Flames Coming out of the Top

by Norman Collins

  It was while they lay there that he became aware of life of a kind going on around them. A toucan, carrying its foot-long beak in front of it like a truncheon, flew past beating furiously at the air with its black and white wings. On the far bank, a deer came down to drink and paused motionless for a minute with one leg drawn up to its body, as delicate and affected as the bent little finger of a lady drinking tea. And once they thought they heard someone coming stealthily through the sedgy undergrowth at the water’s edge. But it was only a pair of storks as tall as a man, striding through the shallows on wrinkled, horny legs like briar roots. They proceeded very slowly, these old gentlemen of the river, picking their way with care among the submerged branches. When one of them stumbled the other turned and regarded him down his long beak for a moment, reprovingly. Then they passed on, sedate, aloof, imperturbable—leaving behind them an air of dignity and other worldliness, of scholarship almost.

  When Dunnett roused himself he saw that Carmel was sleeping. She was lying curled up with her head supported on the crook of her elbow. As he looked down at her he forgave her the wound that burned and pulsated in his thigh. After all, she was a woman cut off in this god-almighty wilderness, and he was responsible for her. At the thought, the whole nature of the adventure became changed. He wasn’t a fugitive any longer: he was a rescuer. It was a challenge to all the power that was in him; and he felt a proud excitement knowing that he could answer it. Passing his tongue across his dried lips he put his hand to the hot rough wood of the paddle and began clawing away at the river again.

  But he was tired now. He could work only in half-hour snatches. And the strokes themselves were slower; slower and feebler. The boat crept up the molten alleyway of water like a tortoise. Between noon and six o’clock they had covered seven miles. The heat of the day was over by now, but already the forest began its nightly sweating. Mist began to roll off the surface of the water like smoke rising from a bonfire. At times the boat would be driving through an opaque screen that formed round them again as fast as they dispersed it. Somehow the mist served to increase their loneliness. It added hundreds of miles to their isolation.

  “I guess we’re done for,” said Carmel. “I don’t blame you, but we’re done for just the same. We ought to have given ourselves up.” She said it almost in a whisper—and she sounded as though she didn’t care. It was like a ghost talking.

  “We’ll go on a bit further,” Dunnett told her. “We must find something.”

  They found what they were looking for, two further weary miles up the river. It was a native village with a row of dugout canoes drawn up on the bank and a huddle of forlorn houses. The houses had that rotten, half-collapsed appearance common to most tropical erections; they were wildly temporary affairs of mud thatch and beaten-out bamboos. Between them careered a family of black and white pigs. The pigs were the first thing that Dunnett saw. From a distance they looked like an animated swarm of maggots. He touched Carmel with his foot and pointed: he was too tired to speak.

  Their arrival was a major occasion in the uneventful history of this little lost village of which they never found the name. The Indians emerged, men and women and children, from whatever cool places they had been sitting in, and sauntered down to the water’s edge in curious, suspicious groups. When Dunnett ran the boat ashore under their noses they even lent a hand in dragging it up into safety.

  It was not difficult for Dunnett to explain what they wanted. The Indians knew without being told. And they were quite willing to supply it—for payment. Facing the boat they stood there, a group of nature’s children, scratching at their tick bites and wondering what was the maximum of profit which they could extract from these two castaways. One of them went back to the village and brought back a gourd filled with yerba and the bargaining began. It proceeded like a Dutch auction conducted in terms of barter—the entire boat with two paddles was asked; then the boat without any paddles; next the paddles without the boat: Dunnett’s watch; the old rusty anchor; Dunnett’s boots; the mooring rope; the metal buckle on Carmel’s belt. They closed the deal with that, and the Indian after taking a long drink from the mouth of the gourd to equalise the transaction handed over his property. He stuck the buckle between his teeth and marched off with it. The price of two handfuls of harina— about half a pound—was a little higher. Dunnett had to let his note case go before he could get it. He handed it over to the half-naked Indian who was being shrilly urged by a toothless blind old woman to accept it. The old woman had previously been allowed to handle and finger it; there was evidently some unthinkable purpose for which it was intended.

  When they had got both yerba and harina Dunnett turned to Carmel. “Shall we stop here for to-night?” he asked.

  They looked together at the trampled down expanse of mud before them. The pigs had squatted everywhere amid the buildings, and the flies, dancing in the air, made black pyramids a yard high, so thick that you couldn’t see through them. An old man came crawling along on all fours, his face white and scaly with disease.

  “I guess we’ll move on,” Carmel replied.

  They found somewhere to rest around the next bend of the stream. The river had been carving a new horse-shoe out for itself and a broad desert of sand had been left near the inner edge. It was a neat, white island a hundred yards in length set in the midst of a turgid and hurrying current. It seemed somehow safer there with water all round them. There wasn’t that feeling of being crushed down by the jungle that there was at the water’s edge, that apprehension of something large suddenly dropping into the boat from one of the overhanging branches. The prow of the boat ran up smoothly into the bright sand and left them there.

