Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  That was bad enough for a start, but the worst of it was, they niver give me back the buttons. Thim buttons was niver mentioned again. Now you know the world, Matthew, like meself, an’ so you will know there is always somethin’ that will rouse a man, howsoever patient an’ long-sufferin’ that man may be.”

  Thus appealed to, Paris nodded. ‘allyes,” he said, “sooner or later there will always be something that we cannot overlook or pretend indifference to, something that sticks in the throat.”

  “You have hit me meanin” exactly. Thim buttons stuck in me throat more than anythin’ else I can call to mind. They were worth money, but it was more than that—a man has his self-respect to think of. I always suspected Haines of stealin’ them an’ I got proof of it one day when we were ashore cuttin’ stakes. I offered to fight Haines for them, but Wilson took the quarrel on himself an’ so me chance was lost.”

  Sullivan paused in his task of drying Paris’s shoulders and neck, and gave a smile of considerable sweetness. ‘He would have beat me anyway,” he said. “The long an” short of it is that I niver got me buttons back. Then Haines was killed an’ as time went by they went out of me mind. Then yesterday, as they were drivin’ us through the bush to where the boats were waitin’, I tripped over me own feet an’ fell down the side of a stream, nearly in the water. There I was, lyin’ on me face in the mud with all the wind gone out of me sails and the corporal cursin’ at me from the bank.

  An’ it was then I seen it, not six inches from me eyes. It was crusted over with clay, but I knew it.”

  He bent down quickly and fumbled a moment at the string of his moccasin. When he straightened up his face wore its usual serious, slightly melancholy expression. On his right palm, held out to view, a smooth round metal button the size of a shilling gleamed yellow in the flat, shadowless light of the cabin. ‘I give it a bit of a polishin”,” he said. “I couldn’t understand how it had come about at first, not for the life of me, then I bethought meself—that must have been the very spot where Haines met his end at the hands of the Indians. It must have dropped from him somehow an” the Blessed Virgin tripped up me feet at the very place.”

  He was still standing there, with the miraculous find shining softly on his palm, when they heard sounds beyond the door. Sullivan brought his hands quickly to his sides. A moment later the door opened and Erasmus stepped over the threshold. ‘allyou can suspend your ministrations for a while,” he said curtly to Sullivan. “I want a few words with Mr Paris.”

  ‘allyes, sir.” Sullivan, however, did not leave quite at once, but turned first to Paris and said, “Will there be anythin” more I can do for you?”’

  ‘no, thank you, nothing.”

  “In that case,” Sullivan said, “I’ll take meself off.”

  Erasmus watched him leave. “There is a brazen fellow,” he said. “He had the impudence to ask me the whereabouts of his fiddle. That is a gallows-bird, if ever I saw one.”

  “If you think that, you cannot ever have seen one.”

  Paris was propped up in his bunk now and able to get a steady view of his cousin’s face, which was white and strained-looking. “To what do I owe this visit?”’ he asked. “I must tell you, cousin, it is not welcome to me.”

  ‘I do not care if it is welcome or not,”

  Erasmus said. “You have forfeited your rights in such matters.” On this, however, he paused. He was conscious his cousin’s question was one that could not be answered altogether frankly. After dismissing Barton in the early hours of the morning he had slept deeply his first good sleep for days. But he had woken once again to desolation. There are forms of triumph or fulfilment, and these not always virtuous, that require no witness, they are sufficient in themselves and can be enjoyed in the quietness of the soul; but the sense of being an instrument of justice was not, it seemed, of this order, not for Erasmus at least; he had felt the need to see it registered on a human face, and there was only one that would do: in all the world there was only Paris that could make the triumph ofjustice real to him. “I have been learning something of this settlement of yours,” he said at last. “I am told that it was founded on the best philosophical principles.”

