His eyes widened incredulously over the next three and final lines.
He read them again to make sure.
His pointing forefinger underlined them slowly, and he looked up to meet the stunned stare of Johnny at his shoulder.
“You see what I see, don’t you?” said the Saint.
“Yes, sah. But—”
“Oh, no,” said the Saint, in a low quavering voice. “Oh, leaping lizards. Oh, holy Moses in the mountains!”
He was rolling the parchment up again with shaking fingers, stuffing it back into the protective tube. He came to his feet with a shout that brought all the others around him.
“O blessed bureaucracy,” he yelled. “O divine dust of departmental archives. O rollicking ribbons of red tape!”
They gaped at him as if he had gone out of his mind, which perhaps he temporarily had. The immortal magnificence of that moment was more than flesh and blood could take with equanimity. And it was all crystallized in the last few words of the Maroons’ charter, after he had given up all hope — exactly like a charge of cavalry pounding to the rescue of a beleaguered outpost in the last few feet of the corniest horse opera ever filmed.
Simon’s ribs ached with laughter. He handed the tube back to the man who had carried it, and clapped Johnny and the Commander ecstatically on the back, one with each hand.
“Let’s get back to Accompong,” he said. “And somebody better find something we can eat on the way. This is going to be a day to remember, and I don’t want to starve to death before I see the end of it.”
7
“I’ve told you till I’m blue in the face,” David Farnham said irritably. “I don’t know where Mr Templar went, or why, or anything about it.”
It was late in the afternoon, and he must have repeated the same statement twenty or thirty times during the day. It was unequivocally true, for Mrs Robertson, who had served him breakfast and a sandwich for lunch, had been blandly unable to enlighten him on that subject, or on the whereabouts of her husband, or the Commander, or Johnny. Farnham was considerably perplexed, but not too worried, for the attitudes of Cuffee and his henchmen clearly proved that they were equally baffled by the disappearance.
Cuffee scowled. The Major, zealously taking his cue, scowled even more ferociously. Others of the bodyguard dutifully joined in the glowering.
They were in a house at the edge of the “parade-ground” where Cuffee was living and making his official headquarters. Twenty yards in front of it, men had been working all day to build a sort of open bandstand about fifteen feet square, with a floor raised two feet above the ground and stout poles at each corner supporting a thatched roof. Now it was completed, and for the past hour the wide clearing had been gradually filling with a motley crowd of men, drifting and conglomerating and separating again uncertainly, with chattering groups of women on its outskirts and small children chasing each other like puppies around its fringes. Several of Cuffee’s elite corps were trying to marshal the mob into a semblance of audience formation facing the newly erected platform. They were now distinguished with broad red arm bands, which seemed to give them the added confidence and bravado of a uniform.
Cuffee looked at his watch. He was restless. Although he knew that schedules meant little to the Maroons, he had set a time for himself, and even more importantly, he sensed that if the suspense of the people waiting to hear him were prolonged beyond a certain point it might have the opposite effect from what he wanted.
With an abrupt decisiveness he stood up, settled his Sam Browne belt, and put on his gilded helmet.
The meeting will begin,” he said, and looked at Farnham. “I think you’ll want to listen to this.”
“I shall be very interested,” Farnham said calmly.
Cuffee turned and marched out, followed by his adjutant and the rest of his bodyguard, except for two who remained with Farnham.
Farnham strolled out, relighting his pipe, and the two followed him. Cuffee had not invited him to join him on the rostrum, and Farnham wondered whether he should take the invitation for granted or the lack of it as a diplomatic affront. His two personal escorts, however, who seemed to have received prior instructions, fell in on either side of him and steered him with suggestive pressures around the reviewing stand to a place close in front of it and in line with one corner, where he discovered that an empty wooden crate had been placed on which it was indicated that he should sit. Thus he found himself nearer the platform than the nearest of the other spectators, but set aside rather than in the center of a special front row. It gave him an uncomfortable feeling of being positioned more like a prisoner on trial, which was not relieved by the way his escorts stationed themselves just behind him, one on each side, with their machetes in hand. But he decided that his best course was to appear unaware of anything out of the ordinary unless and until it was forced upon him, and he crossed his legs composedly and tried to look as if he felt that he was only being treated with proper deference.
A dozen of the elite guard had ranged themselves in a double rank from front to rear of the dais, with the Major in the front of one file. At a word from him, they raised their clenched fists in a ragged salute, and Cuffee strode down the human aisle to the front of the stand, where he raised his fist in salute to the audience.
There was a splatter of applause, which Farnham observed was led and fomented by a number of the red-armleted who still circulated authoritatively through the assembly.
Cuffee lowered his fist, and his guard of honor slouched out of formation and shuffled towards the front of the stage.
“My friends,” Cuffee said, “comrades, and brother Maroons. I am your new Colonel. Colonel Cuffee. I’ve brought you here to meet me, and to let me tell you what I’m going to do for you, and for all our people, while I’m your leader.”
His oratorical voice was resonant and dynamic, and he handled it with the skill of an actor. But with even greater intellectual skill he chose words of almost puerile simplicity but uttered them with overwhelming earnestness, investing them with vast profundity, never seeming to talk down to his listeners, yet contriving to make sure that the most ignorant and unschooled of them could scarcely fail to grasp his meaning.
He started harmlessly enough with a short recital of their history, reminding them of how their ancestors had been torn from their African homes and brought to Jamaica like cattle to make a few white capitalists richer, of how they had rebelled against abuse and slavery, of how they had fought for their freedom against the might of the whole British Empire and forced the King of England himself to plead for peace, and of how the Treaty had finally recognized their right to hold the lands they had defended and to be free for ever of any outside domination.
So far it was not much worse than any nation’s jingoistic version of its own trials and triumphs, although plainly slanted to revive ancient resentments and hint at villains yet to receive their just comeuppance, but Mark Cuffee was still only laying his groundwork.
“It is a pity,” he said, “that the spirit of our Treaty was soon forgotten by the Government of this island. The English Kings had been made to feel small, and they don’t like that. They couldn’t wipe out the Treaty, but they could try to make it mean less and less. And because some of our fathers were not wide awake, or were deceived by tricks and lies, they let their rights be taken away one by one.”