Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

Then Phillips was awakened by the sun. How long he had slept he did not know. Yellow and fresh out of the breeding dews of the forest and the streaked mists of the river, the sun went up over the trees.

  Every morning since the coast the sensation was the same. One awoke to feel the forest had encroached a measurable distance nearer in the night. One had slept, but through the night grasses and trees, creepers and bushes had been a breeding fume of green. The sap and all the green smells smelt nearer and were stronger than on any day before, and the rot of trunk upon trunk, deep enough to bury a man, on the forest floor, had reached a richer, more feverishly fertile putrescence. Millions of new stalks had grown, millions of new insects had been born. The vegetation bred like the minutes of time ceaselessly one out of another and every second was overpowering with the knowledge of the infinite fermentation.

  And this was not a thing that one merely watched from the detachment of one’s place in the river mirror. The physical encroachment upon one’s life, upon one’s body and spirit, was a bewildering reality. The skin of the Indians was like a bark and on the negroes it was like the rind of a black fruit. The trees were printed upon the people. And one felt the forest first draw one into its shadow and then set to work upon one’s life, and sink one into the jungle of the mind’s undergrowth. Something farouche began to burn in the darkness of oneself in the presence of the fantastic glooms and brilliance of the trees.

  Phillips stretched his stiff arms and rubbed the red lumps the insects had made on his hands. Shivering and yawning wretchedly, he looked at the wet decks and the silent hammocks swollen with their fat loads. Only one man of all he could see was awake and was scratching the oily hair of his head and looked with pouched eyes, dazed and waking, at the trees. He blinked, grey-lidded like a fowl. Phillips looked at him. Suddenly he imagined himself picking up a gun, aiming, pressing the trigger and tumbling the man among bubbles of blood into the river. The picture was so sharp and real in his mind that he went cold with horror and tightly closed his eyes.

  It was strange to him that his first impulse this day, before the eyes of the trees, was to kill, and he was left filled with pride and jubilation by it, after a night of shameful fears and wearying memories.

  Johnson was sleeping.

  Chapter Three

  Immediately he came back from Greenland, Harry Johnson went down to see Charles Wright in the country. Harry had heard of the Brazilian plan and was already interested in it; but he was uneasy because for the first time in his life he was being talked of publicly. Reporters were waiting for him at the boat. His photograph had been about. He disliked this. He wanted privacy. It was against everything in his nature to have this public notice and he dreaded meeting people. In Brazil he had got used to being alone.

  Lucy Mommbrekke, Charles Wright’s stepdaughter, heard he was going to see her family. She had heard about Harry from Gilbert; she had read the papers. She got out her car and drove down to the country frankly anxious to see a ‘hero.’

  She saw a man dark and not very gainly, like herself, who laughed as she laughed and who seemed to have her kind of incompetence in social relationships. Very conventional and polite on the surface, but unsure, as she was; underneath, a man on his own. He was helpless, too, before her mother’s smart guerilla tactics in conversation.

  ‘But, Mr Johnson,’ Mrs Wright said, ‘you seem to me to be as naïve as my husband. You can’t expect to go flying off to Greenland and not have publicity. I would love it. Think of us, poor things, we never get into the papers.’

  ‘It spoils everything,’ Harry said. ‘It spoils the whole object of going away.’ There was a smoothing, persuasive, shy tone in his voice, very different from Gilbert’s quick crackle.

  ‘What is that?’ Lucy asked.

  Harry Johnson could not answer.

  ‘To be alone,’ said Gilbert. ‘They want to be alone.’

  ‘You can’t talk,’ said Mrs Wright to Gilbert Phillips. ‘You’re going with Charles too, you know.’

  ‘Is it to be alone?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Partly,’ Johnson said. The quietness of his evenly spoken voice, so pleasing with the implications of laziness, modesty and peace, delighted her ear.

  ‘I think,’ said Mrs Wright, with her smart, ribald laugh, ‘they’ve got girls.’

