The smell from the bushes, and from the thick, prickly, studded trees round the House, under the windows, comes up full into his nostrils. Although he cannot memorize the names of the smells, does not know the names of bush, tree, vine or stalk, he knows there is beauty in the night, on this black, moonless Sunday evening; and love; and that there can be love making.
If he ever had the good fortune to sit in this House, on an ordinary day, earlier, just after the huge, fiery sun was touching the skim of wave and water far out where the German submarine had met the HMS Cornwallis, he would have been able to see the riot of colours, the drama of trees pushing against one another, the arrogant, supercilious disregarding casuarina trees that border the limit, boundary and ownership of the Plantation. He would have been able to see colour and colours. But the Plantation is limitless.
Now, all he can see, and he is not even certain that he is not imagining these tints and hues, as he had earlier imagined the violence and had fantasized the desperate criminal coming through the North Field, towards him; all he can see now, is the unending sweep of dark green, like a sheet of water, big as the sea, big and dark as the sea that night, when he fell from the gunwale of HMS Barracuda . . . There was something beautiful, something inexplainable, something almost religious about the thickness of his fear and fantasy, earlier, as he had stood foolishly with his Raleigh bicycle leaned against his body; and he, a Crown-Sargeant, useless beside it . . . But he is not useless now. He is inside. Inside the front-house of this Great House. And the size, and the grandeur, and the smell, of furniture and of cleanliness, of flowers cut from the gardens that are below the huge windows, all this, this quiet, this silence, this tranquility, makes him brave and confident . . . She finds the sheet-music, just before he reaches the piano bench; and she takes it out, passes it over the skirt of her dress, cleaning the dust off, and then she places it on the music stand that comes up over the keys. The built-in music stand conceals the name of the manufacturer of the piano, printed in Italic Script.
He flings the lid of the grand piano back with a flourish he had never been capable of imitating before.
He is surprised that the lid does not cry out when it touches its acquainting rich, expensive wood from which it is made. The ivories do not sigh, even.
He has never before sat at a piano of such beauty and magnificence. He can see his face in its polish. He can see his eyes in the sheen of the black keys. And his hands begin to shake.
He is incapable of going further, of imagining his life further from this first touch of gentility and graciousness; this is like a journey into the unknown; through a cave; a challenge to embark upon this journey that he somehow knows he cannot take on. It is more than an ordinary moving of fingers over keys, of touching pedals, of travelling through notes over a landscape of such great, tragic foreignness, for any great distance . . . The pages of the sheet-music do not remain flat. She holds her hand on the pages, and then thinking better of it, takes from the pocket of her dress a long wooden clothespin. She affixes this clothespin onto the pages. The pages sit obediently, open, in the full reflection of the light in the room. She closes the book of sheet-music, just for one moment, to check that the cover bears the name of the song. The name is printed on the cover. There is a design. The design is a circle, with the name of the song inside it. The design shows something, specks of something rising. Of dust? Of stardust? Of sand that is like dust on the beach at the Crane Beach Hotel? But she has never seen any other dust but the white, fine powder that rises from the roads whenever a bus or a lorry or a motor-car speeds along the Front Road, the highway where it meets at Highgates Commons and Reservoir Lane.
“You ready?” she asks him.
“I am ready.”
“‘Stardust,’” she says.
“‘Stardust,’” he says.
But he cannot play it. The surroundings are too overwhelming.
The window is open, and he suddenly becomes afraid, frightened that he is on HMS Barracuda; and he is drowning.
His earlier confidence slips away from him. Leaves his power, just as the cane juice slips out of his mouth when he sucks a piece of Juice-nine-tray-five sugar cane.
She rises from her rocking chair, and she goes and sits on the piano bench, beside him.
She places her hands over his. And as if she is a kindergarten teacher guiding him in the first curves of learning Penmanship, controlling his handwriting; she guides his hand over the keys; and he looks up at her; into her eyes; and she gives him back the look; and he closes his eyes because he knows the music by heart; and she locks her eyes onto his closed eyes, and continues to guide his hands over the keys.
