Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  She leaned over to him and suddenly put both hands into his hair and pulled it.

  ‘Here! Lucy!’ he said, glancing anxiously at the door.

  ‘What is it?’ she said, sitting back and looking there.

  ‘Charles . . .’ he said.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He might come in.’

  ‘Charles,’ she said gravely, ‘has gone to bed.’

  ‘Why,’ she said, with a little bitterness like her mother’s, ‘are you worrying about Charles?’

  He was joking, but he was perturbed at the thought of Charles finding her in his room. He hated her really for being there. He was terrified of her nearness to him and when he spoke his voice was choking and small.

  She got up and to his relief went to the door, but she had gone simply to close it. When she had done this she stood hesitating in the middle of the room. She was trembling and shy under the turbulence of her desire, which now she could not hide from herself by any subterfuge. It was there like arms drawing at her waist and her legs, padding like an animal in her heart, music swimming in her breasts. She could feel in her hands the brush of his hair on her hands. And because she had exhausted even subterfuge she felt naked and exposed and reckless. Her nostrils dilated and there was a burning weight on her back. She began to pick up his clothes from the floor and put them on a chair. Vehemently she shook out his trousers and folded them, hung up his coat. Then she faced him and marched towards him and stood over him. He could feel the warmth coming from her. She put out her bare arm and took his hand and held it tightly. She could see the startled look on his face, hear the breath coming from his parted lips as she leaned over him until her breast touched his lips and his face. She kissed his forehead. Then, suddenly helplessly weary, she sat down on the bed beside him and ran her fingers into his hair.

  ‘You are a lovely person,’ she said very quietly. ‘I shall be sad when you’re gone and it will be how many years before I see you again?’

  He looked up at her.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said in a lost voice.

  ‘Don’t say anything. Don’t worry about not loving me.’

  There—she had said the word ‘love.’ He gazed at her speechlessly.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it is cold.’

  She was indeed shivering with the coldness of the room. He could feel the coldness of her bare arm when he put out his hand to it. Her arm was white and round and soft and this softness seemed to flow through his hand and into his body and to make her beautiful. She was beautiful now, and when she had come into the room she had seemed to him terrifying and ugly. It was the ugliness of his revolt and panic. Beautiful or repulsive? Ecstasy or horror? His mind was lost.

  ‘Warm me,’ she said ‘for a little minute. I must go, but warm me. Oh, you’re cold too.’

  He felt like a man drowning amid the last choking, dying images of his life and Charles Wright was the recurrent one, flashing by, portrait after portrait of Charles Wright, the leader, and then this last one, thrown in suddenly and inexplicably: of Charles Wright standing with Mrs Johnson before the painting of his father, in their house.

  Book Two

  Chapter Four

  Loyalty, adherence to a code which respects the privacy of another’s soul, and then a dislike of causing pain and of starting quarrels and controversies which may go on for a lifetime—all these virtuous motives work in only too well with a motive less exalted, like the fear of libel, to prevent travellers from writing true histories of their expeditions. Those who have read the two or three accounts which have been done of the Wright expedition must have been struck by their extraordinary lack of background. The speculations and self-important conjectures of the Englishman, Calcott, from whose house the party set out; the irresponsible fantasies of Silva, the Portuguese, who was also there—all have added a specious kind of mystery to what was already sensational enough in itself, without really adding much enlightenment. And those who examined the expedition from a professional point of view, criticising Wright here, taking sides for and against Johnson there, or insinuating that Phillips knew all the time more than he would tell, are not very much more satisfactory. Phillips, it is true, is the source of the most reliable evidence and the book that was written from his diaries is the best; but the diaries of Phillips are the work of a perfect egoist. He pours himself into everything until it is three parts Phillips and only one part itself. He is concerned only with his own sensations. He was one of those sharp-tongued, clever men, whose humour has an intimidating rasp to it; no one seems more sure of himself; but as a diarist he reveals himself behind these defences as full of panicky introspection and self-pity. He seems to have cultivated an appearance of debonair instability in order to hide the dreary, maudlin flats of commonplace that the monotony of continuous fear had made in his soul. A young man should not, perhaps, be judged by his diaries; Phillips, all the time he was in Brazil, was consumed by worry about money. He had thrown up his job, he had put his savings into the journey, he did not know how he would live when he returned. This was his real act of courage. The remarkable thing is that, in this fear, he seems to have been sustained as much as cast down, by being in the company of secure men like Wright and Johnson. Through them he was able to become courageous.

