Читать книгу Ivan Greet's Masterpiece - Allen Grant - Страница 11

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Ten months passed away. Working by fits and starts, as the mood came upon him, Ivan Greet completed and repolished his masterpiece. It was but a little thing, yet he knew it was a masterpiece. Every word and line in it pleased and satisfied him. And when he was satisfied, he knew he had reckoned with his hardest critic. He had only to send it home to England now, and get it published. For the rest, he cared little. Let men read it or not, let them praise or blame, he had done a piece of work at last that was worthy of him.

And Clemmy admired it more than words could fathom. Though she spoke her own uncouth dialect only, she could understand and appreciate all that Ivan had written—for Ivan had written it. Those ten months of daily intercourse with her poet in all moods had been to Clemmy a liberal education. Even her English improved, though that was a small matter; but her point of view widened and expanded unspeakably. It was the first time she had ever been brought into contact with a higher nature. And Ivan was so kind, so generous, so sympathetic. In one word, he treated her as he would treat a lady. Accustomed as she was only to the coarsely good-natured blacks of her hamlet, Clemmy found an English gentleman a wonderfully lovable and delightful companion. She knew, of course, he didn’t love her—that would be asking too much; but he was tender and gentle to her, as his poet’s heart would have made him be to any other woman under like conditions. Sometimes the girls in the village would ask her in confidence, “You tink him lub you, Clemmy? You tink de buckra lub you?”

And Clemmy, looking coy, and holding her head on one side, would answer, in the peculiar Jamaican sing-song, “Him mind on him book. Him doan’t tink ob dem ting. Him mind too full. Him doan’t tink to lub me.”

But Clemmy loved him—deeply, devotedly. When a woman of the lower races loves a man of the higher, she clings to him with the fidelity of a dog to its master. Clemmy would have died for Ivan Greet; her whole life was now bound up in her Englishman. His masterpiece was to her something even more divine than to Ivan himself; she knew by heart whole pages and passages of it.

In this delicious idyllic dream—a dream of young love satisfied (for Clemmy didn’t ask such impossibilities from fate as that Ivan should love her as she loved him)—those happy months sped away all too fast, till Ivan’s work was finished. On the morning of the day before he meant to take it in to the post at Spanish Town, and send it off, registered, to his friends in England, he walked out carelessly bare-footed—so negro-like had he become—among the deep dew on the grass in front of his shanty. Clemmy caught sight of him from the door, and shook her head gravely.

“If you was my pickney, Ivan,” she said, with true African freedom, “I tell you what I do: I smack you for dat. You gwine to take de fever!”

Ivan, laughed, and waved his hand.

“Oh, no fear,” he cried lightly. “I’m a Jamaican born by now. I’ve taken to the life as a duck takes to the water. Besides, it’s quite warm, Clemmy. This dew won’t hurt me.”

Clemmy thought no more of it at the time, though she went in at once, and brought out his shoes and socks, and made him put them on with much womanly chiding. But that night, after supper, when she took his hand in hers, as was her wont of an evening, she drew back in surprise.

“Why, Ivan,” she cried, all cold with terror, “your hand too hot! You done got de fever!”

“Well, I don’t feel quite the thing,” Ivan admitted grudgingly. “I’ve chills down my back and throbbing pain in my head. I think I’ll turn in and try some quinine, Clemmy.”

Clemmy’s heart sank at once. She put him to bed on the rough sack in the hut that served for a mattress, and sent Peter post haste down to Linstead for the doctor. It was hours before he came; he was dining with a friend at a “penn” on the mountains; he wouldn’t hurry himself for the “white trash” who had “gone nigger” on the hillside. Meanwhile Clemmy sat watching, all inward horror, by Ivan’s bedside. Long before the doctor arrived her Englishman was delirious. Tropical diseases run their course with appalling rapidity. By the time the doctor came he looked at the patient with a careless eye. All the world round about had heard of the white man who “lived with the niggers,” and despised him accordingly.

“Yellow fever,” he said calmly, in a very cold voice. “He can’t be moved, and he can’t be nursed here. A pretty piggery this for a white man to die in!”

Clemmy clasped her hands hard.

“To die in!” she echoed aloud. “To die in! To die in!”

“Well, he’s not likely to live, is he?” the doctor answered, with a sharp little laugh. “But we’ll do what we can. He must be nursed day and night, and kept cool and well-aired, and have arrowroot and brandy every half-hour, awake or asleep—a couple of teaspoonfuls. I suppose you can get some other girl to help you sit up with him?”

To help her sit up with him! Clemmy shuddered at the thought. She would have sat up with him herself every night for a century. What was sleep or rest to her when Ivan was in danger! For the next three days she never moved from his side except to make fresh arrowroot by the fire outside the hut, or to bring back a calabash of clear water from the rivulet. But how could nursing avail? The white man’s constitution was already broken down by the hardships and bad food, nay, even by the very idleness of the past ten months; and that hut was, indeed, no fit place to tend him in. The disease ran its course with all its fatal swiftness. From the very first night Ivan never for a moment recovered consciousness. On the second he was worse. On the third, with the suddenness of that treacherous climate, a tropical thunderstorm burst over them unawares. It chilled the air fast. Before it had rained itself out with peal upon peal and flash upon flash, in quick succession, Ivan Greet had turned on his side and died, and Clemmy sat alone in the hut with a corpse, and her unborn baby.