Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [103]
Big Lou picked up her towel. “Well, that’s nice for you, Eddie,”
she said. There was a sadness in her voice, a resignation, which Matthew picked up and which tugged at his heart. She does not deserve this, he thought. She does not deserve this man.
“What will you call the club, Eddie?” she asked.
“The Rootsie-Tootsie Club,” said Eddie. “How’s that for a name, Lou, hen? See yourself there?”
69. An Unfortunate Incident
Waking in her bungalow in the pirate settlement overlooking the Straits of Malacca, Domenica looked out at the world through the white folds of her mosquito net. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was almost seven o’clock; the dawn had come some time earlier and already the sun was over the top of the trees around the village clearing.
Pushing aside the net, Domenica rose from her bed and stretched. The air was warm, but not excessively so. In fact, the temperature, she thought, was just perfect, although she knew that this would not last. If she felt fresh and exhilarated now, by the end of the day she would be feeling washed out, drained of all energy by the heat. So if anything had to be done, it would be best to do it in the first few hours before the sun made everything impossible and nobody could venture outside. That was the folk wisdom so neatly encapsulated by Noel Coward in ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’; they were the only ones to be seen out in the midday sun. Well, Domenica knew better than to do that sort of thing.
An Unfortunate Incident 215
She crossed the room to where her clothes were draped over a chair. She donned her blouse and her light-fitting white cotton trousers, and then, picking up her shoes – a pair of light moccasins which could be worn without socks – she slipped first her right foot in and then the left, and then . . . And then she screamed, as the sharp jab of pain shot into the toes of her left foot. Instinctively and violently, she tore the shoe off her foot and dashed it onto the floor. Out of it, half crushed and limping from the encounter, a dark black scorpion emerged and began to drag itself away across the boards.
Domenica stared in fascination at the creature that had stung her. It was so small by comparison with her foot; not much bigger than her large toe, and yet it had caused such pain. As it scuttled away, its curved stinging tail held up like a little question-mark, she felt an urge to throw a shoe at it, to crush it and destroy it, and she bent down to retrieve a shoe to do this. But then she stopped, shoe in hand. The scorpion, exhausted perhaps by its own injuries, had paused, and had turned round in a circle. Now it faced her, as if to stand up to the threatened onslaught, although it could not possibly have seen her with its tiny eyes. 216 An Unfortunate Incident
If it had, she must have been a mountain to it, the backdrop to its minute, floor-level world.
She watched as it turned again and continued its limping escape. She did not have the heart to kill this little thing, this scrap of creation, which was, after all, no more predatory than anything else and considerably less so, when one thought about it, than we were ourselves. We, as homo sapiens, packed a mighty sting; a sting capable of blasting the miniature world of such arachnids into nothingness. And all it had done was to try to defend itself in its recently-discovered home against a great threatening toe. That was all.
And suddenly she remembered the lines of D.H. Lawrence about his encounter with a snake. A snake came to his water trough, a visitor, he said, from the bowels of the earth somewhere, and he threw a stone at it. Afterwards, he felt guilty, sensed that he had committed a pettiness. That was what she would feel if she crushed this small creature. She would feel petty. She watched as the scorpion completed its retreat and disappeared over the edge of the veranda. That would have been a terrible tumble for it, falling three feet or so to the ground below, but arachnids