“Try and walk.” Mr. Todd hoisted Tony to his feet and supported him with a stout arm.
“I'll ride your bicycle. It was you I passed just now on a bicycle wasn't it? … except that your beard is a different colour. His was green … green as mice.”
Mr. Todd led Tony across the hummocks of grass towards the house.
“It is a very short way. When we get there I will give you something to make you better.”
“Very kind of you … rotten thing for a man to have his wife go away in a canoe. That was a long time ago. Nothing to eat since.” Presently he said, “I say, you're English. I'm English too. My name is Last.”
“Well, Mr. Last, you aren't to bother about any thing more. You're ill and you've had a rough journey. I'll take care of you.”
Tony looked round him.
“Are you all English?”
“Yes, all of us.”
“That dark girl married a Moor … It's very lucky I met you all. I suppose you're some kind of cycling club?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I feel too tired for bicycling … never liked it much … you fellows ought to get motor bicycles you know, much faster and noisier … Let's stop here.”
“No, you must come as far as the house. It's not very much further.”
“All right … I suppose you would have some difficulty getting petrol here.”
They went very slowly, but at length reached the house.
“Lie there in the hammock.”
“That's what Messinger said. He's in love with John Beaver.”
“I will get something for you.”
“Very good of you. Just my usual morning tray — coffee, toast, fruit. And the morning papers. If her ladyship has been called I will have it with her …”
Mr. Todd went into the back room of the house and dragged a tin canister from under a heap of skins. It was full of a mixture of dried leaf and bark. He took a handful and went outside to the fire. When he returned his guest was bolt upright astride the hammock, talking angrily.
“… You would hear better and it would be more polite if you stood still when I addressed you instead of walking round in a circle. It is for your own good that I am telling you … I know you are friends of my wife and that is why you will not listen to me. But be careful. She will say nothing cruel, she will not raise her voice, there will be no hard words. She hopes you will be great friends afterwards as before. But she will leave you. She will go away quietly during the night. She will take her hammock and her rations of farine … Listen to me. I know I am not clever but … that is no reason why we should forget courtesy. Let us kill in the gentlest manner. I will tell you what I have learned in the forest, where time is different. There is no City. Mrs. Beaver has covered it with chromium plating and converted it into flats. Three guineas a week with a separate bathroom. Very suitable for base love. And Polly will be there. She and Mrs. Beaver under the fallen battlements …”
Mr. Todd put a hand behind Tony's head and held up the concoction of herbs in the calabash. Tony sipped and turned away his head.
“Nasty medicine,” he said, and began to cry.
Mr. Todd stood by him holding the calabash. Presently Tony drank some more, screwing up his face and shuddering slightly at the bitterness. Mr. Todd stood beside him until the draught was finished; then he threw out the dregs on to the mud floor. Tony lay back in the hammock sobbing quietly. Soon he fell into a deep sleep.
Tony's recovery was slow. At first, days of lucidity alternated with delirium; then his temperature dropped and he was conscious even when most ill. The days of fever grew less frequent, finally occurring in the normal system of the tropics, between long periods of comparative health. Mr. Todd dosed him regularly with herbal remedies.
“It's very nasty,” said Tony, “but it does do good.”
“There is medicine for everything in the forest,” said Mr. Todd; “to make you well and to make you ill. My mother was an Indian and she taught me many of them. I have learned others from time to time from my wives. There are plants to cure you and give you fever, to kill you and send you mad, to keep away snakes, to intoxicate fish so that you can pick them out of the water with your hands like fruit from a tree. There are medicines even I do not know. They say that it is possible to bring dead people to life after they have begun to stink, but I have not seen it done.”
“But surely you are English?”
“My father was — at least a Barbadian. He came to Guiana as a missionary. He was married to a white woman but he left her in Guiana to look for gold. Then he took my mother. The Pie-wie women are ugly but very devoted. I have had many. Most of the men and women living in this savannah are my children. That is why they obey — for that reason and because I have the gun. My father lived to a great age. It is not twenty years since he died. He was a man of education. Can you read?”
“Yes, of course.”
“It is not everyone who is so fortunate. I cannot.”
Tony laughed apologetically. “But I suppose you haven't much opportunity here.”
“Oh yes, that is just it. I have a great many books. I will show you when you are better. Until five years ago there was an Englishman — at least a black man, but he was well educated in Georgetown. He died. He used to read to me every day until he died. You shall read to me when you are better.”
“I shall be delighted to.”
“Yes, you shall read to me,” Mr. Todd repeated, nodding over the calabash.
During the early days of his convalescence Tony had little conversation with his host; he lay in the hammock staring up at the thatched roof and thinking, about Brenda. The days, exactly twelve hours, each, passed without distinction. Mr. Todd retired to sleep at sundown, leaving a little lamp burning — a hand-woven wick drooping from a pot of beef fat — to keep away vampire bats.
The first time that Tony left the house Mr. Todd took him for a little stroll around the farm.
“I will show you the black man's grave,” he said, leading him to a mound between the mango trees. “He was very kind. Every afternoon until he died, for two hours, he used to read to me. I think I will put up a cross — to commemorate his death and your arrival — a pretty idea. Do you believe in God?”
“I suppose so. I've never really thought about it much.”
“I have thought about it a great deal and I still do not know … Dickens did.”
“I suppose so.”
“Oh yes, it is apparent in all his books. You will see.”
That afternoon Mr. Todd began the construction of a headpiece for the Negro's grave. He worked with a large spokeshave in a wood so hard that it grated and rang like metal.
At last when Tony had passed six or seven consecutive nights without fever, Mr. Todd said, “Now I think you are well enough to see the books.”
At one end of the but there was a kind of loft formed by a rough platform erected in the caves of the roof. Mr. Todd propped a ladder against it and mounted. Tony followed, still unsteady after his illness. Mr. Todd sat on the platform and Tony stood at the top of the ladder looking over. There was a heap of small bundles there, tied up with rag, palm leaf and raw hide.
“It has been hard to keep out the worms and ants. Two are practically destroyed. But there is an oil the Indians make that is useful.”
He unwrapped the nearest parcel and handed down a calf bound book. It was an early American edition of Bleak House.
“It does not matter which we take first.”
“You are fond of Dickens?”
“Why, yes, of course. More than fond, far more. You see, they are the only books I have ever heard. My father used to read them and then later the black man … and now you. I have heard them all several times by now but I never get tired; there is always more to be learned and noticed, so many characters, so many changes of scene, so many words … I have all Dickens books here except those that the ants devoured. It takes a long time to read them all — more than two years.”