His hands look blacker as they touch the white keys. Her hands, lighter by three or four shades, stand out against his. She removes her hands. He allows his hands to rest on the keys they were covering.
No sound rises from the keyboard.
The white ivories and the black ivories are like the conch shell which is discarded on the beach, without the benefit of a pair of lips placed to it to force a tune from it. No noise. No music. No sound.
He leaves his hands on the keys.
He remembers how another hand touched his hands, shaking and exploring, frightened and daring; and regarded them as ignorant hands, stupid hands; hands that bore the anxiety and the drama of defeat in learning Penmanship years ago in Sin-Davids Elementary School for Boys . . . It was about two in the afternoon; and the room was hot. Humid. Sweat—which the Headmaster called “spirsperration”—was running irrepressible and unrestrained, down his face in two small, slow streams; and he could feel their stickiness and their warmth as they dropped upon his sea-island cotton shirt; and this white shirt he had worn to Church the day before, for his regular school shirt, made of thick, cheap, raw khaki, was still wet from the rain that had fallen all Sunday afternoon, Sunday night and right into early Monday morning.
The blackboard was lined; and they were double lines; and the lines were drawn into the thick blackboard with a nail; and the slate in his hand was black like the blackboard; and lined; and it had a wooden frame; and someone had drawn those double lines even before he was born. Generations before.
The slate in his hand had been scratched on and disfigured in the calculation of the nine-times table; the three-times table; and simple arithmetic, by his own father.
“Manners maketh man,” his teacher, Mr. Edwards, is saying. “What manners maketh?” he asks his class. There are fifteen boys in his class. His class is Standard Five.
“What manners maketh?”
“Manners maketh man, sir!” they shout, rivalling one another for loudness . . .
“Louder!” Mr. Edwards yells at them.
And they scream, even louder, that the entire school can hear them, “Manners maketh . . .”
The school is one large room, divided by the placing of blackboards which spin around on a pin, in certain positions, to form walls; to form classes or “standards.”
There are seven “standards,” excluding Low-Primer and High-Primer, in the one-roomed school.
Boys “graddiated” from elementary school, in Standard Seven. Some went on to Combermere School for Boys, a secondary Government school. Others entered various apprenticeships. Or they fielded tennis balls in the afternoons, at the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club, as Sargeant got to do. Or watered the flower gardens of the rich who lived in Belleville Avenue, in Hastings, in the Married Women’s Quarters in the Garrison. Or they joined the gangs of labourers in the North Field of the Plantation. Some became fishermen. Some became carpenters. Some became thieves. Some became gamblers throwing dice. “Dice don’t nick five! Dice don’t nick five, man! Six cents the dice don’t nick five! Mek it seven!”; playing rummy and jacks, all day on the Pasture. Many never worked. Some died without ever having worked one day in their lives. All were black. Black boys with beautiful physiques and erect posture, all “graddiates” or “school-leavers” of Sin-Davids Elementary School for Boys. Th
ree from Sargeant’s days went to Englund to fight in the Second World War; some before that, in the First World War. In Sargeant’s time, two were killed by a mine, somewhere in France. One returned as a Private, First Class; with no medals. And ten went to Amurca. Four got their letters addressed “in care of Ancon Post Office” in the Canal Zone, in Panama, in Central Amurca, before they disappeared. Some swept the large front yards and grounds of those rich people who lived in Hastings. Like Sargeant, a few qualified for admission to the Bimshire Constabulary as recruits. And more than that number became grooms, and bathed racehorses in the strong currents of the sea, at Gravesend Beach, near the Aquatic Club, near the Garrison Race Course, which the Villagers called the Race Pasture, every morning of the week, at five o’clock, just before most of the regular population arrived at the beach to take a dip. Manny went into his father’s business. Selling rum and killing pigs. Yes, of the hundreds of boys who “graddiated” from Standard Seven, not one, over the years, ever ended up sitting in a front-house like this one, unless he was a servant. Not even as a visitor. And certainly not, as Sargeant is allowing his imagination to roam, as a suitor.
He is aware of where he is. Yes . . . And her hands are no longer touching his. They are placed in her lap. In the rich, white folds of her muslin dress.