  Dunnett passed the gourd over to Carmel and then they began to chew a handful of the harina. At first neither of them spoke. They just ate and thought of yesterday and to-morrow. “I suppose people have got out of worse jams than this,” Carmel observed at last, almost as though talking to herself; and Dunnett nodded. “We’ll be all right,” he said. The yerba in his stomach had closed his eyes to the immediate dangers of their position. “Don’t you worry. I’ve got this situation in hand.”

  It was evening by now and the jungle was tuning up. What had up to that moment been merely a sullen mass of vegetation now became a violent and discordant orchestra. From every tree and piece of undergrowth a mad rush of sounds was pouring. Parrots and toucans screamed and hooted at each other; monkeys squealed wildly as though a dog had got them, and somewhere in the distance one of the big jungle cats—a jaguar possibly—began the frantic, uneasy roaring of a beast that wants to kill. But it was the insects that supplied the real crescendo. In every corner of that forest massed bands of them came into play. They drowned everything. It was their hour. Once, Dunnett turned to Carmel and said: “That’s a man whistling; he’s doing a tune.” But when they listened they soon knew that no man could keep up forever that unvarying scale of five notes with an accent on the fourth. And soon the tune was multiplied until there were a thousand throats all whistling it at once and the whole forest hummed to the refrain. Their heads were throbbing with it.

  “What bird is that?” Dunnett asked.

  But Carmel told him it was not a bird; it was something small, a kind of cricket, that was playing tunes in the forest. He looked at her incredulously, wondering if she had heard what he had been listening to. But something happened that persuaded him that at least she might be right. One of them, a painted fly-by-night of sorts, fell, or was blown, into the boat. No sooner had it landed than it rang a bell like a bicycle’s. It was so loud that Dunnett and Carmel both jumped. They bent over and examined it. The newcomer had a glossy green body shaped like a violin. And then as they looked at it, they saw that it was a violin. It played itself. The astonishing creature disentangled one of its long notched front legs and began to draw it expertly across its own body armour. Immediately the bicycle bell rang again. The insect stayed with them for about half an hour, giving its warning with complete regularity ev
ery thirty seconds; they could have timed a stop watch by it. Then, unfolding a double pair of wings like fine glass, it gathered up its bow and flew away.

  The day by now had almost played itself out. Colours were disappearing and the forest was becoming a piece of the night itself. Above them, when the mist cleared away, would be brightness; but at the moment only a few tired stars showed palely through. Even the forest noises had abated. Dunnett lay back and heaved a long sigh. He was so weary, so utterly exhaused in every nerve and muscle, that he never doubted their perfect safety. The thought that, now night had come, the enemy might make a sudden sally under cover of darkness did not enter his mind. It was as though with the going down of the sun peace and security had reimposed themselves upon a frightened world.

  It was the sound of Carmel’s crying that disturbed him. At first he did nothing. He had never heard anyone cry like this before. He wanted to help her, but somehow, in her sorrow she was cut off from him completely. She was a vague lonely heap of whiteness on the floor of the boat, and he could do nothing. But couldn’t he? After all, wasn’t she in his charge, hadn’t he taken it upon himself to look after her until they reached some sort of safety? He swung himself off the bow platform and began groping his way toward her. A sharp, red-hot pain ran through his injured leg each time he put it down.

  She didn’t move when he touched her. She just lay there, her whole body jerking with sobs. He put one arm under her and raised her head. She lay against him like a child. Then she put her arm slowly round him.

  “I was hoping you’d come,” she said.

  It was better now that they were together. He could feel that simply by being there he was comforting her. He began idly smoothing the hair back from her forehead. The hair under his fingers felt deliciously cool. There was something oddly agreeable about touching it. They sat like that for some time without speaking. When at last Carmel put her head back as though wanting to go to sleep in his arms, he kissed her lightly where his hand had been.

  “On my lips,” she said; and he kissed her again.

  Even then he had no misgiving; only a faint, rather flattering surprise that she should want him. He felt all the time so sure, so perfectly sure of himself, that it did not seem to matter. He found himself thinking about Kay. He had held her in his arms like this and had kissed her in the same way. Would she ever understand about this? he wondered. Would he be able to make her see that what he was doing now he was doing in a way because he loved her? Because he, too, was miserable and wanted her; and because in the way she lay against him this other girl, this person of no importance, reminded him of her? Because, too, this girl was unhappy and in need of comforting; and because in comforting her he could feel for a moment as though he were doing something for Kay herself?

  He stroked Carmel’s arm gently, soothingly, trying to calm her. Soon, he kept telling himself, she would be asleep, asleep and no longer haunted by the morning. But she put out her hand and took hold of his. Then quite naturally, as though they had for years been lovers, she placed his hand over her left breast and held it there. Her dress was open—it had been torn at the shoulder when she had been running—and he could feel the heart beating under the firm, soft flesh beneath.

  “Do you love me?” she asked, and put her lips up to be kissed again.

  This time when he kissed her he was no longer so supremely confident. Carmel was ready to give everything. She treated him as an equal in love. And he knew in his heart that she was right: he wanted her too as much as any man can want anything.

