Wheels within Wheels

by Alec Waugh

  “I’ve not much to offer you. Only tinned stuff. But I’d be glad to have you stay.”

  “It isn’t that. I’ve got to get back and work.”

  “You’ll have a drink?”

  “Thank you.”

  “I haven’t any ice.”

  “I don’t bother about ice.”

  “The Humper” set out two glasses and a bottle of rum, a jar of water, a lime, a cup of sifted sugar. It was cheap white rum. Maitland squeezed a third of the lime into it and filled the glass to the brim with water.

  “Here’s to our finding oil,” he said.

  “I’ll second that,” said Heppell.

  They sipped meditatively, puffing at their pipes in the manner of men who are used to being much alone; who talk little but are grateful for companionship.

  “You never answered my letters,” “The Humper” said.

  “There was no answer I could make them.”

  “You’re uncertain still?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  There was a pause that finally Maitland broke.

  “Why are you so anxious to know?”

  “I told you. I don’t want to go back to Trinidad.”

  “Because Santa Marta is so full of attractions?”

  “Because Trinidad is so full of complications.”

  “A woman?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I thought you never allowed your life to get complicated that way.”

  “Everyone’s entitled to one mistake.”

  “The Humper” spoke quietly, undramatically, but there was a sense of drama behind his words that impressed Maitland. “The Humper” was calm. He was always calm. His calmness was his strength; was the rock against which his friends tethered their uncertainties. But this time there was an element of despair behind it.

  “Cough it up,” said Maitland.

  “The Humper” shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s the usual thing.”

  “The one woman?”

  “The one woman I couldn’t get. Or rather, the one woman I couldn’t keep.”

  She was a New Englander: hard-boiled, defiant; whose instincts were stronger than her training; who had retained from her training a distrust for and resentment against her instincts; who wanted to be revenged against her instincts; who took her revenge by pretending in-difference to her instincts. She made use of men. She was without tenderness. When she was half through with a man she was right through with him. She had been through with “The Humper”: or at least had persuaded herself that she was through with him, when his passion for her was at its flood. In consequence the passion that ordinarily would have subsided quietly, rose foiled of its outlet, into an angry torrent. It had been a year-long madness: that she had teased, exasperated, cajoled, denied. He had loved her less than he had hated her. But since it is the depth of the wound, not the weapon by which the wound is caused, that matters, he had known without knowing love, the agonies of love.

  “I couldn’t sleep because of her. I lived for the sight of her and loathed the sight of her. She humiliated me in my pride; she humiliated me before my friends. There’s nothing she could not have made me do. I’d read about people feeling that way about a woman, but I’d not believed it. ‘Saps,’ I’d called them; ‘sissy’ nonsense. You got a woman or you didn’t get her. That was all there was to it. And that’s how it is, usually. But just once, I don’t know how it is, a woman gets into your blood: you can’t get her out of it.”

  Such a little man, less than eight stone in weight, with his lined face and razor-scarred chin, without a pretence to looks, so small that a schoolboy could have knocked him over was, if you chose to look at it that way, an absurd subject for a grand passion. Yet there was a white-hot core of fire to him, that prevented his confession from sounding ludicrous.

  “What happened?” Maitland asked.

  “What usually happens. I went away. I could have sung I was so happy when that ship sailed out through the Golden Gate into the potato patch, I prayed that I should never see her face again: that there would never be less than an ocean and a continent between us. Yet I don’t suppose a day has passed in which I haven’t imagined what I should say if we were to meet again. Sometimes I see a face in the street that reminds me of her. My heart stops. I never know whether it’s a relief or not when I see that it’s not her.”

  He spoke of her in the quiet way in which a man will describe the symptoms of a disease for which there is no cure.

  “She’s in Trinidad now?”

  “The Humper” nodded.

