“Now drink.”
“Skoal,” said the Saint.
He took a modest sip from the bottle and passed it on. Everyone else now took an internal medication. The bottle came last to the Commander, who took a commander’s swallow and firmly corked it again.
“All right,” he said. “Out de light.”
The cavern was suddenly plunged into blackness.
“Gimme yo’ han’,” said the Commander.
Simon felt fingers groping down his arm in the inky dark until they closed tightly on his wrist.
The Commander said, “Who got de knife?”
Now at last the Saint understood, and for an instant felt only the reflex drumming of his heart. It was fantastic and unreal, but he was awake and this was happening to him. He wondered fleetingly if it was only a test, a primitive elementary ordeal in darkness, and if perhaps in other days a man who flinched might have found the knife turned summarily into his heart. Intuition held him motionless, his arm relaxed. The Commander’s ghoulish laugh vibrated in the cramped space.
“You have de nerve? You don’ frighten?”
“Go ahead,” said the Saint steadily.
“You all right,” said the Commander, with respect. “Good man.”
There was a tiny flick of pain at the base of the Saint’s little finger, and then his hand was grasped and held as in a firm handshake and his wrist was released.
“Light de lamp,” ordered the Commander.
A match flared and dimmed, and then the brighter flame of the lantern took over. The Commander still held Simon’s hand, and in the renewed light the Saint saw a little trickle of blood run from between their clasped palms and drip down on the floor of the cave.
Five other entranced black faces leaned forward to observe the same phenomenon, and from four of them came a murmurous exhalation of approval. Johnny said, “Well, for gosh sakes.”
“My blood mix wid yours,” said the Commander gravely. “So A mek you mi brother. Now you is a Maroon too!” Delighted laughter shook him again as he released his grip. “Whe’ de rum?”
He opened the bottle again and poured a few drops on his own wound, then on the Saint’s. Then they drank again. Each of the other men solemnly shook the Saint’s bloody hand, and drank from the bottle. After that the bottle was empty.
The Commander pulled out a clean handkerchief and tore it in half. He gave one half to Simon and bound the other half around his own hand.
“All right,” he said. “We go back outside.”
He motioned Simon to go first.
The return to sunlight was briefly blinding. While the others were climbing down from the tunnel and replacing the stone across the entrance, Simon wiped his hand and inspected the cut in it. It was reassuringly small and had already almost stopped bleeding. He fastened the cloth around it again and forgot it. Considering various aspects of the rite he had been through, a hypochondriac would undoubtedly have been screaming for mouth-wash, penicillin, and tetanus antitoxin, but the Saint had a sublime contempt for germs which may have given nervous breakdowns to innumerable hapless microbes.
He looked up and saw the Commander standing before him, with Johnny a little behind.
“Now you is a Maroon, and you is mi brother. What you goin’ do ’bout Cuffee?”
“Well,” said the Saint thoughtfully, “first of all, is there any chance of finding the other Colonel? If we produced him, at least Cuffee’s election might be washed out, and we could have another.”
The Commander gazed at him, with bright searching eyes, and put an arm around his shoulders.
“Come.”
He led the Saint only a little way off the trail, where the fast-growing jungle had already almost obliterated the traces of something heavy being dragged through it. The Saint guessed even then what he was going to see, before the sickly-sweet stench and the buzzing of disturbed flies made it a certainty, before the final pathetic travesty of swollen glistening flesh confirmed it without need of the words which were still inevitably spoken.
“Das de Colonel,” the Commander said.
6
It was the Commander who had found the body, Simon learned—driven by rebellious unsatisfied curiosity, guided by atavistic senses that no civilized white man could hope to understand even if the Commander had been able to discourse professorially about them. The other elders represented there had been informed, but had been helpless to decide what should be done with the information, and afraid even to reveal their knowledge outside their own circle. The recent Colonel had been murdered, but they had no evidence to point from his body to the killer. The Commander might just as easily have been accused himself. And if the real killer had felt himself in serious jeopardy, anyone who appeared to threaten him might well be found in the same condition as the luckless ex-Colonel.
All this took some time to establish, much less concisely, and Simon could probably have deduced as much by himself more quickly, but courtesy obliged him to listen.
“It sounds just like in the States, when the gangsters knock someone off,” Johnny said.
Simon nodded.
“Only here the gangster is also the Chief of Police and the Mayor too. But he can’t be the Judge as well. Or is he? Don’t you have any Constitution?”
They looked at him blankly, and he tried again slowly and simply.
“Is he a dictator? Can the Colonel do anything he likes?”
“De Colonel is de head man,” Robertson said.
“What does the Treaty say?”
One of the others stepped forward, the man who carried the cardboard mailing tube which had puzzled the Saint intermittently since the day before. He held it out.
“See de Treaty yah, sah.”
The Saint took it and stared at it. It gave him a strange feeling to be holding that much-discussed document at last, after all he had heard about it. It seemed extraordinary, now, that this moment had been so long delayed, and yet he had not realized before what an essential element had been lacking.
“Well I’m damned,” he said, and then another thought rebounded. “Where did you get this copy?”
