Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  ‘The trees grow,’ said Johnson quietly.

  Phillips looked at the trees which grew while he and Johnson burned and weakened. Their mouths were like charred holes.

  Phillips took out his bottle and held it over his tongue. He tried to imagine a single drop falling upon it.

  That night they sat awake by the fire and the roots of their tongues grew, like a hand wrenching down their throats. Many times they got up to feel the leaves of the bushes for dew and licked them, imagining dew was there. Only their physical weariness gave them two or three hours’ relief in sleep, and they woke before dawn shivering and astonished; for both had dreamed of the morning mist and the dew cupped in the leaves and water curling before them.

  They looked in stupor at each other. There was an irony in their eyes. It would be easier to lie down here in the shade and watch madness creep upon them, rather than to go on and seek it.

  They did not eat but at once got up and open-mouthed went on.

  ‘I can’t go on. Why does he go on ahead? He’s always ahead. I can’t go on. God, I can’t shout to him.’

  Phillips staggered with the blood deafening his ears. Johnson turned. His mouth too gaped open. His eyes stared and glared distended in his thin face. His teeth were pronounced as they are in a skull. They gave him the air of grinning diabolically. Phillips sank faintly to the ground. Johnson did not move. He stared a long time at Phillips, then he too, forty yards away, sat down and waited for Phillips to rise. A last, since Phillips did not rise, Johnson went back to him.

  Phillips said, ‘I’m finished.’

  ‘Lie down,’ Johnson said.

  They sat side by side muttering, looking with pity at each other, the perfunctory pity one might feel for a dead rat. The flies came on their lips. Sometimes the breeze, more active this day in mocking freshness, seemed like the sound of water.

  Johnson unhitched the pans and the sack of meal that were tied to Phillips and took the extra load himself. If there was space in the heat to contain feeling about each other, the feeling was hatred. A whine came into Phillips’ voice, a lameness in his stagger—the lameness of his bad foot—his mouth gaped, all hateful things. The straining of the neck from the loaded shoulders, the blank, glazed stare of the eyes, were hateful. A peremptory irritable terseness came into Johnson’s voice. Then under his beard he looked like some seedy Christ. Hateful also were the dressings on his boils. The life of each, the separate existence of each with its tacit claim to a share of help from Heaven, was hateful.

  They chewed leaves but these were bitter and stinging to the tongue, the green mash dried on it and they had no spittle, only a film of white foam, bitter stuff from the foul stomach.

  ‘Christ!’ muttered Phillips continually. ‘I must drink. I am terribly, terribly sorry to have to state your Royal Highness, father and mother of all, I must get some water.’

  If he doesn’t find that bloody river I’ll kill him. I’ll pot him off like I did that chap on the launch. Oh God, what a fool I was to come with him! I remember going from the river. It dropped away behind the rock. This is how it would end. I knew this. All my life I have seen how everything would end. Lucy, your two bloody lovers.

  And Johnson: Without water one can last seven days. I’ll leave him and bring back water from the river. A mile is taking us nearly an hour. I can manage a day more. I’ll leave everything except gun and pan and go light. I’ll mark trees with an axe. I’ll get to that water. If one of us goes mad he must be tied down in the shade and all arms must be taken away.

  Phillips stopped. Through the veil of lesser trees, bush-bearded and wired in by thicket, was a small cliff of grey rock with the northern side deep in shade. There had been rock cropping out in the land for days but this cliff-faced pile, thirty feet high, was like the ruins of a castle. He stopped. Fontainebleau, he remembered, rocks like these, a girl with ringleted hair, then photographs of buried Maya temples.

  ‘Harry!’ Didn’t hear.

  He waited. A smile—he thought it was a smile—came on his lips as the shadows of the trees passed like wands over Johnson until he was not a man but a ghost in the trees. Gilbert smiled to think that this was the last of the fool, going further and further away, leaving him behind. Resignedly: ‘He’ll be alone and I in Fontainebleau listening to nightingales.’ Watching him go, the sunlit man, the shadowed man, the sunlit man with a gun, the shadowed man: ‘He’s alone. He’s alone. It’s the last I saw of him Lucy. He was going on.’

