Palace of the Peacock Page 3

  It was a day of filtered sunshine, half-cloud, half-sun. Wishrop had been bowing for old Schomburgh. He retired to the stern of the vessel to relieve Donne who looked the strangest shadow of himself, falling across the boat into the water, I suddenly thought. The change in Donne I suddenly felt in the quickest flash was in me. It was something in the open air as well, in the strange half-sun, in the river, in the forest in the mysterious youthful longing which the whole crew possessed for Mariella and for the Mission where she lived above the falls. The murdered horseman of the savannahs, the skeleton footfall on the river bank and in the bush, the moonhead and crucifixion in the waterfall and in the river were over as though a cruel ambush of soul had partly lifted its veil and face to show that death was the shadow of a dream. In this remarkable filtered light it was not men of vain flesh and blood I saw toiling laboriously and meaninglessly, but active ghosts whose labour was indeed a flitting shadow over their shoulders as living men would don raiment and cast it off in turn to fulfil the simplest necessity of being. Wishrop was an excellent steersman. The boat swayed and moved harmoniously with every inclination of his body upon the great paddle. A lull fell upon the crew, transforming them, as it had changed Donne, into the drumming current of the outboard engine and of the rapid swirling water around every shadowy stone. All understanding flowed into Wishrop’s dreaming eternity, all essence and desire and direction, wished-for and longed-for since the beginning of time, or else focused itself in the eye of Vigilance’s spirit.

  In this light it was as if the light of all past days and nights on earth had vanished. It was the first breaking dawn of the light of our soul.

  BOOK TWO

  THE MISSION OF MARIELLA

  … the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  IV

  Our arrival at the Mission was a day of curious consternation and belief for the colony. The news flew like lightning across the river and into the bush. It seemed to fall from the sky through the cloudy trees that arched high in the air and barely touched, leaving the narrowest ribbon of space. The stream that reflected the news was inexpressibly smooth and true, and the leaves that sprinkled the news from the heavens of the forest stood on a shell of expectant water as if they floated half on the air, half on a stone.

  We drove at a walking pace through the brooding reflecting carpet unable to make up our minds where we actually stood. We had hardly turned into the bank when a fleet of canoes devoured us. Faces pressed upon us from land and water. The news was confirmed like wild-fire. We were the news. It was ourselves who were the news. Everyone remembered that not so long ago this self-same crew had been drowned to a man in the rapids below the Mission. Everyone recalled the visits the crew had paid the Mission from time to time leading to the fatal accident. They recalled the event as one would see a bubble, bright and clear as the sun, bursting unexpectedly and knitting itself together again into a feature of sheer consternation, mingled gladness and fear. Or into a teardrop, sadness and unexpected joy running together, in the eye of a friend or a woman or a child.

  They did not know how to trust their own emotion, almost on the verge of doubting the stream in their midst. Old Schomburgh looked as timeless as every member of the crew. Carroll, Vigilance, Wishrop, the daSilva twins. The wooden-faced, solemn-looking Jennings stood under the disc and toy that had spun the grave propeller of the world. Where there had been death was now the reflection of life.

  The unexpected image of Donne awoke a quiver of sudden alarm and fright. A heavy shadow fell upon all of us – upon the Mission, the trees, the wind, the water. It was an ominous and disturbing symptom of retiring gloom and darkened understanding under the narrow chink and ribbon of sky. They shrank from us as from a superstition of dead men. Donne had had a bad name in the savannahs, and Mariella, to their dreaming knowledge, had been abused and ill-treated by him, and had ultimately killed him. Their faces turned into a wall around her. She was a living fugitive from the devil’s rule. This was the birth and beginning of a new fantasy and material difficulty and opposition.

  We had barely succeeded in tying our boat securely to the bank than they had left us alone. We could see their houses – set down in little clearings – through the trees. The small thatched walls and sloping roofs were made of cocerite palm – a sure sign of goodness and prosperity. The flesh of the cocerite fruit was succulent and dreamy and white, and the tree only appeared where there was promising land.

  The young children playing and scrambling near the cocerite houses had vanished with the entire population, and the Mission now looked abandoned.

  “We sleeping in a funny-funny place tonight,” Wishrop said wonderingly.

  “Them Buck folk scare of dead people bad-bad,” Cameron laughed, chewing a sweet blade of grass. “They done know all-you rise bodily from the grave. Big frauds! that is what all you is.” He spoke with affection.

  His face was brick-red as the first day we had set out, his hair close and curling and negroid. His hands moved like a panther boxing and dancing and quick, and in a moment he had slung his hammock between the trees near the river’s edge. He sat in it and tested it, rocking awhile. His brow and expression endorsed the sureness and the life in his hands. They bore an air of patience and experience, a little tired and cynical almost one would imagine when he smiled and his face wrinkled a little: a timeless long-suffering wrinkle of humour and scepticism and native poetry that knew the guts of the world wherein had been invested and planted the toughest breed of sensibility time had ever known.

