Satan; a romance of the Bahamas

Satan : A Romance of the Bahamas by Henry De Vere Stacpoole The sky from sea-line to sea-line was crusted with stars, a triumphant, cloudless, tropic night-sky beneath which the Dryad rode at her anchor, lifting lazily to the swell flowing up from beyond the great Bahama bank. She was Skelton’s boat, a six-hundred-tonner, turbine engined, rigged with everything new in the way of sea valves and patent gadgets, and she had anchored at sundown off Palm Island, a tiny spot, gull haunted, and due west of Andros. Skelton was a Christchurch man, Bobby Ratcliffe a Brazenose, and Bobby, tonight, as he leaned on the starboard rail smoking and listening to the wash of the waves on the island beach, was thinking of Skelton, who was down below writing up his diary. Before coming on this “winter cruise to the West Indies in my yacht” Bobby did not know that Skelton kept a diary, that Skelton was so awfully Anglican, so precise, so stuffed with the convenances, that he dined in dress clothes even in a hurricane, that he had a very nasty, naggling temper, that he had prayers every Sunday morning in the cabin2 which the chief steward, the under stewards, and the officers off watch were expected to attend—also Bobby. Two other men were booked for the cruise, but they cried off at the last moment. If they had come, things might have been different. As it was, Bobby, to use his own language, was pretty much fed up. Skelton was a right good sort, but he was not the man with whom to share loneliness, and Bobby, who had plenty of money of his own, was thinking how jolly this winter cruise would have been if he had only taken it on board a passenger liner, with girls and deck quoits and cards in the evening, instead of Skelton. Bobby was only twenty-two, a good-looking clean youth, well-balanced enough, but desirous of fun. Oxford had not spoiled him a bit. He had no “manner,”—just his own naturalness,—and he had shocked Skelton at Barbados by getting a great negro washing woman on board (she had come alongside in a blue boat) and giving her rum, for the fun of the thing. “Debauching a native woman with alcohol!” Skelton had called it. Skelton vetoed shark fishing. It messed his decks. He was like an old woman about his decks. “I tell you what you ought to do, Skelly,” Bobby had said. “You ought to start a blessed laundry!” They had nearly quarreled at Guadeloupe over sharks. And again at St. Pierre, where, lying off the ruins of the town, Skelton had likened it to Gomorrah, declaring it had been destroyed because of the wickedness of its inhabitants. “And how about the ships in the bay?” had asked3 Bobby. “What had they to do with the business? Why weren’t they given notice to quit?” “We won’t argue on the matter,” replied Skelton. And there was still two months of this blessed cruise to be worked out! He was thinking of this when Skelton came on deck, his white shirt-front shining in the starlight. He was in an amiable mood tonight and, ranging up beside Bobby, he spoke about the beauty of the stars. It was chiefly on Bobby’s initiative that they had dropped the anchor so that they might prospect the island on the morrow, and as they smoked and talked the conversation passed from stars to desert islands, and from desert islands to the old Spaniards of the West Indies, bucaneers, filibusters, pirates, and Brethren of the Coast.