Valiant Gentlemen

by Sabina Murray

  Ward nods in a bland way. “Casement,” he says up the table, “filling my daughter’s head with ideas?”

  “Actually, the inverse,” Casement replies. “Your daughter is very informative.”

  Ward—and all others—are surprised to hear it. “We’re talking about the state of Europe,” says Cricket.

  “So what have you got for us?” asks Ward.

  Cricket produces a smug smile. “Alsace Lorraine is sort of like Ireland,” she says. “The Irish are angry and the French are angry too.” Cricket seems bored, even though she’s the one speaking. “The French sit around talking about how nasty the Germans are, and the Irish say the same thing about the English.”

  “Not all the Irish,” says Ward.

  “And not all the French,” says Sarita.

  “Still,” says Cricket, “things could get very messy. There could be another war, right here in France.”

  “Really?” says Sarita.

  Cricket takes up a spoonful of apple pudding and puts it in her mouth. She thinks for a moment. “I don’t know how far back you want to go, but first everyone is annoyed at Napoleon, so France is in the dog house, and then there’s the Franco-Prussian War, and France loses, so people feel sorry for France and are a bit nicer, but they’re still friends with Germany. And then there’s the Boer War, and England doesn’t like Germany anymore, so they make friends with France. That’s the Entente Cordiale. And the French want Alsace Lorraine back because it’s French, but the Germans really want it because it has coal and Germans like factories. And nearly everyone’s related—the Tsar and the Kaiser and the King—so of course they pretend that they’re best friends, but they all must hate each other.” She rests her spoon on her plate and smiles.

  “Well, I am impressed,” says Sarita. “We should send you to Eton.”

  “Me?” says Cricket. “Oh, please. Pocked-up boys in monkey suits whacking each other with sticks? No, thank you.”

  “I didn’t realize that you were so concerned with the state of European diplomacy,” says Ward.

  Cricket delivers one of her attractive, probably mirror-rehearsed sneers. “Last time Lord Northcliffe was here, that’s all we talked about. He kept asking, ‘What are the French thinking?’ and I kept saying, ‘Why do you care?’”

  Harmsworth was actually asking the right person. Young men determine the fate of nations and no one spends more time with young men than Cricket. It’s only been forty years since the Germans were marching on Paris, so to revisit that is not so difficult. Although Ward thinks the greater problem is these home-grown radicals—youths with open collars and long hair who lurk around Montmartre and who Cricket currently favors, or at least that’s what he suspects. She’s been going to Paris an awful lot to see friends, to buy things, to go—four times in the last few months—to the dentist. It’s all very suspicious. And he’s mentioned it to Sarita, but ever since Dimples’s engagement, his wife’s decided that suitable partners are actually the real problem.

  Casement has returned to Brazil and routine is now restored. Herbert and Sarita sit in the drawing room, he with the newspaper, she at the escritoire working on a letter for Charlie. He’s succeeding at everything—rugby, wrestling, rhetoric—but there’s something desperate about Charlie’s indiscriminate domination. She senses self-doubt in his letters, although to anyone else it would look like hubris. She’s told Ward that he needs to send letters to Charlie as well, and he’s tried, but after a couple of sentences, he’s at a loss.

  “What are you telling him?” Ward asks.

  “Oh, I don’t know. All the things he’s missed.”

  Ward looks around. His eyes rest on the clock that ticks pointedly in the corner. “What would that be?”

  Sarita props her chin on her hand. As an artist, Herbert has a very specialized sense of observation that seems to miss at least half of what’s happening. “Well, Roddie has mastered the bicycle that Harmsworth sent, and would very much like to be a boxer, like his older brother. Herbie has gone moony over Claudine Etienne, even though she’s sixteen years old. Ticker is still chasing rabbits, although not very well. And then I speculate on how old the dog is, and he must be thirteen. Is that possible?”

  “Isn’t Charlie too busy to read all of that?”

  Sarita rests her pen. “No, he’s not. Sometimes, Herbert, it’s as if you don’t know him.”

