Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  Endlessly, fantastic, monotonous, the forest went on lining both sides of a street in silence to see a victim pass to his execution. Johnson’s thought ran on: could one break their ranks, get through and escape to the other river, without seeing Wright?

  Chapter Two

  They were still together in the bows. The afternoon was failing and, with the suddenness of all tropical things, clouds had appeared like long indigo tongues out of the south-west. The talk of the passengers had been stamped out by the heat but now began again.

  For hours the Englishmen had not spoken. They had dozed and slept. Then Johnson spoke out suddenly and sharply like a man talking in his sleep.

  ‘Take that woman away,’ he said. He was lying down full length, with his eyes closed. On his lips was the sullen expression of the sick.

  Phillips took off his sun-glasses and looked anxiously at his friend. He looked from lips to eyes trying to read a meaning into their nervous movements.

  ‘What woman?’ Phillips said, looking round. Two or three men were standing near but there was no woman.

  ‘The nigger. Take her away,’ Johnson said.

  Phillips looked about him. The mulatto who had spoken before was sitting near them and said:

  ‘He has the fever?’

  Phillips did not understand. The others, near by, turned too.

  ‘He is ill,’ they pronounced, staring down.

  Phillips understood nothing.

  ‘Are you ill, Harry?’ he said. ‘God, he is ill.’

  Phillips was a man who got into a panic at once. He had heard Johnson’s complaints during the day. He had heard of the suddenness of sickness in the tropics.

  ‘Is there a doctor?’ he said in English. ‘Doctor?’ Then he made absurd signs, opening his mouth and pointing a finger into it. He looked up at them like an anxious dog ready to fly into a rage.

  Afterwards he said, ‘Being out of England makes you lose your hair. Just like the dagoes.’ He came back to that word. He was the kind of Englishman who objects to the word ‘dago.’

  They all shrugged their shoulders and stared, pushing out their lips. It was not remarkable to them that a man should have the fever. It would not surprise them if he died. They said again, ‘He is ill.’ And one or two new ones came up, pressing casually closer. ‘Is he dying?’

  ‘Y-a-t’il un médecin—sur le bateau?’ Phillips commanded.

  ‘Médico,’ said the mulatto.

  ‘Yes, yes, médico,’ said Phillips, standing up. He looked scathing and lordly, his head thrown back and chin up when afraid.

  They all watched him with slightly awakened interest but did not move. It was chiefly his fair hair that interested them. Then Phillips thought he was making a fool of himself because now Johnson’s eyes were wide open, watching him too.

  ‘How do you feel, Harry? I can’t speak the language. Ask if you can for a doctor.’

  ‘Take her——’ Johnson said and, with the weary cynicism of the sick, closed his eyes again.

  ‘There is no nigger woman,’ Phillips repeated very quietly. ‘We left her at the last place. She’s not on board.’

  He jumped to the conclusion that this was the negress Johnson meant.

  ‘Move back there. He’ll be better left alone,’ said Phillips, turning to the crowding men. He hated scenes. The group did not move.

  Many more passengers came up to see the big man who was ill. They came because he was big and his face was red and because the other one was fairer than anyone they had seen.

  They came along to see a man who was bigger than they and dressed in strange clothes, probably in some way rich. He wore expensive boots.

  So this is why he wanted to go ashore, Phillips thought. Why didn’t he say he was sick?

  Phillips invented natural laws to comfort himself: Johnson would be better when the sun went down. He waited. The sun when it went down had the blazing cocotte-eye of some gaudy-feathered bird of paradise over the trees. The prow of the boat cut into water that fell away in crimson and silver swathes. Then the darkness came and the stars. The mosquitoes, thinning out when the launch was in midstream, came in whining clouds round the hurricane lamps when she was near the forest.

  He got Johnson early into his hammock. He was shivering and sweating, grumbling at assistance. The passengers thought he was taking their places and protested. The mulatto came and helped Phillips and argued with the crowd. Phillips and the mulatto smiled at each other and talked but neither understood.

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Phillips. But he was thinking: Suppose he dies? Suppose he dies before we get to Wright?

