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.Outside was the noise of sailors (yarely, my hearties) staggering from a tavern, and also the tang of brine carried up this other Avon, the brailed, or furled, masts.‘Nor,’ said Cunliffe, ‘wiww you find ’em in aww Bristow ewsewhere.’ That was his way of speech (it was Mostew-waria and Miwes Gworiosus he truly said).Then a coach, drawn by a cobble-clattering pair of greys, went goldenly down Broad Street.‘Not aww the bwack be swaves,’ said Cunliffe.‘She in there, hid by those curtains is bwack, or brown perhaps you would say.They do report that she was brought back from the Indies, aye, a smaww girl, a chieftain’s daughter, and that she was made one of that famiwy out of pity.But now she is a fine haughty Christian dame with her thick mouth, though not many have set eyes on her.’ WS followed that coach with hungry look to its point of clattering round the corner.‘In Fishponds,’ said Cunliffe, nodding and chewing WS out of his shop.WS, books stringed together in his oxter beneath his cloak, wandered, still in wonder, among the back streets that were like serpents or twisted veins.And it was then a voice summoned him.From an open doorway it called:‘What cheer, bully! Dost dou seek a bert?’He turned, his heart near fainted.Dressed in a fair loose gown of virtuous, though dirty, white, her shoulders and bosom glowing to the empty street, she leaned, her arms folded, at ease against the doorpost, smiling.If Englishmen were white, he thought, then must she be called black; but black she could not in truth be called, rather gold, but then not gold, nor royal purple neither, for when we say colours we see a flatness, as of cloth, but here was flesh that moved and swam on the light’s tide, ever changing in hue but always of a richness that could only be termed royal; her colour was royalty.For her hair, it coiled in true blackness; her lips were thick; her nose was not tightened against the cold air, like an English nose, an Anne nose, nor pinched as at the meagreness of the sun, but flat and wide; her brow was wide too, though shallow.And so she stood, smiling at him and beckoning with her long golden finger.With scant money (the ordinary’s destined mutton-slice, enough just for that), he knew not what to do.Surely it must be gold for gold, an angel, say, for this proffer of new heaven, yet had he never before paid (save dearly, or cheaply, with his freedom) for the act of love, and something within him shrivelled at the thought of haggling now over the price of entering this house of gold by its little hid gold door.But, first, the tumbledown brick house, a vista of darkness down a corridor, noises of lust and release.He stood undecided and she smiled still, then said: ‘If’n d’art comin’, come now den.’ He mowed and grinned and muttered, opening out the fingers of his right hand to show an empty palm, and then she laughed in a fracture of strange crystal.As he tottered towards her his calves were emptied of muscle and filled with water.Smiling, she beckoned him to follow her in.He entered darkness that smelled of musk and dust, the tang of sweating oxters, and, somehow, the ancient stale reek of egg after egg cracked in waste, the musty hold-smell of seamen’s garments, seamen’s semen spattered, a ghost procession of dead sailors lusting till the crack of doom.Noises came from the chambers on either side of the corridor — laughter, creakings in rhythm, a deep male voice ejaculating as in prophecy: ‘Let nameless fall and all done.’ And there was one chamber-door standing open, and WS saw what went on within.There was a low pallet with filthy blankets, bloody clouts on the floor, but it was against the wall that the act of lust proceeded, a ride now reaching, in sweat and curses, the destination that was a broken city, a voyage to a shipwreck.The woman was black, shining, naked, agape, thrust against the wall as though at bay, and there rammed and rammed at her a bulky seaman, in unbuttoned shirt and points loosened for his work, whorls and bushes of red hair showing, his beard red, his head bald save for odd plastered tendrils and filaments of red.The companion of WS smiled to see all this, while he himself felt a sickness, an excitement, a disgust he had hardly known before, not even on those bizarre nights of Anne’s madness; he even flushed in shame and fear, strangely fain to run blubbering to that known white body, the thin lips and sharp nose, burrowing into her, his coney, for comfort
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