‘It was seventeen years ago,’ he lectured Phillips; and daring Wright to rob him of a new listener: ‘I’ve got the cuttings. Some American paper sent a man to interview me.’ He took out a greasy leather wallet from his pocket. Wright looked patiently at the worn-out, yellowing cuttings that were coming to pieces at the folds. He knew them. He smiled faintly at Phillips.
Calcott began to read:
‘That Alexander Johnson, missing British missionary and explorer, was slain by cannibal Indians within a week of leaving. . .’
There was nothing in the cutting they did not know, though Calcott had added improvements of his own. ‘“He told me he had a presentiment that he would never come back,” said Mr James Calcott, chief engineer. . .’ Calcott put down the cuttings and poured out another glass of whisky.
‘He knew he couldn’t get through. He knew it. “You can’t always back a winner, Calcott,” he said. “It’s like picking a woman,” he said. “It’s all in the hands of Gawdabove. . .” Those were his last words.’
And indeed so much time had passed since the missionary’s death, and Calcott had so often brooded on the event and told the story, that the elder Johnson had become like a character in a bad novel to him, a character who has got inextricably confused with the character of the author.
But doubts evidently accused Calcott and doubts of the faith-creating kind, for he said:
‘My conscience is clear anyway.’
He had nothing to answer up for. There was no fast train service 400 miles up the river. The Indians who lived in this bloody Turkish bath were not methodists!
‘That was where he made his mistake,’ Calcott said. ‘There was no call for me to go up and see what had happened. I may be lousy,’ he said, with a malevolent glance at Phillips, ‘but I’m not an Oxford and Cambridge fool. If it’s written, it’s written. You can’t alter that.’
‘I see you are a fatalist,’ said Phillips, taking the bottle from Calcott’s side and helping himself, before Calcott had time even to glare at the outrage. He passed the bottle on to Wright. After an anxious glance he said ingratiatingly, ‘What you say ’nother bottle, Doctor? The drinks are on you. We supply the grub, you bring your refreshment, eh!’ Then to Phillips he said:
‘If the twelve ruddy apostles had seen as many men die as I have, they’d have been ruddy fatalists. If it’s coming, it’s coming. You can’t argue against it.’
You could not, they agreed. He nodded several times, staring into his glass. He muttered to himself, at first inaudibly; and then, more audibly, they heard him say, ‘That’s why I say it’s funny your pal’s come down here and it’s funny he’s sick. And it’s bloody funny,’ he ruminated more thickly, ‘that it was just this time of the year his father spent his last night here.’
The remains of the meal were on the table, but talk began to break up, for Calcott was rambling on the borderland of an obsession with ‘funniness’. It was funny they were here, the three of them; well, two of them and one of them next door; funny they should come. In a year they would be in England and he would be still here; that was funny. And there was something funny about everything. ‘Where will we all be in a month’s time?’ he exclaimed, putting an arm on Phillips’ shoulder and looking heavily, his jaw shaking, into his eyes. ‘You don’t know. I don’t know. . .’
The voice thickened into ultimate incoherence and they left him. They saw him an hour later fast asleep with his head on a big Bible, open on the uncleared table, where the flies swarmed, and the bottle beside it.
Harry was left in Wright’s room because it was the largest one. Wright and Phillips slept out in the courtyard. By day they took it in turns when he was not sleeping to sit with him. Calcott was often hanging about. If anything was wanted for Johnson he would be there, shouting orders to his family. Calcott’s preoccupations with ‘funniness’ and his concern for one who was the son of the missionary led him to hanker after the privilege of sitting with Johnson. Once or twice in a day he would manage it and if found in the room would get up guiltily—because he knew he must not disturb the sick man—saying, ‘Just having a word with your pal,’ or, ‘What do you make of his lordship now?’ Then he would go off.
