Cup of Gold Page 11

  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 bounding like stones started down a long hill, awakening an avalanche of admiration. But no ideas came to him.

  His father had been a stout 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 had 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 hasheesh, 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 in 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, Cæsar’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 brains. 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.

  The overseer had been one of them, and now that he commanded those who had been his fellows, he inflicted suffering in memory of his own pain.

  James Flower brought Henry to the shore, and something in the boy’s silent misery touched the planter. He had never been able to think of his slaves as men before. He had blindly followed the injunctions of the shrewd elder Cato in dealing with his slaves. But here was one who was very obviously a human, and possibly a gentleman. This boy had cried that he didn’t want to be a slave. The others always landed knowing their lot, and displaying a sullen rancor which must be beaten out of them on the cross.

  “Do not be so hurt, child,” the planter said. “You are very young to be coming to the islands. In a few years you will be a man, and strong.”

  “But it was on me to be a buccaneer,” said Henry dully. “I came out to the sea to make my fortune and a name. And how can I do these things if I am a slave toiling in the fields?”

  “I do not intend that you shall toil in the fields. I wanted you— I wanted a boy to be about the house now I am growing old. I wanted a—a kind of companion who would talk with me and hear me talk. The other planters come to the house and drink my wine, but when they leave I think they laugh at me and laugh at my books—my lovely books. And so you will sit with me in the evenings, perhaps, and we will talk of the things in books. Your father was a gentleman, I think. You have the look.

  “Now, to-day,” James Flower went on mildly, “we have a hanging, and you and I must hurry to be there. I don’t just know what the fellow did, but it was enough. And what says— oh! what’s his name? I have read it, anyway—‘The chief value of violent punishment lies with those on whom the same might fall.’ Yes, I think it is well to have some one hanged every now and then. It is expensive, but very conducive to good behavior among the rest. But my overseer attends to all that. Do you know, I think he really enjoys it.”

  He led the boy to a square of thatched mud huts, built close together, each with its door opening out into a kind of plaza. And in the center of the square, like a horrible fetish, rose a tall gallows made of black wood and polished with oil until it shone dully in the sunlight. It was so placed that no slave could look out of his hovel without seeing the black horror that might be his end. This was the overseer’s work. With his own hands he had rubbed the dark wood until it glowed. He was accustomed to stand and gaze at it, head cocked to one side, as an artist might look at his new finished work.

  The planter and the boy seated themselves. The slaves were herded into the square. And Henry saw a naked black figure squirm and writhe at the end of a rope while the negroes rocked themselves back and forth on the ground and moaned; while the white slaves gritted their teeth and cursed harshly to keep from shrieking. The Caribs squatted on their hams and watched with no particular interest and no fear. Thus they might squat and watch the fire which cooked their food.

  When it was all over, and the black victim hung limp
ly by his crooked neck, the planter looked down and saw that Henry was crying nervously.

  “I know it is bad the first time,” he said gently. “When I first saw it, I did not sleep for a good while. But after a little, when you have seen five—ten—a dozen—go out in this way, you will come to have no feeling about it, and no more thought of it than of a chicken flopping about with a wrung neck.”

  Henry’s breath still came in little miserable chokes.

  “I can show you in the works of Holmaron on the practices of the Inquisition, a dissertation on this very thing you feel. ‘The first time one sees human suffering,’ he says, ‘it is an unnatural thing, because, within one’s experience, placid, comfortable people are the rule. But, after a number of such experiences, the sight of torture becomes a normal thing, and normal humans come to relish it to various extents.’ Remind me to show you the passage sometime; though I must say I have never come to relish the matter.”

  In the evenings of the months that came, the two of them sat in the black depths of the veranda, and James Flower poured his unrelated facts into the ears of young Henry Morgan. The boy listened eagerly, for often the planter spoke of ancient wars and their conduct.

  “And are these things in the books that line the walls?” Henry asked one night.

  “All of these things, and, oh! many thousands of things more.”

  After a time Henry begged, “Would you be teaching me the languages of the books, sir? There must be things there I should like to read for myself.”

  James Flower was delighted. In teaching this boy the things he had read, he had come nearer to satisfaction than ever before. His heart was warm toward the young slave.

  “The Latin and the Greek!” he cried with enthusiasm. “You shall learn them from me; and the Hebrew, too, if you wish.”

  “I want to read the books of war and sailing,” young Henry said. “I want to read of those old wars you speak of, for one day I shall be a buccaneer and take a Spanish town.”

  And in the months that followed, he learned the languages very rapidly because of his wish to read the books. James Flower plunged more deeply into his volumes than ever, for his new role of teacher was very dear experience to him.

  After a little while, he would say,

  “Henry, will you tell the overseer to gather the molasses on the beach? A ship is in to buy it.” And later still,

  “Henry, is there anything I should be doing today?”

  “Well, sir, there’s a great ship down there, in from the Netherlands. We are in strong need of sickles. The Caribs have stolen nearly all the old ones to make swords with. We shall have trouble with those Caribs one day, sir.”

  “Well, see to the sickles, will you, Henry. I hate to be moving in this sun. And have the Indians punished if they steal things. Attend to that, too, will you?”

  Little by little, Henry was absorbing the management of the plantation.

  One evening, after Henry had been there a year, he gained the paramount respect of James Flower; rather a wistful respect, though he lost no love by it.

