Limekiller!

Jack blinked a bit at this, to him, Bomba-the-Jungle-Boy note. But it was soon cleared up. The retired Anglican Bishop of Poona, in India, had reached an age when he found English winters increasingly difficult. The Mediterranean, where retired British bishops had once been as thick as alewives, had for some long time been in the process of becoming too expensive for anyone who did not happen to own a fleet of oil-tankers. which, somehow, very few retired bishops did. And so this one had — perhaps after fasting, meditation, and prayer, perhaps on the spur of the moment — written to his ecclesiastical associate, the Most Reverend W.C.C. Le Beau, Archbishop emeritus (or whatever) of the Province of Central America and Darien — smallest Province in the Anglican Church — asking for advice.

“And I advised him to consider Curasow Cove. The climate is salubrious, the breeze seldom fails, the water is deep enough to — well, well, I don’t wish to sound like a land agent. Furthermore, English in one form or another is the language of the land. To be sure, Poona speaks Hindi and Gujerathi and a few others of the sort: precious lot of good that would do him in Sicily or Spain.” Scrip. scrop. flop!

It was desired to enable the retired Bishop to move into his new home before very long. (“Just let him get a roof over his head and a floor beneath his feet, and that will give him the chance to see if it serves him well enough for his taste. If it does, he can have his furniture, his Indian things and all the rest of it sent over. If not, well ‘The world is wondrous large, leagues and leagues from marge to marge.’”) Ordinarily, there were enough boats, Lord knows, and enough boatmen, at Point Pleasaunce, that lovely and aptly named little peninsula, to have moved material enough for several bungalows at a time.

But the present season was not an ordinary one.

Every serviceable vessel from the Point, as well as most of those available from other parts of the colony — those not already committed to the seasonal fisheries or to the movement of sand or fruit: and, in fact, so many, even, of those, that both commodities were soon likely to be in short supply — were busy plying between King Town and Plum Tree Creek. There was no road to speak of into the Plum Tree Creek country, one was in the building, but the Canadian-American corporation setting up the turpentine and resin plant at the headwaters of the creek, which thrust so deep into the piney woods that it might better perhaps have been called Pine Tree Creek — the corporation was of no mind to wait. Hence, a constant line of boats, some pure sail, some pure motor, some sail and auxiliary engine, moved along the coast carrying machinery, gasoline, fuel oil, timber, cement, metal-ware, food: and, empty, moved back up the coast for more.

As a non-National, Limekiller stood no chance of a crack at this lucrative commerce as long as any National-owned vessel was available. However, as a citizen of a Commonwealth country — to wit, Canada — he did stand some chance of a permit to take a charter for this other and infinitely smaller project. The greater the interest the archbishop might take in his doing so, the greater his chances of getting it. And well the archbishop knew it.

The kitchen, like every other country kitchen in the Out- Districts (which was any and every district save that of King Town, Urban), consisted of a wall in the yard behind the house in good weather, and underneath the house, in bad. Every house not a trash house stood on high legs to catch the breeze and baffle. or, anyway. slow down. the entry of the less desirable fauna. The archbishop scarcely had to stoop to peer into the cook-pot as he added to the fish some tinned milk, sliced vegetables, country herbs and peppers; though certainly he had once been tall. Whilst it was cooking, the old man without further word retired to the tiny chapel, its doors wide open, where he knelt before the altar. Limekiller did not join him, but others did: old (the very old), lame (the very lame), some partly, some altogether blind, and a few quite small children who, Limekiller thought, may have been orphans. There were an even dozen of them, besides the old priest himself. They were still there when Limekiller returned from a long walk.

With no more word than at the beginning, the old man got up, and, followed by his congregation, made ready to eat the supper: a gesture sufficed to invite the newcomer.

Afterward he wrote out and handed over a paper.

The Permanent Under-secretary

Honorable:

Pray help Mr. John Limekiller help me to help the Lord Bishop.

Yrs in Christ,

William C.A. Darien

„I trust that may do it,” said Archbishop Le Beau.