spear from Foot Works, Hubigon's side kick, and thrust it back in its place. "Keep outa this, if you don't want to get your goddam head mashed in," he said. A woman, a crystal panel in the gray, ugly pattern, tore, fought, had to be kept sane by raw, meaty hands.

Gasping, Hubigon stood by, his eyes shining at the other's languid effort to rise. "Stan' back, fellahs, an' don't interfere. Let 'im come!" With one shoulder jaunty and a jaw risen, claret-drenched, redolent of the stench and grime of Hubigon's boot, parts of it clinging to him, the Cuban rose. A cruel scowl was on his face.

The crowd stood back, and there was sufficient room for them. Hubigon was ripping off his shirt, and licking his red, bleeding lips. He circled the ring like a snarling jungle beast. "Hol' at fuh me, Foot Works, I'm gwine sho' dis monkey wheh he get off at." He was dancing round, jabbing, tapping at ghosts, awaiting the other's beastly pleasure.

As one cowed he came, his jaw swollen. Then with the vigor of a maniac he straightened, facing the mate. He shot out his left. It had the wings of a dart and juggled the mate on the chin. Hubigon's ears tingled distantly. For the particle of a second he was groggy, and the Cuban moored in with the right, flush on the chin. Down the cook's mate went. Leaping like a tiger cat, Jota was upon him, burying his claws in the other's bared, palpitating throat. His eyes gleamed like a tiger cat's. He held him by the throat and squeezed him till his tongue came out. He racked him till the blood seeped through his ears. Then, in a frenzy of frustration, he lifted him up, and pounded with his head on the bared deck. He pounded till the shirt on his back split into ribbons.

"Jesus, take him awf o' him—he's white orready."

"Now, boys, this won't do," cried the baker, a family man. "Come."

And some half dozen of them, running counter to the traditions of the coast, ventured to slug them apart. It was a gruesome job, and Hubigon, once freed, his head and chest smeared with blood, black, was ready to peg at a lancing La Barrie snake.

In the scuffle the woman collapsed, fell under the feet of the milling crew.

"Here," some one cried, "take hold o' her, Butch, she's your kind—she's a decker—hatch four—call the doctor somebody, will ya?"

They took her on a stretcher to the surgeon's room.

The sun had leaped ahead. A sizzling luminosity drenched the sea. Aft the deckers were singing hosannas to Jesus and preparing to walk the gorgeous earth.

Only Alfred St. Xavier Mendez was standing with the baby in his arms, now on its third hunger-nap, gazing with a bewildered look at the deserted door to the galley. "Me wondah wha' mek she 'tan' so lang," he whispered anxiously.

Imperceptibly shedding their drapery of mist, there rose above the prow of the Urubamba the dead blue hills of Jamaica.

THE WHARF RATS

4

THE WHARF RATS

I

Among the motley crew recruited to dig the Panama Canal were artisans from the four ends of the earth. Down in the Cut drifted hordes of Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Negroes—a hardy, sun-defying set of white, black and yellow men. But the bulk of the actual brawn for the work was supplied by the dusky peons of those coral isles in the Caribbean ruled by Britain, France and Holland.

At the Atlantic end of the Canal the blacks were herded in box car huts buried in the jungles of "Silver City"; in the murky tenements perilously poised on the narrow banks of Faulke's River; in the low, smelting cabins of Coco Té. The "Silver Quarters" harbored the inky ones, their wives and pickaninnies.

As it grew dark the hewers at the Ditch, exhausted, half-asleep, naked but for wormy singlets, would hum queer creole tunes, play on guitar or piccolo, and jig to the rhythm of the coombia. It was a brujerial chant, for obeah, a heritage of the French colonial, honey-combed the life of the Negro laboring camps. Over smoking pots, on black, death-black nights legends of the bloodiest were recited till they became the essence of a sort of Negro Koran. One refuted them at the price of one's breath. And to question the verity of the obeah, to dismiss or reject it as the ungodly rite of some lurid, crack-brained Islander was to be an accursed pale-face, dog of a white. And the obeah man, in a fury of rage, would throw a machette at the heretic's head or—worse—burn on his doorstep at night a pyre of Maube bark or green Ganja weed.

