Palace of the Peacock (4 page)

Donne and the other daSilva twin returned as I put the last petrified morsel in my mouth. They were accompanied by the old woman whom the first daSilva had spoken of, and whom I too felt I knew in a mixed futuristic order of memory and event. It suddenly occurred to me that I was premature in thinking she had come of her free will. I suddenly saw – what I had known and dreaded from the very beginning – she was under arrest. Donne had made her come just short of the coarsest persuasion and apprehension he would exercise in the future, hoping to gain information from her about the whereabouts of the rest of the fearful frightened folk.

I shook my head a little, trying hard to free myself from this new obsession. Was it possible that one’s memory and apprehension of a tragic event would strike one’s spirit before the actual happening had been digested? Could a memory spring from nowhere into one’s belly and experience? I knew that if I was dreaming I could pinch myself and wake. But an undigested morsel of recollection erased all present waking sensation and evoked a future time, petrifying and painful, confused and unjust.

I shook my head violently, trying harder than ever to picture the deathless innocence and primitive expectation that had launched our inverse craft. Had we made a new problematical start – a pure and imaginary game, I told myself in despair – only to strip ourselves of all logical sequence and development and time? and to fasten vividly on our material life as if it were a passing fragment and fantasy while the curious nebulosity of ourselves stood stubborn and
permanent
? and as if every solid force and reason and distraction were the cruel stream that mirrored our everlastingness? I felt
I was caught in a principle of never-ending anxiety and fear, and it was impossible to turn back.

I saw that Donne was ageing in the most remarkable misty way. It was something in the light under the trees I said to myself shaking my head. The day had grown sultry and darker than morning and a burst of congealed lightning hung suspended in the atmosphere, threatening to close the long drought and the dry season of the year.

Thirty or forty seasons and years had wrenched from him this violent belt of youth to shape a noose in the air. A shaft from the forest and the heaven of leaves aged him into looking the devil himself. The brownness of his skin looked excessive pallor. He stooped in unconscious subjection I knew to the treachery and oppression in the atmosphere and his eyes were sunken and impatient in rage, burning with the intensity of horror and ambition. His hands opened and closed of their own will, casting to the ground everything save the feeling of themselves and of the identity they wished to establish in the roots of their mortal and earthly sensation. He was an apparition that stooped before me and yet clothed me with the very frightful nature of the jungle exercising its spell over me. I could no longer feel myself shaken: dumb with a morsel of terror.

He started suddenly addressing the company in the lurid storm but it was as if he spoke only to himself. The whole crew were blasted and rooted in the soil of Mariella like imprisoned dead trees. I alone lived and faced him. Words came as from a frightened spiritual medium and translation. Meaning was petrified and congealed and then flashing and clear upon his rigid face and brow hanging in his own ultimatum and light.

The storm passed as quickly as it had begun. Every man came to life again. Donne was free of the hate he had shown, I thought, and a smile had been restored to him ingenuous as youth. He drew me aside leaving the old Arawak woman encircled by the crew.

“Why you’re looking haggard as hell,” he said to me in solicitude. “Put on ten years overnight, old man,” he spoke with a knowledgeable air beneath his apparent freshness and youth. “It’s the trip all the way from the coast I suppose. How do you feel? Up to another strenuous exercise and excursion? Afraid I’ve been deserted by every labouring hand I had, and I’ve got to go on the trail to find them. Think you would relish coming?”

I shook my head quickly and affirmatively.

“Do you know” – he was in a better mood than I could ever remember – “there’s something in what you’ve been telling me, old chap.” He tapped me on the chest significantly, “You do see the situation sensibly and constructively. I grant I have been cruel and harsh….” he paused reflectively.

“Yes,” I prompted him.

“I have treated the folk badly,” he admitted. “But you do know what this nightmare burden of responsibility adds up to, don’t you? How gruesome it can be? I do wish”, he spoke musingly, “someone would lift it from my shoulders. Maybe who knows” – he was joking – “you can. Your faith and intuition may be better than mine. I am beginning to lose all my imagination save that sometimes I feel I’m involved in the most frightful material slavery. I hate myself sometimes, hate myself for being the most violent taskmaster – I drive myself with no hope of redemption whatsoever and I lash the folk. If they do murder me I’ve earned it I suppose, and I don’t see sometimes how I can escape it unless a different person steps into my shoes and accepts my confounded shadow. Some weight and burden I confess frankly,” he laughed as at an image – alien to himself – he was painting. “Still I suppose”, he had grown thoughtful, “there’s a ghost of a chance …”

“Ghost of a chance of what?” I demanded, swept away by his curious rhetoric.