Her hands are not moving. In his mind, he goes back to that humid afternoon, when Mr. Edwards, his teacher, screamed the instruction, “Wunnuh going write out ‘Manners maketh man’ fifty times! Wunnuh hear? Wunnuh hear?”
The teacher had grabbed the thick tamarind rod from the shelf on the easel of the blackboard where the white chalk is kept.
“Wunnuh hear?”
“Yes, sir!” they scream.
“What manners maketh?”
“Man, sir!”
“Again!”
“Man, sir!”
“What manners maketh, class?”
“Manners maketh man, sir!”
“Good.”
That same afternoon, at three-thirty, he has to meet Mr. Edwards for his private tuition lessons.
They are going to talk about the things produced in Englund, from Englund’s natural resources. English products. It is on this afternoon that Sargeant learns about the fine biscuits and chocolates and pipe tobacco, and cigarettes and toiletries and soaps and teas that Englund produce. . . .
“Ten-sixty-six?”
“The Battle of Hastings, Mr. Edwards.”
“Good. The Battle of Bannockburn?”
“Twelve-fifteen? Twelve . . . sixteen?”
“Signing of the Magna Carta?”
And Sargeant knows this; and screams, “Twelve-fifteen!”
“When Cro.Well take-over Parliament?”
And he knows this, too.
“Battle of the Roses?”
He knows this, too.
“Cranmer? When Cranmer get kill?”
Sargeant hesitates.
“Executed?”
Sargeant hesitates.
“Beheaded?”
Sargeant remembers this.
“You going win a scholarship, boy! You going win a Secondary-to-Second-grade, for-true!”
And Sargeant takes the Secondary-to-Second-Grade Examination, which is held at the Drill Hall, the lecture room of the Bimshire Volunteer Regiment and Brigade; and the examination lasts all morning; and Sargeant is sweating; for the questions on the examination paper are questions Mr. Edwards had rehearsed him in, Friday after Friday, Saturday after Saturday, for one full year; and on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, two weeks before the examination; but the heat in the room, from his own anxiety and that of one hundred other boys, from all over the Island, makes his hands sweaty, his palms sticky, increases his need to pee, to have to ask for a “step-out”—“Please, sir, may I have a step-out? I have to pass water, bad, sir!”—to make the Watermans fountain pen leak; and mark his fingers black; and blot the paper on which he writes his answers, many of them incorrect; and then, two months later, the results of the Secondary-to-Second-Grade come back from the examiners and are published Island-wide in the Bimshire Daily Herald; and Sargeant, listed officially and formally as STUART, P. DaC. B. , comes twenty-fifth.
There are twenty-four places.
“Be-Christ!” Mr. Edwards says the Saturday morning, holding the Bimshire Daily Herald crushed violently in his right hand, pointing the newspaper and the hand at Sargeant, as if it is a tamarind rod, with the Official Results crushed in his grip, reading them off to Sargeant. “Let we pray that a boy, any one of the twenty-four that come before you, dead. Just-drop-down-dead! So you could squeeze-through. Some boy. Any fecking boy . . .”
“Manners maketh man.”
. . . Yes, his hands are placed in the exact position, this Sunday evening, in this tranquil Great House, as they had been placed, poised, on his black slate, double-lined by a nail, when he was being coached by Mr. Edwards in the rudiments of Penmanship.
“Penmanship is next to Godliness!” Mr. Edwards had shouted many times. “What is Penmanship next to?”
“Godliness, sir!”
This time, there is more affection in the instruction he is being given; or that he is about to receive from Mary-Mathilda.
Her hands are soft. And they smell of perfume. And they are not sweaty. And they do not have the veneer of dust from the chalk on them. And they do not have thick, black hairs. And their nails do not have a line of black dirt underneath them. And they do not smell of tobacco. And they do not have knuckles that make the hands look deformed and swollen at the joints. And her fingers do not have the marks left by the kitchen knife, as Gertrude’s have.
Her hands are soft, and shapely; with long delicate fingers, clean fingernails and nails shaped like the bottom of a heart. And natural. Without the colour of nail polish.