  But Phillips—and his diaries show this—was quite unaware that the Johnson he met at the coast and with whom he travelled on the launch to meet Wright, was not the Johnson he had known in England. He records merely: ‘Johnson sick. Surprised it is not me.’ He is rather pleased with himself. He has no idea that he is travelling with an obsessed man, that the man who is sitting beside him is not the reasonable, sane creature he knows, but one who is drowning in a chaos and clinging like a fanatic to one ridiculous straw.

  Yet Phillips was not without sensibility and what he chose to put in his diary and what he chose to leave out or did not think important, is his affair. He knew when he met Harry Johnson at the coast that Harry was depressed about Lucy and particularly because she had not written to him. The affair had been broken off, for as Lucy said, ‘We went into it with our eyes open. We know it can’t go on for he can’t stay here and I can’t go with him,’ and Lucy’s common sense was in action once more under the guise of nonchalance and elusiveness. She was making the break complete by not writing. She was leaving Harry without a word, as she had left Gilbert too. Lovers have a greater dramatic sense than ordinary people, which frequently leads them to over-do their gestures. Lucy was parting with dramatic thoroughness. Gilbert would have been pleased to talk about Lucy with Harry and to have attempted consolation; if he had done so many things might have happened differently; perhaps the whole history of the Wright expedition might have been changed. But no one knows the critical actions of his life. Gilbert was in the position of being Lucy’s confidant and not Harry’s and he did not speak.

  An obsession, fantastic in origin and rooted with daily increasing intricacy, had grown in Harry Johnson which a few words from Gilbert or a letter from Lucy might have dissolved.

  Letters were the desire on the one hand; not to see Wright, to avoid him at all costs, was the other desire.

  ‘His lordship’s asking for his mail again,’ said Calcott, the Englishman, when the river launch arrived at the town where Wright was waiting and they were at the house.

  It was sundown. There was one of those crimson, yellow and purple sunsets like the paint of a theatrical backcloth over the scrub and not delicately done but daubed and running. Some red spotlight had caught the few adobe houses of the town, all colour and sound were exaggerated.

  In the brilliant heat of the morning, Wright had been waiting with the crowd on the wooden jetty, standing erect and trim with his grey beard in the air, his arms folded and his white hat over his eyes, like a small, shrewd king. Among the raucous, struggling, glaring people, he alone looked subtle, some skilfully made chessman with a few definite, quiet and powerful moves. A lank and wasted Englishman of fifty, with
an uneasy mouth, already misted with drink and as bald as a vulture under his hat, stood uneasily beside him. This was Calcott. They spoke quietly, under the shouting and the squealing of animals, to Phillips down in the launch.

  ‘Harry’s sick.’

  At last Wright came aboard. Johnson was standing by the cases and Wright walked up to him. Johnson’s thick slow smile was on his face and his lips were parted. He put out his heavy arm. It was as limp as a bell-rope when Wright shook hands with him, and Johnson, making a half-angry effort to pull himself together, had his dark eyes in a fixed drugged stare. A veil of fever hid Wright from him. Not to see Wright!—the fever half achieved that for him.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said.