On the banks of a river beyond Cristobal, Coco Té sheltered a colony of Negroes enslaved to the obeah. Near a roundhouse, daubed with smoke and coal ash, a river serenely flowed away and into the guava region, at the eastern tip of Monkey Hill. Across the bay from it was a sand bank—a rising out of the sea—where ships stopt for coal.

In the first of the six chinky cabins making up the family quarters of Coco Té lived a stout, pot-bellied St. Lucian, black as the coal hills he mended, by the name of Jean Baptiste. Like a host of the native St. Lucian emigrants, Jean Baptiste forgot where the French in him ended and the English began. His speech was the petulant patois of the unlettered French black. Still, whenever he lapsed into His Majesty's English, it was with a thick Barbadian bias.

A coal passer at the Dry Dock, Jean Baptiste was a man of intense piety. After work, by the glow of a red, setting sun, he would discard his crusted overalls, get in starched crocus bag, aping the Yankee foreman on the other side of the track in the "Gold Quarters," and loll on his coffee-vined porch. There, dozing in a bamboo rocker, Celestin, his second wife, a becomingly stout brown beauty from Martinique, chanted gospel hymns to him.

Three sturdy sons Jean Baptiste's first wife had borne him—Philip, the eldest, a good-looking, black fellow; Ernest, shifty, cunning; and Sandel, aged eight. Another boy, said to be wayward and something of a ne'er-do-well, was sometimes spoken of. But Baptiste, a proud, disdainful man, never once referred to him in the presence of his children. No vagabond son of his could eat from his table or sit at his feet unless he went to "meeting." In brief, Jean Baptiste was a religious man. It was a thrust at the omnipresent obeah. He went to "meeting." He made the boys go, too. All hands went, not to the Catholic Church, where Celestin secretly worshiped, but to the English Plymouth Brethren in the Spanish city of Colon.

Stalking about like a ghost in Jean Baptiste's household was a girl, a black ominous Trinidad girl. Had Jean Baptiste been a man given to curiosity about the nature of women, he would have viewed skeptically Maffi's adoption by Celestin. But Jean Baptiste was a man of lofty unconcern, and so Maffi remained there, shadowy, obdurate.

And Maffi was such a hardworking patois girl. From the break of day she'd be at the sink, brightening the tinware. It was she who did the chores which Madame congenitally shirked. And towards sundown, when the labor trains had emptied, it was she who scoured the beach for cockles for Jean Baptiste's epicurean palate.

And as night fell, Maffi, a lone, black figure, would disappear in the dark to dream on top of a canoe hauled up on the mooning beach. An eternity Maffi'd sprawl there, gazing at the frosting of the stars and the glitter of the black sea.

A cabin away lived a family of Tortola mulattoes by the name of Boyce. The father was also a man who piously went to "meeting"—gaunt and hollow-cheeked. The eldest boy, Esau, had been a journeyman tailor for ten years; the girl next him, Ora, was plump, dark, freckled; others came—a string of ulcered girls until finally a pretty, opaque one, Maura.

Of the Bantu tribe Maura would have been a person to turn and stare at. Crossing the line into Cristobal or Colon—a city of rarefied gayety—she was often mistaken for a native señorita or an urbanized Cholo Indian girl. Her skin was the reddish yellow of old gold and in her eyes there lurked the glint of mother-of-pearl. Her hair, long as a jungle elf's was jettish, untethered. And her teeth were whiter than the full-blooded black Philip's.

Maura was brought up, like the children of Jean Baptiste, in the Plymouth Brethren. But the Plymouth Brethren was a harsh faith to bring hemmed-in peasant children up in, and Maura, besides, was of a gentle romantic nature. Going to the Yankee commissary at the bottom of Eleventh and Front Streets, she usually wore a leghorn hat. With flowers bedecking it, she'd look in it older, much older than she really was. Which was an impression quite flattering to her. For Maura, unknown to Philip, was in love—in love with San Tie, a Chinese half-breed, son of a wealthy canteen proprietor in Colon. But San Tie liked to go fishing and deer hunting up the Monkey Hill lagoon, and the object of his occasional visits to Coco Té was the eldest son of Jean Baptiste. And thus it was through Philip that Maura kept in touch with the young Chinese Maroon.

