“You think you really want this ghost of a chance you fishing for?” Schomburgh interrupted. “Maybe you don’t understand you can drive and scare the blasted soul of the world away and lose your bait for good.” It was a speech for him. He had his fishing-rod in his hands and was adjusting the line, rubbing his itching unshaven chin on his shoulders as the gloomy words broke in his chest like an ancient cough. Cameron trembled a little with a sense of cruel unwanted cold, the meaningless engagement with and stab of death that he — with the entire crew — had not yet shaken off. It was a wind blowing on the water, a knife and chill they recognized like tropical fever that blew out of the Mission in an ague of fears, shaking the leaves of the dreaming forest.
V
Night fell on curling flames, on our hammocks curling too like ash and ghost, and the trees turning black as charcoal. Fugitive green shone on the leaves nearest us in the illumination of the camp fire, turning black a little farther away on the fringe of the brittle glaring shadow reflected in the river at our feet.
The fire subsided slowly, spitting stars and sparks every now and then and barking like a hoarse dog. The burning logs crouched and settled and turned white as fur still burning all the while underneath their whiteness redly and sombrely.
The white fur greyed to hourly ash as the night aged in the trees and the fugitive fiery green of dreaming leaves turned faintly silver and grey in anticipation of the pale shadow of dawn.
It was the first night I had spent on the soil of Mariella. So it seemed to me in a kind of hallucination drawing me away from the other members of the crew. Every grey hammock around me became an empty cocoon as hollow as a deserted shell and a house.
I felt the soul of desire to abandon the world at the critical turning point of time around which curled the ash and the fur of night. I knew the keen marrow of this extreme desire and desertion, the sense of animal flight lacking true warmth, the hideous fascination of fire devoid of all burning spirit.
A dog rose and stood over me. A horse it was in the uncertain grey light, half-wolf, half-donkey, monstrous, disconsolate; neighing and barking in one breath, its terrible half-hooves raised over me to trample its premature rider. I grew conscious of its closeness as a shadow and as death. I made a frightful gesture to mount, and it shrank a little into half-woman, half-log greying into the dawn. Its teeth shone like a misty rag, and I raised my hand to cajole and stroke its ageing, soulful face. I sat bolt upright in my hammock, shouting aloud that the devil himself must fondle and mount this muse of hell and this hag, sinking back instantly, a dead man in his bed come to an involuntary climax. The grey wet dream of dawn had restored to me Mariella’s terrible stripes and anguish of soul. The vaguest fire and warmth came like a bullet, flooding me, over aeons of time it seemed, with penitence and sorrow.
*
This musing re-enactment and reconstruction of the death of Donne ushered in the early dawn with a grey feeling inside. The leaves dripped in the entire forest the dewy cold tears of the season of drought that affected the early tropical morning and left me rigid and trembling. A pearl and half-light and arrow shot along the still veined branches. The charcoal memory of the hour lifted as a curtain rises upon the light of an eternal design. The trees were lit with stars of fire of an unchanging and perfect transparency. They hung on every sensitive leaf and twig and fell into the river, streaking the surface of the water with a darting appearance crimson as blood. It was an illusory reflection growing out of the strength of the morning light on my closed eyelids and I had no alternative but to accept my eye as a shade between me and an inviolate spirit. It seemed to me that such a glimpse of perfection was a most cruel and distressing fact in that it brought me face to face with my own enormous frailty. It grew increasingly hard to believe that this blindness and error were all my material fantasy rather than the flaw of a universal creation. For manhood’s sake and estate I saw there must arise the devil of resistance and incredulity toward a grotesque muse which abandoned and killed and saved all at the same time with the power of indestructible understanding and life.
How stupid and silly to lose the cruel expectation and stronghold of death. It was the surest gamble I had known in my life; I was mad to believe I had seen an undying action and presence in the heartfelt malice of all mystery and seduction.
How could I surrender myself to be drawn two ways at once? Indeed what a phenomenon it was to have pulled me, even in the slightest degree, away from nature’s end and wish, and towards the eternal desire and spirit that charged the selfsame wish of death with shades of mediation, precept upon precept in the light of my consciousness which was in itself but another glimmering shadow hedging the vision and the glory and the light.
*
I awoke now completely and fully. I tried to grapple again with my night-and-morning dream; it all faded and vanished. I recognized a curious sense of inner refreshment. The old innocent expectations and the journey — Donne’s first musing journey to Mariella — returned with a rush. The eccentric emotional lives of the crew every man mans and lives in his inmost ship and theatre and mind were a deep testimony of a childlike bizarre faith true to life. It was as if something had snapped again, a prison door, a chain, and a rush and flight of appearances jostled each other — past, present and future in one constantly vanishing and reappearing cloud and mist. I rubbed my eyes. Old Schomburgh was carefully cleaning the fish he had caught the night before. Cameron was poking and lighting the fire, assisted by a young man with high pale cheeks — one of the daSilva twins.
“Cammy,” the young man was saying in a confidential rather duncified tone, “an old woman knocking about one of them houses. I see she since foreday morning.” He pointed.
“Only she come back?” Cameron was incredulous.
“Looking so,” daSilva said.
“Well what in hell really going on….”
“Have you chaps seen Donne anywhere?” I interrupted from my hammock.
“He and me brother gone for a lil look-see walk,” daSilva said somewhat heavily. His voice had a moody almost stupid drawl out of keeping with the slight active life of his hands and limbs.
I rose and began dressing.
“You don’t think is Donne scare them away?” daSilva spoke to me confidentially.
“I dunno,” I said, vaguely stirred by sleeping memories. “They’re funny folk.”
“But you know is he,” daSilva insisted, repeating a brutal time-worn lesson.
“They fear you too,” I waved my hand as vaguely as ever around.
“Yes, I s’pose so,” daSilva consented heavily. “But is a different-different thing,” he argued, struggling with an emotional tide. “I been to this Mission before and I can’t remember me doing harm to anybody. Don’t laugh, Cammy. I know I mek a chile with one of the women. I see you laughing….” He stopped and gave a coarse heavy bray astonishing for his frail chest and shoulders. “You mean to say” — he argued — “a man wife and chile going run from he?”