Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  Chapter Fourteen

  But not to Johnson. He had no doubts about survival. The question was, would they find his father? Had they passed him? Indians would know and could lead them to news to him. Him—what was meant by him?

  At night they kept a watch. Phillips suggested this and Johnson agreed. He agreed in a laconic, courteous way to a two-hour watch as if he were making a concession to the weakness of Phillips. Through the night the watcher kept up the fire.

  ‘What does he think about when he stands there?’ Phillips looked at the figure of Johnson against the flame under the white stars and slept without an answer.

  There were many things Johnson could think about; he could argue with guilt, could think of attack, hunger, thirst, death by exhaustion, the impossibility of getting through. He did not think of these things but of the date, the day of the week, the miles done, the correctness of their course, reduction of rations, prospect of water. Only one thing worried him and because of this he continually watched what animals they saw and then the sky, comparing the visibility of the stars on this night with their visibility on another. Every minute of his thinking was occupied with these things, as the second hand of a watch occupies every millimetre of time with its routine. The question that worried him was, would the rains come early this year? Or would they be late? There were freak years when the rains came early, and if ill-luck brought them early the chances of getting through were small in flooded country; sickness and hunger would come with the rains. And here, the Johnson of expeditions, trained in leadership, interrupted the new fanatic man. He looked at night as he sat by the fire engrossed in Pickwick yet aware of any sound, or of any pair of eyes that might be cut like agates out of the dark bush—he looked at Phillips and felt responsibility. Ought they to go back?

  He argued it down. They were equal partners, taking equal risks. But the sense of responsibility, lying still in the day, grew in the night when he thought of the rains and the misery of sickness. He stared into the fire. He, like Phillips, had grown thin and his eyes were sunken, intent, hungry in their look and circled by violet rings. There grew in him the desire not to have responsibility. There grew in him the desire to be alone.

  In the day following he was always ahead, aiming at increasing the distance between them. Yet he hardly had a full consciousness of what he was doing. Before nightfall, after frying their food in the blackened pan, chewing the tough meat in their teeth and wiping the blood and the fat from their hands on their clothes or the grass, belching like squatting animals, and staring with dyspeptic eyes, they tried to talk. Or Phillips tried. To talk one had to use language beyond the scope of their abbreviations and slang, to relapse into the old buried language, so rich in betrayal. It did not seem to either of the two men that there was a betrayal in this language, there was only a tacit reluctance to use it.

  ‘Until we meet Indians’ (Johnson was on his persisting theme), ‘we shall not know where he is.’

  ‘He’ was the father. By consent the name of ‘father’ was not used. It is tabu to use the name of the god.

  ‘Is?’ said Phillips. ‘You don’t think he is alive?’

  It had all been discussed before as a piece of speculation; now it had become oddly personal. Wright had demonstrated in old discussions that the missionary must be dead. A white man could not survive years of life with the Indians, unless he was mad, any more than he could live in a stable.

  ‘He might be alive,’ Harry said.

  ‘If he is alive he is insane,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘He was a strong man in the prime of life,’ Harry said.

  Reason argued that he must be dead, but every step was like an act of belief in his life. Little by little the father’s life grew, the flickers of wind might be his breath, the brilliance of the sun on the bush might be the light of his eyes. He was there, intangible but unmistakeable, a pervasive presence. Perhaps now he was among those trees, perhaps now in that valley; perhaps now, as they cooked their food, he was cooking his and when they lay down to sleep, he too lay down in some Indian village. Johnson’s face became obstinate, the underlip red as a worm pushed out in the beard. What would they say to him when they met him? What would be changed. What would he wear? How would they know him?

  Johnson remembered a slim man with large, rather cunning eyes standing on the platform at Waterloo more than seventeen years before. His mother and brothers were there. They, the children, were excited. They were glad that their father was going because it made them proud and because they would be free. They were impatient with their mother because she had tears in her eyes. The missionary took out his newspaper. He was an economical man who bought one newspaper in the morning and preserved it all day. His sons smelled the ink-smell of the newspaper on him when they kissed him. It seemed natural that so much should be written about him in newspapers afterwards.

  Johnson remembered other things about him. His shouts to them when he taught them to swim, how he taught them to camp and light fires, how he said Grace before meals, how his voice was sonorous and harsh in churches, how he showed them native weapons, how there was always a quarrel with the missionary society, full of sarcasms on their father’s part, about money. Sometimes important people from the society came to the house and then their father would talk in a language they rarely heard there. A very zealous, religious jargon. After these people had gone they often heard their father say with sudden candour, ‘Keeping these people quiet is a question of knowing the language.’ He always spoke enviously of men who were free of the missionary society. There was also a man called Mr Bunter who lived next door and had been in Malay. He used to come in and attack their father and tell him stories against the missionaries. Their father used then to look powerful, austere and cunning, like a god, when he counter-attacked upon Mr Bunter. But these memories were few and confused and the father they represented was only a fragment of the father of whom Johnson thought. The living father was the man of the last seventeen years or more, the man they knew nothing about, a vacancy rather than a man. He was all the things one did not know. One would feel one had grown up behind his back and that one brought the whole of one’s manhood to his judgement. One poured onself into the invisible, intangible, unknown mould of this vacancy.

