Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  There was another mystery in this for Charles Wright. Harry had got Silva the Portuguese with him. This man Wright remembered in his earlier expedition. He had been taken on by the gold-prospectors. Why had Harry taken him? Was Harry purposely stealing a march on them under Silva’s guidance? Wright was tortured by this; for he was too noble and simple a man to suspect readily and he was far more unhappy because of doubts and suspicions which attacked him, than because of Harry’s desertion.

  Their boat was heavy. Johnson’s was light. There were four men at the extraordinary oars of their boats—which Phillips called the sewage scoops—and the two Englishmen had tried to manage them. It took time to get any skill and the work was monotonous. Their hands were cut and blistered by the rough poles. Again they lost time by the scrupulousness of the enquiries, for they might easily have passed Johnson on the river. The greater part of one morning was lost because the crew had gone up to a village the night before and found drink and women. They came back sullen, exhausted and quarrelsome. They made excuses to stop rowing in the fierce sun. Wright’s usually persuasive patience left him and he made the mistake of showing his anger. ‘And do stop humming and staring like a fool,’ he cried to Phillips. Phillips apologised. When he had done this he realised at once that Wright would have preferred him not to apologise.

  But this did not reconcile the four Brazilians. That day had to be lost and a better beginning was made the next day, when the Brazilians had stopped talking about the women: and they smiled again when Wright promised them beer the day they caught up Johnson.

  But on the ninth day they heard news which brought the pursuit to a crisis.

  It was in the evening. They had encamped on a sandbank two miles long and the crew were in a good humour because they had found turtle-tracks in the sand and had traced them to the place where the eggs were buried. They had dug out forty-five eggs. In the middle of preparations for the meal, Phillips saw a tall man dressed only in a shirt walking across the sand towards them. He was dark against the setting sun and for a moment they thought he was Johnson. He called to Wright and they stood waiting for the stranger. He was a tall European with lobster-coloured skin and a short ragged fair beard.

  ‘Good day,’ he said in Portuguese, standing stiffly, grotesquely formal in his fluttering shirt. ‘My name is Schauer. I’m a Czech,’ he said. ‘I see your camp smoke.’

  ‘Do come in,’ said Phillips. ‘You’ve come at the right moment. We’ll lay a place for you.’

  The enormous Czech sat down in the sand. He explained that he had come down that afternoon.

  ‘From the rapids?’ asked Wright.

  ‘What is that?’ asked the Czech politely. His English was poor.

  ‘You know—the rapids, the . . .’ Phillips made absurd gestures.

  ‘Oh no,’ said the Czech. ‘From the little river.’

  ‘Have you seen a man in a canvas canoe?’ they asked at once.

  It appeared he had seen Johnson two days earlier but on ‘the little river.’

  ‘He’s gone the wrong way,’ said Wright dumbfounded.

  Now, indeed, Johnson was leading the expedition.

  All the evening they feasted the Czech on turtles’ eggs with sugar, and they sat picking ticks out of their skin; but the question ‘Why the little river?’ did not leave their minds. Johnson had not mentioned his pursuers to the Czech. They spent the night talking together in muddled English about the country ahead and then had parted. He had plenty of food, the Czech said.

  ‘Yet he knew,’ Wright said to Phillips, ‘that we are not going up that river.’

  ‘He likes travelling alone,’ Phillips said. ‘When we were coming up to you, do you remember I told you he said it would save time if we cut across country? I said to him, “You can’t go through this forest very far. There are no roads.” But he said, “The Indians get through. One could go from tribe to tribe. They’re not hostile. Even the so-called hostile ones are all right if you manage them. Anyway,” he said, “my idea would be to keep clear of them.” Of course, he didn’t do it but I thought to myself, “If I weren’t here he might.” I supose the idea just occurs to him. When someone says something is impossible he wants to do it. He likes difficulty. Directly the difficulty becomes simple he is happy for a moment because it proves what he always said, then he starts adding a new difficulty.’