“Changing my ways,” he spoke mildly and indifferently. “Not being so beastly and involved in my own devil’s schemes any more. Perhaps there’s a ghost of a chance that I
can find a different relationship with the folk, who knows? Nothing to lose anyway by trying. I suppose it’s what I’ve always really wanted.” He spoke absentmindedly now, stooping to the fire and helping himself to a plate of fish. “God,” he said to himself, eating with sudden awareness and appetite, “I am damnably hungry” – brooding a little as he ate, his face growing severe as of old, spoilt, hard, childish with an old obsession and desire. He tapped me on the chest turning ruthless and charming and smiling. “Of course I cannot afford to lean too far backwards (or is it forwards?) can I? Balance and perspective, eh, Boy? Look what’s happened now. Nearly everybody just vamoosed, vanished. They’re as thoughtless and irresponsible as hell. I was lucky to find even this old bitch” – he pointed to the old Arawak woman – “still hanging around. You can never trust these Bucks you know but she seems harmless enough. Isn’t it a fantastic joke that I have to bargain with them and think of them at all?” He spoke bitterly and incredulously. “Who would believe that these devils have title to the savannahs and to the region? A stupid legacy – aboriginal business and all that nonsense: but there it is. I’ve managed so far to make a place for myself – spread out myself amply as it were – and in a couple of years I shall have firm prescriptive title myself. If”, he spoke bitterly again, “these Indians start to kick up the world of a rumpus now it could be embarrassing and I may have to face costly litigation in the courts down there” – he pointed across the wrinkled map of the Arawak woman’s face in the vague direction of the Atlantic Ocean as towards a scornful pool in heaven – “to hold my own, not to speak of forfeiting a cheap handsome source of labour. It’s all so blasted silly and complicated. After all I’ve earned a right here as well. I’m as native as they, ain’t I? A little better educated maybe whatever in hell that means. They call me sir and curse me when I’m not looking.” He licked his lips and smiled. “The only way to survive of course is to wed oneself into the family. In fact I belong already.” His brow wrinkled a little and he pointed to his dark racial skin.
“As much as Schomburgh or Cameron or anybody.” He could not help laughing, a sudden set laugh like a mask.

“We’re all outside of the folk,” I said musingly. “Nobody belongs yet….”

“Is it a mystery of language and address?” Donne asked quickly and mockingly.

“Language, address?” I found it hard to comprehend what he meant. “There is one dreaming language I know of …” I rebuked him … “which is the same for every man …. No it’s not language. It’s … it’s” … I searched for words with a sudden terrible rage at the difficulty I experienced … “it’s an inapprehension of substance,” I blurted out, “an actual fear … fear of life … fear of the substance of life, fear of the substance of the folk, a cannibal blind fear in oneself. Put it how you like,” I cried, “it’s fear of acknowledging the true substance of life. Yes, fear I tell you, the fear that breeds bitterness in our mouth, the haunting sense of fear that poisons us and hangs us and murders us. And somebody,” I declared, “must demonstrate the unity of being, and
show
…” I had grown violent and emphatic … “that fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance … even death …” I stopped abruptly.

Donne was not listening to my labour and expression and difficulty. He already knew by heart my unpredictable outbursts and attacks and inmost frenzy. Old Schomburgh and the Arawak woman stood at his side.

“What does she say?” he demanded. “You know the blasted Buck talk.”

Old Schomburgh cleared his throat. He disciplined his voice to reply with the subservience of a shrewd labouring man. “They reach far away by now,” he said awkwardly. “They moving quick and they know the trails.”

“We must follow and overtake them,” Donne said promptly.

“They accustom to move at this season, sir,” Schomburgh spoke like a man making an obscure excuse. “Some kind of belief to do with the drought – once in seven year it bound to
curse the land ….” He paused and cleared his throat again.