  The mulatto shook his head. Under the awning the air was thick and heavy with body smells and tobacco smoke. The darkness was striped with the dirty yellow light and the confused shadows cast by it and no one could see Johnson clearly in his hammock. The passengers forgot him. When food was being served up and plates clattered and children cried, they were all so absorbed they did not see Phillips roll up the awning to let the air blow through. Through the voices, he could hear the water sheared away from the prow as the launch went on.

  Gilbert Phillips was a journalist, thought this country a bit of a sensation in itself. An accursed profession, journalism drives its member to think in headlines, interviews, quotable words and melodrama. Every thought they have is printed and on the front page the moment they think it. When Phillips saw Johnson sick, he saw the headline: ‘Missing Missionary’s Son Dies in Jungle.’ That was for the English press: the little English papers in South America would stress the commercial side: ‘Tragic Death of Timber Importer’s Nephew.’

  But why assume Harry would die? Phillips fell back upon tricking the gods: When the plates stop clattering, Harry will be all right, when the people stop talking, when they go to sleep, Wait until midnight and he’ll turn the corner. He’ll be better when the first light comes. Quite better when the sun rises.

  He longed for the magical rising of the sun and even more for the meeting with Charles Wright, the leader, the custodian of salvation.

  ‘Bloody fool I am,’ Phillips suddenly remarked aloud. ‘Wind up about nothing.’

  So he set laboriously to work to prove to himself that his panic was absurd. He entered into argument and sat dictating telegraphic conclusions and assertions to the black river and the invisible forest. A chap like himself, he pointed out, too impressionable. Always dying. Always waking up and finding not dead. Very humiliating. Great argument my safety this expedition is Johnson. But Johnson sick. That’s nothing. He has lived in the tropics for years and is still alive. Cardinal point of my faith: Nothing can happen to Harry Johnson. Why not? Johnson himself says so. Look at his record. Last year he came home on leave to England and no sooner ashore than he is off again. Where? To a nice quiet walking tour in the Pyrenees? Not on your life. Off he goes to Greenland. Says he wants a change from the tropics. The tropics can’t kill him. So he goes off to the Arctic to see if he can freeze to death.

  Phillips saw his two pictures in his mind: Johnson half naked in the tropics; then, black-out, and Johnson astoundingly appears, on his last leave, in Greenland, a shaggy black head, among emerald icebergs, baggy in Arctic suit behind the sleigh, sitting by paraffin lamps, taking meteorological readings in the snow. The amphibian disabled, he and his companions camp in the closing floes: in a week they haul up the plane before it is crushed. ‘There is always something to do,’ Johnson said. For fourteen days he and the others tramped up and down in the snow, trampling it down to make a runway for the plane. ‘It occurred to me that it would save the sweat of shovelling. It kept us warm and occupied. It is essential to be occupied.’

  Phillips knew about it all. He had edited the copy in London as it came through, put in the photograph that no one recognised, made the mistake in the name of the island. ‘Sorry,’ he said, when the Greenland expedition returned. Found explorers damned sensitive. Didn’t understand newspapers.

  ‘God,’ they said, ‘Thought Gilbert Phi
llips knew better than that.

  Johnson was the man in Greenland and the man in Brazil, the lucky beggar. Passing from Cambridge, by the luck of having a ripe and rich uncle, into the Brazilian timber business. At night, behind mosquito wire, he sat on the verandah of a bungalow, reading Pickwick and Hakluyt’s Voyages; took the slow, happy long view of politics. On leave he was in Switzerland and Austria, Norway and Sweden, sailing, climbing and no politics at all. The world his playground. People mimicked Harry’s voice, ‘At Cambridge we learned that it is unwise to have women in camp. Things get soft.’ And Johnson laughing deeply at himself, but not changing his opinion.

  Johnson was action and laughter. He laughed and was laughed at. Sailing, he always fell into the sea. Ropes broke when he pulled them. Losing his dinner-jacket, he appeared at a public dinner in Copenhagen in someone else’s. In view of his chest measurement . . . By mistake he eats two breakfasts. In Brazil he wakes up to find a snake asleep on that chest. He is treed by wild pigs. When he goes up-country from the timber station, he is often three months alone.

