Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  V. S. Pritchett

  Dead Man Leading

  Contents

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  Book Four

  Epilogue

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Every few hours the captain took the launch in towards the bank and the monotonous voice of the man with the sounding chain quickened. He stood up and shouted the depths. The launch, overloaded with thirty people, men, women and children with their goods, bumped in the brown river water, swung on to the mud and off again. With the threshed foam at her stern she was like a mongrel worrying a dirty mat; then she quietened and the shadow of the forest wall slid over her noiselessly, cool and green like an awning. These stops were made to collect wood for fuel. Since there were thousands of miles of trees, you stopped, landed and took what you liked.

  A mulatto came up to Gilbert Phillips and asked:

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Phillips did not understand Portuguese. He turned to his companion, the only other Englishman on the launch. He was squatting beside Gilbert Phillips and stared up from under his furry black brows before he replied.

  The mulatto gazed over their bodies very slowly. His eyes were like a pair of warm, lazy, curious flies, impersonally moving over the two Englishmen.

  Rubber? enquired the mulatto. Coffee? Cotton?

  The accent in these parts was different from the accent in his country, on the timber station, a thousand miles to the south, Johnson said. At first he had difficulty. The speech was thick and crumbling.

  No, he said, not rubber, nor coffee. Going very far up the river.

  The mulatto considered them. The curiosity of his eyes made their white alien skin itch.

  Evangelicals? he suggested.

  Johnson laughed aloud at this. Then stopped short because he saw, by Phillips’ astonishment, that this was his first laugh for several days.

  ‘He thinks we’re missionaries,’ Harry Johnson said.

  ‘That was a near one,’ Gilbert Phillips said, by which he meant that it was near because Johnson’s father had been a missionary.

  The puzzled mulatto smiled. Like many of the other passengers he was barefooted and had sores between his fingers, some in dirty bandages, the wounds of love. He was a frank man with long loose arms and big hands, dressed like the rest in a greasy cotton suit.

  Very far up the river (he delicately suggested) there was gold.

  So then Johnson recited to him the formula they had fallen into for all questioners. They were going very far up the river, not this river, but another one, beyond the falls, to shoot ‘tigers.’ It was useless to tell people they were going on a party of exploration. This would sound incomprehensible, become mysterious and therefore suspicious. The two Englishmen wanted to be left alone.

  This was the second day on the river. The signs around them never changed. They unwound like a repeated panorama on a reel. There was the screen of continuing and continuing green on the banks, a flow of brown water like strong tea, bark-stained and root-stained by the drainage of the forest, and a sky like the wall of a huge blue house, quite immovable. Sometimes they were in narrow waters and sometimes in wide—this was the only change. At the estuary and in those places where the river widened into an inland sea, the far bank became dimmed to a lean hot blur of forest, faint as a distant fence in a flat country. In the hours when the river was narrow, the water light was suspended in the hollows of the foliage and the launch appeared like a fly fixed in flight between sky and sky-reflecting water. In channels narrower still, where the branches of the trees almost met overhead, one seemed to be passing show cases of fantastic drapery and millinery, in an overheated shop, green unfolding upon green, in the absolute silence. Sometimes there was a break where the cases had been smashed and the trees apparently grabbed out with their rigging of liana trailing after them; and sometimes there were muddy coves where tree ferns made a shade of ospreys. A thatched hut built upon a platform of piles, whitened now the water was sinking in the dry weather, would be in these hollows; and on the platform brown people sat like grubs, half naked, watching the wash of the launch chuckle along the banks of mud. The people made no sign with their hands, nor was there any expression of curiosity in their eyes, nor recognition. They sat fixed and still with the water light wavering over their bodies in their aquarium of soundless shade.