One afternoon Maura, at her wit's end, flew to the shed roof to Jean Baptiste's kitchen.

"Maffi," she cried, the words smoky on her lips, "Maffi, when Philip come in to-night tell 'im I want fo' see 'im particular, yes?"

"Sacre gache! All de time Philip, Philip!" growled the Trinidad girl, as Maura, in heart-aching preoccupation, sped towards the lawn. "Why she no le' 'im alone, yes?" And with a spatter she flecked the hunk of lard on Jean Baptiste's stewing okras.

As the others filed up front after dinner that evening Maffi said to Philip, pointing to the cabin across the way, "She—she want fo' see yo'."

Instantly Philip's eyes widened. Ah, he had good news for Maura! San Tie, after an absence of six days, was coming to Coco Té Saturday to hunt on the lagoon. And he'd relish the joy that'd flood Maura's face as she glimpsed the idol of her heart, the hero of her dreams! And Philip, a true son of Jean Baptiste, loved to see others happy, ecstatic.

But Maffi's curious rumination checked him. "All de time, Maura, Maura, me can't understand it, yes. But no mind, me go stop it, oui, me go stop it, so help me—"

He crept up to her, gently holding her by the shoulders.

"Le' me go, sacre!" She shook off his hands bitterly. "Le' me go—yo' go to yo' Maura." And she fled to her room, locking the door behind her.

Philip sighed. He was a generous, good-natured sort. But it was silly to try to enlighten Maffi. It wasn't any use. He could as well have spoken to the tattered torsos the lazy waves puffed up on the shores of Coco Té.

II

"Philip, come on, a ship is in—let's go." Ernest, the wharf rat, seized him by the arm.

"Come," he said, "let's go before it's too late. I want to get some money, yes."

Dashing out of the house the two boys made for the wharf. It was dusk. Already the Hindus in the bachelor quarters were mixing their rotie and the Negroes in their singlets were smoking and cooling off. Night was rapidly approaching. Sunset, an iridescent bit of molten gold, was enriching the stream with its last faint radiance.

The boys stole across the lawn and made their way to the pier.

"Careful," cried Philip, as Ernest slid between a prong of oyster-crusted piles to a raft below, "careful, these shells cut wussah'n a knife."

On the raft the boys untied a rowboat they kept stowed away under the dock, got into it and pushed off. The liner still had two hours to dock. Tourists crowded its decks. Veering away from the barnacled piles the boys eased out into the churning ocean.

It was dusk. Night would soon be upon them. Philip took the oars while Ernest stripped down to loin cloth.

"Come, Philip, let me paddle—" Ernest took the oars. Afar on the dusky sea a whistle echoed. It was the pilot's signal to the captain of port. The ship would soon dock.

The passengers on deck glimpsed the boys. It piqued their curiosity to see two black boys in a boat amid stream.

"All right, mistah," cried Ernest, "a penny, mistah."

He sprang at the guilder as it twisted and turned through a streak of silver dust to the bottom of the sea. Only the tips of his crimson toes—a sherbet-like foam—and up he came with the coin between his teeth.

Deep sea gamin, Philip off yonder, his mouth noisy with coppers, gargled, "This way, sah, as far as yo' like, mistah."

An old red-bearded Scot, in spats and mufti, presumably a lover of the exotic in sport, held aloft a sovereign. A sovereign! Already red, and sore by virtue of the leaps and plunges in the briny swirl, Philip's eyes bulged at its yellow gleam.