  The laughter of Johnson was deep, soft, shy boom and he would put his hand to his lips at the end of it. He was not a humorous man and it surprised him that people laughed, so he laughed too out of good nature.

  Phillips sat stunned with wonder through the night. He could hear the thumping of his heart. The prow of the boat was himself eagerly cutting the flat river water. He had comforted himself. Not he ill, but Johnson! Johnson, the unique and impervious one! Phillips felt draughts of strength coming into him from the night because Johnson was stricken and he pitied Johnson, as a woman would pity a sick lover.

  And now, Gilbert Phillips had strength and had quietened his fears. He would go quite calmly over what would happen if Harry Johnson, the erstwhile impervious one, should die. For example, Harry had ‘died in my arms.’ Phillips wrote letters to England, first to that very difficult woman, Harry’s mother. (‘Wife of Missing Missionary Hears of Son’s Death in Jungle.’) Then he wrote a letter to Lucy Mommbrekke. This was Charles Wright’s, their leader’s stepdaughter. Harry Johnson had had an affair with her. But how could he write a letter to her? Very quietly and near, as if she were sitting beside him on the launch, Lucy’s voice came suddenly to Gilbert:

  ‘Take care of him for me.’

  He was back in England in a flash. He saw Charles Wright’s house. It was built on fairly high ground among a clump of ever-shivering ash and fixed ilex, with miles of marshland, that were greener than any inland fields, to west and east of it. From all the northward looking windows of the house one saw the marsh ending at a sea-wall half a mile away, where Wright’s boat lay in the mud and the land broke up into the reed hummocks of the estuary. Over the ever whistling mud at low tide the birds flew, the redshank and the gull.

  Phillips, hearing the water birds of the tropical river remembered it and the week-ends there before he left.

  He saw Lucy coming across the marsh with Harry from the sea. She was wearing his mackintosh. Her black, closely curling hair was blowing from her fine, very white forehead in a way that gave her a droll and wanton appearance. Harry and she were lovers. Phillips remembered how she and Harry bickered as they came across the marsh, and smiled at the change in Lucy. All independence and all elusiveness gone, she followed Harry and obeyed him like a slave; hot, outrageous and almost impudent in pursuit of a reluctant lover, it seemed now that she was the trapped one.

  Lucy was not very tall, a soft-bodied, lazy and sensual girl. Her voice, which was quick and light and allusive, with all the music of innuendo, gave an animation to the heaviness of her body. The nostrils were broad and humorous, the eyes dark and lively but her skin was the colour of that very pale clay one sees in certain pieces of sculpture. She was one of those women who are not beautiful, but who are illumined when they smile or laugh, like a dark pool when the sun suddenly shines on it. There was something not altogether English in her and yet she was completely English—English from the north-eastern counties too, from where Gilbert Phillips, fair as a Dane, also came.

  ‘When you are out there together,’ Lucy said to him, ‘look after Harry for me.’

  ‘Why do you pretend you are not fond of him?’ Gilbert said.

  It was one of the pretences about this love affair which had been so suddenly pursued, that she and Harry did not wish it to be taken seriously. ‘But suppose,’ Phillips said to her one day, ‘you have a child.’

  ‘What a worry-guts you are, Gilbert,’ Lucy said impatiently. And in a voice which was milder with an abrupt irony and tenderness she said, as though arguing not with him, but with herself:

  ‘It was ridiculous that he had never spoken to a woman.’

  Phillips had almost forgotten now the jealousy he had felt when Harry had become her lover. Phillips was evasive and she was an evasive woman. The wound had been not to his heart, but to his amour-propre and a sensitive man is quick to repair that damage. And he had a potent consolation to which, if the wound irked on occasion, he could go. He, too, had been Lucy’s lover. He carried her beauty upon his body and in his heart.

  She stayed with him one night in the early days of Harry Johnson’s return from Greenland when Gilbert and she talked of nothing but the man who, so different from themselves, had made this deep impression upon them.

  The problem Phillips had to decide in those days was whether he would accept Charles Wright’s invitation to join him on his Brazilian expedition.

