Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  ‘But Harry,’ she said, ‘we all think that about ourselves.’

  She took his hand and said, ‘Where can you have got this idea that you are so different, Harry dear? You do different and difficult things, that is all. That’s why I like you.’

  She laughed nervously.

  ‘Enormous hands,’ she said. ‘And hardly a line in them. How extraordinary!’

  She kissed his hand suddenly and then said, ‘Look at mine,’ putting her white hand beside his. She pointed to a line and laughed.

  ‘That’s the man I slept with, I expect,’ she said. ‘I told you,’ she said.

  She was thinking of Gilbert, but she had not told his name.

  He smiled but did not answer.

  ‘Are you shocked?’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I would be afraid of having a child.’ He was looking over the stays of the boat. She was half angry with him for not minding, but half not angry because she knew his whole nature was shocked. This secret narrowness of his, so rare in her generation, a joke among her candid friends whose candour all her own sensitiveness disliked, drew her to him. Her recklessness rose to meet this buried, rigid self.

  He had brought a new sheet for the boat with him on this day and now he pulled it from his pocket. He made a loop and suddenly he slipped it over her wrist, gave it a twirl over her head and held her arm to her waist. He laughed.

  ‘Harry,’ she called out, ‘let me go.’

  The attack was sudden and had the air of a revenge for what she had told him; but when he saw she was angry, he let her go, and his voice was anxious and apologetic.

  ‘You think your strength is everything,’ she said. She was really very frightened. The power had all been on her side up to now.

  He let her go and got up and looked at the shining sea, and said, ‘I’m going out in the boat.’ He wanted to get away from her because when she was with him he could feel that her life was breaking into his mind.

  He could feel her kiss hungry in his hand and her confession burning in his mind.

  She was very frightened by his sudden loss of quietness and by the pain coming from him.

  The gulls came over their heads as they stood there. In slow wide circles the birds went round, firm and white, and free. He lifted his hand and made comic imitations of aiming at them, like a boy. She saw that pain was nothing to him; load upon load of pain, a tighter and tighter screw of hardship could be forced upon him and he would be impervious—he would even seek it. He would seek the most painful thing. Pain was a transcendent gift. He would think he was handing on to her a little of some ecstatic essence which he had won for himself.

  She turned back to the house on this afternoon. She glanced at it to see if anyone there could have seen their struggle.

  There was a knot he knew of for the wrists—the Brazilian police had one he had seen and practised. ‘Pull you up from the sea-wall by the wrists? Oh! That is nothing to what I could do. Oh! I could punish you for dragging out of me all the things that I have never told anyone.’

  The lovely thing about him, Lucy said, was his innocence, his easy way of being satisfied by simple things. He loved Charles Wright’s house and the marsh country. He liked walking about in it, talking to the people in the pubs. The lovely thing was his unforced love of everything. The frightening thing was the closed door in his heart and the fanatic behind it. She was really touched by the look of apprehension in his face when he came back to the house with the old sheet in his hands and by the undisguised relief he showed when she smiled.

  But the next day he tricked her again. In his heart there seemed to be a desire for sudden and abrupt power over her, hidden under his shy, genial manner. A strong east wind had started in the night and it was blowing half a gale by the morning.

  ‘I’m going out in the boat,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘This is where I let him down,’ she thought, ‘where I can’t live up to him. This is like twisting my wrists.’

  They argued about it.

  ‘There is nothing to be afraid of,’ he said.

  ‘For me there is,’ she said. She was afraid enough to admit her fear to him.

  He cajoled and argued. The more preposterous his desire the more reasonable he became.

  ‘There is no pleasure in suffering,’ she said. ‘I’m not going.’ It took courage to say this to him because it seemed to her that if she did not go, she would lose him. He would despise her and that would be the end of it. The end? Well, the end of possessing him. Of course she was not in love with him, that was out of the question. In a month or two he would be gone and ‘it is impossible for a white woman to live in the jungle of Brazil,’ impossible for a civilised woman who has lived all her life in cities. So there was no question of love.

  She said she would come down after him to see him start. The boat was floating now, straining at its moorings under the clapping sail. In the sound of the wind and the crackle of the sea, they had to shout to each other. He took off his shoes, rolled up his trousers and waded to the boat. She stood on the shore, forgotten, while he crouched in the boat, going round the knots, crawling into the locker in the bows for the foresail. She sat on the grass wall and watched him. At last he saw her.

  ‘Come and have a look,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  But after a while she took off her shoes and stockings and, lifting her skirt, went out silently. ‘Ah,’ he said politely. ‘Wait there. I’ll help you.’ He got her into the boat.

  ‘This is a bad wind for this coast,’ she said.

  She sat still until her teeth began to chatter.

  ‘I’m going back now,’ she said.

  He didn’t hear her. He was heaving the mainsail to its full height and as he pulled he was looking at the channel. Then the foresail was up and the canvas snapped like a machine gun, deafening them. He was in the bows. He was at the stern. She was looking at his crouching and bending body, smiling at his hair blowing on end. This made his ears stick out in a comical way. Her eyes were dazzled by the light on the superb white flank of sail. He ran towards her barefooted—to the stern again and she was amazed at the excitement in his eyes which, as he took the tiller, half closed to a sudden quietened serenity.

