Limekiller!

And the list continued down to the bottom of the page, where nestled numbers of small properties of odd sizes involving measurements in roods and perches, and on which odd sums of money were owed. “I don’t know what I’d want with land that nobody else wants,” Limekiller said. What did Limekiller look like? He w'as not taller than most men in a country where most men w-ere tall. His hair, w'hich had once been light-blond, had grown light-brown, had begun to turn dark-brown, was now', under the inexhaustible suns of the Spanish Main, beginning to turn dark-blond in streaks and — but enough of Limekiller’s hair (and beard), w'hich was rather long. His face was broad and so was his nose. His eyebrows thick, his eyes sometimes seemed blue or green or something darker than either, sometimes (seemingly) depending on the color of the Carib Sea: w'hich is, however, never wane-dark; sometimes they w^ere also bloodshot and often this was the result of saltwater or of lack of sleep and sometimes, of too much National rum, and even — though not verv often — the result of a native herb locallv called “weed” when it was not called “ganja”. and this was rather interesting because some of the older Nationals sometimes called a certain kind of banana “ganja,” and both plants, after all, are members of the hemp family. His family name indicated descent from at least one man who once burned limestone in a kiln or kill, presumably in England; sometimes he said that his mother’s family were Ukrainian, sometimes he said Scotch, and sometimes he said they were Kalmuk Tartars who entered Canada by way of Bering Straits on dogsled during a particularly frozen winter: perhaps he was not serious in saying this.

“What would I want with land nobody else wants?” he asks. “I have enough troubles without it.”

His nameless companion says, “Ah, but some of these small parcels of land are so cheap, Mr. Limekiller! You could plant them in mango or coconut. Eventually, you might re-sell them, perhaps.” A tray materializes on the table, trough Jack recalls ordering nothing more since the initial round.

“Re-sell? Ed have to show it, wouldn’t I? And I can’t even get a license to carry passengers —” He looks rather moodily into his glass, raises it in thanks, drains it.

“Ah, but Mr. Limekiller. Government would not require you to have a license to carry people to whom you were showing your own land for possible sale, you know.”

There seems something more in this statement than in the glass. He considers it. “Government wouldn’t?"

“No, no. Cmainlv not.”

Jack considers this for a long time and then ha says, “Oh.”

“It has been a pleasure speaking to you, Mr. Limekiller. I hope,” the man adds in the charming phrase of his nation after a first meeting, “I hope we’ll be no more strangers.”

“Hoew you like Mr. Lofting?” the barkeeper asked Jack, some small while later.

“Who?”

“Honorable Mr. Lorenzo Lofting, Permanent Under-secretary to Government.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Lerdinand,” Jack said; “I was advised, when I first came here, to sign the Visitors’ Book at Government House. But. somehow. either I didn’t have a clean shirt, or my trousers were tom, or, or something. So I never did. And so I never get invited to occasions where I’d be meeting people like that.”

Ferdinand stared at him. “What you mean, Jock? You just spend close to wahn hahf hour tahkeeng to heem. You no cahl dees ‘meet- teeng?”’

It was Jack’s turn to stare, then. “You mean. that nice fellow who — you mean he

“Yes mon.”

Again Limekiller considered for a long time. And, again, said, “. Oh.”

It might have come as a surprise to Dostoievsky, who wrote in the near-slums of St. Petersburg, or even to Tolstoy, writing on the noble estate where he had been born, that a writer is supposed to have to move and write somewhere else… in order to do good writing. On the other hand, Vergil might have dug it. He wrote about Mantua, Carthage, and the Tiber: but he wrote about them in Naples. However, Vergil was an exile, not an expatriate. Other images haunt our thoughts, floating like phosgenes before our eyes. The Stevensons in Samoa. Hemingway in Paris. Oscar and Bosie, sipping sticky liqueurs in a villa near Florence. (It wasn't near Florence? Okay, it wasn’t near Florence.) Paul Bowles in Tangiers, Ian Fleming in Jamaica, Maugham on the Riviera, Wouk in the Virgin Islands: some of these images of course haunt us less than others.