“De new Major is mi gran’son, sah. Him is a very wil’ bwoy. Him keep it fe Cuffee. A tek it las’ night while him was sleepin’.”
Simon carried it to a convenient rock and sat down. He lighted a cigarette, and then carefully extracted the scroll from the tube and as carefully unrolled it. Johnny had followed him, and was peering over his shoulder.
The parchment was yellowed and stained with age and the antique angular script often hard to decipher. But the following is an exact transcription, and if there are any skeptics who still doubt the authenticity of these chronicles, I should like to say that they can see the original in Kingston whenever they care to go there. I make no apology for quoting it at such length, for it is a real historical curiosity.
At the Camp near Trelawny Town
March 1st 1738
In the name of God Amen.
Whereas Captain Cudjoe, Captain Accompong, Captain Johnny, Captain Cuffee, Captain Quaco, and several other negroes their dependants and adherents, have been in a state of war and hostility for several years past against our Sovereign Lord the King and the inhabitants of this Island; and whereas peace and friendship among mankind and the preventing the effusion of blood is agreeable to God consonant to reason and desired by every good man, and whereas his Majesty George the Second, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland and of Jamaica Lord etc. has…
“King of France too?” said the Saint. “That’s a new one on me.”
…has by his letters patent dated February 25th 1738 in the twelfth year of his reign granted full power and authority to John Guthrie and Francis Sadler, Esquires to negotiate and finally conclude a treaty of peace and friendship with the aforesaid Captain Cudjoe, the rest of his captains adherents and his men; they mutually, sincerely, and amicably have agreed to the following Articles:
1st. That all hostilities shal
l cease on both sides—for ever.
2nd. That the said Captain Cudjoe, the rest of his Captains, adherents, and men shall be for ever hereafter in a perfect state of freedom and liberty, excepting those who have been taken by them or fled to them within two years last past if such are willing to return to their said masters and owners with full pardon and indemnity from their said masters or owners for what is past, provided always that if they are not willing to return they shall remain in subjection to Captain Cudjoe and in friendship with us according to the form and tenor of this treaty.
3rd. That they shall enjoy and possess for themselves and posterity for ever, all the lands situate and lying between Trelawny Town and the Cockpits to the amount of 1500 acres bearing north-west from the said Trelawny Town.
There followed paragraphs defining the rights of farming, marketing, and hunting, and binding the Maroons to join the Governor in suppressing other rebels or repelling foreign invaders. Then:
8th. That if any white man shall do any manner of injury to Captain Cudjoe, his successors, or any of his or their people they shall apply to any commanding officer or Magistrate in the neighbourhood for justice and in case Captain Cudjoe or any of his people shall do any injury to any white person he shall submit himself or deliver up such offenders to justice.
9th. That if any negroes shall hereafter run away from their master or owners and fall into Captain Cudjoe’s hands they shall immediately be sent back to the Chief Magistrate of the next parish where they are taken, and those that bring them are to be satisfied for their trouble as the legislature shall appoint.
10th. That all negroes taken since the raising of this party by Captain Cudjoe’s people shall immediately be returned.
“That seems to settle Cuffee’s idea of taking all the other colored people in Jamaica into the Maroons,” Simon remarked.
“But they aren’t slaves any longer,” Johnny said. “So how could they be returned?”
“It’ll give the lawyers something to haggle with, anyway,” said the Saint. “But Cuffee’s a lawyer himself. I’m looking for some law we can use now.”
11th. That Captain Cudjoe and his successors, shall wait on His Excellency or the commander in chief for the time being once every year if thereunto required.
“And that’s a big help.”
12th. That Captain Cudjoe during his life, and the Captains succeeding him shall have full power to inflict any punishment they think proper for crimes committed by their men among themselves, death only excepted, in which case, if the Captain thinks they deserve death he shall be obliged to bring them before any Justice of the Peace., who shall order proceedings on their trial equal to those of other free negroes.
13th. That Captain Cudjoe with his people shall cut, clear and keep open large and convenient roads—
“God burn it,” said the Saint in disgust, “it just starts to get somewhere and then it veers off again. And there are only a few lines left.”
14th. That two white men to be nominated by His Excellency or the commander in chief for the time being shall constantly live and reside with Captain Cudjoe and his successors in order to maintain a friendly correspondence with the inhabitants of this Island.
“That’s an item that somebody seems to have overlooked,” Simon observed. “It might be some help, but it isn’t exactly a lightning solution.”
The excitement with which he had started reading was beginning to drag its tail. The lift of a couple of false hopes had only made the subsequent let-downs more discouraging. The Treaty, although its simplicity and straightforwardness could have been studied with advantage by the architects of more modern pacts, left vast areas untouched. The only regulation it set up for the internal affairs of the Maroons was that they should not execute each other. How otherwise they should organize their freedom seemed to have been wholly outside the scope of the agenda.
There was only one clause left, and the Saint’s heart sank as the first words foreshadowed its stately irrelevance.