  ‘Harry,’ she exclaimed, ‘I’m going now. Help me over.’ She sat on the gunwale.

  He did not answer, but, like a laugh from the sea, there was a long, galloping chuckle of the water against the bows, a hard slap and a sound like the tearing of silk as the cutter heeled and the boom slipped over to the full spreading power of the wind. The boat was sailing. He had tricked her.

  She said with quiet anger at him:

  ‘Put me back.’ She pulled his arm at the tiller. The boat swung and then lay over once more with a sickening swerve.

  She was furiously angry.

  ‘Harry, put me back at once,’ she said. ‘I told you I’m not coming.’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you meant to come.’

  ‘It isn’t funny,’ she said. ‘You’re being a bore.’

  Soon they were clear of the channel and were sea-ripping where the deeper water opened. They went on the farther side of the estuary, and here the wind came in larger and more sudden gusts making the water pour along almost level with the gunwale. In the east the sky was very pale, almost white as if there were a dust-storm in it. The sea was looser and larger and the boat rushed along with a slow rise and fall like the back of a galloping horse. The waves ran back. They were running over the mounting neck and dipping heads of this herd of waves.

  ‘Put on my coat,’ he said, pointing to the one she had brought for him.

  There was nothing there but the loose, brilliant mass of the sea, pitted like the craters of a molten planet. He looked ahead and did not answer her questions. He was glad the sea was getting rougher. He had no plan in his head but to get out into the rougher water.

  He was like the stone; the wind tore at him but nothi
ng of himself was yielded. He was granite. He crouched, fixed in the hard gladness of another world where the white foam rose like weals on a flogged back that heaved and sent out howling groans. He was in a world of sensations and tortures and difficulties, a spiritual world of obstacles sought and surmounted.

  The northern arm of the land had now dropped away. Under the punches of the wind it was impossible to reckon how much time had passed. All that had been broken up. There were no other boats in the sea.

  He was thinking how pleasant it would be to go on across the North Sea on a violent day, dazed and deafened and with every nerve tight like the sheet, in the brutal cleansing sea and to find himself in Holland. He would drink a lot in the evening.

  If the boat had not been there Harry would not have come down to stay. The sail swelled like a breast in the unreasonable wind, the hull swerved and jumped like a living thing perilously difficult to manage. It had its sudden exertions when it seemed to run away out of your hands and then its times of docility and the caprice that makes you smile with pleasure. Oh! she prayed. If Charles had only sold it. It was too madly engrossing. Yes, she said, it is mad, quite mad. Look at it now; he can’t manage it. It flings about just as it likes.

  The waves grew larger against the clear sky, the skyline capsized. The bowsprit rose up. The cutter shook under the weight of water that came down like gravel out of a tip, dug and shovelled at it. Yes, it was laboriously mad.

  An hour passed swiftly. A second and a third hour went by. She pleaded with him.

  To have a moment’s silence and stillness! Her breasts were cold, the nipples hard with cold, her eyes streaming, heart gulping in her chest. She turned her back to him so that he could not see her teeth biting her lips and the sick shame of her fear and the struggle of her nerves to surmount it. And she prayed. She turned her back so that he would not see her pray. But if their eyes met she smiled to please him.

  ‘I could not let myself love an ox or a mule or a gorilla,’ she reflected; and all the time was busy with thoughts about him, winding, twisting, tying and knotting them, like a woman trying to tie a huge unwieldy parcel with lengths of fine string which break at every moment. Her feeling for him was like this; unwieldy and unmanageable. She fought to assert that there was no blank, helpless chaos of feeling in her heart.

  They returned. Four hours must have passed.

  At last the squalls of the height of the tide became fewer as they sailed back and after the open sea, the estuary was quieter. ‘Now,’ he called. She caught the mooring and hauled it in and the sail rapped out like shots as the boat turned with the wind.

  There was no sign of anyone in the garden of the house or the marsh, only smoke rising from one of the chimneys. She stood on the swinging bows holding the pole loosely and suddenly it slipped from her hands. ‘Oh, isn’t that like me!’ she cried out.

  The pole floated slowly away.

  The next thing she saw was Harry pulling his shirt over his head and stepping out of his trousers. His body, so nearly white with the sallowness of pale sand, was bowed in the wind, but in a second or two it straightened and he dived into the sea. He threshed his way after the pole and more slowly came sprouting back with it and the strokes of his water-shortened limbs were blunt and vigorous.

  ‘You go ashore,’ he called. For he had realised only then that she was there and he was comically naked.

  You look like a rat,’ she laughed as she jumped to the shore. When she turned he was out in deep water again and then clambering in. She felt a wave of protective craving for him, as if he were a child and she was his mother, when the white unsheltered body clambered up the side of the boat. She watched the hands grip, the shoulders swell and then the long bow curve of his back to the small cold-coarsened buttocks which made her eyes dance with amusement. She felt a sudden need to rush out to him and to kiss his back, a rush of feeling disordered and heedless. He levered himself over the side and sprawled into the boat and hid from her sight as he groped for his shirt. But she was buffeted and defeated in mind, overcome and bullied in will and in a temper with him, still more with herself. She had been frightened for herself and for him; she could still feel the fear for him tearing in her.

