Limekiller!

A moment passed. Just the two of them again. Then Rafael, in a tone which was nothing but kindly, said, “Jack, you are still young and you are still healthy, My advice to you: Go away. Go to a cooler climate. One with cooler ways and cooler memories.” The old woman called something from the back of the house. The old man sighed. “It is the summons to supper,” he said. “Not only must I eat in haste because I have my clinic in less than half-an-hour, but suddenly-invited guests make Doha ’Sana very nervous. Good night, then, Jack.”

Jack had had two gin drinks. He felt that he needed two more. At least two more. Or, if not gin, rum. Beer would not do. He wanted to pull the blanket of booze over him, awfully, aw'fully quickly. He had this in his mind as though it were a vow as he walked up the front street towards the Cupid Club.

Someone hailed him, someone out of the gathering dusk.

“Jock! Hey, mon, Jock! Hey, b’y! Where you gweyn so fahst? Bide, b'y, bide a bit!”

The voice was familiar. It was that of Harry Hazeed, his principal creditor in King Town. Ah, well. He had had his chance, Limekiller had. He could have gone on down the coast, down into the Republican waters, where the Queen’s writ runneth not. Now it was too late.

“Oh, hello, Harry,” he said, dully.

Hazeed took him by the hand. Took him by both hands. “Mon, show me where is your boat? She serviceable? She is? Good: Mon, you don’t hear de news: Welcome’s warehouse take fire and born up! Yes, mon. Ahl de earn in King Town born up! No earn ah-tahl: no tortilla, no empinada, no tamale, no cain-cake! Oh, mon, how de people going to punish! Soon as I hear de news, I drah me money from de bonk, I buy ahl de crocus sock I can find, I jump on de pocket-boat — and here I am, oh, mon, I pray fah you… I pray I fine you!”

Limekiller shook his head. It had been one daze, one shock after another. The only thing clear was that Harry Hazeed didn’t seem angry. “You no understand?” Hazeed cried. “Mon! We going take your boat, we going doewn to Nutmeg P’int, we going to buy cam, mon! We going to buy ahl de cam dere is to buy! Nevah mine dat lee’ bit money you di owe me, b’y! We going make plenty money, mon! And we going make de cultivators plenty money, too! What you theenk of eet, Jock, me b’y? Eh? Hey? What you theenk?”

Jack put his forefinger in his mouth, held it up. The wind was in the right quarter. The wind would, if it held up, and, somehow, it felt like a wind which would hold up, the wind would carry them straight and clear to Nutmeg Point: the clear, clean wind in the clear and starry night.

Softly, he said — and old Hazeed leaning closer to make the words out, Limekiller said them again, louder, “I think it’s great. Just great. I think it’s great.”

SLEEP WELL OF NIGHTS

Are those Lahvly young ladies with you, then?” the Red Cross teacher asked.

Limekiller evaded the question by asking another, a technique at least as old as the Book of Genesis. “Which way did they go?” he asked.

But it did not work this time. “Bless me if I saw them gow anywhere! They were both just standing on the corner as I went by.”

Limekiller gave up not so easily. “Ah, but which comer?”

A blank look. “Why. this corner.”

This corner was the corner of Grand Arawack and Queen Alexandra Streets in the Town of St. Michael of the Mountains, capital of Mountains District in the Colony of British Hidalgo. Fretwork galleries dripping with potted plants and water provided shade as well as free shower baths. These were the first and second streets laid out and had originally been deer trails; Government desiring District Commissioner Bartholomew “Bajan” Bainbridge to supply the lanes with names, he had, with that fund of imagination which helped build the Empire, called them First and Second Streets: it was rather a while before anvone in Government next looked at a map and then decided that numbered streets should run parallel to each other and not, as in this instance, across each other. And as the Grand Arawack Hotel was by that time built and as Alexandra (long-suffering consort of Fat Edward) was by that time Queen, thus they were renamed and thus had remained.

“St. Michael’s” or “Mountains” Town, one might take one’s pick, had once been a caravan city in miniature. The average person does not think of caravan cities being located in the Americas, and, for that matter, neither does anyone else. Nevertheless, trains of a hundred and fifty mules laden with flour and rum and textiles and tinned foods coming in, and with chicle and chicle and chicle going out, had been common enough to keep anyone from bothering to count them each time the caravans went by. The labor of a thousand men and a thousand mules had been year by year spat out of the mouths of millions of North Americans in the form of chewing gum.

So far as Limekiller knew, Kipling had never been in either Hidalgo, but he might have thought to have been if one ignored biographical fact and judged only by his lines,