  ‘I’m like you,’ he said to Lucy. ‘I’m always undecided.’

  ‘Why don’t you go?’ she advised him.

  ‘I think I will,’ he said, ‘if Harry does.’

  ‘Does it depend on him?’

  ‘He does all the things I should like to do,’ he said honestly.

  He told her how he had known Harry when he was a boy.

  ‘When I was ten my family moved to London,’ he said, ‘and the first thing I noticed in the place where we lived was that a number of boys wore scarlet caps. I always envied them. Some of them used to come to church. One of them was Harry.’

  ‘One Sunday,’ Gilbert said, ‘I was in church half asleep. The minister said, “Let us pray,” and down we all went. All you could see of him was a big head like a dog’s above the pulpit. He was like a dog,’ said Gilbert enthusiastically. ‘When he prayed he was like a dog howling at the moon. And just as I was going off again I heard him say something about helping those in far distant lands, “bringing Thy light to the heathen,” and how Alexander Johnson, the missionary, was lost in the jungle—I didn’t know it was in Brazil—and would God save him. I rose up on my knees as far as I dared to see if I could spy out Harry in the congregation. I spotted him. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. You know his father was never found.’

  Phillips’ mind drifted and dwelled in the warmth of the past. The truth could be seen and admitted at this remove. ‘I didn’t marry Lucy,’ he thought, ‘because I didn’t want to, because I liked her too well.’

  But when he had seen Lucy arrested by the sight of Harry, when he found they talked of no one else, and then when she spoke, with a sudden, surprising indignation of the chastity of Harry, Gilbert had been aroused.

  He saw again his room at the top of the house, the early darkness of London like a soft rubbed charcoal against the window, smelled the cool stale smell of gas which he always noted when he came in from his office. He and Lucy had had tea and now they were standing by the window at the edge of that gulf that suddenly opens in the friendship between men and women.

  When it came to making love he had no doubt he was no less reluctant, no less caught in the throat by fear than Harry was, and it was precisely at reluctance that Lucy laughed. He stood beside her. Below the house he could see a wilderness of mews where the wireless played and, rising beyond the mews, were two long black cliffs of flats with the crawling sea of the distant traffic breaking in soft, firm gasps against them. It was the hour of day when people are going home and the lights jump i
n the windows of the buildings. He felt that he was breasting the whole tide of the city when at last he heard his voice, like some croaking, recorded imitation of his natural voice, asking her to stay with him that night.

  Well, would she laugh? Would she be angry? Would she argue with him? All that happened was that she lowered her head and turned to touch the lapel of his coat. ‘I had never thought of you,’ she had said. Afterwards she said they must have quick, clever minds, giving themselves to nothing, if they were to escape the aching inertia of being in love.

  Why did he ask her to stay? Why did he feel sorrow and not desire when she did stay? Why did he see her go without regret and avoid seeing her again, letting the days grow into weeks of silence? Why, too, did she not break the silence? Why did he feel for the first time in his life: That was passionless and wrong? And yet, that now they knew each other and were more deeply bound than ever? And yet again that nothing had happened and they were not bound at all? Why did they never speak about it afterwards, pretending that nothing had happened? And why, when he heard that she had passed from her habit of ridiculing Harry to a passionate love of him, did he (Gilbert) feel such an overwhelming tenderness and joy, the friend who ran to them eagerly to join their hands and gaze with delight at them like a girl?

  Phillips sat on the launch trying to seize these things again; but the past is a dim-lit undersea world, leading by impalpable corridors to other rooms lit by the same swaying undersea light, and shapes flick uncertainly before the diver’s goggles and wash rootlessly away to greener and even dimmer fathoms. Often he saw no meaning. All he knew tonight was: ‘I was Lucy’s lover before Harry was.’

  Lucy was the link between them, the stream flowing between them, bringing down to him the current of Harry Johnson’s physical genius; and taking back to Johnson, though Johnson could not know it and perhaps was indifferent to such a thing, the sober wave of Gilbert’s affection. ‘He does not know I was her lover. I must watch him for her sake.’