A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [118]
But it worked. When it rained, as it was beginning to do now every afternoon, the ground below the roof remained dry. Poultry from the barrackyard and other places came to shelter and stayed to dig the earth into dust.
The cedar floorboards came, rough and bristly, and impregnated the site with their smell. When Mr Maclean planed them they seemed to acquire a richer colour. He fitted them together as neatly as he had said, nailing them down with headless nails and filling in the holes at the top with wax mixed with sawdust which dried hard and could scarcely be distinguished from the wood. The back bedroom was floored, and part of the drawingroom, so that, with care, it was possible to walk straight up to the bedroom.
Then Mr Maclean said, ‘When you get more materials you must let me know.’
He had worked for a fortnight for eight dollars.
Perhaps he didn’t pay seven dollars for the cedar, Mr Biswas thought. Only five or six.
The house now became a playground for the children of the barracks. They climbed and they jumped; many took serious falls but, being barrack children, came to little harm. They nailed nails into the crapaud pillars and the cedar floor; they bent nails for no purpose; they flattened them to make knives. They left small muddy footprints on the floor and on the crossbars of the frame; the mud dried and the floor became dusty. The children drove out the poultry and Mr Biswas tried to drive out the children.
‘You blasted little bitches! Let me catch one of you and see if I don’t cut his foot off.’
As the sugarcane grew taller the dispossessed labourers grew surlier, and Mr Biswas began to receive threats, delivered as friendly warnings.
Seth, who had often spoken of the treachery and danger-ousness of the labourers, now only said, ‘Don’t let them frighten you.’
But Mr Biswas knew of the many killings in Indian districts, so well planned that few reached the courts. He knew of the feuds between villages and between families, conducted with courage, ingenuity and loyalty by those same labourers who, as wage-earners, were obsequious and negligible.
He decided to take precautions. He slept with a cutlass and a poui stick, one of his father’s, at the side of his bed. And from Mrs Seeung, the Chinese café-owner at Arwacas, he got a puppy, a hairy brown and white thing of indeterminate breed. The first night at the barracks the puppy whined at being left outside, scratched at the door, fell off the step and whined until he was taken in. When Mr Biswas woke up next morning he found the puppy in bed beside him, lying quite still, its eyes open. At Mr Biswas’s first gesture, which was one of surprise, the puppy jumped to the floor.
He called the puppy Tarzan, to prepare it for its duties. But Tarzan turned out to be friendly and inquisitive, and a terror only to the poultry. ‘The hens stop laying because of your dog,’ the poultry owners complained, and it looked true enough, for Tarzan often had pieces of feather stuck in the corners of his mouth, and he was continually bringing trophies of feathers to the room. Then one day Tarzan ate an egg and immediately developed a taste for eggs. The hens laid their eggs in bush, in places which they thought were secret. Tarzan soon got to know these places as well as the owners of the hens and he often came back to the barracks with his mouth yellow and sticky with egg. The owners of the hens took their revenge. One afternoon Mr Biswas found Tarzan’s muzzle smeared with fowl droppings, and Tarzan in great misery at this novel and continuing discomfort.
The placards in Mr Biswas’s room increased. He worked more slowly on them now, using black and red estate ink and pencils of many colours. He filled the blank space with difficult decorations