  “Have you considered these ancient wars?” Henry asked. “I have been reading of Alexander and Xenophon and Caesar in their wars. And the thought is on me that battle and tactics— that is, successful tactics—are nothing more than a glorified trickery. The force is necessary, and the arms, of course; but the war is really won by the man who sits back, like one cheating at cards, and confounds the enemy with his trickery. Have you considered that, sir? Any one who can guess the minds of ordinary generals, as I can guess the minds of the slaves, can win battles. Such a man would have only to shun what was expected of him. Isn’t that the secret of tactics, sir?”

  “I had not thought of it,” said James Flower just a trifle jealously. And that awe he felt for people of ideas went out to Henry. But the planter took great comfort in telling himself that, after all, he was the teacher who had awakened these ideas.

  Two years after Henry had come, the overseer was released by the years from his bondage. He found his freedom too strong a drug for the mind that had been used to outside control. That mind snapped, and fury flooded in on him, so that he went shouting along the roads, striking at every passer-by. And in the night his mania became a terrible, frantic thing. He rolled on the ground under his gallows, and bloody foam frothed from his mouth while the slaves looked on in terror. At length he arose, with ragged hair and maniac, flaming eyes. He seized a torch and rushed into the fields. And Henry Morgan shot him dead as he entered the close growing rows of cane.

  “Who knows the work as well as I do, and whom can you trust more, sir?” young Henry asked the planter. “I have learned things in the books and from my watching that will make this plantation a hundred times more productive.”

  Thus he became much more than the overseer.

  Henry removed the gallows from the square, and after that the hanging was done secretly, in the night. This was not kindness. He knew, out of his own reasoning, that the unknown thing can never become the normal thing; that unseen punishments could be far more horrible to the remaining slaves than those seen under the light of the sun.

  Henry had learned many things in dealing with the slaves. He knew that he must never let them see what he was thinking, for then, in some ineffable way, they had a hold on him which would be difficult to shake off. He must be cold and distant and insulting to those below him. With few exceptions, they would take insult as the sign of his superiority. Men always believed him what he seemed to be, and he could seem to be almost anything.

  If one were brilliantly dressed, all men presumed him rich and powerful, and treated him accordingly. When he said things as though he meant them, nearly all acted as though he meant them. And, most important of his lessons—if he were perfectly honest and gave a strict accounting in nine consecutive dealings, then the tenth time he might steal as much as he wished, and no one would dream of suspecting him, so only he had brought the nine times forcibly enough to the attention of all men.

  A growing pile of golden coins in a box under his bed gave ample proof of the validity of this last lesson. And he followed all his teachings. He never gave any man the least hold on him, nor insight into his motives and means and abilities and shortcomings. Since most men did not believe in themselves, they could not believe in one they understood to be like themselves.

  These rules he gleaned gradually from his life, until he was master of the plantation, until James Flower pitifully leaned on his advice and his convictions, and until the Caribs and blacks and felon white men hated and feared him, and yet could make no dent in his being—could get no hold to hurt him.

  James Flower was deliciously happy—happier than he had ever been—for this boy had lifted the hideous weight of the plantation from his shoulders. He need think no more of the matters of tilling the soil. More and more he lay drowned in his books. And, now he was coming to be an old man, he read the same books over and over again without knowing it. Often he felt a slight irritation at the careless person who had made notes in his margins and dog-eared the pages.

  And Henry Morgan had got himself a great plantation and a great power. Under his captaincy the earth flowered and increased. He was making the land give four times as much as it had before. The slaves worked deliriously under the whips which followed them to the fields, but there was nothing personal in the whips. The old overseer had delighted in punishment, but Henry Morgan was not cruel. He was merciless. He merely speeded the wheels of his factory. One could not think of being kind to a sprocket or a fly-wheel, and no more could this boy think of pampering his slaves.

  Henry was forcing money out of the ground, and from it was adding to his hoard in the box under his bed—a little from the season’s sale of cane and a trifle in the buying of new cattle. It was not stealing, but only a kind of commission for his success. The little pile of golden coins grew and grew for the time when Henry Morgan should go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town.

  V

&nb
sp; Henry had served three years, and, though he was only eighteen, he was grown and strong. His crisp black hair seemed to curl more tightly to his head, and his mouth, from dealing with the slaves, was more firm than ever. He gazed about him and knew that he should be satisfied, but his eyes had never lost the trick of looking out beyond distance and over the edge of the present. A little hectoring wish ran through his waking and dreaming like a thin red line. He must get back to the sea and ships. The sea was his mother and his mistress, and the goddess who might command and find him ready and alert for service. Why, his very name, in the ancient Briton tongue, signified one who lived by the sea. Yes, the ships were calling to him cruelly now. His heart sailed out, away from him with every passing merchantman.

  In the big house he had studied and considered what navigation there was in books, and in the plantation’s little sloop he had gone cruising in the near waters. But this was the play of a child, he thought, and it was not preparing him to be an expert sailor. It was necessary for him to learn avidly, for in the near future he must go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town. This was the silver throne of all his desire.

  And so, one evening—

  “There is a thing I should like to be speaking of, sir.”

  James Flower raised his eyes from his book and laid his head back in the chair.

  “If we had a ship to carry our produce to Jamaica,” Henry continued, “we should be saving a large deal in freightage. The cost of such a ship would soon enough be eaten away by the profits. Too, we might carry the produce of the other plantations at a smaller fee than the merchantmen ask.”

  “But where might one come on such a ship?” James Flower inquired.

  “There is one in the harbor now, one of two masts and—”

  “Then buy her; buy her, and see to it. You know more about these things than I do. By the way, here is an interesting conjecture on the inhabitants of the moon. ‘They may be totally unlike human beings,’ he read. ‘Their necks could easily be—’ ”