“Good,” he said. “Doree and I welcome you. Now–can you help us to know, a little, the way you want to look?”
Mercy’s splendid eyes were blank no longer; they turned to him appealingly.
“I would like to look like a city girl, please,” Mercy Tachie said. “That is what I would like the most.”
“A city girl–” Mr. Archipelago ran a finger lightly over the chalky powder on her face. “That is why you wear this mask, eh? Ladies never know when they are beautiful–strange. They must be chic–God is not a good enough craftsman. Fortunate, I suppose, for us. Ah well. Yes, we will make you look like a city girl, if that is what you would like the most.”
Confused by his sigh and smile, Mercy felt compelled to explain herself.
“I was going for seven years to the mission school here, you see, and all my life I am never knowing any place outside this town. But someday, maybe, I will be living in some big place, and if so, I would not want to feel like a bushgirl. So I wish to know how it is proper to have my hair, and what to do for the face. You do not think I am foolish?”
Mr. Archipelago shook his head.
“I think the whole world is foolish,” he said. “But you are no more foolish than anyone else, and a great deal less so than many.”
Doree, who felt his reply to be unsatisfactory, placed her splay-hands on the girl’s dark wiry hair.
“Not to worry,” she said. “We’ll straighten your hair just enough to set it and style it. We’ll take that goop off your face. You got lovely skin–not a wrinkle–you shouldn’t cover it up like that. We’ll give you a complete make-up job. Doll, you’ll be a queen.”
And Mercy Tachie, her eyes trusting, smiled.
“Do you think so? Do you really think it will be so?”
The air was redolent once more with the potions and unguents, the lotions and shampoos and lacquers, the nostril-pinching pungency of ammonia and the fragrance of bottled colognes. The snik-snik-snik of Mr. Archipelago’s scissors was the theme of a small-scale symphony; overtones and undertones were provided by the throb of the dryer and the strident blues-chanting of Doree as she paced the room like a priestess. Mercy began to relax.
“My friends, they also would like to come here, I think, if they like the way I will look,” she confided. “Mr. Archipelago, you will be staying here? You will not be leaving now?”
“Perhaps we will be staying,” he said. “We must wait and see if your friends like the way you look.”
Mercy pursed her lips pensively.
“Will you not go back, someday,” she ventured, “to your own country? For the sake of your family?”
Doree glared, but Mr. Archipelago was bland. He had never minded the curiosity of his lady customers.
“The charming questions,” he said. “They begin again. Good. No–I have no family.”
“Oh, I thought it must be so!” Mercy cried.
“I beg your pardon?”
Once more she became self-conscious. She folded her hands and looked at the floor.
“I have heard,” she said apologetically, “that you were leaving your own country many years ago because you had some bad trouble–maybe because you thought you might go to prison. But I am never believing that story, truly. Always I think you had some different kind of trouble. My aunt Abenaa, you know, she lost all her family–husband and three children–when their house burned down, and after that she left her village and came to live here, in my father’s house, and never again will she go to that village.”
“You think it was that way, for me?” he said.
“I think it–yes.”
Mr. Archipelago straightened his waistcoat over his belly. In his eyes there appeared momentarily a certain sadness, a certain regret. But when he replied, his voice expressed nothing except a faint acceptable tenderness.
“You are kind. Perhaps the kindest of all my ladies.”
At last the ritual was accomplished, and Mercy Tachie looked at herself in the cracked and yellowing wall-mirror. Slowly, she turned this way and that, absorbing only gradually the details–the soft-curled hair whorled skilfully down onto her forehead, the face with its crimson lipstick and its brown make-up that matched her own skin. Then she smiled.
“Oh–” she breathed. “It is just like the pictures I have seen in Drum magazine–the girls, African girls, who know how everything is done in the new way. Oh, now I will know, too!”
“Do you think your friends will overcome their shyness now?” Mr. Archipelago asked.
“I will make sure of it,” Mercy promised. “You will see.”
They sat quietly in the shop after Mercy had left. They felt spent and drained, but filled and renewed as well. Doree stretched her long legs and closed her eyes. Mr. Archipelago bulged in his carved rocking-chair, and cradled to and fro peacefully, his shoes off and his waistcoat unbuttoned.
