Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  Johnson liked this and Silva like the abrupt unrevealing stubbornness of Johnson. There was a pretence between them that they were just going on a little further to see what was round the next bend, but they both knew otherwise; that they were now completely governed by a decision to go on alone. Silva, to show this, fished and cooked.

  A deep friendship was forming between the two men. And they did not discuss their situation. They knew what they were doing. Silva knew that Johnson did not want to see his companions and this seemed unremarkable to him. One must always do what one is compelled to do. It had occurred to Silva often not to wish to see his friends again.

  A smaller river joined the longer one in the afternoon. They had kept out from the banks which here broke up into creeks where the alligators belched and grunted, for they did not want one of the beasts under the fragile boat. The forest overhung the banks and trailed its curtains of liana over the water, and as the two men fought over the boil of the current into the small river the whole climate of the country seemed to change. The air was hotter, and they passed into a rich wilder scene. On the banks fallen trees damned up rotting vegetation in the current, the water was as dark as tea, and the alligators lay with their yellow mouths propped wide open, fixed in a hot-house trance. The sky was less wide here and the breezes were less fresh and more fitful and the river was stamped with a humming monotony. The banks being closer, Harry and Silva were more aware of the jungle. It had the appearance of a bedraggled palisade, smashed in at times as if a lorry had crashed into it, or suddenly it thinned away to low dirty scrub the colour of verdigris.

  Silva did not know that in going up this river they were leaving Wright’s route. Silva knew only that this must be the route Johnson’s father had taken.

  But Silva saw a change in Johnson that evening. A new alertness appeared in his heavy features, the smiling laziness went out of his voice. His paddling was less fitful, and all the afternoon his arm dipped and splashed. Silva was tired and stopped but Johnson went on breaking the smooth tea-coloured water with endless energy. They had to go on far up the winding river, which split into narrow channels where the trees met overhead making arcades of quivering river light. The calls of the birds echoed here in the halls of the trees and the alligators sank by the banks. They had at times to beat them off with their paddles. It was not simple to choose the right channel, for some became suddenly shallow and were dammed up by fallen trees and the canoe had to be turned while they retraced their path and tried again. In the shallow water they saw long and vivid fish dart like hands under the boat. Johnson put Silva on to fish. They camped that night in a break in the trees for there was no clear clean stretch of sand, and their skin was pitted with the bites of flies and pinheads of blood appeared on their arms. Silva talked about snakes and scorpions and slept in a hammock slung between two young trees but Johnson slept on the ground. They were tortured that night by the mosquitoes.

  Their boat went on through the rustling water and the eddies in the paddle-pits were left like fading heel-marks on the surface of the river behind them. Johnson said as if speaking to himself:

  ‘He went up this river to the rapids,’ he said, ‘and above them there is a new river on the right bank. You say he went up there but his canoe was found hidden under the bank in the way the Indians hide theirs? Some Indians had come down there because they talked of him afterwards and one of them went with him through the jungle making across the horseshoe to the river beyond it. He must have been cutting across country. It rises to the high land where no one has been. His fires were seen. There are three tribes of Indians, one after another, and they won’t go beyond their own territory because they are afraid of being murdered. So he had to go on alone.’

  Silva said, ‘You are going there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Johnson.

  He did not know. He was only growing into his freedom. There is an insect in the instincts whose feelers push out and touch the unknown with infinitely delicate strokes, cautiously. All Johnson’s training was against such an unplanned journey. He knew time must be calculated, stores rationed, ammunition saved. He must know about water. He was in that bemused condition of curiosity and dream which is the prelude to decision and action; the year is like this at the beginning of spring.

  He had little interest in the country itself. The forest, the scrub, the marshes, the disorderly, untouched wealth of it did not arouse a response in him—except, as he had said, there was too much of it.

  Birds were of two kinds: those he could shoot, those he could not. Of the dangerous creatures, the alligators and the bloodsucking fish which gutted their victims or stung them with poisons, the rattlesnakes, the rare jaguar, he had no great fear. His imagination was not upon these things. Each would be dealt with as it appeared. He did not think for one moment that he would die or could be injured. He rather prided himself in not taking simple precautions.

  In his heart he disliked the country; it was too green, too profuse, too monotonous. The Indians were like so many fleas in a rug. He often thought of his last year’s journey in Greenland with longing. He longed for mountains and snow. He had listened with deep emotion when Wright had talked of the Himalayas and their whiteness. That whiteness could enslave him; not this greeness. It oppressed him to think of his father throwing himself away on this rampant drainage-system of forest and turgid rivers.

  No, this land enclosed him in himself. He was not travelling as he had travelled in Greenland; he was travelling here in himself, paddling down the streams of his own life and nature, enclosed in the jungle of his own unknown or half-known thoughts and impulses. But present with him all the day, written on the walls of the trees in all their variegated detail, was his own life ramified, overgrown, dense and intricate and mysterious in its full tones, halftones and shades of consciousness. The forest itself was like the confusing, shapeless product of a torpid and bemused introspection.

