by Evelyn Waugh
… Carpet and canopy, tapestry and velvet, portcullis and bastion, water fowl on the moat and kingcups along its margin, peacocks trailing their finery across the lawns; high overhead in a sky of sapphire and swansdown silver bells chiming in a turret of alabaster.
Days of shadow and exhaustion, salt wind and wet mist, foghorn and the constant groan and creak of straining metal. Then they were clear of it, after the Azores. Awnings were out and passengers moved their chairs to windward. High noon and an even keel; the blue water lapping against the sides of the ship, rippling away behind her to the horizon; gramophones and deck tennis; bright arcs of flying fish (“Look, Ernie, come quick, there’s a shark.” “That’s not a shark, it’s a dolphin.” “Mr. Brink said it was a porpoise.” “There he is again. Oh, if I had my camera.”); clear, tranquil water and the regular turn and tread of the screw; there were many hands to caress the beagles as they went loping by. Mr. Brink amid laughter suggested that he should exercise the racehorse, or, with a further burst of invention, the bull. Mr. Brink sat at the purser’s table with the cheery crowd.
Dr. Messinger left his cabin and appeared on deck and in the dining saloon. So did the wife of the archdeacon; she was very much whiter than her husband. On Tony’s other side at table sat a girl named Thérèse de Vitré. He had noticed her once or twice during the gray days, a forlorn figure almost lost among furs and cushions and rugs; a colorless little face with wide dark eyes. She said, “The last days have been terrible. I saw you walking about. How I envied you.”
“It ought to be calm all the way now,” and inevitably, “Are you going far?”
“Trinidad. That is my home… I tried to decide who you were from the passenger list.”
“Who was I?”
“Well… someone called Colonel Strapper.”
“Do I look so old?”
“Are colonels old? I didn’t know. It’s not a thing we have much in Trinidad. Now I know who you are because I asked the head steward. Do tell me about your exploring.”
“You’d better ask Doctor Messinger. He knows more about it than I do.”
“No, you tell me.”
She was eighteen years old; small and dark, with a face that disappeared in a soft pointed chin so that attention was drawn to the grave eyes and the high forehead; she had not long outgrown her schoolgirl plumpness and she moved with an air of exultance, as though she had lately shed an encumbrance and was not yet fatigued by the other burdens that would succeed it. For two years she had been at school in Paris.
“… Some of us used to keep lipstick and rouge secretly in our bedrooms and try it on at night. One girl called Antoinette came to Mass on Sunday wearing it. There was a terrible row with Madame de Supplice and she left after that term. It was awfully brave. We all envied her… But she was an ugly girl, always eating chocolates…
“… Now I am coming home to be married… No, I am not yet engaged, but you see there are so few young men I can marry. They must be Catholic and of an island family. It would not do to marry an official and go back to live in England. But it will be easy because I have no brothers or sisters and my father has one of the best houses in Trinidad. You must come and see it. It is a stone house, outside the town. My family came to Trinidad in the French Revolution. There are two or three other rich families and I shall marry into one of them. Our son will have the house. It will be easy…”
She wore a little coat, of the kind that was then fashionable, and no ornament except a string of pearls. “… There was an American girl at Madame de Supplice’s who was engaged. She had a ring with a big diamond but she could never wear it except in bed. Then one day she had a letter from her young man saying he was going to marry another girl. How she cried. We all read the letter and most of us cried too… But in Trinidad it will be quite easy.”
Tony told her about the expedition; of the Peruvian emigrants in the middle ages and their long caravan working through the mountains and forests, llamas packed with works of intricate craftsmanship; of the continual rumors percolating to the coast and luring adventurers up into the forests; of the route they would take up the rivers, then cutting through the bush along Indian trails and across untraveled country; of the stream they might strike higher up and how, Dr. Messinger said, they would make woodskin canoes and take to the water again; how finally they would arrive under the walls of the city like the Vikings at Byzantium. “But of course,” he added, “there may be nothing in it. It ought to be an interesting journey in any case.”