  The launch went on. At thatched villages the siren cord was pulled. Men, playing cards, stopped to stare. There was a woman smoking a pipe and all chewed and spat and lay about sweating and talking, their voices rising to anger like fire spurting up and then dying away to a smoulder. Babies screamed in the arms of heavy women. Men stared down blankly at the children. Two young girls with sores on their lips, like dark and sticky honey, had men about them. Their eyes were sad and beautiful, reddened like dark grapes. The sweet-sour, exciting smells of the women, the heavy acrid smells of the men hung under the awning and, with them, the smell of the wood smoke in the funnel, the green fume of the forest and the sun like a weight holding everything down so that no wind blew it all away. At jetties, where the launch stopped every two or three hours, people swarmed down upon her, struggling with their goods, shouting, fighting, kissing and weeping. The quickest to jump were the cripples. Indians stood waist deep in the water. While the crowd struggled on the listing boat, quietly the Indians swam and dived, coming up to watch, then diving and swimming again because their excitement made them dive and swim like this when a boat arrived. Then on again, the forest continuing the wake dragging behind like an old mat, the jetty turning like the hand of a clock marking an hour gone upon the river face, the crowd as small as birds on the shore, but still heard in argument.

  Johnson and Phillips moved up to the bows. All day, talking very little, they sat looking at the river and the forest.

  ‘With all these stops for wood we could have beaten this launch easily,’ Johnson said moodily on the second day. ‘We could get through the trees to our river’—they always talked of ‘our river’—‘and save 300 miles.’

  ‘You can’t get through the bush,’ said Phillips, alarmed by new ideas. ‘And anyway what about Charles?’

  Charles Wright was their leader. The launch was taking them hourly nearer to their rendezvous with him.

  Phillips took off the floppy brimmed hat he had bought at the coast when he was waiting for Johnson to come up from Rio and join him, and ran a hand through his fair hair. He was taller than Johnson, a slighter, wirier, more nervous man with starting grey eyes, a quick biting way of speaking and a mouth a little askew.

  On the shady side of the bows the awning had been rolled up. They sat here because it was where their packing-cases had been stowed; here also at night they slung their hammocks. A dozen other people slung hammocks here too and hung like a crowd of bats, but snoring, kicking out their feet and creaking in their sleep. When they were not sleeping or talking they were re-bandaging their sores.

  ‘What about Charles?’ repeated Phillips incredulously.

  ‘It’s a nuisance,’ Johnson said.

  This was repeating what he had said at the coast.

  A few months before, by the sea, near Charles Wright’s house in England, Phillips had heard Harry quietly make the devastating proposal that they should step into Wright’s little cutter and sail off the East Coast to Ostend in a full gale. Slow and amiable in thought, Harry Johnson was fanatical and visionary in action.

  ‘We couldn’t let Charles down,’ Gilbert Phillips said.

  Harry did not answer but sat frowning at the river.

  They were both in their thirties. Johnson was one of those men whose chests and shoulders seem to be too broad for their coats, whose heads hang
forward heavily, the big brown eyes looking upward at some distant place in the sky and the forehead crinkled between the brows like a grave young bullock’s. He looked like a man carrying a load on his shoulders, uncomplainingly, so strong, muscular and awkward, soft in voice and thoughtful in every word he spoke, that his gentleness aroused a kind of sympathy. One was touched by the sight of a man so placidly single in thought, so unencumbered, so manifestly self-sufficient, who must always be searching for tasks equal to this strength, who, immoderate in his standards, yet modest to others, could do so much more than other men without troubling very much whether the instinct was competitive or not. The sympathy one felt was for such a capacity for loneliness. He appeared to know so little and to observe so little of other people or to have exhausted them, but without impatience because of that. The Brazilians watched him. Curiously, the girls came near to him, their thick lips parted. He lowered his eyes and turned away, gazing at the river. His eyelids quivered as he frowned against the light. The sweat stood on the coarse skin of his face and neck. They were reddened by the sun.