  When she got to the house she went upstairs to her room. After the uproar of the sea she could feel all the eventless afternoons of her life standing in the passages of the house and she seemed to be walking through day after day. As she unhooked her skirt in her room she looked out of the window to see if Harry was coming. He was walking over the marsh with his slight crouching, plodding gait as though he were going on for miles and miles. Often he looked back at the sea. She took off her skirt and her blouse and lay down on the bed.

  He knew, she thought, that I was afraid. Not to fear is everything to him. After a time—perhaps she had fallen asleep—she heard his voice. He knocked at the door and looked in.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said in his absurdly polite voice, seeing her half undressed. He shut the door and went. She sat up and called him back. He came back to the doorway, glancing back in case anyone should catch him talking to her in her room. He was looking away from her to the window and the sea.

  He stood red-faced, open-mouthed with a hungry pleasure in the sight of the slaty water. Then he went away. It did not occur to him for a moment that she had suffered. The thought came to him, after he had closed her door, that women were continually ill. He passed the rest of the day uneasily, restlessly going to his chair and sitting there inert and bored. The afternoons in England when there is nothing to do are boring. He wanted his holiday to be over and to be back at his work. There were times in all his English leaves when he wished to be out of the country and at work. This leave had been so unlike the others. So many friends had gone away or were married and had children. With their freedom lost, the men’s will went too, it seemed to him. As the years went by he had fewer roots in the country, it would become worse as further years went by. Late in the afternoon, mystified by his restlessness, he went down to the sea-wall and stood staring blankly at the water. It was grey and inexpressibly dreary, thrown down like an old too much trodden rug. Too many people had seen this water. He felt a deep longing to be away with Charles on the river so few had ever seen. He reckoned up the days to his departure.

  That evening, unknown to himself, he was good company. He talked at dinner about his adventures. Even Mrs Wright listened without mockery and Charles Wright checked his own talkativeness. They were delighted with him. The reason for his gaiety was simple: already in imagination he was among the things he liked. He was not in England. ‘Well,’ said Charles Wright as he said good-night to him in his room, giving him a quizzical smile, ‘one gets soft here. Women in camp!’ He looked through his glasses at Harry, like some seigneurial goat.

  Harry undressed quickly and got into bed. His clothes were thrown anywhere, on the chairs and the floor.

  He was used to being happy but on this evening he was happier than he could ever remember. He was one of those men who swing from intense action into a warm and dormant content, who regard their jobs with not too much ambition. He was not complacent; he knew he was lucky. It was his luck which made him happy; he believed in it; he was as intimate with his thoughts as with a mistress. Rich or poor, he would have this fine golden wire of luck in his life, the one string that would not snap. He thought it ‘sheer luck’ that he knew Charles Wright, luck again to be going with him. It was luck that he was different and alone.

  He was in the midst of these thoughts when his door opened and Lucy stood there. ‘Hullo,’ he said.

  She moved a little way into the room and only then he saw she was in her nightdress. The blood rushed to his temples and he sat up fixed and cold with wonder at the sudden sight of her body. In two steps she had broken the bemused amiability of his life and stood in the midst of his dreams and desires; for he could not believe at first that she was not one of the women he had dreamed of, mysteriously come to his waking eyes. Not for a moment di
d he think of her as the woman to whom he had been speaking ten minutes before in the room below.

  ‘I have hardly seen you this evening,’ she said.

  She came barefooted across the room towards him. There was a boldness in the line of her body. It was solid and warm and the breasts caught in the gown were full and lifted. He could see the dark nipples. He lowered his eyes and when she spoke to him he was without breath to answer. She was not smiling; there was even a sullenness about the dark brows and the lamplight gave a hollowness to her eyes and small shadows to her lips. The candour of her body had something in it that was lovely but terrifying.

  ‘May I come and see you?’ she said.

  She spoke in a quieter and more musical voice than she usually had, but the body came between the words, solid, firm and peremptory, and underlining everything she said with resignation and sadness.

  She sat down on the bed and first of all she laughed at the untidiness of the room.

  ‘I’ve just come to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Are you looking forward to going away?’

  He was unable to stop looking at her.

  ‘In a way,’ he said, ‘there is no choice.’

  ‘I shall be sorry when you’re all gone,’ she said very easily.

  ‘Charles and Gilbert will be back within the year,’ he replied. He was looking at her white round breasts which fell forward as she leaned towards him. Sometimes her own eyes were unsteady like his.

  ‘Yes, that is true,’ she said.

  ‘Gilbert is a good sort.’

  She looked at him closely. Was he trying to find out about Gilbert and herself? Did he know that Gilbert had only a month before been her lover?

  ‘Amusing,’ she said.

  ‘I thought,’ he said awkwardly, ‘you and Gilbert were engaged or something first of all. . .’

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ she said. ‘We are just friends.’

  ‘Decent chap,’ he said.