Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  ‘It may be the woman’s fault,’ said Calcott, ‘but you’ll have to answer up.

  ‘And if you was my son and you done that,’ said Calcott, wagging his finger emphatically, ‘I’d say to you, “It may be the climate but you’re a dirty bastard all the same.” And so would your pa.’

  ‘Missionaries in our part of the country aren’t so particular,’ Johnson said.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ said Calcott. ‘But your pa was different. The day before he came here he had been up to a little place eighty mile up the river. There was a man up there, an Irishman called Macguire or Macguinness, I’ve forgotten his name, and anyway he’s dead now, used to be a Roman and then came over. He’d been up there twenty-five years. No one ever went to see him. Result, as per usual, he goes off the straight and narrer. A man of fifty. He takes on an Indian woman and then there’s a jolly little nest of them, all of them happy as tomtits, you bet. When anyone comes up from the mission he gets word of it, buries all the bottles, pins up the texts, and they come ashore and find him in the middle of a service. He’d got it all worked out to a “t.” That was all right. But being Irish he gets beyond himself. Starts giving out he’s a pope or witch-doctor, worshipping the devil or something he’s got hidden away in the woods, like the Indians. Your pa heard of it and copped him at it, wearing no clothes and covered in paint and feathers, doing a bit of a hop, skip and a jump round a blooming bonfire with the rest of the boys and girls. Proper Irish. He gave the ol’ man a hiding. “Calcott,” he said, “I drove him down to the river with my umbrella and I made him scrub the stuff off him.” Your pa wasn’t having any. He was a gentleman.’

  Johnson laughed. Calcott started and then laughed too. He gave a huge spit out of the window and laughed hard. He was glad to have made Johnson laugh.

  ‘Cor!’ laughed Calcott. ‘You’re right. He was a cure, your pa!’

  Calcott’s face became liver-coloured. Each laugh began with a snigger, ran on into a cackle, barked out full and ended in a sweeping throat clearance. Tears were in his eyes. Johnson laughed quietly.

  ‘Have a wet?’ said Calcott. Then superstitiously, ‘No, better not.’

  The pleasure he had in making Johnson laugh made the suddenness of his desire for a drink seem like one of those inspirations which all drinkers wait for, with a mind almost devout. He left the room and soon he was shouting for Wright’s whisky and pouring out a glass for himself. He drank it. Then one for Johnson in the same glass. He drank that. Well, another for himself and another wouldn’t hurt Johnson. He drank two more. He sat down alone in the other room, drinking first his own glass and then Johnson’s. There was only one glass.

  Then he felt guilty that he had not behaved with the decorum he was sure Johnson and his friends would have observed. So he poured out another glass and brought it into Johnson’s room. Making a ponderous gesture and holding his lean chin high he said, ‘Mr Johnson.’

  And he raised his glass. Johnson waved a hand. Calcott bowed. But the bow went too far forward and he was obliged to sit down quickly in the chair again.

  ‘Funny thing,’ he said.

  ‘Damn funny thing—you ask me—you and your dad,’ he said.

  Then he fixed Johnson with a warning eye.

  ‘Your ol’ dad—not human. Never touched it.’

  ‘What?’

  Calcott raised an empty glass despondently.

  ‘Never touched it. That’s what was wrong with him. Wasn’t human. I’m human. That’s what’s the matter with me. Always have been. Too human, you might say.’

  He stuck out his bony jaw in a brave attempt to repel frail humanity, but his face buckled into its whisky lines, and an expression vulture-like but sentimental came on it.

  ‘Know what them dago kids call me? Uncle Jim! They do. Straight. Uncle Jim. I give ’em things sometimes, the poor bloody little devils.’

  Chapter Six

  A Storm broke over the town in the night and was prolonged until within an hour of sunrise. First of all a small wind ran loose in the town and the black water of the anchorage; then it whirled and whipped until it was like a howling tribe, slamming doors, blowing off tiles and streaming through the trees. The forest was like a sea in tumult and the town like some gimcrack raft plunging about on it. But no human sounds came; the people slept, or gaped at their theatrical climate. Then the thunder went off like guns and bumped about the roofs and the rain fell—not a thin sloping rain but a rain in vertical solid rods. The rain turned the air into another forest, hissing and impenetrable.