  His head was aching, Johnson said to Phillips: ‘Still aching? Like it was at the coast?’ ‘Yes, like that.’ The face twitched, the eyes were lowered. A neuralgic pain in the head, he said. It was the country, Phillips said. There is a period when a new country overwhelms the nerves, nauseates by the myriad new vibrations of its life. ‘While I was waiting for you I had to shut myself up in my room at the hotel for two days,’ Phillips said.

  Johnson turned his head slowly and listened. He had some already indistinct memory of Gilbert Phillips’ eagerness to meet him. Gilbert was in an excited state. The food had poisoned him. He had been lying in the hotel for days unable to speak the language, weakened by vomiting and diarrhoea. Now, forgetting what was in his own mind for a moment, Harry remembered with surprise that underneath Gilbert’s jokes about his state there was probably fear. When Phillips finished speaking, he turned away again.

  ‘It’s this lousy boat’, Phillips said.

  Then again Johnson said they could get off the boat and go overland. He made this immoderate and preposterous suggestion with his usual modesty.

  ‘But what about Charles Wright?’ Phillips repeated.

  ‘Send an Indian to tell him,’ Johnson said. Johnson and Phillips got off the launch to stretch their legs when they could. They did not strike off overland. A government boat was at the jetty at one place and a man on the quay had just taken the mail.

  ‘You taking mail?’ Johnson asked. Had the English mail arrived?

  Johnson tried to suggest to the men on the boat that they should go through the mail and look for his letters. He argued and bullied.

  ‘You’ll never get them to do that. We’ll have our stuff in two days,’ Phillips said.

  There had been nothing back at the coast. Four times a day they had been to the post office and then to the consulate.

  ‘It’s two months since I left,’ Johnson said. He said no more about the mystery. His expression was blank and obstinate as it was always when he was harassed.

  Johnson looked blankly and then turned away, saying nothing. He looked over the heads of the people at the settlement. There were big-footed negroes, Indians easily and vacuously laughing, fat men wearing sun-glasses like beetles over the eyes, and pyjama coats. The flies were thick on the refuse scattered over the shore. On the sandy high ground above the flood-level of the water were a few thatched huts and adobe houses. The two men walked across a sunlit stretch. Under the thatch of their open huts, men in pyjamas were asleep in their hammocks, and the women, ragged and scratching themselves, moved to hide in the enclosed compartments. There was just this palm thatch propped up by four poles and the box at one end for the women. In the doorway of one of the adobe houses an Indian lay asleep. Beside him, propped in the sun, a live boa-constrictor was tied neck and tail to a stick. The only sounds in the settlement were men’s shouts—from the drinkers in a furious tavern, and then the slow clapping of wings on a roof, like dusty and ragged rugs being shaken. These were the wings of the vultures.

  It was noon. Now birds and men and insects were silenced. The greater silence of the country, always felt, crept out like a visible tide, and deepened with the heat. One saw the silence in the trees, things made of rubber and metal; and in the sky the sun flashed faster and faster like a fly-wheel. The striped awning of the launch looked colourless against the blinding river.

  They sat in the shade of a tree with their backs to the water. They opened a tin of food; they began eating. It was corned beef, greasy and nearly liquid.

  ‘This’ll kill us.’ They threw the tin on the ground and flies blackened it.

  While they were eating a woman came towards them, walking close to a wall where there were six inches of shadow. She was wearing a straight white dress like a pillow-case from her shoulders to her bare shins. She was a negress or some mixture of negress and Indian. She was tall and lank and young. She came close and grinned, looking with the curiosity of a grotesque bird at the remains of their food. She looked at the bright tin.

  ‘That’s what she’s after. The tin. Give it to her.’ Johnson kicked the tin towards her.

  She did not move until Johnson told her to take the tin. Suspiciously she bent down and snatched it. Then she stood up and grinned broadly at them.

  She began to speak. She spoke a few high laughing words. Johnson understood a little of what she said.

  Why didn’t they go to the house where the captain was? she asked.

