V
Little jingley trot-trot-trot, over the Savannah, hey—!
Joggling along towards Cuna-Cuna the creaking caravan shaped its course. Seated in a hooded chariot, berced by mule-bells, and nibbling a shoot of ripe cane, Mrs. Mouth appeared to have attained the heights of bliss. Disregarding, or insensitive to her husband’s incessant groans, (wedged in between a case of pineapples, and a box marked “lingerie”), she abandoned herself voluptuously to her thoughts. It was droll to contemplate meeting an old acquaintance, Nini Snagg, who had gone to reside in Cuna-Cuna long ago: “Fancy seein’ you!” she would say, and how they both would laugh.
Replying tersely to the innumerable “what would you do ifs” of her sister, supposing attacks from masked-bandits or ferocious wild-animals, Miami moped.
All her whole heart yearned back behind her, and never had she loved Bamboo so much as now.
“—if a big, shaggy buffalo, wid two, sharp, horns, dat long, were to rush right at you?” Edna was plaguing her, when a sudden jolt of the van set up a loud cackling from a dozen scared cocks and hens.
“Drat dose fowl; as if dair were none in Cuna-Cuna!” Mrs. Mouth addressed her husband.
“Not birds ob dat brood,” he retorted, plaintively starting to sing.
“I t’ink when I read dat sweet story ob old,
When Jesus was here among men,
How He called lil chillens as lambs to His fold,
I should hab like to hab been wid dem den!
I wish dat His hands had been placed ahn my head,
Dat His arms had been thrown aroun’ me,
An’ dat I might hab seen His kind look when He said,
Let de lil ones come unto me!”
“Mind de dress-basket don’t drop down, deah, an’ spoil our clo’,” Mrs. Mouth exclaimed, indicating a cowskin trunk that seemed to be in peril of falling; for, from motives of economy and ease, it had been decided that not before Cuna-Cuna should rear her queenly towers above them would they change their floral garlands for the more artificial fabrics of the town, and, when Edna, vastly to her importance, should go into a pair of frilled “invisibles” and a petticoat for the first amazing time; nor, indeed, would Mr. Mouth himself take “to de pants,” until his wife and daughters should have assumed their skirts. But this, from the languid pace at which their vehicle proceeded, was unlikely to be just yet. In the torrid tropic noontime, haste, however, was quite out of the question. Bordered by hills, long, yellow and low, the wooded savannah rolled away beneath a blaze of trembling heat.
“I don’t t’ink much ob dis part of de country,” Mrs. Mouth commented. “All dese common palms ... de cedar wood-tree, dat my tree. Dat is de timber I prefer.”
“An’ some,” Edna pertly smiled, “dey like best de bamboo....”
A remark that was rewarded by a blow on the ear.
“Now she set up a hullabaloo like de time de scorpion bit her botty,” Mrs. Mouth lamented, and, indeed, the uproar made, alarmed from the boskage a cloud of winsome soldier-birds and inquisitive parroquets.
“Oh my God,” Mr. Mouth exclaimed. “What for you make all dat dere noise?” But his daughter paid no attention, and soon sobbed herself to sleep.
Advancing through tracks of acacia-scrub, or groves of nutmeg-trees, they jolted along in the gay, exalting sunlight. Flowers brighter than love, wafting the odour of spices, strewed in profusion the long guinea-grass on either side of the way.
“All dose sweet aprons, if it weren’t fo’ de flies!” Mrs. Mouth murmured, regarding some heavy, ambered, Trumpet flowers, with a covetous eye.
“I trust Charlie get bit by no snake!”
“Prancing Nigger! It a lil too late now to t’ink ob dat.”
Since to avoid overcrowding the family party, Charlie was to follow with his butterfly net, and arrive as he could. And never were butterflies (seen in nigger-boys’ dreams as brilliant, or frolicsome, as were those of mid-savannah.) Azure Soledads, and radiant Conquistadors with frail flamboyant wings, wove about the labouring mules perpetual fresh rosettes.
“De Lord protect de lad,” Mr. Mouth remarked, relapsing into silence.
Onward through the cloudless noontide, beneath the ardent sun, the caravan drowsily crawled. As the afternoon advanced, Mrs. Mouth produced a pack of well-thumbed cards, and cutting, casually, twice, began interrogating Destiny with these. Reposing as best she might, Miami gave herself up to her reflections. The familiar aspect of the wayside palms, the tattered pennons of the bananas, the big silk-cottons (known, to children, as “Mammee-trees”), all brought to her mind Bamboo.
“Dair’s somet’in’ dat look like a death dah, dat’s troublin’ me,” Mrs. Mouth remarked, moodily fingering a greasy ace.
“De Almighty forgib dese foolish games!” Mr. Mouth protestingly said.
“An’ from de lie ob de cards ... it seem as ef de corpse were ob de masculine species.”
“Wha’ gib you de notion ob dat?”
“Sh’o, a sheep puts his wool on his favourite places,” Mrs. Mouth returned, reshuffling slowly her pack.
Awakened by her Father’s psalms, Edna’s “What would you do’s” had commenced with volubility anew, growing more eerie with the gathering night.
“... if a Wood-Spirit wid two heads an’ six arms, were to take hold ob you, Miami, from behind?”
“I no do nothin’ at all,” Miami answered briefly.
“Talk not so much ob de jumbies, Chile, as de chickens go to roost!” Mrs. Mouth admonished.
“Or, if de debil himself should?” Edna insisted, allowing Snowball, the cat, to climb on to her knee.
“Nothin’, sh’o,” Miami murmured, regarding dreamily the sun’s sinking disk, that was illuminating all the Western sky with incarnadine and flamingo-rose. Ominous in the falling dusk, the savannah rolled away, its radiant hues effaced beneath a rapid tide of deepening shadow.
“Start de gramophone gwine girls, an’ gib us somet’in’ bright!” Mrs. Mouth exclaimed, depressed by the forlorn note the Twa-oo-Twa-oo bird, that mingled its lament with a thousand night cries from the grass.
“When de saucy female sing: ‘My Ice Cream Girl,’ fo’ sh’o she scare de elves.”
And as though by force of magic, the nasal soprano of an invisible songstress rattled forth with tinkling gusto a music-hall air with a sparkling refrain.
“And the boys shout Girlie, hi!
Bring me soda, soda, soda,
(Aside, spoken) (Stop your fooling there and let me alone!)
For I’m an Ice Cream Soda Girl.”
“It put me in mind ob de last sugar-factory explosion! It was de same day dat Snowball crack de Tezzrazine record. Drat de cat.”
“O, Lordey Lord! Wha’ for you make dat din?” Mr. Mouth complained, knotting a cotton handkerchief over his head.
“I hope you not gwine to be billeous, honey, afore we get to Lucia?”
“Lemme alone. Ah’m thinkin’....”
Pressing on by the light of a large clear moon, the hamlet of Lucia, the halting-place proposed for the night, lay still far ahead.
Stars, like many Indian pinks, flecked with pale brightness the sky above; towards the horizon shone the Southern Cross, while the Pole Star, through the palm-fronds, came and went.
“And the men cry Girlie, hi!
Bring me—”
“Silence, dah! Ah’m thinkin’....”