Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  Calcott hung about in the courtyard glancing at Harry’s window to catch sight of him reading the miraculous English letters. But all he saw was Harry putting them on a table and picking up the two whose envelopes were in Mrs Wright’s handwriting and staring at them. Calcott could not bear this and at last came to the window.

  ‘What’s the news?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Harry said.

  Calcott wetted his lips with desire to see news from England.

  ‘When Blakeney was here’—Calcott referred to an Englishman who had been on one of the plantations years before—‘we used to read each other’s letters. He had a girl in England and she used to write to him every week. None of these dago girls can write but, God, that girl! I got to know hers off by heart. She was in a restaurant.’

  Calcott, always garrulous, told the story at length, his eyes longingly gazing at the unopened envelopes. He laughed.

  ‘The only girl who ever wrote me from the old country was a blackmailing whore who said I’d given her twins. Can you beat it? Me! Twins. Threatened to bring ’em out here. Bloody fool I’d have looked. Have another guess, I said.’ Calcott glared and then shrugged his shoulders when he saw this got no response from Harry. With one last hungry glance he went away.

  ‘Class,’ Calcott muttered.

  The idea of being in a case so closely similar to Calcott’s added to the shock of still receiving no letter from Lucy; but again he felt all that was past history, the story of another man. Harry left the house. He went along to the outskirts of the town and sat on a terrace of the land, gazing at the islands which lay flashing like the anchored craft in the summer at Wright’s estuary. He did not return for his midday meal.

  When at last he came back, the family crowded to his window and Calcott pushed among them.

  ‘Don’t want anything,’ said Johnson brusquely and shut the window.

  But later he was sorry he had been rude and went to apologise to the women. Calcott, ever-present, came out and said, ‘Get him something to eat.’ They scuttled to it as if a whip had been cracked.

  ‘I’ve got a message from your pals,’ said Calcott. ‘They’re not coming today. Canoe’s rotten. They’re up on one of the islands. A chap down at the water-front told me. Last night did them in.’

  ‘When are they coming?’

  ‘Ask me another,’ said Calcott. ‘Tomorrow. Or the day after. I told Wright the canoe had been lying up in the sun all the summer.’

  ‘Are they all right?’

  ‘Sure, they’re all right. It was just the storm. They were on one of the islands.’

  Calcott added:

  ‘I told you something had happened, didn’t I? When that parrot died.’

  Then Harry looked at the letters and to him it seemed that for one day more, or two, he had been reprieved. He went out again to look at the canoe. He thought that if he could get someone to help him with it to the river he would load it up with stores and test it to see how it would behave under a full load. He argued that he must fill his time profitably until Wright and Phillips returned.

  Circumstance helped because Silva appeared again.

  ‘Don’t you do any work?’ Harry asked.

  ‘No,’ said Silva. He smiled. He had the curiously detached smile of a native child, full and yet seemingly vacant. He agreed eagerly to get men to carry the boat and the stores to the waterfront.

  It was a slow job; the afternoon had passed its greatest heat, longer shadows were on the river. One could feel the heat like a tongue on the skin but a little quick flicker of coming coolness began to vary its slow and heavy strokes. Harry took his gun. He might, he said, get a shot at something before sundown. He did not speak much to Silva or the men because his voice trembled; one of the effects of his sickness was to make his voice seem too strong for his body. Or perhaps it was that his thoughts and his body had become disparate: there was no returning strength in his mind but a kind of frozen chaos and his body went on independently of it.

  There was no such thing as a private departure from the town. There was always a nondescript crowd at the quay, amiable, grinning, tobacco-chewing people, chiefly men; some half-naked. They came out of the shadows of buildings to watch. Since the rubber industry had gone the shadows of the country seemed to exude this wretched, abandoned and derelict population which moved with the curiosity of a colony of monkeys to the bars of a cage.

