Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  The pens dropped and the typewriters ceased. The Englishmen came effusively; the smart, delicately mannered Brazilians sat staring, waiting their turn after the English effusions. The smell of the sawmill and the forest was civilised here. He shook hands. They were decent fellows. The handshakes of the Brazilians were longer. Laughter, because an office-boy running upstairs to the manager’s office, pelted blindly into him and sent a sheaf of letters blowing down through the banisters. A new Johnson joke started: ‘He’s hard. He broke the office-boy’s neck.’

  But by the end of the day, there was this:

  ‘It is not like the last leave. The place gets on my nerves.’

  It was one of those many grey days when the air is warm, passive and electric. The sky was like cement. The white houses, terraced in the city and the scenic railway suburbs, stand out like hard set faces and their open windows are like square perfectly still eyes. Where had he seen that expression of blank satiety before? All those houses—and this was startling—were thousands of Lucys, turned to sad sallow stone on the quay, looking over a dirty and widening grave of dock water to a departing ship. Then came the first turn of the screw of revulsion: he was linked to Lucy. She could be a house, a hill, a tree. She was not a woman, she was an idea. It was marvellous that she could come like that over the sea and stand before him; marvellous in an evil way, that he was chained to her.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is over. In five years a lot can happen. I may marry. I might marry a girl like the one who was in the boat coming over a year ago. The red-haired girl. Girl and woman are different things: girl is flower-stem like the field of yellow irises I dreamed of. Woman is something else: too full like Lucy. She will marry. We discussed it all. We said we would not marry. We accepted that. We are free.’

  It was then as he walked past the massive negro porter standing by the awning of the hotel door that a voice planted a seed in his ear:

  ‘Suppose she had a child? Then you are not free!’

  This time last year . . . he was by the lake where the flamingoes and the duck went up in a cloud as thick and noisy as the leaves of a towering pink tree with the wind in it, and the reflection of the immense flight raced under them in the water like a snake. The smoke of his gun blew away in the clear air. In the evenings at that season the sky was clear and greenish. This was in the higher forests among the flat-topped mountains. He rode down in the cool, dew-dazzled mornings to the timber station by the river. Black smoke came out of the tall iron chimney and he heard the saw in the mill, singing, screaming like the sound of a torn sash and dropping abruptly to a dull hum before it began again on the tree. There was the smell of green timber and the tang of resin. The boards rang down as they were piled. In the evenings he went back late to his house for there was nothing to do but work and sleep. He played the gramophone. He read. The telephone bell rang. He would look up from his book and count the rings: two long and two short for himself, three longs for Milton, four short and one long for Nitti, the Italian, three short for Costa and so on—the code of rings cast a net of shrill electric music miles wide over the forest. But now the age of innocence was gone.

  Once the seed was planted there was no checking its growth. It was a fear that sent out fine roots and touched a nerve. A fantasy is like an extraordinary flowering tree, feeding on all the life in a body, branching and re-branching with endless elaboration.

  The age of innocence was gone. He had been dragged naked from his solitude and privacy into public shame. He had been turned loose with the herd and grazed as they grazed.

  The weeks in Rio were a confused memory to him now. He argued against it first of all. Lucy cannot be having a child. He became superstitious: ‘If there is not a letter today, she is having a child.’

  There were no letters. All these weeks he felt like a Gulliver pinned down to a mean, fine, stinging pain by thousands of Lilliputians. ‘If she has a child I am trapped and chained to her.’

  This was the whole origin of his fear laid bare. He wished to be chained to no woman. He wished to be alone. He counted the days when he would take the steamer to the north. The last few hours were agony, and when the coastal steamer put out to sea he could feel, amid the relief of escape from the land so thickly sown with his fantasies, an absurd fear that the steamer might be taking him back to England. His fear was a chameleon, he found, taking on all colours.