  Phillips looked steadily at Johnson. He wanted to say quietly, ‘I want to go back.’

  But the question of going on or going back had become academic. Under these stars, in these bush smells, hundreds of miles from help or knowledge, there were two human beings become ciphers, written off merely as missing. Yet wherever Johnson walked there was courage and Phillips drank it.

  Johnson loosened their seriousness by smiling. He said:

  ‘He might be king of this country.’

  Phillips said, ‘The great white chief with an Indian wife, singing psalms in holy bigamy.’

  ‘Me, the returning prodigal, spoiling it.’

  ‘This bloody country’s full of your brothers and sisters, I expect.’

  They laughed a long time and Phillips prolonged his laugh to live longer in its absurd happiness as if it would be a long time before they would speak or laugh again. He laughed full out.

  They were camped within fifty yards of a wall of trees. Daylight had not gone and as Phillips’ laughter died there came from the forest another but extraordinary roaring laugh which they thought at first was an echo. It ended abruptly and then—they had got to their feet, looking at the trees—it came again.

  The sound was animal, but not the husky abrupt roar of a great cat or any other animal noise they knew or had heard. It was not a very still time for the insects were striking and there were the rattlenotes of known birds, but this sound broke through them all; it was like the shout or gulp of a drunken man, maniacal and sudden and yet concerned with some private domestic matter. It was like the noise of man, but of a gigantic man, the roar of a Lear in madness.

  The sound did not come again and the evening poured its growing quietness into the wound
.

  ‘Charles heard that once,’ Johnson said. (This was one of the few times he mentioned Wright’s name.) ‘He didn’t know what it was.’

  The sound came from an orang-outang or perhaps a tree had fallen and monkeys had jumped screaming with it.

  They sat down and their weak laughter was ended.

  ‘My father,’ Harry said, ‘did not take anyone with him through this country.’

  One took the first watch and the other slept. A joint experience of the rare makes love grow in the heart. Speaking had become this rare thing and when Harry stood up to watch and Gilbert lay down to sleep, each was wide awake with his trust. But as the night went by and sleep did not come to Phillips the trust grew tired and anger grew in his body. He saw the black figure of Johnson sometimes standing, sometimes squatting in the light of the fire, alone. There was no communication. There was love and then the anger of the frustration of love, the hatred of the impossibility of being mixed in that man and being him.

  In the beautiful morning, cool as a pond and shining, the two men went on. The mists were like seeding cotton on the ephemeral trees. Every day a shorter journey, every day the heat and weariness, the pains of the body, the greed for food and the need of water coming earlier. They were made hungry and exhausted now by the act of strapping on their packs and of getting to their feet under their grotesque loads of greasy pots and pans.

  On the march the body does its mechanical work and the mind prowls around it feeding on the past and the future. The body goes on now, but the mind may be twenty years away in some other landscape, hearing other sounds. Coming upon that place where, the night before, they had talked, Phillips stopped dead in his march. He heard the words of the night before—‘My father did not take anyone with him through this country’—and saw another startling meaning in them. The bowed figure ahead of him, loaded under the sun and scarcely visible against the chloride green of the vegetation in the glare, had become a different and more remote person. Phillips realised that Johnson wished he, too, were alone like his father. He wished that Phillips was not with him. Phillips was an irrelevance.

  First of all Phillips was in panic. He hurried his pace to catch up Johnson. The pans clanked. In the bush there are deep belts of watching silence, especially as the sun goes higher; then in some places there are belts of sound, from birds chiefly. After that there are long times when the monkeys are screaming perpetually in the tops of the trees, so that the traveller is maddened. In the silences he is awed and alert for the sudden honk, the fall of a fruit, the distant mysterious crash which an animal may have made or which may come from a falling branch; in the cries of monkeys and birds he has a deafened and exasperated longing to be in the silence again. The pans clanked on Phillips’ back and hit his thighs, breaking the silence as he exerted himself in panic to catch up Johnson.

  Johnson stopped, bending over his compass.

  ‘God, I’m a fool,’ Phillips thought. He was ashamed now he had overtaken Harry. But he saw to it that they went on side by side, pretending that his panic was merely folly, stamping it down.

  The fear of the country, of every tree and inhuman mile ahead of them, now was streaming in Phillips. When they paused he looked back and he looked ahead. The country behind them was exactly like the country ahead, one view a snapshot copy of the other. Harry wished to be alone! Turning back would be like going on. These were the observations of pure terror and Phillips could feel his scalp stiffen and his hair seem to separate and drag with fright. He was shut in a room with two doors, and both locked. At the height of these panics he saw he was caught. There was no way out.

  Then he calmed himself, looking at Johnson.

  He knows. He is not tortured like this. He is calm. He observes. He thinks and does not imagine.

  All these statements were true except the first. Johnson did not know. All Johnson thought was:

  I am responsible. If I were free of this responsibility, if he were not here, I could get on.

  This duel went on in silence between them, the distance between them vacant yet electric with this soundless, speechless skirmishing. And Johnson’s preoccupations were scientific.