The crash of noise and voices from outside startled them. They ran to the open door. Spilling down the street was an impromptu procession. Every girl in town appeared to be there, hips and shoulders swaying, unshod feet stepping lightly, hands clapping, cloths of blue and magenta and yellow fluttering around them like the flags of nations while they danced. A few of the older women were there, too, buxom and lively, their excited laughter blaring like a melody of raucous horns. At the front of the parade walked Mercy Tachie in new red high-heel shoes, her head held high to display her proud new hair, her new face alight with pleasure and infinite hope. Beside Mercy, as her guard and her champions, there pranced and jittered half a dozen young men, in khaki trousers and brilliantly flower-printed shirts. One held her hand–he was her own young man. Another had a guitar, and another a gourd rattle. They sang at full strength, putting new words to the popular highlife “Everybody Likes Saturday Night”.
“Everybody like Mercy Tachie,
Everybody like Mercy Tachie,
Everybody everybody
Everybody everybody
Everybody say she fine pas’ all–”
Mr. Archipelago turned to Doree. Gravely, they shook hands.
“By an act of Mercy,” Mr. Archipelago said, “we are saved.”
They walked along the shore in the moist and cooling late afternoon. The palm boughs rustled soothingly. The sound reminded Mr. Archipelago of taffeta, the gowns of the whispering ladies, twirling forever in a delicate minuet of dust, the ladies watched over by pale and costly marble angels, the dove-grey and undemanding ladies of his insomnia, eternally solacing, eternally ladies.
He watched Doree. She had discovered a blue crab, clownishly walking sideways, a great round crab with red and comic protruding eyes, and she stooped to examine it more carefully, to enjoy its grotesque loveliness. But it did not know that it need not be afraid, so it ran away.
“Archipelago,” Doree said, “now that it’s over, and we’re here to stay, I guess I oughta tell you.”
“No,” he said. “There is nothing you need tell me.”
“Yes,” she insisted. “You know when you asked me if I could go back, and I said I couldn’t? Well, I guess I didn’t give you the straight goods, in a way–”
“I know,” Mr. Archipelago said quietly. “There was no troubled past. I have always known that.”
“Have you?” she said, mild-eyed, not really surprised. “How did you know?”
He glanced at her face, at the heavy make-up that covered the ageing features, ravaged and virginal.
“Because,” he replied slowly, “for me it was the same. I, too, had no past. The white ladies and now the brown ladies–they have never guessed. I did not intend that they should. It is not their concern. But we know, Doree, why we are here and why we stay.”
“Yes,” she said, “I guess we do know. I guess we both know that. So we don’t need to talk about it any more, do we?”
“No,” he promised. “No more.”
“And whatever happens,” she went on, “even if we go broke, you won’t get any more fancy ideas about me finding a b
etter job somewhere else?”
“The new sign–” he reminded her. “Have you forgotten what it says?”
“That’s right,” she said. “‘Archipelago & Doree’. Yeh, that’s right.”
Mr. Archipelago sniffed the brine-laden wind.
“Smell the sea, Doree? A perfume for our collection.”
She smiled. “What shall we call it?”
“Oh, nothing too ornate,” he said lightly. “Perhaps eau d’exile would do.”
The sea spray was bitter and salt, but to them it was warm, too. They watched on the sand their exaggerated shadows, one squat and bulbous, the other bone-slight and clumsily elongated, pigeon and crane. The shadows walked with hands entwined like children who walk through the dark.
THE MERCHANT OF HEAVEN
Across the tarmac the black-and-orange dragon lizards skitter, occasionally pausing to raise their wrinkled necks and stare with ancient saurian eyes on a world no longer theirs. In the painted light of mid-day, the heat shimmers like molten glass. No shade anywhere. You sweat like a pig, and inside the waiting-room you nearly stifle. The African labourers, trundling baggage or bits of air-freight, work stripped to the waist, their torsos sleek and shining. The airport officials in their white drill uniforms are damp and crumpled as gulls newly emerged from the egg.