  Many were laughing maliciously and some of the boatmen got into their boats. Harry saw he was going to have an escort. ‘He’ll drown’—they wanted to be in at the death. One or two seemed to be wondering whether they might come into possession of the gun. Silva kept off the importunate ones. He was the most voluble and important man on the quay.

  There were police on the quay. They stood, two or three of them, smoking dejectedly and jostled by the crowd and patiently rebuking them. When it was clear that Harry was ready to be off the eyes of the police woke from stupor. One of them, a lean bent twig of a man trussed like a fowl in the straps of his accoutrement, came forward and said:

  ‘Friend!’

  Harry paid no attention.

  ‘Friend!’ repeated the policeman, looking down into the boat.

  Harry looked up.

  ‘And the gun, friend?’ insinuated the policeman.

  ‘What about it?’ Harry asked.

  ‘It’s forbidden to take the gun.’

  ‘What’s this?’ said Silva. ‘Who says it’s forbidden to take the gun?’

  The policeman turned round and studied Silva. Suddenly a furious argument sprang up. Where was the English-man’s permit for the gun? Ah no! Ah yes! Where was it?

  All the world, the policeman said, must have a permit.

  A situation of this kind develops like the problem of the trinity. Schools of thought rise up, casuistries are insinuated, impregnable dogmas appear, a vast theological impasse is created diverting everyone into schisms and heresies. The English intelligence does not flower among these conceits and speculations; it takes the brusque, simple vulgar view of the case. Johnson said, ‘How much does the fellow want?’

  But the occasion was made for Silva. It was a time when the artist awoke in his blood. He broke with the rapidity of a dull tropical stem into a foliage of argument, marvellous and intricate. His words were like insinuations of perfume which first made the policeman’s nostrils twitch uncertainly, then moved his lips and entranced the eyes of his strapped-in face. And Silva, as an employee, though humble, at the Power Station, had almost an esoteric prestige. By the end of his speech, Silva had converted Johnson into a beguiling fiction. He was a Director of the Electric Company. He had a fleet of canvas boats which were to be used by the government. Wherever there is a gun in South America there is lyricism and Silva had made of Johnson a lyrical, mythical figure worthy at the end to stand by that other masterpiece of his—the Hamlet of the seances. Silva himself at the end of his speech turned dazzled eyes upon his model and even when Johnson said, ‘Well, what about it? Ten enough for the swine?’ the ecstasy of creation was not extinguished. The policeman was dazed. He turned round on the crowd and told them not to push him into the water. He gazed upon Johnson with wonder and softened, not indeed into smiles, but into a man whose importance was blissful and passive to him, almost sighing through his slightly parted lips as if he were being tickled by fingers divine in their discretion.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Silva. ‘I said I was going to the island with you. I know him. I got his son a job.’

  ‘Do you want to come?’ said Harry.

  At that moment it was what Silva most wanted in the world.

  A dozen other boats shot after them as they paddled out.

  The negro sergeant moved away into the crowd like a man in a dream. Silva sat amidships smiling like a small royalty at the courtly glitter of the attendant river. A race was on. The other boats came shouting and singing across Johnson’s bows, drifting near with criminal intent, splashing ahead to be first at the sinkin
g place. Gaiety was on the water. But Johnson’s canoe was as light as a leaf, Silva gave it a necessary steadiness and with stern low, bows pointing like a bird’s throat at the sky and with the breeze on their backs, they paddled on.

  And now with the green river wide before him, its far bank nearly a mile distant, the wind lifting the bows like a curled feather, they slithered over the water. There was not a cloud in the sky. The spray spat. He felt the lick of the current on his wrists, the travelling power of the stream. Islands of grass drifted down, slopping and suddy in their trailing wakes. Tree trunks rocked, gulls and plover rode on them and from the islands small birds enamelled in blue and vermillion went by like flecks of crying fire, and herons stood on the shore.

  Johnson went on. There must be one more mile, one more depth of healing to be touched.

