Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [283]
‘Improve themselves?’ Paris was tired and discouraged and disinclined for further talk, but a kind of curiosity kept his attention directed to the other man now. The years had leeched colour from Barton’s eyes and dishevelled his brows and put grey into his wiry, ragged beard; but the peering, relishing expression was the same as ever, the shape of felicitous syllables forming on the thin mouth – these things would be the same until the day he breathed his last. ‘You think it an improvement when we prosper at the expense of others and reduce them and take away their dignity?’ Paris had a sense, half resigned, half despairing, that the terms he was using were in the wrong language. ‘It is a very selective notion of improvement.’
‘You’re a regglar sticker, you are.’ Barton spat delicately aside to express his disgust. ‘You got no sense of the future. If it was left to you, the march of ooman betterment would be slowed down to a crawl, we would be in the doldrums without breeze enough to give steerage way.’ There had risen to his face the old look of pleasure at the rich resources of language. ‘We have got to reach out for somethin’,’ he said virtuously. ‘Take a bebby now, what is the first thing you will see a bebby do? He sees somethin’ before his eyes, he reaches for it. He don’t know what it is, might be a lump of shit, might be a di’mond. He has got to learn for hisself. When we stops reachin’ out, we are done for.’
‘Last time you reached out you came near to losing your scalp,’ Paris said, with a degree of unkindness unusual in him. ‘You only saved it, I seem to remember, by keeping pretty low to the ground.’
Barton spat again. ‘Times a man has to keep his head down,’ he said. ‘Any fool knows that.’ There was a truculence in his manner which seemed new to Paris; it indicated – better perhaps than anything else could have done – the divisions that were growing among the people now. ‘Times change,’ he went on after a moment. ‘This place is changin’. There is pickin’s now such as never before. The land between us and the St John is almost empty – these local Indians are poxed-out an’ dyin’. We know there is peace now with the French and Spanish. The seas will be safer – we can trade skins to Cuba. The English have took Florida for King George, there is an English Gov’nor in place now in St Augustine; we shall have justidge an’ fair play, no more of these blaggard dons linin’ their pockets an’ grindin’ down the people. I will tell you somethin’ now, I am a man that sees ahead. There will be a place up there for a man like me, I am a serviceable fellow. Do you think I am goin’ to rot down here the rest of my nat’ral life? Why do you think I answer to that black devil now?’
His face had grown envenomed as he spoke and his voice had risen. It was clear that Kireku’s contemptuous treatment was resented more than Barton dared openly show – resented enough to take the guard off his tongue now. Or perhaps, Paris thought, it was this he had wanted to say all along, the rhetoric about human aspiration merely a preamble. Barton was devious enough and probably by this time more than a little mad. Asserting a readiness to betray Kireku might seem to him like proof of integrity.
‘I do not know why,’ Paris said.
‘I use him to serve my turn,’ Barton said, in a rapid and confidential tone. ‘I wasn’t Thurso’s fool and I ain’t Kireku’s neither. I am waitin’ my time.’ He raised a finger and laid it along his thin nose. ‘I keep my nose to the wind,’ he said. ‘I am a man that sees ahead, I tell you.’
Paris was silent for a short while. He was aware, as always with Barton, of a mystery. You could not call such a man wicked even; he seemed to have his being below distinctions of good and evil, in some sunless Eden of his own. ‘You see ahead, Barton, God help us,’ he said. ‘But what a man sees must still depend on what he looks for. While I have got eyes of my own, I shall not need to borrow yours.’
With this he turned away and left the other standing there.