In this purgatorially hot and exposed steam bath, I awaited with some trepidation the arrival of Amory Lemon, proselytizer for a mission known as the Angel of Philadelphia.
Above the buildings flew the three-striped flag–red, yellow and green–with the black star of Africa in its centre. I wondered if the evangelist would notice it or know what it signified. Very likely not. Brother Lemon was not coming here to study political developments. He was coming–as traders once went to Babylon–for the souls of men.
I had never seen him before, but I knew him at once, simply because he looked so different from the others who came off the plane–ordinary English people, weary and bored after the long trip, their still-tanned skins indicating that this was not their first tour in the tropics. Brother Lemon’s skin was very white and smooth–it reminded me of those sea pebbles which as a child I used to think were the eyeballs of the drowned. He was unusually tall; he walked in a stately and yet brisk fashion, with controlled excitement. I realized that this must be a great moment for him. The apostle landing at Cyprus or Thessalonica, the light of future battles already kindling in his eyes, and replete with faith as a fresh-gorged mosquito is with blood.
“Mr. Lemon? I’m Will Kettridge–the architect. We’ve corresponded–”
He looked at me with piercing sincerity from those astonishing turquoise eyes of his.
“Yes, of course,” he said, grasping me by the hand. “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance. It surely was nice of you to meet me. The name’s Lee-mon. Brother Lee-mon. Accent on the last syllable. I really appreciate your kindness, Mr. Kettridge.”
I felt miserably at a disadvantage. For one thing, I was wearing khaki trousers which badly needed pressing, whereas Brother Lemon was clad in a dove-grey suit of a miraculously immaculate material. For another, when a person interprets your selfish motive as pure altruism, what can you tactfully say?
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s collect your gear.”
Brother Lemon’s gear consisted of three large wardrobe suitcases, a pair of water skis, a box which from its label and size appeared to contain a gross of cameras but turned out to contain only a Rolleiflex and a cine-camera complete with projector and editing equipment, a carton of an antimalarial drug so new that we in this infested region had not yet heard of it, and finally, a lovely little pigskin case which enfolded a water-purifier. Brother Lemon unlocked the case and took out a silvery mechanism. His face glowed with a boyish fascination.
“See? It works like a syringe. You just press this thing, and the water is sucked up here. Then you squirt it out again, and there you are. Absolutely guaranteed one hundred per cent pure. Not a single bacteria. You can even drink swamp water.”
I was amused and rather touched. He seemed so frankly hopeful of adventure. I was almost sorry that this was not the Africa of Livingstone or Burton.
“Wonderful,” I said. “The water is quite safe here, though. All properly filtered and chlorinated.”
“You can’t be too careful,” Brother Lemon said. “I couldn’t afford to get sick–I’ll be the only representative of our mission, for a while at least.”
He drew in a deep breath of the hot salty tar-stinking air.
“I’ve waited six years for this day, Mr. Kettridge,” he said. “Six years of prayer and preparation.”
“I hope the country comes up to your expectations, then.”
He looked at me in surprise.
“Oh, it will,” he said with perfect equanimity. “Our mission, you know, is based on the Revelation of St. John the Divine. We believe there is a special message for us in the words given by the Spirit to the Angel of the Church in Philadelphia–”
“A different Philadelphia, surely.”
His smile was confident, even pitying.
“These things do not happen by accident, Mr. Kettridge. When Andrew McFetters had his vision, back in 1924, it was revealed that the ancient Church would be reborn in our city of the same name, and would take the divine word to unbelievers in seven different parts of the world.”
Around his head his fair hair sprouted and shone like some fantastic marigold halo in a medieval painting.
“I believe my mission has been foretold,” he said with stunning simplicity. “I estimate I’ll have a thousand souls within six months.”
Suddenly I saw Brother Lemon as a kind of soul-purifier, sucking in the septic souls and spewing them back one hundred per cent pure.
That evening I told Danso of my vague uneasiness. He laughed, as I had known he would.
“Please remember you are an Englishman, Will,” he said. “Englishmen should not have visions. It is not suitable. Leave that to Brother Lemon and me. Evangelists and Africans always get on well–did you know? It is because we are both so mystical. Did you settle anything?”
