Evelyn Waugh - A Handful Of Dust

Dr. Messinger came on board by the last launch. He had met an acquaintance in the town. He had observed the growing friendship between Tony and Thérèse with the strongest disapproval and told him of a friend of his who had been knifed in a back street of Smyrna, as a warning of what happened if one got mixed up with women.

In the islands the life of the ship disintegrated. There were changes of passengers; the black archdeacon left after shaking hands with everyone on board; on their last morning his wife took round a collecting box in aid of an organ that needed repairs. The captain never appeared at meals in the dining saloon. Even Tony's first friend no longer changed for dinner; the cabins were stuffy from being kept locked all day.

Tony and Thérèse bathed again at Barbados and drove round the island visiting castellated churches. They dined at an hotel high up out of town and ate flying fish.

“You must come to my home and see what real creole cooking is like,” said Thérèse. “We have a lot of old recipes that the planters used to use. You must meet my father and mother.”

They could see the lights of the ship from the terrace where they were dining; the bright decks with figures moving about and the double line of portholes.

“Trinidad the day after tomorrow,” said Tony.

They talked of the expedition and she said it was sure to be dangerous. “I don't like Doctor Messinger at all,” she said. “Not anything about him.”

“And you will have to choose your husband.”

“Yes. There are seven of them. There was one called Honoré I liked but of course I haven't seen him for two years. He was studying to be an engineer. There's one called Mendoza who's very rich but he isn't really a Trinidadian. His grandfather came from Dominica and they say he has coloured blood. I expect it will be Honoré. Mother always brought in his name when she wrote to me and he sent me things at Christmas and on my fête. Rather silly things because the shops aren't good in Port of Spain.”

Later she said, “You'll be coming back by Trinidad, won't you? So I shall see you then. Will you be a long time in the bush?”

“I expect you'll be married by then.”

“Tony, why haven't you ever got married?”

“But I am.”

“Married?”

“Yes.”

“You're teasing me.”

“No, honestly I am. At least I was.”

“Oh.”

“Are you surprised?”

“I don't know. Somehow I didn't think you were. Where is she?”

“In England. We had a row.”

“Oh … What's the time?”

“Quite early.”

“Let's go back.”

“D'you want to?”

“Yes, please. It's been a delightful day.”

“You said that as if you were saying goodbye.”

“Did I? I don't know.”

The Negro chauffeur drove them at great speed into the town. Then they sat in a rowing boat and bobbed slowly out to the ship. Earlier in the day in good spirits they had bought a stuffed fish. Thérèse found she had left it behind at the hotel. “It doesn't matter,” she said.

Blue water came to an end after Barbados. Round Trinidad the sea was opaque and colourless, full of the mud which the Orinoco brought down from the mainland. Thérèse spent all that day in her cabin, doing her packing.

Next day she said goodbye to Tony in a hurry. Her father had come out to meet her in the tender. He was a wiry bronzed man with a long grey moustache. He wore a panama hat and smart silk clothes, and smoked a cheroot; the complete slave-owner of the last century. Thérèse did not introduce him to Tony. “He was someone on the ship,” she explained, obviously.

Tony saw her once next day in the town, driving with a lady who was obviously her mother. She waved but did not stop. “Reserved lot, these real old creoles,” remarked the passenger who had first made friends with Tony and had now attached himself again. “Poor as church mice most of them but stinking proud. Time and again I've palled up with them on board and when we got to port it's been goodbye. Do they ever so much as ask you to their houses? Not they.”

Tony spent the two days with this first friend who had business connections in the place. On the second day it rained heavily and they could not leave the terrace of the hotel. Dr. Messinger was engaged on some technical enquiries at the Agricultural Institute.

Muddy sea between Trinidad and Georgetown; and the ship lightened of cargo rolled heavily in the swell. Dr. Messinger took to his cabin once more. Rain fell continuously and a slight mist enclosed them so that they seemed to move in a small puddle of brown water; the foghorn sounded regularly through the rain. Scarcely a dozen passengers remained on board and Tony prowled disconsolately about the deserted decks or sat alone in the music room, his mind straying back along the path he had forbidden it, to the tall elm avenue at Hetton and the budding copses.

Next day they arrived at the mouth of the Demerara. The customs sheds were heavy with the reek of sugar and loud with the buzzing of bees. There were lengthy formalities in getting their stores ashore. Dr. Messinger saw to it while Tony lit a cigar and strayed out on to the quay. Small shipping of all kinds lay round them; on the further bank a low, green fringe of mangrove; behind, the tin roofs of the town were visible among feathery palm trees; everything steamed from the recent rain. Black stevedores grunted rhythmically at their work; East Indians trotted to and fro busily with invoices and bills of lading. Presently Dr. Messinger pronounced that everything was in order and that they could go into the town to their hotel.

The storm lantern stood on the ground between the two hammocks, which in their white sheaths of mosquito net, looked like the cocoons of gigantic silkworms. It was eight o'clock, two hours after sundown; river and forest were already deep in night. The howler monkeys were silent but tree frogs near at hand set up a continuous, hoarse chorus; birds were awake, calling and whistling, and far in the depths about them came the occasional rending and reverberation of dead wood falling among the trees.

The six black boys who manned the boat squatted at a distance round their fire. They had collected some cobs of maize, three days back in a part of the bush, deserted now, choked and overrun with wild growth, that had once been a farm. (The gross second growth at that place had been full of alien plants, fruit and cereals, all rank now, and reverting to earlier type.) The boys were roasting their cobs in the embers.

Fire and storm lantern together shed little light; enough only to suggest the dilapidated roof about their heads, the heap of stores, disembarked and overrun by ants and, beyond, the undergrowth that had invaded the clearing and the vast columns of treetrunk that rose beyond it, disappearing out of sight in the darkness.

Bats like blighted fruit hung in clusters from the thatch and great spiders rode across it astride their shadows. This place had once been a ballata station. It was the furthest point of commercial penetration from the coast. Dr. Messinger marked it on his map with a triangle and named it in red `First Base Camp.'

The first stage of the journey was over. For ten days they had been chugging up-stream in a broad, shallow boat. Once or twice they had passed rapids (there the outboard engine had been reinforced by paddles; the men strained in time to the captain's count; the bosun stood in the bows with a long pole warding them off the rocks). They had camped at sundown on patches of sand bank or in clearings cut from the surrounding bush. Once or twice they fame to a `house' left behind by ballata bleeders or gold washers.

All day Tony and Dr. Messinger sprawled amidships among their stores, under an improvised canopy of palm thatch; sometimes in the hot hours of the early afternoon they fell asleep. They ate in the boat, out of tins, and drank rum mixed with the water of the river which was mahogany brown but quite clear. The nights seemed interminable to Tony; twelve hours of darkness, noisier than a city square with the squealing and croaking and trumpeting of the bush denizens. Dr. Messinger could tell the hours by the succession of sounds. It was not possible to read by the light of the storm lantern. Sleep was irregular and brief after the days of lassitude and torpor. There was little to talk about; everything had been said during the day, in the warm shade among the stores. Tony lay awake, scratching.