“What’s this to do with me Schomburgh?” Donne demanded.

“By Christmas when the hard time blow over they come back.” Schomburgh spoke brokenly. “They gone to look for rain to plant easy-easy younder.” He pointed. “By Christmas they come back.” He stopped and I saw the light of uncertainty in his eye. “Perhaps we best to wait right here for them to come back, sir?” he pleaded.

“Are you mad, Schomburgh?” Donne cried. “Listen
Uncle
,” it was his turn to plead and throw all stiffness to the winds, “find out – you know the Buck lingo – how we can catch up. I must have help in a month’s time at latest, and that’s long-long before you dream to see them back. Why the drought nearly done, and I got to have labour for my estate, my new rice planting, my cattle, everything. The folk just all can’t bloody well run away. It’s a hell of a superstitious unreasonableness. O Christ, don’t look so sad man, ask her.”

“She tell me already,” Schomburgh cried awkwardly. “If we follow the river we going catch up in seven day time at a place where they bound to ford the water….”

“Why in hell you didn’t say so before?” Donne laughed and cried.

“Look, you going to you death,” Schomburgh shouted and threatened suddenly. “To you death I say. I know. The river bad like a devil topside of this Mission. I know.” It was an involuntary croaking outburst of which he grew instantly ashamed.

Jennings, the mechanic, wiped his hands nervously on his pants. “Is true, sir,” he addressed Donne. “Is a dangerous time of the year to venture higher. Look what a bad time we had already.”

“You fellows losing your fire or what?” Donne shot at him. “I thought this was a
crew
when we started.”

“I vote to go,” the daSilva twin exclaimed who had helped Cameron.

Jennings turned furious. “You potagee fool,” he cried, “shut you mouth for a change. I is a young married man, two kiddy, and an old sick mother to mend….” He was no longer wiping his hands on his pants but pointing a black angry finger in daSilva’s face.

“I thought you knew all of that at the beginning,” Donne shouted cold and sharp. “Look here, did you, or did you not, tell me you joined us because you were fed up – anything for a clean break? You wanted the water-top again you said. I pointed out how dangerous a season it was and you said you knew. You had had a narrow escape before, you had escaped by the skin of your teeth, you said. But it hadn’t frightened you, you said. In fact when you felt you were dying you knew what a cowardly waste your life was. Anything was better you promised yourself than living again with a harridan and a shrew. Those were your words. Now tell me, Jennings do you wish us to stay right here and rot?” His voice had grown wretched and powerful. He knew he had to hold the crew to his side or he was lost.

“I know,” Jennings said surlily. All of a sudden he grinned and began wiping his hands again on his grease-stained engineer’s pants. “The truth is – you done know it already, so why pretend? – the folk I come from – me wife and me mother and me two child – believe I dead,” he said. “Good for them and good for me. I like it right here under the trees. I vote to stop.” He glared at the fateful propeller in the water as if that were the cause of all his trouble.

Cameron scowled at Jennings. “Shit,” he said. “Let’s move. We got to keep turning. I vote like daSilva to go.” He adopted a belligerent air but he too was heartily uncertain and afraid.

Carroll had begun laughing and the fresh ringing sound of his voice made everyone forget himself and turn in
involuntary
surprise. The laugh struck them as the slyest music coming clear out of the stream. It was like a bell and it startled away for one instant every imagined revolution of misery and
fear and guile. It was an ingenuous sound like the homely crackle of gossiping parrots or of inspired branches in the leaves, or the slicing ecstasy and abandonment of the laughing wood when the hunter loses and finds his game in the footmark he has himself left and made.

Carroll laughed because he could not help himself. He saw that the omens and engines of grace and salvation were so easily turned again into doom. He felt – without clearly understanding why – that the entire crew had been drawn together almost against their will it seemed now and that their living desire was ambivalent and confused as the origin of the first command they dimly recalled and knew in the grave of memory. Something had freed them and lifted them up out of the deeps, a blessing and a curse, a reverberating clap of thunder and still music and song. The sound was jubilant and obscure and tremulous in their ear like a dreaming sword that had cut them from the womb.