  Cameron’s great-grandfather had been a dour Scot, and his great-grandmother an African slave and mistress. Cameron was related to Schomburgh (whom he addressed as Uncle with the other members of the crew) and it was well-known that Schomburgh’s great-grandfather had come from Germany, and his great-grandmother was an Arawak American Indian. The whole crew was one spiritual family living and dying together in a common grave out of which they had sprung again from the same soul and womb as it were. They were all knotted and bound together in the enormous bruised head of Cameron’s ancestry and nature as in the white unshaven head of Schomburgh’s age and presence.

  It was this thread of toughness and guts that Cameron understood and revelled in more than any other man. It gave him his slowness and caution of foot (in contradistinction to the speed in his hands): he stood like a melodramatic rock in mother earth, born from a close fantasy and web of slave and concubine and free, out of one complex womb, from a phantom of voluptuousness whose memory was bitter and rebellious as death and sweet as life; every discipline and endurance and pain he felt he knew. But this boast sprang from a thriftless love of romance and a genuine optimism and self-advertisement and self-ignorance.

  Cynicism and ribaldry were the gimmick he adopted. Courage was native and spontaneous. Stoicism and shame played a minor part in fashioning his consciousness of himself and his adopted wrinkle and mask. He was never a cunning fisherman like Schomburgh, straining his attention upon the fish that swam in the river, only to delude himself after a while about the nature of his catch. Cameron knew in as plain and literal terms as hell fire itself what it was he actually wanted and had never been able to gain.

  He wanted space and freedom to use his own hands in order to make his own primitive home and kingdom on earth, hands that would rule everything, magical hands dispensing life and death to their subjects as a witch doctor would or a tribal god and judge. This was a gross exaggeration of his desires and intentions, an enormous extension and daydream to which hard and strong and tough men are curiously subject though they fear and seek to reprove themselves for thinking in such a light. In fact it was the only unconscious foreboding (in the midst of his affections and laughter) Cameron ever experienced, the closest he came to Schomburgh’s guilt and imagination he dimly felt to lie beyond his years. So it was, unwitting and ignorant, he had been drawn to his death with the others, and had acquired the extraordinary defensive blindness, ribal
d as hell and witchcraft, of dying again and again to the world and still bobbing up once more lusting for an ultimate satisfaction and a cynical truth.

  There was always the inevitable Woman (he had learnt to capitalize his affairs) – the anchor that tied him down for a while against his will and exercised him into regaining his habitual toughness to break away again for good. Still he could never scrape together enough money – after every grotesque adventure – to buy the place he wanted. That was the taste of death and hell: to make do always with another unintelligent and seedy alternative, while the intelligent and fruitful thing remained just beyond his grasp.

  “A miss is as good as a mile,” he sang aloud impishly. “I must scrape together some real capital –” he winked his eye at the company. “The soil here good,” he spoke stoutly. “Right here in this Mission is the start I always seeing in view. Donkey’s years I seeing it I tell you. I never seem to quite make it you know. Maybe I’m silly in the upper mental storey of me house,” – he tapped his head humbly. “Not smart and obliging enough. Fact is we don’t speak the same language that is God’s truth. They speak shy and tricky – the Mission folk. I speak them hard bitter style of words I been picking up all me life. Is the way I make me living.” He scowled and looked at the world for approval, like a man who conceals his dread of his mistress turning into his witch and his widow. “I got to keep making these brutal sounds to live. You realize these Mission folk is the only people who got the real devil of a title to this land?” He opened his hands helplessly. “If only the right understanding missy and mistress would come along sweet and lucky and Bucky and rich, Ah would be in heaven, boys.” He let his foot drag on the ground crunching the soil a little. His head swung suddenly, in spite of himself and against his will, turning an envious reflective eye on the image of Donne – a superstitious eye almost, fearing the evil within himself as the Mission folk had feared Donne within them.

  “You think you really want this ghost of a chance you fishing for?” Schomburgh interrupted. “Maybe you don’t understand you can drive and scare the blasted soul of the world away and lose your bait for good.” It was a speech for him. He had his fishing-rod in his hands and was adjusting the line, rubbing his itching unshaven chin on his shoulders as the gloomy words broke in his chest like an ancient cough. Cameron trembled a little with a sense of cruel unwanted cold, the meaningless engagement with and stab of death that he – with the entire crew – had not yet shaken off. It was a wind blowing on the water, a knife and chill they recognized like tropical fever that blew out of the Mission in an ague of fears, shaking the leaves of the dreaming forest.

  V

  Night fell on curling flames, on our hammocks curling too like ash and ghost, and the trees turning black as charcoal. Fugitive green shone on the leaves nearest us in the illumination of the camp fire, turning black a little farther away on the fringe of the brittle glaring shadow reflected in the river at our feet.

  The fire subsided slowly, spitting stars and sparks every now and then and barking like a hoarse dog. The burning logs crouched and settled and turned white as fur still burning all the while underneath their whiteness redly and sombrely.

  The white fur greyed to hourly ash as the night aged in the trees and the fugitive fiery green of dreaming leaves turned faintly silver and grey in anticipation of the pale shadow of dawn.

