“But you have not hurt me,” cried Henry. “You’ve brought me to the Indies where I wanted to be so badly.”
“Ah!” said Tim sorrowfully, “if only I had a religion to me like the master, I might say, ‘’Tis God’s will,’—and then be forgetting about it. And if I had a business or position I might be talking how a man must live. But I have no religion in me at all, save only an Ave Mary or a miserere dominie in storms; and as to position, why, I’m only a poor sailor out of Cork, and it does be grieving me to hurt a boy that bought my breakfast, and me a stranger.” He was watching a long canoe that drew near to them, six strong Caribs rowing it. In the stern sat a little, nervous Englishman, whose face had not tanned with the years but had grown redder and redder until the tiny veins seemed to be running on the outside of his skin. In the little man’s pale eyes there was the light of perpetual indecision and perplexity. His canoe bumped the ship’s side and he climbed slowly aboard and went directly to the master.
“These it is, now,” cried Tim; “and you will not be thinking too badly about me, will you, Henry—seeing the grief it does me?”
The captain was shouting, “Galley boy! Oh, galley boy! Morgan! Aft!”
Henry went back to where the Englishman and the captain were standing. He was amazed when the little colonist gingerly felt his arms and shoulders.
“I might give ten,” he said to the captain.
“Twelve!” the captain snapped.
“But do you really think he is worth it? I’m not a rich man, you see, and I just thought that ten—”
“Well, you may have him for eleven, but, as God sees me, he’s worth more. Look at the knit of him and the broad shoulders. He won’t die like so many. No, sir, he’s worth more, but you may have him for eleven.”
“Well, if you really think so,” the planter said hesitantly; and he began pulling money out of his pockets, money that was mixed with tangled string, and pieces of chalk, and a bit of a quill pen, and a broken key.
The master drew a paper from his pocket and showed it to the boy—an order of indenture for five years, with the name Henry Morgan nicely filled in, and the British seal at the bottom.
“But I don’t want to be sold,” cried Henry. “I didn’t come to be sold. I want to make my fortune and be a sailor.”
“So you shall,” the master answered kindly, as though he gave permission, “after five years. Now go along with the gentleman and let us have no caterwauling. Do you think I could run this ship just bringing out boys that want to come to the Indies? You do your work and trust in God, and it may be a very good thing for you. Experience is never wasted on the sharp albeit humble soul.” He pushed Henry soothingly along the deck in front of him.
At last the boy found his voice. “Tim,” he cried, “Tim. They’re selling me, Tim. Oh, Tim, come to me!” But there was no answer. Tim heard, and he was sobbing in his hammock like a small, whipped child.
And Henry, as he climbed over the side ahead of his new master, felt nothing at all. But for a little catching in his throat, there was no sharp feeling in him—only a heavy, sodden dullness.
III
So Henry Morgan came to be living in Barbados by authority of a white paper which forced his life and soul and body to kneel before the pleasure of one James Flower, planter.
James Flower was not a hard man, and certainly he was not a very brilliant man. His whole life had been a hunger for ideas—any ideas—the creation of them. He wanted to conceive ideas, to warm them to throbbing life, then to hurl them on an astonished world. They would go bobbing like stones started down a long hill, awakening an avalanche of admiration. But no ideas came to him.
His father had been a stolid English curate who wrote stout sermons which were actually published, though very few ever bought them. His mother wrote poetry which was a kind of summary of the sermons. Her verses were appended to the volume of rugged orthodoxy. And both his father and mother had ideas. Both were creators in a small way.
James Flower bad been reared in an atmosphere of—
“I must be walking to my publisher’s now, Helen!”
“But William, a glorious thing burst upon me this morning as I was doing my hair—such a conception! It must surely have come from God. It will be done in couplets I think. Oh! glorious! And it just fits in with those delightful words of yours on humility.”
“Ah, well; I must be walking to my publisher’s now, to see how the sermons are going. I sent a copy to the Archbishop, and he may have been talking about them. Such a thing would start a great sale I think.”
Yes, they were people with ideas, and often they shook their heads over their dull son. He had held them in awe, had been frightened at their greatness and ashamed of himself. And so, early in his life, he had made a determination to have ideas. His reading had been tremendous. King James’ “Defense of Witchcraft” came into his hands, and he set about to prove it true. With the aid of ancient incantations and a black lotion which contained a number of filthy ingredients together with a large amount of hashish, he attempted to fly from the roof of his house. It was while his two broken legs were healing that he came on Scot’s “Discoverie of Witchcraft.”
The system of Descartes was causing a stir among learned men, and James Flower, too, determined to reduce all philosophy to a basic postulate. He laid out paper and a number of fine pens at his side, but he could never come on his postulate. “I think, therefore I am,” he said; “at least, I think I am.” But this led in a circle and got him nowhere. Then he joined the new-founded school of Bacon. With persistent experiments he burned his fingers, and tried to cross clover with barley, and pulled the legs from numberless insects, striving to discover something—almost anything; but he never did. As he had a moderate income from money left him by an uncle, his experiments were varied and extensive.
A Separatist of fanatic intensity had written a violent book of the best scientific manner—The Effects of Alcoholic Spirits, Momentary and Perpetual. This work fell into the hands of James Flower, and he set out one evening to verify some of its more fantastic theories. In the midst of his investigation the spirit of induction left him, and, without cause or warning, he assaulted one of His Majesty’s guardsmen with a potted plant. Had he only known it, this was the one spontaneous idea of his life. The matter was hushed up by an archdeacon who was related to his mother. James Flower’s small fortune was invested in a plantation in Barbados, and he was sent to live there. Clearly, he did not fit in with orthodoxy and pentameters.
And so he had grown wistfully old, on the island. His library was the finest in the Indies, and, as far as information went, he was the most learned man anywhere about. But his learning formed no design of the whole. He had learned without absorbing, remembered without assimilating. His mind was a sad mass of unrelated facts and theories. In his brain, as on his shelves, Caesar’s Commentaries stood shoulder to shoulder with Democritus and a treatise on spontaneous generation. James Flower, who had cried to be a creator, became a quiet, kindly little gentleman, somewhat ineffectual and very inefficient. In his later years he had begun to mistake convictions for ideas. If a man stated any belief loudly enough he frightened James Flower, for, he said to himself, “Here is one of those divinely endowed creatures who control the fire I lack altogether.”
IV
There were few white men on the great green plantation, and those who did grub there were sullen, tattered wretches, serving for some forgotten felony against the Crown. Within their bodies the fever lay like a light sleeper who wakes and snarls, then sleeps again with one malicious eye unclosed. They kneaded the soil in the fields with their fingers, and as their years of servitude crawled on their eyes deadened, their shoulders slumped, and a tired, dull imbecility stretched cloying webs in their brain. Their language was a bastard argot of London, with a few words from the Guinea Negroes and a few clattering Carib phrases. When these men were loosed from their slavery, they wandered listlessly about for a time, and watched the others go to work with something of longing. Then, after a little, they either signed new papers of indenture, or went marauding like tigers from a broken cage.