Phillips used to walk up and down the room making jokes and talking endlessly. He described the town. He described the canoes Wright had got. He was in an excited state, eager to go on. The illness of Johnson gave Phillips a kind of swaggering confidence; but he was entertaining. Once or twice he was on the point of mentioning Lucy, because Wright had said to him, ‘Has Harry anything on his mind?’ But he was too shy. He spent all his day walking restlessly about the town, sitting by the river or tramping to the outskirts until he had exhausted himself. He had no gift for being still.
When Wright came in he could find little to say. He looked at Harry and Harry looked at him. Each wondered what the other was thinking. They were reduced to the most conventional phrases. This delay in departure was worrying Wright because the time before the rains came grew shorter. But he concealed this concern from Harry.
None of them knew Harry’s state and would not have credited it. They knew only that one moment he was better and, the next time they saw him, that he had strangely relapsed. Small things which they could not know affected him. But, on the whole, he was much better and towards the end of the week Wright came in and said:
‘Look here, Harry, if I don’t do something with Gilbert he’ll come out in boils or shoot up the town, so I’m taking him up the river tomorrow. We’re going after turtles’ eggs and we’ll have to stay out the night. We’ll be back the day after. That is, if you’re all right.’
‘I’m all right,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll get up.’
He was always protesting that nothing was the matter with him.
‘You stay where you are,’ Wright said. ‘Get up tomorrow afternoon for a bit if you like.’
But Harry himself understood then the crisis he had been through. At the prospect of being left alone he was terrified. He could have wept. All night he kept waking up listening for the sound of their creaking hammocks in the courtyard.
But in the morning when they went he was astonished by his elation. He was glad they had gone. He resented their going and in the same breath felt a sudden freedom.
He lay alone in the heat of the day and the hours dawdled like flies. He felt the fanatic gratitude of the sick that the world was contracted to the area of the room and the white, excluding walls. A lizard was in the room. He turned over and now it was aslant as if gummed on the ceiling. He passed many half-hours watching it, waiting to see it move.
He listened to the voices in the courtyard, the clatter of pots, the gush of water, the singing and the quarrels. The shutters were drawn. Until three there was only a strip of burning light an inch wide from ceiling to floor and through this he could see the thick leaves of a tree. They were like hot green tongues. He got out of the hammock and stood still in the room, waiting to see if anything would happen to him. He stood in his shirt. He had got out several times to test himself. He knew his strength was returning. Then he caught sight of his legs and he felt at once: ‘I am different.’
How different? He thought this out. Weaker, paler from fever, no strength to go on? No. He could feel the return of strength. There were two waves: the wave of feeling, ‘I have been plunged into fever and I am changed; when my strength is full again, it will be a different strength, something narrower and more intense. I have sloughed off something.’ And the other wave was the guilt: the prisoner-in-the-dock-pallor of his legs.
He went to the shutters and peeped through at the sunlight. It was tigerish. The world was a gorgeous tiger and Wright and Phillips down on the river were like a pair of gleaming fleas in the fur. Johnson swayed when they came into his mind and his strength went. He put up his hand and leaned against the wall: the plaster crumbled. He had no connection with them. He smiled.
He got back to the hammock, waiting for his breath; but he was not as exhausted a
s he had been. The strength was there. He was building it up every minute. And he was aware that the change in himself was that the new strength was making a new self which had no knowledge of Wright and Phillips. There was the sick man who had known them and the new one who would not know them. He did not know how this would be or what it meant; he knew only that he was at the beginning of being another person.
The next time he got out of the hammock and was half-way to the window the door opened quietly and Mrs Calcott stood there. She had brought him some food. She stopped in amazement to see him standing there in his shirt.
‘I’m looking for my clothes,’ he murmured.
‘I will ask my husband,’ she said, ‘when he comes back.’ So it depended upon them whether he was to have his clothes?
She was thick-browed and swart, her lips moving rapidly and showing her white teeth, her voice small like a child’s. When the amused light went from her she gazed at him with the lifelessness of the flesh. She was pregnant. He sat down on a chair and she put the food on a box by the window. Then she said:
‘You speak good Brazilian. Mr Wright speaks good Brazilian. Mr Phillips—no.’