  “Yes, I love you,” he said. “You know I love you.” He held her head between his two hands and looked into her eyes. “I loved you,” he added, not because it was true, but because he knew that it was what she wanted to hear, “from the first moment I saw you.”

  She put up her arms and pulled him down to her.

  When he had loved her, they lay there in the bottom of the boat without speaking. The only sound was the steady chatter of the water as it passed, mile upon mile of it, feeling its way through the forest towards the sea. It was not an inanimate thing that river: it had shape and strength and direction. And it had somehow become a part of them. He gathered Carmel up closely to him again and they lay back listening to it. A deep, unrelieved sadness, a self-hatred almost, had come over him. The madness had passed and he saw himself for the thing he was. “Why did I do it?” he kept asking. “How did I let it happen?” But he knew in his heart that what he was asking had no answer. When the time had come, he had been as eager as she, had needed no persuading: so that Carmel, who until that moment had been smiling up at him, had looked suddenly into his intense eyes peering down into hers and said: “Don’t look at me like that. I’m frightened.” But all that had happened to someone who was not there any longer. The lover had gone away again, and in his place was left the confidential clerk with a mission to perform. She had become a stranger to him, this woman lying there in his arms. He could feel every breath she took as she lay there sleeping. Once her lips moved and she murmured something. And when he looked at her he could see that she was smiling.

  Then, when she was quiet again, he removed the arm that was about her, and got up. She did not stir. He put one leg over the side of the boat and swung his wounded leg after it. The sand felt firm and buoyant to his feet. It stretched in front of him a low, silver island in the midst of that hurrying river. He walked to the further end where the waters parted. The mist had cleared and it was starlight by now, clear and fresh and empty. Standing there looking at the everlasting sea of water rolling down to meet him he felt strangely lonely and aloof. He seemed remote even from himself, as if he were detached from his own body and were standing somewhere close at hand. He was like a man who has been brought face to face with his own destiny.

  He did not go back to the boat until he heard Carmel’s frightened voice calling for him.

  Chapter XI

  They Proceeded again up the river almost as soon as it was light. Dunnett had not slept and was sitting ready in the stern when the light broke. It was the sound of the paddle that woke Carmel. She sat up and shaded her eyes with her hand, The sun caught Dunnett as he sat there and lit him up like a window. His pale hair that fringed his head was a halo; it glowed. Beneath it, his face looked drawn and bloodless. She spoke his name, but he did not answer. He did not even appear to have heard her. His eyes were fixed on the river ahead of them and his lips were moving in time with the paddle. “One two, one two, one two,” she could hear him saying. There was no distracting him. His goal lay somewhere out of sight in the future of things; and he was getting there in a desperate, but still orderly, panic.

  From time to time he would stop and shift his injured leg. He had to put down his paddle to do so and shift it with his two hands as though the limb were already dead. Carmel crept forward to be beside him, but he motioned her away. She saw then how bad the wound had been; the heat had drawn the flesh apart so that the bone showed through white and dry like paper.

  “I did that,” she said. “I’d give my life for it not to have happened.” She began stroking the sleeve of his coat to ask if she were forgiven. But he said nothing. He did not even seem to notice her, he was so much preoccupied with flight. Whenever he paused, he would glance over his shoulder for a moment to see if they were being followed and then start paddling again. But he said nothing.

  They finished the yerba at midday. Carmel threw back her head and let the last few drops fall straight into her throat. It stung as it touched. But the drops were magical. Even the thin, desultory trickle seemed to infuse some life into her. It gave her, for a moment at least, a new estimation of the future; she was no longer certain that they would lose. Not that she really ever expected that this crazy figure in the stern of the boat would succeed in what he had set out to do; the dice were loaded far too heavily against him for that. But there he was, the sun pouring down on his blistered shoulders and one leg stuck out in front stiff and useless like a crutch, and he was
paddling as though he really believed that he would get somewhere. “He thinks he’s in England where everything’s small,” she kept saying to herself. “He doesn’t know what he’s trying to do.” And she was right, for when she offered to take over the paddling from him he shook his head and kept on with it himself.

  “We must be halfway,” he muttered. “Halfway to somewhere.”

  But the breaks became longer and more frequent. It was not courage that he was revealing, but obstinacy. Every quarter of an hour he would steer into the bank and clutch at one of the overhanging branches. Then he would remain there gasping. He no longer looked in her direction at all. Either his eyes were closed as he rested or he was peering anxiously down the river for snags and sandbars. Once she stirred because she thought she heard him say something. But she found that he was only singing as he paddled; he was breathlessly and unmusically chanting. He seemed no longer to be sharing her world at all.

  After midday, when no other village had come into sight, and the forest had closed in on them more thickly, more finally than before, she began crying out, and begged him to go back. But he paid no heed to her. He did not answer until he had brought the boat to rest. “If anything happens to me,” he said, “you go on. Don’t do the other thing or they’ll kill you.”

  “But we’ll die if we go on. There’s nothing in front of us but the forest.”

  “Men live in the forest, don’t they?”

  “Not white men.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “No it isn’t; white men go crazy.”

  “Well, we’re not crazy yet.”