  They had been talking in the dry cool darkness and the sad, piping cries of the river birds and the cold lap of the river on the shore came between their words. The silence of other nights had gone because now the sounds of the rapids miles distant came to them along the river, a moan like the organ sound of a steady wind in the forest. There were places where the current had been swift and they had kept to the shore most of the day.

  To be alone. But Wright, hearing the prolonged diapason of the rapids, knew it would be difficult for a man to pass alone in a canvas boat when he did not know the river. A man like Silva would desert, and Wright thought it was doubtful if even the converted or pacified Indians of the river villages could resist for long the chance of attacking a man alone who knew nothing of their language except a few odd words.

  Johnson’s smattering of Guarani would not take him far. When men are alone they begin to talk to themselves and create worlds of habit and fantasy in which they retreat from the real world. It is the beginning of madness. But he knew that the conditions of the country, the conditions of solitude, were ultimately beyond luck and the purely reckless impulse and that the chance of Johnson being killed by accident or getting ill and dying, dying of thirst or poison or exhaustion, were very great. And Wright forgot his own wounded pride, and his anger, in his anxiety to save the young man.

  When they set out again and were themselves in sight of the rock islands and the swift water of the rapids, stopping with some Indians who came whining and squeaking like bats to the shore, they heard that Johnson had passed the rapids. He and Silva had managed it.

  Book Three

  Chapter Nine

  Desertion is one of the commonest occurrences among parties of exploration. A man falls sick, his nerve fails, there are quarrels about objective, direction, time or money, there is jealousy of a leader, weakness or tyranny in authority; again in isolation petty idiosyncratic differences become magnified into intolerable crimes. Those who take the heroic view of men who go into new country are shocked when on closer view they see their gods behaving like a nunnery; sides are taken; there is talk of betrayer and betrayed.

  Every possible reason has been brought forward to explain the desertion of Wright by Harry Johnson. Two of the most fantastic, so fantastic that they could easily be disproved, happened to come near the truth. They came from Silva, an artist in such matters but with the artist’s irresponsibility, his weakness for getting his facts slightly wrong. Silva said that Johnson had two grudges against Wright: one that Wright had not told him that the real object of the expedition was to discover the gold which Wright knew of from his earlier expedition. Wright, said Silva, had deceived his friends. He had been in the country weeks before either of them and had been at a mineralogists’ conference at Caracas. The proposal had been made to him there and he and the mining company were going to get the benefit of it.

  This was untrue, but there is no doubt that while they were together Silva suggested such a story to Harry Johnson and that they discussed the probity of Wright.

  The second alleged cause of quarrel between Wright and Johnson was in Silva’s best melodramatic manner; it was that Johnson was in love with Charles Wright’s wife and that she had just had a child by him. Before his flight he had had letters from her. Calcott and Phillips, too, both confirmed that Harry had been exercised about letters. Neither of these stories has appeared in any book on the Wright expedition, but a sensational American paper got hold of the latter story and published it. The article was never reproduced in England; but when grave rumours about Johnson and Wright got about, they made, with this earlier episode, a very plausi
ble story. Phillips’ diaries say nothing of these things. He records simply: ‘Harry gone.’ ‘No news of Harry.’ And so on. He speculates and then drifts into his own sensations. He is accurate but unrevealing. Phillips was not, however, suppressing what he knew; like so many diarists, he was overwhelmed by the big event. The more he felt the less he wrote. And there is another reason: he was overwhelmed, and for the first time in his life, by something that had occurred, not to himself, but to somebody else. By a paradox, it is not from Phillips’ accuracies that a reader would learn what happened at this time, but from Silva’s fantasies. The creator of Hamlet had once more merely fantasticated the truth.

  For Harry Johnson did not come back that evening. He intended to return and yet he went on and on up the river knowing that night would come suddenly and he would be too far to go back. He camped for the night on a sandbank and took draughts of freedom from the night. Silva was no difficulty; rather he justified the act. The creator of a new life requires a witness. The nonchalance and irresponsibility of Silva was a quality which gave a lightness to the undertaking.

