In this light it was as if the light of all past days and nights on earth had vanished. It was the first breaking dawn of the light of our soul.
BOOK TWO. THE MISSION OF MARIELLA
… the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.
IV
Our arrival at the Mission was a day of curious consternation and belief for the colony. The news flew like lightning across the river and into the bush. It seemed to fall from the sky through the cloudy trees that arched high in the air and barely touched, leaving the narrowest ribbon of space. The stream that reflected the news was inexpressibly smooth and true, and the leaves that sprinkled the news from the heavens of the forest stood on a shell of expectant water as if they floated half on the air, half on a stone.
We drove at a walking pace through the brooding reflecting carpet unable to make up our minds where we actually stood. We had hardly turned into the bank when a fleet of canoes devoured us. Faces pressed upon us from land and water. The news was confirmed like wild-fire. We were the news. It was ourselves who were the news. Everyone remembered that not so long ago this self-same crew had been drowned to a man in the rapids below the Mission. Everyone recalled the visits the crew had paid the Mission from time to time leading to the fatal accident. They recalled the event as one would see a bubble, bright and clear as the sun, bursting unexpectedly and knitting itself together again into a feature of sheer consternation, mingled gladness and fear. Or into a teardrop, sadness and unexpected joy running together, in the eye of a friend or a woman or a child.
They did not know how to trust their own emotion, almost on the verge of doubting the stream in their midst. Old Schomburgh looked as timeless as every member of the crew. Carroll, Vigilance, Wishrop, the daSilva twins. The wooden-faced, solemn-looking Jennings stood under the disc and toy that had spun the grave propeller of the world. Where there had been death was now the reflection of life.
The unexpected image of Donne awoke a quiver of sudden alarm and fright. A heavy shadow fell upon all of us — upon the Mission, the trees, the wind, the water. It was an ominous and disturbing symptom of retiring gloom and darkened understanding under the narrow chink and ribbon of sky. They shrank from us as from a superstition of dead men. Donne had had a bad name in the savannahs, and Mariella, to their dreaming knowledge, had been abused and ill-treated by him, and had ultimately killed him. Their faces turned into a wall around her. She was a living fugitive from the devil’s rule. This was the birth and beginning of a new fantasy and material difficulty and opposition.
We had barely succeeded in tying our boat securely to the bank than they had left us alone. We could see their houses — set down in little clearings — through the trees. The small thatched walls and sloping roofs were made of cocerite palm — a sure sign of goodness and prosperity. The flesh of the cocerite fruit was succulent and dreamy and white, and the tree only appeared where there was promising land.
The young children playing and scrambling near the cocerite houses had vanished with the entire population, and the Mission now looked abandoned.
“We sleeping in a funny-funny place tonight,” Wishrop said wonderingly.
“Them Buck folk scare of dead people bad-bad,” Cameron laughed, chewing a sweet blade of grass. “They done know all-you rise bodily from the grave. Big frauds! that is what all you is.” He spoke with affection.
His face was brick-red as the first day we had set out, his hair close and curling and negroid. His hands moved like a panther boxing and dancing and quick, and in a moment he had slung his hammock between the trees near the river’s edge. He sat in it and tested it, rocking awhile. His brow and expression endorsed the sureness and the life in his hands. They bore an air of patience and experience, a little tired and cynical almost one would imagine when he smiled and his face wrinkled a little: a timeless long-suffering wrinkle of humour and scepticism and native poetry that knew the guts of the world wherein had been invested and planted the toughest breed of sensibility time had ever known.
Cameron’s great-grandfather had been a dour Scot, and his great-grandmother an African slave and mistress. Cameron was related to Schomburgh (whom he addressed as Uncle with the other members of the crew) and it was well-known that Schomburgh’s great-grandfather had come from Germany, and his great-grandmother was an Arawak American Indian. The whole crew was one spiritual family living and dying together in a common grave out of which they had sprung again from the same soul and womb as it were. They were all knotted and bound together in the enormous bruised head of Cameron’s ancestry and nature as in the white unshaven head of Schomburgh’s age and presence.
It was this thread of toughness and guts that Cameron understood and revelled in more than any other man. It gave him his slowness and caution of foot (in contradistinction to the speed in his hands): he stood like a melodramatic rock in mother earth, born from a close fantasy and web of slave and concubine and free, out of one complex womb, from a phantom of voluptuousness whose memory was bitter and rebellious as death and sweet as life; every discipline and endurance and pain he felt he knew. But this boast sprang from a thriftless love of romance and a genuine optimism and self-advertisement and self-ignorance.
Cynicism and ribaldry were the gimmick he adopted. Courage was native and spontaneous. Stoicism and shame played a minor part in fashioning his consciousness of himself and his adopted wrinkle and mask. He was never a cunning fisherman like Schomburgh, straining his attention upon the fish that swam in the river, only to delude himself after a while about the nature of his catch. Cameron knew in as plain and literal terms as hell fire itself what it was he actually wanted and had never been able to gain.
He wanted space and freedom to use his own hands in order to make his own primitive home and kingdom on earth, hands that would rule everything, magical hands dispensing life and death to their subjects as a witch doctor would or a tribal god and judge. This was a gross exaggeration of his desires and intentions, an enormous extension and daydream to which hard and strong and tough men are curiously subject though they fear and seek to reprove themselves for thinking in such a light. In fact it was the only unconscious foreboding (in the midst of his affections and laughter) Cameron ever experienced, the closest he came to Schomburgh’s guilt and imagination he dimly felt to lie beyond his years. So it was, unwitting and ignorant, he had been drawn to his death with the others, and had acquired the extraordinary defensive blindness, ribald as hell and witchcraft, of dying again and again to the world and still bobbing up once more lusting for an ultimate satisfaction and a cynical truth.
There was always the inevitable Woman (he had learnt to capitalize his affairs) — the anchor that tied him down for a while against his will and exercised him into regaining his habitual toughness to break away again for good. Still he could never scrape together enough money — after every grotesque adventure — to buy the place he wanted. That was the taste of death and helclass="underline" to make do always with another unintelligent and seedy alternative, while the intelligent and fruitful thing remained just beyond his grasp.
“A miss is as good as a mile,” he sang aloud impishly. “I must scrape together some real capital —” he winked his eye at the company. “The soil here good,” he spoke stoutly. “Right here in this Mission is the start I always seeing in view. Donkey’s years I seeing it I tell you. I never seem to quite make it you know. Maybe I’m silly in the upper mental storey of me house,” — he tapped his head humbly. “Not smart and obliging enough. Fact is we don’t speak the same language that is God’s truth. They speak shy and tricky — the Mission folk. I speak them hard bitter style of words I been picking up all me life. Is the way I make me living.” He scowled and looked at the world for approval, like a man who conceals his dread of his mistress turning into his witch and his widow. “I got to keep making these brutal sounds to live. You realize these Mission folk is the only people who got the real devil of a title to this land?” He opened his hands helplessly. “If only the right understanding missy and mistress would come along sweet and lucky and Bucky and rich, Ah would be in heaven, boys.” He let his foot drag on the ground crunching the soil a little. His head swung suddenly, in spite of himself and against his will, turning an envious reflective eye on the image of Donne — a superstitious eye almost, fearing the evil within himself as the Mission folk had feared Donne within them.