III
The strange sadness of evening, the détresse of the Evening Sky! Cry, cry, white Rain Birds out of the West, cry ...!
“An’ so, Miami, you no come back no more?”
“No, no come back.”
Flaunting her boredom by the edge of the sea one close of day, she had chanced to fall in with Bamboo, who, stretched at length upon the beach, was engaged in mending a broken net.
“An’ I dats way glad,” she half-resentfully pouted, jealous a little of his toil.
But, presuming deafness, the young man laboured on, since, to support an aged mother, and to attain one’s desires, perforce necessitates work; and his fondest wish, by dint of saving, was to wear on his wedding-day a pink starched, cotton shirt—a starched, pink cotton shirt, stiff as a boat’s-sail when the North winds caught it! But a pink shirt would mean trousers ... and trousers would lead to shoes.... “Extravagant nigger, don’t you dare!” he would exclaim, in dizzy panic, from time to time, aloud.
“Forgib me, honey,” he begged, “but me obliged to finish, while de daylight last.”
“Sh’o,” she sulked, following the amazing strategy of the sunset-clouds.
“Miami angel, you look so sweet: I dat amorous ob you, Mimi!”
A light laugh tripped over her lips:
“Say, buoy, how you getting on?” she queried, sinking down on her knees beside him.
“I dat amorous ob you!”
“Oh, ki,” she tittered, with a swift mocking glance at his crimson loincloth. She had often longed to snatch it away.
“Say you lub me, just a lil, too, deah?”
“Sh’o,” she answered softly, sliding over on to her stomach, and laying her cheek to the flats of her hands.
Boats with crimson spouts, to wit, steamers, dotted the skyline far away, and barques, with sails like the wings of butterflies, borne by an idle breeze, were bringing more than one ineligible young mariner back to the prose of shore.
“Ob wha’ you t’inking?”
“Nothin’,” she sighed, contemplating laconically a little transparent shell of violet pearl, full of sea-water and grains of sand, that the wind ruffled as it blew.
“Not ob any sort ob lil t’ing?” he caressingly insisted, breaking an open dark flower from her belt of wild Pansy.
“I should be gwine home,” she breathed, recollecting the undoing of the negress Ottalie.
“Oh, I dat amorous ob you, Mimi.”
“If you want to finish dat net, while de daylight last.”
For oceanward, in a glowing ball, the sun had dropped already.
“Sho’, nigger, I only wish to be kind,” she murmured, getting up and sauntering a few paces along the strand.
Lured, perhaps, by the nocturnal phosphorescence from its lair, a water-scorpion, disquieted at her approach, turned and vanished amid the sheltering cover of the rocks. “Isht, isht,” she squealed, wading after it into the surf; but to find it, look as she would, was impossible. Dark, curious and anxious, in the fast failing light, the sea disquieted her too, and it was consoling to hear close behind her the solicitous voice of Bamboo.
“Us had best soon be movin’, befo’ de murk ob night.”
The few thatched cabins, that comprised the village of Mediavilla, lay not half a mile from the shore. Situated between the savannah and the sea, on the southern side of the island known as Tacarigua (the “burning Tacarigua” of the Poets), its inhabitants were obliged, from lack of communication with the larger island centres, to rely to a considerable extent for a livelihood among themselves. Local Market days, held, alternatively, at Valley Village, or Broken Hill (the nearest approach to industrial towns in the district around Mediavilla), were the chief source of rural trade, when such merchandise as fish, coral, beads, bananas and loincloths, would exchange hands amid much animation, social gossip and pleasant fun.
“Wh’a you say to dis?” she queried as they turned inland through the cane-fields, holding up a fetish known as a “luck-ball,” attached to her throat by a chain.
“Who gib it you?” he shortly demanded, with a quick suspicious glance.
“Mammee, she bring it from Valley Village, an’ she bring another for my lil sister, too.”
“Folks say she attend de Market only to meet de Obi man, who cast a spell so dat your Dada move to Cuna-Cuna.”
“Dat so!”
“Your Mammee no seek ebber de influence ob Obeah?”
“Not dat I know ob!” she replied; nevertheless, she could not but recall her mother’s peculiar behaviour of late, especially upon Market days, when, instead of conversing with her friends, she would take herself off, with a mysterious air, saying she was going to the Baptist Chapel.
“Mammee, she hab no faith in de Witch-Doctor, at all,” she murmured, halting to lend an ear to the liquid note of a Peadove among the canes.
“I no care; me follow after wherebber you go,” he said, stealing an arm about her.
“True?” she breathed, looking up languidly towards the white mounting moon.
“I dat amorous ob you, Mimi.”