  “Well, that’s Charlie’s thing, isn’t it? He’s hard to know. I know that, and it means I know him. What’s in his letter to you?”

  Sarita hesitates. She and Charlie share confidences. “He would like to know if he can take flying lessons. He says that Northcliffe knows someone.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Good. It’s too dangerous.”

  “On the other hand, he is fourteen. Almost a man.”

  “Charlie? Almost a man?”

  “You coddle him. It’s mothers that have turned this generation of young men into louche, lazy hangers about.”

  “If you weren’t hanging about Montmartre you wouldn’t see the other people who are likewise hanging about.” She looks at Herbert with narrowed eyes. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re talking about. The French may want this war with Germany, but I don’t.”

  “I don’t want it any more than you do. But if it happens, we’re going to need soldiers, not sons.”

  “If that’s the case, we’re going to have to send Cricket. She’s the one who knows her way around a rifle.” Sarita manages a smile, but she can feel the strain of it and is sure she does not look pretty. “What does Northcliffe have to say?”

  Ward consults the front page. “Well, if he thinks there’s going to be a war, he hasn’t written about it.”

  “Sometimes I think you want a war, that you’re hoping for one, just because you want something to happen.”

  “That’s not true, but I do sometimes wonder if bringing our children up in the lap of luxury might have robbed them of something.”

  “And you think war would provide them with it?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” Herbert pauses.

  “You know, Herbert, Charlie knows how you feel and it affects him.”

  Ward sighs and the sight of him deflated is, if nothing else, novel. “I do think that having an adventurous life helped me become the man I am.”

  “You speak with such authority.”

  “Sarita, I have seen battle.”

  “Herbert, having the occasional savage toss a spear in your direction is not the same thing as serving in an army. I’ve seen war, real war, up close. Or at least its effects.”

  “The American Civil War ended when you were five years old.”

  Sarita looks serious, patient. She pushes away from the desk. “My earliest memory is of being at a railroad station at the end of the war. I’m guessing it was New Jersey. My parents were shipping boxes or working out tickets or some such thing. We moved so much in those years that I’m not sure where we were going. I wandered off into a group of soldiers. They were everywhere in those days.”

  She remembers the one soldier, whom she now thinks couldn’t have been much older than Charlie. He was missing his leg from the knee down and the stump was wrapped in bandages soaked with blackening blood. She could smell a sweet rot that was misplaced on someone still alive. The soldier saw her looking and called to her, and she was frightened, but he had a young face and she felt bad for him. So she went to him, and he asked her name and how old she was. He was from Boston and had a sister. He also had a dog. She asked him why he didn’t have a leg. And he said that he did. He said, I’ll whistle to it, and let’s see if it doesn’t come hopping back to where it belongs. So the two had stayed side by side, the youth whistling, and Sarita whistling too, until her terrified mother found her and dragged her off.

  “There were a lot soldiers missing limbs,
and a lot of bodies, and those were boys, Charlie’s age, not men, Herbert. Boys.”

  Herbert returns to his paper, agreeing to disagree. And it’s her duty as wife not to pursue it further, to just let things go, to let him be the superior mind in the marriage as is good and natural. She takes a deep breath and returns to her letter but she’s lost the easy accumulation of words. She would like to tell Herbert about the young man missing a leg, but she can’t bear to hear him distort this into a tale of noble youth and sacrifice, of this boy—soon dead, no doubt, of gangrene—finding a moment of playfulness with a little girl. There is nothing redeeming about the story. And when she sometimes wakes with a start in the night, she knows the cause is often that her thoughts have shaped this boy from distant memory and set him to motion in her dreams. She can hear his soft whistle and the leg hopping on the boards of the platform, hidden by the rough walls of the wooden shed. The leg sounds in thuds, growing louder and louder. She waits at the boy’s side. The sound draws closer and the boy smiles at her and then she wakes up, realizing that the pounding is just the beating of her heart.