15th. That Captain Cudjoe shall during his life be Chief Commander in Trelawny Town, after his decease the command to devolve on his brother Captain Accompong, and in case of his decease to his next brother Captain Johnny, and failing him, Captain Cuffee shall succeed, who is to be succeeded by Captain Quaco—
His eyes widened incredulously over the next three and final lines.
He read them again to make sure.
His pointing forefinger underlined them slowly, and he looked up to meet the stunned stare of Johnny at his shoulder.
“You see what I see, don’t you?” said the Saint.
“Yes, sah. But—”
“Oh, no,” said the Saint, in a low quavering voice. “Oh, leaping lizards. Oh, holy Moses in the mountains!”
He was rolling the parchment up again with shaking fingers, stuffing it back into the protective tube. He came to his feet with a shout that brought all the others around him.
“O blessed bureaucracy,” he yelled. “O divine dust of departmental archives. O rollicking ribbons of red tape!”
They gaped at him as if he had gone out of his mind, which perhaps he temporarily had. The immortal magnificence of that moment was more than flesh and blood could take with equanimity. And it was all crystallized in the last few words of the Maroons’ charter, after he had given up all hope—exactly like a charge of cavalry pounding to the rescue of a beleaguered outpost in the last few feet of the corniest horse opera ever filmed.
Simon’s ribs ached with laughter. He handed the tube back to the man who had carried it, and clapped Johnny and the Commander ecstatically on the back, one with each hand.
“Let’s get back to Accompong,” he said. “And somebody better find something we can eat on the way. This is going to be a day to remember, and I don’t want to starve to death before I see the end of it.”
7
“I’ve told you till I’m blue in the face,” David Farnham said irritably. “I don’t know where Mr Templar went, or why, or anything about it.”
It was late in the afternoon, and he must have repeated the same statement twenty or thirty times during the day. It was unequivocally true, for Mrs Robertson, who had served him breakfast and a sandwich for lunch, had been blandly unable to enlighten him on that subject, or on the whereabouts of her husband, or the Commander, or Johnny. Farnham was considerably perplexed, but not too worried, for the attitudes of Cuffee and his henchmen clearly proved that they were equally baffled by the disappearance.
Cuffee scowled. The Major, zealously taking his cue, scowled even more ferociously. Others of the bodyguard dutifully joined in the glowering.
They were in a house at the edge of the “parade-ground” where Cuffee was living and making his official headquarters. Twenty yards in front of it, men had been working all day to build a sort of open bandstand about fifteen feet square, with a floor raised two feet above the ground and stout poles at each corner supporting a thatched roof. Now it was completed, and for the past hour the wide clearing had been gradually filling with a motley crowd of men, drifting and conglomerating and separating again uncertainly, with chattering groups of women on its outskirts and small children chasing each other like puppies around its fringes. Several of Cuffee’s elite corps were trying to marshal the mob into a semblance of audience formation facing the newly erected platform. They were now distinguished with broad red arm bands, which seemed to give them the added confidence and bravado of a uniform.
Cuffee looked at his watch. He was restless. Although he knew that schedules meant little to the Maroons, he had set a time for himself, and even more importantly, he sensed that if the suspense of the people waiting to hear him were prolonged beyond a certain point it might have the opposite effect from what he wanted.
With an abrupt decisiveness he stood up, settled his Sam Browne belt, and put on his gilded helmet.
The meeting will begin,” he said, and looked at Farnham. “I think you’ll want to listen to this.”
; “I shall be very interested,” Farnham said calmly.
Cuffee turned and marched out, followed by his adjutant and the rest of his bodyguard, except for two who remained with Farnham.
Farnham strolled out, relighting his pipe, and the two followed him. Cuffee had not invited him to join him on the rostrum, and Farnham wondered whether he should take the invitation for granted or the lack of it as a diplomatic affront. His two personal escorts, however, who seemed to have received prior instructions, fell in on either side of him and steered him with suggestive pressures around the reviewing stand to a place close in front of it and in line with one corner, where he discovered that an empty wooden crate had been placed on which it was indicated that he should sit. Thus he found himself nearer the platform than the nearest of the other spectators, but set aside rather than in the center of a special front row. It gave him an uncomfortable feeling of being positioned more like a prisoner on trial, which was not relieved by the way his escorts stationed themselves just behind him, one on each side, with their machetes in hand. But he decided that his best course was to appear unaware of anything out of the ordinary unless and until it was forced upon him, and he crossed his legs composedly and tried to look as if he felt that he was only being treated with proper deference.
A dozen of the elite guard had ranged themselves in a double rank from front to rear of the dais, with the Major in the front of one file. At a word from him, they raised their clenched fists in a ragged salute, and Cuffee strode down the human aisle to the front of the stand, where he raised his fist in salute to the audience.
There was a splatter of applause, which Farnham observed was led and fomented by a number of the red-armleted who still circulated authoritatively through the assembly.
Cuffee lowered his fist, and his guard of honor slouched out of formation and shuffled towards the front of the stage.
“My friends,” Cuffee said, “comrades, and brother Maroons. I am your new Colonel. Colonel Cuffee. I’ve brought you here to meet me, and to let me tell you what I’m going to do for you, and for all our people, while I’m your leader.”
The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series) Page 11