"Ovah yah, sah—"

Off in a whirlpool the man tossed it. And like a garfish Philip took after it, a falling arrow in the stream. His body, once in the water, tore ahead. For a spell the crowd on the ship held its breath. "Where is he?" "Where is the nigger swimmer gone to?" Even Ernest, driven to the boat by the race for such an ornate prize, cold, shivering, his teeth chattering—even he watched with trembling and anxiety. But Ernest's concern was of a deeper kind. For there, where Philip had leaped, was Deathpool—a spawning place for sharks, for baracoudas!

But Philip rose—a brief gurgling sputter—a ripple on the sea—and the Negro's crinkled head was above the water.

"Hey!" shouted Ernest, "there, Philip! Down!"

And down Philip plunged. One—two—minutes. God, how long they seemed! And Ernest anxiously waited. But the bubble on the water boiled, kept on boiling—a sign that life still lasted! It comforted Ernest.

Suddenly Philip, panting, spitting, pawing, dashed through the water like a streak of lightning.

"Shark!" cried a voice aboard ship. "Shark! There he is, a great big one! Run, boy! Run for your life!"

From the edge of the boat Philip saw the monster as twice, thrice it circled the boat. Several times the shark made a dash for it endeavoring to strike it with its murderous tail.

The boys quietly made off. But the shark still followed the boat. It was a pale green monster. In the glittering dusk it seemed black to Philip. Fattened on the swill of the abattoir nearby and the beef tossed from the decks of countless ships in port it had become used to the taste of flesh and the smell of blood.

"Yo' know, Ernest," said Philip, as he made the boat fast to a raft, "one time I thought he wuz rubbin' 'gainst me belly. He wuz such a big able one. But it wuz wuth it, Ernie, it wuz wuth it—"

In his palm there was a flicker of gold. Ernest emptied his loin cloth and together they counted the money, dressed, and trudged back to the cabin.

On the lawn Philip met Maura. Ernest tipped his cap, left his brother, and went into the house. As he entered Maffi, pretending to be scouring a pan, was flushed and mute as a statue. And Ernest, starved, went in the dining room and for a long time stayed there. Unable to bear it any longer, Maffi sang out, "Ernest, whey Philip dey?"

"Outside—some whey—ah talk to Maura—"

"Yo' sure yo' no lie, Ernest?" she asked, suspended.

"Yes, up cose, I jes' lef' 'im 'tandin' out dey—why?"

"Nutton—"

He suspected nothing. He went on eating while Maffi tiptoed to the shed roof. Yes, confound it, there he was, near the stand-pipe, talking to Maura!

"Go stop ee, oui," she hissed impishly. "Go 'top ee, yes."

III

Low, shadowy, the sky painted Maura's face bronze. The sea, noisy, enraged, sent a blob of wind about her black, wavy hair. And with her back to the sea, her hair blew loosely about her face.

"D'ye think, d'ye think he really likes me, Philip?"

"I'm positive he do, Maura," vowed the youth.

And an ageing faith shone in Maura's eyes. No longer was she a silly, insipid girl. Something holy, reverent had touched her. And in so doing it could not fail to leave an impress of beauty. It was worshipful. And it mellowed, ripened her.

Weeks she had waited for word of San Tie. And the springs of Maura's life took on a noble ecstasy. Late at night, after the others had retired, she'd sit up in bed, dreaming. Sometimes they were dreams of envy. For Mama began to look with eyes of comparison upon the happiness of the Italian wife of the boss riveter at the Dry Dock—the lady on the other side of the railroad tracks in the "Gold Quarters" for whom she sewed—who got a fresh baby every year and who danced in a world of silks and satins. Yes, Maura had dreams, love dreams of San Tie, the flashy half-breed, son of a Chinese beer seller and a Jamaica Maroon, who had swept her off her feet by a playful wink of the eye.

"Tell me, Philip, does he work? Or does he play the lottery—what does he do, tell me!"

"I dunno," Philip replied with mock lassitude, "I dunno myself—"

"But it doesn't matter, Philip. I don't want to be nosy, see? I'm simply curious about everything that concerns him, see?"

