"O.K.," said Louis. "Let's go."
The man straightened up at last. He now addressed himself, with special insolence, to Mrs. Stewart-Bates.
"You pay ten American dollars to English Harbour?" he asked. The accent, carefully, was on the first word of the sentence.
"We'll pay," said Louis. "Let's go."
The man ignored Louis; his glance remained on Mrs. Stewart-Bates. She had to answer him, in spite of shamed misgivings. She said:
"Of course we'll pay. What's all the fuss? Where's your taxi?"
"Pay first," said the man. "English Harbour, ten dollars American."
"Now see here—" began Louis.
"Police laws," said the man, indifferently. "Outside town limits, pay first."
"Bunk!" said Louis roughly. "That's just a racket."
"Do you have ten dollars?" Mrs. Stewart-Bates asked him hesitantly. She reached into her bag. The man was watching her, unsmiling, confirmed in his thoughts.
"Sure I have it." Louis pulled out his wallet, peeled off two five-dollar bills, and held them towards the man. "Here!" he said savagely. "Now let's get going, for God's sake!"
He was still scowling when they settled down in the taxi, an ancient mouldering De Soto with torn upholstery and cracked yellow windows.
"Please don't be angry, dear," said Mrs. Stewart-Bates. She pressed his hand; it was something they were by now accustomed to. "Let's not have it spoil our day."
He looked sideways at her. She was the same as ever, stylish, dumpy, and plain; the brilliant sunshine was not kind to her sagging skin, though it did a great deal for her sapphires. It's going to spoil your day, he thought, just that extra little bit. . . . With an effort he smiled, and returned the pressure.
"It'll take more than some snotty cab-driver to get me down," he told her. He spoke carelessly loud, for the driver to hear. "Now let's enjoy the view."
But the view was not encouraging. Though their taxi rattled, rocked, and ground its way round endless corners, the surroundings remained the same—mile upon mile of dusty yellow cane-fields, narrow roads untidily strewn with crushed cane-stalks, small featureless hills crowned with shabby kilns. The earth was bone dry, the air had a sickly sugary smell which never varied; there were half-naked children staring at them, and figures bowed over squeaking bicycles, and men with rounded shoulders wielding their heavy sickles as if each stroke were a lash on their own backs. Antigua was perennially short of water, they had read in the guide-books; but it seemed to be short of much else besides—short of colour, short of hope, short of life. When they bumped their way through a village, the village seemed to turn its back on them; not because of something better to do, but because it did not want to know about them, or about anything.
"What a dump," said Louis presently, when for the hundredth time the taxi groaned round the same right-angle corner at the edge of a cane-field, to show them yet another dusty stretch, another vista of bent canes lining the road.
"But it's interesting," ventured Mrs. Stewart-Bates. She was looking about her in her usual vague way, ready to be impressed by anything she saw. "We've nothing like this in America."
"Damn right we haven't!" answered Louis. "And they can keep it."
The driver turned his head slightly. "Very poor peoples," he said. There was contempt in his voice, but it was not possible to name its target with any certainty.
Louis raised his voice. "Why don't they do something about it, then?" he asked disagreeably. "Instead of just sitting around."
The driver said nothing; the poise of his head above the frayed collar-band spoke his answer for him.We like it this way, it seemed to proclaim; and even if we didn't, we wouldn't change it if we had to be like you. . . . Under the fierce sun beating down on the roof, the air inside the taxi was stifling; but it was not more stifling than the savage pride in poverty which sat, its back turned upon them, a few feet away.
Presently the road began to wind downhill; there was a view of the sea, a blue arm of a bay invading the yellow flat-lands; then they were driving at water-level on the last mile of their journey. They passed a whitewashed water-catchment, its sides daubed with the names of old ships, the initials of long-dead sailors, the curving figures of old dates—"1809", said one: "H.M.S. Paragon". Then they passed through a tall gateway, and into an area of quays and roofless buildings and loading-bays overgrown with grass. The taxi ground down to a stop, its transmission shuddering.
"English Harbour," announced the driver, without looking round. "Dockyard of Lord Nelson."
"Wait for us," said Louis curtly. "Right here."
"Yes, sir!"
They got out, stepping into the sun as if into an open fireplace, and began to walk about. Except to the eye of faith, unashamedly in love with the past, it was not impressive; the efforts of reconstruction had not been able to keep pace with the decay and indifference of a hundred dying years. There were buildings, neatly labelled "Barracks" and "Store-Room" and "Capstan House" and "Sail Lockers", but they were shells of buildings, tumbledown walls, sometimes nothing save a roped-off area with a painted plaque inside it. The few yachts and motor-cruisers moored alongside were like intruders —intruders not upon the past but upon a decayed present. As newcomers, they looked too good, too workmanlike, for their surroundings.
A throng of tourists, most of them from the Alcestis, milled around, tracing without great enthusiasm the ancient formations of the dockyard. Young women sold souvenir postcards, and cold drinks, and cigarettes; the taxi-drivers lounged in the shade, waiting for custom, waiting for interest to fade and history to catch up. The water lapped with a sullen air against the rotting piles, the ruined facings of the dockside.
"Hell!" said Louis Scapelli. "Is this all?"
The eye of faith, unashamedly in love with the past—in the person of the Professor—was near to tears with the magic of its surroundings. The Professor had come to Nelson's Dockyard well prepared; he had a guide-book, he had an historical brochure tracing local maritime history from the middle of the eighteenth century, and he knew a good deal about it already. But mostly he had a sense of the past, an honourable reverence for all ancestors. When he wandered, he trod softly and shakily, aware of the hallowed ground but aware more movingly still of the throng of ghosts which brushed his shoulders.
He had made his tour alone, with loving concentration. He had traced the outlines of the old Capstan House, where the ships were heaved down" by tackles attached to their masts, so that they could be careened for repairs. He had seen the sail lockers, the pond for soaking new spars, the mouldy store-rooms for rum and salt pork and hard biscuit. He had come upon old anchors embedded in the hard earth, and flights of steps leading down to the water, and ancient ring-bolts. He had paced out the length of the rope-walk, where the huge tarry hawsers were woven and spliced.
All the time, his imagination had been at work, conjuring up the past. On this very ground, Nelson himself must have wandered— 1794 . . . 1796, he could not be exact—heart-sick at his exile, wasted by malaria bred in the foetid tideless basin. His ship—the Pegasus'! . . . the Boreas'!—must actually have come alongside at this very quay, not less than one hundred and sixty-four years ago. But there was older history than this, a more evil past which the Professor was forced to re-live at the same time.
For here, earlier, had come the pirates, the freebooters of the Spanish Main, the slavers from the dreaded Guinea Coast, three thousand miles away to the eastwards. In the small museum attached to the dockyard, dark, musty, neglected, he had come upon evidence of this last guilty stain on mankind; a rusty slave-shackle with a great iron ball attached to it, a whip of coiled oxhide "as used by the Over-Seers", and especially a tattered poster which, across a span of two centuries, still spoke loudly of pain.