  The rain caught the Calcott family in their hammocks. Out they jumped and ran into the house, shouting at each other. Things fell over and smashed. In the middle of the storm there was a terrified scream from the parrot in the courtyard. Johnson got out of his hammock to close the shutter and saw a river of water swirling in the courtyard and flowing into one of the doors.

  The storm passed and in these pauses one heard the water streaming from the roofs; but in half an hour it was back again making violet lakes of lightning around the town and the thunder went off once more. Then the spectacle died away into hour after hour of fitful lightning—as if someone were playing with electric switches.

  In the morning Calcott himself brought Johnson’s coffee.

  ‘Did the other two get it last night, do you think?’ Johnson asked.

  ‘They copped it all right, you bet,’ said Calcott, grinning. ‘I’ve been damn nearly drowned up there meself before now.’ he added: ‘The parrot’s finished. Drowned. Hear it?’

  Calcott had gone out in the night to rescue the parrot. In vain. ‘Don’t like it,’ Calcott said in his most lugubrious voice. ‘Bad sign. Means something.’

  He sat moodily in the room watching Johnson. He looked as though he wanted to stay near Johnson all day.

  ‘I wouldn’t have lost that parrot for a thousand pounds. I’ve had it since your father was here,’ Calcott said.

  Nothing Johnson said could cheer up Calcott.

  ‘She doesn’t care,’ Calcott said, meaning his wife. ‘None of these dagoes care. They’d sit and watch an animal die. She would. No feeling.’

  He stood up on his bent stick legs and looked moodily at the room.

  ‘I’ll get Silva to come and see us this afternoon,’ he said gloomily, as if a situation so melancholy demanded Silva, as a corpse demands an undertaker.

  ‘He’s at the works, isn’t he?’ said Johnson politely.

  ‘Yes. You know—Shakespeare. Got me? Educated bloke. I’ll get Silva in.’

  ‘If you would tell me where they’ve put my clothes,’ said Johnson, ‘I’ll get up.’

  ‘No need to, ol’ man,’ said Calcott. ‘I told Silva you was ill. He won’t mind.’

  But Calcott was eager to do anything for Johnson. He went out of the room and returned with the clothes. He put them down expecting Johnson to get up and dress at once. Johnson did not move. Calcott was lost for words and walked about the room. He gave Johnson a look full of significance. Significant of what? Only Calcott knew.

  Men who live cut off from their own race, in a foreign country, fall back for support on a peculiar inner life of their own. They have to make something with which they can resist the country, and Calcott had managed to reserve in his exotic surroundings, and in spite of his Brazilian wife and his half breed children, an inner temple full of holy relics of life as it might be lived in the Old Kent Road. There was the Union Jack spread over the Brazilian piano, and a book of English ballads, never opened but always on it. There were pictures of boxers and actresses cut out of illustrated papers and pinned to the wall. There was the linoleum in his own room, a coal-scuttle and fire-irons which his mother had sent out to him years before. The old lady had never been able to understand that a fire was not lit in these parts from one year’s end to the other; but Calcott would not throw these useful things away. He kept them like sacred vessels and implements. And Calcott’s resources were not external only. He had others. It was a sign o
f the attachment he felt towards Johnson, an attachment which was fervent now his companions were away, that he was about to reveal his great resource, the extraordinary mythology he had created. The only difficulty was that Calcott, in his solitude, had got into habits of allusiveness in conversation which were full of meaning to himself but which meant nothing to others. He imagined himself a high priest of insinuation and diplomacy. When Calcott said, ‘We’d better get Silva in,’ he wished to convey that Johnson, albeit unknowing, had provided him with an opportunity of exploring heights of ‘funniness’ which he (Johnson) would not credit.

  ‘Silva’s an educated man.’ Calcott explained again.