  And he was the most delicate tempter. In the morning Johnson’s first thought was that Wright and Phillips would return; Silva unknowingly (or perhaps knowingly?) diverted his thoughts. He began to boast of his strength

  ‘I can swim far,’ he said. To show this he took off his clothes and went into the river. He was pot-bellied, dark-skinned and very hairy. There was a splash and away he swam.

  ‘You see,’ he said. He crawled out of the water. He pointed to the muscles on his arms and his thighs and then performed small gymnastic acts on the sands. When he had done this he said like a child:

  ‘I come with you?’

  The startling thing about Silva was the way he apparently read that part of Johnson which was pressing him not to go back.

  ‘And your job?’ said Johnson. ‘What will Mr Calcott say?’

  ‘Mr Calcott! He is a fool. He is old and mad. I cannot go back to work under that man.’

  There was your Silva! He did not even consider the question of obligations. He stood there, sweating and nonchalant with his two days’ growth of beard, his eyes ringed with sleepiness, and his smooth hair roughened by the wind.

  ‘I go with you,’ said Silva simply.

  ‘Where?’ asked Johnson with uneasy amusement.

  ‘Anywhere. The way your father went,’ Silva said in his perfunctory way. Johnson involuntarily turned and looked at the river as though expecting to see his father pass by in the sun of seventeen years ago.

  A curious vividness was given to everything Silva said by the imperfection of his English. The faults of accentuation, or a word misplaced, strengthened the words with their streak of the bizarre, gave a suggestion of ulterior penetration and meaning. The birds of the river whistled and called like boys. Their hardness and fullness and boldness, unlike the softer chatter of English birds, was a language; Silva’s speech had the same arresting, exotic quality. It was all the more arresting when Silva spoke about the dead missionary passing along the river.

  His voice was like the voice of the free, wild country. It tempted not the mind but those instincts that quiver at new sounds.

  Johnson looked at the glittering sweep of the river leading into deeper and deeper hazes and recesses of heat that would be like ever fiercer ovens of guilt as he passed back through them to Wright. And then he turned to Silva and the air was younger and fresher and there was no guilt. Because Silva did not know him, because not even instinctively could he guess, because he was foreign. Johnson had grown to crave to be alone, not to feel the minds of people cast intangibly upon him with the spidery lightness of a net. The barrier of a race different from his own lay beneficently between Silva and himself.

  ‘Going to shoot something,’ muttered Johnson and trudged across the sand to the trees two or three hundred yards away. The morning was passing. Silva dozing on the sand was awakened by shots and the rising of a hundred birds out of the trees and the flight of white birds from the sand crying over the river. Johnson came back with his bag. He flung the quails into the boat and said:

  ‘Dinner. We’ll push off.’

  He was heavy-browed with thought.

  Harry Johnson was a reasonable man. But, above all, a reasonable man and very balanced. Judicious, carefully weighing the pros and the cons. At thirteen years of age, in common with thousands of other young Englishmen, he had heard his first Public School master tell him that one played for the side and not for oneself, that one was loyal to the House, the School and the King. But that it was not done to mention these convictions. Like every intensely individual creature he silently revolted from the code. Admirable for the average man, it seemed at variance with most of his instincts. He respected it only when it seemed to be the common sense; and each occasion had to be judged for itself.

  But the thing he had most feared in loving a woman had come upon him: it had overthrown his reason. He had found himself in a world of naked instincts, and the appetite of the instincts increased with eating. He had discovered how strong his desire for self-torture was. After he had been Lucy’s lover for a time and she was congratulating herself on rescuing a man from the marked self-loving fantasies of the solitary, he found that his torture fantasies had not disappeared—as she imagined they had—but that now he wished to make them real. Lucy and he had quarrelled.

  After he had become her lover this was the perpetual subject of their quarrels. They started when one day in a London street he saw a man roped to a chair.