Ah, but Philip wished to cherish Maura, to shield her, be kind to her. And so he lied to her. He did not tell her he had first met San Tie behind the counter of his father's saloon in the Colon tenderloin, for he would have had to tell, besides, why he, Philip, had gone there. And that would have led him, a youth of meager guile, to Celestin Baptiste's mulish regard for anisette which he procured her. He dared not tell her, well-meaning fellow that he was, what San Tie, a fiery comet in the night life of the district, had said to him the day before. "She sick in de head, yes," he had said. "Ah, me no dat saht o' man—don't she know no bettah, egh, Philip?" But Philip desired to be kindly, and hid it from Maura.

"What is to-day?" she cogitated, aloud, "Tuesday. You say he's comin' fo' hunt Saturday, Philip? Wednesday—four more days. I can wait. I can wait. I'd wait a million years fo' 'im, Philip."

But Saturday came and Maura, very properly, was shy as a duck. Other girls, like Hilda Long, a Jamaica brunette, the flower of a bawdy cabin up by the abattoir, would have been less genteel. Hilda would have caught San Tie by the lapels of his coat and in no time would have got him told.

But Maura was lowly, trepid, shy. To her he was a dream—a luxury to be distantly enjoyed. He was not to be touched. And she'd wait till he decided to come to her. And there was no fear, either, of his ever failing to come. Philip had seen to that. Had not he been the intermediary between them? And all Maura needed now was to sit back, and wait till San Tie came to her.

And besides, who knows, brooded Maura, San Tie might be a bashful fellow.

But when, after an exciting hunt, the Chinese mulatto returned from the lagoon, nodded stiffly to her, said good-by to Philip and kept on to the scarlet city, Maura was frantic.

"Maffi," she said, "tell Philip to come here quick—"

It was the same as touching a match to the patois girl's dynamite. "Yo' mek me sick," she said. "Go call he yo'self, yo' ole hag, yo' ole fire hag yo'." But Maura, flighty in despair, had gone on past the lawn.

"Ah go stop ee, oui," she muttered diabolically, "Ah go stop it, yes. This very night."

Soon as she got through lathering the dishes she tidied up and came out on the front porch.

It was a humid dusk, and the glowering sky sent a species of fly—bloody as a tick—buzzing about Jean Baptiste's porch. There he sat, rotund, and sleepy-eyed, rocking and languidly brushing the darting imps away.

"Wha' yo' gwine, Maffi?" asked Celestin Baptiste, fearing to wake the old man.

"Ovah to de Jahn Chinaman shop, mum," answered Maffi unheeding.

"Fi' what?"

"Fi' buy some wash blue, mum."

And she kept on down the road past the Hindu kiosk to the Negro mess house.

IV

"Oh, Philip," cried Maura, "I am so unhappy. Didn't he ask about me at all? Didn't he say he'd like to visit me—didn't he giv' yo' any message fo' me, Philip?"

The boy toyed with a blade of grass. His eyes were downcast. Sighing heavily he at last spoke. "No, Maura, he didn't ask about you."

"What, he didn't ask about me? Philip? I don't believe it! Oh, my God!"

She clung to Philip, mutely; her face, her breath coming warm and fast.

"I wish to God I'd never seen either of you," cried Philip.

"Ah, but wasn't he your friend, Philip? Didn't yo' tell me that?" And the boy bowed his head sadly.

"Answer me!" she screamed, shaking him. "Weren't you his friend?"

"Yes, Maura—"

"But you lied to me, Philip, you lied to me! You took messages from me—you brought back—lies!" Two pearls, large as pigeon's eggs, shone in Maura's burnished face.

"To think," she cried in a hollow sepulchral voice, "that I dreamed about a ghost, a man who didn't exist. Oh, God, why should I suffer like this? Why was I ever born? What did I do, what did my people do, to deserve such misery as this?"

She rose, leaving Philip with his head buried in his hands. She went into the night, tearing her hair, scratching her face, raving.

"Oh, how happy I was! I was a happy girl! I was so young and I had such merry dreams! And I wanted so little! I was carefree—"

Down to the shore of the sea she staggered, the wind behind her, the night obscuring her.