“Yes, I’m getting the design work. He says he doesn’t want contemporary for the church, but he’s willing to consider it for his house.”
“What did he say about money?” Danso asked. “That’s what I’m interested in.”
“His precise words were–‘the Angel of Philadelphia Mission isn’t going to do this thing on the cheap’.”
Danso was short and slim, but he made up for it in mercurial energy. Now he crouched tigerish by the chaise-longue, and began feinting with clenched fists like a bantamweight–which, as a matter of fact, he used to be, before a scholarship to an English university and an interest in painting combined to change the course of his life.
“Hey, come on, you Brother Lemon!” he cried. “That’s it, man! You got it and I want it–very easy, very simple. Bless you, Brother Lemon, benedictions on your name, my dear citric sibling.”
“I have been wondering,” I said, “how you planned to profit from Brother Lemon’s presence.”
“Murals, of course.”
“Oh, Danso, don’t be an idiot. He’d never–”
“All right, all right, man. Pictures, then. A nice oil. Everybody wants holy pictures in a church, see?”
“He’ll bring them from Philadelphia,” I said. “Four-tone prints, done on glossy paper.”
Danso groaned. “Do you really think he’ll do that, Will?”
“Maybe not,” I said encouragingly. “You could try.”
“Listen–how about this? St. Augustine, bishop of hippos.”
“Hippo, you fool. A place.”
“I know that,” Danso said witheringly. “But, hell, who wants to look at some fly-speckled North African town, all mudbrick and camel dung? Brother Lemon wants colour, action, you know what I mean. St. Augustine is on the river bank, see, the Congo or maybe the Niger. Bush all around. Ferns thick as a woman’s hair. Pa
lms–great big feathery palms. But very stiff, very stylized–Rousseau stuff–like this–”
His brown arms twined upward, became the tree trunks, and his thin fingers the palm fans, precise, sharp in the sun.
“And in the river–real blue and green river, man, all sky and scum–in that river is the congregation, only they’re hippos, see–enormous fat ones, all bulging eyes, and they’re singing ‘Hallelujah’ like the angels themselves, while old St. Augustine leads them to paradise–”
“Go ahead–paint it,” I began, “and we’ll–”
I stopped. My smile withdrew as I looked at Danso.
“Whatsamatter?” he said. “Don’t you think the good man will buy it?”
In his eyes there was an inexpressible loathing.
“Danso! How can you–? You haven’t even met him yet.”
The carven face remained ebony, remained black granite.
“I have known this pedlar of magic all my life, Will. My mother always took me along to prayer meetings, when I was small.”
The mask slackened into laughter, but it was not the usual laughter.
“Maybe he thinks we are short of ju-ju,” Danso remarked. “Maybe he thinks we need a few more devils to exorcise.”
When I first met Brother Lemon, I had seen him as he must have seen himself, an apostle. Now I could almost see him with Danso’s bitter eyes–as sorcerer.
I undertook to show Brother Lemon around the city. He was impressed by the profusion and cheapness of tropical fruit; delightedly he purchased baskets of oranges, pineapples, paw-paw. He loaded himself down with the trinkets of Africa–python-skin wallets, carved elephants, miniature dono drums.
On our second trip, however, he began to notice other things. A boy with suppurating yaws covering nearly as much of his body as did his shreds of clothing. A loin-clothed labourer carrying a headload so heavy that his flimsy legs buckled and bent. A trader woman minding a roadside stall on which her living was spread–half a dozen boxes of cube sugar and a handful of pink plastic combs. A girl child squatting modestly in the filth-flowing gutter. A grinning penny-pleading gamin with a belly outpuffed by navel hernia. A young woman, pregnant and carrying another infant on her back, her placid eyes growing all at once proud and hating as we passed comfortably by. An old Muslim beggar who howled and shouted sura from the Qoran, and then, silent, looked and looked with the unclouded innocent eyes of lunacy. Brother Lemon nodded absently as I dutifully pointed out the new Post Office, the library, the Law Courts, the Bank.