“How I wish I was a man,” said Thérèse de Vitré.
After dinner they danced to the music of an amplified gramophone and the girl drank lemon squash on the bench outside the deck bar, sucking it through two straws.
*
A week of blue water that grew clearer and more tranquil daily, of sun that grew warmer, radiating the ship and her passengers, filling them with good humor and ease; blue water that caught the sun in a thousand brilliant points, dazzling the eyes as they searched for porpoises and flying fish; clear blue water in the shallows revealing its bed of silver sand and smooth pebble, fathoms down; soft warm shade on deck under the awnings; the ship moved amid unbroken horizons on a vast blue disc of blue, sparkling with sunlight.
Tony and Miss de Vitré played quoits and shuffle-board; they threw rope rings into a bucket from a short distance. (“We’ll go in a small boat,” Dr. Messinger had said, “so as to escape all that hideous nonsense of deck games.”) Twice consecutively Tony won the sweepstake on the ship’s run; the prize was eighteen shillings. He bought Miss de Vitré a woolen rabbit at the barber’s shop.
It was unusual for Tony to use “Miss” in talking to anyone. Except Miss Tendril he could think of no one he addressed in that way. But it was Thérèse who first called him “Tony,” seeing it engraved in Brenda’s handwriting in his cigarette case. “How funny,” she said, “that was the name of the man who didn’t marry the American girl at Madame de Supplice’s”; and after that they used each other’s Christian names to the great satisfaction of the other passengers who had little to interest them on board except the flowering of this romance.
“I can’t believe this is the same ship as in those cold, rough days,” said Thérèse.
They reached the first of the islands; a green belt of palm trees with wooded hills rising beyond them and a small town heaped up along the shores of a bay. Thérèse and Tony went ashore and bathed. Thérèse swam badly with her head ridiculously erect out of the water. There was practically no bathing in Trinidad, she explained. They lay for some time on the firm, silver beach; then drove back into the town in the shaky, two-horse carriage he had hired, past ramshackle cabins from which little black boys ran out to beg or swing behind on the axle, in the white dust. There was nowhere in the town to dine so they returned to the ship at sundown. She lay out at some distance but from where they stood after dinner, leaning over the rail, they could just hear in the intervals when the winch was not working, the chatter and singing in the streets. Thérèse put her arm through Tony’s, but the decks were full of passengers and agents and swarthy little men with lists of cargo. There was no dancing that night. They went above on to the boat deck and Tony kissed her.
Dr. Messinger came on board by the last launch. He had met an acquaintance in the town. He had observed the growing friendship between Tony and Thérèse with the strongest disapproval and told him of a friend of his who had been knifed in a back street of Smyrna, as a warning of what happened if one got mixed up with women.
In the islands the life of the ship disintegrated. There were changes of passengers; the black archdeacon left after shaking hands with everyone on board; on their last morning his wife took round a collecting box in aid of an organ that needed repairs. The captain never appeared at meals in the dining saloon. Even Tony’s first friend no longer changed for dinner; the cabins were stuffy from being kept locked all day.
Tony and Thérèse bathed again at Barbados and drove round the island visiti
ng castellated churches. They dined at a hotel high up out of town and ate flying fish.
“You must come to my home and see what real creole cooking is like,” said Thérèse. “We have a lot of old recipes that the planters used to use. You must meet my father and mother.”
They could see the lights of the ship from the terrace where they were dining; the bright decks with figures moving about and the double line of portholes.
“Trinidad the day after tomorrow,” said Tony.
They talked of the expedition and she said it was sure to be dangerous. “I don’t like Doctor Messinger at all,” she said. “Not anything about him.”
“And you will have to choose your husband.”