  Charles Wright smiled. In his boiled shirt he looked like a hairy and bearded goat that had been civilised against its will.

  ‘No,’ said Lucy, looking at Harry, ‘they’ve got to get away from us.’

  Harry Johnson was shy and not good at this kind of badinage, which had an edge of asperity turned against her husband when Mrs Wright spoke. He was a little shocked that Charles Wright, so restrained and sober, should have married this tart and scribble-voiced widow; but on the whole Harry was tolerant because his real life was not in England. England was a trance of irresponsible amusement. He sat enclosed in his trance, quiet merriness in his absent eyes.

  When they all went to bed that night Lucy followed Gilbert into Harry’s room. She sat on the bed and they talked for a long time.

  ‘Gilbert’s the only one who can manage mother,’ said she. ‘Wasn’t she awful?’

  Harry looked at her sympathetically. Here was a woman who really understood his wish to be alone.

  When Lucy’s father died, and before the second marriage, she and her mother had put on black as athletes put on white, were down on their toes, quivering and bang! suddenly off the mark. They were racing neck and neck. They were racing into freedom from the tyrannical man. Who had won today? Who ran the best? Who got what prize? Then the next morning it was the same. The post came, the telephone rang: bang! they were off again on another day’s race. They were all over France and Italy, the pair of them together, and very afraid of each other. Is Lucy laughing at me? Does mother really not know what happened last night? For if Mrs Mommbrekke was the more handsome, the more slender, the smarter, the wittier and more self-possessed, Lucy was, after all, the younger.

  Lucy saw the young men appear, watched her mother take them from her. There was an innocence in Mrs Mommbrekke, the innocent cunning of the collector who potters in the antique shops, always picking up, hesitating on the point of desire, and discarding.

  Charles Wright was one of the young men. He was not very young, indeed, not young at all. But he was like all the others in that he had come to Lucy first and then, before he had known where he was, he had been picked up by her mother. The race between them was always like this. Lucy decided it, off they went and then, laughing to herself, she dropped out half-way and watched her mother finish the course. But something went wrong with this race. It was in Madeira. Charles Wright was convalescent there. He had just returned from South America. He had woken from his illness with a sudden disgust for travel, nauseated by rivers and jungles and dirty camps. He had been frightened, not in his body or his nerves, but in his soul by his illness, and now he was recovering he was ashamed of his fright and said, ‘I’m not as young as I was. I’d better give it a rest.’ And so he married Lucy’s mother.

  There was some satisfaction in knowing that Charles Wright had obviously not known whether he was in love with herself or her mother. It was amusing to be the watchful, ironical spirit in such a situation. But the amusement palled. There was a quarrel.

  After this Lucy had to leave. She could not stay in his house by the sea. She must leave them to it.

  Lucy had grown up with a love of the difficult and oblique and the appetite grows with eating. She wanted greater and greater difficulties. She would make them out of the simplest materials. She tired of the small difficulties, the little dodges, the trifling intrigues. She tired of freedom. She wished for the heavy chain on the ankle so that she would have to exert heart and soul to drag it along after her.

  At first one plays with the chain.

  If he married, Harry used to think, he would marry a beautiful woman; if she married, Lucy supposed it would be an apt, accomplished man. They repeated this decisi
on to themselves after their first meetings. She was not beautiful. He was not accomplished.

  They spoke about marriage very early. It was Lucy who spoke first. They were at least united in their determination not to marry. His job, he said, made it impossible. He could not take a woman into a timber station in the middle of Brazil—‘not a white woman.’

  ‘A white woman!’ She repeated his words and laughed inside herself.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘it’s impossible. You don’t realise.’

  Ah, here was a difficulty, an enormous difficulty, something impossible!

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but what will you do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  The chastity of Harry Johnson was a problem.

  ‘You can’t go on like that, can you?’ she enquired. ‘Or perhaps you can?’

  So they discussed that very frankly and came back to the original difficulty, the fascinating, insurmountable difficulty: that he could not get married even if he wished. And this was where they were united, for she did not wish either.

