Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories by H.E. Bates Page B

him, poised on its wiry yellow legs, with its queer, ghoulish, disembodied little eyes.
    â€˜Part of it’s under the sea,’ Mr Pickering said, ‘or in the sea. I found out that much.’
    â€˜You know, you came here to relax,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘Trying to pick a murderer is no way to recuperate after pleurisy.’
    â€˜I’m not trying to pick any murderer,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in picking up a fortune.’
    â€˜Just the same, one links with the other,’ she said. ‘And anyway it doesn’t relax you.’
    â€˜I feel great,’ he said. ‘You got to give your mind something to do anyway, haven’t you? You just can’t sit the whole time.’ Mr Pickering, in three weeks of Caribbean sun, watching theinfinite blues of Caribbean waters, had almost forgotten the harsh and competitive world he had left in Detroit. Sometimes he took from his wallet one of the cards which Charlie Muller, his partner, and himself had fixed up after long deliberation and which both of them thought was pretty good. ‘We insure anything,’ it said, ‘and sell the world.’ These words and the cards on which they were printed, together with
Pickering & Muller: Brokers
, seemed no longer real when seen through the foggy distances of three weeks of time. Nor did Charlie Muller seem real; nor the high offices from which Mr Pickering and his associate and six stenographers looked across the wintry lake and the wintry Canadian distances beyond. It was surprising, Mr Pickering thought, how a world could slip away from you; surprising, too, how another, the world of Torgsen and Maxted’s murder and Maxted’s gold, could so insidiously replace it and so soon.
    â€˜Well, I got a hundred and eighty dollars worth,’ he said.
    â€˜Let’s sit here,’ Mrs Pickering said, ‘and watch the sunset.’
    Mrs Pickering’s passion for watching sunrise and sunset brought them every evening, in the hour before dinner, to a small promontory on the eastern edge of the bay. Below, on the white beach, the long line of hurricane-stricken palms, in almost horizontal curves, took on the strange appearance of gigantic burnished scimitars in the gold-rose glow of dying light. The enormous sinking sun set the calmest of seas on fire. On top of the promontory was a wooden seat above which grew trees of incense covered with small trails of parasite orchids of pinkish mauve, uncommonly like butterflies, and the air was heavy with the drenching sweetness of the incense flowers.
    â€˜Look at the sea now,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘Every wave has a pink tip on it. Look at it now—isn’t that heavenly? In aminute it’ll be orange or yellow or something—it changes so quickly.’
    Mr Pickering looked at the sea and saw on its brilliant surface, four hundred yards from shore, a long dark boat, narrow like a canoe, piled high with what seemed to be a system of wrecked hen-coops.
    â€˜There go the craw-fish boys,’ he said. ‘Setting their pots. That’s another thing I have to do—spear craw-fish.’
    â€˜It’s all red now,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘Look!—it’s all red like fire.’
    â€˜You suppose they do catch craw-fish?’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Could be they didn’t—you know, it could be!——’ he suddenly got up from the seat, descended the small flight of steps that had been cut into the black rock of the promontory and went down to the edge of the sea.
    Over by the thin brown reef the boat had stopped. Mr Pickering peered across the green-red sunset waters and watched as one after another the hen-coop craw-fish pots were pitched into the sea. He could see in the boat two brown-skin boys wearing tattered grey shirts and sombre trilby hats. He could see clearly the splash of each craw-fish pot whitening the delicate surface of the sea. Then the rock of the