  Phillips stood there. A vulture was on the rock.

  ‘You shall not be alone,’ Phillips called out with all his strength. The hardly audible cry made him fall to his knees as if he were in prayer and at this moment Johnson turned and again saw him kneeling. This time the two men did not move for a long time. They merely stared at each other.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It amounted to this now: there was Johnson’s instinct that salvation lay in going on to the river, that every blistered step took them nearer. To stop was to cease to act. What did one do if one ceased to act? Souls made to act fester in inaction.

  There was Phillips’ instinct that salvation lay in stopping now, here, anywhere, but in stopping. In action there was nothing but futility. One must resign oneself a thousand times a day, accepting and being still. One must die in advance. Man dies from the moment he is born. Wise men are inoculated and prepared by a myriad small deaths.

  So each saw in the other in this extremity the enemy who wished to destroy him. Each saw the opposite of himself. There were looks of ironical pity in their faces, a dumb questioning, a bond almost of love and then a wild, alert apartness from each other.

  To both of them it was mysterious and intolerable that the creature who was bringing him the threat of death was alive, passive, suffering a shared pain and moving before his eyes. Each began to watch with fascination the movements of the other’s body. They lowered their eyes. They looked at each other’s hands; the hairier, slender, strong and nervous hands of Phillips whose strength was in his wrists; the blunt, short, thick red hands of Johnson with wide-set hairless pores.

  Johnson had consented to go to the rock. Leading the way he had cut slowly, his great strength diminished, at the thick mesh of scrub, and the birds flew up, flying low between the trunks of the trees.

  Under the shadowed wall where they sat, the rock had split into a tilted platform two yards wide and the top was visible. A stunted tree grew there and one branch of it was the habitual, whitened perch of the vultures. The bird they had first seen was now joined by another and they perched there, rising from time to time to clap their moulting wings.

  The nightingales at Fontainebleau sang all night in the moonlight. He must love his father.

  My father is the flowing river where I could drink. He went alone without an Indian.

  Johnson unstrapped some of his load. He had endured great pain from his boils, but the pain borne in silence had concentrated and made narrow and keener the direction of his will. He put down his gun and unstrapped the bandolier of ammunition. Once they had laughed at this.

  They watched each other. Their movements were intolerable and mysterious to each other. It seemed to Phillips that if they could move away the boulders of the cliff one by one they would come to water. There was water everywhere under the earth where the trees drank into their roots. Johnson did not know that this was the reason Phillips lay on his belly and scratched fitfully at the surface of the rock with his fingers. Phillips did not know that, in their circumstances, even this rest was surrender to Johnson and that was why he got up soon to grope about the rock.

  The quick dry shadows of the vultures swept over the hay-coloured bush when they left their fouled perch on the tree. Johnson had been watching the birds.

  Presently Phillips saw him load his gun. There was a report and Phillips’ eyes widened with wonder at the sight of Johnson firing at random at one of the birds as it swooped above; and he was amazed too, even in the remoteness of his agony, w
hich dulled the sound of the shot to his ears, to see that Johnson missed. They were short, too, of ammunition. Johnson stood half-grinning but when he caught Phillips’ eye on him he stiffened. Phillips could see he was trembling. Angrily, proudly, Johnson went away round the corner of the rock out of sight.

  When after some long time, Johnson did not return, Phillips felt the screw of panic give an extra turn. Steadying himself on the rock wall he followed by the way Johnson had taken. The rock was no more than fifty yards in circumference and he had gone half this distance, too weak to call Johnson’s name. There was no sign of him. Then Phillips saw the gun lying on the earth. He stepped forward and picked it up quickly with a spark of cunning and delight. He had always felt some jealousy of Johnson’s ownership of the gun, and of the way he assumed that he was the warrior and the hunter of the party. It gave Phillips a peculiar sense of triumph to have found the gun lying there; and at the same time, since Johnson cared for it so constantly, saying that if it failed they were done for, to find it lying there was disturbing. A dropped gun! Is he lost? Does he wish to surrender? One should go unarmed to the Indians. So disturbing that now Phillips called. There was no answer and he called again, weak in voice, waiting for an answer than for some nameless response from the bush. If a thousand heads had appeared in the trees in reply he would not have been surprised. He called again, looking round him. Up in the sky the birds, startled by Johnson’s shot, were still wheeling very high, like two bits of charred paper tossed up by the draught of a fire.