  It was the first night I had spent on the soil of Mariella. So it seemed to me in a kind of hallucination drawing me away from the other members of the crew. Every grey hammock around me became an empty cocoon as hollow as a deserted shell and a house.

  I felt the soul of desire to abandon the world at the critical turning point of time around which curled the ash and the fur of night. I knew the keen marrow of this extreme desire and desertion, the sense of animal flight lacking true warmth, the hideous fascination of fire devoid of all burning spirit.

  A dog rose and stood over me. A horse it was in the uncertain grey light, half-wolf, half-donkey, monstrous, disconsolate; neighing and barking in one breath, its terrible half-hooves raised over me to trample its premature rider. I grew conscious of its closeness as a shadow and as death. I made a frightful gesture to mount, and it shrank a little into half-woman, half-log greying into the dawn. Its teeth shone like a misty rag, and I raised my hand to cajole and stroke its ageing, soulful face. I sat bolt upright in my hammock, shouting aloud that the devil himself must fondle and mount this muse of hell and this hag, sinking back instantly, a dead man in his bed come to an involuntary climax. The grey wet dream of dawn had restored to me Mariella’s terrible stripes and anguish of soul. The vaguest fire and warmth came like a bullet, flooding me, over aeons of time it seemed, with penitence and sorrow.

  *

  This musing re-enactment and reconstruction of the death of Donne ushered in the early dawn with a grey feeling inside. The leaves dripped in the entire forest the dewy cold tears of the season of drought that affected the early tropical morning and left me rigid and trembling. A pearl and half-light and arrow shot along the still veined branches. The charcoal memory of the hour lifted as a curtain rises upon the light of an eternal design. The trees were lit with stars of fire of an unchanging and perfect transparency. They hung on every sensitive leaf and twig and fell into the river, streaking the surface of the water with a darting appearance crimson as blood. It was an illusory reflection growing out of the strength of the morning light on my closed eyelids and I had no alternative but to accept my eye as a shade between me and an inviolate spirit. It seemed to me that such a glimpse of perfection was a most cruel and distressing fact in that it brought me face to face with my own enormous frailty. It grew increasingly hard to believe that this blindness and error were all my material fantasy rather than the flaw of a universal creation. For manhood’s sake and estate I saw there must arise the devil of resistance and incredulity toward a grotesque muse which abandoned and killed and saved all at the same time with the power of indestructible understanding and life.

  How stupid and silly to lose the cruel expectation and stronghold of death. It was the surest gamble I had known in my life; I was mad to believe I had seen an undying action and presence in the heartfelt malice of all mystery and seduction.

  How could I surrender myself to be drawn two ways at once? Indeed what a phenomenon it was to have pulled me, even in the slightest degree, away from nature’s end and wish, and towards the eternal desire and spirit that charged the selfsame wish of death with shades of mediation, precept upon precept in the light of my consciousness which was in itself but another glimmering shadow hedging the vision and the glory and the light.

  *

  I awoke now completely and fully. I tried to grapple again with my night-and-morning dream; it all faded and vanished. I recognized a curious sense of inner refreshment. The old innocent expectations and the journey – Donne’s first musing journey to Mariella – returned with a rush. The eccentric emotional lives of the crew every man mans and lives in his inmost ship and theatre and mind were a deep testimony of a childlike bizarre faith true to life. It was as if something had snapped again, a prison door, a chain, and a rush and flight of appearances jostled each other – past, present and future in one constantly vanishing and reappearing cloud and mist. I rubbed my eyes. Old Schomburgh was carefully cleaning the fish he had caught the night before. Cameron was poking and lighting the fire, assisted by a young man with high pale cheeks – one of the daSilva twins.

  “Cammy,” the young man was saying in a confidential rather duncified tone, “an old woman knocking about one of them houses. I see she since foreday morning.” He pointed.

  “Only she come back?” Cameron was incredulous.

  “Looking so,” daSilva said.

  “Well what in hell really going on….”

  “Have you chaps seen Donne anywhere?” I interrupted from my hammock.

  “He and me brother gone for a lil look-see walk,” daSilva said somewhat heavily. His voice had a moody almost
stupid drawl out of keeping with the slight active life of his hands and limbs.

  I rose and began dressing.

  “You don’t think is Donne scare them away?” daSilva spoke to me confidentially.

  “I dunno,” I said, vaguely stirred by sleeping memories. “They’re funny folk.”

  “But you know is he,” daSilva insisted, repeating a brutal time-worn lesson.

  “They fear you too,” I waved my hand as vaguely as ever around.

  “Yes, I s’pose so,” daSilva consented heavily. “But is a different-different thing,” he argued, struggling with an emotional tide. “I been to this Mission before and I can’t remember me doing harm to anybody. Don’t laugh, Cammy. I know I mek a chile with one of the women. I see you laughing….” He stopped and gave a coarse heavy bray astonishing for his frail chest and shoulders. “You mean to say” – he argued – “a man wife and chile going run from he?”