  They sat on the cases in the sickening heat. Johnson was most agitated about the canvas boat that was packed with their cases. Sweat ran down their necks and messed the hair on their hands which dampened their knees. Wright chatted in his easy, gay, unperturbed way about his journey and his preparations, but watching Johnson closely all the time. Johnson’s strained eyes lowered and his eyelids trembled. His hands closed and opened on his thighs. He listened in a trance, opening his mouth as if he were going to speak but saying nothing. He was impatient to go ashore. His neck was bent as if he had a load on his shoulders and he looked like a rebellious, helpless boy who is being pushed along by a father whose temper is up.

  Calcott’s house was among others a hundred yards away on a sandy bluff, and this hill finished Johnson. He insisted on walking, but Calcott one side and Wright the other had his arms. The moment he got to the doorway he fell heavily forward. A dozen young chickens ran squeaking into the house before him as he fell. Wright shot out an arm and saved him. Wright was proud of his small hands and his slim arms because they concealed a wiry strength which could catch and hold a heavy man in his fall. Johnson vomited.

  They got him into Wright’s room and put him in Wright’s hammock. Women and children came out of an inner courtyard to cry out that the man was sick. Someone closed the shutters and the room was dark. He lay in the hammock under the heat of the day, which pressed like the chest of a hot man against the shutters, not knowing how long he had been there. He lay dumb and stunned as if he were being borne sick on a litter on one of those long forest journeys in which hour after hour one is travelling down green, skyless tunnels. There was sky now because he was better, a little sky. Only one fact seemed to him important: he had met Wright and nothing had happened. There had been no disaster. What was he to make of that? That Wright did not know? That he knew, but was silent? There were still no letters. This was the most important point. The news would come in the next letters. Then Wright and everyone would know everything. He would see the genial smile passing from Wright’s lips, the friendship passing from his eyes.

  He had been driven to working it all out again, to go over the details and see where he had gone wrong. Not once but a hundred times, on the river. He had been two months in Rio. A month gave time for letters from England. No letters in Rio. Well, back at the coast there was even more time. To the post office and then to the consulate, the long wait in the afternoon rains: back over the steaming pavements where the flower-petals, torn down every day by the afternoon storm, were a smeared confetti of mock marriage, into the cool courtyard of the consulate. Shy of asking again and again at the consulate. Sending Phillips in. No way of concealing from them. The consul would know in time. The little half-caste at the post office with the cigarette-stump stuck to his lower lips who sat on his stool scratching his leg—he must know. Police censors opened letters, were amused by private news. Phillips would know.

  And before that Mrs Wright, scandal-mouthed among her pictures in England, would know and the newspaper reporters who took his photograph at Southampton would know, and by this time Wright would know.

  The waves of fear began to break over him again, running up his limbs and breaking with an awful soundlessness in his head. One by one they came and after they had gone he felt dull pain in his waist and his bowels contracted. It is the silence of the mind’s convulsions that is unbearable. He lay not one man but two or three, like wrestlers in conflict, too confusing to distinguish in the tangle of their straining bodies.

  He longed to talk to someone, but if Calcott or Phillips or Wright himself appeared, his expression became obstinate and resisting. He showed them he was able to manage his affairs alone. When his friends had gone, he wished he had spoken. Yet letters, this idea he had got into his head, were fundamentally irrelevances. Under it all was a fear cutting far deeper than anything else:

  ‘I am losing my nerve. I was afraid of the water, afraid of the sun, afraid of the trees.’

  And Wright’s words came back to him:

  ‘Women make you lose your nerve.’

  So if Wright said to him, as he would be bound to say when the letters came, speaking like a father, ‘You’ve lost your nerve, Harry,’ he would have to reply, ‘Yes, it’s gone.’

  ‘I know. You’ve slept with a woman,’ Wright would answer. ‘I had a letter. There’s a scandal about it. You slept with my stepdaughter. She is going to have a child.’

  ‘Then it is true what I feared,’ he would have to answer. ‘She did not write because she was going to have a child.’

  ‘It is in the papers,’ Wright would reply. ‘That’s ruined this show.’

