Four Bells: A Tale of the Caribbean

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

The monkey leaped into the air. He was sensitive to shocks. This woman was determined to seek his life. If it was the briar pipe that made her so ruthless, then he would let her have it. Better a live pauper than a dead monkey! Only the gods of the jungle knew what she would be throwing at him next. A bombardment of those explosive flower pots and books that went “bang” might put an end to his career. Old Papa Bazán had a temper, but he was never like this.

Thereupon the mistreated monkey dropped the pipe and sped at top speed to a far part of the house, into the vegetable bin beyond the kitchen where there were burlap sacks to pull over one’s self. The atmosphere of home had been ruined by a hateful, alien presence in petticoats.

Her mind slightly relieved, Teresa called herself a useless girl for yielding so weakly to a fainting spell. It was the breaking strain, but she was by no means ready to surrender to the impact of circumstances. She walked into the bathroom and let the water run cool in the basin. She splashed her face and temples and laved her wrists. This was no time to indulge in hysteria or to let her wits be tangled. It was a mercy that she could be alone in this empty house until the late hours of the afternoon.

Soon she felt strong enough to cross the patio and regain possession of Richard Cary’s pipe. It had intimately belonged to him, a companion of his night watches in all the ships he had known. He had told her this. Perhaps he had thought of Teresa when he had smoked his pipe on the rocking bridge of the Tarragona under the star-spattered skies of the Caribbean.

Now she caressed the pipe with the palm of her hand until the bowl shone like polished teak. With a hairpin she fished out the crumpled bits of paper which the monkey had so painstakingly rammed therein.

Here was a queer thing. She was quick to notice it, and as quick to deduce its immense significance. When she had cleaned the pipe for Ricardo, that last night on shipboard, she had dug out the evil-smelling dottle in order to put steam through it and blow out the nicotine. It had been a labor of love.

Teresa knew as much about pipes as a man. She had listened to many shipmates deliver orations or wrangle over the merits of their pet briars or meerschaums, their clays and corn-cobs. She had watched them carefully scrape the burnt cake when the bowl was almost filled.

Ricardo’s pipe had been almost clear of this charred cake, as hard as coal. This she remembered because it had been easy to clean it. He must have been busy with his knife not long before that, as men were accustomed to do when there was almost no room for tobacco in the bowl.

But this same briar pipe, as she now held it in her hand, was caked and foul. It had been smoked a good deal since she had last seen it on board the Tarragona. A pipe could not get in this condition unless it had been smoked longer than a day or a week. Why, it was time to dig out the bowl again and cut away the black, hard cake. Here was something very engrossing to study, enough to make a girl ever so much flightier than Uncle Ramon Bazán in his maddest moments.

Merely the tobacco ash burned hard in a briar pipe, but in the random alleys of life, no incident is so small that it can be called negligible. The little brown monkeys of chance momentously meddle with the affairs of humankind and pass gayly on.