  ‘I have never talked to any woman about these things before,’ he said, with what seemed to be gratitude, and she was touched; but he really meant, ‘I expect this subject is more important to you in England than we think it in Brazil.’

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think that is a mistake. You have lived too much shut up in yourself.’

  She could have had this kind of conversation with Gilbert, but with the great difference that he would have turned the tables on her; and at the end of it they would have been exactly where they had been in the beginning. But after talking with Harry, neither she nor he were as they had been. Every sentence opened a door—to reveal, perhaps, another door, but that in turn opened.

  She went one day with Gilbert to call for Harry at his mother’s house in London. In England he always stayed with his mother. The house was a narrow three-storey villa, one of a packed row which had been brisk and pink forty years ago, but which, owing to the badness of the building and the precarious-ness of English middle-class life after the war, now had a seediness unredeemed by style.

  It had some eccentric remnants of respectability. A sun blind was over the door. It hung there on a fixed date in the spring and remained there until a fixed day in the late autumn. Here, after her husband’s early death, Mrs Johnson had brought up her four sons.

  The sound of Mrs Johnson’s typewriter could be heard from the street. She earned some small living now by translating missionary publications. She was a very short, withered, white-haired woman with a high breastbone like a plucked fowl’s. She looked with the nervous defiance of a child, as though at first she did not want them to come into the house. Then this gave way to pleasure. Her hair was brushed up as though the wind were blowing up it.

  ‘Come in,’ she said in a high voice, childish and emphatic, and she took them into her room. All the time she was speaking she was struggling to put away her look of diligence and fanaticism and to be simple and kind. She strained up to Lucy and Gilbert because they were both taller than she.

  Old and heavy curtains hung over the window of the room. The pattern of the brown-and-yellow carpet had been clouded by use. Only in auction rooms would one see a similar agglomeration of worn things. The chairs, the books, the tables, and the dozens of spotted water colours of tropical marsh, Brazilian watersides with alligators and herons in mild confabulation among the reeds, and of tigerish wild flowers of the land where Harry Johnson’s father, the missionary, had died seventeen years before—all had the pathos of a family life that has come to an end. Lucy looked at the room curiously, but trying first of all to relate it to Harry, who never talked much about his childhood. She felt the aroused curiosity and sympathy a woman feels when she has come by design into a room a man has closed by the accident of his silence. The Mommbrekkes had been Quakers and she felt a Quaker’s sympathy with an environment marked both by a successful struggle against poverty and by the shrewd fortitude and independence of Protestant religion. Puritanism in her own family had been tortured and perverted, but in Mrs Johnson’s house she recognised the single-minded independence, the tough if eccentric courage of a spirit which was, in part, her own.

  Two of Harry’s brothers appeared. He was the shortest of them and their voices were louder than his. They came grinning into the room like a rugger team clumping into a pavilion.

  ‘Hullo-hullo,’ they said festively. ‘Magnificent! Splendid!’ Strong, well-fed, good-looking, they made up to Lucy at once.

  ‘Fine show Harry put up last year,’ said the eldest to Lucy.

  ‘Magnificent,’ said the other. They glowed.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Harry.

  And the dead were in the ‘show’ too:

  ‘That’s dad,’ said the younger, pointing to a portrait which hung over the fireplace, in the darker end of the room.

  Lucy saw the blackened portrait of a man with dark curling hair, but only the face and a hand holding a book were clear. A residue of light was on the cheek and was diffused also over the hazel eyes which looked slightly upwards. The hand was holding the book in such a way that only a raised thumb could be seen.

  ‘Put on the light,’ someone said.

  But when the light was put on it became impossible to see the picture at all. The missionary disappeared into a mildly glorifying effulgence, symbolical of his own physical disappearance in Brazil.

  The young men looked up without interest.

  ‘I met your father. He is an explorer,’ Mrs Johnson said to Lucy.

  ‘My stepfather,’ said Lucy.