  Paris saw the mockery of this move the tense lines of his cousin’s mouth and realized that Erasmus had come to bait him. Despite his weakness and the pain of his leg, the old combative urge rose in him, the refusal of intellect—or pride comto allow another to interpret the world for him, least of all a man who held him captive. “It sounds as if your informant was Barton,” he said. “He is not much acquainted with principles of any kind.”

  “No, but it is rich, don’t you think so,”

  Erasmus said, “considering that your little colony took its rise from murder and theft?”’ He had wished to maintain a tone of levity, but with Paris’s first words a rigidness had settled over his features and his lips tightened as he spoke.

  “Murder and theft?”’ Paris looked at his cousin with something like wonder. “You have just stolen these people from their homes and murdered three of them in the course of it. Their blood is on your head, no matter who fired the shots. Two of them had nothing whatever to do with Thurso’s death—in fact they were some of the stolen goods that you came all this way to recover.”

  The folly of this took some of the tension from Erasmus’s face. “Your stay in this wilderness has unsettled your brain,” he said. “You must be mad to make such comparisons. Thurso was set in authority over you. He was engaged in a lawful trade. These people are fugitives on the one hand and chattels on the other. I have proceeded at every step with total legality. I have a warrant from the Governor of Florida.”

  “Useful thing, a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one. I suppose the Governor himself was armed with one when he took Florida for the Crown?”’

  “That is a treasonable speech,” Erasmus said. “I have noted it.”

  ‘I can only be hanged once,” Paris said.

  “I do not think we will get far along these lines, Erasmus. But I assure you I had no principles worthy the name. It was Delblanc who was our theorist.” His head felt heavy and there was a pain gathering behind his eyes. What had Delblanc believed? It was an effort now to think about it. Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature.

  If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good …

  “I did not really share these views,” he said, under the momentary impression that he had explained to Erasmus what they were. “But I knew people are held together by having the sense of a common destiny. And of course I had certain hopes.”

  “What hopes were those?”’ The tone was sneering, yet there was an ardour in the question that Erasmus could not conceal. He had been outraged by his cousin’s manner. Flushed out from his bolt-hole, wounded and helpless, with his crimes brought home to him, Paris showed no trace of contrition; he spoke as if engaged in some vague and desultory debate. It was monstrous. And yet Erasmus was held, and in some way fascinated, by what the other was saying; he was conscious of effort, of needing continually to make a wider embrace of hatred and contempt to encompass these movements of his cousin’s mind, to let nothing escape.

  And Paris too felt driven, perhaps to disarm or somehow outflank this enmity which he felt as a pressure almost physical and which he could not altogether understand. “I knew we had done them harm beyond reckoning,” he said. “It was impossible to pretend otherwise. It was impossible not to see that we had taken everything from them and only for the sake of profit—that sacred hunger, as Delblanc once called it, which justifies everything, sanctifies all purposes. You see, I began my career as ship’s surgeon in ignorance and carelessness. Because my life was in ruins I thought it was unimportant what I did, what I assisted in—I thought it could only degrade myself. This was an offence to reason as well as feeling. We have a duty to be vigilant…”

  He fell silent again. The burden of explanation s
eemed too heavy. Had it not been for pain of body and weariness of spirit he might have seen that it was useless in any case. He had sufficient store of irony and under other circumstances might have realized that he was not the ideal man to offer illumination of any kind. His genius was for error. He had blundered once through confusion between obstinate pride and the disinterested promulgation of truth; and then again—though perhaps it was not much different—through the illusion that his own despair was of cosmic import. Throughout the days of the settlement he had mistaken his desire to make amends for a belief in the capacities of the human spirit. And now, ragged and feverish captive, he was blundering again, prating of wisdom and virtue to a man determined to believe him wicked, a man to whom virtue meant well-cut clothes, a proud bearing, money in the bank.

  What, more than anything, he seemed to Erasmus —who had no resources of irony whatever—was an object lesson in how not to conduct one’s life. It was only by a persistent operation of the will that Erasmus could maintain belief in his cousin as a scapegoat worthy enough. He glanced at Paris now, saw the deathly pallor below the tan, the small beads of perspiration that had appeared on the brow.