“Yes. There are seven of them. There was one called Honoré I liked but of course I haven’t seen him for two years. He was studying to be an engineer. There’s one called Mendoza who’s very rich but he isn’t really a Trinidadian. His grandfather came from Dominica and they say he has colored blood. I expect it will be Honoré. Mother always brought in his name when she wrote to me and he sent me things at Christmas and on my fête. Rather silly things because the shops aren’t good in Port of Spain.”
Later she said, “You’ll be coming back by Trinidad, won’t you? So I shall see you then. Will you be a long time in the bush?”
“I expect you’ll be married by then.”
“Tony, why haven’t you ever got married?”
“But I am.”
“Married?”
“Yes.”
“You’re teasing me.”
“No, honestly I am. At least I was.”
“Oh.”
“Are you surprised?”
“I don’t know. Somehow I didn’t think you were. Where is she?”
“In England. We had a row.”
“Oh… What’s the time?”
“Quite early.”
“Let’s go back.”
“D’you want to?”
“Yes, please. It’s been a delightful day.”
“You said that as if you were saying good-bye.”
“Did I? I don’t know.”
The negro chauffeur drove them at great speed into the town. Then they sat in a rowing boat and bobbed slowly out to the ship. Earlier in the day, in good spirits, they had bought a stuffed fish. Thérèse found she had left it behind at the hotel. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
*
Blue water came to an end after Barbados. Round Trinidad the sea was opaque and colorless, full of the mud which the Orinoco brought down from the mainland. Thérèse spent all that day in her cabin, doing her packing.
Next day she said good-bye to Tony in a hurry. Her father had come out to meet her in the tender. He was a wiry bronzed man with a long gray mustache. He wore a panama hat and smart silk clothes, and smoked a cheroot; the complete slave-owner of the last century. Thérèse did not introduce him to Tony. “He was someone on the ship,” she explained, obviously.
Tony saw her once next day in the town, driving with a lady who was obviously her mother. She waved but did not stop. “Reserved lot, these real old creoles,” remarked the passenger who had first made friends with Tony and had now attached himself again. “Poor as church mice most of them but stinking proud. Time and again I’ve palled up with them on board and when we got to port it’s been good-bye. Do they ever so much as ask you to their houses? Not they.”
Tony spent the two days with this first friend who had business connections in the place. On the second day it rained heavily and they could not leave the terrace of the hotel. Dr. Messinger was engaged on some technical inquiries at the Agricultural Institute.
*
Muddy sea between Trinidad and Georgetown; and the ship lightened of cargo rolled heavily in the swell. Dr. Messinger took to his cabin once more. Rain fell continuously and a slight mist enclosed them so that they seemed to move in a small puddle of brown water; the foghorn sounded regularly through the rain. Scarcely a dozen passengers remained on board and Tony prowled disconsolately about the deserted decks or sat alone in the music room, his mind straying back along the path he had forbidden it, to the tall elm avenue at Hetton and the budding copses.
Next day they arrived at the mouth of the Demerara. The customs sheds were heavy with the reek of sugar and loud with the buzzing of bees. There were lengthy formalities in disembarking their stores. Dr. Messinger saw to it while Tony lit a cigar and strayed out on to the quay. Small shipping of all kinds lay round them; on the further bank a low, green fringe of mangrove; behind, the tin roofs of the town were visible among feathery palm trees; everything steamed from the recent rain. Black stevedores grunted rhythmically at their work; East Indians trotted busily to and fro with invoices and bills of lading. Presently Dr. Messinger pronounced that everything was in order and that they could go into the town to their hotel.
II
The storm lantern stood on the ground between the two hammocks, which, in their white sheaths of mosquito net, looked like the cocoons of gigantic silk worms. It was eight o’clock, two hours after sundown; river and forest were already deep in night. The howler monkeys were silent but tree frogs near at hand set up a continuous, hoarse chorus; birds were awake, calling and whistling, and far in the depths about them came the occasional rending and reverberation of dead wood falling among the trees.