  “I heard by the last mail. She’s come back because of me. As I knew she would one day. You always get what you want if you wait long enough. I knew she’d come back to me when she was through. And she’s through now. She’s tired. She wants to settle down and be a nice little New England wife. She thought of me. No one had ever wanted her the way I had. She thought, ‘I’ll go back and get him. I’ll make up to him for all the unhappiness I caused him.’ She thinks she can salve her conscience that way,” he laughed acidly. “And she’s right, the baggage. She could get me. I know that. I’m tied to her by the unhappiness she caused me.”

  “You might be happy with her.”

  “The Humper” shook his head.

  “It would be hell. I hate her and despise her. If I married her I’d hate and despise myself. We’d fight like animals.”

  The words were dramatic, but they were not spoken dramatically. He spoke rather like a professor of philosophy, propounding a thesis: “This is the consequence of that.” His quietness impressed Maitland far more than any histrionic outburst could have done.

  “How long will she wait in Trinidad?” he asked.

  “Not long. She’ll take what lies next to hand. She’ll get someone easily enough. She’s ruthless when her mind’s set on anything. It’s funny,” he said, “how weak women look and yet how strong they are: and how weak men are underneath their muscles. Oh well, I hope you find oil in those wretched bags.”

  • • • • •

  Which was what Maitland himself was hoping as he sat that afternoon over his scales, balances and microscope, sifting the caked mud of the excavations. He would be glad to send a cable “Yes” both for his own sake and “The Humper’s.”

  He was sorry for the little man; for the very reason that “The Humper” showed no pity for himself. There were two things in a man he had no use for: softness and self-pity. And in “The Humper’s” confession that morning there had been signs of neither. He wouldn’t whine if he had to go back to Trinidad: to the spell he could not resist; and the unhappiness that would follow his surrender. He would shrug his shoulders, ready to make the best of a bad job.

  Maitland would be glad to spare him that; just because he had not begged him to. He would be glad if he could conscientiously send a telegram to London with the word “Proceed.” But that was precisely what he was uncertain whether he could do.

  It was just as it had always been. There were signs of oil admittedly in the sifted mud. The oil rivers of Trinidad had cast a tributary strain through this southern quarter of Santa Marta. But whether there was real oil there, or merely traces of it, he could not tell; no man in his position could have told. Had he been asked for a report he would have said: “There are signs of oil: as there were signs of it three months ago. I can promise nothing. I can merely say there is a chance. If you want to gamble, you have a gamble here.” He could say that, honestly. But this definite “Yes” or “No”! It was an unfair question. One could not be expected to give an accurate answer. It was the kind of question that a layman would set.

  • • • • •

  With his mind still undecided he walked down in the late afternoon into Port au Roi.

  It was a little after five, and the club was empty. Just a couple at the billiard table and a man sitting by himself on the veranda looking out over the Savane. Maitland went across to him.

  “Hullo, Lucien
,” he said.

  Lucien Heriot, a man in the middle forties, was the general agent for a number of American manufacturers. He was tall, thin, with a dark Bel-ami moustache; a high, bald forehead and grey hair silvered about his ears. If you had met him in England you would have considered him a Frenchman from the Midi. Meeting him in Santa Marta you suspected that his dark skin was due less to the sun than to African ancestry. He was one of the most important members of the town’s business community. He was rich; he had travelled; he was cosmopolitan. He had a worldliness that the majority of his fellow townsmen lacked. His voice was languid and slightly patronizing.

  “You appear tired,” he said.

  “I am tired. Cablegram from London.”

  Heriot laughed; his hands lifted; the palms spread upward in caricature of a typical French gesture.

  “Ah, those cablegrams. But don’t I know them? You can consider yourself lucky to have London and not New York as your headquarters. The way my people pester me. They will think they’re dealing with some place like Kansas City where everything has to be done in a rush. They won’t realize that this is a very small, and lazy place where people are used to waiting.”

  He proceeded to an amusing analysis of New York: of how they would cable, when a letter would have done just as well: how they put at the foot of all their letters, “Please cable your reply.” He never did. His French economy would not allow him to waste money upon cablegrams. He only cabled when cables were pre-paid.