  XVI

  The Putumayo

  October 1910

  In Iquitos, the murky air is charged with something fearful and vultures—actual vultures—collect at the street corners, fighting over bits of sinew, or waddling after weakened dogs as they circuit the town.

  Casement is a champion of hopeless causes, a Saint Jude whose presence signals true desperation without any of the palliative hope. Even his witnessing of his own life seems a harbinger of certain doom. But for now, he is headed to the plaza, where the young men collect, much as they did in Brazil. With his conquistador’s beard and his soles, he’s popular, although sometimes mistaken for a priest. There are young men sitting by the fountain, their arms linked with girls and with each other. Casement sits on the low wall listening to the water trickle and lights a cigarette without difficulty—the breeze has stilled to nothing.

  Here is a young man possibly attracted by the smell of good tobacco, but hopefully more. He’s smooth-skinned and sleek-haired, more Indian than anything. He has a very sweet expression, such gentle eyes.

  “Buenas noches,” says Casement. He will manage a little conversation. Despite his limited vocabulary, his Spanish is surprisingly fit for certain subjects. It’s time to extend a cigarette, then an invitation for a drink. And whatever else. Tomorrow he’s headed up the Amazon and into the Putumayo to investigate the state of the Indians, and he knows it won’t be good. Casement has become involved in a roundabout way. Apparently, the blancos hire Barbadians to work as overseers and these Barbadians are British subjects. The Barbadians have been kept laboring long after their contracts expire, and—because of the system of payment and provisioning—are often deep in debt with their employers and unable to free themselves. So here is Casement. And there is the river.

  The boat should have left at dawn, but some mechanical issue has delayed them and they left Nauta in the full heat of day. Casement stands, holding the rail, and watches as the arms of the riverbank close behind him. Here is an endless gloaming, as if the river itself were holding her breath. One can hear the rattle of monkeys in the trees, the air batted by the sweep of wings, the leaves onshore shifted by the passage of some earthbound thing, the heart-chug of the steamer as she plows onward, upward. The mosquitoes descend in burning clouds, piercing his skin with a toxic fire. In the evenings he sometimes sees bright lights flicker at the shore, but it is only the reflection of the boat torches catching in the eyes of caimans. A telltale splash lets you know that one has slipped into the water, is mapping its way around the boat.

  Casement maintains his reserve with the other Commission members. To him, they are tourists. They see only what is pleasant. For Fox, it is the exotic foliage—palm fronds the size of sails that called to mind the work of Jules Verne, or creeping vines weighted with brightly colored blooms that, even in maturity, hold their petals in close, secretive folds. For Gielgud, the massive chorizos of rubber that appear, wrung from the jungle, keep his spirits high. Barnes is still curious about the plantations. He hasn’t seen anything that looks like cultivation yet but is sure that he soon will as the fruits of some sort of successful agriculture are filling the storage huts from La Chorrerra to Indostan. The effects of industry—if not the actual process—keeps Seymour Bell, a note-taker, taking his notes. Tizon, a businessman, surprises with his hesitant yearning to justice.

  The Indians guard their expressions, speak in hushed voices. Most are near starvation. Many are whip-scarred. The only Huitotos and Boras who seemed to be thriving are a few young women. In every place the Liberal stops along the river, there are guaranteed to be a group of at least five girls with combed hair and shining skin, usually in some manner of loose-fitting gown, a phenomenon that at first read as modesty but that now Casement recognizes as the entitlement of some blanco to the girls’ naked beauty. Farther up the river they go. Soon they will reach Occidente, and after that Ultimo Retiros. Next they will trek inland to Entre Rios. He already knows of the horrors that await him upriver.

  In Occidente, the other Commission members had gone on some sort of fact-gathering hike to find the rubber plantations, which Casement knows aren’t there. There is no cultivation. All around is evidence of slavery, in the well-constructed bridges that span the Igaraparana, in the chorizos of rubber in the storage huts, in the stocks on display in the clearings of the settlements, and in the deep weals on the legs and buttocks of the Indian laborers. Of course there is no plantation. Where is the means of paying the workers? Why are all the workers half-starved? Why are there armed capitans whose sole purpose is to pursue the Indians through the jungle when they try to escape?

