A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes [56]
Thunder was slain and eaten the next day, without any regard for the feelings of his lovers: indeed, all tenderness towards the children vanished. Even José ceased playing with them. They were treated with a detached severity not wholly divorced from fear--as if these unfortunate men at last realized what diabolic yeast had been introduced into their lump.
So sensible were the children themselves of the change that they even forgot to mourn for Thunder--excepting Laura, whose face burned an angry red for half a day.
But the ship's monkey, on the other hand, with no pig now to tease, nearly died of ennui.
II
The reopening of the wound in her leg made it several days more before Emily was fit to be moved from the cabin. During this time she was much alone. Jonsen and Otto seldom came below, and when they did were too preoccupied to heed her blandishing. She sang, and conversed to herself, almost incessantly; only interrupting herself to beseech these two, with a superfluity of endearments, to pick up her crochet-hook, to look at the animal she had built out of her blanket, to tell her a story, to tell her what naughty things they did when they were little--how unlike Emily it was, all this gross bidding for attention! But as a rule they went away again, or went to sleep, without taking the least notice of her.
As well, she told herself, _to_ herself, endless stories: as many as there are in _The Arabian Nights_, and quite as involved. But the strings of words she used to utter aloud had nothing to do with this: I mean, that when she made a sort of narrative noise (which was often), she did it for the noise's sake: the silent, private formation of sentences and scenes, in one's head, is far preferable for real story-telling. If you had been watching her then, unseen, you could only have told she was doing it by the dramatic expressions of her face, and her restless flexing and tossing--and if she had had the slightest inkling you were there, the audible rigmarole would have started again. (No one who has private thoughts going on loudly in his own head is quite sure of their not being overheard unless he is providing something else to occupy foreign ears.)
When she sang, however, it was always wordless: an endless succession of notes, like a bird's, fixed to the first vocable handy, and practically without tune. Not being musical, there was never any reason for her to stop: so one song would often go on for half an hour.
Although José had scrubbed the cabin floor as well as he could, a large stain still remained.
At times she let her mind wander about, quite peacefully, in her memories of Jamaica: a period which now seemed to her very remote, a golden age. How young she must have been! When her imagination grew tired, too, she could recall the Anansi stories Old Sam had told her: and they often proved the point of departure for new ones of her own.
Also she could remember the creepy things he had told her about duppies. _How_ they used to tease the negroes about the supposed duppy at the bathing-hole, the duppy of the drowned man! It gave one an enormous sense of power, that--not to believe in duppies.
But she found herself taking much less pleasure in duppies now than she used.
She even once caught herself wondering what the Dutchman's duppy would look like, all bloody, with its head turned backwards on its shoulders and clanking a chain. . . it was a momentary flash, the way the banished image of Tabby had come back to her. For a moment her head reeled: in another she was far from Jamaica, far from the schooner, far from duppies, on a golden throne in the remotest East.
The other children were no longer allowed in the cabin to visit her: but when she heard their feet scampering overhead, she often conversed with them in loud yells. One of these yells from above told her:
"Marghie's back, you know."
"O-oh."
After that Emily