She laughed. She made statements about them all. Mr Phillips was fair, Mr Wright was short, her husband taller than Mr Phillips.
She stopped speaking and her arms fell to her side. When she saw he was looking at her swollen body, her face became softer, with a look of helpless tenderness. Her small lids half-closed as if she were glutted with the life that was swelling inside her and she made an instinctive languid movement of display as she let her arms fall back.
‘You have children?’ she asked him.
He started.
‘I. . . No. I don’t know,’ he stammered. ‘No.’
She looked very puzzled.
‘I am not married.’
‘That is not your wife?’
She pointed to a photograph which was on Wright’s tin box in the corner of the room. Johnson looked and saw for the first time that there was a photograph of Lucy in the room. It was one Wright had brought with him.
Johnson looked at it with consternation.
‘I didn’t know that was there. . .’ (He was saying the wrong things and she must see it.) ‘It is Mr Wright’s daughter.’
She asked him whether he was betrothed to Mr Wright’s daughter.
‘No,’ he said. He looked at her suspiciously. What did she know? Had there been letters? Had Wright told them? His look was hard and intense and the poor woman was as frightened as he was. Murmuring something she went out. He frowned at this small contretemps.
When she had gone, he ran his hand through his hair and stared at the door and then at the photograph. Then he got up and put the photograph under some books. That did not seem safe. Out it came and he held it helplessly, looking at it. The shock of seeing Lucy so different from the images of her that came to his mind arrested him. She was not like this, smiling, still, in a flowered dress, standing with her hat in her hand by the door of the house. This was not Lucy. But the house was real to him. There were the white pillars of the door and in the darkness of the hall behind her figure something glimmered. It was perhaps the light catching a vase on a chest or the suggestion of a door. There were Wright’s things. Wright might have been at that moment inside the room with the door. There was the house; he had got into this house, he had talked in it. Afternoons swayed out of the past, like caravans, into his mind, evenings settled there. He marvelled at the separate existence of these things; and the effect of these actual sights, the white pillars, the shadow of a past afternoon on the step, even the mild pocked shadows on the brick, was to make his crime seem greater.
He could not bear to put the photograph back on the box, but when he caught sight of a jacket of Wright’s hanging on the wall, he went over and touched it apprehensively. The cloth was curiously cold. There was a feeling of sacrilege which he had had once in touching a coat of his father’s when he was a child. He put the photograph in one of the pockets.
All this had taken longer than he knew—days and weeks of England had emerged in these seconds—for Mrs Calcott came back and said:
‘Why haven’t you eaten?’
‘I’m just going to,’ he said.
She waited there. He had no alternative but to sit there in his shirt and eat while she watched him. He was too shy and confused to tell her to go.
Had there been a mail? he asked her. No, she said.
Then did she know, or didn’t she? He could not bear her to stand there; but, just as he felt he would scream at her—not really scream aloud but feel his lungs and his throat make the movements of a scream—just then, she scraped out of the room.
‘Ask for letters,’ he heard her say to some woman outside. ‘Ought not to be out of bed. Has a white skin like my husband. Is very young.’
He pushed angrily at the box, pulled down Wright’s coat, looking for clothes, to escape the humiliation of standing in his shirt only in front of this woman who was going to have a child. A lunatic must feel like this, with Calcott’s wife for an attendant.
‘I’m not going out of my mind,’ he said within himself as if his head were a room in which he was sitting and talking with two or three other selves: the pre-Lucy Johnson, the Johnson sickening on the river, and the new, hardening one now getting back strength. ‘They thought I’d lost my nerve so they took my clothes away.’
He thought of the Calcotts as gaolers.
Late in the afternoon when this crisis had passed, Calcott himself came in to see him. This was Calcott’s marvellous opportunity. They had never had much conversation. Calcott was tired of Wright and still took offence at the manner of Phillips. He had a sentimental interest in Johnson. Calcott had been longing to convey this to him.
‘So your pals have left you,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Mind that?’
‘No.’