  ‘We stay here.’

  ‘Good house.’

  ‘Too many flies,’ Johnson said.

  She grinned. She looked down upon them delighted with discovery. Her eyes were on the remains of the food. In the deep, young, liquid pupils of her eyes, sunken in their hollows, was a dull crimson core. Her arms and her legs stuck out of her garment and her belly swelled under it like a pot. She was pregnant.

  ‘Take it,’ Johnson said, pushing the remains of the food away from him. Once more she watched him shyly and suspiciously and then snatched it up. They saw the flies tacked on her forehead and on her neck. When she was safely away she stopped still and stared, smiling with wonder at the two men.

  ‘You go to the captain,’ she said again.

  ‘No.’

  Her head was like a flattened knob on her bony shoulders, a head drained in the pot of the womb. She put out her hand and begged for money.

  ‘Go away,’ Johnson said.

  ‘She won’t go away.’

  ‘I’ll make her go.’

  Her eyes moved quickly from one to the other trying to know what they were saying. She pushed out her belly and laughed at it.

  ‘You come?’ she said to Phillips because he had not spoken.

  She looked sadly at them. She patted her round belly.

  ‘You come?’

  The deep single line of his frown was creased in Johnson’s forehead.

  ‘Let’s get away,’ Johnson said after a long time. The only way to rid themselves of the woman was to walk back to the launch at the jetty. They got up and left her.

  They saw the negress among the crowd which came down to the launch in the afternoon when it sidled off. She stood there with the same vacuous black grin. Even the same flies seemed to be on her head. There was no change in her at all and she did not look at them.

  ‘There’s that bloody woman.’

  They both hated her. Johnson, affecting indifference, glanced up at her with a look secretive, intense and almost fearful.

  They were glad when the four blasts of the siren went up, impudent and superfluous, and the launch under its smear of wood-smoke took them from the place.

  The two Englishmen moved apart now. The heat swamped the lungs. Phillips, the fair one, looked through his dark glasses at the river; the dark one sat with his knees up and his back against the packing-cases under the awning in the bows where the mud-choked water slapped and the iron of the gunwale burned the skin if one touc
hed it. The tar sizzled in the seams. Johnson sat without glasses, biting his pipe, frowning now that he was alone. If a launch going downstream passed them or Indians went by in their long sailing canoes, thatched in the stern and drifting low in the water like some Swiss Family Robinson on a water-logged raft, his eyes opened with untroubled interest. For a moment he escaped from himself; then the frown came again deeply between his brows, he bit once more upon his empty pipe, his hands twitched and the eyelids trembled over his eyes. The sweat stood like an August rime on his forehead and was in the roots of his hair.

  Presently he got up and the crowd made way for him. They looked at him with wonder. The women half-smiled; the men turned round slowly and squared their shoulders and stared after him. He went up to the captain of the launch and spoke to him quietly. Here the heat of the engine was fiercest. Through the noise and the wood-smoke and the sound of rattling screws, the captain said they would put ashore once more for wood. An argument started between Johnson and the captain. Passengers gathered.

  Did he want to get off? they asked.

  ‘You should have got off at the last place,’ the captain said.

  Yes, came the chorus, at the last place if he wanted to get off, that was where he should have got off.

  ‘Now there is nowhere.’

  ‘Nowhere,’ many people said. It seemed to give them satisfaction. Shyly Johnson turned and stood staring at the river. Since he stood still without speaking, without listening and without answering, a side show that had shut up shop, the passengers went away. Then he too went back to his place by the boxes and looked straight ahead of him down the broad mud road of river.

  ‘We ought to have got off at the last place,’ Johnson said to his companion.

  ‘Off?’ Phillips said. ‘You don’t seriously mean that. We’ve got to go on to meet Charles.’ He gazed at Harry for a long time but read nothing in his face. ‘What’s wrong, Harry?’ he finally asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Johnson. ‘Bloody head.’