The Four Beauties by H. E. Bates

Author:H. E. Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1973-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

The White Wind

The lagoon had the hot brilliance of a stretch of celluloid constantly ignited by sunlight into white running flame. From far beyond it the Pacific galloped ceaselessly, charging, white-maned, against the coral reef. At each point of the gap, where the swell poured in, flew great conical flags of splendid spume.

‘Does the boat go fast?’

‘Like the wind.’

‘How fast?’

‘Like the wind, boy. I told you. Like the wind.’

In the shadowy shed, half tin, half palm-frond, the boy fed into a strange rattling wheel-like contraption, not unlike a roundabout at a fair, another soda-water bottle. The machine filled it, sealed it with a sound like that of gnashing iron teeth and bore it away.

‘How long to go to Papeete in the boat?’

‘No time.’

‘And Bora-Bora?’

‘No time. Just like the wind, I tell you. No time.’

On the far side of the machine sat a mass of yellow indolence on a box. It stretched out at mechanical intervals a soporific crab-like hand that grasped the filled soda-water bottles and dropped them in a crate. It had grown over the years so completely into the lethargy of this rhythm that occasionally, when it fell asleep in the heat of oppressive afternoons, the hand kept up its fat, slow clawing, independently.

The boy knew this mass of odiously distended flesh as Fat Uncle. He knew of no other name than Fat Uncle.

‘Fat Uncle, is the boat faster than Pierre’s?’

‘Pierre, Pierre, who’s Pierre? Boat? – you call that a boat? That fish barrel?’

The flesh of the face was so solidly inflated, like a hard tyre, that the simple eyes appeared in it merely as two long slits nicked there by a knife held in a hand that had grown suddenly unsteady as it traced the left-hand eye.

This eye seemed not only larger than the other. It slanted upwards and backwards, jaggedly. The appearance achieved by it was one of idiotic cunning. It was then repeated, astonishingly, in the centre of the naked, soapy paunch below. There the navel lay like a third snoozing eye, the creased lid of stomach folding across it, heaving deeply up and down.

The boy’s own eyes were black and listening. He was slightly over four feet in height, rather squat, with thick yellow skin and a mat of black shining hair that was never combed. There was nothing in these rather inconspicuous features to distinguish him from a score of other boys who ran about the water-front except the eyes. They were far-seeing, arrested, solemn eyes and they were inclined to fix themselves for long periods on distances away at sea, without the trace of a smile.

When he was not working with Fat Uncle at the soda-water machine he spent most of his time working and running errands about the port for an American named Edison. Edison owned, among other things, the soda-water plant. He also owned the tin-hut, Fat Uncle, the schooner that Fat Uncle said was as fast as the wind and a hotel on the water-front.

‘Faster than the wind,’ Fat Uncle sometimes said.

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