  “The Americans will not realize how small and unimportant Santa Marta is and how much people are ready to put up with. People here don’t expect to get a car the boat after they order it. If they get it in the same year they’re happy.”

  He spoke amusingly; a little boastfully; airing his man-of-the-world-ness; including Maitland, in a way that flattered him, in his own Olympian attitude. It was as though he were saying: “New York doesn’t realize; and the people who’ve been born here and never been away from here don’t realize; but you and I who are cosmopolitans do realize that this island is a very little and unimportant place; that it figures only now and then in the concerns of Europe and America; that it would matter to nobody except ourselves were the sea to engulf this town and the high hills and the stretching cane-fields.” They derived a feeling of superiority from their recognition of the island’s triviality.

  “The great thing to remember is this,” said Heriot. “We’re too small to matter to them, but they’re big enough to matter a great deal to us. They’ve their own game on. We pick up such leavings as we can.”

  Which was the wise way of looking at it, Maitland thought, as he sat alone two hours later on the veranda looking out over the Savane.

  He was warm and happy with rum punch; and the pleasant, casual chat of the broad club table. The world was a pleasant place; it was foolish to take anything over-seriously.

  The swift dusk of the Antilles had turned to night. There were lights on the east side of the Savane, music and the sound of singing. The winged statue of Liberty was a white ghost between the guardian palms. Cars were honking noisily at the street corners as they crossed with no diminution of their speed. It was bright and gay. It was ballade-opera. Something to be enjoyed and smiled at: not to be bothered over. In the cold northern latitudes men had to bustle; to plan; to take thought about the morrow. Here there was no need of that. The island mattered to no one but itself.

  When they had told him in the engineering institute in London that he had been appointed to a post in Trinidad, he had had to look the place up in an atlas. As a schoolboy he had found that the West Indies went out of history with the Napoleonic wars. That though through the early days of colonial enterprise gold, and later the equivalent of gold, had poured from the Caribbean into Europe, the little islands were now of profit to nobody. They were retained for the sake of sentiment; because in the case of war they might serve as naval bases; but they were of more expense than profit. They didn’t matter to anyone except themselves.

  He remembered the casual way in which this present scheme had been adopted. There had been a tourist ship at Port of Spain. It had stayed there for two days. Some of the tourists had been motored out to the oil fields. He had been delegated to show them round. There had been a largish party. Some dozen of them; young people for the most part, who had stayed together, laughing, chattering, joking.

  It was an Englishman late in middle-life, tall, distinguished, with the appearance of a prosperous member of the professional classes, who had listened to what he had been saying. He had asked whether there was not a possibility of oil being found upon some other West Indian island; since he gathered that a great part of the West Indies’ trouble was the absence of a produce secondary to sugar.

  It was a problem that Maitland himself had studied. He did not think that Barbados was likely to have oil deposits. But from what he had read of Santa Marta he imagined there might be oil in its southern section.

  “That’s curious,” an American had said. “I’ve a cousin in New Orleans: descendants of French emigrés, who’s got a chunk of land down there that he can raise nothing on, and doesn’t know what to do with.”

  The Englishman had looked interested.

  “We must go into that. It would be amusing to see if we couldn’t find oil there for him.”

  That was how it had begun; casually. A year later there had come from the Englishman, whose name he discovered then for the first time was Newton, a letter stating that he had made inquiries about Santa Marta; that a syndicate might be formed; that he himself was prepared to finance a preliminary investigation. Would Maitland undertake it? Maitland was not actually at a loose end, but he was grateful for the chance of change. “The Humper” was unemployed. They had set out together.

  That was how it had begun; light-heartedly, with no importance attached to it. Something done with the left hand; like the fifty pounds a rich man puts on an outsider for the Derby. He will be pleased if the gamble comes off, but he won’t mind if he loses.