  ‘Harry!’

  His dulled ears were a sea of dizzy sounds. Now if Wright had appeared, or Silva or Calcott, or if Lucy and Mrs Wright had come there quietly talking about the house or their car or some ordinary things of the life in England, and had turned their heads as they passed, hearing the call, Phillips would not have been surprised.

  Then he had enough clarity of mind to be startled by the fact that he could have credited such a possibility, and as these people receded from his mind leaving it bare and clear and firm, he understood as he had never done before the absolute isolation of their position, that in the bush there was no one but themselves. For scores of miles no one. It was revelation and vision to him. For the first time, in these months, he felt absolutely free from fear. He had the sensation, even in his weakness, perhaps because of it, of complete liberty, as though, free of any past life, he had alighted in this place out of the sky, immaculate.

  When the spirit experiences such moments it trembles like a liquid brimming in a glass. Not to lose it, he found his way back to the platform, to dwell in this exaltation in the protection of the place he knew. Johnson was standing there. The muscles of his face were moving as if he were tightening it with immense self-control.

  ‘I’ve been yelling,’ Phillips said.

  ‘There’s a cave,’ Johnson said.

  Then he added, frowning as if forcing all his mind into the words:

  ‘Wright is there.’

  And after he said this he hung his head.

  Phillips’ blood went cold.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Shade.’

  ‘In the cave,’ Johnson said. ‘Come along.’

  ‘Just a moment. Sit down a bit. Fagged,’ Phillips said.

  ‘Wright,’ Johnson said in a monotonous voice.

  ‘I found your gun,’ said Phillips to distract him, ‘I found it over there.’

  This had the effect he scarcely hoped for. Johnson’s expression changed at once.

  ‘God,’ he said, with a sudden sigh. ‘Give it me.’

  ‘Sit down then. Rest.’

  Johnson had had more acutely than he the same delusion. Again surprising Phillips, Johnson obeyed and sat down.

  I’m not going to give him the gun while he’s like this.

  A look of extraordinary hatred came into Johnson’s face, a look of sickness and disgust and cunning, as if he had read this thought.

  They sat there until they had calmed and had become conscious again, after this blessed interval of hallucination, only of their physical pain. And with this, new suspicions returned. Phillips saw danger now only in Johnson, resented, hated him for his sickness of the mind, as a bird attacks the sick bird: Johnson suspected Phillips because of the possession of the gun. He had forgotten already in the space of a few seconds that he had talked about his hallucination. The two men watched each other. They suspected each other of madness.

  He’s got the gun. He might kill me.

  If I let him have the gun he may turn on me.

  The gun was lying across Phillips’ knees. Johnson, pretending indifference, saw him discover that it was loaded, saw Phillips—as it seemed to him—playing with the trigger. Suddenly, exhausted, Phillips dropped the gun off his knees and, crawling a few yards to the edge of the rock, vomited. The sourness stung his mouth and he lay flat and spent. Johnson sat staring at him. They had not the strength or the will to help each other. Their friendship was remote in their minds, some distant country from which they had come. The bond was now animal.

  When Phillips got up and staggered to the place where he had been sitting he saw Johnson. He was sitting still and upright like a man muffled in fever. His chin was raised and he had a look almost of exaltation in his pain. It lifted his chin and the gaze of his eyes was directed upwards. His hair was shaking in the slight wind. The barrel of the gun shone in his lap. He had picked it up.