  How could a vessel so sickly bear so much blame?

  There was a terrible discrepancy here and Erasmus flinched from it as from a mortal threat.

  “It is a lesson strangely hard to learn,” he heard Paris say in low tones.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said coldly. ‘What lesson? A man with anything about him knows what he wants and tries to get it.” This was so obvious that it made him impatient. “That is the way the world goes forward,” he said, “whether in your settlement back there or my larger one on the banks of the Thames. Nothing would ever get done otherwise.”

  “Well, that might not be such a bad thing,”

  Paris said, rather faintly.

  “You have not yet told me of your precious hopes.”

  In spite of the weariness that was gaining on him now, Paris heard the malice in this question, and something more, something strangely like appeal. His cousin was desperate for him to admit failure, disappointment, defeated hope. “You want to take everything from me,” he said. “I cannot understand why you hate me so.

  Why should I explain further to you, who only want to hear a bad report? I owe you nothing. If I wronged anyone, it is your father. He showed me kindness and might think I have made a poor return. I hope I may be allowed to speak to him and given some chance to explain.”

  He had closed his eyes on these last words. He heard a single harsh note of laughter and opened them again to see something wild and disbelieving on his cousin’s face. He saw Erasmus raise a hand briefly to his brow.

  ‘What is the matter?”’ he said.

  “You do not know it,” Erasmus said. “How could you? I had forgot With this, it came from him in a stream there was no stopping, his father’s death—and he did not conceal the nature of this now from Paris—the ruin it had brought, the loss of his bride, all the years of paying back the debts. That these years had brought him also wealth and power he did not mention. The fact was evident enough in any case; and he could think only of his wrongs, only of his cousin’s monstrous guilt.

  And because of this all caution departed him, all the lessons he had learned in a hard school: that you must keep your object firmly in mind and rigorously exclude all that might be prejudicial to it, that you must always hold something back, keep something in reserve, because that is the way to retain control. All this, in the treacherous fluency that swept him, was forgotten. He found himself talking to this hated cousin, whom he had pursued and crippled and intended more firmly than ever to see hanged, as he could have talked to no one else, with a fervent intimacy that in some part of his mind astonished him still as he spoke, with revelations of feeling long buried within him, the deceit of his father’s silence and its wounding lack of trust, the bitterness of his mother’s superior wit in their dealings with the doctor, old Wolpert’s patronizing treatment of him and Sarah’s inability to see the true meaning of his renunciation. ‘She accused me of wanting to add her to my store of possessions,” he said. He had never forgotten the words. “I was forced to go into sugar when I wanted to build canals. I married against my inclination for the sake of the alliance…” Sarah was long since married, he knew it from his Liverpool acquaintance; she had married a local squire and there were children now.

  All this he sought to lay at his cousin’s door.

  But to Paris, listening with face averted, it seemed that Erasmus was not accusing, but confessing: he was begging to be released. ‘nothing that becomes of me can mend these things,” he said. “You will still be where you were.”

  He saw that Erasmus had drawn himself up into a position of rigid attention in the course of speaking, as if braced for some ordeal. The pathos of his cousin’s singleness of vision came to him, the terrible emptiness of conquest. “Can you not see that?”’ he said gently.

  Erasmus heard the change of tone, detected amidst the lines of weariness and pain on his cousin’s face traces of an insolent compassion. All his life he had hated to see knowledge of him on any face.

  After a moment more he turned and walked out of the cabin.

  Outside the door, at the foot of the ladder, he stood for a short while as if uncertain of his direction. Tears had risen to his eyes, a rare thing with him. Of all the injuries that Paris had done him it seemed to him for a moment that this kindness of tone was the worst.

  55.