  The day passed more agreeably than the earlier ones. Harry got up and thought of going down to the river, but the town swayed in his eyes and he stayed under the trees by the house and few people noticed him. He felt he was not in control of himself, that his body might be still lying in the hammock like a chrysalis suffering some change which he could not command or alter. He had looked at himself in a mirror and had indeed shaved off his days of beard, and he had been surprised to recognise no radical change in his appearance. But he knew that in the last few days a change had begun in him. He had passed a crisis. He had begun a new road.

  In the afternoon he went back to his room and sat deeply preoccupied. Mainly he was thinking now not of Lucy and her stepfather, but of the journey before him. He was thinking of the country beyond the river and of the weeks ahead, but in terms of paddling, mileage, hours of distance, thickness of scrub. He did not think of Wright and Phillips as being with him. His thoughts were visually close and vivid, the pictures not merely seen but clothing him as one is clothed by the warm drugged pictures of a dream. He sat on the small straight chair through the blue swamping heat of the afternoon while the household slept the siesta. Even the flies were still and the cold lizard on the ceiling did not move from its dark corner. He was surprised when voices broke into the house and Calcott came into the room with Silva.

  ‘This is Mr Silva,’ said Calcott.

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed the Portuguese, and increased his flow of excellent English. His long acquaintance with Calcott had, however, damaged an almost too perfect Oxford accent. He was wearing a violet-striped pyjama coat in honour of meeting Johnson.

  ‘Maria,’ shouted Calcott from the door. ‘Bring the table.’

  ‘You know the table?’ asked Silva.

  ‘Silver’—Calcott always called his friend by this name—‘Silver’s a dabster,’ interrupted Calcott. ‘We get something every time.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ said Silva modestly, lowering his eyes. ‘Mr Calcott is a hell of a medium,’ he said, with polite detachment.

  One of the women brought in the table. It then dawned on Johnson that Clacott and Silva were going to conduct a spiritualist seance.

  Silva sat back. A cigar was between the fingers of his small, white, right hand. Silva worked under Calcott at the Power Station. He was a fat man in miniature, miniature in blandness, like a monkey of a very old civilisation. The cheeks in his small head were chubby and darkened, like the smoke-deposit on the bulge of a lamp glass, with a day’s growth of beard. A black voice, enormously deep, came from the full lips of this very small man. Once a clerk in an English shipping office in Lisbon, Silva had early in his life decided always to attach himself to the English. He read English books. Intelligent, imitative and simple hearted, his admiration for the English sprang from the observation that they had a lot of money and were, by his frugal standards, very careless about it.

  Silva was a man of talents. He had to perfection the art of living on very little money. He had the art of being inquisitive without being offensive. He had the art of falling on his feet wherever he went, swinging from one job to another, from one country to another, like a monkey from branch to branch in a world that was a luxuriant tree. He knew where the best women were in every town he visited. In a small worn notebook he kept the names and addresses of women he had known in London when he had gone there as a tutor to the son of a Scotch Baronet who had Portuguese interests. Silva had been a waiter, too. He was without prejudices. He had the art of avoiding trouble, the art of pleasing everyone in the way they wished to be pleased. He was as discreet as a cat.

  Silva did not believe in God, but this did not alienate him from the people who did; on the contrary, it attracted his interest. Similarly he did not believe in spirits; so Silva willingly became vicariously English in his seances with Calcott. And Silva believed in doing things habitually and well.

  One day Calcott and he discovered that a spirit who gave his name as ‘Hamlet’ wished to communicate. Silva explained that this must surely be Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Calcott was impressed. ‘To be or not to be . . . you mean,’ he asked Silva nervously. ‘That is the question,’ said Silva. ‘Yes, that is the one. Let’s ask him.’ The spirit was Shakespeare’s Hamlet. ‘You ask him something,’ said Calcott, out of his depth. ‘What are you doing Hamlet?’ Silva asked the spirit. ‘Dancing,’ the spirit replied. ‘Beautiful music and girls.’ And then he broke into poetry and said he would drown the Mayor of Lisbon. Mentioning Shakespeare, the spirit said he didn’t like him. He was difficult. The Duke of Wellington and Caruso were with him. They were eating. What? The table became very excited and this point and leapt about. At last it quietened down. ‘Steak and onions,’ was the reply. Calcott’s subconscious mind, with its nostalgic memories of the Old Kent Road, at last awoke to the inventive genius of Silva and, rebelling against Hamlet’s stress on moonlight and girls, began to make its mark.