  Casement still has not found his way to the center of it all. The pilot of the Liberal, Jose, has provided some distraction. He has a kind face and his friends are often laughing at what he says, so Casement assumes he has a good sense of humor. He watches Jose bathing in the river, and sees the boy catch him and deliver a shy smile. Later, Casement, wandering the lower decks, is attracted by chatter and the smell of something fresh sizzling in hot oil. The boys are frying piranhas that they must have caught off the side of the boat. There is a predictable and humorous exchange, pantomimed, about the ferocious appearance of the fish, about how this toothy thing is now dinner for Jose, and that Casement—smile, nod, hand gesture—should try it. He takes a small bite as this small fish, despite its appetites, provides little to staunch another.

  “Good,” he says. And the boys laugh, which means that he is very welcome to eat anything any time with these Indians (although Jose is tall, which means he is of mixed blood) and that they are pleased to be his friend.

  Jose spends most of his time sounding for depth and checking for snags in the coffee-black Amazon water. The two spend long hours, side by side.

  In Ultimo Retiros, Casement has to leave Jose, leave the boat, leave the Igaraparana and all the creatures hidden beneath her reflecting surface—piranhas and caimans and anacondas and paiche fish the length of the boat—and at this loss, he feels the weight of the forest. The music of panic is the soaring wail of insects flashing close and then closer to his ear.

  In preparation for his inland trek, Jose brings Casement to a termite nest at the side of a tree. He slices it open with his machete and plunges his hands into it. He grinds the termites between the heels of his hands and smears the crushed insects onto Casement’s neck. There is a smell of acid wood. With his left hand, Jose makes a frenetic gesture, bringing it close to his face. Crushed termites repel mosquitoes and this remedy, along with a return to his heavy wool trousers, will be somewhat helpful, although neither precaution is much welcome in the heat.

  Jose keeps waving. Casement loses him to a bend in the path.

  Here, the ground is uneven. Wet leaves lie over tree roots or sucking mud. Much of the time, his eyes are bound to the earth, to the step ahead. A wall of
flat wood means a paddle tree has sunk the great palm of its root deep in the mud. The branches reach up, holding the tarp of sky, still branches, not the waving arms of Irish trees but the fierce, unmoving gesture of the Amazon. Here time holds each second, his fingers clenched into an unyielding fist.

  Feeling a pair of eyes watching him, he jerks to see nothing. Sometimes there are tamarins, but always moving quickly away.

  Casement does not know how malnourished Indians can carry loads of seventy pounds along these paths. Even in the Congo the porters bear no more than sixty-five pounds. And those are larger men. The thought that the Congo could represent a higher standard of justice to any place anywhere seems impossible, as are many things. Even empathy feels a luxury of nonessential thought as he struggles to keep upright on the muddy path. The Indians maintain a quick jerking step akin to donkeys, the gait of man endeavoring to outpace death. A log translates itself before Casement’s suffering eyes to be a corpse. A train of ants course through an eye socket. Here is someone who had been working to stay alive and then thought better of it.

  How long has he been marching? The mud slows everything, making time difficult to track. Casement has already slid into a ravine and had to be rescued with a rope. Now he trips on a root and falls to the ground. He feels steady hands at his elbow, helping him upright, and is shocked to see the tiny woman that is his helper. “Gracias,” he says and executes a little bow—a gesture that usually carries across cultures. She squeezes his hand, whispering at him earnestly. A benediction? A curse? She takes her basket up so that it rests on her back, fixing the strap across her forehead as is the way of portage here. And there’s that jerking step as she outpaces him and whatever else is stalking the rutted walkways of the Putumayo.

  Soon after, a ridge presents itself and along the ridge Casement sees first one Indian, and then another, and one after another the men and women assemble until there is no unpopulated space along the ridge. There have to be sixty Indians lined up, shoulder to shoulder, and then just as quickly as they have assembled, they disappear, one by one.