  Lucy had gone. Wright was distant, an outdistanced pursuer of conscience. Phillips was an embarrassment and never important. Silva was a man, and yet more like a child, a creature who had the disturbing faculty of speaking aloud Johnson’s own buried thoughts. But Silva was not more than an intruding voice, an indicator. Slowly as they went past the trees, Johnson began to exchange the presence of Wright, Phillips and Lucy for the presence of his father.

  Especially in the glazed heat of the afternoons when the shadows began to slip like caps and gloves upon the trees of one bank and there was no sound but the sound of the paddles, Johnson would be arrested by the silence of the trees, by the sensation of being watched. Sometimes he might imagine the tree itself was looking at him, that its trunk and spread of branches were in some fantastic, struck-rigid way, human; or that people were concealed in it, or animals, their eyes as fine and narrow as needles glinting with note taken of him. There was the sensation of casually remembering some incident in one’s life and of writing it upon the faces of the trees, spreading one’s life on them, and then on finding one’s memories breathed out thickly, heavy with brooding and weighted with significance, upon oneself. The trees would hold every thought one had had and would keep them there for ever, so that looking back one would dread to return that way, here to meet this shame or that voluptuousness or hatred. And the trees ahead and the trees sliding smoothly past, moved slowly like heads chin-down upon the water, brooding, so that one expected a deep voice to come out of them.

  But the sound that came out of them was not the deep voice in his memory, but the sudden, motor-horn bark of the toucan in the tops of the trees, and pure high outlandish calls from the river birds, startling, fresh and mocking in their irrelevance.

  The voice he half expected was the voice of his father. An inward awe of this region where his father had passed was growing in Johnson’s heart. As they paddled to the shore in the dusk, forced to camp in the mosquito-infested trees, a feeling had possessed him that he was near his father; and as his foot touched the ground, that there was a dang
er in standing upon the land where he had stood.

  ‘The Indian was probably with him still,’ Harry said to Silva.

  Since Silva had mentioned the missionary Johnson spoke of him and they argued about the seance in Calcott’s house.

  ‘He had no right to do that,’ said Johnson. ‘I didn’t actually mind, but some people would have minded—people who believe that stuff. You don’t believe it?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Silva. ‘I think he is dead.’

  ‘Of course he died.’

  Johnson said after a pause:

  ‘When you are alone like this you get a feeling that he is still alive. It is the silence.’

  ‘It is possible,’ said Silva.

  ‘No,’ said Johnson. ‘It is because no one saw him die. If his death were not mysterious I shouldn’t feel this.’

  The river was like pale marble and the trees stood straight and black plumed by it. Johnson dreamed that night that his father came down the river in a canoe and landed at the camp. He had only one arm and his eyes were accusing. Phillips was with him and there was a woman sitting in the canoe.

  In the morning they lit their fire. They had woken stiff and shivering. Silva took out the boat and fished. Johnson examined the diminishing stores. They were only enough, after they had bought blocks of rapadura and farinha in the last village on the big river, for another ten days. ‘My father must have lived off the country.’

  Weakness overcame them on this day. Johnson felt giddy and sick. He went away in the trees and vomited. He suddenly had a horror of their camp and they broke it up and went on. The land swam. His body ached. They lay half the day in the shade of the scrub and Silva watched him.

  ‘I’m going on. In a minute,’ said Johnson at intervals.

  He was suddenly shocked by his desertion of Wright and Phillips. He hated the sight of the glum, tired-eyed Silva. He was horrified by the morbidity of his thoughts about his father on the previous day. He lay thinking about Lucy again. Exorcised she had rushed back again into his mind, loved, desired, longed for. He tried to remember her voice. He remembered her skin. He remembered how they took off their clothes. He dreamed of slipping back in the boat, eluding Wright and going straight back to England. An avid heat glowed in his mind. He sat up; he saw the scene, hard, brilliant and new, no voluptuous dream of the solitary. He looked around for Silva.

  ‘Silva!’ he called.

  Silva came up. Harry told Silva about Lucy that night, not very clearly. It was not like speaking to a real person because Silva was a foreigner whose accent made him seem unreal. And Silva, the hero of so many adventures with women, scarcely listened. He was burning to tell some of his own stories. A subject on which he could at last be eloquent with Johnson had come up. It was due to this impatience of his that he got the impression that Wright’s wife and not his stepdaughter was in question.

  Chapter Ten

  There was a late moon and the raiment of water, dividing the trees, made a scene of metals. Animals cried out in the forest through the night. There had been laughter about hostile Indians during the day, but now Wright and Phillips watched the yellow flame of a fire, no more than a scratch of yellow, on the distant bend of the river.

  They were, they calculated, only a day and a half s journey from him. They slept uneasily under the white arc of the moon, and, after the usual sullen grumbling from the men, drank their coffee and started soon after sunrise. They sat advancing into the dazzling sun.