  They took it in turns to type out the messages. Now a thick bundle of MS. had accumulated, full of the eloquence of this diffuse character.

  Hamlet became the creation of their combined but very different geniuses, the outlet for the fantasies of Silva and spleen of Calcott. Some days he was laconic. ‘Fed up,’ he said. Or, ‘Shakespeare’s drunk again. I’ll kill him.’ On other days he was rhapsodising about a Portuguese lady called Teresa who had yellow eyes like the Amazon. ‘Have to get my pay in advance.’ Teresa faded. ‘Dago got her. No whisky. Shakespeare drunk it.’ Followed by ‘British Navy very strong.’

  This last episode corresponded to a period in which Calcott had been the unsuccessful rival of Silva for an Indian girl in the town. Silva, ever tactful, ever the artist, had contributed the last sentence. Passions which might have become dangerous were thus sublimated in this strange work of art.

  ‘Well, Silver, ol’ man, what about having a try? It mightn’t do much today, a stranger being present. But,’ said Calcott, raising his eyes to the ceiling and speaking louder so as to be heard clearly in the beyond, ‘we’ve got the son of the Revd Johnson here who passed over, and he’s very interested.’

  ‘Perhaps Mr Johnson would like to try,’ said Silva.

  ‘Oh, the spirits won’t care for me,’ laughed Johnson.

  ‘Not if you’re hostile,’ said Silva.

  Calcott anxiously watched the effect of his proposal upon Johnson. He conveyed that he had reserved the honour and interest of this most private excitement for Johnson alone; that he was admitting him to an innermost secret. And Calcott also rolled his big faded eyes significantly, indicating that this seance might have a far greater importance than Johnson at present supposed. It would be sinister and significant because Calcott had the gravest interest in Johnson’s life. He was doing Johnson a good turn.

  ‘You watch Silver,’ said Calcott. ‘He comes in every Thursday and we don’t always click, but we usually do. Don’t we, Silver, old man?’

  ‘You smoke a cigar?’ said Silva, taking three cigars from his breast pocket.

  ‘Mr Johnson,’ said Calcott, leaning with command over their heads, ‘have one of Silver’s cigars.’

  Calcott sat down at the table and then Silva sat down.

  ‘Don’t close the shutters yet,’ said Calcott. ‘Have a look at this.’

  Now they were ready Calcott prepared an impressive delay in the proc
eedings.

  He opened the pile of typescript. Typed in a faint violet ribbon in single spacing, thumbed, smudged, inked with corrections, were the verbatim reports of the seances of many years. Calcott turned over the pages in loving reminiscence, applauding, speculating.

  He read out many passages of Hamlet’s words from the other world.

  So Johnson joined them. He put his fingers on the table. They all waited in silence. The only sound was the clipped puff of their cigars. Calcott looked up at the ceiling. His face was tense with expectation. He fervently believed in the existence and voices of the spirits. Politely, after Calcott had raised his big eyes to the ceiling, Silva raised his small ones with an abstracted blink. The air of the room was close.

  ‘You have to wait sometimes,’ said Calcott, without looking down from the ceiling.

  ‘They’re sleeping,’ said Silva, in a low gurgling voice to Johnson. They waited for many minutes.

  ‘Funny,’ said Calcott. He gave a look under the table. ‘Thought someone might have their foot on the leg.’

  He looked up to the ceiling again.

  The day after tomorrow, Johnson was thinking, Wright and Phillips will be back. He was in the middle of this thought when he felt the table give a jerk at Silva’s end.

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Calcott.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called.

  The table did not move.

  ‘They’re coming, said Calcott, now intently listening.

  ‘Shall we ask if there is anyone who wishes to say something to us?’ said Silva cermoniously to Johnson.

  ‘This is your show,’ said Johnson. ‘Don’t ask me.’