  He knew it was a dangerous boat and would become more dangerous as it became worn and older. It would be dangerous in squalls. He loved the boat for being dangerous. He would love it more as its danger increased. He considered its trembling sides now and its stays of new wood with criticism and content. If he was testing his boat he was also testing himself, gambling, rediscovering his luck.

  Chapter Eight

  The sound of English voices got Calcott out of his hammock and he hurried out of the room. Wright and Phillips, their faces reddened by the sun and their eyes sparkling and dark with the pleasure of their journey, came towards him.

  ‘Seen young Johnson?’ asked Calcott.

  ‘Why, no,’ said Wright, ‘did he go to meet us?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Calcott. ‘That’s just it. Did he? He’s not here. He’s gone.’

  ‘Where has he gone?’ they asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Calcott, ‘where has he gone? And Silva’s gone too. They went out yesterday in the afternoon and we haven’t seen or heard of him since. It was after he got his mail.’

  ‘The devil he did,’ said Charles Wright and went to his table where the letters were. He put on his glasses and opened them while Calcott poured out all he knew about Harry’s flight. Calcott was afraid he would be made responsible. People come up on expeditions, get lost or in some sort of trouble and the next thing you heard was, ‘Well, didn’t you go up and get them out of it?’ As if he was a bloody park-keeper. Calcott gaped at Wright’s calm.

  ‘Any news?’ Calcott said, looking at the letters.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ Wright looked up in his friendly way, but the shadow or reproof was unmistakeable and Calcott, murmuring ‘The boy doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ left the room.

  After they had been alone some time Wright put down his letters and said, in a dead voice:

  ‘Harry sounds quite recovered, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He got bored,’ Phillips said.

  ‘Yes, if you want him to stay in bed you’ve got to chain him.’

  ‘I think perhaps,’ said Wright, ‘he ought to have asked the chief? Don’t you?’

  This was the only evidence that Wright was concerned about Johnson’s disappearance. Their calm, and their entire preoccupation with starting on the expedition straight away, silenced Calcott. He gazed restlessly and miserably at their preparations. They would go off like this, like people going off for a holiday and then he would be alone once more.

  ‘I don’t envy you,’ he growled.

  But he envied them from the bottom of his heart.

  That night passed and no news came of Johnson.

  But as the morning and the afternoon passed and all that remained for Wright and Phillips to do was to put their stores on the boat, the two men became restless and anxious. They could not sit in the room together; first one went out of the house and then the other followed him like a dog. Wright went down to the quay. They found out that Johnson had not gone to meet them. They went out to the islands to see if he had been there. They were afraid, deeply afraid when they heard about his canoe, that a squall had churned up the river and sunk him. They dared not speak their fear to each other. They joked.

  ‘Tit for tat,’ said Phillips. ‘He’s paying us out for leaving him.’

  ‘Third day of leave overstayed,’ said Wright on the third morning. That day a man who had been coming down the river during the last few days, a small planter, arrived with news. He had passed close to Johnson’s camp in the evening and seen his fire. Two other men confirmed this. They had seen Johnson two days before and still travelling upstream. He had passed out of sight. Later, echoing over the waters and down the forest wall, they had heard a shot.

  Wright stuck out his bearded chin.

  ‘Damn him,’ he said. He was white with anger. Yet in their different ways, Wright and Phillips were admiring Johnson for giving them the slip and for making this mystery.

  ‘Wait till we catch that young bastard!’ Wright exclaimed, looking into the milky foam of the early mists on the water. He was on his mettle.

  But Phillips was not angry, nor had he any cause to be. He was apprehensive. His vanity was wounded that Johnson should have fled from him. And when he laughed it was with less irony and more fully than Wright first of all. The anarchy of Johnson’s behaviour was what pleased him.

  ‘Let him go,’ he thought. ‘He has a right to go if he wants. We all have a right to do what we like. Let’s break all the rules.’

  This was a heroic rationalisation of his own personal fears of the journey itself. He had imagined in England a long journey on foot and on horseback. It was to be by water; and he disliked and feared the green snake smoothness of water and the translucent depths of the river where its beds became white sand, and he himself seemed to be mounted on a frail and perilous glass which might, at any moment, break beneath his weight and plunge him choking to the bottom.