  On the boat he avoided the passengers. He sat in the bar, drinking alone. Above all, he wanted to avoid the few English people. They, more easily than the Brazilians, would read his thoughts and suspect his words. There were two or three English business men and their wives on the boat, and on his last night when he went into the bar he found them sitting there drinking gin and already pink and drunk. One of the women, a fair-haired, tattered creature of forty who had been, she kept saying, a WAAC during the war, began to sing war songs. The others joined in. Tipperary, Keep the Home Fires Burning, Round the Corner, Behind the Tree—she went through the repertoire. Tears began to dribble down her cheeks. At the door the Brazilians looked in silently and rather afraid at the singing Valkyrie. Soon the words became coarser.

  ‘Armentiers!’ shouted one of the clerks, a lean, theatrical man with sad, ringed eyes:

  ‘She took me out into a wood,

  Parlez vous,’

  he shouted out.

  ‘She done me all the good she could,

  Parlez vous,’

  sang out the drunk lady. Some of the party lowered their eyes uneasily: two of the men roared out with applause. The woman laughed.

  Johnson walked out of the hot bar into the air. They were singing about him. He was a joke. He was a figure in the oldest joke in the world. He was not alone, inviolable and exceptional. He was a mere dirty comic character.

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he protested.

  He stood on the deck now in the soft night, watching the white knives of water at the bows of the steamer, and wished for one thing only: to escape from the ship. To get to the land, to get up the river, to be far away in the interior of the country, untouchable, to be purified by the torture of travel.

  And then, in the ecstasy of this desire, the voice said:

  ‘If there are no letters here, it’s the last chance. Lucy is having a child.’

  There were no letters. He went down to the post office the moment he had got his room at the hotel. Phillips came with him. There were letters for Phillips but none for him.

  They went back to the hotel and sat in the courtyard watching the luggage arrive. Presently Johnson heard his voice say:

  ‘I haven’t heard from Lucy.’

  ‘Good God,’ Phillips said. ‘Why not cable?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Johnson. This simple idea had not occurred to him.

  ‘I should.’

  ‘No, I think I’ll wait.’

  Cable and he would know! He would know that Lucy was not going to have a child. And that would mean the deep guilt she had awakened in him, would have to invent another fantasy.

  He did not understand this or know it, except in an obscure, troubled way; he knew only there was for him a luxurious necessity in this self-torture. He clung to his illusion. The conscience of the puritan has need of its melodrama and mythology and he went up the river towards Wright, on the final stage, with the speechless fear of a son guiltily approaching his father.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Ive left him sleeping,’ Charles Wright said. ‘Nothing to worry about. It’s just the country.’

  They would simply have to sit there and wait. One evening they were sitting in the shed where their cases had been put. The place was overrun with rats and half-naked children. Seven of the children were Calcott’s. He had a Brazilian wife. Two of them were negroid and two had coarse fair hair and blue eyes, but their skins were the colour of coffee. One of them could speak two or three words of English. Wright liked the children.

  ‘He’s all right now,’ he said. ‘I was afraid it was something bad. He’ll
be all right in a day or two.’

  Wright got up and, squeezing Phillips’ arm for a second, dropped his seriousness and his face cut into a deep smile of exclaiming happiness. ‘Well,’ he exclaimed, as much as to say, ‘We are all here. That’s fine. That’s splendid.’ Wright was a man with sudden boyish impulses of affection. The sun-burned skin of his hard skull gave the colour of a clay idol. He was like some small and diligent god. He was a busy god, strong, wiry and concentrated on his own mysteries, sure of his own intent, a little fey and overriding. A god whom one duped; an honourable man before whom one sinned in order to be equal with him? So Phillips speculated now he was alone with Wright. Wright had seemed like a trim and lazy stranger in his wife’s house, a sober bird who has got in through the wire of an aviary of twittering repartee, queer feminine calls and counter-calls, smart, exotic, whistlings. During the war he had been a doctor in Egypt and Salonika. After that he had had some government job in India, but having some small means of his own, had thrown up that for exploration. He had been in Tibet and Mongolia, he had spent two years in the Antarctic and had come back with some reputation which grew after his South American travels.