  ‘Wait,’ said Harry. ‘You watch.’ They saw the man step easily out of the knots that bound him. Lucy marvelled. She and Harry were in love and, wandering together in the streets, they were always seeing things to marvel at. Every sight was tinged with this miraculous quality. But Harry said, ‘That is not as difficult as it seems. I’ll show you when we get back.’ When they got back to her flat he took a rope from his suitcase. It was the same old sheet which he had once exchanged in Wright’s boat.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’

  He sat on a chair and held out the rope.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  Lucy was a little disturbed and incredulous and, after some argument, did as he told her. It was only after a few minutes, after seeing the look in Harry’s eyes, that she suspected this imitation of the trick they had seen in the street was a pretext.

  He was ashamed when he saw her horror; that is, his mind was ashamed, but instinct is non-moral and unrepentant. And it was the more powerful for being brought to the surface. They quarrelled and their quarrel ended, under Lucy’s guidance, in confession. Because he was abnormal, he said, he had taken to the life he lived. He went to live alone; his journeys were a mortification of the flesh, a self-torture in flight to the ineffable sensations of the spirit.

  The guilt he had felt because of Lucy was really another guilt in disguise; it was also the fruit of his dissatisfaction with her: ‘She is having a child; that is my punishment (and her punishment) because she is not a satisfying woman to me.’

  And now on the brink of his flight from Charles Wright, because of Lucy, the same motive of self-punishment was at work. It was coupled with the instinct which makes a man punish one before whom he feels guilty. You wrong a man once; and you wrong him again as a revenge for making you feel guilty. In making you feel guilty, he wrongs you. You are justified in wronging him in return; not morally justified. Morality does not come into the matter; it is inevitable.

  So one guilt wipes out another. A murder wipes out a theft. To abandon Wright was against all his tradition and his reason; but in guilt, if it is strong enough and when it is aided by deeper guilt in one’s nature and the aspiration to freedom which springs perhaps from the very depths of guilt, tradition and reason arc nothing.

  Silva and he pushed off the boat and paddled upstream. And here again Silva appeared to be the ideal unwitting accomplice; he had fertilised the seed of flight. Now he was caring for it. H
e talked incessantly. They went on under the protection of his chatter. A look of deep content was on his face.

  ‘You’ll have to work,’ Johnson said.

  Silva took a paddle.

  Johnson looked behind them often.

  ‘They’ll pick us up,’ he said, ‘when they get back.’ Still he had not admitted his desertion.

  Sometimes he smiled sardonically at the thought of pursuit. He was still elated on the water. That night at their encampment when the darkness came, Harry lay in the glow of the fire and Silva was astonished to hear him start singing. Onward Christian Soldiers, Tipperary, and Less than the Dust were among the songs. Silva, after tactful listening, sang two or three Brazilian songs, but Johnson interrupted him and started singing again. His voice sounded small and strained in the wide river air and he broke off if a fish jumped or a tree cracked or a night bird called.

  ‘This bloody country’s too big. It’s got too much of everything,’ Johnson said suddenly. This was the only sign that he had even noticed the country.

  Silva understood that Johnson was singing with sadness and anger and did not follow him when he got up and walked away for two hours to be alone. When he came back he said:

  ‘You say, Silva, you know where my father went.’

  ‘I know where he left the river,’ said Silva.

  He pointed vaguely in the darkness.

  ‘He must have wanted a job,’ Harry said.

  He spoke abruptly and hastily to Silva, treating him with that laconic contempt which conceals the gratitude one feels to an accomplice.

  They got on fast the next day and, getting ashore in the evening, carried the canoe on their heads past the rapids. Silva said little and sweated under his load. But he did not complain.

  ‘We stop here,’ he said, concealing his weakness.

  ‘No,’ said Johnson. ‘Got to get on.’

  He had been going to stop, but he had to be the taskmaster to Silva. They ate a cold greasy meal that night in the darkness and in the middle of the night there was rain, heavy, driving rods of rain. They were soaked and shivering in the morning. Silva was miserable. He stood about pouting at the river. But coffee and food revived him and the sun dried them. He began to boast about ‘a little drop of rain’ hurting no one. He spoke always as though at any moment he might walk away and leave Johnson out of absentmindedness.