It was dark, and the ship was rolling unsettlingly. A kerosene torch spun a star-glow on the Bishop's pale tense face. He was about to address them. He was buried amongst a cargo of potatoes and the litter of the deckers. His was a sober impulse. On all sides the Dutch of Curaçao, the Latins of the Pass, the Africans of Jamaica, and the Irish of Barbadoes—spat, rocked, dozed, crooned.
In a fetid mist odors rose. Sordid; tainted; poised like a sinister vapor over the narrow expanse of deck. And with a passionate calm, the Bishop, clasping the Book of Books, faced them.
"O Lord, our God," he trembled, "O everlasting Father, again it is our privilege to come to Thee, asking Thy blessing and Thy mercy. Great God and Father! Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest the hearts of all men, and especially the hearts of these, Thy children! O Sacred Jehovah! purify their wretched souls—give unto them the strength of Thy wisdom and the glory of Thy power! Lead them, O Blessed Father, unto the path-way of righteousness that they may shine in the glory of Thy goodness! Help them, O! Divine Father! to see the light that shineth in the hearts of all men—we ask Thee Thy blessings in Thy son, Christ Jesus' name, Amen!"
III
Fish, lured onto the glimmering ends of loaded lines, raged in fruitless fury; tore, snarled gutturally, for release; bloodied patches of the hard blue sea; left crescents of gills on green and silvery hooks. Some, big and fat as young oxen, raved for miles on the shining blue sea, snapping and snarling acrobatically. For a stretch of days, the Wellington left behind a scarlet trail.
He was back in Black Rock; a dinky backward village; the gap rocky and grassy, the roads dusty and green-splashed; the marl, in the dry season, whirling blindly at you; the sickly fowls dying of the pip and the yaws; the dogs, a row-rowing, impotent lot; the crops of dry peas and cassava and tannias and eddoes, robbed, before they could feel the pulse of the sun, of their gum or juice; the goats, bred on some jealous tenant's cane shoots, or guided some silken black night down a planter's gully—and then only able to give a little bit of milk; the rain, a whimsical rarity. And then the joys, for a boy of eight—a dew-sprayed, toe-searching tramp at sunrise for "touched" fruit dropped in the night by the epicurean bats, almonds, mangoes, golden apples; dreaming of the day when the cocoanut tree planted at a particularly fecund part of the ground would grow big enough to bear fruit; waiting, in the flush of sowing time, for a cart loaded to the brim to roll rhythmically over the jarring stones and spill a potato or a yam. After silence had again settled over the gap, he'd furtively dash out on the road and seize it and roast it feverishly on a waiting fire; he'd pluck an ear of corn out of the heap his mother'd bring up from the patch to send to town, and roast it, and stuff it hot as it was in his tiny pants pocket and then suffer excruciating rheumatic pains in his leg days afterwards.
Usually on a hike to Bridgetown Sarah would stop at the Oxleys' on Westbury Road. Charlie Oxley was a half-brother of hers. Once he had the smallpox and the corrugations never left him. He was broad and full-bellied and no matter how hot it was he wore severe black serge. He was a potato broker, and a man of religious intelligence.
He had, by as many wives, two girls—and they were as lovely as fine spun silk. But Suttle Street, a pagan's retreat, was hardly a place for them so they were sent to Codrington to absorb the somber sanctity of the Moravian Mission. Now there came to crown the quiet manor on Westbury Road, another mistress, a pretty one, herself a mother of two crimson blown girls, the quintessence of a spring mating. They were a divine puzzle to Oxley. It was queer that their fathers, both firemen on a Bristol tramp, now blissfully ensconced in the heart of the Indian Ocean, had forgotten to return to tickle and fondle their pure white faces....
It had happened in a peculiar way. And all through a silly love of song. Why did she ever encourage such a feeling? The legend of it was fast taking its place beside the parish's scandals of incest. Sea songs; songs sailor-men sang; ballads of the engine room and the stokehole; ditties fashioned out of the crusted sweat of firemen. Ah, it went beyond the lure of the moment. Bowing to it, she'd go, the lovely whelp, to wharf and deck when sunset was spreading a russet mist over the dusky delta of Barbadoes and give herself up to the beauty of song. Greedily songs go to the heart; go to the heart of women. It was bad enough being maid at a grog shop on a bawdy street and the upsquirt of a thundering Scot and an African maiden, but it was worse when the love of songs of the deep, led one at dusk, at dark, to descending stairs to stokeholes or to radiant night-walks on the spotless fringe of Hastings.