  Early in the morning of the following day Paris awoke to pains in the lower region of the chest, on the left side. They lessened after a while but were followed shortly by a feeling of constriction in the lungs, forcing him to take shallow breaths, as any deeper inhalation brought renewed pain. As he lay thus it seemed to him that he could hear an occasional rattle of chains from the deck above; but he was feverish and there was a singing in his ears and so he thought it might have been an illusion. Sullivan, arriving with the morning gruel, heard the quick breaths as he entered and saw that Paris’s face was terribly changed. He could not eat and would not submit to be washed.

  “Will you listen to that now?”’ Sullivan said in a voice disguised by scolding. “What can I do for you then?”’

  “You can stay beside me here.” Paris saw the other man turn his head aside sharply. “It is all right,” he said. “It is only that I don’t want to be moved.”

  “No one will move you,” Sullivan said.

  Paris lay without speaking for a while, then said, “I thought I heard the sound of fetters up on deck. I must have been mistaken, there are soldiers enough for a guard.”

  “No, it was no mistake. During the night, two of the sojers took a hold of Dinka an” started dragging her off, an’ Sefadu tried to prevent them an’ one felled him with the barrel of his musket. Then Hambo, who was standin’ alongside, struck this one with his fist, puttin’ thoughts of ravishment out of the feller’s mind for a good time to come.

  Then Calley got excited, you know how he is sometimes, an’ he caught hold of a lad standin’ near him, an’ set off to strangle him with the strap of his own hat. But that they are forbid to shoot without the order, Hambo and Calley would be dead. As it is, them and Sefadu are in irons for the rest of the voyage, Sefadu with a split head an’ all.”

  ‘So,” Paris said, “the wheel has come round in a full circle. They will all be in irons once the troops have been disembarked.” The pain came again, somewhere just below the breastbone, and he closed his eyes, waiting for it to subside. “We are back where we began,” he said.

  “No, we are not,” Sullivan said. “That is not a thought to be havin” in your mind now. You can niver come back to where you start. You are a travelled man, Matthew, like meself, an’ as a travelled man you must know things niver join up again once you have gone to any distance. How can they, seein’ as there is a gap of time between? There is twelve years between this craft we are on now an’ the Liverpool Me
rchant. Even if them years were not everythin’ you wanted them to be, you can’t say they niver happened.

  Billy is dead but he still had them years of hoppin’ about an’ arguin’ the toss, which is what he liked doin’ most of all. I keep thinkin’ of Koudi an’ that last night when we named the baby. She looked at me, she was impressed with me playin’, an’ I am not surprised, I played like a demon that night, there was power in me. Now I know I missed me chance, I should have gone to her straight. But you cannot say I am back where I started. I have the spirit of me playin’ to think about an’ the hope of Koudi’s smile. Do you hear me, Matthew?”’

  ‘allyes,” Paris said, “I hear you.” The pain in his chest was better for the moment but he could not breathe deeply enough to get the air he needed. “I have taken a turn for the worse, I am afraid,” he said.

  He saw Sullivan bend down and straighten up again quickly. “What are you doing?”’ he said.

  “I want you to take care of this for me,”

  Sullivan said. “I want you to keep it for luck.

  They would only take it from me, sooner or later.”

  Paris felt the smooth metal of the button pressed into his hand and his fingers closed over it.

  “I have nothing to give you, Michael,” he said.

  ‘allyou give me somethin” beyond any price when you spoke to me that time aboard ship,” Sullivan said. ‘Do you remember? I came to ask them to take the chains off the negroes because the noise of the rattlin” was spoilin’ me music’

  “I remember, yes.”

  “You spoke to me as if I was a man, an”

  I have niver forgot it.”

  Paris saw now that Sullivan’s eyes had filled with tears. ‘Don’t be concerned about me,” he said. “If you get a chance tell Tabakali that I think about her. Tell Kenka to look after his mother. I’ll rest for a while now, I think.”

  His sight seemed in some way obscured. He could not see clearly across the narrow space of the cabin.