Her nails have half moons on each finger.
A ring with a shield as its design is on her finger. The initials MGMB are marked deep into the yellow rich gold, as if the owner, the wearer, wants the world to see her identity clearly. Sargeant looks at the signet ring, sees the initials as a blur of interlocking letters, pays no regard to the initials themselves and is satisfied only to say that it is a pretty ring. To himself. The gold ring is on the third finger of her right hand. The way Europeans wear wedding rings, Wilberforce told her. He had bought it for her in Demerara, and had got the initials cut out by the Indian j.Weller, when he spent one week there, attending a medical conference on Fixing Tropical Diseases with European Facilities.
“This is real gold, Mother,” he had told her. “Them Demerara j.Wellers have the best real gold in the world. Two times as many karats as these Bimshire jewelry-thieves who import semi-gold from Europe . . .”
“Hommany karats in this, son?”
“Forty-eight,” he had told her.
“Many’s these?”
“Forty-eight, Mother.”
She had smiled in her heart when he insisted. She did not believe him. All the gold around her on the fingers of the men who came to her home with Mr. Bellfeels was good gold, pure gold, true-true gold. And none was forty-eight karats.
This gold ring on the finger beside her little finger of her right hand that rests on Sargeant’s hand is the deepest, richest colour of gold that he has ever seen. And the colour of the gold in the ring attracts him now, with deeper interest.
MGMB. He goes back in his mind, over all those years when he heard her name called out, in Sunday School, and at picnics when the teacher was making sure that everyone was present and accounted for, to go back on the long trip through the hills of Bimshire, Bathsheba, Horse Hill and Mount Zion Hill, to the Village of Flagstaff; in the classes for the Confirmation of young Christians, learning the Catechism and the Nicene Creed; and then years later, on the radio when the name Wilberforce Alexander Darnley Bellfeels—her son’s name—was announced as the winner of the Bimshire Scholarship for that year, for coming first out of every boy attending Harrison College and the Lodge School, in Classics: Latin, Gre
ek, Ancient History of Greece and of Rome and Religious Knowledge—which is what he took—in the Oxford and Cambridge Joint Board Higher School Certificate Examination.
First in the Island in Latin Prose.
First in Greek Prose.
First in Latin Distinction Prose.
First in Greek Distinction Prose.
First in Latin Unseen.
First in Greek Unseen.
First in Distinction Latin Unseen.
First in Distinction Greek Unseen.
First in Latin Translation, both at Pass Level and at Distinction Level.
First in Greek Translation, both at Pass Level and at Distinction Level.
First in Roman Ancient History.
First in Greek Ancient History.
Third in the Island of Bimshire in Religious Knowledge.
“Jesus Christ, he let-we-down! Jesus Christ, he let-down the entire blasted Parish!” the Reverend Mr. M. R. P. P. Dowd, M.Th. —Masters in Theology—(Dunelmn)—Durham University, the Vicar of Sin-Davids Anglican Church, where Wilberforce was a Sunday School teacher, screamed in mock horror. “You mean, he couldn’t come any more blasted higher in a simple subject like Scripture? Religious Knowledge is nothing but Scripture. Reading the blasted Bible! And understanding the Sermon ’pon the Mount. Anybody could understand the Sermon ’pon the Mount! Jesus Christ! Wilberforce is a disgrace to this Christian community of Flagstaff! And to this whole Parish.”
Winning the scholarship was the cause for great rejoicing in the entire Village. Mr. Bellfeels and the other big men of the Island gathered the night previous, in the restricted private rooms of the Aquatic Club, away from wives, away from their servants, away from the Village, where they spent the night drinking champagne; and then eating.Well-done beefsteaks, washed down with turtle soup and Bellfeels Special Stades White Rum. This gathering was the second celebration; and Mr. Bellfeels was smiling, proud as a rum punch; and had invited everyone, regardless of social status or money, to join in the rum-drinking celebrations. Wilberforce was not invited to this second round, either, because, at sixteen, he was too young.
The Austin Clarke Library Page 24