  No weapon. Can’t defend myself. To be so exalted and alone, shut up in bloody self. His father! The stupidity of it. My stupidity to let him bring me to this. But I’ve seen him afraid. Oh yes, he’s been afraid. The last night in England, terrified of Lucy and Lucy telling me about him. She and I were equals. She and I were not afraid. We did not wish to fly to savagery and solitude.

  Johnson’s eyes were still raised to the sky. They were raised to vacant heaven.

  ‘Water. I must have it now. Water. Harry, water. Damn water. Give me water, damn you. You brought us here. Give me water or I’ll kill you. I’ll go mad. Are you mad? Get us some water!’ Phillips screamed suddenly with all the force of his lungs, which seemed to burst like bags with the effort of his shout and to send gulps of blood pumping into his ears and to blacken his sight. He screamed and the country broke into thick green, blood-warm waves towards him like a sea that has suddenly swelled up to fall upon the sight and the head and shoulders.

  Johnson did not move or turn his head. He had not heard. For Phillips’ scream was nothing but the murmur of man passing into delirium.

  When at last Johnson did turn his head and see Phillips lying face downwards on the rock he considered him for a while and understood. There was a pencil in his pocket. He took out the Pickwick and wrote in the inside of the cover:

  ‘Gone for water.’

  He strapped on his pack and then considered the gun. At last he pushed it over the rock to Phillips’ body and laid the bandolier beside it. Quietly, without looking at his friend again, he climbed down the rock and went out by the slashed branches to the way he had taken before. There were three hours of daylight.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He was on the rock. He was lying with his face to the ground in the shade. Harry was saying something to him but there was only one word he understood, their only word: water. It gasped in his head. Water. Water. Water. Like a dog panting hotly in his ears until it flowed and woke him up. He opened his eyes and saw that in those few unguarded minutes he had been deserted. He was alone. His hand went to the gun at once.

  He sat up and saw the desertion happening under his eyes—Harry was off the rock, he was through the bush, he was among the low scrub, making in the direction of the sun. It was on his head and shoulders. He looked like a small, two-legged golden animal in the scrub going lightly forward.

  ‘I am off my guard for a minute. I am on the point of death and he deserts me. He has the strength. He goes off like that slyly, just as he did from Charles. Charles was nothing to him, Lucy is nothing, I am nothing. It is what has been
in his head all the time: to be alone. He is mad.’

  With the gun in his hand Phillips got to his knees. He tried to shout and no sound came. His open mouth was stiff and made only a fixed hysterical smile. He looked at the rock and saw the note pencilled on the paper of the book, ‘Have gone for water.’ He utterly disbelieved that Harry had gone for water. Or, if he believed, it could not alter the fact that here he was alone, absolutely alone. He was alone, like the missionary, Johnson’s father, had been. The Indians had deserted the missionary and he was alone and that was the end of him.

  Phillips saw his fear made flesh and he had no control of himself.

  ‘Come back!’ he called frantically, but again no sound came. There was only the stiff grimace of shouting on his face, the unfinished smile.

  There was that degree of terror one reaches at once after waking too suddenly and which becomes a kind of spiritless wonder. There was hatred in it also. The smile was the sign. It was the smile of a dying man who sees his life ebbing away before his eyes. Every step of Harry Johnson seemed to Phillips a ticking away of the final minutes of his life.

  ‘Harry!’—a soundless call, this time finally soundless, without even the sound of breath.

  They had both smiled in the way Phillips smiled now when Harry raised the gun to some unwitting animal, smiling at its innocence and the delicacy of that suspension of all creatures between life and death, so easily and chancily broken. There was a moment of love and wonder before one’s smile went and one clicked and raised gun and fired. Now, before Phillips’ arrested eyes, Harry was going forward through glades of sunshine and shade, like one of those alien and innocent creatures. The blood rose to Phillips’ maddened head. He raised the gun and, shoulder trembling, hand shaking, he took aim at the figure of Harry Johnson. He fired. After the shot he did not lower the gun at once but stood considering. It was marvellous to see the man stop in his stride.