  That was how Newton and his colleagues regarded their flutter in this small far island. To them it was nothing. But to the people concerned in the venture it mattered greatly. Santa Marta might not matter in New York and London, but to itself it mattered. Its own problems were personal and intense. To Newton the oil well was a bagatelle. But “The Humper’s” future depended on it. Looking dispassionately at the situation Maitland could not see that anything that counted was at stake apart from “The Humper.”

  That in itself was not sufficient to make him send a “Carry on” cablegram to London. He would never have allowed a personal inclination to disturb his professional loyalty. But other things being equal, it was the final ounce that turned the scale. It couldn’t really matter to Newton what happened here, and to “The Humper” it mattered desperately. Taking a sheet of paper from his pocket he wrote out below the address:

  NEWTON. 21 EASTON SQUARE LONDON.

  Recommend proceed.

  He had a moment’s qualm before he set his signature to the message. Was he justified in encouraging his employer in a gamble that stood an even chance of failing? Ought he to qualify the statement; to give some indication that there was a possibility rather than a probability of success? He hesitated. But down below, skirting the Savane, to counsel him against such qualms, was the whole ballade-opera pageant of Santa Marta: the music, the laughter, the honking cars, the bright dresses, the brown, smiling faces, the cackling laughter, the eager, unreflecting thoughtlessness. He set his signature to the message. Nothing that happened here could have any consequence in the outside world.

  II

  On the same afternoon that Maitland was deliberating his answer to the cablegram, northward and westward in New Orleans John Shirley, the owner of the oil field, unaware of the existence of such persons as Maitland and “The Humper,” was seated on a divan sofa in a ground floor studio in Jackson Square, looking with suddenly awakened interest into the dark eyes of the girl who had just steppe
d down from the model’s throne.

  They made a handsome couple. There was a graceful elegance about the loose-limbed carelessness of his pose, as he leant back among the cushions, one foot drawn back beneath him. As there was a graceful elegance about the carelessness of his unpinned collar and bunching grey silk tie. It was an unstudied, unself-conscious negligence. Though Shirley was not actually good-looking there was a distinction about the long, straight nose, the high forehead, the full mouth. The voice, though precise, cadenced and high-pitched, was unaffected, the padded shoulders of his double-breasted suit concealed firm muscles. His complexion was pale, but not unhealthy. A dockhand might say of him, “He’s one of the nobs but he doesn’t behave like one.” A Wall Street plutocrat: “He looks namby-pamby, but he isn’t.”

  The girl clearly was fifteen years his junior. It was equally clear that in another fifteen years they would seem contemporaries. She was little and plump, black-haired, black-eyed, with very long black eyelashes. Her skin was white, her lips full and brightly painted; her fingernails polished to the same bright scarlet as her mouth. In a shantung frock, flowered against a grey-cream background with mauve and cherry, she looked cool and fresh on the warm spring afternoon, like the bud of a rich southern flower that would soon blossom into summer scent.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he asked.

  It was the first time that they had met. Only during the last few weeks, since he had taken an apartment in the Pontalba buildings, had Shirley seen much of the Quarter’s life. Frequently abroad, living when at home with his parents in the garden section, with his time divided between his home, the University, the country club; unable to afford the admirable cooking of Antoine, Arnaud, and Galatoire, preferring his parents’ table to the fifty-cent table d’hôtes of Royal Street and Toulouse, he had in previous days rarely crossed Canal Street.

  And Canal Street is a dividing line.

  Brown and brown between its high green levees the Mississippi girdles New Orleans in a crescent. Like a jewelled sword, Canal Street divides the old town from the new. Its glittering length is studded with the flashing, intermittent lights of street cars, caféterias, drug stores, restaurants, cinemas, department stores. To its north, ornate with the handwrought iron balconies, the wooden jalousies, the crowded banquettes, the shaded courtyards that are Spain’s heritage to the New World, runs a network of narrow streets, the clustered homes of negroes, small shopkeepers, artists, writers, occasional eccentrics.