  There was a monotony in the brief but overwhelming youth of these tropical dawns, when the land lay without shape like a divine breath upon the air. Phillips leaned eagerly forward and Wright stood keen and grey. His beard seemed to stiffen and his eyes, half closed against the new light, glittered like slits of dew. There was the smell of the trees in the water and the smell of the sleep sweat of the crew. There is to an ageing man nothing more cruel than the everlasting youth of the world, and it was not only the need of travelling fast and overtaking Johnson that made Wright stand up in the morning and impatiently urge on the crew, finally getting to work himself with the paddles; the impulse came also from the exquisite pangs of an envy for Johnson’s youth, a desire to reclaim his own. Wright’s temper sharpened and the crew grew sullen.

  ‘Can’t he see that’s not the way to get these fellows to work,’ thought Phillips.

  Phillips was a man not used to obeying or being obeyed.

  As for Phillips, he saw Johnson in his camps and he saw the courage of Johnson. Not in imaginary encounters—there were pictures made for himself by his own fears—but he saw Johnson, still alone, ordinary, unthinking. The essence of the courageous man’s life is that nothing happens to him. Phillips took the paddle and felt the boat shoot on to Johnson’s courage.

  Suddenly Wright stopped paddling and called out.

  ‘There’s someone there,’ he pointed to the far bank.

  Two figures were moving against the trees.

  ‘It’s Harry.’

  They all stopped and stood up in the drifting boat. Phillips put his hand to his mouth and shouted. The shout fell on the water and the forest. The two figures stood still on the shore. They made no sign.

  ‘The police launch then went ashore,’ Phillips began.

  Wright said ‘Shut up. You’re not to say anything like that to him.’

  Nearer and nearer the two figures came.

  Silva and Johnson were standing there.

  They were standing some yards from the water’s edge, when Wright landed and walked up to them, two scrubbily bearded men with their clothes dirty and torn, the skin on their faces and their arms reddened and spotted and swollen. Johnson murmured something to Silva and they both grinned. They were looking at Phillips and not at Wright. Johnson said:

  ‘Hullo. You know Silva. He’s been fishing.’

  ‘Of course, I remember him,’ said Wright genially stretching a hand to Silva.

  The crew came ashore and the four pretended to study them. Then Silva came forward and broke the awkward greetings:

  ‘I will make us all some coffee.’

  They sat down on the ground and Wright talked of his journey. ‘It was my fire you saw last night. There are no Indians,’ Johnson said.

  ‘We thought it was Indians cooking you,’ said Wright.

  ‘There was a nasty smell in the air,’ Phillips said.

  ‘Mosquitoes were our only trouble,’ Johnson said. He showed his swollen hands.

  They gazed at Johnson and felt a deep affection for him in his comical situation, wondering how he would brazen it out, longing for him to do so. They prepared to laugh loudly at him, to heal the strange breach with laughter. But Johnson, like themselves, gave no hint. There was a set expression on his face of an enclosed man who would not explain. Wright’s diplomacy was a diplomacy of suggestion: ‘You’ve proved your theory about the boat,’ or ‘What do you think about this river? It strikes me as being useful. The wrong river is often the best.’

  But all Johnson revealed was that he had no opinion about the river yet, because he had been ill for two days and they would have been much further up but for this.

  ‘Food was getting short,’ he said.

  He seemed to suggest that but for food they would not have caught him.

  But as time passed Wright was beginning to lose interest in the comedy of their situation. Johnson was no longer symbol of youth or courage. The sun was at midday. Wright was a man of forty-nine. He had planned his purpose on the meridian of his life. He said quietly:

  ‘You know we shall have to go back to the big river according to the plan we all agreed upon.’

  As he began speaking Phillips got up and called Silva away with him.

  Wright continued as they went out of earshot.

  ‘I think your effort was a magnificent one, but we must work as a team and a sideline like this would waste time and we’ve lost too much as it is. I knew of course you were trying the canoe. Calcott got melodramatic about it but Phillips and I didn�
��t worry. You shifted too! But now we’ve got to get back. We’re a team, Harry.’

  Wright waited for Johnson to speak. At last Johnson said:

  ‘I think you’d better send me back.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m sick.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Johnson mumbled and then said:

  ‘I’ve lost my nerve.’

  ‘Not sleeping?’ said Wright.

  ‘I’ve slept all right,’ said Johnson. His heavy shaggy head turned away from Wright. ‘It’s my nerve.’

  ‘You’ve done too much,’ said Wright. ‘You had a start on us but you got away. You must have paddled like hell. You’re just done in and want a rest.’

  Johnson did not answer.

  ‘We’ve got the time,’ lied Wright. It is, Wright knew, a common delusion of men who spend their lives in exciting action that their nerve is going. It is an involuntary indecency of the spirit which, Wright knew, cannot be helped. The two men glanced at each other. They had known each other for years. They had climbed together, sailed together. They had described their doings, they had argued into the night. They had laughed at each other. Wright had the faculty of putting the young at their ease, of being merely the man who had lived longer, pretending with a skill they did not notice that this was a disadvantage. He listened. Yet now Johnson and Wright looked at each other with incomprehension. Engrossed in action, they knew each other’s idiosyncrasies only.

  ‘I’ve been looking at the maps to see if we could cut across-country,’ said Wright, cunningly trading on Johnson’s passion for action. ‘When you’re fit we’ll have a look.’