  ‘I’m against all this water,’ he said to Wright. Wright was in no mood for Phillips. Their boat was a heavy one and they had a crew of four men at the short oars. There was a thatched deckhouse in the stern and the men rowed forward. The stores were amidships. They had a lighter boat in tow.

  ‘I’d give five pounds to see that lot sink,’ Calcott said, watching the long heavy boat when they left him. When he could see them no longer from the quay he went up to higher ground and watched them. They were passing like a black insect between two islands. They had come, they had broken away, he did not know where he was with his peculiar countrymen. He went back to his house and stared into the rooms where they had been. A bottle of whisky, scarcely touched, was the only tangible thing he could recall in connection with them. He went off and found it and took it down to the power station.

  A week passed. The two men rolled themselves in blankets on the sands where the camp was set each night and lay listening to the chatter of the men. It was strange to camp without Harry.

  By day they paused at the Indian villages, filthy places of greasy smoking fires and dilapidated huts, to get news of him. Sometimes they heard of him. He seemed very near but they realised he had got a good lead. They drank their coffee. They cooked their black beans, they mixed in the tasteless farinha meal, they lived off their guns. Dark green forest walls gave place to wilderness of scrub and then forest returned again. Rain soaked them. Sometimes the boats of Indians passed them, whole families in limp migration on the stream or fishermen shooting their arrows into the water. The Englishmen’s nerves were on edge; it was infuriating to think that Johnson was ahead of them and had, so to speak, sent these sights down secondhand.

  On one sandbank by chance they came upon one of his fires. A tobacco tin was there but the fire was cold and the birds had cleaned up all remnants.

  ‘He might have left a note,’ Phillips said.

  ‘Less wit!’ Wright replied shortly.

  They had exhausted the topic of Johnson. They could not imagine the reason for his behaviour; but preoccupation with him underlay all the pleasure of this life of camp and the casual adventures of each idle, sun-filled, monotonous day. Bitterness came into Wright’s baffled talk about him. Phillips could not but sy
mpathise with Wright but had the tact not to show his sympathy. They were in an absurd position. Wright was leading the expedition and yet he was following. Or there were two expeditions? Or—what was it? But when they talked of the next day’s plans or of the ultimate object of their journey—the journey on foot—and whether they would get any of the listless and greedy Indians to guide them from one river-head to the next when they came into really untouched country, Wright spoke as if nothing had been altered; as if what they had discussed in his house, the adventure of his middle age, his defiance of the thought that he was no longer a young man, remained inflexible.

  And the humiliation and anger had not only spiritual causes.

  ‘Never known him rat like this. Must be something,’ Wright kept saying. ‘There’s an explanation somewhere.’ ‘Cherchez la femme,’ said Phillips. He did not mean to say this. He was one of those young men who have a lot of tags, quips and quotations on their restless tongues. Charles Wright was getting tired of them. But he was sufficiently experienced a traveller to know how easily one gets on edge and finds petty faults in one’s companions.

  ‘Is there a woman?’ asked Wright.

  ‘Lucy was a bit gone on Harry,’ Phillips said. ‘I thought he was. But I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Wright quietly.

  ‘I thought,’ said Phillips with a little confusion, ‘you must have observed.’

  Wright said he had not and they talked no more about Harry. No one would have been more delighted than he if Lucy had talked of marrying Harry; no one more surprised if such a thing happened. But he was a little put out that he had not noticed this warmth. Not having noticed it made him feel old. How secretive the young were! He had never worried about his age for he knew his heart was young, but this gossip joined Johnson’s flight and Phillips’ furtiveness to mark him off from the young. Time has planted, not a gulf between the young and the middle-aged, but a wilderness. He would have felt equal to a desertion of men of his own age but betrayal by the young is another matter. That seemed to indicate boredom.