  ‘I told you Charles was Lucy’s stepfather,’ Harry said.

  Mrs Johnson nodded as she adjusted her mind to this fact. Then she said to Lucy, ‘My husband was a missionary.’

  ‘Oh, Lucy knows all about that,’ Harry said.

  All the brothers seemed to want to keep their mother from a tedious subject.

  ‘He travelled in the highest service there is,’ said Mrs Johnson, in a kindly voice that quivered nevertheless with the severity of having to make clear to Lucy what her sons would never make clear because they had drifted away from their mother’s religion. ‘In the service of Christ.’

  There was an awkward silence. The brothers signalled to Lucy to excuse the eccentricity of their mother.

  Quickly Lucy put down her cup and said, ‘My stepfather has often told me about him; he has a great admiration for him. I’ve always wanted to know what really happened. It would be wonderful if they found out this time.’

  Harry, who had been playing with the keys of the typewriter, turned round at this and said quietly:

  ‘We are not going to find out. We are going to a quite different country.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gilbert put in. ‘Three hundred miles away.’

  ‘It’s all been done before. It’s finished with,’ Harry said.

  The effect of this was to give Mrs Johnson’s manner an hostility to the two strangers in the family. She waited for silence and then said quietly, ‘I have my own opinions. You may think you can get on without God, but you can’t. My husband’s work was the only work which does not bring evil, hatred and lust. I told this to your stepfather when he came to see me many years ago—before he was married.’

  ‘In my country,’ said Harry brusquely, ‘missionaries are a pest. Give me some more tea, mother.’

  A glum embarrassment settled upon Lucy and even upon Gilbert. The eyes of the three brothers, in their several ways so alive with concern for the next turn of the toss, now had the look of absence. Such discussions, so familiar, meant nothing to them. They were withdrawn into an unconscious contemplation of the pool central in their lives. And yet, whatever superficially they may have been thinking, the fact of the death of their father and its mystery was obscurely present in their minds. They knew, without thinking it, that their mother’s frenzied energy and defiance sprang from the fixed panic now seventeen years old, which the mystery of their father’s disappear
ance had caused in her. They knew that it was the cause of their family solidarity, deeper than any general gregariousness, their cult of independence, their difference from other people. They knew it so well that they never spoke of it and were scarcely aware of it. He was an open door in them. They had vision through him. As they had grown up and had become restive in argument with their mother, ripening as she dried up, seeing now a pathos in her narrow energies and opinions, each had privately, unknown to the others, imagined the father—added imagination to what memory there was. Slowly each became not only himself, but the father to himself, in his own fashion. They were themselves and then, added to themselves, some vision seen through the open door. And Harry was the most patient, the most sober and most serene of them, Lucy felt. When she left the house that afternoon it was with the feeling that in him the last door of all was this one of his father.

  After this Lucy took possession of him. She pursued in London and in the country. ‘I feel lost in England,’ he said. ‘It seems overcrowded and vulgar to me. That’s my fault, no doubt. All my friends are working.’

  ‘I’m a friend,’ Lucy said.

  He looked at her warm, amused eyes, and was astonished at the truth of her words: she had in some way become his friend. He was her curiosity; utterly impossible to marry—that great attraction. And then he was innocent of women. He was a reasonable man: you could talk to him and he was reasonable enough to agree that it was unreasonable to be innocent of women.

  They drove down to Charles Wright’s together. In the wiry grass of the sea wall at Charles Wright’s house, which looked at them from the cattle-bitten marshes like a mild English face, Lucy led him one day to talk. Wright’s boat was the attraction there, so she had to pretend she liked the sea as much as he did. The sound of the sea and the wind was woven into their words in a way which made it easier to speak.

  Their mother, he said, had brought them up to hate women. It was necessary for each of them to be the missing father—to be immaculate, her husband.

  ‘I think,’ he said in his quiet way which was impervious to counter persuasion, ‘I think I may be very different from other people.’ She laughed.