  A tall figure in dirty white trousers and jacket came swearing towards them. He was swearing at the children who ran to the house. At night, Calcott looked like some skeleton in its grave-clothes, prodding sardonically among the graves. By daylight his clothes wagged on his body like a flag round its pole. The lines and creases in his emaciated face were repeated with fantastic dreariness in his smeared clothes. His dirty blue eyes bulged out of their hollows with the brilliance of many fevers. He shaved only twice a week and at the side of his head the thick grey hair was bushed over his ears, but the rest of his head was streaked with lines of sallow baldness.

  Calcott had spent thirty years in the country. He was a Cockney from Kentish Town who had made his way in the world, protecting himself from an acute sense of social inferiority by an unsteady and blustering contempt. He suspected every visiting Englishman of snubbing him. He had been snubbed and dropped in his time by what he called ‘the shiny-arsed clerks’ in the banks and head offices of the coast towns; there was some satisfaction for him in the fact that his marriage to a Brazilian woman damaged him in the eyes of these people. He liked to think he had damaged himself. He took it out of this woman when he heard that Englishmen were coming and after they had gone. He lived happily with his wife in the times between these English visits; but the sight of an Englishman upset him and then he set to and beat her. After these outbreaks he would shut himself up and pore over a Bible, not in repentance, but in wrathful conviction of the righteousness of his action.

  Calcott’s suspicions wore off if Englishmen stayed long enough. He was now at ease with Wright; but Phillips he looked upon as a new game for bluster and suspicion.

  ‘You an Oxford and Cambridge man?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Reporter? Your boss said you were a reporter. A man who comes up here on a couple of weeks’ picnic will find out damn all. The last one we had got one of those jiggers in his penis.’

  And Calcott went on to a favourite theme: the insects that would get into their bladders, the fish that would tear them to shreds, the sting-rays which would cripple them, the boas that could crush them, the fevers they would catch and the lamp-mouthed alligators which lay waiting for years on the rivers for Englishmen with nice cultivated voices.

  ‘You seem to have survived,’ Phillips observed.

  The contempt of Calcott was a crust easily broken. His response to this mild flattery was warm to the point of exaggeration. All sneering went. He pointed to the moon which hung like a huge Chinese lantern over the trees.

  ‘For Gawd’s sake look at that,’ he said, with the pride of one who had arranged it all for them to see and now was awed by his handiwork. ‘Makes you think of the old country, doesn’t it?’

  It was the one place the round yellow tropical moon did not suggest.

  They went in to dinner.

  A fan hummed in the room where they ate and a weak electric bulb put a dim dirty light on the white walls and the table-cloth. On the occasions when Calcott had English visitors, his Brazilian wife waited on them like a servant. He roared and swore at her, complaining about the food and sending her hither and thither. She was a short, corpulent woman with shining beetle-black hair, a muddle of negro and mongol in her features and her skin beaded with sweat. She was like a waddling spaniel expecting the whip. Every time she brought a dish into the room she had to push her way through her children who crowded watching in the doorway. Her voice when she spoke in the room was subdued.

  This was a bad period for Mrs Calcott but she was indifferent. Outside in the courtyard, during the day, she squatted with her short legs wide apart and a baby in her arms sucking at her big breast which hung as heavily and passively and soft as another face; and she sang songs to the baby, fanning a charcoal fire with her free hand if a pot was stewing there at the same time. At times the song would stop short and her voice skirled out nasal and metallic to a servant or a child.

  Calcott was in a nervous uncertain state on this evening. Phillips’ politeness irritated him. The ease he had reached after having Wright for three weeks in his house had been destroyed once more by the arrival of the two younger men. He had once more to go through his repertory of bluster and self-pity. Wright himself would have come under his displeasure as a member of the household if he had not brought out the whisky at once. Calcott gave him a nod which could be translated, ‘I wondered if I was going to have to remind you of that.’ Calcott took the bottle, poured small measures into each glass and then put the bottle beside him, holding it for a long time by the neck.