Calcott took off his straw hat which left a red band on the grey sweat of his forehead. He sat down on the box near the hammock and said in a low voice which was really respectful, but which sounded because of his nervousness like the sniggering beginning of a dirty story:
‘I knew your father.’
‘So I heard,’ Johnson said.
‘Who told you?’ asked Calcott suspiciously.
‘I expect it was Charles Wright.’
‘Oh,’ said Calcott in a disappointed voice.
They sat in silence.
Calcott smiled. When this unfortunate man smiled, though (as at present) nothing but a simple and innocent warmth inspired him, his face could achieve nothing better than the unconvincing smirk a prisoner might direct at a judge when pleading for leniency.
‘He was all right,’ said Calcott confidentially. ‘Your father was all right. More than you can say about most missionaries, but when you get a good ‘un, they’re good.’
Johnson was sensitive about his father’s profession.
‘I was a boy when he died,’ he said.
‘What I said to Wright,’ said Calcott triumphantly.
‘Your pa,’ continued Calcott, ‘stayed here with me. In this room. This was the last room he ever slept in. The last room, I mean to say, in a house. What do you make of that?’
Johnson put his book down and looked at the room. It was not news to him that his father had stayed at the house. He could see no sentiment or drama, such as Calcott saw, in the fact.
‘I don’t remember him much.’
‘He changed my life,’ said Calcott. ‘Here . . .’ he said, getting up and going to the barred window. A woman was carrying a petrol tin of water across the courtyard. ‘Go and get my Bible,’ he shouted at her in Portuguese. It was comic Cockney Portuguese.
She went across the yard with the tin, mumbling, and presently the cross-eyed child brought in the book and gazed at Johnson.
‘Clear out,’ shouted Calcott in English, raising the book at the child. On bare feet the child skipped out of the way and closed
the door.
‘That’s what your pa gave me,’ he said, handing the book to Johnson. Calcott moved to a low chair with his long bony legs sticking out like the legs of a spider. ‘He gave me that when he married me and Mrs C.’
Calcott got up and went to the bars of the window to spit. He grunted as he came back to the chair. He hesitated before sitting down and then decided to move the chair to the window in order to be near for spitting again.
‘There was a proper blow-up with the priest.’ Calcott lowered his voice: ‘They’re all Romans. On top, I mean. Underneath Gawdabove knows. The old bastard said she was damned. I told him if I saw him speaking to her again I’d throw him in the river. They’ve got a nerve though, those Romans. He said to me, “You wife’s living in adultery.” Bloody insolence, talking like that to a man about his wife.’
‘Anyway,’ continued Calcott, ‘“You’ve missed the bus,” I told him; “she may have been living in adultery and no credit to you, up to yesterday, but she isn’t today, see?’”
‘What did he do?’
‘What could he do? Why didn’t he go and clear up the town. Women’s the only industry on this river now rubber’s gone up the spout. Always was the only industry. That’s what he did for me, your pa. “If we’ve sinned,” he said, “we’ve sinned, but we can put it right. Don’t be one of the crowd that leaves it till Judgement. You don’t know when that will be,” he said. “It’s not your fault, Calcott,” he said. “You’re more sinned against than sinning.” Then he did us. Then he christened all the kids. There were three then.’
It appeared, however, that the nature of woman was deceitful, as Calcott continued his life story. When the other children arrived his wife took them one by one to be baptized by ‘the Romans,’ on the quiet.
‘They’re all rotten, the people of this country,’ Calcott said.
‘My father seems to have caused you trouble,’ Johnson said.
‘You say that!’ exclaimed Calcott. ‘You’re young. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Excuse me saying so, no offence, but you don’t know what your pa saved me from. Here—supposing you had a woman—I mean to say we’re all men, aren’t we?—well, and you got her in the family way; well, you can talk all round it and up and down it, but you know you’ve done wrong, don’t you? You’ve got a conscience. Gawdabove sees everything, you can’t deny that. You know you’ll have to answer up.
Dead Man Leading Page 7