"Maura!" cried Philip, running after her. "Maura! come back!"

Great sheaves of clouds buried the moon, and the wind bearing up from the sea bowed the cypress and palm lining the beach.

"Maura—Maura—"

He bumped into some one, a girl, black, part of the dense pattern of the tropical night.

"Maffi," cried Philip, "have you seen Maura down yondah?"

The girl quietly stared at him. Had Philip lost his mind?

"Talk, no!" he cried, exasperated.

And his quick tones sharpened Maffi's vocal anger. Thrusting him aside, she thundered, "Think I'm she keeper! Go'n look fo' she yo'self. I is not she keeper! Le' me pass, move!"

Towards the end of the track he found Maura, heartrendingly weeping.

"Oh, don't cry, Maura! Never mind, Maura!"

He helped her to her feet, took her to the stand-pipe on the lawn, bathed her temples and sat soothingly, uninterruptingly, beside her.

V

At daybreak the next morning Ernest rose and woke Philip.

He yawned, put on the loin cloth, seized a "cracked licker" skillet, and stole cautiously out of the house. Of late Jean Baptiste had put his foot down on his sons' copper-diving proclivities. And he kept at the head of his bed a greased cat-o'-nine-tails which he would use on Philip himself if the occasion warranted.

"Come on, Philip, let's go—"

Yawning and scratching Philip followed. The grass on the lawn was bright and icy with the dew. On the railroad tracks the six o'clock labor trains were coupling. A rosy mist flooded the dawn. Out in the stream the tug Exotic snorted in a heavy fog.

On the wharf Philip led the way to the rafters below.

"Look out fo' that crapeau, Ernest, don't step on him, he'll spit on you."

The frog splashed into the water. Prickle-backed crabs and oysters and myriad other shells spawned on the rotting piles. The boys paddled the boat. Out in the dawn ahead of them the tug puffed a path through the foggy mist. The water was chilly. Mist glistened on top of it. Far out, beyond the buoys, Philip encountered a placid, untroubled sea. The liner, a German tourist boat, was loaded to the bridge. The water was as still as a lake of ice.

"All right, Ernest, let's hurry—"

Philip drew in the oars. The Kron Prinz Wilhelm came near. Huddled in thick European coats, the passengers viewed from their lofty estate the spectacle of two naked Negro boys peeping up at them from a wiggly bateau.

"Penny, mistah, penny, mistah!"

Somebody dropped a quarter. Ernest, like a shot, flew after it. Half a foot down he caught it as it twisted and turned in the gleaming sea. Vivified by the icy dip, Ernest was a raving wolf and the folk aboard dealt a lavish hand.

"Ovah, yah, mistah," cried Philip, "ovah, yah."

For a Dutch guilder Philip gave an exhibition of "cork." Under something of a ledge on the side of the boat he had stuck a piece of cork. Now, after his and Ernest's mouths were full of coins, he could afford to be extravagant and treat the Europeans to a game of West Indian "cork."

Roughly ramming the cork down in the water, Philip, after the fifteenth ram or so, let it go, and flew back, upwards, having thus "lost" it. It was Ernest's turn now, as a sort of end-man, to scramble forward to the spot where Philip had dug it down and "find" it; the first one to do so, having the prerogative, which he jealously guarded, of raining on the other a series of thundering leg blows. As boys in the West Indies Philip and Ernest had played it. Of a Sunday the Negro fishermen on the Barbadoes coast made a pagan rite of it. Many a Bluetown dandy got his spine cracked in a game of "cork."

With a passive interest the passengers viewed the proceedings. In a game of "cork," the cork after a succession of "rammings" is likely to drift many feet away whence it was first "lost." One had to be an expert, quick, alert, to spy and promptly seize it as it popped up on the rolling waves. Once Ernest got it and endeavored to make much of the possession. But Philip, besides being two feet taller than he, was slippery as an eel, and Ernest, despite all the artful ingenuity at his command, was able to do no more than ineffectively beat the water about him. Again and again he tried, but to no purpose.