The six black boys who manned the boat squatted at a distance round their fire. They had collected some cobs of maize, three days back in a part of the bush, deserted now, choked and overrun with wild growth, that had once been a farm. (The rank second growth at that place had been full of alien plants, fruit and cereals, all gross now, and reverting to earlier type.) The boys were roasting their cobs in the embers.
Fire and storm lantern together shed little light; enough only to suggest the dilapidated roof over their heads, the heap of stores, disembarked and overrun by ants and, beyond, the undergrowth that had invaded the clearing and the vast columns of tree trunks that rose above it, disappearing out of sight in the darkness.
Bats like blighted fruit hung in clusters from the thatch and great spiders rode across it astride their shadows. This place had once been a balata station. It was the furthest point of commercial penetration from the coast. Dr. Messinger marked it on his map with a triangle and named it in red “First Base Camp.”
The first stage of the journey was over. For ten days they had been chugging upstream in a broad, shallow boat. Once or twice they had passed rapids (there the outboard engine had been reinforced by paddles; the men strained in time to the captain’s count; the bo’sun stood in the bows with a long pole warding them off the rocks). They had camped at sundown on patches of sandbank or in clearings cut from the surrounding bush. Once or twice they came to a “house” left behind by balata bleeders or gold washers.
All day Tony and Dr. Messinger sprawled amidships among their stores, under an improvised canopy of palm thatch; sometimes in the hot hours of the early afternoon they fell asleep. They ate in the boat, out of tins, and drank rum mixed with the water of the river which was mahogany brown but quite clear. The nights seemed interminable to Tony; twelve hours of darkness, noisier than a city square with the squealing and croaking and trumpeting of the bush denizens. Dr. Messinger could tell the hours by the succession of sounds. It was not possible to read by the light of the storm lantern. Sleep was irregular and brief after the days of lassitude and torpor. There was little to talk about; everything had been said during the day, in the warm shade among the stores. Tony lay awake, scratching.
Since they had left Georgetown there had not been any part of his body that was ever wholly at ease. His face and neck were burned by the sun reflected from the water; the skin was flaking off them so that he was unable to shave. The stiff growth of beard pricked him between chin and throat. Every exposed part of his skin was bitten by cabouri fly. They had found a way into the buttonholes of his shirt and the laces of his breeches; mosquitoes had got him at the ankles when he changed i
nto slacks for the evening. He had picked up bêtes rouges in the bush and they were crawling and burrowing under his skin; the bitter oil which Dr. Messinger had given him as protection, had set up a rash of its own wherever he had applied it. Every evening after washing he had burned off a few ticks with a cigarette end but they had left irritable little scars behind them; so had the djiggas which one of the black boys had dug out from under his toe nails and the horny skin on his heels and the balls of his feet. A marabunta had left a painful swelling on his left hand.
As Tony scratched he shook the framework from which the hammocks hung. Dr. Messinger turned over and said, “Oh, for God’s sake.” He tried not to scratch; then he tried to scratch quietly; then in a frenzy he scratched as hard as he could, breaking the skin in a dozen places. “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Dr. Messinger.
“Half past eight,” thought Tony. “In London they are just beginning to collect for dinner.” It was the time of year in London when there were parties every night. (Once, when he was trying to get engaged to Brenda, he had gone to them all. If they had dined in different houses, he would search the crowd for Brenda and hang about by the stairs waiting for her to arrive. Later he would hang about to take her home. Lady St. Cloud had done everything to make it easy for him. Later, after they were married, in the two years they had spent in London before Tony’s father died, they had been to fewer parties, one or two a week at the most, except for one very gay month, when Brenda was well again, after John Andrew’s birth.) Tony began to imagine a dinner party assembling at that moment in London, with Brenda there and the surprised look with which she greeted each new arrival. If there was a fire she would be as near it as she could get. Would there be a fire at the end of May? He could not remember. There were nearly always fires at Hetton in the evening, whatever the season.