  One would be able to test the truth of the saying that a man alone in the bush would go mad.

  It seemed to him an immoderate statement. He saw no reason to believe that he would go mad if he were alone.

  The dryness of the day became virulent as it advanced. They appeared to be on the long slope of a plateau and the trees went to north, south, east and west in an unbroken circle of green, from which all strength had been taken by the light which burned in it. At noon there was no water.

  ‘No Indians,’ Phillips said, ‘because no mud. They know it’s drying up and cleared out.’

  This was the first time they had been waterless. They looked with craving at the blue sky, stepping out of the shade to search it fully. Johnson had said casually, ‘With any luck we shall find water.’

  A total change of mood had come upon Phillips. He had not been light-hearted or serene in this march but there had been something romantic in it for him. He knew that they were taking great risks and that if some audience could watch them they would be considered gallant. All day he created imaginary audiences. It would be something to boast about. The chief glory of their folly went to Harry, who had gone imaginatively and with his dogged will upon the project; but glory was reflected upon Phillips.

  Phillips in these days was seeing a dream of courage become real as he followed Harry. The dream was the real motive of his departure from England: to prove that he could master the private current of fear that was always drifting against him in every moment of the day and diverting him with imperceptible dissuasions from the course of his imagination and will.

  Following Harry he found an increase of this mastery. Virtue came out of Harry as he led and poured into Phillips as he followed. The miles ahead, when they stood level with each other, paralysed the will, but as Harry moved off into them the very earth and its trees seemed to lose hostility, every yard taken became safe. And through the days a struggle not to follow Harry but to be level with him took place in Phillips. He attempted to gain on him; and miraculously, as every day died, fear diminished until he felt on the brink of Harry’s fearlessness. Seeking the father, he was to be redeemed by the son.

  And then while he was on the very brink of this redemption, the door had closed on him. You could see this. Courtesy and affability drop away in camp. There was now almost no concealment on Johnson’s part. He wanted, quite bluntly, to be alone. The fact preyed on Phillips’ mind. Harry wished to be alone, thought it simple, easy, desirable to be alone in this place where even being with a companion was fearful and dangerous. Rejected by the son! Denied a place beside the hero! Contemptuously treated, unredeemed, irrelevant!

  When men are living in their communities among their fellows, they can forget about these things or work them off in a dozen ways. A few solitaries become morbid, create works of art, are ill, commit the occasional crime. In sick societies they take political power and become tyrants. But these two men were alone. The joy of realising a dream changed into the disillusion of seeing it was a dream only; he could not have Harry’s courage. In that unguarded excess of admiration for Harry, Phillips had had, there had been, as in all love, a germ of hatred, which the fanaticism of solitude could multiply into a nucleus.

  ‘He wants to be alone—then let him be alone. Let him die.’ Let him die means, ‘I will kill him. I will show who it is that chooses to be alone!’

  ‘He wants to be alone’—that meant humiliation.

  ‘I hate him for humiliating me. I will avenge myself.’

  But in all crises where Harry was concerned there was this thought to fall back on: ‘I am with this man for Lucy’s sake and I am more deeply Lucy’s because I am not her lover any longer, because we passed through love and are in the kind of immortality of having loved. But he and she are muddled together in the temporal struggle of love,
wounding each other, kicking and bruising like animals on heat, half angry with the force that has possessed them against their wills.’

  So his mood rambled on: ‘He humiliates me. All right. But he can’t. He can’t be alone. He can’t be alone from Lucy or me because we are all bound up in this. We are joined through Lucy. It is inescapable.’

  He saw Harry stop to read the compass. ‘He has got to know this.’

  Every stumble and jerk of the marsh, every stab of pain in his limping foot, increased Phillips’ determination.

  ‘I suffer now but for every stab you shall suffer. This is a joint pain. You deserted me.’

  It occurred to him that the way to hold Harry was to tell him that he (Gilbert) had been Lucy’s lover. That would arrest and hold him, make him see the bond.

  He sat by the fire preparing to tell Johnson that he had been Lucy’s lover. His hatred was swelling. All Phillips knew was that this man had a damn-fool, cocksure genius for trying to kill himself; the muddler with women, the red-faced average man of moderate opinions and bloody silences because he had nothing in his head, had landed them in this camp without water. He began in malice, to whip and bludgeon this clod into seeing he wasn’t infallible, couldn’t be alone, was no better than anyone else.

  But when he opened his mouth to speak all he could say was:

  ‘I suppose you know we’re going in a circle.’

  ‘Oh, how’s that?’

  ‘Of course we’re going in circles. You always do in the bush. You must know that.’

  Johnson was surprised at the taunting tone, but said calmly:

  ‘In that case we’ll be back at the river. We’ll get water.’

  ‘We’re not near the river. We’re lost. You know we’re lost. I said turn back two days ago.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ Johnson said.

  ‘Show me the map then, go on, show me,’ Phillips said. ‘If you know.’

  Johnson began to draw out the useless map.

  ‘No, put it away,’ Phillips said. ‘That map’s no good. We both know that.’