  ‘Your pal have some?’ he said, nodding to the wall beyond which Johnson was sleeping. They said he would not.

  ‘The more for us then,’ said Calcott and helped himself to a third glass, this time keeping the bottle entirely to himself. But he began to mellow and conversation became easier. A look of aggressiveness which kept buckling into a smile of mixed amiability and suspicion came into his face, his lower lip dropped, showing teeth which had not seen a dentist since he was a young man.

  He ignored Wright and directed himself to Phillips.

  ‘Funny thing your pal coming up here,’ he said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He means,’ said Wright, who knew what was coming from conversations he had had with Calcott in the past three weeks, ‘he knew Harry’s father when he was up here.’

  ‘Did you? That must have been a long time ago. Harry’s father’s been dead fifteen years.’

  Nothing could have delighted Calcott more than this inaccuracy. ‘Seventeen years you mean,’ said Calcott. And added ironically, ‘So he’s dead, is he?’

  ‘One presumed he must be dead. He may not be.’

  ‘That’s better,’ Calcott said.

  Wright said tactfully, ‘Mr Calcott was the last white man to see him.’

  Calcott paused like an actor. ‘He stayed in this house. He went out and that was the last anyone heard of him. You say he is dead. Well, you know better than me. But you can take it from me that if any man can go and hide in this bloody telephone exchange, it’s a bloody miracle.’

  ‘Telephone exchange?’ asked Phillips.

  ‘That’s what niggers are,’ said Calcott.

  They knew the story so well, and they had been so pestered in England by reporters who wanted to know what they thought of ‘the Johnson mystery,’ that Wright cut Calcott short here.

  ‘Just because Harry is with us, everyone jumps to the conclusion that we’re going to find out what happened to his father. I’ve explained to Mr Calcott that this isn’t so.’

  Wright was sensitive on this point. He had made up his mind about ‘the Johnson mystery’ long ago and said that he was not going to waste his time on it. He had never quite got the suspicion out of his mind that Phillips, as a journalist, was in some way responsible f
or a newspaper article which had appeared before he left England, with the title, ‘Another Search for Johnson. Son of Missionary leaves for Brazil.’ Wright had his own plans. He had marked out his own square of country. He had seen it. The year before his marriage, when Indians had brought him down sick and nearly dying to the coast, he had stood on the edge of this untouched territory. He was too ill to cross to his promised land. He had lain at night in his hammock slung between trees by the river, looking across at it on the other bank, and forever he would remember the sun upon the wall of trees like the light on a woman’s dress, the fantastic millinery of the tree-tops. There was a wild innocence, a feathery enticement and friendliness which were all the more irresistible because he knew all the treachery and chaos and suffering of immolation in the forest which were, by the most perfect art of the light, concealed. This memory, sharpened by his sickness, had always been photographed on his mind. Whenever he had looked at his maps afterwards and made his plans this artless scene came intimately to him. The earlier failure had haunted him. It was an irritating irrelevance that somewhere within a hundred miles of this place a missionary explorer had disappeared, almost staining a virgin country with the notoriety of his disappearance near it. Wright’s passion was anonymity. He admired the missionary’s courage in going into this country alone. He had studied every detail of the career of his competitor and had felt a professional pride in him. He had in England gone to see the missionary’s widow and in that way had met her son. But some exclusiveness of the spirit was in Wright. He too had his private unknown land. He had seen its face and its dress. He longed to be in its body. The talk of the missionary’s country and the mystery of his disappearance was talk of a rival and an attempt to enhance her attraction which he could admire as a connoisseur of discovery and adventure but which, now he was on the point of the heat of action, made him alert for any sign of betrayal.

  But Calcott went on and Wright humoured him. The Johnson affair was the only thing in his life which had given him a vicarious importance. An eventless life, soured by loneliness and inferiority, had been given dramatic and even emotional point by it.