  That was the obsession: You have been Lucy’s lover, she is going to have a child. She has not written because she is going to have a child. She is hiding it, telling only a few people because of the publicity. At Southampton when he kissed Lucy goodbye, some camera man snapped them, ‘Missing missionary’s son says goodbye to friend, probably to fiancée.’

  Still—one is not as innocent as all that. It is upsetting if you get a girl of your own class in the family way, you feel a fool. Good heavens, people say, how very careless! Couldn’t they have been more careful or couldn’t they have waited? One does not say, ‘I have ruined a woman,’ like some raffish prodigal in a novelette. Or does one? Is the heart a little Bethel—some sectarian organ which has lost its religion, the texts on the wall and the Israelitish fantasies, but not the fear and the guilt which were the root of the religion? Still, why invent a child? What is the reason for that?

  He remembered the blast of the ship’s siren and the echoes going down the iron roofs of the dock sheds, as a signal of phenomenal freedom. He waved to Lucy on the quay. She was pale and stolid with wretchedness. There was no smile on her face. Her eyes were shadowed. Rain was falling. He felt an involuntary tenderness for her now that he was going; and with it a feeling of elation and horror. On his last night in England he had expected peace and time to collect himself. At his mother’s house he felt guilty because he had neglected his mother on this leave. He had wished to be alone with her. But Lucy, impetuous and desperate in her passion, had insisted on staying at the house.

  ‘Lucy!’ he said. He hated her for coming into his room on this last night. And in his mother’s house. Once more this hot muddle of love, her hands on him, her breasts against his mouth. Love forced out of him, She stood at the top of the stairs calling to him, careless of who heard, dark-headed, in the yellowish light. The negress on the river had brought this back to him.

  At the time he had no clear judgement. He remembered the delight of desire and a glutted repugnance. He had never dreamed of a woman like Lucy. The women he dreamed of, for example, had fair long hair and walked barefooted in a cool landscape of tall flowers. Or in palaces. And he did not know when he had first feared that Lucy would have a child, it was a fear you do not name—the fear had perhaps always been there—or how it had become a certainty for him. It was suddenly a certainty. After the long, serene ennui of the Atlantic voyage, when one lived ineffably suspended between sky and sea for free day after free day, it was suddenly a certainty. The sight of the first land, the bay at Rio, might have brought it. This was the first experience of her haunting quality that he had had, for on the ship he had not t
hought about her at all. She had gone entirely from his mind. But when the ship approached the bay at Rio and the engines quietened as the chaotic coast opened with the brilliant order of a peacock’s tail, its momentous and gorged profusion, a weight settled in his heart.

  He stood at the rail with the other passengers who, like himself, felt the power of the sliding coast and the beauty of their quiet entry, and he felt the quivering satisfaction of familiarity and recognition. ‘A year ago I was here.’

  This sudden mark on the calendar arrested him. The timeless delusion of the sea had gone and he knew that he had changed. As he waited in the customs house he thought that here was land where Lucy was not. This gave him the shock of passionate craving for her, tumultuous and overwhelming. He was burdened with love. At the hotel he sat in misery, listening to the electric fans, the resident voices came back to the wearily familiar smells. He walked miles through the hard streets looking at the bay and the lights on the water like cheap jewels on a dark harlot. A storm broke—he had forgotten the storms—and lightning carved up the heat of the night like violet knives. How was he going to endure not being with her?

  The next day he went glumly to the office of the company. The thought occurred to him then—and it had recurred on the river; it was one of those master thoughts that strike in the soul, hour after hour, like a clock striking—how was he going to live alone up-country again? He was afraid. It was the first of those waves of cold flame that came over him-and remained licking as if the cold fire had caught on to something in him. How was he going to live alone? He had lost his capacity for solitude.

  Lying sick in his hammock, he said again, ‘I cannot go back. I have lost my nerve.’ As Wright had said, ‘Women take a man’s nerve.’

  Seated at their desks made of the beautifully grained mahogany of the forests, were all the men he knew at the office.

  ‘Johnson’s back.’